ACCORDING TO PLATO

“It certainly is the shortest way to distinction,” said Josephine. “Bankruptcy’s a sort of English Legion of Honour, isn’t it?—a kind of bourgeois decoration.”

“To genius,” said Amber, with the nod of one who completes a quotation that some one else has begun. “Mr. Richmond is really very clever.”

“Now you contradict yourself—a moment ago you said he was a genius—and being a genius is just the opposite to being clever,” laughed Josephine. “Is this your syllogism: Geniuses become bankrupt, Mr. Richmond becomes bankrupt, therefore he is a genius?”

“Well, that wasn’t quite what was in my mind. I suppose that to have the Homeric attribute of nodding scarcely makes one a Homer?”

“If it did there would be no need for people to learn Greek, But you must forgive me for distrusting your Mr. Richmond—no, I shouldn’t make use of so strong a word—I don’t distrust him. What I mean to say is that I am rarely convinced by a man who is so scrupulous about his coats. Genius—in man—is rarely found in association with silk linings where silk linings are not imperative.”

“Now you are becoming commonplace, my dear Joe; you give one the idea that you cannot imagine genius without a darn. A darn—maybe a patch—and a soft hat have floated many a mediocrity upon the public under the name of a genius. But brains can work just as actively within the drum of a silk hat as within the bowl of a bowler.”

“Just as a true heart may beat beneath a silk lining as fervently as under a moleskin waistcoat. Well, I’ll approach Mr. Richmond with an open mind. After all it’s only a universal genius who is a man that has failed in everything; and no man has yet hinted that Mr. Richmond is a universal genius. By the way, I heard of an adroit Irishman who got a great name as a poet solely by reason of his wearing an old cloak and turning up at awkward hours for dinner.”

“Mr. Richmond is—well, perhaps I had better say, a bit of a genius.”

“That sounds more companionable. I like the nodding of Homer—it makes him more human.”

“If you wish I’ll withdraw the genius altogether and merely say that he is a man of ideas.”

“I think I shall like him: a man of ideas is a man of ideals. I am nearly sure that I shall like him. There must be something good about a man who can be praised by his friends in diminuendo.”

“In diminuendo? Oh, I understand: yes, I began by calling him a man of genius and now I am perfectly satisfied to hear you say that you think you will like him. Well, that’s not a crescendo of praise anyhow. Oh, really, he’s not half a bad sort of man when you come to know him.”

“Now you are becoming crescendo, my Amber. One only says of the best men what you have said of Mr. Richmond. I know that it represents the flood-tide of one man’s praise of another. Personally I don’t see why the papers should have made such fun of Mr. Richmond.”

“Oh, my dear Joe, that wasn’t his doing, believe me. Oh, no; that was Willie Bateman’s idea. He’s becoming the great authority on advertising, you know. Yes, he said that you can ridicule any man into success.”

“I fancy he’s not far wrong in that. You remember the horrid man who got on—for a time—by pretending that he was the original of one of Mr. du Maurier’s pictures in Punch?”

“I have heard of him. He was a sort of painter, only he had a habit of dabbing in the eyes outside the face. Mr. Richmond is not an impostor, however; he is only a theorist.”

“Now you are hair-splitting, Amber, the Sophist.” Amber frowned and then laughed—freely—graciously—not the laugh of Ananias and Sapphira his wife, who kept back part of their possessions.

“Well, I admit that—no, I admit nothing. I say that Mr. Richmond deserves to succeed on his own merits, and that he would succeed even without being ridiculed in the papers. His theories are thoroughly scientific—papa admits so much.”

“He not only admits the theorist but the theories as well, into his house. And yet Sir Creighton is a practical man.”

“And a scientific man. It is because Mr. Richmond works on such a scientific basis and in such a practical manner we are so anxious to do all we can for him. Why shouldn’t there be a Technical College of Literature as well as one of Wool-combing, or one of Dyeing, or one of Turning?”

“Why shouldn’t there be one? You have reason and analogy on your side. I suppose it needs quite as much skill to turn a Sonnet as to turn a Sofa-leg, and yet it is thought necessary to serve an apprenticeship to the one industry and not to the other.”

“That’s exactly what I say—exactly what Mr. Richmond says. He once edited a magazine, and he would have made it pay too, if the people who wrote for him had been able to write. But they didn’t. It was reading the fearful stuff he used to get by every post that caused him to think of the great need there was for a Technical School of Literature. Now, suppose you want to write a History of any period, how would you set about it?”

“I haven’t the remotest idea of writing a history of even the remotest period, Amber.”

“Yes, that’s because you are unfortunate enough to be the daughter of so wealthy a man as Mr. West, the Under Secretary for the Arbitration Department. You have no need to do anything for a living—to do anything to distinguish yourself in the world. But take the case that you were dependent upon writing histories of certain periods for your daily bread, wouldn’t you like to have some place to go in order to learn the technicalities of history-writing?”

“There’s no doubt in my mind that I would. The writing of histories of periods has long ago been placed among the great industries of the country, I know.”

“I was appalled the other day when I began to think how utterly at sea I should be if I had to write a history, or for that matter, a biography; and history and biography, mind you, are the branches that do not need any imagination for their working up.”

“Oh, do they not?”

“Well, of course—but I mean that if one has to write a play——”

“What, is there a play department too? What on earth have plays got to do with literature?”

“The connection just now is faint enough, I admit. And why?—why, I ask?”

“Let me guess. Is it because up to the present there has not been a Technical School of Literature?”

“Of course it is. But at one time plays formed a very important part of the literature of the day.”

“Undoubtedly. The author of Shakespeare’s plays, whoever he was, was certainly a literary man. I wonder, by the way, if there was a Technical School in his time.”

“There wasn’t. That’s how it comes that he knew so little about the technicalities of the modern stage. Take my word for it, Josephine, Mr. Richmond will prevent the possibility of a recurrence of such mistakes as those Shakespeare made. And then there are the departments of fiction and poetry. Could anything be worse than the attempts at fiction and poetry which one meets nowadays?”

“Impossible, I admit.”

“The poor things who make those poor attempts are really not to be blamed. If they were set down to make a pair of boots should any one blame them if they failed? Now I hear it said that there is no market for poetry in these days. I don’t believe it.”

“I believe that if a paper pattern were to be given away with every volume the public would buy as many volumes of poetry as could be printed, if only the patterns were of a high class.”

“The public would buy poetry if a first-class article were offered to them, but as only one first-class volume appears for every five hundred of a second-class or a third-class or no class at all, the public are content to go mad over the merest doggerel, provided it is technically good doggerel.”

“Mr. Richmond will guarantee that his third year pupils will turn out good doggerel, I’m sure. And what department do you mean to graduate in, my Amber?”

Amber paused before replying. A line—a delicate little crayon line—appeared across her forehead, suggesting earnest thought as she said:

“I have a great hope to graduate in every department. But I think for the present I shall confine myself to the ‘Answers to Correspondents.’”

“Oh, the school is actually so technical as that?” cried Josephine.

“It is nothing if not practical, Joe; and I think you will agree with Mr. Richmond that there’s no branch of magazine literature that requires to be more practical than the ‘Answers to Correspondents.’ The ‘Aunt Dorothy’ branch is also one that demands considerable technical skill to be exercised if it is to be done properly. Mr. Richmond thinks I might begin upon the Aunt Dorothy branch and work my way up to the true Petrarchian Sonnet Department, through the Rondel, Rondeau, Vilanelle, and Triolet classes.”

“It’s a far cry from Aunt Dorothy to Petrarch. And pray what does Mr. Galmyn think of the scheme?”

“He wasn’t very enthusiastic at first, but I fancy that I have persuaded him to look at it in its true light. But you see, being a poet, he is hardly open to reason.”

“That is what it is to be a poet. A poet does not reason: he sings. And has Mr. Overton any ideas on the subject: he cannot be accused of singing.”

“He has an open mind, he says.”

“Oh, a man with an open mind is just as disagreeable as a man without prejudices. And Willie Bateman—ah, I forgot; you said that he had had something to do with pushing the school.”

“Yes; he took care that the scheme was properly ridiculed in the papers. Oh, yes; he has been extremely useful to us.”

“What, you have actually come to talk of the school as ‘us’? I had no idea that you meant to hang up the scalp of this Mr. Richmond in your wigwam.”

“I do not even want his scalpet, Josephine; at the same time...”

“I see. You don’t want his scalp, but if he insists on sending you a tuft of his hair, you will not return it to him.”

“Well, perhaps that is what is in my mind. Though really I am sincerely anxious to see what will come of so daring, and at the same time, so scientific an experiment.”

“You are a child of science, and to be a child of science is to be the parent of experiments. It was a child of science who modelled toys in dynamite, was it not? Pretty little clay pigs and elephants and poets and millionaires, but one day she thought she would try the experiment of putting a light to the cigar that she had struck into the mouth of the dynamite figure that she was playing with.”

“And what happened?”

“Let me think. Oh, nothing happened because a live man appeared on the scene and quickly dropped all the little toys of the scientific little girl into a bucket of water.”

“And then?”

“Well, then the scientific little girl cried for a while but when she grew up she married the live little man and they lived happily ever after.”

Amber was blushing like a peony before her friend had finished her parable. When Josephine had begun to speak Amber was beginning to fold her serviette, and now she continued folding it as if she were endeavouring to carry out one of the laborious designs of napkin folding given in the Lady’s columns of some weekly paper. Suddenly, while her friend watched her, she pulled the damask square out of its many folds and tossed its crumpled remains on the tablecloth.

“Psha!” she cried, “there’s not a grain of dynamite among all my little boys.”

“Is there not? You just ask your father to give you an analysis of any little boy, and you’ll find that the result will be something like this:”

(She wrote with her chatelaine pencil on the back of the menu card.)

Amber read the card with blushes and laughter.

“It’s very good fun,” she said. “And there is my motor at the door. You will come with me and see how things are managed?”

“Why should I go?”

“Why should not you go?”

“Oh, I’ll go: whatever it may be it is still a topic.”

“It is much more than a topic: it is a revolution.”

“Then I shall go if only to see it revolve.”

CHAPTER II

The two girls left Sir Creighton Severn’s house in Kensington Palace Gardens, and the dainty little motor Victoria made its way eastwards under the skilful guidance of a young coachman engineer trained by Sir Creighton himself.

Every one has heard of Sir Creighton Severn, the great inventor. A large number of people, if asked what Sir Creighton had invented, would reply “Electricity,” so closely has his name become associated with the development of this power and its adaptation to the various necessities of modern life.

Some time ago there was a general feeling throughout the country that he had gone too far in this direction. There should surely be a limit, people said, to the many humiliations to which scientific men were subjecting that power which after all was nothing less than lightning made captive, and under that name, the most imposing attribute of great Jove himself. It was not so bad to ask it to light a well-appointed drawing-room or to annihilate distance when applied to the end of a few thousand miles of telegraph cable—there was a heroic aspect of its employment in such ways: there was something of the dignity of an international treaty in the relationship existing between civilisation and electricity up to a certain point; but it was going quite too far to set it to cook chump chops for the servants’ dinner, or to heat the irons in the laundry.

People began to feel for electricity, just as they did when they heard the story of King Alfred in the swineherd’s cottage. If the nations had ceased to offer oblations to the leven of Jove that was no reason why it should be degraded to the level of a very scullion.

But when Sir Creighton, after inventing the electric kitchener, and the electric ironer, brought out an electric knife cleaner, an electric boot-black, and an electric mouse trap—nay, when he destroyed the very black-beetles in the kitchen by electricity, people ceased to protest. They only shook their heads and said no good could come of such things.

Of course, these adaptations of the power of which Sir Creighton was looked upon as the legitimate owner in succession to Jupiter (deceased), represented only his hours of relaxation. They were the gleanings, so to speak, of his electric harvest—the heel-taps of his electric banquet: they only brought him in about five thousand a year in royalties. The really great adaptations for which he was responsible filled the world with admiration and his own pockets with money. He had lived so long in close association with electricity that he had come to know every little phase of its nature just as a man—after thirty years or so of married life—comes to have an inkling of his wife’s character. He had invented the electric ship that picked up broken cables at sea by merely passing over where they were laid. He had invented the air purifier which instantly destroyed every injurious element in the atmosphere of large manufacturing towns, making them as pleasant to live in as London itself. He had also produced a fog disperser; but he was not sufficiently satisfied with its operation to give it to the public. It was quite equal to the duty of giving fresh air and sunshine to his own house and gardens, at times when people outside were choking with sulphur and knocking their heads against lamp posts, but this was not enough for Sir Creighton, and he withheld his discovery until he should have so perfected it as to make it applicable to the widest areas.

He had sufficient confidence in his powers and in the ductility of his partner—he had long ago come to allude to electricity as his conjux placens—to feel certain that in the course of a year or two, he would be in a position to clear the Atlantic Ocean of fogs and even to do something with London itself.

But there was another discovery which Sir Creighton hoped he was on the eve of perfecting—the greatest of all the long list already standing to his credit—this was the Electric Digester. He had proved to the satisfaction of every one except himself the possibility of treating not only flesh meat but every form of diet in such a way as practically to obviate the necessity for it to undergo the various tedious processes of digestion before it became assimilated with the system.

He had early in life become impressed with the need of making a departure from the old-fashioned methods of preparing food for human consumption. In the early days of man—he put the date roughly at 150000 b. c., though he admitted that the recent discovery of a fossil scorpion in the Silurian rocks left him about a million years to come and go upon—there was probably no need for an Artificial Digestive. The early man had plenty of exercise. It is quite conceivable that, with such things as the Mammoth, the Mastodon, the Pterodactyl and the Ichtheosaurus roaming about with empty stomachs, the human race should have a good deal of exercise (Scoffers said that the human race was properly so called). But the human race had won the race, and had then settled down for a period of well-earned repose.

This was all very well, but their doing so had changed the most important of the conditions under which they had lived, until, as civilisation strengthened the human digestion had weakened. But instead of openly acknowledging this fact and acting accordingly, physicians had kept trying to tinker up the obsolete machinery with, naturally, the most deplorable results. Instead of frankly acknowledging that man’s digestion had gone the way of the tail, the supplemental stomach, and the muscle that moved the ears, attempts were daily made to stimulate the obsolete processes of digestion, but the result was not stimulating.

Sir Creighton Severn, however, frankly assumed that man had got rid of his digestion to make way for his civilisation, and set about the task of accommodating his diet to his altered conditions of life.

He had not yet succeeded in satisfying himself that his invention of the Electric Digester would do all that he meant it to do; so, in spite of the bitter cry that came from the great pie regions of North America, imploring him to help them, he withheld it from the world for the present.

Sir Creighton was wise enough to make a fool of himself every now and again, and the fools said in their haste that his daughter was the agency which he usually employed for effecting his purpose in this direction. But while some said that it was his daughter who made a fool of him others said that it was he who made a fool of his daughter.

No one seemed to fancy that it was quite possible for both statements to be correct.

However this may be it may at once be said that Sir Creighton treated his daughter as if she were a rational person, capable of thinking for herself and of pronouncing a moderately accurate judgment of such minor problems of life as were suggested to her. Without knowing why—though her father could have told her all about it—she was most pleased when she was trying certain experiments—not in electricity, but in sociology.

And yet people said, simply because they saw that she was invariably well dressed, that she had no scientific tendencies.

She had a certain indefinite beauty of her own that made people—some people: mostly men—wonder where they had seen a flower like her—a lily, they were nearly sure it was—or perhaps it was a white clematis—the one with the star centre that swung so gracefully. They continued looking at her and thinking of flowers, and happy is the girl who makes people think of flowers when they see her!

Having very few delusions she knew that there was something of a flower about her nature. And being well aware that flowers are the most practical things in Nature, she had aspirations as boundless as those of a lily.

That was why she was delighted when she attracted to her various forms of idle insect life, male and female. Her aspirations were to attract rather than to retain, for she had the lily’s instincts as well as the lily’s industry. She knew that when youth made a bee-line to her (speaking in a phrase of the garden) they did so for their own advantage. And she awaited their departure with interest, knowing as she did that it is when the insect leaves the lily that the latter is most benefited; but without prejudice to the possibilities of the insect being also benefited. She had no sympathy with the insectivorous plants of womankind, though at the same time she knew that she was born with a passion for experiments. She hoped, however, that her curiosity was founded on a scientific basis.

She had, as it were, taken Love into her father’s laboratory, and with his assistance subjected it to the most careful analysis. She was able to assign to it a chemical symbol, and so she fancied that she knew all there was to be known about love.

She knew a good deal less about it than does the flower of the lily when the summer is at its height.

And now this offspring of the most modern spirit of investigation and the most ancient femininity that existed before the scorpion found his way into the Silurian rocks to sting, after the lapse of a hundred thousand years, the biologists who had nailed their faith to a theory—this blend of the perfume of the lily and the fumes of hydrochlorate of potassium, was chatting to her friend Josephine West as her motor-victoria threaded its silent way through the traffic of Oxford Street to that region where Mr. Richmond had established his Technical School of Literature.

Josephine West was the daughter of the right honourable Joseph West, Under Secretary of State for the Department of Arbitration.

CHAPTER III

The “forced draught” conversation—the phrase was Sir Creighton’s—which the two girls exchanged at lunch and which has been in some measure recorded, formed excellent exercise for their wits, Sir Creighton thought, though he had not the privilege of listening to their latest battledore and shuttlecock in this direction, the fact being that he and Lady Severn were partaking of a more exciting meal aboard the new electric turbine yacht which Sir Creighton had just perfected. It was certainly a stimulating reflection that for the first time since the waters were spread over a portion of the surface of the earth, a meal was partaken of in comfort aboard a vessel moving at the rate of forty-two miles an hour. Even the conversation of the two girls in the dining-room at home could scarcely beat that Sir Creighton remarked to his wife as she clutched at her cap on the hurricane deck and gasped. (There was a pretty fair amount of cap clutching and gasping aboard that boat while it was flying over the measured mile.)

But when the girls were being motored to the Technical School of Literature, their chat was of such commonplaces as the new evening dress bodice with the lace up to the throat, and the future of the Khaki dresses which every one was wearing as a token of respect to the Colonial office. They had not exhausted the latter question when they arrived at the school.

It was located in an interesting house in Hanover Square for the present, Amber explained to her friend; and her friend cordially opined with her that it would be foolish to enter into possession of an important building before the school had taken a sure hold upon the affections of the people of Great Britain.

Mr. Richmond was just opening the fiction class in the largest room when Miss Severn and Miss West entered. Mr. Richmond, who represented the latest of Amber’s experiments, had met Miss West a few days before. He knew that her father was a member of the Government and he hoped to be able to squeeze a grant out of the Government with his assistance, therefore—the logic was Mr. Richmond’s and thoroughly sound—he thought it well to pay as little attention as was consistent with good manners to Miss West, and even to her friend and his friend, Miss Severn. He had a pretty fair working knowledge of a world in which woman has at all times played a rather prominent part, and he knew that while some young women are affected by flattery, those who are most potent in getting grants from their fathers in favour of certain enterprises resent being singled out for attention.

He paid no attention to the entrance of the two girls, but commenced his lesson—he refused to make use of the commonplace word “lecture”: the mention of such a word should be enough to frighten people away from the school, he said; and on the same principle he chose to call his undertaking a school, not a college.

Josephine and Amber took seats at one of the desks, with paper and pens in front of them, and the former glanced round the class. It was composed of some interesting units. At a desk well to the front sat bolt upright a gentleman of rather more than middle-age. Half-pay was writ large all over him. There was not a wrinkle in his coat that did not harbour a little imp that shrieked out “half pay—half pay!” for all the world to hear. His hair was thin in places, but at no place was it too thin to afford cover to half a dozen of those frolicsome demons with their shriek of “half pay!” His over-brushed frock coat (of the year before last), his over-blackened boots, and the general air of over-tidiness that he carried about with him proclaimed the elderly officer of correct habits who after trying for a year or two to obtain congenial employment as the secretary to a club and for another year or two to persuade people to drink the wines of Patagonia, for the sale of which he had been appointed sole agent for Primrose Hill, had resolved to commence life again as a popular novelist.

Not far off sat a youth with receding forehead and chin, and a face like a marmot of the Alps. He kept his small eyes fixed upon the head of a drowsily pretty girl, with towzled hair of an orange tint unknown to nature but well known to art—the art of the second class coiffure. She did the reviews for a humble paper but hoped to qualify to be herself the reviewed one some day. It was clear that she would not ruin her chances by a misalliance with the well-balanced scheme of retrocession observable in his profile.

Two interested young girls sat at another desk guardianed by a governess—they, at any rate, Josephine thought, possessed the first qualification for success in fiction, for they observed every one about them, and made rude remarks to each other respecting their fellow-creatures. The governess took notes by the aid of a stumpy pencil the blunt end of which she audibly touched with the tip of her tongue after every few words; and Josephine perceived that she was anaemic.

Her simple methods contrasted with the elaborate batterie d’’écriture of a young lady who sat at the desk next to that at which Josephine and Amber had placed themselves; for she had placed in front of her a silver-mounted case, monstrously monogrammed, with double ink-bottles, each containing something under half a pint. A rack holding half a dozen pens of varying shapes and sizes, stood imposingly at one side, and on the other lay a neat ream of letter paper, crested and monogrammed, and a pronouncing dictionary. The apparatus certainly seemed quite adequate to the demands of the occasion; and as it turned out, it contained a good deal that was absolutely unnecessary, for the young lady slipped into an unobtrusive doze, the moment the lecturer began to address his class.

A young woman who had removed her hat in order to show that she had a brow with generous bumps scattered about it, resembling Kopjes above a kloof, lounged with an ungracefulness that a plebiscite had pronounced to have a distinct literary flavour about it, half across her desk. It was understood that she had once written a column in a lady’s paper on something and so could afford to be careless.

A youth with a cloak and a yellow smile was understood to be a poet. People said that his smile would work off. But he had never tried.

A well-dressed man of middle age looked, Josephine thought, as if he were something in the city; but that was just where she was mistaken. It was only when he was out of the city that he was something; in the city he was nothing. He was on the eve of drafting a prospectus; and so had joined the fiction class to gain the necessary finish.

Two or three younger men and a few young women who seemed to have come straight from the hands of a confectioner’s artist in frosting and almond icing, had taken up positions of prominence. They looked as if they were anxious to be commented on, and they were commented on.

Mr. Owen Glendower Richmond, the founder of the school was not a well-dressed man, only an expensively dressed man. He was young but not so very young as to be able to disregard the tendency to transparency in that portion of his hair which covered (indifferently) the crown of his head. He had the art of making one hair do duty for two over this area.

He had also a very persuasive voice.

