Frances Peard

"Thorpe Regis"

Chapter One.

Nowadays the word “change,” when applied to a place, seems so naturally to carry in itself the ideas of growth, enlargement, and progress, that we find a certain difficulty in adopting the word in its retrograde sense, or of recognising other steps than those which we are in the habit of looking upon as advancement. And yet, if it be true that, under the pressure of an ever-increasing population, hamlets have become towns and fishing-villages seaports, it is no less certain that the great march leaves behind it, or pushes out of its way, many stragglers too sick, too feeble, or too weary for its ranks. Thorpe Regis was such a straggler. Not to speak of those ancient days, the glories of which only its name now kept in faint remembrance, there had been a time when the great high road to London ran through its length. Twice a week the London coach lumbered up to the door of the Red Lion, changed horses, let out its stiff and cramped passengers to stretch their limbs in the paved space before the door, or refresh themselves with a tankard of foaming ale in the stuffy little bar; and then lumbered off again out of the midst of a gaping knot of ostlers and stable-men. Twice a week came the London coach back, bringing with it a stir of life and importance, the latest messenger from the great world unknown to Thorpe except through its medium,—more peremptory, more consequential, and more exacting. There was not a boy or man about the place but felt a sense of interested proprietorship in the Defiance and the Highflyer, and a pride in their respective performances. From the tiny hamlets round, lying in their green seclusions of elm-trees and apple orchards, the rustics used to make muddy pilgrimages to Thorpe, to carry an occasional letter to its post-office, and to watch the coach with steaming leaders swinging down the hill. That was the moment of triumph. A few little half-fledged boys, who were sure to be on the lookout, would hurrah feebly and set off running as fast as their legs could carry them, and a woman or two was generally at hand to cast up her eyes and exclaim at the pace; but the majority preserved a stolid, satisfied silence. That Thorpe Regis was theirs and the London coach must stop there were facts as undeniable as the Church, the Squire’s house, and the Red lion itself, and needed no comment.

Even facts, however, come to an end sometimes. There arrived a day when the railway, which had gradually been drawing nearer and nearer, reached Underham, a little out-of-the-world village about five miles west of Thorpe, which had hitherto looked humbly up to its more important neighbour, and without a murmur had carried its little tribute of weekly budgets to deposit at the door of the Red Lion. So readily does human nature accommodate itself to added greatness, that Underham was the first to claim from Thorpe the homage which all these years it had yielded ungrudgingly, and beyond a doubt it gave additional sharpness to the stings of humiliation endured by the fallen village, to know that its sudden depression had been caused by the prosperity of its rival.

For a short time the two coaches continued to run. The Highflyer was the first to succumb, while the Defiance, acting in accordance with its name, struggled on for another six months as best it could. But—although there might be something heroic in so unequal a warfare, and a certain dogged obstinacy in the refusal to accept defeat, which appeals forcibly to our English sympathies—the result could not possibly be averted. The old people who held railway travelling to be a tempting of Providence, and would fain have clung to the old ways to the end of their days, were too few in number, and too seldom travellers at the best, to support any means of conveyance whatever. Their journeys were rare events, and the last journey of all was not far off. So gradually the struggle came to an end. Underham built, paved, started a High Street, and gathered into itself all the traffic of the district. A company was formed to cut a canal and unite the railway with the river; and there were timber-yards, black coal-wharves, and all the busy tokens of prosperity, where, in former times, thatched cottages stood in the midst of their gardens, and bees sucked the wild blossoms of the honeysuckle.

Thorpe had long ago given up competing with its neighbouring rival. The old generation which resented the passing of its glories had passed away itself; only here and there an old man, leaning against his gate, would point with trembling finger up the hill, and in a cracked and feeble voice would tell his grandchildren how the London coach once brought the news that Nelson had beaten Bony at Trafalgar, and he, as a little lad, had clipped his hands and cheered with the rest. “They doan’t get news like that thyur down to Under’m, not they,” he would end, shaking his head scornfully. But, as a rule, it was only the old people whose memories pertinaciously resented the fallen fortunes of Thorpe. To others it was, as it had always been, a pretty old-fashioned village, set in the midst of green pastures at the foot of a tolerably steep hill, with a tangled network of lanes about it, and glimpses above the high hedges of a distant purple moorland. The cottages—broken by great outer chimneys running up like buttresses—were whitewashed, with many stages of descent between the first dazzling glaze of cleanliness and the last tumble-down exposure of the red-brown cob; while the thatch, beautiful in one season of its existence, presented as many gradations as the plaster, from its crude freshness to the time when withies were bound on it to prevent the wind from ripping it off, or the rain from dropping, as it often dropped, into the low bedroom of the family. Other houses there were of a more ambitious class. A few shops kept up a struggling existence, for although, except Weeks the butcher, no Thorpe person was rash enough to depend upon a single trade, there were combinations which developed a by no means contemptible ingenuity. Draperies and groceries were disposed from the same counter, with only an occasional inconvenience resulting from homely odours of tea or candles clinging to the materials with which they had long rested in closest neighbourhood. And a triple establishment at the corner, opposite the Red Lion, where the shoemaker kept the post-office and his wife instructed the Thorpe children in a back kitchen, was sometimes treated as the centre round which the village revolved.

Looking towards the hill which had been both the glory and the ruin of Thorpe Regis, since the flatter ground about Underham had led the surveyors for the railway to report more favourably upon its situation, the church with its red stone tower lay to the right, a little way up a lane, which in the hottest weather was hardly ever known to be dry; and the Vicarage might be entered either through the churchyard, or more directly from the village by an iron gate and drive. At the time of which I am writing, the vicar was the Rev. William Miles, whose family consisted of his wife, his son, and his daughter; and the squire of the place was old Mr Chester of Hardlands.

Returning through the village and walking straight forward, instead of taking the road to Underham, a tall, ugly brick house, with a gravel sweep before it and a delightful old garden at the back, would soon be reached. It was inhabited by two brothers called Mannering, who had once been well-known London lawyers. Entering the house by three steps, a low and old-fashioned hall presented itself in singular contrast to the tastes of the day; a staircase with oak banisters fronted the door, to the left was the dining-room, and a door beyond led you into the study, where, about the hour of noon, it was very probable that the two brothers would be found together. At any rate it was so on the morning on which my story opens.

The room was one of those comfortable dens which man, without the aid of feminine taste and adornments, is occasionally so fortunate as to construct for himself. It was low and square, and had neither chintz nor flowers to relieve the dark furniture; but the Turkey carpet, although somewhat faded, had lost little of the richness of its finely blended colours; the books which lined the walls were bound with a care and finish which hinted at something approaching to bibliomania on the part of their owners; the pictures, though few, were choice, and the chairs were deep and inviting. Moreover, a summer noonday brightened whatever sombreness remained: sunshine came broadly in through a deep oriel-window, and the scent of flowers and newly mown grass mingled pleasantly with that of Russia leather and old morocco. The room was a cheerful room, although the cheerfulness might be of a subdued and old-world character; and the writing-table, while conveying certain suspicions of business transactions in the form of sundry bundles of papers docketed and tied with red tape, bore also a proof of more voluntary studies in a magnificently bound edition of Homer lying open upon the blotting-pad.

Mr Mannering, who had but just pushed his chair away from the table, was standing upon some low steps in the act of drawing another volume from his amply filled book-shelves, and turning round as he did so to answer a remark of his brother Robert’s. His slim figure was dressed with scrupulous neatness; he had slender hands,—one of which now rested on the top step, straight from the wrist, and, if one might draw an illustration from another member, as it were on tiptoe; his shoulders were a little stooping, his head bent and turned inquiringly; and his quiet voice and smile contained something of quaint humour, and were noticeable at once.

“My dear Robert,” he was saying, “can there be any use in my giving an opinion? So far as I understand the matter, you are blaming Stokes for not understanding the different natures of Gesnera elliptica and Gesnera elongata. How can I, who until this moment was ignorant of the existence in the world of any Gesnera at all, be an equitable arbiter?”

“Wrong, Charles, wrong. That is not the question; in fact, that has nothing whatever to do with the question,” said Mr Robert, resuming his hasty march up and down the room. “Stokes is a fool, and, as he never was anything else, I suppose he can’t help himself. I don’t complain of that. What I complain of is, that he should attempt to be more than a fool. Haven’t I told you fifty times,” he continued, stopping suddenly before the delinquent, “that your business is to mind my orders, and not to think that or think this, as if you were setting up for having a head on your shoulders? Haven’t I told you that, eh?—answer me, sir.”

“’Tain’t no fault of mine,” rejoined the gardener, slowly and doggedly. “If this here Gehesnear had had a quiet time and no worriting of charcoal and korkynit and such itemy nonsense, you wouldn’t ha’ seen a mossel of dry-rot in the bulb. That’s what I says, and what Mr Anthony says, too.”

“Confound your impudence, and Mr Anthony’s with it. So you have been taking him into consultation? No wonder my Gesnera has come to a bad end between your two wise heads. Charles, do you hear?”

“Mr Anthony has mastered horticulture, has he?” said Mr Mannering, turning his back upon the combatants, whose wrath was rapidly subsiding. “If the boy goes on in this fashion there must be a new science created for his benefit ere long. Well, Robert, science has always had its martyrs, and you should submit with a good grace to your Gesnera being among them. When did Mr Anthony come back?”

“Tuesday night, sir. He comed up here yesterday, but you was to Under’am.”

“I forbid his going within ten yards of the stove plants,” cried Mr Robert, hastily. “If I find him trying experiments in my hot-houses, you shall be packed off, Stokes, as surely as I have put up with your inconceivable ignorance for seven years. I’ve not forgotten what Anthony Miles’s experiments are like. Didn’t he nearly blow up Underham with the chemicals he got hold of when that idiot Salter’s back was turned? Didn’t he bribe the doctor’s assistant, and half poison poor old Miss Philippa with learning how to mix medicines, forsooth? Didn’t he upset his mother, and frighten her out of the few wits she possesses, by trying a new fashion of harnessing? And now, as if all this were not enough, my poor plants are to be the victims. I forbid his coming within the great gate,—I forbid your speaking to him while he is possessed with this mania,—I forbid his looking at my Farleyense—”

“He’ve a seen that, sir,” said Stokes, with his stolid features relaxing into a grin.

“O, he has seen that, has he?” said Mr Robert, struggling between indignation and gratified pride. “Do you hear that, Charles? Actually, before I’ve had time to give my orders. And, pray, what had Mr Anthony to say of my Farleyense?”

“He said,” replied the gardener, doling out the sentences to his impatient master with irritating slowness, “as how he had comed through Lunnon, and been to one o’ they big flower-shows they talk so much about. And he said as there were a Farlyensy there—”

“Well, well?”

“As belonged to a dook—”

“Yes,—well, what did he say? Can’t you speak?”

“As warn’t fit to hold a candle to owers,” burst out Stokes triumphantly, slapping his leg with an emphasis which made Mr Mannering, who had returned to his seat at the writing-table, start and look round in, mild expostulation. His brother was rubbing his hands, and beaming in every feature of his round face.

“To be sure, to be sure,” he said in a tone of supreme satisfaction. “Just what one would have expected. But I am glad Anthony happened to be up there just at this time, and I will say for the lad that he makes better use of his eyes than three parts of the young fellows one meets with. So it was an inferior sort of article, was it?—with fronds half the size, I’ll lay a wager. You hear, Charles, don’t you? Well, Stokes, you have been exceedingly careful to treat that Farleyense in the manner I showed you,—I knew it would answer,—here, man, here’s half a sovereign for you, and mind the earth doesn’t get too dry.”

“Thank ye, sir, thank ye,” said Stokes, prudently abstaining from the contradiction in which at another time he might have indulged.

“And, Stokes—”

“Yes, Mr Robert.”

“If Mr Anthony comes up again, just let me know. I should wish him to see one or two of the other things in the house, but I prefer showing them to him myself.”

“It’s most likely he’ll be up again to-day, sir. He wants Miss Winifred to have a look at the plant.”

“Certainly, certainly. You can send in word when they come. And, Stokes—”

Stokes, who by this time had his hand upon the door, having tucked the luckless Gesnera out of sight, turned obediently.

“No experiments, mind, no experiments.”

“No, Mr Robert ’Specially korkynit,” added the gardener in an audible whisper, as he went out. Whether or not Mr Robert heard him, it is impossible to say. Something like a red flush rose in his face, and he looked hurriedly at his brother; but Mr Mannering was sitting back in his deep chair, his elbows on its arms, his fingers joined at the tips, his eyes fixed upon the volume before him, and if the shadow of a smile just hovered about his lips, it might have been excited by some touch of subtile humour in the pages which apparently absorbed his attention. The younger brother fidgeted, went to the window, altered a slight crookedness about the blind, stood there in his favourite attitude, with his hands behind his back, and at length returned to the writing-table, and took up one of the bundles of papers which were lying upon it.

“You have written to Thompson about the mortgage, I suppose?” he said in a business-like tone which contrasted oddly with his previous bustling excitement.

“Really, Robert,” said Mr Mannering, looking up, and speaking apologetically, “I believe I have done nothing of the kind. Upon my word, I do not know where my memory is going. I had the pen in my hand to begin the letter, and something must have put the matter out of my head.”

“Never mind. If you can make room I’ll sit down at once, and give the fellow a summary of what he has to do.”

But Mr Mannering was evidently annoyed with himself.

“I am growing old, that is the truth,” he said despondingly.

“Old?—pooh! Go and look in the glass, Charles, before you talk of getting old to a man that is but three years your junior. Old?—why, there isn’t a Mannering that comes to his prime before seventy. I expect to grow younger every day, and to have a game of leap-frog with you before many years are past;—do you recollect the leap-frog in the play-ground of the Grammar school?—why, it seems but yesterday that great lout of a fellow, Hunt, went flying over my head, and struck out with his hob-nailed shoes, and caught me just across the knuckles. I can feel the sting yet. There, glance over this, and see if it will do for Thompson. I wonder where old Hunt is now.”

“I met him in the city the other day with a grandson on either side.”

“I dare say. He was always too much of a blundering blockhead to understand that the way to grow old is to have a tribe of children treading on your heels. You and I know better. Here we live, as snug a pair of cronies as is to be met with for twenty miles round, without any such sharp contrasts disturbing our equanimity.”

In answer to his brother’s cheery words, and the hand which grasped his as they were spoken, Mr Mannering shook his head a little sadly.

“Things might have been different—for you, Robert, especially. Do you think I have forgotten Margaret Hare?”

“Why should you forget, or I either? Things might have been different, as you say, but it does not follow they would have been better. Look here, Charles; we have not spoken much of Margaret Hare of late years. I don’t forget her, though I am an old blustering fellow, I don’t forget her, but I can look back and say God bless her, and thank him, too, that things are as they are. I don’t want any change, and I have never repented.”

“It does my heart good to hear you say that, Robert.”

“Well, there, it’s said and done with. Are you going to Underham to-day?”

“I promised Bennett to look in. He wants me to dine with him to-morrow.”

“That’s very well for young fellows like you, but don’t accept for me. If I go off the premises we shall be having Anthony Miles up here with an infallible compound for destroying caterpillars and all the plants into the bargain. I shall administer a lecture to-day, when he brings Miss Winifred.”

“Get her to do it.”

“I’m half afraid she does it too much already. It seems to me that love-making is more altered than leap-frog since our day, Charles,—Well, well, some things don’t change, and luckily luncheon is a permanent institution. Come, and spare Mrs Jones’s feelings.”

“I am losing my appetite,” said Mr Mannering, sighing.

“Come in, at all events.” And, with a little show of reluctance on the part of the elder, the brothers walked off to the long dining-room lying on one side of the library, and looking out upon the cheerful and sunny garden which had somehow caught the spirit of Robert Mannering’s kindliness.

Chapter Two.

“So many worlds, so much to do,
So little done, such things to be.”
In Memoriam.

The path from Thorpe Regis to Hardlands lay across two or three of those green fields which ran in and out of the village and gave it the air of deep retirement remarked by the few visitors who jogged in a fly from the nearest town to see the thatched cottages, the red church, the apple orchards, and the great myrtles which grew boldly up to the very eaves of the houses. You might reach Hardlands in a more dignified and deliberate fashion by driving along the old London road, and turning into a short lane, when the iron gate would soon appear in sight; but the most sociable and habitual means of approach was that which led through the fields to a narrow shrubbery path, emerging from which the long white house, with a green veranda stretching half-way across its front, became pleasantly visible at once.

Between Hardlands and the Vicarage a very brisk communication was kept up. The Squire and the Vicar had not indeed been friends beyond the term of Mr Miles’s residence at Thorpe, but that had now reached a period of fifteen years; and although fifteen years at their time of life will not balance an earlier friendship of but five, and although there was neither similarity nor natural sympathy between the two men, yet neighbourhood and a certain amount of isolation had formed a bond which either of the two would have found it painful to break. Mr Chester, moreover, had lost his wife while the Mileses were yet fresh comers, and with two motherless girls left upon his hands it became a natural thing to apply in his perplexity to Mrs Miles, a woman in whom, whatever else might lack strength, it was not the sweet tenderness of motherly instincts. Winifred and little Bessie were at least as much in the Vicarage nursery as their own, sharing all things with Marion and Anthony; and if, as they grew older, a half-unconscious change took place in their relationships, it had not been the means of loosening the intimacy, or diminishing the number of mutual visits. Bessie and her father had that morning looked in at the Vicarage, and in the late afternoon Marion and Anthony walked across the fields by the familiar path along which they could have gone blindfold, towards Hardlands.

The day was one of those exhilarating days of early summer, before any languor of great beat has stolen into its heart, and while the freshness of spring still leaps up in breezy flutterings of leaf and bough. Hay-making was going on vigorously, and the air was laden with the grateful scent. There were fields yet green with cool depths of waving grass, and others where keen shadows fell upon the smoothly shaven turf. Here and there a foxglove reared itself upwards in the hedges, here and there dog-roses unfolded innocent little pink and white buds. Without any striking beauty in the landscape about Thorpe, a certain pastoral and homely charm in the thatched cottages, the fields, the blossoming orchards, and even in such unromantic details as the shallow duck-pond under Widow Andrews’s wall, made a more exacting demand upon the affections of those who lived among them than could altogether be understood by such as only looked upon them from the outside. Anthony Miles, as he walked along with his head a little thrown back, switching the grass with a laurel rod confiscated from Widow Andrews’s little grandson, who had been caught by the brother and sister, as they passed, using it as an instrument of torture upon a smaller and weaker companion, was not thinking of the familiar objects with any conscious sense of admiration, and yet they were affecting him pleasantly; so that, although he might have said many other places were filling his heart at this time,—for there is an age with both men and women when place has even more power than people,—it is likely that, had he known the truth about himself, he would, after all, have found Thorpe in the warmest corner; old sleepy stupid Thorpe with its hay-ricks, its bad farming, and its broad hedges cumbering the land, against which he was at this moment inveighing to Marion.

“Did you ever see anything cut up like these half-dozen acres? There’s one slice taken out, and here’s another; a hedge six foot across at the bottom if it’s an inch, and a row of useless elms sucking all the goodness out of the ground. I don’t believe there’s a richer bit of soil in all England, and they can do no more than get a three-cornered mouthful of pasture out of it for one old cow.”

“O Anthony, why can’t you let things alone, when they don’t concern you? My father has allowed you to have your own way about the paddock, and you surely need not tease Mr Chester to death over his hedges.”

“That is so like a woman, who can never see anything beyond her own shadow. Can’t you understand that it would be for the good of Thorpe if the ground that feeds people’s mouths were better drained and if there were more of it?”

“So this is to be the next hobby, is it?”

“Farming? Hum, I don’t know. If I could induce old Chester to go in for a few experiments, it might be worth while, perhaps, to get up the subject. But everything is on such an absurdly small scale here, that it would be hardly possible to do anything satisfactory.”

“And you really mean that you would be willing for all your schemes to resolve themselves into the miserable mediocrity of settling down at Thorpe and improving the hedges of the district!” said Marion indignantly.

“One might do a good deal in that way,” Anthony answered, with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes as he looked at his sister. Any one who had seen him at that moment must have been struck with the extreme boyishness of his appearance. It might have been the curly light brown hair, or, more likely, the slight figure and sloping shoulders, but something there was which had changed but little for the last ten years, and kept him a boy still. Marion looked years older. He was always irritating her by his quick changes, his enthusiasm, his projects for the good of other people. So long as he might have his own way in the doing, there was nothing that he would not have done.

Marion had small sympathy for such notions; she clung to what was her own with a passion and a wilfulness which made her blind to what she would not see, but she did not care to go out of that circle. Yet people said that the brother and sister were alike, and to a certain extent the world’s judgments were correct, as the world’s judgments often are, only that a hundred little things too subtile for so large a beholder made a gulf between the two. He provoked her constantly as he was provoking her now.

“I sometimes think you will end in doing nothing,” she said, walking on quickly.

“So do I, a dozen times a day. Who’s this coming?—isn’t it that fellow Stephens? I’ve a bone to pick with him, I can tell him. What do you suppose he’s after now? He wants Maddox to let him have that bit of ground close by the school to build a chapel upon. I think I see it! Stokes gave me a hint of it, and I’ve been bullying Maddox all the morning, and pretty well got his word for it at last. The canting methodistical rascal! I wish I could see him kicked out of the place.”

Anthony was speaking with great energy. He and Marion were walking through the cool meadows, beyond which lay the softly swelling hills. To the left, a little in front of them, the Hardlands shrubbery gate led into a thin belt of fir-trees, but the path continued through the meadows, until it crossed a small stream, and reached a lane branching from the high road. People liked to turn away from the hard dust and get into these pretty fields, where soft shadows fell gently and the delicate cuckoo flowers grew; and Mr Chester had tacitly suffered a right of way to be established, though he inveighed against it on every occasion. It was a grievance with which he would not have parted for the world, even if his own natural kind-heartedness had not been entirely on the side of the tired wayfarers, and nobody took any notice of it. So that even Anthony’s indignation did not extend itself to the fact that David Stephens was coming towards them along the narrow track.

“I shall go on: Winifred will be wondering what has become of us,” said Marion, who had not sufficiently forgiven her brother to be ready to take his side in the contest. He stood still with his hand on the gate, waiting for Stephens to pass, so determinedly, that the man as he reached the spot stopped at once.

He was much shorter than Anthony, as short, indeed, as an ordinary-sized boy of fourteen, and there was an actual though not very prominent deformity of figure. Yet this warp of nature seldom struck those who fronted him, for the head and face were so powerful and remarkable that they irresistibly seized the attention. Even Anthony, who was as enthusiastic in his prejudices as in his other feelings, was conscious of something in the eyes which checked his first flow of resentment. He would have preferred beginning with a more trenchant opening than—

“Hallo, Stephens, you’re the person I wanted to see.”

“Did you, sir? Well, this is the second time I’ve been to Thorpe to-day.”

“Yes, I know that,” said Anthony, recovering himself, and feeling the words come to him. “I’ve seen Maddox, he’s just been at our house, and what you’re after won’t do at all. Do you suppose my father would stand one of your ranting places stuck up just under his nose? You’d better take yourself off a few miles, for, let me tell you, Thorpe doesn’t want to see you, and you may find it a little hotter residence than you have any fancy for.”

“I am not afraid of threats, sir,” said Stephens quietly.

Anthony had been speaking in an authoritative tone, as if his decision quite set the matter at rest, and opposition irritated him as usual.

“I simply tell you what will happen if you come where you’re not wanted,” he said, raising his voice. “And as to the chapel, we’ll take care that is never built. You may call it a threat if you please, but it’s one that will find itself a fact.”

“Mr Miles, the word of God has borne down fiercer things than you are like to hold over me, and it will do so yet again. I am sorry to go against you, but I must either do that or against the inward conviction.”

“Cant,” muttered Anthony wrathfully. “And so you suppose you’re to have that field?”

“Mr Maddox has as good as promised it, sir.”

“You’ll find him in a different mind now.”

“He’ll not go against his word!”

For the first time during the interview Stephens’s quietness was broken by a touch of passion. His eyes, lit up by a sudden fire, fastened themselves anxiously upon Anthony. Anthony, who had hitherto been the angry one of the two, felt a contemptuous satisfaction at having raised this wrath.

“His word! Things are not done quite so easily as all that. You had better turn and go back again, for all the good you’ll get by going on.”

“I should be glad of a direct answer, sir,” said David, restraining himself with an effort. “Has Mr Maddox told you downright that he will not let us have the field?”

“Yes, he has.”

Stephens’s face had lost its red flush, but his eyes still held their deep fire.

“Then God forgive you!” he said in a low passionate voice, opening out his hands slightly, and walking away with quick steps. Anthony did not look after him; he turned into the little path, and began to whistle with a certain sense of pleasure in his victory which was not checked by any pitiful misgivings.

Chapter Three.

“God Almighty first planted a garden; and indeed it is the purest of human pleasures.”
Bacon’s Essays.

As Anthony emerged from the little path under the fir-trees, he saw that Winifred and Marion were in the garden, and that Winifred was gardening, her gown drawn up, gauntleted gloves on her hands, and a trowel held with which she was at work.

“We shall be ready in a minute,” she called out, nodding to him. “I am so glad you are come, for I thought you might have forgotten our walk.”

“It was too hot before,” said Anthony, strolling towards them, and stretching himself lazily upon the grass.

“And I have done no end of work. You see those bare places in the beds, over which you were so unmerciful, are quite filled. Luckily Thomas had a great many surplus plants this year.”

As she stood up, a great clump of flowering shrubs—guelder roses, pink thorn, azaleas—made a pretty and variegated background. She had drawn off her big gloves, and was beating the earth from them as she spoke, and smiling down upon him with bright pleasantness. Anthony looked at her, and a satisfied expression deepened in his eyes. He had hold of one of the ribbons of her dress, and was fingering it.

“Why don’t you always wear lilac?” was his somewhat irrelevant answer.

“You don’t attend to what I am saying,” said Winifred, a little impatiently. “I want to know what you think of the flowers, and not of my dress.”

“Why should I not talk about that as well? You have at least as much to do with the one as the other.”

“It is not what I have to do with it, but how it looks when it is done. Marion, can’t you prevent Anthony from being frivolous?”

“Don’t ask Marion,” said Anthony, biting a bit of grass. “She has been falling foul of me all the way here, though neither of us can exactly say what it has been about. My ruffled feathers want smoothing down, if you please, Winifred.”

“You don’t look ruffled a bit.”

“That is my extraordinary amiability.”

“Marion did very well to scold you, I am sure.”

“And that is the way women jump at conclusions.”

“I shall jump at the conclusion presently that you mean to go to sleep on the grass, and leave us to walk to the Red House alone.”

“I? I am ready to start this moment, and the time you have supposed to be wasted I have spent in making up my mind that a mass of amaranthus ought to replace the verbenas in that bed.”

“Amaranthus! O Anthony, they would be so gloomy.”

“Just the effect you want, when everything is too flaming.”

“No, no,” said Winifred, resolutely holding her ground. “You must find your relief at the back, for the flowers themselves can’t be too bright.”

“Now, Winifred, there are certain principles,” began Anthony, sitting upright and speaking energetically, “principles of contrast, by means of which you get a great deal more out of your brilliancy than when you run one colour into the other. I wish you would let me explain them to you.”

“Understanding the principles would never make me doubt my eyes. No, indeed, I am very sorry, but I could not sacrifice those splendid verbenas after watering them for so many evenings.”

“You should not water at all.”

Winifred looked at him, laughed, and shook her head.

“I don’t mean to give way to these horrible new theories. To begin with, they would break Thomas’s heart.”

“O, very well,” said Anthony, getting up, affronted. “Did you say you were ready to start? Marion! We are waiting.”

He marched before them in evident displeasure; Winifred, who knew that his discontent would not last long, looking at him with a little amusement. They skirted the field where the haymakers had been at work all day, and the sweet dry grass lay tossed about in fragrant swathes as the forks had dropped it. Across, between the elm-trees, the sun shone upon the canal and the Underham houses, while, beyond again, lay meadows and wooded hills, and the soft western moorland. On the other side of the nearest field was a figure on an old bay cob, with a dog standing by his side, and a man pointing. This was the Squire, too deep in consultation over some boundary annoyances to notice the little party scrambling over their stiles, and waving every now and then to attract his attention.

“Which of you are going to dine at the Bennetts’ to-morrow?”

“Papa, Anthony, and I.”

“And is Marmaduke to be there?”

“I suppose so. It depends on the trains.”

“And Mr Mannering, of course. Marion, did you ever hear that there is a romantic story about those brothers?”

“What’s that?” said Anthony, stopping and looking round.

“It was Miss Philippa who told me,” Winifred explained, “and she was not at all clear about it; but it seems that one of them was engaged to a lady, when his brother fell into a bad state of health, requiring great care for a long while, and the other gave up everything, devoted himself, nursed, prevented people from finding out how incapable he had become, and was really the means of saving his life, or his reason, or whatever was in danger. But then comes the sad part. The lady grew tired of waiting, and married some one else.”

“It is rather a complicated story. And which is the hero?”

“Mr Mannering,” Marion said, promptly.

“I believe it to have been Mr Robert,” said Anthony, in a tone of decision.

“So do I,” said Winifred, looking brightly at him, happy in fulfilling a longing against which she not infrequently fought more steadily, from thinking that it was not well for him to carry matters altogether as he liked.

