HIS DARLING SIN

BY

M.E. BRADDON

Author of "LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET." Etc.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Copyright in the United States
of America, 1899

London

SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON,
KENT & CO. Ltd.

Stationers' Hall Court

Printed for the Author by
Wm. Clowes & Sons, Ltd.
London and Beccles.

HIS DARLING SIN.

CHAPTER I.

"That small, small, imperceptible
Small talk! that cuts like powdered glass
Ground in Tophana,—who can tell
Where lurks the power the poison has?"

There is the desolation of riches as well as the desolation of poverty—the empty splendour of a large house in which there is no going and coming of family life, no sound of light footsteps and youthful laughter—only spacious rooms and fine furniture, and one solitary figure moving silently amidst the vacant grandeur. This sense of desolation, of a melancholy silence and emptiness, came upon Lady Perivale on her return to the mansion in Grosvenor Square, which was among the numerous good things of this world that had fallen into her lap, seven years ago, when she made one of the best matches of the season.

She had not sold herself to an unloved suitor. She had been sincerely attached to Sir Hector Perivale, and had sincerely mourned him when, after two years of domestic happiness, he died suddenly, in the prime of life, from the consequences of a chill caught on his grouse moor in Argyleshire, where he and his young wife, and a few chosen pals, made life a perpetual picnic, and knew no enemy but foul weather.

This time the enemy was Death. A neglected cold turned to pneumonia, and Grace Perivale was a widow.

"It does seem hard lines," whispered Hector, when he knew that he was doomed. "We have had such a good time, Grace; and it's rough on me to leave you."

No child had been born of that happy union, and Grace found herself alone in the world at one and twenty, in full possession of her husband's fortune, which was princely, even according to the modern standard by which incomes are measured—a fortune lying chiefly underground, in Durham coalfields, secure from change as the earth itself, and only subject to temporary diminution from strikes, or bad times. She needed a steady brain to deal with such large responsibilities, for she had not been born or reared among the affluent classes. In her father's East Anglian Rectory the main philosophy of life had been to do without things.

Her husband had none but distant relations, whom he had kept at a distance; so there were no interfering brothers or sisters, no prying aunts or officious uncles to worry her with good advice. She stood alone, with a castle on the Scottish border, round whose turrets the seamews wheeled, and at whose base the German Ocean rolled in menacing grandeur, one of the finest houses in Grosvenor Square, and an income that was described by her friends and the gossiping Press at anything you like between twenty and fifty thousand a year.

So rich, so much alone, Lady Perivale was naturally capricious. One of her caprices was to hate her castle in Northumberland, and to love a hill-side villa on the Italian Riviera, two or three miles from a small seaport, little known to travellers, save as a ragged line of dilapidated white houses straggling along the sea front, past which the Mediterranean express carried them, indifferent and unobservant, on their journey between Marseilles and Genoa.

It was Lady Perivale's whim to spend her winters in a spot unknown to Rumpelmeyer and fashion—a spot where smart frocks were out of place; where royalty-worship was impossible, since not the smallest princeling had ever been heard of there; and where for the joy of life one had only the sapphire sea and the silvery grey of the olive woods, perpetual roses, a lawn carpeted with anemones, sloping banks covered with carnations, palms, and aloes, orange and lemon trees, hedges of pale pink geranium, walls tapestried with the dark crimson of the Bougainvilliers, the delicate mauve of the wistaria; and balmy winds which brought the scent of the flowers and the breath of the sea through the open windows.

Lady Perivale came back to London in April, when the flower-girls were selling bunches of purple lilac, and Bond Street seemed as full of lemon-coloured carriages and picture-hats as if it were June. It was the pleasant season after Easter, the season of warm sunshine and cold winds, when some people wore sables and others wore lace, the season of bals blancs and friendly dinners, before the May Drawing Room and the first State concert, before the great entertainments which were to be landmarks in the history of the year.

How empty the three drawing-rooms looked, in a perspective of white and gold; how black and dismal the trees in the square, as Grace Perivale stood at one of the front windows, looking out at the smooth lawns and well-kept shrubbery, in the pale English sunlight. She thought of the ineffable blue of the Mediterranean, the grey and green and gold and purple of the olive wood, and the orange and lemon grove sloping down to the sea from her verandah, where the Safrano roses hung like a curtain of pale yellow blossom over the rustic roof.

"And yet there are people who like London better than Italy," she thought.

Two footmen came in with the tables for tea.

"In the little drawing-room," she said, waving them away from the accustomed spot.

The spaciousness of the room chilled her. The Louis Seize furniture was all white and gold and silvery blue—not too much gold. An adept in the furniture art had made the scheme of colour, had chosen the pale blues and greys of the Aubusson carpet, the silvery sheen of the satin curtains and sofa-covers. It was all pale and delicate, and intensely cold.

"My letters?" she asked, when the men were retiring.

She had slept at Dover, and had come to London by an afternoon train. She liked even the hotel at Dover better than this great house in Grosvenor Square. There she had at least the sea to look at, and not this splendid loneliness.

"Well," she thought, with a long-drawn sigh, "I must plunge into the vortex again, another mill-round of lunches and dinners, theatres and dances, park and Princes', Ranelagh and Hurlingham—the same things over and over and over and over again. But, after all, I enjoy the nonsense while I am in it, enjoy it just as much as the other people do. We all go dancing round the fashionable maypole, in and out, left hand here, right hand there, smiling, smiling, smiling, and quite satisfied while it lasts. We only pretend to be bored."

The little drawing-room—twenty feet by fifteen—looked almost comfortable. There was a bright fire in the low grate, reflected dazzlingly in turquoise tiles, and the old-fashioned bow window was filled with a bank of flowers, which shut out the view of the chimneys and the great glass roof over the stable-yard.

Lady Perivale sank into one of her favourite chairs, and poured out a cup of tea.

"Toujours cet azur banal," she said to herself, as she looked at the pale blue china, remembering a line of Coppée's. "Poor Hector chose this turquoise because he thought it suited my complexion, but how ghastly it will make me look when I am old—to be surrounded by a child-like prettiness—vouée au bleu, like a good little French Catholic!"

The butler came in with her letters. Three, on a silver salver that looked much too large for them.

"These cannot possibly be all, Johnson," she said; "Mrs. Barnes must have the rest."

"Mrs. Barnes says these are all the letters, my lady."

"All! There must be some mistake. You had better ask the other servants."

Her butler and her maid had been with her in Italy—no one else; the butler, elderly and devoted, a man who had grown up in the Perivale family; her maid, also devoted, a native of her father's parish, whom she had taught as a child in the Sunday school, when scarcely more than a child herself, not a very accomplished attendant for a woman of fashion, but for a parson's daughter, who wore her own hair and her own eyebrows, the country-bred girl was handy enough, nature having gifted her with brains and fingers that enabled her to cope with the complicated fastenings of modern frocks, changing every season.

Lady Perivale's letters had been accumulating for nearly a fortnight, and her intended arrival in London had been announced in the Times and a score of papers. She expected a mountain of letters and invitations, such as had always greeted her return to civilization.

Of the three letters, two were circulars from fashionable milliners. The third was from her old friend and singing mistress, Susan Rodney:—

"So glad you are coming back to town, my dear Grace. I shall call in Grosvenor Square on Wednesday afternoon on the chance of finding you.

"Ever yours affectionately,
"Sue."

Miss Rodney answered every correspondent by return of post, and never wrote a long letter.

Wednesday was Lady Perivale's afternoon at home, and this was Wednesday. A double knock resounded through the silence of the hall and staircase; and three minutes later the butler announced Miss Rodney.

"My sweet old Sue," cried Grace, "now this is really too good of you. Words can't say how glad I am to see you."