Many men have gone with success through life with fewer endowments. But Mr. Richmond had never been quite successful in anything that he had attempted, and at thirty-four he had occasional regrets that earlier in life he had not let his hair grow curiously, or acquired a reputation for a profile—a profile like that of Dante in the picture.

He had published a book or two; but people about him were good-natured and had agreed to ignore the incident and to give him another chance. He proved that their benevolence had not been misplaced by becoming bankrupt over a scheme for regulating the output of fiction. The public had subscribed generously to his bureau, and it might possibly have succeeded but for the discovery of the new element to which the name of neurosis was given.

Taking advantage of his position on the summit of a base of bankruptcy, he had no difficulty in finding a sufficient number of friends to assist him in the realisation of his scheme for establishing on a permanent basis a School of Literature; and among his friends he would have permission to include Sir Creighton Severn and his daughter. He knew that their appetite for experiments was insatiable, and he had at one time taught Archie Severn—Amber’s only brother—all that he knew on the subject of exotic forms of verse—a science in which the young man had been greatly interested at one period of his life. He was not altogether free from a suspicion that his claims upon the family were somewhat attenuated; but when he had an interview with them he felt that such a suspicion was unworthy of him. Sir Creighton told his daughter that she was free to experiment with the experimenter, and Mr. Richmond found that his year’s rent was guaranteed.

Although the school had only been established for six months it was already a paying concern and Mr. Richmond was in such prosperous circumstances that he felt at liberty to dress less expensively, so he bought a frock coat at seven pounds instead of the one at seven guineas—the one which Josephine West had first seen him wear: the one with the silk quilted lining where most men were quite contented to have a material bearing the trade name of satinette.

It was the cheaper garment that he was wearing on the afternoon of this first visit of Josephine’s to the school, and being an observant young woman, she had really no trouble in perceiving that his aspirations for the moment were to assume that pose which offered the greatest chance of permanency to the impression that he carried his frock coat as easily as a Greek god carried his drapery.

She was a very observant young woman and she admired the adroitness of Mr. Owen Glendower Richmond in associating himself, even though he did so only through the agency of a crease that began at the waist and ended short of the knee, with classical tradition.

And then she admired herself for the subtlety of her observation, and thus was in a psychological frame of mind to yield to the persuasive charm of Mr. Richmond’s voice.

CHAPTER IV

It has been suggested to the Council,” said Mr. Richmond—the name Council was the one by which he desired to be known to the pupils of the school upon occasions—“that, as the Slum Novel is that branch of fiction by which it is easiest to make a reputation for profound thought, at the least expenditure of thought, I should deal with the technicalities of such a composition.

“I think the suggestion an excellent one, and I trust that I shall succeed in enabling you to produce, after a little practice, such a book as will certainly be reviewed to the extent of a full column in more than one of the leading newspapers.”

There was a general movement of attention throughout the class at this point. The lady with the two ink bottles, who lived in an atmosphere strongly impregnated with monograms done in silver, carefully chose a pen from her rack.

“In addition to the novel receiving a lengthy review or two, it may even sell,” continued Mr. Richmond. “But if it should not sell, the writer will, in the estimation of a certain circle—a circle which I do not say it is impossible to ‘square’—I speak paradoxically—have constituted a still stronger claim to be regarded as a profound thinker.

“Now at the outset I ask you to write at the head of your notes the word ‘Dulness.’ This is the goal to which you must press forward in the Slum Novel. You must be dull at all hazards. No matter what you have to sacrifice to produce this impression you must aim at being dull. Now it is not generally recognised that there are many ways of being dull. There is genial dulness and there is jocular dulness. There is dulness of diction and dulness of characterisation. There is dulness of morality and dulness of criminality. There is dulness of Socialism and dulness of Suburbanism. Now, if you succeed in making a blend of all these forms of dulness you will have gone far in making a successful Slum Novel.

“The next note which I will beg of you to make is this: ‘The Slum Novel must neither embody lessons nor suggest Remedies.’

“You must invent your characters, add if you will, a plot, but the latter is by no means essential, and then you must get up your topography. Too great emphasis cannot be laid upon the necessity for a minute topographical scheme—with a map, if possible. I must remind you that a map in a work of fiction imparts to it an aspect of dulness which even the most brilliant writer might fail to achieve in a dozen pages.

“Next in importance to imaginary topography is imaginary dialect. I will ask you to write the word Dialect large in your notes. The Argot of the Slums cannot be made too unintelligible, nor can its inconsistency be over-emphasised. An excellent recipe for true Cockney is to mix with the broadest Lancashire a phrase or two of Norfolk, a word or two of stage Irish, and all the oaths in daily use in the mining districts. The result will be pure Cockney. But you must be very careful of your oaths. Swearing is to a Slum Novel what vinegar is to salad—what the sulphur tip is to the lucifer match. On the whole I think that those ladies who are desirous of writing dialogue that can scarcely fail to receive the heartiest recognition from critics, would do well to allow no character to make even the simplest remark without intruding at least two of those words which a few years ago a printer would refuse to print. The effect will be startling at first, more especially if the coarsest words are put into the mouths of women and children; but you must remember that the object of a Slum Novel is to startle a reader without interesting a reader. It is in furtherance of this aim that you must so disguise the everyday words spoken by your characters as to make them quite unintelligible to the most adroit of readers. If the least clue is obtainable to the simplest words you may be sure that there is something wrong in your technique.

“Now I come to the important element known as Cruelty. Will you kindly write down the word Cruelty. Respecting the technicalities of this element a good deal of advice might be given. But I shall have said enough on this point to give you a good working acquaintance with its place in the Slum Novel when I assure you that you cannot make it too revolting, and that you cannot describe the details of any revolting act too closely. Your blood stains cannot be too large or dark or damp—you must be careful that the blood stains are kept damp.

“The entire technique of the plot may be included in this precept: Make your heroine a woman with fists like those of a man and let her be murdered by the man whom she loves and let her die in the act of assuring the policeman that she did it herself. Her last words must be ‘S’elp me Gawd.’ This is understood to be genuine pathos. It is not for me to say that it is otherwise. When I shall have the honour of dealing with the technicalities of pathos you may depend on my not neglecting the important branch of Slum Pathos.”

Mr. Owen Glendower Richmond paused and took a glass of water with the air of a connoisseur of vintages. He seemed to trust that it would be understood that the water was of a delicate cru. There was another distinct movement among his audience that almost suggested relief. There were whispers. It seemed to be understood that the relaxing of the strain put upon the members of the class meant a period of complete repose.

“He kept it up wonderfully, did he not?” remarked Josephine.

“Kept it up?” cried Amber, assuming the wrinkle of the one who is puzzled.

“Yes; the tennis ball of satire and the shuttlecock of irony,” said Josephine. “Do these folks take him seriously?”

“We do,” replied Amber with a touch of dignity. “We do. He will prevent a good many of us from making fools of ourselves.”

“But I thought that you had only reached the Aunt Dorothy stage of machine-made literature,” said Josephine. “Have you already mastered the technique of Aunt Dorothy?”

“I am occasionally allowed to join the higher fiction class as a treat,” said Amber. “You see, Mr. Overton comes to this class.”

“I see. You are leading him to higher things by the primrose path of technical literature,” said Josephine. “This primrose path seems to me to resemble the mule track through the valley from Stalden to Saas Fée. It does not admit of much independence of travelling.”

“Hush! Mr. Richmond is going to set us our home exercise,” said Amber as the teacher gave a little tap to his desk with the stem of a quill pen, holding it by the feather end. The sound that it made was curious and its effect was electrical: all faces were instantly turned toward him.

“Last week I made you acquainted with the technique of the Historical Novel,” said Mr. Richmond, “and I am naturally anxious to learn to what extent you have availed yourselves of suggestions. I will therefore offer you for home exercise the following problem: ‘Given Richelieu and a dark alley in a Seventeenth Century Continental city, with a cold damp wind blowing through it when the hero of the story takes shelter in one of the doorways, describe the fight in the cellar when he descends on hearing the shrieks of a girl with fair hair and a curious cross set with pearls and sapphires on her breast, proceeding from that portion of the building.

“You may do me the honour to recollect that I made you acquainted with the technique of the brawl of the historical romance, with its three motives—Cardinal Richelieu, the marked pack of cards, and the girl with fair hair and the cross with pearls and sapphires on her breast. You are at perfect liberty in the exercise to make the young woman either haughty or humble, but I need scarcely remind you, I hope, that she must be either the one or the other to an extravagant degree, but Richelieu must always be old. Now I will read out the terms of the problem once more: ‘Given a dark alley—a dark alley’—have you got that down?”

Mr. Richmond repeated slowly with praiseworthy distinctness, the terms of the problem and the members of the class scratched away at their notes with pencils of varying shapes and sizes—all except the young lady with the big silver monograms and the blotter inside them: she used a pen which she dipped alternately into the bottle of red and the bottle of black ink, such is the absent-mindedness of authorship even in the jelly-fish period of its evolution.

“Is it possible that you are taking it all down?” asked Josephine of Amber.

“It is only to encourage the others,” replied Amber. “If Guy Overton did not see me taking it all down he wouldn’t write a line.”

“And will you make the attempt to work out the problem at home?” asked Josephine.

“Perhaps I may have a shot at it. After all it’s no more difficult than an ordinary equation: given the hero, the cold damp wind and the shrieks, to find the girl—I think I shall make her simple, not haughty; the haughty ones are a little boring, are they not?”

“And now we shall proceed to the dialect lesson,” said Mr. Richmond. “Having dealt with Somersetshire during the past week I will now offer you for translation a few sentences containing the fundamental words necessary to the dialogue of the Lowland Scotch novel. You will observe that these words are really not numerous. But, as you can ring some thousands of changes upon a peal of eight bells so by the free use of a dozen dialect words you can impart a strong local colour to any commonplace story. Of course it ceases to be commonplace when the characters speak in the dialect of the Lowlands.” He then wrote a few sentences on the black board embodying such words as “muckle,” “mickle,” “hoot awa’,” “bonnie—bonnie—bonnie”—“you cannot have too many ‘bonnies,’” he remarked—“wee” in its direct application, and “wee” when combined with another diminutive, such as “wee bit.” He explained the significance of every phrase and pointed out how directly it appealed to the heart of a reader. He applied a critical stethoscope, as it were, to every phrase, showing the strong manly heart of a sturdy people beating through such sentences as he had placed before his class.

“I will now, with your permission,” said Mr. Richmond, “conclude the business of the class with a time study. A short time ago I brought under your notice the technicalities of the novel of phrases. You will, I hope, recollect that I laid considerable emphasis upon the effect capable of being produced by a startling definition of something that, in common acceptation, in no way stands in need of being defined. Now, you all know what Platonic Love means; well, a definition or a series of definitions of Platonic Love, will form the ten minutes time study for to-day. Ladies and gentlemen, Platonic Love—a definition for the purpose of the Novel of Phrases.”

There was nothing like a smile on Mr. Richmond’s face at any part of his lecture. He treated every technical point which he suggested in the most serious way. He handled every portion of the subject with the freedom and the gravity of a surgeon in the dissecting room. There was a certain frankness in his assumption that any one could be taught how to make the great mass of the people smile or laugh or weep or feel—that the production of certain effects in prose was as entirely a matter of machinery as the effects produced by the man at the throttle-valve of the locomotive when he jerks the piece of metal with the handle. Some people might have called this frankness cynicism; but Josephine could not see that there was anything cynical about it.

She had attended for some years a life-class at the studio of a painter of distinction and he had lectured to his pupils on the technical aspects of the art of painting, referring occasionally to what he called the depth of feeling in certain chromatic combinations. He had also showed them how to produce the effect of tears on a face, by making a little smudge on the cheeks. If it was possible to teach such technicalities why should not one do as Mr. Richmond was doing, and teach a crowd of students how to write so as to draw tears or compel smiles?

“I don’t think that I will trouble myself with the time-study,” said Amber.

Josephine looked at her and gave a laugh.

“Platonic affection,” she said musingly. “I wonder why you should shirk a paper on that question. You are supposed to be an exponent of that virtue. I should like to know what Mr. Guy Overton thinks about it. I should like to know what Mr. Galmyn thinks about it. The definition of Mr. Willie Bateman’s opinion might also possess some element of interest.”

“Write down what you think of it,” cried Amber, pushing the paper towards her.

Josephine shook her head at first, smiling gently. Then she made a sudden grab at the pencil that hung to one of the chains of her chatelaine.

“I’ll define Platonic affection for you, my dear,” she whispered, “for you—not for Mr. Richmond: he needs no definition of that or anything else.”

She began to write a good deal more rapidly than the others in the class-room. So rapidly did she write that she was unable to see how great was the interest in Mr. Richmond’s face while he watched her and how great was the interest in the face of a young man who sat at the most distant desk while he watched Amber.

CHAPTER V

Platonic affection is the penalty which one pays in old age for procrastination in one’s youth. It is the phrase that one employs to restore one’s self-respect when suffering from the watchful care of a husband. It is the theory of a Greek Sophist to define the attitude of a sculptor in regard to his marble. It defines the attitude of the marble in regard to the sculptor. It was the attribute of Galatea just before she began to live, and it is the attitude of the moralist just before he begins to die. It is the triumph of Logic over Love. It is the consolation of the man who is content with roses cut out of tissue paper. It is the comfort of the woman who thinks that a quill and a glass of water make an entirely satisfactory substitute for a nightingale in June. It is the banquet of the Barmecides. It is the epitaph on the grave of manhood. It is the slab on the grave of womanhood. It is the phrase that is shrieked out every hour from the cuckoo clock. It is an ode by Sappho written in water. It is the egg-shell that is treasured by a man when some one else is eating the omelette. It is the affection of the Doge of Venice for the Adriatic. It is a salad without vinegar. It is the shortest way to the Divorce Court. It is a perpetual menace to a man and the severest threat that one can hold over the head of a woman. It is a lion with the toothache. It is the Sword of Damocles. It is Apollo in pyjamas. It is the fence upon which a man sits while he waits to see which way the cat will jump. It is a song the words of which have been lost and the music mislaid. It is entering on a property the title deeds of which are in the possession of some one else. It is offering a woman a loaf of bread when she is dying of thirst. It is offering a man a cup of water when he is dying of hunger. It is the smoke of an extinct volcano. It is the purchase price paid by a fool for the fee-simple of a Castle in Spain. It is the fraudulent prospectus of a bogus company. It is the only thing that Nature abhors more than a vacuum. It is the triumph of the Vacuum over Nature. It is the last refuge of the roue. It is presenting a diet of confectionery for carnivora. It is the experiment which my dear friend Amber Severn is trying in order that every one who knows her may be warned in time.”

She folded up the paper carefully and handed it to Amber saying:

“There is not only a definition but a whole treatise for you, my dear Amber. It is for you alone, however, and it is not written to dissuade you from your experiment.”

“My experiment? What is my experiment?” cried Amber.

Josephine looked at her and smiled vaguely, benevolently.

“The experiment of feeding carnivora on confectionery,” said she.

“You mean that—that—— Oh, no; you cannot say that, whatever happens, I have not improved them all.”

“I would not dare even to think so. If, however, you succeed in convincing any two of them that you are quite right in marrying the third you will have proved conclusively that confectionery is a most satisfactory diet.”

“I don’t believe that any one of the three wishes to marry me. Not one of them has even so much hinted at that. Oh, no; we are far too good friends ever to become lovers. They are all nice and are getting nicer every day.”

“I really think that they are. At any rate you were born to try experiments. You can no more avoid experimenting than your father can. Here comes an elementary principle with an empty notebook in his hand.”

A youth of twenty-four or twenty-five with a good figure and a pleasantly plain face and unusually large hands and feet sauntered up—the members of the class were trooping out, some of them handing in their time studies to Mr. Richmond who stood at the head of the room.

“How do you do, Miss West? How are you, Amber?” he said. “I saw you working like a gas-engine, Miss West. What on earth could you find to say on that subject?”

“What subject, Mr. Guy Overton?” said Josephine.

The young man looked puzzled—pleasantly puzzled.

“The subject you were writing about,” he replied cautiously.

“You don’t even remember the title of the time study,” said Amber severely.

“I don’t,” he cried defiantly. “What would be the good of remembering it? I saw at once that it was all Thomas.”

“All Thomas?” said Amber enquiringly.

“All Thomas—all Tommy rot. You didn’t bother yourself writing a big heap Injin about it yourself, my fine lady.”

“That was because she is really scientific in her methods, Mr. Overton,” said Josephine. “She doesn’t write out the result of an experiment until she has analysed the residuum in the crucible.”

The young man looked into her face very carefully. He was never quite sure of this particular girl. She required a lot of looking at, and even then he was never quite certain that she had not said something that would make him look like a fool if any one clever enough to understand her was at hand. Luckily for him there were, he knew, not many such people likely to be about.

He looked at her very carefully and then turned to Amber saying:

“I came across a chippie of a cornstalk yesterday who says his dad used to know Sir Creighton before he went to Australia. May I bring him with me one day?”

“Of course you may,” cried Amber, her face brightening. Josephine knew that her face brightened at the prospect of acquiring some fresh materials for her laboratory. “What is his name?”

“His name is Winwood—Pierce Winwood, if it so please you.”

“I’ll ask the pater, and keep him up to the date,” said Amber. “I suppose his father’s name was Winwood too.”

“Why shouldn’t it be? Oh, there’s nothing the matter with him. My dad used to know his dad out there. They were in the same colony and pretty nearly cleaned it out between them. But Winwood died worth a good bit more than my poor old dad. Oh, he’s all right.”

“I’m sure you have said enough to convince any one that the son is all right,” said Josephine.

“Three-quarters of a million at least,” remarked Guy Overton with the wink of sagacity.

“What, so right as all that?” exclaimed Josephine with the uplifted eyebrows of incredulity.

“Every penny,” said the youth with the emphasis of pride.

“Oh, money is nothing!” said Amber with the head shake of indifference.

“Nothing in the world,” acquiesced Guy, with a heartiness that carried with it absolute conviction of insincerity to the critical ears.

“Have you made any progress, Guy?” enquired Amber.

“Among this racket?” he asked. “Not much. I think if I’ve made any progress it’s backwards. Two months ago I could read a novel—if it was the right sort—without trouble. But since I have been shown the parts of the machine that turns them out, blest if I can get beyond the first page.”

“That’s a good sign; it shows that you are becoming critical,” cried Amber.

“Does it? Well... I don’t know. If attending a Technical School of Novel-writing makes a chippie incapable of reading a book, I don’t think the show can be called a success. Anyway I don’t believe that prose fiction—that’s how it’s called—is the department for me. I believe that the poetry shop is the one I’m meant to shine in. You see, there’s only one sort of poetry nowadays, and it’s easily taught; whereas there are a dozen forms of prose fiction—I never guessed that the business was so complicated before I came here. Oh, yes, I’ll join the poetry shop next week.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort: it’s twice as complicated as this,” said Amber severely.

“Don’t tell me that,” he retorted. “I’ve heard the best poetry of the day—yes, in the Music Halls, and I believe that with a little practice I could turn it out by the web. All the people want is three verses and a good kick in the chorus—something you remember easily, with a good word about Tommy Atkins and two for good old Mother England. I know the swing of the thing. Oh, yes; I’ll get seconded to the poetry shop. Here comes Barnum himself.”

His final words were delivered in a furtive whisper while Mr. Richmond strolled across the room to the group—it was the last group that remained.

When he had come up Mr. Guy Overton was extremely respectful in his attitude to Mr. Richmond and called him “Sir.” He looked at his watch, however, a moment later and said he was an hour late for a particular appointment that he had, so he reckoned he should make himself distant.

Mr. Richmond smiled socially, not officially, and added a nod, before turning to greet the girls. He was not very impressive while saying that he felt greatly honoured to see Miss West in the class-room. He was sure that she understood his aims. Then Miss West said she was certain that it must be a great pleasure to him to lecture before a sympathetic audience. He evaded her evasion and enquired of Miss Severn if he might include her among the sympathetic members of his audience, and Miss Severn declared that she had learned more in ten minutes from him respecting the literary value of certain Scotch words than she had acquired by reading the two novels in the Scotch tongue which she had mastered in the previous four years of her life, and she hoped Mr. Richmond considered the attendance satisfactory. He assured her that sanguine though he had been as to the number of persons anxious to write novels the attendance at the fiction class amazed him.

“And many who were present to-day were actually attentive,” remarked Josephine.

“And one of the ladies defines Platonic Friendship as the reason why Brutus killed Cæsar—I hold the document in my hand,” said the master.

Both girls cried “How funny!” and smiled their way to the door, which Mr. Richmond held open for them.

On the way to Kensington Palace Gardens they agreed that the Khaki frocks then so popular would not survive another season.

CHAPTER VI

Lady Severn had survived the measured mile. Sir Creighton was jubilant. His daughter flew to him. How did the electric turbine work? What was the coefficient of energy developed over the measured mile? Was forty miles actually touched and what about the depression in the stern? Did the boat steer all right on the progressive principle? Did the Admiral grumble as usual?

Her father gave her a detailed account of the strong points of the new system of propulsion, which every one had recognised, and of the weak points, which he alone had detected, and then she was able to drink her tea, and so was Sir Creighton.

Lady Severn said the lunch was excellent; only when travelling by water at the rate of forty-two knots every one seemed inclined to eat at the rate of fifty knots.

After drinking a cup of tea Sir Creighton looked at the clock and sighed.

“The day is gone before one gets any work done,” he said. “I have not been in my room since yesterday afternoon, Joe,” he added, looking at Josephine as if hoping to find in her a sympathetic audience.

“You’ll get no sympathy from me, Sir Creighton,” she laughed. “You have done more to-day than all the men of your craft—I suppose that a turbine boat may be called a craft—have succeeded in accomplishing during the past hundred years—forty knots!—just think of it!—and yet you complain of not being able to get anything done! Oh, no; you’ll get no sympathy from me.”

Sir Creighton went across the room to her and his scientific skill enabled him to squeeze between his finger and thumb that part of her arm where all the sensitive nerves meet.

She shrieked.

“I will force you to sympathise with me,” he said. “You have still another arm. What! they are actually taking your part?”

Sir Creighton had a pretty wit. It was most exuberant when he had discovered a new torture founded on a purely scientific basis. That was how he kept himself young.

“Oh, by the way,” said Amber, when he was going once more towards the door, “Guy has picked up with some one from New South Wales whose father said he had once known you. His name is—now what on earth did he say his name was?”

“Wasn’t it Mr. Winwood?” said Josephine.

“Of course. Pierce Winwood. Do you remember any man of that name—long ago—it must have been long ago. He made a big fortune in the meantime?”

“Winwood—Winwood? No, I don’t remember any one bearing that name,” said Sir Creighton. “Better tell Guy to bring him out and I dare say he’ll draw the threads together.”

