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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Desperate Remedies, by Thomas Hardy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
+
+
+Title: Desperate Remedies
+
+Author: Thomas Hardy
+
+Release Date: October 2, 2004 [EBook #3044]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DESPERATE REMEDIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Les Bowler
+
+
+
+
+                      DESPERATE REMEDIES
+
+
+
+                           CONTENTS
+
+PREFATORY NOTE
+I.     THE EVENTS OF THIRTY YEARS
+II.    THE EVENTS OF A FORTNIGHT
+III.   THE EVENTS OF EIGHT DAYS
+IV.    THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
+V.     THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
+VI.    THE EVENTS OF TWELVE HOURS
+VII.   THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN DAYS
+VIII.  THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN DAYS
+IX.    THE EVENTS OF TEN WEEKS
+X.     THE EVENTS OF A DAY AND NIGHT
+XI.    THE EVENTS OF FIVE DAYS
+XII.   THE EVENTS OF TEN MONTHS
+XIII.  THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
+XIV.   THE EVENTS OF FIVE WEEKS
+XV.    THE EVENTS OF THREE WEEKS
+XVI.   THE EVENTS OF ONE WEEK
+XVII.  THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
+XVIII. THE EVENTS OF THREE DAYS
+XIX.   THE EVENTS OF A DAY AND NIGHT
+XX.    THE EVENTS OF THREE HOURS
+XXI.   THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN HOURS
+       SEQUEL
+
+
+
+                        PREFATORY NOTE
+
+The following story, the first published by the author, was written
+nineteen years ago, at a time when he was feeling his way to a
+method. The principles observed in its composition are, no doubt,
+too exclusively those in which mystery, entanglement, surprise, and
+moral obliquity are depended on for exciting interest; but some of
+the scenes, and at least one of the characters, have been deemed not
+unworthy of a little longer preservation; and as they could hardly
+be reproduced in a fragmentary form the novel is reissued complete
+--the more readily that it has for some considerable time been
+reprinted and widely circulated in America.
+January 1889.
+
+To the foregoing note I have only to add that, in the present
+edition of 'Desperate Remedies,' some Wessex towns and other places
+that are common to the scenes of several of these stories have been
+called for the first time by the names under which they appear
+elsewhere, for the satisfaction of any reader who may care for
+consistency in such matters.
+
+This is the only material change; for, as it happened that certain
+characteristics which provoked most discussion in my latest story
+were present in this my first--published in 1871, when there was no
+French name for them it has seemed best to let them stand unaltered.
+
+T.H.
+February 1896.
+
+
+
+I. THE EVENTS OF THIRTY YEARS
+
+1. DECEMBER AND JANUARY, 1835-36
+
+In the long and intricately inwrought chain of circumstance which
+renders worthy of record some experiences of Cytherea Graye, Edward
+Springrove, and others, the first event directly influencing the
+issue was a Christmas visit.
+
+In the above-mentioned year, 1835, Ambrose Graye, a young architect
+who had just begun the practice of his profession in the midland
+town of Hocbridge, to the north of Christminster, went to London to
+spend the Christmas holidays with a friend who lived in Bloomsbury.
+They had gone up to Cambridge in the same year, and, after
+graduating together, Huntway, the friend, had taken orders.
+
+Graye was handsome, frank, and gentle. He had a quality of thought
+which, exercised on homeliness, was humour; on nature,
+picturesqueness; on abstractions, poetry. Being, as a rule,
+broadcast, it was all three.
+
+Of the wickedness of the world he was too forgetful. To discover
+evil in a new friend is to most people only an additional
+experience: to him it was ever a surprise.
+
+While in London he became acquainted with a retired officer in the
+Navy named Bradleigh, who, with his wife and their daughter, lived
+in a street not far from Russell Square. Though they were in no
+more than comfortable circumstances, the captain's wife came of an
+ancient family whose genealogical tree was interlaced with some of
+the most illustrious and well-known in the kingdom.
+
+The young lady, their daughter, seemed to Graye by far the most
+beautiful and queenly being he had ever beheld. She was about
+nineteen or twenty, and her name was Cytherea. In truth she was not
+so very unlike country girls of that type of beauty, except in one
+respect. She was perfect in her manner and bearing, and they were
+not. A mere distinguishing peculiarity, by catching the eye, is
+often read as the pervading characteristic, and she appeared to him
+no less than perfection throughout--transcending her rural rivals in
+very nature. Graye did a thing the blissfulness of which was only
+eclipsed by its hazardousness. He loved her at first sight.
+
+His introductions had led him into contact with Cytherea and her
+parents two or three times on the first week of his arrival in
+London, and accident and a lover's contrivance brought them together
+as frequently the week following. The parents liked young Graye,
+and having few friends (for their equals in blood were their
+superiors in position), he was received on very generous terms. His
+passion for Cytherea grew not only strong, but ineffably exalted:
+she, without positively encouraging him, tacitly assented to his
+schemes for being near her. Her father and mother seemed to have
+lost all confidence in nobility of birth, without money to give
+effect to its presence, and looked upon the budding consequence of
+the young people's reciprocal glances with placidity, if not actual
+favour.
+
+Graye's whole impassioned dream terminated in a sad and
+unaccountable episode. After passing through three weeks of sweet
+experience, he had arrived at the last stage--a kind of moral Gaza
+--before plunging into an emotional desert. The second week in
+January had come round, and it was necessary for the young architect
+to leave town.
+
+Throughout his acquaintanceship with the lady of his heart there had
+been this marked peculiarity in her love: she had delighted in his
+presence as a sweetheart should do, yet from first to last she had
+repressed all recognition of the true nature of the thread which
+drew them together, blinding herself to its meaning and only natural
+tendency, and appearing to dread his announcement of them. The
+present seemed enough for her without cumulative hope: usually,
+even if love is in itself an end, it must be regarded as a beginning
+to be enjoyed.
+
+In spite of evasions as an obstacle, and in consequence of them as a
+spur, he would put the matter off no longer. It was evening. He
+took her into a little conservatory on the landing, and there among
+the evergreens, by the light of a few tiny lamps, infinitely
+enhancing the freshness and beauty of the leaves, he made the
+declaration of a love as fresh and beautiful as they.
+
+'My love--my darling, be my wife!'
+
+She seemed like one just awakened. 'Ah--we must part now!' she
+faltered, in a voice of anguish. 'I will write to you.' She
+loosened her hand and rushed away.
+
+In a wild fever Graye went home and watched for the next morning.
+Who shall express his misery and wonder when a note containing these
+words was put into his hand?
+
+'Good-bye; good-bye for ever. As recognized lovers something
+divides us eternally. Forgive me--I should have told you before;
+but your love was sweet! Never mention me.'
+
+That very day, and as it seemed, to put an end to a painful
+condition of things, daughter and parents left London to pay off a
+promised visit to a relative in a western county. No message or
+letter of entreaty could wring from her any explanation. She begged
+him not to follow her, and the most bewildering point was that her
+father and mother appeared, from the tone of a letter Graye received
+from them, as vexed and sad as he at this sudden renunciation. One
+thing was plain: without admitting her reason as valid, they knew
+what that reason was, and did not intend to reveal it.
+
+A week from that day Ambrose Graye left his friend Huntway's house
+and saw no more of the Love he mourned. From time to time his
+friend answered any inquiry Graye made by letter respecting her.
+But very poor food to a lover is intelligence of a mistress filtered
+through a friend. Huntway could tell nothing definitely. He said
+he believed there had been some prior flirtation between Cytherea
+and her cousin, an officer of the line, two or three years before
+Graye met her, which had suddenly been terminated by the cousin's
+departure for India, and the young lady's travelling on the
+Continent with her parents the whole of the ensuing summer, on
+account of delicate health. Eventually Huntway said that
+circumstances had rendered Graye's attachment more hopeless still.
+Cytherea's mother had unexpectedly inherited a large fortune and
+estates in the west of England by the rapid fall of some intervening
+lives. This had caused their removal from the small house in
+Bloomsbury, and, as it appeared, a renunciation of their old friends
+in that quarter.
+
+Young Graye concluded that his Cytherea had forgotten him and his
+love. But he could not forget her.
+
+2. FROM 1843 TO 1861
+
+Eight years later, feeling lonely and depressed--a man without
+relatives, with many acquaintances but no friends--Ambrose Graye met
+a young lady of a different kind, fairly endowed with money and good
+gifts. As to caring very deeply for another woman after the loss of
+Cytherea, it was an absolute impossibility with him. With all, the
+beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude
+pursuit; but with some natures utter elusion is the one special
+event which will make a passing love permanent for ever.
+
+This second young lady and Graye were married. That he did not,
+first or last, love his wife as he should have done, was known to
+all; but few knew that his unmanageable heart could never be weaned
+from useless repining at the loss of its first idol.
+
+His character to some extent deteriorated, as emotional
+constitutions will under the long sense of disappointment at having
+missed their imagined destiny. And thus, though naturally of a
+gentle and pleasant disposition, he grew to be not so tenderly
+regarded by his acquaintances as it is the lot of some of those
+persons to be. The winning and sanguine receptivity of his early
+life developed by degrees a moody nervousness, and when not
+picturing prospects drawn from baseless hope he was the victim of
+indescribable depression. The practical issue of such a condition
+was improvidence, originally almost an unconscious improvidence, for
+every debt incurred had been mentally paid off with a religious
+exactness from the treasures of expectation before mentioned. But
+as years revolved, the same course was continued from the lack of
+spirit sufficient for shifting out of an old groove when it has been
+found to lead to disaster.
+
+In the year 1861 his wife died, leaving him a widower with two
+children. The elder, a son named Owen, now just turned seventeen,
+was taken from school, and initiated as pupil to the profession of
+architect in his father's office. The remaining child was a
+daughter, and Owen's junior by a year.
+
+Her christian name was Cytherea, and it is easy to guess why.
+
+3. OCTOBER THE TWELFTH, 1863
+
+We pass over two years in order to reach the next cardinal event of
+these persons' lives. The scene is still the Grayes' native town of
+Hocbridge, but as it appeared on a Monday afternoon in the month of
+October.
+
+The weather was sunny and dry, but the ancient borough was to be
+seen wearing one of its least attractive aspects. First on account
+of the time. It was that stagnant hour of the twenty-four when the
+practical garishness of Day, having escaped from the fresh long
+shadows and enlivening newness of the morning, has not yet made any
+perceptible advance towards acquiring those mellow and soothing
+tones which grace its decline. Next, it was that stage in the
+progress of the week when business--which, carried on under the
+gables of an old country place, is not devoid of a romantic sparkle
+--was well-nigh extinguished. Lastly, the town was intentionally
+bent upon being attractive by exhibiting to an influx of visitors
+the local talent for dramatic recitation, and provincial towns
+trying to be lively are the dullest of dull things.
+
+Little towns are like little children in this respect, that they
+interest most when they are enacting native peculiarities
+unconscious of beholders. Discovering themselves to be watched they
+attempt to be entertaining by putting on an antic, and produce
+disagreeable caricatures which spoil them.
+
+The weather-stained clock-face in the low church tower standing at
+the intersection of the three chief streets was expressing half-past
+two to the Town Hall opposite, where the much talked-of reading from
+Shakespeare was about to begin. The doors were open, and those
+persons who had already assembled within the building were noticing
+the entrance of the new-comers--silently criticizing their dress
+--questioning the genuineness of their teeth and hair--estimating
+their private means.
+
+Among these later ones came an exceptional young maiden who glowed
+amid the dulness like a single bright-red poppy in a field of brown
+stubble. She wore an elegant dark jacket, lavender dress, hat with
+grey strings and trimmings, and gloves of a colour to harmonize.
+She lightly walked up the side passage of the room, cast a slight
+glance around, and entered the seat pointed out to her.
+
+The young girl was Cytherea Graye; her age was now about eighteen.
+During her entry, and at various times whilst sitting in her seat
+and listening to the reader on the platform, her personal appearance
+formed an interesting subject of study for several neighbouring
+eyes.
+
+Her face was exceedingly attractive, though artistically less
+perfect than her figure, which approached unusually near to the
+standard of faultlessness. But even this feature of hers yielded
+the palm to the gracefulness of her movement, which was fascinating
+and delightful to an extreme degree.
+
+Indeed, motion was her speciality, whether shown on its most
+extended scale of bodily progression, or minutely, as in the
+uplifting of her eyelids, the bending of her fingers, the pouting of
+her lip. The carriage of her head--motion within motion--a glide
+upon a glide--was as delicate as that of a magnetic needle. And
+this flexibility and elasticity had never been taught her by rule,
+nor even been acquired by observation, but, nullo cultu, had
+naturally developed itself with her years. In childhood, a stone or
+stalk in the way, which had been the inevitable occasion of a fall
+to her playmates, had usually left her safe and upright on her feet
+after the narrowest escape by oscillations and whirls for the
+preservation of her balance. At mixed Christmas parties, when she
+numbered but twelve or thirteen years, and was heartily despised on
+that account by lads who deemed themselves men, her apt lightness in
+the dance covered this incompleteness in her womanhood, and
+compelled the self-same youths in spite of resolutions to seize upon
+her childish figure as a partner whom they could not afford to
+contemn. And in later years, when the instincts of her sex had
+shown her this point as the best and rarest feature in her external
+self, she was not found wanting in attention to the cultivation of
+finish in its details.
+
+Her hair rested gaily upon her shoulders in curls and was of a
+shining corn yellow in the high lights, deepening to a definite
+nut-brown as each curl wound round into the shade. She had eyes of a
+sapphire hue, though rather darker than the gem ordinarily appears;
+they possessed the affectionate and liquid sparkle of loyalty and
+good faith as distinguishable from that harder brightness which
+seems to express faithfulness only to the object confronting them.
+
+But to attempt to gain a view of her--or indeed of any fascinating
+woman--from a measured category, is as difficult as to appreciate
+the effect of a landscape by exploring it at night with a lantern
+--or of a full chord of music by piping the notes in succession.
+Nevertheless it may readily be believed from the description here
+ventured, that among the many winning phases of her aspect, these
+were particularly striking:--
+
+  During pleasant doubt, when her eyes brightened stealthily and
+  smiled (as eyes will smile) as distinctly as her lips, and in the
+  space of a single instant expressed clearly the whole round of
+  degrees of expectancy which lie over the wide expanse between Yea
+  and Nay.
+
+  During the telling of a secret, which was involuntarily
+  accompanied by a sudden minute start, and ecstatic pressure of
+  the listener's arm, side, or neck, as the position and degree
+  of intimacy dictated.
+
+  When anxiously regarding one who possessed her affections.
+
+She suddenly assumed the last-mentioned bearing in the progress of
+the present entertainment. Her glance was directed out of the
+window.
+
+Why the particulars of a young lady's presence at a very mediocre
+performance were prevented from dropping into the oblivion which
+their intrinsic insignificance would naturally have involved--why
+they were remembered and individualized by herself and others
+through after years--was simply that she unknowingly stood, as it
+were, upon the extreme posterior edge of a tract in her life, in
+which the real meaning of Taking Thought had never been known. It
+was the last hour of experience she ever enjoyed with a mind
+entirely free from a knowledge of that labyrinth into which she
+stepped immediately afterwards--to continue a perplexed course along
+its mazes for the greater portion of twenty-nine subsequent months.
+
+The Town Hall, in which Cytherea sat, was a building of brown stone,
+and through one of the windows could be seen from the interior of
+the room the housetops and chimneys of the adjacent street, and also
+the upper part of a neighbouring church spire, now in course of
+completion under the superintendence of Miss Graye's father, the
+architect to the work.
+
+That the top of this spire should be visible from her position in
+the room was a fact which Cytherea's idling eyes had discovered with
+some interest, and she was now engaged in watching the scene that
+was being enacted about its airy summit. Round the conical
+stonework rose a cage of scaffolding against the blue sky, and upon
+this stood five men--four in clothes as white as the new erection
+close beneath their hands, the fifth in the ordinary dark suit of a
+gentleman.
+
+The four working-men in white were three masons and a mason's
+labourer. The fifth man was the architect, Mr. Graye. He had been
+giving directions as it seemed, and retiring as far as the narrow
+footway allowed, stood perfectly still.
+
+The picture thus presented to a spectator in the Town Hall was
+curious and striking. It was an illuminated miniature, framed in by
+the dark margin of the window, the keen-edged shadiness of which
+emphasized by contrast the softness of the objects enclosed.
+
+The height of the spire was about one hundred and twenty feet, and
+the five men engaged thereon seemed entirely removed from the sphere
+and experiences of ordinary human beings. They appeared little
+larger than pigeons, and made their tiny movements with a soft,
+spirit-like silentness. One idea above all others was conveyed to
+the mind of a person on the ground by their aspect, namely,
+concentration of purpose: that they were indifferent to--even
+unconscious of--the distracted world beneath them, and all that
+moved upon it. They never looked off the scaffolding.
+
+Then one of them turned; it was Mr. Graye. Again he stood
+motionless, with attention to the operations of the others. He
+appeared to be lost in reflection, and had directed his face towards
+a new stone they were lifting.
+
+'Why does he stand like that?' the young lady thought at length--up
+to that moment as listless and careless as one of the ancient
+Tarentines, who, on such an afternoon as this, watched from the
+Theatre the entry into their Harbour of a power that overturned the
+State.
+
+She moved herself uneasily. 'I wish he would come down,' she
+whispered, still gazing at the skybacked picture. 'It is so
+dangerous to be absent-minded up there.'
+
+When she had done murmuring the words her father indecisively laid
+hold of one of the scaffold-poles, as if to test its strength, then
+let it go and stepped back. In stepping, his foot slipped. An
+instant of doubling forward and sideways, and he reeled off into the
+air, immediately disappearing downwards.
+
+His agonized daughter rose to her feet by a convulsive movement.
+Her lips parted, and she gasped for breath. She could utter no
+sound. One by one the people about her, unconscious of what had
+happened, turned their heads, and inquiry and alarm became visible
+upon their faces at the sight of the poor child. A moment longer,
+and she fell to the floor.
+
+The next impression of which Cytherea had any consciousness was of
+being carried from a strange vehicle across the pavement to the
+steps of her own house by her brother and an older man. Recollection
+of what had passed evolved itself an instant later, and just as they
+entered the door--through which another and sadder burden had been
+carried but a few instants before--her eyes caught sight of the
+south-western sky, and, without heeding, saw white sunlight shining
+in shaft-like lines from a rift in a slaty cloud. Emotions will
+attach themselves to scenes that are simultaneous--however foreign
+in essence these scenes may be--as chemical waters will crystallize
+on twigs and wires. Even after that time any mental agony brought
+less vividly to Cytherea's mind the scene from the Town Hall windows
+than sunlight streaming in shaft-like lines.
+
+4. OCTOBER THE NINETEENTH
+
+When death enters a house, an element of sadness and an element of
+horror accompany it. Sadness, from the death itself: horror, from
+the clouds of blackness we designedly labour to introduce.
+
+The funeral had taken place. Depressed, yet resolved in his
+demeanour, Owen Graye sat before his father's private escritoire,
+engaged in turning out and unfolding a heterogeneous collection of
+papers--forbidding and inharmonious to the eye at all times--most of
+all to one under the influence of a great grief. Laminae of white
+paper tied with twine were indiscriminately intermixed with other
+white papers bounded by black edges--these with blue foolscap
+wrapped round with crude red tape.
+
+The bulk of these letters, bills, and other documents were submitted
+to a careful examination, by which the appended particulars were
+ascertained:--
+
+  First, that their father's income from professional sources had
+  been very small, amounting to not more than half their expenditure;
+  and that his own and his wife's property, upon which he had relied
+  for the balance, had been sunk and lost in unwise loans to
+  unscrupulous men, who had traded upon their father's too
+  open-hearted trustfulness.
+
+  Second, that finding his mistake, he had endeavoured to regain
+  his standing by the illusory path of speculation. The most notable
+  instance of this was the following. He had been induced, when at
+  Plymouth in the autumn of the previous year, to venture all his
+  spare capital on the bottomry security of an Italian brig which
+  had put into the harbour in distress. The profit was to be
+  considerable, so was the risk. There turned out to be no security
+  whatever. The circumstances of the case tendered it the most
+  unfortunate speculation that a man like himself--ignorant of all
+  such matters--could possibly engage in. The vessel went down, and
+  all Mr. Graye's money with it.
+
+  Third, that these failures had left him burdened with debts he
+  knew not how to meet; so that at the time of his death even the few
+  pounds lying to his account at the bank were his only in name.
+
+  Fourth, that the loss of his wife two years earlier had
+  awakened him to a keen sense of his blindness, and of his duty by
+  his children. He had then resolved to reinstate by unflagging zeal
+  in the pursuit of his profession, and by no speculation, at least a
+  portion of the little fortune he had let go.
+
+Cytherea was frequently at her brother's elbow during these
+examinations. She often remarked sadly--
+
+'Poor papa failed to fulfil his good intention for want of time,
+didn't he, Owen? And there was an excuse for his past, though he
+never would claim it. I never forget that original disheartening
+blow, and how that from it sprang all the ills of his life
+--everything connected with his gloom, and the lassitude in
+business we used so often to see about him.'
+
+'I remember what he said once,' returned the brother, 'when I sat up
+late with him. He said, "Owen, don't love too blindly: blindly you
+will love if you love at all, but a little care is still possible to
+a well-disciplined heart. May that heart be yours as it was not
+mine," father said. "Cultivate the art of renunciation." And I am
+going to, Cytherea.'
+
+'And once mamma said that an excellent woman was papa's ruin,
+because he did not know the way to give her up when he had lost her.
+I wonder where she is now, Owen? We were told not to try to find
+out anything about her. Papa never told us her name, did he?'
+
+'That was by her own request, I believe. But never mind her; she
+was not our mother.'
+
+The love affair which had been Ambrose Graye's disheartening blow
+was precisely of that nature which lads take little account of, but
+girls ponder in their hearts.
+
+5. FROM OCTOBER THE NINETEENTH TO JULY THE NINTH
+
+Thus Ambrose Graye's good intentions with regard to the
+reintegration of his property had scarcely taken tangible form
+when his sudden death put them for ever out of his power.
+
+Heavy bills, showing the extent of his obligations, tumbled in
+immediately upon the heels of the funeral from quarters previously
+unheard and unthought of. Thus pressed, a bill was filed in
+Chancery to have the assets, such as they were, administered by the
+Court.
+
+'What will become of us now?' thought Owen continually.
+
+There is in us an unquenchable expectation, which at the gloomiest
+time persists in inferring that because we are _ourselves_, there
+must be a special future in store for us, though our nature and
+antecedents to the remotest particular have been common to
+thousands. Thus to Cytherea and Owen Graye the question how their
+lives would end seemed the deepest of possible enigmas. To others
+who knew their position equally well with themselves the question
+was the easiest that could be asked--'Like those of other people
+similarly circumstanced.'
+
+Then Owen held a consultation with his sister to come to some
+decision on their future course, and a month was passed in waiting
+for answers to letters, and in the examination of schemes more or
+less futile. Sudden hopes that were rainbows to the sight proved
+but mists to the touch. In the meantime, unpleasant remarks,
+disguise them as some well-meaning people might, were floating
+around them every day. The undoubted truth, that they were the
+children of a dreamer who let slip away every farthing of his money
+and ran into debt with his neighbours--that the daughter had been
+brought up to no profession--that the son who had, had made no
+progress in it, and might come to the dogs--could not from the
+nature of things be wrapped up in silence in order that it might not
+hurt their feelings; and as a matter of fact, it greeted their ears
+in some form or other wherever they went. Their few acquaintances
+passed them hurriedly. Ancient pot-wallopers, and thriving
+shopkeepers, in their intervals of leisure, stood at their
+shop-doors--their toes hanging over the edge of the step, and their
+obese waists hanging over their toes--and in discourses with friends
+on the pavement, formulated the course of the improvident, and
+reduced the children's prospects to a shadow-like attenuation. The
+sons of these men (who wore breastpins of a sarcastic kind, and
+smoked humorous pipes) stared at Cytherea with a stare unmitigated
+by any of the respect that had formerly softened it.
+
+Now it is a noticeable fact that we do not much mind what men think
+of us, or what humiliating secret they discover of our means,
+parentage, or object, provided that each thinks and acts thereupon
+in isolation. It is the exchange of ideas about us that we dread
+most; and the possession by a hundred acquaintances, severally
+insulated, of the knowledge of our skeleton-closet's whereabouts, is
+not so distressing to the nerves as a chat over it by a party of
+half-a-dozen--exclusive depositaries though these may be.
+
+Perhaps, though Hocbridge watched and whispered, its animus would
+have been little more than a trifle to persons in thriving
+circumstances. But unfortunately, poverty, whilst it is new, and
+before the skin has had time to thicken, makes people susceptible
+inversely to their opportunities for shielding themselves. In Owen
+was found, in place of his father's impressibility, a larger share
+of his father's pride, and a squareness of idea which, if coupled
+with a little more blindness, would have amounted to positive
+prejudice. To him humanity, so far as he had thought of it at all,
+was rather divided into distinct classes than blended from extreme
+to extreme. Hence by a sequence of ideas which might be traced if
+it were worth while, he either detested or respected opinion, and
+instinctively sought to escape a cold shade that mere sensitiveness
+would have endured. He could have submitted to separation,
+sickness, exile, drudgery, hunger and thirst, with stoical
+indifference, but superciliousness was too incisive.
+
+After living on for nine months in attempts to make an income as his
+father's successor in the profession--attempts which were utterly
+fruitless by reason of his inexperience--Graye came to a simple and
+sweeping resolution. They would privately leave that part of
+England, drop from the sight of acquaintances, gossips, harsh
+critics, and bitter creditors of whose misfortune he was not the
+cause, and escape the position which galled him by the only road
+their great poverty left open to them--that of his obtaining some
+employment in a distant place by following his profession as a
+humble under-draughtsman.
+
+He thought over his capabilities with the sensations of a soldier
+grinding his sword at the opening of a campaign. What with lack of
+employment, owing to the decrease of his late father's practice, and
+the absence of direct and uncompromising pressure towards monetary
+results from a pupil's labour (which seems to be always the case
+when a professional man's pupil is also his son), Owen's progress in
+the art and science of architecture had been very insignificant
+indeed. Though anything but an idle young man, he had hardly
+reached the age at which industrious men who lack an external whip
+to send them on in the world, are induced by their own common sense
+to whip on themselves. Hence his knowledge of plans, elevations,
+sections, and specifications, was not greater at the end of two
+years of probation than might easily have been acquired in six
+months by a youth of average ability--himself, for instance--amid a
+bustling London practice.
+
+But at any rate he could make himself handy to one of the
+profession--some man in a remote town--and there fulfil his
+indentures. A tangible inducement lay in this direction of survey.
+He had a slight conception of such a man--a Mr. Gradfield--who was
+in practice in Budmouth Regis, a seaport town and watering-place in
+the south of England.
+
+After some doubts, Graye ventured to write to this gentleman, asking
+the necessary question, shortly alluding to his father's death, and
+stating that his term of apprenticeship had only half expired. He
+would be glad to complete his articles at a very low salary for the
+whole remaining two years, provided payment could begin at once.
+
+The answer from Mr. Gradfield stated that he was not in want of a
+pupil who would serve the remainder of his time on the terms Mr.
+Graye mentioned. But he would just add one remark. He chanced to
+be in want of some young man in his office--for a short time only,
+probably about two months--to trace drawings, and attend to other
+subsidiary work of the kind. If Mr. Graye did not object to occupy
+such an inferior position as these duties would entail, and to
+accept weekly wages which to one with his expectations would be
+considered merely nominal, the post would give him an opportunity
+for learning a few more details of the profession.
+
+'It is a beginning, and, above all, an abiding-place, away from the
+shadow of the cloud which hangs over us here--I will go,' said Owen.
+
+Cytherea's plan for her future, an intensely simple one, owing to
+the even greater narrowness of her resources, was already marked
+out. One advantage had accrued to her through her mother's
+possession of a fair share of personal property, and perhaps only
+one. She had been carefully educated. Upon this consideration her
+plan was based. She was to take up her abode in her brother's
+lodging at Budmouth, when she would immediately advertise for a
+situation as governess, having obtained the consent of a lawyer at
+Aldbrickham who was winding up her father's affairs, and who knew
+the history of her position, to allow himself to be referred to in
+the matter of her past life and respectability.
+
+Early one morning they departed from their native town, leaving
+behind them scarcely a trace of their footsteps.
+
+Then the town pitied their want of wisdom in taking such a step.
+'Rashness; they would have made a better income in Hocbridge, where
+they are known! There is no doubt that they would.'
+
+But what is Wisdom really? A steady handling of any means to bring
+about any end necessary to happiness.
+
+Yet whether one's end be the usual end--a wealthy position in life
+--or no, the name of wisdom is seldom applied but to the means to
+that usual end.
+
+
+
+II. THE EVENTS OF A FORTNIGHT
+
+1. THE NINTH OF JULY
+
+The day of their departure was one of the most glowing that the
+climax of a long series of summer heats could evolve. The wide
+expanse of landscape quivered up and down like the flame of a taper,
+as they steamed along through the midst of it. Placid flocks of
+sheep reclining under trees a little way off appeared of a pale blue
+colour. Clover fields were livid with the brightness of the sun
+upon their deep red flowers. All waggons and carts were moved to
+the shade by their careful owners, rain-water butts fell to pieces;
+well-buckets were lowered inside the covers of the well-hole, to
+preserve them from the fate of the butts, and generally, water
+seemed scarcer in the country than the beer and cider of the
+peasantry who toiled or idled there.
+
+To see persons looking with children's eyes at any ordinary scenery,
+is a proof that they possess the charming faculty of drawing new
+sensations from an old experience--a healthy sign, rare in these
+feverish days--the mark of an imperishable brightness of nature.
+
+Both brother and sister could do this; Cytherea more noticeably.
+They watched the undulating corn-lands, monotonous to all their
+companions; the stony and clayey prospect succeeding those, with its
+angular and abrupt hills. Boggy moors came next, now withered and
+dry--the spots upon which pools usually spread their waters showing
+themselves as circles of smooth bare soil, over-run by a net-work of
+innumerable little fissures. Then arose plantations of firs,
+abruptly terminating beside meadows cleanly mown, in which
+high-hipped, rich-coloured cows, with backs horizontal and straight
+as the ridge of a house, stood motionless or lazily fed. Glimpses of
+the sea now interested them, which became more and more frequent
+till the train finally drew up beside the platform at Budmouth.
+
+'The whole town is looking out for us,' had been Graye's impression
+throughout the day. He called upon Mr. Gradfield--the only man who
+had been directly informed of his coming--and found that Mr.
+Gradfield had forgotten it.
+
+However, arrangements were made with this gentleman--a stout,
+active, grey-bearded burgher of sixty--by which Owen was to commence
+work in his office the following week.
+
+The same day Cytherea drew up and sent off the advertisement
+appended:--
+
+
+  'A YOUNG LADY is desirous of meeting with an _engagement_ as
+  _governess_ or _companion_. She is competent to teach English,
+  French, and Music. Satisfactory references--Address, C. G.,
+  Post-Office, Budmouth.'
+
+
+It seemed a more material existence than her own that she saw thus
+delineated on the paper. 'That can't be myself; how odd I look!'
+she said, and smiled.
+
+2. JULY THE ELEVENTH
+
+On the Monday subsequent to their arrival in Budmouth, Owen Graye
+attended at Mr. Gradfield's office to enter upon his duties, and his
+sister was left in their lodgings alone for the first time.
+
+Despite the sad occurrences of the preceding autumn, an unwonted
+cheerfulness pervaded her spirit throughout the day. Change of
+scene--and that to untravelled eyes--conjoined with the sensation of
+freedom from supervision, revived the sparkle of a warm young nature
+ready enough to take advantage of any adventitious restoratives.
+Point-blank grief tends rather to seal up happiness for a time than
+to produce that attrition which results from griefs of anticipation
+that move onward with the days: these may be said to furrow away
+the capacity for pleasure.
+
+Her expectations from the advertisement began to be extravagant. A
+thriving family, who had always sadly needed her, was already
+definitely pictured in her fancy, which, in its exuberance, led her
+on to picturing its individual members, their possible peculiarities,
+virtues, and vices, and obliterated for a time the recollection that
+she would be separated from her brother.
+
+Thus musing, as she waited for his return in the evening, her eyes
+fell on her left hand. The contemplation of her own left fourth
+finger by symbol-loving girlhood of this age is, it seems, very
+frequently, if not always, followed by a peculiar train of romantic
+ideas. Cytherea's thoughts, still playing about her future, became
+directed into this romantic groove. She leant back in her chair,
+and taking hold of the fourth finger, which had attracted her
+attention, she lifted it with the tips of the others, and looked at
+the smooth and tapering member for a long time.
+
+She whispered idly, 'I wonder who and what he will be?
+
+'If he's a gentleman of fashion, he will take my finger so, just
+with the tips of his own, and with some fluttering of the heart, and
+the least trembling of his lip, slip the ring so lightly on that I
+shall hardly know it is there--looking delightfully into my eyes all
+the time.
+
+'If he's a bold, dashing soldier, I expect he will proudly turn
+round, take the ring as if it equalled her Majesty's crown in value,
+and desperately set it on my finger thus. He will fix his eyes
+unflinchingly upon what he is doing--just as if he stood in battle
+before the enemy (though, in reality, very fond of me, of course),
+and blush as much as I shall.
+
+'If he's a sailor, he will take my finger and the ring in this way,
+and deck it out with a housewifely touch and a tenderness of
+expression about his mouth, as sailors do: kiss it, perhaps, with a
+simple air, as if we were children playing an idle game, and not at
+the very height of observation and envy by a great crowd saying,
+"Ah! they are happy now!"
+
+'If he should be rather a poor man--noble-minded and affectionate,
+but still poor--'
+
+Owen's footsteps rapidly ascending the stairs, interrupted this
+fancy-free meditation. Reproaching herself, even angry with herself
+for allowing her mind to stray upon such subjects in the face of
+their present desperate condition, she rose to meet him, and make
+tea.
+
+Cytherea's interest to know how her brother had been received at Mr.
+Gradfield's broke forth into words at once. Almost before they had
+sat down to table, she began cross-examining him in the regular
+sisterly way.
+
+'Well, Owen, how has it been with you to-day? What is the place
+like--do you think you will like Mr. Gradfield?'
+
+'O yes. But he has not been there to-day; I have only had the head
+draughtsman with me.'
+
+Young women have a habit, not noticeable in men, of putting on at
+a moment's notice the drama of whosoever's life they choose.
+Cytherea's interest was transferred from Mr. Gradfield to his
+representative.
+
+'What sort of a man is he?'
+
+'He seems a very nice fellow indeed; though of course I can hardly
+tell to a certainty as yet. But I think he's a very worthy fellow;
+there's no nonsense in him, and though he is not a public school man
+he has read widely, and has a sharp appreciation of what's good in
+books and art. In fact, his knowledge isn't nearly so exclusive as
+most professional men's.'
+
+'That's a great deal to say of an architect, for of all professional
+men they are, as a rule, the most professional.'
+
+'Yes; perhaps they are. This man is rather of a melancholy turn of
+mind, I think.'
+
+'Has the managing clerk any family?' she mildly asked, after a
+while, pouring out some more tea.
+
+'Family; no!'
+
+'Well, dear Owen, how should I know?'
+
+'Why, of course he isn't married. But there happened to be a
+conversation about women going on in the office, and I heard him say
+what he should wish his wife to be like.'
+
+'What would he wish his wife to be like?' she said, with great
+apparent lack of interest.
+
+'O, he says she must be girlish and artless: yet he would be loth
+to do without a dash of womanly subtlety, 'tis so piquant. Yes, he
+said, that must be in her; she must have womanly cleverness. "And
+yet I should like her to blush if only a cock-sparrow were to look
+at her hard," he said, "which brings me back to the girl again: and
+so I flit backwards and forwards. I must have what comes, I
+suppose," he said, "and whatever she may be, thank God she's no
+worse. However, if he might give a final hint to Providence," he
+said, "a child among pleasures, and a woman among pains was the
+rough outline of his requirement."'
+
+'Did he say that? What a musing creature he must be.'
+
+'He did, indeed.'
+
+3. FROM THE TWELFTH TO THE FIFTEENTH OF JULY
+
+As is well known, ideas are so elastic in a human brain, that they
+have no constant measure which may be called their actual bulk. Any
+important idea may be compressed to a molecule by an unwonted
+crowding of others; and any small idea will expand to whatever
+length and breadth of vacuum the mind may be able to make over to
+it. Cytherea's world was tolerably vacant at this time, and the
+young architectural designer's image became very pervasive. The
+next evening this subject was again renewed.
+
+'His name is Springrove,' said Owen, in reply to her. 'He is a
+thorough artist, but a man of rather humble origin, it seems, who
+has made himself so far. I think he is the son of a farmer, or
+something of the kind.'
+
+'Well, he's none the worse for that, I suppose.'
+
+'None the worse. As we come down the hill, we shall be continually
+meeting people going up.' But Owen had felt that Springrove was a
+little the worse nevertheless.
+
+'Of course he's rather old by this time.'
+
+'O no. He's about six-and-twenty--not more.'
+
+'Ah, I see. . . . What is he like, Owen?'
+
+'I can't exactly tell you his appearance: 'tis always such a
+difficult thing to do.'
+
+'A man you would describe as short? Most men are those we should
+describe as short, I fancy.'
+
+'I should call him, I think, of the middle height; but as I only see
+him sitting in the office, of course I am not certain about his form
+and figure.'
+
+'I wish you were, then.'
+
+'Perhaps you do. But I am not, you see.'
+
+'Of course not, you are always so provoking. Owen, I saw a man in
+the street to-day whom I fancied was he--and yet, I don't see how it
+could be, either. He had light brown hair, a snub nose, very round
+face, and a peculiar habit of reducing his eyes to straight lines
+when he looked narrowly at anything.'
+
+'O no. That was not he, Cytherea.'
+
+'Not a bit like him in all probability.'
+
+'Not a bit. He has dark hair--almost a Grecian nose, regular teeth,
+and an intellectual face, as nearly as I can recall to mind.'
+
+'Ah, there now, Owen, you _have_ described him! But I suppose
+he's not generally called pleasing, or--'
+
+'Handsome?'
+
+'I scarcely meant that. But since you have said it, is he
+handsome?'
+
+'Rather.'
+
+'His tout ensemble is striking?'
+
+'Yes--O no, no--I forgot: it is not. He is rather untidy in his
+waistcoat, and neck-ties, and hair.'
+
+'How vexing! . . . it must be to himself, poor thing.'
+
+'He's a thorough bookworm--despises the pap-and-daisy school of
+verse--knows Shakespeare to the very dregs of the foot-notes.
+Indeed, he's a poet himself in a small way.'
+
+'How delicious!' she said. 'I have never known a poet.'
+
+'And you don't know him,' said Owen dryly.
+
+She reddened. 'Of course I don't. I know that.'
+
+'Have you received any answer to your advertisement?' he inquired.
+
+'Ah--no!' she said, and the forgotten disappointment which had
+showed itself in her face at different times during the day, became
+visible again.
+
+Another day passed away. On Thursday, without inquiry, she learnt
+more of the head draughtsman. He and Graye had become very
+friendly, and he had been tempted to show her brother a copy of some
+poems of his--some serious and sad--some humorous--which had
+appeared in the poets' corner of a magazine from time to time. Owen
+showed them now to Cytherea, who instantly began to read them
+carefully and to think them very beautiful.
+
+'Yes--Springrove's no fool,' said Owen sententiously.
+
+'No fool!--I should think he isn't, indeed,' said Cytherea, looking
+up from the paper in quite an excitement: 'to write such verses as
+these!'
+
+'What logic are you chopping, Cytherea? Well, I don't mean on
+account of the verses, because I haven't read them; but for what he
+said when the fellows were talking about falling in love.'
+
+'Which you will tell me?'
+
+'He says that your true lover breathlessly finds himself engaged to
+a sweetheart, like a man who has caught something in the dark. He
+doesn't know whether it is a bat or a bird, and takes it to the
+light when he is cool to learn what it is. He looks to see if she
+is the right age, but right age or wrong age, he must consider her a
+prize. Sometime later he ponders whether she is the right kind of
+prize for him. Right kind or wrong kind--he has called her his, and
+must abide by it. After a time he asks himself, "Has she the
+temper, hair, and eyes I meant to have, and was firmly resolved not
+to do without?" He finds it is all wrong, and then comes the
+tussle--'
+
+'Do they marry and live happily?'
+
+'Who? O, the supposed pair. I think he said--well, I really forget
+what he said.'
+
+'That _is_ stupid of you!' said the young lady with dismay.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'But he's a satirist--I don't think I care about him now.'
+
+'There you are just wrong. He is not. He is, as I believe, an
+impulsive fellow who has been made to pay the penalty of his
+rashness in some love affair.'
+
+Thus ended the dialogue of Thursday, but Cytherea read the verses
+again in private. On Friday her brother remarked that Springrove
+had informed him he was going to leave Mr. Gradfield's in a
+fortnight to push his fortunes in London.
+
+An indescribable feeling of sadness shot through Cytherea's heart.
+Why should she be sad at such an announcement as that, she thought,
+concerning a man she had never seen, when her spirits were elastic
+enough to rebound after hard blows from deep and real troubles as if
+she had scarcely known them? Though she could not answer this
+question, she knew one thing, she was saddened by Owen's news.
+
+4. JULY THE TWENTY-FIRST
+
+A very popular local excursion by steamboat to Lulstead Cove was
+announced through the streets of Budmouth one Thursday morning by
+the weak-voiced town-crier, to start at six o'clock the same day.
+The weather was lovely, and the opportunity being the first of the
+kind offered to them, Owen and Cytherea went with the rest.
+
+They had reached the Cove, and had walked landward for nearly an
+hour over the hill which rose beside the strand, when Graye
+recollected that two or three miles yet further inland from this
+spot was an interesting mediaeval ruin. He was already familiar
+with its characteristics through the medium of an archaeological
+work, and now finding himself so close to the reality, felt inclined
+to verify some theory he had formed respecting it. Concluding that
+there would be just sufficient time for him to go there and return
+before the boat had left the shore, he parted from Cytherea on the
+hill, struck downwards, and then up a heathery valley.
+
+She remained on the summit where he had left her till the time of
+his expected return, scanning the details of the prospect around.
+Placidly spread out before her on the south was the open Channel,
+reflecting a blue intenser by many shades than that of the sky
+overhead, and dotted in the foreground by half-a-dozen small craft
+of contrasting rig, their sails graduating in hue from extreme
+whiteness to reddish brown, the varying actual colours varied again
+in a double degree by the rays of the declining sun.
+
+Presently the distant bell from the boat was heard, warning the
+passengers to embark. This was followed by a lively air from the
+harps and violins on board, their tones, as they arose, becoming
+intermingled with, though not marred by, the brush of the waves when
+their crests rolled over--at the point where the check of the
+shallows was first felt--and then thinned away up the slope of
+pebbles and sand.
+
+She turned her face landward and strained her eyes to discern, if
+possible, some sign of Owen's return. Nothing was visible save the
+strikingly brilliant, still landscape. The wide concave which lay
+at the back of the hill in this direction was blazing with the
+western light, adding an orange tint to the vivid purple of the
+heather, now at the very climax of bloom, and free from the
+slightest touch of the invidious brown that so soon creeps into its
+shades. The light so intensified the colours that they seemed to
+stand above the surface of the earth and float in mid-air like an
+exhalation of red. In the minor valleys, between the hillocks and
+ridges which diversified the contour of the basin, but did not
+disturb its general sweep, she marked brakes of tall, heavy-stemmed
+ferns, five or six feet high, in a brilliant light-green dress--a
+broad riband of them with the path in their midst winding like a
+stream along the little ravine that reached to the foot of the hill,
+and delivered up the path to its grassy area. Among the ferns grew
+holly bushes deeper in tint than any shadow about them, whilst the
+whole surface of the scene was dimpled with small conical pits, and
+here and there were round ponds, now dry, and half overgrown with
+rushes.
+
+The last bell of the steamer rang. Cytherea had forgotten herself,
+and what she was looking for. In a fever of distress lest Owen
+should be left behind, she gathered up in her hand the corners of
+her handkerchief, containing specimens of the shells, plants, and
+fossils which the locality produced, started off to the sands, and
+mingled with the knots of visitors there congregated from other
+interesting points around; from the inn, the cottages, and hired
+conveyances that had returned from short drives inland. They all
+went aboard by the primitive plan of a narrow plank on two wheels
+--the women being assisted by a rope. Cytherea lingered till the
+very last, reluctant to follow, and looking alternately at the boat
+and the valley behind. Her delay provoked a remark from Captain
+Jacobs, a thickset man of hybrid stains, resulting from the mixed
+effects of fire and water, peculiar to sailors where engines are
+the propelling power.
+
+'Now then, missy, if you please. I am sorry to tell 'ee our time's
+up. Who are you looking for, miss?'
+
+'My brother--he has walked a short distance inland; he must be here
+directly. Could you wait for him--just a minute?'
+
+'Really, I am afraid not, m'm.' Cytherea looked at the stout,
+round-faced man, and at the vessel, with a light in her eyes so
+expressive of her own opinion being the same, on reflection, as his,
+and with such resignation, too, that, from an instinctive feeling of
+pride at being able to prove himself more humane than he was thought
+to be--works of supererogation are the only sacrifices that entice
+in this way--and that at a very small cost, he delayed the boat till
+some among the passengers began to murmur.
+
+'There, never mind,' said Cytherea decisively. 'Go on without me--I
+shall wait for him.'
+
+'Well, 'tis a very awkward thing to leave you here all alone,' said
+the captain. 'I certainly advise you not to wait.'
+
+'He's gone across to the railway station, for certain,' said another
+passenger.
+
+'No--here he is!' Cytherea said, regarding, as she spoke, the half
+hidden figure of a man who was seen advancing at a headlong pace
+down the ravine which lay between the heath and the shore.
+
+'He can't get here in less than five minutes,' a passenger said.
+'People should know what they are about, and keep time. Really, if--'
+
+'You see, sir,' said the captain, in an apologetic undertone, 'since
+'tis her brother, and she's all alone, 'tis only nater to wait a
+minute, now he's in sight. Suppose, now, you were a young woman, as
+might be, and had a brother, like this one, and you stood of an
+evening upon this here wild lonely shore, like her, why you'd want
+us to wait, too, wouldn't you, sir? I think you would.'
+
+The person so hastily approaching had been lost to view during this
+remark by reason of a hollow in the ground, and the projecting cliff
+immediately at hand covered the path in its rise. His footsteps
+were now heard striking sharply upon the flinty road at a distance
+of about twenty or thirty yards, but still behind the escarpment.
+To save time, Cytherea prepared to ascend the plank.
+
+'Let me give you my hand, miss,' said Captain Jacobs.
+
+'No--please don't touch me,' said she, ascending cautiously by
+sliding one foot forward two or three inches, bringing up the other
+behind it, and so on alternately--her lips compressed by
+concentration on the feat, her eyes glued to the plank, her hand to
+the rope, and her immediate thought to the fact of the distressing
+narrowness of her footing. Steps now shook the lower end of the
+board, and in an instant were up to her heels with a bound.
+
+'O, Owen, I am so glad you are come!' she said without turning.
+'Don't, don't shake the plank or touch me, whatever you do. . . .
+There, I am up. Where have you been so long?' she continued, in a
+lower tone, turning round to him as she reached the top.
+
+Raising her eyes from her feet, which, standing on the firm deck,
+demanded her attention no longer, she acquired perceptions of the
+new-comer in the following order: unknown trousers; unknown
+waistcoat; unknown face. The man was not her brother, but a total
+stranger.
+
+Off went the plank; the paddles started, stopped, backed, pattered
+in confusion, then revolved decisively, and the boat passed out into
+deep water.
+
+One or two persons had said, 'How d'ye do, Mr. Springrove?' and
+looked at Cytherea, to see how she bore her disappointment. Her
+ears had but just caught the name of the head draughtsman, when she
+saw him advancing directly to address her.
+
+'Miss Graye, I believe?' he said, lifting his hat.
+
+'Yes,' said Cytherea, colouring, and trying not to look guilty of a
+surreptitious knowledge of him.
+
+'I am Mr. Springrove. I passed Corvsgate Castle about an hour ago,
+and soon afterwards met your brother going that way. He had been
+deceived in the distance, and was about to turn without seeing the
+ruin, on account of a lameness that had come on in his leg or foot.
+I proposed that he should go on, since he had got so near; and
+afterwards, instead of walking back to the boat, get across to
+Anglebury Station--a shorter walk for him--where he could catch the
+late train, and go directly home. I could let you know what he had
+done, and allay any uneasiness.'
+
+'Is the lameness serious, do you know?'
+
+'O no; simply from over-walking himself. Still, it was just as well
+to ride home.'
+
+Relieved from her apprehensions on Owen's score, she was able
+slightly to examine the appearance of her informant--Edward
+Springrove--who now removed his hat for a while, to cool himself.
+He was rather above her brother's height. Although the upper part
+of his face and head was handsomely formed, and bounded by lines of
+sufficiently masculine regularity, his brows were somewhat too
+softly arched, and finely pencilled for one of his sex; without
+prejudice, however, to the belief which the sum total of his
+features inspired--that though they did not prove that the man who
+thought inside them would do much in the world, men who had done
+most of all had had no better ones. Across his forehead, otherwise
+perfectly smooth, ran one thin line, the healthy freshness of his
+remaining features expressing that it had come there prematurely.
+
+Though some years short of the age at which the clear spirit bids
+good-bye to the last infirmity of noble mind, and takes to
+house-hunting and investments, he had reached the period in a young
+man's life when episodic periods, with a hopeful birth and a
+disappointing death, have begun to accumulate, and to bear a fruit
+of generalities; his glance sometimes seeming to state, 'I have
+already thought out the issue of such conditions as these we are
+experiencing.' At other times he wore an abstracted look: 'I seem
+to have lived through this moment before.'
+
+He was carelessly dressed in dark grey, wearing a rolled-up black
+kerchief as a neck-cloth; the knot of which was disarranged, and
+stood obliquely--a deposit of white dust having lodged in the
+creases.
+
+'I am sorry for your disappointment,' he continued, glancing into
+her face. Their eyes having met, became, as it were, mutually
+locked together, and the single instant only which good breeding
+allows as the length of such a look, became trebled: a clear
+penetrating ray of intelligence had shot from each into each, giving
+birth to one of those unaccountable sensations which carry home to
+the heart before the hand has been touched or the merest compliment
+passed, by something stronger than mathematical proof, the
+conviction, 'A tie has begun to unite us.'
+
+Both faces also unconsciously stated that their owners had been much
+in each other's thoughts of late. Owen had talked to the young
+architect of his sister as freely as to Cytherea of the young
+architect.
+
+A conversation began, which was none the less interesting to the
+parties engaged because it consisted only of the most trivial and
+commonplace remarks. Then the band of harps and violins struck up a
+lively melody, and the deck was cleared for dancing; the sun dipping
+beneath the horizon during the proceeding, and the moon showing
+herself at their stern. The sea was so calm, that the soft hiss
+produced by the bursting of the innumerable bubbles of foam behind
+the paddles could be distinctly heard. The passengers who did not
+dance, including Cytherea and Springrove, lapsed into silence,
+leaning against the paddle-boxes, or standing aloof--noticing the
+trembling of the deck to the steps of the dance--watching the waves
+from the paddles as they slid thinly and easily under each other's
+edges.
+
+Night had quite closed in by the time they reached Budmouth harbour,
+sparkling with its white, red, and green lights in opposition to the
+shimmering path of the moon's reflection on the other side, which
+reached away to the horizon till the flecked ripples reduced
+themselves to sparkles as fine as gold dust.
+
+'I will walk to the station and find out the exact time the train
+arrives,' said Springrove, rather eagerly, when they had landed.
+
+She thanked him much.
+
+'Perhaps we might walk together,' he suggested hesitatingly. She
+looked as if she did not quite know, and he settled the question by
+showing the way.
+
+They found, on arriving there, that on the first day of that month
+the particular train selected for Graye's return had ceased to stop
+at Anglebury station.
+
+'I am very sorry I misled him,' said Springrove.
+
+'O, I am not alarmed at all,' replied Cytherea.
+
+'Well, it's sure to be all right--he will sleep there, and come by
+the first in the morning. But what will you do, alone?'
+
+'I am quite easy on that point; the landlady is very friendly. I
+must go indoors now. Good-night, Mr. Springrove.'
+
+'Let me go round to your door with you?' he pleaded.
+
+'No, thank you; we live close by.'
+
+He looked at her as a waiter looks at the change he brings back.
+But she was inexorable.
+
+'Don't--forget me,' he murmured. She did not answer.
+
+'Let me see you sometimes,' he said.
+
+'Perhaps you never will again--I am going away,' she replied in
+lingering tones; and turning into Cross Street, ran indoors and
+upstairs.
+
+The sudden withdrawal of what was superfluous at first, is often
+felt as an essential loss. It was felt now with regard to the
+maiden. More, too, after a meeting so pleasant and so enkindling,
+she had seemed to imply that they would never come together again.
+
+The young man softly followed her, stood opposite the house and
+watched her come into the upper room with the light. Presently his
+gaze was cut short by her approaching the window and pulling down
+the blind--Edward dwelling upon her vanishing figure with a hopeless
+sense of loss akin to that which Adam is said by logicians to have
+felt when he first saw the sun set, and thought, in his
+inexperience, that it would return no more.
+
+He waited till her shadow had twice crossed the window, when,
+finding the charming outline was not to be expected again, he left
+the street, crossed the harbour-bridge, and entered his own solitary
+chamber on the other side, vaguely thinking as he went (for
+undefined reasons),
+
+   'One hope is too like despair
+   For prudence to smother.'
+
+
+
+III. THE EVENTS OF EIGHT DAYS
+
+1. FROM THE TWENTY-SECOND TO THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF JULY
+
+But things are not what they seem. A responsive love for Edward
+Springrove had made its appearance in Cytherea's bosom with all the
+fascinating attributes of a first experience, not succeeding to or
+displacing other emotions, as in older hearts, but taking up
+entirely new ground; as when gazing just after sunset at the pale
+blue sky we see a star come into existence where nothing was before.
+
+His parting words, 'Don't forget me,' she repeated to herself a
+hundred times, and though she thought their import was probably
+commonplace, she could not help toying with them,--looking at them
+from all points, and investing them with meanings of love and
+faithfulness,--ostensibly entertaining such meanings only as fables
+wherewith to pass the time, yet in her heart admitting, for detached
+instants, a possibility of their deeper truth. And thus, for hours
+after he had left her, her reason flirted with her fancy as a kitten
+will sport with a dove, pleasantly and smoothly through easy
+attitudes, but disclosing its cruel and unyielding nature at crises.
+
+To turn now to the more material media through which this story
+moves, it so happened that the very next morning brought round a
+circumstance which, slight in itself, took up a relevant and
+important position between the past and the future of the persons
+herein concerned.
+
+At breakfast time, just as Cytherea had again seen the postman pass
+without bringing her an answer to the advertisement, as she had
+fully expected he would do, Owen entered the room.
+
+'Well,' he said, kissing her, 'you have not been alarmed, of course.
+Springrove told you what I had done, and you found there was no
+train?'
+
+'Yes, it was all clear. But what is the lameness owing to?'
+
+'I don't know--nothing. It has quite gone off now . . . Cytherea,
+I hope you like Springrove. Springrove's a nice fellow, you know.'
+
+'Yes. I think he is, except that--'
+
+'It happened just to the purpose that I should meet him there,
+didn't it? And when I reached the station and learnt that I could
+not get on by train my foot seemed better. I started off to walk
+home, and went about five miles along a path beside the railway. It
+then struck me that I might not be fit for anything to-day if I
+walked and aggravated the bothering foot, so I looked for a place to
+sleep at. There was no available village or inn, and I eventually
+got the keeper of a gate-house, where a lane crossed the line, to
+take me in.'
+
+They proceeded with their breakfast. Owen yawned.
+
+'You didn't get much sleep at the gate-house last night, I'm afraid,
+Owen,' said his sister.
+
+'To tell the truth, I didn't. I was in such very close and narrow
+quarters. Those gate-houses are such small places, and the man had
+only his own bed to offer me. Ah, by-the-bye, Cythie, I have such
+an extraordinary thing to tell you in connection with this man!--by
+Jove, I had nearly forgotten it! But I'll go straight on. As I was
+saying, he had only his own bed to offer me, but I could not afford
+to be fastidious, and as he had a hearty manner, though a very queer
+one, I agreed to accept it, and he made a rough pallet for himself
+on the floor close beside me. Well, I could not sleep for my life,
+and I wished I had not stayed there, though I was so tired. For one
+thing, there were the luggage trains rattling by at my elbow the
+early part of the night. But worse than this, he talked continually
+in his sleep, and occasionally struck out with his limbs at
+something or another, knocking against the post of the bedstead and
+making it tremble. My condition was altogether so unsatisfactory
+that at last I awoke him, and asked him what he had been dreaming
+about for the previous hour, for I could get no sleep at all. He
+begged my pardon for disturbing me, but a name I had casually let
+fall that evening had led him to think of another stranger he had
+once had visit him, who had also accidentally mentioned the same
+name, and some very strange incidents connected with that meeting.
+The affair had occurred years and years ago; but what I had said had
+made him think and dream about it as if it were but yesterday. What
+was the word? I said. "Cytherea," he said. What was the story? I
+asked then. He then told me that when he was a young man in London
+he borrowed a few pounds to add to a few he had saved up, and opened
+a little inn at Hammersmith. One evening, after the inn had been
+open about a couple of months, every idler in the neighbourhood ran
+off to Westminster. The Houses of Parliament were on fire.
+
+'Not a soul remained in his parlour besides himself, and he began
+picking up the pipes and glasses his customers had hastily
+relinquished. At length a young lady about seventeen or eighteen
+came in. She asked if a woman was there waiting for herself--Miss
+Jane Taylor. He said no; asked the young lady if she would wait,
+and showed her into the small inner room. There was a glass-pane in
+the partition dividing this room from the bar to enable the landlord
+to see if his visitors, who sat there, wanted anything. A curious
+awkwardness and melancholy about the behaviour of the girl who
+called, caused my informant to look frequently at her through the
+partition. She seemed weary of her life, and sat with her face
+buried in her hands, evidently quite out of her element in such a
+house. Then a woman much older came in and greeted Miss Taylor by
+name. The man distinctly heard the following words pass between
+them:--
+
+'"Why have you not brought him?"
+
+'"He is ill; he is not likely to live through the night."
+
+'At this announcement from the elderly woman, the young lady fell to
+the floor in a swoon, apparently overcome by the news. The landlord
+ran in and lifted her up. Well, do what they would they could not
+for a long time bring her back to consciousness, and began to be
+much alarmed. "Who is she?" the innkeeper said to the other woman.
+"I know her," the other said, with deep meaning in her tone. The
+elderly and young woman seemed allied, and yet strangers.
+
+'She now showed signs of life, and it struck him (he was plainly of
+an inquisitive turn), that in her half-bewildered state he might get
+some information from her. He stooped over her, put his mouth to
+her ear, and said sharply, "What's your name?" "To catch a woman
+napping is difficult, even when she's half dead; but I did it," says
+the gatekeeper. When he asked her her name, she said immediately--
+
+'"Cytherea"--and stopped suddenly.'
+
+'My own name!' said Cytherea.
+
+'Yes--your name. Well, the gateman thought at the time it might be
+equally with Jane a name she had invented for the occasion, that
+they might not trace her; but I think it was truth unconsciously
+uttered, for she added directly afterwards: "O, what have I said!"
+and was quite overcome again--this time with fright. Her vexation
+that the woman now doubted the genuineness of her other name was
+very much greater than that the innkeeper did, and it is evident
+that to blind the woman was her main object. He also learnt from
+words the elderly woman casually dropped, that meetings of the same
+kind had been held before, and that the falseness of the soi-disant
+Miss Jane Taylor's name had never been suspected by this dependent
+or confederate till then.
+
+'She recovered, rested there for an hour, and first sending off her
+companion peremptorily (which was another odd thing), she left the
+house, offering the landlord all the money she had to say nothing
+about the circumstance. He has never seen her since, according to
+his own account. I said to him again and again, "Did you find any
+more particulars afterwards?" "Not a syllable," he said. O, he
+should never hear any more of that! too many years had passed since
+it happened. "At any rate, you found out her surname?" I said.
+"Well, well, that's my secret," he went on. "Perhaps I should never
+have been in this part of the world if it hadn't been for that. I
+failed as a publican, you know." I imagine the situation of gateman
+was given him and his debts paid off as a bribe to silence; but I
+can't say. "Ah, yes!" he said, with a long breath. "I have never
+heard that name mentioned since that time till to-night, and then
+there instantly rose to my eyes the vision of that young lady lying
+in a fainting fit." He then stopped talking and fell asleep.
+Telling the story must have relieved him as it did the Ancient
+Mariner, for he did not move a muscle or make another sound for the
+remainder of the night. Now isn't that an odd story?'
+
+'It is indeed,' Cytherea murmured. 'Very, very strange.'
+
+'Why should she have said your most uncommon name?' continued Owen.
+'The man was evidently truthful, for there was not motive sufficient
+for his invention of such a tale, and he could not have done it
+either.'
+
+Cytherea looked long at her brother. 'Don't you recognize anything
+else in connection with the story?' she said.
+
+'What?' he asked.
+
+'Do you remember what poor papa once let drop--that Cytherea was the
+name of his first sweetheart in Bloomsbury, who so mysteriously
+renounced him? A sort of intuition tells me that this was the same
+woman.'
+
+'O no--not likely,' said her brother sceptically.
+
+'How not likely, Owen? There's not another woman of the name in
+England. In what year used papa to say the event took place?'
+
+'Eighteen hundred and thirty-five.'
+
+'And when were the Houses of Parliament burnt?--stop, I can tell
+you.' She searched their little stock of books for a list of dates,
+and found one in an old school history.
+
+'The Houses of Parliament were burnt down in the evening of the
+sixteenth of October, eighteen hundred and thirty-four.'
+
+'Nearly a year and a quarter before she met father,' remarked Owen.
+
+They were silent. 'If papa had been alive, what a wonderful
+absorbing interest this story would have had for him,' said Cytherea
+by-and-by. 'And how strangely knowledge comes to us. We might have
+searched for a clue to her secret half the world over, and never
+found one. If we had really had any motive for trying to discover
+more of the sad history than papa told us, we should have gone to
+Bloomsbury; but not caring to do so, we go two hundred miles in the
+opposite direction, and there find information waiting to be told
+us. What could have been the secret, Owen?'
+
+'Heaven knows. But our having heard a little more of her in this
+way (if she is the same woman) is a mere coincidence after all--a
+family story to tell our friends if we ever have any. But we shall
+never know any more of the episode now--trust our fates for that.'
+
+Cytherea sat silently thinking.
+
+'There was no answer this morning to your advertisement, Cytherea?'
+he continued.
+
+'None.'
+
+'I could see that by your looks when I came in.'
+
+'Fancy not getting a single one,' she said sadly. 'Surely there
+must be people somewhere who want governesses?'
+
+'Yes; but those who want them, and can afford to have them, get them
+mostly by friends' recommendations; whilst those who want them, and
+can't afford to have them, make use of their poor relations.'
+
+'What shall I do?'
+
+'Never mind it. Go on living with me. Don't let the difficulty
+trouble your mind so; you think about it all day. I can keep you,
+Cythie, in a plain way of living. Twenty-five shillings a week do
+not amount to much truly; but then many mechanics have no more, and
+we live quite as sparingly as journeymen mechanics. . . It is a
+meagre narrow life we are drifting into,' he added gloomily, 'but it
+is a degree more tolerable than the worrying sensation of all the
+world being ashamed of you, which we experienced at Hocbridge.'
+
+'I couldn't go back there again,' she said.
+
+'Nor I. O, I don't regret our course for a moment. We did quite
+right in dropping out of the world.' The sneering tones of the
+remark were almost too laboured to be real. 'Besides,' he
+continued, 'something better for me is sure to turn up soon. I wish
+my engagement here was a permanent one instead of for only two
+months. It may, certainly, be for a longer time, but all is
+uncertain.'
+
+'I wish I could get something to do; and I must too,' she said
+firmly. 'Suppose, as is very probable, you are not wanted after the
+beginning of October--the time Mr. Gradfield mentioned--what should
+we do if I were dependent on you only throughout the winter?'
+
+They pondered on numerous schemes by which a young lady might be
+supposed to earn a decent livelihood--more or less convenient and
+feasible in imagination, but relinquished them all until advertising
+had been once more tried, this time taking lower ground. Cytherea
+was vexed at her temerity in having represented to the world that so
+inexperienced a being as herself was a qualified governess; and had
+a fancy that this presumption of hers might be one reason why no
+ladies applied. The new and humbler attempt appeared in the
+following form:--
+
+
+  'NURSERY GOVERNESS OR USEFUL COMPANION. A young person wishes to
+  hear of a situation in either of the above capacities. Salary very
+  moderate. She is a good needle-woman--Address G., 3 Cross Street,
+  Budmouth.'
+
+
+In the evening they went to post the letter, and then walked up and
+down the Parade for a while. Soon they met Springrove, said a few
+words to him, and passed on. Owen noticed that his sister's face
+had become crimson. Rather oddly they met Springrove again in a few
+minutes. This time the three walked a little way together, Edward
+ostensibly talking to Owen, though with a single thought to the
+reception of his words by the maiden at the farther side, upon whom
+his gaze was mostly resting, and who was attentively listening
+--looking fixedly upon the pavement the while. It has been said
+that men love with their eyes; women with their ears.
+
+As Owen and himself were little more than acquaintances as yet, and
+as Springrove was wanting in the assurance of many men of his age,
+it now became necessary to wish his friends good-evening, or to find
+a reason for continuing near Cytherea by saying some nice new thing.
+He thought of a new thing; he proposed a pull across the bay. This
+was assented to. They went to the pier; stepped into one of the
+gaily painted boats moored alongside and sheered off. Cytherea sat
+in the stern steering.
+
+They rowed that evening; the next came, and with it the necessity of
+rowing again. Then the next, and the next, Cytherea always sitting
+in the stern with the tiller ropes in her hand. The curves of her
+figure welded with those of the fragile boat in perfect continuation,
+as she girlishly yielded herself to its heaving and sinking, seeming
+to form with it an organic whole.
+
+Then Owen was inclined to test his skill in paddling a canoe.
+Edward did not like canoes, and the issue was, that, having seen
+Owen on board, Springrove proposed to pull off after him with a pair
+of sculls; but not considering himself sufficiently accomplished to
+do finished rowing before a parade full of promenaders when there
+was a little swell on, and with the rudder unshipped in addition, he
+begged that Cytherea might come with him and steer as before. She
+stepped in, and they floated along in the wake of her brother. Thus
+passed the fifth evening on the water.
+
+But the sympathetic pair were thrown into still closer companionship,
+and much more exclusive connection.
+
+2. JULY THE TWENTY-NINTH
+
+It was a sad time for Cytherea--the last day of Springrove's
+management at Gradfield's, and the last evening before his return
+from Budmouth to his father's house, previous to his departure for
+London.
+
+Graye had been requested by the architect to survey a plot of land
+nearly twenty miles off, which, with the journey to and fro, would
+occupy him the whole day, and prevent his returning till late in the
+evening. Cytherea made a companion of her landlady to the extent of
+sharing meals and sitting with her during the morning of her
+brother's absence. Mid-day found her restless and miserable under
+this arrangement. All the afternoon she sat alone, looking out of
+the window for she scarcely knew whom, and hoping she scarcely knew
+what. Half-past five o'clock came--the end of Springrove's official
+day. Two minutes later Springrove walked by.
+
+She endured her solitude for another half-hour, and then could
+endure no longer. She had hoped--while affecting to fear--that
+Edward would have found some reason or other for calling, but it
+seemed that he had not. Hastily dressing herself she went out, when
+the farce of an accidental meeting was repeated. Edward came upon
+her in the street at the first turning, and, like the Great Duke
+Ferdinand in 'The Statue and the Bust'--
+
+   'He looked at her as a lover can;
+   She looked at him as one who awakes--
+   The past was a sleep, and her life began.'
+
+'Shall we have a boat?' he said impulsively.
+
+How blissful it all is at first. Perhaps, indeed, the only bliss in
+the course of love which can truly be called Eden-like is that which
+prevails immediately after doubt has ended and before reflection has
+set in--at the dawn of the emotion, when it is not recognized by
+name, and before the consideration of what this love is, has given
+birth to the consideration of what difficulties it tends to create;
+when on the man's part, the mistress appears to the mind's eye in
+picturesque, hazy, and fresh morning lights, and soft morning
+shadows; when, as yet, she is known only as the wearer of one dress,
+which shares her own personality; as the stander in one special
+position, the giver of one bright particular glance, and the speaker
+of one tender sentence; when, on her part, she is timidly careful
+over what she says and does, lest she should be misconstrued or
+under-rated to the breadth of a shadow of a hair.
+
+'Shall we have a boat?' he said again, more softly, seeing that to
+his first question she had not answered, but looked uncertainly at
+the ground, then almost, but not quite, in his face, blushed a
+series of minute blushes, left off in the midst of them, and showed
+the usual signs of perplexity in a matter of the emotions.
+
+Owen had always been with her before, but there was now a force of
+habit in the proceeding, and with Arcadian innocence she assumed
+that a row on the water was, under any circumstances, a natural
+thing. Without another word being spoken on either side, they went
+down the steps. He carefully handed her in, took his seat, slid
+noiselessly off the sand, and away from the shore.
+
+They thus sat facing each other in the graceful yellow cockle-shell,
+and his eyes frequently found a resting-place in the depths of hers.
+The boat was so small that at each return of the sculls, when his
+hands came forward to begin the pull, they approached so near to her
+that her vivid imagination began to thrill her with a fancy that he
+was going to clasp his arms round her. The sensation grew so strong
+that she could not run the risk of again meeting his eyes at those
+critical moments, and turned aside to inspect the distant horizon;
+then she grew weary of looking sideways, and was driven to return to
+her natural position again. At this instant he again leant forward
+to begin, and met her glance by an ardent fixed gaze. An
+involuntary impulse of girlish embarrassment caused her to give a
+vehement pull at the tiller-rope, which brought the boat's head
+round till they stood directly for shore.
+
+His eyes, which had dwelt upon her form during the whole time of her
+look askance, now left her; he perceived the direction in which they
+were going.
+
+'Why, you have completely turned the boat, Miss Graye?' he said,
+looking over his shoulder. 'Look at our track on the water--a great
+semicircle, preceded by a series of zigzags as far as we can see.'
+
+She looked attentively. 'Is it my fault or yours?' she inquired.
+'Mine, I suppose?'
+
+'I can't help saying that it is yours.'
+
+She dropped the ropes decisively, feeling the slightest twinge of
+vexation at the answer.
+
+'Why do you let go?'
+
+'I do it so badly.'
+
+'O no; you turned about for shore in a masterly way. Do you wish to
+return?'
+
+'Yes, if you please.'
+
+'Of course, then, I will at once.'
+
+'I fear what the people will think of us--going in such absurd
+directions, and all through my wretched steering.'
+
+'Never mind what the people think.' A pause. 'You surely are not
+so weak as to mind what the people think on such a matter as that?'
+
+Those words might almost be called too firm and hard to be given by
+him to her; but never mind. For almost the first time in her life
+she felt the charming sensation, although on such an insignificant
+subject, of being compelled into an opinion by a man she loved.
+Owen, though less yielding physically, and more practical, would not
+have had the intellectual independence to answer a woman thus. She
+replied quietly and honestly--as honestly as when she had stated the
+contrary fact a minute earlier--
+
+'I don't mind.'
+
+'I'll unship the tiller that you may have nothing to do going back
+but to hold your parasol,' he continued, and arose to perform the
+operation, necessarily leaning closely against her, to guard against
+the risk of capsizing the boat as he reached his hands astern. His
+warm breath touched and crept round her face like a caress; but he
+was apparently only concerned with his task. She looked guilty of
+something when he seated himself. He read in her face what that
+something was--she had experienced a pleasure from his touch. But
+he flung a practical glance over his shoulder, seized the oars, and
+they sped in a straight line towards the shore.
+
+Cytherea saw that he noted in her face what had passed in her heart,
+and that noting it, he continued as decided as before. She was
+inwardly distressed. She had not meant him to translate her words
+about returning home so literally at the first; she had not intended
+him to learn her secret; but more than all she was not able to
+endure the perception of his learning it and continuing unmoved.
+
+There was nothing but misery to come now. They would step ashore;
+he would say good-night, go to London to-morrow, and the miserable
+She would lose him for ever. She did not quite suppose what was the
+fact, that a parallel thought was simultaneously passing through his
+mind.
+
+They were now within ten yards, now within five; he was only now
+waiting for a 'smooth' to bring the boat in. Sweet, sweet Love must
+not be slain thus, was the fair maid's reasoning. She was equal to
+the occasion--ladies are--and delivered the god--
+
+'Do you want very much to land, Mr. Springrove?' she said, letting
+her young violet eyes pine at him a very, very little.
+
+'I? Not at all,' said he, looking an astonishment at her inquiry
+which a slight twinkle of his eye half belied. 'But you do?'
+
+'I think that now we have come out, and it is such a pleasant
+evening,' she said gently and sweetly, 'I should like a little
+longer row if you don't mind? I'll try to steer better than before
+if it makes it easier for you. I'll try very hard.'
+
+It was the turn of his face to tell a tale now. He looked, 'We
+understand each other--ah, we do, darling!' turned the boat, and
+pulled back into the Bay once more.
+
+'Now steer wherever you will,' he said, in a low voice. 'Never mind
+the directness of the course--wherever you will.'
+
+'Shall it be Creston Shore?' she said, pointing to a stretch of
+beach northward from Budmouth Esplanade.
+
+'Creston Shore certainly,' he responded, grasping the sculls. She
+took the strings daintily, and they wound away to the left.
+
+For a long time nothing was audible in the boat but the regular dip
+of the oars, and their movement in the rowlocks. Springrove at
+length spoke.
+
+'I must go away to-morrow,' he said tentatively.
+
+'Yes,' she replied faintly.
+
+'To endeavour to advance a little in my profession in London.'
+
+'Yes,' she said again, with the same preoccupied softness.
+
+'But I shan't advance.'
+
+'Why not? Architecture is a bewitching profession. They say that
+an architect's work is another man's play.'
+
+'Yes. But worldly advantage from an art doesn't depend upon
+mastering it. I used to think it did; but it doesn't. Those who
+get rich need have no skill at all as artists.'
+
+'What need they have?'
+
+'A certain kind of energy which men with any fondness for art
+possess very seldom indeed--an earnestness in making acquaintances,
+and a love for using them. They give their whole attention to the
+art of dining out, after mastering a few rudimentary facts to serve
+up in conversation. Now after saying that, do I seem a man likely
+to make a name?'
+
+'You seem a man likely to make a mistake.'
+
+'What's that?'
+
+'To give too much room to the latent feeling which is rather common
+in these days among the unappreciated, that because some remarkably
+successful men are fools, all remarkably unsuccessful men are
+geniuses.'
+
+'Pretty subtle for a young lady,' he said slowly. 'From that remark
+I should fancy you had bought experience.'
+
+She passed over the idea. 'Do try to succeed,' she said, with
+wistful thoughtfulness, leaving her eyes on him.
+
+Springrove flushed a little at the earnestness of her words, and
+mused. 'Then, like Cato the Censor, I shall do what I despise, to
+be in the fashion,' he said at last. . . 'Well, when I found all
+this out that I was speaking of, what ever do you think I did? From
+having already loved verse passionately, I went on to read it
+continually; then I went rhyming myself. If anything on earth ruins
+a man for useful occupation, and for content with reasonable success
+in a profession or trade, it is the habit of writing verses on
+emotional subjects, which had much better be left to die from want
+of nourishment.'
+
+'Do you write poems now?' she said.
+
+'None. Poetical days are getting past with me, according to the
+usual rule. Writing rhymes is a stage people of my sort pass
+through, as they pass through the stage of shaving for a beard, or
+thinking they are ill-used, or saying there's nothing in the world
+worth living for.'
+
+'Then the difference between a common man and a recognized poet is,
+that one has been deluded, and cured of his delusion, and the other
+continues deluded all his days.'
+
+'Well, there's just enough truth in what you say, to make the remark
+unbearable. However, it doesn't matter to me now that I "meditate
+the thankless Muse" no longer, but. . .' He paused, as if
+endeavouring to think what better thing he did.
+
+Cytherea's mind ran on to the succeeding lines of the poem, and
+their startling harmony with the present situation suggested the
+fancy that he was 'sporting' with her, and brought an awkward
+contemplativeness to her face.
+
+Springrove guessed her thoughts, and in answer to them simply said
+'Yes.' Then they were silent again.
+
+'If I had known an Amaryllis was coming here, I should not have made
+arrangements for leaving,' he resumed.
+
+Such levity, superimposed on the notion of 'sport', was intolerable
+to Cytherea; for a woman seems never to see any but the serious side
+of her attachment, though the most devoted lover has all the time a
+vague and dim perception that he is losing his old dignity and
+frittering away his time.
+
+'But will you not try again to get on in your profession? Try once
+more; do try once more,' she murmured. 'I am going to try again. I
+have advertised for something to do.'
+
+'Of course I will,' he said, with an eager gesture and smile. 'But
+we must remember that the fame of Christopher Wren himself depended
+upon the accident of a fire in Pudding Lane. My successes seem to
+come very slowly. I often think, that before I am ready to live, it
+will be time for me to die. However, I am trying--not for fame now,
+but for an easy life of reasonable comfort.'
+
+It is a melancholy truth for the middle classes, that in proportion
+as they develop, by the study of poetry and art, their capacity for
+conjugal love of the highest and purest kind, they limit the
+possibility of their being able to exercise it--the very act putting
+out of their power the attainment of means sufficient for marriage.
+The man who works up a good income has had no time to learn love to
+its solemn extreme; the man who has learnt that has had no time to
+get rich.
+
+'And if you should fail--utterly fail to get that reasonable
+wealth,' she said earnestly, 'don't be perturbed. The truly great
+stand upon no middle ledge; they are either famous or unknown.'
+
+'Unknown,' he said, 'if their ideas have been allowed to flow with a
+sympathetic breadth. Famous only if they have been convergent and
+exclusive.'
+
+'Yes; and I am afraid from that, that my remark was but
+discouragement, wearing the dress of comfort. Perhaps I was not
+quite right in--'
+
+'It depends entirely upon what is meant by being truly great. But
+the long and the short of the matter is, that men must stick to a
+thing if they want to succeed in it--not giving way to over-much
+admiration for the flowers they see growing in other people's
+borders; which I am afraid has been my case.' He looked into the
+far distance and paused.
+
+Adherence to a course with persistence sufficient to ensure success
+is possible to widely appreciative minds only when there is also
+found in them a power--commonplace in its nature, but rare in such
+combination--the power of assuming to conviction that in the
+outlying paths which appear so much more brilliant than their own,
+there are bitternesses equally great--unperceived simply on account
+of their remoteness.
+
+
+
+They were opposite Ringsworth Shore. The cliffs here were formed of
+strata completely contrasting with those of the further side of the
+Bay, whilst in and beneath the water hard boulders had taken the
+place of sand and shingle, between which, however, the sea glided
+noiselessly, without breaking the crest of a single wave, so
+strikingly calm was the air. The breeze had entirely died away,
+leaving the water of that rare glassy smoothness which is unmarked
+even by the small dimples of the least aerial movement. Purples and
+blues of divers shades were reflected from this mirror accordingly
+as each undulation sloped east or west. They could see the rocky
+bottom some twenty feet beneath them, luxuriant with weeds of
+various growths, and dotted with pulpy creatures reflecting a
+silvery and spangled radiance upwards to their eyes.
+
+At length she looked at him to learn the effect of her words of
+encouragement. He had let the oars drift alongside, and the boat
+had come to a standstill. Everything on earth seemed taking a
+contemplative rest, as if waiting to hear the avowal of something
+from his lips. At that instant he appeared to break a resolution
+hitherto zealously kept. Leaving his seat amidships he came and
+gently edged himself down beside her upon the narrow seat at the
+stern.
+
+She breathed more quickly and warmly: he took her right hand in his
+own right: it was not withdrawn. He put his left hand behind her
+neck till it came round upon her left cheek: it was not thrust
+away. Lightly pressing her, he brought her face and mouth towards
+his own; when, at this the very brink, some unaccountable thought or
+spell within him suddenly made him halt--even now, and as it seemed
+as much to himself as to her, he timidly whispered 'May I?'
+
+Her endeavour was to say No, so denuded of its flesh and sinews that
+its nature would hardly be recognized, or in other words a No from
+so near the affirmative frontier as to be affected with the Yes
+accent. It was thus a whispered No, drawn out to nearly a quarter
+of a minute's length, the O making itself audible as a sound like
+the spring coo of a pigeon on unusually friendly terms with its
+mate. Though conscious of her success in producing the kind of word
+she had wished to produce, she at the same time trembled in suspense
+as to how it would be taken. But the time available for doubt was
+so short as to admit of scarcely more than half a pulsation:
+pressing closer he kissed her. Then he kissed her again with a
+longer kiss.
+
+It was the supremely happy moment of their experience. The 'bloom'
+and the 'purple light' were strong on the lineaments of both. Their
+hearts could hardly believe the evidence of their lips.
+
+'I love you, and you love me, Cytherea!' he whispered.
+
+She did not deny it; and all seemed well. The gentle sounds around
+them from the hills, the plains, the distant town, the adjacent
+shore, the water heaving at their side, the kiss, and the long kiss,
+were all 'many a voice of one delight,' and in unison with each
+other.
+
+But his mind flew back to the same unpleasant thought which had been
+connected with the resolution he had broken a minute or two earlier.
+'I could be a slave at my profession to win you, Cytherea; I would
+work at the meanest, honest trade to be near you--much less claim
+you as mine; I would--anything. But I have not told you all; it is
+not this; you don't know what there is yet to tell. Could you
+forgive as you can love?' She was alarmed to see that he had become
+pale with the question.
+
+'No--do not speak,' he said. 'I have kept something from you, which
+has now become the cause of a great uneasiness. I had no right--to
+love you; but I did it. Something forbade--'
+
+'What?' she exclaimed.
+
+'Something forbade me--till the kiss--yes, till the kiss came; and
+now nothing shall forbid it! We'll hope in spite of all. . . I
+must, however, speak of this love of ours to your brother. Dearest,
+you had better go indoors whilst I meet him at the station, and
+explain everything.'
+
+Cytherea's short-lived bliss was dead and gone. O, if she had known
+of this sequel would she have allowed him to break down the barrier
+of mere acquaintanceship--never, never!
+
+'Will you not explain to me?' she faintly urged. Doubt--indefinite,
+carking doubt had taken possession of her.
+
+'Not now. You alarm yourself unnecessarily,' he said tenderly. 'My
+only reason for keeping silence is that with my present knowledge I
+may tell an untrue story. It may be that there is nothing to tell.
+I am to blame for haste in alluding to any such thing. Forgive me,
+sweet--forgive me.' Her heart was ready to burst, and she could not
+answer him. He returned to his place and took to the oars.
+
+They again made for the distant Esplanade, now, with its line of
+houses, lying like a dark grey band against the light western sky.
+The sun had set, and a star or two began to peep out. They drew
+nearer their destination, Edward as he pulled tracing listlessly
+with his eyes the red stripes upon her scarf, which grew to appear
+as black ones in the increasing dusk of evening. She surveyed the
+long line of lamps on the sea-wall of the town, now looking small
+and yellow, and seeming to send long tap-roots of fire quivering
+down deep into the sea. By-and-by they reached the landing-steps.
+He took her hand as before, and found it as cold as the water about
+them. It was not relinquished till he reached her door. His
+assurance had not removed the constraint of her manner: he saw that
+she blamed him mutely and with her eyes, like a captured sparrow.
+Left alone, he went and seated himself in a chair on the Esplanade.
+
+Neither could she go indoors to her solitary room, feeling as she
+did in such a state of desperate heaviness. When Springrove was out
+of sight she turned back, and arrived at the corner just in time to
+see him sit down. Then she glided pensively along the pavement
+behind him, forgetting herself to marble like Melancholy herself as
+she mused in his neighbourhood unseen. She heard, without heeding,
+the notes of pianos and singing voices from the fashionable houses
+at her back, from the open windows of which the lamp-light streamed
+to join that of the orange-hued full moon, newly risen over the Bay
+in front. Then Edward began to pace up and down, and Cytherea,
+fearing that he would notice her, hastened homeward, flinging him a
+last look as she passed out of sight. No promise from him to write:
+no request that she herself would do so--nothing but an indefinite
+expression of hope in the face of some fear unknown to her. Alas,
+alas!
+
+When Owen returned he found she was not in the small sitting-room,
+and creeping upstairs into her bedroom with a light, he discovered
+her there lying asleep upon the coverlet of the bed, still with her
+hat and jacket on. She had flung herself down on entering, and
+succumbed to the unwonted oppressiveness that ever attends
+full-blown love. The wet traces of tears were yet visible upon her
+long drooping lashes.
+
+     'Love is a sowre delight, and sugred griefe,
+     A living death, and ever-dying life.'
+
+'Cytherea,' he whispered, kissing her. She awoke with a start, and
+vented an exclamation before recovering her judgment. 'He's gone!'
+she said.
+
+'He has told me all,' said Graye soothingly. 'He is going off early
+to-morrow morning. 'Twas a shame of him to win you away from me,
+and cruel of you to keep the growth of this attachment a secret.'
+
+'We couldn't help it,' she said, and then jumping up--'Owen, has he
+told you _all_?'
+
+'All of your love from beginning to end,' he said simply.
+
+Edward then had not told more--as he ought to have done: yet she
+could not convict him. But she would struggle against his fetters.
+She tingled to the very soles of her feet at the very possibility
+that he might be deluding her.
+
+'Owen,' she continued, with dignity, 'what is he to me? Nothing. I
+must dismiss such weakness as this--believe me, I will. Something
+far more pressing must drive it away. I have been looking my
+position steadily in the face, and I must get a living somehow. I
+mean to advertise once more.'
+
+'Advertising is no use.'
+
+'This one will be.' He looked surprised at the sanguine tone of her
+answer, till she took a piece of paper from the table and showed it
+him. 'See what I am going to do,' she said sadly, almost bitterly.
+This was her third effort:--
+
+
+  'LADY'S-MAID. Inexperienced. Age eighteen.--G., 3 Cross Street,
+  Budmouth.'
+
+
+Owen--Owen the respectable--looked blank astonishment. He repeated
+in a nameless, varying tone, the two words--
+
+'Lady's-maid!'
+
+'Yes; lady's-maid. 'Tis an honest profession,' said Cytherea
+bravely.
+
+'But _you_, Cytherea?'
+
+'Yes, I--who am I?'
+
+'You will never be a lady's-maid--never, I am quite sure.'
+
+'I shall try to be, at any rate.'
+
+'Such a disgrace--'
+
+'Nonsense! I maintain that it is no disgrace!' she said, rather
+warmly. 'You know very well--'
+
+'Well, since you will, you must,' he interrupted. 'Why do you put
+"inexperienced?"'
+
+'Because I am.'
+
+'Never mind that--scratch out "inexperienced." We are poor,
+Cytherea, aren't we?' he murmured, after a silence, 'and it seems
+that the two months will close my engagement here.'
+
+'We can put up with being poor,' she said, 'if they only give us
+work to do. . . . Yes, we desire as a blessing what was given us as
+a curse, and even that is denied. However, be cheerful, Owen, and
+never mind!'
+
+In justice to desponding men, it is as well to remember that the
+brighter endurance of women at these epochs--invaluable, sweet,
+angelic, as it is--owes more of its origin to a narrower vision that
+shuts out many of the leaden-eyed despairs in the van, than to a
+hopefulness intense enough to quell them.
+
+
+
+IV. THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
+
+1. AUGUST THE FOURTH. TILL FOUR O'CLOCK
+
+The early part of the next week brought an answer to Cytherea's last
+note of hope in the way of advertisement--not from a distance of
+hundreds of miles, London, Scotland, Ireland, the Continent--as
+Cytherea seemed to think it must, to be in keeping with the means
+adopted for obtaining it, but from a place in the neighbourhood of
+that in which she was living--a country mansion not twenty miles
+off. The reply ran thus:--
+
+
+                      KNAPWATER HOUSE,
+                         August 3, 1864.
+
+'Miss Aldclyffe is in want of a young person as lady's-maid. The
+duties of the place are light. Miss Aldclyffe will be in Budmouth
+on Thursday, when (should G. still not have heard of a place) she
+would like to see her at the Belvedere Hotel, Esplanade, at four
+o'clock. No answer need be returned to this note.'
+
+
+A little earlier than the time named, Cytherea, clothed in a modest
+bonnet, and a black silk jacket, turned down to the hotel.
+Expectation, the fresh air from the water, the bright, far-extending
+outlook, raised the most delicate of pink colours to her cheeks, and
+restored to her tread a portion of that elasticity which her past
+troubles, and thoughts of Edward, had well-nigh taken away.
+
+She entered the vestibule, and went to the window of the bar.
+
+'Is Miss Aldclyffe here?' she said to a nicely-dressed barmaid in
+the foreground, who was talking to a landlady covered with chains,
+knobs, and clamps of gold, in the background.
+
+'No, she isn't,' said the barmaid, not very civilly. Cytherea
+looked a shade too pretty for a plain dresser.
+
+'Miss Aldclyffe is expected here,' the landlady said to a third
+person, out of sight, in the tone of one who had known for several
+days the fact newly discovered from Cytherea. 'Get ready her room
+--be quick.' From the alacrity with which the order was given and
+taken, it seemed to Cytherea that Miss Aldclyffe must be a woman of
+considerable importance.
+
+'You are to have an interview with Miss Aldclyffe here?' the
+landlady inquired.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'The young person had better wait,' continued the landlady. With a
+money-taker's intuition she had rightly divined that Cytherea would
+bring no profit to the house.
+
+Cytherea was shown into a nondescript chamber, on the shady side of
+the building, which appeared to be either bedroom or dayroom, as
+occasion necessitated, and was one of a suite at the end of the
+first-floor corridor. The prevailing colour of the walls, curtains,
+carpet, and coverings of furniture, was more or less blue, to which
+the cold light coming from the north easterly sky, and falling on a
+wide roof of new slates--the only object the small window commanded
+--imparted a more striking paleness. But underneath the door,
+communicating with the next room of the suite, gleamed an
+infinitesimally small, yet very powerful, fraction of contrast--a
+very thin line of ruddy light, showing that the sun beamed strongly
+into this room adjoining. The line of radiance was the only
+cheering thing visible in the place.
+
+People give way to very infantine thoughts and actions when they
+wait; the battle-field of life is temporarily fenced off by a hard
+and fast line--the interview. Cytherea fixed her eyes idly upon the
+streak, and began picturing a wonderful paradise on the other side
+as the source of such a beam--reminding her of the well-known good
+deed in a naughty world.
+
+Whilst she watched the particles of dust floating before the
+brilliant chink she heard a carriage and horses stop opposite the
+front of the house. Afterwards came the rustle of a lady's skirts
+down the corridor, and into the room communicating with the one
+Cytherea occupied.
+
+The golden line vanished in parts like the phosphorescent streak
+caused by the striking of a match; there was the fall of a light
+footstep on the floor just behind it: then a pause. Then the foot
+tapped impatiently, and 'There's no one here!' was spoken
+imperiously by a lady's tongue.
+
+'No, madam; in the next room. I am going to fetch her,' said the
+attendant.
+
+'That will do--or you needn't go in; I will call her.'
+
+Cytherea had risen, and she advanced to the middle door with the
+chink under it as the servant retired. She had just laid her hand
+on the knob, when it slipped round within her fingers, and the door
+was pulled open from the other side.
+
+2. FOUR O'CLOCK
+
+The direct blaze of the afternoon sun, partly refracted through the
+crimson curtains of the window, and heightened by reflections from
+the crimson-flock paper which covered the walls, and a carpet on the
+floor of the same tint, shone with a burning glow round the form of
+a lady standing close to Cytherea's front with the door in her hand.
+The stranger appeared to the maiden's eyes--fresh from the blue
+gloom, and assisted by an imagination fresh from nature--like a tall
+black figure standing in the midst of fire. It was the figure of a
+finely-built woman, of spare though not angular proportions.
+
+Cytherea involuntarily shaded her eyes with her hand, retreated a
+step or two, and then she could for the first time see Miss
+Aldclyffe's face in addition to her outline, lit up by the secondary
+and softer light that was reflected from the varnished panels of the
+door. She was not a very young woman, but could boast of much
+beauty of the majestic autumnal phase.
+
+'O,' said the lady, 'come this way.' Cytherea followed her to the
+embrasure of the window.
+
+Both the women showed off themselves to advantage as they walked
+forward in the orange light; and each showed too in her face that
+she had been struck with her companion's appearance. The warm tint
+added to Cytherea's face a voluptuousness which youth and a simple
+life had not yet allowed to express itself there ordinarily; whilst
+in the elder lady's face it reduced the customary expression, which
+might have been called sternness, if not harshness, to grandeur, and
+warmed her decaying complexion with much of the youthful richness it
+plainly had once possessed.
+
+She appeared now no more than five-and-thirty, though she might
+easily have been ten or a dozen years older. She had clear steady
+eyes, a Roman nose in its purest form, and also the round prominent
+chin with which the Caesars are represented in ancient marbles; a
+mouth expressing a capability for and tendency to strong emotion,
+habitually controlled by pride. There was a severity about the
+lower outlines of the face which gave a masculine cast to this
+portion of her countenance. Womanly weakness was nowhere visible
+save in one part--the curve of her forehead and brows--there it was
+clear and emphatic. She wore a lace shawl over a brown silk dress,
+and a net bonnet set with a few blue cornflowers.
+
+'You inserted the advertisement for a situation as lady's-maid
+giving the address, G., Cross Street?'
+
+'Yes, madam. Graye.'
+
+'Yes. I have heard your name--Mrs. Morris, my housekeeper,
+mentioned you, and pointed out your advertisement.'
+
+This was puzzling intelligence, but there was not time enough to
+consider it.
+
+'Where did you live last?' continued Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+'I have never been a servant before. I lived at home.'
+
+'Never been out? I thought too at sight of you that you were too
+girlish-looking to have done much. But why did you advertise with
+such assurance? It misleads people.'
+
+'I am very sorry: I put "inexperienced" at first, but my brother
+said it is absurd to trumpet your own weakness to the world, and
+would not let it remain.'
+
+'But your mother knew what was right, I suppose?'
+
+'I have no mother, madam.'
+
+'Your father, then?'
+
+'I have no father.'
+
+'Well,' she said, more softly, 'your sisters, aunts, or cousins.'
+
+'They didn't think anything about it.'
+
+'You didn't ask them, I suppose.'
+
+'No.'
+
+'You should have done so, then. Why didn't you?'
+
+'Because I haven't any of them, either.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe showed her surprise. 'You deserve forgiveness then
+at any rate, child,' she said, in a sort of drily-kind tone.
+'However, I am afraid you do not suit me, as I am looking for an
+elderly person. You see, I want an experienced maid who knows all
+the usual duties of the office.' She was going to add, 'Though I
+like your appearance,' but the words seemed offensive to apply to
+the ladylike girl before her, and she modified them to, 'though I
+like you much.'
+
+'I am sorry I misled you, madam,' said Cytherea.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe stood in a reverie, without replying.
+
+'Good afternoon,' continued Cytherea.
+
+'Good-bye, Miss Graye--I hope you will succeed.'
+
+Cytherea turned away towards the door. The movement chanced to be
+one of her masterpieces. It was precise: it had as much beauty as
+was compatible with precision, and as little coquettishness as was
+compatible with beauty.
+
+And she had in turning looked over her shoulder at the other lady
+with a faint accent of reproach in her face. Those who remember
+Greuze's 'Head of a Girl,' have an idea of Cytherea's look askance
+at the turning. It is not for a man to tell fishers of men how to
+set out their fascinations so as to bring about the highest possible
+average of takes within the year: but the action that tugs the
+hardest of all at an emotional beholder is this sweet method of
+turning which steals the bosom away and leaves the eyes behind.
+
+Now Miss Aldclyffe herself was no tyro at wheeling. When Cytherea
+had closed the door upon her, she remained for some time in her
+motionless attitude, listening to the gradually dying sound of the
+maiden's retreating footsteps. She murmured to herself, 'It is
+almost worth while to be bored with instructing her in order to have
+a creature who could glide round my luxurious indolent body in that
+manner, and look at me in that way--I warrant how light her fingers
+are upon one's head and neck. . . . What a silly modest young thing
+she is, to go away so suddenly as that!' She rang the bell.
+
+'Ask the young lady who has just left me to step back again,' she
+said to the attendant. 'Quick! or she will be gone.'
+
+Cytherea was now in the vestibule, thinking that if she had told her
+history, Miss Aldclyffe might perhaps have taken her into the
+household; yet her history she particularly wished to conceal from a
+stranger. When she was recalled she turned back without feeling
+much surprise. Something, she knew not what, told her she had not
+seen the last of Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+'You have somebody to refer me to, of course,' the lady said, when
+Cytherea had re-entered the room.
+
+'Yes: Mr. Thorn, a solicitor at Aldbrickham.'
+
+'And are you a clever needlewoman?'
+
+'I am considered to be.'
+
+'Then I think that at any rate I will write to Mr. Thorn,' said Miss
+Aldclyffe, with a little smile. 'It is true, the whole proceeding
+is very irregular; but my present maid leaves next Monday, and
+neither of the five I have already seen seem to do for me. . . .
+Well, I will write to Mr. Thorn, and if his reply is satisfactory,
+you shall hear from me. It will be as well to set yourself in
+readiness to come on Monday.'
+
+When Cytherea had again been watched out of the room, Miss Aldclyffe
+asked for writing materials, that she might at once communicate with
+Mr. Thorn. She indecisively played with the pen. 'Suppose Mr.
+Thorn's reply to be in any way disheartening--and even if so from
+his own imperfect acquaintance with the young creature more than
+from circumstantial knowledge--I shall feel obliged to give her up.
+Then I shall regret that I did not give her one trial in spite of
+other people's prejudices. All her account of herself is reliable
+enough--yes, I can see that by her face. I like that face of hers.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe put down the pen and left the hotel without writing
+to Mr. Thorn.
+
+
+
+V. THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
+
+1. AUGUST THE EIGHTH. MORNING AND AFTERNOON
+
+At post-time on that following Monday morning, Cytherea watched so
+anxiously for the postman, that as the time which must bring him
+narrowed less and less her vivid expectation had only a degree less
+tangibility than his presence itself. In another second his form
+came into view. He brought two letters for Cytherea.
+
+One from Miss Aldclyffe, simply stating that she wished Cytherea to
+come on trial: that she would require her to be at Knapwater House
+by Monday evening.
+
+The other was from Edward Springrove. He told her that she was the
+bright spot of his life: that her existence was far dearer to him
+than his own: that he had never known what it was to love till he
+had met her. True, he had felt passing attachments to other faces
+from time to time; but they all had been weak inclinations towards
+those faces as they then appeared. He loved her past and future, as
+well as her present. He pictured her as a child: he loved her. He
+pictured her of sage years: he loved her. He pictured her in
+trouble; he loved her. Homely friendship entered into his love for
+her, without which all love was evanescent.
+
+He would make one depressing statement. Uncontrollable
+circumstances (a long history, with which it was impossible to
+acquaint her at present) operated to a certain extent as a drag upon
+his wishes. He had felt this more strongly at the time of their
+parting than he did now--and it was the cause of his abrupt
+behaviour, for which he begged her to forgive him. He saw now an
+honourable way of freeing himself, and the perception had prompted
+him to write. In the meantime might he indulge in the hope of
+possessing her on some bright future day, when by hard labour
+generated from her own encouraging words, he had placed himself in a
+position she would think worthy to be shared with him?
+
+Dear little letter; she huddled it up. So much more important a
+love-letter seems to a girl than to a man. Springrove was
+unconsciously clever in his letters, and a man with a talent of that
+kind may write himself up to a hero in the mind of a young woman who
+loves him without knowing much about him. Springrove already stood
+a cubit higher in her imagination than he did in his shoes.
+
+During the day she flitted about the room in an ecstasy of pleasure,
+packing the things and thinking of an answer which should be worthy
+of the tender tone of the question, her love bubbling from her
+involuntarily, like prophesyings from a prophet.
+
+In the afternoon Owen went with her to the railway-station, and put
+her in the train for Carriford Road, the station nearest to
+Knapwater House.
+
+Half-an-hour later she stepped out upon the platform, and found
+nobody there to receive her--though a pony-carriage was waiting
+outside. In two minutes she saw a melancholy man in cheerful livery
+running towards her from a public-house close adjoining, who proved
+to be the servant sent to fetch her. There are two ways of getting
+rid of sorrows: one by living them down, the other by drowning
+them. The coachman drowned his.
+
+He informed her that her luggage would be fetched by a spring-waggon
+in about half-an-hour; then helped her into the chaise and drove
+off.
+
+Her lover's letter, lying close against her neck, fortified her
+against the restless timidity she had previously felt concerning
+this new undertaking, and completely furnished her with the
+confident ease of mind which is required for the critical
+observation of surrounding objects. It was just that stage in the
+slow decline of the summer days, when the deep, dark, and vacuous
+hot-weather shadows are beginning to be replaced by blue ones that
+have a surface and substance to the eye. They trotted along the
+turnpike road for a distance of about a mile, which brought them
+just outside the village of Carriford, and then turned through large
+lodge-gates, on the heavy stone piers of which stood a pair of
+bitterns cast in bronze. They then entered the park and wound along
+a drive shaded by old and drooping lime-trees, not arranged in the
+form of an avenue, but standing irregularly, sometimes leaving the
+track completely exposed to the sky, at other times casting a shade
+over it, which almost approached gloom--the under surface of the
+lowest boughs hanging at a uniform level of six feet above the
+grass--the extreme height to which the nibbling mouths of the cattle
+could reach.
+
+'Is that the house?' said Cytherea expectantly, catching sight of a
+grey gable between the trees, and losing it again.
+
+'No; that's the old manor-house--or rather all that's left of it.
+The Aldycliffes used to let it sometimes, but it was oftener empty.
+'Tis now divided into three cottages. Respectable people didn't
+care to live there.'
+
+'Why didn't they?'
+
+'Well, 'tis so awkward and unhandy. You see so much of it has been
+pulled down, and the rooms that are left won't do very well for a
+small residence. 'Tis so dismal, too, and like most old houses
+stands too low down in the hollow to be healthy.'
+
+'Do they tell any horrid stories about it?'
+
+'No, not a single one.'
+
+'Ah, that's a pity.'
+
+'Yes, that's what I say. 'Tis jest the house for a nice ghastly
+hair-on-end story, that would make the parish religious. Perhaps it
+will have one some day to make it complete; but there's not a word
+of the kind now. There, I wouldn't live there for all that. In
+fact, I couldn't. O no, I couldn't.'
+
+'Why couldn't you?'
+
+'The sounds.'
+
+'What are they?'
+
+'One is the waterfall, which stands so close by that you can hear
+that there waterfall in every room of the house, night or day, ill
+or well. 'Tis enough to drive anybody mad: now hark.'
+
+He stopped the horse. Above the slight common sounds in the air
+came the unvarying steady rush of falling water from some spot
+unseen on account of the thick foliage of the grove.
+
+'There's something awful in the timing o' that sound, ain't there,
+miss?'
+
+'When you say there is, there really seems to be. You said there
+were two--what is the other horrid sound?'
+
+'The pumping-engine. That's close by the Old House, and sends water
+up the hill and all over the Great House. We shall hear that
+directly. . . . There, now hark again.'
+
+From the same direction down the dell they could now hear the
+whistling creak of cranks, repeated at intervals of half-a-minute,
+with a sousing noise between each: a creak, a souse, then another
+creak, and so on continually.
+
+'Now if anybody could make shift to live through the other sounds,
+these would finish him off, don't you think so, miss? That machine
+goes on night and day, summer and winter, and is hardly ever greased
+or visited. Ah, it tries the nerves at night, especially if you are
+not very well; though we don't often hear it at the Great House.'
+
+'That sound is certainly very dismal. They might have the wheel
+greased. Does Miss Aldclyffe take any interest in these things?'
+
+'Well, scarcely; you see her father doesn't attend to that sort of
+thing as he used to. The engine was once quite his hobby. But now
+he's getten old and very seldom goes there.'
+
+'How many are there in family?'
+
+'Only her father and herself. He's a' old man of seventy.'
+
+'I had thought that Miss Aldclyffe was sole mistress of the
+property, and lived here alone.'
+
+'No, m--' The coachman was continually checking himself thus, being
+about to style her miss involuntarily, and then recollecting that he
+was only speaking to the new lady's-maid.
+
+'She will soon be mistress, however, I am afraid,' he continued, as
+if speaking by a spirit of prophecy denied to ordinary humanity.
+'The poor old gentleman has decayed very fast lately.' The man then
+drew a long breath.
+
+'Why did you breathe sadly like that?' said Cytherea.
+
+'Ah! . . . When he's dead peace will be all over with us old
+servants. I expect to see the old house turned inside out.'
+
+'She will marry, do you mean?'
+
+'Marry--not she! I wish she would. No, in her soul she's as
+solitary as Robinson Crusoe, though she has acquaintances in plenty,
+if not relations. There's the rector, Mr. Raunham--he's a relation
+by marriage--yet she's quite distant towards him. And people say
+that if she keeps single there will be hardly a life between Mr.
+Raunham and the heirship of the estate. Dang it, she don't care.
+She's an extraordinary picture of womankind--very extraordinary.'
+
+'In what way besides?'
+
+'You'll know soon enough, miss. She has had seven lady's-maids this
+last twelvemonth. I assure you 'tis one body's work to fetch 'em
+from the station and take 'em back again. The Lord must be a
+neglectful party at heart, or he'd never permit such overbearen
+goings on!'
+
+'Does she dismiss them directly they come!'
+
+'Not at all--she never dismisses them--they go theirselves. Ye see
+'tis like this. She's got a very quick temper; she flees in a
+passion with them for nothing at all; next mornen they come up and
+say they are going; she's sorry for it and wishes they'd stay, but
+she's as proud as a lucifer, and her pride won't let her say,
+"Stay," and away they go. 'Tis like this in fact. If you say to
+her about anybody, "Ah, poor thing!" she says, "Pooh! indeed!" If
+you say, "Pooh, indeed!" "Ah, poor thing!" she says directly. She
+hangs the chief baker, as mid be, and restores the chief butler, as
+mid be, though the devil but Pharaoh herself can see the difference
+between 'em.'
+
+Cytherea was silent. She feared she might be again a burden to her
+brother.
+
+'However, you stand a very good chance,' the man went on, 'for I
+think she likes you more than common. I have never known her send
+the pony-carriage to meet one before; 'tis always the trap, but this
+time she said, in a very particular ladylike tone, "Roobert, gaow
+with the pony-kerriage.". . . There, 'tis true, pony and carriage
+too are getten rather shabby now,' he added, looking round upon the
+vehicle as if to keep Cytherea's pride within reasonable limits.
+
+''Tis to be hoped you'll please in dressen her to-night.'
+
+'Why to-night?'
+
+'There's a dinner-party of seventeen; 'tis her father's birthday,
+and she's very particular about her looks at such times. Now see;
+this is the house. Livelier up here, isn't it, miss?'
+
+They were now on rising ground, and had just emerged from a clump of
+trees. Still a little higher than where they stood was situated the
+mansion, called Knapwater House, the offices gradually losing
+themselves among the trees behind.
+
+2. EVENING
+
+The house was regularly and substantially built of clean grey
+freestone throughout, in that plainer fashion of Greek classicism
+which prevailed at the latter end of the last century, when the
+copyists called designers had grown weary of fantastic variations in
+the Roman orders. The main block approximated to a square on the
+ground plan, having a projection in the centre of each side,
+surmounted by a pediment. From each angle of the inferior side ran
+a line of buildings lower than the rest, turning inwards again at
+their further end, and forming within them a spacious open court,
+within which resounded an echo of astonishing clearness. These
+erections were in their turn backed by ivy-covered ice-houses,
+laundries, and stables, the whole mass of subsidiary buildings being
+half buried beneath close-set shrubs and trees.
+
+There was opening sufficient through the foliage on the right hand
+to enable her on nearer approach to form an idea of the arrangement
+of the remoter or lawn front also. The natural features and contour
+of this quarter of the site had evidently dictated the position of
+the house primarily, and were of the ordinary, and upon the whole,
+most satisfactory kind, namely, a broad, graceful slope running from
+the terrace beneath the walls to the margin of a placid lake lying
+below, upon the surface of which a dozen swans and a green punt
+floated at leisure. An irregular wooded island stood in the midst
+of the lake; beyond this and the further margin of the water were
+plantations and greensward of varied outlines, the trees
+heightening, by half veiling, the softness of the exquisite
+landscape stretching behind.
+
+The glimpses she had obtained of this portion were now checked by
+the angle of the building. In a minute or two they reached the side
+door, at which Cytherea alighted. She was welcomed by an elderly
+woman of lengthy smiles and general pleasantness, who announced
+herself to be Mrs. Morris, the housekeeper.
+
+'Mrs. Graye, I believe?' she said.
+
+'I am not--O yes, yes, we are all mistresses,' said Cytherea,
+smiling, but forcedly. The title accorded her seemed disagreeably
+like the first slight scar of a brand, and she thought of Owen's
+prophecy.
+
+Mrs. Morris led her into a comfortable parlour called The Room.
+Here tea was made ready, and Cytherea sat down, looking, whenever
+occasion allowed, at Mrs. Morris with great interest and curiosity,
+to discover, if possible, something in her which should give a clue
+to the secret of her knowledge of herself, and the recommendation
+based upon it. But nothing was to be learnt, at any rate just then.
+Mrs. Morris was perpetually getting up, feeling in her pockets,
+going to cupboards, leaving the room two or three minutes, and
+trotting back again.
+
+'You'll excuse me, Mrs. Graye,' she said, 'but 'tis the old
+gentleman's birthday, and they always have a lot of people to dinner
+on that day, though he's getting up in years now. However, none of
+them are sleepers--she generally keeps the house pretty clear of
+lodgers (being a lady with no intimate friends, though many
+acquaintances), which, though it gives us less to do, makes it all
+the duller for the younger maids in the house.' Mrs. Morris then
+proceeded to give in fragmentary speeches an outline of the
+constitution and government of the estate.
+
+'Now, are you sure you have quite done tea? Not a bit or drop more?
+Why, you've eaten nothing, I'm sure. . . . Well, now, it is rather
+inconvenient that the other maid is not here to show you the ways of
+the house a little, but she left last Saturday, and Miss Aldclyffe
+has been making shift with poor old clumsy me for a maid all
+yesterday and this morning. She is not come in yet. I expect she
+will ask for you, Mrs. Graye, the first thing. . . . I was going to
+say that if you have really done tea, I will take you upstairs, and
+show you through the wardrobes--Miss Aldclyffe's things are not laid
+out for to-night yet.'
+
+She preceded Cytherea upstairs, pointed out her own room, and then
+took her into Miss Aldclyffe's dressing-room, on the first-floor;
+where, after explaining the whereabouts of various articles of
+apparel, the housekeeper left her, telling her that she had an hour
+yet upon her hands before dressing-time. Cytherea laid out upon the
+bed in the next room all that she had been told would be required
+that evening, and then went again to the little room which had been
+appropriated to herself.
+
+Here she sat down by the open window, leant out upon the sill like
+another Blessed Damozel, and listlessly looked down upon the
+brilliant pattern of colours formed by the flower-beds on the lawn
+--now richly crowded with late summer blossom. But the vivacity of
+spirit which had hitherto enlivened her, was fast ebbing under the
+pressure of prosaic realities, and the warm scarlet of the
+geraniums, glowing most conspicuously, and mingling with the vivid
+cold red and green of the verbenas, the rich depth of the dahlia,
+and the ripe mellowness of the calceolaria, backed by the pale hue
+of a flock of meek sheep feeding in the open park, close to the
+other side of the fence, were, to a great extent, lost upon her
+eyes. She was thinking that nothing seemed worth while; that it was
+possible she might die in a workhouse; and what did it matter? The
+petty, vulgar details of servitude that she had just passed through,
+her dependence upon the whims of a strange woman, the necessity of
+quenching all individuality of character in herself, and
+relinquishing her own peculiar tastes to help on the wheel of this
+alien establishment, made her sick and sad, and she almost longed to
+pursue some free, out-of-doors employment, sleep under trees or a
+hut, and know no enemy but winter and cold weather, like shepherds
+and cowkeepers, and birds and animals--ay, like the sheep she saw
+there under her window. She looked sympathizingly at them for
+several minutes, imagining their enjoyment of the rich grass.
+
+'Yes--like those sheep,' she said aloud; and her face reddened with
+surprise at a discovery she made that very instant.
+
+The flock consisted of some ninety or a hundred young stock ewes:
+the surface of their fleece was as rounded and even as a cushion,
+and white as milk. Now she had just observed that on the left
+buttock of every one of them were marked in distinct red letters the
+initials 'E. S.'
+
+'E. S.' could bring to Cytherea's mind only one thought; but that
+immediately and for ever--the name of her lover, Edward Springrove.
+
+'O, if it should be--!' She interrupted her words by a resolve.
+Miss Aldclyffe's carriage at the same moment made its appearance in
+the drive; but Miss Aldclyffe was not her object now. It was to
+ascertain to whom the sheep belonged, and to set her surmise at rest
+one way or the other. She flew downstairs to Mrs. Morris.
+
+'Whose sheep are those in the park, Mrs. Morris?'
+
+'Farmer Springrove's.'
+
+'What Farmer Springrove is that?' she said quickly.
+
+'Why, surely you know? Your friend, Farmer Springrove, the
+cider-maker, and who keeps the Three Tranters Inn; who recommended
+you to me when he came in to see me the other day?'
+
+Cytherea's mother-wit suddenly warned her in the midst of her
+excitement that it was necessary not to betray the secret of her
+love. 'O yes,' she said, 'of course.' Her thoughts had run as
+follows in that short interval:--
+
+'Farmer Springrove is Edward's father, and his name is Edward too.
+
+'Edward knew I was going to advertise for a situation of some kind.
+
+'He watched the Times, and saw it, my address being attached.
+
+'He thought it would be excellent for me to be here that we might
+meet whenever he came home.
+
+'He told his father that I might be recommended as a lady's-maid;
+and he knew my brother and myself.
+
+'His father told Mrs. Morris; Mrs. Morris told Miss Aldclyffe.'
+
+The whole chain of incidents that drew her there was plain, and
+there was no such thing as chance in the matter. It was all
+Edward's doing.
+
+The sound of a bell was heard. Cytherea did not heed it, and still
+continued in her reverie.
+
+'That's Miss Aldclyffe's bell,' said Mrs. Morris.
+
+'I suppose it is,' said the young woman placidly.
+
+'Well, it means that you must go up to her,' the matron continued,
+in a tone of surprise.
+
+Cytherea felt a burning heat come over her, mingled with a sudden
+irritation at Mrs. Morris's hint. But the good sense which had
+recognized stern necessity prevailed over rebellious independence;
+the flush passed, and she said hastily--
+
+'Yes, yes; of course, I must go to her when she pulls the bell
+--whether I want to or no.'
+
+However, in spite of this painful reminder of her new position in
+life, Cytherea left the apartment in a mood far different from the
+gloomy sadness of ten minutes previous. The place felt like home to
+her now; she did not mind the pettiness of her occupation, because
+Edward evidently did not mind it; and this was Edward's own spot.
+She found time on her way to Miss Aldclyffe's dressing-room to
+hurriedly glide out by a side door, and look for a moment at the
+unconscious sheep bearing the friendly initials. She went up to
+them to try to touch one of the flock, and felt vexed that they all
+stared sceptically at her kind advances, and then ran pell-mell down
+the hill. Then, fearing any one should discover her childish
+movements, she slipped indoors again, and ascended the staircase,
+catching glimpses, as she passed, of silver-buttoned footmen, who
+flashed about the passages like lightning.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe's dressing-room was an apartment which, on a casual
+survey, conveyed an impression that it was available for almost any
+purpose save the adornment of the feminine person. In its hours of
+perfect order nothing pertaining to the toilet was visible; even the
+inevitable mirrors with their accessories were arranged in a roomy
+recess not noticeable from the door, lighted by a window of its own,
+called the dressing-window.
+
+The washing-stand figured as a vast oak chest, carved with grotesque
+Renaissance ornament. The dressing table was in appearance
+something between a high altar and a cabinet piano, the surface
+being richly worked in the same style of semi-classic decoration,
+but the extraordinary outline having been arrived at by an ingenious
+joiner and decorator from the neighbouring town, after months of
+painful toil in cutting and fitting, under Miss Aldclyffe's
+immediate eye; the materials being the remains of two or three old
+cabinets the lady had found in the lumber-room. About two-thirds of
+the floor was carpeted, the remaining portion being laid with
+parquetry of light and dark woods.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe was standing at the larger window, away from the
+dressing-niche. She bowed, and said pleasantly, 'I am glad you have
+come. We shall get on capitally, I dare say.'
+
+Her bonnet was off. Cytherea did not think her so handsome as on
+the earlier day; the queenliness of her beauty was harder and less
+warm. But a worse discovery than this was that Miss Aldclyffe, with
+the usual obliviousness of rich people to their dependents'
+specialities, seemed to have quite forgotten Cytherea's
+inexperience, and mechanically delivered up her body to her handmaid
+without a thought of details, and with a mild yawn.
+
+Everything went well at first. The dress was removed, stockings and
+black boots were taken off, and silk stockings and white shoes were
+put on. Miss Aldclyffe then retired to bathe her hands and face,
+and Cytherea drew breath. If she could get through this first
+evening, all would be right. She felt that it was unfortunate that
+such a crucial test for her powers as a birthday dinner should have
+been applied on the threshold of her arrival; but set to again.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe was now arrayed in a white dressing-gown, and dropped
+languidly into an easy-chair, pushed up before the glass. The
+instincts of her sex and her own practice told Cytherea the next
+movement. She let Miss Aldclyffe's hair fall about her shoulders,
+and began to arrange it. It proved to be all real; a satisfaction.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe was musingly looking on the floor, and the operation
+went on for some minutes in silence. At length her thoughts seemed
+to turn to the present, and she lifted her eyes to the glass.
+
+'Why, what on earth are you doing with my head?' she exclaimed, with
+widely opened eyes. At the words she felt the back of Cytherea's
+little hand tremble against her neck.
+
+'Perhaps you prefer it done the other fashion, madam?' said the
+maiden.
+
+'No, no; that's the fashion right enough, but you must make more
+show of my hair than that, or I shall have to buy some, which God
+forbid!'
+
+'It is how I do my own,' said Cytherea naively, and with a sweetness
+of tone that would have pleased the most acrimonious under
+favourable circumstances; but tyranny was in the ascendant with Miss
+Aldclyffe at this moment, and she was assured of palatable food for
+her vice by having felt the trembling of Cytherea's hand.
+
+'Yours, indeed! _Your_ hair! Come, go on.' Considering that
+Cytherea possessed at least five times as much of that valuable
+auxiliary to woman's beauty as the lady before her, there was at the
+same time some excuse for Miss Aldclyffe's outburst. She remembered
+herself, however, and said more quietly, 'Now then, Graye
+--By-the-bye, what do they call you downstairs?'
+
+'Mrs. Graye,' said the handmaid.
+
+'Then tell them not to do any such absurd thing--not but that it is
+quite according to usage; but you are too young yet.'
+
+This dialogue tided Cytherea safely onward through the hairdressing
+till the flowers and diamonds were to be placed upon the lady's
+brow. Cytherea began arranging them tastefully, and to the very
+best of her judgment.
+
+'That won't do,' said Miss Aldclyffe harshly.
+
+'Why?'
+
+'I look too young--an old dressed doll.'
+
+'Will that, madam?'
+
+'No, I look a fright--a perfect fright!'
+
+'This way, perhaps?'
+
+'Heavens! Don't worry me so.' She shut her lips like a trap.
+
+Having once worked herself up to the belief that her head-dress was
+to be a failure that evening, no cleverness of Cytherea's in
+arranging it could please her. She continued in a smouldering
+passion during the remainder of the performance, keeping her lips
+firmly closed, and the muscles of her body rigid. Finally,
+snatching up her gloves, and taking her handkerchief and fan in her
+hand, she silently sailed out of the room, without betraying the
+least consciousness of another woman's presence behind her.
+
+Cytherea's fears that at the undressing this suppressed anger would
+find a vent, kept her on thorns throughout the evening. She tried
+to read; she could not. She tried to sew; she could not. She tried
+to muse; she could not do that connectedly. 'If this is the
+beginning, what will the end be!' she said in a whisper, and felt
+many misgivings as to the policy of being overhasty in establishing
+an independence at the expense of congruity with a cherished past.
+
+3. MIDNIGHT
+
+The clock struck twelve. The Aldclyffe state dinner was over. The
+company had all gone, and Miss Aldclyffe's bell rang loudly and
+jerkingly.
+
+Cytherea started to her feet at the sound, which broke in upon a
+fitful sleep that had overtaken her. She had been sitting drearily
+in her chair waiting minute after minute for the signal, her brain
+in that state of intentness which takes cognizance of the passage of
+Time as a real motion--motion without matter--the instants throbbing
+past in the company of a feverish pulse. She hastened to the room,
+to find the lady sitting before the dressing shrine, illuminated on
+both sides, and looking so queenly in her attitude of absolute
+repose, that the younger woman felt the awfullest sense of
+responsibility at her Vandalism in having undertaken to demolish so
+imposing a pile.
+
+The lady's jewelled ornaments were taken off in silence--some by her
+own listless hands, some by Cytherea's. Then followed the outer
+stratum of clothing. The dress being removed, Cytherea took it in
+her hand and went with it into the bedroom adjoining, intending to
+hang it in the wardrobe. But on second thoughts, in order that she
+might not keep Miss Aldclyffe waiting a moment longer than
+necessary, she flung it down on the first resting-place that came to
+hand, which happened to be the bed, and re-entered the dressing-room
+with the noiseless footfall of a kitten. She paused in the middle
+of the room.
+
+She was unnoticed, and her sudden return had plainly not been
+expected. During the short time of Cytherea's absence, Miss
+Aldclyffe had pulled off a kind of chemisette of Brussels net, drawn
+high above the throat, which she had worn with her evening dress as
+a semi-opaque covering to her shoulders, and in its place had put
+her night-gown round her. Her right hand was lifted to her neck, as
+if engaged in fastening her night-gown.
+
+But on a second glance Miss Aldclyffe's proceeding was clearer to
+Cytherea. She was not fastening her night-gown; it had been
+carelessly thrown round her, and Miss Aldclyffe was really occupied
+in holding up to her eyes some small object that she was keenly
+scrutinizing. And now on suddenly discovering the presence of
+Cytherea at the back of the apartment, instead of naturally
+continuing or concluding her inspection, she desisted hurriedly; the
+tiny snap of a spring was heard, her hand was removed, and she began
+adjusting her robes.
+
+Modesty might have directed her hasty action of enwrapping her
+shoulders, but it was scarcely likely, considering Miss Aldclyffe's
+temperament, that she had all her life been used to a maid,
+Cytherea's youth, and the elder lady's marked treatment of her as if
+she were a mere child or plaything. The matter was too slight to
+reason about, and yet upon the whole it seemed that Miss Aldclyffe
+must have a practical reason for concealing her neck.
+
+With a timid sense of being an intruder Cytherea was about to step
+back and out of the room; but at the same moment Miss Aldclyffe
+turned, saw the impulse, and told her companion to stay, looking
+into her eyes as if she had half an intention to explain something.
+Cytherea felt certain it was the little mystery of her late
+movements. The other withdrew her eyes; Cytherea went to fetch the
+dressing-gown, and wheeled round again to bring it up to Miss
+Aldclyffe, who had now partly removed her night-dress to put it on
+the proper way, and still sat with her back towards Cytherea.
+
+Her neck was again quite open and uncovered, and though hidden from
+the direct line of Cytherea's vision, she saw it reflected in the
+glass--the fair white surface, and the inimitable combination of
+curves between throat and bosom which artists adore, being brightly
+lit up by the light burning on either side.
+
+And the lady's prior proceedings were now explained in the simplest
+manner. In the midst of her breast, like an island in a sea of
+pearl, reclined an exquisite little gold locket, embellished with
+arabesque work of blue, red, and white enamel. That was undoubtedly
+what Miss Aldclyffe had been contemplating; and, moreover, not
+having been put off with her other ornaments, it was to be retained
+during the night--a slight departure from the custom of ladies which
+Miss Aldclyffe had at first not cared to exhibit to her new
+assistant, though now, on further thought, she seemed to have become
+indifferent on the matter.
+
+'My dressing-gown,' she said, quietly fastening her night-dress as
+she spoke.
+
+Cytherea came forward with it. Miss Aldclyffe did not turn her
+head, but looked inquiringly at her maid in the glass.
+
+'You saw what I wear on my neck, I suppose?' she said to Cytherea's
+reflected face.
+
+'Yes, madam, I did,' said Cytherea to Miss Aldclyffe's reflected
+face.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe again looked at Cytherea's reflection as if she were
+on the point of explaining. Again she checked her resolve, and said
+lightly--
+
+'Few of my maids discover that I wear it always. I generally keep
+it a secret--not that it matters much. But I was careless with you,
+and seemed to want to tell you. You win me to make confidences
+that. . .'
+
+She ceased, took Cytherea's hand in her own, lifted the locket with
+the other, touched the spring and disclosed a miniature.
+
+'It is a handsome face, is it not?' she whispered mournfully, and
+even timidly.
+
+'It is.'
+
+But the sight had gone through Cytherea like an electric shock, and
+there was an instantaneous awakening of perception in her, so
+thrilling in its presence as to be well-nigh insupportable. The
+face in the miniature was the face of her own father--younger and
+fresher than she had ever known him--but her father!
+
+Was this the woman of his wild and unquenchable early love? And was
+this the woman who had figured in the gate-man's story as answering
+the name of Cytherea before her judgment was awake? Surely it was.
+And if so, here was the tangible outcrop of a romantic and hidden
+stratum of the past hitherto seen only in her imagination; but as
+far as her scope allowed, clearly defined therein by reason of its
+strangeness.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe's eyes and thoughts were so intent upon the miniature
+that she had not been conscious of Cytherea's start of surprise.
+She went on speaking in a low and abstracted tone.
+
+'Yes, I lost him.' She interrupted her words by a short meditation,
+and went on again. 'I lost him by excess of honesty as regarded my
+past. But it was best that it should be so. . . . I was led to
+think rather more than usual of the circumstances to-night because
+of your name. It is pronounced the same way, though differently
+spelt.'
+
+The only means by which Cytherea's surname could have been spelt to
+Miss Aldclyffe must have been by Mrs. Morris or Farmer Springrove.
+She fancied Farmer Springrove would have spelt it properly if Edward
+was his informant, which made Miss Aldclyffe's remark obscure.
+
+Women make confidences and then regret them. The impulsive rush of
+feeling which had led Miss Aldclyffe to indulge in this revelation,
+trifling as it was, died out immediately her words were beyond
+recall; and the turmoil, occasioned in her by dwelling upon that
+chapter of her life, found vent in another kind of emotion--the
+result of a trivial accident.
+
+Cytherea, after letting down Miss Aldclyffe's hair, adopted some
+plan with it to which the lady had not been accustomed. A rapid
+revulsion to irritation ensued. The maiden's mere touch seemed to
+discharge the pent-up regret of the lady as if she had been a jar of
+electricity.
+
+'How strangely you treat my hair!' she exclaimed.
+
+A silence.
+
+'I have told you what I never tell my maids as a rule; of course
+_nothing_ that I say in this room is to be mentioned outside it.'
+She spoke crossly no less than emphatically.
+
+'It shall not be, madam,' said Cytherea, agitated and vexed that the
+woman of her romantic wonderings should be so disagreeable to her.
+
+'Why on earth did I tell you of my past?' she went on.
+
+Cytherea made no answer.
+
+The lady's vexation with herself, and the accident which had led to
+the disclosure swelled little by little till it knew no bounds. But
+what was done could not be undone, and though Cytherea had shown a
+most winning responsiveness, quarrel Miss Aldclyffe must. She
+recurred to the subject of Cytherea's want of expertness, like a
+bitter reviewer, who finding the sentiments of a poet unimpeachable,
+quarrels with his rhymes.
+
+'Never, never before did I serve myself such a trick as this in
+engaging a maid!' She waited for an expostulation: none came.
+Miss Aldclyffe tried again.
+
+'The idea of my taking a girl without asking her more than three
+questions, or having a single reference, all because of her good
+l--, the shape of her face and body! It _was_ a fool's trick. There,
+I am served right, quite right--by being deceived in such a way.'
+
+'I didn't deceive you,' said Cytherea. The speech was an
+unfortunate one, and was the very 'fuel to maintain its fires' that
+the other's petulance desired.
+
+'You did,' she said hotly.
+
+'I told you I couldn't promise to be acquainted with every detail of
+routine just at first.'
+
+'Will you contradict me in this way! You are telling untruths, I
+say.'
+
+Cytherea's lip quivered. 'I would answer the remark if--if--'
+
+'If what?'
+
+'If it were a lady's!'
+
+'You girl of impudence--what do you say? Leave the room this
+instant, I tell you.'
+
+'And I tell you that a person who speaks to a lady as you do to me,
+is no lady herself!'
+
+'To a lady? A lady's-maid speaks in this way. The idea!'
+
+'Don't "lady's-maid" me: nobody is my mistress I won't have it!'
+
+'Good Heavens!'
+
+'I wouldn't have come--no--I wouldn't! if I had known!'
+
+'What?'
+
+'That you were such an ill-tempered, unjust woman!'
+
+'Possest beyond the Muse's painting,' Miss Aldclyffe exclaimed--
+
+'A Woman, am I! I'll teach you if I am a Woman!' and lifted her
+hand as if she would have liked to strike her companion. This stung
+the maiden into absolute defiance.
+
+'I dare you to touch me!' she cried. 'Strike me if you dare, madam!
+I am not afraid of you--what do you mean by such an action as that?'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe was disconcerted at this unexpected show of spirit,
+and ashamed of her unladylike impulse now it was put into words.
+She sank back in the chair. 'I was not going to strike you--go to
+your room--I beg you to go to your room!' she repeated in a husky
+whisper.
+
+Cytherea, red and panting, took up her candlestick and advanced to
+the table to get a light. As she stood close to them the rays from
+the candles struck sharply on her face. She usually bore a much
+stronger likeness to her mother than to her father, but now, looking
+with a grave, reckless, and angered expression of countenance at the
+kindling wick as she held it slanting into the other flame, her
+father's features were distinct in her. It was the first time Miss
+Aldclyffe had seen her in a passionate mood, and wearing that
+expression which was invariably its concomitant. It was Miss
+Aldclyffe's turn to start now; and the remark she made was an
+instance of that sudden change of tone from high-flown invective to
+the pettiness of curiosity which so often makes women's quarrels
+ridiculous. Even Miss Aldclyffe's dignity had not sufficient power
+to postpone the absorbing desire she now felt to settle the strange
+suspicion that had entered her head.
+
+'You spell your name the common way, G, R, E, Y, don't you?' she
+said, with assumed indifference.
+
+'No,' said Cytherea, poised on the side of her foot, and still
+looking into the flame.
+
+'Yes, surely? The name was spelt that way on your boxes: I looked
+and saw it myself.'
+
+The enigma of Miss Aldclyffe's mistake was solved. 'O, was it?'
+said Cytherea.  'Ah, I remember Mrs. Jackson, the lodging-house
+keeper at Budmouth, labelled them. We spell our name G, R, A, Y, E.'
+
+'What was your father's trade?'
+
+Cytherea thought it would be useless to attempt to conceal facts any
+longer. 'His was not a trade,' she said. 'He was an architect.'
+
+'The idea of your being an architect's daughter!'
+
+'There's nothing to offend, you in that, I hope?'
+
+'O no.'
+
+'Why did you say "the idea"?'
+
+'Leave that alone. Did he ever visit in Gower Street, Bloomsbury,
+one Christmas, many years ago?--but you would not know that.'
+
+'I have heard him say that Mr. Huntway, a curate somewhere in that
+part of London, and who died there, was an old college friend of
+his.'
+
+'What is your Christian name?'
+
+'Cytherea.'
+
+'No! And is it really? And you knew that face I showed you? Yes,
+I see you did.' Miss Aldclyffe stopped, and closed her lips
+impassibly. She was a little agitated.
+
+'Do you want me any longer?' said Cytherea, standing candle in hand
+and looking quietly in Miss Aldclyffe's face.
+
+'Well--no: no longer,' said the other lingeringly.
+
+'With your permission, I will leave the house to morrow morning,
+madam.'
+
+'Ah.' Miss Aldclyffe had no notion of what she was saying.
+
+'And I know you will be so good as not to intrude upon me during the
+short remainder of my stay?'
+
+Saying this Cytherea left the room before her companion had
+answered. Miss Aldclyffe, then, had recognized her at last, and had
+been curious about her name from the beginning.
+
+The other members of the household had retired to rest. As Cytherea
+went along the passage leading to her room her skirts rustled
+against the partition. A door on her left opened, and Mrs. Morris
+looked out.
+
+'I waited out of bed till you came up,' she said, 'it being your
+first night, in case you should be at a loss for anything. How have
+you got on with Miss Aldclyffe?'
+
+'Pretty well--though not so well as I could have wished.'
+
+'Has she been scolding?'
+
+'A little.'
+
+'She's a very odd lady--'tis all one way or the other with her.
+She's not bad at heart, but unbearable in close quarters. Those of
+us who don't have much to do with her personally, stay on for years
+and years.'
+
+'Has Miss Aldclyffe's family always been rich?' said Cytherea.
+
+'O no. The property, with the name, came from her mother's uncle.
+Her family is a branch of the old Aldclyffe family on the maternal
+side. Her mother married a Bradleigh--a mere nobody at that time
+--and was on that account cut by her relations. But very singularly
+the other branch of the family died out one by one--three of them,
+and Miss Aldclyffe's great-uncle then left all his property,
+including this estate, to Captain Bradleigh and his wife--Miss
+Aldclyffe's father and mother--on condition that they took the old
+family name as well. There's all about it in the "Landed Gentry."
+'Tis a thing very often done.'
+
+'O, I see. Thank you. Well, now I am going. Good-night.'
+
+
+
+VI. THE EVENTS OF TWELVE HOURS
+
+1. AUGUST THE NINTH. ONE TO TWO O'CLOCK A.M.
+
+Cytherea entered her bedroom, and flung herself on the bed,
+bewildered by a whirl of thought. Only one subject was clear in her
+mind, and it was that, in spite of family discoveries, that day was
+to be the first and last of her experience as a lady's-maid.
+Starvation itself should not compel her to hold such a humiliating
+post for another instant. 'Ah,' she thought, with a sigh, at the
+martyrdom of her last little fragment of self-conceit, 'Owen knows
+everything better than I.'
+
+She jumped up and began making ready for her departure in the
+morning, the tears streaming down when she grieved and wondered what
+practical matter on earth she could turn her hand to next. All
+these preparations completed, she began to undress, her mind
+unconsciously drifting away to the contemplation of her late
+surprises. To look in the glass for an instant at the reflection of
+her own magnificent resources in face and bosom, and to mark their
+attractiveness unadorned, was perhaps but the natural action of a
+young woman who had so lately been chidden whilst passing through
+the harassing experience of decorating an older beauty of Miss
+Aldclyffe's temper.
+
+But she directly checked her weakness by sympathizing reflections on
+the hidden troubles which must have thronged the past years of the
+solitary lady, to keep her, though so rich and courted, in a mood so
+repellent and gloomy as that in which Cytherea found her; and then
+the young girl marvelled again and again, as she had marvelled
+before, at the strange confluence of circumstances which had brought
+herself into contact with the one woman in the world whose history
+was so romantically intertwined with her own. She almost began to
+wish she were not obliged to go away and leave the lonely being to
+loneliness still.
+
+In bed and in the dark, Miss Aldclyffe haunted her mind more
+persistently than ever. Instead of sleeping, she called up staring
+visions of the possible past of this queenly lady, her mother's
+rival. Up the long vista of bygone years she saw, behind all, the
+young girl's flirtation, little or much, with the cousin, that
+seemed to have been nipped in the bud, or to have terminated hastily
+in some way. Then the secret meetings between Miss Aldclyffe and
+the other woman at the little inn at Hammersmith and other places:
+the commonplace name she adopted: her swoon at some painful news,
+and the very slight knowledge the elder female had of her partner in
+mystery. Then, more than a year afterwards, the acquaintanceship of
+her own father with this his first love; the awakening of the
+passion, his acts of devotion, the unreasoning heat of his rapture,
+her tacit acceptance of it, and yet her uneasiness under the
+delight. Then his declaration amid the evergreens: the utter
+change produced in her manner thereby, seemingly the result of a
+rigid determination: and the total concealment of her reason by
+herself and her parents, whatever it was. Then the lady's course
+dropped into darkness, and nothing more was visible till she was
+discovered here at Knapwater, nearly fifty years old, still
+unmarried and still beautiful, but lonely, embittered, and haughty.
+Cytherea imagined that her father's image was still warmly cherished
+in Miss Aldclyffe's heart, and was thankful that she herself had not
+been betrayed into announcing that she knew many particulars of this
+page of her father's history, and the chief one, the lady's
+unaccountable renunciation of him. It would have made her bearing
+towards the mistress of the mansion more awkward, and would have
+been no benefit to either.
+
+Thus conjuring up the past, and theorizing on the present, she lay
+restless, changing her posture from one side to the other and back
+again. Finally, when courting sleep with all her art, she heard a
+clock strike two. A minute later, and she fancied she could
+distinguish a soft rustle in the passage outside her room.
+
+To bury her head in the sheets was her first impulse; then to
+uncover it, raise herself on her elbow, and stretch her eyes wide
+open in the darkness; her lips being parted with the intentness of
+her listening. Whatever the noise was, it had ceased for the time.
+
+It began again and came close to her door, lightly touching the
+panels. Then there was another stillness; Cytherea made a movement
+which caused a faint rustling of the bed-clothes.
+
+Before she had time to think another thought a light tap was given.
+Cytherea breathed: the person outside was evidently bent upon
+finding her awake, and the rustle she had made had encouraged the
+hope. The maiden's physical condition shifted from one pole to its
+opposite. The cold sweat of terror forsook her, and modesty took
+the alarm. She became hot and red; her door was not locked.
+
+A distinct woman's whisper came to her through the keyhole:
+'Cytherea!'
+
+Only one being in the house knew her Christian name, and that was
+Miss Aldclyffe. Cytherea stepped out of bed, went to the door, and
+whispered back, 'Yes?'
+
+'Let me come in, darling.'
+
+The young woman paused in a conflict between judgment and emotion.
+It was now mistress and maid no longer; woman and woman only. Yes;
+she must let her come in, poor thing.
+
+She got a light in an instant, opened the door, and raising her eyes
+and the candle, saw Miss Aldclyffe standing outside in her
+dressing-gown.
+
+'Now you see that it is really myself; put out the light,' said the
+visitor. 'I want to stay here with you, Cythie. I came to ask you
+to come down into my bed, but it is snugger here. But remember that
+you are mistress in this room, and that I have no business here, and
+that you may send me away if you choose. Shall I go?'
+
+'O no; you shan't indeed if you don't want to,' said Cythie
+generously.
+
+The instant they were in bed Miss Aldclyffe freed herself from the
+last remnant of restraint. She flung her arms round the young girl,
+and pressed her gently to her heart.
+
+'Now kiss me,' she said.
+
+Cytherea, upon the whole, was rather discomposed at this change of
+treatment; and, discomposed or no, her passions were not so
+impetuous as Miss Aldclyffe's. She could not bring her soul to her
+lips for a moment, try how she would.
+
+'Come, kiss me,' repeated Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+Cytherea gave her a very small one, as soft in touch and in sound as
+the bursting of a bubble.
+
+'More earnestly than that--come.'
+
+She gave another, a little but not much more expressively.
+
+'I don't deserve a more feeling one, I suppose,' said Miss
+Aldclyffe, with an emphasis of sad bitterness in her tone. 'I am an
+ill-tempered woman, you think; half out of my mind. Well, perhaps I
+am; but I have had grief more than you can think or dream of. But I
+can't help loving you--your name is the same as mine--isn't it
+strange?'
+
+Cytherea was inclined to say no, but remained silent.
+
+'Now, don't you think I must love you?' continued the other.
+
+'Yes,' said Cytherea absently. She was still thinking whether duty
+to Owen and her father, which asked for silence on her knowledge of
+her father's unfortunate love, or duty to the woman embracing her,
+which seemed to ask for confidence, ought to predominate. Here was
+a solution. She would wait till Miss Aldclyffe referred to her
+acquaintanceship and attachment to Cytherea's father in past times:
+then she would tell her all she knew: that would be honour.
+
+'Why can't you kiss me as I can kiss you? Why can't you!' She
+impressed upon Cytherea's lips a warm motherly salute, given as if
+in the outburst of strong feeling, long checked, and yearning for
+something to love and be loved by in return.
+
+'Do you think badly of me for my behaviour this evening, child? I
+don't know why I am so foolish as to speak to you in this way. I am
+a very fool, I believe. Yes. How old are you?'
+
+'Eighteen.'
+
+'Eighteen! . . . Well, why don't you ask me how old I am?'
+
+'Because I don't want to know.'
+
+'Never mind if you don't. I am forty-six; and it gives me greater
+pleasure to tell you this than it does to you to listen. I have not
+told my age truly for the last twenty years till now.'
+
+'Why haven't you?'
+
+'I have met deceit by deceit, till I am weary of it--weary, weary
+--and I long to be what I shall never be again--artless and innocent,
+like you. But I suppose that you, too, will, prove to be not worth
+a thought, as every new friend does on more intimate knowledge.
+Come, why don't you talk to me, child? Have you said your prayers?'
+
+'Yes--no! I forgot them to-night.'
+
+'I suppose you say them every night as a rule?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Why do you do that?'
+
+'Because I have always done so, and it would seem strange if I were
+not to. Do you?'
+
+'I? A wicked old sinner like me! No, I never do. I have thought
+all such matters humbug for years--thought so so long that I should
+be glad to think otherwise from very weariness; and yet, such is the
+code of the polite world, that I subscribe regularly to Missionary
+Societies and others of the sort. . . . Well, say your prayers,
+dear--you won't omit them now you recollect it. I should like to
+hear you very much. Will you?'
+
+'It seems hardly--'
+
+'It would seem so like old times to me--when I was young, and
+nearer--far nearer Heaven than I am now. Do, sweet one,'
+
+Cytherea was embarrassed, and her embarrassment arose from the
+following conjuncture of affairs. Since she had loved Edward
+Springrove, she had linked his name with her brother Owen's in her
+nightly supplications to the Almighty. She wished to keep her love
+for him a secret, and, above all, a secret from a woman like Miss
+Aldclyffe; yet her conscience and the honesty of her love would not
+for an instant allow her to think of omitting his dear name, and so
+endanger the efficacy of all her previous prayers for his success by
+an unworthy shame now: it would be wicked of her, she thought, and
+a grievous wrong to him. Under any worldly circumstances she might
+have thought the position justified a little finesse, and have
+skipped him for once; but prayer was too solemn a thing for such
+trifling.
+
+'I would rather not say them,' she murmured first. It struck her
+then that this declining altogether was the same cowardice in
+another dress, and was delivering her poor Edward over to Satan just
+as unceremoniously as before. 'Yes; I will say my prayers, and you
+shall hear me,' she added firmly.
+
+She turned her face to the pillow and repeated in low soft tones the
+simple words she had used from childhood on such occasions. Owen's
+name was mentioned without faltering, but in the other case,
+maidenly shyness was too strong even for religion, and that when
+supported by excellent intentions. At the name of Edward she
+stammered, and her voice sank to the faintest whisper in spite of
+her.
+
+'Thank you, dearest,' said Miss Aldclyffe. 'I have prayed too, I
+verily believe. You are a good girl, I think.' Then the expected
+question came.
+
+'"Bless Owen," and whom, did you say?'
+
+There was no help for it now, and out it came. 'Owen and Edward,'
+said Cytherea.
+
+'Who are Owen and Edward?'
+
+'Owen is my brother, madam,' faltered the maid.
+
+'Ah, I remember. Who is Edward?'
+
+A silence.
+
+'Your brother, too?' continued Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+'No.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe reflected a moment. 'Don't you want to tell me who
+Edward is?' she said at last, in a tone of meaning.
+
+'I don't mind telling; only . . .'
+
+'You would rather not, I suppose?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe shifted her ground. 'Were you ever in love?' she
+inquired suddenly.
+
+Cytherea was surprised to hear how quickly the voice had altered
+from tenderness to harshness, vexation, and disappointment.
+
+'Yes--I think I was--once,' she murmured.
+
+'Aha! And were you ever kissed by a man?'
+
+A pause.
+
+'Well, were you?' said Miss Aldclyffe, rather sharply.
+
+'Don't press me to tell--I can't--indeed, I won't, madam!'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe removed her arms from Cytherea's neck. ''Tis now
+with you as it is always with all girls,' she said, in jealous and
+gloomy accents. 'You are not, after all, the innocent I took you
+for. No, no.' She then changed her tone with fitful rapidity.
+'Cytherea, try to love me more than you love him--do. I love you
+more sincerely than any man can. Do, Cythie: don't let any man
+stand between us. O, I can't bear that!' She clasped Cytherea's
+neck again.
+
+'I must love him now I have begun,' replied the other.
+
+'Must--yes--must,' said the elder lady reproachfully. 'Yes, women
+are all alike. I thought I had at last found an artless woman who
+had not been sullied by a man's lips, and who had not practised or
+been practised upon by the arts which ruin all the truth and
+sweetness and goodness in us. Find a girl, if you can, whose mouth
+and ears have not been made a regular highway of by some man or
+another! Leave the admittedly notorious spots--the drawing-rooms of
+society--and look in the villages--leave the villages and search in
+the schools--and you can hardly find a girl whose heart has not been
+_had_--is not an old thing half worn out by some He or another! If
+men only knew the staleness of the freshest of us! that nine times
+out of ten the "first love" they think they are winning from a woman
+is but the hulk of an old wrecked affection, fitted with new sails
+and re-used. O Cytherea, can it be that you, too, are like the
+rest?'
+
+'No, no, no,' urged Cytherea, awed by the storm she had raised in
+the impetuous woman's mind. 'He only kissed me once--twice I mean.'
+
+'He might have done it a thousand times if he had cared to, there's
+no doubt about that, whoever his lordship is. You are as bad as I
+--we are all alike; and I--an old fool--have been sipping at your
+mouth as if it were honey, because I fancied no wasting lover knew
+the spot. But a minute ago, and you seemed to me like a fresh
+spring meadow--now you seem a dusty highway.'
+
+'O no, no!' Cytherea was not weak enough to shed tears except on
+extraordinary occasions, but she was fain to begin sobbing now. She
+wished Miss Aldclyffe would go to her own room, and leave her and
+her treasured dreams alone. This vehement imperious affection was
+in one sense soothing, but yet it was not of the kind that
+Cytherea's instincts desired. Though it was generous, it seemed
+somewhat too rank and capricious for endurance.
+
+'Well,' said the lady in continuation, 'who is he?'
+
+Her companion was desperately determined not to tell his name: she
+too much feared a taunt when Miss Aldclyffe's fiery mood again ruled
+her tongue.
+
+'Won't you tell me? not tell me after all the affection I have
+shown?'
+
+'I will, perhaps, another day.'
+
+'Did you wear a hat and white feather in Budmouth for the week or
+two previous to your coming here?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Then I have seen you and your lover at a distance! He rowed you
+round the bay with your brother.'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'And without your brother--fie! There, there, don't let that little
+heart beat itself to death: throb, throb: it shakes the bed, you
+silly thing. I didn't mean that there was any harm in going alone
+with him. I only saw you from the Esplanade, in common with the
+rest of the people. I often run down to Budmouth. He was a very
+good figure: now who was he?'
+
+'I--I won't tell, madam--I cannot indeed!'
+
+'Won't tell--very well, don't. You are very foolish to treasure up
+his name and image as you do. Why, he has had loves before you,
+trust him for that, whoever he is, and you are but a temporary link
+in a long chain of others like you: who only have your little day
+as they have had theirs.'
+
+''Tisn't true! 'tisn't true! 'tisn't true!' cried Cytherea in an
+agony of torture. 'He has never loved anybody else, I know--I am
+sure he hasn't.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe was as jealous as any man could have been. She
+continued--
+
+'He sees a beautiful face and thinks he will never forget it, but in
+a few weeks the feeling passes off, and he wonders how he could have
+cared for anybody so absurdly much.'
+
+'No, no, he doesn't--What does he do when he has thought that--Come,
+tell me--tell me!'
+
+'You are as hot as fire, and the throbbing of your heart makes me
+nervous. I can't tell you if you get in that flustered state.'
+
+'Do, do tell--O, it makes me so miserable! but tell--come tell me!'
+
+'Ah--the tables are turned now, dear!' she continued, in a tone
+which mingled pity with derision--
+
+   '"Love's passions shall rock thee
+    As the storm rocks the ravens on high,
+    Bright reason will mock thee
+    Like the sun from a wintry sky."
+
+'What does he do next?--Why, this is what he does next: ruminate on
+what he has heard of women's romantic impulses, and how easily men
+torture them when they have given way to those feelings, and have
+resigned everything for their hero. It may be that though he loves
+you heartily now--that is, as heartily as a man can--and you love
+him in return, your loves may be impracticable and hopeless, and you
+may be separated for ever. You, as the weary, weary years pass by
+will fade and fade--bright eyes _will_ fade--and you will perhaps then
+die early--true to him to your latest breath, and believing him to
+be true to the latest breath also; whilst he, in some gay and busy
+spot far away from your last quiet nook, will have married some
+dashing lady, and not purely oblivious of you, will long have ceased
+to regret you--will chat about you, as you were in long past years
+--will say, "Ah, little Cytherea used to tie her hair like that--poor
+innocent trusting thing; it was a pleasant useless idle dream--that
+dream of mine for the maid with the bright eyes and simple, silly
+heart; but I was a foolish lad at that time." Then he will tell the
+tale of all your little Wills and Wont's and particular ways, and as
+he speaks, turn to his wife with a placid smile.'
+
+'It is not true! He can't, he c-can't be s-so cruel--and you are
+cruel to me--you are, you are!' She was at last driven to
+desperation: her natural common sense and shrewdness had seen all
+through the piece how imaginary her emotions were--she felt herself
+to be weak and foolish in permitting them to rise; but even then she
+could not control them: be agonized she must. She was only
+eighteen, and the long day's labour, her weariness, her excitement,
+had completely unnerved her, and worn her out: she was bent hither
+and thither by this tyrannical working upon her imagination, as a
+young rush in the wind. She wept bitterly. 'And now think how much
+I like you,' resumed Miss Aldclyffe, when Cytherea grew calmer. 'I
+shall never forget you for anybody else, as men do--never. I will
+be exactly as a mother to you. Now will you promise to live with me
+always, and always be taken care of, and never deserted?'
+
+'I cannot. I will not be anybody's maid for another day on any
+consideration.'
+
+'No, no, no. You shan't be a lady's-maid. You shall be my companion.
+I will get another maid.'
+
+Companion--that was a new idea. Cytherea could not resist the
+evidently heartfelt desire of the strange-tempered woman for her
+presence. But she could not trust to the moment's impulse.
+
+'I will stay, I think. But do not ask for a final answer to-night.'
+
+'Never mind now, then. Put your hair round your mamma's neck, and
+give me one good long kiss, and I won't talk any more in that way
+about your lover. After all, some young men are not so fickle as
+others; but even if he's the ficklest, there is consolation. The
+love of an inconstant man is ten times more ardent than that of a
+faithful man--that is, while it lasts.'
+
+Cytherea did as she was told, to escape the punishment of further
+talk; flung the twining tresses of her long, rich hair over Miss
+Aldclyffe's shoulders as directed, and the two ceased conversing,
+making themselves up for sleep. Miss Aldclyffe seemed to give
+herself over to a luxurious sense of content and quiet, as if the
+maiden at her side afforded her a protection against dangers which
+had menaced her for years; she was soon sleeping calmly.
+
+2. TWO TO FIVE A.M.
+
+With Cytherea it was otherwise. Unused to the place and
+circumstances, she continued wakeful, ill at ease, and mentally
+distressed. She withdrew herself from her companion's embrace,
+turned to the other side, and endeavoured to relieve her busy brain
+by looking at the window-blind, and noticing the light of the rising
+moon--now in her last quarter--creep round upon it: it was the
+light of an old waning moon which had but a few days longer to live.
+
+The sight led her to think again of what had happened under the rays
+of the same month's moon, a little before its full, the ecstatic
+evening scene with Edward: the kiss, and the shortness of those
+happy moments--maiden imagination bringing about the apotheosis of a
+status quo which had had several unpleasantnesses in its earthly
+reality.
+
+But sounds were in the ascendant that night. Her ears became aware
+of a strange and gloomy murmur.
+
+She recognized it: it was the gushing of the waterfall, faint and
+low, brought from its source to the unwonted distance of the House
+by a faint breeze which made it distinct and recognizable by reason
+of the utter absence of all disturbing sounds. The groom's
+melancholy representation lent to the sound a more dismal effect
+than it would have had of its own nature. She began to fancy what
+the waterfall must be like at that hour, under the trees in the
+ghostly moonlight. Black at the head, and over the surface of the
+deep cold hole into which it fell; white and frothy at the fall;
+black and white, like a pall and its border; sad everywhere.
+
+She was in the mood for sounds of every kind now, and strained her
+ears to catch the faintest, in wayward enmity to her quiet of mind.
+Another soon came.
+
+The second was quite different from the first--a kind of
+intermittent whistle it seemed primarily: no, a creak, a metallic
+creak, ever and anon, like a plough, or a rusty wheelbarrow, or at
+least a wheel of some kind. Yes, it was, a wheel--the water-wheel
+in the shrubbery by the old manor-house, which the coachman had said
+would drive him mad.
+
+She determined not to think any more of these gloomy things; but now
+that she had once noticed the sound there was no sealing her ears to
+it. She could not help timing its creaks, and putting on a dread
+expectancy just before the end of each half-minute that brought
+them. To imagine the inside of the engine-house, whence these
+noises proceeded, was now a necessity. No window, but crevices in
+the door, through which, probably, the moonbeams streamed in the
+most attenuated and skeleton-like rays, striking sharply upon
+portions of wet rusty cranks and chains; a glistening wheel, turning
+incessantly, labouring in the dark like a captive starving in a
+dungeon; and instead of a floor below, gurgling water, which on
+account of the darkness could only be heard; water which laboured up
+dark pipes almost to where she lay.
+
+She shivered. Now she was determined to go to sleep; there could be
+nothing else left to be heard or to imagine--it was horrid that her
+imagination should be so restless. Yet just for an instant before
+going to sleep she would think this--suppose another sound _should_
+come--just suppose it should! Before the thought had well passed
+through her brain, a third sound came.
+
+The third was a very soft gurgle or rattle--of a strange and
+abnormal kind--yet a sound she had heard before at some past period
+of her life--when, she could not recollect. To make it the more
+disturbing, it seemed to be almost close to her--either close
+outside the window, close under the floor, or close above the
+ceiling. The accidental fact of its coming so immediately upon the
+heels of her supposition, told so powerfully upon her excited nerves
+that she jumped up in the bed. The same instant, a little dog in
+some room near, having probably heard the same noise, set up a low
+whine. The watch-dog in the yard, hearing the moan of his
+associate, began to howl loudly and distinctly. His melancholy
+notes were taken up directly afterwards by the dogs in the kennel a
+long way off, in every variety of wail.
+
+One logical thought alone was able to enter her flurried brain. The
+little dog that began the whining must have heard the other two
+sounds even better than herself. He had taken no notice of them,
+but he had taken notice of the third. The third, then, was an
+unusual sound.
+
+It was not like water, it was not like wind; it was not the
+night-jar, it was not a clock, nor a rat, nor a person snoring.
+
+She crept under the clothes, and flung her arms tightly round Miss
+Aldclyffe, as if for protection. Cytherea perceived that the lady's
+late peaceful warmth had given place to a sweat. At the maiden's
+touch, Miss Aldclyffe awoke with a low scream.
+
+She remembered her position instantly. 'O such a terrible dream!'
+she cried, in a hurried whisper, holding to Cytherea in her turn;
+'and your touch was the end of it. It was dreadful. Time, with his
+wings, hour-glass, and scythe, coming nearer and nearer to me
+--grinning and mocking: then he seized me, took a piece of me
+only . . . But I can't tell you. I can't bear to think of it. How
+those dogs howl! People say it means death.'
+
+The return of Miss Aldclyffe to consciousness was sufficient to
+dispel the wild fancies which the loneliness of the night had woven
+in Cytherea's mind. She dismissed the third noise as something
+which in all likelihood could easily be explained, if trouble were
+taken to inquire into it: large houses had all kinds of strange
+sounds floating about them. She was ashamed to tell Miss Aldclyffe
+her terrors.
+
+A silence of five minutes.
+
+'Are you asleep?' said Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+'No,' said Cytherea, in a long-drawn whisper.
+
+'How those dogs howl, don't they?'
+
+'Yes. A little dog in the house began it.'
+
+'Ah, yes: that was Totsy. He sleeps on the mat outside my father's
+bedroom door. A nervous creature.'
+
+There was a silent interval of nearly half-an-hour. A clock on the
+landing struck three.
+
+'Are you asleep, Miss Aldclyffe?' whispered Cytherea.
+
+'No,' said Miss Aldclyffe. 'How wretched it is not to be able to
+sleep, isn't it?'
+
+'Yes,' replied Cytherea, like a docile child.
+
+Another hour passed, and the clock struck four. Miss Aldclyffe was
+still awake.
+
+'Cytherea,' she said, very softly.
+
+Cytherea made no answer. She was sleeping soundly.
+
+The first glimmer of dawn was now visible. Miss Aldclyffe arose,
+put on her dressing-gown, and went softly downstairs to her own
+room.
+
+'I have not told her who I am after all, or found out the
+particulars of Ambrose's history,' she murmured. 'But her being in
+love alters everything.'
+
+3. HALF-PAST SEVEN TO TEN O'CLOCK A.M.
+
+Cytherea awoke, quiet in mind and refreshed. A conclusion to remain
+at Knapwater was already in possession of her.
+
+Finding Miss Aldclyffe gone, she dressed herself and sat down at the
+window to write an answer to Edward's letter, and an account of her
+arrival at Knapwater to Owen. The dismal and heart-breaking
+pictures that Miss Aldclyffe had placed before her the preceding
+evening, the later terrors of the night, were now but as shadows of
+shadows, and she smiled in derision at her own excitability.
+
+But writing Edward's letter was the great consoler, the effect of
+each word upon him being enacted in her own face as she wrote it.
+She felt how much she would like to share his trouble--how well she
+could endure poverty with him--and wondered what his trouble was.
+But all would be explained at last, she knew.
+
+At the appointed time she went to Miss Aldclyffe's room, intending,
+with the contradictoriness common in people, to perform with
+pleasure, as a work of supererogation, what as a duty was simply
+intolerable.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe was already out of bed. The bright penetrating light
+of morning made a vast difference in the elder lady's behaviour to
+her dependent; the day, which had restored Cytherea's judgment, had
+effected the same for Miss Aldclyffe. Though practical reasons
+forbade her regretting that she had secured such a companionable
+creature to read, talk, or play to her whenever her whim required,
+she was inwardly vexed at the extent to which she had indulged in
+the womanly luxury of making confidences and giving way to emotions.
+Few would have supposed that the calm lady sitting aristocratically
+at the toilet table, seeming scarcely conscious of Cytherea's
+presence in the room, even when greeting her, was the passionate
+creature who had asked for kisses a few hours before.
+
+It is both painful and satisfactory to think how often these
+antitheses are to be observed in the individual most open to our
+observation--ourselves. We pass the evening with faces lit up by
+some flaring illumination or other: we get up the next morning--the
+fiery jets have all gone out, and nothing confronts us but a few
+crinkled pipes and sooty wirework, hardly even recalling the outline
+of the blazing picture that arrested our eyes before bedtime.
+
+Emotions would be half starved if there were no candle-light.
+Probably nine-tenths of the gushing letters of indiscreet confession
+are written after nine or ten o'clock in the evening, and sent off
+before day returns to leer invidiously upon them. Few that remain
+open to catch our glance as we rise in the morning, survive the
+frigid criticism of dressing-time.
+
+The subjects uppermost in the minds of the two women who had thus
+cooled from their fires, were not the visionary ones of the later
+hours, but the hard facts of their earlier conversation. After a
+remark that Cytherea need not assist her in dressing unless she
+wished to, Miss Aldclyffe said abruptly--
+
+'I can tell that young man's name.' She looked keenly at Cytherea.
+'It is Edward Springrove, my tenant's son.'
+
+The inundation of colour upon the younger lady at hearing a name
+which to her was a world, handled as if it were only an atom, told
+Miss Aldclyffe that she had divined the truth at last.
+
+'Ah--it is he, is it?' she continued. 'Well, I wanted to know for
+practical reasons. His example shows that I was not so far wrong in
+my estimate of men after all, though I only generalized, and had no
+thought of him.' This was perfectly true.
+
+'What do you mean?' said Cytherea, visibly alarmed.
+
+'Mean? Why that all the world knows him to be engaged to be married,
+and that the wedding is soon to take place.' She made the remark
+bluntly and superciliously, as if to obtain absolution at the hands
+of her family pride for the weak confidences of the night.
+
+But even the frigidity of Miss Aldclyffe's morning mood was overcome
+by the look of sick and blank despair which the carelessly uttered
+words had produced upon Cytherea's face. She sank back into a
+chair, and buried her face in her hands.
+
+'Don't be so foolish,' said Miss Aldclyffe. 'Come, make the best of
+it. I cannot upset the fact I have told you of, unfortunately. But
+I believe the match can be broken off.'
+
+'O no, no.'
+
+'Nonsense. I liked him much as a youth, and I like him now. I'll
+help you to captivate and chain him down. I have got over my absurd
+feeling of last night in not wanting you ever to go away from me--of
+course, I could not expect such a thing as that. There, now I have
+said I'll help you, and that's enough. He's tired of his first
+choice now that he's been away from home for a while. The love that
+no outer attack can frighten away quails before its idol's own
+homely ways; it is always so. . . . Come, finish what you are doing
+if you are going to, and don't be a little goose about such a
+trumpery affair as that.'
+
+'Who--is he engaged to?' Cytherea inquired by a movement of her lips
+but no sound of her voice. But Miss Aldclyffe did not answer. It
+mattered not, Cytherea thought. Another woman--that was enough for
+her: curiosity was stunned.
+
+She applied herself to the work of dressing, scarcely knowing how.
+Miss Aldclyffe went on:--
+
+'You were too easily won. I'd have made him or anybody else speak
+out before he should have kissed my face for his pleasure. But you
+are one of those precipitantly fond things who are yearning to
+throw away their hearts upon the first worthless fellow who says
+good-morning. In the first place, you shouldn't have loved him so
+quickly: in the next, if you must have loved him off-hand, you
+should have concealed it. It tickled his vanity: "By Jove, that
+girl's in love with me already!" he thought.'
+
+To hasten away at the end of the toilet, to tell Mrs. Morris--who
+stood waiting in a little room prepared for her, with tea poured
+out, bread-and-butter cut into diaphanous slices, and eggs arranged
+--that she wanted no breakfast: then to shut herself alone in her
+bedroom, was her only thought. She was followed thither by the
+well-intentioned matron with a cup of tea and one piece of
+bread-and-butter on a tray, cheerfully insisting that she should
+eat it.
+
+To those who grieve, innocent cheerfulness seems heartless levity.
+'No, thank you, Mrs. Morris,' she said, keeping the door closed.
+Despite the incivility of the action, Cytherea could not bear to let
+a pleasant person see her face then.
+
+Immediate revocation--even if revocation would be more effective by
+postponement--is the impulse of young wounded natures. Cytherea
+went to her blotting-book, took out the long letter so carefully
+written, so full of gushing remarks and tender hints, and sealed up
+so neatly with a little seal bearing 'Good Faith' as its motto, tore
+the missive into fifty pieces, and threw them into the grate. It
+was then the bitterest of anguishes to look upon some of the words
+she had so lovingly written, and see them existing only in mutilated
+forms without meaning--to feel that his eye would never read them,
+nobody ever know how ardently she had penned them.
+
+Pity for one's self for being wasted is mostly present in these
+moods of abnegation.
+
+The meaning of all his allusions, his abruptness in telling her of
+his love, his constraint at first, then his desperate manner of
+speaking, was clear. They must have been the last flickerings of a
+conscience not quite dead to all sense of perfidiousness and
+fickleness. Now he had gone to London: she would be dismissed from
+his memory, in the same way as Miss Aldclyffe had said. And here
+she was in Edward's own parish, reminded continually of him by what
+she saw and heard. The landscape, yesterday so much and so bright
+to her, was now but as the banquet-hall deserted--all gone but
+herself.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe had wormed her secret out of her, and would now be
+continually mocking her for her trusting simplicity in believing
+him. It was altogether unbearable: she would not stay there.
+
+She went downstairs and found Miss Aldclyffe had gone into the
+breakfast-room, but that Captain Aldclyffe, who rose later with
+increasing infirmities, had not yet made his appearance. Cytherea
+entered. Miss Aldclyffe was looking out of the window, watching a
+trail of white smoke along the distant landscape--signifying a
+passing train. At Cytherea's entry she turned and looked inquiry.
+
+'I must tell you now,' began Cytherea, in a tremulous voice.
+
+'Well, what?' Miss Aldclyffe said.
+
+'I am not going to stay with you. I must go away--a very long way.
+I am very sorry, but indeed I can't remain!'
+
+'Pooh--what shall we hear next?' Miss Aldclyffe surveyed Cytherea's
+face with leisurely criticism. 'You are breaking your heart again
+about that worthless young Springrove. I knew how it would be. It
+is as Hallam says of Juliet--what little reason you may have
+possessed originally has all been whirled away by this love. I
+shan't take this notice, mind.'
+
+'Do let me go!'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe took her new pet's hand, and said with severity, 'As
+to hindering you, if you are determined to go, of course that's
+absurd. But you are not now in a state of mind fit for deciding
+upon any such proceeding, and I shall not listen to what you have to
+say. Now, Cythie, come with me; we'll let this volcano burst and
+spend itself, and after that we'll see what had better be done.'
+She took Cytherea into her workroom, opened a drawer, and drew forth
+a roll of linen.
+
+'This is some embroidery I began one day, and now I should like it
+finished.'
+
+She then preceded the maiden upstairs to Cytherea's own room.
+'There,' she said, 'now sit down here, go on with this work, and
+remember one thing--that you are not to leave the room on any
+pretext whatever for two hours unless I send for you--I insist
+kindly, dear. Whilst you stitch--you are to stitch, recollect, and
+not go mooning out of the window--think over the whole matter, and
+get cooled; don't let the foolish love-affair prevent your thinking
+as a woman of the world. If at the end of that time you still say
+you must leave me, you may. I will have no more to say in the
+matter. Come, sit down, and promise to sit here the time I name.'
+
+To hearts in a despairing mood, compulsion seems a relief; and
+docility was at all times natural to Cytherea. She promised, and
+sat down. Miss Aldclyffe shut the door upon her and retreated.
+
+She sewed, stopped to think, shed a tear or two, recollected the
+articles of the treaty, and sewed again; and at length fell into a
+reverie which took no account whatever of the lapse of time.
+
+4. TEN TO TWELVE O'CLOCK A.M.
+
+A quarter of an hour might have passed when her thoughts became
+attracted from the past to the present by unwonted movements
+downstairs. She opened the door and listened.
+
+There were hurryings along passages, opening and shutting of doors,
+trampling in the stable-yard. She went across into another bedroom,
+from which a view of the stable-yard could be obtained, and arrived
+there just in time to see the figure of the man who had driven her
+from the station vanishing down the coach-road on a black horse
+--galloping at the top of the animal's speed.
+
+Another man went off in the direction of the village.
+
+Whatever had occurred, it did not seem to be her duty to inquire or
+meddle with it, stranger and dependent as she was, unless she were
+requested to, especially after Miss Aldclyffe's strict charge to
+her. She sat down again, determined to let no idle curiosity
+influence her movements.
+
+Her window commanded the front of the house; and the next thing she
+saw was a clergyman walk up and enter the door.
+
+All was silent again till, a long time after the first man had left,
+he returned again on the same horse, now matted with sweat and
+trotting behind a carriage in which sat an elderly gentleman driven
+by a lad in livery. These came to the house, entered, and all was
+again the same as before.
+
+The whole household--master, mistress, and servants--appeared to
+have forgotten the very existence of such a being as Cytherea. She
+almost wished she had not vowed to have no idle curiosity.
+
+Half-an-hour later, the carriage drove off with the elderly
+gentleman, and two or three messengers left the house, speeding in
+various directions. Rustics in smock-frocks began to hang about the
+road opposite the house, or lean against trees, looking idly at the
+windows and chimneys.
+
+A tap came to Cytherea's door. She opened it to a young
+maid-servant.
+
+'Miss Aldclyffe wishes to see you, ma'am.' Cytherea hastened down.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe was standing on the hearthrug, her elbow on the
+mantel, her hand to her temples, her eyes on the ground; perfectly
+calm, but very pale.
+
+'Cytherea,' she said in a whisper, 'come here.'
+
+Cytherea went close.
+
+'Something very serious has taken place,' she said again, and then
+paused, with a tremulous movement of her mouth.
+
+'Yes,' said Cytherea.
+
+'My father. He was found dead in his bed this morning.'
+
+'Dead!' echoed the younger woman. It seemed impossible that the
+announcement could be true; that knowledge of so great a fact could
+be contained in a statement so small.
+
+'Yes, dead,' murmured Miss Aldclyffe solemnly. 'He died alone,
+though within a few feet of me. The room we slept in is exactly
+over his own.'
+
+Cytherea said hurriedly, 'Do they know at what hour?'
+
+'The doctor says it must have been between two and three o'clock
+this morning.'
+
+'Then I heard him!'
+
+'Heard him?'
+
+'Heard him die!'
+
+'You heard him die? What did you hear?'
+
+'A sound I heard once before in my life--at the deathbed of my
+mother. I could not identify it--though I recognized it. Then the
+dog howled: you remarked it. I did not think it worth while to
+tell you what I had heard a little earlier.' She looked agonized.
+
+'It would have been useless,' said Miss Aldclyffe. 'All was over by
+that time.' She addressed herself as much as Cytherea when she
+continued, 'Is it a Providence who sent you here at this juncture
+that I might not be left entirely alone?'
+
+Till this instant Miss Aldclyffe had forgotten the reason of
+Cytherea's seclusion in her own room. So had Cytherea herself. The
+fact now recurred to both in one moment.
+
+'Do you still wish to go?' said Miss Aldclyffe anxiously.
+
+'I don't want to go now,' Cytherea had remarked simultaneously with
+the other's question. She was pondering on the strange likeness
+which Miss Aldclyffe's bereavement bore to her own; it had the
+appearance of being still another call to her not to forsake this
+woman so linked to her life, for the sake of any trivial vexation.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe held her almost as a lover would have held her, and
+said musingly--
+
+'We get more and more into one groove. I now am left fatherless and
+motherless as you were.' Other ties lay behind in her thoughts, but
+she did not mention them.
+
+'You loved your father, Cytherea, and wept for him?'
+
+'Yes, I did. Poor papa!'
+
+'I was always at variance with mine, and can't weep for him now!
+But you must stay here always, and make a better woman of me.'
+
+The compact was thus sealed, and Cytherea, in spite of the failure
+of her advertisements, was installed as a veritable Companion. And,
+once more in the history of human endeavour, a position which it was
+impossible to reach by any direct attempt, was come to by the
+seeker's swerving from the path, and regarding the original object
+as one of secondary importance.
+
+
+
+VII. THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN DAYS
+
+1. AUGUST THE SEVENTEENTH
+
+The time of day was four o'clock in the afternoon. The place was
+the lady's study or boudoir, Knapwater House. The person was Miss
+Aldclyffe sitting there alone, clothed in deep mourning.
+
+The funeral of the old Captain had taken place, and his will had
+been read. It was very concise, and had been executed about five
+years previous to his death. It was attested by his solicitors,
+Messrs. Nyttleton and Tayling, of Lincoln's Inn Fields. The whole
+of his estate, real and personal, was bequeathed to his daughter
+Cytherea, for her sole and absolute use, subject only to the payment
+of a legacy to the rector, their relative, and a few small amounts
+to the servants.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe had not chosen the easiest chair of her boudoir to
+sit in, or even a chair of ordinary comfort, but an uncomfortable,
+high, narrow-backed, oak framed and seated chair, which was allowed
+to remain in the room only on the ground of being a companion in
+artistic quaintness to an old coffer beside it, and was never used
+except to stand in to reach for a book from the highest row of
+shelves. But she had sat erect in this chair for more than an hour,
+for the reason that she was utterly unconscious of what her actions
+and bodily feelings were. The chair had stood nearest her path on
+entering the room, and she had gone to it in a dream.
+
+She sat in the attitude which denotes unflagging, intense,
+concentrated thought--as if she were cast in bronze. Her feet were
+together, her body bent a little forward, and quite unsupported by
+the back of the chair; her hands on her knees, her eyes fixed
+intently on the corner of a footstool.
+
+At last she moved and tapped her fingers upon the table at her side.
+Her pent-up ideas had finally found some channel to advance in.
+Motions became more and more frequent as she laboured to carry
+further and further the problem which occupied her brain. She sat
+back and drew a long breath: she sat sideways and leant her
+forehead upon her hand. Later still she arose, walked up and down
+the room--at first abstractedly, with her features as firmly set as
+ever; but by degrees her brow relaxed, her footsteps became lighter
+and more leisurely; her head rode gracefully and was no longer
+bowed. She plumed herself like a swan after exertion.
+
+'Yes,' she said aloud. 'To get _him_ here without letting him know
+that I have any other object than that of getting a useful man
+--that's the difficulty--and that I think I can master.'
+
+She rang for the new maid, a placid woman of forty with a few grey
+hairs.
+
+'Ask Miss Graye if she can come to me.'
+
+Cytherea was not far off, and came in.
+
+'Do you know anything about architects and surveyors?' said Miss
+Aldclyffe abruptly.
+
+'Know anything?' replied Cytherea, poising herself on her toe to
+consider the compass of the question.
+
+'Yes--know anything,' said Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+'Owen is an architect and surveyor's draughtsman,' the maiden said,
+and thought of somebody else who was likewise.
+
+'Yes! that's why I asked you. What are the different kinds of work
+comprised in an architect's practice? They lay out estates, and
+superintend the various works done upon them, I should think, among
+other things?'
+
+'Those are, more properly, a land or building steward's duties--at
+least I have always imagined so. Country architects include those
+things in their practice; city architects don't.'
+
+'I know that, child. But a steward's is an indefinite fast and
+loose profession, it seems to me. Shouldn't you think that a man
+who had been brought up as an architect would do for a steward?'
+
+Cytherea had doubts whether an architect pure would do.
+
+The chief pleasure connected with asking an opinion lies in not
+adopting it. Miss Aldclyffe replied decisively--
+
+'Nonsense; of course he would. Your brother Owen makes plans for
+country buildings--such as cottages, stables, homesteads, and so
+on?'
+
+'Yes; he does.'
+
+'And superintends the building of them?'
+
+'Yes; he will soon.'
+
+'And he surveys land?'
+
+'O yes.'
+
+'And he knows about hedges and ditches--how wide they ought to be,
+boundaries, levelling, planting trees to keep away the winds,
+measuring timber, houses for ninety-nine years, and such things?'
+
+'I have never heard him say that; but I think Mr. Gradfield does
+those things. Owen, I am afraid, is inexperienced as yet.'
+
+'Yes; your brother is not old enough for such a post yet, of course.
+And then there are rent-days, the audit and winding up of
+tradesmen's accounts. I am afraid, Cytherea, you don't know much
+more about the matter than I do myself. . . . I am going out just
+now,' she continued. 'I shall not want you to walk with me to-day.
+Run away till dinner-time.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe went out of doors, and down the steps to the lawn:
+then turning to the left, through a shrubbery, she opened a wicket
+and passed into a neglected and leafy carriage-drive, leading down
+the hill. This she followed till she reached the point of its
+greatest depression, which was also the lowest ground in the whole
+grove.
+
+The trees here were so interlaced, and hung their branches so near
+the ground, that a whole summer's day was scarcely long enough to
+change the air pervading the spot from its normal state of coolness
+to even a temporary warmth. The unvarying freshness was helped by
+the nearness of the ground to the level of the springs, and by the
+presence of a deep, sluggish stream close by, equally well shaded by
+bushes and a high wall. Following the road, which now ran along at
+the margin of the stream, she came to an opening in the wall, on the
+other side of the water, revealing a large rectangular nook from
+which the stream proceeded, covered with froth, and accompanied by a
+dull roar. Two more steps, and she was opposite the nook, in full
+view of the cascade forming its further boundary. Over the top
+could be seen the bright outer sky in the form of a crescent, caused
+by the curve of a bridge across the rapids, and the trees above.
+
+Beautiful as was the scene she did not look in that direction. The
+same standing-ground afforded another prospect, straight in the
+front, less sombre than the water on the right or the trees all
+around. The avenue and grove which flanked it abruptly terminated a
+few yards ahead, where the ground began to rise, and on the remote
+edge of the greensward thus laid open, stood all that remained of
+the original manor-house, to which the dark margin-line of the trees
+in the avenue formed an adequate and well-fitting frame. It was the
+picture thus presented that was now interesting Miss Aldclyffe--not
+artistically or historically, but practically--as regarded its
+fitness for adaptation to modern requirements.
+
+In front, detached from everything else, rose the most ancient
+portion of the structure--an old arched gateway, flanked by the
+bases of two small towers, and nearly covered with creepers, which
+had clambered over the eaves of the sinking roof, and up the gable
+to the crest of the Aldclyffe family perched on the apex. Behind
+this, at a distance of ten or twenty yards, came the only portion of
+the main building that still existed--an Elizabethan fragment,
+consisting of as much as could be contained under three gables and a
+cross roof behind. Against the wall could be seen ragged lines
+indicating the form of other destroyed gables which had once joined
+it there. The mullioned and transomed windows, containing five or
+six lights, were mostly bricked up to the extent of two or three,
+and the remaining portion fitted with cottage window-frames
+carelessly inserted, to suit the purpose to which the old place was
+now applied, it being partitioned out into small rooms downstairs to
+form cottages for two labourers and their families; the upper
+portion was arranged as a storehouse for divers kinds of roots and
+fruit.
