speak, on Beechwood Hill, it alarmingly intensified the _sense_ of my
small stature. Use and habit however. The relative merits of myself and
of the passing scene gradually readjusted themselves with a proper
respect for the former. Soon, too, as if from heaven, the packing-case
containing my furniture arrived. Mrs Bowater shared a whole morning over
its unpacking, ever and again standing in engrossed consideration of
some of my minute treasures, and, quite unaware of it, heaving a great
sigh. But how to arrange them there in a room already over-occupied?

Chapter Nine

A carpenter of the name of Bates was called in, so distant a relative of
Mrs Bowater's apparently that she never by nod, word, or look
acknowledged the bond. Mr Bates held my landlady in almost speechless
respect. "A woman in a thousand," he repeatedly assured me, when we were
grown a little accustomed to one another; "a woman in _ten_ thousand.
And if things hadn't been what they was, you may understand, they might
have turned out different. Ah, miss, there's one looking down on us
could tell a tale." I looked up past his oblong head at the ceiling, but
only a few flies were angling round the chandelier.

Mrs Bowater's compliments were less indirect. "That _Bates_," she would
say, surveying his day's handiwork after he was gone, "is all thumbs."

He was certainly rather snail-like in his movements, and spent most of
his time slowly rubbing his hands on the stiff apron that encased him.
But I minded his thumbs far less than his gluepot.

Many years have passed, yet at the very whisper of his name, that
inexpressible odour clouds up into my nose. It now occurs to me for the
first time that he never sent in his bill. Either his memory failed him,
or he carpentered for love. Level with the wide table in the window
recess, strewn over with my small Persian mats, whereon I sat, sewed,
read, and took my meals, Mr Bates constructed a broad shelf, curtained
off on three sides from the rest of the room. On this wooden stage stood
my four-poster, wardrobe, and other belongings. It was my bedchamber.
From table to floor he made a staircase, so that I could easily descend
and roam the room at large. The latter would have been more commodious
if I could have persuaded Mrs Bowater to empty it a little. If I had
_kept on_ looking at the things in it I am sure I should have gone mad.
Even tact was unavailing. If only there had been the merest tinge of a
Cromwell in my character, the baubles that would have been removed!

There were two simpering plaster figures--a Shepherd and
Shepherdess--nearly half my height on the chimney-piece, whom I
particularly detested; also an enlarged photograph in a discoloured
frame on the wall--that of a thick-necked, formidable man, with a bush
of whisker on either cheek, and a high, quarrelsome stare. He made me
feel intensely self-conscious. It was like a wolf looking all day into a
sheep-fold. So when I had my meals, I invariably turned my back on his
portrait.

I went early to bed. But now that the autumnal dusks were shortening, an
hour or two of artificial light was necessary. The flare of the gas
dazzled and stupefied me, and gave me a kind of hunted feeling; so Mrs
Bowater procured for me a couple of fine little glass candlesticks. In
bed I sometimes burned a wax-light in a saucer, a companionable thing
for night-thoughts in a strange place. Often enough I sat through the
evening with no other illumination than that of the smouldering coals,
so that I could see out of the window. It was an endless source of
amusement to withdraw the muslin curtains, gaze out over the darkened
fields beyond the roadway, and let my day-dreams wander at will.

At nine o'clock Mrs Bowater would bring me my supper--some fragments of
rusk, or of bread, and milk. My food was her constant anxiety. The
difficulty, as she explained, was to supply me with _little_ enough to
eat--at least of cooked food: "It dries up in the winking of an eye." So
her cat, Henry, fared more sumptuously than ever, though the jealous
creature continued to reject all my advances, and as far as possible
ignored my existence. "Simple victuals, by all means, miss," Mrs Bowater
would admit. "But if it don't enjoy, the inside languishes; and you are
not yet of an age that can fall back on skin and bone."

The question of food presently introduced that of money. She insisted on
reducing her charges to twenty shillings a week. "There's the lodging,
and there's the board, the last being as you might say all but
unmentionable; and honesty the best policy though I have never tried the
reverse." So, in spite of all my protestations, it was agreed. And I
thus found myself mistress of a round fifty-eight pounds a year over
and above what I paid to Mrs Bowater. Messrs Harris, Harris, and Harris
were punctual as quarter-day: and so was I. I "_at once_" paid over to
my landlady £13 and whatever other sum was needful. The "charity" my
godmother had recommended began, and, alas, remained at home. I stowed
the rest under lock and key in one of my grandfather's boxes which I
kept under my bed. This was an imprudent habit, perhaps. Mrs Bowater
advocated the Penny Bank. But the thought of my money being so handy and
_palpable_ reassured me. I would count it over in my mind, as if it were
a means to salvation; and became, in consequence, near and parsimonious.

Occasionally when she had "business" to transact, Mrs Bowater would be
off to London. There she would purchase for me any little trifle
required for the replenishment of my wardrobe. Needing so little, I
could afford the finest materials; my sovereign was worth at least sixty
shillings. Rather than "fine," Mrs Bowater preferred things "good"; and
for this "goodness," I must confess, she sometimes made rather alarming
sacrifices of appearance. Still, I was already possessed of a
serviceable stock of clothes, and by aid of one of my dear mother's last
presents to me, a shiny Swiss miniature workbox with an inlaid picture
of the Lake of Geneva on the lid, I soon became a passable needlewoman.

I love bright, pure colours, and, my sweeping and dusting and bedmaking
over, and my external mourning for my father at an end, a remarkably
festive figure would confront me in my cheval glass of an afternoon. The
hours I spent in dressing my hair and matching this bit of colour with
that. I would talk to myself in the glass, too, for company's sake, and
make believe I was a dozen different characters. I was young. I pined
for life and companionship, and having only my own--for Mrs Bowater was
rather a faithful feature of the landscape than a fellow being--I made
as much, and as many, of myself as possible.

Another question that deeply engaged my landlady was my health. She
mistrusted open windows, but strongly recommended "air." What insidious
maladies she spied around me! Indeed that September was unusually hot. I
sat on my table in the window like a cricket in an oven, sorely missing
my high open balcony, the garden, and the stream. Once and again Mrs
Bowater would take me for a little walk after sunset. Discretion to her
was much the better part of valour; nor had I quite recovered from my
experiences in the train. But such walks--though solitary enough at that
hour of the day--were straggly and irksome. Pollie's arm had been a kind
of second nature to me; but Mrs Bowater, I think, had almost as
fastidious a disinclination to carrying me as I have to being carried. I
languished for liberty. Being a light sleeper, I would often awake at
daybreak and the first call of the birds. Then the hill--which led to
Tyddlesdon End and Love (or Loose) Lane--was deserted. Thought of the
beyond haunted me like a passion. At a convenient moment I intimated to
Mrs Bowater how secure was the street at this early hour, how fresh the
meadows, and how thirsty for independent outings her lodger. "Besides,
Mrs Bowater, I am not a child, and who could see me?"

After anxious and arduous discussion, Mr Bates was once more consulted.
He wrapped himself in a veritable blanket of reflection, and all but
became unconscious before he proposed a most ingenious device. With Mrs
Bowater's consent, she being her own landlady and amused at the idea, he
cut out of one of the lower panels of her parlour door a round-headed
opening just of an easy size to suit me. In this aperture he hung a
delicious little door that precisely fitted it. So also with the door
into the street--to which he added a Brahmah lock. By cementing a small
square stone into the corner of each of the steps down from the porch,
he eased _that_ little difficulty. May Heaven bless Mr Bates! With his
key round my neck, stoop once, stoop twice, a scamper down his steps,
and I was free--as completely mistress of my goings-out and of my
comings-in as every self-respecting person should be.

"That's what my father would have called a good job, Mr Bates," said I
cordially.

He looked yearningly at me, as if about to impart a profound secret; but
thought better of it. "Well, miss, what I say is, a job's a _job_; and
if it _is_ a job, it's a job that should be made a job _of_."

As I dot the i's and cross the t's of this manuscript, I often think--a
little ruefully--of Mr Bates.

As soon as daybreak was piercing into my region of the sky, and before
Mrs Bowater or the rest of the world was stirring, I would rise, make my
candlelit toilet, and hasten out into the forsaken sweet of the morning.
If it broke wet or windy, I could turn over and go to sleep again. A few
hundred yards up the hill, the road turned off, as I have said, towards
Tyddlesdon End and Loose Lane--very stony and steep. On the left, and
before the fork, a wicket gate led into the woods and the park of empty
"Wanderslore." To the verge of these deserted woods made a comfortable
walk for me.

If, as might happen, any other wayfarer was early abroad, I could
conceal myself in the tussocks of grass and bushes that bordered the
path. In my thick veil, with my stout green parasol and inconspicuous
shawl, I made a queer and surprising figure no doubt. Indeed, from what
I have heard, the ill fame of Wanderslore acquired a still more piquant
flavour in the town by reports that elf-folk had been descried on its
outskirts. But if I sometimes skipped and capered in these early
outings, it was for exercise as well as suppressed high spirits. To be
prepared, too, for the want of such facilities in the future, I had the
foresight to accustom myself to Mrs Bowater's steep steps as well as to
my cemented-in "Bateses," as I called them. My only difficulty was to
decide whether to practice on them when I was fresh at the outset of my
walk, or fatigued at the end of it. Naturally people grow "peculiar"
when much alone: self plays with self, and the mimicry fades.

These little expeditions, of course, had their spice of danger, and it
made them the more agreeable. A strange dog might give me a fright.
There was an old vixen which once or twice exchanged glances with me at
a distance. But with my parasol I was a match for most of the creatures
which humanity has left unslaughtered. My sudden appearance might
startle or perplex them. But if few were curious, fewer far were
unfriendly. Boys I feared most. A hulking booby once stoned me through
the grass, but fortunately he was both a coward and a poor marksman.
Until winter came, I doubt if a single sunshine morning was wasted. Many
a rainy one, too, found me splashing along, though then I must be a
careful walker to avoid a sousing.

The birds renewed their autumn song, the last flowers were blossoming.
Concealed by scattered tufts of bracken where an enormous beech forked
its roots and cast a golden light from its withering leaves, I would
spend many a solitary hour. Above the eastern tree-tops my Kent
stretched into the distance beneath the early skies. Far to my left and
a little behind me rose the chimneys of gloomy Wanderslore. Breathing in
the gentle air, the dreamer within would stray at will. There I kept the
anniversary of my mother's birthday; twined a wreath for her of
ivy-flowers and winter green; and hid it secretly in a forsaken
blackbird's nest in the woods.

Still I longed for my old home again. Mrs Bowater's was a stuffy and
meagre little house, and when meals were in preparation, none too sweet
to the nose. Especially low I felt, when a scrawling letter was now and
then delivered by the postman from Pollie. Her spelling and grammar
intensified my homesickness. Miss Fenne, too, had not forgotten me. I
pored over her spidery epistles till my head ached. Why, if I had been
so rash and undutiful, was she so uneasy? Even the texts she chose had a
parched look. The thought of her spectacling my minute handwriting and
examining the proof that I was still a child of wrath, gave my pride a
silly qualm. So Mrs Bowater came to my rescue, and between us we
concocted replies to her which, I am afraid, were not more intelligible
for a tendency on my landlady's part to express my sentiments in the
third person.

This little service set her thinking of Sunday and church. She was not,
she told me, "what you might call a religious woman," having been
compelled "to keep her head up in the world, and all not being gold that
glitters." She was none the less a regular attendant at St Peter's--a
church a mile or so away in the valley, whose five bells of a Sabbath
evening never failed to recall my thoughts to Lyndsey and to dip me into
the waters of melancholy. I loved their mellow clanging in the lap of
the wind, yet it was rather doleful to be left alone with my candles,
and only Henry sullenly squatting in the passage awaiting his mistress's
return.

"Not that you need making any _better_, miss," Mrs Bowater assured me.
"Even a buttercup--or a retriever dog, for that matter--being no fuller
than it can hold of what it is, in a manner of speaking. But there's the
next world to be accounted for, and hopes of reunion on another shore,
where, so I understand, mere size, body or station, will not be
noticeable in the sight of the Lamb. _Not_ that I hold with the notion
that only the good so-called will be there."

This speech, I must confess, made me exceedingly uncomfortable.

"Wherever I go, Mrs Bowater," I replied hastily, "I shall not be happy
unless you are there."

"D. V.," said Mrs Bowater, grimly, "I will."

Still, I remained unconverted to St Peter's. Why, I hardly know: perhaps
it was her reference to its pew rents, or her description of the vicar's
daughters (who were now nursing their father at Tunbridge Wells), or
maybe even it was a stare from her husband which I happened at that
precise moment to intercept from the wall. Possibly if I myself had
taken a "sitting," this aura of formality would have faded away. Mrs
Bowater was a little reassured, however, to hear that my father and
mother, in spite of Miss Fenne, had seldom taken me to church. They had
concluded that my absence was best both for me and for the congregation.
And I told her of our little evening services in the drawing-room, with
Mrs Ballard, the parlourmaid, Pollie, and the Boy on the sofa, just as
it happened to be their respective "Sundays in."

This set her mind at rest. Turn and turn about, on one Sunday evening
she went to St Peter's and brought back with her the text and crucial
fragments of Mr Crimble's sermon, and on the next we read the lessons
together and sang a hymn. Once, indeed, I embarked upon a solo, "As
pants the hart," one of my mother's favourite airs. But I got a little
shaky at "O for the wings," and there was no rambling, rumbling chorus
from my father. But Sunday was not my favourite day on Beechwood Hill.
Mrs Bowater looked a little formal with stiff white "frilling" round her
neck. She reminded me of a leg of mutton. To judge from the gloom and
absentmindedness into which they sometimes plunged her, quotations from
Mr Crimble could be double-edged. My real joy was to hear her views on
the fashions and manners of her fellow-worshippers.