“I told Guy I was sure that you would like to have a chat with him—the son, I mean; he said the father, who claimed to know you, was dead.”

“There’s cause and effect for you,” said Sir Creighton. “Better ask him to dinner with Guy—the son, I mean.”

He spoke with his hand on the handle of the door, and then went whistling down the corridor to his study which opened out upon the garden of roses at the back of the house. The long table was covered with scale drawings and the smell of the tracing paper filled the room. Sir Creighton stood for a few moments looking down at those tracings of the sections of wheels—wheels within wheels—and the profiles of pinions.

“What the Nightingale sang to the Rose,” said the man of science. “Pah, what can any one say about the Nightingale and the Rose that has not been said before?”

He turned over several of the drawings critically, and counted the leaves of one of the pinions.

“He has made no allowance for end-shake,” he muttered. “A sixteenth on each pivot. Was it in the Garden of Gulistan? I rather think not. An English rose-garden—why not within the four-mile radius?”

He stood at the glass door leading out to his own garden, and remained there for some minutes looking out upon the great clusters of mixed blooms. Then he turned to one of the desks and unlocking one of the drawers and, drawing it out some way, slipped his hand inside, relieving the spring of a secret compartment that seemed to be a fixture. He drew out a sheaf of papers, covered with verses with many erasures and those countless corrections which commonly occur in the manuscripts of poets who are not only inspired but who add to the original impulse of inspiration a fastidiousness of phrase quite unknown to the older poets.

The topmost leaf of the sheaf contained a stanza and a half of a poem in an original metre describing how a nightingale came nightly to visit a certain rose, but the rose being only a bud, failed to understand what was the meaning of the music, until on the evening of a burning day, when the Star of Love shed the only light that came from the sky through the heavy scented air that hovered on the rose-garden, “The faithful nightingale sang this song: “....

That was where the manuscript ended. There was space enough on the paper for two more stanzas. All that was needed was to put into words the song that the nightingale sang to stir the rosebud into the bloom of passion.

That was the reflection of the man of science as he read the ambitious prelude which he had written the previous day just when the leader writers on all the newspapers in England were pointing out how the adaptation of electricity to the turbine boat marked the most important epoch in the history of marine engineering.

“That’s all I have got to do,” he muttered now, when the cables were carrying to all parts of the world the news that Sir Creighton Severn’s electric turbine had just been tested over the measured mile with the most surprising results, a record speed of forty-two knots having been noted. “Only the song of the nightingale,” said the man of science, seating himself at the desk with the unfinished poem in front of him.

He wrote for two hours, completing the poem entitled “What the Nightingale sang to the Rose,” which when published above the name “Alençon Hope” in a magazine three months later was so widely commented on, some critics going so far as to declare with that confidence which is the chief part of the equipment of the critic, that in all the recently published volume by the same author nothing more exquisite could be found.

It was Sir Creighton’s little fun to publish, unknown to any one in the world, a volume of verse that had achieved a brilliant success in the world and even in his own household where its apt lines were frequently quoted both by Amber and her brother. That was how it came about that Sir Creighton smiled quite vaguely when people remarked how strange it was that young Severn had shown an early taste for writing verse. Who was it that he took after, they enquired. They felt that the exigencies of the theory of heredity were fully satisfied when Lady Severn explained that there was a tradition in her family that her father had once sent a valentine to her mother. Still it was funny, they said, to find the son of a father who was a practical “scientist”—that was what they called Sir Creighton: a “scientist”—having a tendency to write verse.

Sir Creighton, when he had finished writhing at the word “scientist,” smiled quite vaguely; for no one seemed to entertain the idea that the inspiration which had enabled the man of science to look into the future and see ships moving silently over the water at a speed of forty-two knots an hour was precisely the same quality which permitted of his translating into English metre the passionate song sung by the Nightingale to the Rose.

No one knew how refreshed he felt on returning to his electrical designs after spending an hour or two over those exquisite fabrics of verse which appeared in the volume by “Alençon Hope” Rhythm and arithmetic seem to many people to be the positive and negative poles of a magnet, but both mean the same thing in the language from which they are derived.

“Poor old pater!” said Amber when the girls were left alone with Lady Severn. “He is back again at one of those problems which he has set himself to solve for the good of the world. Poor old pater!”

“Old!” cried Josephine. “I never met any one so young in the whole course of my life. In his presence I feel quite mature.”

“The greatest problem that he has solved is the science of living,” said Lady Severn. “If he has not discovered the secret of perpetual youth, he has mastered the more important mystery of perpetual happiness.”

“He knows that it is best seen through another’s eye,” said Josephine.

At this point a young man with a very shiny hat in his hand was shown in. He was greeted by Amber by the name of Arthur and by the others as Mr. Galmyn. He was a somewhat low-sized youth with very fair hair breaking into curls here and there that suggested the crests of a wave blown by the wind. It was not his curls, however, but his eyes that attracted the attention of most people; for his eyes were large and delicately blue. Sentimentalists who sat opposite him in an omnibus—an omnibus is full of sentimental people, six on each side—were accustomed to see a certain depth of sadness in Arthur Galmyn’s eyes. He would have felt greatly disappointed if they had failed to think them sad. He had long ago formed a definite opinion about their expression. They had caused him a great deal of thought and some trouble in his time, but he had long ago come to feel every confidence in their sadness. It was his aim to see that his life was congenially tinged with a mild melancholy.

He quoted from “The Lotus Eaters” and tried to realise a life “in which it always seemed afternoon.”

He took tea punctually at five.

“If you please,” he said. “I know that the tea leaves are never allowed to remain in your tea-pot. I have no disquieting recollection of your tea-pot, Amber. And a cake—one of the hot ones, Miss West. They have no currants. I know that I shall never run the chance of coming in personal contact with a currant, change you your cakes never so often. I found myself confronted with a currant without a moment’s warning a few days ago at Lady March’s. I was saddened. And I thought I knew her tea-cakes so well. I felt for some days as if I had heard of a dear friend’s committing a forgery—as if I had come across you suddenly in the Park wearing mauve, instead of pink, Amber.”

“It does tinge one’s life with melancholy. Have you made any money to-day?” said Amber in one breath.

He drank his cup of tea and bit off a segment from the circle of the tea cake, then he looked earnestly at the tips of his fingers. Two of them were shiny.

“I’ve not done badly,” he said. “I made about eight pounds. It doesn’t seem much, does it? But that eight pounds is on the right side of the ledger, and that’s something.”

“It’s excellent,” said Lady Severn.

“I consider it most praiseworthy if you made it by fair dealing,” said Josephine.

“Oh, Joe, don’t discourage him so early in his career,” cried Amber.

Arthur Galmyn finished the tea in his cup and laid it thoughtfully before Amber to be refilled.

“It’s quite delicious,” he said. “Quite delicious. I wonder if anything is quite fair in the way of making money—except the tables at Monte Carlo: there’s no cheating done there.”

“That’s what I wonder too,” said Josephine.

“Anyway I’ve only made eight pounds to-day—there’s not much cheating in eight pounds, is there, Miss West?” said Mr. Galmyn.

“Everything must have a beginning,” said Miss West.

“Don’t be discouraged, Arthur,” said Amber. “If you only continue on this system I’ve laid down for you you’ll make plenty of money, and what’s better still you will become reformed.”

“I’ve given up poetry already,” said he, in the sad tone that one adopts in speaking of one’s pleasant vices which one is obliged to relinquish through the tyranny of years.

“That’s a step in the right direction,” said Amber. “Oh, I’ve no doubt as to your future, Arthur. But you must study hard—oh, yes, you must study hard.”

“So I do: I can tell you the closing price of all Home Rails to-day without referring to a list.”

“Really? Well, you are progressing. What about Industrials?” said Amber.

“I’m leaving over Industrials for another week,” he replied. “I’ve given all my attention to Home Rails during the past fortnight. I dare say if I don’t break down under the strain I shall go through a course of Industrials inside another week, and then go on to Kaffirs.”

“It’s at Industrials that the money is to be made, you must remember,” said Amber. “Let me enforce upon you once more the non-speculative business—don’t think of coups. Aim only at a half per cent, of a rise, and take advantage of even the smallest rise.”

“That’s how I made my eight pounds to-day,” said he. “You see when things were very flat in the morning there came the report of a great British victory. I knew that it wasn’t true, but half a dozen things went up ten shillings or so and I unloaded—unloaded. It’s so nice to have those words pat; it makes you feel that you’re in the swim of the thing. If I only knew what contango meant, I think I could make an impressive use of that word also.”

At this point another visitor was announced. His name was Mr. William Bateman. He was a bright looking man of perhaps a year or two over thirty, and though he was close upon six feet in height he probably would have ridden under ten stone, so earnest was the attention that he had given to his figure.

He would not take any tea.

CHAPTER VII

We have been talking shop as usual, Mr. Bateman,” said Lady Severn. “I wonder if there’s another drawing-room in London where shop and shop only is talked!”

“To say that shop is talked in a drawing-room is only another way of saying that the people in that drawing-room never cease to be interesting,” said Amber. “So long as people talk of what they know they are interesting and shop is the shortest way of describing what people understand. So how is your shop, Mr. Bateman?”

“Flourishing,” said Mr. Bateman, with something of a Scotch accent. “Miss Amber, I bless the day when you suggested that I should take up the advertising business. I had no idea that it was a business that required the exercise of so much imagination.”

“Have you made much money to-day?” enquired Amber.

“I think I must hurry away,” said Josephine. “We have a political party to-night, and I’m tired of seeing Amber’s friends flaunting their wealth before us. If Mr. Galmyn made eight pounds in the course of the morning and he is a poet, what must Mr. Bateman have made?”

“And he is a Scotchman,” said Mr. Bateman pleasantly.

“Yes, that finish was in my mind I must confess,” said Josephine. “Do not be led into dishonesty by any one, Mr. Galmyn; you will be far happier as a humble lyric poet with the consciousness of being honest than as a great financier with an imaginary mine up your sleeve.”

“Go away, before you do any further mischief,” cried Amber. “Don’t believe her, Arthur. If you ever have a gold mine up your sleeve, we’ll float it between us.”

“And we’ll let Miss West in on the ground floor,” said Arthur. “That’s another good phrase that I’ve got hold of already. The ‘ground floor.’”

“What does it mean?” asked Lady Severn, when Josephine had left the room. “Does it mean anything in particular?”

“It means joining a thing at par,” replied Arthur sadly. “Oh, yes! I’m getting into the swing of the thing. Perhaps I may know what contango means before another week has gone by.”

“I should dearly like to know what contango means,” said Amber sympathetically. It was her sympathetic manner that made a word or two from her change the whole course of certain young lives—for a time. “I was asking you about your prospects, Mr. Bateman,” she added, turning to the latest addition to her circle. “I do hope that you are making your way.”

“Making my way?” said he gravely, and then he gave a little laugh—a cautious little laugh, as of feeling his way to ascertain how far he might safely go in the direction of hilarity. “Making my—oh, yes; I can’t complain. I see a great future for my business if it is developed on the right lines, and if too many adventurers do not take it up.”

“It requires too much imagination to turn out a success in everybody’s hands,” said Amber.

“Imagination,” said he. “My dear Miss Amber, it requires nothing but imagination. In these days advertising is the greatest power that exists. It is, counting all its branches, the most important British industry. There’s nothing that cannot be accomplished by discreet advertising.”

“You can sell a soap by it at any rate,” said Lady Severn.

“Oh, soap selling and pill selling are too easy to need any of the more delicate methods,” said Mr. Bateman. “Everybody—nearly everybody—wants soap and no one can live without medicine—some people live on nothing else. Of course I don’t trouble myself over the rough and tumble advertising of drugs. As I told you last week I intend to proceed on a higher plane. I leave posters and sandwich men and other antediluvian methods for others. I am determined never to forget that I am an artist and that I was once in a cavalry regiment.”

“Have you struck out anything new since you told us of your scheme for pushing things on by holding them up to ridicule?” asked Amber.

“Oh, you allude to what I did for the Technical School of Literature. You know, of course, that I only got that ridiculed into notice because of the interest you took in it, Miss Amber. But I’ve undertaken to see a young chap into Parliament by the same means. He is really such a foolish young man I believe that nothing could keep him out of Parliament in the long run; but he wants to get in at the next General Election, so we haven’t much time to spare. I got him to make a Vegetarian Speech a fortnight ago, and then I arranged with a number of excellent newspapers to ridicule all that he had said. They are at it to-day, all over the country.”

“His name is Thornleigh and he said that no one could wear leather boots and remain a Christian,” cried Amber.

“There, you see,” said Mr. Bateman proudly. “He has already become known to you—yes, and he shall be known to every man, woman and child in England. The Vegetarians are taking him up and he’ll become more ridiculous every day until his name is a by-word. You can’t keep a man out of Parliament whose name is a by-word throughout the length and breadth of the country. Then I’ve a young woman who simply wants to get her name into the papers. It’s marvellous how universal this aspiration is. Anyhow I think I can promise her a good move.”

“She has only to kill a baby,” suggested Mr. Galmyn in a flash of inspiration.

“No more brilliant suggestion could be made,” said Mr. Bateman. “But it does more credit to your heart than to you head, Galmyn, my friend. If you sit down and give the matter that thoughtful consideration it deserves, I think you will agree with me that the goal aimed at can be reached by equally legitimate means and with less risk. I am going to put up the young woman at the next meeting of the County Council’s Licensing Committee to oppose the renewal of any singing and dancing licenses whatsoever. That is the least expensive and most effective way of pushing forward a nonentity with aspirations. She will soon come to be looked upon as an intelligent woman, and the newspapers will publish her opinion upon the conduct of the recent campaign as well as upon the management of children.”

“You don’t think that you are too sanguine, Mr. Bateman,” suggested Lady Severn.

“I prefer to understate rather than exaggerate the possibilities of such a step as I have suggested, Lady Severn,” said Mr. Bateman. “And moreover I will do my best to prevent my client from writing a novel. Writing a novel rather gives away the show. Then another client whom I have just secured to-day is the mother of two very ordinary daughters. The mother is vulgar and wealthy, and the daughters wear birds in their toques. They know no one in Society and yet before six months have gone by you will find that no column of society gossip will be considered complete that does not contain some reference to their movements, and they will probably marry baronets—perhaps peers. I have also got on my books a young American lady, who has set her heart on a peer, poor thing!”

“Poor thing? does that refer to the lady or to the peer?” asked Amber.

“Possibly to both, Miss Amber. Anyhow I’m going to start the campaign by denying on authority that any engagement exists between the young lady and a still younger Duke. Now I need scarcely say that the desire to know more about a young lady who is not engaged to marry a Duke is practically universal. Well, I’ll take good care to let the public know more about my client, and she may be engaged to marry the Duke after all—perhaps she may even marry a member of the Stock Exchange itself. But you mustn’t suppose that my clients are exclusively ladies.”

“Ladies? ladies? oh, no, Mr. Bateman, I am sure we should never suppose that they were ladies,” said Lady Severn.

“They are not,” said Mr. Bateman. “Only a few days ago an honest but obscure tradesman placed himself in my hands. The fact is that he has laid in an absurdly large stock of High Church literature as well as ornaments, and he cannot get rid of them. The stupid man has not acumen enough to perceive that all he has got to do in order to get his name into every paper in the Kingdom, with a portrait in the Weeklies and a stereo-block in the Evening editions, is to disturb a Low Church congregation, and insist on being prosecuted as a brawler. If he succeeds in getting prosecuted into popularity he may double his already large stock and yet be certain of getting rid of it all within a week of his first appearance at the Police Court.”

“You are certainly making an art of the business, Mr. Bateman,” said Amber. “I had no idea when I suggested to you the possibilities of an advertising agency that you would develop it to such an extent.”

“Nor had I, Miss Amber. But I have really only reported progress to you in a few of the cases I have now before me. I have said nothing about the lady manicurist to whom I am giving a show by means of an action for libel; nor have I told you of the tooth paste to which I am going to give a start through the legitimate agency of a breach of promise case. The falling out between the two litigants—whom I may mention incidentally——”

“Dentally,” suggested Mr. Galmyn in a low tone.

“I beg your pardon. Oh, yes, of course. Well, dentally—to be sure, it’s a tooth paste—yes, and incidentally, are the proprietors of the article—their difference arose not upon the actual merits of the tooth paste, for every love letter that will be read in court will contain a handsome acknowledgment of the fact that the article is superior to any in the market—no, the misunderstanding arose through—as the counsel for the defence will allege—the lady’s head having been completely turned by the compliments which she received from her friends upon the marvellous change in her appearance since she was induced to use the Tivoli Toothicum, the new preparation for the teeth and gums. Oh, believe me, the ordinary system of advertising is obsolete. By the way, I wonder if you know any one who is acquainted with a young Australian lately come to London. His name is Mr. Winwood—Pierce Winwood.”

“Why, Guy Overton was talking to us to-day about this very person,” said Amber. “Is it possible that he has placed himself in your hands, Mr. Bateman?”

“Not yet—not yet. I only heard about him yesterday. I hope that he will enter his name on my books. I am very anxious to get a good Colonial Clientele. The way the chances of first-class Colonials have been frittered away in this country makes the heart of any one with the true feelings of an Imperialist to bleed. I know that I can do everything for this Mr. Winwood, but, of course, though I can advertise others, I cannot advertise myself—no, I can only trust to my friends to do that for me.”

“So that on the whole you have your hands pretty full just now?” said Amber.

“Pretty full? My dear Miss Amber, if I were engaged in no other branch of my business but the complete prospectus list, I should still have my hands full. I did not mention this list, by the way. Well, I think it will place in my hands at once the largest prospectus addressing business in the Kingdom. Good heavens! when one thinks of the thousands upon thousands of pounds at present being squandered in promiscuous prospectus posting, one is led to wonder if there is any real knowledge of this business on the part of company promoters. At present they allow their prospectuses to be thrown broadcast around; so that on an average it may be said that nine-tenths of these documents fall into the hands of intelligent—that is to say, moderately intelligent people who, of course, see at once through the schemes. Now it is clear that to let the prospectuses fall into the hands of intelligent people does positive harm.”

“Not if they decline to be drawn,” suggested Mr. Galmyn.

“I am discussing the question from the standpoint of the promoters, you forget, my dear Galmyn. It is plain that if the intelligent people who see through the schemes talk to their friends about the flotations, they will do the promoters’ position harm. Now, with the list which I am compiling it will be impossible for a prospectus to go astray, for my list will contain only the names of widows left with small means which they are anxious to increase, orphans left without trustees, small shopkeepers, governesses, half-pay officers, clerks and clergymen—in short only such people as know nothing about business, and who invariably skip all the small print in a prospectus, whereas, I need scarcely say, the small print is the only part of a prospectus that an intelligent person reads. The list that I am compiling is taking up a great deal of time; but I will guarantee that it does not contain half a dozen names of intelligent people. The only surprising thing is that such a list was not compiled long ago. Oh, you must pardon my egotism; I have bored you to a point of extinction, but I knew that you would be interested in hearing of my progress. I can never forget that it was you who told me that I should not waste my time but take up some enterprise demanding the exercise of such talents as I possess. I hope should you meet this Mr. Pierce Winwood, you will mention my name to him—casually, of course—as casually as possible. Good-afternoon, Lady Severn. Good-afternoon, Miss Amber. Are you coming my way, Galmyn—I can give you a lift?”

“No, I’m going in just the opposite direction,” said Mr. Galmyn.

Then Mr. Bateman smiled his way to the door. “What a bounder!” murmured the other man. “He has found congenial employment certainly,” said Lady Severn. “Oh, Amber, Amber, your name is Frankenstein.”

CHAPTER VIII

Some days had actually passed before Amber Severn read the “time-study” on the subject of Platonic Friendship which had been confided to her by her friend Josephine. She read the quickly written and vaguely worded treatise with alternate smiles and frowns, and the last words that it contained called for a very becoming rose mantle of blushes.

“It is so like Joe!” she muttered. “So very like Joe. And it’s all wrong—all wrong!”

She had thrown herself in her dressing-gown on the sofa in her dressing-room hoping to have half an hour’s doze before dressing to go out to dinner; and she had found the document in the pocket of the luxurious garment of quilted satin and lace which suited her so well that her maid had often lamented the fact that the convenances of modern English Society precluded her being seen within its folds by any one except her mother and her maid.

“It is so like Joe! And it is meant as a commentary upon my friendships. But it is wrong—wrong!” This was her thought as she lay back upon the sofa, until the pillows among which she had thrown herself surged up all about her as though they were billows of the sea.

And then, instead of going asleep, she began to review three or four of the friendships which she had formed during the past few years—friendships which might easily have degenerated into quite another feeling, if they had not been built on a foundation very different from that which Josephine West had assumed to be the basis of friendship according to Plato.

There was Arthur Galmyn for instance. He and she had become very friendly when they had first met the year before. He had been at Oxford with her brother and had won one of those pernicious prizes which are offered for the best poem of the year—to be more exact, for the poem which is most highly approved of by the adjudicating authorities of the University. She quickly perceived that the effect of winning this prize was, upon young Mr. Galmyn, most disquieting; for he had actually settled down as a poet on the strength of winning it.

Instead of saying, “I have written the poem which has met with the approval of the most highly graduated pedants in the world, therefore I am no poet,” he assumed that pedant was another word for prophet, and that their judgment had conferred immortality upon him and perhaps even upon themselves; for whenever his name came to be spoken in the awful whisper which people employ in mentioning the name of a poet, the names of the adjudicators of the prize would also be mentioned.

He hoped to go through life writing poetry—not the poetry which appears on a Christmas card or imprinted on the little ship which never loses the curl that is originally gained by being enwound about the almond in the after dinner cracker—not even the poetry which is sung, when wedded to melody, by the light of a piano candle,—no; but that form of poetry which is absolutely an unsalable commodity in the public market—unless it was of that high quality which appeared over the signature of Alençon Hope to which Amber had frequently called the inattention of her father.

It was just when he was in this critical position that he came under the influence of Amber Severn. They had become ostentatiously Platonic friends. To be sure he had, after their second meeting, addressed to her a sonnet written in exquisite accordance with the true Petrarchian model, embodying a fervent hope in the last line of the sextett—the two quatrains (each ending with a semicolon) had been mainly descriptive—but she had explained to him that she would take a lenient view of this action on his part, if he would promise to do his best to resist in the future the inspiration which had forced him into it.

He had promised her all that she asked; but he gave her to understand that he did so only through fear of alienation from her.=

“I shrink from life from Amber alienate,"=

was the last line of the sonnet which he promptly composed after she had lectured him; and then he had settled down into that graceful philosophical friendship with her, which had sent him on the Stock Exchange before three months had elapsed.

