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+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Shuttle by F. H. Burnett**
+#8 in our series by Frances Hodgson Burnett
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+The Shuttle
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+by Frances Hodgson Burnett
+
+April, 1996  [Etext #506]
+
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+
+
+THE SHUTTLE
+
+BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER                                           
+I.       THE WEAVING OF THE SHUTTLE
+II.      A LACK OF PERCEPTION
+III.     YOUNG LADY ANSTRUTHERS
+IV.      A MISTAKE OF THE POSTBOY'S
+V.       ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC
+VI.      AN UNFAIR ENDOWMENT
+VII.     ON BOARD THE "MERIDIANA"
+VIII.    THE SECOND-CLASS PASSENGER
+IX.      LADY JANE GREY
+X.       "IS LADY ANSTRUTHERS AT HOME?"
+XI.      "I THOUGHT YOU HAD ALL FORGOTTEN" 
+XII.     UGHTRED 
+XIII.    ONE OF THE NEW YORK DRESSES 
+XIV.     IN THE GARDENS
+XV.      THE FIRST MAN 
+XVI.     THE PARTICULAR INCIDENT
+XVII.    TOWNLINSON & SHEPPARD
+XVIII.   THE FIFTEENTH EARL OF MOUNT DUNSTAN 
+XIX.     SPRING IN BOND STREET
+XX.      THINGS OCCUR IN STORNHAM VILLAGE
+XXI.     KEDGERS
+XXII.    ONE OF MR. VANDERPOEL'S LETTERS
+XXIII.   INTRODUCING G. SELDEN 
+XXIV.    THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF STORNHAM
+XXV.     "WE BEGAN TO MARRY THEM, MY GOOD FELLOW!"
+XXVI.    "WHAT IT MUST BE TO BE YOU--JUST YOU!"
+XXVII.   LIFE
+XXVIII.  SETTING THEM THINKING 
+XXIX.    THE THREAD OF G. SELDEN
+XXX.     A RETURN
+XXXI.    NO, SHE WOULD NOT
+XXXII.   A GREAT BALL
+XXXIII.  FOR LADY JANE
+XXXIV.   RED GODWYN
+XXXV.    THE TIDAL WAVE
+XXXVI.   BY THE ROADSIDE EVERYWHERE
+XXXVII.  CLOSED CORRIDORS
+XXXVIII. AT SHANDY'S 
+XXXIX.   ON THE MARSHES
+XL.      "DON'T GO ON WITH THIS"
+XLI.     SHE WOULD DO SOMETHING
+XLII.    IN THE BALLROOM 
+XLIII.   HIS CHANCE
+XLIV.    A FOOTSTEP
+XLV.     THE PASSING BELL
+XLVI.    LISTENING
+XLVII.   "I HAVE NO WORD OR LOOK TO REMEMBER"
+XLVIII.  THE MOMENT
+XLIX.    AT STORNHAM AND AT BROADMORLANDS 
+L.       THE PRIMEVAL THING 
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SHUTTLE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE WEAVING OF THE SHUTTLE
+
+No man knew when the Shuttle began its slow and
+heavy weaving from shore to shore, that it was held
+and guided by the great hand of Fate.  Fate alone
+saw the meaning of the web it wove, the might of it, and
+its place in the making of a world's history.  Men thought
+but little of either web or weaving, calling them by other
+names and lighter ones, for the time unconscious of the strength
+of the thread thrown across thousands of miles of leaping,
+heaving, grey or blue ocean.
+
+Fate and Life planned the weaving, and it seemed mere
+circumstance which guided the Shuttle to and fro between
+two worlds divided by a gulf broader and deeper than the
+thousands of miles of salt, fierce sea--the gulf of a bitter
+quarrel deepened by hatred and the shedding of brothers'
+blood.  Between the two worlds of East and West there was
+no will to draw nearer.  Each held apart.  Those who had
+rebelled against that which their souls called tyranny, having
+struggled madly and shed blood in tearing themselves free,
+turned stern backs upon their unconquered enemies, broke all
+cords that bound them to the past, flinging off ties of name,
+kinship and rank, beginning with fierce disdain a new life.
+
+Those who, being rebelled against, found the rebels too
+passionate in their determination and too desperate in their
+defence of their strongholds to be less than unconquerable,
+sailed back haughtily to the world which seemed so far the
+greater power.  Plunging into new battles, they added new
+conquests and splendour to their land, looking back with
+something of contempt to the half-savage West left to build its
+own civilisation without other aid than the strength of its own
+strong right hand and strong uncultured brain.
+
+But while the two worlds held apart, the Shuttle, weaving 
+slowly in the great hand of Fate, drew them closer and held
+them firm, each of them all unknowing for many a year, that
+what had at first been mere threads of gossamer, was forming
+a web whose strength in time none could compute, whose
+severance could be accomplished but by tragedy and convulsion.
+
+The weaving was but in its early and slow-moving years
+when this story opens.  Steamers crossed and recrossed the
+Atlantic, but they accomplished the journey at leisure and with
+heavy rollings and all such discomforts as small craft can
+afford.  Their staterooms and decks were not crowded with
+people to whom the voyage was a mere incident--in many
+cases a yearly one.  "A crossing" in those days was an event. 
+It was planned seriously, long thought of, discussed and re-
+discussed, with and among the various members of the family
+to which the voyager belonged.  A certain boldness,
+bordering on recklessness, was almost to be presupposed in the
+individual who, turning his back upon New York, Philadelphia,
+Boston, and like cities, turned his face towards "Europe." 
+In those days when the Shuttle wove at leisure, a man
+did not lightly run over to London, or Paris, or Berlin, he
+gravely went to "Europe."
+
+The journey being likely to be made once in a lifetime, the
+traveller's intention was to see as much as possible, to visit
+as many cities cathedrals, ruins, galleries, as his time and
+purse would allow.  People who could speak with any degree
+of familiarity of Hyde Park, the Champs Elysees, the Pincio,
+had gained a certain dignity.  The ability to touch with an
+intimate bearing upon such localities was a raison de plus for
+being asked out to tea or to dinner.  To possess photographs
+and relics was to be of interest, to have seen European
+celebrities even at a distance, to have wandered about the
+outside of poets' gardens and philosophers' houses, was to be
+entitled to respect.  The period was a far cry from the time when
+the Shuttle, having shot to and fro, faster and faster, week by
+week, month by month, weaving new threads into its web
+each year, has woven warp and woof until they bind far
+shore to shore.
+
+It was in comparatively early days that the first thread we
+follow was woven into the web.  Many such have been woven
+since and have added greater strength than any others, twining
+the cord of sex and home-building and race-founding. 
+But this was a slight and weak one, being only the thread of
+the life of one of Reuben Vanderpoel's daughters--the pretty
+little simple one whose name was Rosalie.
+
+They were--the Vanderpoels--of the Americans whose
+fortunes were a portion of the history of their country.  The
+building of these fortunes had been a part of, or had created
+epochs and crises.  Their millions could scarcely be regarded
+as private property.  Newspapers bandied them about, so to
+speak, employing them as factors in argument, using them
+as figures of speech, incorporating them into methods of
+calculation.  Literature touched upon them, moral systems
+considered them, stories for the young treated them gravely as
+illustrative.
+
+The first Reuben Vanderpoel, who in early days of danger
+had traded with savages for the pelts of wild animals, was
+the lauded hero of stories of thrift and enterprise.  Throughout
+his hard-working life he had been irresistibly impelled to
+action by an absolute genius of commerce, expressing itself
+at the outset by the exhibition of courage in mere exchange
+and barter.  An alert power to perceive the potential value
+of things and the possible malleability of men and circumstances,
+had stood him in marvellous good stead.  He had bought
+at low prices things which in the eyes of the less discerning
+were worthless, but, having obtained possession of such things,
+the less discerning had almost invariably awakened to the
+fact that, in his hands, values increased, and methods of
+remunerative disposition, being sought, were found.  Nothing
+remained unutilisable.  The practical, sordid, uneducated
+little man developed the power to create demand for his own
+supplies.  If he was betrayed into an error, he quickly retrieved
+it.  He could live upon nothing and consequently could travel
+anywhere in search of such things as he desired.  He could
+barely read and write, and could not spell, but he was daring
+and astute.  His untaught brain was that of a financier, his
+blood burned with the fever of but one desire--the desire to
+accumulate.  Money expressed to his nature, not expenditure,
+but investment in such small or large properties as could be
+resold at profit in the near or far future.  The future held
+fascinations for him.  He bought nothing for his own pleasure
+or comfort, nothing which could not be sold or bartered
+again.  He married a woman who was a trader's daughter
+and shared his passion for gain.  She was of North of England
+blood, her father having been a hard-fisted small tradesman
+in an unimportant town, who had been daring enough to
+emigrate when emigration meant the facing of unknown dangers
+in a half-savage land.  She had excited Reuben Vanderpoel's
+admiration by taking off her petticoat one bitter winter's
+day to sell it to a squaw in exchange for an ornament
+for which she chanced to know another squaw would pay with
+a skin of value.  The first Mrs. Vanderpoel was as wonderful
+as her husband.  They were both wonderful.  They were the
+founders of the fortune which a century and a half later was
+the delight--in fact the piece de resistance--of New York
+society reporters, its enormity being restated in round figures
+when a blank space must be filled up.  The method of statement
+lent itself to infinite variety and was always interesting
+to a particular class, some elements of which felt it encouraging
+to be assured that so much money could be a personal
+possession, some elements feeling the fact an additional
+argument to be used against the infamy of monopoly.
+
+The first Reuben Vanderpoel transmitted to his son his
+accumulations and his fever for gain.  He had but one child. 
+The second Reuben built upon the foundations this afforded
+him, a fortune as much larger than the first as the rapid growth
+and increasing capabilities of the country gave him enlarging
+opportunities to acquire.  It was no longer necessary to deal
+with savages: his powers were called upon to cope with those
+of white men who came to a new country to struggle for
+livelihood and fortune.  Some were shrewd, some were
+desperate, some were dishonest.  But shrewdness never outwitted,
+desperation never overcame, dishonesty never deceived the second
+Reuben Vanderpoel.  Each characteristic ended by adapting
+itself to his own purposes and qualities, and as a result of
+each it was he who in any business transaction was the gainer. 
+It was the common saying that the Vanderpoels were possessed
+of a money-making spell.  Their spell lay in their entire mental
+and physical absorption in one idea.  Their peculiarity was not
+so much that they wished to be rich as that Nature itself
+impelled them to collect wealth as the load-stone draws towards
+it iron.  Having possessed nothing, they became rich, having
+become rich they became richer, having founded their fortunes
+on small schemes, they increased them by enormous ones.  In
+time they attained that omnipotence of wealth which it would
+seem no circumstance can control or limit.  The first Reuben
+Vanderpoel could not spell, the second could, the third was
+as well educated as a man could be whose sole profession is
+money-making.  His children were taught all that expensive
+teachers and expensive opportunities could teach them.  After
+the second generation the meagre and mercantile physical type
+of the Vanderpoels improved upon itself.  Feminine good looks
+appeared and were made the most of.  The Vanderpoel element
+invested even good looks to an advantage.  The fourth
+Reuben Vanderpoel had no son and two daughters.  They
+were brought up in a brown-stone mansion built upon a fashionable
+New York thoroughfare roaring with traffic.  To the
+farthest point of the Rocky Mountains the number of dollars
+this "mansion" (it was always called so) had cost, was
+known.  There may have existed Pueblo Indians who had
+heard rumours of the price of it.  All the shop-keepers and
+farmers in the United States had read newspaper descriptions
+of its furnishings and knew the value of the brocade which
+hung in the bedrooms and boudoirs of the Misses Vanderpoel. 
+It was a fact much cherished that Miss Rosalie's bath
+was of Carrara marble, and to good souls actively engaged in
+doing their own washing in small New England or Western
+towns, it was a distinct luxury to be aware that the water in
+the Carrara marble bath was perfumed with Florentine Iris. 
+Circumstances such as these seemed to become personal
+possessions and even to lighten somewhat the burden of toil.
+
+Rosalie Vanderpoel married an Englishman of title, and part
+of the story of her married life forms my prologue.  Hers was of
+the early international marriages, and the republican mind had
+not yet adjusted itself to all that such alliances might imply. 
+It was yet ingenuous, imaginative and confiding in such
+matters.  A baronetcy and a manor house reigning over an old
+English village and over villagers in possible smock frocks,
+presented elements of picturesque dignity to people whose
+intimacy with such allurements had been limited by the novels
+of Mrs. Oliphant and other writers.  The most ordinary little
+anecdotes in which vicarages, gamekeepers, and dowagers
+figured, were exciting in these early days.  "Sir Nigel
+Anstruthers," when engraved upon a visiting card, wore an air of
+distinction almost startling.  Sir Nigel himself was not as
+picturesque as his name, though he was not entirely without
+attraction, when for reasons of his own he chose to aim at
+agreeableness of bearing.  He was a man with a good figure
+and a good voice, and but for a heaviness of feature the result
+of objectionable living, might have given the impression of
+being better looking than he really was.  New York laid
+amused and at the same time, charmed stress upon the fact
+that he spoke with an "English accent."  His enunciation
+was in fact clear cut and treated its vowels well.  He was a
+man who observed with an air of accustomed punctiliousness
+such social rules and courtesies as he deemed it expedient to
+consider.  An astute worldling had remarked that he was at
+once more ceremonious and more casual in his manner than
+men bred in America.
+
+"If you invite him to dinner," the wording said, "or if
+you die, or marry, or meet with an accident, his notes of
+condolence or congratulation are prompt and civil, but the actual
+truth is that he cares nothing whatever about you or your
+relations, and if you don't please him he does not hesitate to
+sulk or be astonishingly rude, which last an American does
+not allow himself to be, as a rule."
+
+By many people Sir Nigel was not analysed, but accepted. 
+He was of the early English who came to New York, and was
+a novelty of interest, with his background of Manor House
+and village and old family name.  He was very much talked
+of at vivacious ladies' luncheon parties, he was very much
+talked to at equally vivacious afternoon teas.  At dinner
+parties he was furtively watched a good deal, but after dinner
+when he sat with the men over their wine, he was not popular. 
+He was not perhaps exactly disliked, but men whose chief
+interest at that period lay in stocks and railroads, did not find
+conversation easy with a man whose sole occupation had been
+the shooting of birds and the hunting of foxes, when he was
+not absolutely loitering about London, with his time on his
+hands.  The stories he told--and they were few--were chiefly
+anecdotes whose points gained their humour by the fact that
+a man was a comically bad shot or bad rider and either
+peppered a gamekeeper or was thrown into a ditch when his
+horse went over a hedge, and such relations did not increase
+in the poignancy of their interest by being filtered through
+brains accustomed to applying their powers to problems of
+speculation and commerce.  He was not so dull but that he
+perceived this at an early stage of his visit to New York,
+which was probably the reason of the infrequency of his stories.
+
+He on his side was naturally not quick to rise to the humour
+of a "big deal" or a big blunder made on Wall Street--or
+to the wit of jokes concerning them.  Upon the whole he
+would have been glad to have understood such matters more
+clearly.  His circumstances were such as had at last forced
+him to contemplate the world of money-makers with something
+of an annoyed respect.  "These fellows" who had
+neither titles nor estates to keep up could make money.  He,
+as he acknowledged disgustedly to himself, was much worse
+than a beggar.  There was Stornham Court in a state of ruin--
+the estate going to the dogs, the farmhouses tumbling to
+pieces and he, so to speak, without a sixpence to bless himself
+with, and head over heels in debt.  Englishmen of the
+rank which in bygone times had not associated itself with
+trade had begun at least to trifle with it--to consider its
+potentialities as factors possibly to be made useful by the
+aristocracy.  Countesses had not yet spiritedly opened milliners'
+shops, nor belted Earls adorned the stage, but certain noblemen
+had dallied with beer and coquetted with stocks.  One
+of the first commercial developments had been the discovery
+of America--particularly of New York--as a place where
+if one could make up one's mind to the plunge, one might
+marry one's sons profitably.  At the outset it presented a field
+so promising as to lead to rashness and indiscretion on the part
+of persons not given to analysis of character and in consequence
+relying too serenely upon an ingenuousness which
+rather speedily revealed that it had its limits.  Ingenuousness
+combining itself with remarkable alertness of perception on
+occasion, is rather American than English, and is, therefore, to
+the English mind, misleading.
+
+At first younger sons, who "gave trouble" to their
+families, were sent out.  Their names, their backgrounds of
+castles or manors, relatives of distinction, London seasons, fox
+hunting, Buckingham Palace and Goodwood Races, formed
+a picturesque allurement.  That the castles and manors would
+belong to their elder brothers, that the relatives of distinction
+did not encourage intimacy with swarms of the younger
+branches of their families; that London seasons, hunting, and
+racing were for their elders and betters, were facts not realised
+in all their importance by the republican mind.  In the course
+of time they were realised to the full, but in Rosalie
+Vanderpoel's nineteenth year they covered what was at that time
+almost unknown territory.  One may rest assured Sir Nigel
+Anstruthers said nothing whatsoever in New York of an interview
+he had had before sailing with an intensely disagreeable
+great-aunt, who was the wife of a Bishop.  She was a horrible
+old woman with a broad face, blunt features and a
+raucous voice, whose tones added acridity to her observations
+when she was indulging in her favourite pastime of interfering
+with the business of her acquaintances and relations.
+
+"I do not know what you are going chasing off to America
+for, Nigel," she commented.  "You can't afford it and it is
+perfectly ridiculous of you to take it upon yourself to travel
+for pleasure as if you were a man of means instead of being
+in such a state of pocket that Maria tells me you cannot pay
+your tailor.  Neither the Bishop nor I can do anything for
+you and I hope you don't expect it.  All I can hope is that
+you know yourself what you are going to America in search
+of, and that it is something more practical than buffaloes. 
