THE HAPPY WARRIOR

BY

A. S. M. HUTCHINSON

AUTHOR OF "ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER——"

WITH FRONTISPIECE BY

PAUL JULIEN MEYLAN

TORONTO
MCCLELLAND & GOODCHILD LIMITED

Copyright, 1912,
BY A. S. M. HUTCHINSON.
All rights reserved.
First Edition Printed, December, 1912
Reprinted, January, 1913 (three times)
February, 1913 (three times)
Reprinted, March, 1913
Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
Presswork by S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, Mass., U.S.A.

Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to be?
—It is the generous spirit, who,...
Come when it will, is equal to the need...
Who, with a toward or untoward lot,
Prosperous or adverse, to his wish or not—
Plays, in the many games of life, that one
Where what he most doth value must be won:
Whom neither shape of danger can dismay,
Nor thought of tender happiness betray.
—WORDSWORTH.

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

A NICE, SHORT BOOK, ILLUSTRATING THE
ELEMENTS OF CHANCE

BOOK TWO

A BOOK OF THE SAME SIZE, ILLUSTRATING THE ELEMENT OF FOLLY

BOOK THREE

BOOK OF THE HAPPY, HAPPY TIME. THE ELEMENT OF YOUTH

BOOK FOUR

BOOK OF STORMS AND OF THREATENING STORM. THE ELEMENT OF LOVE

BOOK FIVE

BOOK OF FIGHTS AND OF THE BIG FIGHT. THE ELEMENT OF COURAGE

THE HAPPY WARRIOR

BOOK ONE

A NICE, SHORT BOOK, ILLUSTRATING
THE ELEMENTS OF CHANCE

CHAPTER I

A PAGE OF THE PEERAGE

I

This life we stumble through, or strut through, or through which we creep and whine, or through which we dance and whistle, is built upon hazard—and that is why it is such a very wobbling affair, made up of tricks and chances; hence its miseries, but hence also its spice; hence its tragedies, and hence also its romance. A dog I know—illustrating the point—passed from its gate into the village street one morning, and merely to ease the itch of a momentary fit of temper, or merely to indulge a prankish whim, put a firm bite into a plump leg. Mark, now, the hazard foundation of this chancey life. A dozen commonplace legs were offered the dog; it might have tasted the lot and procured no more pother than the passing of a few shillings, the solatium of a pair of trousers or so. One leg was as good as another to the dog; yet it chanced upon the vicar's (whose back was turned), enjoyed its bite, jerked from the devout but startled man an amazingly coarse expression, and hence arose alarums and excursions, a village set by the ears, family feuds, a budding betrothal crushed by parental strife (one party owning the dog and the other calling the vicar Father) and the genesis of a dead set against the vicar's curate (who hit at the dog and struck the priest) that ended in the unfortunate young man having to leave the village.

But all that is by the way, and is only offered to your notice because commonplace examples are usually the most striking illustrations. It is introduced to excuse the starting of this story with its least and worst character. He figures but occasionally on these pages; yet by this chance and by that he comes to play a vital part as the story draws to an end; he comes, in fact, to close it: and therefore, out of his place, he shall be the first to occupy your attention.

Egbert Hunt his name.

II

Miller's Field, Hertfordshire, an outer suburb of London and within the cockney twang, was put into a proper commotion by the news that had brought a title into its midst—had left a peerage as casually as the morning milk at its desirable residence "Hillside," where Mr. and Mrs. Letham (Lord and Lady Burdon as suddenly and completely as Monday becomes Tuesday) made their home. The commotion chattered and clacked in every household and in every chance meeting in the streets; but it swirled most violently about Hillside and in Hillside, and its brunt—if his own statement may be accepted—pressed most heavily upon Egbert Hunt.

Egbert, morose, a pallid and stoutish boy of fourteen years, constituted the male staff at Hillside. This boy toiled sullenly at a diversity of tasks, knives, boots, coals, windows: any soul-corroding duties of such character, throughout the earlier hours of the day. In the afternoon he fitted himself into a tight page-boy's suit that had been procured through the advertisement columns of the "Lady," and that, on the very day of its arrival, had been shorn of much of the glory it first possessed in Egbert's eyes.

Sunning himself proudly down the village street, the lad had been greeted with a howl of "Marbles!" by the ribald companions he thought to impress.

"Marbles! They're buttons, yer silly toads!" the indignant Egbert had cried.

"Wot O! Marbles!" they jeered, and two of the round silver buttons were wrenched off in the distressing affair that followed.

Egbert carried them home in his pocket. The incident augmented the hostile and suspicious air with which, from his childhood upwards, he regarded the world. For this attitude the accident attending his birth was primarily responsible. When he presented this morose disposition to his mother's friends, Mrs. Hunt, in her softer moods, would instruct them that his sourness—as she termed it—was due to the sudden and unexpected discharge of a cannon during her visit to a circus, when Egbert was but eight months on the road to this vale of tears. The cannon had hastened his arrival (she never knew, so she said, how she managed to get home) and the abruptness, she was convinced, was responsible for his glum demeanor. By a dark process of reasoning, wherein were combined retribution to the clown who had fired the cannon and recompense to the child it had unduly impelled into the world, she had named the boy Egbert, this being the title by which the clown was announced on the circus programme.

The story became a popular joke against the lad; to shout "Bang!" at Egbert from behind concealment became a favourite sport of his grosser companions. It rankled him sorely. For one so young he was unnaturally embittered; his digestion, moreover, was defective.

III

Upon the evening of the day on which his employers, Mr. and Mrs. Letham, had been miraculously elevated to the style and title of Lord and Lady Burdon, Egbert's hostility towards the world was at its height. From half-past three onwards, callers followed one another, or passed one another, over the Hillside threshold. Egbert was bone-tired. It was close upon seven when kindly Mrs. Archer, the doctor's wife, addressing him as he showed her out, inquired in her gentle way after his mother and passed down the path with a "Well, good night, Egbert!"

"Good night, mum," Egbert muttered. He added in a lower but more devout key, "An' I yope ter Gawd yer the last of um."

The cool air invited him to the gate and he leaned wearily over it, his bitterness of spirit increased by a boy who, spying him, cried, "Bang!" as he passed, "Bang!" in retort to Egbert's tongue thrust out in hatred and contempt across the gate, and "Bang! bang!" again, as the gathering evening took him in her trailing cloak.

Egbert drew in his tongue with a groan of misery and hate, of indigestion and of weariness. An approaching footstep along the road caused him to thrust it out again and to keep it extended, armed lest the newcomer should be one of the bangers who irked his young life.

It chanced to be his father, returning from work in the fields. Mr. Hunt paused opposite his son and gazed for a few moments at the outstretched tongue. At some pain to himself Egbert pressed it to further extension: the boy was a little short-sighted and in the gloom did not recognise his parent.

"Tongue sore?" Mr. Hunt inquired, after a space.

Recognising the voice, Egbert restored the member to his mouth.

"Comes of tellin' a lie, so I've 'eard," said Mr. Hunt.

Considerable sympathy was in his tone; but Egbert gave no more attention to this view of retributive justice than he had vouchsafed to the question preceding it.

Father and son—neither greatly given to words when together—continued to regard each other solemnly across the gate. Presently Egbert jerked his head back at the house. "Heard about it?" he inquired.

The news had long since permeated the village. Mr. Hunt said, "Ah!" and taking a step forward, gazed earnestly at the house, first on one side of Egbert's head and then on the other. His air was that of a man who, the inmates suddenly having reached the peerage, rather expected to see a coronet suspended from the roof or a scarlet robe fluttering from a window; and as he stepped back he said, "Ah!" again, in a tone that committed him, as a result of his observations, neither to complete surprise nor complete satisfaction.

"Ah!" said Mr. Hunt, and shifted the spade he carried from his left hand to his right and waited.

"Goin' to take me with 'em when they move to the 'Ouse o' Lords," Egbert announced. "Told me so, dinner time."

Mr. Hunt put the spade before him, and leaning on it gazed profoundly at his son. "Ah! You'll wear one of them wing things side of yer 'at, that's what you'll wear," he informed him. "Tall 'at."

"Cockatoos they call um, don't they?" Egbert inquired.

"That's right. Side of yer 'at," his father replied. "Tall 'at."

Egbert appeared to ponder gloomily on the prospect. It was the habit of this boy's sombre mind to suspect a hidden indignity in each change thrust into his life. Seeking it in the cockatoos, he presently found it.

"Make me a Guy-forx again, I suppose," he said. "Same as these 'ere buttons."

Mr. Hunt took a step forward, and peering over the gate gazed down at his son's buttons with considerable concern.

The inspection finished, "Different in the 'Ouse o' Lords," he consoled. "Expec' they'll all wear them wing things side of their 'ats there. Call 'em same as they call you, that's what you can do. Tall 'ats."

But this boy's pessimism was incurable. "I'll have the biggest, you'll find," Egbert responded. "Else they'll give me two an' make a Guy-forx of me that way."

Mr. Hunt mentally visualised cockades the size of albatross wings on each side of his son's hat. The picture made him unable to deny the slightly outré effect that would be produced, and he began to move away.

"Comin' in to see your mother to-night, I suppose?" he asked.

Egbert grunted.

"Tongue still sore?"

"Boilin'," said Egbert, and turning from the gate moved moodily towards the house.

At nine o'clock, following his usual Tuesday night privilege, he betook himself down the village street to his parents' cottage. A further word or two dropped by his mistress joined with kitchen gossip during supper to enable him to supply something of the information for which he found his mother impatiently waiting.

"So you're goin' with 'em, I hear?" she greeted him.

Egbert nodded.

"Think you was goin' to prising, 'stead of to a lord's castle, one would, judgin' by your face," Mrs. Hunt exclaimed.

"Goin' to wear one o' them wing things side of his 'at, that's what he's goin' to wear," announced her husband. "Tall 'at."

"An' oughter be proud," cried Mrs. Hunt. "Hold yer yed up, Sulky, do!"

Sulky gave a stiff jerk to his bullet head. "Not goin' to the 'Ouse o' Lords, after all," he answered his father.

"'Ouse o' Lords! 'Ouse o' nonsense!" Mrs. Hunt exclaimed. "Goin' to live in a castle, that's where you're goin' to live, young man. Down in Wiltsheer; the cook told me all about it when I popped round this afternoon."

"Goin' to wear one o' them wing things side of 'is 'at, that's what he's goin' to wear," pronounced Mr. Hunt doggedly. "Tall 'at. Tall 'at," he reaffirmed; but "In a castle!" Mrs. Hunt continued, heedless of the interruption. "Burdon Old Manor, they call it, at a place called Little Letham, which Letham is the family name of the family, they giving their name to it as is very often the case, and a proper castle it is, too, though called a Manor."

Mrs. Hunt foamed out this information with a heat that increased as she perceived the morose indifference with which Egbert accepted it. Throwing herself into the third person, "Don't you 'ear what your mother is a telling of you, Sulk?" she demanded. Her eye caught on the wall behind Sulk's head a coloured presentation calendar depicting Lambert Simnel at scullion's work in an enormous kitchen, and she took inspiration. "A proper castle, your mother's telling you, where you'll have scullings in the kitchen; that's what you'll 'ave, you nasty sulk, you! Can't you say something?"

"I'll sculling 'em!" breathed Egbert, yielding to her request. He scented in this new form of acquaintance some fresh trial and indignity. "I'll sculling 'em!" he repeated.

His fierce intention earned him at once, and earned him full, the thump upon his head that his mother's excitement and his own gloom had been conspiring to inflict ever since he entered the cottage; and he trudged his way back to Hillside viciously embittered against every point of an aching day: his mistress, her visitors, the approaching change in his life, his mother, the "scullings." "Tyrangs!" said Egbert. He stumbled over a stone as he pronounced the savage word and bit his tongue most painfully. "Boil yer," said Egbert to the stone; and, including the stone with the "tyrangs," as wearily he got him to bed, "Boil um!" he said. "Tyrangs! Toads!"

CHAPTER II

A CHANGE IN THE PEERAGE

This hazard foundation of life! As a stone tossed down a hillside dislodges others and sets them rolling, themselves dislodging more till the first light pitch will gather to a rumble where was peace, the first stone cause to jump and shout many score that might have held their place long after the thrower's idle hand was equal dust with the dust of their descent—so it is with the lightest action that the least of us may idly toss upon our small affairs. We cannot move alone. Life has us in a web, within whose meshes none may stir a hand but he pulls here, loosens there, and sets a wave of movement through a hundred tangles of the coil.

This hazard foundation of life! Egbert Hunt was made to lean wearily over the gate that evening and the toads and "tyrangs" whose oppression had cost him a bitter day were set in his path by a movement in the web, leagues upon leagues of land and sea from Miller's Field. Life has us in a web. In one remote corner an Afridi tribesman shot a British officer: that was his movement in the meshes, and swift, swift, the chain of tugs set up thereby acted upon a morose page-boy in another remote corner, rendering him bone-tired through ushering the visitors come to congratulate those who had stepped into the dead man's shoes.

This hazard touch even in the billet that the Afridi tribesman selected for his bullet! In sheeting rain, behind a rock above a pass on the northwestern frontier of India, Multan Khan—Afridi, one-time sepoy, deserter from his regiment, scoundrel, first-class shot—snuggled his cheek against his stolen rifle, hesitated for a moment between the heads of three British officers, drew a line on one, pressed the trigger; and, while he chuckled over his success, himself pitched dead with a bullet through the incautious skull he had craned over the rock the better to enjoy the fruits of his skill.

Brief his pleasure but lusty the tug he had given the web. The news of it reached London just in time to catch the final edition of the evening papers as they went to press, just in time to supply a good contents-bill for an uncommonly dull night.

PEER
KILLED IN
FRONTIER
FIGHTING

went flaming down the streets, substantiated in the news columns by a brief message announcing Lord Burdon's name among the casualties of a brisk little engagement in the Frontier Campaign.

The morning papers did better with it, particularly that which Egbert Hunt took in from the doorstep of Hillside. This paper's "Own Correspondent" with the British force, eluding vigilance, had enjoyed the fortune of getting among the party detailed for clearing the rocks whence Multan Khan and his friends had made themselves surprisingly unpleasant; and his long despatch, well handled in Fleet Street, bravely headlined above:

Gallant Young Peer
Lord Burdon Killed in Sharp Frontier Engagement
Leads Dashing Charge

and nicely rounded off below with a paragraph written up from "cuttings about Lord Burdon" in the newspaper's library, was distributed far and wide on the morrow. The journalists dished it up, the presses hammered it out, the carts, the trains, and the boys galloped it broadcast over the country. To some it fetched tragedy (as we shall see); to others idle interest; to Egbert Hunt a bone-aching day and cruel indignities (as have been shown); to Mrs. Letham bewildering excitement.

CHAPTER III

INTO THE PEERAGE

I

It made Mrs. Letham very excited. Mrs. Letham, coming upon it as she idly turned over the newspaper at her breakfast, took a bang at the heart that for the moment made the print difficult to read. Recovering, she read it through, her pulses drumming, her breath catching, her hands shaking so that the paper rustled a little between them. She half rose from her seat, then read again. She read a third time and now pursued the lines to that subjoined paragraph written up from the "cuttings about Lord Burdon."

"Lord Burdon, the twelfth Baron, was attached to the staff of General Sir Wryford Sheringham, commanding the expeditionary force. He was a lieutenant in the 30th Hussars and left England in October last with General Sheringham when the latter went out to take command. Lord Burdon, who only attained his majority in April last, was unmarried. This is the first time since the creation of the Barony in 1660 that the title has not passed directly from holder to eldest son; and about Little Letham, Wilts, where is Burdon Old Manor, the family seat, the expressions "Safe as a Burdon till he's got his heir," and "Safe as a Burdon heir" have passed into the common parlance of the countryside. The successor is of a very remote branch—Mr. Maurice Redpath Letham, whose paternal great-grandfather was the eighth baron. It will be noticed as a most singular event that the first break in a direct succession extending over two hundred years should cause the new heir to be found in the line of no fewer than four generations ago of his house."

When Mrs. Letham presently arose, she arose suddenly as if she forced herself to move against spells that numbed her movements. She arose, the paper clutched between her hands, and for a space she stood with a dizzy air, as if her thoughts reeled in a giddy maze and perplexed her actions. A jostle of visions—half caught, bewildering glimpses of what this thing meant to her—spun through her brain, the mind shaping them quicker than the mental eye could distinguish them, as one half-stunned by a blow, dizzy between its violence and the onward pressure of events. She put a hand for support upon the table before her and felt, but did not think to end, the unpleasant shrinking of her flesh communicated by her fingers scraping the wood where they bunched the cloth beneath them.

She was Lady Burdon...!

II

With that amazement singing in her ears, and recovered from the first effects of her bewilderment, she went quickly to the door and excitedly up the stairs. She was thirty-five; they called her pretty; and certainly she made an attractive presence as she came to the threshold of the room where she sought her husband. Her entry was abrupt: a quick jerk on the door handle, the door wide open and she with a sudden movement standing there, tense, animated, a flush on her cheeks, sparkle in her eyes, and a high, glad, strange note in the "Maurice!" that she cried. "Maurice!"

"Con-found!" came the answer. "Conster-nation!" and illustrating the reason of the words, a fleck of blood came through the snowy lather on a chin in process of being shaved.

Mr. Letham—portly; forty; pleasant of countenance in a loose-lipped, good-natured fashion; in a shirt and trousers before the looking-glass; pain on face; finger firmly on the blood stain; razor in the other hand—Mr. Letham peered short-sightedly into the mirror, made a very squeamish stroke with the razor in the vicinity of the wound, and, quickly over his concern, pleasantly addressed his wife.

"'Morning, old girl. I say, you made me jump. Am I so fearfully late? What's for breakfast?"

He did not turn to face her. Viewed from behind, half-hitched trousers and bulging shirt, he had a lumpish appearance, and it was the more inelegant for the contortions of his arms and shoulders, characteristic of a clumsy shaver.

The spectacle caused Mrs. Letham a pucker of the brows that marred her rosy animation. She said, "Maurice! Do turn round! I've something to tell you."

"M-m-m," murmured Mr. Letham, at very ticklish work with the razor.

"Maurice!"

"M-m-m—M-m-m. Beastly rude, I know. Half-a-second, old girl. This is a most infernal job—"

She interrupted him, "Oh, listen! Listen! In this paper here—" Her voice caught. "In this paper—you are Lord Burdon!"

Mr. Letham, signalling amusement as best he was able, gave a kind of wriggle of his back, held his breath while he made another stroke with the razor, and expired the breath with: "Well, I'll buy a new razor then, hanged if I won't. This infernal thing—" and he bent towards the glass, peering at the reflection of the skin he had cleared.

The door behind him slammed violently, and then for the first time he turned. He had thought her gone—angry, as she was often angry, at his mild joking. Instead he saw her standing there, one hand behind her in the action with which she had swung-to the door, the other clutching the newspaper all rumpled up against her bosom; and there was that in her face, in her eyes, and in the tremble of her parted lips that made him change the easy, tolerant smile and the light banter with which he turned to her. "Only my silly fun, Nelly," he began. "What is it? Some howler in the newspaper? Let's have a—" Then appreciated the pose, the eyes, the parted lips; and changed nervously to: "Eh? Eh? What is it? What's up?"

She broke out: "Your fun! Will you only listen! It's true—true what I tell you! You are Lord Burdon." Angry and incoherent she became, for her husband blinked at her, and looked untidy and looked doltish. "He's unmarried. I was trying only the other day to interest you in what that meant. When his uncle died last August I spoke to you about it—"

Mr. Letham, blinking, more untidy, more doltish: "Who's unmarried?"

And she cried at him: "Young Lord Burdon! Young Lord Burdon is dead! He's been killed in the fighting in India—"

She stopped. She had moved him at last.

III

Mr. Letham laid down his razor—slowly, letting the handle slip noiselessly from his fingers to the dressing-table. Slowly also he lifted his face towards his wife, and she saw his mild forehead all puckered, his eyes dimmed with a bemused air, his loose mouth parted: she particularly saw the comical aspect given to his perturbation by its setting of little patches of soap with the little trickle of red at the chin.

He put out a hand for the paper and made a slow step towards her. "Eh?" he said—a kind of bleat, it sounded to her.

"No! Listen!" she told him. "Listen to this at the end of the account," and she spread the sheet in her hands. A little difficult to find the place ... a little difficult to control her voice.... "Listen!" and she found and read aloud, in jerky sentences, the paragraph that had been made out of "cuttings about Lord Burdon."

Almost in a whisper the vital clause "...the successor is of a very remote branch—Mr. Maurice Redpath Letham, whose paternal great-grandfather was the eighth baron...."

And in a whisper, dizzy again with the amazement of it: "Maurice! Do you realise?"

His turn for bewilderment. He ignored her appeal. He did not heed her agitation. He took the paper from her and she read that in his eyes—preoccupation with some idea outside her range—that caused her own to harden. She crossed and stood against the bed rail, and she eyed him with narrowing gaze as he read Our Own Correspondent's despatch.

"Poor young beggar!" he murmured, following the story. "Poor, plucky young beggar!"

She just watched his face, comical with its dabs of drying soap, reddening a little, eyelids blinking. She watched him reach the fold of the paper, ignore the paragraph relating to himself, and turn again to Our Own Correspondent's account. "Poor—poor, plucky young beggar!" he repeated.

She gave a little catch at her breath. He exasperated her—exasperated! Here was the most amazing fortune suddenly theirs, and he was blind to it! Often Mrs. Letham flamed against her husband those outbursts of almost ungovernable exasperation that a dull intelligence, fumbling with an idea, arouses in the quick-witted. They are the more violent, these outbursts, if the stupid fumbling, fumbling with some moral issue, conveys a reproach to the quicker wit. She was made to feel such a reproach by that reiterated "Poor young beggar! Poor, plucky young beggar!" It intensified the outbreak of exasperation that threatened her; and she told herself the reproach was unmerited, and that intensified her anger more. It was nothing to her and less than nothing, this boy's death; but she had rushed up to her husband the better to enjoy her natural joy by sharing it with him, and ready, if he had met her excitement, to compassionate the fate of young Lord Burdon. He greeted her, instead, only with "Poor young beggar! Poor, plucky young beggar!" She caught her breath. Exasperation surged like a live thing within her. If he said it again! If he said it again, she would break out! She could not bear it! She would dash the paper from his hands. She would cry in his startled face—his doltish face: "What! What! What! What! Don't you see? Don't you understand? Lord Burdon! Lady Burdon! Are you a fool? Are you an utter, utter fool?"

IV

He opened his lips and she trembled. It is natural to judge her harshly, natural to misjudge her, to consider her incredibly snobbish, cruel, common. She was none of these. Given time, given warning, she would have received her great news, received her husband's reception of it, gently and kindly. But life pays us no consideration of that kind. Events come upon us not as the night merges from the day, but as highway robbers clutch at and grapple with us before we can free our weapons.

Happily, for the first time since he had taken the paper, Mr. Letham seemed to remember her. He glanced up, flushed, damp in the eyes, stupidly droll with the dabs of drying soap: "I say, Nellie, did you read this:

"The boy—he was absolutely no more than a boy—poked this way and that on the little ridge we had gained, trying, whimpering just like a keen terrier at a thick hedge, to find a way up through the rocks and thorns above us. We were a dozen yards behind him, blowing and cursing. 'Damn it! we've taken a bad miss in balk on this line!' he cried, turning round at us, laughing. Next moment he had struck an opening and was scrambling, on hands and knees. 'This way, Sergeant-major!' he shouted...."

Portly Mr. Letham, carried away by the grip of the thing, drew himself up and squared his shoulders. He repeated "'This way, Sergeant-major!'" and stuck, and stopped, and swallowed, and turned shining eyes on his wife (she stood there brooding at him) and exclaimed: "Can't you imagine it, Nellie? Listen: 'This way, Sergeant-major!' he shouted, jumped on his feet, gave a hand to his sergeant; cried 'Come on! Come on! Whoop! Forward! Forward!' and then staggered, twisted a bit on his toes, dropped. I saw another officer-boy jump up to him with 'Burdon! Burdon, old buck, have you got it?'..."

Portly Mr. Letham's voice cracked off into a high squeak, and he lowered the paper and said huskily: "I say, Nellie, eh? I say, Nellie, though? That's the stuff, eh? Poor boy! Brave boy!"

With unseeing eyes he blinked a moment at his wife's face. Brooding, she watched him. Then he turned to the washstand and began to remove the signs of shaving from his cheeks, holding the sponge scarcely above the water as he squeezed it out, as though a noise were unseemly in the presence of the scene his thoughts pictured.

And she just stood there, that brooding look upon her face. Ah! again! He was off again!

"And his grandmother," Mr. Letham said, wiping his face in a towel, sniffing a little, paying particular attention to the drying of his eyes. "I say, Nellie, his poor grandmother, eh? How she will be suffering! Think of her picking up her paper and reading that! ... Only saw him once," he mumbled on, brushing his thin hair. "Took him across town when he was going home for his first holidays from Eton. Remember it like yesterday. I remember—"

It was the end of her endurance; she could stand no more of it. "Oh, Maurice!" she broke out; "oh, Maurice, for goodness' sake!"

Mr. Letham turned to her in a puzzled way. He held a hair brush in either hand at the level of his ears and stared at her from between them: "Why, Nellie—" he began; "what—what's up, old girl?"

She struck her hands sharply together. "Oh, you go on, you go on, you go on!" she cried. "You make me—don't you understand? Can't you understand? I thought that when I brought you this news you'd be as excited as I was. Instead—instead—" She broke off and changed her tone. "Oh, do go on brushing your hair. For goodness' sake don't stand staring at me like that!"