It took three months to convince him that she was quite right in her suggestion that instead of spending the best years of his life writing poetry, having nothing to look forward to beyond the perpetual struggle of trying to live within the four hundred pounds a year which represented all his private means, he should endeavour to make a career for himself in some direction where his undoubted gifts of imagination would be appreciated—say the Stock Exchange.

“My dear Arthur,” she had said, “what I fear most for you is the possibility of your making a mercenary marriage. You know as well as I do that it would be ridiculous for you to marry on your present income, and I know your nature sufficiently well to be convinced that you would never be happy so long as you felt that your wife’s fortune was supporting you. Don’t you agree with me?”

He thought that she took too narrow a view of the conditions under which he could be happy; but he thought it better to nod his acquiescence in the flattering estimate which she had formed of his nature.

“I knew you would agree with me,” she said. “And that’s why I urge upon you this step.” (The step she urged upon him was the Stock Exchange Steps.) “You will have to study hard at first, and I believe that you must begin by trusting nobody—especially avoiding every one who wants to be your friend; but by this means you will eventually gain not only a competence—not only complete independence, but such a Fortune as will make you a Power in the world, and then—well, then you can marry any one you please.”

Although the poem which he considered the best that he had ever written was one in praise of a young woman who had remained true to her love for a poet without a penny, in the face of the opposition of her parents who wished her to wed a very rich person in a good paying business, he said he was sure that she was right, and he would give her his promise to buy a twenty-five shilling silk hat the very next day: that being, as he was informed, the first step necessary to be taken by any one with aspirations after financial success.

He had an idea that, after all, he had underrated the practical outlook of the modern young woman. Could it be possible, he asked himself, that after all the penniless poet who wrote on the Petrarchian model, was a less attractive figure in the eyes of a girl—even of a girl who could not be seen by any one without suggesting the thoughts of a flower—perhaps a lily—than the man with a million invested in various excellent securities?

He feared that it was impossible for him to arrive at any other conclusion than this one which was forced upon him; and the worst of the matter was that he found that all his sympathies were on the side of the modern young woman, although he would have died sooner than withdraw a single line of the poem which he had written holding up to admiration the young woman who refused to leave her penniless poet for the man of millions.

He bought a fine silk hat the next day, and forthwith wrote a series of rondeaux bidding farewell to the Muse. He felt that such an act of renunciation on his part demanded celebration on the analogy of the Lenten Carnival. But when his days of riotous indulgence in all the exotic forms of French verse had come to an end, he gave himself up to a consideration of his bank book and found to his amazement that his accumulations including a legacy of two thousand pounds which he had received from the executors of his godmother, amounted to close upon four thousand pounds.

For over two years his account had been increasing, the trustees of the estate of his father (deceased) having been in the habit of lodging the quarterly payments of his income (less expenses) to his credit, and yet he was receiving no penny of interest on all this money.

He was innocent enough to ask the young man at the bank how it was that no circular had been sent to him letting him know that his account was overgrown. If it had been overdrawn he would have been informed of the fact.

The young man had only smiled and said that he was sure the matter had been overlooked; for there was nothing that the bank found so embarrassing as large balances bearing no interest.

In the course of a few weeks he would have blushed to ask such a question as he had put to the clerk. He began to study the methods of finance for the first time and had almost mastered the art embodied in a gold mine prospectus—it is the Petrarchian Sonnet of the money market—before he had been a month at the work. By a rigid attention to Amber’s precept of placing the most implicit distrust in every one connected with finance, he had made a very good start for himself.

His principle was an excellent one. He made several friends among those disinterested financiers who give advice gratis as to what stocks to buy and he had never failed to act contrary to the tips which they had given him; so that when a few days later, they came to him with assumed long faces and frank admissions of fallibility in the past but of promises of certainty for the future, he had shown them that he was made of the stuff that goes to the composition of a real financier by being in no way put out; and disdaining to level a single reproach at them.

“Distrust your best friend,” was the motto which he placed in a conspicuous place on his mantelpiece, and by observing it he had made some hundreds of pounds in the course of a few weeks.

And then he made a stroke; for on hearing from a great authority on the Stock Exchange that there was going to be no war in the Transvaal, and that those rumours regarding strained relations between that State and Great Britain were simply due to the fact that some members of the Cabinet had given orders to their brokers to buy up for them all South African Stock the moment that it fell to a certain figure—on hearing this on so excellent an authority, Mr. Galmyn had felt so sure that war was imminent that he did not hesitate for a moment in joining a syndicate for the purchase of the full cinematograph rights in the campaign.

When the war became inevitable he sold out his shares at a profit of two hundred per cent., and the next week he learned that the War Office had prohibited all cinematographers from joining the troops ordered to South Africa.

He rubbed his hands and felt that he was a born financier.

For some months after, he had been content, Amber knew, with very small earnings, consequently his losses had been proportionately small; and yet now, as she lay back upon her sofa she recalled with pride (she fancied) that he had never written to her a single sonnet. He had never once given expression to a sentiment that would bear to be construed into a departure from the lines of that friendship which was the ideal of Plato.

And yet Josephine could write that “time-study” suggesting that such an ideal was impracticable if not absolutely unattainable!

She lost all patience with her friend.

CHAPTER IX

Before her maid came to her Amber had reflected also upon the cases of Mr. Guy Overton and Mr. Willie Bateman, and the consciousness of the fact that neither of these young men had tried (after the first attempt) to make love to her was a source of the greatest gratification to her. (To such a point of self-deception may the imagination of a young woman born in an atmosphere of science lead her.)

Guy Overton was a young man who was certainly in no need to try the Stock Exchange as a means of livelihood. He was the only son of Richard Over-ton, the once well-known Australian, who had been accidentally killed when acting as his own Stevedore beside the hold of one of his steamers. Guy had inherited from this excellent father a business which he had speedily sold for a trifle over half a million, and a spirit of thrift which was very unusual, people said, on the part of the idle son of a self-made man—a self-made man is a man who has made himself wealthy at the expense of others.

It was a great disappointment to his many friends to find out, as they did very soon after his father’s death, that young Mr. Overton was in no way disposed to fling his money about in the light-hearted way characteristic of the youth who becomes a prodigal by profession. He could not see, he said, why he should buy spavined horses simply because he was half a millionaire. Of course he knew it was an understood thing that spavined horses were to be got rid of upon light-hearted aspiring sons of fathers with humble beginnings in life; but he rather thought that, for the present at least, he would try to pass his time apart from the cheering companionship of the spavined horse.

And then as regards the purchase of that couple of cases of choice Manila cigars—the hemp yarn which entered largely into their composition undoubtedly did come from Manila—he expressed the opinion to the friend who had thoughtfully suggested the transaction, that, until he felt more firmly on his feet in carrying out the rôle of the complete prodigal he would struggle to repress his natural tendency to smoke the sweepings of the rope walks of the Philippine Islands.

In short young Mr. Overton was fortunate enough to obtain, not by slow degrees, but in a single month after his father’s death, a sound practical reputation for being a skinflint.

It was his study to justify all that was said of him by his disappointed friends in respect of the closeness of his pockets.

He lived in chambers and kept no manservant.

Why should he pay a hundred a year—sixty pounds in wages and, say, forty in board and lodging—for having his trousers properly stretched, he asked of those friends of his who were ready to recommend to him several trustworthy menservants. He rather thought that it would pay him better to buy a new pair of trousers every week. He knew a place where you could buy a capital pair of trousers for thirteen and six. He jobbed a horse.

He couldn’t see why he should have a horse eating its head off in a rack-rented stable necessitating the keeping of a groom at twenty-five shillings a week, when he could hire a horse for all the riding that was necessary for his health for five shillings the two hours.

He knew of a good restaurant (Italian) in a back street where the maximum charge for dinner was half a crown, and it was to this establishment he invited his particular friends when the prodigal’s desire to feast became irresistible, overwhelming his better nature which lent him promptings towards frugality.

He recommended the Chianti of this secluded dining-hall. It was a good sound wine, with a distinct tendency towards body, and not wholly without flavour—a flavour that one got accustomed to after a period of probation. Only it was not well to eat olives with it.

He was on the whole a pleasant, shrewd, unaffected man of twenty-eight, when he was presented to Amber, and, on her acceptance of a pretty little imitation Italian enamel from him, he yielded to her influence.

She remembered with pleasure (she thought) that he had only upon one occasion spoken of love in her presence. Her recollection was not at fault. Only once had he hinted at certain aspirations on his part, and then he and she had become good friends. He had submitted to her influence sufficiently far to promise her that he would cease to live a life of idle frugality. A course of practical literature was what she prescribed for him and he at once joined the Technical School just started by Mr. Owen Glen-dower Richmond.

This was, she reflected, a great triumph for Platonic friendship, and yet Guy Overton was only at the other end of the room when Josephine had written that paper of hers in dispraise of this very sentiment!

Amber was inclined to be impatient in thinking of her friend’s scarcely veiled sneers. And then she began to think if it might not be possible that her friend had in her mind her own case—the case of Josephine West and Ernest Clifton—rather than the cases of Amber Severn and Guy Overton, Amber Severn and Arthur Galmyn, Amber Severn and—yes, it was quite possible that the cynicism—if it was cynicism—in the “time study” was prompted by the real feeling of the writer in regard to her relations with Mr. Ernest Clifton.

The reflection had its consolations; but Amber thought she loved her friend Josephine too dearly to be consoled at her expense. Though she herself was, she fancied, perfectly happy in experimentalising, so to speak, in the science of friendship she was too wise to assume that her friend would be equally well satisfied to attain such results as she, Amber, had achieved.

She was led to ask herself if it was possible that Josephine was actually in love with Mr. Ernest Clifton.

And then she went on to ask herself if it was possible that Mr. Ernest Clifton was in love with Josephine West.

Without coming to a conclusion in her consideration of either question, she knew that if Josephine really loved that particular man, her views on the subject of Platonic friendship might be pretty much as she had defined them—precipitating the acid of cynicism at present held in solution in the series of phrases written down on the paper.

Amber had now and again suspected that between Josephine and Mr. Clifton there existed a stronger feeling than that of mere friendship. But Josephine had said no word to her on this subject, and certainly none of their common friends had said anything that tended to strengthen her suspicions. Still the announcement of the engagement of some of her acquaintance had invariably come upon her with surprise, a fact which proved to her—for she was thoroughly logical and always ready to draw faithful deductions even to her own disadvantage—that she had not observed with any great care the phenomena of love in the embryotic state and its gradual growth towards the idiotic state. Things had been going on under her very eyes without her perceiving them, in regard to other young men and maidens, so that it was quite possible that Josephine had come, without Amber’s knowing anything of the matter, to entertain a feeling of tenderness for Ernest Clifton, and had written in that spirit of cynical raillery on the subject of Platonic friendship. Of course if this were so and if at the same time Ernest Clifton had given her no sign that he was affected towards her in the same way, that circumstance would not of itself be sufficient (Amber knew) to prevent Josephine’s taking a cynical view of the question that had formed the subject of the “time study” at the Technical School.

It was at this point in her consideration of the whole question that her maid opened the door gently and began to make preparations for her toilet. Her father had not yet perfected his machinery to discharge the offices of a maid. Where was the electrical device that would lace up a dress behind?

“I shall keep my eyes upon Joe and Mr. Clifton this evening, and perhaps I shall learn something,” was the thought of Amber, while her hair was being teased into the bewitching simplicity of form which gave her a distinction of her own at a period when some artificiality was making itself apparent in the disposal of the hair. (It took a great deal more time to achieve Amber’s simplicity than it did to work out the elaborate devices of the young women who had studied the fashion plate for the month.)

In less than an hour she was driving with her mother to Ranelagh where they were to dine with one Mr. Shirley, a member of Parliament who was known to have aspirations after a place in the Government and who was fully qualified to aspire, being a bachelor. Amber knew that Josephine would be of the party, and she was nearly sure that Mr. Clifton would also be present. When people talked of Mr. Clifton they invariably alluded to him as a long-headed fellow. Some of the men went so far as to say that he knew what he was about. Others said that he might be looked on as the leading exponent of the jumping cat.

Amber, however, knew nothing of his ability, that of all the acquaintance which Josephine and she had in common, Mr. Clifton was the man of whom Josephine spoke most seldom. It was on this account she had a suspicion that he might be held in some manner responsibly accountable for the tone of Josephine’s “time study.”

The lawn at Ranelagh was crowded on this particular Sunday, for the June gloom that had prevailed during the three preceding days had vanished, and the evening sunshine was making everything lovely. The general opinion that prevailed was that the pretty way in which the guests of the sun had dressed themselves to greet him made it worth his while, so to speak, to shine, on the same principle that a host and hostess cannot but be put into a smiling state of mind when their friends have arrived to do them honour in their very best.

The brilliant green of the lawn reflected the greatest credit, people thought, upon the good taste of Nature in providing a background for all the tints of all the fabrics that glowed upon it. And the consciousness that their efforts to clothe themselves tastefully were reciprocated by the sun and the summer was very gratifying to a considerable portion of the crowd, who perhaps had their own reasons for thinking of themselves as included in the general scheme of Nature. They could not imagine any scheme of Nature independent enough to ignore a display of the shimmer of satin or a flutter of muslin.

And this was why Amber thought she had never seen together so many well-satisfied faces as those among which she moved down the lawn to the soft music of the band. And amongst all the well-satisfied faces not one wore this expression more airily than the face of Guy Overton—yes, when she appeared. The face of Mr. Randolph Shirley, in welcoming his guests, also glowed with satisfaction—self-satisfaction. An aspiring politician used long ago to be satisfied when he got his foot on the first rung of the ladder; but the lift system has long ago superseded the outside ladder. A politician of to-day has no idea of climbing up rung by rung, he expects to enter the lift in the lobby and taking a seat among cushions, to be rumbled up to the top floor by pulling a rope.

The correct working of this system is altogether dependent upon one’s knowledge of the right rope to pull; but Mr. Shirley was beginning to know the ropes; so he was pleased to welcome Miss West, the daughter of an under secretary who was almost certain of a chief secretaryship before the end of the year.

It was while Mr. Shirley was welcoming Miss West and her mother that Guy Overton brought up to Amber a man with a very brown face, saying:

“I want to present to you my friend Pierce Winwood, whom I was speaking of a while ago—the cornstalk, you know.”

“I know. I shall be delighted,” said Amber.

He brought the man forward; he looked about the same age as Guy himself, and Amber expressed to his face something of the delight which she felt to meet him. He was not quite so fluent when he opened his lips: as a matter of fact he seemed to be shy almost to a point of embarrassment, and to find that the act of changing his stick from one hand to the other and then treating it as a pendulum not only failed to relieve his embarrassment, but was actually a source of embarrassment to people on each side of him.

Amber wondered if it might not be possible for her to add this young man to her already long list of those whom she was influencing for their own good, through the medium of a colourless friendship.

CHAPTER X

I am so glad to meet you, Mr. Winwood,” she said. “Mr. Overton mentioned that he thought your father was acquainted with mine long ago.”

“I was under that impression—in fact, I am nearly sure—however——”

Amber gave him a chance of finishing his sentence; but he did not take advantage of her offer.

“You think that it is possible he may have made a mistake?” she said.

He did not answer immediately. He followed with his eyes the irritating sweep of his Malacca cane.

“I should like you to ask Sir Creighton if he has any recollection of my father before I make any further claims,” he said, suddenly looking at her straight in the face.

“I have already done so,” said Amber.

He was so startled that he coloured beneath the brown surface of his skin. The effect was a picturesque one.

“And he said that he remembered—that——”

“He said that we should ask you to dinner.”

“Then that’s all right,” put in Guy Overton, for he could not but notice the expression of disappointment on the face of the Australian. And when he noticed that expression, of course Amber noticed it.

“We hope that you will come and dine with us, Mr. Winwood,” she said.

“That is how things begin—and end, in England, I think,” cried Winwood with a laugh that had a note of contempt in its ring. “A dinner is supposed to do duty for welcome as well as for congé. I am always wondering which of the two every invitation that I get is meant to be—a welcome or the other. I knew a man who used to say that an invitation to dinner in England is the height of inhospitality.”

“I say, that’s a bit of freehand drawing, isn’t it?” said Guy. “You seem to have left your manners in the unclaimed luggage department, Winwood. Besides—well, I give a little dinner to my friends now and again—yes, in the Frangipanni: the only place where you get the real macaroni in London. Their Chianti is really not half bad, when you get——”

“I understand exactly what Mr. Winwood means, and I quite agree with him: a dinner is the most cordial form of inhospitality,” said Amber. “But if——”

“I really must ask your pardon, Miss Severn,” interposed Winwood. “I did not mean quite that——”

“You meant that you gathered from what I said that my father had no recollection of yours.”

“Exactly.”

“Then you were—not quite right. My father said he was sure that—that—yes, that you were certain to be able to convince him that he knew your father.”

“Ah!”

“I shall ask my mother to send you a card for—but I suppose you are like the rest of us: you need at least a month’s notice?”

“I only need a day’s notice, Miss Severn.”

“You shall have a week at the least.”

“And you can get up your affidavits in the meantime,” suggested Mr. Overton.

“I think I shall convince Sir Creighton of my identity without the adventitious aid of affidavits,” said Winwood.

“My solicitor—an excellent chap, and so cheap!—says that it is only people who know nothing about the law courts who say that there is no other form of perjury except an affidavit. He once knew a man who made an affidavit that turned out to be true, though no one believed it at the time.”

It was at this point that Mr. Shirley came up and took away Winwood to present him to Miss West, explaining that he had arranged his table so that he was to sit next to Miss West.

“I hope that he is putting me beside you,” said Mr. Overton with a look of longing that is not strictly according to Plato. He now and again made these lapses. They were very irritating to Amber (she thought).

But his hope in regard to the regulation of the table was not destined to be realised for Mr. Shirley brought up to her a young man who was the son of a marquis and a member of the Cabinet as well—Mr. Shirley knew how to choose his guests and how to place them so well.

“I have asked Lord Lullworth to sit beside you, Miss Severn,” he said, and immediately went off to welcome the last two of his guests who were coming down the lawn.

So that it was to a certain Miss Craythorpe—she was the daughter of the under secretary of the annexation department (Mr. Shirley had reduced the disposal of his guests to an exact science)—that Guy had an opportunity of the remarkable chance offered to him the day before—the chance of backing at a theatre a comedy by a dramatist who had made fourteen consecutive failures at London theatres alone. But although the agent of the actor manager who had just acquired for a considerable sum of money the rights of the new comedy had pointed out to him that it was almost sure to be a success, the fact being that it was beyond the bounds of possibility for any dramatist to make fifteen consecutive failures, he had decided to decline the offer.

“I prefer to spend my money myself,” this possible patron of art explained to the young woman as soon as he had settled down in his chair beside her.

Miss Craythorpe thought him very amusing and even went the length of saying so: she had been told that Mr. Overton had at least half a million of a fortune. She had also heard it mentioned casually that he was not given to spending his money. This information was stimulating.

And all the time that Amber Severn was pretending to give all attention to the description of the polo match of the day before which was given to her by the young man next to her, she was looking across the table at Ernest Clifton wondering if he was wishing that, instead of being by the side of Josephine’s mother, he were by the side of Josephine herself. She also looked down the table to where Josephine was sitting and wondered if she was wishing that she were by the side of Ernest Clifton instead of that rather abrupt Mr. Pierce Winwood.

She was of the opinion, being something of a philosopher with more than the average philosopher’s experience, that society is usually made up of people who are evermore longing to be by the side of other people; and that what is meant by good manners is trying to appear content with the people who have been placed beside you.

Josephine certainly had good manners; she seemed to be more than content with Mr. Winwood. She seemed actually to be interested in his conversation—nay absorbed; and as for Ernest Clifton—well, Amber knew enough of men and women to be well aware of the fact that if Ernest Clifton was full of longing to be by the side of Josephine his first impulse would be to make himself as agreeable as possible to Josephine’s mother.

And this was just what Ernest Clifton was doing. He was one of those clever people who are actually better pleased to have a chance of being agreeable to the mother than to the daughter, knowing that the mother may be captured by the art of being agreeable, whereas the daughter is rarely influenced by this rarest of the arts.

And then Amber, somewhat to her own surprise, ceased to give any attention to the people at the other side of the table or at the other end of the table, for she found herself constrained to give all her attention to Lord Lullworth, and his polo. She found that he had at his command a phraseology which without being highly scientific was extremely picturesque, and besides that, he hated Mr. Cupar. Mr. Cupar was the novelist who wrote with the shriek of a street preacher, and was for one season widely discussed.

A common enemy constitutes a bond of friendship far more enduring than any other the wit of man, money, or woman, can devise; so that after Lord Lullworth had pointed out to her some of the ridiculous mistakes which Mr. Cupar had made with all the ostentation of a great teacher—mistakes about horses that a child would never have fallen into, and mistakes about the usages of society that no one who had ever seen anything decent would ever fall into—she found herself more than interested in Lord Lull-worth, and by no means felt inclined to share Guy Overton’s regret that he, Guy Overton, had not been beside her.

She began to wonder if it might not be possible to annex Lord Lullworth for his own good as she had annexed Guy Overton, Arthur Galmyn, Willie Bateman and a few others, with such profitable results—to them all. She thought, after he had agreed with her on some points that were usually regarded as contentious, that he was perhaps the nicest of all the men in whom she had interested herself—for their own good.

Before the glacial period of the dinner had arrived, they had become friendly enough to quarrel.

It was over the Technical School of Literature. She wondered if she could induce him to join, and he assured her that she needn’t allow the question to occupy her thoughts for a moment; for there wasn’t the slightest chance of his joining so ridiculous a scheme. She replied warmly on behalf of the system of imparting instruction on what was undoubtedly one of the arts; and he said he did not believe in machine-made literature.

Of course she could not be expected to let this pass, and she asked him if he did not believe in machine-made pictures, or machine-made statues.

He told her that he did; and then laughed. She gave him to understand that she was hurt by his declining to take her seriously; and she became very frigid over her ice, an attitude which, he assured her, was one that no girl anxious to do her best for her host would assume. A right-minded girl approached her ice with geniality, thereby allowing that particular delicacy to “earn its living”—that was the phrase which he employed and Amber thought it so queer that she allowed herself to glow once more and so to give the ices a chance—a second phrase which originated with him when he heard her laugh.

By the time the strawberries arrived she was surprised to find that she was actually in the position of being under the influence of a man instead of finding the man drawn under her influence. This was a position to which she was not accustomed; therefore it had a certain fascination of its own and by thinking of the fascination of the position she was foolish enough to confound the man with the position and to feel ready to acknowledge that the man was fascinating.

