evening.  And then he asked leave to call later with a letter for Miss
Courtland.

’Well,’ thought Laurette, as the door closed behind him, ’this looks
like the finger of Providence.’  She seemed to hold possibilities in her
grasp that would be valuable, and yet Stella was so unmalleable in some
respects, and Laurette divined, even from her brief interview with
Langdale, that one who knew him, much less one who loved him, would not
be easily duped into doubting the man. But Laurette was content to take
short views.  He was going to the other end of the world, and to entrust
a letter to her care.  Yes, people often wrote on the way, but on a
French boat one could not write earlier than from Mauritius—five or six
weeks ahead at the least; while what Laurette was scheming for was to
get that other fifteen hundred pounds at the end of September on the
plea of serving Ted’s cause so well.

She did not stir out of the house till Langdale came and left the
letter.  She took it at once to her own room and locked the door.  She
opened the letter carefully, and it yielded under her supple fingers
without a tear.  Of course, if nothing could be gained by destroying it,
she would close it up again and deliver it.  But a glance served to show
her that it placed undreamt-of opportunities in her hand, if only she
could devise means of putting them to use.  There was a long letter with
a separate enclosure.  It was this that first caught her eye, and
brought the blood into her face, while her heart beat tumultuously.
Then she read the letter:

’SWEET ST. CHARITY,

’Your first letter reached me an hour ago.  Will you ever know the
extreme joy it gave me?  And the great lovely lock of hair it contained!
I drew it to its full length, and laid it against my cheek.  But
Blättchen knows the fatuity of pens in speaking of things so far beyond
their reach.  How shabby my letter was compared to yours! But, if I do
not take care, I shall not remember to answer one of your questions.

’As I rode away, in the dawn, from Peeloo, I looked back and thought I
saw a face I knew at one of the windows. It came with me all the way,
and showed me the profound loveliness of the early morning light falling
upon the still woods.  The splitter is better.  I stayed with him two
hours, and he told me a little story that would have delighted St.
Charity’s heart.  I may, perhaps, tell it to her when I see her in
Melbourne; and there is something else I must tell her also—the full
reason for my visit to England.  Yes, darling, it may pain you, but your
letter makes me feel that it is unworthy of us both to hold it back.
But this is my first reply to a letter of Liebe’s, and therefore there
must be nothing in it to pain her.  And I may be with her for a little
in a day or two.  How I long to set out, so that I may hasten back!  My
first reply to you, dearest.  What have I to say?  Oh, I have a great
and solemn secret to whisper in your ear.  Don’t let Dustiefoot hear it;
and be sure you do not tell it to the pert Fairacre birds, who do
nothing but chatter from morning to night.  The secret is this.  Oh,
little-leaf-of-my-heart, I love you—I love you—I love you!  Did I ever
tell you before what a darling you are, and how entirely I worship you?
But that I could not tell you adequately—no one could!  Oh, my own, do
you know what your love means to me—how it has gladdened my life as I
never expected it to be gladdened?  I told you once that I had suffered;
but some sorrows have power to make strong and build up, while others
seem to eat up what should go to the woof of calm daily happiness.  That
was the sort of sorrow I have had; yet I felt and acknowledged that I
myself was to blame, as most of us are in the misfortunes that fall on
us apart from bereavement.  But the darkness is over.  Already I see the
gold of dawn which is to broaden into the perfect day of our happiness.

’Darling, does it not seem in some ways as if we could not be really
separated any more?  Now and henceforth you are part of my inmost life.
Each sight and sound of Nature is more vivid—more beautiful since I knew
you. Here are some lines that I keep crooning very often when I am
alone:

    ’"She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
    And humble cares and delicate fears,
    A heart the fountain of sweet tears,
      And love and thought and joy."

’Yes, love and thought and joy.  How grateful I am that the unspeakable
gift of your love was given to me before time and bitter memories robbed
me of the capacity of joy!  It does happen in life that people are
sometimes so crushed and made desolate that, when the possibility of
happiness is restored to them, it comes too late.  It is not only that
Joy is so prone to put his hand to his lips bidding adieu, but that
often, when he approaches, his sovereignty is over.  If necessary, we
can endure our lives and do our work in the world without the possession
of vivid personal joy.  But, ah! when it comes, and our hearts are still
fresh and young enough to bound at its approach, what is there that we
would barter for its possession?

’Belovedest, did I not see tears glisten in your sweet eyes when we
parted?  Do not allow too many sad thoughts to nestle in your heart when
I am not near to chase them afar.  There is but a step between being
dejected for individual reasons and harbouring melancholy forebodings
relative to wider issues.  It is good to remember that the problems of
life do not crowd pell-mell into our daily path in the way that they do
into our minds, and that in the end we have not to solve inextricable
riddles in order to do our best in the world.  There is one maxim you
quoted out of "Wilhelm Meister" I would have you, Liebe, keep in mind
all the time I am away—"Remember to live."  Do not let spectres come
between you and the sunshine you love so well.  By this I do not mean
try to drive solemn thoughts from you.  Ever-belovedest, I love to think
of you too well as you are—to recall how in the most mirth-provoking
mood a sudden seriousness would often fall upon your face.  No, I would
not have Liebe different from her dear self by the twentieth part of the
petal of a milk-white fairy rose.  Her quick moods and rippling fancies
are all too precious to me.  All I plead for is that she should drive
sombre dreams to the far ends of the earth; that she should let no
reflection of the shadow that has burdened part of my life throw any
darkness on hers.  Keep all your buoyant fancies, darling, and your
tender sparkling gaiety, for my sake.

’I have often felt that the exacting routine of labour to which men must
school themselves, brings in its train something wooden and inflexible,
even when their work makes constant demands on their sympathies.  I
suppose it is because of this that a woman’s more inward and leisured
habit of thought exercises so deep a fascination.  She has time to keep
all these things and ponder them in her heart, so that she comes to have
a kind of second sight, a sensitive delicacy of perception, which, with
most men, is either undeveloped or swallowed in the grind of daily life.
A woman sees a thousand things that from their duller, or, let us say,
more preoccupied eyes, are almost wholly obscured. To achieve anything
in the world, a man has to learn to be hard on himself, and that often
produces a certain hardness in other respects.  It would seem that to
work long and constantly, even though the work is what interests us
most, begets a certain strain of insensibility.  Thus I often smile when
I think that though I could draw separately, and in skeleton form, all
the bones of a swallow’s wing, I learned the full poetry of its flight
through your bright eyes.  But what is the use of my talking, or rather
writing, in this way, when Liebe persists in making the most adorably
comic little faces at me, and making up a wicked little story about what
happened to someone who had an evil habit of writing in a didactic,
reasonable strain?  After all, your chrysanthemums will not be out
before I return.  But there will be roses, and mind you wear great
clusters of them on the day the _Pâquerette_ steams into Glenelg.  Dear
day, filled with soft-footed hours!  Is that one of Liebe’s phrases, and
will she inflict penalties on me for using it without leave?  So she
may; only I must draw up a list of the penalties.’

Here followed a page or two of the ardent nothings that come so readily
to a lover’s pen.  Then there was a break, and the rest was dated that
day, ’Scott’s Hotel, Melbourne,’ deeply regretting Stella’s absence from
town, explaining how the prompt acceptance by a friend of Morrison’s of
a medical partnership at Minjah-Millowie had occurred in time to permit
Langdale taking his passage by the out-going French boat, which enabled
him to set out at once, and he was incredibly anxious to get away, so
that he might be back in February.

’And now,’ he wrote, ’I am going to tell you, Stella, what that business
is, because ever since I got your precious letter I felt it was
impossible I should conceal it from you; my only reason for doing so was
that your keenly sensitive, apprehensive nature might dwell on the bare
possibility that there may still be a barrier to our marriage; but with
the exquisite trust and love you have shown, no consideration has force
enough to make me keep this back from you, only it must not be included
in this, my reply to Liebe’s first letter.  Are you satisfied that I am
not so calmly reasonable after all, and that I may even be infected with
a little superstition?  No, not superstition, but "delicate fears."  I
shall not say farewell, but merely what we said that night after our
most memorable ride—"Auf baldige Wiedersehen."’

After reading this, with beating temples, Laurette turned once more to
the enclosure.  There were four thin sheets of foreign paper, the last
being but half written.  As Langdale wrote a firm, rather heavy hand, he
had written on one side only.  It was a trifling circumstance, and yet
it was of material service to Laurette in carrying out the plan that
eventually took shape in her unscrupulous little brain.

’At the age of twenty-two, while still a medical student in London, just
a year after my father’s death, I met a lady a good many years older
than myself, who fascinated me greatly.  She was an Italian, and very
beautiful.  Still, infatuated as I was, I shrank from the idea of
marrying her.  But, under circumstances which I need not now detail, I
married her four months after we first met.  The marriage turned out a
disastrous failure.  After three years we agreed to live apart.  A year
later I knew that she had proved unfaithful to me.  I had sufficient
evidence to secure a divorce, but partly because I shrank from the
exposure—only a few of my most intimate friends knew of the union—partly
because she had fallen into very bad health, and besought me to spare
her, as she had not long to live, I desisted.  She gave my lawyer a
written acknowledgment of her guilt, duly attested, resigned my name,
and left England for Brussels, where some of her friends lived.  On
these conditions I settled an income on her, which she named as being
adequate, and was to be paid by my lawyer half-yearly.

’The letter I opened in the Home Field that day was from my lawyer.  He
wrote to say that the last receipt he had received for this half-yearly
payment was evidently a forgery, that he had caused inquiries to be made
through a trusted agent, and found that the lady to whom the money was
payable had died, but that the fact was concealed by a relative who
endeavoured to make capital out of the imposition.  He found that the
lady who died was buried under the name of the one with whom she lived,
and an application was for a second time made for the annuity, with a
statement that the difference of writing was caused by illness.  But a
request that an interview should be granted to one who knew both ladies
was denied.  No doubt could exist in my lawyer’s mind, nor in my own, as
to the facts of the matter.  But you will understand, Stella, that it is
one of the points on which one is satisfied with nothing less than legal
indisputable proof.  It was my intention to possess this before doing
more than asking leave to write to you.  I cannot but be glad that the
course of events led to my departing from this resolution.  The
assurance of your love is too precious.  But you have been so loyally
trustful, you have shown such entire confidence in me, it seems to me
now I should have frankly told you the position.  But I shrank horribly
from marring the first glow of our happiness with this sordid story.
And then there are some misfortunes in life that men are more sensitive
about than many forms of evil-doing.  And yet, my own, now that I have
won the treasure of your love, I feel more than ever thankful that in
this early, ill-judged, ill-fated bond I was the betrayed, and not the
betrayer.  It hurts me horribly that the bloom of your gladness must be
touched with the thought of a life which closed so darkly stained.  And
yet, Stella, it is best you should know all now—that our happy reunion
on my return should not be spoilt by going back to this.  It will then
be the past for both of us.  From the moment I resolved to tell you I
felt a relief, for the conviction haunted me that I should not have
yielded to your generous wish in the matter, saying that I had been
surprised out of my secret.  Do not be too sorry, Herzblättchen.  Think
chiefly of what carries so much joy for both.  Think of the day on which
the _Pâquerette_ will gaily sail into port.’

After this came some lines that had been blotted out, but so quickly
dried that the words were readable:

’Will you forgive me if I say that one of the memories which gives me
the most unalloyed happiness is your timorous confession that you felt
you could have moved or spoken after your accident when I reached you,
only you wished to know how it would really "affect me"?

’Yours, Stella, with the profoundest respect and love,

’ANSELM LANGDALE.’

Laurette’s head throbbed with swiftly succeeding and conflicting
thoughts as she reached the close.  It was apparent at once that the
first letter must be kept back, if only on account of its allusion to
Stella’s imagined absence from Melbourne.  And the other, the enclosure,
which, taken by itself, would begin with such strange abruptness?

’Chance—chance,’ says Ste. Beuve in one of his critical essays, ’if we
wish to be truthful, we shall never allow enough room for you, nor shall
we ever make deep enough incisions in any philosophy of history.’
Probably Laurette herself could hardly say how far the form of this
statement, the way in which it was written on one side only of the
paper, and the suggestive air of the effaced lines, helped her to work
the scheme which she put into execution with unshrinking completeness.

She sat for an hour or two reading and re-reading the words, regarding
the statement from all sides with concentrated intentness.  Her eyes
glittered strangely, and a brilliant flush reinforced the _soupçon_ of
rouge which lent point to her complexion.  It was characteristic that
though, on first reading Langdale’s little narrative, no doubt entered
her mind as to the death of the unfortunate woman whose life had made
his run with so dark a current for some years, yet the moment she
decided on her plan of campaign, she convinced herself that the news was
illusory.

’People never die when it adds to their friends’ happiness,’ she said to
herself, with the decision of one who argues from the knowledge of
experience.  ’Well, Stella won’t run such a fearful risk if I can help
it.’

She destroyed the letter there and then, setting fire to it in the
grate, and watching it till the last scrap was reduced to a thin black
cinder.  Her next step was to ring for Sarah, the parlour-maid who had
admitted Dr. Langdale and brought her his card.

’Sarah, I want you to get ready to go to Wandalong, Mrs. Morton’s place,
you know, by the early train to-morrow.  She needs a little extra help,
and I must spare you for a few weeks at any cost.  Your wages will be
fifteen shillings a week as long as you are there.’  Then she sent a
telegram to her sister:

’Feel sure you need more help.  Sarah goes to you to-morrow for a
month.’