Anthony smiled, and fell back a little with his good-humour restored. After all, it was a pleasant thing to be walking through the Thorpe fields with Winifred, who had a certain charm about her, harmonising with what surrounded them. In a crowded room she might have passed with little notice; but here, in the open air, with an evening breeze sweeping up from the sea, six miles distant, and fresh cool scents just touching it, the buoyancy of her step, the clearness of her voice, and the frank honesty of her eyes, were all in agreement with the country life in which she had grown to womanhood, and the outer influences of which work in proportion as we admit them. That day, also, had been full of light-hearted happiness. Anthony had returned from an absence of some months, which he had spent in travelling. He and she were in excellent accord in spite of their little passage at arms, and they were just in an easy social position towards each other, which made it seem scarcely possible that they should not always go on as smoothly. It was when they were together in what is called society that little storms arose, that Winifred’s eyes would suddenly flash, and some quick speech descend upon Anthony, in abrupt contrast to the sugared politeness which had been flowing in pleasant streams. It was natural that he should resent it. With an older experience she might have treated him differently; but her very eager longing that he should rise above what she herself despised made her impatient that he did not rise at once. It is no untrue assertion that too close knowledge is an obstacle to love. When a boy and girl grow up together, the light beats too strongly for those delicate and shadowy enchantments, those delicious surprises, those tender awakenings, by which others are led on all unconsciously. It may, now and then, lose no particle of strength because of this, but such cases are at least rare. Winifred had a hundred misgivings for Anthony, who had none for himself. It seemed to him as if nothing were out of his reach, as if neither time, nor opportunity, nor success could fail. Was he not twenty-four, with a lifetime before him? Had he not gained the Chancellor’s gold medal? He had, moreover, that sense of fellowship, which more than any other gift heartens a man for work among his kind; he was full of enthusiasm for doing good, for upholding right, for beating down wrong,—he would be an author, a reformer, a politician,—he would raise Thorpe by penny readings,—he would improve the Hardlands property by inducing the Squire to sweep away his hedges,—the church singing should be converted into harmony, ignorance into intelligence, wrong into right,—are there any limits or misgivings which trouble these young champions who leap into the arena, and believe a hundred eyes are upon them? It was Winifred who looked at him and trembled.

Mr Robert Mannering met them inside the gates.

“I saw you coming,” he said. “Well, Anthony, and so you are back from your travels, and your father says you have not yet made up your mind what new worlds you shall conquer. I congratulate you. Only, my dear boy, don’t make Stokes your prime minister. Leave pottering about amongst leaf-mould and bell-glasses to superannuated old fellows like me. Miss Winifred, I am proud to hear that you are come to see my Farleyense.”

“Anthony says it is such a fine plant.”

“It is a fine plant. It might be almost anything,” said Anthony. “I told Stokes that if I were he I should treat it differently. I wish he would let me have a turn at it for a fortnight.” Mr Mannering gave a quick gasp, and stood still to look at the speaker.

“I shall keep the key in my pocket until he is out of the place. Miss Winifred, Miss Marion,—we are old friends,—detain him at the Vicarage, at Hardlands, find some innocent occupation for him which shall not harrow old gentlemen’s pet hobbies. Set him to cure Miss Philippa’s rheumatism,—I don’t wish to be uncharitable, but by her own account it can’t be worse than it is, whereas my Farleyense—Good Heavens, I shall not sleep for a week for thinking of the peril it is in.”

“Of course, there must be a certain amount of risk,” said Anthony coolly; “but, after all, the experience gained for others is worth more than the thing itself. That always seems to me the only object in gardening. However, if you don’t care about it, sir,—that’s enough. I’m going to hunt up the tortoise.”

“Do, do, by all means. The fellow’s shell is thick enough to protect him. This way, Miss Winifred. I hope you don’t mind a few steps. You are judicious in your time, for I always think this soft late light is more becoming than any other to the plants. There,—a picture, isn’t it? I almost wish Anthony had come down after all.”

“He is too full of projects to be a safe visitor just at present,” said Winifred, shaking her head, but secretly proud in her heart.

“I’ll defy him to find a finer Farleyense anywhere, at any rate,” said Mr Mannering valiantly. He was looking at Winifred as he spoke, and thinking that Thorpe had other pretty things to show Anthony. There was a soft gloom in the house, out of which seemed to spring the delicate green feathery ferns full of still strange life, and Winifred, standing among them, had a sweet light in her eyes and a half-smile on her lips. It was not very often that people agreed she was pretty, and then they were probably thinking of the fresh colouring, the bright hair, and that indescribable fairness of youth which, even without other claim to beauty, carries with it so great a charm; but the true attraction in her face consisted in a certain nobility of expression, of which the delight would but deepen as the more fleeting fairness departed.

“Here is an exquisite little Cystopteris, Miss Marion,” said Mr Robert, beginning to bustle about, “and that is the finest hare’s-foot in the county. I want to have a look at your oak fern, but I must go into Underham to-morrow. Miss Philippa has a quarterly paper which requires signing at least five times every year.”

“Marmaduke comes to-morrow,” said Marion, who had been silent. “Can’t he sign his aunt’s papers?”

“No, I am sorry to tell you that the law makes a distinction between a man and a magistrate. So Marmaduke comes to-morrow? And he and Anthony, I have no doubt, will chalk out a fresh career for every day in the week when they get together.”

“There is not much room for what you call a career in poor Marmaduke’s case,” said Marion, drawing her gloves tightly through her hands, and keeping her head turned away, so that only a sharply cut profile could be seen. “A clerk in a merchant’s office does not look forward to anything very brilliant.”

“Unless he wins the heart of the daughter of the principal partner, and you have been so hardhearted as to cut that chance of promotion from under his feet. Well, these are the contrarieties of life, but they tumble into shape somehow at the end, so keep a good heart, my dear.”

He said it with an odd quaver in the cheery voice, although neither of the two noticed it. They were thinking of themselves with the unconscious egotism of youth. There were all sorts of tender visions flitting about among the soft shadowy ferns, and some not less tender than the rest that they were dim with age and years. Marion went on after a momentary pause:—

“I suppose his best chance lies with Mr Tregennas.”

“Yes and no, and no more than yes, I take it. If Marmaduke will stick to his business and not allow imaginary prospects to unsettle him, they may do him no harm. But it’s ill waiting for dead men’s shoes, especially if you do not step into them at the last. There is nothing so likely to sour a man’s life.”

“There cannot be doubt when he has promised,” Marion said, turning towards him with a movement which was abrupt enough to betray a little anxiety in the words.

“He has, has he?”

“Yes, indeed. Marmaduke has often told me how much Mr Tregennas said, and no one, no one could be so cruel as not to keep to his word in such a matter!”

“Not intentionally,—at least, not many men. But, my dear Miss Marion, you never will be an old lawyer, and so I don’t promise that you will ever find out how much of what we hear depends upon what we think, or how much of what we say depends upon what we believe we ought to have said. Now, you have not gone into such ecstasies as I expected over my Farleyense, but by to-morrow my imagination will have supplied all your deficiencies, and yours will make you ready to swear that you were as prettily enthusiastic as the occasion demanded.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Marion, smiling.

“Don’t do that. Have I not just explained to you the recipe for harmonising the minor discords of one’s life? There is some happy stuff in our composition—vanity, if you will—which fills up what is wanting.”

“Are you there? Shall I come down?” said Anthony’s voice from the top of the steps.

“No, no, wait a moment; we are coming, we are coming this instant,” said Mr Mannering, hurriedly. “Take care of the wet, Miss Winifred,—here we are; thank you, yes, I prefer to lock the house for the night. And how did you find the tortoise, and what did you do to him, Anthony?”

“Do to him? I did nothing,—at least, I only moved him to the sunny side of the wall, where he will be a good deal better off.”

They were strolling towards the road, Mr Mannering with his hands locked behind his back, and a twinkle of amusement about eyes and mouth.

“Thank you, my dear boy, thank you,” he said, gravely. “But I should be a good fourteen stone to carry, and, to tell the truth, I would rather stay where I am.”

“What do you mean?” said Anthony, puzzled. “Was I talking to myself? I beg your pardon,—it was the oddest idea,—do you know, just for a moment I had a feeling at the back of my neck as if I were the tortoise.”

Chapter Four.

“I did but chide in jest: the best loves use it
Sometimes; it sets an edge upon affection:
When we invite our best friends to a feast,
’Tis not all sweetmeat that we set before ’em;
There’s something sharp and salt, both to whet appetite
And make ’em taste their wine well.”
Middleton.

From what has been said of the resources of Thorpe Regis, it will be easily understood that it did not possess any public vehicle capable of conveying its inhabitants to dinner-parties or other solemnities. When such a conveyance became an absolute necessity, there was sent from Underham a fly which had a remarkable capacity for adapting itself to different occasions. A pair of white gloves for the driver and a grey horse presented at once the festive appearance considered desirable for a wedding, while the lugubrious respectability demanded by an English funeral was attained by the substitution of black for white, and by a flowing hat-band which almost enveloped the little driver. Its natural appearance, divested of any special grandeur, was that of a roomy, heavily built, and some what battered vehicle, which upon pressure would hold one or two beyond the conventional four, and carry the Thorpe world to the evening gayeties of the neighbourhood with no greater amount of shaking and bumping than habit had led them to consider an almost indispensable preparation to a dinner with their friends.

On the evening of Mr Bennett’s party, the Underham fly might have been seen drawn up in front of the Vicarage porch, a snug little excrescence on the south side of the house, and scarcely a dozen yards from the church. The dinner-hour was half past six, and it was a three quarters of an hour’s drive to Underham, so that the sun was still slanting brightly upon the old house, green with creepers of long years’ growth; upon the narrow border of sweet, old-fashioned flowers that ran along the front, edged with box, and separated from the grass-plot by a little gravel walk; upon the fine young cedar half-way between the house and the road, the tall tritonias, and the cluster rose that had clambered until it festooned two ilex-trees with its pure white blossoms. Some charm of summer made the homeliness beautiful,—the repose of the last daylight hours, the cheerfulness of children’s laughter in the village, the midges dancing in the quiet air, the shadows on the grass where pink-tipped daisies folded themselves serenely. Even the wrinkled face of Job White, the one-eyed driver, had caught something of glow from the sunshine, as he sat and conversed affably from his box with Faith, the parlour-maid at the Vicarage, a rosy-faced girl, not disposed, as Job expressed it, “to turn agin her mate because it warn’t pudden.” Job himself was one of the characters of the neighbourhood, a good-humoured patron of such of the gentry round as he considered respectable, and intensely conservative in his opinions. He had begun life as a Thorpe baby, and, although professional exigencies afterwards led to his settling at Underham, he did not attempt to disguise his contempt for the new-fangled notions prevalent in that place. One of his peculiarities led him to decline accepting as correct all time which could not be proved to agree with the church clock at Thorpe. The country alteration to what was called railway time which took place some twenty or five-and-twenty years ago he could not speak of except in terms of contemptuous bitterness; and, had it been practicable, he would have insisted upon remaining twenty minutes behind the rest of the world to the end of his days; but as his calling rendered this an impossibility, he contented himself with utterly ignoring the station clock, and obliging all those he drove to accommodate their hours to those of Thorpe. “He’ve been up thaes foorty years, and he ain’t likely to be wrong now,” was his invariable answer to remonstrances; and perhaps there could be no stronger testimony to the old west-world prejudices that, in spite of changes, yet clung about Underham, than the fact that with these opinions for his guide Job White still drove the Milman Arms fly.

At the moment when Faith, shading her eyes from the sun, was looking brightly up with instinctive coquetry, Job was settling in his waistcoat fob the globular silver watch which he had duly compared with his oracle in the tower. It was so bulky that it required a peculiar twist of his body to get it into the pocket at all, and wheft that difficulty was surmounted it formed an odd sort of protuberance, apt to impress beholders with a sympathetic sense of discomfort Faith, however, regarded it with due respect.

“True to a minit,” Job said in a tone of contented self-satisfaction. “Now, Faith, my dear, suppose you wos just to step in and tell Miss Marion that, without she’s pretty sharp, we sha’n’t get to Under’m by half past six, nor nothing like it.”

“She’s on the stairs now,” said Faith, reconnoitring, “and if there isn’t Sarah come out of the kitchen to see her drest! I’m sure it is a wonder if she can stand there for a minute and not say something sharp. It wants the patience of a saint to live with Sarah.”

“And that doesn’t come to everybody as it do to me,—with their name,” said Job. “She’s a woman who isn’t tried with a hitch in her tongue, but she’s a neat figure for a cook.”

“Well, I’m sure!” said Faith, pouting a little. “I never could see nothing in Sarah’s figure,—but you’d better get down and open the door, Mr White.”

With so great a scarcity of conveyances, combinations were matters of necessity in Thorpe, and the fly had already driven to the Red House in order to pick up Mr Mannering. The delay in starting had been caused at least as much by the Vicar’s desire to hear his opinion upon a certain pamphlet which, when sought for, turned out to be missing, as by Marion’s lingering doubts between the respective merits of two white muslins; but the truth was that punctuality did not exist at the Vicarage, and the church bell on Sundays stretched itself indefinitely, until the Vicar himself looked out from the vestry door and nodded for it to stop. Mr Mannering, having, on the contrary, a lawyer’s respect for time, had for the last ten minutes been sitting upon thorns, taking out his watch, and regarding the door with as much uneasiness as a courteous attention to Mrs Miles’s household difficulties would permit. Anthony had walked into Underham to meet Marmaduke Lee, and Mr Mannering fell uninterruptedly to Mrs Miles’s care, until the Vicar opened the door and informed him that they were ready, with the really serious conviction common to unpunctual people that his visitor was the person for whom they had all been waiting.

They were in the hall and out in the little porch at last: the Vicar with his broad shoulders and plain face, Mrs Miles coming softly down to see them off, and pulling out Marion’s skirts with a little motherly anxiety. They were all talking and laughing, and the sun still shone bravely on Marion’s pretty gown and the roses she had twisted into her dark hair, and the jessamine which clambered to the topmost windows. Sniff, the Skye terrier, was dancing round the old grey horse, and barking wildly. Outside, in the little wet lane, brown sweet-breathed cows were plodding slowly back to their farm, and stopping now and then to contemplate the green lawn of the Vicarage, until Sniff, catching sight of an intruding head, became frantic with a new excitement, and, scrambling to the top of the hedge, was last seen as the fly turned out of the gate, a ball of flying hair in pursuit of a retreating enemy.

It was through a curious tangle of lanes that Job jolted his load, a little more unmercifully than usual, lest the time which had been lost should be laid to the account of the Thorpe clock by unbelievers at Underham. The hedge-rows were so high that the sun at this hour of the day shone only upon the tops of the blackthorn and nut bushes which crowned them, shone with a keen yellow light contrasting strongly with the dim shadows falling underneath upon the long grass and moss. But every now and then a break in the hedge, or a gate leading into the fields, revealed a sweet homelike view,—with no bold glory of form or colour, but tender with subtle harmonies of tints melting one into the other, a haze of blue, white smoke curling upwards, straw-thatched barns, with quiet apple orchards lying round them, where the grass grew long and cool about the stalks of the old trees, and the young fruit mellowed through the kindly summer nights. By and by the lanes widened, they passed an old mill, half hidden by ash-trees, drove between flat meadows, crossed a bridge, and reached the outskirts of Underham. Mr Mannering and the Vicar had fallen into a discussion upon a new edition of Sophocles, and Marion looked out of the window with a happy glow upon her face, not understanding how the two men should bury themselves in those old-world interests, when life was rushing on, full of charm, of pain, of wonderment. After all, it is but a world of new editions. Sophocles was no further removed from them than the hundred hopes and fears with which she and Marmaduke beguiled the time until they should meet again, touch each other’s hands, look into each other’s eyes. But Marion had not learnt this yet.

The Bennetts’ house stood directly against the road, and the wall along which for some distance the footpath ran was the wall of their garden; the Underham boys holding fabulous views of the fruit that ripened on its innermost side, where green geometrical lines were marked out upon the warm brick. Mr Bennett was a lawyer, and having no children, he and his wife had adopted the daughter of a sister of Mrs Bennett’s, treating her in every respect as though she were their own child. Miss Lovell was smiling up at Anthony when the Vicarage party arrived, and Mr Chester, who was always a little loud and peremptory in his voice, was holding forth to Mr Bennett upon a local election.

“I should be the last person in the world to wish to influence anybody,” he was saying, “but you’ll not deny, I suppose, that the other men are a pair of fools.”

“Still, one doesn’t altogether like to go against North,—he as good as belongs to Underham.”

“Don’t see the value of that,” said the Squire, with a little roughness; and then dinner was announced, and they all trooped down. Anthony sat between an elderly lady and Miss Lovell, the Bennetts’ niece, Marmaduke had Marion, and Winifred’s neighbour was the son of Sir James Milman, the member. Anthony was always popular in society, so that to secure him was almost a pledge to the host and hostess that things would go brightly; moreover, he had but just returned from his travels, and an added charm of novelty hung about him. Even Mrs Featherly, next to whom he was sitting, the wife of the rector of Underham, and one of those excellent women whom people all blamed themselves for disliking, began to look as if the fault-finding on which she rested as the moral backbone of her character was yielding to Anthony’s pleasantness.

“You have seen a great deal since you left home, Mr Anthony, of one kind and another, and I hope you will make good use of it,” she said graciously.

“He earned his holiday,” said Mr Bennett, nodding his head. “After such great things at Cambridge, a man can’t do better than take a run and let his brain have a little rest. I’m never for overwork.”

“Only I do hope you have written some more beautiful poetry,” Miss Lovell put in on the other side. She was a pretty girl, fair, with a long soft curl falling on her shoulder, and a voice which had a little imploring emphasis in it. “And not in Latin this time, or you really must send us a translation.”

There was a good deal said in the same strain, to which Anthony made laughing disclaimers, liking the incense all the while. He was conscious of exaggerations, but it is not difficult to forgive exaggerations which lead along so pleasant a path, and his was a nature to grow warmly responsive under kindly treatment, so that his conversation became brighter and more entertaining, until even Mrs Bennett, who was contentedly eating strawberries, made the effort of inquiring at what they were laughing.

“Mr Miles is telling us such amusing things,” said Miss Lovell, with unmistakable admiration in her tone.

“Amusing things!” repeated the Squire; “I never hear anything worth listening to of any sort. Bless you, they talk nineteen to the dozen in these days, but there’s no making head nor tail of it when all’s said. It’s speechifying and argufying, and nothing done. That’s what made half the mischief in the Crimea. We sha’n’t get anything again like the old times, when there were no railways, nor confounded telegraphs pulling up the generals for every step they took, or making them believe there’d be a pack of men at their heels to pull them out of any holes they were fools enough to blunder into.”

In his youth the Squire had been in the Dragoons, and no one at Underham was bold enough to question his authority as a military man. Mrs Bennett only said placidly,—

“Dear me, was it not a little inconvenient?”

“It’s a good deal more inconvenient, ma’am, to have a heap of lies talked by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Letters were letters in those days, and you didn’t get pestered by every tradesman who wants to puff off his twopenny halfpenny foolery. When they came they had something in them. My mother, now. I’ve heard my father say that when news from Spain came in, and the old Highflyer was so hung about and set at, all the way down from London, that it was twelve o’clock at night before she got into Thorpe, as soon as my mother heard the wheels far off on the road, no matter what the weather was, rain or shine, moon or no moon, she would go out into the hall and put on her hood and cloak, and away she would trudge across the fields to the Red Lion to see if there might be a letter from poor Jack. My father was crippled at the time, and there wasn’t one she’d let go in her stead. Poor old mother!” said the Squire, with an involuntary softening.

“I remember your mother, Squire,” said old Mr Featherly.

“Then you remember as good a woman as ever breathed,” said Mr Chester, strongly again.

“Well, she was, she was. People called her a little high, but no one found her so when they were in trouble. And a fine woman, too, as upright as a dart, going straight to her point, whatever it was, with as pretty an ankle and as clean a heel as any one in the country. Miss Winifred reminds me of her in many ways.”

The Squire had pushed his chair a little back, and was looking at the glass of port he was fingering on the table with a pleased smile. But he shook his head at the old clergyman’s last remark.

“Winifred’s not so tall by half an inch or more as my mother was when she died.”

“She carries her head in the same fashion, though,” persisted Mr Featherly. “And there’s something that reminds me.”

It was certainly true that Winifred was at this moment holding her head with a little touch of stateliness. She had heard a good many of the flattering words which had been poured upon Anthony, and perhaps valued them at even less than they were worth, and it vexed her to see their effect upon him. Something in his nature courted the pleasant popularity and the spoiling. Is it women only who care for such pretty things? He might have told you that he despised them, but the truth was that they made a sunshine in which he liked to bask, a delight which was not without its influence. Winifred, who saw the weakness, was not merciful: she was a woman, with, perhaps, a grain of jealousy sharpening her perceptions, and rendering them sufficiently keen to probe the feminine flatteries which fell so sweetly upon him, and it is probable that, although a woman who loves—even unconsciously—sets herself, often unconsciously too, to study the character of the man she loves with a closeness of purpose, and an almost unerring instinct, swift to unravel its inmost workings, Winifred did not at this time rightly understand him. What she condemned as vanity was rather an almost womanish sensitiveness, to which the sunshine of applause might be said to have been needful. If it was withdrawn, he might either shrink or become bitter and morose. Perhaps there are two sides even to faults, and the people who love us best are sometimes our most severe judges: no one there thought hardly of Anthony, except Winifred, who would have had none of these little flaws, and sat, carrying her shapely head a little scornfully, as Mr Featherly had noticed. Anthony, on his part, was not long in discovering her displeasure, although unconscious of the cause. It provoked him, and he would not look in her face when the ladies went out of the dining-room.

Marion had drawn her into the balcony to pour out some of her hopes and fears about Marmaduke, and the two were talking eagerly when Ada Lovell came out, followed by such of the gentlemen as had come up stairs.

“I have been envying your good fortune to Mr Miles,” she said, with an innocent air of admiration. “Of course you can see all his poetry whenever you like. It must be so delightful.”

“Only I never do,” said Winifred, standing upright. “I don’t care for poetry unless it is the very best.”

Woman like, she felt a pang in her own heart the instant she had sent forth her shaft. She glanced quickly and almost imploringly at Anthony, to see how sharply he was hit. If he had looked at her he might have known that she had flung down her weapons, and was waiting to make amends. But he would not look. He saw nothing of the involuntary grace of her attitude, as she stood in the glow of the sweet evening light, a little shamefaced and sorry, with a tender rosy softness in her face. He only felt that she had tried to wound him, and was angry with her for the second time that evening. Ada Lovell, looking up at him with admiring awe, had no such pricks with which to make him wince, and, perhaps, it was to be expected that he should devote himself to her for the remainder of the time. Winifred made no more advances. She stood leaning against the railing, looking gravely down upon the tall white lilies that by degrees grew and glimmered out of the dusk, until Mr Milman joined her. Marion and Marmaduke talked in a low voice at one end. People came out now and then, declared the dew was falling, and made a little compromise by sitting round the window, past which the bats flitted softly. Mr Mannering was telling clever stories, and making every one laugh. The Squire called his daughter at last. He disliked being kept waiting, and she went hurriedly, but as she passed Anthony she made a little pause to say gently,—

“Good-night, Anthony.”

“Good-night.”

There are some things which rest in our minds with quite a disproportionate sense of heaviness. Winifred knew that she should see Anthony the next day, by which time he would have forgotten her offence, but she seemed to have lost some of the confidence which ordinarily grew out of such a knowledge, for she could neither forgive herself nor forget the sound of his cold good-night.

Chapter Five.

”‘Yet what is love, good shepherd, sayn?’
‘It is a sunshine mixt with rain.’”
Sir Walter Raleigh.

Places like Underham offer peculiar attractions to maiden ladies, who find in them equal protection from the solitude of the country and relief from the somewhat dreary desolateness of a great town. It might have been an old friendship for Mrs Miles which first brought Miss Philippa Lee into the neighbourhood, but she firmly resisted all attempts to decoy her nearer to Thorpe. She took a small house not far from the Featherlys, and there devoted herself to the care of her orphan nephew with that pathetic self-renunciation which we see in not a few women’s lives. She pinched herself to send him to a public school, and would gladly have supported him at college, but even had this been practicable for such straitened means, there were circumstances which prevented more than a secret sighing on her part. Marmaduke had, on his mother’s side, a great-uncle who was the one rich man in a poor family, and who if not actually childless was so by his own assertion to all intents and purposes, his daughter having mortally offended him by a marriage against his will. She was the Margaret Hare of whom we have heard Mr Mannering speak, for it was not until after her marriage that her father, upon an access of fortune, changed his name to “Tregennas,” and a little later, perhaps in a fit of desolation, took for his second wife and made miserable until her death an aunt of Mr Miles, the Vicar of Thorpe. The connection, although scarcely deserving of the name, was sufficient to form an additional link between the families, and Marmaduke read with the Vicar, and won Marion’s love while they were little more than girl or boy.

To Mr Tregennas—who, it must be allowed, took a certain interest in his great-nephew, if interest is proved by occasional gifts of sovereigns and somewhat arbitrary advice on the subject of his education—Marmaduke meanwhile looked as the maker of his fortunes. He was careful from the first to withhold Miss Philippa from contradicting him, as, to tell the truth, she was not disinclined to do. Odd little shoots of jealousy crop up even in the most loving. Add to this that Mr Tregennas strongly opposed her favourite college scheme, and it will not be surprising that more than once Miss Philippa would very willingly, as she expressed it, have put her foot to the ground, if only Marmaduke had not knocked that very ground from under her, by adopting his uncle’s views. And he was possessed of a certain languid self-will with which he invariably carried his point, even at the time when he appeared to yield, so that people were sometimes puzzled to reconcile cause and effect. Nevertheless, it was no doubt a severe disappointment when Mr Tregennas, instead of assisting him to enter a profession, advised his seeking employment in one of the great manufacturing firms of the north, and indeed actually applied to the heads before he had received an answer to his suggestion. Whether his will was the strongest, or his nephew’s philosophy overcame dislike, his plan was carried out, and Marmaduke had been for two years engaged in the most distasteful occupation that could have been provided for him. It was, perhaps, this very sense of ill-usage which rooted the more firmly his belief that he was to be his uncle’s heir. A grievance quickly excites the idea of compensation, and Marmaduke welded the two together so persistently that the one stood on nearly the same level as the other. The force, however, which prevented his throwing up his work had never proved sufficient to conquer his repugnance towards it, and the fact of feeling himself a victim, while it seemed to give him a right to feed upon future hopes, made it also a duty to seek alleviations in the present; so that a trifling vexation, or other change of mood, not infrequently brought about a flying visit to Thorpe and a drain upon Miss Lee’s slender resources.

He had told Marion at the dinner-party that he must see her alone the next day, and, accordingly, when he walked to the Vicarage, at a time when Mr Miles and John were likely to be absent, Marion was waiting eagerly for him. Mrs Miles, who was in the room, was made more uneasy by his increasing thinness than by her daughter’s determination to go out with him, for although no open engagement existed between the two, it was one of those events which might be expected to fell into shape at some future time, and which, if it were connected with Marion’s will, it was hopeless for her mother to resist, even had she been disinclined towards it. But Marmaduke had a gentle ease of manner pleasant to those with whom he was thrown into contact, and Mrs Miles really loved and pitied him, and was grieved at his looks.

“Does your Aunt Philippa give you porter jelly, Marmaduke?” she asked anxiously. “I wish she would. I am sure it is the very best thing. Sarah shall heat some beef-tea for you in a moment, if you will only take it.”

“Nothing will do me good while I have to work in that hole,” said Marmaduke, with a dreary intonation in his voice. “Life is simply existence. And to think that I have had two years of it already!”

Marion, who had looked at him as he spoke, did not say a word until they were out of the house, and in the deep lane, fresh with a cool beauty of water and shining cresses. Then, as they walked on, Sniff paddling beside them, she asked quietly,—“Is anything the matter?”

There was noticeable in her manner to him—at all times—a difference from her usual fashion of speaking. The abruptness, something even of the brightness, was gone, and in its place seemed to have grown a soft care, a tenderness almost like protection. And at this moment their natures might have been transposed, for Marmaduke turned upon her with an impetuosity unlike himself.

“Anything! I tell you, Marion, that what I go through is unendurable. You might know better than to ask such a question as that.”

“But why—what is it?” she persisted, with a vague trouble lest something more than she had heard was to be unfolded to her. Her loyalty to Marmaduke made her always ready to feed his self-pity, but she was afraid that he had taken some rash step.

“What good can a man do with work that he loathes?”

“You must remember to what the work will lead,” she said, relieved.

“When?—how? It is absolute folly to dream that matters going on as they are going now can ever lead to anything satisfactory. How much do you suppose that I can squeeze out of a paltry hundred and fifty a year? Even Anthony acknowledges it to be absurd, and Anthony is Utopian enough to believe that everything grows out of nothing. That may do very well for him, who will never need to prove it,” added Marmaduke, bitterly.

They were both leaning against a stile, and looking towards the cloudy distance of the moors. Marion slipped her hand softly into his.

“Surely we all heard when you went there that it would bring better things in a few years?”

“You talk of years as if they were days,” he said in the same tone. “Nobody denies it. When I have drudged at that disgustingly low business for half a dozen years, I shall probably be fifty pounds a year better off than I am now, and by the time we are both too old to take pleasure in life we shall be able to marry, and this seems to content you perfectly.”

Marion caught away her hand with a sudden movement. It made him turn to look at her, and the hurt anger in her eyes brought back his usual gentleness of manner at once. He was desirous to bind all her feelings on his side, and he knew her well enough to be aware that his shortest means of doing this was to revert to the wretchedness of his position.