+You had better stop in New York.  Those big shopkeepers'
+daughters are enormously rich, they say, and they are immensely
+pleased by attentions from men of your class.  They say they'll
+marry anything if it has an aunt or a grandmother with a
+title.  You can mention the Marchioness, you know.  You
+need not refer to the fact that she thought your father a
+blackguard and your mother an interloper, and that you have
+never been invited to Broadmere since you were born.  You
+can refer casually to me and to the Bishop and to the Palace,
+too.  A Palace--even a Bishop's--ought to go a long way with
+Americans.  They will think it is something royal."  She
+ended her remarks with one of her most insulting snorts of
+laughter, and Sir Nigel became dark red and looked as if he
+would like to knock her down.
+
+It was not, however, her sentiments which were particularly
+revolting to him.  If she had expressed them in a manner
+more flattering to himself he would have felt that there was
+a good deal to be said for them.  In fact, he had put the
+same thing to himself some time previously, and, in summing
+up the American matter, had reached certain thrifty decisions. 
+The impulse to knock her down surged within him solely because
+he had a brutally bad temper when his vanity was insulted,
+and he was furious at her impudence in speaking to
+him as if he were a villager out of work whom she was at
+liberty to bully and lecture.
+
+"For a woman who is supposed to have been born of
+gentle people," he said to his mother afterwards, "Aunt Marian
+is the most vulgar old beast I have ever beheld.  She has
+the taste of a female costermonger."  Which was entirely
+true, but it might be added that his own was no better and
+his points of view and morals wholly coincided with his taste.
+
+Naturally Rosalie Vanderpoel knew nothing of this side of
+the matter.  She had been a petted, butterfly child, who had
+been pretty and admired and indulged from her infancy; she
+had grown up into a petted, butterfly girl, pretty and admired
+and surrounded by inordinate luxury.  Her world had been
+made up of good-natured, lavish friends and relations, who
+enjoyed themselves and felt a delight in her girlish toilettes
+and triumphs.  She had spent her one season of belledom in being
+whirled from festivity to festivity, in dancing in rooms
+festooned with thousands of dollars' worth of flowers, in
+lunching or dining at tables loaded with roses and violets and
+orchids, from which ballrooms or feasts she had borne away
+wonderful "favours" and gifts, whose prices, being recorded
+in the newspapers, caused a thrill of delight or envy to pass
+over the land.  She was a slim little creature, with quantities
+of light feathery hair like a French doll's.  She had small
+hands and small feet and a small waist--a small brain also,
+it must be admitted, but she was an innocent, sweet-tempered
+girl with a childlike simpleness of mind.  In fine, she was
+exactly the girl to find Sir Nigel's domineering temperament
+at once imposing and attractive, so long as it was cloaked by
+the ceremonies of external good breeding.
+
+Her sister Bettina, who was still a child, was of a stronger
+and less susceptible nature.  Betty--at eight--had long legs
+and a square but delicate small face.  Her well-opened steel-
+blue eyes were noticeable for rather extravagant ink-black
+lashes and a straight young stare which seemed to accuse if
+not to condemn.  She was being educated at a ruinously expensive
+school with a number of other inordinately rich little
+girls, who were all too wonderfully dressed and too lavishly
+supplied with pocket money.  The school considered itself
+especially refined and select, but was in fact interestingly
+vulgar.
+
+The inordinately rich little girls, who had most of them
+pretty and spiritual or pretty and piquant faces, ate a great
+many bon bons and chattered a great deal in high unmodulated
+voices about the parties their sisters and other relatives
+went to and the dresses they wore.  Some of them were
+nice little souls, who in the future would emerge from their
+chrysalis state enchanting women, but they used colloquialisms
+freely, and had an ingenuous habit of referring to the prices of
+things.  Bettina Vanderpoel, who was the richest and cleverest
+and most promisingly handsome among them, was colloquial to
+slanginess, but she had a deep, mellow, child voice and an
+amazing carriage.
+
+She could not endure Sir Nigel Anstruthers, and, being
+an American child, did not hesitate to express herself with
+force, if with some crudeness.  "He's a hateful thing," she said,
+"I loathe him.  He's stuck up and he thinks you are afraid
+of him and he likes it."
+
+Sir Nigel had known only English children, little girls
+who lived in that discreet corner of their parents' town or
+country houses known as "the schoolroom," apparently emerging
+only for daily walks with governesses; girls with long
+hair and boys in little high hats and with faces which seemed
+curiously made to match them.  Both boys and girls were
+decently kept out of the way and not in the least dwelt on
+except when brought out for inspection during the holidays
+and taken to the pantomime.
+
+Sir Nigel had not realised that an American child was an
+absolute factor to be counted with, and a "youngster" who
+entered the drawing-room when she chose and joined fearlessly
+in adult conversation was an element he considered annoying. 
+It was quite true that Bettina talked too much and too readily
+at times, but it had not been explained to her that the opinions
+of eight years are not always of absorbing interest to the
+mature.  It was also true that Sir Nigel was a great fool for
+interfering with what was clearly no affair of his in such a
+manner as would have made him an enemy even had not the child's
+instinct arrayed her against him at the outset.
+
+"You American youngsters are too cheeky," he said on one
+of the occasions when Betty had talked too much.  "If you
+were my sister and lived at Stornham Court, you would be
+learning lessons in the schoolroom and wearing a pinafore. 
+Nobody ever saw my sister Emily when she was your age."
+
+"Well, I'm not your sister Emily," retorted Betty, "and
+I guess I'm glad of it."
+
+It was rather impudent of her, but it must be confessed that
+she was not infrequently rather impudent in a rude little-girl
+way, but she was serenely unconscious of the fact.
+
+Sir Nigel flushed darkly and laughed a short, unpleasant
+laugh.  If she had been his sister Emily she would have fared
+ill at the moment, for his villainous temper would have got
+the better of him.
+
+"I `guess' that I may be congratulated too," he sneered.
+
+"If I was going to be anybody's sister Emily," said Betty,
+excited a little by the sense of the fray, "I shouldn't want to
+be yours."
+
+"Now Betty, don't be hateful," interposed Rosalie,
+laughing, and her laugh was nervous.  "There's Mina Thalberg
+coming up the front steps.  Go and meet her."
+
+Rosalie, poor girl, always found herself nervous when Sir
+Nigel and Betty were in the room together.  She instinctively
+recognised their antagonism and was afraid Betty would do
+something an English baronet would think vulgar.  Her simple
+brain could not have explained to her why it was that she
+knew Sir Nigel often thought New Yorkers vulgar.  She was,
+however, quite aware of this but imperfectly concealed fact,
+and felt a timid desire to be explanatory.
+
+When Bettina marched out of the room with her extraordinary
+carriage finely manifest, Rosy's little laugh was propitiatory.
+
+"You mustn't mind her," she said.  "She's a real splendid
+little thing, but she's got a quick temper.  It's all over in a
+minute."
+
+"They wouldn't stand that sort of thing in England,"
+said Sir Nigel.  "She's deucedly spoiled, you know."
+
+He detested the child.  He disliked all children, but this one
+awakened in him more than mere dislike.  The fact was that
+though Betty herself was wholly unconscious of the subtle
+truth, the as yet undeveloped intellect which later made her
+a brilliant and captivating personality, vaguely saw him as he
+was, an unscrupulous, sordid brute, as remorseless an adventurer
+and swindler in his special line, as if he had been
+engaged in drawing false cheques and arranging huge jewel
+robberies, instead of planning to entrap into a disadvantageous
+marriage a girl whose gentleness and fortune could be used
+by a blackguard of reputable name.  The man was cold-
+blooded enough to see that her gentle weakness was of value
+because it could be bullied, her money was to be counted on
+because it could be spent on himself and his degenerate vices
+and on his racked and ruined name and estate, which must
+be rebuilt and restocked at an early date by someone or other,
+lest they tumbled into ignominious collapse which could not
+be concealed.  Bettina of the accusing eyes did not know that
+in the depth of her yet crude young being, instinct was summing
+up for her the potentialities of an unusually fine specimen
+of the British blackguard, but this was nevertheless the
+interesting truth.  When later she was told that her sister had
+become engaged to Sir Nigel Anstruthers, a flame of colour
+flashed over her face, she stared silently a moment, then bit
+her lip and burst into tears.
+
+"Well, Bett," exclaimed Rosalie, "you are the queerest
+thing I ever saw."
+
+Bettina's tears were an outburst, not a flow.  She swept
+them away passionately with her small handkerchief.
+
+"He'll do something awful to you," she said.  "He'll
+nearly kill you.  I know he will.  I'd rather be dead myself."
+
+She dashed out of the room, and could never be induced to
+say a word further about the matter.  She would indeed have
+found it impossible to express her intense antipathy and sense
+of impending calamity.  She had not the phrases to make herself
+clear even to herself, and after all what controlling effort
+can one produce when one is only eight years old?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A LACK OF PERCEPTION
+
+Mercantile as Americans were proclaimed to be, the opinion
+of Sir Nigel Anstruthers was that they were, on some points,
+singularly unbusinesslike.  In the perfectly obvious and simple
+matter of the settlement of his daughter's fortune, he had
+felt that Reuben Vanderpoel was obtuse to the point of idiocy. 
+He seemed to have none of the ordinary points of view. 
+Naturally there was to Anstruthers' mind but one point of
+view to take.  A man of birth and rank, he argued, does not
+career across the Atlantic to marry a New York millionaire's
+daughter unless he anticipates deriving some advantage from
+the alliance.  Such a man--being of Anstruthers' type--would
+not have married a rich woman even in his own country with
+out making sure that advantages were to accrue to himself
+as a result of the union.  "In England," to use his own words,
+"there was no nonsense about it."  Women's fortunes as well
+as themselves belonged to their husbands, and a man who was
+master in his own house could make his wife do as he chose. 
+He had seen girls with money managed very satisfactorily by
+fellows who held a tight rein, and were not moved by tears,
+and did not allow talking to relations.  If he had been
+desirous of marrying and could have afforded to take a penniless
+wife, there were hundreds of portionless girls ready to
+thank God for a decent chance to settle themselves for life,
+and one need not stir out of one's native land to find them.
+
+But Sir Nigel had not in the least desired to saddle himself
+with a domestic encumbrance, in fact nothing would have
+induced him to consider the step if he had not been driven
+hard by circumstances.  His fortunes had reached a stage
+where money must be forthcoming somehow--from somewhere. 
+He and his mother had been living from hand to
+mouth, so to speak, for years, and they had also been obliged
+to keep up appearances, which is sometimes embittering even
+to persons of amiable tempers.  Lady Anstruthers, it is true, had
+lived in the country in as niggardly a manner as possible.  She
+had narrowed her existence to absolute privation, presenting at
+the same time a stern, bold front to the persons who saw her, to
+the insufficient staff of servants, to the village to the vicar
+and his wife, and the few far-distant neighbours who perhaps once
+a year drove miles to call or leave a card.  She was an old woman
+sufficiently unattractive to find no difficulty in the way of
+limiting her acquaintances.  The unprepossessing wardrobe she had
+gathered in the passing years was remade again and again by the
+village dressmaker.  She wore dingy old silk gowns and appalling
+bonnets, and mantles dripping with rusty fringes and bugle beads,
+but these mitigated not in the least the unflinching arrogance of
+her bearing, or the simple, intolerant rudeness which she
+considered proper and becoming in persons like herself.  She did
+not of course allow that there existed many persons like herself.
+
+That society rejoiced in this fact was but the stamp of its
+inferiority and folly.  While she pinched herself and harried
+her few hirelings at Stornham it was necessary for Sir Nigel
+to show himself in town and present as decent an appearance
+as possible.  His vanity was far too arrogant to allow of his
+permitting himself to drop out of the world to which he could
+not afford to belong.  That he should have been forgotten
+or ignored would have been intolerable to him.  For a few
+years he was invited to dine at good houses, and got shooting
+and hunting as part of the hospitality of his acquaintances. 
+But a man who cannot afford to return hospitalities will find
+that he need not expect to avail himself of those of his
+acquaintances to the end of his career unless he is an extremely
+engaging person.  Sir Nigel Anstruthers was not an engaging
+person.  He never gave a thought to the comfort or interest
+of any other human being than himself.  He was also dominated 
+by the kind of nasty temper which so reveals itself when
+let loose that its owner cannot control it even when it would
+be distinctly to his advantage to do so.
+
+Finding that he had nothing to give in return for what he
+took as if it were his right, society gradually began to cease
+to retain any lively recollection of his existence.  The trades-
+people he had borne himself loftily towards awakened to the
+fact that he was the kind of man it was at once safe and wise
+to dun, and therefore proceeded to make his life a burden to
+him.  At his clubs he had never been a member surrounded
+and rejoiced over when he made his appearance.  The time
+came when he began to fancy that he was rather edged away
+from, and he endeavoured to sustain his dignity by being sulky
+and making caustic speeches when he was approached.  Driven
+occasionally down to Stornham by actual pressure of
+circumstances, he found the outlook there more embittering still.
+
+Lady Anstruthers laid the bareness of the land before him without
+any effort to palliate unpleasantness.  If he chose to stalk
+about and look glum, she could sit still and call his attention
+to revolting truths which he could not deny.  She could point
+out to him that he had no money, and that tenants would not
+stay in houses which were tumbling to pieces, and work land
+which had been starved.  She could tell him just how long a
+time had elapsed since wages had been paid and accounts
+cleared off.  And she had an engaging, unbiassed way of seeming
+to drive these maddening details home by the mere manner
+of her statement.
+
+"You make the whole thing as damned disagreeable as you
+can," Nigel would snarl.
+
+"I merely state facts," she would reply with acrid serenity.
+
+A man who cannot keep up his estate, pay his tailor or the
+rent of his lodgings in town, is in a strait which may drive
+him to desperation.  Sir Nigel Anstruthers borrowed some
+money, went to New York and made his suit to nice little
+silly Rosalie Vanderpoel.
+
+But the whole thing was unexpectedly disappointing and
+surrounded by irritating circumstances.  He found himself face
+to face with a state of affairs such as he had not contemplated. 
+In England when a man married, certain practical matters
+could be inquired into and arranged by solicitors, the
+amount of the prospective bride's fortune, the allowances
+and settlements to be made, the position of the bridegroom
+with regard to pecuniary matters.  To put it simply, a man
+found out where he stood and what he was to gain.  But,
+at first to his sardonic entertainment and later to his
+disgusted annoyance, Sir Nigel gradually discovered that in the
+matter of marriage, Americans had an ingenuous tendency
+to believe in the sentimental feelings of the parties concerned. 
+The general impression seemed to be that a man married
+purely for love, and that delicacy would make it impossible
+for him to ask questions as to what his bride's parents were
+in a position to hand over to him as a sort of indemnity for
+the loss of his bachelor freedom.  Anstruthers began to discover
+this fact before he had been many weeks in New York. 
+He reached the realisation of its existence by processes of
+exclusion and inclusion, by hearing casual remarks people let
+drop, by asking roundabout and careful questions, by leading
+both men and women to the innocent expounding of certain
+points of view.  Millionaires, it appeared, did not expect to
+make allowances to men who married their daughters; young
+women, it transpired, did not in the least realise that a man
+should be liberally endowed in payment for assuming the
+duties of a husband.  If rich fathers made allowances, they
+made them to their daughters themselves, who disposed of them
+as they pleased.  In this case, of course, Sir Nigel privately
+argued with fine acumen, it became the husband's business to
+see that what his wife pleased should be what most agreeably
+coincided with his own views and conveniences.
+
+His most illuminating experience had been the hearing of
+some men, hard-headed, rich stockbrokers with a vulgar
+sense of humour, enjoying themselves quite uproariously one
+night at a club, over a story one of them was relating of an
+unsatisfactory German son-in-law who had demanded an
+income.  He was a man of small title, who had married the
+narrator's daughter, and after some months spent in his father-
+in-law's house, had felt it but proper that his financial
+position should be put on a practical footing.
+
+"He brought her back after the bridal tour to make us a
+visit," said the storyteller, a sharp-featured man with a quaint
+wry mouth, which seemed to express a perpetual, repressed
+appreciation of passing events.  "I had nothing to say against
+that, because we were all glad to see her home and her mother
+had been missing her.  But weeks passed and months passed
+and there was no mention made of them going over to settle
+in the Slosh we'd heard so much of, and in time it came out
+that the Slosh thing"--Anstruthers realised with gall in his
+soul that the "brute," as he called him, meant "Schloss," and
+that his mispronunciation was at once a matter of humour and
+derision--"wasn't his at all.  It was his elder brother's.  The
+whole lot of them were counts and not one of them seemed
+to own a dime.  The Slosh count hadn't more than twenty-five
+cents and he wasn't the kind to deal any of it out to his
+family.  So Lily's count would have to go clerking in a dry
+goods store, if he promised to support himself.  But he didn't
+propose to do it.  He thought he'd got on to a soft thing. 
+Of course we're an easy-going lot and we should have stood
+him if he'd been a nice fellow.  But he wasn't.  Lily's mother
+used to find her crying in her bedroom and it came out by
+degrees that it was because Adolf had been quarrelling with
+her and saying sneering things about her family.  When her
+mother talked to him he was insulting.  Then bills began to
+come in and Lily was expected to get me to pay them.  And
+they were not the kind of bills a decent fellow calls on another
+man to pay.  But I did it five or six times to make it easy
+for her.  I didn't tell her that they gave an older chap than
+himself sidelights on the situation.  But that didn't work well. 
+He thought I did it because I had to, and he began to feel
+free and easy about it, and didn't try to cover up his tracks
+so much when he sent in a new lot.  He was always working
+Lily.  He began to consider himself master of the house. 
+He intimated that a private carriage ought to be kept for
+them.  He said it was beggarly that he should have to consider
+the rest of the family when he wanted to go out.  When I got
+on to the situation, I began to enjoy it.  I let him spread
+himself for a while just to see what he would do.  Good Lord! 
+I couldn't have believed that any fellow could have thought
+any other fellow could be such a fool as he thought I was. 