Well, so the months went by. Winter came with its mists and rains and
frosts, and a fire in the polished grate was no longer an evening luxury
but a daily need. As often as possible I went out walking. When the
weather was too inclement, I danced for an hour or so, for joy and
exercise, and went swimming on a chair. I would entertain myself also in
watching through the muslin curtains the few passers-by; sorting out
their gaits, and noses, and clothes, and acquaintances, and guessing
their characters, occupations, and circumstances. Certain little looks
and movements led me to suppose that, even though I was perfectly
concealed, the more sensitive among them were vaguely uneasy under this
secret scrutiny. In such cases (though very reluctantly) I always drew
my eyes away: first because I did not like the thought of encroaching on
their privacy, and next, because I was afraid their uneasiness might
prevent them coming again. But this microscopic examination of mankind
must cease with dusk, and the candle-hours passed rather heavily at
times. The few books I had brought away from Lyndsey were mine now
nearly by heart. So my eye would often wander up to a small bookcase
that hung out of reach on the other side of the chimney-piece.

Chapter Ten

One supper-time I ventured to ask Mrs Bowater if she would hand me down
a tall, thin, dark-green volume, whose appearance had particularly taken
my fancy. A simple enough request, but surprisingly received. She
stiffened all over and eyed the bookcase with a singular intensity. "The
books there," she said, "are what they call the dead past burying its
dead."

Spoon in hand, I paused, looking now at Mrs Bowater and now at the
coveted book. "_Mr_ Bowater," she added from deep down in herself,
"followed the sea." This was, in fact, Mr Bowater's début in our
conversation, and her remark, uttered in so hollow yet poignant a tone,
produced a romantic expectancy in my mind.

"Is----" I managed to whisper at last: "I hope Mr Bowater isn't _dead_?"

Mrs Bowater's eyes were like lead in her long, dark-skinned face. She
opened her mouth, her gaze travelled slowly until, as I realized, it had
fixed itself on the large yellowing photograph behind my back.

"Dead, no"; she echoed sepulchrally. "Worse than."

By which I understood that, far from being dead, Mr Bowater was still
actively alive. And yet, apparently, not much the happier for that.
Instantaneously I caught sight of a rocky, storm-strewn shore, such as I
had seen in my _Robinson Crusoe_, and _there_ Mr Bowater, still
"following the sea."

"Never, never," continued Mrs Bowater in her Bible voice, "never to
darken these doors again!" I stole an anxious glance over my shoulder.
There was such a brassy boldness in the responsive stare that I was
compelled to shut my eyes.

But Mrs Bowater had caught my expression. "He was, as some would say,"
she explained with gloomy pride, "a handsome man. _Do_ handsome he did
never. But there, miss, things being as they must be, and you in the
green of your youth--though hearing the worst may be a wholesome physic
if taken with care, as I have told Fanny many a time...." She paused to
breathe. "What I was saying is, there can be no harm in your looking at
the book if that's all there's to it." With that she withdrew the
dry-looking volume from the shelf and laid it on the table beside my
chair.

I got down, opened it in the middle (as my father had taught me, in
order to spare the binding), opened it on a page inky black as night all
over, but starred with a design as familiar to me as the lines on the
palm of my hand.

"But oh! Mrs Bowater!" I cried, all in a breath, running across,
dragging back the curtain, and pointing out into the night; "look, look,
it's there! It's Orion!"

There, indeed, in the heavens beyond my window, straddling the dark,
star for star the same as those in the book, stood the Giant, shaking
his wondrous fires upon the air. Even Mrs Bowater was moved by my
enthusiasm. She came to the table, compared at my direction chart with
sky, and was compelled rather grudgingly to admit that her husband's
book was at least true to the facts. Stooping low, I read out a brief
passage. She listened. And it seemed a look of girlhood came into the
shadowy face uplifted towards the window. So the stars came into my
life, and faithful friends they have remained to this day.

Mrs Bowater's little house being towards the crest of the hill, with
sunrise a little to the left across the meadows, my window commanded
about three-fifths of the southern and eastern skies. By day I would
kneel down and study for hours the charts, and thus be prepared for the
dark. Night after night, when the weather was fair, or the windy clouds
made mock of man's celestial patternings, I would sit in the glow of the
firelight and summon these magic shiners each by name--Bellatrix, huge
Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, and the rest. I would look at one, and, while so
doing, watch another. This not only isolated the smaller stars, but
gradually I became aware that they were one and all furtively signalling
to _me_! About a fortnight later my old Lyndsey friend, the Dogstar,
topped the horizon fringe of woodland. I heard myself shout at him
across the world. His sudden molten bursts of crimson betwixt his
emeralds and sapphires filled me with an almost ridiculous delight.

By the middle of December I had mastered all the greater stars in my
region, and with my spyglass a few even of the Gammas and Deltas. But
much of the zenith and all the north was closed to me, and--such is
human greed--I began to pine beyond measure for a sight of Deneb, Vega,
and the Chair. This desire grew unendurable, and led me into a piece of
genuine foolhardiness. I determined to await the first clear still night
and then to sally out and make my way, by hook or crook, up to my
beech-roots, from which I should be able to command a fair stretch of
the northern heavens. A quiet spell favoured me.

I waited until Mrs Bowater had gone to her bedroom, then muffled myself
up in my thickest clothes and stole out into the porch. At my first
attempt, one glance into the stooping dark was enough. At the second, a
furtive sighing breath of wind, as I breasted the hill, suddenly flapped
my mantle and called in my ear. I turned tail and fled. But never faint
heart won fair constellation. At the third I pressed on.

The road was deserted. No earthly light showed anywhere except from a
lamp-post this side of the curve of the hill. I frisked along, listening
and peering, and brimming over with painful delight. The dark waned; and
my eyes grew accustomed to the thin starlight. I gained the woods
unharmed. Rich was my reward. There and then I begged the glimmering
Polestar to be true to Mr Bowater. Fear, indeed, if in a friendly
humour, is enlivening company. Instead of my parasol I had brought out a
curved foreign knife (in a sheath at least five inches long) which I had
discovered on my parlour what-not.

The whisperings of space, the calls of indetectable birds in the wastes
of the sky, the sudden appearance of menacing or sinister shapes which
vanished or melted themselves into mere stocks or stones as I drew
near--my heart gave many an anguished jump. But quiet, and the
magnificence of night, vanquished all folly at last. It seemed to me
that a Being whom one may call Silence was brooding in solitude where
living and human visitants are rare, and that in his company a harmless
spirit may be at peace. Oblivious of my ungainly knife, yet keeping a
firm arm on it, self seemed to be the whole scene there, and my body
being so small I was perhaps less a disturber than were most intruders
of that solemn repose.

Why I kept these night-walks secret, I cannot say. It was not
apprehension of Mrs Bowater. She would have questioned my discretion,
but would not, I think, have attempted to dissuade me from them against
my will. No. It may be that every true astronomer is a miser at heart,
and keeps some Lambda or Mu or lost nebula his eternal friend, named
with his name, but unrecorded on any chart. For my part I hoarded the
complete north for a while.

A fright I got one night, however, kept me indoors for the better part
of a week. In my going out the little house door had been carelessly
left unlatched. Algol and the red planet Mars had been my quarry among
the floating woolpack clouds. The wind was lightly blowing from the
north-west after the calm. I drew down my veil and set off briskly and
lightheartedly for home.

The sight of the dark-looking hole in the door quickly sobered me down.
All was quiet, however, but on entering my room, there was a strangeness
in the air, and that not due to my landlady's forlorn trumpetings from
above. Through the floating vaporous light I trod across to my staircase
and was soon in bed. Hardly had my eyes closed when there broke out of
the gloom around me a dismal, appalling cry. I soon realized that the
creeping horror this caused in me was as nothing compared with that of
the poor beast, lured, no doubt, into the house by Henry, at finding
itself beneath a strange roof.

"Puss, puss," I pleaded shakenly; and again broke out that heart-sick
cry.

Knife in hand, I descended my staircase and edging as far as possible
from the baleful globes greenly burning beneath a mahogany chair, I
threw open both doors and besought my unwelcome visitor to take his
departure. The night wind came fluttering; there was the blur of a
scuttering, shapeless form, and in the flash of an eye I was sprawling
on the floor. A good deal shaken, with a nasty scratch on my thigh, but
otherwise unharmed, I waved my hand after the fugitive and returned to
bed.

The blood soon ceased to flow. Not daring to send my blood-stained
nightgown to the wash, I concealed it behind my dresses in the wardrobe,
and the next fine morning carried it off with me and buried it as deeply
as I could in a deserted rabbit-burrow in the woods. Such is an evil
conscience that, first, I had the fancy that during my digging a twig
had inexplicably snapped in the undergrowth; and next, for "burnt
offering," I made Mrs Bowater the present of an oval handglass set in
garnets (one of my grandfather's gifts). This she took down to a local
jeweller's to be mounted with a pin, and wore it on Sundays in place of
her usual cameo depicting the Three Graces disporting themselves under a
Palm-tree beside a Fountain.

Meanwhile I had heard a little more about the "Fanny" whom Mrs Bowater
had mentioned. My landlady was indeed a slow confider. Fanny, I
gathered, had a post as mistress at a school some forty miles away. She
taught the little boys "English." The fleeting Miss Perry returned to
mind, and with a faint dismay I heard that Fanny would soon be returning
home for the Christmas holidays. Mrs Bowater's allusions to her were the
more formidable for being veiled. I dreaded the invasion. Would she not
come "between us"?

Then by chance I found hidden in my star-book the photograph of an
infant in arms and of a pensive, ringleted woman, who, in spite of this
morsel in her lap, seemed in her gaze out of nowhere to be vaguely
afraid. On the back was scrawled in pencil: "F.: six weeks"--and an
extremely cross six weeks "F." looked. For some inexplicable reason I
pushed back this lady's photograph into the book, and said nothing about
it. The suspicion had entered my mind that Fanny was only a daughter by
marriage. I sank into a kind of twilight reflection at this. It seemed,
in an odd fashion, to make Mrs Bowater more admirable, her husband more
formidable, and the unknown Fanny more mysterious and enigmatical. At
the first opportunity I crept my way to the subject and asked my
landlady if she could show me a portrait of her daughter.

The photograph she produced from upstairs had in fading almost become a
caricature. It had both blackened and greyed. It depicted herself many
years younger but hardly less grim in appearance in full flounced
skirts, Fanny as a child of about five or six standing at her knee, and
Mr Bowater leaning with singular amenity behind her richly-carved chair,
the fingers of his left hand resting disposedly on her right shoulder. I
looked anxiously at the child. It was certainly crosspatch "F.", and a
far from prepossessing little creature with that fixed, level gaze. Mr
Bowater, on the other hand, had not yet adopted the wild and rigid stare
which dominated the small parlour.

Mrs Bowater surveyed the group with a lackadaisical detachment.
"Fractious!--you can see the tears on her cheeks for all what the young
man could do with his woolly lamb and grimaces. It was the heyday."

_What_ was the heyday, I wondered. "Was Mr Bowater--attached to her?"
seemed a less intrusive question.

"Doted," she replied, polishing the glass with her apron. "But not to
much purpose--with an eye for every petticoat."

This seemed a difficult conversation to maintain. "Don't you think, Mrs
Bowater," I returned zealously, "there is just the faintest tinge of
_Mr_ Bowater in the _chin_? I don't," I added candidly, "see the
faintest glimpse of _you_."

Mrs Bowater merely tightened her lips.

"And is she like that now?" I asked presently.

Mrs Bowater re-wrapped frame and photograph in their piece of newspaper.
"It's _looks_, miss, that are my constant anxiety: and you may be
thankful for being as you might say preserved from the world. What's
more, the father will out, I suppose, from now till Day of Judgment."

How strangely her sentiments at times resembled my godmother's, and yet
how different they were in effect. My thoughts after this often drifted
to Mrs Bowater's early married life. And so peculiar are the workings of
the mind that her husband's star-chart, his sleek appearance as a young
father, the mysterious reference to the petticoats, awoke in me an
almost romantic interest in him. To such a degree that it gradually
became my custom to cast his portrait a satirical little bow of greeting
when I emerged from my bedroom in the morning, and even to kiss my hand
to his invisible stare when I retired for the night. To all of which
advances he made no reply.

My next bout of star-gazing presaged disaster. I say star-gazing, for it
is true that I stole out after honest folk are abed only when the
heavens were swept and garnished. But, as a matter of fact, my real
tryst was with another Self. Had my lot been different, I might have
sought that self in Terra del Fuego or Malay, or in a fine marriage.
Mine was a smaller world. Bo-peep I would play with shadow and dew-bead.
And if Ulysses, as my father had read me, stopped his ears against the
Sirens, I contrariwise unsealed mine to the ethereal airs of that bare
wintry solitude.

The spectral rattle of the parched beechleaves on the saplings, the
faintest whisper in the skeleton bracken set me peeping, peering,
tippeting; and the Invisibles, if they heeded me, merely smiled on me
from their grave, all-seeing eyes. As for the first crystal sparking of
frost, I remember in my folly I sat down (bunched up, fortunately, in
honest lamb's-wool) and remained, minute by minute, unstirring,
unwinking, watching as if in my own mind the exquisite small fires
kindle and flit from point to point of lichen and bark, until--out of
this engrossment--little but a burning icicle was left to trudge along
home.

It was December 23rd. I remember that date, and even now hardly
understand the meaning or intention of what it brought me. Love for the
frosty, star-roofed woods, that was easy. And yet what if--though
easy--it is not enough? I had lingered on, talking in my childish
fashion--a habit never to leave me--to every sudden lovely morsel in
turn, when, to my dismay, I heard St Peter's clock toll midnight. Was it
my fancy that at the stroke, and as peacefully as a mother when she is
alone with her sleeping children, the giant tree sighed, and the whole
night stilled as if at the opening of a door? I don't know, for I would
sometimes pretend to be afraid merely to enjoy the pretending. And even
my small Bowater astronomy had taught me that as the earth has her poles
and equator, so these are in relation to the ecliptic and the
equinoctial. So too, then, each one of us--even a mammet like
myself--must live in a world of the imagination which is in everlasting
relation to its heavens. But I must keep my feet.

