face to face."

"Now, Mrs. Wigram! Now, Mrs. Wigram! Is not this a tone to be
deprecated?" he answered, lifting his hands. "I come to you as a man
of business upon business."

"Business! Does that mean wringing advantage from my weakness?" she
retorted.

He shrugged his shoulders. "I do deprecate this tone," he repeated. "I
come in plain English to make you an offer; one which you can accept
or refuse as you please. I offer you five hundred a year for this
house. It is immensely too large for your needs, and too expensive for
your income, and yet you have in strictness no power to let it. Very
well, I, who can release you from that restriction, offer you five
hundred a year for the house. What can be more fair?"

"Fair? In plain English, Lord Wetherby, you are the only possible
purchaser, and you fix the price. Is that fair? The house would let
easily for twelve hundred."

"Possibly," he retorted, "if it were in the open market. But it is
not."

"No," she answered rapidly. "And you, having the forty thousand a year
which, had my husband lived, would have been his and mine; you who, a
poor man, have stepped into this inheritance--you offer me five
hundred for the family house! For shame, my lord! for shame!"

"We are not acting a play," he said doggedly, showing that her words
had stung him in some degree. "The law is the law. I ask for nothing
but my rights, and one of those I am willing to waive in your favor.
You have my offer."

"And if I refuse it? If I let the house? You will not dare to enforce
the restriction."

"Try me," he rejoined, again drumming with his fingers upon the table.
"Try me, and you will see."

"If my husband had lived----"

"But he did not live," he broke in, losing patience, "and that makes
all the difference. Now, for Heaven's sake, Mrs. Wigram, do not make a
scene! Do you accept my offer?"

For a moment she had seemed about to break down, but her pride coming
to the rescue, she recovered herself with wonderful quickness.

"I have no choice," she said, with dignity.

"I am glad you accept," he answered, so much relieved that he gave way
to an absurd burst of generosity. "Come!" he cried, "we will say
guineas instead of pounds, and have done with it!"

She looked at him in wonder. "No, Lord Wetherby," she said, "I
accepted your terms. I prefer to keep to them. You said that you would
bring the necessary papers with you. If you have done so I will sign
them now, and my servants can witness them."

"I have the draft, and the lawyer's clerk is no doubt in the house,"
he answered. "I left directions for him to be here at eleven."

"I do not think he is in the house," the lady answered. "I should know
if he were here."

"Not here!" he cried angrily. "Why not, I wonder! But I have the
skeleton lease. It is very short, and to save delay I will fill in the
particulars, names, and so forth myself, if you will permit me to do
so. It will not take me twenty minutes."

"As you please. You will find a pen and ink on the table. If you will
kindly ring the bell when you are ready, I will come and bring the
servants."

"Thank you; you are very good," he said smoothly; adding, when she had
left the room. "And the devil take your impudence, madam! As for your
cursed pride--well, it has saved me twenty-five pounds a year, and so
you are welcome to it. I was a fool to make the offer." And with that,
now grumbling at the absence of the lawyer's clerk and now
congratulating himself on the saving of a lawyer's fee, my lord sat
down to his task.

A hansom cab on its way to the East India Club rattled through the
square, and under cover of the noise I stole out from behind the
screen, and stood in the middle of the room, looking down at the
unconscious worker. If for a minute I felt strongly the desire to
raise my hand and give his lordship such a surprise as he had never in
his life experienced, any other man might have felt the same; and, as
it was, I put it away and only looked quietly about me. Some rays of
sunshine, piercing the corner pane of a dulled window, fell on and
glorified the Wetherby coat of arms blazoned over the wide fireplace,
and so created the one bright spot in the bare, dismantled room, which
had once, unless the tiers of empty shelves and the yet lingering odor
of Russia lied, been lined from floor to ceiling with books. My lord
had taken the furniture; my lord had taken the books; my lord had
taken--nothing but his rights.

Retreating softly to the door by which I had entered, and rattling the
handle, I advanced afresh into the room. "Will your lordship allow
me?" I said, after I had in vain coughed twice to gain his attention.

He turned hastily and looked at me with a face full of suspicion. Some
surprise on finding another person in the room and close to him was
natural; but possibly, also, there was something in the atmosphere of
that house which threw his nerves off their balance. "Who are you?" he
cried, in a tone which matched his face.

"You left orders, my lord," I explained, "with Messrs. Duggan & Poole
that a clerk should attend here at eleven. I very much regret that
some delay has unavoidably been caused."

"Oh, you are the clerk!" he replied ungraciously. "You do not look
much like a lawyer's clerk."

Involuntarily I glanced aside and saw in a mirror the reflection of a
tall man with a thick beard and mustaches, gray eyes, and an ugly scar
seaming the face from ear to ear. "Yet I hope to give you full
satisfaction, my lord," I murmured, dropping my eyes. "It was
understood that you needed a confidential clerk."

"Well, well, sir, to your work!" he replied irritably. "Better late
than never. And after all it may be preferable for you to be here and
see it duly executed. Only you will not forget," he continued hastily,
with a glance at the papers, "that I have myself copied four--well,
three--three full folios, sir, for which an allowance must be made.
But there! Get on with your work. The handwriting will speak for
itself."

I obeyed, and wrote on steadily, while the earl walked up and down the
room, or stood at a window. Upstairs sat Mrs. Wigram, schooling
herself, I dare swear, to take this one favor that was no favor from
the man who had dealt out to her such hard measure. Outside a casual
passer through the square glanced up at the great house, and seeing
the bent head of the secretary and the figure of his companion moving
to and fro, saw, as he thought, nothing unusual; nor had any
presentiment--how should he?--of the strange scene which the room with
the dingy windows was about to witness.

I had been writing for perhaps five minutes when Lord Wetherby stopped
in his passage behind me and looked over my shoulder. With a jerk his
eye-glasses fell, touching my shoulder.

"Bless my soul!" he exclaimed, "I have seen your handwriting
somewhere; and lately too. Where could it have been?"

"Probably among the family papers, my lord," I answered. "I have
several times been engaged in the family business in the time of the
late Lord Wetherby."

"Indeed!" There were both curiosity and suspicion in his utterance of
the word. "You knew him?"

"Yes, my lord. I have written for him in this very room, and he has
walked up and down, and dictated to me, as you might be doing now," I
explained.

His lordship stopped his pacing to and fro, and retreated to the
window on the instant. But I could see that he was interested, and I
was not surprised when he continued, with transparent carelessness, "A
strange coincidence! And may I ask what it was upon which you were
engaged?"

"At that time?" I answered, looking him in the face. "It was a will,
my lord."

He started and frowned, and abruptly resumed his walk up and down. But
I saw that he had a better conscience than I had given him the credit
of possessing. My shot had not struck fairly where I had looked to
place it; and finding this was so, I turned the thing over afresh,
while I pursued my copying. When I had finished, I asked him--I think
he was busy at the time cursing the absence of tact in the lower
orders--if he would go through the instrument; and he took my seat.

Where I stood behind him, I was not far from the fireplace. While he
muttered to himself the legal jargon in which he was as well versed as
a lawyer bred in an office, I moved to it; and, neither missed nor
suspected, stood looking from his bent figure to the blazoned shield
which formed part of the mantelpiece. If I wavered, my hesitation
lasted but a few seconds. Then, raising my voice, I called sharply,
"My lord, there used to be here----"

He turned swiftly, and saw where I was.

"What the deuce are you doing there, sir?" he cried, in boundless
astonishment, rising to his feet and coming toward me, the pen in his
hand and his face aflame with anger. "You forget----"

"A safe--a concealed safe for papers," I continued, cutting him short
in my turn. "I have seen the late Lord Wetherby place papers in it
more than once. The spring worked from here. You touch this knob----"

"Leave it alone, sir!" cried the peer furiously.

He spoke too late. The shield had swung gently outward on a hinge,
door-fashion, and where it had been gaped a small open safe, lined
with cement. The rays of sunshine, that a few minutes before had
picked out so brightly the gaudy quarterings, now fell on a large
envelope which lay apart on a shelf. It was as clean as if it had been
put there that morning. No doubt the safe was airtight. I laid my hand
upon it. "My lord!" I cried, turning to look at him with ill-concealed
exultation, "here is a paper--I think, a will!"

A moment before the veins of his forehead had been swollen, his face
dark with the rush of blood. His anger died down, at sight of the
packet, with strange abruptness. He regained his self-control, and a
moment saw him pale and calm, all show of resentment confined to a
wicked gleam in his eye. "A will!" he repeated, with a certain kind of
dignity, though the hand he stretched out to take the envelope shook.
"Indeed! Then it is my place to examine it. I am the heir-at-law, and
I am within my rights, sir."

I feared that he was going to put the parcel into his pocket and
dismiss me, and I was considering what course I should take in that
event, when instead he carried the envelope to the table by the
window, and tore off the cover without ceremony. "It is not in your
handwriting?" were his first words, and he looked at me with a
distrust that was almost superstitious. No doubt my sudden entrance,
my ominous talk, and my discovery seemed to him to savor of the devil.

"No," I replied, unmoved. "I told your lordship that I had written a
will at the late Lord Wetherby's dictation. I did not say--for how
could I know?--that it was this one."

"Ah!" He hastily smoothed the sheets, and ran his eyes over their
contents. When he reached the last page there was a dark scowl on his
face, and he stood a while staring at the signatures; not now reading,
I think, but collecting his thoughts. "You know the provisions of
this?" he presently burst forth with violence, dashing the back of his
hand against the paper. "I say, sir, you know the provisions of this?"

"I do not, my lord," I answered. Nor did I.

"The unjust provisions of this will!" he repeated, passing over my
negative as if it had not been uttered. "Fifty thousand pounds to a
woman who had not a penny when she married his son! Ay, and the
interest on another hundred thousand for her life! Why, it is a
prodigious income, an abnormal income, for a woman! And out of whose
pocket is it to come? Out of mine, every stiver of it! It is
monstrous! I say it is! How am I to keep up the title on the income
left to me, I should like to know?"

I marveled. I remembered how rich he was. I could not refrain from
suggesting that he had still remaining all the real property. "And," I
added, "I understood, my lord, that the testator's personalty was
sworn under four hundred thousand pounds."

"You talk nonsense!" he snarled. "Look at the legacies! Five thousand
here, and a thousand there, and hundreds like berries on a bush! It is
a fortune, a decent fortune, clean frittered away! A barren title is
all that will be left to me!"

What was he going to do? His face was gloomy, his hands were
twitching. "Who are the witnesses, my lord?" I asked, in a low voice.

So low--for, under certain conditions, a tone conveys much, very
much--that he shot a stealthy glance toward the door before he
answered, "John Williams."

"Blind," I replied, in the same low tone.

"William Williams."

"He is dead. He was Mr. Alfred's valet. I remember reading in the
newspaper that he was with his master, and was killed by the Indians
at the same time."