He obeyed in his slowish way. "Well, upon my soul, I don't quite understand, old girl," he said perplexedly.

"That's what I'm telling you," she cried sharply and suddenly. "You don't. You go on, you go on!"

He seemed to be puzzling over that. His silence made her break out with the hard words of her meaning. "Do you really not understand?" she broke out. "Do you go on like that just to irritate me? I believe you do." She gave her vexed laugh again. "I don't know what to believe. It's ridiculous—ridiculous you should be so different from everybody else. It means to me, this news, just this: that it makes you Lord Burdon. Can't you realise? Can't you share my feelings?"

"Oh!" he said, as if at last he understood, and said no more.

"How can I work up sympathy for people I have never seen?" she asked.

He did not answer her—brushed his hair very slowly.

"Nobody can say I should. Anybody in my place would feel as I feel."

Still no reply, and that annoyed her beyond measure, forced her to say more than she meant.

"What are they to me, these Burdons?"

"They're my family, old girl," Mr. Letham ventured.

She did not wish to say it but she said it; he goaded her. "You've never troubled to make them mine," she cried.

Mr. Letham had done with his hair. He struggled a collar around his stout neck, examined what injury his finger nails had suffered in the process, and set to work on his tie.

V

For a few minutes Mrs. Letham frowned at the solid, untidy back turned towards her—the lumped shoulders, the heavy neck, the bulges of shirt sticking out between the braces. She gave a little laugh then—useless to be vexed. "You've never quarrelled with any one in your life, have you, Maurice?" she said; and with a touch in which kindliness struggled with impatience, she jerked down the bulging shirt, straightened a twisted brace, said, "Let me!" and by a deft twist or two gave Mr. Letham a neater tie than ever he had made himself. "There! That's better! Have you?" she asked.

He told her smiling: "Not with you, anyway, Nellie." Little attentions like these were rare, and he liked them. In his weak and amiable way he patted the hand that rested for a moment on his shoulder, and he explained. "You're quite right, of course, old girl. Of course I realise what it means to you and I ought to have shared it with you at once. I'm sorry—sorry, Nellie. Just like me. And about never making them your family. I know you're right there. But you don't really mean that—don't mean I've done it intentionally. You know—I've often told you—we were miles apart, my branch and theirs; you do see that, don't you, old girl? A different branch—another crowd altogether. I don't suppose you've ever even heard of the relations who stand the same to you as I stand to the Burdons. All the time we've been married, long before that even, I've never had anything to do with 'em." He smiled affectionately at her. "That's all right, isn't it?"

She was getting impatient that he ran on so. "Of course, of course," she said indifferently. "I never meant to say that." And then: "Oh, Maurice, but do—do—do think what I'm feeling." She entwined her fingers about his arms and looked caressingly up at him. "Have you thought what it means to us, Maurice?"

He liked that. He liked the "us" from her lips. His normal disposition returned to him; he smiled whimsically at her. "'Pon my soul, I haven't," he said; and added, smiling more, "it's a big order. By Gad, it's a big order, Nellie."

She clapped her hands in her excitement and stood away from him, her eyes sparkling. "Maurice! Lord Burdon! Fancy!"

"It'll be a nuisance, I shouldn't wonder," he grimaced.

She laughed delightedly. "Oh, that's just like you to think that! A nuisance! Maurice! Think of it! Lady Burdon—me! It's a dream, isn't it?"

"It's a bit of a startler," he agreed, smiling tolerantly down upon her excitement.

She laughed aloud. "But fancy you a lord!" and she looked at him, holding him by both his arms and laughed again. "A startler! A nuisance! What a—what a person you are, Maurice! Fancy you a lord! You'll have to—you'll have to buck up, Maurice!"

He turned away for a moment, occupying himself in fumbling in a drawer. When he turned again to her, his face had the tail of a grimace that she thought expressive of how repugnant to him was the mere thought of any change in his life. "Well, there's one thing," he said. "It won't be for long;" and he tapped his heart, that doctors had condemned.

She knew that was only his characteristic way of joking, but a flicker of irritation shadowed her face. She hated reference to what had often been a spoil-sport cry of "Wolf! Wolf!"

"Oh, that's absurd!" she cried. "That's nonsense; you know it is. Those doctors! Make haste and dress and come down. Make haste! Make haste! I want to talk all about it. I want you to tell me—heaps of things: what will happen, how it will happen. Now, do make haste. I'll run down now and see to Baby." She had danced away towards the door; now turned again, a laugh on her face. "Baby! What is he now, Maurice?"

"Still a baby, I expect you'll find, though I have been nearly an hour dressing."

For once she laughed delightedly at his mild absurdity; just now her world answered with a laugh wherever she touched a chord. "His title, I mean. An honourable, isn't it—the son of a peer? The Honourable Rollo Letham! I must tell him!" She laughed again, moved lightly to the door and went humming down the stairs.

Mr. Letham waited till the sound had passed. When the slam of a distant door announced the unlikelihood of her return, he dropped rather heavily into a chair and put his hand against the heart he had playfully tapped. "Confound!" said Mr. Letham, breathing hard. "Conster-nation and damn the thing. Like a sword, that one. Like a twisting sword!"

For the new Lady Burdon had been wrong in estimating any humour in the grimace with which he had looked at her after turning away, while she told him he must buck up.

CHAPTER IV

A FORETASTE OF THE PEERAGE

I

A worrying morning foreshadowed—or might have foreshadowed—to Egbert Hunt the strain and distress of the afternoon whose effect upon him we have seen. Normally his master was closeted in the study with the three young men who read with him for University examinations; his mistress engaged first in her household duties, then in her customary run on her bicycle before lunch; shopping, taking some flowers to the cottage hospital, exchanging the magazines for which her circle subscribed. These occupations of master and mistress enabled Egbert to evade with nice calculation the tasks that fell to him. This morning the household, as he expressed it, was "all of a boilin' jump," whereby he was vastly incommoded, being much harried. The three young men thoughtfully denied themselves the intellectual delights of their usual labours with Mr. Letham. "Lucky dawgs," said Egbert bitterly, hiding in the bathroom and watching them from the window meet down the road, confer, laugh, and skim off on their bicycles; his mistress—writing letters, talking excitedly with her husband—did everything except settle to any particular task. The result was to keep Egbert ceaselessly upon "the 'op," and he resented it utterly.

II

With the afternoon the visitors; the satisfying at last of the excitement that had thrilled Miller's Field to the marrow since the newspapers were opened.

A little difficult, the good ladies thought it, to know exactly what to say.

Some, on greeting Mrs. Letham, boldly plumped: "My dear, I do congratulate you!" At the other extreme of tact in grasping a novel situation, those who cleverly began, "My dear, I saw it in the 'Morning Post'!" a wary opening that enabled one to model sentiments on the lead given in reply.

"My dear, I do congratulate you!" "My dear, I saw it in the 'Morning Post'!" and "Ho, do yer, thenk yer!" from bone-tired Egbert, mimicking as he closed the door behind the one; and "Ho, did yer, boil yer!" closing it behind the other.

Between these forms, then, or with slight variations upon them, fell all the salutations but that of Mrs. Savile-Phillips who, arriving late, treading on Egbert's foot in her impressive halt on the threshold, called in her dashing way across the crowded drawing-room, "And where is Lady Burdon?"

She was at her tea table, closely surrounded, prettily coloured by excitement, animated, at her best, tastefully gowned in a becoming dove-grey that fortuitously had arrived from the dressmaker that morning and mingled (she felt) a tribute to her new dignity with a touch of half-mourning for the boy her relationship to whom death with a hot finger had touched to life. Thus Mrs. Letham—new Lady Burdon—took the eye and took it well. This was the moment of her triumph; and that is a moment that is fairy wand to knock asunder the shackles of the heavier years, restoring youth; to warm and make generous the heart; to light the eye and lift the spirit. Hers, hers that moment! She the commanding and captivating figure in that assembly!

Her spirit was equal with her presence. Physically queening it among her friends, psychically she was aloft and afloat in the exaltation that her bearing advertised. Each new congratulation as it came was a vassal hand put out to touch the sceptre she chose to extend. The prattle of voices was a delectable hymn raised to her praise in her new dignity. She was mentally enthroned, queen of a kingdom all her own; and as she visualised its fair places she had a sense of herself, Cinderella-like, shedding drab garments from her shoulders, appearing most wonderfully arrayed; shaking from her skirts the dull past, with eager hands greeting a future splendidly coloured, singing to her with siren note, created for her foot and her pleasure.

Consider her state. The better to consider it, consider that something of these sensations is the lot of every woman when, on her marriage eve, a girl, sleepless she lies through that night, imaging the womanhood that waits her beyond the darkness. It is the threshold of life for woman, this night before the vow, and has no counterpart in all a man's days from boyhood to grave. How should it? The sexes are as widely sundered in habit, thought, custom, as two separate and most alien races. Love has conducted every plighted woman to this threshold and has so delectably engaged her attention on the road that she has reckoned little of the new world towards which she is speeding. Now, on her marriage eve, she is at night and alone: her eager feet upon the immediate moment beyond whose passage lies the unexplored. Love for this space takes rest. To-morrow he will lead her blindfolded into the new country; to-night, poised upon the crest to which blindfolded he has led her, she stands and looks across the prospect, shading her eyes, atremble with ecstasy at the huge adventure. Mighty courage she has—a frail figure, barriers closing up behind her to shut forever the easy paths of maidenhood; hill and valley stretching limitless before, where lie lurking heaven knows what ravening monsters. But she is the born explorer, predestined for this frightful plunge into the unknown, heedless of its dangers, intoxicated by its spaciousness, amazingly confident in Love's power and devotion to keep her in the pleasant places. And Love—he the reckless treaty-monger between the alien races—is prone, unhappily, to lead her a dozen entangling steps down the crest, and there to leave her in the smiling hills suddenly become wilderness, in the little valleys suddenly become abyss.

Mrs. Letham had enjoyed that intoxicating moment upon the crest. Something of its sensations were hers again now; but she found their thrill a far more delectable affair. Again she was upon the crest whence an alluring prospect stretched; but now she looked with eyes not filmed by ignorance; now could have seen desert places, pitfalls, if such had been, but saw that there were none. Or so she thought.

Already, in the congratulations she was receiving, she was tasting the first sweets, plucking the first fruits with which she saw the groves behung. For the first time she found herself and her fortunes the centre of a crowded drawing-room's conversation. For the first time she enjoyed the thrill of eager attention at her command when she chose to raise her voice. It was good, good. It was sufficient to her for the moment. But her exalted mind ran calculating ahead of it, even while she rejoiced in it. She had her little Rollo brought in to her, and kept him on her knee, and stroked his hair; and once and twice and many times went into dreams of all that now awaited him; and with an effort had to recall herself to the attentions of her guests.

As evening stole out from the trees, in shadows across the lawn and in dusk against the windows, like some stealthy stranger peering in, her party began to separate. A few closer friends clustered about her, and the conversation became more particular. Yes, it would mean leaving Miller's Field—dear Miller's Field; and leaving them, but never, never forgetting them. Elated, triumphant, and therefore generous, emotional, she almost believed that indeed she would be sorry to lose these friends.

As one warmed with wine has a largeness of spirit that swamps his proper self in its generous delusions, so she, warmed with triumph, was genuine enough in all her protestations. With real affection she handed over kindly Mrs. Archer, the doctor's wife, who stayed last, to the good offices of Egbert Hunt, and in a happy, happy glow of elation returned to her drawing-room. This was the beginning of it!

This the beginning of it! She drew a long breath, smiling to herself, her hands pressed together; through the glass doors giving on to the lawn she espied her husband, and smiling she went quickly across and opened them.

III

Mr. Letham was coming in from work in the garden. He had a watering-can in one hand, with the other he trailed a rake. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and his face was damp with his exertions around the flower-beds. "Hullo! All gone?" he asked.

The warmth of her spirit caused her to extend her hands to him with a sudden, affectionate gesture:

"All, yes. Maurice, you were an old wretch! You might have come in."

"Simply couldn't, old girl. I had a squint through the window, and fled and hid behind a bush. Thousands of you; it looked awful!"

She laughed: "Miserable coward! I was hoping you would."

"Were you, though?" he said eagerly. "I'd have come like a shot if I'd known."

That made her laugh again: he was always the lover. "Well, come and have a talk now to make up," she told him. "Out here in the garden. It's frightfully hot in this room."

His face beamed. He put down the implements he was carrying, wiped a hand on his waistcoat and slipped his fingers beneath her arm. "That's a stunning dress," he said.

She gathered up the trailing skirt and glanced down at it, well pleased. "It is rather nice, isn't it?"

"Fine! You look as pretty as a picture this evening, Nellie. I tell you, I thought so, when I squinted in through the window."

"That's because I'm so happy."

"So am I." He pressed her arm to show why, and "Maurice! you are a goose," was her gay comment; but for once his foolish loverlikeness pleased her; her mood was widely charitable.

They paced the little lawn in silence. She suddenly asked, "You don't mind my being happy, do you?"

"Mind! Good Lord!" and he pressed her arm again.

"Being excited about—about it, I mean. It's natural, Maurice?"

"Of course it is. Of course it is, old girl."

"But you're not—it doesn't excite you?"

Mr. Letham was too honest, even at risk of disturbing this happy passage, to pretend the untrue. "Well, that's nothing," he said. "That's nothing. I'm so beastly slow. An earthquake wouldn't excite me."

"I don't believe it would," she laughed, then was serious. "But I'm excited," she said abruptly. "Oh, I am!" She put up her face towards the veiling sky—a dim star here and a dim star there and a faint breeze rising—and she drew a deep breath just as she had breathed deeply in the drawing-room a few moments earlier. "Oh, I am!" she repeated. "Maurice! I want to talk about it."

He was not at all conscious of the full intensity of her feelings; but for such of it as he perceived he smiled at her in his tolerant way. "Well, you say," he told her. "You do the talking."

She was silent for a considerable space; her mind run far ahead and occupied among thoughts to which she could not introduce him, for he had no place in them. That he shivered slightly recalled his presence to her. That his presence had been deliberately shut from among the castles she had been building caused her one of those qualms which (if we are kind) often sting us back from our worser self to our better nature. And she was kind, alternating ceaselessly between the many womanly parts she had and those other parts we all possess; only to be pitied if the events now quickly shaping for her tempted her too much, led her too far from the point whence kindness is recoverable.

Recalled to him and to her womanliness, "Oh, your coat!" she exclaimed. "You've been getting hot and you'll catch your death of chill. You're dreadfully careless. Where is it?"

"In the summer-house. But what rot!"

"I'll get it." She slipped her arm from his hand and ran away across the lawn. "There!" she said, returning. "Now button it up. Ah! You're all thumbs!"

She fastened it for him and turned up the collar. The action brought her face close to his. "You're jolly good to me, Nellie," he said, and his lips brushed her forehead. A kiss it had been, but she drew back a step. "Not going to have you ill on my hands," she told him brightly. Then she slipped a hand into his arm and resumed, "What are we going to do—first? I want to talk about that."

She had talked to him of it all the morning; but as if it were undiscussed—anything to preserve these happy moments—"Yes, go on," he said.

She responded eagerly. "Well, we must write to Lady Burdon, of course—Jane Lady Burdon, now, you said, didn't you? Not to-day. Better wait a day—to-morrow."

"That is what I thought."

"Yes—yes—and then you will have to go to see her. By yourself. I won't come at first." She gave a little sound of laughter. "I don't think I shall much like Jane Lady Burdon, from what you told me this morning."

He asked her: "Good lord, why, Nellie? Why, what did I tell you? I've only seen her once, years and years ago."

"You made her out proud; you said she would feel this terribly."

"That poor boy's death? Of course she would. She was devoted to him. Look, he was no more than Rollo's age when his father died. She brought him up. Been mother and father to him all his life. Imagine how she'd feel it."

"Oh, I don't mean that; feel us coming in, I mean. Proud in that way."

It was an idea that another man, though he knew it true, would have laughed aside. Mr. Letham's hopeless simplicity put him to a stumbling explanation. "Ah, but proud's not the word—not fair," he said. "She has pride; you understand the difference, don't you, old girl? A tremendous family pride. She'll feel this break in the direct descent—father to son, as it said in the newspaper, ever since there was a Burdon. It is one of their traditions, at the bottom of half their traditions, and they're simply wrapped up in that kind of thing. I should think there never was a family with so many observances—laws of its own."

"Tell me," she said: and while they paced, he spoke of this family whose style and dignity they were to take; and while he spoke, sometimes she pressed together her lips and contracted her brows as though hostile towards the pictures he made her see, sometimes breathed quickly and took a light in her eyes as though she foretasted delights that he presented. She had no romantic sense in her nature, else had been moved by such traditions of the House of Burdon as, he said, he could remember. That white roses were never permitted in the grounds of Burdon Old Manor, that no male but the head of the family might put on his hat within the threshold, that the coming of age of sons was celebrated at twenty-four, not twenty-one,—she scarcely heeded the legends attaching to these observances. "Rather silly," she named them, and did not condescend a reply to her husband's weak defence, "Well, they rather get you, you know, don't you think?"

He spoke of the Burdon motto, the arrogant, "I hold!" that was of the bone of Burdon character, so he said. "I remember my old grandfather telling me lots about that," he told her. "It sums them up. That's the kind they've always been: headstrong and absolutely fearless, like that poor boy, and stubborn—stubborn as mules where their rights, or their will, or their pride is concerned. Stubborn in having their own way, and stubborn in doing or not doing simply because the thing's done or not done in the traditions they're bred up in."

He stopped and bent to her with "Yes, what did you say?" but only caught her repeating to herself intensely and beneath her breath, "I hold!"

"Yes, it's rather fine, isn't it?" he said; and he went on: "Well, that's just what I mean about old Lady Burdon. She'll have felt that she was holding for her grandson, had held all these years, and now was the one, the only one, to see the tradition break, the direct succession pass. That's what I mean by saying she has pride and will feel it. That time I saw her, as I was telling you this morning, when that poor boy was about Rollo's age and I was doing a walking tour down in Wiltshire and managed to get up courage to go to Burdon Old Manor and introduce myself, I noticed it then. She was dividing all her time between the boy and a quaint kind of 'Lives of the Barons Burdon' as she called it, a manuscript life of each holder of the title, hunting up all the old records and traditions and things with the librarian; he was as keen on it as she. He..."

"Where will she be now, do you think?" Mrs. Letham interrupted. "In town?"

"In town for certain. She'd be sure to be where she could always get earliest news of the boy."

"In the town house? Burdon House in Mount Street, you said, didn't you? Have you ever been there? What's it like?"

"No, never been in. A whacking great place, from the outside. That's where she'll be all right, unless they've sold it."

Mrs. Letham gave him a sudden full attention. "Sold it? Why should they have sold it?"

"The ancient reason—want of money," he replied lightly.

She made no response nor responsive movement; yet some emotion that she had seemed to communicate itself to him, for looking down at her, half-whimsically, half-gravely, "I say, you don't think we've come into untold wealth, do you, Nellie?" he said.

She took her hand sharply from his arm. Much that he had said, though she could not have analysed why, had caused her kinder self to ebb. Now it left her. She answered him by asking him: "What of all those names you told me? Tell me them again."

"The property? The Burdon Old Manor property? Little Letham, and Shepwell, and Burdon, and Abbess Roding, and Nunford, and Market Roding: those, do you mean?"

"Yes, I mean those. How do you mean 'the ancient reason, want of money'?"

"Well, that's all there is, though. The money is all out of the estate. Nothing more."

She said impatiently: "Well? All those villages?"

"All those duties." he corrected her. "That's the Burdon way of looking at it. What they make on Abbess Roding they lose on Market Roding, so to speak. It's that 'I hold!' business again. They won't sell; they won't raise rents when leases fall in; they never refuse improvements that can possibly be afforded. The tenantry have been there for generations. No Burdon would ever think of turning them off or of refusing them anything; it wouldn't enter his head. That's why I said Burdon House in Mount Street might be sold. It's unlikely, but I remember there was talk of it in my grandfather's time. It belongs to an older day, when they were wealthier. They'd sacrifice that, if need be, though it would be like a death in the family; but anything rather than the bare idea of interfering with the people they regard as a trust."

He spoke quite easily, never realising the intensity of her feelings. "Oh, it's no untold wealth," he laughed. "You mustn't think that."

She said after a little space, "Richer than we are, though?" and added, comforting herself with an old truism, "What's poverty to one is wealth to another."

"Oh, richer than we are. Good lord, yes, I hope so. I'm thinking of years ago, anyway. Things may have changed. I'm telling you of when I was a kid."

She gave a little sigh of relief and she made a little laugh at the mood she had permitted to beset her—that sigh we give and that laugh we make when we shake ourselves from vague fears, or open our eyes from disturbing dreams. Folly to be fearful! Life is a biggish field; easy to give those fears the slip! The day is here, night ridiculous! She laughed and turned smiling to her husband and proposed they should go in. "I've got an extra special little dinner for you—to celebrate," she told him.

He pressed her arm against his side. "And I've got an extra special little appetite for it," he said. "Makes me feel fearfully fit to see you so happy."

"Well, I am," she replied, and sighed her content and said again "I am!"

IV

The night ridiculous! But when night came it caught her unstrung, too excited for immediate sleep, and visited her with vague resentments, with vague but chilly fears. They came gradually. Long, long she lay awake, visioning the gleaming future. Her Rollo trod it with her—its golden paths, limitless of delights—her little son rejoicing into manhood as he walked them. She was intensely devoted to her baby Rollo, born two years before. Marriage had disappointed her; from its outset, directly she began to realise Maurice, she accounted herself robbed of all it ought to have given her. Motherhood had recompensed her; from Rollo's birth she had begun to dream dreams for him. Now! She got out of bed and went to his cradle and bent above him, most happily, most adoringly, as he slept. It was there and so occupied that the first vague, unreasonable fear came to disturb her night. It was gone as soon as it had come, and it had neither shape nor meaning. Yet its discomfort made her frown. She had frowned in the midst of happiness when Maurice was telling her of Burdon traditions, and the repetition of the action returned her mind to what had occupied it then.

At once resentments began to stir. She found herself resentful of Jane Lady Burdon, as drawn by Maurice; of the tenantry at Burdon Old Manor, who were regarded as a trust—a greedy, expensive trust on his showing; nay, of the Old Manor itself, if saturated in traditions such as he described. Why resentful? At first she could not say, and worried. Then the reason came to her. It was the feeling that this old lady, not proud but having pride, a ridiculous distinction, this old lady, these tenantry, those traditions would resent her. Resent her? She could not get away from the thought, and it irritated her and tired her. Yes, and rob her, and that irritated and tired her the more. She began to desire sleep and could not sleep for these resentments. Resent her? Rob her? She grew angry that she could not sleep, and then suddenly calmed herself by deliberately setting herself to see how grotesque such thoughts were. After all, what could they do, even suppose they desired her hurt? It came to her, with a grim sense of the humour of it, that their own motto was against them. "I hold!" It was she who held!

"I hold!" The old motto did its new mistress its first service. It charmed her, at last, to sleep. Immediately, as it seemed to her, she passed into dreams of her amazing happiness; and in their midst the motto rose against her. In their midst the vague fear that had troubled her while she bent over her Rollo—but vague no longer—became definite and horrible. She was taunted, she was terrified by some force that told her it was all untrue; that tortured her she was befooled and did not hold and should never hold the amazement she fancied hers. Terrified and struggling, "I hold!" she cried. It became the delirium of her sleep. Again and again "I hold! I hold!" and always from that force the answer, quiet but most terribly assured: "No, you do not! Nay, I hold!" Horror and panic overcame her. She was so nearly awake that she tried to awake but could not. "I hold! I hold!" "No, you do not. Nay, I hold!" There was no escape, no escape.... When at last her fevered brain broke out of sleep, she awoke to hear her own voice cry it aloud in agony: "I hold!" and shaking, unnerved, thanked God for young morning stealing about the room, and none and nothing to rebuke or contradict that waking cry.

CHAPTER V

MISREADING A PEERESS

I

We will give them their title now.

Events fell out much as the new Lady Burdon had planned. On the day following the news, the new Lord Burdon wrote a few sympathetic lines to Jane Lady Burdon; two days later he received an acknowledgment from the house in Mount Street. She would like to see him, Jane Lady Burdon, wrote, but she would like a little time in which to accommodate herself to her sad affliction. Perhaps he would arrange to call on that day week; and meanwhile, if he could see Mr. Pemberton, they would be spared much explanation relative to the sudden change.

"Rather cold," was Lady Burdon's comment; but her attention was taken by another letter brought in with Jane Lady Burdon's by Egbert Hunt, as they sat at early breakfast, and overlooked in the excitement. "And Mr. Pemberton—who is Mr. Pemberton?" she asked, but had opened this other envelope while she spoke, taken the gist of its letter at a glance, and herself answered her question, looking up with flushed face and sparkling eyes. "He's the solicitor," she said.

Lord Burdon nodded. "So he is. The name comes back to me."

"This is from him—to you. It's all right. He says it's all right, Maurice. He's the lawyer. He knows. He admits it."

"Sounds as though he'd committed a crime. What does he admit?"

She was very happy, so she laughed. "Listen!" and she read him the letter in which, in stilted, lawyer like terms, Matthew Pemberton (as it was signed) formally advised him of the death in action on the northwestern frontier of India, and of his succession to the barony and entailed estates. The firm of Pemberton, it appeared, had for many generations enjoyed the honour of acting for the house of Burdon, and, acting on Jane Lady Burdon's instructions, Matthew Pemberton desired to propose an interview "here or at your lordship's residence, as may be most convenient to your lordship."

