THE FATAL THREE

A Novel

BY THE AUTHOR OF

“LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” “VIXEN,”
“ISHMAEL,” “MOHAWKS,”
ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. I.

LONDON
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, AND CO.
STATIONERS’ HALL COURT

[All rights reserved]

LONDON:
ROBSON AND SONS LIMITED, PRINTERS PANCRAS ROAD N.W.

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

Book the First.

CLOTHO; OR SPINNING THE THREAD.

BOOK THE FIRST.

CLOTHO; OR SPINNING THE THREAD.

CHAPTER I.
“WE HAVE BEEN SO HAPPY.”

“I’m afraid she will be a terrible bore,” said the lady, with a slight pettishness in the tone of a voice that was naturally sweet.

“How can she bore us, love? She is only a child, and you can do what you like with her,” said the gentleman.

“My dear John, you have just admitted that she is between thirteen and fourteen—a great deal more than a child—a great overgrown girl, who will want to be taken about in the carriage, and to come down to the drawing-room, and who will be always in the way. Had she been a child of Mildred’s age, and a playfellow for Mildred, I should not have objected half so much.”

“I’m very sorry you object; but I have no doubt she will be a playfellow for Mildred all the same, and that she will not mind spending a good deal of her life in the schoolroom.”

“Evidently, John, you don’t know what girls of fourteen are. I do.”

“Naturally, Maud, since it is not so many years since you yourself were that age.”

The lady smiled, touched ever so slightly by the suggestion of youth, which was gratifying to the mother of a seven-year-old daughter.

The scene was a large old-fashioned drawing-room, in an old-fashioned street in the very best quarter of the town, bounded on the west by Park Lane and on the east by Grosvenor Square. The lady was sitting at her own particular table, in her favourite window, in the summer gloaming; the gentleman was standing with his back to the velvet-draped mantelpiece. The room was full of flowers and prettinesses of every kind, and offered unmistakable evidence of artistic taste and large means in its possessors.

The lady was young and fair, a tall slip of a woman, who afforded a Court milliner the very best possible scaffolding for expensive gowns. The gentleman was middle-aged and stout, with strongly-marked features and a resolute, straightforward expression. The lady was the daughter of an Irish peer; the gentleman was a commoner, whose fortune had been made in a great wholesale firm, which had still its mammoth warehouses near St. Paul’s Churchyard, and its manufactory at Lyons, but with which John Fausset had no longer any connection. He had taken his capital out of the business, and had cleansed himself from the stain of commercial dealings before he married the Honourable Maud Donfrey, third daughter of Lord Castle-Connell.

Miss Donfrey had given herself very willingly to the commoner, albeit he was her senior by more than twenty years, and, in her own deprecating description of him, was quite out of her set. She liked him not a little for his own sake, and for the power his strong will exercised over her own weaker nature; but she liked him still better for the sake of wealth which seemed unlimited.

She was nineteen at the time of her marriage, and she had been married nine years. Those years had brought the Honourable Mrs. Fausset only one child, the seven-year-old daughter playing about the room in the twilight; and maternity had offered very little hindrance to the lady’s pleasures as a woman of fashion. She had been indulged to the uttermost by a fond and admiring husband; and now for the first time in his life John Fausset had occasion to ask his wife a favour, which was not granted too readily. It must be owned that the favour was not a small one, involving nothing less than the adoption of an orphan girl in whose fate Mr. Fausset was interested.

“It is very dreadful,” sighed Mrs. Fausset, as if she were speaking of an earthquake. “We have been so happy alone together—you and I and Mildred.”

“Yes, dearest, when we have been alone, which, you will admit, has not been very often.”

“O, but visitors do not count. They come and go. They don’t belong to us. This dreadful girl will be one of us; or she will expect to be. I feel as if the golden circle of home-life were going to be broken.”

“Not broken, Maud, only expanded.”

“O, but you can’t expand it by letting in a stranger. Had the mother no people of her own; no surroundings whatever; nobody but you who could be appealed to for this wretched girl?” inquired Mrs. Fausset, fanning herself wearily, as she lolled back in her low chair.

She wore a loose cream-coloured gown, of softest silk and Indian embroidery, and there were diamond stars trembling amongst her feathery golden hair. The flowing garment in which she had dined alone with her husband was to be changed presently for white satin and old Mechlin lace, in which she was to appear at three evening parties; but in the meantime, having for once in a way dined at home, she considered her mode of life intensely domestic.

The seven-year-old daughter was roaming about with her doll, sometimes in one drawing-room, sometimes in another. There were three, opening into each other, the innermost room half conservatory, shadowy with palms and tropical ferns. Mildred was enjoying herself in the quiet way of children accustomed to play alone, looking at the pretty things upon the various tables, peering in at the old china figures in the cabinets—the ridiculous Chelsea shepherd and shepherdess; the Chelsea lady in hawking costume, with a falcon upon her wrist; the absurd lambs, and more absurd foliage; and the Bow and Battersea ladies and gentlemen, with their blunt features and coarse complexions. Mildred was quite happy, prowling about and looking at things in silent wonder; turning over the leaves of illustrated books, and lifting the lids of gold and enamelled boxes; trying to find out the uses and meanings of things. Sometimes she came back to the front drawing-room, and seated herself on a stool at her mother’s feet, solemnly listening to the conversation, following it much more earnestly, and comprehending it much better, than either her father or mother would have supposed possible.

To stop up after nine o’clock was an unwonted joy for Mildred, who went to bed ordinarily at seven. The privilege had been granted in honour of the rare occasion—a tête-à-tête dinner in the height of the London season.

“Is there no one else who could take her?” repeated Mrs. Fausset impatiently, finding her husband slow to answer.

“There is really no one else upon whom the poor child has any claim.”

“Cannot she remain at school? You could pay for her schooling, of course. I should not mind that.”

This was generous in a lady who had brought her husband a nominal five thousand pounds, and who spent his money as freely as if it had been water.

“She cannot remain at school. She is a kind of girl who cannot get on at school. She needs home influences.”

“You mean that she is a horrid rebellious girl who has been expelled from a school, and whom I am to take because nobody else will have her.”

“You are unjust and ungenerous, Maud. The girl has not been expelled. She is a girl of peculiar temper, and very strong feelings, and she is unhappy amidst the icy formalities of an unexceptionable school. Perhaps had she been sent to some struggling schoolmistress in a small way of business she might have been happier. At any rate, she is not happy, and as her people were friends of mine in the past I should like to make her girlhood happy, and to see her well married, if I can.”

“But are there not plenty of other people in the world who would do all you want if you paid them. I’m sure I should not grudge the money.”

“It is not a question of money. The girl has money of her own. She is an heiress.”

“Then she is a ward in Chancery, I suppose?”

“No, she is my ward. I am her sole trustee.”

“And you really want to have her here in our own house, and at The Hook, too, I suppose. Always with us wherever we go.”

“That is what I want—until she marries. She will be twenty in five years, and in all probability she will marry before she is twenty. It is not a life-long sacrifice that I am asking from you, Maud; and, remember, it is the first favour I have ever asked you.”

“Let the little girl come, mother,” pleaded Mildred, clambering on to her mother’s knee.

She had been sitting with her head bent over her doll, and her hair falling forward over her face like golden rain, for the last ten minutes. Mrs. Fausset had no suspicion that the child had been listening, and this sudden appeal was startling to the last degree.

“Wisdom has spoken from my darling’s rosy lips,” said Fausset, coming over to the window and stooping to kiss his child.

“My dear John, you must know that your wish is a law to me,” replied his wife, submitting all at once to the inevitable. “If you are really bent upon having your ward here she must come.”

“I am really bent upon it.”

“Then let her come as soon as you like.”

“I will bring her to-morrow.”

“And I shall have some one to play with,” said Mildred, in her baby voice; “I shall give her my second best doll.”

“Not your best, Mildred?” asked the father, smiling at her.

Mildred reflected for a few moments.