The babble of the large dining-room almost overcame the soft melody of the band playing on the terrace while the dinner was proceeding, but when the soft hour of cigarettes had come, there seemed to be a general feeling that the music was worthy of more attention than had yet been given to it. A movement was made to the Terrace by Mr. Shirley’s party and at first there was some talk of wraps. When, however, one got opposite the door and felt the warm breath of the perfect evening upon one’s face no suggestion that a wrap was needed was heard.

There was a scent of roses and mignonette in the air, and now and again at unaccountable intervals a whiff of the new made hay from the paddock. The lawns were spread forth in the softest of twilights, and the trees beyond looked very black, for the moonlight was too faint to show even upon the edge of the bourgeoning June foliage.

“I have got a table for our coffee,” said Mr. Shirley, “also some chairs; try if you can pick up a few more, Lord Lullworth—and you, Overton—get a couple of the easiest cane ones and we shall be all right.”

Thus it was that the sweet companionship of the dinner-table was broken up. Mr. Shirley was too well accustomed to dinner-giving to fancy that one invariably longs to retain in the twilight and among the scent of roses the companion one has had at the dinner-table. And thus it was that Mr. Ernest Clifton found that the only vacant chair was that beside Josephine—it took him as much manoeuvring to accomplish this as would have enabled him, if he had been a military commander, to convince the War Office that he was the right man to conduct a campaign.

And thus it was that Pierce Winwood found himself by the side of Amber, while Lord Lullworth had fallen quite naturally into pony talk with a young woman who, having been left pretty well off at her father’s death the year before, had started life on her own account with a hunting stable within easy reach of the Pytchley.

And then the coffee came, with the sapphire gleam of green Chartreuse here and there, and the topaz twinkle of a Benedictine, and the ruby glow of cherry brandy. It was all very artistic.

CHAPTER XI

There was a different note in the chat on the terrace in the twilight from that which had prevailed in the dining-room. In the dining-room people had seemed to be trying to talk down the band, now they were talking with it. The band was making a very sympathetic accompaniment to their chat—nay, it even suggested something of a possible topic, for it was playing the dreamy strains of the “Roses of Love” Valse. People could not talk loud when that delicious thing was wafting its melody round them—ensnaring their hearts with that delicate network of woven sounds—breathing half hushed rapture at intervals and then glowing as the June roses glow in a passion that is half a dream.

“I suppose you have lovelier places than Ranelagh in Australia,” said Amber as she leant back in her chair. Pierce Win wood was leaning forward in his.

“Oh, yes, I dare say there are lovelier places in Australia,” he replied. “You see there’s a pretty fair amount of room in Australia for places lovely and the opposite. But there’s no place out there that’s just the same as this place here on such an evening as this. I used to wonder long ago if I should ever see Ranelagh under such conditions as these—distinguished men—there are some distinguished men here—and beautiful women—music and moonlight and the scent of roses, and above all, the consciousness that this is Home—Home—in Australia we think a good deal about this England of ours. People in England have great pride in thinking of Australia as their own, but their pride is nothing compared to that of the Australians in thinking of England as their Home.”

“Of course we are all one,” said Amber. “But your father could scarcely have told you about Ranelagh: it did not exist in its present form in his day—that is to say—oh, you see that I am assuming that he was in Australia for a good many years.”

“I heard about Ranelagh first from a stock rider on one of my father’s farms. He was one of the best chaps in the world. He showed me a prize or two that he had won here in the old days,—his old days could not have been more than five or six years ago. I had also a groom who used to play polo here.”

“And people talk about the days of romance being past!” said Amber. “I dare say you could furnish our school—I wonder if Guy mentioned it to you——-”

“Oh, yes; he told me all about it.”

“You could furnish the romance class with some capital plots to work out, could you not?”

“I dare say I could if I knew all the circumstances that led up to the fragments that came under my notice. But I could not ask the stock rider or the groom how they came to sell their horses and settle down to live on thirty shillings a week in a colony. I could not even ask either of them what was his real name.”

“I suppose that almost every romance begins by a change of name?”

He was silent for some moments. Then he threw away the end of the cigar which he had been smoking and drank the few drops of liqueur which remained in his glass. He drew his chair an inch or two closer to hers saying in a low tone:

“It was only a short time before I left the colony that I had brought under my notice the elements of a curious romance. Would you care to hear it?”

“I should like very much. If it is unfinished it might make a good exercise for Mr. Richmond to set for one of his classes at the school—‘given the romance up to a certain point, required the legitimate and artistic ending—that would be the problem.”

“A capital notion, I think. I should like very much myself to know what the legitimate ending should be. But I have noticed now and again that Fate is inclined to laugh at any scheme devised by the most astute of men. That is to say when we have in our possession what seems the beginning of a real romance Fate steps in and brings about the most disastrous ending to the story.”

“That is nearly always what happens. It only proves that romance writers know a great deal better than Fate how to weave the threads of a story into a finished fabric.”

“Ah! those ‘accursed shears’!... I wonder if... never mind, I will tell you the romance as far as it came under my notice and you or your literary adviser—or perhaps your father—but I don’t suppose that Sir Creighton would trouble himself over a miniature romance.”

“Oh, wouldn’t he just? He reads nearly every novel that comes out—especially the French ones.”

“Oh, then I need not hesitate to ask you to place before him the fragment which I acquired in the colony less than a year ago.”

“It will be a capital exercise for him—working out the close artistically. The story begins in England, of course?”

“Of course. Let me think how it does begin. Yes, it begins in England—at a seaport town. There is a shipbuilding yard. The head of it is, naturally, a close-fisted, consequently a wealthy man—one of those men who from insignificant beginnings rise by their own force of character to position of wealth and influence. He has a son and the son has a friend. The son has acquired extravagant habits and his father will not sanction them, nor will he pay his debts a second time, he declares—he has already paid them once. When the relations between the father and the son are in this way strained, the son’s friend is suddenly taken sick, and after a week or two the doctors in attendance think it their duty to tell him that he cannot possibly recover—that they cannot promise him even a month’s life. The man—he must have been a young man—resigns himself to his fate and his friend, the son of the shipbuilder comes to bid him farewell. In doing so, he confesses that in what he calls a moment of madness, he was induced to forge the name of the firm on certain documents on which he raised money, but that the discovery of the forgery cannot be avoided further than another fortnight, and that will mean ruin to him. The dying man suggests—he is actually magnanimous enough—idiotic enough—to suggest that he himself should confess that he committed the crime. That will mean that his friend will be exculpated and that he himself will go to the grave with a lie on his lips and with the stigma of a crime on his memory.”

“And the other man—he actually accepted the sacrifice? Impossible!”

“It was not impossible. The impossibility comes in later on. You see, Miss Severn, the scheme appears feasible enough. One man has only a day or two to live, the other has the chance of redeeming the past and of becoming a person of influence and importance in the world. Yes, I think the scheme sounded well, especially as the real criminal solemnly swore to amend his life. Well, the confession is made in due form; and then,—here is where Fate sometimes becomes objectionable—then—the dying man ceases to die. Whether it was that the doctors were duffers, or that a more skilful man turned up I cannot say—but the man recovered and was arrested on his own confession. The other man being a kind-hearted fellow did his best to get his father to be merciful; but he was not kind-hearted enough to take the place in the dock where his friend stood a month later to receive the judge’s sentence for the crime which he had taken on his own shoulders.”

“You mean to say that he was base enough to see his friend sentenced for the forgery which he had committed?”

“That is what happened. And to show how Fate’s jests are never half-hearted, but played out to the very end in the finest spirit of comedy, it also happened that the man who was the real criminal not only saw that his friend fulfilled his part of the compact which they had made by suffering the penalty of his confession, but he himself was determined to act up to his part in the compact, for he so rigidly kept his promise to amend his life, that when his friend was released from gaol where he had been confined for more than a year, he refused to see him; the fellow had actually come to believe that he was innocent and that the other had been properly convicted!”

“That is a touch of nature, I think. And what happened then? Surely Nemesis——”

“Nemesis is one of the most useful properties of the man who weaves romances; but sometimes Nature dispenses with Nemesis. And do you know, Miss Severn, I really think that the introduction of Nemesis would spoil this particular story. At any rate I know nothing about the part that Nemesis played in this romance.”

“What, you mean to say that you know no more of the story than what you have told me?”

“Don’t you think that the story is complete in itself?”

“Not at all; it must have a sequel.”

“Oh, everybody knows—your master of the technique of romance weaving will bear me out, I am sure—that the sequel to a romance is invariably tame and quite unworthy of the first part. That is why I would rather that Mr. Richmond—or your father tried his hand at the sequel than I—yes, I would like very much to know what your father thinks the sequel should be.”

“But surely you know something more of the lives of the two men, Mr. Winwood.”

“Yes. I know that the man who suffered went out to Australia and married there—as a matter of fact I got the story from him—it was among his papers when he died; but I never found out what his real name was, and his papers failed to reveal the name of the other man; they only said that he had prospered in every undertaking to which he set his hand; so that you see he was not so unscrupulous a man as one might be led to suppose; he was most scrupulous in adhering to his part of the contract which was, of course, to lead a new life. And this shows the danger that lies in ex-parte stories: if one only heard that the man had accepted the sacrifice of his friend on his behalf, one would assume that he was certainly without scruples; whereas you see, he was as a matter of fact most careful to carry out the terms of his compact. I never heard his name either.”

There was a pause of considerable duration before Amber said:

“The story is a curious one; but I don’t think I should do well to submit it to Mr. Richmond with a view of making a class exercise out of it.”

“Well, perhaps... But I should like you to ask your father if he, ever heard a similar story before. If he is so earnest a novel reader as you say he is, the chances are that he has come across such a plot as this, and so will be able to let us know what the artistic finish should be. Here is Overton. I dare say when he has attended Mr. Richmond’s classes for a year or two, he will be in a position to say at a moment’s notice what the artistic conclusion to my story should be.”

It was only when Guy Overton dropped obtrusively into the chair nearest to her that Amber became aware of the fact that only three or four members of Mr. Shirley’s party remained on the Terrace. Josephine was still seated in one of the cane chairs and Ernest Clifton had come beside her. Lord Lull-worth and another man were standing together a little way off, still smoking.

“Good gracious! Where are the others?” cried Amber.

“They are taking a final stroll on the lawn,” said Guy. “Somebody suggested that it was a bit chilly, and so to prevent the possibility of catching cold they are walking about on the damp grass. You must have been absorbed not to notice them going. Has Miss Severn caught you for the Technical School, Pierce?”

“Miss Severn is just thinking that I am a possible candidate for the next vacant chair,” said Pierce.

“A vacant chair? You don’t want another chair, do you?” said Guy. “You’re not so important as the chap that was told by Lord Rothschild or somebody to take two chairs if he was so big an Injin as he wanted to make out.”

Pierce laughed. The story was an old one even in the Australian colonies and every one knows that the stories that have become threadbare in England are shipped off to the colonies with the shape of hat that has been called in and the opera mantle of the year before last.

“I was thinking of the chair of Romance at the School of Literature,” said he, “but I should be sorry to interfere with your prospects if you have an eye on it also.”

He rose as Lady Severn came up by the side of Mr. Shirley.

Mr. Shirley expressed the hope that Miss Severn had not been bored. She looked so absorbed in whatever tale of the bush Mr. Winwood had been telling her that he felt sure she was being bored, he said. (The people to whom Mr. Shirley was obliged to be polite were so numerous that he felt quite a relaxation in being impolite—when he could be so with impunity—now and again.)

“I never was bored in my life, Mr. Shirley,” said Amber. “Bores are the only people that are ever bored. When I hear a man complain that he has been bored I know perfectly well that what he means is that he hasn’t had all the chances he looked for of boring other people.”

“I think we must look for our wraps,” said Lady Severn.

“It’s quite time: they’re beginning to light the Chinese lanterns,” said Guy.

CHAPTER XII

It was while the Australian was telling Amber the story which had interested her so greatly that Ernest Clifton was listening to something that Josephine had to say to him—something that caused him a good deal of spare thought all the time he was driving to his rooms in St. James’s Street, and even after he had settled himself in his chair with a small tumbler half filled with Apollinaris on a table at his elbow.

The words that she had spoken to him at that time of soft sounds and lights and garden scents were not such as he had been accustomed to hear from her; though he could not but acknowledge to himself—he now and again acknowledged something to himself; never to any one else—that he had noticed signs of readiness on her part to say those very words. It had needed all his adroitness—and he had usually a pretty fair share at his command—to prevent her from saying them long ago.

“I wonder if you know how great a strain it is upon me to adhere to the compact which we made last year.”

Those were the words that she had spoken in his ear when the Terrace had become almost deserted, only Amber and Pierce Win wood remaining in the seats they had occupied while drinking their coffee, and she had spoken in so low a tone that, even with the band playing so soft and low as it was, no word could be heard by any one passing their chairs.

He had been slightly startled by her words—he thought now that he had time to think over the matter, that perhaps he should have seemed when in her presence to have been more startled than he actually was. But the fact was that he had been so startled as to be unable to discriminate exactly how startled he should seem.

It required a trained intelligence such as his to appreciate so delicate a train of thought as this. He felt that it would have been more flattering to her if he had seemed more surprised when she had spoken. It would have allowed her to feel that his confidence in her fidelity was absolute and therefore—the logic was his—she would have felt flattered. When a young woman has secretly promised eventually to marry, and in the meantime to love, a certain man, and when in the cool of the evening of a delightful day and a tranquillising dinner she confesses to him that the keeping of the “meantime” clause in her compact subjects her to a great strain, the man should of course seem greatly surprised. If he were to seem otherwise, he would in effect be saying to the girl, “I took it for granted that the strain upon you would be great.”

He could not accuse himself of any deficiency of cleverness in his attitude towards her after she had spoken that surprising sentence. He knew that there was a proper amount of feeling in the way he breathed a sibilant “H’sh—h’sh!” while turning wondering eyes upon her—their expression of surprise being not without a certain element of pain.

“H’sh—for heaven’s sake—my dearest! Oh, Josephine! But... ah, you cannot mean that—that...”

He reflected now that those jerked-out words—those unfinished sentences could scarcely have been surpassed in effect. He hoped that she felt that the hand which he had then laid upon hers, was trembling. He had meant that it should tremble. And yet now when he came to think over it, he was not quite sure that his hand should have trembled. It was just possible that a girl after speaking as she had spoken, would have been more impressed by a thoroughly firm hand touching hers—a hand whose firmness would have given her confidence, compelling her to realise the confidence which he had—well, in himself.

(He was certainly a man of exquisite judgment in subtle shades of expression.)

She had, however, not withdrawn her hand for some seconds—several seconds: the dusk had cast its friendly and fascinating shade over them: the seeming incaution of his attitude was purely imaginary. No one could see the direction taken by his hand or hers.

“I tell you, it is the truth,” she had said, withdrawing her hand. “It is a great strain that you have put upon me, Ernest. I sometimes feel like a criminal—exactly like a criminal—in the presence of my father and my mother.”

“Ah, I thought that you saw with my eyes,” he said, and the pained expression in his voice increased. “I thought that we agreed that it would be madness—your father—he would never give his consent—you yourself said so.”

“I said so—I admit; but—please don’t think that I want to—to—break it off—oh, no; I only mean to say that—that—well, I have said all that I mean to say—it is a great strain upon me and I sometimes feel very miserable about it. You can understand that it should be so, Ernest.”

“I can understand, dearest—heaven knows that I feel how——”

“I don’t know how I ever came to agree to—to all that you put upon me—I really don’t.” She had actually interrupted him with her vehemence. It seemed as if she had not heard that he had begun to speak.

And her eyes were turned, he could see, in the direction of Pierce Winwood—the man who had sat beside her at dinner and who was now sitting beside Amber Severn.

“You agreed to my suggestion because—well, because you knew what you still know—that is, that you loved a man whose hope it is to become worthy of you, Josephine. I admit that I had no right to ask you to listen to me—to hear me tell you that I loved you—when I had nothing to offer you—nothing but years of waiting—years of struggle—years of hope. And now... Josephine, do you wish to be released from your part in the compact which we made a year ago?”

“No, no; I do not wish to be released. What, can it be possible that you have so misunderstood me—that you fancy I am the sort of woman who does not know her own mind—her own heart from one day to another?”

“I know that you are steadfastness itself—only—if I have placed you in an equivocal position—if you feel that the years of waiting... what I feel exactly, my dearest, is that it would be better for both of us to separate now than for——”

“You cannot understand much of my nature if you think for a moment that, after giving you my promise, I would ask you to free me from all that the giving of that promise entailed. But I was thinking that it might be better for us to be frank.”

“Have I ever kept anything from you?”

“I mean that it might be better if you had gone to my father and told him what were your hopes—your prospects—told him that I had given you my promise, and that we meant that nothing should come between us.”

“That would have separated us in a moment—you agreed with me.”

“It might have prevented our meeting and corresponding; but if we were sure of ourselves, would it have separated us in reality? The only separation possible would be brought about by either of us loving some one else; and that we know would be impossible.”

“Dearest, that is the confession which comes from my heart daily—hourly—giving me strength to annihilate time and space, so that the years of our waiting seem no more than hours.”

“Oh, I know my own heart, Ernest; and that is why I feel that what I say is true: even though my father should refuse to listen to us, we should still not be separated. In fact I really feel that there would not be so great a barrier between us as there is now when we meet.”

“I think I know how you feel,” he said; but he had not the smallest notion of how she felt. Barrier? What barrier was she thinking of? He had not the smallest notion of what was in her mind—or for that matter, her heart.

And it seemed that she knew this for she made an attempt to explain herself.

“I mean that the secret which we share together forms a barrier between us—a sort of barrier. I feel every time that I see you, with my mother sitting by not knowing the compact which we have made—every one else too sitting by, having no idea that we are otherwise than free—I feel that I am treating them badly—that I am mean—underhanded—deceitful.”

“Ah, my Josephine... Do you fancy that any one suspects?—your friend, Miss Severn?—she is clever—she has been saying something that has frightened you?”

“Oh, cannot you even see that it would be a positive relief if any one was to suspect anything—if any one were to speak out?”

“Good heavens! What a state of nervousness you must have allowed yourself to fall into when you would feel ruin to be a relief to you.”

“Ruin?”

“Ruin, I say; because I know that in such a case I should have no chance of getting your father’s consent—yes, and not only so: when he came to learn the truth—to be made aware of my presumption he would turn his party against me, and my career would be ruined. Do you think that I am not capable of doing something in the world, Josephine, that you would stand by and see my career ruined?”

“I have every belief in your ability, only—I am not sure that a man should think so much of his career—no, I don’t mean that—I only mean that prudence and—and a career may be bought too dearly.”

“Prudence—bought too dear?”

“I wonder if, after all, I am so very different from other women in thinking that love is more to be preferred than a career.”

“Of course it is, my dearest; but—heavens above, Josephine, would you do me the injustice to believe that I would ask you to make what all the world would call an idiotic match—well, at least an imprudent match?”

“Imprudence? Who is there that can say what is a prudent marriage or what is an imprudent! If people love each other truly... psha! I have actually fallen into the strain of that detestable person—the Other Woman. I dare say that you are right and I am wrong. You see, you are a man and can reason these things out—prudent marriages and so forth; whereas I am only a woman—I cannot reason—I cannot even think—I can only feel.”

“Thank heaven for that, Josephine. Ah, believe me, I have looked at this matter from every standpoint, and I long ago came to see that there was nothing for it but to do as we are doing. Believe me, my dear girl, if you were content to marry me to-morrow just as I am, I would not be content to accept such a sacrifice on your part. And for heaven’s sake, dearest, do not let any one suspect that there exists between us this—this understanding. Ah, Josephine, you will agree with me in thinking that prudence is everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything—next, of course, to love. But above all, no one must be led to have the least suspicion——”

“Oh, have I not been prudence itself up to the present?” There was a suspicion in her voice—a suspicion of scorn,—he remembered that distinctly as he sat in his rooms recalling the whole scene an hour after it had been enacted. With that note—that half tone of scorn—their little chat ceased, for Guy Overton had come up and after him Lady Severn and Mr. Shirley, so that all that remained for him to do was to give a tender pressure with a look of courteous carelessness that was meant to prevent the possibility of any one with eyes fancying that there was tenderness in his pressure of Miss West’s fingers.

And now he was asking himself the question:

“Who is the Other Man?”

Ernest Clifton had a pretty good working acquaintance with the motives of men and women—not perhaps, quite so complete an acquaintance with these motives as he fancied he had, but still a very fair knowledge; and therefore he was asking himself that question:

“Who is the Other Man?”

He had had a good deal of trouble persuading Josephine during the preceding autumn to agree to engage herself to marry him. It had not been done in a minute. He had never before had such difficulty persuading a girl to give him such a promise. She was what physicians call “an obstinate case.” Hers was psychologically an obstinate case; but she had yielded at last to his treatment, and had given him her promise.

He flattered himself that it was his own cleverness—his own cleverness of argument—his own personality, for was not cleverness part of his personality?—that had brought her to perceive that she would be doing well to promise to marry him and at the same time to keep that promise a secret from her own father and mother and all the world besides. He remembered how he had impressed her by his story of his early struggles. He had appealed to her imagination by telling her how humble his career had been in its beginning—how, being the third son of a doctor in a village in Warwickshire, he had been thrown on the world to shift for himself when he was sixteen years of age—how he had, while working as a reporter on the staff of a Birmingham newspaper, starved himself in order to have money enough to pass University examinations and take a degree and, later on, to get called to the Bar. He told her how he had given up much of his time when practically behind the scenes at Birmingham to the study of the political machinery of a great party, with the result that he had worked himself into the position of the Secretary of the Organisation, becoming a power in his political party—a man with whom in critical times, the Head of the Cabinet had conferred before venturing upon legislation that might have a tendency to alienate a considerable proportion of his friends.

And Josephine had listened to him, and had fully appreciated his contention that for such a man as he hoped to become, the choice of a wife was a matter of supreme importance. He had given her to understand that his ideal woman was one to whom her husband would apply for counsel when he needed it—one who would be her husband’s right hand in all matters. He had seen enough, he said, to make him aware of the fact that those men who were willing to relegate their wives to a purely domestic position were the men who were themselves eventually relegated by their party to a purely domestic position: they became the domestics of their party mainly, he believed, because they had been foolish enough—conceited enough, for there is no such fool as your conceited politician—to fancy that nowadays—nay, that at any time in the history of the country, the wife of the political leader should occupy a humbler place than the political leader himself.

He had prevailed upon her, first, by stimulating her interest in himself, and secondly, by stimulating her ambition—he knew that she had ambition—and she had agreed, but only after considerable difficulty on his part, to accept his assurance that for some time at least, it would be well for their engagement to remain a secret, even from her father and mother. He had reason for knowing, he told her, that her father was antagonistic to him, on account of his alleged interference—“interference” was the word that Mr. West had freely employed at the time—with the constituency which he represented at a rather critical time. He knew, he said, that it would require time to clear the recollection of this unhappy incident from her father’s mind, so that to ask him for his consent to their engagement would be hopeless.