"True. I remember that that was the case," he answered huskily. "And
the handwriting is Lord Wetherby's." I assented. Then for fully a
minute we were silent, while he bent over the will, and I stood behind
him looking down at him, with thoughts in my mind which he could as
little fathom as could the senseless wood upon which I leaned. Yet I,
too, mistook him. I thought him, to be plain, a scoundrel; and--well,
so he was, but a mean one. "What is to be done?" he muttered at
length, speaking rather to himself than to me.

I answered softly, "I am a poor man, my lord," while inwardly I was
quoting, "_Quem Deus vult perdere_."

My words startled him. He answered hurriedly: "Just so! just so! So
shall I be when this cursed paper takes effect. A very poor man! A
hundred and fifty thousand gone at a blow! But there, she shall have
it! She shall have every penny of it; only," he continued slowly, "I
do not see what difference one more day will make."

I followed his downcast eyes, which moved from the will before him to
the agreement for the lease of the house; and I did see what
difference a day would make. I saw and understood and wondered. He had
not the courage to suppress the will; but if he could gain a slight
advantage by withholding it for a few hours, he had the mind to do
that. Mrs. Wigram, a rich woman, would no longer let the house; she
would be under no compulsion to do so; and my lord would lose a cheap
residence as well as his hundred and fifty thousand pounds. To the
latter loss he could resign himself with a sigh; but he could not bear
to forego the petty gain for which he had schemed. "I think I
understand, my lord," I replied.

"Of course," he resumed nervously, "you must be rewarded for making
this discovery. I will see that it is so. You may depend upon me. I
will mention the case to Mrs. Wigram, and--and, in fact, my friend,
you may depend upon me."

"That will not do," I said firmly. "If that be all, I had better go to
Mrs. Wigram at once, and claim my reward a day earlier."

He grew very red in the face at receiving this check. "You will not,
in that event, get my good word," he said.

"Which has no weight with the lady," I answered politely but plainly.

"How dare you speak so to me?" his lordship cried. "You are an
impertinent fellow! But there! How much do you want?"

"A hundred pounds."

"A hundred pounds for a mere day's delay, which will do no one any
harm!"

"Except Mrs. Wigram," I retorted dryly. "Come, Lord Wetherby, this
lease is worth a thousand a year to you. Mrs. Wigram, as you well
know, will not voluntarily let the house to you. If you would have
Wetherby House you must pay me. That is the long and the short of it."

"You are an impertinent fellow!" he repeated.

"So you have said before, my lord."

I expected him to burst into a furious passion, but I suppose there
was a something of power in my tone, beyond the mere defiance which
the words expressed; for, instead of doing so, he eyed me with a
thoughtful, malevolent gaze, and paused to consider. "You are at
Duggan & Poole's," he said slowly. "How was it that they did not
search this cupboard, with which you were acquainted?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "I have not been in the house since Lord
Wetherby died," I said. "My employers did not consult me when the
papers he left were examined."

"You are not a member of the firm?"

"No, I am not," I answered. I was thinking that, so far as I knew
those respectable gentlemen, no one of them would have helped my lord
in this for ten times a hundred pounds. My lord! Faugh!

He seemed satisfied, and taking out a notecase laid on the table a
little pile of notes. "There is your money," he said, counting them
over with reluctant fingers. "Be good enough to put the will and
envelope back into the cupboard. Tomorrow you will oblige me by
rediscovering it--you can manage that, no doubt--and giving
information at once to Messrs. Duggan & Poole, or Mrs. Wigram, as you
please. Now," he continued, when I had obeyed him, "will you be good
enough to ask the servants to tell Mrs. Wigram that I am waiting?"

There was a slight noise behind us. "I am here," said someone. I am
sure that we both jumped at the sound, for though I did not look that
way, I knew that the voice was Mrs. Wigram's, and that she was in the
room. "I have come to tell you, Lord Wetherby," she went on, "that I
have an engagement from home at twelve. Do I understand, however, that
you are ready? If so, I will call in Mrs. Williams."

"The papers are ready for signature," the peer answered, betraying
some confusion, "and I am ready to sign. I shall be glad to have the
matter settled as agreed." Then he turned to me, where I had fallen
back, as seemed becoming, to the end of the room, and said, "Be good
enough to ring the bell, if Mrs. Wigram permit it."

As I moved to the fireplace to do so, I was conscious that the lady
was regarding me with some faint surprise. But when I had regained my
position and looked toward her, she was standing near the window,
gazing steadily out into the square, an expression of disdain rendered
by face and figure. Shall I confess that it was a joy to me to see her
fair head so high, and to read, even in the outline of her girlish
form, a contempt which I, and I only, knew to be so justly based? For
myself, I leaned against the edge of the screen by the door, and
perhaps my hundred pounds lay heavily on my heart. As for him, he
fidgeted with his papers, although they were all in order, and was
visibly impatient to get his bit of knavery accomplished. Oh, he was a
worthy man! And Welshman!

"Perhaps," he presently suggested, for the sake of saying something,
"while your servant is coming, you will read the agreement, Mrs.
Wigram. It is very short, and, as you know, your solicitors have
already seen it in the draft."

She bowed, and took the paper negligently. She read some way down the
first sheet with a smile, half careless, half contemptuous. Then
I saw her stop--she had turned her back to the window to obtain more
light--and dwell on a particular sentence. I saw--God! I had forgotten
the handwriting!--I saw her gray eyes grow large, and fear leap into
them, as she grasped the paper with her other hand, and stepped nearer
to the peer's side. "Who?" she cried. "Who wrote this? Tell me! Do you
hear? Tell me quickly!"

He was nervous on his own account, wrapped in his own piece of
scheming, and obtuse.

"I wrote it," he said, with maddening complacency. He put up his
glasses and glanced at the top of the page she held out to him. "I
wrote it myself, and I can assure you that it is quite right, and a
faithful copy. You do not think----"

"Think! think! No! no. This, I mean! Who wrote this?" she cried, awe
in her face, and a suppliant tone, strange as addressed to that man,
in her voice.

He was confounded by her vehemence, as well as hampered by his own
evil conscience.

"The clerk, Mrs. Wigram, the clerk," he said petulantly, still in his
fog of selfishness. "The clerk from Messrs. Duggan & Poole's."

"Where is he?" she cried out breathlessly. I think she did not believe
him.

"Where is he?" he repeated, in querulous surprise. "Why here, of
course. Where should he be, madam? He will witness my signature."

Would he? Signatures! It was little of signatures I recked at that
moment. I was praying to Heaven that my folly might be forgiven me;
and that my lightly planned vengeance might not fall on my own head.
"Joy does not kill," I was saying to myself, repeating it over and
over again, and clinging to it desperately. "Joy does not kill!" But
oh! was it true? in face of that white-lipped woman!

"Here!" She did not say more, but gazing at me with great dazed eyes,
she raised her hand and beckoned to me. And I had no choice but to
obey; to go nearer to her, out into the light.

"Mrs. Wigram," I said hoarsely, my voice sounding to me only as a
whisper, "I have news of your late--of your husband. It is good news."

"Good news?" Did she faintly echo my words? or, as her face, from
which all color had passed, peered into mine, and searched it in
infinite hope and infinite fear, did our two minds speak without need
of physical lips? "Good news?"

"Yes," I whispered. "He is alive. The Indians did not----"

"Alfred!" Her cry rang through the room, and with it I caught her in
my arms as she fell. Beard and long hair, and scar and sunburn, and
strange dress--these which had deceived others were no disguise to
her--my wife. I bore her gently to the couch, and hung over her in a
new paroxysm of fear. "A doctor! Quick! A doctor!" I cried to Mrs.
Williams, who was already kneeling beside her. "Do not tell me," I
added piteously, "that I have killed her!"

"No! no! no!" the good woman answered, the tears running down her
face. "Joy does not kill!"

An hour later this fear had been lifted from me, and I was walking up
and down the library alone with my thankfulness; glad to be alone, yet
more glad, more thankful still, when John came in with a beaming face.
"You have come to tell me," I cried eagerly, pleased that the tidings
had come by his lips, "to go to her? That she will see me?"

"Her ladyship is sitting up," he replied.

"And Lord Wetherby?" I asked, pausing at the door to put the question.
"He left the house at once?"

"Yes, my lord, Mr. Wigram has been gone some time."

                            A BLORE MANOR
                               EPISODE.

Not very remarkable was this courtship: there was nothing very strange
about it, or more romantic than is apt to be the case with such
things. I doubt not that since the daughters of the children of men
were wooed, there have been many millions of such May-time passages of
greater interest, and that countless Pauls and Virginias have plucked
the sweet spring flowers together amid more picturesque surroundings.
Every matron--and some maids, if they will, though we deprecate the
omen--can recall at least one wooing which she can vouch as a thousand
million times more extraordinary than that of my commonplace hero and
heroine. That is so: but for that very reason let her read of this
one, and taking off the cover of her own potpourri savor some faint
scent of the dewy roses of the past springtime.

It had its origin in the 12:10 down train from Euston to Holyhead,
which carried, among other passengers, Charles Maitland of the Temple,
barrister by theory and idler by, or for want of, practice. He
traveled first-class. When you come to know him better you will
understand how superfluous was this last piece of information. Ten
minutes before the train was due out, he arrived at the station
in a hansom. A silk hat, a well-fitting light overcoat--the weather,
for March, was mild--gray trousers, and brown gaiters over his
patent-leather boots were the most salient details of a costume of
which the chief characteristic was an air of perfect correctness. At
the bookstall he did not linger, culling with loving eyes the backs of
many books, and reveling in his choice with florin in hand, as do
second-class passengers, but without hesitation he purchased a
_Saturday Review_ and a _Cornhill Magazine_. After he had taken his
seat a Smith's boy invited him to select from a tray, upon which
glowed half a dozen novels; but he gazed sublimely into vacancy over
the boy's head; who soon left him, and prompted by a vengeful spirit
only inferior to his precocious knowledge of passenger nature,
directed upon him the attacks of two kindred sprites with Banbury
cakes and British sherry. The window was slight protection against
their shrill voices, but soon the train started and freed him from
them. He changed his hat for a brown deer-stalker, and having the
compartment to himself, had recourse to his own thoughts. It was not
unlikely, he told himself, that he had been precipitate in undertaking
this journey. An Easter, coming somewhat early, seemed to have
forestalled his wonted invitations for that season: and, to stay in
London being out of the question, he had accepted Tom Quaritch's
offer. He began to have doubts of the wisdom of this course now, but
it was too late. He was bound for Tom Quaritch's. He had known
something of Tom at college; and recently he had done him a slight
service in town. No more genial soul than the latter existed, and he
did not rest satisfied until he had won from Maitland a half promise
to come and see his beagles at Easter. At the time our traveler had
but the remotest idea of doing so. He did not know enough of Tom's
people, while to have the acquaintance of the right people and of no
one else was part of his creed. But now he was between the horns of a
dilemma. These people, of whom he knew nothing, might not be the right
people; that was one horn. The other consisted in the fact that to
spend a vacation in town was not the thing. When we have chosen our
horn it is natural it should seem the sharper of the two. Mr. Charles
Maitland frowned as he cut the pages of his _Cornhill_. And then he
made up his mind to two things. Firstly, to bring his stay at Blore
Manor within the smallest possible limits, and secondly, to comport
himself while there with such a formal courtesy as should encourage
only the barest familiarity.

