********************START OF HEADER******************** This text has been proofread but is not guaranteed to be free from errors. Corrections to the original text have been left in place. Title: Children of Circumstance, volume II, an electronic edition Author: Caffyn, Mannington, Mrs. Publisher: Hutchinson & Co. Place published: London Date: 1894 ********************END OF HEADER******************** CHILDREN OF CIRCUMSTANCE VOL II.Advertisements included in the front of Iota's Children of Circumstance, vol. II.CHILDREN OF CIRCUMSTANCEA NovelBy IOTA Author of "A YELLOW ASTER."IN THREE VOLUMES VOL. IILondon1894HUTCHINSON AND CO.PATERNOSTER ROWCHAPTER XX.THE next day was bleak and harsh. Sudden gusts of tempest broke out fitfully; flying hailstones fell with swift sharp strokes, stinging the flesh wherever they smote it. It was a vicious, restless day, with no peace in it.Rica shivered as she stood by the window and watched her uncle crossing the green. He walked with bent head and bowed shoulders. He looked "full of the evening and sad," and it was so altogether unlike him that it depressed her. It was neither age nor weariness, however, that touched the man; it was reality. Soil was being turned up in his heart that had long lain fallow, and the fresh sensitive young earth was shrinking and trembling, exposed cold and naked to bitter blasts and scorching suns, and was longing with all its might to get back again into its own warm depths of peace.The life of his little curate had visibly increased the pleasant peace of the Rector, his consoling sense of serene self-satisfaction; in the same way, the approaching death of this little man was visibly decreasing these things.It was not to be supposed that Mr. Weston's stirrings-up produced any permanent change in him. An impression, an upward fillip, rarely does. These things come and go and are forgotten.Mr. Weston cheered up quite soon, and continued on his pleasant course of growing stout."Miss Rica, come near the fire," said Bridges presently. "I do trust the bad night I gave you hasn't made you tired. I feel wretchedly selfish in not insisting on a night nurse nowone has become necessary; but I should so miss you. I did not contemplate being so long," he added apologetically."I'm not an atom tired," said Rica, coming from the window; "and if a night nurse appeared on the premises she should as speedily disappear. Now we're both comfortable, you may talk.""I have been wanting to. I have been wondering what you must have thought of my remaining in the Church after I had found myself out. It seems no doubt a paradox, and I want to put myself right before you on that point.""But you don't want any putting right. Your conscience is like the liver of a Strasbourg goose,—it will crowd you out altogether if you don't curtail it."She turned and laughed outright as she looked at him. She was so glad to think of the great awakening that was going to break on this poor tired little soul.He wondered why she laughed, but he knew she meant him well, and he paused in his grateful way to think what blessed things women were."It is some months since I first began to doubt my fitness for my calling. The thought was more bitter than death; indeed, if this be death, it was a thousand times more bitter. I fought against it, I prayed and wrestled day after day with God. I did my work as one in a dream. I refused to see that my labours were abortive, my strivings in vain. I knew there was a flaw, but I chose to believe that it lay in the hardness of heart of those to whom I ministered, not in my lack of strength, and power, and beauty. The choicest food loses half its savour when served on an unsightly plate, and so it seems to me it is with spiritual matters. I was a weak vessel, with no compensating talent. An ill-made, clumsy instrument, unfit to dispense God's food."He struggled hard against his cough, but it was too much for him, and now a fit seized him and shook out the best part of his remnant of life. But directly he was able he began again."Let me make the most of my time," he pleaded; "let me speak in my lame way till silence comes. I have always been very gregariously inclined, and never till now have I been able to gratify my inclination.""You shall just do as you like," she said; and when she had put his pillows straight, she stooped down and kissed him in her nice, pleasant way. "He might like it," she reflected, "just to know what it's like before he dies," and when she saw the extraordinary startled delight of his face, she felt that it was a really well-spent kiss."When I had finally grasped the ugly fact, and reduced myself to reason," he continued, "with much flinching, but, I trust, honestly, I determined to give place to a better man. I had an uncle, a stockbroker, who promised to obtain for me a clerk's place, and in my evenings I thought of seeking some more congenial work. Before coming to this conclusion, I had considered the advisability of becoming a missionary, till I made some careful investigations which led me to believe that the lower races are even more susceptible to outward influences than we ourselves are, and that there are already quite enough missionaries, meagre in mind and body, to draw down on themselves the derision of coloured peoples, and that still more stinging derision of the press. I read some accounts of missionaries during that period, not to be found in the religious journals, and they surprised me—surprised me very much indeed. I determined not to swell the ranks of these unhappy detrimentals. It was an unpleasant period of my life. The Church's work was very dear to me, it seemed to have absorbed my soul within it. But I found courage at last. The letters to my Bishop and my dear Rector are in my desk; this last cold made me neglect to post them. Will you destroy them, Miss Rica? This came instead, blessed be God! " he murmured softly to himself.A few hours later, just as the twilight was quenching the red in the sky, Rica was sitting watching him. She was very tired; she had had no sleep to speak of now for three nights. She had just been chafing his hands with a sort of hopeless tenderness, for she could bring no warmth into them; and at last she fell asleep, with one of them held in hers.When she awoke, the red in the sky had all been put out; his hand was still in hers, and his face turned towards her smiling; but he was elsewhere.CHAPTER XXI."I WISH this room looked anywhere but into the street, with one of its windows even," said Rica Weston, coming away from an unsatisfactory inspection of the dull rows of small shops opposite Frank's rooms. "I did my best with those window-boxes, yet they hide nothing, but just look conceited and upstarty perched aloft, crowing over the surrounding sordidness. Doesn't it get into you, Frank, this sordidness—into your bones and marrow, and all your other things? This room is pretty, and bright, and chintzy,—in a word, it murmurs of me; and yet it's thick with this horrid suburbiness, and extremely depressing."Frank looked up from the sermon he had got stuck in, according to an unfortunate habit he had, unless indeed it happened to be a few plain words that had swollen up in his mind and grown too big for comfort. At such times a congregation, which simply had to sit still and listen, or pretend to listen, to anything he might choose to say, was a thing to be thankful for."Just now," said Frank, "you are yourself the most depressing object in the room. You ate an excellent luncheon, so it's not measles or croup, anyway.""Frank, pull down the blind; I can stand that Italian oil-shop no longer.""I fear you require some sort of professional consolation. I'll get in the new curate, unless you look out. Curious that one can't manage that sort of thing with one's own sister.""You may try if you want practice.""But I don't. I'm no end of a swell in this department of the profession with the young persons about here. I get regular consignments of them to deal with.""Oh, do you deal with them?""Don't I? Ask them. I amaze even the Vicar. It's somehow got known among the genteeler portion of the flock that I'm in some remote way connected with the West End, and that my 'aunty' married a lord,—one old lady asked me if she didn't,—and that the other young fellow, who looks after 'quite the scum' in that poverty-stricken iron church, could go no higher than a colonial bishop; and yet the airs and graces he gave himself were enough to sicken you. So, in consideration of my aunty, I can put what force I like into my remarks to the young things. I know two who shudder at the sight of me. They were, I fancy, prepared for quite another outcome to the priestly consolations.""Frank, will you shut that window? I smell the oil and the Italians."Frank came over and peered down at her through his glasses with some curiosity."That little chap did his dying very credit-ably to himself and all concerned," he said, "and in a way one would never have expected of him; but don't let the fact make you permanently mawkish. Can't you turn on some new tap? Try a district.""Are you insane, dear?""Jack Arnold's a good fellow; why don't you try him?"Rica was sitting in a low, soft, frilled chair, with her hands behind her back, looking rather cross."It's you who are mawkish, not me. Jack Arnold, poor dear, he has high aims, and babbles of them at dances, and I fancy he improves his mind. You surely don't think I have sunk as low as that?""A woman's life is never complete without husband and children. The Vicar told us so yesterday when we were all behaving so prettily round the table and wishing we could smoke. Being in a mawkish state, I thought the sentiment might suit you.""It would suit that sermon better, perhaps. Hold out to one of the shuddering young things the comfortable hope of annexing a 'lordly aunty.' I can imagine a woman's growing very deadly sick of husband and children taken neat, and as a constancy, but they would be convenient at times—when one feels murderous. I feel this minute as if a yawning chasm had sprung up—or, shouldn't it be sprung down?—into my path.""A mild, immature, yawning chasm, flaxen-haired, with deprecating manners and a lisp, and belongs to the unnatural order—step-mother?""Oh, no doubt it's paltry to care. I suppose my father had a right to marry her if he wanted to. Curious any one should, isn't it? It isn't either because she's she; but you know quite well that I've always mistrusted those small white women with dimples, who move so softly that they're on you before you know what you're about. She's an irritating person, but she's an excellent and creditable head of a house. I am not wanted there any more. What business on earth had you all to grow up at such a rate? There's positively nothing left to do but to amuse myself. And at my age, after two full-pitched seasons, that sort of thing gets flat."Frank again inspected her."It's evident you want toning up. We can't unfortunately provide you with a succession of curates' deaths; besides, though instructive, they rack the constitution and enervate the mind.""That's not in the least funny, and it's abominably unfair to think that even for that he should be laughed at. That's hitting a man when he's down with a vengeance. Then to stand brazenly up in the pulpit and teach that 'charity thinketh no evil'! You couldn't die as well to save your life, my good boy."Frank grinned. "No, my good girl, and neither could you. We've come of too stout a stock. It needs a touch of constitutional sickliness to die effectively. If a life has a strong grasp on its soul, it won't let it go without a struggle, and the struggle is often ugly and often brutal. You see at that time our intellectual bonds have become slackened, and our restraints are all at loose ends.""Frank, don't be ghastly! I don't care what you say, a girl with a step-mother, and with no marked taste for marrying her neighbour, and without a ghost of a mission about her, or any desire whatever to land herself aloft on a pedestal, is at a disadvantage in these times."The unexpected arrival of a step-mother was an ugly shock for Rica. And then her uncertainty about Margaret's fate also worried her a good deal, and yet she had so little to go on that she had not even said anything to Frank about it. She had called at the Yews directly after Bridges' death, and had simply insisted on seeing the two ladies, and had further insisted on their showing her the letter. When she had read it, she quite under-stood what altogether puzzled them,—the fact of no other letters following it.She knew perfectly well that the loving, simple-minded creature who had written the letter, with its quaint, odd pathos, would take no further notice of two aunts so misdirected as not to have rushed up at once to see the girl, living or dead.It was, therefore, just as likely that Margaret had not died, as that she had, especially as in the letter Mrs. Bent had said that Margaret had left the balance of all the money in her own control in her hands, to use as she thought best.The Miss Derings, it seemed, were the sole guardians of the girl, and for some reason, best known to themselves, they had resolved not to inform the lawyers connected with her property either of Margaret's going away or of her death until the time of her majority should come. Rica was certain that Miss Katherine had already become possessed and haunted of a horrid doubt. The restless look in her eyes was something to shiver at, and she knew that she went now and again up to London, a thing the village had never before known her to do.Frank crumpled up his nose in a fashion he had when he was altogether in earnest, and again looked at his sister."I wonder," he said, "if you have any sense worth mentioning ?""If I——""Or how you stand with regard to the proprieties?""Be good enough to look on me as a human woman, and not as a congregation. What are you trying to say?"He gave her another curious inspection."Well, don't glare," she said ; "go on.""If you don't get something to keep you quiet, it's very apparent you'll get into mischief, —probably marry Arnold and find an unvarying diet of a prig's improved mind unsatisfying. Better keep him as a final resource. Perhaps I may be wanting you myself.""Yes—that sounds good—go on.""This parish is a night-mareish place, you see. It's simply overrun with girls—some gone to the devil, and scores more on the road ; and living in the midst of them, they get on one's nerves. Something or other ought to be done for them,—something effectual, I mean. There's any amount being done, but it's mostly failure, and nearly all done in livery. They don't like livery, you see—#x2014;""You take good care they don't see much of yours, under ulsters and other subterfuges.""So would you if you knew all. They see too much.""But aren't there lay committees and things?""I suppose your mind is wandering in the direction of vigilance committees. Oh, they abound, bless you. I was at one the other day. Never, as long as I live, will I forget the unpleasantness of the proceedings, and the rows and rows of women, some of them shockingly badly dressed, listening with bated breath to anecdotes and records that, to say the least, were amazing, and mostly outside the point. From vigilance ladies, good Lord, deliver us! You should have seen them after the meeting (it was a drawing-room one), scurrying to the tea-table, and drinking up the cream. My dear, they didn't leave me a drop.""And so you pitch them into the Litany, poor creatures!""Oh, we've got vigilance ladies, and district ladies, and sisters, and all manner of well-meaning persons; and yet the paucity of the result of work among young girls is appalling. And, you see, we've handicapped ourselves. The man-and-brother business doesn't pay. I think, somehow, we want some absolutely unprofessional help. It's those quite young girls that bother me. Of course, the other hardened creatures are impossible; we won't think of them at all in this category. But I have a sort of theory about the quite young ones. You see, most of the benevolent, staid persons and the liveried ladies being failures, I thought perhaps girls might succeed a little. The foolish sometimes do where the wise fail.""You're a little paradoxical, but go on.""I thought of the British matron with her motherhood at her back, but she's too cock-sure of herself and her salvation, and her perfect understanding of all the ins and outs of girls,—she'd never do. And so it struck me that you, and your like, might step into the breach and flesh your maiden swords.""You have shaped out a fine career for me and my like. One would need to be an angel or a mission, or that sort of person, to——"But that's just what you wouldn't want to be. A nice well-dressed girl with her faults and her foolishness would be a much more likely straw for one of those poor things to cling on to than either an angel or a mission. The mere occasional contact with a girl to whom brightness, and change, and joy come as a matter of course, would of itself bring such a novel stir into the sordid, warping life of a girl of this type that it would have a wholesome influence, and satisfy even a mere fraction of her gregarious instinct. Girls all dragging out life under equally dreary conditions can't find ideas enough to make conversation, and so they resort to facts, which in this neighbourhood is a fatal thing. They get tired of themselves and of each other, and of their homes. They want to seize the colour and light and brightness natural to their age, by fair means or foul. And they do it. I was wondering if girls couldn't distribute themselves better—make of themselves little colour notes, so to speak, in a dreadful drab world, bringing into it with them their sound every-day natures.""I don't think my sound every-day nature would be a very agreeable article to introduce into any household just at present, drab or other-wise," and she added with a shrug, "I don't feel equal to judging any creature living in the general unpleasantness of this hideous neighbourhood for any mortal thing she may do or say, when I can feel as virulent as I do for no mortal cause. I fancy the drab girls would want rather more than occasional contact with us, the brilliant-plumaged, to do themselves much good. We're poor creatures often, and I fancy somehow it is just because we're altogether too humble—we don't appreciate ourselves with sufficient keenness. Violet-in-the-shade business. I wonder, would a nearer acquaintance with the drab persons show us to ourselves in any fresh lights. I fancy it is fresh lights to see ourselves by we want, not the shade that befits violets. The cloth is just off the table, dear Frank, the sermon is on the floor, and the ink's nearly after it. Do you know," she went on at full speed, "that I'm going to tea at Mrs. Duffs this afternoon, and that I had a letter today from Mrs. Hyde? Her husband's election is to come on soon, and she wants me to help canvass. The unhappy part of it is that Mr. Hyde hasn't one definite opinion""He has plenty of indefinite ones, no doubt, only needing consolidation""I heard him with my own ears say he was a transition.""What else are any of us, unless we're throwing-backs ?""That too is a flabby, indefinite thing. I must have something with a more solid name to canvass with.""Is Jim going to canvass?""I don't know—he asked himself down. Frank, why did he chuck India? I thought people never came home from there to stay permanently till they were forty or fifty, and quite liverless.""It was India that chucked him, you see. He had a good appointment, but it was in a bad part, and it's next to done for him, poor chap. Good thing for him he could come home. He came in for a lot of money just lately, so it don't matter.""I'm glad I shall have to canvass, even without a name to do it with. I'm just ready for any sort of a war-path. And later on, I shall consider the drab girl, you know, and tell you the results of my reflections upon her.""No hurry, I only threw out a feeler.""You did, did you? It was a fine stiff feeler, with sharp points to it that, combined with the Italian warehouse, will make me uncomfortable for the rest of the day. Unhappy curate ! You don't mean to say that you have to fill in all those sheets? Good heavens, how fearfully demoralising! How many whiskies-and-sodas do you take in the process? And do you ever consider that the congregation can't take so much as one—and aren't you sorry? And——Frank, it's my best hat! Throw a cushion if you must shy something."Frank felt a little low as he sat down again to his sermon. He hoped to goodness that Jim had nothing to do with Rica's gusty condition, he was far too sick a man for that sort of thing; and sermon-writing was a grind when one never could say a word one wanted to,—conventions dogged one's steps everywhere. As he fitted a new nib into his pen, he wondered if they would stop short even of heaven.CHAPTER XXII.COLCLOUGH spent a good deal of his odd time with Frank Weston. It interested him to watch the keenness of the fellow, his honest downright wish to do his best for his people—his blunders even were amusing to observe. But what Colclough liked best of all was Frank's pleasant way of making the very best of what he himself knew to be irredeemably bad tools. A man shows so much more strength in doing the best possible with inefficient tools, than in kicking over the traces, and setting forth glibly to forge new crude ones from his own inexperience.Jim, Frank, his dog, and his kitten were sitting together in Frank's room one Sunday Evening. They were all good enough friends to ignore each other's existence when the humour took them, and for quite half an hour neither of the men had spoken a word.Colclough looked less battered than he had done for some time, Frank rather more so. Keenness of life must tell on any man, however cool he keeps himself."For the last few weeks," he began suddenly, "a girl has been attending my week-night services that you damn with such an unnecessary amount of platitudes, who puzzles me altogether. I can't place her among the crowd. I have often tried to catch her and to examine her close, but by the time I have shed my surplice she is off. I wish you could get a look at her. Indeed, I wish you could somehow manage to talk to her.""How in Heaven's name am I to spot her? There are dozens, aren't there?""Not an atom like this one. You'd spot her in a jiffy. There's always a big stout girl of the mastiff species, with a touch of the bull-dog, I fancy, at her heels. She glares open-mouthed at the other girl all through the service, and imitates every movement she makes. She has an extraordinary voice—something absorbing in it.""What! the mastiff-cum-bull-dog?""The other one. There's some quite unusual quality in her voice which I never heard before. It strikes those girls, too ; they turn and listen to her when she begins to sing. I've seen some of the young ones start and look at her, terrified out of their wits. The queer thing is, she never draws tears or that sort of thing, even from these hysterical creatures. There's something in her voice that's too alive and wholesome for that.""He seems to know a fair amount about her voice," Colclough thought."What sort of a looking person is she ?" he asked."Don't know. I tell you I never saw her close. She walks well. Do you remember how those Beaucaire women used to walk? Well, it's very much the same style." He looked at his watch and stood up."Beyond a joke!" thought Colclough. "I wonder what's the next move on the board?""Here, Jill! You stay and look after the fire," said Frank. "She has a liking for the calves of vergers and other Church dignitaries, and she'll sneak after me if she can. Here, let me help you! How, in the name of goodness, can you carry an ulster and two comforters?""To cover my bones, man. One layer of flesh is worth a dozen ulsters. What do you know of cold?""I hope this night's work won't hurt you ?""Precisely what I was hoping about yourself."Frank said nothing, but strode on down the street."There's a lot in rude health, I tell you, Frank. You're a sound, wholesome receptacle, as you now stand, to shoot rubbish into.You suit the neighbourhood. If you get sentimental, or lose condition, you'll be a dead failure. Measly looks or weak knees, or any infirmity of a like order, are bad stumbling-blocks in the Church. Hullo! he's disappeared. I always thought his aggressive nose and his amazing circulation would have saved him : I'm mistaken, it seems."Frank came back directly."As we turned that corner, I saw the girl disappearing into a house where one of the ' flock' lives—a wild-eyed creature, whom I defy any one in heaven or on earth to tame. Look here, "he went on after a minute: " this business is a nuisance. Upon my word, I keep hurrying up the prayers to get to the singing—wholesome, isn't it? I find myself preaching at her: do you hear, man? And the folly of it is that it's merely her voice.""Since when have you become so musical?""Since I heard the girl singing, if you must know. It will have to be put a definite stop to, or else I must fly the place. I found myself to-day serving out scraps of stock-in-trade piety to two sick fellows—not so sick, however, but that they could think. I felt one grinning at me all down the stairs.""Perhaps you'd better see her; she may disillusion you and restore your sanity. I hope I may spot her. The next move will be to effect an introduction—not difficult hereabouts, I should imagine. Let me see: sings like an angel, walks like a woman of Beaucaire, has the mastiff-cum-bull-dog at heels, her——"Oh, shut up, Jim !""Well, while you shed your draperies I shall stalk her. Come, isn't that fair? By the way, Frank, suppose you let the young woman sing on, and go down to your father's. You'll get a few days' hunting, won't you?