’I must run no risk of servants’ tattle,’ she thought, with forced calm.
Then she sat down and wrote two notes—both brief.  The first was
addressed to a Mrs. Anson, and ran:

’DEAR ROSE,

’What an age it is since we met!  Can you imagine that your grief and
undeserved misfortune have changed your friends?  As it seems useless to
expect you to come to me, unless some pressure is brought to bear, I
shall send the carriage for you at ten to-morrow morning, and you must
spend the day with me.  I shall take care we have no visitors and no
interruptions.  You see I am determined to take no excuse.’

The next note ran:

’DEAR STELLA,

’As I know the Carters are dying to have you a little longer, I write to
say that I shall not grudge your remaining till we call for you
to-morrow evening on our way to the theatre.  Just demi-toilette and a
few flowers. They say the comedy company is in splendid form.’

After that Laurette set about her task of manipulating the enclosure.

Sarah left by the early train, and at half-past ten Mrs. Anson came.
She was the wife of a man who had been high up in the Civil Service, but
who had, six months previously, been convicted of defalcating the public
funds, and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment.  Mrs. Anson was a
gentle, sensitive woman, who since her misfortune shrank into retirement
as much as possible, yet felt a melancholy pleasure in being so warmly
remembered by an old friend. Laurette, on her part, was all chastened
sympathy and delicate attention, kissing her sweet Rose on each cheek,
and holding her hands in a gentle, detaining clasp.

’You have hurt your hand, dear?’ said Mrs. Anson in a tone of concern,
noticing that the forefinger of Laurette’s right hand was tied up.

’Oh, a mere bagatelle—a little cut with the bread-knife. I gave my
nursery governess a holiday yesterday, and saw to the little one’s
dinner myself.’

’You are always doing someone a kindness,’ murmured Mrs. Anson, suddenly
struck with the thought that hitherto she had hardly given Laurette
credit for all her good qualities.

’Well, my dear, it would be a poor world if we did not help each other
with little deeds of kindness,’ replied Laurette, not only without a
blush, but with a little glow of virtuous self-complacency.  Then she
sat and chatted about all the people her friend had known intimately in
days not long gone by.  Some who had married, and some who expected to
marry, but did not, and all equally repentant.  No little tale of social
disaster lost its piquancy on Laurette’s lips.  Indeed, at her best, she
had a gift for heightening effects, and shading, which many an artist in
journalism might envy.  The hours passed very agreeably. There were
callers, but Laurette was denied to them.  She had promised herself a
treat for the day, and she was not going to be cheated out of it.  There
was so much insincerity and hollowness in the world.  ’As I grow older,
I sometimes long to turn my back on it all,’ she said, with a gentle
little sigh.  Poor Mrs. Anson, though far from being a bitter or envious
woman, yet could not wholly escape a slight tinge of the gratification
sometimes experienced by the unfortunate when the reflection is forced
on them that the disparities of life are, after all, not so great as
they appear on the surface.

As they sat over afternoon tea, several letters were brought in to
Laurette.  One of them seemed to distress her.

’Oh, how very thoughtless of me not to have written that note as I
promised!’ she cried, with a little gesture of despair.  ’Rose, dear,
will you excuse me while I pen a note that I should have sent away last
night?  Thanks, so much.’

She opened a little morocco writing-case that was on a small table near
her.  Presently she uttered a sharp ejaculation of pain.

’Who would have thought that such a slight cut would be so painful?’ she
cried.

’But the cut appears to be on the front of the finger,’ said Mrs. Anson.
’You see the moment you attempt to write the pen presses against the
wound.’

’Oh, how very provoking!’ cried Laurette, knitting her brows prettily.

’Is it anything I can do for you, Laurette?  Pray let me, if it is!’

’Oh, thank you, dear,’ said Laurette, her face brightening. ’It is only
an old friend like you I could have as an amanuensis in the matter.  It
is something to be enclosed in a friend’s letter in corroboration.  A
matrimonial quarrel—only more serious than the average run.  A wretched
affair—jealousy, estrangement, broken hearts.  I must not burden you
with a knowledge of names; secrets are so often a nuisance.  One is so
afraid of betraying them, and of course, if it comes to being questioned
downright, one tries to tell a fib and fails.  I shall be able to put
the beginning and sign my name.’

Mrs. Anson was more and more convinced that Laurette was one of those
people who must be well known before they get credit for all the minor
deeds of charity, and little merciful acts of an unstrained quality,
they scatter on their way through life.  She sat down and wrote, to
Laurette’s dictation, in her elegant, careful handwriting, with a
sincere wish that what she wrote would effect its kindly purpose.

After her visitor was gone, Laurette looked over the shipping news in
the _Age_, and found that the _Salagie_ had not left Williamstown till
eleven o’clock on the previous night.  Dr. Langdale’s name was safe in
the passenger list; but what if the delay had led to a chance encounter
between himself and Stella?  If she and Dora had gone shopping in
Collins Street, as not infrequently happens with young ladies, late in
the afternoon!  Laurette put the conjecture from her.  She was somehow
upheld by the thought that her efforts at putting crooked things
straight would not be so ruthlessly crushed by an overruling Providence.
Laurette thoroughly believed that this power was always on the side of
the strongest battalions, and as matched against Stella, Laurette felt
that at this juncture she was as one armed and lying in ambush to trap
an unsuspecting foe.  As some of the lowest organisms in which nerves
cannot exist are yet somehow sensitive to light, so even the least noble
natures, when contriving a great baseness against a fellow-creature, are
often dimly conscious of remorse.  But few have ever practised
treacherous artifices with less compunction than visited Laurette at
this crisis.

She had never known anything of those delicate instincts of morality
which are motive powers in many minds that have received far less moral
culture.  She had many impulses of generosity and kindness, but they
were rudimentary florets that never blossomed into habit.  Of principles
she knew nothing beyond a determination to make the best of her
opportunities—to get all she could out of life.  She would never
transgress the rules of outward decorum, nor know anything of the better
aspirations of human nature.  She was now threatened with social
extinction, and her insatiable thirst for pleasure and ease, and the
footing she had gained in society, urged her to make a desperate
struggle, using such means as lay within her grasp, as little checked by
any feeble glimmering of conscience as a street urchin when he sucks an
orange and throws the rind away.

And yet, with all this, she had an inimitable trick of assigning, even
to herself, virtuous motives to the shadiest of her shady little
intrigues.  ’It is not only Stella who must be protected from an
entanglement with a married man,’ she reflected, ’but then there is Ted,
and there is Talbot, whose movements I must watch.  A husband and father
must not be left to the wiles of a wretched little actress at a crisis.
I shall have that fifteen hundred pounds after all, for, if I know
anything of Stella Courtland, the letter she is to get to-morrow morning
will set fire to her pride in a way that will put things in a new light.
And her jealousy—I had no idea she had so much of it till her brother
got engaged—to find he hurried away without even seeing her—and to a
living wife!  It must succeed!’ she said half aloud, as she went over
the main features of the affair.

                            *CHAPTER XXXIX.*

’Then you did not care very much for the play last night, Miss Stella?’
said Mr. Tareling at breakfast on the following morning.  ’Tell me what
you objected to most.’

’I had no choice of dislike,’ answered Stella.  ’I thought the whole of
it was overgrown with the scurf of commonness—the sort of thing that
gets acted because of the permanent stupidity of our kind.’

’Goodness!  I feel quite annoyed that I enjoyed it so much,’ said
Laurette, with mock humility.

’I wouldn’t if I were you,’ answered her husband with a laugh.  ’In a
democratic country you are always right if you are on the side of the
majority.  But come now, Miss Stella, weren’t you a little touched by
the despair of the lovers?  There was a big woman in a purple satin
dress near me who mopped her eyes till her handkerchief dripped. You
_must_ have found their despair pathetic.’

’Despair!’ echoed Stella.  ’Why, a marionette wouldn’t be imposed upon
by such a paltry device!  They were engaged in the first act.  It would
never do to let them be married in the second—in fact, the play would
not come into being—and what would then become of the worthy fathers of
families who are supported by the drama?  So of course there must be a
misunderstanding through six or seven scenes.  Oh yes, it might melt a
heart of stone, to see a middle-aged female, rouged up to the eyes,
weeping bitterly without shedding any tears!  Did you see how she held
her handkerchief so as not to brush the powder off her nose?’

’I am sorry I didn’t show you my big woman in the purple satin.  She
wept for herself and both the lovers,’ said Tareling, looking very much
amused.

’But I suppose you will admit that misunderstandings do come between
people—and—why, even your Shakespeare makes a man smother his wife
because of groundless jealousy,’ said Laurette, who had taken up a
morning paper and glanced over it.

’Yes, and with such a fiend incarnate as Iago to poison his mind he
could not have been Othello without being driven into madness.’

Laurette was glancing over the paper, but there was something restless
and nervous in her manner.

’Then what would you consider a sufficient reason for an estrangement in
a modern play?’

’Oh, I cannot say!  I imagine if people really love each other, nothing
that another could say or do would estrange them, unless there is an
Iago in the case, and such a man is much rarer than——’

’Than a grand passion?’ put in Tareling.  ’Ah, Miss Stella, it seems to
me you have a very charming colour this morning.’

She turned on him, and parried the insinuation, with a laughing, radiant
face.

’I don’t think I can quite forgive you for not showing me the woman who
wept so copiously when the despairing lovers could not even move a
muscle.  How the sight would have consoled me!’

Letters were brought in; several for Stella.  Among them she discerned
one addressed in a handwriting the sight of which made her heart throb
stormily.

Laurette was trembling with excitement.  She had opened a letter, but
instead of reading it she looked over it furtively at Stella, whose face
at that moment was irradiated as if a rosy flame shone through it—her
lips slightly parted in a happy smile, her eyes lustrous as stars.  The
Honourable Talbot Tareling’s home correspondence was chiefly of the kind
that takes the disgustingly prosaic form of requesting
payment—applications which, as a rule, rouse neither enthusiasm nor
curiosity in the recipient’s breast.  Tareling turned over his with an
air of profound indifference; then he glanced from his wife’s face to
Stella’s with an expression of curious inquiry.  Laurette caught the
look, and coloured violently, instantly taking refuge in her open
letter.

’It is evident that I shall have to spend part of the morning at my
desk,’ said Stella, rising and gathering up her letters.

’Please remember we are due at Mrs. Joran’s in the afternoon,’ said
Laurette.

’Who is he?’ asked her husband, as the door closed after Stella.

Laurette pretended not to understand.

’Oh, aren’t you behind the scenes, then?  A young lady does not colour
like Aurora because a handful of letters come from the family circle.
And such a dewy smile!  Ye gods, what it must be to be a girl and in
love!  The girl has a lovely face!’

’Oh, probably there was a letter from Ted,’ returned Laurette, trying to
speak carelessly.

Tareling looked at her narrowly, and then gave a short laugh.

’Fancy a girl like Stella colouring up to the whites of her eyes, and
smiling timidly, because she got one of Ritchie’s croppy, jockey-like
epistles!  You are sometimes too funny, Laurette.  What is your little
game now?’

A sickening fear shot across Laurette’s mind.  She knew that, in the
decorums of life in which she herself was founded as on a rock, her
husband scarcely knew the draping of virtue’s garment.  But it was also
equally clear to her that, if he knew a third part of her ’little game,’
in this instance, he would overwhelm her with anger and scorn and
unsparing exposure.  It seemed to her as if Stella might appear at any
moment, denouncing the palpable treachery that had been practised on
her.  But there was no tremor of fear in her voice as she answered:

’Ted is a dreadful cub, isn’t he, except when he signs cheques that may
be treated as blank ones?’

’It appears to me you are acquiring a habit of repeating yourself.  Of
course a man doesn’t expect to be amused in a _tête-à-tête_ with his
wife.  But—ah—don’t you think you might hit on a variation?’

Laurette did not permit herself to attempt a reply. Indeed, to do her
justice, it was only at periods of unusual strain or irritation that she
so far tested how bitter and unalloyed are the dregs of a contract
entered upon for life, with out love or mutual respect, when the
advantages which were the governing motive seem to be gradually becoming
less.

When Stella entered her own room, she stood for a moment by the open
window, that soft rapture still kindling her face with which a woman
receives the first love-letters that are precious to her.  She opened
it, and after the first strange, unreal moments, sank in a chair,
covering her eyes as if to shut out a sight too terrible to be looked
upon.  Again and again she forced herself to read over the words
mechanically:

’At the age of twenty-two, while still a medical student in London, just
a year after my father’s death, I met a lady, a good many years older
than myself, who fascinated me greatly.  She was an Italian, and very
beautiful.  Still, infatuated as I was, I shrank from the idea of
marrying her.  But, under circumstances which I need not now detail, I
married her four months after we first met.  The marriage turned out a
disastrous failure.’  Here there were several lines completely effaced,
and then: ’On these conditions I settled an income on her, which she
named as being adequate, and was to be paid through my lawyer
half-yearly.  The letter I opened in the Home Field that day was from my
lawyer.  He wrote to say that’—here three more lines were effaced—’the
lady to whom the money was payable had died.’  After this, two
half-sheets had been bodily left out by Laurette; and the half-sheet
which concluded bore only the signature, all the writing that preceded
it having been obliterated, and yet not wholly. Looking closely, three
lines at the close could be made out: ’Your timorous confession that you
felt you could have moved or spoken after your accident when I reached
you, only you wished to know how it would really "affect me"?’  Then the
concluding terms were obliterated also, but the name ’ANSELM LANGDALE’
was clear and distinct.

Then there was a sheet of paper, which was evidently part of a letter.