“I’ll wait and see what she is like,” she said, “and if she is very nice I will give her quite my best doll. The one you brought me from Paris, father. The one that walks and talks.”

Maud Fausset sighed, and looked at the little watch dangling on her chatelaine.

“A quarter to ten! How awfully late for Mildred to be up! And it is time I dressed. I hope you are coming with me, John. Ring the bell, please. Come, Mildred.”

The child kissed her father with a hearty, clinging kiss which meant a world of love, and then she picked up her doll—not the walking-talking machine from Paris, but a friendly, old-fashioned wax and bran personage—and trotted out of the room, hanging on to her mother’s gown.

“How sweet she is!” muttered the father, looking after her fondly; “and what a happy home it has been! I hope the coming of that other one won’t make any difference.”

CHAPTER II.
FAY.

Mrs. Fausset’s three parties, the last of which was a very smart ball, kept her away from home until the summer sun was rising above Grosvenor Square, and the cocks were crowing in the mews behind Upper Parchment Street. Having been so late in the morning, Mrs. Fausset ignored breakfast, and only made her appearance in time for lunch, when her husband came in from his ride. He had escorted her to the first of her parties, and had left her on the way to the second, to go and finish his evening in the House, which he found much more interesting than society.

They met at luncheon, and talked of their previous night’s experiences, and of indifferent matters. Not a word about the expected presence which was so soon to disturb their domestic calm. Mr. Fausset affected cheerfulness, yet was evidently out of spirits. He looked round the picturesque old oak dining-room wistfully; he strolled into the inner room, with its dwarf bookcases, pictures, and bronzes, its cosy corner behind a sixfold Indian screen, a century-old screen, bought at Christie’s out of a famous collection. He surveyed this temple of domestic peace, and wondered within himself whether it would be quite as peaceful when a new presence was among them.

“Surely a girl of fourteen can make no difference,” he argued, “even if she has a peculiar temper. If she is inclined to be troublesome, she shall be made to keep herself to herself. Maud shall not be rendered unhappy by her.”

He went out soon after lunch, and came home again at afternoon tea-time in a hansom, with a girl in a black frock. A four-wheeler followed, with a large trunk and two smaller boxes. The splendid creatures in knee-breeches and powder who opened the door had been ordered to deny their mistress to everybody, so Mrs. Fausset was taking tea alone in her morning-room.

The morning-room occupied the whole front of the second floor, a beautiful room with three windows, the centre a large bow jutting out over empty space. This bow-window had been added when Mr. Fausset married, on a suggestion from his fiancée. It spoiled the external appearance of the house, but it made the room delightful. For furniture and decoration there was everything pretty, novel, eccentric, and expensive that Maud Fausset had ever been able to think of. She had only stopped her caprices and her purchases when the room would not hold another thing of beauty. There was a confusion of form and colour, but the general effect was charming; and Mrs. Fausset, in a loose white muslin gown, suited the room, just as the room suited Mrs. Fausset.

She was sitting in the bow-window, in a semicircle of flowers and amidst the noises of the West End world, waiting for her husband and the new-comer, nervous and apprehensive. The scarlet Japanese tea-table stood untouched, the water bubbling in the quaint little bronze tea-kettle, swinging between a pair of rampant dragons.

She started as the door opened, but kept her seat. She did not want to spoil the new-comer by an undue appearance of interest.

John Fausset came into the room, leading a pale girl dressed in black. She was tall for her age, and very thin, and her small face had a pinched look, which made the great black eyes look larger. She was a peculiar-looking girl, with an olive tint in her complexion which hinted at a lineage not altogether English. She was badly dressed in the best materials, and had a look of never having been much cared for since she was born.

“This is Fay,” said Mr. Fausset, trying to be cheerful.

His wife held out her hand, which the girl took coldly, but not shyly. She had an air of being perfectly self-possessed.

“Her name is Fay, is it? What a pretty name! By the bye, you did not tell me her surname.”

“Did I not? Her name is Fausset. She is a distant relation of my family.”

“I did not understand that last night,” said Mrs. Fausset, with a puzzled air. “You only talked of a friend.”

“Was that so? I should have said a family connection. Yes, Fay and I are namesakes, and kindred.”

He patted the girl’s shoulder caressingly, and made her sit down by the little red table in front of the tea-cups, and cakes, and buns. The buns reminded him of his daughter.

“Where is Mildred?”

“She is at her music-lesson; but she will be here in a minute or two, no doubt,” answered his wife.

“Poor little mite, to have to begin lessons so soon; the chubby little fingers stuck down upon the cold hard keys. The piano is so uninviting at seven years old; such a world of labour for such a small effect. If she could turn a barrel-organ, with a monkey on the top, I’m sure she would like music ever so much better; and after a year or two of grinding it would dawn upon her that there was something wanting in that kind of music, and then she would attack the piano of her own accord, and its difficulties would not seem so hopelessly uninteresting. Are you fond of lessons, Fay?”

“I hate them,” answered the girl, with vindictive emphasis.

“And I suppose you hate books too?” said Mrs. Fausset, rather scornfully.

“No, I love books.”

She looked about the spacious room, curiously, with admiring eyes. People who came from very pretty rooms of their own were lost in admiration at Mrs. Fausset’s morning-room, with its heterogeneous styles of art—here Louis Seize, there Japanese; Italian on one side, Indian on the other. What a dazzling effect, then, it must needs have upon this girl, who had spent the last five years of her life amidst the barren surroundings of a suburban school!

“What a pretty room!” she exclaimed at last.

“Don’t you think my wife was made to live in pretty rooms?” asked Fausset, touching Maud’s delicate hand as it moved among the tea-things.

“She is very pretty herself,” said Fay, bluntly.

“Yes, and all things about her should be pretty. This thing, for instance,” as Mildred came bounding into the room, and clambered on her father’s knee. “This is my daughter, Fay, and your playfellow, if you know how to play.”

“I’m afraid I don’t, for they always snubbed us for anything like play,” answered the stranger, “but Mildred shall teach me, if she will.”

She had learnt the child’s name from Mr. Fausset during the drive from Streatham Common to Upper Parchment Street.

Mildred stretched out her little hand to the girl in black with somewhat of a patronising air. She had lived all her little life among bright colours and beautiful objects, in a kind of butterfly world; and she concluded that this pale girl in sombre raiment must needs be poor and unhappy. She looked her prettiest, smiling down at the stranger from her father’s shoulder, where she hung fondly. She looked like a cherub in a picture by Rubens, red-lipped, with eyes of azure, and flaxen hair just touched with gold, and a complexion of dazzling lily and carnation-colour suffused with light.

“I mean to give you my very best doll,” she said.

“You darling, how I shall adore you!” cried the strange girl impulsively, rising from her seat at the tea-table, and clasping Mildred in her arms.

“That is as it should be,” said Fausset, patting Fay’s shoulder affectionately. “Let there be a bond of love between you two.”

“And will you play with me, and learn your lessons with me, and sleep in my room?” asked Mildred coaxingly.

“No, darling. Fay will have a room of her own,” said Mrs. Fausset, replying to the last inquiry. “It is much nicer for girls to have rooms to themselves.”

“No, it isn’t,” answered Mildred, with a touch of petulance that was pretty in so lovely a child. “I want Fay to sleep with me. I want her to tell me stories every night.”

“You have mother to tell you stories, Mildred,” said Mrs. Fausset, already inclined to be jealous.

“Not very often. Mother goes to parties almost every night.”

“Not at The Hook, love.”

“O, but at The Hook there’s always company. Why can’t I have Fay to tell me stories every night?” urged the child persistently.

“I don’t see why they should not be together, Maud,” said Mr. Fausset, always prone to indulge Mildred’s lightest whim.

“It is better that Fay should have a room of her own, for a great many reasons,” replied his wife, with a look of displeasure.

“Very well, Maud, so be it,” he answered, evidently desiring to conciliate her. “And which room is Fay to have?”

“I have given her Bell’s room.”

Mr. Fausset’s countenance fell.