I waved adieu to the woods and unseen Wanderslore. As if out of the
duskiness a kind of reflex of me waved back; and I was soon hastening
along down the hill, the only thing stirring in the cold, white,
luminous dust. Instinctively, in drawing near, I raised my eyes to the
upper windows of Mrs Bowater's crouching house. To my utter confusion.
For one of them was wide open, and seated there, as if in wait for me,
was a muffled figure--and that not my landlady's--looking out. All my
fine boldness and excitement died in me. I may have had no apprehension
of telling Mrs Bowater of my pilgrimages, but, not having told her, I
had a lively distaste of being "found out."

Stiff as a post, I gazed up through the shadowed air at the vague,
motionless figure--to all appearance completely unaware of my presence.
But there is a commerce between minds as well as between eyes. I was
perfectly certain that I was being _thought_ about, up there.

For a while my mind faltered. The old childish desire gathered in me--to
fly, to be gone, to pass myself away. There was a door in the woods.
Better sense, and perhaps a creeping curiosity, prevailed, however. With
a bold front, and as if my stay in the street had been of my own
choosing, I entered the gate, ascended my "Bateses," and so into the
house. Then I listened. Faintly at last sounded a stealthy footfall
overhead; the window was furtively closed. Doubt vanished. In
preparation for the night's expedition I had lain down in the early
evening for a nap. Evidently while I had been asleep, Fanny had come
home. The English mistress had caught her mother's lodger playing
truant!

Chapter Eleven

If it was the child of wrath in me that hungered at times after the
night, woods, and solitude to such a degree that my very breast seemed
empty within me; it was now the child of grace that prevailed. With
girlish exaggeration I began torturing myself in my bed with remorse at
the deceit I had been practising. Now Conscience told me that I must
make a full confession the first thing in the morning; and now that it
would be more decent to let Fanny "tell on me." At length thought
tangled with dream, and a grisly night was mine.

What was that? It was day; Mrs Bowater was herself softly calling me
beyond my curtains, and her eye peeped in. Always before I had been up
and dressed when she brought in my breakfast. Through a violent headache
I surveyed the stooping face. Something in my appearance convinced her
that I was ill, and she insisted on my staying in bed.

"But, Mrs Bowater...." I expostulated.

"No, no, miss; it was in a _butt_ they drowned the sexton. Here you
stay; and its being Christmas Eve, you must rest and keep quiet. What
with those old books and all, you have been burning the candle at both
ends."

Early in the afternoon on finding that her patient was little better, my
landlady went off to the chemist's to get me some physic; I could bear
inactivity no longer, and rose and dressed. The fire was low, the room
sluggish, when in the dusk, as I sat dismally brooding in my chair, the
door opened, and a stranger came in with my tea. She was dressed in
black, and was carrying a light. With that raised in one hand, and my
tea-tray held between finger and thumb of the other, she looked at me
with face a little sidelong. Her hair was dark above her clear pale
skin, and drawn, without a fringe, smoothly over her brows. Her eyes
were almost unnaturally light in colour. I looked at her in
astonishment; she was new in my world. She put the tray on my table,
poked the fire into a blaze, blew out her candle at a single puff from
her pursed lips, and seating herself on the hearthrug, clasped her hands
round her knees.

"Mother told me you were in bed, _ill_," she said, "I hope you are
better."

I assured her in a voice scarcely above a whisper that I was quite well
again.

She nestled her chin down and broke into a little laugh: "My! how you
startled me!"

"Then it _was_ you," I managed to say.

"Oh, yes; it was me, it was me." The words were uttered as if to
herself. She stooped her cheek over her knees again, and smiled round at
me. "I'm not _telling_," she added softly.

Her tone, her expression, filled me with confusion. "But please do not
suppose," I began angrily, "that I am not my own mistress here. I have
my own key----"

"Oh, yes, your own mistress," she interrupted suavely, "but you see
that's just what I'm _not_. And the key! why, it's just envy that's
gnawing at the roots. I've never, never in my life seen anything so
queer." She suddenly raised her strange eyes on me. "What were you doing
out there?"

A lie perched on my lip; but the wide, light eyes searched me through.
"I went," said I, "to be in the woods--to see the stars"; then added in
a rather pompous voice, "only the southern and eastern constellations
are visible from _this_ poky little window."

There was no change in the expression of the two eyes that drank me in.
"_I_ see; and you want them all. That's odd, now," she went on
reflectively, stabbing again at the fire; "they have never attracted me
very much--angels' tin-tacks, as they say in the Sunday Schools. Fanny
Bowater was looking for the moon."

She turned once more, opened her lips, showing the firm row of teeth
beneath them, and sang in a low voice the first words, I suppose, of
some old madrigal: "'_She enchants me._' And if _I_ had my little key,
and my little secret door.... But never mind. 'Tell-tale Tit, her tongue
shall be slit.' It's safe with me. I'm no sneak. But you might like to
know, Miss M., that my mother thinks the very world of you. And so do I,
for that matter; though perhaps for different reasons."

The calm, insolent words infuriated me, and yet her very accents, with
a curious sweet rasp in them, like that in a skylark's song when he
slides his last twenty feet from the clouds, were an enchantment. Ever
and always there seemed to be two Fannies; one visible, her face; the
other audible, her voice. But the enchantment was merely fuel for the
flames.

"Will you please remember," I broke out peremptorily, "that neither
myself nor what I choose to do is any affair of yours. Mrs Bowater is an
excellent landlady; you can tell her precisely what you please;
and--and" (I seemed to be choking) "I am accustomed to take my meals
alone."

The sidelong face grew hard and solemn in the firelight, then slowly
turned, and once more the eyes surveyed me under lifted brows--like the
eyes of an angel, empty of mockery or astonishment or of any meaning but
that of their beauty. "There you are," she said. "One talks like one
human being to another, and I should have thought you'd be grateful for
that; and this is the result. Facts are facts; and I'm not sorry for
them, good or bad. If you wish to see the last of me, here it is. I
don't thrust myself on people--there's no need. But still; I'm not
telling."

She rose, and with one light foot on my fender, surveyed herself for a
moment with infinite composure in the large looking-glass that spanned
the chimney-piece.

And I?--I was exceedingly tired. My head was burning like a coal; my
thoughts in confusion. Suddenly I lost control of myself and broke into
an angry, ridiculous sobbing. I simply sat there, my face hidden in my
dry, hot hands, miserable and defeated. And strange Fanny Bowater, what
did she do?

"Heavens!" she muttered scornfully, "I gave up snivelling when I was a
baby." Then voice, manner, even attitude suddenly changed--"And there's
mother!"

When Mrs Bowater knocked at my door, though still in my day-clothes, I
was in bed again, and my tea lay untasted on a chair beside it.

"Dear, dear," she said, leaning anxiously over me, "your poor cheeks are
red as a firebrand, miss. Those chemists daren't put a nose outside
their soaps and tooth powders. It must be Dr Phelps to-morrow if you are
no better. And as plump a little Christmas pudding boiling for you in
the pot as ever you could see! Tell me, now; there's no _pain_
anywhere--throat, limbs, or elsewhere?"

I shook my head. She sprinkled a drop or two of eau de Cologne on my
sheet and pillow, gently bathed my temples and hands, kindled a
night-light, and left me once more to my own reflections.

They were none too comfortable. One thing only was in my mind--Fanny
Bowater, her face, her voice, every glance and intonation, smile, and
gesture. That few minutes' talk seemed now as remote and incredible as a
nightmare. The stars, the woods, my solitary delights in learning and
thinking were all suddenly become empty and meaningless. She despised
me: and I hated her with a passion I cannot describe.

Yet in the midst of my hatred I longed for her company again,
distracting myself with the sharp and clever speeches I might have made
to her, and picturing her confounded by my contempt and indifference.
But should I ever see her alone again? At every sound and movement in
the house, which before had so little concerned me, I lay listening,
with held breath. I might have been a mummy in a Pyramid hearkening
after the fluttering pinions of its spirit come back to bring it life.
But no tidings came of the stranger.

When my door opened again, it was only to admit Mrs Bowater with my
supper--a bowl of infant's gruel, not the customary old lady's rusk and
milk. I laughed angrily within to think that her daughter must have
witnessed its preparation. Even at twenty, then, I had not grown used to
being of so little consequence in other people's eyes. Yet, after all,
who ever quite succeeds in being that? My real rage was not that Fanny
had taken me as a midget, but as _such_ a midget. Yet can I honestly say
that I have _ever_ taken her as mere Fanny, and not as _such_ a Fanny?

The truth is she had wounded my vanity, and vanity may be a more
fractious nursling even than a wounded heart. Tired and fretful, I had
hardly realized the flattering candour of her advances. Even her
promises not to "tell" of my night-wanderings, implied that she trusted
in my honour not to tell of her promise. I thought and thought of her.
She remained an enigma. Cold and hard--no one had ever spoken to me like
that before. Yet her voice--it was as if it had run about in my blood,
and made my eyes shine. A mere human sound to set me sobbing! More
dangerous yet, I began to think of what Miss Bowater must be thinking of
me, until, exhausted, I fell asleep, to dream that I was a child again
and shut up in one of Mrs Ballard's glass jars, and that a hairy woman
who was a kind of mixture of Mrs Bowater and Miss Fenne, was tapping
with a thimbled finger on its side to increase my terror.

Next morning, thank Heaven, admitted me to my right mind again. I got
out of bed and peered through the window. It was Christmas Day. A thin
scatter of snow was powdering down out of the grey sky. The fields were
calm and frozen. I felt, as I might say, the hunger in my face, looking
out. There was something astonishingly new in my life. Everything
familiar had become a little strange.

Over night, too, some one--and with mingled feelings I guessed who--must
have stolen into my room while I lay asleep. Laid out on a bedside chair
was a crimson padded dressing-jacket, threaded with gold, a delicate
piece of needlework that would have gladdened my grandfather. Rolled up
on the floor beside it was a thick woollen mat, lozenged in green and
scarlet, and just of a size to spread beside my bed. These gifts
multiplied my self-reproaches and made me acutely homesick.

What should I do? Beneath these thoughts was a quiet fizz of expectation
and delight, like water under a boat. Pride and common sense fought out
their battle in my mind. It was pride that lost the day. When Mrs
Bowater brought in my breakfast, she found her invalid sitting up in
Fanny's handsome jacket, and the mat laid over the bedrail for my
constant contemplation. Nor had I forgotten Mrs Bowater. By a little
ruse I had found out the name and address of a chemist in the town, and
on the tray beside my breakfast was the fine bottle of lavender water
which I had myself ordered him to send by the Christmas Eve post.

"Well there, miss, you did take me in that time," she assured me. "And
more like a Valentine than a Christmas present; and its being the only
scent so-called that I've any nose for."

Clearly this was no occasion for the confessional, even if I had had a
mind to it. But I made at least half a vow never to go star-gazing again
without her knowledge. My looks pleased her better, too, though not so
much better as to persuade her to countermand Dr Phelps. Her yellowish
long hand with its worn wedding-ring was smoothing my counterpane. I
clutched at it, and, shame-stricken, smiled up into her face.

"You have made me very happy," I said. At this small remark, the heavy
eyelids trembled, but she made no reply.

"Did," I managed to inquire at last, "did she have any breakfast before
she went for the doctor?"

"A cup of tea," said Mrs Bowater shortly. A curious happiness took
possession of me.

"She is very young to be teaching; not much older than I am."

"The danger was to keep her back," was the obscure reply. "We don't
always see eye to eye."

For an instant the dark, cavernous face above me was mated by that other
of birdlike lightness and beauty. "Isn't it funny?" I observed, "I had
made quite, quite a different picture of her."

"Looks are looks, and brains are brains; and between them you must tread
very wary."

About eleven o'clock a solemn-looking young man of about thirty, with a
large pair of reddish leather gloves in his hand, entered the room. For
a moment he did not see my bed, then, remarking circumspectly in a
cheerful, hollow voice, "So this is our patient," he bade me
good-morning, and took a seat beside my bed. A deep blush mounted up
into the fair, smooth-downed cheeks as he returned my scrutiny and asked
me to exhibit my tongue. I put it out, and he blushed even deeper.

"And the pulse, please," he murmured, rising. I drew back the crimson
sleeve of Fanny's jacket, and with extreme nicety he placed the tip of a
square, icy forefinger on my wrist. Once more his fair-lashed eyelids
began to blink. He extracted a fine gold watch from his waistcoat
pocket, compared beat with beat, frowned, and turned to Mrs Bowater.

"You are not, I assume, aware of the--the young lady's _normal_ pulse?"

"There being no cause before to consider it, I am not," Mrs Bowater
returned.

"Any _pain_?" said Dr Phelps.

"Headache," replied Mrs Bowater on my behalf, "and shoots in the limbs."

At that Dr Phelps took a metal case out of his waistcoat, glanced at
it, glanced at me, and put it back again. He leaned over so close to
catch the whisper of my breathing that there seemed a danger of my
losing myself in the labyrinth of his downy ear.

"H'm, a little fever," he said musingly. "Have we any reason to suppose
that we can have taken a chill?"

The head on the pillow stirred gently to and fro, and I think its cheek
was dyed with an even sprightlier red than had coloured his. After one
or two further questions, and a low colloquy with Mrs Bowater in the
passage, Dr Phelps withdrew, and his carriage rolled away.

"A painstaking young man," Mrs Bowater summed him up in the doorway,
"but not the kind I should choose to die under. You are to keep quiet
and warm, miss; have plenty of light nourishment; and physic to follow.
Which, except for the last-mentioned, and that mainly water, one don't
have to ride in a carriage to know for one's self."

But "peace and goodwill": I liked Dr Phelps, and felt so much better for
his skill that before his wheels had rolled out of hearing I had leapt
out of bed, dragged out the trunk that lay beneath it, and fetched out
from it a treasured ivory box. On removal of the lid, this ingenious
work disclosed an Oriental Temple, with a spreading tree, a pool, a
long-legged bird, and a mountain. And all these exquisitely tinted in
their natural colours. It had come from China, and had belonged to my
mother's brother, Andrew, who was an officer in the Navy and had died at
sea. This I wrapped up in a square of silk and tied with a green thread.
During the whole of his visit my head had been so hotly in chase of this
one stratagem that it is a marvel Dr Phelps had not deciphered it in my
pulse.

