that operation under a tree, so that they might enter as if they had not
walked. He was nervously formal about such trifles, while Rosa took the
whole proceeding-walk, dressing, dinner, and all-as a pastime. To Joshua
it was a serious step in life.

A more unexpected kind of person for a curate's sister was never
presented at a dinner. The surprise of Mrs. Fellmer was unconcealed. She
had looked forward to a Dorcas, or Martha, or Rhoda at the outside, and
a shade of misgiving crossed her face. It was possible that, had the
young lady accompanied her brother to church, there would have been no
dining at Narrobourne House that day.

Not so with the young widower, her son. He resembled a sleeper who had
awaked in a summer noon expecting to find it only dawn. He could
scarcely help stretching his arms and yawning in their faces, so strong
was his sense of being suddenly aroused to an unforeseen thing. When
they had sat down to table he at first talked to Rosa somewhat with the
air of a ruler in the land; but the woman lurking in the acquaintance
soon brought him to his level, and the girl from Brussels saw him
looking at her mouth, her hands, her contour, as if he could not quite
comprehend how they got created: then he dropped into the more
satisfactory stage which discerns no particulars.

He talked but little; she said much. The homeliness of the Fellmers, to
her view, though they were regarded with such awe down here, quite
disembarrassed her. The squire had become so unpractised, had dropped so
far into the shade during the last year or so of his life, that he had
almost forgotten what the world contained till this evening reminded
him. His mother, after her first moments of doubt, appeared to think
that he must be left to his own guidance, and gave her attention to
Joshua.

With all his foresight and doggedness of aim, the result of that dinner
exceeded Halborough's expectations. In weaving his ambitions he had
viewed his sister Rosa as a slight, bright thing to be helped into
notice by his abilities; but it now began to dawn upon him that the
physical gifts of nature to her might do more for them both than
nature's intellectual gifts to himself. While he was patiently boring
the tunnel Rosa seemed about to fly over the mountain.

He wrote the next day to his brother, now occupying his own old rooms in
the theological college, telling him exultingly of the unanticipated
d�but of Rosa at the manor-house. The next post brought him a reply of
congratulation, dashed with the counteracting intelligence that his
father did not like Canada-that his wife had deserted him, which made
him feel so dreary that he thought of returning home.

In his recent satisfaction at his own successes Joshua Halborough had
well-nigh forgotten his chronic trouble-latterly screened by distance.
But it now returned upon him; he saw more in this brief announcement
than his brother seemed to see. It was the cloud no bigger than a man's
hand.

CHAPTER IV

The following December, a day or two before Christmas, Mrs. Fellmer and
her son were walking up and down the broad gravel path which bordered
the east front of the house. Till within the last half-hour the morning
had been a drizzling one, and they had just emerged for a short turn
before luncheon.

'You see, dear mother,' the son was saying, 'it is the peculiarity of my
position which makes her appear to me in such a desirable light. When
you consider how I have been crippled at starting, how my life has been
maimed; that I feel anything like publicity distasteful, that I have ye
no political ambition, and that my chief aim and hope lie in the
education of the little thing Annie has left me, you must see how
desirable a wife like Miss Halborough would be, to prevent my becoming a
mere vegetable.'

'If you adore her, I suppose you must have her!' replied his mother with
dry indirectness. 'But you'll find that she will not be content to live
on here as you do, giving her whole mind to a young child.'

'That's just where we differ. Her very disqualification, that of being a
nobody, as you call it, is her recommendation in my eyes. Her lack of
influential connections limits her ambition. From what I know of her, a
life in this place is all that she would wish for. She would never care
to go outside the park-gates if it were necessary to stay within.'

'Being in love with her, Albert, and meaning to marry her, you invent
your practical reasons to make the case respectable. Well, do as you
will; I have no authority over you, so why should you consult me? You
mean to propose on this very occasion, no doubt. Don't you, now?'

'By no means. I am merely revolving the idea in my mind. If on further
acquaintance she turns out to be as good as she has hitherto seemed-
well, I shall see. Admit, now, that you like her.'

'I readily admit it. She is very captivating at first sight. But as a
stepmother to your child! You seem mighty anxious, Albert, to get rid of
me!'

'Not at all. And I am not so reckless as you think. I don't make up my
mind in a hurry. But the thought having occurred to me, I mention it to
you at once, mother. If you dislike it, say so.'

'I don't say anything. I will try to make the best of it if you are
determined. When does she come?'

'To-morrow.'

All this time there were great preparations in train at the curate's,
who was now a householder. Rosa, whose two or three weeks' stay on two
occasions earlier in the year had so affected the squire, was coming
again, and at the same time her younger brother Cornelius, to make up a
family party. Rosa, who journeyed from the Midlands, could not arrive
till late in the evening, but Cornelius was to get there in the
afternoon, Joshua going out to meet him in his walk across the fields
from the railway.

Everything being ready in Joshua's modest abode he started on his way,
his heart buoyant and thankful, if ever it was in his life. He was of
such good report himself that his brother's path into holy orders
promised to be unexpectedly easy; and he longed to compare experiences
with him, even though there was on hand a more exciting matter still.
From his youth he had held that, in old-fashioned country places, the
Church conferred social prestige up to a certain point at a cheaper
price than any other profession or pursuit; and events seemed to be
proving him right.

He had walked about half an hour when he saw Cornelius coming along the
path; and in a few minutes the two brothers met. The experiences of
Cornelius had been less immediately interesting than those of Joshua,
but his personal position was satisfactory, and there was nothing to
account for the singularly subdued manner that he exhibited, which at
first Joshua set down to the fatigue of over-study; and he proceeded to
the subject of Rosa's arrival in the evening, and the probable
consequences of this her third visit. 'Before next Easter she'll be his
wife, my boy,' said Joshua with grave exultation.

Cornelius shook his head. 'She comes too late!' he returned.

'What do you mean?'

'Look here.' He produced the Fountall paper, and placed his finger on a
paragraph, which Joshua read. It appeared under the report of Petty
Sessions, and was a commonplace case of disorderly conduct, in which a
man was sent to prison for seven days for breaking windows in that town.

'Well?' said Joshua.

'It happened during an evening that I was in the street; and the
offender is our father.'

'Not-how-I sent him more money on his promising to stay in Canada?'

'He is home, safe enough.' Cornelius in the same gloomy tone gave the
remainder of his information. He had witnessed the scene, unobserved of
his father, and had heard him say that he was on his way to see his
daughter, who was going to marry a rich gentleman. The only good fortune
attending the untoward incident was that the millwright's name had been
printed as Joshua Alborough.

'Beaten! We are to be beaten on the eve of our expected victory!' said
the elder brother. 'How did he guess that Rosa was likely to marry? Good
Heaven Cornelius, you seem doomed to bring bad news always, do you not!'

'I do,' said Cornelius. 'Poor Rosa!'

It was almost in tears, so great was their heart-sickness and shame,
that the brothers walked the remainder of the way to Joshua's dwelling.
In the evening they set out to meet Rosa, bringing her to the village in
a fly; and when she had come into the house, and was sitting down with
them, they almost forgot their secret anxiety in contemplating her, who
knew nothing about it.

Next day the Fellmers came, and the two or three days after that were a
lively time. That the squire was yielding to his impulses-making up his
mind-there could be no doubt. On Sunday Cornelius read the lessons, and
Joshua preached. Mrs. Fellmer was quite maternal towards Rosa, and it
appeared that she had decided to welcome the inevitable with a good
grace. The pretty girl was to spend yet another afternoon with the elder
lady, superintending some parish treat at the house in observance of
Christmas, and afterwards to stay on to dinner, her brothers to fetch
her in the evening. They were also invited to dine, but they could not
accept owing to an engagement.

The engagement was of a sombre sort. They were going to meet their
father, who would that day be released from Fountall Gaol, and try to
persuade him to keep away from Narrobourne. Every exertion was to be
made to get him back to Canada, to his old home in the Midlands-
anywhere, so that he would not impinge disastrously upon their courses,
and blast their sister's prospects of the auspicious marriage which was
just then hanging in the balance.

As soon as Rosa had been fetched away by her friends at the manor-house
her brothers started on their expedition, without waiting for dinner or
tea. Cornelius, to whom the millwright always addressed his letters when
he wrote any, drew from his pocket and re-read as he walked the curt
note which had led to this journey being undertaken; it was despatched
by their father the night before, immediately upon his liberation, and
stated that he was setting out for Narrobourne at the moment of writing;
that having no money he would be obliged to walk all the way; that he
calculated on passing through the intervening town of Ivell about six on
the following day, where he should sup at the Castle Inn, and where he
hoped they would meet him with a carriage-and-pair, or some other such
conveyance, that he might not disgrace them by arriving like a tramp.

'That sounds as if he gave a thought to our position,' said Cornelius.

Joshua knew the satire that lurked in the paternal words, and said
nothing. Silence prevailed during the greater part of their journey. The
lamps were lighted in Ivell when they entered the streets, and
Cornelius, who was quite unknown in this neighbourhood, and who,
moreover, was not in clerical attire, decided that he should be the one
to call at the Castle Inn. Here, in answer to his inquiry under the
darkness of the archway, they told him that such a man as he had
described left the house about a quarter of an hour earlier, after
making a meal in the kitchen-settle. He was rather the worse for liquor.

'Then,' said Joshua, when Cornelius joined him outside with this
intelligence, 'we must have met and passed him! And now that I think of
it, we did meet some one who was unsteady in his gait, under the trees
on the other side of Hendford Hill, where it was too dark to see him.'

They rapidly retraced their steps; but for a long stretch of the way
home could discern nobody. When, however, they had gone about three-
quarters of the distance, they became conscious of an irregular footfall
in front of them, and could see a whitish figure in the gloom. They
followed dubiously. The figure met another wayfarer-the single one that
had been encountered upon this lonely road-and they distinctly heard him
ask the way to Narrobourne. The stranger replied-what was quite true-
that the nearest way was by turning in at the stile by the next bridge,
and following the footpath which branched thence across the meadows.

When the brothers reached the stile they also entered the path, but did
not overtake the subject of their worry till they had crossed two or
three meads, and the lights from Narrobourne manor-house were visible
before them through the trees. Their father was no longer walking; he
was seated against the wet bank of an adjoining hedge. Observing their
forms he shouted, 'I'm going to Narrobourne; who may you be?'

They went up to him, and revealed themselves, reminding him of the plan
which he had himself proposed in his note, that they should meet him at
Ivell.

'By Jerry, I'd forgot it!' he said. 'Well, what do you want me to do?'
His tone was distinctly quarrelsome.

A long conversation followed, which became embittered at the first hint
from them that he should not come to the village. The millwright drew a
quart bottle from his pocket, and challenged them to drink if they meant
friendly and called themselves men. Neither of the two had touched
alcohol for years, but for once they thought it best to accept, so as
not to needlessly provoke him.

'What's in it?' said Joshua.

'A drop of weak gin-and-water. It won't hurt ye. Drin' from the bottle.'
Joshua did so, and his father pushed up the bottom of the vessel so as
to make him swallow a good deal in spite of himself. It went down into
his stomach like molten lead.

'Ha, ha, that's right!' said old Halborough. 'But 'twas raw spirit-ha,
ha!'

'Why should you take me in so!' said Joshua, losing his self-command,
try as he would to keep calm.

'Because you took me in, my lad, in banishing me to that cursed country
under pretence that it was for my good. You were a pair of hypocrites to
say so. It was done to get rid of me-no more nor less. But, by Jerry,
I'm a match for ye now! I'll spoil your souls for preaching. My daughter
is going to be married to the squire here. I've heard the news-I saw it
in a paper!'

'It is premature-'

'I know it is true; and I'm her father, and I shall give her away, or
there'll be a hell of a row, I can assure ye! Is that where the
gennleman lives?'

Joshua Halborough writhed in impotent despair. Fellmer had not yet
positively declared himself, his mother was hardly won round; a scene
with their father in the parish would demolish as fair a palace of hopes
as was ever builded. The millwright rose. 'If that's where the squire
lives I'm going to call. Just arrived from Canady with her fortune-ha,
ha! I wish no harm to the gennleman, and the gennleman will wish no harm
to me. But I like to take my place in the family, and stand upon my
rights, and lower people's pride!'

'You've succeeded already! Where's that woman you took with you-'

'Woman! She was my wife as lawful as the Constitution-a sight more
lawful than your mother was till some time after you were born!'

Joshua had for many years before heard whispers that his father had
cajoled his mother in their early acquaintance, and had made somewhat
tardy amends; but never from his father's lips till now. It was the last
stroke, and he could not bear it. He sank back against the hedge. 'It is
over!' he said. 'He ruins us all!'

The millwright moved on, waving his stick triumphantly, and the two
brothers stood still. They could see his drab figure stalking along the
path, and over his head the lights from the conservatory of Narrobourne
House, inside which Albert Fellmer might possibly be sitting with Rosa
at that moment, holding her hand, and asking her to share his home with
him.

The staggering whitey-brown form, advancing to put a blot on all this,
had been diminishing in the shade; and now suddenly disappeared beside a
weir. There was the noise of a flounce in the water.

'He has fallen in!' said Cornelius, starting forward to run for the
place at which his father had vanished.

