The mansion that she occupied had been left to her for so long a time as
she should choose to reside in it, and, having a regard for the spot,
she had coaxed Sir William to remain there. But in the end it was
unfortunate; for one day, when in the full tide of his happiness, he was
walking among the willows near the gardens, where he overheard a
conversation between some basket-makers who were cutting the osiers for
their use. In this fatal dialogue the suspicions of the neighbouring
townsfolk were revealed to him for the first time.

'A cupboard close to his bed, and the key in her pocket. Ah!' said one.

'And a blue phial therein-h'm!' said another.

'And spurge-laurel leaves among the hearth-ashes. Oh-oh!' said a third.

On his return home Sir William seemed to have aged years. But he said
nothing; indeed, it was a thing impossible. And from that hour a ghastly
estrangement began. She could not understand it, and simply waited. One
day he said, however, 'I must go abroad.'

'Why?' said she. 'William, have I offended you?'

'No,' said he; 'but I must go.'

She could coax little more out of him, and in itself there was nothing
unnatural in his departure, for he had been a wanderer from his youth.
In a few days he started off, apparently quite another man than he who
had rushed to her side so devotedly a few months before.

It is not known when, or how, the rumours, which were so thick in the
atmosphere around her, actually reached the Lady Penelope's ears, but
that they did reach her there is no doubt. It was impossible that they
should not; the district teemed with them; they rustled in the air like
night-birds of evil omen. Then a reason for her husband's departure
occurred to her appalled mind, and a loss of health became quickly
apparent. She dwindled thin in the face, and the veins in her temples
could all be distinctly traced. An inner fire seemed to be withering her
away. Her rings fell off her fingers, and her arms hung like the flails
of the threshers, though they had till lately been so round and so
elastic. She wrote to her husband repeatedly, begging him to return to
her; but he, being in extreme and wretched doubt, moreover, knowing
nothing of her ill-health, and never suspecting that the rumours had
reached her also, deemed absence best, and postponed his return awhile,
giving various good reasons for his delay.

At length, however, when the Lady Penelope had given birth to a still-
born child, her mother, the Countess, addressed a letter to Sir William,
requesting him to come back to her if he wished to see her alive; since
she was wasting away of some mysterious disease, which seemed to be
rather mental than physical. It was evident that his mother-in-law knew
nothing of the secret, for she lived at a distance; but Sir William
promptly hastened home, and stood beside the bed of his now dying wife.

'Believe me, William,' she said when they were alone, 'I am innocent-
innocent!'

'Of what?' said he. 'Heaven forbid that I should accuse you of
anything!'

'But you do accuse me-silently!' she gasped. 'I could not write thereon-
and ask you to hear me. It was too much, too degrading. But would that I
had been less proud! They suspect me of poisoning him, William! But, oh
my dear husband, I am innocent of that wicked crime! He died naturally.
I loved you-too soon; but that was all!'

Nothing availed to save her. The worm had gnawed too far into her heart
before Sir William's return for anything to be remedial now; and in a
few weeks she breathed her last. After her death the people spoke
louder, and her conduct became a subject of public discussion. A little
later on, the physician, who had attended the late Sir John, heard the
rumour, and came down from the place near London to which he latterly
had retired, with the express purpose of calling upon Sir William Hervy,
now staying in Casterbridge.

He stated that, at the request of a relative of Sir John's, who wished
to be assured on the matter by reason of its suddenness, he had, with
the assistance of a surgeon, made a private examination of Sir John's
body immediately after his decease, and found that it had resulted from
purely natural causes. Nobody at this time had breathed a suspicion of
foul play, and therefore nothing was said which might afterwards have
established her innocence.

It being thus placed beyond doubt that this beautiful and noble lady had
been done to death by a vile scandal that was wholly unfounded, her
husband was stung with a dreadful remorse at the share he had taken in
her misfortunes, and left the country anew, this time never to return
alive. He survived her but a few years, and his body was brought home
and buried beside his wife's under the tomb which is still visible in
the parish church. Until lately there was a good portrait of her, in
weeds for her first husband, with a cross in her hand, at the ancestral
seat of her family, where she was much pitied, as she deserved to be.
Yet there were some severe enough to say-and these not unjust persons in
other respects-that though unquestionably innocent of the crime imputed
to her, she had shown an unseemly wantonness in contracting three
marriages in such rapid succession; that the untrue suspicion might have
been ordered by Providence (who often works indirectly) as a punishment
for her self-indulgence. Upon that point I have no opinion to offer.

The reverend the Vice-President, however, the tale being ended, offered
as his opinion that her fate ought to be quite clearly recognized as a
punishment. So thought the Churchwarden, and also the quiet gentleman
sitting near. The latter knew many other instances in point, one of
which could be narrated in a few words.

DAME THE NINTH-THE DUCHESS OF HAMPTONSHIRE By the Quiet Gentleman

Some fifty years ago, the then Duke of Hamptonshire, fifth of that
title, was incontestibly the head man in his county, and particularly in
the neighbourhood of Batton. He came of the ancient and loyal family of
Saxelbye, which, before its ennoblement, had numbered many knightly and
ecclesiastical celebrities in its male line. It would have occupied a
painstaking county historian a whole afternoon to take rubbings of the
numerous effigies and heraldic devices graven to their memory on the
brasses, tablets, and altar-tombs in the aisle of the parish-church. The
Duke himself, however, was a man little attracted by ancient chronicles
in stone and metal, even when they concerned his own beginnings. He
allowed his mind to linger by preference on the many graceless and
unedifying pleasures which his position placed at his command. He could
on occasion close the mouths of his dependents by a good bomb-like oath,
and he argued doggedly with the parson on the virtues of cock-fighting
and baiting the bull.

This nobleman's personal appearance was somewhat impressive. His
complexion was that of the copper-beech tree. His frame was stalwart,
though slightly stooping. His mouth was large, and he carried an
unpolished sapling as his walking-stick, except when he carried a spud
for cutting up any thistle he encountered on his walks. His castle stood
in the midst of a park, surrounded by dusky elms, except to the
southward; and when the moon shone out, the gleaming stone facade,
backed by heavy boughs, was visible from the distant high road as a
white spot on the surface of darkness. Though called a castle, the
building was little fortified, and had been erected with greater eye to
internal convenience than those crannied places of defence to which the
name strictly appertains. It was a castellated mansion as regular as a
chessboard on its ground-plan, ornamented with make-believe bastions and
machicolations, behind which were stacks of battlemented chimneys. On
still mornings, at the fire-lighting hour, when ghostly house-maids
stalk the corridors, and thin streaks of light through the shutter-
chinks lend startling winks and smiles to ancestors on canvas, twelve or
fifteen thin stems of blue smoke sprouted upwards from these chimney-
tops, and spread into a flat canopy on high. Around the site stretched
ten thousand acres of good, fat, unimpeachable soil, plentiful in glades
and lawns wherever visible from the castle-windows, and merging in
homely arable where screened from the too curious eye by ingeniously-
contrived plantations.

Some way behind the owner of all this came the second man in the parish,
the rector, the Honourable and Reverend Mr. Oldbourne, a widower, over
stiff and stern for a clergyman, whose severe white neckcloth, well-kept
gray hair, and right-lined face betokened none of those sympathetic
traits whereon depends so much of a parson's power to do good among his
fellow-creatures. The last, far-removed man of the series-altogether the
Neptune of these local primaries-was the curate, Mr. Alwyn Hill. He was
a handsome young deacon with curly hair, dreamy eyes-so dreamy that to
look long into them was like ascending and floating among summer clouds-
a complexion as fresh as a flower, and a chin absolutely beardless.
Though his age was about twenty-five, he looked not much over nineteen.

The rector had a daughter called Emmeline, of so sweet and simple a
nature that her beauty was discovered, measured, and inventoried by
almost everybody in that part of the country before it was suspected by
herself to exist. She had been bred in comparative solitude; a
rencounter with men troubled and confused her. Whenever a strange
visitor came to her father's house she slipped into the orchard and
remained till he was gone, ridiculing her weakness in apostrophes, but
unable to overcome it. Her virtues lay in no resistant force of
character, but in a natural inappetency for evil things, which to her
were as unmeaning as joints of flesh to a herbivorous creature. Her
charms of person, manner, and mind, had been clear for some time to the
Antinous in orders, and no less so to the Duke, who, though scandalously
ignorant of dainty phrases, ever showing a clumsy manner towards the
gentler sex, and, in short, not at all a lady's man, took fire to a
degree that was wellnigh terrible at sudden sight of Emmeline, a short
time after she was turned seventeen.

It occurred one afternoon at the corner of a shrubbery between the
castle and the rectory, where the Duke was standing to watch the heaving
of a mole, when the fair girl brushed past at a distance of a few yards,
in the full light of the sun, and without hat or bonnet. The Duke went
home like a man who had seen a spirit. He ascended to the picture-
gallery of his castle, and there passed some time in staring at the
bygone beauties of his line as if he had never before considered what an
important part those specimens of womankind had played in the evolution
of the Saxelbye race. He dined alone, drank rather freely, and declared
to himself that Emmeline Oldbourne must be his.

Meanwhile there had unfortunately arisen between the curate and this
girl some sweet and secret understanding. Particulars of the attachment
remained unknown then and always, but it was plainly not approved of by
her father. His procedure was cold, hard, and inexorable. Soon the
curate disappeared from the parish, almost suddenly, after bitter and
hard words had been heard to pass between him and the rector one evening
in the garden, intermingled with which, like the cries of the dying in
the din of battle, were the beseeching sobs of a woman. Not long after
this it was announced that a marriage between the Duke and Miss
Oldbourne was to be solemnized at a surprisingly early date.

The wedding-day came and passed; and she was a Duchess. Nobody seemed to
think of the ousted man during the day, or else those who thought of him
concealed their meditations. Some of the less subservient ones were
disposed to speak in a jocular manner of the august husband and wife,
others to make correct and pretty speeches about them, according as
their sex and nature dictated. But in the evening, the ringers in the
belfry, with whom Alwyn had been a favourite, eased their minds a little
concerning the gentle young man, and the possible regrets of the woman
he had loved.

'Don't you see something wrong in it all?' said the third bell as he
wiped his face. 'I know well enough where she would have liked to stable
her horses to-night, when they have done their journey.'

'That is, you would know if you could tell where young Mr. Hill is
living, which is known to none in the parish.'

'Except to the lady that this ring o' grandsire triples is in honour
of.'

Yet these friendly cottagers were at this time far from suspecting the
real dimensions of Emmeline's misery, nor was it clear even to those who
came into much closer communion with her than they, so well had she
concealed her heart-sickness. But bride and bridegroom had not long been
home at the castle when the young wife's unhappiness became plainly
enough perceptible. Her maids and men said that she was in the habit of
turning to the wainscot and shedding stupid scalding tears at a time
when a right-minded lady would have been overhauling her wardrobe. She
prayed earnestly in the great church-pew, where she sat lonely and
insignificant as a mouse in a cell, instead of counting her rings,
falling asleep, or amusing herself in silent laughter at the queer old
people in the congregation, as previous beauties of the family had done
in their time. She seemed to care no more for eating and drinking out of
crystal and silver than from a service of earthen vessels. Her head was,
in truth, full of something else; and that such was the case was only
too obvious to the Duke, her husband. At first he would only taunt her
for her folly in thinking of that milk-and-water parson; but as time
went on his charges took a more positive shape. He would not believe her
assurance that she had in no way communicated with her former lover, nor
he with her, since their parting in the presence of her father. This led
to some strange scenes between them which need not be detailed; their
result was soon to take a catastrophic shape.

One dark quiet evening, about two months after the marriage, a man
entered the gate admitting from the highway to the park and avenue which
ran up to the house. He arrived within two hundred yards of the walls,
when he left the gravelled drive and drew near to the castle by a
roundabout path leading into a shrubbery. Here he stood still. In a few
minutes the strokes of the castle-clock resounded, and then a female
figure entered the same secluded nook from an opposite direction. There
the two indistinct persons leapt together like a pair of dewdrops on a
leaf; and then they stood apart, facing each other, the woman looking
down.

'Emmeline, you begged me to come, and here I am, Heaven forgive me!'
said the man hoarsely.

'You are going to emigrate, Alwyn,' she said in broken accents. 'I have
heard of it; you sail from Plymouth in three days in the Western Glory?'

'Yes. I can live in England no longer. Life is as death to me here,'
says he.

'My life is even worse-worse than death. Death would not have driven me
to this extremity. Listen, Alwyn-I have sent for you to beg to go with
you, or at least to be near you-to do anything so that it be not to stay
here.'

'To go away with me?' he said in a startled tone.

'Yes, yes-or under your direction, or by your help in some way! Don't be
horrified at me-you must bear with me whilst I implore it. Nothing short
of cruelty would have driven me to this. I could have borne my doom in
silence had I been left unmolested; but he tortures me, and I shall soon
be in the grave if I cannot escape.'

To his shocked inquiry how her husband tortured her, the Duchess said
that it was by jealousy. 'He tries to wring admissions from me
concerning you,' she said, 'and will not believe that I have not
communicated with you since my engagement to him was settled by my
father, and I was forced to agree to it.'

The poor curate said that this was the heaviest news of all. 'He has not
personally ill-used you?' he asked.

'Yes,' she whispered.