+
+The owner of the picturesque spot, after her survey from this point,
+went up to the walls and walked into the old court, where the
+paving-stones were pushed sideways and upwards by the thrust of the
+grasses between them. Two or three little children, with their
+fingers in their mouths, came out to look at her, and then ran in to
+tell their mothers in loud tones of secrecy that Miss Aldclyffe was
+coming. Miss Aldclyffe, however, did not come in. She concluded
+her survey of the exterior by making a complete circuit of the
+building; then turned into a nook a short distance off where round
+and square timber, a saw-pit, planks, grindstones, heaps of building
+stone and brick, explained that the spot was the centre of
+operations for the building work done on the estate.
+
+She paused, and looked around. A man who had seen her from the
+window of the workshops behind, came out and respectfully lifted his
+hat to her. It was the first time she had been seen walking outside
+the house since her father's death.
+
+'Strooden, could the Old House be made a decent residence of,
+without much trouble?' she inquired.
+
+The mechanic considered, and spoke as each consideration completed
+itself.
+
+'You don't forget, ma'am, that two-thirds of the place is already
+pulled down, or gone to ruin?'
+
+'Yes; I know.'
+
+'And that what's left may almost as well be, ma'am.'
+
+'Why may it?'
+
+''Twas so cut up inside when they made it into cottages, that the
+whole carcase is full of cracks.'
+
+'Still by pulling down the inserted partitions, and adding a little
+outside, it could be made to answer the purpose of an ordinary six
+or eight-roomed house?'
+
+'Yes, ma'am.'
+
+'About what would it cost?' was the question which had invariably
+come next in every communication of this kind to which the
+superintending workman had been a party during his whole experience.
+To his surprise, Miss Aldclyffe did not put it. The man thought her
+object in altering an old house must have been an unusually
+absorbing one not to prompt what was so instinctive in owners as
+hardly to require any prompting at all.
+
+'Thank you: that's sufficient, Strooden,' she said. 'You will
+understand that it is not unlikely some alteration may be made here
+in a short time, with reference to the management of the affairs.'
+
+Strooden said 'Yes,' in a complex voice, and looked uneasy.
+
+'During the life of Captain Aldclyffe, with you as the foreman of
+works, and he himself as his own steward, everything worked well.
+But now it may be necessary to have a steward, whose management will
+encroach further upon things which have hitherto been left in your
+hands than did your late master's. What I mean is, that he will
+directly and in detail superintend all.'
+
+'Then--I shall not be wanted, ma'am?' he faltered.
+
+'O yes; if you like to stay on as foreman in the yard and workshops
+only. I should be sorry to lose you. However, you had better
+consider. I will send for you in a few days.'
+
+Leaving him to suspense, and all the ills that came in its train
+--distracted application to his duties, and an undefined number of
+sleepless nights and untasted dinners, Miss Aldclyffe looked at her
+watch and returned to the House. She was about to keep an
+appointment with her solicitor, Mr. Nyttleton, who had been to
+Budmouth, and was coming to Knapwater on his way back to London.
+
+2. AUGUST THE TWENTIETH
+
+On the Saturday subsequent to Mr. Nyttleton's visit to Knapwater
+House, the subjoined advertisement appeared in the Field and the
+Builder newspapers:--
+
+
+                     'LAND STEWARD.
+
+'A gentleman of integrity and professional skill is required
+immediately for the MANAGEMENT of an ESTATE, containing about 1000
+acres, upon which agricultural improvements and the erection of
+buildings are contemplated. He must be a man of superior education,
+unmarried, and not more than thirty years of age. Considerable
+preference will be shown for one who possesses an artistic as well
+as a practical knowledge of planning and laying out. The
+remuneration will consist of a salary of 220 pounds, with the old
+manor-house as a residence--Address Messrs. Nyttleton and Tayling,
+solicitors, Lincoln's Inn Fields.'
+
+
+A copy of each paper was sent to Miss Aldclyffe on the day of
+publication. The same evening she told Cytherea that she was
+advertising for a steward, who would live at the old manor-house,
+showing her the papers containing the announcement.
+
+What was the drift of that remark? thought the maiden; or was it
+merely made to her in confidential intercourse, as other
+arrangements were told her daily. Yet it seemed to have more
+meaning than common. She remembered the conversation about
+architects and surveyors, and her brother Owen. Miss Aldclyffe knew
+that his situation was precarious, that he was well educated and
+practical, and was applying himself heart and soul to the details of
+the profession and all connected with it. Miss Aldclyffe might be
+ready to take him if he could compete successfully with others who
+would reply. She hazarded a question:
+
+'Would it be desirable for Owen to answer it?'
+
+'Not at all,' said Miss Aldclyffe peremptorily.
+
+A flat answer of this kind had ceased to alarm Cytherea. Miss
+Aldclyffe's blunt mood was not her worst. Cytherea thought of
+another man, whose name, in spite of resolves, tears, renunciations
+and injured pride, lingered in her ears like an old familiar strain.
+That man was qualified for a stewardship under a king.
+
+'Would it be of any use if Edward Springrove were to answer it?' she
+said, resolutely enunciating the name.
+
+'None whatever,' replied Miss Aldclyffe, again in the same decided
+tone.
+
+'You are very unkind to speak in that way.'
+
+'Now don't pout like a goosie, as you are. I don't want men like
+either of them, for, of course, I must look to the good of the
+estate rather than to that of any individual. The man I want must
+have been more specially educated. I have told you that we are
+going to London next week; it is mostly on this account.'
+
+Cytherea found that she had mistaken the drift of Miss Aldclyffe's
+peculiar explicitness on the subject of advertising, and wrote to
+tell her brother that if he saw the notice it would be useless to
+reply.
+
+3. AUGUST THE TWENTY-FIFTH
+
+Five days after the above-mentioned dialogue took place they went to
+London, and, with scarcely a minute's pause, to the solicitors'
+offices in Lincoln's Inn Fields.
+
+They alighted opposite one of the characteristic entrances about the
+place--a gate which was never, and could never be, closed, flanked
+by lamp-standards carrying no lamp. Rust was the only active agent
+to be seen there at this time of the day and year. The palings
+along the front were rusted away at their base to the thinness of
+wires, and the successive coats of paint, with which they were
+overlaid in bygone days, had been completely undermined by the same
+insidious canker, which lifted off the paint in flakes, leaving the
+raw surface of the iron on palings, standards, and gate hinges, of a
+staring blood-red.
+
+But once inside the railings the picture changed. The court and
+offices were a complete contrast to the grand ruin of the outwork
+which enclosed them. Well-painted respectability extended over,
+within, and around the doorstep; and in the carefully swept yard not
+a particle of dust was visible.
+
+Mr. Nyttleton, who had just come up from Margate, where he was
+staying with his family, was standing at the top of his own
+staircase as the pair ascended. He politely took them inside.
+
+'Is there a comfortable room in which this young lady can sit during
+our interview?' said Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+It was rather a favourite habit of hers to make much of Cytherea
+when they were out, and snub her for it afterwards when they got
+home.
+
+'Certainly--Mr. Tayling's.' Cytherea was shown into an inner room.
+
+Social definitions are all made relatively: an absolute datum is
+only imagined. The small gentry about Knapwater seemed unpractised
+to Miss Aldclyffe, Miss Aldclyffe herself seemed unpractised to Mr.
+Nyttleton's experienced old eyes.
+
+'Now then,' the lady said, when she was alone with the lawyer; 'what
+is the result of our advertisement?'
+
+It was late summer; the estate-agency, building, engineering, and
+surveying worlds were dull. There were forty-five replies to the
+advertisement.
+
+Mr. Nyttleton spread them one by one before Miss Aldclyffe. 'You
+will probably like to read some of them yourself, madam?' he said.
+
+'Yes, certainly,' said she.
+
+'I will not trouble you with those which are from persons manifestly
+unfit at first sight,' he continued; and began selecting from the
+heap twos and threes which he had marked, collecting others into his
+hand.
+
+'The man we want lies among these, if my judgment doesn't deceive
+me, and from them it would be advisable to select a certain number
+to be communicated with.'
+
+'I should like to see every one--only just to glance them over
+--exactly as they came,' she said suasively.
+
+He looked as if he thought this a waste of his time, but dismissing
+his sentiment unfolded each singly and laid it before her. As he
+laid them out, it struck him that she studied them quite as rapidly
+as he could spread them. He slyly glanced up from the outer corner
+of his eye to hers, and noticed that all she did was look at the
+name at the bottom of the letter, and then put the enclosure aside
+without further ceremony. He thought this an odd way of inquiring
+into the merits of forty-five men who at considerable trouble gave
+in detail reasons why they believed themselves well qualified for a
+certain post. She came to the final one, and put it down with the
+rest.
+
+Then the lady said that in her opinion it would be best to get as
+many replies as they possibly could before selecting--'to give us a
+wider choice. What do you think, Mr. Nyttleton?'
+
+It seemed to him, he said, that a greater number than those they
+already had would scarcely be necessary, and if they waited for
+more, there would be this disadvantage attending it, that some of
+those they now could command would possibly not be available.
+
+'Never mind, we will run that risk,' said Miss Aldclyffe. 'Let the
+advertisement be inserted once more, and then we will certainly
+settle the matter.'
+
+Mr. Nyttleton bowed, and seemed to think Miss Aldclyffe, for a
+single woman, and one who till so very recently had never concerned
+herself with business of any kind, a very meddlesome client. But
+she was rich, and handsome still. 'She's a new broom in
+estate-management as yet,' he thought. 'She will soon get tired of
+this,' and he parted from her without a sentiment which could mar
+his habitual blandness.
+
+The two ladies then proceeded westward. Dismissing the cab in
+Waterloo Place, they went along Pall Mall on foot, where in place of
+the usual well-dressed clubbists--rubicund with alcohol--were to be
+seen, in linen pinafores, flocks of house-painters pallid from white
+lead. When they had reached the Green Park, Cytherea proposed that
+they should sit down awhile under the young elms at the brow of the
+hill. This they did--the growl of Piccadilly on their left hand
+--the monastic seclusion of the Palace on their right: before them,
+the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament, standing forth with a
+metallic lustre against a livid Lambeth sky.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe still carried in her hand a copy of the newspaper,
+and while Cytherea had been interesting herself in the picture
+around, glanced again at the advertisement.
+
+She heaved a slight sigh, and began to fold it up again. In the
+action her eye caught sight of two consecutive advertisements on the
+cover, one relating to some lecture on Art, and addressed to members
+of the Institute of Architects. The other emanated from the same
+source, but was addressed to the public, and stated that the
+exhibition of drawings at the Institute's rooms would close at the
+end of that week.
+
+Her eye lighted up. She sent Cytherea back to the hotel in a cab,
+then turned round by Piccadilly into Bond Street, and proceeded to
+the rooms of the Institute. The secretary was sitting in the lobby.
+After making her payment, and looking at a few of the drawings on
+the walls, in the company of three gentlemen, the only other
+visitors to the exhibition, she turned back and asked if she might
+be allowed to see a list of the members. She was a little connected
+with the architectural world, she said, with a smile, and was
+interested in some of the names.
+
+'Here it is, madam,' he replied, politely handing her a pamphlet
+containing the names.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe turned the leaves till she came to the letter M. The
+name she hoped to find there was there, with the address appended,
+as was the case with all the rest.
+
+The address was at some chambers in a street not far from Charing
+Cross. 'Chambers,' as a residence, had always been assumed by the
+lady to imply the condition of a bachelor. She murmured two words,
+'There still.'
+
+Another request had yet to be made, but it was of a more noticeable
+kind than the first, and might compromise the secrecy with which she
+wished to act throughout this episode. Her object was to get one of
+the envelopes lying on the secretary's table, stamped with the die
+of the Institute; and in order to get it she was about to ask if she
+might write a note.
+
+But the secretary's back chanced to be turned, and he now went
+towards one of the men at the other end of the room, who had called
+him to ask some question relating to an etching on the wall. Quick
+as thought, Miss Aldclyffe stood before the table, slipped her hand
+behind her, took one of the envelopes and put it in her pocket.
+
+She sauntered round the rooms for two or three minutes longer, then
+withdrew and returned to her hotel.
+
+Here she cut the Knapwater advertisement from the paper, put it into
+the envelope she had stolen, embossed with the society's stamp, and
+directed it in a round clerkly hand to the address she had seen in
+the list of members' names submitted to her:--
+
+     AENEAS MANSTON, ESQ.,
+          WYKEHAM CHAMBERS,
+               SPRING GARDENS.
+
+This ended her first day's work in London.
+
+4. FROM AUGUST THE TWENTY-SIXTH TO SEPTEMBER THE FIRST
+
+The two Cythereas continued at the Westminster Hotel, Miss Aldclyffe
+informing her companion that business would detain them in London
+another week. The days passed as slowly and quietly as days can
+pass in a city at that time of the year, the shuttered windows about
+the squares and terraces confronting their eyes like the white and
+sightless orbs of blind men. On Thursday Mr. Nyttleton called,
+bringing the whole number of replies to the advertisement. Cytherea
+was present at the interview, by Miss Aldclyffe's request--either
+from whim or design.
+
+Ten additional letters were the result of the second week's
+insertion, making fifty-five in all. Miss Aldclyffe looked them
+over as before. One was signed--
+
+AENEAS MANSTON,
+     133, TURNGATE STREET,
+          LIVERPOOL.
+
+'Now, then, Mr. Nyttleton, will you make a selection, and I will add
+one or two,' Miss Aldclyffe said.
+
+Mr. Nyttleton scanned the whole heap of letters, testimonials, and
+references, sorting them into two heaps. Manston's missive, after a
+mere glance, was thrown amongst the summarily rejected ones.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe read, or pretended to read after the lawyer. When he
+had finished, five lay in the group he had selected. 'Would you
+like to add to the number?' he said, turning to the lady.
+
+'No,' she said carelessly. 'Well, two or three additional ones
+rather took my fancy,' she added, searching for some in the larger
+collection.
+
+She drew out three. One was Manston's.
+
+'These eight, then, shall be communicated with,' said the lawyer,
+taking up the eight letters and placing them by themselves.
+
+They stood up. 'If I myself, Miss Aldclyffe, were only concerned
+personally,' he said, in an off-hand way, and holding up a letter
+singly, 'I should choose this man unhesitatingly. He writes
+honestly, is not afraid to name what he does not consider himself
+well acquainted with--a rare thing to find in answers to
+advertisements; he is well recommended, and possesses some qualities
+rarely found in combination. Oddly enough, he is not really a
+steward. He was bred a farmer, studied building affairs, served on
+an estate for some time, then went with an architect, and is now
+well qualified as architect, estate agent, and surveyor. That man
+is sure to have a fine head for a manor like yours.' He tapped the
+letter as he spoke. 'Yes, I should choose him without hesitation
+--speaking personally.'
+
+'And I think,' she said artificially, 'I should choose this one as a
+matter of mere personal whim, which, of course, can't be given way
+to when practical questions have to be considered.'
+
+Cytherea, after looking out of the window, and then at the
+newspapers, had become interested in the proceedings between the
+clever Miss Aldclyffe and the keen old lawyer, which reminded her of
+a game at cards. She looked inquiringly at the two letters--one in
+Miss Aldclyffe's hand, the other in Mr. Nyttleton's.
+
+'What is the name of your man?' said Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+'His name--' said the lawyer, looking down the page; 'what is his
+name?--it is Edward Springrove.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe glanced towards Cytherea, who was getting red and
+pale by turns. She looked imploringly at Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+'The name of my man,' said Miss Aldclyffe, looking at her letter in
+turn; 'is, I think--yes--AEneas Manston.'
+
+5. SEPTEMBER THE THIRD
+
+The next morning but one was appointed for the interviews, which
+were to be at the lawyer's offices. Mr. Nyttleton and Mr. Tayling
+were both in town for the day, and the candidates were admitted one
+by one into a private room. In the window recess was seated Miss
+Aldclyffe, wearing her veil down.
+
+The lawyer had, in his letters to the selected number, timed each
+candidate at an interval of ten or fifteen minutes from those
+preceding and following. They were shown in as they arrived, and
+had short conversations with Mr. Nyttleton--terse, and to the point.
+Miss Aldclyffe neither moved nor spoke during this proceeding; it
+might have been supposed that she was quite unmindful of it, had it
+not been for what was revealed by a keen penetration of the veil
+covering her countenance--the rays from two bright black eyes,
+directed towards the lawyer and his interlocutor.
+
+Springrove came fifth; Manston seventh. When the examination of all
+was ended, and the last man had retired, Nyttleton, again as at the
+former time, blandly asked his client which of the eight she
+personally preferred. 'I still think the fifth we spoke to,
+Springrove, the man whose letter I pounced upon at first, to be by
+far the best qualified, in short, most suitable generally.'
+
+'I am sorry to say that I differ from you; I lean to my first notion
+still--that Mr.--Mr. Manston is most desirable in tone and bearing,
+and even specifically; I think he would suit me best in the
+long-run.'
+
+Mr. Nyttleton looked out of the window at the whitened wall of the
+court.
+
+'Of course, madam, your opinion may be perfectly sound and reliable;
+a sort of instinct, I know, often leads ladies by a short cut to
+conclusions truer than those come to by men after laborious
+round-about calculations, based on long experience. I must say I
+shouldn't recommend him.'
+
+'Why, pray?'
+
+'Well, let us look first at his letter of answer to the
+advertisement. He didn't reply till the last insertion; that's one
+thing. His letter is bold and frank in tone, so bold and frank that
+the second thought after reading it is that not honesty, but
+unscrupulousness of conscience dictated it. It is written in an
+indifferent mood, as if he felt that he was humbugging us in his
+statement that he was the right man for such an office, that he
+tried hard to get it only as a matter of form which required that he
+should neglect no opportunity that came in his way.'
+
+'You may be right, Mr. Nyttleton, but I don't quite see the grounds
+of your reasoning.'
+
+'He has been, as you perceive, almost entirely used to the office
+duties of a city architect, the experience we don't want. You want
+a man whose acquaintance with rural landed properties is more
+practical and closer--somebody who, if he has not filled exactly
+such an office before, has lived a country life, knows the ins and
+outs of country tenancies, building, farming, and so on.'
+
+'He's by far the most intellectual looking of them all.'
+
+'Yes; he may be--your opinion, Miss Aldclyffe, is worth more than
+mine in that matter. And more than you say, he is a man of parts
+--his brain power would soon enable him to master details and fit
+him for the post, I don't much doubt that. But to speak clearly'
+(here his words started off at a jog-trot) 'I wouldn't run the risk
+of placing the management of an estate of mine in his hands on any
+account whatever. There, that's flat and plain, madam.'
+
+'But, definitely,' she said, with a show of impatience, 'what is
+your reason?'
+
+'He is a voluptuary with activity; which is a very bad form of man
+--as bad as it is rare.'
+
+'Oh. Thank you for your explicit statement, Mr. Nyttleton,' said
+Miss Aldclyffe, starting a little and flushing with displeasure.
+
+Mr. Nyttleton nodded slightly, as a sort of neutral motion, simply
+signifying a receipt of the information, good or bad.
+
+'And I really think it is hardly worth while to trouble you further
+in this,' continued the lady. 'He's quite good enough for a little
+insignificant place like mine at Knapwater; and I know that I could
+not get on with one of the others for a single month. We'll try
+him.'
+
+'Certainly, Miss Aldclyffe,' said the lawyer. And Mr. Manston was
+written to, to the effect that he was the successful competitor.
+
+'Did you see how unmistakably her temper was getting the better of
+her, that minute you were in the room?' said Nyttleton to Tayling,
+when their client had left the house. Nyttleton was a man who
+surveyed everybody's character in a sunless and shadowless northern
+light. A culpable slyness, which marked him as a boy, had been
+moulded by Time, the Improver, into honourable circumspection.
+
+We frequently find that the quality which, conjoined with the
+simplicity of the child, is vice, is virtue when it pervades the
+knowledge of the man.
+
+'She was as near as damn-it to boiling over when I added up her
+man,' continued Nyttleton. 'His handsome face is his qualification
+in her eyes. They have met before; I saw that.'
+
+'He didn't seem conscious of it,' said the junior.
+
+'He didn't. That was rather puzzling to me. But still, if ever a
+woman's face spoke out plainly that she was in love with a man, hers
+did that she was with him. Poor old maid, she's almost old enough
+to be his mother. If that Manston's a schemer he'll marry her, as
+sure as I am Nyttleton. Let's hope he's honest, however.'
+
+'I don't think she's in love with him,' said Tayling. He had seen
+but little of the pair, and yet he could not reconcile what he had
+noticed in Miss Aldclyffe's behaviour with the idea that it was the
+bearing of a woman towards her lover.
+
+'Well, your experience of the fiery phenomenon is more recent than
+mine,' rejoined Nyttleton carelessly. 'And you may remember the
+nature of it best.'
+
+
+
+VIII. THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN DAYS
+
+1. FROM THE THIRD TO THE NINETEENTH OF SEPTEMBER
+
+Miss Aldclyffe's tenderness towards Cytherea, between the hours of
+her irascibility, increased till it became no less than doting
+fondness. Like Nature in the tropics, with her hurricanes and the
+subsequent luxuriant vegetation effacing their ravages, Miss
+Aldclyffe compensated for her outbursts by excess of generosity
+afterwards. She seemed to be completely won out of herself by close
+contact with a young woman whose modesty was absolutely unimpaired,
+and whose artlessness was as perfect as was compatible with the
+complexity necessary to produce the due charm of womanhood.
+Cytherea, on her part, perceived with honest satisfaction that her
+influence for good over Miss Aldclyffe was considerable. Ideas and
+habits peculiar to the younger, which the elder lady had originally
+imitated as a mere whim, she grew in course of time to take a
+positive delight in. Among others were evening and morning prayers,
+dreaming over out-door scenes, learning a verse from some poem
+whilst dressing.
+
+Yet try to force her sympathies as much as she would, Cytherea could
+feel no more than thankful for this, even if she always felt as much
+as thankful. The mysterious cloud hanging over the past life of her
+companion, of which the uncertain light already thrown upon it only
+seemed to render still darker the unpenetrated remainder, nourished
+in her a feeling which was scarcely too slight to be called dread.
+She would have infinitely preferred to be treated distantly, as the
+mere dependent, by such a changeable nature--like a fountain, always
+herself, yet always another. That a crime of any deep dye had ever
+been perpetrated or participated in by her namesake, she would not
+believe; but the reckless adventuring of the lady's youth seemed
+connected with deeds of darkness rather than of light.
+
+Sometimes Miss Aldclyffe appeared to be on the point of making some
+absorbing confidence, but reflection invariably restrained her.
+Cytherea hoped that such a confidence would come with time, and that
+she might thus be a means of soothing a mind which had obviously
+known extreme suffering.
+
+But Miss Aldclyffe's reticence concerning her past was not imitated
+by Cytherea. Though she never disclosed the one fact of her
+knowledge that the love-suit between Miss Aldclyffe and her father
+terminated abnormally, the maiden's natural ingenuousness on
+subjects not set down for special guard had enabled Miss Aldclyffe
+to worm from her, fragment by fragment, every detail of her father's
+history. Cytherea saw how deeply Miss Aldclyffe sympathized--and it
+compensated her, to some extent, for the hasty resentments of other
+times.
+
+Thus uncertainly she lived on. It was perceived by the servants of
+the House that some secret bond of connection existed between Miss
+Aldclyffe and her companion. But they were woman and woman, not
+woman and man, the facts were ethereal and refined, and so they
+could not be worked up into a taking story. Whether, as old critics
+disputed, a supernatural machinery be necessary to an epic or no, an
+ungodly machinery is decidedly necessary to a scandal.
+
+Another letter had come to her from Edward--very short, but full of
+entreaty, asking why she would not write just one line--just one
+line of cold friendship at least? She then allowed herself to
+think, little by little, whether she had not perhaps been too harsh
+with him; and at last wondered if he were really much to blame for
+being engaged to another woman. 'Ah, Brain, there is one in me
+stronger than you!' she said. The young maid now continually pulled
+out his letter, read it and re-read it, almost crying with pity the
+while, to think what wretched suspense he must be enduring at her
+silence, till her heart chid her for her cruelty. She felt that she
+must send him a line--one little line--just a wee line to keep him
+alive, poor thing; sighing like Donna Clara--
+
+
+     'Ah, were he now before me,
+        In spite of injured pride,
+      I fear my eyes would pardon
+        Before my tongue could chide.'
+
+
+2. SEPTEMBER THE TWENTIETH. THREE TO FOUR P.M.
+
+It was the third week in September, about five weeks after
+Cytherea's arrival, when Miss Aldclyffe requested her one day to go
+through the village of Carriford and assist herself in collecting
+the subscriptions made by some of the inhabitants of the parish to a
+religious society she patronized. Miss Aldclyffe formed one of what
+was called a Ladies' Association, each member of which collected
+tributary streams of shillings from her inferiors, to add to her own
+pound at the end.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe took particular interest in Cytherea's appearance
+that afternoon, and the object of her attention was, indeed,
+gratifying to look at. The sight of the lithe girl, set off by an
+airy dress, coquettish jacket, flexible hat, a ray of starlight in
+each eye and a war of lilies and roses in each cheek, was a palpable
+pleasure to the mistress of the mansion, yet a pleasure which
+appeared to partake less of the nature of affectionate satisfaction
+than of mental gratification.
+
+Eight names were printed in the report as belonging to Miss
+Aldclyffe's list, with the amount of subscription-money attached to
+each.
+
+'I will collect the first four, whilst you do the same with the last
+four,' said Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+The names of two tradespeople stood first in Cytherea's share: then
+came a Miss Hinton: last of all in the printed list was Mr.
+Springrove the elder. Underneath his name was pencilled, in Miss
+Aldclyffe's handwriting, 'Mr. Manston.'
+
+Manston had arrived on the estate, in the capacity of steward, three
+or four days previously, and occupied the old manor-house, which had
+been altered and repaired for his reception.
+
+'Call on Mr. Manston,' said the lady impressively, looking at the
+name written under Cytherea's portion of the list.
+
+'But he does not subscribe yet?'
+
+'I know it; but call and leave him a report. Don't forget it.'
+
+'Say you would be pleased if he would subscribe?'
+
+'Yes--say I should be pleased if he would,' repeated Miss Aldclyffe,
+smiling. 'Good-bye. Don't hurry in your walk. If you can't get
+easily through your task to-day put off some of it till to-morrow.'
+
+Each then started on her rounds: Cytherea going in the first place
+to the old manor-house. Mr. Manston was not indoors, which was a
+relief to her. She called then on the two gentleman-farmers' wives,
+who soon transacted their business with her, frigidly indifferent to
+her personality. A person who socially is nothing is thought less
+of by people who are not much than by those who are a great deal.
+
+She then turned towards Peakhill Cottage, the residence of Miss
+Hinton, who lived there happily enough, with an elderly servant and
+a house-dog as companions. Her father, and last remaining parent,
+had retired thither four years before this time, after having filled
+the post of editor to the Casterbridge Chronicle for eighteen or
+twenty years. There he died soon after, and though comparatively a
+poor man, he left his daughter sufficiently well provided for as a
+modest fundholder and claimant of sundry small sums in dividends to
+maintain herself as mistress at Peakhill.
+
+At Cytherea's knock an inner door was heard to open and close, and
+footsteps crossed the passage hesitatingly. The next minute
+Cytherea stood face to face with the lady herself.
+
+Adelaide Hinton was about nine-and-twenty years of age. Her hair
+was plentiful, like Cytherea's own; her teeth equalled Cytherea's in
+regularity and whiteness. But she was much paler, and had features
+too transparent to be in place among household surroundings. Her
+mouth expressed love less forcibly than Cytherea's, and, as a
+natural result of her greater maturity, her tread was less elastic,
+and she was more self-possessed.
+
+She had been a girl of that kind which mothers praise as not
+forward, by way of contrast, when disparaging those warmer ones with
+whom loving is an end and not a means. Men of forty, too, said of
+her, 'a good sensible wife for any man, if she cares to marry,' the
+caring to marry being thrown in as the vaguest hypothesis, because
+she was so practical. Yet it would be singular if, in such cases,
+the important subject of marriage should be excluded from
+manipulation by hands that are ready for practical performance in
+every domestic concern besides.
+
+Cytherea was an acquisition, and the greeting was hearty.
+
+'Good afternoon! O yes--Miss Graye, from Miss Aldclyffe's. I have
+seen you at church, and I am so glad you have called! Come in. I
+wonder if I have change enough to pay my subscription.' She spoke
+girlishly.
+
+Adelaide, when in the company of a younger woman, always levelled
+herself down to that younger woman's age from a sense of justice to
+herself--as if, though not her own age at common law, it was in
+equity.
+
+'It doesn't matter. I'll come again.'
+
+'Yes, do at any time; not only on this errand. But you must step in
+for a minute. Do.'
+
+'I have been wanting to come for several weeks.'
+
+'That's right. Now you must see my house--lonely, isn't it, for a
+single person? People said it was odd for a young woman like me to
+keep on a house; but what did I care? If you knew the pleasure of
+locking up your own door, with the sensation that you reigned
+supreme inside it, you would say it was worth the risk of being
+called odd. Mr. Springrove attends to my gardening, the dog attends
+to robbers, and whenever there is a snake or toad to kill, Jane does
+it.'
+
+'How nice! It is better than living in a town.'
+
+'Far better. A town makes a cynic of me.'
+
+The remark recalled, somewhat startlingly, to Cytherea's mind, that
+Edward had used those very words to herself one evening at Budmouth.
+
+Miss Hinton opened an interior door and led her visitor into a small
+drawing-room commanding a view of the country for miles.
+
+The missionary business was soon settled; but the chat continued.
+
+'How lonely it must be here at night!' said Cytherea. 'Aren't you
+afraid?'
+
+'At first I was, slightly. But I got used to the solitude. And you
+know a sort of commonsense will creep even into timidity. I say to
+myself sometimes at night, "If I were anybody but a harmless woman,
+not worth the trouble of a worm's ghost to appear to me, I should
+think that every sound I hear was a spirit." But you must see all
+over my house.'
+
+Cytherea was highly interested in seeing.
+
+'I say you _must_ do this, and you _must_ do that, as if you were
+a child,' remarked Adelaide. 'A privileged friend of mine tells me
+this use of the imperative comes of being so constantly in nobody's
+society but my own.'
+
+'Ah, yes. I suppose she is right.'
+
+Cytherea called the friend 'she' by a rule of ladylike practice; for
+a woman's 'friend' is delicately assumed by another friend to be of
+their own sex in the absence of knowledge to the contrary; just as
+cats are called she's until they prove themselves he's.
+
+Miss Hinton laughed mysteriously.
+
+'I get a humorous reproof for it now and then, I assure you,' she
+continued.
+
+'"Humorous reproof:" that's not from a woman: who can reprove
+humorously but a man?' was the groove of Cytherea's thought at the
+remark. 'Your brother reproves you, I expect,' said that innocent
+young lady.
+
+'No,' said Miss Hinton, with a candid air. ''Tis only a
+professional man I am acquainted with.' She looked out of the
+window.
+
+Women are persistently imitative. No sooner did a thought flash
+through Cytherea's mind that the man was a lover than she became a
+Miss Aldclyffe in a mild form.
+
+'I imagine he's a lover,' she said.
+
+Miss Hinton smiled a smile of experience in that line.
+
+Few women, if taxed with having an admirer, are so free from vanity
+as to deny the impeachment, even if it is utterly untrue. When it
+does happen to be true, they look pityingly away from the person who
+is so benighted as to have got no further than suspecting it.
+
+'There now--Miss Hinton; you are engaged to be married!' said
+Cytherea accusingly.
+
+Adelaide nodded her head practically. 'Well, yes, I am,' she said.
+
+The word 'engaged' had no sooner passed Cytherea's lips than the
+sound of it--the mere sound of her own lips--carried her mind to the
+time and circumstances under which Miss Aldclyffe had used it
+towards herself. A sickening thought followed--based but on a mere
+surmise; yet its presence took every other idea away from Cytherea's
+mind. Miss Hinton had used Edward's words about towns; she
+mentioned Mr. Springrove as attending to her garden. It could not
+be that Edward was the man! that Miss Aldclyffe had planned to
+reveal her rival thus!
+
+'Are you going to be married soon?' she inquired, with a steadiness
+the result of a sort of fascination, but apparently of indifference.
+
+'Not very soon--still, soon.'
+
+'Ah-ha! In less than three months?' said Cytherea.
+
+'Two.'
+
+Now that the subject was well in hand, Adelaide wanted no more
+prompting. 'You won't tell anybody if I show you something?' she
+said, with eager mystery.
+
+'O no, nobody. But does he live in this parish?'
+
+'No.'
+
+Nothing proved yet.
+
+'What's his name?' said Cytherea flatly. Her breath and heart had
+begun their old tricks, and came and went hotly. Miss Hinton could
+not see her face.
+
+'What do you think?' said Miss Hinton.
+
+'George?' said Cytherea, with deceitful agony.
+
+'No,' said Adelaide. 'But now, you shall see him first; come here;'
+and she led the way upstairs into her bedroom. There, standing on
+the dressing table in a little frame, was the unconscious portrait
+of Edward Springrove.
+
+'There he is,' Miss Hinton said, and a silence ensued.
+
+'Are you very fond of him?' continued the miserable Cytherea at
+length.
+
+'Yes, of course I am,' her companion replied, but in the tone of one
+who 'lived in Abraham's bosom all the year,' and was therefore
+untouched by solemn thought at the fact. 'He's my cousin--a native
+of this village. We were engaged before my father's death left me
+so lonely. I was only twenty, and a much greater belle than I am
+now. We know each other thoroughly, as you may imagine. I give him
+a little sermonizing now and then.'
+
+'Why?'
+
+'O, it's only in fun. He's very naughty sometimes--not really, you
+know--but he will look at any pretty face when he sees it.'
+
+Storing up this statement of his susceptibility as another item to
+be miserable upon when she had time, 'How do you know that?'
+Cytherea asked, with a swelling heart.
+
+'Well, you know how things do come to women's ears. He used to live
+at Budmouth as an assistant-architect, and I found out that a young
+giddy thing of a girl who lives there somewhere took his fancy for a
+day or two. But I don't feel jealous at all--our engagement is so
+matter-of-fact that neither of us can be jealous. And it was a mere
+flirtation--she was too silly for him. He's fond of rowing, and
+kindly gave her an airing for an evening or two. I'll warrant they
+talked the most unmitigated rubbish under the sun--all shallowness
+and pastime, just as everything is at watering places--neither of
+them caring a bit for the other--she giggling like a goose all the
+time--'
+
+Concentrated essence of woman pervaded the room rather than air.
+'She _didn't_! and it _wasn't_ shallowness!' Cytherea burst out,
+with brimming eyes. ''Twas deep deceit on one side, and entire
+confidence on the other--yes, it was!' The pent-up emotion had
+swollen and swollen inside the young thing till the dam could no
+longer embay it. The instant the words were out she would have
+given worlds to have been able to recall them.
+
+'Do you know her--or him?' said Miss Hinton, starting with suspicion
+at the warmth shown.
+
+The two rivals had now lost their personality quite. There was the
+same keen brightness of eye, the same movement of the mouth, the
+same mind in both, as they looked doubtingly and excitedly at each
+other. As is invariably the case with women when a man they care
+for is the subject of an excitement among them, the situation
+abstracted the differences which distinguished them as individuals,
+and left only the properties common to them as atoms of a sex.
+
+Cytherea caught at the chance afforded her of not betraying herself.
+'Yes, I know her,' she said.
+
+'Well,' said Miss Hinton, 'I am really vexed if my speaking so
+lightly of any friend of yours has hurt your feelings, but--'
+
+'O, never mind,' Cytherea returned; 'it doesn't matter, Miss Hinton.
+I think I must leave you now. I have to call at other places. Yes
+--I must go.'
+
+Miss Hinton, in a perplexed state of mind, showed her visitor
+politely downstairs to the door. Here Cytherea bade her a hurried
+adieu, and flitted down the garden into the lane.
+
+She persevered in her duties with a wayward pleasure in giving
+herself misery, as was her wont. Mr. Springrove's name was next on
+the list, and she turned towards his dwelling, the Three Tranters
+Inn.
+
+3. FOUR TO FIVE P.M.
+
+The cottages along Carriford village street were not so close but
+that on one side or other of the road was always a hedge of hawthorn
+or privet, over or through which could be seen gardens or orchards
+rich with produce. It was about the middle of the early
+apple-harvest, and the laden trees were shaken at intervals by the
+gatherers; the soft pattering of the falling crop upon the grassy
+ground being diversified by the loud rattle of vagrant ones upon a
+rail, hencoop, basket, or lean-to roof, or upon the rounded and
+stooping backs of the collectors--mostly children, who would have
+cried bitterly at receiving such a smart blow from any other
+quarter, but smilingly assumed it to be but fun in apples.
+
+The Three Tranters Inn, a many-gabled, mediaeval building,
+constructed almost entirely of timber, plaster, and thatch, stood
+close to the line of the roadside, almost opposite the churchyard,
+and was connected with a row of cottages on the left by thatched
+outbuildings. It was an uncommonly characteristic and handsome
+specimen of the genuine roadside inn of bygone times; and standing
+on one of the great highways in this part of England, had in its
+time been the scene of as much of what is now looked upon as the
+romantic and genial experience of stage-coach travelling as any
+halting-place in the country. The railway had absorbed the whole
+stream of traffic which formerly flowed through the village and
+along by the ancient door of the inn, reducing the empty-handed
+landlord, who used only to farm a few fields at the back of the
+house, to the necessity of eking out his attenuated income by
+increasing the extent of his agricultural business if he would still
+maintain his social standing. Next to the general stillness
+pervading the spot, the long line of outbuildings adjoining the
+house was the most striking and saddening witness to the passed-away
+fortunes of the Three Tranters Inn. It was the bulk of the original
+stabling, and where once the hoofs of two-score horses had daily
+rattled over the stony yard, to and from the stalls within, thick
+grass now grew, whilst the line of roofs--once so straight--over the
+decayed stalls, had sunk into vast hollows till they seemed like the
+cheeks of toothless age.
+
+On a green plot at the other end of the building grew two or three
+large, wide-spreading elm-trees, from which the sign was suspended
+--representing the three men called tranters (irregular carriers),
+standing side by side, and exactly alike to a hair's-breadth, the
+grain of the wood and joints of the boards being visible through the
+thin paint depicting their forms, which were still further
+disfigured by red stains running downwards from the rusty nails
+above.
+
+Under the trees now stood a cider-mill and press, and upon the spot
+sheltered by the boughs were gathered Mr. Springrove himself, his
+men, the parish clerk, two or three other men, grinders and
+supernumeraries, a woman with an infant in her arms, a flock of
+pigeons, and some little boys with straws in their mouths,
+endeavouring, whenever the men's backs were turned, to get a sip of
+the sweet juice issuing from the vat.
+
+Edward Springrove the elder, the landlord, now more particularly a
+farmer, and for two months in the year a cider-maker, was an
+employer of labour of the old school, who worked himself among his
+men. He was now engaged in packing the pomace into horsehair bags
+with a rammer, and Gad Weedy, his man, was occupied in shovelling up
+more from a tub at his side. The shovel shone like silver from the
+action of the juice, and ever and anon, in its motion to and fro,
+caught the rays of the declining sun and reflected them in bristling
+stars of light.
+
+Mr. Springrove had been too young a man when the pristine days of
+the Three Tranters had departed for ever to have much of the host
+left in him now. He was a poet with a rough skin: one whose
+sturdiness was more the result of external circumstances than of
+intrinsic nature. Too kindly constituted to be very provident, he
+was yet not imprudent. He had a quiet humorousness of disposition,
+not out of keeping with a frequent melancholy, the general
+expression of his countenance being one of abstraction. Like Walt
+Whitman he felt as his years increased--
+
+     'I foresee too much; it means more than I thought.'
+
+On the present occasion he wore gaiters and a leathern apron, and
+worked with his shirt-sleeves rolled up beyond his elbows,
+disclosing solid and fleshy rather than muscular arms. They were
+stained by the cider, and two or three brown apple-pips from the
+pomace he was handling were to be seen sticking on them here and
+there.
+
+The other prominent figure was that of Richard Crickett, the parish
+clerk, a kind of Bowdlerized rake, who ate only as much as a woman,
+and had the rheumatism in his left hand. The remainder of the
+group, brown-faced peasants, wore smock-frocks embroidered on the
+shoulders with hearts and diamonds, and were girt round their middle
+with a strap, another being worn round the right wrist.
+
+'And have you seen the steward, Mr. Springrove?' said the clerk.
+
+'Just a glimpse of him; but 'twas just enough to show me that he's
+not here for long.'
+
+'Why mid that be?'
+
+'He'll never stand the vagaries of the female figure holden the
+reins--not he.'
+
+'She d' pay en well,' said a grinder; 'and money's money.'
+
+'Ah--'tis: very much so,' the clerk replied.
+
+'Yes, yes, naibour Crickett,' said Springrove, 'but she'll vlee
+in a passion--all the fat will be in the fire--and there's an end
+o't. . . . Yes, she is a one,' continued the farmer, resting,
+raising his eyes, and reading the features of a distant apple.
+
+'She is,' said Gad, resting too (it is wonderful how prompt a
+journeyman is in following his master's initiative to rest) and
+reflectively regarding the ground in front of him.
+
+'True: a one is she,' the clerk chimed in, shaking his head
+ominously.
+
+'She has such a temper,' said the farmer, 'and is so wilful too.
+You may as well try to stop a footpath as stop her when she has
+taken anything into her head. I'd as soon grind little green crabs
+all day as live wi' her.'
+
+''Tis a temper she hev, 'tis,' the clerk replied, 'though I be a
+servant of the Church that say it. But she isn't goen to flee in a
+passion this time.'
+
+The audience waited for the continuation of the speech, as if they
+knew from experience the exact distance off it lay in the future.
+
+The clerk swallowed nothing as if it were a great deal, and then
+went on, 'There's some'at between 'em: mark my words, naibours
+--there's some'at between 'em.'
+
+'D'ye mean it?'
+
+'I d' know it. He came last Saturday, didn't he?'
+
+''A did, truly,' said Gad Weedy, at the same time taking an apple
+from the hopper of the mill, eating a piece, and flinging back the
+remainder to be ground up for cider.
+
+'He went to church a-Sunday,' said the clerk again.
+
+''A did.'
+
+'And she kept her eye upon en all the service, her face flickeren
+between red and white, but never stoppen at either.'
+
+Mr. Springrove nodded, and went to the press.
+
+'Well,' said the clerk, 'you don't call her the kind o' woman to
+make mistakes in just trotten through the weekly service o' God?
+Why, as a rule she's as right as I be myself.'
+
+Mr. Springrove nodded again, and gave a twist to the screw of the
+press, followed in the movement by Gad at the other side; the two
+grinders expressing by looks of the greatest concern that, if Miss
+Aldclyffe were as right at church as the clerk, she must be right
+indeed.
+
+'Yes, as right in the service o' God as I be myself,' repeated the
+clerk. 'But last Sunday, when we were in the tenth commandment,
+says she, "Incline our hearts to keep this law," says she, when
+'twas "Laws in our hearts, we beseech Thee," all the church through.
+Her eye was upon _him_--she was quite lost--"Hearts to keep this
+law," says she; she was no more than a mere shadder at that tenth
+time--a mere shadder. You mi't ha' mouthed across to her "Laws in
+our hearts we beseech Thee," fifty times over--she'd never ha'
+noticed ye. She's in love wi' the man, that's what she is.'
+
+'Then she's a bigger stunpoll than I took her for,' said Mr.
+Springrove. 'Why, she's old enough to be his mother.'
+
+'The row'll be between her and that young Curlywig, you'll see. She
+won't run the risk of that pretty face be-en near.'
+
+'Clerk Crickett, I d' fancy you d' know everything about everybody,'
+said Gad.
+
+'Well so's,' said the clerk modestly. 'I do know a little. It
+comes to me.'
+
+'And I d' know where from.'
+
+'Ah.'
+
+'That wife o' thine. She's an entertainen woman, not to speak
+disrespectful.'
+
+'She is: and a winnen one. Look at the husbands she've had--God
+bless her!'
+
+'I wonder you could stand third in that list, Clerk Crickett,' said
+Mr. Springrove.
+
+'Well, 't has been a power o' marvel to myself oftentimes. Yes,
+matrimony do begin wi' "Dearly beloved," and ends wi' "Amazement,"
+as the prayer-book says. But what could I do, naibour Springrove?
+'Twas ordained to be. Well do I call to mind what your poor lady
+said to me when I had just married. "Ah, Mr. Crickett," says she,
+"your wife will soon settle you as she did her other two: here's a
+glass o' rum, for I shan't see your poor face this time next year."
+I swallered the rum, called again next year, and said, "Mrs.
+Springrove, you gave me a glass o' rum last year because I was going
+to die--here I be alive still, you see." "Well said, clerk! Here's
+two glasses for you now, then," says she. "Thank you, mem," I
+said, and swallered the rum. Well, dang my old sides, next year I
+thought I'd call again and get three. And call I did. But she
+wouldn't give me a drop o' the commonest. "No, clerk," says she,
+"you be too tough for a woman's pity." . . . Ah, poor soul, 'twas
+true enough! Here be I, that was expected to die, alive and hard as
+a nail, you see, and there's she moulderen in her grave.'
+
+'I used to think 'twas your wife's fate not to have a liven husband
+when I zid 'em die off so,' said Gad.
+
+'Fate? Bless thy simplicity, so 'twas her fate; but she struggled
+to have one, and would, and did. Fate's nothen beside a woman's
+schemen!'
+
+'I suppose, then, that Fate is a He, like us, and the Lord, and the
+rest o' 'em up above there,' said Gad, lifting his eyes to the sky.
+
+'Hullo! Here's the young woman comen that we were a-talken about
+by-now,' said a grinder, suddenly interrupting. 'She's comen up
+here, as I be alive!'
+
+The two grinders stood and regarded Cytherea as if she had been a
+ship tacking into a harbour, nearly stopping the mill in their new
+interest.
+
+'Stylish accoutrements about the head and shoulders, to my thinken,'
+said the clerk. 'Sheenen curls, and plenty o' em.'
+
+'If there's one kind of pride more excusable than another in a young
+woman, 'tis being proud of her hair,' said Mr. Springrove.
+
+'Dear man!--the pride there is only a small piece o' the whole. I
+warrant now, though she can show such a figure, she ha'n't a stick
+o' furniture to call her own.'
+
+'Come, Clerk Crickett, let the maid be a maid while she is a maid,'
+said Farmer Springrove chivalrously.
+
+'O,' replied the servant of the Church; 'I've nothen to say against
+it--O no:
+
+     '"The chimney-sweeper's daughter Sue
+         As I have heard declare, O,
+       Although she's neither sock nor shoe
+         Will curl and deck her hair, O."'
+
+Cytherea was rather disconcerted at finding that the gradual
+cessation of the chopping of the mill was on her account, and still
+more when she saw all the cider-makers' eyes fixed upon her except
+Mr. Springrove's, whose natural delicacy restrained him. She neared
+the plot of grass, but instead of advancing further, hesitated on
+its border.
+
+Mr. Springrove perceived her embarrassment, which was relieved when
+she saw his old-established figure coming across to her, wiping his
+hands in his apron.
+
+'I know your errand, missie,' he said, 'and am glad to see you, and
+attend to it. I'll step indoors.'
+
+'If you are busy I am in no hurry for a minute or two,' said
+Cytherea.
+
+'Then if so be you really wouldn't mind, we'll wring down this last
+filling to let it drain all night?'
+
+'Not at all. I like to see you.'
+
+'We are only just grinding down the early pickthongs and griffins,'
+continued the farmer, in a half-apologetic tone for detaining by his
+cider-making any well-dressed woman. 'They rot as black as a
+chimney-crook if we keep 'em till the regulars turn in.' As he
+spoke he went back to the press, Cytherea keeping at his elbow.
+'I'm later than I should have been by rights,' he continued, taking
+up a lever for propelling the screw, and beckoning to the men to
+come forward. 'The truth is, my son Edward had promised to come
+to-day, and I made preparations; but instead of him comes a letter:
+"London, September the eighteenth, Dear Father," says he, and went
+on to tell me he couldn't. It threw me out a bit.'
+
+'Of course,' said Cytherea.
+
+'He's got a place 'a b'lieve?' said the clerk, drawing near.
+
+'No, poor mortal fellow, no. He tried for this one here, you know,
+but couldn't manage to get it. I don't know the rights o' the
+matter, but willy-nilly they wouldn't have him for steward. Now
+mates, form in line.'
+
+Springrove, the clerk, the grinders, and Gad, all ranged themselves
+behind the lever of the screw, and walked round like soldiers
+wheeling.
+
+'The man that the old quean hev got is a man you can hardly get upon
+your tongue to gainsay, by the look o' en,' rejoined Clerk Crickett.
+
+'One o' them people that can contrive to be thought no worse o' for
+stealen a horse than another man for looken over hedge at en,' said
+a grinder.
+
+'Well, he's all there as steward, and is quite the gentleman--no
+doubt about that.'
+
+'So would my Ted ha' been, for the matter o' that,' the farmer said.
+
+'That's true: 'a would, sir.'
+
+'I said, I'll give Ted a good education if it do cost me my eyes,
+and I would have done it.'
+
+'Ay, that you would so,' said the chorus of assistants solemnly.
+
+'But he took to books and drawing naturally, and cost very little;
+and as a wind-up the womenfolk hatched up a match between him and
+his cousin.'
+
+'When's the wedden to be, Mr. Springrove?'
+
+'Uncertain--but soon, I suppose. Edward, you see, can do anything
+pretty nearly, and yet can't get a straightforward living. I wish
+sometimes I had kept him here, and let professions go. But he was
+such a one for the pencil.'
+
+He dropped the lever in the hedge, and turned to his visitor.
+
+'Now then, missie, if you'll come indoors, please.'
+
+Gad Weedy looked with a placid criticism at Cytherea as she withdrew
+with the farmer.
+
+'I could tell by the tongue o' her that she didn't take her degrees
+in our county,' he said in an undertone.
+
+
+
+'The railways have left you lonely here,' she observed, when they
+were indoors.
+
+Save the withered old flies, which were quite tame from the
+solitude, not a being was in the house. Nobody seemed to have
+entered it since the last passenger had been called out to mount the
+last stage-coach that had run by.
+
+'Yes, the Inn and I seem almost a pair of fossils,' the farmer
+replied, looking at the room and then at himself.
+
+'O, Mr. Springrove,' said Cytherea, suddenly recollecting herself;
+'I am much obliged to you for recommending me to Miss Aldclyffe.'
+She began to warm towards the old man; there was in him a gentleness
+of disposition which reminded her of her own father.
+
+'Recommending? Not at all, miss. Ted--that's my son--Ted said a
+fellow-draughtsman of his had a sister who wanted to be doing
+something in the world, and I mentioned it to the housekeeper,
+that's all. Ay, I miss my son very much.'
+
+She kept her back to the window that he might not see her rising
+colour.
+
+'Yes,' he continued, 'sometimes I can't help feeling uneasy about
+him. You know, he seems not made for a town life exactly: he gets
+very queer over it sometimes, I think. Perhaps he'll be better when
+he's married to Adelaide.'
+
+A half-impatient feeling arose in her, like that which possesses a
+sick person when he hears a recently-struck hour struck again by a
+slow clock. She had lived further on.
+
+'Everything depends upon whether he loves her,' she said
+tremulously.
+
+'He used to--he doesn't show it so much now; but that's because he's
+older. You see, it was several years ago they first walked together
+as young man and young woman. She's altered too from what she was
+when he first courted her.'
+
+'How, sir?'
+
+'O, she's more sensible by half. When he used to write to her she'd
+creep up the lane and look back over her shoulder, and slide out the
+letter, and read a word and stand in thought looking at the hills
+and seeing none. Then the cuckoo would cry--away the letter would
+slip, and she'd start wi' fright at the mere bird, and have a red
+skin before the quickest man among ye could say, "Blood rush up."'
+
+He came forward with the money and dropped it into her hand. His
+thoughts were still with Edward, and he absently took her little
+fingers in his as he said, earnestly and ingenuously--
+
+''Tis so seldom I get a gentlewoman to speak to that I can't help
+speaking to you, Miss Graye, on my fears for Edward; I sometimes am
+afraid that he'll never get on--that he'll die poor and despised
+under the worst mental conditions, a keen sense of having been
+passed in the race by men whose brains are nothing to his own, all
+through his seeing too far into things--being discontented with
+make-shifts--thinking o' perfection in things, and then sickened
+that there's no such thing as perfection. I shan't be sorry to see
+him marry, since it may settle him down and do him good. . . . Ay,
+we'll hope for the best.'
+
+He let go her hand and accompanied her to the door saying, 'If you
+should care to walk this way and talk to an old man once now and
+then, it will be a great delight to him, Miss Graye. Good-evening
+to ye. . . . Ah look! a thunderstorm is brewing--be quick home. Or
+shall I step up with you?'
+
+'No, thank you, Mr. Springrove. Good evening,' she said in a low
+voice, and hurried away. One thought still possessed her; Edward
+had trifled with her love.
+
+4. FIVE TO SIX P.M.
+
+She followed the road into a bower of trees, overhanging it so
+densely that the pass appeared like a rabbit's burrow, and presently
+reached a side entrance to the park. The clouds rose more rapidly
+than the farmer had anticipated: the sheep moved in a trail, and
+complained incoherently. Livid grey shades, like those of the
+modern French painters, made a mystery of the remote and dark parts
+of the vista, and seemed to insist upon a suspension of breath.
+Before she was half-way across the park the thunder rumbled
+distinctly.
+
+The direction in which she had to go would take her close by the old
+manor-house. The air was perfectly still, and between each low
+rumble of the thunder behind she could hear the roar of the
+waterfall before her, and the creak of the engine among the bushes
+hard by it. Hurrying on, with a growing dread of the gloom and of
+the approaching storm, she drew near the Old House, now rising
+before her against the dark foliage and sky in tones of strange
+whiteness.
+
+On the flight of steps, which descended from a terrace in front to
+the level of the park, stood a man. He appeared, partly from the
+relief the position gave to his figure, and partly from fact, to be
+of towering height. He was dark in outline, and was looking at the
+sky, with his hands behind him.
+
+It was necessary for Cytherea to pass directly across the line of
+his front. She felt so reluctant to do this, that she was about to
+turn under the trees out of the path and enter it again at a point
+beyond the Old House; but he had seen her, and she came on
+mechanically, unconsciously averting her face a little, and dropping
+her glance to the ground.
+
+Her eyes unswervingly lingered along the path until they fell upon
+another path branching in a right line from the path she was
+pursuing. It came from the steps of the Old House. 'I am exactly
+opposite him now,' she thought, 'and his eyes are going through me.'
+
+A clear masculine voice said, at the same instant--
+
+'Are you afraid?'
+
+She, interpreting his question by her feelings at the moment,
+assumed himself to be the object of fear, if any. 'I don't think I
+am,' she stammered.
+
+He seemed to know that she thought in that sense.
+
+'Of the thunder, I mean,' he said; 'not of myself.'
+
+She must turn to him now. 'I think it is going to rain,' she
+remarked for the sake of saying something.
+
+He could not conceal his surprise and admiration of her face and
+bearing. He said courteously, 'It may possibly not rain before you
+reach the House, if you are going there?'
+
+'Yes, I am,'
+
+'May I walk up with you? It is lonely under the trees.'
+
+'No.' Fearing his courtesy arose from a belief that he was
+addressing a woman of higher station than was hers, she added, 'I am
+Miss Aldclyffe's companion. I don't mind the loneliness.'
+
+'O, Miss Aldclyffe's companion. Then will you be kind enough to
+take a subscription to her? She sent to me this afternoon to ask me
+to become a subscriber to her Society, and I was out. Of course
+I'll subscribe if she wishes it. I take a great interest in the
+Society.'
+
+'Miss Aldclyffe will be glad to hear that, I know.'
+
+'Yes; let me see--what Society did she say it was? I am afraid I
+haven't enough money in my pocket, and yet it would be a
+satisfaction to her to have practical proof of my willingness. I'll
+get it, and be out in one minute.'
+
+He entered the house and was at her side again within the time he
+had named. 'This is it,' he said pleasantly.
+
+She held up her hand. The soft tips of his fingers brushed the palm
+of her glove as he placed the money within it. She wondered why his
+fingers should have touched her.
+
+'I think after all,' he continued, 'that the rain is upon us, and
+will drench you before you reach the House. Yes: see there.'
+
+He pointed to a round wet spot as large as a nasturtium leaf, which
+had suddenly appeared upon the white surface of the step.
+
+'You had better come into the porch. It is not nearly night yet.
+The clouds make it seem later than it really is.'
+
+Heavy drops of rain, followed immediately by a forked flash of
+lightning and sharp rattling thunder compelled her, willingly or no,
+to accept his invitation. She ascended the steps, stood beside him
+just within the porch, and for the first time obtained a series of
+short views of his person, as they waited there in silence.
+
+He was an extremely handsome man, well-formed, and well-dressed, of
+an age which seemed to be two or three years less than thirty. The
+most striking point in his appearance was the wonderful, almost
+preternatural, clearness of his complexion. There was not a blemish
+or speck of any kind to mar the smoothness of its surface or the
+beauty of its hue. Next, his forehead was square and broad, his
+brows straight and firm, his eyes penetrating and clear. By
+collecting the round of expressions they gave forth, a person who
+theorized on such matters would have imbibed the notion that their
+owner was of a nature to kick against the pricks; the last man in
+the world to put up with a position because it seemed to be his
+destiny to do so; one who took upon himself to resist fate with the
+vindictive determination of a Theomachist. Eyes and forehead both
+would have expressed keenness of intellect too severely to be
+pleasing, had their force not been counteracted by the lines and
+tone of the lips. These were full and luscious to a surprising
+degree, possessing a woman-like softness of curve, and a ruby
+redness so intense, as to testify strongly to much susceptibility of
+heart where feminine beauty was concerned--a susceptibility that
+might require all the ballast of brain with which he had previously
+been credited to confine within reasonable channels.
+
+His manner was rather elegant than good: his speech well-finished
+and unconstrained.
+
+The pause in their discourse, which had been caused by the peal of
+thunder was unbroken by either for a minute or two, during which the
+ears of both seemed to be absently following the low roar of the
+waterfall as it became gradually rivalled by the increasing rush of
+rain upon the trees and herbage of the grove. After her short looks
+at him, Cytherea had turned her head towards the avenue for a while,
+and now, glancing back again for an instant, she discovered that his
+eyes were engaged in a steady, though delicate, regard of her face
+and form.
+
+At this moment, by reason of the narrowness of the porch, their
+dresses touched, and remained in contact.
+
+His clothes are something exterior to every man; but to a woman her
+dress is part of her body. Its motions are all present to her
+intelligence if not to her eyes; no man knows how his coat-tails
+swing. By the slightest hyperbole it may be said that her dress has
+sensation. Crease but the very Ultima Thule of fringe or flounce,
+and it hurts her as much as pinching her. Delicate antennae, or
+feelers, bristle on every outlying frill. Go to the uppermost: she
+is there; tread on the lowest: the fair creature is there almost
+before you.
+
+Thus the touch of clothes, which was nothing to Manston, sent a
+thrill through Cytherea, seeing, moreover, that he was of the nature
+of a mysterious stranger. She looked out again at the storm, but
+still felt him. At last to escape the sensation she moved away,
+though by so doing it was necessary to advance a little into the
+rain.
+
+'Look, the rain is coming into the porch upon you,' he said. 'Step
+inside the door.'
+
+Cytherea hesitated.
+
+'Perfectly safe, I assure you,' he added, laughing, and holding the
+door open. 'You shall see what a state of disorganization I am in
+--boxes on boxes, furniture, straw, crockery, in every form of
+transposition. An old woman is in the back quarters somewhere,
+beginning to put things to rights. . . . You know the inside of the
+house, I dare say?'
+
+'I have never been in.'
+
+'O well, come along. Here, you see, they have made a door through,
+here, they have put a partition dividing the old hall into two, one
+part is now my parlour; there they have put a plaster ceiling,
+hiding the old chestnut-carved roof because it was too high and
+would have been chilly for me; you see, being the original hall, it
+was open right up to the top, and here the lord of the manor and his
+retainers used to meet and be merry by the light from the monstrous
+fire which shone out from that monstrous fire-place, now narrowed to
+a mere nothing for my grate, though you can see the old outline
+still. I almost wish I could have had it in its original state.'
+
+'With more romance and less comfort.'
+
+'Yes, exactly. Well, perhaps the wish is not deep-seated. You will
+see how the things are tumbled in anyhow, packing-cases and all.
+The only piece of ornamental furniture yet unpacked is this one.'
+
+'An organ?'
+
+'Yes, an organ. I made it myself, except the pipes. I opened the
+case this afternoon to commence soothing myself at once. It is not
+a very large one, but quite big enough for a private house. You
+play, I dare say?'
+
+'The piano. I am not at all used to an organ.'
+
+'You would soon acquire the touch for an organ, though it would
+spoil your touch for the piano. Not that that matters a great deal.
+A piano isn't much as an instrument.'
+
+'It is the fashion to say so now. I think it is quite good enough.'
+
+'That isn't altogether a right sentiment about things being good
+enough.'
+
+'No--no. What I mean is, that the men who despise pianos do it as a
+rule from their teeth, merely for fashion's sake, because cleverer
+men have said it before them--not from the experience of their
+ears.'
+
+Now Cytherea all at once broke into a blush at the consciousness of
+a great snub she had been guilty of in her eagerness to explain
+herself. He charitably expressed by a look that he did not in the
+least mind her blunder, if it were one; and this attitude forced him
+into a position of mental superiority which vexed her.
+
+'I play for my private amusement only,' he said. 'I have never
+learned scientifically. All I know is what I taught myself.'
+
+The thunder, lightning, and rain had now increased to a terrific
+force. The clouds, from which darts, forks, zigzags, and balls of
+fire continually sprang, did not appear to be more than a hundred
+yards above their heads, and every now and then a flash and a peal
+made gaps in the steward's descriptions. He went towards the organ,
+in the midst of a volley which seemed to shake the aged house from
+foundations to chimney.
+
+'You are not going to play now, are you?' said Cytherea uneasily.
+
+'O yes. Why not now?' he said. 'You can't go home, and therefore
+we may as well be amused, if you don't mind sitting on this box.
+The few chairs I have unpacked are in the other room.'
+
+Without waiting to see whether she sat down or not, he turned to the
+organ and began extemporizing a harmony which meandered through
+every variety of expression of which the instrument was capable.
+Presently he ceased and began searching for some music-book.
+
+'What a splendid flash!' he said, as the lightning again shone in
+through the mullioned window, which, of a proportion to suit the
+whole extent of the original hall, was much too large for the
+present room. The thunder pealed again. Cytherea, in spite of
+herself, was frightened, not only at the weather, but at the general
+unearthly weirdness which seemed to surround her there.
+
+'I wish I--the lightning wasn't so bright. Do you think it will
+last long?' she said timidly.
+
+'It can't last much longer,' he murmured, without turning, running
+his fingers again over the keys. 'But this is nothing,' he
+continued, suddenly stopping and regarding her. 'It seems brighter
+because of the deep shadow under those trees yonder. Don't mind it;
+now look at me--look in my face--now.'
+
+He had faced the window, looking fixedly at the sky with his dark
+strong eyes. She seemed compelled to do as she was bidden, and
+looked in the too-delicately beautiful face.
+
+The flash came; but he did not turn or blink, keeping his eyes fixed
+as firmly as before. 'There,' he said, turning to her, 'that's the
+way to look at lightning.'
+
+'O, it might have blinded you!' she exclaimed.
+
+'Nonsense--not lightning of this sort--I shouldn't have stared at it
+if there had been danger. It is only sheet-lightning now. Now,
+will you have another piece? Something from an oratorio this time?'
+
+'No, thank you--I don't want to hear it whilst it thunders so.' But
+he had begun without heeding her answer, and she stood motionless
+again, marvelling at the wonderful indifference to all external
+circumstance which was now evinced by his complete absorption in the
+music before him.
+
+'Why do you play such saddening chords?' she said, when he next
+paused.
+
+'H'm--because I like them, I suppose,' said he lightly. 'Don't you
+like sad impressions sometimes?'
+
+'Yes, sometimes, perhaps.'
+
+'When you are full of trouble.'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Well, why shouldn't I when I am full of trouble?'
+
+'Are you troubled?'
+
+'I am troubled.' He said this thoughtfully and abruptly--so
+abruptly that she did not push the dialogue further.
+
+He now played more powerfully. Cytherea had never heard music in
+the completeness of full orchestral power, and the tones of the
+organ, which reverberated with considerable effect in the
+comparatively small space of the room, heightened by the elemental
+strife of light and sound outside, moved her to a degree out of
+proportion to the actual power of the mere notes, practised as was
+the hand that produced them. The varying strains--now loud, now
+soft; simple, complicated, weird, touching, grand, boisterous,
+subdued; each phase distinct, yet modulating into the next with a
+graceful and easy flow--shook and bent her to themselves, as a
+gushing brook shakes and bends a shadow cast across its surface.
+The power of the music did not show itself so much by attracting her
+attention to the subject of the piece, as by taking up and
+developing as its libretto the poem of her own life and soul,
+shifting her deeds and intentions from the hands of her judgment and
+holding them in its own.
+
+She was swayed into emotional opinions concerning the strange man
+before her; new impulses of thought came with new harmonies, and
+entered into her with a gnawing thrill. A dreadful flash of
+lightning then, and the thunder close upon it. She found herself
+involuntarily shrinking up beside him, and looking with parted lips
+at his face.
+
+He turned his eyes and saw her emotion, which greatly increased the
+ideal element in her expressive face. She was in the state in which
+woman's instinct to conceal has lost its power over her impulse to
+tell; and he saw it. Bending his handsome face over her till his
+lips almost touched her ear, he murmured, without breaking the
+harmonies--
+
+'Do you very much like this piece?'
+
+'Very much indeed,' she said.
+
+'I could see you were affected by it. I will copy it for you.'
+
+'Thank you much.'
+
+'I will bring it to the House to you to-morrow. Who shall I ask
+for?'
+
+'O, not for me. Don't bring it,' she said hastily. 'I shouldn't
+like you to.'
+
+'Let me see--to-morrow evening at seven or a few minutes past I
+shall be passing the waterfall on my way home. I could conveniently
+give it you there, and I should like you to have it.'
+
+He modulated into the Pastoral Symphony, still looking in her eyes.
+
+'Very well,' she said, to get rid of the look.
+
+The storm had by this time considerably decreased in violence, and
+in seven or ten minutes the sky partially cleared, the clouds around
+the western horizon becoming lighted up with the rays of the sinking
+sun.
+
+Cytherea drew a long breath of relief, and prepared to go away. She
+was full of a distressing sense that her detention in the old
+manor-house, and the acquaintanceship it had set on foot, was not a
+thing she wished. It was such a foolish thing to have been excited
+and dragged into frankness by the wiles of a stranger.
+
+'Allow me to come with you,' he said, accompanying her to the door,
+and again showing by his behaviour how much he was impressed with
+her. His influence over her had vanished with the musical chords,
+and she turned her back upon him. 'May I come?' he repeated.
+
+'No, no. The distance is not a quarter of a mile--it is really
+not necessary, thank you,' she said quietly. And wishing him
+good-evening, without meeting his eyes, she went down the steps,
+leaving him standing at the door.
+
+'O, how is it that man has so fascinated me?' was all she could
+think. Her own self, as she had sat spell-bound before him, was all
+she could see. Her gait was constrained, from the knowledge that
+his eyes were upon her until she had passed the hollow by the
+waterfall, and by ascending the rise had become hidden from his view
+by the boughs of the overhanging trees.
+
+5. SIX TO SEVEN P.M.
+
+The wet shining road threw the western glare into her eyes with an
+invidious lustre which rendered the restlessness of her mood more
+wearying. Her thoughts flew from idea to idea without asking for
+the slightest link of connection between one and another. One
+moment she was full of the wild music and stirring scene with
+Manston---the next, Edward's image rose before her like a shadowy
+ghost. Then Manston's black eyes seemed piercing her again, and the
+reckless voluptuous mouth appeared bending to the curves of his
+special words. What could be those troubles to which he had
+alluded? Perhaps Miss Aldclyffe was at the bottom of them. Sad at
+heart she paced on: her life was bewildering her.
+
+On coming into Miss Aldclyffe's presence Cytherea told her of the
+incident, not without a fear that she would burst into one of her
+ungovernable fits of temper at learning Cytherea's slight departure
+from the programme. But, strangely to Cytherea, Miss Aldclyffe
+looked delighted. The usual cross-examination followed.
+
+'And so you were with him all that time?' said the lady, with
+assumed severity.
+
+'Yes, I was.'
+
+'I did not tell you to call at the Old House twice.'
+
+'I didn't call, as I have said. He made me come into the porch.'
+
+'What remarks did he make, do you say?'
+
+'That the lightning was not so bad as I thought.'
+
+'A very important remark, that. Did he--' she turned her glance
+full upon the girl, and eyeing her searchingly, said--
+
+'Did he say anything about _me_?'
+
+'Nothing,' said Cytherea, returning her gaze calmly, 'except that I
+was to give you the subscription.'
+
+'You are quite sure?'
+
+'Quite.'
+
+'I believe you. Did he say anything striking or strange about
+himself?'
+
+'Only one thing--that he was troubled,'
+
+'Troubled!'
+
+After saying the word, Miss Aldclyffe relapsed into silence. Such
+behaviour as this had ended, on most previous occasions, by her
+making a confession, and Cytherea expected one now. But for once
+she was mistaken, nothing more was said.
+
+When she had returned to her room she sat down and penned a farewell
+letter to Edward Springrove, as little able as any other excitable
+and brimming young woman of nineteen to feel that the wisest and
+only dignified course at that juncture was to do nothing at all.
+She told him that, to her painful surprise, she had learnt that his
+engagement to another woman was a matter of notoriety. She insisted
+that all honour bade him marry his early love--a woman far better
+than her unworthy self, who only deserved to be forgotten, and
+begged him to remember that he was not to see her face again. She
+upbraided him for levity and cruelty in meeting her so frequently at
+Budmouth, and above all in stealing the kiss from her lips on the
+last evening of the water excursions. 'I never, never can forget
+it!' she said, and then felt a sensation of having done her duty,
+ostensibly persuading herself that her reproaches and commands were
+of such a force that no man to whom they were uttered could ever
+approach her more.
+
+Yet it was all unconsciously said in words which betrayed a
+lingering tenderness of love at every unguarded turn. Like Beatrice
+accusing Dante from the chariot, try as she might to play the
+superior being who contemned such mere eye-sensuousness, she
+betrayed at every point a pretty woman's jealousy of a rival, and
+covertly gave her old lover hints for excusing himself at each fresh
+indictment.
+
+This done, Cytherea, still in a practical mood, upbraided herself
+with weakness in allowing a stranger like Mr. Manston to influence
+her as he had done that evening. What right on earth had he to
+suggest so suddenly that she might meet him at the waterfall to
+receive his music? She would have given much to be able to
+annihilate the ascendency he had obtained over her during that
+extraordinary interval of melodious sound. Not being able to endure
+the notion of his living a minute longer in the belief he was then
+holding, she took her pen and wrote to him also:--
+
+
+                      'KNAPWATER HOUSE
+                         September 20th.
+
+  'I find I cannot meet you at seven o'clock by the waterfall as I
+  promised. The emotion I felt made me forgetful of realities.
+
+                      'C. GRAYE.'
+
+
+
+A great statesman thinks several times, and acts; a young lady acts,
+and thinks several times. When, a few minutes later, she saw the
+postman carry off the bag containing one of the letters, and a
+messenger with the other, she, for the first time, asked herself the
+question whether she had acted very wisely in writing to either of
+the two men who had so influenced her.
+
+
+
+IX. THE EVENTS OF TEN WEEKS
+
+1. FROM SEPTEMBER THE TWENTY-FIRST TO THE MIDDLE OF NOVEMBER
+
+The foremost figure within Cytherea's horizon, exclusive of the
+inmates of Knapwater House, was now the steward, Mr. Manston. It
+was impossible that they should live within a quarter of a mile of
+each other, be engaged in the same service, and attend the same
+church, without meeting at some spot or another, twice or thrice a
+week. On Sundays, in her pew, when by chance she turned her head,
+Cytherea found his eyes waiting desirously for a glimpse of hers,
+and, at first more strangely, the eyes of Miss Aldclyffe furtively
+resting on him. On coming out of church he frequently walked beside
+Cytherea till she reached the gate at which residents in the House
+turned into the shrubbery. By degrees a conjecture grew to a
+certainty. She knew that he loved her.
+
+But a strange fact was connected with the development of his love.
+He was palpably making the strongest efforts to subdue, or at least
+to hide, the weakness, and as it sometimes seemed, rather from his
+own conscience than from surrounding eyes. Hence she found that not
+one of his encounters with her was anything more than the result of
+pure accident. He made no advances whatever: without avoiding her,
+he never sought her: the words he had whispered at their first
+interview now proved themselves to be quite as much the result of
+unguarded impulse as was her answer. Something held him back, bound
+his impulse down, but she saw that it was neither pride of his
+person, nor fear that she would refuse him--a course she
+unhesitatingly resolved to take should he think fit to declare
+himself. She was interested in him and his marvellous beauty, as
+she might have been in some fascinating panther or leopard--for some
+undefinable reason she shrank from him, even whilst she admired.
+The keynote of her nature, a warm 'precipitance of soul,' as
+Coleridge happily writes it, which Manston had so directly pounced
+upon at their very first interview, gave her now a tremulous sense
+of being in some way in his power.
+
+The state of mind was, on the whole, a dangerous one for a young and
+inexperienced woman; and perhaps the circumstance which, more than
+any other, led her to cherish Edward's image now, was that he had
+taken no notice of the receipt of her letter, stating that she
+discarded him. It was plain then, she said, that he did not care
+deeply for her, and she thereupon could not quite leave off caring
+deeply for him:--
+
+                  'Ingenium mulierum,
+              Nolunt ubi velis, ubi nolis cupiunt ultro.'
+
+The month of October passed, and November began its course. The
+inhabitants of the village of Carriford grew weary of supposing that
+Miss Aldclyffe was going to marry her steward. New whispers arose
+and became very distinct (though they did not reach Miss Aldclyffe's
+ears) to the effect that the steward was deeply in love with
+Cytherea Graye. Indeed, the fact became so obvious that there was
+nothing left to say about it except that their marriage would be an
+excellent one for both;--for her in point of comfort--and for him in
+point of love.
+
+As circles in a pond grow wider and wider, the next fact, which at
+first had been patent only to Cytherea herself, in due time spread
+to her neighbours, and they, too, wondered that he made no overt
+advances. By the middle of November, a theory made up of a
+combination of the other two was received with general favour: its
+substance being that a guilty intrigue had been commenced between
+Manston and Miss Aldclyffe, some years before, when he was a very
+young man, and she still in the enjoyment of some womanly beauty,
+but now that her seniority began to grow emphatic she was becoming
+distasteful to him. His fear of the effect of the lady's jealousy
+would, they said, thus lead him to conceal from her his new
+attachment to Cytherea. Almost the only woman who did not believe
+this was Cytherea herself, on unmistakable grounds, which were
+hidden from all besides. It was not only in public, but even more
+markedly in secluded places, on occasions when gallantry would have
+been safe from all discovery, that this guarded course of action was
+pursued, all the strength of a consuming passion burning in his eyes
+the while.
+
+2. NOVEMBER THE EIGHTEENTH
+
+It was on a Friday in this month of November that Owen Graye paid a
+visit to his sister.
+
+His zealous integrity still retained for him the situation at
+Budmouth, and in order that there should be as little interruption
+as possible to his duties there, he had decided not to come to
+Knapwater till late in the afternoon, and to return to Budmouth by
+the first train the next morning, Miss Aldclyffe having made a point
+of frequently offering him lodging for an unlimited period, to the
+great pleasure of Cytherea.
+
+He reached the house about four o'clock, and ringing the bell, asked
+of the page who answered it for Miss Graye.
+
+When Graye spoke the name of his sister, Manston, who was just
+coming out from an interview with Miss Aldclyffe, passed him in the
+vestibule and heard the question. The steward's face grew hot, and
+he secretly clenched his hands. He half crossed the court, then
+turned his head and saw that the lad still stood at the door, though
+Owen had been shown into the house. Manston went back to him.
+
+'Who was that man?' he said.
+
+'I don't know, sir.'
+
+'Has he ever been here before?'
+
+'Yes, sir.'
+
+'How many times?'
+
+'Three.'
+
+'You are sure you don't know him?'
+
+'I think he is Miss Graye's brother, sir.'
+
+'Then, why the devil didn't you say so before!' Manston exclaimed,
+and again went on his way.
+
+'Of course, that was not the man of my dreams--of course, it
+couldn't be!' he said to himself. 'That I should be such a fool
+--such an utter fool. Good God! to allow a girl to influence me
+like this, day after day, till I am jealous of her very brother. A
+lady's dependent, a waif, a helpless thing entirely at the mercy of
+the world; yes, curse it; that is just why it is; that fact of her
+being so helpless against the blows of circumstances which renders
+her so deliciously sweet!'
+
+He paused opposite his house. Should he get his horse saddled? No.
+
+He went down the drive and out of the park, having started to
+proceed to an outlying spot on the estate concerning some draining,
+and to call at the potter's yard to make an arrangement for the
+supply of pipes. But a remark which Miss Aldclyffe had dropped in
+relation to Cytherea was what still occupied his mind, and had been
+the immediate cause of his excitement at the sight of her brother.
+Miss Aldclyffe had meaningly remarked during their intercourse, that
+Cytherea was wildly in love with Edward Springrove, in spite of his
+engagement to his cousin Adelaide.
+
+'How I am harassed!' he said aloud, after deep thought for
+half-an-hour, while still continuing his walk with the greatest
+vehemence. 'How I am harassed by these emotions of mine!' He calmed
+himself by an effort. 'Well, duty after all it shall be, as nearly
+as I can effect it. "Honesty is the best policy;"' with which
+vigorously uttered resolve he once more attempted to turn his
+attention to the prosy object of his journey.
+
+The evening had closed in to a dark and dreary night when the
+steward came from the potter's door to proceed homewards again. The
+gloom did not tend to raise his spirits, and in the total lack of
+objects to attract his eye, he soon fell to introspection as before.
+It was along the margin of turnip fields that his path lay, and the
+large leaves of the crop struck flatly against his feet at every
+step, pouring upon them the rolling drops of moisture gathered upon
+their broad surfaces; but the annoyance was unheeded. Next reaching
+a fir plantation, he mounted the stile and followed the path into
+the midst of the darkness produced by the overhanging trees.
+
+After walking under the dense shade of the inky boughs for a few
+minutes, he fancied he had mistaken the path, which as yet was
+scarcely familiar to him. This was proved directly afterwards by
+his coming at right angles upon some obstruction, which careful
+feeling with outstretched hands soon told him to be a rail fence.
+However, as the wood was not large, he experienced no alarm about
+finding the path again, and with some sense of pleasure halted
+awhile against the rails, to listen to the intensely melancholy yet
+musical wail of the fir-tops, and as the wind passed on, the prompt
+moan of an adjacent plantation in reply. He could just dimly
+discern the airy summits of the two or three trees nearest him
+waving restlessly backwards and forwards, and stretching out their
+boughs like hairy arms into the dull sky. The scene, from its
+striking and emphatic loneliness, began to grow congenial to his
+mood; all of human kind seemed at the antipodes.
+
+A sudden rattle on his right hand caused him to start from his
+reverie, and turn in that direction. There, before him, he saw rise
+up from among the trees a fountain of sparks and smoke, then a red
+glare of light coming forward towards him; then a flashing panorama
+of illuminated oblong pictures; then the old darkness, more
+impressive than ever.
+
+The surprise, which had owed its origin to his imperfect
+acquaintance with the topographical features of that end of the
+estate, had been but momentary; the disturbance, a well-known one to
+dwellers by a railway, being caused by the 6.50 down-train passing
+along a shallow cutting in the midst of the wood immediately below
+where he stood, the driver having the fire-door of the engine open
+at the minute of going by. The train had, when passing him, already
+considerably slackened speed, and now a whistle was heard,
+announcing that Carriford Road Station was not far in its van.
+
+But contrary to the natural order of things, the discovery that it
+was only a commonplace train had not caused Manston to stir from his
+position of facing the railway.
+
+If the 6.50 down-train had been a flash of forked lightning
+transfixing him to the earth, he could scarcely have remained in a
+more trance-like state. He still leant against the railings, his
+right hand still continued pressing on his walking-stick, his weight
+on one foot, his other heel raised, his eyes wide open towards the
+blackness of the cutting. The only movement in him was a slight
+dropping of the lower jaw, separating his previously closed lips a
+little way, as when a strange conviction rushes home suddenly upon a
+man. A new surprise, not nearly so trivial as the first, had taken
+possession of him.
+
+It was on this account. At one of the illuminated windows of a
+second-class carriage in the series gone by, he had seen a pale
+face, reclining upon one hand, the light from the lamp falling full
+upon it. The face was a woman's.
+
+At last Manston moved; gave a whispering kind of whistle, adjusted
+his hat, and walked on again, cross-questioning himself in every
+direction as to how a piece of knowledge he had carefully concealed
+had found its way to another person's intelligence. 'How can my
+address have become known?' he said at length, audibly. 'Well, it
+is a blessing I have been circumspect and honourable, in relation to
+that--yes, I will say it, for once, even if the words choke me, that
+darling of mine, Cytherea, never to be my own, never. I suppose all
+will come out now. All!' The great sadness of his utterance proved
+that no mean force had been exercised upon himself to sustain the
+circumspection he had just claimed.
+
+He wheeled to the left, pursued the ditch beside the railway fence,
+and presently emerged from the wood, stepping into a road which
+crossed the railway by a bridge.
+
+As he neared home, the anxiety lately written in his face, merged by
+degrees into a grimly humorous smile, which hung long upon his lips,
+and he quoted aloud a line from the book of Jeremiah--
+
+     'A woman shall compass a man.'
+
+3. NOVEMBER THE NINETEENTH. DAYBREAK
+
+Before it was light the next morning, two little naked feet pattered
+along the passage in Knapwater House, from which Owen Graye's
+bedroom opened, and a tap was given upon his door.
+
+'Owen, Owen, are you awake?' said Cytherea in a whisper through the
+keyhole. 'You must get up directly, or you'll miss the train.'
+
+When he descended to his sister's little room, he found her there
+already waiting with a cup of cocoa and a grilled rasher on the
+table for him. A hasty meal was despatched in the intervals of
+putting on his overcoat and finding his hat, and they then went
+softly through the long deserted passages, the kitchen-maid who had
+prepared their breakfast walking before them with a lamp held high
+above her head, which cast long wheeling shadows down corridors
+intersecting the one they followed, their remoter ends being lost in
+darkness. The door was unbolted and they stepped out.
+
+Owen had preferred walking to the station to accepting the
+pony-carriage which Miss Aldclyffe had placed at his disposal, having
+a morbid horror of giving trouble to people richer than himself, and
+especially to their men-servants, who looked down upon him as a
+hybrid monster in social position. Cytherea proposed to walk a
+little way with him.
+
+'I want to talk to you as long as I can,' she said tenderly.
+
+Brother and sister then emerged by the heavy door into the drive.
+The feeling and aspect of the hour were precisely similar to those
+under which the steward had left the house the evening previous,
+excepting that apparently unearthly reversal of natural sequence,
+which is caused by the world getting lighter instead of darker.
+'The tearful glimmer of the languid dawn' was just sufficient to
+reveal to them the melancholy red leaves, lying thickly in the
+channels by the roadside, ever and anon loudly tapped on by heavy
+drops of water, which the boughs above had collected from the foggy
+air.
+
+They passed the Old House, engaged in a deep conversation, and had
+proceeded about twenty yards by a cross route, in the direction of
+the turnpike road, when the form of a woman emerged from the porch
+of the building.
+
+She was wrapped in a grey waterproof cloak, the hood of which was
+drawn over her head and closely round her face--so closely that her
+eyes were the sole features uncovered.
+
+With this one exception of her appearance there, the most perfect
+stillness and silence pervaded the steward's residence from basement
+to chimney. Not a shutter was open; not a twine of smoke came
+forth.
+
+Underneath the ivy-covered gateway she stood still and listened for
+two, or possibly three minutes, till she became conscious of others
+in the park. Seeing the pair she stepped back, with the apparent
+intention of letting them pass out of sight, and evidently wishing
+to avoid observation. But looking at her watch, and returning it
+rapidly to her pocket, as if surprised at the lateness of the hour,
+she hurried out again, and across the park by a still more oblique
+line than that traced by Owen and his sister.
+
+These in the meantime had got into the road, and were walking along
+it as the woman came up on the other side of the boundary hedge,
+looking for a gate or stile, by which she, too, might get off the
+grass upon the hard ground.
+
+Their conversation, of which every word was clear and distinct, in
+the still air of the dawn, to the distance of a quarter of a mile,
+reached her ears, and withdrew her attention from all other matters
+and sights whatsoever. Thus arrested she stood for an instant as
+precisely in the attitude of Imogen by the cave of Belarius, as if
+she had studied the position from the play. When they had advanced
+a few steps, she followed them in some doubt, still screened by the
+hedge.
+
+'Do you believe in such odd coincidences?' said Cytherea.
+
+'How do you mean, believe in them? They occur sometimes.'
+
+'Yes, one will occur often enough--that is, two disconnected events
+will fall strangely together by chance, and people scarcely notice
+the fact beyond saying, "Oddly enough it happened that so and so
+were the same," and so on. But when three such events coincide
+without any apparent reason for the coincidence, it seems as if
+there must be invisible means at work. You see, three things
+falling together in that manner are ten times as singular as two
+cases of coincidence which are distinct.'
+
+'Well, of course: what a mathematical head you have, Cytherea! But
+I don't see so much to marvel at in our case. That the man who kept
+the public-house in which Miss Aldclyffe fainted, and who found out
+her name and position, lives in this neighbourhood, is accounted for
+by the fact that she got him the berth to stop his tongue. That you
+came here was simply owing to Springrove.'
+
+'Ah, but look at this. Miss Aldclyffe is the woman our father first
+loved, and I have come to Miss Aldclyffe's; you can't get over
+that.'
+
+From these premises, she proceeded to argue like an elderly divine
+on the designs of Providence which were apparent in such
+conjunctures, and went into a variety of details connected with Miss
+Aldclyffe's history.
+
+'Had I better tell Miss Aldclyffe that I know all this?' she
+inquired at last.
+
+'What's the use?' he said. 'Your possessing the knowledge does no
+harm; you are at any rate comfortable here, and a confession to Miss
+Aldclyffe might only irritate her. No, hold your tongue, Cytherea.'
+
+'I fancy I should have been tempted to tell her too,' Cytherea went
+on, 'had I not found out that there exists a very odd, almost
+imperceptible, and yet real connection of some kind between her and
+Mr. Manston, which is more than that of a mutual interest in the
+estate.'
+
+'She is in love with him!' exclaimed Owen; 'fancy that!'
+
+'Ah--that's what everybody says who has been keen enough to notice
+anything. I said so at first. And yet now I cannot persuade myself
+that she is in love with him at all.'
+
+'Why can't you?'
+
+'She doesn't act as if she were. She isn't--you will know I don't
+say it from any vanity, Owen--she isn't the least jealous of me.'
+
+'Perhaps she is in some way in his power.'
+
+'No--she is not. He was openly advertised for, and chosen from
+forty or fifty who answered the advertisement, without knowing whose
+it was. And since he has been here, she has certainly done nothing
+to compromise herself in any way. Besides, why should she have
+brought an enemy here at all?'
+
+'Then she must have fallen in love with him. You know as well as I
+do, Cyth, that with women there's nothing between the two poles of
+emotion towards an interesting male acquaintance. 'Tis either love
+or aversion.'
+
+They walked for a few minutes in silence, when Cytherea's eyes
+accidentally fell upon her brother's feet.
+
+'Owen,' she said, 'do you know that there is something unusual in
+your manner of walking?'
+
+'What is it like?' he asked.
+
+'I can't quite say, except that you don't walk so regularly as you
+used to.'
+
+The woman behind the hedge, who had still continued to dog their
+footsteps, made an impatient movement at this change in their
+conversation, and looked at her watch again. Yet she seemed
+reluctant to give over listening to them.
+
+'Yes,' Owen returned with assumed carelessness, 'I do know it. I
+think the cause of it is that mysterious pain which comes just above
+my ankle sometimes. You remember the first time I had it? That day
+we went by steam-packet to Lulstead Cove, when it hindered me from
+coming back to you, and compelled me to sleep with the gateman we
+have been talking about.'
+
+'But is it anything serious, dear Owen?' Cytherea exclaimed, with
+some alarm.
+
+'O, nothing at all. It is sure to go off again. I never find a
+sign of it when I sit in the office.'
+
+Again their unperceived companion made a gesture of vexation, and
+looked at her watch as if time were precious. But the dialogue
+still flowed on upon this new subject, and showed no sign of
+returning to its old channel.
+
+Gathering up her skirt decisively she renounced all further hope,
+and hurried along the ditch till she had dropped into a valley, and
+came to a gate which was beyond the view of those coming behind.
+This she softly opened, and came out upon the road, following it in
+the direction of the railway station.
+
+Presently she heard Owen Graye's footsteps in her rear, his
+quickened pace implying that he had parted from his sister. The
+woman thereupon increased her rapid walk to a run, and in a few
+minutes safely distanced her fellow-traveller.
+
+The railway at Carriford Road consisted only of a single line of
+rails; and the short local down-train by which Owen was going to
+Budmouth was shunted on to a siding whilst the first up-train
+passed. Graye entered the waiting-room, and the door being open he
+listlessly observed the movements of a woman wearing a long grey
+cloak, and closely hooded, who had asked for a ticket for London.
+
+He followed her with his eyes on to the platform, saw her waiting
+there and afterwards stepping into the train: his recollection of
+her ceasing with the perception.
+
+4. EIGHT TO TEN O'CLOCK A.M.
+
+Mrs. Crickett, twice a widow, and now the parish clerk's wife, a
+fine-framed, scandal-loving woman, with a peculiar corner to her eye
+by which, without turning her head, she could see what people were
+doing almost behind her, lived in a cottage standing nearer to the
+old manor-house than any other in the village of Carriford, and she
+had on that account been temporarily engaged by the steward, as a
+respectable kind of charwoman and general servant, until a settled
+arrangement could be made with some person as permanent domestic.
+
+Every morning, therefore, Mrs. Crickett, immediately she had lighted
+the fire in her own cottage, and prepared the breakfast for herself
+and husband, paced her way to the Old House to do the same for Mr.
+Manston. Then she went home to breakfast; and when the steward had
+eaten his, and had gone out on his rounds, she returned again to
+clear away, make his bed, and put the house in order for the day.
+
+On the morning of Owen Graye's departure, she went through the
+operations of her first visit as usual--proceeded home to breakfast,
+and went back again, to perform those of the second.
+
+Entering Manston's empty bedroom, with her hands on her hips, she
+indifferently cast her eyes upon the bed, previously to dismantling
+it.
+
+Whilst she looked, she thought in an inattentive manner, 'What a
+remarkably quiet sleeper Mr. Manston must be!' The upper
+bed-clothes were flung back, certainly, but the bed was scarcely
+disarranged. 'Anybody would almost fancy,' she thought, 'that he
+had made it himself after rising.'
+
+But these evanescent thoughts vanished as they had come, and Mrs.
+Crickett set to work; she dragged off the counterpane, blankets and
+sheets, and stooped to lift the pillows. Thus stooping, something
+arrested her attention; she looked closely--more closely--very
+closely. 'Well, to be sure!' was all she could say. The clerk's
+wife stood as if the air had suddenly set to amber, and held her
+fixed like a fly in it.
+
+The object of her wonder was a trailing brown hair, very little less
+than a yard long, which proved it clearly to be a hair from some
+woman's head. She drew it off the pillow, and took it to the
+window; there holding it out she looked fixedly at it, and became
+utterly lost in meditation: her gaze, which had at first actively
+settled on the hair, involuntarily dropped past its object by
+degrees and was lost on the floor, as the inner vision obscured the
+outer one.
+
+She at length moistened her lips, returned her eyes to the hair,
+wound it round her fingers, put it in some paper, and secreted the
+whole in her pocket. Mrs. Crickett's thoughts were with her work no
+more that morning.
+
+She searched the house from roof-tree to cellar, for some other
+trace of feminine existence or appurtenance; but none was to be
+found.
+
+She went out into the yard, coal-hole, stable, hay-loft,
+green-house, fowl-house, and piggery, and still there was no sign.
+Coming in again, she saw a bonnet, eagerly pounced upon it; and
+found it to be her own.
+
+Hastily completing her arrangements in the other rooms, she entered
+the village again, and called at once on the postmistress, Elizabeth
+Leat, an intimate friend of hers, and a female who sported several
+unique diseases and afflictions.
+
+Mrs. Crickett unfolded the paper, took out the hair, and waved it on
+high before the perplexed eyes of Elizabeth, which immediately
+mooned and wandered after it like a cat's.
+
+'What is it?' said Mrs. Leat, contracting her eyelids, and
+stretching out towards the invisible object a narrow bony hand that
+would have been an unmitigated delight to the pencil of Carlo
+Crivelli.
+
+'You shall hear,' said Mrs. Crickett, complacently gathering up the
+treasure into her own fat hand; and the secret was then solemnly
+imparted, together with the accident of its discovery.
+
+A shaving-glass was taken down from a nail, laid on its back in the
+middle of a table by the window, and the hair spread carefully out
+upon it. The pair then bent over the table from opposite sides,
+their elbows on the edge, their hands supporting their heads, their
+foreheads nearly touching, and their eyes upon the hair.
+
+'He ha' been mad a'ter my lady Cytherea,' said Mrs. Crickett, 'and
+'tis my very belief the hair is--'
+
+'No 'tidn'. Hers idn' so dark as that,' said Elizabeth.
+
+'Elizabeth, you know that as the faithful wife of a servant of the
+Church, I should be glad to think as you do about the girl. Mind I
+don't wish to say anything against Miss Graye, but this I do say,
+that I believe her to be a nameless thing, and she's no right to
+stick a moral clock in her face, and deceive the country in such a
+way. If she wasn't of a bad stock at the outset she was bad in the
+planten, and if she wasn't bad in the planten, she was bad in the
+growen, and if not in the growen, she's made bad by what she's gone
+through since.'
+
+'But I have another reason for knowing it idn' hers,' said Mrs.
+Leat.
+
+'Ah! I know whose it is then--Miss Aldclyffe's, upon my song!'
+
+''Tis the colour of hers, but I don't believe it to be hers either.'
+
+'Don't you believe what they d' say about her and him?'
+
+'I say nothen about that; but you don't know what I know about his
+letters.'
+
+'What about 'em?'
+
+'He d' post all his letters here except those for one person, and
+they he d' take to Budmouth. My son is in Budmouth Post Office, as
+you know, and as he d' sit at desk he can see over the blind of the
+window all the people who d' post letters. Mr. Manston d'
+unvariably go there wi' letters for that person; my boy d' know 'em
+by sight well enough now.'
+
+'Is it a she?'
+
+''Tis a she.'
+
+'What's her name?'
+
+'The little stunpoll of a fellow couldn't call to mind more than
+that 'tis Miss Somebody, of London. However, that's the woman who
+ha' been here, depend upon't--a wicked one--some poor street-wench
+escaped from Sodom, I warrant ye.'
+
+'Only to find herself in Gomorrah, seemingly.'
+
+'That may be.'
+
+'No, no, Mrs. Leat, this is clear to me. 'Tis no miss who came here
+to see our steward last night--whenever she came or wherever she
+vanished. Do you think he would ha' let a miss get here how she
+could, go away how she would, without breakfast or help of any
+kind?'
+
+Elizabeth shook her head--Mrs. Crickett looked at her solemnly.
+
+'I say I know she had no help of any kind; I know it was so, for the
+grate was quite cold when I touched it this morning with these
+fingers, and he was still in bed. No, he wouldn't take the trouble
+to write letters to a girl and then treat her so off-hand as that.
+There's a tie between 'em stronger than feelen. She's his wife.'
+
+'He married! The Lord so 's, what shall we hear next? Do he look
+married now? His are not the abashed eyes and lips of a married
+man.'
+
+'Perhaps she's a tame one--but she's his wife still.'
+
+'No, no: he's not a married man.'
+
+'Yes, yes, he is. I've had three, and I ought to know.'
+
+'Well, well,' said Mrs. Leat, giving way. 'Whatever may be the
+truth on't I trust Providence will settle it all for the best, as He
+always do.'
+
+'Ay, ay, Elizabeth,' rejoined Mrs. Crickett with a satirical sigh,
+as she turned on her foot to go home, 'good people like you may say
+so, but I have always found Providence a different sort of feller.'
+
+5. NOVEMBER THE TWENTIETH
+
+It was Miss Aldclyffe's custom, a custom originated by her father,
+and nourished by her own exclusiveness, to unlock the post-bag
+herself every morning, instead of allowing the duty to devolve on
+the butler, as was the case in most of the neighbouring county
+families. The bag was brought upstairs each morning to her
+dressing-room, where she took out the contents, mostly in the
+presence of her maid and Cytherea, who had the entree of the chamber
+at all hours, and attended there in the morning at a kind of
+reception on a small scale, which was held by Miss Aldclyffe of her
+namesake only.
+
+Here she read her letters before the glass, whilst undergoing the
+operation of being brushed and dressed.
+
+'What woman can this be, I wonder?' she said on the morning
+succeeding that of the last section. '"London, N.!" It is the
+first time in my life I ever had a letter from that outlandish
+place, the North side of London.'
+
+Cytherea had just come into her presence to learn if there was
+anything for herself; and on being thus addressed, walked up to Miss
+Aldclyffe's corner of the room to look at the curiosity which had
+raised such an exclamation. But the lady, having opened the
+envelope and read a few lines, put it quickly in her pocket, before
+Cytherea could reach her side.
+
+'O, 'tis nothing,' she said. She proceeded to make general remarks
+in a noticeably forced tone of sang-froid, from which she soon
+lapsed into silence. Not another word was said about the letter:
+she seemed very anxious to get her dressing done, and the room
+cleared. Thereupon Cytherea went away to the other window, and a
+few minutes later left the room to follow her own pursuits.
+
+It was late when Miss Aldclyffe descended to the breakfast-table and
+then she seemed there to no purpose; tea, coffee, eggs, cutlets, and
+all their accessories, were left absolutely untasted. The next that
+was seen of her was when walking up and down the south terrace, and
+round the flower-beds; her face was pale, and her tread was fitful,
+and she crumpled a letter in her hand.
+
+Dinner-time came round as usual; she did not speak ten words, or
+indeed seem conscious of the meal; for all that Miss Aldclyffe did
+in the way of eating, dinner might have been taken out as intact as
+it was taken in.
+
+In her own private apartment Miss Aldclyffe again pulled out the
+letter of the morning. One passage in it ran thus:--
+
+
+'Of course, being his wife, I could publish the fact, and compel him
+to acknowledge me at any moment, notwithstanding his threats, and
+reasonings that it will be better to wait. I have waited, and
+waited again, and the time for such acknowledgment seems no nearer
+than at first. To show you how patiently I have waited I can tell
+you that not till a fortnight ago, when by stress of circumstances I
+had been driven to new lodgings, have I ever assumed my married
+name, solely on account of its having been his request all along
+that I should not do it. This writing to you, madam, is my first
+disobedience, and I am justified in it. A woman who is driven to
+visit her husband like a thief in the night and then sent away like
+a street dog--left to get up, unbolt, unbar, and find her way out of
+the house as she best may--is justified in doing anything.
+
+'But should I demand of him a restitution of rights, there would be
+involved a publicity which I could not endure, and a noisy scandal
+flinging my name the length and breadth of the country.
+
+'What I still prefer to any such violent means is that you reason
+with him privately, and compel him to bring me home to your parish
+in a decent and careful manner, in the way that would be adopted by
+any respectable man, whose wife had been living away from him for
+some time, by reason, say, of peculiar family circumstances which
+had caused disunion, but not enmity, and who at length was enabled
+to reinstate her in his house.
+
+'You will, I know, oblige me in this, especially as knowledge of a
+peculiar transaction of your own, which took place some years ago,
+has lately come to me in a singular way. I will not at present
+trouble you by describing how. It is enough, that I alone, of all
+people living, know _all the sides of the story_, those from whom I
+collected it having each only a partial knowledge which confuses
+them and points to nothing. One person knows of your early
+engagement and its sudden termination; another, of the reason of
+those strange meetings at inns and coffee-houses; another, of what
+was sufficient to cause all this, and so on. I know what fits one
+and all the circumstances like a key, and shows them to be the
+natural outcrop of a rational (though rather rash) line of conduct
+for a young lady. You will at once perceive how it was that some at
+least of these things were revealed to me.
+
+'This knowledge then, common to, and secretly treasured by us both,
+is the ground upon which I beg for your friendship and help, with a
+feeling that you will be too generous to refuse it to me.
+
+'I may add that, as yet, my husband knows nothing of this, neither
+need he if you remember my request.'
+
+
+'A threat--a flat stinging threat! as delicately wrapped up in words
+as the woman could do it; a threat from a miserable unknown creature
+to an Aldclyffe, and not the least proud member of the family
+either! A threat on his account--O, O! shall it be?'
+
+Presently this humour of defiance vanished, and the members of her
+body became supple again, her proceedings proving that it was
+absolutely necessary to give way, Aldclyffe as she was. She wrote a
+short answer to Mrs. Manston, saying civilly that Mr. Manston's
+possession of such a near relation was a fact quite new to herself,
+and that she would see what could be done in such an unfortunate
+affair.
+
+6. NOVEMBER THE TWENTY-FIRST
+
+Manston received a message the next day requesting his attendance at
+the House punctually at eight o'clock the ensuing evening. Miss
+Aldclyffe was brave and imperious, but with the purpose she had in
+view she could not look him in the face whilst daylight shone upon
+her.
+
+The steward was shown into the library. On entering it, he was
+immediately struck with the unusual gloom which pervaded the
+apartment. The fire was dead and dull, one lamp, and that a
+comparatively small one, was burning at the extreme end, leaving the
+main proportion of the lofty and sombre room in an artificial
+twilight, scarcely powerful enough to render visible the titles of
+the folio and quarto volumes which were jammed into the lower tiers
+of the bookshelves.
+
+After keeping him waiting for more than twenty minutes (Miss
+Aldclyffe knew that excellent recipe for taking the stiffness out of
+human flesh, and for extracting all pre-arrangement from human
+speech) she entered the room.
+
+Manston sought her eye directly. The hue of her features was not
+discernible, but the calm glance she flung at him, from which all
+attempt at returning his scrutiny was absent, awoke him to the
+perception that probably his secret was by some means or other known
+to her; how it had become known he could not tell.
+
+She drew forth the letter, unfolded it, and held it up to him,
+letting it hang by one corner from between her finger and thumb, so
+that the light from the lamp, though remote, fell directly upon its
+surface.
+
+'You know whose writing this is?' she said.
+
+He saw the strokes plainly, instantly resolving to burn his ships
+and hazard all on an advance.
+
+'My wife's,' he said calmly.
+
+His quiet answer threw her off her balance. She had no more
+expected an answer than does a preacher when he exclaims from the
+pulpit, 'Do you feel your sin?' She had clearly expected a sudden
+alarm.
+
+'And why all this concealment?' she said again, her voice rising, as
+she vainly endeavoured to control her feelings, whatever they were.
+
+'It doesn't follow that, because a man is married, he must tell
+every stranger of it, madam,' he answered, just as calmly as before.
+
+'Stranger! well, perhaps not; but, Mr. Manston, why did you choose
+to conceal it, I ask again? I have a perfect right to ask this
+question, as you will perceive, if you consider the terms of my
+advertisement.'
+
+'I will tell you. There were two simple reasons. The first was
+this practical one; you advertised for an unmarried man, if you
+remember?'
+
+'Of course I remember.'
+
+'Well, an incident suggested to me that I should try for the
+situation. I was married; but, knowing that in getting an office
+where there is a restriction of this kind, leaving one's wife behind
+is always accepted as a fulfilment of the condition, I left her
+behind for awhile. The other reason is, that these terms of yours
+afforded me a plausible excuse for escaping (for a short time) the
+company of a woman I had been mistaken in marrying.'
+
+'Mistaken! what was she?' the lady inquired.
+
+'A third-rate actress, whom I met with during my stay in Liverpool
+last summer, where I had gone to fulfil a short engagement with an
+architect.'
+
+'Where did she come from?'
+
+'She is an American by birth, and I grew to dislike her when we had
+been married a week.'
+
+'She was ugly, I imagine?'
+
+'She is not an ugly woman by any means.'
+
+'Up to the ordinary standard?'
+
+'Quite up to the ordinary standard--indeed, handsome. After a while
+we quarrelled and separated.'
+
+'You did not ill-use her, of course?' said Miss Aldclyffe, with a
+little sarcasm.
+
+'I did not.'
+
+'But at any rate, you got thoroughly tired of her.'
+
+Manston looked as if he began to think her questions out of place;
+however, he said quietly, 'I did get tired of her. I never told her
+so, but we separated; I to come here, bringing her with me as far as
+London and leaving her there in perfectly comfortable quarters; and
+though your advertisement expressed a single man, I have always
+intended to tell you the whole truth; and this was when I was going
+to tell it, when your satisfaction with my careful management of
+your affairs should have proved the risk to be a safe one to run.'
+
+She bowed.
+
+'Then I saw that you were good enough to be interested in my welfare
+to a greater extent than I could have anticipated or hoped, judging
+you by the frigidity of other employers, and this caused me to
+hesitate. I was vexed at the complication of affairs. So matters
+stood till three nights ago; I was then walking home from the
+pottery, and came up to the railway. The down-train came along
+close to me, and there, sitting at a carriage window, I saw my wife:
+she had found out my address, and had thereupon determined to follow
+me here. I had not been home many minutes before she came in, next
+morning early she left again--'
+
+'Because you treated her so cavalierly?'
+
+'And as I suppose, wrote to you directly. That's the whole story of
+her, madam.' Whatever were Manston's real feelings towards the lady
+who had received his explanation in these supercilious tones, they
+remained locked within him as within a casket of steel.
+
+'Did your friends know of your marriage, Mr. Manston?' she continued.
+
+'Nobody at all; we kept it a secret for various reasons.'
+
+'It is true then that, as your wife tells me in this letter, she has
+not passed as Mrs. Manston till within these last few days?'
+
+'It is quite true; I was in receipt of a very small and uncertain
+income when we married; and so she continued playing at the theatre
+as before our marriage, and in her maiden name.'
+
+'Has she any friends?'
+
+'I have never heard that she has any in England. She came over here
+on some theatrical speculation, as one of a company who were going
+to do much, but who never did anything; and here she has remained.'
+
+A pause ensued, which was terminated by Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+'I understand,' she said. 'Now, though I have no direct right to
+concern myself with your private affairs (beyond those which arise
+from your misleading me and getting the office you hold)--'
+
+'As to that, madam,' he interrupted, rather hotly, 'as to coming
+here, I am vexed as much as you. Somebody, a member of the
+Institute of Architects--who, I could never tell--sent to my old
+address in London your advertisement cut from the paper; it was
+forwarded to me; I wanted to get away from Liverpool, and it seemed
+as if this was put in my way on purpose, by some old friend or
+other. I answered the advertisement certainly, but I was not
+particularly anxious to come here, nor am I anxious to stay.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe descended from haughty superiority to womanly
+persuasion with a haste which was almost ludicrous. Indeed, the
+Quos ego of the whole lecture had been less the genuine menace of
+the imperious ruler of Knapwater than an artificial utterance to
+hide a failing heart.
+
+'Now, now, Mr. Manston, you wrong me; don't suppose I wish to be
+overbearing, or anything of the kind; and you will allow me to say
+this much, at any rate, that I have become interested in your wife,
+as well as in yourself.'
+
+'Certainly, madam,' he said, slowly, like a man feeling his way in
+the dark. Manston was utterly at fault now. His previous
+experience of the effect of his form and features upon womankind en
+masse, had taught him to flatter himself that he could account by
+the same law of natural selection for the extraordinary interest
+Miss Aldclyffe had hitherto taken in him, as an unmarried man; an
+interest he did not at all object to, seeing that it kept him near
+Cytherea, and enabled him, a man of no wealth, to rule on the estate
+as if he were its lawful owner. Like Curius at his Sabine farm, he
+had counted it his glory not to possess gold himself, but to have
+power over her who did. But at this hint of the lady's wish to take
+his wife under her wing also, he was perplexed: could she have any
+sinister motive in doing so? But he did not allow himself to be
+troubled with these doubts, which only concerned his wife's
+happiness.
+
+'She tells me,' continued Miss Aldclyffe, 'how utterly alone in the
+world she stands, and that is an additional reason why I should
+sympathize with her. Instead, then, of requesting the favour of
+your retirement from the post, and dismissing your interests
+altogether, I will retain you as my steward still, on condition that
+you bring home your wife, and live with her respectably, in short,
+as if you loved her; you understand. I _wish_ you to stay here if you
+grant that everything shall flow smoothly between yourself and her.'
+
+The breast and shoulders of the steward rose, as if an expression of
+defiance was about to be poured forth; before it took form, he
+controlled himself and said, in his natural voice--
+
+'My part of the performance shall be carried out, madam.'
+
+'And her anxiety to obtain a standing in the world ensures that hers
+will,' replied Miss Aldclyffe. 'That will be satisfactory, then.'
+
+After a few additional remarks, she gently signified that she wished
+to put an end to the interview. The steward took the hint and
+retired.
+
+He felt vexed and mortified; yet in walking homeward he was
+convinced that telling the whole truth as he had done, with the
+single exception of his love for Cytherea (which he tried to hide
+even from himself), had never served him in better stead than it had
+done that night.
+
+Manston went to his desk and thought of Cytherea's beauty with the
+bitterest, wildest regret. After the lapse of a few minutes he
+calmed himself by a stoical effort, and wrote the subjoined letter
+to his wife:--
+
+
+                                        'KNAPWATER,
+                                         November 21, 1864.
+
+'DEAR EUNICE,--I hope you reached London safely after your flighty
+visit to me.
+
+'As I promised, I have thought over our conversation that night, and
+your wish that your coming here should be no longer delayed. After
+all, it was perfectly natural that you should have spoken unkindly
+as you did, ignorant as you were of the circumstances which bound
+me.
+
+'So I have made arrangements to fetch you home at once. It is
+hardly worth while for you to attempt to bring with you any luggage
+you may have gathered about you (beyond mere clothing). Dispose of
+superfluous things at a broker's; your bringing them would only make
+a talk in this parish, and lead people to believe we had long been
+keeping house separately.
+
+'Will next Monday suit you for coming? You have nothing to do that
+can occupy you for more than a day or two, as far as I can see, and
+the remainder of this week will afford ample time. I can be in
+London the night before, and we will come down together by the
+mid-day train--Your very affectionate husband,
+
+                                       'AENEAS MANSTON.
+
+'Now, of course, I shall no longer write to you as Mrs. Rondley.'
+
+
+The address on the envelope was--
+
+MRS. MANSTON,
+   41 CHARLES SQUARE,
+     HOXTON,
+        LONDON, N.
+
+He took the letter to the house, and it being too late for the
+country post, sent one of the stablemen with it to Casterbridge,
+instead of troubling to go to Budmouth with it himself as
+heretofore. He had no longer any necessity to keep his condition a
+secret.
+
+7. FROM THE TWENTY-SECOND TO THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF NOVEMBER
+
+But the next morning Manston found that he had been forgetful of
+another matter, in naming the following Monday to his wife for the
+journey.
+
+The fact was this. A letter had just come, reminding him that he
+had left the whole of the succeeding week open for an important
+business engagement with a neighbouring land-agent, at that
+gentleman's residence thirteen miles off. The particular day he had
+suggested to his wife, had, in the interim, been appropriated by his
+correspondent. The meeting could not now be put off.
+
+So he wrote again to his wife, stating that business, which could
+not be postponed, called him away from home on Monday, and would
+entirely prevent him coming all the way to fetch her on Sunday night
+as he had intended, but that he would meet her at the Carriford Road
+Station with a conveyance when she arrived there in the evening.
+
+The next day came his wife's answer to his first letter, in which
+she said that she would be ready to be fetched at the time named.
+Having already written his second letter, which was by that time in
+her hands, he made no further reply.
+
+The week passed away. The steward had, in the meantime, let it
+become generally known in the village that he was a married man, and
+by a little judicious management, sound family reasons for his past
+secrecy upon the subject, which were floated as adjuncts to the
+story, were placidly received; they seemed so natural and
+justifiable to the unsophisticated minds of nine-tenths of his
+neighbours, that curiosity in the matter, beyond a strong curiosity
+to see the lady's face, was well-nigh extinguished.
+
+
+
+X. THE EVENTS OF A DAY AND NIGHT
+
+1. NOVEMBER THE TWENTY-EIGHTH. UNTIL TEN P.M.
+
+Monday came, the day named for Mrs. Manston's journey from London to
+her husband's house; a day of singular and great events, influencing
+the present and future of nearly all the personages whose actions in
+a complex drama form the subject of this record.
+
+The proceedings of the steward demand the first notice. Whilst
+taking his breakfast on this particular morning, the clock pointing
+to eight, the horse-and-gig that was to take him to Chettlewood
+waiting ready at the door, Manston hurriedly cast his eyes down the
+column of Bradshaw which showed the details and duration of the
+selected train's journey.
+
+The inspection was carelessly made, the leaf being kept open by the
+aid of one hand, whilst the other still held his cup of coffee; much
+more carelessly than would have been the case had the expected
+new-comer been Cytherea Graye, instead of his lawful wife.
+
+He did not perceive, branching from the column down which his finger
+ran, a small twist, called a shunting-line, inserted at a particular
+place, to imply that at that point the train was divided into two.
+By this oversight he understood that the arrival of his wife at
+Carriford Road Station would not be till late in the evening: by
+the second half of the train, containing the third-class passengers,
+and passing two hours and three-quarters later than the previous
+one, by which the lady, as a second-class passenger, would really be
+brought.
+
+He then considered that there would be plenty of time for him to
+return from his day's engagement to meet this train. He finished
+his breakfast, gave proper and precise directions to his servant on
+the preparations that were to be made for the lady's reception,
+jumped into his gig, and drove off to Lord Claydonfield's, at
+Chettlewood.
+
+He went along by the front of Knapwater House. He could not help
+turning to look at what he knew to be the window of Cytherea's room.
+Whilst he looked, a hopeless expression of passionate love and
+sensuous anguish came upon his face and lingered there for a few
+seconds; then, as on previous occasions, it was resolutely
+repressed, and he trotted along the smooth white road, again
+endeavouring to banish all thought of the young girl whose beauty
+and grace had so enslaved him.
+
+Thus it was that when, in the evening of the same day, Mrs. Manston
+reached Carriford Road Station, her husband was still at
+Chettlewood, ignorant of her arrival, and on looking up and down the
+platform, dreary with autumn gloom and wind, she could see no sign
+that any preparation whatever had been made for her reception and
+conduct home.
+
+The train went on. She waited, fidgeted with the handle of her
+umbrella, walked about, strained her eyes into the gloom of the
+chilly night, listened for wheels, tapped with her foot, and showed
+all the usual signs of annoyance and irritation: she was the more
+irritated in that this seemed a second and culminating instance of
+her husband's neglect--the first having been shown in his not
+fetching her.
+
+Reflecting awhile upon the course it would be best to take, in order
+to secure a passage to Knapwater, she decided to leave all her
+luggage, except a dressing-bag, in the cloak-room, and walk to her
+husband's house, as she had done on her first visit. She asked one
+of the porters if he could find a lad to go with her and carry her
+bag: he offered to do it himself.
+
+The porter was a good-tempered, shallow-minded, ignorant man. Mrs.
+Manston, being apparently in very gloomy spirits, would probably
+have preferred walking beside him without saying a word: but her
+companion would not allow silence to continue between them for a
+longer period than two or three minutes together.
+
+He had volunteered several remarks upon her arrival, chiefly to the
+effect that it was very unfortunate Mr. Manston had not come to the
+station for her, when she suddenly asked him concerning the
+inhabitants of the parish.
+
+He told her categorically the names of the chief--first the chief
+possessors of property; then of brains; then of good looks. As
+first among the latter he mentioned Miss Cytherea Graye.
+
+After getting him to describe her appearance as completely as lay in
+his power, she wormed out of him the statement that everybody had
+been saying--before Mrs. Manston's existence was heard of--how well
+the handsome Mr. Manston and the beautiful Miss Graye were suited
+for each other as man and wife, and that Miss Aldclyffe was the only
+one in the parish who took no interest in bringing about the match.
+
+'He rather liked her you think?'
+
+The porter began to think he had been too explicit, and hastened to
+correct the error.
+
+'O no, he don't care a bit about her, ma'am,' he said solemnly.
+
+'Not more than he does about me?'
+
+'Not a bit.'
+
+'Then that must be little indeed,' Mrs. Manston murmured. She stood
+still, as if reflecting upon the painful neglect her words had
+recalled to her mind; then, with a sudden impulse, turned round, and
+walked petulantly a few steps back again in the direction of the
+station.
+
+The porter stood still and looked surprised.
+
+'I'll go back again; yes, indeed, I'll go back again!' she said
+plaintively. Then she paused and looked anxiously up and down the
+deserted road.
+
+'No, I mustn't go back now,' she continued, in a tone of
+resignation. Seeing that the porter was watching her, she turned
+about and came on as before, giving vent to a slight laugh.
+
+It was a laugh full of character; the low forced laugh which seeks
+to hide the painful perception of a humiliating position under the
+mask of indifference.
+
+Altogether her conduct had shown her to be what in fact she was, a
+weak, though a calculating woman, one clever to conceive, weak to
+execute: one whose best-laid schemes were for ever liable to be
+frustrated by the ineradicable blight of vacillation at the critical
+hour of action.
+
+'O, if I had only known that all this was going to happen!' she
+murmured again, as they paced along upon the rustling leaves.
+
+'What did you say, ma'am?' said the porter.
+
+'O, nothing particular; we are getting near the old manor-house by
+this time, I imagine?'
+
+'Very near now, ma'am.'
+
+They soon reached Manston's residence, round which the wind blew
+mournfully and chill.
+
+Passing under the detached gateway, they entered the porch. The
+porter stepped forward, knocked heavily and waited.
+
+Nobody came.
+
+Mrs. Manston then advanced to the door and gave a different series
+of rappings--less forcible, but more sustained.
+
+There was not a movement of any kind inside, not a ray of light
+visible; nothing but the echo of her own knocks through the
+passages, and the dry scratching of the withered leaves blown about
+her feet upon the floor of the porch.
+
+The steward, of course, was not at home. Mrs. Crickett, not
+expecting that anybody would arrive till the time of the later
+train, had set the place in order, laid the supper-table, and then
+locked the door, to go into the village and converse with her
+friends.
+
+'Is there an inn in the village?' said Mrs. Manston, after the
+fourth and loudest rapping upon the iron-studded old door had
+resulted only in the fourth and loudest echo from the passages
+inside.
+
+'Yes, ma'am.'
+
+'Who keeps it?'
+
+'Farmer Springrove.'
+
+'I will go there to-night,' she said decisively. 'It is too cold,
+and altogether too bad, for a woman to wait in the open road on
+anybody's account, gentle or simple.'
+
+They went down the park and through the gate, into the village of
+Carriford. By the time they reached the Three Tranters, it was
+verging upon ten o'clock. There, on the spot where two months
+earlier in the season the sunny and lively group of villagers making
+cider under the trees had greeted Cytherea's eyes, was nothing now
+intelligible but a vast cloak of darkness, from which came the low
+sough of the elms, and the occasional creak of the swinging sign.
+
+They went to the door, Mrs. Manston shivering; but less from the
+cold, than from the dreariness of her emotions. Neglect is the
+coldest of winter winds.
+
+It so happened that Edward Springrove was expected to arrive from
+London either on that evening or the next, and at the sound of
+voices his father came to the door fully expecting to see him. A
+picture of disappointment seldom witnessed in a man's face was
+visible in old Mr. Springrove's, when he saw that the comer was a
+stranger.
+
+Mrs. Manston asked for a room, and one that had been prepared for
+Edward was immediately named as being ready for her, another being
+adaptable for Edward, should he come in.
+
+Without taking any refreshment, or entering any room downstairs, or
+even lifting her veil, she walked straight along the passage and up
+to her apartment, the chambermaid preceding her.
+
+'If Mr. Manston comes to-night,' she said, sitting on the bed as she
+had come in, and addressing the woman, 'tell him I cannot see him.'
+
+'Yes, ma'am.'
+
+The woman left the room, and Mrs. Manston locked the door. Before
+the servant had gone down more than two or three stairs, Mrs.
+Manston unfastened the door again, and held it ajar.
+
+'Bring me some brandy,' she said.
+
+The chambermaid went down to the bar and brought up the spirit in a
+tumbler. When she came into the room, Mrs. Manston had not removed
+a single article of apparel, and was walking up and down, as if
+still quite undecided upon the course it was best to adopt.
+
+Outside the door, when it was closed upon her, the maid paused to
+listen for an instant. She heard Mrs. Manston talking to herself.
+
+'This is welcome home!' she said.
+
+2. FROM TEN TO HALF-PAST ELEVEN P.M.
+
+A strange concurrence of phenomena now confronts us.
+
+During the autumn in which the past scenes were enacted, Mr.
+Springrove had ploughed, harrowed, and cleaned a narrow and shaded
+piece of ground, lying at the back of his house, which for many
+years had been looked upon as irreclaimable waste.
+
+The couch-grass extracted from the soil had been left to wither in
+the sun; afterwards it was raked together, lighted in the customary
+way, and now lay smouldering in a large heap in the middle of the
+plot.
+
+It had been kindled three days previous to Mrs. Manston's arrival,
+and one or two villagers, of a more cautious and less sanguine
+temperament than Springrove, had suggested that the fire was almost
+too near the back of the house for its continuance to be unattended
+with risk; for though no danger could be apprehended whilst the air
+remained moderately still, a brisk breeze blowing towards the house
+might possibly carry a spark across.
+
+'Ay, that's true enough,' said Springrove. 'I must look round
+before going to bed and see that everything's safe; but to tell the
+truth I am anxious to get the rubbish burnt up before the rain comes
+to wash it into ground again. As to carrying the couch into the
+back field to burn, and bringing it back again, why, 'tis more than
+the ashes would be worth.'
+
+'Well, that's very true,' said the neighbours, and passed on.
+
+Two or three times during the first evening after the heap was lit,
+he went to the back door to take a survey. Before bolting and
+barring up for the night, he made a final and more careful
+examination. The slowly-smoking pile showed not the slightest signs
+of activity. Springrove's perfectly sound conclusion was, that as
+long as the heap was not stirred, and the wind continued in the
+quarter it blew from then, the couch would not flame, and that there
+could be no shadow of danger to anything, even a combustible
+substance, though it were no more than a yard off.
+
+The next morning the burning couch was discovered in precisely the
+same state as when he had gone to bed the preceding night. The heap
+smoked in the same manner the whole of that day: at bed-time the
+farmer looked towards it, but less carefully than on the first
+night.
+
+The morning and the whole of the third day still saw the heap in its
+old smouldering condition; indeed, the smoke was less, and there
+seemed a probability that it might have to be re-kindled on the
+morrow.
+
+After admitting Mrs. Manston to his house in the evening, and
+hearing her retire, Mr. Springrove returned to the front door to
+listen for a sound of his son, and inquired concerning him of the
+railway-porter, who sat for a while in the kitchen. The porter had
+not noticed young Mr. Springrove get out of the train, at which
+intelligence the old man concluded that he would probably not see
+his son till the next day, as Edward had hitherto made a point of
+coming by the train which had brought Mrs. Manston.
+
+Half-an-hour later the porter left the inn, Springrove at the same
+time going to the door to listen again an instant, then he walked
+round and in at the back of the house.
+
+The farmer glanced at the heap casually and indifferently in
+passing; two nights of safety seemed to ensure the third; and he was
+about to bolt and bar as usual, when the idea struck him that there
+was just a possibility of his son's return by the latest train,
+unlikely as it was that he would be so delayed. The old man
+thereupon left the door unfastened, looked to his usual matters
+indoors, and went to bed, it being then half-past ten o'clock.
+
+Farmers and horticulturists well know that it is in the nature of a
+heap of couch-grass, when kindled in calm weather, to smoulder for
+many days, and even weeks, until the whole mass is reduced to a
+powdery charcoal ash, displaying the while scarcely a sign of
+combustion beyond the volcano-like smoke from its summit; but the
+continuance of this quiet process is throughout its length at the
+mercy of one particular whim of Nature: that is, a sudden breeze,
+by which the heap is liable to be fanned into a flame so brisk as to
+consume the whole in an hour or two.
+
+Had the farmer narrowly watched the pile when he went to close the
+door, he would have seen, besides the familiar twine of smoke from
+its summit, a quivering of the air around the mass, showing that a
+considerable heat had arisen inside.
+
+As the railway-porter turned the corner of the row of houses
+adjoining the Three Tranters, a brisk new wind greeted his face, and
+spread past him into the village. He walked along the high-road
+till he came to a gate, about three hundred yards from the inn.
+Over the gate could be discerned the situation of the building he
+had just quitted. He carelessly turned his head in passing, and saw
+behind him a clear red glow indicating the position of the
+couch-heap: a glow without a flame, increasing and diminishing in
+brightness as the breeze quickened or fell, like the coal of a newly
+lighted cigar. If those cottages had been his, he thought, he
+should not care to have a fire so near them as that--and the wind
+rising. But the cottages not being his, he went on his way to the
+station, where he was about to resume duty for the night. The road
+was now quite deserted: till four o'clock the next morning, when
+the carters would go by to the stables there was little probability
+of any human being passing the Three Tranters Inn.
+
+By eleven, everybody in the house was asleep. It truly seemed as if
+the treacherous element knew there had arisen a grand opportunity
+for devastation.
+
+At a quarter past eleven a slight stealthy crackle made itself heard
+amid the increasing moans of the night wind; the heap glowed
+brighter still, and burst into a flame; the flame sank, another
+breeze entered it, sustained it, and it grew to be first continuous
+and weak, then continuous and strong.
+
+At twenty minutes past eleven a blast of wind carried an airy bit of
+ignited fern several yards forward, in a direction parallel to the
+houses and inn, and there deposited it on the ground.
+
+Five minutes later another puff of wind carried a similar piece to a
+distance of five-and-twenty yards, where it also was dropped softly
+on the ground.
+
+Still the wind did not blow in the direction of the houses, and even
+now to a casual observer they would have appeared safe. But Nature
+does few things directly. A minute later yet, an ignited fragment
+fell upon the straw covering of a long thatched heap or 'grave' of
+mangel-wurzel, lying in a direction at right angles to the house,
+and down toward the hedge. There the fragment faded to darkness.
+
+A short time subsequent to this, after many intermediate deposits
+and seemingly baffled attempts, another fragment fell on the
+mangel-wurzel grave, and continued to glow; the glow was increased by
+the wind; the straw caught fire and burst into flame. It was inevitable
+that the flame should run along the ridge of the thatch towards a
+piggery at the end. Yet had the piggery been tiled, the
+time-honoured hostel would even now at this last moment have been safe;
+but it was constructed as piggeries are mostly constructed, of wood
+and thatch. The hurdles and straw roof of the frail erection became
+ignited in their turn, and abutting as the shed did on the back of
+the inn, flamed up to the eaves of the main roof in less than thirty
+seconds.
+
+3. HALF-PAST ELEVEN TO TWELVE P.M.
+
+A hazardous length of time elapsed before the inmates of the Three
+Tranters knew of their danger. When at length the discovery was
+made, the rush was a rush for bare life.
+
+A man's voice calling, then screams, then loud stamping and shouts
+were heard.
+
+Mr. Springrove ran out first. Two minutes later appeared the ostler
+and chambermaid, who were man and wife. The inn, as has been
+stated, was a quaint old building, and as inflammable as a bee-hive;
+it overhung the base at the level of the first floor, and again
+overhung at the eaves, which were finished with heavy oak
+barge-boards; every atom in its substance, every feature in its
+construction, favoured the fire.
+
+The forked flames, lurid and smoky, became nearly lost to view,
+bursting forth again with a bound and loud crackle, increased
+tenfold in power and brightness. The crackling grew sharper. Long
+quivering shadows began to be flung from the stately trees at the
+end of the house; the square outline of the church tower, on the
+other side of the way, which had hitherto been a dark mass against a
+sky comparatively light, now began to appear as a light object
+against a sky of darkness; and even the narrow surface of the
+flag-staff at the top could be seen in its dark surrounding, brought
+out from its obscurity by the rays from the dancing light.
+
+Shouts and other noises increased in loudness and frequency. The
+lapse of ten minutes brought most of the inhabitants of that end of
+the village into the street, followed in a short time by the rector,
+Mr. Raunham.
+
+Casting a hasty glance up and down, he beckoned to one or two of the
+men, and vanished again. In a short time wheels were heard, and Mr.
+Raunham and the men reappeared, with the garden engine, the only one
+in the village, except that at Knapwater House. After some little
+trouble the hose was connected with a tank in the old stable-yard,
+and the puny instrument began to play.
+
+Several seemed paralyzed at first, and stood transfixed, their rigid
+faces looking like red-hot iron in the glaring light. In the
+confusion a woman cried, 'Ring the bells backwards!' and three or
+four of the old and superstitious entered the belfry and jangled
+them indescribably. Some were only half dressed, and, to add to the
+horror, among them was Clerk Crickett, running up and down with a
+face streaming with blood, ghastly and pitiful to see, his
+excitement being so great that he had not the slightest conception
+of how, when, or where he came by the wound.
+
+The crowd was now busy at work, and tried to save a little of the
+furniture of the inn. The only room they could enter was the
+parlour, from which they managed to bring out the bureau, a few
+chairs, some old silver candlesticks, and half-a-dozen light
+articles; but these were all.
+
+Fiery mats of thatch slid off the roof and fell into the road with a
+deadened thud, whilst white flakes of straw and wood-ash were flying
+in the wind like feathers. At the same time two of the cottages
+adjoining, upon which a little water had been brought to play from
+the rector's engine, were seen to be on fire. The attenuated spirt
+of water was as nothing upon the heated and dry surface of the
+thatched roof; the fire prevailed without a minute's hindrance, and
+dived through to the rafters.
+
+Suddenly arose a cry, 'Where's Mr. Springrove?'
+
+He had vanished from the spot by the churchyard wall, where he had
+been standing a few minutes earlier.
+
+'I fancy he's gone inside,' said a voice.
+
+'Madness and folly! what can he save?' said another. 'Good God,
+find him! Help here!'
+
+A wild rush was made at the door, which had fallen to, and in
+defiance of the scorching flame that burst forth, three men forced
+themselves through it. Immediately inside the threshold they found
+the object of their search lying senseless on the floor of the
+passage.
+
+To bring him out and lay him on a bank was the work of an instant; a
+basin of cold water was dashed in his face, and he began to recover
+consciousness, but very slowly. He had been saved by a miracle. No
+sooner were his preservers out of the building than the
+window-frames lit up as if by magic with deep and waving fringes of
+flames. Simultaneously, the joints of the boards forming the front
+door started into view as glowing bars of fire: a star of red light
+penetrated the centre, gradually increasing in size till the flames
+rushed forth.
+
+Then the staircase fell.
+
+'Everybody is out safe,' said a voice.
+
+'Yes, thank God!' said three or four others.
+
+'O, we forgot that a stranger came! I think she is safe.'
+
+'I hope she is,' said the weak voice of some one coming up from
+behind. It was the chambermaid's.
+
+Springrove at that moment aroused himself; he staggered to his feet,
+and threw his hands up wildly.
+
+'Everybody, no! no! The lady who came by train, Mrs. Manston! I
+tried to fetch her out, but I fell.'
+
+An exclamation of horror burst from the crowd; it was caused partly
+by this disclosure of Springrove, more by the added perception which
+followed his words.
+
+An average interval of about three minutes had elapsed between one
+intensely fierce gust of wind and the next, and now another poured
+over them; the roof swayed, and a moment afterwards fell in with a
+crash, pulling the gable after it, and thrusting outwards the front
+wall of wood-work, which fell into the road with a rumbling echo; a
+cloud of black dust, myriads of sparks, and a great outburst of
+flame followed the uproar of the fall.
+
+'Who is she? what is she?' burst from every lip again and again,
+incoherently, and without leaving a sufficient pause for a reply,
+had a reply been volunteered.
+
+The autumn wind, tameless, and swift, and proud, still blew upon the
+dying old house, which was constructed so entirely of combustible
+materials that it burnt almost as fiercely as a corn-rick. The heat
+in the road increased, and now for an instant at the height of the
+conflagration all stood still, and gazed silently, awestruck and
+helpless, in the presence of so irresistible an enemy. Then, with
+minds full of the tragedy unfolded to them, they rushed forward
+again with the obtuse directness of waves, to their labour of saving
+goods from the houses adjoining, which it was evident were all
+doomed to destruction.
+
+The minutes passed by. The Three Tranters Inn sank into a mere heap
+of red-hot charcoal: the fire pushed its way down the row as the
+church clock opposite slowly struck the hour of midnight, and the
+bewildered chimes, scarcely heard amid the crackling of the flames,
+wandered through the wayward air of the Old Hundred-and-Thirteenth
+Psalm.
+
+4. NINE TO ELEVEN P.M.
+
+Manston mounted his gig and set out from Chettlewood that evening in
+no very enviable frame of mind. The thought of domestic life in
+Knapwater Old House, with the now eclipsed wife of the past, was
+more than disagreeable, was positively distasteful to him.
+
+Yet he knew that the influential position, which, from whatever
+fortunate cause, he held on Miss Aldclyffe's manor, would never
+again fall to his lot on any other, and he tacitly assented to this
+dilemma, hoping that some consolation or other would soon suggest
+itself to him; married as he was, he was near Cytherea.
+
+He occasionally looked at his watch as he drove along the lanes,
+timing the pace of his horse by the hour, that he might reach
+Carriford Road Station just soon enough to meet the last London
+train.
+
+He soon began to notice in the sky a slight yellow halo, near the
+horizon. It rapidly increased; it changed colour, and grew redder;
+then the glare visibly brightened and dimmed at intervals, showing
+that its origin was affected by the strong wind prevailing.
+
+Manston reined in his horse on the summit of a hill, and considered.
+
+'It is a rick-yard on fire,' he thought; 'no house could produce
+such a raging flame so suddenly.'
+
+He trotted on again, attempting to particularize the local features
+in the neighbourhood of the fire; but this it was too dark to do,
+and the excessive winding of the roads misled him as to its
+direction, not being an old inhabitant of the district, or a
+countryman used to forming such judgments; whilst the brilliancy of
+the light shortened its real remoteness to an apparent distance of
+not more than half: it seemed so near that he again stopped his
+horse, this time to listen; but he could hear no sound.
+
+Entering now a narrow valley, the sides of which obscured the sky to
+an angle of perhaps thirty or forty degrees above the mathematical
+horizon, he was obliged to suspend his judgment till he was in
+possession of further knowledge, having however assumed in the
+interim, that the fire was somewhere between Carriford Road Station
+and the village.
+
+The self-same glare had just arrested the eyes of another man. He
+was at that minute gliding along several miles to the east of the
+steward's position, but nearing the same point as that to which
+Manston tended. The younger Edward Springrove was returning from
+London to his father's house by the identical train which the
+steward was expecting to bring his wife, the truth being that
+Edward's lateness was owing to the simplest of all causes, his
+temporary want of money, which led him to make a slow journey for
+the sake of travelling at third-class fare.
+
+Springrove had received Cytherea's bitter and admonitory letter, and
+he was clearly awakened to a perception of the false position in
+which he had placed himself, by keeping silence at Budmouth on his
+long engagement. An increasing reluctance to put an end to those
+few days of ecstasy with Cytherea had overruled his conscience, and
+tied his tongue till speaking was too late.
+
+'Why did I do it? how could I dream of loving her?' he asked himself
+as he walked by day, as he tossed on his bed by night: 'miserable
+folly!'
+
+An impressionable heart had for years--perhaps as many as six or
+seven years--been distracting him, by unconsciously setting itself
+to yearn for somebody wanting, he scarcely knew whom. Echoes of
+himself, though rarely, he now and then found. Sometimes they were
+men, sometimes women, his cousin Adelaide being one of these; for in
+spite of a fashion which pervades the whole community at the present
+day--the habit of exclaiming that woman is not undeveloped man, but
+diverse, the fact remains that, after all, women are Mankind, and
+that in many of the sentiments of life the difference of sex is but
+a difference of degree.
+
+But the indefinable helpmate to the remoter sides of himself still
+continued invisible. He grew older, and concluded that the ideas,
+or rather emotions, which possessed him on the subject, were
+probably too unreal ever to be found embodied in the flesh of a
+woman. Thereupon, he developed a plan of satisfying his dreams by
+wandering away to the heroines of poetical imagination, and took no
+further thought on the earthly realization of his formless desire,
+in more homely matters satisfying himself with his cousin.
+
+Cytherea appeared in the sky: his heart started up and spoke:
+
+     'Tis She, and here
+     Lo! I unclothe and clear
+     My wishes' cloudy character.'
+
+Some women kindle emotion so rapidly in a man's heart that the
+judgment cannot keep pace with its rise, and finds, on comprehending
+the situation, that faithfulness to the old love is already
+treachery to the new. Such women are not necessarily the greatest
+of their sex, but there are very few of them. Cytherea was one.
+
+On receiving the letter from her he had taken to thinking over these
+things, and had not answered it at all. But 'hungry generations'
+soon tread down the muser in a city. At length he thought of the
+strong necessity of living. After a dreary search, the negligence
+of which was ultimately overcome by mere conscientiousness, he
+obtained a situation as assistant to an architect in the
+neighbourhood of Charing Cross: the duties would not begin till
+after the lapse of a month.
+
+He could not at first decide whither he should go to spend the
+intervening time; but in the midst of his reasonings he found
+himself on the road homeward, impelled by a secret and unowned hope
+of getting a last glimpse of Cytherea there.
+
+5. MIDNIGHT
+
+It was a quarter to twelve when Manston drove into the station-yard.
+The train was punctual, and the bell, announcing its arrival, rang
+as he crossed the booking-office to go out upon the platform.
+
+The porter who had accompanied Mrs. Manston to Carriford, and had
+returned to the station on his night duty, recognized the steward as
+he entered, and immediately came towards him.
+
+'Mrs. Manston came by the nine o'clock train, sir,' he said.
+
+The steward gave vent to an expression of vexation.
+
+'Her luggage is here, sir,' the porter said.
+
+'Put it up behind me in the gig if it is not too much,' said
+Manston.
+
+'Directly this train is in and gone, sir.'
+
+The man vanished and crossed the line to meet the entering train.
+
+'Where is that fire?' Manston said to the booking-clerk.
+
+Before the clerk could speak, another man ran in and answered the
+question without having heard it.
+
+'Half Carriford is burnt down, or will be!' he exclaimed. 'You
+can't see the flames from this station on account of the trees, but
+step on the bridge--'tis tremendous!'
+
+He also crossed the line to assist at the entry of the train, which
+came in the next minute.
+
+The steward stood in the office. One passenger alighted, gave up
+his ticket, and crossed the room in front of Manston: a young man
+with a black bag and umbrella in his hand. He passed out of the
+door, down the steps, and struck out into the darkness.
+
+'Who was that young man?' said Manston, when the porter had
+returned. The young man, by a kind of magnetism, had drawn the
+steward's thoughts after him.
+
+'He's an architect.'
+
+'My own old profession. I could have sworn it by the cut of him,'
+Manston murmured. 'What's his name?' he said again.
+
+'Springrove--Farmer Springrove's son, Edward.'
+
+'Farmer Springrove's son, Edward,' the steward repeated to himself,
+and considered a matter to which the words had painfully recalled
+his mind.
+
+The matter was Miss Aldclyffe's mention of the young man as
+Cytherea's lover, which, indeed, had scarcely ever been absent from
+his thoughts.
+
+'But for the existence of my wife that man might have been my
+rival,' he pondered, following the porter, who had now come back to
+him, into the luggage-room. And whilst the man was carrying out and
+putting in one box, which was sufficiently portable for the gig,
+Manston still thought, as his eyes watched the process--
+
+'But for my wife, Springrove might have been my rival.'
+
+He examined the lamps of his gig, carefully laid out the reins,
+mounted the seat and drove along the turnpike-road towards Knapwater
+Park.
+
+The exact locality of the fire was plain to him as he neared home.
+He soon could hear the shout of men, the flapping of the flames, the
+crackling of burning wood, and could smell the smoke from the
+conflagration.
+
+Of a sudden, a few yards ahead, within the compass of the rays from
+the right-hand lamp, burst forward the figure of a man. Having been
+walking in darkness the newcomer raised his hands to his eyes, on
+approaching nearer, to screen them from the glare of the reflector.
+
+Manston saw that he was one of the villagers: a small farmer
+originally, who had drunk himself down to a day-labourer and reputed
+poacher.
+
+'Hoy!' cried Manston, aloud, that the man might step aside out of
+the way.
+
+'Is that Mr. Manston?' said the man.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Somebody ha' come to Carriford: and the rest of it may concern
+you, sir.'
+
+'Well, well.'
+
+'Did you expect Mrs. Manston to-night, sir?'
+
+'Yes, unfortunately she's come, I know, and asleep long before this
+time, I suppose.'
+
+The labourer leant his elbow upon the shaft of the gig and turned
+his face, pale and sweating from his late work at the fire, up to
+Manston's.
+
+'Yes, she did come,' he said. . . . 'I beg pardon, sir, but I
+should be glad of--of--'
+
+'What?'
+
+'Glad of a trifle for bringen ye the news.'
+
+'Not a farthing! I didn't want your news, I knew she was come.'
+
+'Won't you give me a shillen, sir?'
+
+'Certainly not.'
+
+'Then will you lend me a shillen, sir? I be tired out, and don't
+know what to do. If I don't pay you back some day I'll be d--d.'
+
+'The devil is so cheated that perdition isn't worth a penny as a
+security.'
+
+'Oh!'
+
+'Let me go on,' said Manston.
+
+'Thy wife is _dead_; that's the rest o' the news,' said the
+labourer slowly. He waited for a reply; none came.
+
+'She went to the Three Tranters, because she couldn't get into thy
+house, the burnen roof fell in upon her before she could be called
+up, and she's a cinder, as thou'lt be some day.'
+
+'That will do, let me drive on,' said the steward calmly.
+
+Expectation of a concussion may be so intense that its failure
+strikes the brain with more force than its fulfilment. The labourer
+sank back into the ditch. Such a Cushi could not realize the
+possibility of such an unmoved David as this.
+
+Manston drove hastily to the turning of the road, tied his horse,
+and ran on foot to the site of the fire.
+
+The stagnation caused by the awful accident had been passed through,
+and all hands were helping to remove from the remaining cottage what
+furniture they could lay hold of; the thatch of the roofs being
+already on fire. The Knapwater fire-engine had arrived on the spot,
+but it was small, and ineffectual. A group was collected round the
+rector, who in a coat which had become bespattered, scorched, and
+torn in his exertions, was directing on one hand the proceedings
+relative to the removal of goods into the church, and with the other
+was pointing out the spot on which it was most desirable that the
+puny engines at their disposal should be made to play. Every tongue
+was instantly silent at the sight of Manston's pale and clear
+countenance, which contrasted strangely with the grimy and streaming
+faces of the toiling villagers.
+
+'Was she burnt?' he said in a firm though husky voice, and stepping
+into the illuminated area. The rector came to him, and took him
+aside. 'Is she burnt?' repeated Manston.
+
+'She is dead: but thank God, she was spared the horrid agony of
+burning,' the rector said solemnly; 'the roof and gable fell in upon
+her, and crushed her. Instant death must have followed.'
+
+'Why was she here?' said Manston.
+
+'From what we can hurriedly collect, it seems that she found the
+door of your house locked, and concluded that you had retired, the
+fact being that your servant, Mrs. Crickett, had gone out to supper.
+She then came back to the inn and went to bed.'
+
+'Where's the landlord?' said Manston.
+
+Mr. Springrove came up, walking feebly, and wrapped in a cloak, and
+corroborated the evidence given by the rector.
+
+'Did she look ill, or annoyed, when she came?' said the steward.
+
+'I can't say. I didn't see; but I think--'
+
+'What do you think?'
+
+'She was much put out about something.'
+
+'My not meeting her, naturally,' murmured the other, lost in
+reverie. He turned his back on Springrove and the rector, and
+retired from the shining light.
+
+Everything had been done that could be done with the limited means
+at their disposal. The whole row of houses was destroyed, and each
+presented itself as one stage of a series, progressing from smoking
+ruins at the end where the inn had stood, to a partly flaming mass
+--glowing as none but wood embers will glow--at the other.
+
+A feature in the decline of town fires was noticeably absent here
+--steam. There was present what is not observable in towns
+--incandescence.
+
+The heat, and the smarting effect upon their eyes of the strong
+smoke from the burning oak and deal, had at last driven the
+villagers back from the road in front of the houses, and they now
+stood in groups in the churchyard, the surface of which, raised by
+the interments of generations, stood four or five feet above the
+level of the road, and almost even with the top of the low wall
+dividing one from the other. The headstones stood forth whitely
+against the dark grass and yews, their brightness being repeated on
+the white smock-frocks of some of the labourers, and in a mellower,
+ruddier form on their faces and hands, on those of the grinning
+gargoyles, and on other salient stonework of the weather-beaten
+church in the background.
+
+The rector had decided that, under the distressing circumstances of
+the case, there would be no sacrilege in placing in the church, for
+the night, the pieces of furniture and utensils which had been saved
+from the several houses. There was no other place of safety for
+them, and they accordingly were gathered there.
+
+6. HALF-PAST TWELVE TO ONE A.M.
+
+Manston, when he retired to meditate, had walked round the
+churchyard, and now entered the opened door of the building.
+
+He mechanically pursued his way round the piers into his own seat in
+the north aisle. The lower atmosphere of this spot was shaded by
+its own wall from the shine which streamed in over the window-sills
+on the same side. The only light burning inside the church was a
+small tallow candle, standing in the font, in the opposite aisle of
+the building to that in which Manston had sat down, and near where
+the furniture was piled. The candle's mild rays were overpowered by
+the ruddier light from the ruins, making the weak flame to appear
+like the moon by day.
+
+Sitting there he saw Farmer Springrove enter the door, followed by
+his son Edward, still carrying his travelling-bag in his hand. They
+were speaking of the sad death of Mrs. Manston, but the subject was
+relinquished for that of the houses burnt.
+
+This row of houses, running from the inn eastward, had been built
+under the following circumstances:--
+
+Fifty years before this date, the spot upon which the cottages
+afterwards stood was a blank strip, along the side of the village
+street, difficult to cultivate, on account of the outcrop thereon of
+a large bed of flints called locally a 'lanch' or 'lanchet.'
+
+The Aldclyffe then in possession of the estate conceived the idea
+that a row of cottages would be an improvement to the spot, and
+accordingly granted leases of portions to several respectable
+inhabitants. Each lessee was to be subject to the payment of a
+merely nominal rent for the whole term of lives, on condition that
+he built his own cottage, and delivered it up intact at the end of
+the term.
+
+Those who had built had, one by one, relinquished their indentures,
+either by sale or barter, to Farmer Springrove's father. New lives
+were added in some cases, by payment of a sum to the lord of the
+manor, etc., and all the leases were now held by the farmer himself,
+as one of the chief provisions for his old age.
+
+The steward had become interested in the following conversation:--
+
+'Try not to be so depressed, father; they are all insured.'
+
+The words came from Edward in an anxious tone.
+
+'You mistake, Edward; they are not insured,' returned the old man
+gloomily.
+
+'Not?' the son asked.
+
+'Not one!' said the farmer.
+
+'In the Helmet Fire Office, surely?'
+
+'They were insured there every one. Six months ago the office,
+which had been raising the premiums on thatched premises higher for
+some years, gave up insuring them altogether, as two or three other
+fire-offices had done previously, on account, they said, of the
+uncertainty and greatness of the risk of thatch undetached. Ever
+since then I have been continually intending to go to another
+office, but have never gone. Who expects a fire?'
+
+'Do you remember the terms of the leases?' said Edward, still more
+uneasily.
+
+'No, not particularly,' said his father absently.
+
+'Where are they?'
+
+'In the bureau there; that's why I tried to save it first, among
+other things.'
+
+'Well, we must see to that at once.'
+
+'What do you want?'
+
+'The key.'
+
+They went into the south aisle, took the candle from the font, and
+then proceeded to open the bureau, which had been placed in a corner
+under the gallery. Both leant over upon the flap; Edward holding
+the candle, whilst his father took the pieces of parchment from one
+of the drawers, and spread the first out before him.
+
+'You read it, Ted. I can't see without my glasses. This one will
+be sufficient. The terms of all are the same.'
+
+Edward took the parchment, and read quickly and indistinctly for
+some time; then aloud and slowly as follows:--
+
+
+'And the said John Springrove for himself his heirs executors and
+administrators doth covenant and agree with the said Gerald
+Fellcourt Aldclyffe his heirs and assigns that he the said John
+Springrove his heirs and assigns during the said term shall pay unto
+the said Gerald Fellcourt Aldclyffe his heirs and assigns the clear
+yearly rent of ten shillings and sixpence . . . . at the several
+times hereinbefore appointed for the payment thereof respectively.
+And also shall and at all times during the said term well and
+sufficiently repair and keep the said Cottage or Dwelling-house and
+all other the premises and all houses or buildings erected or to be
+erected thereupon in good and proper repair in every respect without
+exception and the said premises in such good repair upon the
+determination of this demise shall yield up unto the said Gerald
+Fellcourt Aldclyffe his heirs and assigns.'
+
+
+They closed the bureau and turned towards the door of the church
+without speaking.
+
+Manston also had come forward out of the gloom. Notwithstanding the
+farmer's own troubles, an instinctive respect and generous sense of
+sympathy with the steward for his awful loss caused the old man to
+step aside, that Manston might pass out without speaking to them if
+he chose to do so.
+
+'Who is he?' whispered Edward to his father, as Manston approached.
+
+'Mr. Manston, the steward.'
+
+Manston came near, and passed down the aisle on the side of the
+younger man. Their faces came almost close together: one large
+flame, which still lingered upon the ruins outside, threw long
+dancing shadows of each across the nave till they bent upwards
+against the aisle wall, and also illuminated their eyes, as each met
+those of the other. Edward had learnt, by a letter from home, of
+the steward's passion for Cytherea, and his mysterious repression of
+it, afterwards explained by his marriage. That marriage was now
+nought. Edward realized the man's newly acquired freedom, and felt
+an instinctive enmity towards him--he would hardly own to himself
+why. The steward, too, knew Cytherea's attachment to Edward, and
+looked keenly and inscrutably at him.
+
+7. ONE TO TWO A.M.
+
+Manston went homeward alone, his heart full of strange emotions.
+Entering the house, and dismissing the woman to her own home, he at
+once proceeded upstairs to his bedroom.
+
+Reasoning worldliness, especially when allied with sensuousness,
+cannot repress on some extreme occasions the human instinct to pour
+out the soul to some Being or Personality, who in frigid moments is
+dismissed with the title of Chance, or at most Law. Manston was
+selfishly and inhumanly, but honestly and unutterably, thankful for
+the recent catastrophe. Beside his bed, for that first time during
+a period of nearly twenty years, he fell down upon his knees in a
+passionate outburst of feeling.
+
+Many minutes passed before he arose. He walked to the window, and
+then seemed to remember for the first time that some action on his
+part was necessary in connection with the sad circumstance of the
+night.
+
+Leaving the house at once, he went to the scene of the fire,
+arriving there in time to hear the rector making an arrangement with
+a certain number of men to watch the spot till morning. The ashes
+were still red-hot and flaming. Manston found that nothing could be
+done towards searching them at that hour of the night. He turned
+homeward again, in the company of the rector, who had considerately
+persuaded him to retire from the scene for a while, and promised
+that as soon as a man could live amid the embers of the Three
+Tranters Inn, they should be carefully searched for the remains of
+his unfortunate wife.
+
+Manston then went indoors, to wait for morning.
+
+
+
+XI. THE EVENTS OF FIVE DAYS
+
+1. NOVEMBER THE TWENTY-NINTH
+
+The search began at dawn, but a quarter past nine o'clock came
+without bringing any result. Manston ate a little breakfast, and
+crossed the hollow of the park which intervened between the old and
+modern manor-houses, to ask for an interview with Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+He met her midway. She was about to pay him a visit of condolence,
+and to place every man on the estate at his disposal, that the
+search for any relic of his dead and destroyed wife might not be
+delayed an instant.
+
+He accompanied her back to the house. At first they conversed as if
+the death of the poor woman was an event which the husband must of
+necessity deeply lament; and when all under this head that social
+form seemed to require had been uttered, they spoke of the material
+damage done, and of the steps which had better be taken to remedy
+it.
+
+It was not till both were shut inside her private room that she
+spoke to him in her blunt and cynical manner. A certain newness of
+bearing in him, peculiar to the present morning, had hitherto
+forbidden her this tone: the demeanour of the subject of her
+favouritism had altered, she could not tell in what way. He was
+entirely a changed man.
+
+'Are you really sorry for your poor wife, Mr. Manston?' she said.
+
+'Well, I am,' he answered shortly.
+
+'But only as for any human being who has met with a violent death?'
+
+He confessed it--'For she was not a good woman,' he added.
+
+'I should be sorry to say such a thing now the poor creature is
+dead,' Miss Aldclyffe returned reproachfully.
+
+'Why?' he asked. 'Why should I praise her if she doesn't deserve
+it? I say exactly what I have often admired Sterne for saying in
+one of his letters--that neither reason nor Scripture asks us to
+speak nothing but good of the dead. And now, madam,' he continued,
+after a short interval of thought, 'I may, perhaps, hope that you
+will assist me, or rather not thwart me, in endeavouring to win the
+love of a young lady living about you, one in whom I am much
+interested already.'
+
+'Cytherea!'
+
+'Yes, Cytherea.'
+
+'You have been loving Cytherea all the while?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+Surprise was a preface to much agitation in her, which caused her to
+rise from her seat, and pace to the side of the room. The steward
+quietly looked on and added, 'I have been loving and still love
+her.'
+
+She came close up to him, wistfully contemplating his face, one hand
+moving indecisively at her side.
+
+'And your secret marriage was, then, the true and only reason for
+that backwardness regarding the courtship of Cytherea, which, they
+tell me, has been the talk of the village; not your indifference to
+her attractions.' Her voice had a tone of conviction in it, as well
+as of inquiry; but none of jealousy.
+
+'Yes,' he said; 'and not a dishonourable one. What held me back was
+just that one thing--a sense of morality that perhaps, madam, you
+did not give me credit for.' The latter words were spoken with a
+mien and tone of pride.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe preserved silence.
+
+'And now,' he went on, 'I may as well say a word in vindication of
+my conduct lately, at the risk, too, of offending you. My actual
+motive in submitting to your order that I should send for my late
+wife, and live with her, was not the mercenary policy of wishing to
+retain an office which brings me greater comforts than any I have
+enjoyed before, but this unquenchable passion for Cytherea. Though
+I saw the weakness, folly, and even wickedness of it continually, it
+still forced me to try to continue near her, even as the husband of
+another woman.'
+
+He waited for her to speak: she did not.
+
+'There's a great obstacle to my making any way in winning Miss
+Graye's love,' he went on.
+
+'Yes, Edward Springrove,' she said quietly. 'I know it, I did once
+want to see them married; they have had a slight quarrel, and it
+will soon be made up again, unless--' she spoke as if she had only
+half attended to Manston's last statement.
+
+'He is already engaged to be married to somebody else,' said the
+steward.
+
+'Pooh!' said she, 'you mean to his cousin at Peakhill; that's
+nothing to help us; he's now come home to break it off.'
+
+'He must not break it off,' said Manston, firmly and calmly.
+
+His tone attracted her, startled her. Recovering herself, she said
+haughtily, 'Well, that's your affair, not mine. Though my wish has
+been to see her _your_ wife, I can't do anything dishonourable to
+bring about such a result.'
+
+'But it must be _made_ your affair,' he said in a hard, steady voice,
+looking into her eyes, as if he saw there the whole panorama of her
+past.
+
+One of the most difficult things to portray by written words is that
+peculiar mixture of moods expressed in a woman's countenance when,
+after having been sedulously engaged in establishing another's
+position, she suddenly suspects him of undermining her own. It was
+thus that Miss Aldclyffe looked at the steward.
+
+'You--know--something--of me?' she faltered.
+
+'I know all,' he said.
+
+'Then curse that wife of yours! She wrote and said she wouldn't
+tell you!' she burst out. 'Couldn't she keep her word for a day?'
+She reflected and then said, but no more as to a stranger, 'I will
+not yield. I have committed no crime. I yielded to her threats in
+a moment of weakness, though I felt inclined to defy her at the
+time: it was chiefly because I was mystified as to how she got to
+know of it. Pooh! I will put up with threats no more. O, can _you_
+threaten me?' she added softly, as if she had for the moment
+forgotten to whom she had been speaking.
+
+'My love must be made your affair,' he repeated, without taking his
+eyes from her.
+
+An agony, which was not the agony of being discovered in a secret,
+obstructed her utterance for a time. 'How can you turn upon me so
+when I schemed to get you here--schemed that you might win her till
+I found you were married. O, how can you! O! . . . O!' She wept;
+and the weeping of such a nature was as harrowing as the weeping of
+a man.
+
+'Your getting me here was bad policy as to your secret--the most
+absurd thing in the world,' he said, not heeding her distress. 'I
+knew all, except the identity of the individual, long ago. Directly
+I found that my coming here was a contrived thing, and not a matter
+of chance, it fixed my attention upon you at once. All that was
+required was the mere spark of life, to make of a bundle of
+perceptions an organic whole.'
+
+'Policy, how can you talk of policy? Think, do think! And how can
+you threaten me when you know--you know--that I would befriend you
+readily without a threat!'
+
+'Yes, yes, I think you would,' he said more kindly; 'but your
+indifference for so many, many years has made me doubt it.'
+
+'No, not indifference--'twas enforced silence. My father lived.'
+
+He took her hand, and held it gently.
+
+              *     *     *     *     *
+
+'Now listen,' he said, more quietly and humanly, when she had become
+calmer: 'Springrove must marry the woman he's engaged to. You may
+make him, but only in one way.'
+
+'Well: but don't speak sternly, AEneas!'
+
+'Do you know that his father has not been particularly thriving for
+the last two or three years?'
+
+'I have heard something of it, once or twice, though his rents have
+been promptly paid, haven't they?'
+
+'O yes; and do you know the terms of the leases of the houses which
+are burnt?' he said, explaining to her that by those terms she might
+compel him even to rebuild every house. 'The case is the clearest
+case of fire by negligence that I have ever known, in addition to
+that,' he continued.
+
+'I don't want them rebuilt; you know it was intended by my father,
+directly they fell in, to clear the site for a new entrance to the
+park?'
+
+'Yes, but that doesn't affect the position, which is that Farmer
+Springrove is in your power to an extent which is very serious for
+him.'
+
+'I won't do it--'tis a conspiracy.'
+
+'Won't you for me?' he said eagerly.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe changed colour.
+
+'I don't threaten now, I implore,' he said.
+
+'Because you might threaten if you chose,' she mournfully answered.
+'But why be so--when your marriage with her was my own pet idea long
+before it was yours? What must I do?'
+
+'Scarcely anything: simply this. When I have seen old Mr.
+Springrove, which I shall do in a day or two, and told him that he
+will be expected to rebuild the houses, do you see the young man.
+See him yourself, in order that the proposals made may not appear to
+be anything more than an impulse of your own. You or he will bring
+up the subject of the houses. To rebuild them would be a matter of
+at least six hundred pounds, and he will almost surely say that we
+are hard in insisting upon the extreme letter of the leases. Then
+tell him that scarcely can you yourself think of compelling an old
+tenant like his father to any such painful extreme--there shall be
+no compulsion to build, simply a surrender of the leases. Then
+speak feelingly of his cousin, as a woman whom you respect and love,
+and whose secret you have learnt to be that she is heart-sick with
+hope deferred. Beg him to marry her, his betrothed and your friend,
+as some return for your consideration towards his father. Don't
+suggest too early a day for their marriage, or he will suspect you
+of some motive beyond womanly sympathy. Coax him to make a promise
+to her that she shall be his wife at the end of a twelvemonth, and
+get him, on assenting to this, to write to Cytherea, entirely
+renouncing her.'
+
+'She has already asked him to do that.'
+
+'So much the better--and telling her, too, that he is about to
+fulfil his long-standing promise to marry his cousin. If you think
+it worth while, you may say Cytherea was not indisposed to think of
+me before she knew I was married. I have at home a note she wrote
+me the first evening I saw her, which looks rather warm, and which I
+could show you. Trust me, he will give her up. When he is married
+to Adelaide Hinton, Cytherea will be induced to marry me--perhaps
+before; a woman's pride is soon wounded.'
+
+'And hadn't I better write to Mr. Nyttleton, and inquire more
+particularly what's the law upon the houses?'
+
+'O no, there's no hurry for that. We know well enough how the case
+stands--quite well enough to talk in general terms about it. And I
+want the pressure to be put upon young Springrove before he goes
+away from home again.'
+
+She looked at him furtively, long, and sadly, as after speaking he
+became lost in thought, his eyes listlessly tracing the pattern of
+the carpet. 'Yes, yes, she will be mine,' he whispered, careless of
+Cytherea Aldclyffe's presence. At last he raised his eyes
+inquiringly.
+
+'I will do my best, AEneas,' she answered.
+
+Talibus incusat. Manston then left the house, and again went
+towards the blackened ruins, where men were still raking and
+probing.
+
+2. FROM NOVEMBER THE TWENTY-NINTH TO DECEMBER THE SECOND
+
+The smouldering remnants of the Three Tranters Inn seemed to promise
+that, even when the searchers should light upon the remains of the
+unfortunate Mrs. Manston, very little would be discoverable.
+
+Consisting so largely of the charcoal and ashes of hard dry oak and
+chestnut, intermingled with thatch, the interior of the heap was one
+glowing mass of embers, which, on being stirred about, emitted
+sparks and flame long after it was dead and black on the outside.
+It was persistently hoped, however, that some traces of the body
+would survive the effect of the hot coals, and after a search
+pursued uninterruptedly for thirty hours, under the direction of
+Manston himself, enough was found to set at rest any doubts of her
+fate.
+
+The melancholy gleanings consisted of her watch, bunch of keys, a
+few coins, and two charred and blackened bones.
+
+Two days later the official inquiry into the cause of her death was
+held at the Rising Sun Inn, before Mr. Floy, the coroner, and a jury
+of the chief inhabitants of the district. The little tavern--the
+only remaining one in the village--was crowded to excess by the
+neighbouring peasantry as well as their richer employers: all who
+could by any possibility obtain an hour's release from their duties
+being present as listeners.
+
+The jury viewed the sad and infinitesimal remains, which were folded
+in a white cambric cloth, and laid in the middle of a well-finished
+coffin lined with white silk (by Manston's order), which stood in an
+adjoining room, the bulk of the coffin being completely filled in
+with carefully arranged flowers and evergreens--also the steward's
+own doing.
+
+Abraham Brown, of Hoxton, London--an old white-headed man, without
+the ruddiness which makes white hairs so pleasing--was sworn, and
+deposed that he kept a lodging-house at an address he named. On a
+Saturday evening less than a month before the fire, a lady came to
+him, with very little luggage, and took the front room on the second
+floor. He did not inquire where she came from, as she paid a week
+in advance, but she gave her name as Mrs. Manston, referring him, if
+he wished for any guarantee of her respectability, to Mr. Manston,
+Knapwater Park. Here she lived for three weeks, rarely going out.
+She slept away from her lodgings one night during the time. At the
+end of that time, on the twenty-eighth of November, she left his
+house in a four-wheeled cab, about twelve o'clock in the day,
+telling the driver to take her to the Waterloo Station. She paid
+all her lodging expenses, and not having given notice the full week
+previous to her going away, offered to pay for the next, but he only
+took half. She wore a thick black veil, and grey waterproof cloak,
+when she left him, and her luggage was two boxes, one of plain deal,
+with black japanned clamps, the other sewn up in canvas.
+
+Joseph Chinney, porter at the Carriford Road Station, deposed that
+he saw Mrs. Manston, dressed as the last witness had described, get
+out of a second-class carriage on the night of the twenty-eighth.
+She stood beside him whilst her luggage was taken from the van. The
+luggage, consisting of the clamped deal box and another covered with
+canvas, was placed in the cloak-room. She seemed at a loss at
+finding nobody there to meet her. She asked him for some person to
+accompany her, and carry her bag to Mr. Manston's house, Knapwater
+Park. He was just off duty at that time, and offered to go himself.
+The witness here repeated the conversation he had had with Mrs.
+Manston during their walk, and testified to having left her at the
+door of the Three Tranters Inn, Mr. Manston's house being closed.
+
+Next, Farmer Springrove was called. A murmur of surprise and
+commiseration passed round the crowded room when he stepped forward.
+
+The events of the few preceding days had so worked upon his
+nervously thoughtful nature that the blue orbits of his eyes, and
+the mere spot of scarlet to which the ruddiness of his cheeks had
+contracted, seemed the result of a heavy sickness. A perfect
+silence pervaded the assembly when he spoke.
+
+His statement was that he received Mrs. Manston at the threshold,
+and asked her to enter the parlour. She would not do so, and stood
+in the passage whilst the maid went upstairs to see that the room
+was in order. The maid came down to the middle landing of the
+staircase, when Mrs. Manston followed her up to the room. He did
+not speak ten words with her altogether.
+
+Afterwards, whilst he was standing at the door listening for his son
+Edward's return, he saw her light extinguished, having first caught
+sight of her shadow moving about the room.
+
+THE CORONER: 'Did her shadow appear to be that of a woman
+undressing?'
+
+SPRINGROVE: 'I cannot say, as I didn't take particular notice. It
+moved backwards and forwards; she might have been undressing or
+merely pacing up and down the room.'
+
+Mrs. Fitler, the ostler's wife and chambermaid, said that she
+preceded Mrs. Manston into the room, put down the candle, and went
+out. Mrs. Manston scarcely spoke to her, except to ask her to bring
+a little brandy. Witness went and fetched it from the bar, brought
+it up, and put it on the dressing-table.
+
+THE CORONER: 'Had Mrs. Manston begun to undress, when you came
+back?'
+
+'No, sir; she was sitting on the bed, with everything on, as when
+she came in.'
+
+'Did she begin to undress before you left?'
+
+'Not exactly before I had left; but when I had closed the door, and
+was on the landing I heard her boot drop on the floor, as it does
+sometimes when pulled off?'
+
+'Had her face appeared worn and sleepy?'
+
+'I cannot say as her bonnet and veil were still on when I left, for
+she seemed rather shy and ashamed to be seen at the Three Tranters
+at all.'
+
+'And did you hear or see any more of her?'
+
+'No more, sir.'
+
+Mrs. Crickett, temporary servant to Mr. Manston, said that in
+accordance with Mr. Manston's orders, everything had been made
+comfortable in the house for Mrs. Manston's expected return on
+Monday night. Mr. Manston told her that himself and Mrs. Manston
+would be home late, not till between eleven and twelve o'clock, and
+that supper was to be ready. Not expecting Mrs. Manston so early,
+she had gone out on a very important errand to Mrs. Leat the
+postmistress.
+
+Mr. Manston deposed that in looking down the columns of Bradshaw he
+had mistaken the time of the train's arrival, and hence was not at
+the station when she came. The broken watch produced was his
+wife's--he knew it by a scratch on the inner plate, and by other
+signs. The bunch of keys belonged to her: two of them fitted the
+locks of her two boxes.
+
+Mr. Flooks, agent to Lord Claydonfield at Chettlewood, said that Mr.
+Manston had pleaded as his excuse for leaving him rather early in
+the evening after their day's business had been settled, that he was
+going to meet his wife at Carriford Road Station, where she was
+coming by the last train that night.
+
+The surgeon said that the remains were those of a human being. The
+small fragment seemed a portion of one of the lumbar vertebrae--the
+other the head of the os femoris--but they were both so far gone
+that it was impossible to say definitely whether they belonged to
+the body of a male or female. There was no moral doubt that they
+were a woman's. He did not believe that death resulted from burning
+by fire. He thought she was crushed by the fall of the west gable,
+which being of wood, as well as the floor, burnt after it had
+fallen, and consumed the body with it.
+
+Two or three additional witnesses gave unimportant testimony.
+
+The coroner summed up, and the jury without hesitation found that
+the deceased Mrs. Manston came by her death accidentally through the
+burning of the Three Tranters Inn.
+
+3. DECEMBER THE SECOND. AFTERNOON
+
+When Mr. Springrove came from the door of the Rising Sun at the end
+of the inquiry, Manston walked by his side as far as the stile to
+the park, a distance of about a stone's-throw.
+
+'Ah, Mr. Springrove, this is a sad affair for everybody concerned.'
+
+'Everybody,' said the old farmer, with deep sadness, ''tis quite a
+misery to me. I hardly know how I shall live through each day as it
+breaks. I think of the words, "In the morning thou shalt say, Would
+God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were
+morning! for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and
+for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see."' His voice
+became broken.
+
+'Ah--true. I read Deuteronomy myself,' said Manston.
+
+'But my loss is as nothing to yours,' the farmer continued.
+
+'Nothing; but I can commiserate you. I should be worse than
+unfeeling if I didn't, although my own affliction is of so sad and
+solemn a kind. Indeed my own loss makes me more keenly alive to
+yours, different in nature as it is.'
+
+'What sum do you think would be required of me to put the houses in
+place again?'
+
+'I have roughly thought six or seven hundred pounds.'
+
+'If the letter of the law is to be acted up to,' said the old man,
+with more agitation in his voice.
+
+'Yes, exactly.'
+
+'Do you know enough of Miss Aldclyffe's mind to give me an idea of
+how she means to treat me?'
+
+'Well, I am afraid I must tell you that though I know very little of
+her mind as a rule, in this matter I believe she will be rather
+peremptory; she might share to the extent of a sixth or an eighth
+perhaps, in consideration of her getting new lamps for old, but I
+should hardly think more.'
+
+The steward stepped upon the stile, and Mr. Springrove went along
+the road with a bowed head and heavy footsteps towards his niece's
+cottage, in which, rather against the wish of Edward, they had
+temporarily taken refuge.
+
+The additional weight of this knowledge soon made itself
+perceptible. Though indoors with Edward or Adelaide nearly the
+whole of the afternoon, nothing more than monosyllabic replies could
+be drawn from him. Edward continually discovered him looking
+fixedly at the wall or floor, quite unconscious of another's
+presence. At supper he ate just as usual, but quite mechanically,
+and with the same abstraction.
+
+4. DECEMBER THE THIRD
+
+The next morning he was in no better spirits. Afternoon came: his
+son was alarmed, and managed to draw from him an account of the
+conversation with the steward.
+
+'Nonsense; he knows nothing about it,' said Edward vehemently.
+'I'll see Miss Aldclyffe myself. Now promise me, father, that
+you'll not believe till I come back, and tell you to believe it,
+that Miss Aldclyffe will do any such unjust thing.'
+
+Edward started at once for Knapwater House. He strode rapidly along
+the high-road, till he reached a wicket where a footpath allowed of
+a short cut to the mansion. Here he leant down upon the bars for a
+few minutes, meditating as to the best manner of opening his speech,
+and surveying the scene before him in that absent mood which takes
+cognizance of little things without being conscious of them at the
+time, though they appear in the eye afterwards as vivid impressions.
+It was a yellow, lustrous, late autumn day, one of those days of the
+quarter when morning and evening seem to meet together without the
+intervention of a noon. The clear yellow sunlight had tempted forth
+Miss Aldclyffe herself, who was at this same time taking a walk in
+the direction of the village. As Springrove lingered he heard
+behind the plantation a woman's dress brushing along amid the
+prickly husks and leaves which had fallen into the path from the
+boughs of the chestnut trees. In another minute she stood in front
+of him.
+
+He answered her casual greeting respectfully, and was about to
+request a few minutes' conversation with her, when she directly
+addressed him on the subject of the fire. 'It is a sad misfortune
+for your father' she said, 'and I hear that he has lately let his
+insurances expire?'
+
+'He has, madam, and you are probably aware that either by the
+general terms of his holding, or the same coupled with the origin of
+the fire, the disaster may involve the necessity of his rebuilding
+the whole row of houses, or else of becoming a debtor to the estate,
+to the extent of some hundreds of pounds?'
+
+She assented. 'I have been thinking of it,' she went on, and then
+repeated in substance the words put into her mouth by the steward.
+Some disturbance of thought might have been fancied as taking place
+in Springrove's mind during her statement, but before she had
+reached the end, his eyes were clear, and directed upon her.
+
+'I don't accept your conditions of release,' he said.
+
+'They are not conditions exactly.'
+
+'Well, whatever they are not, they are very uncalled-for remarks.'
+
+'Not at all--the houses have been burnt by your family's
+negligence.'
+
+'I don't refer to the houses--you have of course the best of all
+rights to speak of that matter; but you, a stranger to me
+comparatively, have no right at all to volunteer opinions and wishes
+upon a very delicate subject, which concerns no living beings but
+Miss Graye, Miss Hinton, and myself.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe, like a good many others in her position, had plainly
+not realized that a son of her tenant and inferior could have become
+an educated man, who had learnt to feel his individuality, to view
+society from a Bohemian standpoint, far outside the farming grade in
+Carriford parish, and that hence he had all a developed man's
+unorthodox opinion about the subordination of classes. And fully
+conscious of the labyrinth into which he had wandered between his
+wish to behave honourably in the dilemma of his engagement to his
+cousin Adelaide and the intensity of his love for Cytherea,
+Springrove was additionally sensitive to any allusion to the case.
+He had spoken to Miss Aldclyffe with considerable warmth.
+
+And Miss Aldclyffe was not a woman likely to be far behind any
+second person in warming to a mood of defiance. It seemed as if she
+were prepared to put up with a cold refusal, but that her
+haughtiness resented a criticism of her conduct ending in a rebuke.
+By this, Manston's discreditable object, which had been made hers by
+compulsion only, was now adopted by choice. She flung herself into
+the work.
+
+A fiery man in such a case would have relinquished persuasion and
+tried palpable force. A fiery woman added unscrupulousness and
+evolved daring strategy; and in her obstinacy, and to sustain
+herself as mistress, she descended to an action the meanness of
+which haunted her conscience to her dying hour.
+
+'I don't quite see, Mr. Springrove,' she said, 'that I am altogether
+what you are pleased to call a stranger. I have known your family,
+at any rate, for a good many years, and I know Miss Graye
+particularly well, and her state of mind with regard to this
+matter.'
+
+Perplexed love makes us credulous and curious as old women. Edward
+was willing, he owned it to himself, to get at Cytherea's state of
+mind, even through so dangerous a medium.
+
+'A letter I received from her' he said, with assumed coldness,
+'tells me clearly enough what Miss Graye's mind is.'
+
+'You think she still loves you? O yes, of course you do--all men
+are like that.'
+
+'I have reason to.' He could feign no further than the first
+speech.
+
+'I should be interested in knowing what reason?' she said, with
+sarcastic archness.
+
+Edward felt he was allowing her to do, in fractional parts, what he
+rebelled against when regarding it as a whole; but the fact that his
+antagonist had the presence of a queen, and features only in the
+early evening of their beauty, was not without its influence upon a
+keenly conscious man. Her bearing had charmed him into toleration,
+as Mary Stuart's charmed the indignant Puritan visitors. He again
+answered her honestly.
+
+'The best of reasons--the tone of her letter.'
+
+'Pooh, Mr. Springrove!'
+
+'Not at all, Miss Aldclyffe! Miss Graye desired that we should be
+strangers to each other for the simple practical reason that
+intimacy could only make wretched complications worse, not from lack
+of love--love is only suppressed.'
+
+'Don't you know yet, that in thus putting aside a man, a woman's
+pity for the pain she inflicts gives her a kindness of tone which is
+often mistaken for suppressed love?' said Miss Aldclyffe, with soft
+insidiousness.
+
+This was a translation of the ambiguity of Cytherea's tone which he
+had certainly never thought of; and he was too ingenuous not to own
+it.
+
+'I had never thought of it,' he said.
+
+'And don't believe it?'
+
+'Not unless there was some other evidence to support the view.'
+
+She paused a minute and then began hesitatingly--
+
+'My intention was--what I did not dream of owning to you--my
+intention was to try to induce you to fulfil your promise to Miss
+Hinton not solely on her account and yours (though partly). I love
+Cytherea Graye with all my soul, and I want to see her happy even
+more than I do you. I did not mean to drag her name into the affair
+at all, but I am driven to say that she wrote that letter of
+dismissal to you--for it was a most pronounced dismissal--not on
+account of your engagement. She is old enough to know that
+engagements can be broken as easily as they can be made. She wrote
+it because she loved another man; very suddenly, and not with any
+idea or hope of marrying him, but none the less deeply.'
+
+'Who?'
+
+'Mr. Manston.'
+
+'Good--! I can't listen to you for an instant, madam; why, she
+hadn't seen him!'
+
+'She had; he came here the day before she wrote to you; and I could
+prove to you, if it were worth while, that on that day she went
+voluntarily to his house, though not artfully or blamably; stayed
+for two hours playing and singing; that no sooner did she leave him
+than she went straight home, and wrote the letter saying she should
+not see you again, entirely because she had seen him and fallen
+desperately in love with him--a perfectly natural thing for a young
+girl to do, considering that he's the handsomest man in the county.
+Why else should she not have written to you before?'
+
+'Because I was such a--because she did not know of the connection
+between me and my cousin until then.'
+
+'I must think she did.'
+
+'On what ground?'
+
+'On the strong ground of my having told her so, distinctly, the very
+first day she came to live with me.'
+
+'Well, what do you seek to impress upon me after all? This--that
+the day Miss Graye wrote to me, saying it was better that we should
+part, coincided with the day she had seen a certain man--'
+
+'A remarkably handsome and talented man.'
+
+'Yes, I admit that.'
+
+'And that it coincided with the hour just subsequent to her seeing
+him.'
+
+'Yes, just when she had seen him.'
+
+'And been to his house alone with him.'
+
+'It is nothing.'
+
+'And stayed there playing and singing with him.'