Well, she had, after great demur, consented to give him her promise, and to preserve the matter a secret.

And now he was sitting in his chair asking himself the question:

“Who is the Other Man?”

He was unable to answer the question; all that he could do was to keep his eyes open.

But as this was the normal state of his eyes he knew that he was not subjecting them to any condition that threatened astygia.

CHAPTER XIII

While Mr. Ernest Clifton was thinking over the question, the answer to which he believed to be vital to his interests, Amber Severn was hanging on the arm of her father as they strolled together about their rose-garden under the cool stars of the summer night. She was keeping the promise she had made to Pierce Winwood and was telling him the story—it struck her as being curious—which Pierce Winwood had told to her.

It seemed too that she had not overestimated the element of the curious which it contained, for before she had gone very far with it her father who had been, when she begun the narrative, stooping down every now and again to smell the roses as he moved from bed to bed, was standing still, quite as engrossed in hearing the story from her as she had been in hearing it from the Australian.

When she came to the end, he put his hands in his pockets, and drew a long breath, gazing, not at her face, but in an abstracted way, over her head into the distance of the shrubbery. There was a silence of considerable duration before he said,—and once again he seemed to draw a long breath:

“What did you say is the name of the man—the Australian—I was paying so little attention to you, I regret to say, when you began your story, I have actually forgotten it?”

“Pierce Winwood,” replied Amber. “I mentioned the name to you a few days ago when I told you that I had met him. You said you did not recollect hearing it before, but I now see that you recall it.”

“You are wrong, my dear; I do not recall anyone of that name,” said her father. And then he turned away from her, looking up to the topmost windows of the house, which were glowing one by one, as the servants switched on the lights in turn, preparing the rooms for the night.

Amber was a little struck at his way of taking the story. It appeared to her that he must have heard it all before, for he had not given any exclamation of surprise while she dwelt on some of the details that seemed to her rather marvellous. His attitude on hearing it to its close, was, she thought, that of a person whose distant memories have been awakened.

“What did he say was the name of the man—the man to whom the thing happened?” he asked, after another and a longer pause.

“He was unable to give me any name—either the name of the man who was falsely imprisoned or the one who allowed himself to be saved by the falsehood,” replied Amber.

“Ah... I wonder if he is anxious to find out either of those names.”

“He said nothing about that. He only told me the story because we had been talking about the romance of the colonies,” said Amber.

“Ah...”

“But now that I come to think of the way he dwelt on some of the details in the story he must take a more than ordinary amount of interest in the people of that little drama—the story would make a very good play, I think.”

“That is just what I have been thinking—a very good play. You really fancy that he took a personal interest in some of the details?”

“Well, it did not seem so to me at the moment, I must confess; but as I said just now, the more I think of it the more I feel... but perhaps I exaggerate... I can only tell you what is my impression now.”

“That is almost certain to be accurate, my dear. I am sure that you have been led to believe that I heard the story before. Of course I heard it before. What surprised me was becoming aware of the fact that I was not alone in my acquaintance with the details of the story—the man who was innocent suffering for the one who was guilty.”

“The strangest part seems to me to be that of the guilty man being content to see the innocent suffer. Is it possible that such a man could exist?”

“There are few men in existence possessing sufficient strength of mind to stand silently by while some one else—their closest friend—is suffering in their place.”

“Strength of mind? Strength of—well, they may have strength of mind,—but what about their hearts? Oh, such men could have no hearts.”

“When men set out in life with a determination that their ambition shall be realised they find that their best ally is that process of nature known as atrophy, my dear: they get rid of their hearts to make way for their ambition. At the same time you should remember that atrophy is as much a process of nature as those other processes which we associate with the action of the heart.”

“Oh, yes; I acknowledge that; and our abhorrence of the man with the atrophied heart is quite as natural as the process known as atrophy.”

Sir Creighton laughed.

“And you will be able to tell Mr. Winwood the names of the people—the two men: the man with the heart and the man with the ambition?” continued Amber.

“I could tell him both names; but I am not certain that I should tell him so much as one of them,” said her father. “At any rate, you are going to ask him to dinner. By the way, who did you say sat with him at the little feast to-night—you said he told you the story after dinner?”

“Josephine sat beside him. I think mother mentioned it when we returned,” said Amber.

“Of course she did,” said her father. “I had forgotten for the moment. And I suppose one may take it for granted that Josephine and he got on all right?”

“I’m sure they did. I hadn’t a chance of asking her. Oh, of course, they got on all right; Joe isn’t the girl to let a stranger feel ‘heavy and ill at ease,’ as the song says.”

“That occurred to me. And the man—would he tell her the story too? Oh, I don’t suppose that he would have the chance at the dinner table. He isn’t in the position of the Ancient Mariner.”

“I don’t suppose he would have told me if we hadn’t begun to talk about Australian romances. He had a groom who used to play polo at Ranelagh—and a stock rider too. Funny, isn’t it?”

“Very funny. You came to the conclusion that he was a good sort of chap?”

“You mean Mr. Winwood? Oh, yes, he is very nice.”

“I think you might ask Josephine to come on whatever night you invite him. Make it a small party, Amber.”

“I’ll make it as small as you please, if you want to talk to him afterwards. Why should not I ask him to drop in to lunch? that will be more informal, and besides, we really haven’t a spare evening for three weeks to come.”

“A capital idea! Yes, ask him to lunch. Only he may not have a spare morning for as many weeks. Don’t forget Josephine: meantime we’ll go to our beds and have a sleep or two. Who sat beside you at dinner?”

“Lord Lullworth. A nice—no, he might be nice only that he’s pig-headed. He ridiculed the school.”

They had walked towards the house, and now they were standing together at the foot of the flight of steps leading to the door by which they meant to enter.

“He ridiculed the school, did he? Well, your friend Willie Bateman will tell us that he could not do more for the school than that. By the way, did this Mr. Winwood bind you down to secrecy in regard to his story?”

“On the contrary he asked me to tell it to you; but now that I come to think of it he said he would rather that I didn’t tell it to Mr. Richmond: you see I suggested before he told it to me that it would serve—possibly—as an exercise for one of the classes.”

“I think he was right. I would advise you to refrain from telling it to Mr. Richmond or in fact to any one. I would even go the length of refraining from telling it to Josephine.”

“What! oh, he did not tell me to keep it such a secret as all that. Why shouldn’t I tell it to Joe?”

“Why should you tell it to her. It may concern this Mr. Winwood more closely than you think. You remember what the knowing man says in one of Angler’s comedies?—‘When any one tells me a story of what happened to a friend of his, I know pretty well who that friend is.’”

“You mean to say that it is—that it was——”

“I mean to say nothing more, and I would advise you to follow my example. Good-night, my dear. Don’t give too much of your thought to the question of who Mr. Winwood’s friend is—or was. He told you he was dead, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he said that he was dead and that he didn’t even know what his name was.”

“Ah, well, I have the better of him there. Goodnight.”

He kissed her, and she suffered herself to be kissed by him, but was too far lost in thought to be able to return his valediction.

She went to her dressing-room; but she heard her father go down the corridor to his study before she had reached the first lobby. She could not, however, hear the way he paced the floor of his study for some minutes before throwing himself upon his sofa, or she might have come to the conclusion that the story which she had repeated to him concerned him much more closely than it did.

But he was a scientific man and his methods of thought were scientific.

“A coincidence—a coincidence!” he muttered. “Yes, one of those coincidences that are carefully arranged for. He never would have told her the story but for the fact of his hearing that I knew all about it. It would have been a coincidence if he had told her the story without knowing who she was.”

He resumed his pacing of the room for some minutes longer, but then, with an impatient word, he extinguished the lights.

“Psha!” he said. “What does it amount to after all? Not much, only I never thought it possible that all that old business would ever be revived. I fancied that it was dead and buried long ago. It’s a pity—a great pity. Yes, that’s what I think now. But...”

He remained for a minute or two in the dark, but whatever his thoughts were he did not utter them. He went silently upstairs to his room.

When Amber saw Josephine a couple of days later and asked her to drop in to lunch on the following Friday, Josephine said she would be delighted; but when Amber mentioned immediately afterwards, that Pierce Winwood would probably be the only stranger of the party she was rather surprised to notice a little flush upon Josephine’s face followed by a little drawing down of the corners of her mouth, and the airiest shadow of a frown—perhaps a pout.

“Did you say Friday?” Josephine asked in a tone that suggested a vocal sequence to the tiny frown that might have been a pout.

“Yes, I said Friday and you said you would come. Don’t try to make out now that you misunderstood me,” cried Amber.

“I’m not going to try. Only——”

“Only what? Why should you dislike meeting Mr. Winwood? Did you expect me to ask Guy Overton or Mr. Richmond—or was it Arthur you had set your heart on? Didn’t you find Mr. Win-wood entertaining?”

“Entertaining? Entertaining?” Josephine looked at her strangely for a few moments and then gave a laugh. “Entertaining?” she said again. “I really never gave a thought to the question as to whether he was entertaining or the reverse. The men who entertain one are not always the people one wants to meet again. I think that there’s hardly any one so dull as the man who tries to be entertaining.”

“Then what have you against Mr. Winwood?” asked Amber.

“Did I say that I had somewhat against him?” cried Josephine quickly and with quite unnecessary vehemence. “Now, don’t say that I suggested to you that I disliked this Mr. Winwood. I was only—only surprised. Why should you ask me to meet him again? There was no need for me ever to meet him again. People come together at dinner or at a dance and separate and—and—that’s all right. Why shouldn’t this Mr. Winwood be allowed to drift away after this comfortable and accommodating manner?”

Amber stared at her. Her face was almost flushed with the vehemence of her words, and there was a strange sparkle in her eyes. Amber stared at this inexplicable display of feeling. She wondered what on earth had come over her friend Josephine, and had opened her mouth to say so, when Josephine prevented her speaking.

“Now, don’t say—what you’re going to say,” she cried, lifting up both her hands in an exaggerated attitude of protest which, however, but imperfectly concealed the increased flush upon her face. “Don’t say that I’m an idiot, my beloved girl, because I happen to have—to have taken an unaccountable dislike to your Mr. Winwood. I haven’t—I give you my word I haven’t in reality—as a matter of fact I think that I could almost like him, if I did not—that is to say, if I did not—do the other thing. There you are now.”

“What’s the other thing?” asked Amber.

“Good gracious! what’s the opposite to liking a man?”

“Loving a man,” cried Amber.

Josephine’s flush vanished. It was her turn to stare. She stared as a cold search-light stares.

Then she said coldly:

“I dislike your Mr. Winwood—I—I—I wonder if I don’t actually hate him. Yes, I feel that I must actually hate him or I shouldn’t be looking forward to meeting him so eagerly as I do. That’s the truth for you, my dear Amber—the truth—whatever that may mean.”

“I wish you were not coming on Friday,” said Amber, after a long, thoughtful and embarrassing pause.

“So do I. But I swear to you that nothing shall prevent my lunching with you on Friday,” cried Josephine.

And then after a moment of gravity which Amber thought might be simulated in a kind of spirit of parody of her own gravity, Josephine burst out laughing and then hurried away.

Amber felt completely puzzled by her attitude. She did not know what to make of her flushing—of her frowning—of her pouting—least of all of her outburst of laughter.

She thought over what Josephine had said; but, of course, that was no assistance to her.

If one cannot arrive at any satisfactory interpretation of a girl’s flushing and frowning and laughing one is not helped forward to any appreciable extent by recalling her words.

Amber wished with all her heart that her father had not suggested to her the asking of Josephine to this confidential little lunch which he had projected.

CHAPTER XIV

If Josephine came with great reluctance to lunch with her dearest friend because of her precipitate dislike to Mr. Winwood, she was of course sufficiently a woman of the world to avoid betraying in any way that might cause her friend to feel uncomfortable, her antipathy to him—perhaps antipathy was too strong a word to think, Amber thought; but she felt that if she did Josephine an injustice in letting so strong a word come into her mind in this connection, the mystic manner—the absurd and inexplicable contradictoriness of Josephine was alone accountable for it.

Amber felt a little nervous in observing the attitude of Mr. Winwood in respect of Josephine. If he were to give any sign of returning Josephine’s—well, not antipathy—uncongeniality would be a better word, Amber felt that she should have just cause for annoyance.

The result of her observation of him was to relieve her mind of its burden of doubt. He looked more than pleased when he found himself face to face with Miss West.

And then it was that Amber first came to perceive that Pierce Winwood was a very good-looking man. He had a frank way of standing in front of one that somehow suggested a schoolboy thirsting for information from his betters.

“I thought that London was a place where one never found out the name of one’s next door neighbour and never met the same person twice, but I am glad to discover my mistake,” said he when Josephine had shaken hands with him.

And then Amber breathed freely.

And Josephine treated him with positive cordiality—“How amazingly well a woman can conceal her real feelings,” was Amber’s thought when she noticed how pleasantly her friend smiled looking straight into Mr. Winwood’s face while she said:

“I think our life here quite delightful: we need only meet a second time the people whom we like. In the country one is compelled to take the goats with the sheep: one has no choice in the matter.”

“A second time?” said he. “What about a third time? Is a third time possible?”

“Almost inevitable—if one passes the second time,” said Josephine.

“You are building up my hopes,” he said, turning away from her.

She was petting the Persian cat, Shagpat by name.

And at this moment Sir Creighton entered the room and his daughter noticed the quick scrutiny that he gave to the face of the younger man. She also noticed the return of that nervous awkwardness which the younger man had displayed on meeting her on the Sunday afternoon. It never occurred to her that the man who called himself Pierce Winwood and who said that his father had once known hers might be an impostor.

Sir Creighton shook hands with him and said he was glad that he was able to come.

“There are so many things going on just now, are there not?” he said. “And I suppose you are anxious to attend everything, Mr. Winwood.”

“One must lunch somewhere,” said Amber. “Lunch is a sort of postscript to one’s breakfast in London town,” said Sir Creighton. “I don’t suppose that any one except we working men can get over breakfast before eleven. What time does your father breakfast on the morning after a late sitting of the House, Josephine?”

“He is invariably the first one of the household to be in the breakfast room,” said Josephine.

“I find people in London the earliest to bed and the earliest to rise of any I have ever known,” remarked Winwood. “I was led into Bohemia the other evening. I found it the most orderly and certainly the earliest of communities. The greater number of the revellers drank nothing but Apollinaris and hurried off to catch suburban trains.”

“I heard some one say the other day that the Underground Railway has done more to advance the cause of temperance than all the lecturers in the world,” said Lady Severn.

“I am afraid that even the once potent magic-lantern must take a second place as a reforming agent,” said Sir Creighton.

“I believe that there is still one real Bohemian alive in London to-day,” said Josephine. “He is one of the aborigines and he is as carefully looked after as if he were a Maori or a Pitcairn Islander.”

“He was pointed out to me,” said Winwood. “He is, I hear, the sole survivor of a once dilapidated community. He forms an excellent example to those who may fancy that there was anything fascinating in mediocrity combined with potations.” And all this time Amber perceived that her father was scrutinising the face of Pierce Winwood, but giving no indication that he recalled in the face of the son any of the features of the father, whom her father was supposed to know.

The conversation which was being eked out until the meal should be announced became too attenuated even to serve this purpose, but just at the right moment the relief came; and of course when the little party had settled down at the table topics were not wanting, and also as a matter of course every topic had to be general: there was no possibility of Sir Creighton and Winwood discussing between themselves any matter that they might have to discuss. Amber, who gave herself up to observing everything, came to the conclusion that on the whole her father was favourably impressed by the personality of the Australian; but somehow the latter did not succeed in inducing Josephine to talk as she usually could talk. She was not so silent as to call for remark; but there was at the table none of that “forced draught” conversation which Sir Creighton usually found so stimulating.

When the two men were left together, and had lighted cigars, the younger did not wait for his host to lead up to the question of his identity.

“I have been wondering, with some anxiety, Sir Creighton, if I have yet suggested any person to your memory.”

“I am a scientific man, and therefore not quite so liable as most people to accept fancies on the same basis as real evidence,” said Sir Creighton. “It would be impossible for me to say that your features suggested to me those of any man with whom I was acquainted years ago—how many years ago?”

Winwood shook his head.

“I cannot say how many years ago it was that you were acquainted with my father,” he said. “I thought that perhaps—no one has ever suggested a likeness between my father and myself, still I thought—well, one often sees transmitted some personal trait—some mannerism that recalls an individuality. That is a scientific truth, is it not, Sir Creighton?”

“It is highly scientific,” said Sir Creighton with a laugh. “Yes, on that basis, I admit that—once or twice, perhaps—a recollection seemed to be awakened; but—what is in my mind at this moment, is the imitation of well-known actors to which one is treated in unguarded moments by popular entertainers. I dare say that you have noticed also that it is only when the entertainer has announced the name of the well-known actor whom he imitates that the imitation becomes plausible. Now, although I occasionally boast of being influenced only by scientific methods, still I fancy that if I knew the name of your father I should have less difficulty recalling the man whose personalities—that is some of them—a few—are echoed by you. I knew no one bearing the name Winwood.”

“You ask me the question which I was in hopes you could answer, Sir Creighton,” said Winwood. “I had no idea that the name by which my father was known during the forty years or so that he lived in the colony was an assumed one. I never found out what was his real one. To say the truth, it is only recently that my curiosity on this point has been aroused. In a young colony there is a good deal of uncertainty with regard to names.”

“I dare say. You told my daughter a curious and an almost incredible story, however, and she repeated it to me,” said Sir Creighton.

“You will not tell me that you never heard that story before,” cried the younger man, half rising from his seat. “If you tell me so, I shall feel uncommonly like an impostor.”

“Oh, no; I heard all the details of that story long ago,” replied Sir Creighton. “Only, as it was told to me I fail to see what bearing it has upon your identity.”

“The man who suffered in the place of his friend was my father, Sir Creighton,” said Winwood. “Now you know the name of the original actor of whose personality I have been giving you imitations—faint imitations, I dare say.”

“Yes, now I know; and I admit that I see the original much more clearly,” said Sir Creighton laughing. But his listener was not laughing. He was leaning his head on his hand, his elbow being on the table, and seemed to be lost in thought. There was no elation in his expression at Sir Creighton’s admission.

Sir Creighton became equally grave in a moment.

“It was the cruellest thing and the most heroic thing ever done in the world,” said he in a low voice. “It was to me your father told the truth about that confession of his, and he did so only on my promising in the most solemn way that I would keep the matter a secret. I often wonder if I was justified in adhering to my promise.”

“When he told me the story he rather prided himself on his judgment in selecting you as his confidant,” said Winwood. “Yes; he said that he knew he could trust you to keep his secret.”

“I don’t think that I would have kept it if he had entrusted it to me before he had suffered his imprisonment,” said Sir Creighton. “He did not do so, however, until his release and when he was on the point of sailing for South America—it was for South America he sailed, not Australia.”

“He remained for nearly five years in Rio Janeiro,” said Winwood. “The training which we received at the engineering works he was able to turn to good account at Rio, and so far as I could gather he made enough money to give him a start in Australia. He succeeded and I think he was happy. It was not until he had reached his last year that he told me the story.”

“He did so without any bitterness in regard to the other man, I am sure,” said Sir Creighton.

“Without a single word of reproach,” said Win-wood. “He really felt glad that the other man had prospered—he told me that he had prospered and that he had reached a high position in the world.”

“You see your father rightly thought of himself as having saved the man from destruction; not merely from the disgrace which would have been the direct result of his forgery being discovered, but from the contemptible life which he was leading. I don’t know if your father told you that one of the conditions of the strange compact between them was that he would change his life; and for once the man fulfilled that part of his compact. Your father saved him.”

Winwood nodded in assent, while he still allowed his head to rest on his hand, as if he were lost in thought.

Suddenly he turned his eyes upon Sir Creighton, then drew his chair closer to him, and leaning forward, said:

“Sir Creighton, will you tell me what is the name of that man?”

Sir Creighton was awaiting this question. He had been considering for the previous two days what answer he should return to this question, and yet he felt taken somewhat unawares for he did not expect that his conversation with Winwood would lead to a view of his father’s act from the standpoint from which it now seemed that he regarded it.

“It appears to me that your father had his own reasons—very excellent reasons too—for refraining from telling you either his own name or the name of the man whom he saved from destruction,” he said. “I wonder if I have any right to make you acquainted with what he withheld. What is your opinion on this matter?”

“I asked you to tell me the man’s name, Sir Creighton,” replied Winwood.

“I have no doubt that you are intensely interested in the search for his name,” said Sir Creighton. “But do you really think that I should be justified in telling you what your father clearly meant to remain a secret? Just at present I feel very strongly that I have no right to do this. If any one would be happier for my telling you the man’s name I dare say that I might, at least, be tempted to do so; but no one would be the happier for it. On the contrary, you yourself would, I know, be sorry that I told you the name of the man, and as for the man—as I am acquainted with him to-day and have some respect for him——”

“Some respect?”

“Some respect—in fact, in spite of my knowing all that I do, a good deal of respect—as, I repeat, I have no desire to make him unhappy, I shall not tell you what is his name—I shall not tell him that the son of the man whom he allowed to suffer for his crime, is alive and anxious to know all about him.”

“You mean that you will not tell me—-just yet.”

“That is exactly what is in my mind at this moment. I should have added those words of yours ‘just yet,’ to what I said regarding both you—and the man. I may think it due to you to tell you some day; and I may also think it due to—the man to tell him. Meantime—not just yet—I hope you are not unsatisfied, my boy?”

Sir Creighton put out his hand with more than cordiality—absolute tenderness, and the younger man took it, and was deeply affected.

“I am satisfied—more than satisfied,” he said in a low voice. “I shall try to be worthy of such a father as I had.”

“You are worthy, my boy—I know it now,” said Sir Creighton. “You do not shrink from self-sacrifice. I hoped to find that my old friend had such a son as you. I may be able to do something for you—to help you in a way that—that—oh, we need not lay plans for the future; it is only such plans that are never realised. Now I think we can face the drawing-room.”

CHAPTER XV

Josephine was saying good-bye to Lady Severn and Amber was doing her best to induce her to stay. As the two men paused outside the drawing-room door there was a frou-frou of laughter within the room—the rustle of the drapery of a flying jest at Amber’s insistence.

“You will not go, please,” said Pierce when Amber appealed to him to stand between the door and Josephine. “You cannot go just at the moment of my return, especially as Miss Severn has promised to show me the roses.”