"Maurice!" Lady Burdon exclaimed, and handed him the letter; and when he had read it, "There! There's no doubt now, is there?"

He had frowned over it as though it troubled him. At her words he looked up and smiled at her beaming face and patted her hand. "Why, you never had any doubt, had you?" he asked.

She gave the slightest possible shiver; but with it shook off the recollection that had caused it. "Oh, I don't know," she answered. "I do believe I had; yes, I had. I couldn't realise it sometimes. There was nothing—nothing to go on. Now there is, though!" And she touched the letters that were the magic carpet arrived to wing her from the delirium of that night toward the amazement that night had threatened.

She exclaimed again, "Now there is!" and, pushing back her chair, rose vigorously to her feet, casting aside forever (so she told herself) that nightmare dream and animatedly breaking into "plans." Too animated to be still, too excited to eat, gaily, and with a commanding banter that rendered him utterly happy, she easily influenced her husband, against his purpose, to bid Mr. Pemberton make the proposed interview at Miller's Field, not Bedford Row. "'At your lordship's residence,'" she laughed. "It's his place to do the running about, not yours. And tell him—I'll help you to write the letter—tell him to come the day after to-morrow, not to-morrow. Don't let him think we're bursting with eagerness."

"By gum, he'd better not see you, then," Lord Burdon said grimly.

She gave him a playful pinch. "Oh, I'll do the high and haughty stare all right," she told him, and she laughed again and ran gaily humming to the Hon. Rollo Letham in the garden.

II

Mr. Pemberton, on arrival, proved incapable of much of that running about, in the literal sense of the term, that Lady Burdon had pronounced to be his place.

"Here he is!" Lady Burdon said, watching through the drawing-room window from where she sat, as a closed station-fly drew up before the gate. "Here he is!" There was a longish pause before the cab door opened, and then a walking-stick came out and tapped about in a fumbling sort of way until it hit the step. A very thin leg came groping down the stick, its foot poking about nervously as though to make sure that the step was stable. "Good gracious!" Lady Burdon exclaimed. "The poor old man!"

She forgot the high and haughty stare premeditated for the interview, and she crossed to the window, womanly and womanishly alarmed. The knee above the trembling leg took a jerky shot or two at stiffening, then stiffened suddenly and took the weight of a little wisp of an old man, who swung suddenly out upon it, whirled half around as the gusty breeze took him and, clutching frantically against the side of the cab with one hand, with the other made agitated prods of his stick at the road desperately far beneath.

"Oh, goodness!" Lady Burdon cried. "He'll kill himself! And that idiot like a frozen pig on the box! Maurice!" But she was quicker than her husband and, the high and haughty stare completely abandoned, was swiftly from the room, down the path, through the gate, and with firm young hands under a shaky old arm, just as the little old man, unable to balance longer, was dropping stick and leg towards the ground and in danger of collapsing tremendously upon them.

She landed him safe. "The road slopes so frightfully here, doesn't it?" she said. "I am afraid you are shaken."

The little old man, very visibly shaken by the fearful adventure, essayed to straighten his bent old frame. He raised his silk hat and stood bareheaded before her. "You saved me from that," he said. "It was very, very kind of you. I am clumsy and stupid at moving about."

She was flushed by her run, the breeze was in her hair; she looked pretty and she was quite natural. "Oh, I saw you," she smiled. "I ought to have come before. Let me take your arm. The path is steep; we are on the side of a hill, as you see."

She swung open the gate with one hand and put the other beneath his arm.

He seemed to hesitate, looking at her curiously. "Oh, I am all right when I am on my legs," he said, with a little laugh. "Well, well—it is very, very kind of you," and he accepted the aid she offered.

"It is steep, you see,"—she smiled down at him,—"and rough. It ought to be rolled, but we have the idlest gardener boy in the world. You are Mr. Pemberton, aren't you? I am—I am Lady Burdon."

He halted in his nice little steps and looked full up at her. "I am very glad to know that," he said simply, and put himself again to the task of making the house.

III

Mr. Pemberton was more than pleased; he was intensely relieved and intensely happy. His thoughts, as he came down in the train to Miller's Field, had caused his face to wear a nervous, a wistful, almost an appealing, look. Bound up in inherited devotion to the noble house whose service was handed down in his firm as the title itself was handed down, he had feared, he had dreaded what manner of people the tragic break in the famous direct succession might have brought to the name he loved. Nothing could so well have reassured him as that most womanly action of Lady Burdon when she ran to his assistance at the gate; nothing could so well have affirmed the confidence with which he turned to her husband, come to the door to meet them, as the simple honesty of character imprinted on Lord Burdon's face and expressed in his greeting. Both impressions were sharpened as they sat talking at tea. Mr. Pemberton had come to talk business; he found himself drawn by this sympathetic atmosphere into speaking intimately of the gay young life whose cruel termination had caused his visit.

Clearly he had been deeply attached to that young life; he speaks of it in the jerky, disconnected sentences of one that does not trust his voice too long, for fear it may betray him; and when he comes to his subject's young manhood, after eulogy of childhood and youth, clearly Lady Burdon is interested. She draws her chair a trifle towards him, and with her elbow on the low tea-table, cups her chin in the palm of her hand, the fingers against her lips, watches him and attends him closely. Her throat and face are dusky, her wrist and hand are white against them. Her eyes have a deep and kind look. She makes a gentle picture.

Encouraged by her sympathy, "He was a little wild," says Mr. Pemberton. "I am afraid a little inclined to be wild.... Always so full of spirits, you see ... eager ... careless, reckless perhaps, impetuous ... lovable—ah, me, very lovable....

"I was very fond of him, Lady Burdon," he says apologetically, "very fond;" and he stumbles into an example of what he is pleased to call the young man's impetuous carelessness. It is of his last months in England, before he sailed for India, that this deals. Between June and August, having leave from his regiment, he disappeared, it seems; was completely lost sight of by his grandmother and his friends. Towards the end of August he appeared again. "Not himself—not quite himself," says Mr. Pemberton, shaking his head as though over some recollection that troubled him, "and no explanation of his absence, and, when the chance came—General Sheringham was a relation, you know—wild to get out to this frontier 'show,' as he called it.

"Typical of him," says Mr. Pemberton after a pause, and smiling sadly at Lady Burdon. "Typical. A law to himself he would always be, and not responsible to any one for what he chose to do. A Burdon trait that; and he was a Burdon of Burdons."

Lady Burdon asks a question, breaking into Mr. Pemberton's history for the first time. "But that really is extraordinary, Mr. Pemberton," she says. "Wouldn't Lady Burdon—wouldn't his grandmother—have felt anxious during that disappearance, and wouldn't she have questioned him when he came back?"

"Not unless he seemed disposed to tell her. In a way—in a way, you know, relations between them were a little difficult. Poor boy"—and Mr. Pemberton gives a sad little laugh—"poor boy, he often came to me in a great way, and her ladyship, too, has had occasion. He, on his side, passionately devoted to her, hating to hurt her, but enormously high-spirited, difficult to handle. And she, on hers, making all the world of him and a little apt on that account to claim too much from him, if you follow me. He sometimes chafed—chafed, you know; hating to hurt her but restless of her control, her claim. Latterly she had to be very tactful with him. No, she wouldn't have questioned him unless he seemed disposed to tell her."

They are interrupted here by the entrance of baby Rollo on his way to bed, for it is getting late. "The rummiest little beggar," says Lord Burdon, introducing his small son. "Not much more than eighteen months, and solemn enough for an archbishop, aren't you, Rollo?"

The solemn one, pale and noticeably quiet and far from strong looking, justifies this character by having no smiles, though Mr. Pemberton greets him cheerfully and says approvingly: "Rollo, eh? The Burdon name. His name," he adds, and looks at Lady Burdon, who gives him a gentle smile of understanding.

IV

Mr. Pemberton looked after her very gratefully when she excused herself to take the child up-stairs. The door closed, he turned to Lord Burdon. "Nice—nice," he began in a stifled kind of voice, "to have a little son growing up—to watch. We watched young Lord Burdon—that poor boy—growing up—anxiously—so anxiously...."

He gave a nervous little laugh. "When I say 'we' you've no idea with what a terrible air of proprietorship the family is regarded by those, like myself, attached to it for generations, by those dependent on it. We looked so eagerly, so eagerly as the time drew on, to his coming of age. He was wanted so."

"Wanted?" Lord Burdon asked. "Wanted?" He pronounced the word heavily, as though he had an inkling of the answer and was apprehensive.

It started Mr. Pemberton on a recital that he spoke with seeming difficulty and yet as though he had prepared it. It occupied longer than either knew, and Lord Burdon, before it was finished, was sitting sunk low in his chair, as though what he heard oppressed him. The little old lawyer spoke of difficulties in connection with the estate; the diminished rent roll; the urgent necessity for comprehensive improvements essential to make the land pay its way; the long-urged necessity for the sale of Burdon House in Mount Street, heavily mortgaged and the interest an insupportable drain on the estate. It led him to why they had looked so anxiously for the coming of age. Everything that was essential was impossible, he showed, in the reign of gentle Jane Lady Burdon, who felt that she held in sacred trust for her grandson and would suffer no risks in raising of loans, nor depredation of her charge by sale of the town property. He had no eloquence, this devoted little lawyer, but he had earnestness that seemed to him who listened to fill the room, as it were, with living shapes of duties, demands, traditions of a great heritage that marshalled before him and looked to him to be carried forward, as soldiers to a leader.

A change in Mr. Pemberton's tone aroused him.

"He was wanted so," Mr. Pemberton said jerkily, and stopped.

No response, and in a funny little cracked voice, "Well, he's dead," Mr. Pemberton said.

Lord Burdon raised his eyes, contracted with the trouble that had given him that drooped, oppressed appearance while the other spoke, dim, clouded as with looking at something that menaced; and their eyes met—two very simple men.

Mr. Pemberton stretched out fumbling hands. He cried blunderingly and appealingly, his mouth twisting: "It has affected me—this death, this change. I am only an old man—a devoted old man. As we looked to him, so now we look to you."

"Look to me!" Lord Burdon said slowly. "Look to me! Good God, Pemberton, I funk it!" he cried. "I funk it and I hate it. I'm not the sort. I wish I'd been left alone. I wish to God I had!"

There followed his words a silence of the intense nature caused by speech that has been intense. In that silence, consciousness of some other personality in the room caused Mr. Pemberton to turn suddenly in his chair. He turned to see Lady Burdon standing in the doorway. She was not in the act of entering. She was standing there; and for the briefest space, while Mr. Pemberton looked at her and she at him, she just stood, erect, her head a trifle unduly high, with estimating eyes and with purposed mouth.

V

It had been an anxious Mr. Pemberton that came down to Miller's Field. It was a reassured Mr. Pemberton that stayed there, but a gravely disturbed Mr. Pemberton that went back to town. He knew Lady Burdon had been listening, the look he had seen on her face informed him of her displeasure with what she had heard, and he knew that in his first estimate of her he had misread her.

For he read her look aright. In her husband's cry—his weak, contemptible cry—in what she had heard of the little lawyer's statements and proposals—his tears and prayers of duties—she knew hostility to her plans, to her dreams, to her pleasures. Her estimating eyes that met Mr. Pemberton's inquired the strength of that hostility; her purposed mouth was the mirror of her determination against it.

CHAPTER VI

MISCALCULATING A PEER

I

The little clock that is perched high over the vast fireplace in the library at Burdon House, Mount Street, marks a shade before ten of the evening. Its delicate ticking joins with the fluttering of the flames, and with the steady scratch of Mr. Librarian Amber's pen, to make the only sounds in this dignified apartment with its high-bred air, that has known many a Burdon and that shortly is to acknowledge another bearer of the title and serenely give farewell to the lady seated before the fire.

A gracious lady of many sorrows, as the Vicar of Little Letham parish, in a surprising flight, had named Jane Lady Burdon on the previous Sunday—and rightly named her. Sorrow has companioned Jane Lady Burdon before; now again is called whence it has lightly slumbered—walks hand in hand with the gentle lady, is her bedfellow, crouches on the hearth beside her as she sits, drooping slightly, in the high-backed chair, fingers enlocked on lap, eyes dimly upon the flames.

Lord Burdon, who has stepped into the dead boy's shoes—(Ah, Sorrow, walk here and here with me. Look, Sorrow, where he used to sport and run!)—has paid his visit that afternoon; sympathetic little Mr. Pemberton, with his papers and documents, has occupied a part of her morning. It has been a trying day for her. Her only desire now is to be left alone with her thoughts. (Come away, come away, Sorrow, Sorrow; and hold me close, and open me his prattling lips, his strong young lips.)

II

Mr. Librarian Amber—very conscious of Sorrow crouching there, but busy, busy—is writing at a table behind the drooping figure in the high-backed chair. The bald top of Mr. Amber's narrow head, nose hard after his pen like a diligent bloodhound on a slow scent, shines between the splendid yellow candles in their tall, silver holders that light his work. Neat little packets of papers, neatly arranged, dot the polished surface of the table, like islands set in a still, dark sea about the greater island that is Mr. Amber's manuscript. On a chair by Mr. Amber's side is a large, slim volume held by a gilt clasp and lettered on its cover of white vellum:

Percival Rollo Redpath Letham
XIIth Baron Burdon

He is engaged, Mr. Librarian Amber, on that "Lives of the Barons Burdon" of which Lord Burdon had spoken to his wife, walking in the garden of Hillside.

Then that little clock perched over the mantelpiece tinkles the hour of ten.

"How do you progress, Mr. Amber?" Jane Lady Burdon inquires gently.

Mr. Amber—constitutionally nervous—starts, drops his pen, grabs at it as it rolls for the floor, misses it in the stress of a short-sighted fumble, makes a distressed Tch-tch! as it rattles to the boards, clears his throat, starts on one reply and, in the manner of nervous persons suddenly interrogated, strangles it at birth and has a shot at fortune with another.

"I have almost got—I am just concluding the newspaper reports of the fight, my lady. Very nearly at the end." He recollects a resolve to be bright in order to cheer my lady, so he adds with a funny little pop: "Almost done!" and then with a brisk little puff blows imaginary dust from his manuscript. "Almost done! Hoof!"

"I will read it over to-morrow, Mr. Amber, immediately after breakfast. To-day is Friday. By Monday you should have finished, I think, and the book will be ready to go into its place at the Manor. You will come with me when I go down there next week, Mr. Amber, and we will put it in its place together. I shall be glad to see it in its place before I leave: all the Lives finished—our little hobby, Mr. Amber;" and her gracious ladyship of many sorrows puts into the words the smile that faintly touches her lips.

Mr. Amber, desperately agitated and pleased by this coupling of himself with his dear mistress, takes from the warmth of his happiness courage sufficient to introduce to her a matter that has been troubling him. He gets awkwardly to his feet, a spare, stooping figure, mild of face, little over fifty but looking more, frowns horribly at his chair for the noise it makes upon the polished floor as he pushes it back, and comes forward, twisting the fingers of his hands about one another.

"My lady—yes, I will surely finish by Monday. Your ladyship will forgive me—intruding myself—your ladyship speaks of leaving—I am—if I may venture—so attached—I scarcely—"

He is quite painfully agitated. His fingers, tightly locked now by their twistings, present a figure of his halting sentences come to a final tangle, an ultimate and hopeless knot.

Her gracious ladyship of many sorrows smiles in her kind way. "Dear Mr. Amber, you should know, of course. I have been thoughtless of you in my sorrow. I am going to my sister in York, Mr. Amber—Mrs. Eresby, you remember. Here nor the Manor is no longer my home, you understand. Indeed, how should I stay in houses of sad memories only?"

Mr. Amber murmurs "Ah—my lady!" and she continues: "I intend a last visit to the Manor—to take leave of our dear friends, Mr. Amber, and to collect a few—memories. I would go now, but I have first to meet Lady Burdon. Lord and Lady Burdon will very kindly come here for that purpose on Monday so that we may know one another for a few days."

She pauses and smiles inquiringly as though to ask Mr. Amber if he is now sufficiently informed. He blinks considerably, starts to work at his hands again, and suddenly says with a mouth all twisted: "It will be very—strange—to me to be parted from your ladyship."

She extends a gentle hand towards his that twist and twist, touching them softly: "Dear Mr. Amber. It has been the pleasantest friendship."

He says stupidly and brokenly, "What will I do?"

"You must go on living with the books," she tells him. "Why, what would they do without you, or you without them? I will speak to Lord Burdon. You must live on just the same in the Manor library where we have been together so often—all of us. I shall like to think of you there. It is my wish, Mr. Amber."

She says gently, "There!" as he clutches her hand to his lips. "I will go to bed now. I think I hear Colden coming for me," and as her maid enters, she rises.

Mr. Amber tries for words. That twisting mouth forbids them, and he turns to hold the door open.

"Thank you. Good night, Mr. Amber. Here is our kind Colden so thoughtful for my sleep. I am ready, Colden. Yes, I will take your arm. Good night, Mr. Amber." And as Mr. Amber stands watching, there comes to him faintly across the great hall: "We'll rest a moment here, Colden. A little trying, these stairs. Do you remember how he used to take me up? He never missed a night when he was home, did he? Do you remember how he made us laugh about this seat...?"

Then Mr. Amber returns to the library, closes the door and eases emotion by a trumpet blast upon his nose.

III

Mr. Amber took a seat before the fire. He was unsettled, he found, for further progress that night upon the work that had engaged him at the table. But his mind turned to it and from it to the eleven fine volumes into whose company it would go, completing the lives of the Barons Burdon that were the fruits of many years of loving labour—result of "our little hobby." In memory he trod again those happy days—saw himself installed librarian at Burdon Old Manor, a bookish youth, weak-backed, weak-eyed, son and despair of a tenant farmer; rehearsed again that youth's aimless, browsing years among the books, acquiring strange and various knowledge from the shelves, developing affections, habits, tastes that, as with tentacles, anchored him by heart and mind to the house of Burdon. Mr. Amber moved restlessly in his chair and came to the beginning of the great scheme, propounded by her gracious ladyship, that was to become "our little hobby," as immediately it became the purpose and enthusiasm of his life. Well, it was done—or almost done. The results of desperately exciting scratching about the library—among distressed old books, among family trees, among deeds, letters, parchments, rolls, records—were in eleven fine manuscript volumes—only the twelfth to finish.

A leisurely volume this twelfth, now lying on the table behind Mr. Amber's chair. Written up during its subject's short life—dear and most well-beloved to Mr. Amber every moment of it—the volume is as naturally detailed as some of the earlier volumes are naturally scrappy. Pettily detailed, perhaps. Mr. Amber starts with the precise hour and moment—6:15-½ A.M.—of the birth of the Hon. Rollo Percival Redpath Letham; notes his colouring—fair; his weight at successive infantile months—lusty beyond the average, it would appear; date of his first articulate speech; date of first stumbling run across the nursery floor—and suchlike small beer. His father's death is chronicled ("cf. vol. XI, pp. 196 et seq.") and he is shown to be yet in his third year when he becomes twelfth Baron Burdon.... Date of measles.... Date of whooping cough.... First riding lesson.... Preparatory school.... First holidays.... First shooting lesson.... Puts a charge of shot into a keeper. It is all very closely detailed. It is detailed so closely that a gap towards the end is made conspicuous: and this is precisely that gap occupied by the "disappearance" of which Mr. Pemberton had spoken in the drawing-room at Hillside. The chronicle, that is to say, is brought very fully up to the May in which, as it shows, my lord suddenly went down to Burdon Old Manor from London, his grandmother being at Mount Street, and thence for a long holiday. It jumps to October and at once begins again to be remarkably detailed, "Our Own Correspondent's" account of the frontier engagement waiting on the table there to conclude it. But of this May to October period, covering the June to August of which Mr. Pemberton had spoken, Mr. Amber, like Mr. Pemberton, for the good reason that he knew nothing of how my lord occupied it, has nothing to say. Let it be said. My lord was in that June secretly married in London: a matter closely germane to this history, and now to be examined.

BOOK TWO

A BOOK OF THE SAME SIZE, ILLUSTRATING
THE ELEMENT OF FOLLY

CHAPTER I

LOVE TRIMS WRECKERS' LAMPS

I

On a May morning, then, love in his heart, purpose in his eye, gathering in his careless hand the meshes that he is going to tug, shaking the unconsidered lives they bind—Rollo Percival Redpath Letham, twelfth Baron Burdon, "Roly" to his gay young comrades of the clubs and messes, was set down at Great Letham by the express from London.

Great Letham marks the nearest approach of the railway to the sequestered villages that touch their hats to the Burdon Old Manor folk. It stands at the head of a country that rolls away on either hand in down and valley. Roughly, Great Letham centres the high lands that bound this prospect on its nearer side, and from its outskirts there strikes away a great shoulder of down that thrusts like a massive viaduct straight and far to join the further hills. From a distance this natural viaduct admits to minds however stubbornly practical the similitude of a giant's arm. Rugged and brown and scarred it lies, not green in greenest summer; and the humped shoulder whence it springs, and the great mounds in which it swells along its path, present it as a mighty limb out-thrust to hold away the hills in which its fist is buried. Plowman's Ridge, they call it; and afoot upon it, it is kinder of aspect. Aloof, aloft, alone, the wayfarer stands here, and breathes or breasts the ceaseless wind that saunters or like a live thing thunders down its track; and has on either hand a spreading valley, whence curls the smoke of scattered hamlets, uprise the spires, come the faint sounds of creature life and gleam the fields, as spread upon a palette, coloured in obedience to this and that design of husbandry.

The railway skirts the eastward vale; along the tranquil westward slope the Burdon hamlets sleep. Viewed from the Ridge, they are ridiculously alike; ridiculously equidistant one from the next; ridiculously tethered, as it were, along the foot of the Ridge—like boats along a shore; ridiculously small to have separate names, but named in their order outwards from Great Letham: Market Roding and Abbess Roding and Nunford—linked by those names with the monastic ruins at Upabbot in the eastward vale; Shepwell and Burdon and Little Letham. They are tethered to the Ridge, and the Ridge is the most direct communication between them. Visitors from village to village, or from Great Letham to any, climb the slope and use the Ridge, rather than plod the winding roads that, as twelfth Baron Burdon has often declared, "take you about two miles from where you want to get before they let you loose to go there."

He struck out along the Ridge now.

Burdon village was his destination; and as he pressed his way towards it, putting up his face to snuff the familiar wind, speeding ahead his thoughts to what he came to seek, twelfth Baron Burdon showed himself a very personable young man. His tawny hair he wore closely cropped about his strong young head; beneath a straight nose he grew a little clump of fair moustache shaved bluntly away at the corners of a firm mouth. At a bold right-angle his jaw came cleanly from his throat; and his chin was thick and round, matching his open grey eyes to advertise purpose and command. A Burdon of Burdons Mr. Pemberton had named him. A high-spirited young man, vigorous, alert; very boyish in mind, very dominant of character. A Burdon of Burdons. Through a long line the bone of whose quality was their "I hold!" twelfth Baron Burdon inherited a spirit that, when crossed, was quick to be unsheathed as from their scabbards the eager swords of remote ancestors were quick,—dangerous as they. "Enormously high-spirited, difficult to handle," Mr. Pemberton had told new Lady Burdon. It was handling he could not brook. The lightest feel of the curb threw up his head as the fine-tempered colt's. Brow and lips would assume signs that spoke, even to one unacquainted with him, the imperious resolve of mastery.

He was in pursuit of mastery now.

II

As he came abreast of Burdon he edged down the Ridge, making towards a little copse that ran up from a garden behind the last cottage in the village street, the nearest to Little Letham. In the roadway this cottage displayed, suspended from its porch, the notice, painted in white letters on a black board:

POST OFFIC

(The painter had misjudged the space at his disposal but had added the missing E on the back of the board, "Case," as he explained, "unnybody be that dense as to turn her round to see what her do mean.")

The cottage served in those days for the reception and distribution of all the letters of the westward vale, a community little bothered with correspondence; and "Post Offic" was conducted by a slight little woman whom some called Postmum, some Miss Oxford. She was the daughter of a former vicar of Little Letham; to twelfth Baron Burdon she was Audrey's sister.

Deep in the trees, as he approached the copse, the sharp white of a skirt caught his eager eye. Taking a grassy path, he went noiselessly down and presently was separated from his Audrey by the dense thorn that hedged the tiny glade in which he found her. A basket of young fern roots was beside her and she was stooped, her back towards him, exploring in the undergrowth.

He thought to steal up to her, and tried. The dense thorn locked him, and she heard him and turned swiftly towards him.

She was flushed with her stooping. Now a deeper flush rose beneath her colour, sinking it in a warmer glow that stained her exquisitely from throat to brow. The dark violet's shade was in her eyes; when her colour abated, the pale rose's delicacy might have been shamed against the fairness of her skin. She wore no hat; her soft brown locks unruled the ribbon at her neck, and the breeze stirred her hair in little waves about her temples. Her arms were bare where she had thrust her sleeves beneath her elbows. She stood poised, as one might say, upon the feet of surprise; and her lips were slightly parted, her gentle bosom seeming to hold her breath as though she feared the smallest sigh would waft away the sudden gladness that had caught it.

She just whispered, "Roly!"

"I'm caught in this da—infernal bush," Roly cried, struggling.

"I wasn't to expect you for a week, you wrote."

He began to writhe and wrench. "You needn't. I shall stay here forever, I believe."

She gave the merriest laugh: "You're simply fixed!"

"Wait till I get at you!" He tried and was more firmly held. "I say, what the dickens has happened to me?"

She put her hands together, enjoying his plight as a child that bends forward at a play. "You'll never get through there, Roly. You'll have to go back."