—it won't be over for a week; and come back in your normal condition. It's possible as things stand.""But it is not, unfortunately. I intend to find out who the girl is and how she got her voice."He poked his head forward in his nearsighted way, wrinkling up the skin on his aggressive nose.Colclough knew the gesture."The deuce it isn't! There, come on, and run your head into a noose, if you're fool enough to persist in it, and God help you. At the same time, I have never noticed that He ever does help a man who deliberately makes an ass of himself.""Will you come into the vestry ?""No; what should I want in the vestry?""Reserve your bad manners for your native heath, Jim. We have to be particular in these parts. The verger, I perceive, imagines we're having a free fight, and has the police already in his mind."CHAPTER XXIII.COLCLOUGH'S rejection of the hospitality of his vestry in no wise troubled Frank. He was very glad to be alone for a few minutes. He sincerely wanted to get himself into a fitting state of goodwill, fairness, and clear-sighted sanity to do his evening's work well. He knew that to bring about this state of mind would require an effort, and that he should need a little time before he could give the attempt anything at all of a fair show.He had instituted these midnight services some months before, and he ran them almost unaided. The Vicar stood aside and prayed for their speedy downfall, Frank said; and the other curates had their hands too full to help much.Besides increasing his work considerably, and reducing sermon-making to an abiding terror, his conception was an audacious and ticklish undertaking for the young. "Boys attempting the work of seers and prophets," Colclough called it. These services were not the first set going in London by any means, but they were, perhaps, the most vigorously conducted of any, and had more daring humanity about their organisation. Every possible accessory that could attract was resorted to, and the evangelical journals mentioned the proceedings with wailing and gnashing of teeth.It was a horrible neighbourhood, and badly found in parsons, and the few who scoured its neighbourhood night and day had an anxious, wearing time of it, with great outlay and small return, considered any way—morally, physically, or spiritually.Even a year of such work might well suck every atom of enthusiasm for God or man from the strongest; and yet, although these poor parsons lose flesh and strength and youth largely, and leave behind them hourly the delightful happy insolence, the restful, charming ways of speech and conduct they bring with them from the Universities, and grow hungry-looking, with restless eyes and mouths that twitch easily—yet they still struggle upward and on in a most amazing way.Even at thirty-five, there are to be found enthusiasts among these men, but by that time the froth of their enthusiasm has a tinge of blood in it. At forty, there is more blood than froth.Of the five men who undertook the cure of the souls of the odd thousands in this district, Frank was the only one who still made mild jokes and enjoyed his life properly. He had a private income and a sufficient amount of brute strength. Then he had no wife and young children fading for the light, no big-brained boys, who made their father's heart ache every time he looked at them, to think that he must deny them things that had come to him as his daily bread.Even the certain knowledge that three parts of his work was absolutely resultless had not yet damped Frank's ardour.His little pause was well spent.By the time he had begun "Dearly beloved" he was in as sensible and impersonal a frame of mind as any honest parson need wish to be.The service was half way through when a girl came up the aisle. Colclough, from his corner, watched her with much interest, wondering if she could be the girl in whom Frank was interested. She walked undeniably well, certainly. After a further inspection, he sincerely hoped that she was not.She was a tall, finely-developed woman, with noticeable eyes, as fierce and sombre as any forest beast's, but with neither a spark of eagerness nor any suspicion of restlessness in. them. They were steady and assured. Her mouth was beautiful serene, and cruel. The only restless things about her were her hands. Colclough watched one of them that happened to be ungloved with some interest. It was a dusky, swift, wicked, little hand, as deft as an Arab's. It could curb a horse or handle a dagger with equal ease. Her face too was dusky, except where brilliant red flushes darted up into her cheeks like flames, leaving them brown and cold when they flickered away. She looked extremely Eastern, and had seemingly but little to thank her ancestors for; such a medley of gloom and smouldering fires could only have sprung from a race that had ruled magnificently in blood and lust."An amazing deal of faith, hope, and charity will have to be used up before that young woman is brought to a proper sense of contrition, "Colclough thought.She paused as she reached a certain- pew, and scanned the faces of its occupants with a fine quiet insolence, then turned leisurely and watched the fresh comers as they filed to their places. She was perfectly at ease, and not at all put out by the fact that her skirts nearly filled the narrow aisle, and got jostled unceremoniously by the girls who were making for the seats near the chancel. She was known by them, but no favourite, to judge by the manner in which they looked at her."One would as soon expect a trace of embarrassment from her as from one of the Pyramids," Colclough reflected from his retirement. "It's a wild business altogether; I wish I was out of it, with that fellow disillusioned. What's come to the girl now?"She had bent forward with a slow, slumberous sort of interest, her indifferent lips had parted with a half-pleased look, and she was watching some one who had come in. Colclough turned quickly to see a girl coming rapidly up the aisle, and he knew in a flash it was the girl he had come to see."That unfortunate Frank," he said to himself. "Like a woman of Beaucaire, indeed! I never saw the walk of one a patch on hers, and the turn of her neck is good. What brings her here, I should like to know. She is somebody, that's very apparent, and it's an exceedingly complicated business."She went into the pew where the other girl stood, who immediately followed her, and sat herself down in defiant comfort. Their pew was quite full, and Poll, who was close at Margaret's heels, found her place gone. She paused, and glared at the interloper, with fiery cheeks and lips well set for an oath. Colclough felt that an explosion must be imminent, and wriggled nervously on his seat. But just in the nick of time Margaret looked round, grasped the situation, and pointed emphatically to a seat behind her. Poll yielded, still glaring, flounced into her seat, and flopped on her knees, bringing down in her descent a Bible and three prayer-books.Colclough changed his seat to one higher up, and forgot for the minute to swear at Frank, or even to recommend him to God's help—Which, after all, with the average man is only another form of oath.The distant voices of the choir's "Amen" arose, and the congregation stood or lolled, as seemed best to them. Margaret, of course, stood naturally and directly, the other followed her example lazily with a little shrug. Poll jerked forward, and was on her legs directly she saw her leader move.Then the dusky girl, who held in her hands unopened a quaint, vellum-bound volume, that looked strikingly like a rare old missal, threw it down, and stepped a pace or two away from her companion, half turning so that her rich dress hung right out in the aisle, causing smirks, and nudges, and whispered comments to be bandied about among the congregation. Her part of the service, it seemed, was about to begin.The organ rolled out, then the voices of the choir, and then Colclough's ears were astonished by such a voice as he had never before heard; it was so startlingly pure, and young, and strong, and yet there seemed to him to be in it countless years of life."That's what Frank meant, then, by his 'alive,' I suppose," he thought; "it's certainly that. And I'm exceedingly sorry for the fellow, I fear he's got himself into a bad fix."Colclough turned to the congregation. There was not a man in it but himself and the Church officials, and not a woman over twenty-five. They were all awake now—a tribute to Frank's judicious selection of music, and its lasting influence upon girls of this order—grown more alert at the sound of the music. During the prayers they had whispered, and grinned, and produced a various assortment of noises with their tongues, and they had yawned and sighed copiously. But now they were bored no longer. Many of them, indeed, had found voices, half fearful, half amazed at the words they brought out. Most of them shouted in the worst music-hall style. One or two of the very young ones seemed to be seized with a spasm of rapture ; they swayed violently to and fro ; they clasped their hands and contorted their faces; great tears made havoc among paint and powder; and their voices rose now and again to shrill shrieks. One little thing went near dancing in her wild excitement. If any of them had received the smallest encouragement at that moment, they would then and there have flung themselves on their knees, and howled out, with no reservation whatever, the full sum of their iniquity.This anti-climax was, however, taken heed of in the church, and carefully guarded against. At the end of each hymn the lights were lowered, and there was a long pause; the girls were given time to cool themselves and to gather their senses around them again. It was a little shock to Colclough to hear a few miserable shudders in the dim silence of the interval.Meanwhile, the girl near Margaret was flushing and paling alternately; her impassive- ness seemed to have vanished at the sound of the other's voice ; her eyes were curiously dilated, and her little hands twisted and tortured themselves incessantly. She had, without any doubt, an enormous appreciation of music, and of the rarity of Margaret's voice, but it was a gloomy mixture of unusual and unwelcome emotions that moved her—not enjoyment.When the hymn had ceased she sat down. Colclough thought she was trembling a little, and he was certain she looked unpleasantly sullen and a little resentful. She took no further notice of posture, she sat on movelessly, oblivious of an audible sniff of scorn that Poll cast on her from behind. She knew her duty at least, if the other didn't."She's a most dreadful person from many points of view," Colclough thought, "but it's well to be conscientious in all things. She's marvellously good-looking. I wish that singing girl was at home and in bed.—What, in Heaven's name, is Frank at ? Preaching, does he call it ? I should call it a fine honest round of bruising. He's forgotten to give them even a text."As Frank went on, even the girls were startled into attention ; there was not a sound or a giggle, hardly a yawn, during the few minutes he spoke to them."I didn't think such a sermon was in him," Colclough thought. "And yet the words aren't much. I believe it's only that he's a real good fellow, and is enormously sorry for the poor creatures."Directly he had given out the last hymn, Frank turned abruptly, and went into the vestry."Poor old chap!" Colclough thought, "no doubt he's surprised at himself."Frank threw off his surplice, and leaned up against the table, trying to shut his ears to the girl's voice and get a grip on himself."Am I possessed, I wonder?" he thought."This girl, whom I have never spoken to, has made me talk as no love for God or man has ever been able to do, and yet I have tried my best to walk straight and to keep my wits well about me. I wonder if I ought to take Jim's advice and fly. I'm afraid it's too late. After all, I've never yet made any particular fool of myself about a girl—why should I begin now ? Besides, I have sufficient respect for myself to know that if she wasn't worth some sort of emotion, I wouldn't feel as strongly as I do with regard to her."He washed his hands and face, hoping that the new curate hadn't chanced to go to sleep and omitted to pronounce the blessing. Then he went cheerfully out into the night, almost cannoning against Colclough at the door."Is that you, Jim? I was just coming to hunt you up."Colclough looked at him. "You're not going through with it, then?""I thought we arranged all that.""Well, come on then, and recollect that, whatever happens, I told you so."CHAPTER XXIV.THEY turned the first corner past the church, stopped simultaneously, and looked irresolutely at one another ; then Colclough burst out laughing."Well, what's to be done? Are we to wait here indefinitely and trust to Providence to guide her feet our way ? Supposing Providence is against the business, as I have reason to suppose is the case?"Frank laughed grimly, and the embarrassment and inconvenience of having to create your own conventions as you need them, struck him for the first time."The fact is unfortunate, but there's no denying it, we do look asses," he said."Speak for yourself, Frank. I am 'doing unto others,' and expect civility.—I say, here they come, trooping down. We're fortunately too much in the shade to be seen; she must pass us, I suppose ?""Yes, she will be sure to come this way.""Are we to pounce out on them directly she passes? It's undignified on your part, and may be terrifying to the object. Weston, turn the other way, come home, and have a pipe. Well then, if you won't, button up your ulster and hide your shame. There's no reason you should bring your profession into disrepute."Presently there was a pause in the crowd, and the men from their corner could see Margaret speaking to the others, Poll close beside her. Some of them shook their heads impatiently and went on; some hesitated and looked at her curiously, while they whispered together; a few assented at once to something she was proposing to them; some hurried past, refusing to listen, and a few superior spirits sneered and laughed cynically, and went down the street singing an arrangement of one of the hymns they had just been hearing with a music-hall refrain.The dark girl Colclough noticed particularly. She said a few words, then moved off in an opposite direction, with a languid, weary, delicious walk, as if nothing less than a chariot with gorgeously caparisoned steeds were her right, and her feet could hardly bear themselves on a rough pavement.No one was in sight now but Margaret and Poll, and the two men emerged quietly from their shade. The next minute they wished they had remained there, for Margaret, who felt that they were following her, turned deliberately and glanced keenly from one to the other of them. She hesitated for an instant, then without a trace of embarrassment she addressed Frank."Did you want to speak to us?" she asked. It seemed to Frank and Colclough as if, the same instant, they were all on their proper footing."She has had previous experiences," Colclough thought, with a sudden feeling of irritation against himself and his kind, "and I shouldn't think she was more than twenty.""We do want to speak to you," Frank said with commendable coolness," and there didn't seem to be any other way in which to do it. You are not in my parish, and I couldn't find out where you lived. I have tried several times after church to see you, but you had always gone; and, as no doubt you are aware, a certain amount of impertinence is permitted to a parson."Margaret gave a little amused laugh."I shouldn't think," she said, "that any conventions would trouble you much if you wanted to gain an end. If one is to judge by your sermons, that is."Colclough grunted inwardly. "There's no doubt about her, at any rate. But, upon my word, she appears to be a candid person.""Probably you know my name—Weston—as you come to this church, and this is my friend, Mr. Colclough."Poll hung a little in the rear and stared. There was always a floating notion of a prince in her inconsequent brain, who would some day swoop suddenly down and remove her liege lady in a fiery chariot or otherwise. Neither of these persons came at all up to her expectations, and a fiendish impulse seized her to "frighten 'em off." She had a rich stock of expedients to fall back on for such purposes. She decided, however, to wait and listen a little—she might find it interesting."I wonder," Colclough thought, looking keenly at Margaret, "if she means to enlighten us as to her business here."Frank rarely troubled himself with vague wonderings when he could get to his point by more direct methods."I am a parson, then, and impertinent; we both agree on the last point, I see. In accordance with my character, which you dropped on with such speed and precision, I am going to ask what a girl of your age is doing here at this time of night and in such company as you were five minutes ago."She looked quickly up at him; she was not quite absolutely sure yet. The uncompromising look of his ugly nose completely reassured her. It was self-respecting and trustworthy."Because one evening you preached a sermon that took hold of me and wouldn't let me go. It is so easy and so pleasant to keep one's eyes comfortably shut, but I couldn't manage it; some things you said forced them open, I think, and suggested other notions, and I wanted to see for myself if there was any truth in them.""But it's curious you should be allowed, and in this locality.""There's no one to prevent my doing what I like, and just now, and for some time to come, I shall have to live in this neighbourhood. I have loads of time on my hands, and I thought I would spend it by prowling round with open eyes, and getting to know some of the girls around me; and occasionally we understand each other.""I should think there's not much doubt but you do. Curious that I myself have been thinking, for a long time past, that girls could do an enormous lot for one another—that is, if they would consent or be allowed to open their eyes."The street, at this hour, was very quiet, and they were walking rather slowly, by Frank's connivance, so it was easy to talk comfortably; in the day time, of course, this would have been impossible.Margaret turned on him astonished.'You don't mean to say, "she asked," that you want girls, ordinary girls, living in guarded homes and with nothing to shut their eyes upon, to come down into the conflict and bitterness of this life here, among girls who have been beaten about in it since their very babyhood. You don't mean that?""But I do mean it. I think that girls have shut their eyes on the lives that other girls lead and have to lead, and on the dulness and horror of their surroundings, quite long enough. I mean unofficial, outside girls—not sisters, or nurses, or church workers.""But you are a man. You don't know, and you can't know, that it would be quite impossible, and extremely cruel.""So I've told him till I'm tired," put in Colclough."You do it," said Frank."That's different altogether. I had lived here for months, doing nothing, but detesting everything, and shutting my eyes whenever I could, and yet seeing daily, more and more, how life went. I had got over the first sick shock of grey horrors before I came into personal contact with one of the girls about me. I made no ignorant plunge into a dark, unknown, outcast land, where laughter and amusement are in some horrid way generally connected with evil. Why should ignorant girls' lives be spoilt with the practical knowledge—one only grasps it properly by actual contact—of this dulness and misery? A girl could never be the same again once she knew— really." She broke off and looked oddly at him."Didn't I tell you?" said Colclough triumphantly. "So much for your insane schemes! It would be the death of the ordinary girl with no sense either of values or of humour.""Rica, for example? " said Frank, half aside.'You call her an average girl, do you?"Frank took no notice of him; he was an affectionate brother in his way, but the classification of his sister hardly interested him at the moment. He looked uneasily at Margaret."But, Miss— —"Daintree," said Margaret. She felt horribly guilty the moment after, and wondered if she should have told them her real name."Miss Daintree, you are a contradiction to all you say.""But I told you I am different altogether.""Of course you are," said Colclough. "Your voice is a sufficient witness to that." He was anxious to find out some definite trifle about the girl—she was inclined, seemingly, to generalise rather too much. " It's an unusual voice for a girl. I fancy the life you have chosen, "he remarked tentatively, "may have something to do with its quality.""I really don't see how my life can affect it in the least. I have been well taught, and I am taking good lessons. My mother, I believe, had a wonderful voice, and my grandmother—very likely my great-grandmother, Mine, what there is of it, comes at least through three generations,—so my master says. As for my life, I didn't choose it, it chose me.""I wonder," said Colclough gently, "if it made a wise choice.""I should think it was a matter of certainty that it did," said Frank, feeling vindictive.Margaret looked from one to the other of them and laughed amusedly."You consider me then as a scheme? It is delightful to have become suddenly an object of such interest. I shall take your conception of how far I am valuable as a scheme, Mr. Weston, with reservation. I notice you idealise. And now," she said, hesitating, "I suppose you're going farther on?"Frank had no notion of being got rid of just yet."Suppose," he said artlessly, " that you help me to thresh out my scheme and make it practical? We're bound for the same goal, I fancy, only that each of us prefers his own track."She again looked at the two. She was in a pleasurable little simmer of excitement; it was like meeting suddenly with shod human tracks on a desert island. But there was Mrs. Bent to consider. What would she say? They might only increase her usual irritating doubts and fears a hundredfold.But their voices were so soothing, it was stimulating and delicious not to have to feel as if one were eternally pursuing h 's and panting to oil vocal chords."We are just going to have supper," she said; "we expect a great many of the girls around, and if you will come too, we shall be so glad." She remembered with a pang that she had altogether forgotten Poll. She turned round to her. " Won't we, Poll?" she asked compunctiously."Yes, Miss Margaret, very glad—of wot, Miss?" she added in a hoarse whisper.Margaret laughed. "Glad if these gentlemen will come to supper with us—the clergyman who preached and his friend," she explained."Oh yes, Miss; there's lots o' beef, and the old woman 'll be that proud to see any as respectable as them," she remarked in an unaffected aside.This gratifying communication put the consciences at their ease, and Colclough 's alacrity in accepting the invitation was as marked as Frank's."Haven't you a lot to put up with?" Colclough asked.He felt that he ought to be behind with the fat girl; he knew that Weston's one wish was to kick him; but it interested him to watch the other girl, and she had a charming voice to listen to. He kept his place with a pleasant air of assurance."I have," she said simply," and with such unnecessary things often. It is sometimes astonishing to me how stupid men are. They surely have experience to go on. Have you considered all this in your ideal scheme?" she asked slowly, looking at Frank. "Did you take this drawback into consideration? Or possibly," she added, "living as I do in this place, among these surroundings, may have taken something from me, and that the mistake is natural.""It's altogether unnatural," said Frank "and only means that men are chiefly asses."The direct, uncompromising, impersonal way in which she spoke of these things and of herself was a shock in an odd way. She put herself, as it were, outside of her girlhood, and stood uncomplainingly and critically aloof with her experience. Her attitude was new to the men, and it touched them. It also made them blush a little, in their consciences, not on their cheeks, "as a man is able." It was unpleasant to think that other men should be such fools."Then," she said," that makes your scheme more than ever impossible. It's funny," she went on, " I thought once or twice that, if ever I had occasion to want any of you from a clergyman's point of view, I should go to you. The others whine a good deal, and you never do. I have had a great deal to bear in my time," she added, with the manner of countless ages of experience, " from that tone in prayer and in the praising of God.""Do you know why the other fellows whine? It's because they're always underfed and sometimes hungry. I should whine smart enough if I endured life under the conditions these men do, weighed down by babies and bad diet.""Then," she said unsentimentally, " a fund should be provided to find them properly and to take the babies off their minds. It struck me they suffered from the eternal, overpowering dulness of the neighbourhood, and they have a most unenjoyable and depressing way with them. But their underfeeding is a horrid thought. It worries me with all the people about here. What a delightful person she who wrote 'I thank the goodness and the grace' must have been—so young and dear and ignorant! A person one would like to look at, and feel, and hear laugh."Colclough looked at her and wished she was not quite so uncanny; yet there was no complaint, no note of it; she was always to herself a mere outsider."I wish," she began again, "you had not told me of those men. I shall always consider them now from the food point of view, and wonder what they have had for their dinners, and hope, at least, that it wasn't fried fish or Irish stew. The streets here live on these things; it's part of the misery of these regions: one gets so wolfishly in earnest about food.""But you surely——She laughed aloud. "Oh! not myself. We have excellent food. But every one else. It somehow has given me a shock to think that the men who are to raise the masses—isn't that the word?