When Mrs Bowater brought in my Christmas dinner--little but bread sauce
and a sprig of holly!--I dipped in the spoon, and, as innocently as I
knew how, inquired if her daughter would like to see some really fine
sewing.

The black eyes stood fast, then the ghost of a smile vanished over her
features; "I'll be bound she would, miss. I'll give her your message."
Alone again, I turned over on my pillow and laughed until tears all but
came into my eyes.

All that afternoon I waited on, the coals of fire that I had prepared
for my enemy's head the night before now ashes of penitence on my own.
A dense smell of cooking pervaded the house; and it was not until the
evening that Fanny Bowater appeared.

She was dressed in a white muslin gown with a wreath of pale green
leaves in her hair. "I am going to a party," she said, "so I can't waste
much time."

"Mrs Bowater thought you would like to see some _really_ beautiful
needlework," I replied suavely.

"Well," she said, "where is it?"

"Won't you come a little closer?"

That figure, as nearly like the silver slip of the new moon as ever I
have seen, seemed to float in my direction. I held my breath and looked
up into the light, dwelling eyes. "It is this," I whispered, drawing my
two hands down the bosom of her crimson dressing-jacket. "It is only,
Thank you, I wanted to say."

In a flash her lips broke into a low clear laughter. "Why, _that's_
nothing. Really and truly I hate that kind of work; but mother often
wrote of you; there was nothing better to do; and the smallness of the
thing amused me."

I nodded humbly. "Yes, yes," I muttered, "Midget is as Midget wears. I
know that. And--and here, Miss Bowater, is a little Christmas present
from me."

Voraciously I watched her smooth face as she untied the thread. "A
little ivory box!" she exclaimed, pushing back the lid, "and a Buddhist
temple, how very pretty. Thank you."

"Yes, Miss Bowater, and, do you see, in the corner there? a moon. 'She
enchants' you."

"So it is," she laughed, closing the box. "I was supposing," she went on
solemnly, "that I had been put in the corner in positively everlasting
disgrace."

"Please don't say that," I entreated. "We _may_ be friends, mayn't we? I
am better now."

Her eyes wandered over my bed, my wardrobe, and all my possessions. "But
yes," she said, "of course"; and laughed again.

"And you believe me?"

"Believe you?"

"That it was the stars? I thought Mrs Bowater might be anxious if she
knew. It was quite, quite safe, really; and I'm _going_ to tell her."

"Oh, dear," she replied in a cold, small voice, "so you are still
worrying about that. I--I envied you." With a glance over her shoulder,
she leaned closer. "Next time you go," she breathed out to me, "we'll go
together."

My heart gave a furious leap; my lips closed tight. "I could tell you
the names of some of the stars now," I said, in a last wrestle with
conscience.

"No, no," said Fanny Bowater, "it isn't the stars I'm after. The first
fine night we'll go to the woods. You shall wait for me till everything
is quiet. It will be good practise in _practical_ astronomy." She
watched my face, and began silently laughing as if she were reading my
thoughts. "That's a bargain, then. What is life, Miss M., but
experience? And what is experience, but knowing thyself? And what's
knowing thyself but the very apex of wisdom? Anyhow it's a good deal
more interesting than the Prince of Denmark."

"Yes", I agreed. "And there's still all but a full moon."

"Aha!" said she. "But _what_ a world with only one! Jupiter has scores,
hasn't he? Just think of _his_ Love Lanes!" She rose to her feet with a
sigh of boredom, and smoothed out her skirts with her long, narrow
hands. I stared at her beauty in amazement.

"I hate these parties here," she said. "They are not worth while."

"You look lov--you look all right."

"H'm; but what's that when there's no one to see."

"But you see yourself. You _live_ in it."

The reflected face in the glass, which, craning forward, I could just
distinguish, knitted its placid brows. "Why, if that were enough, we
should all be hermits. I rather think, you know, that God made man
almost solely in the hope of his two-legged appreciation. But perhaps
you disapprove of incense?"

"Why should I, Miss Bowater? My Aunt Kitilda was a Catholic: and so was
my mother's family right back."

"_That's_ right," said Miss Bowater. She kissed her hand to
looking-glass and four-poster, flung me a last fervid smile, and was
gone. And the little box I had given her lay on the table, beside my
bed.

I was aroused much later by the sound of voices drawing nearer.
Instinctively I sat up, my senses fastened on the sound like a vampire.
The voices seemed to be in argument, then the footsteps ceased and clear
on the night air came the words:--

"But you made me promise _not_ to write. Oh, Fanny, and you have broken
your own!"

"Then you must confess," was the cautious reply, "that I am consistent.
As for the promises, you are quite, quite welcome to the pieces."

"You mean that?" was the muffled retort.

"That," cried the other softly, "depends entirely on what you mean by
'mean.' Please look happy! You'd soon grow old and uglier if there was
only that scrap of moon to light your face."

"Oh, Fanny. Will you never be serious?"--the misery in the words seemed
to creep about in my own mind for shelter. They were answered by a
sparkling gush of laughter, followed by a crisp, emphatic knock at the
door. Fanny had returned from her party, and the eavesdropper buried her
face in her pillow. So she enjoyed hurting people. And yet....

Chapter Twelve

The next afternoon Mrs Bowater was out when Dr Phelps made his call. It
was Fanny who ushered him into the room. He felt my pulse again, held up
the phial of medicine to the light, left unconsulted my tongue, and
pronounced that "we are doing very nicely." As indeed I was. While this
professional inquiry was in progress Fanny stood silently watching us,
then exclaimed that it was half-past four, and that I must have my tea.
She was standing behind Dr Phelps, and for a few seconds I watched with
extreme interest but slow understanding a series of mute little
movements of brows and lips which she was directing at me while he was
jotting down a note in a leather pocket-book. At length I found myself
repeating--as if at her dictation--a polite little invitation to him to
take tea with me. The startled blue eyes lifted themselves above the
pocket-book, the square, fair head was bowing a polite refusal, when,
"But, of course, Dr Phelps," Fanny broke in like one inspired, "how very
thoughtless of me!"

"Thank you, thank you, Miss Bowater, but----" cried Dr Phelps, with a
smooth uplifted hand, and almost statuesque in his pose. His refusal was
too late. Miss Bowater had hastened from the room.

His panic passed. He reseated himself, and remarking that it was a very
cold afternoon, predicted that if the frost continued, skating might be
expected. Conversation of this kind is apt so soon to faint away like a
breeze in hot weather, that I kept wondering what to say next. Besides,
whenever Dr Phelps seemed impelled to look at me, he far more quickly
looked away, and the sound of his voice suggested that he was uncertain
if he was not all but talking to himself. To put him more at his ease I
inquired boldly if he had many other midgets among his patients.

The long lashes swept his cheeks; he pondered a while on my landlady's
window curtains. "As a matter of fact perhaps _not_," he replied at
last, as if giving me the result of a mathematical calculation.

"I suppose, Dr Phelps," I then inquired, "there _might_ be more, at any
time, might there not?" Our glances this time met. He blinked.

"My father and mother, I mean," I explained in some confusion, "were
just of the com--of the ordinary size. And what I was wondering is,
whether you yourself would be sorry--in quite a general way, of
course--if you found your practice going down like that."

"Going down?"

"I mean the _patients_ coming smaller. I never had the opportunity of
asking our own doctor, Dr Grose. At Lyndsey, you know. Besides, I was a
child then. Now, first of all, it is true, isn't it, that giants are
usually rather dull-witted people? So nobody would deliberately choose
_that_ kind of change. If, then, quality does vary with quantity,
mightn't there be an improvement in the other direction? You will think
I am being extremely ego--egotistical. But one must take Jack's side,
mustn't one?--even if one's Jill?"

"Jack?"

"The Giant Killer."

He looked at me curiously, and his finger and thumb once more strayed up
towards the waistcoat pocket in which he kept his thermometer. But
instead of taking it out, he coughed.

"There is a norm----" he began in a voice not quite his own.

"Ah," I cried, interrupting him, and throwing up my hands, "there is
indeed. But why, I ask myself, so vast a number of examples of it!"

It was as if a voice within were prompting me. Perhaps the excitement of
Fanny's homecoming was partly to blame. "I sit at my window here and
watch the passers-by. Norms, in mere size, Dr Phelps, every one of them,
if you allow for the few little defects in the--the moulding, you know.
And just think what London must be like. Why, _nobody_ can be
noticeable, there."

"But surely," Dr Phelps smiled indulgently, though his eyelashes seemed
to be in the way, "surely variety is possible, without--er--excess.
Indeed there must be variety in order to arrive at our norm, mustn't
there?"

"You'd be astonished," I assured him, "how slight the differences
really are. A few inches or ounces; red or black or fawn; and age, and
sex, of course; that's all. Now, isn't it true, Dr Phelps, that almost
any twenty women--unselected, you know--would weigh about a ton? And
surely there's no particular reason why just human shells should weigh
as much as that. We are not lobsters. And yet, do you know, I have
watched, and they really seem to enjoy being the same as one another.
One would think they tried to be--manners and habits, knowledge and
victuals, hats and boots, everything. And if on the outside, I suppose
on the inside, too. What a mysterious thing it seems. All of them
_thinking_ pretty much the same: Norm-_Thoughts_, you know; just
five-foot-fivers. After all, one wouldn't so much mind the monotonous
packages, if the contents were different. 'Forty feeding like one'--who
said that? Now, truly, Dr Phelps, don't you feel?---- It would, of
course, be very serious at first for their mothers and fathers if all
the little human babies here came midgets, but it would be amusing, too,
wouldn't it?... And it isn't quite my own idea, either."

Dr Phelps cleared his throat, and looked at his watch. "But surely," he
said, with a peculiar emphasis which I have noticed men are apt to make
when my sex asks intelligent or unintelligent questions: "Surely you and
I are understanding one another. _I_ try to make myself clear to _you_.
So extremes _can_ meet; at least I hope so." He gave me a charming
little awkward bow. "Tell me, then, what is this peculiar difference you
are so anxious about? You wouldn't like a pygmy England, a pygmy
Universe, now, would you, Miss M.?"

It was a great pity. A pygmy England--the thought dazzled me. In a few
minutes Dr Phelps would perhaps have set all my doubts at rest. But at
that moment Miss Bowater came in with the tea, and the talk took quite
another turn. She just made it Fanny's size. Even Dr Phelps looked a
great deal handsomer in her company. More sociable. Nor were we to
remain "three's none." She had finished but one slice of toast over my
fire, and inflamed but one cheek, when a more protracted but far less
vigorous knock than Dr Phelps's on the door summoned her out of the room
again. And a minute or two afterwards our tea-party became one of four,
and its sexes (in number, at any rate) equally matched.

By a happy coincidence, just as Good King Wenceslas had looked out on
the Feast of Stephen, so Mr Crimble, the curate-in-charge at St Peter's,
had looked in. By his "Ah, Phelps!" it was evident that our guests were
well acquainted with one another; and Fanny and I were soon enjoying a
tea enriched by the cream of local society. Mr Crimble had mild dark
eyes, gold spectacles, rather full red lips, and a voice that reminded
me of raspberries. I think he had heard of me, for he was very
attentive, and handled my small cup and saucer with remarkable, if
rather conspicuous, ingenuity.

Candles were lit. The talk soon became animated. From the weather of
this Christmas we passed to the weather of last, to Dr Phelps's
prospects of skating, and thence to the good old times, to Mr Pickwick,
to our respective childish beliefs in Santa Claus, stockings, and to
credulous parents. Fanny repeated some of the naïve remarks made by her
pupils, and Mr Crimble capped them with a collection of biblical _bons
mots_ culled in his Sunday School. I couldn't glance fast enough from
one to the other. Dr Phelps steadily munched and watched Mr Crimble. He
in turn told us of a patient of his, a Mrs Hall, who, poor old creature,
was 101, and enjoyed nothing better than playing at "Old Soldier" with a
small grandson.

"Literally, second childhood. Senile decay," he said, passing his cup.

From Mrs Hall we naturally turned to parochial affairs; and then Mr
Crimble, without more ado, bolted his mouthful of toast, in order to
explain the inmost purpose of his visit.

He was anxious to persuade Miss Bowater to sing at the annual Parish
Concert, which was to be given on New Year's Eve. Try as he might, he
had been unable to persuade his vicar of the efficacy of Watch Night
Services. So a concert was to be given instead. Now, would Miss Bowater,
as ever, be ever so kind, and would I add my entreaties to his? As he
looked at Fanny and I did too--with one of those odd turns of the mind,
I was conscious that the peculiar leaning angle of his head was exactly
the same as my own. Whereupon I glanced at Dr Phelps, but he sat fair
and foursquare, one feeding like forty. Fanny remaining hesitant, appeal
was made to him. With almost more cordiality than Mr Crimble appeared
to relish, he agreed that the musical talent available was not so
abundant as it might be, and he promised to take as many of the
expensive tickets as Miss Bowater would sing songs.

"I don't pretend to be musical, not like you, Crimble. But I don't mind
a pleasant voice--in moderation; and I assure you, Miss Bowater, I am an
excellent listener--given a fair chance, you know."

"But then," said Fanny, "so am I. I believe now really--and one can
judge from one's speaking voice, can't one, Mr Crimble?--I believe you
sing yourself."

"Sing, Miss Bowater," interjected Mr Crimble, tipping back his chair.
"'The wedding guest here beat his chest, for he heard the loud bassoon.'
Now, conjuring tricks, eh, Phelps? With a stethoscope and a clinical
thermometer; and I'll hold the hat and make the omelette. It would bring
down the house."

"It was his _breast_ he beat; not his _chest_," I broke in.

The six eyes slid round, as if at a voice out of the clouds. There was a
pause.

"Why, exactly," cried Mr Crimble, slapping his leg.

"But I wish Dr Phelps _would_ sing," said Fanny in a small voice,
passing him the sugar.

"He must, he shall," said Mr Crimble, in extreme jubilation. "So that's
settled. _Thank_ you, Miss Bowater," his eyes seemed to melt in his head
at his success, "the programme is complete."