They kissed each other like sisters, and then Susan seated herself opposite her friend, and looked at her with a countenance that expressed some strong feeling, affection mingled with sorrow—or was it pity?

She was Grace's senior by more than ten years. She was good-looking in her strong and rather masculine way—her complexion of a healthy darkness, unsophisticated by pearl-powder, her features rugged, but not ugly, her eyes bright and shrewd, but capable of tenderness, her gown and hat just the right gown and hat for a woman who walked, or rode in an omnibus or a hansom.

"Well, Sue, what's the news?" asked Grace, pouring out her visitor's tea. "Is it a particularly dull season? Is nobody entertaining?"

"Oh, much as usual, I believe. I can only answer for my own friends and patronesses—mostly Bayswater way—who are as anxious as ever to get a little after-dinner music for nothing. They have to ask me to dinner, though. No nonsense about that!"

"It isn't the songs only, Sue. They want an agreeable woman who can talk well."

"Oh, I can chatter about most things; but I don't pretend to talk. I can keep the ball rolling."

"Do you know, Sue, you find me in a state of profound mystification. I never was so puzzled in my life. When I was leaving Italy I wired to my people to keep back all my letters. I was ten days on the way home; and instead of the usual accumulation of cards and things I find one letter—yours."

"People don't know you are in town," Sue suggested slowly.

"Oh, but they do; for I sent the announcement to the Times and the Post a fortnight ago. I really meant to be back sooner, but the weather was too lovely. I stopped a couple of days at Bordighera and at St. Raphael, and I was three days in Paris buying frocks. Not a single invitation—not so much as a caller's card. One would think London was asleep. Isn't it strange?"

"Yes," answered Sue, looking at her with an earnest, yet somewhat furtive, scrutiny, "it is—very—strange."

"Well, dear, don't let us be solemn about it. No doubt the invitations will come pouring in now I am at home. People have been too busy to notice my name in the papers. There are always new women for the town to run after. Wives of diamond men from Africa or oil men from America. One cannot expect to keep one's place."

"No," assented Sue. "Society is disgustingly fickle."

"But I am not afraid of being forgotten by the people I like—the really nice people, the pretty girls I have cultivated, and who make a goddess of me, the clever women, worldly but large-minded—all the people I like. I am not afraid of African competitors there. They will stick to me," said Grace, with emphasis.

Her friend could see that she was troubled, though she affected to take the matter easily. There was trouble in both faces, as the friends sat opposite each other, with only the spindle-legged Louis Seize tea-table between them; but the trouble in Susan Rodney's face was graver than in Lady Perivale's.

"Tell me about your winter," said Grace, after a pause, during which tea-cups had been refilled, and dainty cakelets offered and declined.

"Oh, the usual dull mechanic round; plenty of pupils, mostly suburban; and one duchess, five and fifty, who thinks she has discovered a magnificent contralto voice of which she was unaware till quite lately, and desires me to develop it. We bawl the grand duet from Norma till we are both hoarse, and then my duchess makes me stop and lunch with her, and tells me her troubles."

"What are they?"

"I should have put it in the singular. When she talks of her troubles she means her husband."

"Sue, you're trying to be vivacious; but there's something on your mind. If it's any bother of your own, do tell me, dear, and let me help you if I can."

"My tender-hearted Grace! You always wanted to help people. I remember your coming to me with all your little pocket-money that dreadful morning at the Rectory when I had a wire to say my mother was dying, and had to rush back to town. And my dear Gracie thought I should be hard up, and wanted to help me. That's nearly ten years ago. Well, well! Such things live in one's memory. And your father, how kind, how courteous he always was to the holiday music-mistress, and what a happy time my summer holidays were in the dear old Rectory!"

"And what a lucky girl I was to get such a teacher and such a dear friend for nothing!"

"Do you call bed and board, lavender-scented linen, cream à discrétion, pony-cart, lawn tennis, luncheon parties, dinner at the Squire's, a dance at the market town—do you call that nothing? Well, the bargain suited us both, I think, and it was a pleasure to train one of the finest mezzo-sopranos I know. And now, Gracie," slowly, hesitatingly even, "what about your winter?"

"Five months of books, music, and idleness. My lotus land was never lovelier. But for a January storm, that tore my roses and spoilt a Bougainvilliers that covers half the house, I should hardly have known it was winter."

"And were you quite alone all the time? No visitors?"

"Not a mortal! You know I go to my villa to read and think. When I am tired of my own thoughts and other people's—one does tire occasionally even of Browning, even of Shakespeare—I turn to my piano, and find a higher range of thought in Beethoven. You know I go the pace all through the London season, never shirk a dance, do three cotillons a week, go everywhere, see everything."

"Yes, I know you have gone the pace, since your three years' mourning."

"After Cowes comes the reaction, a month or so in Northumberland, just to show myself to my people, and see that the gardeners are doing their duty; and then when the leaves begin to fall, away to my olive woods and their perpetual grey. For half the year I revel in solitude. If you would spend a winter with me I should be charmed, for you like the life I like, and it would be a solitude à deux. But the common herd are only good in cities. I come back to London to be sociable and amused."

Miss Rodney rose and put on her mantle.

"Can't you stop and dine? I'll send you snugly home in my brougham."

Home was a villa facing Regent's Park.

"Alas! dear, it's impossible! I am due in Cadogan Square at half-past six—Islington and Chelsea 'bus from Regent-circus."

"A lesson?"

"Two lessons—sisters, and not an iota of voice between them. But I shall make them sing. Give me a scrap of intelligence, and I can always manage that. Good-bye, Grace. Ask me to dinner some other night, when you are alone."

"Come to-morrow night, or the night after. I have no engagement, as you know. Let us see a lot of each other before the rush begins."

"Friday night, then. Good-bye."

They kissed again. Lady Perivale rang the bell, and then followed her friend towards the drawing-room door; but on her way there Miss Rodney stopped suddenly, and burst into tears.

"Sue, Sue, what is it? I knew you had something on your mind. If it's a money trouble, dear, make light of it, for it needn't plague you another minute. I have more money than I know what to do with."

"No, no, no, dear; it's not money," sobbed Sue. "Oh, what a fool I am—what a weak-minded, foolish fool!"

A footman opened the door, and looked with vacant countenance at the agitated group. Early initiation in his superiors' domestic troubles had taught him to compose his features when storms were raging.

"The door, James—presently," his mistress said, confusedly, watching him leave the room with that incredible slowness with which such persons appear to move when we want to get rid of them.

"Very foolish, if you won't trust your old friend Gracie!" she said, making Sue sit down, and seating herself beside her, and then in caressing tones, "Now, dear, tell me all your troubles. You know there is no sorrow of yours—no difficulty—no complication—which would find me unsympathetic. What is it?"

"Oh, Gracie, Gracie, my darling girl, it's not my trouble. It's yours."

"Mine?" with intense surprise.

"Yes, dear. I meant to have kept silence. I thought it was the only course, in such a delicate matter. I meant to leave things alone—and let you find out for yourself."

"Find out! What?"

"The scandal, Grace—a scandal that touches you."

"What scandal can touch me? Scandal! Why, I have never done anything in my life that the most malignant gossip in London could turn to my disadvantage."

Her indignant eyes, her full, strong voice, answered for her truth.

"Oh, Grace, I knew, I knew there couldn't be anything in it. A wicked lie, a cowardly attack upon a pure-minded woman—a woman of spotless character; the last woman upon this earth to give ground for such a story."

"Oh, Sue, if you love me, be coherent! What is the story? Who is the slanderer?"