+He went perfectly crazy after a month or so and ordered me
+about and patronised me as if I was a bootblack he meant to
+teach something to.  So at last I had a talk with Lily and
+told her I was going to put an end to it.  Of course she cried
+and was half frightened to death, but by that time he had ill-
+used her so that she only wanted to get rid of him.  So I sent
+for him and had a talk with him in my office.  I led him on
+to saying all he had on his mind.  He explained to me what
+a condescension it was for a man like himself to marry a girl
+like Lily.  He made a dignified, touching picture of all the
+disadvantages of such an alliance and all the advantages they
+ought to bring in exchange to the man who bore up under
+them.  I rubbed my head and looked worried every now and
+then and cleared my throat apologetically just to warm him
+up.  I can tell you that fellow felt happy, downright happy
+when he saw how humbly I listened to him.  He positively
+swelled up with hope and comfort.  He thought I was going
+to turn out well, real well.  I was going to pay up just as
+a vulgar New York father-in-law ought to do, and thank God
+for the blessed privilege.  Why, he was real eloquent about
+his blood and his ancestors and the hoary-headed Slosh.  So
+when he'd finished, I cleared my throat in a nervous,
+ingratiating kind of way again and I asked him kind of anxiously
+what he thought would be the proper thing for a base-born New
+York millionaire to do under the circumstances--what he would
+approve of himself."
+
+Sir Nigel was disgusted to see the narrator twist his mouth
+into a sweet, shrewd, repressed grin even as he expectorated
+into the nearest receptacle.  The grin was greeted by a shout
+of laughter from his companions.
+
+"What did he say, Stebbins?" someone cried.
+
+"He said," explained Mr. Stebbins deliberately, "he said
+that an allowance was the proper thing.  He said that a man
+of his rank must have resources, and that it wasn't dignified
+for him to have to ask his wife or his wife's father for money
+when he wanted it.  He said an allowance was what he felt
+he had a right to expect.  And then he twisted his moustache
+and said, `what proposition' did I make--what would I
+allow him?"
+
+The storyteller's hearers evidently knew him well.  Their
+laughter was louder than before.
+
+"Let's hear the rest, Joe!  Let's hear it! "
+
+"Well," replied Mr. Stebbins almost thoughtfully, "I
+just got up and said, `Well, it won't take long for me to
+answer that.  I've always been fond of my children, and Lily
+is rather my pet.  She's always had everything she wanted,
+and she always shall.  She's a good girl and she deserves it. 
+I'll allow you----"  The significant deliberation of his drawl
+could scarcely be described.  "I'll allow you just five minutes
+to get out of this room, before I kick you out, and if I kick
+you out of the room, I'll kick you down the stairs, and if I kick
+you down the stairs, I shall have got my blood comfortably
+warmed up and I'll kick you down the street and round the
+block and down to Hoboken, because you're going to take the
+steamer there and go back to the place you came from, to
+the Slosh thing or whatever you call it.  We haven't a damned
+bit of use for you here.'  And believe it or not, gentlemen----"
+looking round with the wry-mouthed smile, "he took that
+passage and back he went.  And Lily's living with her mother
+and I mean to hold on to her."
+
+Sir Nigel got up and left the club when the story was
+finished.  He took a long walk down Broadway, gnawing his
+lip and holding his head in the air.  He used blasphemous
+language at intervals in a low voice.  Some of it was addressed
+to his fate and some of it to the vulgar mercantile coarseness
+and obtuseness of other people.
+
+"They don't know what they are talking of," he said. 
+"It is unheard of.  What do they expect?  I never thought
+of this.  Damn it!  I'm like a rat in a trap."
+
+It was plain enough that he could not arrange his fortune
+as he had anticipated when he decided to begin to make love
+to little pink and white, doll-faced Rosy Vanderpoel.  If he
+began to demand monetary advantages in his dealing with
+his future wife's people in their settlement of her fortune, he
+might arouse suspicion and inquiry.  He did not want inquiry
+either in connection with his own means or his past manner
+of living.  People who hated him would be sure to crop up
+with stories of things better left alone.  There were always
+meddling fools ready to interfere.
+
+His walk was long and full of savage thinking.  Once or
+twice as he realised what the disinterestedness of his sentiments
+was supposed to be, a short laugh broke from him which was
+rather like the snort of the Bishopess.
+
+"I am supposed to be moonstruck over a simpering American
+chit--moonstruck!  Damn!"  But when he returned to his
+hotel he had made up his mind and was beginning to look
+over the situation in evil cold blood.  Matters must be settled
+without delay and he was shrewd enough to realise that with
+his temper and its varied resources a timid girl would not be
+difficult to manage.  He had seen at an early stage of their
+acquaintance that Rosy was greatly impressed by the superiority
+of his bearing, that he could make her blush with embarrassment
+when he conveyed to her that she had made a mistake,
+that he could chill her miserably when he chose to assume a
+lofty stiffness.  A man's domestic armoury was filled with
+weapons if he could make a woman feel gauche, inexperienced,
+in the wrong.  When he was safely married, he could pave the
+way to what he felt was the only practical and feasible end. 
+
+If he had been marrying a woman with more brains, she would
+be more difficult to subdue, but with Rosalie Vanderpoel,
+processes were not necessary.  If you shocked, bewildered or
+frightened her with accusations, sulks, or sneers, her light,
+innocent head was set in such a whirl that the rest was easy.  It
+was possible, upon the whole, that the thing might not turn out
+so infernally ill after all.  Supposing that it had been Bettina
+who had been the marriageable one!  Appreciating to the full
+the many reasons for rejoicing that she had not been, he walked
+in gloomy reflection home.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+YOUNG LADY ANSTRUTHERS
+
+When the marriage took place the event was accompanied by
+an ingenuously elate flourish of trumpets.  Miss Vanderpoel's
+frocks were multitudinous and wonderful, as also her jewels
+purchased at Tiffany's.  She carried a thousand trunks--more
+or less--across the Atlantic.  When the ship steamed away
+from the dock, the wharf was like a flower garden in the blaze
+of brilliant and delicate attire worn by the bevy of relatives
+and intimates who stood waving their handkerchiefs and laughingly
+calling out farewell good wishes.
+
+Sir Nigel's mental attitude was not a sympathetic or
+admiring one as he stood by his bride's side looking back.  If
+Rosy's half happy, half tearful excitement had left her the
+leisure to reflect on his expression, she would not have felt it
+encouraging.
+
+"What a deuce of a row Americans make," he said even
+before they were out of hearing of the voices.  "It will be
+a positive rest to be in a country where the women do not
+cackle and shriek with laughter."
+
+He said it with that simple rudeness which at times
+professed to be almost impersonal, and which Rosalie had usually
+tried to believe was the outcome of a kind of cool British
+humour.  But this time she started a little at his words.
+
+"I suppose we do make more noise than English people,"
+she admitted a second or so later.  "I wonder why?"  And
+without waiting for an answer--somewhat as if she had not
+expected or quite wanted one--she leaned a little farther over
+the side to look back, waving her small, fluttering 
+handkerchief to the many still in tumult on the wharf.  She was
+not perceptive or quick enough to take offence, to realise that
+the remark was significant and that Sir Nigel had already begun
+as he meant to go on.  It was far from being his intention
+to play the part of an American husband, who was plainly
+a creature in whom no authority vested itself.  Americans let
+their women say and do anything, and were capable of fetching
+and carrying for them.  He had seen a man run upstairs
+for his wife's wrap, cheerfully, without the least apparent
+sense that the service was the part of a footman if there was
+one in the house, a parlour maid if there was not.  Sir Nigel
+had been brought up in the good Early Victorian days when
+"a nice little woman to fetch your slippers for you" figured
+in certain circles as domestic bliss.  Girls were educated to
+fetch slippers as retrievers were trained to go into the water
+after sticks, and terriers to bring back balls thrown for them.
+
+The new Lady Anstruthers had, it supervened, several
+opportunities to obtain a new view of her bridegroom's character
+before their voyage across the Atlantic was over.  At this
+period of the slower and more cumbrous weaving of the
+Shuttle, the world had not yet awakened even to the possibilities
+of the ocean greyhound.  An Atlantic voyage at times was
+capable of offering to a bride and bridegroom days enough to
+begin to glance into their future with a premonition of the
+waning of the honeymoon, at least, and especially if they were
+not sea-proof, to wish wearily that the first half of it were
+over.  Rosalie was not weary, but she began to be bewildered.  As
+she had never been a clever girl or quick to perceive, and had
+spent her life among women-indulging American men, she
+was not prepared with any precedent which made her situation
+clear.  The first time Sir Nigel showed his temper to
+her she simply stared at him, her eyes looking like those of a
+puzzled, questioning child.  Then she broke into her nervous
+little laugh, because she did not know what else to do.  At
+his second outbreak her stare was rather startled and she did
+not laugh.
+
+Her first awakening was to an anxious wonderment
+concerning certain moods of gloom, or what seemed to be gloom,
+to which he seemed prone.  As she lay in her steamer chair
+he would at times march stiffly up and down the deck,
+apparently aware of no other existence than his own, his
+features expressing a certain clouded resentment of whose very
+unexplainableness she secretly stood in awe.  She was not
+astute enough, poor girl, to leave him alone, and when with
+innocent questionings she endeavoured to discover his trouble,
+the greatest mystification she encountered was that he had
+the power to make her feel that she was in some way taking
+a liberty, and showing her lack of tact and perspicuity.
+
+"Is anything the matter, Nigel?" she asked at first,
+wondering if she were guilty of silliness in trying to slip her
+hand into his.  She was sure she had been when he answered her.
+
+"No," he said chillingly.
+
+"I don't believe you are happy," she returned.  "Somehow
+you seem so--so different."
+
+"I have reasons for being depressed," he replied, and it was
+with a stiff finality which struck a note of warning to her,
+signifying that it would be better taste in her to put an end to
+her simple efforts.
+
+She vaguely felt herself put in the wrong, and he preferred
+that it should be so.  It was the best form of preparation for
+any mood he might see that it might pay him to show her in
+the future.  He was, in fact, confronting disdainfully his
+position.  He had her on his hands and he was returning to
+his relations with no definite advantage to exhibit as the result
+of having married her.  She had been supplied with an income
+but he had no control over it.  It would not have been so if
+he had not been in such straits that he had been afraid to
+risk his chance by making a stand.  To have a wife with money,
+a silly, sweet temper and no will of her own, was of course
+better than to be penniless, head over heels in debt and hemmed
+in by difficulties on every side.  He had seen women trained
+to give in to anything rather than be bullied in public, to
+accede in the end to any demand rather than endure the shame
+of a certain kind of scene made before servants, and a certain
+kind of insolence used to relatives and guests.  The quality
+he found most maddeningly irritating in Rosalie was her
+obviously absolute unconsciousness of the fact that it was
+entirely natural and proper that her resources should be in her
+husband's hands.  He had, indeed, even in these early days,
+made a tentative effort or so in the form of a suggestive
+speech; he had given her openings to give him an opening to
+put things on a practical basis, but she had never had the
+intelligence to see what he was aiming at, and he had found
+himself almost floundering ungracefully in his remarks, while
+she had looked at him without a sign of comprehension in
+her simple, anxious blue eyes.  The creature was actually 
+trying to understand him and could not.  That was the worst
+of it, the blank wall of her unconsciousness, her childlike
+belief that he was far too grand a personage to require
+anything.  These were the things he was thinking over when he
+walked up and down the deck in unamiable solitariness. 
+Rosy awakened to the amazed consciousness of the fact that,
+instead of being pleased with the luxury and prettiness of her
+wardrobe and appointments, he seemed to dislike and disdain them.
+
+"You American women change your clothes too much and
+think too much of them," was one of his first amiable
+criticisms.  "You spend more than well-bred women should spend
+on mere dresses and bonnets.  In New York it always strikes
+an Englishman that the women look endimanche at whatever
+time of day you come across them."
+
+"Oh, Nigel!" cried Rosy woefully.  She could not think
+of anything more to say than, "Oh, Nigel!"
+
+"I am sorry to say it is true," he replied loftily.  That
+she was an American and a New Yorker was being impressed
+upon poor little Lady Anstruthers in a new way--somehow
+as if the mere cold statement of the fact put a fine edge of
+sarcasm to any remark.  She was of too innocent a loyalty to
+wish that she was neither the one nor the other, but she did
+wish that Nigel was not so prejudiced against the places and
+people she cared for so much.
+
+She was sitting in her stateroom enfolded in a dressing gown
+covered with cascades of lace, tied with knots of embroidered
+ribbon, and her maid, Hannah, who admired her greatly, was
+brushing her fair long hair with a gold-backed brush, ornamented
+with a monogram of jewels.
+
+If she had been a French duchess of a piquant type, or an
+English one with an aquiline nose, she would have been beyond
+criticism; if she had been a plump, over-fed woman, or
+an ugly, ill-natured, gross one, she would have looked vulgar,
+but she was a little, thin, fair New Yorker, and though she
+was not beyond criticism--if one demanded high distinction--
+she was pretty and nice to look at.  But Nigel Anstruthers
+would not allow this to her.  His own tailors' bills being far
+in arrears and his pocket disgustingly empty, the sight of her
+ingenuous sumptuousness and the gay, accustomed simpleness
+of outlook with which she accepted it as her natural right,
+irritated him and roused his venom.  Bills would remain
+unpaid if she was permitted to spend her money on this sort of
+thing without any consideration for the requirements of other
+people.
+
+He inhaled the air and made a gesture of distaste.
+
+"This sachet business is rather overpowering," he said.  "It is
+the sort of thing a woman should be particularly discreet about."
+
+"Oh, Nigel!" cried the poor girl agitatedly.  "Hannah,
+do go and call the steward to open the windows.  Is it really
+strong?" she implored as Hannah went out.  "How dreadful.  It's
+only orris and I didn't know Hannah had put it in the trunks."
+
+"My dear Rosalie," with a wave of the hand taking in
+both herself and her dressing case, "it is all too strong."
+
+"All--wh--what?" gaspingly.
+
+"The whole thing.  All that lace and love knot arrangement,
+the gold-backed brushes and scent bottles with diamonds
+and rubies sticking in them."
+
+"They--they were wedding presents.  They came from
+Tiffany's.  Everyone thought them lovely."
+
+"They look as if they belonged to the dressing table of a
+French woman of the demi-monde.  I feel as if I had actually
+walked into the apartment of some notorious Parisian soubrette."
+
+Rosalie Vanderpoel was a clean-minded little person, her
+people were of the clean-minded type, therefore she did not
+understand all that this ironic speech implied, but she gathered
+enough of its significance to cause her to turn first red and
+then pale and then to burst into tears.  She was crying and
+trying to conceal the fact when Hannah returned.  She bent
+her head and touched her eyes furtively while her toilette was
+completed.
+
+Sir Nigel had retired from the scene, but he had done so
+feeling that he had planted a seed and bestowed a practical
+lesson.  He had, it is true, bestowed one, but again she had
+not understood its significance and was only left bewildered
+and unhappy.  She began to be nervous and uncertain about
+herself and about his moods and points of view.  She had
+never been made to feel so at home.  Everyone had been
+kind to her and lenient to her lack of brilliancy.  No one
+had expected her to be brilliant, and she had been quite sweet-
+temperedly resigned to the fact that she was not the kind of
+girl who shone either in society or elsewhere.  She did not
+resent the fact that she knew people said of her, "She isn't
+in the least bit bright, Rosy Vanderpoel, but she's a nice,
+sweet little thing."  She had tried to be nice and sweet and
+had aspired to nothing higher.
+
+But now that seemed so much less than enough.  Perhaps
+Nigel ought to have married one of the clever ones, someone
+who would have known how to understand him and who
+would have been more entertaining than she could be.  Perhaps
+she was beginning to bore him, perhaps he was finding
+her out and beginning to get tired.  At this point the always
+too ready tears would rise to her eyes and she would be
+overwhelmed by a sense of homesickness.  Often she cried herself
+silently to sleep, longing for her mother--her nice, comfortable,
+ordinary mother, whom she had several times felt Nigel had
+some difficulty in being unreservedly polite to--though he had
+been polite on the surface.
+
+By the time they landed she had been living under so much
+strain in her effort to seem quite unchanged, that she had lost
+her nerve.  She did not feel well and was sometimes afraid
+that she might do something silly and hysterical in spite of
+herself, begin to cry for instance when there was really no
+explanation for her doing it.  But when she reached London
+the novelty of everything so excited her that she thought she
+was going to be better, and then she said to herself it would
+be proved to her that all her fears had been nonsense.  This
+return of hope made her quite light-spirited, and she was almost
+gay in her little outbursts of delight and admiration as she
+drove about the streets with her husband.  She did not know
+that her ingenuous ignorance of things he had known all his
+life, her rapture over common monuments of history, led him
+to say to himself that he felt rather as if he were taking a
+housemaid to see a Lord Mayor's Show.
+
+Before going to Stornham Court they spent a few days in
+town.  There had been no intention of proclaiming their
+presence to the world, and they did not do so, but unluckily
+certain tradesmen discovered the fact that Sir Nigel
+Anstruthers had returned to England with the bride he had
+secured in New York.  The conclusion to be deduced from
+this circumstance was that the particular moment was a good
+one at which to send in bills for "acct. rendered."  The
+tradesmen quite shared Anstruthers' point of view.  Their
+reasoning was delightfully simple and they were wholly unaware
+that it might have been called gross.  A man over his
+head and ears in debt naturally expected his creditors would
+be paid by the young woman who had married him.  America
+had in these days been so little explored by the thrifty
+impecunious well-born that its ingenuous sentimentality in
+certain matters was by no means comprehended.
+
+By each post Sir Nigel received numerous bills.  Sometimes
+letters accompanied them, and once or twice respectful but
+firm male persons brought them by hand and demanded interviews
+which irritated Sir Nigel extremely.  Given time to
+arrange matters with Rosalie, to train her to some sense of
+her duty, he believed that the "acct. rendered" could be
+wiped off, but he saw he must have time.  She was such a
+little fool.  Again and again he was furious at the fate which
+had forced him to take her.
+
+The truth was that Rosalie knew nothing whatever about
+unpaid bills.  Reuben Vanderpoel's daughters had never
+encountered an indignant tradesman in their lives.  When they
+went into "stores" they were received with unfeigned rapture. 
+Everything was dragged forth to be displayed to them,
+attendants waited to leap forth to supply their smallest behest. 
+They knew no other phase of existence than the one in which
+one could buy anything one wanted and pay any price
+demanded for it.