Joshua, awaking from the stupefied reverie into which he had sunk,
rushed to the other's side before he had taken ten steps. 'Stop, stop,
what are you thinking of?' he whispered hoarsely, grasping Cornelius's
arm.

'Pulling him out!'

'Yes, yes-so am I. But-wait a moment-'

'But, Joshua!'

'Her life and happiness, you know-Cornelius-and your reputation and
mine-and our chance of rising together, all three-'

He clutched his brother's arm to the bone; and as they stood breathless
the splashing and floundering in the weir continued; over it they saw
the hopeful lights from the manor-house conservatory winking through the
trees as their bare branches waved to and fro.

The floundering and splashing grew weaker, and they could hear gurgling
words: 'Help-I'm drownded! Rosie-Rosie!'

'We'll go-we must save him. O Joshua!'

'Yes, yes! we must!'

Still they did not move, but waited, holding each other, each thinking
the same thought. Weights of lead seemed to be affixed to their feet,
which would no longer obey their wills. The mead became silent. Over it
they fancied they could see figures moving in the conservatory. The air
up there seemed to emit gentle kisses.

Cornelius started forward at last, and Joshua almost simultaneously. Two
or three minutes brought them to the brink of the stream. At first they
could see nothing in the water, though it was not so deep nor the night
so dark but that their father's light kerseymere coat would have been
visible if he had lain at the bottom. Joshua looked this way and that.

'He has drifted into the culvert,' he said.

Below the foot-bridge of the weir the stream suddenly narrowed to half
its width, to pass under a barrel arch or culvert constructed for
waggons to cross into the middle of the mead in haymaking time. It being
at present the season of high water the arch was full to the crown,
against which the ripples clucked every now and then. At this point he
had just caught sight of a pale object slipping under. In a moment it
was gone.

They went to the lower end, but nothing emerged. For a long time they
tried at both ends to effect some communication with the interior, but
to no purpose.

'We ought to have come sooner!' said the conscience-stricken Cornelius,
when they were quite exhausted, and dripping wet.

'I suppose we ought,' replied Joshua heavily. He perceived his father's
walking-stick on the bank; hastily picking it up he stuck it into the
mud among the sedge. Then they went on.

'Shall we-say anything about this accident?' whispered Cornelius as they
approached the door of Joshua's house.

'What's the use? It can do no good. We must wait until he is found.'

They went indoors and changed their clothes; after which they started
for the manor-house, reaching it about ten o'clock. Besides their sister
there were only three guests; an adjoining landowner and his wife, and
the infirm old rector.

Rosa, although she had parted from them so recently, grasped their hands
in an ecstatic, brimming, joyful manner, as if she had not seen them for
years. 'You look pale,' she said.

The brothers answered that they had had a long walk, and were somewhat
tired. Everybody in the room seemed charged full with some sort of
interesting knowledge: the squire's neighbour and his wife looked wisely
around; and Fellmer himself played the part of host with a preoccupied
bearing which approached fervour. They left at eleven, not accepting the
carriage offered, the distance being so short and the roads dry. The
squire came rather farther into the dark with them than he need have
done, and wished Rosa good-night in a mysterious manner, slightly apart
from the rest.

When they were walking along Joshua said, with desperate attempt at
joviality, 'Rosa, what's going on?'

'O, I-' she began between a gasp and a bound. 'He-'

'Never mind-if it disturbs you.'

She was so excited that she could not speak connectedly at first, the
practised air which she had brought home with her having disappeared.
Calming herself she added, 'I am not disturbed, and nothing has
happened. Only he said he wanted to ask me something, some day; and I
said never mind that now. He hasn't asked yet, and is coining to speak
to you about it. He would have done so to-night, only I asked him not to
be in a hurry. But he will come to-morrow, I am sure!'

CHAPTER V

It was summer-time, six months later, and mowers and haymakers were at
work in the meads. The manor-house, being opposite them, frequently
formed a peg for conversation during these operations; and the doings of
the squire, and the squire's young wife, the curate's sister-who was at
present the admired of most of them, and the interest of all-met with
their due amount of criticism.

Rosa was happy, if ever woman could be said to be so. She had not learnt
the fate of her father, and sometimes wondered-perhaps with a sense of
relief-why he did not write to her from his supposed home in Canada. Her
brother Joshua had been presented to a living in a small town, shortly
after her marriage, and Cornelius had thereupon succeeded to the vacant
curacy of Narrobourne.

These two had awaited in deep suspense the discovery of their father's
body; and yet the discovery had not been made. Every day they expected a
man or a boy to run up from the meads with the intelligence; but he had
never come. Days had accumulated to weeks and months; the wedding had
come and gone: Joshua had tolled and read himself in at his new parish;
and never a shout of amazement over the millwright's remains.

But now, in June, when they were mowing the meads, the hatches had to be
drawn and the water let out of its channels for the convenience of the
mowers. It was thus that the discovery was made. A man, stooping low
with his scythe, caught a view of the culvert lengthwise, and saw
something entangled in the recently bared weeds of its bed. A day or two
after there was an inquest; but the body was unrecognizable. Fish and
flood had been busy with the millwright; he had no watch or marked
article which could be identified; and a verdict of the accidental
drowning of a person unknown settled the matter.

As the body was found in Narrobourne parish, there it had to be buried.
Cornelius wrote to Joshua, begging him to come and read the service, or
to send some one; he himself could not do it. Rather than let in a
stranger Joshua came, and silently scanned the coroner's order handed
him by the undertaker:-

'I, Henry Giles, Coroner for the Mid-Division of Outer Wessex, do hereby
order the Burial of the Body now shown to the Inquest Jury as the Body
of an Adult Male Person Unknown . . . ,' etc.

Joshua Halborough got through the service in some way, and rejoined his
brother Cornelius at his house. Neither accepted an invitation to lunch
at their sister's; they wished to discuss parish matters together. In
the afternoon she came down, though they had already called on her, and
had not expected to see her again. Her bright eyes, brown hair, flowery
bonnet, lemon-coloured gloves, and flush beauty, were like an
irradiation into the apartment, which they in their gloom could hardly
bear.

'I forgot to tell you,' she said, 'of a curious thing which happened to
me a month or two before my marriage-something which I have thought may
have had a connection with the accident to the poor man you have buried
to-day. It was on that evening I was at the manor-house waiting for you
to fetch me; I was in the winter-garden with Albert, and we were sitting
silent together, when we fancied we heard a cry. We opened the door, and
while Albert ran to fetch his hat, leaving me standing there, the cry
was repeated, and my excited senses made me think I heard my own name.
When Albert came back all was silent, and we decided that it was only a
drunken shout, and not a cry for help. We both forgot the incident, and
it never has occurred to me till since the funeral to-day that it might
have been this stranger's cry. The name of course was only fancy, or he
might have had a wife or child with a name something like mine, poor
man!'

When she was gone the brothers were silent till Cornelius said, 'Now
mark this, Joshua. Sooner or later she'll know.'

'How?'

'From one of us. Do you think human hearts are iron-cased safes, that
you suppose we can keep this secret for ever?'

'Yes, I think they are, sometimes,' said Joshua.

'No. It will out. We shall tell.'

'What, and ruin her-kill her? Disgrace her children, and pull down the
whole auspicious house of Fellmer about our ears? No! May I-drown where
he was drowned before I do it! Never, never. Surely you can say the
same, Cornelius!'

Cornelius seemed fortified, and no more was said. For a long time after
that day he did not see Joshua, and before the next year was out a son
and heir was born to the Fellmers. The villagers rang the three bells
every evening for a week and more, and were made merry by Mr. Fellmer's
ale; and when the christening came on Joshua paid Narrobourne another
visit.

Among all the people who assembled on that day the brother clergymen
were the least interested. Their minds were haunted by a spirit in
kerseymere in the evening they walked together in the fields.

'She's all right,' said Joshua. 'But here are you doing journey-work,
Cornelius, and likely to continue at it till the end of the day, as far
as I can see. I, too, with my petty living-what am I after all? . . . To
tell the truth, the Church is a poor forlorn hope for people without
influence, particularly when their enthusiasm begins to flag. A social
regenerator has a better chance outside, where he is unhampered by dogma
and tradition. As for me, I would rather have gone on mending mills,
with my crust of bread and liberty.'

Almost automatically they had bent their steps along the margin of the
river; they now paused. They were standing on the brink of the well-
known weir. There were the hatches, there was the culvert; they could
see the pebbly bed of the stream through the pellucid water. The notes
of the church-bells were audible, still jangled by the enthusiastic
villagers.

'Why see-it was there I hid his walking-stick!' said Joshua, looking
towards the sedge. The next moment, during a passing breeze, something
flashed white on the spot to which the attention of Cornelius was drawn.

From the sedge rose a straight little silver-poplar, and it was the
leaves of this sapling which caused the flicker of whiteness.

'His walking-stick has grown!' Joshua added. 'It was a rough one-cut
from the hedge, I remember.'

At every puff of wind the tree turned white, till they could not bear to
look at it; and they walked away.

'I see him every night,' Cornelius murmured . . . 'Ah, we read our
Hebrews to little account, Jos! ?p?�e??e sta????, a?s????? ?ataf????sa?.
To have endured the cross, despising the shame-there lay greatness! But
now I often feel that I should like to put an end to trouble here in
this self-same spot.'

'I have thought of it myself,' said Joshua.

'Perhaps we shall, some day,' murmured his brother. 'Perhaps,' said
Joshua moodily.

With that contingency to consider in the silence of their nights and
days they bent their steps homewards.

December 1888.

ON THE WESTERN CIRCUIT

CHAPTER I

The man who played the disturbing part in the two quiet lives hereafter
depicted-no great man, in any sense, by the way-first had knowledge of
them on an October evening, in the city of Melchester. He had been
standing in the Close, vainly endeavouring to gain amid the darkness a
glimpse of the most homogeneous pile of medi�val architecture in
England, which towered and tapered from the damp and level sward in
front of him. While he stood the presence of the Cathedral walls was
revealed rather by the ear than by the eyes; he could not see them, but
they reflected sharply a roar of sound which entered the Close by a
street leading from the city square, and, falling upon the building, was
flung back upon him.

He postponed till the morrow his attempt to examine the deserted
edifice, and turned his attention to the noise. It was compounded of
steam barrel-organs, the clanging of gongs, the ringing of hand-bells,
the clack of rattles, and the undistinguishable shouts of men. A lurid
light hung in the air in the direction of the tumult. Thitherward he
went, passing under the arched gateway, along a straight street, and
into the square.

He might have searched Europe over for a greater contrast between
juxtaposed scenes. The spectacle was that of the eighth chasm of the
Inferno as to colour and flame, and, as to mirth, a development of the
Homeric heaven. A smoky glare, of the complexion of brass-filings,
ascended from the fiery tongues of innumerable naphtha lamps affixed to
booths, stalls, and other temporary erections which crowded the spacious
market-square. In front of this irradiation scores of human figures,
more or less in profile, were darting athwart and across, up, down, and
around, like gnats against a sunset.

Their motions were so rhythmical that they seemed to be moved by
machinery. And it presently appeared that they were moved by machinery
indeed; the figures being those of the patrons of swings, see-saws,
flying-leaps, above all of the three steam roundabouts which occupied
the centre of the position. It was from the latter that the din of
steam-organs came.

Throbbing humanity in full light was, on second thoughts, better than
architecture in the dark. The young man, lighting a short pipe, and
putting his hat on one side and one hand in his pocket, to throw himself
into harmony with his new environment, drew near to the largest and most
patronized of the steam circuses, as the roundabouts were called by
their owners. This was one of brilliant finish, and it was now in full
revolution. The musical instrument around which and to whose tones the
riders revolved, directed its trumpet-mouths of brass upon the young
man, and the long plate-glass mirrors set at angles, which revolved with
the machine, flashed the gyrating personages and hobby horses
kaleidoscopically into his eyes.

It could now be seen that he was unlike the majority of the crowd. A
gentlemanly young fellow, one of the species found in large towns only,
and London particularly, built on delicate lines, well, though not
fashionably dressed, he appeared to belong to the professional class; he
had nothing square or practical about his look, much that was
curvilinear and sensuous. Indeed, some would have called him a man not
altogether typical of the middle-class male of a century wherein sordid
ambition is the master-passion that seems to be taking the time-honoured
place of love.

The revolving figures passed before his eyes with an unexpected and
quiet grace in a throng whose natural movements did not suggest
gracefulness or quietude as a rule. By some contrivance there was
imparted to each of the hobby-horses a motion which was really the
triumph and perfection of roundabout inventiveness-a galloping rise and
fall, so timed that, of each pair of steeds, one was on the spring while
the other was on the pitch. The riders were quite fascinated by these
equine undulations in this most delightful holiday-game of our times.
There were riders as young as six, and as old as sixty years, with every
age between. At first it was difficult to catch a personality, but by
and by the observer's eyes centred on the prettiest girl out of the
several pretty ones revolving.

It was not that one with the light frock and light hat whom he had been
at first attracted by; no, it was the one with the black cape, grey
skirt, light gloves and-no, not even she, but the one behind her; she
with the crimson skirt, dark jacket, brown hat and brown gloves.
Unmistakably that was the prettiest girl.