“The argument is irresistible,” said Josephine with a little shrug following a moment of irresolution. “But that was not Amber’s argument, I assure you.”

“I merely said that I expected some of my friends to come to me to report their progress,” said Amber.

“That seems to me to be an irresistible reason for a hurried departure,” said Sir Creighton.

“Oh, I wouldn’t suggest that they were so interesting as that,” said Josephine, with a laugh, a laugh that made one—some one—think of the laughter of a brook among mossy stones.

“Interesting enough to run away from?” said Pierce. “Well, any one who is interesting enough for Miss West to run away from is certainly interesting enough for an ordinary person to stay for—but for that matter, I did not suggest that I was going away.”

“You saved us the trouble of insisting on your staying—for some time, at any rate,” said Lady Severn.

“As long as you can after the arrival of the objects of interest,” said Sir Creighton.

“And now I think we may go among the roses without reproach,” said Josephine.

She led the way out to the terrace and then down the steps into the garden, and was followed by Amber and Pierce, and for half an hour they strolled about the rose beds, Amber being every minute more amazed at the self-repression of Josephine in regard to Mr. Winwood. Although she had frankly acknowledged that she had formed a dislike to Mr. Winwood, she had not only come to lunch when she knew that he would be the only other guest, but she had allowed herself to be easily persuaded to stay on after the hour when without being thought impolite, she might have gone away.

And she was not even content with these tokens of self-abnegation, for here she was after the lapse of half an hour, still conversing with Mr. Winwood when really she had no need to remain for longer than ten minutes in the garden!

And she was actually pretending to take an interest in all that he was saying, an interest so absorbing as to give Amber herself an impression of being neglected.

She had always felt that Josephine was indeed a true friend, but she had never before had offered to her so impressive a series of tokens of her friendship. The friendship that dissembles a rooted dislike for a fellow-visitor is of sterling quality Amber felt; and with this feeling there was joined one of admiration for the way in which her friend played her part.

Poor Mr. Winwood! He might really have believed from her manner that he had favourably impressed Josephine. Once or twice Amber fancied that she saw on his face a certain look that suggested that he was gratified at his success in holding the attention of the fair dissembler by his side.

Poor Mr. Winwood!

Perhaps Josephine was carrying the thing too far—perhaps she was over-emphasising her attitude of polite attention. It would, the kind-hearted young woman felt, be a very melancholy thing if so good a sort of man as this Mr. Winwood were led to fancy that—that—oh, well, no doubt in the colonies young men were more simple-minded than those at home—more susceptible to the charming manners of a beautiful girl, being less aware of the frequency with which charming manners are used—innocently perhaps—to cloak a girl’s real feelings. It would, she felt, be truly sad if this man were to go away under the belief that he was creating a lasting impression upon Josephine; whereas, all the time, it was only her exquisite sense of what was due to her host and hostess—it was only her delicate appreciation of what her friendship for Amber herself demanded of her, that led her to simulate a certain pleasure from associating with Mr. Winwood.

The kind thoughtfulness of Miss Severn not merely for the present but for the future comfort of at least one of her guests was causing her some slight uneasiness. She became aware of the fact that her mother was making a sign to her from one of the windows of the drawing-room that opened upon the terrace walk.

“Some of my visitors must have arrived already,” she cried. “Oh, yes, it is Guy. You must not run away. He would feel that you were rude.”

“And he would be right: he has his sensitive intervals,” said Winwood. “We should not hurt his feelings.”

“You will not run away at once?” said Amber tripping towards the house. “Oh, thank you.”

They showed no sign of having any great desire to run away.

“I never felt less inclined to run away than I do just now,” said Winwood, looking at the girl who remained by his side.

“You are so fond of roses—you said so.”

She was holding up to her face a handful of crimson petals that she had picked off one of the beds.

“Yes, I am fond of—of roses,” he said. “Somehow England and all things that I like in England are associated in my mind with roses.”

“It is the association of the East with the West,” said she. “The rose that breathes its scent through every eastern love song is still an English emblem; just as that typical Oriental animal, the cat, suggests no more of its native jungle than is to be found in the Rectory Garden.”

“And the turtle of the tropics does not send one’s thoughts straying to Enoch Arden’s island and the coral lagoon but only to the Mansion House and a city dinner.”

She laughed.

“I am sorry I mentioned the cat,” she said. “The first English rose I ever saw was when we were in camp with Methuen at the Modder River,” he said.

He had taken her by surprise. “You went through the campaign?” she cried and he saw a new interest shining in her eyes. “I did not hear that you had been a soldier. You did not mention it when you sat beside me at Ranelagh. You were one of the Australians?”

“We were talking of roses,” said he. “It was out there I saw an English rose at Christmas. It had been sent out to a trooper who had been at Chelsea Barracks, by his sweetheart. Her brother was a gardener and the rose had evidently been grown under glass to send out to him.”

“There is one English love-story with the scent of the rose breathing through it,” she cried. “‘My luv is like a redde redde rose’ is an English song—the rose you speak of was red, of course.”

“Yes,” he replied after a little pause; “it was red—red when I found it—under his tunic.”

She caught her breath with the sound of a little sob in her throat.

“The pity of it! the pity of it! she had sent it out for his grave.”

She put her face once again down to the crimson petals which remained in her hands; and when she let them drop to the grass he saw that two of them were clinging together.

“That was the first time I saw an English rose,” he said, “and I have never seen one since without thinking of what it symbolised. The love that is stronger than death.”

“Yes,” she said, “yes.”

And, curiously enough, it seemed that that word was the most complete commentary upon the little story that he had told to her in so few sentences. It also seemed to suggest something of the nature of a comment upon his last remark—a confidential comment.

He nodded, repeating the word, but with a longer interval between the repetition of it:

“Yes—yes.”

For a few moments they stood together in silence. The sound of voices—a faint murmur—came from the open window of the drawing-room. The note of a blackbird from Kensington Gardens thrilled through the air.

As if under the influence of the one impulse, Josephine and her companion walked once more down the garden—slowly—musingly—silently. It was not until they had made a complete circuit of the rose beds and had returned to the parterre where they had been standing, that he said:

“Yes—yes: I know that I shall never see a rose again without thinking that—that—I have been among the roses with you.”

He noticed that she gave a little start—was it a shudder?—and then glanced quickly towards him. She made a motion with one of her hands—she drew a sudden breath and said quickly in a low tone:

“Mr. Winwood—I think—that is—oh, let us go into the house. I never wish to walk in a garden of roses again.”

He knew that whatever she had meant to say when she drew that long breath, she had not said it: she had broken down and uttered something quite different from what had been on her mind—on her lips.

Already she was half way to the terrace steps, and she had run up them and was within the room before he moved.

She was greeting some one in the room. How loud her laugh was!

And yet he had thought half an hour before that he had never heard so low a laugh as hers!—the laughter of a brook among mossy stones.

But a spate had taken place.

He went down once more to the end of the garden alone thinking his thoughts.

And when, five minutes later, he went slowly up the terrace steps he found that Josephine had gone away.

“She said good-bye to you before she left the garden, did she not?” cried Amber, while he glanced round the room.

“Oh, yes, she said good-bye,” he replied.

And then he cried out, seeing Guy Overton on a stool:

“Hullo, you here? Why, I thought that this was one of your school days.”

Amber had never before heard him speak in so boisterous a tone. He usually spoke in a low voice.

And she had also noticed that Josephine had laughed much louder than was her wont.

But she was sure that Josephine had not been rude to him. Josephine was not one of those horrid girls who cannot be clever without being rude.

CHAPTER XVI

Guy has been telling me all about his great investment,” cried Amber. “You never mentioned it to us, Mr. Winwood. But perhaps you didn’t hear of it?”

“You were the first one to whom I told it,” said Guy looking at her sentimentally. His tone was syrupy with sentimentality.

Pierce laughed quite boisterously. “What has he been doing?” he said. “I certainly heard nothing of it. It hasn’t yet been put into the hands of that Mr. Bateman, the advertiser whom I have been eluding for the past fortnight. Have you bought the Duke’s racers or what?”

“Not much,” said Guy. “I’ve got something more solid for my money.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” said Pierce. “I saw one of the Duke’s racers and in the matter of solidity—but what have you bought?”

“The Gables—I’ve just bought The Gables. You must come down and see me, Pierce, old chap—you really must.”

He had the air of the old-fashioned proprietor—the owner of broad acres and so forth.

“I can see you quite well enough from where I stand—that is, when you keep still. Don’t wriggle about, sonny, but tell me what are The Gables? Whose gables have you been buying?”

“What are The Gables? What are—oh, he has just come from Australia. He has never heard of the historic mansion—see the agent’s catalogue—The historic mansion known as The Gables. Why, don’t you know enough of the history of your native land to be aware of the fact that it was at The Gables that King Charles the First—or was it Henry the First?—signed something or other.”

“Magna Charta?” suggested Pierce blandly.

“No, not Magna Charta,” said Guy with the natural irritation of a great scholar who, on forgetting for a moment an important name or date, hears the haphazard prompting of a tyro. “Not Magna Charta—that was somewhere else. Never mind, Nell Gwyn once lived at The Gables,” he added proudly. “You’ve heard of Nell Gwyn, I suppose?”

“Not in connection with the history of my native land, Mr. Overton. You will search in vain the history of Australia from the earliest date to find any allusion there to a visit from Nell Gwyn,” said Pierce. “But I’ve had fifteen houses pointed out to me within the four-mile radius, in each of which Nell Gwyn lived. And yet the greatest authority on the subject says she never lived in any but two.”

“Well, The Gables was one of them,” said Guy. “I should know it for the place is mine. I’ve just bought it.”

“The dearest old house by the river that was ever seen,” said Amber. “You must have seen it, Mr. Winwood. On the way to Hurley—you told us you went to Hurley. The river is at the bottom of the lawn.”

“Yes, in summer; but in the winter the lawn is at the bottom of the river—why it was Guy himself who told me that some friend of his had said that,” laughed Pierce. “Anyhow you’ve bought the place. Bravo, Guy! You got it cheap?”

“Not so cheap as I meant to when I set out to do it,” said Guy. “But another chap was in the running for it too—a brewer chap! Disgusting, isn’t it, that all these fine old places are getting into the hands of that sort of man?”

“It is revolting to the old stock like you and me, Guy,” responded Pierce with great solemnity.

“I got the historic mansion, the grounds with the wreck of three boats and two boathouses—the stables and a piggery—a decent sized piggery—accommodate a family of seventeen. I don’t suppose that I’ll ever want more than seventeen pigs at one time. The piggery is the only part of the place that has been occupied for the past two years. I got the furniture at a valuation too.”

“And the pigs?” suggested Pierce.

“Oh, I won’t need the pigs. I’m going to ask a crowd of you chaps down some Saturday,” said Guy, and he could not for the life of him understand why Lady Severn as well as Amber and Winwood burst out laughing. He thought it as well to allow himself to be persuaded that he had said something witty, so he too began to laugh; but he laughed so entirely without conviction that every one else in the room roared.

“Why shouldn’t I have a crowd down to keep me company?” he enquired blandly. “What’s the good of having a country house unless to entertain one’s friends. I’m going down as soon as I can. I’m not such a fool as to keep up two establishments. I have been paying two pounds a week for my rooms in town up to the present. That’s a lot of money, you know.”

“You’ll be able to save something now,” said Pierce.

“Not so much in the beginning. The house is not more than a couple of miles from your place, Lady Severn,” said Guy, and at this further suggestion of cause and effect there was another laugh.

He felt that he had joined a merry party.

“I don’t believe that it can be more than four miles from The Weir,” said Amber, “so that we shall be constantly meeting.”

“Yes—yes—I foresaw that,” acquiesced Guy. “And I hope the first Sunday that you are at The Weir, you will come up to my place and give me a few hints about the furniture and things. Shouldn’t I have a cow? I’ve been thinking a lot about a cow. And yet I don’t know. If I get a cow I must have some one to look after it. And yet if I don’t get a cow I’m sure to be cheated in my milk and butter.”

“Yes, you are plainly on the horns of a dilemma,” said Pierce, going across the room to say good-bye to Lady Severn, and then returning to shake hands with Amber.

“I hope that you and papa had a satisfactory chat together,” she said with a note of enquiry in her voice.

“A most satisfactory chat: I think that I convinced him that I was not an impostor.”

And so he went away, narrowly watched by Guy, especially when he was speaking to Amber. Guy did not at all like that confidential exchange of phrases in an undertone. Pierce was clearly worth having an eye on.

“I knew you’d be interested in hearing of my purchase,” he remarked to Amber, assuming the confidential tone that Pierce had dropped.

“Oh, yes; we are both greatly interested, mother and I,” said Amber. “But what about your work at the school? I hope you don’t intend to give up your work at the school.”

There was something half-hearted in his disclaimer. He cried:

“Oh, no—no—of course not!” but it was plain that his words did not carry conviction with them to Amber, for she shook her head doubtfully.

“I’m afraid that if you give all your time up to considering the question of cows and things of that type you’ll not have much time left to perfect yourself in literature,” she said.

There was a kind of hang-literature expression on his face when she had spoken, and she did not fail to notice it; she had shaken her head once more before he hastened to assure her that he had acquired his new possession mainly to give himself a chance of doing some really consecutive literary work.

“The fact is,” said he, “I find that the distractions of the town are too great a strain on me. I feel that for a man to be at his very best in the literary way he should live a life of complete retirement—far from the madding crowd and that, you know. Now, I’ve been a constant attender at the school for the past three weeks—ask Barnum himself if I haven’t—I mean Richmond—Mr. Richmond. Why, only a few days ago he complimented me very highly on my purpose. He said that if I persevered I might one day be in a position to enter the Aunt Dorothy class. Now, when I’ve settled down properly at The Gables I mean to write an Aunt Dorothy letter every week. That’s why I want to be at my best—quite free from all the attractions of the town—I should like to have your opinion about the cow.”

But he was not fortunate enough to be able to learn all that she thought on this momentous question, for Arthur Galmyn was shown in and had a great deal to say regarding his progress in the city. He had learned what contango really did mean and he hoped that he was making the best use of the information which he had acquired. He was contemplating a poetical guide to the Stock Exchange, introducing the current price of the leading debenture issues; and, if treated lyrically, a Sophoclean Chorus dealing with Colonial securities; or should it be made the envoi of a ballade or a Chaunt Royal? He was anxious to get Amber’s opinion on this point, there was so much to be said for and against each scheme.

Amber said she was distinctly opposed to the mingling of poetry and prices. She hoped that Mr. Galmyn was not showing signs of lapsing once again into the unprofitable paths of poetry. Of course she wished to think the best of every one, but she really felt that he should be warned in time. Would it not be a melancholy thing if he were to fall back into his old habits? she asked him.

And while he was assuring her that she need have no apprehension on this score, as he felt that he was completely cured of his old disorder, through six months contact with the flags of the Stock Exchange, Mr. Willie Bateman and Mr. Owen Glendower Richmond were announced, and each of them had a good deal to say to Amber.

What all these young men had to say to her was in the nature of reporting progress. Mr. Galmyn, whom she had turned from the excitement of poetry to the academic quietude of the Stock Exchange, had to tell her how thoughtfully he had made use of some fictitious information which he had disseminated for the purpose of “bulling” a particular stock; Mr. Bateman had a great deal to say regarding the system which he had perfected for bringing American heiresses under the notice of the old county families; he had also come to her for sympathy in respect of one of his failures. He had been entrusted with the indelicate duty of obtaining a knighthood for a certain gentleman of no conspicuous ability—a gentleman who was quite down to the level of the usual candidates for Knighthood. He had advised this gentleman to offer, through the public prints, to present his valuable collection of Old Masters to the Nation; and he had done so. For some reason or other—possibly because all the pictures were the most genuinely spurious collection ever brought together by one man—there was really no knowing why—the Nation had refused the gift.

This was one of his failures, Mr. Bateman said; and it was but indifferently compensated for by his success in obtaining a popular preacher to deliver a sermon on a novel lately published by a lady whom he had been making widely conspicuous for some months back as being the most retiring woman in England. The preacher had consented, and the novel, which was the most characteristic specimen of Nineteenth Century illiterature, was already in its sixth edition.

“But on the whole, I have no reason to complain of my progress in my art,—the art which is just now obtaining recognition as the most important in all grades of society,” said Mr. Bateman. “The Duchesses—well, just see the attitude of the various members of a Ducal House to-day. Her Grace is reciting for an imaginary charity on the boards of a Music Hall, and hopes by that to reach at a single bound the popularity of a Music Hall artiste; another member is pushing herself well to the front as the head of the committee for supplying the British army with Tam o’ Shanter caps, another of the ladies is writing a book on the late war and the most ambitious of all is, they say, going to see what the Divorce Court can do for her. Oh, no, the Duchesses don’t need my help; I sometimes envy them their resources. But think of the hundreds of the aristocracy—the best families in England, Miss Severn, who are falling behind in the great struggle to advertise themselves not from any longing after obscurity; but simply because they don’t know the A B C of the art. Yes, you’ll hear next week of a well-known and beautiful Countess—in personal advertising ‘Once beautiful always beautiful’ is an axiom, as you’ll notice in every Society Column you glance at—the beautiful Countess, I say, will occupy the pulpit of a high-class Conventicle.”

“Following your advice?” said Amber.

“I arranged every detail,” said Mr. Bateman proudly And then came the turn of Mr. Owen Glendower Richmond, to report the progress of the Technical School of Literature.

His report was not a long one.

“Miss Turquoise B. Hoskis, of Poseidon, in the State of Massachusetts, has joined the Historical Romance class,” said Mr. Richmond.

“What, the daughter of the Pie King?” cried Amber.

“The daughter of Hannibal P. Hoskis, the Pie King,” said Mr. Richmond.

Before the suspiration of surprise which passed round the drawing-room at this piece of news had melted into silence, the servant announced Lord Lullworth.

This was certainly a greater surprise for Amber than the news that the daughter of the great American, the head of the Pumpkin Pie Trust who was making his way rapidly in English society, had become a member of one of Mr. Richmond’s classes. And that was possibly why she was slightly put out by the appearance of the young man who had sat beside her at the Ranelagh dinner. She did not know that he had asked Lady Severn for permission to call upon her, and that Lady Severn had mentioned Friday afternoon to him.

She could not quite understand why she should feel pleased at his coming—pleased as well as flushed. She was acquainted with peers by the dozen and with the sons of peers by the score, and yet somehow now she felt as if she were distinctly flattered.

That was why she asked him how he was and apologised for the absence of her mother.

(Lady Severn had left her daughter in possession of the drawing-room when Mr. Bateman was talking about his Duchesses: she pretended that she had an appointment which it was necessary to keep.)

CHAPTER XVII

Lord Lullworth, while he was drinking his tea and admiring to the full the exquisite electrical apparatus by which it was prepared, was giving some attention to the other young men—Mr. Richmond might possibly still be thought of by some people as a young man—who occupied chairs or stools around Miss Severn’s seat. Guy Overton he knew pretty well, and he had never pretended that he thought highly of his talents—by talents Lord Lullworth meant his seat on a pony something between twelve and thirteen hands high—or of his disposition. (He had heard of his habitually dining at a greasy Italian restaurant and drinking Chianti in half flasks.)

He knew nothing about the other men, but he knew instinctively that he would never think much of them.

And then they began to talk, and she actually listened to them and pretended that she was interested in what they were talking about—he was anxious to think the best of her, so he took it for granted that her attention to what they were saying was only simulated. He was not fond of hearing himself talk, so he did not feel all left out in the cold while the others were—well, the exact word that was in his mind as he listened to them was the word “jabbering.” They were jabbering, the whole racket of them, weren’t they?

“We really can’t spare you another week, Miss Severn,” one of the racket was saying—the eldest of them, he was as high-toned as to his dress as a shopwalker in a first-class establishment; a figurant whom he greatly resembled in Lord Lullworth’s judgment. “Oh, no; we cannot spare you so soon. I am holding a special class on The Novel With A Purpose. I think you may find it interesting, though doubtless you are acquainted with some points in the technique of this class of fiction. The title, for instance; the title must be sharp, quick, straightforward, like the bark of a dog, you know: ‘The Atheist,’ ‘The Nigger,’ ‘The Haggis,’ ‘The Bog-trotter,’ ‘The Humbug’—all these are taking titles; they have bark in them. And then in regard to the Purpose—in The Novel With A Purpose, no one should have the least idea of what the Purpose is, but one must never be allowed to forget for a moment that the Purpose is there. It is, however, always as well for a writer of such a novel to engage the services of an interviewer on the eve of the publication of the novel to tell the public how great are his aims, and then he must not forget to talk of the sea—that sea, so full of wonder and mystery beside which The Novel With A Purpose must be written and a hint must be dropped that all the wonder and mystery of the sea, and the sound of the weeping of the women and the wailing of the children, and the strong true beating hearts of great men anxious to strangle women and to repent grandly in the last chapter, will be found in the book, together with a fine old story—as old as the Bible—if you forget to drag the Bible into the interview no one will know that you have written The Novel With A Purpose—one story will do duty for half a dozen novels: two women in love with one man—something Biblical like that. But doubtless you have studied the technique of this class of fiction, Miss Severn.”

“I have never studied it so closely,” replied Amber. “I have always read books for pleasure, not for analysis.”

And Lord Lullworth kept staring away at Mr. Richmond, and then at Amber. What the mischief were they talking about anyway?

And then Willie Bateman chipped in.

“I have always regarded the Interview as obsolete,” said he. “It does not pay the photographer’s expenses. Even the bulldog as an advertising medium for an author has had his day—like every other dog. A publisher told me with tears in his eyes that he saw the time when the portrait of an author’s bull pup in a lady’s weekly journal would have exhausted a large edition of his novel—even a volume of pathetic poems has been known to run into a second edition of twenty-five copies after the appearance in an evening paper of the poet’s black-muzzled, pig-tailed pug. I’m going to give the Cat a trial some of these days. I believe that the Manx Cat has a brilliant future in store for it, and the Persian—perhaps a common or garden-wall cat will do as well as any other—I wouldn’t be bound with the stringency of the laws of the Medes and Persians as to the breed—I’d just give the Cat a chance. Properly run I believe that it will give an author of distinction as good a show as his boasted bull terrier.”

And Lord Lullworth stared away at the speaker. Great Queen of Sheba! What was he talking about anyway?

And then Amber, who had been listening very politely to both of the men who had been trying to impart their ideas to her, turned to Lord Lull-worth and asked him if he had heard that Mr. Over-ton had purchased The Gables, and when he replied with a grin that he hoped Overton hadn’t paid too much money for it, Overton hastened to place his mind at ease on this point. The purchase of the place had involved an immediate outlay of a considerable sum of money, he admitted, but by giving up his chambers in town and the exercise of a few radical economies he hoped to see his way through the transaction. Would Lord Lullworth come down some week’s end and have a look round?