'What has he done?'

She looked fearfully around, and said, sobbing: 'In trying to make me
confess to what I have never done, he adopts plans I dare not describe
for terrifying me into a weak state, so that I may own to anything! I
resolved to write to you, as I had no other friend.' She added, with
dreary irony, 'I thought I would give him some ground for his suspicion,
so as not to disgrace his judgment.'

'Do you really mean, Emmeline,' he tremblingly inquired, 'that you-that
you want to fly with me?'

'Can you think that I would act otherwise than in earnest at such a time
as this?'

He was silent for a minute or more. 'You must not go with me,' he said.

'Why?'

'It would be sin.'

'It cannot be sin, for I have never wanted to commit sin in my life; and
it isn't likely I would begin now, when I pray every day to die and be
sent to Heaven out of my misery!'

'But it is wrong, Emmeline, all the same.'

'Is it wrong to run away from the fire that scorches you?'

'It would look wrong, at any rate, in this case.'

'Alwyn, Alwyn, take me, I beseech you!' she burst out. 'It is not right
in general, I know, but it is such an exceptional instance, this. Why
has such a severe strain been put upon me? I was doing no harm, injuring
no one, helping many people, and expecting happiness; yet trouble came.
Can it be that God holds me in derision? I had no supporter-I gave way;
and now my life is a burden and a shame to me . . . Oh, if you only knew
how much to me this request to you is-how my life is wrapped up in it,
you could not deny me!'

'This is almost beyond endurance-Heaven support us,' he groaned. 'Emmy,
you are the Duchess of Hamptonshire, the Duke of Hamptonshire's wife;
you must not go with me!'

'And am I then refused?-Oh, am I refused?' she cried frantically.
'Alwyn, Alwyn, do you say it indeed to me?'

'Yes, I do, dear, tender heart! I do most sadly say it. You must not go.
Forgive me, for there is no alternative but refusal. Though I die,
though you die, we must not fly together. It is forbidden in God's law.
Good-bye, for always and ever!'

He tore himself away, hastened from the shrubbery, and vanished among
the trees.

Three days after this meeting and farewell, Alwyn, his soft, handsome
features stamped with a haggard hardness that ten years of ordinary wear
and tear in the world could scarcely have produced, sailed from Plymouth
on a drizzling morning, in the passenger-ship Western Glory. When the
land had faded behind him he mechanically endeavoured to school himself
into a stoical frame of mind. His attempt, backed up by the strong moral
staying power that had enabled him to resist the passionate temptation
to which Emmeline, in her reckless trustfulness, had exposed him, was
rewarded by a certain kind of success, though the murmuring stretch of
waters whereon he gazed day after day too often seemed to be
articulating to him in tones of her well-remembered voice.

He framed on his journey rules of conduct for reducing to mild
proportions the feverish regrets which would occasionally arise and
agitate him, when he indulged in visions of what might have been had he
not hearkened to the whispers of conscience. He fixed his thoughts for
so many hours a day on philosophical passages in the volumes he had
brought with him, allowing himself now and then a few minutes' thought
of Emmeline, with the strict yet reluctant niggardliness of an ailing
epicure proportioning the rank drinks that cause his malady. The voyage
was marked by the usual incidents of a sailing-passage in those days-a
storm, a calm, a man overboard, a birth, and a funeral-the latter sad
event being one in which he, as the only clergyman on board, officiated,
reading the service ordained for the purpose. The ship duly arrived at
Boston early in the month following, and thence he proceeded to
Providence to seek out a distant relative.

After a short stay at Providence he returned again to Boston, and by
applying himself to a serious occupation made good progress in shaking
off the dreary melancholy which enveloped him even now. Distracted and
weakened in his beliefs by his recent experiences, he decided that he
could not for a time worthily fill the office of a minister of religion,
and applied for the mastership of a school. Some introductions, given
him before starting, were useful now, and he soon became known as a
respectable scholar and gentleman to the trustees of one of the
colleges. This ultimately led to his retirement from the school and
installation in the college as Professor of rhetoric and oratory.

Here and thus he lived on, exerting himself solely because of a
conscientious determination to do his duty. He passed his winter
evenings in turning sonnets and elegies, often giving his thoughts voice
in 'Lines to an Unfortunate Lady,' while his summer leisure at the same
hour would be spent in watching the lengthening shadows from his window,
and fancifully comparing them with the shades of his own life. If he
walked, he mentally inquired which was the eastern quarter of the
landscape, and thought of two thousand miles of water that way, and of
what was beyond it. In a word he was at all spare times dreaming of her
who was only a memory to him, and would probably never be more.

Nine years passed by, and under their wear and tear Alwyn Hill's face
lost a great many of the attractive characteristics which had formerly
distinguished it. He was kind to his pupils and affable to all who came
in contact with him; but the kernel of his life, his secret, was kept as
snugly shut up as though he had been dumb. In talking to his
acquaintances of England and his life there, he omitted the episode of
Batton Castle and Emmeline as if it had no existence in his calendar at
all. Though of towering importance to himself, it had filled but a short
and small fragment of time, an ephemeral season which would have been
wellnigh imperceptible, even to him, at this distance, but for the
incident it enshrined.

One day, at this date, when cursorily glancing over an old English
newspaper, he observed a paragraph which, short as it was, contained for
him whole tomes of thrilling information-rung with more passion-stirring
rhythm than the collected cantos of all the poets. It was an
announcement of the death of the Duke of Hamptonshire, leaving behind
him a widow, but no children.

The current of Alwyn's thoughts now completely changed. On looking again
at the newspaper he found it to be one that was sent him long ago, and
had been carelessly thrown aside. But for an accidental overhauling of
the waste journals in his study he might not have known of the event for
years. At this moment of reading the Duke had already been dead seven
months. Alwyn could now no longer bind himself down to machine- made
synecdoche, antithesis, and climax, being full of spontaneous specimens
of all these rhetorical forms, which he dared not utter. Who shall
wonder that his mind luxuriated in dreams of a sweet possibility now
laid open for the first time these many years? for Emmeline was to him
now as ever the one dear thing in all the world. The issue of his silent
romancing was that he resolved to return to her at the very earliest
moment.

But he could not abandon his professional work on the instant. He did
not get really quite free from engagements till four months later; but,
though suffering throes of impatience continually, he said to himself
every day: 'If she has continued to love me nine years she will love me
ten; she will think the more tenderly of me when her present hours of
solitude shall have done their proper work; old times will revive with
the cessation of her recent experience, and every day will favour my
return.'

The enforced interval soon passed, and he duly arrived in England,
reaching the village of Batton on a certain winter day between twelve
and thirteen months subsequent to the time of the Duke's death.

It was evening; yet such was Alwyn's impatience that he could not
forbear taking, this very night, one look at the castle which Emmeline
had entered as unhappy mistress ten years before. He threaded the park
trees, gazed in passing at well-known outlines which rose against the
dim sky, and was soon interested in observing that lively country-
people, in parties of two and three, were walking before and behind him
up the interlaced avenue to the castle gateway. Knowing himself to be
safe from recognition, Alwyn inquired of one of these pedestrians what
was going on.

'Her Grace gives her tenantry a ball to-night, to keep up the old custom
of the Duke and his father before him, which she does not wish to
change.'

'Indeed. Has she lived here entirely alone since the Duke's death?'

'Quite alone. But though she doesn't receive company herself, she likes
the village people to enjoy themselves, and often has 'em here.'

'Kind-hearted, as always!' thought Alwyn.

On reaching the castle he found that the great gates at the tradesmen's
entrance were thrown back against the wall as if they were never to be
closed again; that the passages and rooms in that wing were brilliantly
lighted up, some of the numerous candles guttering down over the green
leaves which decorated them, and upon the silk dresses of the happy
farmers' wives as they passed beneath, each on her husband's arm. Alwyn
found no difficulty in marching in along with the rest, the castle being
Liberty Hall to-night. He stood unobserved in a corner of the large
apartment where dancing was about to begin.

'Her Grace, though hardly out of mourning, will be sure to come down and
lead off the dance with neighbour Bates,' said one.

'Who is neighbour Bates?' asked Alwyn.

'An old man she respects much-the oldest of her tenant-farmers. He was
seventy-eight his last birthday.'

'Ah, to be sure!' said Alwyn, at his ease. 'I remember.'

The dancers formed in line, and waited. A door opened at the farther end
of the hall, and a lady in black silk came forth. She bowed, smiled, and
proceeded to the top of the dance.

'Who is that lady?' said Alwyn, in a puzzled tone. 'I thought you told
me that the Duchess of Hamptonshire-'

'That is the Duchess,' said his informant.

'But there is another?'

'No; there is no other.'

'But she is not the Duchess of Hamptonshire-who used to-' Alwyn's tongue
stuck to his mouth, he could get no farther.

'What's the matter?' said his acquaintance. Alwyn had retired, and was
supporting himself against the wall.

The wretched Alwyn murmured something about a stitch in his side from
walking. Then the music struck up, the dance went on, and his neighbour
became so interested in watching the movements of this strange Duchess
through its mazes as to forget Alwyn for a while.

It gave him an opportunity to brace himself up. He was a man who had
suffered, and he could suffer again. 'How came that person to be your
Duchess?' he asked in a firm, distinct voice, when he had attained
complete self-command. 'Where is her other Grace of Hamptonshire? There
certainly was another. I know it.'

'Oh, the previous one! Yes, yes. She ran away years and years ago with
the young curate. Mr. Hill was the young man's name, if I recollect.'

'No! She never did. What do you mean by that?' he said.

'Yes, she certainly ran away. She met the curate in the shrubbery about
a couple of months after her marriage with the Duke. There were folks
who saw the meeting and heard some words of their talk. They arranged to
go, and she sailed from Plymouth with him a day or two afterward.'

'That's not true.'

'Then 'tis the queerest lie ever told by man. Her father believed and
knew to his dying day that she went with him; and so did the Duke, and
everybody about here. Ay, there was a fine upset about it at the time.
The Duke traced her to Plymouth.'

'Traced her to Plymouth?'

'He traced her to Plymouth, and set on his spies; and they found that
she went to the shipping-office, and inquired if Mr. Alwyn Hill had
entered his name as passenger by the Western Glory; and when she found
that he had, she booked herself for the same ship, but not in her real
name. When the vessel had sailed a letter reached the Duke from her,
telling him what she had done. She never came back here again. His Grace
lived by himself a number of years, and married this lady only twelve
months before he died.'

Alwyn was in a state of indescribable bewilderment. But, unmanned as he
was, he called the next day on the, to him, spurious Duchess of
Hamptonshire. At first she was alarmed at his statement, then cold, then
she was won over by his condition to give confidence for confidence. She
showed him a letter which had been found among the papers of the late
Duke, corroborating what Alwyn's informant had detailed. It was from
Emmeline, bearing the postmarked date at which the Western Glory sailed,
and briefly stated that she had emigrated by that ship to America.

Alwyn applied himself body and mind to unravel the remainder of the
mystery. The story repeated to him was always the same: 'She ran away
with the curate.' A strangely circumstantial piece of intelligence was
added to this when he had pushed his inquiries a little further. There
was given him the name of a waterman at Plymouth, who had come forward
at the time that she was missed and sought for by her husband, and had
stated that he put her on board the Western Glory at dusk one evening
before that vessel sailed.

After several days of search about the alleys and quays of Plymouth
Barbican, during which these impossible words, 'She ran off with the
curate,' became branded on his brain, Alwyn found this important
waterman. He was positive as to the truth of his story, still
remembering the incident well, and he described in detail the lady's
dress, as he had long ago described it to her husband, which description
corresponded in every particular with the dress worn by Emmeline on the
evening of their parting.

Before proceeding to the other side of the Atlantic to continue his
inquiries there, the puzzled and distracted Alwyn set himself to
ascertain the address of Captain Wheeler, who had commanded the Western
Glory in the year of Alwyn's voyage out, and immediately wrote a letter
to him on the subject.

The only circumstances which the sailor could recollect or discover from
his papers in connection with such a story were, that a woman bearing
the name which Alwyn had mentioned as fictitious certainly did come
aboard for a voyage he made about that time; that she took a common
berth among the poorest emigrants; that she died on the voyage out, at
about five days' sail from Plymouth; that she seemed a lady in manners
and education. Why she had not applied for a first-class passage, why
she had no trunks, they could not guess, for though she had little money
in her pocket she had that about her which would have fetched it. 'We
buried her at sea,' continued the captain. 'A young parson, one of the
cabin-passengers, read the burial-service over her, I remember well.'

The whole scene and proceedings darted upon Alwyn's recollection in a
moment. It was a fine breezy morning on that long-past voyage out, and
he had been told that they were running at the rate of a hundred and odd
miles a day. The news went round that one of the poor young women in the
other part of the vessel was ill of fever, and delirious. The tidings
caused no little alarm among all the passengers, for the sanitary
conditions of the ship were anything but satisfactory. Shortly after
this the doctor announced that she had died. Then Alwyn had learnt that
she was laid out for burial in great haste, because of the danger that
would have been incurred by delay. And next the funeral scene rose
before him, and the prominent part that he had taken in that solemn
ceremony. The captain had come to him, requesting him to officiate, as
there was no chaplain on board. This he had agreed to do; and as the sun
went down with a blaze in his face he read amidst them all assembled:
'We therefore commit her body to the deep, to be turned into corruption,
looking for the resurrection of the body when the sea shall give up her
dead.'