He wrenched and struggled: "Go back! There's a great spike or something sticking into me!"

His struggles broke a network of branches at his waist. A thorny bough sprang loose and whipped beneath his chin, forcing up his head.

"Good Lord! Look here, Audrey, I shall cut my throat and bleed to death; or this dashed spike will come slick through my back in a minute and impale me!"

"Roly! If you knew how funny you look!"

Her tone, the way in which (as it presented itself to him) she "squirmed" with childlike glee, caused him to laugh the jolliest laugh. No quality of hers attracted him as this fresh and innocent and childlike happiness that was her first characteristic; in none he found so great delight as in the fount of innocence through whose fresh stream came all her thoughts and words like young things at play.

He laughed the jolliest laugh: "Well, I've not come all the way from town just to look funny. I tell you, it's serious. I've never imagined such a fix. I'm dashed if I can move a finger now. Audrey, if you've got a woman's heart that feels, you'll help me out. This infernal thing under my chin—just move that and I'll show you how we fight in the dear old regiment—Damn!"

"Oh, it has cut you!" she cried, all concern as a moment before she had been all glee.

A step brought her face within a hand of his. She found place for her fingers between the thorns of the bramble beneath his chin. She drew the branch downwards, and the action caused her to bend towards him until their brows and eyes and lips were level. She looked directly into his eyes and he directly into hers; and each read there those dear and ardent mysteries that love far better images than ever love can voice.

He no more than breathed, "Kiss me, Audrey."

She waited for the smallest part of a moment. Entranced, enthralled, they only heard a lark that was a speck above them send down a tiny melody, and far upon the down a sheep-bell's distant note. Love's thralldom and Love's music to his thrall. The oldest play that mortals play; and never know befooled were often meeter than enthralled, nor better an ass to bray than some hymn seem to rise in benison. She kissed him tenderly upon the lips; gave the smallest sigh and breathed, "Dear Roly!"

Comic were the word for such a thing.

III

Comic, and comic that which followed when he, released, was with her in the glade and, seated by her, took her hands and bent her to his purpose.

"Now, listen to me, Audrey. Put both your hands in mine."

She responded as he bade her, performing surely the most beautiful action in the world as she gave her hands to his. All human life has no act more beautiful than the weaker hand confided to the stronger, nor any nearer Godhood than when strong hand takes the weak.

He enclosed her hands within his own. "Listen to me, Audrey," he repeated; and, as her hands had been her spirit, he possessed and drew her spirit on.

Yet comic is the word: for here—he planning, she agreeing—they made the plans they thought should make all bliss, all happiness their own; here, in fact, trimmed wreckers' lamps to shipwreck happy lives. He had determined upon secret marriage with her, and had determined it as the perfect solution of difficulties whose consideration was in some degree creditable to him. For as he told himself, and told his Audrey now, nothing prevented him from openly declaring his intention of contracting a marriage that would cause a breach between himself and his grandmother; nothing but the impossibility of enduring such a breach; that was unthinkable.

"Passionately devoted to his grandmother," Mr. Pemberton had told; "and she, for her part, making all the world of him." It was precisely this uncommon devotion between him and his dear "Gran" that drove him into torment of perplexity when first his heart informed him life without Audrey was insupportable. With utmost content he had surrendered himself into the object of Gran's adoring pride and, as such, into her control of her dear possession. As he grew older, that control had sometimes come to irk a little. "He sometimes chafed—chafed, if you follow me," Mr. Pemberton had said. But the quality of that chafing required better understanding than even Mr. Pemberton could give it. It was not at conflict of will between himself and Gran that Roly chafed; he knew his own determined character well enough to know that if he liked he could override her will as he overrode that of others who thought to oppose him. Where he chafed was where his devotion to her pricked him. He could not bear the thought of giving her distress; and he would sometimes chafe when—at this, at that, at some impulse or boyish fling of his—he thought her distress unreasonable; unreasonable because it shackled him unfairly; because either he would submit to it, or, taking his way, would suffer greatly, be robbed of his pleasure, at thought of having caused it.

But always, when the thing was over, be glad he had given way to her or most desperately grieved he had pained her. He knew that he was everything to her; how hurt her then?

With such the measure of his love for her, such the devotion between them, and such that devotion's price, what a situation was presented for his perplexity when Audrey came to occupy his heart! She had been his playmate in his childhood at Burdon Old Manor, she at the Vicarage. When her father died, Gran had expressed her fondness for his daughters by using her influence to procure the establishment of a post-office at Burdon and persuading the elder sister to conduct it, thus keeping them, as she had said, "near us." That was one thing; a head of the house of Burdon's marriage into so humble a degree—and that her Roly—he knew to be unthinkably another. She had great plans for great alliance for him—at some future date. At some future date! At her great age and at his extreme youth she could scarcely think of him as man—always as boy. It was one of the things that sometimes chafed him. But when, as had happened, the subject of marriage came up between them, and he would laugh at her immense ideas of his value, she would always end so pathetically: "But, Roly, how shall I bear any one to come between us?"

Rehearsing it all, "How—how in God's name?" he had desperately cried to himself, "can I tell her of Audrey?" She whom he could never bear to distress—how give her this vital hurt? She from whom—for the suffering it would cause her—he could never endure to be parted, how deliberately put her away? He would tell her his intention; how endure what she would say, or not say? He would carry out his purpose and she would leave him and must shortly die; and how endure her death in such circumstances? Or, haply, he would prevail on her to stay with him; and she, supplanted, jealous of Audrey and gentle Audrey fearing her. And how endure that?

No—to create such a breach insupportable, and insupportable life without Audrey. What then?

It came to him as complete solution, and as complete solution he pressed it now on Audrey, that he would marry Audrey first, then after a little while tell. The more he examined it, the more obvious, the less impossible of failure it seemed. "Gran, dear," he imagined himself saying, taking his opportunity in one of those frequent moments when, out driving with her or sitting alone with her in the evening, she loved just to sit silent, resting her hand on his,—"Gran, dear, I've something to tell you. I've done something and done it without telling you, so as to have you go on living with me like we've always lived together. Gran, I'm married—Audrey, Audrey Oxford; you remember, dear?"

Imagining it, he could imagine her arms about him. "Gran, I'm married"—easy and kind. "Gran, I'm going to marry, going to marry Audrey Oxford"—cruel, impossible!

The solution removed also an obstacle to their mating on Audrey's side—her sister. Their courtship had been carried on against her sister's disapproval. Maggie was twenty years older than Audrey, more mother to her than sister, and sharp-tongued in the matter of Roly's frequent visits, the more surely to avert the disaster in which she believed they must end.

"In time—it's only a question of time," she had once said to Audrey, "he will forget you, turn to his own position and responsibilities in life—leave you broken-hearted. How else can it end?"

And Audrey in tears: "What if I tell you he has asked me to marry him?"

"He has asked you that?"

"Maggie, he has."

"Has he told Lady Burdon?"

"Not yet, because—"

"Ah!"

And Audrey: "Oh, how can you say you love me?"

And Maggie: "Audrey! Audrey!"

And Audrey: "Maggie, I didn't mean that,"

And Maggie, steeling her heart: "But you think it: the first result of him. You are girl and boy; you don't understand. Why, I, who would die if you were to die, would rather see you dead than betrothed to him. If it ended in marriage, it would end in misery."

And later she had said to him: "If you break Audrey's heart, I will never forgive you. That's a poor threat. I would find a way perhaps—"

So there was Maggie stood in the way; and the solution found a way round Maggie. And there was lastly all the clatter of his friends, all the active disapproval of his elders; and the solution found an easy way around that. He could not hurt Gran; he could not conciliate Maggie; he could not face himself gossiped of, implored, advised, reproved; and the solution offered an easy way around it all. Easily winning Audrey to it,—her hands in his, his spirit possessing hers—he came to details. He had examined and arranged everything. He had made inquiries as to Registry Office marriages. They were both of age. There was a residence formality: well, she was coming on a visit to a girl friend in Kensington; he would take a room in a hotel in the district. They would meet at the Registry "one fine day." Long leave from his regiment was due. They would go on the continent—"all over the place, the most gorgeous time"—and afterwards—easy as all the rest was easy—Gran should be told.

He ended: "Audrey—married!"

And she: "Roly! ... Oh, Roly!"

Comic were the word for such a thing.

IV

Comic the word; but if, instead, you choose to judge them and to consider preposterous his arguments of the case between his Gran and his Audrey and preposterous his solution of it, beg you remember that life is going to be an impossible affair for us, a thing to drive us mad, if we are going to judge it by the standard of the correct and noble characters that you and I possess. By some means or another we must stoop down to the level of our neighbours and try to judge from there. Dowered with all the virtues, as you and I are, it is the easiest thing in the world to be impatient with another's folly, to despise him for it, to indicate how little moral courage will rid him of its effects; nay, to go further, and to declare it inconceivable that such blunders and follies and misbehaviours, as for example those upon which Roly and his Audrey were now embarked, can really have been committed. But that is a stage too far. We must not run our excusable intolerance of folly to the length of calling impossible even the most absurd actions, even the most incredible weakness of character. The whole history of mankind results precisely from these absurdities and these incredibilities. On the one hand, we should still and should all be in Eden if it were not so; on the other, there is the distinctly moving thought that you and I, faultless, are dependent for our entertainment on exactly these impossibilities of character in others: but for them we should never enjoy the delicious thrill of being shocked, never (the thing is unthinkable) be able to thank God we are not as others are.

No, we must accept these impossible follies on the part of our neighbours: but to understand them—nay, if we are too utterly high and they too utterly low for that, then merely to pay the poor devils for the entertainment they give us—let us try to see as they see, feel as they feel, become naked as they are naked to the bitter chill of cowardice, of temptation, of God knows what indeed that strikes them to the bone.

Let us try, and coming to these two, let it for Audrey at least be excused that she was the gentlest thing and all unschooled in any heavier book of life than the airy pamphlet that begins "I love;" with "I love" continues; with "I love" ends; and never asks, much less supplies, what "I love" means, or what demands, or whither leads, or how is paid.

CHAPTER II

LOVE LEADS AN EXPEDITION INTO THE UNFORESEEN

I

He married her—and wearied of her. Within two months of when he called her wife—and pressed her to him and kissed her for the fondness of that name, and chaffed her with "Wife" in place of Audrey at every lightest word—within two months of that tremendous day he was discovering himself checked and irritated by the vexations, the hindrances, the deceptions imposed by secret marriage upon his former free and buoyant way of life. Within three he was openly irked, not hiding from her that his temper was crossed when, stronger and more frequently, incidents arose to cross it. Within four months—and still their secret undeclared—he was often neglecting her, often silent in her presence for long periods; brooding; frowning at her where she sat or where she walked beside him; leaving her in a storm; returning to her in remorse; assuring himself he did not love her less, nay, rather loved her more—But...! Every way he turned and everything she did and all the things she did not do, brought him and bruised him against the bars of which that But was made.

All this most wretched and most pitiful, most excusable and most inexcusable business may best be examined in the incidents that stood out to mark its progress. Theirs was the oldest and most frequent of human errors. They had jumped into the delights of the foreseen, and behold! they found themselves in the swamp, in the jungle, in the desert, in the whirlpool of the unforeseen.

II

Audrey wrote and told Sister Maggie—a letter pledging her to secrecy, posted on the very moment of departure for the Continent ("at our wedding breakfast at the Charing Cross hotel, darling; and the train just going") and breathing ecstasy of happiness, and breathing love all atremble in its prayer for forgiveness. It informed Maggie that they were to be Mr. and Mrs. Redpath until everybody was told; and "O, darling Maggie, I shall not sleep until I get your letter—Poste restante, Paris, dear—telling me you forgive me and how glad you are."

Forgiveness was not to be discovered in the reply by the weeping eyes that read it. "You have made a most terrible mistake," Maggie wrote. "You say that you are happy, but you will find you can only be miserable while you are living in deception."

The wounding sentences were written in a firm, clear penmanship that in itself was cold and bitter reprimand. As they appeared, so Audrey read them. She did not know that they were written while the hand that made them could be steadied from its trembling desire to send a message only of devotion, only of prayer for Audrey's happiness, only of blessing. The letter brought to Audrey's eyes the tears that Maggie hoped to bring but ached to bring—forcing herself to be cruel in order to be kind; also it brought belief that Maggie was and wished to be estranged. It was never answered. Wisely intended, unwisely executed, misread, it added to the record of human perversity another of those immensely pitiful blunders that solely and alone are the cause of human unhappiness. When Heaven holds its reassembly, Heaven, as we seek out our loved, will surely ring with broken, loving greetings of: "I did not know! I did not understand!" No more will need be said. All tragedy, all sorrow is in those words; all tragedy, all sorrow removed by them.

Roly also had his letter. "If you cause her one single moment's unhappiness—" and other wild words. He did not show it to Audrey. Cause his darling unhappiness! He kissed away the tears her own letter had brought and laughingly cheered her with an amusing account of an incident in the hotel lobby. "We'll have to get out of this place, Audrey. There's a man staying here and his wife that I know well. Great pals of Gran's. I near as a toucher ran bang into them."

It was the first glimpse of the Unforeseen.

III

The first glimpse of the Unforeseen! At the moment neither recognised it for such. At the moment it was merely "A dickens of a squeak. I say, we'll have to look out for that kind of thing, old girl." Later, and that before very long, incidents of the kind began to be realised as the Unforeseen indeed. "That kind of thing" became, or seemed to become, extraordinarily and exasperatingly frequent. What had promised to be the fun of looking out for it became the strain of avoiding it.

There came a day—in Vienna, an original item of their programme but reached much earlier than intended owing to "That kind of thing's" persistence—there came a day when signs of the strain were suddenly evidenced, when, like a disturbed snake, unsuspected and sharply alarming, the Unforeseen upstarted and hissed at them. Audrey had struck up a pleasant hotel acquaintance, the matter of an hour's chat, but related rather enthusiastically to Roly. At dinner that night she pointed out her friend. "Right at the far end—look! By that statue sort of thing. In pink, with that tall man; d'you see, dear?"

He saw; and with concern she saw him set down the glass he was raising to his lips and saw his face darken. He said: "Damnation! It's Lady Ashington. It's maddening, this kind of thing. By God, it is. I'm going. She'll spot me in a minute. I'm going."

His violent words hurt her and frightened her. He got to his feet and she made to rise also. That worsened the incident. "Stop where you are," he said angrily. "Both of us getting up—making people look! I can slip out behind here. Damn this business!"

When she followed him to their room, she found his temper no better that he had gone without his dinner. He had made arrangements, he told her, for them to leave early in the morning, and he named their destination. She tried to pretend not to notice his mood; but her voice trembled a little as she said, "I've never heard of the place, dear."

He grunted, a little ashamed of himself: "I don't suppose anybody has. I hope not. We must get off the beaten track. Badgered about like this from pillar to post. It's getting on my nerves."

She faltered, "I'm so sorry, Roly."

Her tone pricked him. But these men hate above all things to feel in the wrong when they are in the wrong. The effect of her humility was to make him explain: "I don't know what possessed you, Audrey, 'pon my soul I don't, to go palling up with that woman."

Again she blundered. His reproach was so absurd that she laughed quite naturally at it: "O Roly! how ridiculous! How was I to know you knew her?"

He turned on her, alarming her utterly. "You ought to have known!"

Foolish, exasperating tears in her eyes: "How could I? How could I?"

"I've told you—I've warned you; that's what I mean. I've told you that every dashed soul I ever knew seems to be all over the Continent. I've warned you to be careful. Asked you not to get in with people. You absolutely don't care, seems to me. Perhaps you think it funny dodging about like this—perhaps you enjoy it. Well, I don't. That's enough. Let's drop the subject."

IV

So and in this wise the miserable business jolted towards its climax; deeper blunders at every step and every blunder additional to the load that stumbled them into the next. Here was a young man that had taken to himself pleasures, and lo! they were chains, rattling whensoever he moved most grimly to remind him that now limits were imposed upon his movements; that he who, by virtue of his rank, of the blood in his veins, of his own high, careless, fearless air, that he who by virtue of these was wont to look every man in the face more boldly than the most of us, must now hide, dodge, shift, dissemble, or betray the secret that, as to his torment he found, every day and every covering deception made more impossible to discover to the world.

Of all mankind's infirmities nothing than deception so quickly, so deeply and so surely turns the quality of his behaviour; nothing so cruelly tears, so acidly pierces his nerves; nothing so saps his resolution, destroys his moral fibre. Honesty is sword and armour, bread and wine; deception a voracious canker in the vitals, a clutch out of hell dragging through fog of fear, through slough of sin, into mire unspeakable. He was in its torments, he was writhing from them into deeper blunders; he began to shudder at the thought of proclaiming his marriage—yet.

She saw his plight and, all unschooled in life, she contributed to the disaster. Here was the gentlest creature, adoring and mated with an impetuous mate that now was as a free beast trapped, goaded by the sudden bars that caged him on every side, wildly seeking an outlet, panicked at finding none. She searched her miserable pamphlet of "I love," stained now with tears. It had nothing to give her. She read into it that in marrying her Roly she thought to have brought him nectar, and lo! it was a cup of poison she had given him, tormenting him utterly. She blamed herself. Through wakeful nights she watched him where he lay beside her—troubled often now in his sleep—and sought and sought, fumbling her pamphlet, to know what amends she could make him; and chid herself she was a burden to him; and would sit up in the darkness and wring her poor young hands in her distracted grief.

He noted the results that these distresses of her mind introduced to her appearance and her behaviour. They did not aid the difficulties with which he found himself beset. This was the beginning of the period of neglect of her; of silence in her presence for long periods; of brooding; of frowning at her where she sat or when she walked beside him; of leaving her in a storm, returning in remorse; of assuring himself he did not love her less, nay, rather loved her more—But!

V

At the end of August came their return to England, and immediately his full realisation of the ghastly delusion of the idea that it were easy to tell Gran—easy and kind—when the thing was done. Monstrous delusion, ghastly folly! Why, the very fates were arrayed against it. He returned to find Gran ailing, in bed. He went to the Mount Street house, bracing his warped resolution to the pitch of telling her, and it was to her bedroom he must go, and found her weak and stretching out her arms to him and overjoyed—O God! so overjoyed!—to have her Roly back. How tell her? Agony enough that she had no reproach for his neglect of her through the summer, nor any that he was come now with the news that he had run his leave to the last day and must at once rejoin the regiment at Canterbury. Agony enough that she nothing reproached, nothing questioned; unthinkable the agony of watching her while he said, "Gran—Gran, dear, I'm married. Audrey, Audrey Oxford, you know," and of hearing her poor lips falter, "Married? Married, Roly? Audrey Oxford? Married, Roly?"

Unthinkable! Impossible!

But it was another blunder committed, another step deeper into the coils, and he knew it for that when he left her, and ranged it with the similar torments that possessed him: the mad initial folly; the blunder of not proclaiming the marriage immediately he was married; the blunder of each hour delayed during the weeks on the Continent.

Now he was in the very jungle of the Unforeseen. Each step, every day, lost him deeper in its fastnesses; and like one so lost indeed, its dangers—encountered or suspected on every hand—preyed upon his mind, robbed his remaining courage, lost him his moral bearings that remained unwarped. His regimental duties kept him at Canterbury. He could not have Audrey there. He took a tiny furnished flat in the neighbourhood of Knightsbridge and there installed her, and there ran up to see her as often as might be. And the inevitable began. The inevitable—the chaff of his companions as to why he was forever "dodging up to town"; the meetings with his friends and their "Roly, where the devil do you get to these days?" the discovery that not only his men friends but his larger circle of acquaintances—Gran's friends—were beginning to gossip of his mysterious habits. The former put a man's interpretation on his conduct, baited him that they would track him down "to see what she was like." That thrice infuriated him: on Audrey's account; on the fear that they might do it and disclosure be forced, to relieve her from the horrible thing; and on the fact that what was implied was detestable to his nature. The larger circle of his friends were not more charitable, if more discreet. Gran, who was better again and had gone for her health to Burdon Old Manor, sent letters that failed to hide concern telling him of this, that and the other friend who had written saying he denied himself to everybody, was frequently in town, but never available and never to be found. Gran "hoped nothing was wrong, dear;" but erased her suspicion with her pen, but not so well that he could not read the words and picture the troubled thoughts that wrote them.

Ah! this was that grisly Unforeseen in shape new and most monstrous. How meet it? How meet it? Just as he had shrunk from announcing his intention of marriage because of the clatter of tongues and the opposition that it would loose upon him, so now, but a thousand, thousand times more, he shrank from the clatter that divulgement of his secret would cause; from the resentment of his world at its befoolment by him (as they would feel it); from the sneers and laughter at his turpitude; from the apologies with which he must go round on his knees to those he had deceived; from the interminable explanations he must make. The Unforeseen in shape most monstrous! It rushed him as a host of savage beasts that had snarled, that had threatened, that had come at him singly and torn him but been whipped, but that now was on him in the pack. How meet it? How meet it? God! What a lightsome, harmless, innocent, mad, wanton, reckless thing he had done, and what a turmoil he had loosed!

Bitter days, these, in the Knightsbridge flat. That pamphlet of "I love" all connoted now, written in tears, with what "I love" demands, where leads and must be paid.

CHAPTER III

A LOVERS' LITANY

I

Bitter days—but suddenly breaking to dawn. There came to him, on the rack of this torment, a thought that tortured him anew, yet made for healing. Audrey? Even if, as in his extremity he debated, he dared all and defied all—snatched himself out of this hell by publishing his position and crying to all concerned, "Now do and say your worst!"—even if he so made an end of it, to what would he bring her? How would she be received, suddenly proclaimed his wife when this ugly crop of suspicion and gossip was at its height? He knew, or through his distraught imagination he believed he knew; and he writhed to picture her—his gentle, unversed Audrey—thus introduced to the suspicious, uncharitable, malicious atmosphere that well he was aware his world could breathe. "Comes from a post-office somewhere, or a shop was it? Married at such and such a date—so he says!"

Thus the gate was slammed anew upon his resolution and locked and double-locked: the way must somehow be prepared for Audrey, the gossip by some means made to die, before he declared her. And with that there was unlocked and opened wide the gate that had barred up his love. Imagining the world's treatment of her, he realised his own.

It was in the tumult of these discoveries that he presented himself at the Knightsbridge flat and greeted his Audrey with a fondness that made her cry a little for happiness; she frequently cried in these days, not often for happiness. His fondness continued at that dear level through the evening. It emboldened her to urge again the step that she believed the best of all the many plans she ceaselessly revolved for curing the trouble she told herself she had brought upon him. She urged him to tell Gran. "Do tell her, dear. It will end all your worry. You're so worried, Roly. I see it—oh, how I see it! And I only add to it because I'm not—because I don't—because I vex you in so many ways. I know I do. You used to be so happy. You will be again directly this is all over. Do tell her, Roly! Roly, do!"

She had been seated on the floor, her head resting against him where he sat in a great armchair. Now, in this appeal of hers, she was turned about and on her knees, her hands enfondling his, her face lifted towards him.

He made a little choking sound, all his love for her surging; all his treatment of her wounding him; the thought of what he would bring her to if he took the course she urged filling him with remorse and with pity for her. He said in a strangled voice: "I can't; I can't," and stooping, he raised her to him so that they lay together in the big chair, their faces close, his arms about her....

For a little space, except that she was crying softly, they were silent—clasped thus, most dear to one another; and then proclaimed that dearness in scraps of murmured sentences, the gaps filled up by what their tones and their clasped arms instructed them....

Just murmurs, and dusky evening in the room—light, faint as their tones were faint, and in the shadows (how else seemed the air they breathed at every breath to thrill them?) spirits of true lovers that were winged down as, let us believe, lovers' spirits may when mortals love.

Just murmurs.

He said: "Audrey, Audrey, I've been so cruel—angry—thoughtless."

And she: "No ... no."

And she again: "Go to her, then, Roly. Don't tell, if you think not.... Just be with her for a little.... You'll be happy then.... Leave me alone a little, dear.... Not even write."

And he: "Audrey! ... Audrey!"

Her voice: "I shall be happy ... if only you are happy..."

And his: "I have been mad ... mad to treat you so.... Forgive.... Forgive."

Her voice—and close, close, all those lovers' spirits to hear this lovers' litany: "When you are happy ... I am happy."

And his—and all these murmurs chorused from lover's wraith to lover's wraith, as watchers handing flame from hand to hand to instruct heaven love still is here: "Audrey! ... Audrey!"

And she: "My dear ... my dear!"

II

Happy for her, happy for him, for all that have a smile and tear for true love, to remember that from that moment never a hasty word or thought passed between them. In that lovers' litany all such were purged, the past wiped out as if it had never been. And, as if in reward, into the night that surrounded Roly came a ray like a miraculous rope thrown to one in a pit.

The way must somehow be prepared for Audrey, he had said; the gossip somehow be made to die before he could declare her.

Sir Wryford Sheringham supplied the way.

General Sir Wryford Sheringham had been his father's close friend, was Gran's much-trusted nephew and her adviser in Roly's training. Gran was sending him appealing letters in these days, imploring him to find out what it was that was wrong with her dear Roly. Chance enabled him suddenly to reply that, on the eve of his return to India, he was now returning to take command of the Frontier Expedition that the government of India had been saving up for a long time against three Border tribes, and that he purposed taking Roly with him. He could invent a corner to shove the boy into, he wrote; and she must not break her heart nor shed a single tear except for joy that the chance had come to get the boy away and to work. "Whatever it is he's been up to," Sir Wryford wrote, "this'll pull him out of it and send him back to you his father's son again."