Having finally selected her, this idle spectator studied her as well as
he was able during each of her brief transits across his visual field.
She was absolutely unconscious of everything save the act of riding: her
features were rapt in an ecstatic dreaminess; for the moment she did not
know her age or her history or her lineaments, much less her troubles.
He himself was full of vague latter-day glooms and popular melancholies,
and it was a refreshing sensation to behold this young thing then and
there, absolutely as happy as if she were in a Paradise.

Dreading the moment when the inexorable stoker, grimily lurking behind
the glittering rococo-work, should decide that this set of riders had
had their pennyworth, and bring the whole concern of steam-engine,
horses, mirrors, trumpets, drums, cymbals, and such-like to pause and
silence, he waited for her every reappearance, glancing indifferently
over the intervening forms, including the two plainer girls, the old
woman and child, the two youngsters, the newly-married couple, the old
man with a clay pipe, the sparkish youth with a ring, the young ladies
in the chariot, the pair of journeyman-carpenters, and others, till his
select country beauty followed on again in her place. He had never seen
a fairer product of nature, and at each round she made a deeper mark in
his sentiments. The stoppage then came, and the sighs of the riders were
audible.

He moved round to the place at which he reckoned she would alight; but
she retained her seat. The empty saddles began to refill, and she
plainly was deciding to have another turn. The young man drew up to the
side of her steed, and pleasantly asked her if she had enjoyed her ride.

'O yes!' she said, with dancing eyes. 'It has been quite unlike anything
I have ever felt in my life before!'

It was not difficult to fall into conversation with her. Unreserved-too
unreserved-by nature, she was not experienced enough to be reserved by
art, and after a little coaxing she answered his remarks readily. She
had come to live in Melchester from a village on the Great Plain, and
this was the first time that she had ever seen a steam-circus; she could
not understand how such wonderful machines were made. She had come to
the city on the invitation of Mrs. Harnham, who had taken her into her
household to train her as a servant, if she showed any aptitude. Mrs.
Harnham was a young lady who before she married had been Miss Edith
White, living in the country near the speaker's cottage; she was now
very kind to her through knowing her in childhood so well. She was even
taking the trouble to educate her. Mrs. Harnham was the only friend she
had in the world, and being without children had wished to have her near
her in preference to anybody else, though she had only lately come;
allowed her to do almost as she liked, and to have a holiday whenever
she asked for it. The husband of this kind young lady was a rich wine-
merchant of the town, but Mrs. Harnham did not care much about him. In
the daytime you could see the house from where they were talking. She,
the speaker, liked Melchester better than the lonely country, and she
was going to have a new hat for next Sunday that was to cost fifteen and
ninepence.

Then she inquired of her acquaintance where he lived, and he told her in
London, that ancient and smoky city, where everybody lived who lived at
all, and died because they could not live there. He came into Wessex two
or three times a year for professional reasons; he had arrived from
Wintoncester yesterday, and was going on into the next county in a day
or two. For one thing he did like the country better than the town, and
it was because it contained such girls as herself.

Then the pleasure-machine started again, and, to the light-hearted girl,
the figure of the handsome young man, the market-square with its lights
and crowd, the houses beyond, and the world at large, began moving round
as before, countermoving in the revolving mirrors on her right hand, she
being as it were the fixed point in an undulating, dazzling, lurid
universe, in which loomed forward most prominently of all the form of
her late interlocutor. Each time that she approached the half of her
orbit that lay nearest him they gazed at each other with smiles, and
with that unmistakable expression which means so little at the moment,
yet so often leads up to passion, heart-ache, union, disunion, devotion,
overpopulation, drudgery, content, resignation, despair.

When the horses slowed anew he stepped to her side and proposed another
heat. 'Hang the expense for once,' he said. 'I'll pay!'

She laughed till the tears came.

'Why do you laugh, dear?' said he.

'Because-you are so genteel that you must have plenty of money, and only
say that for fun!' she returned.

'Ha-ha!' laughed the young man in unison, and gallantly producing his
money she was enabled to whirl on again.

As he stood smiling there in the motley crowd, with his pipe in his
hand, and clad in the rough pea-jacket and wideawake that he had put on
for his stroll, who would have supposed him to be Charles Bradford Raye,
Esquire, stuff-gownsman, educated at Wintoncester, called to the Bar at
Lincoln's-Inn, now going the Western Circuit, merely detained in
Melchester by a small arbitration after his brethren had moved on to the
next county-town?

CHAPTER II

The square was overlooked from its remoter corner by the house of which
the young girl had spoken, a dignified residence of considerable size,
having several windows on each floor. Inside one of these, on the first
floor, the apartment being a large drawing-room, sat a lady, in
appearance from twenty-eight to thirty years of age. The blinds were
still undrawn, and the lady was absently surveying the weird scene
without, her cheek resting on her hand. The room was unlit from within,
but enough of the glare from the market-place entered it to reveal the
lady's face. She was what is called an interesting creature rather than
a handsome woman; dark-eyed, thoughtful, and with sensitive lips.

A man sauntered into the room from behind and came forward.

'O, Edith, I didn't see you,' he said. 'Why are you sitting here in the
dark?'

'I am looking at the fair,' replied the lady in a languid voice.

'Oh? Horrid nuisance every year! I wish it could be put a stop to'

'I like it.'

'H'm. There's no accounting for taste.'

For a moment he gazed from the window with her, for politeness sake, and
then went out again.

In a few minutes she rang.

'Hasn't Anna come in?' asked Mrs. Harnham.

'No m'm.'

'She ought to be in by this time. I meant her to go for ten minutes
only.'

'Shall I go and look for her, m'm?' said the house-maid alertly.

'No. It is not necessary: she is a good girl and will come soon.'

However, when the servant had gone Mrs. Harnham arose, went up to her
room, cloaked and bonneted herself, and proceeded downstairs, where she
found her husband.

'I want to see the fair,' she said; 'and I am going to look for Anna. I
have made myself responsible for her, and must see she comes to no harm.
She ought to be indoors. Will you come with me?'

'Oh, she's all right. I saw her on one of those whirligig things,
talking to her young man as I came in. But I'll go if you wish, though
I'd rather go a hundred miles the other way.'

'Then please do so. I shall come to no harm alone.'

She left the house and entered the crowd which thronged the market-
place, where she soon discovered Anna, seated on the revolving horse. As
soon as it stopped Mrs. Harnham advanced and said severely, 'Anna, how
can you be such a wild girl? You were only to be out for ten minutes.'

Anna looked blank, and the young man, who had dropped into the
background, came to her assistance.

'Please don't blame her,' he said politely. 'It is my fault that she has
stayed. She looked so graceful on the horse that I induced her to go
round again. I assure you that she has been quite safe.'

'In that case I'll leave her in your hands,' said Mrs. Harnham, turning
to retrace her steps.

But this for the moment it was not so easy to do. Something had
attracted the crowd to a spot in their rear, and the wine-merchant's
wife, caught by its sway, found herself pressed against Anna's
acquaintance without power to move away. Their faces were within a few
inches of each other, his breath fanned her cheek as well as Anna's.
They could do no other than smile at the accident; but neither spoke,
and each waited passively. Mrs. Harnham then felt a man's hand clasping
her fingers, and from the look of consciousness on the young fellow's
face she knew the hand to be his: she also knew that from the position
of the girl he had no other thought than that the imprisoned hand was
Anna's. What prompted her to refrain from undeceiving him she could
hardly tell. Not content with holding the hand, he playfully slipped two
of his fingers inside her glove, against her palm. Thus matters
continued till the pressure lessened; but several minutes passed before
the crowd thinned sufficiently to allow Mrs. Harnham to withdraw.

'How did they get to know each other, I wonder?' she mused as she
retreated. 'Anna is really very forward-and he very wicked and nice.'

She was so gently stirred with the stranger's manner and voice, with the
tenderness of his idle touch, that instead of re-entering the house she
turned back again and observed the pair from a screened nook. Really she
argued (being little less impulsive than Anna herself) it was very
excusable in Anna to encourage him, however she might have contrived to
make his acquaintance; he was so gentlemanly, so fascinating, had such
beautiful eyes. The thought that he was several years her junior
produced a reasonless sigh.

At length the couple turned from the roundabout towards the door of Mrs.
Harnham's house, and the young man could be heard saying that he would
accompany her home. Anna, then, had found a lover, apparently a very
devoted one. Mrs. Harnham was quite interested in him. When they drew
near the door of the wine-merchant's house, a comparatively deserted
spot by this time, they stood invisible for a little while in the shadow
of a wall, where they separated, Anna going on to the entrance, and her
acquaintance returning across the square.

'Anna,' said Mrs. Harnham, coming up. 'I've been looking at you! That
young man kissed you at parting I am almost sure.'

'Well,' stammered Anna; 'he said, if I didn't mind-it would do me no
harm, and, and, him a great deal of good!'

'Ah, I thought so! And he was a stranger till to-night?'

'Yes ma'am.'

'Yet I warrant you told him your name and every thing about yourself?'

'He asked me.'

'But he didn't tell you his?'

'Yes ma'am, he did!' cried Anna victoriously. 'It is Charles Bradford,
of London.'

'Well, if he's respectable, of course I've nothing to say against your
knowing him,' remarked her mistress, prepossessed, in spite of general
principles, in the young man's favour. 'But I must reconsider all that,
if he attempts to renew your acquaintance. A country-bred girl like you,
who has never lived in Melchester till this month, who had hardly ever
seen a black-coated man till you came here, to be so sharp as to capture
a young Londoner like him!'

'I didn't capture him. I didn't do anything,' said Anna, in confusion.

When she was indoors and alone Mrs. Harnham thought what a well-bred and
chivalrous young man Anna's companion had seemed. There had been a magic
in his wooing touch of her hand; and she wondered how he had come to be
attracted by the girl.

The next morning the emotional Edith Harnham went to the usual week-day
service in Melchester cathedral. In crossing the Close through the fog
she again perceived him who had interested her the previous evening,
gazing up thoughtfully at the high-piled architecture of the nave: and
as soon as she had taken her seat he entered and sat down in a stall
opposite hers.

He did not particularly heed her; but Mrs. Harnham was continually
occupying her eyes with him, and wondered more than ever what had
attracted him in her unfledged maid-servant. The mistress was almost as
unaccustomed as the maiden herself to the end-of-the-age young man, or
she might have wondered less. Raye, having looked about him awhile, left
abruptly, without regard to the service that was proceeding; and Mrs.
Harnham-lonely, impressionable creature that she was-took no further
interest in praising the Lord. She wished she had married a London man
who knew the subtleties of love-making as they were evidently known to
him who had mistakenly caressed her hand.

The calendar at Melchester had been light, occupying the court only a
few hours; and the assizes at Casterbridge, the next county-town on the
Western Circuit, having no business for Raye, he had not gone thither.
At the next town after that they did not open till the following Monday,
trials to begin on Tuesday morning. In the natural order of things Raye
would have arrived at the latter place on Monday afternoon; but it was
not till the middle of Wednesday that his gown and grey wig, curled in
tiers, in the best fashion of Assyrian bas-reliefs, were seen blowing
and bobbing behind him as he hastily walked up the High Street from his
lodgings. But though he entered the assize building there was nothing
for him to do, and sitting at the blue baize table in the well of the
court, he mended pens with a mind far away from the case in progress.
Thoughts of unpremeditated conduct, of which a week earlier he would not
have believed himself capable, threw him into a mood of dissatisfied
depression.

He had contrived to see again the pretty rural maiden Anna, the day
after the fair, had walked out of the city with her to the earthworks of
Old Melchester, and feeling a violent fancy for her, had remained in
Melchester all Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday; by persuasion obtaining
walks and meetings with the girl six or seven times during the interval;
had in brief won her, body and soul.

He supposed it must have been owing to the seclusion in which he had
lived of late in town that he had given way so unrestrainedly to a
passion for an artless creature whose inexperience had, from the first,
led her to place herself unreservedly in his hands. Much he deplored
trifling with her feelings for the sake of a passing desire; and he
could only hope that she might not live to suffer on his account.

She had begged him to come to her again; entreated him; wept. He had
promised that he would do so, and he meant to carry out that promise. He
could not desert her now. Awkward as such unintentional connections
were, the interspace of a hundred miles-which to a girl of her limited
capabilities was like a thousand-would effectually hinder this summer
fancy from greatly encumbering his life; while thought of her simple
love might do him the negative good of keeping him from idle pleasures
in town when he wished to work hard. His circuit journeys would take him
to Melchester three or four times a year; and then he could always see
her.

The pseudonym, or rather partial name, that he had given her as his
before knowing how far the acquaintance was going to carry him, had been
spoken on the spur of the moment, without any ulterior intention
whatever. He had not afterwards disturbed Anna's error, but on leaving
her he had felt bound to give her an address at a stationer's not far
from his chambers, at which she might write to him under the initials
'C. B.'

In due time Raye returned to his London abode, having called at
Melchester on his way and spent a few additional hours with his
fascinating child of nature. In town he lived monotonously every day.
Often he and his rooms were enclosed by a tawny fog from all the world
besides, and when he lighted the gas to read or write by, his situation
seemed so unnatural that he would look into the fire and think of that
trusting girl at Melchester again and again. Often, oppressed by absurd
fondness for her, he would enter the dim religious nave of the Law
Courts by the north door, elbow other juniors habited like himself, and
like him unretained; edge himself into this or that crowded court where
a sensational case was going on, just as if he were in it, though the
police officers at the door knew as well as he knew himself that he had
no more concern with the business in hand than the patient idlers at the
gallery-door outside, who had waited to enter since eight in the morning
because, like him, they belonged to the classes that live on
expectation. But he would do these things to no purpose, and think how
greatly the characters in such scenes contrasted with the pink and
breezy Anna.