He drew a slip of paper from his inside pocket and brandished a silver
pencil-case. "Mrs Browning, 'The Better Land'--better and better every
year. 'Caller Herrin'' to follow--though what kind of herrings caller
herrings are I've never been able to discover." He beamed on me. "Miss
Finch--she is sending me the names of her songs this evening. Miss
Willett and Mr Bangor--'O that we two,' and a queer pair they'd look;
and 'My luv is like.' Hardy annuals. Mrs Bullace--recitations, 'Abt
Vogler,' and no doubt a Lord Tennyson. Flute, Mr Piper; 'Cello, Miss
Oran, a niece of Lady Pollacke's; and for comic relief, Tom Sturgess, of
course; though I hope he will be a little more--er--eclectic this year.
And you and I," again he turned his boyish brow on me, "will sit with
Mrs Bowater in the front row of the gallery--a claque, Phelps, eh?"

He seemed to be in the topmost height of good spirits. Well, thought I,
if social badinage and _bonhomie_ were as pleasant and easy as this, why
hadn't my mother----?

"But why in the gallery?" drawled Fanny suddenly from the hearthrug,
with the little steel poker ready poised; "Miss M. _dances_."

The clear voice rasped on the word. A peculiar silence followed the
lingering accents. The two gentlemen's faces smoothed themselves out,
and both, I knew, though I gave them no heed, sat gazing, _not_ at their
hostess. But Fanny herself was looking at me now, her light eyes quite
still in the flame of the candles, which, with their reflections in Mrs
Bowater's pier glass were not two, but four. It was into those eyes I
gazed, yet not into, only at.

All day my thoughts had remained on her, like bubbles in wine. All day
hope of the coming night and of our expedition to the woods had been, as
it were, a palace in which my girlish fancy had wandered, and now,
though only a few minutes ago I had been cheeping my small extemporary
philosophy into the ear of Dr Phelps, the fires of self-contempt and
hatred burned up in me hotter than ever.

I forgot even the dainty dressing-jacket on my back. "Miss Bowater is
pleased to be satirical," I said, my hand clenched in my lap.

"Now _was_ I?" cried Fanny, appealing to Dr Phelps, "be just to me." Dr
Phelps opened his mouth, swallowed, and shut it again.

"I really think not, you know," said Mr Crimble persuasively, coming to
her rescue. "Indeed it would be extremely kind and--er--entertaining;
though dancing--er--and--unless, perhaps, so many strangers.... We can
count in any case on your being _present_, can we not, Miss M.?" He
leaned over seductively, finger and thumb twitching at the plain gold
cross suspended from his watch-chain on his black waistcoat.

"Oh, yes," I replied, "you can count on me for the claque."

The room had sunk into a stillness. Constraint was in the air. "Then
that's settled. On New Year's Eve we--we all meet again. Unless, Miss
Bowater, there is any hope of seeing you meanwhile--just to arrange the
_titles_ and so on of your songs on the programme."

"No," smiled Fanny, "I see no hope whatever. You forget, Mr Crimble,
there are dishes to wash. And hadn't you better see Miss Finch first?"

Mr Crimble cast a strange look at her face. He was close to her, and it
was almost as if he had whispered, "Fanny." But there was no time for
further discussion. Dr Phelps, gloved and buttoned, was already at the
door.

Fanny returned into the room when our guests had taken their departure.
I heard their male voices in vivacious talk as they marched off in the
cold dark air beneath my window.

"I thought they were never going," said Fanny lightly, twisting up into
her hair an escaped ringlet. "I think, do you know, we had better say
nothing to mother about the tea--at least not yet a while. They are dull
creatures: it's pottering about so dull and sleepy a place, I suppose.
What _could_ have inspired you to invite Dr Phelps to tea? Really,
really, Miss M., you are rather astonishing. Aren't you, now?"

What right had she to speak to me like this, as if we had met again
after another life? She paused in her swift collection of the remnants
of our feast. "Sulking?" she inquired sweetly.

With an effort I kept my self-possession. "You meant what you said,
then? You really think I would sink to that?"

"'Sink!' To what? Oh, the dancing, you mean. How funny you should still
be fretting about that. Still, you look quite entertaining when you are
cross: 'Diaphenia like the daffadowndilly,' you know. Good Heavens!
Surely we shouldn't hide any kind of lights under bushels, should we?
I'm sure the Reverend Harold would agree to that. Isn't it being the
least bit pedantic?"

"I should think," I retorted, "Mr Crimble would say anything pleasant to
_any_ young woman."

"I have no doubt he would," she agreed. "The other cheek also, you know.
But the real question is what the young woman would say in reply. You
are too sensitive, Miss M."

"Perhaps I am." Oh that I could escape from this horrible net between
us. "I know this, anyhow--that I lay awake till midnight because you had
made a kind of promise to come in. Then I--I 'counted the pieces.'"

Her face whitened beneath the clear skin. "Oh, so we list----" she
began, turning on me, then checked herself. "I tell you this," she said,
her hand trembling, "I'm sick of it all. Those--those fools! Ph! I
thought that you, being as you are--snippeting along out of the
night--might understand. There's such a thing as friendship on false
pretences, Miss M."

Was she, too, addressing, as she supposed, a confidant hardly more
external to herself than that inward being whom we engage in such
endless talk and argument? Her violence shocked me; still more her
"fools." For the word was still next-door neighbour in my mind to the
dreadful "_Raca_."

"'Understand,'" I said, "I do, if you would only let me. You just hide
in your--in your own outside. You think because I am as I am that I'm
only of that much account. It's you are the--foolish. Oh, don't let us
quarrel. You just came. I never knew. Every hour, every minute...."
Inarticulate my tongue might be, but my face told its tale. She must
have heard many similar confessions, yet an almost childish incredulity
lightened in hers.

"Keep there," she said; "keep there! I won't be a moment."

She hastened out of the room with the tea things, poising an instant
like a bird on a branch as she pushed open the door with her foot. The
slave left behind her listened to her footsteps dying away in a mingling
of shame, sorrow, and of a happiness beyond words. I know now that it is
not when we are near people that we reach themselves, not, I mean, in
their looks and words, but only by following their thoughts to where the
spirit within plays and has its being. Perhaps if I had realized this
earlier, I shouldn't have fallen so easy a prey to Fanny Bowater. I
waited--but that particular exchange of confidences was never to be
completed. A key sounded in the latch. Fanny had but time to show
herself with stooping, almost serpent-like head, in the doorway.
"To-night!" she whispered. "And not a word, not a word!"

Chapter Thirteen

Was there suspicion in the face of Mrs Bowater that evening? Our usual
familiar talk dwindled to a few words this supper-time. The old conflict
was raging in my mind--hatred of my deceit, horror at betraying an
accomplice, and longing for the solemn quiet and solitude of the dark. I
crushed my doubtings down and cast a dismal, hostile look at the long
face, so yellow of skin and sombre in expression. When would she be gone
and leave me in peace? The packed little parlour hung stagnant in the
candlelight. It seemed impossible that Mrs Bowater could not hear the
thoughts in my mind. Apparently not. She tidied up my few belongings,
which, contrary to my usual neat habits, I had left scattered over the
table. She bade me good-night; but paused in the doorway to look back at
me. But what intimacy she had meant to share with me was put aside.
"Good-night, miss," she repeated; "and I'm sure, God bless you." It was
the dark, quiet look that whelmed over me. I gazed mutely, without
response, and the silence was broken by a clear voice like that of a
cautious mocking-bird out of a wood.

It called softly on two honeyed notes, "Mo--ther!"

The house draped itself in quiet. Until ten had struck, and footsteps
had ascended to the rooms overhead, I kept close in my bedchamber. Then
I hastily put on my outdoor clothes, shivering not with cold, but with
expectation, and sat down by the fire, prepared for the least sound that
would prove that Fanny had not forgotten our assignation. But I waited
in vain. The cold gathered. The vaporous light of the waning moon
brightened in the room. The cinders fainted to a darker glow. I heard
the kitchen clock with its cracked, cantankerous stroke beat out eleven.
Its solemn mate outside, who had seemingly lost his voice, ticked on.

Hope died out in me, leaving an almost physical nausea, a profound
hatred of myself and even of being alive. "Well," a cold voice said in
my ear, "that's how we are treated; that comes of those eyes we cannot
forget. Cheated, cheated again, my friend."

In those young days disappointment set my heart aching with a bitterness
less easy to bear than it is now. No doubt I was steeped in
sentimentality and folly. It was the vehemence of this new feeling that
almost terrified me. But my mind was my world; it is my only excuse. I
could not get out of _that_ by merely turning a tiny key in a Brahma
lock. Nor could I betake myself to bed. How sleep in such an inward
storm of reproaches, humiliation, and despised love?

I drew down my veil, wrapped my shawl closer round my shoulders,
descended my staircase, and presently stood in the porch in
confrontation of the night. Low on the horizon, at evens with me across
space, and burning with a limpid fire, hung my chosen--Sirius. The
sudden sight of him pouring his brilliance into my eyes brought a
revulsion of feeling. He was "cutting me dead." I brazened him down. I
trod with exquisite caution down the steps, daring but one fleeting
glance, as I turned, at Fanny's window. It was blinded, empty. Toiling
on heavily up the hill, I sourly comforted myself with the vow that she
should realize how little I cared, that her room had been sweeter than
her company. Never more would I put trust in "any child of man."

Gradually, however, the quiet night received me into its peace (just as,
poor soul, did the Moor Desdemona), and its influence stole into my
darkened mind. The smooth, columnar boughs of the beeches lifted
themselves archingly into the sky. Soon I was climbing over the
moss-bound roots of my customary observatory. But this night the stars
were left for a while unsignalled and unadmired. The crisped,
frost-lined leaves scattered between the snake-like roots sparkled
faintly. Years seemed to have passed away, dwindled in Time's
hour-glass, since my previous visit. That Miss M. had ghosted herself
away for ever. In my reverie the vision of Fanny re-arose into my
imagination--that secret still fountain--of herself. Asleep now.... I
could no more free myself from her sorcery than I could disclaim the two
hands that lay in my lap. She was indeed more closely mine than
they--and nearer in actuality than I had imagined.

A faint stir in the woods suddenly caught my attention. The sound
neared. I pressed my hand to my breast, torn now between two incentives,
two desires--to fly, to stay. And on the path by which I had come,
appeared, some yards distant, in the faint trickling light, the dark
figure of my dreams.

She was dressed in a black cloak, its peaked old-fashioned hood drawn
over her head. The moonbeams struck its folds as she moved. Her face was
bowed down a little, her hand from within clutching her cloak together.
And I realized instinctively and with joy that the silence and solitude
of the woods alarmed her. It was I who was calm and self-contained. She
paused and looked around her--stood listening with lips divided that yet
could not persuade themselves to call me by name. For my part, I softly
gathered myself closer together and continued to gloat. And suddenly out
of the far-away of the woods a nightbird loosed its cry: "A-hoo....
Ahoo-oo-oo-hooh!"

There is a hunter in us all. I laughed inwardly as I watched. A few
months more and I was to watch a lion-tamer ... but let me keep to one
thing at a time. I needled myself in, and, almost hooting the sound
through my mouth, as if in echo of the bird, I heard myself call
stealthily across the air, "Fanny!--Fanny Bowater!"

The cloaked figure recoiled, with lifted head, like the picture of a
fawn I have seen, and gazed in my direction. Seeing nothing of me amidst
the leaves and shadows, she was about to flee, when I called again:--

"It is I, Fanny. Here: here!"

Instantly she woke to herself, came near, and looked down on me. No
movement welcomed her. "I was tired of waiting," I yawned. "There is
nothing to be frightened about."

Many of her fellow creatures, I fancy, have in their day wearied of
waiting for Fanny Bowater, but few have had the courage or sagacity to
tell her so. She had not recovered her equanimity fully enough to
refrain from excuses.

"Surely you did not expect me while mother was moving? I am not
accustomed, Miss M., to midnight wanderings."

"I gave up expecting you, and was glad to be alone."

The barb fell short. She looked stilly around her. The solemn beeches
were like mute giants overarching with their starry, sky-hung boughs
the dark, slim figure. What consciousness had they, I wonder, of those
odd humans at their roots?

"Alone! Here!" she returned. "But no wonder. It's what you are all
about."

A peculiar elation sprang up in me at this none too intelligible remark.

"I wonder, though," she added, "you are not frozen like--like a pebble,
sitting there."

"But I am," I said, laughing softly. "It doesn't matter in me, because
I'm so easy to thaw. You ought to know that. Oh, Miss Bowater, think if
this were summer time and the dew and the first burning heat! Are you
wrapped up? And shall we sit here, just--just for one dance of the
Sisters: thou lost dove, Merope?"

For there on high--and I had murmured the last words all but inaudibly
to myself--there played the spangling Pleiads, clear above her head in
the twig-swept sky.

"What sisters?" she inquired, merely humouring me, perhaps.

"The Six, Fanny, look! You cannot see their Seventh--yet she is all that
_that_ is about." South to north I swept my hand across the powdery
firmament. "And I myself trudge along down Watling Street; that's the
Milky Way. I don't think, Fanny, I shall ever, ever be weaned. Please,
may I call you that?"

She frowned up a moment into the emptiness, hesitated, then--just like a
white peacock I had once seen when a child from my godmother's ancient
carriage as we rolled by an old low house with terraces smooth as velvet
beneath its cedars--she disposed her black draperies upon the ground at
a little distance, disclosing, in so doing, beneath their folds the
moon-blanched flounces of her party gown. I gazed spellbound. I looked
at the white and black, and thought of what there was within their
folds, and of the heart within that, and of the spirit of man. Such was
my foolish fashion, following idly like a butterfly the scents of the
air, flitting on from thought to thought, and so missing the full
richness of the one blossom on which I might have hovered.

"Tell me some more," broke suddenly the curious voice into the midst of
this reverie.

"Well, there," I cried, "is fickle Algol; the Demon. And over there
where the Crab crawls, is the little Beehive between the Roses."

"Præsepe," drawled Fanny.

"Yes," said I, unabashed, "the Beehive. And crane back your neck,
Fanny--there's little Jack-by-the-Middle-Horse; and far down, oh, far
down, Berenice's Hair, which would have been Fanny Bowater's Hair, if
you had been she."