They walked into this last and supreme blunder as blindly as they had gone into the first. Roly presented it as the opportunity more wonderful than any that he could have invented to give this gossiping the slip. When he returned ("loaded with medals, old girl," as, aflame with excitement, he told her) it would all be forgotten; open arms for him and open arms for her.

Audrey's contribution to the folly was as characteristic. The news struck her like a blow; but instantly with the shock came its anodyne. He planned for her; every word of his rushing, thoughtless words was drafted to scale of "Because I love you so;" though they had been actual knives she would gladly have clasped such to her heart.

Credit him that the night before the day on which he sailed he had a sudden realisation of his madness. Credit him, at least, that now for the first time in their misguided chapter, he saw a blunder before he was irrevocably in it, and seeing it, tried to halt. He realised. He told her it was impossible that he should leave her thus. He must leave her in her right place. He must leave her with Gran. Gran was in town to bid him good-by. He must—he would tell her that very night of their marriage: in the morning take Audrey to her.

But at that she broke down utterly—betraying for the first time the flood and tempest of her agony at losing him and, while he strove to soothe her, imploring him not to put upon her this last trial of her strength. "I couldn't bear it, Roly!" she sobbed. "Roly, I couldn't bear it!" Overwrought by the cumulative effects of the past months, culminating in the sleepless agony of this last week and now in the unendurable torture of good-by, she became hysterical at his proposal; sobbed as if her reason were gone, shaking with dreadful spasms of emotion that terrified him lest she would be unable to retake her breath. His arms about her, and his loving pleadings, his earnest promises to withdraw what he had said, joined with the sheer weariness of her convulsive distress at last to relieve her. She passed into a still, exhausted state and thence—utterly alarming him by her deathly pallor and by the faintness of her voice—into imploring him in whispers into the last, worst folly of all their pitiable blunders. She could not be left, she implored him, with Gran—left alone with her, left in such circumstances. "No, no! Roly, no! Together, Roly; not alone, not alone!" And then she began to assure him of her happiness if she might just wait here. "You can always think of me and imagine me here: just waiting for you, and thinking of you and praying for you; and not lonely, not unhappy. I promise not lonely; I promise, promise not unhappy! You can't think of me like that if you leave me with Lady Burdon. You don't know what may happen to me; how she may feel towards me or what I might imagine she felt and what I might not do. I could not—I could not!"

Try to understand him that he suffered himself to be convinced against himself. So placed; so implored; so loved and so loving; so shackled by the train of blunders he had committed, a hundred times more wise, more strong a man than twelfth Baron Burdon would have given way as he gave way. This was their farewell, and not to rob its fleeting hours more he agreed, and turned with her to rehearse the plans for her comfort in his absence. The flat was taken for six months ahead. "Back in four! Now I bet you any money I'm back in four!" There was money banked for her. Finally he wrote and gave her two letters, one addressed to a Mr. Pemberton—"One of the best, old Pemberton"—the other to Gran. He began to say, "If anything happens to me," but went on: "If ever you get—you know—down on your luck—that kind of thing—or feel you'd like to make it known about us before I come back, just send those letters—just as they are; you needn't write or take them yourself. They explain everything, they ... oh, don't cry.... Audrey ... Audrey!"

Within a few hours he was gone. Within four months they were building a cairn of stones above him to keep the jackals from his body.

CHAPTER IV

WHAT THE TOOO-FIRTY WINNER BROUGHT MRS. ERPS

I

Come to her in the month of January. Bridge those long weeks wherein she lived from mail day to mail day—as one not strong that has a weary mile to cover and walks from seat to seat—and come to her there.

She was at this time not in good health, suffered much from headaches and was oppressed with a constant fatigue. In this condition fresh air without exertion had become very desirable to her, and she formed the daily habit of long rides outside the leisurely horsed tramcars of those days. Study of a guide acquainted her with their routes. She had a particular one for each day of the week, counting from Saturday to Friday, and arranged on a little plan by which (as she made believe) each journey was part of a long journey whose end was Friday's ride, whence she returned home to find the Indian mail. Not only fresh air was obtained by this means, but a sense of actively advancing towards the day that brought the letters, round which she lived.

On an afternoon of this January her ride was from Holborn, through Islington and Holloway, to Highgate Archway. On the near side of the Holloway road, half a mile perhaps below the stopping place, there is a group of houses approached by shallow steps that have resisted the overpowering inclination of the district to become shops and instead support their tenants by providing apartments. The car that carried her had stopped here. She had learnt to eke out the amusement of these rides by attention to all manner of little incidents, and—employed with one such—was wondering if her car would restart before it was reached by a newsboy who ran towards them from the distance, his pink contents-bill fluttering apronwise before him. Some one was a terribly long time over the business of alighting or entering. The newsboy won. A few yards from where she sat above him he stopped to sell a paper and to fumble for change. The halt caused his fluttering pink apron to come to rest.

PEER
KILLED IN
FRONTIER
FIGHTING

Had something actually struck her throat? Was a hand actually strangling there? Could they see she was fighting for breath? Was the car really rocking—right up so she could not see the street, right down and all the street circling? Could others hear that shrill and enormous din that threatened to split her brain?

Through the tremendous hubbub and the dizzy rocking she got down. If this strangle at her throat did not relax, if this dizzy whirling did not cease, this immense din silence....

A curious voice, leagues away, said: "Yer've got ter pye fer it, y'know."

She put her fingers in her purse and held out what she could gather. A figure that had been going up and down in front of her seemed to take a tremendous sidelong sweep and vanished. She was left with a paper in her hands and knew what she must do. But if this din, this giddy circling....

It suddenly stopped. Everything stopped. There was not a sound, there was not a movement.

II

London stands stock still in the middle of a windy, crowded pavement to open its evening paper and to peer at the stop-press space for only one particular purpose. While she thus stood and peered (and suddenly knew this icy silence was the gathering of an immense tide that was coming—coming) a woman who wore an apron over a capitally developed figure, and a rakish cloth cap over a headful of curl papers, opened the door of the house immediately beside her (appearing with the air of one shot at immense velocity out of a trap) and called "I! Piper!" She then exclaimed nearly as loudly "Ennoyin'!" and then saw Audrey.

This lady's name was Mrs. Erps, and she knew perfectly well, and rejoiced to observe an example of, the peculiarity in regard to London's evening paper that has been noted above. Mrs. Erps rolled her solid hands in her apron and came down ingratiatingly. A model of correctness. "Excoose me, my dear," she began, "Excoose me, wot 'orse won the tooo-firty? My old man—Ho, thenks, I'm sure—Ho, gryshus!"

Relating the incident later in the evening to a lady friend, and acting it with considerable dramatic power: "'Ands me the piper she does," said Mrs. Erps, "as natural as I 'ands this apring to you and then looks at me jus' as if I mightn't had been there, and then she says in a whissiper 'Oh, dear!' she says. 'O Gawd!' and dahn she goes plump—dahn like that!" explained Mrs. Erps from the floor, very nearly carrying her friend with her in the stress of dramatic illustration.

But Mrs. Erps was more than a great tragedy actress; she was also a kindly soul and there is to be added to this quality the genial warmth aroused in her by the fact that the tooo-firty winner was Lollipop, that Lollipop had cantered home at what she called sevings, and that her old man was seving times arf a dollar the richer for the performance. "Carry 'er in there," said Mrs. Erps in a very loud voice to a policeman in particular and to a considerable area of the street in general. "Young man, that's my 'ouse, and Mrs. Elbert Erps my nime, and dahn in front of it the pore young thing's fell jus' as she was 'anding me this very piper wot 'ad come aht to see the tooo-firty winner. 'Excoose me,' I says to 'er, 'excoose me—'"

The policeman: "All right, mother. Now, then, you boys."

Mrs. Elbert Erps, going backwards up the steps, hands beneath the arms of that poor stricken creature: "There's a cleeng, sweet bed in my first front, well-haired and wool blenkits, that lets eight and six and find yer own, and could ask ten, and there she'll rest, the poor pretty thing, dropped on me very doorstep, as yer might say, and standin' there with the piper same as you might. 'Excoose me,' I says to 'er, 'excoose me—'"

Mrs. Erps shot open her front door with a backward plunge of her foot, the policeman closed it with a backward kick of his foot; and to the continued recital in great detail of how it all happened, their burden was carried to the first front and laid upon the cleeng, sweet bed, well-haired, wool blenkits, eight and six and find yer own.

They loosened her dress at her throat; beneath the constable's direction made use of water and chafed her hands. "Marrit," said Mrs. Erps, denoting the wedding ring. "Marrit, she is."

Presently Audrey opened her eyes.

"Why, there you are!" cried Mrs. Erps in high delight. "There you are, my pretty. Safe and sahnd as ever you was. There you are! You recolleck me, don't you, my love? Wot you gave the piper to? 'Excoose me,' I says to yer, 'excoose me,' I says—"

Audrey's eyes went meaninglessly from Mrs. Erps to the constable, her eyelids fluttered above them and closed.

"Stand aht of it!" said Mrs. Erps to the constable in a very sharp whisper. "Stand aht of it, frightenin' her. 'E won't 'urt you, my pretty. 'E only carried of yer up. Dahn you went, yer know, right dahn. Where's your 'usbing, my pretty?"

Her lips just parted. She moaned "Oh, dear! O God!"

Mrs. Erps communicated to the constable: "Jus' 'er very words. Dahn she went—"

The eyes opened again.

"Your 'usbing, dear, I'm askin'. 'Usbing. Ain't you got a ma, my dear? Ain't you got a pa?"

She said: "Dead ... dead ... Oh, dear..."

"Orfing," communicated Mrs. Erps.

"Rambling in her mind," said the constable. "Not answering you, she wasn't."

"You pop off, young man," commanded Mrs. Erps with sudden hostility. "Ramberling! Didn't I ask her, and didn't she give answer back to me? Ramberling! You pop off. I'll fine where she lives, and my old man 'll come to the station if so need be. 'E ain't afraid of yer, so don't you think it. Served on a joory, he has, before now. Ramberling! I'm going to rub 'er pore feet. That's what I'm goin' to do. Ramberling! She knows me as spoke 'er fair before ever you came. 'Excoose me,' I says to her, 'excoose me—'"

The policeman, from the door: "Yes, I've heard that."

Mrs. Erps, bending over the stairs: "Pop off! That's what I'm telling you. Pop off!"

III

Mrs. Erps rubbed the "pore feet," put a hot bottle to them, covered the poor, motionless form with two of the wool blenkits, called up her old man when he came in; and in his presence and in that of the lady second floor lodger and the young man first back lodger, trembling with witnessed honesty, she opened the pretty dear's purse and searched her pocket for any clue to her home. There was none. Mrs. Erps, having counted the money in the purse, written down the amount and had the paper signed by her old man, by second floor and by first back, bade them pop off, and sat beside her patient with soothing words and frequently a kiss to the reiterated "Oh, dear ... oh, dear ... O God!" that came in scarcely audible sighs as from one numbed with pain and utterly tired.

So, only now and then sighing, eyes closed, she lay for close upon three hours. Mrs. Erps stole away to cook up a nice bit of fried fish for 'er old man, revisiting the first front at intervals, waiting to hear that weary moan, and returning down-stairs increasingly troubled with: "I don't like to hear her. Fair wrings my 'art, it does."

A visit paid towards seven o'clock was better rewarded. Audrey opened her eyes, looked full and intelligently at Mrs. Erps, standing there with a lighted candle, and quite naturally addressed her. She questioned nothing. She seemed fully to understand where she was and why. In tones weak but quite clear and collected she made two requests. Please let her stay here for the night and leave her quite alone; she wanted nothing, just to be alone; and please send a telegram for her.

She dictated the message and it was sent—to Maggie, and with Mrs. Erps' address added, and running: "Please come at once. He is dead. Audrey."

IV

Miss Oxford arrived in the early afternoon of the next day. All the devotion of the years she had mothered Audrey, all the longing—longing—longing of the past months for news, all the agony of suspense in the train journey (the papers informing her as they informed new Lady Burdon at Miller's Field), all a breaking heart's distress was in the little cry she gave when she entered first front and saw that strangely white, strangely impassive face lying on the pillow.

"My darling! Oh, my darling"—arms about the still form, tears raining down.

No responsive movement; just "Dear Maggie—dear Maggie."

"Why did you never write?"

"Dear Maggie..."

There was no more of explanation between them.

"Maggie, I want to be quite, quite still. Not to talk, Maggie darling. Just hold my hand and let me lie here. Are you holding it?"

"Audrey! Audrey! Yes—yes. In both mine."

"I don't feel you."

She seemed to feel nothing, to want nothing, and, though she lay now with wide eyes, to see nothing. She just lay, scarcely seeming to breathe. Once she said, in a very fond voice, "Yes, Roly," as if she were in conversation with him. No other sound.

After a long time Maggie told her: "Darling, I'm going to bring a doctor to see you."

No reply nor movement when Maggie released the hand she held and left the room to seek Mrs. Erps. No interest nor response when the doctor came, or while he examined her. He took Maggie aside. "She's very young. How long has she been married?"

"In June—the first of June."

They spoke in whispers. When he was going, he repeated what he had most impressed. "No fear of it happening so far as I can see. She doesn't seem in pain. That numbness? Mental. Her mind is too occupied. I don't think movement would bring it on; but don't move her yet. We mustn't run risks. It would be fatal—almost certainly fatal if it happened. Another shock would do it; nothing else, I think. Well, there's no likelihood of shock, is there? You can guard against that. See to that and you've no need to worry. She couldn't possibly live through it in her present state. Otherwise—why, we'll soon be on the right road and getting strong for it. I'll look in to-night."

This was in the passage, and with Mrs. Erps in waiting at the front door rehearsing in her mind: "As I was telling you when you come, doctor, 'Excoose me,' I says to 'er, 'excoose me—'" But what Mrs. Erps overheard caused her to let him escape and to say instead to Miss Oxford, "Oh, the pore love! If any one makes a sahnd to shock 'er—not if I knows it, they don't."

Mrs. Erps knew quite well the meaning of that recurrent "it" in the doctor's words.

V

But it was not in Mrs. Erps's power to prevent the shock that came.

It came in direct train of action from that "Yes, Roly" that Maggie had heard, separated from it by the days of high fever, the mind wandering, that almost immediately supervened. As one that falls asleep upon a resolution and wakes at once to remember it and to act upon it, so, the fever releasing her to her senses, Audrey took up immediately that which lay in those words of hers.

She had fallen into a natural sleep that promised the end of her fever. She awoke, and directly she awoke sat up in bed. She was alone. Only the one thought was in her mind; she got up and began to dress.

The resolution of her mind governed the extreme weakness of her body. She was no more aware of her feebleness than one strung up in battle notices a wound not immediately crippling. She knew exactly what she must do. She found her purse on the mantelpiece and took it and left the house without being noticed—or thinking to escape or to give notice. Only that one thought occupied her; a few yards down the street she met a cab and hailed it. "Burdon House, Mount Street," she directed the driver.

"Yes, Roly," had been when Roly, visiting her more clearly, more real than any other figure about her during that numb and impassive period when she desired to be quiet in order to talk with him, had told her to go to Gran, to comfort Gran, and to be comforted.

VI

Old butler Noble admitted her. Events had caused old butler Noble to be considerably shaken in his wits. A week ago the door would have been closed to a young woman who asked for Lady Burdon and refused her name. To-day, on the explanation, "The name does not matter. Lady Burdon will be glad to see me," it was held open and the visitor taken to the library.

This was the second day of new Lord and Lady Burdon's visit for the latter to make Jane Lady Burdon's acquaintance. Only that morning old butler Noble had made the mistake of turning away a Miller's Field friend who had called to see new Lady Burdon, carrying out a promise to report how baby Rollo, left behind, was getting on. "Her ladyship is seeing no one," Noble had informed her. The excellent Miller's Field friend had been too overawed by his manner to explain exactly whom it was she wished to see. She sent a note of explanation by messenger. Noble delivered it to his mistress, who read it and sent him with it to new Lady Burdon. The note was foolishly worded. New Lady Burdon, ill at ease in this house, crimsoned to think it had been read. From the outset, hostile and prepared for hostility, she had taken a sharp dislike to this old man-servant; angry and mortified, she questioned him and spoke to him as he was unaccustomed to be addressed.

It was beneath the lesson of this incident that he admitted Audrey without question. She was none of his mistress's friends. In the first place he knew all such; in the second they did not call at the impossible hour of half-past six in the evening, nor present the strange appearance—white, not very steady, faltering in voice—that she bore.

He took the news of her arrival to new Lady Burdon.

"Gave no name, do you say?"

"She said your ladyship would be glad to see her."

Lady Burdon hesitated a moment. She tingled with fresh hostility against this man because she wondered whether he expected her to accept that statement or to send him again for the name. She did not know and hated him the more, and hated all the fancied resentment for which he stood, because she did not know.

Her mind sought a way out. She said with a little laugh: "Oh, I think I know. Very well."

She went to the library.

CHAPTER V

WHAT AUDREY BROUGHT LADY BURDON

I

It was very dim in the library. Above the centre of the room light stood in soft points upon a high chandelier. A fire burnt low within the shelter of the great hearth. The rest was shadow.

Lady Burdon came easily into the room, but in the doorway stopped; and Audrey, who had made a forward movement, prepared words on her lips, also stopped. There was something odd about this girl who stood there, Lady Burdon thought, and her mind ran questing the cause of some strange apprehension that somehow was communicated to it. There was something wrong, Audrey thought; and she began to tremble. For a briefest space, that was a world's space to Audrey's mind bewildered and to Lady Burdon's mind suspicious, as they went hunting through it, these two stood thus, and thus regarded one another.

It was told of this library at Burdon House—Mr. Amber's "Lives" record it—that in the days when gentlemen wore swords against their thighs, a duel was fought here, that the thing went in three fierce assaults, each ended by a bloody thrust on this side or on that, and that between the bouts the rivals panted, sick with fatigue and hurt.

Words for swords, and the first bout:—

Lady Burdon closed the door. She went a step towards Audrey and said, "Yes?"

Audrey, with fumbling hands, swaying a little where she stood: "I think—I came to see Lady Burdon."

Odd her look, and odd her tone, and strange the trembling that visibly possessed her. Lady Burdon was about to explain. Her mind came back from its questing like one that cries alarm by night through silent streets. "Beware!" it cried to her. "Beware!" and for her explanation she substituted:

"I am Lady Burdon."

The first thrust.

Audrey put a hand against a chair that stood beside her. The trembling that had taken her when, expecting to see Roly's Gran, this stranger had appeared, began to shake her terribly in all her frame. This Lady Burdon? For the first time since her will had got her from her bed and brought her here, she was informed how weak she was. A dreadful physical sickness came over her and all the room became unsteady.

Respite enough, and the second bout:—

Lady Burdon demanded: "Who are you, please?"

No reply, and that augmented her suspicion, and she came on again: "Who are you, please?"

Wave upon wave that dreadful sickness swept over Audrey and set her brain aswim. Bewildered thoughts, like frantic arms of one that drowns, tossed up upon the flood, and like such arms that gesticulate and vanish, spun there a dizzy moment and spun away: This Lady Burdon? ... then this not Roly's house ... then what? ... then where? This Lady Burdon? ... then all her life with Roly was dream ... had never been ... none of her life had ever been ... what had been then?

A third time: "Who are you, please? Why do you not answer me?"

She made an effort. She said very pitiably: "Oh, how—oh, how can you be Lady Burdon?"

No wound—only the merest scratch, but increasing in Lady Burdon the dis-ease that had come to her on entering the room and had heightened at every moment.

In her turn it was hers to give pause, but she engaged quickly for the third bout.

"I see you do not understand," she said.

And Audrey: "Oh, please forgive me. No, I do not understand; I have been ill. I am ill."

"But I am afraid I do not understand you. I do not understand your manner. If you will tell me who you are—what it is you want—I can perhaps explain."

But Audrey only looked at her. Only most pitiable inquiry was in her eyes. Lady Burdon read their inquiry, that same "Oh, how can you be Lady Burdon?" and the question and the silence brought vague, unreasoning alarm in violent collision with her suspicions. Anger was struck out of their conjunction. She said sharply:

"You must answer me, please. You must answer me. What is the matter? I am asking you who you are."

Mr. Amber's account of the duel says that one contestant drove the other the length of the room and had him pinned against the wall:—

Into Audrey's bewilderment, the dreadful sickness and the trembling she could not control, these sharp demands came like numbing blows upon one in the trough of the sea grappling for life. When Roly had come to her as she lay stupefied and she had answered him "Yes, Roly," he had told her clearly as if in fact he had stood beside her, what she should say to Gran. She had come with the words prepared. They suddenly returned to her now.

The words she had made ready: "I am Audrey—" she said.

Mr. Amber's account of the duel says that the one contestant, having his rival pinned, was too impetuous and ran upon the other's sword:—

Lady Burdon said: "Audrey? Do you say Audrey? Are you known here?"

And ran upon the other's sword:—

"I am Audrey—I am Roly's wife."

II

As a dreadful blow sends the stricken, hands to face, staggering this way and that on nerveless, aimless legs; or as a tipsy man, unbalanced by fresh air, will blunder into any open door, so, at that "I am Audrey—I am Roly's wife"—Lady Burdon's mind was sent reeling, fumbling through a maze of spinning scenes—marriage? and what then?—before it could fix itself to realisation.

She stood plucking with one hand at the fingers of the other; and when the whirl subsided and she came dizzily out of it her mind was leaden and the first words she could get from it were none she wanted.

Her voice all thick: "He was not married," she said.

The reply, very gentle: "We did not tell any one."

And to that nothing better than "Why?"

"Roly did not wish it."

Thick and heavy still: "Why do you come now?"

And Audrey in a little cry: "Because he is dead!"

Then Lady Burdon said dully: "You had better go," and at the bewilderment that came into Audrey's eyes repeated more strongly: "You had better go—quickly;" and then "Quickly!" with her voice run up on the word, and her hands that had been plucking flung apart.

Her mind was over its numbness and through the whirl of nightmare meanings in that "I am Roly's wife;" and it came out of them as one shaken by a fall and strung up for vengeance. Marriage! Impossible! And she a fool to be frightened by it—at worst a horrid aftermath of disgusting conduct.

"Quickly!" she cried and then burst out with: "I see what you are—to come at such a time—to this house of mourning—he scarcely dead—with such a story—wicked—infamous—I know, I see now why you were surprised to see me—an old lady you expected—grief-stricken—"

She stopped, achoke for breath, and Audrey said: "Oh, please—please."

Misgiving, that subtle, coward spy that spies the way for fear, cast its net over Lady Burdon. The pleading, gentle air—no flush of shame, no note of defiance hunted her mind back to its alarms. And Audrey said: "He did not wish our marriage known;" and at "marriage" misgiving turned and shouted fear to follow.

She said slowly: "You persist marriage? There are proofs of marriage. Where are your proofs?"

The pleading look only deepened: "But I never thought—" Audrey said, "—but I never thought—" She swayed, and swayed against the chair she held. It supported her. "I never thought I would not be believed. Lady Burdon will understand. I know she will understand. If I may see her, please..."

"If you were married—proofs."

There was a considerable space before Audrey answered. Presently she said very faintly:

"I am very ill ... I am very ill ... I can bring proofs.... But she will understand.... Please let me see her.... Please, please..."

In advertisement of her state her eyelids fluttered and fell upon her eyes while she spoke. Her voice was scarcely to be heard.

Her condition made no appeal to Lady Burdon. The simplicity of her words, her simple acceptance of the challenge to bring proofs, returned Lady Burdon to that dull plucking at her hands; and presently she turned and went heavily across the room and through the door, closed it behind her and went a few paces down the hall—to what? At that question she stopped, and at the answer her mind gave went quickly back to the door and stood there breathing fast. What was shut in here? A monstrous thing come to strike her down as suddenly as miracle had come to snatch her up? And where had she been going? To publish it? To impel the horrible fate it might have for her? To say to old Lady Burdon and to Maurice: "There is a woman here who says she was married to Lord Burdon?" To say what would spring into their minds as it tore like a wild thing at hers:—"Yes, if marriage, a child ... an heir?" At thought of how narrowly she had escaped the results of that action, she trembled as one trembles that in darkness has come to the edge of a cliff and by a single further step had plunged to destruction; and at imagination of the bitterness, the humiliation that would be hers if the worst were realised and she returned from what she had become to worse than she had been, she writhed in torture of spirit that was like twisting poison in her vitals. All her plans, all her dreams, all her sweet foretasting sprang up before her, mocking her; all the intolerable sympathy of her friends, all the secret laughter it would hide, came at her, twisting her.

Somewhere in the house a door opened and shut. She put a hand violently to her throat, as though the shock of the sound were a blow that struck her there. She found herself braced against the door, guarding it; listening for footsteps, and strung up to keep away whoever came. Silence! But the attitude into which she had sprung informed her of the determination that had shaped unperceived beneath the tumult of her thoughts. She was not going to fall beneath the blow that threatened her! When she knew that, she was calmer, and set herself to satisfy her fears. What was shut in here? A wanton.... Wanton? Who never flushed, never railed, defied? A betrayed, then. Well, what was that to her, and how was she concerned? A betrayed? Who came with no story of betrayal that might or might not be, but with assertion of marriage that was capable of definite proof or disproof? Marriage? Impossible! A lie! Impossible? There came to her recollection of that strange disappearance of which Mr. Pemberton had told; was marriage the secret of it? There swept back to her that vivid and hideous nightmare on the very night of the news when she had cried "I hold!" and had been answered: "No, you do not—nay, I hold." Was that foreboding? There flamed before her again the mock of her plans, the humiliation of her downfall. She struck her clenched hands together; and as if the violent action caused an assembly of her arguments, she reduced her position to this: either the thing was true, in which case it could be proved; or it was a lie, in which case no consideration recommended her to do other than keep it to herself and herself stamp upon it.