+
+Consequently Rosalie did not recognise signs which would
+have been obviously recognisable by the initiated.  If Sir Nigel
+Anstruthers had been a nice young fellow who had loved her,
+and he had been honest enough to make a clean breast of his
+difficulties, she would have thrown herself into his arms and
+implored him effusively to make use of all her available funds,
+and if the supply had been insufficient, would have immediately
+written to her father for further donations, knowing that her
+appeal would be responded to at once.  But Sir Nigel
+Anstruthers cherished no sentiment for any other individual than
+himself, and he had no intention of explaining that his mere
+vanity had caused him to mislead her, that his rank and estate
+counted for nothing and that he was in fact a pauper loaded
+with dishonest debts.  He wanted money, but he wanted it
+to be given to him as if he conferred a favour by receiving it. 
+It must be transferred to him as though it were his by right. 
+What did a man marry for?  Therefore his wife's unconsciousness
+that she was inflicting outrage upon him by her mere
+mental attitude filled his being with slowly rising gall.
+
+Poor Rosalie went joyfully forth shopping after the manner
+of all newly arrived Americans.  She bought new toilettes
+and gewgaws and presents for her friends and relations in New
+York, and each package which was delivered at the hotel added
+to Sir Nigel's rage.
+
+That the little blockhead should be allowed to do what
+she liked with her money and that he should not be able to
+forbid her!  This he said to himself at intervals of five minutes
+through the day--which led to another small episode.
+
+"You are spending a great deal of money," he said one
+morning in his condemnatory manner.  Rosalie looked up from
+the lace flounce which had just been delivered and gave the
+little nervous laugh, which was becoming entirely uncertain
+of propitiating.
+
+"Am I?" she answered.  "They say all Americans spend
+a good deal."
+
+"Your money ought to be in proper hands and properly
+managed," he went on with cold precision.  "If you were
+an English woman, your husband would control it."
+
+"Would he?"  The simple, sweet-tempered obtuseness of
+her tone was an infuriating thing to him.  There was the
+usual shade of troubled surprise in her eyes as they met his.
+"I don't think men in America ever do that.  I don't believe
+the nice ones want to.  You see they have such a pride about
+always giving things to women, and taking care of them.  I
+believe a nice American man would break stones in the street
+rather than take money from a woman--even his wife.  I mean
+while he could work.  Of course if he was ill or had ill luck or
+anything like that, he wouldn't be so proud as not to take it
+from the person who loved him most and wanted to help him. 
+You do sometimes hear of a man who won't work and lets
+his wife support him, but it's very seldom, and they are always
+the low kind that other men look down on."
+
+"Wanted to help him."  Sir Nigel selected the phrase and
+quoted it between puffs of the cigar he held in his fine, rather
+cruel-looking hands, and his voice expressed a not too subtle
+sneer.  "A woman is not `helping' her husband when she
+gives him control of her fortune.  She is only doing her duty
+and accepting her proper position with regard to him.  The law
+used to settle the thing definitely."
+
+"Did-did it?"  Rosy faltered weakly.  She knew he was
+offended again and that she was once more somehow in the
+wrong.  So many things about her seemed to displease him, and
+when he was displeased he always reminded her that she was
+stupidly, objectionably guilty of not being an English woman.
+
+Whatsoever it happened to be, the fault she had committed
+out of her depth of ignorance, he did not forget it.  It was no
+habit of his to endeavour to dismiss offences.  He preferred to
+hold them in possession as if they were treasures and to turn
+them over and over, in the mental seclusion which nourishes
+the growth of injuries, since within its barriers there is no
+chance of their being palliated by the apologies or explanations
+of the offender.
+
+During their journey to Stornham Court the next day he
+was in one of his black moods.  Once in the railway carriage
+he paid small attention to his wife, but sat rigidly reading his
+Times, until about midway to their destination he descended at
+a station and paid a visit to the buffet in the small refreshment
+room, after which he settled himself to doze in an exceedingly
+unbecoming attitude, his travelling cap pulled down, his
+rather heavy face congested with the dark flush Rosalie had
+not yet learned was due to the fact that he had hastily tossed
+off two or three whiskies and sodas.  Though he was never
+either thick of utterance or unsteady on his feet, whisky and
+soda formed an important factor in his existence.  When he
+was annoyed or dull he at once took the necessary precautions
+against being overcome by these feelings, and the effect upon
+a constitutionally evil temper was to transform it into an
+infernal one.  The night had been a bad one for Rosy.  Such
+floods of homesick longing had overpowered her that she had
+not been able to sleep.  She had risen feeling shaky and
+hysterical and her nervousness had been added to by her fear that
+Nigel might observe her and make comment.  Of course she
+told herself it was natural that he should not wish her to
+appear at Stornham Court looking a pale, pink-nosed little
+fright.  Her efforts to be cheerful had indeed been somewhat
+touching, but they had met with small encouragement.
+
+She thought the green-clothed country lovely as the train
+sped through it, and a lump rose in her small throat because
+she knew she might have been so happy if she had not been so
+frightened and miserable.  The thing which had been dawning
+upon her took clearer, more awful form.  Incidents she had
+tried to explain and excuse to herself, upon all sorts of futile,
+simple grounds, began to loom up before her in something like
+their actual proportions.  She had heard of men who had
+changed their manner towards girls after they had married
+them, but she did not know they had begun to change so
+soon.  This was so early in the honeymoon to be sitting in a 
+railway carriage, in a corner remote from that occupied by a
+bridegroom, who read his paper in what was obviously intentional,
+resentful solitude.  Emily Soame's father, she remembered
+it against her will, had been obliged to get a divorce for
+Emily after her two years of wretched married life.  But Alfred
+Soames had been quite nice for six months at least.  It seemed
+as if all this must be a dream, one of those nightmare things,
+in which you suddenly find yourself married to someone you
+cannot bear, and you don't know how it happened, because
+you yourself have had nothing to do with the matter.  She
+felt that presently she must waken with a start and find herself
+breathing fast, and panting out, half laughing, half crying,
+"Oh, I am so glad it's not true!  I am so glad it's not true!"
+
+But this was true, and there was Nigel.  And she was in a
+new, unexplored world.  Her little trembling hands clutched
+each other.  The happy, light girlish days full of ease and
+friendliness and decency seemed gone forever.  It was not Rosalie
+Vanderpoel who pressed her colourless face against the glass of
+the window, looking out at the flying trees; it was the wife
+of Nigel Anstruthers, and suddenly, by some hideous magic,
+she had been snatched from the world to which she belonged
+and was being dragged by a gaoler to a prison from which she
+did not know how to escape.  Already Nigel had managed to
+convey to her that in England a woman who was married could
+do nothing to defend herself against her husband, and that
+to endeavour to do anything was the last impossible touch of
+vulgar ignominy.
+
+The vivid realisation of the situation seized upon her like a
+possession as she glanced sideways at her bridegroom and
+hurriedly glanced away again with a little hysterical shudder. 
+New York, good-tempered, lenient, free New York, was millions
+of miles away and Nigel was so loathly near and--and so
+ugly.  She had never known before that he was so ugly, that
+his face was so heavy, his skin so thick and coarse and his
+expression so evilly ill-tempered.  She was not sufficiently
+analytical to be conscious that she had with one bound leaped to
+the appalling point of feeling uncontrollable physical abhorrence
+of the creature to whom she was chained for life.  She was
+terrified at finding herself forced to combat the realisation
+that there were certain expressions of his countenance which made
+her feel sick with repulsion.  Her self-reproach also was as
+great as her terror.  He was her husband--her husband--and she
+was a wicked girl.  She repeated the words to herself again and
+again, but remotely she knew that when she said, "He is my
+husband," that was the worst thing of all.
+
+This inward struggle was a bad preparation for any added
+misery, and when their railroad journey terminated at Stornham
+Station she was met by new bewilderment.
+
+The station itself was a rustic place where wild roses climbed
+down a bank to meet the very train itself.  The station master's
+cottage had roses and clusters of lilies waving in its tiny
+garden.  The station master, a good-natured, red-faced man, came
+forward, baring his head, to open the railroad carriage door
+with his own hand.  Rosy thought him delightful and bowed
+and smiled sweet-temperedly to him and to his wife and little
+girls, who were curtseying at the garden gate.  She was
+sufficiently homesick to be actually grateful to them for their
+air of welcoming her.  But as she smiled she glanced furtively
+at Nigel to see if she was doing exactly the right thing.
+
+He himself was not smiling and did not unbend even when
+the station master, who had known him from his boyhood, felt
+at liberty to offer a deferential welcome.
+
+"Happy to see you home with her ladyship, Sir Nigel," he
+said; "very happy, if I may say so."
+
+Sir Nigel responded to the respectful amiability with a half-
+military lifting of his right hand, accompanied by a grunt.
+
+"D'ye do, Wells," he said, and strode past him to speak to
+the footman who had come from Stornham Court with the
+carriage.
+
+The new and nervous little Lady Anstruthers, who was left
+to trot after her husband, smiled again at the ruddy, kind-
+looking fellow, this time in conscious deprecation.  In the
+simplicity of her republican sympathy with a well-meaning fellow
+creature who might feel himself snubbed, she could have shaken
+him by the hand.  She had even parted her lips to venture a
+word of civility when she was startled by hearing Sir Nigel's
+voice raised in angry rating.
+
+"Damned bad management not to bring something else,"
+she heard.  "Kind of thing you fellows are always doing."
+
+She made her way to the carriage, flurried again by not
+knowing whether she was doing right or wrong.  Sir Nigel had
+given her no instructions and she had not yet learned that
+when he was in a certain humour there was equal fault in
+obeying or disobeying such orders as he gave.
+
+The carriage from the Court--not in the least a new or 
+smart equipage--was drawn up before the entrance of the
+station and Sir Nigel was in a rage because the vehicle brought
+for the luggage was too small to carry it all.
+
+"Very sorry, Sir Nigel," said the coachman, touching his
+hat two or three times in his agitation.  "Very sorry.  The
+omnibus was a little out of order--the springs, Sir Nigel--and
+I thought----"
+
+"You thought!" was the heated interruption.  "What right
+had you to think, damn it!  You are not paid to think, you are
+paid to do your work properly.  Here are a lot of damned
+boxes which ought to go with us and--where's your maid?"
+wheeling round upon his wife.
+
+Rosalie turned towards the woman, who was approaching
+from the waiting room.
+
+"Hannah," she said timorously.
+
+"Drop those confounded bundles," ordered Sir Nigel, "and
+show James the boxes her ladyship is obliged to have this
+evening.  Be quick about it and don't pick out half a dozen.  The
+cart can't take them."
+
+Hannah looked frightened.  This sort of thing was new to
+her, too.  She shuffled her packages on to a seat and followed
+the footman to the luggage.  Sir Nigel continued rating the
+coachman.  Any form of violent self-assertion was welcome to
+him at any time, and when he was irritated he found it a distinct
+luxury to kick a dog or throw a boot at a cat.  The springs
+of the omnibus, he argued, had no right to be broken when it
+was known that he was coming home.  His anger was only
+added to by the coachman's halting endeavours in his excuses
+to veil a fact he knew his master was aware of, that everything
+at Stornham was more or less out of order, and that dilapidations
+were the inevitable result of there being no money to pay
+for repairs.  The man leaned forward on his box and spoke at
+last in a low tone.
+
+"The bus has been broken some time," he said.  "It's--it's
+an expensive job, Sir Nigel.  Her ladyship thought it better
+to----"  Sir Nigel turned white about the mouth.
+
+"Hold your tongue," he commanded, and the coachman got
+red in the face, saluted, biting his lips, and sat very stiff and
+upright on his box.
+
+The station master edged away uneasily and tried to look as
+if he were not listening.  But Rosalie could see that he could
+not help hearing, nor could the country people who had been 
+passengers by the train and who were collecting their belongings
+and getting into their traps.
+
+Lady Anstruthers was ignored and remained standing while
+the scene went on.  She could not help recalling the manner
+in which she had been invariably received in New York on her
+return from any journey, how she was met by comfortable,
+merry people and taken care of at once.  This was so strange,
+it was so queer, so different.
+
+"Oh, never mind, Nigel dear," she said at last, with
+innocent indiscretion.  "It doesn't really matter, you know."
+
+Sir Nigel turned upon her a blaze of haughty indignation.
+
+"If you'll pardon my saying so, it does matter," he said. 
+"It matters confoundedly.  Be good enough to take your place
+in the carriage."
+
+He moved to the carriage door, and not too civilly put her
+in.  She gasped a little for breath as she sat down.  He had
+spoken to her as if she had been an impertinent servant who
+had taken a liberty.  The poor girl was bewildered to the
+verge of panic.  When he had ended his tirade and took his
+place beside her he wore his most haughtily intolerant air.
+
+"May I request that in future you will be good enough not
+to interfere when I am reproving my servants," he remarked.
+
+"I didn't mean to interfere," she apologised tremulously.
+
+"I don't know what you meant.  I only know what you
+did," was his response.  "You American women are too fond
+of cutting in.  An Englishman can think for himself without
+his wife's assistance."
+
+The tears rose to her eyes.  The introduction of the
+international question overpowered her as always.
+
+"Don't begin to be hysterical," was the ameliorating
+tenderness with which he observed the two hot salt drops which
+fell despite her.  "I should scarcely wish to present you to my
+mother bathed in tears."
+
+She wiped the salt drops hastily away and sat for a moment
+silent in the corner of the carriage.  Being wholly primitive
+and unanalytical, she was ashamed and began to blame herself. 
+He was right.  She must not be silly because she was unused
+to things.  She ought not to be disturbed by trifles.  She must
+try to be nice and look cheerful.  She made an effort and did
+no speak for a few minutes.  When she had recovered herself
+she tried again.
+
+"English country is so pretty," she said, when she thought 
+she was quite sure that her voice would not tremble.  "I do
+so like the hedges and the darling little red-roofed cottages."
+
+It was an innocent tentative at saying something agreeable
+which might propitiate him.  She was beginning to realise that
+she was continually making efforts to propitiate him.  But one
+of the forms of unpleasantness most enjoyable to him was the
+snubbing of any gentle effort at palliating his mood.  He
+condescended in this case no response whatever, but merely
+continued staring contemptuously before him.
+
+"It is so picturesque, and so unlike America," was the
+pathetic little commonplace she ventured next.  "Ain't it,
+Nigel?"
+
+He turned his head slowly towards her, as if she had taken
+a new liberty in disturbing his meditations.
+
+"Wha--at?" he drawled.
+
+It was almost too much for her to sustain herself under. 
+Her courage collapsed.
+
+"I was only saying how pretty the cottages were," she
+faltered.  "And that there's nothing like this in America."
+
+"You ended your remark by adding, `ain't it,' " her
+husband condescended.  "There is nothing like that in England. 
+I shall ask you to do me the favour of leaving Americanisms
+out of your conversation when you are in the society of English
+ladies and gentlemen.  It won't do."
+
+"I didn't know I said it," Rosy answered feebly.
+
+"That is the difficulty," was his response.  "You never
+know, but educated people do."
+
+There was nothing more to be said, at least for a girl who
+had never known what it was to be bullied.  This one felt
+like a beggar or a scullery maid, who, being rated by her
+master, had not the refuge of being able to "give warning." 
+She could never give warning.  The Atlantic Ocean was between
+her and those who had loved and protected her all her
+short life, and the carriage was bearing her onwards to the
+home in which she was to live alone as this man's companion
+to the end of her existence.
+
+She made no further propitiatory efforts, but sat and stared
+in simple blankness at the country, which seemed to increase
+in loveliness at each new point of view.  Sometimes she saw
+sweet wooded, rolling lands made lovelier by the homely farm-
+houses and cottages enclosed and sheltered by thick hedges and
+trees; once or twice they drove past a park enfolding a great
+house guarded by its huge sentinel oaks and beeches; once the
+carriage passed through an adorable little village, where
+children played on the green and a square-towered grey church
+seemed to watch over the steep-roofed cottages and creeper-
+covered vicarage.  If she had been a happy American tourist
+travelling in company with impressionable friends, she would
+have broken into ecstatic little exclamations of admiration
+every five minutes, but it had been driven home to her that
+to her present companion, to whom nothing was new, her
+rapture would merely represent the crudeness which had existed
+in contentment in a brown-stone house on a noisy thoroughfare,
+through a life which had been passed tramping up and
+down numbered streets and avenues.
+
+They approached at last a second village with a green, a
+grass-grown street and the irregular red-tiled cottages, which
+to the unaccustomed eye seemed rather to represent studies for
+sketches than absolute realities.  The bells in the church tower
+broke forth into a chime and people appeared at the doors
+of the cottages.  The men touched their foreheads as the
+carriage passed, and the children made bobbing curtsies.  Sir
+Nigel condescended to straighten himself a trifle in his seat,
+and recognised the greetings with the stiff, half-military
+salute.  The poor girl at his side felt that he put as little
+feeling as possible into the movement, and that if she herself
+had been a bowing villager she would almost have preferred to be
+wholly ignored.  She looked at him questioningly.
+
+"Are they--must _I_?" she began.
+
+"Make some civil recognition," answered Sir Nigel, as if
+he were instructing an ignorant child.  "It is customary."
+
+So she bowed and tried to smile, and the joyous clamour of
+the bells brought the awful lump into her throat again.  It
+reminded her of the ringing of the chimes at the New York
+church on that day of her marriage, which had been so full
+of gay, luxurious bustle, so crowded with wedding presents,
+and flowers, and warm-hearted, affectionate congratulations,
+and good wishes uttered in merry American voices.
+
+The park at Stornham Court was large and beautiful and
+old.  The trees were magnificent, and the broad sweep of
+sward and rich dip of ferny dell all that the imagination could
+desire.  The Court itself was old, and many-gabled and
+mellow-red and fine.  Rosalie had learned from no precedent
+as yet that houses of its kind may represent the apotheosis of
+discomfort and dilapidation within, and only become more
+beautiful without.  Tumbled-down chimneys and broken tiles,
+being clambered over by tossing ivy, are pictures to delight
+the soul.