At Stafford he had to change into another train, which he did, even as
he cut his magazine, with characteristic precision and coolness. And
so he reached Blore Station about half-past five, still neat and
unsullied, with all the aroma of the street of scents about him.

He let down the window and put out his head. The country thereabouts
was flat and uninteresting, the farming untidy, the fences low, yet
straggling. A short distance away a few roofs peeping forth from a
clump of trees, above which the smoke gently curled, marked the
village. The station consisted of a mere shed and a long, bare
platform. There were but five persons visible, and of these one was a
porter, and one a man servant in a quiet, countrified livery. The
latter walked quickly toward him, but was forestalled by three girls,
the other occupants of the platform, who, at sight of the stranger,
came tearing from the far end of it at a headlong pace.

"Here he is! Here he is!" cried the foremost, her shrill voice drawing
a dozen heads to the windows of the train. She owed her success to an
extempore tug in the form of an excited bull terrier, which, dragging
violently at a strap attached to her wrist, jerked her after him much
as if she had been a kettle tied to his tail. She might be anything
between twenty and five-and-twenty--a tiny little creature of almost
fairylike proportions. Her color was high and her hair brown; she had
curiously opaque brown eyes, bright as well as opaque. Gloves she had
none, and her hair was disordered by her struggles with the dog. But,
after all, the main impression she made upon Maitland was that she was
excessively small. He had no eyes for the others at present. But one,
owing to the reckless method of her progression, gave him a dim notion
of being all legs.

"You are Mr. Maitland, are you not?" the first comer began volubly,
though loss of breath interfered a little with the symmetry of her
sentences. "Tom had to attend a meeting of the fox committee at
Annerley. I'm Maggie Quaritch, and this is Dubs--I beg your pardon,
how silly of me--Joan, I mean, and this is Agnes. Why, child, what
have you done with your hat? Pick it up at once! What wild things Mr.
Maitland will think us!"

The youngest girl, whose hat was lying upon the platform some distance
away, hung her head in a very pretty attitude of shy _gaucherie_. She
was about fifteen--rising sixteen in her brother's phrase--and taller
than the elder girls, with a peculiarly pale complexion, greenish-gray
eyes, and a mass of brownish-red hair. Her loosely made dress was more
in consonance with her style than Maitland, staggering under the shock
of such a reception, had time or mind to observe. He formally
acknowledged the introductions, but words did not come easily to him.
He was dumfounded. He was so unaccustomed to this, or to people like
these.

"And we must not forget Bill," resumed Miss Quaritch, if possible,
faster than before. "Isn't he a beauty now, Mr. Maitland? Look at his
chest, look at his head, look at his eyes. Yes, he lost that one in a
fight with Jack Madeley's retriever, and I'm afraid the sight of the
other is going, but he's the most beautiful, loveliest, faithfullest
dog in the whole world for all that, and his mother loves him, she
does!" All in a shrill tone, rising a note perhaps with the final
words.

The train was moving out. The last that the twelve faces, still glued
to the carriage windows, beheld of the scene was Miss Quaritch
rapturously kissing and hugging the bull terrier, while the Londoner
looked on sheepishly. He was horribly conscious of the presence of
those grinning faces and suffered as much until the train left as if
the onlookers had been a dozen of his club comrades. Whereas the fact
was that they found whatever amusement the scene afforded them not in
the girl's enthusiasm--she was young enough to gush prettily--but in
the strange gentleman's awkward consciousness.

"Now, Mr. Maitland, shall Abiah drive you up in the dog cart, or will
you walk with us? Agnes!" this suddenly in a loud scream to the
youngest girl, who had moved away, "you can let out the dogs! Down,
Juno! Go down, Jack o' Pack! Roy, you ill-conditioned little dog, you
are always quarreling! I'm afraid they will make you in a dreadful
pickle."

Indeed it seemed to Maitland that they would. An avalanche of
scurrying dogs descended upon him from some receptacle where they had
been penned. He had a vision of a red Irish setter with soft brown
eyes, not unlike to, but far finer than Miss Maggie's, with its paws
momentarily upon the breast of his overcoat; of a couple of wiry fox
terriers skirmishing and snarling round his trousers, and of a shy,
lop-eared beagle puppy casting miserable glances at them from an
outside place. And then the party got under way in some sort of order.
At first Maitland had much ado to answer yes and no.

He was still bewildered by these things, crushed, confounded.

He could have groaned as he sedately explained at what time he left
Euston, and where he changed. He was conscious that when their
attention was not demanded by the pack of dogs, the girls were
covertly scrutinizing him; but in his present state of mind, it
mattered not a straw to him whether they were calling him a prig, and
a "stick," and affected, and supercilious, or were admiring half in
scorn the fit of his clothes and boots, and his lordly air. All these
remarks were in fact made by some one or other of them before the day
was over. But he was, and would have been, supremely indifferent to
their criticisms.

The weight of the conversation did not fall heavily upon him: indeed,
when Miss Quaritch had a share in it, no one else was overburdened.
And from time to time they met upon the road old women or children to
whom the girls had always something to say. It was, "Well, Mrs.
Marjoram, and so the donkey is better," or, "Now, Johnny, get along
home to your mother," or, "How are you, daddy?" in the high-pitched
key so trying to the cockney's ear.

In these parleys Joan, the second girl, was foremost. Maitland glanced
at her. A young man may be very fastidious, but neck-ribbons awry and
brown hair in rich disorder do not entirely close his eyes to a
maiden's comeliness. It would be strange if they did, were she such an
one as Joan Quaritch. Not tall, yet tall enough, with a full, rounded
figure, to which her dress hardly did, hardly could do, justice, she
moved with the grace and freedom of perfect health. Her fair
complexion could afford to have its clearness marred by a freckle or
two, such as hers, mere clots in cream; and if her features were not
perfect, yet a nose too straight and a chin too heavy were more than
redeemed by great gray eyes that, sunny or tearful, could be nothing
but true--eyes whose frankness and good fellowship aggravated the
wounds they inflicted. Why she was called "Dubs" I cannot tell.
Perhaps no one can. But, in her good nature and her truth, her simple
pride and independence, it suited her.

He had just, to quote the language of this cynic's thoughts,
catalogued the last of the Graces, when the party reached the house,
which stood some way back from the road. Tom Quaritch had just
returned, and welcomed the guest warmly; his mother met Maitland at
the drawing-room door. She was a singularly comely woman, stately and
somewhat formal. Her greeting so differed from that of her daughters
that the visitor found himself speculating upon the extraordinary
flightiness of the late Mr. Quaritch. Wherein I doubt not he did him
injustice.

At dinner our hero had in some degree recovered himself, and he told
them the latest news of the theaters, the clubs, and the book world,
and while their ignorance filled him with a wonder he did not hide,
their attention propitiated him. He talked well, and if he was
inclined to lord it a little, a shrewd word from Mrs. Quaritch, or a
demure glance from Miss Joan's eyes, would lower his didactic tone.
The youngest girl promised to be an especial thorn in his side.

"Does everyone in London wear shiny boots in the daytime, Mr.
Maitland?" she asked suddenly, _à propos des bottes_, and nothing
else.

"A considerable number do, Miss Agnes."

"What sort of people? No, I'm not being rude, mother."

"Well, I hardly know how to answer that. The idle people, perhaps." He
smiled indulgently, which aggravated the young lady. She replied,
crumbling her bread the while in an absent, meditative way, her eyes
innocently fixed on his face:

"Then you are one of the idle people, Mr. Maitland? I don't think I
like idle people."

"How singularly unselfish of you, my dear Agnes!" put in Joan
vigorously--more vigorously than politely.

Maitland's last reflection as he got into bed was that he was quite
out of place here. These might be very nice people in their way, but
not in his way. He must make his visit as short as possible, and
forget all about it as quickly as he could. The girls would be
insufferable when they came to know him familiarly. Good gracious!
fancy young ladies who had never heard of "John Inglesant," or of W.
D. Howells' books, and confused the Grosvenor Gallery with the Water
Color Exhibition! and read Longfellow! and had but vague ideas of the
æsthetic! Miss Joan was pretty too, yes, really pretty, and had fine
eyes and a pleasant voice, and fine eyes--yes, fine eyes. And with
this thought he fell comfortably asleep.

He came down next morning to find her alone in the breakfast room. A
short-skirted beagling costume of scarlet and blue allowed him a
glimpse of neat ankles in scarlet hose. She was kneeling before the
fire playing with Roy. Her brown wavy hair fell in a heavy loose loop
upon her neck, and there was something wonderfully bright and fresh in
her whole appearance.

"How quickly you have fallen in with our barbarous ways!" she said
with a smile, as she rose. "I did not expect you to be up for hours
yet."

"I generally breakfast at nine, and it is nearly that now," he
answered, annoyed by some hint of raillery in her tone, and yet unable
to conceal a glance of admiration. "I think I must adopt the Blore
breakfast hour; it seems, Miss Joan, to agree with you all so well."

"Yes," was the indifferent reply; "we get the first of the three
rewards for early rising. The other two we leave for our betters."

And she turned away with a little nod as the others came in. In five
minutes a noisy, cheerful breakfast was in progress, and the chances
of finding a hare formed the all-engrossing subject of conversation.

On this calm gray morning, warm rather than cold, the little pack, to
the great delight of the household, found quickly, and found well. No
October leveret was before them, but a good, stout old hare, who gave
them a ringing run of two hours, the pleasure of which was not
materially diminished when she baffled them at last in the mysterious
way these old hares affect and huntsmen fail to fathom. The visitor
performed creditably, though in indifferent training. At Oxford he had
been something of a crack, and could still upon occasion forget to
keep his boots clean and his clothes intact.

Returning home, Maitland found himself again with Joan. The heat and
pleasure of the chase had for the time melted his reserve and thawed
his resolution. He talked well and freely to her of a great London
hospital over which one of the house surgeons had recently taken him;
of the quiet and orderliness of the lone, still wards; of the feeling
that came over him there that life was all suffering and death; and
how quickly in the bustle of the London streets, where the little
world of the hospital seemed distant and unreal, this impression faded
away. She listened eagerly, and he, tasting a stealthy and stolen
pleasure in seeing how deep and pitiful the gray eyes could grow,
prolonged his tale.

"I have enjoyed hearing about it so much," she said gratefully, as
they entered the village. And indeed she had passed several people
upon the road without a word of greeting. "I hope to be a nurse soon.
The dear mother does not think me old enough yet."

"You are going to be a nurse!" he said in tones of such incredulous
surprise that the amusement which first appeared in her face changed
to annoyance.

"Why not? One does not need a knowledge of art and the newest books
for that," she sharply answered.