"Heaven knows how it began! My Duchess told me. I spoke of you the other day at our tête-à-tête luncheon. I told her about your lovely voice, your passion for music. She nodded her old wig in a supercilious way. 'I have heard her sing,' she said curtly. She waited till the servants left the room, and then asked me if it was possible I had not heard the scandal about Lady Perivale."

"What scandal? Oh, for pity's sake come to that, Sue. Never mind your Duchess."

"Well, I'll tell you in the most brutal way. It seems that three or four people, whose names I haven't discovered, declare they met you in Algiers, and in Corsica and Sardinia, travelling with Colonel Rannock—travelling with Colonel Rannock—passing as his wife, under a nom de guerre—Mr. and Mrs. Randall."

"How utterly disgusting and absurd! But what on earth can have made them imagine such a thing?"

"People say you were seen—seen and recognized—by different people who knew you, in one or the other of those places."

"Travelling with Colonel Rannock, as his wife! My God! A man I refused three times. Three times," laughing hysterically. "Why, I have had him on his knees in this room; kneeling, Sue, like a lover in an old comedy; and I only laughed at him."

"That's rather a dangerous thing to do, Grace, with some men."

"Oh, Colonel Rannock is not the kind of man to start a vendetta for a woman's laughter. He is a laughing philosopher himself, and takes everything lightly."

"Does he? One never knows what there is behind that lightness. What if Colonel Rannock has set this scandal on foot with a view to proposing a fourth time, and getting himself accepted?"

"How could he make people swear they saw me—me!—at Algiers, when I was in Italy? It is all nonsense Sue; an absurd malentendu; my name substituted for some other woman's. Now I am in London, the matter will be put straight in an hour. People have only to see me again to be sure I am not that kind of woman. As for Colonel Rannock, he may be dissipated, and a spendthrift; but he is well-born, and he ought to be a gentleman."

"Who said he was ill-born? Surely, you know that there are good races and bad. Who can tell when the bad blood came in, and the character of the race began to degenerate? Under the Plantagenets, perhaps. Colonel Rannock comes of a bad race—everybody knows that. His grandfather, Lord Kirkmichael, was notorious in the Regency. He left his memoirs, don't you know, to be published fifty years after his death—an awful book—that had a succès de scandale six or seven years ago. He was bosom friend of Lord Hertford, and that set."

"I did not trouble myself about his grandfather."

"Ah! but you ought! A man's family history is the man. Lord Kirkmichael's grandson would be capable of anything infamous."

"The whole thing is too preposterous for consideration," Lady Perivale said angrily. "I wonder at your taking it tragically."

And then, recalling that empty salver instead of the usual pile of letters and cards, she cried, distractedly—

"It is shameful—atrocious—that any one upon earth could believe such a thing of me. It makes me hate the human race. Yes, and I shall always hate those horrid wretches I called friends, however they may try to make amends for this insolent neglect."

There was no question of taking the matter lightly now, for Grace Perivale burst into a passion of sobs, and was quite as tragic as her friend.

"My dearest Grace, pray, pray be calm! Don't stay in this odious London, where people have no hearts. Why not go to your Northern castle, and live there quietly till the mystery clears itself, as no doubt it will soon?"

"Go?" cried Lady Perivale, starting up out of the drooping attitude in which she had given way to her distress. "Beat a retreat? Why, if Grosvenor Square were a fiery furnace I would stay and face those wretches—those false, false friends—till I made them know the kind of woman I am!"

"Well, dear, perhaps that is best—if you can stand it," Susan answered, rather sadly.

"But where is Colonel Rannock? Surely he has not been dumb! It is his business to bring the slanderers to book!"

"That's what I told the Duchess. But Rannock has not been seen in London since the autumn, and is said to be shooting something in the Rockies. And now, I must rush off to my lessons. Good-bye, again, dear. Don't forget that I am to dine with you on Friday!"

"Shall I invite a party of twenty to meet you—an impromptu party, asked by telegraph, such as I had last year to welcome me home?" Grace asked, bitterly. "Go, dear! Don't be too sorry for me. I shall weather the storm. I ought to be more amused than distressed by such nonsense."

Miss Rodney dried her tearful eyes, and composed her agitated features, on her way downstairs. The footman stood ready to open the door, stifling a yawn behind his hand. Miss Rodney gave a quick glance round the hall, taking in all its spaciousness and splendour, the marble group at the foot of the double staircase, the bronze and ormolu candelabra, the crimson carpets, softer than forest moss.

"Rich beyond the dreams of avarice—and so unhappy!" she thought, as she hurried off to catch the Chelsea 'bus.

CHAPTER II.

"How blest he names, in love's familiar tone,
The kind fair friend by nature marked his own;
And, in the waveless mirror of his mind,
Views the fleet years of pleasure left behind,
Since when her empire o'er his heart began—
Since first he called her his before the holy man."

It was not often in the London season that Lady Perivale could taste the pleasures of solitude, a long evening by her own fireside, unbroken by letters, messages, telegrams, sudden inroads of friends breaking in upon her at eleven o'clock, between a dinner and a dance, wanting to know why she had not been at the dinner, and whether she was going to the dance, or dances, of the evening, what accident or caprice had eclipsed their star. But on this night of her return the visitor's bell sounded no more after Susan Rodney left her. The quiet of her house was so strange a thing that it almost scared her.

"I begin to understand what a leper must feel in his cavern in the wilderness," she said to herself with a laugh. "The thing is almost tragic, and yet so utterly absurd. It is tragic to discover what society friendships are made of—ropes of sand that fly away with the first wind that blows unkindly."

She pretended to dine, for the servants might have heard of the scandal, and she did not want them to think her crushed by unmerited slights. They, of course, knew the truth, since she had two witnesses among them to prove an alibi, Johnson the butler, and her devoted maid, Emily Scott.

She did not know that the first footman and the cook had both laughed off Johnson's indignant statement that his mistress had never left Porto Maurizio.

"You're not the man to give her away if she had gone off for a bit of a scamper. You and Miss Scott would look the other way when her boxes were being labelled."

"And she'd take a courier maid instead of Emily," said the cook. "After all, it's only finn der seecle."

"Why don't she marry him, and ha' done with it?" said the footman.

Butler and maid were goaded into a fury by talk of this kind, and it was only the force of esprit de corps, and the fact that James was six foot one, and a first rate plate-cleaner, that prevented Mr. Johnson sacking him on the instant.

"Did you ever know me tell a lie?" he asked indignantly.

"Or me?" sobbed Emily.

"Not on your own account," said the cook; "but you'd tell a good big one to screen your mistress."

"And so I might perhaps," said the girl, "if she wanted screening; but she don't, and, what's more, she never will."

"Well, all I can say is it's all over London," said James, "and it's made it very unpleasant for me at the Feathers, for, of course, I stand up for my lady in public, and swear it's a pack of lies. But here we're tiled in, and I'm free to confess I don't believe in smoke without fire."

They went on wrangling till bedtime, while Grace sat by the fire in the little drawing-room with her brown poodle lying on the lace flounces of her tea-gown, and tried to read.

She tried book after book, Meredith, Hardy, Browning, Anatole France, taking the volumes at random from a whirligig book-stand, twisting the stand about impatiently to find a book that would calm her agitation, and beguile her thoughts into a new channel. But literature was no use to her tonight.