+
+As she descended from the carriage the girl was tremulous
+and uncertain of herself and much overpowered by the unbending
+air of the man-servant who received her as if she were a
+parcel in which it was no part of his duty to take the smallest
+interest.  As she mounted the stone steps she caught a glimpse
+of broad gloom within the threshold, a big, square, dingy hall
+where some other servants were drawn up in a row.  She had
+read of something of the sort in English novels, and she was
+suddenly embarrassed afresh by her realisation of the fact that
+she did not know what to do and that if she made a mistake Nigel
+would never forgive her.
+
+An elderly woman came out of a room opening into the
+hall.  She was an ugly woman of a rigid carriage, which, with
+the obvious intention of being severely majestic, was only
+antagonistic.  She had a flaccid chin, and was curiously like
+Nigel.  She had also his expression when he intended to be
+disagreeable.  She was the Dowager Lady Anstruthers, and being an
+entirely revolting old person at her best, she objected extremely
+to the transatlantic bride who had made her a dowager, though
+she was determinedly prepared to profit by any practical benefit
+likely to accrue.
+
+"Well, Nigel," she said in a deep voice.  "Here you are
+at last."
+
+This was of course a statement not to be refuted.  She held
+out a leathern cheek, and as Sir Nigel also presented his, their
+caress of greeting was a singular and not effusive one.
+
+"Is this your wife?" she asked, giving Rosalie a bony hand. 
+And as he did not indignantly deny this to be the fact, she
+added, "How do you do?"
+
+Rosalie murmured a reply and tried to control herself by
+making another effort to swallow the lump in her throat. 
+But she could not swallow it.  She had been keeping a desperate
+hold on herself too long.  The bewildered misery of
+her awakening, the awkwardness of the public row at the
+station, the sulks which had filled the carriage to repletion
+through all the long drive, and finally the jangling bells which
+had so recalled that last joyous day at home--at home--had
+brought her to a point where this meeting between mother and
+son--these two stony, unpleasant creatures exchanging a
+reluctant rub of uninviting cheeks--as two savages might have
+rubbed noses--proved the finishing impetus to hysteria.  They
+were so hideous, these two, and so ghastly comic and fantastic
+in their unresponsive glumness, that the poor girl lost all hold
+upon herself and broke into a trembling shriek of laughter.
+
+"Oh!" she gasped in terror at what she felt to be her
+indecent madness.  "Oh! how--how----"  And then seeing
+Nigel's furious start, his mother's glare and all the servants'
+alarmed stare at her, she rushed staggering to the only creature
+she felt she knew--her maid Hannah, clutched her and broke
+down into wild sobbing.
+
+"Oh, take me away!" she cried.  "Oh, do!  Oh, do! Oh, Hannah! 
+Oh, mother--mother!"
+
+"Take your mistress to her room," commanded Sir Nigel. 
+"Go downstairs," he called out to the servants.  "Take her
+upstairs at once and throw water in her face," to the excited
+Hannah.
+
+And as the new Lady Anstruthers was half led, half dragged,
+in humiliated hysteric disorder up the staircase, he took his
+mother by the elbow, marched her into the nearest room and
+shut the door.  There they stood and stared at each other,
+breathing quick, enraged breaths and looking particularly alike
+with their heavy-featured, thick-skinned, infuriated faces.
+
+It was the Dowager who spoke first, and her whole voice and
+manner expressed all she intended that they should, all the
+derision, dislike and scathing resignment to a grotesque fate.
+
+"Well," said her ladyship.  "So THIS is what you have
+brought home from America!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+A MISTAKE OF THE POSTBOY'S
+
+As the weeks passed at Stornham Court the Atlantic Ocean
+seemed to Rosalie Anstruthers to widen endlessly, and gay,
+happy, noisy New York to recede until it was as far away
+as some memory of heaven.  The girl had been born in the
+midst of the rattling, rumbling bustle, and it had never struck
+her as assuming the character of noise; she had only thought
+of it as being the cheerful confusion inseparable from town. 
+She had been secretly offended and hurt when strangers said
+that New York was noisy and dirty; when they called it
+vulgar, she never wholly forgave them.  She was of the New
+Yorkers who adore their New York as Parisians adore Paris
+and who feel that only within its beloved boundaries can the
+breath of life be breathed.  People were often too hot or too
+cold there, but there was usually plenty of bright glaring sun,
+and the extremes of the weather had at least something rather
+dramatic about them.  There were dramatic incidents connected
+with them, at any rate.  People fell dead of sunstroke
+or were frozen to death, and the newspapers were full of
+anecdotes during a "cold snap" or a "torrid wave," which
+all made for excitement and conversation.
+
+But at Stornham the rain seemed to young Lady Anstruthers
+to descend ceaselessly.  The season was a wet one, and when
+she rose in the morning and looked out over the huge stretch of
+trees and sward she thought she always saw the rain falling
+either in hopeless sheets or more hopeless drizzle.  The
+occasions upon which this was a dreary truth blotted out or
+blurred the exceptions, when in liquid ultramarine deeps of sky,
+floated islands and mountains of snow-white fleece, of a beauty
+of which she had before had no conception.
+
+In the English novels she had read, places such as Stornham
+Court were always filled with "house parties," made up of
+wonderful town wits and beauties, who provided endless
+entertainment for each other, who played games, who hunted and
+shot pheasants and shone in dazzling amateur theatricals.  There
+were, however, no visitors at Stornham, and there were in
+fact, no accommodations for any.  There were numberless
+bedrooms, but none really fit for guests to occupy.  Carpets
+and curtains were ancient and ragged, furniture was dilapidated,
+chimneys would not draw, beds were falling to pieces. 
+The Dowager Lady Anstruthers had never either attracted
+desired, or been able to afford company.  Her son's wife
+suffered from the resulting boredom and unpopularity without
+being able to comprehend the significance of the situation.
+
+As the weeks dragged by a few heavy carriages deposited at
+the Court a few callers.  Some of the visitors bore imposing
+titles, which made Rosalie very nervous and caused her hastily
+to array herself to receive them in toilettes much too pretty and
+delicate for the occasion.  Her innocent idea was that she
+must do her husband credit by appearing as "stylish" as possible.
+
+As a result she was stared at, either with open disfavour,
+or with well-bred, furtive criticism, and was described
+afterwards as being either "very American" or "very over-
+dressed."  When she had lived in huge rooms in Fifth Avenue, 
+Rosalie had changed her attire as many times a day as she had
+changed her fancy; every hour had been filled with engagements
+and amusements; the Vanderpoel carriages had driven
+up to the door and driven away again and again through the
+mornings and afternoons and until midnight and later.  Someone
+was always going out or coming in.  There had been in
+the big handsome house not much more of an air of repose than
+one might expect to find at a railway station; but the flurry,
+the coming and going, the calling and chatting had all been
+cheery, amiable.  At Stornham, Rosalie sat at breakfast before
+unchanging boiled eggs, unfailing toast and unalterable broiled
+bacon, morning after morning.  Sir Nigel sat and munched
+over the newspapers, his mother, with an air of relentless
+disapproval from a lofty height of both her food and companions,
+disposed of her eggs and her rasher at Rosalie's right
+hand.  She had transferred to her daughter-in-law her previously
+occupied seat at the head of the table.  This had been
+done with a carefully prepared scene of intense though correct
+disagreeableness, in which she had managed to convey all
+the rancour of her dethroned spirit and her disapproval and
+disdain of international alliances.
+
+"It is of course proper that you should sit at the head
+of your husband's table," she had said, among other agreeable
+things.  "A woman having devoted her life to her son
+must relinquish her position to the person he chooses to marry. 
+If you should have a son you will give up your position to
+his wife.  Since Nigel has married you, he has, of course, a
+right to expect that you will at least make an effort to learn
+something of what is required of women of your position."
+
+"Sit down, Rosalie," said Nigel.  "Of course you take the
+head of the table, and naturally you must learn what is
+expected of my wife, but don't talk confounded rubbish, mother,
+about devoting your life to your son.  We have seen about as
+little of each other as we could help.  We never agreed."  They
+were both bullies and each made occasional efforts at bullying
+the other without any particular result.  But each could at
+least bully the other into intensified unpleasantness.
+
+The vicar's wife having made her call of ceremony upon the
+new Lady Anstruthers, followed up the acquaintance, and
+found her quite exotically unlike her mother-in-law, whose
+charities one may be sure had neither been lavish nor dispensed
+by any hand less impressive than her own.  The younger woman
+was of wholly malleable material.  Her sympathies were easily 
+awakened and her purse was well filled and readily opened. 
+Small families or large ones, newly born infants or newly buried
+ones, old women with "bad legs" and old men who needed
+comforts, equally touched her heart.  She innocently bestowed
+sovereigns where an Englishwoman would have known that
+half-crowns would have been sufficient.  As the vicaress was
+her almoner that lady felt her importance rapidly on the
+increase.  When she left a cottage saying, "I'll speak to young
+Lady Anstruthers about you," the good woman of the house
+curtsied low and her husband touched his forehead respectfully.
+
+But this did not advance the fortunes of Sir Nigel, who
+personally required of her very different things.  Two weeks
+after her arrival at Stornham, Rosalie began to see that somehow
+she was regarded as a person almost impudently in the wrong. 
+It appeared that if she had been an English girl she would
+have been quite different, that she would have been an advantage
+instead of a detriment.  As an American she was a detriment. 
+That seemed to go without saying.  She tried to do
+everything she was told, and learn something from each cold
+insinuation.  She did not know that her very amenability and
+timidity were her undoing.  Sir Nigel and his mother
+thoroughly enjoyed themselves at her expense.  They knew they
+could say anything they chose, and that at the most she would
+only break down into crying and afterwards apologise for
+being so badly behaved.  If some practical, strong-minded
+person had been near to defend her she might have been rescued
+promptly and her tyrants routed.  But she was a young girl,
+tender of heart and weak of nature.  She used to cry a great
+deal when she was alone, and when she wrote to her mother
+she was too frightened to tell the truth concerning her
+unhappiness.
+
+"Oh, if I could just see some of them!" she would wail
+to herself.  "If I could just see mother or father or anybody
+from New York!  Oh, I know I shall never see New York
+again, or Broadway or Fifth Avenue or Central Park--I never
+--never--never shall!"  And she would grovel among her
+pillows, burying her face and half stifling herself lest her sobs
+should be heard.  Her feeling for her husband had become
+one of terror and repulsion.  She was almost more afraid of
+his patronising, affectionate moments than she was of his temper.
+
+His conjugal condescensions made her feel vaguely--
+without knowing why--as if she were some lower order of
+little animal.
+
+American women, he said, had no conception of wifely
+duties and affection.  He had a great deal to say on the
+subject of wifely duty.  It was part of her duty as a wife to
+be entirely satisfied with his society, and to be completely
+happy in the pleasure it afforded her.  It was her wifely duty
+not to talk about her own family and palpitatingly expect
+letters by every American mail.  He objected intensely to this
+letter writing and receiving, and his mother shared his
+prejudices.
+
+"You have married an Englishman," her ladyship said. 
+"You have put it out of his power to marry an Englishwoman,
+and the least consideration you can show is to let
+New York and Nine-hundredth street remain upon the other
+side of the Atlantic and not insist on dragging them into
+Stornham Court."
+
+The Dowager Lady Anstruthers was very fine in her
+picture of her mental condition, when she realised, as she seemed
+periodically to do, that it was no longer possible for her son
+to make a respectable marriage with a woman of his own
+nation.  The unadorned fact was that both she and Sir Nigel
+were infuriated by the simplicity which made Rosalie slow in
+comprehending that it was proper that the money her father
+allowed her should be placed in her husband's hands, and left
+there with no indelicate questioning.  If she had been an
+English girl matters would have been made plain to her from the
+first and arranged satisfactorily before her marriage.  Sir
+Nigel's mother considered that he had played the fool, and
+would not believe that New York fathers were such touchy,
+sentimental idiots as not to know what was expected of them.
+
+They wasted no time, however, in coming to the point, and
+in a measure it was the vicaress who aided them.  Not she
+entirely, however.
+
+Since her mother-in-law's first mention of a possible son
+whose wife would eventually thrust her from her seat at the
+head of the table, Rosalie had several times heard this son
+referred to.  It struck her that in England such things seemed
+discussed with more freedom than in America.  She had never
+heard a young woman's possible family arranged for and made
+the subject of conversation in the more crude atmosphere of
+New York.  It made her feel rather awkward at first.  Then
+she began to realise that the son was part of her wifely duty
+also; that she was expected to provide one, and that he was
+in some way expected to provide for the estate--to rehabilitate
+it--and that this was because her father, being a rich man,
+would provide for him.  It had also struck her that in England
+there was a tendency to expectation that someone would
+"provide" for someone else, that relatives even by marriage
+were supposed to "make allowances" on which it was quite
+proper for other persons to live.  Rosalie had been accustomed
+to a community in which even rich men worked, and
+in which young and able-bodied men would have felt rather
+indignant if aunts or uncles had thought it necessary to
+pension them off as if they had been impotent paupers.  It was
+Rosalie's son who was to be "provided for" in this case, and
+who was to "provide for" his father.
+
+"When you have a son," her mother-in-law had remarked
+severely, "I suppose something will be done for Nigel and
+the estate."
+
+This had been said before she had been ten days in the
+house, and had set her not-too-quick brain working.  She had
+already begun to see that life at Stornham Court was not the
+luxurious affair it was in the house in Fifth Avenue.  Things
+were shabby and queer and not at all comfortable.  Fires were
+not lighted because a day was chilly and gloomy.  She had
+once asked for one in her bedroom and her mother-in-law had
+reproved her for indecent extravagance in a manner which took
+her breath away.
+
+"I suppose in America you have your house at furnace heat
+in July," she said.  "Mere wastefulness and self-indulgence! 
+That is why Americans are old women at twenty.  They are
+shrivelled and withered by the unhealthy lives they lead. 
+Stuffing themselves with sweets and hot bread and never
+breathing the fresh air."
+
+Rosalie could not at the moment recall any withered and
+shrivelled old women of twenty, but she blushed and stammered
+as usual.
+
+"It is never cold enough for fires in July," she answered,
+"but we--we never think fires extravagant when we are not
+comfortable without them."
+
+"Coal must be cheaper than it is in England," said her
+ladyship.  "When you have a daughter, I hope you do not
+expect to bring her up as girls are brought up in New York."
+
+This was the first time Rosalie had heard of her daughter,
+and she was not ready enough to reply.  She naturally went
+into her room and cried again, wondering what her father
+and mother would say if they knew that bedroom fires were
+considered vulgarly extravagant by an impressive member of
+the British aristocracy.
+
+She was not at all strong at the time and was given to
+feeling chilly and miserable on wet, windy days.  She used to
+cry more than ever and was so desolate that there were days
+when she used to go to the vicarage for companionship.  On
+such days the vicar's wife would entertain her with stories of
+the villagers' catastrophes, and she would empty her purse upon
+the tea table and feel a little consoled because she was the
+means of consoling someone else.
+
+"I suppose it gratifies your vanity to play the Lady
+Bountiful," Sir Nigel sneered one evening, having heard in the
+village what she was doing.
+
+"I--never thought of such a thing," she stammered feebly. 
+"Mrs. Brent said they were so poor."
+
+"You throw your money about as if you were a child,"
+said her mother-in-law.  "It is a pity it is not put in the
+hands of some person with discretion."
+
+It had begun to dawn upon Rosalie that her ladyship was deeply
+convinced that either herself or her son would be admirably
+discreet custodians of the money referred to.  And even
+the dawning of this idea had frightened the girl.  She was so
+inexperienced and ignorant that she felt it might be possible
+that in England one's husband and one's mother-in-law could
+do what they liked.  It might be that they could take possession
+of one's money as they seemed to take possession of one's
+self and one's very soul.  She would have been very glad to
+give them money, and had indeed wondered frequently if she
+might dare to offer it to them, if they would be outraged and
+insulted and slay her in their wrath at her purse-proud daring. 
+She had tried to invent ways in which she could approach the
+subject, but had not been able to screw up her courage to any
+sticking point.  She was so overpowered by her consciousness
+that they seemed continually to intimate that Americans with
+money were ostentatious and always laying stress upon the
+amount of their possessions.  She had no conception of the
+primeval simpleness of their attitude in such matters, and that
+no ceremonies were necessary save the process of transferring
+sufficiently large sums as though they were the mere right of
+the recipients.  She was taught to understand this later.  In
+the meantime, however, ready as she would have been to give
+large sums if she had known how, she was terrified by the
+thought that it might be possible that she could be deprived of
+her bank account and reduced to the condition of a sort of
+dependent upon the humours of her lately acquired relations. 
+She thought over this a good deal, and would have found
+immense relief if she dared have consulted anyone.  But she
+could not make up her mind to reveal her unhappiness to her
+people.  She had been married so recently, everybody had
+thought her marriage so delightful, she could not bear that her
+father and mother should be distressed by knowing that she
+was wretched.  She also reflected with misery that New York
+would talk the matter over excitedly and that finally the
+newspapers would get hold of the gossip.  She could even imagine
+interviewers calling at the house in Fifth Avenue and
+endeavouring to obtain particulars of the situation.  Her father
+would be angry and refuse to give them, but that would make no
+difference; the newspapers would give them and everybody would
+read what they said, whether it was true or not.  She could not
+possibly write facts, she thought, so her poor little letters
+were restrained and unlike herself, and to the warm-hearted souls
+in New York, even appearing stiff and unaffectionate, as if her
+aristocratic surroundings had chilled her love for them.  In
+fact, it became far from easy for her to write at all, since Sir
+Nigel so disapproved of her interest in the American mail.  His
+objections had indeed taken the form of his feeling himself
+quite within his rights when he occasionally intercepted letters
+from her relations, with a view of finding out whether they
+contained criticisms of himself, which would betray that she
+had been guilty of indiscreet confidences.  He discovered that
+she had not apparently been so guilty, but it was evident that
+there were moments when Mrs. Vanderpoel was uneasy and
+disposed to ask anxious questions.  When this occurred he
+destroyed the letters, and as a result of this precaution on his
+part her motherly queries seemed to be ignored, and she several
+times shed tears in the belief that Rosy had grown so
+patrician that she was capable of snubbing her mother in her
+resentment at feeling her privacy intruded upon and an unrefined
+effusiveness shown.