“Bell’s room—a servant’s room!”—he repeated blankly.

“It is very inconvenient for Bell, of course,” said Mrs. Fausset. “She will have to put up with an extra bed in the housemaid’s room; and as she has always been used to a room of her own, she made herself rather disagreeable about the change.”

Mr. Fausset was silent, and seemed thoughtful. Mildred had pulled Fay away from the table and led her to a distant window, where a pair of Virginian love-birds were twittering in their gilded cage, half hidden amidst the bank of feathery white spirea and yellow marguerites which filled the recess.

“I should like to see the room,” said Fausset presently, when his wife had put down her teacup.

“My dear John, why should you trouble yourself about such a detail?”

“I want to do my duty to the girl—if I can.”

“I think you might trust such a small matter to me, or even to my housekeeper,” Maud Fausset answered with an offended air. “However, you are quite at liberty to make a personal inspection. Bell is very particular, and any room she occupied is sure to be nice. But you can judge for yourself. The room is on the same floor as Mildred’s.”

This last remark implied that to occupy any apartment on that floor must be a privilege.

“But not with the same aspect.”

“Isn’t it? No, I suppose not. The windows look the other way,” said Mrs. Fausset innocently.

She was not an over-educated person. She adored Keats, Shelley, and Browning, and talked about them learnedly in a way; but she hardly knew the points of the compass.

She sauntered out of the room, a picture of languid elegance in her flowing muslin gown. There were flowers on the landing, and a scarlet Japanese screen to fence off the stairs that went downward, and a blue-and-gold Algerian curtain to hide the upward flight. This second floor was Mrs. Fausset’s particular domain. Her bedroom and bathroom and dressing-room were all on this floor. Mr. Fausset lived there also, but seemed to be there on sufferance.

She pulled aside the Algerian curtain, and they went up to the third story. The two front rooms were Mildred’s bedroom and schoolroom. The bedroom-door was open, revealing an airy room with two windows brightened by outside flower-boxes, full of gaudy red geraniums and snow-white marguerites, a gay-looking room, with a pale blue paper and a blue-and-cream-colour carpet. A little brass bed, with lace curtains, for Mildred—an iron bed, without curtains, for Mildred’s maid.

The house was like many old London houses, more spacious than it looked outside. There were four or five small rooms at the back occupied by servants, and it was one of those rooms—a very small room looking into a mews—which Mr. Fausset went to inspect.

It was not a delightful room. There was an outside wall at right-angles with the one window which shut off the glory of the westering sun. There was a forest of chimney-pots by way of prospect. There was not even a flower-box to redeem the dinginess of the outlook. The furniture was neat, and the room was spotlessly clean; but as much might be said of a cell in Portland Prison. A narrow iron bedstead, a couple of cane chairs, a common mahogany chest of drawers in the window, and on the chest of drawers a white toilet-cover and a small mahogany looking-glass; a deal washstand and a zinc bath. These are not luxurious surroundings; and Mr. Fausset’s countenance did not express approval.

“I’m sure it is quite as nice a room as she would have at any boarding-school,” said his wife, answering that disapproving look.

“Perhaps; but I want her to feel as if she were not at school, but at home.”

“She can have a prettier room at The Hook, I daresay, though we are short of bedrooms even there—if she is to go to The Hook with us.”

“Why, of course she is to go with us. She is to live with us till she marries.”

Mrs. Fausset sighed, and looked profoundly melancholy.

“I don’t think we shall get her married very easily,” she said.

“Why not?” asked her husband quickly, looking at her anxiously as he spoke.

“She is so remarkably plain.”

“Did she strike you so? I think her rather pretty, or at least interesting. She has magnificent eyes.”

“So has an owl in an ivy-bush,” exclaimed Mrs. Fausset petulantly. “Those great black eyes in that small pale face are positively repulsive. However, I don’t want to depreciate her. She is of your kith and kin, and you are interested in her; so we must do the best we can. I only hope Mildred will get on with her.”

This conversation took place upon the stairs. Mr. Fausset was at the morning-room door by this time. He opened it, and saw his daughter in the sunlit window among the flowers, with her arm round Fay’s neck.

“They have begun very well,” he said.

“Children are so capricious,” answered his wife.

CHAPTER III.
A SUPERIOR PERSON.

Mildred and her father’s ward got on remarkably well—perhaps a little too well to please Mrs. Fausset, who had been jealous of the new-comer, and resentful of her intrusion from the outset. Mildred did not show herself capricious in her treatment of her playfellow. The child had never had a young companion before, and to her the advent of Fay meant the beginning of a brighter life. Until Fay came there had been no one but mother; and mother spent the greater part of her life in visiting and receiving visits. Only the briefest intervals between a ceaseless round of gaieties could be afforded to Mildred. Her mother doated on her, or thought she did; but she had allowed herself to be caught in the cogs of the great society wheel, and she was obliged to go round with the wheel. So far as brightly-furnished rooms and an expensive morning governess, ever so much too clever for the pupil’s requirements, and costly toys and pretty frocks and carriage-drives, could go, Mildred was a child in an earthly paradise; but there are some children who yearn for something more than luxurious surroundings and fine clothes, and Mildred Fausset was one of those. She wanted a great deal of love—she wanted love always; not in brief snatches, as her mother gave it—hurried caresses given in the midst of dressing for a ball, hasty kisses before stepping into her carriage to be whisked off to a garden-party, or in all the pomp and splendour of ostrich feathers, diamonds, and court-train before the solemn function of a Drawing-room. Such passing glimpses of love were not enough for Mildred. She wanted warm affections interwoven with the fabric of her life; she wanted loving companionship from morning till night; and this she had from Fay. From the first moment of their clasping hands the two girls had loved each other. Each sorely in need of love, they had come together naturally, and with all the force of free undisciplined nature, meeting and mingling like two rivers.

John Fausset saw their affection, and was delighted. That loving union between the girl and the child seemed to solve all difficulties. Fay was no longer a stranger. She was a part of the family, merged in the golden circle of domestic love. Mrs. Fausset looked on with jaundiced eye.

“If one could only believe it were genuine!” she sighed.

“Genuine! which of them do you suppose is pretending? Not Mildred, surely?”

“Mildred! No, indeed. She is truth itself.”

“Why do you suspect Fay of falsehood?”

“My dear John, I fear—I only say I fear—that your protégée is sly. She has a quiet self-contained air that I don’t like in one so young.”

“I don’t wonder she is self-contained. You do so little to draw her out.”

“Her attachment to Mildred has an exaggerated air—as if she wanted to curry favour with us by pretending to be fond of our child,” said Mrs. Fausset, ignoring her husband’s remark.

“Why should she curry favour? She is not here as a dependent—though she is made to wear the look of one sometimes more than I like. I have told you that her future is provided for; and as for pretending to be fond of Mildred, she is the last girl to pretend affection. She would have been better liked at school if she had been capable of pretending. There is a wild, undisciplined nature under that self-contained air you talk about.”

“There is a very bad temper, if that is what you mean. Bell has complained to me more than once on that subject.”

“I hope you have not set Bell in authority over her,” exclaimed Mr. Fausset hastily.

“There must be some one to maintain order when Miss Colville is away.”

“That some one should be you or I, not Bell.”

“Bell is a conscientious person, and she would make no improper use of authority.”

“She is a very disagreeable person. That is all I know about her,” retorted Mr. Fausset, as he left the room.

He was dissatisfied with Fay’s position in the house, yet hardly knew how to complain or what alteration to suggest. There were no positive wrongs to resent. Fay shared Mildred’s studies and amusements; they had their meals together, and took their airings together.

When Mildred went down to the morning-room or the drawing-room Fay generally went with her—generally, not always. There were times when Bell looked in at the schoolroom-door and beckoned Mildred. “Mamma wants you alone,” she would whisper on the threshold; and Mildred ran off to be petted and paraded before some privileged visitor.