"I see it is only happy people who can read," she thought. She opened no more books, and let her mind work as it would. There had been sorrows in her life, deep and lasting sorrow, in the early death of a husband to whom she had been fondly attached, and in the previous loss of a father she had adored. But in spite of these losses, which had darkened her sky for a long time, her life had been happy; she had a happy disposition, the capacity for enjoyment, the love of all that was bright and beautiful in the world, art, music, flowers, scenery, horses, dogs—and even people. She loved travelling, she loved the gaiety of a London season, she loved the quiet of her Italian villa. Her childhood had been spent in a rustic solitude, and all her girlish pleasures had been of the simplest. The only child of a father who had done with the world when he read the burial service over his young wife, and who had lived in almost unbroken retirement in an East Anglian Rectory. He was a student, and could afford a curate to take the burden of parish work, in a sparsely populated parish, where distance, not numbers, had to be considered. He kept good horses, mounted his curate, and drove or rode about among his flock, and was beloved even by the roughest of them.

That girl-child was the one human thing he had to love, and he lavished love upon her. He taught her, trained her to appreciate all that is best in literature, yet kept her simple as a child, and thought of her as if she were still a child after her eighteenth birthday, and so was taken by surprise when Sir Hector Perivale, who had met her at friendly parties in the neighbourhood, came to him at the end of the shooting season, and asked to be accepted as her future husband.

He had offered himself to Grace, and Grace had not said no. Grace had allowed him to call upon the rector.

Mr. Mallandine looked up from his book like a man in a dream.

"Marry my Grace!" he cried. "Why, she has hardly done with her dolls. It seems only yesterday she was sitting on the carpet over there"—pointing to a corner of his library—"playing with her doll's-house."

"Indeed, rector, she is a woman, and a very clever woman. She gave me excellent advice the other day when we were threatened with a strike in the north. She has a better head for business than I have."

"That may be," said Mr. Mallandine, smiling at him. "But she is not old enough to be married."

"She will be nineteen on her next birthday, sir."

"What a pertinacious young man you are. Her next birthday is nearly a year off. She shall not take the cares of a husband and a household until she is twenty."

"That means two years, rector. What am I to do with myself all that time?" Sir Hector asked ruefully.

"Do as other young men do. Isn't there sport enough and travel enough for such as you? Go to Canada, to the North Pole, to the Pamirs, over the roof of the world. I thought no young man of spirit was satisfied till he had crossed the Pamirs, or shot lions in Bechuanaland."

"I have left off caring for such things since I have known Grace."

"Well, you'll have to possess your soul in patience. My daughter's girlhood belongs to me. Two years hence she will be a woman, and able to know whether she loves you well enough to live and die with you, or whether she only wants to be called my lady. It will be hard enough for me to part with her then."

"You shall not part with her, rector. You will have a son as well as a daughter. That will be the only difference."

"All prospective sons-in-law say the same thing. Come, Sir Hector, I don't want to be selfish. Grace has been the sunshine of my life ever since she and I were left alone in the world together. I want to see her happily married before I lay me down for the long sweet sleep; but I will not have her marry till she has had time to fall in love and out of love a good many times with the man who is to have the charge of her destiny."

There was no choice but to submit, since Grace thought as her father thought, so Sir Hector reconciled himself to a two years' engagement, but could but smile as he thought how brief need have been his probation had his choice fallen in the Mayfair marriage market.

Fate was on his side, after all. For a little more than half a year Grace and he were betrothed lovers, meeting under restrictions; and the rector had leisure to study his future son-in-law's character.

He found no evil in Hector Perivale, and he found much good—a warm heart, an honest, open disposition, pluck such as should go with good blood. It was quite true that Grace was the cleverer of the two, and could even give good advice in the difficulties between capital and labour, always in favour of concessions, yet always counselling a firm attitude when labour put on the aspect of an enemy, and refused to hear reason.

Then, one day, when it was least expected of him, the rector held out his hand to Sir Hector over their evening wine, and said—

"I believe you are a good fellow, Hector, and that you will make my Grace happy. Marry her as soon as you and she like—the sooner the better for me!"

"Oh, sir, this is indeed generous."

"No; it is only prudent. I told you I wanted to see my daughter happily married before I die. Well, when I was in London the other day I saw a specialist—at the advice of Ringston, here—and he told me my life is not quite so good as I thought."

"Oh, sir, I hope he was wrong."

"So do I, Hector. But I shall act as if I was sure he was right. There is nothing certain about his verdict—a man and a mortal disease may jog on for years together—so not a word to alarm Grace. I would not have the bright morning of her life clouded by fears about me. You can tell her that I admire your character so much that I want to secure you at once as my son-in-law. I shall only tell her to set about her trousseau."

Grace required a great deal of talking to, on her father's part and on Hector's, before she was reconciled to a speedy marriage. She was sure her father wanted her. He had not been looking well lately. He had left off those early morning rides which had been so delightful, and which she had often shared with him—those long scampers on the broad margins of greensward on the edge of the pine-woods, in the freshness of the new day. He let his groom drive for him, even his favourite cob, whose mouth no hand but his own had been allowed to control till lately.

Her father laughed off her fears.

"Did you think I was never going to be an old man, Gracie?"

"Not yet, father! Oh, not yet for a score of years. Why, it was only last summer everybody was telling me how young you looked—growing younger instead of older."

"That was last summer, Gracie. Où sont les neiges d'antan? Don't you know that when Time has seemed to stand still for ever so long, he seems to move on very fast all of a sudden? It is all only seeming. The sands are always falling, and the scythe is always moving—slow and sure, my love, slow and very sure. But I shall be a happy old man when I see my darling married to the man of her choice."

"If you call yourself an old man, I won't marry him," Grace said almost angrily. "If you are an old man, you want a spinster daughter to take care of you—and in that case I shall never marry."

He smiled at her with a touch of mournfulness. She would not have long to wait, perhaps, if she insisted on staying to the end.

After this he was careful to talk in a cheerful strain, and played his part so well that she left him for an Italian honeymoon without the faintest apprehension of evil—left him a gay and happy bride, going out into a beautiful world of which she knew nothing but East Anglia.

The whole of May was spent on the lakes—first Maggiore, and then Como. They stayed at Baveno, lived most of their life on the lake, and visited the three islands till they knew them by heart—the gardens, the palaces, the fishermen's huts, the caffes, the people, old and young, crones, children, boatmen, priests. Those island gardens in their glory of Maytime made a region of enchantment that even Grace's dreams over Rogers's Italy had never equalled. The facilities of travel, repetition, the crowding of tourists, may have cheapened these exquisite scenes; but to each of us on that first Italian journey they offer the same magic philter, the same revelation of a loveliness beyond our power of dreaming.

Then came Bellagio, Cadenabbia, Varenna, a leisurely tour of that still lovelier lake; and then, when June began and the days waxed hot, a quiet week at Promontogno, roaming in chestnut woods, driving up the hill to Soglio. Then to the cool breezes of the Engadine.

It was at Pontresina that a telegram came—one of those fatal messages that are opened so lightly, expectant of some trivial intelligence, and which bring despair—

"The Rector dangerously ill. Pray come home immediately.—Mary."

Mary was Mr. Mallandine's cook and housekeeper, an admirable person, not without considerable dignity, and a black silk gown for Sundays; but who had risen from the ranks, and was still only "Mary," as she had been when she was a kitchen-maid at seven pounds a year.

That hurried journey through the long June days was a never-to-be-forgotten experience. Sir Hector planned everything, so that not a minute should be lost. They left Pontresina at two in the morning in a carriage and four, and halted only to change horses; reached Coire in time for the express, and halted no more till they were at Victoria. Then across London to Liverpool Street, and then to the grey quiet of the Suffolk Rectory, in the second evening of their journey.

Grace was not too late. Her father lingered for nearly a month after her return, and all the consolation that last hours and fond words, mutual prayers, tears, and kisses, can give in the after time, were given to her. She never forgot those solemn hours, that sweet communion and confession of faith, her education for eternity. Never, perhaps, until those sad hours had she known how true a Christian her father was, or realized the perfect beauty of the Christian life and the Christian death.