The captain also forwarded the addresses of the ship's matron and of
other persons who had been engaged on board at the date. To these Alwyn
went in the course of time. A categorical description of the clothes of
the dead truant, the colour of her hair, and other things, extinguished
for ever all hope of a mistake in identity.

At last, then, the course of events had become clear. On that unhappy
evening when he left Emmeline in the shrubbery, forbidding her to follow
him because it would be a sin, she must have disobeyed. She must have
followed at his heels silently through the darkness, like a poor pet
animal that will not be driven back. She could have accumulated nothing
for the journey more than she might have carried in her hand; and thus
poorly provided she must have embarked. Her intention had doubtless been
to make her presence on board known to him as soon as she could muster
courage to do so.

Thus the ten years' chapter of Alwyn Hill's romance wound itself up
under his eyes. That the poor young woman in the steerage had been the
young Duchess of Hamptonshire was never publicly disclosed. Hill had no
longer any reason for remaining in England, and soon after left its
shores with no intention to return. Previous to his departure he
confided his story to an old friend from his native town-grandfather of
the person who now relates it to you.

A few members, including the Bookworm, seemed to be impressed by the
quiet gentleman's tale; but the member we have called the Spark-who, by
the way, was getting somewhat tinged with the light of other days, and
owned to eight-and-thirty-walked daintily about the room instead of
sitting down by the fire with the majority and said that for his part he
preferred something more lively than the last story-something in which
such long-separated lovers were ultimately united. He also liked stories
that were more modern in their date of action than those he had heard
to-day.

Members immediately requested him to give them a specimen, to which the
Spark replied that he didn't mind, as far as that went. And though the
Vice-President, the Man of Family, the Colonel, and others, looked at
their watches, and said they must soon retire to their respective
quarters in the hotel adjoining, they all decided to sit out the Spark's
story.

DAME THE TENTH-THE HONOURABLE LAURA By the Spark

It was a cold and gloomy Christmas Eve. The mass of cloud overhead was
almost impervious to such daylight as still lingered on; the snow lay
several inches deep upon the ground, and the slanting downfall which
still went on threatened to considerably increase its thickness before
the morning. The Prospect Hotel, a building standing near the wild north
coast of Lower Wessex, looked so lonely and so useless at such a time as
this that a passing wayfarer would have been led to forget summer
possibilities, and to wonder at the commercial courage which could
invest capital, on the basis of the popular taste for the picturesque,
in a country subject to such dreary phases. That the district was alive
with visitors in August seemed but a dim tradition in weather so totally
opposed to all that tempts mankind from home. However, there the hotel
stood immovable; and the cliffs, creeks, and headlands which were the
primary attractions of the spot, rising in full view on the opposite
side of the valley, were now but stern angular outlines, while the
townlet in front was tinged over with a grimy dirtiness rather than the
pearly gray that in summer lent such beauty to its appearance.

Within the hotel commanding this outlook the landlord walked idly about
with his hands in his pockets, not in the least expectant of a visitor,
and yet unable to settle down to any occupation which should compensate
in some degree for the losses that winter idleness entailed on his
regular profession. So little, indeed, was anybody expected, that the
coffee-room waiter-a genteel boy, whose plated buttons in summer were as
close together upon the front of his short jacket as peas in a pod-now
appeared in the back yard, metamorphosed into the unrecognizable shape
of a rough country lad in corduroys and hobnailed boots, sweeping the
snow away, and talking the local dialect in all its purity, quite
oblivious of the new polite accent he had learned in the hot weather
from the well-behaved visitors. The front door was closed, and, as if to
express still more fully the sealed and chrysalis state of the
establishment, a sand-bag was placed at the bottom to keep out the
insidious snowdrift, the wind setting in directly from that quarter.

The landlord, entering his own parlour, walked to the large fire which
it was absolutely necessary to keep up for his comfort, no such blaze
burning in the coffee-room or elsewhere, and after giving it a stir
returned to a table in the lobby, whereon lay the visitors' book-now
closed and pushed back against the wall. He carelessly opened it; not a
name had been entered there since the 19th of the previous November, and
that was only the name of a man who had arrived on a tricycle, who,
indeed, had not been asked to enter at all.

While he was engaged thus the evening grew darker; but before it was as
yet too dark to distinguish objects upon the road winding round the back
of the cliffs, the landlord perceived a black spot on the distant white,
which speedily enlarged itself and drew near. The probabilities were
that this vehicle-for a vehicle of some sort it seemed to be-would pass
by and pursue its way to the nearest railway-town as others had done.
But, contrary to the landlord's expectation, as he stood conning it
through the yet unshuttered windows, the solitary object, on reaching
the corner, turned into the hotel-front, and drove up to the door.

It was a conveyance particularly unsuited to such a season and weather,
being nothing more substantial than an open basket-carriage drawn by a
single horse. Within sat two persons, of different sexes, as could soon
be discerned, in spite of their muffled attire. The man held the reins,
and the lady had got some shelter from the storm by clinging close to
his side. The landlord rang the hostler's bell to attract the attention
of the stable-man, for the approach of the visitors had been deadened to
noiselessness by the snow, and when the hostler had come to the horse's
head the gentleman and lady alighted, the landlord meeting them in the
hall.

The male stranger was a foreign-looking individual of about eight-and-
twenty. He was close-shaven, excepting a moustache, his features being
good, and even handsome. The lady, who stood timidly behind him, seemed
to be much younger-possibly not more than eighteen, though it was
difficult to judge either of her age or appearance in her present
wrappings.

The gentleman expressed his wish to stay till the morning, explaining
somewhat unnecessarily, considering that the house was an inn, that they
had been unexpectedly benighted on their drive. Such a welcome being
given them as landlords can give in dull times, the latter ordered fires
in the drawing and coffee-rooms, and went to the boy in the yard, who
soon scrubbed himself up, dragged his disused jacket from its box,
polished the buttons with his sleeve, and appeared civilized in the
hall. The lady was shown into a room where she could take off her snow-
damped garments, which she sent down to be dried, her companion,
meanwhile, putting a couple of sovereigns on the table, as if anxious to
make everything smooth and comfortable at starting, and requesting that
a private sitting-room might be got ready. The landlord assured him that
the best upstairs parlour-usually public-should be kept private this
evening, and sent the maid to light the candles. Dinner was prepared for
them, and, at the gentleman's desire, served in the same apartment;
where, the young lady having joined him, they were left to the rest and
refreshment they seemed to need.

That something was peculiar in the relations of the pair had more than
once struck the landlord, though wherein that peculiarity lay it was
hard to decide. But that his guest was one who paid his way readily had
been proved by his conduct, and dismissing conjectures, he turned to
practical affairs.

About nine o'clock he re-entered the hall, and, everything being done
for the day, again walked up and down, occasionally gazing through the
glass door at the prospect without, to ascertain how the weather was
progressing. Contrary to prognostication, snow had ceased falling, and,
with the rising of the moon, the sky had partially cleared, light
fleeces of cloud drifting across the silvery disk. There was every sign
that a frost was going to set in later on. For these reasons the distant
rising road was even more distinct now between its high banks than it
had been in the declining daylight. Not a track or rut broke the virgin
surface of the white mantle that lay along it, all marks left by the
lately arrived travellers having been speedily obliterated by the flakes
falling at the time.

And now the landlord beheld by the light of the moon a sight very
similar to that he had seen by the light of day. Again a black spot was
advancing down the road that margined the coast. He was in a moment or
two enabled to perceive that the present vehicle moved onward at a more
headlong pace than the little carriage which had preceded it; next, that
it was a brougham drawn by two powerful horses; next, that this
carriage, like the former one, was bound for the hotel-door. This
desirable feature of resemblance caused the landlord to once more
withdraw the sand-bag and advance into the porch.

An old gentleman was the first to alight. He was followed by a young
one, and both unhesitatingly came forward.

'Has a young lady, less than nineteen years of age, recently arrived
here in the company of a man some years her senior?' asked the old
gentleman, in haste. 'A man cleanly shaven for the most part, having the
appearance of an opera-singer, and calling himself Signor Smithozzi?'

'We have had arrivals lately,' said the landlord, in the tone of having
had twenty at least-not caring to acknowledge the attenuated state of
business that afflicted Prospect Hotel in winter.

'And among them can your memory recall two persons such as those I
describe?-the man a sort of baritone?'

'There certainly is or was a young couple staying in the hotel; but I
could not pronounce on the compass of the gentleman's voice.'

'No, no; of course not. I am quite bewildered. They arrived in a basket-
carriage, altogether badly provided?'

'They came in a carriage, I believe, as most of our visitors do.'

'Yes, yes. I must see them at once. Pardon my want of ceremony, and show
us in to where they are.'

'But, sir, you forget. Suppose the lady and gentleman I mean are not the
lady and gentleman you mean? It would be awkward to allow you to rush in
upon them just now while they are at dinner, and might cause me to lose
their future patronage.'

'True, true. They may not be the same persons. My anxiety, I perceive,
makes me rash in my assumptions!'

'Upon the whole, I think they must be the same, Uncle Quantock,' said
the young man, who had not till now spoken. And turning to the landlord:
'You possibly have not such a large assemblage of visitors here, on this
somewhat forbidding evening, that you quite forget how this couple
arrived, and what the lady wore?' His tone of addressing the landlord
had in it a quiet frigidity that was not without irony.

'Ah! what she wore; that's it, James. What did she wear?'

'I don't usually take stock of my guests' clothing,' replied the
landlord drily, for the ready money of the first arrival had decidedly
biassed him in favour of that gentleman's cause. 'You can certainly see
some of it if you want to,' he added carelessly, 'for it is drying by
the kitchen fire.'

Before the words were half out of his mouth the old gentleman had
exclaimed, 'Ah!' and precipitated himself along what seemed to be the
passage to the kitchen; but as this turned out to be only the entrance
to a dark china-closet, he hastily emerged again, after a collision with
the inn-crockery had told him of his mistake.

'I beg your pardon, I'm sure; but if you only knew my feelings (which I
cannot at present explain), you would make allowances. Anything I have
broken I will willingly pay for.'

'Don't mention it, sir,' said the landlord. And showing the way, they
adjourned to the kitchen without further parley. The eldest of the party
instantly seized the lady's cloak, that hung upon a clothes-horse,
exclaiming: 'Ah! yes, James, it is hers. I knew we were on their track.'

'Yes, it is hers,' answered the nephew quietly, for he was much less
excited than his companion.

'Show us their room at once,' said the old man.

'William, have the lady and gentleman in the front sitting-room finished
dining?'

'Yes, sir, long ago,' said the hundred plated buttons.

'Then show up these gentlemen to them at once. You stay here to-night,
gentlemen, I presume? Shall the horses be taken out?'

'Feed the horses and wash their mouths. Whether we stay or not depends
upon circumstances,' said the placid younger man, as he followed his
uncle and the waiter to the staircase.

'I think, Nephew James,' said the former, as he paused with his foot on
the first step-'I think we had better not be announced, but take them by
surprise. She may go throwing herself out of the window, or do some
equally desperate thing!'

'Yes, certainly, we'll enter unannounced.' And he called back the lad
who preceded them.

'I cannot sufficiently thank you, James, for so effectually aiding me in
this pursuit!' exclaimed the old gentleman, taking the other by the
hand. 'My increasing infirmities would have hindered my overtaking her
to-night, had it not been for your timely aid.'

'I am only too happy, uncle, to have been of service to you in this or
any other matter. I only wish I could have accompanied you on a
pleasanter journey. However, it is advisable to go up to them at once,
or they may hear us.' And they softly ascended the stairs.

On the door being opened, a room too large to be comfortable, lit by the
best branch-candlesticks of the hotel, was disclosed, before the fire of
which apartment the truant couple were sitting, very innocently looking
over the hotel scrap-book and the album containing views of the
neighbourhood. No sooner had the old man entered than the young lady-who
now showed herself to be quite as young as described, and remarkably
prepossessing as to features-perceptibly turned pale. When the nephew
entered, she turned still paler, as if she were going to faint. The
young man described as an opera-singer rose with grim civility, and
placed chairs for his visitors.

'Caught you, thank God!' said the old gentleman breathlessly.

'Yes, worse luck, my lord!' murmured Signor Smithozzi, in native London-
English, that distinguished alien having, in fact, first seen the light
in the vicinity of the City Road. 'She would have been mine to-morrow.
And I think that under the peculiar circumstances it would be wiser-
considering how soon the breath of scandal will tarnish a lady's fame-to
let her be mine to-morrow, just the same.'

'Never!' said the old man. 'Here is a lady under age, without
experience-child-like in her maiden innocence and virtue-whom you have
plied by your vile arts, till this morning at dawn-'

'Lord Quantock, were I not bound to respect your gray hairs-'

'Till this morning at dawn you tempted her away from her father's roof.
What blame can attach to her conduct that will not, on a full
explanation of the matter, be readily passed over in her and thrown
entirely on you? Laura, you return at once with me. I should not have
arrived, after all, early enough to deliver you, if it had not been for
the disinterestedness of your cousin, Captain Northbrook, who, on my
discovering your flight this morning, offered with a promptitude for
which I can never sufficiently thank him, to accompany me on my journey,
as the only male relative I have near me. Come, do you hear? Put on your
things; we are off at once.'