“Forgive me, dearest,” he said; “you don’t know what a poor wretch a man becomes when he grinds along in one eternal round of small miseries. It is such a horrible separation from you all. And what is the good of being old Tregennas’s heir, if he can’t put his hand into his pocket and let me live like a gentleman?”

“He promised that, did he not, Marmaduke?”

“It depends upon what you call promising. He is not the man to say out honestly, ‘Marmaduke Lee, you’re my heir, and I’ll give you a fit allowance till you come into the property.’ If he had, I should not be as I am. But he said quite enough. Of course I am his heir. There isn’t a Jew in the country but would lend me a few thousands on the chance. Of course I am his heir. I wish you would make your father understand, and then he might allow us to consider ourselves engaged; at present it’s like dropping a poor wretch into a pit, and blocking up his one glimpse of blue sky. I tell you, Marion, again, I cannot endure this state of things any longer. I’ve not got it in me to toil on in that dirty hole without so much as an atom of hope to cheer one.”

They were both silent for an instant, and then Marion cried out passionately, “Toil! I would toil day and night for the joy of earning a sixpence which I could lay aside and say, ‘This is ours.’” There was such a swift leaping out of the love of her heart in word and eyes, that it seemed fire which must needs kindle whatever it touched, if only for a moment. But no answering glow passed across his pale face. He looked away again as if what she said had not any relation to his thoughts, and she presently continued more timidly. “Surely it would be the height of imprudence to give up your work? And you know that if you did so my father would be less than ever likely to consent to our engagement, than now when you are at least on the road to independence.”

“I can’t go on as I am,” he said, a little doggedly. “Mr Miles must give me something to hold by, or I shall throw up the whole concern. I have nearly done so a dozen times already.”

“Is there no way of influencing Mr Tregennas?” asked Marion, after a minute’s troubled thought.

“That’s what I wanted to speak to you about. As I said before, it isn’t fair that he should leave me in such a position. It’s not as if I should have to work for my bread all the days of my life, like some poor devils. By and by I shall step into as pretty a place as you’ll find anywhere, and why I should have to do compensation now by sitting on a high stool and addling my brain over ledgers is more than I can see. If he’d only say something definite one would know what one had to go upon. But—”

“But what?”

“O, you must understand, Marion, that I can’t very well go to him and say this sort of thing!”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Well, women are queer about such matters, but I should think you might guess it’s not the way to make yourself agreeable to an old fellow who has you in his power.”

“It is only justice,” said Marion, whose cheek had flushed under the presence of an absorbing pity for Marmaduke which swept her away like a flood. “I wish I could tell him what I think.”

“You can do something better,” said Marmaduke, seeing she had reached the point to which he had been leading.

“What? Only tell me.”

“Get your father to interfere.”

She shook her head, moving her hands nervously. “You know he will not. He is so scrupulous about such matters. Over and over again I have heard him say he would never ask a favour of his uncle.”

“A favour! But I am not demanding an allowance of a thousand a year. All I want to know is how I stand. And if Mr Miles sees in black and white that I am his heir, he will no longer object to an engagement. I tell you plainly, I can’t work unless I see some end before me. Besides, one must go step by step, and if he would acknowledge my position straightforwardly, by and by other things would follow. No one is so well entitled to ask as your father. Marion, you don’t want to keep me in this misery?”

She was at no time insensible to these appeals, and perhaps less than ever on such a morning as this, when things about her were shining, dancing, singing in a burst of happy life, could she endure any weight of gloom for the man she loved best in the world. To some of us every echo of a happiness which does not at the same time fill our own souls with its music seems only discord. We cry out against it with voices that clash and jar and sadden themselves with the dissonance, when if we would be but content to listen in patience, some tender vibrations of an eternal harmony should reach us from afar, and satisfy us with their beauty. To Marion it was a positive wrong that the skylark high in the air was singing joyously; that the fresh breeze stirred into brightness the little stream which ran along the meadows; that the sound of the scythe and the chatter of the hay-making folk rose now and then with cheerful distinctness above lesser summer sounds; that Sniff was yelping with delight after the birds he was vainly chasing. Marion told him sharply to be quiet, but he only stopped for a moment, and looked at her with his head on one side at an angle of consideration, before he was off again, his little red tongue hanging out, his brown eyes on fire with excitement. Marmaduke, who was leaning moodily against the gate, waiting for Marion to speak, said at last,—

“Anthony is a lucky dog, with the world before him, and no one to please but himself. But I don’t know that such sharp contrasts are the most encouraging reflections in the world.”

The languor and depression of his voice pierced the girl’s heart like a thorn. She exclaimed impetuously,—

“Something must be done,—my father shall write,—nothing can be so bad as that you should suffer in this way.”

She put out her hand again, and he took it in his, and began to thank her in the gently caressing tones which fell easily from his lips. Her resolution, indeed, carried a greater relief to him than seemed to be contained in it. It was not only that he wanted to escape from the irksomeness of his duly toil, and believed the acknowledgment of his position the first step towards it, but he was also fretted by a wearing anxiety lest the position might never be his, and the very assumption of a certain claim on his part by Mr Miles might have a good effect, and remove a vague uneasiness, for which he could not account, of Anthony as a possible rival. Poor Marion thought it to be love for her which urged him; but although he did love her after a fashion, she was only one of the pleasant things he wanted to sweep into his net. He was full of satisfaction at the promise she had given.

“Who are these—by the watercourse?” he said. “One of them looks like Anthony.”

“And the other is Mr Chester,” said Marion, abstractedly. “Come.”

“Yes, it is the Squire. I can see his red face, and that little flourish of his stick which he gives when he is angry. They see us by this time, and we may as well hear the battle-royal, if there is one. Listen.”

Mr Chester’s loud voice came up well before him.

“I tell you, sir, I tell you your father will live to see you a carping radical yet. When a young fellow gets this sort of notions into his head, we all know what’ll be the end of it. Everything respectable goes out by the heels, and he makes a fool of himself over balloting and universal suffrage, and a heap of rascally French republicanisms. How d’ye do, Marion, how d’ye do? Glad to see you, Marmaduke. Hope you’re not infected with any of this modern rubbish?”

“No, sir, I’m a Conservative. A Liberal-Conservative,” added the young man under his breath, not expecting to be heard. But the Squire’s quick ears caught the word.

“Don’t be half anything. There’s nothing I think so poorly of as a man that can’t make up his mind. He says this on one side and that on another, till he knows no more than a teetotum where his spinning will lead him. I should have twice the opinion of Anthony if he could say straight out what he means, instead of calling himself one thing and talking himself into another.” There was a good deal of truth in the Squire’s accusation, and the clash was not one for which he had any sympathy. Anthony himself was too young not to be sore upon the charge of inconsistency. He said hotly,—

“Really, sir, I don’t know what hedges and draining have to do with the ballot. I have not been the one to say anything about it.”

“I’m only showing what these ideas lead to,” said Mr Chester, enjoying his adversary’s irritation. “I’m content to take my land as it came to me. That’s good theology, ain’t it, Marion? By the way, I forgot to tell you that young Frank Orde comes to-morrow. Come up to dinner, all of you, will you? I dare say he’s as bad as the rest, but you’ll not make me believe my father hadn’t as good common-sense as the young fellows that find fault with his farming.”

Sometimes, by talking loudly enough, a man becomes impressed with so confident a sense of triumph, that the sound of his own voice is like the salvo of guns over a victory. It was so now with the Squire, who remained in high good-humour during the rest of the walk, and gave Anthony to understand that he looked upon him as crushed and annihilated by an overwhelming weight of argument.

Chapter Six.

Marion was not the person to delay the doing of anything which she had made up her mind should be done, nor had she the faculty instinctive in many women, of approaching a critical subject with that deliberate and delicate touch of preparation which smooths the way for a more open attack. Whatever was uppermost in her mind was apt to take possession of her with so great an intensity that she had no longer the mastery of herself required for this method of handling. She did not trouble herself to join in the family conversation at luncheon, and when her father went into his study,—a small room choked with a heterogeneous collection of books and pamphlets, heaped here and thrown there in utter carelessness to dust and disorder,—Marion followed him and said abruptly,—

“Papa, something must be done to improve Marmaduke’s position. Will you write to Mr Tregennas, and point this out?”

“Write to Mr Tregennas!” said Mr Miles sharply, turning round from the papers on his table.

“What do you mean? Is Marmaduke dismissed? No? Then there cannot be anything much amiss.” He said this with a relieved air, going back to his papers. “Marion, I wish you’d just see whether that last hospital report is up stairs. Mannering tells me I’ve been down on the committee for a twelvemonth, but I cannot credit it.”

“Marmaduke has been at that hateful place for two years,” said Marion, unheeding. “It is quite unfit for him, and some one ought to point it out to his uncle.”

“What is the matter with the place?” Mr Miles asked, still searching. “Really, your mother must speak to the maids; I cannot allow them to disturb everything under pretence of tidying. I am confident I left that report on this table.”

Marion was trembling with impatience. “Papa,” she said, “you might think a little more about poor Marmaduke’s happiness.”

“Happiness? Humph! He is too young to be talking about happiness. Let him take what comes to him, and be thankful for it—” The Vicar turned suddenly round with a quick, clumsy movement, “He has not been talking nonsense to you, has he?”

The girl was standing with her back to the door, so that a clear light fell upon her. As her father spoke, a soft beautiful change came over her face, tender brightness shone in the dark eyes, the curve of the mouth was touched with tremulous joy, a faint glow on her cheek gave an indescribable look of youth, and her head bent gently with the perfection of womanly grace.

Mr Miles, who had spoken sharply, could not but be moved by this strange magic,—this mute answer,—so unlike Marion that it affected him the more. He did not know what to say; he wished he had not ceased speaking, had not looked at her, and so become aware of what—in its contrast to her usual expression—was almost a revelation. Hitherto, although he had vaguely listened to what they told him, it had been but a feeble attention he paid, considering that the children must necessarily pass through certain stages of existence, the boys going to school, running wild over cricket, coming home to snowballing, having the whooping-cough, every now and then requiring a thrashing, teasing Marion, quarrelling with her, and at last by the same law, as he imagined, falling in love with her. When Miss Philippa solemnly told him that Marmaduke had confided to her his affection, and Mrs Miles complained that Marion had lost her appetite, the Vicar half laughed at himself for so far treating it seriously as to tell Marmaduke that he was in no position to talk to his daughter of love, and, contenting himself with this prudent command, dismissed the matter from his thoughts. He had, indeed, a mind which did not occupy itself freely with many subjects at once. Those which ceased to interest him he would lay on the shelf, and forget altogether, until they would sometimes start from their unwatched seclusion in a form so grown, so changed, so great with life, that the shock gave him a sudden blow. Such a blow came now. For, looking at her so standing, with the sweet flush of girlish triumph vanquishing for the moment all care and fret, and softening the harsher lines in her face with its happy touch, the father’s awakening brought sharp remorse for his former blindness. It was not possible for him to reproach her when he felt as though reproach might so justly fall upon himself, and if she had been thinking of him at that moment she might have noticed a wistfulness in his eyes, a faltering change in his voice, as strange perhaps as that other revelation.

“How long has this been?” he said at last, not that he would have chosen the words, but that they seemed to force themselves out.

“How long have we cared for each other, do you mean?” she answered directly. “I think—always.”

He shook his head at this. That which was so new to himself in his own child must, he believed, be new-born.

“Children like you do not know your own minds,” he said, but faintly, and with a want of confidence which Marion was shrewd enough to note.

“Papa,” she said, going closer to him, “we are not children. We are not asking for anything foolish. I would give up all in the world for Marmaduke. I would bear anything for him. I should feel it my richest joy to be with him, at his side, however poor and struggling he was. But of course I understand that could not be. It would not do for him to be hampered with a wife while he can scarcely make his miserable means support himself.” As she spoke with a growing impetuosity, her father, who had been holding her hand in his, and looking into her face, turned slightly away, still holding her hand, and leaned a little backwards against the writing-table.

“We know all that,” she went on. “I have not said a word against it. But now that I have seen him, and understand how miserable he is, chained to work utterly distasteful to him, and without even the most meagre of hopes, I cannot bear it any longer, I cannot, indeed. Why should we not be engaged?”

Hearing that she paused for a reply, Mr Miles, after pausing also for a moment, said,—

“You are thinking only of him.”

“And of whom should I think?” she asked, vehemently.

“Perhaps I have been in error: I think I have been in error,” said Mr Miles, speaking with a strange humility. “One has no right to live with one’s eyes shut. But, Marion, if this be so, I cannot make wrong more wrong. Marmaduke has no prospect of being able to marry for a considerable number of years, unless, indeed, this shadowy hope to which he clings of Mr Tregennas—”

“It ought not to be shadowy. It is disgraceful that he should not say more. Papa, you must write and press this upon him.”

“I!”

“Yes, indeed! There is no one else.”

“This is simply absurd, Marion,” said Mr Miles with some anger.

But he had given her an advantage, which she was resolved to use even to ungenerosity.

“You said you had been unjust to Marmaduke—”

“Not to him, Marion.”

“He and I are one in such a matter, papa.”

Ah, there was the strangeness of it! His child’s life had seemed to him no more than an undeveloped bud, some day to expand, but as yet folded securely within its sheath, and suddenly it had shot apart from, was almost opposed to them all. It was a thing so strange that the father, looking at the woman, thought only of the child, and took to his own blindness greater blame than it deserved.

“Well,” he said, sighing, “it is possible, as you say, that I have not acted in the best way for Marmaduke, or indeed for any one.”

“And you will write?”

“To tell the man he is to make Marmaduke his heir!”

“O, he has said it already. Tell him that he must be kinder to him, poor fellow!—that he is thrown away in his present position—”

“I cannot say that,” said the Vicar, with a wavering smile at the childishness of the proposition. And as the idea struck him, he looked keenly at her again. “Child, is this really what you suppose it? Do you care so much for Marmaduke that you are prepared to be his wife? You have been thrown together, you have no experience to guide you, you have seen nothing of the world. I ought to take you about and show you other places,” he added in grave bewilderment.

Marion, who had been going to the door, turned round and laughed.

“It is too late now, papa.”

Too late! And he had been thinking of her life as a smooth, untrodden meadow!

Outside, in a spot of cool shade under the cedar, Mrs Miles was sitting and working placidly at some little white squares, which never seemed to grow nearer their completion. The Vicar, after looking at her for a moment from his window, went out into the hall, through the porch, and across the grass-plot to her side. It was very rarely that he carried any problems to his wife; but it now appeared to him that there were certain complications, such as the white intricacies lying upon her lap, which it might be given only to a feminine understanding to disentangle. He sat down gravely by her side, looking with abstraction at the sunshine falling pleasantly on the house and the fine old tower beyond, and listening, perhaps, to the hum of the bees, or the rough rhythm which came from a saw-pit in the lane. Mrs Miles only looked up and smiled, and went on with her knitting, believing the Vicar to be absorbed in the Sunday sermons which she held to be the great events of Thorpe life. These, although never weak, ran a risk of being considered by a critic as rather dry and lengthy, but loyal wifehood excited a most earnest admiration in Mrs Miles. She knitted softly, therefore, lest the click of her needles should interfere with the roll of his ideas, and in the hush of the sweet summer afternoon a pleasant drowsiness was creeping over her, when her husband startled her by asking abruptly,—

“Wife, how old is Marion?”

“Marion, my dear?” said Mrs Miles, with a perplexed conviction that the Vicar must have meant some other person more nearly connected with his sermon,—“Marion was twenty last month. Don’t you remember we had a junket on her birthday, and it was the first time Sarah quite succeeded in it?”

“Twenty!” repeated Mr Miles with a little groan. “I believed her to have been sixteen.”

“My dear! And dining out as she does, and so admired.”

“Well, well,” said the Vicar in a moment or two, “it is no fault of yours or hers. But tell me whether you understood that Marmaduke was serious in his attachment to her?”

“Why not?” asked Mrs Miles, a little motherly indignation making itself heard in her voice.

“Why not?” repeated her husband, standing up and looking down on her, impatiently. “They are both children.”

“I never could think of Marion as a child at all,” said the mother, with a little sigh. “She has always been so much older than her years. And as for Marmaduke, poor fellow, I am sure he can’t have proper food at his lodgings. I have told Sarah to make some jelly for him to take away with him. Of course it is natural that the separation should be a trial to him, but I dare say it will all come right by and by.”

“But—good heavens, what a marriage for Marion!” cried the Vicar, beginning to walk hastily up and down under, the cedar, and crushing the daisies that peeped up through the not too carefully trimmed grass.

“My dear,” said Mrs Miles, knitting calmly, “Marion is a girl who would be miserable unless she had her own way. With all his strong will, Anthony would be more likely to listen to reason.”

“Anthony!” exclaimed her husband, stopping before her. “There is nothing of the sort going on with Anthony?”

“It has not come to the same point, of course, but it is easy to see that he has a fancy for Winifred. I am sure I should be very glad if you could persuade him to make up his mind as to what he will be, and get him out of the place.”

“I don’t see why,” said the Vicar, amazed at his wife’s penetration. “I have never thought of what you have just put before me, but it appears to me that Anthony would be fortunate to secure so good a girl as Winifred Chester.”

“Fortunate, Mr Miles!” said his wife, laying down her work, and speaking with unusual irritation. “Why, Anthony, with his good looks, his cleverness, and his fortune, might marry any girl in the county. I have never seen any one good enough for him, that is the worst of it; and as for Winifred, what you can see in her that you should call him fortunate, I am sure I cannot conceive. She will be a very lucky girl that gets our Anthony.”

The Vicar said, “Pooh, pooh!” but he had a humiliating sense of being baffled by his women. He went away, without further words, across the lawn and past the mignonettes and sweet-peas into his study. There he pulled down the blind to shut out the sun, in a fit of absence tore up a carefully arranged table of parish accounts which he had just prepared for Mr Mannering to audit, flung it into the waste-paper basket, and sat down to write a letter to old Mr Tregennas.

Chapter Seven.

Sunday was rather a gay day at the Vicarage. The Hardlands party were in the habit of spending a good deal of time there, Winifred, indeed, remaining for the early dinner, so as to be in her place in the school before the afternoon service; and there were further elements of friendliness in the two Mr Mannerings, who would drop in for a chat with the Vicar when his work was over.

On this particular Sunday, the people of Thorpe had undergone one of those disturbances of routine which they were uncertain whether to resent as an injury or to hail as a welcome variety. One of the neighbouring clergy had been taken ill suddenly the day before, and Mr Miles had ridden over to supply his place, while Mr and Mrs Featherly were jolted from Underham by Job White to undertake the services at Thorpe. Lest it should be supposed that the plural number has been used unadvisedly, it must be explained that many persons who had fair means of forming an opinion held it to be no less than a moral impossibility that the rector of Underham should accomplish any act in his ministerial or private life without his wife’s support, and believed that if her head, crowned with marabouts, were withdrawn from the seat immediately below the pulpit, the sermon would collapse in some fatal and irretrievable manner. The influence, whatever it was, was in no way connected with criticism, since Mrs Featherly, as the rector’s wife, considered herself released from the necessity of seeking benefit from any preaching whatever, and it probably depended upon that subtile link of habit by which all persons are in some degree bound, and which, in her own case, led her almost mechanically to count the heads of the congregation, and to store in her memory, with unerring acuteness, the names of those offenders who should have been and were not present.

So powerful in her, indeed, was this almost instinct, that as they drove painfully between the high hedges of the lanes, Mrs Featherly, with her head out of the window, reckoned the members of the different families they passed, and kept up a running commentary upon their numbers.

“I am convinced I have seen that woman in the red shawl at Underham. I believe her to be the farmer’s wife who supplies Langford’s dairy, and if so, I should like to know where her husband is? And there are the Crockers, and the daughter who is home from service not with them. Really, Mr Featherly, you ought to make a point of giving Mr Miles a hint. When people once take to neglecting their parish church I have the worst possible opinion of them.”

The consciousness of so much wrong-doing imparted quite a judicial severity to Mrs Featherly’s countenance, as she descended heavily at the Vicarage porch, just as the bells were chiming merrily and the people clustering in knots outside the church. There had been rain in the early morning, and large clouds were still coming up, but the sun was shining after the shower, and the wet on grass and roof only gave a touch of additional brightness. The boys who were too big to go to school lounged up in little companies, too shamefaced to venture alone, and putting on an appearance of great boldness and explosive mirth, to cover their actual bashfulness. The girls generally tossed their heads, walking on demurely without taking any notice of their contemporaries, but a ruddy-cheeked young farmer or two, who had come from the outskirts of the village, received such smiling glances from the same damsels as to bring down an occasional sharp remark from one of the elder women.

“You’ll a lost yere eyes as well as yere bonnet before iver you gets into choorch, Emma,” said one of these matrons, with a satirical look at the red rose that crowned its wearer’s last effort at millinery.

Emma, who was blue-eyed and literal-minded, gave an anxious pull to assure herself of the safety of the structure, before she answered good-humouredly,—

“You see, Mrs Anders, Susan gits a new shape for me into Under’m now and then, and I’m sure, if Polly wanted wan—”

“My Polly!” began Mrs Andrews, in so high a staccato of indignation that her husband, who was standing nearer the porch, looked round and said, in a deprecating tone,—

“Stiddy, missus, stiddy. Hyur’s the new parson coming oop to t’ choorch.”

“Ees, fay, so it be,” said another man. “Hers so smarl us can sceerce see un.”

“I can find him a tex for his sermond,” retorted Mrs Andrews, lowering her voice a little, but looking at Emma with wrathful contempt, ”‘The pompses and vanities of this wicked wordel.’ That’s a tex as might agree with some as is not so far off at this minit, and doan’t know how to be’ave themselves afor their betters.”

“That bain’t no tex, though,” said old Araunah Stokes, slowly shaking his head. “That’s noa moor than watt godfaythers and godmoothers have got to doo in t’ catechiz. Noa, noa, thicky thyur bain’t noan of the Scripter texes.”

“And I’d be glad to know, Mr Stokes,” replied the irate Mrs Andrews, unfolding her prayer-book from its pocket-handkerchief as if with the intention of appealing to written authority, “I’d be glad to know whether Scripter and the catechiz bain’t wan? P’raps you’ll be holding next as the Ten Commandmints bain’t in the Bible, becos they’m put down in the catechiz?—nor the Blief, nor my dooty towaeds my nayber as I was bound to say wann I wor a little maaed, till it slipped aff my tongue so faest as pays owt of a barrel, nayther? If any wan have a right to spake abeowt the catechiz, it’s me, though you doo caest it up to me, Mr Stokes, as I doan’t know texes when I see ’em.”

“Cloack’s strook, fayther,” said Jeremiah Stokes, interposing feebly in the character of peacemaker. Old Araunah, however, only hobbled off to where two or three other old men were standing, looking apathetically into a little newly dug child’s grave.

“Cloack’s strook, as you say, lad, but a woman’s tongue ’ull diffen cloacks and bells, and arl t’ rest o’ um. Ees, yer moother gived me a bet o’ ’sperience that way. An’ so that’s fur little Rose Tucker’s little un? Whay, I minds her moother wann her warn’t noa begger, and us wor—”

But here an unexpected interruption occurred. Mr Featherly, unconscious of the ordinary arrangements by which the Vicar caused the ringers to accommodate themselves to his own erratic time, had, punctually as the clock struck, appeared in the reading-desk. The ringers, unprepared for such a movement, did not even cast a look in that direction, and, engaged in cheerful conversation, only became aware when the exhortation had been with some difficulty concluded, that the service had actually begun. The consequence was a sudden stoppage of the bells, instead of the ordinary change for three minutes to a single toll, which gave time for the loiterers in the churchyard to present themselves; and it was not until one of the ringers had come out and related what had happened, that the men were able to persuade themselves that the single bell was not yet to be rung. Mrs Featherly was terribly scandalised by the unseemly stamping and scuffling that followed, and the male part of the congregation, naturally incensed at being placed so unexpectedly in the wrong, looked a little hot and sulky throughout the remainder of the service.

A larger number than usual turned into the Vicarage garden afterwards. Frank Orde, the Squire’s nephew, had arrived the day before, and old Mr Wood, of the Grange, had walked over to the Red House, not, certainly, with the expectation of finding Mrs Featherly installed at Thorpe, nor with any satisfaction at the fact.

“Why on earth didn’t you get rid of the woman?” he growled sharply, under his breath. “She says as many disagreeable things as if she were a relation.”

“Charles manages her admirably,” said Mr Robert, laughing. “His excessive politeness is just what she cannot meet with her usual weapons. Not that I believe there’s harm in her, except when compassion for Featherly is too strong for one’s justice.”

“Compassion! If a man cuts his throat it’s his own doing,” said Mr Wood. “There! the very dogs have more sense.”

Sniff, indeed, showed a rooted dislike to Mrs Featherly, a feeling which was fully returned; on this occasion, however, she so far unbent as to call him in a gracious tone, “Dog, dog,” an indignity which Sniff as naturally resented, as we should resent being addressed in the abstract as “man,” and marked his displeasure by turning a deaf ear to her endearments.

“And there, the Squire is falling foul of Anthony again,” said Mr Robert, hurrying on with a good-humoured design to act as peacemaker.

“Red’s red, I suppose,” Mr Chester was loudly asserting, “without a chimney-sweep standing up beside it. Give me a good old-fashioned garden, with rose de Meaux and gilliflowers, and that sort. I hate that talk about contrasts and backgrounds and rubbish.”

“Never mind these young fellows, Squire,” said Mr Robert, interposing before Anthony had time to answer. “There are a certain set of theories they are bound to run through before they settle into good sound stuff like you and me.”

The Squire, who was easily propitiated, but unwilling to allow it, walked away with a grunt.

Since this last home-coming of Anthony’s, it seemed as if there were always some little contest springing up between the Squire and him; the things were almost too trivial to deserve notice, but there was a pervading spirit of antagonism Anthony probably enjoyed it, for he provoked it at least as much as Mr Chester, though there were times, as on this occasion, when his opponent’s bristles rubbed a sore spot, and when the sense of restraint was galling. He drew Winifred on one side, and she went willingly, for there had been a little shadow between them ever since the dinner at the Bennetts’, and she accused herself of having been in fault, and longed to hold out her little olive-branch. There was a sweet hush and serenity in the day itself. The homely garden, which vexed Mr Robert by its disorder, was fresh and fragrant, daisies held open their rosy-tipped cups, soft little wafts of air just rustled the lighter branches, and made tremulous shadows on the grass: she was glad to move away from the others, and to stroll along a broad path bordered with stiff hollyhocks, which led towards a mulberry-tree standing in its own square of turf.

It is one of the privileges of old friendship—at least to us taciturn island folk—that there may be silence between two people without any feeling of awkwardness marring its pleasantness. Under its influence Anthony’s wrath subsided quickly, but there was still a touch of irritation in the voice in which he said at last,—

“Your father finds fault with everything I do.”

“He doesn’t mean it,—or he doesn’t mean it seriously,” said Winifred, correcting herself. “He has been accustomed so long to us girls, that he can’t understand anything that seems like contradiction.”

“I never contradict him.”

“O no, you only disagree. Only the two things are so dreadfully alike, Anthony, that no wonder he is puzzled,” said Winifred, with a quick look of fun.

“Living with you ought to have broken him in to difference of opinion.”

“O, I can’t afford to waste my contradictions on papa. I keep them for my friends.”

They glanced at each other and laughed, and walked on again silently side by side. Both were too easy in their companionship to be thinking about love, but they were very happy and contented to be together. Her influence tightened its hold upon his heart all imperceptibly, like so many threads which did not let themselves be known for fetters. There is a peril in those little threads, woven by habit, by proximity, by opportunities,—not a peril of their breaking, but of their untried strength being all unguessed, of some blast of passion, some storm of resentment, even some petty gust of pique, seeming for the moment to sweep them off, and free the heart of them forever,—until, as the rush dies away and the calm comes back, too late, perhaps, we learn that not a thread has snapt, that the work has been a work of desolation, that the small cords bind us still, like unyielding links of iron, and that the freedom we fancied we had gained is no more than a double bondage. Winifred said presently, in a questioning tone,—

“Anthony, I cannot make out what is the matter with Marion.”

“She is uneasy about Marmaduke. She has persuaded my father to write to old Tregennas. It’s the last thing I would have done myself; however, it’s his business, not mine.”

“I should long so much more for everything to go smoothly with them, if I felt more sure about Marmaduke. I wish you would tell me if you really like him,” said Winifred eagerly, “or whether it is the having been old playfellows that prejudices you towards him.”

“Of course I like him,” said Anthony, a little indignantly. “He’s the best fellow in the world. Talk of prejudices, you women keep fresh relays which come in every week, and last about as long. Here’s a poor fellow eating his heart out over work which he detests, and just because he’s down in the world, you must all set your faces against him. I wish there were a better chance of things coming right than I see at present.”

The speech ended more mildly than it began, for Anthony was suddenly struck with the golden threads which the sunshine brought out in Winifred’s hair. They were standing at this moment close to the mulberry-tree. And then he rushed off to point out to her the spot which David Stephens had intended to appropriate for the chapel. But he returned presently to the subject.

“I wonder you do not feel more for him. It must be horribly hard to know so much is against one. I’m not sure that I could stand it myself.”

“I don’t know that you could,” said Winifred, composedly.

“What makes you say so? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Winifred, just come from church, and going to teach those wretched little victims, with uncharitableness written on every hair of your head. Poor Marmaduke! Well, he gets on with your father better than I do.”

“I don’t know that, really. Only you and papa have each your own hobby-horses, and instead of trotting comfortably along, you must go full tilt at each other. I am sure he was very proud when he heard you had won the Chancellor’s medal. How nice it was of you, Anthony!”

“You could not have cared much about it.”