"Perhaps not," he said feebly. "But after such a life as this, it--the
change I mean--would be so complete."

She looked at him, an angry gleam in her eyes, and the color high in
her cheeks.

"Do you think, Mr. Maitland, that because we run wild--oh, no, you
have not said so--and seem to do nothing but enjoy ourselves, we are
incapable of anything beyond hunting and playing tennis, and feeding
the dogs and the hens and the chickens? That we cannot have a thought
beyond pleasure, or a wish to do good like other people--people in
London? That we can never look beyond Blore--though Blore, I can tell
you, would manage ill without some of us!--nor have an aspiration
above the kennels and the--and the stables? If you do think so, I
trust you are wrong."

He would have answered humbly, but she was gone into the house in huge
indignation, leaving our friend strangely uncomfortable. It was just
twenty-four hours since his arrival: the opinion of one at least of
the madcaps had ceased to be a matter of indifference to him. The
change occurred to himself as he mounted the stairs, so that he
laughed when alone in his room and resolved to keep away from that
girl for the future. How handsome she had looked when she was flying
out at him, and how generous seemed her anger even at the time!
Somehow the prospect of the four days he had still to spend at Blore
was not so depressing as at first. Certainly the vista was shortened
by one day, and that may have been the reason.

Meanwhile Maggie, in her sister's bedroom, had much to say of the
day's doings. "Didn't he go well? My word! he is not half so stiff as
I thought him. I believe he'd be a very good fellow if he had some of
the conceit taken out of him."

"I think he's insufferable," was the chilling answer from Joan; "he
considers us savages, and treats us as such."

"He may consider us fit for the Zoo, if he likes; it won't hurt us,"
quoth Maggie indifferently. With which Joan expressed neither assent
nor dissent, but brushed her hair a little faster.

Maitland did not for a moment abandon his fresh resolution. Still he
thought he owed it to himself to set the matter right with the young
lady before he stiffened anew. As he descended he met her running up
two steps at a time.

"Miss Joan, I am afraid I vexed you just now," he said, with grave
humility. "Will you believe it unintentional--stupid, on my part, and
grant me your pardon?"

"Oh, dear!" she cried gayly. "We are not used to this here. It is
quite King Cophetua and the beggar maid." She dropped him a mock
courtesy, and held out her hand in token of amity, when the full
signification of what she had said rushed into her mind and flooded
her face with crimson. Without another word or look she fled upstairs,
and he heard her door bang behind her.

Mr. Charles Maitland, after this _rencontre_, went down smiling
grimly. In the hall he stood for a moment in deep thought; then sagely
shook his head several times at a stuffed fox and joined the party in
the drawing room.

[Illustration: MR. CHARLES MAITLAND, AFTER THIS RENCONTRE, WENT DOWN
SMILING GRIMLY.]

The next day and the next passed with surprising quickness, as the
latter days of a visit always do. In another forty-eight hours
Maitland's would be over. Yet singularly enough his spirits did not
rise, as he expected they would, at the near prospect of release. As
he closed his bedroom door he had a vision of a pair of gray eyes
smiling into his, and his palm seemed still to tingle with the touch
of a soft, warm hand. He had kept his resolution well--small credit to
him. Joan had seemed to avoid him since her unlucky speech upon the
stairs; when she did speak to him her words, or more often her tone,
stung him, and he smarted under a sense that she repaid with interest
the small account in which he was inclined to hold the family
generally. He resented her veiled contempt with strange bitterness, so
that Agnes remarked with her usual candor that he and Joan never spoke
to one another save to "jangle." Afterward, walking on the lawn, some
line about "sweet bells jangled out of tune," ran in his head. The
girl was a vixen, he said to himself, yet he tried to imagine how
tender and glorious the great gray eyes, that he only knew as cold or
saucy or defiant, could be when their depths were stirred by love. But
his imagination failing to satisfy even himself, he went to put on his
beagling dress in the worst of humors.

Possibly this made him a trifle reckless, for a promising run ended in
ten minutes so far as he was concerned, in a sprained ankle. In
jumping over a low fence into a lane his one foot came down sideways
on a large stone upon which some pauper had scamped his work, and the
mischief was done. The ominous little circle that hunting men know so
well soon gathered round him, and he was helped to his feet, or rather
foot. Then Agnes fetched the carriage, and he was driven back to
Blore. Now, under the circumstances, what could Mrs. Quaritch, without
an _arrière pensée_ in the world, do but press him to stay until at
least he could put the foot to the ground? Nothing. And what could he
do but consent? At any rate, that is what he did.

So he was established in the drawing room, a pretty, cozy room, and
told himself it was a terrible nuisance. But, for a cripple confined
to a couple of rooms, and surrounded by uncongenial people, without a
single new magazine or a word of the world's gossip, he kept up his
spirits wonderfully well. The ways of the three girls, and the calm
approval of their sedate mother, could not fail to amuse him. Lying
there and seeing and hearing many things which would not have come to
his knowledge as a mere visitor, he found them not quite what he had
judged them to be. He missed Joan one morning, and when with an
unconscious fretfulness he inquired the reason, learned that she had
been sitting up through the night with an old servant who was ill in
the village. He said some word about it to her--very diffidently, for
she took his compliments but ill at all times; now she flamed out at
him with twice her ordinary bitterness and disdain, and punished him
by taking herself out of the room at once.

"Confound it!" he cried, beating up his pillow fiercely, "I believe
the girl hates me."

Did he? and did she?

Then he fell into a fit of musing such as men approaching thirty, who
have lived in London, are very apt to indulge in. A club was not
everything, be it as good as it might be. And life was not a lounge in
Bond Street and Pall Mall, and nothing more. He thought how dull a
week spent on his sofa in the Adelphi would have been, even with the
newest magazines and the fifth and special _Globes_. In three days was
his birthday--his twenty-ninth. And did the girl really hate him? It
was a nice name, Joan; Dubs, umph! Dubs? Joan? And so he fell asleep.

How long he slept and whether he carried something of his dreams into
his waking he could only guess, but he was aroused by a singular
sensation--singular in that, though once familiar enough, it was now
as strange to him as the sight of his dead mother's face. If his
half-recalled senses did not deceive him, if he was not still dreaming
of Joan, the warm touch of a pair of soft lips was yet lingering upon
his forehead, the rustle of a dress very near his ear yet sounded
crisply in it. And then someone glided from him, and he heard a hasty
exclamation and opened his eyes dreamily. By the screen which
concealed the door and sheltered him from its draughts was standing
Joan, a-tiptoe, poised as in expectation, something between flight and
amusement in her face, her attitude full of unconscious grace. He was
still bewildered, and hardly returned from a dreamland even less
conventional than Blore. Without as much surprise as if he had thought
the matter out--it seemed then almost a natural thing--he said:

"You shall have the gloves, Dubs, with pleasure."

The girl's expression, as he spoke, changed to startled astonishment.
She became crimson from her hair to her throat. She stepped toward
him, checked herself, then made a quick movement with her hand as if
about to say something, and finally covered her face with her hands
and fled from the room. Before he was wide awake he was alone.

At first he smiled pleasantly at the fire, and patted Roy, Joan's
terrier, who was lying beside him, curled up snugly in an angle of the
sofa. Afterward he became grave and thoughtful, and finally shook his
head very much as he had at the stuffed fox in the hall. And so he
fidgeted till Roy, who was in a restful mood, retired to the
hearthrug.

It would be hard to describe Joan's feelings that afternoon. She was
proud, and had begun by resenting for all of them the ill-concealed
contempt of Tom's London friend--this man of clubs and chit-chat. She
was quite prepared to grant that he was different from them, but not
superior. A kind of contempt for the veneer and polish which were his
pride was natural to her, and she showed this, not rudely nor
coquettishly, but with a hearty sincerity. Still, it is seldom a girl
is unaware of admiration, and rare that she does not in secret respect
self-assertion in the male creature. This man knew much too, and could
tell it well, that was strange and new and delightful to the country
maiden. If he had any heart at all--and since he was from London town
she supposed he had not, though she granted him eyes and fine
perceptions of the beautiful--she might have, almost, some day,
promised herself to like him, had he been of her world--not reflecting
that this very fact that he was out of her world formed the charm by
which he evoked her interest. As things were, she more than doubted of
his heart, and had no doubt at all that between their worlds lay a
great, impassable, unbridgeable abyss.

But this afternoon the dislike, which had been fading day by day along
with those feelings in another which had caused it, was revived in its
old strength upon the matter of the kiss. Alone in her own room the
thought made her turn crimson with vexation, and she stamped the floor
with annoyance. He had made certain overtures to her--slender and
meaningless in all probability. Still, if he could believe her capable
after such looks and words as he had used--if after these he thought
her capable of this, then indeed, were there no abyss at all, he could
be nothing to her. Oh, it was too bad, too intolerable! She would
never forgive him. How indeed could she be anything to him, if she
could do such a thing, as dreadful, as unmaidenly to her as to the
proudest beauty among his London friends. She told herself again that
he was insufferable; and determined to slap Roy well, upon the first
opportunity, if that mistaken little pearl of price would persist in
favoring the stranger's sofa.

Until this was cleared up she felt her position the very worst in the
world, and yet would not for a fortune give him an opportunity of
freeing her from it. The very fact that he addressed her with, as it
seemed, a greater show of respect, chafed her. Agnes, with a
precocious cleverness, a penetration quite her own, kept herself and
her dog, Jack o' Pack _alias_ Johnny Sprawn, out of her sister's way,
and teased her only before company.

But at last Maitland caught Miss Joan unprotected.

"I hope that these are the right size, Miss Joan--they are six and a
quarter," he said boldly, yet with, for a person of his disposition
and breeding, a strange amount of shamefacedness; producing at the
same time a pair of gloves, Courvoisier's best, many-buttoned, fit for
a goddess.

"I beg your pardon?" she said, breathing quickly. But she guessed what
he meant.

"Let me get out of your debt."

"Out of my debt, Mr. Maitland?" taking the gloves mechanically.

"Please. Did you think I had forgotten? I should find it hard to do
that," he continued, encouraged and relieved by having got rid of the
gloves, and inattentive at the moment to her face. Yet she looked long
at him searchingly.

"I have found it hard to understand you," she said at last, with
repressed anger in voice and eye; "very hard, Mr. Maitland; but I
think I do so now. Do you believe that it was I who kissed you
when you were asleep on Wednesday afternoon? Can you think so? You
force me to presume it is so. Your estimate of my modesty and of your
own deserts must differ considerably. I had not the honor. Your
gloves"--and she dropped them upon the floor as if the touch
contaminated her, the act humiliating the young gentleman at least as
much as her words--"you had better give to Agnes, if you wish to
observe a silly custom. They are due to her, not to me. I thank you,
Mr. Maitland, for having compelled me to give this pleasant
explanation."