’You are entirely in error in every particular regarding your wife.
Return as quickly as possible, and all these miserable misunderstandings
will be explained and set right.  You need not hesitate nor imagine that
you will be asked to believe this merely on bare assertion.  Proofs are
forthcoming.  As to the rumour of death, it is as ill-founded as the
first mistakes.  But your long-continued absence has reduced my poor
friend to such a state of despair that she is too indifferent to take
even the slightest trouble.  Pray—pray do not lose any time after
getting this.  Return to her, and all will yet be well.’

When a great blow suddenly falls on one, it can hardly be said that at
first coherent thought is possible.  The throbbing temples, the parched
throat and flickering vision, the slow, dull, cold beating of the heart,
make the physical anguish as pressing as the mental suffering.  Then the
creeping stupor that succeeds the swift exhaustion of all the faculties
paralyzes coherent thought.  It is as though all the powers of the mind
and body were concentrated in sullenly keeping hold on life—dreary and
hopeless as it has been made in a few wild incredible moments.  Cold and
trembling in every limb, Stella cowered by the window over these
fragmentary sentences.  Every feature that under other circumstances
would have thrown discredit on these strange communications was even, at
the first glance, a strong link in a chain of crushing evidence.  Here
there was no hearsay—no perhaps.  It was a bald, commonplace little
story.  An unhappy early marriage—a separation years ago.  Then the news
of his wife’s death.  That was the letter he read out in the Home Field
that happy spring day—O God! how long, how long ago!  She seemed to see
herself through the lapse of gray years out in the sunshine with the
birds singing all round, and her heart leaping with a sudden passion of
joy as Anselm asked leave in a broken voice to write to her from the
other side of the world.  She went over all that followed—moaning
faintly now and again as her breath failed her.  Already all the rapture
and bounding hope and insane gladness were part of an unreal fable.  She
turned to his letter written the day after they parted.  She knew it by
heart.  She had read it the last thing at night, and had wakened up with
the first, faint approach of day to read it again.  Then this letter had
come to him.  No wonder he wrote in a disjointed, halting fashion,
blotting out almost as much as remained legible—beginning and closing
abruptly.  Where was he now?  Oh, she must see him.  She opened a letter
from Louise, and near the beginning of the letter she read: ’You will,
of course, have seen Dr. Langdale before he sailed on the 22nd’—that was
two days back.  Why had not the letter reached her before?  Ah, he had
taken precautions.  Would it not have been kinder to see her when this
torturing revelation was to be made—or did he understand her too well?
Did he know that she would have thrown herself at his feet and implored
him not to leave her—not to believe this woman who urged his return?
Merciful Heaven! what frantic thoughts were these?  Would she indeed
have been so lost to pride and maidenly reticence?  She went and
confronted herself in the looking-glass.  But the face she met there—the
eyes like those of a creature trapped and wounded to death—made her turn
away shuddering.  He was gone.  He had found it possible to leave
without one more look or word, though they were never to meet again.
There was something in this that wounded her beyond endurance.  And he
had not made one allusion to her long letter.  Perhaps it was wiser.
Wiser?  Yes, wiser—she repeated the word as if trying to understand it.
She felt dimly that to her wisdom, prudence or caution were but empty
word-echoes in face of this overwhelming calamity. How could she have
looked at him and borne the thought—’It is for the last time’?  Yes, he
had been wise and reasonable.  As for her, she could not have left him
thus if ten thousand obstacles had stood between them.  Ah, yes, he
understood the wild passion of which her nature was capable.  Sometimes
she walked up and down the room; at other times she stood staring out of
the window, trying to recall what she had been thinking of.  And so the
hours wore on to noon....  Then there was a tap at her door, and Maisie
came in asking something about a dress.

’Oh, Miss Stella!’ she suddenly cried out in dismay, as she looked full
in her mistress’s face, waiting for an answer which did not come.
’There’s ill news—there’s ill news!  Is it from Fairacre, dear Miss
Stella?’ cried the maid, overcome with terror at the white impassive
face.

’No—no—it is only—a little faintness,’ murmured Stella. It was all over,
and the world swept on as usual, and she had somehow to face the lie
that life still went on with her. Maisie bathed her face and hands, and
stood fanning her by the open window.  She was still half fearful that
the news of some catastrophe had wrought this sudden change—but when she
saw that her mistress shed no tears she was reassured.  Maisie,
fortunately, had no knowledge of those stabs which are so deadly that
they bleed but little outwardly.

’You were to go out in the afternoon, Miss Stella—but I doubt you
suldna,’ said Maisie, who in moments of agitation returned on her
mother’s accent and phrases with curious fidelity.

’Oh yes—yes; don’t speak so loud, Maisie,’ and then Stella forced
herself to open the Fairacre letters, and read bits of them to Maisie,
who at once became certain as she listened that all was well.  There
were honeybirds in swarms in the Park-lands, especially the Botanic
Park, all during the spring.  The Torrens was determined, so Alice
wrote, not to give up running and singing as it went till Stella
returned.  The roses were extraordinarily fine this season, especially
Stella’s favourite white fairy and Macartney roses——

The girl dropped the letter with a little miserable moan. Then she
compelled herself to read on.  Weighty changes were imminent in the old
home.  Felix Harrison had won so many distinctions of late, and his
income showed so liberal a margin over former years, that he and Allie
were to be married at Christmas.  Then Tom was also an accepted lover,
and there was not a single reason forthcoming why their wedding should
be delayed.  ’Can you fancy only you and mother in the old home?’ wrote
Allie.  ’You would have to see all the visitors that came, instead of
retreating to the library, you spoilt child!  But no; Esther and the
children will share the old home with you.  It is time Clem went to
college—and, after all, no one expects you to linger long in the
paternal nest.  Oh, you monkey, what secrets have you not kept from me!’
She crushed the letter into the envelope—and there was the maid still
waiting an answer.

’Thank you, Maisie.  I must write some letters.  The dress—the navy-blue
velvet?  Oh, any way you like.’

She was left alone—but she tried to read no more of her letters just
then.  She was stunned, insensible, though not unconscious.  There is a
kind of moral syncope which falls on the heart and brain after the first
shock of a great calamity.  A sort of lethargy crept over Stella, in
which no thought, no feeling, was acutely present.  She read the words
over repeatedly, till she could have said them by heart.  She could so
well understand those erasures—that stern avoidance of all empty words
of regret.  And then the lines at the close, which had been so hurriedly
blotted that the forms of the letters were still traceable, caught her
attention: ’Your timorous confession that you felt you could have moved
or spoken after your accident when I reached you, only you wished to
know how it would "affect me"?’  Her heart gave a strange leap, and the
blood came back to her face in an overflowing wave.

As if the anguish and despair that held her did not fill the cup of her
supreme agony to the brim, she saw in the words, coupled with the cold,
bald statement that preceded them, a record of Langdale’s consciousness
that her love for him had caused the avowal of his when he had meant to
keep silent.  It had been his intention to sail for England without
making a sign—merely asking leave to write to her from there.  She had
been quite happy in her confidence that he loved her, even before his
avowal.  Oh, what madness, when the mere thought that he cared at all
for her, and kept silence, should have at once suggested some
insuperable obstacle!  She, who had ever been so ready to question, to
doubt things that were beyond the scope of human knowledge, while here,
in a simple every-day matter, in which silence was in itself suspicion
ready forged, she had found no cause for inquiry, for a moment’s
uneasiness!  He loved her; he did not wish to say so for a time—that had
been quite enough.  Oh, fool and blind that she had been!—ready to give
her love before it was asked—ready to see no peril in anything so long
as she knew that he held her dear.

He had loved this woman once, then, that he had made his wife?  His
wife!—she shuddered and cowered down on her bed as if seeking to hide
herself; and then she rose up and read over again and again the words
written in a woman’s hand—in fair, even, well-formed characters, on the
face of them the writing of a lady: ’All will yet be well!’  Was this
possible?  Would he, perhaps, learn that he had been in error—that the
wretchedness of the marriage had been caused by misunderstandings on
which light would be now thrown?  Would he be thankful that the rumour
of her death was untrue?  Would he, perhaps, learn to love her?  Oh, God
in heaven forbid!

The next moment she was thrilled with horror at the prayer—the
imprecation, rather.  But no quick involuntary horror, no reasoning,
could hide the truth which forced itself on her—that the thought that he
should love this woman was even more torturing than the knowledge that
she was his wife.  Should not this in itself serve to loosen the
dominion of this love—this passion that had insidiously rooted itself in
every fibre of her nature?

She satisfied herself that he had really sailed.  Every hour that passed
widened the distance between them—brought him nearer to her who might
win his love.  The thought worked like poison in her veins.  She threw
her unread letters aside, she put away out of sight these miserable
fragmentary ones that had brought her the tidings which seemed more to
wreck her soul than her life—even the envelope, with its firm, clear
writing, her name written in full, as if he had lingered over it in the
old lover-like way, hurt her intolerably.  And his ring which she wore
next her heart like a charm, with its noble motto, now the bitterest
irony.  All that was best and highest to her seemed touched with this
mildew of mockery.  Yet she would keep this to the day of her death.
When the world was mercifully shrouded in oblivion, this golden amulet
would lie against her heart, while all its stormy throbbings were
overpast.  But oh, merciful Heaven, what a long and weary eternity lay
between!  She had come to one of those epochs that arise in the lives of
women who have souls, when nothing is left but death and the love of
God—both seemed equally remote.

Dustiefoot, who had patiently waited for his mistress, finding that she
did not come as usual to caress and talk to him, jumped lightly through
the open window.  When she spoke to him he instantly noticed the change
in her voice, and looked at her with that keen, almost human
intelligence in his eyes which Langdale had once compared to those of a
dog painted by Piero di Cosimo in his picture of the death of Procris.
Ah! those endless memories!  Each thought, and emotion, and association,
all were steeped in the dye of those days which seemed to hem her in on
every side.

Laurette waited in almost trembling impatience for Stella’s appearance.
She did not leave her room at luncheon-time; she had letters to write,
and could not eat.  Maisie brought her some tea, and biscuits for
Dustiefoot, who lay at his mistress’s feet, looking up in her face from
time to time with watchful solicitude.

Laurette longed to go into her room—to know in what way the letter that
had been so subtly changed had wrought. ’If she takes it fighting,’
thought Laurette, ’I shall send for Ted this very afternoon.’

Four o’clock was the hour at which they were to leave for Mrs. Joran’s.
A few minutes before that time Stella joined her hostess in the
drawing-room, faultlessly dressed, a damask flush on her cheeks.  Her
eyes glistened like those of a creature that has been dangerously
wounded, and there was a livid aureole round them; but beyond this, and
a curiously toneless timbre of voice, there was no outward sign of the
fierce storm which had swept over her.

If she could have been thankful for anything at that time, it would have
been that no one knew, as she believed, of the disaster which had
overtaken her.  A weight seemed to press on her head, and voices that
were near sounded at times as if they came from a great distance.  Her
lips were hot and parched; occasionally a shuddering sigh, that
threatened to become a low moan, roused her to greater vigilance.  She
had not shed a tear, but at times a film came over her eyes as if a mist
fell on all around.  The strain of bearing such torture, without the
relief of solitude or rest, or any touch of gentle resignation as to an
inevitable grief, was cruel in the extreme.  But it seemed to induce an
apathy and a deadly fatigue, so that sleep came to her almost at once
when, late that night, she went to bed.  She slept for two or three
hours, and then she woke up sobbing uncontrollably, with tearless eyes.
She rose up and lit her lamp, trembling in every limb.  There was an
unbearable burning weight on her head.  She opened her desk, hardly
knowing why.  She searched for those fragmentary letters, and sat down,
going over every word afresh. The thought had suddenly lodged in her
mind that she was the victim of some strange delusion.  But as she read,
all the thoughts and events of the past day came crowding back.  The
contrast between the overflowing happiness of the woman who had opened
this miserable letter, and the stony misery which had fallen on her,
fortunately touched the source of tears.  ’Oh, my lost love! my lost
love!’ she moaned, and the tears rained down and blistered the paper
through and through.  The light of day surprised her still crouching
over that strangely-pathetic record of the days that had been
illuminated with a light now quenched in the darkness of despair.  She
knew that the new-born loveliness of the day flooded the sky with its
accustomed tenderness and splendour, but she shrank from the sight as
though it had the poison of asps in it for eyes outworn with weeping.

Turn where she would, she saw no gleam of consolation. And in these
first hours of intolerable suffering, pain and anguish were more hateful
to her than they had ever been before.  She was scorched under the agony
that had fallen on her, as a flower exposed in its opening freshness is
shrivelled by a furious hot wind.  All those tendrils of hope, of
dawning love to God—those moments of exalted consciousness in which she
seemed to draw closer to the vivid faith that had once kindled her
heart—were put to flight, withered, and entirely slain.  It was as
though the air around her, which had before been fanned by the
dove-wings of ethereal hours, was suddenly darkened by the sweep of
vulture wings.  Even that last resource of an unhappy love—the
remembrance of happier days—was impossible to her.  She knew that for
her these days had been the flowering point of her life; but as for him,
was it more than a brief episode—one soon to be forgotten, perhaps, in a
happy and unlooked-for reconciliation with _his wife_?  The words had in
them something that crushed all the finer tissues of thought and
sensation.  She lay hiding her face from the light, quivering at times
from head to foot.  She was thankful to feel that apathy creeping over
her that comes to the overstrained mind like the insensibility of
muscles which have been severely bruised or scalded.

She rose at the usual hour, and Maisie was again startled at the sight
of her mistress’s face.  It was one in which expression played so large
a part that the absence of vivacity and light, of a quickly mantling
colour, as well as the dark rings round the heavily-lashed eyes, made a
startling change.