“Why not?” asked Winifred, who knew what was coming.

“You do not care for any poetry but the very best, you know.”

“That need not stand in the way,” said Winifred, smiling, and holding out her olive-branch magnanimously, “and besides—”

“Well?”

“I was rather cross that night, Anthony.”

“At what?”

“O, I don’t know! How can one know what makes one cross? I think Mr Milman bored me. Were you bored, too?”

“I don’t believe I was. That Miss Lovell is pleasant enough.”

“Do you think so? She worries me by drawling the last word of every sentence, and it is all so very commonplace.”

“Well, perhaps it is commonplace, but one doesn’t expect to find anything else.”

“If you like it, there is nothing to be said against it,” said Winifred carelessly, still playing with the mulberry leaves. “Shall we go back? There is something I want to tell Bessie.”

“Wait a moment,” said Anthony, not thinking much of what had been said. “Tell me, why did you say just now that you did not think I could stand being down in the world?”

Winifred was silent.

“Tell me,” he urged, trying to look in her face. “I don’t mean to go down. My belief is that circumstances are much more under our own control than we allow. Still, I should like to know why you made the assertion.”

“I suppose it is owing to that very belief you have just stated, and to your having such terrible faith in your own powers,” said Winifred, speaking with a kind of sweet strength. “You think you are sure to get what you aim at because it is good and great. I have an idea that, the higher one aims, the less one will be satisfied with what is reached, and then it is called failure, and that seems to discourage some people utterly.”

“And you think I should be discouraged?” said Anthony. “It is better not to dream about failures. They generally belong to half-heartedness, so far as I can see.”

“Not all,” said Winifred softly.

They did not speak again, and she walked along the grass that bordered the path, smelling a dewy cabbage rose which he had given her, and humming under her breath one of the old version psalms. Sometimes, in the midst of all our familiar knowledge of another, there is a sudden impression cut deep into our memory. We can give no definite reason for it, but it is there, and there forever. Anthony and Winifred had walked a hundred times as they were walking then: no change had come over the old Vicarage, which stood up to their left with fluttering shadows on the grey stones, and house-martins flashing in and out under the eaves; no new charm belonged, to the bright freshness of the garden, the quiet of the day, nor indeed was he conscious of any peculiar force about the little picture which should so impress it on his mind, and yet—he never afterwards forgot it, it never faded into dull outline, or lost its delicacy of colour; there always, not to be cast out, grew into life the quaint trim hollyhocks, the busy martins, the daisies in the grass, and brown-haired Winifred walking along with a quiet grace, singing the old psalm tune, and laying the cool rose against her cheek.

Chapter Eight.

“O Life and Love! O happy throng
Of thoughts, whose only speech is song!
O heart of man! canst thou not be
Blithe as the air is, and as free?”
Longfellow.

Mr Tregennas’s answer to the Vicar’s letter was a little unsatisfactory and perplexing. Answer, indeed, it could hardly be called, since it touched upon no subject which Mr Miles had introduced, but it contained an unexpected invitation for himself and Anthony to start at once, and pass a few days at Trenance.

Probably at no other time within the last ten years would such an invitation have been treated by the Vicar with more consideration than a hasty reply in the negative, and a speedy forgetfulness that it had been given. A man who has all his life hated change, and that uprooting of habit which even the absence of a day will effect, becomes at last a positive slave to the feeling. Nothing could be more distasteful to Mr Miles than the prospect of leaving behind him his familiar every-day life, of having the trouble of accommodating himself to new forms, and of moving, in feet, out of a world in which instinct had grown to serve him almost as well as the deliberate exercise of will. When, added to this, arose a consideration of Mr Tregennas and his uncongenial society, it was perhaps natural that on ordinary occasions he should have thrown aside the letter without so much as giving its contents a second thought.

But now there was a change. Ever since Marion’s appeal in the study, a close observer might have traced an almost wistful uneasiness in her father, would have noticed that his eyes followed her, that his voice was modulated into unusual gentleness in addressing her, and that once or twice in a discussion with Anthony he had sided with her, taking her part, indeed, with a sharpness which seemed uncalled for. His heart smote him for the blindness which, after all, had caused little or no mischief. But we are all inclined to suppose that we might have averted evil had we only seen it coming. It seemed to him as if his girl’s determination were something against which he should have watched and prayed. Not that he had any cause of complaint to make him object to Marmaduke personally as her husband, but that his poverty and present position held out no prospect of marriage, and he keenly felt what the bitterness of a long waiting would be to her. It made him long to do something that should atone for his failure of care. He called Marion into the study, put the letter into her hand, and waited silently.

“Of course you will accept, papa,” Marion said, looking up. “To-morrow will be a very good day.”

“He says nothing of Marmaduke,” Mr Miles observed slowly.

“But it means that he will listen to you.”

“I suppose I must,” said the Vicar, looking round his room with a sigh. “But I don’t know about to-morrow. Anthony may not be able to start so soon.”

“Anthony! Why should he go?” said Marion, in a tone of dissatisfaction.

“We are asked together; I could not go without him.”

No more was said, and it may have been that the greatness of the sacrifice he was about to make in some measure appeared to the Vicar to compensate for his mistakes, for he did not attempt to disguise his misery at the prospect before him, and Marion breathed more freely when she saw him seated with Anthony in the little pony-carriage, of which James and a portmanteau shared the back seat. Even when they had started, her anxiety was not ended, for twice, to Sniffs extreme disgust, the fat pony came tugging round the corner again, once to leave a message for a farmer, and once to say that Tom Lear must wait to be married until the Vicar’s return. At last they were fairly off. The children ran out to courtesy; the women speculated as to the meaning of the portmanteau.

“Mr Anthony’s gwoin’ agaen,” said old Araunah, shaking his head. “Thyur’s a dale of comin’ and gwoin’ nowadays. Us used to think twice afore us car’d ower legs dree or fowter miles out o’ t’ pleace, us did, and ’twarn’t wi’out there wor a good rason for’t, a peg to sell, or a bet o’ sense like that. But thyur’s a dale of comin’ and gwoin’ nowadays.”

“I shall never believe they are gone until they are back again, I am sure,” said Mrs Miles, coming into the porch with tearful eyes. “It is three years since the Vicar slept out of the house, and that was to preach, and it does seem so unnatural he should have left his sermon book behind him. But there is really one good thing about it, and that is that we can have the kitchen chimney swept quite comfortably. Marion my dear, you’ll not mind cold—”

But Marion had escaped. She wanted some vent for the excitement which was apt to rise even to the verge of pain in its passionate impetuosity. The little shrubbery path was as oppressive to her as the four walls of the house, and almost mechanically she opened the gate and crossed the road towards the Hardlands meadows.

The Squire and Bessie were just starting for a ride when Marion reached the house, and Winifred was with them at the door, indulging the pony and the roan cob with lumps of sugar. Bessie was a pretty bright-eyed girl of sixteen, a good deal spoilt by her father, whose special pride it was that she displayed a keener talent for housekeeping than Winifred had ever developed, and who, in consequence, aided and abetted her attempts to gain the upper hand in that department. The Squire was in high good-humour over the result of his hay-making, and it was not lessened by the triumph with which he compared his own success with the less favourable crop secured on the Vicar’s glebe.

“Good morning, Marion, good morning,” he began in his loud hearty voice, “what does your father say now to my waiting a good fortnight after my neighbours? Tell him to come up and have a look at the ricks, if he’s not convinced yet. I suppose he was wanting to jump with Master Anthony’s theories, eh? He’ll lead you all a pretty dance yet, if you don’t look out.”

“That’s a shame, papa,” said Bessie, promptly, “for Anthony was not at home when they cut their hay at the Vicarage.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I’m sure. Anthony has a finger in every pie that I can see. Where’s he off now? Who’s this old Tregennas? Well, Bessie, you and I had better be jogging, or Winifred’s fine cook will be spoiling the luncheon, and swearing it’s our fault.”

With Marion’s feverish longing for the open air, she would not allow Winifred to go into the house, but insisted upon her walking to the end of the garden and crossing one of the newly mown fields, which led up to a crowning circle of firs commanding the widest view in the neighbourhood. There she poured out a torrent of hopes and fears, all Marmaduke’s wrongs, and all she had determined Mr Tregennas should do. It struck Winifred at times as a little strange that Marion could speak so readily of things which her own instinct, more delicate and more proud, would have guarded like a treasure in a casket, but she put the thought aside. Marion was lying on the grass, rolling the short blades into balls, while Winifred sat up and looked straight before her over the gently sloping fields, the apple orchards, Underham with its white houses and black wharves, the river winding and broadening between red wooded banks, until it lost itself in a distant dimly glimmering sea. All the colours blended into each other with a sweet fair freshness. There was just that subtile charm of warmth which brings life, not languor. Sounds reached them, softened, but vigorous. Vessels were discernible in the river, coming up with spread sails before the breeze, and timber or coal on board for those same black wharves. It might have been a blank to Marion, whose mind was too self-absorbed to be affected by the outer world, but Winifred was at all times open to these external influences, and they contrasted strangely with Marion’s impetuous complaints of misery.

“If I could be only at Trenance!” she ended.

“Dear Marion, Anthony will be there,—he will do his best. Old Mr Tregennas is sure to like him.”

“Anthony!” said Marion, with a hard little laugh. “Anthony will fell into one of his fevers. He will find the estate at sixes and sevens, and imagine it to be his mission to set it to rights. Besides, it is Marmaduke, not Anthony, whom it is of consequence that Mr Tregennas should like.”

Winifred hardly knew what to say. Her sympathies were so active that a strongly expressed idea such as Marion’s was apt to carry her away, even in spite of her better judgment, and yet her mind was healthfully constituted, and repelled by what was morbid or strained. Surely there was no such absence of hope in Marmaduke’s lot that it should be bewailed as unbearable. Surely Mr Miles had painfully uprooted himself, and Anthony agreed to a distasteful journey for his sake. And meanwhile the sun was shining, and the larks singing, and a sea-breeze sweeping along the water up to the fir-crowned height. She must have sung, too, if it had not been for the risk of hurting Marion’s feelings. As it was, her foot was beating on the short grass, and her eyes danced in spite of all her efforts to feel concerned.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Marion discontentedly.

“Of what we shall wear as your bridesmaids. If you don’t let me choose for myself, I will never forgive you.”

“How silly you are! If things go on as they are going now, I shall be too old to have any bridesmaids at all, by the time we are married.”

“Well, I don’t know how things could go much faster, but I believe you would like to be married in a whirlwind. Now, it seems to me it would have been quite dreadful if you had not had these little hitches and impediments. Why should you be different from other people?”

“I hope you will have them yourself, and then you will know they are not so agreeable.”

“But I did not say they were agreeable,” said Winifred, her voice taking a changed tone. “Only that they are such small things in comparison—”

“In comparison with what? I don’t understand,—I don’t think you understand yourself,” Marion exclaimed impatiently.

“O yes, I do,” Winifred said confidently, but without further explanation. Marion was not the person to whom she could have breathed a word of the little visions that trooped up softly as she spoke,—innocent womanly visions, coming and going with a tender grace. She only looked out towards the shining streak of sea and smiled.

Somebody opened the gate at the bottom of the field, waved his hat, and began to clamber lazily towards the two girls,—a big man, with long limbs and high shoulders. Winifred jumped up with a little relief when she saw him, and nodded and beckoned at once as if he needed to be shown where they were.

“How did you find us, Frank?” she called out.

“Parker told me you were somewhere about. Women always give themselves so much trouble before they can do anything comfortable, that I knew I should find you at the highest point of the place.”

He came straggling up, and stretched himself on the grass with an air of contentment. The lark had finished its song, and dropped silently into the grass; the wind was freshening, blowing back Winifred’s hair, and stirring her face into colour;—everything was full of delicious, strong beauty. Winifred looked down at her cousin and smiled, perhaps at the sight of his brown, good-tempered eyes.

“Now that you are come, you shall tell us what you have been doing,” she said, not sorry to lead Marion’s thoughts away from the road of unavailing regrets.

“Doing? I have been walking through the mud. That is what you all do here always, isn’t it? I met an old woman who told me a great deal more about cider than I ever knew before, and a man—O, by the way, Winifred, that is what I wanted to ask you—who is a short man, rather deformed, with a powerful face, and strong religious opinions?”

“It must have been David Stephens, Anthony’s bugbear,” said Winifred.

Other people’s bugbears often strike one curiously in an opposite light. Frank repeated the word a little wonderingly.

“He is a dissenter,” said Marion, beginning to listen. “He actually wanted to build a chapel in Thorpe, and had almost got that stupid old Maddox to let him have the field by the church. Luckily Anthony found it out, and stopped it. I dare say he hates him for it.”

“Poor fellow!” said Frank kindly, while Marion stared at him. “One can soon see he is a dissenter. There is nothing very original in his opinions, either, so far as they go: he has got hold of the usual distortion of facts. But it was the intensity of the man’s convictions which impressed me. In these days it is something even to be a fanatic.”

“Every one says he is a most mischievous agitator,” persisted Marion, eagerly. “We are quite unhappy because our maid—Faith Stokes—has allowed herself to be engaged to him. Her father is gardener at the Red House. All her family dislike it.”

“She will stick to him,” asserted Captain Orde. “He is the very man to get a hold over a woman. Unless he himself gives her up. If I don’t mistake him, he would neither let his own happiness nor another person’s stand in the way of what he imagined to be his work,—perhaps not even his own conscience.”

“How could you talk to him?” Marion said reproachfully. “He must be very unsafe.”

“Unsafe? Unsafe as a powder-train. But I don’t know that it is altogether his fault. He has been cramped and goaded and sat upon, and no one has taken the trouble to do anything but run counter to his opinions.”

“Because they are so wrong.”

“Not altogether wrong. They may get mixed up with no end of mistakes, but there are some which seem to me a little beyond our improving. He believes he may help some poor men and women up towards God,” said Captain Orde, speaking with tender reverence. “There is that, at all events.”

Winifred, who had been listening silently, turned round quickly and clasped her hands.

“O yes, we cannot judge him,” she said earnestly, “when we have never tried to do anything for him! I am so glad you have told us, Frank.”

All her feelings had been stirred and touched somehow that morning. We cannot explain how it is that very often this is so when there seems no particular reason for it, it may be a chance word that awakens a chain of ideas, or reaches springs which are sealed at other times when we take more trouble to get at them. The happy sunshine about her, the thoughts which had grown into life, quickened Winifreds sympathies into generous glow. Frank was looking at her, at the flush on her cheek, the eager kindness of her eyes, with a strange thrill in his heart that his words should have so moved her. He could have very easily forgotten David Stephens, if Marion had not said coldly,—

“Anthony will not be much obliged to you, Winifred.”

“O, Anthony will understand!” said Winifred, speaking with quick conviction. “It was natural that he should be annoyed about the chapel. That is another thing. But if Frank convinces him that the poor fellow is in earnest, Anthony will respect him, however much they may differ. I am sure he will try to help him.”

Frank Orde did not say any more. His eyes had an odd, wistful look in them, as if some discord had suddenly jarred; but Winifred was quite blind to the look. Perhaps this very want of self-consciousness, which dulled the perception of things that touched herself, was one secret of her power of influence. People who forget themselves seldom fail to impress others.

Chapter Nine.

The Vicar’s departure caused a few lively gleams of astonishment among the Thorpe people, especially as it was not a call to preach that had taken him away; but no one would have dreamed of finding fault with him if he had locked up the church, carried the keys with him, and condemned the village to virtual excommunication until his return. Tom Lear and his young woman meekly submitted to the postponement of their bridal. George Tucker, who had wanted a certificate signed, said the parson was away, and there was an end of it. There is often something pathetically touching in this mute acceptance by the poor of the little hardships for which we should impatiently seek remedies; but in this case it was Mr Miles’s true kindness of heart and courtesy of manner that made his people treat with a forbearance at least as refined the inconveniences to which his absent-mindedness and forgetfulness exposed them.

Then, as events strangely multiply themselves, the village awakened to another agitation, for an old woman declared that an attempt to rob her had been made in the night, and Mr Robert Mannering, summoned to the cottage in his magisterial character, was seen by attentive watchers to turn towards the Vicarage, and walk briskly up the drive towards the door. There also he was observed to knock, two little urchins having been sent to run down the Church Lane, and report whether or not he entered the house.

The knock outside was answered by Sniff within by a series of short sharp barks, which only increased in energy until the door being opened by Faith disclosed a friend. A dog of weaker character would at once have acknowledged his mistake by a sudden change of attitude, and a hospitable greeting to the new-comer. Sniff knew better. With infinite presence of mind, and without a moment’s hesitation, he rushed past Mr Mannering as if he had nothing in the world to do with the matter, and, planting himself in the middle of the drive, barked long and loudly at an imaginary enemy, after which he subsided into an amiable calm, returned leisurely to the house, went up stairs, scratched open the drawing-room, door, and advanced to Mr Mannering with the most friendly of brown eyes.

“Then there was nothing really amiss?” Mrs Miles was saying.

“Nothing whatever. When does the Vicar return to put an end to these panics?” said Mr Robert, patting Sniff.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Mrs Miles, shaking her head. “I do hope he will write and tell us how he gets on with old Mr Tregennas. It makes me quite uncomfortable to think of their being there, when I remember how miserable William’s poor aunt was.”

Mr Mannering looked up quickly, checked himself, and said hesitatingly,—

“He once lived in Yorkshire, I believe?”

“Yes, indeed,” said Mrs Miles, “Yorkshire was just where he did live. That was before he changed his name. Do you know about him? Do tell us what you know.”

“He had daughters, I think.”

“One daughter,—Margaret. But there is quite a sad story about her, for Mr Tregennas disapproved of her marriage, and never forgave her. He must be so terribly unforgiving,” concluded Mrs Miles, with a sigh.

“I heard,” said Mr Mannering, still slowly, “that her father objected to her choice, and that she and her husband went to Australia. But I heard also,—I hope it is so,”—he went on with a little agitation, “that Mrs Harford was a happy woman?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure. Poor thing, she is dead now, and as for the child, of course it is for Marmaduke’s interests that Mr Tregennas should hold out, but still—it does seem hard, doesn’t it, Marion?”

“Mamma, what is the use of reviving that old story!” said Marion, impatiently. “Mr Tregennas is not likely to change his mind.”

“No, my dear, no, to be sure not; indeed, one could not wish it. Only it does seem a little hard, for there was nothing against him that we could ever hear, and it was only that she was too fond of him to give him up. Don’t you feel sorry for her, Mr Mannering?”

“Sorry! Good heavens, madam!” he said, jumping up with a sudden impetuosity which startled Mrs Miles, and made him beg her pardon hastily. “I knew Miss Hare in old days,” he explained, “and, as you say, it strikes one as something horrible that her father should never have softened towards her. There is a child, isn’t there?”

“Yes, a little girl; and how she may be brought up since the poor mother’s death, I am sure nobody knows. William’s poor aunt did all in her power to make Mr Tregennas think more kindly; but, dear me, she used to say one might as well talk to a stone-wall, and then Mr Harford was nearly as bad, so there was really no bringing them together.”

“Things can’t be forced,” Marion put in again. “I dare say Mr Harford is a great deal better off staying out there and keeping his daughter to himself. His position is not half so trying as Marmaduke’s, who is the last person considered.”

“My dear, don’t say so. I am sure I have been quite uncomfortable about him, poor boy, ever since he was here, and I do wish he had taken a hamper of vegetables with him. Still, one may be sorry for two people as well as one.”

“Sixteen—seventeen—the child must be seventeen by this time,” said Mr Robert meditatively.

“Only think of your remembering so well!”

“Yes, only think!” repeated Mr Mannering, with his old cheery voice returning as he rose to go. “Miss Marion, I give you warning that I shall not be able to come to the Vicarage much more if you allow my poor roses to fall into such a miserable condition. There’s a Devoniensis at the porch, which it goes to my heart to see. Good by, Mrs Miles; you need not trouble your head about the robber, but if you or Marion will go and sit with her for an hour, I can’t conceive any greater enjoyment to the poor old soul than to tell you the history from beginning to end.”

“I am glad he is gone,” said Marion, feverishly, as the door shut him out.

There were other little strings pulling to the same tune, and setting hearts throbbing at the Vicarage just then, while the sweet summer days blossomed and faded. David Stephens met Faith that very evening, as she came back from her father’s cottage. Perhaps there could not have been a more favourable moment for him, for old Araunah, who was the most inveterate of the family against the preacher, had been inveighing loudly and angrily upon his granddaughter’s infatuation, and her mother had joined in a weak, irritating sort of way, which had raised Faith’s indignation on behalf of her lover.

“A poor crooked feller like that there David! It do vex me so to think o’t, Faith, that I can’t give my mind to my meat, an’ if I doan’t kep abowt an’ do my niffles, I doan’t know watt iver’ll come to the house nor fayther. If he wor a fine, hearty young man, now, there’d be somethin’ to say for ’ee.”

“Handsome is as handsome does,” said Faith, flushing. She was not very much in love with David, but this disparagement created a natural desire to set him a little higher than she might otherwise have done. “There was crowds to hear him last Sunday, and the people so taken up with him, they’re ready to cut off their hands if he told them to.”

“Likely enough,” said old Araunah, with vast acorn. “You’ll find more fules than wise, my gal, wheriver you goes. For my peart, I doan’t see as this hyur ground grows much beside.”

Faith had come away in the very thick of the battle, and as she suddenly turned a corner upon David, the feeling of championship excited on his behalf had not had time to cool. She showed him more plainly than usual that she was glad to see him, and the perception of this brought an immediate change in his pale face.

“You’re looking tired, David,” she said tenderly. “You’ve been tramping about too much, as you’re always doing. Why can’t you take a little rest? Nobody works so hard as you, I do believe; there’s father at it all day, but when he comes home, there he sits comfortable, and you’re only off to something else.”

“Your father works for time, and I have to work against it, that’s the difference. If you saw those poor souls looking up at you with hungry eyes you wouldn’t know where to stop. Not but what the Devil is very keen in his temptations. He sets it before me again and again that there’s more thrust on my hands by the Lord than one man can do, and he’s not content with that, without raising up difficulties and hindrances on either side so as to make the work seem pretty nigh impossible at times. But in spite of all, there’s a great stirring of hearts in those that hear.”

“John Moore told me you’d more than ever last Sunday.”

“Yes, there were plenty that had never been before, and perhaps they were more moved than those that have had the Gospel put before them longer. And many told me they should bring more the next time. It’s the truth at work.”

“And your preaching, David,” said Faith, a little jealously. “They say they like to listen to you, because you never want for words, and that you are the finest preacher the Wesleyans have ever had here.”

“It isn’t that,” said David, with a grave earnestness in his voice. “It never can be the instruments that do the work. I couldn’t say ten words if I believed they were my own words that I was speaking. There’s nothing in it, but that I tell them what the Gospel says to them, without letting man’s devices come in between us.”

“I don’t know,” said Faith, shaking her head incredulously; “I think it’s the way you put it mostly that pleases them. There’s old Mary Potter wanting to hear you, but she can never get in all the way to Underham. And grandfather’s that angry when he hears them talk of a chapel in Thorpe!”

David sighed, but it was at the first part of the girls speech rather than the latter, which only acted upon him as a challenge to battle acts upon a brave man. He loved Faith with an intensity which often pained him, conscious as he was of a want of agreement between her nature and his own, conscious also that her theological views were rather adopted from an interest in himself, than from any firm persuasion on one side or the other. The truth lay before him in one narrow groove, out of which there was no turning a hair’s-breadth to the left hand or right. It followed necessarily that a conviction would force itself upon him,—when he had the courage to face it,—that Faith had as yet no part or share in the salvation which he preached as altogether a matter of faith, and the further conviction which lurked behind the other, but which he never yet had ventured boldly to drag into the light, would have forced him to cast away his love, as the eye or hand which needed to be destroyed. It does not require the same conclusions to be aware that what to David Stephens was actually a matter of conscience there was danger in temporising with. He told himself that the sin was at least all his own, and suffered expediency to suggest the hope that Faith would by and by become other than she was. The unacknowledged scourge of anxiety which he felt made him the more zealous for the building of a chapel in Thorpe: he had then the promise of becoming its minister, and he was aware that the position held out charms to Faith, who had some sort of idea that it would raise her almost to a level with Mrs Miles herself. David told himself fiercely that once he had Faith for his own, he should have removed her from the teaching which he held to be utterly antagonistic to the truth, and that his prayers and his love must win her to his side for eternity. He had fully believed himself to have succeeded with old Maddox,—who, having lived a life of indifference, was beginning to find it less easy now that death was in view, and caught at any teaching which held out a promise of security,—when Anthony Miles had overthrown his hopes. He did not, however, yet despair, nor must it be imagined that it was the thought of Faith which even chiefly incited him in his efforts. Had she been lost to him that very day, his convictions were so earnest, his yearning to save souls so strong, that he would have toiled as perseveringly as ever: but she was the human spur which, almost unconsciously, gave a feverish anxiety to his endeavours, and excited at all events a strong personal persuasion that Anthony, in opposing him, was siding with the great enemy of all good, against whom David daily wrestled and prayed.

“Your grandfather may think different one day, Faith, but if he doesn’t, we mustn’t let the words of those that are dearest to us keep us back from the plough.” David said this with a throb of anguish in his own heart, but he contrived to steady his voice, and it only gave it one of those singular thrills which added not a little to the influence it had upon his hearers. Faith was impressed with it just as her own thoughts had strayed off to picturing herself as minister’s wife, sitting in the chapel arrayed in a silk gown, and she looked hurriedly in his face with a sensation partly pride and partly discomfort. The plough was not in her thoughts, but she acknowledged it to be David’s duty to talk about it, and her little head had an idea that by becoming his wife she might both be good by proxy, and also share in the admiration which she heard largely expressed of his talents as a preacher. On the whole, she had seldom felt more kindly towards David than at this moment; while he, poor fellow, took it as a hopeful sign of grace, that she did not urge any of those arguments against his doctrines which she brought forward when she fancied they interfered with his advancement. He held her hand in his with a strong grasp as they parted, and the colour which rose in her cheek under his gaze gave him a glad thrill of exultation. It seemed to him as if he were borne on the top of an irresistible wave, which was sweeping triumphant spoil from the very grasp of the enemy. And now the soul dearer to him than his own was being drawn slowly but surely towards him, while to come to him must, as he believed, lead it onwards towards his God.

Chapter Ten.

These few days of waiting were intolerable to Marion, who hated all delays, and from her earliest childhood objected to hear reason, as the old nurse used to say. Whatever was hanging over her head, good, bad, or indifferent, she would have come down at once, and let the crash be over. Poor Mrs Miles had too little in common with her daughter to know what to say or do. Every morning she was sure that a letter would come by that post, and as sure when the hour had passed that it was more natural that it should not arrive until the next day. Such little securities win their triumphs at last. On Saturday morning a few lines from Anthony announced their intended return in the afternoon.

It struck Marion at once that her father was depressed, although there was evident gladness at getting back to his home. After he had kissed her, and before turning to his letters, he looked for a moment into her face with a touch of the wistfulness which his talk with her in the study seemed to have brought into his eyes. She determined to find Anthony, who had gone off to the stables to see the pony nibbed down, and whose whereabouts were easily discoverable through Sniffs bark of delight. Hearing his sister’s call, he crossed the yard.

“Hallo, Marion, what have you been doing with yourself? You look as if you wanted fresh air badly. Put on your hat, and come up to Hardlands with me.”

“Hardlands! Anthony, you and papa are as cruel as can be to keep me in this horrible suspense. O Anthony, dear, do tell me,—what did he say?—what is Marmaduke to do?”

“I think it’s pretty nearly right, or on the way to be right,” said Anthony, digging his hands into his pockets, “though I don’t exactly know what Marmaduke expects.”

“To be his heir,” said Marion quickly. “It was a promise.”

“I think Marmaduke must have made a mistake there,” began Anthony, but she interrupted him at once.

“He did not, indeed.”

Anthony was silenced, and began to whistle, not knowing in the least what to say. His father had begged him to tell Marion no more than was absolutely necessary, and there was an uncomfortable and unacknowledged impression upon the two that she would not be satisfied with their tidings. Mr Tregennas would not admit anything definite. “Sha’n’t forget the lad, I tell you. If you want to know for your daughter’s sake, he’ll have enough to live upon, and she, too, unless you’ve brought her up in these new-fangled fashions.” This was what he had said, and of course it was something, Mr Miles would have said it was a good deal, if there had not been that uneasy consciousness of Marmaduke’s expectations, and it was quite certain that it did not satisfy Marion. It was sufficient, however, to give her a further ground on which to urge her father to admit of their engagement. If the Vicar had felt himself as free as usual to follow his own judgment, he would, probably, for some time yet, have refused his consent; but he was in the position of a man who, having failed to see what all the time lay close at hand, feels a nervous distrust of himself, and, moreover, his life had fallen too completely into a matter of routine for him to meet an unexpected call for decision as firmly as he would have met it years ago. He would have willingly let the matter drift to the shore as the tide of circumstances carried it. But Marion was too well aware of the advantage she had gained not to push it farther; Mr Tregennas had rather encouraged than opposed the engagement, and Mrs Miles shook her head over Marion’s loss of colour and brightness. The Vicar was inclined to believe implicitly in his wife at this moment, Marion had one of those temperaments which in their many changes act rapidly upon people’s looks, and her father could not meet her heavy eyes and live his own life any more in peace.

So she had her way; the engagement was allowed, Marmaduke was to spend his approaching leave at Thorpe, and Anthony and he were to go for a week to Trenance.