—have not only the horror of the masses to contend against, but these com-monplace discomforts of their own. No wonder they look serious and uninviting."Frank opened his eyes and peered at her through his spectacles. She certainly had opinions, and she announced them."If the babies are a further burden on their minds," she said, " would they not be better to have remained celibate, as in the Romish Church?"Colclough laughed softly."Possibly," said Frank; "but we're not all downtrodden with babies.""No; and then you don't whine, but cheer up and stimulate your congregation. It's stimulating that everything about here wants, I think. And now, here's our house. But Mrs. Bent, my old nurse, with whom I live, is very nervous. I must explain you to her. Strange faces perplex her. Will you wait just a minute?"She disappeared inside the house, and darted into the room; but Poll was before her spluttering out, with many calls on the "Lor!" and "Goodness Gracious!" the approach of the distinguished visitors."Miss Margaret, dear heart, what is it?" said Mrs. Bent, gazing in silent horror at Poll, wondering if she had indeed and in truth verified her frequent predictions and taken leave altogether of her senses."Mrs. Bent, one of our clergymen and his friend are coming in to supper. You don't mind, do you, dear?"Mrs. Bent put on her spectacles and examined the girl. She looked flushed, and bright, and pleased."My dear," Mrs. Bent said, " black clothes covers all sorts. I have had a long experience of life. "She shook her head, weary with its weight of years. " You're young; but it's too late now. Bring 'em in, dear." She smoothed her apron, and waited—doubting.CHAPTER XXV."SHE seems to be built up chiefly from a groundwork of hankering after happiness," said Colclough, growing cold with waiting."But it seems to be altogether for other people. She appears to have got out of wanting that sort of thing for herself. Her laugh explains her, I fancy. It's a breaking-up of nature through circumstances.""A breaking-up—hang it all! Frank, say it again."Frank was engaged in wondering how much longer they were to stand there."Will you step into my parlour?" muttered Colclough."I wish we had the chance!" growled the other."It's a seemly expedition, taking it all round, isn't it?"Directly he was out of the girl's sight and uninfluenced, except by a hideous sensation of cold in the draughty door-way, Colclough felt an impulse to sheer off on to the expedient and moral track."Supposing the Vicar should happen to be out on a sick call, or otherwise on the war-path, and came along?""Fortunately, he's snoring.""I wonder if we shall get a chance to dig into her antecedents. You, with your parson's antennae now——"I have other and less savoury uses for that part of my professional person. Besides, no one but an old woman would want to rake up what that girl wishes to be silent about. She is strong enough to stand alone—to be her own past:""Oh, that's satisfactory, anyway.""Your Indian experiences or lack of them, in women, Jim, have made you rather an ass.""One needn't go to India to be an ass. What's she at, in Heaven's name? The cold has got to my uttermost corners.""Here she is. Stop shivering. The room will be too small for that kind of thing, I fancy."Margaret had been delayed by several quite unnecessary preparations which at the last moment Mrs. Bent had nervously insisted upon being made, and which Poll's frantic haste had considerably retarded.When she brought her visitors boldly up, Mrs. Bent performed two solemn curtseys, took in the men, gave them one rapid turnover in her mind, then she did her manners."Poll, girl, you forget your duties. Dust chairs for the gentlemen—them, next the fire." She then turned to Frank. He was not very old, probably not very wise, but he had at least the label of respectability upon him—the hall-mark of a long. Waistcoat—and he looked wholesome. The other, she reflected, "looked a deal too broken for his years."There was at least no doubt as to her first duty—which was without delay to make plain to these gentlemen her young lady's proper position."I am pleased," she said with severe dignity, "that my young lady should consort with them of her own station. She's young, sir, and trustful, and thinks to make others as good as herself. I am but an old foolish body, and believes in old ways, and thinks that them wild young hussies, as also the stray creatures, should be left to the Lord and to them as is appointed to gather 'em in—not as many of 'em stays as is gathered, which is my experience. I make bold to hope that you, being a minister of God, will advise my young lady according."Margaret was satisfied for the present; she could not hear what the old woman said, but she was evidently " taking counsel," in which case she could not consider the young man as an unmitigated wolf, so she gave her uninterrupted attention to Colclough."Mrs. Bent," said Frank, "sit comfortably down in your arm-chair, and we can talk properly. Do you know, it has been my idea and hope for ever so long now that young ladies might be induced to step out of the beaten track, and do something of the same sort of thing that your young lady is doing. Possibly Christ might approve of it even if their maiden aunts didn't. What do you think?"She looked at him grimly, took off her spectacles, and wiped them deliberately."Oh dear, oh dear!" she thought, "have she got round him already? and the other the same no doubt, and never set eyes on 'em till an hour ago. Oh dear!" She put on her glasses and said stiffly, "Them as Christ bade to go into the highways and hedges after such like were men as knew the world, rough fishermen moreover, not young ladies with the best blood in the county in 'em, sir." She paused, and let that work. "And must I point out to you, sir",' she added with a tinge of scornful wonder, "that my young lady is a deal too pretty for such uses?"The reminder, if unnecessary, was convenient; it gave him the opportunity for a conscientious stare. Colclough didn't count for the minute, as he was watching her from another point of view.Even in a London drawing-room, Frank decided, she would have set going a quiver of distrust in himself, in every mother's son in it; here, in this quaint room in the wilderness, she was amazing, and a shock. One felt a little uncomfortable sense of a want of proportion in her placing.Since Margaret had lifted up her head and compelled circumstances to serve her she had grown in every way. There was little to be seen now of her old indefiniteness of shape; her possibilities were expanding healthily to perfection.Neither of the men could have told you even as much as the colour of the dress she wore; they only knew that it was just precisely what they would themselves have chosen for her; and Frank thought that all the other girls of his acquaintance must be rather dense not to do their hair just as she did hers. There was one little thing about her, however, that worried and annoyed Frank—he connected it in some way with a man; it was one line between her eyebrows, furrowed in her creamy young flesh; it had a way of contracting now and then, and deepening, and it kept company with an old-experienced look of gloom that occasionally leapt into her eyes, making them black and heavy instead of brilliant and grey.Margaret felt that Mrs. Bent's confidence the Church was getting a shock. She came up to her."How late it is!" she said. "I wonder why they don't come."A sudden idea struck Poll. She had been sitting up stiff, twiddling her thumbs as "genteel as you please," and picking up information. She bounced up and imparted her idea to Margaret's ear—"Belike they seen the passon."Frank laughed. "Oh, I hope that's not it. Is it, Mrs. Bent?""Go and see to that coffee, Poll," Mrs. Bent commanded, her fingers twitching to box the girl's ears, "and boil the milk, and don't take your eyes off it, or else it'll go over."Poll went glibly enough. She could hear very well from the passage, and see too; there was no mortal sense in staying in the kitchen."Keep her eyes on the milk indeed!" She winked as soon as she was out of range of observation, and stretched. It was embarrassing "having passon's eyes a-samplin' o' you.""Take no notice of her, please, sir," said Mrs. Bent deprecatingly—"a poor foolish thing as my young lady have took up and apprenticed to a dressmaker. She does as well as she can, poor crittur; but she's a torment and an abiding unpleasantness, as you may see, sir.""Are those girls ever rude to Miss Daintree?""I can't say they be," she replied reluctantly. "They're not to say rude, neither to her nor to me. But they're noisy, sir, and I'm always uneasy lest they should forget. There's one girl, sir, as makes me quake," she went on, oblivious to the fact that the parson's eyes were wandering and his ears doing likewise. "A dark, big one; there's summat fearsome in her. She won't neither eat nor speak. She only comes to hear Miss Margaret sing. She's a queer, mad young woman, and that awful." The old woman fingered her glasses nervously and trembled. " The last night she rose up in the middle of a song and marched out into the night, like a great impudent statue. The Lord forgive me if I misapprehend Him, but I fear sore He have clean forsook her. And to think of the likes of her and my lamb a-standin' cheek by jowl," she said, half to herself.She had forgotten the parson and her manners, and only thought of the hideous-ness of the fact. Frank brought his eyes from Margaret's face to hers.It was awful from her point of view, and, in fact, from that of most other people's.He turned and again looked at Margaret, to give courage to his idea. She was laughing and eager, and her excited young face seemed as if untouched by one crude truth. For a minute he wavered and was inclined to go over to the side of the enemy; but he was a dogged soul, and his idea had been brought forth with fear and trembling."No," he concluded; "she may have touched pitch, but she's not defiled. Mouths don't lie, especially adult mouths like hers, whatever proverbs may do. Mrs. Bent, "he said gently, "I quite understand all your objections, and how bitter the pain they breed must be; but, if I were you, whenever I feel like that, I would take a good look at your young lady, and think of the white doves among the pots. I am convinced you would then feel all right in no time."Mrs. Bent sighed, and wished to the Lord that, just for a minute or two even, he were a woman. Frank was awfully sorry for her, but he felt that he had done his duty nobly, and wished he could kick Colclough. There was fair play in everything, and, after all, he had discovered the girl. Mrs. Bent waived her momentary objection to his sex, and went on placidly."It helps and cheers me, sir, to talk with you, even though you see fit to go contrary to me. You being a minister of God, it do seem natural-like to talk confidential," she went on, with gentle satisfaction, happily unconscious of the goings-on inside her hearer. It was so pleasant to have such a nice polite young man to listen to one, an ordained minister too, and that friendly and interested."I wouldn't so much mind now if Miss Margaret would but speak to 'em like the ladies as carries tracks, only gentler-like, and with some common sense. If she would advise 'em now, and bring their sins home to 'em, and give 'em suitable texts. Lord knows," she sighed sadly, "the book of God reeks with such, as well you know, sir. If she would help 'em, but keep herself to herself and show them their place. They're lawless, wild creatures, sir, and needs a rare amount of placing. But she don't, Lord love you; she speaks to 'em as if she was one of 'em.""The beastly bad taste of the fellow and his grin," Frank reflected ruefully, "and her dear old voice is putting me to sleep too.""She laughs with 'em, sir—oh dear, oh dear!—she sings to 'em, songs and hymns just as they ask for 'em, and she sets and eats with 'em, and all the same as if she enjoyed her vittles. I sets too. What's good enough for her is surely good enough for me. But every morsel chokes me, having that much respect for myself. Poor Poll is as good as she knows how to be, which ain't much, poor body; but them others! They're best left in the Lord's hands; He made 'em, and no doubt He understands 'em."She sighed despondently, and tried hard to believe her own words, but not with any marked success.''Hearken to 'em," she said; "here they come."CHAPTER XXVI."ANYTHING of a change must be a bettering of the present state of things," Frank thought.He could not of course now hope to get Margaret to himself, but at least the tantalising spectacle of Colclough monopolising her at his ease would be removed from his sight. Then there was Mrs. Bent's prim, pronounced, disapproving touch of silence-producing expectancy to be thankful for.He bore down on Colclough, and delivered himself of a few sentences; then he listened in rather an unamiable abstraction to the patter of feet outside the door, followed by a succession of rapid knocks. He could hear Margaret welcoming and talking to a medley of voices,—quite, indeed, as if she had been "one of them." As he listened to her, his belief in his scheme grew each moment more beset with reservations and complications, his primeval enthusiasm was losing in concentration, his mind was rapidly getting itself into an irrational general-objection state. It struck him he had better pull up and watch the proceedings.As each girl appeared in her turn, she filed up to Mrs. Bent and did her unwilling duty by the old woman, in her own particular fashion; and there was no sameness whatever in the outward deportment of these young people. Many of them had slipped or been thrust outside of the laws and codes that govern ordinary conduct, and though each and all among them carried about with her a remnant of what she had learned in other days, there was invariably a marked individuality in what she had acquired, in the way or in lieu of manners since those old times. Always old times with the majority of Margaret's guests, even if dewy-eyed childhood was still with them. The step from virtue to vice is a quick little one, but it constitutes an era of unutterable length in any woman's life.Times that are so fresh and young to-day, bubbling over with mere baby-life, are old to-morrow, and grey, with a curious, unsound note of declining and decay in them.Mrs. Bent responded to the girls' greeting with a grave, distant dignity that tried their constitutions, and Poll, from behind Margaret, nodded at her old chums with a grotesque mixture of superiority and deprecation. The try at airs was mild, and only showed its ridiculous head on compulsion, as it were, for the parson's sake; but it was Poll's first and last flight into higher altitudes. A speedy quencher was put on it. From each girl in turn the luckless daw got the retort uncourteous, veiled under divers forms, none of them tending to edification. The old blood indeed surged up, and she gave them back all she got and in kind—but strictly under her breath.After that one spurt, however, Poll returned, once and for ever, to her ordinary rôle of blundering and admiring second fiddle.Margaret noticed, directly they had disposed of Poll, the nods and winks and covert nudges of her unaffected and candid guests at sight of the men. Whereupon she felt a sudden hot rush of embarrassment. She flung one half-perplexed, half-amused look at the crowd, then she announced in a clear, unabashed voice, and with a comprehensive all-round glance,—"One of our clergymen and his friend have come to supper, and to help afterwards with the singing—You'll both have to sing whether you can or not," she commanded in a rapid voice as she passed them. "Goodness, if they haven't a note between them!" she thought, as they both assented with what struck her as rather a suspicious alacrity.The young people instantly regained their accustomed ease. For a minute, in spite of winks and giggles, the sight of a full-fledged parson and his "hanger-on"—possibly a Scripture reader, with nothing on earth to do but to "pry round"—had caused a slight uneasy flutter of apprehension in this dove-cote, and the notion of a sermon was already floating in mutinous minds. This, the parson's cheerfulness and readiness to sing to a great extent dispelled."If it's only an "ym," giggled one young thing, with a toss of her tousled head, "it'll keep 'im off our souls."Presently more knocks had been heard and answered, and there were now about twenty in the room, all told.The men had been wondering, awe-stricken, how it held them, and watched Margaret and Poll curiously pulling out from under sofas and reaching down from the tops of cupboards, with each fresh batch of girls, little stools and boxes, all over chintz and ribbons."Who made them?" Frank asked in an interval."Poll and I. It was an awful experience, we were nearly frantic by the time the stuff was cut out, not to say fastened on. The ribbons are mostly to stop holes or cover puckers."The only arm-chair in the room was Mrs. Bent's; that was never moved or meddled with, and Margaret took good care that plenty of space should be left round it. There was a dado round the room which seemed to be one blaze of brilliant colouring, on a ground of delicate grey.Frank found that the colouring came from innumerable fans, thrown helter-skelter over the grey paper, and the confusion of dusty soft reds and blues, the glints of gold and delicate violets, and shimmerings of silver, with here and there shadings of ebony black and gorgeous oranges and yellows, had an odd, charming, crazy effect. Above the dado was a shelf of natural wood, fastened on with brackets, on which stood morsels of china, and an amazing quaint medley of odds and ends, only to be found in little old shops in back streets. Some of them were Eastern things brought home by sailors, and they smelt of spices, and suggested dead Egyptians. There were vases of flowers too, and dead grasses and palms, and scores of other small things to enliven light minds for a passing moment."What suggested the arrangement?" said Frank, laughing and waylaying her."To counteract the drabs and the greys of the world—our world here among the endless ugly rows of ugly houses. One gets to long for colour. If I gave way to the natural woman, I should this minute be clothed in scarlet and purple, and all the girls feel just the same; but they do, as you may perceive, give way to the natural woman, and throw on colour whenever they can. I sometimes envy them their capacity to wear brilliant inconsequent bows. The craving for colour in these parts is a disease, I think, and wants treatment, only parish doctors don't include it in their course."Meanwhile, Colclough was prowling round on his own account. He had chanced on a book-shelf, and was finding some mute amusement in the wear and tear of the novels and comic papers, and in the spotless purity of a large selection of scientific primers, a stock of which Margaret had laid in in one foolish moment, when her brain had been addled by the platform utterances of a lad from Oxford. He was a charming boy, with great faith, and a strong belief in the upward tendency of the primeval mind, and he depressed Margaret frightfully. She felt she was failing in laying a solid foundation, so she went out repentant and bought the primers."She's young yet," thought Colclough, with the pleasant chuckle of one who isn't.Then he turned round to watch her. But he first reviewed Frank, and wished to God he was well out of it all. Margaret certainly bore herself to Frank's satisfaction and his own. She was going about among her guests, gay and bright, talking and laughing with perfect ease and unrestraint; the girls felt happy and at ease in her presence. Yet each one of them knew, and moreover felt the fact to each individual finger-tip, that she was as high above them as the heavens are above the earth. Her upright, honorable, fine womanhood was a curious sight in such company. Her alert, open-eyed common sense struck both Frank and Colclough with particular force. Nothing escaped her: every nod, and wink, and wriggle of her guests was taken notice of; she went from one to the other of them, turning sulks to grins, subduing odd cackles of impious laughter, bringing forward new interests to wandering minds—for the minute transforming hearts and getting the better of nature.Frank sat down comfortably, so that he might carry on his observations with greater ease. She caught his eyes on her, however, and Colclough's at the same moment, and concluding they meant to philosophise on her in her character of scheme, while she worked, she pounced on them, and before they quite knew what she demanded of them, she had them entertaining her guests as actively as herself.They began presently to perceive that there was, in spite of facts, an oddly wholesome atmosphere of primitive Christianity abroad in the quaint motley room, and the only one it singled out to skip was the one professing Christian in it, poor sad Mrs. Bent, who still sat aloof, longing for the end of it all, and for the last sight of the "creatures."During the wait before supper, Frank's eyes were drawn to the trouble in the good old face. He put aside his own affairs, and tried to soften it in his kind way; but it was a hopeless task. It seemed impossible to raise the cold veil of reserve in which the old inherited peasant instincts of decency had wrapped the woman. No appeal had any effect on her gentle, timid, perplexed alarms.For, not only was she in desperate straits on account of the unseemliness of the position for her young lady, but on her own account she was in terror, lest she should be caught in the stream, succumb weakly, forget her upbringing, and cease to keep herself to herself. The patient, fearful, watchful, old face was a suggestion of pathos to Margaret and to the men. On the contrary, it clearly aggravated the rest of that gathering. It was a constant mute protest against their social standing—or their want of it. Mrs. Bent was, in fact, the death's head at this feast.At last, all the girls who meant to come had evidently arrived, and after a significant whisper from Poll, Margaret put Mrs. Bent into Frank's hands, and told him she expected him to carve. She looked a shade whiter, and a little different.Frank wondered, as his eyes swept over the knots of chattering creatures, how it would all end, how long the girl would stand erect and alone, to throw her feeble strength against the tide of foul waters that swept about her feet, but that could not touch so much as the hem of her garment."God bless her, or rather He has blessed her," he thought, "however it ends."But how long would she stand erect, with shining eyes, and hope to keep her heart warm? How soon would come the moment when something would break within her—give way: when an aching void would take the place of the warm fulness, and she would know, when the horror of it was past, and when her eyes had grown clear and she could think again, that it was the death of idealisation that shook her, and that, henceforth and for ever, it must be duty that would lead her, not rosy idea ever any more?Then would come the inexorable dimming of the sweet daring eyes, the stoop of the proud shoulders, the bowing of the head, and worse than all these things, there would come a note of death into the living ring of her laughter. And over all her dreams the sober sickening slime of " common sense " and the " possible."At this point Frank's practical mind hinted to him that he wanted a smoke and that he was hungry, and had besides only met the young lady two hours before. He took possession of Mrs. Bent, and resolved still to cherish his scheme, and in the meantime. do his duty by the carving. Under wholesome labour, sentiment returned to its proper place, and Frank began to "take notice" again, and to order his conduct and regulate his thoughts in a rational way.CHAPTER XXVII.MARGARET, backed by Poll, had brought into the arrangements of the table much grace and more realism. Considering the season, the show of flowers down the long table was lavish. Frank was surprised, for the. distribution of flowers among his people was part of his own creed, and he knew very well how much they cost him. If he had not been a man, he would have seen in a glance that the effect was produced by a great deal of green, and by a comparatively few pink azaleas, and these had been a bargain of Poll's getting in a late foray down the New Cut.Margaret was beginning to learn that she must husband her resources if they were to last out the time to her majority. She had con-siderable expenses in helping girls to apprenticeships and situations; indeed her only difficulty was not to spend every penny she had and all at once; but she had at her back Mrs. Bent, wise with the wisdom of small savings.All among the flowers there stood little china dishes of pickles, among which onions took the lead, and everywhere were oranges, apples, and nuts, with crackers aggressively thrust forward. There had been a slight omission in this particular the first night, and Margaret's teeth had felt on edge for the next week.There seemed to Frank to be enough almonds and raisins on the table to supply a regiment, which showed that he was better up in the lowest and highest possibilities of his neighbours than in their natural tastes—which ignorance Poll took good care that Margaret should have none of.This happened to be a cold meat supper, being Sunday night, so beef and pork-pie were the mainstay of the feast. But when the supper fell on a week night, Mrs. Bent's house was deliciously redolent of the fumes of stewed tripe and onions, and liver and bacon, and spluttering saveloys on white potato beds; and the combined scent was often the most edifying memory that Margaret's guests carried about for years after in their queer rubbish-bags of minds. Even a reek of onions can hold a touch of sentiment in it.It was an odd table and oddly filled. There was hardly a girl round it who was over twenty-four, or who went by the name handed on to her by her ancestors, or who, except at odd soft moments, would tell you a story of her young days with a word of truth in it.And it was only at such odd soft times that any of them realised, with any distinctness, the truth about herself, or cared a rap to be any other. And yet there are ways and means to get at every solitary young specimen of this great wild tribe, during those odd times, when the heart within her is soft, and sick, and malleable; to catch it, so to speak, on the hop, and then to strike in with words and methods, bracing, compelling, and human. To force open eyes blind with folly, or the gnawing need of food, or the mad young yearning for pleasure—to compel the whole being to a turbulent convulsive recoil from itself. The difficulty then is to help on the upward impetus, that the recoil may become permanent and abiding. Whoever attempts the task will need a sound head, free of mawkishness, and a steady hand, lest the pendulum escape from his clutch and the wretch be swept back to her wretchedness. And then God help her—or give her a fresh start elsewhere, where even the poorest and lowest woman of God's making understands and reverences herself, and where men have at last admitted their responsibility.By the time Weston had filled the plates, and got Mrs. Bent now and then to creep gently out of herself, he found he could rest and take a leisurely survey of the position. The com-pany seemed now very much in touch with itself and its supper, and the conversation, whatever it lacked in the glasses and taste was made up for amply in ease and briskness—yet within bounds.Margaret was still dispensing wedges from the big pie, but at the very height of her busiest time, with a dozen hungry eyes on her, and Poll waiting with two plates, she never for an instant relaxed her constant alert observation of eye and ear. It was necessary. She had the most combustible material, yet known, to deal with—the mere reflection of a spark would have been enough to cause an explosion—and the meat, and the drink, and the hilarity that comes of the breaking of bread together were having their effect. It