Even as I looked, a remote film of mist blotted out the infinitesimal
cluster. "And see, beyond the Chair," I went on, laughing, and yet
exalted with my theme, "that dim in the Girdle is the Great
Nebula--s-sh! And on, on, that chirruping Invisible, _that_, Fanny, is
the Midget. Perhaps you cannot even dream of her: but she watches."

"Never even heard of her," said Fanny good-humouredly, withdrawing the
angle of her chin from the Ecliptic.

"Say not so, Horatia," I mocked, "there are more things...."

"Oh, yes, I know all about that. And these cold, monotonous old things
really please you? Personally, I'd give the whole meaningless scramble
of them for another moon."

"But your old glutton has gobbled up half of them already."

"Then my old glutton can gobble up what's left. Who taught you about
them? And why," she scanned me closely, "why did you pick out the
faintest; do you see them the best?"

"I picked out the faintest because they were meant especially for me so
that I could give them to you. My father taught me a little about them;
and _your_ father the rest."

"_My_ father," echoed Fanny, her face suddenly intent.

"His book. Do you miss him? Mine is dead."

"Oh, yes, I miss him," was the serene retort, "and so, I fancy, does
mother."

"Oh, Fanny, I am sorry. She told me--something like that."

"You need not be. I suppose God chooses one's parents quite
deliberately. Praise Him from Whom all blessings flow!" She smoothed out
her black cloak over her ankles, raised her face again into the
dwindling moonlight, and gently smiled at me. "I am glad I came,
Midgetina, though it's suicidally cold. '_Pardi! on sent Dieu bien à son
aise ici._' We are going to be great friends, aren't we?" Her eyes swept
over me. "Would you like that?"

"Friends," indeed! and as if she had offered me a lump of sugar.

I gravely nodded. "But I must come to you. You can't come to me. No one
has; except, perhaps, my mother--a little."

"Oh, yes," she replied cautiously, piercing her eyes at me, "that _is_ a
riddle. You must tell me about your childhood. Not that I love children,
or my own childhood either. I had enough of that to last me a lifetime.
I shan't pass it on; though I promise you, Midgetina, if I ever _do_
have a baby, I will anoint its little backbone with the grease of moles,
bats, and dormice, and make it like you. Was your mother----" she began
again, after a pause of reflection. "Are _you_ sorry, I mean, you
aren't--you aren't----?"

Her look supplied the missing words. "Sorry that I am a midget, Fanny?
People think I must be. But why? It is all I am, all I ever was. I am
myself, inside; like everybody else; and yet, you know, not quite like
everybody else. I sometimes think"--I laughed at the memory--"I was
asking Dr Phelps about that. Besides, would _you_ be--alone?"

"Not when I was alone, perhaps. Still, it must be rather odd, Miss
Needle-in-a-Haystack. As for being alone"--once again our owl, if owl it
was, much nearer now, screeched its screech in the wintry woods--"I hate
it!"

"But surely," expostulated the wiseacre in me, "that's what we cannot
help being. We even die alone, Fanny."

"Oh, but I'm going to help it. I'm not dead yet. Do you ever think of
the future?"

For an instant its great black hole yawned close, but I shook my head.

"Well, that," replied she, "is what Fanny Bowater is doing all the time.
There's nothing," she added satirically, "so important, so imperative
for teachers as learning. And you must learn your lesson, my dear,
before you are heard it--if you want to escape a slapping. Every little
donkey knows that."

"I suppose the truth is," said I, as if seized with a bright idea,
"there are two kinds of ambitions, of wants, I mean. We are all like
those Chinese boxes; and some of us want to live in the biggest, the
outsidest we can possibly manage; and some in the inmost one of all. The
one," I added a little drearily, "no one can share."

"Quite, quite true," said Fanny, mimicking my sententiousness, "the
teeniest, tiniest, ickiest one, which no mortal ingenuity has ever been
able to open--and so discover the nothing inside. I know your Chinese
Boxes!"

"Poor Fanny," I cried, rising up and kneeling beside the ice-cold hand
that lay on the frosty leaves. "All that I have shall help you."

Infatuated thing; I stooped low as I knelt, and stroked softly with my
own the outstretched fingers on which she was leaning.

I might have been a pet animal for all the heed she paid to my caress.
"Fanny," I whispered tragically, "will you please sing to me--if you are
not frozenly cold? You remember--the Moon Song: I have never forgotten
it; and only three notes, yet it sometimes wakes me at night. It's
queer, isn't it, being you and me?"

She laughed, tilting her chin; and her voice began at once to sing, as
if at the scarcely opened door of her throat, and a tune so plain it
seemed but the words speaking:--

     "Twas a Cuckoo, cried 'cuck-oo'
     In the youth of the year;
     And the timid things nesting,
     Crouched, ruffled in fear;
     And the Cuckoo cried, 'cuck-oo,'
     For the honest to hear.

     One--two notes: a bell sound
     In the blue and the green;
     'Cuck-oo: cuck-oo: cuck-oo!'
     And a silence between.

     Ay, mistress, have a care, lest
     Harsh love, he hie by,
     And for kindness a monster
     To nourish you try--
     In your bosom to lie:
     'Cuck-oo,' and a 'cuck-oo,'
     And 'cuck-oo!'"

The sounds fell like beads into the quiet--as if a small child had come
up out of her heart and gone down again; and she callous and unmoved. I
cannot say why the clear, muted notes saddened and thrilled me so. Was
_she_ the monster?

I had drawn back, and stayed eyeing her pale face, the high cheek, the
delicate straight nose, the darkened lips, the slim black eyebrows, the
light, clear, unfathomable eyes reflecting the solitude and the thin
brilliance of the wood. Yet the secret of herself remained her own. She
tried in vain not to be disturbed at my scrutiny.

"Well," she inquired at last, with motionless glance fixed on the
distance. "Do you think you could honestly give me a testimonial, Miss
Midget?"

It is strange. The Sphinx had spoken, yet without much enlightenment.
"Now look at me," I commanded. "If I went away, you couldn't follow.
When you go away, you cannot escape from me. I can go back and--and _be_
where I was." My own meaning was half-concealed from me; but a startled
something that had not been there before peeped out of those eyes so
close to mine.

"If," she said, "I could care like that too, yet wanted nothing, then I
should be free too."

"What do you mean?" said I, lifting my hand from the unanswering
fingers.

"I mean," she exclaimed, leaping to her feet, "that I'm sick to death of
the stars and am going home to bed. Hateful, listening old woods!"

I turned sharp round, as if in apprehension that some secret hearer
might have caught her remark. But Fanny stretched out her arms, and,
laughing a foolish tune, in affected abandonment began softly to dance
in the crisp leaves, quite lost to me again. So twirling, she set off
down the path by which she had come trespassing. A physical exhaustion
came over me. I watched her no more, but stumbled along, with unheeding
eyes, in her wake. What had I not given, I thought bitterly, and this my
reward. Thus solitary, I had gone only a little distance, and had
reached the outskirts of the woods, when a far from indifferent Fanny
came hastening back to intercept me.

And no wonder. She had remembered to attire herself becomingly for her
moonlight tryst, but had forgotten the door key. We stood looking at one
another aghast, as, from eternity, I suppose, have all
fellow-conspirators in danger of discovery. It was I who first awoke to
action. There was but one thing to be done, and, warning Fanny that I
had never before attempted to unlatch the big front door of her mother's
house, I set off resolutely down the hill.

"You walk so slowly!" she said suddenly, turning back on me. "I will
carry you."

Again we paused. I looked up at her with an inextricable medley of
emotions struggling together in my mind, and shook my head.

"But why, why?" she repeated impatiently. "We could get there in half
the time."

"If you could _fly_, Fanny, I'd walk," I replied stubbornly.

"You mean----" and her cold anger distorted her face. "Oh, pride! What
childish nonsense! And you said we were to be friends. Do you suppose I
care whether...?" But the question remained unfinished.

"I _am_ your friend," said I, "and that is why I will not, I _will_ not
give way to you." It was hardly friendship that gleamed out of the wide
eyes then. But mine the victory--a victory in which only a tithe of the
spoils, unrecognized by the vanquished, had fallen to the victor.

Without another word she turned on her heel, and for the rest of our
dejected journey she might have been mistaken for a cross nurse trailing
on pace for pace beside a rebellious child. My dignity was less ruffled
than hers, however, and for a brief while I had earned my freedom.

Arrived at the house, dumbly hostile in the luminous night, Fanny
concealed herself as best she could behind the gate-post and kept watch
on the windows. Far away in the stillness we heard a footfall echoing on
the hill. "There is some one coming," she whispered, "you must hurry."
She might, I think, have serpented her way in by my own little door.
Where the _head_ leads, the heart may follow. But she did not suggest
it. Nor did I.

I tugged and pushed as best I could, but the umbrella with which from a
chair I at last managed to draw the upper bolt of the door was extremely
cumbersome. The latch for a while resisted my efforts. And the knowledge
that Fanny was fretting and fuming behind the gatepost hardly increased
my skill. The house was sunken in quiet; Mrs Bowater apparently was
sleeping without her usual accompaniment; only Henry shared my labours,
and he sat moodily at the foot of the stairs, refusing to draw near
until at the same moment Fanny entered, and he leapt out.

Once safely within, and the door closed and bolted again, Fanny stood
for a few moments listening. Then with a sigh and a curious gesture she
bent herself and kissed the black veil that concealed my fair hair.

"I am sorry, Midgetina," she whispered into its folds, "I was impatient.
Mother wouldn't have liked the astronomy, you know. That was all. And I
am truly sorry for--for----"

"My dear," I replied in firm, elderly tones, whose echo is in my ear to
this very day; "My dear, it was my mind you hurt, not my feelings." With
that piece of sententiousness I scrambled blindly through my Bates's
doorway, shut the door behind me, and more disturbed at heart than I can
tell, soon sank into the thronging slumber of the guilty and the
obsessed.

Chapter Fourteen

When my eyes opened next morning, a strange, still glare lay over the
ceiling, and I looked out of my window on a world mantled and cold with
snow. For a while I forgot the fever of the last few days in watching
the birds hopping and twittering among the crumbs that Mrs Bowater
scattered out on the windowsill for my pleasure. And yet--their every
virtue, every grace, Fanny Bowater, all were thine! The very snow, in my
girlish fantasy, was the fairness beneath which the unknown Self in her
must, as I fondly believed, lie slumbering; a beauty that hid also from
me for a while the restless, self-centred mind. How believe that such
beauty is any the less a gift to its possessor than its bespeckled
breast and song to a thrush, its sheen to a starling? It is a riddle
that still baffles me. If we are all shut up in our bodies as the poets
and the Scriptures say we are, then how is it that many of the loveliest
seem to be all but uninhabited, or to harbour such dingy tenants; while
quite plain faces may throng with animated ghosts?

Fanny did not come to share my delight in the snow that morning. And as
I looked out on it, waiting on in vain, hope flagged, and a sadness
stole over its beauty. Probably she had not given the fantastic lodger a
thought. She slid through life, it seemed, as easily as a seal through
water. But I was not the only friend who survived her caprices. In spite
of her warning about the dish-washing, Mr Crimble came to see her that
afternoon. She was out. With a little bundle of papers in his hand he
paused at the gate-post to push his spectacles more firmly on to his
nose and cast a kind of homeless look over the fields before turning his
face towards St Peter's. Next day, Holy Innocents', he came again; but
this time with more determination, for he asked to see me.

To rid myself, as far as possible, of one piece of duplicity, I at once
took the bull by the horns, and in the presence of Mrs Bowater boldly
invited him to stay to tea. With a flurried glance of the eye in her
direction he accepted my invitation.

"A cold afternoon, Mrs Bowater," he intoned. "The cup that cheers, the
cup that cheers."

My landlady left the conventions to take care of themselves; and
presently he and I found ourselves positively _tête-à-tête_ over her
seed cake and thin bread and butter.

But though we both set to work to make conversation, an absent
intentness in his manner, a listening turn of his head, hinted that his
thoughts were not wholly with me.

"Are you long with us?" he inquired, stirring his tea.

"I am quite, quite happy here," I replied, with a sigh.

"Ah!" he replied, a little wistfully, taking a sip, "how few of us have
the courage to confess that. Perhaps it flatters us to suppose we are
miserable. It is this pessimism--of a mechanical, a scientific
age--which we have chiefly to contend against. We don't often see you at
St Peter's, I think?"

"You wouldn't see _very_ much of me, if I did come," I replied a little
tartly. Possibly it was his "we" that had fretted me. It seemed
needlessly egotistical. "On the other hand," I added, "wouldn't there be
a risk of the congregation seeing nothing else?"

Mr Crimble opened his mouth and laughed. "I wish," he said, with a
gallant little bow, "there were more like you."

"More like _me_, Mr Crimble?"

"I mean," he explained, darting a glance at the furniture of my bedroom,
whose curtains, to my annoyance, hung withdrawn, "I mean that--that
you--that so many of us refuse to see the facts of life. To look them in
the face, Miss M. There is nothing to fear."

We were getting along famously, and I begged him to take some of Mrs
Bowater's black currant jam.

"But then, I have plenty of time," I said agreeably. "And the real
difficulty is to get the facts to face me. Dear me, if only, now, I had
some of Miss Bowater's brains."

A veil seemed suddenly to lift from his face and as suddenly to descend
again. So, too, he had for a moment stopped eating, then as suddenly
begun eating again.

"Ah, Miss Bowater! She is indeed clever; a--a brilliant young lady. The
very life of a party, I assure you. And, yet, do you know, in parochial
gatherings, try as I may, I occasionally find it very difficult to get
people to mix. The little social formulas, the prejudices. Yet, surely,
Miss M., religion _should_ be the great solvent. At least, that is my
view."

He munched away more vigorously, and gazed through his spectacles out
through my window-blinds.

"Mixing people must be very wearisome," I suggested, examining his face.

"'Wearisome,'" he repeated blandly. "I am sometimes at my wits' end. No.
A curate's life is not a happy one." Yet he confessed it almost with
joy.

"And the visiting!" I said. And then, alas! my tongue began to run away
with me. He was falling back again into what I may call his company
voice, and I pined to talk to the real Mr Crimble, little dreaming how
soon that want was to be satiated.