An unexpected feature in that peasant maiden's conduct was that she had
not as yet written to him, though he had told her she might do so if she
wished. Surely a young creature had never before been so reticent in
such circumstances. At length he sent her a brief line, positively
requesting her to write. There was no answer by the return post, but the
day after a letter in a neat feminine hand, and bearing the Melchester
post-mark, was handed to him by the stationer.

The fact alone of its arrival was sufficient to satisfy his imaginative
sentiment. He was not anxious to open the epistle, and in truth did not
begin to read it for nearly half-an-hour, anticipating readily its terms
of passionate retrospect and tender adjuration. When at last he turned
his feet to the fireplace and unfolded the sheet, he was surprised and
pleased to find that neither extravagance nor vulgarity was there. It
was the most charming little missive he had ever received from woman. To
be sure the language was simple and the ideas were slight; but it was so
self-possessed; so purely that of a young girl who felt her womanhood to
be enough for her dignity that he read it through twice. Four sides were
filled, and a few lines written across, after the fashion of former
days; the paper, too, was common, and not of the latest shade and
surface. But what of those things? He had received letters from women
who were fairly called ladies, but never so sensible, so human a letter
as this. He could not single out any one sentence and say it was at all
remarkable or clever; the ensemble of the letter it was which won him;
and beyond the one request that he would write or come to her again soon
there was nothing to show her sense of a claim upon him.

To write again and develop a correspondence was the last thing Raye
would have preconceived as his conduct in such a situation; yet he did
send a short, encouraging line or two, signed with his pseudonym, in
which he asked for another letter, and cheeringly promised that he would
try to see her again on some near day, and would never forget how much
they had been to each other during their short acquaintance.

CHAPTER IV

To return now to the moment at which Anna, at Melchester, had received
Raye's letter.

It had been put into her own hand by the postman on his morning rounds.
She flushed down to her neck on receipt of it, and turned it over and
over. 'It is mine?' she said.

'Why, yes, can't you see it is?' said the postman, smiling as he guessed
the nature of the document and the cause of the confusion.

'O yes, of course!' replied Anna, looking at the letter, forcedly
tittering, and blushing still more.

Her look of embarrassment did not leave her with the postman's
departure. She opened the envelope, kissed its contents, put away the
letter in her pocket, and remained musing till her eyes filled with
tears.

A few minutes later she carried up a cup of tea to Mrs. Harnham in her
bed-chamber. Anna's mistress looked at her, and said: 'How dismal you
seem this morning, Anna. What's the matter?'

'I'm not dismal, I'm glad; only I-' She stopped to stifle a sob.

'Well?'

'I've got a letter-and what good is it to me, if I can't read a word in
it!'

'Why, I'll read it, child, if necessary.'

'But this is from somebody-I don't want anybody to read it but myself!'
Anna murmured.

'I shall not tell anybody. Is it from that young man?'

'I think so.' Anna slowly produced the letter, saying: 'Then will you
read it to me, ma'am?'

This was the secret of Anna's embarrassment and flutterings. She could
neither read nor write. She had grown up under the care of an aunt by
marriage, at one of the lonely hamlets on the Great Mid-Wessex Plain
where, even in days of national education, there had been no school
within a distance of two miles. Her aunt was an ignorant woman; there
had been nobody to investigate Anna's circumstances, nobody to care
about her learning the rudiments; though, as often in such cases, she
had been well fed and clothed and not unkindly treated. Since she had
come to live at Melchester with Mrs. Harnham, the latter, who took a
kindly interest in the girl, had taught her to speak correctly, in which
accomplishment Anna showed considerable readiness, as is not unusual
with the illiterate; and soon became quite fluent in the use of her
mistress's phraseology. Mrs. Harnham also insisted upon her getting a
spelling and copy book, and beginning to practise in these. Anna was
slower in this branch of her education, and meanwhile here was the
letter.

Edith Harnham's large dark eyes expressed some interest in the contents,
though, in her character of mere interpreter, she threw into her tone as
much as she could of mechanical passiveness. She read the short epistle
on to its concluding sentence, which idly requested Anna to send him a
tender answer.

'Now-you'll do it for me, won't you, dear mistress?' said Anna eagerly.
'And you'll do it as well as ever you can, please? Because I couldn't
bear him to think I am not able to do it myself. I should sink into the
earth with shame if he knew that!'

From some words in the letter Mrs. Harnham was led to ask questions, and
the answers she received confirmed her suspicions. Deep concern filled
Edith's heart at perceiving how the girl had committed her happiness to
the issue of this new-sprung attachment. She blamed herself for not
interfering in a flirtation which had resulted so seriously for the poor
little creature in her charge; though at the time of seeing the pair
together she had a feeling that it was hardly within her province to nip
young affection in the bud. However, what was done could not be undone,
and it behoved her now, as Anna's only protector, to help her as much as
she could. To Anna's eager request that she, Mrs. Harnham, should
compose and write the answer to this young London man's letter, she felt
bound to accede, to keep alive his attachment to the girl if possible;
though in other circumstances she might have suggested the cook as an
amanuensis.

A tender reply was thereupon concocted, and set down in Edith Harnham's
hand. This letter it had been which Raye had received and delighted in.
Written in the presence of Anna it certainly was, and on Anna's humble
note-paper, and in a measure indited by the young girl; but the life,
the spirit, the individuality, were Edith Harnham's.

'Won't you at least put your name yourself?' she said. 'You can manage
to write that by this time?'

'No, no,' said Anna, shrinking back. 'I should do it so bad. He'd be
ashamed of me, and never see me again!'

The note, so prettily requesting another from him, had, as we have seen,
power enough in its pages to bring one. He declared it to be such a
pleasure to hear from her that she must write every week. The same
process of manufacture was accordingly repeated by Anna and her
mistress, and continued for several weeks in succession; each letter
being penned and suggested by Edith, the girl standing by; the answer
read and commented on by Edith, Anna standing by and listening again.

Late on a winter evening, after the dispatch of the sixth letter, Mrs.
Harnham was sitting alone by the remains of her fire. Her husband had
retired to bed, and she had fallen into that fixity of musing which
takes no count of hour or temperature. The state of mind had been
brought about in Edith by a strange thing which she had done that day.
For the first time since Raye's visit Anna had gone to stay over a night
or two with her cottage friends on the Plain, and in her absence had
arrived, out of its time, a letter from Raye. To this Edith had replied
on her own responsibility, from the depths of her own heart, without
waiting for her maid's collaboration. The luxury of writing to him what
would be known to no consciousness but his was great, and she had
indulged herself therein.

Why was it a luxury?

Edith Harnham led a lonely life. Influenced by the belief of the British
parent that a bad marriage with its aversions is better than free
womanhood with its interests, dignity, and leisure, she had consented to
marry the elderly wine-merchant as a pis aller, at the age of seven-and-
twenty-some three years before this date-to find afterwards that she had
made a mistake. That contract had left her still a woman whose deeper
nature had never been stirred.

She was now clearly realizing that she had become possessed to the
bottom of her soul with the image of a man to whom she was hardly so
much as a name. From the first he had attracted her by his looks and
voice; by his tender touch; and, with these as generators, the writing
of letter after letter and the reading of their soft answers had
insensibly developed on her side an emotion which fanned his; till there
had resulted a magnetic reciprocity between the correspondents,
notwithstanding that one of them wrote in a character not her own. That
he had been able to seduce another woman in two days was his crowning
though unrecognized fascination for her as the she-animal.

They were her own impassioned and pent-up ideas-lowered to monosyllabic
phraseology in order to keep up the disguise-that Edith put into letters
signed with another name, much to the shallow Anna's delight, who,
unassisted, could not for the world have conceived such pretty fancies
for winning him, even had she been able to write them. Edith found that
it was these, her own foisted-in sentiments, to which the young
barrister mainly responded. The few sentences occasionally added from
Anna's own lips made apparently no impression upon him.

The letter-writing in her absence Anna never discovered; but on her
return the next morning she declared she wished to see her lover about
something at once, and begged Mrs. Harnham to ask him to come.

There was a strange anxiety in her manner which did not escape Mrs.
Harnham, and ultimately resolved itself into a flood of tears. Sinking
down at Edith's knees, she made confession that the result of her
relations with her lover it would soon become necessary to disclose.

Edith Harnham was generous enough to be very far from inclined to cast
Anna adrift at this conjuncture. No true woman ever is so inclined from
her own personal point of view, however prompt she may be in taking such
steps to safeguard those dear to her. Although she had written to Raye
so short a time previously, she instantly penned another Anna-note
hinting clearly though delicately the state of affairs.

Raye replied by a hasty line to say how much he was affected by her
news: he felt that he must run down to see her almost immediately.

But a week later the girl came to her mistress's room with another note,
which on being read informed her that after all he could not find time
for the journey. Anna was broken with grief; but by Mrs. Harnham's
counsel strictly refrained from hurling at him the reproaches and
bitterness customary from young women so situated. One thing was
imperative: to keep the young man's romantic interest in her alive.
Rather therefore did Edith, in the name of her prot�g�e, request him on
no account to be distressed about the looming event, and not to
inconvenience himself to hasten down. She desired above everything to be
no weight upon him in his career, no clog upon his high activities. She
had wished him to know what had befallen: he was to dismiss it again
from his mind. Only he must write tenderly as ever, and when he should
come again on the spring circuit it would be soon enough to discuss what
had better be done.

It may well be supposed that Anna's own feelings had not been quite in
accord with these generous expressions; but the mistress's judgment had
ruled, and Anna had acquiesced. 'All I want is that niceness you can so
well put into your letters, my dear, dear mistress, and that I can't for
the life o' me make up out of my own head; though I mean the same thing
and feel it exactly when you've written it down!'

When the letter had been sent off, and Edith Harnham was left alone, she
bowed herself on the back of her chair and wept.

'I wish it was mine-I wish it was!' she murmured. 'Yet how can I say
such a wicked thing!'

CHAPTER V

The letter moved Raye considerably when it reached him. The intelligence
itself had affected him less than her unexpected manner of treating him
in relation to it. The absence of any word of reproach, the devotion to
his interests, the self-sacrifice apparent in every line, all made up a
nobility of character that he had never dreamt of finding in womankind.

'God forgive me!' he said tremulously. 'I have been a wicked wretch. I
did not know she was such a treasure as this!'

He reassured her instantly; declaring that he would not of course desert
her, that he would provide a home for her somewhere. Meanwhile she was
to stay where she was as long as her mistress would allow her.

But a misfortune supervened in this direction. Whether an inkling of
Anna's circumstances reached the knowledge of Mrs. Harnham's husband or
not cannot be said, but the girl was compelled, in spite of Edith's
entreaties, to leave the house. By her own choice she decided to go back
for a while to the cottage on the Plain. This arrangement led to a
consultation as to how the correspondence should be carried on; and in
the girl's inability to continue personally what had been begun in her
name, and in the difficulty of their acting in concert as heretofore,
she requested Mrs. Harnham-the only well-to-do friend she had in the
world-to receive the letters and reply to them off-hand, sending them on
afterwards to herself on the Plain, where she might at least get some
neighbour to read them to her, if a trustworthy one could be met with.
Anna and her box then departed for the Plain.

Thus it befel that Edith Harnham found herself in the strange position
of having to correspond, under no supervision by the real woman, with a
man not her husband, in terms which were virtually those of a wife,
concerning a condition that was not Edith's at all; the man being one
for whom, mainly through the sympathies involved in playing this part,
she secretly cherished a predilection, subtle and imaginative truly, but
strong and absorbing. She opened each letter, read it as if intended for
herself, and replied from the promptings of her own heart and no other.

Throughout this correspondence, carried on in the girl's absence, the
high-strung Edith Harnham lived in the ecstasy of fancy; the vicarious
intimacy engendered such a flow of passionateness as was never exceeded.
For conscience' sake Edith at first sent on each of his letters to Anna,
and even rough copies of her replies; but later on these so-called
copies were much abridged, and many letters on both sides were not sent
on at all.

Though selfish, and, superficially at least, infested with the self-
indulgent vices of artificial society, there was a substratum of honesty
and fairness in Raye's character. He had really a tender regard for the
country girl, and it grew more tender than ever when he found her
apparently capable of expressing the deepest sensibilities in the
simplest words. He meditated, he wavered; and finally resolved to
consult his sister, a maiden lady much older than himself, of lively
sympathies and good intent. In making this confidence he showed her some
of the letters.

'She seems fairly educated,' Miss Raye observed. 'And bright in ideas.
She expresses herself with a taste that must be innate.'

'Yes. She writes very prettily, doesn't she, thanks to these elementary
schools?'

'One is drawn out towards her, in spite of one's self, poor thing.'

The upshot of the discussion was that though he had not been directly
advised to do it, Raye wrote, in his real name, what he would never have
decided to write on his own responsibility; namely that he could not
live without her, and would come down in the spring and shelve her
looming difficulty by marrying her.