was very much like hobnobbing round a volcano, Frank thought with an appreciative grin, bred of his adventurous youth, as he insisted, in spite of her remonstrances, in filling Mrs. Bent's glass with beer. It was a good brand, generally liked better of men than of women—women's drink generally being, as is well known, but poor stuff. Whether this comes to pass from the vile tyranny of man, or through the pressure of original sin, is a question yet to be answered. In dealing faithfully with it, possibly one stigma might be lifted from the harassed sex."Who chooses your beer, Mrs. Bent?"She reddened, and reflected on him swallowing his, with pain, and a touch of spiritual pride."Miss Margaret, sir," she replied in a low voice, pushing her untasted glass away."Mrs. Bent, I'm half a doctor, if being filled to the chin with prescriptions, every one contradicting its neighbour, goes for anything, and I prescribe that beer for you. It's the best I've tasted for months. I shall ask Miss Daintree for the name of her wine merchant."Poll heard him and uttered one prolonged and irrepressible giggle. "I niver—oh Lor', no, I niver!" she muttered in an agony of delight.But Mrs. Bent's sense of decency was hurt to the quick."To think that even in this—this pandering to the flesh of the creatures, he aids and abets her" She took a slow, steady look at him. " His eyes ain't them of wolves," she concluded, and tried to eat, but the meat tasted dry to her, her thirst was enormous, and water" that indigestible." She looked round and felt a sinful and unseemly envy of her irresponsible neighbours; her eyes turned again to "the minister," and she gave a short, troubled sigh. He freshened up her glass cheerfully, and began to talk to her on outside matters, till the gentle, cracked old laugh broke out, unwillingly at first, but gradually relaxing and forgetting its bonds, till at last Frank's end of the table was as merry as Margaret's, and -Mrs. Bent found after a little, that not only had she drunk her beer and enjoyed her supper, but that she was talking to "them creatures" as if she had been a "mother to "em" For one wild minute, she thought of mentioning the matter to the Lord at the very next opportunity; but when it came, she remembered her up-bringing, and Whom she was speaking to, and flurriedly decided to bring up another subject.After one particular round with the beer, Poll grew painfully alert. She kept hovering about a certain quartette of young women whose whisperings were gradually rising. Some old, well-remembered note had struck on Poll's practised ear, and all the watch-dog had risen in her. The demand for more beer from one of the four was met with lordly indifference, a solemn reminding frown, and a thumb dexterously shot over one shoulder, which produced a scream of laughter from the clique and a huge poke. It was trying to Poll's dignity, especially as just at that moment she caught "the passon's eye on 'er, and 'im laffin'."She held her ground, however, and pro-ceeded to change plates with a will. As she rounded the corner nearest the insurgents, with one well-directed shot a large walnut struck her in the eye, and reduced her to a spluttering, threatening mass.Margaret, who had watched the affair from the start, and had let it go on, hoping that some fresh imp-begotten impulse might crop up in the little knot and distract its attention, now turned to the four, who, although they were giggling as hard as they could, yet felt clearly ill at ease."You've blinded Poll, you see," she said, "so I suppose you're prepared to do her work. Nancy and Madge, will you take this side, and you, Flo and Claudine, the other? and, Poll, you had better sit down till your eye is better."There was no attempt at gainsaying her order. In a minute the four were brandishing about plates with "clatter enough to deafen one," Mrs. Bent observed plaintively. The noise was begotten partly of spite, partly of the exuberance of their spirits, and though sundry shrugs were to be seen and divers mutters might have been audible to acute ears, there was no thought even of jibbing."Her hand is light enough," Colclough reflected, "but there's no doubt as to its strength. It's not altogether the best training for a domestic career. There's an advantage in the common groove after all." He took another interested inspection. "On the whole, I should not recommend this school to the natural man to select from. I wonder how long she has been conducting this kind of entertainment; I must ascertain. Frank is quite useless in the detective line, poor beggar. What will the family say?—and the super-excellent step-mother?—Lady Gordon's money and her certainty of his coming bishopric, poor chap!"When Poll felt a little restored, she swallowed the rest of her visible indignation, and with one eye on the interests of morality and the other on the paying off of old scores, proceeded to substitute cups for glasses.Meanwhile Colclough, when he had placed Frank's situation, fell to considering his own, and found it anything but agreeable. His volcanic neighbours were beginning to jar, and to prevent anything like ease or contentment of mind. A sudden remark from a candid-eyed young person on his left suggested to him that it's sometimes a little difficult to be quite successful in the rôle of a man and a brother. He looked at Frank with a melancholy pang."All very well for him," he thought; "his clothes are his salvation. My dress carries neither conviction nor respect."With an impulse of self-preservation, he plunged wildly into vigorous conversation, scattered wide in an impersonal way, and he set himself sedulously to attend to the condition of his neighbours' plates. After a quite short time his tactics bore fruit; for he had a good heart and a great pity for the reckless inconsequent youth of the girls. This feeling brought some fresh unusual tone into his manner, which awoke the curiosity of the damsels, and, in trying to find out more, they forgot their "knowingness," and ended in "behaving" in spite of themselves. They found it queer but distinctly pleasant to experience a whole batch of totally new sensations.Vague wonderings and glimmerings of misty thought were stirring in odd corners of the hearts pulsating in those grotesque prinked-out bodies. The suppers had from the first been an enlightenment to them, a new sensation, but the introduction into them of the two men was something more; it revealed a quite new side of life to every girl present.Hardly one of them had any real notion of what a gentleman—that is, a man at his best—is like; they came across them now and again professionally, as clergymen perhaps, or in "the way of business"; but in that latter capacity—they were quite conscious of the fact too—any one of them was to any man, gentle or simple, a thing, a detail, a speck of dust to be flicked off one's mind and forgotten, as dust from a smoked cigar off one's coat, not thought of as a sentient piece of one's own flesh and blood, with a heart in her and tears, and a soul, more or less.The natural service of man to woman was a new experience,—the kindly deference to her, and interest in all her little wants, the very fact of finding such trifles as pickles and salt supplied to her before she had even asked for them, and by a man—her natural prey or enemy, or mere peg to hang jokes on—was strange and fresh.The dignity of the intercourse between men and women was shown to these girls for the first time in their existence, and it was so different from that portrayed in tracts or "penny dreadfuls" that it took their breath away, and, at first, perplexity forewent enjoyment. But every woman born of woman takes kindly to man's homage, so these girls were no exception; but as they had only known men hitherto from other points of view, a good many alien things got mixed up with their pleasure, and some of them were uncomfortable, and had to be kept under by a torrent of rapid speech as decent and in order as inordinate haste would allow.Once during the meat course a little girl fresh from the country and new to her work, consequently hungry, in making a lunge into her beef cut a deep gash in her finger, and in her uncontrolled way expressed her feelings in a piercing yell. It was a nasty cut, and justified some audible expression of the emotions. Colclough, after a vindictive look at Weston for his luck in escaping the nuisance, rose to the occasion like a brick, and tied her up in a masterly style, learnt in his houseful of natives.To keep her quiet he told her a rapid succession of savage anecdotes, with local colour powerfully laid on, while she quivered and squealed in his hands. She found out, during these few moments, by some curious process, that it really paid better on the whole to be good than bad; it was easier all round, and saved embarrassment. She was frightened and subdued when she sat down again, and there were some vague intentions, making for decency, astir in her primitive heart.Frank undoubtedly might have made better use of his time, and have collected more ideas for his schemes, had he not been so largely employed in individual investigation; but he had some new light thrown on old views that in his ordinary parson's beat might have escaped him. He found himself frequently arrested, pulled up by tiny traits tendencies and small possibles and im-possibles in his neighbours, which brought many modifications into his mind and more into his methods.The suspicion of the adjacent volcano sharpened what wits he kept clear, and, taking things all round, he was really quite surprisingly alert.CHAPTER XXVIII.THEY had all returned to the front room, and were packing themselves away hilariously, when a single, swift, imperious knock was struck on the outer door. Margaret went out and came back directly with the dusky girl. She declined either to eat anything or to take off her things in Margaret's room. She, however, removed her cloak and her little bonnet languidly, and handed them to Poll, in an unseeing, imperial way. Poll received them blandly, and was about to drop them into the grate when Margaret frustrated her by herself carrying them off to safe quarters.Having greeted Mrs. Bent with polished insolence, the girl turned and took serene stock of the men. She had a lofty contempt for persons of that order, and so she informed them in one subtle glance.Weston felt it would do him a lot of good to see her in course of reformation at the wash-tub, and Colclough wondered, with a melancholy twinge, if she could possibly mistake him for a district visitor.She dismissed the pair from her mind with a slight, intricate, mocking smile, and looked round the room, nodding carelessly at one or two of the girls, who returned her impertinent recognition with half-shamefaced, half-fearful defiance. They feared her, it was plainly to be seen, and an uneasy silence fell on the assembly."We had better give them something fresh to think of," said Margaret to Weston.He and Colclough had been feeling rather low under the young lady's classification and from want of a smoke, and so for the minute, as neither of them could get hold of Margaret, they had taken refuge with one another."I shall sing first," she went on ; " and then will one of you be ready? Long intervals never do in our society.""I can't sing a note," said Colclough guiltily; "I only said it to stop a gap.""I thought so. You are evidently accustomed to stopping gaps. What can you do? Can you do conjuring tricks or anything? They never go till two o'clock," she explained hurriedly, "and if there's not heaps to do to-night we shall have trouble. You see the last girl, that beautiful, wonderful-looking one ; she simply terrifies me. I can't sing half as long when she's here. Think of something," she ordered, turning on Colclough, "and make reparation for stopping a gap with such an atrocious untruth""I can do a handkerchief trick," he meekly admitted."Yes," said Frank, "he can. Did one for my night school lately. It went all right till he suddenly forgot the point. Just at that minute the platform caved in and he fell, feet up. The audience were quite satisfied and cheered: they thought it was the point of the trick.""That," said Margaret composedly, "would be quite too melodramatic for us. We're critical as to art. The girl there would find you out if you went the eighth of a note astray. There isn't a girl here to-night," she went on, "with all her featherheadedness, who isn't sharper than the generality of her kind. We're told no experience is lost. It's rather interesting to find it out for oneself, and not to have altogether to take books' words for it." She knitted her brows curiously and looked at her flock. "You see real good people often treat those girls there," she nodded towards the crowd, "as if their brains were non-existent as well as their morals, and they entirely and altogether forget their sense of humour, which is a thing to be most carefully considered, I find. It is simply awful when they laugh at you.""Do they laugh at you?""Yes," she said, "and at you; but parish magazines make them wittier than any other—what would you call them ?—means of grace. Mr. Colclough, think your trick out, will you?—although you deserve to do it wrongly. I have been waiting to see what those three girls mean to do. See! do you notice them? The fist of one is clenched, ready for action. I hope you'll like my voice; I'm anxious to do justice to my grandmother. Oh!"She darted into the knot of mutineers, and was lost to them."Yes," said Colclough, after a pause, "I should like her to know Miss Weston.""I should have liked Rica to know her long ago.""After that, I suppose," thought Colclough," I may hold my tongue. No doubt he's a fool. So might, for that matter, another man be, if he was not clue elsewhere—or incapacitated. I suppose that fellow, now, never an ache in his life—lucky beggar!""The eternal feminine is getting too big for this room," said Frank. "There's a new atmosphere altogether since the Eastern princess came in. Doesn't it strike you, by the way, that she's a spook, not a woman? How many bodies do you suppose she's rioted into the grave? The soul in her is as old as Time. She has sat many an evening on the roof-tops of Babylon, and seen libations poured and blood shed in her honour, and would again if she had the chance. Civilisation has done precious little for that type. It will be archaic till the knell of doom. Look at the eternal gloom in her eyes!""She's a baleful person. I shall take refuge under the old woman's wing. Indeed, I don't feel as if I can hold out much longer without the moral support of a pipe."Hullo!" he went on, "she's going to sing : she's squared it with the young people in the corner. Without notes, you perceive. I believe she saw you meant turning over for her, and did it for your good. Pity if she lets the reforming spirit spread to our side—better keep it on her own. It's all wanted there. Must give her a hint on the subject""Shut up and listen"Margaret understood her accessories; her piano seemed to have been created for her voice. For a minute there was a trace of nervousness in her singing. This annoyed her; she had the true artist's respect for her own gift, and would no more do injustice to it than she would to any other person's. She stopped for an instant, and began again.This time she satisfied herself, and she sang on joyously, song, ballad, or hymn, just as they asked for them. In a minute's halt for a rest, Colclough left Mrs. Bent's chair and waylaid Frank, who was going over to the piano."Let her rest, man, and give us more of it. She'd be the fortune of an operatic manager.""No, she wouldn't; she'd clear out the house in a fortnight, and ruin the manager. She'd let loose altogether too many secrets, and make us all too beastly uncomfortable. I could confess myself, this minute, even the sins I only meant to commit. Just watch them, even the old woman.""Oh Lord! do you see the Spook ? I hope that next song will exorcise that devil, or some judgment will be dropping in on the room.""We'll escape, anyhow," said Frank. "The loss of a smoke till this time of night is surely punishment enough for any ordinary day's sin."Margaret began again, a soft low croon. Her master had found it in manuscript in an old farm-house in the Highlands. It was a low, sad, ghostly sort of wail, that slid into one's soul and made a man believe in everything but in himself."It's next to cruel," Colclough muttered; "she's young still, and kittenish, or she wouldn't play with heart-strings in this wholesale fashion."Mrs. Bent wept under the shade of her trembling hand in the silent, solemn manner of the aged, and thought of the spring of her youth.Several girls looked dry-eyed out before them, seeing more than they bargained for. Two of them turned their backs on their neighbours and their shoulders heaved. Some gave covert vicious digs and kicks to any one that came handy, and Poll roared behind the door and wished that she was dead. But the Spook sat immovable, with strange eyes.Frank saw her, and a sudden big pity sprang up in him. By some inexplicable impulse, he went and stood by the ottoman on which she sat till the song was over. It seemed to him as if nothing had ever hurt him quite so much as the girl's face; his own pain perplexed him, and he felt an odd respect for it. He knew it was no fleeting sentiment or mere personal pity, but some great age-echo that was re-awaking in his soul. Gradually the truth came to him. It was an echo of Christ's vicarious suffering on the Cross for the sin of all time that moved him. And it is an experience which is but rarely vouchsafed to parsons.Margaret turned round, and looked curiously about the room with an expression on her mouth years too old for it. It annoyed Colclough; it seemed to him hardly fair to turn every one else inside out and to keep herself so comfortably cool.Frank's look surprised her. a little, and it puzzled her. . She turned to the piano again and wondered why men always brought mysteries in their wake. Then she sang a little pleasant tune with a savour of herbs and healing properties about it; but she suddenly broke off."I've sung too much," she said. "Now, Mr. Weston, are you ready? Here's a choice of songs.""Had you to go on till you stopped?""Yes, I believe it's a sort of mania that possesses me. I feel enchanted with my own voice,—which is, I suppose, conceit, but it's also truth. I'm only a puppet and the song drives me#x2014;not I it. It's a possession, perhaps, like the dancing dervishes, or the Malay running amuck. I don't at all believe music's heaven-born; if it is, it mixes up good and evil in the most extraordinary way."He wished vaguely he could tell her the effect of her singing on him, but that was an experience to be shared with no one."Doesn't it take it out of you?" he asked, pretending to look for songs."Oh yes, it makes me feel idiotic—but haven't you found a song yet?"On the whole, he acquitted himself well, and made his hearers think tolerantly of his profession, and admit that one can be a parson after all and not quite a born ass. He chose nice, blood-thirsty, off-hand soldiers' songs, that cheered them up and made them "fancy" themselves more than they had just lately been doing.CHAPTER XXIX.WHILE Weston was singing, Margaret sat for a few minutes on the arm of Mrs. Bent's chair, giving her some mute comfort; then she went and sat by the Spook, whom the singing clearly was irritating. She was watching Frank's back disagreeably."Jack among the maids," she murmured, turning to look at Margaret. "I suppose in time they get used to their positions. Mothers' meetings, Bible classes to young women, and so on break them in. But even when I myself floated gaily in a clerical circle, that part of the business struck me as rather sickening.""Considering everything," Margaret said softly, "I think the two here to-night have done remarkably well. When I asked them I never thought how easily their situation might be made ridiculous, and when suddenly the fact came upon me, I felt awful. I consoled myself directly though. Neither of those men will make himself look foolish in a hurry, whatever he may make other people."I suppose it's being generally successful that gives one that sort of assurance," went on Margaret, with a nervous fear of personalities. "If you're a failure at all, you must be constantly feeling yourself and letting other people find out what you're at.""In this case," said Miss Brett serenely, "it's a man's nose which is plain-spoken and sniffs at the world, and the world takes its own valuation of itself. Shear it off now——"Oh," said Margaret, "that's enough."Miss Brett laughed softly."Ah well," she said, "we'll leave the nose; a parson's individuality always rests on such a slender thread it would be a pity to snap it and pitch him back among the herd."She was silent a minute, and Margaret devoutly hoped she would keep so; if she meant to speak she knew quite well all that she herself could do would be to give her her head, and put up with the rudeness. She felt a weak desire to fly, and stirred with that intention, but the other stopped her by suddenly looking curiously into her face and beginning to speak in a low, soft, contained voice."Go back," she said, "you poor foolish baby, go back from whence you came ; you have no business here; go and enjoy yourself, and laugh and play about with your kind and be loved—by someone else; there's more than one man in the world—and leave these to work out their own destiny. You'll alter nothing and advance nothing. When he has finished singing I shall sing, and show you how long their order of impressions lasts, and what they're worth. Just now you made them feel like spring onions; that excellent clergyman there is making them ready to swear that he and all his kind are the nicest, kindliest, most thoughtful creatures in creation, and altogether improving to their mind. Presently I——well, wait and see. You're twenty-five this minute—in three years you will be faded."Margaret begged her to stop and to listen to the music, but she went on coolly:—"And your taste permanently destroyed by the smell of tripe and onions, and the sound of bad grammar. You're beginning at the wrong end. Go home and fulfil your destiny, cultivate the domestic virtues, and marry, and bring nice wholesome babies into the world, and make good wise men and women of them,—but be careful about the wisdom, it's the first thing. Goodness without wisdom is, I assure you, not worth a grain" Margaret turned to stop her, but she laughed and went on, in a softer, gentler voice: "My advice, I assure you, is based on knowledge and is good. Go home and leave them—she waved her little brown hand towards the others—" to be swept to their own place. Oh, you little fool," she whispered mockingly, "I've scared you, have I? Well, never mind. You're a really nice, clear, sweet little dream, and I'm glad I've come across you. It's a funny experience—for both of us, I fancy."Margaret was so absolutely thunderstruck at this outbreak and the extraordinary look on the girl's face, that she lost her head completely and stared at her gasping. The Spook had never before betrayed a spark of personal interest in her; she had kept herself as aloof from her—only in a different way—as she had from the others. Even the insolence of her speech hardly struck Margaret, her consternation was altogether too great to think of details. She felt blurred, indistinct, the half-blotted out remains of a girl; she pulled herself a little together, and stood up."Will you sing now?" she said, rather lamely, miserably aware that every eye in the room was raking her, and that they were dying to know what was up.For the minute she could have turned and rent the whole crowd ; it was hideous to be reminded in this way of her impotence, her audacity in daring to throw her puny strength in the teeth of the gods. The Spook stood up in a languid way, with a soft, amused chuckle, and threw a sweeping, leisurely glance about the room."I am to sing then, am I?" she drawled in her slow sweet voice. "But it's so long since I sang to an assembly as correct as this, that I feel embarrassed. I must think a little."She waved one little hand towards a chattering group, while with the other she touched the notes and produced little low, cooing sounds. There was a mutter among the damsels, and one of them, with a strong overblown face, sprang forward and made for her unaffectedly with a pointed pair of scissors.Mrs. Bent rose with trembling knees; Poll grew as pale as she could in the time, and the waited and watched. Margaret felt a guilty conviction that her own cowardice was having a demoralising effect. She clutched the champion nimbly and made her put the scissors down on the table."As to you, Miss Brett," she said, "you're altogether inexcusable, as you are Mrs. Bent's guest and mine."Miss Brett was leaning lazily against the piano with her hands behind her, watching Margaret with critical interest and wondering how the men liked it. Margaret felt miserable and baffled; she had, besides, a horrible suspicion that she was undergoing reformation herself at the Spook's hands, and being experimented upon for her good. She deposited the other girl in a seat near Colclough, seized again on her courage, and told Miss Brett in a creditably steady voice that if she would sing she would let her off and look upon it as an apology. It was a neat, small stroke of ingenuity, and amused Miss Brett. She gave a little gurgly laugh."I shall sing, of course," she explained gently; "I was only anxious to make a proper selection—merely considering 'weaker brethren. Unfortunately,—she went on artlessly, "our best actions are so liable to misconstruction."After a benevolent glance round and a tired shrug, she began to sing."Just listen," said Margaret to one of the more violent of the girls a minute later, "and stop thumping. Mrs. Bent and I have the same right to swear and rave.""Look 'ere, lidy, the devil hisself is a fool to 'er, if you knew——"But I don't want to. Stop and listen at once."She was herself listening, in eager, intense excitement. The girl's voice was like her face—superb, serene, terrible. In a minute more every one in the room was listening motionless. The eyes of the girls dilated gradually, their lips grew loose and greedy, their breathing came thick. Her voice grew in strength and swift-ness. It was as the sound of rushing waters; it rose to ecstasy, it melted to soft kisses, it flashed with lithe flames. The girls moved, pale and panting, in a languorous rhythm, like ripe corn billowing to a hot blast.Margaret, half dazed herself, shuddered as she saw them, and felt their scorching breath on her. Weston had moved from his seat, and was leaning