+
+'Admit that, too,' he said; 'an accident might have caused it.'
+
+'And at the same instant that she wrote your dismissal she wrote a
+letter referring to a secret appointment with him.'
+
+'Never, by God, madam! never!'
+
+'What do you say, sir?'
+
+'Never.'
+
+She sneered.
+
+'There's no accounting for beliefs, and the whole history is a
+very trivial matter; but I am resolved to prove that a lady's word
+is truthful, though upon a matter which concerns neither you nor
+herself. You shall learn that she _did_ write him a letter
+concerning an assignation--that is, if Mr. Manston still has it,
+and will be considerate enough to lend it me.'
+
+'But besides,' continued Edward, 'a married man to do what would
+cause a young girl to write a note of the kind you mention!'
+
+She flushed a little.
+
+'That I don't know anything about,' she stammered. 'But Cytherea
+didn't, of course, dream any more than I did, or others in the
+parish, that he was married.'
+
+'Of course she didn't.'
+
+'And I have reason to believe that he told her of the fact directly
+afterwards, that she might not compromise herself, or allow him to.
+It is notorious that he struggled honestly and hard against her
+attractions, and succeeded in hiding his feelings, if not in
+quenching them.'
+
+'We'll hope that he did.'
+
+'But circumstances are changed now.'
+
+'Very greatly changed,' he murmured abstractedly.
+
+'You must remember,' she added more suasively, 'that Miss Graye has
+a perfect right to do what she likes with her own--her heart, that
+is to say.'
+
+Her descent from irritation was caused by perceiving that Edward's
+faith was really disturbed by her strong assertions, and it
+gratified her.
+
+Edward's thoughts flew to his father, and the object of his
+interview with her. Tongue-fencing was utterly distasteful to him.
+
+'I will not trouble you by remaining longer, madam,' he remarked,
+gloomily; 'our conversation has ended sadly for me.'
+
+'Don't think so,' she said, 'and don't be mistaken. I am older than
+you are, many years older, and I know many things.'
+
+
+
+Full of miserable doubt, and bitterly regretting that he had raised
+his father's expectations by anticipations impossible of fulfilment,
+Edward slowly went his way into the village, and approached his
+cousin's house. The farmer was at the door looking eagerly for him.
+He had been waiting there for more than half-an-hour. His eye
+kindled quickly.
+
+'Well, Ted, what does she say?' he asked, in the intensely sanguine
+tones which fall sadly upon a listener's ear, because, antecedently,
+they raise pictures of inevitable disappointment for the speaker, in
+some direction or another.
+
+'Nothing for us to be alarmed at,' said Edward, with a forced
+cheerfulness.
+
+'But must we rebuild?'
+
+'It seems we must, father.'
+
+The old man's eyes swept the horizon, then he turned to go in,
+without making another observation. All light seemed extinguished
+in him again. When Edward went in he found his father with the
+bureau open, unfolding the leases with a shaking hand, folding them
+up again without reading them, then putting them in their niche only
+to remove them again.
+
+Adelaide was in the room. She said thoughtfully to Edward, as she
+watched the farmer--
+
+'I hope it won't kill poor uncle, Edward. What should we do if
+anything were to happen to him? He is the only near relative you
+and I have in the world.' It was perfectly true, and somehow Edward
+felt more bound up with her after that remark.
+
+She continued: 'And he was only saying so hopefully the day before
+the fire, that he wouldn't for the world let any one else give me
+away to you when we are married.'
+
+For the first time a conscientious doubt arose in Edward's mind as
+to the justice of the course he was pursuing in resolving to refuse
+the alternative offered by Miss Aldclyffe. Could it be selfishness
+as well as independence? How much he had thought of his own heart,
+how little he had thought of his father's peace of mind!
+
+The old man did not speak again till supper-time, when he began
+asking his son an endless number of hypothetical questions on what
+might induce Miss Aldclyffe to listen to kinder terms; speaking of
+her now not as an unfair woman, but as a Lachesis or Fate whose
+course it behoved nobody to condemn. In his earnestness he once
+turned his eyes on Edward's face: their expression was woful: the
+pupils were dilated and strange in aspect.
+
+'If she will only agree to that!' he reiterated for the hundredth
+time, increasing the sadness of his listeners.
+
+An aristocratic knocking came to the door, and Jane entered with a
+letter, addressed--
+
+                'MR. EDWARD SPRINGROVE, Junior.'
+
+'Charles from Knapwater House brought it,' she said.
+
+'Miss Aldclyffe's writing,' said Mr. Springrove, before Edward had
+recognized it himself. 'Now 'tis all right; she's going to make an
+offer; she doesn't want the houses there, not she; they are going to
+make that the way into the park.'
+
+Edward opened the seal and glanced at the inside. He said, with a
+supreme effort of self-command--
+
+'It is only directed by Miss Aldclyffe, and refers to nothing
+connected with the fire. I wonder at her taking the trouble to send
+it to-night.'
+
+His father looked absently at him and turned away again. Shortly
+afterwards they retired for the night. Alone in his bedroom Edward
+opened and read what he had not dared to refer to in their presence.
+
+The envelope contained another envelope in Cytherea's handwriting,
+addressed to '---- Manston, Esq., Old Manor House.' Inside this was
+the note she had written to the steward after her detention in his
+house by the thunderstorm--
+
+
+                     'KNAPWATER HOUSE,
+                          September 20th.
+
+'I find I cannot meet you at seven o'clock by the waterfall as I
+promised. The emotion I felt made me forgetful of realities.
+                                             'C. GRAYE.'
+
+
+Miss Aldclyffe had not written a line, and, by the unvarying rule
+observable when words are not an absolute necessity, her silence
+seemed ten times as convincing as any expression of opinion could
+have been.
+
+He then, step by step, recalled all the conversation on the subject
+of Cytherea's feelings that had passed between himself and Miss
+Aldclyffe in the afternoon, and by a confusion of thought, natural
+enough under the trying experience, concluded that because the lady
+was truthful in her portraiture of effects, she must necessarily be
+right in her assumption of causes. That is, he was convinced that
+Cytherea--the hitherto-believed faithful Cytherea--had, at any rate,
+looked with something more than indifference upon the extremely
+handsome face and form of Manston.
+
+Did he blame her, as guilty of the impropriety of allowing herself
+to love the newcomer in the face of his not being free to return her
+love? No; never for a moment did he doubt that all had occurred in
+her old, innocent, impulsive way; that her heart was gone before she
+knew it--before she knew anything, beyond his existence, of the man
+to whom it had flown. Perhaps the very note enclosed to him was the
+result of first reflection. Manston he would unhesitatingly have
+called a scoundrel, but for one strikingly redeeming fact. It had
+been patent to the whole parish, and had come to Edward's own
+knowledge by that indirect channel, that Manston, as a married man,
+conscientiously avoided Cytherea after those first few days of his
+arrival during which her irresistibly beautiful and fatal glances
+had rested upon him--his upon her.
+
+Taking from his coat a creased and pocket-worn envelope containing
+Cytherea's letter to himself, Springrove opened it and read it
+through. He was upbraided therein, and he was dismissed. It bore
+the date of the letter sent to Manston, and by containing within it
+the phrase, 'All the day long I have been thinking,' afforded
+justifiable ground for assuming that it was written subsequently to
+the other (and in Edward's sight far sweeter one) to the steward.
+
+But though he accused her of fickleness, he would not doubt the
+genuineness, in its kind, of her partiality for him at Budmouth. It
+was a short and shallow feeling--not perfect love:
+
+          'Love is not love
+   Which alters when it alteration finds.'
+
+But it was not flirtation; a feeling had been born in her and had
+died. It would be well for his peace of mind if his love for her
+could flit away so softly, and leave so few traces behind.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe had shown herself desperately concerned in the whole
+matter by the alacrity with which she had obtained the letter from
+Manston, and her labours to induce himself to marry his cousin.
+Taken in connection with her apparent interest in, if not love for,
+Cytherea, her eagerness, too, could only be accounted for on the
+ground that Cytherea indeed loved the steward.
+
+5. DECEMBER THE FOURTH
+
+Edward passed the night he scarcely knew how, tossing feverishly
+from side to side, the blood throbbing in his temples, and singing
+in his ears.
+
+Before the day began to break he dressed himself. On going out upon
+the landing he found his father's bedroom door already open. Edward
+concluded that the old man had risen softly, as was his wont, and
+gone out into the fields to start the labourers. But neither of the
+outer doors was unfastened. He entered the front room, and found it
+empty. Then animated by a new idea, he went round to the little
+back parlour, in which the few wrecks saved from the fire were
+deposited, and looked in at the door. Here, near the window, the
+shutters of which had been opened half way, he saw his father
+leaning on the bureau, his elbows resting on the flap, his body
+nearly doubled, his hands clasping his forehead. Beside him were
+ghostly-looking square folds of parchment--the leases of the houses
+destroyed.
+
+His father looked up when Edward entered, and wearily spoke to the
+young man as his face came into the faint light.
+
+'Edward, why did you get up so early?'
+
+'I was uneasy, and could not sleep.'
+
+The farmer turned again to the leases on the bureau, and seemed to
+become lost in reflection. In a minute or two, without lifting his
+eyes, he said--
+
+'This is more than we can bear, Ted--more than we can bear! Ted,
+this will kill me. Not the loss only--the sense of my neglect about
+the insurance and everything. Borrow I never will. 'Tis all misery
+now. God help us--all misery now!'
+
+Edward did not answer, continuing to look fixedly at the dreary
+daylight outside.
+
+'Ted,' the farmer went on, 'this upset of be-en burnt out o' home
+makes me very nervous and doubtful about everything. There's this
+troubles me besides--our liven here with your cousin, and fillen up
+her house. It must be very awkward for her. But she says she
+doesn't mind. Have you said anything to her lately about when you
+are going to marry her?'
+
+'Nothing at all lately.'
+
+'Well, perhaps you may as well, now we are so mixed in together.
+You know, no time has ever been mentioned to her at all, first or
+last, and I think it right that now, since she has waited so
+patiently and so long--you are almost called upon to say you are
+ready. It would simplify matters very much, if you were to walk up
+to church wi' her one of these mornings, get the thing done, and go
+on liven here as we are. If you don't I must get a house all the
+sooner. It would lighten my mind, too, about the two little
+freeholds over the hill--not a morsel a-piece, divided as they were
+between her mother and me, but a tidy bit tied together again. Just
+think about it, will ye, Ted?'
+
+He stopped from exhaustion produced by the intense concentration of
+his mind upon the weary subject, and looked anxiously at his son.
+
+'Yes, I will,' said Edward.
+
+'But I am going to see her of the Great House this morning,' the
+farmer went on, his thoughts reverting to the old subject. 'I must
+know the rights of the matter, the when and the where. I don't like
+seeing her, but I'd rather talk to her than the steward. I wonder
+what she'll say to me.'
+
+The younger man knew exactly what she would say. If his father
+asked her what he was to do, and when, she would simply refer him to
+Manston: her character was not that of a woman who shrank from a
+proposition she had once laid down. If his father were to say to
+her that his son had at last resolved to marry his cousin within the
+year, and had given her a promise to that effect, she would say,
+'Mr. Springrove, the houses are burnt: we'll let them go: trouble
+no more about them.'
+
+His mind was already made up. He said calmly, 'Father, when you are
+talking to Miss Aldclyffe, mention to her that I have asked Adelaide
+if she is willing to marry me next Christmas. She is interested in
+my union with Adelaide, and the news will be welcome to her.'
+
+'And yet she can be iron with reference to me and her property,' the
+farmer murmured. 'Very well, Ted, I'll tell her.'
+
+6. DECEMBER THE FIFTH
+
+Of the many contradictory particulars constituting a woman's heart,
+two had shown their vigorous contrast in Cytherea's bosom just at
+this time.
+
+It was a dark morning, the morning after old Mr. Springrove's visit
+to Miss Aldclyffe, which had terminated as Edward had intended.
+Having risen an hour earlier than was usual with her, Cytherea sat
+at the window of an elegant little sitting-room on the ground floor,
+which had been appropriated to her by the kindness or whim of Miss
+Aldclyffe, that she might not be driven into that lady's presence
+against her will. She leant with her face on her hand, looking out
+into the gloomy grey air. A yellow glimmer from the flapping flame
+of the newly-lit fire fluttered on one side of her face and neck
+like a butterfly about to settle there, contrasting warmly with the
+other side of the same fair face, which received from the window the
+faint cold morning light, so weak that her shadow from the fire had
+a distinct outline on the window-shutter in spite of it. There the
+shadow danced like a demon, blue and grim.
+
+The contradiction alluded to was that in spite of the decisive mood
+which two months earlier in the year had caused her to write a
+peremptory and final letter to Edward, she was now hoping for some
+answer other than the only possible one a man who, as she held, did
+not love her wildly, could send to such a communication. For a
+lover who did love wildly, she had left one little loophole in her
+otherwise straightforward epistle. Why she expected the letter on
+some morning of this particular week was, that hearing of his return
+to Carriford, she fondly assumed that he meant to ask for an
+interview before he left. Hence it was, too, that for the last few
+days, she had not been able to keep in bed later than the time of
+the postman's arrival.
+
+The clock pointed to half-past seven. She saw the postman emerge
+from beneath the bare boughs of the park trees, come through the
+wicket, dive through the shrubbery, reappear on the lawn, stalk
+across it without reference to paths--as country postmen do--and
+come to the porch. She heard him fling the bag down on the seat,
+and turn away towards the village, without hindering himself for a
+single pace.
+
+Then the butler opened the door, took up the bag, brought it in, and
+carried it up the staircase to place it on the slab by Miss
+Aldclyffe's dressing-room door. The whole proceeding had been
+depicted by sounds.
+
+She had a presentiment that her letter was in the bag at last. She
+thought then in diminishing pulsations of confidence, 'He asks to
+see me! Perhaps he asks to see me: I hope he asks to see me.'
+
+A quarter to eight: Miss Aldclyffe's bell--rather earlier than
+usual. 'She must have heard the post-bag brought,' said the maiden,
+as, tired of the chilly prospect outside, she turned to the fire,
+and drew imaginative pictures of her future therein.
+
+A tap came to the door, and the lady's-maid entered.
+
+'Miss Aldclyffe is awake,' she said; 'and she asked if you were
+moving yet, miss.'
+
+'I'll run up to her,' said Cytherea, and flitted off with the
+utterance of the words. 'Very fortunate this,' she thought; 'I
+shall see what is in the bag this morning all the sooner.'
+
+She took it up from the side table, went into Miss Aldclyffe's
+bedroom, pulled up the blinds, and looked round upon the lady in
+bed, calculating the minutes that must elapse before she looked at
+her letters.
+
+'Well, darling, how are you? I am glad you have come in to see me,'
+said Miss Aldclyffe. 'You can unlock the bag this morning, child,
+if you like,' she continued, yawning factitiously.
+
+'Strange!' Cytherea thought; 'it seems as if she knew there was
+likely to be a letter for me.'
+
+From her bed Miss Aldclyffe watched the girl's face as she
+tremblingly opened the post-bag and found there an envelope
+addressed to her in Edward's handwriting; one he had written the day
+before, after the decision he had come to on an impartial, and on
+that account torturing, survey of his own, his father's, his cousin
+Adelaide's, and what he believed to be Cytherea's, position.
+
+The haughty mistress's soul sickened remorsefully within her when
+she saw suddenly appear upon the speaking countenance of the young
+lady before her a wan desolate look of agony.
+
+The master-sentences of Edward's letter were these: 'You speak
+truly. That we never meet again is the wisest and only proper
+course. That I regret the past as much as you do yourself, it is
+hardly necessary for me to say.'
+
+
+
+XII. THE EVENTS OF TEN MONTHS
+
+1. DECEMBER TO APRIL
+
+Week after week, month after month, the time had flown by.
+Christmas had passed; dreary winter with dark evenings had given
+place to more dreary winter with light evenings. Thaws had ended in
+rain, rain in wind, wind in dust. Showery days had come--the period
+of pink dawns and white sunsets; with the third week in April the
+cuckoo had appeared, with the fourth, the nightingale.
+
+Edward Springrove was in London, attending to the duties of his new
+office, and it had become known throughout the neighbourhood of
+Carriford that the engagement between himself and Miss Adelaide
+Hinton would terminate in marriage at the end of the year.
+
+The only occasion on which her lover of the idle delicious days at
+Budmouth watering-place had been seen by Cytherea after the time of
+the decisive correspondence, was once in church, when he sat in
+front of her, and beside Miss Hinton.
+
+The rencounter was quite an accident. Springrove had come there in
+the full belief that Cytherea was away from home with Miss
+Aldclyffe; and he continued ignorant of her presence throughout the
+service.
+
+It is at such moments as these, when a sensitive nature writhes
+under the conception that its most cherished emotions have been
+treated with contumely, that the sphere-descended Maid, Music,
+friend of Pleasure at other times, becomes a positive enemy
+--racking, bewildering, unrelenting. The congregation sang the
+first Psalm and came to the verse--
+
+     'Like some fair tree which, fed by streams,
+       With timely fruit doth bend,
+     He still shall flourish, and success
+       All his designs attend.'
+
+Cytherea's lips did not move, nor did any sound escape her; but
+could she help singing the words in the depths of her being,
+although the man to whom she applied them sat at her rival's side?
+
+Perhaps the moral compensation for all a woman's petty cleverness
+under thriving conditions is the real nobility that lies in her
+extreme foolishness at these other times; her sheer inability to be
+simply just, her exercise of an illogical power entirely denied to
+men in general--the power not only of kissing, but of delighting to
+kiss the rod by a punctilious observance of the self-immolating
+doctrines in the Sermon on the Mount.
+
+As for Edward--a little like other men of his temperament, to whom,
+it is somewhat humiliating to think, the aberrancy of a given love
+is in itself a recommendation--his sentiment, as he looked over his
+cousin's book, was of a lower rank, Horatian rather than Psalmodic--
+
+     'O, what hast thou of her, of her
+     Whose every look did love inspire;
+     Whose every breathing fanned my fire,
+     And stole me from myself away!'
+
+Then, without letting him see her, Cytherea slipt out of church
+early, and went home, the tones of the organ still lingering in her
+ears as she tried bravely to kill a jealous thought that would
+nevertheless live: 'My nature is one capable of more, far more,
+intense feeling than hers! She can't appreciate all the sides of
+him--she never will! He is more tangible to me even now, as a
+thought, than his presence itself is to her!' She was less noble
+then.
+
+But she continually repressed her misery and bitterness of heart
+till the effort to do so showed signs of lessening. At length she
+even tried to hope that her lost lover and her rival would love one
+another very dearly.
+
+The scene and the sentiment dropped into the past. Meanwhile,
+Manston continued visibly before her. He, though quiet and subdued
+in his bearing for a long time after the calamity of November, had
+not simulated a grief that he did not feel. At first his loss
+seemed so to absorb him--though as a startling change rather than as
+a heavy sorrow--that he paid Cytherea no attention whatever. His
+conduct was uniformly kind and respectful, but little more. Then,
+as the date of the catastrophe grew remoter, he began to wear a
+different aspect towards her. He always contrived to obliterate by
+his manner all recollection on her side that she was comparatively
+more dependent than himself--making much of her womanhood, nothing
+of her situation. Prompt to aid her whenever occasion offered, and
+full of delightful petits soins at all times, he was not officious.
+In this way he irresistibly won for himself a position as her
+friend, and the more easily in that he allowed not the faintest
+symptom of the old love to be apparent.
+
+Matters stood thus in the middle of the spring when the next move on
+his behalf was made by Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+2. THE THIRD OF MAY
+
+She led Cytherea to a summer-house called the Fane, built in the
+private grounds about the mansion in the form of a Grecian temple;
+it overlooked the lake, the island on it, the trees, and their
+undisturbed reflection in the smooth still water. Here the old and
+young maid halted; here they stood, side by side, mentally imbibing
+the scene.
+
+The month was May--the time, morning. Cuckoos, thrushes,
+blackbirds, and sparrows gave forth a perfect confusion of song and
+twitter. The road was spotted white with the fallen leaves of
+apple-blossoms, and the sparkling grey dew still lingered on the
+grass and flowers. Two swans floated into view in front of the
+women, and then crossed the water towards them.
+
+'They seem to come to us without any will of their own--quite
+involuntarily--don't they?' said Cytherea, looking at the birds'
+graceful advance.
+
+'Yes, but if you look narrowly you can see their hips just beneath
+the water, working with the greatest energy.'
+
+'I'd rather not see that, it spoils the idea of proud indifference
+to direction which we associate with a swan.'
+
+'It does; we'll have "involuntarily." Ah, now this reminds me of
+something.'
+
+'Of what?'
+
+'Of a human being who involuntarily comes towards yourself.'
+
+Cytherea looked into Miss Aldclyffe's face; her eyes grew round as
+circles, and lines of wonderment came visibly upon her countenance.
+She had not once regarded Manston as a lover since his wife's sudden
+appearance and subsequent death. The death of a wife, and such a
+death, was an overwhelming matter in her ideas of things.
+
+'Is it a man or woman?' she said, quite innocently.
+
+'Mr. Manston,' said Miss Aldclyffe quietly.
+
+'Mr. Manston attracted by me _now_?' said Cytherea, standing at gaze.
+
+'Didn't you know it?'
+
+'Certainly I did not. Why, his poor wife has only been dead six
+months.'
+
+'Of course he knows that. But loving is not done by months, or
+method, or rule, or nobody would ever have invented such a phrase as
+"falling in love." He does not want his love to be observed just
+yet, on the very account you mention; but conceal it as he may from
+himself and us, it exists definitely--and very intensely, I assure
+you.'
+
+'I suppose then, that if he can't help it, it is no harm of him,'
+said Cytherea naively, and beginning to ponder.
+
+'Of course it isn't--you know that well enough. She was a great
+burden and trouble to him. This may become a great good to you
+both.'
+
+A rush of feeling at remembering that the same woman, before
+Manston's arrival, had just as frankly advocated Edward's claims,
+checked Cytherea's utterance for awhile.
+
+'There, don't look at me like that, for Heaven's sake!' said Miss
+Aldclyffe. 'You could almost kill a person by the force of reproach
+you can put into those eyes of yours, I verily believe.'
+
+Edward once in the young lady's thoughts, there was no getting rid
+of him. She wanted to be alone.
+
+'Do you want me here?' she said.
+
+'Now there, there; you want to be off, and have a good cry,' said
+Miss Aldclyffe, taking her hand. 'But you mustn't, my dear.
+There's nothing in the past for you to regret. Compare Mr.
+Manston's honourable conduct towards his wife and yourself, with
+Springrove towards his betrothed and yourself, and then see which
+appears the more worthy of your thoughts.'
+
+3. FROM THE FOURTH OF MAY TO THE TWENTY-FIRST OF JUNE
+
+The next stage in Manston's advances towards her hand was a clearly
+defined courtship. She was sadly perplexed, and some contrivance
+was necessary on his part in order to meet with her. But it is next
+to impossible for an appreciative woman to have a positive
+repugnance towards an unusually handsome and gifted man, even though
+she may not be inclined to love him. Hence Cytherea was not so
+alarmed at the sight of him as to render a meeting and conversation
+with her more than a matter of difficulty.
+
+Coming and going from church was his grand opportunity. Manston was
+very religious now. It is commonly said that no man was ever
+converted by argument, but there is a single one which will make any
+Laodicean in England, let him be once love-sick, wear prayer-books
+and become a zealous Episcopalian--the argument that his sweetheart
+can be seen from his pew.
+
+Manston introduced into his method a system of bewitching flattery,
+everywhere pervasive, yet, too, so transitory and intangible, that,
+as in the case of the poet Wordsworth and the Wandering Voice,
+though she felt it present, she could never find it. As a foil to
+heighten its effect, he occasionally spoke philosophically of the
+evanescence of female beauty--the worthlessness of mere appearance.
+'Handsome is that handsome does' he considered a proverb which
+should be written on the looking-glass of every woman in the land.
+'Your form, your motions, your heart have won me,' he said, in a
+tone of playful sadness. 'They are beautiful. But I see these
+things, and it comes into my mind that they are doomed, they are
+gliding to nothing as I look. Poor eyes, poor mouth, poor face,
+poor maiden! "Where will her glories be in twenty years?" I say.
+"Where will all of her be in a hundred?" Then I think it is cruel
+that you should bloom a day, and fade for ever and ever. It seems
+hard and sad that you will die as ordinarily as I, and be buried; be
+food for roots and worms, be forgotten and come to earth, and grow
+up a mere blade of churchyard-grass and an ivy leaf. Then, Miss
+Graye, when I see you are a Lovely Nothing, I pity you, and the love
+I feel then is better and sounder, larger and more lasting than that
+I felt at the beginning.' Again an ardent flash of his handsome
+eyes.
+
+It was by this route that he ventured on an indirect declaration and
+offer of his hand.
+
+She implied in the same indirect manner that she did not love him
+enough to accept it.
+
+An actual refusal was more than he had expected. Cursing himself
+for what he called his egregious folly in making himself the slave
+of a mere lady's attendant, and for having given the parish, should
+they know of her refusal, a chance of sneering at him--certainly a
+ground for thinking less of his standing than before--he went home
+to the Old House, and walked indecisively up and down his back-yard.
+Turning aside, he leant his arms upon the edge of the rain-water-butt
+standing in the corner, and looked into it. The reflection
+from the smooth stagnant surface tinged his face with the greenish
+shades of Correggio's nudes. Staves of sunlight slanted down
+through the still pool, lighting it up with wonderful distinctness.
+Hundreds of thousands of minute living creatures sported and tumbled
+in its depth with every contortion that gaiety could suggest;
+perfectly happy, though consisting only of a head, or a tail, or at
+most a head and a tail, and all doomed to die within the twenty-four
+hours.
+
+'Damn my position! Why shouldn't I be happy through my little day
+too? Let the parish sneer at my repulses, let it. I'll get her, if
+I move heaven and earth to do it!'
+
+Indeed, the inexperienced Cytherea had, towards Edward in the first
+place, and Manston afterwards, unconsciously adopted bearings that
+would have been the very tactics of a professional fisher of men who
+wished to have them each successively dangling at her heels. For if
+any rule at all can be laid down in a matter which, for men
+collectively, is notoriously beyond regulation, it is that to snub a
+petted man, and to pet a snubbed man, is the way to win in suits of
+both kinds. Manston with Springrove's encouragement would have
+become indifferent. Edward with Manston's repulses would have
+sheered off at the outset, as he did afterwards. Her supreme
+indifference added fuel to Manston's ardour--it completely disarmed
+his pride. The invulnerable Nobody seemed greater to him than a
+susceptible Princess.
+
+4. FROM THE TWENTY-FIRST OF JUNE TO THE END OF JULY
+
+Cytherea had in the meantime received the following letter from her
+brother. It was the first definite notification of the enlargement
+of that cloud no bigger than a man's hand which had for nearly a
+twelvemonth hung before them in the distance, and which was soon to
+give a colour to their whole sky from horizon to horizon.
+
+
+                                               'BUDMOUTH REGIS,
+
+Saturday.
+
+'DARLING SIS,--I have delayed telling you for a long time of a
+little matter which, though not one to be seriously alarmed about,
+is sufficiently vexing, and it would be unfair in me to keep it from
+you any longer. It is that for some time past I have again been
+distressed by that lameness which I first distinctly felt when we
+went to Lulstead Cove, and again when I left Knapwater that morning
+early. It is an unusual pain in my left leg, between the knee and
+the ankle. I had just found fresh symptoms of it when you were here
+for that half-hour about a month ago--when you said in fun that I
+began to move like an old man. I had a good mind to tell you then,
+but fancying it would go off in a few days, I thought it was not
+worth while. Since that time it has increased, but I am still able
+to work in the office, sitting on the stool. My great fear is that
+Mr. G. will have some out-door measuring work for me to do soon, and
+that I shall be obliged to decline it. However, we will hope for
+the best. How it came, what was its origin, or what it tends to, I
+cannot think. You shall hear again in a day or two, if it is no
+better. . .--Your loving brother, OWEN.'
+
+
+This she answered, begging to know the worst, which she could bear,
+but suspense and anxiety never. In two days came another letter
+from him, of which the subjoined paragraph is a portion:--
+
+
+'I had quite decided to let you know the worst, and to assure you
+that it was the worst, before you wrote to ask it. And again I give
+you my word that I will conceal nothing--so that there will be no
+excuse whatever for your wearing yourself out with fears that I am
+worse than I say. This morning then, for the first time, I have
+been obliged to stay away from the office. Don't be frightened at
+this, dear Cytherea. Rest is all that is wanted, and by nursing
+myself now for a week, I may avoid an illness of six months.'
+
+
+After a visit from her he wrote again:--
+
+
+'Dr. Chestman has seen me. He said that the ailment was some sort
+of rheumatism, and I am now undergoing proper treatment for its
+cure. My leg and foot have been placed in hot bran, liniments have
+been applied, and also severe friction with a pad. He says I shall
+be as right as ever in a very short time. Directly I am I shall run
+up by the train to see you. Don't trouble to come to me if Miss
+Aldclyffe grumbles again about your being away, for I am going on
+capitally. . . . You shall hear again at the end of the week.'
+
+
+At the time mentioned came the following:--
+
+
+'I am sorry to tell you, because I know it will be so disheartening
+after my last letter, that I am not so well as I was then, and that
+there has been a sort of hitch in the proceedings. After I had been
+treated for rheumatism a few days longer (in which treatment they
+pricked the place with a long needle several times,) I saw that Dr.
+Chestman was in doubt about something, and I requested that he would
+call in a brother professional man to see me as well. They
+consulted together and then told me that rheumatism was not the
+disease after all, but erysipelas. They then began treating it
+differently, as became a different matter. Blisters, flour, and
+starch, seem to be the order of the day now--medicine, of course,
+besides.
+
+'Mr. Gradfield has been in to inquire about me. He says he has been
+obliged to get a designer in my place, which grieves me very much,
+though, of course, it could not be avoided.'
+
+
+A month passed away; throughout this period, Cytherea visited him as
+often as the limited time at her command would allow, and wore as
+cheerful a countenance as the womanly determination to do nothing
+which might depress him could enable her to wear. Another letter
+from him then told her these additional facts:--
+
+
+'The doctors find they are again on the wrong tack. They cannot
+make out what the disease is. O Cytherea! how I wish they knew!
+This suspense is wearing me out. Could not Miss Aldclyffe spare you
+for a day? Do come to me. We will talk about the best course then.
+I am sorry to complain, but I am worn out.'
+
+
+Cytherea went to Miss Aldclyffe, and told her of the melancholy turn
+her brother's illness had taken. Miss Aldclyffe at once said that
+Cytherea might go, and offered to do anything to assist her which
+lay in her power. Cytherea's eyes beamed gratitude as she turned to
+leave the room, and hasten to the station.
+
+'O, Cytherea,' said Miss Aldclyffe, calling her back; 'just one
+word. Has Mr. Manston spoken to you lately?'
+
+'Yes,' said Cytherea, blushing timorously.
+
+'He proposed?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'And you refused him?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Tut, tut! Now listen to my advice,' said Miss Aldclyffe
+emphatically, 'and accept him before he changes his mind. The
+chance which he offers you of settling in life is one that may
+possibly, probably, not occur again. His position is good and
+secure, and the life of his wife would be a happy one. You may not
+be sure that you love him madly; but suppose you are not sure? My
+father used to say to me as a child when he was teaching me whist,
+"When in doubt win the trick!" That advice is ten times as valuable
+to a woman on the subject of matrimony. In refusing a man there is
+always the risk that you may never get another offer.'
+
+'Why didn't you win the trick when you were a girl?' said Cytherea.
+
+'Come, my lady Pert; I'm not the text,' said Miss Aldclyffe, her
+face glowing like fire.
+
+Cytherea laughed stealthily.
+
+'I was about to say,' resumed Miss Aldclyffe severely, 'that here is
+Mr. Manston waiting with the tenderest solicitude for you, and you
+overlooking it, as if it were altogether beneath you. Think how you
+might benefit your sick brother if you were Mrs. Manston. You will
+please me _very much_ by giving him some encouragement. You
+understand me, Cythie dear?'
+
+Cytherea was silent.
+
+'And,' said Miss Aldclyffe, still more emphatically, 'on your
+promising that you will accept him some time this year, I will take
+especial care of your brother. You are listening, Cytherea?'
+
+'Yes,' she whispered, leaving the room.
+
+She went to Budmouth, passed the day with her brother, and returned
+to Knapwater wretched and full of foreboding. Owen had looked
+startlingly thin and pale--thinner and paler than ever she had seen
+him before. The brother and sister had that day decided that
+notwithstanding the drain upon their slender resources, another
+surgeon should see him. Time was everything.
+
+Owen told her the result in his next letter:--
+
+
+'The three practitioners between them have at last hit the nail on
+the head, I hope. They probed the place, and discovered that the
+secret lay in the bone. I underwent an operation for its removal
+three days ago (after taking chloroform). . . Thank God it is over.
+Though I am so weak, my spirits are rather better. I wonder when I
+shall be at work again? I asked the surgeons how long it would be
+first. I said a month? They shook their heads. A year? I said.
+Not so long, they said. Six months? I inquired. They would not, or
+could not, tell me. But never mind.
+
+'Run down, when you have half a day to spare, for the hours drag on
+so drearily. O Cytherea, you can't think how drearily!'
+
+
+She went. Immediately on her departure Miss Aldclyffe sent a note
+to the Old House, to Manston. On the maiden's return, tired and
+sick at heart as usual, she found Manston at the station awaiting
+her. He asked politely if he might accompany her to Knapwater. She
+tacitly acquiesced. During their walk he inquired the particulars
+of her brother's illness, and with an irresistible desire to pour
+out her trouble to some one, she told him of the length of time
+which must elapse before he could be strong again, and of the lack
+of comfort in lodgings.
+
+Manston was silent awhile. Then he said impetuously: 'Miss Graye,
+I will not mince matters--I love you--you know it. Stratagem they
+say is fair in love, and I am compelled to adopt it now. Forgive
+me, for I cannot help it. Consent to be my wife at any time that
+may suit you--any remote day you may name will satisfy me--and you
+shall find him well provided for.'
+
+For the first time in her life she truly dreaded the handsome man at
+her side who pleaded thus selfishly, and shrank from the hot
+voluptuous nature of his passion for her, which, disguise it as he
+might under a quiet and polished exterior, at times radiated forth
+with a scorching white heat. She perceived how animal was the love
+which bargained.
+
+'I do not love you, Mr. Manston,' she replied coldly.
+
+5. FROM THE FIRST TO THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF AUGUST
+
+The long sunny days of the later summer-time brought only the same
+dreary accounts from Budmouth, and saw Cytherea paying the same sad
+visits.
+
+She grew perceptibly weaker, in body and mind. Manston still
+persisted in his suit, but with more of his former indirectness, now
+that he saw how unexpectedly well she stood an open attack. His was
+the system of Dares at the Sicilian games--
+
+     'He, like a captain who beleaguers round
+      Some strong-built castle on a rising ground,
+      Views all the approaches with observing eyes,
+      This and that other part again he tries,
+      And more on industry than force relies.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe made it appear more clearly than ever that aid to
+Owen from herself depended entirely upon Cytherea's acceptance of
+her steward. Hemmed in and distressed, Cytherea's answers to his
+importunities grew less uniform; they were firm, or wavering, as
+Owen's malady fluctuated. Had a register of her pitiful
+oscillations been kept, it would have rivalled in pathos the diary
+wherein De Quincey tabulates his combat with Opium--perhaps as
+noticeable an instance as any in which a thrilling dramatic power
+has been given to mere numerals. Thus she wearily and monotonously
+lived through the month, listening on Sundays to the well-known
+round of chapters narrating the history of Elijah and Elisha in
+famine and drought; on week-days to buzzing flies in hot sunny
+rooms. 'So like, so very like, was day to day.' Extreme lassitude
+seemed all that the world could show her.
+
+Her state was in this wise, when one afternoon, having been with her
+brother, she met the surgeon, and begged him to tell the actual
+truth concerning Owen's condition.
+
+The reply was that he feared that the first operation had not been
+thorough; that although the wound had healed, another attempt might
+still be necessary, unless nature were left to effect her own cure.
+But the time such a self-healing proceeding would occupy might be
+ruinous.
+
+'How long would it be?' she said.
+
+'It is impossible to say. A year or two, more or less.'
+
+'And suppose he submitted to another artificial extraction?'
+
+'Then he might be well in four or six months.'
+
+Now the remainder of his and her possessions, together with a sum he
+had borrowed, would not provide him with necessary comforts for half
+that time. To combat the misfortune, there were two courses open
+--her becoming betrothed to Manston, or the sending Owen to the
+County Hospital.
+
+Thus terrified, driven into a corner, panting and fluttering about
+for some loophole of escape, yet still shrinking from the idea of
+being Manston's wife, the poor little bird endeavoured to find out
+from Miss Aldclyffe whether it was likely Owen would be well treated
+in the hospital.
+
+'County Hospital!' said Miss Aldclyffe; 'why, it is only another
+name for slaughter-house--in surgical cases at any rate. Certainly
+if anything about your body is snapt in two they do join you
+together in a fashion, but 'tis so askew and ugly, that you may as
+well be apart again.' Then she terrified the inquiring and anxious
+maiden by relating horrid stories of how the legs and arms of poor
+people were cut off at a moment's notice, especially in cases where
+the restorative treatment was likely to be long and tedious.
+
+'You know how willing I am to help you, Cytherea,' she added
+reproachfully. 'You know it. Why are you so obstinate then? Why
+do you selfishly bar the clear, honourable, and only sisterly path
+which leads out of this difficulty? I cannot, on my conscience,
+countenance you; no, I cannot.'
+
+Manston once more repeated his offer; and once more she refused, but
+this time weakly, and with signs of an internal struggle. Manston's
+eye sparkled; he saw for the hundredth time in his life, that
+perseverance, if only systematic, was irresistible by womankind.
+
+6. THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF AUGUST
+
+On going to Budmouth three days later, she found to her surprise
+that the steward had been there, had introduced himself, and had
+seen her brother. A few delicacies had been brought him also by the
+same hand. Owen spoke in warm terms of Manston and his free and
+unceremonious call, as he could not have refrained from doing of any
+person, of any kind, whose presence had served to help away the
+tedious hours of a long day, and who had, moreover, shown that sort
+of consideration for him which the accompanying basket implied
+--antecedent consideration, so telling upon all invalids--and which
+he so seldom experienced except from the hands of his sister.
+
+How should he perceive, amid this tithe-paying of mint, and anise,
+and cummin, the weightier matters which were left undone?
+
+Again the steward met her at Carriford Road Station on her return
+journey. Instead of being frigid as at the former meeting at the
+same place, she was embarrassed by a strife of thought, and murmured
+brokenly her thanks for what he had done. The same request that he
+might see her home was made.
+
+He had perceived his error in making his kindness to Owen a
+conditional kindness, and had hastened to efface all recollection of
+it. 'Though I let my offer on her brother's--my friend's--behalf,
+seem dependent on my lady's graciousness to me,' he whispered
+wooingly in the course of their walk, 'I could not conscientiously
+adhere to my statement; it was said with all the impulsive
+selfishness of love. Whether you choose to have me, or whether you
+don't, I love you too devotedly to be anything but kind to your
+brother. . . . Miss Graye, Cytherea, I will do anything,' he
+continued earnestly, 'to give you pleasure--indeed I will.'
+
+She saw on the one hand her poor and much-loved Owen recovering from
+his illness and troubles by the disinterested kindness of the man
+beside her, on the other she drew him dying, wholly by reason of her
+self-enforced poverty. To marry this man was obviously the course
+of common sense, to refuse him was impolitic temerity. There was
+reason in this. But there was more behind than a hundred reasons--a
+woman's gratitude and her impulse to be kind.
+
+The wavering of her mind was visible in her tell-tale face. He
+noticed it, and caught at the opportunity.
+
+They were standing by the ruinous foundations of an old mill in the
+midst of a meadow. Between grey and half-overgrown stonework--the
+only signs of masonry remaining--the water gurgled down from the old
+millpond to a lower level, under the cloak of rank broad leaves--the
+sensuous natures of the vegetable world. On the right hand the sun,
+resting on the horizon-line, streamed across the ground from below
+copper-coloured and lilac clouds, stretched out in flats beneath a
+sky of pale soft green. All dark objects on the earth that lay
+towards the sun were overspread by a purple haze, against which a
+swarm of wailing gnats shone forth luminously, rising upward and
+floating away like sparks of fire.
+
+The stillness oppressed and reduced her to mere passivity. The only
+wish the humidity of the place left in her was to stand motionless.
+The helpless flatness of the landscape gave her, as it gives all
+such temperaments, a sense of bare equality with, and no superiority
+to, a single entity under the sky.
+
+He came so close that their clothes touched. 'Will you try to love
+me? Do try to love me!' he said, in a whisper, taking her hand. He
+had never taken it before. She could feel his hand trembling
+exceedingly as it held hers in its clasp.
+
+Considering his kindness to her brother, his love for herself, and
+Edward's fickleness, ought she to forbid him to do this? How truly
+pitiful it was to feel his hand tremble so--all for her! Should she
+withdraw her hand? She would think whether she would. Thinking, and
+hesitating, she looked as far as the autumnal haze on the marshy
+ground would allow her to see distinctly. There was the fragment of
+a hedge--all that remained of a 'wet old garden'--standing in the
+middle of the mead, without a definite beginning or ending,
+purposeless and valueless. It was overgrown, and choked with
+mandrakes, and she could almost fancy she heard their shrieks. . .
+Should she withdraw her hand? No, she could not withdraw it now; it
+was too late, the act would not imply refusal. She felt as one in a
+boat without oars, drifting with closed eyes down a river--she knew
+not whither.
+
+He gave her hand a gentle pressure, and relinquished it.
+
+Then it seemed as if he were coming to the point again. No, he was
+not going to urge his suit that evening. Another respite.
+
+7. THE EARLY PART OF SEPTEMBER
+
+Saturday came, and she went on some trivial errand to the village
+post-office. It was a little grey cottage with a luxuriant jasmine
+encircling the doorway, and before going in Cytherea paused to
+admire this pleasing feature of the exterior. Hearing a step on the
+gravel behind the corner of the house, she resigned the jasmine and
+entered. Nobody was in the room. She could hear Mrs. Leat, the
+widow who acted as postmistress, walking about over her head.
+Cytherea was going to the foot of the stairs to call Mrs. Leat, but
+before she had accomplished her object, another form stood at the
+half-open door. Manston came in.
+
+'Both on the same errand,' he said gracefully.
+
+'I will call her,' said Cytherea, moving in haste to the foot of the
+stairs.
+
+'One moment.' He glided to her side. 'Don't call her for a moment,'
+he repeated.
+
+But she had said, 'Mrs. Leat!'
+
+He seized Cytherea's hand, kissed it tenderly, and carefully
+replaced it by her side.
+
+She had that morning determined to check his further advances, until
+she had thoroughly considered her position. The remonstrance was
+now on her tongue, but as accident would have it, before the word
+could be spoken Mrs. Leat was stepping from the last stair to the
+floor, and no remonstrance came.
+
+With the subtlety which characterized him in all his dealings with
+her, he quickly concluded his own errand, bade her a good-bye, in
+the tones of which love was so garnished with pure politeness that
+it only showed its presence to herself, and left the house--putting
+it out of her power to refuse him her companionship homeward, or to
+object to his late action of kissing her hand.
+
+The Friday of the next week brought another letter from her brother.
+In this he informed her that, in absolute grief lest he should
+distress her unnecessarily, he had some time earlier borrowed a few
+pounds. A week ago, he said, his creditor became importunate, but
+that on the day on which he wrote, the creditor had told him there
+was no hurry for a settlement, that 'his _sister's suitor_ had
+guaranteed the sum.' 'Is he Mr. Manston? tell me, Cytherea,' said
+Owen.
+
+He also mentioned that a wheeled chair had been anonymously hired
+for his especial use, though as yet he was hardly far enough
+advanced towards convalescence to avail himself of the luxury. 'Is
+this Mr. Manston's doing?' he inquired.
+
+She could dally with her perplexity, evade it, trust to time for
+guidance, no longer. The matter had come to a crisis: she must
+once and for all choose between the dictates of her understanding
+and those of her heart. She longed, till her soul seemed nigh to
+bursting, for her lost mother's return to earth, but for one minute,
+that she might have tender counsel to guide her through this, her
+great difficulty.
+
+As for her heart, she half fancied that it was not Edward's to quite
+the extent that it once had been; she thought him cruel in
+conducting himself towards her as he did at Budmouth, cruel
+afterwards in making so light of her. She knew he had stifled his
+love for her--was utterly lost to her. But for all that she could
+not help indulging in a woman's pleasure of recreating defunct
+agonies, and lacerating herself with them now and then.
+
+'If I were rich,' she thought, 'I would give way to the luxury of
+being morbidly faithful to him for ever without his knowledge.'
+
+But she considered; in the first place she was a homeless dependent;
+and what did practical wisdom tell her to do under such desperate
+circumstances? To provide herself with some place of refuge from
+poverty, and with means to aid her brother Owen. This was to be Mr.
+Manston's wife.
+
+She did not love him.
+
+But what was love without a home? Misery. What was a home without
+love? Alas, not much; but still a kind of home.
+
+'Yes,' she thought, 'I am urged by my common sense to marry Mr.
+Manston.'
+
+Did anything nobler in her say so too?
+
+With the death (to her) of Edward her heart's occupation was gone.
+Was it necessary or even right for her to tend it and take care of
+it as she used to in the old time, when it was still a capable
+minister?
+
+By a slight sacrifice here she could give happiness to at least two
+hearts whose emotional activities were still unwounded. She would
+do good to two men whose lives were far more important than hers.
+
+'Yes,' she said again, 'even Christianity urges me to marry Mr.
+Manston.'
+
+Directly Cytherea had persuaded herself that a kind of heroic
+self-abnegation had to do with the matter, she became much more
+content in the consideration of it. A wilful indifference to the
+future was what really prevailed in her, ill and worn out, as she
+was, by the perpetual harassments of her sad fortune, and she
+regarded this indifference, as gushing natures will do under such
+circumstances, as genuine resignation and devotedness.
+
+Manston met her again the following day: indeed, there was no
+escaping him now. At the end of a short conversation between them,
+which took place in the hollow of the park by the waterfall,
+obscured on the outer side by the low hanging branches of the limes,
+she tacitly assented to his assumption of a privilege greater than
+any that had preceded it. He stooped and kissed her brow.
+
+Before going to bed she wrote to Owen explaining the whole matter.
+It was too late in the evening for the postman's visit, and she
+placed the letter on the mantelpiece to send it the next day.
+
+The morning (Sunday) brought a hurried postscript to Owen's letter
+of the day before:--
+
+
+                                              'September 9, 1865.
+
+'DEAR CYTHEREA--I have received a frank and friendly letter from Mr.
+Manston explaining the position in which he stands now, and also
+that in which he hopes to stand towards you. Can't you love him?
+Why not? Try, for he is a good, and not only that, but a cultured
+man. Think of the weary and laborious future that awaits you if you
+continue for life in your present position, and do you see any way
+of escape from it except by marriage? I don't. Don't go against
+your heart, Cytherea, but be wise.--Ever affectionately yours,
+OWEN.'
+
+
+She thought that probably he had replied to Mr. Manston in the same
+favouring mood. She had a conviction that that day would settle her
+doom. Yet
+
+     'So true a fool is love,'
+
+that even now she nourished a half-hope that something would happen
+at the last moment to thwart her deliberately-formed intentions, and
+favour the old emotion she was using all her strength to thrust
+down.
+
+8. THE TENTH OF SEPTEMBER
+
+The Sunday was the thirteenth after Trinity, and the afternoon
+service at Carriford was nearly over. The people were singing the
+Evening Hymn.
+
+Manston was at church as usual in his accustomed place two seats
+forward from the large square pew occupied by Miss Aldclyffe and
+Cytherea.
+
+The ordinary sadness of an autumnal evening-service seemed, in
+Cytherea's eyes, to be doubled on this particular occasion. She
+looked at all the people as they stood and sang, waving backwards
+and forwards like a forest of pines swayed by a gentle breeze; then
+at the village children singing too, their heads inclined to one
+side, their eyes listlessly tracing some crack in the old walls, or
+following the movement of a distant bough or bird with features
+petrified almost to painfulness. Then she looked at Manston; he was
+already regarding her with some purpose in his glance.
+
+'It is coming this evening,' she said in her mind. A minute later,
+at the end of the hymn, when the congregation began to move out,
+Manston came down the aisle. He was opposite the end of her seat as
+she stepped from it, the remainder of their progress to the door
+being in contact with each other. Miss Aldclyffe had lingered
+behind.
+
+'Don't let's hurry,' he said, when Cytherea was about to enter the
+private path to the House as usual. 'Would you mind turning down
+this way for a minute till Miss Aldclyffe has passed?'
+
+She could not very well refuse now. They turned into a secluded
+path on their left, leading round through a thicket of laurels to
+the other gate of the church-yard, walking very slowly. By the time
+the further gate was reached, the church was closed. They met the
+sexton with the keys in his hand.
+
+'We are going inside for a minute,' said Manston to him, taking the
+keys unceremoniously. 'I will bring them to you when we return.'
+
+The sexton nodded his assent, and Cytherea and Manston walked into
+the porch, and up the nave.
+
+They did not speak a word during their progress, or in any way
+interfere with the stillness and silence that prevailed everywhere
+around them. Everything in the place was the embodiment of decay:
+the fading red glare from the setting sun, which came in at the west
+window, emphasizing the end of the day and all its cheerful doings,
+the mildewed walls, the uneven paving-stones, the wormy pews, the
+sense of recent occupation, and the dank air of death which had
+gathered with the evening, would have made grave a lighter mood than
+Cytherea's was then.
+
+'What sensations does the place impress you with?' she said at last,
+very sadly.
+
+'I feel imperatively called upon to be honest, from very despair of
+achieving anything by stratagem in a world where the materials are
+such as these.' He, too, spoke in a depressed voice, purposely or
+otherwise.
+
+'I feel as if I were almost ashamed to be seen walking such a
+world,' she murmured; 'that's the effect it has upon me; but it does
+not induce me to be honest particularly.'
+
+He took her hand in both his, and looked down upon the lids of her
+eyes.
+
+'I pity you sometimes,' he said more emphatically.
+
+'I am pitiable, perhaps; so are many people. Why do you pity me?'
+
+'I think that you make yourself needlessly sad.'
+
+'Not needlessly.'
+
+'Yes, needlessly. Why should you be separated from your brother so
+much, when you might have him to stay with you till he is well?'
+
+'That can't be,' she said, turning away.
+
+He went on, 'I think the real and only good thing that can be done
+for him is to get him away from Budmouth awhile; and I have been
+wondering whether it could not be managed for him to come to my
+house to live for a few weeks. Only a quarter of a mile from you.
+How pleasant it would be!'
+
+'It would.'
+
+He moved himself round immediately to the front of her, and held her
+hand more firmly, as he continued, 'Cytherea, why do you say "It
+would," so entirely in the tone of abstract supposition? I want him
+there: I want him to be my brother, too. Then make him so, and be
+my wife! I cannot live without you. O Cytherea, my darling, my
+love, come and be my wife!'
+
+His face bent closer and closer to hers, and the last words sank to
+a whisper as weak as the emotion inspiring it was strong.
+
+She said firmly and distinctly, 'Yes, I will.'
+
+'Next month?' he said on the instant, before taking breath.
+
+'No; not next month.'
+
+'The next?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'December? Christmas Day, say?'
+
+'I don't mind.'
+
+'O, you darling!' He was about to imprint a kiss upon her pale,
+cold mouth, but she hastily covered it with her hand.
+
+'Don't kiss me--at least where we are now!' she whispered
+imploringly.
+
+'Why?'
+
+'We are too near God.'
+
+He gave a sudden start, and his face flushed. She had spoken so
+emphatically that the words 'Near God' echoed back again through the
+hollow building from the far end of the chancel.
+
+'What a thing to say!' he exclaimed; 'surely a pure kiss is not
+inappropriate to the place!'
+
+'No,' she replied, with a swelling heart; 'I don't know why I burst
+out so--I can't tell what has come over me! Will you forgive me?'
+
+'How shall I say "Yes" without judging you? How shall I say "No"
+without losing the pleasure of saying "Yes?"' He was himself again.
+
+'I don't know,' she absently murmured.
+
+'I'll say "Yes,"' he answered daintily. 'It is sweeter to fancy we
+are forgiven, than to think we have not sinned; and you shall have
+the sweetness without the need.'
+
+She did not reply, and they moved away. The church was nearly dark
+now, and melancholy in the extreme. She stood beside him while he
+locked the door, then took the arm he gave her, and wound her way
+out of the churchyard with him. Then they walked to the house
+together, but the great matter having been set at rest, she
+persisted in talking only on indifferent subjects.
+
+'Christmas Day, then,' he said, as they were parting at the end of
+the shrubbery.
+
+'I meant Old Christmas Day,' she said evasively.
+
+'H'm, people do not usually attach that meaning to the words.'
+
+'No; but I should like it best if it could not be till then?' It
+seemed to be still her instinct to delay the marriage to the utmost.
+
+'Very well, love,' he said gently. ''Tis a fortnight longer still;
+but never mind. Old Christmas Day.'
+
+9. THE ELEVENTH OF SEPTEMBER
+
+'There. It will be on a Friday!'
+
+She sat upon a little footstool gazing intently into the fire. It
+was the afternoon of the day following that of the steward's
+successful solicitation of her hand.
+
+'I wonder if it would be proper in me to run across the park and
+tell him it is a Friday?' she said to herself, rising to her feet,
+looking at her hat lying near, and then out of the window towards
+the Old House. Proper or not, she felt that she must at all hazards
+remove the disagreeable, though, as she herself owned, unfounded
+impression the coincidence had occasioned. She left the house
+directly, and went to search for him.
+
+Manston was in the timber-yard, looking at the sawyers as they
+worked. Cytherea came up to him hesitatingly. Till within a
+distance of a few yards she had hurried forward with alacrity--now
+that the practical expression of his face became visible she wished
+almost she had never sought him on such an errand; in his
+business-mood he was perhaps very stern.
+
+'It will be on a Friday,' she said confusedly, and without any
+preface.
+
+'Come this way!' said Manston, in the tone he used for workmen, not
+being able to alter at an instant's notice. He gave her his arm and
+led her back into the avenue, by which time he was lover again. 'On
+a Friday, will it, dearest? You do not mind Fridays, surely?
+That's nonsense.'
+
+'Not seriously mind them, exactly--but if it could be any other
+day?'
+
+'Well, let us say Old Christmas Eve, then. Shall it be Old
+Christmas Eve?'
+
+'Yes, Old Christmas Eve.'
+
+'Your word is solemn, and irrevocable now?'
+
+'Certainly, I have solemnly pledged my word; I should not have
+promised to marry you if I had not meant it. Don't think I should.'
+She spoke the words with a dignified impressiveness.
+
+'You must not be vexed at my remark, dearest. Can you think the
+worse of an ardent man, Cytherea, for showing some anxiety in love?'
+
+'No, no.' She could not say more. She was always ill at ease when
+he spoke of himself as a piece of human nature in that analytical
+way, and wanted to be out of his presence. The time of day, and the
+proximity of the house, afforded her a means of escape. 'I must be
+with Miss Aldclyffe now--will you excuse my hasty coming and going?'
+she said prettily. Before he had replied she had parted from him.
+
+'Cytherea, was it Mr. Manston I saw you scudding away from in the
+avenue just now?' said Miss Aldclyffe, when Cytherea joined her.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'"Yes." Come, why don't you say more than that? I hate those
+taciturn "Yesses" of yours. I tell you everything, and yet you are
+as close as wax with me.'
+
+'I parted from him because I wanted to come in.'
+
+'What a novel and important announcement! Well, is the day fixed?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe's face kindled into intense interest at once. 'Is it
+indeed? When is it to be?'
+
+'On Old Christmas Eve.'
+
+'Old Christmas Eve.' Miss Aldclyffe drew Cytherea round to her
+front, and took a hand in each of her own. 'And then you will be a
+bride!' she said slowly, looking with critical thoughtfulness upon
+the maiden's delicately rounded cheeks.
+
+The normal area of the colour upon each of them decreased
+perceptibly after that slow and emphatic utterance by the elder
+lady.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe continued impressively, 'You did not say "Old
+Christmas Eve" as a fiancee should have said the words: and you
+don't receive my remark with the warm excitement that foreshadows a
+bright future. . . . How many weeks are there to the time?'
+
+'I have not reckoned them.'
+
+'Not? Fancy a girl not counting the weeks! I find I must take the
+lead in this matter--you are so childish, or frightened, or stupid,
+or something, about it. Bring me my diary, and we will count them at
+once.'
+
+Cytherea silently fetched the book.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe opened the diary at the page containing the almanac,
+and counted sixteen weeks, which brought her to the thirty-first of
+December--a Sunday. Cytherea stood by, looking on as if she had no
+appetite for the scene.
+
+'Sixteen to the thirty-first. Then let me see, Monday will be the
+first of January, Tuesday the second, Wednesday third, Thursday
+fourth, Friday fifth--you have chosen a Friday, as I declare!'
+
+'A Thursday, surely?' said Cytherea.
+
+'No: Old Christmas Day comes on a Saturday.'
+
+The perturbed little brain had reckoned wrong. 'Well, it must be a
+Friday,' she murmured in a reverie.
+
+'No: have it altered, of course,' said Miss Aldclyffe cheerfully.
+'There's nothing bad in Friday, but such a creature as you will be
+thinking about its being unlucky--in fact, I wouldn't choose a
+Friday myself to be married on, since all the other days are equally
+available.'
+
+'I shall not have it altered,' said Cytherea firmly; 'it has been
+altered once already: I shall let it be.'
+
+
+
+XIII. THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
+
+1. THE FIFTH OF JANUARY. BEFORE DAWN
+
+We pass over the intervening weeks. The time of the story is thus
+advanced more than a quarter of a year.
+
+On the midnight preceding the morning which would make her the wife
+of a man whose presence fascinated her into involuntariness of
+bearing, and whom in absence she almost dreaded, Cytherea lay in her
+little bed, vainly endeavouring to sleep.
+
+She had been looking back amid the years of her short though varied
+past, and thinking of the threshold upon which she stood. Days and
+months had dimmed the form of Edward Springrove like the gauzes of a
+vanishing stage-scene, but his dying voice could still be heard
+faintly behind. That a soft small chord in her still vibrated true
+to his memory, she would not admit: that she did not approach
+Manston with feelings which could by any stretch of words be called
+hymeneal, she calmly owned.
+
+'Why do I marry him?' she said to herself. 'Because Owen, dear Owen
+my brother, wishes me to marry him. Because Mr. Manston is, and has
+been, uniformly kind to Owen, and to me. "Act in obedience to the
+dictates of common-sense," Owen said, "and dread the sharp sting of
+poverty. How many thousands of women like you marry every year for
+the same reason, to secure a home, and mere ordinary, material
+comforts, which after all go far to make life endurable, even if not
+supremely happy."
+
+''Tis right, I suppose, for him to say that. O, if people only knew
+what a timidity and melancholy upon the subject of her future grows
+up in the heart of a friendless woman who is blown about like a reed
+shaken with the wind, as I am, they would not call this resignation
+of one's self by the name of scheming to get a husband. Scheme to
+marry? I'd rather scheme to die! I know I am not pleasing my
+heart; I know that if I only were concerned, I should like risking a
+single future. But why should I please my useless self overmuch,
+when by doing otherwise I please those who are more valuable than
+I?'
+
+In the midst of desultory reflections like these, which alternated
+with surmises as to the inexplicable connection that appeared to
+exist between her intended husband and Miss Aldclyffe, she heard
+dull noises outside the walls of the house, which she could not
+quite fancy to be caused by the wind. She seemed doomed to such
+disturbances at critical periods of her existence. 'It is strange,'
+she pondered, 'that this my last night in Knapwater House should be
+disturbed precisely as my first was, no occurrence of the kind
+having intervened.'
+
+As the minutes glided by the noise increased, sounding as if some
+one were beating the wall below her window with a bunch of switches.
+She would gladly have left her room and gone to stay with one of the
+maids, but they were without doubt all asleep.
+
+The only person in the house likely to be awake, or who would have
+brains enough to comprehend her nervousness, was Miss Aldclyffe, but
+Cytherea never cared to go to Miss Aldclyffe's room, though she was
+always welcome there, and was often almost compelled to go against
+her will.
+
+The oft-repeated noise of switches grew heavier upon the wall, and
+was now intermingled with creaks, and a rattling like the rattling
+of dice. The wind blew stronger; there came first a snapping, then
+a crash, and some portion of the mystery was revealed. It was the
+breaking off and fall of a branch from one of the large trees
+outside. The smacking against the wall, and the intermediate
+rattling, ceased from that time.
+
+Well, it was the tree which had caused the noises. The unexplained
+matter was that neither of the trees ever touched the walls of the
+house during the highest wind, and that trees could not rattle like
+a man playing castanets or shaking dice.
+
+She thought, 'Is it the intention of Fate that something connected
+with these noises shall influence my future as in the last case of
+the kind?'
+
+During the dilemma she fell into a troubled sleep, and dreamt that
+she was being whipped with dry bones suspended on strings, which
+rattled at every blow like those of a malefactor on a gibbet; that
+she shifted and shrank and avoided every blow, and they fell then
+upon the wall to which she was tied. She could not see the face of
+the executioner for his mask, but his form was like Manston's.
+
+'Thank Heaven!' she said, when she awoke and saw a faint light
+struggling through her blind. 'Now what were those noises?' To
+settle that question seemed more to her than the event of the day.
+
+She pulled the blind aside and looked out. All was plain. The
+evening previous had closed in with a grey drizzle, borne upon a
+piercing air from the north, and now its effects were visible. The
+hoary drizzle still continued; but the trees and shrubs were laden
+with icicles to an extent such as she had never before witnessed. A
+shoot of the diameter of a pin's head was iced as thick as her
+finger; all the boughs in the park were bent almost to the earth
+with the immense weight of the glistening incumbrance; the walks
+were like a looking-glass. Many boughs had snapped beneath their
+burden, and lay in heaps upon the icy grass. Opposite her eye, on
+the nearest tree, was a fresh yellow scar, showing where the branch
+that had terrified her had been splintered from the trunk.
+
+'I never could have believed it possible,' she thought, surveying
+the bowed-down branches, 'that trees would bend so far out of their
+true positions without breaking.' By watching a twig she could see
+a drop collect upon it from the hoary fog, sink to the lowest point,
+and there become coagulated as the others had done.
+
+'Or that I could so exactly have imitated them,' she continued. 'On
+this morning I am to be married--unless this is a scheme of the
+great Mother to hinder a union of which she does not approve. Is it
+possible for my wedding to take place in the face of such weather as
+this?'
+
+2. MORNING
+
+Her brother Owen was staying with Manston at the Old House.
+Contrary to the opinion of the doctors, the wound had healed after
+the first surgical operation, and his leg was gradually acquiring
+strength, though he could only as yet get about on crutches, or
+ride, or be dragged in a chair.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe had arranged that Cytherea should be married from
+Knapwater House, and not from her brother's lodgings at Budmouth,
+which was Cytherea's first idea. Owen, too, seemed to prefer the
+plan. The capricious old maid had latterly taken to the
+contemplation of the wedding with even greater warmth than had at
+first inspired her, and appeared determined to do everything in her
+power, consistent with her dignity, to render the adjuncts of the
+ceremony pleasing and complete.
+
+But the weather seemed in flat contradiction of the whole
+proceeding. At eight o'clock the coachman crept up to the House
+almost upon his hands and knees, entered the kitchen, and stood with
+his back to the fire, panting from his exertions in pedestrianism.
+
+The kitchen was by far the pleasantest apartment in Knapwater House
+on such a morning as this. The vast fire was the centre of the
+whole system, like a sun, and threw its warm rays upon the figures
+of the domestics, wheeling about it in true planetary style. A
+nervously-feeble imitation of its flicker was continually attempted
+by a family of polished metallic utensils standing in rows and
+groups against the walls opposite, the whole collection of shines
+nearly annihilating the weak daylight from outside. A step further
+in, and the nostrils were greeted by the scent of green herbs just
+gathered, and the eye by the plump form of the cook, wholesome,
+white-aproned, and floury--looking as edible as the food she
+manipulated--her movements being supported and assisted by her
+satellites, the kitchen and scullery maids. Minute recurrent sounds
+prevailed--the click of the smoke-jack, the flap of the flames, and
+the light touches of the women's slippers upon the stone floor.
+
+The coachman hemmed, spread his feet more firmly upon the
+hearthstone, and looked hard at a small plate in the extreme corner
+of the dresser.
+
+'No wedden this mornen--that's my opinion. In fact, there can't
+be,' he said abruptly, as if the words were the mere torso of a
+many-membered thought that had existed complete in his head.
+
+The kitchen-maid was toasting a slice of bread at the end of a very
+long toasting-fork, which she held at arm's length towards the
+unapproachable fire, travestying the Flanconnade in fencing.
+
+'Bad out of doors, isn't it?' she said, with a look of commiseration
+for things in general.
+
+'Bad? Not even a liven soul, gentle or simple, can stand on level
+ground. As to getten up hill to the church, 'tis perfect lunacy.
+And I speak of foot-passengers. As to horses and carriage, 'tis
+murder to think of 'em. I am going to send straight as a line into
+the breakfast-room, and say 'tis a closer. . . . Hullo--here's
+Clerk Crickett and John Day a-comen! Now just look at 'em and
+picture a wedden if you can.'
+
+All eyes were turned to the window, from which the clerk and
+gardener were seen crossing the court, bowed and stooping like Bel
+and Nebo.
+
+'You'll have to go if it breaks all the horses' legs in the county,'
+said the cook, turning from the spectacle, knocking open the
+oven-door with the tongs, glancing critically in, and slamming it
+together with a clang.
+
+'O, O; why shall I?' asked the coachman, including in his auditory
+by a glance the clerk and gardener who had just entered.
+
+'Because Mr. Manston is in the business. Did you ever know him to
+give up for weather of any kind, or for any other mortal thing in
+heaven or earth?'
+
+'----Mornen so's--such as it is!' interrupted Mr. Crickett
+cheerily, coming forward to the blaze and warming one hand without
+looking at the fire. 'Mr. Manston gie up for anything in heaven or
+earth, did you say? You might ha' cut it short by sayen "to Miss
+Aldclyffe," and leaven out heaven and earth as trifles. But it
+might be put off; putten off a thing isn't getten rid of a thing, if
+that thing is a woman. O no, no!'
+
+The coachman and gardener now naturally subsided into secondaries.
+The cook went on rather sharply, as she dribbled milk into the exact
+centre of a little crater of flour in a platter--
+
+'It might be in this case; she's so indifferent.'
+
+'Dang my old sides! and so it might be. I have a bit of news--I
+thought there was something upon my tongue; but 'tis a secret; not a
+word, mind, not a word. Why, Miss Hinton took a holiday yesterday.'
+
+'Yes?' inquired the cook, looking up with perplexed curiosity.
+
+'D'ye think that's all?'
+
+'Don't be so three-cunning--if it is all, deliver you from the evil
+of raising a woman's expectations wrongfully; I'll skimmer your pate
+as sure as you cry Amen!'
+
+'Well, it isn't all. When I got home last night my wife said, "Miss
+Adelaide took a holiday this mornen," says she (my wife, that is);
+"walked over to Nether Mynton, met the comen man, and got married!"
+says she.'
+
+'Got married! what, Lord-a-mercy, did Springrove come?'
+
+'Springrove, no--no--Springrove's nothen to do wi' it--'twas Farmer
+Bollens. They've been playing bo-peep for these two or three months
+seemingly. Whilst Master Teddy Springrove has been daddlen, and
+hawken, and spetten about having her, she's quietly left him all
+forsook. Serve him right. I don't blame the little woman a bit.'
+
+'Farmer Bollens is old enough to be her father!'
+
+'Ay, quite; and rich enough to be ten fathers. They say he's so
+rich that he has business in every bank, and measures his money in
+half-pint cups.'
+
+'Lord, I wish it was me, don't I wish 'twas me!' said the
+scullery-maid.
+
+'Yes, 'twas as neat a bit of stitching as ever I heard of,'
+continued the clerk, with a fixed eye, as if he were watching the
+process from a distance. 'Not a soul knew anything about it, and my
+wife is the only one in our parish who knows it yet. Miss Hinton
+came back from the wedden, went to Mr. Manston, puffed herself out
+large, and said she was Mrs. Bollens, but that if he wished, she had
+no objection to keep on the house till the regular time of giving
+notice had expired, or till he could get another tenant.'
+
+'Just like her independence,' said the cook.
+
+'Well, independent or no, she's Mrs. Bollens now. Ah, I shall never
+forget once when I went by Farmer Bollens's garden--years ago now
+--years, when he was taking up ashleaf taties. A merry feller I was
+at that time, a very merry feller--for 'twas before I took holy
+orders, and it didn't prick my conscience as 'twould now. "Farmer,"
+says I, "little taties seem to turn out small this year, don't em?"
+"O no, Crickett," says he, "some be fair-sized." He's a dull man
+--Farmer Bollens is--he always was. However, that's neither here nor
+there; he's a-married to a sharp woman, and if I don't make a
+mistake she'll bring him a pretty good family, gie her time.'
+
+'Well, it don't matter; there's a Providence in it,' said the
+scullery-maid. 'God A'mighty always sends bread as well as
+children.'
+
+'But 'tis the bread to one house and the children to another very
+often. However, I think I can see my lady Hinton's reason for
+chosen yesterday to sickness-or-health-it. Your young miss, and
+that one, had crossed one another's path in regard to young Master
+Springrove; and I expect that when Addy Hinton found Miss Graye
+wasn't caren to have en, she thought she'd be beforehand with her
+old enemy in marrying somebody else too. That's maids' logic all
+over, and maids' malice likewise.'
+
+Women who are bad enough to divide against themselves under a man's
+partiality are good enough to instantly unite in a common cause
+against his attack. 'I'll just tell you one thing then,' said the
+cook, shaking out her words to the time of a whisk she was beating
+eggs with. 'Whatever maids' logic is and maids' malice too, if
+Cytherea Graye even now knows that young Springrove is free again,
+she'll fling over the steward as soon as look at him.'
+
+'No, no: not now,' the coachman broke in like a moderator.
+'There's honour in that maid, if ever there was in one. No Miss
+Hinton's tricks in her. She'll stick to Manston.'
+
+'Pifh!'
+
+'Don't let a word be said till the wedden is over, for Heaven's
+sake,' the clerk continued. 'Miss Aldclyffe would fairly hang and
+quarter me, if my news broke off that there wedden at a last minute
+like this.'
+
+'Then you had better get your wife to bolt you in the closet for an
+hour or two, for you'll chatter it yourself to the whole boiling
+parish if she don't! 'Tis a poor womanly feller!'
+
+'You shouldn't ha' begun it, clerk. I knew how 'twould be,' said
+the gardener soothingly, in a whisper to the clerk's mangled
+remains.
+
+The clerk turned and smiled at the fire, and warmed his other hand.
+
+3. NOON
+
+The weather gave way. In half-an-hour there began a rapid thaw. By
+ten o'clock the roads, though still dangerous, were practicable to
+the extent of the half-mile required by the people of Knapwater
+Park. One mass of heavy leaden cloud spread over the whole sky; the
+air began to feel damp and mild out of doors, though still cold and
+frosty within.
+
+They reached the church and passed up the nave, the deep-coloured
+glass of the narrow windows rendering the gloom of the morning
+almost night itself inside the building. Then the ceremony began.
+The only warmth or spirit imported into it came from the bridegroom,
+who retained a vigorous--even Spenserian--bridal-mood throughout the
+morning.
+
+Cytherea was as firm as he at this critical moment, but as cold as
+the air surrounding her. The few persons forming the wedding-party
+were constrained in movement and tone, and from the nave of the
+church came occasional coughs, emitted by those who, in spite of the
+weather, had assembled to see the termination of Cytherea's
+existence as a single woman. Many poor people loved her. They
+pitied her success, why, they could not tell, except that it was
+because she seemed to stand more like a statue than Cytherea Graye.
+
+Yet she was prettily and carefully dressed; a strange contradiction
+in a man's idea of things--a saddening, perplexing contradiction.
+Are there any points in which a difference of sex amounts to a
+difference of nature? Then this is surely one. Not so much, as it
+is commonly put, in regard to the amount of consideration given, but
+in the conception of the thing considered. A man emasculated by
+coxcombry may spend more time upon the arrangement of his clothes
+than any woman, but even then there is no fetichism in his idea of
+them--they are still only a covering he uses for a time. But here
+was Cytherea, in the bottom of her heart almost indifferent to life,
+yet possessing an instinct with which her heart had nothing to do,
+the instinct to be particularly regardful of those sorry trifles,
+her robe, her flowers, her veil, and her gloves.
+
+The irrevocable words were soon spoken--the indelible writing soon
+written--and they came out of the vestry. Candles had been
+necessary here to enable them to sign their names, and on their
+return to the church the light from the candles streamed from the
+small open door, and across the chancel to a black chestnut screen
+on the south side, dividing it from a small chapel or chantry,
+erected for the soul's peace of some Aldclyffe of the past. Through
+the open-work of this screen could now be seen illuminated, inside
+the chantry, the reclining figures of cross-legged knights, damp and
+green with age, and above them a huge classic monument, also
+inscribed to the Aldclyffe family, heavily sculptured in cadaverous
+marble.
+
+Leaning here--almost hanging to the monument--was Edward Springrove,
+or his spirit.
+
+The weak daylight would never have revealed him, shaded as he was by
+the screen; but the unexpected rays of candle-light in the front
+showed him forth in startling relief to any and all of those whose
+eyes wandered in that direction. The sight was a sad one--sad
+beyond all description. His eyes were wild, their orbits leaden.
+His face was of a sickly paleness, his hair dry and disordered, his
+lips parted as if he could get no breath. His figure was
+spectre-thin. His actions seemed beyond his own control.
+
+Manston did not see him; Cytherea did. The healing effect upon her
+heart of a year's silence--a year and a half's separation--was
+undone in an instant. One of those strange revivals of passion by
+mere sight--commoner in women than in men, and in oppressed women
+commonest of all--had taken place in her--so transcendently, that
+even to herself it seemed more like a new creation than a revival.
+
+Marrying for a home--what a mockery it was!
+
+It may be said that the means most potent for rekindling old love in
+a maiden's heart are, to see her lover in laughter and good spirits
+in her despite when the breach has been owing to a slight from
+herself; when owing to a slight from him, to see him suffering for
+his own fault. If he is happy in a clear conscience, she blames
+him; if he is miserable because deeply to blame, she blames herself.
+The latter was Cytherea's case now.
+
+First, an agony of face told of the suppressed misery within her,
+which presently could be suppressed no longer. When they were coming
+out of the porch, there broke from her in a low plaintive scream the
+words, 'He's dying--dying! O God, save us!' She began to sink
+down, and would have fallen had not Manston caught her. The chief
+bridesmaid applied her vinaigrette.
+
+'What did she say?' inquired Manston.
+
+Owen was the only one to whom the words were intelligible, and he
+was far too deeply impressed, or rather alarmed, to reply. She did
+not faint, and soon began to recover her self-command. Owen took
+advantage of the hindrance to step back to where the apparition had
+been seen. He was enraged with Springrove for what he considered an
+unwarrantable intrusion.
+
+But Edward was not in the chantry. As he had come, so he had gone,
+nobody could tell how or whither.
+
+4. AFTERNOON
+
+It might almost have been believed that a transmutation had taken
+place in Cytherea's idiosyncrasy, that her moral nature had fled.
+
+The wedding-party returned to the house. As soon as he could find
+an opportunity, Owen took his sister aside to speak privately with
+her on what had happened. The expression of her face was hard,
+wild, and unreal--an expression he had never seen there before, and
+it disturbed him. He spoke to her severely and sadly.
+
+'Cytherea,' he said, 'I know the cause of this emotion of yours.
+But remember this, there was no excuse for it. You should have been
+woman enough to control yourself. Remember whose wife you are, and
+don't think anything more of a mean-spirited fellow like Springrove;
+he had no business to come there as he did. You are altogether
+wrong, Cytherea, and I am vexed with you more than I can say--very
+vexed.'
+
+'Say ashamed of me at once,' she bitterly answered.
+
+'I am ashamed of you,' he retorted angrily; 'the mood has not left
+you yet, then?'
+
+'Owen,' she said, and paused. Her lip trembled; her eye told of
+sensations too deep for tears. 'No, Owen, it has not left me; and I
+will be honest. I own now to you, without any disguise of words,
+what last night I did not own to myself, because I hardly knew of
+it. I love Edward Springrove with all my strength, and heart, and
+soul. You call me a wanton for it, don't you? I don't care; I have
+gone beyond caring for anything!' She looked stonily into his face
+and made the speech calmly.
+
+'Well, poor Cytherea, don't talk like that!' he said, alarmed at her
+manner.
+
+'I thought that I did not love him at all,' she went on
+hysterically. 'A year and a half had passed since we met. I could
+go by the gate of his garden without thinking of him--look at his
+seat in church and not care. But I saw him this morning--dying
+because he loves me so--I know it is that! Can I help loving him
+too? No, I cannot, and I will love him, and I don't care! We have
+been separated somehow by some contrivance--I know we have. O, if I
+could only die!'
+
+He held her in his arms. 'Many a woman has gone to ruin herself,'
+he said, 'and brought those who love her into disgrace, by acting
+upon such impulses as possess you now. I have a reputation to lose
+as well as you. It seems that do what I will by way of remedying
+the stains which fell upon us, it is all doomed to be undone again.'
+His voice grew husky as he made the reply.
+
+The right and only effective chord had been touched. Since she had
+seen Edward, she had thought only of herself and him. Owen--her
+name--position--future--had been as if they did not exist.
+
+'I won't give way and become a disgrace to _you_, at any rate,' she
+said.
+
+'Besides, your duty to society, and those about you, requires that
+you should live with (at any rate) all the appearance of a good
+wife, and try to love your husband.'
+
+'Yes--my duty to society,' she murmured. 'But ah, Owen, it is
+difficult to adjust our outer and inner life with perfect honesty to
+all! Though it may be right to care more for the benefit of the
+many than for the indulgence of your own single self, when you
+consider that the many, and duty to them, only exist to you through
+your own existence, what can be said? What do our own acquaintances
+care about us? Not much. I think of mine. Mine will now (do they
+learn all the wicked frailty of my heart in this affair) look at me,
+smile sickly, and condemn me. And perhaps, far in time to come,
+when I am dead and gone, some other's accent, or some other's song,
+or thought, like an old one of mine, will carry them back to what I
+used to say, and hurt their hearts a little that they blamed me so
+soon. And they will pause just for an instant, and give a sigh to
+me, and think, "Poor girl!" believing they do great justice to my
+memory by this. But they will never, never realize that it was my
+single opportunity of existence, as well as of doing my duty, which
+they are regarding; they will not feel that what to them is but a
+thought, easily held in those two words of pity, "Poor girl!" was a
+whole life to me; as full of hours, minutes, and peculiar minutes,
+of hopes and dreads, smiles, whisperings, tears, as theirs: that it
+was my world, what is to them their world, and they in that life of
+mine, however much I cared for them, only as the thought I seem to
+them to be. Nobody can enter into another's nature truly, that's
+what is so grievous.'
+
+'Well, it cannot be helped,' said Owen.
+
+'But we must not stay here,' she continued, starting up and going.
+'We shall be missed. I'll do my best, Owen--I will, indeed.'
+
+It had been decided that on account of the wretched state of the
+roads, the newly-married pair should not drive to the station till
+the latest hour in the afternoon at which they could get a train to
+take them to Southampton (their destination that night) by a
+reasonable time in the evening. They intended the next morning to
+cross to Havre, and thence to Paris--a place Cytherea had never
+visited--for their wedding tour.
+
+The afternoon drew on. The packing was done. Cytherea was so
+restless that she could stay still nowhere. Miss Aldclyffe, who,
+though she took little part in the day's proceedings, was, as it
+were, instinctively conscious of all their movements, put down her
+charge's agitation for once as the natural result of the novel
+event, and Manston himself was as indulgent as could be wished.
+
+At length Cytherea wandered alone into the conservatory. When in
+it, she thought she would run across to the hot-house in the outer
+garden, having in her heart a whimsical desire that she should also
+like to take a last look at the familiar flowers and luxuriant
+leaves collected there. She pulled on a pair of overshoes, and
+thither she went. Not a soul was in or around the place. The
+gardener was making merry on Manston's and her account.
+
+The happiness that a generous spirit derives from the belief that it
+exists in others is often greater than the primary happiness itself.
+The gardener thought 'How happy they are!' and the thought made him
+happier than they.
+
+Coming out of the forcing-house again, she was on the point of
+returning indoors, when a feeling that these moments of solitude
+would be her last of freedom induced her to prolong them a little,
+and she stood still, unheeding the wintry aspect of the curly-leaved
+plants, the straw-covered beds, and the bare fruit-trees around her.
+The garden, no part of which was visible from the house, sloped down
+to a narrow river at the foot, dividing it from the meadows without.
+
+A man was lingering along the public path on the other side of the
+river; she fancied she knew the form. Her resolutions, taken in the
+presence of Owen, did not fail her now. She hoped and prayed that
+it might not be one who had stolen her heart away, and still kept
+it. Why should he have reappeared at all, when he had declared that
+he went out of her sight for ever?
+
+She hastily hid herself, in the lowest corner of the garden close to
+the river. A large dead tree, thickly robed in ivy, had been
+considerably depressed by its icy load of the morning, and hung low
+over the stream, which here ran slow and deep. The tree screened
+her from the eyes of any passer on the other side.
+
+She waited timidly, and her timidity increased. She would not allow
+herself to see him--she would hear him pass, and then look to see if
+it had been Edward.
+
+But, before she heard anything, she became aware of an object
+reflected in the water from under the tree which hung over the river
+in such a way that, though hiding the actual path, and objects upon
+it, it permitted their reflected images to pass beneath its boughs.
+The reflected form was that of the man she had seen further off, but
+being inverted, she could not definitely characterize him.
+
+He was looking at the upper windows of the House--at hers--was it
+Edward, indeed? If so, he was probably thinking he would like to
+say one parting word. He came closer, gazed into the stream, and
+walked very slowly. She was almost certain that it was Edward. She
+kept more safely hidden. Conscience told her that she ought not to
+see him. But she suddenly asked herself a question: 'Can it be
+possible that he sees my reflected image, as I see his? Of course
+he does!'
+
+He was looking at her in the water.
+
+She could not help herself now. She stepped forward just as he
+emerged from the other side of the tree and appeared erect before
+her. It was Edward Springrove--till the inverted vision met his
+eye, dreaming no more of seeing his Cytherea there than of seeing
+the dead themselves.
+
+'Cytherea!'
+
+'Mr. Springrove,' she returned, in a low voice, across the stream.
+
+He was the first to speak again.
+
+'Since we have met, I want to tell you something, before we become
+quite as strangers to each other.'
+
+'No--not now--I did not mean to speak--it is not right, Edward.'
+She spoke hurriedly and turned away from him, beating the air with
+her hand.
+
+'Not one common word of explanation?' he implored. 'Don't think I
+am bad enough to try to lead you astray. Well, go--it is better.'
+
+Their eyes met again. She was nearly choked. O, how she longed
+--and dreaded--to hear his explanation!
+
+'What is it?' she said desperately.
+
+'It is that I did not come to the church this morning in order to
+distress you: I did not, Cytherea. It was to try to speak to you
+before you were--married.'
+
+He stepped closer, and went on, 'You know what has taken place?
+Surely you do?--my cousin is married, and I am free.'
+
+'Married--and not to you?' Cytherea faltered, in a weak whisper.
+
+'Yes, she was married yesterday! A rich man had appeared, and she
+jilted me. She said she never would have jilted a stranger, but
+that by jilting me, she only exercised the right everybody has of
+snubbing their own relations. But that's nothing now. I came to
+you to ask once more if. . . . But I was too late.'
+
+'But, Edward, what's that, what's that!' she cried, in an agony of
+reproach. 'Why did you leave me to return to her? Why did you
+write me that cruel, cruel letter that nearly killed me!'
+
+'Cytherea! Why, you had grown to love--like--Mr. Manston, and how
+could you be anything to me--or care for me? Surely I acted
+naturally?'
+
+'O no--never! I loved you--only you--not him--always you!--till
+lately. . . . I try to love him now.'
+
+'But that can't be correct! Miss Aldclyffe told me that you wanted
+to hear no more of me--proved it to me!' said Edward.
+
+'Never! she couldn't.'
+
+'She did, Cytherea. And she sent me a letter--a love-letter, you
+wrote to Mr. Manston.'
+
+'A love-letter I wrote?'
+
+'Yes, a love-letter--you could not meet him just then, you said you
+were sorry, but the emotion you had felt with him made you forgetful
+of realities.'
+
+The strife of thought in the unhappy girl who listened to this
+distortion of her meaning could find no vent in words. And then
+there followed the slow revelation in return, bringing with it all
+the misery of an explanation which comes too late. The question
+whether Miss Aldclyffe were schemer or dupe was almost passed over
+by Cytherea, under the immediate oppressiveness of her despair in
+the sense that her position was irretrievable.
+
+Not so Springrove. He saw through all the cunning
+half-misrepresentations--worse than downright lies--which had just
+been sufficient to turn the scale both with him and with her; and
+from the bottom of his soul he cursed the woman and man who had
+brought all this agony upon him and his Love. But he could not add
+more misery to the future of the poor child by revealing too much.
+The whole scheme she should never know.
+
+'I was indifferent to my own future,' Edward said, 'and was urged to
+promise adherence to my engagement with my cousin Adelaide by Miss
+Aldclyffe: now you are married I cannot tell you how, but it was on
+account of my father. Being forbidden to think of you, what did I
+care about anything? My new thought that you still loved me was
+first raised by what my father said in the letter announcing my
+cousin's marriage. He said that although you were to be married on
+Old Christmas Day--that is to-morrow--he had noticed your appearance
+with pity: he thought you loved me still. It was enough for me--I
+came down by the earliest morning train, thinking I could see you
+some time to-day, the day, as I thought, before your marriage,
+hoping, but hardly daring to hope, that you might be induced to
+marry me. I hurried from the station; when I reached the village I
+saw idlers about the church, and the private gate leading to the
+House open. I ran into the church by the small door and saw you
+come out of the vestry; I was too late. I have now told you. I was
+compelled to tell you. O, my lost darling, now I shall live
+content--or die content!'
+
+'I am to blame, Edward, I am,' she said mournfully; 'I was taught to
+dread pauperism; my nights were made sleepless; there was
+continually reiterated in my ears till I believed it--
+
+     '"The world and its ways have a certain worth,
+       And to press a point where these oppose
+       Were a simple policy."
+
+'But I will say nothing about who influenced--who persuaded. The act
+is mine, after all. Edward, I married to escape dependence for my
+bread upon the whim of Miss Aldclyffe, or others like her. It was
+clearly represented to me that dependence is bearable if we have
+another place which we can call home; but to be a dependent and to
+have no other spot for the heart to anchor upon--O, it is mournful
+and harassing! . . . But that without which all persuasion would
+have been as air, was added by my miserable conviction that you were
+false; that did it, that turned me! You were to be considered as
+nobody to me, and Mr. Manston was invariably kind. Well, the deed
+is done--I must abide by it. I shall never let him know that I do
+not love him--never. If things had only remained as they seemed to
+be, if you had really forgotten me and married another woman, I
+could have borne it better. I wish I did not know the truth as I
+know it now! But our life, what is it? Let us be brave, Edward,
+and live out our few remaining years with dignity. They will not be
+long. O, I hope they will not be long! . . . Now, good-bye,
+good-bye!'
+
+'I wish I could be near and touch you once, just once,' said
+Springrove, in a voice which he vainly endeavoured to keep firm and
+clear.
+
+They looked at the river, then into it; a shoal of minnows was
+floating over the sandy bottom, like the black dashes on miniver;
+though narrow, the stream was deep, and there was no bridge.
+
+'Cytherea, reach out your hand that I may just touch it with mine.'
+
+She stepped to the brink and stretched out her hand and fingers
+towards his, but not into them. The river was too wide.
+
+'Never mind,' said Cytherea, her voice broken by agitation, 'I must
+be going. God bless and keep you, my Edward! God bless you!'
+
+'I must touch you, I must press your hand,' he said.
+
+They came near--nearer--nearer still--their fingers met. There was
+a long firm clasp, so close and still that each hand could feel the
+other's pulse throbbing beside its own.
+
+'My Cytherea! my stolen pet lamb!'
+
+She glanced a mute farewell from her large perturbed eyes, turned,
+and ran up the garden without looking back. All was over between
+them. The river flowed on as quietly and obtusely as ever, and the
+minnows gathered again in their favourite spot as if they had never
+been disturbed.
+
+Nobody indoors guessed from her countenance and bearing that her
+heart was near to breaking with the intensity of the misery which
+gnawed there. At these times a woman does not faint, or weep, or
+scream, as she will in the moment of sudden shocks. When lanced by
+a mental agony of such refined and special torture that it is
+indescribable by men's words, she moves among her acquaintances much
+as before, and contrives so to cast her actions in the old moulds
+that she is only considered to be rather duller than usual.
+
+5. HALF-PAST TWO TO FIVE O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+Owen accompanied the newly-married couple to the railway-station,
+and in his anxiety to see the last of his sister, left the brougham
+and stood upon his crutches whilst the train was starting.
+
+When the husband and wife were about to enter the railway-carriage
+they saw one of the porters looking frequently and furtively at
+them. He was pale, and apparently very ill.
+
+'Look at that poor sick man,' said Cytherea compassionately, 'surely
+he ought not to be here.'
+
+'He's been very queer to-day, madam, very queer,' another porter
+answered. 'He do hardly hear when he's spoken to, and d' seem
+giddy, or as if something was on his mind. He's been like it for
+this month past, but nothing so bad as he is to-day.'
+
+'Poor thing.'
+
+She could not resist an innate desire to do some just thing on this
+most deceitful and wretched day of her life. Going up to him she
+gave him money, and told him to send to the old manor-house for wine
+or whatever he wanted.
+
+The train moved off as the trembling man was murmuring his
+incoherent thanks. Owen waved his hand; Cytherea smiled back to him
+as if it were unknown to her that she wept all the while.
+
+Owen was driven back to the Old House. But he could not rest in the
+lonely place. His conscience began to reproach him for having
+forced on the marriage of his sister with a little too much
+peremptoriness. Taking up his crutches he went out of doors and
+wandered about the muddy roads with no object in view save that of
+getting rid of time.
+
+The clouds which had hung so low and densely during the day cleared
+from the west just now as the sun was setting, calling forth a
+weakly twitter from a few small birds. Owen crawled down the path
+to the waterfall, and lingered thereabout till the solitude of the
+place oppressed him, when he turned back and into the road to the
+village. He was sad; he said to himself--
+
+'If there is ever any meaning in those heavy feelings which are
+called presentiments--and I don't believe there is--there will be in
+mine to-day. . . . Poor little Cytherea!'
+
+At that moment the last low rays of the sun touched the head and
+shoulders of a man who was approaching, and showed him up to Owen's
+view. It was old Mr. Springrove. They had grown familiar with
+each other by reason of Owen's visits to Knapwater during the past
+year. The farmer inquired how Owen's foot was progressing, and was
+glad to see him so nimble again.
+
+'How is your son?' said Owen mechanically.
+
+'He is at home, sitting by the fire,' said the farmer, in a sad
+voice. 'This morning he slipped indoors from God knows where, and
+there he sits and mopes, and thinks, and thinks, and presses his
+head so hard, that I can't help feeling for him.'
+
+'Is he married?' said Owen. Cytherea had feared to tell him of the
+interview in the garden.
+
+'No. I can't quite understand how the matter rests. . . . Ah!
+Edward, too, who started with such promise; that he should now have
+become such a careless fellow--not a month in one place. There, Mr.
+Graye, I know what it is mainly owing to. If it hadn't been for
+that heart affair, he might have done--but the less said about him
+the better. I don't know what we should have done if Miss Aldclyffe
+had insisted upon the conditions of the leases. Your brother-in-law,
+the steward, had a hand in making it light for us, I know, and
+I heartily thank him for it.' He ceased speaking, and looked round
+at the sky.
+
+'Have you heard o' what's happened?' he said suddenly; 'I was just
+coming out to learn about it.'
+
+'I haven't heard of anything.'
+
+'It is something very serious, though I don't know what. All I know
+is what I heard a man call out bynow--that it very much concerns
+somebody who lives in the parish.'
+
+It seems singular enough, even to minds who have no dim beliefs in
+adumbration and presentiment, that at that moment not the shadow of
+a thought crossed Owen's mind that the somebody whom the matter
+concerned might be himself, or any belonging to him. The event
+about to transpire was as portentous to the woman whose welfare was
+more dear to him than his own, as any, short of death itself, could
+possibly be; and ever afterwards, when he considered the effect of
+the knowledge the next half-hour conveyed to his brain, even his
+practical good sense could not refrain from wonder that he should
+have walked toward the village after hearing those words of the
+farmer, in so leisurely and unconcerned a way. 'How unutterably
+mean must my intelligence have appeared to the eye of a foreseeing
+God,' he frequently said in after-time. 'Columbus on the eve of his
+discovery of a world was not so contemptibly unaware.'
+
+After a few additional words of common-place the farmer left him,
+and, as has been said, Owen proceeded slowly and indifferently
+towards the village.
+
+The labouring men had just left work, and passed the park gate,
+which opened into the street as Owen came down towards it. They
+went along in a drift, earnestly talking, and were finally about to
+turn in at their respective doorways. But upon seeing him they
+looked significantly at one another, and paused. He came into the
+road, on that side of the village-green which was opposite the row
+of cottages, and turned round to the right. When Owen turned, all
+eyes turned; one or two men went hurriedly indoors, and afterwards
+appeared at the doorstep with their wives, who also contemplated
+him, talking as they looked. They seemed uncertain how to act in
+some matter.
+
+'If they want me, surely they will call me,' he thought, wondering
+more and more. He could no longer doubt that he was connected with
+the subject of their discourse.
+
+The first who approached him was a boy.
+
+'What has occurred?' said Owen.
+
+'O, a man ha' got crazy-religious, and sent for the pa'son.'
+
+'Is that all?'
+
+'Yes, sir. He wished he was dead, he said, and he's almost out of
+his mind wi' wishen it so much. That was before Mr. Raunham came.'
+
+'Who is he?' said Owen.
+
+'Joseph Chinney, one of the railway-porters; he used to be
+night-porter.'
+
+'Ah--the man who was ill this afternoon; by the way, he was told to
+come to the Old House for something, but he hasn't been. But has
+anything else happened--anything that concerns the wedding to-day?'
+
+'No, sir.'
+
+Concluding that the connection which had seemed to be traced between
+himself and the event must in some way have arisen from Cytherea's
+friendliness towards the man, Owen turned about and went homewards
+in a much quieter frame of mind--yet scarcely satisfied with the
+solution. The route he had chosen led through the dairy-yard, and
+he opened the gate.
+
+Five minutes before this point of time, Edward Springrove was
+looking over one of his father's fields at an outlying hamlet of
+three or four cottages some mile and a half distant. A
+turnpike-gate was close by the gate of the field.
+
+The carrier to Casterbridge came up as Edward stepped into the road,
+and jumped down from the van to pay toll. He recognized Springrove.
+'This is a pretty set-to in your place, sir,' he said. 'You don't
+know about it, I suppose?'
+
+'What?' said Springrove.
+
+The carrier paid his dues, came up to Edward, and spoke ten words in
+a confidential whisper: then sprang upon the shafts of his vehicle,
+gave a clinching nod of significance to Springrove, and rattled
+away.
+
+Edward turned pale with the intelligence. His first thought was,
+'Bring her home!'
+
+The next--did Owen Graye know what had been discovered? He probably
+did by that time, but no risks of probability must be run by a woman
+he loved dearer than all the world besides. He would at any rate
+make perfectly sure that her brother was in possession of the
+knowledge, by telling it him with his own lips.
+
+Off he ran in the direction of the old manor-house.
+
+The path was across arable land, and was ploughed up with the rest
+of the field every autumn, after which it was trodden out afresh.
+The thaw had so loosened the soft earth, that lumps of stiff mud
+were lifted by his feet at every leap he took, and flung against him
+by his rapid motion, as it were doggedly impeding him, and
+increasing tenfold the customary effort of running,
+
+But he ran on--uphill, and downhill, the same pace alike--like the
+shadow of a cloud. His nearest direction, too, like Owen's, was
+through the dairy-barton, and as Owen entered it he saw the figure
+of Edward rapidly descending the opposite hill, at a distance of two
+or three hundred yards. Owen advanced amid the cows.
+
+The dairyman, who had hitherto been talking loudly on some absorbing
+subject to the maids and men milking around him, turned his face
+towards the head of the cow when Owen passed, and ceased speaking.
+
+Owen approached him and said--
+
+'A singular thing has happened, I hear. The man is not insane, I
+suppose?'
+
+'Not he--he's sensible enough,' said the dairyman, and paused. He
+was a man noisy with his associates--stolid and taciturn with
+strangers.
+
+'Is it true that he is Chinney, the railway-porter?'
+
+'That's the man, sir.' The maids and men sitting under the cows
+were all attentively listening to this discourse, milking
+irregularly, and softly directing the jets against the sides of the
+pail.
+
+Owen could contain himself no longer, much as his mind dreaded
+anything of the nature of ridicule. 'The people all seem to look at
+me, as if something seriously concerned me; is it this stupid
+matter, or what is it?'
+
+'Surely, sir, you know better than anybody else if such a strange
+thing concerns you.'
+
+'What strange thing?'
+
+'Don't you know! His confessing to Parson Raunham.'
+
+'What did he confess? Tell me.'
+
+'If you really ha'n't heard, 'tis this. He was as usual on duty at
+the station on the night of the fire last year, otherwise he
+wouldn't ha' known it.'
+
+'Known what? For God's sake tell, man!'
+
+But at this instant the two opposite gates of the dairy-yard, one on
+the east, the other on the west side, slammed almost simultaneously.
+
+The rector from one, Springrove from the other, came striding across
+the barton.
+
+Edward was nearest, and spoke first. He said in a low voice: 'Your
+sister is not legally married! His first wife is still living! How
+it comes out I don't know!'
+
+'O, here you are at last, Mr. Graye, thank Heaven!' said the rector
+breathlessly. 'I have been to the Old House, and then to Miss
+Aldclyffe's looking for you--something very extraordinary.' He
+beckoned to Owen, afterwards included Springrove in his glance, and
+the three stepped aside together.
+
+'A porter at the station. He was a curious nervous man. He had
+been in a strange state all day, but he wouldn't go home. Your
+sister was kind to him, it seems, this afternoon. When she and her
+husband had gone, he went on with his work, shifting luggage-vans.
+Well, he got in the way, as if he were quite lost to what was going
+on, and they sent him home at last. Then he wished to see me. I
+went directly. There was something on his mind, he said, and told
+it. About the time when the fire of last November twelvemonth was
+got under, whilst he was by himself in the porter's room, almost
+asleep, somebody came to the station and tried to open the door. He
+went out and found the person to be the lady he had accompanied to
+Carriford earlier in the evening, Mrs. Manston. She asked, when
+would be another train to London? The first the next morning, he
+told her, was at a quarter-past six o'clock from Budmouth, but that
+it was express, and didn't stop at Carriford Road--it didn't stop
+till it got to Anglebury. "How far is it to Anglebury?" she said.
+He told her, and she thanked him, and went away up the line. In a
+short time she ran back and took out her purse. "Don't on any
+account say a word in the village or anywhere that I have been here,
+or a single breath about me--I'm ashamed ever to have come." He
+promised; she took out two sovereigns. "Swear it on the Testament
+in the waiting-room," she said, "and I'll pay you these." He got
+the book, took an oath upon it, received the money, and she left
+him. He was off duty at half-past five. He has kept silence all
+through the intervening time till now, but lately the knowledge he
+possessed weighed heavily upon his conscience and weak mind. Yet
+the nearer came the wedding-day, the more he feared to tell. The
+actual marriage filled him with remorse. He says your sister's
+kindness afterwards was like a knife going through his heart. He
+thought he had ruined her.'
+
+'But whatever can be done? Why didn't he speak sooner?' cried Owen.
+
+'He actually called at my house twice yesterday,' the rector
+continued, 'resolved, it seems, to unburden his mind. I was out
+both times--he left no message, and, they say, he looked relieved
+that his object was defeated. Then he says he resolved to come to
+you at the Old House last night--started, reached the door, and
+dreaded to knock--and then went home again.'
+
+'Here will be a tale for the newsmongers of the county,' said Owen
+bitterly. 'The idea of his not opening his mouth sooner--the
+criminality of the thing!'
+
+'Ah, that's the inconsistency of a weak nature. But now that it is
+put to us in this way, how much more probable it seems that she
+should have escaped than have been burnt--'
+
+'You will, of course, go straight to Mr. Manston, and ask him what
+it all means?' Edward interrupted.
+
+'Of course I shall! Manston has no right to carry off my sister
+unless he's her husband,' said Owen. 'I shall go and separate
+them.'
+
+'Certainly you will,' said the rector.
+
+'Where's the man?'
+
+'In his cottage.'
+
+''Tis no use going to him, either. I must go off at once and
+overtake them--lay the case before Manston, and ask him for
+additional and certain proofs of his first wife's death. An
+up-train passes soon, I think.'
+
+'Where have they gone?' said Edward.
+
+'To Paris--as far as Southampton this afternoon, to proceed
+to-morrow morning.'
+
+'Where in Southampton?'
+
+'I really don't know--some hotel. I only have their Paris address.
+But I shall find them by making a few inquiries.'
+
+The rector had in the meantime been taking out his pocket-book, and
+now opened it at the first page, whereon it was his custom every
+month to gum a small railway time-table--cut from the local
+newspaper.
+
+'The afternoon express is just gone,' he said, holding open the
+page, 'and the next train to Southampton passes at ten minutes to
+six o'clock. Now it wants--let me see--five-and-forty minutes to
+that time. Mr. Graye, my advice is that you come with me to the
+porter's cottage, where I will shortly write out the substance of
+what he has said, and get him to sign it. You will then have far
+better grounds for interfering between Mr. and Mrs. Manston than if
+you went to them with a mere hearsay story.'
+
+The suggestion seemed a good one. 'Yes, there will be time before
+the train starts,' said Owen.
+
+Edward had been musing restlessly.
+
+'Let me go to Southampton in your place, on account of your
+lameness?' he said suddenly to Graye.
+
+'I am much obliged to you, but I think I can scarcely accept the
+offer,' returned Owen coldly. 'Mr. Manston is an honourable man,
+and I had much better see him myself.'
+
+'There is no doubt,' said Mr. Raunham, 'that the death of his wife
+was fully believed in by himself.'
+
+'None whatever,' said Owen; 'and the news must be broken to him, and
+the question of other proofs asked, in a friendly way. It would not
+do for Mr. Springrove to appear in the case at all.' He still spoke
+rather coldly; the recollection of the attachment between his sister
+and Edward was not a pleasant one to him.
+
+'You will never find them,' said Edward. 'You have never been to
+Southampton, and I know every house there.'
+
+'That makes little difference,' said the rector; 'he will have a
+cab. Certainly Mr. Graye is the proper man to go on the errand.'
+
+'Stay; I'll telegraph to ask them to meet me when I arrive at the
+terminus,' said Owen; 'that is, if their train has not already
+arrived.'
+
+Mr. Raunham pulled out his pocket-book again. 'The two-thirty train
+reached Southampton a quarter of an hour ago,' he said.
+
+It was too late to catch them at the station. Nevertheless, the
+rector suggested that it would be worth while to direct a message to
+'all the respectable hotels in Southampton,' on the chance of its
+finding them, and thus saving a deal of personal labour to Owen in
+searching about the place.
+
+'I'll go and telegraph, whilst you return to the man,' said Edward
+--an offer which was accepted. Graye and the rector then turned off
+in the direction of the porter's cottage.
+
+Edward, to despatch the message at once, hurriedly followed the road
+towards the station, still restlessly thinking. All Owen's
+proceedings were based on the assumption, natural under the
+circumstances, of Manston's good faith, and that he would readily
+acquiesce in any arrangement which should clear up the mystery.
+'But,' thought Edward, 'suppose--and Heaven forgive me, I cannot
+help supposing it--that Manston is not that honourable man, what
+will a young and inexperienced fellow like Owen do? Will he not be
+hoodwinked by some specious story or another, framed to last till
+Manston gets tired of poor Cytherea? And then the disclosure of the
+truth will ruin and blacken both their futures irremediably.'
+
+However, he proceeded to execute his commission. This he put in the
+form of a simple request from Owen to Manston, that Manston would
+come to the Southampton platform, and wait for Owen's arrival, as he
+valued his reputation. The message was directed as the rector had
+suggested, Edward guaranteeing to the clerk who sent it off that
+every expense connected with the search would be paid.
+
+No sooner had the telegram been despatched than his heart sank
+within him at the want of foresight shown in sending it. Had
+Manston, all the time, a knowledge that his first wife lived, the
+telegram would be a forewarning which might enable him to defeat
+Owen still more signally.
+
+Whilst the machine was still giving off its multitudinous series of
+raps, Edward heard a powerful rush under the shed outside, followed
+by a long sonorous creak. It was a train of some sort, stealing
+softly into the station, and it was an up-train. There was the ring
+of a bell. It was certainly a passenger train.
+
+Yet the booking-office window was closed.
+
+'Ho, ho, John, seventeen minutes after time and only three stations
+up the line. The incline again?' The voice was the stationmaster's,
+and the reply seemed to come from the guard.
+
+'Yes, the other side of the cutting. The thaw has made it all in a
+perfect cloud of fog, and the rails are as slippery as glass. We
+had to bring them through the cutting at twice.'
+
+'Anybody else for the four-forty-five express?' the voice continued.
+The few passengers, having crossed over to the other side long
+before this time, had taken their places at once.
+
+A conviction suddenly broke in upon Edward's mind; then a wish
+overwhelmed him. The conviction--as startling as it was sudden--was
+that Manston was a villain, who at some earlier time had discovered
+that his wife lived, and had bribed her to keep out of sight, that
+he might possess Cytherea. The wish was--to proceed at once by this
+very train that was starting, find Manston before he would expect
+from the words of the telegram (if he got it) that anybody from
+Carriford could be with him--charge him boldly with the crime, and
+trust to his consequent confusion (if he were guilty) for a solution
+of the extraordinary riddle, and the release of Cytherea!
+
+The ticket-office had been locked up at the expiration of the time
+at which the train was due. Rushing out as the guard blew his
+whistle, Edward opened the door of a carriage and leapt in. The
+train moved along, and he was soon out of sight.
+
+Springrove had long since passed that peculiar line which lies
+across the course of falling in love--if, indeed, it may not be
+called the initial itself of the complete passion--a longing to
+cherish; when the woman is shifted in a man's mind from the region
+of mere admiration to the region of warm fellowship. At this
+assumption of her nature, she changes to him in tone, hue, and
+expression. All about the loved one that said 'She' before, says
+'We' now. Eyes that were to be subdued become eyes to be feared
+for: a brain that was to be probed by cynicism becomes a brain that
+is to be tenderly assisted; feet that were to be tested in the dance
+become feet that are not to be distressed; the once-criticized
+accent, manner, and dress, become the clients of a special pleader.
+
+6. FIVE TO EIGHT O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+Now that he was fairly on the track, and had begun to cool down,
+Edward remembered that he had nothing to show--no legal authority
+whatever to question Manston or interfere between him and Cytherea
+as husband and wife. He now saw the wisdom of the rector in
+obtaining a signed confession from the porter. The document would
+not be a death-bed confession--perhaps not worth anything legally
+--but it would be held by Owen; and he alone, as Cytherea's natural
+guardian, could separate them on the mere ground of an unproved
+probability, or what might perhaps be called the hallucination of an
+idiot. Edward himself, however, was as firmly convinced as the
+rector had been of the truth of the man's story, and paced backward
+and forward the solitary compartment as the train wound through the
+dark heathery plains, the mazy woods, and moaning coppices, as
+resolved as ever to pounce on Manston, and charge him with the crime
+during the critical interval between the reception of the telegram
+and the hour at which Owen's train would arrive--trusting to
+circumstances for what he should say and do afterwards, but making
+up his mind to be a ready second to Owen in any emergency that might
+arise.
+
+At thirty-three minutes past seven he stood on the platform of the
+station at Southampton--a clear hour before the train containing
+Owen could possibly arrive.
+
+Making a few inquiries here, but too impatient to pursue his
+investigation carefully and inductively, he went into the town.
+
+At the expiration of another half-hour he had visited seven
+hotels and inns, large and small, asking the same questions at
+each, and always receiving the same reply--nobody of that name,
+or answering to that description, had been there. A boy from the
+telegraph-office had called, asking for the same persons, if they
+recollected rightly.
+
+He reflected awhile, struck again by a painful thought that they
+might possibly have decided to cross the Channel by the night-boat.
+Then he hastened off to another quarter of the town to pursue his
+inquiries among hotels of the more old-fashioned and quiet class.
+His stained and weary appearance obtained for him but a modicum of
+civility, wherever he went, which made his task yet more difficult.
+He called at three several houses in this neighbourhood, with the
+same result as before. He entered the door of the fourth house
+whilst the clock of the nearest church was striking eight.
+
+'Have a tall gentleman named Manston, and a young wife arrived here
+this evening?' he asked again, in words which had grown odd to his
+ears from very familiarity.
+
+'A new-married couple, did you say?'
+
+'They are, though I didn't say so.'
+
+'They have taken a sitting-room and bedroom, number thirteen.'
+
+'Are they indoors?'
+
+'I don't know. Eliza!'
+
+'Yes, m'm.'
+
+'See if number thirteen is in--that gentleman and his wife.'
+
+'Yes, m'm.'
+
+'Has any telegram come for them?' said Edward, when the maid had
+gone on her errand.
+
+'No--nothing that I know of.'
+
+'Somebody did come and ask if a Mr. and Mrs. Masters, or some such
+name, were here this evening,' said another voice from the back of
+the bar-parlour.
+
+'And did they get the message?'
+
+'Of course they did not--they were not here--they didn't come till
+half-an-hour after that. The man who made inquiries left no
+message. I told them when they came that they, or a name something
+like theirs, had been asked for, but they didn't seem to understand
+why it should be, and so the matter dropped.'
+
+The chambermaid came back. 'The gentleman is not in, but the lady
+is. Who shall I say?'
+
+'Nobody,' said Edward. For it now became necessary to reflect upon
+his method of proceeding. His object in finding their whereabouts
+--apart from the wish to assist Owen--had been to see Manston, ask
+him flatly for an explanation, and confirm the request of the message
+in the presence of Cytherea--so as to prevent the possibility of the
+steward's palming off a story upon Cytherea, or eluding her brother
+when he came. But here were two important modifications of the
+expected condition of affairs. The telegram had not been received,
+and Cytherea was in the house alone.
+
+He hesitated as to the propriety of intruding upon her in Manston's
+absence. Besides, the women at the bottom of the stairs would see
+him--his intrusion would seem odd--and Manston might return at any
+moment. He certainly might call, and wait for Manston with the
+accusation upon his tongue, as he had intended. But it was a
+doubtful course. That idea had been based upon the assumption that
+Cytherea was not married. If the first wife were really dead after
+all--and he felt sick at the thought--Cytherea as the steward's wife
+might in after-years--perhaps, at once--be subjected to indignity
+and cruelty on account of an old lover's interference now.
+
+Yes, perhaps the announcement would come most properly and safely
+for her from her brother Owen, the time of whose arrival had almost
+expired.
+
+But, on turning round, he saw that the staircase and passage were
+quite deserted. He and his errand had as completely died from the
+minds of the attendants as if they had never been. There was
+absolutely nothing between him and Cytherea's presence. Reason was
+powerless now; he must see her--right or wrong, fair or unfair to
+Manston--offensive to her brother or no. His lips must be the first
+to tell the alarming story to her. Who loved her as he! He went
+back lightly through the hall, up the stairs, two at a time, and
+followed the corridor till he came to the door numbered thirteen.
+
+He knocked softly: nobody answered.
+
+There was no time to lose if he would speak to Cytherea before
+Manston came. He turned the handle of the door and looked in. The
+lamp on the table burned low, and showed writing materials open
+beside it; the chief light came from the fire, the direct rays of
+which were obscured by a sweet familiar outline of head and
+shoulders--still as precious to him as ever.
+
+7. A QUARTER-PAST EIGHT O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+There is an attitude--approximatively called pensive--in which the
+soul of a human being, and especially of a woman, dominates
+outwardly and expresses its presence so strongly, that the
+intangible essence seems more apparent than the body itself. This
+was Cytherea's expression now. What old days and sunny eves at
+Budmouth Bay was she picturing? Her reverie had caused her not to
+notice his knock.
+
+'Cytherea!' he said softly.
+
+She let drop her hand, and turned her head, evidently thinking that
+her visitor could be no other than Manston, yet puzzled at the
+voice.
+
+There was no preface on Springrove's tongue; he forgot his position
+--hers--that he had come to ask quietly if Manston had other proofs
+of being a widower--everything--and jumped to a conclusion.
+
+'You are not his wife, Cytherea--come away, he has a wife living!'
+he cried in an agitated whisper. 'Owen will be here directly.'
+
+She started up, recognized the tidings first, the bearer of them
+afterwards. 'Not his wife? O, what is it--what--who is living?'
+She awoke by degrees. 'What must I do? Edward, it is you! Why did
+you come? Where is Owen?'
+
+'What has Manston shown you in proof of the death of his other wife?
+Tell me quick.'
+
+'Nothing--we have never spoken of the subject. Where is my brother
+Owen? I want him, I want him!'
+
+'He is coming by-and-by. Come to the station to meet him--do,'
+implored Springrove. 'If Mr. Manston comes, he will keep you from
+me: I am nobody,' he added bitterly, feeling the reproach her words
+had faintly shadowed forth.
+
+'Mr. Manston is only gone out to post a letter he has just written,'
+she said, and without being distinctly cognizant of the action, she
+wildly looked for her bonnet and cloak, and began putting them on,
+but in the act of fastening them uttered a spasmodic cry.
+
+'No, I'll not go out with you,' she said, flinging the articles down
+again. Running to the door she flitted along the passage, and
+downstairs.
+
+'Give me a private room--quite private,' she said breathlessly to
+some one below.
+
+'Number twelve is a single room, madam, and unoccupied,' said some
+tongue in astonishment.
+
+Without waiting for any person to show her into it, Cytherea hurried
+upstairs again, brushed through the corridor, entered the room
+specified, and closed the door. Edward heard her sob out--
+
+'Nobody but Owen shall speak to me--nobody!'
+
+'He will be here directly,' said Springrove, close against the
+panel, and then went towards the stairs. He had seen her; it was
+enough.
+
+He descended, stepped into the street, and hastened to meet Owen at
+the railway-station.
+
+As for the poor maiden who had received the news, she knew not what
+to think. She listened till the echo of Edward's footsteps had died
+away, then bowed her face upon the bed. Her sudden impulse had been
+to escape from sight. Her weariness after the unwonted strain,
+mental and bodily, which had been put upon her by the scenes she had
+passed through during the long day, rendered her much more timid and
+shaken by her position than she would naturally have been. She
+thought and thought of that single fact which had been told her
+--that the first Mrs. Manston was still living--till her brain seemed
+ready to burst its confinement with excess of throbbing. It was
+only natural that she should, by degrees, be unable to separate the
+discovery, which was matter of fact, from the suspicion of treachery
+on her husband's part, which was only matter of inference. And thus
+there arose in her a personal fear of him.
+
+'Suppose he should come in now and seize me!' This at first mere
+frenzied supposition grew by degrees to a definite horror of his
+presence, and especially of his intense gaze. Thus she raised
+herself to a heat of excitement, which was none the less real for
+being vented in no cry of any kind. No; she could not meet
+Manston's eye alone, she would only see him in her brother's
+company.
+
+Almost delirious with this idea, she ran and locked the door to
+prevent all possibility of her intentions being nullified, or a look
+or word being flung at her by anybody whilst she knew not what she
+was.
+
+8. HALF-PAST EIGHT O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+Then Cytherea felt her way amid the darkness of the room till she
+came to the head of the bed, where she searched for the bell-rope
+and gave it a pull. Her summons was speedily answered by the
+landlady herself, whose curiosity to know the meaning of these
+strange proceedings knew no bounds. The landlady attempted to turn
+the handle of the door. Cytherea kept the door locked. 'Please
+tell Mr. Manston when he comes that I am ill,' she said from the
+inside, 'and that I cannot see him.'
+
+'Certainly I will, madam,' said the landlady. 'Won't you have a
+fire?'
+
+'No, thank you.'
+
+'Nor a light?'
+
+'I don't want one, thank you.'
+
+'Nor anything?'
+
+'Nothing.'
+
+The landlady withdrew, thinking her visitor half insane.
+
+Manston came in about five minutes later, and went at once up to the
+sitting-room, fully expecting to find his wife there. He looked
+round, rang, and was told the words Cytherea had said, that she was
+too ill to be seen.
+
+'She is in number twelve room,' added the maid.
+
+Manston was alarmed, and knocked at the door. 'Cytherea!'
+
+'I am unwell, I cannot see you,' she said.
+
+'Are you seriously ill, dearest? Surely not.'
+
+'No, not seriously.'
+
+'Let me come in; I will get a doctor.'
+
+'No, he can't see me either.'
+
+'She won't open the door, sir, not to nobody at all!' said the
+chambermaid, with wonder-waiting eyes.
+
+'Hold your tongue, and be off!' said Manston with a snap.
+
+The maid vanished.
+
+'Come, Cytherea, this is foolish--indeed it is--not opening the
+door. . . . I cannot comprehend what can be the matter with you.
+Nor can a doctor either, unless he sees you.'
+
+Her voice had trembled more and more at each answer she gave, but
+nothing could induce her to come out and confront him. Hating
+scenes, Manston went back to the sitting-room, greatly irritated and
+perplexed.
+
+And there Cytherea from the adjoining room could hear him pacing up
+and down. She thought, 'Suppose he insists upon seeing me--he
+probably may--and will burst open the door!' This notion increased,
+and she sank into a corner in a half-somnolent state, but with ears
+alive to the slightest sound. Reason could not overthrow the
+delirious fancy that outside her door stood Manston and all the
+people in the hotel, waiting to laugh her to scorn.
+
+9. HALF-PAST EIGHT TO ELEVEN P.M.
+
+In the meantime, Springrove was pacing up and down the arrival
+platform of the railway-station. Half-past eight o'clock--the time
+at which Owen's train was due--had come, and passed, but no train
+appeared.
+
+'When will the eight-thirty train be in?' he asked of a man who was
+sweeping the mud from the steps.
+
+'She is not expected yet this hour.'
+
+'How is that?'
+
+'Christmas-time, you see, 'tis always so. People are running about
+to see their friends. The trains have been like it ever since
+Christmas Eve, and will be for another week yet.'
+
+Edward again went on walking and waiting under the draughty roof.
+He found it utterly impossible to leave the spot. His mind was so
+intent upon the importance of meeting with Owen, and informing him
+of Cytherea's whereabouts, that he could not but fancy Owen might
+leave the station unobserved if he turned his back, and become lost
+to him in the streets of the town.
+
+The hour expired. Ten o'clock struck. 'When will the train be in?'
+said Edward to the telegraph clerk.
+
+'In five-and-thirty minutes. She's now at L----. They have extra
+passengers, and the rails are bad to-day.'
+
+At last, at a quarter to eleven, the train came in.
+
+The first to alight from it was Owen, looking pale and cold. He
+casually glanced round upon the nearly deserted platform, and was
+hurrying to the outlet, when his eyes fell upon Edward. At sight of
+his friend he was quite bewildered, and could not speak.
+
+'Here I am, Mr. Graye,' said Edward cheerfully. 'I have seen
+Cytherea, and she has been waiting for you these two or three
+hours.'
+
+Owen took Edward's hand, pressed it, and looked at him in silence.
+Such was the concentration of his mind, that not till many minutes
+after did he think of inquiring how Springrove had contrived to be
+there before him.
+
+10. ELEVEN O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+On their arrival at the door of the hotel, it was arranged between
+Springrove and Graye that the latter only should enter, Edward
+waiting outside. Owen had remembered continually what his friend
+had frequently overlooked, that there was yet a possibility of his
+sister being Manston's wife, and the recollection taught him to
+avoid any rashness in his proceedings which might lead to bitterness
+hereafter.
+
+Entering the room, he found Manston sitting in the chair which had
+been occupied by Cytherea on Edward's visit, three hours earlier.
+Before Owen had spoken, Manston arose, and stepping past him closed
+the door. His face appeared harassed--much more troubled than the
+slight circumstance which had as yet come to his knowledge seemed to
+account for.
+
+Manston could form no reason for Owen's presence, but intuitively
+linked it with Cytherea's seclusion. 'Altogether this is most
+unseemly,' he said, 'whatever it may mean.'
+
+'Don't think there is meant anything unfriendly by my coming here,'
+said Owen earnestly; 'but listen to this, and think if I could do
+otherwise than come.'
+
+He took from his pocket the confession of Chinney the porter, as
+hastily written out by the vicar, and read it aloud. The aspects of
+Manston's face whilst he listened to the opening words were strange,
+dark, and mysterious enough to have justified suspicions that no
+deceit could be too complicated for the possessor of such impulses,
+had there not overridden them all, as the reading went on, a new and
+irrepressible expression--one unmistakably honest. It was that of
+unqualified amazement in the steward's mind at the news he heard.
+Owen looked up and saw it. The sight only confirmed him in the
+belief he had held throughout, in antagonism to Edward's suspicions.
+
+There could no longer be a shadow of doubt that if the first Mrs.
+Manston lived, her husband was ignorant of the fact. What he could
+have feared by his ghastly look at first, and now have ceased to
+fear, it was quite futile to conjecture.
+
+'Now I do not for a moment doubt your complete ignorance of the
+whole matter; you cannot suppose for an instant that I do,' said
+Owen when he had finished reading. 'But is it not best for both
+that Cytherea should come back with me till the matter is cleared
+up? In fact, under the circumstances, no other course is left open
+to me than to request it.'
+
+Whatever Manston's original feelings had been, all in him now gave
+way to irritation, and irritation to rage. He paced up and down the
+room till he had mastered it; then said in ordinary tones--
+
+'Certainly, I know no more than you and others know--it was a
+gratuitous unpleasantness in you to say you did not doubt me. Why
+should you, or anybody, have doubted me?'
+
+'Well, where is my sister?' said Owen.
+
+'Locked in the next room.'
+
+His own answer reminded Manston that Cytherea must, by some
+inscrutable means, have had an inkling of the event.
+
+Owen had gone to the door of Cytherea's room.
+
+'Cytherea, darling--'tis Owen,' he said, outside the door. A
+rustling of clothes, soft footsteps, and a voice saying from the
+inside, 'Is it really you, Owen,--is it really?'
+
+'It is.'
+
+'O, will you take care of me?'
+
+'Always.'
+
+She unlocked the door, and retreated again. Manston came forward
+from the other room with a candle in his hand, as Owen pushed open
+the door.
+
+Her frightened eyes were unnaturally large, and shone like stars in
+the darkness of the background, as the light fell upon them. She
+leapt up to Owen in one bound, her small taper fingers extended like
+the leaves of a lupine. Then she clasped her cold and trembling
+hands round his neck and shivered.
+
+The sight of her again kindled all Manston's passions into activity.
+'She shall not go with you,' he said firmly, and stepping a pace or
+two closer, 'unless you prove that she is not my wife; and you can't
+do it!'
+
+'This is proof,' said Owen, holding up the paper.
+
+'No proof at all,' said Manston hotly. ''Tis not a death-bed
+confession, and those are the only things of the kind held as good
+evidence.'
+
+'Send for a lawyer,' Owen returned, 'and let him tell us the proper
+course to adopt.'
+
+'Never mind the law--let me go with Owen!' cried Cytherea, still
+holding on to him. 'You will let me go with him, won't you, sir?'
+she said, turning appealingly to Manston.
+
+'We'll have it all right and square,' said Manston, with more
+quietness. 'I have no objection to your brother sending for a
+lawyer, if he wants to.'
+
+It was getting on for twelve o'clock, but the proprietor of the
+hotel had not yet gone to bed on account of the mystery on the first
+floor, which was an occurrence unusual in the quiet family lodging.
+Owen looked over the banisters, and saw him standing in the hall.
+It struck Graye that the wisest course would be to take the landlord
+to a certain extent into their confidence, appeal to his honour as a
+gentleman, and so on, in order to acquire the information he wanted,
+and also to prevent the episode of the evening from becoming a
+public piece of news. He called the landlord up to where they
+stood, and told him the main facts of the story.
+
+The landlord was fortunately a quiet, prejudiced man, and a
+meditative smoker.
+
+'I know the very man you want to see--the very man,' he said,
+looking at the general features of the candle-flame. 'Sharp as a
+needle, and not over-rich. Timms will put you all straight in no
+time--trust Timms for that.'
+
+'He's in bed by this time for certain,' said Owen.
+
+'Never mind that--Timms knows me, I know him. He'll oblige me as a
+personal favour. Wait here a bit. Perhaps, too, he's up at some
+party or another--he's a nice, jovial fellow, sharp as a needle,
+too; mind you, sharp as a needle, too.'
+
+He went downstairs, put on his overcoat, and left the house, the
+three persons most concerned entering the room, and standing
+motionless, awkward, and silent in the midst of it. Cytherea
+pictured to herself the long weary minutes she would have to stand
+there, whilst a sleepy man could be prepared for consultation, till
+the constraint between them seemed unendurable to her--she could
+never last out the time. Owen was annoyed that Manston had not
+quietly arranged with him at once; Manston at Owen's homeliness of
+idea in proposing to send for an attorney, as if he would be a
+touchstone of infallible proof.
+
+Reflection was cut short by the approach of footsteps, and in a few
+moments the proprietor of the hotel entered, introducing his friend.
+'Mr. Timms has not been in bed,' he said; 'he had just returned from
+dining with a few friends, so there's no trouble given. To save
+time I explained the matter as we came along.'
+
+It occurred to Owen and Manston both that they might get a misty
+exposition of the law from Mr. Timms at that moment of concluding
+dinner with a few friends.
+
+'As far as I can see,' said the lawyer, yawning, and turning his
+vision inward by main force, 'it is quite a matter for private
+arrangement between the parties, whoever the parties are--at least
+at present. I speak more as a father than as a lawyer, it is true,
+but, let the young lady stay with her father, or guardian, safe out
+of shame's way, until the mystery is sifted, whatever the mystery
+is. Should the evidence prove to be false, or trumped up by anybody
+to get her away from you, her husband, you may sue them for the
+damages accruing from the delay.'
+
+'Yes, yes,' said Manston, who had completely recovered his
+self-possession and common-sense; 'let it all be settled by herself.'
+Turning to Cytherea he whispered so softly that Owen did not hear
+the words--
+
+'Do you wish to go back with your brother, dearest, and leave me
+here miserable, and lonely, or will you stay with me, your own
+husband.'
+
+'I'll go back with Owen.'
+
+'Very well.' He relinquished his coaxing tone, and went on sternly:
+'And remember this, Cytherea, I am as innocent of deception in this
+thing as you are yourself. Do you believe me?'
+
+'I do,' she said.
+
+'I had no shadow of suspicion that my first wife lived. I don't
+think she does even now. Do you believe me?'
+
+'I believe you,' she said.
+
+'And now, good-evening,' he continued, opening the door and politely
+intimating to the three men standing by that there was no further
+necessity for their remaining in his room. 'In three days I shall
+claim her.'
+
+The lawyer and the hotel-keeper retired first. Owen, gathering up
+as much of his sister's clothing as lay about the room, took her
+upon his arm, and followed them. Edward, to whom she owed
+everything, who had been left standing in the street like a dog
+without a home, was utterly forgotten. Owen paid the landlord and
+the lawyer for the trouble he had occasioned them, looked to the
+packing, and went to the door.
+
+A fly, which somewhat unaccountably was seen lingering in front of
+the house, was called up, and Cytherea's luggage put upon it.
+
+'Do you know of any hotel near the station that is open for night
+arrivals?' Owen inquired of the driver.
+
+'A place has been bespoke for you, sir, at the White Unicorn--and
+the gentleman wished me to give you this.'
+
+'Bespoken by Springrove, who ordered the fly, of course,' said Owen
+to himself. By the light of the street-lamp he read these lines,
+hurriedly traced in pencil:--
+
+'I have gone home by the mail-train. It is better for all parties
+that I should be out of the way. Tell Cytherea that I apologize for
+having caused her such unnecessary pain, as it seems I did--but it
+cannot be helped now.  E.S.'
+
+Owen handed his sister into the vehicle, and told the flyman to
+drive on.
+
+'Poor Springrove--I think we have served him rather badly,' he said
+to Cytherea, repeating the words of the note to her.
+
+A thrill of pleasure passed through her bosom as she listened to
+them. They were the genuine reproach of a lover to his mistress;
+the trifling coldness of her answer to him would have been noticed
+by no man who was only a friend. But, in entertaining that sweet
+thought, she had forgotten herself, and her position for the
+instant.
+
+Was she still Manston's wife--that was the terrible supposition, and
+her future seemed still a possible misery to her. For, on account
+of the late jarring accident, a life with Manston which would
+otherwise have been only a sadness, must become a burden of
+unutterable sorrow.
+
+Then she thought of the misrepresentation and scandal that would
+ensue if she were no wife. One cause for thankfulness accompanied
+the reflection; Edward knew the truth.
+
+They soon reached the quiet old inn, which had been selected for
+them by the forethought of the man who loved her well. Here they
+installed themselves for the night, arranging to go to Budmouth by
+the first train the next day.
+
+At this hour Edward Springrove was fast approaching his native
+county on the wheels of the night-mail.
+
+
+
+XIV. THE EVENTS OF FIVE WEEKS
+
+1. FROM THE SIXTH TO THE THIRTEENTH OF JANUARY
+
+Manston had evidently resolved to do nothing in a hurry.
+
+This much was plain, that his earnest desire and intention was to
+raise in Cytherea's bosom no feelings of permanent aversion to him.
+The instant after the first burst of disappointment had escaped him
+in the hotel at Southampton, he had seen how far better it would be
+to lose her presence for a week than her respect for ever.
+
+'She shall be mine; I will claim the young thing yet,' he insisted.
+And then he seemed to reason over methods for compassing that
+object, which, to all those who were in any degree acquainted with
+the recent event, appeared the least likely of possible
+contingencies.
+
+He returned to Knapwater late the next day, and was preparing to
+call on Miss Aldclyffe, when the conclusion forced itself upon him
+that nothing would be gained by such a step. No; every action of
+his should be done openly--even religiously. At least, he called on
+the rector, and stated this to be his resolve.
+
+'Certainly,' said Mr. Raunham, 'it is best to proceed candidly and
+fairly, or undue suspicion may fall on you. You should, in my
+opinion, take active steps at once.'
+
+'I will do the utmost that lies in my power to clear up the mystery,
+and silence the hubbub of gossip that has been set going about me.
+But what can I do? They say that the man who comes first in the
+chain of inquiry is not to be found--I mean the porter.'
+
+'I am sorry to say that he is not. When I returned from the station
+last night, after seeing Owen Graye off, I went again to the cottage
+where he has been lodging, to get more intelligence, as I thought.
+He was not there. He had gone out at dusk, saying he would be back
+soon. But he has not come back yet.'
+
+'I rather doubt if we shall see him again.'
+
+'Had I known of this, I would have done what in my flurry I did not
+think of doing--set a watch upon him. But why not advertise for
+your missing wife as a preliminary, consulting your solicitor in the
+meantime?'
+
+'Advertise. I'll think about it,' said Manston, lingering on the
+word as he pronounced it. 'Yes, that seems a right thing--quite a
+right thing.'
+
+He went home and remained moodily indoors all the next day and the
+next--for nearly a week, in short. Then, one evening at dusk, he
+went out with an uncertain air as to the direction of his walk,
+which resulted, however, in leading him again to the rectory.
+
+He saw Mr. Raunham. 'Have you done anything yet?' the rector
+inquired.
+
+'No--I have not,' said Manston absently. 'But I am going to set
+about it.' He hesitated, as if ashamed of some weakness he was
+about to betray. 'My object in calling was to ask if you had heard
+any tidings from Budmouth of my--Cytherea. You used to speak of her
+as one you were interested in.'
+
+There was, at any rate, real sadness in Manston's tone now, and the
+rector paused to weigh his words ere he replied.
+
+'I have not heard directly from her,' he said gently. 'But her
+brother has communicated with some people in the parish--'
+
+'The Springroves, I suppose,' said Manston gloomily.
+
+'Yes; and they tell me that she is very ill, and I am sorry to say,
+likely to be for some days.'
+
+'Surely, surely, I must go and see her!' Manston cried.
+
+'I would advise you not to go,' said Raunham. 'But do this instead
+--be as quick as you can in making a movement towards ascertaining
+the truth as regards the existence of your wife. You see, Mr.
+Manston, an out-step place like this is not like a city, and there
+is nobody to busy himself for the good of the community; whilst poor
+Cytherea and her brother are socially too dependent to be able to
+make much stir in the matter, which is a greater reason still why
+you should be disinterestedly prompt.'
+
+The steward murmured an assent. Still there was the same
+indecision!--not the indecision of weakness--the indecision of
+conscious perplexity.
+
+On Manston's return from this interview at the rectory, he passed
+the door of the Rising Sun Inn. Finding he had no light for his
+cigar, and it being three-quarters of a mile to his residence in the
+park, he entered the tavern to get one. Nobody was in the outer
+portion of the front room where Manston stood, but a space round the
+fire was screened off from the remainder, and inside the high oak
+settle, forming a part of the screen, he heard voices conversing.
+The speakers had not noticed his footsteps, and continued their
+discourse.
+
+One of the two he recognized as a well-known night-poacher, the man
+who had met him with tidings of his wife's death on the evening of
+the conflagration. The other seemed to be a stranger following the
+same mode of life. The conversation was carried on in the emphatic
+and confidential tone of men who are slightly intoxicated, its
+subject being an unaccountable experience that one of them had had
+on the night of the fire.
+
+What the steward heard was enough, and more than enough, to lead him
+to forget or to renounce his motive in entering. The effect upon
+him was strange and strong. His first object seemed to be to escape
+from the house again without being seen or heard.
+
+Having accomplished this, he went in at the park gate, and strode
+off under the trees to the Old House. There sitting down by the
+fire, and burying himself in reflection, he allowed the minutes to
+pass by unheeded. First the candle burnt down in its socket and
+stunk: he did not notice it. Then the fire went out: he did not
+see it. His feet grew cold; still he thought on.
+
+It may be remarked that a lady, a year and a quarter before this
+time, had, under the same conditions--an unrestricted mental
+absorption--shown nearly the same peculiarities as this man evinced
+now. The lady was Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+It was half-past twelve when Manston moved, as if he had come to a
+determination.
+
+The first thing he did the next morning was to call at Knapwater
+House; where he found that Miss Aldclyffe was not well enough to see
+him. She had been ailing from slight internal haemorrhage ever
+since the confession of the porter Chinney. Apparently not much
+aggrieved at the denial, he shortly afterwards went to the
+railway-station and took his departure for London, leaving a letter
+for Miss Aldclyffe, stating the reason of his journey thither--to
+recover traces of his missing wife.
+
+During the remainder of the week paragraphs appeared in the local
+and other newspapers, drawing attention to the facts of this
+singular case. The writers, with scarcely an exception, dwelt
+forcibly upon a feature which had at first escaped the observation
+of the villagers, including Mr. Raunham--that if the announcement of
+the man Chinney were true, it seemed extremely probable that Mrs.
+Manston left her watch and keys behind on purpose to blind people as
+to her escape; and that therefore she would not now let herself be
+discovered, unless a strong pressure were put upon her. The writers
+added that the police were on the track of the porter, who very
+possibly had absconded in the fear that his reticence was criminal,
+and that Mr. Manston, the husband, was, with praiseworthy energy,
+making every effort to clear the whole matter up.
+
+2. FROM THE EIGHTEENTH TO THE END OF JANUARY
+
+Five days from the time of his departure, Manston returned from
+London and Liverpool, looking very fatigued and thoughtful. He
+explained to the rector and other of his acquaintance that all the
+inquiries he had made at his wife's old lodgings and his own had
+been totally barren of results.
+
+But he seemed inclined to push the affair to a clear conclusion now
+that he had commenced. After the lapse of another day or two he
+proceeded to fulfil his promise to the rector, and advertised for
+the missing woman in three of the London papers. The advertisement
+was a carefully considered and even attractive effusion, calculated
+to win the heart, or at least the understanding, of any woman who
+had a spark of her own nature left in her.
+
+There was no answer.
+
+Three days later he repeated the experiment; with the same result as
+before.
+
+'I cannot try any further,' said Manston speciously to the rector,
+his sole auditor throughout the proceedings. 'Mr. Raunham, I'll
+tell you the truth plainly: I don't love her; I do love Cytherea,
+and the whole of this business of searching for the other woman goes
+altogether against me. I hope to God I shall never see her again.'
+
+'But you will do your duty at least?' said Mr. Raunham.
+
+'I have done it,' said Manston. 'If ever a man on the face of this
+earth has done his duty towards an absent wife, I have towards her
+--living or dead--at least,' he added, correcting himself, 'since I
+have lived at Knapwater. I neglected her before that time--I own
+that, as I have owned it before.'
+
+'I should, if I were you, adopt other means to get tidings of her if
+advertising fails, in spite of my feelings,' said the rector
+emphatically. 'But at any rate, try advertising once more. There's
+a satisfaction in having made any attempt three several times.'
+
+When Manston had left the study, the rector stood looking at the
+fire for a considerable length of time, lost in profound reflection.
+He went to his private diary, and after many pauses, which he varied
+only by dipping his pen, letting it dry, wiping it on his sleeve,
+and then dipping it again, he took the following note of events:--
+
+
+'January 25.--Mr. Manston has just seen me for the third time on the
+subject of his lost wife. There have been these peculiarities
+attending the three interviews:--
+
+'The first. My visitor, whilst expressing by words his great
+anxiety to do everything for her recovery, showed plainly by his
+bearing that he was convinced he should never see her again.
+
+'The second. He had left off feigning anxiety to do rightly by his
+first wife, and honestly asked after Cytherea's welfare.
+
+'The third (and most remarkable). He seemed to have lost all
+consistency. Whilst expressing his love for Cytherea (which
+certainly is strong) and evincing the usual indifference to the
+first Mrs. Manston's fate, he was unable to conceal the intensity of
+his eagerness for me to advise him to _advertise again_ for her.'
+
+
+A week after the second, the third advertisement was inserted. A
+paragraph was attached, which stated that this would be the last
+time the announcement would appear.
+
+3. THE FIRST OF FEBRUARY
+
+At this, the eleventh hour, the postman brought a letter for
+Manston, directed in a woman's hand.
+
+A bachelor friend of the steward's, Mr. Dickson by name, who was
+somewhat of a chatterer--plenus rimarum--and who boasted of an
+endless string of acquaintances, had come over from Casterbridge the
+preceding day by invitation--an invitation which had been a pleasant
+surprise to Dickson himself, insomuch that Manston, as a rule, voted
+him a bore almost to his face. He had stayed over the night, and
+was sitting at breakfast with his host when the important missive
+arrived.
+
+Manston did not attempt to conceal the subject of the letter, or the
+name of the writer. First glancing the pages through, he read aloud
+as follows:--
+
+
+'"MY HUSBAND,--I implore your forgiveness.
+
+'"During the last thirteen months I have repeated to myself a
+hundred times that you should never discover what I voluntarily tell
+you now, namely, that I am alive and in perfect health.
+
+'"I have seen all your advertisements. Nothing but your persistence
+has won me round. Surely, I thought, he _must_ love me still. Why
+else should he try to win back a woman who, faithful unto death as
+she will be, can, in a social sense, aid him towards acquiring
+nothing?--rather the reverse, indeed.
+
+'"You yourself state my own mind--that the only grounds upon which
+we can meet and live together, with a reasonable hope of happiness,
+must be a mutual consent to bury in oblivion all past differences.
+I heartily and willingly forget everything--and forgive everything.
+You will do the same, as your actions show.
+
+'"There will be plenty of opportunity for me to explain the few
+facts relating to my escape on the night of the fire. I will only
+give the heads in this hurried note. I was grieved at your not
+coming to fetch me, more grieved at your absence from the station,
+most of all by your absence from home. On my journey to the inn I
+writhed under a passionate sense of wrong done me. When I had been
+shown to my room I waited and hoped for you till the landlord had
+gone upstairs to bed. I still found that you did not come, and then
+I finally made up my mind to leave. I had half undressed, but I put
+on my things again, forgetting my watch (and I suppose dropping my
+keys, though I am not sure where) in my hurry, and slipped out of
+the house. The--"'
+
+
+'Well, that's a rum story,' said Mr. Dickson, interrupting.
+
+'What's a rum story?' said Manston hastily, and flushing in the
+face.
+
+'Forgetting her watch and dropping her keys in her hurry.'
+
+'I don't see anything particularly wonderful in it. Any woman might
+do such a thing.'
+
+'Any woman might if escaping from fire or shipwreck, or any such
+immediate danger. But it seems incomprehensible to me that any
+woman in her senses, who quietly decides to leave a house, should be
+so forgetful.'
+
+'All that is required to reconcile your seeming with her facts is to
+assume that she was not in her senses, for that's what she did
+plainly, or how could the things have been found there? Besides,
+she's truthful enough.' He spoke eagerly and peremptorily.
+
+'Yes, yes, I know that. I merely meant that it seemed rather odd.'
+
+'O yes.' Manston read on:--
+
+
+'"--and slipped out of the house. The rubbish-heap was burning up
+brightly, but the thought that the house was in danger did not
+strike me; I did not consider that it might be thatched.
+
+'"I idled in the lane behind the wood till the last down-train had
+come in, not being in a mood to face strangers. Whilst I was there
+the fire broke out, and this perplexed me still more. However, I
+was still determined not to stay in the place. I went to the
+railway-station, which was now quiet, and inquired of the solitary
+man on duty there concerning the trains. It was not till I had left
+the man that I saw the effect the fire might have on my history. I
+considered also, though not in any detailed manner, that the event,
+by attracting the attention of the village to my former abode, might
+set people on my track should they doubt my death, and a sudden
+dread of having to go back again to Knapwater--a place which had
+seemed inimical to me from first to last--prompted me to run back
+and bribe the porter to secrecy. I then walked on to Anglebury,
+lingering about the outskirts of the town till the morning train
+came in, when I proceeded by it to London, and then took these
+lodgings, where I have been supporting myself ever since by
+needlework, endeavouring to save enough money to pay my passage home
+to America, but making melancholy progress in my attempt. However,
+all that is changed--can I be otherwise than happy at it? Of course
+not. I am happy. Tell me what I am to do, and believe me still to
+be your faithful wife,  EUNICE.
+
+'"My name here is (as before)
+
+     '"MRS. RONDLEY, and my address,
+          79 ADDINGTON STREET,
+               LAMBETH.'"
+
+
+The name and address were written on a separate slip of paper.
+
+'So it's to be all right at last then,' said Manston's friend. 'But
+after all there's another woman in the case. You don't seem very
+sorry for the little thing who is put to such distress by this turn
+of affairs? I wonder you can let her go so coolly.' The speaker
+was looking out between the mullions of the window--noticing that
+some of the lights were glazed in lozenges, some in squares--as he
+said the words, otherwise he would have seen the passionate
+expression of agonized hopelessness that flitted across the
+steward's countenance when the remark was made. He did not see it,
+and Manston answered after a short interval. The way in which he
+spoke of the young girl who had believed herself his wife, whom, a
+few short days ago, he had openly idolized, and whom, in his secret
+heart, he idolized still, as far as such a form of love was
+compatible with his nature, showed that from policy or otherwise, he
+meant to act up to the requirements of the position into which fate
+appeared determined to drive him.
+
+'That's neither here nor there,' he said; 'it is a point of honour
+to do as I am doing, and there's an end of it.'
+
+'Yes. Only I thought you used not to care overmuch about your first
+bargain.'
+
+'I certainly did not at one time. One is apt to feel rather weary
+of wives when they are so devilish civil under all aspects, as she
+used to be. But anything for a change--Abigail is lost, but Michal
+is recovered. You would hardly believe it, but she seems in fancy
+to be quite another bride--in fact, almost as if she had really
+risen from the dead, instead of having only done so virtually.'
+
+'You let the young pink one know that the other has come or is
+coming?'
+
+'Cui bono?' The steward meditated critically, showing a portion of
+his intensely wide and regular teeth within the ruby lips.
+
+'I cannot say anything to her that will do any good,' he resumed.
+'It would be awkward--either seeing or communicating with her again.
+The best plan to adopt will be to let matters take their course
+--she'll find it all out soon enough.'
+
+Manston found himself alone a few minutes later. He buried his face
+in his hands, and murmured, 'O my lost one! O my Cytherea! That it
+should come to this is hard for me! 'Tis now all darkness--"a land
+of darkness as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death without
+any order, and where the light is as darkness."'
+
+Yes, the artificial bearing which this extraordinary man had adopted
+before strangers ever since he had overheard the conversation at the
+inn, left him now, and he mourned for Cytherea aloud.
+
+4. THE TWELFTH OF FEBRUARY
+
+Knapwater Park is the picture--at eleven o'clock on a muddy, quiet,
+hazy, but bright morning--a morning without any blue sky, and
+without any shadows, the earth being enlivened and lit up rather by
+the spirit of an invisible sun than by its bodily presence.
+
+The local Hunt had met for the day's sport on the open space of
+ground immediately in front of the steward's residence--called in
+the list of appointments, 'Old House, Knapwater'--the meet being
+here once every season, for the pleasure of Miss Aldclyffe and her
+friends.
+
+Leaning out from one of the first-floor windows, and surveying with
+the keenest interest the lively picture of pink and black coats,
+rich-coloured horses, and sparkling bits and spurs, was the returned
+and long-lost woman, Mrs. Manston.
+
+The eyes of those forming the brilliant group were occasionally
+turned towards her, showing plainly that her adventures were the
+subject of conversation equally with or more than the chances of the
+coming day. She did not flush beneath their scrutiny; on the
+contrary, she seemed rather to enjoy it, her eyes being kindled with
+a light of contented exultation, subdued to square with the
+circumstances of her matronly position.
+
+She was, at the distance from which they surveyed her, an attractive
+woman--comely as the tents of Kedar. But to a close observer it was
+palpable enough that God did not do all the picture. Appearing at
+least seven years older than Cytherea, she was probably her senior
+by double the number, the artificial means employed to heighten the
+natural good appearance of her face being very cleverly applied.
+Her form was full and round, its voluptuous maturity standing out in
+strong contrast to the memory of Cytherea's lissom girlishness.
+
+It seems to be an almost universal rule that a woman who once has
+courted, or who eventually will court, the society of men on terms
+dangerous to her honour cannot refrain from flinging the meaning
+glance whenever the moment arrives in which the glance is strongly
+asked for, even if her life and whole future depended upon that
+moment's abstinence.
+
+Had a cautious, uxorious husband seen in his wife's countenance what
+might now have been seen in this dark-eyed woman's as she caught a
+stray glance of flirtation from one or other of the red-coated
+gallants outside, he would have passed many days in an agony of
+restless jealousy and doubt. But Manston was not such a husband,
+and he was, moreover, calmly attending to his business at the other
+end of the manor.
+
+The steward had fetched home his wife in the most matter-of-fact way
+a few days earlier, walking round the village with her the very next
+morning--at once putting an end, by this simple solution, to all the
+riddling inquiries and surmises that were rank in the village and
+its neighbourhood. Some men said that this woman was as far
+inferior to Cytherea as earth to heaven; others, older and sager,
+thought Manston better off with such a wife than he would have been
+with one of Cytherea's youthful impulses, and inexperience in
+household management. All felt their curiosity dying out of them.
+It was the same in Carriford as in other parts of the world
+--immediately circumstantial evidence became exchanged for direct,
+the loungers in court yawned, gave a final survey, and turned away
+to a subject which would afford more scope for speculation.
+
+
+
+XV. THE EVENTS OF THREE WEEKS
+
+1. FROM THE TWELFTH OF FEBRUARY TO THE SECOND OF MARCH
+
+Owen Graye's recovery from the illness that had incapacitated him
+for so long a time was, professionally, the dawn of a brighter
+prospect for him in every direction, though the change was at first
+very gradual, and his movements and efforts were little more than
+mechanical. With the lengthening of the days, and the revival of
+building operations for the forthcoming season, he saw himself, for
+the first time, on a road which, pursued with care, would probably
+lead to a comfortable income at some future day. But he was still
+very low down the hill as yet.
+
+The first undertaking entrusted to him in the new year began about a
+month after his return from Southampton. Mr. Gradfield had come
+back to him in the wake of his restored health, and offered him the
+superintendence, as clerk of works, of a church which was to be
+nearly rebuilt at the village of Tolchurch, fifteen or sixteen miles
+from Budmouth, and about half that distance from Carriford.
+
+'I am now being paid at the rate of a hundred and fifty pounds a
+year,' he said to his sister in a burst of thankfulness, 'and you
+shall never, Cytherea, be at any tyrannous lady's beck and call
+again as long as I live. Never pine or think about what has
+happened, dear; it's no disgrace to you. Cheer up; you'll be
+somebody's happy wife yet.'
+
+He did not say Edward Springrove's, for, greatly to his
+disappointment, a report had reached his ears that the friend to
+whom Cytherea owed so much had been about to pack up his things and
+sail for Australia. However, this was before the uncertainty
+concerning Mrs. Manston's existence had been dispersed by her
+return, a phenomenon that altered the cloudy relationship in which
+Cytherea had lately been standing towards her old lover, to one of
+distinctness; which result would have been delightful but for
+circumstances about to be mentioned.
+
+Cytherea was still pale from her recent illness, and still greatly
+dejected. Until the news of Mrs. Manston's return had reached them,
+she had kept herself closely shut up during the day-time, never
+venturing forth except at night. Sleeping and waking she had been
+in perpetual dread lest she should still be claimed by a man whom,
+only a few weeks earlier, she had regarded in the light of a future
+husband with quiet assent, not unmixed with cheerfulness.
+
+But the removal of the uneasiness in this direction--by Mrs.
+Manston's arrival, and her own consequent freedom--had been the
+imposition of pain in another. Utterly fictitious details of the
+finding of Cytherea and Manston had been invented and circulated,
+unavoidably reaching her ears in the course of time. Thus the
+freedom brought no happiness, and it seemed well-nigh impossible
+that she could ever again show herself the sparkling creature she
+once had been--
+
+     'Apt to entice a deity.'
+
+On this account, and for the first time in his life, Owen made a
+point of concealing from her the real state of his feelings with
+regard to the unhappy transaction. He writhed in secret under the
+humiliation to which they had been subjected, till the resentment it
+gave rise to, and for which there was no vent, was sometimes beyond
+endurance; it induced a mood that did serious damage to the material
+and plodding perseverance necessary if he would secure permanently
+the comforts of a home for them.
+
+They gave up their lodgings at Budmouth, and went to Tolchurch as
+soon as the work commenced.
+
+Here they were domiciled in one half of an old farmhouse, standing
+not far from the ivy-covered church tower (which was all that was to
+remain of the original structure). The long steep roof of this
+picturesque dwelling sloped nearly down to the ground, the old tiles
+that covered it being overgrown with rich olive-hued moss. New red
+tiles in twos and threes had been used for patching the holes
+wrought by decay, lighting up the whole harmonious surface with dots
+of brilliant scarlet.
+
+The chief internal features of this snug abode were a wide
+fireplace, enormous cupboards, a brown settle, and several sketches
+on the wood mantel, done in outline with the point of a hot poker
+--the subjects mainly consisting of old men walking painfully erect,
+with a curly-tailed dog behind.
+
+After a week or two of residence in Tolchurch, and rambles amid the
+quaint scenery circumscribing it, a tranquillity began to spread
+itself through the mind of the maiden, which Graye hoped would be a
+preface to her complete restoration. She felt ready and willing to
+live the whole remainder of her days in the retirement of their
+present quarters: she began to sing about the house in low
+tremulous snatches--
+
+     '"--I said, if there's peace to be found in the world,
+       A heart that is humble may hope for it here."'
+
+2. THE THIRD OF MARCH
+
+Her convalescence had arrived at this point on a certain evening
+towards the end of the winter, when Owen had come in from the
+building hard by, and was changing his muddy boots for slippers,
+previously to sitting down to toast and tea.
+
+A prolonged though quiet knocking came to the door.
+
+The only person who ever knocked at their door in that way was the
+new vicar, the prime mover in the church-building. But he was that
+evening dining with the Squire.
+
+Cytherea was uneasy at the sound--she did not know why, unless it
+was because her nerves were weakened by the sickness she had
+undergone. Instead of opening the door she ran out of the room, and
+upstairs.
+
+'What nonsense, Cytherea!' said her brother, going to the door.
+
+Edward Springrove stood in the grey light outside.
+
+'Capital--not gone to Australia, and not going, of course!' cried
+Owen. 'What's the use of going to such a place as that?--I never
+believed that you would.'
+
+'I am going back to London again to-morrow,' said Springrove, 'and I
+called to say a word before going. Where is . . . ?'
+
+'She has just run upstairs. Come in--never mind scraping your
+shoes--we are regular cottagers now; stone floor, yawning
+chimney-corner, and all, you see.'
+
+'Mrs. Manston came,' said Edward awkwardly, when he had sat down in
+the chimney-corner by preference.
+
+'Yes.' At mention of one of his skeletons Owen lost his blitheness
+at once, and fell into a reverie.
+
+'The history of her escape is very simple.'
+
+'Very.'
+
+'You know I always had wondered, when my father was telling any of
+the circumstances of the fire to me, how it could be that a woman
+could sleep so soundly as to be unaware of her horrid position till
+it was too late even to give shout or sound of any kind.'
+
+'Well, I think that would have been possible, considering her long
+wearisome journey. People have often been suffocated in their beds
+before they awoke. But it was hardly likely a body would be
+completely burnt to ashes as this was assumed to be, though nobody
+seemed to see it at the time. And how positive the surgeon was too,
+about those bits of bone! Why he should have been so, nobody can
+tell. I cannot help saying that if it has ever been possible to
+find pure stupidity incarnate, it was in that jury of Carriford.
+There existed in the mass the stupidity of twelve and not the
+penetration of one.'
+
+'Is she quite well?' said Springrove.
+
+'Who?--O, my sister, Cytherea. Thank you, nearly well, now. I'll
+call her.'
+
+'Wait one minute. I have a word to say to you.'
+
+Owen sat down again.
+
+'You know, without my saying it, that I love Cytherea as dearly as
+ever. . . . I think she loves me too,--does she really?'
+
+There was in Owen enough of that worldly policy on the subject of
+matchmaking which naturally resides in the breasts of parents and
+guardians, to give him a certain caution in replying, and, younger
+as he was by five years than Edward, it had an odd effect.
+
+'Well, she may possibly love you still,' he said, as if rather in
+doubt as to the truth of his words.
+
+Springrove's countenance instantly saddened; he had expected a
+simple 'Yes,' at the very least. He continued in a tone of greater
+depression--
+
+'Supposing she does love me, would it be fair to you and to her if I
+made her an offer of marriage, with these dreary conditions
+attached--that we lived for a few years on the narrowest system,
+till a great debt, which all honour and duty require me to pay off,
+shall be paid? My father, by reason of the misfortune that befell
+him, is under a great obligation to Miss Aldclyffe. He is getting
+old, and losing his energies. I am attempting to work free of the
+burden. This makes my prospects gloomy enough at present.
+
+'But consider again,' he went on. 'Cytherea has been left in a
+nameless and unsatisfactory, though innocent state, by this
+unfortunate, and now void, marriage with Manston. A marriage with
+me, though under the--materially--untoward conditions I have
+mentioned, would make us happy; it would give her a locus standi.
+If she wished to be out of the sound of her misfortunes we would go
+to another part of England--emigrate--do anything.'
+
+'I'll call Cytherea,' said Owen. 'It is a matter which she alone
+can settle.' He did not speak warmly. His pride could not endure
+the pity which Edward's visit and errand tacitly implied. Yet, in
+the other affair, his heart went with Edward; he was on the same
+beat for paying off old debts himself.
+
+'Cythie, Mr. Springrove is here,' he said, at the foot of the
+staircase.
+
+His sister descended the creaking old steps with a faltering tread,
+and stood in the firelight from the hearth. She extended her hand
+to Springrove, welcoming him by a mere motion of the lip, her eyes
+averted--a habit which had engendered itself in her since the
+beginning of her illness and defamation. Owen opened the door and
+went out--leaving the lovers alone. It was the first time they had
+met since the memorable night at Southampton.
+
+'I will get a light,' she said, with a little embarrassment.
+
+'No--don't, please, Cytherea,' said Edward softly, 'Come and sit
+down with me.'
+
+'O yes. I ought to have asked _you_ to,' she returned timidly.
+'Everybody sits in the chimney-corner in this parish. You sit on
+that side. I'll sit here.'
+
+Two recesses--one on the right, one on the left hand--were cut in
+the inside of the fireplace, and here they sat down facing each
+other, on benches fitted to the recesses, the fire glowing on the
+hearth between their feet. Its ruddy light shone on the underslopes
+of their faces, and spread out over the floor of the room with the
+low horizontality of the setting sun, giving to every grain of sand
+and tumour in the paving a long shadow towards the door.
+
+Edward looked at his pale love through the thin azure twines of
+smoke that went up like ringlets between them, and invested her, as
+seen through its medium, with the shadowy appearance of a phantom.
+Nothing is so potent for coaxing back the lost eyes of a woman as a
+discreet silence in the man who has so lost them--and thus the
+patient Edward coaxed hers. After lingering on the hearth for half
+a minute, waiting in vain for another word from him, they were
+lifted into his face.
+
+He was ready primed to receive them. 'Cytherea, will you marry me?'
+he said.
+
+He could not wait in his original position till the answer came.
+Stepping across the front of the fire to her own side of the chimney
+corner, he reclined at her feet, and searched for her hand. She
+continued in silence awhile.
+
+'Edward, I can never be anybody's wife,' she then said sadly, and
+with firmness.
+
+'Think of it in every light,' he pleaded; 'the light of love, first.
+Then, when you have done that, see how wise a step it would be. I
+can only offer you poverty as yet, but I want--I do so long to
+secure you from the intrusion of that unpleasant past, which will
+often and always be thrust before you as long as you live the
+shrinking solitary life you do now--a life which purity chooses, it
+may be; but to the outside world it appears like the enforced
+loneliness of neglect and scorn--and tongues are busy inventing a
+reason for it which does not exist.'
+
+'I know all about it,' she said hastily; 'and those are the grounds
+of my refusal. You and Owen know the whole truth--the two I love
+best on earth--and I am content. But the scandal will be
+continually repeated, and I can never give any one the opportunity
+of saying to you--that--your wife . . . .' She utterly broke down
+and wept.
+
+'Don't, my own darling!' he entreated. 'Don't, Cytherea!'
+
+'Please to leave me--we will be friends, Edward--but don't press me
+--my mind is made up--I cannot--I will not marry you or any man under
+the present ambiguous circumstances--never will I--I have said it:
+never!'
+
+They were both silent. He listlessly regarded the illuminated
+blackness overhead, where long flakes of soot floated from the sides
+and bars of the chimney-throat like tattered banners in ancient
+aisles; whilst through the square opening in the midst one or two
+bright stars looked down upon them from the grey March sky. The
+sight seemed to cheer him.
+
+'At any rate you will love me?' he murmured to her.
+
+'Yes--always--for ever and for ever!'
+
+He kissed her once, twice, three times, and arose to his feet,
+slowly withdrawing himself from her side towards the door. Cytherea
+remained with her gaze fixed on the fire. Edward went out grieving,
+but hope was not extinguished even now.
+
+He smelt the fragrance of a cigar, and immediately afterwards saw a
+small red star of fire against the darkness of the hedge. Graye was
+pacing up and down the lane, smoking as he walked. Springrove told
+him the result of the interview.
+
+'You are a good fellow, Edward,' he said; 'but I think my sister is
+right.'
+
+'I wish you would believe Manston a villain, as I do,' said
+Springrove.
+
+'It would be absurd of me to say that I like him now--family feeling
+prevents it, but I cannot in honesty say deliberately that he is a
+bad man.'
+
+Edward could keep the secret of Manston's coercion of Miss Aldclyffe
+in the matter of the houses a secret no longer. He told Owen the
+whole story.
+
+'That's one thing,' he continued, 'but not all. What do you think
+of this--I have discovered that he went to Budmouth post-office for
+a letter the day before the first advertisement for his wife
+appeared in the papers. One was there for him, and it was directed
+in his wife's handwriting, as I can prove. This was not till after
+the marriage with Cytherea, it is true, but if (as it seems to show)
+the advertising was a farce, there is a strong presumption that the
+rest of the piece was.'
+
+Owen was too astounded to speak. He dropped his cigar, and fixed
+his eyes upon his companion.
+
+'Collusion!'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'With his first wife?'
+
+'Yes--with his wife. I am firmly persuaded of it.'
+
+'What did you discover?'
+
+'That he fetched from the post-office at Budmouth a letter from her
+the day _before_ the first advertisement appeared.'
+
+Graye was lost in a long consideration. 'Ah!' he said, 'it would be
+difficult to prove anything of that sort now. The writing could not
+be sworn to, and if he is guilty the letter is destroyed.'
+
+'I have other suspicions--'
+
+'Yes--as you said' interrupted Owen, who had not till now been able
+to form the complicated set of ideas necessary for picturing the
+position. 'Yes, there is this to be remembered--Cytherea had been
+taken from him before that letter came--and his knowledge of his
+wife's existence could not have originated till after the wedding.
+I could have sworn he believed her dead then. His manner was
+unmistakable.'
+
+'Well, I have other suspicions,' repeated Edward; 'and if I only had
+the right--if I were her husband or brother, he should be convicted
+of bigamy yet.'
+
+'The reproof was not needed,' said Owen, with a little bitterness.
+'What can I do--a man with neither money nor friends--whilst Manston
+has Miss Aldclyffe and all her fortune to back him up? God only
+knows what lies between the mistress and her steward, but since this
+has transpired--if it is true--I can believe the connection to be
+even an unworthy one--a thing I certainly never so much as owned to
+myself before.'
+
+3. THE FIFTH OF MARCH
+
+Edward's disclosure had the effect of directing Owen Graye's
+thoughts into an entirely new and uncommon channel.
+
+On the Monday after Springrove's visit, Owen had walked to the top
+of a hill in the neighbourhood of Tolchurch--a wild hill that had no
+name, beside a barren down where it never looked like summer. In
+the intensity of his meditations on the ever-present subject, he sat
+down on a weather-beaten boundary-stone gazing towards the distant
+valleys--seeing only Manston's imagined form.
+
+Had his defenceless sister been trifled with? that was the question
+which affected him. Her refusal of Edward as a husband was, he
+knew, dictated solely by a humiliated sense of inadequacy to him in
+repute, and had not been formed till since the slanderous tale
+accounting for her seclusion had been circulated. Was it not true,
+as Edward had hinted, that he, her brother, was neglecting his duty
+towards her in allowing Manston to thrive unquestioned, whilst she
+was hiding her head for no fault at all?
+
+Was it possible that Manston was sensuous villain enough to have
+contemplated, at any moment before the marriage with Cytherea, the
+return of his first wife, when he should have grown weary of his new
+toy? Had he believed that, by a skilful manipulation of such
+circumstances as chance would throw in his way, he could escape all
+suspicion of having known that she lived? Only one fact within his
+own direct knowledge afforded the least ground for such a
+supposition. It was that, possessed by a woman only in the humble
+and unprotected station of a lady's hired companion, his sister's
+beauty might scarcely have been sufficient to induce a selfish man
+like Manston to make her his wife, unless he had foreseen the
+possibility of getting rid of her again.
+
+'But for that stratagem of Manston's in relation to the
+Springroves,' Owen thought, 'Cythie might now have been the happy
+wife of Edward. True, that he influenced Miss Aldclyffe only rests
+on Edward's suspicions, but the grounds are good--the probability is
+strong.'
+
+He went indoors and questioned Cytherea.
+
+'On the night of the fire, who first said that Mrs. Manston was
+burnt?' he asked.
+
+'I don't know who started the report.'
+
+'Was it Manston?'
+
+'It was certainly not he. All doubt on the subject was removed
+before he came to the spot--that I am certain of. Everybody knew
+that she did not escape _after_ the house was on fire, and thus all
+overlooked the fact that she might have left before--of course that
+would have seemed such an improbable thing for anybody to do.'
+
+'Yes, until the porter's story of her irritation and doubt as to her
+course made it natural.'
+
+'What settled the matter at the inquest,' said Cytherea, 'was Mr.
+Manston's evidence that the watch was his wife's.'
+
+'He was sure of that, wasn't he?'
+
+'I believe he said he was certain of it.'
+
+'It might have been hers--left behind in her perturbation, as they
+say it was--impossible as that seems at first sight. Yes--on the
+whole, he might have believed in her death.'
+
+'I know by several proofs that then, and at least for some time
+after, he had no other thought than that she was dead. I now think
+that before the porter's confession he knew something about her
+--though not that she lived.'
+
+'Why do you?'
+
+'From what he said to me on the evening of the wedding-day, when I
+had fastened myself in the room at the hotel, after Edward's visit.
+He must have suspected that I knew something, for he was irritated,
+and in a passion of uneasy doubt. He said, "You don't suppose my
+first wife is come to light again, madam, surely?" Directly he had
+let the remark slip out, he seemed anxious to withdraw it.'
+
+'That's odd,' said Owen.
+
+'I thought it very odd.'
+
+'Still we must remember he might only have hit upon the thought by
+accident, in doubt as to your motive. Yes, the great point to
+discover remains the same as ever--did he doubt his first impression
+of her death _before_ he married you. I can't help thinking he did,
+although he was so astounded at our news that night. Edward swears
+he did.'
+
+'It was perhaps only a short time before,' said Cytherea; 'when he
+could hardly recede from having me.
+
+'Seasoning justice with mercy as usual, Cytherea. 'Tis unfair to
+yourself to talk like that. If I could only bring him to ruin as a
+bigamist--supposing him to be one--I should die happy. That's what
+we must find out by fair means or foul--was he a wilful bigamist?'
+
+'It is no use trying, Owen. You would have to employ a solicitor,
+and how can you do that?'
+
+'I can't at all--I know that very well. But neither do I altogether
+wish to at present--a lawyer must have a case--facts to go upon,
+that means. Now they are scarce at present--as scarce as money is
+with us, and till we have found more money there is no hurry for a
+lawyer. Perhaps by the time we have the facts we shall have the
+money. The only thing we lose in working alone in this way, is
+time--not the issue: for the fruit that one mind matures in a
+twelvemonth forms a more perfectly organized whole than that of
+twelve minds in one month, especially if the interests of the single
+one are vitally concerned, and those of the twelve are only hired.
+But there is not only my mind available--you are a shrewd woman,
+Cythie, and Edward is an earnest ally. Then, if we really get a
+sure footing for a criminal prosecution, the Crown will take up the
+case.'
+
+'I don't much care to press on in the matter,' she murmured. 'What
+good can it do us, Owen, after all?'
+
+'Selfishly speaking, it will do this good--that all the facts of
+your journey to Southampton will become known, and the scandal will
+die. Besides, Manston will have to suffer--it's an act of justice
+to you and to other women, and to Edward Springrove.'
+
+He now thought it necessary to tell her of the real nature of the
+Springroves' obligation to Miss Aldclyffe--and their nearly certain
+knowledge that Manston was the prime mover in effecting their
+embarrassment. Her face flushed as she listened.
+
+'And now,' he said, 'our first undertaking is to find out where Mrs.
+Manston lived during the separation; next, when the first
+communications passed between them after the fire.'
+
+'If we only had Miss Aldclyffe's countenance and assistance as I
+used to have them,' Cytherea returned, 'how strong we should be! O,
+what power is it that he exercises over her, swaying her just as he
+wishes! She loves me now. Mrs. Morris in her letter said that Miss
+Aldclyffe prayed for me--yes, she heard her praying for me, and
+crying. Miss Aldclyffe did not mind an old friend like Mrs. Morris
+knowing it, either. Yet in opposition to this, notice her dead
+silence and inaction throughout this proceeding.'
+
+'It is a mystery; but never mind that now,' said Owen impressively.
+'About where Mrs. Manston has been living. We must get this part of
+it first--learn the place of her stay in the early stage of their
+separation, during the period of Manston's arrival here, and so on,
+for that was where she was first communicated with on the subject of
+coming to Knapwater, before the fire; and that address, too, was her
+point of departure when she came to her husband by stealth in the
+night--you know--the time I visited you in the evening and went home
+early in the morning, and it was found that he had been visited too.
+Ah! couldn't we inquire of Mrs. Leat, who keeps the post-office at
+Carriford, if she remembers where the letters to Mrs. Manston were
+directed?'
+
+'He never posted his letters to her in the parish--it was remarked
+at the time. I was thinking if something relating to her address
+might not be found in the report of the inquest in the Casterbridge
+Chronicle of the date. Some facts about the inquest were given in
+the papers to a certainty.'
+
+Her brother caught eagerly at the suggestion. 'Who has a file of
+the Chronicles?' he said.
+
+'Mr. Raunham used to file them,' said Cytherea. 'He was rather
+friendly-disposed towards me, too.'
+
+Owen could not, on any consideration, escape from his attendance at
+the church-building till Saturday evening; and thus it became
+necessary, unless they actually wasted time, that Cytherea herself
+should assist. 'I act under your orders, Owen,' she said.
+
+
+
+XVI. THE EVENTS OF ONE WEEK
+
+1. MARCH THE SIXTH
+
+The next morning the opening move of the game was made. Cytherea,
+under cover of a thick veil, hired a conveyance and drove to within
+a mile or so of Carriford. It was with a renewed sense of
+depression that she saw again the objects which had become familiar
+to her eye during her sojourn under Miss Aldclyffe's roof--the
+outline of the hills, the meadow streams, the old park trees. She
+hastened by a lonely path to the rectory-house, and asked if Mr.
+Raunham was at home.
+
+Now the rector, though a solitary bachelor, was as gallant and
+courteous to womankind as an ancient Iberian; and, moreover, he was
+Cytherea's friend in particular, to an extent far greater than she
+had ever surmised. Rarely visiting his relative, Miss Aldclyffe,
+except on parish matters, more rarely still being called upon by
+Miss Aldclyffe, Cytherea had learnt very little of him whilst she
+lived at Knapwater. The relationship was on the impecunious
+paternal side, and for this branch of her family the lady of the
+estate had never evinced much sympathy. In looking back upon our
+line of descent it is an instinct with us to feel that all our
+vitality was drawn from the richer party to any unequal marriage in
+the chain.
+
+Since the death of the old captain, the rector's bearing in
+Knapwater House had been almost that of a stranger, a circumstance
+which he himself was the last man in the world to regret. This
+polite indifference was so frigid on both sides that the rector did
+not concern himself to preach at her, which was a great deal in a
+rector; and she did not take the trouble to think his sermons poor
+stuff, which in a cynical woman was a great deal more.
+
+Though barely fifty years of age, his hair was as white as snow,
+contrasting strangely with the redness of his skin, which was as
+fresh and healthy as a lad's. Cytherea's bright eyes, mutely and
+demurely glancing up at him Sunday after Sunday, had been the means
+of driving away many of the saturnine humours that creep into an
+empty heart during the hours of a solitary life; in this case,
+however, to supplant them, when she left his parish, by those others
+of a more aching nature which accompany an over-full one. In short,
+he had been on the verge of feeling towards her that passion to
+which his dignified self-respect would not give its true name, even
+in the privacy of his own thought.
+
+He received her kindly; but she was not disposed to be frank with
+him. He saw her wish to be reserved, and with genuine good taste
+and good nature made no comment whatever upon her request to be
+allowed to see the Chronicle for the year before the last. He
+placed the papers before her on his study table, with a timidity as
+great as her own, and then left her entirely to herself.
+
+She turned them over till she came to the first heading connected
+with the subject of her search--'Disastrous Fire and Loss of Life at
+Carriford.'
+
+The sight, and its calamitous bearing upon her own life, made her so
+dizzy that she could, for a while, hardly decipher the letters.
+Stifling recollection by an effort she nerved herself to her work,
+and carefully read the column. The account reminded her of no other
+fact than was remembered already.
+
+She turned on to the following week's report of the inquest. After
+a miserable perusal she could find no more pertaining to Mrs.
+Manston's address than this:--
+
+'ABRAHAM BROWN, of Hoxton, London, at whose house the deceased woman
+had been living, deposed,' etc.
+
+Nobody else from London had attended the inquest. She arose to
+depart, first sending a message of thanks to Mr. Raunham, who was
+out of doors gardening.
+
+He stuck his spade into the ground, and accompanied her to the gate.
+
+'Can I help you in anything, Cytherea?' he said, using her Christian
+name by an intuition that unpleasant memories might be revived if he
+called her Miss Graye after wishing her good-bye as Mrs. Manston at
+the wedding. Cytherea saw the motive and appreciated it,
+nevertheless replying evasively--
+
+'I only guess and fear.'
+
+He earnestly looked at her again.
+
+'Promise me that if you want assistance, and you think I can give
+it, you will come to me.'
+
+'I will,' she said.
+
+The gate closed between them.
+
+'You don't want me to help you in anything now, Cytherea?' he
+repeated.
+
+If he had spoken what he felt, 'I want very much to help you,
+Cytherea, and have been watching Manston on your account,' she would
+gladly have accepted his offer. As it was, she was perplexed, and
+raised her eyes to his, not so fearlessly as before her trouble, but
+as modestly, and with still enough brightness in them to do fearful
+execution as she said over the gate--
+
+'No, thank you.'
+
+She returned to Tolchurch weary with her day's work. Owen's
+greeting was anxious--
+
+'Well, Cytherea?'
+
+She gave him the words from the report of the inquest, pencilled on
+a slip of paper.
+
+'Now to find out the name of the street and number,' Owen remarked.
+
+'Owen,' she said, 'will you forgive me for what I am going to say?
+I don't think I can--indeed I don't think I can--take any further
+steps towards disentangling the mystery. I still think it a useless
+task, and it does not seem any duty of mine to be revenged upon Mr.
+Manston in any way.' She added more gravely, 'It is beneath my
+dignity as a woman to labour for this; I have felt it so all day.'
+
+'Very well,' he said, somewhat shortly; 'I shall work without you
+then. There's dignity in justice.' He caught sight of her pale
+tired face, and the dilated eye which always appeared in her with
+weariness. 'Darling,' he continued warmly, and kissing her, 'you
+shall not work so hard again--you are worn out quite. But you must
+let me do as I like.'
+
+2. MARCH THE TENTH
+
+On Saturday evening Graye hurried off to Casterbridge, and called at
+the house of the reporter to the Chronicle. The reporter was at
+home, and came out to Graye in the passage. Owen explained who and
+what he was, and asked the man if he would oblige him by turning to
+his notes of the inquest at Carriford in the December of the year
+preceding the last--just adding that a family entanglement, of which
+the reporter probably knew something, made him anxious to ascertain
+some additional details of the event, if any existed.
+
+'Certainly,' said the other, without hesitation; 'though I am afraid
+I haven't much beyond what we printed at the time. Let me see--my
+old note-books are in my drawer at the office of the paper: if you
+will come with me I can refer to them there.' His wife and family
+were at tea inside the room, and with the timidity of decent poverty
+everywhere he seemed glad to get a stranger out of his domestic
+groove.
+
+They crossed the street, entered the office, and went thence to an
+inner room. Here, after a short search, was found the book
+required. The precise address, not given in the condensed report
+that was printed, but written down by the reporter, was as follows:--
+
+
+     'ABRAHAM BROWN,
+          LODGING-HOUSE KEEPER,
+              41 CHARLES SQUARE,
+                   HOXTON.'
+
+
+Owen copied it, and gave the reporter a small fee. 'I want to keep
+this inquiry private for the present,' he said hesitatingly. 'You
+will perhaps understand why, and oblige me.'
+
+The reporter promised. 'News is shop with me,' he said, 'and to
+escape from handling it is my greatest social enjoyment.'
+
+It was evening, and the outer room of the publishing-office was
+lighted up with flaring jets of gas. After making the above remark,
+the reporter came out from the inner apartment in Graye's company,
+answering an expression of obligation from Owen with the words that
+it was no trouble. At the moment of his speech, he closed behind
+him the door between the two rooms, still holding his note-book in
+his hand.
+
+Before the counter of the front room stood a tall man, who was also
+speaking, when they emerged. He said to the youth in attendance, 'I
+will take my paper for this week now I am here, so that you needn't
+post it to me.'
+
+The stranger then slightly turned his head, saw Owen, and recognized
+him. Owen passed out without recognizing the other as Manston.
+
+Manston then looked at the reporter, who, after walking to the door
+with Owen, had come back again to lock up his books. Manston did
+not need to be told that the shabby marble-covered book which he
+held in his hand, opening endways and interleaved with
+blotting-paper, was an old reporting-book. He raised his eyes to the
+reporter's face, whose experience had not so schooled his features
+but that they betrayed a consciousness, to one half initiated as the
+other was, that his late proceeding had been connected with events
+in the life of the steward. Manston said no more, but, taking his
+newspaper, followed Owen from the office, and disappeared in the
+gloom of the street.
+
+Edward Springrove was now in London again, and on this same evening,
+before leaving Casterbridge, Owen wrote a careful letter to him,
+stating therein all the facts that had come to his knowledge, and
+begging him, as he valued Cytherea, to make cautious inquiries. A
+tall man was standing under the lamp-post, about half-a-dozen yards
+above the post-office, when he dropped the letter into the box.
+
+That same night, too, for a reason connected with the rencounter
+with Owen Graye, the steward entertained the idea of rushing off
+suddenly to London by the mail-train, which left Casterbridge at ten
+o'clock. But remembering that letters posted after the hour at
+which Owen had obtained his information--whatever that was--could
+not be delivered in London till Monday morning, he changed his mind
+and went home to Knapwater. Making a confidential explanation to
+his wife, arrangements were set on foot for his departure by the
+mail on Sunday night.
+
+3. MARCH THE ELEVENTH
+
+Starting for church the next morning several minutes earlier than
+was usual with him, the steward intentionally loitered along the
+road from the village till old Mr. Springrove overtook him. Manston
+spoke very civilly of the morning, and of the weather, asking how
+the farmer's barometer stood, and when it was probable that the wind
+might change. It was not in Mr. Springrove's nature--going to
+church as he was, too--to return anything but a civil answer to such
+civil questions, however his feelings might have been biassed by
+late events. The conversation was continued on terms of greater
+friendliness.