There were differences which Fay felt keenly, and inwardly resented. She was allowed to sit aloof when the drawing-room was full of fine ladies, upon Mrs. Fausset’s afternoon; while Mildred was brought into notice and talked about, her little graces exhibited and expatiated upon, or her childish tastes conciliated. Fay would sit looking at one of the art-books piled upon a side-table, or turning over photographs and prints in a portfolio. She never talked unless spoken to, or did anything to put herself forward.

Sometimes an officious visitor would notice her.

“What a clever-looking girl! Who is she?” asked a prosperous dowager, whose own daughters were all planted out in life, happy wives and mothers, and who could afford to interest herself in stray members of the human race.

“She is a ward of my husband’s, Miss Fausset.”

“Indeed! A cousin, I suppose?”

“Hardly so near as that. A distant connection.”

Mrs. Fausset’s tone expressed a wish not to be bored by praise of the clever-looking girl. People soon perceived that Miss Fausset was to be taken no more notice of than a piece of furniture. She was there for some reason known to Mr. and Mrs. Fausset, but she was not there because she was wanted—except by Mildred. Everybody could see that Mildred wanted her. Mildred would run to her as she sat apart, and clamber on her knee, and hang upon her, and whisper and giggle with her, and warm the statue into life. Mildred would carry her tea and cakes, and make a loving fuss about her in spite of all the world.

Bell was a power in the house in Upper Parchment Street. She was that kind of old servant who is as bad as a mother-in-law, or even worse; for your mother-in-law is a lady by breeding and education, and is in somewise governed by reason, while your trustworthy old servant is apt to be a creature of impulse, influenced only by feeling. Bell was a woman of strong feelings, devotedly attached to Mrs. Fausset.

Twenty-seven years ago, when Maud Donfrey was an infant, Martha Bell was the young wife of the head-gardener at Castle-Connell. The gardener and his wife lived at one of the lodges near the bank of the Shannon, and were altogether superior people for their class. Martha had been a lace-maker at Limerick, and was fairly educated. Patrick Bell was less refined, and had no ideas beyond his garden; but he was honest, sober, and thoroughly respectable. He seldom read the newspapers, and had never heard of Home Rule or the three F.s.

Their first child died within three weeks of its birth, and a wet-nurse being wanted at the great house for Lady Castle-Connell’s seventh baby, Mrs. Bell was chosen as altogether the best person for that confidential office. She went to live at the great white house in the beautiful gardens near the river. It was only a temporary separation, she told Patrick; and Patrick took courage at the thought that his wife would return to him as soon as Lady Castle-Connell’s daughter was weaned, while in the meantime he was to enjoy the privilege of seeing her every Sunday afternoon; but somehow it happened that Martha Bell never went back to the commonly-furnished little rooms in the lodge, or to the coarse-handed husband.

Martha Bell was a woman of strong feelings. She grieved passionately for her dead baby, and she took the stranger’s child reluctantly to her aching breast. But babies have a way of getting themselves loved, and one baby will creep into the place of another unawares. Before Mrs. Bell had been at the great house three months she idolised her nursling. By the time she had been there a year she felt that life would be unbearable without her foster-child. Fortunately for her, she seemed as necessary to the child as the child was to her. Maud was delicate, fragile, lovely, and evanescent of aspect. Lady Castle-Connell had lost two out of her brood, partly, she feared, from carelessness in the nursery. Bell was devoted to her charge, and Bell was entreated to remain for a year or two at least.

Bell consented to remain for a year; she became accustomed to the comforts and refinements of a nobleman’s house; she hated the lodge, and she cared very little for her husband. It was a relief to her when Patrick Bell sickened of his desolate home, and took it into his head to emigrate to Canada, where he had brothers and sisters settled already. He and his wife parted in the friendliest spirit, with some ideas of reunion years hence, when the Honourable Maud should have outgrown the need of a nurse; but the husband died in Canada before the wife had made up her mind to join him there. Mrs. Bell lived at the great white house until Maud Donfrey left Castle-Connell as the bride of John Fausset. She went before her mistress to the house in Upper Parchment Street, and was there when the husband and wife arrived after their Continental honeymoon. From that hour she remained in possession at The Hook, Surrey, or at Upper Parchment Street, or at any temporary abode by sea or lake. Bell was always a power in Mrs. Fausset’s life, ruling over the other servants, dictating and fault-finding in a quiet, respectful way, discovering the weak side of everybody’s character, and getting to the bottom of everybody’s history. The servants hated her, and bowed down before her. Mrs. Fausset was fond of her as a part of her own childhood, remembering that great love which had watched through all her infantine illnesses and delighted in all her childish joys. Yet, even despite these fond associations, there were times when Maud Fausset thought that it would be a good thing if dear old Bell would accept a liberal pension and go and live in some rose and honeysuckle cottage among the summery meadows by the Thames. Mrs. Fausset had only seen that riverside region in summer, and she had hardly realised the stern fact of winter in that district. She never thought of rheumatism in connection with one of those low white-walled cottages, half-hidden under overhanging thatched gables, and curtained with woodbine and passionflower, rose and myrtle. Dear old Bell was forty-eight, straight as a ramrod, very thin, with sharp features, and eager gray eyes under bushy iron-gray brows. She had thick iron-gray hair, and she never wore a cap; that was one of her privileges, and a mark of demarcation between her and the other servants—that and her afternoon gown of black silk or satin.

She had no specific duties in the house, but had something to say about everything. Mrs. Fausset’s French maid and Mildred’s German maid were at one in their detestation of Bell; but both were eminently civil to that authority.

From the hour of Fay’s advent in Upper Parchment Street, Bell had set her face against her. In the first place, she had not been taken into Mr. and Mrs. Fausset’s confidence about the girl. She had not been consulted or appealed to in any way; and, in the second place, she had been told that her bedroom would be wanted for the new-comer, and that she must henceforward share a room with one of the housemaids, an indignity which this superior person keenly felt.

Nor did Fay do anything to conciliate this domestic power. Fay disliked Bell as heartily as Bell disliked Fay. She refused all offers of service from the confidential servant at the outset, and when Bell wanted to help in unpacking her boxes—perhaps with some idea of peering into those details of a girl’s possessions which in themselves constitute a history—Fay declined her help curtly, and shut the door in her face.

Bell had sounded her mistress, but had obtained the scantiest information from that source. A distant connection of Mr. Fausset’s—his ward, an heiress. Not one detail beyond this could Bell extract from her mistress, who had never kept a secret from her. Evidently Mrs. Fausset knew no more.

“I must say, ma’am, that for an heiress the child has been sadly neglected,” said Bell. “Her under-linen was all at sixes and sevens till I took it in hand; and she came to this house with her left boot worn down at heel. Her drawers are stuffed with clothes, but many of them are out of repair; and she is such a wilful young lady that she will hardly let me touch her things.”

Bell had a habit of emphasising personal pronouns that referred to herself.

“You must do whatever you think proper about her clothes, whether she likes it or not,” answered Mrs. Fausset, standing before her glass, and giving final touches to the feathery golden hair which her maid had arranged a few minutes before. “If she wants new things, you can buy them for her from any of my tradespeople. Mr. Fausset says she is to be looked after in every way. You had better not go to Bond Street for her under-linen. Oxford Street will do; and you need not go to Stephanie for her hats. She is such a very plain girl that it would be absurd—cruel even—to dress her like Mildred.”

“Yes, indeed, it would, ma’am,” assented Bell; and then she pursued musingly: “If it was a good school she was at, all I can say is that the wardrobe-woman was a very queer person to send any pupil away with her linen in such a neglected state. And as for her education, Miss Colville says she is shockingly backward. Miss Mildred knows more geography and more grammar than that great overgrown girl of fourteen.”

Mrs. Fausset sighed.

“Yes, Bell, she has evidently been neglected; but her education matters very little. It is her disposition I am anxious about.”

“Ah, ma’am, and so am I,” sighed Bell.