against the chimney-piece and watching Margaret. She was white, her mouth was sombre with anxiety, and there was a young look of entreaty about her that was touching.Frank forgot his scheme and her in connection with it; he just thought of her as a young, frail, foolish creature, a poor little forlorn hope tottering on the brink of the hideous gulf of necessity to stretch out futile hands to its victims."The woman's cursed voice is demoralising me," he thought angrily, giving himself a shake; and then he looked again at Margaret, and saw clearer this time—or thought he did so. She seemed to him now to be the embodiment of all the purity of the women of all ages—the purity born of knowledge, not of ignorance, which is higher than Heaven, whiter than light, and which alone shall last while ages endure.This rendering of the position pleased him better. On the strength of it, he got himself quite outside the singer's thrall, and a gleam of professional disapproval appeared in his eyes.Colclough looked angrily from the woman to Margaret."It's a voice to make fiends of women," he said to himself, "and to rob men of their souls. I wish she'd dry up."But the singer went on triumphantly, moving her poor puppets to a dance which is a riddle, which is as grey as the world, and is immortal.As she sang, she looked round the room from time to time. Suddenly she stopped and laughed aloud. Then she walked over to Margaret."I told you I too would show my power," she murmured softly ;"now you can restore the balance, and I should advise you to do it"Margaret's eyelids were drooping heavily, and she felt faint and frightened. She saw that some ugly scene was upon them, and that she herself could best stop it. She went almost mechanically to the piano and began to sing—tender, merry, old-fashioned songs: and as soon as she herself felt better, she took furtive glances round, and found practical confirmation of Miss Brett's words as to the value and variety of her guests' impressions.Gradually their cheeks cooled, their fierce mouths closed, their bold eyes sank half-ashamed of having blabbed their secrets. In a few, the scorched-up tears burst out afresh, and better memories gave place to the late unhealthy excitement.It was all very hopeless. Margaret gave a miserable little shiver, and a new pathos came into her young voice, and touched new chords in her emotional hearers. The smell of home-baked bread struck the nostrils of one, the scent of fresh cut peat another, the wail of a curlew was distinct to the ears of a third, and the. little seventeen-year-old girl seemed to taste blackberries, and blubbered aloud.And outside in the night a little thing was leaning up against the door, listening and astonished. She was one of those small fragile creatures, who never seem to grow up, or to take woman's shape upon them.Margaret stopped singing, and broke gently into a twinkling, radiant little jig that set every heart in the room dancing. Then she stood up."You've restored the balance," whispered Miss Brett; "now I shall again try my hand.""You will not," said Margaret;" you're not a coward, and you do happen to be a lady. Besides, it would be so supremely silly, as I am already quite aware of your power. I am so tired. If you would go the others would follow."Miss Brett looked at her, and reflected that after all it wasn't much of an audience to play to; besides——she wasn't quite sure for the moment what the besides meant.While Margaret got slowly rid of her guests, Frank occupied himself in collecting Mrs. Bent's scattered wits for her."Oh, sir," she whispered, as soon as she got better, "you'll side with me now, won't you? Is it right she should wear out her young life like this? and for what?""For the glory of God and of women," said Frank cheerfully. "It's a fine struggle, even if it is more or less vain and futile, and it does one good to watch it.""But, sir, I'm thinking of my young lady.""Your young lady, even if she's all wrong, which I decline to admit, is getting a training which will better the world till the end of time.""Mrs. Bent," put in Colclough, "I quite agree with you. I think your young lady is all wrong, just as wrong as Mr. Weston happens to be. I consider both their schemes and their ideas absolutely unworkable, and that they must end in bitterness and smoke. I agree with you absolutely in your most sensible conception of a young lady's duty, which is to keep well within her own track and to mind her own business; but we can't all think alike on these matters, and if a woman does step out into an unknown wilderness, however foolishly, but with an honest, unselfish purpose to do good, she has done her bit of good, and every living man and every man-child yet unborn will be the better—even for her failure."Possibly the events of the evening were having their effect on Colclough; he knew he was very mixed, and that he had mystified his audience, but he was altogether too tired to retrieve himself.Mrs. Bent looked at him in a scared way. "God grant it, God grant it!" she repeated, wishing simply that she quite knew what Mr.Weston meant, or what she wanted "Him" to grant.Margaret came back at last."Mr. Weston," she said, as she was saying good-night to him," after what you have seen to-night you surely don't want to pitch nice, light-hearted, ignorant girls, who have homes, into anything of this sort? You'll allow, now, it's impossible, won't you?""I shall allow nothing until I have seen more. I should certainly say the personal results on yourself justify my scheme."She looked tiredly at him."You don't know what you're speaking about, "she said gently. "Good-night."CHAPTER XXX.Although Rica, having fallen out badly with herself at the time, and had hailed Mrs. Hyde's invitation and the election with glee, when she came to think of it as close quarters she was rather doubtful as to the time she was about to experience. If she could not succeed in breaking into Beatrice's crust, and getting a proper grip of her reality, it would certainly pall to stand about and watch from the outside, for an indefinite period, the independent action of two uncomfortable lives. She knew quite well that a tragedy of the cold, classical, well-bred order was playing itself out in that correct household. No one would be down this time of year, and the position of solitary spectator did not promise gaiety. Moreover, Rica did not consider that her proper place was to stand altogether out in the cold.Hyde himself was of course altogether too much of a gentleman, now that he had ordered himself, and had decided to serve necessity and forego the consolations of the devil, to furnish clues;—she being a girl of whom he was very fond, but with whom he could under no circumstances ever fall in love.But it was otherwise with Beatrice; this variety of honour is less stringent in women's cases. Beatrice had a right to reveal herself in a measure to another girl, and Rica felt justified of her discontent, and robbed of her rights. One expects at least some concessions to usualness on the part of one's own kind.As she drove down the Manor avenue, she was chiefly occupied in taking notice of the fine bold sweep of hill and woodland, and wondering that she had never before noticed the charm of a tracery of bare twigs and branches against a pale spring sky. As she neared the house she began to think on more personal matters, and decided that these frozen-star women must have a shocking bad time of it."I wonder," she said to herself, "if she ever goes near that baby's grave, or if she ever planted flowers on it, or did any one womanish silly thing with regard to it? I'm certain she never did. It's just a little lonely green mound without a speck of white about it, and it's just like that in her heart. They have no imagination, these women; and they're unpractical; they have nothing to break the shock of life. Thank God for being commonplace! All the same, I hope I'm not going to make myself into a fool. That dead baby and its mother's face that day at lunch have got into my head. And there she is on the steps in a silvery sort of frock, and two peacocks on the terrace to give the colour-note. She surely must be happy just this minute, or she's not human."Rica found that Beatrice had already started on the canvassing war-path, and the contained concentrated excitement of the woman mystified her."But after all," said Rica, when she came down to tea, and had chosen the most comfortable chair she could see, "if he doesn't get in this time he will the next. It's his ultimate destination, of course; he has all the needful equipments,—brains, leisure, money, and an infinite capacity for harrying his kind, if it goes against his convictions, for the time being. There's no mortal reason you should get thin over it, as you're doing.""He shall get in this time," said Beatrice slowly.Rica glanced curiously at her. "It's a matter of life and death then, it seems. What on earth's the reason?" she thought."There would be no difficulty at all," Beatrice went on earnestly, "but that he refuses to pledge himself to any one definite thing. An idler has no political conscience till he's had his training, he informs them on all possible occasions.""He says it plump out, does he?""In the plainest possible language. He will promise nothing, he says, till he sees light and finds his bearings.""But wouldn't it be better if he were to find them, more or less, before he enters Parliament?""No, he says it's better to get your training inside the House, with plenty of experts and shocking examples at hand to teach you wisdom. Outside, we're all pretty much in the same boat as far as experience goes.""You're quoting?""Oh yes—of course; those were his very words. Then he tells them plainly that he refuses to accept their conclusions, or represent their opinions. He doesn't consider that they have any worth the name, any more than he himself has. He intends, therefore, to confine himself to representing their conscience, and this, in the natural man, being a fluid entity, he feels himself justified in the attempt""What do his putative constituents say to this edifying political creed?" said Rica, watching the uneasy serious face."Oh, it amuses them at the time. It is a new sort of joke, and they like it. But as soon as they get home, and turn it over in their minds, they begin to think that Geoffrey has been making a fool of them; and when that aspect of the affair occurs to them they frequently abuse their wives. There have been quite shocking scenes in the village of late. I am really getting to know quite a good deal about poor people. Is this not a strange outcome of political speeches?"Rica laughed. "It's the natural outcome of such speeches as those. I should think they're quite too stimulating for Arcadia. If I were an Arcadian, I should also abuse my wife.""Oh," said Beatrice anxiously, "you surely would not——"I surely would—if I didn't beat her! I should feel stirred up, you see, and ready for anything calculated to reform the species; and, naturally, the first person one thinks of as requiring urgent reformation is one's wife or husband. On the contrary, you would naturally make for the Free Library, and read up the subject.""I would, "Beatrice said simply. "I should have thought it the first thing to occur to any reasonable person in perplexity. I brought down with me a great many new books bearing on political subjects. I go into the library every day, and find that not one of them has been opened.""Nor will be, till all need for the special information is at an end. Don't you see, if he is all simmering up with rampant party-feeling and virtuous exaltation, and is generally a chaotic quantity, he can't sit doggedly down to read and indigest his reading, and further to muddle himself? Your people have quite enough to upset themselves with Mr. Hyde's crude slabs of truth, without resorting to books. Here he is, looking as cool as if he hadn't been going about like a roaring sledge-hammer, stirring up the brute beast in his tenants."Mrs. Hyde has been giving me your programme," said Rica, as soon as the greetings were over, "and I don't intend to accept it without amendments. I have some sense of humour, if your electors have none.""So long as you don't expect me to say that I believe in myself, still less in the electors, or in any cause, I'm ready to swear to anything.""Do you believe in the authenticity of the Four Gospels?""No, but I believe in germs.""You also believe in unadulterated whiskey, don't you?""Naturally.""Ah, that will touch the minds of the masses. My canvassing programme is now complete; one must have a basis, the rest comes with experience."Beatrice looked at them in half-envious astonishment. If she could only bring herself to approve of it, how delicious a thing light-mindedness might seem! She looked sombrely out at the moat waters, and the lily leaves unfurling in the spring sun. Those two were as honourable and straight as she was, and as bent on duty, yet they could make merry. Her husband's irritating refusal to humour his electors, or to assume any fraction of knowledge or power he had not put to the test of experience, was done from as stern a sense of duty as her own; he was ready to sacrifice ambition and position for an idea, yet he could make a joke of it all. His life was as bitter a failure as hers; his heart ached as bitterly, yet he could suffer gaily.In every grown man and woman there is a heart, and in that heart there is a grave—that goes without saying; and yet all men, and some women, can laugh and amuse themselves, and play flower-balls with life: why should she alone sit for ever and watch her open graves? She brought her eyes slowly back from the lily leaves to her husband's face."You know I haven't a chance, don't you?" he said to Rica, wondering what on earth Beatrice was looking like that for.Her eager, absorbed face also mystified Rica, but it touched her, and inspired her with an odd prophetic instinct."You'll get in all right," she said, looking from one to the other of them," not from your own deserts, nor from your electors' clearheadedness, but from Mrs. Hyde's sublime faith in you, and in the task she's undertaken. It's of the quality that removes mountains. I saw the same sort once before. It's a shock to find that sort of thing happening to one twice in a life-time; it calls for more tea to steady one's nerves."There was the faintest echo of a flush in Beatrice's cheeks as she poured out the tea, but her lips looked severe and cold, and a trifle prim. They had got into a reflex way of falling into this attitude whenever they wanted to stop a tremble."Jim Colclough's coming next week," said Hyde, rather uncomfortably.He would have liked awfully to say some nice pleasant thing to Beatrice. Rica's impulsive speech had touched him, but that set of his wife's lips put him off."Ah! you must have his programme ready—he may demand a less simple one than mine.""He may, but whether he'll get it or not is another matter.""And now, Miss Weston, shall we go out, or are you too tired?" Beatrice asked. "They will be all at home for tea if we go soon.""I'm not at all tired. I mean to go round with you for several days, and just get my cues.""You shall do exactly as you like; but you know infinitely more of men and women and things than I do. My vision is limited beyond your conception. I grow confused," she added, with a little laugh, "unless I can look straight along a line."Hyde looked thoughtfully after her."That's exactly it!" he said to himself ''and that's what's playing hell with both of us. She's too absolutely straight and single-minded to answer to the demands of any one who sees side-lights on things. When did the fact of her limits occur to her, I wonder? She said that for my benefit, and I'm afraid the confession hurt her horribly. How cruel a fellow is, in spite of himself!" He went over to get some matches from the chimney-piece. "Upon my word, I shall do my best to keep moot questions at bay, and get in on jabber, just to please her. The worst is, some of them are so extraordinarily cute and cocky; they may want to see behind the words, which on occasions might be embarrassing."He went out to a meeting at a little inn a few miles off, and gained a whole handful of votes, and lost another by the good-tempered, sensible way in which he rated them all round, for some expression of what seemed to him false sentiment on the part of one of his committee.On the homeward ride he was chiefly occupied in wondering why Beatrice had taken up this election with such extraordinary keenness."It's a matter of such enormous seriousness to her," he thought. "Her fearful truthfulness comes against her always; she can't assume anything—even a touch of flippancy; and I believe the thought of that poor dead child torments her continually."Rica, meanwhile, was watching her companion in and out among the cottages of the labourers, and the shops of the tradespeople, with an astonishment that often nearly gasped aloud. The calm, direct methods she adopted; her absolute freedom from an atom of cajolery, her straightforward, quite uncompromising answers to ticklish questions, that would have been damning in any one else, gained for her a hearing and a success that were amazing.Not a man or a woman on the estate, or in the neighbourhood, but recognised the perfect truth in the handsome cold woman, who held herself so unconsciously but absolutely above them, and who had a great deal too much respect for herself and for them to make any attempt at standing on their level, or in pretending to understand their lives. She could not do it to save her own, and she did not try to—a fact which every one of them recognised at once. In a dim way they also understood this simple code of honour, and it pleased them, and made them think gently of themselves.Her straightforward faith in her husband's ability to do anything he wanted to do also pleased them, and impressed them, especially as they were all quite aware that there had been a "story," and that the blame lay with him altogether.Her conduct with regard to the children question touched Rica. She took slight, gentle, well-bred notice of any children brought forward prominently; but she let slip countless opportunities that the ordinary feminine canvasser would have seized on greedily. Children were indifferent creatures, without votes, to be passed with a kind word; her business lay elsewhere, and there was so little time.But, in one poor little cottage, Beatrice heard a sick baby moaning in its cradle. She quite forgot the election for an entire minute, stooped down, and took the child softly to her arms. Rica watched her in the dim light, and she felt cold to the bone."The baby isn't in its little grave at all," she thought; "it's lying there in her heart. As soon as ever I leave this house I shall call her 'Beatrice,' and she shall call me 'Rica,' and we shall be real flesh-and-blood friends."Mrs. Hyde never went into a house but she left a little hush behind her, and in the hush there was reverence and a little awe.They did a tremendous afternoon's work. Even Rica felt rather worn out when they got home, and came into the lighted hall. Beatrice was ghastly, and Rica noticed that she tottered as they reached the head of the stairs.She came down to dinner, however, looking calm and serene, with a little delicate colour in her cheeks, and her eyes were brilliant.CHAPTER XXXI.COLCLOUGH came down a few days after Margaret's supper, with a frightful cold which he had caught that night. The reason he came was to take observations on Rica Weston; this he feebly confessed to himself; he confessed just as feebly that he was acting altogether against his conscience, and was a poor creature for doing it. Hitherto he had steered carefully clear of love, having suffered severely in his time from outbreaks of it on the part of other people, and having got into awful scrapes in consequence. His magistracy in India had carried him into divers parts, where men were scarce and women pretty, and idleness the day's rule.From his very first meeting with her he had been attracted by Rica Weston, and he had a general inward certainty that he could make the attraction mutual if he put out his full strength, having had quite embarrassing successes without putting out any strength at all. Besides, men are constitutionally given to make too sure.Marrying, moreover, was not, as things stood, for the like of him. India had fairly done for him, so some dozens of doctors had assured him; and it seemed a shabby, inadequate thing to offer to a sound, wholesome, fresh creature like Rica the mere remains of a man—to ask her, so to speak, to marry a cough.He had no business to come and stay in the house with her, of course, but he could keep the consequences strictly to himself. For, he flattered himself, with a grin, he was an excellent hand at making himself obnoxious, and had done so more than once with great glory when the occasion arose.He had been round all the morning canvassing with Hyde, and had been swearing softly at the result since lunch, while Geoffrey listened cheerfully and smoked three cigarettes. When Colclough pulled up to cough he was rolling a fresh one."You don't think I'll get in?" he said, during Jim's rest after a spasm. "I'm not so sure myself—my wife has half the county by the heels; and I ask so precious little of the fellows," he went on lazily—"just the chance to get experience enough to spoon-feed a political conscience. Directly the thing kicks and feels its feet they won't find any cause to complain of its bashfulness. After all, when you come to think of it, there's hardly a fellow in my position in England who has any more right to speak definitely than I have, or to promise more. One doesn't pass political exams, at Eton, or trouble particularly with history, nor does it ever enter into the heart of boy to apply classical lore. You know yourself that the worth of a political training at the universities makes politicians about as much as the Newdigate prize makes poets. As to the traditions of one's house, in these times the boy may be his own father, but he's not, as a rule, his father's son.""More's the pity.""No doubt. But what I want to ask is why you're in such a devil of a hurry to crush my young enthusiasm at the start. I have ten more speeches to make this week, and it would be a pity to use up all your adjectives the first day. There will be no end of swearing to be done by you before I've finished. Reserve your forces. How's Frank Weston getting on?""In a nice eruptive youthful way.""I can't grasp the fellow as a curate. At Christ's he was a good fellow, 'a mere man and brother.''"So he is now. He says the great ad-vantage of the Church is that you can do as you please in it. It's the one profession in which you can have a free hand, and a secured audience to swear at evenly all round without injuring your prospects.""But bishops and vicars and things of that order?" suggested Hyde, half opening his eyes."They re nothing if you know how to work 'em, Frank assures me. A parson can put conventions in his pocket and keep his character if he's not a born ass.""There must be a good many born asses about in that case.""They haven't got the right grip on their privileges, that's all. The clerical conscience wants putting into hard condition, dropping the dual nature, and returning to the masculine gender.""There's too much of the Delilah-lap and the cheap martyr about the business, it seems to me.""Just so.""They were better men when they burnt them," said Hyde, carefully brushing off a pinch of ashes that had fallen on his dog's head."And provided entertainment of a more bracing order for the laity," said Colclough gently. "Well, Frank's steered clear of all the old pitfalls," he said presently; "but he's just about to step into one of his own making.""What?""A woman, of course.""But I thought he had cleared the pitfalls?""She isn't a pitfall; she's an original.""They all are, aren't they, with variations?" said Hyde simply."Ah, but she's different altogether.""Go on; it's getting interesting.""I don't think I will," Colclough said slowly, " till I know more about her. She's a good woman—one doesn't want to talk at random about her""What about this reforming craze of his?"It's madness, of course. He's beginning at the wrong end. If a man knows men as well as Frank does, he shouldn't attack mountains.""He may collect some fresh side-lights.""That goes without saying. He'll return to his kind with new material enough to force them into thinking. He's a cheerful, sane person, and they'll believe him too, more or less. Besides, you see, he's a fine animal himself, and has an understanding of the ways of ' such.' Another thing, he'd as soon hurt a woman as torture a child, and has a great horror of both crimes; yet he can understand how lots of fellows have got into the way of being careless about the one thing, while they would knock you down if you so much as suggested that they were capable of the other.""It's anything but a nice thing to hurt a woman," said Hyde, with a dash of memory in his voice.Colclough was sorry. He felt a little old-maidenly, as if he had been pointing a moral, whereas he had altogether forgotten the personality of his audience. Geoffrey jumped up and stretched himself."I must go," he said; "it's four o'clock; I'm late as it is."Colclough was coughing again badly."I say, Jim, have some brandy when it's over. Do you often go on like this? Is it all lungs?""Lungs, liver, spleen, and general disintegration of the organs,—all in precisely the same condition as your politics.""Shows how much you know about it. Your organs are worn out, whereas my politics are in the course of making.""Go and get them made then, and leave me to cough in peace.""All right. You'll find the ladies and tea in the drawing-room, no doubt. Have some brandy before you go in, or medicine, or something."When he had finished and rested, Colclough went off to look for Rica. It had not yet become necessary, he found, to begin to make himself obnoxious.It was a cold, false, sunshiny, east-windy day. She was alone in the drawing-room, sitting before the fire in a big chair. She looked placid and consolatory, the very thing for a man half knocked to pieces with a cough. He settled himself in the next most comfortable chair and stirred the fire tenderly. She looked at him kindly."You believe in fire, I perceive," she observed."Yes, and in all other things that make the face to shine.""Ah, you and Frank agree there! There's nothing ascetic about him," she said comfortably. "There's more perhaps than you think. Frank's not the person to blab out all his fastings. Going without food and ruining your digestion and your temper isn't everything. There