That satisfied her and she reëntered the room to act upon it.

Audrey was on her knees by the chair. The sight shook her satisfaction. Wanton? Betrayed? A lie?

Audrey turned towards her: "I have been praying," she said. She got to her feet and came forward a step: "She is coming to see me?"

Lady Burdon said: "I have told her. She will not see you."

She was committed. She stood agonisingly strung up in every fibre, as one that waits an appalling catastrophe. She saw Audrey wring her hands and heard her moan "Oh ... Oh!"

She heard her own voice say: "You can bring your proofs." She had, as it were, a vision of herself opening the street door and watching Audrey pass her and go down the steps and out of sight. She was only actually returned to herself when she found herself, as one awaking who has walked in sleep, striving to make her trembling hands close the latch of the door.

CHAPTER VI

ARRIVAL OF THE HAPPY WARRIOR

I

The driver of a four-wheeled cab, crawling down Mount Street, pushed along his horse when he saw Audrey walking with very slow and uncertain steps ahead of him. He drew into pace alongside her and began to repeat: "Keb? Keb, miss—keb,—keb?" with a persistence and regularity that suggested it was the normal sound of his breathing.

She stopped and stared at him in a dazed way. He pulled up and went on quite contentedly: "Keb?—Keb, miss—keb,—keb?" His voice and his keb came presently into her realisation. There returned to her knowledge of what she purposed. Her thoughts seemed to her to be drifting shapes, and this one had floated away and she had been trying to reach it—hanging there just above her—while she stared at him. She gave him the address of the Knightsbridge flat and presently was driving there and presently going up the stairs, very slowly, taking her key from her purse, and then entering.

The flat was in extraordinary confusion. She did not notice. The woman who came daily to attend her wants had come twice to find her not returned, and a third time with a gentleman friend (on tiptoe), taking a stealthy and permanent departure an hour later with everything that could be conveniently carried. The back of a drawer in a bureau had not received this lady's attention. It contained all that Audrey had come to seek: a box of carved wood, picked up on the Continent. Those two letters Roly had given her for Mr. Pemberton and Gran were here. Her mind had turned to them when she had realised the thing that had never occurred to her: that she would not be believed. Here also was her marriage certificate and all the letters Roly had written her—before marriage and from India.

She took up the box and began to retrace her steps. She had scarcely got down the stairs when dizziness seized her again. The dreadful sickness and the trembling that the shock of her first encounter with Lady Burdon had caused her had been stamped out by the final blow that made her wring her hands and cry "Oh ... oh!" and had sent her numbed from the house and carried her numbed to this point. Her physical senses had been drugged, just as they had been hypnotised by the instruction to which she had answered "Yes, Roly." Now they were suddenly released from the kindness of the drug. Dizziness—and while all things spun about her—pain. It caught her with a violence so immense that she believed her body could not contain it and would go asunder. It drove her, as it seemed to her, through unconsciousness and into a state in which she met it again with a quality in its sharpness that she knew for death, as if she recognised death. It dropped her back from where she had seen death, through the degree of its first immensity, and down to a gnawing that told her it was gathering force to rush up again and this time leave her there—gone. In that respite she got to the cab. She would die at the next onslaught—Maggie! If Maggie could hold her when it came! She did not know the address in the Holloway Road; but knew it was there, and a butcher's with a strange name—Utter—had caught her attention opposite when she left the house. She tried to tell the driver, but her condition overcame her speech. He saw her state and jumped down to her, and she called tremendously upon herself and effected the words. He more lifted than helped her in, and she continued to hold herself until he got back to his box, then collapsed groaning.

The cabman pulled up opposite the establishment of Mr. Utter and had scarcely stopped his horse when from Mrs. Erps's house came Mrs. Erps, plunging down the steps, and Miss Oxford, who stopped at the entrance, not daring to come on. Mrs. Erps peered through the cab window and then called back to Miss Oxford. "Told yer it was. Safe and sahnd!" and began to tug at the handle and sharply addressed the cabman: "Ho, ain't you got a nasty stiff door!" and cried through the window: "Why, there you are, my dear! Popping off like you hadn't ought to, give us a fair ole turn!" and flung open the door and said, "Ho, dear!" and turned a frightened face to Maggie, come beside her.

The open door revealed how Audrey was collapsed, and showed the hue of ashes that her face had, and gave the groaning that came from her.

Miss Oxford went to her. "Audrey! ... dying! She is dying!"

By common understanding they began to try to carry her out. The cabman leant over from his box and presently saw Mrs. Erps come backing out with violent movements and suddenly had her fist shaken in his surprised face. "'Old your old 'orse, carng yer!" Mrs. Erps cried furiously. "Joltin' of us! 'Old your old catsmeat, carng yer!" She plunged round to the further door, and through that they lifted her whose groaning terrified them utterly, carried her up-stairs, and for the second time she was laid on the cleeng blenkits, well haired, eight an six and find yer own.

All Mrs. Erps's breath—no policeman to assist her—was this time required for the exertion. But when their burden was laid she voiced the extremity to which it was clearly come. "'Ad er shock, she 'as," said Mrs. Erps. "Some one's done it on 'er."

"Oh, bring the doctor," Miss Oxford cried. "Quick! Quick! Oh, my God ... my God!"

She did what she could while Mrs. Erps was gone. She was praying, when her prayer was so far answered that Audrey recognised her. "Maggie..." and then "I am dying—forgive," and then caught up in her pains again while Maggie cried: "Don't! Don't! It is for you to forgive me; you will be all right soon—very soon." The pains drew off a little. Audrey began to speak very faintly. "I went to Lady Burdon—" Very feebly she told what had happened and Maggie, who had begged her, "Darling, don't talk—don't worry," listened as one that is held aghast. When the slow words failed, she did not at once realise that Audrey's voice had stopped. Mrs. Erps and the doctor found her kneeling by the still form with strangely staring, unweeping eyes.

"She has had a shock," the doctor began.

"They have killed her," Miss Oxford said.

Bending over the patient he did not notice her words nor the intensity of their tone; and there began to come very quickly a dreadful urgency that caused agony of grief to override the agony of hate that had possessed her.

There was a thin, new cry went up in the room: and that was life newly come. And there was heavy breathing with dreadful pause at each expiration's end and then the straining upward climb: and that was life fluttering to be gone. Longer the pauses grew and harsher the upward breath. Loud the thin cry struck in, and as though it called that fleeting life, and as though that fleeting life, in the act of springing away, turned its head at the sound, Audrey opened her eyes.

There seemed to be a question in them. Miss Oxford bent closely over her: "A boy, my darling."

She seemed to smile before she died.

CHAPTER VII

ENLISTMENT OF THE HAPPY WARRIOR

I

That day of Audrey's death was in two minds at two breakfasts in different quarters of London on a morning some while later. In the Mount Street house Jane Lady Burdon, starting in an hour to make her home with her sister in York, was reading to Lord and Lady Burdon a letter just received from India. It was a sympathetic note from the officer who had been with her Roly when he fell. "'His last words,'" she read aloud with faltering lips, "'were: Tell Gran to love Audrey. It was difficult to catch them, but I think that was it.'"

Jane Lady Burdon laid down the letter and smiled feebly. "They have no meaning for me," she said.

And Lord Burdon: "Nellie! What's up, old girl?"

Lady Burdon struggled with the dreadful agitation the words had caused her. They had meaning for her. "I am Audrey—I am Roly's wife."

"So sad," she exclaimed, "so sad—excuse me—I—" She rose shakily and went from the room. After two days of suspense she had thought that hideous alarm defeated and disproved. What now? And what had she done?

The other breakfast was at Mrs. Erps's—also immediately before a journey. "No one," Mrs. Erps had said, "no one hadn't oughter travel on a nempty stomach," and had forced Miss Oxford to the table before the start for Little Letham and "Post Offic." "I know you've had bitter trouble as loved the pretty dear meself ever since 'Excoose me,' I says to 'er, 'excoose me,' as I've told yer. An' Gord alone knows I know what trouble is, as 'ad twings of me own pop off in one mumf. But you've got the living for to think of. Same as I 'ad my ole man, you've got this blessed ingfang what never know'd a muvver's breast and took to the bottle like nothing I never did see."

And to the blessed "infang" reposing in her arms while she talked: "Didn't yer, yer saucy sossidge? That's what you are, yer know—a saucy sossidge. Ho, yes yer are. No use yer giving answer back ter me, yer know. A saucy, saucy sossidge, wot I should cook up with mashed if I had me way with yer, bless yer."

Maggie scarcely heard; but there was one sentence of Mrs. Erps that joined her thoughts: "You've got the living for to think of." Yes, she had that—and the dead to revenge. "They have killed her," she had cried to the doctor. Through the long night, when she knelt beside the still figure, that thought had burned within her and refused her tears. It grew to an intolerable agony that pressed upon her brain as though a band of steel were there. She understood what had bewildered Audrey—who it had been that had said "I am Lady Burdon." Her imagination pictured the woman. An orgasm of most terrible hate possessed her, increasing that dreadful pressure on her brain, and suddenly something seemed to her to have given way beneath the pressure.

Hate or passion of that degree never filled her again. She was strangely quiet in manner when Mrs. Erps came to her in the morning, strangely quiet at the funeral in Highgate Cemetery while Mrs. Erps wept in loud emotion, and always quite quiet in mind. The child was going to live, she was somehow fully assured of that, and she was not going to give him up—her Audrey's child—as, if she spoke, she might have to give him up. He was going to live with her at "Post Offic" and take his mother's place; and one day.... They had taken Audrey from her. One day she would return to them Audrey's son. "I am Lady Burdon" had murdered Audrey. One day, when "I am Lady Burdon" was secure and comfortable in her possessions, and had forgotten Audrey, Audrey's son should avenge his mother....

Nothing could go wrong, Miss Oxford thought. She went through all the proofs in the carved box. Nothing was wanting. One day she would hand them to him—and then!

She wrote to her friend, Miss Purdie, at Little Letham, who had been taking care of "Post Offic" for her and told her—for the village information—that Audrey had lost her husband, and, on the shock, had died, in giving birth to a son. "I have called him Percival—his father's name—Percival Redpath."

"Look arter yerself," cried Mrs. Erps, as the train drew out of Waterloo. "Look arter yerself. Can't not look arter him if yer don't—and 'e 'll want lookin' arter, 'e will. 'E's going ter be a knockaht, that's what 'e's going to be, ain't yer, yer saucy sossidge! Sossidge! Goo'by, sossidge. Goo'by...."

BOOK THREE

BOOK OF THE HAPPY, HAPPY TIME.
THE ELEMENT OF YOUTH

CHAPTER I

PERCIVAL HAS A PEEP AT THE 'NORMOUS

I

Young Percival was seven—rising eight—when he first saw Burdon Old Manor. Miss Oxford had taken him for a walk, and they were in the direction of the Manor grounds, a locality she commonly avoided, when "There's a cart coming!" he warned her. He had lagged behind, exploring in a dry ditch; and he raced up to her with the news, catching her hand and drawing her to the hedge, for she had been walking in the middle of the road, occupied with her thoughts.

Percival had learnt to be accustomed to long silences in his Aunt Maggie and to rescue her from them when need arose. They were familiar, too, to all the villagers and to the "help" who was now required for the domestic work of "Post Offic." Not the same but a very different Miss Oxford had returned to "Post Offic" seven years ago, bringing the news of poor, pretty Miss Audrey's loss of husband and death, and bringing the little mite that was born orphan, bless him. A very different Miss Oxford, for whose characteristic alertness there was substituted a profound quietness, a notable air of absence, preoccupation. It was held by the villagers that she had gone a little bit strange-like. Her sister's death, it was thought, had made her a little touched-like. The "help," a gaunt and stern creature named Honor, who largely devoted herself to bringing up Percival on a system of copy-book and devotional maxims which had become considerably mixed in her mind, called her mistress's lapses into long silence symptoms of an "incline," and in kindly, rough fashion sought to rally her from them. Percival, nearest the truth, called them "thinking." When Aunt Maggie lapsed into such a mood, he would often stand by her, watching her face doubtfully and rather wistfully, with his head a little on one side. Presently he would give a little sigh and run off to his play. It was as though he puzzled to know what occupied her, as though he had some dim, unshaped idea which, while he stood watching, he tried to formulate—and the then little sigh: he could not discover it—yet.

What was clear was that nothing ever aroused Aunt Maggie from her strange habit of mind; and that at least is symptom of a dangerous melancholy. What was plain was that her fits of complete, of utter abstraction, embraced her like a sudden physical paralysis in the midst of even an energetic task or an absorbing conversation; and that at least is sign of a lesion somewhere in the faculty of self-control. She divided her time between those periods of "thinking" and an intense devotion to Percival; and the two phases acted directly one upon the other. It was in the midst of loving occupation with the child, that, perhaps at some look in his eyes, perhaps at some note in his voice, abstraction would suddenly strike down upon her; it was from the very depth of such abstraction that she would suddenly start awake and go to find Percival or, he being near her, would take him almost violently into her arms.

II

In characteristic keeping with this habit, her action when now he ran to her and drew her from the roadway with his cry, "There's a cart coming! A cart, Aunt Maggie!" Her grey, gentle face and her sad eyes irradiated with a sudden colour and sudden light that advertised the affection with which, standing behind him to let the cart pass, she stooped down to him and kissed his glowing cheek—"Would I have been run over, do you think?"

Percival was eagerly awaiting the excitement of seeing the cart come into view around the bend whence it sounded. But he stretched up his hands to fondle her face. "Well, I believe you would, you know," he declared. "Of course they'd have shouted, but suppose the horse was bobbery and wouldn't stop?"

Aunt Maggie feigned alarm at this dreadful possibility. "Oh, but you're all right with me," Percival reassured her. He had a quaint habit of using phrases of hers. "I keep an eye on you, you know, even when I'm far behind."

She laughed and looked at him proudly; and she had reason for her pride. At seven—rising eight—Percival had fairly won through the vicissitudes of a motherless infancy. He had come through a lusty babyhood and was sprung into an alert and beautiful childhood, dowered of his father's strong loins, of his mother's gentle fairness, that caused heads to turn after him as he raced about the village street.

Heads turned from the cart that now approached and passed. It proved to be a wagonette. Two women and a man sat among the many packages behind. On the box-seat, next the driver, was a lanky youth, peculiarly white and unhealthy of visage. Percival stared at him. In envy perhaps of the sturdy and glowing health of the starer, the lanky youth scowled back, and lowering his jaw pulled a grimace with an ease and repulsiveness that argued some practice. Turning in his seat, he allowed Percival to appreciate the distortion to the full.

This was that same Egbert Hunt, whose power of grimace opened, as it continues, our history.

Percival directed an interested face to Aunt Maggie. "Is that a clown sitting up there?" he asked her. He had accompanied Aunt Maggie into Great Letham on the previous day, and had been much engaged by the chalked countenance of a clown, grinning from posters of a coming circus.

Aunt Maggie answered him with her thoughts: "I think they must be going to the Manor, dear. I expect they are Lord Burdon's servants."

"Well, I'm sure he was a clown," Percival answered. But a few paces farther up the road, stepping into it from a footpath over the fields, a little old gentleman was met, whom Aunt Maggie greeted as Mr. Amber, and who verified her opinion.

"The family is coming down the day after to-morrow," Mr. Amber said, "as I was telling you last week. Servants are to arrive to-day. I think I saw them in the wagonette as I came down the path. And how are you, Master Percival? I hope you are very well."

Percival put his small hand into the extended palm. "I'm very well, Mr. Amber, thank you. One of them was a clown, you know. He made a face at me—like this."

"God bless my soul, did he indeed?" Mr. Amber exclaimed.

"Yes, he did," said Percival. "Just make it back again to me, will you please, so I can see if I showed you properly?"

But Mr. Amber declined the experiment. "The wind might change while I was doing it," he said, "and then I should be like that always."

"Oh, I shouldn't mind," Percival declared.

"But I should," said Mr. Amber, and poked Percival with his stick.

They were very close friends, Percival and this bent old librarian, permanently located at Burdon Old Manor in those days and a constant visitor at "Post Offic" for the purpose of enjoying the affection displayed in his silvery old face as it watched the glowing young countenance upturned to it. "But I should," said he; "and what would they think of me in there?"

Percival turned about. They had reached the boundary of the Manor grounds and he pointed through the trees. "Is that where you live, Mr. Amber?"

"Yes, I live in there. Look here, now, here's a nice thing! You're growing up nearly as big as me and you've never been to see me. That's not friendly, you know."

"Oh, but I've wanted to, you know," Percival cried. "We don't often come this way, you see, do we, Aunt Maggie?"

He bounded across the road to squint through the wooden paling that surrounds the Manor park, and Mr. Amber gave a little sigh and turned to Aunt Maggie.

"How Percival grows, Miss Oxford! And what a picture, what a picture! You know, he recalls to me walking these lanes twenty years ago, with just his counterpart in looks and spirits and charm—ah, well! dear me, dear me!" And he began to mumble to himself in the fashion of old people whose thoughts run more easily in the past than in the present, and to walk around poking with his stick in a fashion that was his own.

He referred to Roly, Aunt Maggie knew. "You never forget him, do you?" she said gently. She also was devoted to a memory. "You never forget him?"

"No—no," said Mr. Amber, poking around and not looking at her. "Certainly not—certainly not."

Percival's voice broke in upon them, announcing his observations through the fence. "I say, you've got a lovely garden to play in, you know," he called.

They turned from thoughts that had a common element to the bright young spirit in whom those thoughts found a not dissimilar relief.

"Well, it's not exactly my garden," Mr. Amber replied in his deliberate way. "I live there just like Honor lives with you. She looks after the cooking and I look after the books, eh? Would you like to see my books?"

"Picture books?"

"Why, yes, some have got pictures. Yes, there are pictures in some. And fine big rooms, Percival. You would like to see them."

Percival turned an excited face to Aunt Maggie, and Aunt Maggie smiled. He took Mr. Amber's hand. "Thank you very much indeed," he said. "I tell you what, then. I will see your books and then I think you will let me play in your garden, please, if you please?"

Mr. Amber declared that this was a very fair bargain. "Come in and have some tea, Miss Oxford. Mrs. Ferris will be glad to see you. She finds housekeeping very dull work, I am afraid, with only me to look after."

Aunt Maggie did not reply immediately. Percival looked at her anxiously. He observed signs of "thinking," and thinking might be fatal to this most engaging proposition. "If you possibly could, Aunt Maggie!" he pleaded.

But it was Mr. Amber's further argument that persuaded her. His words acutely entered the matter with which she was occupied. "You know, Percival must be the only soul in the countryside that hasn't seen the Manor," he urged. "It was the regular custom for any one who liked to come up in the old days. You recollect the Tenant Teas in the summer? Why, it's his right, I declare."

A little colour showed on her cheeks. "Yes, it is his right," she said.

III

Percival was to enjoy another right before the day was out. The decision to accept Mr. Amber's invitation once made, he had whooped ahead through the Manor gates and flashed up the long drive at play with a game of his own among the flanking trees. A noble turn in the avenue brought him within astonished gaze of the house, and, very flushed in the cheeks, he came racing back to his elders.

"I say, it's a perfectly 'normous house you live in, Mr. Amber."

"Aha!" cries old Mr. Amber, highly pleased. "I knew you would like it, Master Percival!"

"Why, I call it a castle!" Percival declares.

They turn the corner and Mr. Amber points with his stick. "Well, you're not quite wrong, either. That part—the East Wing we call that—you see how old that is? Almost a castle once, that. See those funny little marks? Used to be holes there to fire guns through. What do you think of that?"

Percival's face proclaims what he thinks—and his voice, deep with awe, says, "Fire them bang?"

"Bang? I should think so, indeed!"

"Who at?"

"Aha! Strange little boys, perhaps. I'll tell you all about it, if you'll come and see me sometimes."

Percival announces that he will come every single day, and runs eagerly up the five broad steps that lead to the great oak door, now standing ajar, and halts wonderingly upon the threshold to gaze around the spacious hall and up at the gallery that encircles it.

Aunt Maggie stops so abruptly and gives so strange a catch at her breath that Mr. Amber turns to look at her. Following her eyes, and reading what he fancies in them, "Why, he does make a brave little picture, standing there, doesn't he?" Mr. Amber says.

Her faint smile seems to assent. But she sees the child, framed in the fine doorway, as his father's son surveying for the first time the domain that is his own.

They join him on the threshold and he turns to them round-eyed. "Why, it's simply 'normous!" he declares. "Aunt Maggie, come and look with me. It's simply 'normous."

"Told you so!" cries Mr. Amber, vastly delighted. "Fine big rooms, I said, didn't I, now?"

"'Normous!" Percival breathes. "Per-feck-ly 'normous to me, you know;" and after a huge sigh of wonder, pointing to the gallery, "What's that funny little bridge up there for?"

"Bridge!" says Mr. Amber almost indignantly. "Gallery, we call that. Goes right around the hall, see? Except this end. Bridge! Bless my soul, bridge!" For the moment he is really almost put out at this slight done to a celebrated feature of the Manor, his concern betraying the profound devotion to the house, the sense of his own incorporation with it, that always characterises him when beneath its roof. That devotion and that sense have deepened greatly during these years in which the new Burdons have neglected the Manor and he, living in the past, has grown to feel himself the custodian of the memories as he is the author of the "Lives" of the house of Burdon. He has a trick, indeed, as Percival comes to know, of speaking of "we" when he talks of himself in connection with the Manor. He uses it now. "We are very proud of that gallery, I can tell you. Do you know we've had—well, well, never mind about that now. Come along, I'll take you all over and up there, too. Come along, Miss Oxford. We'll find Mrs. Ferris first."

Mr. Amber takes Percival's hand and starts up the hall; and then pulls him up short again, but with an exaggerated concern this time. "But here, I say, young man, what's this? Cap on! Good gracious, you can't wear your cap here, you know!"

Percival goes almost as red as the jolly red fisher cap he wears, and pulls it off, much abashed. He explains his breach of manners. "I always do take it off in a house. But this doesn't feel like a house to me, you know; it's simply 'normous!"

"Ah, but that's a strict rule of ours here. No one but a Burdon may be capped in the hall; a tradition we call it. There was a—a wicked man came here hundreds of years ago and kept on his hat and they didn't see his face properly and thought he was a good man; and the Lord Burdon that was then came to speak to him, and the wicked man took out his dagger and killed Lord Burdon. What do you think of that?"

Percival seeks the proper touch. He asks: "With blug?"

"Blug—blood!" Mr. Amber exclaims testily, a trifle injured that his legends adapted to the use of children should lack conviction. "Why, bless my soul, of course there was blug—blood. Blug—dear me—blood!" and he puts so fierce an eye round where they stand, as if expecting a stain to ooze through the floor and corroborate him, that Percival draws back in haste lest he should be standing in the pool.

That makes Mr. Amber laugh and he pats Percival's golden head and concludes. "So ever since then, you see, we never let any but a Burdon wear his hat in the hall here. It would be a sign of coming disaster to the house, the tradition says."

He turns to Aunt Maggie. "My lady was very particular about it," he says. "She made a great point of observing all the traditions."

Jane Lady Burdon, though she has been dead these four years, is always "my lady" to Mr. Amber, as Roly remains to him "my lord" or "my young lord." Aunt Maggie, standing a little aside, looking at Percival, replies in her quiet voice: "I know—I remember. They are not so foolish—traditions—as some people think, Mr. Amber."

He nods his head in very weighty agreement, then turns again to Percival who, gazing round, discovers a new amazement. "But two fireplaces!" Percival cries.

"Big as a small room, too, aren't they?" says Mr. Amber, important and gratified again. "Now, look at that! There's another story for you!" He leads Percival to one vast hearth, high over which the Burdon arms are carved in oak. "See those letters around there? That's our motto. That's the Burdon motto: 'I hold!' That was the message a Burdon sent to the king's troops when Cromwell's men—another wicked man, Cromwell—were trying to get in. 'I hold!' he told his messenger to say—just that, 'I hold!' and afterwards, when Cromwell was dead and another king came back, the king changed the Burdon motto to that. 'I hold!' Fine? Eh?"

"I hold!" breathes Percival, mightily impressed.

"Why, I tell you—I tell you," cries Mr. Amber, "there's a story in every inch of this house. Better stories than all your picture books. I'll just tell Mrs. Ferris about tea and then we'll go round. I know all the stories; no one knows them like I do." And he toddles off to Mrs. Ferris, absorbed in his lore and congratulating himself upon it, and Aunt Maggie and Percival are left alone.

It is then that Percival enjoys his second right of that day.

Aunt Maggie calls him to her. "Put on your cap again a minute, Percival—just for a minute."

"Oh, but I mustn't, Aunt Maggie."

She takes the cap from his hand and holds it above his clustering curls.

He protests. "Mr. Amber said so, you know."

"What did he say, dear?"

"Only Burdons, Aunt Maggie."

She placed the cap on his head and took his face between her hands and kissed him. She looked up, and all about the hall, and high to where, around the gallery, portraits of bygone Burdons looked steadily down upon her; and her lips moved as if she spoke some message that she signalled with her eyes.

"Whoever are you talking to, Aunt Maggie?"

She put her hands on his shoulders as he stood sturdily there, the jolly red fisher cap on the back of his head, a puzzled expression in his face, and she held him a pace from her. "Say the motto, Percival, dear—the Burdon motto. Do you remember it? Say it while you have your cap on—out loud!"

"Is it a game, Aunt Maggie?"