+
+"I just feel as if she was beginning not to care about us at
+all, Betty," she said.  "I couldn't have believed it of Rosy. 
+She was always such an affectionate girl."
+
+"I don't believe it now," replied Betty sharply.  "Rosy
+couldn't grow hateful and stuck up.  It's that nasty Nigel
+I know it is."
+
+Sir Nigel's intention was that there should be as little
+intercourse between Fifth Avenue and Stornham Court as was
+possible.  Among other things, he did not intend that a lot of
+American relations should come tumbling in when they chose
+to cross the Atlantic.  He would not have it, and took
+discreet steps to prevent any accident of the sort.  He wrote to
+America occasionally himself, and knowing well how to make
+himself civilly repellent, so subtly chilled his parents-in-law
+as to discourage in them more than once their half-formed plan
+of paying a visit to their child in her new home.  He opened,
+read and reclosed all epistles to and from New York, and while
+Mrs. Vanderpoel was much hurt to find that Rosalie never
+condescended to make any response to her tentatives concerning
+her possible visit, Rosalie herself was mystified by the fact
+that the journey "to Europe" was never spoken of.
+
+"I don't see why they never seem to think of coming over,"
+she said plaintively one day.  "They used to talk so much
+about it."
+
+"They?" ejaculated the Dowager Lady Anstruthers.  "Whom may you
+mean?"
+
+"Mother and father and Betty and some of the others."
+
+Her mother-in-law put up her eye-glasses to stare at her.
+
+"The whole family?" she inquired.
+
+"There are not so many of them," Rosalie answered.
+
+"A family is always too many to descend upon a young
+woman when she is married," observed her ladyship unmovedly. 
+Nigel glanced over the top of his Times.
+
+"I may as well tell you that it would not do at all," he put in.
+
+"Why--why not?" exclaimed Rosalie, aghast.
+
+"Americans don't do in English society," slightingly.
+
+"But they are coming over so much.  They like London so--
+all Americans like London."
+
+"Do they?" with a drawl which made Rosalie blush until
+the tears started to her eyes.  "I am afraid the sentiment is
+scarcely mutual."
+
+Rosalie turned and fled from the room.  She turned and
+fled because she realised that she should burst out crying if
+she waited to hear another word, and she realised that of
+late she seemed always to be bursting out crying before one
+or the other of those two.  She could not help it.  They always
+seemed to be implying something slighting or scathing.  They
+were always putting her in the wrong and hurting her
+feelings.
+
+The day was damp and chill, but she put on her hat and
+ran out into the park.  She went down the avenue and turned
+into a coppice.  There, among the wet bracken, she sank down
+on the mossy trunk of a fallen tree and huddled herself in a
+small heap, her head on her arms, actually wailing.
+
+"Oh, mother!  Oh, mother!" she cried hysterically.  "Oh,
+I do wish you would come.  I'm so cold, mother; I'm so ill! 
+I can't bear it!  It seems as if you'd forgotten all about me! 
+You're all so happy in New York that perhaps you have forgotten--
+perhaps you have!  Oh, don't, mother--don't! "
+
+It was a month later that through the vicar's wife she
+reached a discovery and a climax.  She had heard one morning
+from this lady of a misfortune which had befallen a small
+farmer.  It was a misfortune which was an actual catastrophe
+to a man in his position.  His house had caught fire during a
+gale of wind and the fire had spread to the outbuildings and
+rickyard and swept away all his belongings, his house, his
+furniture, his hayricks, and stored grain, and even his few cows
+and horses.  He had been a poor, hard-working fellow, and
+his small insurance had lapsed the day before the fire.  He
+was absolutely ruined, and with his wife and six children
+stood face to face with beggary and starvation.
+
+Rosalie Anstruthers entered the vicarage to find the poor
+woman who was his companion in calamity sobbing in the
+hall.  A child of a few weeks was in her arms, and two
+small creatures clung crying to her skirts.
+
+"We've worked hard," she wept; "we have, ma'am.  Father,
+he's always been steady, an' up early an' late.  P'r'aps it's the
+Lord's 'and, as you say, ma'am, but we've been decent people
+an' never missed church when we could 'elp it--father didn't
+deserve it--that he didn't."
+
+She was heartbroken in her downtrodden hopelessness.  Rosalie
+literally quaked with sympathy.  She poured forth her pity
+in such words as the poor woman had never heard spoken by
+a great lady to a humble creature like herself.  The villagers
+found the new Lady Anstruthers' interviews with them curiously
+simple and suggestive of an equality they could not understand. 
+Stornham was a conservative old village, where the
+distinction between the gentry and the peasants was clearly
+marked.  The cottagers were puzzled by Sir Nigel's wife, but
+they decided that she was kind, if unusual.
+
+As Rosalie talked to the farmer's wife she longed for her
+father's presence.  She had remembered a time when a man 
+in his employ had lost his all by fire, the small house he
+had just made his last payment upon having been burned
+to the ground.  He had lost one of his children in the fire, and
+the details had been heartrending.  The entire Vanderpoel
+household had wept on hearing them, and Mr. Vanderpoel had
+drawn a cheque which had seemed like a fortune to the
+sufferer.  A new house had been bought, and Mrs. Vanderpoel
+and her daughters and friends had bestowed furniture and
+clothing enough to make the family comfortable to the verge
+of luxury.
+
+"See, you poor thing," said Rosalie, glowing with memories
+of this incident, her homesick young soul comforted by the
+mere likeness in the two calamities.  "I brought my cheque
+book with me because I meant to help you.  A man
+worked for my father had his house burned, just as yours
+was, and my father made everything all right for him again. 
+I'll make it all right for you; I'll make you a cheque for a
+hundred pounds now, and then when your husband begins to
+build I'll give him some more."
+
+The woman gasped for breath and turned pale.  She was
+frightened.  It really seemed as if her ladyship must have lost
+her wits a little.  She could not mean this.  The vicaress
+turned pale also.
+
+"Lady Anstruthers," she said, "Lady Anstruthers, it--it
+is too much.  Sir Nigel----"
+
+"Too much!" exclaimed Rosalie.  "They have lost everything,
+you know; their hayricks and cattle as well as their
+house; I guess it won't be half enough."
+
+Mrs. Brent dragged her into the vicar's study and talked to
+her.  She tried to explain that in English villages such things
+were not done in a manner so casual, as if they were the mere
+result of unconsidered feeling, as if they were quite natural
+things, such as any human person might do.  When Rosalie
+cried:  "But why not--why not?  They ought to be."  Mrs.
+Brent could not seem to make herself quite clear.  Rosalie only
+gathered in a bewildered way that there ought to be more
+ceremony, more deliberation, more holding off, before a person
+of rank indulged in such munificence.  The recipient ought
+to be made to feel it more, to understand fully what a great
+thing was being done.
+
+"They will think you will do anything for them."
+
+"So I will," said young Lady Anstruthers, "if I have the
+money when they are in such awful trouble.  Suppose we
+lost everything in the world and there were people who could
+easily help us and wouldn't?"
+
+"You and Sir Nigel--that is quite different," said Mrs.
+Brent.  "I am afraid that if you do not discuss the matter
+and ask advice from your husband and mother-in-law they
+will be very much offended."
+
+"If I were doing it with their money they would have
+the right to be," replied Rosalie, with entire ingenuousness. 
+"I wouldn't presume to do such a thing as that.  That wouldn't
+be right, of course."
+
+"They will be angry with me," said the vicaress
+awkwardly.  This queer, silly girl, who seemed to see nothing in
+the right light, frequently made her feel awkward.  Mrs. Brent
+told her husband that she appeared to have no sense of dignity
+or proper appreciation of her position.
+
+The wife of the farmer, John Wilson, carried away the
+cheque, quite stunned.  She was breathless with amazement
+and turned rather faint with excitement, bewilderment and
+her sense of relief.  She had to sit down in the vicarage kitchen
+for a few minutes and drink a glass of the thin vicarage beer.
+
+Rosalie promised that she would discuss the matter and ask
+advice when she returned to the Court.  Just as she left the
+house Mrs. Brent suddenly remembered something she had forgotten.
+
+"The Wilson trouble completely drove it out of my mind,"
+she said.  "It was a stupid mistake of the postboy's.  He left
+a letter of yours among mine when he came this morning.  It
+was most careless.  I shall speak to his father about it.  It
+might have been important that you should receive it early."
+
+When she saw the letter Rosalie uttered an exclamation.  It
+was addressed in her father's handwriting.
+
+"Oh!" she cried.  "It's from father!  And the postmark
+is Havre.  What does it mean?"
+
+She was so excited that she almost forgot to express her
+thanks.  Her heart leaped up in her throat.  Could they have
+come over from America--could they?  Why was it written
+from Havre?  Could they be near her?
+
+She walked along the road choked with ecstatic, laughing
+sobs.  Her hand shook so that she could scarcely tear open
+the envelope; she tore a corner of the letter, and when the
+sheet was spread open her eyes were full of wild, delighted
+tears, which made it impossible for her to see for the moment. 
+But she swept the tears away and read this:
+
+
+DEAR DAUGHTER:
+
+It seems as if we had had pretty bad luck in not seeing you. 
+We had counted on it very much, and your mother feels it
+all the more because she is weak after her illness.  We don't
+quite understand why you did not seem to know about her
+having had diphtheria in Paris.  You did not answer Betty's
+letter.  Perhaps it missed you in some way.  Things do sometimes
+go wrong in the mail, and several times your mother has
+thought a letter has been lost.  She thought so because you
+seemed to forget to refer to things.  We came over to leave
+Betty at a French school and we had expected to visit you
+later.  But your mother fell ill of diphtheria and not hearing
+from you seemed to make her homesick, so we decided to return
+to New York by the next steamer.  I ran over to London,
+however, to make some inquiries about you, and on the
+first day I arrived I met your husband in Bond Street.  He at
+once explained to me that you had gone to a house party
+at some castle in Scotland, and said you were well and
+enjoying yourself very much, and he was on his way to join you. 
+I am sorry, daughter, that it has turned out that we could
+not see each other.  It seems a long time since you left us. 
+But I am very glad, however, that you are so well and
+really like English life.  If we had time for it I am sure it
+would be delightful.  Your mother sends her love and wants
+very much to hear of all you are doing and enjoying.  Hoping
+that we may have better luck the next time we cross--
+               Your affectionate father,
+                         REUBEN L. VANDERPOEL.
+
+
+Rosalie found herself running breathlessly up the avenue. 
+She was clutching the letter still in her hand, and staggering
+from side to side.  Now and then she uttered horrible little
+short cries, like an animal's.  She ran and ran, seeing nothing,
+and now and then with the clenched hand in which the letter
+was crushed striking a sharp blow at her breast.
+
+She stumbled up the big stone steps she had mounted on the
+day she was brought home as a bride.  Her dress caught her
+feet and she fell on her knees and scrambled up again, gasping;
+she dashed across the huge dark hall, and, hurling herself
+against the door of the morning room, appeared, dishevelled,
+haggard-eyed, and with scarlet patches on her wild,
+white face, before the Dowager, who started angrily to her
+feet:
+
+"Where is Nigel?  Where is Nigel?" she cried out frenziedly.
+
+"What in heaven's name do you mean by such manners?"
+demanded her ladyship.  "Apologise at once!"
+
+"Where is Nigel?  Nigel!  Nigel!" the girl raved.  "I will
+see him--I will--I will see him!"
+
+She who had been the mildest of sweet-tempered creatures
+all her life had suddenly gone almost insane with heartbroken,
+hysteric grief and rage.  She did not know what she was saying
+and doing; she only realised in an agony of despair that she
+was a thing caught in a trap; that these people had her in their
+power, and that they had tricked and lied to her and kept her
+apart from what her girl's heart so cried out to and longed for. 
+Her father, her mother, her little sister; they had been near
+her and had been lied to and sent away
+
+"You are quite mad, you violent, uncontrolled creature!"
+cried the Dowager furiously.  "You ought to be put in a
+straitjacket and drenched with cold water."
+
+Then the door opened again and Nigel strode in.  He was
+in riding dress and was breathless and livid with anger.  He
+was in a nice mood to confront a wife on the verge of screaming
+hysterics.  After a bad half hour with his steward, who
+had been talking of impending disasters, he had heard by
+chance of Wilson's conflagration and the hundred-pound
+cheque.  He had galloped home at the top of his horse's speed.
+
+"Here is your wife raving mad," cried out his mother.
+
+Rosalie staggered across the room to him.  She held up her
+hand clenching the letter and shook it at him.
+
+"My mother and father have been here," she shrieked. 
+My mother has been ill.  They wanted to come to see me. 
+You knew and you kept it from me.  You told my father lies
+--lies--hideous lies!  You said I was away in Scotland--
+enjoying myself--when I was here and dying with homesickness. 
+You made them think I did not care for them--or for New York! 
+You have killed me!  Why did you do such a wicked thing!
+
+He looked at her with glaring eyes.  If a man born a
+gentleman is ever in the mood to kick his wife to death, as
+costermongers do, he was in that mood.  He had lost control over
+himself as completely as she had, and while she was only a
+desperate, hysteric girl, he was a violent man.
+
+"I did it because I did not mean to have them here," he
+said.  "I did it because I won't have them here."
+
+"They shall come," she quavered shrilly in her wildness. 
+"They shall come to see me.  They are my own father and
+mother, and I will have them."
+
+He caught her arm in such a grip that she must have thought he
+would break it, if she could have thought or felt anything.
+
+"No, you will not have them," he ground forth between
+his teeth.  "You will do as I order you and learn to behave
+yourself as a decent married woman should.  You will learn
+to obey your husband and respect his wishes and control your
+devilish American temper."
+
+"They have gone--gone!" wailed Rosalie.  "You sent them
+away!  My father, my mother, my sister!"
+
+"Stop your indecent ravings!" ordered Sir Nigel, shaking
+her.  "I will not submit to be disgraced before the servants."
+
+"Put your hand over her mouth, Nigel," cried his mother. 
+"The very scullery maids will hear."
+
+She was as infuriated as her son.  And, indeed, to behold
+civilised human beings in the state of uncontrolled violence
+these three had reached was a sight to shudder at.
+
+"I won't stop," cried the girl.  "Why did you take me
+away from everything--I was quite happy.  Everybody was
+kind to me.  I loved people, I had everything.  No one ever--
+ever--ever ill-used anyone----"
+
+Sir Nigel clutched her arm more brutally still and shook
+her with absolute violence.  Her hair broke loose and fell
+about her awful little distorted, sobbing face.
+
+"I did not take you to give you an opportunity to display
+your vulgar ostentation by throwing away hundred-pound
+cheques to villagers," he said.  "I didn't take you to give you
+the position of a lady and be made a fool of by you."
+
+"You have ruined him," burst forth his mother.  "You
+have put it out of his power to marry an Englishwoman who
+would have known it was her duty to give something in return
+for his name and protection."
+
+Her ladyship had begun to rave also, and as mother and
+son were of equal violence when they had ceased to control
+themselves, Rosalie began to find herself enlightened
+unsparingly.  She and her people were vulgar sharpers.  They had
+trapped a gentleman into a low American marriage and had
+not the decency to pay for what they had got.  If she had
+been an Englishwoman, well born, and of decent breeding,
+all her fortune would have been properly transferred to her
+husband and he would have had the dispensing of it.  Her 
+husband would have been in the position to control her
+expenditure and see that she did not make a fool of herself.  As
+it was she was the derision of all decent people, of all people
+who had been properly brought up and knew what was in
+good taste and of good morality.
+
+First it was the Dowager who poured forth, and then it
+was Sir Nigel.  They broke in on each other, they interrupted
+one another with exclamations and interpolations.  They had
+so far lost themselves that they did not know they became
+grotesque in the violence of their fury.  Rosalie's brain
+whirled.  Her hysteria mounted and mounted.  She stared first at
+one and then at the other, gasping and sobbing by turns; she
+swayed on her feet and clutched at a chair.
+
+"I did not know," she broke forth at last, trying to make
+her voice heard in the storm.  "I never understood.  I knew
+something made you hate me, but I didn't know you were
+angry about money."  She laughed tremulously and wildly. 
+"I would have given it to you--father would have given you
+some--if you had been good to me."  The laugh became
+hysterical beyond her management.  Peal after peal broke from
+her, she shook all over with her ghastly merriment, sobbing
+at one and the same time.
+
+"Oh! oh! oh!" she shrieked.  "You see, I thought you
+were so aristocratic.  I wouldn't have dared to think of such
+a thing.  I thought an English gentleman--an English gentleman--
+oh! oh! to think it was all because I did not give you
+money--just common dollars and cents that--that I daren't
+offer to a decent American who could work for himself."
+
+Sir Nigel sprang at her.  He struck her with his open hand
+upon the cheek, and as she reeled she held up her small,
+feverish, shaking hand, laughing more wildly than before.
+
+"You ought not to strike me," she cried.  "You oughtn't! 
+You don't know how valuable I am.  Perhaps----" with a
+little, crazy scream--"perhaps I might have a son."
+
+She fell in a shuddering heap, and as she dropped she struck
+heavily against the protruding end of an oak chest and lay upon
+the floor, her arms flung out and limp, as if she were a dead
+thing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC
+
+In the course of twelve years the Shuttle had woven steadily
+and--its movements lubricated by time and custom--with
+increasing rapidity.  Threads of commerce it caught up and shot
+to and fro, with threads of literature and art, threads of life
+drawn from one shore to the other and back again, until they
+were bound in the fabric of its weaving.  Coldness there had
+been between both lands, broad divergence of taste and thought,
+argument across seas, sometimes resentment, but the web in
+Fate's hands broadened and strengthened and held fast.  Coldness
+faintly warmed despite itself, taste and thought drawn into
+nearer contact, reflecting upon their divergences, grew into
+tolerance and the knowledge that the diverging, seen more
+clearly, was not so broad; argument coming within speaking
+distance reasoned itself to logical and practical conclusions. 
+Problems which had stirred anger began to find solutions. 
+Books, in the first place, did perhaps more than all else. 