When Bell had withdrawn, Maud Fausset sat in front of her dressing-table in a reverie. She forgot to put on her bonnet or to ring for her maid, though she had been told the carriage was waiting, and although she was due at a musical recital in ten minutes. She sat there lost in thought, while the horses jingled their bits impatiently in the street below.

“Yes, there is a mystery,” she said to herself; “everybody sees it, even Bell.”

CHAPTER IV.
ALL SHE COULD REMEMBER.

The London season was waning, and fewer carriages rolled westward to the Park gates in the low sunlight of late afternoon, and fewer riders trotted eastward towards Grosvenor Square in the brighter sunshine before luncheon. Town was gay still; but the flood-tide of pleasure was over. The river of London life was on the ebb, and people were beginning to talk about grouse-moors in Scotland and sulphur-springs in Germany.

Fay had lived in Upper Parchment Street nearly two months. It seemed to her impatient spirit as if she had lived there half a lifetime. The life would have been hateful to her without Mildred’s love. That made amends for a good deal, but it could not make amends for everything; not for Bell’s quiet insolence, for instance.

Bell had replenished the alien’s wardrobe. Everything she had bought was of excellent quality, and expensive after its kind; but had a prize been offered for bad taste, Bell would have taken it by her selections of raiment on this occasion. Not once did she allow Fay to have a voice in the matter.

“Mrs. Fausset deputed me to choose the things, miss,” she said, “and I hope I know my duty.”

“I suppose I am very ugly,” said Fay resignedly, as she contemplated her small features in the glass, overshadowed by a mushroom hat of coarse brown straw, with a big brown bow, “but in this hat I look positively hideous.”

The hat was an excellent hat: that good coarse Dunstable, which costs money and wears for ever, the ribbon of the best quality; but Hebe herself would have looked plain under a hat shaped like a bell-glass.

Fay’s remark was recorded to Mrs. Fausset as the indication of a discontented spirit.

Not being able to learn anything about Fay’s history from her mistress, Bell had tried to obtain a little light from the girl herself, but without avail. Questioned about her school, Fay had replied that she hated her school, and didn’t want to talk of it. Questioned about her mother, she answered that her mother’s name was too sacred to be spoken about to a stranger; and on a subtle attempt to obtain information about her father, the girl flushed crimson, started up angrily from her chair, and told the highly respectable Bell that she was not in the habit of chattering to servants, or being questioned by them.

After this it was war to the knife on Martha Bell’s part.

Miss Colville, the expensive morning governess, was in somewise above prejudice, and was a person of liberal mind, allowing for the fact that she had lived all her life in other people’s houses, looking on at lives of fashionable frivolity in which she had no share, and had been obliged to study Debrett’s annual volume as if it were her Bible, lest she should commit herself in every other speech, so intricate are the ramifications and intermarriages of the Upper Ten Thousand. Miss Colville was not unkind to Fay Fausset, and was conscientious in her instructions; but even she resented the mystery of the girl’s existence, and felt that her presence blemished the respectability of the household. By and by, when she should be seeking new employment, and should have occasion to refer to Mrs. Fausset, and to talk of her pupils in Upper Parchment Street, there would be a difficulty in accounting for Fay. A ward of Mr. Fausset’s, a distant connection: the whole thing sounded improbable. An heiress who had come to the house with torn embroidery upon her under-linen. A mystery—yes, no doubt a mystery. And in Miss Colville’s ultra-particular phase of life no manner of mystery was considered respectable; except always those open secrets in the very highest circles which society agrees to ignore.

In spite of these drawbacks, Miss Colville was fairly kind to her new charge. Fay was backward in grammar and geography; she was a dullard about science; but she could chatter French, she knew a little Italian, and in music she was highly gifted. In this she resembled Mildred, who adored music, and had taken her first lessons on the piano as a water-fowl takes to a pond, joyously, as to her native element. Fay was not advanced in the technique of the art, but she played and sang charmingly, for the most part by ear; and she used to play and sing to Mildred in the summer twilight, till Bell came like a prison-warder and insisted upon Mildred’s going to bed.

“I nursed your mamma, miss,” she would say, “and I never allowed her to spoil her complexion with late hours as Miss Fay is leading you on to do.”

At seven Mildred cared neither for health nor complexion in the abstract, and she loved Fay’s music and Fay’s stories. Fay would tell her a fairy tale, with musical accompaniments, improvised to suit the story. This was Beauty’s father groping through the dark wood. Then came the swaying of branches, the rustling of summer leaves, the long, long sigh of the night wind, the hoot of the owl, and the roll of distant thunder. Here came Fatima’s brothers to the rescue, with a triumphant march, and the trampling of fiery steeds, careering up and down the piano in presto arpeggios, bursting open the gates of Bluebeard’s Castle with a fortissimo volley of chords.

“I never heard any one make such a noise on a piano,” said Bell, bristling with indignation.

At eight o’clock Fay’s day and evening were done. Mildred vanished like the setting of the sun. She would like to have had Fay to sit beside her bed and tell her stories, and talk to her, till she dropped to sleep; but this happiness was sternly interdicted by Bell.

“She would keep you awake half the night, Miss Mildred, over-exciting you with her stories; and what would your pa and the doctors say to me?” exclaimed Bell.

The door of the bright, pretty bedchamber closed upon Mildred, and Fay went back to the schoolroom heavy of heart, to enjoy the privilege of sitting up by herself till half-past nine, a privilege conceded to superior years. In that dismal hour and a half the girl had leisure to contemplate the solitude of her friendless life. Take Mildred from her, and she had no one—nothing. Mr. Fausset had meant to be kind to her, perhaps. He had talked very kindly to her in the long drive from Streatham. He had promised her a home and the love of kindred; but evil influences had come in his way, and he had given her—Bell. Perhaps she was of a jealous, exacting disposition; for, fondly as she loved Mildred, she could not help comparing Mildred’s lot with her own: Mildred’s bright, airy room and flower-decked windows, looking over the tree-tops in the Park, with her dingy cell opening upon a forest of chimneys, and tainted with odours of stables and kitchen; Mildred’s butterfly frocks of lace and muslin, with the substantial ugliness of her own attire; Mildred’s manifold possessions—trinkets, toys, books, games, pictures, and flowers—with her empty dressing-table and unadorned walls.

“At your age white frocks would be ridiculous,” said Bell; yet Fay saw other girls of her age flaunting in white muslin all that summer through.

Sometimes the footman forgot to bring her lamp, and she would sit in the schoolroom window, looking down into the street, and watching the carriages roll by in endless procession, with their lamps flaming in the pale gray night, carrying their freight to balls and parties, hurrying from pleasure to pleasure on swift-revolving wheels. A melancholy hour this for the longing heart of youth, even when the schoolgirl’s future participation in all these pleasures is a certainty, or contingent only upon life; but what was it for this girl, who had all girlhood’s yearnings for pleasure and excitement, and who knew not if that sparkling draught would ever touch her lips, who felt herself an alien in this fine house, a stranger at this fashionable end of the town? It was no new thing for her to sit alone in the twilight, a prey to melancholy thoughts. Ever since she could remember, her life had been solitary and loveless. The home ties and tender associations which sweeten other lives were unknown to her. She had never known what love meant till she felt Mildred’s warm arms clinging round her neck, and Mildred’s soft cheek pressed against hers. Her life had been a shifting scene peopled with strangers. Dim and misty memories of childhood’s earliest dawn conjured up a cottage-garden on a windy hill; the sea stretching far away in the distance, bright and blue, but unattainable; a patch of grass on one side, a patch of potatoes on the other; a bed of wallflowers and stocks and yellow marigolds in front of the parlour window; a family of hens and an arrogant cock strutting in the foreground; and, standing out sharply against the sky and the sea, a tall column surmounted by a statue.

How she had longed to get nearer that vast expanse of water, to find out what the sea was like! From some points in the view it seemed so near, almost as if she could touch it with her outstretched hands; from other points it looked so far away. She used to stand on a bank behind the cottage and watch the white-sailed boats going out to sea, and the steamers with their trailing smoke melting and vanishing on the horizon.