Here again the poor Vicar was aware of perplexity. Mr Tregennas had shown an inconveniently strong liking for Anthony, whom nobody wanted him to like. His energy and brightness seemed to have such an attraction for him, that the old man, now with little more left of his old nigged self-will than a certain feeble captiousness, would sit and watch him by the hour from under his big eyebrows. The Vicar, who had become aware of this, was almost provoked at his son’s unconsciousness. Anthony was at all times disposed to take it for granted that things would be as he thought best, and it seemed to him that Marmaduke was really as sure of his inheritance as if it had all been plainly set down in black and white. Even if the idea of his becoming his friend’s rival had ever entered his head, the prospect of heirship would have had little fascination for him. He had some money of his own, which made him independent of his father. Trenance was but a dull country place, and he was too young and too sanguine to care much for money and possessions. He wanted power, but not of that sort, and how to gain it he had not yet resolved, but there was a swing of energy about the young fellow which made all things seem possible. If his self-confidence were too buoyant, too ready to rush blindfold, it was a danger which he would be the last to discover for himself; if, later in life, his character were likely to develop just a touch of arrogance, it was for the present concealed by his brightness and boyish gaiety of heart. At any rate he could never be covetous. Trenance was nothing to him, and thinking of Marmaduke it was with a little real compassion for a life which was to be bounded by so many acres, a mine or two, and the little church town. His own dreams reached far beyond those limits.

Already he had taken a step in one of the paths which lay before him, and seemed to invite him into smiling depths. He had written a pamphlet upon certain branches of reform, and it had been noticed with some commendation by an influential paper, to Mrs Miles’s great delight. The notice was a good deal more dear to her than the pamphlet, and she would go up to her son’s room and read out little bits, although with a sharp criticism of its shortcomings.

“There are only two quotations, and so much that people would have liked to read! And why should they say you are a young author? I am sure there is nothing your father might not have written so far as age is concerned.”

“They must criticise, you know.”

“Well,” said Mrs Miles, doubtfully, “if they did not find a little fault, I suppose others would be jealous. But they could not deny that it is excellent.”

She got up as she spoke, and went softly about the room, putting some tidying touches which Faith had neglected. The summer sun was shining in and discovering dust in little out-of-the-way corners where things were heaped. There was a faded sketch of Hardlands by Winifred stuck over the chimney-piece.

“It is a pity those people don’t know who you are,” Mrs Miles continued. “I wish you would write and tell them, Anthony; I am sure they would be pleased. My dear, you would find a better picture than this in the portfolio down stairs.”

“It does very well,” said Anthony sleepily.

Mrs Miles went on with her work, but presently began again.

“My dear, it is a long time since you called at Deanscourt, and Sir James Milman has always been so civil that it does not seem quite right. Suppose you were to ride over there this afternoon.”

“I don’t believe they’ve come down yet.”

“Lady and Miss Milman are at home, I know,” asserted Mrs Miles gravely, “for she wrote the other day to ask for Ellen Harding’s character. Miss Milman seems a very sweet girl.”

“Oh!”

“And very pretty, I’m sure.”

“She’s not my style,” said Anthony, with an air of having disposed of her.

“My dear, I think you would find her so, if only you knew her better,” interposed Mrs Miles earnestly, “and Mrs Featherly tells me—”

“What?”

“That all those girls have money.”

“Well, mother, I’m too shy to venture there by myself, but, if you like, I’ll drive you over in the pony-carriage.”

“Thank you, I’m sure, my dear, it would be very nice,” said Mrs Miles, whose pleasure in driving with her son was mixed with several pet perturbations of her own; “but are you sure the pony is not too fresh?”

“Fresh? He wants a little work, of course, but it’s nothing on earth but play that makes him caper. I’ll see he does no harm.”

“My dear, I can’t help wishing he would play in the stables, where he really has nothing else to do, but if you think he’s quite safe—”

“As safe as any old cart-horse. Come, mother, if he should upset us, I’ll give you leave to call me all the bad names you can think of.”

“O dear, but that will not make it any better,” said Mrs Miles, shaking her head. “I don’t see how you can help it if he takes it into his head to play, as you call it. However, my dear, you really ought to go to Deanscourt, so I will be quite ready by four o’clock, and now I must go and speak to Faith about the dust in this room.”

“You don’t mean to say, mother, that you’ve let Faith engage herself to that dissenting fellow, Stephens,” said Anthony, beginning to speak energetically.

“I could not prevent it,” said Mrs Miles, giving her head a mournful shake by way of protest. “I don’t know what the world is coming to, but servants are not at all what they were.”

“We ought to have stopped it, though. How was he ever allowed to hang about the house? Faith is too good a little thing for a humbugging rascal like that. You wouldn’t believe how he has worked upon that old idiot Maddox; if I hadn’t gone into it, my father would have had a meeting-house stuck under his very nose, ay, and he’ll have it still, unless I keep a sharp lookout. But, upon my word, it is a great deal too bad that he should get hold of Faith.”

Anthony was handling a tool as he spoke, and punching a hole in a bit of wood with as much force as if it had been Stephens’s head. Mrs Miles never liked to see her son “put out;” his face was quick to reflect his feelings, and he certainly did not look pleasantly upon what galled him. It was quite true that David was his present bugbear, and that he gave him credit for no motives except the lowest: his feelings had so much heat in them, that they deprived him in a great measure of the power of sympathy with that with which he had no agreement, and were always easily excited into prejudice.

Chapter Eleven.

“Like, but unlike, the sun that shone,
The waves that beat the shore,
The words we said, the songs we sung,
Like, unlike, evermore.”
A.F.C.K.

The summer was passing at Thorpe very much as other summers had passed, and yet with the difference that dogs our footsteps whether we will or no. The grass waves, the forget-me-nots look up from the brink of cool brown streams, the roses are as sweet as ever,—we wonder as we touch them how there can be a change and what it is, but we know in our hearts that it has come, and that things can never more be what they once have been.

As for Anthony, all things considered, he seemed to be leading a pleasant life enough. There was bright, settled weather, and the neighbourhood had taken one of those sudden freaks of gaiety with which such neighbourhoods are occasionally seized; dinners and picnics and cricket-matches succeeded one another rapidly, people came to stay with each other, glad to escape from the heat of London to these pretty country-places, where they could lie under the shadow of great elms, and pick dewy fruit in old-fashioned gardens. It was an easy, charming existence, with a busy idleness about it, which had an indescribable delight so long as the sun would shine. Anthony was wanted for all the little festivities, he was asked to stay here, to dine there; the Milmans, the Hunters, the Bennetts, the Davieses, had each some attraction to offer, and young ladies who were ready to encourage Mr Miles’s attentions. By and by little echoes of rumours began to be heard. At one picnic he had talked to no one but Miss Lovell, at another dinner-party he had devoted himself for the whole evening to Miss Milman. Winifred had been there, and had seen it for herself, and, indeed, Anthony, when he indulged in these flirtations, generally contrived to be near Winifred. Not that a spirit of mischief prompted him on such occasions, or anything beyond a light-hearted enjoyment of the present moment. He liked the pretty flatteries of manner, the little attentions, which the young girls were not unwilling to lavish upon him,—liked to feel himself courted and appealed to,—liked also, or something more than liked, that Winifred should be near him, that he might look at her, listen to her at the very moment he was turning away, touch something she had touched, unconsciously compare her with her companions. Unconsciously, I repeat, for, although many problems were puzzling him at this moment, he was thinking least of all about his own heart. He did very much what he liked, and if it pleased him to talk to Miss Milman and to sit near Winifred, he talked and he sat. That was all.

That was all, and no one could have said a word against it if it had been always so. He had no intention of neglecting Winifred; but to a girl who loves, unintentional neglect is more cruelly wounding than any other. Each day worked with a sort of slow torture upon her, the more so that her cheeks burnt with shame, when she even acknowledged it to herself. She was in high spirits,—or so it seemed. She fancied herself that all sweetness and gentleness had died out of her heart, leaving bitter ashes behind. When she spoke to Anthony it was laughingly and lightly, only every now and then there would descend a sharp cut, or one that she thought sharp, poor child, and would repeat over to herself with a dreary satisfaction, while she invented other sayings more terrible, which the time never came for uttering. After all, they were not so severe as she intended, for such weapons did not belong to her by nature, and she used them as tremblingly as a woman will fire off a gun that she expects to explode in her hands. As often as not, Anthony did not notice these little attacks; he noticed more what she did not say, the pleasant things which fell so trippingly from others’ lips, to Winifred’s disdain. Feeling as if Anthony were slipping away altogether from the pleasant, familiar intercourse which had been enough to satisfy her while it lasted, and which, therefore, she fancied would have satisfied her forever, these sweet summer days, in which all the world was making holiday, were to her full of restless misery, to which she dared neither give a name nor a cause, and over which she shed the bitterest tears that her life as yet had known.

No one saw the struggle. It would have added tenfold to her suffering if they had done so, for she had too much of her grandmothers undaunted spirit not to be at times fierce and impatient with herself, and her very prayers were not so often that she might be loved again, as that she might cease to love, and so have done with the pain. She had no mother. The Squire, when he was in his most jovial moods, would strike Anthony on the back and ask who was the last flame, but his own daughter’s name had never occurred to him. Mrs Miles was distracted between hopes and fears, represented by Miss Milman and Miss Davies. Marion was taken up with Marmaduke, who was at Thorpe, and who for his part was absorbed in thoughts of Mr Tregennas and Trenance. After this one step had been gained, he was greedy for a clearer declaration of the old man’s intentions, and waited restlessly for a repetition of the invitation to himself and Anthony. Yet when it arrived, he said jealously to Marion,—

“Why should Anthony go? What has he to do with it? Is he trying to come over the old man?”

Even she flamed a little. “You should know him better. There was never any one in the world who cared less for money,” she said angrily.

One wonders sometimes how many misjudgments will rise up and face us one day. Anthony was so far from thinking the thoughts that Marmaduke put into his head, that he was a good deal vexed at the summons which took him away from the pleasant little round into which he had fallen. But he consoled himself with grumbling, and the Milmans insisted upon putting off their picnic until his return.

“They’ll turn the boy’s head between them,” said Mr Robert Mannering wrathfully to himself. He was in his garden, alternately attending to some newly budded roses, and doing his utmost to discomfit the imperturbable Stokes. The little ugly red-faced man guessed better than other people what was going on, and perhaps saw more clearly. “Confound those women!” he said ungallantly. “They do their best to spoil any man they take a fancy to! Stokes, I presume you suppose these unhappy buds are to undo their own bandages? I should like to tie you up for a week, and see how you’d feel at the end of it. And those seedling carnations are in a disgraceful condition.”

“There bain’t wan o’ them worth the soil he grows in,” asserted Stokes with round emphasis.

“Not worth! Pray do you know where the seed came from, and how much I gave for it?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised but what you might ha’ given anything they asked of you. I can’t help that, Mr Robert. There’s a lot of impostors in gardining like as there is in anything else, unless you looks pretty sharp. And they thyur caernations is rubbish.”

“That’s your ignorance. I should like to know how much you knew about gardening until I taught you.”

“I knowed rubbish—always,” said Stokes, with an air of decision which fairly drove Mr Robert off the field. He walked towards the house across the short fine turf, all unlike the Vicarage lawn with its intruding daisies and dandelions, smiling a little to himself over his own discomfiture.

“They are worthless, I believe,” he said, “only I didn’t think the fellow would have the wit to find it out. Who are these coming in at the gate? The Chesters, if I’m not mistaken.” And away hurried Mr Robert to receive his visitors.

“The girls got hold of me, and would make me walk over with them,” said the Squire, pulling Bessie’s hair, and talking loudly. “What are you doing in the garden, eh? Your hobby, ain’t it, Mannering? I’ll lay sixpence, though, you don’t show me a finer dish of peas than we had for dinner yesterday. What were they called, Bessie? Bessie’s the one for remembering all the fine names.”

“Come and dine with us one day, and I’ll see what we can do. Will you say Thursday?—unless Miss Winifred has some engagement.”

“No,” said Winifred, with a little weariness in her voice, which Mr Mannering detected at once. “The Milmans were to have had a picnic on that day, but it is to wait.”

“Because Anthony is going away,” put in Bessie in an aggrieved tone.

“They want young Miles to marry the girl Milman, and so they can’t make enough of him,” said the Squire. “That’s the long and short of it.”

“Ah, I don’t believe he has any such notion in his head,” replied Mr Robert, manfully. “He’ll not be marrying just yet, though other people will marry him a dozen times over.”

“Perhaps not, perhaps not; I don’t know that I should expect to see him do anything so sensible. Old Milman isn’t over-troubled with brains, but they carry him along very fairly, and he’s as sound a Tory as any man in the county. It might be the making of the young fellow to marry into a good steady holdfast family like that, and get some of his harebrained notions knocked out of him,” said the Squire, who was becoming very sore with Anthony’s arguments.

“O, his notions will come all right by and by!” said Mr Robert pacifically. “People can’t all think and live in just the same grooves.”

“More’s the pity. I don’t see that the new grooves are any the better.”

“Well, perhaps sometimes they’re not so much worse as we think them. And how does Bessie get on without Miss Palmer?”

“Why, she plagues us all,” said the Squire, with great satisfaction. “She’s always running out into the fields after me, when she ought to be at her lessons, or her sampler, I tell her. Winifred’s got no end of trouble with her. And now she’s bothering my life out to go into Aunecester twice a week, to the School of Art I suppose she must go, but who’s to take her, I should like to know?”

“You, papa, of course,” said Bessie decidedly. “You are always as glad as you can be to go to Aunecester.”

“There, you hear. That’s how she serves her father,” said Mr Chester, chuckling, and pulling her hair again. “No, thank you, we’ll not come in, Henderson’s waiting to speak to me about his farm. Where’s Mannering?”

“He’s driven over to dine at the Hunters’.”

“What a man he is for society.”

“Yes, he likes it, and it does him good,” said Mr Robert quietly.

“That’s what people always say about things that please them. I tried it for a good bit upon salmon, but it didn’t do. Had to give it up. Well, girls, now you’ve had your say, I hope you’re satisfied, and will let me go home in peace. You’re a lucky man, Mannering, to have your own way without being plagued for it. Here’s Bessie, now: a fellow will have a pretty handful that gets her,—bless you, she’ll not let him say his soul’s his own,” added the Squire, in high good-humour, making signs behind his youngest daughter’s back.

“How is the Farleyense, Mr Mannering?” asked Winifred, lingering.

“I really think that, if possible, it is in more perfect condition than when you did it the honour to come to look at it.”

“And Stokes has not tried any experiments?”

“He knows that if he did it would cost him his place. No, Miss Winifred, there is a point behind which even the easiest master must intrench himself.”

The girl sighed a little. Her father and sister were strolling along the lane outside the gates, and the Squire’s loud laugh came to them scarcely softened by the short distance. The rich fulness of August seemed to weigh somewhat heavily in the air; the hedge-row elms stood in thick unenlightened masses against the sky; the garden was a little parched and exhausted by its very profusion of flowers, the scent of the jessamine was almost oppressive in its richness; it was one of those days in which, without any perceptible change, the knowledge forces itself upon us that the change is there, and that something is gone from us.

“And do you still carry the key in your pocket?” said Winifred, with a faint smile.

“No, no, the house is open. Will you come and see it again?”

“Winifred!” called the Squire from the other side of the wall.

“Not now, thank you. I mustn’t keep my father.”

She spoke hurriedly, but walked lingeringly towards the gate, and Mr Mannering remained stationary for some moments after she had disappeared. “I wonder what is making her take such an interest in the Farleyense,” he said to himself. “The plant is a picture, to be sure, but still—when I think of it—and why should I keep the key in my pocket?—Why—what an old fool I am!—I had forgotten all about Anthony, and no doubt the poor girl wanted to hear a word or two more about him. He’s off somewhere to-day, I dare say, and going into Cornwall to-morrow,—the best place for him, too, if he doesn’t know what’s good for him; and there she is fretting over all these confounded reports, and thinking I could have said a word or two to comfort her. I’ve a great mind not to look at the Farleyense for a week. However, perhaps I’d better just go and give it a glance, to make sure that Stokes hasn’t been meddling.”

Chapter Twelve.

“Brave spirits are a balsam to themselves:
There is a nobleness of mind, that heals
Wounds beyond salves.”
Cartwright.

The two young men found time hang on their hands at Trenance somewhat heavily. The old shadowy house stood at the foot of a hill, by the river’s side; the river was there, making silvery gleams between the trees; it was all cool, green, and dull for these energetic lives, but Marmaduke looked forward to the sweets of ownership, and found it more endurable than his companion. And yet Anthony was the most kind to the old man.

“Poor old fellow!” he said one day, as they locked the door of the boat-house, where the water was lapping drearily among the piles, and climbed the bank towards the house. “There must be a queer sort of feeling in looking at the man who is waiting to step into one’s shoes. I am not sure we should stand it so well as he does.”

“He has had his day.”

“Well, I don’t know that having had dinner one day makes one wish to go without it the next, if that’s what you mean.”

“You wouldn’t care for dinner if you had lost your appetite,” said Marmaduke.

“You mightn’t care, though, much to see other people eat.”

“Pray do you suggest my starving myself for company?”

“I wasn’t thinking of you, I was thinking of him,” said Anthony, stopping to cut down an ungainly bramble. “Everybody knows it’s the course of nature, and all that. Still, I say it can’t be altogether easy to be pleasant under those circumstances,—particularly when it’s not your own son that’s to follow.”

“That’s not my fault,” said Marmaduke, who seemed to put himself upon the defensive.

“No, it’s your luck, old fellow,” said Anthony kindly. “Don’t be crusty. Do you suppose I’m not glad from the bottom of my heart there don’t happen to be a Mrs Tregennas and half a dozen young Tregennases to keep you out of Trenance? Though, by all the much-abused laws of justice and equity, I don’t know that you ought to be here now.”

“Why not?” said Marmaduke, turning hastily.

“Because there’s nearer blood.”

“Mrs Harford is dead.”

“Of course she is. But her daughter isn’t, so far as we know,” said Anthony, finishing his bramble.

“She’s well out of the way in Australia, at any rate.”

“O, she’s far enough off. And her grandfather seems to care little enough what becomes of her. If I were you, Marmaduke, I’d say a good word for her. My father tried, but he wouldn’t listen.”

“Thank you,” said Marmaduke, curtly. They were near the house, and he turned abruptly into one of the side paths and walked off by himself. Anthony, whose temper was none of the sweetest, felt a little indignant at his manner. Marmaduke was not like the boy he remembered, a change seemed to have come over him; Anthony, perhaps, had not yet learned how many-sided we all may be, how as one front and then another comes forward, it needs a golden cord to draw us into the beauty of harmony, or a false mask to make pretence of it. Marmaduke had not either at this time. There were things surging up in him which were all at war; he was torn and distracted between them. He knew Anthony well, and yet he had lost faith in his own knowledge. The idea that had once taken root grew hatefully into form and haunting prominence, and there was not a look of old Mr Tregennas, or a word from the young man, but he caught at greedily, and with it fed the lurking fear. He was forever watching, and, as he called it to himself, countermining. Anthony’s natural ease and brightness of manner became, in his sight, deliberate pitfalls spread to entrap the old man; so that although he did contrive to disguise his feelings with a facility which was becoming dangerous, he was restless and uneasy when Anthony was out of his sight, especially when he suspected him of being by Mr Tregennas’s side. His disquiet was the more unaccountable that Mr Tregennas rather fell foul of the world in a peevishly discontented fashion, which had taken the place of his former ungracious doggedness, than showed any especial marks of favour on that side or on this. He snubbed Anthony quite as much as he snubbed Marmaduke, on the whole perhaps rather more, Anthony being less careful not to disagree with him, and having taken up a crusade about some labourers’ cottages on the estate, a suggestion to improve which was popularly considered to have the same effect upon the master as the shaking of a red rag has upon a bull. Anthony used to talk to the men, and invite them to complain to the steward, and then come back and tell Mr Tregennas what he had done.

“What d’ye mean by that, sir?” the old man would growl in a rage. “What d’ye mean by stirring these rascals up?”

“They’re in the right, sir, indeed they are. You can’t get down to see the place, and White doesn’t choose to tell you what the people say, but it’s a shame that any one should have to live in such holes.”

“You’ll live in them yourself one of these days, if you go on in this confounded fashion of yours.”

“Then I hope you’ll have them set in order at once, sir,” said Anthony, with a promptitude over which old Tregennas chuckled.

In about a fortnight he let them go. Anthony was so conscious of the sacrifice he had made upon the altar of friendship, that he was the more irritated at the change which had become perceptible in Marmaduke. It seemed at times as if he scarcely cared to conceal his repulsion, and at other moments as though he were studiously forcing himself to wear the old dress of pleasant companionship. Anthony’s nature was one which very quickly took the tone which others exhibited towards him; he was apt to fall aloof at the first symptom of drawing back, and to feel more anger than sorrow at the loss of good-will. In this case, however, the thought of Marion prevented the alteration in their relations to one another becoming so marked as it might otherwise have been, and, indeed, Marmaduke was kept closely at his distasteful duties during the following autumn and winter months.

Anthony himself was not uninterruptedly at the Vicarage. He had a feeling as if this choice of a profession which lay before him were a crisis in his life; perhaps a little pleasant sense of self-importance gave it even undue gravity in his eyes. It was possible to debate upon it without that goad of necessity behind him by which men are often driven into the decisions of life, and his mind travelled after many projects in the paths which stretched to this and that summit in the horizon of the future. At one time he would be a barrister,—until he went to London and was talked out of it by one of the profession; at another he would travel with a pupil, an idea unconsciously crushed by Sir James Milman’s energy in offering him the charge of a shock-headed lad whose irreproachable heaviness would have driven Anthony out of his senses by the end of a week; finally, his longest and favourite dream was that of literature, the gates of which were to fly open as all gates are to open before these young knights. Meanwhile his life was much what it had been in the summer, energetic in everything, whether shooting or flirting or dancing or writing, splendidly young, as Mr Robert once said. As to his relations with Winifred Chester, the barrier between them, doubtless, still existed, and caused a fret on either side, he telling himself that Winifred was changeable and unsympathetic, and she accusing him of giving up old friendships for new, yet neither the one nor the other so entirely believing in their own reproaches as to have lost the idea that some day things would go back to what once had been. Meanwhile, if the old familiar life did not flow on with the pleasant smoothness of former days,—and, indeed, the Squire’s manner with Anthony must be allowed in some measure to have prevented this,—Winifred was less tired in the winter than in the gay brightness of the summer days, and it was less sharp to dream of his sitting by Miss Milman’s side than to be actually there to feel herself neglected. Moreover, she was struggling with all her might to prove herself—even to herself—indifferent. It was balm to her sore heart, ashamed of its own weakness and attempting to ignore it, to keep away from the Vicarage when Anthony was there, to avoid the roads in which she was likely to meet him, to turn the conversation when it drew near the subject which was dearest, to remain in her own room when he came to Hardlands. Every such act was a triumph, but what a triumph! For Anthony was not likely to bear his treatment with good-humoured indifference. It galled him. He was inclined to retaliate, and he laid all the blame of their altered relations at Winifred’s door. Now and then there came a faint return of what once had been, but there was no doubt that the last few months had developed a certain easiness to take offence, which had never before seemed to belong to the girl’s nature, so that often even after a momentary relaxation she pulled herself up with a sharp and uncomfortable check. It is indeed a little difficult for a woman in her position to strike the just balance between self-respect and pride.

If she could not altogether deceive herself, she unconsciously contrived to mystify others: the men said she had refused young Miles, the women that she had tried in vain to marry him, even shrewd Mr Robert was puzzled. There was no one so loving, so tender, so observant, that they weighed the trifles which might have betrayed her, no swiftness of motherhood to read what was passing. So far as human sympathy was concerned, she bore her burden, without a finger being stretched to help her; but there is a Hand from whose loving touch the sorest heart never shrinks, and from out of the very depths it draws us gently.

Her self-containing puzzled even herself. There comes a time in most strong lives when the mysterious power of repression becomes an experience to them and grows into a wonder. It fills the world with a keener interest than when all things seemed open in the page of the great book. Face, heart, nature,—what is hidden beyond our sight?—what does the mask cover?—of what tremendous powers are we unconscious that lie beside us and round our very hearth? Now and then the crust heaves, and we see a flash, but the very working of our own hearts is often hidden from us, and it is only by slow degrees that we learn those forces in ourselves which teach us to reverence our brother’s soul.

Chapter Thirteen.

“He that wrongs his friend
Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about
A silent court of justice in his breast.”
Tennyson.

Marmaduke came down in April, and it was evident enough to any one that he wanted change, or rest, or some other means of renewing health. His face was thin, his eyes unquiet; there was a sort of suspicious watchfulness in his manner unlike his old languor, which nobody could make out, but which they all noticed, except the Vicar and Marion. It made Winifred so uncomfortable that she could not help asking Marion whether anything were the matter.

“Everything is the matter,” said the girl in her eager way. She could not get out of her head that each day that passed was defrauding them of that perfect bliss for which she waited impatiently. She looked with a little contempt at Winifred, who seemed not to understand this impetuous demand for happiness. Poor Winifred! It was impossible for her not to contrast Marion’s position with her own, and to wonder that it should bring so little contentment. Once when Marion was pouring forth her complaints and longings, she said gravely,—“You don’t know what worse than nonsense you are talking;” and yet, as she said it, her eyes were full of tender depth. Her moods were not very settled at this time, sometimes she was resentful, abrupt; but she said these words so strangely that they startled Marion, who was accustomed on the strength of her engagement to look down upon her friend as from a height of experience. She did not know that there were other springs of experience of which she could not fathom the depths, nay, that there is something far more divine and profound than experience itself, out of the strength of which came Winifred’s quiet words. Yet something in them made her wonder. It was a spring afternoon, one of those days in which sudden surprises of shade and brightness alternate with each other. Now and then an intensity of light flashed out from a break in the grey hurrying clouds, and the young green of the larches and the tender pink blossoms of the elms grew vivid and sparkling under its touch; now and then it all faded into sober tints. A line of heavy blue marked the distant moorland; between a thinly clothed network of branches might be traced a crowd of small fields, patches of red soil crossed by sombre lines of hedges, brown nests in the rookery swaying in the wind, a pear-tree standing up in ghostly whiteness before the rent clouds. Winifred was leaning against a window of the Vicarage drawing-room, and looking out, her steadfast eyes grave with a sweet seriousness. Marion, who was watching her, said suddenly,—

“Winifred, you have grown older!”

She smiled, but gave no answer.

“But it is you who do not know. Wait until you are engaged yourself,” continued Marion, falling back upon her old point of superiority, and yet anxious to induce Winifred to agree.

“It is possible to see, although one is outside,—besides, it has nothing to do with feelings.”

This was said slowly, and Marion cried out at once,—

“Nothing to do with feelings!”

“The right or the wrong can’t be affected by them, I mean,” Winifred went on, still slowly, turning her face towards the grey clouds broken with white depths that were driven from the west. “There is something more secure for us to rest upon than even the love you hold to be so strong, Marion, or else—”

“Else what?” said Marion impatiently. But Winifred would not answer. She came from the window, and took up her hat which was lying on the sofa.

“I must go, or I shall be caught in the rain. Take care of your cold.”

“O, I am taking care!” said Marion discontentedly. “Marmaduke was obliged to go into Underham on some stupid business of Miss Philippa’s. Old people are so selfish. Anthony comes back to-morrow. Ask Bessie to bring the last magazines. But you don’t know what you were talking about, Winifred, really.”

Winifred laughed and went away.

Marmaduke had gone to Underham, as she said, doing what he had done a hundred times before, walking in through the narrow lanes, white with the blossom of the blackthorn, and past the farm orchards to the little ugly improving town, with its bustle, its grimy coal-wharves, and its rows of stiff houses run up quickly by the sides of the street. Marmaduke transacted Miss Philippa’s business, and stood talking for a while to Mr Featherly. He particularly disliked meeting Mr Featherly, because the old clergyman had a fashion of inquiring whether he were still at work in the north, with an expression which Marmaduke chose to interpret as astonishment, although his questioner only intended to prove his interest in the little lad whom he remembered running about with the Miles children in the days when he was a younger man, and rode out to Thorpe now and then when ordered forth by Mrs Featherly to take a constitutional Marmaduke, however, imagined that his words implied that wonder from which we are inclined to wince when it professes to be excited in our behalf, a wonder that Mr Tregennas had not done more for the nephew who was popularly looked upon as his heir, and he was careful to avoid the old clergyman whenever it was practicable. On this day his efforts had been in vain, and Mr Featherly kept him for an unusual length of time to tell him the story of some local event, which his wife permitted no one but herself to relate in her presence, and which Mr Featherly therefore hailed the opportunity of producing. Afterwards, Marmaduke, who had not Anthony’s many-sided interests, and found time a wearisome weight, sauntered round by the canal, watched a coal-barge dragged up to her moorings, and then strolled towards the post-office, it being the custom at Thorpe for any responsible inhabitant who happened to be at Underham after the arrival of the mail train, to call for the letters due by the second delivery to the Vicarage, the Red House, and Hardlands. He was not, however, sure whether the train had come in, and stopped David Stephens, who was passing him, to ask the question.

His own feelings towards David were rather favourable than otherwise; not that his nature was sufficiently large to have a more just view of the real intensity of the man’s longings, or, indeed, that he could have sympathised with any desires which were merely spiritual, and therefore to his mind unreal, but that he knew that Anthony was opposing David with all his might, and something within him inclined him to rank himself in every matter on the side against Anthony. He had not a very clear idea of what position David held amongst the dissenters, or of the points at variance between him and Anthony, and he was not sorry for the opportunity of putting one or two leading questions, which should at all events let David see that he was not offending all the family by his open warfare. He said in a conciliatory tone,—

“I heard something of your trying to get into the post-office, Stephens. Have you succeeded?”