This bold acceptance of the situation was made known to Anna by Mrs.
Harnham driving out immediately to the cottage on the Plain. Anna jumped
for joy like a little child. And poor, crude directions for answering
appropriately were given to Edith Harnham, who on her return to the city
carried them out with warm intensification.

'O!' she groaned, as she threw down the pen. 'Anna-poor good little
fool-hasn't intelligence enough to appreciate him! How should she? While
I-don't bear his child!'

It was now February. The correspondence had continued altogether for
four months; and the next letter from Raye contained incidentally a
statement of his position and prospects. He said that in offering to wed
her he had, at first, contemplated the step of retiring from a
profession which hitherto had brought him very slight emolument, and
which, to speak plainly, he had thought might be difficult of practice
after his union with her. But the unexpected mines of brightness and
warmth that her letters had disclosed to be lurking in her sweet nature
had led him to abandon that somewhat sad prospect. He felt sure that,
with her powers of development, after a little private training in the
social forms of London under his supervision, and a little help from a
governess if necessary, she would make as good a professional man's wife
as could be desired, even if he should rise to the woolsack. Many a Lord
Chancellor's wife had been less intuitively a lady than she had shown
herself to be in her lines to him.

'O-poor fellow, poor fellow!' mourned Edith Harnham.

Her distress now raged as high as her infatuation. It was she who had
wrought him to this pitch-to a marriage which meant his ruin; yet she
could not, in mercy to her maid, do anything to hinder his plan. Anna
was coming to Melchester that week, but she could hardly show the girl
this last reply from the young man; it told too much of the second
individuality that had usurped the place of the first.

Anna came, and her mistress took her into her own room for privacy. Anna
began by saying with some anxiety that she was glad the wedding was so
near.

'O Anna!' replied Mrs. Harnham. 'I think we must tell him all-that I
have been doing your writing for you?-lest he should not know it till
after you become his wife, and it might lead to dissension and
recriminations-'

'O mis'ess, dear mis'ess-please don't tell him now!' cried Anna in
distress. 'If you were to do it, perhaps he would not marry me; and what
should I do then? It would be terrible what would come to me! And I am
getting on with my writing, too. I have brought with me the copybook you
were so good as to give me, and I practise every day, and though it is
so, so hard, I shall do it well at last, I believe, if I keep on
trying.'

Edith looked at the copybook. The copies had been set by herself, and
such progress as the girl had made was in the way of grotesque facsimile
of her mistress's hand. But even if Edith's flowing caligraphy were
reproduced the inspiration would be another thing.

'You do it so beautifully,' continued Anna, 'and say all that I want to
say so much better than I could say it, that I do hope you won't leave
me in the lurch just now!'

'Very well,' replied the other. 'But I-but I thought I ought not to go
on!'

'Why?'

Her strong desire to confide her sentiments led Edith to answer truly:

'Because of its effect upon me.'

'But it can't have any!'

'Why, child?'

'Because you are married already!' said Anna with lucid simplicity.

'Of course it can't,' said her mistress hastily; yet glad, despite her
conscience, that two or three outpourings still remained to her. 'But
you must concentrate your attention on writing your name as I write it
here.'

CHAPTER VI

Soon Raye wrote about the wedding. Having decided to make the best of
what he feared was a piece of romantic folly, he had acquired more zest
for the grand experiment. He wished the ceremony to be in London, for
greater privacy. Edith Harnham would have preferred it at Melchester;
Anna was passive. His reasoning prevailed, and Mrs. Harnham threw
herself with mournful zeal into the preparations for Anna's departure.
In a last desperate feeling that she must at every hazard be in at the
death of her dream, and see once again the man who by a species of
telepathy had exercised such an influence on her, she offered to go up
with Anna and be with her through the ceremony-'to see the end of her,'
as her mistress put it with forced gaiety; an offer which the girl
gratefully accepted; for she had no other friend capable of playing the
part of companion and witness, in the presence of a gentlemanly
bridegroom, in such a way as not to hasten an opinion that he had made
an irremediable social blunder.

It was a muddy morning in March when Raye alighted from a four-wheel cab
at the door of a registry-office in the S.W. district of London, and
carefully handed down Anna and her companion Mrs. Harnham. Anna looked
attractive in the somewhat fashionable clothes which Mrs. Harnham had
helped her to buy, though not quite so attractive as, an innocent child,
she had appeared in her country gown on the back of the wooden horse at
Melchester Fair.

Mrs. Harnham had come up this morning by an early train, and a young
man-a friend of Raye's-having met them at the door, all four entered the
registry-office together. Till an hour before this time Raye had never
known the wine-merchant's wife, except at that first casual encounter,
and in the flutter of the performance before them he had little
opportunity for more than a brief acquaintance. The contract of marriage
at a registry is soon got through; but somehow, during its progress,
Raye discovered a strange and secret gravitation between himself and
Anna's friend.

The formalities of the wedding-or rather ratification of a previous
union-being concluded, the four went in one cab to Raye's lodgings,
newly taken in a new suburb in preference to a house, the rent of which
he could ill afford just then. Here Anna cut the little cake which Raye
had bought at a pastrycook's on his way home from Lincoln's Inn the
night before. But she did not do much besides. Raye's friend was obliged
to depart almost immediately, and when he had left the only ones
virtually present were Edith and Raye who exchanged ideas with much
animation. The conversation was indeed theirs only, Anna being as a
domestic animal who humbly heard but understood not. Raye seemed
startled in awakening to this fact, and began to feel dissatisfied with
her inadequacy.

At last, more disappointed than he cared to own, he said, 'Mrs. Harnham,
my darling is so flurried that she doesn't know what she is doing or
saying. I see that after this event a little quietude will be necessary
before she gives tongue to that tender philosophy which she used to
treat me to in her letters.'

They had planned to start early that afternoon for Knollsea, to spend
the few opening days of their married life there, and as the hour for
departure was drawing near Raye asked his wife if she would go to the
writing-desk in the next room and scribble a little note to his sister,
who had been unable to attend through indisposition, informing her that
the ceremony was over, thanking her for her little present, and hoping
to know her well now that she was the writer's sister as well as
Charles's.

'Say it in the pretty poetical way you know so well how to adopt,' he
added, 'for I want you particularly to win her, and both of you to be
dear friends.'

Anna looked uneasy, but departed to her task, Raye remaining to talk to
their guest. Anna was a long while absent, and her husband suddenly rose
and went to her.

He found her still bending over the writing-table, with tears brimming
up in her eyes; and he looked down upon the sheet of note-paper with
some interest, to discover with what tact she had expressed her good-
will in the delicate circumstances. To his surprise she had progressed
but a few lines, in the characters and spelling of a child of eight, and
with the ideas of a goose.

'Anna,' he said, staring; 'what's this?'

'It only means-that I can't do it any better!' she answered, through her
tears.

'Eh? Nonsense!'

'I can't!' she insisted, with miserable, sobbing hardihood. 'I-I-didn't
write those letters, Charles! I only told her what to write! And not
always that! But I am learning, O so fast, my dear, dear husband! And
you'll forgive me, won't you, for not telling you before?' She slid to
her knees, abjectly clasped his waist and laid her face against him.

He stood a few moments, raised her, abruptly turned, and shut the door
upon her, rejoining Edith in the drawing-room. She saw that something
untoward had been discovered, and their eyes remained fixed on each
other.

'Do I guess rightly?' he asked, with wan quietude. 'You were her scribe
through all this?'

'It was necessary,' said Edith.

'Did she dictate every word you ever wrote to me?'

'Not every word.'

'In fact, very little?'

'Very little.'

'You wrote a great part of those pages every week from your own
conceptions, though in her name!'

'Yes.'

'Perhaps you wrote many of the letters when you were alone, without
communication with her?'

'I did.'

He turned to the bookcase, and leant with his hand over his face; and
Edith, seeing his distress, became white as a sheet.

'You have deceived me-ruined me!' he murmured.

'O, don't say it!' she cried in her anguish, jumping up and putting her
hand on his shoulder. 'I can't bear that!'

'Delighting me deceptively! Why did you do it-why did you!'

'I began doing it in kindness to her! How could I do otherwise than try
to save such a simple girl from misery? But I admit that I continued it
for pleasure to myself.'

Raye looked up. 'Why did it give you pleasure?' he asked.

'I must not tell,' said she.

He continued to regard her, and saw that her lips suddenly began to
quiver under his scrutiny, and her eyes to fill and droop. She started
aside, and said that she must go to the station to catch the return
train: could a cab be called immediately?

But Raye went up to her, and took her unresisting hand. 'Well, to think
of such a thing as this!' he said. 'Why, you and I are friends-lovers-
devoted lovers-by correspondence!'

'Yes; I suppose.'

'More.'

'More?'

'Plainly more. It is no use bIRONlinking that. Legally I have married
her-God help us both!-in soul and spirit I have married you, and no
other woman in the world!'

'Hush!'

'But I will not hush! Why should you try to disguise the full truth,
when you have already owned half of it? Yes, it is between you and me
that the bond is-not between me and her! Now I'll say no more. But, O my
cruel one, I think I have one claim upon you!'

She did not say what, and he drew her towards him, and bent over her.
'If it was all pure invention in those letters,' he said emphatically,
'give me your cheek only. If you meant what you said, let it be lips. It
is for the first and last time, remember!'

She put up her mouth, and he kissed her long. 'You forgive me?' she said
crying.

'Yes.'

'But you are ruined!'

'What matter!' he said shrugging his shoulders. 'It serves me right!'

She withdrew, wiped her eyes, entered and bade good-bye to Anna, who had
not expected her to go so soon, and was still wrestling with the letter.
Raye followed Edith downstairs, and in three minutes she was in a hansom
driving to the Waterloo station.

He went back to his wife. 'Never mind the letter, Anna, to-day,' he said
gently. 'Put on your things. We, too, must be off shortly.'

The simple girl, upheld by the sense that she was indeed married, showed
her delight at finding that he was as kind as ever after the disclosure.
She did not know that before his eyes he beheld as it were a galley, in
which he, the fastidious urban, was chained to work for the remainder of
his life, with her, the unlettered peasant, chained to his side.

Edith travelled back to Melchester that day with a face that showed the
very stupor of grief; her lips still tingling from the desperate
pressure of his kiss. The end of her impassioned dream had come. When at
dusk she reached the Melchester station her husband was there to meet
her, but in his perfunctoriness and her preoccupation they did not see
each other, and she went out of the station alone.

She walked mechanically homewards without calling a fly. Entering, she
could not bear the silence of the house, and went up in the dark to
where Anna had slept, where she remained thinking awhile. She then
returned to the drawing-room, and not knowing what she did, crouched
down upon the floor.

'I have ruined him!' she kept repeating. 'I have ruined him; because I
would not deal treacherously towards her!'

In the course of half an hour a figure opened the door of the apartment.

'Ah-who's that?' she said, starting up, for it was dark.

'Your husband-who should it be?' said the worthy merchant.

'Ah-my husband!-I forgot I had a husband!' she whispered to herself.

'I missed you at the station,' he continued. 'Did you see Anna safely
tied up? I hope so, for 'twas time.'

'Yes-Anna is married.'

Simultaneously with Edith's journey home Anna and her husband were
sitting at the opposite windows of a second-class carriage which sped
along to Knollsea. In his hand was a pocket-book full of creased sheets
closely written over. Unfolding them one after another he read them in
silence, and sighed.

'What are you doing, dear Charles?' she said timidly from the other
window, and drew nearer to him as if he were a god.

'Reading over all those sweet letters to me signed "Anna,"' he replied
with dreary resignation.

Autumn 1891.

TO PLEASE HIS WIFE

CHAPTER I

The interior of St. James's Church, in Havenpool Town, was slowly
darkening under the close clouds of a winter afternoon. It was Sunday:
service had just ended, the face of the parson in the pulpit was buried
in his hands, and the congregation, with a cheerful sigh of release,
were rising from their knees to depart.

For the moment the stillness was so complete that the surging of the sea
could be heard outside the harbour-bar. Then it was broken by the
footsteps of the clerk going towards the west door to open it in the
usual manner for the exit of the assembly. Before, however, he had
reached the doorway, the latch was lifted from without, and the dark
figure of a man in a sailor's garb appeared against the light.

The clerk stepped aside, the sailor closed the door gently behind him,
and advanced up the nave till he stood at the chancel-step. The parson
looked up from the private little prayer which, after so many for the
parish, he quite fairly took for himself; rose to his feet, and stared
at the intruder.

'I beg your pardon, sir,' said the sailor, addressing the minister in a
voice distinctly audible to all the congregation. 'I have come here to
offer thanks for my narrow escape from shipwreck. I am given to
understand that it is a proper thing to do, if you have no objection?'

The parson, after a moment's pause, said hesitatingly, 'I have no
objection; certainly. It is usual to mention any such wish before
service, so that the proper words may be used in the General
Thanksgiving. But, if you wish, we can read from the form for use after
a storm at sea.'

'Ay, sure; I ain't particular,' said the sailor.

The clerk thereupon directed the sailor to the page in the prayer-book
where the collect of thanksgiving would be found, and the rector began
reading it, the sailor kneeling where he stood, and repeating it after
him word by word in a distinct voice. The people, who had remained agape
and motionless at the proceeding, mechanically knelt down likewise; but
they continued to regard the isolated form of the sailor who, in the
precise middle of the chancel-step, remained fixed on his knees, facing
the east, his hat beside him, his hands joined, and he quite unconscious
of his appearance in their regard.