are forms of fasting of which the world, being mostly feminine after all, knows nothing.""For such a ghastly-looking creature," she thought, watching him pleasantly, "he's a restful person to talk to.""There's a distinct draught where you're sitting," she said in her motherly way;" move your chair just an atom."He obeyed her, and went on in a lazy, desultory style."Common-sense, you see, is the groundwork of Frank, with notable exceptions, of course—as at present. He knows, if he works among unsavoury masses, he must keep his body above par, or his soul will sink below it. One can't soar on prayer and cold mutton in these days, life is too real and fast. Never did believe myself in high thinking or an insufficient meat diet."Rica pulled a letter out of her pocket and fingered it absently."He doesn't think much of Frank's experiment then," she thought. "This letter is perplexing. Who is the girl? He slurs her over too much for wholesomeness and practical purposes. "She looked at Colclough doubtfully, but the doubt cleared off presently."What do you think of Frank's present crusade?" she asked abruptly."It's mad, of course," he said slowly, "but it's excellent experience.""Yes; experience has a nasty trick of making you pay for it.""In this case that may be where the excellence comes in.""Probably. To begin with, tell me all you know of this girl."Colclough's eyes twinkled as he stroked his moustache."Your sharpness makes one squirm, Miss Weston. She's a good girl, quite a marvellous girl.""But," repeated Rica," who is she?""We leave that for you to discover," he said, watching her amusedly; "I haven't a notion. She's perfect in her place, as she would, I fancy, be perfect in any other place. I wish you knew her, Miss Weston."She looked at him superiorly. "I wish I did," she said drily; "I might then get some sensible suggestion of her.""She's unique altogether.""He's not a scrap in love with her," she thought. "Thank goodness, I shall hear it all in time." She fitted her back well into the chair and settled down. "Begin at the beginning," she said. "Tell me the details, and I shall do the generalisation. There seems to be an astonishing amount of uniqueness about the whole affair.""Don't you think, Miss Weston," he said reflectively," that there's a deal of the detective in women? Some of the ferret has been forgotten in them, perhaps. It's an animal remains that's evoluted itself into a nice, delicate, searching, and fairly accurate instrument, but a bit dangerous, don't you think? Digs into sore spots, you know, chucks ugly things out of hidden drawers. But it's a fine birthright, and has admirable staying powers.""It's a miserable birthright," she said impatiently," and nothing but the folly and dense crudity of man makes it necessary to our salvation. Leave the nasty, little, ferrety beast, and tell me all you know of this girl.""That you may rout out her poor little ewe lamb of a mystery? I may tell you I did my level best to do it, but failed.""Naturally. Go on."He told her all he could of Margaret, and as he went on her eyes widened more and more. He was touching the coals in his gentle interested way all the time. If his eyes had been in their proper place—where there was a girl to be looked at—he would have been amazed at Rica and at her very unusual state of strung tension."What's her name?" she asked suddenly. Her voice brought his eyes from the fire to her face."Miss Daintree.""Oh!" she said in a baffled tone. "Her Christian name?""Margaret." He put down the poker and peered at her. "Upon my word, I believe you've dropped on a spoor.""Go on—tell me more," she ordered eagerly, and he noticed that the hand which lay on her lap was trembling.He told her all he knew. When he had finished she stood up and gave herself a little shake."It's Margaret Dering," she said at last."The girl Hyde——"Yes. You think she's dead—I don't. Wait—I'll tell you all I know now."When she had done so he felt pretty certain that she was right."I felt sure you'd be able to tell me who she was," he said. "The ferret's an intelligent animal.""How is it you're not in love with her?" she demanded sharply."No need," he thought dejectedly, " to turn on the obnoxious tap just yet.""I'm sure I beg your pardon," he rejoined humbly; "I'll do my best.""Protected no doubt by some one else," she went on placidly. "Although, for my part, I can't imagine a previous person making any difference when that girl appears.""You forgive Geoffrey, then?""One has to, under the circumstances. But don't let us speak of that. It was all too cruel, too relentless, and so unnecessary—from one's own point of view. By a little management every one of them could have had lovely times of it—but——Then Beatrice is my friend,"she went on loyally. "No one is quite like her, in her fine, sedate beauty.""She's a genuine good woman too, "Colclough said gently. He had an unconscious way of lowering his voice whenever he spoke of a good woman. Perhaps it was because he had met so many bad ones. "She's been the best friend Geoffrey ever had. With a lesser woman he'd have made an ass of himself in one way or another."Rica beamed on him indulgently. "You think that, do you? I'm so glad. I have been thinking it too. I wish she knew—I wish——She thought she heard a little moaning breath and a soft shuffle of feet. She looked round, but there was no one to be seen."I wish almost she did not care for him so uncomfortably for herself! And to think of his not seeing it is so amazing! Men are blind and acquisitive persons. They get all sorts of nice things poured out on them, they absorb them gaily, and go on their way rejoicing.""Oh, do they?""Yes, anyway as far as is made known to the naked eye. Whenever a man trips too, if you notice, there are always women hanging about to help him up and dust him and put salve on his bruises. On the contrary, women have to pick themselves up, and dust themselves, and even the publicans pass by on the other side. There's Frank trying in his small way to do a little dusting for us, and the first thing you do is to shoot out the lip and call him an ass.""My dear Miss Weston! A maniac.""Ah well, that's a concession to be thankful for. It wants then, it seems, the best part of two women's lives, given ungrudgingly, to save one man's soul alive. The result seems inadequate to the outlay."Colclough laughed softly into the fire, and the things he didn't say irritated her beyond words. She would gladly have boxed his ears. She was silent for a minute or two, then she said rapidly, "We must settle up now at once about Margaret.""No need to tell them here anything about her, is there?"That minute Rica was herself again, and snubbed him and his sex collectively with her eyebrows before she spoke."Hardly! The all-round complication is the point of interest just now. Surely, having spoilt two lives, it might have been arranged that she should bless one; and Frank's a good fellow. Not being used to this sort of thing, too, he will be in a horrid tumult, and won't shake together for an untold time. He's a stiff-necked and perverse generation. It's too late in the day to do anything, either. The mischief's done.""Consider the experience.""I'm just doing it. No doubt it will soften his angles—possibly teach him to preach, not as at present to stand aloft and swear, forgetting, as he did last Sunday, that he had put on the surplice belonging to the smallest curate, and that it just touched his armpits.""Why should you thrust him altogether out of the running and then proceed off-hand to improve the occasion for the poor beggar?" She looked at him softly, frowning as if one had to focus one's sight to see anything so microscopical."But—you saw her. Is she the person to sacrifice herself for one man, to be picked up the next minute by another? Besides, the same women wouldn't love those two men. That's patent enough, surely?""Women's fancies aren't always patent. One can sometimes hardly quite account for them.""Margaret Dering isn't a type," said Rica severely; " she's herself. You're thinking of types.""Oh, am I?""Perhaps you congratulate yourself," she continued, benevolently eyeing him, "that you have escaped a danger. Now women are more adventurous. I should have plunged in regardless of consequences. To be in love with some women must teach a man so many things."He wished she would keep her clear eyes off him, he wanted to have an uninterrupted laugh. His previous qualms of conscience and heroic resolves to ward her off had become an excellent joke."You're coughing again. Surely you're not in a draught there?" she said."No, thank you, I'm all right. Women have a way of springing novelties on you, I admit; but whether the derangement they produce in you isn't more than the knowledge they bring along is another matter.""The moral then is, don't let the derangements be produced. It is possible, I assure you, in the case of most women."She stood up, and while he was wondering what she was about she had pulled a screen carefully round him. He wished for a minute she wasn't quite so healthy herself, she might then be more sympathetic in a less motherly way. He had an uncomfortable suspicion that she wanted to fatten him, possibly to make him take cod-liver oil—even that she went the length of hoping anyway that he wore flannel next his skin.It was not quite what he wanted of her. However, it made his position altogether tenable."Margaret, you see," she began again," stands out too distinctly, is too solitary to escape herself, or to allow any escape to the men she draws to her. We're not all endowed with a self any more than you are. Half of us are just slices out of one great whole, "she continued pleasantly," as like as one piece of Christmas pudding is to another.""Oh! Can't imagine myself the joys of making love to a slice. They expect that sort of thing, I conclude?""Certainly they do, and they get it. It needs a good deal of experience before you can differentiate them from individuals. You see," she explained," they're always dropping on answering chords in each other's insides, and so they can compare notes, which makes them genial and companionable. And they're generally cheerful and busy trotting round scouring creation. They haven't a suspicion that their creation is just a little well-trodden maze in a citizen's lot. It's delightful, you see. A slice is never lonely, but always good-tempered, sociable, pleasant, and guileless. They are by far the best wives for the sons of men, just as their counterparts are the best husbands for the daughters of men.""You've arranged it all neatly. Which do you prefer for yourself?""For comfort, the state of being a slice. It takes a god or an individual to be lonely, and to make other people properly uncomfortable.""That's it, is it?" He chuckled delightedly, and began again on the fire.She looked at him half amused, half angry, then she shrugged her shoulders. "What does it matter after all?" she thought;" they all laugh at us. But not one of them can get on without us."She took no notice of him, therefore, but began to think of Margaret; then she suddenly put her aside with a little shiver. She could not quite realise it as yet. She wanted just now to get some one definite idea of Frank and his schemes from her companion, and it might be her last opportunity. She was out most of the day with Beatrice, and they were all together in the evenings."Look here," she said, "I know Frank's position now pretty nearly as well as I ever shall—from him. People who love women like Margaret don't speak of it much, any more than they do of their dead ideals, or their good deeds, or God. Tell me what you think of his scheme, and why it is madness.""Because it's a sort of thing you can't work up from—you must work down to; and Frank is wasting his enthusiasm in hoping for results. He would be a power among intelligent men, whereas ignorant women don't understand him. Common-sense and time will do well what he's doing badly.""It seems the old thing over again. The evil that we do bears immediate fruit, the good is only visible to our grandchildren.""Woman all over! You expect too much—must see results. Well for us God is masculine, otherwise we should have been long since swept off the face of the earth.""Men are born of women——"Quite so, we have a lot to answer for.""You have. I wonder you ever get a night's rest.""I hear Beatrice and the distant music of the tea. I'm so glad! I think we're getting dull."CHAPTER XXXII.MRS. BENT was asleep, and so was Poll, which fact was sufficiently audible. Poll did all things heartily, from sinning to snoring.But Margaret and Caroline Brett were still talking, though the dawn was breaking through the clouds, half cramped by the bitter cold, and casting ghostly shadows on the grey housetops.Caroline had come late and had stayed on talking. She had put on her cloak and had begun to go several times, but had sat down again for no quite apparent reason. In the earlier hours she had said strange wild things, and her voice had seemed often to scorch and sear, and had more than once caused Margaret's heart to quiver and cry out within her in its impotent pain.But in the grim chill of the dawn she hardly said a word. When she did speak there was something in her voice that would have been a sob in another woman. Heat and passion, however intense, must shrink and shiver when the corpse-touch of a sunless daybreak is upon them. Crimes may be done in the touch of these death's fingers, but they must be of the vendetta order, of long standing, and done on principle, and the doer's blood must be of the even-flowing chilled sort; no hot full-blooded strokes ever fell at this hour from any man's hand.Caroline sat wearily back in a low cane chair, staring indifferently into the dawn; and Margaret watched her as wearily, racking her brain for something to say. She was so utterly fearful of saying the wrong thing that she had hardly spoken at all. She was also trying her hardest to still the echo of the other's low, rich, oppressive monotone of misery which was in her ears, like the sound of the troubled sea in a shell."But why," she said at last, "when you have gone the whole round and have grown so deadly sick' of it all, when it bores you, when you despise and jeer at the people you live among—why then don't you try the other side of life? It would at least have the advantage of novelty. Anyway, it would only be reasonable to give it a chance.""Under what conditions? To-morrow, if I were to repent, as you call it, what would happen? Do you think I should be any the better for a wash-tub and regular prayer?""No—I think you would probably be the worse. There are other ways of living decently besides washing dirty clothes. You are a strong enough woman to seize on any one of them and to live it better than most other people.""I am a strong enough woman to die as I have lived—amidst the crash of broken laws," she laughed. "It sounds melodramatic, doesn't it? but you see melodrama is the badge of all my kind. Repentance doesn't appeal to me. I have a distinct admiration for the Egyptian idea that repentance was one of the forty-two deadly sins. By the way, you speak rather glibly, don't you, of my strength, and of my capacity to live out my life creditably and comfortably—that last trifle is one to be considered by me— at any rate? As a matter of fact, if it did occur to me to-morrow to repent, in the whole wide world there would be no pleasant place for me, no rest anywhere that would in any way commend itself to the soles of my feet. There are unfortunately not the makings of a Catholic in me; then it might be otherwise. They manage these things better than we do. They embellish repentance with picturesqueness, and give an air of distinction to it. Here it is dull, and grey, and impossible always. What place or peace does a woman who has even once tripped find ever after—not to say me? I have thought the matter out, you see, at odd times.""There are other places besides England," said Margaret;" warm brilliant countries, where you could be happy.""The world is too small a place to hide a woman's past in. Besides, when you come to consider the matter, I have nothing to repent of. I was pre-ordained for another life, I was made and finished for another life, and fitted with the capacities, and ambitions, and thoughts befitting one. My face and my figure, my all, down to my little pink fingernails, were all polished and perfected to fit another life. Then I was chucked helpless into an impossible condition. Ah, I see little shreds of philosophy floating about in you, and your conscience is at you to jerk them out, though you know their blatant lies as well as I do. 'Character makes circumstances.' 'Accommodate yourself to your surroundings,'—such precepts are not suited to women's needs, least of all to mine. Other people, you see, are given their lives to live out. I was given—with no choice of mine—another person's, and put in a state of being where it was impossible to get one of the essentials to live the life given me.""It seems to me," said Margaret, "that you are in a bad muddle.""It seems to me," said the other," that I am a bad muddle myself—a frantic joke of whoever created me.""If I only had sense to explain myself properly," said Margaret, " I could show you that you are talking sheer nonsense. You are bitter and angry and sore with Fate, of course; but still, isn't it a little weak to go wandering off irresponsibly as you are doing? Surely to have to train down daily to your surroundings must be an inexpressible effort, and extremely irritating. It appears to me it is you who are frantic, not God.""No, I am quite sane. Moreover, I am not evil—which, after all, is a racial distinction—because I love evil. If I had been born in a sphere of life a few pegs higher I should have been a credit to my class, an ornament to society, a fine, arresting, notable woman, with half London at my feet. I should then not have desired evil, I should have been more blessed and admirable than any of my fellows. I should certainly have felt no inclination to drag such glory as mine in the dust. My name would have been handed on, pure and unsullied, to all generations—a name to conjure with!""We all dream dreams," said Margaret, following the other girl's eyes out into the morning grey, "and we are always good in them.""You are mistaken. You can exactly gauge a woman's possibilities for good by her dreams. I could tell you one of your dreams this minute, plot and motive; you might make a shot at the plot of mine, but you would hopelessly confuse the motive. I never said I should have been a good woman, as the goodness of convention and commerce goes, but I should have been a superb, notable woman, with a reputation, which is a quite different matter. I once knew a man who had a craze for Rénan. He was always reading aloud. One sentence struck me. 'Dieu m'a trahi,' Rénan observes in his candid, Frenchy way, deploring his free thought, which would in the Protestant community have been mere intelligent broad thought. The words seem to touch my case to a T."She went over to the window and began to play a soft little tune on the pane. Suddenly the words of it began to echo in her ears; she gave a short angry laugh, and wheeled round on Margaret, who was quite too worn out to break the silence."Should you pick me out at a glance as a clergyman's daughter?" she asked."No, decidedly I should not," said Margaret, with a sudden laugh, which Caroline echoed grimly."Ah, you see, I'm not a clergyman-daughtery sort of person, and it's rather a pity, perhaps. I was a hawk or other bird of prey among barn-door fowl, and I couldn't stand them at any price. When I was even ever so little a child I used to have to rush to the garret or behind the dust-heap, my two cities of refuge, time after time, to press my hands against my heart to stop the actual pain in it when I wanted things I couldn't get—quite justifiable, every-day things in another life. My very soul needed light, and beauty, and breadth, and warmth to keep it alive, and there was I cast into the middle of a sordid, ugly Welsh village, hemmed in by bleak mountains on one side and wind-blown seas on the other, and I craving for burning suns and brilliant skies, and the golden glories and the scents and sounds of my dreams."She shivered, and drew her cloak closer round her. Margaret stirred the smouldering dawn-cold fire."Come and sit here," she said; "I can hear you so much better."She came over, huddled down into a chair, and went on in a low, soft, monotonous voice,—"My father was an uninteresting person. When he was not teaching us—he did that well, I will say—he was engaged in coercing the thieving bodies and souls of his parishioners into something resembling decency; and the ways and means to this end were the current topics of conversation in our household. The discussion of commonplace vice is a most wearisome thing, but it was the leaven of my father's life; it seemed to stir the monotony of his flat pool. But heavens, to live in the thick of it! His face used to pucker up with spite as he deplored the sin and heaped platitudes on the sinner. My mother——Margaret leaned forward eagerly. She never remembered her own mother, but she always liked to pick up anything she could about other girls'. A mother seemed to her to be so very delightful a possession."You scent sentiment," said Caroline with a laugh. "Don't! I have none in connection with my mother. She was good, no doubt, as befitted her station in life, but she was exceedingly dull and dreary, never soaring more than an inch or two above her stocking-basket, if as high as that. She did her day's work with a dogged perseverance that was irritating, it was so like a beast of burden—a patient ass. She dealt sparingly in the moralities—she was dull, you see—and got confused among them, so she sensibly avoided them. It was her best point. My sisters were excellent Sunday-school teachers, and designed specially for the rôle. They and my mother had, I conclude, some fellowship with one another. They used to discuss parish matters, with their feet, each with a bunion on it, disposed on old hassocks, and mend clothes with a monotonous content. Sometimes I could have killed them, and hid their bunions out of my sight for ever. However, I had to confine myself to spoiling all the sewing entrusted to me."She looked tiredly into the fire. Margaret would have given worlds to go to bed, but she did her best not to look at all as she felt."I think my mother always felt a sub-acute sense of guilt at having introduced such an innovation as me into any respectable family. She would sit and look at me with a mild, perplexed protest in her eyes.""What a place to live in!" said Margaret suddenly. " But how do you account for yourself? You couldn't have dropped into that house without a cause.""Oh! I heard myself explained one day by my dear parents. I had been forgotten in a dark cupboard, where I was presumably repenting for some crime, and they had retired to their room to commune together. The text they chose was that about the father's sins, and I was the shocking example. It seems my grandfather was an Indian Nabob. In his unregenerate days he had married a high-caste Hindoo lady; she was a fine savage, full of fire and venom, but my ancestor, growing pious, proceeded to convert her according to family methods. Conversion proved too much for her; she disgraced him in a variety of ways, and the evil strain—for the express purpose, it seemed, of making good Scripture words—was perpetuated in me. My father seemed quite haughty at the thought of himself being the proud proprietor of a well-authenticated scriptural example. As soon as I descended from my stool of repentance I ran off to the mountains, and hid till starvation brought me back. I was shut up for four days with five sermons to read.""Weren't you weak and ill from exposure and hunger?""Oh yes. Those were carnal afflictions not to be considered. There was, however, a glass in the room, and, as soon as I had polished off the sermons, I betook myself to it. One or two of my father's remarks had sharpened my wits, and I discovered that I had got something from my unholy old grandmother with my sins; and I found it pleasant to watch the brilliant rushes of red to my cheeks, the leaps of light into my eyes. The consciousness of a beauty like mine blazing on you for the first time is a liberal education, and leads quickly to the knowledge of its power. I tingled and quivered and swayed foolishly with the shock. Then, in sheer joy in myself, I began to hum snatches of the old ballads that float in the Welsh air and fill one's ears, and I found I had a voice to match my face. I took off my bodice, and looked at my neck and arms in the mangy old glass, propped against two bricks, and I wondered at the perfection of me. I could hardly bear to cover myself with my badly-cut common clothes; but the bitter cold brought up ugly goose-skin on me, so I had to. I dressed and got warm; but I was silly enough to take off my bodice again just to have one more little look, when the door burst open and my father appeared, and began casually to throw abuse and moralities and verses of Scripture at me. He had been watching me through the keyhole with professional disapproval. When he had come to the end of his ' langwidge ' he gave me a stinging stroke across my nice creamy shoulders, and made a horrid black mark, which was worse than the pain. Somehow, after that, original sin and its correctives got confused in my mind. I was like tinder, ready for the touchstone; and it came—I have done well since.