She had further evidence of his goodness in the grief of his parishioners, to whom his bounty had been limited only by his means, life at the Rectory being planned with a Spartan simplicity, so as to leave the wider margin for the poor.

When all was over Sir Hector took his wife back to Switzerland; but not to the scenes where those evil tidings had found her. He was all the world to her now, and his heart was a fountain of tenderness. The bond between husband and wife was strengthened by Grace's sorrow. They lived alone in the loveliest places of the earth for more than a year, and then it was for Hector's sake that Grace took up the burden of life, and began her new duties as mistress of the house in Grosvenor Square, and the Castle in Northumberland. The town house had been refurnished while they were on their travels. All the ponderous early Victorian rosewood and mahogany had been swept into the limbo of things that were once thought beautiful. The chairs with curved backs and Brussels sprouts upon their gouty legs, the acres of looking glass framed in cabbage leaves, the loo-tables, and heavy valances shutting out the top-light of every window, all the draperies making for darkness, disappeared under the ruthless hand of improvement; and from the dust and shadow of a lumber-room filled by past generations, mirrors crowned with golden eagles, chairs with shield-shaped backs and wheatsheaf carving, were brought out into the light of day, and were deemed worthy.

"I wonder whether anybody will ever want the loo-tables and Victorian sideboards back again?" Grace said; but the upholsterer had provided against that contingency by carrying everything away, to be sold for firewood, he told Sir Hector, and a very small item on the credit side of his account was supposed to represent their value in that capacity.

Then began Grace Perivale's new phase of existence—a life of luxury that was as much a revelation as the loveliness of lakes and mountains, the blue of an Italian sky. She was only twenty, and she found herself almost a personage, one of the recognized beauties, who could not move without a paragraph. Her appearance on a tiara night at the opera, her diamonds, her frocks, her parties, her poodles were written about. All the lady journalists followed her movements with unflagging pens. She could not take up a newspaper, at least among those of the frivolous order, without seeing her name in it.

She laughed, was inclined to be disgusted, and made mock of the papers, but was not actually displeased. Even in East Anglia, after a round of tennis-parties in the gardens of neighbouring squarsons, in a district where almost everybody was a parson, and most of the parsons were land-owners and rich—even in those rural scenes she had discovered that people admired her; and then Sir Hector had come with his adulation, taking fire at her beauty as at a flame, and declaring that she was the loveliest girl in England. And at twenty to be called—even by irresponsible young women—a queen of Society, has its intoxication.

She plunged into the world of pleasure. Her husband was a member of all the pleasure clubs—Hurlingham, Sandown, and the rest. Had there been a hundred he would have belonged to them all. He was popular, and had scores of friends, and if Grace had been much less attractive, she would have been well received for Sir Hector's sake.

She caught the knack of entertaining, and her parties were pronounced right from the outset. She was open to advice from old hands, but had ideas of her own, and thought out the subject thoroughly. She imparted a touch of originality to the commonest things. Her dinner-table surprised with some flower that nobody else had thought of.

"I expect to see ferns and green frogs at your next dinner," said Mr. George Howard, famous in literature and politics, ultra Liberal scion of a Liberal house, and a great admirer of Lady Perivale's. "I don't think you can find anything new—short of frogs. They must have tiny gold chains to fasten them to the épergne, like the turtle that swim about under the jetty at Nice."

It was by the pleasantness and number of her parties that Grace established herself as an entertainer, rather than by their splendour. Who can be splendid in an age of African millionaires, of Americans with inexhaustible oil-springs? She did not vie with the oil and diamond people. She left them their proper element—the colossal. Her métier was to give small parties, and to bring nice people together. She studied every invitation as carefully as a move at chess. Her queen, her knights, her bishops—she knew exactly how to place them. The knights—those choicest pieces that move anyway—were her wits and brilliant talkers, the men whom everybody wants to meet, and who always say the right thing. Her queens were of every type; first the beauties, then the clever women, then the great ladies, dowagers or otherwise, the women whose social status is in itself an attraction.

She smiled when people praised her tact and savoir faire.

"I have so little to think about," she said; "no child, no near relations. And Hector spoils me. He encourages me to care for trivial things."

"Because he cares for them himself—if you call the pleasantness of life trivial. I don't. I call it the one thing worth thinking about. I could name a score of women in London who have all the essentials of happiness and yet their houses are intolerable."

Thus Mr. Howard, her self-appointed mentor. He went about praising her. Everybody wondered that a girl of twenty, who had been reared in a rural parsonage, could commit so few gaucheries.

"Few!" cried Howard, indignantly. "She has never been gauche. She is incapable of the kind of blunder Frenchmen call a gaffe. Some women are born with a feeling for society, as others are born with a feeling for art."

In Northumberland, as in London, Lady Perivale's success was unquestionable. Sir Hector's old chums—the shooting and hunting and fishing men—were delighted with his choice, and Sir Hector himself was in a seventh heaven of wedded bliss. One only blessing was denied him. Grace and her husband longed for a child on whom to lavish the overplus of love in two affectionate natures. But no child had come to them.

A child might have brought consolation in that dark season when, after three days and nights of acute anxiety, Grace Perivale found herself a widow, and more lonely in her wealth and station than women often are in that sad hour of bereavement.

Her father had been the last of an old Norfolk family in which only children were hereditary. She had neither uncles nor aunts. She had heard of remote cousinships, but her father had held but scantiest communion with those distant kindred, most of whom were distant in locality as well as in blood.

CHAPTER III.

"I see him furnished forth for his career,
On starting from the life-chance in our world,
With nearly all we count sufficient help:
Body and mind in balance, a sound frame,
A solid intellect: the wit to seek,
Wisdom to choose, and courage wherewithal
To deal with whatsoever circumstance
Should minister to man, make life succeed.
Oh, and much drawback! What were earth without?"

Now began the third phase of Lady Perivale's existence. She spent the next three years, not in utter loneliness, but in complete retirement from worldly pleasures. It was in this time of bereavement that her devoted Sue was of most use to her. She persuaded Sue to travel with her during her first year of widowhood, at the risk of losing that to which Miss Rodney had been a slave—her connection. Grace insisted on her friend accepting a salary to cover that jeopardized connection; and, when they went back to London, it was Grace's care to find new pupils to fill the gaps. When West Kensington or Balham had fallen away, Lady Perivale sent recruits from Mayfair and Belgravia. She had a host of girl-friends—her court, her "Queen's Maries"—and she could order them to have lessons from her dearest Sue. In some cases she went further than this, and paid for the lessons—girl-friends being often impecunious—but this her friend never knew. But she may have been near guessing the truth later, for, after that one Italian winter, Miss Rodney would travel no more.

"I am one of the working bees, Grace," she said; "and you are trying to make a drone of me."

"No, dear, that could never be; but I want you to have your butterfly season."

It was while she was with her friend that they came upon the villa above Porto Maurizio. Grace fell in love with the spot because, although near the high-road to Genoa, it lay off the beaten track, and was purely Italian—no Swiss-German hotel, no English tourists. The villa was out of repair, and by no means beautiful; but some extent of land went with it—olive woods, lemon groves, old, old mulberry trees, festooned with vines that were looped from tree to tree, banks of carnations, a wilderness of roses.

Lady Perivale sent for the owner's agent, and bought land and villa as easily as she would have bought a bonnet. The agent saw her child-like eagerness for a new toy, and only asked twice as much as the reserve price.

"It is a place that can be made anything in the hands of an owner of taste and means," he said; "and if you find the land a burden you can always let it on the métairie system."

"But I mean to keep the land, and employ people—to have my own olive woods, my own oranges and lemons."