When his thanksgiving had come to an end he rose; the people rose also,
and all went out of church together. As soon as the sailor emerged, so
that the remaining daylight fell upon his face, old inhabitants began to
recognize him as no other than Shadrach Jolliffe, a young man who had
not been seen at Havenpool for several years. A son of the town, his
parents had died when he was quite young, on which account he had early
gone to sea, in the Newfoundland trade.

He talked with this and that townsman as he walked, informing them that,
since leaving his native place years before, he had become captain and
owner of a small coasting-ketch, which had providentially been saved
from the gale as well as himself. Presently he drew near to two girls
who were going out of the churchyard in front of him; they had been
sitting in the nave at his entry, and had watched his doings with deep
interest, afterwards discussing him as they moved out of church
together. One was a slight and gentle creature, the other a tall, large-
framed, deliberative girl. Captain Jolliffe regarded the loose curls of
their hair, their backs and shoulders, down to their heels, for some
time.

'Who may them two maids be?' he whispered to his neighbour.

'The little one is Emily Hanning; the tall one Joanna Phippard.'

'Ah! I recollect 'em now, to be sure.'

He advanced to their elbow, and genially stole a gaze at them.

'Emily, you don't know me?' said the sailor, turning his beaming brown
eyes on her.

'I think I do, Mr. Jolliffe,' said Emily shyly.

The other girl looked straight at him with her dark eyes.

'The face of Miss Joanna I don't call to mind so well,' he continued.
'But I know her beginnings and kindred.'

They walked and talked together, Jolliffe narrating particulars of his
late narrow escape, till they reached the corner of Sloop Lane, in which
Emily Hanning dwelt, when, with a nod and smile, she left them. Soon the
sailor parted also from Joanna, and, having no especial errand or
appointment, turned back towards Emily's house. She lived with her
father, who called himself an accountant, the daughter, however, keeping
a little stationery-shop as a supplemental provision for the gaps of his
somewhat uncertain business. On entering Jolliffe found father and
daughter about to begin tea.

'O, I didn't know it was tea-time,' he said. 'Ay, I'll have a cup with
much pleasure.'

He remained to tea and long afterwards, telling more tales of his
seafaring life. Several neighbours called to listen, and were asked to
come in. Somehow Emily Hanning lost her heart to the sailor that Sunday
night, and in the course of a week or two there was a tender
understanding between them.

One moonlight evening in the next month Shadrach was ascending out of
the town by the long straight road eastward, to an elevated suburb where
the more fashionable houses stood-if anything near this ancient port
could be called fashionable-when he saw a figure before him whom, from
her manner of glancing back, he took to be Emily. But, on coming up, he
found she was Joanna Phippard. He gave a gallant greeting, and walked
beside her.

'Go along,' she said, 'or Emily will be jealous!'

He seemed not to like the suggestion, and remained. What was said and
what was done on that walk never could be clearly recollected by
Shadrach; but in some way or other Joanna contrived to wean him away
from her gentler and younger rival. From that week onwards, Jolliffe was
seen more and more in the wake of Joanna Phippard and less in the
company of Emily; and it was soon rumoured about the quay that old
Jolliffe's son, who had come home from sea, was going to be married to
the former young woman, to the great disappointment of the latter.

Just after this report had gone about, Joanna dressed herself for a walk
one morning, and started for Emily's house in the little cross-street.
Intelligence of the deep sorrow of her friend on account of the loss of
Shadrach had reached her ears also, and her conscience reproached her
for winning him away.

Joanna was not altogether satisfied with the sailor. She liked his
attentions, and she coveted the dignity of matrimony; but she had never
been deeply in love with Jolliffe. For one thing, she was ambitious, and
socially his position was hardly so good as her own, and there was
always the chance of an attractive woman mating considerably above her.
It had long been in her mind that she would not strongly object to give
him back again to Emily if her friend felt so very badly about him. To
this end she had written a letter of renunciation to Shadrach, which
letter she carried in her hand, intending to send it if personal
observation of Emily convinced her that her friend was suffering.

Joanna entered Sloop Lane and stepped down into the stationery-shop,
which was below the pavement level. Emily's father was never at home at
this hour of the day, and it seemed as though Emily were not at home
either, for the visitor could make nobody hear. Customers came so seldom
hither that a five minutes' absence of the proprietor counted for
little. Joanna waited in the little shop, where Emily had tastefully set
out-as women can-articles in themselves of slight value, so as to
obscure the meagreness of the stock-in-trade; till she saw a figure
pausing without the window apparently absorbed in the contemplation of
the sixpenny books, packets of paper, and prints hung on a string. It
was Captain Shadrach Jolliffe, peering in to ascertain if Emily were
there alone. Moved by an impulse of reluctance to meet him in a spot
which breathed of Emily, Joanna slipped through the door that
communicated with the parlour at the back. She had frequently done so
before, for in her friendship with Emily she had the freedom of the
house without ceremony.

Jolliffe entered the shop. Through the thin blind which screened the
glass partition she could see that he was disappointed at not finding
Emily there. He was about to go out again, when Emily's form darkened
the doorway, hastening home from some errand. At sight of Jolliffe she
started back as if she would have gone out again.

'Don't run away, Emily; don't!' said he. 'What can make ye afraid?'

'I'm not afraid, Captain Jolliffe. Only-only I saw you all of a sudden,
and-it made me jump!' Her voice showed that her heart had jumped even
more than the rest of her.

'I just called as I was passing,' he said.

'For some paper?' She hastened behind the counter.

'No, no, Emily; why do ye get behind there? Why not stay by me? You seem
to hate me.'

'I don't hate you. How can I?'

'Then come out, so that we can talk like Christians.'

Emily obeyed with a fitful laugh, till she stood again beside him in the
open part of the shop.

'There's a dear,' he said.

'You mustn't say that, Captain Jolliffe; because the words belong to
somebody else.'

'Ah! I know what you mean. But, Emily, upon my life I didn't know till
this morning that you cared one bit about me, or I should not have done
as I have done. I have the best of feelings for Joanna, but I know that
from the beginning she hasn't cared for me more than in a friendly way;
and I see now the one I ought to have asked to be my wife. You know,
Emily, when a man comes home from sea after a long voyage he's as blind
as a bat-he can't see who's who in women. They are all alike to him,
beautiful creatures, and he takes the first that comes easy, without
thinking if she loves him, or if he might not soon love another better
than her. From the first I inclined to you most, but you were so
backward and shy that I thought you didn't want me to bother 'ee, and so
I went to Joanna.'

'Don't say any more, Mr. Jolliffe, don't!' said she, choking. 'You are
going to marry Joanna next month, and it is wrong to-to-'

'O, Emily, my darling!' he cried, and clasped her little figure in his
arms before she was aware.

Joanna, behind the curtain, turned pale, tried to withdraw her eyes, but
could not.

'It is only you I love as a man ought to love the woman he is going to
marry; and I know this from what Joanna has said, that she will
willingly let me off! She wants to marry higher I know, and only said
"Yes" to me out of kindness. A fine, tall girl like her isn't the sort
for a plain sailor's wife: you be the best suited for that.'

He kissed her and kissed her again, her flexible form quivering in the
agitation of his embrace.

'I wonder-are you sure-Joanna is going to break off with you? O, are you
sure? Because-'

'I know she would not wish to make us miserable. She will release me.'

'O, I hope-I hope she will! Don't stay any longer, Captain Jolliffe!'

He lingered, however, till a customer came for a penny stick of sealing-
wax, and then he withdrew.

Green envy had overspread Joanna at the scene. She looked about for a
way of escape. To get out without Emily's knowledge of her visit was
indispensable. She crept from the parlour into the passage, and thence
to the front door of the house, where she let herself noiselessly into
the street.

The sight of that caress had reversed all her resolutions. She could not
let Shadrach go. Reaching home she burnt the letter, and told her mother
that if Captain Jolliffe called she was too unwell to see him.

Shadrach, however, did not call. He sent her a note expressing in simple
language the state of his feelings; and asked to be allowed to take
advantage of the hints she had given him that her affection, too, was
little more than friendly, by cancelling the engagement.

Looking out upon the harbour and the island beyond he waited and waited
in his lodgings for an answer that did not come. The suspense grew to be
so intolerable that after dark he went up the High Street. He could not
resist calling at Joanna's to learn his fate.

Her mother said her daughter was too unwell to see him, and to his
questioning admitted that it was in consequence of a letter received
from himself; which had distressed her deeply.

'You know what it was about, perhaps, Mrs. Phippard?' he said.

Mrs. Phippard owned that she did, adding that it put them in a very
painful position. Thereupon Shadrach, fearing that he had been guilty of
an enormity, explained that if his letter had pained Joanna it must be
owing to a misunderstanding, since he had thought it would be a relief
to her. If otherwise, he would hold himself bound by his word, and she
was to think of the letter as never having been written.

Next morning he received an oral message from the young woman, asking
him to fetch her home from a meeting that evening. This he did, and
while walking from the Town Hall to her door, with her hand in his arm,
she said:

'It is all the same as before between us, isn't it, Shadrach? Your
letter was sent in mistake?'

'It is all the same as before,' he answered, 'if you say it must be.'

'I wish it to be,' she murmured, with hard lineaments, as she thought of
Emily.

Shadrach was a religious and scrupulous man, who respected his word as
his life. Shortly afterwards the wedding took place, Jolliffe having
conveyed to Emily as gently as possible the error he had fallen into
when estimating Joanna's mood as one of indifference.

CHAPTER II

A month after the marriage Joanna's mother died, and the couple were
obliged to turn their attention to very practical matters. Now that she
was left without a parent, Joanna could not bear the notion of her
husband going to sea again, but the question was, What could he do at
home? They finally decided to take on a grocer's shop in High Street,
the goodwill and stock of which were waiting to be disposed of at that
time. Shadrach knew nothing of shopkeeping, and Joanna very little, but
they hoped to learn.

To the management of this grocery business they now devoted all their
energies, and continued to conduct it for many succeeding years, without
great success. Two sons were born to them, whom their mother loved to
idolatry, although she had never passionately loved her husband; and she
lavished upon them all her forethought and care. But the shop did not
thrive, and the large dreams she had entertained of her sons' education
and career became attenuated in the face of realities. Their schooling
was of the plainest, but, being by the sea, they grew alert in all such
nautical arts and enterprises as were attractive to their age.

The great interest of the Jolliffes' married life, outside their own
immediate household, had lain in the marriage of Emily. By one of those
odd chances which lead those that lurk in unexpected corners to be
discovered, while the obvious are passed by, the gentle girl had been
seen and loved by a thriving merchant of the town, a widower, some years
older than herself, though still in the prime of life. At first Emily
had declared that she never, never could marry any one; but Mr. Lester
had quietly persevered, and had at last won her reluctant assent. Two
children also were the fruits of this union, and, as they grew and
prospered, Emily declared that she had never supposed that she could
live to be so happy.

The worthy merchant's home, one of those large, substantial brick
mansions frequently jammed up in old-fashioned towns, faced directly on
the High Street, nearly opposite to the grocery shop of the Jolliffes,
and it now became the pain of Joanna to behold the woman whose place she
had usurped out of pure covetousness, looking down from her position of
comparative wealth upon the humble shop-window with its dusty sugar-
loaves, heaps of raisins, and canisters of tea, over which it was her
own lot to preside. The business having so dwindled, Joanna was obliged
to serve in the shop herself; and it galled and mortified her that Emily
Lester, sitting in her large drawing-room over the way, could witness
her own dancings up and down behind the counter at the beck and call of
wretched twopenny customers, whose patronage she was driven to welcome
gladly: persons to whom she was compelled to be civil in the street,
while Emily was bounding along with her children and her governess, and
conversing with the genteelest people of the town and neighbourhood.
This was what she had gained by not letting Shadrach Jolliffe, whom she
had so faintly loved, carry his affection elsewhere.

Shadrach was a good and honest man, and he had been faithful to her in
heart and in deed. Time had clipped the wings of his love for Emily in
his devotion to the mother of his boys: he had quite lived down that
impulsive earlier fancy, and Emily had become in his regard nothing more
than a friend. It was the same with Emily's feelings for him. Possibly,
had she found the least cause for jealousy, Joanna would almost have
been better satisfied. It was in the absolute acquiescence of Emily and
Shadrach in the results she herself had contrived that her discontent
found nourishment.

Shadrach was not endowed with the narrow shrewdness necessary for
developing a retail business in the face of many competitors. Did a
customer inquire if the grocer could really recommend the wondrous
substitute for eggs which a persevering bagman had forced into his
stock, he would answer that 'when you did not put eggs into a pudding it
was difficult to taste them there'; and when he was asked if his 'real
Mocha coffee' was real Mocha, he would say grimly, 'as understood in
small shops.'

One summer day, when the big brick house opposite was reflecting the
oppressive sun's heat into the shop, and nobody was present but husband
and wife, Joanna looked across at Emily's door, where a wealthy
visitor's carriage had drawn up. Traces of patronage had been visible in
Emily's manner of late.

'Shadrach, the truth is, you are not a business-man,' his wife sadly
murmured. 'You were not brought up to shopkeeping, and it is impossible
for a man to make a fortune at an occupation he has jumped into, as you
did into this.'