"I sometimes wonder, do you know, if religion is made difficult enough."

"But I assure you," he replied, politely but firmly, "a true religion is
exceedingly difficult. 'The eye of a needle'--we mustn't forget that."

"Ah, yes," said I warmly; "that 'eye' will be narrow enough even for a
person with my little advantages. I remember my mother's cook telling
me, when I was a child, that in the old days, really wicked people if
they wanted to return to the Church, had to do so in a sheet, with ashes
on their heads, you know, and carrying a long lighted candle. She said
that if the door was shut against them, they died in torment, and went
to Hell. But she was a Roman Catholic, like my grandmother."

Mr Crimble peered at me as if over a wall.

"I remember, too," I went on, "one summer's day as a very little girl I
was taken to the evening service. And the singing--bursting out like
that, you know, with the panting and the yowling of the organ, made me
faint and sick; and I jumped right out of the window."

"Jumped out of the window!" cried my visitor in consternation.

"Yes, we were at the back. Pollie, my nursemaid, had put me up in the
niche, you see; and I dragged her hand away. But I didn't hurt myself.
The grass was thick in the churchyard; I fell light, and I had plenty
of clothes on. I rather enjoyed it--the air and the tombstones. And
though I had my gasps, the 'eye' seemed big enough when I was a child.
But afterwards--when I was confirmed--I thought of Hell a good deal. I
can't _see_ it so plainly now. Wide, low, and black, with a few demons.
_That_ can't be right."

"My dear young lady!" cried Mr Crimble, as if shocked, "is it wise to
attempt it? It must be admitted, of course, that if we do not take
advantage of the benefits bestowed upon us by Providence in a Christian
community, we cannot escape His displeasure. The absence from His Love."

"Yes," I said, looking at him in sudden intimacy, "I believe that." And
I pondered a while, following up my own thoughts. "Have you ever read Mr
Clodd's _Childhood of the World_, Mr Crimble?"

By the momentary confusion of his face I gathered that he had not. "Mr
Clodd?... Ah, yes, the writer on Primitive Man."

"This was only a little book, for the young, you know. But in it Mr
Clodd says, I remember, that even the most shocking old forms of
religion were not invented by devils. They were 'Man's struggles from
darkness to twilight.' What he meant was that no man _loves_ darkness.
At least," I added, with a sudden gush of remembrances, "not without the
stars."

"That is exceedingly true," replied Mr Crimble. "And, talking of stars,
what a wonderful sight it was the night before last, the whole heavens
one spangle of diamonds! I was returning from visiting a sick
parishioner, Mr Hubbins." Then it was _his_ foot that Fanny and I had
heard reverberating on the hill! I hastily hid my face in my cup, but he
appeared not to have noticed my confusion. He took another slice of
bread and butter; folded it carefully in two, then peered up out of the
corner of his round eye at me, and added solemnly: "Sick, I regret to
say, no longer."

"Dead?" I cried from the bottom of my heart, and again looked at him.

Then my eyes strayed to the silent scene beyond the window, silent, it
seemed, with the very presence of poor Mr Hubbins. "I should not like to
go to Hell in the snow," I said ruminatingly. Out of the past welled
into memory an old ballad my mother had taught me:--

     "This ae nighte, this ae nighte
       --_Every nighte and alle_,
     Fire and sleet and candle-lighte,
       _And Christe receive thy saule_!"

"Beautiful, beautiful," murmured Mr Crimble, yet not without a trace of
alarm in his dark eyes. "But believe me, I am not suggesting that Mr
Hubbins---- His was, I am told, a wonderfully peaceful end."

"Peaceful! Oh, but surely not in his mind, Mr Crimble. Surely one must
be more alive in that last hour than ever--just when one's going away.
At any rate," and I couldn't refrain a sigh, almost of envy, "I hope _I_
shall be. Was Mr Hubbins a good man?"

"He was a most regular church-goer," replied my visitor a little
unsteadily; "a family-man, one of our Sidesmen, in fact. He will be
greatly missed. You may remember what Mr Ruskin wrote of his father:
'Here lies an entirely honest merchant.' Mr Ruskin, senior, was, as a
matter of fact, in the wine trade. Mr Hubbins, I believe, was in linen,
though, of course, it amounts to the same thing. But haven't we," and he
cleared his throat, "haven't we--er--strayed into a rather lugubrious
subject?"

"We have strayed into a rather lugubrious world," said I.

"Of course, of course; but, believe me, we mustn't always _think_ too
closely. 'Days and moments quickly flying,' true enough, though hardly
appropriate, as a matter of fact, at this particular season in the
Christian year. But, on the other hand, 'we may make our lives sublime.'
Does not yet another poet tell us that? Although, perhaps, Mr Hub----"

"Yes," I interposed eagerly, the lover of books in me at once rising to
the bait, "but what do you think Longfellow absolutely _meant_ by his
'sailor on the main' of life being comforted, you remember, by somebody
else having been shipwrecked and just leaving _footprints_ in the sand?
I used to wonder and wonder. Does the poem imply, Mr Crimble, that
merely to be born is to be shipwrecked? I don't think that can be so,
because Longfellow was quite a cheerful man, wasn't he?--at least for a
poet. For my part," I ran on, now thoroughly at home with my visitor,
and on familiar ground, "I am sure I prefer poor Friday. Do you remember
how Robinson Crusoe described him soon after the rescue from the
savages as 'without Passions, Sullenness, or Designs,' even though he
did, poor thing, 'have a hankering stomach after some of the Flesh'? Not
that I mean to suggest," I added hastily, "that Mr Hubbins was in any
sense a cannibal."

"By no means," said Mr Crimble helplessly. "But there," and he brushed
his knees with his handkerchief, "I fear you are too much of a reader
for me, and--and critic. For that very reason I do hope, Miss M., you
will sometimes contrive to pay a visit to St Peter's. Mother Church has
room for all, you know, in her--about her footstool." He smiled at me
very kindly. "And our organist, Mr Temple, has been treating us to some
charmingly quaint old carols--at least the words seem a little quaint to
a modern ear. But I cannot boast of being a _student_ of poetry.
Parochial work leaves little time even for the classics:--

     "Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo.
     Favete linguis...."

He almost chirped the delightful words in a high, pleasant voice, but
except for the first three of them, they were too many for my small
Latin, and I afterwards forgot to test the aptness of his quotation. I
was just about to ask him (with some little unwillingness) to translate
the whole ode for me, when I heard Fanny's step at the door. I desisted.

At her entry the whole of our conversation, as it hung about in Mrs
Bowater's firelit little parlour, seemed to have become threadbare and
meaningless. My visitor and I turned away from each other almost with
relief--like Longfellow's shipwrecked sailors, perhaps, at sight of a
ship.

Fanny's pale cheeks beneath her round beaver hat and veil were bright
with the cold--for frost had followed the snow. She eyed us slowly, with
less even than a smile in her eyes, facing my candles softly, as if she
had come out of a dream. Whatever class of the community Mr Crimble may
have meant to include in his _Odi_, the celerity with which he rose to
greet her made it perfectly clear that it was not Miss Bowater's. She
smiled at the black sleeve, cuff, and signet ring outstretched towards
her, but made no further advance. She brought him, too, a sad
disappointment, simply that she would be unable to sing at his concert
on the last night of the year. At this blow Mr Crimble instinctively
folded his hands. He looked helpless and distressed.

"But, Miss Bowater," he pleaded, "the printer has been waiting nearly
two days for the names of your songs. The time is very short now."

"Yes," said Fanny, seating herself on a stool by the fire and slowly
removing her gloves. "It is annoying. I hadn't a vestige of a cold last
night."

"But indeed, indeed," he began, "is it wise in this severe weather----?"

"Oh, it isn't the weather I mind," was the serene retort, "it's the
croaking like a frog in public."

"'A frog!'" cried Mr Crimble beguilingly, "oh, no!"

But all his protestations and cajoleries were unavailing. Even to a
long, silent glance so private in appearance that it seemed more
courteous to turn away from it, Fanny made no discernible response. His
shoulders humped. He caught up his soft hat, made his adieu--a little
formal, and hasty--and hurried off through the door to the printer.

When his muffled footsteps had passed away, I looked at Fanny.

"Oh, yes," she agreed, shrugging her shoulders, "it was a lie. I said it
like a lie, so that it shouldn't deceive him. I detest all that
wheedling. To come here two days running, after.... And why, may I ask,
if it is beneath your dignity to dance to the parish, is it not beneath
mine to sing? Let the silly sheep amuse _themselves_ with their
bleating. I have done with it all."

She rose, folded her gloves into a ball and her veil over her hat, and
once more faced her reflection in her mother's looking-glass. I had not
the courage to tell her that the expression she wore on other occasions
suited her best.

"But surely," I argued uneasily, "things are different. If I were to
dance, stuck up there on a platform, you know very well it would not be
the dancing that would amuse them, but--just me. Would you care for that
if you were--well, what I am?"

"Ah, you don't know," a low voice replied bitterly, "you don't know. The
snobs they are! I have soaked in it for years, like a pig in brine.
Boxed up here in your pretty little doll's house, you suppose that all
that matters is what you think of other people. But to be perfectly
frank, you are out of the running, my dear. _I_ have to get my own
living, and all that matters is not what I think of other people but
what other people think of me. Do you suppose I don't know what _he_, in
his heart, thinks of me--and all the rest of them? Well, I say, wait!"

And she left me to my doll's house--a more helpless slave than ever.

Not only one "star" the fewer, then, dazzled St Peter's parish that New
Year's Eve, but Fanny and I never again shared an hour's practical
astronomy. Still, she would often sit and talk to me, and the chain of
my devotion grew heavy. Perhaps she, on her side, merely basked in the
flattery of my imagination. It was for her a new variety of a familiar
experience. Perhaps a curious and condescending fondness for me for a
while sprang up in her--as far as that was possible, for, apart from her
instinctive heartlessness, she never really accustomed herself to my
physical shortcomings. I believe they attracted yet repelled her. To my
lonely spirit she was a dream that remained a dream in spite of its
intensifying resemblance to a nightmare.

I realize now that she was desperately capricious, of a cat-like cruelty
by nature, and so evasive and elusive that frequently I could not
distinguish her soft, furry pads from her claws. But whatever her mood,
or her treatment of me, or her lapses into a kind of commonness to which
I deliberately shut my eyes, her beauty remained. Whomsoever we love
becomes unique in that love, and I suppose we are responsible for what
we give as well as for what we accept. The very memory of her beauty,
when I was alone, haunted me as intensely as if she were present. Yet in
her actual company, it made her in a sense unreal. So, often, it was
only the ghost of her with whom I sat and talked. How sharply it would
have incensed her to know it. When she came to me in my sleep, she was
both paradise and seraph, and never fiddle entranced a Paganini as did
her liquid lapsing voice my small fastidious ear. Yet, however much she
loved to watch herself in looking-glass or in her mind, and to observe
her effects on others, she was not vain.

But the constant, unbanishable thought of anything wearies the mind and
weakens the body. In my infatuation, I, too, was scarcely more than a
ghost--a very childish ghost perhaps. I think if I could call him for
witness, my small pasha in the train from Lyndsey would bear me out in
this. As for what is called passion, the only burning of it I ever felt
was for an outcast with whom I never shared so much as glance or word.
Alas, Fanny, I suppose, was merely a brazen image.

Long before the dark day of her departure--a day which stood in my
thoughts like a barrier at the world's end--I had very foolishly poured
out most of my memories for her profit and amusement, though so immobile
was she when seated in a chair beside my table, or standing foot on
fender at the chimney-piece, that it was difficult at times to decide
whether she was listening to me or not. What is more important, she told
me in return in her curious tortuous and contradictory fashion, a good
deal about herself, and of her childhood, which--because of the endless
violent roarings of her nautical father, and the taciturn discipline of
poor Mrs Bowater--filled me with compassion and heaped fuel on my love.
And not least of these bonds was the secret which, in spite of endless
temptation, I managed to withhold from her in a last instinctive loyalty
to Mrs Bowater--the discovery that her own mother was long since dead
and gone.

She possessed more brains than she cared to exhibit to visitors like Dr
Phelps and Mr Crimble. Even to this day I cannot believe that Mr Crimble
even so much as guessed how clever she was. It was just part of herself,
like the bloom on a plum. Hers was not one of those gesticulating minds.
Her efforts only intensified her Fannyishness. Oh dear, how simple
things are if only you leave them unexplained. Her very knowledge, too
(which for the most part she kept to herself) was to me like finding
chain armour when one is in search of a beating heart. She could shed it
all, and her cleverness too, as easily as a swan water-drops. What could
she not shed, and yet remain Fanny? And with all her confidences, she
was extremely reticent. A lift of the light shoulders, or of the flat
arched eyebrows, a sarcasm, a far-away smile, at the same time
illuminated and obscured her talk. These are feminine gifts, and yet
past my mastery. Perhaps for this reason I admired them the more in
Fanny--just as, in reading my childhood's beloved volume, _The Observing
Eye_, I had admired the crab's cuirass and the scorpion's horny
rings--because, being, after all, myself a woman, I faintly understood
their purpose.

Thus, when Fanny told me of the school she taught in; and of the
smooth-haired drawing-master who attended it with his skill, on Mondays,
Wednesdays, and Fridays; and of the vivacious and saturnine "Monsieur
Crapaud," who, poked up in a room under the gables, lived in the house;
or of that other parish curate who was a nephew of the head-mistress's,
the implacable Miss Stebbings, and who, apparently, preached Sunday
after Sunday, with peculiar pertinacity, on such texts as "God is
love"--when Fanny recounted to me these afflictions, graces, and
mockeries of her daily routine as "literature" mistress, I could as
easily bestow on her the vivifying particulars she left out, as a
painter can send his portraits to be framed.

Once and again--just as I have seen a blackbird drop plumb from the
upper boughs of a tree on a worm disporting itself in the dewy
mould--once I did ask a question which produced in her one of those
curious reactions which made her, rather than immaterial, an exceedingly
vigilant image of her very self. "What will you do, Fanny, when you
_can't_ mock at him?"