She smiled, remembering a nursery game of her childhood. Oranges and lemons! Never had she thought to see them growing on sunlit heights, sloping upward from a sapphire sea, to that dark line where the olives cease and the pines begin, darker and darker, till they touch the rugged edge of far-off snow-peaks.

It was three years before Lady Perivale went back to the world in which everybody's business—barring the few who live for politics or philanthropy—is to cram the utmost amusement into the shortest space of time. The briefer the season the faster the pace. Three balls a night. Mrs. A.'s concert jostling with Mrs. B.'s private theatricals, and both of them crushed under the Juggernaut car of her Grace's fancy ball. The longer the invitation the worse chance of a dull party: for those duchesses and marchionesses can spring a great entertainment on the town at a fortnight's notice, and empty meaner people's dancing-rooms, and leave the Coldstreams or the Hungarians fiddling to twenty couples in a house where there is breathing space everywhere.

Lady Perivale felt as if she were awaking from a long dream of beautiful places and tranquil hours, awaking in the din and riot of a crowded fair. But she opened her own little booth with a proper dignity. She was almost glad to see old faces, and to be made a prodigious fuss about.

She was the rage in that season of her return. There was hardly a bachelor in town who did not want to marry her, though many were too wise to pursue the charming prey. Her girl-friends who had married, and her girl-friends who were still single, flocked round her, and her house was the rendezvous of all the pretty people in London. Her dinners, her luncheons, her little musical afternoons—a single artist, perhaps, or at most two, and a room only half full—but, most of all, her suppers after the play or the opera were the top of the mode.

"She spends her money on the things that are best worth having," Mr. Howard said of her, "and that alone is genius. She breakfasts on an egg, and dines on a cutlet, but she has taken the trouble to secure an incomparable cook, and she gives him carte blanche. She drinks nothing stronger than salutaris, but she lets me order her wine, and gives me a free hand, as she does Herr Ganz when he organizes her concerts. Such a woman knows how to live."

It was in this year of her return to the world of pleasure, when all things seemed more dazzling by contrast, that she made the acquaintance of two men whom she had not known during her married life. One was Arthur Haldane, a man of letters, who had leapt at once into renown by the success of a first novel—a work of fire and flame, which had startled the novel-reading world, and surprised even the critics, in an age when all stories have been told, and when genius means an original mind dealing with old familiar things. Since that success Mr. Haldane had devoted himself to more solid and serious works, and he was now a personage in the literary world. The other was Colonel Rannock, a Scotchman of old family, grandson of the Earl of Kirkmichael, and late of the Lanarkshire regiment, the man who was destined to bring trouble into Grace Perivale's smooth and prosperous life. He was a reprobate, a man who had long been banished from the holy of holies in the temple of society, but who contrived to whirl in the vortex, nevertheless, by the indulgence of old friends and allies of his house, who would not cast him off utterly so long as he was only suspected and had never been found out. He was known to have ruined other men, callow subalterns who had admired and trusted him; he was known to have lived in the company of vicious women, to have said to evil, "Be thou my good"; and he was even suspected of having cheated at cards, though that is a common suspicion of every Captain Rook who keeps company with pigeons.

But against all this there was the man's personal charm—that subtle, indescribable charm of a high-bred Scotchman who has lived in the best Continental society, and is also a cosmopolitan. "A charm that no woman could resist." That was what men who knew him well said of him.

It was this man that in an evil hour Grace Perivale admitted to her friendship. She had not known him a week before she had been lectured about him, assured solemnly that he ought not to cross her threshold. Her friendly mentor, Mr. Howard, was the most importunate.

"I am old enough to be your father, Lady Perivale," he began; but she stopped him with a laugh.

"If you say that I know something horrid is coming; though my dear father never said a disagreeable thing to me in his life."

"Ah, but you were safe then—a little boat chained to a pier—and now you are a fast sailing schooner racing through unknown waters. I know the chart, and where there are shoals. You must not let Colonel Rannock visit you."

"Why he, too, is old enough to be my father."

"No; I am ten years older than he, and thirty years more trustworthy."

"I don't care about the trustworthiness of a casual acquaintance."

"Rannock will not remain your casual acquaintance. He will make himself your friend, whether you like it or not, unless you put him in his place at once, or, in plain words, tell your butler you are never to be at home to him."

"I am not going to shut my door against the most amusing man I have met for a long time."

"Ah, that is how he begins. He amuses. It is the thin end of the wedge. Then he interests—then—and then—— But I need not pursue the subject. He will never reach those later stages. You will find him out before then. But in the mean time he——"

"Why do you stop short like that?"

Howard had been nearly saying, "He will compromise you," but would not for worlds have made an insulting suggestion to a woman he so thoroughly believed in.

"Come, my dear Mr. Howard, you must credit me with some knowledge of human nature, and believe that if I find Colonel Rannock unworthy of my acquaintance, I shall know how to dismiss him. I want to be amused. I have had two great sorrows in my life—the loss of a father I adored, and of the best of husbands. Perhaps you don't know how sad life is when one is always looking back."

"Do I not? I, who have lived nearly half a century!"

"Ah, no doubt you too have your griefs. But you are a sportsman and an explorer, a politician and a philanthropist. You have so many ways of forgetting. I have only a woman's distractions, dawdling about the Continent, or steeping myself in London gaieties."

Mr. Howard did not pursue the argument, and he never recurred to it. He was too proud a man to hazard a second repulse. If she made so light of his counsel she should be troubled with no more of it. He admired and esteemed her, and there may have been some touch of deeper feeling, which, at his sober age, he would scarcely confess to himself, though Lafontaine's sad question often found an echo in his breast—"Ai-je passé le temps d'aimer?"

Lady Perivale lived in a crowd all that season, but Colonel Rannock was a prominent figure in the crowd, and people were kinder to him than they had been, on her account. It was thought that she would marry him, and he would shine forth rehabilitated, rich, and a power in society; and the clever, pushing, second-rate people who had cut him last season began to think they had been precipitate and ill-advised. The end of the season came in a moment, as it seemed, after Goodwood. Everybody was going or gone, and the Park was a Sahara sprinkled with nurse-maids and perambulators. Lady Perivale made up her house-party for her Border Castle, but Colonel Rannock was not of the party. She let him haunt her footsteps in London, but she would not admit him to the intimacy of a house-guest. So much evil had George Howard's warning done him. He tried hard for an invitation, and was irritated at failing.

"You will have no music in your villeggiatura, and what a dull set you have chosen. Your women are nice enough, young and bright, and pretty, and only wanting to be amused; but your men are hopeless. Frank Lawford—a quarterly review in breeches, Canon Millighan—a Jesuit in disguise, and Captain Grant, Sir Henry Bolton, Jack Scudamore, who live only to fill game-bags."

"They were my husband's friends, and I am very glad for them to shoot his birds. Poor Hector! I always think of the birds and the moor as his still—the cruel moor that cost him his life."

Her eyes clouded as she spoke of her husband. Commonplace and kindly, a homely figure in the drama of life, he had been her first and only lover, her faithful and devoted husband, and, after three years of mourning, regret was not lessened. Colonel Rannock talked again of her house-party. He was going to Iceland to shoot things, and to live under canvas in unconceivable roughness and discomfort. He spoke with bitterness of a joyless holiday, and then, as if on the impulse of the moment, confessed his passion, his jealous rage at the thought of her surrounded by other men, and asked her to be his wife.

This was his first throw of the dice. She rejected him with a kindly firmness which she thought would settle the question for ever. He promised that it should be so. He would be content to know himself her friend, and so he went off to Iceland without further murmuring.