“I hardly know as yet, sir. I have not many friends among those who have the disposal of the place; a dissenter seems necessarily to bring a large amount of ill-will about his head.”

“Not necessarily, I should suppose. It is hard to believe that any man could be persecuted in these days for holding his own religious opinions.”

“There are many hard things that are true,” said David bitterly. “One would say that it is hard that so much as standing room should be denied to those who would worship God as they believe right, and yet you know, Mr Lee, whether that is true or not, and who has done it.”

“Mr Anthony does not think much of the feelings of those who oppose him,” said Marmaduke, slowly lighting a cigar. “I am afraid it is of no use for me to say anything, Stephens. You had better give it up, unless you really see a chance of succeeding in spite of him.”

“Until to-day I had hopes, sir, but I find he has been more inveterate than I could have supposed. Mr Maddox has gone back from his word altogether; the fear of man has been too strong for him to battle against, even with the fear of another world before him. I thank you, sir, however, for your kindness.”

He went on quickly, as if he were afraid of adding more, and Marmaduke strolled leisurely after him to the post-office, where the clerk handed him three letters for Mr Mannering, one for Hardlands, and none for the Vicarage. Setting off to walk homewards, however, he heard steps behind, and Stephens, overtaking him, said,—

“Mr Tucker overlooked one letter, sir.”

“Thank you, Stephens. Are you going this way?”

“I am making haste to a cottage where they want me, and I have to be back at the office by an hour’s time. Good day, sir.”

For the second time they parted, and Marmaduke looked at the letter. He saw at a glance that it was for the Vicarage, and for Anthony, but he saw at the same moment something which brought a red flush into his face. The letter was for Anthony, and it came from Mr Tregennas.

To ordinary persons it might have seemed a not unnatural thing for Mr Tregennas to have written to Anthony, who had once or twice been his guest; but to Marmaduke the sight of the handwriting broke down the barriers which had hitherto stemmed in his slowly accumulating suspicions, and let loose a very torrent. The thoughts could not have leapt to life in that moment, but they leapt from their hiding-places. In those few feebly written words he saw revealed a very network of treachery, and walked on mechanically, looking at the letter as he walked with a kind of dumb rage. What did it conceal from him? What plot was weaving round him its web of ruin? How had Anthony toiled and dug, and how much had he gained? Gained away from him,—his own as he had thought it, and called it, and counted upon it! How had he been so blind? Jealousies that hitherto had been vague and unacknowledged took shape and rose up in fierce array. He said to himself that Anthony had seemed abstracted of late, and called himself a fool as he recollected that just before he went to London a week ago he had noticed a letter in his hand, the address upon which stirred him with a half-memory. As he walked quickly on, shut in by green lanes, he lashed himself by a hundred evidences into the conviction that Anthony was a traitor, and that in his hand he carried the letter which held the key to this treachery.

In his hand.

It was a strange power. To his excited imagination the thought dawned like the beginning of retribution. How many chances were there not against its thus coming into his possession! Had justice so guided it that he, of all others, should be the one to whose care it was delivered? Had Anthony’s absence and Miss Philippa’s fancies all worked for this end? He looked at the letter as if there, hidden only by a slender cover, lay the means of confounding his enemies, at first with a kind of angry triumph that so much at least had been gained. The letter was in his hands, and that was the first step.

After all, however, he became soon aware that it was only a step. To himself it might be conclusive proof, but that was not sufficient, and he felt irritated and baffled. In what shape did the danger threaten, and would it be yet impossible for him to turn its tide? He had thought of giving Anthony Miles the letter, and so openly accusing him as to force from him a confession of his shamelessness; but, with a passionate impotence, he acknowledged this to be a vain manner of confronting the blow. He was not in the position to make good his claim. He must meet his enemy with all the subtlety of self-defence. But what had he to meet? How should he know what lay before him, from which side the thrusts should be parried, in what shape grew the threat? The questions beat in his brain with recurrent strokes, as if a hammer were smiting dull iron. All the keenness of suspicion could do no more than bring a shadowy uncertainty before him; nothing could solve the problem except the letter, with its poor feeble failing writing, which he held in his hand.

For there, to be sure, lay the certainty; there was hid the proof or the acquittal, as the case might be. He began to look at it as though Anthony were the prisoner on trial before him, while he himself was the person who possessed the clew, and could determine the guilt. To his distorted reasoning it became almost a sin against Anthony not at once to decide the question, when, after all, he might be innocent, and surely it would be better that this innocence should be placed beyond the power of doubt, than that so cruel a suspicion should divide two friends. For Anthony’s own sake it seemed to Marmaduke a duty to determine the truth forever. The letter had been given to him for some purpose, he argued, as a man will argue, himself clothing the temptation in the strong armour with which it comes to meet him at last, mighty and irresistible. It needed only one look to convince himself, a look which could not harm Anthony Miles in any way, only put Marmaduke on his guard, and show him how to defend his rights. One look—nothing more—at the letter which was in his hands.

He opened it. And as he did so, out of some background of old associations, there rushed upon him such an intolerable loathing for his own action that for a few moments his eyes refused to see its contents. The false pleading with which he had covered it was no longer to be called up, could never any more be called up. It was with a sense of desperate degradation that he forced himself to master the writing, pathetic in its feebleness, confused and indistinct. “I think it is all coming to an end at last,” it said, with a forlornness which might have touched him at another time, “and that my successor will soon be free of my shoes, such as they are. I don’t talk about repenting, but somehow my girl’s face comes before me night and day,—I might have been more patient with her, though I did no more than I told her to look for. Your father seems a just man; people call me a hard old fellow, but I have still a feeble belief in human nature, and I believe in him. If you choose you may place a decision in his hands, and if he tells me the thing should be done, I will make an alteration in my will, half the money shall go as it is now settled, and half to Ellen Harford, Margaret’s child. But should he think the change unnecessary, I do not wish to be pestered by replies or arguments. Silence will answer me fully. I shall understand that he thinks my proposal unadvisable, and I shall never break it by an allusion.”

And this was the letter which Marmaduke must deliver.

For a quarter of an hour he stood motionless with it in his hand. Over his head was the sweet changeable April sky, and on either side of the road a little green copse in which the birds were chirping and twittering. He looked up at last, with a fierce gesture of impatience at their glad piping, at the tender sunshine; a sudden storm, a wild rending of all these pretty gentle things, would have been more congenial to him just then than the burden of their joy. Two men jogged by him in a cart, and looked at him curiously as he stood by the roadside. It raised a quick fear that they might discover his secret, and he began to walk slowly on again, reading and rereading the letter in obedience to some mechanical impulse, for the first sight had burned the words into his brain. It was remarkable that he had no longer any fear of Anthony as a rival, probably from his own frame of mind being such that it was impossible for him to realise a sane man putting such a choice into the hands of his heir, and conceiving the idea of his exercising it in any way but one. It was only a robbery of himself which was revealed to him; an iniquitous deprival of half of his inheritance. For he needed no assurance of what Mr Miles’s decision would be. He had a half-uncomfortable, half-slighting contempt for the Vicar’s notions, which he classed with other antiquated forms of thought belonging to the old world. Anthony’s words came back to him with a sting which they had not at the time they were spoken, when he believed them to be powerless, and he knew that half of those good things on which he had so long counted would go out of his grasp forever as soon as this letter was delivered. As soon as it was delivered,—but the question immediately forced itself on his thought of why such a letter should exist at all to harrow them with its sentence of deprivation. Was not the Vicar himself concerned, Marion’s interests being equally involved with his own? And it was for the sake of a girl who knew nothing, hoped nothing, and whose father was as equally averse to a reconciliation as Mr Tregennas had been. Then he thought angrily that the decision, if there were one, should have been offered to himself. Indeed, fate said the same thing, and, resenting the injustice, gave him the needed opportunity. If he did not embrace it, he was yielding his own property, and sealing a gross injustice. The thought grew, it rang in his brain as he walked along,—alas, no song of birds could drown it!

He tore the letter across and across without a renewal of those accusing feelings which had rushed upon him when first he opened it, having wrought himself into a condition in which right and wrong became mere accidents dependent on his own will. He set his teeth and tore it into a hundred fragments, dropping them, as he walked, upon the grass by the side of the lane, and almost taking a pleasure, as it seemed, in their symmetrical destruction. No sense of pity touched him for the failing life that had there made its last vain effort, and the notion that he was baffling an act of injustice he was able by a strong and concentrated pressure of conscience to keep uppermost in the place it had usurped.

A little farther along the lane he once more met David Stephens, letting him pass this time without comment, and congratulating himself that the man had not timed his return earlier. It was, however, noticeable that, having delivered himself from his previous haunting suspicions of Anthony’s rivalship, he should, nevertheless, immediately decide that he would in some hidden manner assist Stephens, thinking that the fortune which was to come into his hands would enable him to do this, and siding more strongly than even an hour ago with any attempt to oppose Anthony’s influence.

David himself, accustomed to observe keenly, was aware of some disturbance in Marmaduke’s face as he passed him, wondering, too, at his having gone so short a distance since they parted. It is possible that the surprise made him quick to notice trifles, for the tiny atoms which had fluttered on the grass would naturally have escaped his observation. As it was, he stooped and gathered some of them into his hand. They were torn so closely as to make it almost a matter of impossibility to fit one piece with another, unless he had bestowed long attention upon the work, and no impulse moved him to do this. But a scrap of the envelope, which Marmaduke had destroyed with less care, showed enough of the postmark for Polmear to be distinguishable, and Polmear had been stamped on the letter which Stephens had handed to Mr Lee. One or two other half-words there were, which, his curiosity being a little excited, he tried to put together as he went along, but for the most part they were illegible. Something, however, gave him an uneasy feeling as he hurried on to the post-office to hear whether his application had been successful.

Chapter Fourteen.

“Our life is but a chain of many deaths.”
Young.

For a few days things went on to all outward intents as if the letter which Marmaduke destroyed had never existed. Once or twice he had a feeling as if it were indeed nothing more than a dream through which he had passed, for the act struck himself as so unlike his usual languid easy-going nature, that even to him there was an unreality mingled with it, and he was inclined at all events to compassionate himself for the crisis which had forced anything so repugnant upon him. On the sixth day there arrived a telegram announcing Mr Tregennas’s death.

Mr Miles, Anthony, and Marmaduke started at once. A sort of restraint had grown up between the two young men, which was, perhaps, although it began only by reflection, more perceptible in Anthony’s manner than in that of Marmaduke, for the former was at all times quickly conscious of the feelings of others towards himself, and apt to throw them back. He was sensitive, moreover, to external influences; there was heavy rain falling, a damp chill in the air, and, as they drove down the road towards Trenance through woods in which the wild garlic was beginning to scent the air, the mournfully heavy drip of the rain through scantily clothed trees, the coarse sodden grass, the dreary moss-grown little paths that led away as it seemed into some dismal wilderness, the house with its shut and blinded windows lying under a pall of low clouds, deepened the disturbed expression of his face. No one spoke after they left the station. The carriage that had been sent for them, with its old moth-eaten cushions, rolled slowly along, the coachman not thinking very kindly of his load: a probable heir can scarcely expect a welcome from old servants who have grown fat and masterful under the weakened hands of age. The place had always seemed oppressed with a weight of silence, but now, as they drove up, the very wheels jarred upon the excessive stillness, broken only by the ceaseless dripping of the rain. Nevertheless, Marmaduke’s spirits rose as soon as he found himself in the house; and while Anthony, with a pale and troubled face, flung himself down in the dreary drawing-room, which looked uglier and more uninviting than ever, he went about from room to room, only avoiding that which an awful Presence guarded. It was Mr Miles who went there first, and when he came down again he held a little miniature in his hand.

“It was found under his pillow,” he said. “There is Margaret Hare, as she must have been in the old days before the unhappy quarrel. It makes me hope that he may, after all, have remembered her child.”

“I shall go up to him,” said Anthony, starting up. He had a shrinking from the sight of death and all painful things, but at this moment he could only remember the old man who had been kind to him after his fashion. “Marmaduke, will you come?”

“No,” said Marmaduke carelessly, “it can do no good now. You can tell me if anything has to be arranged, and I will see about it.”

He spoke with an easy assumption of authority, which stirred Anthony’s anger. All that Marmaduke said or did seemed to jar upon him, upon the time, the quiet, the sadness; for, after all, although there is not so much to stir our sympathy, perhaps no death can be so sad as that of a forlorn and unlovely old age.

There were no relations to come to the house; all the orders were given by Mr Pitt, Mr Tregennas’s lawyer, a little withered red-faced man with shrewd eyes, who was there when they arrived, and who kept himself in the library, away from them all, until the day of the funeral. Perhaps a more silent four could hardly have been found than the men who were gathered in the old damp house, although with Marmaduke the silence was rather compulsion than choice. Anthony was very grave and subdued. When the funeral came they were all together almost for the first time, rumbling along the desolate overgrown road, with two or three empty carriages crawling behind them, which had been sent by the neighbours with a vague belief that it was an easy method of doing honour to the dead. The rain was falling still as they all rumbled back again, and gathered in the library to hear Mr Pitt read the will. It was soon done. A few annuities were bequeathed to the old servants, five thousand pounds free of legacy duty to his great-nephew, Marmaduke Lee, and the remainder, half in entail and half unreservedly, to the great-nephew of his second wife, Anthony Miles. William Miles, clerk, was appointed executor.

Mr Pitt’s monotonous reading was interrupted by Marmaduke Lee, with a white, quivering face,—

“I protest against such a will as a fraud. I can prove it to be a fraud,” he cried, lifting his hand and letting it fall tremulously on the table.

Anthony neither turned towards him nor moved. Mr Miles said, a little hurriedly,—

“When Mr Pitt has finished, my son has something to say.”

The lawyer, looking quietly from one to the other, took up his sing-song again, and went on as if there had been no break. Marmaduke had shrunk into his chair like a man who had received a heavy blow, his very passion was too weak to support him at this crisis, he scarcely heard the formal words running on in set rounded phrases: what he did hear at last was Mr Miles asking,—

“Is there no mention whatever of Miss Harford in the will?”

“There is nothing more than you have heard me read,” said Mr Pitt, in his dry voice.

The name seemed to recall Marmaduke’s senses, and a rush of rage stimulated him to burst out again,—

“It is false, and a lie! Anthony has taken advantage of his dotage. I will dispute every word of it.”

Anthony looked at him with a contemptuous darkness in his face, which it was not pleasant to see, but he held his voice under repression as he bent forward, folding his arms on the table, and saying slowly,—

“Dr Evans is the person to testify whether or not Mr Tregennas was in the full possession of his senses. It was only a fortnight before his death that I received a hint of his intentions, which were as unwelcome to me as to Lee. I had fixed this very day for coming here to urge my objections. No one could have thought it would all have ended so soon,” said the young fellow, with his lips quivering. “All that I can do is to make over to Lee that part of the property which is at my own disposal,—not because of his words, but because he has a better right to it than I.”

Sometimes people get small thanks for large acts of generosity, and in this case it is possible that Marmaduke was too stupefied or too sullen for gratitude, Mr Pitt might have said something, but he only glanced at Anthony with his shrewd eyes, and gathered and tied up his packets silently. There was a chill about the whole business which struck keenly on Anthony, who liked to be generous, but who also liked acknowledgments, warm words, and hearty looks: he got up quickly and went out of the room, leaving his father to settle what remained.

As for Marmaduke, it was not easy for his mind at that moment to grasp the fact that things were not so crushing as he had dreaded. What might have seemed much to him at another time now seemed nothing, and he hated Anthony so much that his gift was an intolerable load. Was it for this that he had done the wrong? For, after all, however cunningly a man may disguise his sin beforehand, the disguise is but a poor helpless thing that falls off when it has served the Devil’s turn, and leaves what it covered hideous. It was only before he opened the letter that he had tried to deceive himself with dreams of fairness to Anthony. Ever since it had been scourging him. And now a fierce rage was uppermost.

He went back to Thorpe the next morning alone, Mr Miles and his son finding it necessary to remain and set matters in train, and before he went he forced himself to say some ungracious words to Anthony about his gift. Perhaps it would have been better had he gone away in silence, for the words were not likely to do much towards healing the breach: they were said, however, and the Vicar and Anthony stood at the door and watched the carriage toiling away up the drive. The sky was a soft dazzle of blue, everything was shooting and sprouting after the rain, colours seemed full of light, there were young creatures leaping and running, a spring glory brightening the ugly old house.

“It is almost a pity that it should be let,” said Mr Miles, standing on the steps with his hands behind him.

“I could not live here,” Anthony answered, shrugging his shoulders.

There was a little silence. The Vicar was looking after the carriage, and not really thinking much about the house. He said at last, slowly,—

“I don’t much like the spirit he has shown.”

“It can’t be helped,” said Anthony, without much cordiality. “I don’t suppose he can do me any particular harm.”

“Harm!” repeated Mr Miles, startled. Then, as his son did not reply, he said, sighing, “I am thinking of poor Marion.”

“She can be married now as soon as she likes, I suppose,” said Anthony shortly, turning away and going into the house. He was not feeling much of that sweet sense of satisfaction which is held up to us as bringing a quick reward for our good actions: he had behaved more generously towards his cousin than ninety-nine men out of a hundred might have done, but his generosity did not tend to make him ignorant of this fact, and he had expected a certain reward which had not come. Mr Pitt’s manner had chilled him as much as Marmaduke’s. He would have resented the imputation that he was dependent upon external influences, yet there was a certain side of his character which seemed almost at their mercy, and a fortress is no stronger than its weakest point. If he made over the fortune to Marmaduke as an act of justice, it is certain that his mode of receiving it should have made no difference in Anthony’s determination; nevertheless, at this moment he half repented, and perhaps would have undone it if he could.

Mr Miles stood where his son had left him, looking sadly up the road along which Marmaduke had but now driven. Something, which was so indefinable that only a woman might have noticed it, seemed to have changed his face and his whole bearing ever since the day in which he had spoken to Marion in his study: the shadow of a shade had now and then, as it were, just touched him and passed, but during the last few days it had rested longer. He was conscious of it himself, yet it was so little beyond a vague something that he was inclined to smile at his own fancifulness. Rousing himself at last, although with another sigh, he went slowly down the steps and round to the front of the house, instead of going into the library, where there were papers and accounts to be looked over. Anthony was right. Marion might marry if she pleased, now that there was enough money to make things easy to them. And yet with the thought the shadow deepened.

For two days, however, he said nothing. But one evening when Anthony, who had cast off some of his vexation, was planning changes in the estate before it passed into the hands of tenants, his father remarked slowly,—

“I think I shall go home to-morrow. Something ails me, and I don’t know what it is. Perhaps your mother will find out.”

“Do you mean that you feel ill?” Anthony asked, looking up hastily.

“No, I don’t mean anything of the sort I have no more to say about it than just what I have said, so you need not alarm yourself. But I shall go, and you can either remain behind or run down again next week.”

“My mother will set you to rights, sir,” said Anthony cheerfully.

“Yes. And Marion. And Marion,” repeated the Vicar with a little absence of manner.

“I’ll go back with you, and come down again, as you suggest,” his son went on. “I should like to put two or three things straight before the place is let. There must be a clean sweep of a good deal.”

“Yes, yes,” said Mr Miles, half impatient, half smiling, “your young man’s idea of a reformer is a Briareus with a broom in each hand. It’s lucky we don’t all get treated in that fashion. Well, let me see your plans.”

Father and son went home the next day, as the Vicar desired, and the shadow passed,—or so it seemed. It might have been Mrs Miles’s little doctorings, or the return to the old routine of habit, which had grown into a second self; at any rate, the Vicar was apparently as well as he had been during the long years of his residence at Thorpe Regis, nor was there anything to distract his wife’s interest from Marion’s wedding when that took place a little later. No one could give any reason for delay strong enough to weigh down the girl’s impetuous demand; that her father and Anthony felt a vague uneasiness was not sufficient to do more than perhaps excite her to a determined attitude of defiance. To outward eyes there was everything that a wedding should have, youth and love, sunshine, roses in the old garden, smiles, brightness. Yet it was not all smooth. Marmaduke was restless, and his easy temper every now and then broke down in fits of irritation, while there was a visible restraint between himself and Anthony. Mr Miles was grave and sad throughout the day. After it was over, and Anthony had walked up to Hardlands to dinner, taking with him the few Vicarage guests, his father stood in the drawing-room in a manner altogether unlike himself, and looked wistfully at his wife.

“We have been happy together, Hannah,” he said slowly.

Mrs Miles’s eyes filled with tears at this sudden appeal.

“Very happy, William.”

“You have been a good wife,—it would be better perhaps if poor Marion were more like you. Somehow, I don’t feel so sure about things now,—I forget—”

“Forget? I am always forgetting,” said Mrs Miles consolingly. “I am sure you don’t lose your spectacles half so often as I do, and where they are now is more than I can really say. But it has all gone off as well as possible.”

“I wish I knew Marmaduke better.”

“My dear, when you have seen him since he was no higher than the table!”

“Poor Marion! Poor child!”

“She is quite happy,” said the mother, nodding her head sagaciously. “I only warned her to take care that he has plenty of beef-tea, for he is sadly thin.”

The door was pushed open, and Sniff came running in, looking for Marion. Somebody had tied a white favour round his neck, of which nothing was left but a little ragged strip of ribbon. He had followed Anthony to Hardlands, and not finding Marion there or here, flung himself exhausted at Mr Miles’s feet, with a piteous look of entreaty in his faithful eyes. The Vicar stooped and patted him.

“Is she gone, poor fellow—” he said.

What stopped the words?—What spring of life suddenly failed?—Was it the shadow, after all, no longer shadowy, but a presence, a reality? Mrs Miles, running to him with a cry, caught him in her faithful arms, and held him by an almost supernatural strength from falling forward on his face.

“William, William!”

The servants in the kitchen heard the cry though he did not, and flocked in, Anthony was sent for, another messenger despatched to Underham for the doctor. All the doctors in the world could do him no good, but Mrs Miles would not believe it as she sat by the bed where he was lying.

“He was so well, Anthony, all the morning. And I think Marion’s wedding made him remember our own, for do you know what he said just before? ‘We have been very happy together, Hannah,’ he said. I must tell him when he is better that I did not say half enough.”

I think the words have been told by this time like so many other of those unspoken words which wait for our utterance, but he did not hear them then. No more sounds apparently reached his ear where he lay silent and motionless while the days passed slowly by, carrying his moments with them, until the last came, when they scarcely expected it, as quiet and gentle as his life had been throughout.

Chapter Fifteen.

When death brings other departures besides the one that is greatest, a hundred pangs may be added to its sadness. There is the leaving the old home, the uprooting of old ties,—a shock meets you at every turn. Mrs Miles felt so sharply the fear of these added troubles, that she implored Anthony with a wistful entreaty he could not resist to let her remain at Thorpe, and to move, at least for the present, into a house they called “the cottage,” about half a mile from the Vicarage. He agreed reluctantly, and because it seemed cruelty to his mother to oppose her at such a time. He himself disliked staying in the place, with their home no longer theirs; and his sorrow for his father was so great that he had almost an impatient longing to escape from a neighbourhood which was absolutely made up of associations. The Squire forgot all his little animosities with Anthony Miles, while the awe of standing by his old friends grave was fresh in his mind; but Anthony shrank from his homely attempts at consolation, as a man shrinks from the reopening of a wound. Even Winifred, whose sympathy was at once strong and delicate, found it difficult to show it. The little barrier which had reared itself between them did not fall away at her kind, womanly touch. Anthony was inclined to reject an attempt to share his sorrow,—almost to resent it. He wanted to escape, to try his wings, to make a career, and Mrs Miles promised to go with him to London; but her heart failed her, poor thing, whenever the time came, and he gave way to her wishes, meaning his own to have their way by and by.

So one by one the new things which had seemed so strange subsided into ordinary life. Marmaduke and Marion were living in one of the midland counties. A new vicar came to Thorpe,—a short, bustling man, in all respects a contrast to Mr Miles. But it was a peculiarity of the place that even change seemed to lose its characteristics in the quiet little village; a certain dogged custom was too strong for it, or the climate was too sleepy. Little by little Mr Brent laid down his arms, accepted this anomaly, that habit, and things went on in much the same groove as in Mr Miles’s time, although Mr Brent was red-haired and energetic.

In the winter a visitor came to Hardlands, an old friend of the Squire’s, and no less a person than Mr Pitt, Mr Tregennas’s lawyer. It took Anthony by surprise to meet him one day walking with the Squire, and the young man, who had been chafed by a certain dry, unsympathetic manner in the old lawyer, was not very cordial in his greeting.

“So you knew Anthony Miles before?” said Mr Chester when they had parted. “Oh! ay! to be sure! I forgot you had to do with that queer affair of his uncle, or grandfather, or whoever he was, that died the other day.”

“Who told you it was a queer affair?” said Mr Pitt, stopping short.

“Who? Why, my own common-sense could do so much, I suppose. I always thought the boy a romantic young idiot, and it’s just the sort of thing I should have expected him to do,” replied the Squire with great pride.

“Humph!”

“I’ll say this for him, he hasn’t got any of those low mercantile notions half the young men of the present day bring out of their pockets cut and dried for use. They’ll be the ruin of the country, sir. Don’t talk to me about reductions and rotten administrations, and all the rest of it; the other’s the real evil, take my word.”

“And you consider young Miles free from the prevailing passion?”

“I consider he hasn’t that miserable, pettifogging spirit at his back, if that’s what you mean. You must have seen it for yourself. You haven’t many clients, I should say, that would knock off half a fortune to put things right, have you?”

“No,” said Mr Pitt, thrusting his stick into a lump of red mud. “Certainly not many.”

“There, that’s what I said. Generally there is some spur in the background before they do that sort of thing.”

“Squire, you deserve to have been a lawyer.”

“Ay, ay,” said Mr Chester, rubbing his hands in high glee, “that’s the way with you fellows; you think no one can see an inch before his nose, except he’s one of yourselves. The worst of your trade is the confounded low opinion you get of human nature. I dare say the best you would say for young Miles was that he was a fool for his pains.”

“Certainly not,” said Mr Pitt dryly. “A fool is the last thing I should have called him.”

“Eh, what?” said Mr Chester, stopping suddenly, and looking at his companion with an expression of bewilderment. “What do you mean? Can’t you speak out? What on earth would you call him?”

“A very prudent—scoundrel would be nearer the mark.”

The effect upon the Squire was electrical. His face became crimson with anger.

“Do you know what you are talking about, sir? Anthony Miles a scoundrel! Why, you’ll be saying I’m a scoundrel next! Anthony Miles!—a young fellow I’ve known since he was that high! It’s an insult, an insult to us all.—Are you mad, Pitt?” said the Squire, pulling himself up with a sudden attempt at self-control which nearly choked him.

“No, I’m not mad, and I know all you have to say against it; but there are such unfortunate things as facts which outweigh everything else in the way of evidence. I’ve known you longer than you’ve known him, remember, and I’ve spoken out because I’ve heard a rumour that Mr Anthony Miles is desirous of marrying your daughter.”

Mr Chester stared at him incredulously, and then burst into a laugh.

“O, that’s one of your facts too, I suppose! Anthony many Winifred! Mercy on us, man, what cock-and-bull stories have you been picking up? Winifred and Anthony? They’ve played like brother and sister pretty nearly all their lives, and that’s enough for the gossips, no doubt. You’d better ask Winifred, and see what she’ll say.”

“It is new to you, then?”

“New to me? Ay, as new as it is to them, I’ll be bound. I’ll tell you what, Pitt, you’d better not let it out, but some sly rascal has been hocusing you, and done it neatly, too, uncommon neatly. Come, come, isn’t there a little more as good to tell me?” And the Squire, with all his good-humour restored, walked on, nodding to the children who came running up to make their courtesies.

“Well, if that part of my information isn’t true, I’m glad of it,” said Mr Pitt, coolly. “I told you, if you recollect, that it was no more than a rumour. But as to my opinion of young Miles, I am sorry to say it does not rest upon anything so doubtful.”

“You had better speak out,” said Mr Chester, fuming again, and striding on savagely. It was a very different matter to fall foul of the young man himself, and to hear this said of him in sober earnest, especially when he thought of a grave by which they had stood side by side not very long ago.

“I intend to speak out, now I have said so much. All my relations with Mr Anthony Miles date only from one time—”

“When he behaved as few young fellows would have behaved,” interrupted the Squire warmly.

“I hope so, I am sure,” said Mr Pitt, pointedly misapplying the words. “You are acquainted with the external features of the case, the bequest to the young man and his own subsequent division of the property?”

“I am proud to say I am.”

“You are also probably aware that there is a granddaughter of Mr Tregennas living, or presumed to be living, for whom he had refused to make any provision whatever?”

“To Anthony’s excessive regret,” said Mr Chester, marching on bravely.

“Those are your words, not mine.”

“Well, are you going to say they are a lie?” broke out the Squire in a white heat again. “His father told me with his own lips that they had done their utmost with the old curmudgeon, and he was the truest-hearted gentleman that ever breathed, sir!”

“Did his father tell you that, a week before his death, Mr Tregennas wrote to Anthony Miles, asking whether the Vicar would agree to half the fortune being made over to the grandchild, and—mark this—desiring him if he would not consent to take no notice of the letter?”

“Well?” said the Squire, stopping.

“Well.”

“Can’t you do anything but repeat one’s words?” growled Mr Chester with something else between his teeth.