'I don't want to go!' pouted the young lady.

'I daresay you don't,' replied her father drily. 'But children never
know what's best for them. So come along, and trust to my opinion.'

Laura was silent, and did not move, the opera gentleman looking
helplessly into the fire, and the lady's cousin sitting meditatively
calm, as the single one of the four whose position enabled him to survey
the whole escapade with the cool criticism of a comparative outsider.

'I say to you, Laura, as the father of a daughter under age, that you
instantly come with me. What? Would you compel me to use physical force
to reclaim you?'

'I don't want to return!' again declared Laura.

'It is your duty to return nevertheless, and at once, I inform you.'

'I don't want to!'

'Now, dear Laura, this is what I say: return with me and your cousin
James quietly, like a good and repentant girl, and nothing will be said.
Nobody knows what has happened as yet, and if we start at once, we shall
be home before it is light to-morrow morning. Come.'

'I am not obliged to come at your bidding, father, and I would rather
not!'

Now James, the cousin, during this dialogue might have been observed to
grow somewhat restless, and even impatient. More than once he had parted
his lips to speak, but second thoughts each time held him back. The
moment had come, however, when he could keep silence no longer.

'Come, madam!' he spoke out, 'this farce with your father has, in my
opinion, gone on long enough. Just make no more ado, and step downstairs
with us.'

She gave herself an intractable little twist, and did not reply.

'By the Lord Harry, Laura, I won't stand this!' he said angrily. 'Come,
get on your things before I come and compel you. There is a kind of
compulsion to which this talk is child's play. Come, madam-instantly, I
say!'

The old nobleman turned to his nephew and said mildly: 'Leave me to
insist, James. It doesn't become you. I can speak to her sharply enough,
if I choose.'

James, however, did not heed his uncle, and went on to the troublesome
young woman: 'You say you don't want to come, indeed! A pretty story to
tell me, that! Come, march out of the room at once, and leave that
hulking fellow for me to deal with afterward. Get on quickly-come!' and
he advanced toward her as if to pull her by the hand.

'Nay, nay,' expostulated Laura's father, much surprised at his nephew's
sudden demeanour. 'You take too much upon yourself. Leave her to me.'

'I won't leave her to you any longer!'

'You have no right, James, to address either me or her in this way; so
just hold your tongue. Come, my dear.'

'I have every right!' insisted James.

'How do you make that out?'

'I have the right of a husband.'

'Whose husband?'

'Hers.'

'What?'

'She's my wife.'

'James!'

'Well, to cut a long story short, I may say that she secretly married
me, in spite of your lordship's prohibition, about three months ago. And
I must add that, though she cooled down rather quickly, everything went
on smoothly enough between us for some time; in spite of the awkwardness
of meeting only by stealth. We were only waiting for a convenient moment
to break the news to you when this idle Adonis turned up, and after
poisoning her mind against me, brought her into this disgrace.'

Here the operatic luminary, who had sat in rather an abstracted and
nerveless attitude till the cousin made his declaration, fired up and
cried: 'I declare before Heaven that till this moment I never knew she
was a wife! I found her in her father's house an unhappy girl-unhappy,
as I believe, because of the loneliness and dreariness of that
establishment, and the want of society, and for nothing else whatever.
What this statement about her being your wife means I am quite at a loss
to understand. Are you indeed married to him, Laura?'

Laura nodded from within her tearful handkerchief. 'It was because of my
anomalous position in being privately married to him,' she sobbed, 'that
I was unhappy at home-and-and I didn't like him so well as I did at
first-and I wished I could get out of the mess I was in! And then I saw
you a few times, and when you said, "We'll run off," I thought I saw a
way out of it all, and then I agreed to come with you-oo-oo!'

'Well! well! well! And is this true?' murmured the bewildered old
nobleman, staring from James to Laura, and from Laura to James, as if he
fancied they might be figments of the imagination. 'Is this, then,
James, the secret of your kindness to your old uncle in helping him to
find his daughter? Good Heavens! What further depths of duplicity are
there left for a man to learn!'

'I have married her, Uncle Quantock, as I said,' answered James coolly.
'The deed is done, and can't be undone by talking here.'

'Where were you married?'

'At St. Mary's, Toneborough.'

'When?'

'On the 29th of September, during the time she was visiting there.'

'Who married you?'

'I don't know. One of the curates-we were quite strangers to the place.
So, instead of my assisting you to recover her, you may as well assist
me.'

'Never! never!' said Lord Quantock. 'Madam, and sir, I beg to tell you
that I wash my hands of the whole affair! If you are man and wife, as it
seems you are, get reconciled as best you may. I have no more to say or
do with either of you. I leave you, Laura, in the hands of your husband,
and much joy may you bring him; though the situation, I own, is not
encouraging.'

Saying this, the indignant speaker pushed back his chair against the
table with such force that the candlesticks rocked on their bases, and
left the room.

Laura's wet eyes roved from one of the young men to the other, who now
stood glaring face to face, and, being much frightened at their aspect,
slipped out of the room after her father. Him, however, she could hear
going out of the front door, and, not knowing where to take shelter, she
crept into the darkness of an adjoining bedroom, and there awaited
events with a palpitating heart.

Meanwhile the two men remaining in the sitting-room drew nearer to each
other, and the opera-singer broke the silence by saying, 'How could you
insult me in the way you did, calling me a fellow, and accusing me of
poisoning her mind toward you, when you knew very well I was as ignorant
of your relation to her as an unborn babe?'

'Oh yes, you were quite ignorant; I can believe that readily,' sneered
Laura's husband.

'I here call Heaven to witness that I never knew!'

'Recitativo-the rhythm excellent, and the tone well sustained. Is it
likely that any man could win the confidence of a young fool her age,
and not get that out of her? Preposterous! Tell it to the most improved
new pit-stalls.'

'Captain Northbrook, your insinuations are as despicable as your
wretched person!' cried the baritone, losing all patience. And springing
forward he slapped the captain in the face with the palm of his hand.

Northbrook flinched but slightly, and calmly using his handkerchief to
learn if his nose was bleeding, said, 'I quite expected this insult, so
I came prepared.' And he drew forth from a black valise which he carried
in his hand a small case of pistols.

The baritone started at the unexpected sight, but recovering from his
surprise said, 'Very well, as you will,' though perhaps his tone showed
a slight want of confidence.

'Now,' continued the husband, quite confidingly, 'we want no parade, no
nonsense, you know. Therefore we'll dispense with seconds?'

The signor slightly nodded.

'Do you know this part of the country well?' Cousin James went on, in
the same cool and still manner. 'If you don't, I do. Quite at the bottom
of the rocks out there, just beyond the stream which falls over them to
the shore, is a smooth sandy space, not so much shut in as to be out of
the moonlight; and the way down to it from this side is over steps cut
in the cliff; and we can find our way down without trouble. We-we two-
will find our way down; but only one of us will find his way up, you
understand?'

'Quite.'

'Then suppose we start; the sooner it is over the better. We can order
supper before we go out-supper for two; for though we are three at
present-'

'Three?'

'Yes; you and I and she-'

'Oh yes.'

'-We shall be only two by and by; so that, as I say, we will order
supper for two; for the lady and a gentleman. Whichever comes back alive
will tap at her door, and call her in to share the repast with him-she's
not off the premises. But we must not alarm her now; and above all
things we must not let the inn-people see us go out; it would look so
odd for two to go out, and only one come in. Ha! ha!'

'Ha! ha! exactly.'

'Are you ready?'

'Oh-quite.'

'Then I'll lead the way.'

He went softly to the door and downstairs, ordering supper to be ready
in an hour, as he had said; then making a feint of returning to the room
again, he beckoned to the singer, and together they slipped out of the
house by a side door.

The sky was now quite clear, and the wheelmarks of the brougham which
had borne away Laura's father, Lord Quantock, remained distinctly
visible. Soon the verge of the down was reached, the captain leading the
way, and the baritone following silently, casting furtive glances at his
companion, and beyond him at the scene ahead. In due course they arrived
at the chasm in the cliff which formed the waterfall. The outlook here
was wild and picturesque in the extreme, and fully justified the many
praises, paintings, and photographic views to which the spot had given
birth. What in summer was charmingly green and gray, was now rendered
weird and fantastic by the snow.

From their feet the cascade plunged downward almost vertically to a
depth of eighty or a hundred feet before finally losing itself in the
sand, and though the stream was but small, its impact upon jutting rocks
in its descent divided it into a hundred spirts and splashes that sent
up a mist into the upper air. A few marginal drippings had been frozen
into icicles, but the centre flowed on unimpeded.

The operatic artist looked down as he halted, but his thoughts were
plainly not of the beauty of the scene. His companion with the pistols
was immediately in front of him, and there was no handrail on the side
of the path toward the chasm. Obeying a quick impulse, he stretched out
his arm, and with a superhuman thrust sent Laura's husband reeling over.
A whirling human shape, diminishing downward in the moon's rays farther
and farther toward invisibility, a smack-smack upon the projecting
ledges of rock-at first louder and heavier than that of the brook, and
then scarcely to be distinguished from it-then a cessation, then the
splashing of the stream as before, and the accompanying murmur of the
sea, were all the incidents that disturbed the customary flow of the
little waterfall.

The singer waited in a fixed attitude for a few minutes, then turning,
he rapidly retraced his steps over the intervening upland toward the
road, and in less than a quarter of an hour was at the door of the
hotel. Slipping quietly in as the clock struck ten, he said to the
landlord, over the bar hatchway-

'The bill as soon as you can let me have it, including charges for the
supper that was ordered, though we cannot stay to eat it, I am sorry to
say.' He added with forced gaiety, 'The lady's father and cousin have
thought better of intercepting the marriage, and after quarrelling with
each other have gone home independently.'

'Well done, sir!' said the landlord, who still sided with this customer
in preference to those who had given trouble and barely paid for baiting
the horses. '"Love will find out the way!" as the saying is. Wish you
joy, sir!'

Signor Smithozzi went upstairs, and on entering the sitting-room found
that Laura had crept out from the dark adjoining chamber in his absence.
She looked up at him with eyes red from weeping, and with symptoms of
alarm.

'What is it?-where is he?' she said apprehensively.

'Captain Northbrook has gone back. He says he will have no more to do
with you.'

'And I am quite abandoned by them!-and they'll forget me, and nobody
care about me any more!' She began to cry afresh.

'But it is the luckiest thing that could have happened. All is just as
it was before they came disturbing us. But, Laura, you ought to have
told me about that private marriage, though it is all the same now; it
will be dissolved, of course. You are a wid-virtually a widow.'

'It is no use to reproach me for what is past. What am I to do now?'

'We go at once to Cliff-Martin. The horse has rested thoroughly these
last three hours, and he will have no difficulty in doing an additional
half-dozen miles. We shall be there before twelve, and there are late
taverns in the place, no doubt. There we'll sell both horse and carriage
to-morrow morning; and go by the coach to Downstaple. Once in the train
we are safe.'

'I agree to anything,' she said listlessly.

In about ten minutes the horse was put in, the bill paid, the lady's
dried wraps put round her, and the journey resumed.

When about a mile on their way, they saw a glimmering light in advance
of them. 'I wonder what that is?' said the baritone, whose manner had
latterly become nervous, every sound and sight causing him to turn his
head.

'It is only a turnpike,' said she. 'That light is the lamp kept burning
over the door.'

'Of course, of course, dearest. How stupid I am!'

On reaching the gate they perceived that a man on foot had approached
it, apparently by some more direct path than the roadway they pursued,
and was, at the moment they drew up, standing in conversation with the
gatekeeper.

'It is quite impossible that he could fall over the cliff by accident or
the will of God on such a light night as this,' the pedestrian was
saying. 'These two children I tell you of saw two men go along the path
toward the waterfall, and ten minutes later only one of 'em came back,
walking fast, like a man who wanted to get out of the way because he had
done something queer. There is no manner of doubt that he pushed the
other man over, and, mark me, it will soon cause a hue and cry for that
man.'

The candle shone in the face of the Signor and showed that there had
arisen upon it a film of ghastliness. Laura, glancing toward him for a
few moments observed it, till, the gatekeeper having mechanically swung
open the gate, her companion drove through, and they were soon again
enveloped in the white silence.

Her conductor had said to Laura, just before, that he meant to inquire
the way at this turnpike; but he had certainly not done so.

As soon as they had gone a little farther the omission, intentional or
not, began to cause them some trouble. Beyond the secluded district
which they now traversed ran the more frequented road, where progress
would be easy, the snow being probably already beaten there to some
extent by traffic; but they had not yet reached it, and having no one to
guide them their journey began to appear less feasible than it had done
before starting. When the little lane which they had entered ascended
another hill, and seemed to wind round in a direction contrary to the
expected route to Cliff-Martin, the question grew serious. Ever since
overhearing the conversation at the turnpike, Laura had maintained a
perfect silence, and had even shrunk somewhat away from the side of her
lover.

'Why don't you talk, Laura,' he said with forced buoyancy, 'and suggest
the way we should go?'

'Oh yes, I will,' she responded, a curious fearfulness being audible in
her voice.

After this she uttered a few occasional sentences which seemed to
persuade him that she suspected nothing. At last he drew rein, and the
weary horse stood still.