+Cheap, pirated editions of English works, much quarrelled over by
+authors and publishers, being scattered over the land, brought
+before American eyes soft, home-like pictures of places which
+were, after all was said and done, the homes of those who read
+of them, at least in the sense of having been the birthplaces
+of fathers or grandfathers.  Some subtle, far-reaching power
+of nature caused a stirring of the blood, a vague, unexpressed
+yearning and lingering over pages which depicted sweet, green
+lanes, broad acres rich with centuries of nourishment and care;
+grey church towers, red roofs, and village children playing
+before cottage doors.  None of these things were new to those
+who pondered over them, kinsmen had dwelt on memories of
+them in their fireside talk, and their children had seen them in
+fancy and in dreams.  Old grievances having had time to fade
+away and take on less poignant colour, the stirring of the blood
+stirred also imaginations, and wakened something akin to
+homesickness, though no man called the feeling by its name.  And
+this, perhaps, was the strongest cord the Shuttle wove and was
+the true meaning of its power.  Being drawn by it, Americans
+in increasing numbers turned their faces towards the older
+land.  Gradually it was discovered that it was the simplest
+affair in the world to drive down to the wharves and take a
+steamer which landed one, after a more or less interesting
+voyage, in Liverpool, or at some other convenient port.  From
+there one went to London, or Paris, or Rome; in fact, whither-
+soever one's fancy guided, but first or last it always led the
+traveller to the treading of green, velvet English turf.  And
+once standing on such velvet, both men and women, looking
+about them, felt, despite themselves, the strange old thrill
+which some of them half resented and some warmly loved.
+
+In the course of twelve years, a length of time which will
+transform a little girl wearing a short frock into a young
+woman wearing a long one, the pace of life and the ordering
+of society may become so altered as to appear amazing when
+one finds time to reflect on the subject.  But one does not
+often find time.  Changes occur so gradually that one scarcely
+observes them, or so swiftly that they take the form of a kind of
+amazed shock which one gets over as quickly as one experiences it
+and realises that its cause is already a fixed fact.
+
+In the United States of America, which have not yet acquired the
+serene sense of conservative self-satisfaction and repose which
+centuries of age may bestow, the spirit of life itself is the
+aspiration for change.  Ambition itself only means the insistence
+on change.  Each day is to be better than yesterday fuller of
+plans, of briskness, of initiative.  Each to-day demands
+of to-morrow new men, new minds, new work.  A to-day which
+has not launched new ships, explored new countries, constructed
+new buildings, added stories to old ones, may consider
+itself a failure, unworthy even of being consigned to the limbo
+of respectable yesterdays.  Such a country lives by leaps and
+bounds, and the ten years which followed the marriage of
+Reuben Vanderpoel's eldest daughter made many such bounds
+and leaps.  They were years which initiated and established
+international social relations in a manner which caused them
+to incorporate themselves with the history of both countries. 
+As America discovered Europe, that continent discovered America. 
+American beauties began to appear in English drawing-rooms and
+Continental salons.  They were presented at court
+and commented upon in the Row and the Bois.  Their little
+transatlantic tricks of speech and their mots were repeated with
+gusto.  It became understood that they were amusing and
+amazing.  Americans "came in" as the heroes and heroines of
+novels and stories.  Punch delighted in them vastly.  Shop-
+keepers and hotel proprietors stocked, furnished, and
+provisioned for them.  They spent money enormously and were
+singularly indifferent (at the outset) under imposition.  They
+"came over" in a manner as epoch-making, though less war-like
+than that of William the Conqueror.
+
+International marriages ceased to be a novelty.  As Bettina
+Vanderpoel grew up, she grew up, so to speak, in the midst
+of them.  She saw her country, its people, its newspapers, its
+literature, innocently rejoiced by the alliances its charming
+young women contracted with foreign rank.  She saw it
+affectionately, gleefully, rubbing its hands over its duchesses,
+its countesses, its miladies.  The American Eagle spread its
+wings and flapped them sometimes a trifle, over this new but so
+natural and inevitable triumph of its virgins.  It was of course
+only "American" that such things should happen.  America
+ruled the universe, and its women ruled America, bullying it
+a little, prettily, perhaps.  What could be more a matter of
+course than that American women, being aided by adoring
+fathers, brothers and husbands, sumptuously to ship themselves
+to other lands, should begin to rule these lands also?  Betty,
+in her growing up, heard all this intimated.  At twelve years
+old, though she had detested Rosalie's marriage, she had rather
+liked to hear people talk of the picturesqueness of places like
+Stornham Court, and of the life led by women of rank in
+their houses in town and country.  Such talk nearly always
+involved the description of things and people, whose colour
+and tone had only reached her through the medium of books,
+most frequently fiction.
+
+She was, however, of an unusually observing mind, even as
+a child, and the time came when she realised that the national
+bird spread its wings less proudly when the subject of
+international matches was touched upon, and even at such times
+showed signs of restlessness.  Now and then things had not
+turned out as they appeared to promise; two or three seemingly
+brilliant unions had resulted in disaster.  She had not
+understood all the details the newspapers cheerfully provided,
+but it was clear to her that more than one previously envied
+young woman had had practical reasons for discovering that she
+had made an astonishingly bad bargain.  This being the case, she
+used frequently to ponder over the case of Rosy--Rosy! who had
+been swept away from them and swallowed up, as it seemed,
+by that other and older world.  She was in certain ways a
+silent child, and no one but herself knew how little she had 
+forgotten Rosy, how often she pondered over her, how sometimes
+she had lain awake in the night and puzzled out lines
+of argument concerning her and things which might be true.
+
+The one grief of poor Mrs. Vanderpoel's life had been the
+apparent estrangement of her eldest child.  After her first
+six months in England Lady Anstruthers' letters had become
+fewer and farther between, and had given so little information
+connected with herself that affectionate curiosity became
+discouraged.  Sir Nigel's brief and rare epistles revealed so
+little desire for any relationship with his wife's family that
+gradually Rosy's image seemed to fade into far distance and
+become fainter with the passing of each month.  It seemed
+almost an incredible thing, when they allowed themselves to think
+of it, but no member of the family had ever been to Stornham
+Court.  Two or three efforts to arrange a visit had been
+made, but on each occasion had failed through some apparently
+accidental cause.  Once Lady Anstruthers had been
+away, once a letter had seemingly failed to reach her, once
+her children had had scarlet fever and the orders of the
+physicians in attendance had been stringent in regard to
+visitors, even relatives who did not fear contagion.
+
+"If she had been living in New York and her children had
+been ill I should have been with her all the time," poor Mrs.
+Vanderpoel had said with tears.  "Rosy's changed awfully,
+somehow.  Her letters don't sound a bit like she used to be. 
+It seems as if she just doesn't care to see her mother and
+father."
+
+Betty had frowned a good deal and thought intensely in
+secret.  She did not believe that Rosy was ashamed of her
+relations.  She remembered, however, it is true, that Clara
+Newell (who had been a schoolmate) had become very super-fine and
+indifferent to her family after her marriage to an
+aristocratic and learned German.  Hers had been one of the
+successful alliances, and after living a few years in Berlin she
+had quite looked down upon New Yorkers, and had made herself
+exceedingly unpopular during her one brief visit to her
+relatives.  She seemed to think her father and mother undignified
+and uncultivated, and she disapproved entirely of her
+sisters dress and bearing.  She said that they had no distinction
+of manner and that all their interests were frivolous and
+unenlightened.
+
+"But Clara always was a conceited girl," thought Betty. 
+"She was always patronising people, and Rosy was only pretty
+and sweet.  She always said herself that she had no brains. 
+But she had a heart."
+
+After the lapse of a few years there had been no further
+discussion of plans for visiting Stornham.  Rosalie had become
+so remote as to appear almost unreachable.  She had been
+presented at Court, she had had three children, the Dowager
+Lady Anstruthers had died.  Once she had written to her
+father to ask for a large sum of money, which he had sent to
+her, because she seemed to want it very much.  She required
+it to pay off certain debts on the estate and spoke touchingly
+of her boy who would inherit.
+
+"He is a delicate boy, father," she wrote, "and I don't
+want the estate to come to him burdened."
+
+When she received the money she wrote gratefully of the
+generosity shown her, but she spoke very vaguely of the prospect
+of their seeing each other in the future.  It was as if she
+felt her own remoteness even more than they felt it themselves.
+
+In the meantime Bettina had been taken to France and
+placed at school there.  The resulting experience was an
+enlightening one, far more illuminating to the quick-witted
+American child than it would have been to an English, French,
+or German one, who would not have had so much to learn,
+and probably would not have been so quick at the learning.
+
+Betty Vanderpoel knew nothing which was not American,
+and only vaguely a few things which were not of New York. 
+She had lived in Fifth Avenue, attended school in a numbered
+street near her own home, played in and been driven round
+Central Park.  She had spent the hot months of the summer
+in places up the Hudson, or on Long Island, and such resorts
+of pleasure.  She had believed implicitly in all she saw and
+knew.  She had been surrounded by wealth and decent good
+nature throughout her existence, and had enjoyed her life far
+too much to admit of any doubt that America was the most
+perfect country in the world, Americans the cleverest and most
+amusing people, and that other nations were a little out of it,
+and consequently sufficiently scant of resource to render pity
+without condemnation a natural sentiment in connection with
+one's occasional thoughts of them.
+
+But hers was a mentality by no means ordinary.  Inheritance
+in her nature had combined with circumstances, as it has a
+habit of doing in all human beings.  But in her case the
+combinations were unusual and produced a result somewhat
+remarkable.  The quality of brains which, in the first Reuben 
+Vanderpoel had expressed itself in the marvellously successful
+planning and carrying to their ends of commercial and financial
+schemes, the absolute genius of penetration and calculation
+of the sordid and uneducated little trader in skins and
+barterer of goods, having filtered through two generations of
+gradual education and refinement of existence, which was no
+longer that of the mere trader, had been transformed in the
+great-granddaughter into keen, clear sight, level-headed
+perceptiveness and a logical sense of values.  As the first
+Reuben had known by instinct the values of pelts and lands,
+Bettina knew by instinct the values of qualities, of brains, of
+hearts, of circumstances, and the incidents which affect them. 
+She was as unaware of the significance of her great possession as
+werethose around her.  Nevertheless it was an unerring thing.  As
+a mere child, unformed and uneducated by life, she had not
+been one of the small creatures to be deceived or flattered.
+
+"She's an awfully smart little thing, that Betty," her New
+York aunts and cousins often remarked.  "She seems to see
+what people mean, it doesn't matter what they say.  She likes
+people you would not expect her to like, and then again she
+sometimes doesn't care the least for people who are thought
+awfully attractive."
+
+As has been already intimated, the child was crude enough
+and not particularly well bred, but her small brain had always
+been at work, and each day of her life recorded for her valuable
+impressions.  The page of her young mind had ceased to
+be a blank much earlier than is usual.
+
+The comparing of these impressions with such as she
+received when her life in the French school was new afforded
+her active mental exercise
+
+She began with natural, secret indignation and rebellion. 
+There was no other American pupil in the establishment besides
+herself.  But for the fact that the name of Vanderpoel
+represented wealth so enormous as to amount to a sort of
+rank in itself, Bettina would not have been received.  The
+proprietress of the institution had gravely disquieting doubts of
+the propriety of America.  Her pupils were not accustomed to
+freedom of opinions and customs.  An American child might
+either consciously or unconsciously introduce them.  As this
+must be guarded against, Betty's first few months at the school
+were not agreeable to her.  She was supervised and expurgated,
+as it were.  Special Sisters were told off to converse and
+walk with her, and she soon perceived that conversations were
+not only French lessons in disguise, but were lectures on ethics,
+morals, and good manners, imperfectly concealed by the mask
+and domino of amiable entertainment.  She translated into
+English after the following manner the facts her swift young
+perceptions gathered.  There were things it was so inelegant
+to say that only the most impossible persons said them; there
+were things it was so inexcusable to do that when done their
+inexcusability assumed the proportions of a crime.  There were
+movements, expressions, points of view, which one must avoid
+as one would avoid the plague.  And they were all things, acts,
+expressions, attitudes of mind which Bettina had been familiar
+with from her infancy, and which she was well aware were
+considered almost entirely harmless and unobjectionable in New
+York, in her beloved New York, which was the centre of the
+world, which was bigger, richer, gayer, more admirable than
+any other city known upon the earth.
+
+If she had not so loved it, if she had ever dreamed of the
+existence of any other place as being absolutely necessary, she
+would not have felt the thing so bitterly.  But it seemed to her
+that all these amiable diatribes in exquisite French were
+directed at her New York, and it must be admitted that she was
+humiliated and enraged.  It was a personal, indeed, a family
+matter.  Her father, her mother, her relatives, and friends
+were all in some degree exactly the kind of persons whose speech,
+habits, and opinions she must conscientiously avoid.  But for the
+instinct of summing up values, circumstances, and intentions,
+it is probable that she would have lost her head, let loose
+her temper and her tongue, and have become insubordinate. 
+But the quickness of perception which had revealed practical
+potentialities to old Reuben Vanderpoel, revealed to her the
+value of French which was perfectly fluent, a voice which was
+musical, movements which were grace, manners which had a still
+beauty, and comparing these things with others less charming
+she listened and restrained herself, learning, marking, and
+inwardly digesting with a cleverness most enviable.
+
+Among her fellow pensionnaires she met with discomforting
+illuminations, which were fine discipline also, though if she
+herself had been a less intellectual creature they might have
+been embittering.  Without doubt Betty, even at twelve years,
+was intellectual.  Hers was the practical working intellect
+which begins duty at birth and does not lay down its tools
+because the sun sets.  The little and big girls who wrote their
+exercises at her side did not deliberately enlighten her, but she
+learned from them in vague ways that it was not New York
+which was the centre of the earth, but Paris, or Berlin, Madrid,
+London, or Rome.  Paris and London were perhaps more calmly
+positive of themselves than other capitals, and were a little
+inclined to smile at the lack of seriousness in other claims. 
+But one strange fact was more predominant than any other,
+and this was that New York was not counted as a civilised
+centre at all; it had no particular existence.  Nobody expressed
+this rudely; in fact, it did not acquire the form of actual
+statement at any time.  It was merely revealed by amiable and
+ingenuous unconsciousness of the circumstance that such a part
+of the world expected to be regarded or referred to at all. 
+Betty began early to realise that as her companions did not
+talk of Timbuctoo or Zanzibar, so they did not talk of New
+York.  Stockholm or Amsterdam seemed, despite their smallness,
+to be considered.  No one denied the presence of Zanzibar
+on the map, but as it conveyed nothing more than the impression
+of being a mere geographical fact, there was no reason
+why one should dwell on it in conversation.  Remembering
+all she had left behind, the crowded streets, the brilliant shop
+windows, the buzz of individual people, there were moments
+when Betty ground her strong little teeth.  She wanted to
+express all these things, to call out, to explain, and command
+recognition for them.  But her cleverness showed to her that
+argument or protestation would be useless.  She could not
+make such hearers understand.  There were girls whose interest
+in America was founded on their impression that magnificent
+Indian chieftains in blankets and feathers stalked about
+the streets of the towns, and that Betty's own thick black hair
+had been handed down to her by some beautiful Minnehaha
+or Pocahontas.  When first she was approached by timid, tentative
+questionings revealing this point of view, Betty felt hot
+and answered with unamiable curtness.  No, there were no
+red Indians in New York.  There had been no red Indians
+in her family.  She had neither grandmothers nor aunts who
+were squaws, if they meant that.
+
+She felt so scornfully, so disgustedly indignant at their
+benighted ignorance, that she knew she behaved very well in
+saying so little in reply.  She could have said so much, but
+whatsoever she had said would have conveyed nothing to them,
+so she thought it all out alone.  She went over the whole ground
+and little realised how much she was teaching herself as she
+turned and tossed in her narrow, spotlessly white bed at night,
+arguing, comparing, drawing deductions from what she knew
+and did not know of the two continents.  Her childish anger,
+combining itself with the practical, alert brain of Reuben
+Vanderpoel the first, developed in her a logical reasoning power
+which led her to arrive at many an excellent and curiously
+mature conclusion.  The result was finely educational.  All
+the more so that in her fevered desire for justification of
+the things she loved, she began to read books such as little
+girls do not usually take interest in.  She found some difficulty
+in obtaining them at first, but a letter or two written to her
+father obtained for her permission to read what she chose.  The
+third Reuben Vanderpoel was deeply fond of his younger
+daughter, and felt in secret a profound admiration for her,
+which was saved from becoming too obvious by the ever present
+American sense of humour.
+
+"Betty seems to be going in for politics," he said after
+reading the letter containing her request and her first list of
+books.  "She's about as mad as she can be at the ignorance of the
+French girls about America and Americans.  She wants to fill
+up on solid facts, so that she can come out strong in argument. 
+She's got an understanding of the power of solid facts
+that would be a fortune to her if she were a man."
+
+It was no doubt her understanding of the power of facts
+which led her to learn everything well and to develop in many
+directions.  She began to dip into political and historical
+volumes because she was furious, and wished to be able to refute
+idiocy, but she found herself continuing to read because she
+was interested in a way she had not expected.  She began to
+see things.  Once she made a remark which was prophetic. 
+She made it in answer to a guileless observation concerning the
+gold mines with which Boston was supposed to be enriched.
+
+"You don't know anything about America, you others," she
+said.  "But you WILL know!"
+
+"Do you think it will become the fashion to travel in
+America?" asked a German girl.
+
+"Perhaps," said Betty.  "But--it isn't so much that you will go
+to America.  I believe it will come to you.  It's like
+that--America.  It doesn't stand still.  It goes and gets what
+it wants."
+
+She laughed as she ended, and so did the other girls.  But
+in ten years' time, when they were young women, some of
+them married, some of them court beauties, one of them
+recalled this speech to another, whom she encountered in an
+important house in St. Petersburg, the wife of the celebrated
+diplomat who was its owner being an American woman.