History repeated itself next season, when people were beginning to wonder why she did not marry him—nay, even to say that she ought to marry him. Mr. Howard was in China, on a diplomatic mission, so there was no prophet in Israel to warn her of coming evil. In this year Colonel Rannock offered himself to her twice, and was twice refused; but even after the third disappointment, he declared himself still her friend, and the concertante duets, and the dinners and suppers, at which he was her most brilliant talker, went on. And people said, "Dear Lady Perivale is so very unconventional."

CHAPTER IV.

"Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed:
Drink deep, until the habits of the slave,
The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite
And slander, die. Better not be at all
Than not be noble."

Susan Rodney and her friend dined tête-à-tête, in a solemn splendour of butler and silk-stockinged footmen, and talked of music and the Opera. They spent the evening in Lady Perivale's sitting-room on the second floor, a delightful room, with three windows on a level with the tree tops in the square, and containing all her favourite books, her favourite etchings, her favourite piano, and her marron poodle's favourite easy-chair. The poodle was the choicest thing in ornamental dogs, beautiful exceedingly, with silken hair of the delicatest brown, and a face like a Lord Chief Justice, beautiful, but cold-hearted, accepting love, but hardly reciprocating, thinking nothing the world holds too good for him. Susan Rodney called him marron glacé.

Lady Perivale glanced at the drawing-rooms, and turned away with a faint shiver. Their spacious emptiness glittered with a pale brilliancy in the electric light.

"We shall be cosier in my den, Sue," she said; and they went upstairs together, and seated themselves in low, luxurious chairs, by tables loaded with roses and lilies of the valley.

A wood fire flamed and crackled on the amber-tiled hearth, and the varied colouring of exquisitely bound books, the brightness of rose-bud chintz, and satin pillows heaped on low sofas, gave an air of life and cheerfulness which was wanting in the sumptuous spaciousness below.

"Why, what has happened to your photographs?" cried Sue, looking round the room, where one attractive feature had been a collection of panel, promenade, and other portraits of handsome and fashionable women, in court gowns, in ball gowns, in tea gowns, in riding habits, in fancy dress, nay, even in bathing dress, at Trouville or Dieppe, each in the costume the sitter thought most becoming—photographs framed in silver, in gold, in tortoiseshell, in ivory, in brocade, in Dresden china, in every kind of frame that ingenious manufacturers devise for people with expensive tastes. They had filled a long shelf at the top of the dado. They had been stuck up in every available corner, when Sue was last in the room; and, behold, there was not one of them left!

"Oh, I put the horrid things away," Grace said impatiently; "I wonder I didn't burn them. Who would wish to be surrounded by lying smiles—false friends?"

Sue said nothing; and even here, within four walls, the conversation was still about impersonal matters, the books the friends had read in the last half-year—a subject which both were fond of discussing—the authors they loved, the authors they hated, the successes they wondered at.

After an hour's talk Miss Rodney persuaded her friend to sing, but Lady Perivale was not in voice. She sang "There was a King in Thule" with less than her usual power, and then played desultory bits of Schumann and Schubert, while Sue turned over a pile of new magazines.

They parted without any allusion to the scandal, except that angry remark about the photographs.

"Good night, dear; it has been so sweet to spend a quiet evening with you."

"Come again very soon, Sue. Come to luncheon or dinner, whenever you can spare an hour or two."

The week wore itself out. Lady Perivale received plenty of letters, but they were almost all of them appeals to her purse—programmes of concerts, applications from hospitals, tradesmen's circulars; not a single letter or card of invitation from anybody of mark.

She was not without visitors on Wednesday afternoon; but they made a vastly different appearance in her drawing-rooms to her visitors of last year, and there were no yellow barouches and French victorias waiting in the square. A gushing widow with two rather tawdry daughters, whom she had met only at charity bazaars and an occasional omnium gatherum, and had severely kept at a distance, came sailing and simpering in, followed by two bushy fringes, pert retroussé noses, and suspiciously rosy lips, under picture hats of a cheap smartness, scintillating with mock diamonds.

"Dear Lady Perivale, I know you are at home on Wednesday, so I thought I would take my courage in my two hands, and call on you, in the hope of interesting you in the bazaar at the Riding School. The cause is such a good one—providing bicycles for daily governesses of small means. I think you know my girls, Flora and Nora?"

Grace was coldly civil. She promised to think about the bicycles, and she began to pour out tea, which had just been brought in.

"My girls" composed themselves upon low chairs, whisking the rose-coloured flounces under their pale-green frocks into due prominence, unconscious of a slightly draggled effect in skirts that had done church parade on three Sundays. They scanned the spacious drawing-rooms with eyes accustomed to the band-box limitations of a flat in West Kensington, where, if a sudden gust blew, one could shut the window with one hand, and the door with the other.

How vast and splendid the rooms were, and yet Lady Perivale was only a country parson's daughter! They appraised her beauty, and wondered at her good luck. They took in every detail of her pale lavender frock—softest silk, tucked, and frilled, and ruched, and pleated, by a fashionable dressmaker, until, by sheer needle-work, twenty yards of China silk were made to look worth forty guineas. There was more work in that little visiting-gown than in six of Nora's frocks, although she spent most of her morning hours at her sewing machine.

"How delicious it must be to be so rich," thought Flora. "And what can a trumpery scandal matter to a woman with a house in Grosvenor Square and powdered footmen? It's ridiculous of mother to be 'poor thing-ing' her."

"Flora and Nora are helping Lady de Green at the tea-stall," Mrs. Wilfred explained. "They mean to have a quite original tea, don't you know; Japanese cups and saucers, and tiny brown and white sandwiches."

"Nora has a German friend who can make thirty kinds of sandwiches," said Flora. "I believe sandwich cutting ranks before Wagner's music as an accomplishment in Berlin."

Three young men straggled in while the tea was circulating. They were men whom Lady Perivale knew very well, but they were not in the best set, not the men with highly placed mothers and sisters, whose presence gives a cachet. She thought them a shade too empressé in their satisfaction at her return to town. They hoped she was going to give some of her delightful parties, and that she was not going to waste time before she sent out her cards.

"The season is so short nowadays. Everybody rushes off to some German cure before July is half over," said Mr. Mordaunt, a clerk at the Admiralty.

Nobody asked Lady Perivale where she had spent the winter. She hated them for their reticence, hated them for finding her in the emptiness of her three drawing-rooms, with only that detestable Mrs. Wilfred, and still more hateful Flora and Nora. It was so much worse than being quite alone. But she had sworn to herself to stay in Grosvenor Square, and could not deny herself to detrimentals. Nobody stopped long. Mrs. Wilfred did not feel her visit a success, and the men saw that Lady Perivale was bored.

Captain Marduke, of the Blues, outstayed the others, and put on a certain familiarity of tone. It was the faintest shade of difference, but Lady Perivale was aware of it, and froze him out in five minutes by her distant manner.

He met Mordaunt at his club before dinner.

"Wasn't it awful in Grosvenor Square, Tommy?" said his friend.

"Ghastly. Don't you think she was a fool to show herself in London after her escapade?" returned Marduke, who had been christened Reginald Stuart Ponsonby, and was Tommy to his friends and the Society papers.

"I can't understand it," said Mordaunt, chalking his cue slowly, and looking at the tip with a puzzled expression, as if the mystery were there. "Such a good woman I always thought her. The very last, don't you know, to pitch her cap over the mill. And the way she looked at us this afternoon, through and through, with such proud, steady eyes! It's damn perplexing."

"So it is, Bill. Your shot."

"But are people sure of the story? Is there no mistake, do you think?" asked Mordaunt, missing an easy cannon.