+
+'You must be feeling settled again by this time, Mr. Springrove,
+after the rough turn-out you had on that terrible night in
+November.'
+
+'Ay, but I don't know about feeling settled, either, Mr. Manston.
+The old window in the chimney-corner of the old house I shall never
+forget. No window in the chimney-corner where I am now, and I had
+been used to it for more than fifty years. Ted says 'tis a great
+loss to me, and he knows exactly what I feel.'
+
+'Your son is again in a good situation, I believe?' said Manston,
+imitating that inquisitiveness into the private affairs of the
+natives which passes for high breeding in country villages.
+
+'Yes, sir. I hope he'll keep it, or do something else and stick to
+it.'
+
+''Tis to be hoped he'll be steady now.'
+
+'He's always been that, I assure 'ee,' said the old man tartly.
+
+'Yes--yes--I mean intellectually steady. Intellectual wild oats
+will thrive in a soil of the strictest morality.'
+
+'Intellectual gingerbread! Ted's steady enough--that's all I know
+about it.'
+
+'Of course--of course. Has he respectable lodgings? My own
+experience has shown me that that's a great thing to a young man
+living alone in London.'
+
+'Warwick Street, Charing Cross--that's where he is.'
+
+'Well, to be sure--strange! A very dear friend of mine used to live
+at number fifty-two in that very same street.'
+
+'Edward lives at number forty-nine--how very near being the same
+house!' said the old farmer, pleased in spite of himself.
+
+'Very,' said Manston. 'Well, I suppose we had better step along a
+little quicker, Mr. Springrove; the parson's bell has just begun.'
+
+'Number forty-nine,' he murmured.
+
+4. MARCH THE TWELFTH
+
+Edward received Owen's letter in due time, but on account of his
+daily engagements he could not attend to any request till the clock
+had struck five in the afternoon. Rushing then from his office in
+Westminster, he called a hansom and proceeded to Hoxton. A few
+minutes later he knocked at the door of number forty-one, Charles
+Square, the old lodging of Mrs. Manston.
+
+A tall man who would have looked extremely handsome had he not been
+clumsily and closely wrapped up in garments that were much too
+elderly in style for his years, stood at the corner of the quiet
+square at the same instant, having, too, alighted from a cab, that
+had been driven along Old Street in Edward's rear. He smiled
+confidently when Springrove knocked.
+
+Nobody came to the door. Springrove knocked again.
+
+This brought out two people--one at the door he had been knocking
+upon, the other from the next on the right.
+
+'Is Mr. Brown at home?' said Springrove.
+
+'No, sir.'
+
+'When will he be in?'
+
+'Quite uncertain.'
+
+'Can you tell me where I may find him?'
+
+'No. O, here he is coming, sir. That's Mr. Brown.'
+
+Edward looked down the pavement in the direction pointed out by the
+woman, and saw a man approaching. He proceeded a few steps to meet
+him.
+
+Edward was impatient, and to a certain extent still a countryman,
+who had not, after the manner of city men, subdued the natural
+impulse to speak out the ruling thought without preface. He said in
+a quiet tone to the stranger, 'One word with you--do you remember a
+lady lodger of yours of the name of Mrs. Manston?'
+
+Mr. Brown half closed his eyes at Springrove, somewhat as if he were
+looking into a telescope at the wrong end.
+
+'I have never let lodgings in my life,' he said, after his survey.
+
+'Didn't you attend an inquest a year and a half ago, at Carriford?'
+
+'Never knew there was such a place in the world, sir; and as to
+lodgings, I have taken acres first and last during the last thirty
+years, but I have never let an inch.'
+
+'I suppose there is some mistake,' Edward murmured, and turned away.
+He and Mr. Brown were now opposite the door next to the one he had
+knocked at. The woman who was still standing there had heard the
+inquiry and the result of it.
+
+'I expect it is the other Mr. Brown, who used to live there, that
+you want, sir,' she said. 'The Mr. Brown that was inquired for the
+other day?'
+
+'Very likely that is the man,' said Edward, his interest
+reawakening.
+
+'He couldn't make a do of lodging-letting here, and at last he went
+to Cornwall, where he came from, and where his brother still lived,
+who had often asked him to come home again. But there was little
+luck in the change; for after London they say he couldn't stand the
+rainy west winds they get there, and he died in the December
+following. Will you step into the passage?'
+
+'That's unfortunate,' said Edward, going in. 'But perhaps you
+remember a Mrs. Manston living next door to you?'
+
+'O yes,' said the landlady, closing the door. 'The lady who was
+supposed to have met with such a horrible fate, and was alive all
+the time. I saw her the other day.'
+
+'Since the fire at Carriford?'
+
+'Yes. Her husband came to ask if Mr. Brown was still living here
+--just as you might. He seemed anxious about it; and then one
+evening, a week or fortnight afterwards, when he came again to make
+further inquiries, she was with him. But I did not speak to her
+--she stood back, as if she were shy. I was interested, however,
+for old Mr. Brown had told me all about her when he came back from
+the inquest.'
+
+'Did you know Mrs. Manston before she called the other day?'
+
+'No. You see she was only Mr. Brown's lodger for two or three
+weeks, and I didn't know she was living there till she was near upon
+leaving again--we don't notice next-door people much here in London.
+I much regretted I had not known her when I heard what had happened.
+It led me and Mr. Brown to talk about her a great deal afterwards.
+I little thought I should see her alive after all.'
+
+'And when do you say they came here together?'
+
+'I don't exactly remember the day--though I remember a very
+beautiful dream I had that same night--ah, I shall never forget it!
+Shoals of lodgers coming along the square with angels' wings and
+bright golden sovereigns in their hands wanting apartments at West
+End prices. They would not give any less; no, not if you--'
+
+'Yes. Did Mrs. Manston leave anything, such as papers, when she
+left these lodgings originally?' said Edward, though his heart sank
+as he asked. He felt that he was outwitted. Manston and his wife
+had been there before him, clearing the ground of all traces.
+
+'I have always said "No" hitherto,' replied the woman, 'considering
+I could say no more if put upon my oath, as I expected to be. But
+speaking in a common everyday way now the occurrence is past, I
+believe a few things of some kind (though I doubt if they were
+papers) were left in a workbox she had, because she talked about it
+to Mr. Brown, and was rather angry at what occurred--you see, she
+had a temper by all account, and so I didn't like to remind the lady
+of this workbox when she came the other day with her husband.'
+
+'And about the workbox?'
+
+'Well, from what was casually dropped, I think Mrs. Manston had a
+few articles of furniture she didn't want, and when she was leaving
+they were put in a sale just by. Amongst her things were two
+workboxes very much alike. One of these she intended to sell, the
+other she didn't, and Mr. Brown, who collected the things together,
+took the wrong one to the sale.'
+
+'What was in it?'
+
+'O, nothing in particular, or of any value--some accounts, and her
+usual sewing materials I think--nothing more. She didn't take much
+trouble to get it back--she said the bills were worth nothing to her
+or anybody else, but that she should have liked to keep the box
+because her husband gave it her when they were first married, and if
+he found she had parted with it, he would be vexed.'
+
+'Did Mrs. Manston, when she called recently with her husband, allude
+to this, or inquire for it, or did Mr. Manston?'
+
+'No--and I rather wondered at it. But she seemed to have forgotten
+it--indeed, she didn't make any inquiry at all, only standing behind
+him, listening to his; and he probably had never been told anything
+about it.'
+
+'Whose sale were these articles of hers taken to?'
+
+'Who was the auctioneer? Mr. Halway. His place is the third
+turning from the end of that street you see there. Anybody will
+tell you the shop--his name is written up.'
+
+Edward went off to follow up his clue with a promptness which was
+dictated more by a dogged will to do his utmost than by a hope of
+doing much. When he was out of sight, the tall and cloaked man, who
+had watched him, came up to the woman's door, with an appearance of
+being in breathless haste.
+
+'Has a gentleman been here inquiring about Mrs. Manston?'
+
+'Yes; he's just gone.'
+
+'Dear me! I want him.'
+
+'He's gone to Mr. Halway's.'
+
+'I think I can give him some information upon the subject. Does he
+pay pretty liberally?'
+
+'He gave me half-a-crown.'
+
+'That scale will do. I'm a poor man, and will see what my little
+contribution to his knowledge will fetch. But, by the way, perhaps
+you told him all I know--where she lived before coming to live
+here?'
+
+'I didn't know where she lived before coming here. O no--I only
+said what Mr. Brown had told me. He seemed a nice, gentle young
+man, or I shouldn't have been so open as I was.'
+
+'I shall now about catch him at Mr. Halway's,' said the man, and
+went away as hastily as he had come.
+
+Edward in the meantime had reached the auction-room. He found some
+difficulty, on account of the inertness of those whose only
+inducement to an action is a mere wish from another, in getting the
+information he stood in need of, but it was at last accorded him.
+The auctioneer's book gave the name of Mrs. Higgins, 3 Canley
+Passage, as the purchaser of the lot which had included Mrs.
+Manston's workbox.
+
+Thither Edward went, followed by the man. Four bell pulls, one
+above the other like waistcoat-buttons, appeared on the door-post.
+Edward seized the first he came to.
+
+'Who did you woant?' said a thin voice from somewhere.
+
+Edward looked above and around him; nobody was visible.
+
+'Who did you woant?' said the thin voice again.
+
+He found now that the sound proceeded from below the grating
+covering the basement window. He dropped his glance through the
+bars, and saw a child's white face.
+
+'Who did you woant?' said the voice the third time, with precisely
+the same languid inflection.
+
+'Mrs. Higgins,' said Edward.
+
+'Third bell up,' said the face, and disappeared.
+
+He pulled the third bell from the bottom, and was admitted by
+another child, the daughter of the woman he was in search of. He
+gave the little thing sixpence, and asked for her mamma. The child
+led him upstairs.
+
+Mrs. Higgins was the wife of a carpenter who from want of employment
+one winter had decided to marry. Afterwards they both took to
+drink, and sank into desperate circumstances. A few chairs and a
+table were the chief articles of furniture in the third-floor back
+room which they occupied. A roll of baby-linen lay on the floor;
+beside it a pap-clogged spoon and an overturned tin pap-cup.
+Against the wall a Dutch clock was fixed out of level, and ticked
+wildly in longs and shorts, its entrails hanging down beneath its
+white face and wiry hands, like the faeces of a Harpy ('foedissima
+ventris proluvies, uncaeque manus, et pallida semper ora'). A baby
+was crying against every chair-leg, the whole family of six or seven
+being small enough to be covered by a washing-tub. Mrs. Higgins sat
+helpless, clothed in a dress which had hooks and eyes in plenty, but
+never one opposite the other, thereby rendering the dress almost
+useless as a screen to the bosom. No workbox was visible anywhere.
+
+It was a depressing picture of married life among the very poor of a
+city. Only for one short hour in the whole twenty-four did husband
+and wife taste genuine happiness. It was in the evening, when,
+after the sale of some necessary article of furniture, they were
+under the influence of a quartern of gin.
+
+Of all the ingenious and cruel satires that from the beginning till
+now have been stuck like knives into womankind, surely there is not
+one so lacerating to them, and to us who love them, as the trite old
+fact, that the most wretched of men can, in the twinkling of an eye,
+find a wife ready to be more wretched still for the sake of his
+company.
+
+Edward hastened to despatch his errand.
+
+Mrs. Higgins had lately pawned the workbox with other useless
+articles of lumber, she said. Edward bought the duplicate of her,
+and went downstairs to the pawnbroker's.
+
+In the back division of a musty shop, amid the heterogeneous
+collection of articles and odours invariably crowding such places,
+he produced his ticket, and with a sense of satisfaction out of all
+proportion to the probable worth of his acquisition, took the box
+and carried it off under his arm. He attempted to lift the cover as
+he walked, but found it locked.
+
+It was dusk when Springrove reached his lodging. Entering his small
+sitting-room, the front apartment on the ground floor, he struck a
+light, and proceeded to learn if any scrap or mark within or upon
+his purchase rendered it of moment to the business in hand.
+Breaking open the cover with a small chisel, and lifting the tray,
+he glanced eagerly beneath, and found--nothing.
+
+He next discovered that a pocket or portfolio was formed on the
+underside of the cover. This he unfastened, and slipping his hand
+within, found that it really contained some substance. First he
+pulled out about a dozen tangled silk and cotton threads. Under
+them were a short household account, a dry moss-rosebud, and an old
+pair of carte-de-visite photographs. One of these was a likeness of
+Mrs. Manston--'Eunice' being written under it in ink--the other of
+Manston himself.
+
+He sat down dispirited. This was all the fruit of his task--not a
+single letter, date, or address of any kind to help him--and was it
+likely there would be?
+
+However, thinking he would send the fragments, such as they were, to
+Graye, in order to satisfy him that he had done his best so far, he
+scribbled a line, and put all except the silk and cotton into an
+envelope. Looking at his watch, he found it was then twenty minutes
+to seven; by affixing an extra stamp he would be enabled to despatch
+them by that evening's post. He hastily directed the packet, and
+ran with it at once to the post-office at Charing Cross.
+
+On his return he took up the workbox again to examine it more
+leisurely. He then found there was also a small cavity in the tray
+under the pincushion, which was movable by a bit of ribbon. Lifting
+this he uncovered a flattened sprig of myrtle, and a small scrap of
+crumpled paper. The paper contained a verse or two in a man's
+handwriting. He recognized it as Manston's, having seen notes and
+bills from him at his father's house. The stanza was of a
+complimentary character, descriptive of the lady who was now
+Manston's wife.
+
+
+                        'EUNICE.
+
+          'Whoso for hours or lengthy days
+           Shall catch her aspect's changeful rays,
+           Then turn away, can none recall
+           Beyond a galaxy of all
+               In hazy portraiture;
+           Lit by the light of azure eyes
+           Like summer days by summer skies:
+           Her sweet transitions seem to be
+           A kind of pictured melody,
+               And not a set contour.
+                                      'AE. M.'
+
+
+To shake, pull, and ransack the box till he had almost destroyed it
+was now his natural action. But it contained absolutely nothing
+more.
+
+'Disappointed again,' he said, flinging down the box, the bit of
+paper, and the withered twig that had lain with it.
+
+Yet valueless as the new acquisition was, on second thoughts he
+considered that it would be worth while to make good the statement
+in his late note to Graye--that he had sent everything the box
+contained except the sewing-thread. Thereupon he enclosed the verse
+and myrtle-twig in another envelope, with a remark that he had
+overlooked them in his first search, and put it on the table for the
+next day's post.
+
+In his hurry and concentration upon the matter that occupied him,
+Springrove, on entering his lodging and obtaining a light, had not
+waited to pull down the blind or close the shutters. Consequently
+all that he had done had been visible from the street. But as on an
+average not one person a minute passed along the quiet pavement at
+this time of the evening, the discovery of the omission did not much
+concern his mind.
+
+But the real state of the case was that a tall man had stood against
+the opposite wall and watched the whole of his proceeding. When
+Edward came out and went to the Charing Cross post-office, the man
+followed him and saw him drop the letter into the box. The stranger
+did not further trouble himself to follow Springrove back to his
+lodging again.
+
+Manston now knew that there had been photographs of some kind in his
+wife's workbox, and though he had not been near enough to see them,
+he guessed whose they were. The least reflection told him to whom
+they had been sent.
+
+He paused a minute under the portico of the post-office, looking at
+the two or three omnibuses stopping and starting in front of him.
+Then he rushed along the Strand, through Holywell Street, and on to
+Old Boswell Court. Kicking aside the shoeblacks who began to
+importune him as he passed under the colonnade, he turned up the
+narrow passage to the publishing-office of the Post-Office
+Directory. He begged to be allowed to see the Directory of the
+south-west counties of England for a moment.
+
+The shopman immediately handed down the volume from a shelf, and
+Manston retired with it to the window-bench. He turned to the
+county, and then to the parish of Tolchurch. At the end of the
+historical and topographical description of the village he read:--
+
+'Postmistress--Mrs. Hurston. Letters received at 6.3O A.M. by
+foot-post from Anglebury.'
+
+Returning his thanks, he handed back the book and quitted the
+office, thence pursuing his way to an obscure coffee-house by the
+Strand, where he now partook of a light dinner. But rest seemed
+impossible with him. Some absorbing intention kept his body
+continually on the move. He paid his bill, took his bag in his
+hand, and went out to idle about the streets and over the river till
+the time should have arrived at which the night-mail left the
+Waterloo Station, by which train he intended to return homeward.
+
+There exists, as it were, an outer chamber to the mind, in which,
+when a man is occupied centrally with the most momentous question of
+his life, casual and trifling thoughts are just allowed to wander
+softly for an interval, before being banished altogether. Thus,
+amid his concentration did Manston receive perceptions of the
+individuals about him in the lively thoroughfare of the Strand; tall
+men looking insignificant; little men looking great and profound;
+lost women of miserable repute looking as happy as the days are
+long; wives, happy by assumption, looking careworn and miserable.
+Each and all were alike in this one respect, that they followed a
+solitary trail like the inwoven threads which form a banner, and all
+were equally unconscious of the significant whole they collectively
+showed forth.
+
+At ten o'clock he turned into Lancaster Place, crossed the river,
+and entered the railway-station, where he took his seat in the down
+mail-train, which bore him, and Edward Springrove's letter to Graye,
+far away from London.
+
+
+
+XVII. THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
+
+1. MARCH THE THIRTEENTH. THREE TO SIX O'CLOCK A.M.
+
+They entered Anglebury Station in the dead, still time of early
+morning, the clock over the booking-office pointing to twenty-five
+minutes to three. Manston lingered on the platform and saw the
+mail-bags brought out, noticing, as a pertinent pastime, the many
+shabby blotches of wax from innumerable seals that had been set upon
+their mouths. The guard took them into a fly, and was driven down
+the road to the post-office.
+
+It was a raw, damp, uncomfortable morning, though, as yet, little
+rain was falling. Manston drank a mouthful from his flask and
+walked at once away from the station, pursuing his way through the
+gloom till he stood on the side of the town adjoining, at a distance
+from the last house in the street of about two hundred yards.
+
+The station road was also the turnpike-road into the country, the
+first part of its course being across a heath. Having surveyed the
+highway up and down to make sure of its bearing, Manston
+methodically set himself to walk backwards and forwards a stone's
+throw in each direction. Although the spring was temperate, the
+time of day, and the condition of suspense in which the steward
+found himself, caused a sensation of chilliness to pervade his frame
+in spite of the overcoat he wore. The drizzling rain increased, and
+drops from the trees at the wayside fell noisily upon the hard road
+beneath them, which reflected from its glassy surface the faint halo
+of light hanging over the lamps of the adjacent town.
+
+Here he walked and lingered for two hours, without seeing or hearing
+a living soul. Then he heard the market-house clock strike five,
+and soon afterwards, quick hard footsteps smote upon the pavement of
+the street leading towards him. They were those of the postman for
+the Tolchurch beat. He reached the bottom of the street, gave his
+bags a final hitch-up, stepped off the pavement, and struck out for
+the country with a brisk shuffle.
+
+Manston then turned his back upon the town, and walked slowly on.
+In two minutes a flickering light shone upon his form, and the
+postman overtook him.
+
+The new-comer was a short, stooping individual of above
+five-and-forty, laden on both sides with leather bags large and
+small, and carrying a little lantern strapped to his breast, which
+cast a tiny patch of light upon the road ahead.
+
+'A tryen mornen for travellers!' the postman cried, in a cheerful
+voice, without turning his head or slackening his trot.
+
+'It is, indeed,' said Manston, stepping out abreast of him. 'You
+have a long walk every day.'
+
+'Yes--a long walk--for though the distance is only sixteen miles on
+the straight--that is, eight to the furthest place and eight back,
+what with the ins and outs to the gentlemen's houses, it makes
+two-and-twenty for my legs. Two-and-twenty miles a day, how many a
+year? I used to reckon it, but I never do now. I don't care to
+think o' my wear and tear, now it do begin to tell upon me.'
+
+Thus the conversation was begun, and the postman proceeded to
+narrate the different strange events that marked his experience.
+Manston grew very friendly.
+
+'Postman, I don't know what your custom is,' he said, after a while;
+'but between you and me, I always carry a drop of something warm in
+my pocket when I am out on such a morning as this. Try it.' He
+handed the bottle of brandy.
+
+'If you'll excuse me, please. I haven't took no stimmilents these
+five years.'
+
+''Tis never too late to mend.'
+
+'Against the regulations, I be afraid.'
+
+'Who'll know it?'
+
+'That's true--nobody will know it. Still, honesty's the best
+policy.'
+
+'Ah--it is certainly. But, thank God, I've been able to get on
+without it yet. You'll surely drink with me?'
+
+'Really, 'tis a'most too early for that sort o' thing--however, to
+oblige a friend, I don't object to the faintest shadder of a drop.'
+The postman drank, and Manston did the same to a very slight degree.
+Five minutes later, when they came to a gate, the flask was pulled
+out again.
+
+'Well done!' said the postman, beginning to feel its effect; 'but
+guide my soul, I be afraid 'twill hardly do!'
+
+'Not unless 'tis well followed, like any other line you take up,'
+said Manston. 'Besides, there's a way of liking a drop of liquor,
+and of being good--even religious--at the same time.'
+
+'Ay, for some thimble-and-button in-an-out fellers; but I could
+never get into the knack o' it; not I.'
+
+'Well, you needn't be troubled; it isn't necessary for the higher
+class of mind to be religious--they have so much common-sense that
+they can risk playing with fire.'
+
+'That hits me exactly.'
+
+'In fact, a man I know, who always had no other god but "Me;" and
+devoutly loved his neighbour's wife, says now that believing is a
+mistake.'
+
+'Well, to be sure! However, believing in God is a mistake made by
+very few people, after all.'
+
+'A true remark.'
+
+'Not one Christian in our parish would walk half a mile in a rain
+like this to know whether the Scripture had concluded him under sin
+or grace.'
+
+'Nor in mine.'
+
+'Ah, you may depend upon it they'll do away wi' Goddymity altogether
+afore long, although we've had him over us so many years.'
+
+'There's no knowing.'
+
+'And I suppose the Queen 'ill be done away wi' then. A pretty
+concern that'll be! Nobody's head to put on your letters; and then
+your honest man who do pay his penny will never be known from your
+scamp who don't. O, 'tis a nation!'
+
+'Warm the cockles of your heart, however. Here's the bottle
+waiting.'
+
+'I'll oblige you, my friend.'
+
+The drinking was repeated. The postman grew livelier as he went on,
+and at length favoured the steward with a song, Manston himself
+joining in the chorus.
+
+
+          'He flung his mallet against the wall,
+           Said, "The Lord make churches and chapels to fall,
+           And there'll be work for tradesmen all!"
+               When Joan's ale was new,
+                               My boys,
+               When Joan's ale was new.'
+
+
+'You understand, friend,' the postman added, 'I was originally a
+mason by trade: no offence to you if you be a parson?'
+
+'None at all,' said Manston.
+
+The rain now came down heavily, but they pursued their path with
+alacrity, the produce of the several fields between which the lane
+wound its way being indicated by the peculiar character of the sound
+emitted by the falling drops. Sometimes a soaking hiss proclaimed
+that they were passing by a pasture, then a patter would show that
+the rain fell upon some large-leafed root crop, then a paddling
+plash announced the naked arable, the low sound of the wind in their
+ears rising and falling with each pace they took.
+
+Besides the small private bags of the county families, which were
+all locked, the postman bore the large general budget for the
+remaining inhabitants along his beat. At each village or hamlet
+they came to, the postman searched for the packet of letters
+destined for that place, and thrust it into an ordinary letter-hole
+cut in the door of the receiver's cottage--the village post-offices
+being mostly kept by old women who had not yet risen, though lights
+moving in other cottage windows showed that such people as carters,
+woodmen, and stablemen had long been stirring.
+
+The postman had by this time become markedly unsteady, but he still
+continued to be too conscious of his duties to suffer the steward to
+search the bag. Manston was perplexed, and at lonely points in the
+road cast his eyes keenly upon the short bowed figure of the man
+trotting through the mud by his side, as if he were half inclined to
+run a very great risk indeed.
+
+It frequently happened that the houses of farmers, clergymen, etc.,
+lay a short distance up or down a lane or path branching from the
+direct track of the postman's journey. To save time and distance,
+at the point of junction of some of these paths with the main road,
+the gate-post was hollowed out to form a letter-box, in which the
+postman deposited his missives in the morning, looking in the box
+again in the evening to collect those placed there for the return
+post. Tolchurch Vicarage and Farmstead, lying back from the village
+street, were served on this principle. This fact the steward now
+learnt by conversing with the postman, and the discovery relieved
+Manston greatly, making his intentions much clearer to himself than
+they had been in the earlier stages of his journey.
+
+They had reached the outskirts of the village. Manston insisted
+upon the flask being emptied before they proceeded further. This
+was done, and they approached the church, the vicarage, and the
+farmhouse in which Owen and Cytherea were living.
+
+The postman paused, fumbled in his bag, took out by the light of his
+lantern some half-dozen letters, and tried to sort them. He could
+not perform the task.
+
+'We be crippled disciples a b'lieve,' he said, with a sigh and a
+stagger.
+
+'Not drunk, but market-merry,' said Manston cheerfully.
+
+'Well done! If I baint so weak that I can't see the clouds--much
+less letters. Guide my soul, if so be anybody should tell the
+Queen's postmaster-general of me! The whole story will have to go
+through Parliament House, and I shall be high-treasoned--as safe as
+houses--and be fined, and who'll pay for a poor martel! O, 'tis a
+world!'
+
+'Trust in the Lord--he'll pay.'
+
+'He pay a b'lieve! why should he when he didn't drink the drink? He
+pay a b'lieve! D'ye think the man's a fool?'
+
+'Well, well, I had no intention of hurting your feelings--but how
+was I to know you were so sensitive?'
+
+'True--you were not to know I was so sensitive. Here's a caddle wi'
+these letters! Guide my soul, what will Billy do!'
+
+Manston offered his services.
+
+'They are to be divided,' the man said.
+
+'How?' said Manston.
+
+'These, for the village, to be carried on into it: any for the
+vicarage or vicarage farm must be left in the box of the gate-post
+just here. There's none for the vicarage-house this mornen, but I
+saw when I started there was one for the clerk o' works at the new
+church. This is it, isn't it?'
+
+He held up a large envelope, directed in Edward Springrove's
+handwriting:--
+
+     'MR. O. GRAYE,
+          CLERK OF WORKS,
+               TOLCHURCH,
+                    NEAR ANGLEBURY.'
+
+The letter-box was scooped in an oak gate-post about a foot square.
+There was no slit for inserting the letters, by reason of the
+opportunity such a lonely spot would have afforded mischievous
+peasant-boys of doing damage had such been the case; but at the side
+was a small iron door, kept close by an iron reversible strap locked
+across it. One side of this strap was painted black, the other
+white, and white or black outwards implied respectively that there
+were letters inside, or none.
+
+The postman had taken the key from his pocket and was attempting to
+insert it in the keyhole of the box. He touched one side, the
+other, above, below, but never made a straight hit.
+
+'Let me unlock it,' said Manston, taking the key from the postman.
+He opened the box and reached out with his other hand for Owen's
+letter.
+
+'No, no. O no--no,' the postman said. 'As one of--Majesty's
+servants--care--Majesty's mails--duty--put letters--own hands.' He
+slowly and solemnly placed the letter in the small cavity.
+
+'Now lock it,' he said, closing the door.
+
+The steward placed the bar across, with the black side outwards,
+signifying 'empty,' and turned the key.
+
+'You've put the wrong side outwards!' said the postman. ''Tisn't
+empty.'
+
+'And dropped the key in the mud, so that I can't alter it,' said the
+steward, letting something fall.
+
+'What an awkward thing!'
+
+'It is an awkward thing.'
+
+They both went searching in the mud, which their own trampling had
+reduced to the consistency of pap, the postman unstrapping his
+little lantern from his breast, and thrusting it about, close to the
+ground, the rain still drizzling down, and the dawn so tardy on
+account of the heavy clouds that daylight seemed delayed
+indefinitely. The rays of the lantern were rendered individually
+visible upon the thick mist, and seemed almost tangible as they
+passed off into it, after illuminating the faces and knees of the
+two stooping figures dripping with wet; the postman's cape and
+private bags, and the steward's valise, glistening as if they had
+been varnished.
+
+'It fell on the grass,' said the postman.
+
+'No; it fell in the mud,' said Manston. They searched again.
+
+'I'm afraid we shan't find it by this light,' said the steward at
+length, washing his muddy fingers in the wet grass of the bank.
+
+'I'm afraid we shan't,' said the other, standing up.
+
+'I'll tell you what we had better do,' said Manston. 'I shall be
+back this way in an hour or so, and since it was all my fault, I'll
+look again, and shall be sure to find it in the daylight. And I'll
+hide the key here for you.' He pointed to a spot behind the post.
+'It will be too late to turn the index then, as the people will have
+been here, so that the box had better stay as it is. The letter
+will only be delayed a day, and that will not be noticed; if it is,
+you can say you placed the iron the wrong way without knowing it,
+and all will be well.'
+
+This was agreed to by the postman as the best thing to be done under
+the circumstances, and the pair went on. They had passed the
+village and come to a crossroad, when the steward, telling his
+companion that their paths now diverged, turned off to the left
+towards Carriford.
+
+No sooner was the postman out of sight and hearing than Manston
+stalked back to the vicarage letter-box by keeping inside a fence,
+and thus avoiding the village; arrived here, he took the key from
+his pocket, where it had been concealed all the time, and abstracted
+Owen's letter. This done, he turned towards home, by the help of
+what he carried in his valise adjusting himself to his ordinary
+appearance as he neared the quarter in which he was known.
+
+An hour and half's sharp walking brought him to his own door in
+Knapwater Park.
+
+2. EIGHT O'CLOCK A.M.
+
+Seated in his private office he wetted the flap of the stolen
+letter, and waited patiently till the adhesive gum could be
+loosened. He took out Edward's note, the accounts, the rosebud, and
+the photographs, regarding them with the keenest interest and
+anxiety.
+
+The note, the accounts, the rosebud, and his own photograph, he
+restored to their places again. The other photograph he took
+between his finger and thumb, and held it towards the bars of the
+grate. There he held it for half-a-minute or more, meditating.
+
+'It is a great risk to run, even for such an end,' he muttered.
+
+Suddenly, impregnated with a bright idea, he jumped up and left the
+office for the front parlour. Taking up an album of portraits,
+which lay on the table, he searched for three or four likenesses of
+the lady who had so lately displaced Cytherea, which were
+interspersed among the rest of the collection, and carefully
+regarded them. They were taken in different attitudes and styles,
+and he compared each singly with that he held in his hand. One of
+them, the one most resembling that abstracted from the letter in
+general tone, size, and attitude, he selected from the rest, and
+returned with it to his office.
+
+Pouring some water into a plate, he set the two portraits afloat
+upon it, and sitting down tried to read.
+
+At the end of a quarter of an hour, after several ineffectual
+attempts, he found that each photograph would peel from the card on
+which it was mounted. This done, he threw into the fire the
+original likeness and the recent card, stuck upon the original card
+the recent likeness from the album, dried it before the fire, and
+placed it in the envelope with the other scraps.
+
+The result he had obtained, then, was this: in the envelope were
+now two photographs, both having the same photographer's name on the
+back and consecutive numbers attached. At the bottom of the one
+which showed his own likeness, his own name was written down; on the
+other his wife's name was written; whilst the central feature, and
+whole matter to which this latter card and writing referred, the
+likeness of a lady mounted upon it, had been changed.
+
+Mrs. Manston entered the room, and begged him to come to breakfast.
+He followed her and they sat down. During the meal he told her what
+he had done, with scrupulous regard to every detail, and showed her
+the result.
+
+'It is indeed a great risk to run,' she said, sipping her tea.
+
+'But it would be a greater not to do it.'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+The envelope was again fastened up as before, and Manston put it in
+his pocket and went out. Shortly afterwards he was seen, on
+horseback, riding in a direction towards Tolchurch. Keeping to the
+fields, as well as he could, for the greater part of the way, he
+dropped into the road by the vicarage letter-box, and looking
+carefully about, to ascertain that no person was near, he restored
+the letter to its nook, placed the key in its hiding-place, as he
+had promised the postman, and again rode homewards by a roundabout
+way.
+
+3. AFTERNOON
+
+The letter was brought to Owen Graye, the same afternoon, by one of
+the vicar's servants who had been to the box with a duplicate key,
+as usual, to leave letters for the evening post. The man found that
+the index had told falsely that morning for the first time within
+his recollection; but no particular attention was paid to the
+mistake, as it was considered. The contents of the envelope were
+scrutinized by Owen and flung aside as useless.
+
+The next morning brought Springrove's second letter, the existence
+of which was unknown to Manston. The sight of Edward's handwriting
+again raised the expectations of brother and sister, till Owen had
+opened the envelope and pulled out the twig and verse.
+
+'Nothing that's of the slightest use, after all,' he said to her;
+'we are as far as ever from the merest shadow of legal proof that
+would convict him of what I am morally certain he did, marry you,
+suspecting, if not knowing, her to be alive all the time.'
+
+'What has Edward sent?' said Cytherea.
+
+'An old amatory verse in Manston's writing. Fancy,' he said
+bitterly, 'this is the strain he addressed her in when they were
+courting--as he did you, I suppose.'
+
+He handed her the verse and she read--
+
+
+                        'EUNICE.
+
+          'Whoso for hours or lengthy days
+           Shall catch her aspect's changeful rays,
+           Then turn away, can none recall
+           Beyond a galaxy of all
+               In hazy portraiture;
+           Lit by the light of azure eyes
+           Like summer days by summer skies:
+           Her sweet transitions seem to be
+           A kind of pictured melody,
+               And not a set contour.
+                                      'AE. M.'
+
+
+A strange expression had overspread Cytherea's countenance. It
+rapidly increased to the most death-like anguish. She flung down
+the paper, seized Owen's hand tremblingly, and covered her face.
+
+'Cytherea! What is it, for Heaven's sake?'
+
+'Owen--suppose--O, you don't know what I think.'
+
+'What?'
+
+'"_The light of azure eyes_,"' she repeated with ashy lips.
+
+'Well, "the light of azure eyes"?' he said, astounded at her manner.
+
+'Mrs. Morris said in her letter to me that her eyes are _black_!'
+
+'H'm. Mrs. Morris must have made a mistake--nothing likelier.'
+
+'She didn't.'
+
+'They might be either in this photograph,' said Owen, looking at the
+card bearing Mrs. Manston's name.
+
+'Blue eyes would scarcely photograph so deep in tone as that,' said
+Cytherea. 'No, they seem black here, certainly.'
+
+'Well, then, Manston must have blundered in writing his verses.'
+
+'But could he? Say a man in love may forget his own name, but not
+that he forgets the colour of his mistress's eyes. Besides she
+would have seen the mistake when she read them, and have had it
+corrected.'
+
+'That's true, she would,' mused Owen. 'Then, Cytherea, it comes to
+this--you must have been misinformed by Mrs. Morris, since there is
+no other alternative.'
+
+'I suppose I must.'
+
+Her looks belied her words.
+
+'What makes you so strange--ill?' said Owen again.
+
+'I can't believe Mrs. Morris wrong.'
+
+'But look at this, Cytherea. If it is clear to us that the woman
+had blue eyes two years ago, she _must_ have blue eyes now,
+whatever Mrs. Morris or anybody else may fancy. Any one would
+think that Manston could change the colour of a woman's eyes to
+hear you.'
+
+'Yes,' she said, and paused.
+
+'You say yes, as if he could,' said Owen impatiently.
+
+'By changing the woman herself,' she exclaimed. 'Owen, don't you
+see the horrid--what I dread?--that the woman he lives with is not
+Mrs. Manston--that she was burnt after all--and that I am _his
+wife_!'
+
+She tried to support a stoicism under the weight of this new
+trouble, but no! The unexpected revulsion of ideas was so
+overwhelming that she crept to him and leant against his breast.
+
+Before reflecting any further upon the subject Graye led her
+upstairs and got her to lie down. Then he went to the window and
+stared out of it up the lane, vainly endeavouring to come to some
+conclusion upon the fantastic enigma that confronted him.
+Cytherea's new view seemed incredible, yet it had such a hold upon
+her that it would be necessary to clear it away by positive proof
+before contemplation of her fear should have preyed too deeply upon
+her.
+
+'Cytherea,' he said, 'this will not do. You must stay here alone
+all the afternoon whilst I go to Carriford. I shall know all when I
+return.'
+
+'No, no, don't go!' she implored.
+
+'Soon, then, not directly.' He saw her subtle reasoning--that it
+was folly to be wise.
+
+Reflection still convinced him that good would come of persevering
+in his intention and dispelling his sister's idle fears. Anything
+was better than this absurd doubt in her mind. But he resolved to
+wait till Sunday, the first day on which he might reckon upon seeing
+Mrs. Manston without suspicion. In the meantime he wrote to Edward
+Springrove, requesting him to go again to Mrs. Manston's former
+lodgings.
+
+
+
+XVIII. THE EVENTS OF THREE DAYS
+
+1. MARCH THE EIGHTEENTH
+
+Sunday morning had come, and Owen was trudging over the six miles of
+hill and dale that lay between Tolchurch and Carriford.
+
+Edward Springrove's answer to the last letter, after expressing
+his amazement at the strange contradiction between the verses and
+Mrs. Morris's letter, had been to the effect that he had again
+visited the neighbour of the dead Mr. Brown, and had received as
+near a description of Mrs. Manston as it was possible to get at
+second-hand, and by hearsay. She was a tall woman, wide at the
+shoulders, and full-chested, and she had a straight and rather
+large nose. The colour of her eyes the informant did not know,
+for she had only seen the lady in the street as she went in or out.
+This confusing remark was added. The woman had almost recognized Mrs.
+Manston when she had called with her husband lately, but she had
+kept her veil down. Her residence, before she came to Hoxton, was
+quite unknown to this next-door neighbour, and Edward could get no
+manner of clue to it from any other source.
+
+Owen reached the church-door a few minutes before the bells began
+chiming. Nobody was yet in the church, and he walked round the
+aisles. From Cytherea's frequent description of how and where
+herself and others used to sit, he knew where to look for Manston's
+seat; and after two or three errors of examination he took up a
+prayer-book in which was written 'Eunice Manston.' The book was
+nearly new, and the date of the writing about a month earlier. One
+point was at any rate established: that the woman living with
+Manston was presented to the world as no other than his lawful wife.
+
+The quiet villagers of Carriford required no pew-opener in their
+place of worship: natives and in-dwellers had their own seats, and
+strangers sat where they could. Graye took a seat in the nave, on
+the north side, close behind a pillar dividing it from the north
+aisle, which was completely allotted to Miss Aldclyffe, her farmers,
+and her retainers, Manston's pew being in the midst of them. Owen's
+position on the other side of the passage was a little in advance of
+Manston's seat, and so situated that by leaning forward he could
+look directly into the face of any person sitting there, though, if
+he sat upright, he was wholly hidden from such a one by the
+intervening pillar.
+
+Aiming to keep his presence unknown to Manston if possible, Owen
+sat, without once turning his head, during the entrance of the
+congregation. A rustling of silk round by the north passage and
+into Manston's seat, told him that some woman had entered there, and
+as it seemed from the accompaniment of heavier footsteps, Manston
+was with her.
+
+Immediately upon rising up, he looked intently in that direction,
+and saw a lady standing at the end of the seat nearest himself.
+Portions of Manston's figure appeared on the other side of her. In
+two glances Graye read thus many of her characteristics, and in the
+following order:--
+
+She was a tall woman.
+
+She was broad at the shoulders.
+
+She was full-bosomed.
+
+She was easily recognizable from the photograph but nothing could be
+discerned of the colour of her eyes.
+
+With a preoccupied mind he withdrew into his nook, and heard the
+service continued--only conscious of the fact that in opposition to
+the suspicion which one odd circumstance had bred in his sister
+concerning this woman, all ostensible and ordinary proofs and
+probabilities tended to the opposite conclusion. There sat the
+genuine original of the portrait--could he wish for more? Cytherea
+wished for more. Eunice Manston's eyes were blue, and it was
+necessary that this woman's eyes should be blue also.
+
+Unskilled labour wastes in beating against the bars ten times the
+energy exerted by the practised hand in the effective direction.
+Owen felt this to be the case in his own and Edward's attempts to
+follow up the clue afforded them. Think as he might, he could not
+think of a crucial test in the matter absorbing him, which should
+possess the indispensable attribute--a capability of being applied
+privately; that in the event of its proving the lady to be the
+rightful owner of the name she used, he might recede without obloquy
+from an untenable position.
+
+But to see Mrs. Manston's eyes from where he sat was impossible, and
+he could do nothing in the shape of a direct examination at present.
+Miss Aldclyffe had possibly recognized him, but Manston had not, and
+feeling that it was indispensable to keep the purport of his visit a
+secret from the steward, he thought it would be as well, too, to
+keep his presence in the village a secret from him; at any rate,
+till the day was over.
+
+At the first opening of the doors, Graye left the church and
+wandered away into the fields to ponder on another scheme. He could
+not call on Farmer Springrove, as he had intended, until this matter
+was set at rest. Two hours intervened between the morning and
+afternoon services.
+
+This time had nearly expired before Owen had struck out any method
+of proceeding, or could decide to run the risk of calling at the Old
+House and asking to see Mrs. Manston point-blank. But he had drawn
+near the place, and was standing still in the public path, from
+which a partial view of the front of the building could be obtained,
+when the bells began chiming for afternoon service. Whilst Graye
+paused, two persons came from the front door of the half-hidden
+dwelling whom he presently saw to be Manston and his wife. Manston
+was wearing his old garden-hat, and carried one of the monthly
+magazines under his arm. Immediately they had passed the gateway he
+branched off and went over the hill in a direction away from the
+church, evidently intending to ramble along, and read as the humour
+moved him. The lady meanwhile turned in the other direction, and
+went into the church path.
+
+Owen resolved to make something of this opportunity. He hurried
+along towards the church, doubled round a sharp angle, and came back
+upon the other path, by which Mrs. Manston must arrive.
+
+In about three minutes she appeared in sight without a veil. He
+discovered, as she drew nearer, a difficulty which had not struck
+him at first--that it is not an easy matter to particularize the
+colour of a stranger's eyes in a merely casual encounter on a path
+out of doors. That Mrs. Manston must be brought close to him, and
+not only so, but to look closely at him, if his purpose were to be
+accomplished.
+
+He shaped a plan. It might by chance be effectual; if otherwise, it
+would not reveal his intention to her. When Mrs. Manston was within
+speaking distance, he went up to her and said--
+
+'Will you kindly tell me which turning will take me to Casterbridge?'
+
+'The second on the right,' said Mrs. Manston.
+
+Owen put on a blank look: he held his hand to his ear--conveying to
+the lady the idea that he was deaf.
+
+She came closer and said more distinctly--
+
+'The second turning on the right.'
+
+Owen flushed a little. He fancied he had beheld the revelation he
+was in search of. But had his eyes deceived him?
+
+Once more he used the ruse, still drawing nearer and intimating by a
+glance that the trouble he gave her was very distressing to him.
+
+'How very deaf!' she murmured. She exclaimed loudly--
+
+'_The second turning to the right_.'
+
+She had advanced her face to within a foot of his own, and in
+speaking mouthed very emphatically, fixing her eyes intently upon
+his. And now his first suspicion was indubitably confirmed. Her
+eyes were as black as midnight.
+
+All this feigning was most distasteful to Graye. The riddle having
+been solved, he unconsciously assumed his natural look before she
+had withdrawn her face. She found him to be peering at her as if he
+would read her very soul--expressing with his eyes the notification
+of which, apart from emotion, the eyes are more capable than any
+other--inquiry.
+
+Her face changed its expression--then its colour. The natural tint
+of the lighter portions sank to an ashy gray; the pink of her cheeks
+grew purpler. It was the precise result which would remain after
+blood had left the face of one whose skin was dark, and artificially
+coated with pearl-powder and carmine.
+
+She turned her head and moved away, murmuring a hasty reply to
+Owen's farewell remark of 'Good-day,' and with a kind of nervous
+twitch lifting her hand and smoothing her hair, which was of a
+light-brown colour.
+
+'She wears false hair,' he thought, 'or has changed its colour
+artificially. Her true hair matched her eyes.'
+
+And now, in spite of what Mr. Brown's neighbours had said about
+nearly recognizing Mrs. Manston on her recent visit--which might
+have meant anything or nothing; in spite of the photograph, and in
+spite of his previous incredulity; in consequence of the verse, of
+her silence and backwardness at the visit to Hoxton with Manston,
+and of her appearance and distress at the present moment, Graye had
+a conviction that the woman was an impostor.
+
+What could be Manston's reason for such an astounding trick he could
+by no stretch of imagination divine.
+
+He changed his direction as soon as the woman was out of sight, and
+plodded along the lanes homeward to Tolchurch.
+
+One new idea was suggested to him by his desire to allay Cytherea's
+dread of being claimed, and by the difficulty of believing that the
+first Mrs. Manston lost her life as supposed, notwithstanding the
+inquest and verdict. Was it possible that the real Mrs. Manston,
+who was known to be a Philadelphian by birth, had returned by the
+train to London, as the porter had said, and then left the country
+under an assumed name, to escape that worst kind of widowhood--the
+misery of being wedded to a fickle, faithless, and truant husband?
+
+
+
+In her complicated distress at the news brought by her brother,
+Cytherea's thoughts at length reverted to her friend, the Rector of
+Carriford. She told Owen of Mr. Raunham's warm-hearted behaviour
+towards herself, and of his strongly expressed wish to aid her.
+
+'He is not only a good, but a sensible man. We seem to want an old
+head on our side.'
+
+'And he is a magistrate,' said Owen in a tone of concurrence. He
+thought, too, that no harm could come of confiding in the rector,
+but there was a difficulty in bringing about the confidence. He
+wished that his sister and himself might both be present at an
+interview with Mr. Raunham, yet it would be unwise for them to call
+on him together, in the sight of all the servants and parish of
+Carriford.
+
+There could be no objection to their writing him a letter.
+
+No sooner was the thought born than it was carried out. They wrote
+to him at once, asking him to have the goodness to give them some
+advice they sadly needed, and begging that he would accept their
+assurance that there was a real justification for the additional
+request they made--that instead of their calling upon him, he would
+any evening of the week come to their cottage at Tolchurch.
+
+2. MARCH THE TWENTIETH. SIX TO NINE O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+Two evenings later, to the total disarrangement of his dinner-hour,
+Mr. Raunham appeared at Owen's door. His arrival was hailed with
+genuine gratitude. The horse was tied to the palings, and the
+rector ushered indoors and put into the easy-chair.
+
+Then Graye told him the whole story, reminding him that their first
+suspicions had been of a totally different nature, and that in
+endeavouring to obtain proof of their truth they had stumbled upon
+marks which had surprised them into these new uncertainties, thrice
+as marvellous as the first, yet more prominent.
+
+Cytherea's heart was so full of anxiety that it superinduced a
+manner of confidence which was a death-blow to all formality. Mr.
+Raunham took her hand pityingly.
+
+'It is a serious charge,' he said, as a sort of original twig on
+which his thoughts might precipitate themselves.
+
+'Assuming for a moment that such a substitution was rendered an easy
+matter by fortuitous events,' he continued, 'there is this
+consideration to be placed beside it--what earthly motive can Mr.
+Manston have had which would be sufficiently powerful to lead him to
+run such a very great risk? The most abandoned roue could not, at
+that particular crisis, have taken such a reckless step for the mere
+pleasure of a new companion.'
+
+Owen had seen that difficulty about the motive; Cytherea had not.
+
+'Unfortunately for us,' the rector resumed, 'no more evidence is to
+be obtained from the porter, Chinney. I suppose you know what
+became of him? He got to Liverpool and embarked, intending to work
+his way to America, but on the passage he fell overboard and was
+drowned. But there is no doubt of the truth of his confession--in
+fact, his conduct tends to prove it true--and no moral doubt of the
+fact that the real Mrs. Manston left here to go back by that
+morning's train. This being the case, then, why, if this woman is
+not she, did she take no notice of the advertisement--I mean not
+necessarily a friendly notice, but from the information it afforded
+her have rendered it impossible that she should be personified
+without her own connivance?'
+
+'I think that argument is overthrown,' Graye said, 'by my earliest
+assumption of her hatred of him, weariness of the chain which bound
+her to him, and a resolve to begin the world anew. Let's suppose
+she has married another man--somewhere abroad, say; she would be
+silent for her own sake.'
+
+'You've hit the only genuine possibility,' said Mr. Raunham, tapping
+his finger upon his knee. 'That would decidedly dispose of the
+second difficulty. But his motive would be as mysterious as ever.'
+
+Cytherea's pictured dreads would not allow her mind to follow their
+conversation. 'She's burnt,' she said. 'O yes; I fear--I fear she
+is!'
+
+'I don't think we can seriously believe that now, after what has
+happened,' said the rector.
+
+Still straining her thought towards the worst, 'Then, perhaps, the
+first Mrs. Manston was not his wife,' she returned; 'and then I
+should be his wife just the same, shouldn't I?'
+
+'They were married safely enough,' said Owen. 'There is abundance
+of circumstantial evidence to prove that.'
+
+'Upon the whole,' said Mr. Raunham, 'I should advise your asking in
+a straightforward way for legal proof from the steward that the
+present woman is really his original wife--a thing which, to my
+mind, you should have done at the outset.' He turned to Cytherea
+kindly, and asked her what made her give up her husband so
+unceremoniously.
+
+She could not tell the rector of her aversion to Manston, and of her
+unquenched love for Edward.
+
+'Your terrified state no doubt,' he said, answering for her, in the
+manner of those accustomed to the pulpit. 'But into such a solemn
+compact as marriage, all-important considerations, both legally and
+morally, enter; it was your duty to have seen everything clearly
+proved. Doubtless Mr. Manston is prepared with proofs, but as it
+concerns nobody but yourself that her identity should be publicly
+established (and by your absenteeism you act as if you were
+satisfied) he has not troubled to exhibit them. Nobody else has
+taken the trouble to prove what does not affect them in the least
+--that's the way of the world always. You, who should have required
+all things to be made clear, ran away.'
+
+'That was partly my doing,' said Owen.
+
+The same explanation--her want of love for Manston--applied here
+too, but she shunned the revelation.
+
+'But never mind,' added the rector, 'it was all the greater credit
+to your womanhood, perhaps. I say, then, get your brother to write
+a line to Mr. Manston, saying you wish to be satisfied that all is
+legally clear (in case you should want to marry again, for
+instance), and I have no doubt that you will be. Or, if you would
+rather, I'll write myself?'
+
+'O no, sir, no,' pleaded Cytherea, beginning to blanch, and
+breathing quickly. 'Please don't say anything. Let me live here
+with Owen. I am so afraid it will turn out that I shall have to go
+to Knapwater and be his wife, and I don't want to go. Do conceal
+what we have told you. Let him continue his deception--it is much
+the best for me.'
+
+Mr. Raunham at length divined that her love for Manston, if it had
+ever existed, had transmuted itself into a very different feeling
+now.
+
+'At any rate,' he said, as he took his leave and mounted his mare,
+'I will see about it. Rest content, Miss Graye, and depend upon it
+that I will not lead you into difficulty.'
+
+'Conceal it,' she still pleaded.
+
+'We'll see--but of course I must do my duty.'
+
+'No--don't do your duty!' She looked up at him through the gloom,
+illuminating her own face and eyes with the candle she held.
+
+'I will consider, then,' said Mr. Raunham, sensibly moved. He
+turned his horse's head, bade them a warm adieu, and left the door.
+
+The rector of Carriford trotted homewards under the cold and clear
+March sky, its countless stars fluttering like bright birds. He was
+unconscious of the scene. Recovering from the effect of Cytherea's
+voice and glance of entreaty, he laid the subject of the interview
+clearly before himself.
+
+The suspicions of Cytherea and Owen were honest, and had foundation
+--that he must own. Was he--a clergyman, magistrate, and
+conscientious man--justified in yielding to Cytherea's importunities
+to keep silence, because she dreaded the possibility of a return to
+Manston? Was she wise in her request? Holding her present belief,
+and with no definite evidence either way, she could, for one thing,
+never conscientiously marry any one else. Suppose that Cytherea
+were Manston's wife--i.e., that the first wife was really burnt?
+The adultery of Manston would be proved, and, Mr. Raunham thought,
+cruelty sufficient to bring the case within the meaning of the
+statute. Suppose the new woman was, as stated, Mr. Manston's
+restored wife? Cytherea was perfectly safe as a single woman whose
+marriage had been void. And if it turned out that, though this
+woman was not Manston's wife, his wife was still living, as Owen had
+suggested, in America or elsewhere, Cytherea was safe.
+
+The first supposition opened up the worst contingency. Was she
+really safe as Manston's wife? Doubtful. But, however that might
+be, the gentle, defenceless girl, whom it seemed nobody's business
+to help or defend, should be put in a track to proceed against this
+man. She had but one life, and the superciliousness with which all
+the world now regarded her should be compensated in some measure by
+the man whose carelessness--to set him in the best light--had caused
+it.
+
+Mr. Raunham felt more and more positively that his duty must be
+done. An inquiry must be made into the matter. Immediately on
+reaching home, he sat down and wrote a plain and friendly letter to
+Mr. Manston, and despatched it at once to him by hand. Then he
+flung himself back in his chair, and went on with his meditation.
+Was there anything in the suspicion? There could be nothing,
+surely. Nothing is done by a clever man without a motive, and what
+conceivable motive could Manston have for such abnormal conduct?
+Corinthian that he might be, who had preyed on virginity like St.
+George's dragon, he would never have been absurd enough to venture
+on such a course for the possession alone of the woman--there was no
+reason for it--she was inferior to Cytherea in every respect,
+physical and mental.
+
+On the other hand, it seemed rather odd, when he analyzed the
+action, that a woman who deliberately hid herself from her husband
+for more than a twelvemonth should be brought back by a mere
+advertisement. In fact, the whole business had worked almost too
+smoothly and effectually for unpremeditated sequence. It was too
+much like the indiscriminate righting of everything at the end of an
+old play. And there was that curious business of the keys and
+watch. Her way of accounting for their being left behind by
+forgetfulness had always seemed to him rather forced. The only
+unforced explanation was that suggested by the newspaper writers
+--that she left them behind on purpose to blind people as to her
+escape, a motive which would have clashed with the possibility of
+her being fished back by an advertisement, as the present woman had
+been. Again, there were the two charred bones. He shuffled the
+books and papers in his study, and walked about the room, restlessly
+musing on the same subject. The parlour-maid entered.
+
+'Can young Mr. Springrove from London see you to-night, sir?'
+
+'Young Mr. Springrove?' said the rector, surprised.
+
+'Yes, sir.'
+
+'Yes, of course he can see me. Tell him to come in.'
+
+Edward came so impatiently into the room, as to show that the few
+short moments his announcement had occupied had been irksome to him.
+He stood in the doorway with the same black bag in his hand, and the
+same old gray cloak on his shoulders, that he had worn fifteen
+months earlier when returning on the night of the fire. This
+appearance of his conveyed a true impression; he had become a
+stagnant man. But he was excited now.
+
+'I have this moment come from London,' he said, as the door was
+closed behind him.
+
+The prophetic insight, which so strangely accompanies critical
+experiences, prompted Mr. Raunham's reply.
+
+'About the Grayes and Manston?'
+
+'Yes. That woman is not Mrs. Manston.'
+
+'Prove it.'
+
+'I can prove that she is somebody else--that her name is Anne
+Seaway.'
+
+'And are their suspicions true indeed!'
+
+'And I can do what's more to the purpose at present.'
+
+'Suggest Manston's motive?'
+
+'Only suggest it, remember. But my assumption fits so perfectly
+with the facts that have been secretly unearthed and conveyed to me,
+that I can hardly conceive of another.'
+
+There was in Edward's bearing that entire unconsciousness of himself
+which, natural to wild animals, only prevails in a sensitive man at
+moments of extreme intentness. The rector saw that he had no
+trivial story to communicate, whatever the story was.
+
+'Sit down,' said Mr. Raunham. 'My mind has been on the stretch all
+the evening to form the slightest guess at such an object, and all
+to no purpose--entirely to no purpose. Have you said anything to
+Owen Graye?'
+
+'Nothing--nor to anybody. I could not trust to the effect a letter
+might have upon yourself, either; the intricacy of the case brings
+me to this interview.'
+
+Whilst Springrove had been speaking the two had sat down together.
+The conversation, hitherto distinct to every corner of the room, was
+carried on now in tones so low as to be scarcely audible to the
+interlocutors, and in phrases which hesitated to complete
+themselves. Three-quarters of an hour passed. Then Edward arose,
+came out of the rector's study and again flung his cloak around him.
+Instead of going thence homeward, he went first to the Carriford
+Road Station with a telegram, having despatched which he proceeded
+to his father's house for the first time since his arrival in the
+village.
+
+3. FROM NINE TO TEN O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+The next presentation is the interior of the Old House on the
+evening of the preceding section. The steward was sitting by his
+parlour fire, and had been reading the letter arrived from the
+rectory. Opposite to him sat the woman known to the village and
+neighbourhood as Mrs. Manston.
+
+'Things are looking desperate with us,' he said gloomily. His gloom
+was not that of the hypochondriac, but the legitimate gloom which
+has its origin in a syllogism. As he uttered the words he handed
+the letter to her.
+
+'I almost expected some such news as this,' she replied, in a tone
+of much greater indifference. 'I knew suspicion lurked in the eyes
+of that young man who stared at me so in the church path: I could
+have sworn it.'
+
+Manston did not answer for some time. His face was worn and
+haggard; latterly his head had not been carried so uprightly as of
+old. 'If they prove you to be--who you are. . . . Yes, if they
+do,' he murmured.
+
+'They must not find that out,' she said, in a positive voice, and
+looking at him. 'But supposing they do, the trick does not seem to
+me to be so serious as to justify that wretched, miserable, horrible
+look of yours. It makes my flesh creep; it is perfectly deathlike.'
+
+He did not reply, and she continued, 'If they say and prove that
+Eunice is indeed living--and dear, you know she is--she is sure to
+come back.'
+
+This remark seemed to awaken and irritate him to speech. Again, as
+he had done a hundred times during their residence together, he
+categorized the events connected with the fire at the Three
+Tranters. He dwelt on every incident of that night's history, and
+endeavoured, with an anxiety which was extraordinary in the apparent
+circumstances, to prove that his wife must, by the very nature of
+things, have perished in the flames. She arose from her seat,
+crossed the hearthrug, and set herself to soothe him; then she
+whispered that she was still as unbelieving as ever. 'Come,
+supposing she escaped--just supposing she escaped--where is she?'
+coaxed the lady.
+
+'Why are you so curious continually?' said Manston.
+
+'Because I am a woman and want to know. Now where is she?'
+
+'In the Flying Isle of San Borandan.'
+
+'Witty cruelty is the cruellest of any. Ah, well--if she is in
+England, she will come back.'
+
+'She is not in England.'
+
+'But she will come back?'
+
+'No, she won't. . . . Come, madam,' he said, arousing himself, 'I
+shall not answer any more questions.'
+
+'Ah--ah--ah--she is not dead,' the woman murmured again poutingly.
+
+'She is, I tell you.'
+
+'I don't think so, love.'
+
+'She was burnt, I tell you!' he exclaimed.
+
+'Now to please me, admit the bare possibility of her being alive
+--just the possibility.'
+
+'O yes--to please you I will admit that,' he said quickly. 'Yes, I
+admit the possibility of her being alive, to please you.'
+
+She looked at him in utter perplexity. The words could only have
+been said in jest, and yet they seemed to savour of a tone the
+furthest remove from jesting. There was his face plain to her eyes,
+but no information of any kind was to be read there.
+
+'It is only natural that I should be curious,' she murmured
+pettishly, 'if I resemble her as much as you say I do.'
+
+'You are handsomer,' he said, 'though you are about her own height
+and size. But don't worry yourself. You must know that you are
+body and soul united with me, though you are but my housekeeper.'
+
+She bridled a little at the remark. 'Wife,' she said, 'most
+certainly wife, since you cannot dismiss me without losing your
+character and position, and incurring heavy penalties.'
+
+'I own it--it was well said, though mistakenly--very mistakenly.'
+
+'Don't riddle to me about mistakenly and such dark things. Now what
+was your motive, dearest, in running the risk of having me here?'
+
+'Your beauty,' he said.
+
+'She thanks you much for the compliment, but will not take it.
+Come, what was your motive?'
+
+'Your wit.'
+
+'No, no; not my wit. Wit would have made a wife of me by this time
+instead of what I am.'
+
+'Your virtue.'
+
+'Or virtue either.'
+
+'I tell you it was your beauty--really.'
+
+'But I cannot help seeing and hearing, and if what people say is
+true, I am not nearly so good-looking as Cytherea, and several years
+older.'
+
+The aspect of Manston's face at these words from her was so
+confirmatory of her hint, that his forced reply of 'O no,' tended to
+develop her chagrin.
+
+'Mere liking or love for me,' she resumed, 'would not have sprung up
+all of a sudden, as your pretended passion did. You had been to
+London several times between the time of the fire and your marriage
+with Cytherea--you had never visited me or thought of my existence
+or cared that I was out of a situation and poor. But the week after
+you married her and were separated from her, off you rush to make
+love to me--not first to me either, for you went to several places--'
+
+'No, not several places.'
+
+'Yes, you told me so yourself--that you went first to the only
+lodging in which your wife had been known as Mrs. Manston, and when
+you found that the lodging-house-keeper had gone away and died, and
+that nobody else in the street had any definite ideas as to your
+wife's personal appearance, and came and proposed the arrangement we
+carried out--that I should personate her. Your taking all this
+trouble shows that something more serious than love had to do with
+the matter.'
+
+'Humbug--what trouble after all did I take? When I found Cytherea
+would not stay with me after the wedding I was much put out at being
+left alone again. Was that unnatural?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'And those favouring accidents you mention--that nobody knew my
+first wife--seemed an arrangement of Providence for our mutual
+benefit, and merely perfected a half-formed impulse--that I should
+call you my first wife to escape the scandal that would have arisen
+if you had come here as anything else.'
+
+'My love, that story won't do. If Mrs. Manston was burnt, Cytherea,
+whom you love better than me, could have been compelled to live with
+you as your lawful wife. If she was not burnt, why should you run
+the risk of her turning up again at any moment and exposing your
+substitution of me, and ruining your name and prospects?'
+
+'Why--because I might have loved you well enough to run the risk
+(assuming her not to be burnt, which I deny).'
+
+'No--you would have run the risk the other way. You would rather
+have risked her finding you with Cytherea as a second wife, than
+with me as a personator of herself--the first one.'
+
+'You came easiest to hand--remember that.'
+
+'Not so very easy either, considering the labour you took to teach
+me your first wife's history. All about how she was a native of
+Philadelphia. Then making me read up the guide-book to
+Philadelphia, and details of American life and manners, in case the
+birthplace and history of your wife, Eunice, should ever become
+known in this neighbourhood--unlikely as it was. Ah! and then about
+the handwriting of hers that I had to imitate, and the dying my
+hair, and rouging, to make the transformation complete? You mean to
+say that that was taking less trouble than there would have been in
+arranging events to make Cytherea believe herself your wife, and
+live with you?'
+
+'You were a needy adventuress, who would dare anything for a new
+pleasure and an easy life--and I was fool enough to give in to you--'
+
+'Good heavens above!--did I ask you to insert those advertisements
+for your old wife, and to make me answer it as if I was she? Did I
+ask you to send me the letter for me to copy and send back to you
+when the third advertisement appeared--purporting to come from the
+long-lost wife, and giving a detailed history of her escape and
+subsequent life--all which you had invented yourself? You deluded
+me into loving you, and then enticed me here! Ah, and this is
+another thing. How did you know the real wife wouldn't answer it,
+and upset all your plans?'
+
+'Because I knew she was burnt.'
+
+'Why didn't you force Cytherea to come back, then? Now, my love, I
+have caught you, and you may just as well tell first as last, _what
+was your motive in having me here as your first wife_?'
+
+'Silence!' he exclaimed.
+
+She was silent for the space of two minutes, and then persisted in
+going on to mutter, 'And why was it that Miss Aldclyffe allowed her
+favourite young lady, Cythie, to be overthrown and supplanted
+without an expostulation or any show of sympathy? Do you know I
+often think you exercise a secret power over Miss Aldclyffe. And
+she always shuns me as if I shared the power. A poor, ill-used
+creature like me sharing power, indeed!'
+
+'She thinks you are Mrs. Manston.'
+
+'That wouldn't make her avoid me.'
+
+'Yes it would,' he exclaimed impatiently. 'I wish I was dead
+--dead!' He had jumped up from his seat in uttering the words,
+and now walked wearily to the end of the room. Coming back more
+decisively, he looked in her face.
+
+'We must leave this place if Raunham suspects what I think he does,'
+he said. 'The request of Cytherea and her brother may simply be for
+a satisfactory proof, to make her feel legally free--but it may mean
+more.'
+
+'What may it mean?'
+
+'How should I know?'
+
+'Well, well, never mind, old boy,' she said, approaching him to make
+up the quarrel. 'Don't be so alarmed--anybody would think that you
+were the woman and I the man. Suppose they do find out what I am
+--we can go away from here and keep house as usual. People will say
+of you, "His first wife was burnt to death" (or "ran away to the
+Colonies," as the case may be); "He married a second, and deserted
+her for Anne Seaway." A very everyday case--nothing so horrible,
+after all.'
+
+He made an impatient movement. 'Whichever way we do it, _nobody must
+know that you are not my wife Eunice_. And now I must think about
+arranging matters.'
+
+Manston then retired to his office, and shut himself up for the
+remainder of the evening.
+
+
+
+XIX. THE EVENTS OF A DAY AND NIGHT
+
+1. MARCH THE TWENTY-FIRST. MORNING
+
+Next morning the steward went out as usual. He shortly told his
+companion, Anne, that he had almost matured their scheme, and that
+they would enter upon the details of it when he came home at night.
+The fortunate fact that the rector's letter did not require an
+immediate answer would give him time to consider.
+
+Anne Seaway then began her duties in the house. Besides daily
+superintending the cook and housemaid one of these duties was, at
+rare intervals, to dust Manston's office with her own hands, a
+servant being supposed to disturb the books and papers
+unnecessarily. She softly wandered from table to shelf with the
+duster in her hand, afterwards standing in the middle of the room,
+and glancing around to discover if any noteworthy collection of dust
+had still escaped her.
+
+Her eye fell upon a faint layer which rested upon the ledge of an
+old-fashioned chestnut cabinet of French Renaissance workmanship,
+placed in a recess by the fireplace. At a height of about four feet
+from the floor the upper portion of the front receded, forming the
+ledge alluded to, on which opened at each end two small doors, the
+centre space between them being filled out by a panel of similar
+size, making the third of three squares. The dust on the ledge was
+nearly on a level with the woman's eye, and, though insignificant in
+quantity, showed itself distinctly on account of this obliquity of
+vision. Now opposite the central panel, concentric quarter-circles
+were traced in the deposited film, expressing to her that this
+panel, too, was a door like the others; that it had lately been
+opened, and had skimmed the dust with its lower edge.
+
+At last, then, her curiosity was slightly rewarded. For the right
+of the matter was that Anne had been incited to this exploration of
+Manston's office rather by a wish to know the reason of his long
+seclusion here, after the arrival of the rector's letter, and their
+subsequent discourse, than by any immediate desire for cleanliness.
+Still, there would have been nothing remarkable to Anne in this
+sight but for one recollection. Manston had once casually told her
+that each of the two side-lockers included half the middle space,
+the panel of which did not open, and was only put in for symmetry.
+It was possible that he had opened this compartment by candlelight
+the preceding night, or he would have seen the marks in the dust,
+and effaced them, that he might not be proved guilty of telling her
+an untruth. She balanced herself on one foot and stood pondering.
+She considered that it was very vexing and unfair in him to refuse
+her all knowledge of his remaining secrets, under the peculiar
+circumstances of her connection with him. She went close to the
+cabinet. As there was no keyhole, the door must be capable of being
+opened by the unassisted hand. The circles in the dust told her at
+which edge to apply her force. Here she pulled with the tips of her
+fingers, but the panel would not come forward. She fetched a chair
+and looked over the top of the cabinet, but no bolt, knob, or spring
+was to be seen.
+
+'O, never mind,' she said, with indifference; 'I'll ask him about
+it, and he will tell me.' Down she came and turned away. Then
+looking back again she thought it was absurd such a trifle should
+puzzle her. She retraced her steps, and opened a drawer beneath the
+ledge of the cabinet, pushing in her hand and feeling about on the
+underside of the board.
+
+Here she found a small round sinking, and pressed her finger into
+it. Nothing came of the pressure. She withdrew her hand and looked
+at the tip of her finger: it was marked with the impress of the
+circle, and, in addition, a line ran across it diametrically.
+
+'How stupid of me; it is the head of a screw.' Whatever mysterious
+contrivance had originally existed for opening the puny cupboard of
+the cabinet, it had at some time been broken, and this rough
+substitute provided. Stimulated curiosity would not allow her to
+recede now. She fetched a screwdriver, withdrew the screw, pulled
+the door open with a penknife, and found inside a cavity about ten
+inches square. The cavity contained--
+
+Letters from different women, with unknown signatures, Christian
+names only (surnames being despised in Paphos). Letters from his
+wife Eunice. Letters from Anne herself, including that she wrote in
+answer to his advertisement. A small pocket-book. Sundry scraps of
+paper.
+
+The letters from the strange women with pet names she glanced
+carelessly through, and then put them aside. They were too similar
+to her own regretted delusion, and curiosity requires contrast to
+excite it.
+
+The letters from his wife were next examined. They were dated back
+as far as Eunice's first meeting with Manston, and the early ones
+before their marriage contained the usual pretty effusions of women
+at such a period of their existence. Some little time after he had
+made her his wife, and when he had come to Knapwater, the series
+began again, and now their contents arrested her attention more
+forcibly. She closed the cabinet, carried the letters into the
+parlour, reclined herself on the sofa, and carefully perused them in
+the order of their dates.
+
+
+                                            'JOHN STREET,
+                                                   October 17, 1864.
+
+'MY DEAREST HUSBAND,--I received your hurried line of yesterday, and
+was of course content with it. But why don't you tell me your exact
+address instead of that "Post-Office, Budmouth?" This matter is all
+a mystery to me, and I ought to be told every detail. I cannot
+fancy it is the same kind of occupation you have been used to
+hitherto. Your command that I am to stay here awhile until you can
+"see how things look" and can arrange to send for me, I must
+necessarily abide by. But if, as you say, a married man would have
+been rejected by the person who engaged you, and that hence my
+existence must be kept a secret until you have secured your
+position, why did you think of going at all?
+
+'The truth is, this keeping our marriage a secret is troublesome,
+vexing, and wearisome to me. I see the poorest woman in the street
+bearing her husband's name openly--living with him in the most
+matter-of-fact ease, and why shouldn't I? I wish I was back again
+in Liverpool.
+
+'To-day I bought a grey waterproof cloak. I think it is a little
+too long for me, but it was cheap for one of such a quality. The
+weather is gusty and dreary, and till this morning I had hardly set
+foot outside the door since you left. Please do tell me when I am
+to come.--Very affectionately yours, EUNICE.'
+
+
+                                             'JOHN STREET,
+                                                    October 25, 1864.
+
+'MY DEAR HUSBAND,--Why don't you write? Do you hate me? I have not
+had the heart to do anything this last week. That I, your wife,
+should be in this strait, and my husband well to do! I have been
+obliged to leave my first lodging for debt--among other things, they
+charged me for a lot of brandy which I am quite sure I did not
+taste. Then I went to Camberwell and was found out by them. I went
+away privately from thence, and changed my name the second time. I
+am now Mrs. Rondley. But the new lodging was the wretchedest and
+dearest I ever set foot in, and I left it after being there only a
+day. I am now at No. 20 in the same street that you left me in
+originally. All last night the sash of my window rattled so
+dreadfully that I could not sleep, but I had not energy enough to
+get out of bed to stop it. This morning I have been walking--I
+don't know how far--but far enough to make my feet ache. I have
+been looking at the outside of two or three of the theatres, but
+they seem forbidding if I regard them with the eye of an actress in
+search of an engagement. Though you said I was to think no more of
+the stage, I believe you would not care if you found me there. But
+I am not an actress by nature, and art will never make me one. I am
+too timid and retiring; I was intended for a cottager's wife. I
+certainly shall not try to go on the boards again whilst I am in
+this strange place. The idea of being brought on as far as London
+and then left here alone! Why didn't you leave me in Liverpool?
+Perhaps you thought I might have told somebody that my real name was
+Mrs. Manston. As if I had a living friend to whom I could impart
+it--no such good fortune! In fact, my nearest friend is no nearer
+than what most people would call a stranger. But perhaps I ought to
+tell you that a week before I wrote my last letter to you, after
+wishing that my uncle and aunt in Philadelphia (the only near
+relatives I had) were still alive, I suddenly resolved to send a
+line to my cousin James, who, I believe, is still living in that
+neighbourhood. He has never seen me since we were babies together.
+I did not tell him of my marriage, because I thought you might not
+like it, and I gave my real maiden name, and an address at the
+post-office here. But God knows if the letter will ever reach him.
+
+'Do write me an answer, and send something.--Your affectionate wife,
+EUNICE.'
+
+
+                                                'FRIDAY, October 28.
+
+'MY DEAR HUSBAND,--The order for ten pounds has just come, and I am
+truly glad to get it. But why will you write so bitterly? Ah
+--well, if I had only had the money I should have been on my way to
+America by this time, so don't think I want to bore you of my own
+free-will. Who can you have met with at that new place? Remember I
+say this in no malignant tone, but certainly the facts go to prove
+that you have deserted me! You are inconstant--I know it. O, why
+are you so? Now I have lost you, I love you in spite of your
+neglect. I am weakly fond--that's my nature. I fear that upon the
+whole my life has been wasted. I know there is another woman
+supplanting me in your heart--yes, I know it. Come to me--do come.
+EUNICE.'
+
+
+                                      '41 CHARLES SQUARE, HOXTON,
+                                                   November 19.
+
+'DEAR AENEAS,--Here I am back again after my visit. Why should you
+have been so enraged at my finding your exact address? Any woman
+would have tried to do it--you know she would have. And no woman
+would have lived under assumed names so long as I did. I repeat
+that I did not call myself Mrs. Manston until I came to this lodging
+at the beginning of this month--what could you expect?
+
+'A helpless creature I, had not fortune favoured me unexpectedly.
+Banished as I was from your house at dawn, I did not suppose the
+indignity was about to lead to important results. But in crossing
+the park I overheard the conversation of a young man and woman who
+had also risen early. I believe her to be the girl who has won you
+away from me. Well, their conversation concerned you and Miss
+Aldclyffe, _very peculiarly_. The remarkable thing is that you
+yourself, without knowing it, told me of what, added to their
+conversation, completely reveals a secret to me that neither of you
+understand. Two negatives never made such a telling positive
+before. One clue more, and you would see it. A single
+consideration prevents my revealing it--just one doubt as to whether
+your ignorance was real, and was not feigned to deceive me.
+Civility now, please.
+EUNICE.'
+
+
+                                          '41 CHARLES SQUARE,
+                                               Tuesday, November 22.
+
+'MY DARLING HUSBAND,--Monday will suit me excellently for coming. I
+have acted exactly up to your instructions, and have sold my rubbish
+at the broker's in the next street. All this movement and bustle is
+delightful to me after the weeks of monotony I have endured. It is
+a relief to wish the place good-bye--London always has seemed so
+much more foreign to me than Liverpool The mid-day train on Monday
+will do nicely for me. I shall be anxiously looking out for you on
+Sunday night.
+
+'I hope so much that you are not angry with me for writing to Miss
+Aldclyffe. You are not, dear, are you? Forgive me.--Your loving
+wife, EUNICE.'
+
+
+This was the last of the letters from the wife to the husband. One
+other, in Mrs. Manston's handwriting, and in the same packet, was
+differently addressed.
+
+
+                                    'THREE TRANTERS INN, CARRIFORD,
+                                                  November 28, 1864.
+
+'DEAR COUSIN JAMES,--Thank you indeed for answering my letter so
+promptly. When I called at the post-office yesterday I did not in
+the least think there would be one. But I must leave this subject.
+I write again at once under the strangest and saddest conditions it
+is possible to conceive.
+
+'I did not tell you in my last that I was a married woman. Don't
+blame me--it was my husband's influence. I hardly know where to
+begin my story. I had been living apart from him for a time--then
+he sent for me (this was last week) and I was glad to go to him.
+Then this is what he did. He promised to fetch me, and did not
+--leaving me to do the journey alone. He promised to meet me at the
+station here--he did not. I went on through the darkness to his
+house, and found his door locked and himself away from home. I have
+been obliged to come here, and I write to you in a strange room in a
+strange village inn! I choose the present moment to write to drive
+away my misery. Sorrow seems a sort of pleasure when you detail it
+on paper--poor pleasure though.
+
+'But this is what I want to know--and I am ashamed to tell it. I
+would gladly do as you say, and come to you as a housekeeper, but I
+have not the money even for a steerage passage. James, do you want
+me badly enough--do you pity me enough to send it? I could manage
+to subsist in London upon the proceeds of my sale for another month
+or six weeks. Will you send it to the same address at the
+post-office? But how do I know that you . . . '
+
+Thus the letter ended. From creases in the paper it was plain that
+the writer, having got so far, had become dissatisfied with her
+production, and had crumpled it in her hand. Was it to write
+another, or not to write at all?
+
+The next thing Anne Seaway perceived was that the fragmentary story
+she had coaxed out of Manston, to the effect that his wife had left
+England for America, might be truthful, according to two of these
+letters, corroborated by the evidence of the railway-porter. And
+yet, at first, he had sworn in a passion that his wife was most
+certainly consumed in the fire.
+
+If she had been burnt, this letter, written in her bedroom, and
+probably thrust into her pocket when she relinquished it, would have
+been burnt with her. Nothing was surer than that. Why, then, did
+he say she was burnt, and never show Anne herself this letter?
+
+The question suddenly raised a new and much stranger one--kindling a
+burst of amazement in her. How did Manston become possessed of this
+letter?
+
+That fact of possession was certainly the most remarkable revelation
+of all in connection with this epistle, and perhaps had something to
+do with his reason for never showing it to her.
+
+She knew by several proofs, that before his marriage with Cytherea,
+and up to the time of the porter's confession, Manston believed
+--honestly believed--that Cytherea would be his lawful wife, and
+hence, of course, that his wife Eunice was dead. So that no
+communication could possibly have passed between his wife and
+himself from the first moment that he believed her dead on the night
+of the fire, to the day of his wedding. And yet he had that letter.
+How soon afterwards could they have communicated with each other?
+
+The existence of the letter--as much as, or more than its contents
+--implying that Mrs. Manston was not burnt, his belief in that
+calamity must have terminated at the moment he obtained possession
+of the letter, if no earlier. Was, then, the only solution to the
+riddle that Anne could discern, the true one?--that he had
+communicated with his wife somewhere about the commencement of
+Anne's residence with him, or at any time since?
+
+It was the most unlikely thing on earth that a woman who had
+forsaken her husband should countenance his scheme to personify her
+--whether she were in America, in London, or in the neighbourhood
+of Knapwater.
+
+Then came the old and harassing question, what was Manston's real
+motive in risking his name on the deception he was practising as
+regarded Anne. It could not be, as he had always pretended, mere
+passion. Her thoughts had reverted to Mr. Raunham's letter, asking
+for proofs of her identity with the original Mrs. Manston. She
+could see no loophole of escape for the man who supported her.
+True, in her own estimation, his worst alternative was not so very
+bad after all--the getting the name of libertine, a possible
+appearance in the divorce or some other court of law, and a question
+of damages. Such an exposure might hinder his worldly progress for
+some time. Yet to him this alternative was, apparently, terrible as
+death itself.
+
+She restored the letters to their hiding-place, scanned anew the
+other letters and memoranda, from which she could gain no fresh
+information, fastened up the cabinet, and left everything in its
+former condition.
+
+Her mind was ill at ease. More than ever she wished that she had
+never seen Manston. Where the person suspected of mysterious moral
+obliquity is the possessor of great physical and intellectual
+attractions, the mere sense of incongruity adds an extra shudder to
+dread. The man's strange bearing terrified Anne as it had terrified
+Cytherea; for with all the woman Anne's faults, she had not
+descended to such depths of depravity as to willingly participate in
+crime. She had not even known that a living wife was being
+displaced till her arrival at Knapwater put retreat out of the
+question, and had looked upon personation simply as a mode of
+subsistence a degree better than toiling in poverty and alone, after
+a bustling and somewhat pampered life as housekeeper in a gay
+mansion.
+
+              'Non illa colo calathisve Minervae
+      Foemineas assueta manus.'
+
+2. AFTERNOON
+
+Mr. Raunham and Edward Springrove had by this time set in motion a
+machinery which they hoped to find working out important results.
+
+The rector was restless and full of meditation all the following
+morning. It was plain, even to the servants about him, that
+Springrove's communication wore a deeper complexion than any that
+had been made to the old magistrate for many months or years past.
+The fact was that, having arrived at the stage of existence in which
+the difficult intellectual feat of suspending one's judgment becomes
+possible, he was now putting it in practice, though not without the
+penalty of watchful effort.
+
+It was not till the afternoon that he determined to call on his
+relative, Miss Aldclyffe, and cautiously probe her knowledge of the
+subject occupying him so thoroughly. Cytherea, he knew, was still
+beloved by this solitary woman. Miss Aldclyffe had made several
+private inquiries concerning her former companion, and there was
+ever a sadness in her tone when the young lady's name was mentioned,
+which showed that from whatever cause the elder Cytherea's
+renunciation of her favourite and namesake proceeded, it was not
+from indifference to her fate.
+
+'Have you ever had any reason for supposing your steward anything
+but an upright man?' he said to the lady.
+
+'Never the slightest. Have you?' said she reservedly.
+
+'Well--I have.'
+
+'What is it?'
+
+'I can say nothing plainly, because nothing is proved. But my
+suspicions are very strong.'
+
+'Do you mean that he was rather cool towards his wife when they were
+first married, and that it was unfair in him to leave her? I know
+he was; but I think his recent conduct towards her has amply atoned
+for the neglect.'
+
+He looked Miss Aldclyffe full in the face. It was plain that she
+spoke honestly. She had not the slightest notion that the woman who
+lived with the steward might be other than Mrs. Manston--much less
+that a greater matter might be behind.
+
+'That's not it--I wish it was no more. My suspicion is, first, that
+the woman living at the Old House is not Mr. Manston's wife.'
+
+'Not--Mr. Manston's wife?'
+
+'That is it.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe looked blankly at the rector. 'Not Mr. Manston's
+wife--who else can she be?' she said simply.
+
+'An improper woman of the name of Anne Seaway.'
+
+Mr. Raunham had, in common with other people, noticed the
+extraordinary interest of Miss Aldclyffe in the well-being of her
+steward, and had endeavoured to account for it in various ways. The
+extent to which she was shaken by his information, whilst it proved
+that the understanding between herself and Manston did not make her
+a sharer of his secrets, also showed that the tie which bound her to
+him was still unbroken. Mr. Raunham had lately begun to doubt the
+latter fact, and now, on finding himself mistaken, regretted that he
+had not kept his own counsel in the matter. This it was too late to
+do, and he pushed on with his proofs. He gave Miss Aldclyffe in
+detail the grounds of his belief.
+
+Before he had done, she recovered the cloak of reserve that she had
+adopted on his opening the subject.
+
+'I might possibly be convinced that you were in the right, after
+such an elaborate argument,' she replied, 'were it not for one fact,
+which bears in the contrary direction so pointedly, that nothing but
+absolute proof can turn it. It is that there is no conceivable
+motive which could induce any sane man--leaving alone a man of Mr.
+Manston's clear-headedness and integrity--to venture upon such an
+extraordinary course of conduct--no motive on earth.'
+
+'That was my own opinion till after the visit of a friend last
+night--a friend of mine and poor little Cytherea's.'
+
+'Ah--and Cytherea,' said Miss Aldclyffe, catching at the idea raised
+by the name. 'That he loved Cytherea--yes and loves her now, wildly
+and devotedly, I am as positive as that I breathe. Cytherea is
+years younger than Mrs. Manston--as I shall call her--twice as sweet
+in disposition, three times as beautiful. Would he have given her
+up quietly and suddenly for a common--Mr. Raunham, your story is
+monstrous, and I don't believe it!' She glowed in her earnestness.
+
+The rector might now have advanced his second proposition--the
+possible motive--but for reasons of his own he did not.
+
+'Very well, madam. I only hope that facts will sustain you in your
+belief. Ask him the question to his face, whether the woman is his
+wife or no, and see how he receives it.'
+
+'I will to-morrow, most certainly,' she said. 'I always let these
+things die of wholesome ventilation, as every fungus does.'
+
+But no sooner had the rector left her presence, than the grain of
+mustard-seed he had sown grew to a tree. Her impatience to set her
+mind at rest could not brook a night's delay. It was with the
+utmost difficulty that she could wait till evening arrived to screen
+her movements. Immediately the sun had dropped behind the horizon,
+and before it was quite dark, she wrapped her cloak around her,
+softly left the house, and walked erect through the gloomy park in
+the direction of the old manor-house.
+
+The same minute saw two persons sit down in the rectory-house to
+share the rector's usually solitary dinner. One was a man of
+official appearance, commonplace in all except his eyes. The other
+was Edward Springrove.
+
+
+
+The discovery of the carefully-concealed letters rankled in the mind
+of Anne Seaway. Her woman's nature insisted that Manston had no
+right to keep all matters connected with his lost wife a secret from
+herself. Perplexity had bred vexation; vexation, resentment;
+curiosity had been continuous. The whole morning this resentment
+and curiosity increased.
+
+The steward said very little to his companion during their luncheon
+at mid-day. He seemed reckless of appearances--almost indifferent
+to whatever fate awaited him. All his actions betrayed that
+something portentous was impending, and still he explained nothing.
+By carefully observing every trifling action, as only a woman can
+observe them, the thought at length dawned upon her that he was
+going to run away secretly. She feared for herself; her knowledge
+of law and justice was vague, and she fancied she might in some way
+be made responsible for him.
+
+In the afternoon he went out of the house again, and she watched him
+drive away in the direction of the county-town. She felt a desire
+to go there herself, and, after an interval of half-an-hour,
+followed him on foot notwithstanding the distance--ostensibly to do
+some shopping.
+
+One among her several trivial errands was to make a small purchase
+at the druggist's. Near the druggist's stood the County Bank.
+Looking out of the shop window, between the coloured bottles, she
+saw Manston come down the steps of the bank, in the act of
+withdrawing his hand from his pocket, and pulling his coat close
+over its mouth.
+
+It is an almost universal habit with people, when leaving a bank, to
+be carefully adjusting their pockets if they have been receiving
+money; if they have been paying it in, their hands swing laxly. The
+steward had in all likelihood been taking money--possibly on Miss
+Aldclyffe's account--that was continual with him. And he might have
+been removing his own, as a man would do who was intending to leave
+the country.
+
+3. FROM FIVE TO EIGHT O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+Anne reached home again in time to preside over preparations for
+dinner. Manston came in half-an-hour later. The lamp was lighted,
+the shutters were closed, and they sat down together. He was pale
+and worn--almost haggard.
+
+The meal passed off in almost unbroken silence. When preoccupation
+withstands the influence of a social meal with one pleasant
+companion, the mental scene must be surpassingly vivid. Just as she
+was rising a tap came to the door.
+
+Before a maid could attend to the knock, Manston crossed the room
+and answered it himself. The visitor was Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+Manston instantly came back and spoke to Anne in an undertone. 'I
+should be glad if you could retire to your room for a short time.'
+
+'It is a dry, starlight evening,' she replied. 'I will go for a
+little walk if your object is merely a private conversation with
+Miss Aldclyffe.'
+
+'Very well, do; there's no accounting for tastes,' he said. A few
+commonplaces then passed between her and Miss Aldclyffe, and Anne
+went upstairs to bonnet and cloak herself. She came down, opened
+the front door, and went out.
+
+She looked around to realize the night. It was dark, mournful, and
+quiet. Then she stood still. From the moment that Manston had
+requested her absence, a strong and burning desire had prevailed in
+her to know the subject of Miss Aldclyffe's conversation with him.
+Simple curiosity was not entirely what inspired her. Her suspicions
+had been thoroughly aroused by the discovery of the morning. A
+conviction that her future depended on her power to combat a man
+who, in desperate circumstances, would be far from a friend to her,
+prompted a strategic movement to acquire the important secret that
+was in handling now. The woman thought and thought, and regarded
+the dull dark trees, anxiously debating how the thing could be done.
+
+Stealthily re-opening the front door she entered the hall, and
+advancing and pausing alternately, came close to the door of the
+room in which Miss Aldclyffe and Manston conversed. Nothing could
+be heard through the keyhole or panels. At a great risk she softly
+turned the knob and opened the door to a width of about
+half-an-inch, performing the act so delicately that three minutes,
+at least, were occupied in completing it. At that instant Miss
+Aldclyffe said--
+
+'There's a draught somewhere. The door is ajar, I think.'
+
+Anne glided back under the staircase. Manston came forward and
+closed the door. This chance was now cut off, and she considered
+again. The parlour, or sitting-room, in which the conference took
+place, had the window-shutters fixed on the outside of the window,
+as is usual in the back portions of old country-houses. The
+shutters were hinged one on each side of the opening, and met in the
+middle, where they were fastened by a bolt passing continuously
+through them and the wood mullion within, the bolt being secured on
+the inside by a pin, which was seldom inserted till Manston and
+herself were about to retire for the night; sometimes not at all.
+
+If she returned to the door of the room she might be discovered at
+any moment, but could she listen at the window, which overlooked a
+part of the garden never visited after nightfall, she would be safe
+from disturbance. The idea was worth a trial.
+
+She glided round to the window, took the head of the bolt between
+her finger and thumb, and softly screwed it round until it was
+entirely withdrawn from its position. The shutters remained as
+before, whilst, where the bolt had come out, was now a shining hole
+three-quarters of an inch in diameter, through which one might see
+into the middle of the room. She applied her eye to the orifice.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe and Manston were both standing; Manston with his back
+to the window, his companion facing it. The lady's demeanour was
+severe, condemnatory, and haughty. No more was to be seen; Anne
+then turned sideways, leant with her shoulder against the shutters
+and placed her ear upon the hole.
+
+'You know where,' said Miss Aldclyffe. 'And how could you, a man,
+act a double deceit like this?'
+
+'Men do strange things sometimes.'
+
+'What was your reason--come?'
+
+'A mere whim.'
+
+'I might even believe that, if the woman were handsomer than
+Cytherea, or if you had been married some time to Cytherea and had
+grown tired of her.'
+
+'And can't you believe it, too, under these conditions; that I
+married Cytherea, gave her up because I heard that my wife was
+alive, found that my wife would not come to live with me, and then,
+not to let any woman I love so well as Cytherea run any risk of
+being displaced and ruined in reputation, should my wife ever think
+fit to return, induced this woman to come to me, as being better
+than no companion at all?'
+
+'I cannot believe it. Your love for Cytherea was not of such a kind
+as that excuse would imply. It was Cytherea or nobody with you. As
+an object of passion, you did not desire the company of this Anne
+Seaway at all, and certainly not so much as to madly risk your
+reputation by bringing her here in the way you have done. I am sure
+you didn't, AEneas.'
+
+'So am I,' he said bluntly.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe uttered an exclamation of astonishment; the
+confession was like a blow in its suddenness. She began to reproach
+him bitterly, and with tears.
+
+'How could you overthrow my plans, disgrace the only girl I ever had
+any respect for, by such inexplicable doings! . . . That woman must
+leave this place--the country perhaps. Heavens! the truth will leak
+out in a day or two!'
+
+'She must do no such thing, and the truth must be stifled somehow
+--nobody knows how. If I stay here, or on any spot of the civilized
+globe, as AEneas Manston, this woman must live with me as my wife,
+or I am damned past redemption!'
+
+'I will not countenance your keeping her, whatever your motive may
+be.'
+
+'You must do something,' he murmured. 'You must. Yes, you must.'
+
+'I never will,' she said. 'It is a criminal act.'
+
+He looked at her earnestly. 'Will you not support me through this
+deception if my very life depends upon it? Will you not?'
+
+'Nonsense! Life! It will be a scandal to you, but she must leave
+this place. It will out sooner or later, and the exposure had
+better come now.'
+
+Manston repeated gloomily the same words. 'My life depends upon
+your supporting me--my very life.'
+
+He then came close to her, and spoke into her ear. Whilst he spoke
+he held her head to his mouth with both his hands. Strange
+expressions came over her face; the workings of her mouth were
+painful to observe. Still he held her and whispered on.
+
+The only words that could be caught by Anne Seaway, confused as her
+hearing frequently was by the moan of the wind and the waterfall in
+her outer ear, were these of Miss Aldclyffe, in tones which
+absolutely quivered: 'They have no money. What can they prove?'
+
+The listener tasked herself to the utmost to catch his answer, but
+it was in vain. Of the remainder of the colloquy one fact alone was
+plain to Anne, and that only inductively--that Miss Aldclyffe, from
+what he had revealed to her, was going to scheme body and soul on
+Manston's behalf.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe seemed now to have no further reason for remaining,
+yet she lingered awhile as if loth to leave him. When, finally, the
+crestfallen and agitated lady made preparations for departure, Anne
+quickly inserted the bolt, ran round to the entrance archway, and
+down the steps into the park. Here she stood close to the trunk of
+a huge lime-tree, which absorbed her dark outline into its own.
+
+In a few minutes she saw Manston, with Miss Aldclyffe leaning on his
+arm, cross the glade before her and proceed in the direction of the
+house. She watched them ascend the rise and advance, as two black
+spots, towards the mansion. The appearance of an oblong space of
+light in the dark mass of walls denoted that the door was opened.
+Miss Aldclyffe's outline became visible upon it; the door shut her
+in, and all was darkness again. The form of Manston returning alone
+arose from the gloom, and passed by Anne in her hiding-place.
+
+Waiting outside a quarter of an hour longer, that no suspicion of
+any kind might be excited, Anne returned to the old manor-house.
+
+4. FROM EIGHT TO ELEVEN O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+Manston was very friendly that evening. It was evident to her, now
+that she was behind the scenes, that he was making desperate efforts
+to disguise the real state of his mind.
+
+Her terror of him did not decrease. They sat down to supper,
+Manston still talking cheerfully. But what is keener than the eye
+of a mistrustful woman? A man's cunning is to it as was the armour
+of Sisera to the thin tent-nail. She found, in spite of his
+adroitness, that he was attempting something more than a disguise of
+his feeling. He was trying to distract her attention, that he might
+be unobserved in some special movement of his hands.
+
+What a moment it was for her then! The whole surface of her body
+became attentive. She allowed him no chance whatever. We know the
+duplicated condition at such times--when the existence divides
+itself into two, and the ostensibly innocent chatterer stands in
+front, like another person, to hide the timorous spy.
+
+Manston played the same game, but more palpably. The meal was
+nearly over when he seemed possessed of a new idea of how his object
+might be accomplished. He tilted back his chair with a reflective
+air, and looked steadily at the clock standing against the wall
+opposite to him. He said sententiously, 'Few faces are capable of
+expressing more by dumb show than the face of a clock. You may see
+in it every variety of incentive--from the softest seductions to
+negligence to the strongest hints for action.'
+
+'Well, in what way?' she inquired. His drift was, as yet, quite
+unintelligible to her.
+
+'Why, for instance: look at the cold, methodical, unromantic,
+business-like air of all the right-angled positions of the hands.
+They make a man set about work in spite of himself. Then look at
+the piquant shyness of its face when the two hands are over each
+other. Several attitudes imply "Make ready." The "make ready" of
+ten minutes to one differs from the "make ready" of ten minutes to
+twelve, as youth differs from age. "Upward and onward" says
+twenty-five minutes to eleven. Mid-day or midnight expresses
+distinctly "It is done." You surely have noticed that?'
+
+'Yes, I have.'
+
+He continued with affected quaintness:--
+
+'The easy dash of ten minutes past seven, the rakish recklessness of
+a quarter past, the drooping weariness of twenty-five minutes past,
+must have been observed by everybody.'
+
+'Whatever amount of truth there may be, there is a good deal of
+imagination in your fancy,' she said.
+
+He still contemplated the clock.
+
+'Then, again, the general finish of the face has a great effect upon
+the eye. This old-fashioned brass-faced one we have here, with its
+arched top, half-moon slit for the day of the month, and ship
+rocking at the upper part, impresses me with the notion of its being
+an old cynic, elevating his brows, whose thoughts can be seen
+wavering between good and evil.'
+
+A thought now enlightened her: the clock was behind her, and he
+wanted to get her back turned. She dreaded turning, yet, not to
+excite his suspicion, she was on her guard; she quickly looked
+behind her at the clock as he spoke, recovering her old position
+again instantly. The time had not been long enough for any action
+whatever on his part.
+
+'Ah,' he casually remarked, and at the same minute began to pour her
+out a glass of wine. 'Speaking of the clock has reminded me that it
+must nearly want winding up. Remember that it is wound to-night.
+Suppose you do it at once, my dear.'
+
+There was no possible way of evading the act. She resolutely turned
+to perform the operation: anything was better than that he should
+suspect her. It was an old-fashioned eight-day clock, of
+workmanship suited to the rest of the antique furniture that Manston
+had collected there, and ground heavily during winding.
+
+Anne had given up all idea of being able to watch him during the
+interval, and the noise of the wheels prevented her learning
+anything by her ears. But, as she wound, she caught sight of his
+shadow on the wall at her right hand.
+
+What was he doing? He was in the very act of pouring something into
+her glass of wine.
+
+He had completed the manoeuvre before she had done winding. She
+methodically closed the clock-case and turned round again. When she
+faced him he was sitting in his chair as before she had risen.
+
+In a familiar scene which has hitherto been pleasant it is difficult
+to realize that an added condition, which does not alter its aspect,
+can have made it terrible. The woman thought that his action must
+have been prompted by no other intent than that of poisoning her,
+and yet she could not instantly put on a fear of her position.
+
+And before she had grasped these consequences, another supposition
+served to make her regard the first as unlikely, if not absurd. It
+was the act of a madman to take her life in a manner so easy of
+discovery, unless there were far more reason for the crime than any
+that Manston could possibly have.
+
+Was it not merely his intention, in tampering with her wine, to make
+her sleep soundly that night? This was in harmony with her original
+suspicion, that he intended secretly to abscond. At any rate, he
+was going to set about some stealthy proceeding, as to which she was
+to be kept in utter darkness. The difficulty now was to avoid
+drinking the wine.
+
+By means of one pretext and another she put off taking her glass for
+nearly five minutes, but he eyed her too frequently to allow her to
+throw the potion under the grate. It became necessary to take one
+sip. This she did, and found an opportunity of absorbing it in her
+handkerchief.
+
+Plainly he had no idea of her countermoves. The scheme seemed to
+him in proper train, and he turned to poke out the fire. She
+instantly seized the glass, and poured its contents down her bosom.
+When he faced round again she was holding the glass to her lips,
+empty.
+
+In due course he locked the doors and saw that the shutters were
+fastened. She attended to a few closing details of housewifery, and
+a few minutes later they retired for the night.
+
+5. FROM ELEVEN O'CLOCK TO MIDNIGHT
+
+When Manston was persuaded, by the feigned heaviness of her
+breathing, that Anne Seaway was asleep, he softly arose, and dressed
+himself in the gloom. With ears strained to their utmost she heard
+him complete this operation; then he took something from his pocket,
+put it in the drawer of the dressing-table, went to the door, and
+down the stairs. She glided out of bed and looked in the drawer.
+He had only restored to its place a small phial she had seen there
+before. It was labelled 'Battley's Solution of Opium.' She felt
+relieved that her life had not been attempted. That was to have
+been her sleeping-draught. No time was to be lost if she meant to
+be a match for him. She followed him in her nightdress. When she
+reached the foot of the staircase he was in the office and had
+closed the door, under which a faint gleam showed that he had
+obtained a light. She crept to the door, but could not venture to
+open it, however slightly. Placing her ear to the panel, she could
+hear him tearing up papers of some sort, and a brighter and
+quivering ray of light coming from the threshold an instant later,
+implied that he was burning them. By the slight noise of his
+footsteps on the uncarpeted floor, she at length imagined that he
+was approaching the door. She flitted upstairs again and crept into
+bed.
+
+Manston returned to the bedroom close upon her heels, and entered
+it--again without a light. Standing motionless for an instant to
+assure himself that she still slept, he went to the drawer in which
+their ready-money was kept, and removed the casket that contained
+it. Anne's ear distinctly caught the rustle of notes, and the chink
+of the gold as he handled it. Some he placed in his pocket, some he
+returned to its place. He stood thinking, as it were weighing a
+possibility. While lingering thus, he noticed the reflected image
+of his own face in the glass--pale and spectre-like in its
+indistinctness. The sight seemed to be the feather which turned the
+balance of indecision: he drew a heavy breath, retired from the
+room, and passed downstairs. She heard him unbar the back-door, and
+go out into the yard.
+
+Feeling safe in a conclusion that he did not intend to return to the
+bedroom again, she arose, and hastily dressed herself. On going to
+the door of the apartment she found that he had locked it behind
+him. 'A precaution--it can be no more,' she muttered. Yet she was
+all the more perplexed and excited on this account. Had he been
+going to leave home immediately, he would scarcely have taken the
+trouble to lock her in, holding the belief that she was in a drugged
+sleep. The lock shot into a mortice, so that there was no
+possibility of her pushing back the bolt. How should she follow
+him? Easily. An inner closet opened from the bedroom: it was
+large, and had some time heretofore been used as a dressing or bath
+room, but had been found inconvenient from having no other outlet to
+the landing. The window of this little room looked out upon the
+roof of the porch, which was flat and covered with lead. Anne took
+a pillow from the bed, gently opened the casement of the inner room
+and stepped forth on the flat. There, leaning over the edge of the
+small parapet that ornamented the porch, she dropped the pillow upon
+the gravel path, and let herself down over the parapet by her hands
+till her toes swung about two feet from the ground. From this
+position she adroitly alighted upon the pillow, and stood in the
+path.
+
+Since she had come indoors from her walk in the early part of the
+evening the moon had risen. But the thick clouds overspreading the
+whole landscape rendered the dim light pervasive and grey: it
+appeared as an attribute of the air. Anne crept round to the back
+of the house, listening intently. The steward had had at least ten
+minutes' start of her. She had waited here whilst one might count
+fifty, when she heard a movement in the outhouse--a fragment once
+attached to the main building. This outhouse was partitioned into
+an outer and an inner room, which had been a kitchen and a scullery
+before the connecting erections were pulled down, but they were now
+used respectively as a brewhouse and workshop, the only means of
+access to the latter being through the brewhouse. The outer door of
+this first apartment was usually fastened by a padlock on the
+exterior. It was now closed, but not fastened. Manston was
+evidently in the outhouse.
+
+She slightly moved the door. The interior of the brewhouse was
+wrapped in gloom, but a streak of light fell towards her in a line
+across the floor from the inner or workshop door, which was not
+quite closed. This light was unexpected, none having been visible
+through hole or crevice. Glancing in, the woman found that he had
+placed cloths and mats at the various apertures, and hung a sack at
+the window to prevent the egress of a single ray. She could also
+perceive from where she stood that the bar of light fell across the
+brewing-copper just outside the inner door, and that upon it lay the
+key of her bedroom. The illuminated interior of the workshop was
+also partly visible from her position through the two half-open
+doors. Manston was engaged in emptying a large cupboard of the
+tools, gallipots, and old iron it contained. When it was quite
+cleared he took a chisel, and with it began to withdraw the hooks
+and shoulder-nails holding the cupboard to the wall. All these
+being loosened, he extended his arms, lifted the cupboard bodily
+from the brackets under it, and deposited it on the floor beside
+him.
+
+That portion of the wall which had been screened by the cupboard was
+now laid bare. This, it appeared, had been plastered more recently
+than the bulk of the outhouse. Manston loosened the plaster with
+some kind of tool, flinging the pieces into a basket as they fell.
+Having now stripped clear about two feet area of wall, he inserted a
+crowbar between the joints of the bricks beneath, softly wriggling
+it until several were loosened. There was now disclosed the mouth
+of an old oven, which was apparently contrived in the thickness of
+the wall, and having fallen into disuse, had been closed up with
+bricks in this manner. It was formed after the simple old-fashioned
+plan of oven-building--a mere oblate cavity without a flue.
+
+Manston now stretched his arm into the oven, dragged forth a heavy
+weight of great bulk, and let it slide to the ground. The woman
+who watched him could see the object plainly. It was a common
+corn-sack, nearly full, and was tied at the mouth in the usual way.
+
+The steward had once or twice started up, as if he had heard sounds,
+and his motions now became more cat-like still. On a sudden he put
+out the light. Anne had made no noise, yet a foreign noise of some
+kind had certainly been made in the intervening portion of the
+house. She heard it. 'One of the rats,' she thought.
+
+He seemed soon to recover from his alarm, but changed his tactics
+completely. He did not light his candle--going on with his work in
+the dark. She had only sounds to go by now, and, judging as well as
+she could from these, he was piling up the bricks which closed the
+oven's mouth as they had been before he disturbed them. The query
+that had not left her brain all the interval of her inspection--how
+should she get back into her bedroom again?--now received a
+solution. Whilst he was replacing the cupboard, she would glide
+across the brewhouse, take the key from the top of the copper, run
+upstairs, unlock the door, and bring back the key again: if he
+returned to bed, which was unlikely, he would think the lock had
+failed to catch in the staple. This thought and intention,
+occupying such length of words, flashed upon her in an instant, and
+hardly disturbed her strong curiosity to stay and learn the meaning
+of his actions in the workshop.
+
+Slipping sideways through the first door and closing it behind her,
+she advanced into the darkness towards the second, making every
+individual footfall with the greatest care, lest the fragments of
+rubbish on the floor should crackle beneath her tread. She soon
+stood close by the copper, and not more than a foot from the door of
+the room occupied by Manston himself, from which position she could
+distinctly hear him breathe between each exertion, although it was
+far too dark to discern anything of him.
+
+To secure the key of her chamber was her first anxiety, and
+accordingly she cautiously reached out with her hand to where it
+lay. Instead of touching it, her fingers came in contact with the
+boot of a human being.
+
+She drooped faint in a cold sweat. It was the foot either of a man
+or woman, standing on the brewing-copper where the key had lain. A
+warm foot, covered with a polished boot.
+
+The startling discovery so terrified her that she could hardly
+repress a sound. She withdrew her hand with a motion like the
+flight of an arrow. Her touch was so light that the leather seemed
+to have been thick enough to keep the owner of the foot in entire
+ignorance of it, and the noise of Manston's scraping might have been
+quite sufficient to drown the slight rustle of her dress.
+
+The person was obviously not the steward: he was still busy. It
+was somebody who, since the light had been extinguished, had taken
+advantage of the gloom, to come from some dark recess in the
+brewhouse and stand upon the brickwork of the copper. The fear
+which had at first paralyzed her lessened with the birth of a sense
+that fear now was utter failure: she was in a desperate position
+and must abide by the consequences. The motionless person on the
+copper was, equally with Manston, quite unconscious of her
+proximity, and she ventured to advance her hand again, feeling
+behind the feet, till she found the key. On its return to her side,
+her finger-tip skimmed the lower verge of a trousers-leg.
+
+It was a man, then, who stood there. To go to the door just at this
+time was impolitic, and she shrank back into an inner corner to
+wait. The comparative security from discovery that her new position
+ensured resuscitated reason a little, and empowered her to form some
+logical inferences:--
+
+1. The man who stood on the copper had taken advantage of the
+darkness to get there, as she had to enter.
+
+2. The man must have been hidden in the outhouse before she had
+reached the door.
+
+3. He must be watching Manston with much calculation and system,
+and for purposes of his own.
+
+She could now tell by the noises that Manston had completed his
+re-erection of the cupboard. She heard him replacing the articles it
+had contained--bottle by bottle, tool by tool--after which he came
+into the brewhouse, went to the window, and pulled down the cloths
+covering it; but the window being rather small, this unveiling
+scarcely relieved the darkness of the interior. He returned to the
+workshop, hoisted something to his back by a jerk, and felt about
+the room for some other article. Having found it, he emerged from
+the inner door, crossed the brewhouse, and went into the yard.
+Directly he stepped out she could see his outline by the light of
+the clouded and weakly moon. The sack was slung at his back, and in
+his hand he carried a spade.
+
+Anne now waited in her corner in breathless suspense for the
+proceedings of the other man. In about half-a-minute she heard him
+descend from the copper, and then the square opening of the doorway
+showed the outline of this other watcher passing through it
+likewise. The form was that of a broad-shouldered man enveloped in
+a long coat. He vanished after the steward.
+
+The woman vented a sigh of relief, and moved forward to follow.
+Simultaneously, she discovered that the watcher whose foot she had
+touched was, in his turn, watched and followed also.
+
+It was by one of her own sex. Anne Seaway shrank backward again.
+The unknown woman came forward from the further side of the yard,
+and pondered awhile in hesitation. Tall, dark, and closely wrapped,
+she stood up from the earth like a cypress. She moved, crossed the
+yard without producing the slightest disturbance by her footsteps,
+and went in the direction the others had taken.
+
+Anne waited yet another minute--then in her turn noiselessly
+followed the last woman.
+
+But so impressed was she with the sensation of people in hiding,
+that in coming out of the yard she turned her head to see if any
+person were following her, in the same way. Nobody was visible, but
+she discerned, standing behind the angle of the stable, Manston's
+horse and gig, ready harnessed.
+
+He did intend to fly after all, then, she thought. He must have
+placed the horse in readiness, in the interval between his leaving
+the house and her exit by the window. However, there was not time
+to weigh this branch of the night's events. She turned about again,
+and continued on the trail of the other three.
+
+6. FROM MIDNIGHT TO HALF-PAST ONE A.M.
+
+Intentness pervaded everything; Night herself seemed to have become
+a watcher.
+
+The four persons proceeded across the glade, and into the park
+plantation, at equi-distances of about seventy yards. Here the
+ground, completely overhung by the foliage, was coated with a thick
+moss which was as soft as velvet beneath their feet. The first
+watcher, that is, the man walking immediately behind Manston, now
+fell back, when Manston's housekeeper, knowing the ground pretty
+well, dived circuitously among the trees and got directly behind the
+steward, who, encumbered with his load, had proceeded but slowly.
+The other woman seemed now to be about opposite to Anne, or a little
+in advance, but on Manston's other hand.
+
+He reached a pit, midway between the waterfall and the engine-house.
+There he stopped, wiped his face, and listened.
+
+Into this pit had drifted uncounted generations of withered leaves,
+half filling it. Oak, beech, and chestnut, rotten and brown alike,
+mingled themselves in one fibrous mass. Manston descended into the
+midst of them, placed his sack on the ground, and raking the leaves
+aside into a large heap, began digging. Anne softly drew nearer,
+crept into a bush, and turning her head to survey the rest, missed
+the man who had dropped behind, and whom we have called the first
+watcher. Concluding that he, too, had hidden himself, she turned
+her attention to the second watcher, the other woman, who had
+meanwhile advanced near to where Anne lay in hiding, and now seated
+herself behind a tree, still closer to the steward than was Anne
+Seaway.
+
+Here and thus Anne remained concealed. The crunch of the steward's
+spade, as it cut into the soft vegetable mould, was plainly
+perceptible to her ears when the periodic cessations between the
+creaks of the engine concurred with a lull in the breeze, which
+otherwise brought the subdued roar of the cascade from the further
+side of the bank that screened it. A large hole--some four or five
+feet deep--had been excavated by Manston in about twenty minutes.
+Into this he immediately placed the sack, and then began filling in
+the earth, and treading it down. Lastly he carefully raked the
+whole mass of dead and dry leaves into the middle of the pit,
+burying the ground with them as they had buried it before.
+
+For a hiding-place the spot was unequalled. The thick accumulation
+of leaves, which had not been disturbed for centuries, might not be
+disturbed again for centuries to come, whilst their lower layers
+still decayed and added to the mould beneath.
+
+By the time this work was ended the sky had grown clearer, and Anne
+could now see distinctly the face of the other woman, stretching
+from behind the tree, seemingly forgetful of her position in her
+intense contemplation of the actions of the steward. Her
+countenance was white and motionless.
+
+It was impossible that Manston should not soon notice her. At the
+completion of his labour he turned, and did so.
+
+'Ho--you here!' he exclaimed.
+
+'Don't think I am a spy upon you,' she said, in an imploring
+whisper. Anne recognized the voice as Miss Aldclyffe's.
+
+The trembling lady added hastily another remark, which was drowned
+in the recurring creak of the engine close at hand The first
+watcher, if he had come no nearer than his original position, was
+too far off to hear any part of this dialogue, on account of the
+roar of the falling water, which could reach him unimpeded by the
+bank.
+
+The remark of Miss Aldclyffe to Manston had plainly been concerning
+the first watcher, for Manston, with his spade in his hand,
+instantly rushed to where the man was concealed, and, before the
+latter could disengage himself from the boughs, the steward struck
+him on the head with the blade of the instrument. The man fell to
+the ground.
+
+'Fly!' said Miss Aldclyffe to Manston. Manston vanished amidst the
+trees. Miss Aldclyffe went off in a contrary direction.
+
+Anne Seaway was about to run away likewise, when she turned and
+looked at the fallen man. He lay on his face, motionless.
+
+Many of these women who own to no moral code show considerable
+magnanimity when they see people in trouble. To act right simply
+because it is one's duty is proper; but a good action which is the
+result of no law of reflection shines more than any. She went up to
+him and gently turned him over, upon which he began to show signs of
+life. By her assistance he was soon able to stand upright.
+
+He looked about him with a bewildered air, endeavouring to collect
+his ideas. 'Who are you?' he said to the woman, mechanically.
+
+It was bad policy now to attempt disguise. 'I am the supposed Mrs.
+Manston,' she said. 'Who are you?'
+
+'I am the officer employed by Mr. Raunham to sift this mystery
+--which may be criminal.' He stretched his limbs, pressed his head,
+and seemed gradually to awake to a sense of having been incautious
+in his utterance. 'Never you mind who I am,' he continued. 'Well,
+it doesn't matter now, either--it will no longer be a secret.'
+
+He stooped for his hat and ran in the direction the steward had
+taken--coming back again after the lapse of a minute.
+
+'It's only an aggravated assault, after all,' he said hastily,
+'until we have found out for certain what's buried here. It may be
+only a bag of building rubbish; but it may be more. Come and help
+me dig.' He seized the spade with the awkwardness of a town man,
+and went into the pit, continuing a muttered discourse. 'It's no
+use my running after him single-handed,' he said. 'He's ever so far
+off by this time. The best step is to see what is here.'
+
+It was far easier for the detective to re-open the hole than it had
+been for Manston to form it. The leaves were raked away, the loam
+thrown out, and the sack dragged forth.
+
+'Hold this,' he said to Anne, whose curiosity still kept her
+standing near. He turned on the light of a dark lantern he had
+brought, and gave it into her hand.
+
+The string which bound the mouth of the sack was now cut. The
+officer laid the bag on its side, seized it by the bottom, and
+jerked forth the contents. A large package was disclosed, carefully
+wrapped up in impervious tarpaulin, also well tied. He was on the
+point of pulling open the folds at one end, when a light coloured
+thread of something, hanging on the outside, arrested his eye. He
+put his hand upon it; it felt stringy, and adhered to his fingers.
+'Hold the light close,' he said.
+
+She held it close. He raised his hand to the glass, and they both
+peered at an almost intangible filament he held between his finger
+and thumb. It was a long hair; the hair of a woman.
+
+'God! I couldn't believe it--no, I couldn't believe it!' the
+detective whispered, horror-struck. 'And I have lost the man for
+the present through my unbelief. Let's get into a sheltered place.
+. . . Now wait a minute whilst I prove it.'
+
+He thrust his hand into his waistcoat pocket, and withdrew thence a
+minute packet of brown paper. Spreading it out he disclosed, coiled
+in the middle, another long hair. It was the hair the clerk's wife
+had found on Manston's pillow nine days before the Carriford fire.
+He held the two hairs to the light: they were both of a pale-brown
+hue. He laid them parallel and stretched out his arms: they were
+of the same length to a nicety. The detective turned to Anne.
+
+'It is the body of his first wife,' he said quietly. 'He murdered
+her, as Mr. Springrove and the rector suspected--but how and when,
+God only knows.'
+
+'And I!' exclaimed Anne Seaway, a probable and natural sequence of
+events and motives explanatory of the whole crime--events and
+motives shadowed forth by the letter, Manston's possession of it,
+his renunciation of Cytherea, and instalment of herself--flashing
+upon her mind with the rapidity of lightning.
+
+'Ah--I see,' said the detective, standing unusually close to her:
+and a handcuff was on her wrist. 'You must come with me, madam.
+Knowing as much about a secret murder as God knows is a very
+suspicious thing: it doesn't make you a goddess--far from it.' He
+directed the bull's-eye into her face.
+
+'Pooh--lead on,' she said scornfully, 'and don't lose your principal
+actor for the sake of torturing a poor subordinate like me.'
+
+He loosened her hand, gave her his arm, and dragged her out of the
+grove--making her run beside him till they had reached the rectory.
+A light was burning here, and an auxiliary of the detective's
+awaiting him: a horse ready harnessed to a spring-cart was standing
+outside.
+
+'You have come--I wish I had known that,' the detective said to his
+assistant, hurriedly and angrily. 'Well, we've blundered--he's
+gone--you should have been here, as I said! I was sold by that
+woman, Miss Aldclyffe--she watched me.' He hastily gave directions
+in an undertone to this man. The concluding words were, 'Go in to
+the rector--he's up. Detain Miss Aldclyffe. I, in the meantime, am
+driving to Casterbridge with this one, and for help. We shall be
+sure to have him when it gets light.'
+
+He assisted Anne into the vehicle, and drove off with her. As they
+went, the clear, dry road showed before them, between the grassy
+quarters at each side, like a white riband, and made their progress
+easy. They came to a spot where the highway was overhung by dense
+firs for some distance on both sides. It was totally dark here.
+
+There was a smash; and a rude shock. In the very midst of its
+length, at the point where the road began to drop down a hill, the
+detective drove against something with a jerk which nearly flung
+them both to the ground.
+
+The man recovered himself, placed Anne on the seat, and reached out
+his hand. He found that the off-wheel of his gig was locked in that
+of another conveyance of some kind.
+
+'Hoy!' said the officer.
+
+Nobody answered.
+
+'Hoy, you man asleep there!' he said again.
+
+No reply.
+
+'Well, that's odd--this comes of the folly of travelling without
+gig-lamps because you expect the dawn.' He jumped to the ground and
+turned on his lantern.
+
+There was the gig which had obstructed him, standing in the middle
+of the road; a jaded horse harnessed to it, but no human being in or
+near the vehicle.
+
+'Do you know whose gig this is?' he said to the woman.
+
+'No,' she said sullenly. But she did recognize it as the steward's.
+
+'I'll swear it's Manston's! Come, I can hear it by your tone.
+However, you needn't say anything which may criminate you. What
+forethought the man must have had--how carefully he must have
+considered possible contingencies! Why, he must have got the horse
+and gig ready before he began shifting the body.'
+
+He listened for a sound among the trees. None was to be heard but
+the occasional scamper of a rabbit over the withered leaves. He
+threw the light of his lantern through a gap in the hedge, but could
+see nothing beyond an impenetrable thicket. It was clear that
+Manston was not many yards off, but the question was how to find
+him. Nothing could be done by the detective just then, encumbered
+as he was by the horse and Anne. If he had entered the thicket on a
+search unaided, Manston might have stepped unobserved from behind a
+bush and murdered him with the greatest ease. Indeed, there were
+such strong reasons for the exploit in Manston's circumstances at
+that moment that without showing cowardice, his pursuer felt it
+hazardous to remain any longer where he stood.
+
+He hastily tied the head of Manston's horse to the back of his own
+vehicle, that the steward might be deprived of the use of any means
+of escape other than his own legs, and drove on thus with his
+prisoner to the county-town. Arrived there, he lodged her in the
+police-station, and then took immediate steps for the capture of
+Manston.
+
+
+
+XX. THE EVENTS OF THREE HOURS
+
+1. MARCH THE TWENTY-THIRD. MIDDAY
+
+Thirty-six hours had elapsed since Manston's escape.
+
+It was market-day at the county-town. The farmers outside and
+inside the corn-exchange looked at their samples of wheat, and
+poured them critically as usual from one palm to another, but they
+thought and spoke of Manston. Grocers serving behind their
+counters, instead of using their constant phrase, 'The next article,
+please?' substituted, 'Have you heard if he's caught?' Dairymen and
+drovers standing beside the sheep and cattle pens, spread their legs
+firmly, readjusted their hats, thrust their hands into the lowest
+depths of their pockets, regarded the animals with the utmost
+keenness of which the eye was capable, and said, 'Ay, ay, so's:
+they'll have him avore night.'
+
+Later in the day Edward Springrove passed along the street hurriedly
+and anxiously. 'Well, have you heard any more?' he said to an
+acquaintance who accosted him.
+
+'They tracked him in this way,' said the other young man. 'A
+vagrant first told them that Manston had passed a rick at daybreak,
+under which this man was lying. They followed the track he pointed
+out and ultimately came to a stile. On the other side was a heap of
+half-hardened mud, scraped from the road. On the surface of the
+heap, where it had been smoothed by the shovel, was distinctly
+imprinted the form of a man's hand, the buttons of his waistcoat,
+and his watch-chain, showing that he had stumbled in hurrying over
+the stile, and fallen there. The pattern of the chain proved the
+man to have been Manston. They followed on till they reached a ford
+crossed by stepping-stones--on the further bank were the same
+footmarks that had shown themselves beside the stile. The whole of
+this course had been in the direction of Budmouth. On they went,
+and the next clue was furnished them by a shepherd. He said that
+wherever a clear space three or four yards wide ran in a line
+through a flock of sheep lying about a ewe-lease, it was a proof
+that somebody had passed there not more than half-an-hour earlier.
+At twelve o'clock that day he had noticed such a feature in his
+flock. Nothing more could be heard of him, and they got into
+Budmouth. The steam-packet to the Channel Islands was to start at
+eleven last night, and they at once concluded that his hope was to
+get to France by way of Jersey and St. Malo--his only chance, all
+the railway-stations being watched.
+
+'Well, they went to the boat: he was not on board then. They went
+again at half-past ten: he had not come. Two men now placed
+themselves under the lamp immediately beside the gangway. Another
+stayed by the office door, and one or two more up Mary Street--the
+straight cut to the quay. At a quarter to eleven the mail-bags were
+put on board. Whilst the attention of the idlers was directed to
+the mails, down Mary Street came a man as boldly as possible. The
+gait was Manston's, but not the clothes. He passed over to the
+shaded part of the street: heads were turned. I suppose this
+warned him, for he never emerged from the shadow. They watched and
+waited, but the steward did not reappear. The alarm was raised
+--they searched the town high and low--no Manston. All this morning
+they have been searching, but there's not a sign of him anywhere.
+However, he has lost his last chance of getting across the Channel.
+It is reported that he has since changed clothes with a labourer.'
+
+During this narration, Edward, lost in thought, had let his eyes
+follow a shabby man in a smock-frock, but wearing light boots--who
+was stalking down the street under a bundle of straw which overhung
+and concealed his head. It was a very ordinary circumstance for a
+man with a bundle of straw on his shoulders and overhanging his
+head, to go down the High Street. Edward saw him cross the bridge
+which divided the town from the country, place his shaggy
+encumbrance by the side of the road, and leave it there.
+
+Springrove now parted from his acquaintance, and went also in the
+direction of the bridge, and some way beyond it. As far as he could
+see stretched the turnpike road, and, while he was looking, he
+noticed a man to leap from the hedge at a point two hundred, or two
+hundred and fifty yards ahead, cross the road, and go through a
+wicket on the other side. This figure seemed like that of the man
+who had been carrying the bundle of straw. He looked at the straw:
+it still stood alone.
+
+The subjoined facts sprang, as it were, into juxtaposition in his
+brain:--
+
+Manston had been seen wearing the clothes of a labouring man--a
+brown smock-frock. So had this man, who seemed other than a
+labourer, on second thoughts: and he had concealed his face by his
+bundle of straw with the greatest ease and naturalness.
+
+The path the man had taken led, among other places, to Tolchurch,
+where Cytherea was living.
+
+If Mrs. Manston was murdered, as some said, on the night of the
+fire, Cytherea was the steward's lawful wife. Manston at bay, and
+reckless of results, might rush to his wife and harm her.
+
+It was a horrible supposition for a man who loved Cytherea to
+entertain; but Springrove could not resist its influence. He
+started off for Tolchurch.
+
+2. ONE TO TWO O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+On that self-same mid-day, whilst Edward was proceeding to Tolchurch
+by the footpath across the fields, Owen Graye had left the village
+and was riding along the turnpike road to the county-town, that he
+might ascertain the exact truth of the strange rumour which had
+reached him concerning Manston. Not to disquiet his sister, he had
+said nothing to her of the matter.
+
+She sat by the window reading. From her position she could see up
+the lane for a distance of at least a hundred yards. Passers-by
+were so rare in this retired nook, that the eyes of those who dwelt
+by the wayside were invariably lifted to every one on the road,
+great and small, as to a novelty.
+
+A man in a brown smock-frock turned the corner and came towards the
+house. It being market-day at Casterbridge, the village was nearly
+deserted, and more than this, the old farm-house in which Owen and
+his sister were staying, stood, as has been stated, apart from the
+body of cottages. The man did not look respectable; Cytherea arose
+and bolted the door.
+
+Unfortunately he was near enough to see her cross the room. He
+advanced to the door, knocked, and, receiving no answer, came to the
+window; he next pressed his face against the glass, peering in.
+
+Cytherea's experience at that moment was probably as trying a one as
+ever fell to the lot of a gentlewoman to endure. She recognized in
+the peering face that of the man she had married.
+
+But not a movement was made by her, not a sound escaped her. Her
+fear was great; but had she known the truth--that the man outside,
+feeling he had nothing on earth to lose by any act, was in the last
+stage of recklessness, terrified nature must have given way.
+
+'Cytherea,' he said, 'let me come in: I am your husband.'
+
+'No,' she replied, still not realizing the magnitude of her peril.
+'If you want to speak to us, wait till my brother comes.'
+
+'O, he's not at home? Cytherea, I can't live without you! All my
+sin has been because I love you so! Will you fly with me? I have
+money enough for us both--only come with me.'
+
+'Not now--not now.'
+
+'I am your husband, I tell you, and I must come in.'
+
+'You cannot,' she said faintly. His words began to terrify her.
+
+'I will, I say!' he exclaimed. 'Will you let me in, I ask once
+more?'
+
+'No--I will not,' said Cytherea.
+
+'Then I will let myself in!' he answered resolutely. 'I will, if I
+die for it!'
+
+The windows were glazed in lattice panes of leadwork, hung in
+casements. He broke one of the panes with a stone, thrust his hand
+through the hole, unfastened the latch which held the casement
+close, and began opening the window.
+
+Instantly the shutters flew together with a slam, and were barred
+with desperate quickness by Cytherea on the inside.
+
+'Damn you!' he exclaimed.
+
+He ran round to the back of the house. His impatience was greater
+now: he thrust his fist through the pantry window at one blow, and
+opened it in the same way as the former one had been opened, before
+the terror-stricken girl was aware that he had gone round. In an
+instant he stood in the pantry, advanced to the front room where she
+was, flung back the shutters, and held out his arms to embrace her.
+
+In extremely trying moments of bodily or mental pain, Cytherea
+either flushed hot or faded pale, according to the state of her
+constitution at the moment. Now she burned like fire from head to
+foot, and this preserved her consciousness.
+
+Never before had the poor child's natural agility served her in such
+good stead as now. A heavy oblong table stood in the middle of the
+room. Round this table she flew, keeping it between herself and
+Manston, her large eyes wide open with terror, their dilated pupils
+constantly fixed upon Manston's, to read by his expression whether
+his next intention was to dart to the right or the left.
+
+Even he, at that heated moment, could not endure the expression of
+unutterable agony which shone from that extraordinary gaze of hers.
+It had surely been given her by God as a means of defence. Manston
+continued his pursuit with a lowered eye.
+
+The panting and maddened desperado--blind to everything but the
+capture of his wife--went with a rush under the table: she went
+over it like a bird. He went heavily over it: she flew under it,
+and was out at the other side.
+
+     'One on her youth and pliant limbs relies,
+      One on his sinews and his giant size.'
+
+But his superior strength was sure to tire her down in the long-run.
+She felt her weakness increasing with the quickness of her breath;
+she uttered a wild scream, which in its heartrending intensity
+seemed to echo for miles.
+
+At the same juncture her hair became unfastened, and rolled down
+about her shoulders. The least accident at such critical periods is
+sufficient to confuse the overwrought intelligence. She lost sight
+of his intended direction for one instant, and he immediately
+outmanoeuvred her.
+
+'At last! my Cytherea!' he cried, overturning the table, springing
+over it, seizing one of the long brown tresses, pulling her towards
+him, and clasping her round. She writhed downwards between his arms
+and breast, and fell fainting on the floor. For the first time his
+action was leisurely. He lifted her upon the sofa, exclaiming,
+'Rest there for a while, my frightened little bird!'
+
+And then there was an end of his triumph. He felt himself clutched
+by the collar, and whizzed backwards with the force of a
+battering-ram against the fireplace. Springrove, wild, red, and
+breathless, had sprung in at the open window, and stood once more
+between man and wife.
+
+Manston was on his legs again in an instant. A fiery glance on the
+one side, a glance of pitiless justice on the other, passed between
+them. It was again the meeting in the vineyard of Naboth the
+Jezreelite: 'Hast thou found me, O mine enemy? And he answered, I
+have found thee: because thou hast sold thyself to work evil in the
+sight of the Lord.'
+
+A desperate wrestle now began between the two men. Manston was the
+taller, but there was in Edward much hard tough muscle which the
+delicate flesh of the steward lacked. They flew together like the
+jaws of a gin. In a minute they were both on the floor, rolling
+over and over, locked in each other's grasp as tightly as if they
+had been one organic being at war with itself--Edward trying to
+secure Manston's arms with a small thong he had drawn from his
+pocket, Manston trying to reach his knife.
+
+Two characteristic noises pervaded the apartment through this
+momentous space of time. One was the sharp panting of the two
+combatants, so similar in each as to be undistinguishable; the other
+was the stroke of their heels and toes, as they smote the floor at
+every contortion of body or limbs.
+
+Cytherea had not lost consciousness for more than half-a-minute.
+She had then leapt up without recognizing that Edward was her
+deliverer, unfastened the door, and rushed out, screaming wildly,
+'Come! Help! O, help!'
+
+Three men stood not twenty yards off, looking perplexed. They
+dashed forward at her words. 'Have you seen a shabby man with a
+smock-frock on lately?' they inquired. She pointed to the door, and
+ran on the same as before.
+
+Manston, who had just loosened himself from Edward's grasp, seemed
+at this moment to renounce his intention of pushing the conflict to
+a desperate end. 'I give it all up for life--dear life!' he cried,
+with a hoarse laugh. 'A reckless man has a dozen lives--see how
+I'll baffle you all yet!'
+
+He rushed out of the house, but no further. The boast was his last.
+In one half-minute more he was helpless in the hands of his
+pursuers.
+
+
+
+Edward staggered to his feet, and paused to recover breath. His
+thoughts had never forsaken Cytherea, and his first act now was to
+hasten up the lane after her. She had not gone far. He found her
+leaning upon a bank by the roadside, where she had flung herself
+down in sheer exhaustion. He ran up and lifted her in his arms, and
+thus aided she was enabled to stand upright--clinging to him. What
+would Springrove have given to imprint a kiss upon her lips then!
+
+They walked slowly towards the house. The distressing sensation of
+whose wife she was could not entirely quench the resuscitated
+pleasure he felt at her grateful recognition of him, and her
+confiding seizure of his arm for support. He conveyed her carefully
+into the house.
+
+A quarter of an hour later, whilst she was sitting in a partially
+recovered, half-dozing state in an arm-chair, Edward beside her
+waiting anxiously till Graye should arrive, they saw a spring-cart
+pass the door. Old and dry mud-splashes from long-forgotten rains
+disfigured its wheels and sides; the varnish and paint had been
+scratched and dimmed; ornament had long been forgotten in a restless
+contemplation of use. Three men sat on the seat, the middle one
+being Manston. His hands were bound in front of him, his eyes were
+set directly forward, his countenance pallid, hard, and fixed.
+
+Springrove had told Cytherea of Manston's crime in a few short
+words. He now said solemnly, 'He is to die.'
+
+'And I cannot mourn for him,' she replied with a shudder, leaning
+back and covering her face with her hands.
+
+In the silence that followed the two short remarks, Springrove
+watched the cart round the corner, and heard the rattle of its
+wheels gradually dying away as it rolled in the direction of the
+county-town.
+
+
+
+XXI. THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN HOURS
+
+1. MARCH THE TWENTY-NINTH. NOON
+
+Exactly seven days after Edward Springrove had seen the man with the
+bundle of straw walking down the streets of Casterbridge, old Farmer
+Springrove was standing on the edge of the same pavement, talking to
+his friend, Farmer Baker.
+
+There was a pause in their discourse. Mr. Springrove was looking
+down the street at some object which had attracted his attention.
+'Ah, 'tis what we shall all come to!' he murmured.
+
+The other looked in the same direction. 'True, neighbour
+Springrove; true.'
+
+Two men, advancing one behind the other in the middle of the road,
+were what the farmers referred to. They were carpenters, and bore
+on their shoulders an empty coffin, covered by a thin black cloth.
+
+'I always feel a satisfaction at being breasted by such a sight as
+that,' said Springrove, still regarding the men's sad burden. 'I
+call it a sort of medicine.'
+
+'And it is medicine. . . . I have not heard of any body being ill
+up this way lately? D'seem as if the person died suddenly.'
+
+'May be so. Ah, Baker, we say sudden death, don't we? But there's
+no difference in their nature between sudden death and death of any
+other sort. There's no such thing as a random snapping off of what
+was laid down to last longer. We only suddenly light upon an end
+--thoughtfully formed as any other--which has been existing at that
+very same point from the beginning, though unseen by us to be so
+soon.'
+
+'It is just a discovery to your own mind, and not an alteration in
+the Lord's.'
+
+'That's it. Unexpected is not as to the thing, but as to our
+sight.'
+
+'Now you'll hardly believe me, neighbour, but this little scene in
+front of us makes me feel less anxious about pushing on wi' that
+threshing and winnowing next week, that I was speaking about. Why
+should we not stand still, says I to myself, and fling a quiet eye
+upon the Whys and the Wherefores, before the end o' it all, and we
+go down into the mouldering-place, and are forgotten?'
+
+''Tis a feeling that will come. But 'twont bear looking into.
+There's a back'ard current in the world, and we must do our utmost
+to advance in order just to bide where we be. But, Baker, they are
+turning in here with the coffin, look.'
+
+The two carpenters had borne their load into a narrow way close at
+hand. The farmers, in common with others, turned and watched them
+along the way.
+
+''Tis a man's coffin, and a tall man's, too,' continued Farmer
+Springrove. 'His was a fine frame, whoever he was.'
+
+'A very plain box for the poor soul--just the rough elm, you see.'
+The corner of the cloth had blown aside.
+
+'Yes, for a very poor man. Well, death's all the less insult to
+him. I have often thought how much smaller the richer class are
+made to look than the poor at last pinches like this. Perhaps the
+greatest of all the reconcilers of a thoughtful man to poverty--and
+I speak from experience--is the grand quiet it fills him with when
+the uncertainty of his life shows itself more than usual.'
+
+As Springrove finished speaking, the bearers of the coffin went
+across a gravelled square facing the two men and approached a grim
+and heavy archway. They paused beneath it, rang a bell, and waited.
+
+Over the archway was written in Egyptian capitals,
+
+                           'COUNTY GAOL.'
+
+The small rectangular wicket, which was constructed in one of the
+two iron-studded doors, was opened from the inside. The men
+severally stepped over the threshold, the coffin dragged its
+melancholy length through the aperture, and both entered the court,
+and were covered from sight.
+
+'Somebody in the gaol, then?'
+
+'Yes, one of the prisoners,' said a boy, scudding by at the moment,
+who passed on whistling.
+
+'Do you know the name of the man who is dead?' inquired Baker of a
+third bystander.
+
+'Yes, 'tis all over town--surely you know, Mr. Springrove? Why,
+Manston, Miss Aldclyffe's steward. He was found dead the first
+thing this morning. He had hung himself behind the door of his
+cell, in some way, by a handkerchief and some strips of his clothes.
+The turnkey says his features were scarcely changed, as he looked at
+'em with the early sun a-shining in at the grating upon him. He has
+left a full account of the murder, and all that led to it. So
+there's an end of him.'
+
+
+
+It was perfectly true: Manston was dead.
+
+The previous day he had been allowed the use of writing-materials,
+and had occupied himself for nearly seven hours in preparing the
+following confession:--
+
+
+                         'LAST WORDS.
+
+'Having found man's life to be a wretchedly conceived scheme, I
+renounce it, and, to cause no further trouble, I write down the
+facts connected with my past proceedings.
+
+'After thanking God, on first entering my house, on the night of the
+fire at Carriford, for my release from bondage to a woman I
+detested, I went, a second time, to the scene of the disaster, and,
+finding that nothing could be done by remaining there, shortly
+afterwards I returned home again in the company of Mr. Raunham.
+
+'He parted from me at the steps of my porch, and went back towards
+the rectory. Whilst I still stood at the door, musing on my strange
+deliverance, I saw a figure advance from beneath the shadow of the
+park trees. It was the figure of a woman.
+
+'When she came near, the twilight was sufficient to show me her
+attire: it was a cloak reaching to the bottom of her dress, and a
+thick veil covering her face. These features, together with her
+size and gait, aided also by a flash of perception as to the chain
+of events which had saved her life, told me that she was my wife
+Eunice.
+
+'I gnashed my teeth in a frenzy of despair; I had lost Cytherea; I
+had gained one whose beauty had departed, whose utterance was
+complaint, whose mind was shallow, and who drank brandy every day.
+The revulsion of feeling was terrible. Providence, whom I had just
+thanked, seemed a mocking tormentor laughing at me. I felt like a
+madman.
+
+'She came close--started at seeing me outside--then spoke to me.
+Her first words were reproof for what I had unintentionally done,
+and sounded as an earnest of what I was to be cursed with as long as
+we both lived. I answered angrily; this tone of mine changed her
+complaints to irritation. She taunted me with a secret she had
+discovered, which concerned Miss Aldclyffe and myself. I was
+surprised to learn it--more surprised that she knew it, but
+concealed my feeling.
+
+'"How could you serve me so?" she said, her breath smelling of
+spirits even then. "You love another woman--yes, you do. See how
+you drive me about! I have been to the station, intending to leave
+you for ever, and yet I come to try you once more."
+
+'An indescribable exasperation had sprung up in me as she talked
+--rage and regret were all in all. Scarcely knowing what I did, I
+furiously raised my hand and swung it round with my whole force to
+strike her. She turned quickly--and it was the poor creature's end.
+By her movement my hand came edgewise exactly in the nape of the
+neck--as men strike a hare to kill it. The effect staggered me with
+amazement. The blow must have disturbed the vertebrae; she fell at
+my feet, made a few movements, and uttered one low sound.
+
+'I ran indoors for water and some wine, I came out and lanced her
+arm with my penknife. But she lay still, and I found that she was
+dead.
+
+'It was a long time before I could realize my horrible position.
+For several minutes I had no idea of attempting to escape the
+consequences of my deed. Then a light broke upon me. Had anybody
+seen her since she left the Three Tranters? Had they not, she was
+already believed by the parishioners to be dust and ashes. I should
+never be found out.
+
+'Upon this I acted.
+
+'The first question was how to dispose of the body. The impulse
+of the moment was to bury her at once in the pit between the
+engine-house and waterfall; but it struck me that I should not have
+time. It was now four o'clock, and the working-men would soon be
+stirring about the place. I would put off burying her till the next
+night. I carried her indoors.
+
+'In turning the outhouse into a workshop, earlier in the season, I
+found, when driving a nail into the wall for fixing a cupboard, that
+the wall sounded hollow. I examined it, and discovered behind the
+plaster an old oven which had long been disused, and was bricked up
+when the house was prepared for me.
+
+'To unfix this cupboard and pull out the bricks was the work of a
+few minutes. Then, bearing in mind that I should have to remove the
+body again the next night, I placed it in a sack, pushed it into the
+oven, packed in the bricks, and replaced the cupboard.
+
+'I then went to bed. In bed, I thought whether there were any very
+remote possibilities that might lead to the supposition that my wife
+was not consumed by the flames of the burning house. The thing
+which struck me most forcibly was this, that the searchers might
+think it odd that no remains whatever should be found.
+
+'The clinching and triumphant deed would be to take the body and
+place it among the ruins of the destroyed house. But I could not do
+this, on account of the men who were watching against an outbreak of
+the fire. One remedy remained.
+
+'I arose again, dressed myself, and went down to the outhouse. I
+must take down the cupboard again. I did take it down. I pulled
+out the bricks, pulled out the sack, pulled out the corpse, and took
+her keys from her pocket and the watch from her side.
+
+'I then replaced everything as before.
+
+'With these articles in my pocket I went out of the yard, and took
+my way through the withy copse to the churchyard, entering it from
+the back. Here I felt my way carefully along till I came to the
+nook where pieces of bones from newly-dug graves are sometimes piled
+behind the laurel-bushes. I had been earnestly hoping to find a
+skull among these old bones; but though I had frequently seen one or
+two in the rubbish here, there was not one now. I then groped in
+the other corner with the same result--nowhere could I find a skull.
+Three or four fragments of leg and back-bones were all I could
+collect, and with these I was forced to be content.
+
+'Taking them in my hand, I crossed the road, and got round behind
+the inn, where the couch heap was still smouldering. Keeping behind
+the hedge, I could see the heads of the three or four men who
+watched the spot.
+
+'Standing in this place I took the bones, and threw them one by one
+over the hedge and over the men's heads into the smoking embers.
+When the bones had all been thrown, I threw the keys; last of all I
+threw the watch.
+
+'I then returned home as I had gone, and went to bed once more, just
+as the dawn began to break. I exulted--"Cytherea is mine again!"
+
+'At breakfast-time I thought, "Suppose the cupboard should by some
+unlikely chance get moved to-day!"
+
+'I went to the mason's yard hard by, while the men were at
+breakfast, and brought away a shovelful of mortar. I took it into
+the outhouse, again shifted the cupboard, and plastered over the
+mouth of the oven behind. Simply pushing the cupboard back into its
+place, I waited for the next night that I might bury the body,
+though upon the whole it was in a tolerably safe hiding-place.
+
+'When the night came, my nerves were in some way weaker than they
+had been on the previous night. I felt reluctant to touch the body.
+I went to the outhouse, but instead of opening the oven, I firmly
+drove in the shoulder-nails that held the cupboard to the wall. "I
+will bury her to-morrow night, however," I thought.
+
+'But the next night I was still more reluctant to touch her. And my
+reluctance increased, and there the body remained. The oven was,
+after all, never likely to be opened in my time.
+
+'I married Cytherea Graye, and never did a bridegroom leave the
+church with a heart more full of love and happiness, and a brain
+more fixed on good intentions, than I did on that morning.
+
+'When Cytherea's brother made his appearance at the hotel in
+Southampton, bearing his strange evidence of the porter's
+disclosure, I was staggered beyond expression. I thought they had
+found the body. "Am I to be apprehended and to lose her even now?"
+I mourned. I saw my error, and instantly saw, too, that I must act
+externally like an honourable man. So at his request I yielded her
+up to him, and meditated on several schemes for enabling me to claim
+the woman I had a legal right to claim as my wife, without
+disclosing the reason why I knew myself to have it.
+
+'I went home to Knapwater the next day, and for nearly a week lived
+in a state of indecision. I could not hit upon a scheme for proving
+my wife dead without compromising myself.
+
+'Mr. Raunham hinted that I should take steps to discover her
+whereabouts by advertising. I had no energy for the farce. But one
+evening I chanced to enter the Rising Sun Inn. Two notorious
+poachers were sitting in the settle, which screened my entrance.
+They were half drunk--their conversation was carried on in the
+solemn and emphatic tone common to that stage of intoxication, and I
+myself was the subject of it.
+
+'The following was the substance of their disjointed remarks: On
+the night of the great fire at Carriford, one of them was sent to
+meet me, and break the news of the death of my wife to me. This he
+did; but because I would not pay him for his news, he left me in a
+mood of vindictiveness. When the fire was over, he joined his
+comrade. The favourable hour of the night suggested to them the
+possibility of some unlawful gain before daylight came. My
+fowlhouse stood in a tempting position, and still resenting his
+repulse during the evening, one of them proposed to operate upon my
+birds. I was believed to have gone to the rectory with Mr. Raunham.
+The other was disinclined to go, and the first went off alone.
+
+'It was now about three o'clock. He had advanced as far as the
+shrubbery, which grows near the north wall of the house, when he
+fancied he heard, above the rush of the waterfall, noises on the
+other side of the building. He described them in these words,
+"Ghostly mouths talking--then a fall--then a groan--then the rush of
+the water and creak of the engine as before." Only one explanation
+occurred to him; the house was haunted. And, whether those of the
+living or the dead, voices of any kind were inimical to one who had
+come on such an errand. He stealthily crept home.
+
+'His unlawful purpose in being behind the house led him to conceal
+his adventure. No suspicion of the truth entered his mind till the
+railway-porter had startled everybody by his strange announcement.
+Then he asked himself, had the horrifying sounds of that night been
+really an enactment in the flesh between me and my wife?
+
+'The words of the other man were:
+
+'"Why don't he try to find her if she's alive?"
+
+'"True," said the first. "Well, I don't forget what I heard, and if
+she don't turn up alive my mind will be as sure as a Bible upon her
+murder, and the parson shall know it, though I do get six months on
+the treadmill for being where I was."
+
+'"And if she should turn up alive?"
+
+'"Then I shall know that I am wrong, and believing myself a fool as
+well as a rogue, hold my tongue."
+
+'I glided out of the house in a cold sweat. The only pressure in
+heaven or earth which could have forced me to renounce Cytherea was
+now put upon me--the dread of a death upon the gallows.
+
+'I sat all that night weaving strategy of various kinds. The only
+effectual remedy for my hazardous standing that I could see was a
+simple one. It was to substitute another woman for my wife before
+the suspicions of that one easily-hoodwinked man extended further.
+
+'The only difficulty was to find a practicable substitute.
+
+'The one woman at all available for the purpose was a friendless,
+innocent creature, named Anne Seaway, whom I had known in my youth,
+and who had for some time been the housekeeper of a lady in London.
+On account of this lady's sudden death, Anne stood in rather a
+precarious position, as regarded her future subsistence. She was
+not the best kind of woman for the scheme; but there was no
+alternative. One quality of hers was valuable; she was not a
+talker. I went to London the very next day, called at the Hoxton
+lodging of my wife (the only place at which she had been known as
+Mrs. Manston), and found that no great difficulties stood in the way
+of a personation. And thus favouring circumstances determined my
+course. I visited Anne Seaway, made love to her, and propounded my
+plan.
+
+              *     *     *     *     *
+
+'We lived quietly enough until the Sunday before my apprehension.
+Anne came home from church that morning, and told me of the
+suspicious way in which a young man had looked at her there.
+Nothing could be done beyond waiting the issue of events. Then the
+letter came from Raunham. For the first time in my life I was half
+indifferent as to what fate awaited me. During the succeeding day I
+thought once or twice of running away, but could not quite make up
+my mind. At any rate it would be best to bury the body of my wife,
+I thought, for the oven might be opened at any time. I went to
+Casterbridge and made some arrangements. In the evening Miss
+Aldclyffe (who is united to me by a common secret which I have no
+right or wish to disclose) came to my house, and alarmed me still
+more. She said that she could tell by Mr. Raunham's manner that
+evening, that he kept back from her a suspicion of more importance
+even than the one he spoke of, and that strangers were in his house
+even then.
+
+'I guessed what this further suspicion was, and resolved to
+enlighten her to a certain extent, and so secure her assistance. I
+said that I killed my wife by an accident on the night of the fire,
+dwelling upon the advantage to her of the death of the only woman
+who knew her secret.
+
+'Her terror, and fears for my fate, led her to watch the rectory
+that evening. She saw the detective leave it, and followed him to
+my residence. This she told me hurriedly when I perceived her after
+digging my wife's grave in the plantation. She did not suspect what
+the sack contained.
+
+'I am now about to enter on my normal condition. For people are
+almost always in their graves. When we survey the long race of men,
+it is strange and still more strange to find that they are mainly
+dead men, who have scarcely ever been otherwise.
+
+                                              'AENEAS MANSTON.'
+
+
+The steward's confession, aided by circumstantial evidence of
+various kinds, was the means of freeing both Anne Seaway and Miss
+Aldclyffe from all suspicion of complicity with the murderer.
+
+2. SIX O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+It was evening--just at sunset--on the day of Manston's death.
+
+In the cottage at Tolchurch was gathered a group consisting of
+Cytherea, her brother, Edward Springrove, and his father. They sat
+by the window conversing of the strange events which had just taken
+place. In Cytherea's eye there beamed a hopeful ray, though her
+face was as white as a lily.
+
+Whilst they talked, looking out at the yellow evening light that
+coated the hedges, trees, and church tower, a brougham rolled round
+the corner of the lane, and came in full view. It reflected the
+rays of the sun in a flash from its polished panels as it turned the
+angle, the spokes of the wheels bristling in the same light like
+bayonets. The vehicle came nearer, and arrived opposite Owen's
+door, when the driver pulled the rein and gave a shout, and the
+panting and sweating horses stopped.
+
+'Miss Aldclyffe's carriage!' they all exclaimed.
+
+Owen went out. 'Is Miss Graye at home?' said the man. 'A note for
+her, and I am to wait for an answer.'
+
+Cytherea read in the handwriting of the Rector of Carriford:--
+
+
+'DEAR MISS GRAYE,--Miss Aldclyffe is ill, though not dangerously.
+She continually repeats your name, and now wishes very much to see
+you. If you possibly can, come in the carriage.--Very sincerely
+yours, JOHN RAUNHAM.'
+
+
+'How comes she ill?' Owen inquired of the coachman.
+
+'She caught a violent cold by standing out of doors in the damp, on
+the night the steward ran away. Ever since, till this morning, she
+complained of fulness and heat in the chest. This morning the maid
+ran in and told her suddenly that Manston had killed himself in
+gaol--she shrieked--broke a blood-vessel--and fell upon the floor.
+Severe internal haemorrhage continued for some time and then
+stopped. They say she is sure to get over it; but she herself says
+no. She has suffered from it before.'
+
+Cytherea was ready in a few moments, and entered the carriage.
+
+3. SEVEN O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+Soft as was Cytherea's motion along the corridors of Knapwater
+House, the preternaturally keen intelligence of the suffering
+woman caught the maiden's well-known footfall. She entered the
+sick-chamber with suspended breath.
+
+In the room everything was so still, and sensation was as it were so
+rarefied by solicitude, that thinking seemed acting, and the lady's
+weak act of trying to live a silent wrestling with all the powers of
+the universe. Nobody was present but Mr. Raunham, the nurse having
+left the room on Cytherea's entry, and the physician and surgeon
+being engaged in a whispered conversation in a side-chamber. Their
+patient had been pronounced out of danger.
+
+Cytherea went to the bedside, and was instantly recognized. O, what
+a change--Miss Aldclyffe dependent upon pillows! And yet not a
+forbidding change. With weakness had come softness of aspect: the
+haughtiness was extracted from the frail thin countenance, and a
+sweeter mild placidity had taken its place.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe signified to Mr. Raunham that she would like to be
+alone with Cytherea.
+
+'Cytherea?' she faintly whispered the instant the door was closed.
+
+Cytherea clasped the lady's weak hand, and sank beside her.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe whispered again. 'They say I am certain to live; but
+I know that I am certainly going to die.'
+
+'They know, I think, and hope.'
+
+'I know best, but we'll leave that. Cytherea--O Cytherea, can you
+forgive me!'
+
+Her companion pressed her hand.
+
+'But you don't know yet--you don't know yet,' the invalid murmured.
+'It is forgiveness for that misrepresentation to Edward Springrove
+that I implore, and for putting such force upon him--that which
+caused all the train of your innumerable ills!'
+
+'I know all--all. And I do forgive you. Not in a hasty impulse
+that is revoked when coolness comes, but deliberately and sincerely:
+as I myself hope to be forgiven, I accord you my forgiveness now.'
+
+Tears streamed from Miss Aldclyffe's eyes, and mingled with those of
+her young companion, who could not restrain hers for sympathy.
+Expressions of strong attachment, interrupted by emotion, burst
+again and again from the broken-spirited woman.
+
+'But you don't know my motive. O, if you only knew it, how you
+would pity me then!'
+
+Cytherea did not break the pause which ensued, and the elder woman
+appeared now to nerve herself by a superhuman effort. She spoke on
+in a voice weak as a summer breeze, and full of intermission, and
+yet there pervaded it a steadiness of intention that seemed to
+demand firm tones to bear it out worthily.
+
+'Cytherea,' she said, 'listen to me before I die.
+
+'A long time ago--more than thirty years ago--a young girl of
+seventeen was cruelly betrayed by her cousin, a wild officer of
+six-and-twenty. He went to India, and died.
+
+'One night when that miserable girl had just arrived home with her
+parents from Germany, where her baby had been born, she took all the
+money she possessed, pinned it on her infant's bosom, together with
+a letter, stating, among other things, what she wished the child's
+Christian name to be; wrapped up the little thing, and walked with
+it to Clapham. Here, in a retired street, she selected a house.
+She placed the child on the doorstep and knocked at the door, then
+ran away and watched. They took it up and carried it indoors.
+
+'Now that her poor baby was gone, the girl blamed herself bitterly
+for cruelty towards it, and wished she had adopted her parents'
+counsel to secretly hire a nurse. She longed to see it. She didn't
+know what to do. She wrote in an assumed name to the woman who had
+taken it in, and asked her to meet the writer with the infant at
+certain places she named. These were hotels or coffee-houses in
+Chelsea, Pimlico, or Hammersmith. The woman, being well paid,
+always came, and asked no questions. At one meeting--at an inn in
+Hammersmith--she made her appearance without the child, and told the
+girl it was so ill that it would not live through the night. The
+news, and fatigue, brought on a fainting-fit . . .'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe's sobs choked her utterance, and she became painfully
+agitated. Cytherea, pale and amazed at what she heard, wept for
+her, bent over her, and begged her not to go on speaking.
+
+'Yes--I must,' she cried, between her sobs. 'I will--I must go on!
+And I must tell yet more plainly! . . . you must hear it before I am
+gone, Cytherea.' The sympathizing and astonished girl sat down
+again.
+
+'The name of the woman who had taken the child was _Manston_. She was
+the widow of a schoolmaster. She said she had adopted the child of
+a relation.
+
+'Only one man ever found out who the mother was. He was the keeper
+of the inn in which she fainted, and his silence she has purchased
+ever since.
+
+'A twelvemonth passed--fifteen months--and the saddened girl met a
+man at her father's house named Graye--your father, Cytherea, then
+unmarried. Ah, such a man! Inexperience now perceived what it was
+to be loved in spirit and in truth! But it was too late. Had he
+known her secret he would have cast her out. She withdrew from him
+by an effort, and pined.
+
+'Years and years afterwards, when she became mistress of a fortune
+and estates by her father's death, she formed the weak scheme of
+having near her the son whom, in her father's life-time, she had
+been forbidden to recognize. Cytherea, you know who that weak woman
+is.
+
+              *     *     *     *     *
+
+'By such toilsome labour as this I got him here as my steward. And
+I wanted to see him _your husband_, Cytherea!--the husband of my true
+lover's child. It was a sweet dream to me. . . . Pity me--O, pity
+me! To die unloved is more than I can bear! I loved your father,
+and I love him now.'
+
+
+
+That was the burden of Cytherea Aldclyffe.
+
+'I suppose you must leave me again--you always leave me,' she said,
+after holding the young woman's hand a long while in silence.
+
+'No--indeed I'll stay always. Do you like me to stay?'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe in the jaws of death was Miss Aldclyffe still, though
+the old fire had degenerated to mere phosphorescence now. 'But you
+are your brother's housekeeper?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Well, of course you cannot stay with me on a sudden like this.
+. . . Go home, or he will be at a loss for things. And to-morrow
+morning come again, won't you, dearest, come again--we'll fetch you.
+But you mustn't stay now, and put Owen out. O no--it would be absurd.'
+The absorbing concern about trifles of daily routine, which is so
+often seen in very sick people, was present here.
+
+Cytherea promised to go home, and come the next morning to stay
+continuously.
+
+'Stay till I die then, will you not? Yes, till I die--I shan't die
+till to-morrow.'
+
+'We hope for your recovery--all of us.'
+
+'I know best. Come at six o'clock, darling.'
+
+'As soon as ever I can,' returned Cytherea tenderly.
+
+'But six is too early--you will have to think of your brother's
+breakfast. Leave Tolchurch at eight, will you?'
+
+Cytherea consented to this. Miss Aldclyffe would never have known
+had her companion stayed in the house all night; but the honesty of
+Cytherea's nature rebelled against even the friendly deceit which
+such a proceeding would have involved.
+
+An arrangement was come to whereby she was to be taken home in the
+pony-carriage instead of the brougham that fetched her; the carriage
+to put up at Tolchurch farm for the night, and on that account to be
+in readiness to bring her back earlier.
+
+4. MARCH THE THIRTIETH. DAYBREAK
+
+The third and last instance of Cytherea's subjection to those
+periodic terrors of the night which had emphasized her connection
+with the Aldclyffe name and blood occurred at the present date.
+
+It was about four o'clock in the morning when Cytherea, though most
+probably dreaming, seemed to awake--and instantly was transfixed by
+a sort of spell, that had in it more of awe than of affright. At
+the foot of her bed, looking her in the face with an expression of
+entreaty beyond the power of words to portray, was the form of Miss
+Aldclyffe--wan and distinct. No motion was perceptible in her; but
+longing--earnest longing--was written in every feature.
+
+Cytherea believed she exercised her waking judgment as usual in
+thinking, without a shadow of doubt, that Miss Aldclyffe stood
+before her in flesh and blood. Reason was not sufficiently alert to
+lead Cytherea to ask herself how such a thing could have occurred.
+
+'I would have remained with you--why would you not allow me to
+stay!' Cytherea exclaimed. The spell was broken: she became
+broadly awake; and the figure vanished.
+
+It was in the grey time of dawn. She trembled in a sweat of
+disquiet, and not being able to endure the thought of her brother
+being asleep, she went and tapped at his door.
+
+'Owen!'
+
+He was not a heavy sleeper, and it was verging upon his time to
+rise.
+
+'What do you want, Cytherea?'
+
+'I ought not to have left Knapwater last night. I wish I had not.
+I really think I will start at once. She wants me, I know.'
+
+'What time is it?'
+
+'A few minutes past four.'
+
+'You had better not. Keep to the time agreed upon. Consider, we
+should have such a trouble in rousing the driver, and other things.'
+
+Upon the whole it seemed wiser not to act on a mere fancy. She went
+to bed again.
+
+An hour later, when Owen was thinking of getting up, a knocking came
+to the front door. The next minute something touched the glass of
+Owen's window. He waited--the noise was repeated. A little gravel
+had been thrown against it to arouse him.
+
+He crossed the room, pulled up the blind, and looked out. A solemn
+white face was gazing upwards from the road, expectantly straining
+to catch the first glimpse of a person within the panes. It was the
+face of a Knapwater man sitting on horseback.
+
+Owen saw his errand. There is an unmistakable look in the face of
+every man who brings tidings of death. Graye opened the window.
+
+'Miss Aldclyffe . . .' said the messenger, and paused.
+
+'Ah--dead?'
+
+'Yes--she is dead.'
+
+'When did she die?'
+
+'At ten minutes past four, after another effusion. She knew best,
+you see, sir. I started directly, by the rector's orders.'
+
+
+
+                            SEQUEL
+
+Fifteen months have passed, and we are brought on to Midsummer
+Night, 1867.
+
+The picture presented is the interior of the old belfry of Carriford
+Church, at ten o'clock in the evening.
+
+Six Carriford men and one stranger are gathered there, beneath the
+light of a flaring candle stuck on a piece of wood against the wall.
+The six Carriford men are the well-known ringers of the fine-toned
+old bells in the key of F, which have been music to the ears of
+Carriford parish and the outlying districts for the last four
+hundred years. The stranger is an assistant, who has appeared from
+nobody knows where.
+
+The six natives--in their shirt-sleeves, and without hats--pull and
+catch frantically at the dancing bellropes, the locks of their hair
+waving in the breeze created by their quick motions; the stranger,
+who has the treble bell, does likewise, but in his right mind and
+coat. Their ever-changing shadows mingle on the wall in an endless
+variety of kaleidoscopic forms, and the eyes of all the seven are
+religiously fixed on a diagram like a large addition sum, which is
+chalked on the floor.
+
+Vividly contrasting with the yellow light of the candle upon the
+four unplastered walls of the tower, and upon the faces and clothes
+of the men, is the scene discernible through the screen beneath the
+tower archway. At the extremity of the long mysterious avenue of
+the nave and chancel can be seen shafts of moonlight streaming in at
+the east window of the church--blue, phosphoric, and ghostly.
+
+A thorough renovation of the bell-ringing machinery and accessories
+had taken place in anticipation of an interesting event. New ropes
+had been provided; every bell had been carefully shifted from its
+carriage, and the pivots lubricated. Bright red 'sallies' of
+woollen texture--soft to the hands and easily caught--glowed on the
+ropes in place of the old ragged knots, all of which newness in
+small details only rendered more evident the irrepressible aspect of
+age in the mass surrounding them.
+
+The triple-bob-major was ended, and the ringers wiped their faces
+and rolled down their shirt-sleeves, previously to tucking away the
+ropes and leaving the place for the night.
+
+'Piph--h--h--h! A good forty minutes,' said a man with a streaming
+face, and blowing out his breath--one of the pair who had taken the
+tenor bell.
+
+'Our friend here pulled proper well--that 'a did--seeing he's but a
+stranger,' said Clerk Crickett, who had just resigned the second
+rope, and addressing the man in the black coat.
+
+''A did,' said the rest.
+
+'I enjoyed it much,' said the man modestly.
+
+'What we should ha' done without you words can't tell. The man that
+d'belong by rights to that there bell is ill o' two gallons o' wold
+cider.'
+
+'And now so's,' remarked the fifth ringer, as pertaining to the last
+allusion, 'we'll finish this drop o' metheglin and cider, and every
+man home--along straight as a line.'
+
+'Wi' all my heart,' Clerk Crickett replied. 'And the Lord send if I
+ha'n't done my duty by Master Teddy Springrove--that I have so.'
+
+'And the rest o' us,' they said, as the cup was handed round.
+
+'Ay, ay--in ringen--but I was spaken in a spiritual sense o' this
+mornen's business o' mine up by the chancel rails there. 'Twas very
+convenient to lug her here and marry her instead o' doen it at that
+twopenny-halfpenny town o' Budm'th. Very convenient.'
+
+'Very. There was a little fee for Master Crickett.'
+
+'Ah--well. Money's money--very much so--very--I always have said
+it. But 'twas a pretty sight for the nation. He coloured up like
+any maid, that 'a did.'
+
+'Well enough 'a mid colour up. 'Tis no small matter for a man to
+play wi' fire.'
+
+'Whatever it may be to a woman,' said the clerk absently.
+
+'Thou'rt thinken o' thy wife, clerk,' said Gad Weedy. 'She'll play
+wi'it again when thou'st got mildewed.'
+
+'Well--let her, God bless her; for I'm but a poor third man, I. The
+Lord have mercy upon the fourth! . . . Ay, Teddy's got his own at
+last. What little white ears that maid hev, to be sure! choose your
+wife as you choose your pig--a small ear and a small tale--that was
+always my joke when I was a merry feller, ah--years agone now! But
+Teddy's got her. Poor chap, he was getten as thin as a hermit wi'
+grief--so was she.'
+
+'Maybe she'll pick up now.'
+
+'True--'tis nater's law, which no man shall gainsay. Ah, well do I
+bear in mind what I said to Pa'son Raunham, about thy mother's
+family o' seven, Gad, the very first week of his comen here, when I
+was just in my prime. "And how many daughters has that poor Weedy
+got, clerk?" he says. "Six, sir," says I, "and every one of 'em has
+a brother!" "Poor woman," says he, "a dozen children!--give her
+this half-sovereign from me, clerk." 'A laughed a good five minutes
+afterwards, when he found out my merry nater--'a did. But there,
+'tis over wi' me now. Enteren the Church is the ruin of a man's wit
+for wit's nothen without a faint shadder o' sin.'
+
+'If so be Teddy and the lady had been kept apart for life, they'd
+both ha' died,' said Gad emphatically.
+
+'But now instead o' death there'll be increase o' life,' answered
+the clerk.
+
+'It all went proper well,' said the fifth bell-ringer. 'They didn't
+flee off to Babylonish places--not they.' He struck up an attitude
+--'Here's Master Springrove standen so: here's the married woman
+standen likewise; here they d'walk across to Knapwater House; and
+there they d'bide in the chimley corner, hard and fast.'
+
+'Yes, 'twas a pretty wedden, and well attended,' added the clerk.
+'Here was my lady herself--red as scarlet: here was Master
+Springrove, looken as if he half wished he'd never a-come--ah, poor
+souls!--the men always do! The women do stand it best--the maid was
+in her glory. Though she was so shy the glory shone plain through
+that shy skin. Ah, it did so's.'
+
+'Ay,' said Gad, 'and there was Tim Tankins and his five journeymen
+carpenters, standen on tiptoe and peepen in at the chancel winders.
+There was Dairyman Dodman waiten in his new spring-cart to see 'em
+come out--whip in hand--that 'a was. Then up comes two master
+tailors. Then there was Christopher Runt wi' his pickaxe and
+shovel. There was wimmen-folk and there was men-folk traypsen up
+and down church'ard till they wore a path wi' traypsen so--letten
+the squallen children slip down through their arms and nearly
+skinnen o' em. And these were all over and above the gentry and
+Sunday-clothes folk inside. Well, I seed Mr. Graye at last dressed
+up quite the dand. "Well, Mr. Graye," says I from the top o'
+church'ard wall, "how's yerself?" Mr. Graye never spoke--he'd
+prided away his hearen. Seize the man, I didn' want en to spak.
+Teddy hears it, and turns round: "All right, Gad!" says he, and
+laughed like a boy. There's more in Teddy.'
+
+'Well,' said Clerk Crickett, turning to the man in black, 'now
+you've been among us so long, and d'know us so well, won't ye tell
+us what ye've come here for, and what your trade is?'
+
+'I am no trade,' said the thin man, smiling, 'and I came to see the
+wickedness of the land.'
+
+'I said thou wast one o' the devil's brood wi' thy black clothes,'
+replied a sturdy ringer, who had not spoken before.
+
+'No, the truth is,' said the thin man, retracting at this horrible
+translation, 'I came for a walk because it is a fine evening.'
+
+'Now let's be off, neighbours,' the clerk interrupted.
+
+The candle was inverted in the socket, and the whole party stepped
+out into the churchyard. The moon was shining within a day or two
+of full, and just overlooked the three or four vast yews that stood
+on the south-east side of the church, and rose in unvaried and flat
+darkness against the illuminated atmosphere behind them.
+
+'Good-night,' the clerk said to his comrades, when the door was
+locked. 'My nearest way is through the park.'
+
+'I suppose mine is too?' said the stranger. 'I am going to the
+railway-station.'
+
+'Of course--come on.'
+
+The two men went over a stile to the west, the remainder of the
+party going into the road on the opposite side.
+
+'And so the romance has ended well,' the clerk's companion remarked,
+as they brushed along through the grass. 'But what is the truth of
+the story about the property?'
+
+'Now look here, neighbour,' said Clerk Crickett, 'if so be you'll
+tell me what your line o' life is, and your purpose in comen here
+to-day, I'll tell you the truth about the wedden particulars.'
+
+'Very well--I will when you have done,' said the other man.
+
+''Tis a bargain; and this is the right o' the story. When Miss
+Aldclyffe's will was opened, it was found to have been drawn up on
+the very day that Manston (her love-child) married Miss Cytherea
+Graye. And this is what that deep woman did. Deep? she was as deep
+as the North Star. She bequeathed all her property, real and
+personal, to "THE WIFE OF AENEAS MANSTON" (with one exception):
+failen her life to her husband: failen his life to the heirs of his
+head--body I would say: failen them to her absolutely and her heirs
+for ever: failen these to Pa'son Raunham, and so on to the end o'
+the human race. Now do you see the depth of her scheme? Why,
+although upon the surface it appeared her whole property was for
+Miss Cytherea, by the word "wife" being used, and not Cytherea's
+name, whoever was the wife o' Manston would come in for't. Wasn't
+that rale depth? It was done, of course, that her son AEneas, under
+any circumstances, should be master o' the property, without folk
+knowen it was her son or suspecting anything, as they would if it
+had been left to en straightway.'
+
+'A clever arrangement! And what was the exception?'
+
+'The payment of a legacy to her relative, Pa'son Raunham.'
+
+'And Miss Cytherea was now Manston's widow and only relative, and
+inherited all absolutely.'
+
+'True, she did. "Well," says she, "I shan't have it" (she didn't
+like the notion o' getten anything through Manston, naturally
+enough, pretty dear). She waived her right in favour o' Mr.
+Raunham. Now, if there's a man in the world that d'care nothen
+about land--I don't say there is, but _if_ there is--'tis our pa'son.
+He's like a snail. He's a-growed so to the shape o' that there
+rectory that 'a wouldn' think o' leaven it even in name. "'Tis
+yours, Miss Graye," says he. "No, 'tis yours," says she. "'Tis'n'
+mine," says he. The Crown had cast his eyes upon the case, thinken
+o' forfeiture by felony--but 'twas no such thing, and 'a gied it up,
+too. Did you ever hear such a tale?--three people, a man and a
+woman, and a Crown--neither o' em in a madhouse--flingen an estate
+backwards and forwards like an apple or nut? Well, it ended in this
+way. Mr. Raunham took it: young Springrove was had as agent and
+steward, and put to live in Knapwater House, close here at hand
+--just as if 'twas his own. He does just what he'd like--Mr. Raunham
+never interferen--and hither to-day he's brought his new wife,
+Cytherea. And a settlement ha' been drawn up this very day, whereby
+their children, heirs, and cetrer, be to inherit after Mr. Raunham's
+death. Good fortune came at last. Her brother, too, is doen well.
+He came in first man in some architectural competition, and is about
+to move to London. Here's the house, look. Stap out from these
+bushes, and you'll get a clear sight o't.'
+
+They emerged from the shrubbery, breaking off towards the lake, and
+down the south slope. When they arrived exactly opposite the centre
+of the mansion, they halted.
+
+It was a magnificent picture of the English country-house. The
+whole of the severe regular front, with its columns and cornices,
+was built of a white smoothly-faced freestone, which appeared in the
+rays of the moon as pure as Pentelic marble. The sole objects in
+the scene rivalling the fairness of the facade were a dozen swans
+floating upon the lake.
+
+At this moment the central door at the top of the steps was opened,
+and two figures advanced into the light. Two contrasting figures
+were they. A young lithe woman in an airy fairy dress--Cytherea
+Springrove: a young man in black stereotype raiment--Edward, her
+husband.
+
+They stood at the top of the steps together, looking at the moon,
+the water, and the general loveliness of the prospect.
+
+'That's the married man and wife--there, I've illustrated my story
+by rale liven specimens,' the clerk whispered.
+
+'To be sure, how close together they do stand! You couldn' slip a
+penny-piece between 'em--that you couldn'! Beautiful to see it,
+isn't it--beautiful! . . . But this is a private path, and we won't
+let 'em see us, as all the ringers be goen there to a supper and
+dance to-morrow night.'
+
+The speaker and his companion softly moved on, passed through the
+wicket, and into the coach-road. Arrived at the clerk's house at
+the further boundary of the park, they paused to part.
+
+'Now for your half o' the bargain,' said Clerk Crickett. 'What's
+your line o' life, and what d'ye come here for?'
+
+'I'm the reporter to the Casterbridge Chronicle, and I come to pick
+up the news. Good-night.'
+
+
+
+Meanwhile Edward and Cytherea, after lingering on the steps for
+several minutes, slowly descended the slope to the lake. The skiff
+was lying alongside.
+
+'O, Edward,' said Cytherea, 'you must do something that has just
+come into my head!'
+
+'Well, dearest--I know.'
+
+'Yes--give me one half-minute's row on the lake here now, just as
+you did on Budmouth Bay three years ago.'
+
+He handed her into the boat, and almost noiselessly pulled off from
+shore. When they were half-way between the two margins of the lake,
+he paused and looked at her.
+
+'Ah, darling, I remember exactly how I kissed you that first time,'
+said Springrove. 'You were there as you are now. I unshipped the
+sculls in this way. Then I turned round and sat beside you--in this
+way. Then I put my hand on the other side of your little neck--'
+
+'I think it was just on my cheek, in this way.'
+
+'Ah, so it was. Then you moved that soft red mouth round to mine--'
+
+'But, dearest--you pressed it round if you remember; and of course I
+couldn't then help letting it come to your mouth without being
+unkind to you, and I wouldn't be that.'
+
+'And then I put my cheek against that cheek, and turned my two lips
+round upon those two lips, and kissed them--so.'
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Desperate Remedies, by Thomas Hardy
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Desperate Remedies by Thomas Hardy
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+Title:  Desperate Remedies
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+Author:  Thomas Hardy
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+
+
+
+DESPERATE REMEDIES
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+PREFATORY NOTE
+I.     THE EVENTS OF THIRTY YEARS
+II.    THE EVENTS OF A FORTNIGHT
+III.   THE EVENTS OF EIGHT DAYS
+IV.    THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
+V.     THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
+VI.    THE EVENTS OF TWELVE HOURS
+VII.   THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN DAYS
+VIII.  THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN DAYS
+IX.    THE EVENTS OF TEN WEEKS
+X.     THE EVENTS OF A DAY AND NIGHT
+XI.    THE EVENTS OF FIVE DAYS
+XII.   THE EVENTS OF TEN MONTHS
+XIII.  THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
+XIV.   THE EVENTS OF FIVE WEEKS
+XV.    THE EVENTS OF THREE WEEKS
+XVI.   THE EVENTS OF ONE WEEK
+XVII.  THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
+XVIII. THE EVENTS OF THREE DAYS
+XIX.   THE EVENTS OF A DAY AND NIGHT
+XX.    THE EVENTS OF THREE HOURS
+XXI.   THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN HOURS
+       SEQUEL
+
+
+
+PREFATORY NOTE
+
+
+
+The following story, the first published by the author, was written
+nineteen years ago, at a time when he was feeling his way to a
+method.  The principles observed in its composition are, no doubt,
+too exclusively those in which mystery, entanglement, surprise, and
+moral obliquity are depended on for exciting interest; but some of
+the scenes, and at least one of the characters, have been deemed not
+unworthy of a little longer preservation; and as they could hardly
+be reproduced in a fragmentary form the novel is reissued complete--
+the more readily that it has for some considerable time been
+reprinted and widely circulated in America.
+January 1889.
+
+To the foregoing note I have only to add that, in the present
+edition of 'Desperate Remedies,' some Wessex towns and other places
+that are common to the scenes of several of these stories have been
+called for the first time by the names under which they appear
+elsewhere, for the satisfaction of any reader who may care for
+consistency in such matters.
+
+This is the only material change; for, as it happened that certain
+characteristics which provoked most discussion in my latest story
+were present in this my first--published in 1871, when there was no
+French name for them it has seemed best to let them stand unaltered.
+
+T.H.
+February 1896.
+
+
+
+
+I.  THE EVENTS OF THIRTY YEARS
+
+1.  DECEMBER AND JANUARY, 1835-36
+
+In the long and intricately inwrought chain of circumstance which
+renders worthy of record some experiences of Cytherea Graye, Edward
+Springrove, and others, the first event directly influencing the
+issue was a Christmas visit.
+
+In the above-mentioned year, 1835, Ambrose Graye, a young architect
+who had just begun the practice of his profession in the midland
+town of Hocbridge, to the north of Christminster, went to London to
+spend the Christmas holidays with a friend who lived in Bloomsbury.
+They had gone up to Cambridge in the same year, and, after
+graduating together, Huntway, the friend, had taken orders.
+
+Graye was handsome, frank, and gentle.  He had a quality of thought
+which, exercised on homeliness, was humour; on nature,
+picturesqueness; on abstractions, poetry.  Being, as a rule,
+broadcast, it was all three.
+
+Of the wickedness of the world he was too forgetful.  To discover
+evil in a new friend is to most people only an additional
+experience:  to him it was ever a surprise.
+
+While in London he became acquainted with a retired officer in the
+Navy named Bradleigh, who, with his wife and their daughter, lived
+in a street not far from Russell Square.  Though they were in no
+more than comfortable circumstances, the captain's wife came of an
+ancient family whose genealogical tree was interlaced with some of
+the most illustrious and well-known in the kingdom.
+
+The young lady, their daughter, seemed to Graye by far the most
+beautiful and queenly being he had ever beheld.  She was about
+nineteen or twenty, and her name was Cytherea.  In truth she was not
+so very unlike country girls of that type of beauty, except in one
+respect.  She was perfect in her manner and bearing, and they were
+not.  A mere distinguishing peculiarity, by catching the eye, is
+often read as the pervading characteristic, and she appeared to him
+no less than perfection throughout--transcending her rural rivals in
+very nature.  Graye did a thing the blissfulness of which was only
+eclipsed by its hazardousness.  He loved her at first sight.
+
+His introductions had led him into contact with Cytherea and her
+parents two or three times on the first week of his arrival in
+London, and accident and a lover's contrivance brought them together
+as frequently the week following.  The parents liked young Graye,
+and having few friends (for their equals in blood were their
+superiors in position), he was received on very generous terms.  His
+passion for Cytherea grew not only strong, but ineffably exalted:
+she, without positively encouraging him, tacitly assented to his
+schemes for being near her.  Her father and mother seemed to have
+lost all confidence in nobility of birth, without money to give
+effect to its presence, and looked upon the budding consequence of
+the young people's reciprocal glances with placidity, if not actual
+favour.