She turned away with a gesture of such queenly contempt that our poor
hero--now most unheroic, and dumb as Carlyle would have had his, only
with mortification and intense disgust at his stupidity--amazed that
he could ever have thought meanly of this girl, "who moved most
certainly a goddess," had not a word to express his sorrow. A hero
utterly crestfallen! But at the door she looked back, for some strange
reason known perchance to female readers. The gloves were on the
floor, just beyond his reach--poor, forlorn, sprawling objects, their
fingers and palms spread as in ridiculous appeal. As for him, he was
lying back on the sofa, in appearance so crushed and helpless that the
woman's pity ever near her eyes moved her. She went slowly back, and
picked up the gloves, and put them on the table where he could take
them.

"Miss Joan," he said, in a tone of persistence that claimed a hearing,
and, starting far from the immediate trouble, was apt to arouse
curiosity; "we are always, as Agnes says, jangling--on my side, of
course, is the false note. Can we not accord better, and be better
friends?"

"Not until we learn to know one another better," she said coldly,
looking down at him, "or become more discerning judges."

"I was a fool, an idiot, an imbecile!" She nodded gravely, still
regarding him from a great height. "I was mad to believe it possible!"

"I think we may be better friends," she responded, smiling faintly,
yet with sudden good humor. "We are beginning to know--one another."

"And ourselves," almost under his breath. Then, "Miss Joan, will you
ever forgive me? I shall never err again in that direction," he
pleaded. "I am humiliated in my own eyes until you tell me it is
forgotten."

She nodded, and this time with her own frank smile.

Then she turned away and did leave the room, this time taking Roy with
her. Her joyous laughter and his wild, excited barking proclaimed
through the length and breadth of Blore that he was enjoying the rare
indulgence of a good romp on the back lawn. It was Roy's day.

And can a dog ever hope for a better day than that upon which his
mistress becomes aware that she is also another's mistress: becomes
aware that another is thinking of her and for her, nay, that she is
the very center of that other's thoughts? What a charming, pleasantly
bewildering discovery it is, this learning that for him when she is in
the room it is full, and wanting her it is empty, be it never so
crowded; that all beside, though they be witty or famous, or what they
will, or can or would, are but lay figures, _umbræ_, shadow guests in
his estimation. She learns with strange thrills, that in moments of
meditation will flash to eye and cheek, that her slightest glance and
every change of color, every tone and smile, are marked with jealous
care; that pleasure which she does not share is tasteless, and a
dinner of herbs, if she be but at a far corner, is a feast for
princes. That is her dog's day, or it may be his dog's day. It is a
pleasant discovery for a man, _mutatis mutandis_; but for a girl, a
sweet, half fearful consciousness, the brightest part of love's young
dream--even when the kindred soul is of another world, and an abyss,
wide, impassable, unbridgeable lies between.

But these things come to sudden ends sometimes. Sprains, however
severe, have an awkward knack of getting well. Swellings subside from
inanition, and doctors insist for their credit's sake that the stick
or ready arm be relinquished. Certainly a respite or a relapse--call
it which you will--is not impossible with care, but it is brief. A
singular shooting pain, not easily located with exactness, but
somewhere in the neighborhood of the calf, has been found useful; and
a strange rigidity of the tendon Achilles in certain positions may
gain a day or two. But at last not even these will avail, and the
doubly injured one must out and away from among the rose leaves. Twice
Maitland fixed his departure for the following morning, and each time
when pressed to stay gave way, after so feeble, so ludicrous a
resistance, if it deserved the name, that Agnes scarcely concealed her
grimace, and Joan looked another way. She did not add anything to the
others' hospitable entreaties. If she guessed what made Maggie's
good-night kiss so fervent and clinging, she made no sign and offered
no opening.

In the garden next morning, Maitland taxed her with her neutrality. It
was wonderful how his sense of humor had become developed at Blore.

"I thought that you did not need so much pressure as to necessitate
more than four people's powers of persuasion being used," she
answered, in the same playful spirit. "And besides, now you are well
enough, must you not leave?"

"Indeed, Miss Joan?"

"And go back to your own way of life? It is a month since you saw the
latest telegrams, and there is a French company at the Gaiety, I learn
from the _Standard_. We have interests and duties, though you were so
hard of belief about them, at Blore, but you have none."

"No interests?"

She shook her head. "No duties, at any rate."

"And so you think," he asked, his eyes fixed upon her changing
features, "that I should go back to my old way of life--of a century
ago?"

"Of course you must!" But she was not so rude as to tell him what a
very foolish question this was. Still it was, was it not?

"So I will, or to something like it, and yet very unlike. But not
alone. Joan, will you come with me? If I have known you but a month, I
have learned to love your truth and goodness and you, Joan, so that if
I go away alone, to return to the old life would be bitterly
impossible. You have spoiled that; you must make for me a fresh life
in its place. Do you remember you told me that when we knew one
another we might be better friends? I have come to know you better,
but we cannot be friends. We must be something more, more even than
lovers, Joan--husband and wife, if you can like me enough."

It was not an unmanly way of putting it, and he was in earnest. But so
quiet, so self-restrained was his manner that it savored of coldness.
The girl whose hand he held while he spoke had no such thought. Her
face was turned from him. She was gazing over the wall across the
paddock where Maggie's mare was peaceably and audibly feeding, and so
at the Blore Ash on its mimic hill, every bough and drooping branchlet
dark against the sunset sky; and this radiant in her eyes with a
beauty its deepest glow had never held for her before. The sweetest
joy was in her heart, and grief in her face. He had been worthy of
himself and her love. While he spoke she told herself, not that some
time she might love him, but that she had given him all her true heart
already. And yet as he was worthy, so she must be worthy and do her
part.

"You have done me a great honor," she said at last, drawing away her
hand from his grasp, though she did not turn her face, "but it cannot
be, Mr. Maitland. I am very grateful to you--I am indeed, and sorry."

"Why can it not be?" he said shortly; startled, I am bound to say, and
mortified.

"Because of--of many things. One is that I should not make you happy,
nor you me. I am not suited to your way of life. I am of the country,
and I love to be free and unconstrained, while you are of the town.
Oh, we should not get on at all! Perhaps you would not be ashamed of
me as your wife, but you might be, and I could not endure the chance
even of it. There," she added, with a laugh in which a woman's ear
might have detected the suppression of a sob, "is one sober reason
where none can be needed."

"Is that your only reason?"

She was picking the mortar out of the wall. "Oh, dear me, no! I have a
hundred, but that is a sufficient one," she answered almost
carelessly, flirting a scrap of lime from the wall with her
forefinger.

"And you have been playing with me all this time!" cried he, obtusely
enraged by her flippancy.

"Not knowingly, not knowingly, indeed!"

"Can you tell me that you were not aware that I loved you?"

"Well, I thought--the fact is, I thought that you were amusing
yourself--in West End fashion."

"Coquette!"

"Mr. Maitland!" she cried vehemently, "how dare you? There is proof,
if any were needed, that I am right. You would not have dared to say
that to any of your town acquaintances. I am no coquette. If I have
given you pain, I am very sorry. And--I beg that we may part friends."

She had begun fiercely, with all her old spirit. He turned away, and
she ended with a sudden, anxious, pitiful lameness, that yet, so angry
and dull of understanding was he, taught him nothing.

"Friends!" he cried impatiently. "I told you that it was impossible.
Oh, Joan, think again! Have I been too hasty? Have I given you no time
to weigh it? Have I just offended you in some little thing? Then let
me come to you again in three months, after I have been back among my
old friends?"

"No, don't do that, Mr. Maitland. It will be of no use and will but
give us pain."

"And yet I will come," he replied firmly, endeavoring by the very
eager longing of his own gaze to draw from her fair, downcast face
some sign of hope. "I will come, if you forbid me a hundred times. And
if you have been playing with me--true, I am in no mood for soft words
now--it shall be your punishment to say me nay, again. I shall be
here, Joan, to ask you in three months from to-day."

"I cannot prevent you," she said. "Believe me, I shall only have the
same answer for you."

"I shall come," he said doggedly, and looked at her with eyes
reluctant to quit her drooping lashes lest they should miss some
glance bidding his heart take courage. But none came, only the color
fluttered uncertainly in her face. So he slowly turned away from her
at last and walked across the garden, and out of sight by the gate
into the road. He saw nothing of the long, dusty track, and straggling
hedges bathed in the last glows of sunset. Those big gray eyes, so
frank and true, came again and again between him and the prospect, and
blinded his own with a hot mist of sorrow and anger. Ah, Blore, thou
wast mightily avenged!

                          *   *   *   *   *

It is a hot afternoon in August, laden with the hum of dozing life.
The sun has driven the less energetic members of the Quaritch family
into the cool gloom of the drawing room, where the open windows are
shaded by the great cedar. Mrs. Quaritch, upon the sofa, is nodding
over a book. Joan, in a low wicker seat, may be doing the same; while
Agnes, pursuing a favorite employment upon the hearthrug, is now and
again betrayed by a half stifled growl from one or other of the dogs
as they rise and turn themselves reproachfully, and flop down again
with a sigh in a cool place.

"Agnes," cries her mother, upon some more distinct demonstration of
misery being made, "for goodness' sake leave the dogs alone. They have
not had a moment's peace since lunch."

"A dog's life isn't peace, mamma," she answers, with the simple air of
a discoverer of truth. But, nevertheless, she looks about for fresh
worlds to conquer.

"Even Mr. Maitland was better than this," she announces, after a long
yawn of discontent, "though he was dull enough, I wonder why he did
not come in July. Do you know, Joan?"

"Oh, Agnes, do let us have a moment's peace for once! We are not
dogs," cried Joan fretfully.

Wonder! she was always wondering. This very minute, while her eyes
were on the page, it was in her mind. Through all those three months
passing hour by hour and day by day, she could assure herself that
when he had come and gone, she would be at rest again; things would be
as before with her. Let him come and go! But when July arrived, and he
did not, a sharper pain made itself felt. Bravely as she strove to
beat it down, well as she might hide it from others, the certainty
that it had needed no second repulse to balk his love sorely hurt her
pride. Just her pride, she told herself; nothing else. That he had not
stood the test he had himself proposed; that any unacknowledged
faintest hope she might have cherished, deep down in her heart, that
he might master her by noble persistence, must now be utterly
quenched; these things of course had no bitterness for her through the
hot August days; had nothing to do with the wearied look that
sometimes dulled the gray eyes, nor with the sudden indifference or as
sudden enthusiasms for lawn tennis and dogs and pigeons, that marked
her daily moods.

Agnes' teasing, by putting her meditations into words, has disturbed
her. She gets up and moves restlessly about, touching this thing and
that, and at last leaves the room and stands in the hall, thinking.
Here, too, it is dark and cool, and made to seem more so--the door
into the garden being open--by the hot glare of sunshine falling upon
the spotless doorstep. She glances at this listlessly. The house is
still, the servants are at the back; the dogs all worn out by the
heat. Then, as she hesitates, a slight crunching of footsteps upon the
gravel comes to her ear, breaking the silence. A sudden black shadow
falls upon the sunny step and tells of a visitor. Someone chases away
his shadow, and steps upon the stone, and raises his gloved hand to
the bell. Charles Maitland at last!