’Indeed, Miss Stella, I doubt but we should get away home sooner than
you spoke of.  This place doesna agree with you.  The room is too small,
and ye miss the woods, and the birds, and your rides.  Wouldn’t you be
glad, ma’am, to leave for Fairacre soon?’

Stella, at the words, swiftly realized what a terror the thought of
returning to her peaceful home had for her. Those calm existences—her
mother and sister, who had lived their lives, who had passed their
keenest joys and sorrows; the children whose lives were to come, whose
life was made up of sunshine, and flowers, and gentle schooling, and all
the healthful, untroubled influences that for the more fortunate bridge
the isthmus from infancy to maturity—how could she take up the ravelled
threads amongst them? Nature and books, and the sweet serenity of home,
all had become equally impossible.  All the force of her strong, complex
organization rose in revolt against the perspective of a faded, insipid
existence which the prospect called up. How could she endure that faint
replica of life with those agonizing memories in the background?  Birds,
and flowers, and trees, and running water, the dawn of day, and the
music of childish voices—they had not only lost their enchantment: their
very memories were barbed with fiery darts—part of a past which had worn
a faint simulacrum of happiness before the keen flame of love had
breathed on her and transformed her being.  What were they all now to
her—the persons and scenes and events that had made up existence?  Links
in an inexorable chain that bound her, like a galley-slave, to her
ineffectual, inept post in the world, when life itself had really passed
from her grasp! Oh no; she had not lost all affection for those dear,
but they could do without her, and she could do without them for a time.
She must throw the past from her like a stained chalice emptied of all
the wine of life.  She must be somewhere in the stir and tumult of the
world, where things would hold her and draw her away from herself—where
she could live without happiness, and those foolish dreams that had been
the dearest possession of her soul.

’But maybe ye would like to stay for the ball?’

’Oh, of course, Maisie.  Use the hard brushes for my hair this morning.’
She spoke in an impatient, imperative tone, which surprised the maid so
much that she offered no further suggestions.

At sight of her pallid face in the glass, Stella sponged her cheeks with
pungent aromatic vinegar.  The delicate skin responded at once to the
touch, and her determination to keep at bay the rising sorrow that at
times threatened like a great flood to sweep all embankments into its
whirling eddies, kept the colour in her cheeks and the fire in her eyes.

’Only four more days till our ball,’ said Laurette, who in her heart had
ejaculated a fervent little thanksgiving to Providence at sight of
Stella entering the breakfast-room. She had looked so deadly weary and
done on the previous night, fear, like a chilly snake, had lodged in
Laurette’s bosom that the girl would certainly fall ill.

’I think, Miss Stella, you had better come with me for a riding
expedition till the evening of the ball,’ said the master of the house,
who, with the wisdom of the serpent, generally cleared out on the days
immediately preceding such festivities.

’But I thought you were to be the villain in Mrs. Joran’s comedietta
to-morrow night,’ answered Stella, with a faint smile.

’Ah, true—the man who drugs people and steals letters.’

’Surely that is not the _rôle_ of a real villain—to drug and steal
letters merely.  You are going to be a philanthropist in disguise.’

’Thank Heaven! she believes it all,’ thought Laurette.

’Do you know, Miss Stella, that sounds a little misanthropical for one
who gets letters in handfuls.’

’But how should I know it would be a boon from the gods to have them
stolen if I did not get a few?’

’Still, you would not like them all stolen?’  He could not help watching
her a little curiously.  There was some inexplicable change in her whole
face and bearing since she had sat in the same place twenty-four hours
ago.  He saw that, notwithstanding her effort to keep an indifferent,
smiling look, her face hardened, and he hastened to change the
conversation.  ’Are you going to fall into Mrs. Anstey-Hobbs’ plan of
getting you for the heroine of her little adaptation from the French?’

’No, I think not.  One’s own little part in life gives me so many _jours
insipides_, without dabbling in other people’s.’

’Thank God! she is in a fighting mood,’ thought Laurette.

’I am sorry.  Mrs. Anstey-Hobbs consulted me, and I told her I thought
her idea was an inspiration, as you constantly remind me of a cousin of
my own, of whom a French diplomat once said that she had a Parisian edge
to her mind. She had, too, as he said, that vivacity _dans ses moindres
mouvements_ which Englishwomen so rarely possessed.  She had, in fact,
an infusion of Irish blood, as you have of Highland.’

’Wasn’t Mrs. Anstey-Hobbs shocked at the mention of anything Parisian in
connection with Stella?  You never told _me_ the funny story Ted was
laughing about once.  I shouldn’t wonder if he turned up to-morrow.’

This remark seemed to be addressed to the teapot more than to anyone in
particular.

’But shearing is in full swing at Strathhaye,’ said Tareling, who
instantly connected this announcement with Stella’s presence, and began
vaguely to speculate whether, after all, there was anything in it.
Women were such queer conundrums—one could never tell.  How many
impossible marriages he, Tareling, had seen in his day! But Australian
girls were not as a rule so keenly alive to the fascinations of wealth
as those inoculated with the aims and standard of London society, where
to lack money was to be out of the swim of everything that held life
together. That same Lady Mary, his cousin, who in Tareling’s memory held
the shadowy place of what might have been; who had at times scolded him,
and somehow got him out of his first serious scrape at Eton, and written
him letters, and promised to marry him if a Chinese mandarin left him a
mine in Golconda; whose radiant gray eyes and brilliant sallies had
often been recalled by Stella Courtland—what a strange hash she had made
of her life, first marrying the wrong man, then running away with the
wrong one, and finally taking the wrong dose of chloral!

Would she have fared so very much worse if she had married him, though
they were both as poor as church mice, with something less than nine
hundred a year between them, and no one likely to leave them a mine in
Golconda? She in her dishonoured grave—and he in his dishonoured life,
gambling, and drinking deep at times, and playing the _roué_ generally
in third-rate society at the far ends of the earth, ’sponging on his
wife’s relations,’ as old Ritchie had once said in a fury, after he had
been called on to shell out a thousand pounds or so to keep a very shady
story from the light of day?  Probably they would have quarrelled; and
to quarrel in one of those tiny establishments in which people lived on
nine hundred a year was the very deuce—one had to get down so completely
to hard pan—or be a plumb idiot the next moment, and kiss and be
friends.  He rather thought they would have done the latter.  But at any
rate would they quite have come to this; she in a nameless grave at
Monte Carlo—he married to a colonial heiress, intriguing to keep a firm
hold among the mixed lot that formed the _crême demi-double_ in a
pushing, vulgar colonial city?  Yet even Lady Mary’s marriage lacked
some of the utter incongruity that would attend one between Ritchie and
this young woman.  A mammoth scratched on a bone by a prehistoric man,
and a statuette by one of the old Grecian sculptors, that was what would
represent the comparative quality of their minds.

Tareling was not a man who had retained much of the faculty of being
even touched by the higher possibilities of human life.  He would have
had to purge and live cleanly before he could be the moral equal of many
among those he contemptuously classed as a ’mixed lot.’  Whatever
semblance of the hero had once lived in his heart had long since
atrophied.  His aims and ideals were to the full as ignoble as those of
that lower division of the common herd who value money chiefly for the
physical excesses and mental excitements that it commands.  Yet it may
be taken for granted that one has not generations of well-born and
cultured people behind him, without retaining some keenness of
perception that belongs to a well-descended creature, whether he be man,
horse, or dog.  Stella interested him not only because of the
resemblance he fancied in her to the unhappy girl who, in her brilliant
youth, had been so much his friend, but also because of that element of
personal fascination which is inseparable from some women.  Why had the
glow and the sparkle of her face been suddenly quenched?  Why those
livid circles round the eyes that did not in the least respond to the
smile she called up?

’You will be glad to have some riding, Stella.  No doubt Ted will bring
a hack or two a lady can ride,’ said Laurette, emboldened by the
inferences she drew from observing the girl to handle her subject ’like
a lad of mettle.’  She began to think that Stella, after all, was not
such a very bad sort of nettle to manage.

’Would you like to ride to-day?’ said Tareling suddenly. But it seemed
there were too many engagements of one sort or another.  Indeed, if
there had not been such, Laurette would have invented them.  No one
allowed himself to be more easily hoodwinked than Talbot when it suited
him; but, on the other hand, no one had a more unerring vision in
piecing broken hints into a whole, once his suspicion or interest was
thoroughly roused.  He had, too, curious tact with people whom Laurette
herself might deceive or mislead, but whose confidence she could never
win.  She could see by the way he glanced under his heavy, deeply-lined
eyelids from herself to Stella, that something had presented itself to
him as a problem.

’Oh, it will be delightful to ride!’ Stella said, looking up, with a
faint flush rising on her face.

The word ’delightful’ had a sardonic ring in her ears. But language
cannot serve its purpose, as legal tender between beings whose first
care often is that nothing of what surges most vividly in the mind
should pass into speech, without at times sounding in the ears like a
mocking echo.

                             *CHAPTER XL.*

Ritchie arrived at Monico Lodge on the forenoon of the next day.
Laurette met him in the hall, and drew him into the breakfast-room.

’Yes, Stella is in; she is in the drawing-room,’ she said in answer to
her brother’s eager inquiries.  ’But, Ted, I am in despair.  I
absolutely do not know what to think. Heaven knows if ever a woman tried
to serve a brother as I have.’

’Well, what’s in the wind now—anything fresh?’

’Oh, goodness only knows!  When she came, she was in almost wild
spirits; one would say she counted the moments till you came.  Now——’

’Now she ain’t so jolly!  Well, that is Stella all over. What is there
to wonder at in that?  Hurry up, Larry, if you’ve got anything to say; I
am famishing to see her.’

’Only this, Ted.  Feel your way cautiously; and whatever you do, don’t
breathe a word of anything I said to you before you went to Strathhaye.’

’Of course not—I told you before I wouldn’t,’ answered Ted impatiently;
’but look here, Larry, you’re a trump to take so much trouble on my
account.’

’Oh, if one could only be sure of her; but one day to be full of hope
and all smooth sailing, and the next——’  Laurette gave a deep sigh, as
if she were in the depths of perplexity.  Then Ted made his escape into
the drawing-room.

’Well, Stella, are you still cross with me?’ he said gently, holding her
hand.

’No, I think not,’ she said with a wan smile, endeavouring to recollect
the reason why she should cherish offence. Everything was so incredibly
misty at times, so far away and indifferent.  The days seemed to stretch
on and on, like eternity.  Three had not yet passed since the morning on
which she opened that letter with its pitiless tidings. Yet the most
remote epoch of her life seemed to be the days in which supreme
happiness was neither a threat nor a vague possibility, but a secure
possession.  And now it was all over—all over, with nothing left but
those recurring periods in which she was alive in every nerve to the
horrible misery that had overtaken her—periods in which she seemed to
see nothing but a ship that sailed on, night and day, bearing the only
man she had ever loved, or could love, to his _wife_.  The thought stung
her so intolerably that she often rose up, seeking for relief in motion,
as if a heavy physical load crushed her which she must endeavour to
throw off.

Ritchie looked into her face with startled inquiry.  What ailed her?
Was it possible that the knowledge which Laurette said had partly come
to the girl should give her so much pain?  The thought touched him
strongly.  But he remembered Laurette’s warning.  He might interrupt her
counsels and little incipient homilies roughly; but yet no one else
could help him so much, nor tell so well what motives swayed Stella.

’I don’t believe Melbourne agrees with you one bit,’ he said, still
holding her hand, which she left passively in his.

’No, perhaps not; and yet I don’t want to go back to Fairacre.’  They
stood side by side in the bay-window, she looking out with heavy, tired
eyes at the scrubby little trees and scantily-flowering rose-bushes that
decorated the ’grounds’ of Monico Lodge, but seeing nought of all that
was around her.

’Where would you like to go, Stella?’ said Ritchie slowly. His breath
came fast, but some instinct warned him to keep down his rising joy.

’Oh, I don’t know I where I would not see these woods and skies
eternally—away to the far ends of the world.’

’Stella, let me take you wherever you would like to go. It’s all I’ve
got to live or care for.’  He was looking eagerly into her face, and
suddenly saw a gray paleness creeping over it.  All became dim around
her.  She put her hands out like one groping in the dark.  He passed his
arm round her, and for a moment her head fell on his shoulder.  Her face
was like that of one dead, and its pallor terrified him. But she did not
entirely lose consciousness.

’How dark it has grown!’ she said in a faint whisper.

’It will soon be light again, Stella,’ answered Ted, hardly knowing what
he said.  The profound sadness of her face, and her sudden,
unaccountable weakness, smote him to the heart.  ’Stella, has anything
happened that hurts you? Is there anything in the world I can do for
you?’

His voice trembled, and he tried to draw her nearer to him.  This roused
her, and sighing heavily once or twice, she disengaged herself, and sat
on the seat that ran round the window.  Ritchie’s presence had recalled,
with a paroxysm of acute agony, all that lay between now and their last
parting.  Such moments of overpowering pain were succeeded by hours that
were passed rather than felt. The intolerable edge of suffering was
gradually dulled—became for the time blunted.  Apathy put a foil on
grief, and robbed memory of its piercing barbs.  In the reaction, Ted’s
familiar voice and unswerving devotion soothed, nay, even reassured her.
Her stern, proud self-control had not broken down before anyone till
now.  And with her self-possession came the thought that he had claims
on her. She had once consented to be his wife.  But her heart had
rebelled against a marriage without the quickening pulse of love and
tender mutual sympathy.  Now she knew that these were forever sealed
against her.  The glow and romance of youth were over.  She had loved
and lost. But the years could not be thrown aside like a stupid story.
She had dreamed a dream of life, and it was over, but existence still
remained to be got through.