'We are in a fix,' he said.

She answered eagerly: 'I'll hold the reins while you run forward to the
top of the ridge, and see if the road takes a favourable turn beyond. It
would give the horse a few minutes' rest, and if you find out no change
in the direction, we will retrace this lane, and take the other
turning.'

The expedient seemed a good one in the circumstances, especially when
recommended by the singular eagerness of her voice; and placing the
reins in her hands-a quite unnecessary precaution, considering the state
of their hack-he stepped out and went forward through the snow till she
could see no more of him.

No sooner was he gone than Laura, with a rapidity which contrasted
strangely with her previous stillness, made fast the reins to the corner
of the phaeton, and slipping out on the opposite side, ran back with all
her might down the hill, till, coming to an opening in the fence, she
scrambled through it, and plunged into the copse which bordered this
portion of the lane. Here she stood in hiding under one of the large
bushes, clinging so closely to its umbrage as to seem but a portion of
its mass, and listening intently for the faintest sound of pursuit. But
nothing disturbed the stillness save the occasional slipping of gathered
snow from the boughs, or the rustle of some wild animal over the crisp
flake-bespattered herbage. At length, apparently convinced that her
former companion was either unable to find her, or not anxious to do so,
in the present strange state of affairs, she crept out from the bushes,
and in less than an hour found herself again approaching the door of the
Prospect Hotel.

As she drew near, Laura could see that, far from being wrapped in
darkness, as she might have expected, there were ample signs that all
the tenants were on the alert, lights moving about the open space in
front. Satisfaction was expressed in her face when she discerned that no
reappearance of her baritone and his pony-carriage was causing this
sensation; but it speedily gave way to grief and dismay when she saw by
the lights the form of a man borne on a stretcher by two others into the
porch of the hotel.

'I have caused all this,' she murmured between her quivering lips. 'He
has murdered him!' Running forward to the door, she hastily asked of the
first person she met if the man on the stretcher was dead.

'No, miss,' said the labourer addressed, eyeing her up and down as an
unexpected apparition. 'He is still alive, they say, but not sensible.
He either fell or was pushed over the waterfall; 'tis thoughted he was
pushed. He is the gentleman who came here just now with the old lord,
and went out afterward (as is thoughted) with a stranger who had come a
little earlier. Anyhow, that's as I had it.'

Laura entered the house, and acknowledging without the least reserve
that she was the injured man's wife, had soon installed herself as head
nurse by the bed on which he lay. When the two surgeons who had been
sent for arrived, she learned from them that his wounds were so severe
as to leave but a slender hope of recovery, it being little short of
miraculous that he was not killed on the spot, which his enemy had
evidently reckoned to be the case. She knew who that enemy was, and
shuddered.

Laura watched all night, but her husband knew nothing of her presence.
During the next day he slightly recognized her, and in the evening was
able to speak. He informed the surgeons that, as was surmised, he had
been pushed over the cascade by Signor Smithozzi; but he communicated
nothing to her who nursed him, not even replying to her remarks; he
nodded courteously at any act of attention she rendered, and that was
all.

In a day or two it was declared that everything favoured his recovery,
notwithstanding the severity of his injuries. Full search was made for
Smithozzi, but as yet there was no intelligence of his whereabouts,
though the repentant Laura communicated all she knew. As far as could be
judged, he had come back to the carriage after searching out the way,
and finding the young lady missing, had looked about for her till he was
tired; then had driven on to Cliff-Martin, sold the horse and carriage
next morning, and disappeared, probably by one of the departing coaches
which ran thence to the nearest station, the only difference from his
original programme being that he had gone alone.

During the days and weeks of that long and tedious recovery, Laura
watched by her husband's bedside with a zeal and assiduity which would
have considerably extenuated any fault save one of such magnitude as
hers. That her husband did not forgive her was soon obvious. Nothing
that she could do in the way of smoothing pillows, easing his position,
shifting bandages, or administering draughts, could win from him more
than a few measured words of thankfulness, such as he would probably
have uttered to any other woman on earth who had performed these
particular services for him.

'Dear, dear James,' she said one day, bending her face upon the bed in
an excess of emotion. 'How you have suffered! It has been too cruel. I
am more glad you are getting better than I can say. I have prayed for
it-and I am sorry for what I have done; I am innocent of the worst, and-
I hope you will not think me so very bad, James!'

'Oh no. On the contrary, I shall think you very good-as a nurse,' he
answered, the caustic severity of his tone being apparent through its
weakness.

Laura let fall two or three silent tears, and said no more that day.

Somehow or other Signor Smithozzi seemed to be making good his escape.
It transpired that he had not taken a passage in either of the suspected
coaches, though he had certainly got out of the county; altogether, the
chance of finding him was problematical.

Not only did Captain Northbrook survive his injuries, but it soon
appeared that in the course of a few weeks he would find himself little
if any the worse for the catastrophe. It could also be seen that Laura,
while secretly hoping for her husband's forgiveness for a piece of folly
of which she saw the enormity more clearly every day, was in great doubt
as to what her future relations with him would be. Moreover, to add to
the complication, whilst she, as a runaway wife, was unforgiven by her
husband, she and her husband, as a runaway couple, were unforgiven by
her father, who had never once communicated with either of them since
his departure from the inn. But her immediate anxiety was to win the
pardon of her husband, who possibly might be bearing in mind, as he lay
upon his couch, the familiar words of Brabantio, 'She has deceived her
father, and may thee.'

Matters went on thus till Captain Northbrook was able to walk about. He
then removed with his wife to quiet apartments on the south coast, and
here his recovery was rapid. Walking up the cliffs one day, supporting
him by her arm as usual, she said to him, simply, 'James, if I go on as
I am going now, and always attend to your smallest want, and never think
of anything but devotion to you, will you-try to like me a little?'

'It is a thing I must carefully consider,' he said, with the same gloomy
dryness which characterized all his words to her now. 'When I have
considered, I will tell you.'

He did not tell her that evening, though she lingered long at her
routine work of making his bedroom comfortable, putting the light so
that it would not shine into his eyes, seeing him fall asleep, and then
retiring noiselessly to her own chamber. When they met in the morning at
breakfast, and she had asked him as usual how he had passed the night,
she added timidly, in the silence which followed his reply, 'Have you
considered?'

'No, I have not considered sufficiently to give you an answer.'

Laura sighed, but to no purpose; and the day wore on with intense
heaviness to her, and the customary modicum of strength gained to him.

The next morning she put the same question, and looked up despairingly
in his face, as though her whole life hung upon his reply.

'Yes, I have considered,' he said.

'Ah!'

'We must part.'

'O James!'

'I cannot forgive you; no man would. Enough is settled upon you to keep
you in comfort, whatever your father may do. I shall sell out, and
disappear from this hemisphere.'

'You have absolutely decided?' she asked miserably. 'I have nobody now
to c-c-care for-'

'I have absolutely decided,' he shortly returned. 'We had better part
here. You will go back to your father. There is no reason why I should
accompany you, since my presence would only stand in the way of the
forgiveness he will probably grant you if you appear before him alone.
We will say farewell to each other in three days from this time. I have
calculated on being ready to go on that day.'

Bowed down with trouble, she withdrew to her room, and the three days
were passed by her husband in writing letters and attending to other
business-matters, saying hardly a word to her the while. The morning of
departure came; but before the horses had been put in to take the
severed twain in different directions, out of sight of each other,
possibly for ever, the postman arrived with the morning letters.

There was one for the captain; none for her-there were never any for
her. However, on this occasion something was enclosed for her in his,
which he handed her. She read it and looked up helpless.

'My dear father-is dead!' she said. In a few moments she added, in a
whisper, 'I must go to the Manor to bury him . . . Will you go with me,
James?'

He musingly looked out of the window. 'I suppose it is an awkward and
melancholy undertaking for a woman alone,' he said coldly. 'Well, well-
my poor uncle!-Yes, I'll go with you, and see you through the business.'

So they went off together instead of asunder, as planned. It is
unnecessary to record the details of the journey, or of the sad week
which followed it at her father's house. Lord Quantock's seat was a fine
old mansion standing in its own park, and there were plenty of
opportunities for husband and wife either to avoid each other, or to get
reconciled if they were so minded, which one of them was at least.
Captain Northbrook was not present at the reading of the will. She came
to him afterward, and found him packing up his papers, intending to
start next morning, now that he had seen her through the turmoil
occasioned by her father's death.

'He has left me everything that he could!' she said to her husband.
'James, will you forgive me now, and stay?'

'I cannot stay.'

'Why not?'

'I cannot stay,' he repeated.

'But why?'

'I don't like you.'

He acted up to his word. When she came downstairs the next morning she
was told that he had gone.

Laura bore her double bereavement as best she could. The vast mansion in
which she had hitherto lived, with all its historic contents, had gone
to her father's successor in the title; but her own was no unhandsome
one. Around lay the undulating park, studded with trees a dozen times
her own age; beyond it, the wood; beyond the wood, the farms. All this
fair and quiet scene was hers. She nevertheless remained a lonely,
repentant, depressed being, who would have given the greater part of
everything she possessed to ensure the presence and affection of that
husband whose very austerity and phlegm-qualities that had formerly led
to the alienation between them-seemed now to be adorable features in his
character.

She hoped and hoped again, but all to no purpose. Captain Northbrook did
not alter his mind and return. He was quite a different sort of man from
one who altered his mind; that she was at last despairingly forced to
admit. And then she left off hoping, and settled down to a mechanical
routine of existence which in some measure dulled her grief; but at the
expense of all her natural animation and the sprightly wilfulness which
had once charmed those who knew her, though it was perhaps all the while
a factor in the production of her unhappiness.

To say that her beauty quite departed as the years rolled on would be to
overstate the truth. Time is not a merciful master, as we all know, and
he was not likely to act exceptionally in the case of a woman who had
mental troubles to bear in addition to the ordinary weight of years. Be
this as it may, eleven other winters came and went, and Laura Northbrook
remained the lonely mistress of house and lands without once hearing of
her husband. Every probability seemed to favour the assumption that he
had died in some foreign land; and offers for her hand were not few as
the probability verged on certainty with the long lapse of time. But the
idea of remarriage seemed never to have entered her head for a moment.
Whether she continued to hope even now for his return could not be
distinctly ascertained; at all events she lived a life unmodified in the
slightest degree from that of the first six months of his absence.

This twelfth year of Laura's loneliness, and the thirtieth of her life
drew on apace, and the season approached that had seen the unhappy
adventure for which she so long had suffered. Christmas promised to be
rather wet than cold, and the trees on the outskirts of Laura's estate
dripped monotonously from day to day upon the turnpike-road which
bordered them. On an afternoon in this week between three and four
o'clock a hired fly might have been seen driving along the highway at
this point, and on reaching the top of the hill it stopped. A gentleman
of middle age alighted from the vehicle.

'You need drive no farther,' he said to the coachman. 'The rain seems to
have nearly ceased. I'll stroll a little way, and return on foot to the
inn by dinner-time.'

The flyman touched his hat, turned the horse, and drove back as
directed. When he was out of sight, the gentleman walked on, but he had
not gone far before the rain again came down pitilessly, though of this
the pedestrian took little heed, going leisurely onward till he reached
Laura's park gate, which he passed through. The clouds were thick and
the days were short, so that by the time he stood in front of the
mansion it was dark. In addition to this his appearance, which on
alighting from the carriage had been untarnished, partook now of the
character of a drenched wayfarer not too well blessed with this world's
goods. He halted for no more than a moment at the front entrance, and
going round to the servants' quarter, as if he had a preconceived
purpose in so doing, there rang the bell. When a page came to him he
inquired if they would kindly allow him to dry himself by the kitchen
fire.

The page retired, and after a murmured colloquy returned with the cook,
who informed the wet and muddy man that though it was not her custom to
admit strangers, she should have no particular objection to his drying
himself; the night being so damp and gloomy. Therefore the wayfarer
entered and sat down by the fire.

'The owner of this house is a very rich gentleman, no doubt?' he asked,
as he watched the meat turning on the spit.

''Tis not a gentleman, but a lady,' said the cook.

'A widow, I presume?'

'A sort of widow. Poor soul, her husband is gone abroad, and has never
been heard of for many years.'

'She sees plenty of company, no doubt, to make up for his absence?'

'No, indeed-hardly a soul. Service here is as bad as being in a
nunnery.'

In short, the wayfarer, who had at first been so coldly received,
contrived by his frank and engaging manner to draw the ladies of the
kitchen into a most confidential conversation, in which Laura's history
was minutely detailed, from the day of her husband's departure to the
present. The salient feature in all their discourse was her unflagging
devotion to his memory.

Having apparently learned all that he wanted to know-among other things
that she was at this moment, as always, alone-the traveller said he was
quite dry; and thanking the servants for their kindness, departed as he
had come. On emerging into the darkness he did not, however, go down the
avenue by which he had arrived. He simply walked round to the front
door. There he rang, and the door was opened to him by a man-servant
whom he had not seen during his sojourn at the other end of the house.

In answer to the servant's inquiry for his name, he said ceremoniously,
'Will you tell The Honourable Mrs. Northbrook that the man she nursed
many years ago, after a frightful accident, has called to thank her?'