Jolliffe agreed with her, in this as in everything else.

'Not that I care a rope's end about making a fortune,' he said
cheerfully. 'I am happy enough, and we can rub on somehow.'

She looked again at the great house through the screen of bottled
pickles.

'Rub on-yes,' she said bitterly. 'But see how well off Emmy Lester is,
who used to be so poor! Her boys will go to College, no doubt; and think
of yours-obliged to go to the Parish School!'

Shadrach's thoughts had flown to Emily.

'Nobody,' he said good-humouredly, 'ever did Emily a better turn than
you did, Joanna, when you warned her off me and put an end to that
little simpering nonsense between us, so as to leave it in her power to
say "Aye" to Lester when he came along.' This almost maddened her.

'Don't speak of bygones!' she implored, in stern sadness. 'But think,
for the boys' and my sake, if not for your own, what are we to do to get
richer?'

'Well,' he said, becoming serious, 'to tell the truth, I have always
felt myself unfit for this business, though I've never liked to say so.
I seem to want more room for sprawling; a more open space to strike out
in than here among friends and neighbours. I could get rich as well as
any man, if I tried my own way.'

'I wish you would! What is your way?'

'To go to sea again.'

She had been the very one to keep him at home, hating the semi-widowed
existence of sailors' wives. But her ambition checked her instincts now,
and she said: 'Do you think success really lies that way?'

'I am sure it lies in no other.'

'Do you want to go, Shadrach?'

'Not for the pleasure of it, I can tell 'ee. There's no such pleasure at
sea, Joanna, as I can find in my back parlour here. To speak honest, I
have no love for the brine. I never had much. But if it comes to a
question of a fortune for you and the lads, it is another thing. That's
the only way to it for one born and bred a seafarer as I.'

'Would it take long to earn?'

'Well, that depends; perhaps not.'

The next morning Shadrach pulled from a chest of drawers the nautical
jacket he had worn during the first months of his return, brushed out
the moths, donned it, and walked down to the quay. The port still did a
fair business in the Newfoundland trade, though not so much as formerly.

It was not long after this that he invested all he possessed in
purchasing a part-ownership in a brig, of which he was appointed
captain. A few months were passed in coast-trading, during which
interval Shadrach wore off the land-rust that had accumulated upon him
in his grocery phase; and in the spring the brig sailed for
Newfoundland.

Joanna lived on at home with her sons, who were now growing up into
strong lads, and occupying themselves in various ways about the harbour
and quay.

'Never mind, let them work a little,' their fond mother said to herself.
'Our necessities compel it now, but when Shadrach comes home they will
be only seventeen and eighteen, and they shall be removed from the port,
and their education thoroughly taken in hand by a tutor; and with the
money they'll have they will perhaps be as near to gentlemen as Emmy
Lester's precious two, with their algebra and their Latin!'

The date for Shadrach's return drew near and arrived, and he did not
appear. Joanna was assured that there was no cause for anxiety, sailing-
ships being so uncertain in their coming; which assurance proved to be
well grounded, for late one wet evening, about a month after the
calculated time, the ship was announced as at hand, and presently the
slip-slop step of Shadrach as the sailor sounded in the passage, and he
entered. The boys had gone out and had missed him, and Joanna was
sitting alone.

As soon as the first emotion of reunion between the couple had passed,
Jolliffe explained the delay as owing to a small speculative contract,
which had produced good results.

'I was determined not to disappoint 'ee,' he said; 'and I think you'll
own that I haven't!'

With this he pulled out an enormous canvas bag, full and rotund as the
money-bag of the giant whom Jack slew, untied it, and shook the contents
out into her lap as she sat in her low chair by the fire. A mass of
sovereigns and guineas (there were guineas on the earth in those days)
fell into her lap with a sudden thud, weighing down her gown to the
floor.

'There!' said Shadrach complacently. 'I told 'ee, dear, I'd do it; and
have I done it or no?'

Somehow her face, after the first excitement of possession, did not
retain its glory.

'It is a lot of gold, indeed,' she said. 'And-is this all?'

'All? Why, dear Joanna, do you know you can count to three hundred in
that heap? It is a fortune!'

'Yes-yes. A fortune-judged by sea; but judged by land-'

However, she banished considerations of the money for the nonce. Soon
the boys came in, and next Sunday Shadrach returned thanks to God-this
time by the more ordinary channel of the italics in the General
Thanksgiving. But a few days after, when the question of investing the
money arose, he remarked that she did not seem so satisfied as he had
hoped.

'Well you see, Shadrach,' she answered, 'we count by hundreds; they
count by thousands' (nodding towards the other side of the Street).
'They have set up a carriage and pair since you left.'

'O, have they?'

'My dear Shadrach, you don't know how the world moves. However, we'll do
the best we can with it. But they are rich, and we are poor still!'

The greater part of a year was desultorily spent. She moved sadly about
the house and shop, and the boys were still occupying themselves in and
around the harbour.

'Joanna,' he said, one day, 'I see by your movements that it is not
enough.'

'It is not enough,' said she. 'My boys will have to live by steering the
ships that the Lesters own; and I was once above her!'

Jolliffe was not an argumentative man, and he only murmured that he
thought he would make another voyage.

He meditated for several days, and coming home from the quay one
afternoon said suddenly:

'I could do it for 'ee, dear, in one more trip, for certain, if-if-'

'Do what, Shadrach?'

'Enable 'ee to count by thousands instead of hundreds.'

'If what?'

'If I might take the boys.'

She turned pale.

'Don't say that, Shadrach,' she answered hastily.

'Why?'

'I don't like to hear it! There's danger at sea. I want them to be
something genteel, and no danger to them. I couldn't let them risk their
lives at sea. O, I couldn't ever, ever!'

'Very well, dear, it shan't be done.'

Next day, after a silence, she asked a question:

'If they were to go with you it would make a great deal of difference, I
suppose, to the profit?'

''Twould treble what I should get from the venture single-handed. Under
my eye they would be as good as two more of myself.'

Later on she said: 'Tell me more about this.'

'Well, the boys are almost as clever as master-mariners in handling a
craft, upon my life! There isn't a more cranky place in the Northern
Seas than about the sandbanks of this harbour, and they've practised
here from their infancy. And they are so steady. I couldn't get their
steadiness and their trustworthiness in half a dozen men twice their
age.'

'And is it very dangerous at sea; now, too, there are rumours of war?'
she asked uneasily.

'O, well, there be risks. Still . . . '

The idea grew and magnified, and the mother's heart was crushed and
stifled by it. Emmy was growing too patronizing; it could not be borne.
Shadrach's wife could not help nagging him about their comparative
poverty. The young men, amiable as their father, when spoken to on the
subject of a voyage of enterprise, were quite willing to embark; and
though they, like their father, had no great love for the sea, they
became quite enthusiastic when the proposal was detailed.

Everything now hung upon their mother's assent. She withheld it long,
but at last gave the word: the young men might accompany their father.
Shadrach was unusually cheerful about it: Heaven had preserved him
hitherto, and he had uttered his thanks. God would not forsake those who
were faithful to him.

All that the Jolliffes possessed in the world was put into the
enterprise. The grocery stock was pared down to the least that possibly
could afford a bare sustenance to Joanna during the absence, which was
to last through the usual 'New-f'nland spell.' How she would endure the
weary time she hardly knew, for the boys had been with her formerly; but
she nerved herself for the trial.

The ship was laden with boots and shoes, ready-made clothing, fishing-
tackle, butter, cheese, cordage, sailcloth, and many other commodities;
and was to bring back oil, furs, skins, fish, cranberries, and what else
came to hand. But much trading to other ports was to be undertaken
between the voyages out and homeward, and thereby much money made.

The brig sailed on a Monday morning in spring; but Joanna did not
witness its departure. She could not bear the sight that she had been
the means of bringing about. Knowing this, her husband told her
overnight that they were to sail some time before noon next day hence
when, awakening at five the next morning, she heard them bustling about
downstairs, she did not hasten to descend, but lay trying to nerve
herself for the parting, imagining they would leave about nine, as her
husband had done on his previous voyage. When she did descend she beheld
words chalked upon the sloping face of the bureau; but no husband or
sons. In the hastily-scrawled lines Shadrach said they had gone off thus
not to pain her by a leave-taking; and the sons had chalked under his
words: 'Good-bye, mother!'

She rushed to the quay, and looked down the harbour towards the blue rim
of the sea, but she could only see the masts and bulging sails of the
Joanna; no human figures. ''Tis I have sent them!' she said wildly, and
burst into tears. In the house the chalked 'Good-bye' nearly broke her
heart. But when she had re-entered the front room, and looked across at
Emily's, a gleam of triumph lit her thin face at her anticipated release
from the thraldom of subservience.

To do Emily Lester justice, her assumption of superiority was mainly a
figment of Joanna's brain. That the circumstances of the merchant's wife
were more luxurious than Joanna's, the former could not conceal; though
whenever the two met, which was not very often now, Emily endeavoured to
subdue the difference by every means in her power.

The first summer lapsed away; and Joanna meagrely maintained herself by
the shop, which now consisted of little more than a window and a
counter. Emily was, in truth, her only large customer; and Mrs. Lester's
kindly readiness to buy anything and everything without questioning the
quality had a sting of bitterness in it, for it was the uncritical
attitude of a patron, and almost of a donor. The long dreary winter
moved on; the face of the bureau had been turned to the wall to protect
the chalked words of farewell, for Joanna could never bring herself to
rub them out; and she often glanced at them with wet eyes. Emily's
handsome boys came home for the Christmas holidays; the University was
talked of for them; and still Joanna subsisted as it were with held
breath, like a person submerged. Only one summer more, and the 'spell'
would end. Towards the close of the time Emily called on her quondam
friend. She had heard that Joanna began to feel anxious; she had
received no letter from husband or sons for some months. Emily's silks
rustled arrogantly when, in response to Joanna's almost dumb invitation,
she squeezed through the opening of the counter and into the parlour
behind the shop.

'You are all success, and I am all the other way!' said Joanna.

'But why do you think so?' said Emily. 'They are to bring back a
fortune, I hear.'

'Ah! will they come? The doubt is more than a woman can bear. All three
in one ship-think of that! And I have not heard of them for months!'

'But the time is not up. You should not meet misfortune half-way.'

'Nothing will repay me for the grief of their absence!'

'Then why did you let them go? You were doing fairly well.'

'I made them go!' she said, turning vehemently upon Emily. 'And I'll
tell you why! I could not bear that we should be only muddling on, and
you so rich and thriving! Now I have told you, and you may hate me if
you will!'

'I shall never hate you, Joanna.'

And she proved the truth of her words afterwards. The end of autumn
came, and the brig should have been in port; but nothing like the Joanna
appeared in the channel between the sands. It was now really time to be
uneasy. Joanna Jolliffe sat by the fire, and every gust of wind caused
her a cold thrill. She had always feared and detested the sea; to her it
was a treacherous, restless, slimy creature, glorying in the griefs of
women. 'Still,' she said, 'they must come!'

She recalled to her mind that Shadrach had said before starting that if
they returned safe and sound, with success crowning their enterprise, he
would go as he had gone after his shipwreck, and kneel with his sons in
the church, and offer sincere thanks for their deliverance. She went to
church regularly morning and afternoon, and sat in the most forward pew,
nearest the chancel-step. Her eyes were mostly fixed on that step, where
Shadrach had knelt in the bloom of his young manhood: she knew to an
inch the spot which his knees had pressed twenty winters before; his
outline as he had knelt, his hat on the step beside him. God was good.
Surely her husband must kneel there again: a son on each side as he had
said; George just here, Jim just there. By long watching the spot as she
worshipped it became as if she saw the three returned ones there
kneeling; the two slim outlines of her boys, the more bulky form between
them; their hands clasped, their heads shaped against the eastern wall.
The fancy grew almost to an hallucination: she could never turn her worn
eyes to the step without seeing them there.

Nevertheless they did not come. Heaven was merciful, but it was not yet
pleased to relieve her soul. This was her purgation for the sin of
making them the slaves of her ambition. But it became more than
purgation soon, and her mood approached despair. Months had passed since
the brig had been due, but it had not returned.

Joanna was always hearing or seeing evidences of their arrival. When on
the hill behind the port, whence a view of the open Channel could be
obtained, she felt sure that a little speck on the horizon, breaking the
eternally level waste of waters southward, was the truck of the Joana's
mainmast. Or when indoors, a shout or excitement of any kind at the
corner of the Town Cellar, where the High Street joined the Quay, caused
her to spring to her feet and cry: ''Tis they!'

But it was not. The visionary forms knelt every Sunday afternoon on the
chancel-step, but not the real. Her shop had, as it were, eaten itself
hollow. In the apathy which had resulted from her loneliness and grief
she had ceased to take in the smallest supplies, and thus had sent away
her last customer.

In this strait Emily Lester tried by every means in her power to aid the
afflicted woman; but she met with constant repulses.

'I don't like you! I can't bear to see you!' Joanna would whisper
hoarsely when Emily came to her and made advances.

'But I want to help and soothe you, Joanna,' Emily would say.

'You are a lady, with a rich husband and fine sons! What can you want
with a bereaved crone like me!'

'Joanna, I want this: I want you to come and live in my house, and not
stay alone in this dismal place any longer.'

