"No woman can be kept too much at home," he continued. "I would have more Eastern customs in England if I could, and not suffer women to go gadding about in public, blocking up the streets, and hindering business in the shops, and sowing seeds of mischief wherever they go. Busy bodies, gossips, tattlers! 'Speaking things which they ought not,' as Paul says, in his wisdom. Margaret is none of them, I can tell you. I should keep women back—back. That is their place, well in the background, you know. Kindly treated, of course, and their rights secured, only secured by men. Come and see how my plan has worked with Margaret."
"Certainly, with pleasure," replied Sidney.
But he was in no hurry to go. There were many things to be done a hundredfold more interesting to him than an interview with an eccentric man's childish daughter. He scarcely gave Colonel Cleveland's invitation a second thought. Day after day slipped by, and the idea of going did not cross his preoccupied mind. Nor did Colonel Cleveland recur to the subject of his daughter when they met in the city to transact necessary business. Possibly he had been alarmed at his own rashness.
But one afternoon a note reached Sidney by post. It was written in a hand as clear and legible as a clerk's and was quite as brief, and to the point. He read it with a smile.
SIR: My father, Colonel Cleveland, has met with an accident. He bids me ask you if you can come to-night and see him at his house? MARGARET CLEVELAND.
"No superfluous words here," he thought; "no empty compliments; no conventional forms. If every woman wrote notes like this, a good deal of time would be saved. It is like a telegram."
CHAPTER VI.
COLONEL CLEVELAND.
The house where Colonel Cleveland was for the present living stood alone on Wimbledon Common, surrounded by a large garden, which was completely walled in on every side. Sidney rode toward it in the twilight of an autumn evening. A yellow light in the western sky shone through the delicate net-work of silver beech trees, where a few leaves were still clinging to the slender branches. All around him there were the forewarnings of the coming winter, and the lingering traces of the dead summer. The pale gray of the low sky overhead was sad; and sad was the fluttering of the brown leaves as they floated to the ground. A robin was singing its mournful little song, as if all the other birds had forsaken the land, and left it to bear alone the burden of song through the winter. A few solitary ramblers, looking as if they had lost their way in the gathering mist, were passing to and fro along the sodden paths. The scent of dying fern filled the air.
Sidney was the more open to all the impressions of nature because of his busy life in the city. This almost deserted, open common, looking like a stretch of distant moorland, was all the more touching and pathetic to him because an hour ago he had been threading his way through the crowded labyrinths of London. The yellow light shining through the beech stems was more lovely, because for half the day his eyes had seen nothing but gaslights burning amid the fog.