The footman retreated, and it was rather a long time before any further
signs of attention were apparent. Then he was shown into the drawing-
room, and the door closed behind him.

On the couch was Laura, trembling and pale. She parted her lips and held
out her hands to him, but could not speak. But he did not require
speech, and in a moment they were in each other's arms.

Strange news circulated through that mansion and the neighbouring town
on the next and following days. But the world has a way of getting used
to things, and the intelligence of the return of The Honourable Mrs.
Northbrook's long-absent husband was soon received with comparative
calm.

A few days more brought Christmas, and the forlorn home of Laura
Northbrook blazed from basement to attic with light and cheerfulness.
Not that the house was overcrowded with visitors, but many were present,
and the apathy of a dozen years came at length to an end. The animation
which set in thus at the close of the old year did not diminish on the
arrival of the new; and by the time its twelve months had likewise run
the course of its predecessors, a son had been added to the dwindled
line of the Northbrook family.

At the conclusion of this narrative the Spark was thanked, with a manner
of some surprise, for nobody had credited him with a taste for tale-
telling. Though it had been resolved that this story should be the last,
a few of the weather-bound listeners were for sitting on into the small
hours over their pipes and glasses, and raking up yet more episodes of
family history. But the majority murmured reasons for soon getting to
their lodgings.

It was quite dark without, except in the immediate neighbourhood of the
feeble street-lamps, and before a few shop-windows which had been
hardily kept open in spite of the obvious unlikelihood of any chance
customer traversing the muddy thoroughfares at that hour.

By one, by two, and by three the benighted members of the Field-Club
rose from their seats, shook hands, made appointments, and dropped away
to their respective quarters, free or hired, hoping for a fair morrow.
It would probably be not until the next summer meeting, months away in
the future, that the easy intercourse which now existed between them all
would repeat itself. The crimson maltster, for instance, knew that on
the following market-day his friends the President, the Rural Dean, and
the bookworm would pass him in the street, if they met him, with the
barest nod of civility, the President and the Colonel for social
reasons, the bookworm for intellectual reasons, and the Rural Dean for
moral ones, the latter being a staunch teetotaller, dead against John
Barleycorn. The sentimental member knew that when, on his rambles, he
met his friend the bookworm with a pocket-copy of something or other
under his nose, the latter would not love his companionship as he had
done to-day; and the President, the aristocrat, and the farmer knew that
affairs political, sporting, domestic, or agricultural would exclude for
a long time all rumination on the characters of dames gone to dust for
scores of years, however beautiful and noble they may have been in their
day.

The last member at length departed, the attendant at the museum lowered
the fire, the curator locked up the rooms, and soon there was only a
single pirouetting flame on the top of a single coal to make the bones
of the ichthyosaurus seem to leap, the stuffed birds to wink, and to
draw a smile from the varnished skulls of Vespasian's soldiery. draw a
smile from the varnished skulls of Vespasian's soldiery.

WESSEX TALES

By Thomas Hardy

CONTENTS

PREFACE

AN IMAGINATIVE WOMAN

THE THREE STRANGERS

THE WITHERED ARM

CHAPTER I-A LORN MILKMAID

CHAPTER II-THE YOUNG WIFE

CHAPTER III-A VISION

CHAPTER IV-A SUGGESTION

CHAPTER V-CONJUROR TRENDLE

CHAPTER VI-A SECOND ATTEMPT

CHAPTER VII-A RIDE

VIII-A WATER-SIDE HERMIT

IX-A RENCOUNTER

FELLOW-TOWNSMEN

II

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

INTERLOPERS AT THE KNAP

II

IV

V

THE DISTRACTED PREACHER

I-HOW HIS COLD WAS CURED

II-HOW HE SAW TWO OTHER MEN

III-THE MYSTERIOUS GREATCOAT

IV-AT THE TIME OF THE NEW MOON

V-HOW THEY WENT TO LULSTEAD COVE

VI-THE GREAT SEARCH AT NETHER-MOYNTON

VII-THE WALK TO WARM'ELL CROSS AND AFTERWARDS

PREFACE

An apology is perhaps needed for the neglect of contrast which is shown
by presenting two consecutive stories of hangmen in such a small
collection as the following. But in the neighbourhood of county-towns
tales of executions used to form a large proportion of the local
traditions; and though never personally acquainted with any chief
operator at such scenes, the writer of these pages had as a boy the
privilege of being on speaking terms with a man who applied for the
office, and who sank into an incurable melancholy because he failed to
get it, some slight mitigation of his grief being to dwell upon striking
episodes in the lives of those happier ones who had held it with success
and renown. His tale of disappointment used to cause some wonder why his
ambition should have taken such an unfortunate form, but its nobleness
was never questioned. In those days, too, there was still living an old
woman who, for the cure of some eating disease, had been taken in her
youth to have her 'blood turned' by a convict's corpse, in the manner
described in 'The Withered Arm.'

Since writing this story some years ago I have been reminded by an aged
friend who knew 'Rhoda Brook' that, in relating her dream, my
forgetfulness has weakened the facts our of which the tale grew. In
reality it was while lying down on a hot afternoon that the incubus
oppressed her and she flung it off, with the results upon the body of
the original as described. To my mind the occurrence of such a vision in
the daytime is more impressive than if it had happened in a midnight
dream. Readers are therefore asked to correct the misrelation, which
affords an instance of how our imperfect memories insensibly formalize
the fresh originality of living fact-from whose shape they slowly
depart, as machine-made castings depart by degrees from the sharp hand-
work of the mould.

Among the many devices for concealing smuggled goods in caves and pits
of the earth, that of planting an apple-tree in a tray or box which was
placed over the mouth of the pit is, I believe, unique, and it is
detailed in one of the tales precisely as described by an old carrier of
'tubs'-a man who was afterwards in my father's employ for over thirty
years. I never gathered from his reminiscences what means were adopted
for lifting the tree, which, with its roots, earth, and receptacle, must
have been of considerable weight. There is no doubt, however, that the
thing was done through many years. My informant often spoke, too, of the
horribly suffocating sensation produced by the pair of spirit-tubs slung
upon the chest and back, after stumbling with the burden of them for
several miles inland over a rough country and in darkness. He said that
though years of his youth and young manhood were spent in this irregular
business, his profits from the same, taken all together, did not average
the wages he might have earned in a steady employment, whilst the
fatigues and risks were excessive.

I may add that the first story in the series turns upon a physical
possibility that may attach to women of imaginative temperament, and
that is well supported by the experiences of medical men and other
observers of such manifestations.

T. H. April 1896.

AN IMAGINATIVE WOMAN

When William Marchmill had finished his inquiries for lodgings at a
well-known watering-place in Upper Wessex, he returned to the hotel to
find his wife. She, with the children, had rambled along the shore, and
Marchmill followed in the direction indicated by the military-looking
hall-porter

'By Jove, how far you've gone! I am quite out of breath,' Marchmill
said, rather impatiently, when he came up with his wife, who was reading
as she walked, the three children being considerably further ahead with
the nurse.

Mrs. Marchmill started out of the reverie into which the book had thrown
her. 'Yes,' she said, 'you've been such a long time. I was tired of
staying in that dreary hotel. But I am sorry if you have wanted me,
Will?'

'Well, I have had trouble to suit myself. When you see the airy and
comfortable rooms heard of, you find they are stuffy and uncomfortable.
Will you come and see if what I've fixed on will do? There is not much
room, I am afraid; hut I can light on nothing better. The town is rather
full.'

The pair left the children and nurse to continue their ramble, and went
back together.

In age well-balanced, in personal appearance fairly matched, and in
domestic requirements conformable, in temper this couple differed,
though even here they did not often clash, he being equable, if not
lymphatic, and she decidedly nervous and sanguine. It was to their
tastes and fancies, those smallest, greatest particulars, that no common
denominator could be applied. Marchmill considered his wife's likes and
inclinations somewhat silly; she considered his sordid and material. The
husband's business was that of a gunmaker in a thriving city northwards,
and his soul was in that business always; the lady was best
characterized by that superannuated phrase of elegance 'a votary of the
muse.' An impressionable, palpitating creature was Ella, shrinking
humanely from detailed knowledge of her husband's trade whenever she
reflected that everything he manufactured had for its purpose the
destruction of life. She could only recover her equanimity by assuring
herself that some, at least, of his weapons were sooner or later used
for the extermination of horrid vermin and animals almost as cruel to
their inferiors in species as human beings were to theirs.

She had never antecedently regarded this occupation of his as any
objection to having him for a husband. Indeed, the necessity of getting
life-leased at all cost, a cardinal virtue which all good mothers teach,
kept her from thinking of it at all till she had closed with William,
had passed the honeymoon, and reached the reflecting stage. Then, like a
person who has stumbled upon some object in the dark, she wondered what
she had got; mentally walked round it, estimated it; whether it were
rare or common; contained gold, silver, or lead; were a clog or a
pedestal, everything to her or nothing.

She came to some vague conclusions, and since then had kept her heart
alive by pitying her proprietor's obtuseness and want of refinement,
pitying herself, and letting off her delicate and ethereal emotions in
imaginative occupations, day-dreams, and night-sighs, which perhaps
would not much have disturbed William if he had known of them.

Her figure was small, elegant, and slight in build, tripping, or rather
bounding, in movement. She was dark-eyed, and had that marvellously
bright and liquid sparkle in each pupil which characterizes persons of
Ella's cast of soul, and is too often a cause of heartache to the
possessor's male friends, ultimately sometimes to herself. Her husband
was a tall, long-featured man, with a brown beard; he had a pondering
regard; and was, it must be added, usually kind and tolerant to her. He
spoke in squarely shaped sentences, and was supremely satisfied with a
condition of sublunary things which made weapons a necessity.

Husband and wife walked till they had reached the house they were in
search of, which stood in a terrace facing the sea, and was fronted by a
small garden of wind-proof and salt-proof evergreens, stone steps
leading up to the porch. It had its number in the row, but, being rather
larger than the rest, was in addition sedulously distinguished as Coburg
House by its landlady, though everybody else called it 'Thirteen, New
Parade.' The spot was bright and lively now; but in winter it became
necessary to place sandbags against the door, and to stuff up the
keyhole against the wind and rain, which had worn the paint so thin that
the priming and knotting showed through.

The householder, who bad been watching for the gentleman's return, met
them in the passage, and showed the rooms. She informed them that she
was a professional man's widow, left in needy circumstances by the
rather sudden death of her husband, and she spoke anxiously of the
conveniences of the establishment.

Mrs. Marchmill said that she liked the situation and the house; but, it
being small, there would not be accommodation enough, unless she could
have all the rooms.

The landlady mused with an air of disappointment. She wanted the
visitors to be her tenants very badly, she said, with obvious honesty.
But unfortunately two of the rooms were occupied permanently by a
bachelor gentleman. He did not pay season prices, it was true; but as he
kept on his apartments all the year round, and was an extremely nice and
interesting young man, who gave no trouble, she did not like to turn him
out for a month's 'let,' even at a high figure. 'Perhaps, however,' she
added, 'he might offer to go for a time.'

They would not hear of this, and went back to the hotel, intending to
proceed to the agent's to inquire further. Hardly had they sat down to
tea when the landlady called. Her gentleman, she said, had been so
obliging as to offer to give up his rooms for three or four weeks rather
than drive the new-comers away.

'It is very kind, but we won't inconvenience him in that way,' said the
Marchmills.

'O, it won't inconvenience him, I assure you!' said the landlady
eloquently. 'You see, he's a different sort of young man from most-
dreamy, solitary, rather melancholy-and he cares more to be here when
the south-westerly gales are beating against the door, and the sea
washes over the Parade, and there's not a soul in the place, than he
does now in the season. He'd just as soon be where, in fact, he's going
temporarily, to a little cottage on the Island opposite, for a change.'
She hoped therefore that they would come.

The Marchmill family accordingly took possession of the house next day,
and it seemed to suit them very well. After luncheon Mr. Marchmill
strolled out towards the pier, and Mrs. Marchmill, having despatched the
children to their outdoor amusements on the sands, settled herself in
more completely, examining this and that article, and testing the
reflecting powers of the mirror in the wardrobe door.

In the small back sitting-room, which had been the young bachelor's, she
found furniture of a more personal nature than in the rest. Shabby
books, of correct rather than rare editions, were piled up in a queerly
reserved manner in corners, as if the previous occupant had not
conceived the possibility that any incoming person of the season's
bringing could care to look inside them. The landlady hovered on the
threshold to rectify anything that Mrs. Marchmill might not find to her
satisfaction.

'I'll make this my own little room,' said the latter, 'because the books
are here. By the way, the person who has left seems to have a good many.
He won't mind my reading some of them, Mrs. Hooper, I hope?'

'O dear no, ma'am. Yes, he has a good many. You see, he is in the
literary line himself somewhat. He is a poet-yes, really a poet-and he
has a little income of his own, which is enough to write verses on, but
not enough for cutting a figure, even if he cared to.'

'A poet! O, I did not know that.'

Mrs. Marchmill opened one of the books, and saw the owner's name written
on the title-page. 'Dear me!' she continued; 'I know his name very well-
Robert Trewe-of course I do; and his writings! And it is his rooms we
have taken, and him we have turned out of his home?'