"Him?" she inquired in a breath.

"_The_ him!" I said.

"What him?" she replied.

"Well," I said, stumbling along down what was a rather black and
unfamiliar alley to me, "my father was not, I suppose, particularly wise
in anything, but my mother loved him very much."

"And _my_ father," she retorted, in words so carefully pronounced that I
knew they must be dangerous, "my father was a first mate in the
mercantile marine when he married your landlady."

"Well," I repeated, "what would you do, if--if _you_ fell in love?"

Fanny sat quite still, all the light at the window gently beating on her
face, with its half-closed eyes. Her foot stirred, and with an almost
imperceptible movement of her shoulder, she replied, "I shall go blind."

I looked at her, dumbfounded. All the days of her company were
shrivelled up in that small sentence. "Oh, Fanny," I whispered
hopelessly, "then you know?"

"'Know'?" echoed the smooth lips.

"Why, I mean," I expostulated, rushing for shelter fully as rapidly as
my old friend the lobster must have done when it was time to change his
shell, "I mean that's what that absurd little Frenchman is--'Monsieur
Crapaud.'"

"Oh, no," said Fanny calmly, "_he_ is not blind, he only has his eyes
shut. Mine," she added, as if the whole light of the wintry sky she
faced were the mirror of her prediction, "mine will be wide open."

How did I know that for once the serene, theatrical creature was being
mortally serious?

Chapter Fifteen

I grew a little weary of the beautiful snow in the days that followed my
first talk with Mr Crimble, and fretted at the close air of the house.
The last day of the year the wind was still in the north. It perplexed
me that the pride which from my seed had sprung up in Fanny, and had
prevented her from taking part in the parish concert, yet allowed her to
attend it. She set off thickly veiled. Not even Mr Crimble's spectacles
were likely to pierce her disguise. I had written a little letter the
afternoon before and had myself handed it to Mrs Bowater with a large
fork of mistletoe from my Christmas bunch. It was an invitation to
herself and Fanny to sit with me and "see in" the New Year. She smiled
at me over it--still her tranquil, though neglected self--and I was
half-satisfied.

Her best black dress was donned for the occasion. She had purchased a
bottle of ginger wine, which she brought in with some glasses and placed
in the middle of the red and black tablecloth. Its white-lettered,
dark-green label "haunts me still." The hours drew on. Fanny returned
from the concert--entering the room like a cloud of beauty. She beguiled
the dwindling minutes of the year with mocking echoes of it.

In a rich falsetto she repeated Mr Crimble's "few words" of sympathetic
apology for her absence: "'I must ask your indulgence, ladies and
gentlemen, for a lamentable hiatus in our programme.'" She gave us Miss
Willett's and Mr Bangor's spirited rendering of "Oh, that we two"; and
of the recitation which rather easily, it appeared, Mrs Bullace had been
prevailed upon to give as an encore after her "Abt Vogler": "The Lady's
'Yes,'" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And what a glance of light and
fire she cast me when she came to stanza six of the poem:--

     "Lead her from the festive boards,
     Point her to the starry skies!..."

And she imitated Lady Pollacke's niece's--Miss Oran's--'cello obligato
to "The Lost Chord," with a plangency that stirred even the soul of
Henry as he lay curled up in my landlady's lap. The black head split
like a pomegranate as he yawned his disgust.

At this Mrs Bowater turned her bony face on me, her hands on her knees,
and with a lift of her eyes disclosed the fact that she was amused, and
that she hoped her amusement would remain a confidence between us. She
got up and put the cat out: and on her return had regained her
solemnity.

"I suppose," she said stiffly, staring into the sparkling fire that was
our only illumination, "I suppose, poor creatures, they did their best:
and it isn't so many years ago, Fanny, since you were as put-about to be
allowed to sing at one of the church concerts as a bird is to hop out of
its cage."

"Yes," said Fanny, "but in this world birds merely hop out of one cage
into another; though I suppose the larger are the more comfortable."
This retort set Mrs Bowater's countenance in an impassive mask--so
impassive that every fitfully-lit photograph in the room seemed to have
imitated her stare. "And, mother," added Fanny seductively, "who
_taught_ me to sing?"

"The Lord knows," cried Mrs Bowater, with conviction, "_I_ never did."

"Yes," muttered Fanny in a low voice, for my information, "but does He
care?" I hastily asked Mrs Bowater if she was glad of to-morrow's New
Year. As if in reply the kitchen clock, always ten minutes fast, began
to chime twelve, half-choking at every stroke. And once more the soul of
poor Mr Hubbins sorrowfully took shape in a gaze at me out of vacancy.

"To them going downhill, miss," my landlady was replying to my question,
"it is not the milestones are the pleasantest company--nor that the
journey's then of much account until it is over. By which I don't mean
to suggest there need be _gloom_. But to you and Fanny here--well, I
expect the little that's the present for you is mostly wasted on the
future." With that, she rose, and poured out the syrupy brown wine from
the green bottle, reserving a remarkably little glass which she had
rummaged out of her years' hoardings for me.

Fanny herself, with musing head--her mockings over--was sitting drawn-up
on a stool by the fire. I doubt if she was thinking. Whether or not, to
my enchanted eyes some phantom within her seemed content merely to be
her beauty. And in rest, there was a grace in her body--the smooth
shoulder, the poised head that, because, perhaps, it was so transitory,
seemed to resemble the never-changing--that mimicry of the unknown which
may be seen in a flower, in a green hill, even in an animal. It is as
though, I do think, what we love most in this life must of necessity
share two worlds.

Faintly out of the frosty air was wafted the knelling of midnight. I
rose, stepped back from the firelight, drew the curtain, and stole a
look into space. Away on the right flashed Sirius, and to east of him
came gliding flat-headed Hydra with Alphard, the Red Bird, in his coil.
So, for a moment in our history, I and the terrestrial globe were alone
together. It seemed indeed that an intenser silence drew over reality as
the earth faced yet one more fleeting revolution round her invisible
lord and master. But no moon was risen yet.

I turned towards the shape by the fire, and without her perceiving it,
wafted kiss and prayer in her direction. Cold, careless Fanny--further
than Uranus. We were alone, for at first stroke of St Peter's Mrs
Bowater had left the room and had opened the front door. She was
smiling; but _was_ she smiling, or was that vague bewitchingness in her
face merely an unmeaning guile of which she was unaware? It might have
been a mermaid sitting there in the firelight.

The bells broke in on our stillness; and fortunately, since there was no
dark man in the house to bring us luck, Henry, already disgusted with
the snow and blacker in hue than any whiskered human I have ever seen,
seized his opportunity, and was the first living creature to cross our
threshold from one year into another.

This auspicious event renewed our spirits which, in waiting, had begun
to flag. From far away came a jangling murmur of shouting and
instruments and bells, which showed that the rest of the parish was
sharing our solemn vigil; and then, with me on my table between them, a
hand of each clasping mine, Mrs Bowater, Fanny, and I, after sipping
each other's health, raised the strains of "Auld Lang Syne." There must
have been Scottish blood in Mrs Bowater; she certainly made up for some
little variation from the tune by a heartfelt pronunciation of the
words. Hardly had we completed this rite than the grandfather's clock in
the narrow passage staidly protested its own rendering of eternity; and
we all--even Mrs Bowater--burst out laughing.

"Good-night, Midgetina; an immense happy New Year to you," whispered a
voice to me about half an hour afterwards. I jumped out of bed, and
peeped through my curtains. On some little errand Fanny had come down
from her bedroom, and with a Paisley shawl over her shoulders stood with
head and candle thrust in at the door. I gazed at her fairness. "Oh,
Fanny!" I cried. "Oh, Fanny!"

New Year's Day brought a change of weather. A slight mist rose over the
fields, it began to thaw. A kind of listlessness now came over Fanny,
which I tried in vain to dispel. Yet she seemed to seek my company;
often to remain silent, and occasionally to ask me curious questions as
if testing one answer against another. And one discovery I made in my
efforts to keep her near me: that she liked being read to. Most of the
volumes in Mrs Bowater's small library were of a nautical character, and
though one of them, on the winds and tides and seas and coasts of the
world, was to console me later in Fanny's absence, the majority defied
even my obstinacy. Fanny hated stories of the sea, seemed to detest
Crusoe; and smiled her slow, mysterious smile while she examined my own
small literary treasures. By a flighty stroke of fortune, tacked up by
an unskilled hand in the stained brown binding of a volume on Disorders
of the Nerves, we discovered among her father's books a copy of
_Wuthering Heights_, by Emily Brontë.

The very first sentence of this strange, dwelling book, was a spell:
"1801.--I have just returned from a visit to my landlord--the solitary
neighbour that I shall be troubled with."... And when, a few lines
farther on, I read: "He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him
when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their
brows"--the apparition of who but Mr Crumble blinked at me out of the
print, and the enchantment was complete. It was not only gaunt enormous
Yorkshire with its fells and wastes of snow that seized on my
imagination, not only that vast kitchen with its flagstones, green
chairs, and firearms, but the mere music and aroma of the words, "I
beheld his black eyes"; "a range of gaunt thorns"; "a wilderness of
crumbling griffins"; "a huge, liver-coloured bitch pointer"--they rang
in my mind, echoed on in my dreams.

And though in the wet and windy afternoons and evenings which Fanny and
I thus shared, she, much more than poor Mr Crimble, resembled Heathcliff
in being "rather morose," and in frequently expressing "an aversion to
showing displays of feeling," she was more attracted by my discovery
than she condescended to confess. _Jane Eyre_, she said, was a better
story, "though Jane herself was a fool." What cared I? To me this book
was like the kindling of a light in a strange house; and that house my
mind. I gazed, watched, marvelled, and recognized, as I kneeled before
its pages. But though my heart was torn, and my feelings were a little
deranged by the scenes of violence, and my fancy was haunted by that
stalking wolfish spectre, I took no part. I surveyed all with just that
sense of aloofness and absorption with which as children Cathy and
Heathcliff, barefoot in the darkness of the garden, had looked in that
Sunday evening on the Lintons' crimson taper-lit drawing-room.

If, in February, you put a newly gathered sprig of budding thorn into
the fire; instantaneously, in the influence of the heat, it will break
into bright-green tiny leaf. That is what Emily Brontë did for me. Not
so for Fanny. In her "vapid listlessness" she often pretended to yawn
over _Wuthering Heights_, and would shock me with mocking criticism, or
cry "Ah!" at the poignant passages. But I believe it was pure
concealment. She was really playing a part in the story. I have, at any
rate, never seen her face so transfigured as when once she suddenly
looked up in the firelight and caught my eye fixed on her over the book.

It was at the passage where Cathy--in her grand plaid silk frock, white
trousers, and burnished shoes--returns to the dreadful Grange; and,
"dismally beclouded," Heathcliff stares out at her from his
hiding-place. "'He might,'" I read on, "'well skulk behind the settle,
at beholding such a bright, graceful damsel enter the house. "Is
Heathcliff not here?" she demanded, pulling off her gloves, and
displaying fingers wonderfully whitened with doing nothing and staying
indoors.'"

It was at this point that our eyes, as I say, Fanny's and mine, met.
But she, bright, graceful damsel, was not thinking of me.

"Do you like that kind of character, Fanny?" I inquired.

My candle's flames gleamed lean and tiny in her eyes. "Whose?" she
asked.

"Why, Heathcliff's."

She turned slowly away. "You take things so seriously, Midgetina. It's
merely a story. He only wanted taming. You'll see by-and-by." But at
that moment my ear caught the sound of footsteps, and when Mrs Bowater
opened the door to contemplate idle Fanny, the book was under my bed.

As the day drew near for Fanny's return to her "duties," her mood
brightened. She displayed before me in all their stages, the new clothes
which Mrs Bowater lavished on her--to a degree that, amateur though I
was in domestic economy, filled me with astonishment. I had to feign
delight in these fineries--"Ah!" whispered I to each, "when she wears
_you_ she will be far, far away." I envied the very buttons, and indeed
pestered her with entreaties. I implored her to think of me at certain
hours; to say good-night to herself for me; to write day by day in the
first of the evening; to share the moon: "If we both look at her at the
same moment," I argued, "it will be next to looking at one another. You
_cannot_ be utterly gone: and if you see even a flower, or hear the
wind.... Oh, I hope and hope you will be happy."

She promised everything with smiling ease, and would have sealed the
compact in blood if I had thought to cut my thumb for it. Thursday in
Holy Week--_then_ she would be home again. I stared at the blessed day
across the centuries as a condemned man stares in fancy at the scaffold
awaiting him; but on mine hung all my hopes. Long evenings I never saw
her at all; and voices in the kitchen, when she came in late, suggested
that my landlady had also missed her. But Fanny never lost her
self-control even when she lost her temper; and I dared not tax her with
neglecting me. Her cold looks almost suffocated me. I besought her to
spend one last hour of the eve of her departure alone with me and with
the stars in the woods. She promised. At eleven she came home, and went
straight up into her bedroom. I heard her footsteps. She was packing.
Then silence.

I waited on until sick at heart I flung myself on my knees beside my bed
and prayed that God would comfort her. Heathcliff had acquired a feeble
pupil. The next afternoon she was gone.

Chapter Sixteen

For many days my mind was an empty husk, yet in a constant torment of
longing, daydream, despair, and self-reproaches. Everything I looked at
had but one meaning--that she was not there. I did not dare to admit
into my heart a hope of the future, since it would be treason to the
absent. There was an ecstatic mournfulness even in the sight of the
January sun, the greening fields, the first scarcely perceptible signals
of a new year. And when one morning I awoke early and heard, still half
in dream, a thrush in all but darkness singing of spring, it seemed it
was a voice pealing in the empty courts of paradise. What ridiculous
care I took to conceal my misery from Mrs Bowater. Hardly a morning
passed but that I carried out in a bag the food I couldn't eat the day
before, to hide it away or bury it. But such journeys were brief.

I have read somewhere that love is a disease. Or is it that Life piles
up the fuel, a chance stranger darts a spark, and the whole world goes
up in smoke? Was I happier in that fever than I am in this literary
calm? Why did love for things without jealousy or envy fill me with