—Life has been good to me —I am rich—and——She crouched over the fire, and Margaret waited miserably. Caroline sat up again in a minute or so."Do you think I should have been a much better woman if I had stayed in 'our village'?By this time I should have been a faded, discontented old maid, with every natural instinct shrunken and shrivelled.""It does not follow at all. There are heaps of things you could have done. Every one now can find some outlet if she wants one.""For her brain or her hands she can, not for her beauty, or for those desires which are only right and natural for the privileged classes. I had nothing in me by which I could distinguish myself in art or literature, or compel Fate, so to speak, and I had no desire for work; I hated the thought of it as much as half the good women of society do. I should, I tell you, have been no whit less immoral than I am now as an old maid in a cramped community of monotonous, sordid bodies, with choked crepe-draped souls in them. Then," she went on slowly, "as I grew older, I should have shrunken with shame, and have developed a fresh wrinkle every time I looked at the face of a baby. That is the overflow drop in the bitterness of a woman's defeat; it is also a big factor in her degradation. As many women have been ruined by the lean hungering after a child as by giving birth to one."Margaret looked fearfully at the woman. She laughed."No, I never had a child—I chose to have none. I never find any fun in hurting helpless irresponsible things. One of my dreams, by the way, is to get hold of a well-filled crêche. I would feed up the babies; I would give them sweets and fruit and toys; I would fill them up to their chins with joy and laughter, blot out every idea of cold and hunger or discomfort. Their lives should be one warm dream of delight; then," she said, with a soft little hiss, " I would kill them all in their sleep, so sweetly and softly that dying would be the best little bit in the dream.""But, "said Margaret, "from your own showing God is more cruel than man, and yet you trust Him to finish your dream.""Ah! one keeps always a vague, fond, foolish faith in the unknown, possibly because it is the only belief we have not tried and found wanting."She brooded gloomily into the fire. Suddenly a great fear leapt into her eyes; she rose quickly, and turned them into the dimness of the dawn. Margaret looked at her, but she could not find one word to say. Caroline picked up the cloak that had fallen from her shoulders."You see now," she said, with a grim laugh, "that I had to work out my own salvation by the only road open to me."She went to the bed and began to put on her things, as if even that effort were not worth the making. Margaret's lips moved and quivered as she looked out into the dreary street with a face of perplexed misery.A revelation had been made to her, and it was beyond her dealing with. In that moment she struggled to cast from her the crushing, inexorable, so-reasonable-seeming belief in the injustice of all things on earth and above it that comes to most of us at some moments, and falls like a pall on the hope and trust with knowledge that keep us distinct from the beasts."She has only spoken the truth—God has betrayed her. The ground was cut from under her feet right from the first. What! can I say that isn't a lie? I am more foolish than she."Something touched her. She lifted her tired young face and saw Caroline looking down with a half-smile on her lips."You're bursting to deal faithfully with me. Don't—I like you better silent. Your silence brings as much good to me as I can take in. A little goes a long way with me. Don't worry either—it's quite providential you're constitutionally unable to preach.""Preach!" said Margaret wretchedly—"I couldn't to save my life. I wish I could. I should feel less of an idiot then."Caroline laughed. "As soon as you learn that trick you're lost. Can't you see that words won't meet the case of me, or of the like of me? I have whisperings of better things, I assure you, as well as my betters. On the contrary, I have other promptings of which they and you know nothing." She stooped and put her hands heavily on Margaret's shoulders and looked at her. "What made me tell that lie, I wonder?" she said in her soft hiss. "You could be as bad as any one else, and that's why you are good and have commonsense, I believe. You have forces that bring back the balance—no thanks to you. In me for instance there are none—no blame to me——""We can make ourselves not do things," said Margaret feebly.Caroline stood up and threw out her hands with a gesture of contempt."Speak for yourself, my dear; I am radically out of plumb, and words won't re-model the foundations. You are firmly convinced, no doubt, that God made me. Well, in the internal machinery there's a fundamental flaw for which I am not responsible. Moreover, in other conditions of life this flaw would never in any sort of way have inconvenienced me; it would, in fact, not have been found out, which is the one thing needful for respectability."She spoke in bitter flippancy, but there was the flickering ghost of a forlorn hope behind her eyes that stirred Margaret strangely."I know nothing," she cried at last, "I can see nothing clearly. I would give anything in the world to do some tiniest little thing for you, and I can't.""But you couldn't make Him, Who made me, unpick His workmanship and begin again on a new principle. Never cry over spilt milk, it is wasted energy. "She looked curiously at Margaret and laughed harshly. "I wonder what induces me to come night after night into a crowd that smells like a stale Sunday-school just to look at you and hear you sing? It's poor fun, and, as a matter of fact, I hate you. Do you know that?""Of course I do; sometimes you take no pains to conceal it. Why do you?""Again I refer you to a higher authority. Another screw loose somewhere.""Caroline, don't go—stay here with me tonight and for a few days, and we'll go down the river and—and——she broke off.Her tired brain could form no more words; there was some vague notion floating bewilderedly in her that if she could only keep this creature, with her dreadful pessimism and her maddening beauty, she might in some unknown way or another hold her, and hustle her, as it were, into the kingdom of heaven."Go to bed," said Caroline, "and get the colour back into your cheeks. What, in God's name, brought you into this sort of thing? If I had been in your place I should have got to heaven some easier way. However, that's neither here nor there. Well, I have made a fool of myself, and you've tired yourself to death. Go to bed, and don't further tire yourself praying for me; it's really of no earthly or heavenly use. I'm not, I tell you, worth a line in your poor little face; and the sooner you go to those to whom you belong, and learn the importance to a woman's salvation of a seamless face, the better. You're losing all womanly morality in this wild-goose chase.""Don't talk to me any more to-night," said Margaret wearily, standing up. "Please go home if you won't stay with me. I don't think I can tell you quite how sorry I am that you won't stay."CHAPTER XXXIII.HYDE was enormously sorry for his wife; he felt instinctively that she carried somewhere about her a characteristic, prim tragedy, but the exact plot of it he would have been altogether at a loss even to guess at. He knew the baby came largely into it, and the injury to her pride in connection with Margaret Bering probably had an innings; but if any one had suggested that her miserable, enduring, starved love for himself had one jot to do with it he would have laughed in his face. One might just as reasonably have suggested that his own particular grievance had anything to do with Beatrice.He felt very grateful to her just now, and a little touched by her absorbed, serious in-terest in the election, and her persistent, undaunted methods of work to further his aim; then her quiet unspoken faith in his honesty was eminently gratifying, especially as she was altogether incapable of grasping his motives, and said so in her sedate, gentle, indifferent voice—that voice which so often drove him fairly frantic. The perfect trust of such a superlatively conscientious person was a fine concession to a man, and a big compliment.There was, besides, about this time a certain change in Beatrice, a sort of soft, restrained excitement, that pleased him; it was suggestive of some new experience, and Beatrice so rarely suggested any novelty.One evening, after running amuck among the prejudices of his constituents with phenomenal brilliancy, he came and sat near her after dinner, and told her of his afternoon's work, and her eyes rested on him with the newness quite startling in them, and there was a young little smile about her mouth."By Jove," he thought, "I hardly ever remember her looking at me before in ordinary talk!"After that he constantly found himself trying to get her to look at him again. She had made him curious for the first time."What do you think of Colclough?" he asked her suddenly."I like him—I like him very much," she answered, with unusual expansiveness. "He seems to me so modest; I could believe anything good or even great of him, although he never speaks by any chance of himself.""I am glad you see that—women don't, as a rule; they like him tremendously, but it's mostly for qualities they spin for him out of their own fancies. He had an awful time in India, a man told me the other day; he was beset before and behind by femmes in-comprises, who would insist on his translating their souls for them. They had a sort of notion there that he had a history and a few score mysteries of his own in tow, consequently a sympathetic soul somewhere in the background; and by some trick of a rascally sub it got about that he wrote poetry—fellow couldn't rhyme a line to save his soul. He had to put the fear of Death in one or two of the tender beings, I can tell you before he could clear them out. Some Anglo-Indian women have a tenacious way with them, you know."" Have they, Geoffrey? " she said simply."Yes, my dear, they have. That fellow," he went on, quite pleased with the little change in her generally so silent eyes, "has killed more tigers than any man of his length of service, and in bad places too, without proper escort. He's a great linguist besides, and has done a deal of exploring. Last year he wrote a very decent book of travels—wonder I never told you more of him."She lowered her eyes; she did not want him to see the small cynical flash of mockery in them: when before had he told her anything of any one?"He has got two Royal Humane Society medals into the bargain, and risked his life more than once without so much as a 'thank-you'; and yet that young woman there treats him as she, no doubt, and deservedly, treated the little curate Bridges.""She takes care of us all," said Beatrice, with a faint smile. "Then he is so ill; I think she thinks of that chiefly.""H'm! looks on him as a patient, and forgets he's a man. He's not dead yet, and he'll give her a fine start some day. Serve her right too! Oh, no, don't interfere; they're old enough to take care of themselves, and it's fun looking on. You like her—no need to ask that.""I like her—more than I can say," she added, with curious earnestness.Suddenly he shifted his chair, and looked full at her."I'm awfully obliged to you, do you know, for the way you're working for me! It's quite true what Miss Weston says: if I do get in all the credit is due to you. They judge me through your ways of putting me,—myself undiluted wouldn't have had a show. I have a curiosity to know why you want this so much. Will you tell me?"It was the very first thing he had ever asked her to do for him. She felt faint and sick inside, but outside she only looked a little quieter, more like her monotonous every-day self."I shall tell you some other time. It is a foolish little reason perhaps, and it has altered; it is quite a different reason now from what it was in the beginning.""Is this a riddle?""If you like to call it one.""Are your hands thin? I think they are."" Do you? Ah! perhaps it's only fancy.""Why do you always wear tea-gowns now?"It struck him he had not seen her in a proper low dress for an age."Tea-gowns are so comfortable. There will be so many weeks of enforced low necks when we get back to town."After a minute or so he went over to launch Colclough out on some tiger yarns, and when he looked round for Beatrice she was gone. From that time he found quite a diverting interest in looking for surprises in his wife. It occurred to him after a little it was a more wholesome and far pleasanter pastime than superintending the making of ensilage.CHAPTER XXXIV.Miss Dow, the district visitor, had just concluded a hurried sniff round Frank Weston's room, her parochial nose well in the air. She was a person made with a sordid regard to economy, except as to angles; and by some miscalculation in her make there had not been quite enough flesh left to cover these. Her spareness was a great help to her professionally. It enabled her to squeeze herself into any corner, and to step lightly. She was on sinners before they had a notion of her approach, and was thus frequently privileged to deal faithfully with them caught red-handed in the act. She was sharper in spotting female vice than male, from a feeling of modesty befitting the intricacies of her virgin state, but she overcame her natural feelings when duty demanded it of her.She had already in her short inspection discovered many things about Frank, and all distinctly to his disadvantage; and was now standing, holding delicately between her finger and thumb, the last number of Punch.When Frank came in she told him that she had ventured to place some tracts on his table. When he had thanked her warmly she ventured further—"Is it possible, Mr. Weston, that you approve of publications of this order for this neighbourhood ?""Punch!" said Frank; "why not? There's nothing specially plutocratic about it, surely. Has it occurred to you that it might hurt their prejudices in any way?" He looked at her in a spirit of artless enquiry.She cleared a space between her tracts and the journal."To our own consciences we stand or fall; it is not for me to dictate,"she observed. "No doubt you are aware that I visit in your neighbouring Vicar's, Mr. Driver's, parish?""Indeed!" said Frank. "I wonder what he's done to deserve you," he thought."I have called," she continued, " with reference to a young person living with Mrs. Bent, who lived till lately in my district.""I wonder, "he thought, "what she has ferreted out about Poll.""She belonged to that class of women over whom—ahem!—we have to mourn daily. My attention was first drawn to her by a most damaging rumour of an infant,"—she flung her nose protestingly heavenwards—" which infant disappeared mysteriously.""Oh!" said Frank; "no doubt that was all right, and that the infant can be accounted for satisfactorily."Miss Dow reflected on him for a moment with clasped lips."Since that time I have reason to believe the young woman has gone from bad to worse.""I can reassure you on that point. She is honestly trying to do well, and working hard at a trade.""I have, alas! very sufficient proof to the contrary.""Proof?" He had no particular interest in her answer. He knew the stock suspicions of her kind, and quite believed in Poll as far as she went. He was watching her face with a sort of irreverent pity—wondering if any one outside a near relative ever had had the courage to kiss her."Yes, incontestable proof." Weston's attitude irritated her. "It is not my custom to speak at random." She waited, but he decided to give her her head, and smothered a yawn. "This young woman has been seen at twelve at night, Mr. Weston, in a street, the name of which I prefer not to mention, talking with those persons—giggling——""Have you seen her, Miss Dow?""I, Mr. Weston! Do you for a moment imagine that I perambulate an unspeakable street at midnight?""I was a trifle astonished, but with a woman of your zeal one never knows. You have her watched, then?""Certainly I have.""Oh, indeed!"She would stand this no longer. Watch her—her, indeed—out of that chair with a sort of a smile on his face, as if some one had lately made a joke. There was a carnal look about it, very unpleasant indeed. And she quite alone in the room too! She would report the matter—possibly to the Bishop. A sudden little thrill of pleasure made her for the minute quite weak and human. It would be delightful to write to a Bishop, on any account whatsoever; but a horrid conviction that she did not know in the least how to address a Bishop brought her up with a gasp. She forgot her modulated tones of Christian sorrow, and raised her voice disagreeably."The girl also holds midnight orgies at the house of that once decent woman, Mrs. Bent, and bids her friends to them." She paused and lowered her head bashfully. "The nature of these orgies I cannot dwell upon—nor is it necessary, as I am informed that you yourself, Mr. Weston, frequent them.""Anything else, Miss Dow?""Do you desire more, Mr. Weston?""No ;on the whole ,I think I have had enough. Of what girl have you been speaking all this time ?" he asked, in a low, careful tone."Of a young person calling herself Miss Daintree."He took two steps towards her and looked at her for a minute, right into her shabby restless eyes, and he was disarmed at once. Such things in a woman's eyes hurt a man who has had a good mother. He wanted to forget what he had seen, and to try to regain his trust in God. He came back and spoke down at her gently."It's rather waste of breath to tell you, Miss Dow, for you know it quite well, that Miss Daintree is a good girl, with no shadow of suspicion about her except, possibly, what you yourself may have sown in your rounds. It is also a waste of energy to inform you—as you also know it quite well—that in these midnight walks and orgies you mention this girl—or lady: of course you will have seen she is that—has done and is doing a very noble work, entailing enormous self-sacrifice. Leave Miss Daintree and her methods to God, Miss Dow. You will find plenty of work more befitting your capacities.""I have not sought your advice, Mr. Weston; I came with a warning. It is not the first time in the history of the Church of God that Delilah has shorn the strength of His servants.""Miss Daintree, I suppose, is Delilah and I am the servant? Unfortunately for me, Miss Dow, you are quite out of it. Miss Daintree has never shown the most distant inclination to shear me. I wish she had."Miss Dow collected her tracts and returned them to her bag. It was her symbolical and delicate way of casting his dust off her feet."If it would interest you in the least to know it, or if it would be any help to you professionally," he said, as he opened the door for her, "I may tell you that I am going round directly to ask Miss Daintree if she will do me the honour to be my wife. I don't for a moment suppose she will, but I mean to ask her. And now, in gratitude for this gratuitous piece of information, you will oblige me by never on any pretence whatsoever entering this house again; and I will request Mr. Driver to keep you out of this parish.""I hope God may forgive you, Mr. Weston.""I hope He may. Good-bye."He shut the door with a pleasant smile, but he thought that for a sinful man he had stood a good deal. He went back to his room and opened the window. The woman seemed to have used up all the freshness of the air."Well, he thought, "Mrs. Grundy in the odious body of Miss Dow has precipitated matters finely, and probably spoilt any small fraction of chance I might have had. What's Driver been at all this time that he hasn't choked her! No wonder he looks sickly, and that his sermons are—well, as they are! I wish he'd keep his parochial femininity in their own waters. This has upset all my calculations, but it's the only thing to do now that that viper's on the war-path—I wonder what she'll say, what she'll think, how she'll look? Well, when all's said and done, I have a wretched conviction that I have as much chance now as ever I shall have—I could make her happy, too, even if she is altogether too good for me—I wonder why we all have our day of crying for the moon?—I wonder when Rica's coming up? She'd be a nice cosy person to have about just now."He went off to brush his hair and set out on his mission, swinging his stick.Meanwhile, Margaret was having a steady cry in her room, a most unusual occurrence nowadays, for she had learned self-control in a fine school, and as a rule she practised it. She had indeed at first stretched out foolish hands for help, had done her little best to tear pity from the skies; but she soon found that the only thing really left for her to do was to fold her hands and to wait.And as she waited she found, in her little drab world, that bad as was her plight there were others in even a worse. Then gradually a new pain for the wretches more God-forsaken than herself grew up on the top of the old, and formed a coating over it, and in a way kept it from throbbing. This new pain was like the scorching of caustic—in as much as it healed while it hurt.But a healing film is a delicate tissue, and Miss Dow had, a little earlier in the day, before her call on Frank, stripped it off in the superfine way of the consciously righteous.Unfortunately, Mrs. Bent was out for the day; Poll was at work, so Margaret had to receive her visitor's broadsides without a soul to back her. She never had been able to put up with Miss Dow, and was by no means backward in making her aware of the fact by her own restrained, well-bred impertinence in return for the other's fanatical revilings, and she had in the end gloriously routed her enemy.But not till the enemy had done what she had come to do: that was, to leave Margaret feeling very forlorn and bruised all over. Indeed, as she sat and cried, everything inside her seemed to go wrong. The sense of the futility of the sacrifice she had made in the first instance fell on her like a sudden blow. Who was one atom the better for it? How could she even tell if it had done as she had meant it to do—save Geoffrey and his wife? She knew nothing; she was groping darkly in a land where hope lies slain. She was toiling day and night, only to be confounded every hour by the fact that there had been "put a bridle in the jaws of the people causing them to err." Had she thrust herself, and all to no purpose, out of a world brilliant with hope and possibilities into this? Why could she not have let things go and been happy, as only she and Geoffrey in the whole wide world knew how to be?She thrust conscience aside, held her breath, shut her eyes, and took a big leap back into the past; and presently rose up again, giddy and dazed, but in a whirling tumult of joy. A woman's thin screech and the howl of a kicked cur pulled her up. She shuddered back into the present. Then an aggravated detestation for the ugliness of her life took her by the throat. The grey, narrow, monotonous streets seemed to close in on her and stifle her. The squalling of squalid infants made aches in her ears ; the curses of half-drunken women filled her with disgust and anger against all womenkind. Even the clean, inoffensive Dutch carpet on her room, and the cane chairs, and the splash-board with puce bulrushes on it, made her feel sick. Everything about her was so little, so carefully considered, so retail. Bodies, souls, brains, houses, and effects all to match, all microscopical, and the result of her hope and toil just the same—more microscopical than all the rest.A sudden cold fear came on her: would her youth and prettiness slip away from her in this dulness? would her soul fine down to a miserable sharp point, and would she become just a half-sentient monotonous detail with a grievance like all the others?Then another idea began to take definite shape in her. It had been simmering vaguely in her sub-consciousness since she had known Mr. Weston and his friend, and had recognised the queer under-current of reverence in their treatment of her, and noticed little things they had said—little, trivial, simple things, but enough to give one a notion. Was she really a hypocrite, or was she only coerced into being like one, as she seemed to have been coerced into everything else? For what passed for goodness in her was really nothing but the result of the pressure of circumstances, and possibly, she thought worriedly, had no foundations of its own to stand on. Else, why should she feel such sudden revolts against her surroundings, sudden sick sensations now and again at the mere sight and sound of her frousy protegées? No saint ever felt the least atom like this, or if so, her chroniclers forgot to mention it.She shivered as the saint occurred to her; but she grew warm as with an impulse of wilfulness her mind veered round to David, and she felt herself hoping that he had a good time with Bathsheba, and wishing, half-reluctantly, that it hadn't been cut short quite so soon. She recollected her duty in a minute, and felt rueful and disappointed in herself."Oh," she thought, "what Caroline said was perfectly true! I could be as bad as any one. I daresay there's a whole unexplored mine of evil in me. I believe half the time when I am working like anything for other people I am longing, panting, pining myself for whole heartsful of the world, the flesh, and the devil; and if my world and things differ from theirs, after all it's only a mere question of race and education. Oh! this isn't the way of good women, and it accounts for the fact that I never can by any chance advise any one."She sighed wearily, and glanced round the clean, bright room, that looked as if it were made of cheap remnants."It's like everything else," she thought, " in all these countless streets. Everything and everybody is just a remnant,—not one sound, wholesome, untouched body and soul, fresh from God's manufactory, in the whole place."CHAPTER XXXV.SHE had just arrived at this pleasing state of morbidness when a knock came to the door, a resolute knock, that meant to be attended to.Margaret darted to the window."Mr. Weston!" she cried, making a dash at the glass,—"and my eyes? They're impossible!" It was hopeless to rub them. She went desperately to the door. "Possibly he won't come in as Mrs. Bent is out," she thought dejectedly, keeping the door carefully half-closed in his face.He coolly opened it, and as soon as they got into the room put her down in a chair."You might have asked me in," he said; "this is unlike the hospitable ways of Mrs. Bent's house. Have you" had your tea yet ?""No.""Neither have I."She got up, laughing rather weakly."You cut the bread and butter," said Frank, "I'll boil the kettle; I see it's meant to be done on this fire." He turned his back on her, and in his man's way began to worry the kettle, that would have boiled directly if only he had given it half a chance. "That individual," he said back at her, " isn't worth crying about, unless you happen to be crying for her lost soul, and even then I fear it would only be a wasted effort on your part. I have had her this afternoon—she left me raging, if you like! but with not the slightest inclination to cry. Don't think any more of her. She's a blight one should blot off one's mind at the earliest possible opportunity.""How did you know Miss Dow had been here?" Margaret asked, wondering if her eyes looked as awful as they felt."I had an inward conviction—I came to see if I was right.""That was very good of you!""I should hardly call it that. I came for purely selfish reasons.""It was extremely unfortunate in one way that you did come."She wished he would turn round, that she might see his nose. It always took away from her any feeling of shyness; there was an air of strength and sense about it."Oh indeed!""You will perhaps imagine that I