"Say it quickly, dear—out loud!"

"I hold!" says Percival, clear and sharp.

In the gallery behind him there was a sound of movement. He turned quickly and saw a man's figure step hastily away.

"Some one was watching us, Aunt Maggie."

But Aunt Maggie was gone into her "thinking."

IV

There followed for Percival the most delightful two hours. There was first a prodigal tea in the housekeeper's room, where motherly Mrs. Ferris set him to work on scones and cream and strawberry jam, and where, as the meal progressed, he gladly gave himself over to Mr. Amber's entrancing stories of Burdon lore, while Aunt Maggie and Mrs. Ferris gossiped together.

Mrs. Ferris confirmed the arrival of servants in advance of Lord and Lady Burdon and gave some details of the visit. Her ladyship had written to say they expected to stay about a month. They came for the purpose of seeing if the fine air, for a holiday of that length, would pick up Rollo. "An ailing child," said Mrs. Ferris. "Just the opposite of that young gentleman, from all accounts," and she nodded towards the young gentleman, who beamed back at her as cheerfully as a prodigiously distended mouth would permit. "A lazy-looking lot," Mrs. Ferris thought the servants were, and ought to have come earlier, too, for there was work to be done getting the house ready, Miss Oxford might take her word for it—all the furniture and the pictures in dusting sheets—made her quite creepylike to look into the rooms sometimes. Not right, she thought it, to neglect the Manor like these were doing. She knew her place, mind you, but she meant to have a word with her ladyship before her ladyship went off again.

But the rooms had no creeps for Percival when at last the tea was done, the jam wiped off, and the promised tour of inspection started. He put a sticky hand confidingly into Mr. Amber's palm and breathed "'Normous! Simply 'normous to me, you know," as each apartment was discovered to him; and stood absorbed, the most gratifying of listeners, while Mr. Amber, comfortably astride his hobby, poured forth the stories and the legends that had gone into his cherished "Lives" and that he had by heart and could tell with an air which called up the actors out of their frames and out of the very walls to play their parts before the child. Yet once or twice he stopped in the midst of a recital and stood frowning as though something puzzled him, and once for so long that Percival asked: "Are you thinking of something else, Mr. Amber?"

"Eh?" said Mr. Amber. "Thinking? I'm afraid I was. Let me see, where was I?" But he turned away, leaving the story unfinished; and as they walked from the room Percival said politely: "I don't mind if you were, you know. I only asked. Aunt Maggie does it and I just run away and play."

Mr. Amber pressed his old fingers closer about the young hand they held. "Don't run away when I do it," he said. "Just wake me up. It keeps coming over me that I've done all this before—held a little boy's hand and told him all this just like I hold yours and tell you. Well, that's a very funny feeling, you know."

"'Strordinary!" Percival agreed in his interested way; and Mr. Amber was caused to laugh and to forget the stirring in his mind of recollections buried there twenty years down. Twenty years is deep water. It was to be more disturbed, causing much frowning, much "funny feeling," before ever it should clear and show the old librarian, looking into the pool of his own mind over Percival's shoulder, Percival's reflection cast up from the depths.

The tour finished in the library. "Now this is the library!" announced Mr. Amber at the threshold, much as St. Peter, coming with a new spirit to the last gate, might say: "Now this is Paradise."

"Now this is the library. This is my room. Now, we'll just wipe our feet once again—sideways, too—that's right. And I think our fingers are still a little sticky, eh? that's better—there!"

"'Normous!" breathed Percival. "Simply 'normous, to me, you know."

No dust sheets here, everything mellow with the deep sheen of age carefully attended. Tier upon tier of books, every hue of binding—dark red to brown, brown to deep blue, deep blue to white—and all, however worn, however aged, exquisitely responsive to Mr. Amber's soft chamois leather.

Mr. Amber waved a proud hand at them. "I expect you'll live a long time before you see another collection like this, Master Percival. And I know every one of them—every single one just like you know your toys. In the pitch dark—in the pitch dark, mind you—I could put my hand on any one I wanted without touching another. What do you think of that, eh?"

Percival has no better thought for it than the old one.

"'Normous!" he declares. "Simply 'normous to me, you know, Mr. Amber!"

"And the care I take of them!" Mr. Amber continues, as pleased with his audience as if Percival were the librarians of the House of Lords, the Bodleian and the British Museum rolled into one. "You wouldn't find enough dust on those books, anywhere, to cover the head of a pin!" He points to the highest and furthest shelves: "You'd think there might be dust right up there, wouldn't you? Well, you just choose one of those books—any one, anywhere you like."

"To keep for my own?"

"Keep! Bless my soul, no! Keep! Dear me! dear me! No, just point to a book."

"That one!" says Percival, stretching an arm. "That one in the corner!"

Mr. Amber accepts the challenge with a triumphant rubbing together of his hands. "That brown one, eh? Very well. That's a rare volume—Black Letter—Latimer's 'Fruitfull Sermons'—London, 1584. Now, you see." He trots excitedly to a high, wheeled ladder, runs it beneath the "Fruitfull Sermons," climbs up shakily, fetches down the volume and presents it for Percival's inspection: "There! Run your finger over the top of it; that's where dust collects. Ah, not that finger; got a cleaner one? That'll do. Now!"

It is getting dusk in the library, so Mr. Amber clutches the small finger that has rubbed over the "Fruitfull Sermons," and they go to a deep window where young head and old peer anxiously at the pink skin.

"Not a speck!" Mr. Amber cries triumphantly. "Not a speck of dust! What did I tell you?"

And Percival, holding the finger carefully apart from its fellows: "'Strordinary! Simply 'strordinary to me, you know!"

Mr. Amber climbs laboriously up the steps again, and seats himself at the top, and starts dusting all around the "Fruitfull Sermons," and completely forgets Percival, who wanders about for a little and then, hearing a sound, goes to the door.

V

Here was the white-faced youth, our Egbert Hunt, who had grimaced at him from the box of the wagonette. The white-faced youth stood on the further side of the passage, paused beneath a window by whose light he seemed to be examining a small phial held in his hand.

Percival ran forward: "Hallo! Are you a clown, please?"

The white-faced youth bit a pale lip and stared resentfully: "Do you live here?"

"No, I don't," Percival told him. "I've been having tea with Mrs. Ferris."

The white-faced youth developed the sudden heat characteristic of Egbert Hunt in the Miller's Field days. "Well, don't you call me no names, then," said Egbert Hunt fiercely.

"I'm not," Percival protested. "You made a face at me when you were driving in the road, and I thought you were a clown, you see."

Egbert Hunt breathed hotly through his nose. "Saucing me, ain't you?" he demanded.

Percival had heard the expression in the village. "Oh, no," he said in his earnest way. "I thought you had a funny face, that was all."

His engaging tone and air mollified the sour Egbert. "I've got a sick yedache," said Egbert. "That's what I've got—crool!"

Percival looked sorry and sought to give comfort with a phrase of Aunt Maggie. "It will soon go," he said soothingly.

"Not mine," Egbert declared. "Not my sort won't. I'm a living martyr to 'em. Fac'." He nodded with impressive gloom and took three tabloids from the phial he held in his hand. "Vegules," he explained; and swallowed them with a very loud gulping sound.

"What are you, please?" Percival inquired, vastly interested.

"Slave," said Egbert briefly.

"But you're not black," argued Percival, recalling the picture of a chained negro on a missionary almanac in Honor's kitchen.

"Thenk Gord, no!" said Egbert piously. "White slaves are worse," he added.

"And were those slaves in the carriage with you?"

"Tyrangs," said Egbert Hunt. "Tyrangs and sickopants of tyrangs."

Percival started a question; then, as a sound came: "That's my Aunt Maggie calling me. Good-by! I hope your poor head will soon be better."

Egbert smiled the wan smile of one not to be deluded into hope: "You've been kind to me," he said. "I like you. You ain't like all the rest. What's your name?"

"Percival. I really must go now, if you please. My Aunt Maggie—"

He started to run in the direction of Aunt Maggie's voice; but Egbert recalled him with a very mysterious and compelling "H'st!" and wag of the head.

"Was that your Aunt Maggie in the hall with you just now?" Egbert inquired.

A sudden recollection came to Percival. "You mean before tea? Was that you?"

"What she make you put your cap on for, and say 'I hold'? That was a funny bit, that was."

"Why, I don't know," said Percival. "Was that you up on the bridge?"

Egbert did not answer the question. "You ask her," he said, "an' tell me. Odd bit, that was."

"Yes, I will," Percival agreed. "I say, I must go. What's your name, if you please?"

"Mr. Unt. Run along; you're a nice little chap; I like you."

"I like you, too," said Percival, very interested in this strange character. "I'm sorry I thought you were a clown. Good-by, Mr. Unt. I say, there is my Aunt Maggie! Isn't this a 'normous house?" and he scampered brightly to the sound of Aunt Maggie's voice.

"Abode of tyrangs," said Mr. Hunt, moving swiftly in the opposite direction. "Boil um!"

CHAPTER II

FOLLOWS A FROG AND FINDS A TADPOLE

I

The acquaintance with slave Egbert was very shortly renewed. The afternoon of the Friday that was to see the arrival of the Burdons at the Old Manor brought also a threshing-engine up the village street—a snorting and enormous thing that fetched Percival rushing to the gate and drew him after it and kept him in charmed attendance until "Post Offic" was half a mile behind. Here the engine stopped, and the men who accompanied it setting themselves to a deliberate meal, Percival turned himself into a horse that had escaped from its stable and was recaptured and began to trot himself home.

He was in the lane that strikes out of the highroad towards Burdon Old Manor when his quick eye caught sight of a frog in the grass-grown hedge-side and "Whoa!" cried Percival and changed from escaped horse to ardent frog-hunter. The sturdiest frog, it proved to be, a big, solid fellow and wonderfully nimble at great jumps when Percival was found to be in pursuit. He pressed it hotly; it bounded amain. He laughed and followed—it was here—it was there—it was lost—it was found—it was gone again. He grew stubborn and vexed in the chase. A frown stood on his moist brow. He began to breathe hotly. The frog perceived the change. It lost its wits. It dashed from cover, made with wild bounds across the road, was closely followed, and lived to tell the frightful tale by intervention of a shout before it, a stumble behind it, and the barest pulling up of the Manor wagonette within a yard of fallen Percival.

Lord Burdon jumped out and lifted Percival in his arms before the frog-hunter was well aware of what had happened. "Not hurt, eh? That's all right! You young rascal, you—you might have been killed. Haven't you got ears? What are those great flappers for, eh?" and Lord Burdon tweaked a flapper and laughed jovially. "What were you doing, eh?"

"I was chasing a frog," said Percival, rubbing his ear and using his elevation on Lord Burdon's arms to have a stare at the little boy and the pretty lady in the wagonette.

"A frog! Why here's a frog for you. Come and look at my frog in the cart here."

Lord Burdon carried him to the body of the wagonette. "Here's my frog! tadpole, rather. Rollo, look here. You're only a little tadpole, aren't you? Look what this fine air is going to do for you. Look at this great lump of a fellow. That's what you've got to be like!"

The little tadpole smiled shyly. Tadpole was an excusable description. Rollo Letham at nearly ten might have passed for younger than Percival at rising eight. He was very thin, pale, fragile; his head looked too big for his delicate frame; his eyes were big and shy, his mouth nervous.

"A shame!" said Lady Burdon, smiling. "You're not a tadpole, are you, Rollo? But this is a splendid young man!" And she stretched a kind hand—nicely gloved—across the cart to Percival.

Lord Burdon raised him to meet it. Bare knees, well-streaked with mud and blood, came into view.

"Oh, your poor little knees!" Lady Burdon cried.

Percival caught Rollo's eye fixed in some horror on the wounds. "I cut them every day!" he said bigly, and shot a proud glance at the tadpole.

"Well, they're terrible. They must be washed. Bring him in, Maurice. We'll wash him, as we've nearly killed him, at the house."

"Yes, do! Yes, please do!" Rollo whispered, and his mother patted his hand, pleased at the animation of the thin little face.

Lord Burdon hesitated: "Take him to the Manor? Why, that may be miles from his home, you know."

"I suppose we can send him back in the trap, can't we?" Lady Burdon said, a trifle disagreeably. "You're a regular old woman, Maurice. Lift him in next to Rollo. You can see how Rollo takes to him, I should have thought."

"Didn't want to be had up for kidnapping, you know," Lord Burdon responded cheerfully. "Would be a bad start in the local opinion—eh?" And he laughed with the appeal and the apology with which he always met his wife's waves of impatience. "Shove up, Rollo! In you get, frog-hunter! Heavens! What a lump. All right. Drive on!"

"Gee up!" cried Percival, highly entertained, and chatted frankly with Lady Burdon as the wagonette bowled along. To her questions he was nearly eight, he told her; he would have another birthday in a short time; Honor gave him a sword at his last birthday and his Aunt Maggie gave him a trumpet. "You may blow my trumpet, if you like," turning to Rollo. "Honor says it is poison to blow it because I've broken the little white thing what you blow through. But I blow it all right."

Rollo flushed and smiled and put a thin little hand from beneath the rug and took Percival's muddy fist and held it for the remainder of the journey. Boy friends who did not laugh at him were new to him.

"Miss Oxford's little boy," Percival explained to further questions. "I live at the post-office, and we've got a drawer full of stamps with funny little holes what you tear off."

Lady Burdon turned to her husband: "Ah, I know now. You remember? You remember the vicar telling us about Miss Oxford when we first came down here? Well, she's to be congratulated on her nephew. I'm glad. He'll be the jolliest little companion for Rollo."

Lord Burdon remembered. "Yes—this will be her sister's child. Orphan, poor little beggar."

And Lady Burdon: "We'll be able to have him up with Rollo as much as we like, I've no doubt. Look how happy they are together," and she smiled at them, chatting eagerly.

Percival was twisting and bending the better to see the occupants of the box-seat. A form that seemed familiar sat beside the driver. "Why, that's Mr. Unt!" Percival cried brightly, and as the familiar form turned at the sound of its name, "How's your poor headache, Mr. Unt?" he asked. "Much better now, isn't it?"

Mr. Unt's pallid face became slightly tinged with embarrassment. "The young gentleman spoke to me at the Manor Wednesday, me lady," he apologised. "Had come up to take tea with Mr. Hamber." He profited by the touch of his hat with which he spoke to draw his hand across his forehead; a sick yedache clearly was still torturing there.

"His headaches are terrible," Percival explained. "I thought he was a clown, you know. I saw him driving in this carriage with tyrangs."

Egbert's back shivered. "Parding, me lady," said he, turning again.

Lady Burdon laughed. "Hunt," she told Percival. "Not Unt. He speaks badly."

"You know, his headaches—" Percival began; and she added more severely: "He is a servant."

"He's my servant," Rollo said. "Hunt looks after me when I go out. I hate nurses, so I have him. He'll be yours too, if you'll come and play with me. Both of ours. May he, mother?"

"You can tell Miss Oxford that some one will always be there to keep an eye on you if she will let you come and play," Lady Burdon replied to Percival.

"So now he is yours and mine," cried Rollo, squeezing the hand he held.

"Thank you very much," Percival said. "Of course, if his headache is very bad we won't have him, because he will like to lie down."

He spoke clearly; and a tiny little tremble of Egbert's back seemed to advertise again the gratitude that sympathy aroused in him.

"Oh, that's nothing," Rollo declared. "He pretends."

The poor back drooped. "Tyrangs," Egbert murmured and furtively edged a vegule to his mouth.

II

In the dusk of that evening Percival went bounding home, immensely pleased with his new friends and with the new delights in life they had discovered for him. He had nice clean knees and a bandage on each—a matter that caused him considerable pride. He had gladly promised to come to see Rollo again on the morrow, and he would have stayed much longer into the evening had not Lord Burdon (as Lady Burdon said) "begun to fidget" and to persist that Miss Oxford must be getting nervous at this long absence.

"His aunt will naturally be glad when she knows where he has been," Lady Burdon had exclaimed.

Lord Burdon gave the smile that she knew came before one of his annoying rejoinders. "That won't make her wild with joy while she doesn't know where he is, old girl."

She was irritable. The vexation of having to leave London, which she enjoyed, for Burdon which she felt she would hate, was settling upon her. She looked at him resentfully. "That is funny, I suppose?" she inquired. "You are always very funny, aren't you?" and she gave orders for Hunt to take Percival home.

Down the road Percival chattered brightly to Egbert, holding his hand. "I jump like this," he explained, capering along, "because I pretend I'm a horse. Then if you want me to walk quietly you only have to say 'whoa!' you see."

"Whoa!" said Egbert very promptly.

Percival's legs itched to jump out the animation that events had bottled into him. "Did you say 'gee up'?" he presently inquired.

"No," said Egbert.

"Oh," said Percival, and with a little sigh repeated "oh!"

Egbert felt the appeal. "Fac' of it is, that jumping jerks me up."

"Got another sick headache, have you?"

"Crool," said the living martyr to 'em.

Percival took another phrase of Aunt Maggie: "You must be thor'ly out of sorts, I think."

"Got one foot in the grave, that's what I've got," Egbert agreed. "Fac'."

Percival peered down at Egbert's legs. "Which one, please?" he inquired.

"Figger o' speech," Egbert told him, and explained: "Way of saying things." He added: "Go off in the night one of these days, I shall;" and commented with gloomy satisfaction: "Then they'll be sorry."

Percival asked: "Who will?" He visioned Egbert running by night with one foot embedded in a tombstone, and he was considerably attracted by the picture. "Who will?" he repeated.

"Tyrangs!" said Egbert. "Too late to be sorry then. Fac'."

"Well, I should be dreffly sorry," Percival assured him.

"Believe you," said Egbert, "and many thanks for the same. First that's ever said a kine word to me, you are; and I'll be grateful—if I'm spared."

He looked at his watch and then down the lane. "Think you could get home safe from here? Fac' is I'm behind with my vegules and left them in my other coat."

"Oh, yes," Percival agreed. "This is just by the corner, you know."

"Well, then," said Egbert, halting, "you see, if I don't take 'em fair, can't expec' them to treat me fair, can I?"

Percival assented: "Oh, no."

"Sure you'll be all right?"

"Oh, yes. I'll be a horse, you see. Just say 'gee up!' will you?"

"Gee up!" said Egbert.

"Stead-ey!" cried Percival, prancing. "Stead-ey! Goodnight!" and bounded off.

"Nice little f'ler," commented Egbert; and hurried back to the vegules.

Where the lane turned to the village, horse Percival was made, as he declared, to shy dreff'ly. He galloped almost into the arms of two figures that stepped suddenly out of the dusk. "Oh, Percival!" Aunt Maggie cried and kissed him. "Oh, Percival, where have you been?"

"Say 'whoa!" cried Percival. "Say 'whoa!' Aunt Maggie. I'm a horse—a white one, you know."

Two heavy hands pressed the white horse's shoulders, stilling its plunges. "You're a bad little boy, that's what you are," Honor exclaimed, "running off and frightening your Auntie, and not caring nor minding. Don't Care comes before a fall, as I've told you many times and—"

"Pride comes before a fall," corrected Percival. "You've got it wrong again, Honor," and Honor's flow was checked with the suddenness that had become the established termination of attempts to reprove Percival since he had learnt the right phrasing of her store of confused maxims.

She took his hand while she pondered doubtfully upon the correction, and with Aunt Maggie holding the other, he skipped along, bubbling over with his adventures. "I've got bandages on both my legs, Aunt Maggie—oh, and Hunt has got one of his legs in the grave, just fancy that! I've been having tea with Rollo; and Lady Burdon put on these bandages and she wants me to go and play with Rollo every day. Do let me, Aunt Maggie. I say, you are squeezing my hand most dreffly, you know."

Aunt Maggie relaxed the sudden contraction of her fingers. "Lady Burdon—yes?—tell from the very beginning, Percival dear."

"Well, she said 'Promise to tell your Aunt Maggie I will come and ask her to let you be Rollo's little friend and'—Aunt Maggie! You're hurting!"

She recollected herself again and patted the small fingers. "Tell from the very beginning, dear. How did you meet them?"

"Well, you understand, I was catching a frog—"

"Post Offic" was reached, supper was swallowed, his merry head beginning to droop and nod, while still he excitedly recounted all his adventures. He was almost asleep when Aunt Maggie undressed him and put him to bed.

She sat a long time beside him, watching him while he slept.

CHAPTER III

LADY BURDON COMES TO "POST OFFIC"

I

In the morning Lady Burdon came with Rollo to make her request that Percival might spend much of his time at the Old Manor as Rollo's playmate. In these seven years since the amazement at Miller's Field, this was but her third visit to the estate, her first for the purpose of staying any length of time, and the first that had seen Rollo with her. Two days had been spent here when Jane Lady Burdon had been brought to rest in Burdon churchyard; three when Mr. Maxwell, the agent, had been troublesome and importunate in the matter of expensive alterations on the property. Lady Burdon had come down then "to have an understanding with him;" as she expressed it—"to see for herself." The result had been as unfortunate for Mr. Maxwell (to whom she had shown some temper) as it had been augmentative of the dislike she had always felt for the property and its greedy responsibilities. The result had been to filter over the countryside from Mr. Maxwell that she was the controlling partner in the new representatives of the house; that hers was the refusal to take up the urgently needed irrigation scheme; hers the scandal (as it became) of neglect to carry out improvements in the cottages over at Abbess Roding; hers the crime (as it was held) of the selling-up over at Shepwall that entailed eviction of tenants old on the land as the house of Burdon itself.

On the other hand the result had been to return Lady Burdon to the Mount Street life with at least a temporary stop put to the Maxwell whinings and at least a lighter drain from the Mount Street expenses.

Miss Oxford had not seen her on either of these visits. Miss Oxford had only smiled in an odd way when she heard of the behaviour that had set the countryside clacking. The better Lady Burdon flourished, the more Lady Burdon exercised the prerogatives of her usurped position, the riper she ripened for the blow, when there should be returned to her the son whose mother she had murdered; that was the entertainment Miss Oxford nursed through these years, living so gently and so quietly, "thinking" so much, poor dear.

"Strange-like?" "Silly-like?" Or dreadfully sane? For Miss Oxford's own part, she knew only one thing of her mental condition. At very rare intervals there seized her a state that was related to and that recalled the tremendous pressure in her brain when she had knelt, consumed with hate and desire for vengeance, by Audrey's death-bed. It took the form of a sudden violent fluttering in her brain, as though a live, winged thing were beating there, beating to be free. The pressure that came by Audrey's death-bed had ended in a snap—in something giving that left her extraordinarily, tinglingly calm, possessed by the plan and certainty of revenge to be taken by Audrey's son—one day. The fluttering, the winglike beating ended of its own volition, and outside any command she could put upon it—sweeping up all her senses in its beating, only leaving to her the terror that it would end—in what? Sometimes it came in just the tiniest flutter, without cause and gone as soon as come, just arresting her and frightening her like a swift shoot of pain in a nerve. Sometimes in the briefest flutter but with cause; such a case had been when Percival told her of his meeting with the Burdons and she had caused him to exclaim by clutching his hand. Once of much longer duration and of new effect, and with revelation to her of the end it threatened. That was when, a few days ago, she had stood alone with Percival in the great hall of Burdon Old Manor. It was the fluttering that had bade her make him put on his cap and cry 'I hold!' and she had been informed that if it did not stop—if it did not stop!—if it did not stop! she would scream out her secret—run through the house and cry to all that Lady Burdon was—

It had stopped. The beating wings ceased. She was returned to her quiet, gentle waiting.

II

It always took the same form—the presentation of a picture.

"They're coming! They're coming!" cried Percival, bursting into the parlour with tossing arms, aflame with excitement, hopping on lively toes, to announce Lady Burdon and Rollo. "They're coming, Aunt Maggie!" and he was away to greet them at the gate.

Aunt Maggie was at the table where post-office business was conducted. The open door gave directly on to the garden path; and she heard voices and then a step on the threshold and bent over the papers before her; and then a pleasant tone that said "Good morning, I am Lady Burdon," and immediately the beating wings, wild, savage, whirling, and she transported from where she sat to watch herself in the picture that the fluttering always brought.

Immense beating of the wings, the sound drumming in her ears; seven years rolled up as a stage-curtain discloses a scene, and she saw the room in the Holloway road, herself kneeling there and Audrey's voice: "... and then said 'I am Lady Burdon' ... O Maggie! O Maggie! ... and I said 'Oh, how can you be Lady Burdon?' ... Maggie! Maggie!" The beating wings drove up to a pitch they had never before reached. Through their tumult—buffeted, as it were, by their fury—and from the scene in which she saw herself, she looked up and saw Lady Burdon smiling there, and heard Lady Burdon's voice: "Good morning, I am Lady Burdon." Again, as in the great hall with Rollo, if it did not stop!—if it did not stop!—if it did not stop! she must cry out: "You are not! You said that to Audrey and killed her! Now—"

And again, and this time when the terrible fluttering had almost beaten itself free and she had formed her lips to release it, it suddenly stopped. As at the bedside, seven years before, she fell from paroxysm of passion to unnatural calm, so now she was returned to her normal, quiet self, content to wait, and she said quite quietly: "Percival told me to expect you."

Lady Burdon advanced pleasantly. "Ah, and I hope he also remembered to tell you of my apologies. I am afraid we kept him with us much too long last night."

She looked around the room with the air of one willing to chat and to be entertained, and Miss Oxford, murmuring there was no occasion for apology, advanced a chair with: "Please sit down, if you will. This is very humble, I am afraid. It is only the post-office, you know; and only a toy post-office at that."