“That is all.”

“What is all?”

“What I say. Mr Tregennas wrote that letter, and there the matter ended.”

“Ended! Do you pretend to tell me there was no answer from Anthony?”

“Never a word more. And that was enough for Mr Tregennas. It had been all I could do to work him up so far, and I confess,—though I was a fool not to know the world better at my time of life,—I confess I hoped there was a chance for poor Margaret’s girl when we had got him to that point.”

“A chance!” stammered Mr Chester, as red and discomfited as if he had been the person accused. “Anthony would have jumped to give it to her, as I’ve told you already.”

“So it seemed,” said the lawyer, dryly.

“Confound you, man, but I tell you he would!”

“I can only answer you by the facts of the case.”

“But—I’ll ask him—you don’t know what you’re saying—my word for it, he never had that letter.”

“I posted it myself. Besides, where is it? If there had been a non-delivery we should have heard by this time from the Dead-Letter Office. Pooh, pooh, Chester, the temptation was a little too strong, that’s the long and short of it, and, after all, no one pretends that there was any fraud. Mr Tregennas put the choice into his hands, and he had no doubt an absolute right to choose.”

The Squire, who had thrust his hands into his pockets, was striding on at a pace with which his friend found it difficult to keep up. He gave a sort of groan when Mr Pitt finished his deliberate speech, and then stopped and turned suddenly upon him.

“I tell you what, Pitt,” he said, setting his teeth. “If you weren’t who you are, I should like to—to—”

“To kick me,” said the lawyer, coolly finishing the sentence. “I should not wonder. But considering who I am, and considering that I have certainly no personal animus against the young man,—what can you make of the story?”

“Do you want me to say I think my old friend’s lad a villain? Good heavens, sir, and he was so proud of him!”

Mr Pitt’s manner changed a little, losing some of the hard ease with which he had talked, as he began to understand the pain it cost the loyal-hearted Squire to receive his impressions. He said earnestly,—

“You think too harshly of it, Chester, and perhaps I spoke too strongly. There is no villainy in the matter. Few young men would have had strength of moral purpose sufficient to resist such a temptation, and give up half a valuable property.”

“But that is exactly what he has done,” broke in Mr Chester, quickly. “We’re forgetting all that. He has voluntarily disposed of half. It is sheer nonsense, Pitt. How can you account for such an act?”

“Well, it has gone to his sister, which is a different business from losing it altogether. But I own to you that my own convictions point to a certain pressure having been brought to bear. I suspect that the secret was scented, and that this was the price of silence,—in fact, I may say that I put a question or two to young Lee, which proved pretty decidedly that he was acquainted with the contents of the letter. No other theory would explain his manner of receiving the gift, for he absolutely expressed no gratitude whatever.”

It was evident that Mr Pitt’s quiet persistence was producing the effect it usually does produce upon violent people. The Squire looked like a man who has received a blow. He walked on silently for some time, then stopping at a gate, said,—

“I think I’ll go across to Sanders’s farm; there’s a little business I want to speak to him about. You can’t miss Mannering’s house if you go straight forward.” He turned away as he spoke, but had not gone many paces before he strode back. “The boy’s father did not know a word of the matter, sir; of that I’ll stake my existence,” he said positively, and went off again without giving Mr Pitt time to answer.

As the lawyer walked thoughtfully on towards the Red House, he acknowledged to himself that this conviction of the Squire’s was probably well grounded. Even to the eyes of a suspicious man, and Mr Pitt was partly from nature and partly from profession suspicious, the Vicar had carried that about him which made it very difficult to doubt his honour. It was quite possible that the contents of the letter had been withheld from him. But the other affair had resolved itself almost into certainty. When Mr Tregennas read to him the words he had just written, Mr Pitt had felt that it was putting human virtue to too severe a test; he half smiled at himself now for having been such a fool as to cherish a hope that the young man would be generous to Margaret Hare’s child at his own expense.

Chapter Sixteen.

“A very pitiful lady, very young,
Exceeding rich in human sympathies.”
Rosetti’s Dante.

The Squire was more utterly cast down by Mr Pitt’s communication than those would have thought possible who knew that Anthony Miles had never been a favourite of his. Perhaps a little touch of jealousy had given the first warp when he looked at the Vicar’s son and his own daughters, and had made him always hard upon the young fellow; but it was not a jealousy which could take pleasure in such a discovery as this. He was so cross and miserable throughout the day that Winifred felt sure something was the matter. Mr Pitt had left them; the evening was cold and stormy, a southwest gale was blowing, and the wind tore at the windows and howled drearily round the house. Winifred only waited until Bessie had gone to bed—a concession to years of half an hour against which that young lady nightly rebelled—before she asked her father what had happened, and whether Mr Pitt had brought any bad news.

“Yes, he has,” said the Squire doggedly; “very bad news. It’s well the poor old Vicar should be dead and gone.”

And then he told her.

As he went bluntly through Mr Pitt’s account he once or twice looked curiously at her, for, in spite of his disclaimer, he could not help remembering that other hint which the lawyer had let drop, that Winifred was dear to Anthony. “If it is so, she’ll have hysterics or something; that’s how girls always show it.”

To his relief, however, Winifred did not so much as utter an exclamation. If he had been quick to notice, he might have observed a little proud up-drawing of her head, and a sudden light in her eyes; but we are all apt to read only those signs for which we are on the lookout, and the Squire drew a long breath of relief.

“What do you think of this?” he said, when he had finished.

“Did Mr Pitt really tell you such an absurd story?” said Winifred, smiling.

Her treating the matter lightly was unfortunate, for her father had been made so wretched all day that it irritated him to have it supposed that he was throwing away his sympathies; and his love of contradiction was such that every instinct of his nature arrayed him on the side that was assailed, so that he began at once to adopt Mr Pitt’s opinion as his own, to hasten to its defence, to run his thoughts more keenly over its possibilities. He flustered a little directly.

“It’s very well for you to laugh, since you don’t understand anything at all about it. Is Pitt a likely man to concoct a bundle of lies?”

“I don’t know, I am sure,” she said, looking at him with astonishment. “But you do not mean that anything he could say would make you believe such a story of Anthony?”

“Well, explain it, explain it,” said the Squire grimly, “that’s all.”

Winifred sat forward, and began to speak with more impetuosity.

“That Anthony should—” she began, and then suddenly broke off and laughed outright. “It is so very ridiculous!” she said.

“I don’t see the absurdity,” growled Mr Chester. “I don’t see how Pitt can be mistaken, or how Anthony can get over the thing. You women run away with your own opinions, without ever stopping to hear reason; but other people will put two and two together. It is a very bad business.”

“It is exceedingly wrong of Mr Pitt to have dared to say such a thing,” said Winifred, standing up quickly, and looking very tall and stately; “but it can hurt Anthony no more than—than it could hurt you. He could explain it, of course, but I hope he will never hear that anything so cruel and untrue has been suggested. Good-night, papa. I am glad there is nothing really the matter.”

She walked out of the room with the smile still on her lips and the backward curve of her slender throat a little more apparent. But those few words of opposition had done Anthony’s cause no good with the Squire. He repeated to himself that women were so obstinate there was no dealing with them, and while he fancied himself as grieved as ever, in his heart, I think there lurked a secret hope that Winifred might be forced to acknowledge herself in the wrong. He was not in the least aware of the petty obstacle which had turned the current, nor indeed would he have acknowledged that the current had been turned at all, but, no doubt, as he went over the array of presumptive evidence against Anthony, he weighted it in a manner which he had not done until this moment.

As for Winifred, the smile died out of her face before she reached her own room. A bright fire was burning; she went to the window, threw back the shutter, and stood looking out into the wild darkness. There were furious gusts, strange depths of blackness, lights gleaming and vanishing in the direction of Underham, a sawing of branches one against the other, now and then distant and mysterious sounds, as if the rush and roar of the great sea itself were swelling the tumult. Nothing but fancy could have brought such a sound, but Winifred caught at it, and would not let it go. The swoop of the wind upon the water, the jagged tossed waves hurling themselves against the sandy bar, the wild shrieks of the night, the blackness, the confusion, here and there, perhaps, a concentration of the horror, lives going out in a last cry... she pressed her face against the panes, shuddering and praying for the poor souls. All this while there was something nearer to her which she was shutting out and trying to overwhelm by a more terrible distress. It was the strongest of the two, after all. She softly closed the shutters, turning away from the window with pitiful compunction in her heart, as if she were leaving poor drowning men out in the cold, and came and sat before the fire to think of Anthony. For, though she might smile at her father’s story, and a little smile again stole over the sweet grave face as she thought of the accusation, she knew Anthony well enough to dread the idea of its reaching his ears. There was no room now in her heart for pride, or for anything except a kind tenderness. That he did not care for her any longer, if indeed he had ever cared, she felt assured, and at this moment it seemed to her that she would not have had him care in such a sense, so long as they might be friends. Perhaps the very storm and darkness had something to do with this persuasion. When skies were soft, and the sun shining, and things bright about her, she too might have cried out for some share in the brightness and softness; but the grim earnestness of the night, a night for wrecks and disasters, and big with struggle and suffering, utterly shut out such joy of fair visions.

She could not but reflect what such a report would cost Anthony if it should reach him, and how he, of all men, would suffer and writhe under it. Kindliness, love, and praise seemed so completely his natural food, that if they were withdrawn it was certain that he would droop and flag. With the thought, her first impression came strongly back that the accusation should at any cost be kept from his knowledge, but her own nature was too brave and high-minded for such an impression to linger. Better the open wound than the secret calamity; better that he should taste the sharpness even of disappointment than be dogged by a suspicion to which he could give no tangible shape; better, a hundred times better, know, and meet, and repel.

But who should tell him?

As she put the question to herself, she trembled a little with a perception that the answer was fall of personal pain. Names floated before her,—her father, the Mannerings, Mrs Miles,—but each suggestion carried a negative with it, although she paused longest at the thought of Mr Robert. He was kind-heartedness itself; at the same time, she felt as if such a telling required more delicate care than he would give—who would give it?—who would give it except herself? Winifred shrank and flushed Pride put out its prickles; but, after all, there was something so much stronger than pride in her heart, that it failed to conquer. The little impalpable bar that had sprung up between them was the harder to pass for its very impalpability, yet—if she could help him, only as his friend, with no touch of love to mar it, as she thought, unconscious that it was the highest and most divine love which she was offering, then pain of her own should not withhold her, nor even the added estrangement which her words might cause.

The next morning she awoke with her determination unweakened. She would seek an opportunity, and tell him what slander he had to kill.

Chapter Seventeen.

“When adversities flow
Then love ebbs; but friendship standeth stiffly
In storms.”
Lilly.

People, women especially, make resolutions sometimes with no more to back them up than a vague hope that they will be able to carry them out in some haphazard fashion. Winifred had almost offended Mrs Miles by the slackness of her visits to the cottage, and hardly knew whether Anthony were in Thorpe or not. She persuaded Bessie, however, to ride with her father, and, putting on her red cloak, went across the meadows, making a little spot of brightness in the midst of the quiet winter colouring.

She walked through the village, lingering a little at the post-office, and afterwards going on towards Underham, simply from not knowing where else to turn. The rain had reduced the roads to thick mud, and strewn them with little twigs and branches, whipped from the trees by the violence of the storm. But, as not infrequently happens after these fierce gales, there was an exquisite beauty shining where lately the hurly-burly had raged. Instinctively Winifred stopped at a gate in the hedge to look at what was generally dull and uninteresting enough, a long stretch of flat meadows with low hills beyond. But the meadow was transfigured with a depth of colour; there were rich patches of indigo and russet, poplars lighting up the sober background with streaks of brown light, breadths of freshly turned earth, infinite traceries springing from dark stems, a delicate sky broken by soft shadows and round masses of living light, little pools of shining beautiful water left by the rains, hedges ruddy with crimson berries, a white horse, an old man leaning on his stick,—the picture was full of simple, homely grace.

She was still looking at it when some one came along the road behind her. It was Mr Robert Mannering, and his first words connected themselves with her own purpose.

“Have you seen Anthony Miles?” he asked. “He was to come down by this train, and I am particularly desirous to meet him.” Something that he saw in Winifred’s face made him add immediately, “So you have heard it, too?”

“Does Anthony know?” asked the girl, without answering directly.

Mr Robert’s kindly face looked grave and worried. He began to brush imaginary dust from his coat-sleeve,—an action in which he always took refuge under any annoyance.

“If you mean the report,” he said, laying a little stress upon the last word, “I imagine that he does not. To tell you the truth, that is why I am here; for his father’s sake I am inclined to let him hear what is said.”

Winifred flushed a little.

“I do not know why you should say for his father’s sake,” she said at once. “I do not suppose that Anthony’s friends can have allowed a breath of this horrible story to affect them, so that their one wish must be to stand by him for his own sake.”

She stopped and looked at Mr Mannering, who was silent.

“Surely,” said Winifred impetuously, “Mr Pitt has not influenced you!”

“My dear,” said Robert Mannering, looking out towards the low hills, and speaking with a little hesitation, “I think that Anthony had a difficult duty to perform—”

“Yes, yes, go on,” said Winifred, trying to govern her voice.

“And that he shrank from it.”

She could no longer laugh as she had laughed the night before. A sickening feeling came over her. Was this lie actually living, spreading, destroying? Her eyes filled with a rush of tears. She lifted her hand in mute indignation.

“You—his friend!—you believe that!”

He was silent again, and then said slowly,—

“Perhaps neither you nor I are fair judges, Winifred. You naturally think of Anthony, whom you have known all your life, and I think of Margaret Hare. Remember that her child was in all justice the heir, and remember what the poor mother has suffered.”

“O, I remember!” said Winifred, recovering herself, and standing upright, with the full light of the sky in her face; “and I remember, too, who it was that spoke to old Mr Tregennas for the child. It is only I who recollect at all, I think. And it seems to me that there is little use in knowing people all one’s life long, as you say, if that knowledge falls away into doubt the instant our trust in them is tried. If you believe this story, Mr Mannering, pray let me be the person to tell him. I may meet him now; at any rate, I am sure to have an opportunity.”

“As you like,” Mr Robert said, gravely. “Good by, my dear. I am afraid there is pain in store for us all.”

But, although he was the first to say good by, it was Winifred who left him standing by the gate watching her, as she went resolutely along with a quickened step, and the light still on her face.

“True woman, true woman, she will not fail him,” said Mr Robert to himself, shaking his head sadly. “Poor boy, I can’t think of him without being sorry from the bottom of my heart, and yet it was an evil thing to do to Margaret Hare’s child. I wish Pitt had not told us—I wish—”

And then he turned and went back again.

Winifred walked swiftly on for about half a mile, slackening her pace as she became aware that she was going too fast, and trying to lose the consciousness that she had come here to meet Anthony Miles, for it was only when the pitiful feeling was very strong in her heart that it overcame a secret repugnance, and every now and then this last grew into a kind of startled shyness.

Presently she heard wheels, and saw the pony-carriage coming towards her with Anthony driving. Her first impulse was to nod and smile, and pass on as if the meeting were accidental, but the next moment she was ashamed of its prompting, and stood still bravely. Ah, how strange it was that she should need any bravery where Anthony was concerned! It evidently pleased him that she should have stopped, for it was with a radiant countenance that he drew up and jumped out, and asked what had brought her so far from Thorpe.

“He should not have asked,” thought poor Winifred. Then she found he was preparing to send oh James with the carriage, and to walk back with her.

“If you will let me?” he said questioningly.

“I should like it,” Winifred said, so eagerly that he brightened still more. It struck both of them with a pleasant sense of warmth that they two should be walking alone together through the lanes. It was winter, but Anthony thought there was plenty of colour and brightness, and perhaps Winifred’s red cloak had something to do with it. As for her, after the gleam of those few delicious moments, the dull weight of what she had to say came back with depressing heaviness. Anthony’s good-humour and lightness of heart added a hundredfold to the difficulty of her task; yet, time was passing, and she felt with terror that each step brought them nearer to Thorpe. She was always deficient in the feminine art of doubling upon her subject, and in this hour of need it seemed as if she were duller than ever. Anthony, however, knowing nothing of her inward strife, was quite content with Winifred’s softness and kindness; he talked gayly—more gayly than he had talked since the Vicar’s death—of what he had been doing in London.

“I think I see my way to some satisfactory work at last,” he said.

“Shall you live in London, do you mean?” asked Winifred, thinking not of London, but of nearer things.

“One must, you know,” Anthony said slowly. And yet, although he had been dissatisfied with Thorpe of late, he said these words with a strange reluctance in his heart. “It is necessary to be in the midst of things. This place is so far off.”

“Trenance is let, is it not?” Winifred was plunging nervously into her subject.

“Yes, and, oddly enough, to a relation of old Lucas. You remember old Lucas, don’t you? I wonder what this Sir Somebody Somebody is like, and whether it runs in the family to wear your hat at the back of your head.”

And so he went on. It seemed to Winifred, poor child, as if he had never talked so fast or so brightly, and all the while, though, as I have said, that thing which she had to tell lay like a cruel weight upon her heart, there was also a secret joy, a delight in this return of free confidence, a feeling as though the happiness which had once seemed possible were possible again. Anthony, too, had vague thoughts stirring. He was pleased at Winifred’s walking back with him, at her little concession; for of late he had declared angrily that she was cold, changed, variable. He was too much taken up with his satisfaction to see her wistful looks, or to guess how her heart ached with the thought that it was she herself who must embitter these quickly passing moments. Already she was wasting time dangerously. They had reached the gate where Winifred and Mr Robert had stood and looked across the meadows. The transient glow which had so beautified the common things was gone, a grey gloom had crept over the snowy clouds, everything lay stretched in a bare, flat level; it seemed no more than a dull land of hedges and ditches, with a few ugly poplars and insignificant hills. Anthony laughed at Winifred a little for stopping to look at them, but indeed she felt as if she needed the bar of the gate by which to hold, so strange a tremor had seized upon her. She glanced at him with the hope that he would see that something was wrong and question her, for it seemed to her as if her face must tell the tale alone; but he talked on happily, until Winifred interrupted him with sudden abruptness.

“Anthony,” she said, “do you know that there is a cruel report abroad about you?”

Her heart beat so fast that she could hardly speak, and yet her voice sounded in her own ears harsh and unfeeling.

“A report?” said Anthony inquiringly. He began to wonder whether she could have heard what had been told him a few days ago, that he was engaged to Miss Milman. It might be unlike Winifred to speak in this fashion, but a man is often egotist enough to forget these impossibilities, and he folded his arms on the bar of the gate, and laughed and looked round with a pleasant anticipation of fault-finding. Winifred kept her face turned from him, and went on nervously.

“They say that Mr Tregennas wanted to have changed his will at the last, and to have left half his fortune to his granddaughter—”

Something choked her voice. Anthony looked at her and gave a little whistle of astonishment. “Then why on earth did he not?”

“They say that he wrote to you to tell you his desire, placing the matter entirely in your hands, and requesting that if you decided against it,”—she left out his father’s name, fearing to seem irreverent to the dead,—“you would take no notice of the letter; and they say—”

He interrupted her here sharply.

“They! Whom do you mean by they?”

“Mr Pitt,” said Winifred in a low voice, after a moment’s hesitation. “Mr Pitt says that you sent Mr Tregennas no answer.”

“So they believe that, do they?” he said in a jarred voice.

Winifred could not answer. Her heart was too full of pity and pain for her to speak. She held by the bar of the gate, and saw blankly lying before her the wintry fields, the tall, expressionless poplars. Anthony put another question in a moment, in the same coldly restrained tone.

“How do they account for my sharing the property with Marmaduke?”

“Anthony, do not force me to repeat such folly.”

“I must hear.”

“It is so absurd!” said Winifred, keenly ashamed, and trying to laugh. “They say Marmaduke discovered the secret, and to avoid its becoming known you consented to—to—”

“Let him share the spoils. I see. Has Mr Pitt returned to London?”

“I believe so. A word from you will set it right.”

“It should never have been wrong,” he said bitterly. “After what you have said I must get home to catch the post. Good by. You don’t mind walking back alone? Indeed, it doesn’t seem as if my company would do you much credit.”

He was gone almost before she heard, and a cold desolation crept over her as she stood still, turning her back upon the little network of fields, and watched him striding away along the muddy lane. What a fierceness there had been in his last words! What a sense of separation he had left behind him! It had required all her resolution to take this task upon her, and it was cruel that it should thus recoil upon herself; a sense of injustice must have stirred her into indignation, had it not been for the womanly tenderness which at once turned it aside with compassionate excuses. No wonder that the very breath of such an accusation should have angered him; no wonder that his first thought should have been to hurry to refute it; no wonder, ah, no wonder, that he should forget her.

She little thought that it was wrath instead of forgetfulness which was uppermost in Anthony’s mind as he splashed through little innocent pools of water with angry steps. Like most reserved men, he was exceeding impatient of reserve in others, and he wanted her to have protested her disbelief in the slander which had met him, while such a protest would have seemed a positive insult to Winifred, who had never dreamed of doubting him. Her words had given him a terrible blow, and the charge was quickly fermented by his imagination into a distorted form. Conscious that he had not sought the old man’s favour, that it had been hateful to him to replace Marmaduke, that he was even now setting inquiries after Ellen Harford on foot, he was accused, nevertheless, of committing what he called a crime to gain this fortune to which he was indifferent. I am not defending his manner of receiving the accusation. If he had been a hero it would have been very different; but, so far as one sees, heroes seldom leap into the world in complete armour; they are more likely to grow out of trials and temptations, yes, out of many a slip and fall, in which they seem to be beaten down and overwhelmed. Anthony had the stuff in him which would bear the furnace, although there were little overgrowths hiding its goodness; he had a ready generosity, high imaginings, longings to better the world; but these were the very feelings upon which such an accusation came like a stream of icy water. If people ceased to believe in him, he felt as if he could believe in nothing.

As he went quickly through Thorpe, he held aloof from the people, but noticed them jealously, fancying he could read meanings in their faces of which, it is needless to say, they were guiltless. Ill report of a man flies fast, but this was not the sort of report to gain wings quickly, for if any of the people heard it, to what did it amount? To the fact that before Mr Tregennas died he put it to Mr Anthony whether or not he should change his will. “A’d ha’ bin a big fule for’s pains if a’d said a wudd,” would have been the heaviest verdict that Anthony could have received from their lips.

But we place our own thoughts in other people’s hearts, and so Anthony heard a hundred unspoken things on his way through Thorpe.

Chapter Eighteen.

“Anthony Miles is gone to London,” said Mr Robert Mannering, walking into the library of the Red House, on the day following that described in the last chapter.

Mr Mannering looked with a shiver at the door his brother had left open behind him. He had a cold, and a great many theories about its treatment.

“I don’t know what good he can do himself by going up,” added Mr Robert in a perturbed tone.

“He will be able to see Pitt,” suggested Mr Mannering, drawing nearer the fire.

“I wish I could feel there was any chance of his convincing Pitt. It’s a bad business, Charles.”

Mr Mannering looked up with a little surprise; for although his brother frequently indulged in cynical speeches, he had never yet known him to believe in them, or take anything but a largely hopeful view of individualised human nature.

“My dear Robert—would you object to shutting the door?—”

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr Robert hastily, doing as he was requested with an abstracted bang, which made Mr Mannering wince. But he went on.

“Look calmly at the matter. What do we know of the contents of that letter? How is it possible to judge of the terms in which the suggestion was made?—of the burden it may have inflicted upon Anthony?”

“That is not the question,” said his brother, shaking his head. “He denies, you must remember, having received any suggestion whatever. Pooh, the thing’s absurd. Besides, young Lee seems to have implied that he was aware of what had taken place.”

Sometimes they are odd things which warp our judgments. Robert Mannering was an old lawyer, with a red face and short iron-grey hair, and yet it took a very little thing to turn aside his shrewd every-day sense. Only a woman’s name, and a curl of brown hair out of which the living light had faded.

“I have said all I can for him to the Squire,” he went on. “We shall see when he comes back. But—”

He walked to the window, and stood with his hands behind him, looking out. There was a threatening of snow in the air, and a few solitary flakes, the more dismal for their want of companionship, came fluttering down upon the empty beds. That “but” sounded like the key-note of all dreary disbelief.

“Nobody can tell,” said Mr Mannering, who usually took a more desponding view of human nature than his brother. “My own opinion is that you are all deciding hastily, but with the wind where it is, I don’t believe there’s a man alive could give an unprejudiced judgment. As to these hot-water pipes, Jane contrives to convert them into conductors of cold air, with an ingenuity worthy of a better cause.”

“The room is like a hot-house,” said Mr Robert, a little shortly, and still keeping his back turned. “That fool Stokes has not had the sense to mat up the red geranium. He’ll have got rid of every flower in the garden before long, that’s certain. Commend me to this place for incapable idiots.”

While he spoke, Mr Mannering with great care and deliberation proceeded to fold a handkerchief, and to tie it round his head, thus imparting an extraordinarily rueful expression to his face.

“Yates tells me they’re going to push the Bill for connecting the two lines,” he said, fastening the knot.

“So I supposed. Nothing is too fraudulent for me to discredit, and I’m quite aware that you may pick as many pockets as you please, if only you do it on a large enough scale.”

“Come, come, Robert. You’ll be had up for a libel.”

“I dare say. There’s no bigger libel than truth in these days.”

And then he suddenly turned round with a laugh at himself. To do him justice, he was not often so cross, but then he was not often so sore and disappointed at heart. It was very bitter to him to think of Anthony Miles committing a dishonourable action, and it smote him again to remember the injustice to the dead. He could not get one predominant feeling, and that irritated his natural sense of orderliness.

Winifred, of whom he thought much at this time, was, perhaps, more impatient than grieved, having an unflinching faith in the triumph of right, which to such natures is as the very air they breathe. Only she had not lived long enough to know that though the triumph comes, it is not always the thing we picture to ourselves, laurel crowns, joyful music, and the people looking on and shouting. There are other triumphs besides this, wounds and tears, and a slow struggle upwards.

She believed that every shadow of blame would be swept away from Anthony as soon as he returned from seeing Mr Pitt, and though keenly sensitive to the reproaches she was forced to hear, took a pride in treating them indifferently, as stings too slight even to require defence. When Mr Robert met her one day and would have said something, she was very cool with him.

“When Anthony returns,” she said, scarcely stopping, “we shall know exactly how such a mistake can have arisen.”

“Anthony is come back,” said Mr Robert, gravely.

She could not resist the rush of blood to her heart, which made her ask hastily, “When?”

“He came last night. I have just seen him,” Mr Mannering said in the same tone.

“Well?”

“You will hear from himself, no doubt. Only, my dear, don’t set your heart too strongly upon things being made straight.”

Winifred had grown a little pale, but there was not one shade of doubt in her clear eyes as she looked at him.

“I do not understand you,” she said quietly. “Things must be made straight, as you call it, in the end; and in the mean time, of course, no one who knows Anthony can doubt him for a moment. That such a report should have ever lived for an hour is the real hardship that we have to regret.”

She was so unflinchingly steadfast, that Mr Robert, who believed there was more trouble in store for her, left his warnings alone, and went away mute. After all, she would know soon enough.

And to know enough, in this case, simply meant to know nothing. Anthony had come back as he went, with hard lines about his face, and the bitterness deepened and intensified. His first care had been to go to Mr Pitt’s chambers, where he found the old lawyer polite, cold, and unshaken. “I posted the letter myself, Mr Miles. You have ascertained, I presume, that it is not to be heard of in the Dead-Letter Office?” was the text to which he returned when all had been said. He had not seen the contents, but Mr Tregennas had communicated them to him. Anthony grew exceedingly angry, and lost his temper. Although he was aware when he left him that it was absolutely imperative that he should follow Mr Pitt’s suggestions, which were of a very obvious and practical nature, the manner in which they had been thrown out had raised so strong an antagonism in his blood, that he was tempted to fling them and all prudent dealing to the winds, and was, perhaps, not without a feeling of satisfaction, when they proved altogether barren of results.

It was a word, however, of Mr Pitt’s about Marmaduke Lee, which gave him something approaching to a clew, at first no more than an idea that his brother-in-law might be able to assist him to grope in the darkness in which he found himself, but gradually, after he went down to Oakham, and had seen Marmaduke, growing by some instinctive power into a perception of what had actually happened. Only those who have some knowledge of the strength and weakness of a character like Anthony’s can conceive what a shattering of landmarks came with this perception. All his impulses were full of indignation and contempt; he almost withered Marmaduke with an outbreak of angry scorn, and yet felt compelled, by the very intensity of this scorn to save so miserable a man from the consequences that would have crushed him. Something in the excessive meanness and cowardice of the act filled him with a loathing shame which made it impossible to proclaim it. Naturally his connection with Marion touched him more nearly with its dishonour, but without such a shield it is probable that he would have shrunk from dragging such a deed from its hiding-place, in order to shelter himself behind it. Yet, although there was a certain generosity in this attitude, there was little mercy in his heart. It enraged him to feel the helplessness of his position, the impotence with which he must submit to the world’s verdict His was a nature to which injustice was the most unbearable form of persecution that could have visited him, one, also, which seemed to raise all his worst qualities in opposition, so as to sweep away with a crash the noble ideal he had set up of men and things; and such a moment in a man’s life is full of danger and trial, his weakness concealing itself so deceptively that it seems to himself to be the armour which enables him to present an undaunted front.