pass my time howling. I don't, by any means. As to Miss Dow, if she hadn't set me off I should have forgotten her existence long ago.""And now you've to forget your own, and to think of tea, which is a far more important matter. I am ready with this kettle, if you are with the other things.""Mrs. Bent left everything on the tray. I have only this bread and butter to cut, and I've done it vilely. However, it matches your tea. Look! you put oceans of water, but forgot the tea.""That's a mere detail," said Frank, repairing his mistake. "I'll tell you something which isn't, but, on the contrary, comes perilously near to being an episode. You've given me the cracked cup. Mrs. Bent always takes it herself, and keeps the crack turned towards her.""And I'm using the every-day cream-jug. The best is bronze, and has pink forget-me-nots on it.""And 'A Present from Epping Forest' on its back. If Mrs. Bent came in she'd have a fit, and the last trump and general confusion of ranks would suggest themselves to her.""She's so charmingly exclusive.""She is. It's only in her and her like that one ever nowadays meets with the true aristocratic instinct. One is thankful in her presence to have the Christian names of both one's great-grandmothers at one's finger-tips, and to be able conscientiously to swear that they in variably wore clocked silk stockings.""A man who knows all about his great-grandmothers' silk stockings should make better tea. At first it was all water, now it's all tea.""We're not domesticated persons, I imagine.""Do domesticated young men exist?""I'm told they're coming in, as a corrective to the advanced young woman.""It has been the dream of my life to meet an advanced young woman; but, now that you suggest him, I think a domesticated young man would be more piquant.""I shall bring round the first I catch. I must bring my sister Rica round, too, directly I can get hold of her; she makes excellent tea.""I thought all folded-lamb girls who could manage it were in London now.""Oh, Rica's down in the country canvassing for a man with notions and a lately-excavated conscience and other embarrassing complications. But I think his wife, backed by Rica and a tidy amount of landed interest, will haul him in all right. His wife is a fine white creature, to whom most things on earth, more especially her husband, are sealed mysteries. But she's very fetching—Rica's devoted to her."Margaret's thoughts flew back to her one earthly experience of a fine white creature, and her eyes suddenly darkened in a blabbing way they had. Frank saw the change in them, and he somehow felt as if he had seen the death-warrant of his hopes: it made him curiously gentle with her. Margaret found an indefinable change in his manner, and wondered how it came about.It struck Frank just then that it must be a rare experience for her to have a man to take care of her, and to do man's work generally. He used his opportunity to the full, although he knew by some instinct that all the time he was working against himself.Margaret, however, felt soothed and in her right place. The horrid, belittling, retail feeling of everything began to vanish; old memories began to stir in her, old scents to float round; even the noises in the street gradually altered, as she sat and let Frank amuse her, and an old dead sound of rushing, purling, swishing waters came to life in her. She leaned eagerly forward, with parted lips and eyes full of laughter, and gave him back joke for joke.Frank felt himself first startled, then enthralled—intoxicated—with the radiant, superb happiness on the girl's face, precisely as had happened to Hyde in his day, but with a difference. Hyde had a delightful consciousness that he himself had set this miracle of radiancy afloat; the poor parson, on the contrary, had a horrid conviction that now he had completely done for himself.He had, indeed, succeeded in his design; he had cheered her up, not to say metamorphosed her; but it was not of him she thought, as she let him move her as he listed. It was not for him her eyes laughed, her dimples deepened, her mouth melted. It was for the other man—the same man, Frank felt vindictively and vaguely, for whose sake she had hid her youth in the desert.He suddenly tripped in his speech and pulled up short. She came to her senses as suddenly. The waters ceased to flow, and a child's howl from the curb gutter struck her ears, and something in Frank's face arrested her laugh. Some impulse made her half stand up."Sit down," he said, with a sudden resolve to plunge in. "I must tell you something."She sat down a little fearfully, and looked at him."I came here to-day to tell you that I love you as much as I know, and to ask you to be my wife."Margaret whitened and shrank back. She tried to frame some words and to get them said, but they stuck in her throat and hurt her."I never dreamt of this," she said at last. "I thought people must know without my telling that that sort of thing has nothing to do with me now. Couldn't you see I had lived all that part of me?""But, dear, you're so young. Nothing can be quite final at your age. Let me go on loving you, and some day perhaps old feelings will have grown dim with time, and then you can love me back. If you can make ever so small a beginning, just give me one little shred of hope——""But I can't! You see this minute I love another man with every bit of me, and I can't change myself. I may be young, but my love is final.""But why, then——""Why, then, don't I marry him? Because he is already married. Still, it's just as impossible to marry you——""But you——""I? No; I didn't know at the time.""The man was sane. He could hardly plead ignorance. Will you sacrifice——""Sane or insane," she said drearily, "we loved each other, and that's the end of it. I had to love him the very first minute I saw him, and he had to love me. It was all wrong; but I don't think we settle these things for ourselves.""But, dear, if he's married——""But even if he is, I shall have to love him, if I never see him again. We both did our best to make it different for him," she added simply, "on account of his wife. Besides, I'm told that time does wonders for men. I have just to think, you see, of how I feel myself.""Have you met or spoken to him since——"He felt a brute the minute the words had taken shape. But he was hard driven; he hardly knew till then how very dear she was."No; we are neither of us that sort of person.""I think," he said in a low voice, "he is a better fellow under the circumstances than I should have been."She looked at him, and a sudden wave of pity for him filled her eyes with tears."No," she said, "he's not. We don't measure our love by the degrees of a man's goodness. We love them—well, because we love them. And you came late, that is all. All I had to give was given. Don't think I'm not grateful, "she went on abruptly, "or don't know how much your offer means, or what a sacrifice it is on your part. You know absolutely nothing of me. You don't know even if I am commonly respectable or not. You don't know if that wretched baby of Miss Dow's isn't a living fact. But if it was, and that you had known it, I don't believe it would have made any difference. I haven't had a very wide experience, but I know true love when I see it. I wish—I wish you had shown me just a mere glimmer of it before, and I might have saved you some sorrow.""Never mind, dear.""But how can I help minding, horribly?" She looked keenly at him. "The man I love is not a better man than you—you are the better of the two, and much more grown up; and yet, "she said in a soft low voice," if I had lived with you for years, if you had loaded me with lovingkindness, cherished me in sorrow and in joy, and if I saw the other man out in the cold, half naked and a beggar, and if he still wanted me, my first impulse would be to throw up everything and to follow him; and even if a vague clinging to conventions and duty restrained me, and I let him pass on without another look, I should have proved myself unworthy to be the wife of a man like you. Don't you remember your own sermon?"He was confounded out of his own mouth with a vengeance, and the tender, protecting, frank sorrow in her eyes as they rested on him hurt him perhaps more than her refusal, for they showed how final it was. He was speechless and impotent. The fact that in most girls' "No" there is an echo of "Yes" gives many a man courage, and if he has anything to say for himself he says it. Frank had plenty to say, but he said nothing. He turned away and stared out into the street for a minute, then he took his hat mechanically and made for the door. Margaret jumped up in a sudden fright.Was he going to leave her with a face like that? If he did, he would never come back again himself—it would be a strange man she would meet the next time.She had too few friends, she could not afford to lose the very best of them; no stranger could ever fill his place for her. She seized his hat, put it down on a chair, and took hold of his hands."Will it hurt you too much to be my friend still—not to come back in some vague future, but to keep my friend now, straight off with no break at all? Don't think me too abjectly selfish, but I want you to come just as you have done since we have known each other, and to be just as you have been. It is a thankless thing to ask so much when I have so little to give. It wouldn't, you see, be such a great thing to some girls to lose a friend," she went on breathlessly, " but to me it seems disastrous, I am so friendless." She looked wistfully into his face. "It would have been so easy to love you—but you see it has been made impossible for me.""I see," he said gently. "I shall take your friendship, dear, and do my best to keep my love from boring you; but you'll understand, by your own case, it will hardly be possible to alter its character.""No," she said, still breathlessly ;" but I'm so brutally selfish, I simply can't give you up—even give you a respite to pull yourself together in, and to give love the airs of friendship.""No need you should.""And perhaps," she said, with a wild thought of consolation, " perhaps, after all, men are not so like burs as girls. One can't quite tell what time and other girls may not do for you. There are crowds of both before you."He laughed huskily. "There are," he said. "We'll leave it to them, for the present. However, I wish every one whom it may concern, but especially every one whom it may not, to understand distinctly that I have asked you to be my wife and that you have refused me. I have already told Miss Dow I meant to ask you."She loosed his hands and started back flushing."Was it from a sort of duty—protection idea, then——He laughed. "No, it was just your own case over again. I had to love you; then the next natural step was to ask you to marry me. Does it never occur to you to look in the glass?""It does, frequently. But, surely, mere prettiness is common enough in your world, with the distinct advantages of accessories. Girls are the better, even morally, for a fine setting. I'm quite certain it's harder to be commonly, decently good this side of Oxford Street than it is the other side. Give me your friendship—but seek your love on the other side.""Ah, some day we'll discuss all that. Meantime, will you kiss me just once?" he said softly. "It will do me a lot more good than advice, you poor little thing!"She was bitterly sorry for him—it hurt her terribly to see the tired look of him. She would have done any mortal thing for him but this."How can I? You understand just how things are. You wouldn't like to kiss another girl yourself—well, say, quite for six months, now would you?""No," he said, making a praiseworthy shot at a laugh;" perhaps I should allow myself a few months' respite.""And we are such burs," she explained deprecatingly."I had better clear," he thought, "while I have any wits left. Good-bye, little bur.""I wish—I wish I could have helped it!""So do I—it spoilt our tea-party."CHAPTER XXXVI.HYDE won his election by a good neck, and his constituents, while unaffectedly adoring him, shook in their shoes, and prepared their minds for sensations. The more intellectually alert among them nourished and wound up their consciences in view of any sudden calls or extra strain on them; while every individual unit among them, whether with a conscience or without, had an uneasy conviction somewhere in him that he had let loose on the world a power, and that it was quite a toss-up as to the future goings-on of this power. It might carry them all to heaven in a fiery chariot; it might, on the contrary, blow them in a twinkling to perdition.Hyde's first impression on any one was to make that person think of him, and fall forthwith into speculations concerning him. Unfortunately, in the case of women, the thoughts generally grew and multiplied, and the speculations waxed wild.Directly, then, he had thrown off his apathy of indifference, and had set seriously to bring himself and his county into direct personal contact, the same thing happened—every adult creature, man or woman, friend or foe, broke out into thoughts and speculations with regard to this simple, plain-spoken, but exceedingly courteous young man, and his potential possibilities."Hang it all!" said Colclough one day, "what the fools see in you I can't imagine! It was the same at Eton, then at Christ's: you chucked yourself into the consciousness of every one you came across. What's queerer still, "he continued sadly, "you kept there, and went on simmering in him."''I was only elected yesterday," said Hyde; "can't you let a fellow R.I.P. and smoke in comfort? I shall have to listen to enough jaw before the year's out. If fellows are asses, I'm not responsible for them.""I don't blame you," said Colclough indulgently. "You can't help it. It's something in your make not visible to the naked eye. Perhaps it's Divine grace—perhaps it's the devil—who can tell? But here you are now simmering in the interior of every man-Jack of the population within a radius of ten miles, and if you're going to do anything to justify all the inward commotion you're causing it's pretty near time you began."Geoffrey smoked on in lazy peace for a minute or two."As a matter of fact," he said, "it isn't I who have set vacant minds agog this time. It's Beatrice. For such a sedate, unimpressionable person her effects are quite startling.''"You're confounding her effects and your own. She could never by any chance startle any mind, however melodramatic. You startle them and set them jabbering. She silences them, and fills them with a sort of essence of reverence that half awes them. They think of her on dark nights, and when it occurs to them to say their prayers."Geoffrey felt suddenly warm with a half-reluctant and altogether astonished flush of gratitude."You think a lot of Beatrice!""A good woman is always a lot to me; and if she's handsome as well, no doubt the effect's intensified."They smoked in silence for a few minutes. Geoffrey said at last—"You heard about the other girl?""I did.""Miss Weston told you?"Colclough nodded."I behaved like a beast in that business. I was deuced hard driven—and——""Oh yes, I know all about it. She was a young thing, full of all manner of possibilities, like yourself—kindred souls, and all that. The details, if combined, would have clashed like the devil in no time, blown you both sky-high, or landed you in the ditch" He remembered suddenly a look on Rica's face as she had told him the story, "All the same, she was a good girl. You're lucky in your women—should live up to "em.""No doubt. All the same, ' living up ' is a fag now and again. One tires at times of craning to a star.""Take it easy," suggested Colclough. "There's more woman than star in all feminine creatures. Always a mistake to consider the star first—crick in the neck puts you off the other a lot."Geoffrey looked moody and said nothing. Colclough lighted a fresh pipe and fell to turning him over in his mind. They had been friends at Eton and at Christ's, and at the present moment liked each other probably better than they had ever done before. They were drawn together by a common, but unexpressed, and almost unconscious bond of sympathy. Hyde was frightfully sorry for the dilapidated physical condition and the evident suffering of the other man, who in his turn felt a regret of a paternal order for what he looked upon as a precisely similar state of things in the mental and moral economy of Hyde.They were very much the same age, but Colclough looked upon himself as the elder man by a long way. Hyde's manner alone was enough to keep his youth fresh in him; besides, Colclough's present certainty that death had got the better of the life in him gave him in his own eyes age, and an unpleasant sense of weight—gave him, in fact, a tendency now and again to preach.Like every one else, he looked upon Hyde as a man with a career before him, and was beset with qualms of doubt as to its nature. From his earlier knowledge of him he con-sidered that he should have been by this time well launched out on this career for good or evil. But then he had been handicapped by bad checks: first, his marriage; then his folly with Margaret. The inoffensive decency of his life since she had disappeared from it, now that he had seen more of him, didn't count for much with Colclough. No doubt the fact of his straightness was due in some measure to a strong sense of loyalty to his promises to her, and to a chivalrous desire to do his best for a good wife; but his apathy had a lot more to do with it, in Colclough's opinion. He had not enough go for the stock temptations incidental to his state of loose ends.Now, however, that he had elected to wake up was the time to look out for squalls. Colclough here began to contrast Geoffrey's former appreciative and all-embracing, if a trifle easygoing, relish for his privileges with some of the things he had noticed lately in London. He remembered one evening, especially, watch-ing him at a ball. He had, with his customary luck, got hold of the prettiest and wittiest woman in the room, and had begun to do his duty by her quite genially. He had said a number of smart things, and had put her on even more excellent terms with herself than usual, when he suddenly appeared bored to death, and got stuck in the midst of a sentence, while she looked round to see if she had got hold of a lunatic. He remembered her directly, but clean forgot what he had been saying, and struck out coolly on a new track. She forgave him, too, Colclough thought with a grin. He saw her looking radiant, sitting out a dance with him, later on in the night. It was the same with everything—it was all done by reflex action, from hunting to the drainage of his village; and if it was well done, no thanks to him. He never happened to do things badly. Some fellows get into the way of pulling things off all right.Colclough felt instinctively that Mrs. Hyde knew all this quite well, and that one reason of her absorbed, anxious interest in his election was to have a political career ready to his hand directly he woke up completely, and was ready for active mischief or otherwise. Colclough had seen very early in his acquaintance with Mrs. Hyde that though she was single-minded to a fault, and hadn't a spark of imagination—was, besides, crassly ignorant of the world—she had yet a curious, swift knack of getting to the ultimate truth in things and persons. She hadn't understood one of the motives of Geoffrey's refusal to commit himself to any given set of opinions, but she had recognised that what seemed to him a big truth lay at the bottom of all of them; if she had not done so, she would not have moved a finger to help him, and so Rica had often explained to him.She had known the whole truth of Margaret's meetings with her husband before a breath of scandal had reached any one else, and directly she saw the girl she was ready to acknowledge her belief in her truth. The fact was, her own nature was so pure and delicate that she could not be anything but accurate in her soundings, and she never failed to detect a false note. With all her limits, this would have been an embarrassing and blood-curdling power in any one less well bred than herself—at times it made even her rather hard for mortal man to live with, Colclough thought with a concerned shrug in Hyde's direction."A woman with such a confoundedly accurate scent for truth ought to know more. It's like living under a search-light that magnifies indiscriminately and gives undue importance to everything."Just then Beatrice and Rica came in. It struck Colclough that Mrs. Hyde, from one point of view, had done foolishly in choosing Rica for a friend. Her wholesome, well-proportioned breadth gave a suggestion of scragginess to the other woman's ethereal slenderness. The same thought struck Geoffrey, and annoyed him in an odd way."A fat wife would be an unutterable bore; but—I wonder how her collar-bones are! One can't see them under those tea-gowns."Then he went over and softened the light. It seemed to him a wretchedly shabby thing to let her stand under the full glare of a cross-light, with the other girl so close to her."We're suffering horribly from reaction," said Rica, settling into a chair. "We came to see how you felt. The world is at an end now you're disposed of for the present, Mr. Hyde, and with nothing fresh coming up""With bulbs bursting up all over the place," said Colclough. "It was green under that tree yesterday, now it's yellow with crocuses." He looked out of the window with an air of lazy interest. "There's a dash of violet, too—that's since the morning.""I want a novelty," said Rica, "and you suggest Nature. She asked bread, and he gave her a stone. The upspringing of crocuses may soothe, but it doesn't excite.""There's always a certain excitement in watching an adventurous spirit. Imagine the pluck of putting your head above ground on a day like this.""Ah, that's it. It's forbidden fruit for you in a mild way." She put on her motherly look for him. "The east wind, this afternoon, has all the elements of true friendship: it pierces to the very marrow of your bones.""I agree with you, Miss Weston," said Hyde; "after an election one wants more than crocuses.""There's Season," suggested Colclough, "ready to your hand.""Season! Why, my good fellow, we want an absolutely new sensation! We have the explorer's mania on us. Isn't that it, Miss Weston? I shouldn't bother myself, if I were you, however; these things always come to women, without the bother of going out after them.""That, at least, is a new doctrine."I fear not, else I should feel the unmistakable warm shiver of a creator. I assure you it's we who have to go out prospecting in strange soils, making ourselves in a hideous mess with clay and mud, before we find anything at all. When we have found it, and begin to think that we alone of all the world have found a new thing, the assayers of these products tell us it's as old as Babylon. Neither crocuses, balls, nor even teas, will be enough after this election racket, so as soon as Beatrice has settled back in town I'm going for a month to Ireland.""To look for something new?" said Colclough; "Oh Lord!""Has it anything to do with Home Rule?" said Beatrice, looking earnestly at him, half-doubtful, half-pleased.Was it, after all, possible that the merest atom of family tradition had got somehow into him and was "making for righteousness"? She gave a little nervous sigh, and waited for his answer."I'm afraid," he said, watching her amusedly, "that Home Rule isn't in it. My one object in going to Ireland just now is to contemplate that wretched, used-up topic from a point of view from which even the idea, past or future, of Home Rule has been rigorously excluded. That's where the notion of novelty comes in, you see.""Then," said Beatrice, with wide, surprised eyes, " it will hardly be Ireland any longer.""But that's what I'm trying to arrive at. Think what a delightful place it would be if it weren't Ireland."That required imagination, so she passed it, and gave utterance to her two hereditary Irish associations."The hunting is over; and isn't the fishing better here?""But I'm not going to hunt or fish; I'm going to see Ireland—my Ireland and its natives—from a fresh standpoint When I come back I'll tell you the result."She wondered a little sadly if she would understand it, and be able to grasp any joke it might contain. She always considered her sensations with reference to him before she thought of herself personally. When she thought of his being away for a whole month—thirty-one days—her heart fell slowly and her upper lip lengthened in an uninteresting way it had when she was miserable."How prim and dogged she can look!" thought Colclough. "A woman has no right to hurt a man with a face like that. Poor old Geoff!"He wondered, and so did Rica, what Hyde meant by this sudden Irish scheme; but, as they saw he had not the smallest notion of telling them, they held their tongues."Rica," said Beatrice suddenly, "will you stay with me while Geoffrey is away?""I was wondering if I should have the courage to ask you to let me," said Rica. "It would be delightful, especially as my step-mother's second cousin died lately. Her relatives have a startling way of dropping off when anything is going on. They never by any chance vanish in the silly season and my step-mother has the tribal instinct quite fiercely developed in her. She detests this person, but she will be in complimentary mourning for a month, and so will the house You're a dear angel for asking me!""You'll take care of her, won't you?" said Colclough solicitously. "Beef tea, you know, and draughts.""It's only men who need taking care of," she explained scornfully. "We are reasonable beings, and understand the science of consequences. We'll take care of each other, and have a good time. We'll also keep our eyes open, and see what we can pick up in the way of new things.""I'll lay long odds," said Colclough, "that you'll find more in the 'daily round' than Geoffrey will by crossing the sea. Can't you leave that till later, Geoffrey?""I can't," said Geoffrey, rolling a cigarette.He did not notice the sudden leap of hope into his wife's eyes at Colclough's question, nor their sudden dulling at his answer. Colclough did, however. He felt curiously sorry for her. "But after all," he thought, in the superior tone of a spurious old age, "what's a month in the days of one's youth? It isn't fair, somehow, either to him or to herself, that she should take it like this.'END OF VOL. IIPrinted by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ltd., London and Aylesbury.Advertisements included in the back of Iota's Children of Circumstance, vol. 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