’Stella, we have been friends since we were little children. You do care
a little for me.  Be my wife!’

She heard the voice so long familiar pleading with her brokenly, and it
touched her in that strange hour as it had never touched her before.
The thought welled up strongly in her heart: ’This love is to him what
mine was to me—the one great affection of his life....  In this was
centred the keenest possibilities of his happiness.’  The very depth of
her own suffering and infinite loneliness moved her to compassionate
sympathy.  She had almost forgotten him in the brief triumphant days of
her joy.  But no one had ever usurped her place with him.  Could she now
confer on him the boon that was so priceless in his estimation—for which
he had so long pleaded?  And for herself? ... Would this not, after all,
be the best solution of the cruel enigma into which existence had
resolved itself?  The old home life, full of leisure and calm and
well-loved books—how could she take that up when her one fierce longing
was to forget?  It would be an endless stifling life in death, in which
the weary days would stretch before her, to be filled only with bleeding
recollections, with famished imaginings of what might have been.  Her
pursuits and meditations there would touch those treacherous springs
which woke all the cells of memory, and flooded her being with
unbearable agony, with the wild, baleful pangs of jealousy.  Yes,
jealousy unreasonable, uncontrollable.

It was the bitter humiliation of this that stung her beyond endurance.
Sorrow in any other form she might have borne—but this scorched her,
degraded her, bit into her like some virulent, immaterial poison which
nourishes the blood in order that it may consume the soul.  Jealous of a
man’s wife!  These were the words that came to her perpetually, more
venomous than the hiss of a serpent.  A marriage in which some kind of
friendship was possible—in which travel, movement, variety, were open to
her—this was the least objectionable scheme that remained to her.  Ted’s
allegiance was so unshaken—he exacted so little.  He watched her face
with keen emotion.

’Stella, you are going to consent,’ he said, drawing near to her.  But
she drew back.

’Don’t, Ted.  You must not be affectionate if you want me to marry you.’

Ted smiled under his moustache.  Then a servant came to announce the
arrival of his groom with the horses.

The day was perfect in its warm, serene loveliness.  The sky was like a
vast bed of blue hyacinths, bending above the earth with angelic
benedictions.  Already the sun-rays had something of the ardour of
summer heat, but there was a cool southerly breeze, and a recent fall of
rain had laid the dust.

The sight of the sea lying as calm as a great lake, its bosom glancing
in silvery sheaves rather than waves, brought back to Stella, with
irresistible vividness, the memorable ride over the wide Peeloo plain.
A great wave of anguish swept over her afresh, in which it seemed as if
she must call aloud to find some relief from the fierce torment.  So
great was the agony, that for a little time she could neither hear nor
see.  ’Oh, my love, my love, have I indeed lost you?’ were the words
that rose to her lips.  For a moment a wild revolt rose within her
against all the obstacles that could part them.  On the wide horizon she
seemed to see the faint film of smoke which a great steamer leaves as it
speeds on its way to the old world.  ’All will yet be well.’  Did this
hope animate his heart?  Did he, perchance, count the hours till he saw
her again—till those proofs were given him of faults imputed that were
groundless—of years made dark with undeserved blame?  Would a fresher,
stronger bond rise up in place of the old unhappiness?  Would he learn
to love her—his _wife_?  Ah, what a pitiful, humiliated creature had she
become to harbour such thoughts!  Hell seemed to yawn at her feet when
she found her heart torn with savage jealousy as these thoughts rose in
quick succession.

The riders had ridden fast, and Dustiefoot, who could not bear to lag
far behind his mistress, panted and showed such signs of being overdone
that they rode back slowly.

’Will you take him with you on your travels, Stella?’ asked Ted, who
watched with a feeling akin to envy the tenderness with which Stella
regarded her dog.

’On my travels?  Oh yes, wherever I go.  One should always have a dog to
keep one in countenance.’

’In countenance?’

’Yes.  Most human creatures remind one of the characters in an old
morality.  As—enter God’s Visitation; enter Time, who maketh people
weary and melancholy with a similitude of rust and dust.’

’And what is an "old morality," Stella?’

’Well, Ted, you really must go to school.’  She laughed, and the sound
was music in his ears, though it was a strange, mirthless little laugh.

’Yes, I should like that very much—if you keep school, and take just one
scholar.  Where would you begin with me, Stella?  How many books have
you read?’

’Heaven only knows!  Quite enough to convince me that I do not know
anything.’

’O Jupiter! is it worth while learning so much to know that?  What is
the good of reading so many dry old fogies of books?’

’Well, sometimes it makes people better companions for themselves; but
other times it makes them the worst of all company, I believe.’

’I read very slowly.  If it is a dull book like the Bible and poetry, I
forget what one page is about before I get to the next.  It would take
me a thundering long time to read books, and if they don’t teach me much
in the end, and make me worse company for myself, why, we’ll give books
the go-by.  What’s the next on your list, Stella?’

’I haven’t got a list—and there isn’t a next.  Ted, you mustn’t ask me
questions.  I do that to myself endlessly, and I hate them; there are no
answers to most, and those that have answers are scorpions.’

’What questions do you ask yourself?  There, I’ve put my foot in it
again!  Well, look here, Stella, your school will be the jolliest affair
going.  You only teach reading, and that game isn’t worth the candle.
So there I’ll be, bright and early, and nothing to learn but to stay
with you. But I’ll pick up a lot in that way.  Why, some time ago I put
the stuns on a fellow with just only remembering that the line, "Where
is the land to which yon ship must go?" is in one of Wordsworth’s
sonnets.  Oh, he’s just a racing fellow! he comes from one of the old
swell families in England, but nothing like such a bad lot as Tareling.
He’s as straight as a die, and never borrows money, and he’s quite gone
on books, though he took his degree at Oxford. He and another fellow
were talking about poetry in the smoking-room after dinner at the club
the last time I was in town, and the other fellow asked Dacre, that’s
his name, where that line came from.  I was reading the sporting part of
the _Australasian_, but the words came on me like seeing you
unexpectedly, and I looked up and said: "Why, that’s from one of
Wordsworth’s sonnets."  By George! they were more astonished than if I
had stood on my head.  Yes, upon my soul, they both stared as if they
had paid a bob to see me!  "Why, Ritchie, do you actually read sonnets?"
said Dacre.  He has written a bookful himself.  He is one of those
fellows who think that all men write poetry when they are spoony.  I
could tell him better than that.  Do you remember, Stella, one Sunday
evening when I was staying from Saturday till Monday at Fairacre?  Billy
Stein and Herby Lindsay were there, too.  Billy knew a fearful lot of
German stuff that you were always fond of, and as for poetry, he could
spout it by the hour.  It was shortly before I left for Strathhaye—I
suppose you were fifteen at the time—you used sometimes to get perfectly
wild with making fun of one thing or another, and your eyes, and cheeks,
and lips all used to make flashes.  Oh, you may laugh! but I know what I
mean.  Your eyes are awfully heavy just now, Stella.  Well, you put the
four of us in a row—Cuthbert, and me, and the other two—and you wouldn’t
let us move till we each made some sort of verses. ’Pon my soul, I
nearly squirmed my eyes out trying to think of words that sounded alike.
When I did get any, the spelling was out, and there was that little
beggar Billy making up something as long as my arm about a rose, and a
maiden, and a nightingale.  But I put the kybosh on him there, for I
said there were no nightingales in Australia, and how did we know
whether they sang as he said?  And you took my side, but I think it was
out of pure wickedness. Everyone got finished long before I did, and at
the end I could only make up four lines.  Oh, I remember them well
enough:

    ’"A lamb’s tail
    Caught on a rail;
    The mother humming,
    The crow a-coming."’

Stella laughed again.

’Why, Ted, you are one of the dumb poets?  What in the world put that
into your head?’

’Oh, don’t suppose I made up the adventure.  I took it from life.  I saw
a little lunatic of a lamb caught by his hind end before he was tailed,
and if I hadn’t taken him to his mother, the old crow would have scooped
his optics out in no time.  You all objected to "humming."  I didn’t
want the darned sheep to hum; it was you that would have rhyme, and how
could you make "bleating" into poetry there?  I very nearly got into a
scot with Stein, he kept on laughing so much.  But then you walked with
me up to the Spanish reeds, and showed me the nest of a superb warbler
there—domed, I think you called it—and told me how you watched the old
mater teaching the young ’uns to fly.  And then I made up my mind to ask
you if I might write to you.  My heart beat so hard I thought it would
crack, and you said quite carelessly: "Oh yes, Ted, why shouldn’t you?"
I couldn’t have told why it gave me a lump in the throat the way you
spoke.  Then I thought, That little wretch Billy will want to write,
too, and spin away about nightingales, and the Lord knows what!  I never
feel such a duffer as I do when I take a pen.  I say, Stella, did you
ever keep any of my letters?’

’Oh yes, I think so.’

’I expect you’ve got a nice pile of love-letters by this time?  Now,
tell me true—are there any of them you like better than mine?’

’No; not one.’

The thought welled up bitterly of the letter she had opened with such
insane joy three short days ago.  And with this came recollections of
the long faithful wooing of her companion—of the devotion she had taken
as carelessly as an unset pebble; and yet, was there anything in the
world more rare, more precious?  These reminiscences of her untroubled
girlhood touched a tender chord.  She realized that a love which had its
roots so far back in the past had a claim on her loyalty.  At the worst,
it was less humiliating to marry a man without loving him than to love
one already married.  Ted, watching her face closely, noted its wistful,
softening expression.

’Lookee here, Stella,’ he burst out suddenly.  ’I am going to run away
with you.  You will be cross at first, but you will get over it.  You
know you looked as if you could not speak with passion when I held you
that night and asked that I might kiss you.  But when we met, you never
once thought of bringing it up against me; now did you?’

’No.’

’Oh, good Lord!  Stella, why do you keep me on and on hoping, and
nothing come of it?  Put an end to it.  You want to get away; you need a
complete change; anyone can see that.  You said in July you sometimes
thought of marrying me.  Yes—no—yes.  There it is in the horses’ hoofs.
Summer, autumn, winter, spring—spring.  It is spring now.  We won’t have
the smallest morsel of fuss.  If we were married to-morrow, everyone
would say: "Well, goodness knows, they’ve been long enough thinking over
it."  Let’s put an end to it, Stella.  Hear the horses’ hoofs, every one
of them saying "Yes, yes—yes!"  Stella, will you marry me?’

There was a long pause.  The sound of a railway whistle in the distance,
of snowy-breasted sea-gulls calling as they skimmed the waves, the deep,
solemn crescendo of the wide sea as it broke on the shining sand, the
merry cries of children on the shore—these came borne to them on the
balmy spring air.  Memories that had a pang beyond the bitterness of
death surged up in Stella’s mind.  To the smallest detail, the hour in
which she had listened in speechless happiness to Anselm Langdale’s
avowal of love rose up before her.  An hour so near in time—but in the
sensations that turn hours into years remote as the first dawn of
consciousness.

’Answer me, Stella,’ said Ritchie, his voice now low and husky with
contending emotion.  ’Don’t you know what to say?  It’s very simple—say
"Yes."’

Again there was a long pause.

’Yes,’ she answered at last, and Ritchie turned quite pale through the
ruddy bronze of his cheeks.  For a moment he almost reeled in his saddle
and doubted his senses.

’Stella, do you mean it?  You will be my wife?’

’Yes,’ she said, again looking into his face.  He was agitated almost to
tears, while she was perfectly calm.

They rode on for a little time in silence.  Something like rest stole
over Stella.  She felt that her course was now fixed, her decision
unalterable—and there was relief in the thought.  As for Ritchie, he
almost feared to give complete credence to the belief that after all
these years of unavailing hope—of waiting and rejection—he was in truth
an accepted lover.  And even he, ’elementary human being’ though he
might be in one of Stella’s old phrases, yet experienced that quick
revulsion which so often sets in, of dread because of other
possibilities, now that this ardently longed-for happiness seemed within
reach.  But as the first tumult of thought subsided, his joy rose high.

’Stella, you have said "No" so long; you must keep on telling me it’s
all right now,’ he said in unusually timid tones; ’I can hardly believe
in such luck for myself.’

’Don’t be too glad, Ted; if you are, you’re sure to be disappointed.’

’But if you were me, Stella, you couldn’t help being too glad,’ returned
Ted, with unconscious pathos.

Something in the words struck a chord in Stella’s heart. She felt
softened and remorseful.  She determined that, as far as in her lay, she
would quench the rising tide of hard, cold indifference, of scorn for
her own life and action, which was the first result of her momentous
decision.  But when people feel one way and make resolutions in another
direction, it is a toss-up with circumstance which will be victor in the
first or subsequent encounters.

                             *CHAPTER XLI.*

When they reached Monico Lodge there was Cuthbert at the door, going
away after having waited for some little time.  He helped Stella to
dismount, and the three went in together.

’Congratulate me, my dear fellow,’ said Ted, the moment they went into
the drawing-room.  ’Stella has promised this very afternoon to be my
wife—and this time there is to be no drawing back.’

The brother stared at Ritchie in an incredulous way, and then at his
sister.

She suddenly coloured deeply and said:

’Yes, Cuthbert, you may congratulate us; but we are going away almost
directly, so as to escape all that—and the wedding-gifts——’  She felt
compelled to talk in a half-mocking tone, so as to save herself from the
imbecility of tears.  ’Oh yes, the day after to-morrow, if you please.
By the way, I must go and tell Larry—I believe she’s in.’