Coming straight in from the sunshine he cannot see the swift welcome
that springs to eye and cheek, a flash of light and color, quick to
come and go. He is too much moved himself to mark how her hand shakes.
He sees no difference in her. But she sees a change in him. She
detects some subtle difference that eludes her attempt to define its
nature and only fills her with a vague sense that this is not the
Charles Maitland from whom she parted.

It is a meeting she has pictured often, but not at all like this. He
signs to her to take him into the dining room, the door of which
stands open.

"I have come back, Miss Joan."

"Yes?" she answers, sitting down with an attempt to still the tumult
within, with such success that she brings herself for the moment
nearly to the frame of mind in which they parted, and there is the
same weary sufferance in her tone.

"I have come back as I said I would. I have overstepped the three
months, but I had a good reason for my delay. Indeed I have been in
doubt whether I ought to see you again at all, only I could not bear
you to think what you naturally would. I felt that I must see you,
even if it cost us both pain." There is a new awkwardness in his tone
and pose.

"I told you that it was--quite unnecessary--and useless," she answers,
with a strange tightening in her throat.

"Then it can do you no harm," he assents quietly. "I have come back
not to repeat my petition, but to tell you why I do not and cannot."

"I think," she puts in coldly, "that upon the whole you had better
spare yourself the unpleasantness of explaining anything to me. Don't
you think so? I asked you for no proof, and held out no hope. Why do
you trouble me? Why have you come back?"

"You have not changed!"

For the first time a ring of contempt in her voice takes the place of
cold indifference. "I do not change in three months, Mr. Maitland. But
there! my mother will wish to see you, and so will Agnes, who is
hankering after something to happen. They are in the drawing room."

"But, Miss Joan, grant me one moment! You have not heard my reasons."

"Your reasons! Is it absolutely necessary?" she asks, half fretfully,
half scornfully; her uppermost thought an intense desire to be by
herself in her own room, with the door safely locked.

"I think so, at any rate. Why, I see! By Jove! of course you must
be thinking the worst of me now! Oh, no! if you could not love me,
Joan--pray pardon me, I had no right to call you by your name--you
need not despise me. I cannot again ask you to be my wife, because,"
he laughs uneasily, "fortune has put it out of my power to take a
wife. My trustee has made ducks and drakes of my property, or rather
bulls and bears. I have but a trifle left to begin the world upon, and
far too little to marry upon."

"I read of it in the papers. I saw that a Mr. Maitland was the chief
sufferer, but I did not connect him with you," she says, in a low
voice.

"No, of course not. How should you?" he answers lightly. But
nevertheless her coldness is dreadful to him. He had thought she would
express some sympathy. And gayly as he talks of it, he feels something
of the importance of a ruined man and something of his claim to pity.

"And what are you going to do?"

"Do? We've arranged all that. They say there is a living to be made at
the Bar in New Zealand, if one does not object to riding boots and
spurs as part of the professional costume. Of course it will be a
different sort of life, and Agnes' favorite patent leathers will
be left behind in every sense. This would have been a bad blow to
me"--there is a slight catch in his voice, and he gets up, and looks
out of one of the windows with his back to her--"now I have learned
from you that life should not be all lounging round the table and
looking over other people's cards. It has been a sharp lesson, but
very opportune as things have turned out. I am ready to take a hand
myself now--even without a partner."

He does not at once turn round. He had not fancied she would take it
like this, and he listens for a word to tell him that at any rate she
is sorry--is grieved as for a stranger. Then he feels a sudden light,
timid touch upon his arm. Joan is standing quite close to him, and
does not move or take away her hand as he turns. Only she looks down
at the floor when she speaks:

"I think I should be better than--than dummy--if you will take me to
New Zealand."

Half laughing, half crying, and wholly confused, she looks up into his
astonished face with eyes so brimful of love and tenderness that they
tell all her story. For just an instant his eyes meet hers. Then, with
a smothered exclamation, he draws her to him--and--in fact smothers
the exclamation.

"I am so glad you've lost your money," she sobs, hiding her face,
as soon as she can, upon his shoulder. "I should not have done at
all--for you--in London, Charley."

There let us leave her. But no, another is less merciful. Neither of
them hears the door open or sees Agnes' face appear at it. But she
both sees and hears, and says very distinctly and clearly:

"Well!"

But even Agnes is happy and satisfied. Something _has_ happened.

                          THE FATAL LETTER.

I have friends who tell me that they seldom walk the streets of London
without wondering what is passing behind the house-fronts; without
picturing a comedy here, a love-scene there, and behind the dingy cane
blinds a something ill-defined, a something odd and _bizarre_. They
experience--if you believe them--a sense of loneliness out in the
street, an impatience of the sameness of all these many houses, their
dull bricks and discreet windows, and a longing that someone would
step out and ask them to enter and see the play.

Well, I have never felt any of these things; but as I was passing
through Fitzhardinge Square about half-past ten o'clock one evening in
last July, after dining, if I remember rightly, in Baker Street,
something happened to me which I fancy may be of interest to such
people.

I was passing through the square from north to south, and to avoid a
small crowd, which some reception had drawn together, I left the
pavement and struck across the road to the path around the oval
garden; which, by the way, contains a few of the finest trees in
London. This part was in deep shadow, so that when I presently emerged
from it and recrossed the road to the pavement near the top of
Fitzhardinge Street, I had an advantage over any persons on the
pavement. They were under the lamps, while I, coming from beneath the
trees, was almost invisible.

The door of the house immediately in front of me as I crossed was
open, and an elderly man servant out of livery was standing at it,
looking up and down the pavement by turns. It was his air of furtive
anxiety that drew my attention to him. He was not like a man looking
for a cab, or waiting for his sweetheart; and I had my eye upon him as
I stepped upon the pavement before him. But my surprise was great when
he uttered a low exclamation of dismay at sight of me, and made as if
he would escape; while his face, in the full glare of the light, grew
so pale and terror-stricken that he might before have been completely
at his ease. I was astonished and instinctively stood still returning
his gaze; for perhaps twenty seconds we remained so, he speechless,
and his hands fallen by his side. Then, before I could move on, as I
was in the act of doing, he cried, "Oh, Mr. George! Oh! Mr. George!"
in a tone that rang out in the stillness rather as a wail than an
ordinary cry.

My name, my surname, I mean, is George. For a moment I took the
address to myself, forgetting that the man was a stranger, and my
heart began to beat more quickly with fear of what might have
happened. "What is it?" I exclaimed. "What is it?" and I shook back
from the lower part of my face the silk muffler I was wearing. The
evening was close, but I had been suffering from a sore throat.

He came nearer and peered more closely at me, and I dismissed my fear;
for I thought that I could see the discovery of his mistake dawning
upon him. His pallid face, on which the pallor was the more noticeable
as his plump features were those of a man with whom the world as a
rule went well, regained some of its lost color, and a sigh of relief
passed his lips. But this feeling was only momentary. The joy of
escape from whatever blow he had thought imminent gave place at once
to his previous state of miserable expectancy of something or other.

"You took me for another person," I said, preparing to pass on. At
that moment I could have sworn--I would have given one hundred to one
twice over--that he was going to say yes. To my intense astonishment,
he did not. With a very visible effort he said, "No."

"Eh! What?" I exclaimed. I had taken a step or two.

"No, sir."

"Then what is it?" I said. "What do you want, my good fellow?"

Watching his shuffling, indeterminate manner, I wondered if he were
sane. His next answer reassured me on that point. There was an almost
desperate deliberation about its manner. "My master wishes to see you,
sir, if you will kindly walk in for five minutes," was what he said.

I should have replied, "Who is your master?" if I had been wise; or
cried, "Nonsense!" and gone my way. But the mind, when it is spurred
by a sudden emergency, often overruns the more obvious course to adopt
a worse. It was possible that one of my intimates had taken the house,
and said in his butler's presence that he wished to see me. Thinking
of that I answered, "Are you sure of this? Have you not made a
mistake, my man?"

With an obstinate sullenness that was new in him, he said, No he had
not. Would I please to walk in? He stepped briskly forward as he
spake, and induced me by a kind of gentle urgency to enter the house,
taking from me, with the ease of a trained servant, my hat, coat, and
muffler. Finding himself in the course of his duties he gained more
composure; while I, being thus treated, lost my sense of the
strangeness of the proceeding, and only awoke to a full consciousness
of my position when he had softly shut the door behind us and was in
the act of putting up the chain.

Then I confess I looked round, a little alarmed at my precipitancy.
But I found the hall spacious, lofty, and dark-paneled, the ordinary
hall of an old London house. The big fireplace was filled with plants
in flower. There were rugs on the floor and a number of chairs with
painted crests on the backs, and in a corner was an old sedan chair,
its poles upright against the wall.

No other servants were visible, it is true. But apart from this all
was in order, all was quiet, and any idea of violence was manifestly
absurd.

At the same time the affair seemed of the strangest. Why should the
butler in charge of a well-arranged and handsome house--the house of
an ordinary wealthy gentleman--why should he loiter about the open
doorway as if anxious to feel the presence of his kind? Why should he
show such nervous excitement and terror as I had witnessed? Why should
he introduce a stranger?

I had reached this point when he led the way upstairs. The staircase
was wide, the steps were low and broad. On either side at the head of
the flight stood a beautiful Venus of white Parian marble. They were
not common reproductions, and I paused. I could see beyond them a
Hercules and a Meleager of bronze, and delicately tinted draperies and
ottomans that under the light of a silver hanging lamp--a gem from
Malta--changed a mere lobby to a fairies' nook. The sight filled me
with a certain suspicion; which was dispelled, however, when my hand
rested for an instant upon the reddish pedestal that supported one of
the statues. The cold touch of the marble was enough for me. The
pillars were not of composite; of which they certainly would have
consisted in a gaming house, or worse.

Three steps carried me across the lobby to a curtained doorway
by which the servant was waiting. I saw that the "shakes" were upon
him again. His impatience was so ill concealed that I was not
surprised--though I was taken aback--when he dropped the mask
altogether, and as I passed him--it being now too late for me to
retreat undiscovered, if the room were occupied--laid a trembling hand
upon my arm and thrust his face close to mine. "Ask how he is! Say
anything," he whispered, trembling, "no matter what, sir! Only, for
the love of Heaven, stay five minutes!"

He gave me a gentle push forward as he spoke--pleasant, all this!--and
announced in a loud, quavering voice, "Mr. George!" which was true
enough. I found myself walking round a screen at the same time that
something in the room, a long, dimly lighted room, fell with a brisk,
rattling sound, and there was the scuffling noise of a person, still
hidden from me by the screen, rising to his feet in haste.