+
+Graye's whole impassioned dream terminated in a sad and
+unaccountable episode.  After passing through three weeks of sweet
+experience, he had arrived at the last stage--a kind of moral Gaza--
+before plunging into an emotional desert.  The second week in
+January had come round, and it was necessary for the young architect
+to leave town.
+
+Throughout his acquaintanceship with the lady of his heart there had
+been this marked peculiarity in her love:  she had delighted in his
+presence as a sweetheart should do, yet from first to last she had
+repressed all recognition of the true nature of the thread which
+drew them together, blinding herself to its meaning and only natural
+tendency, and appearing to dread his announcement of them.  The
+present seemed enough for her without cumulative hope:  usually,
+even if love is in itself an end, it must be regarded as a beginning
+to be enjoyed.
+
+In spite of evasions as an obstacle, and in consequence of them as a
+spur, he would put the matter off no longer.  It was evening.  He
+took her into a little conservatory on the landing, and there among
+the evergreens, by the light of a few tiny lamps, infinitely
+enhancing the freshness and beauty of the leaves, he made the
+declaration of a love as fresh and beautiful as they.
+
+'My love--my darling, be my wife!'
+
+She seemed like one just awakened.  'Ah--we must part now!' she
+faltered, in a voice of anguish.  'I will write to you.'  She
+loosened her hand and rushed away.
+
+In a wild fever Graye went home and watched for the next morning.
+Who shall express his misery and wonder when a note containing these
+words was put into his hand?
+
+'Good-bye; good-bye for ever.  As recognized lovers something
+divides us eternally.  Forgive me--I should have told you before;
+but your love was sweet!  Never mention me.'
+
+That very day, and as it seemed, to put an end to a painful
+condition of things, daughter and parents left London to pay off a
+promised visit to a relative in a western county.  No message or
+letter of entreaty could wring from her any explanation.  She begged
+him not to follow her, and the most bewildering point was that her
+father and mother appeared, from the tone of a letter Graye received
+from them, as vexed and sad as he at this sudden renunciation.  One
+thing was plain:  without admitting her reason as valid, they knew
+what that reason was, and did not intend to reveal it.
+
+A week from that day Ambrose Graye left his friend Huntway's house
+and saw no more of the Love he mourned.  From time to time his
+friend answered any inquiry Graye made by letter respecting her.
+But very poor food to a lover is intelligence of a mistress filtered
+through a friend.  Huntway could tell nothing definitely.  He said
+he believed there had been some prior flirtation between Cytherea
+and her cousin, an officer of the line, two or three years before
+Graye met her, which had suddenly been terminated by the cousin's
+departure for India, and the young lady's travelling on the
+Continent with her parents the whole of the ensuing summer, on
+account of delicate health.  Eventually Huntway said that
+circumstances had rendered Graye's attachment more hopeless still.
+Cytherea's mother had unexpectedly inherited a large fortune and
+estates in the west of England by the rapid fall of some intervening
+lives.  This had caused their removal from the small house in
+Bloomsbury, and, as it appeared, a renunciation of their old friends
+in that quarter.
+
+Young Graye concluded that his Cytherea had forgotten him and his
+love.  But he could not forget her.
+
+2.  FROM 1843 TO 1861
+
+Eight years later, feeling lonely and depressed--a man without
+relatives, with many acquaintances but no friends--Ambrose Graye met
+a young lady of a different kind, fairly endowed with money and good
+gifts.  As to caring very deeply for another woman after the loss of
+Cytherea, it was an absolute impossibility with him.  With all, the
+beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude
+pursuit; but with some natures utter elusion is the one special
+event which will make a passing love permanent for ever.
+
+This second young lady and Graye were married.  That he did not,
+first or last, love his wife as he should have done, was known to
+all; but few knew that his unmanageable heart could never be weaned
+from useless repining at the loss of its first idol.
+
+His character to some extent deteriorated, as emotional
+constitutions will under the long sense of disappointment at having
+missed their imagined destiny.  And thus, though naturally of a
+gentle and pleasant disposition, he grew to be not so tenderly
+regarded by his acquaintances as it is the lot of some of those
+persons to be.  The winning and sanguine receptivity of his early
+life developed by degrees a moody nervousness, and when not
+picturing prospects drawn from baseless hope he was the victim of
+indescribable depression.  The practical issue of such a condition
+was improvidence, originally almost an unconscious improvidence, for
+every debt incurred had been mentally paid off with a religious
+exactness from the treasures of expectation before mentioned.  But
+as years revolved, the same course was continued from the lack of
+spirit sufficient for shifting out of an old groove when it has been
+found to lead to disaster.
+
+In the year 1861 his wife died, leaving him a widower with two
+children.  The elder, a son named Owen, now just turned seventeen,
+was taken from school, and initiated as pupil to the profession of
+architect in his father's office.  The remaining child was a
+daughter, and Owen's junior by a year.
+
+Her christian name was Cytherea, and it is easy to guess why.
+
+3.  OCTOBER THE TWELFTH, 1863
+
+We pass over two years in order to reach the next cardinal event of
+these persons' lives.  The scene is still the Grayes' native town of
+Hocbridge, but as it appeared on a Monday afternoon in the month of
+October.
+
+The weather was sunny and dry, but the ancient borough was to be
+seen wearing one of its least attractive aspects.  First on account
+of the time.  It was that stagnant hour of the twenty-four when the
+practical garishness of Day, having escaped from the fresh long
+shadows and enlivening newness of the morning, has not yet made any
+perceptible advance towards acquiring those mellow and soothing
+tones which grace its decline.  Next, it was that stage in the
+progress of the week when business--which, carried on under the
+gables of an old country place, is not devoid of a romantic sparkle-
+-was well-nigh extinguished.  Lastly, the town was intentionally
+bent upon being attractive by exhibiting to an influx of visitors
+the local talent for dramatic recitation, and provincial towns
+trying to be lively are the dullest of dull things.
+
+Little towns are like little children in this respect, that they
+interest most when they are enacting native peculiarities
+unconscious of beholders.  Discovering themselves to be watched they
+attempt to be entertaining by putting on an antic, and produce
+disagreeable caricatures which spoil them.
+
+The weather-stained clock-face in the low church tower standing at
+the intersection of the three chief streets was expressing half-past
+two to the Town Hall opposite, where the much talked-of reading from
+Shakespeare was about to begin.  The doors were open, and those
+persons who had already assembled within the building were noticing
+the entrance of the new-comers--silently criticizing their dress--
+questioning the genuineness of their teeth and hair--estimating
+their private means.
+
+Among these later ones came an exceptional young maiden who glowed
+amid the dulness like a single bright-red poppy in a field of brown
+stubble.  She wore an elegant dark jacket, lavender dress, hat with
+grey strings and trimmings, and gloves of a colour to harmonize.
+She lightly walked up the side passage of the room, cast a slight
+glance around, and entered the seat pointed out to her.
+
+The young girl was Cytherea Graye; her age was now about eighteen.
+During her entry, and at various times whilst sitting in her seat
+and listening to the reader on the platform, her personal appearance
+formed an interesting subject of study for several neighbouring
+eyes.
+
+Her face was exceedingly attractive, though artistically less
+perfect than her figure, which approached unusually near to the
+standard of faultlessness.  But even this feature of hers yielded
+the palm to the gracefulness of her movement, which was fascinating
+and delightful to an extreme degree.
+
+Indeed, motion was her speciality, whether shown on its most
+extended scale of bodily progression, or minutely, as in the
+uplifting of her eyelids, the bending of her fingers, the pouting of
+her lip.  The carriage of her head--motion within motion--a glide
+upon a glide--was as delicate as that of a magnetic needle.  And
+this flexibility and elasticity had never been taught her by rule,
+nor even been acquired by observation, but, nullo cultu, had
+naturally developed itself with her years.  In childhood, a stone or
+stalk in the way, which had been the inevitable occasion of a fall
+to her playmates, had usually left her safe and upright on her feet
+after the narrowest escape by oscillations and whirls for the
+preservation of her balance.  At mixed Christmas parties, when she
+numbered but twelve or thirteen years, and was heartily despised on
+that account by lads who deemed themselves men, her apt lightness in
+the dance covered this incompleteness in her womanhood, and
+compelled the self-same youths in spite of resolutions to seize upon
+her childish figure as a partner whom they could not afford to
+contemn.  And in later years, when the instincts of her sex had
+shown her this point as the best and rarest feature in her external
+self, she was not found wanting in attention to the cultivation of
+finish in its details.
+
+Her hair rested gaily upon her shoulders in curls and was of a
+shining corn yellow in the high lights, deepening to a definite nut-
+brown as each curl wound round into the shade.  She had eyes of a
+sapphire hue, though rather darker than the gem ordinarily appears;
+they possessed the affectionate and liquid sparkle of loyalty and
+good faith as distinguishable from that harder brightness which
+seems to express faithfulness only to the object confronting them.
+
+But to attempt to gain a view of her--or indeed of any fascinating
+woman--from a measured category, is as difficult as to appreciate
+the effect of a landscape by exploring it at night with a lantern--
+or of a full chord of music by piping the notes in succession.
+Nevertheless it may readily be believed from the description here
+ventured, that among the many winning phases of her aspect, these
+were particularly striking:--
+
+     During pleasant doubt, when her eyes brightened stealthily and
+smiled (as eyes will smile) as distinctly as her lips, and in the
+space of a single instant expressed clearly the whole round of
+degrees of expectancy which lie over the wide expanse between Yea
+and Nay.
+
+     During the telling of a secret, which was involuntarily
+accompanied by a sudden minute start, and ecstatic pressure of the
+listener's arm, side, or neck, as the position and degree of
+intimacy dictated.
+
+     When anxiously regarding one who possessed her affections.
+
+She suddenly assumed the last-mentioned bearing in the progress of
+the present entertainment.  Her glance was directed out of the
+window.
+
+Why the particulars of a young lady's presence at a very mediocre
+performance were prevented from dropping into the oblivion which
+their intrinsic insignificance would naturally have involved--why
+they were remembered and individualized by herself and others
+through after years--was simply that she unknowingly stood, as it
+were, upon the extreme posterior edge of a tract in her life, in
+which the real meaning of Taking Thought had never been known.  It
+was the last hour of experience she ever enjoyed with a mind
+entirely free from a knowledge of that labyrinth into which she
+stepped immediately afterwards--to continue a perplexed course along
+its mazes for the greater portion of twenty-nine subsequent months.
+
+The Town Hall, in which Cytherea sat, was a building of brown stone,
+and through one of the windows could be seen from the interior of
+the room the housetops and chimneys of the adjacent street, and also
+the upper part of a neighbouring church spire, now in course of
+completion under the superintendence of Miss Graye's father, the
+architect to the work.
+
+That the top of this spire should be visible from her position in
+the room was a fact which Cytherea's idling eyes had discovered with
+some interest, and she was now engaged in watching the scene that
+was being enacted about its airy summit.  Round the conical
+stonework rose a cage of scaffolding against the blue sky, and upon
+this stood five men--four in clothes as white as the new erection
+close beneath their hands, the fifth in the ordinary dark suit of a
+gentleman.
+
+The four working-men in white were three masons and a mason's
+labourer.  The fifth man was the architect, Mr. Graye.  He had been
+giving directions as it seemed, and retiring as far as the narrow
+footway allowed, stood perfectly still.
+
+The picture thus presented to a spectator in the Town Hall was
+curious and striking.  It was an illuminated miniature, framed in by
+the dark margin of the window, the keen-edged shadiness of which
+emphasized by contrast the softness of the objects enclosed.
+
+The height of the spire was about one hundred and twenty feet, and
+the five men engaged thereon seemed entirely removed from the sphere
+and experiences of ordinary human beings.  They appeared little
+larger than pigeons, and made their tiny movements with a soft,
+spirit-like silentness.  One idea above all others was conveyed to
+the mind of a person on the ground by their aspect, namely,
+concentration of purpose:  that they were indifferent to--even
+unconscious of--the distracted world beneath them, and all that
+moved upon it.  They never looked off the scaffolding.
+
+Then one of them turned; it was Mr. Graye.  Again he stood
+motionless, with attention to the operations of the others.  He
+appeared to be lost in reflection, and had directed his face towards
+a new stone they were lifting.
+
+'Why does he stand like that?' the young lady thought at length--up
+to that moment as listless and careless as one of the ancient
+Tarentines, who, on such an afternoon as this, watched from the
+Theatre the entry into their Harbour of a power that overturned the
+State.
+
+She moved herself uneasily.  'I wish he would come down,' she
+whispered, still gazing at the skybacked picture.  'It is so
+dangerous to be absent-minded up there.'
+
+When she had done murmuring the words her father indecisively laid
+hold of one of the scaffold-poles, as if to test its strength, then
+let it go and stepped back.  In stepping, his foot slipped.  An
+instant of doubling forward and sideways, and he reeled off into the
+air, immediately disappearing downwards.
+
+His agonized daughter rose to her feet by a convulsive movement.
+Her lips parted, and she gasped for breath.  She could utter no
+sound.  One by one the people about her, unconscious of what had
+happened, turned their heads, and inquiry and alarm became visible
+upon their faces at the sight of the poor child.  A moment longer,
+and she fell to the floor,
+
+The next impression of which Cytherea had any consciousness was of
+being carried from a strange vehicle across the pavement to the
+steps of her own house by her brother and an older man.
+Recollection of what had passed evolved itself an instant later, and
+just as they entered the door--through which another and sadder
+burden had been carried but a few instants before--her eyes caught
+sight of the south-western sky, and, without heeding, saw white
+sunlight shining in shaft-like lines from a rift in a slaty cloud.
+Emotions will attach themselves to scenes that are simultaneous--
+however foreign in essence these scenes may be--as chemical waters
+will crystallize on twigs and wires.  Even after that time any
+mental agony brought less vividly to Cytherea's mind the scene from
+the Town Hall windows than sunlight streaming in shaft-like lines.
+
+4.  OCTOBER THE NINETEENTH
+
+When death enters a house, an element of sadness and an element of
+horror accompany it.  Sadness, from the death itself:  horror, from
+the clouds of blackness we designedly labour to introduce.
+
+The funeral had taken place.  Depressed, yet resolved in his
+demeanour, Owen Graye sat before his father's private escritoire,
+engaged in turning out and unfolding a heterogeneous collection of
+papers--forbidding and inharmonious to the eye at all times--most of
+all to one under the influence of a great grief.  Laminae of white
+paper tied with twine were indiscriminately intermixed with other
+white papers bounded by black edges--these with blue foolscap
+wrapped round with crude red tape.
+
+The bulk of these letters, bills, and other documents were submitted
+to a careful examination, by which the appended particulars were
+ascertained:--
+
+     First, that their father's income from professional sources had
+been very small, amounting to not more than half their expenditure;
+and that his own and his wife's property, upon which he had relied
+for the balance, had been sunk and lost in unwise loans to
+unscrupulous men, who had traded upon their father's too open-
+hearted trustfulness.
+
+     Second, that finding his mistake, he had endeavoured to regain
+his standing by the illusory path of speculation.  The most notable
+instance of this was the following.  He had been induced, when at
+Plymouth in the autumn of the previous year, to venture all his
+spare capital on the bottomry security of an Italian brig which had
+put into the harbour in distress.  The profit was to be
+considerable, so was the risk.  There turned out to be no security
+whatever.  The circumstances of the case tendered it the most
+unfortunate speculation that a man like himself--ignorant of all
+such matters--could possibly engage in.  The vessel went down, and
+all Mr. Graye's money with it.
+
+     Third, that these failures had left him burdened with debts he
+knew not how to meet; so that at the time of his death even the few
+pounds lying to his account at the bank were his only in name.
+
+     Fourth, that the loss of his wife two years earlier had
+awakened him to a keen sense of his blindness, and of his duty by
+his children.  He had then resolved to reinstate by unflagging zeal
+in the pursuit of his profession, and by no speculation, at least a
+portion of the little fortune he had let go.
+
+Cytherea was frequently at her brother's elbow during these
+examinations.  She often remarked sadly--
+
+'Poor papa failed to fulfil his good intention for want of time,
+didn't he, Owen?  And there was an excuse for his past, though he
+never would claim it.  I never forget that original disheartening
+blow, and how that from it sprang all the ills of his life--
+everything connected with his gloom, and the lassitude in business
+we used so often to see about him.'
+
+'I remember what he said once,' returned the brother, 'when I sat up
+late with him.  He said, "Owen, don't love too blindly:  blindly you
+will love if you love at all, but a little care is still possible to
+a well-disciplined heart.  May that heart be yours as it was not
+mine," father said.  "Cultivate the art of renunciation."  And I am
+going to, Cytherea.'
+
+'And once mamma said that an excellent woman was papa's ruin,
+because he did not know the way to give her up when he had lost her.
+I wonder where she is now, Owen?  We were told not to try to find
+out anything about her.  Papa never told us her name, did he?'
+
+'That was by her own request, I believe.  But never mind her; she
+was not our mother.'
+
+The love affair which had been Ambrose Graye's disheartening blow
+was precisely of that nature which lads take little account of, but
+girls ponder in their hearts.
+
+5.  FROM OCTOBER THE NINETEENTH TO JULY THE NINTH
+
+Thus Ambrose Graye's good intentions with regard to the
+reintegration of his property had scarcely taken tangible form when
+his sudden death put them for ever out of his power.
+
+Heavy bills, showing the extent of his obligations, tumbled in
+immediately upon the heels of the funeral from quarters previously
+unheard and unthought of.  Thus pressed, a bill was filed in
+Chancery to have the assets, such as they were, administered by the
+Court.
+
+'What will become of us now?' thought Owen continually.
+
+There is in us an unquenchable expectation, which at the gloomiest
+time persists in inferring that because we are OURSELVES, there must
+be a special future in store for us, though our nature and
+antecedents to the remotest particular have been common to
+thousands.  Thus to Cytherea and Owen Graye the question how their
+lives would end seemed the deepest of possible enigmas.  To others
+who knew their position equally well with themselves the question
+was the easiest that could be asked--'Like those of other people
+similarly circumstanced.'
+
+Then Owen held a consultation with his sister to come to some
+decision on their future course, and a month was passed in waiting
+for answers to letters, and in the examination of schemes more or
+less futile.  Sudden hopes that were rainbows to the sight proved
+but mists to the touch.  In the meantime, unpleasant remarks,
+disguise them as some well-meaning people might, were floating
+around them every day.  The undoubted truth, that they were the
+children of a dreamer who let slip away every farthing of his money
+and ran into debt with his neighbours--that the daughter had been
+brought up to no profession--that the son who had, had made no
+progress in it, and might come to the dogs--could not from the
+nature of things be wrapped up in silence in order that it might not
+hurt their feelings; and as a matter of fact, it greeted their ears
+in some form or other wherever they went.  Their few acquaintances
+passed them hurriedly.  Ancient pot-wallopers, and thriving
+shopkeepers, in their intervals of leisure, stood at their shop-
+doors--their toes hanging over the edge of the step, and their obese
+waists hanging over their toes--and in discourses with friends on
+the pavement, formulated the course of the improvident, and reduced
+the children's prospects to a shadow-like attenuation.  The sons of
+these men (who wore breastpins of a sarcastic kind, and smoked
+humorous pipes) stared at Cytherea with a stare unmitigated by any
+of the respect that had formerly softened it.
+
+Now it is a noticeable fact that we do not much mind what men think
+of us, or what humiliating secret they discover of our means,
+parentage, or object, provided that each thinks and acts thereupon
+in isolation.  It is the exchange of ideas about us that we dread
+most; and the possession by a hundred acquaintances, severally
+insulated, of the knowledge of our skeleton-closet's whereabouts, is
+not so distressing to the nerves as a chat over it by a party of
+half-a-dozen--exclusive depositaries though these may be.
+
+Perhaps, though Hocbridge watched and whispered, its animus would
+have been little more than a trifle to persons in thriving
+circumstances.  But unfortunately, poverty, whilst it is new, and
+before the skin has had time to thicken, makes people susceptible
+inversely to their opportunities for shielding themselves.  In Owen
+was found, in place of his father's impressibility, a larger share
+of his father's pride, and a squareness of idea which, if coupled
+with a little more blindness, would have amounted to positive
+prejudice.  To him humanity, so far as he had thought of it at all,
+was rather divided into distinct classes than blended from extreme
+to extreme.  Hence by a sequence of ideas which might be traced if
+it were worth while, he either detested or respected opinion, and
+instinctively sought to escape a cold shade that mere sensitiveness
+would have endured.  He could have submitted to separation,
+sickness, exile, drudgery, hunger and thirst, with stoical
+indifference, but superciliousness was too incisive.
+
+After living on for nine months in attempts to make an income as his
+father's successor in the profession--attempts which were utterly
+fruitless by reason of his inexperience--Graye came to a simple and
+sweeping resolution.  They would privately leave that part of
+England, drop from the sight of acquaintances, gossips, harsh
+critics, and bitter creditors of whose misfortune he was not the
+cause, and escape the position which galled him by the only road
+their great poverty left open to them--that of his obtaining some
+employment in a distant place by following his profession as a
+humble under-draughtsman.
+
+He thought over his capabilities with the sensations of a soldier
+grinding his sword at the opening of a campaign.  What with lack of
+employment, owing to the decrease of his late father's practice, and
+the absence of direct and uncompromising pressure towards monetary
+results from a pupil's labour (which seems to be always the case
+when a professional man's pupil is also his son), Owen's progress in
+the art and science of architecture had been very insignificant
+indeed.  Though anything but an idle young man, he had hardly
+reached the age at which industrious men who lack an external whip
+to send them on in the world, are induced by their own common sense
+to whip on themselves.  Hence his knowledge of plans, elevations,
+sections, and specifications, was not greater at the end of two
+years of probation than might easily have been acquired in six
+months by a youth of average ability--himself, for instance--amid a
+bustling London practice.
+
+But at any rate he could make himself handy to one of the
+profession--some man in a remote town--and there fulfil his
+indentures.  A tangible inducement lay in this direction of survey.
+He had a slight conception of such a man--a Mr. Gradfield--who was
+in practice in Budmouth Regis, a seaport town and watering-place in
+the south of England.
+
+After some doubts, Graye ventured to write to this gentleman, asking
+the necessary question, shortly alluding to his father's death, and
+stating that his term of apprenticeship had only half expired.  He
+would be glad to complete his articles at a very low salary for the
+whole remaining two years, provided payment could begin at once.
+
+The answer from Mr. Gradfield stated that he was not in want of a
+pupil who would serve the remainder of his time on the terms Mr.
+Graye mentioned.  But he would just add one remark.  He chanced to
+be in want of some young man in his office--for a short time only,
+probably about two months--to trace drawings, and attend to other
+subsidiary work of the kind.  If Mr. Graye did not object to occupy
+such an inferior position as these duties would entail, and to
+accept weekly wages which to one with his expectations would be
+considered merely nominal, the post would give him an opportunity
+for learning a few more details of the profession.
+
+'It is a beginning, and, above all, an abiding-place, away from the
+shadow of the cloud which hangs over us here--I will go,' said Owen.
+
+Cytherea's plan for her future, an intensely simple one, owing to
+the even greater narrowness of her resources, was already marked
+out.  One advantage had accrued to her through her mother's
+possession of a fair share of personal property, and perhaps only
+one.  She had been carefully educated.  Upon this consideration her
+plan was based.  She was to take up her abode in her brother's
+lodging at Budmouth, when she would immediately advertise for a
+situation as governess, having obtained the consent of a lawyer at
+Aldbrickham who was winding up her father's affairs, and who knew
+the history of her position, to allow himself to be referred to in
+the matter of her past life and respectability.
+
+Early one morning they departed from their native town, leaving
+behind them scarcely a trace of their footsteps.
+
+Then the town pitied their want of wisdom in taking such a step.
+'Rashness; they would have made a better income in Hocbridge, where
+they are known!  There is no doubt that they would.'
+
+But what is Wisdom really?  A steady handling of any means to bring
+about any end necessary to happiness.
+
+Yet whether one's end be the usual end--a wealthy position in life--
+or no, the name of wisdom is seldom applied but to the means to that
+usual end.
+
+
+
+II.  THE EVENTS OF A FORTNIGHT
+
+1.  THE NINTH OF JULY
+
+The day of their departure was one of the most glowing that the
+climax of a long series of summer heats could evolve.  The wide
+expanse of landscape quivered up and down like the flame of a taper,
+as they steamed along through the midst of it.  Placid flocks of
+sheep reclining under trees a little way off appeared of a pale blue
+colour.  Clover fields were livid with the brightness of the sun
+upon their deep red flowers.  All waggons and carts were moved to
+the shade by their careful owners, rain-water butts fell to pieces;
+well-buckets were lowered inside the covers of the well-hole, to
+preserve them from the fate of the butts, and generally, water
+seemed scarcer in the country than the beer and cider of the
+peasantry who toiled or idled there.
+
+To see persons looking with children's eyes at any ordinary scenery,
+is a proof that they possess the charming faculty of drawing new
+sensations from an old experience--a healthy sign, rare in these
+feverish days--the mark of an imperishable brightness of nature.
+
+Both brother and sister could do this; Cytherea more noticeably.
+They watched the undulating corn-lands, monotonous to all their
+companions; the stony and clayey prospect succeeding those, with its
+angular and abrupt hills.  Boggy moors came next, now withered and
+dry--the spots upon which pools usually spread their waters showing
+themselves as circles of smooth bare soil, over-run by a net-work of
+innumerable little fissures.  Then arose plantations of firs,
+abruptly terminating beside meadows cleanly mown, in which high-
+hipped, rich-coloured cows, with backs horizontal and straight as
+the ridge of a house, stood motionless or lazily fed.  Glimpses of
+the sea now interested them, which became more and more frequent
+till the train finally drew up beside the platform at Budmouth.
+
+'The whole town is looking out for us,' had been Graye's impression
+throughout the day.  He called upon Mr. Gradfield--the only man who
+had been directly informed of his coming--and found that Mr.
+Gradfield had forgotten it.
+
+However, arrangements were made with this gentleman--a stout,
+active, grey-bearded burgher of sixty--by which Owen was to commence
+work in his office the following week.
+
+The same day Cytherea drew up and sent off the advertisement
+appended:--
+
+'A YOUNG LADY is desirous of meeting with an ENGAGEMENT as GOVERNESS
+or COMPANION.  She is competent to teach English, French, and Music.
+Satisfactory references--Address, C. G., Post-Office, Budmouth.'
+
+It seemed a more material existence than her own that she saw thus
+delineated on the paper.  'That can't be myself; how odd I look!'
+she said, and smiled.
+
+2.  JULY THE ELEVENTH
+
+On the Monday subsequent to their arrival in Budmouth, Owen Graye
+attended at Mr. Gradfield's office to enter upon his duties, and his
+sister was left in their lodgings alone for the first time.
+
+Despite the sad occurrences of the preceding autumn, an unwonted
+cheerfulness pervaded her spirit throughout the day.  Change of
+scene--and that to untravelled eyes--conjoined with the sensation of
+freedom from supervision, revived the sparkle of a warm young nature
+ready enough to take advantage of any adventitious restoratives.
+Point-blank grief tends rather to seal up happiness for a time than
+to produce that attrition which results from griefs of anticipation
+that move onward with the days:  these may be said to furrow away
+the capacity for pleasure.
+
+Her expectations from the advertisement began to be extravagant.  A
+thriving family, who had always sadly needed her, was already
+definitely pictured in her fancy, which, in its exuberance, led her
+on to picturing its individual members, their possible
+peculiarities, virtues, and vices, and obliterated for a time the
+recollection that she would be separated from her brother.
+
+Thus musing, as she waited for his return in the evening, her eyes
+fell on her left hand.  The contemplation of her own left fourth
+finger by symbol-loving girlhood of this age is, it seems, very
+frequently, if not always, followed by a peculiar train of romantic
+ideas.  Cytherea's thoughts, still playing about her future, became
+directed into this romantic groove.  She leant back in her chair,
+and taking hold of the fourth finger, which had attracted her
+attention, she lifted it with the tips of the others, and looked at
+the smooth and tapering member for a long time.
+
+She whispered idly, 'I wonder who and what he will be?
+
+'If he's a gentleman of fashion, he will take my finger so, just
+with the tips of his own, and with some fluttering of the heart, and
+the least trembling of his lip, slip the ring so lightly on that I
+shall hardly know it is there--looking delightfully into my eyes all
+the time.
+
+'If he's a bold, dashing soldier, I expect he will proudly turn
+round, take the ring as if it equalled her Majesty's crown in value,
+and desperately set it on my finger thus.  He will fix his eyes
+unflinchingly upon what he is doing--just as if he stood in battle
+before the enemy (though, in reality, very fond of me, of course),
+and blush as much as I shall.
+
+'If he's a sailor, he will take my finger and the ring in this way,
+and deck it out with a housewifely touch and a tenderness of
+expression about his mouth, as sailors do:  kiss it, perhaps, with a
+simple air, as if we were children playing an idle game, and not at
+the very height of observation and envy by a great crowd saying,
+"Ah! they are happy now!"
+
+'If he should be rather a poor man--noble-minded and affectionate,
+but still poor--'
+
+Owen's footsteps rapidly ascending the stairs, interrupted this
+fancy-free meditation.  Reproaching herself, even angry with herself
+for allowing her mind to stray upon such subjects in the face of
+their present desperate condition, she rose to meet him, and make
+tea.
+
+Cytherea's interest to know how her brother had been received at Mr.
+Gradfield's broke forth into words at once.  Almost before they had
+sat down to table, she began cross-examining him in the regular
+sisterly way.
+
+'Well, Owen, how has it been with you to-day?  What is the place
+like--do you think you will like Mr Gradfield?'
+
+'O yes.  But he has not been there to-day; I have only had the head
+draughtsman with me.'
+
+Young women have a habit, not noticeable in men, of putting on at a
+moment's notice the drama of whosoever's life they choose.
+Cytherea's interest was transferred from Mr. Gradfield to his
+representative.
+
+'What sort of a man is he?'
+
+'He seems a very nice fellow indeed; though of course I can hardly
+tell to a certainty as yet.  But I think he's a very worthy fellow;
+there's no nonsense in him, and though he is not a public school man
+he has read widely, and has a sharp appreciation of what's good in
+books and art.  In fact, his knowledge isn't nearly so exclusive as
+most professional men's.'
+
+'That's a great deal to say of an architect, for of all professional
+men they are, as a rule, the most professional.'
+
+'Yes; perhaps they are.  This man is rather of a melancholy turn of
+mind, I think.'
+
+'Has the managing clerk any family?' she mildly asked, after a
+while, pouring out some more tea.
+
+'Family; no!'
+
+'Well, dear Owen, how should I know?'
+
+'Why, of course he isn't married.  But there happened to be a
+conversation about women going on in the office, and I heard him say
+what he should wish his wife to be like.'
+
+'What would he wish his wife to be like?' she said, with great
+apparent lack of interest.
+
+'O, he says she must be girlish and artless:  yet he would be loth
+to do without a dash of womanly subtlety, 'tis so piquant.  Yes, he
+said, that must be in her; she must have womanly cleverness.  "And
+yet I should like her to blush if only a cock-sparrow were to look
+at her hard," he said, "which brings me back to the girl again:  and
+so I flit backwards and forwards.  I must have what comes, I
+suppose," he said, "and whatever she may be, thank God she's no
+worse.  However, if he might give a final hint to Providence," he
+said, "a child among pleasures, and a woman among pains was the
+rough outline of his requirement."'
+
+'Did he say that?  What a musing creature he must be.'
+
+'He did, indeed.'
+
+3.  FROM THE TWELFTH TO THE FIFTEENTH OF JULY
+
+As is well known, ideas are so elastic in a human brain, that they
+have no constant measure which may be called their actual bulk.  Any
+important idea may be compressed to a molecule by an unwonted
+crowding of others; and any small idea will expand to whatever
+length and breadth of vacuum the mind may be able to make over to
+it.  Cytherea's world was tolerably vacant at this time, and the
+young architectural designer's image became very pervasive.  The
+next evening this subject was again renewed.
+
+'His name is Springrove,' said Owen, in reply to her.  'He is a
+thorough artist, but a man of rather humble origin, it seems, who
+has made himself so far.  I think he is the son of a farmer, or
+something of the kind.'
+
+'Well, he's none the worse for that, I suppose.'
+
+'None the worse.  As we come down the hill, we shall be continually
+meeting people going up.'  But Owen had felt that Springrove was a
+little the worse nevertheless.
+
+'Of course he's rather old by this time.'
+
+'O no.  He's about six-and-twenty--not more.'
+
+'Ah, I see. . . .  What is he like, Owen?'
+
+'I can't exactly tell you his appearance:  'tis always such a
+difficult thing to do.'
+
+'A man you would describe as short?  Most men are those we should
+describe as short, I fancy.'
+
+'I should call him, I think, of the middle height; but as I only see
+him sitting in the office, of course I am not certain about his form
+and figure.'
+
+'I wish you were, then.'
+
+'Perhaps you do.  But I am not, you see.'
+
+'Of course not, you are always so provoking.  Owen, I saw a man in
+the street to-day whom I fancied was he--and yet, I don't see how it
+could be, either.  He had light brown hair, a snub nose, very round
+face, and a peculiar habit of reducing his eyes to straight lines
+when he looked narrowly at anything.'
+
+'O no.  That was not he, Cytherea.'
+
+'Not a bit like him in all probability.'
+
+'Not a bit.  He has dark hair--almost a Grecian nose, regular teeth,
+and an intellectual face, as nearly as I can recall to mind.'
+
+'Ah, there now, Owen, you HAVE described him!  But I suppose he's
+not generally called pleasing, or--'
+
+'Handsome?'
+
+'I scarcely meant that.  But since you have said it, is he
+handsome?'
+
+'Rather.'
+
+'His tout ensemble is striking?'
+
+'Yes--O no, no--I forgot:  it is not.  He is rather untidy in his
+waistcoat, and neck-ties, and hair.'
+
+'How vexing!. . .  it must be to himself, poor thing.'
+
+'He's a thorough bookworm--despises the pap-and-daisy school of
+verse--knows Shakespeare to the very dregs of the foot-notes.
+Indeed, he's a poet himself in a small way.'
+
+'How delicious!' she said.  'I have never known a poet.'
+
+'And you don't know him,' said Owen dryly.
+
+She reddened.  'Of course I don't.  I know that.'
+
+'Have you received any answer to your advertisement?' he inquired.
+
+'Ah--no!' she said, and the forgotten disappointment which had
+showed itself in her face at different times during the day, became
+visible again.
+
+Another day passed away.  On Thursday, without inquiry, she learnt
+more of the head draughtsman.  He and Graye had become very
+friendly, and he had been tempted to show her brother a copy of some
+poems of his--some serious and sad--some humorous--which had
+appeared in the poets' corner of a magazine from time to time.  Owen
+showed them now to Cytherea, who instantly began to read them
+carefully and to think them very beautiful.
+
+'Yes--Springrove's no fool,' said Owen sententiously.
+
+'No fool!--I should think he isn't, indeed,' said Cytherea, looking
+up from the paper in quite an excitement:  'to write such verses as
+these!'
+
+'What logic are you chopping, Cytherea?  Well, I don't mean on
+account of the verses, because I haven't read them; but for what he
+said when the fellows were talking about falling in love.'
+
+'Which you will tell me?'
+
+'He says that your true lover breathlessly finds himself engaged to
+a sweetheart, like a man who has caught something in the dark.  He
+doesn't know whether it is a bat or a bird, and takes it to the
+light when he is cool to learn what it is.  He looks to see if she
+is the right age, but right age or wrong age, he must consider her a
+prize.  Sometime later he ponders whether she is the right kind of
+prize for him.  Right kind or wrong kind--he has called her his, and
+must abide by it.  After a time he asks himself, "Has she the
+temper, hair, and eyes I meant to have, and was firmly resolved not
+to do without?"  He finds it is all wrong, and then comes the
+tussle--'
+
+'Do they marry and live happily?'
+
+'Who?  O, the supposed pair.  I think he said--well, I really forget
+what he said.'
+
+'That IS stupid of you!' said the young lady with dismay.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'But he's a satirist--I don't think I care about him now.'
+
+'There you are just wrong.  He is not.  He is, as I believe, an
+impulsive fellow who has been made to pay the penalty of his
+rashness in some love affair.'
+
+Thus ended the dialogue of Thursday, but Cytherea read the verses
+again in private.  On Friday her brother remarked that Springrove
+had informed him he was going to leave Mr. Gradfield's in a
+fortnight to push his fortunes in London.
+
+An indescribable feeling of sadness shot through Cytherea's heart.
+Why should she be sad at such an announcement as that, she thought,
+concerning a man she had never seen, when her spirits were elastic
+enough to rebound after hard blows from deep and real troubles as if
+she had scarcely known them?  Though she could not answer this
+question, she knew one thing, she was saddened by Owen's news.
+
+4.  JULY THE TWENTY-FIRST
+
+A very popular local excursion by steamboat to Lulstead Cove was
+announced through the streets of Budmouth one Thursday morning by
+the weak-voiced town-crier, to start at six o'clock the same day.
+The weather was lovely, and the opportunity being the first of the
+kind offered to them, Owen and Cytherea went with the rest.
+
+They had reached the Cove, and had walked landward for nearly an
+hour over the hill which rose beside the strand, when Graye
+recollected that two or three miles yet further inland from this
+spot was an interesting mediaeval ruin.  He was already familiar
+with its characteristics through the medium of an archaeological
+work, and now finding himself so close to the reality, felt inclined
+to verify some theory he had formed respecting it.  Concluding that
+there would be just sufficient time for him to go there and return
+before the boat had left the shore, he parted from Cytherea on the
+hill, struck downwards, and then up a heathery valley.
+
+She remained on the summit where he had left her till the time of
+his expected return, scanning the details of the prospect around.
+Placidly spread out before her on the south was the open Channel,
+reflecting a blue intenser by many shades than that of the sky
+overhead, and dotted in the foreground by half-a-dozen small craft
+of contrasting rig, their sails graduating in hue from extreme
+whiteness to reddish brown, the varying actual colours varied again
+in a double degree by the rays of the declining sun.
+
+Presently the distant bell from the boat was heard, warning the
+passengers to embark.  This was followed by a lively air from the
+harps and violins on board, their tones, as they arose, becoming
+intermingled with, though not marred by, the brush of the waves when
+their crests rolled over--at the point where the check of the
+shallows was first felt--and then thinned away up the slope of
+pebbles and sand.
+
+She turned her face landward and strained her eyes to discern, if
+possible, some sign of Owen's return.  Nothing was visible save the
+strikingly brilliant, still landscape.  The wide concave which lay
+at the back of the hill in this direction was blazing with the
+western light, adding an orange tint to the vivid purple of the
+heather, now at the very climax of bloom, and free from the
+slightest touch of the invidious brown that so soon creeps into its
+shades.  The light so intensified the colours that they seemed to
+stand above the surface of the earth and float in mid-air like an
+exhalation of red.  In the minor valleys, between the hillocks and
+ridges which diversified the contour of the basin, but did not
+disturb its general sweep, she marked brakes of tall, heavy-stemmed
+ferns, five or six feet high, in a brilliant light-green dress--a
+broad riband of them with the path in their midst winding like a
+stream along the little ravine that reached to the foot of the hill,
+and delivered up the path to its grassy area.  Among the ferns grew
+holly bushes deeper in tint than any shadow about them, whilst the
+whole surface of the scene was dimpled with small conical pits, and
+here and there were round ponds, now dry, and half overgrown with
+rushes.
+
+The last bell of the steamer rang.  Cytherea had forgotten herself,
+and what she was looking for.  In a fever of distress lest Owen
+should be left behind, she gathered up in her hand the corners of
+her handkerchief, containing specimens of the shells, plants, and
+fossils which the locality produced, started off to the sands, and
+mingled with the knots of visitors there congregated from other
+interesting points around; from the inn, the cottages, and hired
+conveyances that had returned from short drives inland.  They all
+went aboard by the primitive plan of a narrow plank on two wheels--
+the women being assisted by a rope.  Cytherea lingered till the very
+last, reluctant to follow, and looking alternately at the boat and
+the valley behind.  Her delay provoked a remark from Captain Jacobs,
+a thickset man of hybrid stains, resulting from the mixed effects of
+fire and water, peculiar to sailors where engines are the propelling
+power.
+
+'Now then, missy, if you please.  I am sorry to tell 'ee our time's
+up.  Who are you looking for, miss?'
+
+'My brother--he has walked a short distance inland; he must be here
+directly.  Could you wait for him--just a minute?'
+
+'Really, I am afraid not, m'm.'  Cytherea looked at the stout,
+round-faced man, and at the vessel, with a light in her eyes so
+expressive of her own opinion being the same, on reflection, as his,
+and with such resignation, too, that, from an instinctive feeling of
+pride at being able to prove himself more humane than he was thought
+to be--works of supererogation are the only sacrifices that entice
+in this way--and that at a very small cost, he delayed the boat till
+some among the passengers began to murmur.
+
+'There, never mind,' said Cytherea decisively.  'Go on without me--I
+shall wait for him.'
+
+'Well, 'tis a very awkward thing to leave you here all alone,' said
+the captain.  'I certainly advise you not to wait.'
+
+'He's gone across to the railway station, for certain,' said another
+passenger.
+
+'No--here he is!' Cytherea said, regarding, as she spoke, the half
+hidden figure of a man who was seen advancing at a headlong pace
+down the ravine which lay between the heath and the shore.
+
+'He can't get here in less than five minutes,' a passenger said.
+'People should know what they are about, and keep time.  Really, if-
+-'
+
+'You see, sir,' said the captain, in an apologetic undertone, 'since
+'tis her brother, and she's all alone, 'tis only nater to wait a
+minute, now he's in sight.  Suppose, now, you were a young woman, as
+might be, and had a brother, like this one, and you stood of an
+evening upon this here wild lonely shore, like her, why you'd want
+us to wait, too, wouldn't you, sir?  I think you would.'
+
+The person so hastily approaching had been lost to view during this
+remark by reason of a hollow in the ground, and the projecting cliff
+immediately at hand covered the path in its rise.  His footsteps
+were now heard striking sharply upon the flinty road at a distance
+of about twenty or thirty yards, but still behind the escarpment.
+To save time, Cytherea prepared to ascend the plank.
+
+'Let me give you my hand, miss,' said Captain Jacobs.
+
+'No--please don't touch me,' said she, ascending cautiously by
+sliding one foot forward two or three inches, bringing up the other
+behind it, and so on alternately--her lips compressed by
+concentration on the feat, her eyes glued to the plank, her hand to
+the rope, and her immediate thought to the fact of the distressing
+narrowness of her footing.  Steps now shook the lower end of the
+board, and in an instant were up to her heels with a bound.
+
+'O, Owen, I am so glad you are come!' she said without turning.
+'Don't, don't shake the plank or touch me, whatever you do. . . .
+There, I am up.  Where have you been so long?' she continued, in a
+lower tone, turning round to him as she reached the top.
+
+Raising her eyes from her feet, which, standing on the firm deck,
+demanded her attention no longer, she acquired perceptions of the
+new-comer in the following order:  unknown trousers; unknown
+waistcoat; unknown face.  The man was not her brother, but a total
+stranger.
+
+Off went the plank; the paddles started, stopped, backed, pattered
+in confusion, then revolved decisively, and the boat passed out into
+deep water.
+
+One or two persons had said, 'How d'ye do, Mr. Springrove?' and
+looked at Cytherea, to see how she bore her disappointment.  Her
+ears had but just caught the name of the head draughtsman, when she
+saw him advancing directly to address her.
+
+'Miss Graye, I believe?' he said, lifting his hat.
+
+'Yes,' said Cytherea, colouring, and trying not to look guilty of a
+surreptitious knowledge of him.
+
+'I am Mr. Springrove.  I passed Corvsgate Castle about an hour ago,
+and soon afterwards met your brother going that way.  He had been
+deceived in the distance, and was about to turn without seeing the
+ruin, on account of a lameness that had come on in his leg or foot.
+I proposed that he should go on, since he had got so near; and
+afterwards, instead of walking back to the boat, get across to
+Anglebury Station--a shorter walk for him--where he could catch the
+late train, and go directly home.  I could let you know what he had
+done, and allay any uneasiness.'
+
+'Is the lameness serious, do you know?'
+
+'O no; simply from over-walking himself.  Still, it was just as well
+to ride home.'
+
+Relieved from her apprehensions on Owen's score, she was able
+slightly to examine the appearance of her informant--Edward
+Springrove--who now removed his hat for a while, to cool himself.
+He was rather above her brother's height.  Although the upper part
+of his face and head was handsomely formed, and bounded by lines of
+sufficiently masculine regularity, his brows were somewhat too
+softly arched, and finely pencilled for one of his sex; without
+prejudice, however, to the belief which the sum total of his
+features inspired--that though they did not prove that the man who
+thought inside them would do much in the world, men who had done
+most of all had had no better ones.  Across his forehead, otherwise
+perfectly smooth, ran one thin line, the healthy freshness of his
+remaining features expressing that it had come there prematurely.
+
+Though some years short of the age at which the clear spirit bids
+good-bye to the last infirmity of noble mind, and takes to house-
+hunting and investments, he had reached the period in a young man's
+life when episodic periods, with a hopeful birth and a disappointing
+death, have begun to accumulate, and to bear a fruit of
+generalities; his glance sometimes seeming to state, 'I have already
+thought out the issue of such conditions as these we are
+experiencing.'  At other times he wore an abstracted look:  'I seem
+to have lived through this moment before.'
+
+He was carelessly dressed in dark grey, wearing a rolled-up black
+kerchief as a neck-cloth; the knot of which was disarranged, and
+stood obliquely--a deposit of white dust having lodged in the
+creases.
+
+'I am sorry for your disappointment,' he continued, glancing into
+her face.  Their eyes having met, became, as it were, mutually
+locked together, and the single instant only which good breeding
+allows as the length of such a look, became trebled:  a clear
+penetrating ray of intelligence had shot from each into each, giving
+birth to one of those unaccountable sensations which carry home to
+the heart before the hand has been touched or the merest compliment
+passed, by something stronger than mathematical proof, the
+conviction, 'A tie has begun to unite us.'
+
+Both faces also unconsciously stated that their owners had been much
+in each other's thoughts of late.  Owen had talked to the young
+architect of his sister as freely as to Cytherea of the young
+architect.
+
+A conversation began, which was none the less interesting to the
+parties engaged because it consisted only of the most trivial and
+commonplace remarks.  Then the band of harps and violins struck up a
+lively melody, and the deck was cleared for dancing; the sun dipping
+beneath the horizon during the proceeding, and the moon showing
+herself at their stern.  The sea was so calm, that the soft hiss
+produced by the bursting of the innumerable bubbles of foam behind
+the paddles could be distinctly heard.  The passengers who did not
+dance, including Cytherea and Springrove, lapsed into silence,
+leaning against the paddle-boxes, or standing aloof--noticing the
+trembling of the deck to the steps of the dance--watching the waves
+from the paddles as they slid thinly and easily under each other's
+edges.
+
+Night had quite closed in by the time they reached Budmouth harbour,
+sparkling with its white, red, and green lights in opposition to the
+shimmering path of the moon's reflection on the other side, which
+reached away to the horizon till the flecked ripples reduced
+themselves to sparkles as fine as gold dust.
+
+'I will walk to the station and find out the exact time the train
+arrives,' said Springrove, rather eagerly, when they had landed.
+
+She thanked him much.
+
+'Perhaps we might walk together,' he suggested hesitatingly.  She
+looked as if she did not quite know, and he settled the question by
+showing the way.
+
+They found, on arriving there, that on the first day of that month
+the particular train selected for Graye's return had ceased to stop
+at Anglebury station.
+
+'I am very sorry I misled him,' said Springrove.
+
+'O, I am not alarmed at all,' replied Cytherea.
+
+'Well, it's sure to be all right--he will sleep there, and come by
+the first in the morning.  But what will you do, alone?'
+
+'I am quite easy on that point; the landlady is very friendly.  I
+must go indoors now.  Good-night, Mr. Springrove.'
+
+'Let me go round to your door with you?' he pleaded.
+
+'No, thank you; we live close by.'
+
+He looked at her as a waiter looks at the change he brings back.
+But she was inexorable.
+
+'Don't--forget me,' he murmured.  She did not answer.
+
+'Let me see you sometimes,' he said.
+
+'Perhaps you never will again--I am going away,' she replied in
+lingering tones; and turning into Cross Street, ran indoors and
+upstairs.
+
+The sudden withdrawal of what was superfluous at first, is often
+felt as an essential loss.  It was felt now with regard to the
+maiden.  More, too, after a meeting so pleasant and so enkindling,
+she had seemed to imply that they would never come together again.
+
+The young man softly followed her, stood opposite the house and
+watched her come into the upper room with the light.  Presently his
+gaze was cut short by her approaching the window and pulling down
+the blind--Edward dwelling upon her vanishing figure with a hopeless
+sense of loss akin to that which Adam is said by logicians to have
+felt when he first saw the sun set, and thought, in his
+inexperience, that it would return no more.
+
+He waited till her shadow had twice crossed the window, when,
+finding the charming outline was not to be expected again, he left
+the street, crossed the harbour-bridge, and entered his own solitary
+chamber on the other side, vaguely thinking as he went (for
+undefined reasons),
+
+     'One hope is too like despair
+      For prudence to smother.'
+
+
+
+III.  THE EVENTS OF EIGHT DAYS
+
+1.  FROM THE TWENTY-SECOND TO THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF JULY
+
+But things are not what they seem.  A responsive love for Edward
+Springrove had made its appearance in Cytherea's bosom with all the
+fascinating attributes of a first experience, not succeeding to or
+displacing other emotions, as in older hearts, but taking up
+entirely new ground; as when gazing just after sunset at the pale
+blue sky we see a star come into existence where nothing was before.
+
+His parting words, 'Don't forget me,' she repeated to herself a
+hundred times, and though she thought their import was probably
+commonplace, she could not help toying with them,--looking at them
+from all points, and investing them with meanings of love and
+faithfulness,--ostensibly entertaining such meanings only as fables
+wherewith to pass the time, yet in her heart admitting, for detached
+instants, a possibility of their deeper truth.  And thus, for hours
+after he had left her, her reason flirted with her fancy as a kitten
+will sport with a dove, pleasantly and smoothly through easy
+attitudes, but disclosing its cruel and unyielding nature at crises.
+
+To turn now to the more material media through which this story
+moves, it so happened that the very next morning brought round a
+circumstance which, slight in itself, took up a relevant and
+important position between the past and the future of the persons
+herein concerned.
+
+At breakfast time, just as Cytherea had again seen the postman pass
+without bringing her an answer to the advertisement, as she had
+fully expected he would do, Owen entered the room.
+
+'Well,' he said, kissing her, 'you have not been alarmed, of course.
+Springrove told you what I had done, and you found there was no
+train?'
+
+'Yes, it was all clear.  But what is the lameness owing to?'
+
+'I don't know--nothing.  It has quite gone off now . . .  Cytherea,
+I hope you like Springrove.  Springrove's a nice fellow, you know.'
+
+'Yes.  I think he is, except that--'
+
+'It happened just to the purpose that I should meet him there,
+didn't it?  And when I reached the station and learnt that I could
+not get on by train my foot seemed better.  I started off to walk
+home, and went about five miles along a path beside the railway.  It
+then struck me that I might not be fit for anything today if I
+walked and aggravated the bothering foot, so I looked for a place to
+sleep at.  There was no available village or inn, and I eventually
+got the keeper of a gate-house, where a lane crossed the line, to
+take me in.'
+
+They proceeded with their breakfast.  Owen yawned.
+
+'You didn't get much sleep at the gate-house last night, I'm afraid,
+Owen,' said his sister.
+
+'To tell the truth, I didn't.  I was in such very close and narrow
+quarters.  Those gate-houses are such small places, and the man had
+only his own bed to offer me.  Ah, by-the-bye, Cythie, I have such
+an extraordinary thing to tell you in connection with this man!--by
+Jove, I had nearly forgotten it!  But I'll go straight on.  As I was
+saying, he had only his own bed to offer me, but I could not afford
+to be fastidious, and as he had a hearty manner, though a very queer
+one, I agreed to accept it, and he made a rough pallet for himself
+on the floor close beside me.  Well, I could not sleep for my life,
+and I wished I had not stayed there, though I was so tired.  For one
+thing, there were the luggage trains rattling by at my elbow the
+early part of the night.  But worse than this, he talked continually
+in his sleep, and occasionally struck out with his limbs at
+something or another, knocking against the post of the bedstead and
+making it tremble.  My condition was altogether so unsatisfactory
+that at last I awoke him, and asked him what he had been dreaming
+about for the previous hour, for I could get no sleep at all.  He
+begged my pardon for disturbing me, but a name I had casually let
+fall that evening had led him to think of another stranger he had
+once had visit him, who had also accidentally mentioned the same
+name, and some very strange incidents connected with that meeting.
+The affair had occurred years and years ago; but what I had said had
+made him think and dream about it as if it were but yesterday.  What
+was the word? I said.  "Cytherea," he said.  What was the story? I
+asked then.  He then told me that when he was a young man in London
+he borrowed a few pounds to add to a few he had saved up, and opened
+a little inn at Hammersmith.  One evening, after the inn had been
+open about a couple of months, every idler in the neighbourhood ran
+off to Westminster.  The Houses of Parliament were on fire.
+
+'Not a soul remained in his parlour besides himself, and he began
+picking up the pipes and glasses his customers had hastily
+relinquished.  At length a young lady about seventeen or eighteen
+came in.  She asked if a woman was there waiting for herself--Miss
+Jane Taylor.  He said no; asked the young lady if she would wait,
+and showed her into the small inner room.  There was a glass-pane in
+the partition dividing this room from the bar to enable the landlord
+to see if his visitors, who sat there, wanted anything.  A curious
+awkwardness and melancholy about the behaviour of the girl who
+called, caused my informant to look frequently at her through the
+partition.  She seemed weary of her life, and sat with her face
+buried in her hands, evidently quite out of her element in such a
+house.  Then a woman much older came in and greeted Miss Taylor by
+name.  The man distinctly heard the following words pass between
+them:--
+
+'"Why have you not brought him?"
+
+'"He is ill; he is not likely to live through the night."
+
+'At this announcement from the elderly woman, the young lady fell to
+the floor in a swoon, apparently overcome by the news.  The landlord
+ran in and lifted her up.  Well, do what they would they could not
+for a long time bring her back to consciousness, and began to be
+much alarmed.  "Who is she?" the innkeeper said to the other woman.
+"I know her," the other said, with deep meaning in her tone.  The
+elderly and young woman seemed allied, and yet strangers.
+
+'She now showed signs of life, and it struck him (he was plainly of
+an inquisitive turn), that in her half-bewildered state he might get
+some information from her.  He stooped over her, put his mouth to
+her ear, and said sharply, "What's your name?"  "To catch a woman
+napping is difficult, even when she's half dead; but I did it," says
+the gatekeeper.  When he asked her her name, she said immediately--
+
+'"Cytherea"--and stopped suddenly.'
+
+'My own name!' said Cytherea.
+
+'Yes--your name.  Well, the gateman thought at the time it might be
+equally with Jane a name she had invented for the occasion, that
+they might not trace her; but I think it was truth unconsciously
+uttered, for she added directly afterwards:  "O, what have I said!"
+and was quite overcome again--this time with fright.  Her vexation
+that the woman now doubted the genuineness of her other name was
+very much greater than that the innkeeper did, and it is evident
+that to blind the woman was her main object.  He also learnt from
+words the elderly woman casually dropped, that meetings of the same
+kind had been held before, and that the falseness of the soi-disant
+Miss Jane Taylor's name had never been suspected by this dependent
+or confederate till then.
+
+'She recovered, rested there for an hour, and first sending off her
+companion peremptorily (which was another odd thing), she left the
+house, offering the landlord all the money she had to say nothing
+about the circumstance.  He has never seen her since, according to
+his own account.  I said to him again and again, "Did you find any
+more particulars afterwards?"  "Not a syllable," he said.  O, he
+should never hear any more of that! too many years had passed since
+it happened.  "At any rate, you found out her surname?" I said.
+"Well, well, that's my secret," he went on.  "Perhaps I should never
+have been in this part of the world if it hadn't been for that.  I
+failed as a publican, you know."  I imagine the situation of gateman
+was given him and his debts paid off as a bribe to silence; but I
+can't say.  "Ah, yes!" he said, with a long breath.  "I have never
+heard that name mentioned since that time till to-night, and then
+there instantly rose to my eyes the vision of that young lady lying
+in a fainting fit."  He then stopped talking and fell asleep.
+Telling the story must have relieved him as it did the Ancient
+Mariner, for he did not move a muscle or make another sound for the
+remainder of the night.  Now isn't that an odd story?'
+
+'It is indeed,' Cytherea murmured.  'Very, very strange.'
+
+'Why should she have said your most uncommon name?' continued Owen.
+'The man was evidently truthful, for there was not motive sufficient
+for his invention of such a tale, and he could not have done it
+either.'
+
+Cytherea looked long at her brother.  'Don't you recognize anything
+else in connection with the story?' she said.
+
+'What?' he asked.
+
+'Do you remember what poor papa once let drop--that Cytherea was the
+name of his first sweetheart in Bloomsbury, who so mysteriously
+renounced him?  A sort of intuition tells me that this was the same
+woman.'
+
+'O no--not likely,' said her brother sceptically.
+
+'How not likely, Owen?  There's not another woman of the name in
+England.  In what year used papa to say the event took place?'
+
+'Eighteen hundred and thirty-five.'
+
+'And when were the Houses of Parliament burnt?--stop, I can tell
+you.'  She searched their little stock of books for a list of dates,
+and found one in an old school history.
+
+'The Houses of Parliament were burnt down in the evening of the
+sixteenth of October, eighteen hundred and thirty-four.'
+
+'Nearly a year and a quarter before she met father,' remarked Owen.
+
+They were silent.  'If papa had been alive, what a wonderful
+absorbing interest this story would have had for him,' said Cytherea
+by-and-by.  'And how strangely knowledge comes to us.  We might have
+searched for a clue to her secret half the world over, and never
+found one.  If we had really had any motive for trying to discover
+more of the sad history than papa told us, we should have gone to
+Bloomsbury; but not caring to do so, we go two hundred miles in the
+opposite direction, and there find information waiting to be told
+us.  What could have been the secret, Owen?'
+
+'Heaven knows.  But our having heard a little more of her in this
+way (if she is the same woman) is a mere coincidence after all--a
+family story to tell our friends if we ever have any.  But we shall
+never know any more of the episode now--trust our fates for that.'
+
+Cytherea sat silently thinking.
+
+'There was no answer this morning to your advertisement, Cytherea?'
+he continued.
+
+'None.'
+
+'I could see that by your looks when I came in.'
+
+'Fancy not getting a single one,' she said sadly.  'Surely there
+must be people somewhere who want governesses?'
+
+'Yes; but those who want them, and can afford to have them, get them
+mostly by friends' recommendations; whilst those who want them, and
+can't afford to have them, make use of their poor relations.'
+
+'What shall I do?'
+
+'Never mind it.  Go on living with me.  Don't let the difficulty
+trouble your mind so; you think about it all day.  I can keep you,
+Cythie, in a plain way of living.  Twenty-five shillings a week do
+not amount to much truly; but then many mechanics have no more, and
+we live quite as sparingly as journeymen mechanics. . .  It is a
+meagre narrow life we are drifting into,' he added gloomily, 'but it
+is a degree more tolerable than the worrying sensation of all the
+world being ashamed of you, which we experienced at Hocbridge.'
+
+'I couldn't go back there again,' she said.
+
+'Nor I.  O, I don't regret our course for a moment.  We did quite
+right in dropping out of the world.'  The sneering tones of the
+remark were almost too laboured to be real.  'Besides,' he
+continued, 'something better for me is sure to turn up soon.  I wish
+my engagement here was a permanent one instead of for only two
+months.  It may, certainly, be for a longer time, but all is
+uncertain.'
+
+'I wish I could get something to do; and I must too,' she said
+firmly.  'Suppose, as is very probable, you are not wanted after the
+beginning of October--the time Mr. Gradfield mentioned--what should
+we do if I were dependent on you only throughout the winter?'
+
+They pondered on numerous schemes by which a young lady might be
+supposed to earn a decent livelihood--more or less convenient and
+feasible in imagination, but relinquished them all until advertising
+had been once more tried, this time taking lower ground.  Cytherea
+was vexed at her temerity in having represented to the world that so
+inexperienced a being as herself was a qualified governess; and had
+a fancy that this presumption of hers might be one reason why no
+ladies applied.  The new and humbler attempt appeared in the
+following form:--
+
+'NURSERY GOVERNESS OR USEFUL COMPANION.  A young person wishes to
+hear of a situation in either of the above capacities.  Salary very
+moderate.  She is a good needle-woman--Address G., 3 Cross Street,
+Budmouth.'
+
+In the evening they went to post the letter, and then walked up and
+down the Parade for a while.  Soon they met Springrove, said a few
+words to him, and passed on.  Owen noticed that his sister's face
+had become crimson.  Rather oddly they met Springrove again in a few
+minutes.  This time the three walked a little way together, Edward
+ostensibly talking to Owen, though with a single thought to the
+reception of his words by the maiden at the farther side, upon whom
+his gaze was mostly resting, and who was attentively listening--
+looking fixedly upon the pavement the while.  It has been said that
+men love with their eyes; women with their ears.
+
+As Owen and himself were little more than acquaintances as yet, and
+as Springrove was wanting in the assurance of many men of his age,
+it now became necessary to wish his friends good-evening, or to find
+a reason for continuing near Cytherea by saying some nice new thing.
+He thought of a new thing; he proposed a pull across the bay.  This
+was assented to.  They went to the pier; stepped into one of the
+gaily painted boats moored alongside and sheered off.  Cytherea sat
+in the stern steering.
+
+They rowed that evening; the next came, and with it the necessity of
+rowing again.  Then the next, and the next, Cytherea always sitting
+in the stern with the tiller ropes in her hand.  The curves of her
+figure welded with those of the fragile boat in perfect
+continuation, as she girlishly yielded herself to its heaving and
+sinking, seeming to form with it an organic whole.
+
+Then Owen was inclined to test his skill in paddling a canoe.
+Edward did not like canoes, and the issue was, that, having seen
+Owen on board, Springrove proposed to pull off after him with a pair
+of sculls; but not considering himself sufficiently accomplished to
+do finished rowing before a parade full of promenaders when there
+was a little swell on, and with the rudder unshipped in addition, he
+begged that Cytherea might come with him and steer as before.  She
+stepped in, and they floated along in the wake of her brother.  Thus
+passed the fifth evening on the water.
+
+But the sympathetic pair were thrown into still closer
+companionship, and much more exclusive connection.
+
+2.  JULY THE TWENTY-NINTH
+
+It was a sad time for Cytherea--the last day of Springrove's
+management at Gradfield's, and the last evening before his return
+from Budmouth to his father's house, previous to his departure for
+London.
+
+Graye had been requested by the architect to survey a plot of land
+nearly twenty miles off, which, with the journey to and fro, would
+occupy him the whole day, and prevent his returning till late in the
+evening.  Cytherea made a companion of her landlady to the extent of
+sharing meals and sitting with her during the morning of her
+brother's absence.  Mid-day found her restless and miserable under
+this arrangement.  All the afternoon she sat alone, looking out of
+the window for she scarcely knew whom, and hoping she scarcely knew
+what.  Half-past five o'clock came--the end of Springrove's official
+day.  Two minutes later Springrove walked by.
+
+She endured her solitude for another half-hour, and then could
+endure no longer.  She had hoped--while affecting to fear--that
+Edward would have found some reason or other for calling, but it
+seemed that he had not.  Hastily dressing herself she went out, when
+the farce of an accidental meeting was repeated.  Edward came upon
+her in the street at the first turning, and, like the Great Duke
+Ferdinand in 'The Statue and the Bust'--
+
+     'He looked at her as a lover can;
+      She looked at him as one who awakes--
+      The past was a sleep, and her life began.'
+
+'Shall we have a boat?' he said impulsively.
+
+How blissful it all is at first.  Perhaps, indeed, the only bliss in
+the course of love which can truly be called Eden-like is that which
+prevails immediately after doubt has ended and before reflection has
+set in--at the dawn of the emotion, when it is not recognized by
+name, and before the consideration of what this love is, has given
+birth to the consideration of what difficulties it tends to create;
+when on the man's part, the mistress appears to the mind's eye in
+picturesque, hazy, and fresh morning lights, and soft morning
+shadows; when, as yet, she is known only as the wearer of one dress,
+which shares her own personality; as the stander in one special
+position, the giver of one bright particular glance, and the speaker
+of one tender sentence; when, on her part, she is timidly careful
+over what she says and does, lest she should be misconstrued or
+under-rated to the breadth of a shadow of a hair.
+
+'Shall we have a boat?' he said again, more softly, seeing that to
+his first question she had not answered, but looked uncertainly at
+the ground, then almost, but not quite, in his face, blushed a
+series of minute blushes, left off in the midst of them, and showed
+the usual signs of perplexity in a matter of the emotions.
+
+Owen had always been with her before, but there was now a force of
+habit in the proceeding, and with Arcadian innocence she assumed
+that a row on the water was, under any circumstances, a natural
+thing.  Without another word being spoken on either side, they went
+down the steps.  He carefully handed her in, took his seat, slid
+noiselessly off the sand, and away from the shore.
+
+They thus sat facing each other in the graceful yellow cockle-shell,
+and his eyes frequently found a resting-place in the depths of hers.
+The boat was so small that at each return of the sculls, when his
+hands came forward to begin the pull, they approached so near to her
+that her vivid imagination began to thrill her with a fancy that he
+was going to clasp his arms round her.  The sensation grew so strong
+that she could not run the risk of again meeting his eyes at those
+critical moments, and turned aside to inspect the distant horizon;
+then she grew weary of looking sideways, and was driven to return to
+her natural position again.  At this instant he again leant forward
+to begin, and met her glance by an ardent fixed gaze.  An
+involuntary impulse of girlish embarrassment caused her to give a
+vehement pull at the tiller-rope, which brought the boat's head
+round till they stood directly for shore.
+
+His eyes, which had dwelt upon her form during the whole time of her
+look askance, now left her; he perceived the direction in which they
+were going.
+
+'Why, you have completely turned the boat, Miss Graye?' he said,
+looking over his shoulder.  'Look at our track on the water--a great
+semicircle, preceded by a series of zigzags as far as we can see.'
+
+She looked attentively.  'Is it my fault or yours?' she inquired.
+'Mine, I suppose?'
+
+'I can't help saying that it is yours.'
+
+She dropped the ropes decisively, feeling the slightest twinge of
+vexation at the answer.
+
+'Why do you let go?'
+
+'I do it so badly.'
+
+'O no; you turned about for shore in a masterly way.  Do you wish to
+return?'
+
+'Yes, if you please.'
+
+'Of course, then, I will at once.'
+
+'I fear what the people will think of us--going in such absurd
+directions, and all through my wretched steering.'
+
+'Never mind what the people think.'  A pause.  'You surely are not
+so weak as to mind what the people think on such a matter as that?'
+
+Those words might almost be called too firm and hard to be given by
+him to her; but never mind.  For almost the first time in her life
+she felt the charming sensation, although on such an insignificant
+subject, of being compelled into an opinion by a man she loved.
+Owen, though less yielding physically, and more practical, would not
+have had the intellectual independence to answer a woman thus.  She
+replied quietly and honestly--as honestly as when she had stated the
+contrary fact a minute earlier--
+
+'I don't mind.'
+
+'I'll unship the tiller that you may have nothing to do going back
+but to hold your parasol,' he continued, and arose to perform the
+operation, necessarily leaning closely against her, to guard against
+the risk of capsizing the boat as he reached his hands astern.  His
+warm breath touched and crept round her face like a caress; but he
+was apparently only concerned with his task.  She looked guilty of
+something when he seated himself.  He read in her face what that
+something was--she had experienced a pleasure from his touch.  But
+he flung a practical glance over his shoulder, seized the oars, and
+they sped in a straight line towards the shore.
+
+Cytherea saw that he noted in her face what had passed in her heart,
+and that noting it, he continued as decided as before.  She was
+inwardly distressed.  She had not meant him to translate her words
+about returning home so literally at the first; she had not intended
+him to learn her secret; but more than all she was not able to
+endure the perception of his learning it and continuing unmoved.
+
+There was nothing but misery to come now.  They would step ashore;
+he would say good-night, go to London to-morrow, and the miserable
+She would lose him for ever.  She did not quite suppose what was the
+fact, that a parallel thought was simultaneously passing through his
+mind.
+
+They were now within ten yards, now within five; he was only now
+waiting for a 'smooth' to bring the boat in.  Sweet, sweet Love must
+not be slain thus, was the fair maid's reasoning.  She was equal to
+the occasion--ladies are--and delivered the god--
+
+'Do you want very much to land, Mr. Springrove?' she said, letting
+her young violet eyes pine at him a very, very little.
+
+'I?  Not at all,' said he, looking an astonishment at her inquiry
+which a slight twinkle of his eye half belied.  'But you do?'
+
+'I think that now we have come out, and it is such a pleasant
+evening,' she said gently and sweetly, 'I should like a little
+longer row if you don't mind?  I'll try to steer better than before
+if it makes it easier for you.  I'll try very hard.'
+
+It was the turn of his face to tell a tale now.  He looked, 'We
+understand each other--ah, we do, darling!' turned the boat, and
+pulled back into the Bay once more.
+
+'Now steer wherever you will,' he said, in a low voice.  'Never mind
+the directness of the course--wherever you will.'
+
+'Shall it be Creston Shore?' she said, pointing to a stretch of
+beach northward from Budmouth Esplanade.
+
+'Creston Shore certainly,' he responded, grasping the sculls.  She
+took the strings daintily, and they wound away to the left.
+
+For a long time nothing was audible in the boat but the regular dip
+of the oars, and their movement in the rowlocks.  Springrove at
+length spoke.
+
+'I must go away to-morrow,' he said tentatively.
+
+'Yes,' she replied faintly.
+
+'To endeavour to advance a little in my profession in London.'
+
+'Yes,' she said again, with the same preoccupied softness.
+
+'But I shan't advance.'
+
+'Why not?  Architecture is a bewitching profession.  They say that
+an architect's work is another man's play.'
+
+'Yes.  But worldly advantage from an art doesn't depend upon
+mastering it.  I used to think it did; but it doesn't.  Those who
+get rich need have no skill at all as artists.'
+
+'What need they have?'
+
+'A certain kind of energy which men with any fondness for art
+possess very seldom indeed--an earnestness in making acquaintances,
+and a love for using them.  They give their whole attention to the
+art of dining out, after mastering a few rudimentary facts to serve
+up in conversation.  Now after saying that, do I seem a man likely
+to make a name?'
+
+'You seem a man likely to make a mistake.'
+
+'What's that?'
+
+'To give too much room to the latent feeling which is rather common
+in these days among the unappreciated, that because some remarkably
+successful men are fools, all remarkably unsuccessful men are
+geniuses.'
+
+'Pretty subtle for a young lady,' he said slowly.  'From that remark
+I should fancy you had bought experience.'
+
+She passed over the idea.  'Do try to succeed,' she said, with
+wistful thoughtfulness, leaving her eyes on him.
+
+Springrove flushed a little at the earnestness of her words, and
+mused.  'Then, like Cato the Censor, I shall do what I despise, to
+be in the fashion,' he said at last. . .  'Well, when I found all
+this out that I was speaking of, what ever do you think I did?  From
+having already loved verse passionately, I went on to read it
+continually; then I went rhyming myself.  If anything on earth ruins
+a man for useful occupation, and for content with reasonable success
+in a profession or trade, it is the habit of writing verses on
+emotional subjects, which had much better be left to die from want
+of nourishment.'
+
+'Do you write poems now?' she said.
+
+'None.  Poetical days are getting past with me, according to the
+usual rule.  Writing rhymes is a stage people of my sort pass
+through, as they pass through the stage of shaving for a beard, or
+thinking they are ill-used, or saying there's nothing in the world
+worth living for.'
+
+'Then the difference between a common man and a recognized poet is,
+that one has been deluded, and cured of his delusion, and the other
+continues deluded all his days.'
+
+'Well, there's just enough truth in what you say, to make the remark
+unbearable.  However, it doesn't matter to me now that I "meditate
+the thankless Muse" no longer, but. . .'  He paused, as if
+endeavouring to think what better thing he did.
+
+Cytherea's mind ran on to the succeeding lines of the poem, and
+their startling harmony with the present situation suggested the
+fancy that he was 'sporting' with her, and brought an awkward
+contemplativeness to her face.
+
+Springrove guessed her thoughts, and in answer to them simply said
+'Yes.'  Then they were silent again.
+
+'If I had known an Amaryllis was coming here, I should not have made
+arrangements for leaving,' he resumed.
+
+Such levity, superimposed on the notion of 'sport', was intolerable
+to Cytherea; for a woman seems never to see any but the serious side
+of her attachment, though the most devoted lover has all the time a
+vague and dim perception that he is losing his old dignity and
+frittering away his time.
+
+'But will you not try again to get on in your profession?  Try once
+more; do try once more,' she murmured.  'I am going to try again.  I
+have advertised for something to do.'
+
+'Of course I will,' he said, with an eager gesture and smile.  'But
+we must remember that the fame of Christopher Wren himself depended
+upon the accident of a fire in Pudding Lane.  My successes seem to
+come very slowly.  I often think, that before I am ready to live, it
+will be time for me to die.  However, I am trying--not for fame now,
+but for an easy life of reasonable comfort.'
+
+It is a melancholy truth for the middle classes, that in proportion
+as they develop, by the study of poetry and art, their capacity for
+conjugal love of the highest and purest kind, they limit the
+possibility of their being able to exercise it--the very act putting
+out of their power the attainment of means sufficient for marriage.
+The man who works up a good income has had no time to learn love to
+its solemn extreme; the man who has learnt that has had no time to
+get rich.
+
+'And if you should fail--utterly fail to get that reasonable
+wealth,' she said earnestly, 'don't be perturbed.  The truly great
+stand upon no middle ledge; they are either famous or unknown.'
+
+'Unknown,' he said, 'if their ideas have been allowed to flow with a
+sympathetic breadth.  Famous only if they have been convergent and
+exclusive.'
+
+'Yes; and I am afraid from that, that my remark was but
+discouragement, wearing the dress of comfort.  Perhaps I was not
+quite right in--'
+
+'It depends entirely upon what is meant by being truly great.  But
+the long and the short of the matter is, that men must stick to a
+thing if they want to succeed in it--not giving way to over-much
+admiration for the flowers they see growing in other people's
+borders; which I am afraid has been my case.'  He looked into the
+far distance and paused.
+
+Adherence to a course with persistence sufficient to ensure success
+is possible to widely appreciative minds only when there is also
+found in them a power--commonplace in its nature, but rare in such
+combination--the power of assuming to conviction that in the
+outlying paths which appear so much more brilliant than their own,
+there are bitternesses equally great--unperceived simply on account
+of their remoteness.
+
+
+
+They were opposite Ringsworth Shore.  The cliffs here were formed of
+strata completely contrasting with those of the further side of the
+Bay, whilst in and beneath the water hard boulders had taken the
+place of sand and shingle, between which, however, the sea glided
+noiselessly, without breaking the crest of a single wave, so
+strikingly calm was the air.  The breeze had entirely died away,
+leaving the water of that rare glassy smoothness which is unmarked
+even by the small dimples of the least aerial movement.  Purples and
+blues of divers shades were reflected from this mirror accordingly
+as each undulation sloped east or west.  They could see the rocky
+bottom some twenty feet beneath them, luxuriant with weeds of
+various growths, and dotted with pulpy creatures reflecting a
+silvery and spangled radiance upwards to their eyes.
+
+At length she looked at him to learn the effect of her words of
+encouragement.  He had let the oars drift alongside, and the boat
+had come to a standstill.  Everything on earth seemed taking a
+contemplative rest, as if waiting to hear the avowal of something
+from his lips.  At that instant he appeared to break a resolution
+hitherto zealously kept.  Leaving his seat amidships he came and
+gently edged himself down beside her upon the narrow seat at the
+stern.
+
+She breathed more quickly and warmly:  he took her right hand in his
+own right:  it was not withdrawn.  He put his left hand behind her
+neck till it came round upon her left cheek:  it was not thrust
+away.  Lightly pressing her, he brought her face and mouth towards
+his own; when, at this the very brink, some unaccountable thought or
+spell within him suddenly made him halt--even now, and as it seemed
+as much to himself as to her, he timidly whispered 'May I?'
+
+Her endeavour was to say No, so denuded of its flesh and sinews that
+its nature would hardly be recognized, or in other words a No from
+so near the affirmative frontier as to be affected with the Yes
+accent.  It was thus a whispered No, drawn out to nearly a quarter
+of a minute's length, the O making itself audible as a sound like
+the spring coo of a pigeon on unusually friendly terms with its
+mate.  Though conscious of her success in producing the kind of word
+she had wished to produce, she at the same time trembled in suspense
+as to how it would be taken.  But the time available for doubt was
+so short as to admit of scarcely more than half a pulsation:
+pressing closer he kissed her.  Then he kissed her again with a
+longer kiss.
+
+It was the supremely happy moment of their experience.  The 'bloom'
+and the 'purple light' were strong on the lineaments of both.  Their
+hearts could hardly believe the evidence of their lips.
+
+'I love you, and you love me, Cytherea!' he whispered.
+
+She did not deny it; and all seemed well.  The gentle sounds around
+them from the hills, the plains, the distant town, the adjacent
+shore, the water heaving at their side, the kiss, and the long kiss,
+were all 'many a voice of one delight,' and in unison with each
+other.
+
+But his mind flew back to the same unpleasant thought which had been
+connected with the resolution he had broken a minute or two earlier.
+'I could be a slave at my profession to win you, Cytherea; I would
+work at the meanest, honest trade to be near you--much less claim
+you as mine; I would--anything.  But I have not told you all; it is
+not this; you don't know what there is yet to tell.  Could you
+forgive as you can love?'  She was alarmed to see that he had become
+pale with the question.
+
+'No--do not speak,' he said.  'I have kept something from you, which
+has now become the cause of a great uneasiness.  I had no right--to
+love you; but I did it.  Something forbade--'
+
+'What?' she exclaimed.
+
+'Something forbade me--till the kiss--yes, till the kiss came; and
+now nothing shall forbid it!  We'll hope in spite of all. . .  I
+must, however, speak of this love of ours to your brother.  Dearest,
+you had better go indoors whilst I meet him at the station, and
+explain everything.'
+
+Cytherea's short-lived bliss was dead and gone.  O, if she had known
+of this sequel would she have allowed him to break down the barrier
+of mere acquaintanceship--never, never!
+
+'Will you not explain to me?' she faintly urged.  Doubt--indefinite,
+carking doubt had taken possession of her.
+
+'Not now.  You alarm yourself unnecessarily,' he said tenderly.  'My
+only reason for keeping silence is that with my present knowledge I
+may tell an untrue story.  It may be that there is nothing to tell.
+I am to blame for haste in alluding to any such thing.  Forgive me,
+sweet--forgive me.'  Her heart was ready to burst, and she could not
+answer him.  He returned to his place and took to the oars.
+
+They again made for the distant Esplanade, now, with its line of
+houses, lying like a dark grey band against the light western sky.
+The sun had set, and a star or two began to peep out.  They drew
+nearer their destination, Edward as he pulled tracing listlessly
+with his eyes the red stripes upon her scarf, which grew to appear
+as black ones in the increasing dusk of evening.  She surveyed the
+long line of lamps on the sea-wall of the town, now looking small
+and yellow, and seeming to send long tap-roots of fire quivering
+down deep into the sea.  By-and-by they reached the landing-steps.
+He took her hand as before, and found it as cold as the water about
+them.  It was not relinquished till he reached her door.  His
+assurance had not removed the constraint of her manner:  he saw that
+she blamed him mutely and with her eyes, like a captured sparrow.
+Left alone, he went and seated himself in a chair on the Esplanade.
+
+Neither could she go indoors to her solitary room, feeling as she
+did in such a state of desperate heaviness.  When Springrove was out
+of sight she turned back, and arrived at the corner just in time to
+see him sit down.  Then she glided pensively along the pavement
+behind him, forgetting herself to marble like Melancholy herself as
+she mused in his neighbourhood unseen.  She heard, without heeding,
+the notes of pianos and singing voices from the fashionable houses
+at her back, from the open windows of which the lamp-light streamed
+to join that of the orange-hued full moon, newly risen over the Bay
+in front.  Then Edward began to pace up and down, and Cytherea,
+fearing that he would notice her, hastened homeward, flinging him a
+last look as she passed out of sight.  No promise from him to write:
+no request that she herself would do so--nothing but an indefinite
+expression of hope in the face of some fear unknown to her.  Alas,
+alas!
+
+When Owen returned he found she was not in the small sitting-room,
+and creeping upstairs into her bedroom with a light, he discovered
+her there lying asleep upon the coverlet of the bed, still with her
+hat and jacket on.  She had flung herself down on entering, and
+succumbed to the unwonted oppressiveness that ever attends full-
+blown love.  The wet traces of tears were yet visible upon her long
+drooping lashes.
+
+     'Love is a sowre delight, and sugred griefe,
+      A living death, and ever-dying life.'
+
+'Cytherea,' he whispered, kissing her.  She awoke with a start, and
+vented an exclamation before recovering her judgment.  'He's gone!'
+she said.
+
+'He has told me all,' said Graye soothingly.  'He is going off early
+to-morrow morning.  'Twas a shame of him to win you away from me,
+and cruel of you to keep the growth of this attachment a secret.'
+
+'We couldn't help it,' she said, and then jumping up--'Owen, has he
+told you ALL?'
+
+'All of your love from beginning to end,' he said simply.
+
+Edward then had not told more--as he ought to have done:  yet she
+could not convict him.  But she would struggle against his fetters.
+She tingled to the very soles of her feet at the very possibility
+that he might be deluding her.
+
+'Owen,' she continued, with dignity, 'what is he to me?  Nothing.  I
+must dismiss such weakness as this--believe me, I will.  Something
+far more pressing must drive it away.  I have been looking my
+position steadily in the face, and I must get a living somehow.  I
+mean to advertise once more.'
+
+'Advertising is no use.'
+
+'This one will be.'  He looked surprised at the sanguine tone of her
+answer, till she took a piece of paper from the table and showed it
+him.  'See what I am going to do,' she said sadly, almost bitterly.
+This was her third effort:--
+
+  'LADY'S-MAID.  Inexperienced.  Age eighteen.--G., 3 Cross Street,
+Budmouth.'
+
+Owen--Owen the respectable--looked blank astonishment.  He repeated
+in a nameless, varying tone, the two words--
+
+'Lady's-maid!'
+
+'Yes; lady's-maid.  'Tis an honest profession,' said Cytherea
+bravely.
+
+'But YOU, Cytherea?'
+
+'Yes, I--who am I?'
+
+'You will never be a lady's-maid--never, I am quite sure.'
+
+'I shall try to be, at any rate.'
+
+'Such a disgrace--'
+
+'Nonsense!  I maintain that it is no disgrace!' she said, rather
+warmly.  'You know very well--'
+
+'Well, since you will, you must,' he interrupted.  'Why do you put
+"inexperienced?"'
+
+'Because I am.'
+
+'Never mind that--scratch out "inexperienced."  We are poor,
+Cytherea, aren't we?' he murmured, after a silence, 'and it seems
+that the two months will close my engagement here.'
+
+'We can put up with being poor,' she said, 'if they only give us
+work to do. . . .  Yes, we desire as a blessing what was given us as
+a curse, and even that is denied.  However, be cheerful, Owen, and
+never mind!'
+
+In justice to desponding men, it is as well to remember that the
+brighter endurance of women at these epochs--invaluable, sweet,
+angelic, as it is--owes more of its origin to a narrower vision that
+shuts out many of the leaden-eyed despairs in the van, than to a
+hopefulness intense enough to quell them.
+
+
+
+IV.  THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
+
+1.  AUGUST THE FOURTH.  TILL FOUR O'CLOCK
+
+The early part of the next week brought an answer to Cytherea's last
+note of hope in the way of advertisement--not from a distance of
+hundreds of miles, London, Scotland, Ireland, the Continent--as
+Cytherea seemed to think it must, to be in keeping with the means
+adopted for obtaining it, but from a place in the neighbourhood of
+that in which she was living--a country mansion not twenty miles
+off.  The reply ran thus:--
+
+                                           KNAPWATER HOUSE,
+                                                 August 3, 1864.
+
+'Miss Aldclyffe is in want of a young person as lady's-maid.  The
+duties of the place are light.  Miss Aldclyffe will be in Budmouth
+on Thursday, when (should G.  still not have heard of a place) she
+would like to see her at the Belvedere Hotel, Esplanade, at four
+o'clock.  No answer need be returned to this note.'
+
+
+A little earlier than the time named, Cytherea, clothed in a modest
+bonnet, and a black silk jacket, turned down to the hotel.
+Expectation, the fresh air from the water, the bright, far-extending
+outlook, raised the most delicate of pink colours to her cheeks, and
+restored to her tread a portion of that elasticity which her past
+troubles, and thoughts of Edward, had well-nigh taken away.
+
+She entered the vestibule, and went to the window of the bar.
+
+'Is Miss Aldclyffe here?' she said to a nicely-dressed barmaid in
+the foreground, who was talking to a landlady covered with chains,
+knobs, and clamps of gold, in the background.
+
+'No, she isn't,' said the barmaid, not very civilly.  Cytherea
+looked a shade too pretty for a plain dresser.
+
+'Miss Aldclyffe is expected here,' the landlady said to a third
+person, out of sight, in the tone of one who had known for several
+days the fact newly discovered from Cytherea.  'Get ready her room--
+be quick.'  From the alacrity with which the order was given and
+taken, it seemed to Cytherea that Miss Aldclyffe must be a woman of
+considerable importance.
+
+'You are to have an interview with Miss Aldclyffe here?' the
+landlady inquired.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'The young person had better wait,' continued the landlady.  With a
+money-taker's intuition she had rightly divined that Cytherea would
+bring no profit to the house.
+
+Cytherea was shown into a nondescript chamber, on the shady side of
+the building, which appeared to be either bedroom or dayroom, as
+occasion necessitated, and was one of a suite at the end of the
+first-floor corridor.  The prevailing colour of the walls, curtains,
+carpet, and coverings of furniture, was more or less blue, to which
+the cold light coming from the north easterly sky, and falling on a
+wide roof of new slates--the only object the small window commanded-
+-imparted a more striking paleness.  But underneath the door,
+communicating with the next room of the suite, gleamed an
+infinitesimally small, yet very powerful, fraction of contrast--a
+very thin line of ruddy light, showing that the sun beamed strongly
+into this room adjoining.  The line of radiance was the only
+cheering thing visible in the place.
+
+People give way to very infantine thoughts and actions when they
+wait; the battle-field of life is temporarily fenced off by a hard
+and fast line--the interview.  Cytherea fixed her eyes idly upon the
+streak, and began picturing a wonderful paradise on the other side
+as the source of such a beam--reminding her of the well-known good
+deed in a naughty world.
+
+Whilst she watched the particles of dust floating before the
+brilliant chink she heard a carriage and horses stop opposite the
+front of the house.  Afterwards came the rustle of a lady's skirts
+down the corridor, and into the room communicating with the one
+Cytherea occupied.
+
+The golden line vanished in parts like the phosphorescent streak
+caused by the striking of a match; there was the fall of a light
+footstep on the floor just behind it:  then a pause.  Then the foot
+tapped impatiently, and 'There's no one here!' was spoken
+imperiously by a lady's tongue.
+
+'No, madam; in the next room.  I am going to fetch her,' said the
+attendant.
+
+'That will do--or you needn't go in; I will call her.'
+
+Cytherea had risen, and she advanced to the middle door with the
+chink under it as the servant retired.  She had just laid her hand
+on the knob, when it slipped round within her fingers, and the door
+was pulled open from the other side.
+
+2.  FOUR O'CLOCK
+
+The direct blaze of the afternoon sun, partly refracted through the
+crimson curtains of the window, and heightened by reflections from
+the crimson-flock paper which covered the walls, and a carpet on the
+floor of the same tint, shone with a burning glow round the form of
+a lady standing close to Cytherea's front with the door in her hand.
+The stranger appeared to the maiden's eyes--fresh from the blue
+gloom, and assisted by an imagination fresh from nature--like a tall
+black figure standing in the midst of fire.  It was the figure of a
+finely-built woman, of spare though not angular proportions.
+
+Cytherea involuntarily shaded her eyes with her hand, retreated a
+step or two, and then she could for the first time see Miss
+Aldclyffe's face in addition to her outline, lit up by the secondary
+and softer light that was reflected from the varnished panels of the
+door.  She was not a very young woman, but could boast of much
+beauty of the majestic autumnal phase.
+
+'O,' said the lady, 'come this way.'  Cytherea followed her to the
+embrasure of the window.
+
+Both the women showed off themselves to advantage as they walked
+forward in the orange light; and each showed too in her face that
+she had been struck with her companion's appearance.  The warm tint
+added to Cytherea's face a voluptuousness which youth and a simple
+life had not yet allowed to express itself there ordinarily; whilst
+in the elder lady's face it reduced the customary expression, which
+might have been called sternness, if not harshness, to grandeur, and
+warmed her decaying complexion with much of the youthful richness it
+plainly had once possessed.
+
+She appeared now no more than five-and-thirty, though she might
+easily have been ten or a dozen years older.  She had clear steady
+eyes, a Roman nose in its purest form, and also the round prominent
+chin with which the Caesars are represented in ancient marbles; a
+mouth expressing a capability for and tendency to strong emotion,
+habitually controlled by pride.  There was a severity about the
+lower outlines of the face which gave a masculine cast to this
+portion of her countenance.  Womanly weakness was nowhere visible
+save in one part--the curve of her forehead and brows--there it was
+clear and emphatic.  She wore a lace shawl over a brown silk dress,
+and a net bonnet set with a few blue cornflowers.
+
+'You inserted the advertisement for a situation as lady's-maid
+giving the address, G., Cross Street?'
+
+'Yes, madam.  Graye.'
+
+'Yes.  I have heard your name--Mrs. Morris, my housekeeper,
+mentioned you, and pointed out your advertisement.'
+
+This was puzzling intelligence, but there was not time enough to
+consider it.
+
+'Where did you live last?' continued Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+'I have never been a servant before.  I lived at home.'
+
+'Never been out?  I thought too at sight of you that you were too
+girlish-looking to have done much.  But why did you advertise with
+such assurance?  It misleads people.'
+
+'I am very sorry:  I put "inexperienced" at first, but my brother
+said it is absurd to trumpet your own weakness to the world, and
+would not let it remain.'
+
+'But your mother knew what was right, I suppose?'
+
+'I have no mother, madam.'
+
+'Your father, then?'
+
+'I have no father.'
+
+'Well,' she said, more softly, 'your sisters, aunts, or cousins.'
+
+'They didn't think anything about it.'
+
+'You didn't ask them, I suppose.'
+
+'No.'
+
+'You should have done so, then.  Why didn't you?'
+
+'Because I haven't any of them, either.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe showed her surprise.  'You deserve forgiveness then
+at any rate, child,' she said, in a sort of drily-kind tone.
+'However, I am afraid you do not suit me, as I am looking for an
+elderly person.  You see, I want an experienced maid who knows all
+the usual duties of the office.'  She was going to add, 'Though I
+like your appearance,' but the words seemed offensive to apply to
+the ladylike girl before her, and she modified them to, 'though I
+like you much.'
+
+'I am sorry I misled you, madam,' said Cytherea.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe stood in a reverie, without replying.
+
+'Good afternoon,' continued Cytherea.
+
+'Good-bye, Miss Graye--I hope you will succeed.'
+
+Cytherea turned away towards the door.  The movement chanced to be
+one of her masterpieces.  It was precise:  it had as much beauty as
+was compatible with precision, and as little coquettishness as was
+compatible with beauty.
+
+And she had in turning looked over her shoulder at the other lady
+with a faint accent of reproach in her face.  Those who remember
+Greuze's 'Head of a Girl,' have an idea of Cytherea's look askance
+at the turning.  It is not for a man to tell fishers of men how to
+set out their fascinations so as to bring about the highest possible
+average of takes within the year:  but the action that tugs the
+hardest of all at an emotional beholder is this sweet method of
+turning which steals the bosom away and leaves the eyes behind.
+
+Now Miss Aldclyffe herself was no tyro at wheeling.  When Cytherea
+had closed the door upon her, she remained for some time in her
+motionless attitude, listening to the gradually dying sound of the
+maiden's retreating footsteps.  She murmured to herself, 'It is
+almost worth while to be bored with instructing her in order to have
+a creature who could glide round my luxurious indolent body in that
+manner, and look at me in that way--I warrant how light her fingers
+are upon one's head and neck. . . .  What a silly modest young thing
+she is, to go away so suddenly as that!'  She rang the bell.
+
+'Ask the young lady who has just left me to step back again,' she
+said to the attendant.  'Quick! or she will be gone.'
+
+Cytherea was now in the vestibule, thinking that if she had told her
+history, Miss Aldclyffe might perhaps have taken her into the
+household; yet her history she particularly wished to conceal from a
+stranger.  When she was recalled she turned back without feeling
+much surprise.  Something, she knew not what, told her she had not
+seen the last of Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+'You have somebody to refer me to, of course,' the lady said, when
+Cytherea had re-entered the room.
+
+'Yes:  Mr. Thorn, a solicitor at Aldbrickham.'
+
+'And are you a clever needlewoman?'
+
+'I am considered to be.'
+
+'Then I think that at any rate I will write to Mr. Thorn,' said Miss
+Aldclyffe, with a little smile.  'It is true, the whole proceeding
+is very irregular; but my present maid leaves next Monday, and
+neither of the five I have already seen seem to do for me. . . .
+Well, I will write to Mr. Thorn, and if his reply is satisfactory,
+you shall hear from me.  It will be as well to set yourself in
+readiness to come on Monday.'
+
+When Cytherea had again been watched out of the room, Miss Aldclyffe
+asked for writing materials, that she might at once communicate with
+Mr. Thorn.  She indecisively played with the pen.  'Suppose Mr.
+Thorn's reply to be in any way disheartening--and even if so from
+his own imperfect acquaintance with the young creature more than
+from circumstantial knowledge--I shall feel obliged to give her up.
+Then I shall regret that I did not give her one trial in spite of
+other people's prejudices.  All her account of herself is reliable
+enough--yes, I can see that by her face.  I like that face of hers.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe put down the pen and left the hotel without writing
+to Mr. Thorn.
+
+
+
+V.  THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
+
+1.  AUGUST THE EIGHTH.  MORNING AND AFTERNOON
+
+At post-time on that following Monday morning, Cytherea watched so
+anxiously for the postman, that as the time which must bring him
+narrowed less and less her vivid expectation had only a degree less
+tangibility than his presence itself.  In another second his form
+came into view.  He brought two letters for Cytherea.
+
+One from Miss Aldclyffe, simply stating that she wished Cytherea to
+come on trial:  that she would require her to be at Knapwater House
+by Monday evening.
+
+The other was from Edward Springrove.  He told her that she was the
+bright spot of his life:  that her existence was far dearer to him
+than his own:  that he had never known what it was to love till he
+had met her.  True, he had felt passing attachments to other faces
+from time to time; but they all had been weak inclinations towards
+those faces as they then appeared.  He loved her past and future, as
+well as her present.  He pictured her as a child:  he loved her.  He
+pictured her of sage years:  he loved her.  He pictured her in
+trouble; he loved her.  Homely friendship entered into his love for
+her, without which all love was evanescent.
+
+He would make one depressing statement.  Uncontrollable
+circumstances (a long history, with which it was impossible to
+acquaint her at present) operated to a certain extent as a drag upon
+his wishes.  He had felt this more strongly at the time of their
+parting than he did now--and it was the cause of his abrupt
+behaviour, for which he begged her to forgive him.  He saw now an
+honourable way of freeing himself, and the perception had prompted
+him to write.  In the meantime might he indulge in the hope of
+possessing her on some bright future day, when by hard labour
+generated from her own encouraging words, he had placed himself in a
+position she would think worthy to be shared with him?
+
+Dear little letter; she huddled it up.  So much more important a
+love-letter seems to a girl than to a man.  Springrove was
+unconsciously clever in his letters, and a man with a talent of that
+kind may write himself up to a hero in the mind of a young woman who
+loves him without knowing much about him.  Springrove already stood
+a cubit higher in her imagination than he did in his shoes.
+
+During the day she flitted about the room in an ecstasy of pleasure,
+packing the things and thinking of an answer which should be worthy
+of the tender tone of the question, her love bubbling from her
+involuntarily, like prophesyings from a prophet.
+
+In the afternoon Owen went with her to the railway-station, and put
+her in the train for Carriford Road, the station nearest to
+Knapwater House.
+
+Half-an-hour later she stepped out upon the platform, and found
+nobody there to receive her--though a pony-carriage was waiting
+outside.  In two minutes she saw a melancholy man in cheerful livery
+running towards her from a public-house close adjoining, who proved
+to be the servant sent to fetch her.  There are two ways of getting
+rid of sorrows:  one by living them down, the other by drowning
+them.  The coachman drowned his.
+
+He informed her that her luggage would be fetched by a spring-waggon
+in about half-an-hour; then helped her into the chaise and drove
+off.
+
+Her lover's letter, lying close against her neck, fortified her
+against the restless timidity she had previously felt concerning
+this new undertaking, and completely furnished her with the
+confident ease of mind which is required for the critical
+observation of surrounding objects.  It was just that stage in the
+slow decline of the summer days, when the deep, dark, and vacuous
+hot-weather shadows are beginning to be replaced by blue ones that
+have a surface and substance to the eye.  They trotted along the
+turnpike road for a distance of about a mile, which brought them
+just outside the village of Carriford, and then turned through large
+lodge-gates, on the heavy stone piers of which stood a pair of
+bitterns cast in bronze.  They then entered the park and wound along
+a drive shaded by old and drooping lime-trees, not arranged in the
+form of an avenue, but standing irregularly, sometimes leaving the
+track completely exposed to the sky, at other times casting a shade
+over it, which almost approached gloom--the under surface of the
+lowest boughs hanging at a uniform level of six feet above the
+grass--the extreme height to which the nibbling mouths of the cattle
+could reach.
+
+'Is that the house?' said Cytherea expectantly, catching sight of a
+grey gable between the trees, and losing it again.
+
+'No; that's the old manor-house--or rather all that's left of it.
+The Aldycliffes used to let it sometimes, but it was oftener empty.
+'Tis now divided into three cottages.  Respectable people didn't
+care to live there.'
+
+'Why didn't they?'
+
+'Well, 'tis so awkward and unhandy.  You see so much of it has been
+pulled down, and the rooms that are left won't do very well for a
+small residence.  'Tis so dismal, too, and like most old houses
+stands too low down in the hollow to be healthy.'
+
+'Do they tell any horrid stories about it?'
+
+'No, not a single one.'
+
+'Ah, that's a pity.'
+
+'Yes, that's what I say.  'Tis jest the house for a nice ghastly
+hair-on-end story, that would make the parish religious.  Perhaps it
+will have one some day to make it complete; but there's not a word
+of the kind now.  There, I wouldn't live there for all that.  In
+fact, I couldn't.  O no, I couldn't.'
+
+'Why couldn't you?'
+
+'The sounds.'
+
+'What are they?'
+
+'One is the waterfall, which stands so close by that you can hear
+that there waterfall in every room of the house, night or day, ill
+or well.  'Tis enough to drive anybody mad:  now hark.'
+
+He stopped the horse.  Above the slight common sounds in the air
+came the unvarying steady rush of falling water from some spot
+unseen on account of the thick foliage of the grove.
+
+'There's something awful in the timing o' that sound, ain't there,
+miss?'
+
+'When you say there is, there really seems to be.  You said there
+were two--what is the other horrid sound?'
+
+'The pumping-engine.  That's close by the Old House, and sends water
+up the hill and all over the Great House.  We shall hear that
+directly. . . .  There, now hark again.'
+
+From the same direction down the dell they could now hear the
+whistling creak of cranks, repeated at intervals of half-a-minute,
+with a sousing noise between each:  a creak, a souse, then another
+creak, and so on continually.
+
+'Now if anybody could make shift to live through the other sounds,
+these would finish him off, don't you think so, miss?  That machine
+goes on night and day, summer and winter, and is hardly ever greased
+or visited.  Ah, it tries the nerves at night, especially if you are
+not very well; though we don't often hear it at the Great House.'
+
+'That sound is certainly very dismal.  They might have the wheel
+greased.  Does Miss Aldclyffe take any interest in these things?'
+
+'Well, scarcely; you see her father doesn't attend to that sort of
+thing as he used to.  The engine was once quite his hobby.  But now
+he's getten old and very seldom goes there.'
+
+'How many are there in family?'
+
+'Only her father and herself.  He's a' old man of seventy.'
+
+'I had thought that Miss Aldclyffe was sole mistress of the
+property, and lived here alone.'
+
+'No, m--'  The coachman was continually checking himself thus, being
+about to style her miss involuntarily, and then recollecting that he
+was only speaking to the new lady's-maid.
+
+'She will soon be mistress, however, I am afraid,' he continued, as
+if speaking by a spirit of prophecy denied to ordinary humanity.
+'The poor old gentleman has decayed very fast lately.'  The man then
+drew a long breath.
+
+'Why did you breathe sadly like that?' said Cytherea.
+
+'Ah!. . .  When he's dead peace will be all over with us old
+servants.  I expect to see the old house turned inside out.'
+
+'She will marry, do you mean?'
+
+'Marry--not she!  I wish she would.  No, in her soul she's as
+solitary as Robinson Crusoe, though she has acquaintances in plenty,
+if not relations.  There's the rector, Mr. Raunham--he's a relation
+by marriage--yet she's quite distant towards him.  And people say
+that if she keeps single there will be hardly a life between Mr.
+Raunham and the heirship of the estate.  Dang it, she don't care.
+She's an extraordinary picture of womankind--very extraordinary.'
+
+'In what way besides?'
+
+'You'll know soon enough, miss.  She has had seven lady's-maids this
+last twelvemonth.  I assure you 'tis one body's work to fetch 'em
+from the station and take 'em back again.  The Lord must be a
+neglectful party at heart, or he'd never permit such overbearen
+goings on!'
+
+'Does she dismiss them directly they come!'
+
+'Not at all--she never dismisses them--they go theirselves.  Ye see
+'tis like this.  She's got a very quick temper; she flees in a
+passion with them for nothing at all; next mornen they come up and
+say they are going; she's sorry for it and wishes they'd stay, but
+she's as proud as a lucifer, and her pride won't let her say,
+"Stay," and away they go.  'Tis like this in fact.  If you say to
+her about anybody, "Ah, poor thing!" she says, "Pooh! indeed!"  If
+you say, "Pooh, indeed!"  "Ah, poor thing!" she says directly.  She
+hangs the chief baker, as mid be, and restores the chief butler, as
+mid be, though the devil but Pharaoh herself can see the difference
+between 'em.'
+
+Cytherea was silent.  She feared she might be again a burden to her
+brother.
+
+'However, you stand a very good chance,' the man went on, 'for I
+think she likes you more than common.  I have never known her send
+the pony-carriage to meet one before; 'tis always the trap, but this
+time she said, in a very particular ladylike tone, "Roobert, gaow
+with the pony-kerriage.". . .  There, 'tis true, pony and carriage
+too are getten rather shabby now,' he added, looking round upon the
+vehicle as if to keep Cytherea's pride within reasonable limits.
+
+''Tis to be hoped you'll please in dressen her to-night.'
+
+'Why to-night?'
+
+'There's a dinner-party of seventeen; 'tis her father's birthday,
+and she's very particular about her looks at such times. Now see;
+this is the house.  Livelier up here, isn't it, miss?'
+
+They were now on rising ground, and had just emerged from a clump of
+trees.  Still a little higher than where they stood was situated the
+mansion, called Knapwater House, the offices gradually losing
+themselves among the trees behind.
+
+2.  EVENING
+
+The house was regularly and substantially built of clean grey
+freestone throughout, in that plainer fashion of Greek classicism
+which prevailed at the latter end of the last century, when the
+copyists called designers had grown weary of fantastic variations in
+the Roman orders.  The main block approximated to a square on the
+ground plan, having a projection in the centre of each side,
+surmounted by a pediment.  From each angle of the inferior side ran
+a line of buildings lower than the rest, turning inwards again at
+their further end, and forming within them a spacious open court,
+within which resounded an echo of astonishing clearness.  These
+erections were in their turn backed by ivy-covered ice-houses,
+laundries, and stables, the whole mass of subsidiary buildings being
+half buried beneath close-set shrubs and trees.
+
+There was opening sufficient through the foliage on the right hand
+to enable her on nearer approach to form an idea of the arrangement
+of the remoter or lawn front also.  The natural features and contour
+of this quarter of the site had evidently dictated the position of
+the house primarily, and were of the ordinary, and upon the whole,
+most satisfactory kind, namely, a broad, graceful slope running from
+the terrace beneath the walls to the margin of a placid lake lying
+below, upon the surface of which a dozen swans and a green punt
+floated at leisure.  An irregular wooded island stood in the midst
+of the lake; beyond this and the further margin of the water were
+plantations and greensward of varied outlines, the trees
+heightening, by half veiling, the softness of the exquisite
+landscape stretching behind.
+
+The glimpses she had obtained of this portion were now checked by
+the angle of the building.  In a minute or two they reached the side
+door, at which Cytherea alighted.  She was welcomed by an elderly
+woman of lengthy smiles and general pleasantness, who announced
+herself to be Mrs. Morris, the housekeeper.
+
+'Mrs. Graye, I believe?' she said.
+
+'I am not--O yes, yes, we are all mistresses,' said Cytherea,
+smiling, but forcedly.  The title accorded her seemed disagreeably
+like the first slight scar of a brand, and she thought of Owen's
+prophecy.
+
+Mrs. Morris led her into a comfortable parlour called The Room.
+Here tea was made ready, and Cytherea sat down, looking, whenever
+occasion allowed, at Mrs. Morris with great interest and curiosity,
+to discover, if possible, something in her which should give a clue
+to the secret of her knowledge of herself, and the recommendation
+based upon it.  But nothing was to be learnt, at any rate just then.
+Mrs. Morris was perpetually getting up, feeling in her pockets,
+going to cupboards, leaving the room two or three minutes, and
+trotting back again.
+
+'You'll excuse me, Mrs. Graye,' she said, 'but 'tis the old
+gentleman's birthday, and they always have a lot of people to dinner
+on that day, though he's getting up in years now.  However, none of
+them are sleepers--she generally keeps the house pretty clear of
+lodgers (being a lady with no intimate friends, though many
+acquaintances), which, though it gives us less to do, makes it all
+the duller for the younger maids in the house.'  Mrs. Morris then
+proceeded to give in fragmentary speeches an outline of the
+constitution and government of the estate.
+
+'Now, are you sure you have quite done tea?  Not a bit or drop more?
+Why, you've eaten nothing, I'm sure. . . .  Well, now, it is rather
+inconvenient that the other maid is not here to show you the ways of
+the house a little, but she left last Saturday, and Miss Aldclyffe
+has been making shift with poor old clumsy me for a maid all
+yesterday and this morning.  She is not come in yet.  I expect she
+will ask for you, Mrs. Graye, the first thing. . . .  I was going to
+say that if you have really done tea, I will take you upstairs, and
+show you through the wardrobes--Miss Aldclyffe's things are not laid
+out for to-night yet.'
+
+She preceded Cytherea upstairs, pointed out her own room, and then
+took her into Miss Aldclyffe's dressing-room, on the first-floor;
+where, after explaining the whereabouts of various articles of
+apparel, the housekeeper left her, telling her that she had an hour
+yet upon her hands before dressing-time.  Cytherea laid out upon the
+bed in the next room all that she had been told would be required
+that evening, and then went again to the little room which had been
+appropriated to herself.
+
+Here she sat down by the open window, leant out upon the sill like
+another Blessed Damozel, and listlessly looked down upon the
+brilliant pattern of colours formed by the flower-beds on the lawn--
+now richly crowded with late summer blossom.  But the vivacity of
+spirit which had hitherto enlivened her, was fast ebbing under the
+pressure of prosaic realities, and the warm scarlet of the
+geraniums, glowing most conspicuously, and mingling with the vivid
+cold red and green of the verbenas, the rich depth of the dahlia,
+and the ripe mellowness of the calceolaria, backed by the pale hue
+of a flock of meek sheep feeding in the open park, close to the
+other side of the fence, were, to a great extent, lost upon her
+eyes.  She was thinking that nothing seemed worth while; that it was
+possible she might die in a workhouse; and what did it matter?  The
+petty, vulgar details of servitude that she had just passed through,
+her dependence upon the whims of a strange woman, the necessity of
+quenching all individuality of character in herself, and
+relinquishing her own peculiar tastes to help on the wheel of this
+alien establishment, made her sick and sad, and she almost longed to
+pursue some free, out-of-doors employment, sleep under trees or a
+hut, and know no enemy but winter and cold weather, like shepherds
+and cowkeepers, and birds and animals--ay, like the sheep she saw
+there under her window.  She looked sympathizingly at them for
+several minutes, imagining their enjoyment of the rich grass.
+
+'Yes--like those sheep,' she said aloud; and her face reddened with
+surprise at a discovery she made that very instant.
+
+The flock consisted of some ninety or a hundred young stock ewes:
+the surface of their fleece was as rounded and even as a cushion,
+and white as milk.  Now she had just observed that on the left
+buttock of every one of them were marked in distinct red letters the
+initials 'E. S.'
+
+'E. S.' could bring to Cytherea's mind only one thought; but that
+immediately and for ever--the name of her lover, Edward Springrove.
+
+'O, if it should be--!'  She interrupted her words by a resolve.
+Miss Aldclyffe's carriage at the same moment made its appearance in
+the drive; but Miss Aldclyffe was not her object now.  It was to
+ascertain to whom the sheep belonged, and to set her surmise at rest
+one way or the other.  She flew downstairs to Mrs. Morris.
+
+'Whose sheep are those in the park, Mrs. Morris?'
+
+'Farmer Springrove's.'
+
+'What Farmer Springrove is that?' she said quickly.
+
+'Why, surely you know?  Your friend, Farmer Springrove, the cider-
+maker, and who keeps the Three Tranters Inn; who recommended you to
+me when he came in to see me the other day?'
+
+Cytherea's mother-wit suddenly warned her in the midst of her
+excitement that it was necessary not to betray the secret of her
+love.  'O yes,' she said, 'of course.'  Her thoughts had run as
+follows in that short interval:--
+
+'Farmer Springrove is Edward's father, and his name is Edward too.
+
+'Edward knew I was going to advertise for a situation of some kind.
+
+'He watched the Times, and saw it, my address being attached.
+
+'He thought it would be excellent for me to be here that we might
+meet whenever he came home.
+
+'He told his father that I might be recommended as a lady's-maid;
+and he knew my brother and myself.
+
+'His father told Mrs. Morris; Mrs. Morris told Miss Aldclyffe.'
+
+The whole chain of incidents that drew her there was plain, and
+there was no such thing as chance in the matter.  It was all
+Edward's doing.
+
+The sound of a bell was heard.  Cytherea did not heed it, and still
+continued in her reverie.
+
+'That's Miss Aldclyffe's bell,' said Mrs. Morris.
+
+'I suppose it is,' said the young woman placidly.
+
+'Well, it means that you must go up to her,' the matron continued,
+in a tone of surprise.
+
+Cytherea felt a burning heat come over her, mingled with a sudden
+irritation at Mrs. Morris's hint.  But the good sense which had
+recognized stern necessity prevailed over rebellious independence;
+the flush passed, and she said hastily--
+
+'Yes, yes; of course, I must go to her when she pulls the bell--
+whether I want to or no.'
+
+However, in spite of this painful reminder of her new position in
+life, Cytherea left the apartment in a mood far different from the
+gloomy sadness of ten minutes previous.  The place felt like home to
+her now; she did not mind the pettiness of her occupation, because
+Edward evidently did not mind it; and this was Edward's own spot.
+She found time on her way to Miss Aldclyffe's dressing-room to
+hurriedly glide out by a side door, and look for a moment at the
+unconscious sheep bearing the friendly initials.  She went up to
+them to try to touch one of the flock, and felt vexed that they all
+stared sceptically at her kind advances, and then ran pell-mell down
+the hill.  Then, fearing any one should discover her childish
+movements, she slipped indoors again, and ascended the staircase,
+catching glimpses, as she passed, of silver-buttoned footmen, who
+flashed about the passages like lightning.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe's dressing-room was an apartment which, on a casual
+survey, conveyed an impression that it was available for almost any
+purpose save the adornment of the feminine person.  In its hours of
+perfect order nothing pertaining to the toilet was visible; even the
+inevitable mirrors with their accessories were arranged in a roomy
+recess not noticeable from the door, lighted by a window of its own,
+called the dressing-window.
+
+The washing-stand figured as a vast oak chest, carved with grotesque
+Renaissance ornament.  The dressing table was in appearance
+something between a high altar and a cabinet piano, the surface
+being richly worked in the same style of semi-classic decoration,
+but the extraordinary outline having been arrived at by an ingenious
+joiner and decorator from the neighbouring town, after months of
+painful toil in cutting and fitting, under Miss Aldclyffe's
+immediate eye; the materials being the remains of two or three old
+cabinets the lady had found in the lumber-room.  About two-thirds of
+the floor was carpeted, the remaining portion being laid with
+parquetry of light and dark woods.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe was standing at the larger window, away from the
+dressing-niche.  She bowed, and said pleasantly, 'I am glad you have
+come.  We shall get on capitally, I dare say.'
+
+Her bonnet was off.  Cytherea did not think her so handsome as on
+the earlier day; the queenliness of her beauty was harder and less
+warm.  But a worse discovery than this was that Miss Aldclyffe, with
+the usual obliviousness of rich people to their dependents'
+specialities, seemed to have quite forgotten Cytherea's
+inexperience, and mechanically delivered up her body to her handmaid
+without a thought of details, and with a mild yawn.
+
+Everything went well at first.  The dress was removed, stockings and
+black boots were taken off, and silk stockings and white shoes were
+put on.  Miss Aldclyffe then retired to bathe her hands and face,
+and Cytherea drew breath.  If she could get through this first
+evening, all would be right.  She felt that it was unfortunate that
+such a crucial test for her powers as a birthday dinner should have
+been applied on the threshold of her arrival; but set to again.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe was now arrayed in a white dressing-gown, and dropped
+languidly into an easy-chair, pushed up before the glass.  The
+instincts of her sex and her own practice told Cytherea the next
+movement.  She let Miss Aldclyffe's hair fall about her shoulders,
+and began to arrange it.  It proved to be all real; a satisfaction.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe was musingly looking on the floor, and the operation
+went on for some minutes in silence.  At length her thoughts seemed
+to turn to the present, and she lifted her eyes to the glass.
+
+'Why, what on earth are you doing with my head?' she exclaimed, with
+widely opened eyes.  At the words she felt the back of Cytherea's
+little hand tremble against her neck.
+
+'Perhaps you prefer it done the other fashion, madam?' said the
+maiden.
+
+'No, no; that's the fashion right enough, but you must make more
+show of my hair than that, or I shall have to buy some, which God
+forbid!'
+
+'It is how I do my own,' said Cytherea naively, and with a sweetness
+of tone that would have pleased the most acrimonious under
+favourable circumstances; but tyranny was in the ascendant with Miss
+Aldclyffe at this moment, and she was assured of palatable food for
+her vice by having felt the trembling of Cytherea's hand.
+
+'Yours, indeed!  YOUR hair!  Come, go on.'  Considering that
+Cytherea possessed at least five times as much of that valuable
+auxiliary to woman's beauty as the lady before her, there was at the
+same time some excuse for Miss Aldclyffe's outburst.  She remembered
+herself, however, and said more quietly, 'Now then, Graye--  By-the-
+bye, what do they call you downstairs?'
+
+'Mrs. Graye,' said the handmaid.
+
+'Then tell them not to do any such absurd thing--not but that it is
+quite according to usage; but you are too young yet.'
+
+This dialogue tided Cytherea safely onward through the hairdressing
+till the flowers and diamonds were to be placed upon the lady's
+brow.  Cytherea began arranging them tastefully, and to the very
+best of her judgment.
+
+'That won't do,' said Miss Aldclyffe harshly.
+
+'Why?'
+
+'I look too young--an old dressed doll.'
+
+'Will that, madam?'
+
+'No, I look a fright--a perfect fright!'
+
+'This way, perhaps?'
+
+'Heavens!  Don't worry me so.'  She shut her lips like a trap.
+
+Having once worked herself up to the belief that her head-dress was
+to be a failure that evening, no cleverness of Cytherea's in
+arranging it could please her.  She continued in a smouldering
+passion during the remainder of the performance, keeping her lips
+firmly closed, and the muscles of her body rigid.  Finally,
+snatching up her gloves, and taking her handkerchief and fan in her
+hand, she silently sailed out of the room, without betraying the
+least consciousness of another woman's presence behind her.
+
+Cytherea's fears that at the undressing this suppressed anger would
+find a vent, kept her on thorns throughout the evening.  She tried
+to read; she could not.  She tried to sew; she could not.  She tried
+to muse; she could not do that connectedly.  'If this is the
+beginning, what will the end be!' she said in a whisper, and felt
+many misgivings as to the policy of being overhasty in establishing
+an independence at the expense of congruity with a cherished past.
+
+3.  MIDNIGHT
+
+The clock struck twelve.  The Aldclyffe state dinner was over.  The
+company had all gone, and Miss Aldclyffe's bell rang loudly and
+jerkingly.
+
+Cytherea started to her feet at the sound, which broke in upon a
+fitful sleep that had overtaken her.  She had been sitting drearily
+in her chair waiting minute after minute for the signal, her brain
+in that state of intentness which takes cognizance of the passage of
+Time as a real motion--motion without matter--the instants throbbing
+past in the company of a feverish pulse.  She hastened to the room,
+to find the lady sitting before the dressing shrine, illuminated on
+both sides, and looking so queenly in her attitude of absolute
+repose, that the younger woman felt the awfullest sense of
+responsibility at her Vandalism in having undertaken to demolish so
+imposing a pile.
+
+The lady's jewelled ornaments were taken off in silence--some by her
+own listless hands, some by Cytherea's.  Then followed the outer
+stratum of clothing.  The dress being removed, Cytherea took it in
+her hand and went with it into the bedroom adjoining, intending to
+hang it in the wardrobe.  But on second thoughts, in order that she
+might not keep Miss Aldclyffe waiting a moment longer than
+necessary, she flung it down on the first resting-place that came to
+hand, which happened to be the bed, and re-entered the dressing-room
+with the noiseless footfall of a kitten.  She paused in the middle
+of the room.
+
+She was unnoticed, and her sudden return had plainly not been
+expected.  During the short time of Cytherea's absence, Miss
+Aldclyffe had pulled off a kind of chemisette of Brussels net, drawn
+high above the throat, which she had worn with her evening dress as
+a semi-opaque covering to her shoulders, and in its place had put
+her night-gown round her.  Her right hand was lifted to her neck, as
+if engaged in fastening her night-gown.
+
+But on a second glance Miss Aldclyffe's proceeding was clearer to
+Cytherea.  She was not fastening her night-gown; it had been
+carelessly thrown round her, and Miss Aldclyffe was really occupied
+in holding up to her eyes some small object that she was keenly
+scrutinizing.  And now on suddenly discovering the presence of
+Cytherea at the back of the apartment, instead of naturally
+continuing or concluding her inspection, she desisted hurriedly; the
+tiny snap of a spring was heard, her hand was removed, and she began
+adjusting her robes.
+
+Modesty might have directed her hasty action of enwrapping her
+shoulders, but it was scarcely likely, considering Miss Aldclyffe's
+temperament, that she had all her life been used to a maid,
+Cytherea's youth, and the elder lady's marked treatment of her as if
+she were a mere child or plaything.  The matter was too slight to
+reason about, and yet upon the whole it seemed that Miss Aldclyffe
+must have a practical reason for concealing her neck.
+
+With a timid sense of being an intruder Cytherea was about to step
+back and out of the room; but at the same moment Miss Aldclyffe
+turned, saw the impulse, and told her companion to stay, looking
+into her eyes as if she had half an intention to explain something.
+Cytherea felt certain it was the little mystery of her late
+movements.  The other withdrew her eyes; Cytherea went to fetch the
+dressing-gown, and wheeled round again to bring it up to Miss
+Aldclyffe, who had now partly removed her night-dress to put it on
+the proper way, and still sat with her back towards Cytherea.
+
+Her neck was again quite open and uncovered, and though hidden from
+the direct line of Cytherea's vision, she saw it reflected in the
+glass--the fair white surface, and the inimitable combination of
+curves between throat and bosom which artists adore, being brightly
+lit up by the light burning on either side.
+
+And the lady's prior proceedings were now explained in the simplest
+manner.  In the midst of her breast, like an island in a sea of
+pearl, reclined an exquisite little gold locket, embellished with
+arabesque work of blue, red, and white enamel.  That was undoubtedly
+what Miss Aldclyffe had been contemplating; and, moreover, not
+having been put off with her other ornaments, it was to be retained
+during the night--a slight departure from the custom of ladies which
+Miss Aldclyffe had at first not cared to exhibit to her new
+assistant, though now, on further thought, she seemed to have become
+indifferent on the matter.
+
+'My dressing-gown,' she said, quietly fastening her night-dress as
+she spoke.
+
+Cytherea came forward with it.  Miss Aldclyffe did not turn her
+head, but looked inquiringly at her maid in the glass.
+
+'You saw what I wear on my neck, I suppose?' she said to Cytherea's
+reflected face.
+
+'Yes, madam, I did,' said Cytherea to Miss Aldclyffe's reflected
+face.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe again looked at Cytherea's reflection as if she were
+on the point of explaining.  Again she checked her resolve, and said
+lightly--
+
+'Few of my maids discover that I wear it always.  I generally keep
+it a secret--not that it matters much.  But I was careless with you,
+and seemed to want to tell you.  You win me to make confidences
+that. . .'
+
+She ceased, took Cytherea's hand in her own, lifted the locket with
+the other, touched the spring and disclosed a miniature.
+
+'It is a handsome face, is it not?' she whispered mournfully, and
+even timidly.
+
+'It is.'
+
+But the sight had gone through Cytherea like an electric shock, and
+there was an instantaneous awakening of perception in her, so
+thrilling in its presence as to be well-nigh insupportable.  The
+face in the miniature was the face of her own father--younger and
+fresher than she had ever known him--but her father!
+
+Was this the woman of his wild and unquenchable early love?  And was
+this the woman who had figured in the gate-man's story as answering
+the name of Cytherea before her judgment was awake?  Surely it was.
+And if so, here was the tangible outcrop of a romantic and hidden
+stratum of the past hitherto seen only in her imagination; but as
+far as her scope allowed, clearly defined therein by reason of its
+strangeness.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe's eyes and thoughts were so intent upon the miniature
+that she had not been conscious of Cytherea's start of surprise.
+She went on speaking in a low and abstracted tone.
+
+'Yes, I lost him.'  She interrupted her words by a short meditation,
+and went on again.  'I lost him by excess of honesty as regarded my
+past.  But it was best that it should be so. . . .  I was led to
+think rather more than usual of the circumstances to-night because
+of your name.  It is pronounced the same way, though differently
+spelt.'
+
+The only means by which Cytherea's surname could have been spelt to
+Miss Aldclyffe must have been by Mrs. Morris or Farmer Springrove.
+She fancied Farmer Springrove would have spelt it properly if Edward
+was his informant, which made Miss Aldclyffe's remark obscure.
+
+Women make confidences and then regret them.  The impulsive rush of
+feeling which had led Miss Aldclyffe to indulge in this revelation,
+trifling as it was, died out immediately her words were beyond
+recall; and the turmoil, occasioned in her by dwelling upon that
+chapter of her life, found vent in another kind of emotion--the
+result of a trivial accident.
+
+Cytherea, after letting down Miss Aldclyffe's hair, adopted some
+plan with it to which the lady had not been accustomed.  A rapid
+revulsion to irritation ensued.  The maiden's mere touch seemed to
+discharge the pent-up regret of the lady as if she had been a jar of
+electricity.
+
+'How strangely you treat my hair!' she exclaimed.
+
+A silence.
+
+'I have told you what I never tell my maids as a rule; of course
+NOTHING that I say in this room is to be mentioned outside it.'  She
+spoke crossly no less than emphatically.
+
+'It shall not be, madam,' said Cytherea, agitated and vexed that the
+woman of her romantic wonderings should be so disagreeable to her.
+
+'Why on earth did I tell you of my past?' she went on.
+
+Cytherea made no answer.
+
+The lady's vexation with herself, and the accident which had led to
+the disclosure swelled little by little till it knew no bounds.  But
+what was done could not be undone, and though Cytherea had shown a
+most winning responsiveness, quarrel Miss Aldclyffe must.  She
+recurred to the subject of Cytherea's want of expertness, like a
+bitter reviewer, who finding the sentiments of a poet unimpeachable,
+quarrels with his rhymes.
+
+'Never, never before did I serve myself such a trick as this in
+engaging a maid!'  She waited for an expostulation:  none came.
+Miss Aldclyffe tried again.
+
+'The idea of my taking a girl without asking her more than three
+questions, or having a single reference, all because of her good l--
+, the shape of her face and body!  It WAS a fool's trick.  There, I
+am served right, quite right--by being deceived in such a way.'
+
+'I didn't deceive you,' said Cytherea.  The speech was an
+unfortunate one, and was the very 'fuel to maintain its fires' that
+the other's petulance desired.
+
+'You did,' she said hotly.
+
+'I told you I couldn't promise to be acquainted with every detail of
+routine just at first.'
+
+'Will you contradict me in this way!  You are telling untruths, I
+say.'
+
+Cytherea's lip quivered.  'I would answer the remark if--if--'
+
+'If what?'
+
+'If it were a lady's!'
+
+'You girl of impudence--what do you say?  Leave the room this
+instant, I tell you.'
+
+'And I tell you that a person who speaks to a lady as you do to me,
+is no lady herself!'
+
+'To a lady?  A lady's-maid speaks in this way.  The idea!'
+
+'Don't "lady's-maid" me:  nobody is my mistress I won't have it!'
+
+'Good Heavens!'
+
+'I wouldn't have come--no--I wouldn't! if I had known!'
+
+'What?'
+
+'That you were such an ill-tempered, unjust woman!'
+
+'Possest beyond the Muse's painting,' Miss Aldclyffe exclaimed--
+
+'A Woman, am I!  I'll teach you if I am a Woman!' and lifted her
+hand as if she would have liked to strike her companion.  This stung
+the maiden into absolute defiance.
+
+'I dare you to touch me!' she cried.  'Strike me if you dare, madam!
+I am not afraid of you--what do you mean by such an action as that?'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe was disconcerted at this unexpected show of spirit,
+and ashamed of her unladylike impulse now it was put into words.
+She sank back in the chair.  'I was not going to strike you--go to
+your room--I beg you to go to your room!' she repeated in a husky
+whisper.
+
+Cytherea, red and panting, took up her candlestick and advanced to
+the table to get a light.  As she stood close to them the rays from
+the candles struck sharply on her face.  She usually bore a much
+stronger likeness to her mother than to her father, but now, looking
+with a grave, reckless, and angered expression of countenance at the
+kindling wick as she held it slanting into the other flame, her
+father's features were distinct in her.  It was the first time Miss
+Aldclyffe had seen her in a passionate mood, and wearing that
+expression which was invariably its concomitant.  It was Miss
+Aldclyffe's turn to start now; and the remark she made was an
+instance of that sudden change of tone from high-flown invective to
+the pettiness of curiosity which so often makes women's quarrels
+ridiculous.  Even Miss Aldclyffe's dignity had not sufficient power
+to postpone the absorbing desire she now felt to settle the strange
+suspicion that had entered her head.
+
+'You spell your name the common way, G, R, E, Y, don't you?' she
+said, with assumed indifference.
+
+'No,' said Cytherea, poised on the side of her foot, and still
+looking into the flame.
+
+'Yes, surely?  The name was spelt that way on your boxes:  I looked
+and saw it myself.'
+
+The enigma of Miss Aldclyffe's mistake was solved.  'O, was it?'
+said Cytherea.   'Ah, I remember Mrs. Jackson, the lodging-house
+keeper at Budmouth, labelled them.  We spell our name G, R, A, Y,
+E.'
+
+'What was your father's trade?'
+
+Cytherea thought it would be useless to attempt to conceal facts any
+longer.  'His was not a trade,' she said.  'He was an architect.'
+
+'The idea of your being an architect's daughter!'
+
+'There's nothing to offend, you in that, I hope?'
+
+'O no.'
+
+'Why did you say "the idea"?'
+
+'Leave that alone.  Did he ever visit in Gower Street, Bloomsbury,
+one Christmas, many years ago?--but you would not know that.'
+
+'I have heard him say that Mr. Huntway, a curate somewhere in that
+part of London, and who died there, was an old college friend of
+his.'
+
+'What is your Christian name?'
+
+'Cytherea.'
+
+'No!  And is it really?  And you knew that face I showed you?  Yes,
+I see you did.'  Miss Aldclyffe stopped, and closed her lips
+impassibly.  She was a little agitated.
+
+'Do you want me any longer?' said Cytherea, standing candle in hand
+and looking quietly in Miss Aldclyffe's face.
+
+'Well--no:  no longer,' said the other lingeringly.
+
+'With your permission, I will leave the house to morrow morning,
+madam.'
+
+'Ah.'  Miss Aldclyffe had no notion of what she was saying.
+
+'And I know you will be so good as not to intrude upon me during the
+short remainder of my stay?'
+
+Saying this Cytherea left the room before her companion had
+answered.  Miss Aldclyffe, then, had recognized her at last, and had
+been curious about her name from the beginning.
+
+The other members of the household had retired to rest.  As Cytherea
+went along the passage leading to her room her skirts rustled
+against the partition.  A door on her left opened, and Mrs. Morris
+looked out.
+
+'I waited out of bed till you came up,' she said, 'it being your
+first night, in case you should be at a loss for anything.  How have
+you got on with Miss Aldclyffe?'
+
+'Pretty well--though not so well as I could have wished.'
+
+'Has she been scolding?'
+
+'A little.'
+
+'She's a very odd lady--'tis all one way or the other with her.
+She's not bad at heart, but unbearable in close quarters.  Those of
+us who don't have much to do with her personally, stay on for years
+and years.'
+
+'Has Miss Aldclyffe's family always been rich?' said Cytherea.
+
+'O no.  The property, with the name, came from her mother's uncle.
+Her family is a branch of the old Aldclyffe family on the maternal
+side.  Her mother married a Bradleigh--a mere nobody at that time--
+and was on that account cut by her relations.  But very singularly
+the other branch of the family died out one by one--three of them,
+and Miss Aldclyffe's great-uncle then left all his property,
+including this estate, to Captain Bradleigh and his wife--Miss
+Aldclyffe's father and mother--on condition that they took the old
+family name as well.  There's all about it in the "Landed Gentry."
+'Tis a thing very often done.'
+
+'O, I see.  Thank you.  Well, now I am going.  Good-night.'
+
+
+
+VI.  THE EVENTS OF TWELVE HOURS
+
+1.  AUGUST THE NINTH.  ONE TO TWO O'CLOCK A.M.
+
+Cytherea entered her bedroom, and flung herself on the, bed,
+bewildered by a whirl of thought.  Only one subject was clear in her
+mind, and it was that, in spite of family discoveries, that day was
+to be the first and last of her experience as a lady's-maid.
+Starvation itself should not compel her to hold such a humiliating
+post for another instant.  'Ah,' she thought, with a sigh, at the
+martyrdom of her last little fragment of self-conceit, 'Owen knows
+everything better than I.'
+
+She jumped up and began making ready for her departure in the
+morning, the tears streaming down when she grieved and wondered what
+practical matter on earth she could turn her hand to next.  All
+these preparations completed, she began to undress, her mind
+unconsciously drifting away to the contemplation of her late
+surprises.  To look in the glass for an instant at the reflection of
+her own magnificent resources in face and bosom, and to mark their
+attractiveness unadorned, was perhaps but the natural action of a
+young woman who had so lately been chidden whilst passing through
+the harassing experience of decorating an older beauty of Miss
+Aldclyffe's temper.
+
+But she directly checked her weakness by sympathizing reflections on
+the hidden troubles which must have thronged the past years of the
+solitary lady, to keep her, though so rich and courted, in a mood so
+repellent and gloomy as that in which Cytherea found her; and then
+the young girl marvelled again and again, as she had marvelled
+before, at the strange confluence of circumstances which had brought
+herself into contact with the one woman in the world whose history
+was so romantically intertwined with her own.  She almost began to
+wish she were not obliged to go away and leave the lonely being to
+loneliness still.
+
+In bed and in the dark, Miss Aldclyffe haunted her mind more
+persistently than ever.  Instead of sleeping, she called up staring
+visions of the possible past of this queenly lady, her mother's
+rival.  Up the long vista of bygone years she saw, behind all, the
+young girl's flirtation, little or much, with the cousin, that
+seemed to have been nipped in the bud, or to have terminated hastily
+in some way.  Then the secret meetings between Miss Aldclyffe and
+the other woman at the little inn at Hammersmith and other places:
+the commonplace name she adopted:  her swoon at some painful news,
+and the very slight knowledge the elder female had of her partner in
+mystery.  Then, more than a year afterwards, the acquaintanceship of
+her own father with this his first love; the awakening of the
+passion, his acts of devotion, the unreasoning heat of his rapture,
+her tacit acceptance of it, and yet her uneasiness under the
+delight.  Then his declaration amid the evergreens:  the utter
+change produced in her manner thereby, seemingly the result of a
+rigid determination:  and the total concealment of her reason by
+herself and her parents, whatever it was.  Then the lady's course
+dropped into darkness, and nothing more was visible till she was
+discovered here at Knapwater, nearly fifty years old, still
+unmarried and still beautiful, but lonely, embittered, and haughty.
+Cytherea imagined that her father's image was still warmly cherished
+in Miss Aldclyffe's heart, and was thankful that she herself had not
+been betrayed into announcing that she knew many particulars of this
+page of her father's history, and the chief one, the lady's
+unaccountable renunciation of him.  It would have made her bearing
+towards the mistress of the mansion more awkward, and would have
+been no benefit to either.
+
+Thus conjuring up the past, and theorizing on the present, she lay
+restless, changing her posture from one side to the other and back
+again.  Finally, when courting sleep with all her art, she heard a
+clock strike two.  A minute later, and she fancied she could
+distinguish a soft rustle in the passage outside her room.
+
+To bury her head in the sheets was her first impulse; then to
+uncover it, raise herself on her elbow, and stretch her eyes wide
+open in the darkness; her lips being parted with the intentness of
+her listening.  Whatever the noise was, it had ceased for the time.
+
+It began again and came close to her door, lightly touching the
+panels.  Then there was another stillness; Cytherea made a movement
+which caused a faint rustling of the bed-clothes.
+
+Before she had time to think another thought a light tap was given.
+Cytherea breathed:  the person outside was evidently bent upon
+finding her awake, and the rustle she had made had encouraged the
+hope.  The maiden's physical condition shifted from one pole to its
+opposite.  The cold sweat of terror forsook her, and modesty took
+the alarm.  She became hot and red; her door was not locked.
+
+A distinct woman's whisper came to her through the keyhole:
+'Cytherea!'
+
+Only one being in the house knew her Christian name, and that was
+Miss Aldclyffe.  Cytherea stepped out of bed, went to the door, and
+whispered back, 'Yes?'
+
+'Let me come in, darling.'
+
+The young woman paused in a conflict between judgment and emotion.
+It was now mistress and maid no longer; woman and woman only.  Yes;
+she must let her come in, poor thing.
+
+She got a light in an instant, opened the door, and raising her eyes
+and the candle, saw Miss Aldclyffe standing outside in her dressing-
+gown.
+
+'Now you see that it is really myself; put out the light,' said the
+visitor.  'I want to stay here with you, Cythie.  I came to ask you
+to come down into my bed, but it is snugger here.  But remember that
+you are mistress in this room, and that I have no business here, and
+that you may send me away if you choose.  Shall I go?'
+
+'O no; you shan't indeed if you don't want to,' said Cythie
+generously.
+
+The instant they were in bed Miss Aldclyffe freed herself from the
+last remnant of restraint.  She flung her arms round the young girl,
+and pressed her gently to her heart.
+
+'Now kiss me,' she said.
+
+Cytherea, upon the whole, was rather discomposed at this change of
+treatment; and, discomposed or no, her passions were not so
+impetuous as Miss Aldclyffe's.  She could not bring her soul to her
+lips for a moment, try how she would.
+
+'Come, kiss me,' repeated Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+Cytherea gave her a very small one, as soft in touch and in sound as
+the bursting of a bubble.
+
+'More earnestly than that--come.'
+
+She gave another, a little but not much more expressively.
+
+'I don't deserve a more feeling one, I suppose,' said Miss
+Aldclyffe, with an emphasis of sad bitterness in her tone.  'I am an
+ill-tempered woman, you think; half out of my mind.  Well, perhaps I
+am; but I have had grief more than you can think or dream of.  But I
+can't help loving you--your name is the same as mine--isn't it
+strange?'
+
+Cytherea was inclined to say no, but remained silent.
+
+'Now, don't you think I must love you?' continued the other.
+
+'Yes,' said Cytherea absently.  She was still thinking whether duty
+to Owen and her father, which asked for silence on her knowledge of
+her father's unfortunate love, or duty to the woman embracing her,
+which seemed to ask for confidence, ought to predominate.  Here was
+a solution.  She would wait till Miss Aldclyffe referred to her
+acquaintanceship and attachment to Cytherea's father in past times:
+then she would tell her all she knew:  that would be honour.
+
+'Why can't you kiss me as I can kiss you?  Why can't you!'  She
+impressed upon Cytherea's lips a warm motherly salute, given as if
+in the outburst of strong feeling, long checked, and yearning for
+something to love and be loved by in return.
+
+'Do you think badly of me for my behaviour this evening, child?  I
+don't know why I am so foolish as to speak to you in this way.  I am
+a very fool, I believe.  Yes.  How old are you?'
+
+'Eighteen.'
+
+'Eighteen! . . .  Well, why don't you ask me how old I am?'
+
+'Because I don't want to know.'
+
+'Never mind if you don't.  I am forty-six; and it gives me greater
+pleasure to tell you this than it does to you to listen.  I have not
+told my age truly for the last twenty years till now.'
+
+'Why haven't you?'
+
+'I have met deceit by deceit, till I am weary of it--weary, weary--
+and I long to be what I shall never be again--artless and innocent,
+like you.  But I suppose that you, too, will, prove to be not worth
+a thought, as every new friend does on more intimate knowledge.
+Come, why don't you talk to me, child?  Have you said your prayers?'
+
+'Yes--no!  I forgot them to-night.'
+
+'I suppose you say them every night as a rule?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Why do you do that?'
+
+'Because I have always done so, and it would seem strange if I were
+not to.  Do you?'
+
+'I?  A wicked old sinner like me!  No, I never do.  I have thought
+all such matters humbug for years--thought so so long that I should
+be glad to think otherwise from very weariness; and yet, such is the
+code of the polite world, that I subscribe regularly to Missionary
+Societies and others of the sort. . . .  Well, say your prayers,
+dear--you won't omit them now you recollect it.  I should like to
+hear you very much.  Will you?'
+
+'It seems hardly--'
+
+'It would seem so like old times to me--when I was young, and
+nearer--far nearer Heaven than I am now.  Do, sweet one,'
+
+Cytherea was embarrassed, and her embarrassment arose from the
+following conjuncture of affairs.  Since she had loved Edward
+Springrove, she had linked his name with her brother Owen's in her
+nightly supplications to the Almighty.  She wished to keep her love
+for him a secret, and, above all, a secret from a woman like Miss
+Aldclyffe; yet her conscience and the honesty of her love would not
+for an instant allow her to think of omitting his dear name, and so
+endanger the efficacy of all her previous prayers for his success by
+an unworthy shame now:  it would be wicked of her, she thought, and
+a grievous wrong to him.  Under any worldly circumstances she might
+have thought the position justified a little finesse, and have
+skipped him for once; but prayer was too solemn a thing for such
+trifling.
+
+'I would rather not say them,' she murmured first.  It struck her
+then that this declining altogether was the same cowardice in
+another dress, and was delivering her poor Edward over to Satan just
+as unceremoniously as before.  'Yes; I will say my prayers, and you
+shall hear me,' she added firmly.
+
+She turned her face to the pillow and repeated in low soft tones the
+simple words she had used from childhood on such occasions.  Owen's
+name was mentioned without faltering, but in the other case,
+maidenly shyness was too strong even for religion, and that when
+supported by excellent intentions.  At the name of Edward she
+stammered, and her voice sank to the faintest whisper in spite of
+her.
+
+'Thank you, dearest,' said Miss Aldclyffe.  'I have prayed too, I
+verily believe.  You are a good girl, I think.'  Then the expected
+question came.
+
+'"Bless Owen," and whom, did you say?'
+
+There was no help for it now, and out it came.  'Owen and Edward,'
+said Cytherea.
+
+'Who are Owen and Edward?'
+
+'Owen is my brother, madam,' faltered the maid.
+
+'Ah, I remember.  Who is Edward?'
+
+A silence.
+
+'Your brother, too?' continued Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+'No.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe reflected a moment.  'Don't you want to tell me who
+Edward is?' she said at last, in a tone of meaning.
+
+'I don't mind telling; only . . .'
+
+'You would rather not, I suppose?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe shifted her ground.  'Were you ever in love?' she
+inquired suddenly.
+
+Cytherea was surprised to hear how quickly the voice had altered
+from tenderness to harshness, vexation, and disappointment.
+
+'Yes--I think I was--once,' she murmured.
+
+'Aha!  And were you ever kissed by a man?'
+
+A pause.
+
+'Well, were you?' said Miss Aldclyffe, rather sharply.
+
+'Don't press me to tell--I can't--indeed, I won't, madam!'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe removed her arms from Cytherea's neck.  ''Tis now
+with you as it is always with all girls,' she said, in jealous and
+gloomy accents.  'You are not, after all, the innocent I took you
+for.  No, no.'  She then changed her tone with fitful rapidity.
+'Cytherea, try to love me more than you love him--do.  I love you
+more sincerely than any man can.  Do, Cythie:  don't let any man
+stand between us.  O, I can't bear that!'  She clasped Cytherea's
+neck again.
+
+'I must love him now I have begun,' replied the other.
+
+'Must--yes--must,' said the elder lady reproachfully.  'Yes, women
+are all alike.  I thought I had at last found an artless woman who
+had not been sullied by a man's lips, and who had not practised or
+been practised upon by the arts which ruin all the truth and
+sweetness and goodness in us.  Find a girl, if you can, whose mouth
+and ears have not been made a regular highway of by some man or
+another!  Leave the admittedly notorious spots--the drawing-rooms of
+society--and look in the villages--leave the villages and search in
+the schools--and you can hardly find a girl whose heart has not been
+HAD--is not an old thing half worn out by some He or another!  If
+men only knew the staleness of the freshest of us! that nine times
+out of ten the "first love" they think they are winning from a woman
+is but the hulk of an old wrecked affection, fitted with new sails
+and re-used.  O Cytherea, can it be that you, too, are like the
+rest?'
+
+'No, no, no,' urged Cytherea, awed by the storm she had raised in
+the impetuous woman's mind.  'He only kissed me once--twice I mean.'
+
+'He might have done it a thousand times if he had cared to, there's
+no doubt about that, whoever his lordship is.  You are as bad as I--
+we are all alike; and I--an old fool--have been sipping at your
+mouth as if it were honey, because I fancied no wasting lover knew
+the spot.  But a minute ago, and you seemed to me like a fresh
+spring meadow--now you seem a dusty highway.'
+
+'O no, no!'  Cytherea was not weak enough to shed tears except on
+extraordinary occasions, but she was fain to begin sobbing now.  She
+wished Miss Aldclyffe would go to her own room, and leave her and
+her treasured dreams alone.  This vehement imperious affection was
+in one sense soothing, but yet it was not of the kind that
+Cytherea's instincts desired.  Though it was generous, it seemed
+somewhat too rank and capricious for endurance.
+
+'Well,' said the lady in continuation, 'who is he?'
+
+Her companion was desperately determined not to tell his name:  she
+too much feared a taunt when Miss Aldclyffe's fiery mood again ruled
+her tongue.
+
+'Won't you tell me? not tell me after all the affection I have
+shown?'
+
+'I will, perhaps, another day.'
+
+'Did you wear a hat and white feather in Budmouth for the week or
+two previous to your coming here?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Then I have seen you and your lover at a distance!  He rowed you
+round the bay with your brother.'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'And without your brother--fie!  There, there, don't let that little
+heart beat itself to death:  throb, throb:  it shakes the bed, you
+silly thing.  I didn't mean that there was any harm in going alone
+with him.  I only saw you from the Esplanade, in common with the
+rest of the people.  I often run down to Budmouth.  He was a very
+good figure:  now who was he?'
+
+'I--I won't tell, madam--I cannot indeed!'
+
+'Won't tell--very well, don't.  You are very foolish to treasure up
+his name and image as you do.  Why, he has had loves before you,
+trust him for that, whoever he is, and you are but a temporary link
+in a long chain of others like you:  who only have your little day
+as they have had theirs.'
+
+''Tisn't true! 'tisn't true! 'tisn't true!' cried Cytherea in an
+agony of torture.  'He has never loved anybody else, I know--I am
+sure he hasn't.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe was as jealous as any man could have been.  She
+continued--
+
+'He sees a beautiful face and thinks he will never forget it, but in
+a few weeks the feeling passes off, and he wonders how he could have
+cared for anybody so absurdly much.'
+
+'No, no, he doesn't--What does he do when he has thought that--Come,
+tell me--tell me!'
+
+'You are as hot as fire, and the throbbing of your heart makes me
+nervous.  I can't tell you if you get in that flustered state.'
+
+'Do, do tell--O, it makes me so miserable! but tell---come tell me!'
+
+'Ah--the tables are turned now, dear!' she continued, in a tone
+which mingled pity with derision--
+
+     '"Love's passions shall rock thee
+       As the storm rocks the ravens on high,
+       Bright reason will mock thee
+       Like the sun from a wintry sky."
+
+'What does he do next?--Why, this is what he does next:  ruminate on
+what he has heard of women's romantic impulses, and how easily men
+torture them when they have given way to those feelings, and have
+resigned everything for their hero.  It may be that though he loves
+you heartily now--that is, as heartily as a man can--and you love
+him in return, your loves may be impracticable and hopeless, and you
+may be separated for ever.  You, as the weary, weary years pass by
+will fade and fade--bright eyes WILL fade--and you will perhaps then
+die early--true to him to your latest breath, and believing him to
+be true to the latest breath also; whilst he, in some gay and busy
+spot far away from your last quiet nook, will have married some
+dashing lady, and not purely oblivious of you, will long have ceased
+to regret you--will chat about you, as you were in long past years--
+will say, "Ah, little Cytherea used to tie her hair like that--poor
+innocent trusting thing; it was a pleasant useless idle dream--that
+dream of mine for the maid with the bright eyes and simple, silly
+heart; but I was a foolish lad at that time."  Then he will tell the
+tale of all your little Wills and Wont's and particular ways, and as
+he speaks, turn to his wife with a placid smile.'
+
+'It is not true!  He can't, he c-can't be s-so cruel--and you are
+cruel to me--you are, you are!'  She was at last driven to
+desperation:  her natural common sense and shrewdness had seen all
+through the piece how imaginary her emotions were--she felt herself
+to be weak and foolish in permitting them to rise; but even then she
+could not control them:  be agonized she must.  She was only
+eighteen, and the long day's labour, her weariness, her excitement,
+had completely unnerved her, and worn her out:  she was bent hither
+and thither by this tyrannical working upon her imagination, as a
+young rush in the wind.  She wept bitterly.  'And now think how much
+I like you,' resumed Miss Aldclyffe, when Cytherea grew calmer.  'I
+shall never forget you for anybody else, as men do--never.  I will
+be exactly as a mother to you.  Now will you promise to live with me
+always, and always be taken care of, and never deserted?'
+
+'I cannot.  I will not be anybody's maid for another day on any
+consideration.'
+
+'No, no, no.  You shan't be a lady's-maid.  You shall be my
+companion.  I will get another maid.'
+
+Companion--that was a new idea.  Cytherea could not resist the
+evidently heartfelt desire of the strange-tempered woman for her
+presence.  But she could not trust to the moment's impulse.
+
+'I will stay, I think.  But do not ask for a final answer to-night.'
+
+'Never mind now, then.  Put your hair round your mamma's neck, and
+give me one good long kiss, and I won't talk any more in that way
+about your lover.  After all, some young men are not so fickle as
+others; but even if he's the ficklest, there is consolation.  The
+love of an inconstant man is ten times more ardent than that of a
+faithful man--that is, while it lasts.'
+
+Cytherea did as she was told, to escape the punishment of further
+talk; flung the twining tresses of her long, rich hair over Miss
+Aldclyffe's shoulders as directed, and the two ceased conversing,
+making themselves up for sleep.  Miss Aldclyffe seemed to give
+herself over to a luxurious sense of content and quiet, as if the
+maiden at her side afforded her a protection against dangers which
+had menaced her for years; she was soon sleeping calmly.
+
+2.  TWO TO FIVE A.M.
+
+With Cytherea it was otherwise.  Unused to the place and
+circumstances, she continued wakeful, ill at ease, and mentally
+distressed.  She withdrew herself from her companion's embrace,
+turned to the other side, and endeavoured to relieve her busy brain
+by looking at the window-blind, and noticing the light of the rising
+moon--now in her last quarter--creep round upon it:  it was the
+light of an old waning moon which had but a few days longer to live.
+
+The sight led her to think again of what had happened under the rays
+of the same month's moon, a little before its full, the ecstatic
+evening scene with Edward:  the kiss, and the shortness of those
+happy moments--maiden imagination bringing about the apotheosis of a
+status quo which had had several unpleasantnesses in its earthly
+reality.
+
+But sounds were in the ascendant that night.  Her ears became aware
+of a strange and gloomy murmur.
+
+She recognized it:  it was the gushing of the waterfall, faint and
+low, brought from its source to the unwonted distance of the House
+by a faint breeze which made it distinct and recognizable by reason
+of the utter absence of all disturbing sounds.  The groom's
+melancholy representation lent to the sound a more dismal effect
+than it would have had of its own nature.  She began to fancy what
+the waterfall must be like at that hour, under the trees in the
+ghostly moonlight.  Black at the head, and over the surface of the
+deep cold hole into which it fell; white and frothy at the fall;
+black and white, like a pall and its border; sad everywhere.
+
+She was in the mood for sounds of every kind now, and strained her
+ears to catch the faintest, in wayward enmity to her quiet of mind.
+Another soon came.
+
+The second was quite different from the first--a kind of
+intermittent whistle it seemed primarily:  no, a creak, a metallic
+creak, ever and anon, like a plough, or a rusty wheelbarrow, or at
+least a wheel of some kind.  Yes, it was, a wheel--the water-wheel
+in the shrubbery by the old manor-house, which the coachman had said
+would drive him mad.
+
+She determined not to think any more of these gloomy things; but now
+that she had once noticed the sound there was no sealing her ears to
+it.  She could not help timing its creaks, and putting on a dread
+expectancy just before the end of each half-minute that brought
+them.  To imagine the inside of the engine-house, whence these
+noises proceeded, was now a necessity.  No window, but crevices in
+the door, through which, probably, the moonbeams streamed in the
+most attenuated and skeleton-like rays, striking sharply upon
+portions of wet rusty cranks and chains; a glistening wheel, turning
+incessantly, labouring in the dark like a captive starving in a
+dungeon; and instead of a floor below, gurgling water, which on
+account of the darkness could only be heard; water which laboured up
+dark pipes almost to where she lay.
+
+She shivered.  Now she was determined to go to sleep; there could be
+nothing else left to be heard or to imagine--it was horrid that her
+imagination should be so restless.  Yet just for an instant before
+going to sleep she would think this--suppose another sound SHOULD
+come--just suppose it should!  Before the thought had well passed
+through her brain, a third sound came.
+
+The third was a very soft gurgle or rattle--of a strange and
+abnormal kind--yet a sound she had heard before at some past period
+of her life--when, she could not recollect.  To make it the more
+disturbing, it seemed to be almost close to her--either close
+outside the window, close under the floor, or close above the
+ceiling.  The accidental fact of its coming so immediately upon the
+heels of her supposition, told so powerfully upon her excited nerves
+that she jumped up in the bed.  The same instant, a little dog in
+some room near, having probably heard the same noise, set up a low
+whine.  The watch-dog in the yard, hearing the moan of his
+associate, began to howl loudly and distinctly.  His melancholy
+notes were taken up directly afterwards by the dogs in the kennel a
+long way off, in every variety of wail.
+
+One logical thought alone was able to enter her flurried brain.  The
+little dog that began the whining must have heard the other two
+sounds even better than herself.  He had taken no notice of them,
+but he had taken notice of the third.  The third, then, was an
+unusual sound.
+
+It was not like water, it was not like wind; it was not the night-
+jar, it was not a clock, nor a rat, nor a person snoring.
+
+She crept under the clothes, and flung her arms tightly round Miss
+Aldclyffe, as if for protection.  Cytherea perceived that the lady's
+late peaceful warmth had given place to a sweat.  At the maiden's
+touch, Miss Aldclyffe awoke with a low scream.
+
+She remembered her position instantly.  'O such a terrible dream!'
+she cried, in a hurried whisper, holding to Cytherea in her turn;
+'and your touch was the end of it.  It was dreadful.  Time, with his
+wings, hour-glass, and scythe, coming nearer and nearer to me--
+grinning and mocking:  then he seized me, took a piece of me only. .
+.  But I can't tell you.  I can't bear to think of it.  How those
+dogs howl!  People say it means death.'
+
+The return of Miss Aldclyffe to consciousness was sufficient to
+dispel the wild fancies which the loneliness of the night had woven
+in Cytherea's mind.  She dismissed the third noise as something
+which in all likelihood could easily be explained, if trouble were
+taken to inquire into it:  large houses had all kinds of strange
+sounds floating about them.  She was ashamed to tell Miss Aldclyffe
+her terrors.
+
+A silence of five minutes.
+
+'Are you asleep?' said Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+'No,' said Cytherea, in a long-drawn whisper.
+
+'How those dogs howl, don't they?'
+
+'Yes.  A little dog in the house began it.'
+
+'Ah, yes:  that was Totsy.  He sleeps on the mat outside my father's
+bedroom door.  A nervous creature.'
+
+There was a silent interval of nearly half-an-hour.  A clock on the
+landing struck three.
+
+'Are you asleep, Miss Aldclyffe?' whispered Cytherea.
+
+'No,' said Miss Aldclyffe.  'How wretched it is not to be able to
+sleep, isn't it?'
+
+'Yes,' replied Cytherea, like a docile child.
+
+Another hour passed, and the clock struck four.  Miss Aldclyffe was
+still awake.
+
+'Cytherea,' she said, very softly.
+
+Cytherea made no answer.  She was sleeping soundly.
+
+The first glimmer of dawn was now visible.  Miss Aldclyffe arose,
+put on her dressing-gown, and went softly downstairs to her own
+room.
+
+'I have not told her who I am after all, or found out the
+particulars of Ambrose's history,' she murmured.  'But her being in
+love alters everything.'
+
+3.  HALF-PAST SEVEN TO TEN O'CLOCK A.M.
+
+Cytherea awoke, quiet in mind and refreshed.  A conclusion to remain
+at Knapwater was already in possession of her.
+
+Finding Miss Aldclyffe gone, she dressed herself and sat down at the
+window to write an answer to Edward's letter, and an account of her
+arrival at Knapwater to Owen.  The dismal and heart-breaking
+pictures that Miss Aldclyffe had placed before her the preceding
+evening, the later terrors of the night, were now but as shadows of
+shadows, and she smiled in derision at her own excitability.
+
+But writing Edward's letter was the great consoler, the effect of
+each word upon him being enacted in her own face as she wrote it.
+She felt how much she would like to share his trouble--how well she
+could endure poverty with him--and wondered what his trouble was.
+But all would be explained at last, she knew.
+
+At the appointed time she went to Miss Aldclyffe's room, intending,
+with the contradictoriness common in people, to perform with
+pleasure, as a work of supererogation, what as a duty was simply
+intolerable.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe was already out of bed.  The bright penetrating light
+of morning made a vast difference in the elder lady's behaviour to
+her dependent; the day, which had restored Cytherea's judgment, had
+effected the same for Miss Aldclyffe.  Though practical reasons
+forbade her regretting that she had secured such a companionable
+creature to read, talk, or play to her whenever her whim required,
+she was inwardly vexed at the extent to which she had indulged in
+the womanly luxury of making confidences and giving way to emotions.
+Few would have supposed that the calm lady sitting aristocratically
+at the toilet table, seeming scarcely conscious of Cytherea's
+presence in the room, even when greeting her, was the passionate
+creature who had asked for kisses a few hours before.
+
+It is both painful and satisfactory to think how often these
+antitheses are to be observed in the individual most open to our
+observation--ourselves.  We pass the evening with faces lit up by
+some flaring illumination or other:  we get up the next morning--the
+fiery jets have all gone out, and nothing confronts us but a few
+crinkled pipes and sooty wirework, hardly even recalling the outline
+of the blazing picture that arrested our eyes before bedtime.
+
+Emotions would be half starved if there were no candle-light.
+Probably nine-tenths of the gushing letters of indiscreet confession
+are written after nine or ten o'clock in the evening, and sent off
+before day returns to leer invidiously upon them.  Few that remain
+open to catch our glance as we rise in the morning, survive the
+frigid criticism of dressing-time.
+
+The subjects uppermost in the minds of the two women who had thus
+cooled from their fires, were not the visionary ones of the later
+hours, but the hard facts of their earlier conversation.  After a
+remark that Cytherea need not assist her in dressing unless she
+wished to, Miss Aldclyffe said abruptly--
+
+'I can tell that young man's name.'  She looked keenly at Cytherea.
+'It is Edward Springrove, my tenant's son.'
+
+The inundation of colour upon the younger lady at hearing a name
+which to her was a world, handled as if it were only an atom, told
+Miss Aldclyffe that she had divined the truth at last.
+
+'Ah--it is he, is it?' she continued.  'Well, I wanted to know for
+practical reasons.  His example shows that I was not so far wrong in
+my estimate of men after all, though I only generalized, and had no
+thought of him.'  This was perfectly true.
+
+'What do you mean?' said Cytherea, visibly alarmed.
+
+'Mean?  Why that all the world knows him to be engaged to be
+married, and that the wedding is soon to take place.'  She made the
+remark bluntly and superciliously, as if to obtain absolution at the
+hands of her family pride for the weak confidences of the night.
+
+But even the frigidity of Miss Aldclyffe's morning mood was overcome
+by the look of sick and blank despair which the carelessly uttered
+words had produced upon Cytherea's face.  She sank back into a
+chair, and buried her face in her hands.
+
+'Don't be so foolish,' said Miss Aldclyffe.  'Come, make the best of
+it.  I cannot upset the fact I have told you of, unfortunately.  But
+I believe the match can be broken off.'
+
+'O no, no.'
+
+'Nonsense.  I liked him much as a youth, and I like him now.  I'll
+help you to captivate and chain him down.  I have got over my absurd
+feeling of last night in not wanting you ever to go away from me--of
+course, I could not expect such a thing as that.  There, now I have
+said I'll help you, and that's enough.  He's tired of his first
+choice now that he's been away from home for a while.  The love that
+no outer attack can frighten away quails before its idol's own
+homely ways; it is always so. . . .  Come, finish what you are doing
+if you are going to, and don't be a little goose about such a
+trumpery affair as that.'
+
+'Who--is he engaged to?' Cytherea inquired by a movement of her lips
+but no sound of her voice.  But Miss Aldclyffe did not answer.  It
+mattered not, Cytherea thought.  Another woman--that was enough for
+her:  curiosity was stunned.
+
+She applied herself to the work of dressing, scarcely knowing how.
+Miss Aldclyffe went on:--
+
+'You were too easily won.  I'd have made him or anybody else speak
+out before he should have kissed my face for his pleasure.  But you
+are one of those precipitantly fond things who are yearning to throw
+away their hearts upon the first worthless fellow who says good-
+morning.  In the first place, you shouldn't have loved him so
+quickly:  in the next, if you must have loved him off-hand, you
+should have concealed it.  It tickled his vanity:  "By Jove, that
+girl's in love with me already!" he thought.'
+
+To hasten away at the end of the toilet, to tell Mrs. Morris--who
+stood waiting in a little room prepared for her, with tea poured
+out, bread-and-butter cut into diaphanous slices, and eggs arranged-
+-that she wanted no breakfast:  then to shut herself alone in her
+bedroom, was her only thought.  She was followed thither by the
+well-intentioned matron with a cup of tea and one piece of bread-
+and-butter on a tray, cheerfully insisting that she should eat it.
+
+To those who grieve, innocent cheerfulness seems heartless levity.
+'No, thank you, Mrs. Morris,' she said, keeping the door closed.
+Despite the incivility of the action, Cytherea could not bear to let
+a pleasant person see her face then.
+
+Immediate revocation--even if revocation would be more effective by
+postponement--is the impulse of young wounded natures.  Cytherea
+went to her blotting-book, took out the long letter so carefully
+written, so full of gushing remarks and tender hints, and sealed up
+so neatly with a little seal bearing 'Good Faith' as its motto, tore
+the missive into fifty pieces, and threw them into the grate.  It
+was then the bitterest of anguishes to look upon some of the words
+she had so lovingly written, and see them existing only in mutilated
+forms without meaning--to feel that his eye would never read them,
+nobody ever know how ardently she had penned them.
+
+Pity for one's self for being wasted is mostly present in these
+moods of abnegation.
+
+The meaning of all his allusions, his abruptness in telling her of
+his love, his constraint at first, then his desperate manner of
+speaking, was clear.  They must have been the last flickerings of a
+conscience not quite dead to all sense of perfidiousness and
+fickleness.  Now he had gone to London:  she would be dismissed from
+his memory, in the same way as Miss Aldclyffe had said.  And here
+she was in Edward's own parish, reminded continually of him by what
+she saw and heard.  The landscape, yesterday so much and so bright
+to her, was now but as the banquet-hall deserted--all gone but
+herself.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe had wormed her secret out of her, and would now be
+continually mocking her for her trusting simplicity in believing
+him.  It was altogether unbearable:  she would not stay there.
+
+She went downstairs and found Miss Aldclyffe had gone into the
+breakfast-room, but that Captain Aldclyffe, who rose later with
+increasing infirmities, had not yet made his appearance.  Cytherea
+entered.  Miss Aldclyffe was looking out of the window, watching a
+trail of white smoke along the distant landscape--signifying a
+passing train.  At Cytherea's entry she turned and looked inquiry.
+
+'I must tell you now,' began Cytherea, in a tremulous voice.
+
+'Well, what?' Miss Aldclyffe said.
+
+'I am not going to stay with you.  I must go away--a very long way.
+I am very sorry, but indeed I can't remain!'
+
+'Pooh--what shall we hear next?'  Miss Aldclyffe surveyed Cytherea's
+face with leisurely criticism.  'You are breaking your heart again
+about that worthless young Springrove.  I knew how it would be.  It
+is as Hallam says of Juliet--what little reason you may have
+possessed originally has all been whirled away by this love.  I
+shan't take this notice, mind.'
+
+'Do let me go!'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe took her new pet's hand, and said with severity, 'As
+to hindering you, if you are determined to go, of course that's
+absurd.  But you are not now in a state of mind fit for deciding
+upon any such proceeding, and I shall not listen to what you have to
+say.  Now, Cythie, come with me; we'll let this volcano burst and
+spend itself, and after that we'll see what had better be done.'
+She took Cytherea into her workroom, opened a drawer, and drew forth
+a roll of linen.
+
+'This is some embroidery I began one day, and now I should like it
+finished.'
+
+She then preceded the maiden upstairs to Cytherea's own room.
+'There,' she said, 'now sit down here, go on with this work, and
+remember one thing--that you are not to leave the room on any
+pretext whatever for two hours unless I send for you--I insist
+kindly, dear.  Whilst you stitch--you are to stitch, recollect, and
+not go mooning out of the window--think over the whole matter, and
+get cooled; don't let the foolish love-affair prevent your thinking
+as a woman of the world.  If at the end of that time you still say
+you must leave me, you may.  I will have no more to say in the
+matter.  Come, sit down, and promise to sit here the time I name.'
+
+To hearts in a despairing mood, compulsion seems a relief; and
+docility was at all times natural to Cytherea.  She promised, and
+sat down.  Miss Aldclyffe shut the door upon her and retreated.
+
+She sewed, stopped to think, shed a tear or two, recollected the
+articles of the treaty, and sewed again; and at length fell into a
+reverie which took no account whatever of the lapse of time.
+
+4.  TEN TO TWELVE O'CLOCK A.M.
+
+A quarter of an hour might have passed when her thoughts became
+attracted from the past to the present by unwonted movements
+downstairs.  She opened the door and listened.
+
+There were hurryings along passages, opening and shutting of doors,
+trampling in the stable-yard.  She went across into another bedroom,
+from which a view of the stable-yard could be obtained, and arrived
+there just in time to see the figure of the man who had driven her
+from the station vanishing down the coach-road on a black horse--
+galloping at the top of the animal's speed.
+
+Another man went off in the direction of the village.
+
+Whatever had occurred, it did not seem to be her duty to inquire or
+meddle with it, stranger and dependent as she was, unless she were
+requested to, especially after Miss Aldclyffe's strict charge to
+her.  She sat down again, determined to let no idle curiosity
+influence her movements.
+
+Her window commanded the front of the house; and the next thing she
+saw was a clergyman walk up and enter the door.
+
+All was silent again till, a long time after the first man had left,
+he returned again on the same horse, now matted with sweat and
+trotting behind a carriage in which sat an elderly gentleman driven
+by a lad in livery.  These came to the house, entered, and all was
+again the same as before.
+
+The whole household--master, mistress, and servants--appeared to
+have forgotten the very existence of such a being as Cytherea.  She
+almost wished she had not vowed to have no idle curiosity.
+
+Half-an-hour later, the carriage drove off with the elderly
+gentleman, and two or three messengers left the house, speeding in
+various directions.  Rustics in smock-frocks began to hang about the
+road opposite the house, or lean against trees, looking idly at the
+windows and chimneys.
+
+A tap came to Cytherea's door.  She opened it to a young maid-
+servant.
+
+'Miss Aldclyffe wishes to see you, ma'am.'  Cytherea hastened down.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe was standing on the hearthrug, her elbow on the
+mantel, her hand to her temples, her eyes on the ground; perfectly
+calm, but very pale.
+
+'Cytherea,' she said in a whisper, 'come here.'
+
+Cytherea went close.
+
+'Something very serious has taken place,' she said again, and then
+paused, with a tremulous movement of her mouth.
+
+'Yes,' said Cytherea.
+
+'My father.  He was found dead in his bed this morning.'
+
+'Dead!' echoed the younger woman.  It seemed impossible that the
+announcement could be true; that knowledge of so great a fact could
+be contained in a statement so small.
+
+'Yes, dead,' murmured Miss Aldclyffe solemnly.  'He died alone,
+though within a few feet of me.  The room we slept in is exactly
+over his own.'
+
+Cytherea said hurriedly, 'Do they know at what hour?'
+
+'The doctor says it must have been between two and three o'clock
+this morning.'
+
+'Then I heard him!'
+
+'Heard him?'
+
+'Heard him die!'
+
+'You heard him die?  What did you hear?'
+
+'A sound I heard once before in my life--at the deathbed of my
+mother.  I could not identify it--though I recognized it.  Then the
+dog howled:  you remarked it.  I did not think it worth while to
+tell you what I had heard a little earlier.'  She looked agonized.
+
+'It would have been useless,' said Miss Aldclyffe.  'All was over by
+that time.'  She addressed herself as much as Cytherea when she
+continued, 'Is it a Providence who sent you here at this juncture
+that I might not be left entirely alone?'
+
+Till this instant Miss Aldclyffe had forgotten the reason of
+Cytherea's seclusion in her own room.  So had Cytherea herself.  The
+fact now recurred to both in one moment.
+
+'Do you still wish to go?' said Miss Aldclyffe anxiously.
+
+'I don't want to go now,' Cytherea had remarked simultaneously with
+the other's question.  She was pondering on the strange likeness
+which Miss Aldclyffe's bereavement bore to her own; it had the
+appearance of being still another call to her not to forsake this
+woman so linked to her life, for the sake of any trivial vexation.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe held her almost as a lover would have held her, and
+said musingly--
+
+'We get more and more into one groove.  I now am left fatherless and
+motherless as you were.'  Other ties lay behind in her thoughts, but
+she did not mention them.
+
+'You loved your father, Cytherea, and wept for him?'
+
+'Yes, I did.  Poor papa!'
+
+'I was always at variance with mine, and can't weep for him now!
+But you must stay here always, and make a better woman of me.'
+
+The compact was thus sealed, and Cytherea, in spite of the failure
+of her advertisements, was installed as a veritable Companion.  And,
+once more in the history of human endeavour, a position which it was
+impossible to reach by any direct attempt, was come to by the
+seeker's swerving from the path, and regarding the original object
+as one of secondary importance.
+
+
+
+VII.  THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN DAYS
+
+1.  AUGUST THE SEVENTEENTH
+
+The time of day was four o'clock in the afternoon.  The place was
+the lady's study or boudoir, Knapwater House.  The person was Miss
+Aldclyffe sitting there alone, clothed in deep mourning.
+
+The funeral of the old Captain had taken place, and his will had
+been read.  It was very concise, and had been executed about five
+years previous to his death.  It was attested by his solicitors,
+Messrs. Nyttleton and Tayling, of Lincoln's Inn Fields.  The whole
+of his estate, real and personal, was bequeathed to his daughter
+Cytherea, for her sole and absolute use, subject only to the payment
+of a legacy to the rector, their relative, and a few small amounts
+to the servants.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe had not chosen the easiest chair of her boudoir to
+sit in, or even a chair of ordinary comfort, but an uncomfortable,
+high, narrow-backed, oak framed and seated chair, which was allowed
+to remain in the room only on the ground of being a companion in
+artistic quaintness to an old coffer beside it, and was never used
+except to stand in to reach for a book from the highest row of
+shelves.  But she had sat erect in this chair for more than an hour,
+for the reason that she was utterly unconscious of what her actions
+and bodily feelings were.  The chair had stood nearest her path on
+entering the room, and she had gone to it in a dream.
+
+She sat in the attitude which denotes unflagging, intense,
+concentrated thought--as if she were cast in bronze.  Her feet were
+together, her body bent a little forward, and quite unsupported by
+the back of the chair; her hands on her knees, her eyes fixed
+intently on the corner of a footstool.
+
+At last she moved and tapped her fingers upon the table at her side.
+Her pent-up ideas had finally found some channel to advance in.
+Motions became more and more frequent as she laboured to carry
+further and further the problem which occupied her brain.  She sat
+back and drew a long breath:  she sat sideways and leant her
+forehead upon her hand.  Later still she arose, walked up and down
+the room--at first abstractedly, with her features as firmly set as
+ever; but by degrees her brow relaxed, her footsteps became lighter
+and more leisurely; her head rode gracefully and was no longer
+bowed.  She plumed herself like a swan after exertion.
+
+'Yes,' she said aloud.  'To get HIM here without letting him know
+that I have any other object than that of getting a useful man--
+that's the difficulty--and that I think I can master.'
+
+She rang for the new maid, a placid woman of forty with a few grey
+hairs.
+
+'Ask Miss Graye if she can come to me.'
+
+Cytherea was not far off, and came in.
+
+'Do you know anything about architects and surveyors?' said Miss
+Aldclyffe abruptly.
+
+'Know anything?' replied Cytherea, poising herself on her toe to
+consider the compass of the question.
+
+'Yes--know anything,' said Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+'Owen is an architect and surveyor's draughtsman,' the maiden said,
+and thought of somebody else who was likewise.
+
+'Yes! that's why I asked you.  What are the different kinds of work
+comprised in an architect's practice?  They lay out estates, and
+superintend the various works done upon them, I should think, among
+other things?'
+
+'Those are, more properly, a land or building steward's duties--at
+least I have always imagined so.  Country architects include those
+things in their practice; city architects don't.'
+
+'I know that, child.  But a steward's is an indefinite fast and
+loose profession, it seems to me.  Shouldn't you think that a man
+who had been brought up as an architect would do for a steward?'
+
+Cytherea had doubts whether an architect pure would do.
+
+The chief pleasure connected with asking an opinion lies in not
+adopting it.  Miss Aldclyffe replied decisively--
+
+'Nonsense; of course he would.  Your brother Owen makes plans for
+country buildings--such as cottages, stables, homesteads, and so
+on?'
+
+'Yes; he does.'
+
+'And superintends the building of them?'
+
+'Yes; he will soon.'
+
+'And he surveys land?'
+
+'O yes.'
+
+'And he knows about hedges and ditches--how wide they ought to be,
+boundaries, levelling, planting trees to keep away the winds,
+measuring timber, houses for ninety-nine years, and such things?'
+
+'I have never heard him say that; but I think Mr. Gradfield does
+those things.  Owen, I am afraid, is inexperienced as yet.'
+
+'Yes; your brother is not old enough for such a post yet, of course.
+And then there are rent-days, the audit and winding up of
+tradesmen's accounts.  I am afraid, Cytherea, you don't know much
+more about the matter than I do myself. . . .  I am going out just
+now,' she continued.  'I shall not want you to walk with me to-day.
+Run away till dinner-time.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe went out of doors, and down the steps to the lawn:
+then turning to the left, through a shrubbery, she opened a wicket
+and passed into a neglected and leafy carriage-drive, leading down
+the hill.  This she followed till she reached the point of its
+greatest depression, which was also the lowest ground in the whole
+grove.
+
+The trees here were so interlaced, and hung their branches so near
+the ground, that a whole summer's day was scarcely long enough to
+change the air pervading the spot from its normal state of coolness
+to even a temporary warmth.  The unvarying freshness was helped by
+the nearness of the ground to the level of the springs, and by the
+presence of a deep, sluggish stream close by, equally well shaded by
+bushes and a high wall.  Following the road, which now ran along at
+the margin of the stream, she came to an opening in the wall, on the
+other side of the water, revealing a large rectangular nook from
+which the stream proceeded, covered with froth, and accompanied by a
+dull roar.  Two more steps, and she was opposite the nook, in full
+view of the cascade forming its further boundary.  Over the top
+could be seen the bright outer sky in the form of a crescent, caused
+by the curve of a bridge across the rapids, and the trees above.
+
+Beautiful as was the scene she did not look in that direction.  The
+same standing-ground afforded another prospect, straight in the
+front, less sombre than the water on the right or the trees all
+around.  The avenue and grove which flanked it abruptly terminated a
+few yards ahead, where the ground began to rise, and on the remote
+edge of the greensward thus laid open, stood all that remained of
+the original manor-house, to which the dark margin-line of the trees
+in the avenue formed an adequate and well-fitting frame.  It was the
+picture thus presented that was now interesting Miss Aldclyffe--not
+artistically or historically, but practically--as regarded its
+fitness for adaptation to modern requirements.
+
+In front, detached from everything else, rose the most ancient
+portion of the structure--an old arched gateway, flanked by the
+bases of two small towers, and nearly covered with creepers, which
+had clambered over the eaves of the sinking roof, and up the gable
+to the crest of the Aldclyffe family perched on the apex.  Behind
+this, at a distance of ten or twenty yards, came the only portion of
+the main building that still existed--an Elizabethan fragment,
+consisting of as much as could be contained under three gables and a
+cross roof behind.  Against the wall could be seen ragged lines
+indicating the form of other destroyed gables which had once joined
+it there.  The mullioned and transomed windows, containing five or
+six lights, were mostly bricked up to the extent of two or three,
+and the remaining portion fitted with cottage window-frames
+carelessly inserted, to suit the purpose to which the old place was
+now applied, it being partitioned out into small rooms downstairs to
+form cottages for two labourers and their families; the upper
+portion was arranged as a storehouse for divers kinds of roots and
+fruit.
+
+The owner of the picturesque spot, after her survey from this point,
+went up to the walls and walked into the old court, where the
+paving-stones were pushed sideways and upwards by the thrust of the
+grasses between them.  Two or three little children, with their
+fingers in their mouths, came out to look at her, and then ran in to
+tell their mothers in loud tones of secrecy that Miss Aldclyffe was
+coming.  Miss Aldclyffe, however, did not come in.  She concluded
+her survey of the exterior by making a complete circuit of the
+building; then turned into a nook a short distance off where round
+and square timber, a saw-pit, planks, grindstones, heaps of building
+stone and brick, explained that the spot was the centre of
+operations for the building work done on the estate.
+
+She paused, and looked around.  A man who had seen her from the
+window of the workshops behind, came out and respectfully lifted his
+hat to her.  It was the first time she had been seen walking outside
+the house since her father's death.
+
+'Strooden, could the Old House be made a decent residence of,
+without much trouble?' she inquired.
+
+The mechanic considered, and spoke as each consideration completed
+itself.
+
+'You don't forget, ma'am, that two-thirds of the place is already
+pulled down, or gone to ruin?'
+
+'Yes; I know.'
+
+'And that what's left may almost as well be, ma'am.'
+
+'Why may it?'
+
+''Twas so cut up inside when they made it into cottages, that the
+whole carcase is full of cracks.'
+
+'Still by pulling down the inserted partitions, and adding a little
+outside, it could be made to answer the purpose of an ordinary six
+or eight-roomed house?'
+
+'Yes, ma'am.'
+
+'About what would it cost?' was the question which had invariably
+come next in every communication of this kind to which the
+superintending workman had been a party during his whole experience.
+To his surprise, Miss Aldclyffe did not put it.  The man thought her
+object in altering an old house must have been an unusually
+absorbing one not to prompt what was so instinctive in owners as
+hardly to require any prompting at all.
+
+'Thank you:  that's sufficient, Strooden,' she said.  'You will
+understand that it is not unlikely some alteration may be made here
+in a short time, with reference to the management of the affairs.'
+
+Strooden said 'Yes,' in a complex voice, and looked uneasy.
+
+'During the life of Captain Aldclyffe, with you as the foreman of
+works, and he himself as his own steward, everything worked well.
+But now it may be necessary to have a steward, whose management will
+encroach further upon things which have hitherto been left in your
+hands than did your late master's.  What I mean is, that he will
+directly and in detail superintend all.'