She was quite herself again. Through this interview, and always thereafter when she met Lady Burdon or thought of her, she was invested with the calmness that had come to her by the death-bed. She knew quite certainly that she had only to wait. She was not at all anxious. She knew she could wait. She only feared—now for the first time, and increasingly as the attacks became more frequent—that an onset of that dreadful fluttering might descend upon her and might not go before it had driven her to wreck the plan for which she waited—Percival, not she, to avenge his mother.

The fear caused in her a noticeable nervousness of manner. Lady Burdon attributed it to natural embarrassment at this gracious visit, and that made her more gracious yet. Miller's Field would have perceived in Lady Burdon, as she sat talking pleasantly, a considerable change from the Mrs. Letham it had known. She was very becomingly dressed. She had grown a trifle rounder in the figure and fuller in the face since Miller's Field gave her good-by, and that advantaged her. Her olive complexion was warmer in shade, healthier in tinting than it had been. The walk from the Manor had touched her freshly, and she had been pleased by the respectful greetings of the villagers. Rollo, completely in love with Percival, was brighter than she had ever known him. She had hated the idea of burying herself down here for a month; but she was beginning to entertain an agreeable view of taking up her neglected position and dignity in this pleasant countryside. She was very happy as she faced Miss Oxford: her happiness and all that contributed to it made her very comely to the eye; and she was aware of that.

She spoke enthusiastically of Percival. "Such a splendid young man. Such charming manners." She spoke most graciously of knowing all about Miss Oxford and of how plucky of her it was to take up the post-office. She said smilingly that Miss Oxford was not to take advantage of the post-office by keeping herself to herself as the saying was; and when Miss Oxford replied; "You are kind; we have no society here, of course; with the one or two families the post-office makes no difference; we are all old friends; with you, it is different;" she said very winningly: "Not kind, in any case—selfish. It is Percival I am after. We have taken so much to him. He and my Rollo have struck up the greatest friendship, and that is such a pleasure to me. Rollo as a rule is so shy and reserved with children. He has no child friends. It will do him a world of good if Percival may play with him. Percival will be the making of him."

She smiled in confident and happy belief of her words, and Miss Oxford smiled, too. It was not for Lady Burdon to know—yet—that Percival was being brought up to be not Rollo's making but his undoing.

But Miss Oxford only said that the friendship would be capital for Percival also, since Lady Burdon permitted it. "There are no boys here in Little Letham that he can make close companions," she said. "We seem short of children—except among the villagers. I think Mrs. Espart's little girl at Upabbot over the Ridge is the nearest."

Lady Burdon nodded. "Mrs. Espart—yes, I am to go over there. She left cards, thinking we had arrived. Abbey Royal, she lives at, doesn't she?"

"Abbey Royal, yes. One of our show places, you know. What Percival would call 'normous," and Miss Oxford related the "'normous; simply 'normous to me, you know," of Percival's visit to the Manor. "We came to 'enormous' when I was reading to him shortly afterwards," she said, "and he exclaimed: 'I know! 'Normous, like Mr. Amber's house!' Mr. Amber showed him round."

"He is the sweetest little fellow," Lady Burdon laughed. "And reading to him—I was going to ask you about that—about lessons, I mean. Does he do lessons? Rollo's education has been terribly neglected, I am afraid. I thought it would be so nice if he could join his new friend in them while he is here."

"Percival goes every morning to Miss Purdie—you would have passed her cottage—next to the Church."

"Capital," Lady Burdon said. "I will arrange for Rollo."

"She will be delighted. Having Percival has already lost her a chance of another pupil. Mrs. Espart was going to send her little girl over daily, but didn't like the idea of the post-office little boy."

"Ridiculous!" Lady Burdon cried. "I will tell her so." She turned at the sound of much scrambling and laughter in the doorway. "Ridiculous! Rollo, you are going to do lessons with Percival. Now won't that be jolly, darling?"

But it was Percival who was first in and came bounding to them with: "Aunt Maggie! Aunt Maggie! Rollo has got a pony of his own in London and rides it! Well, what do you think of that?"

Aunt Maggie thought it splendid and was introduced to Rollo, and "suddenly seemed to lose her tongue," as Lady Burdon told Lord Burdon at lunch. "Hugged Percival as though she hadn't seen him for a year and scarcely looked at Rollo. Jealous, I believe, at the difference between their stations. Funny, that kind of jealousy, don't you think?"

But it was not jealousy that had silenced Aunt Maggie and caused her to clutch Percival to her breast. At sight of him with Rollo, and of Lady Burdon smiling at him, that fluttering had run up in her brain, and she had clasped Percival to restrain herself while it lasted. It had gone while she held him; but she had almost cried: "Do you dare smile at him? He is Audrey's son! Audrey's son!"

Percival wriggled from her embrace and she heard Lady Burdon say to Rollo: "Well, why not a pony here?" and heard her laugh delightedly at the excited roar the suggestion shot out of Percival.

"I wonder if there is anywhere here we could get a pony for Rollo?" she heard Lady Burdon say, and heard the question repeated, and made a great effort to come out of the shaken state in which the fluttering had left her.

"Over at Market Roding you might get a pony," she said dully. "There is a Mr. Hannaford there. He has ponies. He supplies ponies to circuses, I have heard."

Lady Burdon kissed Percival good-by at the gate. "Lord Burdon shall take you over with Rollo to this Mr. Hannaford," she told him. "That Miss Purdie's cottage? We are going to look in on our way. Run back to your Aunt Maggie. She is tired, I think."

"Well, she's thinking, you know," said Percival.

Lady Burdon laughed. "Thinking, is she, you funny little man? Of what?"

And Percival, in his earnest way: "Well, I don't know. It 'plexes me, you know."

CHAPTER IV

LITTLE 'ORSES AND LITTLE STU-PIDS

I

The pony was obtained from Mr. Hannaford and lessons were arranged with Miss Purdie.

It was the happiest party that occupied the wagonette on that drive to and from Mr. Hannaford's farm at Market Roding. Lord Burdon, Rollo, Percival—each declared it that evening to have been the very jolliest time that ever was.

"Well, we have had a jolly day, haven't we, old man?" Lord Burdon said to Rollo when he kissed him good night. Lord Burdon had worn a shabby old suit and had told the boys stories till, as he assured them, his tongue ached; and had walked with them about Mr. Hannaford's farm, with Percival prancing on one side and Rollo quietly beaming on the other. In London, in the life that Lady Burdon directed at Mount Street, such careless, childish joys were impossible. Not since the day he had spent with Rollo at the Zoölogical Gardens, when Lady Burdon was at Ascot, had he so completely enjoyed himself—and not a doubt but that the bursting excitement of young Percival was responsible for the far greater joviality of this day at Mr. Hannaford's.

"Did I tell you about when they came to the ditch while we were walking over the farm?" Lord Burdon asked Lady Burdon. "That little beggar Percival—"

Lady Burdon looked at him over the book she was reading. "Not a sixth time, please, Maurice," she said. "I'm really rather tired of hearing it," and Lord Burdon assumed his foolishly distressed look and for the remainder of the evening sat smiling over the jolly day in silence.

The jolliest day for Rollo! He had been the quiet one of the party because to be retiring was his nature, but when Percival shouted and when Percival jumped, Rollo's heart was in the shout and Rollo's spirit bounded with the jump. He had never believed there could be such a friend for him or so much new fun in life. Hitherto his chief companion had been his mother, his constant mood a dreamy and shrinking habit of mind. Vigorous Percival introduced him to the novelty of "games," showed him what mirth was, and what vigorous young limbs could do. The jolliest day! He fell asleep that night thinking of Percival; in his dreams with Percival raced and shouted; awakened in the morning with Percival for his first thought.

And of course it was the jolliest day for Percival. "I never had such fun, you know," Percival declared to Aunt Maggie. "I rode the pony all alone and Mr. Hannaford said I was a Pocket Marvel; so I should like to know what you think of that?"

Mr. Hannaford, indeed, was mightily pleased with Percival. Mr. Hannaford was an immensely stout man with a tremendously deep voice and with very twinkling little eyes set in a superbly red face. He wore brown leather gaiters and very tight cord-breeches and a very loose tail-coat of tweed, cut very square. From his habit of never removing his bowler hat in the house even at meals, the common belief was that he slept in it, and he punctuated his sentences when he spoke, and marked his alternate strides when he walked, by tremendously loud cracks of a bamboo cane against a gaitered leg. It was his frequent habit when he desired emphasis to bless what he termed his "eighteen stun proper," and he caused Rollo to giggle by his trick of calling a horse "a norse."

Mr. Hannaford received his visitors by raising his hat as far from his head as any one had ever seen it, by giving three terrific cracks of his cane against his leg, and by extending to Rollo and Percival in turn a hand of the size of a small shoulder of mutton.

"Well, you've come to the right place for a little 'orse, me lord, bless my eighteen stun proper if you haven't," Mr. Hannaford declared. "And 'll want a proper little 'orse for your lordship's son, moreover," continued Mr. Hannaford, after another tremendous leg-and-cane crack and looking admiringly at Percival.

Percival was quick with the correction. "Oh, I'm not his son. I'm only a little boy, you know. I can ride, though, because sometimes I pretend I'm a horse all day long; so I should like to know what you think of that?"

Mr. Hannaford was hugely delighted, and having begged his lordship's pardon for the mistake, gave it as his deliberate opinion that a young gentleman who could pretend he was a norse all day long was a Pocket Marvel.

The Pocket Marvel performed a prance or two in order to show that this estimate of him was well merited, and they proceeded to the stables, Mr. Hannaford, as they walked, making clear, to the tune of astonishing leg-and-cane cracks, the reasons why the right place for a little 'orse had been selected by his lordship.

"There's money in little 'orses," said Mr. Hannaford. (Crack!) "And I'm one of the few that know it." (Crack!) He broke off, stared towards the house, face changing from its superb red to astonishing purple, and to a distant figure roared "Garge!" in a voice like a clap of thunder. "Garge! Fetch that pig out of the flower beds! You want my stick about your back, Garge; bless my eighteen stun proper if you don't."

"Pardon, me lord," begged Mr. Hannaford, bringing his stick back to his leg from where it had flourished at Garge, and continuing: "There's more demand for little 'orses than anybody that hasn't given brain to it would believe, me lord. Gentlefolks' little girls want little 'orses and gentlefolks' little boys want little 'orses; gentlefolks' little carts want little 'orses, young gentlemen want little polo 'orses, and circuses want little trick 'orses. Where are they going to get 'em?" inquired Mr. Hannaford, and answered his question with: "They're coming to me." (Crack!)

"Capital!" declared Lord Burdon, who was finding Mr. Hannaford a man nearer to his liking than any he had met within the radius of Mount Street.

"Capital's the word," agreed Mr. Hannaford. "Bless my eighteen stun proper if it isn't!" (Crack!) "It will take time, mind you, me lord. I'm doing it in stages. Stage One: circus little 'orses. I rackon I'm level with Stage One now. Started with circus little 'orses because I was in the circus line once and my brother Martin—Stingo they call him, me lord—is in it now. Proper connaction with circus little 'orses I've worked up. They come to me when they want a circus little 'orse, bless my eighteen stun proper if they don't." (Crack!) "Stage Two: little gentlefolks' little 'orses—just starting that now, me lord. Stage Three: gentlefolks' little carts' little 'orses. Stage Four: young gentlemen's little polo 'orses. What I want," declared Mr. Hannaford with a culminating crack of tremendous proportions, "is to make people when they see a little 'orse think of Hannaford. Hannaford—little 'orse; little 'orse—Hannaford. Two words one meaning, one meaning two words; that's my lay and I'll do it, bless my eighteen stun proper if I won't!" (Crack!)

"'Pon my soul it's a big scheme," said Lord Burdon, highly entertained and beginning to realise that this was no common man.

"Correct!" Mr. Hannaford assured him, and confided with a terrible crack: "I call it a whopper. One of these days Stingo will settle down and join me and there'll be no more holding us than you can hold a little 'orse with your finger and thumb."

"Settle down?" Lord Burdon questioned, greatly interested. "Younger than you, eh?"

"Three and a half minutes," returned Mr. Hannaford, and added, "Twins," in reply to Lord Burdon's exclamation of surprise. "Not much in point of time, but very different in point of nature. Wants settling down; then he'll be all right. You'll see Stingo in a minute, me lord; he's here," and Mr. Hannaford pointed to the line of sheds they had reached. "On a visit," he explained; and added with a heavy sigh: "Here to-day and gone to-morrow; that's Stingo."

He unlatched a door. "This way, me lord. Only wooden stables at present; brick, and brick floors, that's to come. This way, my young lordship. This way, little master; don't you be a little 'orse now, else maybe we shall make a mistake and tie you up in a stall."

The interior was dim. Restless movements announced the presence of several little 'orses, and presently was to be seen a line of plump little quarters, mainly piebald, one or two more sedately coloured.

"Gentleman to buy a little 'orse," announced Mr. Hannaford; and immediately a face that was the precise replica of his own appeared from over the side of a partition.

"Well he's come to the proper place for a little 'orse," announced the face in a very husky whisper and disappeared again.

"Why, just my very words!" declared Mr. Hannaford with high delight. "Just my very words, bless my eighteen stun proper if it wasn't! Step out, Stingo. Lord Burdon, over from Burdon, with his young lordship and a—" Mr. Hannaford stopped and stared around him. "Why, wherever's that young Pocket Marvel got to?"

"I'm here!" Percival called excitedly. "I'm stroking this dear little black one and he knows me; so I should like to know what you think of that?" He came dancing out from the stall of the little black one, his face blazing with excitement, and simultaneously the replica of Mr. Hannaford's face appeared again and a replica of Mr. Hannaford's figure advanced towards them.

"Proud!" declared the replica in a strained whisper, and raised his hat. "You're doing well," he whispered to Mr. Hannaford. "You're doing uncommon well." He extended his hand and the brothers shook hands, very solemnly on the part of the replica, with beaming delight on the part of Mr. Hannaford.

"Steady down, boy; steady down and join us," Mr. Hannaford earnestly entreated, holding Stingo's hand and gazing into his face with great fondness. But Stingo slowly shook his head, and turning to Lord Burdon again, raised his hat and after many severe throatings managed a husky repetition of "Proud!"

Mr. Hannaford heaved an astonishingly loud sigh, pulled himself together with a leg-and-cane crack that caused all the little 'orses to start, and addressed himself to business. Little master, he declared, had a proper eye for a proper little 'orse. The little black 'orse that little master had stroked might have been specially born for his lordship's purpose; picked up at Bampton fair last spring, a trifle too stout and not quite the colouring for a circus little 'orse and trained to be the first of Stage Two: little gentlefolks' little 'orses.

Concluding this recommendation, Mr. Hannaford put his head outside the stable and roared "Jim!" in a voice that might have been heard at Little Letham; Stingo put his head out and throated "Jim!" in a husky whisper that nobody heard but himself; and presently there appeared a long, thin youth wearing a brimless straw hat that was in constant movement owing to an alarming habit of twitching his scalp.

"Fix him up and run him out," commanded Mr. Hannaford, jerking a thumb at the little black 'orse; "and keep your scalp steady, me lad, else you'll do yourself a ninjury." He glared very fiercely; and Jim, touching an eyebrow which a violent twitch had rushed up to the point that should have been covered by the brimless straw hat, took down a bridle and approached the little black 'orse with the air of one who anticipates some embarrassment.

Mr. Hannaford's stables looked on to a small enclosed paddock, much cut about with hoofs and marked in the centre by a deeply trodden ring, around which, as he explained, the little 'orses were put through their circus paces.

Rollo shyly held his father's hand; Stingo revolved slowly on his own axis the better to keep a surprised eye on Percival, who pranced and bounded with excitement; and presently the little black 'orse, with tossing head and delighted heels, was produced before them.

"Now!" said Mr. Hannaford, patting the little black 'orse with one hand and extending the other to Rollo. "Up you come, my little lordship. Nothing to be afraid of. Only his fun that. Steady as a little lamb when you're on his back—perfectly safe, me lord," he assured Lord Burdon.

But Rollo hung back, nestling his hand deeper into his father's and flushing with nervous appeal into Lord Burdon's face. His riding in the Park did not accommodate the natural timidity of his nature to the adventures of a strange mount, and less so to the doubtful prospects that the spirit of the little black 'orse appeared to offer. Lord Burdon understood, and patted Rollo's hand. "Not feeling quite up to it, old man? Well, we'll ask Mr. Hannaford to send the pony over to the Manor, and try him there, eh?"

"Blest if you ain't right, me young lordship," declared Mr. Hannaford tactfully. "Never be hurried into trying a new little 'orse. That's the way. Jim shall bring him round for you, me lord, first thing in the morning. Walk him up the field, Jim, to let his lordship see how he moves."

Jim clicked his tongue, the little black 'orse bounded amain, and Percival, who had been watching with burning eyes, could control himself no longer. "Oh, let me!" Percival cried. "Just one tiny little ride! Lord Burdon, please let me! I 'treat you to let me!"

"Why, you can't ride," Lord Burdon objected playfully.

"I could ride him anywhere!" Percival implored. "He knows me. Just look how he's looking at me. Oh, please—please!" and he ended with a shout of delight, for Lord Burdon nodded to Mr. Hannaford and Mr. Hannaford swung Percival from the ground into the saddle.

"Shorten up that stirrup-iron, Jim," said Mr. Hannaford, stuffing Percival's foot into the stirrup on his side. "Catch hold this way, little master. Stick in with your knees. That's the way. Run him out, Jim."

The straw-hatted youth made a clutch at the bridle, the little black 'orse jerked up its little black head, and Percival jerked up the bridle and cried: "Let go! let go!" and kicked a stirruped foot at the straw-hatted youth and cried: "He knows me, I tell you!"

"Pocket Marvel," commented Stingo huskily, watching the struggle. "Pocket Marvel, if ever I saw one."

"Why, that's just the very words that I called him, bless my eighteen stun proper if it isn't!" cried Mr. Hannaford in huge delight; and simultaneously the straw-hatted youth, with a terrible cry and a tremendous jerk of the scalp, received a pawing hoof on his foot and relaxed his hold on the bridle.

Away went the little black 'orse and away went the Pocket Marvel bounding in the saddle like an india-rubber ball; shouting with delight; losing a stirrup; clutching at the saddle; saving himself by a miraculous twist as the little black 'orse circled at the top of the field; bumping higher and higher as the little black 'orse came gamely trotting back to them, and finally shooting headfirst into Mr. Hannaford's arms, as Stingo caught the bridle and the little black 'orse came to a stop.

Mr. Hannaford placed Percival on his legs and he stood by the little black 'orse's side, breathless, flushed, the centre of general congratulations and laughter, from the deep "Ho! Ho!" and terrible leg-and-cane cracks of Mr. Hannaford to the silent signals of appreciation indicated by the rapid oscillation of the brimless straw hat on the astonishing scalp movements of Jim.

"Well, I'm afraid I got off rather too quickly, you know," he announced.

"Not a bit of it!" Mr. Hannaford declared stoutly, rubbing that portion of his waistcoat into which Percival's head had cannoned. "You got off same as you stuck on; like a regular little Pocket Marvel, bless my eighteen stun proper if you didn't."

The Pocket Marvel went crimson with new pride and excitement. He made to turn eagerly to the little black 'orse again; and there occurred then an incident of which he thought nothing at the time, nor for many years, but which secreted itself in that strange storehouse of the brain where trivialities permanently root themselves and whence they stir, shake off the dust and emerge, when the impressions of far greater events are obliterated. As he stretched a hand to the bridle, he caught a glimpse of Rollo's face. Distress not far removed from tears was there. The boy was concealing himself behind his father. His sensitive nature caused him to feel that the laughing group, when it turned attention to him, would to his detriment compare him with this bold young junior; he shrank from that moment.

Percival turned away from the little black 'orse and ran to him. "Now it's your turn, Rollo. You see, he knew me from the beginning, and that's why he liked me to ride him. Now you try. I promise you I shall run by his side and then, you see, he'll know you're a friend of mine."

He took Rollo's hand and drew him forward. "Sure you'd like to, old chap?" Lord Burdon asked, and Rollo said; "Oh, yes," and mounted by himself, as he had been taught in London.

"There you are!" cried Percival, beaming up at him and clapping his hands with delight. "There you are! Now, then!" And he set off running alongside as he had undertaken, as the little black 'orse broke into a trot. Once in the saddle, Rollo abandoned his fears and rode easily. The little black 'orse outpaced Percival's small legs, and Percival came running back and took Lord Burdon's hand and watched with eager eyes and squirmed with delight.

"He doesn't bump like I did, you see," he said. "Look how he turns him!" and he freed his hand and clapped and shouted: "Well done, Rollo!"

"'Pon my soul, Percival, you're a devilish good little beggar," said Lord Burdon; and a similar thought was in the minds of the brothers Hannaford when, the pony purchased, they watched the wagonette drive from the farm. "I shall save up and come with my Aunt Maggie and buy one too," Percival declared, giving his hand to Mr. Hannaford over the side of the trap. "In my money-box I've got three shillings already; so I should like to know what you think of that?"

"Pocket Marvel, that little master," commented Mr. Hannaford, as the wagonette turned out of sight.

Stingo made three husky attempts at speech and at length whispered: "Thought he was the young lordship when I first saw 'em."

Mr. Hannaford beamed with delight and extended his hand. "Why, that's just what I thought!" he declared; "bless my eighteen stun proper if it wasn't. Steady down, boy, steady down and join us."

But Stingo's handshake was limp, and he shook his head slowly.

II

Then there were the lessons with Miss Purdie. Very considerably less satisfactory, these, than the tearing excitements that the pony provided, yet having plenty of fun for Percival's eager young mind, and increasing along a new path the intimacy between the two boys. Rollo was the more advanced; but his grounding! "Your grounding," as Miss Purdie would cry, "is shoc-king! Grounding is everything! Look at this sum! What is seven times twelve, sir? ... then why have you put down a six? How dare you laugh, Percival? You are worse! Rollo, it's no good! You must begin at the beginning. Grounding is everything!"

Terribly frightening, Miss Purdie, when swept by her little storms. Rather like a little bird, Miss Purdie, with her sharp little glances from behind her spectacles. "Don't put your tongue out when you write, Percival! What would you think of me, if I moved my tongue from corner to corner every time I write, like that? Don't laugh at me, sir!"

"Well, it comes out by itself," Percival expostulates, "and I don't even know that it is out, you know; so I should like to know what you think of that?"

"I don't think any thing about it," says Miss Purdie, with a stamp of her little foot. "That stu-pid question of yours! How often have I told you not to use it?"

Very like a little bird, Miss Purdie, with her sharp little glances, with her nimble little hops to and fro, and with her perky little cockings of the head on this side and the other as she encourages an answer.

"Now the grammar lesson and I hope you've both prepared it. Gender of nouns. Masculine, Govern-or. Feminine?"

"Govern-ess," venture the boys, a trifle apprehensively.

"Good boys! Masculine, Sorcer-er. Feminine?"

"Sorcer-ess," says the chorus, gathering courage.

"Masculine, Cater-er. Feminine?"

"Cater-ess," bawls the chorus, thoroughly enjoying itself.

"Not so loud! Masculine, Murder-er. Feminine?"

"Murder-ess," howls the chorus, recklessly delighted.

"Good boys! Now be careful! Prosecutor? Take time over it. Masculine, Prosecut-or. Feminine?"

"Prosecutr-ess!" thunders the chorus, plunging to destruction on the swing of the thing; and "Oh, you stu-pids! you stu-pids!" cries Miss Purdie. "You intol-er-able stu-pids!" and the unhappy chorus hangs its head and cowers beneath the little storm it has let loose.

Delightfully appreciative, though, Miss Purdie, when the "break" of ten minutes comes and when the boys gorge plum-cake and milk and make her positively quiver with recitals of the terrible gallops on the pony; and delightfully concerned, too, when, as happens once or twice, Rollo is discovered to have a headache and is made to lie on the sofa in a rug and with a hot-water bottle, while the lessons are continued with Percival in fierce whispers and hissed "stu-pids." Delightfully inconsequent, moreover, Miss Purdie, who at the end of an especially exasperating morning, when Hunt is heard with the pony outside the gate, will suddenly cry: "Well, go away then, you thorough little stu-pids; go away!" and will drive them to the door and then at once will go into ecstatics over the pony and hurry Percival in for sugar, and quake with terror while the pony nibbles it from her hand, and stand and wave at her gate while they go flying down the road, one in the saddle, the other gasping behind.

Delightfully appreciative, Miss Purdie, and they learn to love her for all their terrible fear of her.

Percival, Miss Purdie finds, is the more affectionate—also the more troublesome. Rollo takes his cue from Percival and acts accordingly. "You are the ringleader!" cries Miss Purdie, stabbing a forefinger at Percival on the fearful morrow of the day on which truant was played—whose morning had seen Miss Purdie running between her house and her gate like a distressed hen abandoned by her chickens; whose afternoon had seen the alarm communicated to Burdon Old Manor and to "Post Offic"; and whose evening had discovered the disconsolate return to the village of two travel-stained and weary figures. "You are the ringleader in everything, and I don't know whether you ought to be more ashamed or you"—and she turns from the ringleader to stab her finger at the ring, as represented by Rollo—"or you, for allowing yourself to be led away by one so much younger."

"I've told you," protests Percival, "I've told you again and again we got lost; so I should like to know what you think of that?"

"Don't use that abom-inable phrase, sir! If you hadn't gone off—tempted Rollo to go off—you wouldn't have got lost, would you?"

Percival beams at her in his disarming manner. "Well, you see, we saw a fox and went after it and kept on seeing it and then found we were lost; so I should like—"

"Don't argue. I tell you, you are the ring-leader!"