Next moment I was face to face with two men. One, a handsome elderly
gentleman, who wore gray mustaches and would have seemed in place at a
service club, was still in his chair, regarding me with a perfectly
calm, unmoved face, as if my entrance at that hour were the commonest
incident of his life. The other had risen and stood looking at me
askance. He was five-and-twenty years younger than his companion and
as good-looking in a different way. But now his face was white and
drawn, distorted by the same expression of terror--ay, and a darker
and fiercer terror than that which I had already seen upon the
servant's features; it was the face of one in a desperate strait. He
looked as a man looks who has put all he has in the world upon an
outsider--and done it twice. In that quiet drawing room by the side of
his placid companion, with nothing whatever in their surroundings to
account for his emotion, his panic-stricken face shocked me
inexpressibly.

They were in evening dress; and between them was a chess table, its
men in disorder: almost touching this was another small table bearing
a tray of Apollinaris water and spirits. On this the young man was
resting one hand as if, but for its support, he would have fallen.

To add one more fact, I had never seen either of them in my life.

Or wait; could that be true? If so, it must indeed have been a
nightmare I was suffering. For the elder man broke the silence by
addressing me in a quiet, ordinary tone that exactly matched his face.
"Sit down, George," he said, "don't stand there. I did not expect you
this evening." He held out his hand, without rising from his chair,
and I advanced and shook it in silence. "I thought you were in
Liverpool. How are you?" he continued.

"Very well, I thank you," I muttered mechanically.

"Not very well, I should say," he retorted. "You are as hoarse as a
raven. You have a bad cold at best. It is nothing worse, my boy, is
it?" with anxiety.

"No, a throat cough; nothing else," I murmured, resigning myself to
this astonishing reception--this evident concern for my welfare on the
part of a man whom I had never seen in my life.

"That is well!" he answered cheerily. Not only did my presence cause
him no surprise. It gave him, without doubt, actual pleasure!

It was otherwise with his companion; grimly and painfully so indeed.
He had made no advances to me, spoken no word, scarcely altered
his position. His eyes he had never taken from me. Yet in him there
was a change. He had discovered, exactly as had the butler before
him, his mistake. The sickly terror was gone from his face, and a
half-frightened malevolence, not much more pleasant to witness, had
taken its place. Why this did not break out in any active form was
part of the general mystery given to me to solve. I could only surmise
from glances which he later cast from time to time toward the door,
and from the occasional faint creaking of a board in that direction,
that his self-restraint had to do with my friend the butler. The
inconsequences of dreamland ran through it all: why the elder man
remained in error; why the younger with that passion on his face was
tongue-tied; why the great house was so still; why the servant should
have mixed me up with this business at all--these were questions as
unanswerable, one as the other.

And the fog in my mind grew denser when the old gentleman turned from
me as if my presence were a usual thing, and rapped the table before
him impatiently. "Now, Gerald!" cried he, in sharp tones, "have you
put those pieces back? Good Heavens! I am glad that I have not nerves
like yours! Don't you remember the squares, boy? Here, give them to
me!" With a hasty gesture of his hand, something like a mesmeric pass
over the board, he set down the half dozen pieces with a rapid tap!
tap! tap! which made it abundantly clear that he, at any rate, had no
doubt of their former positions.

"You will not mind sitting by until we have finished the game?" he
continued, speaking to me, and in a voice I fancied more genial than
that which he had used to Gerald. "You are anxious to talk to me about
your letter, George?" he went on when I did not answer. "The fact is
that I have not read the inclosure. Barnes, as usual, read the outer
letter to me, in which you said the matter was private and of grave
importance; and I intended to go to Laura to-morrow, as you suggested,
and get her to read the news to me. Now you have returned so soon, I
am glad that I did not trouble her."

"Just so, sir," I said, listening with all my ears; and wondering.

"Well, I hope there is nothing very bad the matter, my boy?" he
replied. "However--Gerald! it is your move! ten minutes more of such
play as your brother's, and I shall be at your service."

Gerald made a hurried move. The piece rattled upon the board as if he
had been playing the castanets. His father made him take it back. I
sat watching the two in wonder and silence. What did it all mean? Why
should Barnes--doubtless behind the screen, listening--read the outer
letter? Why must Laura be employed to read the inner? Why could not
this cultivated and refined gentleman before me read his---- Ah! that
much was disclosed to me. A mere turn of the hand did it. He had made
another of those passes over the board, and I learned from it what an
ordinary examination would not have detected. He, the old soldier with
the placid face and light-blue eyes, was blind! Quite blind!

I began to see more clearly now, and from this moment I took up, at
any rate in my own mind, a different position. Possibly the servant
who had impelled me into the middle of this had had his own good
reasons for doing so, as I now began to discern. But with a clew to
the labyrinth in my hand, I could no longer move passively at any
other's impulse. I must act for myself. For a while I sat still and
made no sign. My suspicions were presently confirmed. The elder man
more than once scolded his opponent for playing slowly. In one of
these intervals he took from an inside pocket of his dress waistcoat a
small package.

"You had better take your letter, George," he said. "If there are, as
you mentioned, originals in it, they will be more safe with you than
with me. You can tell me all about it, _viva voce_, now you are here.
Gerald will leave us alone presently."

He held the papers toward me. To take them would be to take an active
part in the imposture, and I hesitated, my own hand half outstretched.
But my eyes fell at the critical instant upon Master Gerald's face,
and my scruples took themselves off. He was eying the packet with an
intense greed and a trembling longing--a very itching of the fingers
and toes to fall upon the prey--that put an end to my doubts. I rose
and took the papers. With a quiet, but I think significant look in his
direction, I placed them in the breast pocket of my evening coat. I
had no safer receptacle about me, or into that they would have gone.

"Very well, sir," I said, "there is no particular hurry. I think the
matter will keep, as things now are, until to-morrow."

"To be sure. You ought not to be out with such a cold at night, my
boy," he answered. "You will find a decanter of the Scotch whisky you
gave me last Christmas on the tray. Will you have some with hot water
and a lemon, George? The servants are all at the theater--Gerald
begged a holiday for them--but Barnes will get you the things in a
minute."

"Thank you; I won't trouble him. I will take some with cold water," I
replied, thinking I should gain in this way what I wanted--time to
think; five minutes to myself while they played.

But I was out of my reckoning. "I will have mine now, too," he said.
"Will you mix it, Gerald?"

Gerald jumped up to do it, with tolerable alacrity. I sat still,
preferring to help myself when he should have attended to his father,
if his father it was. I felt more easy now that I had those papers in
my pocket. The more I thought of it the more certain I became that
they were the object aimed at by whatever deviltry was on foot, and
that possession of them gave me the whip hand. My young gentleman
might snarl and show his teeth, but the prize had escaped him.

Perhaps I was a little too confident, a little too contemptuous of my
opponent; a little too proud of the firmness with which I had taken at
one and the same time the responsibility and the post of vantage. A
creak of the board behind the screen roused me from my thoughts. It
fell upon my ear trumpet-tongued, a sudden note of warning. I glanced
up with a start and a conviction that I was being caught napping, and
looked instinctively toward the young man. He was busy at the tray,
his back to me. Relieved of my fear of I did not know what,--perhaps a
desperate attack upon my pocket,--I was removing my eyes, when, in
doing so, I caught sight of his reflection in a small mirror beyond
him. Ah!

What was he busy about? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, at the moment. He
was standing motionless,--I could fancy him breathless also,--a
strange, listening expression on his face, which seemed to me to have
faded to a grayish tinge. His left hand was clasping a half-filled
tumbler, the other was at his waistcoat pocket. So he stood during
perhaps a second or two, a small lamp upon the tray before him
illumining his handsome figure; and then his eyes, glancing up, met
the reflection of mine in the mirror. Swiftly as the thought itself
could pass from brain to limb, the hand which had been resting in the
pocket flashed with a clatter among the glasses; and, turning almost
as quickly, he brought one of the latter to the chess table, and set
it down unsteadily.

What had I seen? Nothing, actually nothing. Just what Gerald had been
doing. Yet my heart was going as many strokes to the minute as a
losing crew. I rose abruptly.

"Wait a moment, sir," I said, as the elder man laid his hand upon the
glass. "I don't think that Gerald has mixed this quite as you like
it."

He had already lifted it to his lips. I looked from him to Gerald.
That young gentleman's color, though he faced me hardily, shifted more
than once, and he seemed to be swallowing a succession of oversized
fives balls; but his eyes met mine in a vicious kind of smile that was
not without its gleam of triumph. I was persuaded that all was right
even before his father said so.

"Perhaps you have mixed for me, Gerald?" I suggested pleasantly.

"No!" he answered in sullen defiance. He filled a glass with
something--perhaps it was water--and drank it, his back toward me. He
had not spoken so much as a single word to me before.

The blind man's ear recognized the tone now. "I wish you boys would
agree better," he said wearily. "Gerald, go to bed. I would as soon
play chess with an idiot from Earlswood. Generally you can play the
game, if you are good for nothing else; but since your brother came
in, you have not made a move which anyone not an imbecile would make.
Go to bed, boy! go to bed!"

I had stepped to the table while he was speaking. One of the glasses
was full. I lifted it, with seeming unconcern, to my nose. There was
whisky in it as well as water. Then _had_ Gerald mixed for me? At any
rate, I put the tumbler aside, and helped myself afresh. When I set
the glass down empty, my mind was made up.

"Gerald does not seem inclined to move, sir, so I will," I said
quietly. "I will call in the morning and discuss that matter, if it
will suit you. But to-night I feel inclined to get to bed early."

"Quite right, my boy. I would ask you to take a bed here instead of
turning out, but I suppose that Laura will be expecting you. Come in
any time tomorrow morning. Shall Barnes call a cab for you?"

"I think I will walk," I answered, shaking the proffered hand. "By the
way, sir," I added, "have you heard who is the new Home Secretary?"

"Yes, Henry Matthews," he replied. "Gerald told me. He had heard it at
the club."

"It is to be hoped that he will have no womanish scruples about
capital punishment," I said, as if I were incidentally considering the
appointment. And with that last shot at Mr. Gerald--he turned green, I
thought, a color which does not go well with a black mustache--I
walked out of the room, so peaceful, so cozy, so softly lighted as it
looked, I remember, and downstairs. I hoped that I had paralyzed the
young fellow, and might leave the house without molestation.

But, as I gained the foot of the stairs, he tapped me on the shoulder.
I saw, then, looking at him, that I had mistaken my man. Every trace
of the sullen defiance which had marked his manner throughout the
interview upstairs was gone. His face was still pale, but it wore a
gentle smile as we confronted one another under the hall lamp. "I have
not the pleasure of knowing you, but let me thank you for your help,"
he said in a low voice, yet with a kind of frank spontaneity. "Barnes'
idea of bringing you in was a splendid one, and I am immensely obliged
to you."

[Illustration: "YOU ARE FORGETTING THE PAPERS," HE REMINDED ME.]

"Don't mention it," I answered stiffly, proceeding with my
preparations for going out as if he had not been there, although I
must confess that this complete change in him exercised my mind no
little.

"I feel so sure that we may rely upon your discretion," he went on,
ignoring my tone, "that I need say nothing about that. Of course, we
owe you an explanation, but as your cold is really yours and not my
brother's, you will not mind if I read you the riddle to-morrow
instead of keeping you from your bed to-night?"