In Marions case, it was pity which Anthony felt, and he was as anxious as Marmaduke to spare her the disclosure; but this did not prevent a hard contempt becoming visible in his manner, when she, as was daily the case, openly displayed her enthusiastic admiration for her husband. Naturally, this made her angry, and placed Anthony again in the wrong. It was, as it often is in the world, although, in spite of the repetitions of some thousand years, every experience comes to us with the sense of novelty, the man who was most heavily weighted had the least sympathy, the hardest blame, the sharpest judgments. Other people, less bound to partiality than Marion, compared Anthony’s abruptness, and the strong lines which had grown round his mouth, unfavourably with Marmaduke’s easy-humoured placidity by which he had become a popular neighbour. All the crooks and angles of Anthony’s disposition seemed to be showing themselves, and yet the poor fellow had never so sorely wanted pity, and kindness, and patient treatment. Whether he judged rightly or not, there was something even beyond chivalry in accepting the burden of this hateful thing, to spare another a more terrible weight. There was so much cowardice and feebleness in Marmaduke’s nature that to avoid the pain of disgrace he might, so Anthony believed, have fled from it at any cost,—even life itself; and though he scorned such cowardice, he had not the heart to leave it to its fate.

He left Oakham with a bitter consciousness that a gulf was dug between them, and a hot, sore feeling with the world which he was about to face without the power of clearing himself from its accusation. He would make no attempt to save anything out of the wreck; with the pride of youth, he determined that he would not stoop to offer assurances. Knowing how impossible it was that he could have done this deed,—as careless of money as those can be who have never wanted it,—it cut him to the heart that he should be suspected, and he revenged himself by a simulated indifference. Nothing could have been more repellent than his manner of meeting Mr Robert, or less satisfactory than the answers he vouchsafed. He would make no appeal for trust. Little by little, the people who wished to be friendly grew irritated, and the matter was talked of more openly and more unfavourably for Anthony when, instead of conciliating, he seemed to provoke war to the knife. When the Squire passed him with a cool bow, he retaliated by taking no notice whatever of the Squire the next time they met. Even kindness appeared to wound him. Winifred was bewildered when Anthony would lift his hat and go by as if he saw no appeal in her sad eyes. He put himself in opposition to all the world, and as a natural consequence grew hard, bitter, and mistrustful.

Perhaps our powers of endurance are never so near giving way as when we are holding them tightly strung, yet conscious of every jar and vibration in the effort; and poor Anthony, with his sensitive and affectionate temperament, went about with a dumb misery in his heart. He was rejecting friendship at the time he most needed it, and really longed to stretch out the hands with which he repelled its sweet kindness, in pitiful entreaty for some touch of fellowship which should break the cold isolation he was creating for himself.

Chapter Nineteen.

“Those have most power to hurt us that we love;
We lay our sleeping lives within their arms.”
Beaumont and Fletcher.

There is a curious likeness in the yesterdays and to-days of our lives, a likeness so strong that it conceals the greater differences from us until we have gone far enough to look back and compare them dispassionately. We eat and drink, talk and sleep, more or less; certain things seem to hold us in chains to which we move obediently. If it were not so, life would be unendurable, the calls upon our sympathy would harden our hearts or wear them out, joy and sorrow would jostle each other too openly in the high road. The mechanism hurts us sometimes, but it is good discipline nevertheless.

And so at Thorpe Regis the many changes were gradually covered with the old dress of routine and habit. It is almost sad how soon people become reconciled to them. A year ago it would have seemed the strangest thing in the world for anything to have broken through the daily intercourse between Hardlands and the Vicarage, and here was an alienation so great that it almost amounted to total estrangement. Not that the Squire desired it. Unused to keep a very close control over himself, he allowed his feelings to be seen, and affronted Anthony; but he would gladly have had everything as of old with Mrs Miles, and was too autocratic not to be puzzled when he found this not the case.

“It was not her fault. The girls may go to her as much as they please. The poor woman’s to be pitied,—I pity her from the bottom of my heart,” he would say.

Mrs Miles on her part had no very clear conception of what had happened, for she had lived in close retirement since her husband’s death, and the few friends who entered that solitude were not likely to be cruelly communicative. But she was aware that unkind reports had been set afloat about the will, and, while really too sad and crushed in spirit to do more than reiterate her assurance that it would not have happened had the Vicar been alive, she was vaguely willing to take up cudgels against all the world on Anthony’s behalf; in comparison with whom what was Hardlands, what was the Squire, what even were motherless Bessie and Winifred?

And so, and so, and so,—a hundred little obstacles magnified themselves indefinitely, the two sets of lives that had been so blended with each other fell apart, the little brook widened into a river. Many people thought that it would have been better if Anthony had left the neighbourhood for a time, and allowed the exaggerated reports of his conduct to settle quietly. But perhaps the idea of this sediment of black mud, only requiring a chance stone to be stirred into turbid activity, was more hateful to Anthony than the knowledge that the waters all about him were kept in constant disturbance. He made no pretence of concealing that he was unhappy, or at least no one could fail to see it in his face; and his irritation and soreness against all the world were marked so acutely that it was impossible not to foresee a reaction from so abrupt a closing of his heart. He remained at Thorpe, partly from yielding to his mothers clinging desire to do so, partly from pride which forbade flight from disagreeables, and partly from a failure in those springs of action which had hitherto urged him forward. But he could not long endure the position of solitude he had taken up, and some consciousness of this added to his discomfort.

When the thing of which he was accused had first grown into form, Winifred had reproached herself for the warm glow with which her heart assured her that Anthony would never feel her friendship fail him; but this had long ago faded away under the keen chill of his manner, keener because her generous spirit had never wavered in its faithfulness and was enduring all the pangs which he believed himself to be bearing alone. She would not suffer one throb of resentment to answer his coldness, but it cost her a daily and bitter struggle to learn her powerlessness, and to understand that he was himself making it impossible for her to put out so much as a hand to help him in his trouble.

She was in the village one day, and just turning out of it towards the Hardlands meadows when she met old Araunah Stokes and his daughter-in-law, Faith’s mother. It was not very often the old man got so far from his house, and he was now walking on with a kind of feeble vigour, as if bent upon making the most of what small strength remained to him. His daughter-in-law—who had evidently been crying, and now and then wiped her eyes—gave Miss Chester to understand that it was Faith who caused their trouble by her persistence in her engagement.

“Whatever us shall do, I don’t know, wi’ her so contrairy.”

“Hold your tongue,” said the old man, turning upon her with a weak, fierce voice. “The women tells and tells, till they talks the very brains out o’ yer head. You’m no better than a baby when they’ve clacketed at ye for an hour or two without a word of sense from beginnin’ to end.”

“An’ me niver so much as openin’ my lips,” said Mrs Stokes, crying meekly and holding up her hands. “An’ I did think as Faith would ha’ bin a comfort, me so weak, wi’ no sproyle, nor nothin’, and gran’father only just fit to totle about.”

“It ain’t much comfort you’m like to get out o’ maedens,” said Araunah, still bitterly. “They’m so hard to manage as a drove o’ pegs. Faith shall bide where her be, though, for all her mother’s setting up.”

“Has she made up her mind, then, to marry this man?” asked Winifred, interested.

“He doan’t give her the chance,” said the grandfather angrily, striking his stick upon the ground. “Girl’s a fule, that’s t’ long an’ short o’t, an’ he bain’t so beg a wan.”

“He knows better nor to persume,” said Mrs Stokes, indignant for Faith’s sake. “You see, Miss Winifred, he doan’t feel he’ve got enough to offer our maed,—I doan’t know what her can be thinkin’ of,” continued her mother, dissolving suddenly again.

“An’ her’d give up a good pleace. But her shall bide, her shall bide.”

“Though it mayn’t be for long, with Mr Anthony goin’ to be married hisself.”

Self-possession is a wonderful power. We read with a thrill of amazement of the Spartan boy, and the fox, and the hidden agony, but, after all, the heroism is repeated day by day around us. There are people getting stabs from unconscious executioners, and the life dying out of them, while they are smiling and keeping up the little ball of conversation, and betraying nothing of the pang. Winifred’s voice became a little gayer than usual as she said,—

“Mr Anthony? Is he going to be married?”

“To Miss Lovell down to Under’m, haven’t you heard it, miss? It’s that has set Faith thinkin’ more o’ that Stephens.”

“I woan’t have it,” said the old man, querulously. “I woan’t have she comin’ hoam to we, ating and drinking. Polly has more sense than Faith and her mother putt together.”

Winifred never quite knew what she said, but she walked away with her heart suddenly hardened against Faith. Why should Faith escape?—why should she not bear her lot like other people?—why should one be set free more than another? And, O, what had Faith to endure! What grief was hers, whose lover only did not think himself worthy, or who would, perhaps, renounce his happiness for the sake of perishing souls? Grief?—why, it was an exquisite bliss. Faith stood on one side, triumphant and happy, while Winifred walked in the valley of humiliation, with sharpest thorns piercing her feet. Anthony did not love her, for he loved another. Death builds no wall of separation like this, nay, death, will break down walls,—only love itself can bar love with a hopeless fence. She fought against the bitter truth, poor soul, calling herself by hard names, and laughing drearily at her own folly; but the anguish was very acute, and she had a feeling as if, though for a little while she might keep its sharpest suffering at aim’s length, it would overmaster her at last. Was it all true,—real? Was the sun shining on her, or was it rather a cruel furnace that had suddenly scorched the earth, and would burn and scorch day after day, day after day, through long years, through an endless lifetime, grey with shadows and weary with pain, and with no better hope than forgetfulness? Heaven pity those whose sorrow brings them face to face with such a thought and no further! Its very touch gave Winifred a shuddering fear of herself, and a momentary but clear perception of something that should shine through grief and overcome it, ah, even make the rugged road beautiful.

But it was difficult for her to disconnect her thoughts as yet while they were vibrating and ringing with the blow. She walked mechanically towards home, but she saw Bessie and Mr and Mrs Featherly in the garden, and feeling it impossible at this moment to join them, she stood still irresolutely, and then turned and went along the field, where a little stream was running, and a path led up through a small wood.

The day was delicately bright and hot. Across a pale moon that looked herself no more than a stationary cloud, little wilful vapours which had broken away from larger masses were sailing. Red cattle, satisfied with their rich flowery pastures, had gathered under the hedges to chew the cud and sleepily whisk away the flies. The brown water hurried along, washing long grass, and shining up at meadow-sweet and purple clusters of loosestrife. There were cool flashing lights, and tender depths of colour, and a sweet content over everything, and poor Winifred growing sadder and sadder with the sense of contrast, yet walking more slowly and looking wistfully at the long grass, with a vague longing to lie down in it, and let everything go by and away forever. It might have been this which, as she went towards a little wooden bridge crossing the stream into the wood, deafened her ears to a step until Anthony Miles himself was close to her. The instant before she had believed herself safe with the patient cattle and the water and her own sad thoughts, and it cost her a struggle to master the tumult into which her feelings were suddenly stirred. But Anthony was too much absorbed in his own thoughts to notice any disturbance, and as matters had not yet come to such a pass that they could meet in a lonely meadow and go by without greeting, he put out his hand, and said,—

“Are you going into the wood? You will find it very hot even there. A thunder-storm would be a real comfort.”

“O, I like this sort of day!” said Winifred, with a hurrying desire to prove her own perfect contentment. “Everything is looking most beautiful I see Sniff is as fond as ever of the water—” She hesitated suddenly, there being a certain awkwardness quick to make itself felt in any allusion to the past, however slight; but Anthony said carelessly,—

“Sniff was due at Oakham, but as my mother seems to want him more than Marion, I shall not send him.”

“Is Marion quite well?”

“Quite well, thank you.”

It was all so commonplace, and the moment had given her so much strength, that Winifred made a desperate resolution.

“I have just been told something,” she said, looking straight in his face and smiling. “I hear that you are going to marry Miss Lovell. Please let me congratulate you, unless it is too soon.”

There was a flush on her cheek, and her words ended with an odd ring of hardness, but no one would have been likely to read these little signs. Anthony looked at her more kindly than he had yet done, and said “Thank you” gravely.

That was all. A few words, the river running through the waving grass, a woodpecker scraping the tree, flies darting here and there, Sniff dashing after a trout, Anthony, who once had been so near them all, standing by her, and answering from the other side of a great gulf. That was all. It did not seem as if Winifred could say any more except the good-by of which the air was full, and which all the little leaves in the wood rustled as she passed under them.

Anthony stood still for a moment and watched her going away. He had a very tender heart, poor fellow, though it was obstinate and proud in many things, and too angry now to be just. A remembrance of old times was sure to soften him, when once he realised that they were old and past; and he began to think that, after all, Winifred was not, perhaps, an enemy. He watched her, and then called Sniff out of the bright brown water and walked away.

As for Winifred—well, it was on her knees that she fought her battle, into which neither you nor I need look.

Almost to all people, I suppose, there comes a time in their lives when life, not death, is the phantom they dread. One fear may be as unworthy as the other, but it is there. Only for both there is a merciful Hand stretched out, and if into that Hand we put our own it will lead us gently until we are brought face to face with our fear, and see that the dread phantom has, indeed, as it were, the face of an angel.

Chapter Twenty.

“They who see more of our nature than the surface know that our interests are quite as frequently governed by our character as our character is by our interests.”
Sir H. Lytton Bulwer.

Anthony walked towards Thorpe. He was going back to the cottage, and then intended to drive into Underham, and dine with the Bennetts. They evidently expected that he should spend part of each day at their house, and the arrangement was one which he did not dislike, and to which he therefore consented tacitly.

But it must be confessed that although when he thought of Ada Lovell, and the position in which he stood towards her, the remembrance was winged with a certain satisfaction, she did not occupy any large portion of his reflections. He was not thinking very much of anybody except himself, and the injustice of the world. What had he, of all men, done to be visited as he was? He was so sensitive, so conscious of his own uprightness, that the cold blight of suspicion withered him with its very first breath; and he had put on a bold front, and, as it were, exhausted his courage with an outward show of defiance, while to his inward spirit it seemed that all life and energy had died utterly away. The very foundations were shaken. For if people ceased to believe in him, with the reaction of a sanguine mind there was nothing left in which he could continue to believe. He had made himself the centre of his own theories, working them out from himself, confident in his own powers, and suddenly all had come to an end, such an end as seemed to him the end of all things, faith, hope, and charity with the rest. To his ardent nature there was no balm in conscious innocence; it mattered nothing that he knew the falseness of their suspicions, while the monstrous feet of suspicion itself remained.

Deep down in his heart, moreover, there was a touch of that insistance upon martyrdom which is more universal than we perhaps think. He thrust away compassion, feeling as if an earthquake had separated him from his former life, and as if no one were left to stand on the same side with him. This was an exaggeration of his position, for, although the world is more ready for condemnation than acquittal, there is a party for every side, and Anthony might have seen hands stretched out if he would. But there was not a word or look to which he did not give a warp in the wrong direction. He had persistently classed Winifred with the rest of the world, and it is possible that the very consciousness that to do so cost him a pang made the martyrdom the dearer; but her reticence had told against her cruelly, for she believed in him too fully to have thought of expressing her belief, little dreaming that a more open sympathy would have better suited his mood than her intense but hidden feeling. He nursed the soreness in the same way that he nursed all things which were painful at this time, until it really seemed as if Mr Bennett’s rather coarse expressions of friendliness, and Ada’s assurance that she had no patience with people who talked as the Thorpe people talked, had a value which he could not find elsewhere. And then she was pretty and good-natured, trying to please him just as ardently as in the days before the cloud,—which, indeed, she thought a matter of very small consequence,—and he felt a certain gratitude towards her. There may have been something of defiance, and a disposition to run counter to opinion, for whatever was his motive in turning suddenly one day upon Ada, who was fluttering and saying foolish amiable things, it was certainly not purely that of love; but perhaps we are all sufficiently liable to act from mixed motives, to abstain from judging him too harshly.

His engagement, although Winifred heard of it for the first time that day, had really lasted a week: some question of the time struck him as he drove to the door of the Bennetts’ house, and went slowly up the steps. There had been a little confusion of blue at one side of the windows, of which he had caught sight, and guessed who was waiting for him. In the short space between the door and the staircase there rose up before him her welcome, her look, the very words she would say, as if it had all been going on for a year instead of the few days which had surely offered no time for weariness. And yet a certain weariness touched him with a sting of self-reproach, and made him infuse a little more warmth into his greeting than was usual.

“You are very late, Anthony,” she said, putting her hand on his arm, and shaking her long curl reprovingly. “Do you know that Aunt Henrietta fancied you were not coming at all?”

“But you did not accuse me of anything so impossible?”

“No, indeed. I don’t think I should have spoken to you for a week if you had stayed away, and I suppose, though I am sure I don’t know, that you would have minded that. But now that you are here, you are to tell me every single thing you have been doing.”

His face darkened slightly. This small affectionate tyranny was new to him, and he was not quite in the mood for it.

“Suppose we turn the tables,” he said, with a little restraint. “What have you been about to-day?”

“I? O, I have not been beyond the garden. I sat there and read and thought—”

“Thought?”

“Ah, I am not going to tell you what I was thinking of; you men are conceited enough already. O Anthony, I hear Uncle Tom. Do go and look out of that window; do, please, go!”

There seemed no particular reason for this separation, but she was so eager that Anthony obeyed. He rather dreaded Mr Bennett’s ponderous jokes himself, and it was possible that Ada had not yet become used to them.

“Ah, Miles, here you are, here you are! just in time for the salmon, after all. My wife took it into her head you’d be late, but I said, ‘My dear, put a salmon at one end of the line, and a man at the other, and the two must come together somehow.’ Ha, ha! not bad, was it? And you’d something else to draw you besides, hadn’t you? Ada,—where are you, Ada? Come, come, you’d have me believe you’ve never met before; perhaps you’d like to be introduced. It’s never too late to mend, is it?”

“O Uncle Tom!” said Ada, smiling, and trying to blush. She looked very pretty in spite of the failure, and Anthony’s face relaxed from the lines which were becoming habitual. She was pretty and affectionate, adornments on which a man sets a high value, often taking a little silliness as a natural and not much to be minded accompaniment. The room was cheerful, not furnished altogether in the best taste, but laden with a certain air of ripe and drowsy comfort which went far to atone for a few sins of colour. It was not so easy to get over Mr Bennett’s prosy facetiousness, but his business kept him generally out of the way, and both he and his wife possessed a fund of that kind-heartedness which never fails to create a friendly atmosphere. If they were apt to err on the side of plenty, there was no doubt that they gave good dinners, dinners which Anthony, who was fastidious, liked, although not to the extent to which Mr Bennett credited him. Thus there were, on the whole, reasons which made the house pleasant to him, and with the morbid fret that had grown into his life—or out of his life, if you will—worrying him incessantly, it gave him a feeling of ease to find himself in the midst of a softly moving existence, where all sharp corners were rounded off, all hardness padded, and where he was made much of and gently flattered. Mrs Bennett had always sleepily thought—if thinking is not too strong an expression for the occasion—that it would be a good match for Ada, who had lived with them ever since she had been left an orphan, two years ago; and as for the absurd stories which had been spread about, it was far more agreeable to her good-natured stolidity to have no opinions on the matter. It was very likely a mistake from beginning to end, or, if not a mistake, no doubt Mr Miles had good reasons for all he had done. Her comfortable kindness, so unequivocally free from hidden doubts, was really soothing to poor Anthony, and paved the way for the step which Ada’s prettiness and enthusiasm and desperate admiration brought about at last. No one could have suspected indolent Mrs Bennett of match-making, but she liked to see people happy, and had not a tinge of malice or uncharitableness in her disposition.

“It is so hot,” she said, coming into the room with her soft heavy step, and sinking into an easy-chair. “One of those things they have in India—punkahs, don’t they call them?—would be very nice. Does your mother feel the heat, Mr Miles? I really think it is quite a labour to have to go down to dinner.”

“My dear, I can assure you it never answers to neglect the inner man,” said Mr Bennett, laughing weightily at his own jokes, on his way to the dining-room. “Come, Ada, it’s all very well to live upon air, but when you are as old as your aunt and I, you’ll find it’ll not pay. Not it, indeed. No, no; keep up the system, that has always been my maxim. By the way, Miles, I haven’t seen Mannering or his brother for the last ten days. Nothing wrong, I hope?”

“I don’t speak from personal knowledge,” said Anthony, with the shade again on his face, “but some one in the village said that Mr Mannering was laid up with an attack of rheumatism.”

“Poor fellow, poor fellow, he has wretched health, and no wonder. Any one must suffer in the end who lives upon mutton six days out of the seven. Tell him, when you see him, that he must come and dine with us as soon as he can, and try a little variety. Or you might drive out there one afternoon, my dear, and see what really is the matter. I’ve the greatest regard for Mannering.”

“Yes, indeed,” assented Mrs Bennett in the slow round voice that seemed hardly able to utter a contradiction.

“And I will go with you, Aunt Henrietta,” said Ada, cheerfully. “I want to see that darling Mr Robert, and to get him to show me his flowers. It will be very nice, and you will meet us there, Anthony, won’t you?”

“Mr Robert is a better showman when he is not interfered with,” said Anthony, with a sharp pang of remembrance. “I’ll meet you afterwards, and hear what you have seen.”

“Well, I think Adas plan is not a bad one,” persisted Mr Bennett, “and, dear me, you must be as free of that house as if it were your own! Say to-morrow.”

“To-morrow I am engaged.”

“Well then, Wednesday.”

“It will not be possible for me to go to the Red House,” said Anthony in an odd, unyielding tone.

Mr Bennett gave a long “Whew!”

Ada said with a pout, “O, but you must!” and Mrs Bennett came to the rescue with the unconsciousness which constituted a real charm in Anthony’s eyes.

“It will be too hot for us to drive there just yet. Ada and I must go some day when I am a little less overdone and the weather is cooler.”

Mr Bennett was sufficiently shrewd to be alive both to the jar and to a perception that the subject was one which had better be allowed to drop.

“It is hot, as you say, my dear, and perhaps it would be as well to wait until Mannering is about again. Try a little of that Sauterne, Miles; capital stuff for this weather. Well, Ada, what have you been doing with yourself? Warren told me he had seen you at the station.”

It was Ada’s turn to look discomposed.

“The station? O yes, I remember. I walked across to see whether the Mannerses came by the four-o’clock train. I forgot that I had been out of the garden when you asked me,” she said, with an elaboration of openness which was unnecessary, as Anthony had no suspicions to be allayed.

“O, he’s been asking you, has he?” said Mr Bennett jocosely. “It’s lucky you can explain yourself, or poor Warren would have put his foot in it.”

“Mr Warren!” said Ada with scorn.

“Come, come, what has the poor man done? Upon my word, I should have thought young ladies would consider him a good-looking, agreeable young fellow. I am sure you did when you first knew him, Ada, eh?”

“I don’t know what I thought once,” said Ada, looking down, and smiling prettily again; “all I know is that I don’t admire him now.”

If Anthony wanted mollifying,—which was perhaps not the case, although this family party had not seemed to go quite as smoothly as those which had preceded it,—this little speech effected its purpose. He liked the covert homage, and, congratulating himself upon the good-humour which Mr Bennett’s rather trying allusions could not ruffle, roused himself into the old brightness which only now came in occasional flashes. Ada was enchanted, shook back her long curl, and put out all her attractions; and Anthony, walking home through the quiet lanes sweet with the dewy freshness of a summer night, dreamed his new dream with a better success. Only, alas, even in dreams there are jangled notes, struggles, interruptions. People’s faces come and go, and look sadly at us, changing often, just as the joy of their presence makes itself felt. Every now and then out of Ada’s face other eyes looked at him; eyes that were grave and true and tender, and full of a trust that had never failed, although he had read it wrongly.

Chapter Twenty One.

“While friends we were, the hot debates
That rose ’twixt you and me!
Now we are mere associates
And never disagree.”
Fraser’s Magazine.

Anthony’s engagement, coming so soon after the other affair, made a little sensation in the neighbourhood. Things die out so quickly that, except in the more immediate Thorpe circle, his supposed act of injustice might have ceased to interest people; but the young man was so antagonistic, so sore, so fierce with all the world, that there was nothing for it but to take the position he insisted upon. The news of his engagement gave something pleasanter to talk about. There were a few injured mothers, but the gentlemen generally pronounced that he had shown his sense by making up his mind to marry Bennett’s niece. The Bennetts were favourites, and held a thoroughly respectable place in the county; and though Anthony might have done better as to family, every one felt that a sort of cloud had just touched him, and was on the whole glad that the Bennetts should be rewarded for their hospitality and liberality and conservatism by seeing their niece well married. As for the Squire, who had been more ruffled and made uneasy by the consequences of his own coolness than he himself knew, he came into the room where Winifred and Bessie were together, chuckling and rubbing his hands.

“So there’s to be a wedding to waken us all up,” he said briskly. “You know all about it, girls, of course. I’m always the last in the place to hear a bit of news—but there!”

“But there!—you always know it before we’ve time to tell you,” Bessie said saucily. “Is that what you mean, papa?”

“You’ll find out what I mean one day, when you won’t like it, Miss Pert,” said the Squire, pulling her hair. “I must say Anthony Miles has shown greater sense than I should have expected. He’s just the man to have made a fool of himself. If he’d not been so confounded touchy about that business of Pitt’s, I’d have walked down and wished him joy; but I suppose that won’t do,—not just at first, eh, Winifred?”

“No, indeed,” said Winifred, her face flushing.

“I suppose not,” said Mr Chester, regretfully. “Those young fellows fly off at such tangents, there’s no knowing where to take them. One would think I’d been the one to set that report going, and I’m sure, for his fathers sake, I’d have given a hundred pounds—well, it’s over and done now, and can’t be helped; people do say there was no real harm in it when old Tregennas left it in his hands, but I wouldn’t have believed it, I wouldn’t have believed it. And then he goes and fights shy of the friends who would have stuck by him if they could.”

“Papa, he never did it. How can he help being hurt with you all, when you will not trust him!”

Winifred’s face had grown pale after the flush, but her voice did not tremble, and she looked at her father with clear steadfast eyes which always affected him, though, oddly enough, they often gave him a twinge of discomfort, and a little irritated him into obstinacy.

“Nonsense, Winifred,” he said sharply, while he winced. “He has never so much as denied it. Women shouldn’t talk of what they don’t understand. And it hasn’t anything to do with his getting married, has it? I wish you to tell Mrs Miles that it’s given me a great deal of pleasure to hear of this match, and you and Bess had better drive into Underham and call on the Bennetts.”

He was really desirous by this time to mend the breach, and perhaps a little secretly relieved that Mr Pitt’s other idea about Anthony had been proved so erroneous. Before all this had happened, and while Anthony had been a poorer man, a marriage between him and Winifred, although it had never presented itself to his imagination, would have met with no opposition from him, except the fret which arose from a little personal dislike, natural enough between the two characters. But since a breath of dishonour had rested upon the young man, it would have been a bitter blow to the Squire to have been forced to give him his daughter. He could by this time make some excuses for him, for his father’s sake,—indeed, now that he was not constantly meeting him, and getting irritated by his schemes, he really liked him a good deal more heartily than he had ever done before. But that would not have availed in such a trial. Therefore he now felt a certain amount of gratitude to him for removing the vague uneasiness which every now and then cropped up when he looked at Winifred or remembered shrewd Mr Pitt. He even spoke sharply to Bessie, who yawned and declared it was too hot to go to Underham.

“You’ll go where your sister bids you. Winifred, don’t let that child give herself airs to you. If she does, speak to me. I’ll get a governess again, or pack her off to school, or something.”

“I wonder who would mind that most,” said Bessie, jumping up and hugging him.

“That’s very fine. I know somebody who’d cry her eyes out over backboards and French exercises, and all the rest of it. Not but what I believe your mother would have had you do it,” said the Squire, with a sudden wistful look at his favourite.

“She is not so bad as she seems, papa,” said Winifred, rousing herself. “We read every morning, and she really works hard. Mr Anderson is quite satisfied.”

“Well, mind she doesn’t get her headaches again,” her father said, veering round to another anxiety. “I’d rather she only knew her ABC than get headaches, and I’m not sure you’re careful enough, Winifred. Do you hear, Bess? Go out for a scamper on the pony when you’re tired of all this work. You’re not so strong as your sister.” Winifred did not answer. Something crossed her face so quickly that only the tenderest watcher could have seen it, a look which is very sad on those young faces. There is no storm or impatience in it, but a kind of weary protest. You hear it sometimes in a voice. The Squire went on with his injunctions about Underham and Miss Lovell.

“I’m ready enough to be on friendly terms,” were his parting words, “only one doesn’t know on which side to meet these touchy young fellows. But this marriage looks as if he were coming to his senses.”

“And we are to smooth over everything,” said Bessie, shutting her book and jumping up. “I don’t care to smooth it now that Anthony has been so stupid. That horrid Miss Lovell! Don’t you know how she walks, holding her hand out stiffly—so. You needn’t look shocked, Winnie dear, for she does, and I know she is horrid.”

“Don’t say anything more about it, please,” Winifred pleaded, with a look of pain. “I am going to order the carriage at four o’clock.”

“I hate them all, and I hate going,” said Bessie rebelliously. “Well?” as her sister made no answer to this downright statement.

“Well?”

“Don’t you mean to scold, or at least talk me into my proper behaviour?”

“You must learn to find what you call your proper behaviour for yourself,” said Winifred, trying to smile brightly, as she looked into the girl’s dancing eyes. But her own suddenly filled with tears, and just as quickly Bessie’s arms were round her.

“Something is the matter, I know, and you may as well tell me, Winnie, or I shall be obliged to find it out. Something is making you unhappy. Is it about Anthony?”

The hot colour flashed into Winifred’s cheeks, but she was too honest to give an evasive answer, and said, holding Bessie’s clasping hands, and pausing for a moment between her sentences,—