“Where do they go?” she asked in her baby French. “Where do they go?”

Those were the first words she remembered speaking, and nobody seemed ever to have answered that eager question.

No one had cared for her in those days. She was very sure of that, looking back upon that monotonous childhood: a long series of empty hours in a cottage garden, and with no companions except the fowls, and no voice except that of the cow in the meadow hard by: a cow which sent forth meaningless bellows occasionally, and which she feared as if it had been a lion.

There was a woman in a white cap whom she called Nounou, and who seemed too busy to care about anybody; a woman who did all the housework, and dug the potato-garden, and looked after the fowls, and milked the cow and made butter, and rode to market on a donkey once or twice a week: a woman who was always in a hurry. There was a man who came home from work at sundown, and there were two boys in blouses and sabots, the youngest of whom was too old to play with the nurse-child. Long summer days in the chalky garden, long hours of listless monotony in front of the wide bright sea, had left a sense of oppression upon Fay’s mind. She did not know even the name of the town she had seen far below the long ridge of chalky hill—a town of tall white houses and domes and spires, which had seemed a vast metropolis to the eyes of infancy. She had but to shut her eyes in her evening solitude, and she could conjure up the picture of roofs and spires, and hill and sea, and the tall column in its railed enclosure; yet she knew no more of town or hill than that they were on the other side of the Channel.

She remembered lying in a narrow little bed, that rocked desperately on a windy day, and looking out at the white sea-foam dashing against a curious oval window, like a giant’s eye; and then she remembered her first wondering experience of railway travelling; a train flashing past green fields and hop-gardens and houses; and then darkness and the jolting of a cab; and after that being carried half-asleep into a strange house, and waking to find herself in a strange room, all very clean and neat, with a white-curtained bed and white muslin window-curtains, and on looking out of the window, behold, there was a patch of common all abloom with yellow gorse.

She remembered dimly that she had travelled in the charge of a little gray-haired man, who disappeared after the journey. She found herself now in the care of an elderly lady, very prim and strict, but not absolutely unkind; who wore a silk gown, and a gold watch at her waistband, and who talked in an unknown tongue. Everything here was prettier than in Nounou’s house, and there was a better garden, a garden where there were more flowers and no potatoes and there was the common in the front of the garden, all hillocks and hollows, where she was allowed to amuse herself in charge of a ruddy-faced girl in a lavender cotton frock.

The old lady taught her the unknown tongue, which she discovered in time to be English, and a good deal besides—reading and writing, for instance, and the rudiments of music, a little arithmetic, grammar, and geography. She took kindly to music and reading, and she liked to dabble with ink; but the other lessons were abhorrent, and she gave the orderly old lady a good deal of trouble. There was no love between them, only endurance on either side; and the long days on the common were almost as desolate as the days on the chalky hill above the sea.

At last there came a change. The dressmaker sent home three new frocks, all uncompromisingly ugly; the little old gray-haired man reappeared, looking exactly as he had looked on board the steamer, and a fly carried Fay and this guardian to the railway-station on the common, and thence the train took them to a great dark city, which the man told Fay was London; and then they went in a cab through streets that seemed endless, till at last the streets melted into a wide high-road, with trees on either side, and the cab drove into a garden of shining laurels and rhododendrons, and pulled up before a classic portico. Fay had no memory of any house so grand as this, although it was only the conventional suburban villa of sixty or seventy years ago.

Just at first the change seemed delightful. That circular carriage-sweep, those shining rhododendrons with great rose-coloured trusses of bloom, the drooping gold of the laburnums, and the masses of perfumed lilac, were beautiful in her eyes. Not so beautiful the long, bare schoolroom and the willow-pattern cups and saucers. Not so beautiful that all-pervading atmosphere of restraint which made school odious to Fay from the outset.

She stayed there for years—an eternity it seemed to her, looking back upon its hopeless monotony. Pleasure, variety, excitement, she had none. Life was an everlasting treadmill—up and down, down and up, over and over again. The same dull round of lessons; a dismal uniformity of food; Sunday penance in the shape of two long services in a badly ventilated church, and one long catechism in a dreary schoolroom. No gaol can be much duller than a well-regulated middle-class girls’ school. Fay could complain of no ill-treatment. She was well fed, comfortably housed, warmly clad; but her life was a burden to her.

She had a bad temper; was irritable, impatient, quick to take offence, and prone to fits of sullenness. This was the opinion of the authorities; and her faults increased as she grew older. She was not absolutely rebellious towards the governesses; but there was always something amiss. She was idle and listless at her studies, took no interest in anything but her music-lessons, and was altogether an unsatisfactory pupil. She had no lasting friendships among her schoolfellows. She was capricious in her likings, and was prone to fancy herself slighted or ill-treated on the smallest provocation. The general verdict condemned her as the most disagreeable girl in the school. With the meaner souls among her schoolfellows it was considered an affront that she should have no antecedents worth talking about, no relatives, no home, and no hampers or presents. Even the servants neglected her as a young person without surroundings, upon whom kindness would be thrown away. The wardrobe-woman left her clothes unmended, feeling that it mattered very little in what order they were kept, since the girl never went home for the holidays, and there was no mother or aunt to investigate her trunks. She was condemned on every hand as a discreditable mystery; and when, one unlucky afternoon, a sultry afternoon at the beginning of a hot summer, she lost her temper in the middle of a class-lesson, burst into a torrent of angry speech, half defiance, half reproach, bounced up from her seat, and rushed out of the schoolroom, there were few to pity, and none to sympathise.

The proprietress of the school was elderly and lymphatic. Miss Fausset had been stigmatised as a troublesome pupil for a long time. There were continual complaints about Miss Fausset’s conduct, worrying complaints, which spoilt Miss Constable’s dinner and interfered with her digestion. Really, the only course open to that prosperous, over-fed personage was to get rid of Miss Fausset. There was an amiable family of three sisters—highly connected young persons, whose father was in the wine trade—waiting for vacancies in that old-established seminary.

“We will make a tabula rasa of a troublesome past,” said Miss Constable, who loved fine words. “Miss Fausset must go.”

Thus it was that John Fausset had been suddenly called upon to find a new home for his ward; and thus it was that Fay had been brought to Upper Parchment Street.

No doubt Upper Parchment Street was better than school; but if it had not been for Mildred the atmosphere on the edge of Hyde Park would have been no more congenial than the atmosphere at Streatham. Fay felt herself an intruder in that splendid house, where, amidst that multitude of pretty things, she could not put her finger upon one gracious object that belonged to her—nothing that was her “very own,” as Mildred called it; for she had refused Mildred’s doll and all other proffered gifts, too proud to profit by a child’s lavish generosity. Mrs. Fausset made her no gifts, never talked to her, rarely looked at her.

Fay knew that Mrs. Fausset disliked her. She had divined as much from the first, and she knew only too well that dislike had grown with experience. She was allowed to go down to afternoon tea with Mildred; but had she been deaf and dumb her society could not have been less cultivated by the mistress of the house. Mrs. Fausset’s feelings were patent to the whole household, and were common talk in the servants’ hall. “No wonder,” said the women; the men said “What a shame!” but footmen and housemaids were at one in their treatment of Fay, which was neglectful, and occasionally insolent. It would hardly have been possible for them to behave well to the intruder and keep in favour with Bell, who was absolute—a superior power to butler or housekeeper, a person with no stated office, and the supreme right to interfere with everybody.

Bell sighed and shook her head whenever Miss Fay was mentioned. She bridled with pent-up indignation, as if the girl’s existence were an injury to her, Martha Bell. “If I hadn’t nursed Mrs. Fausset when she was the loveliest infant that ever drew breath, I shouldn’t feel it so much,” said Bell; and then tears would spring to her eyes and chokings would convulse her throat, and the housekeeper would shake her head and sympathise mysteriously.