"It will do equally well; indeed better," I said, putting on my
overcoat and buttoning it carefully across my chest, while I affected
to be looking with curiosity at the sedan chair.

He pointed lightly to the place where the packet lay. "You are
forgetting the papers," he reminded me. His tone almost compelled the
answer: "To be sure."

But I had pretty well made up my mind, and I answered instead: "Not at
all. They are quite safe, thank you."

"But you don't---- I beg your pardon," he said, opening his eyes very
wide, as if some new light were beginning to shine upon his mind and
he could scarcely believe its revelations. "You don't really mean that
you are going to take those papers away with you?"

"Certainly!"

"My dear sir!" he remonstrated earnestly. "This is preposterous. Pray
forgive me the reminder, but those papers, as my father gave you to
understand, are private papers, which he supposed himself to be
handing to my brother George."

"Just so," was all I said. And I took a step toward the door.

"You really mean to take them?" he asked seriously.

"I do; unless you can satisfactorily explain the part I have played
this evening, and also make it clear to me that you have a right to
the possession of the papers."

"Confound it! If I must do so tonight, I must!" he said reluctantly.
"I trust to your honor, sir, to keep the explanation secret." I bowed,
and he resumed: "My elder brother and I are in business together.
Lately we have had losses which have crippled us so severely that we
decided to disclose them to Sir Charles and ask his help. George did
so yesterday by letter, giving certain notes of our liabilities. You
ask why he did not make such a statement by word of mouth? Because he
had to go to Liverpool at a moment's notice to make a last effort to
arrange the matter. And as for me," with a curious grimace, "my father
would as soon discuss business with his dog! Sooner!"

"Well?" I said. He had paused, and was absently nicking the blossoms
off the geraniums in the fireplace with his pocket handkerchief,
looking moodily at his work the while. I cannot remember noticing the
handkerchief, yet I seem to be able to see it now. It had a red
border, and was heavily scented with white rose. "Well?"

"Well," he continued, with a visible effort, "my father has been
ailing lately, and this morning his usual doctor made him see
Bristowe. He is an authority on heart disease, as you doubtless know;
and his opinion is," he added, in a lower voice and with some emotion,
"that even a slight shock may prove fatal."

I began to feel hot and uncomfortable. What was I to think? The packet
was becoming as lead in my pocket.

"Of course," he resumed more briskly, "that threw our difficulties
into the shade at once; and my first impulse was to get these papers
from him. Don't you see that? All day I have been trying in vain to
effect it. I took Barnes, who is an old servant, partially into my
confidence, but we could think of no plan. My father, like many people
who have lost their sight, is jealous, and I was at my wits' end, when
Barnes brought you up. Your likeness," he added in a parenthesis,
looking at me reflectively, "to George put the idea into his head, I
fancy? Yes, it must have been so. When I heard you announced, for a
moment I thought that you were George."

"And you called up a look of the warmest welcome," I put in dryly.

He colored, but answered almost immediately, "I was afraid that he
would assume that the governor had read his letter, and blurt out
something about it. Good Lord! if you knew the funk in which I have
been all the evening lest my father should ask either of us to read
the letter!" and he gathered up his handkerchief with a sigh of
relief, and wiped his forehead.

"I could see it very plainly," I answered, going slowly in my mind
over what he had told me. If the truth must be confessed, I was in no
slight quandary what I should do, or what I should believe. Was this
really the key to it all? Dared I doubt it? or that that which I had
constructed was a mare's nest--the mere framework of a mare's nest.
For the life of me I could not tell!

"Well?" he said presently, looking up with an offended air. "Is there
anything else I can explain? or will you have the kindness to return
my property to me now?"

"There is one thing, about which I should like to ask a question," I
said.

"Ask on!" he replied; and I wondered whether there was not a little
too much of bravado in the tone of sufferance he assumed.

"Why do you carry"--I went on, raising my eyes to his, and pausing on
the word an instant--"that little medicament--you know what I mean--in
your waistcoat pocket, my friend?"

He perceptibly flinched. "I don't quite--quite understand," he began
to stammer. Then he changed his tone and went on rapidly, "No! I will
be frank with you, Mr.--Mr.----"

"George," I said calmly.

"Ah, indeed?" a trifle surprised, "Mr. George! Well, it is something
Bristowe gave me this morning to be administered to my father--without
his knowledge, if possible--whenever he grows excited. I did not think
that you had seen it."

Nor had I. I had only inferred its presence. But having inferred
rightly once, I was inclined to trust my inference farther. Moreover,
while he gave this explanation, his breath came and went so quickly
that my former suspicions returned. I was ready for him when he said,
"Now I will trouble you, if you please, for those papers?" and held
out his hand.

"I cannot give them to you," I replied, point-blank.

"You cannot give them to me now?" he repeated.

"No. Moreover, the packet is sealed. I do not see, on second thoughts,
what harm I can do you--now that it is out of your father's hands--by
keeping it until to-morrow, when I will return it to your brother,
from whom it came."

"He will not be in London," he answered doggedly. He stepped between
me and the door with looks which I did not like. At the same time I
felt that some allowance must be made for a man treated in this way.

"I am sorry," I said, "but I cannot do what you ask. I will do this,
however. If you think the delay of importance, and will give me your
brother's address in Liverpool, I will undertake to post the letters
to him at once."

He considered the offer, eying me the while with the same disfavor
which he had exhibited in the drawing room. At last he said slowly,
"If you will do that?"

"I will," I repeated. "I will do it immediately."

He gave me the direction--"George Ritherdon, at the London and
Northwestern Hotel, Liverpool"--and in return I gave him my own name
and address. Then I parted from him, with a civil good-night on either
side--and little liking, I fancy--the clocks striking midnight, and
the servants coming in as I passed out into the cool darkness of the
square.

Late as it was I went straight to my club, determined that, as I had
assumed the responsibility, there should be no laches on my part.
There I placed the packet, together with a short note explaining how
it came into my possession, in an outer envelope, and dropped the
whole, duly directed and stamped, into the nearest pillar box. I could
not register it at that hour, and rather than wait until next morning,
I omitted the precaution; merely requesting Mr. Ritherdon to
acknowledge its receipt.

Well, some days passed; during which it may be imagined that I thought
no little about my odd experience. It was the story of the Lady and
the Tiger over again. I had the choice of two alternatives at least. I
might either believe the young fellow's story, which certainly had the
merit of explaining in a fairly probable manner an occurrence of so
odd a character as not to lend itself freely to explanation. Or I
might disbelieve his story, plausible in its very strangeness as it
was, in favor of my own vague suspicions. Which was I to do?

Well, I set out by preferring the former alternative. This,
notwithstanding that I had to some extent committed myself against it
by withholding the papers. But with each day that passed without
bringing me an answer from Liverpool, I leaned more and more to the
other side. I began to pin my faith to the Tiger, adding each morning
a point to the odds in the animal's favor. So it went on until ten
days had passed.

Then a little out of curiosity, but more, I gravely declare, because I
thought it the right thing to do, I resolved to seek out George
Ritherdon. I had no difficulty in learning where he might be found.
I turned up the firm of Ritherdon Brothers (George and Gerald),
cotton-spinners and India merchants, in the first directory I
consulted. And about noon the next day I called at their place of
business, and sent in my card to the senior partner. I waited five
minutes--curiously scanned by the porter, who no doubt saw a likeness
between me and his employer--and then I was admitted to the latter's
room.

He was a tall man with a fair beard, not one whit like Gerald, and yet
tolerably good looking; if I say more I shall seem to be describing
myself. I fancied him to be balder about the temples, however, and
grayer and more careworn than the man I am in the habit of seeing in
my shaving glass. His eyes, too, had a hard look, and he seemed in ill
health. All these things I took in later. At the time I only noticed
his clothes. "So the old gentleman is dead," I thought, "and the young
one's tale is true, after all?" George Ritherdon was in deep mourning.

"I wrote to you," I began, taking the seat to which he pointed, "about
a fortnight ago."

He looked at my card, which he held in his hand. "I think not," he
said slowly.

"Yes," I repeated. "You were then at the London and Northwestern
Hotel, at Liverpool."

He was stepping to his writing table, but he stopped abruptly. "I was
in Liverpool," he answered, in a different tone, "but I was not at
that hotel. You are thinking of my brother, are you not?"

"No," I said. "It was your brother who told me you were there."

"Perhaps you had better explain what was the subject of your letter,"
he suggested, speaking in the weary tone of one returning to a painful
matter. "I have been through a great trouble lately, and this may well
have been overlooked."

I said I would, and as briefly as possible I told the main facts of my
strange visit in Fitzhardinge Square. He was much moved, walking up
and down the room as he listened, and giving vent to exclamations from
time to time, until I came to the arrangement I had finally made with
his brother. Then he raised his hand as one might do in pain.

"Enough!" he said abruptly. "Barnes told me a rambling tale of some
stranger. I understand it all now."

"So do I, I think!" I replied dryly. "Your brother went to Liverpool,
and received the papers in your name?"

He murmured what I took for "Yes." But he did not utter a single word
of acknowledgment to me, or of reprobation of his brother's deceit. I
thought some such word should have been spoken; and I let my feelings
carry me away. "Let me tell you," I said warmly, "that your brother is
a----"

"Hush!" he said, holding up his hand again. "He is dead."

"Dead!" I repeated, shocked and amazed.

"Have you not read of it in the papers? It is in all the papers," he
said wearily. "He committed suicide--God forgive me for it!--at
Liverpool, at the hotel you have mentioned, and the day after you saw
him."

And so it was. He had committed some serious forgery--he had always
been wild, though his father, slow to see it, had only lately closed
his purse to him--and the forged signatures had come into his
brother's power. He had cheated his brother before. There had long
been bad blood between them; the one being as cold, businesslike, and
masterful as the other was idle and jealous.

"I told him," the elder said to me, shading his eyes with his hand,
"that I should let him be prosecuted--that I would not protect or
shelter him. The threat nearly drove him mad; and while it was hanging
over him, I wrote to disclose the matter to Sir Charles. Gerald
thought his last chance lay in recovering this letter unread. The
proofs against him destroyed, he might laugh at me. His first attempts
failed; and then he planned, with Barnes' cognizance, to get
possession of the packet by drugging my father's whisky. Barnes'
courage deserted him; he called you in, and--and you know the rest."

"But," I said softly, "your brother did get the letter--at Liverpool."

George Ritherdon groaned. "Yes," he said, "he did. But the proofs were
not inclosed. After writing the outside letter I changed my mind, and
withheld them, explaining my reasons within. He found his plot laid in
vain; and it was under the shock of this disappointment--the packet
lay before him, resealed and directed to me--that he--that he did it.
Poor Gerald!"

"Poor Gerald!" I said. What else remained to be said?

It may be a survival of superstition, yet, when I dine in Baker Street
now, I take some care to go home by any other route than that through
Fitzhardinge Square.

                               THE END.