’Stella, darling, may God grant you every happiness!’ said her brother,
kissing her first on one cheek and then on the other.  He felt a pang of
misgiving which he could not conquer, and his face and voice were
exceedingly grave.

’Now, Cuthbert, don’t be so solemn—at any rate, until the ultimate
disaster.’

’But you do—you are attached to Ted—or you would never have given your
consent?’

’Oh, my dear, it is unsafe to generalize about our delightful sex.
Don’t you remember what St. Teresa said in one of her letters to a
Carmelite Father: "Your Reverence made me smile by saying that you could
tell her character so well.  But we women are not so easily known."’

’But there are some things, Stella, it would be safe to prognosticate of
all good women.’

’Oh yes; as, for example, they all have ten fingers, and have learned
the Catechism and the Creed.  But if it comes to asserting that they
believe the one and remember all the rest——’

’But what motive could or would be strong enough with you, darling,
except love in some degree?’

’Ah, of course—love.  But a woman must not give her love till it is
asked.  Isn’t that one of the demure, unwritten statutes?  Well, I am so
very proper that I am not going to give it even when asked—not until I
am married.  It is the process of evolution.  In the meantime, Ted vows
he has enough for two.’

’Oh, Stella, you pain me!  I cannot believe you would look and speak
like this if your heart were really touched.’

’Now, Cuth, you know very well if my heart were touched I would be dead.
You see, it is a very hard-worked organ as it is.  If it went through
all the impossible gymnastics ascribed to it by lovers, the human race
would have come to an end long ago.  When one comes to think of it,
perhaps that is the best thing that could happen.’

’You are not well, dear.  You flush up feverishly, and then you are
pale, with dark rings about the eyes.  You looked very different when
you came from Lull.  Dora and I both noticed it—and you were so dear and
tender.  We were so delighted.  I came to tell you, Stella, that our
wedding-day is fixed.’

’Oh! is it to-morrow?  Because, if so, Ted and I will be married to-day.
Yes, I’m determined not to be like Cinderella, left with the cinders,
when you go straight to heaven like Elijah in a fiery chariot.  But then
Elijah, poor man! had no Dora.’

’Well, Stella, I should be very unhappy if the girl who promised to
marry me could talk like you the day she was engaged.  That reckless,
mocking tone—no girl who was happy could use it.’

’Unless it were an artifice to conceal her joy,’ said Stella, laughing.
Then, in a graver tone: ’You see, dear, it does not do to generalize too
largely.  On looking round among our married friends, does it not strike
you that the majority never committed the indiscretion of falling in
love at all, or if they did, that they have all they asked for, and
nothing of what they hoped, poor wretches?  I, for my part——’

Here Laurette entered, followed by Ted.  She threw her arms round Stella
with a little cry.

’Don’t, Laurette; this is what I am determined to avoid,’ said Stella,
holding her at arms’ length.  But Laurette was half intoxicated with
joy.  Not till that moment had she really believed that her schemes
would be crowned with such complete success.  She pecked once or twice
at Stella’s cheeks with her hard little lips, and then turned to
Courtland, her face wreathed with smiles.

’Isn’t it too delightful, after all these years of waiting?’ she said to
him, pressing his hand with a congratulatory fervour.  Courtland, pale
and erect, bowed, and murmured something in reply.  Then he turned to
Ritchie, and took his hand.

’I congratulate you, Ted; you are a very lucky man!  I pray God——’
There was a sharp break in his voice, and at the sound a cord seemed to
tighten round Stella’s heart. The old bond between them had been a very
strong and tender one.  Now that the half-petulant irritation of finding
herself, as she thought, displaced in his affection, was lost in the
storm that had swept away so many of the old landmarks, her heart went
out to him more fully.  Only she had to guard against any treacherous
yearning for full sympathy and intimate communion.  She must be
inexorable against her weakness on every side.  She was struggling
against her whole nature as a strong athlete struggles for victory.
That was what made Ritchie’s society safer for her in this crisis than
that of the old home circle. He was imperturbably good-natured; he had a
strong fund of animal spirits, and his hand could never touch any of
those inner cords which, if they vibrated at all, brought her in one
swift moment face to face with black despair and gnawing jealousy.  She
conquered the climbing sorrow which her brother’s emotion awakened; then
going up to him, and putting her hands in his, she said softly:

’Ah, you dear old boy, you have always been so good to me; Ted and I
will pull all straight, do not fear.  As for you, never forget, though,
that you threw me over first.’

She raised the tips of her brother’s fingers to her lips as she spoke,
and he was instantly melted by her caressing tenderness.  She was always
confident of winning entire forgiveness for any outbreak of caprice or
wilfulness the moment she made up her mind to be quite good.  This
confidence, modified by an air of imploring entreaty, had always been
one of her irresistible moods.

’Pull all straight?—I should think we would!’ said Ted proudly,
possessing himself of Stella’s left hand, while her brother held the
right.

’How long do you mean to keep up that wicked little story about my
throwing you over?’ said Cuthbert, smiling fondly at her as he stroked
her hair.  ’There never lived the human being who could make me do that.
And, Stella, whatever comes or goes, if ever you are in trouble or
perplexity, never forget that if need were I would lay down my life for
you.’  He did not mean to say so much, but there was some undercurrent
of feeling at work which he could hardly analyze.  He only knew that
from the first a strong misgiving beset him as to this marriage.

At Courtland’s words a vague alarm rose in Laurette’s breast.  ’How very
absurd!’ she thought to herself angrily. ’Women don’t want their
brothers after they are married—not in that way.’

She herself had only wanted her brother’s money, and the means by which
she had obtained some of it, and hoped for still more, rose before her,
for the first time, in an almost lurid light.  A sudden panic fastened
on her lest there should be some loophole by which her machinations
should be detected.  But she had gone too thoroughly to work to be
caught in the toils which wreck the half-hearted dissembler.  It is not
cunning, but simplicity, that must patch and tell a tale which often
carries no conviction in a world where it is a common trade to make the
thing which is seem as though it were not.  Simplicity, poor unthrift,
who makes no use of all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory
thereof, but to tell the truth, is all too often shamed into hiding her
pensive, virginal, unaffected brow before the bold, rouged, menacing
front of her successful rival—Mendacity.

But Laurette betrayed none of the uneasiness which shot athwart her
mind.  Indeed, her anxieties at this time were so multiform that they
might be said to swallow each other, so that, on the whole, she kept up
as gay an appearance as though no cares oppressed her.  Chief among them
was her husband’s intrigue with this ’wretched little divorced actress.’
This had blossomed apace into a well-concocted scheme of indefinite
migration on his part with her theatrical company.  Laurette knew this
definitely by means of examining the Honourable Talbot’s pocket-book,
when he slept not wisely but too well.  And yet she felt that her only
course was to make no sign; to feign complete ignorance, and take such
action at the last moment, that is, the eleventh of October, as might be
of vital service to her. Then that letter which she had got Mrs. Anson
to write.  It was only after fully convincing herself that Langdale’s
half-erased, mutilated narrative might not of itself serve her purpose,
that Laurette had hit on the scheme of boldly supplementing it by a
communication which would at once throw light on his supposed story, and
his action in hastening away without seeing Stella.  She judged
unerringly, too, that the thought of his hastening back to a loving wife
anxious for reconciliation would stab the girl’s pride into more active
resistance against grief than any other theory.

’Stella has it in her to be jealous—one can see that by the way she took
her brother’s engagement,’ reasoned Laurette.  ’And if there is any
occasion on which jealousy may grow into a monster, surely it is when
the man who called you "sweet St. Charity," and the innermost leaf of
his heart, is supposed to be steaming away at the rate of seventeen
knots an hour to the beautiful woman he married before he left school,
so to speak.  Not that I believe she is really dead—at any rate, if so,
her conduct is very unlike that of other people, who could do nothing to
oblige one in life so much as to leave it....’

Yes, all her calculations had been singularly favoured by Providence;
but this speedy engagement was of that order of good luck which all but
frightens one.  It was almost sinister—like the appearance of a sociable
vulture in the desert when drawing near a well that may prove empty. All
that evening at Mrs. Joran’s private theatricals the thought rose at
intervals, What if Stella and Langdale met abroad?  And yet, once the
marriage had taken place, what would it avail?  There was a dance after
the acting was over.  Everyone was enraptured with Talbot’s masterly
performance, and she replied to congratulations on this abominable
accomplishment as cheerfully as though it were not drawing a husband and
a father, as she styled him, even to herself, in her more melodramatic
moments, into the Bohemian depths of a strolling-player’s career.  But
she would save him despite himself—which was usually the way people were
saved when once they gave themselves up to the enjoyment of being lost.
And to secure that end what means were not legitimate?  Yet she could
not resist the inclination to reassure herself, by laughing inquiry of a
distinguished judge, as to whether deception practised to bring marriage
about could in any way invalidate it.

’My dear Mrs. Tareling, what could have put such an uncanny idea into
your head?  What marriage would be safe if once the plea of deception
were allowed to batter against the foundations of the holy institution
of matrimony?’ said the judge, laughing.  ’Take the deceptions which
Nature puts upon us, to begin with——’

’Now, Sir Henry, you are laughing at me!  No one ever knows where Nature
begins or ends.  I do not mean only with the complexions of my own dear
sex.’  The judge laughed with real amusement at this sally: Laurette
fully knew the value of talking in an amusing way when she had an aim to
serve.  ’I mean real deception: abstracting letters, and having others
written, and things like that, for which I have no doubt you could find
awful names in some of your awful books.’

The judge fixed his gray, penetrating eyes on the softly pretty,
exquisitely dressed young woman before him, vaguely wondering whose
interest she had at heart in this inquiry.  ’These bright, pretty young
women have often a wonderfully altruistic vein in their natures,’ he
reflected. Then, in a very lucid unpedantic way, he pointed out that if
people did things that had awful names in law-books, they might be
brought to account; but people were not supposed to marry because other
people abstracted letters or wrote sham ones.  Marriage was a contract
between this man and this woman for certain ends, clearly set forth in
the Prayer-book and elsewhere and under certain conditions. If these
conditions were observed, no alleged deception on the part of anyone
else could, in the slightest, affect the contract.

’Well, after all, how beautifully simple and reasonable that is!’ said
Laurette, with a glow of enthusiasm.

Even the term ’alleged deception’ carried with it a kind of balm.  It
made her reflect that not one scratch of her pen had been contained in
the letters that had suddenly changed the whole complexion of Stella’s
life.  She had erased, but she had not formed a single letter; and the
little note Mrs. Anson had written at her dictation was like eternity,
without beginning or end, without date or local habitation.  After all,
what a bulwark to society the law was!  Her spirits rose, and she felt
like an Eastern hero, as if she were destined to destroy Afrits.

A little afterwards, when in conversation with the Honourable Miss
Brendover, this lady said something of having spent the last winter in
Berlin, where the musical season had been very brilliant, it flashed
through Laurette’s mind like an inspiration that Berlin was the very
city to which it would be safest for Ted and Stella to go in the first
instance.  England would not be safe for awhile. Langdale would most
likely go on to Brussels before going there.  Then he would get the
newspaper announcing the marriage, which she would send him the very day
after the event came off.  Laurette had taken down the address he had
inclosed for Stella, which was that of his lawyer in London.  Well,
after getting that newspaper, he would at once perceive there was
nothing to be done but bear his fate.  He would not be likely to return
to Australia.  He would, perhaps, drift about, travelling for awhile.
Now, France and Italy were the happy hunting-grounds of all travellers;
but Berlin—’My dear Milly, I wish you would tell my sister-in-law-elect
about the music in Berlin,’ said Laurette.  ’I fancy she thought of
going to Germany.’

’Oh, and then they will meet Talbot’s cousins there—the Avenells!  So it
will be quite nice and friendly for Mr. Ritchie in a foreign land.  He
does not know German, I think?’

Before the evening was over, Stella had a long chat with Miss Brendover,
chiefly about the charms of winter in Berlin.  At the same time Laurette
duly impressed Ted with the wisdom of going there direct if Stella
expressed any wish of the kind.

’I don’t care a copper where Stella wants to go,’ returned Ted.
’Whatever she wants to do, she shall.’

The subject somehow came up again as they drove home.

’I lost a waltz with you, Stella!’ said Ted ruefully. ’What a lot you
and that old cousin of Talbot’s had to say to each other!’

’Old?—she is charmingly young!’ returned Stella.  ’I know, because that
waltz of Strauss’s—by the way, never ask me to dance to it—is one I
heard two hundred and fifty years ago.  Oh, it was a strange, enchanted
sort of country—full of fairy stories, and I believed them all.’

Her cheeks were deeply flushed, and her eyes were shining with a
feverish light.  Ted was always pleased when Stella was inspired with
something of her old gaiety, and yet there was something in the sound of
her voice that disturbed him.

’Did you tell Miss Brendover about this country, then? and was that what
kept you chatting so long?’

’Oh no—bits of it came trilling back in the music; but between I
listened to glowing accounts of wonderful Berlin concerts—eighty trained
musicians playing an accompaniment like one man, etc.’

’Shall we go to Berlin, Stella, and take Egypt and the other places on
the way back?’

’Happy thought!’ cried Stella lightly.  ’Charter a vessel direct, before
ten to-morrow morning.’

’No, but I am serious, Stella.  The _Hindoo Fawn_ sails on the sixteenth
October.’

’Cannot we get away before then?’ said Stella.

Ted’s heart thumped wildly at the question.