At the end of July the establishment migrated from Parchment Street to The Hook, Mr. Fausset’s riverside villa between Chertsey and Windsor. The Hook was an expanse of meadow-land bordered with willows, round which the river made a loop; and on this enchanted bit of ground—a spot loved by the river-god—Mr. Fausset had built for himself the most delightful embodiment of that much-abused word villa; a long, low, white house, with spacious rooms, broad corridors, a double flight of marble stairs, meeting on a landing lit by an Italian cupola—a villa surrounded with a classic colonnade, and looking out upon peerless gardens sloping to the willow-shadowed stream.

To Fay The Hook seemed like a vision of Paradise. It was almost happiness even to her impatient spirit to sit in a corner of those lovely grounds, screened from the outer world by a dense wall of Portugal laurels and arbutus, with the blue water and the low, flat meadows of the further shore for her only prospect.

Miss Colville was left behind in London. For Fay and Mildred life was a perpetual holiday. Mrs. Fausset was almost as much in society at The Hook as she had been in London. Visitors came and visitors went. She was never alone. There were parties at Henley and Marlow, and Wargrave and Goring. Two pairs of horses were kept hard at work carrying Mr. and Mrs. Fausset about that lovely riverside landscape to garden-parties and dinners, picnics and regattas. John Fausset went because his wife liked him to go, and because he liked to see her happy and admired. The two girls were left, for the most part, to their own devices, under the supervision of Bell. They lived in the gardens, with an occasional excursion into the unknown world along the river. There was a trustworthy under-gardener, who was a good oarsman, and in his charge Mildred was allowed to go on the water in a big wherry, which looked substantial enough to have carried a select boarding-school.

This life by the Thames was the nearest approach to absolute happiness which Fay had ever known; but for her there was to be no such thing as unbroken bliss. In the midst of the sultry August weather Mildred fell ill—a mild attack of scarlet fever, which sounded less alarming to Mrs. Fausset’s ear, because the doctor spoke of it as scarlatina. It was a very mild case, the local practitioner told Mrs. Fausset; there was no occasion to send for a London physician; there was no occasion for alarm. Mildred must keep her bed for a fortnight, and must be isolated from the rest of the house. Her own maid might nurse her if she had had the complaint.

“How could she have caught the fever?” Mrs. Fausset asked, with an injured air; and there was a grand investigation, but no scarlet fever to be heard of nearer than Maidenhead.

“People are so artful in hiding these things,” said Mrs. Fausset; and ten minutes afterwards she begged the doctor not to mention Mildred’s malady to any of her neighbours.

“We have such a host of engagements, and crowds of visitors coming from London,” she said. “People are so ridiculously nervous. Of course I shall be extremely careful.”

The doctor gave elaborate instructions about isolation. Such measures being taken, Mrs. Fausset might receive all fashionable London with safety.

“And it is really such a mild case that you need not put yourself about in any way,” concluded the doctor.

“Dear, sweet pet, we must do all we can to amuse her,” sighed the fond mother.

Mild as the case might be, the patient had to suffer thirst and headache, a dry and swollen throat, and restless nights. Her most eager desire was for Fay’s company, and as it was ascertained that Fay had suffered from scarlet fever some years before in a somewhat severe form, it was considered she might safely assist in the sick-room.

She was there almost all day, and very often in the night. She read to Mildred, and sang to her, and played with her, and indulged every changing fancy and caprice of sickness. Her love was inexhaustible, indefatigable, for ever on the watch. If Mildred woke from a feverish dream in the deep of night, with a little agitated sob or cry, she found a figure in a white dressing-gown bending over her, and loving arms encircling her before she had time to feel frightened. Fay slept in a little dressing-room opening out of Mildred’s large, airy bedroom, so as to be near her darling. It was a mere closet, with a truckle-bed brought down from the servants’ attic; but it was good enough for Fay, whose only thought was of the child who loved her as none other had ever loved within her memory.

Mrs. Fausset was prettily anxious about her child. She would come to Mildred’s room in her dressing-gown before her leisurely morning toilet, to hear the last report. She would sit by the bed for five minutes showering kisses on the pale cheeks, and then she would go away to her long summer-day of frivolous pleasures and society talk. Ripples of laughter and snatches of speech came floating in at the open windows; and at Mildred’s behest Fay would stand at a window and report the proceedings of that happy world outside.

“They are going out in the boat. They are going to have tea on the lawn. Your mamma is walking up and down with Sir Horace Clavering. Miss Grenville and her sister are playing croquet;” and so on, and so on, all day.

Mildred tossed about on her pretty white bed impatiently.

“It is very horrid being shut up here on these fine days,” she said; “or it would be horrid without you, Fay. Mamma does not come to see me much.”

Mamma came three or four times a day; but her visits were of the briefest. She would come into the room beaming with smiles, looking like living sunlight in her exquisite white gown, with its delicate ribbons and cloudy lace—a fleecy white cloud just touched with rose-colour, as if she were an embodiment of the summer dawn. Sometimes she brought Mildred a peach, or a bunch of hothouse grapes, or an orchid, or a new picture-book; but beautiful as these offerings were, the child did not always value them. She would push the plate of grapes or the peach aside impatiently when her mother was gone, or she would entreat Fay to eat the dainty.

“Mamma thinks I am greedy,” she said; “but I ain’t, am I, Fay?”

Those three weeks in the sick-room, those wakeful nights and long, slow summer days, strengthened the bond of love between the two girls. By the time Mildred was convalescent they seemed to have loved each other for years. Mildred could hardly remember what her life was like before she had Fay for a companion. Mrs. Fausset saw this growing affection not without jealousy; but it was very convenient that there should be some one in the house whose companionship kept Mildred happy, and she even went so far as to admit that Fay was “useful.”

“I cannot be with the dear child half so much as I should like to be,” she said; “visitors are so exacting.”

Fay had slept very little during Mildred’s illness, and now that the child was nearly well the elder girl began to flag somewhat, and was tired early in the evening, and glad to go to bed at the same hour as the patient, who, under Bell’s supervision, was made to retire before eight. She was now well enough to sit up all day, and to drive out in a pony-carriage in the sunny hours after early dinner. Fay went with her, of course. Pony and landscape would have been wanting in charm without Fay’s company. Both girls had gone to bed one sultry evening in the faint gray twilight. Fay was sleeping profoundly; but Mildred, after dozing a little, was lying half-awake, with closed eyelids, in the flower-scented room. The day had been exceptionally warm. The windows were all open, and a door between Mildred’s bedroom and sitting-room had been left ajar.

Bell was in the sitting-room at her favourite task of clearing up the scattered toys and books, and reducing all things to mathematical precision. Meta, Mildred’s German maid, was sitting at needlework near the window by the light of a shaded lamp. The light shone in the twilight through the partly-open door, and gave Mildred a sense of company. They began to talk presently, and Mildred listened, idly at first, and soothed by the sound of their voices, but afterwards with keen curiosity.

“I know I shouldn’t like to be treated so,” said Meta.

“I don’t see that she has anything to complain of,” answered Bell. “She has a good home, and everything provided for her. What more can she want?”

“I should want a good deal more if I was a heiress.”

“An heiress,” corrected Bell, who prided herself on having cultivated her mind, and was somewhat pedantic of speech. “That’s all nonsense, Meta. She’s no more an heiress than I am. Mr. Fausset told my poor young mistress that just to throw dust in her eyes. Heiress, indeed! An heiress without a relative in the world that she can speak of—an heiress that has dropped from the moon. Don’t tell me.”

Nobody was telling Mrs. Bell anything; but she had a resentful air, as if combating the arguments of an invisible adversary.

There was a silence during which Mildred nearly fell asleep; and then the voices began again.

“It’s impossible for sisters to be fonder of each other than those two are,” said Meta.

“There’s nothing strange in that, considering they are sisters,” answered Bell angrily.

“O, but you’ve no right to say that, Mrs. Bell; it’s going too far.”