+
+'Then--I shall not be wanted, ma'am?' he faltered.
+
+'O yes; if you like to stay on as foreman in the yard and workshops
+only.  I should be sorry to lose you.  However, you had better
+consider.  I will send for you in a few days.'
+
+Leaving him to suspense, and all the ills that came in its train--
+distracted application to his duties, and an undefined number of
+sleepless nights and untasted dinners, Miss Aldclyffe looked at her
+watch and returned to the House.  She was about to keep an
+appointment with her solicitor, Mr. Nyttleton, who had been to
+Budmouth, and was coming to Knapwater on his way back to London.
+
+2.  AUGUST THE TWENTIETH
+
+On the Saturday subsequent to Mr. Nyttleton's visit to Knapwater
+House, the subjoined advertisement appeared in the Field and the
+Builder newspapers:--
+
+                             'LAND STEWARD.
+
+'A gentleman of integrity and professional skill is required
+immediately for the MANAGEMENT of an ESTATE, containing about 1000
+acres, upon which agricultural improvements and the erection of
+buildings are contemplated.  He must be a man of superior education,
+unmarried, and not more than thirty years of age.  Considerable
+preference will be shown for one who possesses an artistic as well
+as a practical knowledge of planning and laying out.  The
+remuneration will consist of a salary of 22O pounds, with the old
+manor-house as a residence--Address Messrs. Nyttleton and Tayling,
+solicitors, Lincoln's Inn Fields.'
+
+A copy of each paper was sent to Miss Aldclyffe on the day of
+publication.  The same evening she told Cytherea that she was
+advertising for a steward, who would live at the old manor-house,
+showing her the papers containing the announcement.
+
+What was the drift of that remark? thought the maiden; or was it
+merely made to her in confidential intercourse, as other
+arrangements were told her daily.  Yet it seemed to have more
+meaning than common.  She remembered the conversation about
+architects and surveyors, and her brother Owen.  Miss Aldclyffe knew
+that his situation was precarious, that he was well educated and
+practical, and was applying himself heart and soul to the details of
+the profession and all connected with it.  Miss Aldclyffe might be
+ready to take him if he could compete successfully with others who
+would reply.  She hazarded a question:
+
+'Would it be desirable for Owen to answer it?'
+
+'Not at all,' said Miss Aldclyffe peremptorily.
+
+A flat answer of this kind had ceased to alarm Cytherea.  Miss
+Aldclyffe's blunt mood was not her worst.  Cytherea thought of
+another man, whose name, in spite of resolves, tears, renunciations
+and injured pride, lingered in her ears like an old familiar strain.
+That man was qualified for a stewardship under a king.
+
+'Would it be of any use if Edward Springrove were to answer it?' she
+said, resolutely enunciating the name.
+
+'None whatever,' replied Miss Aldclyffe, again in the same decided
+tone.
+
+'You are very unkind to speak in that way.'
+
+'Now don't pout like a goosie, as you are.  I don't want men like
+either of them, for, of course, I must look to the good of the
+estate rather than to that of any individual.  The man I want must
+have been more specially educated.  I have told you that we are
+going to London next week; it is mostly on this account.'
+
+Cytherea found that she had mistaken the drift of Miss Aldclyffe's
+peculiar explicitness on the subject of advertising, and wrote to
+tell her brother that if he saw the notice it would be useless to
+reply.
+
+3.  AUGUST THE TWENTY-FIFTH
+
+Five days after the above-mentioned dialogue took place they went to
+London, and, with scarcely a minute's pause, to the solicitors'
+offices in Lincoln's Inn Fields.
+
+They alighted opposite one of the characteristic entrances about the
+place--a gate which was never, and could never be, closed, flanked
+by lamp-standards carrying no lamp.  Rust was the only active agent
+to be seen there at this time of the day and year.  The palings
+along the front were rusted away at their base to the thinness of
+wires, and the successive coats of paint, with which they were
+overlaid in bygone days, had been completely undermined by the same
+insidious canker, which lifted off the paint in flakes, leaving the
+raw surface of the iron on palings, standards, and gate hinges, of a
+staring blood-red.
+
+But once inside the railings the picture changed.  The court and
+offices were a complete contrast to the grand ruin of the outwork
+which enclosed them.  Well-painted respectability extended over,
+within, and around the doorstep; and in the carefully swept yard not
+a particle of dust was visible.
+
+Mr. Nyttleton, who had just come up from Margate, where he was
+staying with his family, was standing at the top of his own
+staircase as the pair ascended.  He politely took them inside.
+
+'Is there a comfortable room in which this young lady can sit during
+our interview?' said Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+It was rather a favourite habit of hers to make much of Cytherea
+when they were out, and snub her for it afterwards when they got
+home.
+
+'Certainly--Mr. Tayling's.'  Cytherea was shown into an inner room.
+
+Social definitions are all made relatively:  an absolute datum is
+only imagined.  The small gentry about Knapwater seemed unpractised
+to Miss Aldclyffe, Miss Aldclyffe herself seemed unpractised to Mr.
+Nyttleton's experienced old eyes.
+
+'Now then,' the lady said, when she was alone with the lawyer; 'what
+is the result of our advertisement?'
+
+It was late summer; the estate-agency, building, engineering, and
+surveying worlds were dull.  There were forty-five replies to the
+advertisement.
+
+Mr. Nyttleton spread them one by one before Miss Aldclyffe.  'You
+will probably like to read some of them yourself, madam?' he said.
+
+'Yes, certainly,' said she.
+
+'I will not trouble you with those which are from persons manifestly
+unfit at first sight,' he continued; and began selecting from the
+heap twos and threes which he had marked, collecting others into his
+hand.
+
+'The man we want lies among these, if my judgment doesn't deceive
+me, and from them it would be advisable to select a certain number
+to be communicated with.'
+
+'I should like to see every one--only just to glance them over--
+exactly as they came,' she said suasively.
+
+He looked as if he thought this a waste of his time, but dismissing
+his sentiment unfolded each singly and laid it before her.  As he
+laid them out, it struck him that she studied them quite as rapidly
+as he could spread them.  He slyly glanced up from the outer corner
+of his eye to hers, and noticed that all she did was look at the
+name at the bottom of the letter, and then put the enclosure aside
+without further ceremony.  He thought this an odd way of inquiring
+into the merits of forty-five men who at considerable trouble gave
+in detail reasons why they believed themselves well qualified for a
+certain post.  She came to the final one, and put it down with the
+rest.
+
+Then the lady said that in her opinion it would be best to get as
+many replies as they possibly could before selecting--'to give us a
+wider choice.  What do you think, Mr. Nyttleton?'
+
+It seemed to him, he said, that a greater number than those they
+already had would scarcely be necessary, and if they waited for
+more, there would be this disadvantage attending it, that some of
+those they now could command would possibly not be available.
+
+'Never mind, we will run that risk,' said Miss Aldclyffe.  'Let the
+advertisement be inserted once more, and then we will certainly
+settle the matter.'
+
+Mr. Nyttleton bowed, and seemed to think Miss Aldclyffe, for a
+single woman, and one who till so very recently had never concerned
+herself with business of any kind, a very meddlesome client.  But
+she was rich, and handsome still.  'She's a new broom in estate-
+management as yet,' he thought.  'She will soon get tired of this,'
+and he parted from her without a sentiment which could mar his
+habitual blandness.
+
+The two ladies then proceeded westward.  Dismissing the cab in
+Waterloo Place, they went along Pall Mall on foot, where in place of
+the usual well-dressed clubbists--rubicund with alcohol--were to be
+seen, in linen pinafores, flocks of house-painters pallid from white
+lead.  When they had reached the Green Park, Cytherea proposed that
+they should sit down awhile under the young elms at the brow of the
+hill.  This they did--the growl of Piccadilly on their left hand--
+the monastic seclusion of the Palace on their right:  before them,
+the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament, standing forth with a
+metallic lustre against a livid Lambeth sky.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe still carried in her hand a copy of the newspaper,
+and while Cytherea had been interesting herself in the picture
+around, glanced again at the advertisement.
+
+She heaved a slight sigh, and began to fold it up again.  In the
+action her eye caught sight of two consecutive advertisements on the
+cover, one relating to some lecture on Art, and addressed to members
+of the Institute of Architects.  The other emanated from the same
+source, but was addressed to the public, and stated that the
+exhibition of drawings at the Institute's rooms would close at the
+end of that week.
+
+Her eye lighted up.  She sent Cytherea back to the hotel in a cab,
+then turned round by Piccadilly into Bond Street, and proceeded to
+the rooms of the Institute.  The secretary was sitting in the lobby.
+After making her payment, and looking at a few of the drawings on
+the walls, in the company of three gentlemen, the only other
+visitors to the exhibition, she turned back and asked if she might
+be allowed to see a list of the members.  She was a little connected
+with the architectural world, she said, with a smile, and was
+interested in some of the names.
+
+'Here it is, madam,' he replied, politely handing her a pamphlet
+containing the names.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe turned the leaves till she came to the letter M.  The
+name she hoped to find there was there, with the address appended,
+as was the case with all the rest.
+
+The address was at some chambers in a street not far from Charing
+Cross.  'Chambers,' as a residence, had always been assumed by the
+lady to imply the condition of a bachelor.  She murmured two words,
+'There still.'
+
+Another request had yet to be made, but it was of a more noticeable
+kind than the first, and might compromise the secrecy with which she
+wished to act throughout this episode.  Her object was to get one of
+the envelopes lying on the secretary's table, stamped with the die
+of the Institute; and in order to get it she was about to ask if she
+might write a note.
+
+But the secretary's back chanced to be turned, and he now went
+towards one of the men at the other end of the room, who had called
+him to ask some question relating to an etching on the wall.  Quick
+as thought, Miss Aldclyffe stood before the table, slipped her hand
+behind her, took one of the envelopes and put it in her pocket.
+
+She sauntered round the rooms for two or three minutes longer, then
+withdrew and returned to her hotel.
+
+Here she cut the Knapwater advertisement from the paper, put it into
+the envelope she had stolen, embossed with the society's stamp, and
+directed it in a round clerkly hand to the address she had seen in
+the list of members' names submitted to her:--
+
+     AENEAS MANSTON, ESQ.,
+          WYKEHAM CHAMBERS,
+               SPRING GARDENS.
+
+This ended her first day's work in London.
+
+4.  FROM AUGUST THE TWENTY-SIXTH TO SEPTEMBER THE FIRST
+
+The two Cythereas continued at the Westminster Hotel, Miss Aldclyffe
+informing her companion that business would detain them in London
+another week.  The days passed as slowly and quietly as days can
+pass in a city at that time of the year, the shuttered windows about
+the squares and terraces confronting their eyes like the white and
+sightless orbs of blind men.  On Thursday Mr. Nyttleton called,
+bringing the whole number of replies to the advertisement.  Cytherea
+was present at the interview, by Miss Aldclyffe's request--either
+from whim or design.
+
+Ten additional letters were the result of the second week's
+insertion, making fifty-five in all.  Miss Aldclyffe looked them
+over as before.  One was signed--
+
+AENEAS MANSTON,
+     133, TURNGATE STREET,
+          LIVERPOOL.
+
+'Now, then, Mr. Nyttleton, will you make a selection, and I will add
+one or two,' Miss Aldclyffe said.
+
+Mr. Nyttleton scanned the whole heap of letters, testimonials, and
+references, sorting them into two heaps.  Manston's missive, after a
+mere glance, was thrown amongst the summarily rejected ones.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe read, or pretended to read after the lawyer.  When he
+had finished, five lay in the group he had selected.  'Would you
+like to add to the number?' he said, turning to the lady.
+
+'No,' she said carelessly.  'Well, two or three additional ones
+rather took my fancy,' she added, searching for some in the larger
+collection.
+
+She drew out three.  One was Manston's.
+
+'These eight, then, shall be communicated with,' said the lawyer,
+taking up the eight letters and placing them by themselves.
+
+They stood up.  'If I myself, Miss Aldclyffe, were only concerned
+personally,' he said, in an off-hand way, and holding up a letter
+singly, 'I should choose this man unhesitatingly.  He writes
+honestly, is not afraid to name what he does not consider himself
+well acquainted with--a rare thing to find in answers to
+advertisements; he is well recommended, and possesses some qualities
+rarely found in combination.  Oddly enough, he is not really a
+steward.  He was bred a farmer, studied building affairs, served on
+an estate for some time, then went with an architect, and is now
+well qualified as architect, estate agent, and surveyor.  That man
+is sure to have a fine head for a manor like yours.'  He tapped the
+letter as he spoke.  'Yes, I should choose him without hesitation--
+speaking personally.'
+
+'And I think,' she said artificially, 'I should choose this one as a
+matter of mere personal whim, which, of course, can't be given way
+to when practical questions have to be considered.'
+
+Cytherea, after looking out of the window, and then at the
+newspapers, had become interested in the proceedings between the
+clever Miss Aldclyffe and the keen old lawyer, which reminded her of
+a game at cards.  She looked inquiringly at the two letters--one in
+Miss Aldclyffe's hand, the other in Mr. Nyttleton's.
+
+'What is the name of your man?' said Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+'His name--' said the lawyer, looking down the page; 'what is his
+name?--it is Edward Springrove.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe glanced towards Cytherea, who was getting red and
+pale by turns.  She looked imploringly at Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+'The name of my man,' said Miss Aldclyffe, looking at her letter in
+turn; 'is, I think--yes--AEneas Manston.'
+
+5.  SEPTEMBER THE THIRD
+
+The next morning but one was appointed for the interviews, which
+were to be at the lawyer's offices.  Mr. Nyttleton and Mr. Tayling
+were both in town for the day, and the candidates were admitted one
+by one into a private room.  In the window recess was seated Miss
+Aldclyffe, wearing her veil down.
+
+The lawyer had, in his letters to the selected number, timed each
+candidate at an interval of ten or fifteen minutes from those
+preceding and following.  They were shown in as they arrived, and
+had short conversations with Mr. Nyttleton--terse, and to the point.
+Miss Aldclyffe neither moved nor spoke during this proceeding; it
+might have been supposed that she was quite unmindful of it, had it
+not been for what was revealed by a keen penetration of the veil
+covering her countenance--the rays from two bright black eyes,
+directed towards the lawyer and his interlocutor.
+
+Springrove came fifth; Manston seventh.  When the examination of all
+was ended, and the last man had retired, Nyttleton, again as at the
+former time, blandly asked his client which of the eight she
+personally preferred.  'I still think the fifth we spoke to,
+Springrove, the man whose letter I pounced upon at first, to be by
+far the best qualified, in short, most suitable generally.'
+
+'I am sorry to say that I differ from you; I lean to my first notion
+still--that Mr--Mr. Manston is most desirable in tone and bearing,
+and even specifically; I think he would suit me best in the long-
+run.'
+
+Mr. Nyttleton looked out of the window at the whitened wall of the
+court.
+
+'Of course, madam, your opinion may be perfectly sound and reliable;
+a sort of instinct, I know, often leads ladies by a short cut to
+conclusions truer than those come to by men after laborious round-
+about calculations, based on long experience.  I must say I
+shouldn't recommend him.'
+
+'Why, pray?'
+
+'Well, let us look first at his letter of answer to the
+advertisement.  He didn't reply till the last insertion; that's one
+thing.  His letter is bold and frank in tone, so bold and frank that
+the second thought after reading it is that not honesty, but
+unscrupulousness of conscience dictated it.  It is written in an
+indifferent mood, as if he felt that he was humbugging us in his
+statement that he was the right man for such an office, that he
+tried hard to get it only as a matter of form which required that he
+should neglect no opportunity that came in his way.'
+
+'You may be right, Mr. Nyttleton, but I don't quite see the grounds
+of your reasoning.'
+
+'He has been, as you perceive, almost entirely used to the office
+duties of a city architect, the experience we don't want.  You want
+a man whose acquaintance with rural landed properties is more
+practical and closer--somebody who, if he has not filled exactly
+such an office before, has lived a country life, knows the ins and
+outs of country tenancies, building, farming, and so on.'
+
+'He's by far the most intellectual looking of them all.'
+
+'Yes; he may be--your opinion, Miss Aldclyffe, is worth more than
+mine in that matter.  And more than you say, he is a man of parts--
+his brain power would soon enable him to master details and fit him
+for the post, I don't much doubt that.  But to speak clearly' (here
+his words started off at a jog-trot) 'I wouldn't run the risk of
+placing the management of an estate of mine in his hands on any
+account whatever.  There, that's flat and plain, madam.'
+
+'But, definitely,' she said, with a show of impatience, 'what is
+your reason?'
+
+'He is a voluptuary with activity; which is a very bad form of man--
+as bad as it is rare.'
+
+'Oh.  Thank you for your explicit statement, Mr. Nyttleton,' said
+Miss Aldclyffe, starting a little and flushing with displeasure.
+
+Mr. Nyttleton nodded slightly, as a sort of neutral motion, simply
+signifying a receipt of the information, good or bad.
+
+'And I really think it is hardly worth while to trouble you further
+in this,' continued the lady.  'He's quite good enough for a little
+insignificant place like mine at Knapwater; and I know that I could
+not get on with one of the others for a single month.  We'll try
+him.'
+
+'Certainly, Miss Aldclyffe,' said the lawyer.  And Mr. Manston was
+written to, to the effect that he was the successful competitor.
+
+'Did you see how unmistakably her temper was getting the better of
+her, that minute you were in the room?' said Nyttleton to Tayling,
+when their client had left the house.  Nyttleton was a man who
+surveyed everybody's character in a sunless and shadowless northern
+light.  A culpable slyness, which marked him as a boy, had been
+moulded by Time, the Improver, into honourable circumspection.
+
+We frequently find that the quality which, conjoined with the
+simplicity of the child, is vice, is virtue when it pervades the
+knowledge of the man.
+
+'She was as near as damn-it to boiling over when I added up her
+man,' continued Nyttleton.  'His handsome face is his qualification
+in her eyes.  They have met before; I saw that.'
+
+'He didn't seem conscious of it,' said the junior.
+
+'He didn't.  That was rather puzzling to me.  But still, if ever a
+woman's face spoke out plainly that she was in love with a man, hers
+did that she was with him.  Poor old maid, she's almost old enough
+to be his mother.  If that Manston's a schemer he'll marry her, as
+sure as I am Nyttleton.  Let's hope he's honest, however.'
+
+'I don't think she's in love with him,' said Tayling.  He had seen
+but little of the pair, and yet he could not reconcile what he had
+noticed in Miss Aldclyffe's behaviour with the idea that it was the
+bearing of a woman towards her lover.
+
+'Well, your experience of the fiery phenomenon is more recent than
+mine,' rejoined Nyttleton carelessly.  'And you may remember the
+nature of it best.'
+
+
+
+VIII.  THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN DAYS
+
+1.  FROM THE THIRD TO THE NINETEENTH OF SEPTEMBER
+
+Miss Aldclyffe's tenderness towards Cytherea, between the hours of
+her irascibility, increased till it became no less than doting
+fondness.  Like Nature in the tropics, with her hurricanes and the
+subsequent luxuriant vegetation effacing their ravages, Miss
+Aldclyffe compensated for her outbursts by excess of generosity
+afterwards.  She seemed to be completely won out of herself by close
+contact with a young woman whose modesty was absolutely unimpaired,
+and whose artlessness was as perfect as was compatible with the
+complexity necessary to produce the due charm of womanhood.
+Cytherea, on her part, perceived with honest satisfaction that her
+influence for good over Miss Aldclyffe was considerable.  Ideas and
+habits peculiar to the younger, which the elder lady had originally
+imitated as a mere whim, she grew in course of time to take a
+positive delight in.  Among others were evening and morning prayers,
+dreaming over out-door scenes, learning a verse from some poem
+whilst dressing.
+
+Yet try to force her sympathies as much as she would, Cytherea could
+feel no more than thankful for this, even if she always felt as much
+as thankful.  The mysterious cloud hanging over the past life of her
+companion, of which the uncertain light already thrown upon it only
+seemed to render still darker the unpenetrated remainder, nourished
+in her a feeling which was scarcely too slight to be called dread.
+She would have infinitely preferred to be treated distantly, as the
+mere dependent, by such a changeable nature--like a fountain, always
+herself, yet always another.  That a crime of any deep dye had ever
+been perpetrated or participated in by her namesake, she would not
+believe; but the reckless adventuring of the lady's youth seemed
+connected with deeds of darkness rather than of light.
+
+Sometimes Miss Aldclyffe appeared to be on the point of making some
+absorbing confidence, but reflection invariably restrained her.
+Cytherea hoped that such a confidence would come with time, and that
+she might thus be a means of soothing a mind which had obviously
+known extreme suffering.
+
+But Miss Aldclyffe's reticence concerning her past was not imitated
+by Cytherea.  Though she never disclosed the one fact of her
+knowledge that the love-suit between Miss Aldclyffe and her father
+terminated abnormally, the maiden's natural ingenuousness on
+subjects not set down for special guard had enabled Miss Aldclyffe
+to worm from her, fragment by fragment, every detail of her father's
+history.  Cytherea saw how deeply Miss Aldclyffe sympathized--and it
+compensated her, to some extent, for the hasty resentments of other
+times.
+
+Thus uncertainly she lived on.  It was perceived by the servants of
+the House that some secret bond of connection existed between Miss
+Aldclyffe and her companion.  But they were woman and woman, not
+woman and man, the facts were ethereal and refined, and so they
+could not be worked up into a taking story.  Whether, as old critics
+disputed, a supernatural machinery be necessary to an epic or no, an
+ungodly machinery is decidedly necessary to a scandal.
+
+Another letter had come to her from Edward--very short, but full of
+entreaty, asking why she would not write just one line--just one
+line of cold friendship at least?  She then allowed herself to
+think, little by little, whether she had not perhaps been too harsh
+with him; and at last wondered if he were really much to blame for
+being engaged to another woman.  'Ah, Brain, there is one in me
+stronger than you!' she said.  The young maid now continually pulled
+out his letter, read it and re-read it, almost crying with pity the
+while, to think what wretched suspense he must be enduring at her
+silence, till her heart chid her for her cruelty.  She felt that she
+must send him a line--one little line--just a wee line to keep him
+alive, poor thing; sighing like Donna Clara--
+
+     'Ah, were he now before me,
+        In spite of injured pride,
+      I fear my eyes would pardon
+        Before my tongue could chide.'
+
+2.  SEPTEMBER THE TWENTIETH.  THREE TO FOUR P.M.
+
+It was the third week in September, about five weeks after
+Cytherea's arrival, when Miss Aldclyffe requested her one day to go
+through the village of Carriford and assist herself in collecting
+the subscriptions made by some of the inhabitants of the parish to a
+religious society she patronized.  Miss Aldclyffe formed one of what
+was called a Ladies' Association, each member of which collected
+tributary streams of shillings from her inferiors, to add to her own
+pound at the end.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe took particular interest in Cytherea's appearance
+that afternoon, and the object of her attention was, indeed,
+gratifying to look at.  The sight of the lithe girl, set off by an
+airy dress, coquettish jacket, flexible hat, a ray of starlight in
+each eye and a war of lilies and roses in each cheek, was a palpable
+pleasure to the mistress of the mansion, yet a pleasure which
+appeared to partake less of the nature of affectionate satisfaction
+than of mental gratification.
+
+Eight names were printed in the report as belonging to Miss
+Aldclyffe's list, with the amount of subscription-money attached to
+each.
+
+'I will collect the first four, whilst you do the same with the last
+four,' said Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+The names of two tradespeople stood first in Cytherea's share:  then
+came a Miss Hinton:  last of all in the printed list was Mr.
+Springrove the elder.  Underneath his name was pencilled, in Miss
+Aldclyffe's handwriting, 'Mr. Manston.'
+
+Manston had arrived on the estate, in the capacity of steward, three
+or four days previously, and occupied the old manor-house, which had
+been altered and repaired for his reception.
+
+'Call on Mr. Manston,' said the lady impressively, looking at the
+name written under Cytherea's portion of the list.
+
+'But he does not subscribe yet?'
+
+'I know it; but call and leave him a report.  Don't forget it.'
+
+'Say you would be pleased if he would subscribe?'
+
+'Yes--say I should be pleased if he would,' repeated Miss Aldclyffe,
+smiling.  'Good-bye.  Don't hurry in your walk.  If you can't get
+easily through your task to-day put off some of it till to-morrow.'
+
+Each then started on her rounds:  Cytherea going in the first place
+to the old manor-house.  Mr. Manston was not indoors, which was a
+relief to her.  She called then on the two gentleman-farmers' wives,
+who soon transacted their business with her, frigidly indifferent to
+her personality.  A person who socially is nothing is thought less
+of by people who are not much than by those who are a great deal.
+
+She then turned towards Peakhill Cottage, the residence of Miss
+Hinton, who lived there happily enough, with an elderly servant and
+a house-dog as companions.  Her father, and last remaining parent,
+had retired thither four years before this time, after having filled
+the post of editor to the Casterbridge Chronicle for eighteen or
+twenty years.  There he died soon after, and though comparatively a
+poor man, he left his daughter sufficiently well provided for as a
+modest fundholder and claimant of sundry small sums in dividends to
+maintain herself as mistress at Peakhill.
+
+At Cytherea's knock an inner door was heard to open and close, and
+footsteps crossed the passage hesitatingly.  The next minute
+Cytherea stood face to face with the lady herself.
+
+Adelaide Hinton was about nine-and-twenty years of age.  Her hair
+was plentiful, like Cytherea's own; her teeth equalled Cytherea's in
+regularity and whiteness.  But she was much paler, and had features
+too transparent to be in place among household surroundings.  Her
+mouth expressed love less forcibly than Cytherea's, and, as a
+natural result of her greater maturity, her tread was less elastic,
+and she was more self-possessed.
+
+She had been a girl of that kind which mothers praise as not
+forward, by way of contrast, when disparaging those warmer ones with
+whom loving is an end and not a means.  Men of forty, too, said of
+her, 'a good sensible wife for any man, if she cares to marry,' the
+caring to marry being thrown in as the vaguest hypothesis, because
+she was so practical.  Yet it would be singular if, in such cases,
+the important subject of marriage should be excluded from
+manipulation by hands that are ready for practical performance in
+every domestic concern besides.
+
+Cytherea was an acquisition, and the greeting was hearty.
+
+'Good afternoon!  O yes--Miss Graye, from Miss Aldclyffe's.  I have
+seen you at church, and I am so glad you have called!  Come in.  I
+wonder if I have change enough to pay my subscription.'  She spoke
+girlishly.
+
+Adelaide, when in the company of a younger woman, always levelled
+herself down to that younger woman's age from a sense of justice to
+herself--as if, though not her own age at common law, it was in
+equity.
+
+'It doesn't matter.  I'll come again.'
+
+'Yes, do at any time; not only on this errand.  But you must step in
+for a minute.  Do.'
+
+'I have been wanting to come for several weeks.'
+
+'That's right.  Now you must see my house--lonely, isn't it, for a
+single person?  People said it was odd for a young woman like me to
+keep on a house; but what did I care?  If you knew the pleasure of
+locking up your own door, with the sensation that you reigned
+supreme inside it, you would say it was worth the risk of being
+called odd.  Mr. Springrove attends to my gardening, the dog attends
+to robbers, and whenever there is a snake or toad to kill, Jane does
+it.'
+
+'How nice!  It is better than living in a town.'
+
+'Far better.  A town makes a cynic of me.'
+
+The remark recalled, somewhat startlingly, to Cytherea's mind, that
+Edward had used those very words to herself one evening at Budmouth.
+
+Miss Hinton opened an interior door and led her visitor into a small
+drawing-room commanding a view of the country for miles.
+
+The missionary business was soon settled; but the chat continued.
+
+'How lonely it must be here at night!' said Cytherea.  'Aren't you
+afraid?'
+
+'At first I was, slightly.  But I got used to the solitude.  And you
+know a sort of commonsense will creep even into timidity.  I say to
+myself sometimes at night, "If I were anybody but a harmless woman,
+not worth the trouble of a worm's ghost to appear to me, I should
+think that every sound I hear was a spirit."  But you must see all
+over my house.'
+
+Cytherea was highly interested in seeing.
+
+'I say you MUST do this, and you MUST do that, as if you were a
+child,' remarked Adelaide.  'A privileged friend of mine tells me
+this use of the imperative comes of being so constantly in nobody's
+society but my own.'
+
+'Ah, yes.  I suppose she is right.'
+
+Cytherea called the friend 'she' by a rule of ladylike practice; for
+a woman's 'friend' is delicately assumed by another friend to be of
+their own sex in the absence of knowledge to the contrary; just as
+cats are called she's until they prove themselves he's.
+
+Miss Hinton laughed mysteriously.
+
+'I get a humorous reproof for it now and then, I assure you,' she
+continued.
+
+'"Humorous reproof:" that's not from a woman:  who can reprove
+humorously but a man?' was the groove of Cytherea's thought at the
+remark.  'Your brother reproves you, I expect,' said that innocent
+young lady.
+
+'No,' said Miss Hinton, with a candid air.  ''Tis only a
+professional man I am acquainted with.'  She looked out of the
+window.
+
+Women are persistently imitative.  No sooner did a thought flash
+through Cytherea's mind that the man was a lover than she became a
+Miss Aldclyffe in a mild form.
+
+'I imagine he's a lover,' she said.
+
+Miss Hinton smiled a smile of experience in that line.
+
+Few women, if taxed with having an admirer, are so free from vanity
+as to deny the impeachment, even if it is utterly untrue.  When it
+does happen to be true, they look pityingly away from the person who
+is so benighted as to have got no further than suspecting it.
+
+'There now--Miss Hinton; you are engaged to be married!' said
+Cytherea accusingly.
+
+Adelaide nodded her head practically.  'Well, yes, I am,' she said.
+
+The word 'engaged' had no sooner passed Cytherea's lips than the
+sound of it--the mere sound of her own lips--carried her mind to the
+time and circumstances under which Miss Aldclyffe had used it
+towards herself.  A sickening thought followed--based but on a mere
+surmise; yet its presence took every other idea away from Cytherea's
+mind.  Miss Hinton had used Edward's words about towns; she
+mentioned Mr. Springrove as attending to her garden.  It could not
+be that Edward was the man! that Miss Aldclyffe had planned to
+reveal her rival thus!
+
+'Are you going to be married soon?' she inquired, with a steadiness
+the result of a sort of fascination, but apparently of indifference.
+
+'Not very soon--still, soon.'
+
+'Ah-ha!  In less than three months?' said Cytherea.
+
+'Two.'
+
+Now that the subject was well in hand, Adelaide wanted no more
+prompting.  'You won't tell anybody if I show you something?' she
+said, with eager mystery.
+
+'O no, nobody.  But does he live in this parish?'
+
+'No.'
+
+Nothing proved yet.
+
+'What's his name?' said Cytherea flatly.  Her breath and heart had
+begun their old tricks, and came and went hotly.  Miss Hinton could
+not see her face.
+
+'What do you think?' said Miss Hinton.
+
+'George?' said Cytherea, with deceitful agony.
+
+'No,' said Adelaide.  'But now, you shall see him first; come here;'
+and she led the way upstairs into her bedroom.  There, standing on
+the dressing table in a little frame, was the unconscious portrait
+of Edward Springrove.
+
+'There he is,' Miss Hinton said, and a silence ensued.
+
+'Are you very fond of him?' continued the miserable Cytherea at
+length.
+
+'Yes, of course I am,' her companion replied, but in the tone of one
+who 'lived in Abraham's bosom all the year,' and was therefore
+untouched by solemn thought at the fact.  'He's my cousin--a native
+of this village.  We were engaged before my father's death left me
+so lonely.  I was only twenty, and a much greater belle than I am
+now.  We know each other thoroughly, as you may imagine.  I give him
+a little sermonizing now and then.'
+
+'Why?'
+
+'O, it's only in fun. He's very naughty sometimes--not really, you
+know--but he will look at any pretty face when he sees it.'
+
+Storing up this statement of his susceptibility as another item to
+be miserable upon when she had time, 'How do you know that?'
+Cytherea asked, with a swelling heart.
+
+'Well, you know how things do come to women's ears.  He used to live
+at Budmouth as an assistant-architect, and I found out that a young
+giddy thing of a girl who lives there somewhere took his fancy for a
+day or two.  But I don't feel jealous at all--our engagement is so
+matter-of-fact that neither of us can be jealous.  And it was a mere
+flirtation--she was too silly for him.  He's fond of rowing, and
+kindly gave her an airing for an evening or two. I'll warrant they
+talked the most unmitigated rubbish under the sun--all shallowness
+and pastime, just as everything is at watering places--neither of
+them caring a bit for the other--she giggling like a goose all the
+time--'
+
+Concentrated essence of woman pervaded the room rather than air.
+'She DIDN'T! and it WASN'T shallowness!' Cytherea burst out, with
+brimming eyes.  ''Twas deep deceit on one side, and entire
+confidence on the other--yes, it was!'  The pent-up emotion had
+swollen and swollen inside the young thing till the dam could no
+longer embay it.  The instant the words were out she would have
+given worlds to have been able to recall them.
+
+'Do you know her--or him?' said Miss Hinton, starting with suspicion
+at the warmth shown.
+
+The two rivals had now lost their personality quite.  There was the
+same keen brightness of eye, the same movement of the mouth, the
+same mind in both, as they looked doubtingly and excitedly at each
+other.  As is invariably the case with women when a man they care
+for is the subject of an excitement among them, the situation
+abstracted the differences which distinguished them as individuals,
+and left only the properties common to them as atoms of a sex.
+
+Cytherea caught at the chance afforded her of not betraying herself.
+'Yes, I know her,' she said.
+
+'Well,' said Miss Hinton, 'I am really vexed if my speaking so
+lightly of any friend of yours has hurt your feelings, but--'
+
+'O, never mind,' Cytherea returned; 'it doesn't matter, Miss Hinton.
+I think I must leave you now.  I have to call at other places.  Yes-
+-I must go.'
+
+Miss Hinton, in a perplexed state of mind, showed her visitor
+politely downstairs to the door.  Here Cytherea bade her a hurried
+adieu, and flitted down the garden into the lane.
+
+She persevered in her duties with a wayward pleasure in giving
+herself misery, as was her wont.  Mr. Springrove's name was next on
+the list, and she turned towards his dwelling, the Three Tranters
+Inn.
+
+3.  FOUR TO FIVE P.M.
+
+The cottages along Carriford village street were not so close but
+that on one side or other of the road was always a hedge of hawthorn
+or privet, over or through which could be seen gardens or orchards
+rich with produce.  It was about the middle of the early apple-
+harvest, and the laden trees were shaken at intervals by the
+gatherers; the soft pattering of the falling crop upon the grassy
+ground being diversified by the loud rattle of vagrant ones upon a
+rail, hencoop, basket, or lean-to roof, or upon the rounded and
+stooping backs of the collectors--mostly children, who would have
+cried bitterly at receiving such a smart blow from any other
+quarter, but smilingly assumed it to be but fun in apples.
+
+The Three Tranters Inn, a many-gabled, mediaeval building,
+constructed almost entirely of timber, plaster, and thatch, stood
+close to the line of the roadside, almost opposite the churchyard,
+and was connected with a row of cottages on the left by thatched
+outbuildings.  It was an uncommonly characteristic and handsome
+specimen of the genuine roadside inn of bygone times; and standing
+on one of the great highways in this part of England, had in its
+time been the scene of as much of what is now looked upon as the
+romantic and genial experience of stage-coach travelling as any
+halting-place in the country.  The railway had absorbed the whole
+stream of traffic which formerly flowed through the village and
+along by the ancient door of the inn, reducing the empty-handed
+landlord, who used only to farm a few fields at the back of the
+house, to the necessity of eking out his attenuated income by
+increasing the extent of his agricultural business if he would still
+maintain his social standing.  Next to the general stillness
+pervading the spot, the long line of outbuildings adjoining the
+house was the most striking and saddening witness to the passed-away
+fortunes of the Three Tranters Inn.  It was the bulk of the original
+stabling, and where once the hoofs of two-score horses had daily
+rattled over the stony yard, to and from the stalls within, thick
+grass now grew, whilst the line of roofs--once so straight--over the
+decayed stalls, had sunk into vast hollows till they seemed like the
+cheeks of toothless age.
+
+On a green plot at the other end of the building grew two or three
+large, wide-spreading elm-trees, from which the sign was suspended--
+representing the three men called tranters (irregular carriers),
+standing side by side, and exactly alike to a hair's-breadth, the
+grain of the wood and joints of the boards being visible through the
+thin paint depicting their forms, which were still further
+disfigured by red stains running downwards from the rusty nails
+above.
+
+Under the trees now stood a cider-mill and press, and upon the spot
+sheltered by the boughs were gathered Mr. Springrove himself, his
+men, the parish clerk, two or three other men, grinders and
+supernumeraries, a woman with an infant in her arms, a flock of
+pigeons, and some little boys with straws in their mouths,
+endeavouring, whenever the men's backs were turned, to get a sip of
+the sweet juice issuing from the vat.
+
+Edward Springrove the elder, the landlord, now more particularly a
+farmer, and for two months in the year a cider-maker, was an
+employer of labour of the old school, who worked himself among his
+men.  He was now engaged in packing the pomace into horsehair bags
+with a rammer, and Gad Weedy, his man, was occupied in shovelling up
+more from a tub at his side.  The shovel shone like silver from the
+action of the juice, and ever and anon, in its motion to and fro,
+caught the rays of the declining sun and reflected them in bristling
+stars of light.
+
+Mr. Springrove had been too young a man when the pristine days of
+the Three Tranters had departed for ever to have much of the host
+left in him now.  He was a poet with a rough skin:  one whose
+sturdiness was more the result of external circumstances than of
+intrinsic nature.  Too kindly constituted to be very provident, he
+was yet not imprudent.  He had a quiet humorousness of disposition,
+not out of keeping with a frequent melancholy, the general
+expression of his countenance being one of abstraction.  Like Walt
+Whitman he felt as his years increased--
+
+     'I foresee too much; it means more than I thought.'
+
+On the present occasion he wore gaiters and a leathern apron, and
+worked with his shirt-sleeves rolled up beyond his elbows,
+disclosing solid and fleshy rather than muscular arms.  They were
+stained by the cider, and two or three brown apple-pips from the
+pomace he was handling were to be seen sticking on them here and
+there.
+
+The other prominent figure was that of Richard Crickett, the parish
+clerk, a kind of Bowdlerized rake, who ate only as much as a woman,
+and had the rheumatism in his left hand.  The remainder of the
+group, brown-faced peasants, wore smock-frocks embroidered on the
+shoulders with hearts and diamonds, and were girt round their middle
+with a strap, another being worn round the right wrist.
+
+'And have you seen the steward, Mr. Springrove?' said the clerk.
+
+'Just a glimpse of him; but 'twas just enough to show me that he's
+not here for long.'
+
+'Why mid that be?'
+
+'He'll never stand the vagaries of the female figure holden the
+reins--not he.'
+
+'She d' pay en well,' said a grinder; 'and money's money.'
+
+'Ah--'tis:  very much so,' the clerk replied.
+
+'Yes, yes, naibour Crickett,' said Springrove, 'but she'll vlee in a
+passion--all the fat will be in the fire--and there's an end o't. .
+. .  Yes, she is a one,' continued the farmer, resting, raising his
+eyes, and reading the features of a distant apple.
+
+'She is,' said Gad, resting too (it is wonderful how prompt a
+journeyman is in following his master's initiative to rest) and
+reflectively regarding the ground in front of him.
+
+'True:  a one is she,' the clerk chimed in, shaking his head
+ominously.
+
+'She has such a temper,' said the farmer, 'and is so wilful too.
+You may as well try to stop a footpath as stop her when she has
+taken anything into her head.  I'd as soon grind little green crabs
+all day as live wi' her.'
+
+''Tis a temper she hev, 'tis,' the clerk replied, 'though I be a
+servant of the Church that say it.  But she isn't goen to flee in a
+passion this time.'
+
+The audience waited for the continuation of the speech, as if they
+knew from experience the exact distance off it lay in the future.
+
+The clerk swallowed nothing as if it were a great deal, and then
+went on, 'There's some'at between 'em:  mark my words, naibours--
+there's some'at between 'em.'
+
+'D'ye mean it?'
+
+'I d' know it.  He came last Saturday, didn't he?'
+
+''A did, truly,' said Gad Weedy, at the same time taking an apple
+from the hopper of the mill, eating a piece, and flinging back the
+remainder to be ground up for cider.
+
+'He went to church a-Sunday,' said the clerk again.
+
+''A did.'
+
+'And she kept her eye upon en all the service, her face flickeren
+between red and white, but never stoppen at either.'
+
+Mr. Springrove nodded, and went to the press.
+
+'Well,' said the clerk, 'you don't call her the kind o' woman to
+make mistakes in just trotten through the weekly service o' God?
+Why, as a rule she's as right as I be myself.'
+
+Mr. Springrove nodded again, and gave a twist to the screw of the
+press, followed in the movement by Gad at the other side; the two
+grinders expressing by looks of the greatest concern that, if Miss
+Aldclyffe were as right at church as the clerk, she must be right
+indeed.
+
+'Yes, as right in the service o' God as I be myself,' repeated the
+clerk.  'But last Sunday, when we were in the tenth commandment,
+says she, "Incline our hearts to keep this law," says she, when
+'twas "Laws in our hearts, we beseech Thee," all the church through.
+Her eye was upon HIM--she was quite lost--"Hearts to keep this law,"
+says she; she was no more than a mere shadder at that tenth time--a
+mere shadder.  You mi't ha' mouthed across to her "Laws in our
+hearts we beseech Thee," fifty times over--she'd never ha' noticed
+ye.  She's in love wi' the man, that's what she is.'
+
+'Then she's a bigger stunpoll than I took her for,' said Mr.
+Springrove.  'Why, she's old enough to be his mother.'
+
+'The row'll be between her and that young Curlywig, you'll see.  She
+won't run the risk of that pretty face be-en near.'
+
+'Clerk Crickett, I d' fancy you d' know everything about everybody,'
+said Gad.
+
+'Well so's,' said the clerk modestly.  'I do know a little.  It
+comes to me.'
+
+'And I d' know where from.'
+
+'Ah.'
+
+'That wife o' thine.  She's an entertainen woman, not to speak
+disrespectful.'
+
+'She is:  and a winnen one.  Look at the husbands she've had--God
+bless her!'
+
+'I wonder you could stand third in that list, Clerk Crickett,' said
+Mr. Springrove.
+
+'Well, 't has been a power o' marvel to myself oftentimes.  Yes,
+matrimony do begin wi' "Dearly beloved," and ends wi' "Amazement,"
+as the prayer-book says.  But what could I do, naibour Springrove?
+'Twas ordained to be.  Well do I call to mind what your poor lady
+said to me when I had just married.  "Ah, Mr. Crickett," says she,
+"your wife will soon settle you as she did her other two:  here's a
+glass o' rum, for I shan't see your poor face this time next year."
+I swallered the rum, called again next year, and said, "Mrs.
+Springrove, you gave me a glass o' rum last year because I was going
+to die--here I be alive still, you see."  "Well said, clerk!  Here's
+two glasses for you now, then," says she.   "Thank you, mem," I
+said, and swallered the rum.  Well, dang my old sides, next year I
+thought I'd call again and get three.  And call I did.  But she
+wouldn't give me a drop o' the commonest.  "No, clerk," says she,
+"you be too tough for a woman's pity.". . .  Ah, poor soul, 'twas
+true enough!  Here be I, that was expected to die, alive and hard as
+a nail, you see, and there's she moulderen in her grave.'
+
+'I used to think 'twas your wife's fate not to have a liven husband
+when I zid 'em die off so,' said Gad.
+
+'Fate?  Bless thy simplicity, so 'twas her fate; but she struggled
+to have one, and would, and did.  Fate's nothen beside a woman's
+schemen!'
+
+'I suppose, then, that Fate is a He, like us, and the Lord, and the
+rest o' 'em up above there,' said Gad, lifting his eyes to the sky.
+
+'Hullo!  Here's the young woman comen that we were a-talken about
+by-now,' said a grinder, suddenly interrupting.  'She's comen up
+here, as I be alive!'
+
+The two grinders stood and regarded Cytherea as if she had been a
+ship tacking into a harbour, nearly stopping the mill in their new
+interest.
+
+'Stylish accoutrements about the head and shoulders, to my thinken,'
+said the clerk.  'Sheenen curls, and plenty o' em.'
+
+'If there's one kind of pride more excusable than another in a young
+woman, 'tis being proud of her hair,' said Mr. Springrove.
+
+'Dear man!--the pride there is only a small piece o' the whole.  I
+warrant now, though she can show such a figure, she ha'n't a stick
+o' furniture to call her own.'
+
+'Come, Clerk Crickett, let the maid be a maid while she is a maid,'
+said Farmer Springrove chivalrously.
+
+'O,' replied the servant of the Church; 'I've nothen to say against
+it--O no:
+
+     '"The chimney-sweeper's daughter Sue
+         As I have heard declare, O,
+       Although she's neither sock nor shoe
+         Will curl and deck her hair, O."'
+
+Cytherea was rather disconcerted at finding that the gradual
+cessation of the chopping of the mill was on her account, and still
+more when she saw all the cider-makers' eyes fixed upon her except
+Mr. Springrove's, whose natural delicacy restrained him.  She neared
+the plot of grass, but instead of advancing further, hesitated on
+its border.
+
+Mr. Springrove perceived her embarrassment, which was relieved when
+she saw his old-established figure coming across to her, wiping his
+hands in his apron.
+
+'I know your errand, missie,' he said, 'and am glad to see you, and
+attend to it.  I'll step indoors.'
+
+'If you are busy I am in no hurry for a minute or two,' said
+Cytherea.
+
+'Then if so be you really wouldn't mind, we'll wring down this last
+filling to let it drain all night?'
+
+'Not at all.  I like to see you.'
+
+'We are only just grinding down the early pickthongs and griffins,'
+continued the farmer, in a half-apologetic tone for detaining by his
+cider-making any well-dressed woman.  'They rot as black as a
+chimney-crook if we keep 'em till the regulars turn in.'  As he
+spoke he went back to the press, Cytherea keeping at his elbow.
+'I'm later than I should have been by rights,' he continued, taking
+up a lever for propelling the screw, and beckoning to the men to
+come forward.  'The truth is, my son Edward had promised to come to-
+day, and I made preparations; but instead of him comes a letter:
+"London, September the eighteenth, Dear Father," says he, and went
+on to tell me he couldn't.  It threw me out a bit.'
+
+'Of course,' said Cytherea.
+
+'He's got a place 'a b'lieve?' said the clerk, drawing near.
+
+'No, poor mortal fellow, no.  He tried for this one here, you know,
+but couldn't manage to get it.  I don't know the rights o' the
+matter, but willy-nilly they wouldn't have him for steward.  Now
+mates, form in line.'
+
+Springrove, the clerk, the grinders, and Gad, all ranged themselves
+behind the lever of the screw, and walked round like soldiers
+wheeling.
+
+'The man that the old quean hev got is a man you can hardly get upon
+your tongue to gainsay, by the look o' en,' rejoined Clerk Crickett.
+
+'One o' them people that can contrive to be thought no worse o' for
+stealen a horse than another man for looken over hedge at en,' said
+a grinder.
+
+'Well, he's all there as steward, and is quite the gentleman--no
+doubt about that.'
+
+'So would my Ted ha' been, for the matter o' that,' the farmer said.
+
+'That's true:  'a would, sir.'
+
+'I said, I'll give Ted a good education if it do cost me my eyes,
+and I would have done it.'
+
+'Ay, that you would so,' said the chorus of assistants solemnly.
+
+'But he took to books and drawing naturally, and cost very little;
+and as a wind-up the womenfolk hatched up a match between him and
+his cousin.'
+
+'When's the wedden to be, Mr. Springrove?'
+
+'Uncertain--but soon, I suppose.  Edward, you see, can do anything
+pretty nearly, and yet can't get a straightforward living.  I wish
+sometimes I had kept him here, and let professions go.  But he was
+such a one for the pencil.'
+
+He dropped the lever in the hedge, and turned to his visitor.
+
+'Now then, missie, if you'll come indoors, please.'
+
+Gad Weedy looked with a placid criticism at Cytherea as she withdrew
+with the farmer.
+
+'I could tell by the tongue o' her that she didn't take her degrees
+in our county,' he said in an undertone.
+
+
+
+'The railways have left you lonely here,' she observed, when they
+were indoors.
+
+Save the withered old flies, which were quite tame from the
+solitude, not a being was in the house.  Nobody seemed to have
+entered it since the last passenger had been called out to mount the
+last stage-coach that had run by.
+
+'Yes, the Inn and I seem almost a pair of fossils,' the farmer
+replied, looking at the room and then at himself.
+
+'O, Mr.  Springrove,' said Cytherea, suddenly recollecting herself;
+'I am much obliged to you for recommending me to Miss Aldclyffe.'
+She began to warm towards the old man; there was in him a gentleness
+of disposition which reminded her of her own father.
+
+'Recommending?  Not at all, miss.  Ted--that's my son--Ted said a
+fellow-draughtsman of his had a sister who wanted to be doing
+something in the world, and I mentioned it to the housekeeper,
+that's all.  Ay, I miss my son very much.'
+
+She kept her back to the window that he might not see her rising
+colour.
+
+'Yes,' he continued, 'sometimes I can't help feeling uneasy about
+him.  You know, he seems not made for a town life exactly:  he gets
+very queer over it sometimes, I think.  Perhaps he'll be better when
+he's married to Adelaide.'
+
+A half-impatient feeling arose in her, like that which possesses a
+sick person when he hears a recently-struck hour struck again by a
+slow clock.  She had lived further on.
+
+'Everything depends upon whether he loves her,' she said
+tremulously.
+
+'He used to--he doesn't show it so much now; but that's because he's
+older.  You see, it was several years ago they first walked together
+as young man and young woman.  She's altered too from what she was
+when he first courted her.'
+
+'How, sir?'
+
+'O, she's more sensible by half.  When he used to write to her she'd
+creep up the lane and look back over her shoulder, and slide out the
+letter, and read a word and stand in thought looking at the hills
+and seeing none.  Then the cuckoo would cry--away the letter would
+slip, and she'd start wi' fright at the mere bird, and have a red
+skin before the quickest man among ye could say, "Blood rush up."'
+
+He came forward with the money and dropped it into her hand.  His
+thoughts were still with Edward, and he absently took her little
+fingers in his as he said, earnestly and ingenuously--
+
+''Tis so seldom I get a gentlewoman to speak to that I can't help
+speaking to you, Miss Graye, on my fears for Edward; I sometimes am
+afraid that he'll never get on--that he'll die poor and despised
+under the worst mental conditions, a keen sense of having been
+passed in the race by men whose brains are nothing to his own, all
+through his seeing too far into things--being discontented with
+make-shifts--thinking o' perfection in things, and then sickened
+that there's no such thing as perfection.  I shan't be sorry to see
+him marry, since it may settle him down and do him good. . . .  Ay,
+we'll hope for the best.'
+
+He let go her hand and accompanied her to the door saying, 'If you
+should care to walk this way and talk to an old man once now and
+then, it will be a great delight to him, Miss Graye.  Good-evening
+to ye. . . .  Ah look! a thunderstorm is brewing--be quick home.  Or
+shall I step up with you?'
+
+'No, thank you, Mr. Springrove.  Good evening,' she said in a low
+voice, and hurried away.  One thought still possessed her; Edward
+had trifled with her love.
+
+4.  FIVE TO SIX P.M.
+
+She followed the road into a bower of trees, overhanging it so
+densely that the pass appeared like a rabbit's burrow, and presently
+reached a side entrance to the park.  The clouds rose more rapidly
+than the farmer had anticipated:  the sheep moved in a trail, and
+complained incoherently.  Livid grey shades, like those of the
+modern French painters, made a mystery of the remote and dark parts
+of the vista, and seemed to insist upon a suspension of breath.
+Before she was half-way across the park the thunder rumbled
+distinctly.
+
+The direction in which she had to go would take her close by the old
+manor-house.  The air was perfectly still, and between each low
+rumble of the thunder behind she could hear the roar of the
+waterfall before her, and the creak of the engine among the bushes
+hard by it.  Hurrying on, with a growing dread of the gloom and of
+the approaching storm, she drew near the Old House, now rising
+before her against the dark foliage and sky in tones of strange
+whiteness.
+
+On the flight of steps, which descended from a terrace in front to
+the level of the park, stood a man.  He appeared, partly from the
+relief the position gave to his figure, and partly from fact, to be
+of towering height.  He was dark in outline, and was looking at the
+sky, with his hands behind him.
+
+It was necessary for Cytherea to pass directly across the line of
+his front.  She felt so reluctant to do this, that she was about to
+turn under the trees out of the path and enter it again at a point
+beyond the Old House; but he had seen her, and she came on
+mechanically, unconsciously averting her face a little, and dropping
+her glance to the ground.
+
+Her eyes unswervingly lingered along the path until they fell upon
+another path branching in a right line from the path she was
+pursuing.  It came from the steps of the Old House.  'I am exactly
+opposite him now,' she thought, 'and his eyes are going through me.'
+
+A clear masculine voice said, at the same instant--
+
+'Are you afraid?'
+
+She, interpreting his question by her feelings at the moment,
+assumed himself to be the object of fear, if any.  'I don't think I
+am,' she stammered.
+
+He seemed to know that she thought in that sense.
+
+'Of the thunder, I mean,' he said; 'not of myself.'
+
+She must turn to him now.  'I think it is going to rain,' she
+remarked for the sake of saying something.
+
+He could not conceal his surprise and admiration of her face and
+bearing.  He said courteously, 'It may possibly not rain before you
+reach the House, if you are going there?'
+
+'Yes, I am,'
+
+'May I walk up with you?  It is lonely under the trees.'
+
+'No.'  Fearing his courtesy arose from a belief that he was
+addressing a woman of higher station than was hers, she added, 'I am
+Miss Aldclyffe's companion.  I don't mind the loneliness.'
+
+'O, Miss Aldclyffe's companion.  Then will you be kind enough to
+take a subscription to her?  She sent to me this afternoon to ask me
+to become a subscriber to her Society, and I was out.  Of course
+I'll subscribe if she wishes it.  I take a great interest in the
+Society.'
+
+'Miss Aldclyffe will be glad to hear that, I know.'
+
+'Yes; let me see--what Society did she say it was?  I am afraid I
+haven't enough money in my pocket, and yet it would be a
+satisfaction to her to have practical proof of my willingness.  I'll
+get it, and be out in one minute.'
+
+He entered the house and was at her side again within the time he
+had named.  'This is it,' he said pleasantly.
+
+She held up her hand.  The soft tips of his fingers brushed the palm
+of her glove as he placed the money within it.  She wondered why his
+fingers should have touched her.
+
+'I think after all,' he continued, 'that the rain is upon us, and
+will drench you before you reach the House.  Yes:  see there.'
+
+He pointed to a round wet spot as large as a nasturtium leaf, which
+had suddenly appeared upon the white surface of the step.
+
+'You had better come into the porch.  It is not nearly night yet.
+The clouds make it seem later than it really is.'
+
+Heavy drops of rain, followed immediately by a forked flash of
+lightning and sharp rattling thunder compelled her, willingly or no,
+to accept his invitation.  She ascended the steps, stood beside him
+just within the porch, and for the first time obtained a series of
+short views of his person, as they waited there in silence.
+
+He was an extremely handsome man, well-formed, and well-dressed, of
+an age which seemed to be two or three years less than thirty.  The
+most striking point in his appearance was the wonderful, almost
+preternatural, clearness of his complexion.  There was not a blemish
+or speck of any kind to mar the smoothness of its surface or the
+beauty of its hue.  Next, his forehead was square and broad, his
+brows straight and firm, his eyes penetrating and clear.  By
+collecting the round of expressions they gave forth, a person who
+theorized on such matters would have imbibed the notion that their
+owner was of a nature to kick against the pricks; the last man in
+the world to put up with a position because it seemed to be his
+destiny to do so; one who took upon himself to resist fate with the
+vindictive determination of a Theomachist.  Eyes and forehead both
+would have expressed keenness of intellect too severely to be
+pleasing, had their force not been counteracted by the lines and
+tone of the lips.  These were full and luscious to a surprising
+degree, possessing a woman-like softness of curve, and a ruby
+redness so intense, as to testify strongly to much susceptibility of
+heart where feminine beauty was concerned--a susceptibility that
+might require all the ballast of brain with which he had previously
+been credited to confine within reasonable channels.
+
+His manner was rather elegant than good:  his speech well-finished
+and unconstrained.
+
+The pause in their discourse, which had been caused by the peal of
+thunder was unbroken by either for a minute or two, during which the
+ears of both seemed to be absently following the low roar of the
+waterfall as it became gradually rivalled by the increasing rush of
+rain upon the trees and herbage of the grove.  After her short looks
+at him, Cytherea had turned her head towards the avenue for a while,
+and now, glancing back again for an instant, she discovered that his
+eyes were engaged in a steady, though delicate, regard of her face
+and form.
+
+At this moment, by reason of the narrowness of the porch, their
+dresses touched, and remained in contact.
+
+His clothes are something exterior to every man; but to a woman her
+dress is part of her body.  Its motions are all present to her
+intelligence if not to her eyes; no man knows how his coat-tails
+swing.  By the slightest hyperbole it may be said that her dress has
+sensation.  Crease but the very Ultima Thule of fringe or flounce,
+and it hurts her as much as pinching her.  Delicate antennae, or
+feelers, bristle on every outlying frill.  Go to the uppermost:  she
+is there; tread on the lowest:  the fair creature is there almost
+before you.
+
+Thus the touch of clothes, which was nothing to Manston, sent a
+thrill through Cytherea, seeing, moreover, that he was of the nature
+of a mysterious stranger.  She looked out again at the storm, but
+still felt him.  At last to escape the sensation she moved away,
+though by so doing it was necessary to advance a little into the
+rain.
+
+'Look, the rain is coming into the porch upon you,' he said.  'Step
+inside the door.'
+
+Cytherea hesitated.
+
+'Perfectly safe, I assure you,' he added, laughing, and holding the
+door open.  'You shall see what a state of disorganization I am in--
+boxes on boxes, furniture, straw, crockery, in every form of
+transposition.  An old woman is in the back quarters somewhere,
+beginning to put things to rights. . . .  You know the inside of the
+house, I dare say?'
+
+'I have never been in.'
+
+'O well, come along.  Here, you see, they have made a door through,
+here, they have put a partition dividing the old hall into two, one
+part is now my parlour; there they have put a plaster ceiling,
+hiding the old chestnut-carved roof because it was too high and
+would have been chilly for me; you see, being the original hall, it
+was open right up to the top, and here the lord of the manor and his
+retainers used to meet and be merry by the light from the monstrous
+fire which shone out from that monstrous fire-place, now narrowed to
+a mere nothing for my grate, though you can see the old outline
+still.  I almost wish I could have had it in its original state.'
+
+'With more romance and less comfort.'
+
+'Yes, exactly.  Well, perhaps the wish is not deep-seated.  You will
+see how the things are tumbled in anyhow, packing-cases and all.
+The only piece of ornamental furniture yet unpacked is this one.'
+
+'An organ?'
+
+'Yes, an organ.  I made it myself, except the pipes.  I opened the
+case this afternoon to commence soothing myself at once.  It is not
+a very large one, but quite big enough for a private house.  You
+play, I dare say?'
+
+'The piano.  I am not at all used to an organ.'
+
+'You would soon acquire the touch for an organ, though it would
+spoil your touch for the piano.  Not that that matters a great deal.
+A piano isn't much as an instrument.'
+
+'It is the fashion to say so now.  I think it is quite good enough.'
+
+'That isn't altogether a right sentiment about things being good
+enough.'
+
+'No--no.  What I mean is, that the men who despise pianos do it as a
+rule from their teeth, merely for fashion's sake, because cleverer
+men have said it before them--not from the experience of their
+ears.'
+
+Now Cytherea all at once broke into a blush at the consciousness of
+a great snub she had been guilty of in her eagerness to explain
+herself.  He charitably expressed by a look that he did not in the
+least mind her blunder, if it were one; and this attitude forced him
+into a position of mental superiority which vexed her.
+
+'I play for my private amusement only,' he said.  'I have never
+learned scientifically.  All I know is what I taught myself.'
+
+The thunder, lightning, and rain had now increased to a terrific
+force.  The clouds, from which darts, forks, zigzags, and balls of
+fire continually sprang, did not appear to be more than a hundred
+yards above their heads, and every now and then a flash and a peal
+made gaps in the steward's descriptions.  He went towards the organ,
+in the midst of a volley which seemed to shake the aged house from
+foundations to chimney.
+
+'You are not going to play now, are you?' said Cytherea uneasily.
+
+'O yes.  Why not now?' he said.  'You can't go home, and therefore
+we may as well be amused, if you don't mind sitting on this box.
+The few chairs I have unpacked are in the other room.'
+
+Without waiting to see whether she sat down or not, he turned to the
+organ and began extemporizing a harmony which meandered through
+every variety of expression of which the instrument was capable.
+Presently he ceased and began searching for some music-book.
+
+'What a splendid flash!' he said, as the lightning again shone in
+through the mullioned window, which, of a proportion to suit the
+whole extent of the original hall, was much too large for the
+present room.  The thunder pealed again.  Cytherea, in spite of
+herself, was frightened, not only at the weather, but at the general
+unearthly weirdness which seemed to surround her there.
+
+'I wish I--the lightning wasn't so bright.  Do you think it will
+last long?' she said timidly.
+
+'It can't last much longer,' he murmured, without turning, running
+his fingers again over the keys.  'But this is nothing,' he
+continued, suddenly stopping and regarding her.  'It seems brighter
+because of the deep shadow under those trees yonder.  Don't mind it;
+now look at me--look in my face--now.'
+
+He had faced the window, looking fixedly at the sky with his dark
+strong eyes.  She seemed compelled to do as she was bidden, and
+looked in the too-delicately beautiful face.
+
+The flash came; but he did not turn or blink, keeping his eyes fixed
+as firmly as before.  'There,' he said, turning to her, 'that's the
+way to look at lightning.'
+
+'O, it might have blinded you!' she exclaimed.
+
+'Nonsense--not lightning of this sort--I shouldn't have stared at it
+if there had been danger.  It is only sheet-lightning now.  Now,
+will you have another piece?  Something from an oratorio this time?'
+
+'No, thank you--I don't want to hear it whilst it thunders so.'  But
+he had begun without heeding her answer, and she stood motionless
+again, marvelling at the wonderful indifference to all external
+circumstance which was now evinced by his complete absorption in the
+music before him.
+
+'Why do you play such saddening chords?' she said, when he next
+paused.
+
+'H'm--because I like them, I suppose,' said he lightly.  'Don't you
+like sad impressions sometimes?'
+
+'Yes, sometimes, perhaps.'
+
+'When you are full of trouble.'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Well, why shouldn't I when I am full of trouble?'
+
+'Are you troubled?'
+
+'I am troubled.'  He said this thoughtfully and abruptly--so
+abruptly that she did not push the dialogue further.
+
+He now played more powerfully.  Cytherea had never heard music in
+the completeness of full orchestral power, and the tones of the
+organ, which reverberated with considerable effect in the
+comparatively small space of the room, heightened by the elemental
+strife of light and sound outside, moved her to a degree out of
+proportion to the actual power of the mere notes, practised as was
+the hand that produced them.  The varying strains--now loud, now
+soft; simple, complicated, weird, touching, grand, boisterous,
+subdued; each phase distinct, yet modulating into the next with a
+graceful and easy flow--shook and bent her to themselves, as a
+gushing brook shakes and bends a shadow cast across its surface.
+The power of the music did not show itself so much by attracting her
+attention to the subject of the piece, as by taking up and
+developing as its libretto the poem of her own life and soul,
+shifting her deeds and intentions from the hands of her judgment and
+holding them in its own.
+
+She was swayed into emotional opinions concerning the strange man
+before her; new impulses of thought came with new harmonies, and
+entered into her with a gnawing thrill.  A dreadful flash of
+lightning then, and the thunder close upon it.  She found herself
+involuntarily shrinking up beside him, and looking with parted lips
+at his face.
+
+He turned his eyes and saw her emotion, which greatly increased the
+ideal element in her expressive face.  She was in the state in which
+woman's instinct to conceal has lost its power over her impulse to
+tell; and he saw it.  Bending his handsome face over her till his
+lips almost touched her ear, he murmured, without breaking the
+harmonies--
+
+'Do you very much like this piece?'
+
+'Very much indeed,' she said.
+
+'I could see you were affected by it.  I will copy it for you.'
+
+'Thank you much.'
+
+'I will bring it to the House to you to-morrow.  Who shall I ask
+for?'
+
+'O, not for me.  Don't bring it,' she said hastily.  'I shouldn't
+like you to.'
+
+'Let me see--to-morrow evening at seven or a few minutes past I
+shall be passing the waterfall on my way home.  I could conveniently
+give it you there, and I should like you to have it.'
+
+He modulated into the Pastoral Symphony, still looking in her eyes.
+
+'Very well,' she said, to get rid of the look.
+
+The storm had by this time considerably decreased in violence, and
+in seven or ten minutes the sky partially cleared, the clouds around
+the western horizon becoming lighted up with the rays of the sinking
+sun.
+
+Cytherea drew a long breath of relief, and prepared to go away.  She
+was full of a distressing sense that her detention in the old manor-
+house, and the acquaintanceship it had set on foot, was not a thing
+she wished.  It was such a foolish thing to have been excited and
+dragged into frankness by the wiles of a stranger.
+
+'Allow me to come with you,' he said, accompanying her to the door,
+and again showing by his behaviour how much he was impressed with
+her.  His influence over her had vanished with the musical chords,
+and she turned her back upon him.  'May I come?' he repeated.
+
+'No, no.  The distance is not a quarter of a mile--it is really not
+necessary, thank you,' she said quietly.  And wishing him good-
+evening, without meeting his eyes, she went down the steps, leaving
+him standing at the door.
+
+'O, how is it that man has so fascinated me?' was all she could
+think.  Her own self, as she had sat spell-bound before him, was all
+she could see.  Her gait was constrained, from the knowledge that
+his eyes were upon her until she had passed the hollow by the
+waterfall, and by ascending the rise had become hidden from his view
+by the boughs of the overhanging trees.
+
+5.  SIX TO SEVEN P.M.
+
+The wet shining road threw the western glare into her eyes with an
+invidious lustre which rendered the restlessness of her mood more
+wearying.  Her thoughts flew from idea to idea without asking for
+the slightest link of connection between one and another.  One
+moment she was full of the wild music and stirring scene with
+Manston---the next, Edward's image rose before her like a shadowy
+ghost.  Then Manston's black eyes seemed piercing her again, and the
+reckless voluptuous mouth appeared bending to the curves of his
+special words.  What could be those troubles to which he had
+alluded?  Perhaps Miss Aldclyffe was at the bottom of them.  Sad at
+heart she paced on:  her life was bewildering her.
+
+On coming into Miss Aldclyffe's presence Cytherea told her of the
+incident, not without a fear that she would burst into one of her
+ungovernable fits of temper at learning Cytherea's slight departure
+from the programme.  But, strangely to Cytherea, Miss Aldclyffe
+looked delighted.  The usual cross-examination followed.
+
+'And so you were with him all that time?' said the lady, with
+assumed severity.
+
+'Yes, I was.'
+
+'I did not tell you to call at the Old House twice.'
+
+'I didn't call, as I have said.  He made me come into the porch.'
+
+'What remarks did he make, do you say?'
+
+'That the lightning was not so bad as I thought.'
+
+'A very important remark, that.  Did he--' she turned her glance
+full upon the girl, and eyeing her searchingly, said--
+
+'Did he say anything about ME?'
+
+'Nothing,' said Cytherea, returning her gaze calmly, 'except that I
+was to give you the subscription.'
+
+'You are quite sure?'
+
+'Quite.'
+
+'I believe you.  Did he say anything striking or strange about
+himself?'
+
+'Only one thing--that he was troubled,'
+
+'Troubled!'
+
+After saying the word, Miss Aldclyffe relapsed into silence.  Such
+behaviour as this had ended, on most previous occasions, by her
+making a confession, and Cytherea expected one now.  But for once
+she was mistaken, nothing more was said.
+
+When she had returned to her room she sat down and penned a farewell
+letter to Edward Springrove, as little able as any other excitable
+and brimming young woman of nineteen to feel that the wisest and
+only dignified course at that juncture was to do nothing at all.
+She told him that, to her painful surprise, she had learnt that his
+engagement to another woman was a matter of notoriety.  She insisted
+that all honour bade him marry his early love--a woman far better
+than her unworthy self, who only deserved to be forgotten, and
+begged him to remember that he was not to see her face again.  She
+upbraided him for levity and cruelty in meeting her so frequently at
+Budmouth, and above all in stealing the kiss from her lips on the
+last evening of the water excursions.  'I never, never can forget
+it!' she said, and then felt a sensation of having done her duty,
+ostensibly persuading herself that her reproaches and commands were
+of such a force that no man to whom they were uttered could ever
+approach her more.
+
+Yet it was all unconsciously said in words which betrayed a
+lingering tenderness of love at every unguarded turn.  Like Beatrice
+accusing Dante from the chariot, try as she might to play the
+superior being who contemned such mere eye-sensuousness, she
+betrayed at every point a pretty woman's jealousy of a rival, and
+covertly gave her old lover hints for excusing himself at each fresh
+indictment.
+
+This done, Cytherea, still in a practical mood, upbraided herself
+with weakness in allowing a stranger like Mr. Manston to influence
+her as he had done that evening.  What right on earth had he to
+suggest so suddenly that she might meet him at the waterfall to
+receive his music?  She would have given much to be able to
+annihilate the ascendency he had obtained over her during that
+extraordinary interval of melodious sound.  Not being able to endure
+the notion of his living a minute longer in the belief he was then
+holding, she took her pen and wrote to him also:--
+
+                                            'KNAPWATER HOUSE
+                                                  September 20th.
+
+'I find I cannot meet you at seven o'clock by the waterfall as I
+promised.  The emotion I felt made me forgetful of realities.
+
+                                            'C. GRAYE.'
+
+
+
+A great statesman thinks several times, and acts; a young lady acts,
+and thinks several times.  When, a few minutes later, she saw the
+postman carry off the bag containing one of the letters, and a
+messenger with the other, she, for the first time, asked herself the
+question whether she had acted very wisely in writing to either of
+the two men who had so influenced her.
+
+
+
+IX.  THE EVENTS OF TEN WEEKS
+
+1.  FROM SEPTEMBER THE TWENTY-FIRST TO THE MIDDLE OF NOVEMBER
+
+The foremost figure within Cytherea's horizon, exclusive of the
+inmates of Knapwater House, was now the steward, Mr. Manston.  It
+was impossible that they should live within a quarter of a mile of
+each other, be engaged in the same service, and attend the same
+church, without meeting at some spot or another, twice or thrice a
+week.  On Sundays, in her pew, when by chance she turned her head,
+Cytherea found his eyes waiting desirously for a glimpse of hers,
+and, at first more strangely, the eyes of Miss Aldclyffe furtively
+resting on him.  On coming out of church he frequently walked beside
+Cytherea till she reached the gate at which residents in the House
+turned into the shrubbery.  By degrees a conjecture grew to a
+certainty.  She knew that he loved her.
+
+But a strange fact was connected with the development of his love.
+He was palpably making the strongest efforts to subdue, or at least
+to hide, the weakness, and as it sometimes seemed, rather from his
+own conscience than from surrounding eyes.  Hence she found that not
+one of his encounters with her was anything more than the result of
+pure accident.  He made no advances whatever:  without avoiding her,
+he never sought her:  the words he had whispered at their first
+interview now proved themselves to be quite as much the result of
+unguarded impulse as was her answer.  Something held him back, bound
+his impulse down, but she saw that it was neither pride of his
+person, nor fear that she would refuse him--a course she
+unhesitatingly resolved to take should he think fit to declare
+himself.  She was interested in him and his marvellous beauty, as
+she might have been in some fascinating panther or leopard--for some
+undefinable reason she shrank from him, even whilst she admired.
+The keynote of her nature, a warm 'precipitance of soul,' as
+Coleridge happily writes it, which Manston had so directly pounced
+upon at their very first interview, gave her now a tremulous sense
+of being in some way in his power.
+
+The state of mind was, on the whole, a dangerous one for a young and
+inexperienced woman; and perhaps the circumstance which, more than
+any other, led her to cherish Edward's image now, was that he had
+taken no notice of the receipt of her letter, stating that she
+discarded him.  It was plain then, she said, that he did not care
+deeply for her, and she thereupon could not quite leave off caring
+deeply for him:--
+
+               'Ingenium mulierum,
+     Nolunt ubi velis, ubi nolis cupiunt ultro.'
+
+The month of October passed, and November began its course.  The
+inhabitants of the village of Carriford grew weary of supposing that
+Miss Aldclyffe was going to marry her steward.  New whispers arose
+and became very distinct (though they did not reach Miss Aldclyffe's
+ears) to the effect that the steward was deeply in love with
+Cytherea Graye.  Indeed, the fact became so obvious that there was
+nothing left to say about it except that their marriage would be an
+excellent one for both;--for her in point of comfort--and for him in
+point of love.
+
+As circles in a pond grow wider and wider, the next fact, which at
+first had been patent only to Cytherea herself, in due time spread
+to her neighbours, and they, too, wondered that he made no overt
+advances.  By the middle of November, a theory made up of a
+combination of the other two was received with general favour:  its
+substance being that a guilty intrigue had been commenced between
+Manston and Miss Aldclyffe, some years before, when he was a very
+young man, and she still in the enjoyment of some womanly beauty,
+but now that her seniority began to grow emphatic she was becoming
+distasteful to him.  His fear of the effect of the lady's jealousy
+would, they said, thus lead him to conceal from her his new
+attachment to Cytherea.  Almost the only woman who did not believe
+this was Cytherea herself, on unmistakable grounds, which were
+hidden from all besides.  It was not only in public, but even more
+markedly in secluded places, on occasions when gallantry would have
+been safe from all discovery, that this guarded course of action was
+pursued, all the strength of a consuming passion burning in his eyes
+the while.
+
+2.  NOVEMBER THE EIGHTEENTH
+
+It was on a Friday in this month of November that Owen Graye paid a
+visit to his sister.
+
+His zealous integrity still retained for him the situation at
+Budmouth, and in order that there should be as little interruption
+as possible to his duties there, he had decided not to come to
+Knapwater till late in the afternoon, and to return to Budmouth by
+the first train the next morning, Miss Aldclyffe having made a point
+of frequently offering him lodging for an unlimited period, to the
+great pleasure of Cytherea.
+
+He reached the house about four o'clock, and ringing the bell, asked
+of the page who answered it for Miss Graye.
+
+When Graye spoke the name of his sister, Manston, who was just
+coming out from an interview with Miss Aldclyffe, passed him in the
+vestibule and heard the question.  The steward's face grew hot, and
+he secretly clenched his hands.  He half crossed the court, then
+turned his head and saw that the lad still stood at the door, though
+Owen had been shown into the house.  Manston went back to him.
+
+'Who was that man?' he said.
+
+'I don't know, sir.'
+
+'Has he ever been here before?'
+
+'Yes, sir.'
+
+'How many times?'
+
+'Three.'
+
+'You are sure you don't know him?'
+
+'I think he is Miss Graye's brother, sir.'
+
+'Then, why the devil didn't you say so before!' Manston exclaimed,
+and again went on his way.
+
+'Of course, that was not the man of my dreams--of course, it
+couldn't be!' he said to himself.  'That I should be such a fool--
+such an utter fool.  Good God! to allow a girl to influence me like
+this, day after day, till I am jealous of her very brother.  A
+lady's dependent, a waif, a helpless thing entirely at the mercy of
+the world; yes, curse it; that is just why it is; that fact of her
+being so helpless against the blows of circumstances which renders
+her so deliciously sweet!'
+
+He paused opposite his house.  Should he get his horse saddled?  No.
+
+He went down the drive and out of the park, having started to
+proceed to an outlying spot on the estate concerning some draining,
+and to call at the potter's yard to make an arrangement for the
+supply of pipes.  But a remark which Miss Aldclyffe had dropped in
+relation to Cytherea was what still occupied his mind, and had been
+the immediate cause of his excitement at the sight of her brother.
+Miss Aldclyffe had meaningly remarked during their intercourse, that
+Cytherea was wildly in love with Edward Springrove, in spite of his
+engagement to his cousin Adelaide.
+
+'How I am harassed!' he said aloud, after deep thought for half-an-
+hour, while still continuing his walk with the greatest vehemence.
+'How I am harassed by these emotions of mine!'  He calmed himself by
+an effort.  'Well, duty after all it shall be, as nearly as I can
+effect it.  "Honesty is the best policy;"' with which vigorously
+uttered resolve he once more attempted to turn his attention to the
+prosy object of his journey.
+
+The evening had closed in to a dark and dreary night when the
+steward came from the potter's door to proceed homewards again.  The
+gloom did not tend to raise his spirits, and in the total lack of
+objects to attract his eye, he soon fell to introspection as before.
+It was along the margin of turnip fields that his path lay, and the
+large leaves of the crop struck flatly against his feet at every
+step, pouring upon them the rolling drops of moisture gathered upon
+their broad surfaces; but the annoyance was unheeded.  Next reaching
+a fir plantation, he mounted the stile and followed the path into
+the midst of the darkness produced by the overhanging trees.
+
+After walking under the dense shade of the inky boughs for a few
+minutes, he fancied he had mistaken the path, which as yet was
+scarcely familiar to him.  This was proved directly afterwards by
+his coming at right angles upon some obstruction, which careful
+feeling with outstretched hands soon told him to be a rail fence.
+However, as the wood was not large, he experienced no alarm about
+finding the path again, and with some sense of pleasure halted
+awhile against the rails, to listen to the intensely melancholy yet
+musical wail of the fir-tops, and as the wind passed on, the prompt
+moan of an adjacent plantation in reply.  He could just dimly
+discern the airy summits of the two or three trees nearest him
+waving restlessly backwards and forwards, and stretching out their
+boughs like hairy arms into the dull sky.  The scene, from its
+striking and emphatic loneliness, began to grow congenial to his
+mood; all of human kind seemed at the antipodes.
+
+A sudden rattle on his right hand caused him to start from his
+reverie, and turn in that direction.  There, before him, he saw rise
+up from among the trees a fountain of sparks and smoke, then a red
+glare of light coming forward towards him; then a flashing panorama
+of illuminated oblong pictures; then the old darkness, more
+impressive than ever.
+
+The surprise, which had owed its origin to his imperfect
+acquaintance with the topographical features of that end of the
+estate, had been but momentary; the disturbance, a well-known one to
+dwellers by a railway, being caused by the 6.50 down-train passing
+along a shallow cutting in the midst of the wood immediately below
+where he stood, the driver having the fire-door of the engine open
+at the minute of going by.  The train had, when passing him, already
+considerably slackened speed, and now a whistle was heard,
+announcing that Carriford Road Station was not far in its van.
+
+But contrary to the natural order of things, the discovery that it
+was only a commonplace train had not caused Manston to stir from his
+position of facing the railway.
+
+If the 6.50 down-train had been a flash of forked lightning
+transfixing him to the earth, he could scarcely have remained in a
+more trance-like state.  He still leant against the railings, his
+right hand still continued pressing on his walking-stick, his weight
+on one foot, his other heel raised, his eyes wide open towards the
+blackness of the cutting.  The only movement in him was a slight
+dropping of the lower jaw, separating his previously closed lips a
+little way, as when a strange conviction rushes home suddenly upon a
+man.  A new surprise, not nearly so trivial as the first, had taken
+possession of him.
+
+It was on this account.  At one of the illuminated windows of a
+second-class carriage in the series gone by, he had seen a pale
+face, reclining upon one hand, the light from the lamp falling full
+upon it.  The face was a woman's.
+
+At last Manston moved; gave a whispering kind of whistle, adjusted
+his hat, and walked on again, cross-questioning himself in every
+direction as to how a piece of knowledge he had carefully concealed
+had found its way to another person's intelligence.  'How can my
+address have become known?' he said at length, audibly.  'Well, it
+is a blessing I have been circumspect and honourable, in relation to
+that--yes, I will say it, for once, even if the words choke me, that
+darling of mine, Cytherea, never to be my own, never.  I suppose all
+will come out now.  All!'  The great sadness of his utterance proved
+that no mean force had been exercised upon himself to sustain the
+circumspection he had just claimed.
+
+He wheeled to the left, pursued the ditch beside the railway fence,
+and presently emerged from the wood, stepping into a road which
+crossed the railway by a bridge.
+
+As he neared home, the anxiety lately written in his face, merged by
+degrees into a grimly humorous smile, which hung long upon his lips,
+and he quoted aloud a line from the book of Jeremiah--
+
+     'A woman shall compass a man.'
+
+3.  NOVEMBER THE NINETEENTH.  DAYBREAK
+
+Before it was light the next morning, two little naked feet pattered
+along the passage in Knapwater House, from which Owen Graye's
+bedroom opened, and a tap was given upon his door.
+
+'Owen, Owen, are you awake?' said Cytherea in a whisper through the
+keyhole.  'You must get up directly, or you'll miss the train.'
+
+When he descended to his sister's little room, he found her there
+already waiting with a cup of cocoa and a grilled rasher on the
+table for him.  A hasty meal was despatched in the intervals of
+putting on his overcoat and finding his hat, and they then went
+softly through the long deserted passages, the kitchen-maid who had
+prepared their breakfast walking before them with a lamp held high
+above her head, which cast long wheeling shadows down corridors
+intersecting the one they followed, their remoter ends being lost in
+darkness.  The door was unbolted and they stepped out.
+
+Owen had preferred walking to the station to accepting the pony-
+carriage which Miss Aldclyffe had placed at his disposal, having a
+morbid horror of giving trouble to people richer than himself, and
+especially to their men-servants, who looked down upon him as a
+hybrid monster in social position.  Cytherea proposed to walk a
+little way with him.
+
+'I want to talk to you as long as I can,' she said tenderly.
+
+Brother and sister then emerged by the heavy door into the drive.
+The feeling and aspect of the hour were precisely similar to those
+under which the steward had left the house the evening previous,
+excepting that apparently unearthly reversal of natural sequence,
+which is caused by the world getting lighter instead of darker.
+'The tearful glimmer of the languid dawn' was just sufficient to
+reveal to them the melancholy red leaves, lying thickly in the
+channels by the roadside, ever and anon loudly tapped on by heavy
+drops of water, which the boughs above had collected from the foggy
+air.
+
+They passed the Old House, engaged in a deep conversation, and had
+proceeded about twenty yards by a cross route, in the direction of
+the turnpike road, when the form of a woman emerged from the porch
+of the building.
+
+She was wrapped in a grey waterproof cloak, the hood of which was
+drawn over her head and closely round her face--so closely that her
+eyes were the sole features uncovered.
+
+With this one exception of her appearance there, the most perfect
+stillness and silence pervaded the steward's residence from basement
+to chimney.  Not a shutter was open; not a twine of smoke came
+forth.
+
+Underneath the ivy-covered gateway she stood still and listened for
+two, or possibly three minutes, till she became conscious of others
+in the park.  Seeing the pair she stepped back, with the apparent
+intention of letting them pass out of sight, and evidently wishing
+to avoid observation.  But looking at her watch, and returning it
+rapidly to her pocket, as if surprised at the lateness of the hour,
+she hurried out again, and across the park by a still more oblique
+line than that traced by Owen and his sister.
+
+These in the meantime had got into the road, and were walking along
+it as the woman came up on the other side of the boundary hedge,
+looking for a gate or stile, by which she, too, might get off the
+grass upon the hard ground.
+
+Their conversation, of which every word was clear and distinct, in
+the still air of the dawn, to the distance of a quarter of a mile,
+reached her ears, and withdrew her attention from all other matters
+and sights whatsoever.  Thus arrested she stood for an instant as
+precisely in the attitude of Imogen by the cave of Belarius, as if
+she had studied the position from the play.  When they had advanced
+a few steps, she followed them in some doubt, still screened by the
+hedge.
+
+'Do you believe in such odd coincidences?' said Cytherea.
+
+'How do you mean, believe in them?  They occur sometimes.'
+
+'Yes, one will occur often enough--that is, two disconnected events
+will fall strangely together by chance, and people scarcely notice
+the fact beyond saying, "Oddly enough it happened that so and so
+were the same," and so on.  But when three such events coincide
+without any apparent reason for the coincidence, it seems as if
+there must be invisible means at work.  You see, three things
+falling together in that manner are ten times as singular as two
+cases of coincidence which are distinct.'
+
+'Well, of course:  what a mathematical head you have, Cytherea!  But
+I don't see so much to marvel at in our case.  That the man who kept
+the public-house in which Miss Aldclyffe fainted, and who found out
+her name and position, lives in this neighbourhood, is accounted for
+by the fact that she got him the berth to stop his tongue.  That you
+came here was simply owing to Springrove.'
+
+'Ah, but look at this.  Miss Aldclyffe is the woman our father first
+loved, and I have come to Miss Aldclyffe's; you can't get over
+that.'
+
+From these premises, she proceeded to argue like an elderly divine
+on the designs of Providence which were apparent in such
+conjunctures, and went into a variety of details connected with Miss
+Aldclyffe's history.
+
+'Had I better tell Miss Aldclyffe that I know all this?' she
+inquired at last.
+
+'What's the use?' he said.  'Your possessing the knowledge does no
+harm; you are at any rate comfortable here, and a confession to Miss
+Aldclyffe might only irritate her.  No, hold your tongue, Cytherea.'
+
+'I fancy I should have been tempted to tell her too,' Cytherea went
+on, 'had I not found out that there exists a very odd, almost
+imperceptible, and yet real connection of some kind between her and
+Mr. Manston, which is more than that of a mutual interest in the
+estate.'
+
+'She is in love with him!' exclaimed Owen; 'fancy that!'
+
+'Ah--that's what everybody says who has been keen enough to notice
+anything.  I said so at first.  And yet now I cannot persuade myself
+that she is in love with him at all.'
+
+'Why can't you?'
+
+'She doesn't act as if she were.  She isn't--you will know I don't
+say it from any vanity, Owen--she isn't the least jealous of me.'
+
+'Perhaps she is in some way in his power.'
+
+'No--she is not.  He was openly advertised for, and chosen from
+forty or fifty who answered the advertisement, without knowing whose
+it was.  And since he has been here, she has certainly done nothing
+to compromise herself in any way.  Besides, why should she have
+brought an enemy here at all?'
+
+'Then she must have fallen in love with him.  You know as well as I
+do, Cyth, that with women there's nothing between the two poles of
+emotion towards an interesting male acquaintance.  'Tis either love
+or aversion.'
+
+They walked for a few minutes in silence, when Cytherea's eyes
+accidentally fell upon her brother's feet.
+
+'Owen,' she said, 'do you know that there is something unusual in
+your manner of walking?'
+
+'What is it like?' he asked.
+
+'I can't quite say, except that you don't walk so regularly as you
+used to.'
+
+The woman behind the hedge, who had still continued to dog their
+footsteps, made an impatient movement at this change in their
+conversation, and looked at her watch again.  Yet she seemed
+reluctant to give over listening to them.
+
+'Yes,' Owen returned with assumed carelessness, 'I do know it.  I
+think the cause of it is that mysterious pain which comes just above
+my ankle sometimes.  You remember the first time I had it?  That day
+we went by steam-packet to Lulstead Cove, when it hindered me from
+coming back to you, and compelled me to sleep with the gateman we
+have been talking about.'
+
+'But is it anything serious, dear Owen?' Cytherea exclaimed, with
+some alarm.
+
+'O, nothing at all.  It is sure to go off again.  I never find a
+sign of it when I sit in the office.'
+
+Again their unperceived companion made a gesture of vexation, and
+looked at her watch as if time were precious.  But the dialogue
+still flowed on upon this new subject, and showed no sign of
+returning to its old channel.
+
+Gathering up her skirt decisively she renounced all further hope,
+and hurried along the ditch till she had dropped into a valley, and
+came to a gate which was beyond the view of those coming behind.
+This she softly opened, and came out upon the road, following it in
+the direction of the railway station.
+
+Presently she heard Owen Graye's footsteps in her rear, his
+quickened pace implying that he had parted from his sister.  The
+woman thereupon increased her rapid walk to a run, and in a few
+minutes safely distanced her fellow-traveller.
+
+The railway at Carriford Road consisted only of a single line of
+rails; and the short local down-train by which Owen was going to
+Budmouth was shunted on to a siding whilst the first up-train
+passed.  Graye entered the waiting-room, and the door being open he
+listlessly observed the movements of a woman wearing a long grey
+cloak, and closely hooded, who had asked for a ticket for London.
+
+He followed her with his eyes on to the platform, saw her waiting
+there and afterwards stepping into the train:  his recollection of
+her ceasing with the perception.
+
+4.  EIGHT TO TEN O'CLOCK A.M.
+
+Mrs. Crickett, twice a widow, and now the parish clerk's wife, a
+fine-framed, scandal-loving woman, with a peculiar corner to her eye
+by which, without turning her head, she could see what people were
+doing almost behind her, lived in a cottage standing nearer to the
+old manor-house than any other in the village of Carriford, and she
+had on that account been temporarily engaged by the steward, as a
+respectable kind of charwoman and general servant, until a settled
+arrangement could be made with some person as permanent domestic.
+
+Every morning, therefore, Mrs. Crickett, immediately she had lighted
+the fire in her own cottage, and prepared the breakfast for herself
+and husband, paced her way to the Old House to do the same for Mr.
+Manston.  Then she went home to breakfast; and when the steward had
+eaten his, and had gone out on his rounds, she returned again to
+clear away, make his bed, and put the house in order for the day.
+
+On the morning of Owen Graye's departure, she went through the
+operations of her first visit as usual--proceeded home to breakfast,
+and went back again, to perform those of the second.
+
+Entering Manston's empty bedroom, with her hands on her hips, she
+indifferently cast her eyes upon the bed, previously to dismantling
+it.
+
+Whilst she looked, she thought in an inattentive manner, 'What a
+remarkably quiet sleeper Mr. Manston must be!'  The upper bed-
+clothes were flung back, certainly, but the bed was scarcely
+disarranged.  'Anybody would almost fancy,' she thought, 'that he
+had made it himself after rising.'
+
+But these evanescent thoughts vanished as they had come, and Mrs.
+Crickett set to work; she dragged off the counterpane, blankets and
+sheets, and stooped to lift the pillows.  Thus stooping, something
+arrested her attention; she looked closely--more closely--very
+closely.  'Well, to be sure!' was all she could say.  The clerk's
+wife stood as if the air had suddenly set to amber, and held her
+fixed like a fly in it.
+
+The object of her wonder was a trailing brown hair, very little less
+than a yard long, which proved it clearly to be a hair from some
+woman's head.  She drew it off the pillow, and took it to the
+window; there holding it out she looked fixedly at it, and became
+utterly lost in meditation:  her gaze, which had at first actively
+settled on the hair, involuntarily dropped past its object by
+degrees and was lost on the floor, as the inner vision obscured the
+outer one.
+
+She at length moistened her lips, returned her eyes to the hair,
+wound it round her fingers, put it in some paper, and secreted the
+whole in her pocket.  Mrs. Crickett's thoughts were with her work no
+more that morning.
+
+She searched the house from roof-tree to cellar, for some other
+trace of feminine existence or appurtenance; but none was to be
+found.
+
+She went out into the yard, coal-hole, stable, hay-loft, green-
+house, fowl-house, and piggery, and still there was no sign.  Coming
+in again, she saw a bonnet, eagerly pounced upon it; and found it to
+be her own.
+
+Hastily completing her arrangements in the other rooms, she entered
+the village again, and called at once on the postmistress, Elizabeth
+Leat, an intimate friend of hers, and a female who sported several
+unique diseases and afflictions.
+
+Mrs. Crickett unfolded the paper, took out the hair, and waved it on
+high before the perplexed eyes of Elizabeth, which immediately
+mooned and wandered after it like a cat's.
+
+'What is it?' said Mrs. Leat, contracting her eyelids, and
+stretching out towards the invisible object a narrow bony hand that
+would have been an unmitigated delight to the pencil of Carlo
+Crivelli.
+
+'You shall hear,' said Mrs. Crickett, complacently gathering up the
+treasure into her own fat hand; and the secret was then solemnly
+imparted, together with the accident of its discovery.
+
+A shaving-glass was taken down from a nail, laid on its back in the
+middle of a table by the window, and the hair spread carefully out
+upon it.  The pair then bent over the table from opposite sides,
+their elbows on the edge, their hands supporting their heads, their
+foreheads nearly touching, and their eyes upon the hair.
+
+'He ha' been mad a'ter my lady Cytherea,' said Mrs. Crickett, 'and
+'tis my very belief the hair is--'
+
+'No 'tidn'.  Hers idn' so dark as that,' said Elizabeth.
+
+'Elizabeth, you know that as the faithful wife of a servant of the
+Church, I should be glad to think as you do about the girl.  Mind I
+don't wish to say anything against Miss Graye, but this I do say,
+that I believe her to be a nameless thing, and she's no right to
+stick a moral clock in her face, and deceive the country in such a
+way.  If she wasn't of a bad stock at the outset she was bad in the
+planten, and if she wasn't bad in the planten, she was bad in the
+growen, and if not in the growen, she's made bad by what she's gone
+through since.'
+
+'But I have another reason for knowing it idn' hers,' said Mrs.
+Leat.
+
+'Ah!  I know whose it is then--Miss Aldclyffe's, upon my song!'
+
+''Tis the colour of hers, but I don't believe it to be hers either.'
+
+'Don't you believe what they d' say about her and him?'
+
+'I say nothen about that; but you don't know what I know about his
+letters.'
+
+'What about 'em?'
+
+'He d' post all his letters here except those for one person, and
+they he d' take to Budmouth.  My son is in Budmouth Post Office, as
+you know, and as he d' sit at desk he can see over the blind of the
+window all the people who d' post letters.  Mr. Manston d'
+unvariably go there wi' letters for that person; my boy d' know 'em
+by sight well enough now.'
+
+'Is it a she?'
+
+''Tis a she.'
+
+'What's her name?'
+
+'The little stunpoll of a fellow couldn't call to mind more than
+that 'tis Miss Somebody, of London.  However, that's the woman who
+ha' been here, depend upon't--a wicked one--some poor street-wench
+escaped from Sodom, I warrant ye.'
+
+'Only to find herself in Gomorrah, seemingly.'
+
+'That may be.'
+
+'No, no, Mrs. Leat, this is clear to me.  'Tis no miss who came here
+to see our steward last night--whenever she came or wherever she
+vanished.  Do you think he would ha' let a miss get here how she
+could, go away how she would, without breakfast or help of any
+kind?'
+
+Elizabeth shook her head--Mrs. Crickett looked at her solemnly.
+
+'I say I know she had no help of any kind; I know it was so, for the
+grate was quite cold when I touched it this morning with these
+fingers, and he was still in bed.  No, he wouldn't take the trouble
+to write letters to a girl and then treat her so off-hand as that.
+There's a tie between 'em stronger than feelen.  She's his wife.'
+
+'He married!  The Lord so 's, what shall we hear next?  Do he look
+married now?  His are not the abashed eyes and lips of a married
+man.'
+
+'Perhaps she's a tame one--but she's his wife still.'
+
+'No, no:  he's not a married man.'
+
+'Yes, yes, he is.  I've had three, and I ought to know.'
+
+'Well, well,' said Mrs. Leat, giving way.  'Whatever may be the
+truth on't I trust Providence will settle it all for the best, as He
+always do.'
+
+'Ay, ay, Elizabeth,' rejoined Mrs. Crickett with a satirical sigh,
+as she turned on her foot to go home, 'good people like you may say
+so, but I have always found Providence a different sort of feller.'
+
+5.  NOVEMBER THE TWENTIETH
+
+It was Miss Aldclyffe's custom, a custom originated by her father,
+and nourished by her own exclusiveness, to unlock the post-bag
+herself every morning, instead of allowing the duty to devolve on
+the butler, as was the case in most of the neighbouring county
+families.  The bag was brought upstairs each morning to her
+dressing-room, where she took out the contents, mostly in the
+presence of her maid and Cytherea, who had the entree of the chamber
+at all hours, and attended there in the morning at a kind of
+reception on a small scale, which was held by Miss Aldclyffe of her
+namesake only.
+
+Here she read her letters before the glass, whilst undergoing the
+operation of being brushed and dressed.
+
+'What woman can this be, I wonder?' she said on the morning
+succeeding that of the last section.  '"London, N.!"  It is the
+first time in my life I ever had a letter from that outlandish
+place, the North side of London.'
+
+Cytherea had just come into her presence to learn if there was
+anything for herself; and on being thus addressed, walked up to Miss
+Aldclyffe's corner of the room to look at the curiosity which had
+raised such an exclamation.  But the lady, having opened the
+envelope and read a few lines, put it quickly in her pocket, before
+Cytherea could reach her side.
+
+'O, 'tis nothing,' she said.  She proceeded to make general remarks
+in a noticeably forced tone of sang-froid, from which she soon
+lapsed into silence.  Not another word was said about the letter:
+she seemed very anxious to get her dressing done, and the room
+cleared.  Thereupon Cytherea went away to the other window, and a
+few minutes later left the room to follow her own pursuits.
+
+It was late when Miss Aldclyffe descended to the breakfast-table and
+then she seemed there to no purpose; tea, coffee, eggs, cutlets, and
+all their accessories, were left absolutely untasted.  The next that
+was seen of her was when walking up and down the south terrace, and
+round the flower-beds; her face was pale, and her tread was fitful,
+and she crumpled a letter in her hand.
+
+Dinner-time came round as usual; she did not speak ten words, or
+indeed seem conscious of the meal; for all that Miss Aldclyffe did
+in the way of eating, dinner might have been taken out as intact as
+it was taken in.
+
+In her own private apartment Miss Aldclyffe again pulled out the
+letter of the morning.  One passage in it ran thus:--
+
+'Of course, being his wife, I could publish the fact, and compel him
+to acknowledge me at any moment, notwithstanding his threats, and
+reasonings that it will be better to wait.  I have waited, and
+waited again, and the time for such acknowledgment seems no nearer
+than at first.  To show you how patiently I have waited I can tell
+you that not till a fortnight ago, when by stress of circumstances I
+had been driven to new lodgings, have I ever assumed my married
+name, solely on account of its having been his request all along
+that I should not do it.  This writing to you, madam, is my first
+disobedience, and I am justified in it.  A woman who is driven to
+visit her husband like a thief in the night and then sent away like
+a street dog--left to get up, unbolt, unbar, and find her way out of
+the house as she best may--is justified in doing anything.
+
+'But should I demand of him a restitution of rights, there would be
+involved a publicity which I could not endure, and a noisy scandal
+flinging my name the length and breadth of the country.
+
+'What I still prefer to any such violent means is that you reason
+with him privately, and compel him to bring me home to your parish
+in a decent and careful manner, in the way that would be adopted by
+any respectable man, whose wife had been living away from him for
+some time, by reason, say, of peculiar family circumstances which
+had caused disunion, but not enmity, and who at length was enabled
+to reinstate her in his house.
+
+'You will, I know, oblige me in this, especially as knowledge of a
+peculiar transaction of your own, which took place some years ago,
+has lately come to me in a singular way.  I will not at present
+trouble you by describing how.  It is enough, that I alone, of all
+people living, know ALL THE SIDES OF THE STORY,  those from whom I
+collected it having each only a partial knowledge which confuses
+them and points to nothing.  One person knows of your early
+engagement and its sudden termination; another, of the reason of
+those strange meetings at inns and coffee-houses; another, of what
+was sufficient to cause all this, and so on.  I know what fits one
+and all the circumstances like a key, and shows them to be the
+natural outcrop of a rational (though rather rash) line of conduct
+for a young lady.  You will at once perceive how it was that some at
+least of these things were revealed to me.
+
+'This knowledge then, common to, and secretly treasured by us both,
+is the ground upon which I beg for your friendship and help, with a
+feeling that you will be too generous to refuse it to me.
+
+'I may add that, as yet, my husband knows nothing of this, neither
+need he if you remember my request.'
+
+
+
+'A threat--a flat stinging threat! as delicately wrapped up in words
+as the woman could do it; a threat from a miserable unknown creature
+to an Aldclyffe, and not the least proud member of the family
+either!  A threat on his account--O, O! shall it be?'
+
+Presently this humour of defiance vanished, and the members of her
+body became supple again, her proceedings proving that it was
+absolutely necessary to give way, Aldclyffe as she was.  She wrote a
+short answer to Mrs. Manston, saying civilly that Mr. Manston's
+possession of such a near relation was a fact quite new to herself,
+and that she would see what could be done in such an unfortunate
+affair.
+
+6.  NOVEMBER THE TWENTY-FIRST
+
+Manston received a message the next day requesting his attendance at
+the House punctually at eight o'clock the ensuing evening.  Miss
+Aldclyffe was brave and imperious, but with the purpose she had in
+view she could not look him in the face whilst daylight shone upon
+her.
+
+The steward was shown into the library.  On entering it, he was
+immediately struck with the unusual gloom which pervaded the
+apartment.  The fire was dead and dull, one lamp, and that a
+comparatively small one, was burning at the extreme end, leaving the
+main proportion of the lofty and sombre room in an artificial
+twilight, scarcely powerful enough to render visible the titles of
+the folio and quarto volumes which were jammed into the lower tiers
+of the bookshelves.
+
+After keeping him waiting for more than twenty minutes (Miss
+Aldclyffe knew that excellent recipe for taking the stiffness out of
+human flesh, and for extracting all pre-arrangement from human
+speech) she entered the room.
+
+Manston sought her eye directly.  The hue of her features was not
+discernible, but the calm glance she flung at him, from which all
+attempt at returning his scrutiny was absent, awoke him to the
+perception that probably his secret was by some means or other known
+to her; how it had become known he could not tell.
+
+She drew forth the letter, unfolded it, and held it up to him,
+letting it hang by one corner from between her finger and thumb, so
+that the light from the lamp, though remote, fell directly upon its
+surface.
+
+'You know whose writing this is?' she said.
+
+He saw the strokes plainly, instantly resolving to burn his ships
+and hazard all on an advance.
+
+'My wife's,' he said calmly.
+
+His quiet answer threw her off her balance.  She had no more
+expected an answer than does a preacher when he exclaims from the
+pulpit, 'Do you feel your sin?'  She had clearly expected a sudden
+alarm.
+
+'And why all this concealment?' she said again, her voice rising, as
+she vainly endeavoured to control her feelings, whatever they were.
+
+'It doesn't follow that, because a man is married, he must tell
+every stranger of it, madam,' he answered, just as calmly as before.
+
+'Stranger! well, perhaps not; but, Mr. Manston, why did you choose
+to conceal it, I ask again?  I have a perfect right to ask this
+question, as you will perceive, if you consider the terms of my
+advertisement.'
+
+'I will tell you.  There were two simple reasons.  The first was
+this practical one; you advertised for an unmarried man, if you
+remember?'
+
+'Of course I remember.'
+
+'Well, an incident suggested to me that I should try for the
+situation.  I was married; but, knowing that in getting an office
+where there is a restriction of this kind, leaving one's wife behind
+is always accepted as a fulfilment of the condition, I left her
+behind for awhile.  The other reason is, that these terms of yours
+afforded me a plausible excuse for escaping (for a short time) the
+company of a woman I had been mistaken in marrying.'
+
+'Mistaken! what was she?' the lady inquired.
+
+'A third-rate actress, whom I met with during my stay in Liverpool
+last summer, where I had gone to fulfil a short engagement with an
+architect.'
+
+'Where did she come from?'
+
+'She is an American by birth, and I grew to dislike her when we had
+been married a week.'
+
+'She was ugly, I imagine?'
+
+'She is not an ugly woman by any means.'
+
+'Up to the ordinary standard?'
+
+'Quite up to the ordinary standard--indeed, handsome.  After a while
+we quarrelled and separated.'
+
+'You did not ill-use her, of course?' said Miss Aldclyffe, with a
+little sarcasm.
+
+'I did not.'
+
+'But at any rate, you got thoroughly tired of her.'
+
+Manston looked as if he began to think her questions put of place;
+however, he said quietly, 'I did get tired of her.  I never told her
+so, but we separated; I to come here, bringing her with me as far as
+London and leaving her there in perfectly comfortable quarters; and
+though your advertisement expressed a single man, I have always
+intended to tell you the whole truth; and this was when I was going
+to tell it, when your satisfaction with my careful management of
+your affairs should have proved the risk to be a safe one to run.'
+
+She bowed.
+
+'Then I saw that you were good enough to be interested in my welfare
+to a greater extent than I could have anticipated or hoped, judging
+you by the frigidity of other employers, and this caused me to
+hesitate.  I was vexed at the complication of affairs.  So matters
+stood till three nights ago; I was then walking home from the
+pottery, and came up to the railway.  The down-train came along
+close to me, and there, sitting at a carriage window, I saw my wife:
+she had found out my address, and had thereupon determined to follow
+me here.  I had not been home many minutes before she came in, next
+morning early she left again--'
+
+'Because you treated her so cavalierly?'
+
+'And as I suppose, wrote to you directly.  That's the whole story of
+her, madam.'  Whatever were Manston's real feelings towards the lady
+who had received his explanation in these supercilious tones, they
+remained locked within him as within a casket of steel.
+
+'Did your friends know of your marriage, Mr Manston?' she continued.
+
+'Nobody at all; we kept it a secret for various reasons.'
+
+'It is true then that, as your wife tells me in this letter, she has
+not passed as Mrs. Manston till within these last few days?'
+
+'It is quite true; I was in receipt of a very small and uncertain
+income when we married; and so she continued playing at the theatre
+as before our marriage, and in her maiden name.'
+
+'Has she any friends?'
+
+'I have never heard that she has any in England.  She came over here
+on some theatrical speculation, as one of a company who were going
+to do much, but who never did anything; and here she has remained.'
+
+A pause ensued, which was terminated by Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+'I understand,' she said.  'Now, though I have no direct right to
+concern myself with your private affairs (beyond those which arise
+from your misleading me and getting the office you hold)--'
+
+'As to that, madam,' he interrupted, rather hotly, 'as to coming
+here, I am vexed as much as you.  Somebody, a member of the
+Institute of Architects--who, I could never tell--sent to my old
+address in London your advertisement cut from the paper; it was
+forwarded to me; I wanted to get away from Liverpool, and it seemed
+as if this was put in my way on purpose, by some old friend or
+other.  I answered the advertisement certainly, but I was not
+particularly anxious to come here, nor am I anxious to stay.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe descended from haughty superiority to womanly
+persuasion with a haste which was almost ludicrous.  Indeed, the
+Quos ego of the whole lecture had been less the genuine menace of
+the imperious ruler of Knapwater than an artificial utterance to
+hide a failing heart.
+
+'Now, now, Mr. Manston, you wrong me; don't suppose I wish to be
+overbearing, or anything of the kind; and you will allow me to say
+this much, at any rate, that I have become interested in your wife,
+as well as in yourself.'
+
+'Certainly, madam,' he said, slowly, like a man feeling his way in
+the dark.  Manston was utterly at fault now.  His previous
+experience of the effect of his form and features upon womankind en
+masse, had taught him to flatter himself that he could account by
+the same law of natural selection for the extraordinary interest
+Miss Aldclyffe had hitherto taken in him, as an unmarried man; an
+interest he did not at all object to, seeing that it kept him near
+Cytherea, and enabled him, a man of no wealth, to rule on the estate
+as if he were its lawful owner.  Like Curius at his Sabine farm, he
+had counted it his glory not to possess gold himself, but to have
+power over her who did.  But at this hint of the lady's wish to take
+his wife under her wing also, he was perplexed:  could she have any
+sinister motive in doing so?  But he did not allow himself to be
+troubled with these doubts, which only concerned his wife's
+happiness.
+
+'She tells me,' continued Miss Aldclyffe, 'how utterly alone in the
+world she stands, and that is an additional reason why I should
+sympathize with her.  Instead, then, of requesting the favour of
+your retirement from the post, and dismissing your interests
+altogether, I will retain you as my steward still, on condition that
+you bring home your wife, and live with her respectably, in short,
+as if you loved her; you understand.  I WISH you to stay here if you
+grant that everything shall flow smoothly between yourself and her.'
+
+The breast and shoulders of the steward rose, as if an expression of
+defiance was about to be poured forth; before it took form, he
+controlled himself and said, in his natural voice--
+
+'My part of the performance shall be carried out, madam.'
+
+'And her anxiety to obtain a standing in the world ensures that hers
+will,' replied Miss Aldclyffe.  'That will be satisfactory, then.'
+
+After a few additional remarks, she gently signified that she wished
+to put an end to the interview.  The steward took the hint and
+retired.
+
+He felt vexed and mortified; yet in walking homeward he was
+convinced that telling the whole truth as he had done, with the
+single exception of his love for Cytherea (which he tried to hide
+even from himself), had never served him in better stead than it had
+done that night.
+
+Manston went to his desk and thought of Cytherea's beauty with the
+bitterest, wildest regret.  After the lapse of a few minutes he
+calmed himself by a stoical effort, and wrote the subjoined letter
+to his wife:--
+
+                                               'KNAPWATER,
+                                                  November 21, 1864.
+
+'DEAR EUNICE,--I hope you reached London safely after your flighty
+visit to me.
+
+'As I promised, I have thought over our conversation that night, and
+your wish that your coming here should be no longer delayed.  After
+all, it was perfectly natural that you should have spoken unkindly
+as you did, ignorant as you were of the circumstances which bound
+me.
+
+'So I have made arrangements to fetch you home at once.  It is
+hardly worth while for you to attempt to bring with you any luggage
+you may have gathered about you (beyond mere clothing).  Dispose of
+superfluous things at a broker's; your bringing them would only make
+a talk in this parish, and lead people to believe we had long been
+keeping house separately.
+
+'Will next Monday suit you for coming?  You have nothing to do that
+can occupy you for more than a day or two, as far as I can see, and
+the remainder of this week will afford ample time.  I can be in
+London the night before, and we will come down together by the mid-
+day train--Your very affectionate husband,
+
+                                                'AENEAS MANSTON.
+
+'Now, of course, I shall no longer write to you as Mrs. Rondley.'
+
+The address on the envelope was--
+
+MRS. MANSTON,
+     41 CHARLES SQUARE,
+          HOXTON,
+               LONDON, N.
+
+He took the letter to the house, and it being too late for the
+country post, sent one of the stablemen with it to Casterbridge,
+instead of troubling to go to Budmouth with it himself as
+heretofore.  He had no longer any necessity to keep his condition a
+secret.
+
+7.  FROM THE TWENTY-SECOND TO THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF NOVEMBER
+
+But the next morning Manston found that he had been forgetful of
+another matter, in naming the following Monday to his wife for the
+journey.
+
+The fact was this.  A letter had just come, reminding him that he
+had left the whole of the succeeding week open for an important
+business engagement with a neighbouring land-agent, at that
+gentleman's residence thirteen miles off.  The particular day he had
+suggested to his wife, had, in the interim, been appropriated by his
+correspondent.  The meeting could not now be put off.
+
+So he wrote again to his wife, stating that business, which could
+not be postponed, called him away from home on Monday, and would
+entirely prevent him coming all the way to fetch her on Sunday night
+as he had intended, but that he would meet her at the Carriford Road
+Station with a conveyance when she arrived there in the evening.
+
+The next day came his wife's answer to his first letter, in which
+she said that she would be ready to be fetched at the time named.
+Having already written his second letter, which was by that time in
+her hands, he made no further reply.
+
+The week passed away.  The steward had, in the meantime, let it
+become generally known in the village that he was a married man, and
+by a little judicious management, sound family reasons for his past
+secrecy upon the subject, which were floated as adjuncts to the
+story, were placidly received; they seemed so natural and
+justifiable to the unsophisticated minds of nine-tenths of his
+neighbours, that curiosity in the matter, beyond a strong curiosity
+to see the lady's face, was well-nigh extinguished.
+
+
+
+X.  THE EVENTS OF A DAY AND NIGHT
+
+1.  NOVEMBER THE TWENTY-EIGHTH.  UNTIL TEN P.M.
+
+Monday came, the day named for Mrs. Manston's journey from London to
+her husband's house; a day of singular and great events, influencing
+the present and future of nearly all the personages whose actions in
+a complex drama form the subject of this record.
+
+The proceedings of the steward demand the first notice.  Whilst
+taking his breakfast on this particular morning, the clock pointing
+to eight, the horse-and-gig that was to take him to Chettlewood
+waiting ready at the door, Manston hurriedly cast his eyes down the
+column of Bradshaw which showed the details and duration of the
+selected train's journey.
+
+The inspection was carelessly made, the leaf being kept open by the
+aid of one hand, whilst the other still held his cup of coffee; much
+more carelessly than would have been the case had the expected new-
+comer been Cytherea Graye, instead of his lawful wife.
+
+He did not perceive, branching from the column down which his finger
+ran, a small twist, called a shunting-line, inserted at a particular
+place, to imply that at that point the train was divided into two.
+By this oversight he understood that the arrival of his wife at
+Carriford Road Station would not be till late in the evening:  by
+the second half of the train, containing the third-class passengers,
+and passing two hours and three-quarters later than the previous
+one, by which the lady, as a second-class passenger, would really be
+brought.
+
+He then considered that there would be plenty of time for him to
+return from his day's engagement to meet this train.  He finished
+his breakfast, gave proper and precise directions to his servant on
+the preparations that were to be made for the lady's reception,
+jumped into his gig, and drove off to Lord Claydonfield's, at
+Chettlewood.
+
+He went along by the front of Knapwater House.  He could not help
+turning to look at what he knew to be the window of Cytherea's room.
+Whilst he looked, a hopeless expression of passionate love and
+sensuous anguish came upon his face and lingered there for a few
+seconds; then, as on previous occasions, it was resolutely
+repressed, and he trotted along the smooth white road, again
+endeavouring to banish all thought of the young girl whose beauty
+and grace had so enslaved him.
+
+Thus it was that when, in the evening of the same day, Mrs. Manston
+reached Carriford Road Station, her husband was still at
+Chettlewood, ignorant of her arrival, and on looking up and down the
+platform, dreary with autumn gloom and wind, she could see no sign
+that any preparation whatever had been made for her reception and
+conduct home.
+
+The train went on. She waited, fidgeted with the handle of her
+umbrella, walked about, strained her eyes into the gloom of the
+chilly night, listened for wheels, tapped with her foot, and showed
+all the usual signs of annoyance and irritation:  she was the more
+irritated in that this seemed a second and culminating instance of
+her husband's neglect--the first having been shown in his not
+fetching her.
+
+Reflecting awhile upon the course it would be best to take, in order
+to secure a passage to Knapwater, she decided to leave all her
+luggage, except a dressing-bag, in the cloak-room, and walk to her
+husband's house, as she had done on her first visit.  She asked one
+of the porters if he could find a lad to go with her and carry her
+bag:  he offered to do it himself.
+
+The porter was a good-tempered, shallow-minded, ignorant man.  Mrs.
+Manston, being apparently in very gloomy spirits, would probably
+have preferred walking beside him without saying a word:  but her
+companion would not allow silence to continue between them for a
+longer period than two or three minutes together.
+
+He had volunteered several remarks upon her arrival, chiefly to the
+effect that it was very unfortunate Mr. Manston had not come to the
+station for her, when she suddenly asked him concerning the
+inhabitants of the parish.
+
+He told her categorically the names of the chief--first the chief
+possessors of property; then of brains; then of good looks.  As
+first among the latter he mentioned Miss Cytherea Graye.
+
+After getting him to describe her appearance as completely as lay in
+his power, she wormed out of him the statement that everybody had
+been saying--before Mrs. Manston's existence was heard of--how well
+the handsome Mr. Manston and the beautiful Miss Graye were suited
+for each other as man and wife, and that Miss Aldclyffe was the only
+one in the parish who took no interest in bringing about the match.
+
+'He rather liked her you think?'
+
+The porter began to think he had been too explicit, and hastened to
+correct the error.
+
+'O no, he don't care a bit about her, ma'am,' he said solemnly.
+
+'Not more than he does about me?'
+
+'Not a bit.'
+
+'Then that must be little indeed,' Mrs. Manston murmured.  She stood
+still, as if reflecting upon the painful neglect her words had
+recalled to her mind; then, with a sudden impulse, turned round, and
+walked petulantly a few steps back again in the direction of the
+station.
+
+The porter stood still and looked surprised.
+
+'I'll go back again; yes, indeed, I'll go back again!' she said
+plaintively.  Then she paused and looked anxiously up and down the
+deserted road.
+
+'No, I mustn't go back now,' she continued, in a tone of
+resignation.  Seeing that the porter was watching her, she turned
+about and came on as before, giving vent to a slight laugh.
+
+It was a laugh full of character; the low forced laugh which seeks
+to hide the painful perception of a humiliating position under the
+mask of indifference.
+
+Altogether her conduct had shown her to be what in fact she was, a
+weak, though a calculating woman, one clever to conceive, weak to
+execute:  one whose best-laid schemes were for ever liable to be
+frustrated by the ineradicable blight of vacillation at the critical
+hour of action.
+
+'O, if I had only known that all this was going to happen!' she
+murmured again, as they paced along upon the rustling leaves.
+
+'What did you say, ma'am?' said the porter.
+
+'O, nothing particular; we are getting near the old manor-house by
+this time, I imagine?'
+
+'Very near now, ma'am.'
+
+They soon reached Manston's residence, round which the wind blew
+mournfully and chill.
+
+Passing under the detached gateway, they entered the porch.  The
+porter stepped forward, knocked heavily and waited.
+
+Nobody came.
+
+Mrs. Manston then advanced to the door and gave a different series
+of rappings--less forcible, but more sustained.
+
+There was not a movement of any kind inside, not a ray of light
+visible; nothing but the echo of her own knocks through the
+passages, and the dry scratching of the withered leaves blown about
+her feet upon the floor of the porch.
+
+The steward, of course, was not at home.  Mrs. Crickett, not
+expecting that anybody would arrive till the time of the later
+train, had set the place in order, laid the supper-table, and then
+locked the door, to go into the village and converse with her
+friends.
+
+'Is there an inn in the village?' said Mrs. Manston, after the
+fourth and loudest rapping upon the iron-studded old door had
+resulted only in the fourth and loudest echo from the passages
+inside.
+
+'Yes, ma'am.'
+
+'Who keeps it?'
+
+'Farmer Springrove.'
+
+'I will go there to-night,' she said decisively.  'It is too cold,
+and altogether too bad, for a woman to wait in the open road on
+anybody's account, gentle or simple.'
+
+They went down the park and through the gate, into the village of
+Carriford.  By the time they reached the Three Tranters, it was
+verging upon ten o'clock.  There, on the spot where two months
+earlier in the season the sunny and lively group of villagers making
+cider under the trees had greeted Cytherea's eyes, was nothing now
+intelligible but a vast cloak of darkness, from which came the low
+sough of the elms, and the occasional creak of the swinging sign.
+
+They went to the door, Mrs. Manston shivering; but less from the
+cold, than from the dreariness of her emotions.  Neglect is the
+coldest of winter winds.
+
+It so happened that Edward Springrove was expected to arrive from
+London either on that evening or the next, and at the sound of
+voices his father came to the door fully expecting to see him.  A
+picture of disappointment seldom witnessed in a man's face was
+visible in old Mr. Springrove's, when he saw that the comer was a
+stranger.
+
+Mrs. Manston asked for a room, and one that had been prepared for
+Edward was immediately named as being ready for her, another being
+adaptable for Edward, should he come in.
+
+Without taking any refreshment, or entering any room downstairs, or
+even lifting her veil, she walked straight along the passage and up
+to her apartment, the chambermaid preceding her.
+
+'If Mr. Manston comes to-night,' she said, sitting on the bed as she
+had come in, and addressing the woman, 'tell him I cannot see him.'
+
+'Yes, ma'am.'
+
+The woman left the room, and Mrs. Manston locked the door.  Before
+the servant had gone down more than two or three stairs, Mrs.
+Manston unfastened the door again, and held it ajar.
+
+'Bring me some brandy,' she said.
+
+The chambermaid went down to the bar and brought up the spirit in a
+tumbler.  When she came into the room, Mrs. Manston had not removed
+a single article of apparel, and was walking up and down, as if
+still quite undecided upon the course it was best to adopt.
+
+Outside the door, when it was closed upon her, the maid paused to
+listen for an instant.  She heard Mrs. Manston talking to herself.
+
+'This is welcome home!' she said.
+
+2.  FROM TEN TO HALF-PAST ELEVEN P.M.
+
+A strange concurrence of phenomena now confronts us.
+
+During the autumn in which the past scenes were enacted, Mr.
+Springrove had ploughed, harrowed, and cleaned a narrow and shaded
+piece of ground, lying at the back of his house, which for many
+years had been looked upon as irreclaimable waste.
+
+The couch-grass extracted from the soil had been left to wither in
+the sun; afterwards it was raked together, lighted in the customary
+way, and now lay smouldering in a large heap in the middle of the
+plot.
+
+It had been kindled three days previous to Mrs. Manston's arrival,
+and one or two villagers, of a more cautious and less sanguine
+temperament than Springrove, had suggested that the fire was almost
+too near the back of the house for its continuance to be unattended
+with risk; for though no danger could be apprehended whilst the air
+remained moderately still, a brisk breeze blowing towards the house
+might possibly carry a spark across.
+
+'Ay, that's true enough,' said Springrove.  'I must look round
+before going to bed and see that everything's safe; but to tell the
+truth I am anxious to get the rubbish burnt up before the rain comes
+to wash it into ground again.  As to carrying the couch into the
+back field to burn, and bringing it back again, why, 'tis more than
+the ashes would be worth.'
+
+'Well, that's very true,' said the neighbours, and passed on.
+
+Two or three times during the first evening after the heap was lit,
+he went to the back door to take a survey.  Before bolting and
+barring up for the night, he made a final and more careful
+examination.  The slowly-smoking pile showed not the slightest signs
+of activity.  Springrove's perfectly sound conclusion was, that as
+long as the heap was not stirred, and the wind continued in the
+quarter it blew from then, the couch would not flame, and that there
+could be no shadow of danger to anything, even a combustible
+substance, though it were no more than a yard off.
+
+The next morning the burning couch was discovered in precisely the
+same state as when he had gone to bed the preceding night.  The heap
+smoked in the same manner the whole of that day:  at bed-time the
+farmer looked towards it, but less carefully than on the first
+night.
+
+The morning and the whole of the third day still saw the heap in its
+old smouldering condition; indeed, the smoke was less, and there
+seemed a probability that it might have to be re-kindled on the
+morrow.
+
+After admitting Mrs. Manston to his house in the evening, and
+hearing her retire, Mr. Springrove return to the front door to
+listen for a sound of his son, and inquired concerning him of the
+railway-porter, who sat for a while in the kitchen.  The porter had
+not noticed young Mr. Springrove get out of the train, at which
+intelligence the old man concluded that he would probably not see
+his son till the next day, as Edward had hitherto made a point of
+coming by the train which had brought Mrs. Manston.
+
+Half-an-hour later the porter left the inn, Springrove at the same
+time going to the door to listen again an instant, then he walked
+round and in at the back of the house.
+
+The farmer glanced at the heap casually and indifferently in
+passing; two nights of safety seemed to ensure the third; and he was
+about to bolt and bar as usual, when the idea struck him that there
+was just a possibility of his son's return by the latest train,
+unlikely as it was that he would be so delayed.  The old man
+thereupon left the door unfastened, looked to his usual matters
+indoors, and went to bed, it being then half-past ten o'clock.
+
+Farmers and horticulturists well know that it is in the nature of a
+heap of couch-grass, when kindled in calm weather, to smoulder for
+many days, and even weeks, until the whole mass is reduced to a
+powdery charcoal ash, displaying the while scarcely a sign of
+combustion beyond the volcano-like smoke from its summit; but the
+continuance of this quiet process is throughout its length at the
+mercy of one particular whim of Nature:  that is, a sudden breeze,
+by which the heap is liable to be fanned into a flame so brisk as to
+consume the whole in an hour or two.
+
+Had the farmer narrowly watched the pile when he went to close the
+door, he would have seen, besides the familiar twine of smoke from
+its summit, a quivering of the air around the mass, showing that a
+considerable heat had arisen inside.
+
+As the railway-porter turned the corner of the row of houses
+adjoining the Three Tranters, a brisk new wind greeted his face, and
+spread past him into the village.  He walked along the high-road
+till he came to a gate, about three hundred yards from the inn.
+Over the gate could be discerned the situation of the building he
+had just quitted.  He carelessly turned his head in passing, and saw
+behind him a clear red glow indicating the position of the couch-
+heap:  a glow without a flame, increasing and diminishing in
+brightness as the breeze quickened or fell, like the coal of a newly
+lighted cigar.  If those cottages had been his, he thought, he
+should not care to have a fire so near them as that--and the wind
+rising.  But the cottages not being his, he went on his way to the
+station, where he was about to resume duty for the night.  The road
+was now quite deserted:  till four o'clock the next morning, when
+the carters would go by to the stables there was little probability
+of any human being passing the Three Tranters Inn.
+
+By eleven, everybody in the house was asleep.  It truly seemed as if
+the treacherous element knew there had arisen a grand opportunity
+for devastation.
+
+At a quarter past eleven a slight stealthy crackle made itself heard
+amid the increasing moans of the night wind; the heap glowed
+brighter still, and burst into a flame; the flame sank, another
+breeze entered it, sustained it, and it grew to be first continuous
+and weak, then continuous and strong.
+
+At twenty minutes past eleven a blast of wind carried an airy bit of
+ignited fern several yards forward, in a direction parallel to the
+houses and inn, and there deposited it on the ground.
+
+Five minutes later another puff of wind carried a similar piece to a
+distance of five-and-twenty yards, where it also was dropped softly
+on the ground.
+
+Still the wind did not blow in the direction of the houses, and even
+now to a casual observer they would have appeared safe.  But Nature
+does few things directly.  A minute later yet, an ignited fragment
+fell upon the straw covering of a long thatched heap or 'grave' of
+mangel-wurzel, lying in a direction at right angles to the house,
+and down toward the hedge.  There the fragment faded to darkness.
+
+A short time subsequent to this, after many intermediate deposits
+and seemingly baffled attempts, another fragment fell on the mangel-
+wurzel grave, and continued to glow; the glow was increased by the
+wind; the straw caught fire and burst into flame.  It was inevitable
+that the flame should run along the ridge of the thatch towards a
+piggery at the end.  Yet had the piggery been tiled, the time-
+honoured hostel would even now at this last moment have been safe;
+but it was constructed as piggeries are mostly constructed, of wood
+and thatch.  The hurdles and straw roof of the frail erection became
+ignited in their turn, and abutting as the shed did on the back of
+the inn, flamed up to the eaves of the main roof in less than thirty
+seconds.
+
+3.  HALF-PAST ELEVEN TO TWELVE P.M.
+
+A hazardous length of time elapsed before the inmates of the Three
+Tranters knew of their danger.  When at length the discovery was
+made, the rush was a rush for bare life.
+
+A man's voice calling, then screams, then loud stamping and shouts
+were heard.
+
+Mr. Springrove ran out first.  Two minutes later appeared the ostler
+and chambermaid, who were man and wife.  The inn, as has been
+stated, was a quaint old building, and as inflammable as a bee-hive;
+it overhung the base at the level of the first floor, and again
+overhung at the eaves, which were finished with heavy oak barge-
+boards; every atom in its substance, every feature in its
+construction, favoured the fire.
+
+The forked flames, lurid and smoky, became nearly lost to view,
+bursting forth again with a bound and loud crackle, increased
+tenfold in power and brightness.  The crackling grew sharper.  Long
+quivering shadows began to be flung from the stately trees at the
+end of the house; the square outline of the church tower, on the
+other side of the way, which had hitherto been a dark mass against a
+sky comparatively light, now began to appear as a light object
+against a sky of darkness; and even the narrow surface of the flag-
+staff at the top could be seen in its dark surrounding, brought out
+from its obscurity by the rays from the dancing light.
+
+Shouts and other noises increased in loudness and frequency.  The
+lapse of ten minutes brought most of the inhabitants of that end of
+the village into the street, followed in a short time by the rector,
+Mr. Raunham.
+
+Casting a hasty glance up and down, he beckoned to one or two of the
+men, and vanished again.  In a short time wheels were heard, and Mr.
+Raunham and the men reappeared, with the garden engine, the only one
+in the village, except that at Knapwater House.  After some little
+trouble the hose was connected with a tank in the old stable-yard,
+and the puny instrument began to play.
+
+Several seemed paralyzed at first, and stood transfixed, their rigid
+faces looking like red-hot iron in the glaring light.  In the
+confusion a woman cried, 'Ring the bells backwards!' and three or
+four of the old and superstitious entered the belfry and jangled
+them indescribably.  Some were only half dressed, and, to add to the
+horror, among them was Clerk Crickett, running up and down with a
+face streaming with blood, ghastly and pitiful to see, his
+excitement being so great that he had not the slightest conception
+of how, when, or where he came by the wound.
+
+The crowd was now busy at work, and tried to save a little of the
+furniture of the inn.  The only room they could enter was the
+parlour, from which they managed to bring out the bureau, a few
+chairs, some old silver candlesticks, and half-a-dozen light
+articles; but these were all.
+
+Fiery mats of thatch slid off the roof and fell into the road with a
+deadened thud, whilst white flakes of straw and wood-ash were flying
+in the wind like feathers.  At the same time two of the cottages
+adjoining, upon which a little water had been brought to play from
+the rector's engine, were seen to be on fire.  The attenuated spirt
+of water was as nothing upon the heated and dry surface of the
+thatched roof; the fire prevailed without a minute's hindrance, and
+dived through to the rafters.
+
+Suddenly arose a cry, 'Where's Mr. Springrove?'
+
+He had vanished from the spot by the churchyard wall, where he had
+been standing a few minutes earlier.
+
+'I fancy he's gone inside,' said a voice.
+
+'Madness and folly! what can he save?' said another.  'Good God,
+find him!  Help here!'
+
+A wild rush was made at the door, which had fallen to, and in
+defiance of the scorching flame that burst forth, three men forced
+themselves through it.  Immediately inside the threshold they found
+the object of their search lying senseless on the floor of the
+passage.
+
+To bring him out and lay him on a bank was the work of an instant; a
+basin of cold water was dashed in his face, and he began to recover
+consciousness, but very slowly.  He had been saved by a miracle.  No
+sooner were his preservers out of the building than the window-
+frames lit up as if by magic with deep and waving fringes of flames.
+Simultaneously, the joints of the boards forming the front door
+started into view as glowing bars of fire:  a star of red light
+penetrated the centre, gradually increasing in size till the flames
+rushed forth.
+
+Then the staircase fell.
+
+'Everybody is out safe,' said a voice.
+
+'Yes, thank God!' said three or four others.
+
+'O, we forgot that a stranger came!  I think she is safe.'
+
+'I hope she is,' said the weak voice of some one coming up from
+behind.  It was the chambermaid's.
+
+Springrove at that moment aroused himself; he staggered to his feet,
+and threw his hands up wildly.
+
+'Everybody, no! no!  The lady who came by train, Mrs. Manston!  I
+tried to fetch her out, but I fell.'
+
+An exclamation of horror burst from the crowd; it was caused partly
+by this disclosure of Springrove, more by the added perception which
+followed his words.
+
+An average interval of about three minutes had elapsed between one
+intensely fierce gust of wind and the next, and now another poured
+over them; the roof swayed, and a moment afterwards fell in with a
+crash, pulling the gable after it, and thrusting outwards the front
+wall of wood-work, which fell into the road with a rumbling echo; a
+cloud of black dust, myriads of sparks, and a great outburst of
+flame followed the uproar of the fall.
+
+'Who is she? what is she?' burst from every lip again and again,
+incoherently, and without leaving a sufficient pause for a reply,
+had a reply been volunteered.
+
+The autumn wind, tameless, and swift, and proud, still blew upon the
+dying old house, which was constructed so entirely of combustible
+materials that it burnt almost as fiercely as a corn-rick.  The heat
+in the road increased, and now for an instant at the height of the
+conflagration all stood still, and gazed silently, awestruck and
+helpless, in the presence of so irresistible an enemy.  Then, with
+minds full of the tragedy unfolded to them, they rushed forward
+again with the obtuse directness of waves, to their labour of saving
+goods from the houses adjoining, which it was evident were all
+doomed to destruction.
+
+The minutes passed by.  The Three Tranters Inn sank into a mere heap
+of red-hot charcoal:  the fire pushed its way down the row as the
+church clock opposite slowly struck the hour of midnight, and the
+bewildered chimes, scarcely heard amid the crackling of the flames,
+wandered through the wayward air of the Old Hundred-and-Thirteenth
+Psalm.
+
+4.  NINE TO ELEVEN P.M.
+
+Manston mounted his gig and set out from Chettlewood that evening in
+no very enviable frame of mind.  The thought of domestic life in
+Knapwater Old House, with the now eclipsed wife of the past, was
+more than disagreeable, was positively distasteful to him.
+
+Yet he knew that the influential position, which, from whatever
+fortunate cause, he held on Miss Aldclyffe's manor, would never
+again fall to his lot on any other, and he tacitly assented to this
+dilemma, hoping that some consolation or other would soon suggest
+itself to him; married as he was, he was near Cytherea.
+
+He occasionally looked at his watch as he drove along the lanes,
+timing the pace of his horse by the hour, that he might reach
+Carriford Road Station just soon enough to meet the last London
+train.
+
+He soon began to notice in the sky a slight yellow halo, near the
+horizon.  It rapidly increased; it changed colour, and grew redder;
+then the glare visibly brightened and dimmed at intervals, showing
+that its origin was affected by the strong wind prevailing.
+
+Manston reined in his horse on the summit of a hill, and considered.
+
+'It is a rick-yard on fire,' he thought; 'no house could produce
+such a raging flame so suddenly.'
+
+He trotted on again, attempting to particularize the local features
+in the neighbourhood of the fire; but this it was too dark to do,
+and the excessive winding of the roads misled him as to its
+direction, not being an old inhabitant of the district, or a
+countryman used to forming such judgments; whilst the brilliancy of
+the light shortened its real remoteness to an apparent distance of
+not more than half:  it seemed so near that he again stopped his
+horse, this time to listen; but he could hear no sound.
+
+Entering now a narrow valley, the sides of which obscured the sky to
+an angle of perhaps thirty or forty degrees above the mathematical
+horizon, he was obliged to suspend his judgment till he was in
+possession of further knowledge, having however assumed in the
+interim, that the fire was somewhere between Carriford Road Station
+and the village.
+
+The self-same glare had just arrested the eyes of another man.  He
+was at that minute gliding along several miles to the east of the
+steward's position, but nearing the same point as that to which
+Manston tended.  The younger Edward Springrove was returning from
+London to his father's house by the identical train which the
+steward was expecting to bring his wife, the truth being that
+Edward's lateness was owing to the simplest of all causes, his
+temporary want of money, which led him to make a slow journey for
+the sake of travelling at third-class fare.
+
+Springrove had received Cytherea's bitter and admonitory letter, and
+he was clearly awakened to a perception of the false position in
+which he had placed himself, by keeping silence at Budmouth on his
+long engagement.  An increasing reluctance to put an end to those
+few days of ecstasy with Cytherea had overruled his conscience, and
+tied his tongue till speaking was too late.
+
+'Why did I do it? how could I dream of loving her?' he asked himself
+as he walked by day, as he tossed on his bed by night:  'miserable
+folly!'
+
+An impressionable heart had for years--perhaps as many as six or
+seven years--been distracting him, by unconsciously setting itself
+to yearn for somebody wanting, he scarcely knew whom.  Echoes of
+himself, though rarely, he now and then found.  Sometimes they were
+men, sometimes women, his cousin Adelaide being one of these; for in
+spite of a fashion which pervades the whole community at the present
+day--the habit of exclaiming that woman is not undeveloped man, but
+diverse, the fact remains that, after all, women are Mankind, and
+that in many of the sentiments of life the difference of sex is but
+a difference of degree.
+
+But the indefinable helpmate to the remoter sides of himself still
+continued invisible.  He grew older, and concluded that the ideas,
+or rather emotions, which possessed him on the subject, were
+probably too unreal ever to be found embodied in the flesh of a
+woman.  Thereupon, he developed a plan of satisfying his dreams by
+wandering away to the heroines of poetical imagination, and took no
+further thought on the earthly realization of his formless desire,
+in more homely matters satisfying himself with his cousin.
+
+Cytherea appeared in the sky:  his heart started up and spoke:
+
+     'Tis She, and here
+      Lo! I unclothe and clear
+      My wishes' cloudy character.'
+
+Some women kindle emotion so rapidly in a man's heart that the
+judgment cannot keep pace with its rise, and finds, on comprehending
+the situation, that faithfulness to the old love is already
+treachery to the new.  Such women are not necessarily the greatest
+of their sex, but there are very few of them.  Cytherea was one.
+
+On receiving the letter from her he had taken to thinking over these
+things, and had not answered it at all.  But 'hungry generations'
+soon tread down the muser in a city.  At length he thought of the
+strong necessity of living.  After a dreary search, the negligence
+of which was ultimately overcome by mere conscientiousness, he
+obtained a situation as assistant to an architect in the
+neighbourhood of Charing Cross:  the duties would not begin till
+after the lapse of a month.
+
+He could not at first decide whither he should go to spend the
+intervening time; but in the midst of his reasonings he found
+himself on the road homeward, impelled by a secret and unowned hope
+of getting a last glimpse of Cytherea there.
+
+5.  MIDNIGHT
+
+It was a quarter to twelve when Manston drove into the station-yard.
+The train was punctual, and the bell, announcing its arrival, rang
+as he crossed the booking-office to go out upon the platform.
+
+The porter who had accompanied Mrs. Manston to Carriford, and had
+returned to the station on his night duty, recognized the steward as
+he entered, and immediately came towards him.
+
+'Mrs. Manston came by the nine o'clock train, sir,' he said.
+
+The steward gave vent to an expression of vexation.
+
+'Her luggage is here, sir,' the porter said.
+
+'Put it up behind me in the gig if it is not too much,' said
+Manston.
+
+'Directly this train is in and gone, sir.'
+
+The man vanished and crossed the line to meet the entering train.
+
+'Where is that fire?' Manston said to the booking-clerk.
+
+Before the clerk could speak, another man ran in and answered the
+question without having heard it.
+
+'Half Carriford is burnt down, or will be!' he exclaimed.  'You
+can't see the flames from this station on account of the trees, but
+step on the bridge--'tis tremendous!'
+
+He also crossed the line to assist at the entry of the train, which
+came in the next minute.
+
+The steward stood in the office.  One passenger alighted, gave up
+his ticket, and crossed the room in front of Manston:  a young man
+with a black bag and umbrella in his hand.  He passed out of the
+door, down the steps, and struck out into the darkness.
+
+'Who was that young man?' said Manston, when the porter had
+returned.  The young man, by a kind of magnetism, had drawn the
+steward's thoughts after him.
+
+'He's an architect.'
+
+'My own old profession.  I could have sworn it by the cut of him,'
+Manston murmured.  'What's his name?' he said again.
+
+'Springrove--Farmer Springrove's son, Edward.'
+
+'Farmer Springrove's son, Edward,' the steward repeated to himself,
+and considered a matter to which the words had painfully recalled
+his mind.
+
+The matter was Miss Aldclyffe's mention of the young man as
+Cytherea's lover, which, indeed, had scarcely ever been absent from
+his thoughts.
+
+'But for the existence of my wife that man might have been my
+rival,' he pondered, following the porter, who had now come back to
+him, into the luggage-room.  And whilst the man was carrying out and
+putting in one box, which was sufficiently portable for the gig,
+Manston still thought, as his eyes watched the process--
+
+'But for my wife, Springrove might have been my rival.'
+
+He examined the lamps of his gig, carefully laid out the reins,
+mounted the seat and drove along the turnpike-road towards Knapwater
+Park.
+
+The exact locality of the fire was plain to him as he neared home.
+He soon could hear the shout of men, the flapping of the flames, the
+crackling of burning wood, and could smell the smoke from the
+conflagration.
+
+Of a sudden, a few yards ahead, within the compass of the rays from
+the right-hand lamp, burst forward the figure of a man.  Having been
+walking in darkness the newcomer raised his hands to his eyes, on
+approaching nearer, to screen them from the glare of the reflector.
+
+Manston saw that he was one of the villagers:  a small farmer
+originally, who had drunk himself down to a day-labourer and reputed
+poacher.
+
+'Hoy!' cried Manston, aloud, that the man might step aside out of
+the way.
+
+'Is that Mr. Manston?' said the man.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Somebody ha' come to Carriford:  and the rest of it may concern
+you, sir.'
+
+'Well, well.'
+
+'Did you expect Mrs. Manston to-night, sir?'
+
+'Yes, unfortunately she's come, I know, and asleep long before this
+time, I suppose.'
+
+The labourer leant his elbow upon the shaft of the gig and turned
+his face, pale and sweating from his late work at the fire, up to
+Manston's.
+
+'Yes, she did come,' he said. . . .  'I beg pardon, sir, but I
+should be glad of--of--'
+
+'What?'
+
+'Glad of a trifle for bringen ye the news.'
+
+'Not a farthing!  I didn't want your news, I knew she was come.'
+
+'Won't you give me a shillen, sir?'
+
+'Certainly not.'
+
+'Then will you lend me a shillen, sir?  I be tired out, and don't
+know what to do.  If I don't pay you back some day I'll be d--d.'
+
+'The devil is so cheated that perdition isn't worth a penny as a
+security.'
+
+'Oh!'
+
+'Let me go on,' said Manston.
+
+'Thy wife is DEAD; that's 'the rest o' the news,' said the labourer
+slowly.  He waited for a reply; none came.
+
+'She went to the Three Tranters, because she couldn't get into thy
+house, the burnen roof fell in upon her before she could be called
+up, and she's a cinder, as thou'lt be some day.'
+
+'That will do, let me drive on,' said the steward calmly.
+
+Expectation of a concussion may be so intense that its failure
+strikes the brain with more force than its fulfilment.  The labourer
+sank back into the ditch.  Such a Cushi could not realize the
+possibility of such an unmoved David as this.
+
+Manston drove hastily to the turning of the road, tied his horse,
+and ran on foot to the site of the fire.
+
+The stagnation caused by the awful accident had been passed through,
+and all hands were helping to remove from the remaining cottage what
+furniture they could lay hold of; the thatch of the roofs being
+already on fire.  The Knapwater fire-engine had arrived on the spot,
+but it was small, and ineffectual.  A group was collected round the
+rector, who in a coat which had become bespattered, scorched, and
+torn in his exertions, was directing on one hand the proceedings
+relative to the removal of goods into the church, and with the other
+was pointing out the spot on which it was most desirable that the
+puny engines at their disposal should be made to play.  Every tongue
+was instantly silent at the sight of Manston's pale and clear
+countenance, which contrasted strangely with the grimy and streaming
+faces of the toiling villagers.
+
+'Was she burnt?' he said in a firm though husky voice, and stepping
+into the illuminated area.  The rector came to him, and took him
+aside.  'Is she burnt?' repeated Manston.
+
+'She is dead:  but thank God, she was spared the horrid agony of
+burning,' the rector said solemnly; 'the roof and gable fell in upon
+her, and crushed her.  Instant death must have followed.'
+
+'Why was she here?' said Manston.
+
+'From what we can hurriedly collect, it seems that she found the
+door of your house locked, and concluded that you had retired, the
+fact being that your servant, Mrs. Crickett, had gone out to supper.
+She then came back to the inn and went to bed.'
+
+'Where's the landlord?' said Manston.
+
+Mr. Springrove came up, walking feebly, and wrapped in a cloak, and
+corroborated the evidence given by the rector.
+
+'Did she look ill, or annoyed, when she came?' said the steward.
+
+'I can't say.  I didn't see; but I think--'
+
+'What do you think?'
+
+'She was much put out about something.'
+
+'My not meeting her, naturally,' murmured the other, lost in
+reverie.  He turned his back on Springrove and the rector, and
+retired from the shining light.
+
+Everything had been done that could be done with the limited means
+at their disposal.  The whole row of houses was destroyed, and each
+presented itself as one stage of a series, progressing from smoking
+ruins at the end where the inn had stood, to a partly flaming mass--
+glowing as none but wood embers will glow--at the other.
+
+A feature in the decline of town fires was noticeably absent here--
+steam.  There was present what is not observable in towns--
+incandescence.
+
+The heat, and the smarting effect upon their eyes of the strong
+smoke from the burning oak and deal, had at last driven the
+villagers back from the road in front of the houses, and they now
+stood in groups in the churchyard, the surface of which, raised by
+the interments of generations, stood four or five feet above the
+level of the road, and almost even with the top of the low wall
+dividing one from the other.  The headstones stood forth whitely
+against the dark grass and yews, their brightness being repeated on
+the white smock-frocks of some of the labourers, and in a mellower,
+ruddier form on their faces and hands, on those of the grinning
+gargoyles, and on other salient stonework of the weather-beaten
+church in the background.
+
+The rector had decided that, under the distressing circumstances of
+the case, there would be no sacrilege in placing in the church, for
+the night, the pieces of furniture and utensils which had been saved
+from the several houses.  There was no other place of safety for
+them, and they accordingly were gathered there.
+
+6.  HALF-PAST TWELVE TO ONE A.M.
+
+Manston, when he retired to meditate, had walked round the
+churchyard, and now entered the opened door of the building.
+
+He mechanically pursued his way round the piers into his own seat in
+the north aisle.  The lower atmosphere of this spot was shaded by
+its own wall from the shine which streamed in over the window-sills
+on the same side.  The only light burning inside the church was a
+small tallow candle, standing in the font, in the opposite aisle of
+the building to that in which Manston had sat down, and near where
+the furniture was piled.  The candle's mild rays were overpowered by
+the ruddier light from the ruins, making the weak flame to appear
+like the moon by day.
+
+Sitting there he saw Farmer Springrove enter the door, followed by
+his son Edward, still carrying his travelling-bag in his hand.  They
+were speaking of the sad death of Mrs. Manston, but the subject was
+relinquished for that of the houses burnt.
+
+This row of houses, running from the inn eastward, had been built
+under the following circumstances:--
+
+Fifty years before this date, the spot upon which the cottages
+afterwards stood was a blank strip, along the side of the village
+street, difficult to cultivate, on account of the outcrop thereon of
+a large bed of flints called locally a 'lanch' or 'lanchet.'
+
+The Aldclyffe then in possession of the estate conceived the idea
+that a row of cottages would be an improvement to the spot, and
+accordingly granted leases of portions to several respectable
+inhabitants.  Each lessee was to be subject to the payment of a
+merely nominal rent for the whole term of lives, on condition that
+he built his own cottage, and delivered it up intact at the end of
+the term.
+
+Those who had built had, one by one, relinquished their indentures,
+either by sale or barter, to Farmer Springrove's father.  New lives
+were added in some cases, by payment of a sum to the lord of the
+manor, etc., and all the leases were now held by the farmer himself,
+as one of the chief provisions for his old age.
+
+The steward had become interested in the following conversation:--
+
+'Try not to be so depressed, father; they are all insured.'
+
+The words came from Edward in an anxious tone.
+
+'You mistake, Edward; they are not insured,' returned the old man
+gloomily.
+
+'Not?' the son asked.
+
+'Not one!' said the farmer.
+
+'In the Helmet Fire Office, surely?'
+
+'They were insured there every one.  Six months ago the office,
+which had been raising the premiums on thatched premises higher for
+some years, gave up insuring them altogether, as two or three other
+fire-offices had done previously, on account, they said, of the
+uncertainty and greatness of the risk of thatch undetached.  Ever
+since then I have been continually intending to go to another
+office, but have never gone.  Who expects a fire?'
+
+'Do you remember the terms of the leases?' said Edward, still more
+uneasily.
+
+'No, not particularly,' said his father absently.
+
+'Where are they?'
+
+'In the bureau there; that's why I tried to save it first, among
+other things.'
+
+'Well, we must see to that at once.'
+
+'What do you want?'
+
+'The key.'
+
+They went into the south aisle, took the candle from the font, and
+then proceeded to open the bureau, which had been placed in a corner
+under the gallery.  Both leant over upon the flap; Edward holding
+the candle, whilst his father took the pieces of parchment from one
+of the drawers, and spread the first out before him.
+
+'You read it, Ted.  I can't see without my glasses.  This one will
+be sufficient.  The terms of all are the same.'
+
+Edward took the parchment, and read quickly and indistinctly for
+some time; then aloud and slowly as follows:--
+
+'And the said John Springrove for himself his heirs executors and
+administrators doth covenant and agree with the said Gerald
+Fellcourt Aldclyffe his heirs and assigns that he the said John
+Springrove his heirs and assigns during the said term shall pay unto
+the said Gerald Fellcourt Aldclyffe his heirs and assigns the clear
+yearly rent of ten shillings and sixpence. . . .  at the several
+times hereinbefore appointed for the payment thereof respectively.
+And also shall and at all times during the said term well and
+sufficiently repair and keep the said Cottage or Dwelling-house and
+all other the premises and all houses or buildings erected or to be
+erected thereupon in good and proper repair in every respect without
+exception and the said premises in such good repair upon the
+determination of this demise shall yield up unto the said Gerald
+Fellcourt Aldclyffe his heirs and assigns.'
+
+They closed the bureau and turned towards the door of the church
+without speaking.
+
+Manston also had come forward out of the gloom.  Notwithstanding the
+farmer's own troubles, an instinctive respect and generous sense of
+sympathy with the steward for his awful loss caused the old man to
+step aside, that Manston might pass out without speaking to them if
+he chose to do so.
+
+'Who is he?' whispered Edward to his father, as Manston approached.
+
+'Mr. Manston, the steward.'
+
+Manston came near, and passed down the aisle on the side of the
+younger man.  Their faces came almost close together:  one large
+flame, which still lingered upon the ruins outside, threw long
+dancing shadows of each across the nave till they bent upwards
+against the aisle wall, and also illuminated their eyes, as each met
+those of the other.  Edward had learnt, by a letter from home, of
+the steward's passion for Cytherea, and his mysterious repression of
+it, afterwards explained by his marriage.  That marriage was now
+nought.  Edward realized the man's newly acquired freedom, and felt
+an instinctive enmity towards him--he would hardly own to himself
+why.  The steward, too, knew Cytherea's attachment to Edward, and
+looked keenly and inscrutably at him.
+
+7.  ONE TO TWO A.M.
+
+Manston went homeward alone, his heart full of strange emotions.
+Entering the house, and dismissing the woman to her own home, he at
+once proceeded upstairs to his bedroom.
+
+Reasoning worldliness, especially when allied with sensuousness,
+cannot repress on some extreme occasions the human instinct to pour
+out the soul to some Being or Personality, who in frigid moments is
+dismissed with the title of Chance, or at most Law.  Manston was
+selfishly and inhumanly, but honestly and unutterably, thankful for
+the recent catastrophe.  Beside his bed, for that first time during
+a period of nearly twenty years, he fell down upon his knees in a
+passionate outburst of feeling.
+
+Many minutes passed before he arose.  He walked to the window, and
+then seemed to remember for the first time that some action on his
+part was necessary in connection with the sad circumstance of the
+night.
+
+Leaving the house at once, he went to the scene of the fire,
+arriving there in time to hear the rector making an arrangement with
+a certain number of men to watch the spot till morning.  The ashes
+were still red-hot and flaming.  Manston found that nothing could be
+done towards searching them at that hour of the night.  He turned
+homeward again, in the company of the rector, who had considerately
+persuaded him to retire from the scene for a while, and promised
+that as soon as a man could live amid the embers of the Three
+Tranters Inn, they should be carefully searched for the remains of
+his unfortunate wife.
+
+Manston then went indoors, to wait for morning.
+
+
+
+XI.  THE EVENTS OF FIVE DAYS
+
+1.  NOVEMBER THE TWENTY-NINTH
+
+The search began at dawn, but a quarter past nine o'clock came
+without bringing any result.  Manston ate a little breakfast, and
+crossed the hollow of the park which intervened between the old and
+modern manor-houses, to ask for an interview with Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+He met her midway.  She was about to pay him a visit of condolence,
+and to place every man on the estate at his disposal, that the
+search for any relic of his dead and destroyed wife might not be
+delayed an instant.
+
+He accompanied her back to the house.  At first they conversed as if
+the death of the poor woman was an event which the husband must of
+necessity deeply lament; and when all under this head that social
+form seemed to require had been uttered, they spoke of the material
+damage done, and of the steps which had better be taken to remedy
+it.
+
+It was not till both were shut inside her private room that she
+spoke to him in her blunt and cynical manner.  A certain newness of
+bearing in him, peculiar to the present morning, had hitherto
+forbidden her this tone:  the demeanour of the subject of her
+favouritism had altered, she could not tell in what way.  He was
+entirely a changed man.
+
+'Are you really sorry for your poor wife, Mr. Manston?' she said.
+
+'Well, I am,' he answered shortly.
+
+'But only as for any human being who has met with a violent death?'
+
+He confessed it--'For she was not a good woman,' he added.
+
+'I should be sorry to say such a thing now the poor creature is
+dead,' Miss Aldclyffe returned reproachfully.
+
+'Why?' he asked.  'Why should I praise her if she doesn't deserve
+it?  I say exactly what I have often admired Sterne for saying in
+one of his letters--that neither reason nor Scripture asks us to
+speak nothing but good of the dead.  And now, madam,' he continued,
+after a short interval of thought, 'I may, perhaps, hope that you
+will assist me, or rather not thwart me, in endeavouring to win the
+love of a young lady living about you, one in whom I am much
+interested already.'
+
+'Cytherea!'
+
+'Yes, Cytherea.'
+
+'You have been loving Cytherea all the while?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+Surprise was a preface to much agitation in her, which caused her to
+rise from her seat, and pace to the side of the room.  The steward
+quietly looked on and added, 'I have been loving and still love
+her.'
+
+She came close up to him, wistfully contemplating his face, one hand
+moving indecisively at her side.
+
+'And your secret marriage was, then, the true and only reason for
+that backwardness regarding the courtship of Cytherea, which, they
+tell me, has been the talk of the village; not your indifference to
+her attractions.'  Her voice had a tone of conviction in it, as well
+as of inquiry; but none of jealousy.
+
+'Yes,' he said; 'and not a dishonourable one.  What held me back was
+just that one thing--a sense of morality that perhaps, madam, you
+did not give me credit for.'  The latter words were spoken with a
+mien and tone of pride.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe preserved silence.
+
+'And now,' he went on, 'I may as well say a word in vindication of
+my conduct lately, at the risk, too, of offending you.  My actual
+motive in submitting to your order that I should send for my late
+wife, and live with her, was not the mercenary policy of wishing to
+retain an office which brings me greater comforts than any I have
+enjoyed before, but this unquenchable passion for Cytherea.  Though
+I saw the weakness, folly, and even wickedness of it continually, it
+still forced me to try to continue near her, even as the husband of
+another woman.'
+
+He waited for her to speak:  she did not.
+
+'There's a great obstacle to my making any way in winning Miss
+Graye's love,' he went on.
+
+'Yes, Edward Springrove,' she said quietly.  'I know it, I did once
+want to see them married; they have had a slight quarrel, and it
+will soon be made up again, unless--' she spoke as if she had only
+half attended to Manston's last statement.
+
+'He is already engaged to be married to somebody else,' said the
+steward.
+
+'Pooh!' said she, 'you mean to his cousin at Peakhill; that's
+nothing to help us; he's now come home to break it off.'
+
+'He must not break it off,' said Manston, firmly and calmly.
+
+His tone attracted her, startled her.  Recovering herself, she said
+haughtily, 'Well, that's your affair, not mine.  Though my wish has
+been to see her YOUR wife, I can't do anything dishonourable to
+bring about such a result.'
+
+'But it must be MADE your affair,' he said in a hard, steady voice,
+looking into her eyes, as if he saw there the whole panorama of her
+past.
+
+One of the most difficult things to portray by written words is that
+peculiar mixture of moods expressed in a woman's countenance when,
+after having been sedulously engaged in establishing another's
+position, she suddenly suspects him of undermining her own.  It was
+thus that Miss Aldclyffe looked at the steward.
+
+'You--know--something--of me?' she faltered.
+
+'I know all,' he said.
+
+'Then curse that wife of yours!  She wrote and said she wouldn't
+tell you!' she burst out.  'Couldn't she keep her word for a day?'
+She reflected and then said, but no more as to a stranger, 'I will
+not yield.  I have committed no crime.  I yielded to her threats in
+a moment of weakness, though I felt inclined to defy her at the
+time:  it was chiefly because I was mystified as to how she got to
+know of it.  Pooh! I will put up with threats no more.  O, can YOU
+threaten me?' she added softly, as if she had for the moment
+forgotten to whom she had been speaking.
+
+'My love must be made your affair,' he repeated, without taking his
+eyes from her.
+
+An agony, which was not the agony of being discovered in a secret,
+obstructed her utterance for a time.  'How can you turn upon me so
+when I schemed to get you here--schemed that you might win her till
+I found you were married.  O, how can you!  O!. . .  O!'  She wept;
+and the weeping of such a nature was as harrowing as the weeping of
+a man.
+
+'Your getting me here was bad policy as to your secret--the most
+absurd thing in the world,' he said, not heeding her distress.  'I
+knew all, except the identity of the individual, long ago.  Directly
+I found that my coming here was a contrived thing, and not a matter
+of chance, it fixed my attention upon you at once.  All that was
+required was the mere spark of life, to make of a bundle of
+perceptions an organic whole.'
+
+'Policy, how can you talk of policy?  Think, do think!  And how can
+you threaten me when you know--you know--that I would befriend you
+readily without a threat!'
+
+'Yes, yes, I think you would,' he said more kindly; 'but your
+indifference for so many, many years has made me doubt it.'
+
+'No, not indifference--'twas enforced silence.  My father lived.'
+
+He took her hand, and held it gently.
+
+                    *          *          *
+
+'Now listen,' he said, more quietly and humanly, when she had become
+calmer:  'Springrove must marry the woman he's engaged to.  You may
+make him, but only in one way.'
+
+'Well:  but don't speak sternly, AEneas!'
+
+'Do you know that his father has not been particularly thriving for
+the last two or three years?'
+
+'I have heard something of it, once or twice, though his rents have
+been promptly paid, haven't they?'
+
+'O yes; and do you know the terms of the leases of the houses which
+are burnt?' he said, explaining to her that by those terms she might
+compel him even to rebuild every house.  'The case is the clearest
+case of fire by negligence that I have ever known, in addition to
+that,' he continued.
+
+'I don't want them rebuilt; you know it was intended by my father,
+directly they fell in, to clear the site for a new entrance to the
+park?'
+
+'Yes, but that doesn't affect the position, which is that Farmer
+Springrove is in your power to an extent which is very serious for
+him.'
+
+'I won't do it--'tis a conspiracy.'
+
+'Won't you for me?' he said eagerly.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe changed colour.
+
+'I don't threaten now, I implore,' he said.
+
+'Because you might threaten if you chose,' she mournfully answered.
+'But why be so--when your marriage with her was my own pet idea long
+before it was yours?  What must I do?'
+
+'Scarcely anything:  simply this.  When I have seen old Mr.
+Springrove, which I shall do in a day or two, and told him that he
+will be expected to rebuild the houses, do you see the young man.
+See him yourself, in order that the proposals made may not appear to
+be anything more than an impulse of your own.  You or he will bring
+up the subject of the houses.  To rebuild them would be a matter of
+at least six hundred pounds, and he will almost surely say that we
+are hard in insisting upon the extreme letter of the leases.  Then
+tell him that scarcely can you yourself think of compelling an old
+tenant like his father to any such painful extreme--there shall be
+no compulsion to build, simply a surrender of the leases.  Then
+speak feelingly of his cousin, as a woman whom you respect and love,
+and whose secret you have learnt to be that she is heart-sick with
+hope deferred.  Beg him to marry her, his betrothed and your friend,
+as some return for your consideration towards his father.  Don't
+suggest too early a day for their marriage, or he will suspect you
+of some motive beyond womanly sympathy.  Coax him to make a promise
+to her that she shall be his wife at the end of a twelvemonth, and
+get him, on assenting to this, to write to Cytherea, entirely
+renouncing her.'
+
+'She has already asked him to do that.'
+
+'So much the better--and telling her, too, that he is about to
+fulfil his long-standing promise to marry his cousin.  If you think
+it worth while, you may say Cytherea was not indisposed to think of
+me before she knew I was married.  I have at home a note she wrote
+me the first evening I saw her, which looks rather warm, and which I
+could show you.  Trust me, he will give her up.  When he is married
+to Adelaide Hinton, Cytherea will be induced to marry me--perhaps
+before; a woman's pride is soon wounded.'
+
+'And hadn't I better write to Mr. Nyttleton, and inquire more
+particularly what's the law upon the houses?'
+
+'O no, there's no hurry for that.  We know well enough how the case
+stands--quite well enough to talk in general terms about it.  And I
+want the pressure to be put upon young Springrove before he goes
+away from home again.'
+
+She looked at him furtively, long, and sadly, as after speaking he
+became lost in thought, his eyes listlessly tracing the pattern of
+the carpet.  'Yes, yes, she will be mine,' he whispered, careless of
+Cytherea Aldclyffe's presence.  At last he raised his eyes
+inquiringly.
+
+'I will do my best, AEneas,' she answered.
+
+Talibus incusat.  Manston then left the house, and again went
+towards the blackened ruins, where men were still raking and
+probing.
+
+2.  FROM NOVEMBER THE TWENTY-NINTH TO DECEMBER THE SECOND
+
+The smouldering remnants of the Three Tranters Inn seemed to promise
+that, even when the searchers should light upon the remains of the
+unfortunate Mrs. Manston, very little would be discoverable.
+
+Consisting so largely of the charcoal and ashes of hard dry oak and
+chestnut, intermingled with thatch, the interior of the heap was one
+glowing mass of embers, which, on being stirred about, emitted
+sparks and flame long after it was dead and black on the outside.
+It was persistently hoped, however, that some traces of the body
+would survive the effect of the hot coals, and after a search
+pursued uninterruptedly for thirty hours, under the direction of
+Manston himself, enough was found to set at rest any doubts of her
+fate.
+
+The melancholy gleanings consisted of her watch, bunch of keys, a
+few coins, and two charred and blackened bones.
+
+Two days later the official inquiry into the cause of her death was
+held at the Rising Sun Inn, before Mr. Floy, the coroner, and a jury
+of the chief inhabitants of the district.  The little tavern--the
+only remaining one in the village--was crowded to excess by the
+neighbouring peasantry as well as their richer employers:  all who
+could by any possibility obtain an hour's release from their duties
+being present as listeners.
+
+The jury viewed the sad and infinitesimal remains, which were folded
+in a white cambric cloth, and laid in the middle of a well-finished
+coffin lined with white silk (by Manston's order), which stood in an
+adjoining room, the bulk of the coffin being completely filled in
+with carefully arranged flowers and evergreens--also the steward's
+own doing.
+
+Abraham Brown, of Hoxton, London--an old white-headed man, without
+the ruddiness which makes white hairs so pleasing--was sworn, and
+deposed that he kept a lodging-house at an address he named.  On a
+Saturday evening less than a month before the fire, a lady came to
+him, with very little luggage, and took the front room on the second
+floor.  He did not inquire where she came from, as she paid a week
+in advance, but she gave her name as Mrs. Manston, referring him, if
+he wished for any guarantee of her respectability, to Mr. Manston,
+Knapwater Park.  Here she lived for three weeks, rarely going out.
+She slept away from her lodgings one night during the time.  At the
+end of that time, on the twenty-eighth of November, she left his
+house in a four-wheeled cab, about twelve o'clock in the day,
+telling the driver to take her to the Waterloo Station.  She paid
+all her lodging expenses, and not having given notice the full week
+previous to her going away, offered to pay for the next, but he only
+took half.  She wore a thick black veil, and grey waterproof cloak,
+when she left him, and her luggage was two boxes, one of plain deal,
+with black japanned clamps, the other sewn up in canvas.
+
+Joseph Chinney, porter at the Carriford Road Station, deposed that
+he saw Mrs. Manston, dressed as the last witness had described, get
+out of a second-class carriage on the night of the twenty-eighth.
+She stood beside him whilst her luggage was taken from the van.  The
+luggage, consisting of the clamped deal box and another covered with
+canvas, was placed in the cloak-room.  She seemed at a loss at
+finding nobody there to meet her.  She asked him for some person to
+accompany her, and carry her bag to Mr. Manston's house, Knapwater
+Park.  He was just off duty at that time, and offered to go himself.
+The witness here repeated the conversation he had had with Mrs.
+Manston during their walk, and testified to having left her at the
+door of the Three Tranters Inn, Mr. Manston's house being closed.
+
+Next, Farmer Springrove was called.  A murmur of surprise and
+commiseration passed round the crowded room when he stepped forward.
+
+The events of the few preceding days had so worked upon his
+nervously thoughtful nature that the blue orbits of his eyes, and
+the mere spot of scarlet to which the ruddiness of his cheeks had
+contracted, seemed the result of a heavy sickness.  A perfect
+silence pervaded the assembly when he spoke.
+
+His statement was that he received Mrs. Manston at the threshold,
+and asked her to enter the parlour.  She would not do so, and stood
+in the passage whilst the maid went upstairs to see that the room
+was in order.  The maid came down to the middle landing of the
+staircase, when Mrs. Manston followed her up to the room.  He did
+not speak ten words with her altogether.
+
+Afterwards, whilst he was standing at the door listening for his son
+Edward's return, he saw her light extinguished, having first caught
+sight of her shadow moving about the room.
+
+THE CORONER:  'Did her shadow appear to be that of a woman
+undressing?'
+
+SPRINGROVE:  'I cannot say, as I didn't take particular notice.  It
+moved backwards and forwards; she might have been undressing or
+merely pacing up and down the room.'
+
+Mrs. Fitler, the ostler's wife and chambermaid, said that she
+preceded Mrs. Manston into the room, put down the candle, and went
+out.  Mrs. Manston scarcely spoke to her, except to ask her to bring
+a little brandy.  Witness went and fetched it from the bar, brought
+it up, and put it on the dressing-table.
+
+THE CORONER:  'Had Mrs. Manston begun to undress, when you came
+back?'
+
+'No, sir; she was sitting on the bed, with everything on, as when
+she came in.'
+
+'Did she begin to undress before you left?'
+
+'Not exactly before I had left; but when I had closed the door, and
+was on the landing I heard her boot drop on the floor, as it does
+sometimes when pulled off?'
+
+'Had her face appeared worn and sleepy?'
+
+'I cannot say as her bonnet and veil were still on when I left, for
+she seemed rather shy and ashamed to be seen at the Three Tranters
+at all.'
+
+'And did you hear or see any more of her?'
+
+'No more, sir.'
+
+Mrs. Crickett, temporary servant to Mr. Manston, said that in
+accordance with Mr. Manston's orders, everything had been made
+comfortable in the house for Mrs. Manston's expected return on
+Monday night.  Mr. Manston told her that himself and Mrs. Manston
+would be home late, not till between eleven and twelve o'clock, and
+that supper was to be ready.  Not expecting Mrs. Manston so early,
+she had gone out on a very important errand to Mrs. Leat the
+postmistress.
+
+Mr. Manston deposed that in looking down the columns of Bradshaw he
+had mistaken the time of the train's arrival, and hence was not at
+the station when she came.  The broken watch produced was his
+wife's--he knew it by a scratch on the inner plate, and by other
+signs.  The bunch of keys belonged to her:  two of them fitted the
+locks of her two boxes.
+
+Mr. Flooks, agent to Lord Claydonfield at Chettlewood, said that Mr.
+Manston had pleaded as his excuse for leaving him rather early in
+the evening after their day's business had been settled, that he was
+going to meet his wife at Carriford Road Station, where she was
+coming by the last train that night.
+
+The surgeon said that the remains were those of a human being.  The
+small fragment seemed a portion of one of the lumbar vertebrae--the
+other the head of the os femoris--but they were both so far gone
+that it was impossible to say definitely whether they belonged to
+the body of a male or female.  There was no moral doubt that they
+were a woman's.  He did not believe that death resulted from burning
+by fire.  He thought she was crushed by the fall of the west gable,
+which being of wood, as well as the floor, burnt after it had
+fallen, and consumed the body with it.
+
+Two or three additional witnesses gave unimportant testimony.
+
+The coroner summed up, and the jury without hesitation found that
+the deceased Mrs. Manston came by her death accidentally through the
+burning of the Three Tranters Inn.
+
+3.  DECEMBER THE SECOND.  AFTERNOON
+
+When Mr. Springrove came from the door of the Rising Sun at the end
+of the inquiry, Manston walked by his side as far as the stile to
+the park, a distance of about a stone's-throw.
+
+'Ah, Mr. Springrove, this is a sad affair for everybody concerned.'
+
+'Everybody,' said the old farmer, with deep sadness, ''tis quite a
+misery to me.  I hardly know how I shall live through each day as it
+breaks.  I think of the words, "In the morning thou shalt say, Would
+God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were
+morning! for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and
+for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see."'  His voice
+became broken.
+
+'Ah--true.  I read Deuteronomy myself,' said Manston.
+
+'But my loss is as nothing to yours,' the farmer continued.
+
+'Nothing; but I can commiserate you.  I should be worse than
+unfeeling if I didn't, although my own affliction is of so sad and
+solemn a kind.  Indeed my own loss makes me more keenly alive to
+yours, different in nature as it is.'
+
+'What sum do you think would be required of me to put the houses in
+place again?'
+
+'I have roughly thought six or seven hundred pounds.'
+
+'If the letter of the law is to be acted up to,' said the old man,
+with more agitation in his voice.
+
+'Yes, exactly.'
+
+'Do you know enough of Miss Aldclyffe's mind to give me an idea of
+how she means to treat me?'
+
+'Well, I am afraid I must tell you that though I know very little of
+her mind as a rule, in this matter I believe she will be rather
+peremptory; she might share to the extent of a sixth or an eighth
+perhaps, in consideration of her getting new lamps for old, but I
+should hardly think more.'
+
+The steward stepped upon the stile, and Mr. Springrove went along
+the road with a bowed head and heavy footsteps towards his niece's
+cottage, in which, rather against the wish of Edward, they had
+temporarily taken refuge.
+
+The additional weight of this knowledge soon made itself
+perceptible.  Though indoors with Edward or Adelaide nearly the
+whole of the afternoon, nothing more than monosyllabic replies could
+be drawn from him.  Edward continually discovered him looking
+fixedly at the wall or floor, quite unconscious of another's
+presence.  At supper he ate just as usual, but quite mechanically,
+and with the same abstraction.
+
+4.  DECEMBER THE THIRD
+
+The next morning he was in no better spirits.  Afternoon came:  his
+son was alarmed, and managed to draw from him an account of the
+conversation with the steward.
+
+'Nonsense; he knows nothing about it,' said Edward vehemently.
+'I'll see Miss Aldclyffe myself.  Now promise me, father, that
+you'll not believe till I come back, and tell you to believe it,
+that Miss Aldclyffe will do any such unjust thing.'
+
+Edward started at once for Knapwater House.  He strode rapidly along
+the high-road, till he reached a wicket where a footpath allowed of
+a short cut to the mansion.  Here he leant down upon the bars for a
+few minutes, meditating as to the best manner of opening his speech,
+and surveying the scene before him in that absent mood which takes
+cognizance of little things without being conscious of them at the
+time, though they appear in the eye afterwards as vivid impressions.
+It was a yellow, lustrous, late autumn day, one of those days of the
+quarter when morning and evening seem to meet together without the
+intervention of a noon.  The clear yellow sunlight had tempted forth
+Miss Aldclyffe herself, who was at this same time taking a walk in
+the direction of the village.  As Springrove lingered he heard
+behind the plantation a woman's dress brushing along amid the
+prickly husks and leaves which had fallen into the path from the
+boughs of the chestnut trees.  In another minute she stood in front
+of him.
+
+He answered her casual greeting respectfully, and was about to
+request a few minutes' conversation with her, when she directly
+addressed him on the subject of the fire.  'It is a sad misfortune
+for your father' she said, 'and I hear that he has lately let his
+insurances expire?'
+
+'He has, madam, and you are probably aware that either by the
+general terms of his holding, or the same coupled with the origin of
+the fire, the disaster may involve the necessity of his rebuilding
+the whole row of houses, or else of becoming a debtor to the estate,
+to the extent of some hundreds of pounds?'
+
+She assented.  'I have been thinking of it,' she went on, and then
+repeated in substance the words put into her mouth by the steward.
+Some disturbance of thought might have been fancied as taking place
+in Springrove's mind during her statement, but before she had
+reached the end, his eyes were clear, and directed upon her.
+
+'I don't accept your conditions of release,' he said.
+
+'They are not conditions exactly.'
+
+'Well, whatever they are not, they are very uncalled-for remarks.'
+
+'Not at all--the houses have been burnt by your family's
+negligence.'
+
+'I don't refer to the houses--you have of course the best of all
+rights to speak of that matter; but you, a stranger to me
+comparatively, have no right at all to volunteer opinions and wishes
+upon a very delicate subject, which concerns no living beings but
+Miss Graye, Miss Hinton, and myself.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe, like a good many others in her position, had plainly
+not realized that a son of her tenant and inferior could have become
+an educated man, who had learnt to feel his individuality, to view
+society from a Bohemian standpoint, far outside the farming grade in
+Carriford parish, and that hence he had all a developed man's
+unorthodox opinion about the subordination of classes.  And fully
+conscious of the labyrinth into which he had wandered between his
+wish to behave honourably in the dilemma of his engagement to his
+cousin Adelaide and the intensity of his love for Cytherea,
+Springrove was additionally sensitive to any allusion to the case.
+He had spoken to Miss Aldclyffe with considerable warmth.
+
+And Miss Aldclyffe was not a woman likely to be far behind any
+second person in warming to a mood of defiance.  It seemed as if she
+were prepared to put up with a cold refusal, but that her
+haughtiness resented a criticism of her conduct ending in a rebuke.
+By this, Manston's discreditable object, which had been made hers by
+compulsion only, was now adopted by choice.  She flung herself into
+the work.
+
+A fiery man in such a case would have relinquished persuasion and
+tried palpable force.  A fiery woman added unscrupulousness and
+evolved daring strategy; and in her obstinacy, and to sustain
+herself as mistress, she descended to an action the meanness of
+which haunted her conscience to her dying hour.
+
+'I don't quite see, Mr. Springrove,' she said, 'that I am altogether
+what you are pleased to call a stranger.  I have known your family,
+at any rate, for a good many years, and I know Miss Graye
+particularly well, and her state of mind with regard to this
+matter.'
+
+Perplexed love makes us credulous and curious as old women.  Edward
+was willing, he owned it to himself, to get at Cytherea's state of
+mind, even through so dangerous a medium.
+
+'A letter I received from her' he said, with assumed coldness,
+'tells me clearly enough what Miss Graye's mind is.'
+
+'You think she still loves you?  O yes, of course you do--all men
+are like that.'
+
+'I have reason to.'  He could feign no further than the first
+speech.
+
+'I should be interested in knowing what reason?' she said, with
+sarcastic archness.
+
+Edward felt he was allowing her to do, in fractional parts, what he
+rebelled against when regarding it as a whole; but the fact that his
+antagonist had the presence of a queen, and features only in the
+early evening of their beauty, was not without its influence upon a
+keenly conscious man.  Her bearing had charmed him into toleration,
+as Mary Stuart's charmed the indignant Puritan visitors.  He again
+answered her honestly.
+
+'The best of reasons--the tone of her letter.'
+
+'Pooh, Mr. Springrove!'
+
+'Not at all, Miss Aldclyffe!  Miss Graye desired that we should be
+strangers to each other for the simple practical reason that
+intimacy could only make wretched complications worse, not from lack
+of love--love is only suppressed.'
+
+'Don't you know yet, that in thus putting aside a man, a woman's
+pity for the pain she inflicts gives her a kindness of tone which is
+often mistaken for suppressed love?' said Miss Aldclyffe, with soft
+insidiousness.
+
+This was a translation of the ambiguity of Cytherea's tone which he
+had certainly never thought of; and he was too ingenuous not to own
+it.
+
+'I had never thought of it,' he said.
+
+'And don't believe it?'
+
+'Not unless there was some other evidence to support the view.'
+
+She paused a minute and then began hesitatingly--
+
+'My intention was--what I did not dream of owning to you--my
+intention was to try to induce you to fulfil your promise to Miss
+Hinton not solely on her account and yours (though partly).  I love
+Cytherea Graye with all my soul, and I want to see her happy even
+more than I do you.  I did not mean to drag her name into the affair
+at all, but I am driven to say that she wrote that letter of
+dismissal to you--for it was a most pronounced dismissal--not on
+account of your engagement.  She is old enough to know that
+engagements can be broken as easily as they can be made.  She wrote
+it because she loved another man; very suddenly, and not with any
+idea or hope of marrying him, but none the less deeply.'
+
+'Who?'
+
+'Mr. Manston.'
+
+'Good ---!  I can't listen to you for an instant, madam; why, she
+hadn't seen him!'
+
+'She had; he came here the day before she wrote to you; and I could
+prove to you, if it were worth while, that on that day she went
+voluntarily to his house, though not artfully or blamably; stayed
+for two hours playing and singing; that no sooner did she leave him
+than she went straight home, and wrote the letter saying she should
+not see you again, entirely because she had seen him and fallen
+desperately in love with him--a perfectly natural thing for a young
+girl to do, considering that he's the handsomest man in the county.
+Why else should she not have written to you before?'
+
+'Because I was such a--because she did not know of the connection
+between me and my cousin until then.'
+
+'I must think she did.'
+
+'On what ground?'
+
+'On the strong ground of my having told her so, distinctly, the very
+first day she came to live with me.'
+
+'Well, what do you seek to impress upon me after all?  This--that
+the day Miss Graye wrote to me, saying it was better that we should
+part, coincided with the day she had seen a certain man--'
+
+'A remarkably handsome and talented man.'
+
+'Yes, I admit that.'
+
+'And that it coincided with the hour just subsequent to her seeing
+him.'
+
+'Yes, just when she had seen him.'
+
+'And been to his house alone with him.'
+
+'It is nothing.'
+
+'And stayed there playing and singing with him.'
+
+'Admit that, too,' he said; 'an accident might have caused it.'
+
+'And at the same instant that she wrote your dismissal she wrote a
+letter referring to a secret appointment with him.'
+
+'Never, by God, madam! never!'
+
+'What do you say, sir?'
+
+'Never.'
+
+She sneered.
+
+'There's no accounting for beliefs, and the whole history is a very
+trivial matter; but I am resolved to prove that a lady's word is
+truthful, though upon a matter which concerns neither you nor
+herself.  You shall learn that she DID write him a letter concerning
+an assignation--that is, if Mr. Manston still has it, and will be
+considerate enough to lend it me.'