’There is a French vessel——’ he began slowly.  But she held up her
hands.

’A French vessel—not for your life!  There is some very good reason
somewhere—in the Book of Proverbs.’

’There is an Orient steamer on the ninth of October; but—but will your
mother consent to such haste?’

’Ah, that is your concern, Ted.  You must explain everything when you
write.  Mind, I take no responsibility beyond the usual fibs of the
marriage ceremony.’

Laurette was leaning back in a corner of the carriage, with closed eyes,
as if she heard nothing.  No one could be more discreet and wary, and
less observant, where observation would have been an element of danger.
She roused up when they got home, and she sat rattling away to Stella
and Ted about all sorts of indifferent things.

’Did you see Mrs. Anstey-Hobbs’ new poet, Stella—the young man with the
sombre expression and the long hair?’

’Is that one of the signs of a poet—not to go to the barber?’ asked Ted.

’Oh, besides that, you must write things—

    ’"What is life but a spectre of bale?
    What is joy but a curse that is stale!"

That is one of the couplets Mrs. Anstey-Hobbs quotes in dusky corners
with a tremolo in her voice.  I wonder why that little Mrs. Lee-Towers
makes a point of fastening on me on every available occasion of late?’

’Don’t you approve of her, Laurette?’ asked Stella, with a lurking
smile.

’Well, no.  I think the way she flirts in public, using the last pattern
of young man she approves of like a fan, to keep her husband out of
sight, is a little too bare-faced. And then she seems to have them to
suit her style of dress. When she is in pale heliotrope velvet, it is
that large young idiot with a lisp and flaxen hair.  But he seems to be
playing truant lately.  It must really be a trying moment, when the
young man who seemed to have been sent by Heaven into the world to hold
your bouquet sympathetically begins to get out of your way.’

’What the deuce does her husband allow it for?—what is he like?’ said
Ted, who was picking up leaves that had fallen from Stella’s nosegay of
blush roses, and wondering why Larry did not find it necessary to go to
the nursery or somewhere.  He had not been a moment alone with Stella
since their engagement.

’Oh, don’t you know him by sight?  He is rather a cadaverous-looking
man, with six or seven mouse-coloured hairs on his chin.  He looks as if
he could ride in the air if he had the proper sort of broomstick.  He
never opens his lips, unless you make a mistake about figures.  No, he
isn’t amusing; but nothing of that kind excuses a woman in such conduct.
You may congratulate yourself, my dear Ted——’

Stella rose with a bored expression.  ’Good-night, _mes amis_,’ she
said, kissing the tips of her gloved hand to both, and gliding out of
the room before Ted could reach the door—a proceeding which need hardly
be characterized as unsatisfactory to Ritchie.

’By Jove!  I shall never be sure of Stella till we’re safely and
substantially married,’ he said, looking after her with knitted brows.

’True; therefore let it be on the sixth of October, and sail on the
sixteenth,’ said Laurette decisively.  ’You will reach Berlin before the
end of November.  To be done in that time?  Certainly—after a courtship
of five years.’

’It’s more like ten,’ broke in Ted; ’and we were engaged once before.’

’Yes, allude to that.  No one can be surprised at your determination to
make sure of the young lady now.’

’Allude to it?  I don’t know how to allude to things.  I shall simply
put it down in black and white.  By the way, Larry, where is Tareling?’

Laurette murmured something in reply which was not audible; but as she
offered no explanation, this did not much signify.

’He did his part very well,’ said Ted, taking out his cigar-case
preparatory to retiring.  ’But do you suppose anyone would ever carry on
in that way in real life—hocussing people and stealing letters?’

’Oh, people must put something into plays,’ said Laurette
contemptuously.  As a matter of fact, her own little performance in that
line had been infinitely superior, and she may have felt something of
the scorn of a finished artist for a pretentious amateur.  What did not
occur to her was the irony which underlay her discussion of such a
theme.

She was preoccupied with thoughts of checkmating Talbot’s secret plans,
and withal profoundly grateful that she was freed from the haunting fear
of being forced to retire to the wilds of the Australian Bush, instead
of shining in her proper orbit.  She remembered the learned judge’s
words with a fresh glow of gratitude, and recalled with solemn approval
a maxim she had somewhere heard or read, that we can benefit others in
no surer way than by making the best of our own lives.  How true this
was as applied to herself!  The best use she could make of her life was
certainly to maintain her position in Melbourne society until she might
perhaps be called on to take her place among the titled aristocracy of
England.  And in her efforts to keep this position she was securing
Ted’s happiness, protecting Stella from the danger of entanglement with
a married man, and, most important of all, in a way to thwart the wild
folly of her husband and the father of her children. Being in a very
wakeful, active-minded mood, she wrote several letters to members of the
Courtland family.  She begged pardon in a pretty, winning way for siding
wholly with Stella and Ted in the arrangement of being married in time
to leave by the sixteenth of October.  This was partly because of
business arrangements which compelled Ted to leave by that date, partly
because, after all that had passed, prompt action was best.  She was
taking the liberty of seeing to Stella’s trousseau so as to save time:
not that it would be a very extensive affair; why should it?  She had so
many pretty dresses, and she was going to the great centres of fashion,
etc., etc.

                            *CHAPTER XLII.*

Breakfast was late next morning at Monico Lodge, and the master of the
house did not make his appearance. There were times when he simply
haunted the place—being quite the closest approximation to a ghost the
neighbourhood could produce.  It might, however, be urged by the
charitably inclined that his notions of day and night had been seriously
upset by having spent most of his life at the antipodes—being thirty-one
years of age when he left England six years previously.

’I wrote my letter to your mother this morning, Stella—I want you just
to look over it,’ said Ted, as they rose from the table.

Laurette was deep in arrangements for her ball, and left the young
people to themselves in a little morning apartment off the
breakfast-room.

’And mind, Stella, directly after lunch we must go to see about your
dresses,’ she said—an announcement which Stella received with
incredulous amazement.

’Stella, have you got a conscience?’ asked Ted, as she ensconced herself
in an armchair behind a davenport by the window.

’Yes, occasionally; but it’s good to let sleeping dogs lie,’ said
Stella; and then, seeing Ted’s aggrieved face, she held out her hand to
him.  ’You may kiss the little finger, Ted, who was a traitor on your
side when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.’

’But sooner or later, you know, Stella——’

’Ah, later then!  Now, what have you written?’

’"MY DEAR MRS. COURTLAND,

’"You will be glad to hear that Stella and I are fast engaged once more,
and with your kind consent we must be married on the fifth of next
month, so as to set sail for Europe on the sixteenth."’

’You see, Stella, I cannot make it any sooner,’ said Ted, with a twinkle
in his eyes—his line being to keep Stella literally to her mood of last
night—’that is, as you object to the French line.  There is an extra
boat to sail on the eighth.’

She sat staring at him as if she did not hear him.  She was following in
the wake of a ship that went on its remorseless way day and night,
speeding every hour nearer to its goal.  Did it bear hearts that beat
joyfully at the thought?

’I do not believe you hear what I say, Stella?’

’Oh yes, I do.  What makes you think my mother will be glad for me to
leave her?’

’I don’t; a fellow must say something.  But about the French boat?’

’Do not speak of that line.  There was only one little Christian boat
among them all, and it went down in a frightful storm in mid-ocean—a
long way off.  But still at times I hear the cries of the drowning; and
there is a woman’s face.  She does not sink, but she has lost
everything!’

’Stella, if you want to spin a yarn as you used to, do tell a jollier
one than that thing.  Anyone would think you saw it, and your eyes are
getting larger than ever.’

She got up and looked at herself in a little plush-framed mirror near
her.

He followed her, and put his arms round her.

’For God’s sake, don’t!’ she cried, starting back as if she were
stabbed.  And then the next moment she turned on herself with fierce
disdain.

She, whose whole frame had thrilled with rapture at the touch of lips
whose kisses were forsworn, what right had she to repulse the honest
love of a man who had been faithful to her from boyhood, to whom she had
promised all her future life?

’Forgive me, Ted,’ she said humbly; ’but I am nervous lately, and you
took me by surprise.’  She stroked his hand, and he flushed hotly under
the touch.

’All right, Stella.  Now let’s go on with this letter: "This hurry is
partly because of business arrangements, and also because, being engaged
before, and nothing came of it, it’s better to avoid accidents.  As for
me, I have waited so long, and felt often so frightfully down on my
luck, I would much sooner the wedding were to-morrow than any other day.
You have always been so kind to me, I’m sure you won’t say a word
against this plan, for I know Stella couldn’t bear to do anything
against your wishes.  It would be only foolish sort of jawing for me to
say how much I love Stella.  Long before I should be thinking of such
things I made up my mind she should be my wife.  Many a day since I
thought this would never be.  But it has come all right now.  So hoping
you will concur in the above,

"I am, dear Mrs. Courtland,
       "Yours most respectfully,
              "EDWARD RITCHIE.

"P.S.—As Stella can have everything she wants in Paris or elsewhere, it
would be foolish for her to lay in a big stock of clothes.  The dress
she has on now would be the nicest of all for her to be married in.  She
will have a thousand a year for frills and things, and as much more as
she likes. So it would be foolery for her to have an army of trunks full
of things she can get where we are going."—How will that do, Stella?’

’Oh, very well, Ted; but are you sure that we are both awake?  On the
fifth of next month?’

’Yes, fourteen long days.  It’s rather a shame, but I suppose we can’t
fix it earlier?  You won’t go back on the date, Stella?  After all, you
know, your mother has had you far longer than she should, if you hadn’t
gone back on the first racket.  Now you write and back me up.  You see,
Cuth and Dora will be going back with you, and Tom engaged, and Allie
soon to be married: they won’t miss you, Stella.  It’s not as though
your mother were a duck with one gosling.’

’Oh, Ted, what names!’ and then Stella smiled.

’Go on, Stella; write your letter.  I want to post it, and then take you
for a ride.  Look at that young calf of a Dustiefoot, with his snout
against the window looking at you.  It floors me how he finds out so
soon the room you are in.’

’I need not write a separate letter.  There is room on this half-sheet
of yours.’

Stella took up a pen and wrote hastily.

’DEAREST MOTHER, AND ALL OF YOU,

’Do not be too much taken by surprise.  We had better keep to the time
named by Ted, as we must get away on the sixteenth.  We shall escape all
the Apostle spoons and things every household should be without.  I
shall be married in a travelling-dress; and I really don’t see what I
want with any more things, I have been so extravagant this last year;
and Tom has given me so many loans.  I suppose he will throw an old shoe
for good luck, but will it be necessary, when one has a thousand a year
for frills?  I kiss you all three times on the mouth.

’Your loving
       ’STELLA.’

’Don’t you ever stop to think what you are going to say, Stella?’

’Not when I write to say that we are to be married in fourteen days.’

Ted read the lines Stella had written, and his face gleamed with joy.

’Oh, that is splendid!’ he cried; ’but should you put that in about the
thousand a year?  Shouldn’t it be—"Will it be necessary, when we love
each other so much?"’

’It is indifferent.  One of the advantages of so much social
superstition is that a good many things are taken for granted.’

Ted, notwithstanding, made the correction in his uncial, squarely
legible writing.  Then he dwelt on the last sentence, and looked
reproachfully into the girl’s face.

’You kiss everyone at Fairacre three times on the mouth, but you don’t
kiss me once—and in two weeks you leave every man jack of them for my
sake.  Stella, do you call it decent, or according to God’s holy
ordinance, as it says in the Prayer-book?’

He bent over her, and she turned her cheek to him.  But he took her in
his arms and covered her face with burning kisses.  She turned deadly
pale and trembled, but remained as passive as if she had been drugged.
Then after a little she fought down the crowding thoughts that made the
present give place to what had been.  Memory, like a rebel, betrayed her
to a surging host of recollections that seemed to stamp this moment with
a seal of infamy.  But the keen pangs of wounded pride, of hopeless
love, and jealousy, came to her aid.  She conquered her shrinking shame,
her instinctive revolt—reminding herself that it was less humiliating to
be kissed by unloved lips than by those that were so dear to her.

’Tell me, Stella, you are not sorry you gave me back your promise again
yesterday,’ said Ted in a low voice.

’Sorry?  Oh no—I am glad,’ she replied, feeling for the time her words
were true—so fiercely did she seek to trample out that smouldering
jealousy which was ever ready to leap into consuming flame.  He was more
than content with the answer.  Yet, after she disengaged herself from
his arms, he tested her tardy, passionately longed-for submission a
little farther.

’Stella, come and kiss me on the mouth three times,’ he said, in a
tremulous voice.

Almost to her own astonishment she obeyed.  Yes, it was part of the
bargain.  It made this incredible transaction all the more irrevocable.
It made those days she would give her right hand to sink in utter
oblivion more remote—more impossible.  From that day she did not even in
thought go back from her approaching marriage.  It was as though she had
drunk of some opiate that deadened her moral nature. She seemed to
escape all fears, all responsibility, and the envenomed darts of memory.
She was so much occupied during the day, she danced so much at night,
she was so bent on being amused all the time, that none but the closest
observer would have doubted the real source of this abandonment to
gaiety.

Once or twice Ted, in a clumsy but honest way, tried to speak seriously
of his own felt unworthiness, being misled by the statement Laurette had
once made as to Stella’s suspicion of his failure in conduct.  But
Stella treated these attempts like jugglers’ plates—things to spin in
the air, but not to let them down with a crash.

’Have you any wives hidden away, Ted?’ she asked; arching her brows at
him.

’Oh, come, Stella, you know very well you shouldn’t talk in that way.’
It was a fact that at this time her irresponsible levity sometimes
wounded Ted’s moral sense—chiefly because she was so unlike her former
self.