“Haven’t I a right to use my eyes and ears? Can’t I see the family look in those two faces, though Miss Mildred is pretty and Miss Fay is plain? Can’t I hear the same tones in the two voices, and haven’t I seen his way of bringing that girl into the house, and his guilty look before my poor injured mistress? Of course they’re sisters. Who could ever doubt it? She doesn’t, I know, poor dear.”

She, in this connection, meant Mrs. Fausset.

There was only one point in this speech which the innocent child seized upon. She and Fay were said to be sisters. O, how she had longed for a sister in the last year or so of her life, since she had found out the meaning of solitude among fairest surroundings! How all the brightest things she possessed had palled upon her for want of sisterly companionship! How she had longed for a baby-sister even, and had envied the children in households where a new baby was an annual institution! She had wondered why her mother did not treat herself to a new baby occasionally, as so many of her mother’s friends did. And now Fay had been given to her, ever so much better than a baby, which would have taken such a long time to grow up. Mildred had never calculated how long, but she concluded that it would be some months before the most forward baby would be of a companionable age. Fay had been given to her—a ready-made companion, versed in fairy tales, able to conjure up an enchanted world out of the schoolroom piano, skilful with pencil and colour-box, able to draw the faces and figures and palaces and woodlands of that fairy world, able to amuse and entertain her in a hundred ways. And Fay was her sister after all. She dropped asleep in a flutter of pleasurable excitement. She would ask her mother all about it to-morrow; and in the meantime she would say nothing to Fay. It was fun to have a secret from Fay.

A batch of visitors left next day after lunch. Mr. and Mrs. Fausset were to be alone for forty-eight hours, a rare oasis of domesticity in the society desert. Mildred had been promised that the first day there was no company she was to have tea with mamma in the tent on the lawn. She claimed the fulfilment of that promise to-day.

It was a lovely day after the sultry, thundery night. Mrs. Fausset reclined in her basket-chair in the shelter of the tent. Fay and Mildred sat side by side on a low bamboo bench on the grass: the little girl, fairy-like, in her white muslin and flowing flaxen hair, the big girl in olive-coloured alpaca, with dark hair clustering in short curls about the small intelligent head. There could hardly have been a stronger contrast than that between the two girls; and yet Bell was right. There was a family look, an undefinable resemblance of contour and expression which would have struck a very attentive observer—something in the line of the delicate eyebrow, something in the angle of the forehead.

“Mamma,” said Mildred suddenly, clambering into her mother’s lap, “why mayn’t I call Fay sister?”

Mrs. Fausset started, and flushed crimson.

“What nonsense, child! Why, because it would be most ridiculous.”

“But she is my sister,” urged Mildred, looking full into her mother’s eyes, with tremendous resolution in her own. “I love her like a sister, and she is my sister. Bell says so.”

“Bell is an impertinent person,” cried Mrs. Fausset angrily. “When did she say so?”

“Last night, when she thought I was asleep. Mayn’t I call Fay sister?” persisted Mildred coaxingly.

“On no account. I never heard anything so shameful. To think that Bell should gossip! An old servant like Bell—my own old nurse. It is too cruel!” cried Mrs. Fausset, forgetting herself in her anger.

Fay stood tall and straight in the sunshine outside the tent, wondering at the storm. She had an instinctive apprehension that Mrs. Fausset’s anger was humiliating to her. She knew not why, but she felt a sense of despair darker than any other evil moment in her life; and yet her evil moments had been many.

“You need not be afraid that I shall ask Mildred to call me sister,” she said. “I love her dearly, but I hate everybody else in this house.”

“You are a wicked, ungrateful girl,” exclaimed Mrs. Fausset, “and I am very sorry I ever saw your face.”

Fay drew herself up, looked at the speaker indignantly for a moment or so, and then walked quietly away towards the house.

She passed the footman with the tea-tray as she crossed the lawn, and a little further on she passed John Fausset, who looked at her wonderingly.

Mildred burst out crying.

“How unkind you are, mamma!” she sobbed. “If I mayn’t call her my sister I shall always love her like a sister—always, always, always.”

“What is the matter with my Mildred?” asked Mr. Fausset, arriving at this moment.

“Nothing. She has only been silly,” his wife answered pettishly.

“And Fay—has she been silly, too?”

“Fay, your protégée, has been most impertinent to me. But I suppose that does not count.”

“It does count, for a good deal, if she has been intentionally impertinent,” answered Fausset gravely.

He looked back after Fay’s vanishing figure with a troubled expression. He had so sighed for peace. He had hoped that the motherless girl might be taken into his home and cared for and made happy, without evil feeling upon any one’s part; and now he could see by his wife’s countenance that the hope of union and peace was at an end.

“I don’t know what you mean about intention,” said his wife; “I only know that the girl you are so fond of has just said she hates everybody in this house except Mildred. That sound rather like intentional impertinence, I think.”

“Go and play, darling,” said Fausset to his child; “or run after Fay, and bring her back to tea.”

“You show a vast amount of consideration for your wife,” said Mrs. Fausset.

“My dear Maud, I want you to show a little more consideration for that girl, who has been so devoted to Mildred all through her illness, and who has one very strong claim upon a mother’s heart—she is motherless.”

“I should think more of that claim, perhaps, if I knew who her mother was, and what she was to you,” said Maud Fausset.

“She was once near and dear to me. That is all I can tell you, Maud; and it ought to be enough.”

“It is more than enough,” his wife answered, trembling from head to foot, as she rose from her low chair, and walked away from the tent.

John Fausset looked after her irresolutely, went a few steps as if he meant to follow her, and then turned back to the tent, just as Mildred reappeared with Fay from another direction.

“We three will have tea together,” he exclaimed, with demonstrative cheerfulness. “Mamma is not very well, Mildred; she has gone back to the house. You shall pour out my tea.”

He seated himself in his wife’s chair, and Mildred sat on his knee, and put her arms round his neck, and adored him with all her power of adoration. Her household divinity had ever been the father. Perhaps her baby mind had found out the weakness of one parent and the strength of the other.

“Fay shall pour out the tea,” she said, with a sense of self-sacrifice. “It will be a treat for Fay.”

So Fay poured out the tea, and they all three sat in the tent, and were happy and merry—or seemingly so, perhaps, as concerned John Fausset—for one whole sunshiny hour, and for the first time Fay felt that she was not an outsider. Yet there lurked in her mind the memory of Mrs. Fausset’s anger, and that memory was bitter.

“What am I, that almost everybody should be rude to me?” she asked herself, as she sat alone that night after Mildred had gone to bed.

From the open windows below came the languid sweetness of a nocturne by Chopin. Mrs. Fausset was playing her husband to sleep after dinner. Sure token of reconciliation between husband and wife.

The doctor came next morning. He appeared upon alternate days now, and looked at Mildred in a casual manner, after exhausting the local gossip with Mrs. Fausset. This morning he and Mrs. Fausset were particularly confidential before the patient was sent for.

“Admirable!” he exclaimed, when he had looked at her tongue and felt her pulse; “we are as nearly well as we can be. All we want now is a little sea-air to set us up for the winter. The great point, my dear madam”—to Mrs. Fausset—“is to avoid all risk of sequelæ. A fortnight at Brighton or Eastbourne will restore our little friend to perfect health.”

There were no difficulties in the way of such people as the Faussets, no question of ways and means. Bell was sent for, and despatched to Eastbourne by an afternoon train. She was to take lodgings in a perfect position, and of impeccable repute as to sanitation. Mildred was to follow next day, under convoy of Meta and the under-butler, a responsible person of thirty-five.

“Fay must go, too,” exclaimed Mildred; whereupon followed a tragic scene.

Fay was not to go to Eastbourne. No reasons were assigned for the decision. Mildred was to ride a donkey; she was to have a pony-carriage at her disposition; but she was to be without Fay for a whole fortnight. In a fortnight she would be able to come home again.

“How many days are there in a fortnight?” she asked piteously.

“Fourteen.”

“O Fay, fourteen days away from you!” she exclaimed, clinging with fond arms round Fay’s neck, and pulling down the dark head on a level with her own bright hair.