'And suppose they come and don't find me at home? You wish to separate
me and mine! No, I'll stay here. I don't like you, and I can't thank
you, whatever kindness you do me!'

However, as time went on Joanna could not afford to pay the rent of the
shop and house without an income. She was assured that all hope of the
return of Shadrach and his sons was vain, and she reluctantly consented
to accept the asylum of the Lesters' house. Here she was allotted a room
of her own on the second floor, and went and came as she chose, without
contact with the family. Her hair greyed and whitened, deep lines
channeled her forehead, and her form grew gaunt and stooping. But she
still expected the lost ones, and when she met Emily on the staircase
she would say morosely: 'I know why you've got me here! They'll come,
and be disappointed at not finding me at home, and perhaps go away
again; and then you'll be revenged for my taking Shadrach away from
'ee!'

Emily Lester bore these reproaches from the grief-stricken soul. She was
sure-all the people of Havenpool were sure-that Shadrach and his sons
could not return. For years the vessel had been given up as lost.

Nevertheless, when awakened at night by any noise, Joanna would rise
from bed and glance at the shop opposite by the light from the
flickering lamp, to make sure it was not they.

It was a damp and dark December night, six years after the departure of
the brig Joanna. The wind was from the sea, and brought up a fishy mist
which mopped the face like moist flannel. Joanna had prayed her usual
prayer for the absent ones with more fervour and confidence than she had
felt for months, and had fallen asleep about eleven. It must have been
between one and two when she suddenly started up. She had certainly
heard steps in the street, and the voices of Shadrach and her sons
calling at the door of the grocery shop. She sprang out of bed, and,
hardly knowing what clothing she dragged on herself; hastened down
Emily's large and carpeted staircase, put the candle on the hall-table,
unfastened the bolts and chain, and stepped into the street. The mist,
blowing up the street from the Quay, hindered her seeing the shop,
although it was so near; but she had crossed to it in a moment. How was
it? Nobody stood there. The wretched woman walked wildly up and down
with her bare feet-there was not a soul. She returned and knocked with
all her might at the door which had once been her own-they might have
been admitted for the night, unwilling to disturb her till the morning.

It was not till several minutes had elapsed that the young man who now
kept the shop looked out of an upper window, and saw the skeleton of
something human standing below half-dressed.

'Has anybody come?' asked the form.

'O, Mrs. Jolliffe, I didn't know it was you,' said the young man kindly,
for he was aware how her baseless expectations moved her. 'No; nobody
has come.'

June 1891.

THE MELANCHOLY HUSSAR OF THE GERMAN LEGION

CHAPTER I

Here stretch the downs, high and breezy and green, absolutely unchanged
since those eventful days. A plough has never disturbed the turf, and
the sod that was uppermost then is uppermost now. Here stood the camp;
here are distinct traces of the banks thrown up for the horses of the
cavalry, and spots where the midden-heaps lay are still to be observed.
At night, when I walk across the lonely place, it is impossible to avoid
hearing, amid the scourings of the wind over the grass-bents and
thistles, the old trumpet and bugle calls, the rattle of the halters; to
help seeing rows of spectral tents and the impedimenta of the soldiery.
From within the canvases come guttural syllables of foreign tongues, and
broken songs of the fatherland; for they were mainly regiments of the
King's German Legion that slept round the tent-poles hereabout at that
time.

It was nearly ninety years ago. The British uniform of the period, with
its immense epaulettes, queer cocked-hat, breeches, gaiters, ponderous
cartridge-box, buckled shoes, and what not, would look strange and
barbarous now. Ideas have changed; invention has followed invention.
Soldiers were monumental objects then. A divinity still hedged kings
here and there; and war was considered a glorious thing.

Secluded old manor-houses and hamlets lie in the ravines and hollows
among these hills, where a stranger had hardly ever been seen till the
King chose to take the baths yearly at the sea-side watering-place a few
miles to the south; as a consequence of which battalions descended in a
cloud upon the open country around. Is it necessary to add that the
echoes of many characteristic tales, dating from that picturesque time,
still linger about here in more or less fragmentary form, to be caught
by the attentive ear? Some of them I have repeated; most of them I have
forgotten; one I have never repeated, and assuredly can never forget.

Phyllis told me the story with her own lips. She was then an old lady of
seventy-five, and her auditor a lad of fifteen. She enjoined silence as
to her share in the incident, till she should be 'dead, buried, and
forgotten.' Her life was prolonged twelve years after the day of her
narration, and she has now been dead nearly twenty. The oblivion which
in her modesty and humility she courted for herself has only partially
fallen on her, with the unfortunate result of inflicting an injustice
upon her memory; since such fragments of her story as got abroad at the
time, and have been kept alive ever since, are precisely those which are
most unfavourable to her character.

It all began with the arrival of the York Hussars, one of the foreign
regiments above alluded to. Before that day scarcely a soul had been
seen near her father's house for weeks. When a noise like the brushing
skirt of a visitor was heard on the doorstep, it proved to be a scudding
leaf; when a carriage seemed to be nearing the door, it was her father
grinding his sickle on the stone in the garden for his favourite
relaxation of trimming the box-tree borders to the plots. A sound like
luggage thrown down from the coach was a gun far away at sea; and what
looked like a tall man by the gate at dusk was a yew bush cut into a
quaint and attenuated shape. There is no such solitude in country places
now as there was in those old days.

Yet all the while King George and his court were at his favourite sea-
side resort, not more than five miles off.

The daughter's seclusion was great, but beyond the seclusion of the girl
lay the seclusion of the father. If her social condition was twilight,
his was darkness. Yet he enjoyed his darkness, while her twilight
oppressed her. Dr. Grove had been a professional man whose taste for
lonely meditation over metaphysical questions had diminished his
practice till it no longer paid him to keep it going; after which he had
relinquished it and hired at a nominal rent the small, dilapidated, half
farm half manor-house of this obscure inland nook, to make a sufficiency
of an income which in a town would have been inadequate for their
maintenance. He stayed in his garden the greater part of the day,
growing more and more irritable with the lapse of time, and the
increasing perception that he had wasted his life in the pursuit of
illusions. He saw his friends less and less frequently. Phyllis became
so shy that if she met a stranger anywhere in her short rambles she felt
ashamed at his gaze, walked awkwardly, and blushed to her shoulders.

Yet Phyllis was discovered even here by an admirer, and her hand most
unexpectedly asked in marriage.

The King, as aforesaid, was at the neighbouring town, where he had taken
up his abode at Gloucester Lodge and his presence in the town naturally
brought many county people thither. Among these idlers-many of whom
professed to have connections and interests with the Court-was one
Humphrey Gould, a bachelor; a personage neither young nor old; neither
good-looking nor positively plain. Too steady-going to be 'a buck' (as
fast and unmarried men were then called), he was an approximately
fashionable man of a mild type. This bachelor of thirty found his way to
the village on the down: beheld Phyllis; made her father's acquaintance
in order to make hers; and by some means or other she sufficiently
inflamed his heart to lead him in that direction almost daily; till he
became engaged to marry her.

As he was of an old local family, some of whose members were held in
respect in the county, Phyllis, in bringing him to her feet, had
accomplished what was considered a brilliant move for one in her
constrained position. How she had done it was not quite known to Phyllis
herself. In those days unequal marriages were regarded rather as a
violation of the laws of nature than as a mere infringement of
convention, the more modern view, and hence when Phyllis, of the
watering-place bourgeoisie, was chosen by such a gentlemanly fellow, it
was as if she were going to be taken to heaven, though perhaps the
uninformed would have seen no great difference in the respective
positions of the pair, the said Gould being as poor as a crow.

This pecuniary condition was his excuse-probably a true one-for
postponing their union, and as the winter drew nearer, and the King
departed for the season, Mr. Humphrey Gould set out for Bath, promising
to return to Phyllis in a few weeks. The winter arrived, the date of his
promise passed, yet Gould postponed his coming, on the ground that he
could not very easily leave his father in the city of their sojourn, the
elder having no other relative near him. Phyllis, though lonely in the
extreme, was content. The man who had asked her in marriage was a
desirable husband for her in many ways; her father highly approved of
his suit; but this neglect of her was awkward, if not painful, for
Phyllis. Love him in the true sense of the word she assured me she never
did, but she had a genuine regard for him; admired a certain methodical
and dogged way in which he sometimes took his pleasure; valued his
knowledge of what the Court was doing, had done, or was about to do; and
she was not without a feeling of pride that he had chosen her when he
might have exercised a more ambitious choice.

But he did not come; and the spring developed. His letters were regular
though formal; and it is not to be wondered that the uncertainty of her
position, IRONlinked with the fact that there was not much passion in
her thoughts of Humphrey, bred an indescribable dreariness in the heart
of Phyllis Grove. The spring was soon summer, and the summer brought the
King; but still no Humphrey Gould. All this while the engagement by
letter was maintained intact.

At this point of time a golden radiance flashed in upon the lives of
people here, and charged all youthful thought with emotional interest.
This radiance was the aforesaid York Hussars.

CHAPTER II

The present generation has probably but a very dim notion of the
celebrated York Hussars of ninety years ago. They were one of the
regiments of the King's German Legion, and (though they somewhat
degenerated later on) their brilliant uniform, their splendid horses,
and above all, their foreign air and mustachios (rare appendages then),
drew crowds of admirers of both sexes wherever they went. These with
other regiments had come to encamp on the downs and pastures, because of
the presence of the King in the neighbouring town.

The spot was high and airy, and the view extensive, commanding the Isle
of Portland in front, and reaching to St. Aldhelm's Head eastward, and
almost to the Start on the west.

Phyllis, though not precisely a girl of the village, was as interested
as any of them in this military investment. Her father's home stood
somewhat apart, and on the highest point of ground to which the lane
ascended, so that it was almost level with the top of the church tower
in the lower part of the parish. Immediately from the outside of the
garden-wall the grass spread away to a great distance, and it was
crossed by a path which came close to the wall. Ever since her childhood
it had been Phyllis's pleasure to clamber up this fence and sit on the
top-a feat not so difficult as it may seem, the walls in this district
being built of rubble, without mortar, so that there were plenty of
crevices for small toes.

She was sitting up here one day, listlessly surveying the pasture
without, when her attention was arrested by a solitary figure walking
along the path. It was one of the renowned German Hussars, and he moved
onward with his eyes on the ground, and with the manner of one who
wished to escape company. His head would probably have been bent like
his eyes but for his stiff neck-gear. On nearer view she perceived that
his face was marked with deep sadness. Without observing her, he
advanced by the footpath till it brought him almost immediately under
the wall.

Phyllis was much surprised to see a fine, tall soldier in such a mood as
this. Her theory of the military, and of the York Hussars in particular
(derived entirely from hearsay, for she had never talked to a soldier in
her life), was that their hearts were as gay as their accoutrements.

At this moment the Hussar lifted his eyes and noticed her on her perch,
the white muslin neckerchief which covered her shoulders and neck where
left bare by her low gown, and her white raiment in general, showing
conspicuously in the bright sunlight of this summer day. He blushed a
little at the suddenness of the encounter, and without halting a moment
from his pace passed on.

All that day the foreigner's face haunted Phyllis; its aspect was so
striking, so handsome, and his eyes were so blue, and sad, and
abstracted. It was perhaps only natural that on some following day at
the same hour she should look over that wall again, and wait till he had
passed a second time. On this occasion he was reading a letter, and at
the sight of her his manner was that of one who had half expected or
hoped to discover her. He almost stopped, smiled, and made a courteous
salute. The end of the meeting was that they exchanged a few words. She
asked him what he was reading, and he readily informed her that he was
re-perusing letters from his mother in Germany; he did not get them
often, he said, and was forced to read the old ones a great many times.
This was all that passed at the present interview, but others of the
same kind followed.

Phyllis used to say that his English, though not good, was quite
intelligible to her, so that their acquaintance was never hindered by
difficulties of speech. Whenever the subject became too delicate,
subtle, or tender, for such words of English as were at his command, the
eyes no doubt helped out the tongue, and-though this was later on-the
lips helped out the eyes. In short this acquaintance, unguardedly made,
and rash enough on her part, developed and ripened. Like Desdemona, she
pitied him, and learnt his history.

His name was Matth�us Tina, and Saarbr�ck his native town, where his
mother was still living. His age was twenty-two, and he had already
risen to the grade of corporal, though he had not long been in the army.
Phyllis used to assert that no such refined or well-educated young man
could have been found in the ranks of the purely English regiments, some
of these foreign soldiers having rather the graceful manner and presence
of our native officers than of our rank and file.

She by degrees learnt from her foreign friend a circumstance about
himself and his comrades which Phyllis would least have expected of the
York Hussars. So far from being as gay as its uniform, the regiment was
pervaded by a dreadful melancholy, a chronic home-sickness, which
depressed many of the men to such an extent that they could hardly
attend to their drill. The worst sufferers were the younger soldiers who
had not been over here long. They hated England and English life; they
took no interest whatever in King George and his island kingdom, and
they only wished to be out of it and never to see it any more. Their
bodies were here, but their hearts and minds were always far away in
their dear fatherland, of which-brave men and stoical as they were in
many ways-they would speak with tears in their eyes. One of the worst of
the sufferers from this home-woe, as he called it in his own tongue, was