’Shouldn’t I?  Let me assure you people’s wives do turn up when they
ought to be dead.  But you haven’t got one at all, it seems.  No doubt
there was a time when you should have married some, but you didn’t—so it
is all right. Isn’t it beautifully simple?’

It was unpardonable, and Ted, who felt in a dumb way that she was his
higher conscience, began to think that after all he had no need to be so
remorseful when he thought over the curious difference presented by the
spotless record of Stella’s life and his own.  He supposed women of
sense always understood that things were so, though, of course, a line
must be drawn somewhere.

Stella was, in truth, passing through that phase of deterioration in
which some men gamble and drink deep so as to escape from themselves.
She succeeded by ignoring all her better aspirations, all the higher
capacities of her mind, in drowning thought, and numbing her sense of
what was right to a strange degree.  She had a strong will, and the
unusual mental discipline through which she had passed early in life had
given her a rare power of controlling her thoughts.  She exercised both
faculties to the utmost degree in casting from her memory the immediate
past.  But this was so woven into the deepest fibres of her being that
to accomplish this object was to become, to a certain degree, morally
callous.  It was one of those remedies infinitely more injurious to the
soul than the original disease.

Laurette was amazed at the change which had come over Stella.  She was,
at the same time, a little afraid of the element of inconsequence bound
up with this alteration.  It was all very well as long as nothing in
particular happened, but everyone knows that life is full of accidents.
It is not easy for women to deceive one another.  This is one reason why
their strictures on each other often strike men as being malicious.
Laurette had a very definite idea that her future sister-in-law was
changed—not because she had grown indifferent to Langdale, but because
she cared too much.  The last night of Stella’s stay in Melbourne they
had been at a Government House ball, and on their return they sat
chatting for some little time.

’I suppose you will really live very little at Strathhaye, Stella, when
you return,’ said Laurette, who was an adept at leading up to what she
wanted to say by beginning a long way off.

’I have hardly considered the matter,’ replied Stella, playing with the
brilliant diamond hoop which was her engagement-ring.

’You take so kindly to Melbourne life now; and I must say you are likely
to be rather spoiled.  You will be very popular.  What story of yours
sent the old Marchioness Lismore into such roars of laughter?’

’Oh, a rather hideous anecdote about an old aboriginal, who wanted to be
baptized while he carried the remains of an enemy in his hair till he
should kill the next-of-kin as well.  The old dame was talking quite
seriously about the possibility of Christianizing our natives, and I
felt bound to support her views.’

’Well, she laughed like a regiment—and what a wig she wears, to be sure!
The more one reads the society papers and sees of the English
aristocracy, the less one is impressed by them.  Considering all it
takes to keep them going, they should be a little more different from
the common herd.  I suppose the Marchioness invited you to visit them
when you go to England?’

’Yes; but I remembered the fate of your friends the Jorans, and I did
not commit myself.  Besides, I don’t want to go to England much now.’

’But of course you will go with Ted to see Uncle Matthew—and then there
are your own friends and relations.’

’I don’t know.  Claude’s wife declares that family circles there get
upon one’s nerves dreadfully.  That, at any rate, is one striking
advantage of an aristocracy.  They are not formal, and squeezy, and
peering timorously at other people to see how they behave.’

’How long do you think you’ll be away?’

’Laurette, don’t turn into a catechism without the answers.  As long as
it is quite amusing.’

’You have decided upon Berlin for the winter?’

’Oh yes; we go direct there from Brindisi.’

’Well, Stella, you are certainly a very fortunate girl—nearly as
fortunate as Ted.’

’Call no man fortunate till he is dead, and no woman till she is
buried.’

’Oh, of course, I don’t at all mean to say that, like everyone else, you
won’t have your own trials.  Men are pretty much alike in many ways.  A
girl may marry the greatest milksop alive, but after all she is bound to
find herself hopelessly behind the scenes.’

’Don’t you think, Larry, you might be a little more entertaining?  You
remind one a little of a vivisector, who for certain experiments makes a
lesion in the neck of a guinea-pig, and then pinches its nose to throw
it into convulsions.  I don’t mind so much about my neck, but I am
rather sensitive about my nose.’

’Well, Stella dear, you must forgive something to the weakness of a
loving sister.  I can’t help seeing that lately you are more brilliant
and somehow harder.  In the midst of my joy on Ted’s account, I
sometimes ask myself, "Does Stella really love him enough?  Will she be
able to overlook his faults, and help him, and lead him?"’

’Oh, Laurette, what have you been reading?’ cried Stella, and she
laughed outright, looking on with an animated face, as though she were
witnessing a comedy.

But not a muscle of Laurette’s face moved, either in mirth or anger.

’Ah, my dear, when you have my maturity of experience as a wife and
mother, you will better understand my anxieties. If I thought that you
did not really love Ted, I would say to you, even now, "Pause before it
is too late!"’

It was inexpressibly comic.  Only the play of daily life is often marred
by the fact that we generally see—not the whole gem, but merely one or
two facets.  Yet, on the other hand, to see comedy in its more intimate
bearings, as it affects ourselves, might frequently mean that all sense
of fun would be merged in that of tragic irony.

Stella sat with such undisguised amusement on her face, waiting for this
to go on, that Laurette instantly took up a fresh cue.

’But of course it is only my fears.  And what makes it so very safe for
you, is having been friends ever since you were babies, I may say.  But
it’s just one of the things we women have to face—to take the world as
we find it.  To do that in married life, one must start with a good
stock of affection.  Where should I have been without it?  We soon
discover that our fairy tales and imaginations have been raised far
enough away from reality.  Many people were of opinion that if your
sister Esther, for instance, had not been so horrified and scornful when
she found Raymond went a little into queer society—my dear, why do you
stare so?  I mean among the _pêches à quinze sous_; now that you are to
be married, one may mention speckled fruit before you—affairs between
them might have turned out differently. I dare say she forgave him at
intervals; but if a man must forgive his brother seventy times seven,
how often must a woman forgive her husband?  It’s not put in the Bible,
partly, I think, because there is not enough arithmetic going to make it
up.  And it’s not only forgiving, but making light of it in a way.  To
do that, one must really enjoy one’s self—and that’s what you have the
power of doing. You have to come down a cropper or two in your ideals,
but you will soon find that a young married woman in a good position,
with plenty of money and some brains, has more advantages, is more
perfectly independent, than any other creature in the world.  You will
get on with all sorts of people.  You can have a _salon_ if you try, and
succeed better than poor Mrs. Anstey-Hobbs.  If no one else says smart
things, you will yourself.  And then, of course, you will be sure to
have enemies, and they are often far more useful in amusing one than any
friends....  What could be more diverting than to watch people come to
you, their faces covered with smiles, their hearts on their lips, so to
speak, as they stretch out their hands to you? ... And yet you know all
the time they never say a true word of you behind your back, unless you
are ugly or stupid.... I expect you will bring back heaps of lovely
things; and of course you will go to Worth as you are coming home.  Of
course, too, you will go to visit the Lillimore family.  Talbot said the
other day his mother would be perfectly charmed to know you.  There are
three unmarried sisters—unfortunately none of them under thirty-three,
and none of them very sweet-tempered; but how can you wonder?  They are
very poor, and their letters are always like Jeremiah’s
scroll—tenantless lands and mortgages.

’If ever Talbot succeeds to the title, I shall be at my wits’ ends; for
what would be the use of being swallowed up in London society, and
passing your time scheming how to make ends meet, etc.?  They do not
even give me any of those little details one longs for so.  They write
sometimes about the "sausage people," and the "screw-makers," and the
"Jew money-lenders," meaning those who have made their money by these
articles.  But, after all, what is the good of trying to throw names at
people about the way their money has been made?  Land is going down and
down in England.  They can’t grow wool much, nor wine, nor cotton, and
the farmers are going to places where they can make more money, and
become gentry on their own account.  And there’s no class in all the
world that need money so constantly in large sums as an aristocracy.
They want to be always well amused, and well fed, and well dressed—the
dearest things in all the world—and, on top of it all, to do no work,
which is dearer than all the rest put together—to be, in fact, almond
tumblers, whose beaks are so soft they must be fed out of a spoon, which
is no doubt very genteel, as long as you can get people to feed you.
But the Middle Ages are long over.  Why, even here, in a properly
democratic country, how soon everyone conspires to make you feel your
poverty!  I have often thought if one continued hopelessly poor all
one’s life, one would have to take to the love of God—there would be
nothing else left.’

’Surely you are not threatened with such destitution, Larry?’ said
Stella, smiling.  ’Why, Ted has more money than he knows what to do
with; he must give you some.’

’My dear, that is very sweet and good of you! but you know how absurdly
awkward one feels about taking money; and, of course, our poverty, after
all, is comparative.  It consists largely in having to fall back on
second-rate tradespeople—not but what that is a bitter cross in itself:
they are more flattered by your patronage, but they charge nearly as
much; indeed, they leave out nothing but the style—like Surah, Muslin,
and Company, who descend to the paltriest details if you have a dress
made at their establishment—even putting the eyelet-holes down as an
extra—and then put in sundries one pound fifteen shillings.  And there
is hardly anything in life more tiresome than a dressmaker who is not
quite _chic_.  Her fingers are always cold, and she _will_ touch your
skin, and stick pins in you, and hold things in her mouth, and say in a
gushing way, "Yes, madam, it will be a most be-au-ti-ful fit," and then
take a cheerful snip out of your arms with her scissors.  Stella, you
will never know anything of these small miseries....  Well, I wish it
were possible for me to come to your wedding; but Talbot cannot leave
town, as I said, and I must not go without him.  But you are to stay
with us the few days you are in Melbourne before leaving.  What a
charming idea that is of Ted’s, to drive you in his new drag
four-in-hand from Adelaide to Strathhaye!’

Laurette found everything in Stella’s lot all the more charming just
then by reason of Ted’s action in presenting her only that morning with
a cheque for two thousand pounds.

                            *CHAPTER XLIII.*

It was the evening before Stella’s wedding-day.  She had returned, in
company with her brother Cuthbert and his _fiancée_, and their presence
and the interest of their new relationship shielded her from undivided
attention.  A few days afterwards came Mrs. Wallerton, with her
children. Everyone knows how a family reunion serves to minimize the
concentration of attention on any one grown-up individual of the circle.
It is a small republic, in which, after the manner of limited
monarchies, those who reign do not rule.  Claude Hector, aged eight
months, being the youngest member, and till then a complete stranger to
his older relatives, was a great centre of attraction.

Then Dora, with her pretty, affectionate little ways, drew great
attention.  If anyone sang or played, Dora always begged for one more
song or a little more music. If one spoke a little hoarsely, she never
forgot to inquire next morning, with the deepest concern, after the
afflicted throat.  She was always gliding about, to put a footstool
under someone’s feet or to recover a straying newspaper or a dropped
needle.  Then, when anyone spoke, she always listened with the most
reverential attention.  When Cuthbert spoke, she would often murmur one
of his sentences over to herself, as if better to impress it on her
memory. She was, in fact, what is known in England as a very sweet girl.
In Australia, unfortunately, the species is so rare that no specific
name has had to be invented.  Dora was to stay at Fairacre for a month
after the wedding, and Felix Harrison could not refrain from saying to
Allie that the change from Stella to Dora was rather soothing.

’But, indeed, her approaching marriage seems already to have improved
her,’ the young man said meditatively.  He had many good qualities, and
withal a liberal estimate of his own abilities.  This had long been a
subject of serio-comic treatment with Stella.

’I hope Stella won’t alter much,’ returned Alice, who was embroidering a
chair-back for her own future home. ’I began to think she never would
accept Ted——’

’I think she is a very lucky girl, if you ask me.  Ritchie simply
worships the ground she treads on.  And she must be fond of him, though
she so long kept up that indifferent way.  Why, these last few days at
home she spends most of the time with him on horseback.’

Now the last few days had passed, and to-morrow was the wedding-day.
Stella sat in the little library on a footstool at her mother’s feet.
Both windows were open; through one Banksia roses were drooping in heavy
cream-coloured clusters; through the other a microphylla rosebush
peeped, with its thick foliage of small green leaves, long-spiked buds
unclosing, and roses fully blown with deep-pink hearts, and outer petals
deadly pale.  The sun was setting in golden splendour, and all the
atmosphere was warm and rosy; the lovely Adelaide Hills had caught the
glow all along their crests with magical effect.  The pigeons were
flying to their cotes in scores, and the soft beating of their wings in
the garden clove the air like silken banners.

’There is one thing that troubles me a little, darling,’ the mother
said, in her tender voice, with its soft Celtic intonations; ’I thought
on your wedding-day you would communicate.  It would be possible to do
that with our old friend the Archdeacon, though you have not been
confirmed.  I should like you to enter on your new life by drawing near
the visible Church.’

’Mother, I cannot,’ answered the girl, with averted face, as she held
her mother’s hand in both hers.

’Well, my child, you are in God’s hands.  I do not fear but you will yet
find Him who is the soul’s most precious possession.  In our span of
life the rose is ever neighbour with the thorn—the web woven with
threads not all of our choosing.  And yet God grants us to reap our
hundredfold even in this life.  In marriage itself, when two hearts and
souls cleave together, what deep and sacred happiness has He not granted
to us!’

A burning flame of colour rose and spread over the girl’s face.  How
unjustifiable did her marriage appear to her in the white light of her
mother’s life—one consecrated throughout with fidelity to the higher
ideals that sway human conduct.

But she sternly kept the feeling in check.  She reflected that for the