"Oh! people are sure enough. It isn't one man's word, you see. Brander met them at Ajaccio, saw her stepping into a carriage in front of the hotel, met him face to face in the coffee-room, knew by his confused manner that there was something up, questioned the manager, and found they had been living there a fortnight as Mr. and Mrs. Randall. Jack Dane saw them in Sardinia. The Willoughby Parkers came upon them in Algiers, staying at a second-rate hotel in the town, saw them sitting under a palm-tree, taking their coffee, as they drove by, and met them driving in the environs. No mistaking her—as handsome a woman as you'd see in a day's journey; no mistaking him—a wrong 'un, but a damn good-looking demon, with the manners of Chesterfield and the morals of Robert Macaire, the sort of man most women admire."

"Only the wrong sort of women, I think," said Mordaunt, resuming his cue, the soldier having spaced his sentences with cannons and losers, and made a break of twenty while he talked. "I can't understand such a woman as Lady Perivale disgracing herself by an intrigue of that kind—least of all for such a man as Rannock. Thoroughly bad style!"

"Women don't know bad style from good in our sex; they only know their own by the clothes."

"If she cared for the man, why not marry him?"

"Not much! She is a rich woman, and doesn't want a husband who would spend every shillin' in two or three years."

"Oh! but nowadays a woman can take care of her money. The law will protect her!"

"Not from a spendthrift that she's fond of. And nowadays the clever women have free and easy ideas of the marriage tie. They've been educated up to it by novels and newspapers. Well, it isn't a nice story, anyhow you look at it; but I thought it was friendly to call."

"So did I," said Mordaunt. "But I'm afraid she'd rather not have seen us. I hope she'll go to her place in the north, and cut the whole boiling."

"Not much left for her to cut, poor soul, if people have given her the cold shoulder."

"She can cut Mrs. Wilfred and her girls," said Mordaunt. "I should think she'd enjoy doing it."

Lady Perivale drove in the park three or four afternoons a week at the fashionable hour, when carriages had to move slowly, and mounted policemen were keeping the way clear for the passing of royal personages. Some of her women friends bowed to her coldly, and she returned the salute with the same distance. The men lounging by the railings were on the alert to acknowledge a bow from her; but she had a way of not seeing them that they could hardly call offensive. The more strait-laced among the women looked at her with unrecognizing eyes; and she gave them back the same blank stare. Young, very handsome, exquisitely dressed by the faiseuse at the top of the mode, and seated in a victoria whose every detail, from the blood horses to the men's gloves and collars, was perfection, she drove to and fro, knowing herself under a dark cloud of undeserved disgrace. Anger was her strongest feeling. Her heart beat fast, and her cheek flushed as she drove past those treacherous women whom she had called friends. She had not cultivated sentimental friendships in the fashionable world. She had no alter ego, no bosom friend, in society. But she had liked people, and had believed they liked her; and it was difficult to think they could insult her by giving credence to such a preposterous story as some idiots had set on foot.

She sought no society, sent out no invitations to the intimates of old, the girls who had made her little court of adorers, her Queen's Maries, whose hats and gloves had so often figured in her milliner's bills, since if a nice girl were assisting at her own choice of head-gear, and cast longing looks upon some sparkling vision of roses and leghorn, or ostrich feathers and spangled lace, what more natural than to insist upon buying the things for her, in spite of all protests. She had scattered such gifts with lavish hands, forgetting all about them till surprised by the total of her milliner's bill.

"Can I have spent so much on finery in a single season? Ah, by-the-by, I gave Kate Holloway a hat, and Emily Dashwood an ostrich fan, and Laura Vane had an ostrich boa, and a dozen long gloves. There are ever so many things I had forgotten." And now the Lauras and Emilys and Kates had other patronesses to eke out the paternal allowance, and they went gaily down the stream with the people who thought evil of Lady Perivale.

"We never were really intimate with her, don't you know?" they explained, to acquaintance who had seen them in her barouche or in her opera-box three or four times a week.

Her opera-box had been one of her chief splendours, a large box on the grand tier. Music was her delight, and, except for a scratch performance of Il Trovatore or La Traviata, she had seldom been absent from her place. It was at the opera that Colonel Rannock had been most remarkable in his attendance upon her. She liked him to be there, for it was pleasant to have the sympathy of a fine musician, whose critical faculty made him a delightful guide through the labyrinth of a Wagnerian opera. Their heads had been often seen bending over the score, he explaining, she listening as if enthralled. To the unmusical, that study of Wagner's orchestration seemed the thinnest pretext for confidential whispers, for lips hovering too near perfumed tresses and jewelled throat.

"No need to inquire for the Leit-motif, there," said the men in the stalls; and it was generally supposed that Lady Perivale meant to marry Colonel Rannock, in spite of all that the world had to say against him.

"If she hadn't carried on desperately with him last year one might hardly believe the story," said the people who had accepted the truth of the rumour without a moment's hesitation.

She occupied her opera-box this year, resplendent in satin and diamonds, radiating light on a tiara night from the circlet of stars and roses that trembled on their delicate wires as she turned her head from the stage to the auditorium. She had her visitors as of old: attachés, ambassadors even, literary men, musical men, painters, politicians. Coldly as she received them, she could not snub them, she could not keep them at bay altogether; and, after all, she had no grudge against the foreigners, and her box scintillated with stars on a gala night. It pleased her to face her detractors in that public arena, conspicuous by her beauty and her jewels.

There were waverers who would have liked to go to her, to hold out the hand of friendship, to laugh off the story of her infamy; but the fiat had gone forth, and she was taboo. The bellwether had scrambled up the bank and passed through the gap in the hedge, and all the other sheep must follow in that leading animal's steps. Life is too short for individual choice in a case of this kind.

She had half a mind to go to the May Drawing-room, and had no fear of repulse from Court officials, who are ever slow to condemn; but, on reflection, she decided against that act of self-assertion. She would not seem to appeal against the sentence that had been pronounced against her by confronting her traducers before the face of royalty. The card for the Marlborough House garden-party came in due course, but she made an excuse for being absent. She would not hazard an appearance which might cause annoyance to the Princess, who would perhaps have been told afterwards that Lady Perivale ought not to have been asked, and that it was an act of insolence in such a person to have written her name in the sacred book when she came to London.

But June had not come yet, and the royal garden-party was still a thing of the future.

As yet Lady Perivale had taken no trouble to discover how the slanderous story had been circulated, or who the people were who pretended to have met her. She could not bring herself to search out the details of a scandal that so outraged all her feelings—her pride, her self-respect, her belief in friendship and human kindness.

She had made no attempt to justify herself. She had accepted the situation in a spirit of dogged resentment, and she faced her little world with head erect, and eyes that gave scorn for scorn, and the only sign of feeling was the fever spot that burnt on her cheek sometimes, when she passed the friends of last year.

She had been living in Grosvenor Square more than a month, and her drawing-room windows were wide open on a balcony full of May flowers, when the butler announced—

"Lady Morningside," and a stout, comfortable-looking matron, in a grey satin pelisse and an early victorian bonnet, rolled in upon her solitude.

"My dear, I am so glad to find you at home and alone," said Lady Morningside, shaking hands in her hearty fashion, and seating herself in a capacious grandfather chair. "I have come for a confidential talk. I only came to London three days ago. I have been at Wiesbaden about these wretched eyes of mine. He can't do much," name understood, "but he does something, and that keeps my spirits up."

"I am so sorry you have been suffering."

"Oh, it wasn't very bad. An excuse for being away."

"You have been at Wiesbaden, Marchioness? Then you haven't heard——-"

"What? How handsome you are lookin'. But a little too pale."

"You haven't heard that I am shunned like an influenza patient, on account of a miserable slander that I am utterly unable to focus or to refute."