Ella Marchmill, sitting down alone a few minutes later, thought with
interested surprise of Robert Trewe. Her own latter history will best
explain that interest. Herself the only daughter of a struggling man of
letters, she had during the last year or two taken to writing poems, in
an endeavour to find a congenial channel in which to let flow her
painfully embayed emotions, whose former limpidity and sparkle seemed
departing in the stagnation caused by the routine of a practical
household and the gloom of bearing children to a commonplace father.
These poems, subscribed with a masculine pseudonym, had appeared in
various obscure magazines, and in two cases in rather prominent ones. In
the second of the latter the page which bore her effusion at the bottom,
in smallish print, bore at the top, in large print, a few verses on the
same subject by this very man, Robert Trewe. Both of them had, in fact,
been struck by a tragic incident reported in the daily papers, and had
used it simultaneously as an inspiration, the editor remarking in a note
upon the coincidence, and that the excellence of both poems prompted him
to give them together.

After that event Ella, otherwise 'John Ivy,' had watched with much
attention the appearance anywhere in print of verse bearing the
signature of Robert Trewe, who, with a man's unsusceptibility on the
question of sex, had never once thought of passing himself off as a
woman. To be sure, Mrs. Marchmill had satisfied herself with a sort of
reason for doing the contrary in her case; that nobody might believe in
her inspiration if they found that the sentiments came from a pushing
tradesman's wife, from the mother of three children by a matter-of-fact
small-arms manufacturer.

Trewe's verse contrasted with that of the rank and file of recent minor
poets in being impassioned rather than ingenious, luxuriant rather than
finished. Neither symboliste nor d�cadent, he was a pessimist in so far
as that character applies to a man who looks at the worst contingencies
as well as the best in the human condition. Being little attracted by
excellences of form and rhythm apart from content, he sometimes, when
feeling outran his artistic speed, perpetrated sonnets in the loosely
rhymed Elizabethan fashion, which every right-minded reviewer said he
ought not to have done.

With sad and hopeless envy, Ella Marchmill had often and often scanned
the rival poet's work, so much stronger as it always was than her own
feeble lines. She had imitated him, and her inability to touch his level
would send her into fits of despondency. Months passed away thus, till
she observed from the publishers' list that Trewe had collected his
fugitive pieces into a volume, which was duly issued, and was much or
little praised according to chance, and had a sale quite sufficient to
pay for the printing.

This step onward had suggested to John Ivy the idea of collecting her
pieces also, or at any rate of making up a book of her rhymes by adding
many in manuscript to the few that had seen the light, for she had been
able to get no great number into print. A ruinous charge was made for
costs of publication; a few reviews noticed her poor little volume; but
nobody talked of it, nobody bought it, and it fell dead in a fortnight-
if it had ever been alive.

The author's thoughts were diverted to another groove just then by the
discovery that she was going to have a third child, and the collapse of
her poetical venture had perhaps less effect upon her mind than it might
have done if she had been domestically unoccupied. Her husband had paid
the publisher's bill with the doctor's, and there it all had ended for
the time. But, though less than a poet of her century, Ella was more
than a mere multiplier of her kind, and latterly she had begun to feel
the old afflatus once more. And now by an odd conjunction she found
herself in the rooms of Robert Trewe.

She thoughtfully rose from her chair and searched the apartment with the
interest of a fellow-tradesman. Yes, the volume of his own verse was
among the rest. Though quite familiar with its contents, she read it
here as if it spoke aloud to her, then called up Mrs. Hooper, the
landlady, for some trivial service, and inquired again about the young
man.

'Well, I'm sure you'd be interested in him, ma'am, if you could see him,
only he's so shy that I don't suppose you will.' Mrs. Hooper seemed
nothing loth to minister to her tenant's curiosity about her
predecessor. 'Lived here long? Yes, nearly two years. He keeps on his
rooms even when he's not here: the soft air of this place suits his
chest, and he likes to be able to come back at any time. He is mostly
writing or reading, and doesn't see many people, though, for the matter
of that, he is such a good, kind young fellow that folks would only be
too glad to be friendly with him if they knew him. You don't meet kind-
hearted people every day.'

'Ah, he's kind-hearted . . . and good.'

'Yes; he'll oblige me in anything if I ask him. "Mr. Trewe," I say to
him sometimes, "you are rather out of spirits." "Well, I am, Mrs.
Hooper," he'll say, "though I don't know how you should find it out."
"Why not take a little change?" I ask. Then in a day or two he'll say
that he will take a trip to Paris, or Norway, or somewhere; and I assure
you he comes back all the better for it.'

'Ah, indeed! His is a sensitive nature, no doubt.'

'Yes. Still he's odd in some things. Once when he had finished a poem of
his composition late at night he walked up and down the room rehearsing
it; and the floors being so thin-jerry-built houses, you know, though I
say it myself-he kept me awake up above him till I wished him further .
. . But we get on very well.'

This was but the beginning of a series of conversations about the rising
poet as the days went on. On one of these occasions Mrs. Hooper drew
Ella's attention to what she had not noticed before: minute scribblings
in pencil on the wall-paper behind the curtains at the head of the bed.

'O! let me look,' said Mrs. Marchmill, unable to conceal a rush of
tender curiosity as she bent her pretty face close to the wall.

'These,' said Mrs. Hooper, with the manner of a woman who knew things,
'are the very beginnings and first thoughts of his verses. He has tried
to rub most of them out, but you can read them still. My belief is that
he wakes up in the night, you know, with some rhyme in his head, and
jots it down there on the wall lest he should forget it by the morning.
Some of these very lines you see here I have seen afterwards in print in
the magazines. Some are newer; indeed, I have not seen that one before.
It must have been done only a few days ago.'

'O yes! . . . '

Ella Marchmill flushed without knowing why, and suddenly wished her
companion would go away, now that the information was imparted. An
indescribable consciousness of personal interest rather than literary
made her anxious to read the inscription alone; and she accordingly
waited till she could do so, with a sense that a great store of emotion
would be enjoyed in the act.

Perhaps because the sea was choppy outside the Island, Ella's husband
found it much pleasanter to go sailing and steaming about without his
wife, who was a bad sailor, than with her. He did not disdain to go thus
alone on board the steamboats of the cheap-trippers, where there was
dancing by moonlight, and where the couples would come suddenly down
with a lurch into each other's arms; for, as he blandly told her, the
company was too mixed for him to take her amid such scenes. Thus, while
this thriving manufacturer got a great deal of change and sea-air out of
his sojourn here, the life, external at least, of Ella was monotonous
enough, and mainly consisted in passing a certain number of hours each
day in bathing and walking up and down a stretch of shore. But the
poetic impulse having again waxed strong, she was possessed by an inner
flame which left her hardly conscious of what was proceeding around her.

She had read till she knew by heart Trewe's last little volume of
verses, and spent a great deal of time in vainly attempting to rival
some of them, till, in her failure, she burst into tears. The personal
element in the magnetic attraction exercised by this circumambient,
unapproachable master of hers was so much stronger than the intellectual
and abstract that she could not understand it. To be sure, she was
surrounded noon and night by his customary environment, which literally
whispered of him to her at every moment; but he was a man she had never
seen, and that all that moved her was the instinct to specialize a
waiting emotion on the first fit thing that came to hand did not, of
course, suggest itself to Ella.

In the natural way of passion under the too practical conditions which
civilization has devised for its fruition, her husband's love for her
had not survived, except in the form of fitful friendship, any more
than, or even so much as, her own for him; and, being a woman of very
living ardours, that required sustenance of some sort, they were
beginning to feed on this chancing material, which was, indeed, of a
quality far better than chance usually offers.

One day the children had been playing hide-and-seek in a closet, whence,
in their excitement, they pulled out some clothing. Mrs. Hooper
explained that it belonged to Mr. Trewe, and hung it up in the closet
again. Possessed of her fantasy, Ella went later in the afternoon, when
nobody was in that part of the house, opened the closet, unhitched one
of the articles, a mackintosh, and put it on, with the waterproof cap
belonging to it.

'The mantle of Elijah!' she said. 'Would it might inspire me to rival
him, glorious genius that he is!'

Her eyes always grew wet when she thought like that, and she turned to
look at herself in the glass. His heart had beat inside that coat, and
his brain had worked under that hat at levels of thought she would never
reach. The consciousness of her weakness beside him made her feel quite
sick. Before she had got the things off her the door opened, and her
husband entered the room.

'What the devil-'

She blushed, and removed them

'I found them in the closet here,' she said, 'and put them on in a
freak. What have I else to do? You are always away!'

'Always away? Well . . . '

That evening she had a further talk with the landlady, who might herself
have nourished a half-tender regard for the poet, so ready was she to
discourse ardently about him.

'You are interested in Mr. Trewe, I know, ma'am,' she said; 'and he has
just sent to say that he is going to call to-morrow afternoon to look up
some books of his that he wants, if I'll be in, and he may select them
from your room?'

'O yes!'

'You could very well meet Mr Trewe then, if you'd like to be in the
way!'

She promised with secret delight, and went to bed musing of him.

Next morning her husband observed: 'I've been thinking of what you said,
Ell: that I have gone about a good deal and left you without much to
amuse you. Perhaps it's true. To-day, as there's not much sea, I'll take
you with me on board the yacht.'

For the first time in her experience of such an offer Ella was not glad.
But she accepted it for the moment. The time for setting out drew near,
and she went to get ready. She stood reflecting. The longing to see the
poet she was now distinctly in love with overpowered all other
considerations.

'I don't want to go,' she said to herself. 'I can't bear to be away! And
I won't go.'

She told her husband that she had changed her mind about wishing to
sail. He was indifferent, and went his way.

For the rest of the day the house was quiet, the children having gone
out upon the sands. The blinds waved in the sunshine to the soft, steady
stroke of the sea beyond the wall; and the notes of the Green Silesian
band, a troop of foreign gentlemen hired for the season, had drawn
almost all the residents and promenaders away from the vicinity of
Coburg House. A knock was audible at the door.

Mrs. Marchmill did not hear any servant go to answer it, and she became
impatient. The books were in the room where she sat; but nobody came up.
She rang the bell.

'There is some person waiting at the door,' she said.

'O no, ma'am! He's gone long ago. I answered it.'

Mrs. Hooper came in herself.

'So disappointing!' she said. 'Mr. Trewe not coming after all!'

'But I heard him knock, I fancy!'

'No; that was somebody inquiring for lodgings who came to the wrong
house. I forgot to tell you that Mr. Trewe sent a note just before lunch
to say I needn't get any tea for him, as he should not require the
books, and wouldn't come to select them.'

Ella was miserable, and for a long time could not even re-read his
mournful ballad on 'Severed Lives,' so aching was her erratic little
heart, and so tearful her eyes. When the children came in with wet
stockings, and ran up to her to tell her of their adventures, she could
not feel that she cared about them half as much as usual.

'Mrs. Hooper, have you a photograph of-the gentleman who lived here?'
She was getting to be curiously shy in mentioning his name.

'Why, yes. It's in the ornamental frame on the mantelpiece in your own
bedroom, ma'am.'

'No; the Royal Duke and Duchess are in that.'

'Yes, so they are; but he's behind them. He belongs rightly to that
frame, which I bought on purpose; but as he went away he said: "Cover me
up from those strangers that are coming, for God's sake. I don't want
them staring at me, and I am sure they won't want me staring at them."
So I slipped in the Duke and Duchess temporarily in front of him, as
they had no frame, and Royalties are more suitable for letting furnished
than a private young man. If you take 'em out you'll see him under.
Lord, ma'am, he wouldn't mind if he knew it! He didn't think the next
tenant would be such an attractive lady as you, or he wouldn't have
thought of hiding himself; perhaps.'

'Is he handsome?' she asked timidly.

'I call him so. Some, perhaps, wouldn't.'

'Should I?' she asked, with eagerness.

'I think you would, though some would say he's more striking than
handsome; a large-eyed thoughtful fellow, you know, with a very electric
flash in his eye when he looks round quickly, such as you'd expect a
poet to be who doesn't get his living by it.'

'How old is he?'

'Several years older than yourself, ma'am; about thirty-one or two, I
think.'

Ella was, as a matter of fact, a few months over thirty herself; but she
did not look nearly so much. Though so immature in nature, she was
entering on that tract of life in which emotional women begin to suspect
that last love may be stronger than first love; and she would soon,
alas, enter on the still more melancholy tract when at least the vainer
ones of her sex shrink from receiving a male visitor otherwise than with
their backs to the window or the blinds half down. She reflected on Mrs.
Hooper's remark, and said no more about age.

Just then a telegram was brought up. It came from her husband, who had
gone down the Channel as far as Budmouth with his friends in the yacht,
and would not be able to get back till next day.

After her light dinner Ella idled about the shore with the children till
dusk, thinking of the yet uncovered photograph in her room, with a
serene sense of something ecstatic to come. For, with the subtle
luxuriousness of fancy in which this young woman was an adept, on
learning that her husband was to be absent that night she had refrained
from incontinently rushing upstairs and opening the picture-frame,
preferring to reserve the inspection till she could be alone, and a more
romantic tinge be imparted to the occasion by silence, candles, solemn
sea and stars outside, than was afforded by the garish afternoon
sunlight.