Lord Lullworth smilingly asked for some superficial information regarding the Cellar.

And then Mr. Owen Glendower Richmond and Arthur Galmyn went off together, and when Guy Overton found that he had to hurry off—the cuisine at the Casa Maccaroni was at its best between the hours of six and seven—Willie Bateman, who wanted to have a quiet word with him went away by his side. (He wondered if Guy would think it worth his while to pay a hundred pounds to have a stereo-block made of the river view of The Gables for an evening paper, to be inserted with a historical sketch of the house and some account of the family of the new purchaser.)

Lord Lullworth laughed pleasantly—confidentially, when he and Amber were left alone together.

“They are all so clever,” said Amber apologetically. She had really quite a faculty interpreting people’s thoughts.

“Yes,” said he, “they are, as you say, a rummy lot.”

Then she too laughed.

“That’s your way of putting it,” she said.

“I suppose so. What fun chaps can find in jabbering away like that beats me. They’re a bit pinkeyed, aren’t they now?”

Amber evaded a question which might possibly be enigmatical, she thought.

“But they are really very clever,” said she. “Arthur Galmyn was a poet, but I saw that he had not patience enough to wait for fame to come to him.”

“Why couldn’t he buy a practice in a populous suburban district?” asked Lord Lullworth. “If a chap can’t succeed as a specialist in town he should set up as a general practitioner in the suburbs or in the provinces.”

“I suppose a poet is a sort of literary specialist,” said Amber. “Never mind,—he is all right now: he is making money on the Stock Exchange.”

“You made him go on the Stock Exchange?”

“Oh, yes; we talked it over together. And I got Guy Overton to join the Technical School of Literature, and I believe he is improved by doing so already.”

“And you got the other chap to set up the school, I suppose?”

“It was an old idea of mine. When people have a Conservatoire of Music, and the Academy School of Painting, why should the art of Literary Composition be allowed to struggle on as best it can without instruction or advice?”

“That’s just what I should like to know. And the other bounder—I mean the chap who talked that about bulldogs and the cats and things—a bit of a rotter he was, wasn’t he? Did you advise him in any direction? I didn’t quite make out what his line was.”

“Yes, it was I who suggested to him the splendid possibilities there were in the way of advertising things. I showed him in what a haphazard way people advertised just now, and persuaded him that there was money in any systematic scheme of advertising, and he has gone far ahead of anything I ever imagined to be possible.”

“I should think he has. And what are they up to, the lot of them, can you guess, Miss Severn?”

“Up to?—what are they up to? Why, haven’t I just explained that each of them is making a profession——”

“Oh, yes; but do you fancy that they’re doing it for love of the profession or for—for—any other reason?”

“I don’t quite see what you mean, Lord Lullworth.”

“It’s a bit rough to be frank with a girl; and it’s rarely that a chap has to say just what he means, but there are times...”

He spoke apologetically and paused, allowing his smile to rest upon her for a moment. It was the smile of a man who hopes he hasn’t gone too far, and trusts to get out of an untenable position by the aid of a temporising smile.

She returned his smile quite pleasantly. She knew that the sentences over the utterance of which men hesitate are invariably the most interesting that they have to speak.

“What is it?” she asked. “Everybody speaks frankly to me: they don’t treat me as they do other girls, you know.”

“It’s a dangerous experiment talking frankly to a girl,” said he. “But if it comes to that, it’s not so dangerous an experiment as a girl talking frankly to a man—leading him to do things that he hasn’t a mind to do—may be that he hates doing.”

“I was born in an atmosphere of experiments,” said she. “I delight in having dealings with new forces, and making out their respective coefficients of energy.”

“Oh; then you don’t happen to think that these chaps who were here just now are in love with you? That’s frank enough, isn’t it?”

Her face had become roseate, but she was not angry. Whatever she may have been she was sufficiently like other girls to be able to refrain from getting angry at the suggestion that four young men were in love with her at the same time.

“It’s nonsense enough,” she said. “You have quite misunderstood the situation, Lord Lullworth. I like Guy Overton and all the others greatly, and I hope they like me. But they are no more in love with me than I am in love with them.”

“Do you fancy that a chap allows himself to be led about by a girl all for the fun of the thing?” he asked.

“Why should a man think it ridiculous for a woman to be his friend and to give him the advice of a friend—the advice that he would welcome if it were to come from a brother?” she enquired.

“I don’t know why, but I know that he does,” said Lord Lullworth. “Anyhow, you don’t think of any of the chaps who were here as a lover?”

“I do not,” she cried emphatically—almost eagerly.

“That’s all right,” he said quietly—almost sympathetically.

“It is all right,” she said. “I believe in the value of friendship according to Plato.”

“Have you ever thought of calculating its coefficient of energy, or its breaking strain?” said he.

“I do not like people who make fun—who try to make fun of what I believe, Lord Lullworth,” said she.

“Do you dislike alarum clocks?” he asked blandly.

“Alarum clocks?” She was puzzled.

“Yes; I’m an alarum clock—one of the cheap make, I admit, but a going concern and quite effective. I want to rattle in your ears until your eyes are opened.”

“You certainly do the rattling very well. But I’m not asleep. I know what you mean to say about my friends.”

“I don’t mean to say anything about them. I don’t want to try to make them out to be quite such soft roes as you would have me think they are. I don’t want to talk of them; I want to talk of you.”

“Of me? Well?”

“Yes, and of me.”

“Excellent topics both.”

“Yes; but the two of us only make up one topic, and this is it. Now listen. Your mother asked me to call and have tea some afternoon. If she hadn’t asked me I would have asked her permission to do so. I came pretty soon after her invitation, didn’t I?”

“I’m so sorry that she has a Committee meeting this afternoon.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to me—that is, in what I have to say to you. And what I have to say to you is this; I came early to see you and I’m coming often—very often—you have no notion how often—I don’t believe I quite know it myself. Now no matter how often I come I want you to understand distinctly from the first that I disclaim all intention of using Plato as an umbrella to sit under with you. I am coming in a strictly anti-Platonic spirit.”

He had grown a bit red and she had flushed all over.

“Go on—go on; tell me all you have to say; it’s quite—quite—funny—yes, funny,” she said, and there was something of bewilderment in her voice. “I never—never—heard anything so—so queer—so straightforward. Go on.”

“I have really said all that I came to say—maybe a trifle more,” he said. “I’m not going to make an ass of myself leading you to fancy that I’m coming here as a casual acquaintance having no designs in my heart against you—I mean, for you. I don’t want you to fancy that I’m coming here to talk to you about books, or pictures, for the sake of exchanging opinions in a strictly platonic way. No, I want you to know from the outset that I’m coming as a possible lover.”

“I understand—oh, quite clearly—you have made the position quite clear to me; only let me tell you at once, Lord Lullworth that—that——”

“Now there you go treating me as disdainfully as if I had actually declared myself to be your lover. I’m nothing of the sort, let me tell you. I’m only the rough material out of which a lover may be formed. I’m a possible lover, so I should be treated very gently—just the way that you would treat a baby feeling that it may one day grow up to be a man. At the same time nothing may really come of the business. Cupid, the god of love is always shown as a child, because the people who started the idea had before them the statistics of infant mortality; so many little Loves die when they are young and never grow up at all.”

“They do—they do. Isn’t it a blessing? You have only seen me twice and yet you——”

“My dear Miss Severn, I’ve seen you very often. I have been looking at you for the past eighteen months, and I thought you the nicest girl I had ever seen. I found out who you were, and it was I who got old Shirley to get up his dinner to give me a chance of meeting you; and I found you nicer even than I allowed myself to hope you would be. So I’m coming to see you very often on the chance that something may come of it. If after a while—a year or so—you find me a bit of a bore, you just tell me to clear off, and I’ll clear without a back word. Now you know just what my idea is. I’m not a lover yet but I may grow up to be a lover. You may tell Lady Severn all this—and your father too, if you think it worth while—if you think anything will come of the business.”

“I won’t trouble either of them. It’s not worth while.”

“I dare say you are right—only... Well, you are forewarned anyway. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” said she. “This is the second time I have seen you in my life. I don’t care how soon you come again, but if you never do come again I promise you that my pillow will not be wet with bitter tears of disappointment.”

“Same here,” he cried briskly, when he was at the door. He laughed and went out and closed the door. In a moment, however, he opened the door, and took a step towards her.

“No; I find that I was wrong—I should not have said ‘same here.’ As a matter of fact, I find that I’m more of a lover than I thought. Since I have been with you here I am twice the lover that I was when I entered this room. No, I should be greatly disappointed if you were to tell me that I must not return.”

“Then I won’t; only... oh, take my advice and hurry away before I have time to say what I have on my mind to say.”

“I know it already; and I also know that you’ll never tell it to me. Good-bye again.”

CHAPTER XVIII

When she was quite sure that he had gone—quite gone, beyond the likelihood of another return to say something that he had omitted to say or to take back something that he had already said, she threw herself back on a sofa and yawned ostentatiously—almost insultingly at her own reflection in a mirror that hung in the centre of one of the silk panels—and then it seemed that it was for the first time in her life that she perceived how curious was the design of the mirror. The silvered glass was a Florentine one and at one curved edge it was cut with a charming intaglio of a boy chasing a butterfly. On the opposite curve there was a girl with a bird on her finger. Butterflies and birds were cut all over the glass except in the centre. The frame of the mirror was of beaten silver, and the design was that of a number of cupids bending, as it were, over the brink of the glass to see the face that it reflected. And some were fixing their arrows in their little silver bows to shoot at the glass and its reflection.

She lay back and laughed quite merrily at the thought that often as she had looked at that charming work of art, she had never before noticed the significance of the design. It interested her so greatly just now that she actually rose from her sofa and stood before it, examining its infinity of detail for several minutes. Then she threw herself once again back among her cushions and laughed.

She had never before had such a funny interview with any one in all her life, she thought, and the funny part of it all was to be found in the seriousness of the man. If he had meant to be jocular he would have been a dead failure. But he had been desperately serious from the moment he had entered the room, and had gone on talking gravely as if he had been talking sense and not nonsense.

That was the funny part of the business.

The aid of Mr. Richmond had never been needed to make her aware of the fact that the novel writers who produce the greatest amount of nonsense are those who write seriously—who take themselves seriously and talk about having a message to deliver. Such, she was well aware, are the novel writers who perish after a year or two, for the only imperishable quality in a novel is wit. Wit is the boric acid that makes a novel “keep,” she knew. But here was a live man coming to her with a message to deliver to her ears, and although he took himself quite seriously she had not found him dull—certainly not dull as the novels with the “message” are dull. What he had to say to her had surprised her at the outset of his interview with her and had kept her excited until he had gone away—nay, longer, for what he had said to her on his return after an absence of perhaps ten seconds, was, she thought, the most exciting part of her afternoon.

But after all he had talked such nonsense as a child who knew nothing of the world would talk. All the time that he was talking to her she felt that she was listening to the prattle of a boy child asking her if she would play at being sweethearts, and laying down certain rules of the game—decreeing that if he were to get tired of having her for a sweetheart, she must not get cross with him for leaving her, and at the same time, with a high sense of fairness, affirming that if she tired of him and told him to go back to the nursery he would not beat her with his fists.

Yes, he had talked just as any little boy in a sailor suit, and with a little bucket in one hand and a little spade in the other might talk while the day was young, and his gravity had made the scene very funny to her.

But then the fact of her thinking of the resemblance between him and the little boy, caused her to recall what he had said about treating him as gently as a baby should be treated. Yes, he was not to be looked on as a lover, but only as the rough material that might eventually shape itself into a lover. This was one of the rules of the game at which he wanted her to play, and it was quite worthy of him.

At first she had felt angry with him—slightly angry; but then she felt that she would be a fool if she were to be seriously angry with a little boy for asking her to play at being grown up and selling tea and sugar with him in a shop made of oyster-shells. She had then only become amused at the way he talked—she was amused at it still, as she lay back among her cushions.

She was glad on the whole that she had not snubbed him—that she had even taken him seriously; and she thought that it was this reflection upon the extent of her consideration for his feelings—that amour propre which children hold so dear—that made her feel so pleased as she did.

Although she knew that the young man had talked nonsense—making an absurd proposal to her, and making it too on a purely unintellectual basis; as if she, a girl born in an atmosphere of intellectuality and breathing of this atmosphere into her life, could listen for a moment to a proposal made to the emotional and not to the intellectual side of her nature!—although he had talked this nonsense, still she could not deny that she felt pleased at the thought of it all. The air somehow seemed fresher about her, and she breathed more freely. Had none of those writers with a message suggested that an atmosphere saturated with intellectuality is like Rimmel’s shop on a spring day: one longs to get out once more into the pure scentless air of Nature’s own breathing?

She felt all the first sweet satisfaction which comes from a good romp on the sands with a child who, though it has not conversed on intellectual topics, has brought one into the open air—into the air that blows across the sands from the sea.

And she was glad that she had not snubbed him when he sneered at that triumph of the intellect known as Platonic friendship. She was happy to think that she was an exponent of that actuality of intellectuality, and that in his hands it had become a great force tending towards the civilisation of man.

To be sure civilisation has always been opposed to Nature in its operations, and the best civilisation is that which forms the most satisfactory compromise with Nature. She knew all this, and a good deal more in the same line of elementary biology, and it was just because she had proofs of the success of her plans of Platonic friendship she was disposed to regard it as one of the greatest of civilising forces.

All the same she felt glad that she had refrained from severity towards him when he had sneered at this force. She knew that if she had done so, she would now feel ill at ease. If a baby boy jeers at the precession of the Equinoxes—a phrase which it cannot even pronounce—an adult would surely feel ill at ease at rebuking it for its ignorance. But Amber Severn felt that she had no reason for self-reproach in the matter of her interview with young Lord Lull-worth.

But then she was led to do a foolish thing, for she began comparing Lord Lullworth with the other young men who had been visiting her in the fulness of their disinterested friendship for her. He was the best looking of them all, she knew. He stood up straighter and he looked at her straighter in the face than the best of them had done. If it came to a fight....

And hereupon this young woman who had been born in, and who had lived in, an atmosphere of intellectuality was led to think of the chances that the young man who had just gone from her would have in a rough and tumble tussle with the three others. She felt herself, curiously enough, taking his part in this hustle and tussle—she actually became his backer, and was ready to convince any one who might differ from her that he could lick three of them—that horrid word of the butcher’s boy was actually in her mind as she thought over the possible contest, though why she should think over anything of the sort she would have had difficulty in explaining to the satisfaction even of herself. But somehow thinking of the men altogether—they were five of them all told—made a comparison between them inevitable, and as Lord Lullworth had frankly admitted that he was not intellectual she had, out of a sense of fair play to him, drawn the comparison from an unintellectual standpoint.

This explanation—it is not wholly plausible—never occurred to her and she was therefore left in a condition bordering on wonderment when she pulled herself up, so to speak, in her attempt to witness the exciting finish of the contest which had suggested itself to her when she involuntarily compared the young man who had lately stood before her, with the other four.

She was startled, and gave a little laugh of derision at the foolish exuberance of her own fancy; and then she became angry, and because she felt that she had made a fool of herself, she called Lord Lullworth a fool—not in a whisper, but quite out loud.

“He is a fool—a fool—and I never want to see him again!” she said.

And then the servant opened the door and announced Mr. Pierce Winwood, and withdrew and closed the door.

She sat upright on the sofa, staring at him, her left hand pressing the centre of a cushion of Aubusson tapestry, and her right one a big pillow of amber brocade.

She stared at him.

He gave a rather sheepish laugh, and twirled his cane till the handle caught his gloves which he held in his hand, and sent them flying. He gave another laugh picking them up.

She was bewildered. Matters were becoming too much for her. Had he actually been lunching in the house that day or had she dreamt it? It seemed to her that only an hour had passed since she had said good-bye to him, and yet here he was entering as a casual visitor might enter.

She rose and mechanically held out her hand to him.

“How do you do?” she said. “How do you do? A warm afternoon, is it not? You look warm.”

And so he did. He looked extremely warm.

“I am afraid that I have surprised you,” said he. “I’m so sorry. But when a chap is bound on making an ass of himself there’s really no holding him back.”

She felt her face becoming as warm as his appeared to be; for the terrible thought flashed upon her:

“This man too has come to me to offer himself as the rough material from which a lover may one day be made.”

It seemed to her that there was any amount of rough material of lovers available within easy reach this particular afternoon.

“After leaving here an hour ago,” he said, “I had a rather important call to make, so I didn’t make it but went for a long walk instead—I think I must have walked four or five miles and I don’t think I kept my pace down as I should have, considering the day it is.”

“Well?” she said when he paused. “Well, Mr. Winwood?”

“Well, you see I was bent on thinking out something, and I thought it out, and I have come back to you, you see, because you are, I think, disposed to be friendly to me and I know that you are her closest friend—that is why I ventured to come back to you.”

“Yes—yes,” she said slowly and with a liberal space between each utterance of the word. “Yes; but—what is the matter? What have I to say to—to—whatever it is?”

“I must really try to tell you,” said he. “Yes, the fact is, I hope you will not think me impudent, but it is a serious matter to me. I have—that is, I wish to—Miss Severn, I am, as you know, a stranger here. I do not know many people, and I have no means of finding out—except through you—what I should very much like to know. You see I don’t want to make too great a fool of myself altogether; that is why I hope you will not think me impudent when I ask you if you can tell me if—if—Miss West is engaged to marry some one. You can well believe, I am sure, that when I saw her for the first time—when I saw her here to-day, it seemed to me quite impossible that such a girl—so beautiful—so gracious—so womanly, should remain free. It seemed quite impossible that no one should wish—but of course though every one who sees her must feel how—how she stands alone—she would not lightly think of giving her promise—in short—I—— Yes, I believe that I have said all that I wished to say. I have said it badly, I know; but perhaps I have made myself moderately clear to you—clear enough for you to give me an answer.”

He had seated himself close to her and had bent forward, turning his hat over and over between his hands and showing himself to be far from self-possessed while stammering out his statement.

But Amber, although she had never before been made the confidante of a man, and although she had just passed through a curious experience of her own, felt, so soon as it dawned on her that the man beside her was in love with Josephine, both interested and became more than sympathetic.

The pleasure she experienced so soon as she became aware of the fact that it was not to herself he was about to offer himself as the rough material of a lover, after the fashion of the day, caused her to feel almost enthusiastic as she said:

“You have expressed yourself admirably, Mr. Win-wood; and I can tell you at once that Josephine West is not engaged to marry any one—that is—well, I think I am justified in speaking so decidedly, for if she had promised to marry any one I am certain that she would tell me of it before any one else in the world.”

He rose and held out his hand to her, saying:

“Thank you, Miss Severn—thank you. I knew that I should be safe in coming to you in this matter, you have shown yourself to be so kind—so gracious. You can understand how my position in this country is not quite the same as that of the men who have lived here all their lives—who are in your set and who hear of every incident as it occurs. I thought it quite possible that she might... well, I hope you don’t think me impudent.”

“I do not indeed,” she said, “I feel that you have done me great honour, and I think that you are—you are—manly. I think, you know, that there is a good deal of manliness about men—more than I thought, and I tell you that I always did think well of men. I believe that there is a great future awaiting them.”

“I hope that your optimism will be rewarded,” said he. “Of one thing I am sure, and that is that a great future awaits one man: the man who is lucky enough to be loved by you. Good-bye. You have placed me in such a position as makes it inevitable for me to take the rosiest view of all the world.”

“Even of the man whom I shall love? Well, you are an optimist. Good-bye.”

CHAPTER XIX

Mr. Ernest Clifton had a good deal to think about; but, as he was usually in this condition, he did not feel greatly inconvenienced. He was well aware of the fact that when one man insists on doing all the thinking for a large and important organisation, he cannot expect to have a vacant mind for many hours together. He had, however, so managed matters in connection with the great political machine of which he was secretary that he had become the sole Intelligence of the organisation. He was not only the man who controlled the driving power of the engine, he also had command of the brakes; and every one is aware of the fact that to know when to slacken speed and when to stop is a most important part of the duties of the man who is running any machine. Any inferior person can pitch the coal into the furnace to keep up the steam, but it requires an Intelligence to know when to shut it off.

He had determined from the outset that he would not allow himself to be hampered by the presence of another thinking man on the foot plate of his engine; it is the easiest thing in the world to obtain for any political organisation a president and a committee utterly devoid of intelligence, and Ernest Clifton resolved that though he might be forced to make seek for such a committee among the most notable men in the Party, he would secure it somehow.

He found it the easiest thing in the world to get an ideal President, Vice-President, Honorary Secretary and Committee. They were all men whom he could implicitly trust to abstain from thought on any vexed question, but he took care that no question of this type remained in a condition of suspense: he himself supplied the thinking power necessary for its solution.

The result of several years’ adherence to this system was that Ernest Clifton, without a seat in Parliament, without a name that carried weight with it outside his own Party, had become a Power in the political world.

It was rumoured that upon one occasion he had been consulted by the Prime Minister in regard to a matter involving a considerable change in the domestic policy of the Government, and that his counsel had been accepted although it differed materially from the view of some important members of the Cabinet.

It was this Ernest Clifton who, after dictating to his private secretary half a dozen letters of a more or less ambiguous phraseology, sat with a letter of his own in front of him—a letter which he had received that morning—a letter which added in no inconsiderable degree to his burden of thought. The letter was from Josephine West and it notified to him the fact that the writer found it impossible any longer to maintain the policy of secrecy which he had imposed upon her.

“When I agreed for your sake to keep our engagement a secret,” Josephine wrote, “I did not foresee the difficulties in the situation which that secrecy has already created. Daily I feel myself to be in a false position, and hourly I feel humiliated by the consciousness of being concerned in an underhand act. I know that I was wrong in giving you my promise at first; there was really no reason why you should not have gone to my father and if he refused his consent we should be placed in no worse position than that of numbers of other men and women who are separated by cruel circumstances, but are still happy relying on each other’s fidelity. Surely we could bear up by the same means, against a much greater adversity than the refusal of my father to give his consent to our engagement being made public. I must therefore ask of you, my dear Ernest, to release me from the promise which I made to you—to release me nominally is all that I beg of you—until my father has given his consent to our engagement. Of course I need hardly say to you who know me so well, that your releasing me would not interfere with my present affection which is quite unchanged and not likely to change. But I must be released.”

This was the part of the letter which added so materially to his burden of thought, though the letter really could not be said to go more than a little step in advance of the situation created by the writer by her interview with him at Ranelagh, a fortnight ago.

The question which he had then formulated to himself was one that could not by any possibility be regarded as flattering to that assumption of constancy upon which she now laid some stress.