+
+'But besides,' continued Edward, 'a married man to do what would
+cause a young girl to write a note of the kind you mention!'
+
+She flushed a little.
+
+'That I don't know anything about,' she stammered.  'But Cytherea
+didn't, of course, dream any more than I did, or others in the
+parish, that he was married.'
+
+'Of course she didn't.'
+
+'And I have reason to believe that he told her of the fact directly
+afterwards, that she might not compromise herself, or allow him to.
+It is notorious that he struggled honestly and hard against her
+attractions, and succeeded in hiding his feelings, if not in
+quenching them.'
+
+'We'll hope that he did.'
+
+'But circumstances are changed now.'
+
+'Very greatly changed,' he murmured abstractedly.
+
+'You must remember,' she added more suasively, 'that Miss Graye has
+a perfect right to do what she likes with her own--her heart, that
+is to say.'
+
+Her descent from irritation was caused by perceiving that Edward's
+faith was really disturbed by her strong assertions, and it
+gratified her.
+
+Edward's thoughts flew to his father, and the object of his
+interview with her.  Tongue-fencing was utterly distasteful to him.
+
+'I will not trouble you by remaining longer, madam,' he remarked,
+gloomily; 'our conversation has ended sadly for me.'
+
+'Don't think so,' she said, 'and don't be mistaken.  I am older than
+you are, many years older, and I know many things.'
+
+
+
+Full of miserable doubt, and bitterly regretting that he had raised
+his father's expectations by anticipations impossible of fulfilment,
+Edward slowly went his way into the village, and approached his
+cousin's house.  The farmer was at the door looking eagerly for him.
+He had been waiting there for more than half-an-hour.  His eye
+kindled quickly.
+
+'Well, Ted, what does she say?' he asked, in the intensely sanguine
+tones which fall sadly upon a listener's ear, because, antecedently,
+they raise pictures of inevitable disappointment for the speaker, in
+some direction or another.
+
+'Nothing for us to be alarmed at,' said Edward, with a forced
+cheerfulness.
+
+'But must we rebuild?'
+
+'It seems we must, father.'
+
+The old man's eyes swept the horizon, then he turned to go in,
+without making another observation.  All light seemed extinguished
+in him again.  When Edward went in he found his father with the
+bureau open, unfolding the leases with a shaking hand, folding them
+up again without reading them, then putting them in their niche only
+to remove them again.
+
+Adelaide was in the room.  She said thoughtfully to Edward, as she
+watched the farmer--
+
+'I hope it won't kill poor uncle, Edward.  What should we do if
+anything were to happen to him?  He is the only near relative you
+and I have in the world.'  It was perfectly true, and somehow Edward
+felt more bound up with her after that remark.
+
+She continued:  'And he was only saying so hopefully the day before
+the fire, that he wouldn't for the world let any one else give me
+away to you when we are married.'
+
+For the first time a conscientious doubt arose in Edward's mind as
+to the justice of the course he was pursuing in resolving to refuse
+the alternative offered by Miss Aldclyffe.  Could it be selfishness
+as well as independence?  How much he had thought of his own heart,
+how little he had thought of his father's peace of mind!
+
+The old man did not speak again till supper-time, when he began
+asking his son an endless number of hypothetical questions on what
+might induce Miss Aldclyffe to listen to kinder terms; speaking of
+her now not as an unfair woman, but as a Lachesis or Fate whose
+course it behoved nobody to condemn.  In his earnestness he once
+turned his eyes on Edward's face:  their expression was woful:  the
+pupils were dilated and strange in aspect.
+
+'If she will only agree to that!' he reiterated for the hundredth
+time, increasing the sadness of his listeners.
+
+An aristocratic knocking came to the door, and Jane entered with a
+letter, addressed--
+
+               'MR. EDWARD SPRINGROVE, Junior.'
+
+'Charles from Knapwater House brought it,' she said.
+
+'Miss Aldclyffe's writing,' said Mr. Springrove, before Edward had
+recognized it himself.  'Now 'tis all right; she's going to make an
+offer; she doesn't want the houses there, not she; they are going to
+make that the way into the park.'
+
+Edward opened the seal and glanced at the inside.  He said, with a
+supreme effort of self-command--
+
+'It is only directed by Miss Aldclyffe, and refers to nothing
+connected with the fire.  I wonder at her taking the trouble to send
+it to-night.'
+
+His father looked absently at him and turned away again.  Shortly
+afterwards they retired for the night.  Alone in his bedroom Edward
+opened and read what he had not dared to refer to in their presence.
+
+The envelope contained another envelope in Cytherea's handwriting,
+addressed to '---- Manston, Esq., Old Manor House.'  Inside this was
+the note she had written to the steward after her detention in his
+house by the thunderstorm--
+
+                                          'KNAPWATER HOUSE,
+                                                    September 20th.
+
+'I find I cannot meet you at seven o'clock by the waterfall as I
+promised.  The emotion I felt made me forgetful of realities.
+                                          'C. GRAYE.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe had not written a line, and, by the unvarying rule
+observable when words are not an absolute necessity, her silence
+seemed ten times as convincing as any expression of opinion could
+have been.
+
+He then, step by step, recalled all the conversation on the subject
+of Cytherea's feelings that had passed between himself and Miss
+Aldclyffe in the afternoon, and by a confusion of thought, natural
+enough under the trying experience, concluded that because the lady
+was truthful in her portraiture of effects, she must necessarily be
+right in her assumption of causes.  That is, he was convinced that
+Cytherea--the hitherto-believed faithful Cytherea--had, at any rate,
+looked with something more than indifference upon the extremely
+handsome face and form of Manston.
+
+Did he blame her, as guilty of the impropriety of allowing herself
+to love the newcomer in the face of his not being free to return her
+love?  No; never for a moment did he doubt that all had occurred in
+her old, innocent, impulsive way; that her heart was gone before she
+knew it--before she knew anything, beyond his existence, of the man
+to whom it had flown.  Perhaps the very note enclosed to him was the
+result of first reflection.  Manston he would unhesitatingly have
+called a scoundrel, but for one strikingly redeeming fact.  It had
+been patent to the whole parish, and had come to Edward's own
+knowledge by that indirect channel, that Manston, as a married man,
+conscientiously avoided Cytherea after those first few days of his
+arrival during which her irresistibly beautiful and fatal glances
+had rested upon him--his upon her.
+
+Taking from his coat a creased and pocket-worn envelope containing
+Cytherea's letter to himself, Springrove opened it and read it
+through.  He was upbraided therein, and he was dismissed.  It bore
+the date of the letter sent to Manston, and by containing within it
+the phrase, 'All the day long I have been thinking,' afforded
+justifiable ground for assuming that it was written subsequently to
+the other (and in Edward's sight far sweeter one) to the steward.
+
+But though he accused her of fickleness, he would not doubt the
+genuineness, in its kind, of her partiality for him at Budmouth.  It
+was a short and shallow feeling--not perfect love:
+
+                    'Love is not love
+     Which alters when it alteration finds.'
+
+But it was not flirtation; a feeling had been born in her and had
+died.  It would be well for his peace of mind if his love for her
+could flit away so softly, and leave so few traces behind.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe had shown herself desperately concerned in the whole
+matter by the alacrity with which she had obtained the letter from
+Manston, and her labours to induce himself to marry his cousin.
+Taken in connection with her apparent interest in, if not love for,
+Cytherea, her eagerness, too, could only be accounted for on the
+ground that Cytherea indeed loved the steward.
+
+5.  DECEMBER THE FOURTH
+
+Edward passed the night he scarcely knew how, tossing feverishly
+from side to side, the blood throbbing in his temples, and singing
+in his ears.
+
+Before the day began to break he dressed himself.  On going out upon
+the landing he found his father's bedroom door already open.  Edward
+concluded that the old man had risen softly, as was his wont, and
+gone out into the fields to start the labourers.  But neither of the
+outer doors was unfastened.  He entered the front room, and found it
+empty.  Then animated by a new idea, he went round to the little
+back parlour, in which the few wrecks saved from the fire were
+deposited, and looked in at the door.  Here, near the window, the
+shutters of which had been opened half way, he saw his father
+leaning on the bureau, his elbows resting on the flap, his body
+nearly doubled, his hands clasping his forehead.  Beside him were
+ghostly-looking square folds of parchment--the leases of the houses
+destroyed.
+
+His father looked up when Edward entered, and wearily spoke to the
+young man as his face came into the faint light.
+
+'Edward, why did you get up so early?'
+
+'I was uneasy, and could not sleep.'
+
+The farmer turned again to the leases on the bureau, and seemed to
+become lost in reflection.  In a minute or two, without lifting his
+eyes, he said--
+
+'This is more than we can bear, Ted--more than we can bear!  Ted,
+this will kill me.  Not the loss only--the sense of my neglect about
+the insurance and everything.  Borrow I never will.  'Tis all misery
+now.  God help us--all misery now!'
+
+Edward did not answer, continuing to look fixedly at the dreary
+daylight outside.
+
+'Ted,' the farmer went on, 'this upset of be-en burnt out o' home
+makes me very nervous and doubtful about everything.  There's this
+troubles me besides--our liven here with your cousin, and fillen up
+her house.  It must be very awkward for her.  But she says she
+doesn't mind.  Have you said anything to her lately about when you
+are going to marry her?'
+
+'Nothing at all lately.'
+
+'Well, perhaps you may as well, now we are so mixed in together.
+You know, no time has ever been mentioned to her at all, first or
+last, and I think it right that now, since she has waited so
+patiently and so long--you are almost called upon to say you are
+ready.  It would simplify matters very much, if you were to walk up
+to church wi' her one of these mornings, get the thing done, and go
+on liven here as we are.  If you don't I must get a house all the
+sooner.  It would lighten my mind, too, about the two little
+freeholds over the hill--not a morsel a-piece, divided as they were
+between her mother and me, but a tidy bit tied together again.  Just
+think about it, will ye, Ted?'
+
+He stopped from exhaustion produced by the intense concentration of
+his mind upon the weary subject, and looked anxiously at his son.
+
+'Yes, I will,' said Edward.
+
+'But I am going to see her of the Great House this morning,' the
+farmer went on, his thoughts reverting to the old subject.  'I must
+know the rights of the matter, the when and the where.  I don't like
+seeing her, but I'd rather talk to her than the steward.  I wonder
+what she'll say to me.'
+
+The younger man knew exactly what she would say.  If his father
+asked her what he was to do, and when, she would simply refer him to
+Manston:  her character was not that of a woman who shrank from a
+proposition she had once laid down.  If his father were to say to
+her that his son had at last resolved to marry his cousin within the
+year, and had given her a promise to that effect, she would say,
+'Mr. Springrove, the houses are burnt:  we'll let them go:  trouble
+no more about them.'
+
+His mind was already made up.  He said calmly, 'Father, when you are
+talking to Miss Aldclyffe, mention to her that I have asked Adelaide
+if she is willing to marry me next Christmas.  She is interested in
+my union with Adelaide, and the news will be welcome to her.'
+
+'And yet she can be iron with reference to me and her property,' the
+farmer murmured.  'Very well, Ted, I'll tell her.'
+
+6.  DECEMBER THE FIFTH
+
+Of the many contradictory particulars constituting a woman's heart,
+two had shown their vigorous contrast in Cytherea's bosom just at
+this time.
+
+It was a dark morning, the morning after old Mr. Springrove's visit
+to Miss Aldclyffe, which had terminated as Edward had intended.
+Having risen an hour earlier than was usual with her, Cytherea sat
+at the window of an elegant little sitting-room on the ground floor,
+which had been appropriated to her by the kindness or whim of Miss
+Aldclyffe, that she might not be driven into that lady's presence
+against her will.  She leant with her face on her hand, looking out
+into the gloomy grey air.  A yellow glimmer from the flapping flame
+of the newly-lit fire fluttered on one side of her face and neck
+like a butterfly about to settle there, contrasting warmly with the
+other side of the same fair face, which received from the window the
+faint cold morning light, so weak that her shadow from the fire had
+a distinct outline on the window-shutter in spite of it.  There the
+shadow danced like a demon, blue and grim.
+
+The contradiction alluded to was that in spite of the decisive mood
+which two months earlier in the year had caused her to write a
+peremptory and final letter to Edward, she was now hoping for some
+answer other than the only possible one a man who, as she held, did
+not love her wildly, could send to such a communication.  For a
+lover who did love wildly, she had left one little loophole in her
+otherwise straightforward epistle.  Why she expected the letter on
+some morning of this particular week was, that hearing of his return
+to Carriford, she fondly assumed that he meant to ask for an
+interview before he left.  Hence it was, too, that for the last few
+days, she had not been able to keep in bed later than the time of
+the postman's arrival.
+
+The clock pointed to half-past seven.  She saw the postman emerge
+from beneath the bare boughs of the park trees, come through the
+wicket, dive through the shrubbery, reappear on the lawn, stalk
+across it without reference to paths--as country postmen do--and
+come to the porch.  She heard him fling the bag down on the seat,
+and turn away towards the village, without hindering himself for a
+single pace.
+
+Then the butler opened the door, took up the bag, brought it in, and
+carried it up the staircase to place it on the slab by Miss
+Aldclyffe's dressing-room door.  The whole proceeding had been
+depicted by sounds.
+
+She had a presentiment that her letter was in the bag at last.  She
+thought then in diminishing pulsations of confidence, 'He asks to
+see me!  Perhaps he asks to see me:  I hope he asks to see me.'
+
+A quarter to eight:  Miss Aldclyffe's bell--rather earlier than
+usual.  'She must have heard the post-bag brought,' said the maiden,
+as, tired of the chilly prospect outside, she turned to the fire,
+and drew imaginative pictures of her future therein.
+
+A tap came to the door, and the lady's-maid entered.
+
+'Miss Aldclyffe is awake,' she said; 'and she asked if you were
+moving yet, miss.'
+
+'I'll run up to her,' said Cytherea, and flitted off with the
+utterance of the words.  'Very fortunate this,' she thought; 'I
+shall see what is in the bag this morning all the sooner.'
+
+She took it up from the side table, went into Miss Aldclyffe's
+bedroom, pulled up the blinds, and looked round upon the lady in
+bed, calculating the minutes that must elapse before she looked at
+her letters.
+
+'Well, darling, how are you?  I am glad you have come in to see me,'
+said Miss Aldclyffe.  'You can unlock the bag this morning, child,
+if you like,' she continued, yawning factitiously.
+
+'Strange!' Cytherea thought; 'it seems as if she knew there was
+likely to be a letter for me.'
+
+From her bed Miss Aldclyffe watched the girl's face as she
+tremblingly opened the post-bag and found there an envelope
+addressed to her in Edward's handwriting; one he had written the day
+before, after the decision he had come to on an impartial, and on
+that account torturing, survey of his own, his father's, his cousin
+Adelaide's, and what he believed to be Cytherea's, position.
+
+The haughty mistress's soul sickened remorsefully within her when
+she saw suddenly appear upon the speaking countenance of the young
+lady before her a wan desolate look of agony.
+
+The master-sentences of Edward's letter were these:  'You speak
+truly.  That we never meet again is the wisest and only proper
+course.  That I regret the past as much as you do yourself, it is
+hardly necessary for me to say.'
+
+
+
+XII.  THE EVENTS OF TEN MONTHS
+
+1.  DECEMBER TO APRIL
+
+Week after week, month after month, the time had flown by.
+Christmas had passed; dreary winter with dark evenings had given
+place to more dreary winter with light evenings.  Thaws had ended in
+rain, rain in wind, wind in dust.  Showery days had come--the period
+of pink dawns and white sunsets; with the third week in April the
+cuckoo had appeared, with the fourth, the nightingale.
+
+Edward Springrove was in London, attending to the duties of his new
+office, and it had become known throughout the neighbourhood of
+Carriford that the engagement between himself and Miss Adelaide
+Hinton would terminate in marriage at the end of the year.
+
+The only occasion on which her lover of the idle delicious days at
+Budmouth watering-place had been seen by Cytherea after the time of
+the decisive correspondence, was once in church, when he sat in
+front of her, and beside Miss Hinton.
+
+The rencounter was quite an accident.  Springrove had come there in
+the full belief that Cytherea was away from home with Miss
+Aldclyffe; and he continued ignorant of her presence throughout the
+service.
+
+It is at such moments as these, when a sensitive nature writhes
+under the conception that its most cherished emotions have been
+treated with contumely, that the sphere-descended Maid, Music,
+friend of Pleasure at other times, becomes a positive enemy--
+racking, bewildering, unrelenting.  The congregation sang the first
+Psalm and came to the verse--
+
+     'Like some fair tree which, fed by streams,
+        With timely fruit doth bend,
+      He still shall flourish, and success
+        All his designs attend.'
+
+Cytherea's lips did not move, nor did any sound escape her; but
+could she help singing the words in the depths of her being,
+although the man to whom she applied them sat at her rival's side?
+
+Perhaps the moral compensation for all a woman's petty cleverness
+under thriving conditions is the real nobility that lies in her
+extreme foolishness at these other times; her sheer inability to be
+simply just, her exercise of an illogical power entirely denied to
+men in general--the power not only of kissing, but of delighting to
+kiss the rod by a punctilious observance of the self-immolating
+doctrines in the Sermon on the Mount.
+
+As for Edward--a little like other men of his temperament, to whom,
+it is somewhat humiliating to think, the aberrancy of a given love
+is in itself a recommendation--his sentiment, as he looked over his
+cousin's book, was of a lower rank, Horatian rather than Psalmodic--
+
+     'O, what hast thou of her, of her
+      Whose every look did love inspire;
+      Whose every breathing fanned my fire,
+      And stole me from myself away!'
+
+Then, without letting him see her, Cytherea slipt out of church
+early, and went home, the tones of the organ still lingering in her
+ears as she tried bravely to kill a jealous thought that would
+nevertheless live:  'My nature is one capable of more, far more,
+intense feeling than hers!  She can't appreciate all the sides of
+him--she never will!  He is more tangible to me even now, as a
+thought, than his presence itself is to her!'  She was less noble
+then.
+
+But she continually repressed her misery and bitterness of heart
+till the effort to do so showed signs of lessening.  At length she
+even tried to hope that her lost lover and her rival would love one
+another very dearly.
+
+The scene and the sentiment dropped into the past.  Meanwhile,
+Manston continued visibly before her.  He, though quiet and subdued
+in his bearing for a long time after the calamity of November, had
+not simulated a grief that he did not feel.  At first his loss
+seemed so to absorb him--though as a startling change rather than as
+a heavy sorrow--that he paid Cytherea no attention whatever.  His
+conduct was uniformly kind and respectful, but little more.  Then,
+as the date of the catastrophe grew remoter, he began to wear a
+different aspect towards her.  He always contrived to obliterate by
+his manner all recollection on her side that she was comparatively
+more dependent than himself--making much of her womanhood, nothing
+of her situation.  Prompt to aid her whenever occasion offered, and
+full of delightful petits soins at all times, he was not officious.
+In this way he irresistibly won for himself a position as her
+friend, and the more easily in that he allowed not the faintest
+symptom of the old love to be apparent.
+
+Matters stood thus in the middle of the spring when the next move on
+his behalf was made by Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+2.  THE THIRD OF MAY
+
+She led Cytherea to a summer-house called the Fane, built in the
+private grounds about the mansion in the form of a Grecian temple;
+it overlooked the lake, the island on it, the trees, and their
+undisturbed reflection in the smooth still water.  Here the old and
+young maid halted; here they stood, side by side, mentally imbibing
+the scene.
+
+The month was May--the time, morning.  Cuckoos, thrushes,
+blackbirds, and sparrows gave forth a perfect confusion of song and
+twitter.  The road was spotted white with the fallen leaves of
+apple-blossoms, and the sparkling grey dew still lingered on the
+grass and flowers.  Two swans floated into view in front of the
+women, and then crossed the water towards them.
+
+'They seem to come to us without any will of their own--quite
+involuntarily--don't they?' said Cytherea, looking at the birds'
+graceful advance.
+
+'Yes, but if you look narrowly you can see their hips just beneath
+the water, working with the greatest energy.'
+
+'I'd rather not see that, it spoils the idea of proud indifference
+to direction which we associate with a swan.'
+
+'It does; we'll have "involuntarily."  Ah, now this reminds me of
+something.'
+
+'Of what?'
+
+'Of a human being who involuntarily comes towards yourself.'
+
+Cytherea looked into Miss Aldclyffe's face; her eyes grew round as
+circles, and lines of wonderment came visibly upon her countenance.
+She had not once regarded Manston as a lover since his wife's sudden
+appearance and subsequent death.  The death of a wife, and such a
+death, was an overwhelming matter in her ideas of things.
+
+'Is it a man or woman?' she said, quite innocently.
+
+'Mr. Manston,' said Miss Aldclyffe quietly.
+
+'Mr. Manston attracted by me NOW?' said Cytherea, standing at gaze.
+
+'Didn't you know it?'
+
+'Certainly I did not.  Why, his poor wife has only been dead six
+months.'
+
+'Of course he knows that.  But loving is not done by months, or
+method, or rule, or nobody would ever have invented such a phrase as
+"falling in love."  He does not want his love to be observed just
+yet, on the very account you mention; but conceal it as he may from
+himself and us, it exists definitely--and very intensely, I assure
+you.'
+
+'I suppose then, that if he can't help it, it is no harm of him,'
+said Cytherea naively, and beginning to ponder.
+
+'Of course it isn't--you know that well enough.  She was a great
+burden and trouble to him.  This may become a great good to you
+both.'
+
+A rush of feeling at remembering that the same woman, before
+Manston's arrival, had just as frankly advocated Edward's claims,
+checked Cytherea's utterance for awhile.
+
+'There, don't look at me like that, for Heaven's sake!' said Miss
+Aldclyffe.  'You could almost kill a person by the force of reproach
+you can put into those eyes of yours, I verily believe.'
+
+Edward once in the young lady's thoughts, there was no getting rid
+of him.  She wanted to be alone.
+
+'Do you want me here?' she said.
+
+'Now there, there; you want to be off, and have a good cry,' said
+Miss Aldclyffe, taking her hand.  'But you mustn't, my dear.
+There's nothing in the past for you to regret.  Compare Mr.
+Manston's honourable conduct towards his wife and yourself, with
+Springrove towards his betrothed and yourself, and then see which
+appears the more worthy of your thoughts.'
+
+3.  FROM THE FOURTH OF MAY TO THE TWENTY-FIRST OF JUNE
+
+The next stage in Manston's advances towards her hand was a clearly
+defined courtship.  She was sadly perplexed, and some contrivance
+was necessary on his part in order to meet with her.  But it is next
+to impossible for an appreciative woman to have a positive
+repugnance towards an unusually handsome and gifted man, even though
+she may not be inclined to love him.  Hence Cytherea was not so
+alarmed at the sight of him as to render a meeting and conversation
+with her more than a matter of difficulty.
+
+Coming and going from church was his grand opportunity.  Manston was
+very religious now.  It is commonly said that no man was ever
+converted by argument, but there is a single one which will make any
+Laodicean in England, let him be once love-sick, wear prayer-books
+and become a zealous Episcopalian--the argument that his sweetheart
+can be seen from his pew.
+
+Manston introduced into his method a system of bewitching flattery,
+everywhere pervasive, yet, too, so transitory and intangible, that,
+as in the case of the poet Wordsworth and the Wandering Voice,
+though she felt it present, she could never find it.  As a foil to
+heighten its effect, he occasionally spoke philosophically of the
+evanescence of female beauty--the worthlessness of mere appearance.
+'Handsome is that handsome does' he considered a proverb which
+should be written on the looking-glass of every woman in the land.
+'Your form, your motions, your heart have won me,' he said, in a
+tone of playful sadness.  'They are beautiful.  But I see these
+things, and it comes into my mind that they are doomed, they are
+gliding to nothing as I look.  Poor eyes, poor mouth, poor face,
+poor maiden!  "Where will her glories be in twenty years?" I say.
+"Where will all of her be in a hundred?"  Then I think it is cruel
+that you should bloom a day, and fade for ever and ever.  It seems
+hard and sad that you will die as ordinarily as I, and be buried; be
+food for roots and worms, be forgotten and come to earth, and grow
+up a mere blade of churchyard-grass and an ivy leaf.  Then, Miss
+Graye, when I see you are a Lovely Nothing, I pity you, and the love
+I feel then is better and sounder, larger and more lasting than that
+I felt at the beginning.'  Again an ardent flash of his handsome
+eyes.
+
+It was by this route that he ventured on an indirect declaration and
+offer of his hand.
+
+She implied in the same indirect manner that she did not love him
+enough to accept it.
+
+An actual refusal was more than he had expected.  Cursing himself
+for what he called his egregious folly in making himself the slave
+of a mere lady's attendant, and for having given the parish, should
+they know of her refusal, a chance of sneering at him--certainly a
+ground for thinking less of his standing than before--he went home
+to the Old House, and walked indecisively up and down his back-yard.
+Turning aside, he leant his arms upon the edge of the rain-water-
+butt standing in the corner, and looked into it.  The reflection
+from the smooth stagnant surface tinged his face with the greenish
+shades of Correggio's nudes.  Staves of sunlight slanted down
+through the still pool, lighting it up with wonderful distinctness.
+Hundreds of thousands of minute living creatures sported and tumbled
+in its depth with every contortion that gaiety could suggest;
+perfectly happy, though consisting only of a head, or a tail, or at
+most a head and a tail, and all doomed to die within the twenty-four
+hours.
+
+'Damn my position!  Why shouldn't I be happy through my little day
+too?  Let the parish sneer at my repulses, let it.  I'll get her, if
+I move heaven and earth to do it!'
+
+Indeed, the inexperienced Cytherea had, towards Edward in the first
+place, and Manston afterwards, unconsciously adopted bearings that
+would have been the very tactics of a professional fisher of men who
+wished to have them each successively dangling at her heels.  For if
+any rule at all can be laid down in a matter which, for men
+collectively, is notoriously beyond regulation, it is that to snub a
+petted man, and to pet a snubbed man, is the way to win in suits of
+both kinds.  Manston with Springrove's encouragement would have
+become indifferent.  Edward with Manston's repulses would have
+sheered off at the outset, as he did afterwards.  Her supreme
+indifference added fuel to Manston's ardour--it completely disarmed
+his pride.  The invulnerable Nobody seemed greater to him than a
+susceptible Princess.
+
+4.  FROM THE TWENTY-FIRST OF JUNE TO THE END OF JULY
+
+Cytherea had in the meantime received the following letter from her
+brother.  It was the first definite notification of the enlargement
+of that cloud no bigger than a man's hand which had for nearly a
+twelvemonth hung before them in the distance, and which was soon to
+give a colour to their whole sky from horizon to horizon.
+
+                                                 'BUDMOUTH REGIS,
+
+Saturday.
+
+'DARLING SIS,--I have delayed telling you for a long time of a
+little matter which, though not one to be seriously alarmed about,
+is sufficiently vexing, and it would be unfair in me to keep it from
+you any longer.  It is that for some time past I have again been
+distressed by that lameness which I first distinctly felt when we
+went to Lulstead Cove, and again when I left Knapwater that morning
+early.  It is an unusual pain in my left leg, between the knee and
+the ankle.  I had just found fresh symptoms of it when you were here
+for that half-hour about a month ago--when you said in fun that I
+began to move like an old man.  I had a good mind to tell you then,
+but fancying it would go off in a few days, I thought it was not
+worth while.  Since that time it has increased, but I am still able
+to work in the office, sitting on the stool.  My great fear is that
+Mr. G. will have some out-door measuring work for me to do soon, and
+that I shall be obliged to decline it.  However, we will hope for
+the best.  How it came, what was its origin, or what it tends to, I
+cannot think.  You shall hear again in a day or two, if it is no
+better. . .--Your loving brother, OWEN.'
+
+This she answered, begging to know the worst, which she could bear,
+but suspense and anxiety never.  In two days came another letter
+from him, of which the subjoined paragraph is a portion:--
+
+'I had quite decided to let you know the worst, and to assure you
+that it was the worst, before you wrote to ask it.  And again I give
+you my word that I will conceal nothing--so that there will be no
+excuse whatever for your wearing yourself out with fears that I am
+worse than I say.  This morning then, for the first time, I have
+been obliged to stay away from the office.  Don't be frightened at
+this, dear Cytherea.  Rest is all that is wanted, and by nursing
+myself now for a week, I may avoid an illness of six months.'
+
+After a visit from her he wrote again:--
+
+'Dr. Chestman has seen me.  He said that the ailment was some sort
+of rheumatism, and I am now undergoing proper treatment for its
+cure.  My leg and foot have been placed in hot bran, liniments have
+been applied, and also severe friction with a pad.  He says I shall
+be as right as ever in a very short time.  Directly I am I shall run
+up by the train to see you.  Don't trouble to come to me if Miss
+Aldclyffe grumbles again about your being away, for I am going on
+capitally. . . .  You shall hear again at the end of the week.'
+
+At the time mentioned came the following:--
+
+'I am sorry to tell you, because I know it will be so disheartening
+after my last letter, that I am not so well as I was then, and that
+there has been a sort of hitch in the proceedings.  After I had been
+treated for rheumatism a few days longer (in which treatment they
+pricked the place with a long needle several times,) I saw that Dr.
+Chestman was in doubt about something, and I requested that he would
+call in a brother professional man to see me as well.  They
+consulted together and then told me that rheumatism was not the
+disease after all, but erysipelas.  They then began treating it
+differently, as became a different matter.  Blisters, flour, and
+starch, seem to be the order of the day now--medicine, of course,
+besides.
+
+'Mr. Gradfield has been in to inquire about me.  He says he has been
+obliged to get a designer in my place, which grieves me very much,
+though, of course, it could not be avoided.'
+
+A month passed away; throughout this period, Cytherea visited him as
+often as the limited time at her command would allow, and wore as
+cheerful a countenance as the womanly determination to do nothing
+which might depress him could enable her to wear.  Another letter
+from him then told her these additional facts:--
+
+'The doctors find they are again on the wrong tack.  They cannot
+make out what the disease is.  O Cytherea! how I wish they knew!
+This suspense is wearing me out.  Could not Miss Aldclyffe spare you
+for a day?  Do come to me.  We will talk about the best course then.
+I am sorry to complain, but I am worn out."
+
+Cytherea went to Miss Aldclyffe, and told her of the melancholy turn
+her brother's illness had taken.  Miss Aldclyffe at once said that
+Cytherea might go, and offered to do anything to assist her which
+lay in her power.  Cytherea's eyes beamed gratitude as she turned to
+leave the room, and hasten to the station.
+
+'O, Cytherea,' said Miss Aldclyffe, calling her back;  'just one
+word.  Has Mr. Manston spoken to you lately?'
+
+'Yes,' said Cytherea, blushing timorously.
+
+'He proposed?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'And you refused him?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Tut, tut!  Now listen to my advice,' said Miss Aldclyffe
+emphatically, 'and accept him before he changes his mind.  The
+chance which he offers you of settling in life is one that may
+possibly, probably, not occur again.  His position is good and
+secure, and the life of his wife would be a happy one.  You may not
+be sure that you love him madly; but suppose you are not sure?  My
+father used to say to me as a child when he was teaching me whist,
+"When in doubt win the trick!"  That advice is ten times as valuable
+to a woman on the subject of matrimony.  In refusing a man there is
+always the risk that you may never get another offer.'
+
+'Why didn't you win the trick when you were a girl?' said Cytherea.
+
+'Come, my lady Pert; I'm not the text,' said Miss Aldclyffe, her
+face glowing like fire.
+
+Cytherea laughed stealthily.
+
+'I was about to say,' resumed Miss Aldclyffe severely, 'that here is
+Mr. Manston waiting with the tenderest solicitude for you, and you
+overlooking it, as if it were altogether beneath you.  Think how you
+might benefit your sick brother if you were Mrs. Manston.  You will
+please me VERY MUCH by giving him some encouragement.  You
+understand me, Cythie dear?'
+
+Cytherea was silent.
+
+'And,' said Miss Aldclyffe, still more emphatically, 'on your
+promising that you will accept him some time this year, I will take
+especial care of your brother.  You are listening, Cytherea?'
+
+'Yes,' she whispered, leaving the room.
+
+She went to Budmouth, passed the day with her brother, and returned
+to Knapwater wretched and full of foreboding.  Owen had looked
+startlingly thin and pale--thinner and paler than ever she had seen
+him before.  The brother and sister had that day decided that
+notwithstanding the drain upon their slender resources, another
+surgeon should see him.  Time was everything.
+
+Owen told her the result in his next letter:--
+
+'The three practitioners between them have at last hit the nail on
+the head, I hope.  They probed the place, and discovered that the
+secret lay in the bone.  I underwent an operation for its removal
+three days ago (after taking chloroform). . .  Thank God it is over.
+Though I am so weak, my spirits are rather better.  I wonder when I
+shall be at work again?  I asked the surgeons how long it would be
+first.  I said a month?  They shook their heads.  A year? I said.
+Not so long, they said.  Six months? I inquired.  They would not, or
+could not, tell me.  But never mind.
+
+'Run down, when you have half a day to spare, for the hours drag on
+so drearily.  O Cytherea, you can't think how drearily!'
+
+She went.  Immediately on her departure Miss Aldclyffe sent a note
+to the Old House, to Manston.  On the maiden's return, tired and
+sick at heart as usual, she found Manston at the station awaiting
+her.  He asked politely if he might accompany her to Knapwater.  She
+tacitly acquiesced.  During their walk he inquired the particulars
+of her brother's illness, and with an irresistible desire to pour
+out her trouble to some one, she told him of the length of time
+which must elapse before he could be strong again, and of the lack
+of comfort in lodgings.
+
+Manston was silent awhile.  Then he said impetuously:  'Miss Graye,
+I will not mince matters--I love you--you know it.  Stratagem they
+say is fair in love, and I am compelled to adopt it now.  Forgive
+me, for I cannot help it.  Consent to be my wife at any time that
+may suit you--any remote day you may name will satisfy me--and you
+shall find him well provided for.'
+
+For the first time in her life she truly dreaded the handsome man at
+her side who pleaded thus selfishly, and shrank from the hot
+voluptuous nature of his passion for her, which, disguise it as he
+might under a quiet and polished exterior, at times radiated forth
+with a scorching white heat.  She perceived how animal was the love
+which bargained.
+
+'I do not love you, Mr. Manston,' she replied coldly.
+
+5.  FROM THE FIRST TO THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF AUGUST
+
+The long sunny days of the later summer-time brought only the same
+dreary accounts from Budmouth, and saw Cytherea paying the same sad
+visits.
+
+She grew perceptibly weaker, in body and mind.  Manston still
+persisted in his suit, but with more of his former indirectness, now
+that he saw how unexpectedly well she stood an open attack.  His was
+the system of Dares at the Sicilian games--
+
+     'He, like a captain who beleaguers round
+      Some strong-built castle on a rising ground,
+      Views all the approaches with observing eyes,
+      This and that other part again he tries,
+      And more on industry than force relies.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe made it appear more clearly than ever that aid to
+Owen from herself depended entirely upon Cytherea's acceptance of
+her steward.  Hemmed in and distressed, Cytherea's answers to his
+importunities grew less uniform; they were firm, or wavering, as
+Owen's malady fluctuated.  Had a register of her pitiful
+oscillations been kept, it would have rivalled in pathos the diary
+wherein De Quincey tabulates his combat with Opium--perhaps as
+noticeable an instance as any in which a thrilling dramatic power
+has been given to mere numerals.  Thus she wearily and monotonously
+lived through the month, listening on Sundays to the wellknown round
+of chapters narrating the history of Elijah and Elisha in famine and
+drought; on week-days to buzzing flies in hot sunny rooms.  'So
+like, so very like, was day to day.'  Extreme lassitude seemed all
+that the world could show her.
+
+Her state was in this wise, when one afternoon, having been with her
+brother, she met the surgeon, and begged him to tell the actual
+truth concerning Owen's condition.
+
+The reply was that he feared that the first operation had not been
+thorough; that although the wound had healed, another attempt might
+still be necessary, unless nature were left to effect her own cure.
+But the time such a self-healing proceeding would occupy might be
+ruinous.
+
+'How long would it be?' she said.
+
+'It is impossible to say.  A year or two, more or less.'
+
+'And suppose he submitted to another artificial extraction?'
+
+'Then he might be well in four or six months.'
+
+Now the remainder of his and her possessions, together with a sum he
+had borrowed, would not provide him with necessary comforts for half
+that time.  To combat the misfortune, there were two courses open--
+her becoming betrothed to Manston, or the sending Owen to the County
+Hospital.
+
+Thus terrified, driven into a corner, panting and fluttering about
+for some loophole of escape, yet still shrinking from the idea of
+being Manston's wife, the poor little bird endeavoured to find out
+from Miss Aldclyffe whether it was likely Owen would be well treated
+in the hospital.
+
+'County Hospital!' said Miss Aldclyffe; 'why, it is only another
+name for slaughter-house--in surgical cases at any rate.  Certainly
+if anything about your body is snapt in two they do join you
+together in a fashion, but 'tis so askew and ugly, that you may as
+well be apart again.'  Then she terrified the inquiring and anxious
+maiden by relating horrid stories of how the legs and arms of poor
+people were cut off at a moment's notice, especially in cases where
+the restorative treatment was likely to be long and tedious.
+
+'You know how willing I am to help you, Cytherea,' she added
+reproachfully.  'You know it.  Why are you so obstinate then?  Why
+do you selfishly bar the clear, honourable, and only sisterly path
+which leads out of this difficulty?  I cannot, on my conscience,
+countenance you; no, I cannot.'
+
+Manston once more repeated his offer; and once more she refused, but
+this time weakly, and with signs of an internal struggle.  Manston's
+eye sparkled; he saw for the hundredth time in his life, that
+perseverance, if only systematic, was irresistible by womankind.
+
+6.  THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF AUGUST
+
+On going to Budmouth three days later, she found to her surprise
+that the steward had been there, had introduced himself, and had
+seen her brother.  A few delicacies had been brought him also by the
+same hand.  Owen spoke in warm terms of Manston and his free and
+unceremonious call, as he could not have refrained from doing of any
+person, of any kind, whose presence had served to help away the
+tedious hours of a long day, and who had, moreover, shown that sort
+of consideration for him which the accompanying basket implied--
+antecedent consideration, so telling upon all invalids--and which he
+so seldom experienced except from the hands of his sister.
+
+How should he perceive, amid this tithe-paying of mint, and anise,
+and cummin, the weightier matters which were left undone?
+
+Again the steward met her at Carriford Road Station on her return
+journey.  Instead of being frigid as at the former meeting at the
+same place, she was embarrassed by a strife of thought, and murmured
+brokenly her thanks for what he had done.  The same request that he
+might see her home was made.
+
+He had perceived his error in making his kindness to Owen a
+conditional kindness, and had hastened to efface all recollection of
+it.  'Though I let my offer on her brother's--my friend's--behalf,
+seem dependent on my lady's graciousness to me,' he whispered
+wooingly in the course of their walk, 'I could not conscientiously
+adhere to my statement; it was said with all the impulsive
+selfishness of love.  Whether you choose to have me, or whether you
+don't, I love you too devotedly to be anything but kind to your
+brother. . . .  Miss Graye, Cytherea, I will do anything,' he
+continued earnestly, 'to give you pleasure--indeed I will.'
+
+She saw on the one hand her poor and much-loved Owen recovering from
+his illness and troubles by the disinterested kindness of the man
+beside her, on the other she drew him dying, wholly by reason of her
+self-enforced poverty.  To marry this man was obviously the course
+of common sense, to refuse him was impolitic temerity.  There was
+reason in this.  But there was more behind than a hundred reasons--a
+woman's gratitude and her impulse to be kind.
+
+The wavering of her mind was visible in her tell-tale face.  He
+noticed it, and caught at the opportunity.
+
+They were standing by the ruinous foundations of an old mill in the
+midst of a meadow.  Between grey and half-overgrown stonework--the
+only signs of masonry remaining--the water gurgled down from the old
+millpond to a lower level, under the cloak of rank broad leaves--the
+sensuous natures of the vegetable world.  On the right hand the sun,
+resting on the horizon-line, streamed across the ground from below
+copper-coloured and lilac clouds, stretched out in flats beneath a
+sky of pale soft green.  All dark objects on the earth that lay
+towards the sun were overspread by a purple haze, against which a
+swarm of wailing gnats shone forth luminously, rising upward and
+floating away like sparks of fire.
+
+The stillness oppressed and reduced her to mere passivity.  The only
+wish the humidity of the place left in her was to stand motionless.
+The helpless flatness of the landscape gave her, as it gives all
+such temperaments, a sense of bare equality with, and no superiority
+to, a single entity under the sky.
+
+He came so close that their clothes touched.  'Will you try to love
+me?  Do try to love me!' he said, in a whisper, taking her hand.  He
+had never taken it before.  She could feel his hand trembling
+exceedingly as it held hers in its clasp.
+
+Considering his kindness to her brother, his love for herself, and
+Edward's fickleness, ought she to forbid him to do this?  How truly
+pitiful it was to feel his hand tremble so--all for her!  Should she
+withdraw her hand?  She would think whether she would. Thinking, and
+hesitating, she looked as far as the autumnal haze on the marshy
+ground would allow her to see distinctly. There was the fragment of
+a hedge--all that remained of a 'wet old garden'--standing in the
+middle of the mead, without a definite beginning or ending,
+purposeless and valueless. It was overgrown, and choked with
+mandrakes, and she could almost fancy she heard their shrieks. . .
+Should she withdraw her hand?  No, she could not withdraw it now; it
+was too late, the act would not imply refusal.  She felt as one in a
+boat without oars, drifting with closed eyes down a river--she knew
+not whither.
+
+He gave her hand a gentle pressure, and relinquished it.
+
+Then it seemed as if he were coming to the point again.  No, he was
+not going to urge his suit that evening.  Another respite.
+
+7.  THE EARLY PART OF SEPTEMBER
+
+Saturday came, and she went on some trivial errand to the village
+post-office.  It was a little grey cottage with a luxuriant jasmine
+encircling the doorway, and before going in Cytherea paused to
+admire this pleasing feature of the exterior.  Hearing a step on the
+gravel behind the corner of the house, she resigned the jasmine and
+entered.  Nobody was in the room.  She could hear Mrs. Leat, the
+widow who acted as postmistress, walking about over her head.
+Cytherea was going to the foot of the stairs to call Mrs. Leat, but
+before she had accomplished her object, another form stood at the
+half-open door.  Manston came in.
+
+'Both on the same errand,' he said gracefully.
+
+'I will call her,' said Cytherea, moving in haste to the foot of the
+stairs.
+
+'One moment.'  He glided to her side.  'Don't call her for a
+moment,' he repeated.
+
+But she had said, 'Mrs. Leat!'
+
+He seized Cytherea's hand, kissed it tenderly, and carefully
+replaced it by her side.
+
+She had that morning determined to check his further advances, until
+she had thoroughly considered her position.  The remonstrance was
+now on her tongue, but as accident would have it, before the word
+could be spoken Mrs. Leat was stepping from the last stair to the
+floor, and no remonstrance came.
+
+With the subtlety which characterized him in all his dealings with
+her, he quickly concluded his own errand, bade her a good-bye, in
+the tones of which love was so garnished with pure politeness that
+it only showed its presence to herself, and left the house--putting
+it out of her power to refuse him her companionship homeward, or to
+object to his late action of kissing her hand.
+
+The Friday of the next week brought another letter from her brother.
+In this he informed her that, in absolute grief lest he should
+distress her unnecessarily, he had some time earlier borrowed a few
+pounds.  A week ago, he said, his creditor became importunate, but
+that on the day on which he wrote, the creditor had told him there
+was no hurry for a settlement, that 'his SISTER'S SUITOR had
+guaranteed the sum.'  'Is he Mr. Manston? tell me, Cytherea,' said
+Owen.
+
+He also mentioned that a wheeled chair had been anonymously hired
+for his especial use, though as yet he was hardly far enough
+advanced towards convalescence to avail himself of the luxury.  'Is
+this Mr. Manston's doing?' he inquired.
+
+She could dally with her perplexity, evade it, trust to time for
+guidance, no longer.  The matter had come to a crisis:  she must
+once and for all choose between the dictates of her understanding
+and those of her heart.  She longed, till her soul seemed nigh to
+bursting, for her lost mother's return to earth, but for one minute,
+that she might have tender counsel to guide her through this, her
+great difficulty.
+
+As for her heart, she half fancied that it was not Edward's to quite
+the extent that it once had been; she thought him cruel in
+conducting himself towards her as he did at Budmouth, cruel
+afterwards in making so light of her.  She knew he had stifled his
+love for her--was utterly lost to her.  But for all that she could
+not help indulging in a woman's pleasure of recreating defunct
+agonies, and lacerating herself with them now and then.
+
+'If I were rich,' she thought, 'I would give way to the luxury of
+being morbidly faithful to him for ever without his knowledge.'
+
+But she considered; in the first place she was a homeless dependent;
+and what did practical wisdom tell her to do under such desperate
+circumstances?  To provide herself with some place of refuge from
+poverty, and with means to aid her brother Owen.  This was to be Mr.
+Manston's wife.
+
+She did not love him.
+
+But what was love without a home?  Misery.  What was a home without
+love?  Alas, not much; but still a kind of home.
+
+'Yes,' she thought, 'I am urged by my common sense to marry Mr.
+Manston.'
+
+Did anything nobler in her say so too?
+
+With the death (to her) of Edward her heart's occupation was gone.
+Was it necessary or even right for her to tend it and take care of
+it as she used to in the old time, when it was still a capable
+minister?
+
+By a slight sacrifice here she could give happiness to at least two
+hearts whose emotional activities were still unwounded.  She would
+do good to two men whose lives were far more important than hers.
+
+'Yes,' she said again, 'even Christianity urges me to marry Mr.
+Manston.'
+
+Directly Cytherea had persuaded herself that a kind of heroic self-
+abnegation had to do with the matter, she became much more content
+in the consideration of it.  A wilful indifference to the future was
+what really prevailed in her, ill and worn out, as she was, by the
+perpetual harassments of her sad fortune, and she regarded this
+indifference, as gushing natures will do under such circumstances,
+as genuine resignation and devotedness.
+
+Manston met her again the following day:  indeed, there was no
+escaping him now.  At the end of a short conversation between them,
+which took place in the hollow of the park by the waterfall,
+obscured on the outer side by the low hanging branches of the limes,
+she tacitly assented to his assumption of a privilege greater than
+any that had preceded it.  He stooped and kissed her brow.
+
+Before going to bed she wrote to Owen explaining the whole matter.
+It was too late in the evening for the postman's visit, and she
+placed the letter on the mantelpiece to send it the next day.
+
+The morning (Sunday) brought a hurried postscript to Owen's letter
+of the day before:--
+
+                                              'September 9, 1865.
+
+'DEAR CYTHEREA--I have received a frank and friendly letter from Mr.
+Manston explaining the position in which he stands now, and also
+that in which he hopes to stand towards you. Can't you love him?
+Why not?  Try, for he is a good, and not only that, but a cultured
+man.  Think of the weary and laborious future that awaits you if you
+continue for life in your present position, and do you see any way
+of escape from it except by marriage?  I don't.  Don't go against
+your heart, Cytherea, but be wise.--Ever affectionately yours,
+OWEN.'
+
+She thought that probably he had replied to Mr. Manston in the same
+favouring mood.  She had a conviction that that day would settle her
+doom.  Yet
+
+     'So true a fool is love,'
+
+that even now she nourished a half-hope that something would happen
+at the last moment to thwart her deliberately-formed intentions, and
+favour the old emotion she was using all her strength to thrust
+down.
+
+8.  THE TENTH OF SEPTEMBER
+
+The Sunday was the thirteenth after Trinity, and the afternoon
+service at Carriford was nearly over.  The people were singing the
+Evening Hymn.
+
+Manston was at church as usual in his accustomed place two seats
+forward from the large square pew occupied by Miss Aldclyffe and
+Cytherea.
+
+The ordinary sadness of an autumnal evening-service seemed, in
+Cytherea's eyes, to be doubled on this particular occasion.  She
+looked at all the people as they stood and sang, waving backwards
+and forwards like a forest of pines swayed by a gentle breeze; then
+at the village children singing too, their heads inclined to one
+side, their eyes listlessly tracing some crack in the old walls, or
+following the movement of a distant bough or bird with features
+petrified almost to painfulness.  Then she looked at Manston; he was
+already regarding her with some purpose in his glance.
+
+'It is coming this evening,' she said in her mind.  A minute later,
+at the end of the hymn, when the congregation began to move out,
+Manston came down the aisle. He was opposite the end of her seat as
+she stepped from it, the remainder of their progress to the door
+being in contact with each other.  Miss Aldclyffe had lingered
+behind.
+
+'Don't let's hurry,' he said, when Cytherea was about to enter the
+private path to the House as usual.  'Would you mind turning down
+this way for a minute till Miss Aldclyffe has passed?'
+
+She could not very well refuse now.  They turned into a secluded
+path on their left, leading round through a thicket of laurels to
+the other gate of the church-yard, walking very slowly.  By the time
+the further gate was reached, the church was closed.  They met the
+sexton with the keys in his hand.
+
+'We are going inside for a minute,' said Manston to him, taking the
+keys unceremoniously.  'I will bring them to you when we return.'
+
+The sexton nodded his assent, and Cytherea and Manston walked into
+the porch, and up the nave.
+
+They did not speak a word during their progress, or in any way
+interfere with the stillness and silence that prevailed everywhere
+around them.  Everything in the place was the embodiment of decay:
+the fading red glare from the setting sun, which came in at the west
+window, emphasizing the end of the day and all its cheerful doings,
+the mildewed walls, the uneven paving-stones, the wormy pews, the
+sense of recent occupation, and the dank air of death which had
+gathered with the evening, would have made grave a lighter mood than
+Cytherea's was then.
+
+'What sensations does the place impress you with?' she said at last,
+very sadly.
+
+'I feel imperatively called upon to be honest, from very despair of
+achieving anything by stratagem in a world where the materials are
+such as these.'  He, too, spoke in a depressed voice, purposely or
+otherwise.
+
+'I feel as if I were almost ashamed to be seen walking such a
+world,' she murmured; 'that's the effect it has upon me; but it does
+not induce me to be honest particularly.'
+
+He took her hand in both his, and looked down upon the lids of her
+eyes.
+
+'I pity you sometimes,' he said more emphatically.
+
+'I am pitiable, perhaps; so are many people.  Why do you pity me?'
+
+'I think that you make yourself needlessly sad.'
+
+'Not needlessly.'
+
+'Yes, needlessly.  Why should you be separated from your brother so
+much, when you might have him to stay with you till he is well?'
+
+'That can't be,' she said, turning away.
+
+He went on, 'I think the real and only good thing that can be done
+for him is to get him away from Budmouth awhile; and I have been
+wondering whether it could not be managed for him to come to my
+house to live for a few weeks.  Only a quarter of a mile from you.
+How pleasant it would be!'
+
+'It would.'
+
+He moved himself round immediately to the front of her, and held her
+hand more firmly, as he continued, 'Cytherea, why do you say "It
+would," so entirely in the tone of abstract supposition?  I want him
+there:  I want him to be my brother, too.  Then make him so, and be
+my wife!  I cannot live without you.  O Cytherea.  my darling, my
+love, come and be my wife!'
+
+His face bent closer and closer to hers, and the last words sank to
+a whisper as weak as the emotion inspiring it was strong.
+
+She said firmly and distinctly, 'Yes, I will.'
+
+'Next month?' he said on the instant, before taking breath.
+
+'No; not next month.'
+
+'The next?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'December?  Christmas Day, say?'
+
+'I don't mind.'
+
+'O, you darling!'  He was about to imprint a kiss upon her pale,
+cold mouth, but she hastily covered it with her hand.
+
+'Don't kiss me--at least where we are now!' she whispered
+imploringly.
+
+'Why?'
+
+'We are too near God.'
+
+He gave a sudden start, and his face flushed.  She had spoken so
+emphatically that the words 'Near God' echoed back again through the
+hollow building from the far end of the chancel.
+
+'What a thing to say!' he exclaimed; 'surely a pure kiss is not
+inappropriate to the place !'
+
+'No,' she replied, with a swelling heart; 'I don't know why I burst
+out so--I can't tell what has come over me!  Will you forgive me?'
+
+'How shall I say "Yes" without judging you?  How shall I say "No"
+without losing the pleasure of saying "Yes?"'  He was himself again.
+
+'I don't know,' she absently murmured.
+
+'I'll say "Yes,"' he answered daintily.  'It is sweeter to fancy we
+are forgiven, than to think we have not sinned; and you shall have
+the sweetness without the need.'
+
+She did not reply, and they moved away.  The church was nearly dark
+now, and melancholy in the extreme.  She stood beside him while he
+locked the door, then took the arm he gave her, and wound her way
+out of the churchyard with him.  Then they walked to the house
+together, but the great matter having been set at rest, she
+persisted in talking only on indifferent subjects.
+
+'Christmas Day, then,' he said, as they were parting at the end of
+the shrubbery.
+
+'I meant Old Christmas Day,' she said evasively.
+
+'H'm, people do not usually attach that meaning to the words.'
+
+'No; but I should like it best if it could not be till then?'  It
+seemed to be still her instinct to delay the marriage to the utmost.
+
+'Very well, love,' he said gently.  ''Tis a fortnight longer still;
+but never mind.  Old Christmas Day.'
+
+9.  THE ELEVENTH OF SEPTEMBER
+
+'There.  It will be on a Friday!'
+
+She sat upon a little footstool gazing intently into the fire.  It
+was the afternoon of the day following that of the steward's
+successful solicitation of her hand.
+
+'I wonder if it would be proper in me to run across the park and
+tell him it is a Friday?' she said to herself, rising to her feet,
+looking at her hat lying near, and then out of the window towards
+the Old House.  Proper or not, she felt that she must at all hazards
+remove the disagreeable, though, as she herself owned, unfounded
+impression the coincidence had occasioned.  She left the house
+directly, and went to search for him.
+
+Manston was in the timber-yard, looking at the sawyers as they
+worked.  Cytherea came up to him hesitatingly.  Till within a
+distance of a few yards she had hurried forward with alacrity--now
+that the practical expression of his face became visible she wished
+almost she had never sought him on such an errand; in his business-
+mood he was perhaps very stern.
+
+'It will be on a Friday,' she said confusedly, and without any
+preface.
+
+'Come this way!' said Manston, in the tone he used for workmen, not
+being able to alter at an instant's notice.  He gave her his arm and
+led her back into the avenue, by which time he was lover again.  'On
+a Friday, will it, dearest?  You do not mind Fridays, surely?
+That's nonsense.'
+
+'Not seriously mind them, exactly--but if it could be any other
+day?'
+
+'Well, let us say Old Christmas Eve, then.  Shall it be Old
+Christmas Eve?'
+
+'Yes, Old Christmas Eve.'
+
+'Your word is solemn, and irrevocable now?'
+
+'Certainly, I have solemnly pledged my word; I should not have
+promised to marry you if I had not meant it.  Don't think I should.'
+She spoke the words with a dignified impressiveness.
+
+'You must not be vexed at my remark, dearest.  Can you think the
+worse of an ardent man, Cytherea, for showing some anxiety in love?'
+
+'No, no.'  She could not say more.  She was always ill at ease when
+he spoke of himself as a piece of human nature in that analytical
+way, and wanted to be out of his presence.  The time of day, and the
+proximity of the house, afforded her a means of escape.  'I must be
+with Miss Aldclyffe now--will you excuse my hasty coming and going?'
+she said prettily.  Before he had replied she had parted from him.
+
+'Cytherea, was it Mr. Manston I saw you scudding away from in the
+avenue just now?' said Miss Aldclyffe, when Cytherea joined her.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'"Yes."  Come, why don't you say more than that?  I hate those
+taciturn "Yesses" of yours.  I tell you everything, and yet you are
+as close as wax with me.'
+
+'I parted from him because I wanted to come in.'
+
+'What a novel and important announcement!  Well, is the day fixed?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe's face kindled into intense interest at once.  'Is it
+indeed?  When is it to be?'
+
+'On Old Christmas Eve.'
+
+'Old Christmas Eve.'  Miss Aldclyffe drew Cytherea round to her
+front, and took a hand in each of her own.  'And then you will be a
+bride!' she said slowly, looking with critical thoughtfulness upon
+the maiden's delicately rounded cheeks.
+
+The normal area of the colour upon each of them decreased
+perceptibly after that slow and emphatic utterance by the elder
+lady.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe continued impressively, 'You did not say "Old
+Christmas Eve" as a fiancee should have said the words:  and you
+don't receive my remark with the warm excitement that foreshadows a
+bright future. . .  How many weeks are there to the time?'
+
+'I have not reckoned them.'
+
+'Not?  Fancy a girl not counting the weeks!  I find I must take the
+lead in this matter--you are so childish, or frightened, or stupid,
+or something, about it, Bring me my diary, and we will count them at
+once.'
+
+Cytherea silently fetched the book.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe opened the diary at the page containing the almanac,
+and counted sixteen weeks, which brought her to the thirty-first of
+December--a Sunday.  Cytherea stood by, looking on as if she had no
+appetite for the scene.
+
+'Sixteen to the thirty-first.  Then let me see, Monday will be the
+first of January, Tuesday the second, Wednesday third, Thursday
+fourth, Friday fifth--you have chosen a Friday, as I declare!'
+
+'A Thursday, surely?' said Cytherea.
+
+'No:  Old Christmas Day comes on a Saturday.'
+
+The perturbed little brain had reckoned wrong.  'Well, it must be a
+Friday,' she murmured in a reverie.
+
+'No:  have it altered, of course,' said Miss Aldclyffe cheerfully.
+'There's nothing bad in Friday, but such a creature as you will be
+thinking about its being unlucky--in fact, I wouldn't choose a
+Friday myself to be married on, since all the other days are equally
+available.'
+
+'I shall not have it altered,' said Cytherea firmly; 'it has been
+altered once already:  I shall let it be.'
+
+
+
+XIII.  THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
+
+1.  THE FIFTH OF JANUARY.  BEFORE DAWN
+
+We pass over the intervening weeks.  The time of the story is thus
+advanced more than a quarter of a year.
+
+On the midnight preceding the morning which would make her the wife
+of a man whose presence fascinated her into involuntariness of
+bearing, and whom in absence she almost dreaded, Cytherea lay in her
+little bed, vainly endeavouring to sleep.
+
+She had been looking back amid the years of her short though varied
+past, and thinking of the threshold upon which she stood.  Days and
+months had dimmed the form of Edward Springrove like the gauzes of a
+vanishing stage-scene, but his dying voice could still be heard
+faintly behind.  That a soft small chord in her still vibrated true
+to his memory, she would not admit:  that she did not approach
+Manston with feelings which could by any stretch of words be called
+hymeneal, she calmly owned.
+
+'Why do I marry him?' she said to herself.  'Because Owen, dear Owen
+my brother, wishes me to marry him.  Because Mr. Manston is, and has
+been, uniformly kind to Owen, and to me.  "Act in obedience to the
+dictates of common-sense," Owen said, "and dread the sharp sting of
+poverty.  How many thousands of women like you marry every year for
+the same reason, to secure a home, and mere ordinary, material
+comforts, which after all go far to make life endurable, even if not
+supremely happy."
+
+''Tis right, I suppose, for him to say that.  O, if people only knew
+what a timidity and melancholy upon the subject of her future grows
+up in the heart of a friendless woman who is blown about like a reed
+shaken with the wind, as I am, they would not call this resignation
+of one's self by the name of scheming to get a husband.  Scheme to
+marry?  I'd rather scheme to die!  I know I am not pleasing my
+heart; I know that if I only were concerned, I should like risking a
+single future.  But why should I please my useless self overmuch,
+when by doing otherwise I please those who are more valuable than
+I?'
+
+In the midst of desultory reflections like these, which alternated
+with surmises as to the inexplicable connection that appeared to
+exist between her intended husband and Miss Aldclyffe, she heard
+dull noises outside the walls of the house, which she could not
+quite fancy to be caused by the wind.  She seemed doomed to such
+disturbances at critical periods of her existence.  'It is strange,'
+she pondered, 'that this my last night in Knapwater House should be
+disturbed precisely as my first was, no occurrence of the kind
+having intervened.'
+
+As the minutes glided by the noise increased, sounding as if some
+one were beating the wall below her window with a bunch of switches.
+She would gladly have left her room and gone to stay with one of the
+maids, but they were without doubt all asleep.
+
+The only person in the house likely to be awake, or who would have
+brains enough to comprehend her nervousness, was Miss Aldclyffe, but
+Cytherea never cared to go to Miss Aldclyffe's room, though she was
+always welcome there, and was often almost compelled to go against
+her will.
+
+The oft-repeated noise of switches grew heavier upon the wall, and
+was now intermingled with creaks, and a rattling like the rattling
+of dice.  The wind blew stronger; there came first a snapping, then
+a crash, and some portion of the mystery was revealed.  It was the
+breaking off and fall of a branch from one of the large trees
+outside.  The smacking against the wall, and the intermediate
+rattling, ceased from that time.
+
+Well, it was the tree which had caused the noises.  The unexplained
+matter was that neither of the trees ever touched the walls of the
+house during the highest wind, and that trees could not rattle like
+a man playing castanets or shaking dice.
+
+She thought, 'Is it the intention of Fate that something connected
+with these noises shall influence my future as in the last case of
+the kind?'
+
+During the dilemma she fell into a troubled sleep, and dreamt that
+she was being whipped with dry bones suspended on strings, which
+rattled at every blow like those of a malefactor on a gibbet; that
+she shifted and shrank and avoided every blow, and they fell then
+upon the wall to which she was tied.  She could not see the face of
+the executioner for his mask, but his form was like Manston's.
+
+'Thank Heaven!' she said, when she awoke and saw a faint light
+struggling through her blind.  'Now what were those noises?'  To
+settle that question seemed more to her than the event of the day.
+
+She pulled the blind aside and looked out.  All was plain.  The
+evening previous had closed in with a grey drizzle, borne upon a
+piercing air from the north, and now its effects were visible.  The
+hoary drizzle still continued; but the trees and shrubs were laden
+with icicles to an extent such as she had never before witnessed.  A
+shoot of the diameter of a pin's head was iced as thick as her
+finger; all the boughs in the park were bent almost to the earth
+with the immense weight of the glistening incumbrance; the walks
+were like a looking-glass.  Many boughs had snapped beneath their
+burden, and lay in heaps upon the icy grass.  Opposite her eye, on
+the nearest tree, was a fresh yellow scar, showing where the branch
+that had terrified her had been splintered from the trunk.
+
+'I never could have believed it possible,' she thought, surveying
+the bowed-down branches, 'that trees would bend so far out of their
+true positions without breaking.'  By watching a twig she could see
+a drop collect upon it from the hoary fog, sink to the lowest point,
+and there become coagulated as the others had done.
+
+'Or that I could so exactly have imitated them,' she continued.  'On
+this morning I am to be married--unless this is a scheme of the
+great Mother to hinder a union of which she does not approve.  Is it
+possible for my wedding to take place in the face of such weather as
+this?'
+
+2.  MORNING
+
+Her brother Owen was staying with Manston at the Old House.
+Contrary to the opinion of the doctors, the wound had healed after
+the first surgical operation, and his leg was gradually acquiring
+strength, though he could only as yet get about on crutches, or
+ride, or be dragged in a chair.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe had arranged that Cytherea should be married from
+Knapwater House, and not from her brother's lodgings at Budmouth,
+which was Cytherea's first idea.  Owen, too, seemed to prefer the
+plan.  The capricious old maid had latterly taken to the
+contemplation of the wedding with even greater warmth than had at
+first inspired her, and appeared determined to do everything in her
+power, consistent with her dignity, to render the adjuncts of the
+ceremony pleasing and complete.
+
+But the weather seemed in flat contradiction of the whole
+proceeding.  At eight o'clock the coachman crept up to the House
+almost upon his hands and knees, entered the kitchen, and stood with
+his back to the fire, panting from his exertions in pedestrianism.
+
+The kitchen was by far the pleasantest apartment in Knapwater House
+on such a morning as this.  The vast fire was the centre of the
+whole system, like a sun, and threw its warm rays upon the figures
+of the domestics, wheeling about it in true planetary style.  A
+nervously-feeble imitation of its flicker was continually attempted
+by a family of polished metallic utensils standing in rows and
+groups against the walls opposite, the whole collection of shines
+nearly annihilating the weak daylight from outside.  A step further
+in, and the nostrils were greeted by the scent of green herbs just
+gathered, and the eye by the plump form of the cook, wholesome,
+white-aproned, and floury--looking as edible as the food she
+manipulated--her movements being supported and assisted by her
+satellites, the kitchen and scullery maids.  Minute recurrent sounds
+prevailed--the click of the smoke-jack, the flap of the flames, and
+the light touches of the women's slippers upon the stone floor.
+
+The coachman hemmed, spread his feet more firmly upon the
+hearthstone, and looked hard at a small plate in the extreme corner
+of the dresser.
+
+'No wedden this mornen--that's my opinion.  In fact, there can't
+be,' he said abruptly, as if the words were the mere torso of a
+many-membered thought that had existed complete in his head.
+
+The kitchen-maid was toasting a slice of bread at the end of a very
+long toasting-fork, which she held at arm's length towards the
+unapproachable fire, travestying the Flanconnade in fencing.
+
+'Bad out of doors, isn't it?' she said, with a look of commiseration
+for things in general.
+
+'Bad?  Not even a liven soul, gentle or simple, can stand on level
+ground.  As to getten up hill to the church, 'tis perfect lunacy.
+And I speak of foot-passengers.  As to horses and carriage, 'tis
+murder to think of 'em.  I am going to send straight as a line into
+the breakfast-room, and say 'tis a closer. . . .  Hullo--here's
+Clerk Crickett and John Day a-comen!  Now just look at 'em and
+picture a wedden if you can.'
+
+All eyes were turned to the window, from which the clerk and
+gardener were seen crossing the court, bowed and stooping like Bel
+and Nebo.
+
+'You'll have to go if it breaks all the horses' legs in the county,'
+said the cook, turning from the spectacle, knocking open the oven-
+door with the tongs, glancing critically in, and slamming it
+together with a clang.
+
+'O, O; why shall I?' asked the coachman, including in his auditory
+by a glance the clerk and gardener who had just entered.
+
+'Because Mr. Manston is in the business.  Did you ever know him to
+give up for weather of any kind, or for any other mortal thing in
+heaven or earth?'
+
+'---- Mornen so's--such as it is!' interrupted Mr. Crickett
+cheerily, coming forward to the blaze and warming one hand without
+looking at the fire.  'Mr. Manston gie up for anything in heaven or
+earth, did you say?  You might ha' cut it short by sayen "to Miss
+Aldclyffe," and leaven out heaven and earth as trifles.  But it
+might be put off; putten off a thing isn't getten rid of a thing, if
+that thing is a woman.  O no, no!'
+
+The coachman and gardener now naturally subsided into secondaries.
+The cook went on rather sharply, as she dribbled milk into the exact
+centre of a little crater of flour in a platter--
+
+'It might be in this case; she's so indifferent.'
+
+'Dang my old sides! and so it might be.  I have a bit of news--I
+thought there was something upon my tongue; but 'tis a secret; not a
+word, mind, not a word.  Why, Miss Hinton took a holiday yesterday.'
+
+'Yes?' inquired the cook, looking up with perplexed curiosity.
+
+'D'ye think that's all?'
+
+'Don't be so three-cunning--if it is all, deliver you from the evil
+of raising a woman's expectations wrongfully; I'll skimmer your pate
+as sure as you cry Amen!'
+
+'Well, it isn't all.  When I got home last night my wife said, "Miss
+Adelaide took a holiday this mornen," says she (my wife, that is);
+"walked over to Nether Mynton, met the comen man, and got married!"
+says she.'
+
+'Got married! what, Lord-a-mercy, did Springrove come?'
+
+'Springrove, no--no--Springrove's nothen to do wi' it--'twas Farmer
+Bollens.  They've been playing bo-peep for these two or three months
+seemingly.  Whilst Master Teddy Springrove has been daddlen, and
+hawken, and spetten about having her, she's quietly left him all
+forsook.  Serve him right.  I don't blame the little woman a bit.'
+
+'Farmer Bollens is old enough to be her father!'
+
+'Ay, quite; and rich enough to be ten fathers.  They say he's so
+rich that he has business in every bank, and measures his money in
+half-pint cups.'
+
+'Lord, I wish it was me, don't I wish 'twas me!' said the scullery-
+maid.
+
+'Yes, 'twas as neat a bit of stitching as ever I heard of,'
+continued the clerk, with a fixed eye, as if he were watching the
+process from a distance.  'Not a soul knew anything about it, and my
+wife is the only one in our parish who knows it yet.  Miss Hinton
+came back from the wedden, went to Mr. Manston, puffed herself out
+large, and said she was Mrs. Bollens, but that if he wished, she had
+no objection to keep on the house till the regular time of giving
+notice had expired, or till he could get another tenant.'
+
+'Just like her independence,' said the cook.
+
+'Well, independent or no, she's Mrs. Bollens now.  Ah, I shall never
+forget once when I went by Farmer Bollens's garden--years ago now--
+years, when he was taking up ashleaf taties.  A merry feller I was
+at that time, a very merry feller--for 'twas before I took holy
+orders, and it didn't prick my conscience as 'twould now.  "Farmer,"
+says I, "little taties seem to turn out small this year, don't em?"
+"O no, Crickett," says he, "some be fair-sized."  He's a dull man--
+Farmer Bollens is--he always was.  However, that's neither here nor
+there; he's a-married to a sharp woman, and if I don't make a
+mistake she'll bring him a pretty good family, gie her time.'
+
+'Well, it don't matter; there's a Providence in it,' said the
+scullery-maid.  'God A'mighty always sends bread as well as
+children.'
+
+'But 'tis the bread to one house and the children to another very
+often.  However, I think I can see my lady Hinton's reason for
+chosen yesterday to sickness-or-health-it.  Your young miss, and
+that one, had crossed one another's path in regard to young Master
+Springrove; and I expect that when Addy Hinton found Miss Graye
+wasn't caren to have en, she thought she'd be beforehand with her
+old enemy in marrying somebody else too.  That's maids' logic all
+over, and maids' malice likewise.'
+
+Women who are bad enough to divide against themselves under a man's
+partiality are good enough to instantly unite in a common cause
+against his attack.  'I'll just tell you one thing then,' said the
+cook, shaking out her words to the time of a whisk she was beating
+eggs with.  'Whatever maids' logic is and maids' malice too, if
+Cytherea Graye even now knows that young Springrove is free again,
+she'll fling over the steward as soon as look at him.'
+
+'No, no:  not now,' the coachman broke in like a moderator.
+'There's honour in that maid, if ever there was in one.  No Miss
+Hinton's tricks in her.  She'll stick to Manston.'
+
+'Pifh!'
+
+'Don't let a word be said till the wedden is over, for Heaven's
+sake,' the clerk continued.  'Miss Aldclyffe would fairly hang and
+quarter me, if my news broke off that there wedden at a last minute
+like this.'
+
+'Then you had better get your wife to bolt you in the closet for an
+hour or two, for you'll chatter it yourself to the whole boiling
+parish if she don't!  'Tis a poor womanly feller!'
+
+'You shouldn't ha' begun it, clerk.  I knew how 'twould be,' said
+the gardener soothingly, in a whisper to the clerk's mangled
+remains.
+
+The clerk turned and smiled at the fire, and warmed his other hand.
+
+3.  NOON
+
+The weather gave way.  In half-an-hour there began a rapid thaw.  By
+ten o'clock the roads, though still dangerous, were practicable to
+the extent of the half-mile required by the people of Knapwater
+Park.  One mass of heavy leaden cloud spread over the whole sky; the
+air began to feel damp and mild out of doors, though still cold and
+frosty within.
+
+They reached the church and passed up the nave, the deep-coloured
+glass of the narrow windows rendering the gloom of the morning
+almost night itself inside the building.  Then the ceremony began.
+The only warmth or spirit imported into it came from the bridegroom,
+who retained a vigorous--even Spenserian--bridal-mood throughout the
+morning.
+
+Cytherea was as firm as he at this critical moment, but as cold as
+the air surrounding her.  The few persons forming the wedding-party
+were constrained in movement and tone, and from the nave of the
+church came occasional coughs, emitted by those who, in spite of the
+weather, had assembled to see the termination of Cytherea's
+existence as a single woman.  Many poor people loved her.  They
+pitied her success, why, they could not tell, except that it was
+because she seemed to stand more like a statue than Cytherea Graye.
+
+Yet she was prettily and carefully dressed; a strange contradiction
+in a man's idea of things--a saddening, perplexing contradiction.
+Are there any points in which a difference of sex amounts to a
+difference of nature?  Then this is surely one.  Not so much, as it
+is commonly put, in regard to the amount of consideration given, but
+in the conception of the thing considered.  A man emasculated by
+coxcombry may spend more time upon the arrangement of his clothes
+than any woman, but even then there is no fetichism in his idea of
+them--they are still only a covering he uses for a time.  But here
+was Cytherea, in the bottom of her heart almost indifferent to life,
+yet possessing an instinct with which her heart had nothing to do,
+the instinct to be particularly regardful of those sorry trifles,
+her robe, her flowers, her veil, and her gloves.
+
+The irrevocable words were soon spoken--the indelible writing soon
+written--and they came out of the vestry.  Candles had been
+necessary here to enable them to sign their names, and on their
+return to the church the light from the candles streamed from the
+small open door, and across the chancel to a black chestnut screen
+on the south side, dividing it from a small chapel or chantry,
+erected for the soul's peace of some Aldclyffe of the past.  Through
+the open-work of this screen could now be seen illuminated, inside
+the chantry, the reclining figures of cross-legged knights, damp and
+green with age, and above them a huge classic monument, also
+inscribed to the Aldclyffe family, heavily sculptured in cadaverous
+marble.
+
+Leaning here--almost hanging to the monument--was Edward Springrove,
+or his spirit.
+
+The weak daylight would never have revealed him, shaded as he was by
+the screen; but the unexpected rays of candle-light in the front
+showed him forth in startling relief to any and all of those whose
+eyes wandered in that direction.  The sight was a sad one--sad
+beyond all description.  His eyes were wild, their orbits leaden.
+His face was of a sickly paleness, his hair dry and disordered, his
+lips parted as if he could get no breath.  His figure was spectre-
+thin.  His actions seemed beyond his own control.
+
+Manston did not see him; Cytherea did.  The healing effect upon her
+heart of a year's silence--a year and a half's separation--was
+undone in an instant.  One of those strange revivals of passion by
+mere sight--commoner in women than in men, and in oppressed women
+commonest of all--had taken place in her--so transcendently, that
+even to herself it seemed more like a new creation than a revival.
+
+Marrying for a home--what a mockery it was!
+
+It may be said that the means most potent for rekindling old love in
+a maiden's heart are, to see her lover in laughter and good spirits
+in her despite when the breach has been owing to a slight from
+herself; when owing to a slight from him, to see him suffering for
+his own fault.  If he is happy in a clear conscience, she blames
+him; if he is miserable because deeply to blame, she blames herself.
+The latter was Cytherea's case now.
+
+First, an agony of face told of the suppressed misery within her,
+which presently could be suppressed no longer. When they were coming
+out of the porch, there broke from her in a low plaintive scream the
+words, 'He's dying--dying!  O God, save us!'  She began to sink
+down, and would have fallen had not Manston caught her.  The chief
+bridesmaid applied her vinaigrette.
+
+'What did she say?' inquired Manston.
+
+Owen was the only one to whom the words were intelligible, and he
+was far too deeply impressed, or rather alarmed, to reply.  She did
+not faint, and soon began to recover her self-command.  Owen took
+advantage of the hindrance to step back to where the apparition had
+been seen.  He was enraged with Springrove for what he considered an
+unwarrantable intrusion.
+
+But Edward was not in the chantry.  As he had come, so he had gone,
+nobody could tell how or whither.
+
+4.  AFTERNOON
+
+It might almost have been believed that a transmutation had taken
+place in Cytherea's idiosyncrasy, that her moral nature had fled.
+
+The wedding-party returned to the house.  As soon as he could find
+an opportunity, Owen took his sister aside to speak privately with
+her on what had happened.  The expression of her face was hard,
+wild, and unreal--an expression he had never seen there before, and
+it disturbed him.  He spoke to her severely and sadly.
+
+'Cytherea,' he said, 'I know the cause of this emotion of yours.
+But remember this, there was no excuse for it.  You should have been
+woman enough to control yourself.  Remember whose wife you are, and
+don't think anything more of a mean-spirited fellow like Springrove;
+he had no business to come there as he did.  You are altogether
+wrong, Cytherea, and I am vexed with you more than I can say--very
+vexed.'
+
+'Say ashamed of me at once,' she bitterly answered.
+
+'I am ashamed of you,' he retorted angrily; 'the mood has not left
+you yet, then?'
+
+'Owen,' she said, and paused.  Her lip trembled; her eye told of
+sensations too deep for tears.  'No, Owen, it has not left me; and I
+will be honest.  I own now to you, without any disguise of words,
+what last night I did not own to myself, because I hardly knew of
+it.  I love Edward Springrove with all my strength, and heart, and
+soul.  You call me a wanton for it, don't you?  I don't care; I have
+gone beyond caring for anything!'  She looked stonily into his face
+and made the speech calmly.
+
+'Well, poor Cytherea, don't talk like that!' he said, alarmed at her
+manner.
+
+'I thought that I did not love him at all,' she went on
+hysterically.  'A year and a half had passed since we met.  I could
+go by the gate of his garden without thinking of him--look at his
+seat in church and not care.  But I saw him this morning--dying
+because he loves me so--I know it is that!  Can I help loving him
+too?  No, I cannot, and I will love him, and I don't care!  We have
+been separated somehow by some contrivance--I know we have.  O, if I
+could only die!'
+
+He held her in his arms.  'Many a woman has gone to ruin herself,'
+he said, 'and brought those who love her into disgrace, by acting
+upon such impulses as possess you now.  I have a reputation to lose
+as well as you.  It seems that do what I will by way of remedying
+the stains which fell upon us, it is all doomed to be undone again.'
+His voice grew husky as he made the reply.
+
+The right and only effective chord had been touched.  Since she had
+seen Edward, she had thought only of herself and him.  Owen--her
+name--position--future--had been as if they did not exist.
+
+'I won't give way and become a disgrace to YOU, at any rate,' she
+said.
+
+'Besides, your duty to society, and those about you, requires that
+you should live with (at any rate) all the appearance of a good
+wife, and try to love your husband.'
+
+'Yes--my duty to society,' she murmured.  'But ah, Owen, it is
+difficult to adjust our outer and inner life with perfect honesty to
+all!  Though it may be right to care more for the benefit of the
+many than for the indulgence of your own single self, when you
+consider that the many, and duty to them, only exist to you through
+your own existence, what can be said?  What do our own acquaintances
+care about us?  Not much.  I think of mine.  Mine will now (do they
+learn all the wicked frailty of my heart in this affair) look at me,
+smile sickly, and condemn me.  And perhaps, far in time to come,
+when I am dead and gone, some other's accent, or some other's song,
+or thought, like an old one of mine, will carry them back to what I
+used to say, and hurt their hearts a little that they blamed me so
+soon.  And they will pause just for an instant, and give a sigh to
+me, and think, "Poor girl!" believing they do great justice to my
+memory by this.  But they will never, never realize that it was my
+single opportunity of existence, as well as of doing my duty, which
+they are regarding; they will not feel that what to them is but a
+thought, easily held in those two words of pity, "Poor girl!" was a
+whole life to me; as full of hours, minutes, and peculiar minutes,
+of hopes and dreads, smiles, whisperings, tears, as theirs:  that it
+was my world, what is to them their world, and they in that life of
+mine, however much I cared for them, only as the thought I seem to
+them to be.  Nobody can enter into another's nature truly, that's
+what is so grievous.'
+
+'Well, it cannot be helped,' said Owen.
+
+'But we must not stay here,' she continued, starting up and going.
+'We shall be missed.  I'll do my best, Owen--I will, indeed.'
+
+It had been decided that on account of the wretched state of the
+roads, the newly-married pair should not drive to the station till
+the latest hour in the afternoon at which they could get a train to
+take them to Southampton (their destination that night) by a
+reasonable time in the evening.  They intended the next morning to
+cross to Havre, and thence to Paris--a place Cytherea had never
+visited--for their wedding tour.
+
+The afternoon drew on.  The packing was done.  Cytherea was so
+restless that she could stay still nowhere.  Miss Aldclyffe, who,
+though she took little part in the day's proceedings, was, as it
+were, instinctively conscious of all their movements, put down her
+charge's agitation for once as the natural result of the novel
+event, and Manston himself was as indulgent as could be wished.
+
+At length Cytherea wandered alone into the conservatory.  When in
+it, she thought she would run across to the hot-house in the outer
+garden, having in her heart a whimsical desire that she should also
+like to take a last look at the familiar flowers and luxuriant
+leaves collected there.  She pulled on a pair of overshoes, and
+thither she went.  Not a soul was in or around the place.  The
+gardener was making merry on Manston's and her account.
+
+The happiness that a generous spirit derives from the belief that it
+exists in others is often greater than the primary happiness itself.
+The gardener thought 'How happy they are!' and the thought made him
+happier than they.
+
+Coming out of the forcing-house again, she was on the point of
+returning indoors, when a feeling that these moments of solitude
+would be her last of freedom induced her to prolong them a little,
+and she stood still, unheeding the wintry aspect of the curly-leaved
+plants, the straw-covered beds, and the bare fruit-trees around her.
+The garden, no part of which was visible from the house, sloped down
+to a narrow river at the foot, dividing it from the meadows without.
+
+A man was lingering along the public path on the other side of the
+river; she fancied she knew the form.  Her resolutions, taken in the
+presence of Owen, did not fail her now.  She hoped and prayed that
+it might not be one who had stolen her heart away, and still kept
+it.  Why should he have reappeared at all, when he had declared that
+he went out of her sight for ever?
+
+She hastily hid herself, in the lowest corner of the garden close to
+the river.  A large dead tree, thickly robed in ivy, had been
+considerably depressed by its icy load of the morning, and hung low
+over the stream, which here ran slow and deep.  The tree screened
+her from the eyes of any passer on the other side.
+
+She waited timidly, and her timidity increased.  She would not allow
+herself to see him--she would hear him pass, and then look to see if
+it had been Edward.
+
+But, before she heard anything, she became aware of an object
+reflected in the water from under the tree which hung over the river
+in such a way that, though hiding the actual path, and objects upon
+it, it permitted their reflected images to pass beneath its boughs.
+The reflected form was that of the man she had seen further off, but
+being inverted, she could not definitely characterize him.
+
+He was looking at the upper windows of the House--at hers--was it
+Edward, indeed?  If so, he was probably thinking he would like to
+say one parting word.  He came closer, gazed into the stream, and
+walked very slowly.  She was almost certain that it was Edward.  She
+kept more safely hidden.  Conscience told her that she ought not to
+see him.  But she suddenly asked herself a question:  'Can it be
+possible that he sees my reflected image, as I see his?  Of course
+he does!'
+
+He was looking at her in the water.
+
+She could not help herself now.  She stepped forward just as he
+emerged from the other side of the tree and appeared erect before
+her.  It was Edward Springrove--till the inverted vision met his
+eye, dreaming no more of seeing his Cytherea there than of seeing
+the dead themselves.
+
+'Cytherea!'
+
+'Mr. Springrove,' she returned, in a low voice, across the stream.
+
+He was the first to speak again.
+
+'Since we have met, I want to tell you something, before we become
+quite as strangers to each other.'
+
+'No--not now--I did not mean to speak--it is not right, Edward.'
+She spoke hurriedly and turned away from him, beating the air with
+her hand.
+
+'Not one common word of explanation?' he implored.  'Don't think I
+am bad enough to try to lead you astray.  Well, go--it is better.'
+
+Their eyes met again.  She was nearly choked.  O, how she longed--
+and dreaded--to hear his explanation!
+
+'What is it?' she said desperately.
+
+'It is that I did not come to the church this morning in order to
+distress you:  I did not, Cytherea.  It was to try to speak to you
+before you were--married.'
+
+He stepped closer, and went on, 'You know what has taken place?
+Surely you do?--my cousin is married, and I am free.'
+
+'Married--and not to you?' Cytherea faltered, in a weak whisper.
+
+'Yes, she was married yesterday!  A rich man had appeared, and she
+jilted me.  She said she never would have jilted a stranger, but
+that by jilting me, she only exercised the right everybody has of
+snubbing their own relations.  But that's nothing now.  I came to
+you to ask once more if. . . .  But I was too late.'
+
+'But, Edward, what's that, what's that!' she cried, in an agony of
+reproach.  'Why did you leave me to return to her?  Why did you
+write me that cruel, cruel letter that nearly killed me!'
+
+'Cytherea!  Why, you had grown to love--like--Mr. Manston, and how
+could you be anything to me--or care for me?  Surely I acted
+naturally?'
+
+'O no--never!  I loved you--only you--not him--always you!--till
+lately. . . .  I try to love him now.'
+
+'But that can't be correct!  Miss Aldclyffe told me that you wanted
+to hear no more of me--proved it to me!' said Edward.
+
+'Never! she couldn't.'
+
+'She did, Cytherea.  And she sent me a letter--a love-letter, you
+wrote to Mr. Manston.'
+
+'A love-letter I wrote?'
+
+'Yes, a love-letter--you could not meet him just then, you said you
+were sorry, but the emotion you had felt with him made you forgetful
+of realities.'
+
+The strife of thought in the unhappy girl who listened to this
+distortion of her meaning could find no vent in words.  And then
+there followed the slow revelation in return, bringing with it all
+the misery of an explanation which comes too late.  The question
+whether Miss Aldclyffe were schemer or dupe was almost passed over
+by Cytherea, under the immediate oppressiveness of her despair in
+the sense that her position was irretrievable.
+
+Not so Springrove.  He saw through all the cunning half-
+misrepresentations--worse than downright lies--which had just been
+sufficient to turn the scale both with him and with her; and from
+the bottom of his soul he cursed the woman and man who had brought
+all this agony upon him and his Love.  But he could not add more
+misery to the future of the poor child by revealing too much.  The
+whole scheme she should never know.
+
+'I was indifferent to my own future,' Edward said, 'and was urged to
+promise adherence to my engagement with my cousin Adelaide by Miss
+Aldclyffe:  now you are married I cannot tell you how, but it was on
+account of my father.  Being forbidden to think of you, what did I
+care about anything?  My new thought that you still loved me was
+first raised by what my father said in the letter announcing my
+cousin's marriage.  He said that although you were to be married on
+Old Christmas Day--that is to-morrow--he had noticed your appearance
+with pity:  he thought you loved me still.  It was enough for me--I
+came down by the earliest morning train, thinking I could see you
+some time to-day, the day, as I thought, before your marriage,
+hoping, but hardly daring to hope, that you might be induced to
+marry me.  I hurried from the station; when I reached the village I
+saw idlers about the church, and the private gate leading to the
+House open.  I ran into the church by the small door and saw you
+come out of the vestry; I was too late.  I have now told you.  I was
+compelled to tell you.  O, my lost darling, now I shall live
+content--or die content!'
+
+'I am to blame, Edward, I am,' she said mournfully; 'I was taught to
+dread pauperism; my nights were made sleepless; there was
+continually reiterated in my ears till I believed it--
+
+     '"The world and its ways have a certain worth,
+       And to press a point where these oppose
+       Were a simple policy."
+
+But I will say nothing about who influenced--who persuaded.  The act
+is mine, after all.  Edward, I married to escape dependence for my
+bread upon the whim of Miss Aldclyffe, or others like her.  It was
+clearly represented to me that dependence is bearable if we have
+another place which we can call home; but to be a dependent and to
+have no other spot for the heart to anchor upon--O, it is mournful
+and harassing!. . .  But that without which all persuasion would
+have been as air, was added by my miserable conviction that you were
+false; that did it, that turned me!  You were to be considered as
+nobody to me, and Mr. Manston was invariably kind.  Well, the deed
+is done--I must abide by it.  I shall never let him know that I do
+not love him--never.  If things had only remained as they seemed to
+be, if you had really forgotten me and married another woman, I
+could have borne it better.  I wish I did not know the truth as I
+know it now!  But our life, what is it?  Let us be brave, Edward,
+and live out our few remaining years with dignity.  They will not be
+long.  O, I hope they will not be long!. . .  Now, good-bye, good-
+bye!'
+
+'I wish I could be near and touch you once, just once,' said
+Springrove, in a voice which he vainly endeavoured to keep firm and
+clear.
+
+They looked at the river, then into it; a shoal of minnows was
+floating over the sandy bottom, like the black dashes on miniver;
+though narrow, the stream was deep, and there was no bridge.
+
+'Cytherea, reach out your hand that I may just touch it with mine.'
+
+She stepped to the brink and stretched out her hand and fingers
+towards his, but not into them.  The river was too wide.
+
+'Never mind,' said Cytherea, her voice broken by agitation, 'I must
+be going.  God bless and keep you, my Edward!  God bless you!'
+
+'I must touch you, I must press your hand,' he said.
+
+They came near--nearer--nearer still--their fingers met.  There was
+a long firm clasp, so close and still that each hand could feel the
+other's pulse throbbing beside its own.
+
+'My Cytherea! my stolen pet lamb!'
+
+She glanced a mute farewell from her large perturbed eyes, turned,
+and ran up the garden without looking back.  All was over between
+them.  The river flowed on as quietly and obtusely as ever, and the
+minnows gathered again in their favourite spot as if they had never
+been disturbed.
+
+Nobody indoors guessed from her countenance and bearing that her
+heart was near to breaking with the intensity of the misery which
+gnawed there.  At these times a woman does not faint, or weep, or
+scream, as she will in the moment of sudden shocks.  When lanced by
+a mental agony of such refined and special torture that it is
+indescribable by men's words, she moves among her acquaintances much
+as before, and contrives so to cast her actions in the old moulds
+that she is only considered to be rather duller than usual.
+
+5.  HALF-PAST TWO TO FIVE O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+Owen accompanied the newly-married couple to the railway-station,
+and in his anxiety to see the last of his sister, left the brougham
+and stood upon his crutches whilst the train was starting.
+
+When the husband and wife were about to enter the railway-carriage
+they saw one of the porters looking frequently and furtively at
+them.  He was pale, and apparently very ill.
+
+'Look at that poor sick man,' said Cytherea compassionately, 'surely
+he ought not to be here.'
+
+'He's been very queer to-day, madam, very queer,' another porter
+answered.  'He do hardly hear when he's spoken to, and d' seem
+giddy, or as if something was on his mind.  He's been like it for
+this month past, but nothing so bad as he is to-day.'
+
+'Poor thing.'
+
+She could not resist an innate desire to do some just thing on this
+most deceitful and wretched day of her life.  Going up to him she
+gave him money, and told him to send to the old manor-house for wine
+or whatever he wanted.
+
+The train moved off as the trembling man was murmuring his
+incoherent thanks.  Owen waved his hand; Cytherea smiled back to him
+as if it were unknown to her that she wept all the while.
+
+Owen was driven back to the Old House.  But he could not rest in the
+lonely place.  His conscience began to reproach him for having
+forced on the marriage of his sister with a little too much
+peremptoriness.  Taking up his crutches he went out of doors and
+wandered about the muddy roads with no object in view save that of
+getting rid of time.
+
+The clouds which had hung so low and densely during the day cleared
+from the west just now as the sun was setting, calling forth a
+weakly twitter from a few small birds.  Owen crawled down the path
+to the waterfall, and lingered thereabout till the solitude of the
+place oppressed him, when he turned back and into the road to the
+village.  He was sad; he said to himself--
+
+'If there is ever any meaning in those heavy feelings which are
+called presentiments--and I don't believe there is--there will be in
+mine to-day. . . .  Poor little Cytherea!'
+
+At that moment the last low rays of the sun touched the head and
+shoulders of a man who was approaching, and showed him up to Owen's
+view.  It was old  Mr. Springrove.  They had grown familiar with
+each other by reason of Owen's visits to Knapwater during the past
+year.  The farmer inquired how Owen's foot was progressing, and was
+glad to see him so nimble again.
+
+'How is your son?' said Owen mechanically.
+
+'He is at home, sitting by the fire,' said the farmer, in a sad
+voice.  'This morning he slipped indoors from God knows where, and
+there he sits and mopes, and thinks, and thinks, and presses his
+head so hard, that I can't help feeling for him.'
+
+'Is he married?' said Owen.  Cytherea had feared to tell him of the
+interview in the garden.
+
+'No.  I can't quite understand how the matter rests. . . .  Ah!
+Edward, too, who started with such promise; that he should now have
+become such a careless fellow--not a month in one place.  There, Mr.
+Graye, I know what it is mainly owing to.  If it hadn't been for
+that heart affair, he might have done--but the less said about him
+the better.  I don't know what we should have done if Miss Aldclyffe
+had insisted upon the conditions of the leases.  Your brother-in-
+law, the steward, had a hand in making it light for us, I know, and
+I heartily thank him for it.'  He ceased speaking, and looked round
+at the sky.
+
+'Have you heard o' what's happened?' he said suddenly; 'I was just
+coming out to learn about it.'
+
+'I haven't heard of anything.'
+
+'It is something very serious, though I don't know what.  All I know
+is what I heard a man call out bynow--that it very much concerns
+somebody who lives in the parish.'
+
+It seems singular enough, even to minds who have no dim beliefs in
+adumbration and presentiment, that at that moment not the shadow of
+a thought crossed Owen's mind that the somebody whom the matter
+concerned might be himself, or any belonging to him.  The event
+about to transpire was as portentous to the woman whose welfare was
+more dear to him than his own, as any, short of death itself, could
+possibly be; and ever afterwards, when he considered the effect of
+the knowledge the next half-hour conveyed to his brain, even his
+practical good sense could not refrain from wonder that he should
+have walked toward the village after hearing those words of the
+farmer, in so leisurely and unconcerned a way.  'How unutterably
+mean must my intelligence have appeared to the eye of a foreseeing
+God,' he frequently said in after-time.  'Columbus on the eve of his
+discovery of a world was not so contemptibly unaware.'
+
+After a few additional words of common-place the farmer left him,
+and, as has been said, Owen proceeded slowly and indifferently
+towards the village.
+
+The labouring men had just left work, and passed the park gate,
+which opened into the street as Owen came down towards it.  They
+went along in a drift, earnestly talking, and were finally about to
+turn in at their respective doorways.  But upon seeing him they
+looked significantly at one another, and paused.  He came into the
+road, on that side of the village-green which was opposite the row
+of cottages, and turned round to the right.  When Owen turned, all
+eyes turned; one or two men went hurriedly indoors, and afterwards
+appeared at the doorstep with their wives, who also contemplated
+him, talking as they looked.  They seemed uncertain how to act in
+some matter.
+
+'If they want me, surely they will call me,' he thought, wondering
+more and more.  He could no longer doubt that he was connected with
+the subject of their discourse.
+
+The first who approached him was a boy.
+
+'What has occurred?' said Owen.
+
+'O, a man ha' got crazy-religious, and sent for the pa'son.'
+
+'Is that all?'
+
+'Yes, sir.  He wished he was dead, he said, and he's almost out of
+his mind wi' wishen it so much.  That was before Mr. Raunham came.'
+
+'Who is he?' said Owen.
+
+'Joseph Chinney, one of the railway-porters; he used to be night-
+porter.'
+
+'Ah--the man who was ill this afternoon; by the way, he was told to
+come to the Old House for something, but he hasn't been.  But has
+anything else happened--anything that concerns the wedding to-day?'
+
+'No, sir.'
+
+Concluding that the connection which had seemed to be traced between
+himself and the event must in some way have arisen from Cytherea's
+friendliness towards the man, Owen turned about and went homewards
+in a much quieter frame of mind--yet scarcely satisfied with the
+solution.  The route he had chosen led through the dairy-yard, and
+he opened the gate.
+
+Five minutes before this point of time, Edward Springrove was
+looking over one of his father's fields at an outlying hamlet of
+three or four cottages some mile and a half distant.  A turnpike-
+gate was close by the gate of the field.
+
+The carrier to Casterbridge came up as Edward stepped into the road,
+and jumped down from the van to pay toll.  He recognized Springrove.
+'This is a pretty set-to in your place, sir,' he said.  'You don't
+know about it, I suppose?'
+
+'What?' said Springrove.
+
+The carrier paid his dues, came up to Edward, and spoke ten words in
+a confidential whisper:  then sprang upon the shafts of his vehicle,
+gave a clinching nod of significance to Springrove, and rattled
+away.
+
+Edward turned pale with the intelligence.  His first thought was,
+'Bring her home!'
+
+The next--did Owen Graye know what had been discovered?  He probably
+did by that time, but no risks of probability must be run by a woman
+he loved dearer than all the world besides.  He would at any rate
+make perfectly sure that her brother was in possession of the
+knowledge, by telling it him with his own lips.
+
+Off he ran in the direction of the old manor-house.
+
+The path was across arable land, and was ploughed up with the rest
+of the field every autumn, after which it was trodden out afresh.
+The thaw had so loosened the soft earth, that lumps of stiff mud
+were lifted by his feet at every leap he took, and flung against him
+by his rapid motion, as it were doggedly impeding him, and
+increasing tenfold the customary effort of running,
+
+But he ran on--uphill, and downhill, the same pace alike--like the
+shadow of a cloud.  His nearest direction, too, like Owen's, was
+through the dairy-barton, and as Owen entered it he saw the figure
+of Edward rapidly descending the opposite hill, at a distance of two
+or three hundred yards.  Owen advanced amid the cows.
+
+The dairyman, who had hitherto been talking loudly on some absorbing
+subject to the maids and men milking around him, turned his face
+towards the head of the cow when Owen passed, and ceased speaking.
+
+Owen approached him and said--
+
+'A singular thing has happened, I hear.  The man is not insane, I
+suppose?'
+
+'Not he--he's sensible enough,' said the dairyman, and paused.  He
+was a man noisy with his associates--stolid and taciturn with
+strangers.
+
+'Is it true that he is Chinney, the railway-porter?'
+
+'That's the man, sir.'  The maids and men sitting under the cows
+were all attentively listening to this discourse, milking
+irregularly, and softly directing the jets against the sides of the
+pail.
+
+Owen could contain himself no longer, much as his mind dreaded
+anything of the nature of ridicule.  'The people all seem to look at
+me, as if something seriously concerned me; is it this stupid
+matter, or what is it?'
+
+'Surely, sir, you know better than anybody else if such a strange
+thing concerns you.'
+
+'What strange thing?'
+
+'Don't you know!  His confessing to Parson Raunham.'
+
+'What did he confess?  Tell me.'
+
+'If you really ha'n't heard, 'tis this.  He was as usual on duty at
+the station on the night of the fire last year, otherwise he
+wouldn't ha' known it.'
+
+'Known what?  For God's sake tell, man!'
+
+But at this instant the two opposite gates of the dairy-yard, one on
+the east, the other on the west side, slammed almost simultaneously.
+
+The rector from one, Springrove from the other, came striding across
+the barton.
+
+Edward was nearest, and spoke first.  He said in a low voice:  'Your
+sister is not legally married!  His first wife is still living!  How
+it comes out I don't know!'
+
+'O, here you are at last, Mr. Graye, thank Heaven!' said the rector
+breathlessly.  'I have been to the Old House, and then to Miss
+Aldclyffe's looking for you--something very extraordinary.'  He
+beckoned to Owen, afterwards included Springrove in his glance, and
+the three stepped aside together.
+
+'A porter at the station.  He was a curious nervous man.  He had
+been in a strange state all day, but he wouldn't go home.  Your
+sister was kind to him, it seems, this afternoon.  When she and her
+husband had gone, he went on with his work, shifting luggage-vans.
+Well, he got in the way, as if he were quite lost to what was going
+on, and they sent him home at last.  Then he wished to see me.  I
+went directly.  There was something on his mind, he said, and told
+it.  About the time when the fire of last November twelvemonth was
+got under, whilst he was by himself in the porter's room, almost
+asleep, somebody came to the station and tried to open the door.  He
+went out and found the person to be the lady he had accompanied to
+Carriford earlier in the evening, Mrs. Manston.  She asked, when
+would be another train to London?  The first the next morning, he
+told her, was at a quarter-past six o'clock from Budmouth, but that
+it was express, and didn't stop at Carriford Road--it didn't stop
+till it got to Anglebury.  "How far is it to Anglebury?" she said.
+He told her, and she thanked him, and went away up the line.  In a
+short time she ran back and took out her purse.  "Don't on any
+account say a word in the village or anywhere that I have been here,
+or a single breath about me--I'm ashamed ever to have come."  He
+promised; she took out two sovereigns.  "Swear it on the Testament
+in the waiting-room," she said, "and I'll pay you these."  He got
+the book, took an oath upon it, received the money, and she left
+him.  He was off duty at half-past five.  He has kept silence all
+through the intervening time till now, but lately the knowledge he
+possessed weighed heavily upon his conscience and weak mind.  Yet
+the nearer came the wedding-day, the more he feared to tell.  The
+actual marriage filled him with remorse.  He says your sister's
+kindness afterwards was like a knife going through his heart.  He
+thought he had ruined her.'
+
+'But whatever can be done?  Why didn't he speak sooner?' cried Owen.
+
+'He actually called at my house twice yesterday,' the rector
+continued, 'resolved, it seems, to unburden his mind.  I was out
+both times--he left no message, and, they say, he looked relieved
+that his object was defeated.  Then he says he resolved to come to
+you at the Old House last night--started, reached the door, and
+dreaded to knock--and then went home again.'
+
+'Here will be a tale for the newsmongers of the county,' said Owen
+bitterly.  'The idea of his not opening his mouth sooner--the
+criminality of the thing!'
+
+'Ah, that's the inconsistency of a weak nature.  But now that it is
+put to us in this way, how much more probable it seems that she
+should have escaped than have been burnt--'
+
+'You will, of course, go straight to Mr. Manston, and ask him what
+it all means?' Edward interrupted.
+
+'Of course I shall!  Manston has no right to carry off my sister
+unless he's her husband,' said Owen.  'I shall go and separate
+them.'
+
+'Certainly you will,' said the rector.
+
+'Where's the man?'
+
+'In his cottage.'
+
+''Tis no use going to him, either.  I must go off at once and
+overtake them--lay the case before Manston, and ask him for
+additional and certain proofs of his first wife's death.  An up-
+train passes soon, I think.'
+
+'Where have they gone?' said Edward.
+
+'To Paris--as far as Southampton this afternoon, to proceed to-
+morrow morning.'
+
+'Where in Southampton?'
+
+'I really don't know--some hotel.  I only have their Paris address.
+But I shall find them by making a few inquiries.'
+
+The rector had in the meantime been taking out his pocket-book, and
+now opened it at the first page, whereon it was his custom every
+month to gum a small railway time-table--cut from the local
+newspaper.
+
+'The afternoon express is just gone,' he said, holding open the
+page, 'and the next train to Southampton passes at ten minutes to
+six o'clock.  Now it wants--let me see--five-and-forty minutes to
+that time.  Mr. Graye, my advice is that you come with me to the
+porter's cottage, where I will shortly write out the substance of
+what he has said, and get him to sign it.  You will then have far
+better grounds for interfering between Mr. and Mrs. Manston than if
+you went to them with a mere hearsay story.'
+
+The suggestion seemed a good one.  'Yes, there will be time before
+the train starts,' said Owen.
+
+Edward had been musing restlessly.
+
+'Let me go to Southampton in your place, on account of your
+lameness?' he said suddenly to Graye.
+
+'I am much obliged to you, but I think I can scarcely accept the
+offer,' returned Owen coldly.  'Mr. Manston is an honourable man,
+and I had much better see him myself.'
+
+'There is no doubt,' said Mr. Raunham, 'that the death of his wife
+was fully believed in by himself.'
+
+'None whatever,' said Owen; 'and the news must be broken to him, and
+the question of other proofs asked, in a friendly way.  It would not
+do for Mr. Springrove to appear in the case at all.'  He still spoke
+rather coldly; the recollection of the attachment between his sister
+and Edward was not a pleasant one to him.
+
+'You will never find them,' said Edward.  'You have never been to
+Southampton, and I know every house there.'
+
+'That makes little difference,' said the rector; 'he will have a
+cab.  Certainly Mr. Graye is the proper man to go on the errand.'
+
+'Stay; I'll telegraph to ask them to meet me when I arrive at the
+terminus,' said Owen; 'that is, if their train has not already
+arrived.'
+
+Mr. Raunham pulled out his pocket-book again.  'The two-thirty train
+reached Southampton a quarter of an hour ago,' he said.
+
+It was too late to catch them at the station.  Nevertheless, the
+rector suggested that it would be worth while to direct a message to
+'all the respectable hotels in Southampton,' on the chance of its
+finding them, and thus saving a deal of personal labour to Owen in
+searching about the place.
+
+'I'll go and telegraph, whilst you return to the man,' said Edward--
+an offer which was accepted.  Graye and the rector then turned off
+in the direction of the porter's cottage.
+
+Edward, to despatch the message at once, hurriedly followed the road
+towards the station, still restlessly thinking.  All Owen's
+proceedings were based on the assumption, natural under the
+circumstances, of Manston's good faith, and that he would readily
+acquiesce in any arrangement which should clear up the mystery.
+'But,' thought Edward, 'suppose--and Heaven forgive me, I cannot
+help supposing it--that Manston is not that honourable man, what
+will a young and inexperienced fellow like Owen do?  Will he not be
+hoodwinked by some specious story or another, framed to last till
+Manston gets tired of poor Cytherea?  And then the disclosure of the
+truth will ruin and blacken both their futures irremediably.'
+
+However, he proceeded to execute his commission.  This he put in the
+form of a simple request from Owen to Manston, that Manston would
+come to the Southampton platform, and wait for Owen's arrival, as he
+valued his reputation.  The message was directed as the rector had
+suggested, Edward guaranteeing to the clerk who sent it off that
+every expense connected with the search would be paid.
+
+No sooner had the telegram been despatched than his heart sank
+within him at the want of foresight shown in sending it.  Had
+Manston, all the time, a knowledge that his first wife lived, the
+telegram would be a forewarning which might enable him to defeat
+Owen still more signally.
+
+Whilst the machine was still giving off its multitudinous series of
+raps, Edward heard a powerful rush under the shed outside, followed
+by a long sonorous creak.  It was a train of some sort, stealing
+softly into the station, and it was an up-train.  There was the ring
+of a bell.  It was certainly a passenger train.
+
+Yet the booking-office window was closed.
+
+'Ho, ho, John, seventeen minutes after time and only three stations
+up the line.  The incline again?'  The voice was the
+stationmaster's, and the reply seemed to come from the guard.
+
+'Yes, the other side of the cutting.  The thaw has made it all in a
+perfect cloud of fog, and the rails are as slippery as glass.  We
+had to bring them through the cutting at twice.'
+
+'Anybody else for the four-forty-five express?' the voice continued.
+The few passengers, having crossed over to the other side long
+before this time, had taken their places at once.
+
+A conviction suddenly broke in upon Edward's mind; then a wish
+overwhelmed him.  The conviction--as startling as it was sudden--was
+that Manston was a villain, who at some earlier time had discovered
+that his wife lived, and had bribed her to keep out of sight, that
+he might possess Cytherea.  The wish was--to proceed at once by this
+very train that was starting, find Manston before he would expect
+from the words of the telegram (if he got it) that anybody from
+Carriford could be with him--charge him boldly with the crime, and
+trust to his consequent confusion (if he were guilty) for a solution
+of the extraordinary riddle, and the release of Cytherea!
+
+The ticket-office had been locked up at the expiration of the time
+at which the train was due.  Rushing out as the guard blew his
+whistle, Edward opened the door of a carriage and leapt in.  The
+train moved along, and he was soon out of sight.
+
+Springrove had long since passed that peculiar line which lies
+across the course of falling in love--if, indeed, it may not be
+called the initial itself of the complete passion--a longing to
+cherish; when the woman is shifted in a man's mind from the region
+of mere admiration to the region of warm fellowship.  At this
+assumption of her nature, she changes to him in tone, hue, and
+expression.  All about the loved one that said 'She' before, says
+'We' now.  Eyes that were to be subdued become eyes to be feared
+for:  a brain that was to be probed by cynicism becomes a brain that
+is to be tenderly assisted; feet that were to be tested in the dance
+become feet that are not to be distressed; the once-criticized
+accent, manner, and dress, become the clients of a special pleader.
+
+6.  FIVE TO EIGHT O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+Now that he was fairly on the track, and had begun to cool down,
+Edward remembered that he had nothing to show--no legal authority
+whatever to question Manston or interfere between him and Cytherea
+as husband and wife.  He now saw the wisdom of the rector in
+obtaining a signed confession from the porter.  The document would
+not be a death-bed confession--perhaps not worth anything legally--
+but it would be held by Owen; and he alone, as Cytherea's natural
+guardian, could separate them on the mere ground of an unproved
+probability, or what might perhaps be called the hallucination of an
+idiot.  Edward himself, however, was as firmly convinced as the
+rector had been of the truth of the man's story, and paced backward
+and forward the solitary compartment as the train wound through the
+dark heathery plains, the mazy woods, and moaning coppices, as
+resolved as ever to pounce on Manston, and charge him with the crime
+during the critical interval between the reception of the telegram
+and the hour at which Owen's train would arrive--trusting to
+circumstances for what he should say and do afterwards, but making
+up his mind to be a ready second to Owen in any emergency that might
+arise.
+
+At thirty-three minutes past seven he stood on the platform of the
+station at Southampton--a clear hour before the train containing
+Owen could possibly arrive.
+
+Making a few inquiries here, but too impatient to pursue his
+investigation carefully and inductively, he went into the town.
+
+At the expiration of another half-hour he had visited seven hotels
+and inns, large and small, asking the same questions at each, and
+always receiving the same reply--nobody of that name, or answering
+to that description, had been there.  A boy from the telegraph-
+office had called, asking for the same persons, if they recollected
+rightly.
+
+He reflected awhile, struck again by a painful thought that they
+might possibly have decided to cross the Channel by the night-boat.
+Then he hastened off to another quarter of the town to pursue his
+inquiries among hotels of the more old-fashioned and quiet class.
+His stained and weary appearance obtained for him but a modicum of
+civility, wherever he went, which made his task yet more difficult.
+He called at three several houses in this neighbourhood, with the
+same result as before.  He entered the door of the fourth house
+whilst the clock of the nearest church was striking eight.
+
+'Have a tall gentleman named Manston, and a young wife arrived here
+this evening?' he asked again, in words which had grown odd to his
+ears from very familiarity.
+
+'A new-married couple, did you say?'
+
+'They are, though I didn't say so.'
+
+'They have taken a sitting-room and bedroom, number thirteen.'
+
+'Are they indoors?'
+
+'I don't know.  Eliza!'
+
+'Yes, m'm.'
+
+'See if number thirteen is in--that gentleman and his wife.'
+
+'Yes, m'm.'
+
+'Has any telegram come for them?' said Edward, when the maid had
+gone on her errand.
+
+'No--nothing that I know of.'
+
+'Somebody did come and ask if a Mr. and Mrs. Masters, or some such
+name, were here this evening,' said another voice from the back of
+the bar-parlour.
+
+'And did they get the message?'
+
+'Of course they did not--they were not here--they didn't come till
+half-an-hour after that.  The man who made inquiries left no
+message.  I told them when they came that they, or a name something
+like theirs, had been asked for, but they didn't seem to understand
+why it should be, and so the matter dropped.'
+
+The chambermaid came back.  'The gentleman is not in, but the lady
+is.  Who shall I say?'
+
+'Nobody,' said Edward.  For it now became necessary to reflect upon
+his method of proceeding.  His object in finding their whereabouts--
+apart from the wish to assist Owen--had been to see Manston, ask him
+flatly for an explanation, and confirm the request of the message in
+the presence of Cytherea--so as to prevent the possibility of the
+steward's palming off a story upon Cytherea, or eluding her brother
+when he came.  But here were two important modifications of the
+expected condition of affairs.  The telegram had not been received,
+and Cytherea was in the house alone.
+
+He hesitated as to the propriety of intruding upon her in Manston's
+absence.  Besides, the women at the bottom of the stairs would see
+him--his intrusion would seem odd--and Manston might return at any
+moment.  He certainly might call, and wait for Manston with the
+accusation upon his tongue, as he had intended.  But it was a
+doubtful course.  That idea had been based upon the assumption that
+Cytherea was not married.  If the first wife were really dead after
+all--and he felt sick at the thought--Cytherea as the steward's wife
+might in after-years--perhaps, at once--be subjected to indignity
+and cruelty on account of an old lover's interference now.
+
+Yes, perhaps the announcement would come most properly and safely
+for her from her brother Owen, the time of whose arrival had almost
+expired.
+
+But, on turning round, he saw that the staircase and passage were
+quite deserted.  He and his errand had as completely died from the
+minds of the attendants as if they had never been.  There was
+absolutely nothing between him and Cytherea's presence.  Reason was
+powerless now; he must see her--right or wrong, fair or unfair to
+Manston--offensive to her brother or no.  His lips must be the first
+to tell the alarming story to her.  Who loved her as he!  He went
+back lightly through the hall, up the stairs, two at a time, and
+followed the corridor till he came to the door numbered thirteen.
+
+He knocked softly:  nobody answered.
+
+There was no time to lose if he would speak to Cytherea before
+Manston came.  He turned the handle of the door and looked in.  The
+lamp on the table burned low, and showed writing materials open
+beside it; the chief light came from the fire, the direct rays of
+which were obscured by a sweet familiar outline of head and
+shoulders--still as precious to him as ever.
+
+7.  A QUARTER-PAST EIGHT O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+There is an attitude--approximatively called pensive--in which the
+soul of a human being, and especially of a woman, dominates
+outwardly and expresses its presence so strongly, that the
+intangible essence seems more apparent than the body itself.  This
+was Cytherea's expression now.  What old days and sunny eves at
+Budmouth Bay was she picturing?  Her reverie had caused her not to
+notice his knock.
+
+'Cytherea!' he said softly.
+
+She let drop her hand, and turned her head, evidently thinking that
+her visitor could be no other than Manston, yet puzzled at the
+voice.
+
+There was no preface on Springrove's tongue; he forgot his position-
+-hers--that he had come to ask quietly if Manston had other proofs
+of being a widower--everything--and jumped to a conclusion.
+
+'You are not his wife, Cytherea--come away, he has a wife living!'
+he cried in an agitated whisper.  'Owen will be here directly.'
+
+She started up, recognized the tidings first, the bearer of them
+afterwards.  'Not his wife?  O, what is it--what--who is living?'
+She awoke by degrees.  'What must I do?  Edward, it is you!  Why did
+you come?  Where is Owen?'
+
+'What has Manston shown you in proof of the death of his other wife?
+Tell me quick.'
+
+'Nothing--we have never spoken of the subject.  Where is my brother
+Owen?  I want him, I want him!'
+
+'He is coming by-and-by.  Come to the station to meet him--do,'
+implored Springrove.  'If Mr. Manston comes, he will keep you from
+me:  I am nobody,' he added bitterly, feeling the reproach her words
+had faintly shadowed forth.
+
+'Mr. Manston is only gone out to post a letter he has just written,'
+she said, and without being distinctly cognizant of the action, she
+wildly looked for her bonnet and cloak, and began putting them on,
+but in the act of fastening them uttered a spasmodic cry.
+
+'No, I'll not go out with you,' she said, flinging the articles down
+again.  Running to the door she flitted along the passage, and
+downstairs.
+
+'Give me a private room--quite private,' she said breathlessly to
+some one below.
+
+'Number twelve is a single room, madam, and unoccupied,' said some
+tongue in astonishment.
+
+Without waiting for any person to show her into it, Cytherea hurried
+upstairs again, brushed through the corridor, entered the room
+specified, and closed the door.  Edward heard her sob out--
+
+'Nobody but Owen shall speak to me--nobody!'
+
+'He will be here directly,' said Springrove, close against the
+panel, and then went towards the stairs.  He had seen her; it was
+enough.
+
+He descended, stepped into the street, and hastened to meet Owen at
+the railway-station.
+
+As for the poor maiden who had received the news, she knew not what
+to think.  She listened till the echo of Edward's footsteps had died
+away, then bowed her face upon the bed.  Her sudden impulse had been
+to escape from sight.  Her weariness after the unwonted strain,
+mental and bodily, which had been put upon her by the scenes she had
+passed through during the long day, rendered her much more timid and
+shaken by her position than she would naturally have been.  She
+thought and thought of that single fact which had been told her--
+that the first Mrs. Manston was still living--till her brain seemed
+ready to burst its confinement with excess of throbbing.  It was
+only natural that she should, by degrees, be unable to separate the
+discovery, which was matter of fact, from the suspicion of treachery
+on her husband's part, which was only matter of inference.  And thus
+there arose in her a personal fear of him.
+
+'Suppose he should come in now and seize me!'  This at first mere
+frenzied supposition grew by degrees to a definite horror of his
+presence, and especially of his intense gaze.  Thus she raised
+herself to a heat of excitement, which was none the less real for
+being vented in no cry of any kind.  No; she could not meet
+Manston's eye alone, she would only see him in her brother's
+company.
+
+Almost delirious with this idea, she ran and locked the door to
+prevent all possibility of her intentions being nullified, or a look
+or word being flung at her by anybody whilst she knew not what she
+was.
+
+8.  HALF-PAST EIGHT O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+Then Cytherea felt her way amid the darkness of the room till she
+came to the head of the bed, where she searched for the bell-rope
+and gave it a pull.  Her summons was speedily answered by the
+landlady herself, whose curiosity to know the meaning of these
+strange proceedings knew no bounds.  The landlady attempted to turn
+the handle of the door.  Cytherea kept the door locked.  'Please
+tell Mr. Manston when he comes that I am ill,' she said from the
+inside, 'and that I cannot see him.'
+
+'Certainly I will, madam,' said the landlady.  'Won't you have a
+fire?'
+
+'No, thank you.'
+
+'Nor a light?'
+
+'I don't want one, thank you.'
+
+'Nor anything?'
+
+'Nothing.'
+
+The landlady withdrew, thinking her visitor half insane.
+
+Manston came in about five minutes later, and went at once up to the
+sitting-room, fully expecting to find his wife there.  He looked
+round, rang, and was told the words Cytherea had said, that she was
+too ill to be seen.
+
+'She is in number twelve room,' added the maid.
+
+Manston was alarmed, and knocked at the door.  'Cytherea!'
+
+'I am unwell, I cannot see you,' she said.
+
+'Are you seriously ill, dearest?  Surely not.'
+
+'No, not seriously.'
+
+'Let me come in; I will get a doctor.'
+
+'No, he can't see me either.'
+
+'She won't open the door, sir, not to nobody at all!' said the
+chambermaid, with wonder-waiting eyes.
+
+'Hold your tongue, and be off!' said Manston with a snap.
+
+The maid vanished.
+
+'Come, Cytherea, this is foolish--indeed it is--not opening the
+door. . . .  I cannot comprehend what can be the matter with you.
+Nor can a doctor either, unless he sees you.'
+
+Her voice had trembled more and more at each answer she gave, but
+nothing could induce her to come out and confront him.  Hating
+scenes, Manston went back to the sitting-room, greatly irritated and
+perplexed.
+
+And there Cytherea from the adjoining room could hear him pacing up
+and down.  She thought, 'Suppose he insists upon seeing me--he
+probably may--and will burst open the door!'  This notion increased,
+and she sank into a corner in a half-somnolent state, but with ears
+alive to the slightest sound.  Reason could not overthrow the
+delirious fancy that outside her door stood Manston and all the
+people in the hotel, waiting to laugh her to scorn.
+
+9.  HALF-PAST EIGHT TO ELEVEN P.M.
+
+In the meantime, Springrove was pacing up and down the arrival
+platform of the railway-station.  Half-past eight o'clock--the time
+at which Owen's train was due--had come, and passed, but no train
+appeared.
+
+'When will the eight-thirty train be in?' he asked of a man who was
+sweeping the mud from the steps.
+
+'She is not expected yet this hour.'
+
+'How is that?'
+
+'Christmas-time, you see, 'tis always so.  People are running about
+to see their friends.  The trains have been like it ever since
+Christmas Eve, and will be for another week yet.'
+
+Edward again went on walking and waiting under the draughty roof.
+He found it utterly impossible to leave the spot.  His mind was so
+intent upon the importance of meeting with Owen, and informing him
+of Cytherea's whereabouts, that he could not but fancy Owen might
+leave the station unobserved if he turned his back, and become lost
+to him in the streets of the town.
+
+The hour expired.  Ten o'clock struck.  'When will the train be in?'
+said Edward to the telegraph clerk.
+
+'In five-and-thirty minutes.  She's now at L----.  They have extra
+passengers, and the rails are bad to-day.'
+
+At last, at a quarter to eleven, the train came in.
+
+The first to alight from it was Owen, looking pale and cold.  He
+casually glanced round upon the nearly deserted platform, and was
+hurrying to the outlet, when his eyes fell upon Edward.  At sight of
+his friend he was quite bewildered, and could not speak.
+
+'Here I am, Mr. Graye,' said Edward cheerfully.  'I have seen
+Cytherea, and she has been waiting for you these two or three
+hours.'
+
+Owen took Edward's hand, pressed it, and looked at him in silence.
+Such was the concentration of his mind, that not till many minutes
+after did he think of inquiring how Springrove had contrived to be
+there before him.
+
+10.  ELEVEN O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+On their arrival at the door of the hotel, it was arranged between
+Springrove and Graye that the latter only should enter, Edward
+waiting outside.  Owen had remembered continually what his friend
+had frequently overlooked, that there was yet a possibility of his
+sister being Manston's wife, and the recollection taught him to
+avoid any rashness in his proceedings which might lead to bitterness
+hereafter.
+
+Entering the room, he found Manston sitting in the chair which had
+been occupied by Cytherea on Edward's visit, three hours earlier.
+Before Owen had spoken, Manston arose, and stepping past him closed
+the door.  His face appeared harassed--much more troubled than the
+slight circumstance which had as yet come to his knowledge seemed to
+account for.
+
+Manston could form no reason for Owen's presence, but intuitively
+linked it with Cytherea's seclusion.  'Altogether this is most
+unseemly,' he said, 'whatever it may mean.'
+
+'Don't think there is meant anything unfriendly by my coming here,'
+said Owen earnestly; 'but listen to this, and think if I could do
+otherwise than come.'
+
+He took from his pocket the confession of Chinney the porter, as
+hastily written out by the vicar, and read it aloud.  The aspects of
+Manston's face whilst he listened to the opening words were strange,
+dark, and mysterious enough to have justified suspicions that no
+deceit could be too complicated for the possessor of such impulses,
+had there not overridden them all, as the reading went on, a new and
+irrepressible expression--one unmistakably honest.  It was that of
+unqualified amazement in the steward's mind at the news he heard.
+Owen looked up and saw it.  The sight only confirmed him in the
+belief he had held throughout, in antagonism to Edward's suspicions.
+
+There could no longer be a shadow of doubt that if the first Mrs.
+Manston lived, her husband was ignorant of the fact.  What he could
+have feared by his ghastly look at first, and now have ceased to
+fear, it was quite futile to conjecture.
+
+'Now I do not for a moment doubt your complete ignorance of the
+whole matter; you cannot suppose for an instant that I do,' said
+Owen when he had finished reading.  'But is it not best for both
+that Cytherea should come back with me till the matter is cleared
+up?  In fact, under the circumstances, no other course is left open
+to me than to request it.'
+
+Whatever Manston's original feelings had been, all in him now gave
+way to irritation, and irritation to rage.  He paced up and down the
+room till he had mastered it; then said in ordinary tones--
+
+'Certainly, I know no more than you and others know--it was a
+gratuitous unpleasantness in you to say you did not doubt me.  Why
+should you, or anybody, have doubted me?'
+
+'Well, where is my sister?' said Owen.
+
+'Locked in the next room.'
+
+His own answer reminded Manston that Cytherea must, by some
+inscrutable means, have had an inkling of the event.
+
+Owen had gone to the door of Cytherea's room.
+
+'Cytherea, darling--'tis Owen,' he said, outside the door.  A
+rustling of clothes, soft footsteps, and a voice saying from the
+inside, 'Is it really you, Owen,--is it really?'
+
+'It is.'
+
+'O, will you take care of me?'
+
+'Always.'
+
+She unlocked the door, and retreated again.  Manston came forward
+from the other room with a candle in his hand, as Owen pushed open
+the door.
+
+Her frightened eyes were unnaturally large, and shone like stars in
+the darkness of the background, as the light fell upon them.  She
+leapt up to Owen in one bound, her small taper fingers extended like
+the leaves of a lupine.  Then she clasped her cold and trembling
+hands round his neck and shivered.
+
+The sight of her again kindled all Manston's passions into activity.
+'She shall not go with you,' he said firmly, and stepping a pace or
+two closer, 'unless you prove that she is not my wife; and you can't
+do it!'
+
+'This is proof,' said Owen, holding up the paper.
+
+'No proof at all,' said Manston hotly.  ''Tis not a death-bed
+confession, and those are the only things of the kind held as good
+evidence.'
+
+'Send for a lawyer,' Owen returned, 'and let him tell us the proper
+course to adopt.'
+
+'Never mind the law--let me go with Owen!' cried Cytherea, still
+holding on to him.  'You will let me go with him, won't you, sir?'
+she said, turning appealingly to Manston.
+
+'We'll have it all right and square,' said Manston, with more
+quietness.  'I have no objection to your brother sending for a
+lawyer, if he wants to.'
+
+It was getting on for twelve o'clock, but the proprietor of the
+hotel had not yet gone to bed on account of the mystery on the first
+floor, which was an occurrence unusual in the quiet family lodging.
+Owen looked over the banisters, and saw him standing in the hall.
+It struck Graye that the wisest course would be to take the landlord
+to a certain extent into their confidence, appeal to his honour as a
+gentleman, and so on, in order to acquire the information he wanted,
+and also to prevent the episode of the evening from becoming a
+public piece of news.  He called the landlord up to where they
+stood, and told him the main facts of the story.
+
+The landlord was fortunately a quiet, prejudiced man, and a
+meditative smoker.
+
+'I know the very man you want to see--the very man,' he said,
+looking at the general features of the candle-flame.  'Sharp as a
+needle, and not over-rich.  Timms will put you all straight in no
+time--trust Timms for that.'
+
+'He's in bed by this time for certain,' said Owen.
+
+'Never mind that--Timms knows me, I know him.  He'll oblige me as a
+personal favour.  Wait here a bit.  Perhaps, too, he's up at some
+party or another--he's a nice, jovial fellow, sharp as a needle,
+too; mind you, sharp as a needle, too.'
+
+He went downstairs, put on his overcoat, and left the house, the
+three persons most concerned entering the room, and standing
+motionless, awkward, and silent in the midst of it.  Cytherea
+pictured to herself the long weary minutes she would have to stand
+there, whilst a sleepy man could be prepared for consultation, till
+the constraint between them seemed unendurable to her--she could
+never last out the time.  Owen was annoyed that Manston had not
+quietly arranged with him at once; Manston at Owen's homeliness of
+idea in proposing to send for an attorney, as if he would be a
+touchstone of infallible proof.
+
+Reflection was cut short by the approach of footsteps, and in a few
+moments the proprietor of the hotel entered, introducing his friend.
+'Mr. Timms has not been in bed,' he said; 'he had just returned from
+dining with a few friends, so there's no trouble given.  To save
+time I explained the matter as we came along.'
+
+It occurred to Owen and Manston both that they might get a misty
+exposition of the law from Mr. Timms at that moment of concluding
+dinner with a few friends.
+
+'As far as I can see,' said the lawyer, yawning, and turning his
+vision inward by main force, 'it is quite a matter for private
+arrangement between the parties, whoever the parties are--at least
+at present.  I speak more as a father than as a lawyer, it is true,
+but, let the young lady stay with her father, or guardian, safe out
+of shame's way, until the mystery is sifted, whatever the mystery
+is.  Should the evidence prove to be false, or trumped up by anybody
+to get her away from you, her husband, you may sue them for the
+damages accruing from the delay.'
+
+'Yes, yes,' said Manston, who had completely recovered his self-
+possession and common-sense; 'let it all be settled by herself.'
+Turning to Cytherea he whispered so softly that Owen did not hear
+the words--
+
+'Do you wish to go back with your brother, dearest, and leave me
+here miserable, and lonely, or will you stay with me, your own
+husband.'
+
+'I'll go back with Owen.'
+
+'Very well.'  He relinquished his coaxing tone, and went on sternly:
+'And remember this, Cytherea, I am as innocent of deception in this
+thing as you are yourself.  Do you believe me?'
+
+'I do,' she said.
+
+'I had no shadow of suspicion that my first wife lived.  I don't
+think she does even now.  Do you believe me?'
+
+'I believe you,' she said.
+
+'And now, good-evening,' he continued, opening the door and politely
+intimating to the three men standing by that there was no further
+necessity for their remaining in his room.  'In three days I shall
+claim her.'
+
+The lawyer and the hotel-keeper retired first.  Owen, gathering up
+as much of his sister's clothing as lay about the room, took her
+upon his arm, and followed them.  Edward, to whom she owed
+everything, who had been left standing in the street like a dog
+without a home, was utterly forgotten.  Owen paid the landlord and
+the lawyer for the trouble he had occasioned them, looked to the
+packing, and went to the door.
+
+A fly, which somewhat unaccountably was seen lingering in front of
+the house, was called up, and Cytherea's luggage put upon it.
+
+'Do you know of any hotel near the station that is open for night
+arrivals?' Owen inquired of the driver.
+
+'A place has been bespoke for you, sir, at the White Unicorn--and
+the gentleman wished me to give you this.'
+
+'Bespoken by Springrove, who ordered the fly, of course,' said Owen
+to himself.  By the light of the street-lamp he read these lines,
+hurriedly traced in pencil:--
+
+'I have gone home by the mail-train.  It is better for all parties
+that I should be out of the way.  Tell Cytherea that I apologize for
+having caused her such unnecessary pain, as it seems I did--but it
+cannot be helped now.   E.S.'
+
+Owen handed his sister into the vehicle, and told the flyman to
+drive on.
+
+'Poor Springrove--I think we have served him rather badly,' he said
+to Cytherea, repeating the words of the note to her.
+
+A thrill of pleasure passed through her bosom as she listened to
+them.  They were the genuine reproach of a lover to his mistress;
+the trifling coldness of her answer to him would have been noticed
+by no man who was only a friend.  But, in entertaining that sweet
+thought, she had forgotten herself, and her position for the
+instant.
+
+Was she still Manston's wife--that was the terrible supposition, and
+her future seemed still a possible misery to her.  For, on account
+of the late jarring accident, a life with Manston which would
+otherwise have been only a sadness, must become a burden of
+unutterable sorrow.
+
+Then she thought of the misrepresentation and scandal that would
+ensue if she were no wife.  One cause for thankfulness accompanied
+the reflection; Edward knew the truth.
+
+They soon reached the quiet old inn, which had been selected for
+them by the forethought of the man who loved her well.  Here they
+installed themselves for the night, arranging to go to Budmouth by
+the first train the next day.
+
+At this hour Edward Springrove was fast approaching his native
+county on the wheels of the night-mail.
+
+
+
+XIV.  THE EVENTS OF FIVE WEEKS
+
+1.  FROM THE SIXTH TO THE THIRTEENTH OF JANUARY
+
+Manston had evidently resolved to do nothing in a hurry.
+
+This much was plain, that his earnest desire and intention was to
+raise in Cytherea's bosom no feelings of permanent aversion to him.
+The instant after the first burst of disappointment had escaped him
+in the hotel at Southampton, he had seen how far better it would be
+to lose her presence for a week than her respect for ever.
+
+'She shall be mine; I will claim the young thing yet,' he insisted.
+And then he seemed to reason over methods for compassing that
+object, which, to all those who were in any degree acquainted with
+the recent event, appeared the least likely of possible
+contingencies.
+
+He returned to Knapwater late the next day, and was preparing to
+call on Miss Aldclyffe, when the conclusion forced itself upon him
+that nothing would be gained by such a step.  No; every action of
+his should be done openly--even religiously.  At least, he called on
+the rector, and stated this to be his resolve.
+
+'Certainly,' said Mr. Raunham, 'it is best to proceed candidly and
+fairly, or undue suspicion may fall on you.  You should, in my
+opinion, take active steps at once.'
+
+'I will do the utmost that lies in my power to clear up the mystery,
+and silence the hubbub of gossip that has been set going about me.
+But what can I do?  They say that the man who comes first in the
+chain of inquiry is not to be found--I mean the porter.'
+
+'I am sorry to say that he is not.  When I returned from the station
+last night, after seeing Owen Graye off, I went again to the cottage
+where he has been lodging, to get more intelligence, as I thought.
+He was not there.  He had gone out at dusk, saying he would be back
+soon.  But he has not come back yet.'
+
+'I rather doubt if we shall see him again.'
+
+'Had I known of this, I would have done what in my flurry I did not
+think of doing--set a watch upon him.  But why not advertise for
+your missing wife as a preliminary, consulting your solicitor in the
+meantime?'
+
+'Advertise.  I'll think about it,' said Manston, lingering on the
+word as he pronounced it.  'Yes, that seems a right thing--quite a
+right thing.'
+
+He went home and remained moodily indoors all the next day and the
+next--for nearly a week, in short.  Then, one evening at dusk, he
+went out with an uncertain air as to the direction of his walk,
+which resulted, however, in leading him again to the rectory.
+
+He saw Mr. Raunham.  'Have you done anything yet?' the rector
+inquired.
+
+'No--I have not,' said Manston absently.  'But I am going to set
+about it.'  He hesitated, as if ashamed of some weakness he was
+about to betray.  'My object in calling was to ask if you had heard
+any tidings from Budmouth of my--Cytherea.  You used to speak of her
+as one you were interested in.'
+
+There was, at any rate, real sadness in Manston's tone now, and the
+rector paused to weigh his words ere he replied.
+
+'I have not heard directly from her,' he said gently.  'But her
+brother has communicated with some people in the parish--'
+
+'The Springroves, I suppose,' said Manston gloomily.
+
+'Yes; and they tell me that she is very ill, and I am sorry to say,
+likely to be for some days.'
+
+'Surely, surely, I must go and see her!' Manston cried.
+
+'I would advise you not to go,' said Raunham.  'But do this instead-
+-be as quick as you can in making a movement towards ascertaining
+the truth as regards the existence of your wife.  You see, Mr.
+Manston, an out-step place like this is not like a city, and there
+is nobody to busy himself for the good of the community; whilst poor
+Cytherea and her brother are socially too dependent to be able to
+make much stir in the matter, which is a greater reason still why
+you should be disinterestedly prompt.'
+
+The steward murmured an assent.  Still there was the same
+indecision!--not the indecision of weakness--the indecision of
+conscious perplexity.
+
+On Manston's return from this interview at the rectory, he passed
+the door of the Rising Sun Inn.  Finding he had no light for his
+cigar, and it being three-quarters of a mile to his residence in the
+park, he entered the tavern to get one.  Nobody was in the outer
+portion of the front room where Manston stood, but a space round the
+fire was screened off from the remainder, and inside the high oak
+settle, forming a part of the screen, he heard voices conversing.
+The speakers had not noticed his footsteps, and continued their
+discourse.
+
+One of the two he recognized as a well-known night-poacher, the man
+who had met him with tidings of his wife's death on the evening of
+the conflagration.  The
+other seemed to be a stranger following the same mode of life.  The
+conversation was carried on in the emphatic and confidential tone of
+men who are slightly intoxicated, its subject being an unaccountable
+experience that one of them had had on the night of the fire.
+
+What the steward heard was enough, and more than enough, to lead him
+to forget or to renounce his motive in entering.  The effect upon
+him was strange and strong.  His first object seemed to be to escape
+from the house again without being seen or heard.
+
+Having accomplished this, he went in at the park gate, and strode
+off under the trees to the Old House.  There sitting down by the
+fire, and burying himself in reflection, he allowed the minutes to
+pass by unheeded.  First the candle burnt down in its socket and
+stunk:  he did not notice it.  Then the fire went out:  he did not
+see it.  His feet grew cold; still he thought on.
+
+It may be remarked that a lady, a year and a quarter before this
+time, had, under the same conditions--an unrestricted mental
+absorption--shown nearly the same peculiarities as this man evinced
+now.  The lady was Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+It was half-past twelve when Manston moved, as if he had come to a
+determination.
+
+The first thing he did the next morning was to call at Knapwater
+House; where he found that Miss Aldclyffe was not well enough to see
+him.  She had been ailing from slight internal haemorrhage ever
+since the confession of the porter Chinney.  Apparently not much
+aggrieved at the denial, he shortly afterwards went to the railway-
+station and took his departure for London, leaving a letter for Miss
+Aldclyffe, stating the reason of his journey thither--to recover
+traces of his missing wife.
+
+During the remainder of the week paragraphs appeared in the local
+and other newspapers, drawing attention to the facts of this
+singular case.  The writers, with scarcely an exception, dwelt
+forcibly upon a feature which had at first escaped the observation
+of the villagers, including Mr. Raunham--that if the announcement of
+the man Chinney were true, it seemed extremely probable that Mrs.
+Manston left her watch and keys behind on purpose to blind people as
+to her escape; and that therefore she would not now let herself be
+discovered, unless a strong pressure were put upon her.  The writers
+added that the police were on the track of the porter, who very
+possibly had absconded in the fear that his reticence was criminal,
+and that Mr. Manston, the husband, was, with praiseworthy energy,
+making every effort to clear the whole matter up.
+
+2.  FROM THE EIGHTEENTH TO THE END OF JANUARY
+
+Five days from the time of his departure, Manston returned from
+London and Liverpool, looking very fatigued and thoughtful.  He
+explained to the rector and other of his acquaintance that all the
+inquiries he had made at his wife's old lodgings and his own had
+been totally barren of results.
+
+But he seemed inclined to push the affair to a clear conclusion now
+that he had commenced.  After the lapse of another day or two he
+proceeded to fulfil his promise to the rector, and advertised for
+the missing woman in three of the London papers.  The advertisement
+was a carefully considered and even attractive effusion, calculated
+to win the heart, or at least the understanding, of any woman who
+had a spark of her own nature left in her.
+
+There was no answer.
+
+Three days later he repeated the experiment; with the same result as
+before.
+
+'I cannot try any further,' said Manston speciously to the rector,
+his sole auditor throughout the proceedings.  'Mr. Raunham, I'll
+tell you the truth plainly:  I don't love her; I do love Cytherea,
+and the whole of this business of searching for the other woman goes
+altogether against me.  I hope to God I shall never see her again.'
+
+'But you will do your duty at least?' said Mr. Raunham.
+
+'I have done it,' said Manston.  'If ever a man on the face of this
+earth has done his duty towards an absent wife, I have towards her--
+living or dead--at least,' he added, correcting himself, 'since I
+have lived at Knapwater.  I neglected her before that time--I own
+that, as I have owned it before.'
+
+'I should, if I were you, adopt other means to get tidings of her if
+advertising fails, in spite of my feelings,' said the rector
+emphatically.  'But at any rate, try advertising once more.  There's
+a satisfaction in having made any attempt three several times.'
+
+When Manston had left the study, the rector stood looking at the
+fire for a considerable length of time, lost in profound reflection.
+He went to his private diary, and after many pauses, which he varied
+only by dipping his pen, letting it dry, wiping it on his sleeve,
+and then dipping it again, he took the following note of events:--
+
+'January 25.--Mr. Manston has just seen me for the third time on the
+subject of his lost wife.  There have been these peculiarities
+attending the three interviews:--
+
+'The first.  My visitor, whilst expressing by words his great
+anxiety to do everything for her recovery, showed plainly by his
+bearing that he was convinced he should never see her again.
+
+'The second.  He had left off feigning anxiety to do rightly by his
+first wife, and honestly asked after Cytherea's welfare.
+
+'The third (and most remarkable).  He seemed to have lost all
+consistency.  Whilst expressing his love for Cytherea (which
+certainly is strong) and evincing the usual indifference to the
+first Mrs. Manston's fate, he was unable to conceal the intensity of
+his eagerness for me to advise him to ADVERTISE AGAIN for her.'
+
+A week after the second, the third advertisement was inserted.  A
+paragraph was attached, which stated that this would be the last
+time the announcement would appear.
+
+3.  THE FIRST OF FEBRUARY
+
+At this, the eleventh hour, the postman brought a letter for
+Manston, directed in a woman's hand.
+
+A bachelor friend of the steward's, Mr. Dickson by name, who was
+somewhat of a chatterer--plenus rimarum--and who boasted of an
+endless string of acquaintances, had come over from Casterbridge the
+preceding day by invitation--an invitation which had been a pleasant
+surprise to Dickson himself, insomuch that Manston, as a rule, voted
+him a bore almost to his face.  He had stayed over the night, and
+was sitting at breakfast with his host when the important missive
+arrived.
+
+Manston did not attempt to conceal the subject of the letter, or the
+name of the writer.  First glancing the pages through, he read aloud
+as follows:--
+
+'"MY HUSBAND,--I implore your forgiveness.
+
+'"During the last thirteen months I have repeated to myself a
+hundred times that you should never discover what I voluntarily tell
+you now, namely, that I am alive and in perfect health.
+
+'"I have seen all your advertisements.  Nothing but your persistence
+has won me round.  Surely, I thought, he MUST love me still.  Why
+else should he try to win back a woman who, faithful unto death as
+she will be, can, in a social sense, aid him towards acquiring
+nothing?--rather the reverse, indeed.
+
+'"You yourself state my own mind--that the only grounds upon which
+we can meet and live together, with a reasonable hope of happiness,
+must be a mutual consent to bury in oblivion all past differences.
+I heartily and willingly forget everything--and forgive everything.
+You will do the same, as your actions show.
+
+'"There will be plenty of opportunity for me to explain the few
+facts relating to my escape on the night of the fire.  I will only
+give the heads in this hurried note.  I was grieved at your not
+coming to fetch me, more grieved at your absence from the station,
+most of all by your absence from home.  On my journey to the inn I
+writhed under a passionate sense of wrong done me.  When I had been
+shown to my room I waited and hoped for you till the landlord had
+gone upstairs to bed.  I still found that you did not come, and then
+I finally made up my mind to leave.  I had half undressed, but I put
+on my things again, forgetting my watch (and I suppose dropping my
+keys, though I am not sure where) in my hurry, and slipped out of
+the house.  The--"'
+
+'Well, that's a rum story,' said Mr. Dickson, interrupting.
+
+'What's a rum story?' said Manston hastily, and flushing in the
+face.
+
+'Forgetting her watch and dropping her keys in her hurry.'
+
+'I don't see anything particularly wonderful in it.  Any woman might
+do such a thing.'
+
+'Any woman might if escaping from fire or shipwreck, or any such
+immediate danger.  But it seems incomprehensible to me that any
+woman in her senses, who quietly decides to leave a house, should be
+so forgetful.'
+
+'All that is required to reconcile your seeming with her facts is to
+assume that she was not in her senses, for that's what she did
+plainly, or how could the things have been found there?  Besides,
+she's truthful enough.'  He spoke eagerly and peremptorily.
+
+'Yes, yes, I know that.  I merely meant that it seemed rather odd.'
+
+'O yes.'  Manston read on:--
+
+'"--and slipped out of the house.  The rubbish-heap was burning up
+brightly, but the thought that the house was in danger did not
+strike me; I did not consider that it might be thatched.
+
+'"I idled in the lane behind the wood till the last down-train had
+come in, not being in a mood to face strangers.  Whilst I was there
+the fire broke out, and this perplexed me still more.  However, I
+was still determined not to stay in the place.  I went to the
+railway-station, which was now quiet, and inquired of the solitary
+man on duty there concerning the trains.  It was not till I had left
+the man that I saw the effect the fire might have on my history.  I
+considered also, though not in any detailed manner, that the event,
+by attracting the attention of the village to my former abode, might
+set people on my track should they doubt my death, and a sudden
+dread of having to go back again to Knapwater--a place which had
+seemed inimical to me from first to last--prompted me to run back
+and bribe the porter to secrecy.  I then walked on to Anglebury,
+lingering about the outskirts of the town till the morning train
+came in, when I proceeded by it to London, and then took these
+lodgings, where I have been supporting myself ever since by
+needlework, endeavouring to save enough money to pay my passage home
+to America, but making melancholy progress in my attempt.  However,
+all that is changed--can I be otherwise than happy at it?  Of course
+not.  I am happy.  Tell me what I am to do, and believe me still to
+be your faithful wife,   EUNICE.
+
+'"My name here is (as before)
+
+     '"MRS. RONDLEY, and my address,
+          79 ADDINGTON STREET,
+               LAMBETH.'"
+
+The name and address were written on a separate slip of paper.
+
+'So it's to be all right at last then,' said Manston's friend.  'But
+after all there's another woman in the case.  You don't seem very
+sorry for the little thing who is put to such distress by this turn
+of affairs?  I wonder you can let her go so coolly.'  The speaker
+was looking out between the mullions of the window--noticing that
+some of the lights were glazed in lozenges, some in squares--as he
+said the words, otherwise he would have seen the passionate
+expression of agonized hopelessness that flitted across the
+steward's countenance when the remark was made.  He did not see it,
+and Manston answered after a short interval.  The way in which he
+spoke of the young girl who had believed herself his wife, whom, a
+few short days ago, he had openly idolized, and whom, in his secret
+heart, he idolized still, as far as such a form of love was
+compatible with his nature, showed that from policy or otherwise, he
+meant to act up to the requirements of the position into which fate
+appeared determined to drive him.
+
+'That's neither here nor there,' he said; 'it is a point of honour
+to do as I am doing, and there's an end of it.'
+
+'Yes.  Only I thought you used not to care overmuch about your first
+bargain.'
+
+'I certainly did not at one time.  One is apt to feel rather weary
+of wives when they are so devilish civil under all aspects, as she
+used to be.  But anything for a change--Abigail is lost, but Michal
+is recovered.  You would hardly believe it, but she seems in fancy
+to be quite another bride--in fact, almost as if she had really
+risen from the dead, instead of having only done so virtually.'
+
+'You let the young pink one know that the other has come or is
+coming?'
+
+'Cui bono?'  The steward meditated critically, showing a portion of
+his intensely wide and regular teeth within the ruby lips.
+
+'I cannot say anything to her that will do any good,' he resumed.
+'It would be awkward--either seeing or communicating with her again.
+The best plan to adopt will be to let matters take their course--
+she'll find it all out soon enough.'
+
+Manston found himself alone a few minutes later.  He buried his face
+in his hands, and murmured, 'O my lost one!  O my Cytherea!  That it
+should come to this is hard for me!  'Tis now all darkness--"a land
+of darkness as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death without
+any order, and where the light is as darkness."'
+
+Yes, the artificial bearing which this extraordinary man had adopted
+before strangers ever since he had overheard the conversation at the
+inn, left him now, and he mourned for Cytherea aloud.
+
+4.  THE TWELFTH OF FEBRUARY
+
+Knapwater Park is the picture--at eleven o'clock on a muddy, quiet,
+hazy, but bright morning--a morning without any blue sky, and
+without any shadows, the earth being enlivened and lit up rather by
+the spirit of an invisible sun than by its bodily presence.
+
+The local Hunt had met for the day's sport on the open space of
+ground immediately in front of the steward's residence--called in
+the list of appointments, 'Old House, Knapwater'--the meet being
+here once every season, for the pleasure of Miss Aldclyffe and her
+friends.
+
+Leaning out from one of the first-floor windows, and surveying with
+the keenest interest the lively picture of pink and black coats,
+rich-coloured horses, and sparkling bits and spurs, was the returned
+and long-lost woman, Mrs. Manston.
+
+The eyes of those forming the brilliant group were occasionally
+turned towards her, showing plainly that her adventures were the
+subject of conversation equally with or more than the chances of the
+coming day.  She did not flush beneath their scrutiny; on the
+contrary, she seemed rather to enjoy it, her eyes being kindled with
+a light of contented exultation, subdued to square with the
+circumstances of her matronly position.
+
+She was, at the distance from which they surveyed her, an attractive
+woman--comely as the tents of Kedar.  But to a close observer it was
+palpable enough that God did not do all the picture.  Appearing at
+least seven years older than Cytherea, she was probably her senior
+by double the number, the artificial means employed to heighten the
+natural good appearance of her face being very cleverly applied.
+Her form was full and round, its voluptuous maturity standing out in
+strong contrast to the memory of Cytherea's lissom girlishness.
+
+It seems to be an almost universal rule that a woman who once has
+courted, or who eventually will court, the society of men on terms
+dangerous to her honour cannot refrain from flinging the meaning
+glance whenever the moment arrives in which the glance is strongly
+asked for, even if her life and whole future depended upon that
+moment's abstinence.
+
+Had a cautious, uxorious husband seen in his wife's countenance what
+might now have been seen in this dark-eyed woman's as she caught a
+stray glance of flirtation from one or other of the red-coated
+gallants outside, he would have passed many days in an agony of
+restless jealousy and doubt.  But Manston was not such a husband,
+and he was, moreover, calmly attending to his business at the other
+end of the manor.
+
+The steward had fetched home his wife in the most matter-of-fact way
+a few days earlier, walking round the village with her the very next
+morning--at once putting an end, by this simple solution, to all the
+riddling inquiries and surmises that were rank in the village and
+its neighbourhood.  Some men said that this woman was as far
+inferior to Cytherea as earth to heaven; others, older and sager,
+thought Manston better off with such a wife than he would have been
+with one of Cytherea's youthful impulses, and inexperience in
+household management.  All felt their curiosity dying out of them.
+It was the same in Carriford as in other parts of the world--
+immediately circumstantial evidence became exchanged for direct, the
+loungers in court yawned, gave a final survey, and turned away to a
+subject which would afford more scope for speculation.
+
+
+
+XV.  THE EVENTS OF THREE WEEKS
+
+1.  FROM THE TWELFTH OF FEBRUARY TO THE SECOND OF MARCH
+
+Owen Graye's recovery from the illness that had incapacitated him
+for so long a time was, professionally, the dawn of a brighter
+prospect for him in every direction, though the change was at first
+very gradual, and his movements and efforts were little more than
+mechanical.  With the lengthening of the days, and the revival of
+building operations for the forthcoming season, he saw himself, for
+the first time, on a road which, pursued with care, would probably
+lead to a comfortable income at some future day.  But he was still
+very low down the hill as yet.
+
+The first undertaking entrusted to him in the new year began about a
+month after his return from Southampton.  Mr. Gradfield had come
+back to him in the wake of his restored health, and offered him the
+superintendence, as clerk of works, of a church which was to be
+nearly rebuilt at the village of Tolchurch, fifteen or sixteen miles
+from Budmouth, and about half that distance from Carriford.
+
+'I am now being paid at the rate of a hundred and fifty pounds a
+year,' he said to his sister in a burst of thankfulness, 'and you
+shall never, Cytherea, be at any tyrannous lady's beck and call
+again as long as I live.  Never pine or think about what has
+happened, dear; it's no disgrace to you.  Cheer up; you'll be
+somebody's happy wife yet.'
+
+He did not say Edward Springrove's, for, greatly to his
+disappointment, a report had reached his ears that the friend to
+whom Cytherea owed so much had been about to pack up his things and
+sail for Australia.  However, this was before the uncertainty
+concerning Mrs. Manston's existence had been dispersed by her
+return, a phenomenon that altered the cloudy relationship in which
+Cytherea had lately been standing towards her old lover, to one of
+distinctness; which result would have been delightful but for
+circumstances about to be mentioned.
+
+Cytherea was still pale from her recent illness, and still greatly
+dejected.  Until the news of Mrs. Manston's return had reached them,
+she had kept herself closely shut up during the day-time, never
+venturing forth except at night.  Sleeping and waking she had been
+in perpetual dread lest she should still be claimed by a man whom,
+only a few weeks earlier, she had regarded in the light of a future
+husband with quiet assent, not unmixed with cheerfulness.
+
+But the removal of the uneasiness in this direction--by Mrs.
+Manston's arrival, and her own consequent freedom--had been the
+imposition of pain in another.  Utterly fictitious details of the
+finding of Cytherea and Manston had been invented and circulated,
+unavoidably reaching her ears in the course of time.  Thus the
+freedom brought no happiness, and it seemed well-nigh impossible
+that she could ever again show herself the sparkling creature she
+once had been--
+
+     'Apt to entice a deity.'
+
+On this account, and for the first time in his life, Owen made a
+point of concealing from her the real state of his feelings with
+regard to the unhappy transaction.  He writhed in secret under the
+humiliation to which they had been subjected, till the resentment it
+gave rise to, and for which there was no vent, was sometimes beyond
+endurance; it induced a mood that did serious damage to the material
+and plodding perseverance necessary if he would secure permanently
+the comforts of a home for them.
+
+They gave up their lodgings at Budmouth, and went to Tolchurch as
+soon as the work commenced.
+
+Here they were domiciled in one half of an old farmhouse, standing
+not far from the ivy-covered church tower (which was all that was to
+remain of the original structure).  The long steep roof of this
+picturesque dwelling sloped nearly down to the ground, the old tiles
+that covered it being overgrown with rich olive-hued moss.  New red
+tiles in twos and threes had been used for patching the holes
+wrought by decay, lighting up the whole harmonious surface with dots
+of brilliant scarlet.
+
+The chief internal features of this snug abode were a wide
+fireplace, enormous cupboards, a brown settle, and several sketches
+on the wood mantel, done in outline with the point of a hot poker--
+the subjects mainly consisting of old men walking painfully erect,
+with a curly-tailed dog behind.
+
+After a week or two of residence in Tolchurch, and rambles amid the
+quaint scenery circumscribing it, a tranquillity began to spread
+itself through the mind of the maiden, which Graye hoped would be a
+preface to her complete restoration.  She felt ready and willing to
+live the whole remainder of her days in the retirement of their
+present quarters:  she began to sing about the house in low
+tremulous snatches--
+
+     '"--I said, if there's peace to be found in the world,
+       A heart that is humble may hope for it here."'
+
+2.  THE THIRD OF MARCH
+
+Her convalescence had arrived at this point on a certain evening
+towards the end of the winter, when Owen had come in from the
+building hard by, and was changing his muddy boots for slippers,
+previously to sitting down to toast and tea.
+
+A prolonged though quiet knocking came to the door.
+
+The only person who ever knocked at their door in that way was the
+new vicar, the prime mover in the church-building.  But he was that
+evening dining with the Squire.
+
+Cytherea was uneasy at the sound--she did not know why, unless it
+was because her nerves were weakened by the sickness she had
+undergone.  Instead of opening the door she ran out of the room, and
+upstairs.
+
+'What nonsense, Cytherea!' said her brother, going to the door.
+
+Edward Springrove stood in the grey light outside.
+
+'Capital--not gone to Australia, and not going, of course!' cried
+Owen.  'What's the use of going to such a place as that?--I never
+believed that you would.'
+
+'I am going back to London again to-morrow,' said Springrove, 'and I
+called to say a word before going.  Where is . . .?'
+
+'She has just run upstairs.  Come in--never mind scraping your
+shoes--we are regular cottagers now; stone floor, yawning chimney-
+corner, and all, you see.'
+
+'Mrs. Manston came,' said Edward awkwardly, when he had sat down in
+the chimney-corner by preference.
+
+'Yes.'  At mention of one of his skeletons Owen lost his blitheness
+at once, and fell into a reverie.
+
+'The history of her escape is very simple.'
+
+'Very.'
+
+'You know I always had wondered, when my father was telling any of
+the circumstances of the fire to me, how it could be that a woman
+could sleep so soundly as to be unaware of her horrid position till
+it was too late even to give shout or sound of any kind.'
+
+'Well, I think that would have been possible, considering her long
+wearisome journey.  People have often been suffocated in their beds
+before they awoke.  But it was hardly likely a body would be
+completely burnt to ashes as this was assumed to be, though nobody
+seemed to see it at the time.  And how positive the surgeon was too,
+about those bits of bone!  Why he should have been so, nobody can
+tell.  I cannot help saying that if it has ever been possible to
+find pure stupidity incarnate, it was in that jury of Carriford.
+There existed in the mass the stupidity of twelve and not the
+penetration of one.'
+
+'Is she quite well?' said Springrove.
+
+'Who?--O, my sister, Cytherea.  Thank you, nearly well, now.  I'll
+call her.'
+
+'Wait one minute.  I have a word to say to you.'
+
+Owen sat down again.
+
+'You know, without my saying it, that I love Cytherea as dearly as
+ever. . . .  I think she loves me too,--does she really?'
+
+There was in Owen enough of that worldly policy on the subject of
+matchmaking which naturally resides in the breasts of parents and
+guardians, to give him a certain caution in replying, and, younger
+as he was by five years than Edward, it had an odd effect.
+
+'Well, she may possibly love you still,' he said, as if rather in
+doubt as to the truth of his words.
+
+Springrove's countenance instantly saddened; he had expected a
+simple 'Yes,' at the very least.  He continued in a tone of greater
+depression--
+
+'Supposing she does love me, would it be fair to you and to her if I
+made her an offer of marriage, with these dreary conditions
+attached--that we lived for a few years on the narrowest system,
+till a great debt, which all honour and duty require me to pay off,
+shall be paid?  My father, by reason of the misfortune that befell
+him, is under a great obligation to Miss Aldclyffe.  He is getting
+old, and losing his energies.  I am attempting to work free of the
+burden.  This makes my prospects gloomy enough at present.
+
+'But consider again,' he went on.  'Cytherea has been left in a
+nameless and unsatisfactory, though innocent state, by this
+unfortunate, and now void, marriage with Manston.  A marriage with
+me, though under the--materially--untoward conditions I have
+mentioned, would make us happy; it would give her a locus standi.
+If she wished to be out of the sound of her misfortunes we would go
+to another part of England--emigrate--do anything.'
+
+'I'll call Cytherea,' said Owen.  'It is a matter which she alone
+can settle.'  He did not speak warmly.  His pride could not endure
+the pity which Edward's visit and errand tacitly implied.  Yet, in
+the other affair, his heart went with Edward; he was on the same
+beat for paying off old debts himself.
+
+'Cythie, Mr. Springrove is here,' he said, at the foot of the
+staircase.
+
+His sister descended the creaking old steps with a faltering tread,
+and stood in the firelight from the hearth.  She extended her hand
+to Springrove, welcoming him by a mere motion of the lip, her eyes
+averted--a habit which had engendered itself in her since the
+beginning of her illness and defamation.  Owen opened the door and
+went out--leaving the lovers alone.  It was the first time they had
+met since the memorable night at Southampton.
+
+'I will get a light,' she said, with a little embarrassment.
+
+'No--don't, please, Cytherea,' said Edward softly, 'Come and sit
+down with me.'
+
+'O yes.  I ought to have asked YOU to,' she returned timidly.
+'Everybody sits in the chimney-corner in this parish.  You sit on
+that side.  I'll sit here.'
+
+Two recesses--one on the right, one on the left hand--were cut in
+the inside of the fireplace, and here they sat down facing each
+other, on benches fitted to the recesses, the fire glowing on the
+hearth between their feet.  Its ruddy light shone on the underslopes
+of their faces, and spread out over the floor of the room with the
+low horizontality of the setting sun, giving to every grain of sand
+and tumour in the paving a long shadow towards the door.
+
+Edward looked at his pale love through the thin azure twines of
+smoke that went up like ringlets between them, and invested her, as
+seen through its medium, with the shadowy appearance of a phantom.
+Nothing is so potent for coaxing back the lost eyes of a woman as a
+discreet silence in the man who has so lost them--and thus the
+patient Edward coaxed hers.  After lingering on the hearth for half
+a minute, waiting in vain for another word from him, they were
+lifted into his face.
+
+He was ready primed to receive them.  'Cytherea, will you marry me?'
+he said.
+
+He could not wait in his original position till the answer came.
+Stepping across the front of the fire to her own side of the chimney
+corner, he reclined at her feet, and searched for her hand.  She
+continued in silence awhile.
+
+'Edward, I can never be anybody's wife,' she then said sadly, and
+with firmness.
+
+'Think of it in every light,' he pleaded; 'the light of love, first.
+Then, when you have done that, see how wise a step it would be.  I
+can only offer you poverty as yet, but I want--I do so long to
+secure you from the intrusion of that unpleasant past, which will
+often and always be thrust before you as long as you live the
+shrinking solitary life you do now--a life which purity chooses, it
+may be; but to the outside world it appears like the enforced
+loneliness of neglect and scorn--and tongues are busy inventing a
+reason for it which does not exist.'
+
+'I know all about it,' she said hastily; 'and those are the grounds
+of my refusal.  You and Owen know the whole truth--the two I love
+best on earth--and I am content.  But the scandal will be
+continually repeated, and I can never give any one the opportunity
+of saying to you--that--your wife . . . .'  She utterly broke down
+and wept.
+
+'Don't, my own darling!' he entreated.  'Don't, Cytherea!'
+
+'Please to leave me--we will be friends, Edward--but don't press me-
+-my mind is made up--I cannot--I will not marry you or any man under
+the present ambiguous circumstances--never will I--I have said it:
+never!'
+
+They were both silent.  He listlessly regarded the illuminated
+blackness overhead, where long flakes of soot floated from the sides
+and bars of the chimney-throat like tattered banners in ancient
+aisles; whilst through the square opening in the midst one or two
+bright stars looked down upon them from the grey March sky.  The
+sight seemed to cheer him.
+
+'At any rate you will love me?' he murmured to her.
+
+'Yes--always--for ever and for ever!'
+
+He kissed her once, twice, three times, and arose to his feet,
+slowly withdrawing himself from her side towards the door.  Cytherea
+remained with her gaze fixed on the fire.  Edward went out grieving,
+but hope was not extinguished even now.
+
+He smelt the fragrance of a cigar, and immediately afterwards saw a
+small red star of fire against the darkness of the hedge.  Graye was
+pacing up and down the lane, smoking as he walked.  Springrove told
+him the result of the interview.
+
+'You are a good fellow, Edward,' he said; 'but I think my sister is
+right.'
+
+'I wish you would believe Manston a villain, as I do,' said
+Springrove.
+
+'It would be absurd of me to say that I like him now--family feeling
+prevents it, but I cannot in honesty say deliberately that he is a
+bad man.'
+
+Edward could keep the secret of Manston's coercion of Miss Aldclyffe
+in the matter of the houses a secret no longer.  He told Owen the
+whole story.
+
+'That's one thing,' he continued, 'but not all.  What do you think
+of this--I have discovered that he went to Budmouth post-office for
+a letter the day before the first advertisement for his wife
+appeared in the papers.  One was there for him, and it was directed
+in his wife's handwriting, as I can prove.  This was not till after
+the marriage with Cytherea, it is true, but if (as it seems to show)
+the advertising was a farce, there is a strong presumption that the
+rest of the piece was.'
+
+Owen was too astounded to speak.  He dropped his cigar, and fixed
+his eyes upon his companion.
+
+'Collusion!'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'With his first wife?'
+
+'Yes--with his wife.  I am firmly persuaded of it.'
+
+'What did you discover?'
+
+'That he fetched from the post-office at Budmouth a letter from her
+the day BEFORE the first advertisement appeared.'
+
+Graye was lost in a long consideration.  'Ah!' he said, 'it would be
+difficult to prove anything of that sort now.  The writing could not
+be sworn to, and if he is guilty the letter is destroyed.'
+
+'I have other suspicions--'
+
+'Yes--as you said' interrupted Owen, who had not till now been able
+to form the complicated set of ideas necessary for picturing the
+position.  'Yes, there is this to be remembered--Cytherea had been
+taken from him before that letter came--and his knowledge of his
+wife's existence could not have originated till after the wedding.
+I could have sworn he believed her dead then.  His manner was
+unmistakable.'
+
+'Well, I have other suspicions,' repeated Edward; 'and if I only had
+the right--if I were her husband or brother, he should be convicted
+of bigamy yet.'
+
+'The reproof was not needed,' said Owen, with a little bitterness.
+'What can I do--a man with neither money nor friends--whilst Manston
+has Miss Aldclyffe and all her fortune to back him up?  God only
+knows what lies between the mistress and her steward, but since this
+has transpired--if it is true--I can believe the connection to be
+even an unworthy one--a thing I certainly never so much as owned to
+myself before.'
+
+3.  THE FIFTH OF MARCH
+
+Edward's disclosure had the effect of directing Owen Graye's
+thoughts into an entirely new and uncommon channel.
+
+On the Monday after Springrove's visit, Owen had walked to the top
+of a hill in the neighbourhood of Tolchurch--a wild hill that had no
+name, beside a barren down where it never looked like summer.  In
+the intensity of his meditations on the ever-present subject, he sat
+down on a weather-beaten boundary-stone gazing towards the distant
+valleys--seeing only Manston's imagined form.
+
+Had his defenceless sister been trifled with? that was the question
+which affected him.  Her refusal of Edward as a husband was, he
+knew, dictated solely by a humiliated sense of inadequacy to him in
+repute, and had not been formed till since the slanderous tale
+accounting for her seclusion had been circulated.  Was it not true,
+as Edward had hinted, that he, her brother, was neglecting his duty
+towards her in allowing Manston to thrive unquestioned, whilst she
+was hiding her head for no fault at all?
+
+Was it possible that Manston was sensuous villain enough to have
+contemplated, at any moment before the marriage with Cytherea, the
+return of his first wife, when he should have grown weary of his new
+toy?  Had he believed that, by a skilful manipulation of such
+circumstances as chance would throw in his way, he could escape all
+suspicion of having known that she lived?  Only one fact within his
+own direct knowledge afforded the least ground for such a
+supposition.  It was that, possessed by a woman only in the humble
+and unprotected station of a lady's hired companion, his sister's
+beauty might scarcely have been sufficient to induce a selfish man
+like Manston to make her his wife, unless he had foreseen the
+possibility of getting rid of her again.
+
+'But for that stratagem of Manston's in relation to the
+Springroves,' Owen thought, 'Cythie might now have been the happy
+wife of Edward.  True, that he influenced Miss Aldclyffe only rests
+on Edward's suspicions, but the grounds are good--the probability is
+strong.'
+
+He went indoors and questioned Cytherea.
+
+'On the night of the fire, who first said that Mrs. Manston was
+burnt?' he asked.
+
+'I don't know who started the report.'
+
+'Was it Manston?'
+
+'It was certainly not he.  All doubt on the subject was removed
+before he came to the spot--that I am certain of.  Everybody knew
+that she did not escape AFTER the house was on fire, and thus all
+overlooked the fact that she might have left before--of course that
+would have seemed such an improbable thing for anybody to do.'
+
+'Yes, until the porter's story of her irritation and doubt as to her
+course made it natural.'
+
+'What settled the matter at the inquest,' said Cytherea, 'was Mr.
+Manston's evidence that the watch was his wife's.'
+
+'He was sure of that, wasn't he?'
+
+'I believe he said he was certain of it.'
+
+'It might have been hers--left behind in her perturbation, as they
+say it was--impossible as that seems at first sight.  Yes--on the
+whole, he might have believed in her death.'
+
+'I know by several proofs that then, and at least for some time
+after, he had no other thought than that she was dead.  I now think
+that before the porter's confession he knew something about her--
+though not that she lived.'
+
+'Why do you?'
+
+'From what he said to me on the evening of the wedding-day, when I
+had fastened myself in the room at the hotel, after Edward's visit.
+He must have suspected that I knew something, for he was irritated,
+and in a passion of uneasy doubt.  He said, "You don't suppose my
+first wife is come to light again, madam, surely?"  Directly he had
+let the remark slip out, he seemed anxious to withdraw it.'
+
+'That's odd,' said Owen.
+
+'I thought it very odd.'
+
+'Still we must remember he might only have hit upon the thought by
+accident, in doubt as to your motive.  Yes, the great point to
+discover remains the same as ever--did he doubt his first impression
+of her death BEFORE he married you.  I can't help thinking he did,
+although he was so astounded at our news that night.  Edward swears
+he did.'
+
+'It was perhaps only a short time before,' said Cytherea; 'when he
+could hardly recede from having me.
+
+'Seasoning justice with mercy as usual, Cytherea.  'Tis unfair to
+yourself to talk like that.  If I could only bring him to ruin as a
+bigamist--supposing him to be one--I should die happy.  That's what
+we must find out by fair means or foul--was he a wilful bigamist?'
+
+'It is no use trying, Owen.  You would have to employ a solicitor,
+and how can you do that?'
+
+'I can't at all--I know that very well.  But neither do I altogether
+wish to at present--a lawyer must have a case--facts to go upon,
+that means.  Now they are scarce at present--as scarce as money is
+with us, and till we have found more money there is no hurry for a
+lawyer.  Perhaps by the time we have the facts we shall have the
+money.  The only thing we lose in working alone in this way, is
+time--not the issue:  for the fruit that one mind matures in a
+twelvemonth forms a more perfectly organized whole than that of
+twelve minds in one month, especially if the interests of the single
+one are vitally concerned, and those of the twelve are only hired.
+But there is not only my mind available--you are a shrewd woman,
+Cythie, and Edward is an earnest ally.  Then, if we really get a
+sure footing for a criminal prosecution, the Crown will take up the
+case.'
+
+'I don't much care to press on in the matter,' she murmured.  'What
+good can it do us, Owen, after all?'
+
+'Selfishly speaking, it will do this good--that all the facts of
+your journey to Southampton will become known, and the scandal will
+die.  Besides, Manston will have to suffer--it's an act of justice
+to you and to other women, and to Edward Springrove.'
+
+He now thought it necessary to tell her of the real nature of the
+Springroves' obligation to Miss Aldclyffe--and their nearly certain
+knowledge that Manston was the prime mover in effecting their
+embarrassment.  Her face flushed as she listened.
+
+'And now,' he said, 'our first undertaking is to find out where Mrs.
+Manston lived during the separation; next, when the first
+communications passed between them after the fire.'
+
+'If we only had Miss Aldclyffe's countenance and assistance as I
+used to have them,' Cytherea returned, 'how strong we should be!  O,
+what power is it that he exercises over her, swaying her just as he
+wishes!  She loves me now.  Mrs. Morris in her letter said that Miss
+Aldclyffe prayed for me--yes, she heard her praying for me, and
+crying.  Miss Aldclyffe did not mind an old friend like Mrs. Morris
+knowing it, either.  Yet in opposition to this, notice her dead
+silence and inaction throughout this proceeding.'
+
+'It is a mystery; but never mind that now,' said Owen impressively.
+'About where Mrs. Manston has been living.  We must get this part of
+it first--learn the place of her stay in the early stage of their
+separation, during the period of Manston's arrival here, and so on,
+for that was where she was first communicated with on the subject of
+coming to Knapwater, before the fire; and that address, too, was her
+point of departure when she came to her husband by stealth in the
+night--you know--the time I visited you in the evening and went home
+early in the morning, and it was found that he had been visited too.
+Ah! couldn't we inquire of Mrs. Leat, who keeps the post-office at
+Carriford, if she remembers where the letters to Mrs. Manston were
+directed?'
+
+'He never posted his letters to her in the parish--it was remarked
+at the time.  I was thinking if something relating to her address
+might not be found in the report of the inquest in the Casterbridge
+Chronicle of the date.  Some facts about the inquest were given in
+the papers to a certainty.'
+
+Her brother caught eagerly at the suggestion.  'Who has a file of
+the Chronicles?' he said.
+
+'Mr. Raunham used to file them,' said Cytherea.  'He was rather
+friendly-disposed towards me, too.'
+
+Owen could not, on any consideration, escape from his attendance at
+the church-building till Saturday evening; and thus it became
+necessary, unless they actually wasted time, that Cytherea herself
+should assist.  'I act under your orders, Owen,' she said.
+
+
+
+XVI.  THE EVENTS OF ONE WEEK
+
+1.  MARCH THE SIXTH
+
+The next morning the opening move of the game was made.  Cytherea,
+under cover of a thick veil, hired a conveyance and drove to within
+a mile or so of Carriford.  It was with a renewed sense of
+depression that she saw again the objects which had become familiar
+to her eye during her sojourn under Miss Aldclyffe's roof--the
+outline of the hills, the meadow streams, the old park trees.  She
+hastened by a lonely path to the rectory-house, and asked if Mr.
+Raunham was at home.
+
+Now the rector, though a solitary bachelor, was as gallant and
+courteous to womankind as an ancient Iberian; and, moreover, he was
+Cytherea's friend in particular, to an extent far greater than she
+had ever surmised.  Rarely visiting his relative, Miss Aldclyffe,
+except on parish matters, more rarely still being called upon by
+Miss Aldclyffe, Cytherea had learnt very little of him whilst she
+lived at Knapwater.  The relationship was on the impecunious
+paternal side, and for this branch of her family the lady of the
+estate had never evinced much sympathy.  In looking back upon our
+line of descent it is an instinct with us to feel that all our
+vitality was drawn from the richer party to any unequal marriage in
+the chain.
+
+Since the death of the old captain, the rector's bearing in
+Knapwater House had been almost that of a stranger, a circumstance
+which he himself was the last man in the world to regret.  This
+polite indifference was so frigid on both sides that the rector did
+not concern himself to preach at her, which was a great deal in a
+rector; and she did not take the trouble to think his sermons poor
+stuff, which in a cynical woman was a great deal more.
+
+Though barely fifty years of age, his hair was as white as snow,
+contrasting strangely with the redness of his skin, which was as
+fresh and healthy as a lad's.  Cytherea's bright eyes, mutely and
+demurely glancing up at him Sunday after Sunday, had been the means
+of driving away many of the saturnine humours that creep into an
+empty heart during the hours of a solitary life; in this case,
+however, to supplant them, when she left his parish, by those others
+of a more aching nature which accompany an over-full one.  In short,
+he had been on the verge of feeling towards her that passion to
+which his dignified self-respect would not give its true name, even
+in the privacy of his own thought.
+
+He received her kindly; but she was not disposed to be frank with
+him.  He saw her wish to be reserved, and with genuine good taste
+and good nature made no comment whatever upon her request to be
+allowed to see the Chronicle for the year before the last.  He
+placed the papers before her on his study table, with a timidity as
+great as her own, and then left her entirely to herself.
+
+She turned them over till she came to the first heading connected
+with the subject of her search--'Disastrous Fire and Loss of Life at
+Carriford.'
+
+The sight, and its calamitous bearing upon her own life, made her so
+dizzy that she could, for a while, hardly decipher the letters.
+Stifling recollection by an effort she nerved herself to her work,
+and carefully read the column.  The account reminded her of no other
+fact than was remembered already.
+
+She turned on to the following week's report of the inquest.  After
+a miserable perusal she could find no more pertaining to Mrs.
+Manston's address than this:--
+
+'ABRAHAM BROWN, of Hoxton, London, at whose house the deceased woman
+had been living, deposed,' etc.
+
+Nobody else from London had attended the inquest.  She arose to
+depart, first sending a message of thanks to Mr. Raunham, who was
+out of doors gardening.
+
+He stuck his spade into the ground, and accompanied her to the gate.
+
+'Can I help you in anything, Cytherea?' he said, using her Christian
+name by an intuition that unpleasant memories might be revived if he
+called her Miss Graye after wishing her good-bye as Mrs. Manston at
+the wedding.  Cytherea saw the motive and appreciated it,
+nevertheless replying evasively--
+
+'I only guess and fear.'
+
+He earnestly looked at her again.
+
+'Promise me that if you want assistance, and you think I can give
+it, you will come to me.'
+
+'I will,' she said.
+
+The gate closed between them.
+
+'You don't want me to help you in anything now, Cytherea?' he
+repeated.
+
+If he had spoken what he felt, 'I want very much to help you,
+Cytherea, and have been watching Manston on your account,' she would
+gladly have accepted his offer.  As it was, she was perplexed, and
+raised her eyes to his, not so fearlessly as before her trouble, but
+as modestly, and with still enough brightness in them to do fearful
+execution as she said over the gate--
+
+'No, thank you.'
+
+She returned to Tolchurch weary with her day's work.  Owen's
+greeting was anxious--
+
+'Well, Cytherea?'
+
+She gave him the words from the report of the inquest, pencilled on
+a slip of paper.
+
+'Now to find out the name of the street and number,' Owen remarked.
+
+'Owen,' she said, 'will you forgive me for what I am going to say?
+I don't think I can--indeed I don't think I can--take any further
+steps towards disentangling the mystery.  I still think it a useless
+task, and it does not seem any duty of mine to be revenged upon Mr.
+Manston in any way.'  She added more gravely, 'It is beneath my
+dignity as a woman to labour for this; I have felt it so all day.'
+
+'Very well,' he said, somewhat shortly; 'I shall work without you
+then.  There's dignity in justice.'  He caught sight of her pale
+tired face, and the dilated eye which always appeared in her with
+weariness.  'Darling,' he continued warmly, and kissing her, 'you
+shall not work so hard again--you are worn out quite.  But you must
+let me do as I like.'
+
+2.  MARCH THE TENTH
+
+On Saturday evening Graye hurried off to Casterbridge, and called at
+the house of the reporter to the Chronicle.  The reporter was at
+home, and came out to Graye in the passage.  Owen explained who and
+what he was, and asked the man if he would oblige him by turning to
+his notes of the inquest at Carriford in the December of the year
+preceding the last--just adding that a family entanglement, of which
+the reporter probably knew something, made him anxious to ascertain
+some additional details of the event, if any existed.
+
+'Certainly,' said the other, without hesitation; 'though I am afraid
+I haven't much beyond what we printed at the time.  Let me see--my
+old note-books are in my drawer at the office of the paper:  if you
+will come with me I can refer to them there.'  His wife and family
+were at tea inside the room, and with the timidity of decent poverty
+everywhere he seemed glad to get a stranger out of his domestic
+groove.
+
+They crossed the street, entered the office, and went thence to an
+inner room.  Here, after a short search, was found the book
+required.  The precise address, not given in the condensed report
+that was printed, but written down by the reporter, was as follows:-
+-
+
+     'ABRAHAM BROWN,
+          LODGING-HOUSE KEEPER,
+               41 CHARLES SQUARE,
+                    HOXTON.'
+
+Owen copied it, and gave the reporter a small fee.  'I want to keep
+this inquiry private for the present,' he said hesitatingly.  'You
+will perhaps understand why, and oblige me.'
+
+The reporter promised.  'News is shop with me,' he said, 'and to
+escape from handling it is my greatest social enjoyment.'
+
+It was evening, and the outer room of the publishing-office was
+lighted up with flaring jets of gas.  After making the above remark,
+the reporter came out from the inner apartment in Graye's company,
+answering an expression of obligation from Owen with the words that
+it was no trouble.  At the moment of his speech, he closed behind
+him the door between the two rooms, still holding his note-book in
+his hand.
+
+Before the counter of the front room stood a tall man, who was also
+speaking, when they emerged.  He said to the youth in attendance, 'I
+will take my paper for this week now I am here, so that you needn't
+post it to me.'