The children had been sent to bed, and Ella soon followed, though it was
not yet ten o'clock. To gratify her passionate curiosity she now made
her preparations, first getting rid of superfluous garments and putting
on her dressing-gown, then arranging a chair in front of the table and
reading several pages of Trewe's tenderest utterances. Then she fetched
the portrait-frame to the light, opened the back, took out the likeness,
and set it up before her.

It was a striking countenance to look upon. The poet wore a luxuriant
black moustache and imperial, and a slouched hat which shaded the
forehead. The large dark eyes, described by the landlady, showed an
unlimited capacity for misery; they looked out from beneath well-shaped
brows as if they were reading the universe in the microcosm of the
confronter's face, and were not altogether overjoyed at what the
spectacle portended.

Ella murmured in her lowest, richest, tenderest tone: 'And it's you
who've so cruelly eclipsed me these many times!'

As she gazed long at the portrait she fell into thought, till her eyes
filled with tears, and she touched the cardboard with her lips. Then she
laughed with a nervous lightness, and wiped her eyes.

She thought how wicked she was, a woman having a husband and three
children, to let her mind stray to a stranger in this unconscionable
manner. No, he was not a stranger! She knew his thoughts and feelings as
well as she knew her own; they were, in fact, the self-same thoughts and
feelings as hers, which her husband distinctly lacked; perhaps luckily
for himself; considering that he had to provide for family expenses.

'He's nearer my real self, he's more intimate with the real me than Will
is, after all, even though I've never seen him,' she said.

She laid his book and picture on the table at the bedside, and when she
was reclining on the pillow she re-read those of Robert Trewe's verses
which she had marked from time to time as most touching and true.
Putting these aside, she set up the photograph on its edge upon the
coverlet, and contemplated it as she lay. Then she scanned again by the
light of the candle the half-obliterated pencillings on the wall-paper
beside her head. There they were-phrases, couplets, bouts-rim�s,
beginnings and middles of lines, ideas in the rough, like Shelley's
scraps, and the least of them so intense, so sweet, so palpitating, that
it seemed as if his very breath, warm and loving, fanned her cheeks from
those walls, walls that had surrounded his head times and times as they
surrounded her own now. He must often have put up his hand so-with the
pencil in it. Yes, the writing was sideways, as it would be if executed
by one who extended his arm thus.

These inscribed shapes of the poet's world,

'Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality,'

were, no doubt, the thoughts and spirit-strivings which had come to him
in the dead of night, when he could let himself go and have no fear of
the frost of criticism. No doubt they had often been written up hastily
by the light of the moon, the rays of the lamp, in the blue-grey dawn,
in full daylight perhaps never. And now her hair was dragging where his
arm had lain when he secured the fugitive fancies; she was sleeping on a
poet's lips, immersed in the very essence of him, permeated by his
spirit as by an ether.

While she was dreaming the minutes away thus, a footstep came upon the
stairs, and in a moment she heard her husband's heavy step on the
landing immediately without.

'Ell, where are you?'

What possessed her she could not have described, but, with an
instinctive objection to let her husband know what she had been doing,
she slipped the photograph under the pillow just as he flung open the
door, with the air of a man who had dined not badly.

'O, I beg pardon,' said William Marchmill. 'Have you a headache? I am
afraid I have disturbed you.'

'No, I've not got a headache,' said she. 'How is it you've come?'

'Well, we found we could get back in very good time after all, and I
didn't want to make another day of it, because of going somewhere else
to-morrow.'

'Shall I come down again?'

'O no. I'm as tired as a dog. I've had a good feed, and I shall turn in
straight off. I want to get out at six o'clock to-morrow if I can . . .
I shan't disturb you by my getting up; it will be long before you are
awake.' And he came forward into the room.

While her eyes followed his movements, Ella softly pushed the photograph
further out of sight.

'Sure you're not ill?' he asked, bending over her.

'No, only wicked!'

'Never mind that.' And he stooped and kissed her.

Next morning Marchmill was called at six o'clock; and in waking and
yawning she heard him muttering to himself: 'What the deuce is this
that's been crackling under me so?' Imagining her asleep he searched
round him and withdrew something. Through her half-opened eyes she
perceived it to be Mr. Trewe.

'Well, I'm damned!' her husband exclaimed.

'What, dear?' said she.

'O, you are awake? Ha! ha!'

'What do you mean?'

'Some bloke's photograph-a friend of our landlady's, I suppose. I wonder
how it came here; whisked off the table by accident perhaps when they
were making the bed.'

'I was looking at it yesterday, and it must have dropped in then.'

'O, he's a friend of yours? Bless his picturesque heart!'

Ella's loyalty to the object of her admiration could not endure to hear
him ridiculed. 'He's a clever man!' she said, with a tremor in her
gentle voice which she herself felt to be absurdly uncalled for.

'He is a rising poet-the gentleman who occupied two of these rooms
before we came, though I've never seen him.'

'How do you know, if you've never seen him?'

'Mrs. Hooper told me when she showed me the photograph.'

'O; well, I must up and be off. I shall be home rather early. Sorry I
can't take you to-day, dear. Mind the children don't go getting
drowned.'

That day Mrs. Marchmill inquired if Mr. Trewe were likely to call at any
other time.

'Yes,' said Mrs. Hooper. 'He's coming this day week to stay with a
friend near here till you leave. He'll be sure to call.'

Marchmill did return quite early in the afternoon; and, opening some
letters which had arrived in his absence, declared suddenly that he and
his family would have to leave a week earlier than they had expected to
do-in short, in three days.

'Surely we can stay a week longer?' she pleaded. 'I like it here.'

'I don't. It is getting rather slow.'

'Then you might leave me and the children!'

'How perverse you are, Ell! What's the use? And have to come to fetch
you! No: we'll all return together; and we'll make out our time in North
Wales or Brighton a little later on. Besides, you've three days longer
yet.'

It seemed to be her doom not to meet the man for whose rival talent she
had a despairing admiration, and to whose person she was now absolutely
attached. Yet she determined to make a last effort; and having gathered
from her landlady that Trewe was living in a lonely spot not far from
the fashionable town on the Island opposite, she crossed over in the
packet from the neighbouring pier the following afternoon.

What a useless journey it was! Ella knew but vaguely where the house
stood, and when she fancied she had found it, and ventured to inquire of
a pedestrian if he lived there, the answer returned by the man was that
he did not know. And if he did live there, how could she call upon him?
Some women might have the assurance to do it, but she had not. How crazy
he would think her. She might have asked him to call upon her, perhaps;
but she had not the courage for that, either. She lingered mournfully
about the picturesque seaside eminence till it was time to return to the
town and enter the steamer for recrossing, reaching home for dinner
without having been greatly missed.

At the last moment, unexpectedly enough, her husband said that he should
have no objection to letting her and the children stay on till the end
of the week, since she wished to do so, if she felt herself able to get
home without him. She concealed the pleasure this extension of time gave
her; and Marchmill went off the next morning alone.

But the week passed, and Trewe did not call.

On Saturday morning the remaining members of the Marchmill family
departed from the place which had been productive of so much fervour in
her. The dreary, dreary train; the sun shining in moted beams upon the
hot cushions; the dusty permanent way; the mean rows of wire-these
things were her accompaniment: while out of the window the deep blue
sea-levels disappeared from her gaze, and with them her poet's home.
Heavy-hearted, she tried to read, and wept instead.

Mr. Marchmill was in a thriving way of business, and he and his family
lived in a large new house, which stood in rather extensive grounds a
few miles outside the city wherein he carried on his trade. Ella's life
was lonely here, as the suburban life is apt to be, particularly at
certain seasons; and she had ample time to indulge her taste for lyric
and elegiac composition. She had hardly got back when she encountered a
piece by Robert Trewe in the new number of her favourite magazine, which
must have been written almost immediately before her visit to Solentsea,
for it contained the very couplet she had seen pencilled on the
wallpaper by the bed, and Mrs. Hooper had declared to be recent. Ella
could resist no longer, but seizing a pen impulsively, wrote to him as a
brother-poet, using the name of John Ivy, congratulating him in her
letter on his triumphant executions in metre and rhythm of thoughts that
moved his soul, as compared with her own brow-beaten efforts in the same
pathetic trade.

To this address there came a response in a few days, little as she had
dared to hope for it-a civil and brief note, in which the young poet
stated that, though he was not well acquainted with Mr. Ivy's verse, he
recalled the name as being one he had seen attached to some very
promising pieces; that he was glad to gain Mr. Ivy's acquaintance by
letter, and should certainly look with much interest for his productions
in the future.

There must have been something juvenile or timid in her own epistle, as
one ostensibly coming from a man, she declared to herself; for Trewe
quite adopted the tone of an elder and superior in this reply. But what
did it matter? he had replied; he had written to her with his own hand
from that very room she knew so well, for he was now back again in his
quarters.

The correspondence thus begun was continued for two months or more, Ella
Marchmill sending him from time to time some that she considered to be
the best of her pieces, which he very kindly accepted, though he did not
say he sedulously read them, nor did he send her any of his own in
return. Ella would have been more hurt at this than she was if she had
not known that Trewe laboured under the impression that she was one of
his own sex.

Yet the situation was unsatisfactory. A flattering little voice told her
that, were he only to see her, matters would be otherwise. No doubt she
would have helped on this by making a frank confession of womanhood, to
begin with, if something had not happened, to her delight, to render it
unnecessary. A friend of her husband's, the editor of the most important
newspaper in the city and county, who was dining with them one day,
observed during their conversation about the poet that his (the
editor's) brother the landscape-painter was a friend of Mr. Trewe's, and
that the two men were at that very moment in Wales together.

Ella was slightly acquainted with the editor's brother. The next morning
down she sat and wrote, inviting him to stay at her house for a short
time on his way back, and requesting him to bring with him, if
practicable, his companion Mr. Trewe, whose acquaintance she was anxious
to make. The answer arrived after some few days. Her correspondent and
his friend Trewe would have much satisfaction in accepting her
invitation on their way southward, which would be on such and such a day
in the following week.

Ella was blithe and buoyant. Her scheme had succeeded; her beloved
though as yet unseen one was coming. "Behold, he standeth behind our
wall; he looked forth at the windows, showing himself through the
lattice," she thought ecstatically. "And, lo, the winter is past, the
rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the
singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our
land."

But it was necessary to consider the details of lodging and feeding him.
This she did most solicitously, and awaited the pregnant day and hour.

It was about five in the afternoon when she heard a ring at the door and
the editor's brother's voice in the hall. Poetess as she was, or as she
thought herself, she had not been too sublime that day to dress with
infinite trouble in a fashionable robe of rich material, having a faint
resemblance to the chiton of the Greeks, a style just then in vogue
among ladies of an artistic and romantic turn, which had been obtained
by Ella of her Bond Street dressmaker when she was last in London. Her
visitor entered the drawing-room. She looked towards his rear; nobody
else came through the door. Where, in the name of the God of Love, was
Robert Trewe?

'O, I'm sorry,' said the painter, after their introductory words had
been spoken. 'Trewe is a curious fellow, you know, Mrs. Marchmill. He
said he'd come; then he said he couldn't. He's rather dusty. We've been
doing a few miles with knapsacks, you know; and he wanted to get on
home.'

'He-he's not coming?'

'He's not; and he asked me to make his apologies.'

'When did you p-p-part from him?' she asked, her nether lip starting off
quivering so much that it was like a tremolo-stop opened in her speech.
She longed to run away from this dreadful bore and cry her eyes out.

'Just now, in the turnpike road yonder there.'

'What! he has actually gone past my gates?'

'Yes. When we got to them-handsome gates they are, too, the finest bit
of modern wrought-iron work I have seen-when we came to them we stopped,
talking there a little while, and then he wished me good-bye and went
on. The truth is, he's a little bit depressed just now, and doesn't want
to see anybody. He's a very good fellow, and a warm friend, but a little
uncertain and gloomy sometimes; he thinks too much of things. His poetry
is rather too erotic and passionate, you know, for some tastes; and he
has just come in for a terrible slating from the �- Review that was
published yesterday; he saw a copy of it at the station by accident.
Perhaps you've read it?'

'No.'

'So much the better. O, it is not worth thinking of; just one of those
articles written to order, to please the narrow-minded set of
subscribers upon whom the circulation depends. But he's upset by it. He
says it is the misrepresentation that hurts him so; that, though he can
stand a fair attack, he can't stand lies that he's powerless to refute
and stop from spreading. That's just Trewe's weak point. He lives so
much by himself that these things affect him much more than they would
if he were in the bustle of fashionable or commercial life. So he
wouldn't come here, making the excuse that it all looked so new and
monied-if you'll pardon-'

'But-he must have known-there was sympathy here! Has he never said
anything about getting letters from this address?'

'Yes, yes, he has, from John Ivy-perhaps a relative of yours, he
thought, visiting here at the time?'

'Did he-like Ivy, did he say?'

'Well, I don't know that he took any great interest in Ivy.'

'Or in his poems?'

'Or in his poems-so far as I know, that is.'

Robert Trewe took no interest in her house, in her poems, or in their
writer. As soon as she could get away she went into the nursery and
tried to let off her emotion by unnecessarily kissing the children, till
she had a sudden sense of disgust at being reminded how plain-looking
they were, like their father.

The obtuse and single-minded landscape-painter never once perceived from
her conversation that it was only Trewe she wanted, and not himself. He
made the best of his visit, seeming to enjoy the society of Ella's