+
+The stranger then slightly turned his head, saw Owen, and recognized
+him.  Owen passed out without recognizing the other as Manston.
+
+Manston then looked at the reporter, who, after walking to the door
+with Owen, had come back again to lock up his books.  Manston did
+not need to be told that the shabby marble-covered book which he
+held in his hand, opening endways and interleaved with blotting-
+paper, was an old reporting-book.  He raised his eyes to the
+reporter's face, whose experience had not so schooled his features
+but that they betrayed a consciousness, to one half initiated as the
+other was, that his late proceeding had been connected with events
+in the life of the steward.  Manston said no more, but, taking his
+newspaper, followed Owen from the office, and disappeared in the
+gloom of the street.
+
+Edward Springrove was now in London again, and on this same evening,
+before leaving Casterbridge, Owen wrote a careful letter to him,
+stating therein all the facts that had come to his knowledge, and
+begging him, as he valued Cytherea, to make cautious inquiries.  A
+tall man was standing under the lamp-post, about half-a-dozen yards
+above the post-office, when he dropped the letter into the box.
+
+That same night, too, for a reason connected with the rencounter
+with Owen Graye, the steward entertained the idea of rushing off
+suddenly to London by the mail-train, which left Casterbridge at ten
+o'clock.  But remembering that letters posted after the hour at
+which Owen had obtained his information--whatever that was--could
+not be delivered in London till Monday morning, he changed his mind
+and went home to Knapwater.  Making a confidential explanation to
+his wife, arrangements were set on foot for his departure by the
+mail on Sunday night.
+
+3.  MARCH THE ELEVENTH
+
+Starting for church the next morning several minutes earlier than
+was usual with him, the steward intentionally loitered along the
+road from the village till old Mr. Springrove overtook him.  Manston
+spoke very civilly of the morning, and of the weather, asking how
+the farmer's barometer stood, and when it was probable that the wind
+might change.  It was not in Mr. Springrove's nature--going to
+church as he was, too--to return anything but a civil answer to such
+civil questions, however his feelings might have been biassed by
+late events.  The conversation was continued on terms of greater
+friendliness.
+
+'You must be feeling settled again by this time, Mr. Springrove,
+after the rough turn-out you had on that terrible night in
+November.'
+
+'Ay, but I don't know about feeling settled, either, Mr. Manston.
+The old window in the chimney-corner of the old house I shall never
+forget.  No window in the chimney-corner where I am now, and I had
+been used to it for more than fifty years.  Ted says 'tis a great
+loss to me, and he knows exactly what I feel.'
+
+'Your son is again in a good situation, I believe?' said Manston,
+imitating that inquisitiveness into the private affairs of the
+natives which passes for high breeding in country villages.
+
+'Yes, sir.  I hope he'll keep it, or do something else and stick to
+it.'
+
+''Tis to be hoped he'll be steady now.'
+
+'He's always been that, I assure 'ee,' said the old man tartly.
+
+'Yes--yes--I mean intellectually steady.  Intellectual wild oats
+will thrive in a soil of the strictest morality.'
+
+'Intellectual gingerbread!  Ted's steady enough--that's all I know
+about it.'
+
+'Of course--of course.  Has he respectable lodgings?  My own
+experience has shown me that that's a great thing to a young man
+living alone in London.'
+
+'Warwick Street, Charing Cross--that's where he is.'
+
+'Well, to be sure--strange!  A very dear friend of mine used to live
+at number fifty-two in that very same street.'
+
+'Edward lives at number forty-nine--how very near being the same
+house!' said the old farmer, pleased in spite of himself.
+
+'Very,' said Manston.  'Well, I suppose we had better step along a
+little quicker, Mr. Springrove; the parson's bell has just begun.'
+
+'Number forty-nine,' he murmured.
+
+4.  MARCH THE TWELFTH
+
+Edward received Owen's letter in due time, but on account of his
+daily engagements he could not attend to any request till the clock
+had struck five in the afternoon.  Rushing then from his office in
+Westminster, he called a hansom and proceeded to Hoxton.  A few
+minutes later he knocked at the door of number forty-one, Charles
+Square, the old lodging of Mrs. Manston.
+
+A tall man who would have looked extremely handsome had he not been
+clumsily and closely wrapped up in garments that were much too
+elderly in style for his years, stood at the corner of the quiet
+square at the same instant, having, too, alighted from a cab, that
+had been driven along Old Street in Edward's rear.  He smiled
+confidently when Springrove knocked.
+
+Nobody came to the door.  Springrove knocked again.
+
+This brought out two people--one at the door he had been knocking
+upon, the other from the next on the right.
+
+'Is Mr. Brown at home?' said Springrove.
+
+'No, sir.'
+
+'When will he be in?'
+
+'Quite uncertain.'
+
+'Can you tell me where I may find him?'
+
+'No. O, here he is coming, sir.  That's Mr. Brown.'
+
+Edward looked down the pavement in the direction pointed out by the
+woman, and saw a man approaching.  He proceeded a few steps to meet
+him.
+
+Edward was impatient, and to a certain extent still a countryman,
+who had not, after the manner of city men, subdued the natural
+impulse to speak out the ruling thought without preface.  He said in
+a quiet tone to the stranger, 'One word with you--do you remember a
+lady lodger of yours of the name of Mrs. Manston?'
+
+Mr. Brown half closed his eyes at Springrove, somewhat as if he were
+looking into a telescope at the wrong end.
+
+'I have never let lodgings in my life,' he said, after his survey.
+
+'Didn't you attend an inquest a year and a half ago, at Carriford?'
+
+'Never knew there was such a place in the world, sir; and as to
+lodgings, I have taken acres first and last during the last thirty
+years, but I have never let an inch.'
+
+'I suppose there is some mistake,' Edward murmured, and turned away.
+He and Mr. Brown were now opposite the door next to the one he had
+knocked at.  The woman who was still standing there had heard the
+inquiry and the result of it.
+
+'I expect it is the other Mr. Brown, who used to live there, that
+you want, sir,' she said.  'The Mr. Brown that was inquired for the
+other day?'
+
+'Very likely that is the man,' said Edward, his interest
+reawakening.
+
+'He couldn't make a do of lodging-letting here, and at last he went
+to Cornwall, where he came from, and where his brother still lived,
+who had often asked him to come home again.  But there was little
+luck in the change; for after London they say he couldn't stand the
+rainy west winds they get there, and he died in the December
+following.  Will you step into the passage?'
+
+'That's unfortunate,' said Edward, going in.  'But perhaps you
+remember a Mrs. Manston living next door to you?'
+
+'O yes,' said the landlady, closing the door.  'The lady who was
+supposed to have met with such a horrible fate, and was alive all
+the time.  I saw her the other day.'
+
+'Since the fire at Carriford?'
+
+'Yes.  Her husband came to ask if Mr. Brown was still living here--
+just as you might.  He seemed anxious about it; and then one
+evening, a week or fortnight afterwards, when he came again to make
+further inquiries, she was with him.  But I did not speak to her--
+she stood back, as if she were shy.  I was interested, however, for
+old Mr. Brown had told me all about her when he came back from the
+inquest.'
+
+'Did you know Mrs. Manston before she called the other day?'
+
+'No.  You see she was only Mr. Brown's lodger for two or three
+weeks, and I didn't know she was living there till she was near upon
+leaving again--we don't notice next-door people much here in London.
+I much regretted I had not known her when I heard what had happened.
+It led me and Mr. Brown to talk about her a great deal afterwards.
+I little thought I should see her alive after all.'
+
+'And when do you say they came here together?'
+
+'I don't exactly remember the day--though I remember a very
+beautiful dream I had that same night--ah, I shall never forget it!
+Shoals of lodgers coming along the square with angels' wings and
+bright golden sovereigns in their hands wanting apartments at West
+End prices.  They would not give any less; no, not if you--'
+
+'Yes.  Did Mrs. Manston leave anything, such as papers, when she
+left these lodgings originally?' said Edward, though his heart sank
+as he asked.  He felt that he was outwitted.  Manston and his wife
+had been there before him, clearing the ground of all traces.
+
+'I have always said "No" hitherto,' replied the woman, 'considering
+I could say no more if put upon my oath, as I expected to be.  But
+speaking in a common everyday way now the occurrence is past, I
+believe a few things of some kind (though I doubt if they were
+papers) were left in a workbox she had, because she talked about it
+to Mr. Brown, and was rather angry at what occurred--you see, she
+had a temper by all account, and so I didn't like to remind the lady
+of this workbox when she came the other day with her husband.'
+
+'And about the workbox?'
+
+'Well, from what was casually dropped, I think Mrs. Manston had a
+few articles of furniture she didn't want, and when she was leaving
+they were put in a sale just by.  Amongst her things were two
+workboxes very much alike.  One of these she intended to sell, the
+other she didn't, and Mr. Brown, who collected the things together,
+took the wrong one to the sale.'
+
+'What was in it?'
+
+'O, nothing in particular, or of any value--some accounts, and her
+usual sewing materials I think--nothing more.  She didn't take much
+trouble to get it back--she said the bills were worth nothing to her
+or anybody else, but that she should have liked to keep the box
+because her husband gave it her when they were first married, and if
+he found she had parted with it, he would be vexed.'
+
+'Did Mrs. Manston, when she called recently with her husband, allude
+to this, or inquire for it, or did Mr. Manston?'
+
+'No--and I rather wondered at it.  But she seemed to have forgotten
+it--indeed, she didn't make any inquiry at all, only standing behind
+him, listening to his; and he probably had never been told anything
+about it.'
+
+'Whose sale were these articles of hers taken to?'
+
+'Who was the auctioneer?  Mr. Halway.  His place is the third
+turning from the end of that street you see there.  Anybody will
+tell you the shop--his name is written up.'
+
+Edward went off to follow up his clue with a promptness which was
+dictated more by a dogged will to do his utmost than by a hope of
+doing much.  When he was out of sight, the tall and cloaked man, who
+had watched him, came up to the woman's door, with an appearance of
+being in breathless haste.
+
+'Has a gentleman been here inquiring about Mrs. Manston?'
+
+'Yes; he's just gone.'
+
+'Dear me!  I want him.'
+
+'He's gone to Mr. Halway's.'
+
+'I think I can give him some information upon the subject.  Does he
+pay pretty liberally?'
+
+'He gave me half-a-crown.'
+
+'That scale will do.  I'm a poor man, and will see what my little
+contribution to his knowledge will fetch.  But, by the way, perhaps
+you told him all I know--where she lived before coming to live
+here?'
+
+'I didn't know where she lived before coming here.  O no--I only
+said what Mr. Brown had told me.  He seemed a nice, gentle young
+man, or I shouldn't have been so open as I was.'
+
+'I shall now about catch him at Mr. Halway's,' said the man, and
+went away as hastily as he had come.
+
+Edward in the meantime had reached the auction-room.  He found some
+difficulty, on account of the inertness of those whose only
+inducement to an action is a mere wish from another, in getting the
+information he stood in need of, but it was at last accorded him.
+The auctioneer's book gave the name of Mrs. Higgins, 3 Canley
+Passage, as the purchaser of the lot which had included Mrs.
+Manston's workbox.
+
+Thither Edward went, followed by the man.  Four bell pulls, one
+above the other like waistcoat-buttons, appeared on the door-post.
+Edward seized the first he came to.
+
+'Who did you woant?' said a thin voice from somewhere.
+
+Edward looked above and around him; nobody was visible.
+
+'Who did you woant?' said the thin voice again.
+
+He found now that the sound proceeded from below the grating
+covering the basement window.  He dropped his glance through the
+bars, and saw a child's white face.
+
+'Who did you woant?' said the voice the third time, with precisely
+the same languid inflection.
+
+'Mrs. Higgins,' said Edward.
+
+'Third bell up,' said the face, and disappeared.
+
+He pulled the third bell from the bottom, and was admitted by
+another child, the daughter of the woman he was in search of.  He
+gave the little thing sixpence, and asked for her mamma.  The child
+led him upstairs.
+
+Mrs. Higgins was the wife of a carpenter who from want of employment
+one winter had decided to marry.  Afterwards they both took to
+drink, and sank into desperate circumstances.  A few chairs and a
+table were the chief articles of furniture in the third-floor back
+room which they occupied.  A roll of baby-linen lay on the floor;
+beside it a pap-clogged spoon and an overturned tin pap-cup.
+Against the wall a Dutch clock was fixed out of level, and ticked
+wildly in longs and shorts, its entrails hanging down beneath its
+white face and wiry hands, like the faeces of a Harpy ('foedissima
+ventris proluvies, uncaeque manus, et pallida semper ora').  A baby
+was crying against every chair-leg, the whole family of six or seven
+being small enough to be covered by a washing-tub.  Mrs. Higgins sat
+helpless, clothed in a dress which had hooks and eyes in plenty, but
+never one opposite the other, thereby rendering the dress almost
+useless as a screen to the bosom.  No workbox was visible anywhere.
+
+It was a depressing picture of married life among the very poor of a
+city.  Only for one short hour in the whole twenty-four did husband
+and wife taste genuine happiness.  It was in the evening, when,
+after the sale of some necessary article of furniture, they were
+under the influence of a quartern of gin.
+
+Of all the ingenious and cruel satires that from the beginning till
+now have been stuck like knives into womankind, surely there is not
+one so lacerating to them, and to us who love them, as the trite old
+fact, that the most wretched of men can, in the twinkling of an eye,
+find a wife ready to be more wretched still for the sake of his
+company.
+
+Edward hastened to despatch his errand.
+
+Mrs. Higgins had lately pawned the workbox with other useless
+articles of lumber, she said.  Edward bought the duplicate of her,
+and went downstairs to the pawnbroker's.
+
+In the back division of a musty shop, amid the heterogeneous
+collection of articles and odours invariably crowding such places,
+he produced his ticket, and with a sense of satisfaction out of all
+proportion to the probable worth of his acquisition, took the box
+and carried it off under his arm.  He attempted to lift the cover as
+he walked, but found it locked.
+
+It was dusk when Springrove reached his lodging.  Entering his small
+sitting-room, the front apartment on the ground floor, he struck a
+light, and proceeded to learn if any scrap or mark within or upon
+his purchase rendered it of moment to the business in hand.
+Breaking open the cover with a small chisel, and lifting the tray,
+he glanced eagerly beneath, and found--nothing.
+
+He next discovered that a pocket or portfolio was formed on the
+underside of the cover.  This he unfastened, and slipping his hand
+within, found that it really contained some substance.  First he
+pulled out about a dozen tangled silk and cotton threads.  Under
+them were a short household account, a dry moss-rosebud, and an old
+pair of carte-de-visite photographs.  One of these was a likeness of
+Mrs. Manston--'Eunice' being written under it in ink--the other of
+Manston himself.
+
+He sat down dispirited.  This was all the fruit of his task--not a
+single letter, date, or address of any kind to help him--and was it
+likely there would be?
+
+However, thinking he would send the fragments, such as they were, to
+Graye, in order to satisfy him that he had done his best so far, he
+scribbled a line, and put all except the silk and cotton into an
+envelope.  Looking at his watch, he found it was then twenty minutes
+to seven; by affixing an extra stamp he would be enabled to despatch
+them by that evening's post.  He hastily directed the packet, and
+ran with it at once to the post-office at Charing Cross.
+
+On his return he took up the workbox again to examine it more
+leisurely.  He then found there was also a small cavity in the tray
+under the pincushion, which was movable by a bit of ribbon.  Lifting
+this he uncovered a flattened sprig of myrtle, and a small scrap of
+crumpled paper.  The paper contained a verse or two in a man's
+handwriting.  He recognized it as Manston's, having seen notes and
+bills from him at his father's house.  The stanza was of a
+complimentary character, descriptive of the lady who was now
+Manston's wife.
+
+                    'EUNICE.
+
+     'Whoso for hours or lengthy days
+      Shall catch her aspect's changeful rays,
+      Then turn away, can none recall
+      Beyond a galaxy of all
+          In hazy portraiture;
+      Lit by the light of azure eyes
+      Like summer days by summer skies:
+      Her sweet transitions seem to be
+      A kind of pictured melody,
+          And not a set contour.
+                                 'AE. M.'
+
+To shake, pull, and ransack the box till he had almost destroyed it
+was now his natural action.  But it contained absolutely nothing
+more.
+
+'Disappointed again,' he said, flinging down the box, the bit of
+paper, and the withered twig that had lain with it.
+
+Yet valueless as the new acquisition was, on second thoughts he
+considered that it would be worth while to make good the statement
+in his late note to Graye--that he had sent everything the box
+contained except the sewing-thread.  Thereupon he enclosed the verse
+and myrtle-twig in another envelope, with a remark that he had
+overlooked them in his first search, and put it on the table for the
+next day's post.
+
+In his hurry and concentration upon the matter that occupied him,
+Springrove, on entering his lodging and obtaining a light, had not
+waited to pull down the blind or close the shutters.  Consequently
+all that he had done had been visible from the street.  But as on an
+average not one person a minute passed along the quiet pavement at
+this time of the evening, the discovery of the omission did not much
+concern his mind.
+
+But the real state of the case was that a tall man had stood against
+the opposite wall and watched the whole of his proceeding.  When
+Edward came out and went to the Charing Cross post-office, the man
+followed him and saw him drop the letter into the box.  The stranger
+did not further trouble himself to follow Springrove back to his
+lodging again.
+
+Manston now knew that there had been photographs of some kind in his
+wife's workbox, and though he had not been near enough to see them,
+he guessed whose they were.  The least reflection told him to whom
+they had been sent.
+
+He paused a minute under the portico of the post-office, looking at
+the two or three omnibuses stopping and starting in front of him.
+Then he rushed along the Strand, through Holywell Street, and on to
+Old Boswell Court.  Kicking aside the shoeblacks who began to
+importune him as he passed under the colonnade, he turned up the
+narrow passage to the publishing-office of the Post-Office
+Directory.  He begged to be allowed to see the Directory of the
+south-west counties of England for a moment.
+
+The shopman immediately handed down the volume from a shelf, and
+Manston retired with it to the window-bench.  He turned to the
+county, and then to the parish of Tolchurch.  At the end of the
+historical and topographical description of the village he read:--
+
+'Postmistress--Mrs. Hurston.  Letters received at 6.3O A.M. by foot-
+post from Anglebury.'
+
+Returning his thanks, he handed back the book and quitted the
+office, thence pursuing his way to an obscure coffee-house by the
+Strand, where he now partook of a light dinner.  But rest seemed
+impossible with him.  Some absorbing intention kept his body
+continually on the move.  He paid his bill, took his bag in his
+hand, and went out to idle about the streets and over the river till
+the time should have arrived at which the night-mail left the
+Waterloo Station, by which train he intended to return homeward.
+
+There exists, as it were, an outer chamber to the mind, in which,
+when a man is occupied centrally with the most momentous question of
+his life, casual and trifling thoughts are just allowed to wander
+softly for an interval, before being banished altogether.  Thus,
+amid his concentration did Manston receive perceptions of the
+individuals about him in the lively thoroughfare of the Strand; tall
+men looking insignificant; little men looking great and profound;
+lost women of miserable repute looking as happy as the days are
+long; wives, happy by assumption, looking careworn and miserable.
+Each and all were alike in this one respect, that they followed a
+solitary trail like the inwoven threads which form a banner, and all
+were equally unconscious of the significant whole they collectively
+showed forth.
+
+At ten o'clock he turned into Lancaster Place, crossed the river,
+and entered the railway-station, where he took his seat in the down
+mail-train, which bore him, and Edward Springrove's letter to Graye,
+far away from London.
+
+
+
+XVII.  THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
+
+1.  MARCH THE THIRTEENTH.  THREE TO SIX O'CLOCK A.M.
+
+They entered Anglebury Station in the dead, still time of early
+morning, the clock over the booking-office pointing to twenty-five
+minutes to three.  Manston lingered on the platform and saw the
+mail-bags brought out, noticing, as a pertinent pastime, the many
+shabby blotches of wax from innumerable seals that had been set upon
+their mouths.  The guard took them into a fly, and was driven down
+the road to the post-office.
+
+It was a raw, damp, uncomfortable morning, though, as yet, little
+rain was falling.  Manston drank a mouthful from his flask and
+walked at once away from the station, pursuing his way through the
+gloom till he stood on the side of the town adjoining, at a distance
+from the last house in the street of about two hundred yards.
+
+The station road was also the turnpike-road into the country, the
+first part of its course being across a heath.  Having surveyed the
+highway up and down to make sure of its bearing, Manston
+methodically set himself to walk backwards and forwards a stone's
+throw in each direction.  Although the spring was temperate, the
+time of day, and the condition of suspense in which the steward
+found himself, caused a sensation of chilliness to pervade his frame
+in spite of the overcoat he wore.  The drizzling rain increased, and
+drops from the trees at the wayside fell noisily upon the hard road
+beneath them, which reflected from its glassy surface the faint halo
+of light hanging over the lamps of the adjacent town.
+
+Here he walked and lingered for two hours, without seeing or hearing
+a living soul.  Then he heard the market-house clock strike five,
+and soon afterwards, quick hard footsteps smote upon the pavement of
+the street leading towards him.  They were those of the postman for
+the Tolchurch beat.  He reached the bottom of the street, gave his
+bags a final hitch-up, stepped off the pavement, and struck out for
+the country with a brisk shuffle.
+
+Manston then turned his back upon the town, and walked slowly on.
+In two minutes a flickering light shone upon his form, and the
+postman overtook him.
+
+The new-comer was a short, stooping individual of above five-and-
+forty, laden on both sides with leather bags large and small, and
+carrying a little lantern strapped to his breast, which cast a tiny
+patch of light upon the road ahead.
+
+'A tryen mornen for travellers!' the postman cried, in a cheerful
+voice, without turning his head or slackening his trot.
+
+'It is, indeed,' said Manston, stepping out abreast of him.  'You
+have a long walk every day.'
+
+'Yes--a long walk--for though the distance is only sixteen miles on
+the straight--that is, eight to the furthest place and eight back,
+what with the ins and outs to the gentlemen's houses, it makes two-
+and-twenty for my legs.  Two-and-twenty miles a day, how many a
+year?  I used to reckon it, but I never do now.  I don't care to
+think o' my wear and tear, now it do begin to tell upon me.'
+
+Thus the conversation was begun, and the postman proceeded to
+narrate the different strange events that marked his experience.
+Manston grew very friendly.
+
+'Postman, I don't know what your custom is,' he said, after a while;
+'but between you and me, I always carry a drop of something warm in
+my pocket when I am out on such a morning as this.  Try it.'  He
+handed the bottle of brandy.
+
+'If you'll excuse me, please.  I haven't took no stimmilents these
+five years.'
+
+''Tis never too late to mend.'
+
+'Against the regulations, I be afraid.'
+
+'Who'll know it?'
+
+'That's true--nobody will know it.  Still, honesty's the best
+policy.'
+
+'Ah--it is certainly.  But, thank God, I've been able to get on
+without it yet.  You'll surely drink with me?'
+
+'Really, 'tis a'most too early for that sort o' thing--however, to
+oblige a friend, I don't object to the faintest shadder of a drop.'
+The postman drank, and Manston did the same to a very slight degree.
+Five minutes later, when they came to a gate, the flask was pulled
+out again.
+
+'Well done!' said the postman, beginning to feel its effect; 'but
+guide my soul, I be afraid 'twill hardly do!'
+
+'Not unless 'tis well followed, like any other line you take up,'
+said Manston.  'Besides, there's a way of liking a drop of liquor,
+and of being good--even religious--at the same time.'
+
+'Ay, for some thimble-and-button in-an-out fellers; but I could
+never get into the knack o' it; not I.'
+
+'Well, you needn't be troubled; it isn't necessary for the higher
+class of mind to be religious--they have so much common-sense that
+they can risk playing with fire.'
+
+'That hits me exactly.'
+
+'In fact, a man I know, who always had no other god but "Me;" and
+devoutly loved his neighbour's wife, says now that believing is a
+mistake.'
+
+'Well, to be sure!  However, believing in God is a mistake made by
+very few people, after all.'
+
+'A true remark.'
+
+'Not one Christian in our parish would walk half a mile in a rain
+like this to know whether the Scripture had concluded him under sin
+or grace.'
+
+'Nor in mine.'
+
+'Ah, you may depend upon it they'll do away wi' Goddymity altogether
+afore long, although we've had him over us so many years.'
+
+'There's no knowing.'
+
+'And I suppose the Queen 'ill be done away wi' then.  A pretty
+concern that'll be!  Nobody's head to put on your letters; and then
+your honest man who do pay his penny will never be known from your
+scamp who don't.  O, 'tis a nation!'
+
+'Warm the cockles of your heart, however.  Here's the bottle
+waiting.'
+
+'I'll oblige you, my friend.'
+
+The drinking was repeated.  The postman grew livelier as he went on,
+and at length favoured the steward with a song, Manston himself
+joining in the chorus.
+
+     'He flung his mallet against the wall,
+      Said, "The Lord make churches and chapels to fall,
+      And there'll be work for tradesmen all!"
+          When Joan's ale was new,
+                          My boys,
+          When Joan's ale was new.'
+
+'You understand, friend,' the postman added, 'I was originally a
+mason by trade:  no offence to you if you be a parson?'
+
+'None at all,' said Manston.
+
+The rain now came down heavily, but they pursued their path with
+alacrity, the produce of the several fields between which the lane
+wound its way being indicated by the peculiar character of the sound
+emitted by the falling drops.  Sometimes a soaking hiss proclaimed
+that they were passing by a pasture, then a patter would show that
+the rain fell upon some large-leafed root crop, then a paddling
+plash announced the naked arable, the low sound of the wind in their
+ears rising and falling with each pace they took.
+
+Besides the small private bags of the county families, which were
+all locked, the postman bore the large general budget for the
+remaining inhabitants along his beat.  At each village or hamlet
+they came to, the postman searched for the packet of letters
+destined for that place, and thrust it into an ordinary letter-hole
+cut in the door of the receiver's cottage--the village post-offices
+being mostly kept by old women who had not yet risen, though lights
+moving in other cottage windows showed that such people as carters,
+woodmen, and stablemen had long been stirring.
+
+The postman had by this time become markedly unsteady, but he still
+continued to be too conscious of his duties to suffer the steward to
+search the bag.  Manston was perplexed, and at lonely points in the
+road cast his eyes keenly upon the short bowed figure of the man
+trotting through the mud by his side, as if he were half inclined to
+run a very great risk indeed.
+
+It frequently happened that the houses of farmers, clergymen, etc.,
+lay a short distance up or down a lane or path branching from the
+direct track of the postman's journey.  To save time and distance,
+at the point of junction of some of these paths with the main road,
+the gate-post was hollowed out to form a letter-box, in which the
+postman deposited his missives in the morning, looking in the box
+again in the evening to collect those placed there for the return
+post.  Tolchurch Vicarage and Farmstead, lying back from the village
+street, were served on this principle.  This fact the steward now
+learnt by conversing with the postman, and the discovery relieved
+Manston greatly, making his intentions much clearer to himself than
+they had been in the earlier stages of his journey.
+
+They had reached the outskirts of the village.  Manston insisted
+upon the flask being emptied before they proceeded further.  This
+was done, and they approached the church, the vicarage, and the
+farmhouse in which Owen and Cytherea were living.
+
+The postman paused, fumbled in his bag, took out by the light of his
+lantern some half-dozen letters, and tried to sort them.  He could
+not perform the task.
+
+'We be crippled disciples a b'lieve,' he said, with a sigh and a
+stagger.
+
+'Not drunk, but market-merry,' said Manston cheerfully.
+
+'Well done!  If I baint so weak that I can't see the clouds--much
+less letters.  Guide my soul, if so be anybody should tell the
+Queen's postmaster-general of me!  The whole story will have to go
+through Parliament House, and I shall be high-treasoned--as safe as
+houses--and be fined, and who'll pay for a poor martel!  O, 'tis a
+world!'
+
+'Trust in the Lord--he'll pay.'
+
+'He pay a b'lieve! why should he when he didn't drink the drink?  He
+pay a b'lieve!  D'ye think the man's a fool?'
+
+'Well, well, I had no intention of hurting your feelings--but how
+was I to know you were so sensitive?'
+
+'True--you were not to know I was so sensitive.  Here's a caddle wi'
+these letters!  Guide my soul, what will Billy do!'
+
+Manston offered his services.
+
+'They are to be divided,' the man said.
+
+'How?' said Manston.
+
+'These, for the village, to be carried on into it:  any for the
+vicarage or vicarage farm must be left in the box of the gate-post
+just here.  There's none for the vicarage-house this mornen, but I
+saw when I started there was one for the clerk o' works at the new
+church.  This is it, isn't it?'
+
+He held up a large envelope, directed in Edward Springrove's
+handwriting:--
+
+     'MR. O. GRAYE,
+          CLERK OF WORKS,
+               TOLCHURCH,
+                    NEAR ANGLEBURY.'
+
+The letter-box was scooped in an oak gate-post about a foot square.
+There was no slit for inserting the letters, by reason of the
+opportunity such a lonely spot would have afforded mischievous
+peasant-boys of doing damage had such been the case; but at the side
+was a small iron door, kept close by an iron reversible strap locked
+across it.  One side of this strap was painted black, the other
+white, and white or black outwards implied respectively that there
+were letters inside, or none.
+
+The postman had taken the key from his pocket and was attempting to
+insert it in the keyhole of the box.  He touched one side, the
+other, above, below, but never made a straight hit.
+
+'Let me unlock it,' said Manston, taking the key from the postman.
+He opened the box and reached out with his other hand for Owen's
+letter.
+
+'No, no.  O no--no,' the postman said.  'As one of--Majesty's
+servants--care--Majesty's mails--duty--put letters--own hands.'  He
+slowly and solemnly placed the letter in the small cavity.
+
+'Now lock it,' he said, closing the door.
+
+The steward placed the bar across, with the black side outwards,
+signifying 'empty,' and turned the key.
+
+'You've put the wrong side outwards!' said the postman.  ''Tisn't
+empty.'
+
+'And dropped the key in the mud, so that I can't alter it,' said the
+steward, letting something fall.
+
+'What an awkward thing!'
+
+'It is an awkward thing.'
+
+They both went searching in the mud, which their own trampling had
+reduced to the consistency of pap, the postman unstrapping his
+little lantern from his breast, and thrusting it about, close to the
+ground, the rain still drizzling down, and the dawn so tardy on
+account of the heavy clouds that daylight seemed delayed
+indefinitely.  The rays of the lantern were rendered individually
+visible upon the thick mist, and seemed almost tangible as they
+passed off into it, after illuminating the faces and knees of the
+two stooping figures dripping with wet; the postman's cape and
+private bags, and the steward's valise, glistening as if they had
+been varnished.
+
+'It fell on the grass,' said the postman.
+
+'No; it fell in the mud,' said Manston.  They searched again.
+
+'I'm afraid we shan't find it by this light,' said the steward at
+length, washing his muddy fingers in the wet grass of the bank.
+
+'I'm afraid we shan't,' said the other, standing up.
+
+'I'll tell you what we had better do,' said Manston.  'I shall be
+back this way in an hour or so, and since it was all my fault, I'll
+look again, and shall be sure to find it in the daylight.  And I'll
+hide the key here for you.'  He pointed to a spot behind the post.
+'It will be too late to turn the index then, as the people will have
+been here, so that the box had better stay as it is.  The letter
+will only be delayed a day, and that will not be noticed; if it is,
+you can say you placed the iron the wrong way without knowing it,
+and all will be well.'
+
+This was agreed to by the postman as the best thing to be done under
+the circumstances, and the pair went on.  They had passed the
+village and come to a crossroad, when the steward, telling his
+companion that their paths now diverged, turned off to the left
+towards Carriford.
+
+No sooner was the postman out of sight and hearing than Manston
+stalked back to the vicarage letter-box by keeping inside a fence,
+and thus avoiding the village; arrived here, he took the key from
+his pocket, where it had been concealed all the time, and abstracted
+Owen's letter.  This done, he turned towards home, by the help of
+what he carried in his valise adjusting himself to his ordinary
+appearance as he neared the quarter in which he was known.
+
+An hour and half's sharp walking brought him to his own door in
+Knapwater Park.
+
+2.  EIGHT O'CLOCK A.M.
+
+Seated in his private office he wetted the flap of the stolen
+letter, and waited patiently till the adhesive gum could be
+loosened.  He took out Edward's note, the accounts, the rosebud, and
+the photographs, regarding them with the keenest interest and
+anxiety.
+
+The note, the accounts, the rosebud, and his own photograph, he
+restored to their places again.  The other photograph he took
+between his finger and thumb, and held it towards the bars of the
+grate.  There he held it for half-a-minute or more, meditating.
+
+'It is a great risk to run, even for such an end,' he muttered.
+
+Suddenly, impregnated with a bright idea, he jumped up and left the
+office for the front parlour.  Taking up an album of portraits,
+which lay on the table, he searched for three or four likenesses of
+the lady who had so lately displaced Cytherea, which were
+interspersed among the rest of the collection, and carefully
+regarded them.  They were taken in different attitudes and styles,
+and he compared each singly with that he held in his hand.  One of
+them, the one most resembling that abstracted from the letter in
+general tone, size, and attitude, he selected from the rest, and
+returned with it to his office.
+
+Pouring some water into a plate, he set the two portraits afloat
+upon it, and sitting down tried to read.
+
+At the end of a quarter of an hour, after several ineffectual
+attempts, he found that each photograph would peel from the card on
+which it was mounted.  This done, he threw into the fire the
+original likeness and the recent card, stuck upon the original card
+the recent likeness from the album, dried it before the fire, and
+placed it in the envelope with the other scraps.
+
+The result he had obtained, then, was this:  in the envelope were
+now two photographs, both having the same photographer's name on the
+back and consecutive numbers attached.  At the bottom of the one
+which showed his own likeness, his own name was written down; on the
+other his wife's name was written; whilst the central feature, and
+whole matter to which this latter card and writing referred, the
+likeness of a lady mounted upon it, had been changed.
+
+Mrs. Manston entered the room, and begged him to come to breakfast.
+He followed her and they sat down.  During the meal he told her what
+he had done, with scrupulous regard to every detail, and showed her
+the result.
+
+'It is indeed a great risk to run,' she said, sipping her tea.
+
+'But it would be a greater not to do it.'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+The envelope was again fastened up as before, and Manston put it in
+his pocket and went out.  Shortly afterwards he was seen, on
+horseback, riding in a direction towards Tolchurch.  Keeping to the
+fields, as well as he could, for the greater part of the way, he
+dropped into the road by the vicarage letter-box, and looking
+carefully about, to ascertain that no person was near, he restored
+the letter to its nook, placed the key in its hiding-place, as he
+had promised the postman, and again rode homewards by a roundabout
+way,
+
+3.  AFTERNOON
+
+The letter was brought to Owen Graye, the same afternoon, by one of
+the vicar's servants who had been to the box with a duplicate key,
+as usual, to leave letters for the evening post.  The man found that
+the index had told falsely that morning for the first time within
+his recollection; but no particular attention was paid to the
+mistake, as it was considered.  The contents of the envelope were
+scrutinized by Owen and flung aside as useless.
+
+The next morning brought Springrove's second letter, the existence
+of which was unknown to Manston.  The sight of Edward's handwriting
+again raised the expectations of brother and sister, till Owen had
+opened the envelope and pulled out the twig and verse.
+
+'Nothing that's of the slightest use, after all,' he said to her;
+'we are as far as ever from the merest shadow of legal proof that
+would convict him of what I am morally certain he did, marry you,
+suspecting, if not knowing, her to be alive all the time.'
+
+'What has Edward sent?' said Cytherea.
+
+'An old amatory verse in Manston's writing.  Fancy,' he said
+bitterly, 'this is the strain he addressed her in when they were
+courting--as he did you, I suppose.'
+
+He handed her the verse and she read--
+
+                    'EUNICE.
+
+     'Whoso for hours or lengthy days
+      Shall catch her aspect's changeful rays,
+      Then turn away, can none recall
+      Beyond a galaxy of all
+          In hazy portraiture;
+      Lit by the light of azure eyes
+      Like summer days by summer skies:
+      Her sweet transitions seem to be
+      A kind of pictured melody,
+          And not a set contour.
+                                 'AE. M.'
+
+A strange expression had overspread Cytherea's countenance.  It
+rapidly increased to the most death-like anguish.  She flung down
+the paper, seized Owen's hand tremblingly, and covered her face.
+
+'Cytherea!  What is it, for Heaven's sake?'
+
+'Owen--suppose--O, you don't know what I think.'
+
+'What?'
+
+'"THE LIGHT OF AZURE EYES,"' she repeated with ashy lips.
+
+'Well, "the light of azure eyes"?' he said, astounded at her manner.
+
+'Mrs. Morris said in her letter to me that her eyes are BLACK!'
+
+'H'm.  Mrs. Morris must have made a mistake--nothing likelier.'
+
+'She didn't.'
+
+'They might be either in this photograph,' said Owen, looking at the
+card bearing Mrs. Manston's name.
+
+'Blue eyes would scarcely photograph so deep in tone as that,' said
+Cytherea.  'No, they seem black here, certainly.'
+
+'Well, then, Manston must have blundered in writing his verses.'
+
+'But could he?  Say a man in love may forget his own name, but not
+that he forgets the colour of his mistress's eyes.  Besides she
+would have seen the mistake when she read them, and have had it
+corrected.'
+
+'That's true, she would,' mused Owen.  'Then, Cytherea, it comes to
+this--you must have been misinformed by Mrs. Morris, since there is
+no other alternative.'
+
+'I suppose I must.'
+
+Her looks belied her words.
+
+'What makes you so strange--ill?' said Owen again.
+
+'I can't believe Mrs. Morris wrong.'
+
+'But look at this, Cytherea.  If it is clear to us that the woman
+had blue eyes two years ago, she MUST have blue eyes now, whatever
+Mrs. Morris or anybody else may fancy.  Any one would think that
+Manston could change the colour of a woman's eyes to hear you.'
+
+'Yes,' she said, and paused.
+
+'You say yes, as if he could,' said Owen impatiently.
+
+'By changing the woman herself,' she exclaimed.  'Owen, don't you
+see the horrid--what I dread?--that the woman he lives with is not
+Mrs. Manston--that she was burnt after all--and that I am HIS WIFE!'
+
+She tried to support a stoicism under the weight of this new
+trouble, but no!  The unexpected revulsion of ideas was so
+overwhelming that she crept to him and leant against his breast.
+
+Before reflecting any further upon the subject Graye led her
+upstairs and got her to lie down.  Then he went to the window and
+stared out of it up the lane, vainly endeavouring to come to some
+conclusion upon the fantastic enigma that confronted him.
+Cytherea's new view seemed incredible, yet it had such a hold upon
+her that it would be necessary to clear it away by positive proof
+before contemplation of her fear should have preyed too deeply upon
+her.
+
+'Cytherea,' he said, 'this will not do.  You must stay here alone
+all the afternoon whilst I go to Carriford.  I shall know all when I
+return.'
+
+'No, no, don't go!' she implored.
+
+'Soon, then, not directly.'  He saw her subtle reasoning--that it
+was folly to be wise.
+
+Reflection still convinced him that good would come of persevering
+in his intention and dispelling his sister's idle fears.  Anything
+was better than this absurd doubt in her mind.  But he resolved to
+wait till Sunday, the first day on which he might reckon upon seeing
+Mrs. Manston without suspicion.  In the meantime he wrote to Edward
+Springrove, requesting him to go again to Mrs. Manston's former
+lodgings.
+
+
+
+XVIII.  THE EVENTS OF THREE DAYS
+
+1.  MARCH THE EIGHTEENTH
+
+Sunday morning had come, and Owen was trudging over the six miles of
+hill and dale that lay between Tolchurch and Carriford.
+
+Edward Springrove's answer to the last letter, after expressing his
+amazement at the strange contradiction between the verses and Mrs.
+Morris's letter, had been to the effect that he had again visited
+the neighbour of the dead Mr. Brown, and had received as near a
+description of Mrs. Manston as it was possible to get at second-
+hand, and by hearsay.  She was a tall woman, wide at the shoulders,
+and full-chested, and she had a straight and rather large nose.  The
+colour of her eyes the informant did not know, for she had only seen
+the lady in the street as she went in or out.  This confusing remark
+was added.  The woman had almost recognized Mrs. Manston when she
+had called with her husband lately, but she had kept her veil down.
+Her residence, before she came to Hoxton, was quite unknown to this
+next-door neighbour, and Edward could get no manner of clue to it
+from any other source.
+
+Owen reached the church-door a few minutes before the bells began
+chiming.  Nobody was yet in the church, and he walked round the
+aisles.  From Cytherea's frequent description of how and where
+herself and others used to sit, he knew where to look for Manston's
+seat; and after two or three errors of examination he took up a
+prayer-book in which was written 'Eunice Manston.'  The book was
+nearly new, and the date of the writing about a month earlier.  One
+point was at any rate established:  that the woman living with
+Manston was presented to the world as no other than his lawful wife.
+
+The quiet villagers of Carriford required no pew-opener in their
+place of worship:  natives and in-dwellers had their own seats, and
+strangers sat where they could.  Graye took a seat in the nave, on
+the north side, close behind a pillar dividing it from the north
+aisle, which was completely allotted to Miss Aldclyffe, her farmers,
+and her retainers, Manston's pew being in the midst of them.  Owen's
+position on the other side of the passage was a little in advance of
+Manston's seat, and so situated that by leaning forward he could
+look directly into the face of any person sitting there, though, if
+he sat upright, he was wholly hidden from such a one by the
+intervening pillar.
+
+Aiming to keep his presence unknown to Manston if possible, Owen
+sat, without once turning his head, during the entrance of the
+congregation.  A rustling of silk round by the north passage and
+into Manston's seat, told him that some woman had entered there, and
+as it seemed from the accompaniment of heavier footsteps, Manston
+was with her.
+
+Immediately upon rising up, he looked intently in that direction,
+and saw a lady standing at the end of the seat nearest himself.
+Portions of Manston's figure appeared on the other side of her.  In
+two glances Graye read thus many of her characteristics, and in the
+following order:--
+
+She was a tall woman.
+
+She was broad at the shoulders.
+
+She was full-bosomed.
+
+She was easily recognizable from the photograph but nothing could be
+discerned of the colour of her eyes.
+
+With a preoccupied mind he withdrew into his nook, and heard the
+service continued--only conscious of the fact that in opposition to
+the suspicion which one odd circumstance had bred in his sister
+concerning this woman, all ostensible and ordinary proofs and
+probabilities tended to the opposite conclusion.  There sat the
+genuine original of the portrait--could he wish for more?  Cytherea
+wished for more.  Eunice Manston's eyes were blue, and it was
+necessary that this woman's eyes should be blue also.
+
+Unskilled labour wastes in beating against the bars ten times the
+energy exerted by the practised hand in the effective direction.
+Owen felt this to be the case in his own and Edward's attempts to
+follow up the clue afforded them.  Think as he might, he could not
+think of a crucial test in the matter absorbing him, which should
+possess the indispensable attribute--a capability of being applied
+privately; that in the event of its proving the lady to be the
+rightful owner of the name she used, he might recede without obloquy
+from an untenable position.
+
+But to see Mrs. Manston's eyes from where he sat was impossible, and
+he could do nothing in the shape of a direct examination at present.
+Miss Aldclyffe had possibly recognized him, but Manston had not, and
+feeling that it was indispensable to keep the purport of his visit a
+secret from the steward, he thought it would be as well, too, to
+keep his presence in the village a secret from him; at any rate,
+till the day was over.
+
+At the first opening of the doors, Graye left the church and
+wandered away into the fields to ponder on another scheme.  He could
+not call on Farmer Springrove, as he had intended, until this matter
+was set at rest.  Two hours intervened between the morning and
+afternoon services.
+
+This time had nearly expired before Owen had struck out any method
+of proceeding, or could decide to run the risk of calling at the Old
+House and asking to see Mrs. Manston point-blank.  But he had drawn
+near the place, and was standing still in the public path, from
+which a partial view of the front of the building could be obtained,
+when the bells began chiming for afternoon service.  Whilst Graye
+paused, two persons came from the front door of the half-hidden
+dwelling whom he presently saw to be Manston and his wife.  Manston
+was wearing his old garden-hat, and carried one of the monthly
+magazines under his arm.  Immediately they had passed the gateway he
+branched off and went over the hill in a direction away from the
+church, evidently intending to ramble along, and read as the humour
+moved him.  The lady meanwhile turned in the other direction, and
+went into the church path.
+
+Owen resolved to make something of this opportunity.  He hurried
+along towards the church, doubled round a sharp angle, and came back
+upon the other path, by which Mrs. Manston must arrive.
+
+In about three minutes she appeared in sight without a veil.  He
+discovered, as she drew nearer, a difficulty which had not struck
+him at first--that it is not an easy matter to particularize the
+colour of a stranger's eyes in a merely casual encounter on a path
+out of doors.  That Mrs. Manston must be brought close to him, and
+not only so, but to look closely at him, if his purpose were to be
+accomplished.
+
+He shaped a plan.  It might by chance be effectual; if otherwise, it
+would not reveal his intention to her.  When Mrs. Manston was within
+speaking distance, he went up to her and said--
+
+'Will you kindly tell me which turning will take me to
+Casterbridge?'
+
+'The second on the right,' said Mrs. Manston.
+
+Owen put on a blank look:  he held his hand to his ear--conveying to
+the lady the idea that he was deaf.
+
+She came closer and said more distinctly--
+
+'The second turning on the right.'
+
+Owen flushed a little.  He fancied he had beheld the revelation he
+was in search of.  But had his eyes deceived him?
+
+Once more he used the ruse, still drawing nearer and intimating by a
+glance that the trouble he gave her was very distressing to him.
+
+'How very deaf!' she murmured.  She exclaimed loudly--
+
+'THE SECOND TURNING TO THE RIGHT.'
+
+She had advanced her face to within a foot of his own, and in
+speaking mouthed very emphatically, fixing her eyes intently upon
+his.  And now his first suspicion was indubitably confirmed.  Her
+eyes were as black as midnight.
+
+All this feigning was most distasteful to Graye.  The riddle having
+been solved, he unconsciously assumed his natural look before she
+had withdrawn her face.  She found him to be peering at her as if he
+would read her very soul--expressing with his eyes the notification
+of which, apart from emotion, the eyes are more capable than any
+other---inquiry.
+
+Her face changed its expression--then its colour.  The natural tint
+of the lighter portions sank to an ashy gray; the pink of her cheeks
+grew purpler.  It was the precise result which would remain after
+blood had left the face of one whose skin was dark, and artificially
+coated with pearl-powder and carmine.
+
+She turned her head and moved away, murmuring a hasty reply to
+Owen's farewell remark of 'Good-day,' and with a kind of nervous
+twitch lifting her hand and smoothing her hair, which was of a
+light-brown colour.
+
+'She wears false hair,' he thought, 'or has changed its colour
+artificially.  Her true hair matched her eyes.'
+
+And now, in spite of what Mr. Brown's neighbours had said about
+nearly recognizing Mrs. Manston on her recent visit--which might
+have meant anything or nothing; in spite of the photograph, and in
+spite of his previous incredulity; in consequence of the verse, of
+her silence and backwardness at the visit to Hoxton with Manston,
+and of her appearance and distress at the present moment, Graye had
+a conviction that the woman was an impostor.
+
+What could be Manston's reason for such an astounding trick he could
+by no stretch of imagination divine.
+
+He changed his direction as soon as the woman was out of sight, and
+plodded along the lanes homeward to Tolchurch.
+
+One new idea was suggested to him by his desire to allay Cytherea's
+dread of being claimed, and by the difficulty of believing that the
+first Mrs. Manston lost her life as supposed, notwithstanding the
+inquest and verdict.  Was it possible that the real Mrs. Manston,
+who was known to be a Philadelphian by birth, had returned by the
+train to London, as the porter had said, and then left the country
+under an assumed name, to escape that worst kind of widowhood--the
+misery of being wedded to a fickle, faithless, and truant husband?
+
+
+
+In her complicated distress at the news brought by her brother,
+Cytherea's thoughts at length reverted to her friend, the Rector of
+Carriford.  She told Owen of Mr. Raunham's warm-hearted behaviour
+towards herself, and of his strongly expressed wish to aid her.
+
+'He is not only a good, but a sensible man.  We seem to want an old
+head on our side.'
+
+'And he is a magistrate,' said Owen in a tone of concurrence.  He
+thought, too, that no harm could come of confiding in the rector,
+but there was a difficulty in bringing about the confidence.  He
+wished that his sister and himself might both be present at an
+interview with Mr. Raunham, yet it would be unwise for them to call
+on him together, in the sight of all the servants and parish of
+Carriford.
+
+There could be no objection to their writing him a letter.
+
+No sooner was the thought born than it was carried out.  They wrote
+to him at once, asking him to have the goodness to give them some
+advice they sadly needed, and begging that he would accept their
+assurance that there was a real justification for the additional
+request they made--that instead of their calling upon him, he would
+any evening of the week come to their cottage at Tolchurch.
+
+2.  MARCH THE TWENTIETH.  SIX TO NINE O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+Two evenings later, to the total disarrangement of his dinner-hour,
+Mr. Raunham appeared at Owen's door.  His arrival was hailed with
+genuine gratitude.  The horse was tied to the palings, and the
+rector ushered indoors and put into the easy-chair.
+
+Then Graye told him the whole story, reminding him that their first
+suspicions had been of a totally different nature, and that in
+endeavouring to obtain proof of their truth they had stumbled upon
+marks which had surprised them into these new uncertainties, thrice
+as marvellous as the first, yet more prominent.
+
+Cytherea's heart was so full of anxiety that it superinduced a
+manner of confidence which was a death-blow to all formality.  Mr.
+Raunham took her hand pityingly.
+
+'It is a serious charge,' he said, as a sort of original twig on
+which his thoughts might precipitate themselves.
+
+'Assuming for a moment that such a substitution was rendered an easy
+matter by fortuitous events,' he continued, 'there is this
+consideration to be placed beside it--what earthly motive can Mr.
+Manston have had which would be sufficiently powerful to lead him to
+run such a very great risk?  The most abandoned roue could not, at
+that particular crisis, have taken such a reckless step for the mere
+pleasure of a new companion.'
+
+Owen had seen that difficulty about the motive; Cytherea had not.
+
+'Unfortunately for us,' the rector resumed, 'no more evidence is to
+be obtained from the porter, Chinney.  I suppose you know what
+became of him?  He got to Liverpool and embarked, intending to work
+his way to America, but on the passage he fell overboard and was
+drowned.  But there is no doubt of the truth of his confession--in
+fact, his conduct tends to prove it true--and no moral doubt of the
+fact that the real Mrs. Manston left here to go back by that
+morning's train.  This being the case, then, why, if this woman is
+not she, did she take no notice of the advertisement--I mean not
+necessarily a friendly notice, but from the information it afforded
+her have rendered it impossible that she should be personified
+without her own connivance?'
+
+'I think that argument is overthrown,' Graye said, 'by my earliest
+assumption of her hatred of him, weariness of the chain which bound
+her to him, and a resolve to begin the world anew.  Let's suppose
+she has married another man--somewhere abroad, say; she would be
+silent for her own sake.'
+
+'You've hit the only genuine possibility,' said Mr. Raunham, tapping
+his finger upon his knee.  'That would decidedly dispose of the
+second difficulty.  But his motive would be as mysterious as ever.'
+
+Cytherea's pictured dreads would not allow her mind to follow their
+conversation.  'She's burnt,' she said.  'O yes; I fear--I fear she
+is!'
+
+'I don't think we can seriously believe that now, after what has
+happened,' said the rector.
+
+Still straining her thought towards the worst, 'Then, perhaps, the
+first Mrs. Manston was not his wife,' she returned; 'and then I
+should be his wife just the same, shouldn't I?'
+
+'They were married safely enough,' said Owen.  'There is abundance
+of circumstantial evidence to prove that.'
+
+'Upon the whole,' said Mr. Raunham, 'I should advise your asking in
+a straightforward way for legal proof from the steward that the
+present woman is really his original wife--a thing which, to my
+mind, you should have done at the outset.'  He turned to Cytherea
+kindly, and asked her what made her give up her husband so
+unceremoniously.
+
+She could not tell the rector of her aversion to Manston, and of her
+unquenched love for Edward.
+
+'Your terrified state no doubt,' he said, answering for her, in the
+manner of those accustomed to the pulpit.  'But into such a solemn
+compact as marriage, all-important considerations, both legally and
+morally, enter; it was your duty to have seen everything clearly
+proved.  Doubtless Mr. Manston is prepared with proofs, but as it
+concerns nobody but yourself that her identity should be publicly
+established (and by your absenteeism you act as if you were
+satisfied) he has not troubled to exhibit them.  Nobody else has
+taken the trouble to prove what does not affect them in the least--
+that's the way of the world always.  You, who should have required
+all things to be made clear, ran away.'
+
+'That was partly my doing,' said Owen.
+
+The same explanation--her want of love for Manston--applied here
+too, but she shunned the revelation.
+
+'But never mind,' added the rector, 'it was all the greater credit
+to your womanhood, perhaps.  I say, then, get your brother to write
+a line to Mr. Manston, saying you wish to be satisfied that all is
+legally clear (in case you should want to marry again, for
+instance), and I have no doubt that you will be.  Or, if you would
+rather, I'll write myself?'
+
+'O no, sir, no,' pleaded Cytherea, beginning to blanch, and
+breathing quickly.  'Please don't say anything.  Let me live here
+with Owen.  I am so afraid it will turn out that I shall have to go
+to Knapwater and be his wife, and I don't want to go.  Do conceal
+what we have told you.  Let him continue his deception--it is much
+the best for me.'
+
+Mr. Raunham at length divined that her love for Manston, if it had
+ever existed, had transmuted itself into a very different feeling
+now.
+
+'At any rate,' he said, as he took his leave and mounted his mare,
+'I will see about it.  Rest content, Miss Graye, and depend upon it
+that I will not lead you into difficulty.'
+
+'Conceal it,' she still pleaded.
+
+'We'll see--but of course I must do my duty.'
+
+'No--don't do your duty!'  She looked up at him through the gloom,
+illuminating her own face and eyes with the candle she held.
+
+'I will consider, then,' said Mr. Raunham, sensibly moved.  He
+turned his horse's head, bade them a warm adieu, and left the door.
+
+The rector of Carriford trotted homewards under the cold and clear
+March sky, its countless stars fluttering like bright birds.  He was
+unconscious of the scene.  Recovering from the effect of Cytherea's
+voice and glance of entreaty, he laid the subject of the interview
+clearly before himself.
+
+The suspicions of Cytherea and Owen were honest, and had foundation-
+-that he must own.  Was he--a clergyman, magistrate, and
+conscientious man--justified in yielding to Cytherea's importunities
+to keep silence, because she dreaded the possibility of a return to
+Manston?  Was she wise in her request?  Holding her present belief,
+and with no definite evidence either way, she could, for one thing,
+never conscientiously marry any one else.  Suppose that Cytherea
+were Manston's wife--i.e., that the first wife was really burnt?
+The adultery of Manston would be proved, and, Mr. Raunham thought,
+cruelty sufficient to bring the case within the meaning of the
+statute.  Suppose the new woman was, as stated, Mr. Manston's
+restored wife?  Cytherea was perfectly safe as a single woman whose
+marriage had been void.  And if it turned out that, though this
+woman was not Manston's wife, his wife was still living, as Owen had
+suggested, in America or elsewhere, Cytherea was safe.
+
+The first supposition opened up the worst contingency.  Was she
+really safe as Manston's wife?  Doubtful.  But, however that might
+be, the gentle, defenceless girl, whom it seemed nobody's business
+to help or defend, should be put in a track to proceed against this
+man.  She had but one life, and the superciliousness with which all
+the world now regarded her should be compensated in some measure by
+the man whose carelessness--to set him in the best light--had caused
+it.
+
+Mr. Raunham felt more and more positively that his duty must be
+done.  An inquiry must be made into the matter.  Immediately on
+reaching home, he sat down and wrote a plain and friendly letter to
+Mr. Manston, and despatched it at once to him by hand.  Then he
+flung himself back in his chair, and went on with his meditation.
+Was there anything in the suspicion?  There could be nothing,
+surely.  Nothing is done by a clever man without a motive, and what
+conceivable motive could Manston have for such abnormal conduct?
+Corinthian that he might be, who had preyed on virginity like St.
+George's dragon, he would never have been absurd enough to venture
+on such a course for the possession alone of the woman--there was no
+reason for it--she was inferior to Cytherea in every respect,
+physical and mental.
+
+On the other hand, it seemed rather odd, when he analyzed the
+action, that a woman who deliberately hid herself from her husband
+for more than a twelvemonth should be brought back by a mere
+advertisement.  In fact, the whole business had worked almost too
+smoothly and effectually for unpremeditated sequence.  It was too
+much like the indiscriminate righting of everything at the end of an
+old play.  And there was that curious business of the keys and
+watch.  Her way of accounting for their being left behind by
+forgetfulness had always seemed to him rather forced.  The only
+unforced explanation was that suggested by the newspaper writers--
+that she left them behind on purpose to blind people as to her
+escape, a motive which would have clashed with the possibility of
+her being fished back by an advertisement, as the present woman had
+been.  Again, there were the two charred bones.  He shuffled the
+books and papers in his study, and walked about the room, restlessly
+musing on the same subject.  The parlour-maid entered.
+
+'Can young Mr. Springrove from London see you to-night, sir?'
+
+'Young Mr. Springrove?' said the rector, surprised.
+
+'Yes, sir.'
+
+'Yes, of course he can see me.  Tell him to come in.'
+
+Edward came so impatiently into the room, as to show that the few
+short moments his announcement had occupied had been irksome to him.
+He stood in the doorway with the same black bag in his hand, and the
+same old gray cloak on his shoulders, that he had worn fifteen
+months earlier when returning on the night of the fire.  This
+appearance of his conveyed a true impression; he had become a
+stagnant man.  But he was excited now.
+
+'I have this moment come from London,' he said, as the door was
+closed behind him.
+
+The prophetic insight, which so strangely accompanies critical
+experiences, prompted Mr. Raunham's reply.
+
+'About the Grayes and Manston?'
+
+'Yes.  That woman is not Mrs. Manston.'
+
+'Prove it.'
+
+'I can prove that she is somebody else--that her name is Anne
+Seaway.'
+
+'And are their suspicions true indeed!'
+
+'And I can do what's more to the purpose at present.'
+
+'Suggest Manston's motive?'
+
+'Only suggest it, remember.  But my assumption fits so perfectly
+with the facts that have been secretly unearthed and conveyed to me,
+that I can hardly conceive of another.'
+
+There was in Edward's bearing that entire unconsciousness of himself
+which, natural to wild animals, only prevails in a sensitive man at
+moments of extreme intentness.  The rector saw that he had no
+trivial story to communicate, whatever the story was.
+
+'Sit down,' said Mr. Raunham.  'My mind has been on the stretch all
+the evening to form the slightest guess at such an object, and all
+to no purpose--entirely to no purpose.  Have you said anything to
+Owen Graye?'
+
+'Nothing--nor to anybody.  I could not trust to the effect a letter
+might have upon yourself, either; the intricacy of the case brings
+me to this interview.'
+
+Whilst Springrove had been speaking the two had sat down together.
+The conversation, hitherto distinct to every corner of the room, was
+carried on now in tones so low as to be scarcely audible to the
+interlocutors, and in phrases which hesitated to complete
+themselves.  Three-quarters of an hour passed.  Then Edward arose,
+came out of the rector's study and again flung his cloak around him.
+Instead of going thence homeward, he went first to the Carriford
+Road Station with a telegram, having despatched which he proceeded
+to his father's house for the first time since his arrival in the
+village.
+
+3.  FROM NINE TO TEN O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+The next presentation is the interior of the Old House on the
+evening of the preceding section.  The steward was sitting by his
+parlour fire, and had been reading the letter arrived from the
+rectory.  Opposite to him sat the woman known to the village and
+neighbourhood as Mrs. Manston.
+
+'Things are looking desperate with us,' he said gloomily.  His gloom
+was not that of the hypochondriac, but the legitimate gloom which
+has its origin in a syllogism.  As he uttered the words he handed
+the letter to her.
+
+'I almost expected some such news as this,' she replied, in a tone
+of much greater indifference.  'I knew suspicion lurked in the eyes
+of that young man who stared at me so in the church path:  I could
+have sworn it.'
+
+Manston did not answer for some time.  His face was worn and
+haggard; latterly his head had not been carried so uprightly as of
+old.  'If they prove you to be--who you are. . . .  Yes, if they
+do,' he murmured.
+
+'They must not find that out,' she said, in a positive voice, and
+looking at him.  'But supposing they do, the trick does not seem to
+me to be so serious as to justify that wretched, miserable, horrible
+look of yours.  It makes my flesh creep; it is perfectly deathlike.'
+
+He did not reply, and she continued, 'If they say and prove that
+Eunice is indeed living--and dear, you know she is--she is sure to
+come back.'
+
+This remark seemed to awaken and irritate him to speech.  Again, as
+he had done a hundred times during their residence together, he
+categorized the events connected with the fire at the Three
+Tranters.  He dwelt on every incident of that night's history, and
+endeavoured, with an anxiety which was extraordinary in the apparent
+circumstances, to prove that his wife must, by the very nature of
+things, have perished in the flames.  She arose from her seat,
+crossed the hearthrug, and set herself to soothe him; then she
+whispered that she was still as unbelieving as ever.  'Come,
+supposing she escaped--just supposing she escaped--where is she?'
+coaxed the lady.
+
+'Why are you so curious continually?' said Manston.
+
+'Because I am a woman and want to know.  Now where is she?'
+
+'In the Flying Isle of San Borandan.'
+
+'Witty cruelty is the cruellest of any.  Ah, well--if she is in
+England, she will come back.'
+
+'She is not in England.'
+
+'But she will come back?'
+
+'No, she won't. . . .  Come, madam,' he said, arousing himself, 'I
+shall not answer any more questions.'
+
+'Ah--ah--ah--she is not dead,' the woman murmured again poutingly.
+
+'She is, I tell you.'
+
+'I don't think so, love.'
+
+'She was burnt, I tell you!' he exclaimed.
+
+'Now to please me, admit the bare possibility of her being alive--
+just the possibility.'
+
+'O yes--to please you I will admit that,' he said quickly.  'Yes, I
+admit the possibility of her being alive, to please you.'
+
+She looked at him in utter perplexity.  The words could only have
+been said in jest, and yet they seemed to savour of a tone the
+furthest remove from jesting.  There was his face plain to her eyes,
+but no information of any kind was to be read there.
+
+'It is only natural that I should be curious,' she murmured
+pettishly, 'if I resemble her as much as you say I do.'
+
+'You are handsomer,' he said, 'though you are about her own height
+and size.  But don't worry yourself.  You must know that you are
+body and soul united with me, though you are but my housekeeper.'
+
+She bridled a little at the remark.  'Wife,' she said, 'most
+certainly wife, since you cannot dismiss me without losing your
+character and position, and incurring heavy penalties.'
+
+'I own it--it was well said, though mistakenly--very mistakenly.'
+
+'Don't riddle to me about mistakenly and such dark things.  Now what
+was your motive, dearest, in running the risk of having me here?'
+
+'Your beauty,' he said.
+
+'She thanks you much for the compliment, but will not take it.
+Come, what was your motive?'
+
+'Your wit.'
+
+'No, no; not my wit.  Wit would have made a wife of me by this time
+instead of what I am.'
+
+'Your virtue.'
+
+'Or virtue either.'
+
+'I tell you it was your beauty--really.'
+
+'But I cannot help seeing and hearing, and if what people say is
+true, I am not nearly so good-looking as Cytherea, and several years
+older.'
+
+The aspect of Manston's face at these words from her was so
+confirmatory of her hint, that his forced reply of 'O no,' tended to
+develop her chagrin.
+
+'Mere liking or love for me,' she resumed, 'would not have sprung up
+all of a sudden, as your pretended passion did.  You had been to
+London several times between the time of the fire and your marriage
+with Cytherea--you had never visited me or thought of my existence
+or cared that I was out of a situation and poor.  But the week after
+you married her and were separated from her, off you rush to make
+love to me--not first to me either, for you went to several places--
+'
+
+'No, not several places.'
+
+'Yes, you told me so yourself--that you went first to the only
+lodging in which your wife had been known as Mrs. Manston, and when
+you found that the lodging-house-keeper had gone away and died, and
+that nobody else in the street had any definite ideas as to your
+wife's personal appearance, and came and proposed the arrangement we
+carried out--that I should personate her.  Your taking all this
+trouble shows that something more serious than love had to do with
+the matter.'
+
+'Humbug--what trouble after all did I take?  When I found Cytherea
+would not stay with me after the wedding I was much put out at being
+left alone again.  Was that unnatural?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'And those favouring accidents you mention--that nobody knew my
+first wife--seemed an arrangement of Providence for our mutual
+benefit, and merely perfected a half-formed impulse--that I should
+call you my first wife to escape the scandal that would have arisen
+if you had come here as anything else.'
+
+'My love, that story won't do.  If Mrs. Manston was burnt, Cytherea,
+whom you love better than me, could have been compelled to live with
+you as your lawful wife.  If she was not burnt, why should you run
+the risk of her turning up again at any moment and exposing your
+substitution of me, and ruining your name and prospects?'
+
+'Why--because I might have loved you well enough to run the risk
+(assuming her not to be burnt, which I deny).'
+
+'No--you would have run the risk the other way.  You would rather
+have risked her finding you with Cytherea as a second wife, than
+with me as a personator of herself--the first one.'
+
+'You came easiest to hand--remember that.'
+
+'Not so very easy either, considering the labour you took to teach
+me your first wife's history.  All about how she was a native of
+Philadelphia.  Then making me read up the guide-book to
+Philadelphia, and details of American life and manners, in case the
+birthplace and history of your wife, Eunice, should ever become
+known in this neighbourhood--unlikely as it was.  Ah! and then about
+the handwriting of hers that I had to imitate, and the dying my
+hair, and rouging, to make the transformation complete?  You mean to
+say that that was taking less trouble than there would have been in
+arranging events to make Cytherea believe herself your wife, and
+live with you?'
+
+'You were a needy adventuress, who would dare anything for a new
+pleasure and an easy life--and I was fool enough to give in to you--
+'
+
+'Good heavens above!--did I ask you to insert those advertisements
+for your old wife, and to make me answer it as if I was she?  Did I
+ask you to send me the letter for me to copy and send back to you
+when the third advertisement appeared--purporting to come from the
+long-lost wife, and giving a detailed history of her escape and
+subsequent life--all which you had invented yourself?  You deluded
+me into loving you, and then enticed me here!  Ah, and this is
+another thing.  How did you know the real wife wouldn't answer it,
+and upset all your plans?'
+
+'Because I knew she was burnt.'
+
+'Why didn't you force Cytherea to come back, then?  Now, my love, I
+have caught you, and you may just as well tell first as last, WHAT
+WAS YOUR MOTIVE IN HAVING ME HERE AS YOUR FIRST WIFE?'
+
+'Silence!' he exclaimed.
+
+She was silent for the space of two minutes, and then persisted in
+going on to mutter, 'And why was it that Miss Aldclyffe allowed her
+favourite young lady, Cythie, to be overthrown and supplanted
+without an expostulation or any show of sympathy?  Do you know I
+often think you exercise a secret power over Miss Aldclyffe.  And
+she always shuns me as if I shared the power.  A poor, ill-used
+creature like me sharing power, indeed!'
+
+'She thinks you are Mrs. Manston.'
+
+'That wouldn't make her avoid me.'
+
+'Yes it would,' he exclaimed impatiently.  'I wish I was dead--
+dead!'  He had jumped up from his seat in uttering the words, and
+now walked wearily to the end of the room.  Coming back more
+decisively, he looked in her face.
+
+'We must leave this place if Raunham suspects what I think he does,'
+he said.  'The request of Cytherea and her brother may simply be for
+a satisfactory proof, to make her feel legally free--but it may mean
+more.'
+
+'What may it mean?'
+
+'How should I know?'
+
+'Well, well, never mind, old boy,' she said, approaching him to make
+up the quarrel.  'Don't be so alarmed--anybody would think that you
+were the woman and I the man.  Suppose they do find out what I am--
+we can go away from here and keep house as usual.  People will say
+of you, "His first wife was burnt to death" (or "ran away to the
+Colonies," as the case may be); "He married a second, and deserted
+her for Anne Seaway."  A very everyday case--nothing so horrible,
+after all.'
+
+He made an impatient movement.  'Whichever way we do it, NOBODY MUST
+KNOW THAT YOU ARE NOT MY WIFE EUNICE.  And now I must think about
+arranging matters.'
+
+Manston then retired to his office, and shut himself up for the
+remainder of the evening.
+
+
+
+XIX.  THE EVENTS OF A DAY AND NIGHT
+
+1.  MARCH THE TWENTY-FIRST.  MORNING
+
+Next morning the steward went out as usual.  He shortly told his
+companion, Anne, that he had almost matured their scheme, and that
+they would enter upon the details of it when he came home at night.
+The fortunate fact that the rector's letter did not require an
+immediate answer would give him time to consider.
+
+Anne Seaway then began her duties in the house.  Besides daily
+superintending the cook and housemaid one of these duties was, at
+rare intervals, to dust Manston's office with her own hands, a
+servant being supposed to disturb the books and papers
+unnecessarily.  She softly wandered from table to shelf with the
+duster in her hand, afterwards standing in the middle of the room,
+and glancing around to discover if any noteworthy collection of dust
+had still escaped her.
+
+Her eye fell upon a faint layer which rested upon the ledge of an
+old-fashioned chestnut cabinet of French Renaissance workmanship,
+placed in a recess by the fireplace.  At a height of about four feet
+from the floor the upper portion of the front receded, forming the
+ledge alluded to, on which opened at each end two small doors, the
+centre space between them being filled out by a panel of similar
+size, making the third of three squares.  The dust on the ledge was
+nearly on a level with the woman's eye, and, though insignificant in
+quantity, showed itself distinctly on account of this obliquity of
+vision.  Now opposite the central panel, concentric quarter-circles
+were traced in the deposited film, expressing to her that this
+panel, too, was a door like the others; that it had lately been
+opened, and had skimmed the dust with its lower edge.
+
+At last, then, her curiosity was slightly rewarded.  For the right
+of the matter was that Anne had been incited to this exploration of
+Manston's office rather by a wish to know the reason of his long
+seclusion here, after the arrival of the rector's letter, and their
+subsequent discourse, than by any immediate desire for cleanliness.
+Still, there would have been nothing remarkable to Anne in this
+sight but for one recollection.  Manston had once casually told her
+that each of the two side-lockers included half the middle space,
+the panel of which did not open, and was only put in for symmetry.
+It was possible that he had opened this compartment by candlelight
+the preceding night, or he would have seen the marks in the dust,
+and effaced them, that he might not be proved guilty of telling her
+an untruth.  She balanced herself on one foot and stood pondering.
+She considered that it was very vexing and unfair in him to refuse
+her all knowledge of his remaining secrets, under the peculiar
+circumstances of her connection with him.  She went close to the
+cabinet.  As there was no keyhole, the door must be capable of being
+opened by the unassisted hand.  The circles in the dust told her at
+which edge to apply her force.  Here she pulled with the tips of her
+fingers, but the panel would not come forward.  She fetched a chair
+and looked over the top of the cabinet, but no bolt, knob, or spring
+was to be seen.
+
+'O, never mind,' she said, with indifference; 'I'll ask him about
+it, and he will tell me.'  Down she came and turned away.  Then
+looking back again she thought it was absurd such a trifle should
+puzzle her.  She retraced her steps, and opened a drawer beneath the
+ledge of the cabinet, pushing in her hand and feeling about on the
+underside of the board.
+
+Here she found a small round sinking, and pressed her finger into
+it.  Nothing came of the pressure.  She withdrew her hand and looked
+at the tip of her finger:  it was marked with the impress of the
+circle, and, in addition, a line ran across it diametrically.
+
+'How stupid of me; it is the head of a screw.'  Whatever mysterious
+contrivance had originally existed for opening the puny cupboard of
+the cabinet, it had at some time been broken, and this rough
+substitute provided.  Stimulated curiosity would not allow her to
+recede now.  She fetched a screwdriver, withdrew the screw, pulled
+the door open with a penknife, and found inside a cavity about ten
+inches square.  The cavity contained--
+
+Letters from different women, with unknown signatures, Christian
+names only (surnames being despised in Paphos).  Letters from his
+wife Eunice.  Letters from Anne herself, including that she wrote in
+answer to his advertisement.  A small pocket-book.  Sundry scraps of
+paper.
+
+The letters from the strange women with pet names she glanced
+carelessly through, and then put them aside.  They were too similar
+to her own regretted delusion, and curiosity requires contrast to
+excite it.
+
+The letters from his wife were next examined.  They were dated back
+as far as Eunice's first meeting with Manston, and the early ones
+before their marriage contained the usual pretty effusions of women
+at such a period of their existence.  Some little time after he had
+made her his wife, and when he had come to Knapwater, the series
+began again, and now their contents arrested her attention more
+forcibly.  She closed the cabinet, carried the letters into the
+parlour, reclined herself on the sofa, and carefully perused them in
+the order of their dates.
+
+                                             'JOHN STREET,
+                                                    October 17,
+1864.
+
+'MY DEAREST HUSBAND,--I received your hurried line of yesterday, and
+was of course content with it.  But why don't you tell me your exact
+address instead of that "Post-Office, Budmouth?"  This matter is all
+a mystery to me, and I ought to be told every detail.  I cannot
+fancy it is the same kind of occupation you have been used to
+hitherto.  Your command that I am to stay here awhile until you can
+"see how things look" and can arrange to send for me, I must
+necessarily abide by.  But if, as you say, a married man would have
+been rejected by the person who engaged you, and that hence my
+existence must be kept a secret until you have secured your
+position, why did you think of going at all?
+
+'The truth is, this keeping our marriage a secret is troublesome,
+vexing, and wearisome to me.  I see the poorest woman in the street
+bearing her husband's name openly--living with him in the most
+matter-of-fact ease, and why shouldn't I?  I wish I was back again
+in Liverpool.
+
+'To-day I bought a grey waterproof cloak.  I think it is a little
+too long for me, but it was cheap for one of such a quality.  The
+weather is gusty and dreary, and till this morning I had hardly set
+foot outside the door since you left.  Please do tell me when I am
+to come.--Very affectionately yours, EUNICE.'
+
+
+                                               'JOHN STREET,
+                                                      October 25,
+1864.
+
+'MY DEAR HUSBAND,--Why don't you write?  Do you hate me?  I have not
+had the heart to do anything this last week.  That I, your wife,
+should be in this strait, and my husband well to do!  I have been
+obliged to leave my first lodging for debt--among other things, they
+charged me for a lot of brandy which I am quite sure I did not
+taste.  Then I went to Camberwell and was found out by them.  I went
+away privately from thence, and changed my name the second time.  I
+am now Mrs. Rondley.  But the new lodging was the wretchedest and
+dearest I ever set foot in, and I left it after being there only a
+day.  I am now at No. 2O in the same street that you left me in
+originally.  All last night the sash of my window rattled so
+dreadfully that I could not sleep, but I had not energy enough to
+get out of bed to stop it.  This morning I have been walking--I
+don't know how far--but far enough to make my feet ache.  I have
+been looking at the outside of two or three of the theatres, but
+they seem forbidding if I regard them with the eye of an actress in
+search of an engagement.  Though you said I was to think no more of
+the stage, I believe you would not care if you found me there.  But
+I am not an actress by nature, and art will never make me one.  I am
+too timid and retiring; I was intended for a cottager's wife.  I
+certainly shall not try to go on the boards again whilst I am in
+this strange place.  The idea of being brought on as far as London
+and then left here alone!  Why didn't you leave me in Liverpool?
+Perhaps you thought I might have told somebody that my real name was
+Mrs. Manston.  As if I had a living friend to whom I could impart
+it--no such good fortune!  In fact, my nearest friend is no nearer
+than what most people would call a stranger.  But perhaps I ought to
+tell you that a week before I wrote my last letter to you, after
+wishing that my uncle and aunt in Philadelphia (the only near
+relatives I had) were still alive, I suddenly resolved to send a
+line to my cousin James, who, I believe, is still living in that
+neighbourhood.  He has never seen me since we were babies together.
+I did not tell him of my marriage, because I thought you might not
+like it, and I gave my real maiden name, and an address at the post-
+office here.  But God knows if the letter will ever reach him.
+
+'Do write me an answer, and send something.--Your affectionate wife,
+EUNICE.'
+
+
+                                                       'FRIDAY,
+October 28.
+
+'MY DEAR HUSBAND,--The order for ten pounds has just come, and I am
+truly glad to get it.  But why will you write so bitterly?  Ah--
+well, if I had only had the money I should have been on my way to
+America by this time, so don't think I want to bore you of my own
+free-will.  Who can you have met with at that new place?  Remember I
+say this in no malignant tone, but certainly the facts go to prove
+that you have deserted me!  You are inconstant--I know it.  O, why
+are you so?  Now I have lost you, I love you in spite of your
+neglect.  I am weakly fond--that's my nature.  I fear that upon the
+whole my life has been wasted. I know there is another woman
+supplanting me in your heart--yes, I know it.  Come to me--do come.
+EUNICE.'
+
+
+                                      '41 CHARLES SQUARE, HOXTON,
+                                                         November
+19.
+
+'DEAR AENEAS,--Here I am back again after my visit.  Why should you
+have been so enraged at my finding your exact address?  Any woman
+would have tried to do it--you know she would have.  And no woman
+would have lived under assumed names so long as I did.  I repeat
+that I did not call myself Mrs. Manston until I came to this lodging
+at the beginning of this month--what could you expect?
+
+'A helpless creature I, had not fortune favoured me unexpectedly.
+Banished as I was from your house at dawn, I did not suppose the
+indignity was about to lead to important results.  But in crossing
+the park I overheard the conversation of a young man and woman who
+had also risen early.  I believe her to be the girl who has won you
+away from me.  Well, their conversation concerned you and Miss
+Aldclyffe, VERY PECULIARLY.  The remarkable thing is that you
+yourself, without knowing it, told me of what, added to their
+conversation, completely reveals a secret to me that neither of you
+understand.  Two negatives never made such a telling positive
+before.  One clue more, and you would see it.  A single
+consideration prevents my revealing it--just one doubt as to whether
+your ignorance was real, and was not feigned to deceive me.
+Civility now, please.
+
+EUNICE.'
+
+
+                                          '41 CHARLES SQUARE,
+                                               Tuesday, November 22.
+
+'MY DARLING HUSBAND,--Monday will suit me excellently for coming.  I
+have acted exactly up to your instructions, and have sold my rubbish
+at the broker's in the next street.  All this movement and bustle is
+delightful to me after the weeks of monotony I have endured.  It is
+a relief to wish the place good-bye--London always has seemed so
+much more foreign to me than Liverpool The mid-day train on Monday
+will do nicely for me.  I shall be anxiously looking out for you on
+Sunday night.
+
+'I hope so much that you are not angry with me for writing to Miss
+Aldclyffe.  You are not, dear, are you?  Forgive me.--Your loving
+wife, EUNICE.'
+
+
+This was the last of the letters from the wife to the husband.  One
+other, in Mrs. Manston's handwriting, and in the same packet, was
+differently addressed.
+
+
+                                  'THREE TRANTERS INN, CARRIFORD,
+                                                November 28, 1864.
+
+'DEAR COUSIN JAMES,--Thank you indeed for answering my letter so
+promptly.  When I called at the post-office yesterday I did not in
+the least think there would be one.  But I must leave this subject.
+I write again at once under the strangest and saddest conditions it
+is possible to conceive.
+
+'I did not tell you in my last that I was a married woman.  Don't
+blame me--it was my husband's influence.  I hardly know where to
+begin my story.  I had been living apart from him for a time--then
+he sent for me (this was last week) and I was glad to go to him.
+Then this is what he did.  He promised to fetch me, and did not--
+leaving me to do the journey alone.  He promised to meet me at the
+station here--he did not.  I went on through the darkness to his
+house, and found his door locked and himself away from home.  I have
+been obliged to come here, and I write to you in a strange room in a
+strange village inn!  I choose the present moment to write to drive
+away my misery.  Sorrow seems a sort of pleasure when you detail it
+on paper--poor pleasure though.
+
+'But this is what I want to know--and I am ashamed to tell it.  I
+would gladly do as you say, and come to you as a housekeeper, but I
+have not the money even for a steerage passage.  James, do you want
+me badly enough--do you pity me enough to send it?  I could manage
+to subsist in London upon the proceeds of my sale for another month
+or six weeks.  Will you send it to the same address at the post-
+office?  But how do I know that you . . . '
+
+Thus the letter ended.  From creases in the paper it was plain that
+the writer, having got so far, had become dissatisfied with her
+production, and had crumpled it in her hand.  Was it to write
+another, or not to write at all?
+
+The next thing Anne Seaway perceived was that the fragmentary story
+she had coaxed out of Manston, to the effect that his wife had left
+England for America, might be truthful, according to two of these
+letters, corroborated by the evidence of the railway-porter.  And
+yet, at first, he had sworn in a passion that his wife was most
+certainly consumed in the fire.
+
+If she had been burnt, this letter, written in her bedroom, and
+probably thrust into her pocket when she relinquished it, would have
+been burnt with her.  Nothing was surer than that.  Why, then, did
+he say she was burnt, and never show Anne herself this letter?
+
+The question suddenly raised a new and much stranger one--kindling a
+burst of amazement in her.  How did Manston become possessed of this
+letter?
+
+That fact of possession was certainly the most remarkable revelation
+of all in connection with this epistle, and perhaps had something to
+do with his reason for never showing it to her.
+
+She knew by several proofs, that before his marriage with Cytherea,
+and up to the time of the porter's confession, Manston believed--
+honestly believed--that Cytherea would be his lawful wife, and
+hence, of course, that his wife Eunice was dead.  So that no
+communication could possibly have passed between his wife and
+himself from the first moment that he believed her dead on the night
+of the fire, to the day of his wedding.  And yet he had that letter.
+How soon afterwards could they have communicated with each other?
+
+The existence of the letter--as much as, or more than its contents--
+implying that Mrs Manston was not burnt, his belief in that calamity
+must have terminated at the moment he obtained possession of the
+letter, if no earlier.  Was, then, the only solution to the riddle
+that Anne could discern, the true one?--that he had communicated
+with his wife somewhere about the commencement of Anne's residence
+with him, or at any time since?
+
+It was the most unlikely thing on earth that a woman who had
+forsaken her husband should countenance his scheme to personify her-
+-whether she were in America, in London, or in the neighbourhood of
+Knapwater.
+
+Then came the old and harassing question, what was Manston's real
+motive in risking his name on the deception he was practising as
+regarded Anne.  It could not be, as he had always pretended, mere
+passion.  Her thoughts had reverted to Mr. Raunham's letter, asking
+for proofs of her identity with the original Mrs. Manston.  She
+could see no loophole of escape for the man who supported her.
+True, in her own estimation, his worst alternative was not so very
+bad after all--the getting the name of libertine, a possible
+appearance in the divorce or some other court of law, and a question
+of damages.  Such an exposure might hinder his worldly progress for
+some time.  Yet to him this alternative was, apparently, terrible as
+death itself.
+
+She restored the letters to their hiding-place, scanned anew the
+other letters and memoranda, from which she could gain no fresh
+information, fastened up the cabinet, and left everything in its
+former condition.
+
+Her mind was ill at ease.  More than ever she wished that she had
+never seen Manston.  Where the person suspected of mysterious moral
+obliquity is the possessor of great physical and intellectual
+attractions, the mere sense of incongruity adds an extra shudder to
+dread.  The man's strange bearing terrified Anne as it had terrified
+Cytherea; for with all the woman Anne's faults, she had not
+descended to such depths of depravity as to willingly participate in
+crime.  She had not even known that a living wife was being
+displaced till her arrival at Knapwater put retreat out of the
+question, and had looked upon personation simply as a mode of
+subsistence a degree better than toiling in poverty and alone, after
+a bustling and somewhat pampered life as housekeeper in a gay
+mansion.
+
+              'Non illa colo calathisve Minervae
+      Foemineas assueta manus.'
+
+2.  AFTERNOON
+
+Mr. Raunham and Edward Springrove had by this time set in motion a
+machinery which they hoped to find working out important results.
+
+The rector was restless and full of meditation all the following
+morning.  It was plain, even to the servants about him, that
+Springrove's communication wore a deeper complexion than any that
+had been made to the old magistrate for many months or years past.
+The fact was that, having arrived at the stage of existence in which
+the difficult intellectual feat of suspending one's judgment becomes
+possible, he was now putting it in practice, though not without the
+penalty of watchful effort.
+
+It was not till the afternoon that he determined to call on his
+relative, Miss Aldclyffe, and cautiously probe her knowledge of the
+subject occupying him so thoroughly.  Cytherea, he knew, was still
+beloved by this solitary woman.  Miss Aldclyffe had made several
+private inquiries concerning her former companion, and there was
+ever a sadness in her tone when the young lady's name was mentioned,
+which showed that from whatever cause the elder Cytherea's
+renunciation of her favourite and namesake proceeded, it was not
+from indifference to her fate.
+
+'Have you ever had any reason for supposing your steward anything
+but an upright man?' he said to the lady.
+
+'Never the slightest.  Have you?' said she reservedly.
+
+'Well--I have.'
+
+'What is it?'
+
+'I can say nothing plainly, because nothing is proved.  But my
+suspicions are very strong.'
+
+'Do you mean that he was rather cool towards his wife when they were
+first married, and that it was unfair in him to leave her?  I know
+he was; but I think his recent conduct towards her has amply atoned
+for the neglect.'
+
+He looked Miss Aldclyffe full in the face.  It was plain that she
+spoke honestly.  She had not the slightest notion that the woman who
+lived with the steward might be other than Mrs. Manston--much less
+that a greater matter might be behind.
+
+'That's not it--I wish it was no more.  My suspicion is, first, that
+the woman living at the Old House is not Mr. Manston's wife.'
+
+'Not--Mr. Manston's wife?'
+
+'That is it.'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe looked blankly at the rector.  'Not Mr. Manston's
+wife--who else can she be?' she said simply.
+
+'An improper woman of the name of Anne Seaway.'
+
+Mr. Raunham had, in common with other people, noticed the
+extraordinary interest of Miss Aldclyffe in the well-being of her
+steward, and had endeavoured to account for it in various ways.  The
+extent to which she was shaken by his information, whilst it proved
+that the understanding between herself and Manston did not make her
+a sharer of his secrets, also showed that the tie which bound her to
+him was still unbroken.  Mr. Raunham had lately begun to doubt the
+latter fact, and now, on finding himself mistaken, regretted that he
+had not kept his own counsel in the matter.  This it was too late to
+do, and he pushed on with his proofs.  He gave Miss Aldclyffe in
+detail the grounds of his belief.
+
+Before he had done, she recovered the cloak of reserve that she had
+adopted on his opening the subject.
+
+'I might possibly be convinced that you were in the right, after
+such an elaborate argument,' she replied, 'were it not for one fact,
+which bears in the contrary direction so pointedly, that nothing but
+absolute proof can turn it.  It is that there is no conceivable
+motive which could induce any sane man--leaving alone a man of Mr.
+Manston's clear-headedness and integrity--to venture upon such an
+extraordinary course of conduct--no motive on earth.'
+
+'That was my own opinion till after the visit of a friend last
+night--a friend of mine and poor little Cytherea's.'
+
+'Ah--and Cytherea,' said Miss Aldclyffe, catching at the idea raised
+by the name.  'That he loved Cytherea--yes and loves her now, wildly
+and devotedly, I am as positive as that I breathe.  Cytherea is
+years younger than Mrs. Manston--as I shall call her--twice as sweet
+in disposition, three times as beautiful.  Would he have given her
+up quietly and suddenly for a common--Mr. Raunham, your story is
+monstrous, and I don't believe it!'  She glowed in her earnestness.
+
+The rector might now have advanced his second proposition--the
+possible motive--but for reasons of his own he did not.
+
+'Very well, madam.  I only hope that facts will sustain you in your
+belief.  Ask him the question to his face, whether the woman is his
+wife or no, and see how he receives it.'
+
+'I will to-morrow, most certainly,' she said.  'I always let these
+things die of wholesome ventilation, as every fungus does.'
+
+But no sooner had the rector left her presence, than the grain of
+mustard-seed he had sown grew to a tree.  Her impatience to set her
+mind at rest could not brook a night's delay.  It was with the
+utmost difficulty that she could wait till evening arrived to screen
+her movements.  Immediately the sun had dropped behind the horizon,
+and before it was quite dark, she wrapped her cloak around her,
+softly left the house, and walked erect through the gloomy park in
+the direction of the old manor-house.
+
+The same minute saw two persons sit down in the rectory-house to
+share the rector's usually solitary dinner.  One was a man of
+official appearance, commonplace in all except his eyes.  The other
+was Edward Springrove.
+
+
+
+The discovery of the carefully-concealed letters rankled in the mind
+of Anne Seaway.  Her woman's nature insisted that Manston had no
+right to keep all matters connected with his lost wife a secret from
+herself.  Perplexity had bred vexation; vexation, resentment;
+curiosity had been continuous.  The whole morning this resentment
+and curiosity increased.
+
+The steward said very little to his companion during their luncheon
+at mid-day.  He seemed reckless of appearances--almost indifferent
+to whatever fate awaited him.  All his actions betrayed that
+something portentous was impending, and still he explained nothing.
+By carefully observing every trifling action, as only a woman can
+observe them, the thought at length dawned upon her that he was
+going to run away secretly.  She feared for herself; her knowledge
+of law and justice was vague, and she fancied she might in some way
+be made responsible for him.
+
+In the afternoon he went out of the house again, and she watched him
+drive away in the direction of the county-town.  She felt a desire
+to go there herself, and, after an interval of half-an-hour,
+followed him on foot notwithstanding the distance--ostensibly to do
+some shopping.
+
+One among her several trivial errands was to make a small purchase
+at the druggist's.  Near the druggist's stood the County Bank.
+Looking out of the shop window, between the coloured bottles, she
+saw Manston come down the steps of the bank, in the act of
+withdrawing his hand from his pocket, and pulling his coat close
+over its mouth.
+
+It is an almost universal habit with people, when leaving a bank, to
+be carefully adjusting their pockets if they have been receiving
+money; if they have been paying it in, their hands swing laxly.  The
+steward had in all likelihood been taking money--possibly on Miss
+Aldclyffe's account--that was continual with him.  And he might have
+been removing his own, as a man would do who was intending to leave
+the country.
+
+3.  FROM FIVE TO EIGHT O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+Anne reached home again in time to preside over preparations for
+dinner.  Manston came in half-an-hour later.  The lamp was lighted,
+the shutters were closed, and they sat down together.  He was pale
+and worn--almost haggard.
+
+The meal passed off in almost unbroken silence.  When preoccupation
+withstands the influence of a social meal with one pleasant
+companion, the mental scene must be surpassingly vivid.  Just as she
+was rising a tap came to the door.
+
+Before a maid could attend to the knock, Manston crossed the room
+and answered it himself.  The visitor was Miss Aldclyffe.
+
+Manston instantly came back and spoke to Anne in an undertone.  'I
+should be glad if you could retire to your room for a short time.'
+
+'It is a dry, starlight evening,' she replied.  'I will go for a
+little walk if your object is merely a private conversation with
+Miss Aldclyffe.'
+
+'Very well, do; there's no accounting for tastes,' he said.  A few
+commonplaces then passed between her and Miss Aldclyffe, and Anne
+went upstairs to bonnet and cloak herself.  She came down, opened
+the front door, and went out.
+
+She looked around to realize the night.  It was dark, mournful, and
+quiet.  Then she stood still.  From the moment that Manston had
+requested her absence, a strong and burning desire had prevailed in
+her to know the subject of Miss Aldclyffe's conversation with him.
+Simple curiosity was not entirely what inspired her.  Her suspicions
+had been thoroughly aroused by the discovery of the morning.  A
+conviction that her future depended on her power to combat a man
+who, in desperate circumstances, would be far from a friend to her,
+prompted a strategic movement to acquire the important secret that
+was in handling now.  The woman thought and thought, and regarded
+the dull dark trees, anxiously debating how the thing could be done.
+
+Stealthily re-opening the front door she entered the hall, and
+advancing and pausing alternately, came close to the door of the
+room in which Miss Aldclyffe and Manston conversed.  Nothing could
+be heard through the keyhole or panels.  At a great risk she softly
+turned the knob and opened the door to a width of about half-an-
+inch, performing the act so delicately that three minutes, at least,
+were occupied in completing it.  At that instant Miss Aldclyffe
+said--
+
+'There's a draught somewhere.  The door is ajar, I think.'
+
+Anne glided back under the staircase.  Manston came forward and
+closed the door.  This chance was now cut off, and she considered
+again.  The parlour, or sitting-room, in which the conference took
+place, had the window-shutters fixed on the outside of the window,
+as is usual in the back portions of old country-houses.  The
+shutters were hinged one on each side of the opening, and met in the
+middle, where they were fastened by a bolt passing continuously
+through them and the wood mullion within, the bolt being secured on
+the inside by a pin, which was seldom inserted till Manston and
+herself were about to retire for the night; sometimes not at all.
+
+If she returned to the door of the room she might be discovered at
+any moment, but could she listen at the window, which overlooked a
+part of the garden never visited after nightfall, she would be safe
+from disturbance.  The idea was worth a trial.
+
+She glided round to the window, took the head of the bolt between
+her finger and thumb, and softly screwed it round until it was
+entirely withdrawn from its position.  The shutters remained as
+before, whilst, where the bolt had come out, was now a shining hole
+three-quarters of an inch in diameter, through which one might see
+into the middle of the room.  She applied her eye to the orifice.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe and Manston were both standing; Manston with his back
+to the window, his companion facing it.  The lady's demeanour was
+severe, condemnatory, and haughty.  No more was to be seen; Anne
+then turned sideways, leant with her shoulder against the shutters
+and placed her ear upon the hole.
+
+'You know where,' said Miss Aldclyffe.  'And how could you, a man,
+act a double deceit like this?'
+
+'Men do strange things sometimes.'
+
+'What was your reason--come?'
+
+'A mere whim.'
+
+'I might even believe that, if the woman were handsomer than
+Cytherea, or if you had been married some time to Cytherea and had
+grown tired of her.'
+
+'And can't you believe it, too, under these conditions; that I
+married Cytherea, gave her up because I heard that my wife was
+alive, found that my wife would not come to live with me, and then,
+not to let any woman I love so well as Cytherea run any risk of
+being displaced and ruined in reputation, should my wife ever think
+fit to return, induced this woman to come to me, as being better
+than no companion at all?'
+
+'I cannot believe it.  Your love for Cytherea was not of such a kind
+as that excuse would imply.  It was Cytherea or nobody with you.  As
+an object of passion, you did not desire the company of this Anne
+Seaway at all, and certainly not so much as to madly risk your
+reputation by bringing her here in the way you have done.  I am sure
+you didn't, AEneas.'
+
+'So am I,' he said bluntly.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe uttered an exclamation of astonishment; the
+confession was like a blow in its suddenness.  She began to reproach
+him bitterly, and with tears.
+
+'How could you overthrow my plans, disgrace the only girl I ever had
+any respect for, by such inexplicable doings!. . .  That woman must
+leave this place--the country perhaps.  Heavens! the truth will leak
+out in a day or two!'
+
+'She must do no such thing, and the truth must be stifled somehow--
+nobody knows how.  If I stay here, or on any spot of the civilized
+globe, as AEneas Manston, this woman must live with me as my wife,
+or I am damned past redemption!'
+
+'I will not countenance your keeping her, whatever your motive may
+be.'
+
+'You must do something,' he murmured.  'You must.  Yes, you must.'
+
+'I never will,' she said.  'It is a criminal act.'
+
+He looked at her earnestly.  'Will you not support me through this
+deception if my very life depends upon it?  Will you not?'
+
+'Nonsense!  Life!  It will be a scandal to you, but she must leave
+this place.  It will out sooner or later, and the exposure had
+better come now.'
+
+Manston repeated gloomily the same words.  'My life depends upon
+your supporting me--my very life.'
+
+He then came close to her, and spoke into her ear.  Whilst he spoke
+he held her head to his mouth with both his hands.  Strange
+expressions came over her face; the workings of her mouth were
+painful to observe.  Still he held her and whispered on.
+
+The only words that could be caught by Anne Seaway, confused as her
+hearing frequently was by the moan of the wind and the waterfall in
+her outer ear, were these of Miss Aldclyffe, in tones which
+absolutely quivered:  'They have no money.  What can they prove?'
+
+The listener tasked herself to the utmost to catch his answer, but
+it was in vain.  Of the remainder of the colloquy one fact alone was
+plain to Anne, and that only inductively--that Miss Aldclyffe, from
+what he had revealed to her, was going to scheme body and soul on
+Manston's behalf.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe seemed now to have no further reason for remaining,
+yet she lingered awhile as if loth to leave him.  When, finally, the
+crestfallen and agitated lady made preparations for departure, Anne
+quickly inserted the bolt, ran round to the entrance archway, and
+down the steps into the park.  Here she stood close to the trunk of
+a huge lime-tree, which absorbed her dark outline into its own.
+
+In a few minutes she saw Manston, with Miss Aldclyffe leaning on his
+arm, cross the glade before her and proceed in the direction of the
+house.  She watched them ascend the rise and advance, as two black
+spots, towards the mansion.  The appearance of an oblong space of
+light in the dark mass of walls denoted that the door was opened.
+Miss Aldclyffe's outline became visible upon it; the door shut her
+in, and all was darkness again.  The form of Manston returning alone
+arose from the gloom, and passed by Anne in her hiding-place.
+
+Waiting outside a quarter of an hour longer, that no suspicion of
+any kind might be excited, Anne returned to the old manor-house.
+
+4.  FROM EIGHT TO ELEVEN O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+Manston was very friendly that evening.  It was evident to her, now
+that she was behind the scenes, that he was making desperate efforts
+to disguise the real state of his mind.
+
+Her terror of him did not decrease.  They sat down to supper,
+Manston still talking cheerfully.  But what is keener than the eye
+of a mistrustful woman?  A man's cunning is to it as was the armour
+of Sisera to the thin tent-nail.  She found, in spite of his
+adroitness, that he was attempting something more than a disguise of
+his feeling.  He was trying to distract her attention, that he might
+be unobserved in some special movement of his hands.
+
+What a moment it was for her then!  The whole surface of her body
+became attentive.  She allowed him no chance whatever.  We know the
+duplicated condition at such times--when the existence divides
+itself into two, and the ostensibly innocent chatterer stands in
+front, like another person, to hide the timorous spy.
+
+Manston played the same game, but more palpably.  The meal was
+nearly over when he seemed possessed of a new idea of how his object
+might be accomplished.  He tilted back his chair with a reflective
+air, and looked steadily at the clock standing against the wall
+opposite to him.  He said sententiously, 'Few faces are capable of
+expressing more by dumb show than the face of a clock.  You may see
+in it every variety of incentive--from the softest seductions to
+negligence to the strongest hints for action.'
+
+'Well, in what way?' she inquired.  His drift was, as yet, quite
+unintelligible to her.
+
+'Why, for instance:  look at the cold, methodical, unromantic,
+business-like air of all the right-angled positions of the hands.
+They make a man set about work in spite of himself.  Then look at
+the piquant shyness of its face when the two hands are over each
+other.  Several attitudes imply "Make ready."  The "make ready" of
+ten minutes to one differs from the "make ready" of ten minutes to
+twelve, as youth differs from age.  "Upward and onward" says twenty-
+five minutes to eleven.  Mid-day or midnight expresses distinctly
+"It is done."  You surely have noticed that?'
+
+'Yes, I have.'
+
+He continued with affected quaintness:--
+
+'The easy dash of ten minutes past seven, the rakish recklessness of
+a quarter past, the drooping weariness of twenty-five minutes past,
+must have been observed by everybody.'
+
+'Whatever amount of truth there may be, there is a good deal of
+imagination in your fancy,' she said.
+
+He still contemplated the clock.
+
+'Then, again, the general finish of the face has a great effect upon
+the eye.  This old-fashioned brass-faced one we have here, with its
+arched top, half-moon slit for the day of the month, and ship
+rocking at the upper part, impresses me with the notion of its being
+an old cynic, elevating his brows, whose thoughts can be seen
+wavering between good and evil.'
+
+A thought now enlightened her:  the clock was behind her, and he
+wanted to get her back turned.  She dreaded turning, yet, not to
+excite his suspicion, she was on her guard; she quickly looked
+behind her at the clock as he spoke, recovering her old position
+again instantly.  The time had not been long enough for any action
+whatever on his part.
+
+'Ah,' he casually remarked, and at the same minute began to pour her
+out a glass of wine.  'Speaking of the clock has reminded me that it
+must nearly want winding up.  Remember that it is wound to-night.
+Suppose you do it at once, my dear.'
+
+There was no possible way of evading the act.  She resolutely turned
+to perform the operation:  anything was better than that he should
+suspect her.  It was an old-fashioned eight-day clock, of
+workmanship suited to the rest of the antique furniture that Manston
+had collected there, and ground heavily during winding.
+
+Anne had given up all idea of being able to watch him during the
+interval, and the noise of the wheels prevented her learning
+anything by her ears.  But, as she wound, she caught sight of his
+shadow on the wall at her right hand.
+
+What was he doing?  He was in the very act of pouring something into
+her glass of wine.
+
+He had completed the manoeuvre before she had done winding.  She
+methodically closed the clock-case and turned round again.  When she
+faced him he was sitting in his chair as before she had risen.
+
+In a familiar scene which has hitherto been pleasant it is difficult
+to realize that an added condition, which does not alter its aspect,
+can have made it terrible.  The woman thought that his action must
+have been prompted by no other intent than that of poisoning her,
+and yet she could not instantly put on a fear of her position.
+
+And before she had grasped these consequences, another supposition
+served to make her regard the first as unlikely, if not absurd.  It
+was the act of a madman to take her life in a manner so easy of
+discovery, unless there were far more reason for the crime than any
+that Manston could possibly have.
+
+Was it not merely his intention, in tampering with her wine, to make
+her sleep soundly that night?  This was in harmony with her original
+suspicion, that he intended secretly to abscond.  At any rate, he
+was going to set about some stealthy proceeding, as to which she was
+to be kept in utter darkness.  The difficulty now was to avoid
+drinking the wine.
+
+By means of one pretext and another she put off taking her glass for
+nearly five minutes, but he eyed her too frequently to allow her to
+throw the potion under the grate.  It became necessary to take one
+sip.  This she did, and found an opportunity of absorbing it in her
+handkerchief.
+
+Plainly he had no idea of her countermoves.  The scheme seemed to
+him in proper train, and he turned to poke out the fire.  She
+instantly seized the glass, and poured its contents down her bosom.
+When he faced round again she was holding the glass to her lips,
+empty.
+
+In due course he locked the doors and saw that the shutters were
+fastened.  She attended to a few closing details of housewifery, and
+a few minutes later they retired for the night.
+
+5.  FROM ELEVEN O'CLOCK TO MIDNIGHT
+
+When Manston was persuaded, by the feigned heaviness of her
+breathing, that Anne Seaway was asleep, he softly arose, and dressed
+himself in the gloom.  With ears strained to their utmost she heard
+him complete this operation; then he took something from his pocket,
+put it in the drawer of the dressing-table, went to the door, and
+down the stairs.  She glided out of bed and looked in the drawer.
+He had only restored to its place a small phial she had seen there
+before.  It was labelled 'Battley's Solution of Opium.'  She felt
+relieved that her life had not been attempted.  That was to have
+been her sleeping-draught.  No time was to be lost if she meant to
+be a match for him.  She followed him in her nightdress.  When she
+reached the foot of the staircase he was in the office and had
+closed the door, under which a faint gleam showed that he had
+obtained a light.  She crept to the door, but could not venture to
+open it, however slightly.  Placing her ear to the panel, she could
+hear him tearing up papers of some sort, and a brighter and
+quivering ray of light coming from the threshold an instant later,
+implied that he was burning them.  By the slight noise of his
+footsteps on the uncarpeted floor, she at length imagined that he
+was approaching the door.  She flitted upstairs again and crept into
+bed.
+
+Manston returned to the bedroom close upon her heels, and entered
+it--again without a light.  Standing motionless for an instant to
+assure himself that she still slept, he went to the drawer in which
+their ready-money was kept, and removed the casket that contained
+it.  Anne's ear distinctly caught the rustle of notes, and the chink
+of the gold as he handled it.  Some he placed in his pocket, some he
+returned to its place.  He stood thinking, as it were weighing a
+possibility.  While lingering thus, he noticed the reflected image
+of his own face in the glass--pale and spectre-like in its
+indistinctness.  The sight seemed to be the feather which turned the
+balance of indecision:  he drew a heavy breath, retired from the
+room, and passed downstairs.  She heard him unbar the back-door, and
+go out into the yard.
+
+Feeling safe in a conclusion that he did not intend to return to the
+bedroom again, she arose, and hastily dressed herself.  On going to
+the door of the apartment she found that he had locked it behind
+him.  'A precaution--it can be no more,' she muttered.  Yet she was
+all the more perplexed and excited on this account.  Had he been
+going to leave home immediately, he would scarcely have taken the
+trouble to lock her in, holding the belief that she was in a drugged
+sleep.  The lock shot into a mortice, so that there was no
+possibility of her pushing back the bolt.  How should she follow
+him?  Easily.  An inner closet opened from the bedroom:  it was
+large, and had some time heretofore been used as a dressing or bath
+room, but had been found inconvenient from having no other outlet to
+the landing.  The window of this little room looked out upon the
+roof of the porch, which was flat and covered with lead.  Anne took
+a pillow from the bed, gently opened the casement of the inner room
+and stepped forth on the flat.  There, leaning over the edge of the
+small parapet that ornamented the porch, she dropped the pillow upon
+the gravel path, and let herself down over the parapet by her hands
+till her toes swung about two feet from the ground.  From this
+position she adroitly alighted upon the pillow, and stood in the
+path.
+
+Since she had come indoors from her walk in the early part of the
+evening the moon had risen.  But the thick clouds overspreading the
+whole landscape rendered the dim light pervasive and grey:  it
+appeared as an attribute of the air.  Anne crept round to the back
+of the house, listening intently.  The steward had had at least ten
+minutes' start of her.  She had waited here whilst one might count
+fifty, when she heard a movement in the outhouse--a fragment once
+attached to the main building.  This outhouse was partitioned into
+an outer and an inner room, which had been a kitchen and a scullery
+before the connecting erections were pulled down, but they were now
+used respectively as a brewhouse and workshop, the only means of
+access to the latter being through the brewhouse.  The outer door of
+this first apartment was usually fastened by a padlock on the
+exterior.  It was now closed, but not fastened.  Manston was
+evidently in the outhouse.
+
+She slightly moved the door.  The interior of the brewhouse was
+wrapped in gloom, but a streak of light fell towards her in a line
+across the floor from the inner or workshop door, which was not
+quite closed.  This light was unexpected, none having been visible
+through hole or crevice.  Glancing in, the woman found that he had
+placed cloths and mats at the various apertures, and hung a sack at
+the window to prevent the egress of a single ray.  She could also
+perceive from where she stood that the bar of light fell across the
+brewing-copper just outside the inner door, and that upon it lay the
+key of her bedroom.  The illuminated interior of the workshop was
+also partly visible from her position through the two half-open
+doors.  Manston was engaged in emptying a large cupboard of the
+tools, gallipots, and old iron it contained.  When it was quite
+cleared he took a chisel, and with it began to withdraw the hooks
+and shoulder-nails holding the cupboard to the wall.  All these
+being loosened, he extended his arms, lifted the cupboard bodily
+from the brackets under it, and deposited it on the floor beside
+him.
+
+That portion of the wall which had been screened by the cupboard was
+now laid bare.  This, it appeared, had been plastered more recently
+than the bulk of the outhouse.  Manston loosened the plaster with
+some kind of tool, flinging the pieces into a basket as they fell.
+Having now stripped clear about two feet area of wall, he inserted a
+crowbar between the joints of the bricks beneath, softly wriggling
+it until several were loosened.  There was now disclosed the mouth
+of an old oven, which was apparently contrived in the thickness of
+the wall, and having fallen into disuse, had been closed up with
+bricks in this manner.  It was formed after the simple old-fashioned
+plan of oven-building--a mere oblate cavity without a flue.
+
+Manston now stretched his arm into the oven, dragged forth a heavy
+weight of great bulk, and let it slide to the ground.  The woman who
+watched him could see the object plainly.  It was a common corn-
+sack, nearly full, and was tied at the mouth in the usual way.
+
+The steward had once or twice started up, as if he had heard sounds,
+and his motions now became more cat-like still.  On a sudden he put
+out the light.  Anne had made no noise, yet a foreign noise of some
+kind had certainly been made in the intervening portion of the
+house.  She heard it.  'One of the rats,' she thought.
+
+He seemed soon to recover from his alarm, but changed his tactics
+completely.  He did not light his candle--going on with his work in
+the dark.  She had only sounds to go by now, and, judging as well as
+she could from these, he was piling up the bricks which closed the
+oven's mouth as they had been before he disturbed them.  The query
+that had not left her brain all the interval of her inspection--how
+should she get back into her bedroom again?--now received a
+solution.  Whilst he was replacing the cupboard, she would glide
+across the brewhouse, take the key from the top of the copper, run
+upstairs, unlock the door, and bring back the key again:  if he
+returned to bed, which was unlikely, he would think the lock had
+failed to catch in the staple.  This thought and intention,
+occupying such length of words, flashed upon her in an instant, and
+hardly disturbed her strong curiosity to stay and learn the meaning
+of his actions in the workshop.
+
+Slipping sideways through the first door and closing it behind her,
+she advanced into the darkness towards the second, making every
+individual footfall with the greatest care, lest the fragments of
+rubbish on the floor should crackle beneath her tread.  She soon
+stood close by the copper, and not more than a foot from the door of
+the room occupied by Manston himself, from which position she could
+distinctly hear him breathe between each exertion, although it was
+far too dark to discern anything of him.
+
+To secure the key of her chamber was her first anxiety, and
+accordingly she cautiously reached out with her hand to where it
+lay.  Instead of touching it, her fingers came in contact with the
+boot of a human being.
+
+She drooped faint in a cold sweat.  It was the foot either of a man
+or woman, standing on the brewing-copper where the key had lain.  A
+warm foot, covered with a polished boot.
+
+The startling discovery so terrified her that she could hardly
+repress a sound.  She withdrew her hand with a motion like the
+flight of an arrow.  Her touch was so light that the leather seemed
+to have been thick enough to keep the owner of the foot in entire
+ignorance of it, and the noise of Manston's scraping might have been
+quite sufficient to drown the slight rustle of her dress.
+
+The person was obviously not the steward:  he was still busy.  It
+was somebody who, since the light had been extinguished, had taken
+advantage of the gloom, to come from some dark recess in the
+brewhouse and stand upon the brickwork of the copper.  The fear
+which had at first paralyzed her lessened with the birth of a sense
+that fear now was utter failure:  she was in a desperate position
+and must abide by the consequences.  The motionless person on the
+copper was, equally with Manston, quite unconscious of her
+proximity, and she ventured to advance her hand again, feeling
+behind the feet, till she found the key.  On its return to her side,
+her finger-tip skimmed the lower verge of a trousers-leg.
+
+It was a man, then, who stood there.  To go to the door just at this
+time was impolitic, and she shrank back into an inner corner to
+wait.  The comparative security from discovery that her new position
+ensured resuscitated reason a little, and empowered her to form some
+logical inferences:--
+
+1.  The man who stood on the copper had taken advantage of the
+darkness to get there, as she had to enter.
+
+2.  The man must have been hidden in the outhouse before she had
+reached the door.
+
+3.  He must be watching Manston with much calculation and system,
+and for purposes of his own.
+
+She could now tell by the noises that Manston had completed his re-
+erection of the cupboard.  She heard him replacing the articles it
+had contained--bottle by bottle, tool by tool--after which he came
+into the brewhouse, went to the window, and pulled down the cloths
+covering it; but the window being rather small, this unveiling
+scarcely relieved the darkness of the interior.  He returned to the
+workshop, hoisted something to his back by a jerk, and felt about
+the room for some other article.  Having found it, he emerged from
+the inner door, crossed the brewhouse, and went into the yard.
+Directly he stepped out she could see his outline by the light of
+the clouded and weakly moon.  The sack was slung at his back, and in
+his hand he carried a spade.
+
+Anne now waited in her corner in breathless suspense for the
+proceedings of the other man.  In about half-a-minute she heard him
+descend from the copper, and then the square opening of the doorway
+showed the outline of this other watcher passing through it
+likewise.  The form was that of a broad-shouldered man enveloped in
+a long coat.  He vanished after the steward.
+
+The woman vented a sigh of relief, and moved forward to follow.
+Simultaneously, she discovered that the watcher whose foot she had
+touched was, in his turn, watched and followed also.
+
+It was by one of her own sex.  Anne Seaway shrank backward again.
+The unknown woman came forward from the further side of the yard,
+and pondered awhile in hesitation.  Tall, dark, and closely wrapped,
+she stood up from the earth like a cypress.  She moved, crossed the
+yard without producing the slightest disturbance by her footsteps,
+and went in the direction the others had taken.
+
+Anne waited yet another minute--then in her turn noiselessly
+followed the last woman.
+
+But so impressed was she with the sensation of people in hiding,
+that in coming out of the yard she turned her head to see if any
+person were following her, in the same way.  Nobody was visible, but
+she discerned, standing behind the angle of the stable, Manston's
+horse and gig, ready harnessed.
+
+He did intend to fly after all, then, she thought.  He must have
+placed the horse in readiness, in the interval between his leaving
+the house and her exit by the window.  However, there was not time
+to weigh this branch of the night's events.  She turned about again,
+and continued on the trail of the other three.
+
+6.  FROM MIDNIGHT TO HALF-PAST ONE A.M.
+
+Intentness pervaded everything; Night herself seemed to have become
+a watcher.
+
+The four persons proceeded across the glade, and into the park
+plantation, at equi-distances of about seventy yards.  Here the
+ground, completely overhung by the foliage, was coated with a thick
+moss which was as soft as velvet beneath their feet.  The first
+watcher, that is, the man walking immediately behind Manston, now
+fell back, when Manston's housekeeper, knowing the ground pretty
+well, dived circuitously among the trees and got directly behind the
+steward, who, encumbered with his load, had proceeded but slowly.
+The other woman seemed now to be about opposite to Anne, or a little
+in advance, but on Manston's other hand.
+
+He reached a pit, midway between the waterfall and the engine-house.
+There he stopped, wiped his face, and listened.
+
+Into this pit had drifted uncounted generations of withered leaves,
+half filling it.  Oak, beech, and chestnut, rotten and brown alike,
+mingled themselves in one fibrous mass.  Manston descended into the
+midst of them, placed his sack on the ground, and raking the leaves
+aside into a large heap, began digging.  Anne softly drew nearer,
+crept into a bush, and turning her head to survey the rest, missed
+the man who had dropped behind, and whom we have called the first
+watcher.  Concluding that he, too, had hidden himself, she turned
+her attention to the second watcher, the other woman, who had
+meanwhile advanced near to where Anne lay in hiding, and now seated
+herself behind a tree, still closer to the steward than was Anne
+Seaway.
+
+Here and thus Anne remained concealed.  The crunch of the steward's
+spade, as it cut into the soft vegetable mould, was plainly
+perceptible to her ears when the periodic cessations between the
+creaks of the engine concurred with a lull in the breeze, which
+otherwise brought the subdued roar of the cascade from the further
+side of the bank that screened it.  A large hole--some four or five
+feet deep--had been excavated by Manston in about twenty minutes.
+Into this he immediately placed the sack, and then began filling in
+the earth, and treading it down.  Lastly he carefully raked the
+whole mass of dead and dry leaves into the middle of the pit,
+burying the ground with them as they had buried it before.
+
+For a hiding-place the spot was unequalled.  The thick accumulation
+of leaves, which had not been disturbed for centuries, might not be
+disturbed again for centuries to come, whilst their lower layers
+still decayed and added to the mould beneath.
+
+By the time this work was ended the sky had grown clearer, and Anne
+could now see distinctly the face of the other woman, stretching
+from behind the tree, seemingly forgetful of her position in her
+intense contemplation of the actions of the steward.  Her
+countenance was white and motionless.
+
+It was impossible that Manston should not soon notice her.  At the
+completion of his labour he turned, and did so.
+
+'Ho--you here!' he exclaimed.
+
+'Don't think I am a spy upon you,' she said, in an imploring
+whisper.  Anne recognized the voice as Miss Aldclyffe's.
+
+The trembling lady added hastily another remark, which was drowned
+in the recurring creak of the engine close at hand The first
+watcher, if he had come no nearer than his original position, was
+too far off to hear any part of this dialogue, on account of the
+roar of the falling water, which could reach him unimpeded by the
+bank.
+
+The remark of Miss Aldclyffe to Manston had plainly been concerning
+the first watcher, for Manston, with his spade in his hand,
+instantly rushed to where the man was concealed, and, before the
+latter could disengage himself from the boughs, the steward struck
+him on the head with the blade of the instrument.  The man fell to
+the ground.
+
+'Fly!' said Miss Aldclyffe to Manston.  Manston vanished amidst the
+trees.  Miss Aldclyffe went off in a contrary direction.
+
+Anne Seaway was about to run away likewise, when she turned and
+looked at the fallen man.  He lay on his face, motionless.
+
+Many of these women who own to no moral code show considerable
+magnanimity when they see people in trouble.  To act right simply
+because it is one's duty is proper; but a good action which is the
+result of no law of reflection shines more than any.  She went up to
+him and gently turned him over, upon which he began to show signs of
+life.  By her assistance he was soon able to stand upright.
+
+He looked about him with a bewildered air, endeavouring to collect
+his ideas.  'Who are you?' he said to the woman, mechanically.
+
+It was bad policy now to attempt disguise.  'I am the supposed Mrs.
+Manston,' she said.  'Who are you?'
+
+'I am the officer employed by Mr. Raunham to sift this mystery--
+which may be criminal.'  He stretched his limbs, pressed his head,
+and seemed gradually to awake to a sense of having been incautious
+in his utterance.  'Never you mind who I am,' he continued.  'Well,
+it doesn't matter now, either--it will no longer be a secret.'
+
+He stooped for his hat and ran in the direction the steward had
+taken--coming back again after the lapse of a minute.
+
+'It's only an aggravated assault, after all,' he said hastily,
+'until we have found out for certain what's buried here.  It may be
+only a bag of building rubbish; but it may be more.  Come and help
+me dig.'  He seized the spade with the awkwardness of a town man,
+and went into the pit, continuing a muttered discourse.  'It's no
+use my running after him single-handed,' he said.  'He's ever so far
+off by this time.  The best step is to see what is here.'
+
+It was far easier for the detective to re-open the hole than it had
+been for Manston to form it.  The leaves were raked away, the loam
+thrown out, and the sack dragged forth.
+
+'Hold this,' he said to Anne, whose curiosity still kept her
+standing near.  He turned on the light of a dark lantern he had
+brought, and gave it into her hand.
+
+The string which bound the mouth of the sack was now cut.  The
+officer laid the bag on its side, seized it by the bottom, and
+jerked forth the contents.  A large package was disclosed, carefully
+wrapped up in impervious tarpaulin, also well tied.  He was on the
+point of pulling open the folds at one end, when a light coloured
+thread of something, hanging on the outside, arrested his eye.  He
+put his hand upon it; it felt stringy, and adhered to his fingers.
+'Hold the light close,' he said.
+
+She held it close.  He raised his hand to the glass, and they both
+peered at an almost intangible filament he held between his finger
+and thumb.  It was a long hair; the hair of a woman.
+
+'God!  I couldn't believe it--no, I couldn't believe it!' the
+detective whispered, horror-struck.  'And I have lost the man for
+the present through my unbelief.  Let's get into a sheltered place.
+. . .  Now wait a minute whilst I prove it.'
+
+He thrust his hand into his waistcoat pocket, and withdrew thence a
+minute packet of brown paper.  Spreading it out he disclosed, coiled
+in the middle, another long hair.  It was the hair the clerk's wife
+had found on Manston's pillow nine days before the Carriford fire.
+He held the two hairs to the light:  they were both of a pale-brown
+hue.  He laid them parallel and stretched out his arms:  they were
+of the same length to a nicety.  The detective turned to Anne.
+
+'It is the body of his first wife,' he said quietly.  'He murdered
+her, as Mr. Springrove and the rector suspected--but how and when,
+God only knows.'
+
+'And I!' exclaimed Anne Seaway, a probable and natural sequence of
+events and motives explanatory of the whole crime--events and
+motives shadowed forth by the letter, Manston's possession of it,
+his renunciation of Cytherea, and instalment of herself--flashing
+upon her mind with the rapidity of lightning.
+
+'Ah--I see,' said the detective, standing unusually close to her:
+and a handcuff was on her wrist.  'You must come with me, madam.
+Knowing as much about a secret murder as God knows is a very
+suspicious thing:  it doesn't make you a goddess--far from it.'  He
+directed the bull's-eye into her face.
+
+'Pooh--lead on,' she said scornfully, 'and don't lose your principal
+actor for the sake of torturing a poor subordinate like me.'
+
+He loosened her hand, gave her his arm, and dragged her out of the
+grove--making her run beside him till they had reached the rectory.
+A light was burning here, and an auxiliary of the detective's
+awaiting him:  a horse ready harnessed to a spring-cart was standing
+outside.
+
+'You have come--I wish I had known that,' the detective said to his
+assistant, hurriedly and angrily.  'Well, we've blundered--he's
+gone--you should have been here, as I said!  I was sold by that
+woman, Miss Aldclyffe--she watched me.'  He hastily gave directions
+in an undertone to this man.  The concluding words were, 'Go in to
+the rector--he's up.  Detain Miss Aldclyffe.  I, in the meantime, am
+driving to Casterbridge with this one, and for help.  We shall be
+sure to have him when it gets light.'
+
+He assisted Anne into the vehicle, and drove off with her.  As they
+went, the clear, dry road showed before them, between the grassy
+quarters at each side, like a white riband, and made their progress
+easy.  They came to a spot where the highway was overhung by dense
+firs for some distance on both sides.  It was totally dark here.
+
+There was a smash; and a rude shock.  In the very midst of its
+length, at the point where the road began to drop down a hill, the
+detective drove against something with a jerk which nearly flung
+them both to the ground.
+
+The man recovered himself, placed Anne on the seat, and reached out
+his hand.  He found that the off-wheel of his gig was locked in that
+of another conveyance of some kind.
+
+'Hoy!' said the officer.
+
+Nobody answered.
+
+'Hoy, you man asleep there!' he said again.
+
+No reply.
+
+'Well, that's odd--this comes of the folly of travelling without
+gig-lamps because you expect the dawn.'  He jumped to the ground and
+turned on his lantern.
+
+There was the gig which had obstructed him, standing in the middle
+of the road; a jaded horse harnessed to it, but no human being in or
+near the vehicle.
+
+'Do you know whose gig this is?' he said to the woman.
+
+'No,' she said sullenly.  But she did recognize it as the steward's.
+
+'I'll swear it's Manston's!  Come, I can hear it by your tone.
+However, you needn't say anything which may criminate you.  What
+forethought the man must have had--how carefully he must have
+considered possible contingencies!  Why, he must have got the horse
+and gig ready before he began shifting the body.'
+
+He listened for a sound among the trees.  None was to be heard but
+the occasional scamper of a rabbit over the withered leaves.  He
+threw the light of his lantern through a gap in the hedge, but could
+see nothing beyond an impenetrable thicket.  It was clear that
+Manston was not many yards off, but the question was how to find
+him.  Nothing could be done by the detective just then, encumbered
+as he was by the horse and Anne.  If he had entered the thicket on a
+search unaided, Manston might have stepped unobserved from behind a
+bush and murdered him with the greatest ease.  Indeed, there were
+such strong reasons for the exploit in Manston's circumstances at
+that moment that without showing cowardice, his pursuer felt it
+hazardous to remain any longer where he stood.
+
+He hastily tied the head of Manston's horse to the back of his own
+vehicle, that the steward might be deprived of the use of any means
+of escape other than his own legs, and drove on thus with his
+prisoner to the county-town.  Arrived there, he lodged her in the
+police-station, and then took immediate steps for the capture of
+Manston.
+
+
+
+XX.  THE EVENTS OF THREE HOURS
+
+1.  MARCH THE TWENTY-THIRD.  MIDDAY
+
+Thirty-six hours had elapsed since Manston's escape.
+
+It was market-day at the county-town.  The farmers outside and
+inside the corn-exchange looked at their samples of wheat, and
+poured them critically as usual from one palm to another, but they
+thought and spoke of Manston.  Grocers serving behind their
+counters, instead of using their constant phrase, 'The next article,
+please?' substituted, 'Have you heard if he's caught?'  Dairymen and
+drovers standing beside the sheep and cattle pens, spread their legs
+firmly, readjusted their hats, thrust their hands into the lowest
+depths of their pockets, regarded the animals with the utmost
+keenness of which the eye was capable, and said, 'Ay, ay, so's:
+they'll have him avore night.'
+
+Later in the day Edward Springrove passed along the street hurriedly
+and anxiously.  'Well, have you heard any more?' he said to an
+acquaintance who accosted him.
+
+'They tracked him in this way,' said the other young man.  'A
+vagrant first told them that Manston had passed a rick at daybreak,
+under which this man was lying.  They followed the track he pointed
+out and ultimately came to a stile.  On the other side was a heap of
+half-hardened mud, scraped from the road.  On the surface of the
+heap, where it had been smoothed by the shovel, was distinctly
+imprinted the form of a man's hand, the buttons of his waistcoat,
+and his watch-chain, showing that he had stumbled in hurrying over
+the stile, and fallen there.  The pattern of the chain proved the
+man to have been Manston.  They followed on till they reached a ford
+crossed by stepping-stones--on the further bank were the same
+footmarks that had shown themselves beside the stile.  The whole of
+this course had been in the direction of Budmouth.  On they went,
+and the next clue was furnished them by a shepherd.  He said that
+wherever a clear space three or four yards wide ran in a line
+through a flock of sheep lying about a ewe-lease, it was a proof
+that somebody had passed there not more than half-an-hour earlier.
+At twelve o'clock that day he had noticed such a feature in his
+flock.  Nothing more could be heard of him, and they got into
+Budmouth.  The steam-packet to the Channel Islands was to start at
+eleven last night, and they at once concluded that his hope was to
+get to France by way of Jersey and St. Malo--his only chance, all
+the railway-stations being watched.
+
+'Well, they went to the boat:  he was not on board then.  They went
+again at half-past ten:  he had not come.  Two men now placed
+themselves under the lamp immediately beside the gangway.  Another
+stayed by the office door, and one or two more up Mary Street--the
+straight cut to the quay.  At a quarter to eleven the mail-bags were
+put on board.  Whilst the attention of the idlers was directed to
+the mails, down Mary Street came a man as boldly as possible.  The
+gait was Manston's, but not the clothes.  He passed over to the
+shaded part of the street:  heads were turned.  I suppose this
+warned him, for he never emerged from the shadow.  They watched and
+waited, but the steward did not reappear.  The alarm was raised--
+they searched the town high and low--no Manston.  All this morning
+they have been searching, but there's not a sign of him anywhere.
+However, he has lost his last chance of getting across the Channel.
+It is reported that he has since changed clothes with a labourer.'
+
+During this narration, Edward, lost in thought, had let his eyes
+follow a shabby man in a smock-frock, but wearing light boots--who
+was stalking down the street under a bundle of straw which overhung
+and concealed his head.  It was a very ordinary circumstance for a
+man with a bundle of straw on his shoulders and overhanging his
+head, to go down the High Street.  Edward saw him cross the bridge
+which divided the town from the country, place his shaggy
+encumbrance by the side of the road, and leave it there.
+
+Springrove now parted from his acquaintance, and went also in the
+direction of the bridge, and some way beyond it.  As far as he could
+see stretched the turnpike road, and, while he was looking, he
+noticed a man to leap from the hedge at a point two hundred, or two
+hundred and fifty yards ahead, cross the road, and go through a
+wicket on the other side.  This figure seemed like that of the man
+who had been carrying the bundle of straw.  He looked at the straw:
+it still stood alone.
+
+The subjoined facts sprang, as it were, into juxtaposition in his
+brain:--
+
+Manston had been seen wearing the clothes of a labouring man--a
+brown smock-frock.  So had this man, who seemed other than a
+labourer, on second thoughts:  and he had concealed his face by his
+bundle of straw with the greatest ease and naturalness.
+
+The path the man had taken led, among other places, to Tolchurch,
+where Cytherea was living.
+
+If Mrs. Manston was murdered, as some said, on the night of the
+fire, Cytherea was the steward's lawful wife.  Manston at bay, and
+reckless of results, might rush to his wife and harm her.
+
+It was a horrible supposition for a man who loved Cytherea to
+entertain; but Springrove could not resist its influence.  He
+started off for Tolchurch.
+
+2.  ONE TO TWO O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+On that self-same mid-day, whilst Edward was proceeding to Tolchurch
+by the footpath across the fields, Owen Graye had left the village
+and was riding along the turnpike road to the county-town, that he
+might ascertain the exact truth of the strange rumour which had
+reached him concerning Manston.  Not to disquiet his sister, he had
+said nothing to her of the matter.
+
+She sat by the window reading.  From her position she could see up
+the lane for a distance of at least a hundred yards.  Passers-by
+were so rare in this retired nook, that the eyes of those who dwelt
+by the wayside were invariably lifted to every one on the road,
+great and small, as to a novelty.
+
+A man in a brown smock-frock turned the corner and came towards the
+house.  It being market-day at Casterbridge, the village was nearly
+deserted, and more than this, the old farm-house in which Owen and
+his sister were staying, stood, as has been stated, apart from the
+body of cottages.  The man did not look respectable; Cytherea arose
+and bolted the door.
+
+Unfortunately he was near enough to see her cross the room.  He
+advanced to the door, knocked, and, receiving no answer, came to the
+window; he next pressed his face against the glass, peering in.
+
+Cytherea's experience at that moment was probably as trying a one as
+ever fell to the lot of a gentlewoman to endure.  She recognized in
+the peering face that of the man she had married.
+
+But not a movement was made by her, not a sound escaped her.  Her
+fear was great; but had she known the truth--that the man outside,
+feeling he had nothing on earth to lose by any act, was in the last
+stage of recklessness, terrified nature must have given way.
+
+'Cytherea,' he said, 'let me come in:  I am your husband.'
+
+'No,' she replied, still not realizing the magnitude of her peril.
+'If you want to speak to us, wait till my brother comes.'
+
+'O, he's not at home?  Cytherea, I can't live without you!  All my
+sin has been because I love you so!  Will you fly with me?  I have
+money enough for us both--only come with me.'
+
+'Not now--not now.'
+
+'I am your husband, I tell you, and I must come in.'
+
+'You cannot,' she said faintly.  His words began to terrify her.
+
+'I will, I say!' he exclaimed.  'Will you let me in, I ask once
+more?'
+
+'No--I will not,' said Cytherea.
+
+'Then I will let myself in!' he answered resolutely.  'I will, if I
+die for it!'
+
+The windows were glazed in lattice panes of leadwork, hung in
+casements.  He broke one of the panes with a stone, thrust his hand
+through the hole, unfastened the latch which held the casement
+close, and began opening the window.
+
+Instantly the shutters flew together with a slam, and were barred
+with desperate quickness by Cytherea on the inside.
+
+'Damn you!' he exclaimed.
+
+He ran round to the back of the house.  His impatience was greater
+now:  he thrust his fist through the pantry window at one blow, and
+opened it in the same way as the former one had been opened, before
+the terror-stricken girl was aware that he had gone round.  In an
+instant he stood in the pantry, advanced to the front room where she
+was, flung back the shutters, and held out his arms to embrace her.
+
+In extremely trying moments of bodily or mental pain, Cytherea
+either flushed hot or faded pale, according to the state of her
+constitution at the moment.  Now she burned like fire from head to
+foot, and this preserved her consciousness.
+
+Never before had the poor child's natural agility served her in such
+good stead as now.  A heavy oblong table stood in the middle of the
+room.  Round this table she flew, keeping it between herself and
+Manston, her large eyes wide open with terror, their dilated pupils
+constantly fixed upon Manston's, to read by his expression whether
+his next intention was to dart to the right or the left.
+
+Even he, at that heated moment, could not endure the expression of
+unutterable agony which shone from that extraordinary gaze of hers.
+It had surely been given her by God as a means of defence.  Manston
+continued his pursuit with a lowered eye.
+
+The panting and maddened desperado--blind to everything but the
+capture of his wife--went with a rush under the table:  she went
+over it like a bird.  He went heavily over it:  she flew under it,
+and was out at the other side.
+
+     'One on her youth and pliant limbs relies,
+      One on his sinews and his giant size.'
+
+But his superior strength was sure to tire her down in the long-run.
+She felt her weakness increasing with the quickness of her breath;
+she uttered a wild scream, which in its heartrending intensity
+seemed to echo for miles.
+
+At the same juncture her hair became unfastened, and rolled down
+about her shoulders.  The least accident at such critical periods is
+sufficient to confuse the overwrought intelligence.  She lost sight
+of his intended direction for one instant, and he immediately
+outmanoeuvred her.
+
+'At last! my Cytherea!' he cried, overturning the table, springing
+over it, seizing one of the long brown tresses, pulling her towards
+him, and clasping her round.  She writhed downwards between his arms
+and breast, and fell fainting on the floor.  For the first time his
+action was leisurely.  He lifted her upon the sofa, exclaiming,
+'Rest there for a while, my frightened little bird!'
+
+And then there was an end of his triumph.  He felt himself clutched
+by the collar, and whizzed backwards with the force of a battering-
+ram against the fireplace.  Springrove, wild, red, and breathless,
+had sprung in at the open window, and stood once more between man
+and wife.
+
+Manston was on his legs again in an instant.  A fiery glance on the
+one side, a glance of pitiless justice on the other, passed between
+them.  It was again the meeting in the vineyard of Naboth the
+Jezreelite:  'Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?  And he answered, I
+have found thee:  because thou hast sold thyself to work evil in the
+sight of the Lord.'
+
+A desperate wrestle now began between the two men.  Manston was the
+taller, but there was in Edward much hard tough muscle which the
+delicate flesh of the steward lacked.  They flew together like the
+jaws of a gin.  In a minute they were both on the floor, rolling
+over and over, locked in each other's grasp as tightly as if they
+had been one organic being at war with itself--Edward trying to
+secure Manston's arms with a small thong he had drawn from his
+pocket, Manston trying to reach his knife.
+
+Two characteristic noises pervaded the apartment through this
+momentous space of time.  One was the sharp panting of the two
+combatants, so similar in each as to be undistinguishable; the other
+was the stroke of their heels and toes, as they smote the floor at
+every contortion of body or limbs.
+
+Cytherea had not lost consciousness for more than half-a-minute.
+She had then leapt up without recognizing that Edward was her
+deliverer, unfastened the door, and rushed out, screaming wildly,
+'Come!  Help!  O, help!'
+
+Three men stood not twenty yards off, looking perplexed.  They
+dashed forward at her words.  'Have you seen a shabby man with a
+smock-frock on lately?' they inquired.  She pointed to the door, and
+ran on the same as before.
+
+Manston, who had just loosened himself from Edward's grasp, seemed
+at this moment to renounce his intention of pushing the conflict to
+a desperate end.  'I give it all up for life--dear life!' he cried,
+with a hoarse laugh.  'A reckless man has a dozen lives--see how
+I'll baffle you all yet!'
+
+He rushed out of the house, but no further.  The boast was his last.
+In one half-minute more he was helpless in the hands of his
+pursuers.
+
+
+
+Edward staggered to his feet, and paused to recover breath.  His
+thoughts had never forsaken Cytherea, and his first act now was to
+hasten up the lane after her.  She had not gone far.  He found her
+leaning upon a bank by the roadside, where she had flung herself
+down in sheer exhaustion.  He ran up and lifted her in his arms, and
+thus aided she was enabled to stand upright--clinging to him.  What
+would Springrove have given to imprint a kiss upon her lips then!
+
+They walked slowly towards the house.  The distressing sensation of
+whose wife she was could not entirely quench the resuscitated
+pleasure he felt at her grateful recognition of him, and her
+confiding seizure of his arm for support.  He conveyed her carefully
+into the house.
+
+A quarter of an hour later, whilst she was sitting in a partially
+recovered, half-dozing state in an arm-chair, Edward beside her
+waiting anxiously till Graye should arrive, they saw a spring-cart
+pass the door.  Old and dry mud-splashes from long-forgotten rains
+disfigured its wheels and sides; the varnish and paint had been
+scratched and dimmed; ornament had long been forgotten in a restless
+contemplation of use.  Three men sat on the seat, the middle one
+being Manston.  His hands were bound in front of him, his eyes were
+set directly forward, his countenance pallid, hard, and fixed.
+
+Springrove had told Cytherea of Manston's crime in a few short
+words.  He now said solemnly, 'He is to die.'
+
+'And I cannot mourn for him,' she replied with a shudder, leaning
+back and covering her face with her hands.
+
+In the silence that followed the two short remarks, Springrove
+watched the cart round the corner, and heard the rattle of its
+wheels gradually dying away as it rolled in the direction of the
+county-town.
+
+
+
+XXI.  THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN HOURS
+
+1.  MARCH THE TWENTY-NINTH.  NOON
+
+Exactly seven days after Edward Springrove had seen the man with the
+bundle of straw walking down the streets of Casterbridge, old Farmer
+Springrove was standing on the edge of the same pavement, talking to
+his friend, Farmer Baker.
+
+There was a pause in their discourse.  Mr. Springrove was looking
+down the street at some object which had attracted his attention.
+'Ah, 'tis what we shall all come to!' he murmured.
+
+The other looked in the same direction.  'True, neighbour
+Springrove; true.'
+
+Two men, advancing one behind the other in the middle of the road,
+were what the farmers referred to.  They were carpenters, and bore
+on their shoulders an empty coffin, covered by a thin black cloth.
+
+'I always feel a satisfaction at being breasted by such a sight as
+that,' said Springrove, still regarding the men's sad burden.  'I
+call it a sort of medicine.'
+
+'And it is medicine. . . .  I have not heard of any body being ill
+up this way lately?  D'seem as if the person died suddenly.'
+
+'May be so.  Ah, Baker, we say sudden death, don't we?  But there's
+no difference in their nature between sudden death and death of any
+other sort.  There's no such thing as a random snapping off of what
+was laid down to last longer.  We only suddenly light upon an end--
+thoughtfully formed as any other--which has been existing at that
+very same point from the beginning, though unseen by us to be so
+soon.'
+
+'It is just a discovery to your own mind, and not an alteration in
+the Lord's.'
+
+'That's it.  Unexpected is not as to the thing, but as to our
+sight.'
+
+'Now you'll hardly believe me, neighbour, but this little scene in
+front of us makes me feel less anxious about pushing on wi' that
+threshing and winnowing next week, that I was speaking about.  Why
+should we not stand still, says I to myself, and fling a quiet eye
+upon the Whys and the Wherefores, before the end o' it all, and we
+go down into the mouldering-place, and are forgotten?'
+
+''Tis a feeling that will come.  But 'twont bear looking into.
+There's a back'ard current in the world, and we must do our utmost
+to advance in order just to bide where we be.  But, Baker, they are
+turning in here with the coffin, look.'
+
+The two carpenters had borne their load into a narrow way close at
+hand.  The farmers, in common with others, turned and watched them
+along the way.
+
+''Tis a man's coffin, and a tall man's, too,' continued Farmer
+Springrove.  'His was a fine frame, whoever he was.'
+
+'A very plain box for the poor soul--just the rough elm, you see.'
+The corner of the cloth had blown aside.
+
+'Yes, for a very poor man.  Well, death's all the less insult to
+him.  I have often thought how much smaller the richer class are
+made to look than the poor at last pinches like this.  Perhaps the
+greatest of all the reconcilers of a thoughtful man to poverty--and
+I speak from experience--is the grand quiet it fills him with when
+the uncertainty of his life shows itself more than usual.'
+
+As Springrove finished speaking, the bearers of the coffin went
+across a gravelled square facing the two men and approached a grim
+and heavy archway.  They paused beneath it, rang a bell, and waited.
+
+Over the archway was written in Egyptian capitals,
+
+                            'COUNTY GAOL.'
+
+The small rectangular wicket, which was constructed in one of the
+two iron-studded doors, was opened from the inside.  The men
+severally stepped over the threshold, the coffin dragged its
+melancholy length through the aperture, and both entered the court,
+and were covered from sight.
+
+'Somebody in the gaol, then?'
+
+'Yes, one of the prisoners,' said a boy, scudding by at the moment,
+who passed on whistling.
+
+'Do you know the name of the man who is dead?' inquired Baker of a
+third bystander.
+
+'Yes, 'tis all over town--surely you know, Mr. Springrove?  Why,
+Manston, Miss Aldclyffe's steward.  He was found dead the first
+thing this morning.  He had hung himself behind the door of his
+cell, in some way, by a handkerchief and some strips of his clothes.
+The turnkey says his features were scarcely changed, as he looked at
+'em with the early sun a-shining in at the grating upon him.  He has
+left a full account of the murder, and all that led to it.  So
+there's an end of him.'
+
+
+
+It was perfectly true:  Manston was dead.
+
+The previous day he had been allowed the use of writing-materials,
+and had occupied himself for nearly seven hours in preparing the
+following confession:--
+
+                    'LAST WORDS.
+
+'Having found man's life to be a wretchedly conceived scheme, I
+renounce it, and, to cause no further trouble, I write down the
+facts connected with my past proceedings.
+
+'After thanking God, on first entering my house, on the night of the
+fire at Carriford, for my release from bondage to a woman I
+detested, I went, a second time, to the scene of the disaster, and,
+finding that nothing could be done by remaining there, shortly
+afterwards I returned home again in the company of Mr. Raunham.
+
+'He parted from me at the steps of my porch, and went back towards
+the rectory.  Whilst I still stood at the door, musing on my strange
+deliverance, I saw a figure advance from beneath the shadow of the
+park trees.  It was the figure of a woman.
+
+'When she came near, the twilight was sufficient to show me her
+attire:  it was a cloak reaching to the bottom of her dress, and a
+thick veil covering her face.  These features, together with her
+size and gait, aided also by a flash of perception as to the chain
+of events which had saved her life, told me that she was my wife
+Eunice.
+
+'I gnashed my teeth in a frenzy of despair; I had lost Cytherea; I
+had gained one whose beauty had departed, whose utterance was
+complaint, whose mind was shallow, and who drank brandy every day.
+The revulsion of feeling was terrible.  Providence, whom I had just
+thanked, seemed a mocking tormentor laughing at me.  I felt like a
+madman.
+
+'She came close--started at seeing me outside--then spoke to me.
+Her first words were reproof for what I had unintentionally done,
+and sounded as an earnest of what I was to be cursed with as long as
+we both lived.  I answered angrily; this tone of mine changed her
+complaints to irritation.  She taunted me with a secret she had
+discovered, which concerned Miss Aldclyffe and myself.  I was
+surprised to learn it--more surprised that she knew it, but
+concealed my feeling.
+
+'"How could you serve me so?" she said, her breath smelling of
+spirits even then.  "You love another woman--yes, you do.  See how
+you drive me about!  I have been to the station, intending to leave
+you for ever, and yet I come to try you once more."
+
+'An indescribable exasperation had sprung up in me as she talked--
+rage and regret were all in all.  Scarcely knowing what I did, I
+furiously raised my hand and swung it round with my whole force to
+strike her.  She turned quickly--and it was the poor creature's end.
+By her movement my hand came edgewise exactly in the nape of the
+neck--as men strike a hare to kill it.  The effect staggered me with
+amazement.  The blow must have disturbed the vertebrae; she fell at
+my feet, made a few movements, and uttered one low sound.
+
+'I ran indoors for water and some wine, I came out and lanced her
+arm with my penknife.  But she lay still, and I found that she was
+dead.
+
+'It was a long time before I could realize my horrible position.
+For several minutes I had no idea of attempting to escape the
+consequences of my deed.  Then a light broke upon me.  Had anybody
+seen her since she left the Three Tranters?  Had they not, she was
+already believed by the parishioners to be dust and ashes.  I should
+never be found out.
+
+'Upon this I acted.
+
+'The first question was how to dispose of the body.  The impulse of
+the moment was to bury her at once in the pit between the engine-
+house and waterfall; but it struck me that I should not have time.
+It was now four o'clock, and the working-men would soon be stirring
+about the place.  I would put off burying her till the next night.
+I carried her indoors.
+
+'In turning the outhouse into a workshop, earlier in the season, I
+found, when driving a nail into the wall for fixing a cupboard, that
+the wall sounded hollow.  I examined it, and discovered behind the
+plaster an old oven which had long been disused, and was bricked up
+when the house was prepared for me.
+
+'To unfix this cupboard and pull out the bricks was the work of a
+few minutes.  Then, bearing in mind that I should have to remove the
+body again the next night, I placed it in a sack, pushed it into the
+oven, packed in the bricks, and replaced the cupboard.
+
+'I then went to bed.  In bed, I thought whether there were any very
+remote possibilities that might lead to the supposition that my wife
+was not consumed by the flames of the burning house.  The thing
+which struck me most forcibly was this, that the searchers might
+think it odd that no remains whatever should be found.
+
+'The clinching and triumphant deed would be to take the body and
+place it among the ruins of the destroyed house.  But I could not do
+this, on account of the men who were watching against an outbreak of
+the fire.  One remedy remained.
+
+'I arose again, dressed myself, and went down to the outhouse.  I
+must take down the cupboard again.  I did take it down.  I pulled
+out the bricks, pulled out the sack, pulled out the corpse, and took
+her keys from her pocket and the watch from her side.
+
+'I then replaced everything as before.
+
+'With these articles in my pocket I went out of the yard, and took
+my way through the withy copse to the churchyard, entering it from
+the back.  Here I felt my way carefully along till I came to the
+nook where pieces of bones from newly-dug graves are sometimes piled
+behind the laurel-bushes.  I had been earnestly hoping to find a
+skull among these old bones; but though I had frequently seen one or
+two in the rubbish here, there was not one now.  I then groped in
+the other corner with the same result--nowhere could I find a skull.
+Three or four fragments of leg and back-bones were all I could
+collect, and with these I was forced to be content.
+
+'Taking them in my hand, I crossed the road, and got round behind
+the inn, where the couch heap was still smouldering.  Keeping behind
+the hedge, I could see the heads of the three or four men who
+watched the spot.
+
+'Standing in this place I took the bones, and threw them one by one
+over the hedge and over the men's heads into the smoking embers.
+When the bones had all been thrown, I threw the keys; last of all I
+threw the watch.
+
+'I then returned home as I had gone, and went to bed once more, just
+as the dawn began to break.  I exulted--"Cytherea is mine again!"
+
+'At breakfast-time I thought, "Suppose the cupboard should by some
+unlikely chance get moved to-day!"
+
+'I went to the mason's yard hard by, while the men were at
+breakfast, and brought away a shovelful of mortar.  I took it into
+the outhouse, again shifted the cupboard, and plastered over the
+mouth of the oven behind.  Simply pushing the cupboard back into its
+place, I waited for the next night that I might bury the body,
+though upon the whole it was in a tolerably safe hiding-place.
+
+'When the night came, my nerves were in some way weaker than they
+had been on the previous night.  I felt reluctant to touch the body.
+I went to the outhouse, but instead of opening the oven, I firmly
+drove in the shoulder-nails that held the cupboard to the wall.  "I
+will bury her to-morrow night, however," I thought.
+
+'But the next night I was still more reluctant to touch her.  And my
+reluctance increased, and there the body remained.  The oven was,
+after all, never likely to be opened in my time.
+
+'I married Cytherea Graye, and never did a bridegroom leave the
+church with a heart more full of love and happiness, and a brain
+more fixed on good intentions, than I did on that morning.
+
+'When Cytherea's brother made his appearance at the hotel in
+Southampton, bearing his strange evidence of the porter's
+disclosure, I was staggered beyond expression.  I thought they had
+found the body.  "Am I to be apprehended and to lose her even now?"
+I mourned.  I saw my error, and instantly saw, too, that I must act
+externally like an honourable man.  So at his request I yielded her
+up to him, and meditated on several schemes for enabling me to claim
+the woman I had a legal right to claim as my wife, without
+disclosing the reason why I knew myself to have it.
+
+'I went home to Knapwater the next day, and for nearly a week lived
+in a state of indecision.  I could not hit upon a scheme for proving
+my wife dead without compromising myself.
+
+'Mr. Raunham hinted that I should take steps to discover her
+whereabouts by advertising.  I had no energy for the farce.  But one
+evening I chanced to enter the Rising Sun Inn.  Two notorious
+poachers were sitting in the settle, which screened my entrance.
+They were half drunk--their conversation was carried on in the
+solemn and emphatic tone common to that stage of intoxication, and I
+myself was the subject of it.
+
+'The following was the substance of their disjointed remarks:  On
+the night of the great fire at Carriford, one of them was sent to
+meet me, and break the news of the death of my wife to me.  This he
+did; but because I would not pay him for his news, he left me in a
+mood of vindictiveness.  When the fire was over, he joined his
+comrade.  The favourable hour of the night suggested to them the
+possibility of some unlawful gain before daylight came.  My
+fowlhouse stood in a tempting position, and still resenting his
+repulse during the evening, one of them proposed to operate upon my
+birds.  I was believed to have gone to the rectory with Mr. Raunham.
+The other was disinclined to go, and the first went off alone.
+
+'It was now about three o'clock.  He had advanced as far as the
+shrubbery, which grows near the north wall of the house, when he
+fancied he heard, above the rush of the waterfall, noises on the
+other side of the building.  He described them in these words,
+"Ghostly mouths talking--then a fall--then a groan--then the rush of
+the water and creak of the engine as before."  Only one explanation
+occurred to him; the house was haunted.  And, whether those of the
+living or the dead, voices of any kind were inimical to one who had
+come on such an errand.  He stealthily crept home.
+
+'His unlawful purpose in being behind the house led him to conceal
+his adventure.  No suspicion of the truth entered his mind till the
+railway-porter had startled everybody by his strange announcement.
+Then he asked himself, had the horrifying sounds of that night been
+really an enactment in the flesh between me and my wife?
+
+'The words of the other man were:
+
+'"Why don't he try to find her if she's alive?"
+
+'"True," said the first.  "Well, I don't forget what I heard, and if
+she don't turn up alive my mind will be as sure as a Bible upon her
+murder, and the parson shall know it, though I do get six months on
+the treadmill for being where I was."
+
+'"And if she should turn up alive?"
+
+'"Then I shall know that I am wrong, and believing myself a fool as
+well as a rogue, hold my tongue."
+
+'I glided out of the house in a cold sweat.  The only pressure in
+heaven or earth which could have forced me to renounce Cytherea was
+now put upon me--the dread of a death upon the gallows.
+
+'I sat all that night weaving strategy of various kinds.  The only
+effectual remedy for my hazardous standing that I could see was a
+simple one.  It was to substitute another woman for my wife before
+the suspicions of that one easily-hoodwinked man extended further.
+
+'The only difficulty was to find a practicable substitute.
+
+'The one woman at all available for the purpose was a friendless,
+innocent creature, named Anne Seaway, whom I had known in my youth,
+and who had for some time been the housekeeper of a lady in London.
+On account of this lady's sudden death, Anne stood in rather a
+precarious position, as regarded her future subsistence.  She was
+not the best kind of woman for the scheme; but there was no
+alternative.  One quality of hers was valuable; she was not a
+talker.  I went to London the very next day, called at the Hoxton
+lodging of my wife (the only place at which she had been known as
+Mrs. Manston), and found that no great difficulties stood in the way
+of a personation.  And thus favouring circumstances determined my
+course.  I visited Anne Seaway, made love to her, and propounded my
+plan.
+                    .                    .                    .
+
+'We lived quietly enough until the Sunday before my apprehension.
+Anne came home from church that morning, and told me of the
+suspicious way in which a young man had looked at her there.
+Nothing could be done beyond waiting the issue of events.  Then the
+letter came from Raunham.  For the first time in my life I was half
+indifferent as to what fate awaited me.  During the succeeding day I
+thought once or twice of running away, but could not quite make up
+my mind.  At any rate it would be best to bury the body of my wife,
+I thought, for the oven might be opened at any time.  I went to
+Casterbridge and made some arrangements.  In the evening Miss
+Aldclyffe (who is united to me by a common secret which I have no
+right or wish to disclose) came to my house, and alarmed me still
+more.  She said that she could tell by Mr. Raunham's manner that
+evening, that he kept back from her a suspicion of more importance
+even than the one he spoke of, and that strangers were in his house
+even then.
+
+'I guessed what this further suspicion was, and resolved to
+enlighten her to a certain extent, and so secure her assistance.  I
+said that I killed my wife by an accident on the night of the fire,
+dwelling upon the advantage to her of the death of the only woman
+who knew her secret.
+
+'Her terror, and fears for my fate, led her to watch the rectory
+that evening.  She saw the detective leave it, and followed him to
+my residence.  This she told me hurriedly when I perceived her after
+digging my wife's grave in the plantation.  She did not suspect what
+the sack contained.
+
+'I am now about to enter on my normal condition.  For people are
+almost always in their graves.  When we survey the long race of men,
+it is strange and still more strange to find that they are mainly
+dead men, who have scarcely ever been otherwise.
+
+                                           'AENEAS MANSTON.'
+
+The steward's confession, aided by circumstantial evidence of
+various kinds, was the means of freeing both Anne Seaway and Miss
+Aldclyffe from all suspicion of complicity with the murderer.
+
+2.  SIX O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+It was evening--just at sunset--on the day of Manston's death.
+
+In the cottage at Tolchurch was gathered a group consisting of
+Cytherea, her brother, Edward Springrove, and his father.  They sat
+by the window conversing of the strange events which had just taken
+place.  In Cytherea's eye there beamed a hopeful ray, though her
+face was as white as a lily.
+
+Whilst they talked, looking out at the yellow evening light that
+coated the hedges, trees, and church tower, a brougham rolled round
+the corner of the lane, and came in full view.  It reflected the
+rays of the sun in a flash from its polished panels as it turned the
+angle, the spokes of the wheels bristling in the same light like
+bayonets.  The vehicle came nearer, and arrived opposite Owen's
+door, when the driver pulled the rein and gave a shout, and the
+panting and sweating horses stopped.
+
+'Miss Aldclyffe's carriage!' they all exclaimed.
+
+Owen went out.  'Is Miss Graye at home?' said the man.  'A note for
+her, and I am to wait for an answer.'
+
+Cytherea read in the handwriting of the Rector of Carriford:--
+
+'DEAR MISS GRAYE,--Miss Aldclyffe is ill, though not dangerously.
+She continually repeats your name, and now wishes very much to see
+you.  If you possibly can, come in the carriage.--Very sincerely
+yours, JOHN RAUNHAM.'
+
+'How comes she ill?' Owen inquired of the coachman.
+
+'She caught a violent cold by standing out of doors in the damp, on
+the night the steward ran away.  Ever since, till this morning, she
+complained of fulness and heat in the chest.  This morning the maid
+ran in and told her suddenly that Manston had killed himself in
+gaol--she shrieked--broke a blood-vessel--and fell upon the floor.
+Severe internal haemorrhage continued for some time and then
+stopped.  They say she is sure to get over it; but she herself says
+no.  She has suffered from it before.'
+
+Cytherea was ready in a few moments, and entered the carriage.
+
+3.  SEVEN O'CLOCK P.M.
+
+Soft as was Cytherea's motion along the corridors of Knapwater
+House, the preternaturally keen intelligence of the suffering woman
+caught the maiden's well-known footfall.  She entered the sick-
+chamber with suspended breath.
+
+In the room everything was so still, and sensation was as it were so
+rarefied by solicitude, that thinking seemed acting, and the lady's
+weak act of trying to live a silent wrestling with all the powers of
+the universe.  Nobody was present but Mr. Raunham, the nurse having
+left the room on Cytherea's entry, and the physician and surgeon
+being engaged in a whispered conversation in a side-chamber.  Their
+patient had been pronounced out of danger.
+
+Cytherea went to the bedside, and was instantly recognized.  O, what
+a change--Miss Aldclyffe dependent upon pillows!  And yet not a
+forbidding change.  With weakness had come softness of aspect:  the
+haughtiness was extracted from the frail thin countenance, and a
+sweeter mild placidity had taken its place.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe signified to Mr. Raunham that she would like to be
+alone with Cytherea.
+
+'Cytherea?' she faintly whispered the instant the door was closed.
+
+Cytherea clasped the lady's weak hand, and sank beside her.
+
+Miss Aldclyffe whispered again.  'They say I am certain to live; but
+I know that I am certainly going to die.'
+
+'They know, I think, and hope.'
+
+'I know best, but we'll leave that.  Cytherea--O Cytherea, can you
+forgive me!'
+
+Her companion pressed her hand.
+
+'But you don't know yet--you don't know yet,' the invalid murmured.
+'It is forgiveness for that misrepresentation to Edward Springrove
+that I implore, and for putting such force upon him--that which
+caused all the train of your innumerable ills!'
+
+'I know all--all.  And I do forgive you.  Not in a hasty impulse
+that is revoked when coolness comes, but deliberately and sincerely:
+as I myself hope to be forgiven, I accord you my forgiveness now.'
+
+Tears streamed from Miss Aldclyffe's eyes, and mingled with those of
+her young companion, who could not restrain hers for sympathy.
+Expressions of strong attachment, interrupted by emotion, burst
+again and again from the broken-spirited woman.
+
+'But you don't know my motive.  O, if you only knew it, how you
+would pity me then!'
+
+Cytherea did not break the pause which ensued, and the elder woman
+appeared now to nerve herself by a superhuman effort.  She spoke on
+in a voice weak as a summer breeze, and full of intermission, and
+yet there pervaded it a steadiness of intention that seemed to
+demand firm tones to bear it out worthily.
+
+'Cytherea,' she said, 'listen to me before I die.
+
+'A long time ago--more than thirty years ago--a young girl of
+seventeen was cruelly betrayed by her cousin, a wild officer of six-
+and-twenty.  He went to India, and died.
+
+'One night when that miserable girl had just arrived home with her
+parents from Germany, where her baby had been born, she took all the
+money she possessed, pinned it on her infant's bosom, together with
+a letter, stating, among other things, what she wished the child's
+Christian name to be; wrapped up the little thing, and walked with
+it to Clapham.  Here, in a retired street, she selected a house.
+She placed the child on the doorstep and knocked at the door, then
+ran away and watched.  They took it up and carried it indoors.
+
+'Now that her poor baby was gone, the girl blamed herself bitterly
+for cruelty towards it, and wished she had adopted her parents'
+counsel to secretly hire a nurse.  She longed to see it.  She didn't
+know what to do.  She wrote in an assumed name to the woman who had
+taken it in, and asked her to meet the writer with the infant at
+certain places she named.  These were hotels or coffee-houses in
+Chelsea, Pimlico, or Hammersmith.  The woman, being well paid,
+always came, and asked no questions.  At one meeting--at an inn in
+Hammersmith--she made her appearance without the child, and told the
+girl it was so ill that it would not live through the night.  The
+news, and fatigue, brought on a fainting-fit . . .'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe's sobs choked her utterance, and she became painfully
+agitated.  Cytherea, pale and amazed at what she heard, wept for
+her, bent over her, and begged her not to go on speaking.
+
+'Yes--I must,' she cried, between her sobs.  'I will--I must go on!
+And I must tell yet more plainly!. . .  you must hear it before I am
+gone, Cytherea.'  The sympathizing and astonished girl sat down
+again.
+
+'The name of the woman who had taken the child was MANSTON.  She was
+the widow of a schoolmaster.  She said she had adopted the child of
+a relation.
+
+'Only one man ever found out who the mother was.  He was the keeper
+of the inn in which she fainted, and his silence she has purchased
+ever since.
+
+'A twelvemonth passed--fifteen months--and the saddened girl met a
+man at her father's house named Graye--your father, Cytherea, then
+unmarried.  Ah, such a man!  Inexperience now perceived what it was
+to be loved in spirit and in truth!  But it was too late.  Had he
+known her secret he would have cast her out.  She withdrew from him
+by an effort, and pined.
+
+'Years and years afterwards, when she became mistress of a fortune
+and estates by her father's death, she formed the weak scheme of
+having near her the son whom, in her father's life-time, she had
+been forbidden to recognize.  Cytherea, you know who that weak woman
+is.
+
+                    .                    .                    .
+
+'By such toilsome labour as this I got him here as my steward.  And
+I wanted to see him YOUR HUSBAND, Cytherea!--the husband of my true
+lover's child.  It was a sweet dream to me. . . .  Pity me--O, pity
+me!  To die unloved is more than I can bear!  I loved your father,
+and I love him now.'
+
+
+
+That was the burden of Cytherea Aldclyffe.
+
+'I suppose you must leave me again--you always leave me,' she said,
+after holding the young woman's hand a long while in silence.
+
+'No--indeed I'll stay always.  Do you like me to stay?'
+
+Miss Aldclyffe in the jaws of death was Miss Aldclyffe still, though
+the old fire had degenerated to mere phosphorescence now.  'But you
+are your brother's housekeeper?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Well, of course you cannot stay with me on a sudden like this. . .
+Go home, or he will be at a loss for things. And to-morrow morning
+come again, won't you, dearest, come again--we'll fetch you.  But
+you mustn't stay now, and put Owen out.  O no--it would be absurd.'
+The absorbing concern about trifles of daily routine, which is so
+often seen in very sick people, was present here.
+
+Cytherea promised to go home, and come the next morning to stay
+continuously.
+
+'Stay till I die then, will you not?  Yes, till I die--I shan't die
+till to-morrow.'
+
+'We hope for your recovery--all of us.'
+
+'I know best.  Come at six o'clock, darling.'
+
+'As soon as ever I can,' returned Cytherea tenderly.
+
+'But six is too early--you will have to think of your brother's
+breakfast.  Leave Tolchurch at eight, will you?'
+
+Cytherea consented to this.  Miss Aldclyffe would never have known
+had her companion stayed in the house all night; but the honesty of
+Cytherea's nature rebelled against even the friendly deceit which
+such a proceeding would have involved.
+
+An arrangement was come to whereby she was to be taken home in the
+pony-carriage instead of the brougham that fetched her; the carriage
+to put up at Tolchurch farm for the night, and on that account to be
+in readiness to bring her back earlier.
+
+4.  MARCH THE THIRTIETH.  DAYBREAK
+
+The third and last instance of Cytherea's subjection to those
+periodic terrors of the night which had emphasized her connection
+with the Aldclyffe name and blood occurred at the present date.
+
+It was about four o'clock in the morning when Cytherea, though most
+probably dreaming, seemed to awake--and instantly was transfixed by
+a sort of spell, that had in it more of awe than of affright.  At
+the foot of her bed, looking her in the face with an expression of
+entreaty beyond the power of words to portray, was the form of Miss
+Aldclyffe--wan and distinct.  No motion was perceptible in her; but
+longing--earnest longing--was written in every feature.
+
+Cytherea believed she exercised her waking judgment as usual in
+thinking, without a shadow of doubt, that Miss Aldclyffe stood
+before her in flesh and blood.  Reason was not sufficiently alert to
+lead Cytherea to ask herself how such a thing could have occurred.
+
+'I would have remained with you--why would you not allow me to
+stay!' Cytherea exclaimed.  The spell was broken:  she became
+broadly awake; and the figure vanished.
+
+It was in the grey time of dawn.  She trembled in a sweat of
+disquiet, and not being able to endure the thought of her brother
+being asleep, she went and tapped at his door.
+
+'Owen!'
+
+He was not a heavy sleeper, and it was verging upon his time to
+rise.
+
+'What do you want, Cytherea?'
+
+'I ought not to have left Knapwater last night.  I wish I had not.
+I really think I will start at once.  She wants me, I know.'
+
+'What time is it?'
+
+'A few minutes past four.'
+
+'You had better not.  Keep to the time agreed upon.  Consider, we
+should have such a trouble in rousing the driver, and other things.'
+
+Upon the whole it seemed wiser not to act on a mere fancy.  She went
+to bed again.
+
+An hour later, when Owen was thinking of getting up, a knocking came
+to the front door.  The next minute something touched the glass of
+Owen's window.  He waited--the noise was repeated.  A little gravel
+had been thrown against it to arouse him.
+
+He crossed the room, pulled up the blind, and looked out.  A solemn
+white face was gazing upwards from the road, expectantly straining
+to catch the first glimpse of a person within the panes.  It was the
+face of a Knapwater man sitting on horseback.
+
+Owen saw his errand.  There is an unmistakable look in the face of
+every man who brings tidings of death.  Graye opened the window.
+
+'Miss Aldclyffe . . . ' said the messenger, and paused.
+
+'Ah--dead?'
+
+'Yes--she is dead.'
+
+'When did she die?'
+
+'At ten minutes past four, after another effusion.  She knew best,
+you see, sir.  I started directly, by the rector's orders.'
+
+
+
+SEQUEL
+
+Fifteen months have passed, and we are brought on to Midsummer
+Night, 1867.
+
+The picture presented is the interior of the old belfry of Carriford
+Church, at ten o'clock in the evening.
+
+Six Carriford men and one stranger are gathered there, beneath the
+light of a flaring candle stuck on a piece of wood against the wall.
+The six Carriford men are the well-known ringers of the fine-toned
+old bells in the key of F, which have been music to the ears of
+Carriford parish and the outlying districts for the last four
+hundred years.  The stranger is an assistant, who has appeared from
+nobody knows where.
+
+The six natives--in their shirt-sleeves, and without hats--pull and
+catch frantically at the dancing bellropes, the locks of their hair
+waving in the breeze created by their quick motions; the stranger,
+who has the treble bell, does likewise, but in his right mind and
+coat.  Their ever-changing shadows mingle on the wall in an endless
+variety of kaleidoscopic forms, and the eyes of all the seven are
+religiously fixed on a diagram like a large addition sum, which is
+chalked on the floor.
+
+Vividly contrasting with the yellow light of the candle upon the
+four unplastered walls of the tower, and upon the faces and clothes
+of the men, is the scene discernible through the screen beneath the
+tower archway.  At the extremity of the long mysterious avenue of
+the nave and chancel can be seen shafts of moonlight streaming in at
+the east window of the church--blue, phosphoric, and ghostly.
+
+A thorough renovation of the bell-ringing machinery and accessories
+had taken place in anticipation of an interesting event.  New ropes
+had been provided; every bell had been carefully shifted from its
+carriage, and the pivots lubricated.  Bright red 'sallies' of
+woollen texture--soft to the hands and easily caught--glowed on the
+ropes in place of the old ragged knots, all of which newness in
+small details only rendered more evident the irrepressible aspect of
+age in the mass surrounding them.
+
+The triple-bob-major was ended, and the ringers wiped their faces
+and rolled down their shirt-sleeves, previously to tucking away the
+ropes and leaving the place for the night.
+
+'Piph--h--h--h!  A good forty minutes,' said a man with a streaming
+face, and blowing out his breath--one of the pair who had taken the
+tenor bell.
+
+'Our friend here pulled proper well--that 'a did--seeing he's but a
+stranger,' said Clerk Crickett, who had just resigned the second
+rope, and addressing the man in the black coat.
+
+''A did,' said the rest.
+
+'I enjoyed it much,' said the man modestly.
+
+'What we should ha' done without you words can't tell.  The man that
+d'belong by rights to that there bell is ill o' two gallons o' wold
+cider.'
+
+'And now so's,' remarked the fifth ringer, as pertaining to the last
+allusion, 'we'll finish this drop o' metheglin and cider, and every
+man home-along straight as a line.'
+
+'Wi' all my heart,' Clerk Crickett replied.  'And the Lord send if I
+ha'n't done my duty by Master Teddy Springrove--that I have so.'
+
+'And the rest o' us,' they said, as the cup was handed round.
+
+'Ay, ay--in ringen--but I was spaken in a spiritual sense o' this
+mornen's business o' mine up by the chancel rails there.  'Twas very
+convenient to lug her here and marry her instead o' doen it at that
+twopenny-halfpenny town o' Budm'th.  Very convenient.'
+
+'Very.  There was a little fee for Master Crickett.'
+
+'Ah--well.  Money's money--very much so--very--I always have said
+it.  But 'twas a pretty sight for the nation.  He coloured up like
+any maid, that 'a did.'
+
+'Well enough 'a mid colour up.  'Tis no small matter for a man to
+play wi' fire.'
+
+'Whatever it may be to a woman,' said the clerk absently.
+
+'Thou'rt thinken o' thy wife, clerk,' said Gad Weedy.  'She'll play
+wi'it again when thou'st got mildewed.'
+
+'Well--let her, God bless her; for I'm but a poor third man, I.  The
+Lord have mercy upon the fourth! . . .  Ay, Teddy's got his own at
+last.  What little white ears that maid hev, to be sure! choose your
+wife as you choose your pig--a small ear and a small tale--that was
+always my joke when I was a merry feller, ah--years agone now!  But
+Teddy's got her.  Poor chap, he was getten as thin as a hermit wi'
+grief--so was she.'
+
+'Maybe she'll pick up now.'
+
+'True--'tis nater's law, which no man shall gainsay.  Ah, well do I
+bear in mind what I said to Pa'son Raunham, about thy mother's
+family o' seven, Gad, the very first week of his comen here, when I
+was just in my prime.  "And how many daughters has that poor Weedy
+got, clerk?" he says.  "Six, sir," says I, "and every one of 'em has
+a brother!"  "Poor woman," says he, "a dozen children!--give her
+this half-sovereign from me, clerk."  'A laughed a good five minutes
+afterwards, when he found out my merry nater--'a did.  But there,
+'tis over wi' me now.  Enteren the Church is the ruin of a man's wit
+for wit's nothen without a faint shadder o' sin.'
+
+'If so be Teddy and the lady had been kept apart for life, they'd
+both ha' died,' said Gad emphatically.
+
+'But now instead o' death there'll be increase o' life,' answered
+the clerk.
+
+'It all went proper well,' said the fifth bell-ringer.  'They didn't
+flee off to Babylonish places--not they.'  He struck up an attitude-
+-'Here's Master Springrove standen so:  here's the married woman
+standen likewise; here they d'walk across to Knapwater House; and
+there they d'bide in the chimley corner, hard and fast.'
+
+'Yes, 'twas a pretty wedden, and well attended,' added the clerk.
+'Here was my lady herself--red as scarlet:  here was Master
+Springrove, looken as if he half wished he'd never a-come--ah, poor
+souls!--the men always do!  The women do stand it best--the maid was
+in her glory.  Though she was so shy the glory shone plain through
+that shy skin.  Ah, it did so's.'
+
+'Ay,' said Gad, 'and there was Tim Tankins and his five journeymen
+carpenters, standen on tiptoe and peepen in at the chancel winders.
+There was Dairyman Dodman waiten in his new spring-cart to see 'em
+come out--whip in hand--that 'a was.  Then up comes two master
+tailors.  Then there was Christopher Runt wi' his pickaxe and
+shovel.  There was wimmen-folk and there was men-folk traypsen up
+and down church'ard till they wore a path wi' traypsen so--letten
+the squallen children slip down through their arms and nearly
+skinnen o' em.  And these were all over and above the gentry and
+Sunday-clothes folk inside.  Well, I seed Mr. Graye at last dressed
+up quite the dand.  "Well, Mr. Graye," says I from the top o'
+church'ard wall, "how's yerself?"  Mr. Graye never spoke--he'd
+prided away his hearen.  Seize the man, I didn' want en to spak.
+Teddy hears it, and turns round:  "All right, Gad!" says he, and
+laughed like a boy.  There's more in Teddy.'
+
+'Well,' said Clerk Crickett, turning to the man in black, 'now
+you've been among us so long, and d'know us so well, won't ye tell
+us what ye've come here for, and what your trade is?'
+
+'I am no trade,' said the thin man, smiling, 'and I came to see the
+wickedness of the land.'
+
+'I said thou wast one o' the devil's brood wi' thy black clothes,'
+replied a sturdy ringer, who had not spoken before.
+
+'No, the truth is,' said the thin man, retracting at this horrible
+translation, 'I came for a walk because it is a fine evening.'
+
+'Now let's be off, neighbours,' the clerk interrupted.
+
+The candle was inverted in the socket, and the whole party stepped
+out into the churchyard.  The moon was shining within a day or two
+of full, and just overlooked the three or four vast yews that stood
+on the south-east side of the church, and rose in unvaried and flat
+darkness against the illuminated atmosphere behind them.
+
+'Good-night,' the clerk said to his comrades, when the door was
+locked.  'My nearest way is through the park.'
+
+'I suppose mine is too?' said the stranger.  'I am going to the
+railway-station.'
+
+'Of course--come on.'
+
+The two men went over a stile to the west, the remainder of the
+party going into the road on the opposite side.
+
+'And so the romance has ended well,' the clerk's companion remarked,
+as they brushed along through the grass.  'But what is the truth of
+the story about the property?'
+
+'Now look here, neighbour,' said Clerk Crickett, 'if so be you'll
+tell me what your line o' life is, and your purpose in comen here
+to-day, I'll tell you the truth about the wedden particulars.'
+
+'Very well--I will when you have done,' said the other man.
+
+''Tis a bargain; and this is the right o' the story.  When Miss
+Aldclyffe's will was opened, it was found to have been drawn up on
+the very day that Manston (her love-child) married Miss Cytherea
+Graye.  And this is what that deep woman did.  Deep? she was as deep
+as the North Star.  She bequeathed all her property, real and
+personal, to "THE WIFE OF AENEAS MANSTON" (with one exception):
+failen her life to her husband:  failen his life to the heirs of his
+head--body I would say:  failen them to her absolutely and her heirs
+for ever:  failen these to Pa'son Raunham, and so on to the end o'
+the human race.  Now do you see the depth of her scheme?  Why,
+although upon the surface it appeared her whole property was for
+Miss Cytherea, by the word "wife" being used, and not Cytherea's
+name, whoever was the wife o' Manston would come in for't.  Wasn't
+that rale depth?  It was done, of course, that her son AEneas, under
+any circumstances, should be master o' the property, without folk
+knowen it was her son or suspecting anything, as they would if it
+had been left to en straightway.'
+
+'A clever arrangement!  And what was the exception?'
+
+'The payment of a legacy to her relative, Pa'son Raunham.'
+
+'And Miss Cytherea was now Manston's widow and only relative, and
+inherited all absolutely.'
+
+'True, she did.  "Well," says she, "I shan't have it" (she didn't
+like the notion o' getten anything through Manston, naturally
+enough, pretty dear).  She waived her right in favour o' Mr.
+Raunham.  Now, if there's a man in the world that d'care nothen
+about land--I don't say there is, but IF there is--'tis our pa'son.
+He's like a snail.  He's a-growed so to the shape o' that there
+rectory that 'a wouldn' think o' leaven it even in name.  "'Tis
+yours, Miss Graye," says he.  "No, 'tis yours," says she.  "'Tis'n'
+mine," says he.  The Crown had cast his eyes upon the case, thinken
+o' forfeiture by felony--but 'twas no such thing, and 'a gied it up,
+too.  Did you ever hear such a tale?--three people, a man and a
+woman, and a Crown--neither o' em in a madhouse--flingen an estate
+backwards and forwards like an apple or nut?  Well, it ended in this
+way.  Mr. Raunham took it:  young Springrove was had as agent and
+steward, and put to live in Knapwater House, close here at hand--
+just as if 'twas his own.  He does just what he'd like--Mr. Raunham
+never interferen--and hither to-day he's brought his new wife,
+Cytherea.  And a settlement ha' been drawn up this very day, whereby
+their children, heirs, and cetrer, be to inherit after Mr. Raunham's
+death.  Good fortune came at last.  Her brother, too, is doen well.
+He came in first man in some architectural competition, and is about
+to move to London.  Here's the house, look.  Stap out from these
+bushes, and you'll get a clear sight o't.'
+
+They emerged from the shrubbery, breaking off towards the lake, and
+down the south slope.  When they arrived exactly opposite the centre
+of the mansion, they halted.
+
+It was a magnificent picture of the English country-house.  The
+whole of the severe regular front, with its columns and cornices,
+was built of a white smoothly-faced freestone, which appeared in the
+rays of the moon as pure as Pentelic marble.  The sole objects in
+the scene rivalling the fairness of the facade were a dozen swans
+floating upon the lake.
+
+At this moment the central door at the top of the steps was opened,
+and two figures advanced into the light.  Two contrasting figures
+were they.  A young lithe woman in an airy fairy dress--Cytherea
+Springrove:  a young man in black stereotype raiment--Edward, her
+husband.
+
+They stood at the top of the steps together, looking at the moon,
+the water, and the general loveliness of the prospect.
+
+'That's the married man and wife--there, I've illustrated my story
+by rale liven specimens,' the clerk whispered.
+
+'To be sure, how close together they do stand!  You couldn' slip a
+penny-piece between 'em--that you couldn'!  Beautiful to see it,
+isn't it--beautiful!. . .  But this is a private path, and we won't
+let 'em see us, as all the ringers be goen there to a supper and
+dance to-morrow night.'
+
+The speaker and his companion softly moved on, passed through the
+wicket, and into the coach-road.  Arrived at the clerk's house at
+the further boundary of the park, they paused to part.
+
+'Now for your half o' the bargain,' said Clerk Crickett.  'What's
+your line o' life, and what d'ye come here for?'
+
+'I'm the reporter to the Casterbridge Chronicle, and I come to pick
+up the news.  Good-night.'
+
+
+Meanwhile Edward and Cytherea, after lingering on the steps for
+several minutes, slowly descended the slope to the lake.  The skiff
+was lying alongside.
+
+'O, Edward,' said Cytherea, 'you must do something that has just
+come into my head!'
+
+'Well, dearest--I know.'
+
+'Yes--give me one half-minute's row on the lake here now, just as
+you did on Budmouth Bay three years ago.'
+
+He handed her into the boat, and almost noiselessly pulled off from
+shore.  When they were half-way between the two margins of the lake,
+he paused and looked at her.
+
+'Ah, darling, I remember exactly how I kissed you that first time,'
+said Springrove.  'You were there as you are now.  I unshipped the
+sculls in this way.  Then I turned round and sat beside you--in this
+way.  Then I put my hand on the other side of your little neck--'
+
+'I think it was just on my cheek, in this way.'
+
+'Ah, so it was.  Then you moved that soft red mouth round to mine--'
+
+'But, dearest--you pressed it round if you remember; and of course I
+couldn't then help letting it come to your mouth without being
+unkind to you, and I wouldn't be that.'
+
+'And then I put my cheek against that cheek, and turned my two lips
+round upon those two lips, and kissed them--so.'
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg eText of Desperate Remedies.
+
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