+
+Bettina Vanderpoel's education was a rather fine thing.  She
+herself had more to do with it than girls usually have to do
+with their own training.  In a few months' time those in
+authority in the French school found that it was not necessary
+to supervise and expurgate her.  She learned with an interested
+rapacity which was at once unusual and amazing.  And
+she evidently did not learn from books alone.  Her voice, as
+an organ, had been musical and full from babyhood.  It began
+to modulate itself and to express things most voices are
+incapable of expressing.  She had been so built by nature that
+the carriage of her head and limbs was good to behold.  She
+acquired a harmony of movement which caused her to lose no
+shade of grace and spirit.  Her eyes were full of thought, of
+speculation, and intentness.
+
+"She thinks a great deal for one so young," was said of her
+frequently by one or the other of her teachers.  One finally
+went further and added, "She has genius."
+
+This was true.  She had genius, but it was not specialised. 
+It was not genius which expressed itself through any one art.  It
+was a genius for life, for living herself, for aiding others to
+live, for vivifying mere existence.  She herself was, however,
+aware only of an eagerness of temperament, a passion for seeing,
+doing, and gaining knowledge.  Everything interested her,
+everybody was suggestive and more or less enlightening.
+
+Her relatives thought her original in her fancies.  They
+called them fancies because she was so young.  Fortunately for
+her, there was no reason why she should not be gratified.  Most
+girls preferred to spend their holidays on the Continent.  She
+elected to return to America every alternate year.  She enjoyed
+the voyage and she liked the entire change of atmosphere and
+people.
+
+"It makes me like both places more," she said to her father
+when she was thirteen.  "It makes me see things."
+
+Her father discovered that she saw everything.  She was
+the pleasure of his life.  He was attracted greatly by the
+interest she exhibited in all orders of things.  He saw her make
+bold, ingenuous plunges into all waters, without any apparent
+consciousness that the scraps of knowledge she brought to the
+surface were unusual possessions for a schoolgirl.  She had
+young views on the politics and commerce of different countries,
+as she had views on their literature.  When Reuben Vanderpoel
+swooped across the American continent on journeys of
+thousands of miles, taking her as a companion, he discovered
+that he actually placed a sort of confidence in her summing up
+of men and schemes.  He took her to see mines and railroads
+and those who worked them, and he talked them over with her
+afterward, half with a sense of humour, half with a sense of
+finding comfort in her intelligent comprehension of all he said.
+
+She enjoyed herself immensely and gained a strong picturesqueness
+of character.  After an American holiday she used to return to
+France, Germany, or Italy, with a renewed zest of feeling for all
+things romantic and antique.  After a few years in the French
+convent she asked that she might be sent to Germany.
+
+"I am gradually changing into a French girl," she wrote
+to her father.  "One morning I found I was thinking it
+would be nice to go into a convent, and another day I almost
+entirely agreed with one of the girls who was declaiming
+against her brother who had fallen in love with a Californian. 
+You had better take me away and send me to Germany.
+
+Reuben Vanderpoel laughed.  He understood Betty much
+better than most of her relations did.  He knew when seriousness
+underlay her jests and his respect for her seriousness was
+great.  He sent her to school in Germany.  During the early
+years of her schooldays Betty had observed that America
+appeared upon the whole to be regarded by her schoolfellows
+principally as a place to which the more unfortunate among
+the peasantry emigrated as steerage passengers when things
+could become no worse for them in their own country.  The
+United States was not mentally detached from any other
+portion of the huge Western Continent.  Quite well-educated
+persons spoke casually of individuals having "gone to America,"
+as if there were no particular difference between Brazil
+and Massachusetts.
+
+"I wonder if you ever saw my cousin Gaston," a French
+girl once asked her as they sat at their desks.  "He became
+very poor through ill living.  He was quite without money
+and he went to America."
+
+"To New York?" inquired Bettina.
+
+"I am not sure.  The town is called Concepcion."
+
+"That is not in the United States," Betty answered
+disdainfully.  "It is in Chili."
+
+She dragged her atlas towards her and found the place.
+
+"See," she said.  "It is thousands of miles from New York." 
+Her companion was a near-sighted, rather slow girl.  She peered
+at the map, drawing a line with her finger from New York
+to Concepcion.
+
+"Yes, they are at a great distance from one another," she
+admitted, "but they are both in America."
+
+"But not both in the United States," cried Betty.  "French
+girls always seem to think that North and South America
+are the same, that they are both the United States."
+
+"Yes," said the slow girl with deliberation.  "We do make
+odd mistakes sometimes."  To which she added with entire
+innocence of any ironic intention.  "But you Americans, you
+seem to feel the United States, your New York, to be all America.
+
+Betty started a little and flushed.  During a few minutes
+of rapid reflection she sat bolt upright at her desk and looked
+straight before her.  Her mentality was of the order which is
+capable of making discoveries concerning itself as well as
+concerning others.  She had never thought of this view of the
+matter before, but it was quite true.  To passionate young
+patriots such as herself at least, that portion of the map
+covered by the United States was America.  She suddenly saw also
+that to her New York had been America.  Fifth Avenue
+Broadway, Central Park, even Tiffany's had been "America." 
+She laughed and reddened a shade as she put the atlas aside
+having recorded a new idea.  She had found out that it was
+not only Europeans who were local, which was a discovery of
+some importance to her fervid youth.
+
+Because she thought so often of Rosalie, her attention was,
+during the passing years, naturally attracted by the many
+things she heard of such marriages as were made by Americans
+with men of other countries than their own.  She discovered
+that notwithstanding certain commercial views of matrimony,
+all foreigners who united themselves with American heiresses
+were not the entire brutes primitive prejudice might lead one
+to imagine.  There were rather one-sided alliances which proved
+themselves far from happy.  The Cousin Gaston, for instance,
+brought home a bride whose fortune rebuilt and refurnished
+his dilapidated chateau and who ended by making of him a
+well-behaved and cheery country gentleman not at all to be
+despised in his amiable, if light-minded good nature and
+good spirits.  His wife, fortunately, was not a young woman
+who yearned for sentiment.  She was a nice-tempered, practical
+American girl, who adored French country life and
+knew how to amuse and manage her husband.  It was a genial
+sort of menage and yet though this was an undeniable fact,
+Bettina observed that when the union was spoken of it was
+always referred to with a certain tone which conveyed that
+though one did not exactly complain of its having been
+undesirable, it was not quite what Gaston might have expected. 
+His wife had money and was good-natured, but there were
+limitations to one's appreciation of a marriage in which
+husband and wife were not on the same plane.
+
+"She is an excellent person, and it has been good for Gaston,"
+said Bettina's friend.  "We like her, but she is not--she is
+not----"  She paused there, evidently seeing that the remark was
+unlucky.  Bettina, who was still in short frocks, took her up.
+
+"What is she not?" she asked.
+
+"Ah!--it is difficult to explain--to Americans.  It is really
+not exactly a fault.  But she is not of his world."
+
+"But if he does not like that," said Bettina coolly, "why did
+he let her buy him and pay for him?"
+
+It was young and brutal, but there were times when the
+business perspicuity of the first Reuben Vanderpoel, combining
+with the fiery, wounded spirit of his young descendant, rendered
+Bettina brutal.  She saw certain unadorned facts with
+unsparing young eyes and wanted to state them.  After her
+frocks were lengthened, she learned how to state them with
+more fineness of phrase, but even then she was sometimes still
+rather unsparing.
+
+In this case her companion, who was not fiery of temperament,
+only coloured slightly.
+
+"It was not quite that," she answered.  "Gaston really is fond of
+her.  She amuses him, and he says she is far cleverer than he
+is."
+
+But there were unions less satisfactory, and Bettina had
+opportunities to reflect upon these also.  The English and
+Continental papers did not give enthusiastic, detailed
+descriptions of the marriages New York journals dwelt upon with
+such delight.  They were passed over with a paragraph. 
+When Betty heard them spoken of in France, Germany or
+Italy, she observed that they were not, as a rule, spoken of
+respectfully.  It seemed to her that the bridegrooms were, in
+conversation, treated by their equals with scant respect.  It
+appeared that there had always been some extremely practical
+reason for the passion which had led them to the altar. 
+One generally gathered that they or their estates were very
+much out at elbow, and frequently their characters were not
+considered admirable by their relatives and acquaintances. 
+Some had been rather cold shouldered in certain capitals on
+account of embarrassing little, or big, stories.  Some had spent
+their patrimonies in riotous living.  Those who had merely
+begun by coming into impoverished estates, and had later
+attenuated their resources by comparatively decent follies, were
+of the more desirable order.  By the time she was nineteen,
+Bettina had felt the blood surge in her veins more than once
+when she heard some comments on alliances over which she
+had seen her compatriots glow with affectionate delight.
+
+"It was time Ludlow married some girl with money," she
+heard said of one such union.  "He had been playing the fool
+ever since he came into the estate.  Horses and a lot of stupid
+women.  He had come some awful croppers during the last
+ten years.  Good-enough looking girl, they tell me--the
+American he has married--tremendous lot of money.  Couldn't
+have picked it up on this side.  English young women of
+fortune are not looking for that kind of thing.  Poor old Billy
+wasn't good enough.'
+
+Bettina told the story to her father when they next met. 
+She had grown into a tall young creature by this time.  Her
+low, full voice was like a bell and was capable of ringing forth
+some fine, mellow tones of irony
+
+"And in America we are pleased," she said, "and flatter
+ourselves that we are receiving the proper tribute of adoration
+of our American wit and beauty.  We plume ourselves on
+our conquests.
+
+"No, Betty," said her father, and his reflective deliberation
+had meaning.  "There are a lot of us who don't plume ourselves
+particularly in these days.  We are not as innocent as
+we were when this sort of thing began.  We are not as innocent
+as we were when Rosy was married."  And he sighed and
+rubbed his forehead with the handle of his pen.  "Not as
+innocent as we were when Rosy was married," he repeated.
+
+Bettina went to him and slid her fine young arm round his
+neck.  It was a long, slim, round arm with a wonderful power
+to caress in its curves.  She kissed Vanderpoel's lined cheek.
+
+"Have you had time to think much about Rosy?" she said.
+
+"I've not had time, but I've done it," he answered. 
+"Anything that hurts your mother hurts me.  Sometimes she begins
+to cry in her sleep, and when I wake her she tells me she has
+been dreaming that she has seen Rosy."
+
+"I have had time to think of her," said Bettina.  "I have
+heard so much of these things.  I was at school in Germany
+when Annie Butterfield and Baron von Steindahl were married. 
+I heard it talked about there, and then my mother sent
+me some American papers."
+
+She laughed a little, and for a moment her laugh did not
+sound like a girl's.
+
+"Well, it's turned out badly enough," her father commented. 
+"The papers had plenty to say about it later.  There wasn't
+much he was too good to do to his wife, apparently."
+
+"There was nothing too bad for him to do before he had
+a wife," said Bettina.  "He was black.  It was an insolence
+that he should have dared to speak to Annie Butterfield. 
+Somebody ought to have beaten him."
+
+"He beat her instead."
+
+"Yes, and I think his family thought it quite natural. 
+They said that she was so vulgar and American that she
+exasperated Frederick beyond endurance.  She was not geboren,
+that was it."  She laughed her severe little laugh again. 
+"Perhaps we shall get tired in time," she added.  "I think
+we are learning.  If it is made a matter of business quite open
+and aboveboard, it will be fair.  You know, father, you always
+said that I was businesslike."
+
+There was interested curiosity in Vanderpoel's steady look
+at her.  There were times when he felt that Betty's summing
+up of things was well worth listening to.  He saw that now she
+was in one of her moods when it would pay one to hear her out. 
+She held her chin up a little, and her face took on a fine
+stillness at once sweet and unrelenting.  She was very good to
+look at in such moments.
+
+"Yes," he answered, "you have a particularly level head
+for a girl."
+
+"Well," she went on.  "What I see is that these things are
+not business, and they ought to be.  If a man comes to a rich
+American girl and says, `I and my title are for sale.  Will you
+buy us?'  If the girl is--is that kind of a girl and wants that
+kind of man, she can look them both over and say, `Yes, I will
+buy you,' and it can be arranged.  He will not return the
+money if he is unsatisfactory, but she cannot complain that she
+has been deceived.  She can only complain of that when he
+pretends that he asks her to marry him because he wants her for
+his wife, because he would want her for his wife if she were as
+poor as himself.  Let it be understood that he is property for
+sale, let her make sure that he is the kind of property she wants
+to buy.  Then, if, when they are married, he is brutal or
+impudent, or his people are brutal or impudent, she can say, `I
+will forfeit the purchase money, but I will not forfeit myself. 
+I will not stay with you.' "
+
+"They would not like to hear you say that, Betty," said her
+father, rubbing his chin reflectively.
+
+"No," she answered.  "Neither the girl nor the man would
+like it, and it is their business, not mine.  But it is practical
+and would prevent silly mistakes.  It would prevent the girls
+being laughed at.  It is when they are flattered by the choice
+made of them that they are laughed at.  No one can sneer at a
+man or woman for buying what they think they want, and
+throwing it aside if it turns out a bad bargain."
+
+She had seated herself near her father.  She rested her elbow
+slightly on the table and her chin in the hollow of her hand. 
+She was a beautiful young creature.  She had a soft curving
+mouth, and a soft curving cheek which was warm rose.  Taken
+in conjunction with those young charms, her next words had
+an air of incongruity.
+
+"You think I am hard," she said.  "When I think of these
+things I am hard--as hard as nails.  That is an Americanism,
+but it is a good expression.  I am angry for America.  If we
+are sordid and undignified, let us get what we pay for and make
+the others acknowledge that we have paid."
+
+She did not smile, nor did her father.  Mr. Vanderpoel, on
+the contrary, sighed.  He had a dreary suspicion that Rosy, at
+least, had not received what she had paid for, and he knew she
+had not been in the least aware that she had paid or that she
+was expected to do so.  Several times during the last few years
+he had thought that if he had not been so hard worked, if he
+had had time, he would have seriously investigated the case of
+Rosy.  But who is not aware that the profession of
+multimillionaire does not allow of any swerving from duty or of
+any interests requiring leisure?
+
+"I wonder, Betty," he said quite deliberately, "if you know
+how handsome you are?"
+
+"Yes," answered Bettina.  "I think so.  And I am tall.  It
+is the fashion to be tall now.  It was Early Victorian to be
+little.  The Queen brought in the `dear little woman,' and
+now the type has gone out."
+
+"They will come to look at you pretty soon," said
+Vanderpoel.  "What shall you say then?"
+
+"I?"  said Bettina, and her voice sounded particularly low
+and mellow.  "I have a little monomania, father.  Some
+people have a monomania for one thing and some for another. 
+Mine is for NOT taking a bargain from the ducal remnant counter."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+AN UNFAIR ENDOWMENT
+
+To Bettina Vanderpoel had been given, to an extraordinary
+extent, the extraordinary thing which is called beauty--which
+is a thing entirely set apart from mere good looks or prettiness.
+This thing is extraordinary because, if statistics were taken,
+the result would probably be the discovery that not three human
+beings in a million really possess it.  That it should be
+bestowed at all--since it is so rare--seems as unfair a thing as
+appears to the mere mortal mind the bestowal of unbounded wealth,
+since it quite as inevitably places the life of its owner upon an
+abnormal plane.  There are millions of pretty women, and
+billions of personable men, but the man or woman of entire
+physical beauty may cross one's pathway only once in a life-
+time--or not at all.  In the latter case it is natural to doubt
+the absolute truth of the rumours that the thing exists.  The
+abnormal creature seems a mere freak of nature and may
+chance to be angel, criminal, total insipidity, virago or
+enchanter, but let such an one enter a room or appear in the
+street, and heads must turn, eyes light and follow, souls yearn
+or envy, or sink under the discouragement of comparison.  With
+the complete harmony and perfect balance of the singular thing,
+it would be folly for the rest of the world to compete.  A
+human being who had lived in poverty for half a lifetime,
+might, if suddenly endowed with limitless fortune, retain, to
+a certain extent, balance of mind; but the same creature having
+lived the same number of years a wholly unlovely thing, suddenly
+awakening to the possession of entire physical beauty,
+might find the strain upon pure sanity greater and the balance
+less easy to preserve.  The relief from the conscious or
+unconscious tension bred by the sense of imperfection, the calm
+surety of the fearlessness of meeting in any eye a look not
+lighted by pleasure, would be less normal than the knowledge
+that no wish need remain unfulfilled, no fancy ungratified. 
+Even at sixteen Betty was a long-limbed young nymph whose
+small head, set high on a fine slim column of throat, might well
+have been crowned with the garland of some goddess of health
+and the joy of life.  She was light and swift, and being a
+creature of long lines and tender curves, there was pleasure in
+the mere seeing her move.  The cut of her spirited lip, and
+delicate nostril, made for a profile at which one turned to look
+more than once, despite one's self.  Her hair was soft and black
+and repeated its colour in the extravagant lashes of her
+childhood, which made mysterious the changeful dense blue of her
+eyes.  They were eyes with laughter in them and pride, and a
+suggestion of many deep things yet unstirred.  She was rather
+unusually tall, and her body had the suppleness of a young
+bamboo.  The deep corners of her red mouth curled generously,
+and the chin, melting into the fine line of the lovely throat,
+was at once strong and soft and lovely.  She was a creature of
+harmony, warm richness of colour, and brilliantly alluring
+life.
+
+When her school days were over she returned to New York
+and gave herself into her mother's hands.  Her mother's kindness
+of heart and sweet-tempered lovingness were touching
+things to Bettina.  In the midst of her millions Mrs. Vanderpoel
+was wholly unworldly.  Bettina knew that she felt a perpetual
+homesickness when she allowed herself to think of the daughter
+who seemed lost to her, and the girl's realisation of this caused
+her to wish to be especially affectionate and amenable.  She was
+glad that she was tall and beautiful, not merely because such
+physical gifts added to the colour and agreeableness of life, 
+but because hers gave comfort and happiness to
+her mother.  To Mrs. Vanderpoel, to introduce to the world
+the loveliest debutante of many years was to be launched into
+a new future.  To concern one's self about her exquisite
+wardrobe was to have an enlivening occupation.  To see her
+surrounded, to watch eyes as they followed her, to hear her
+praised, was to feel something of the happiness she had known
+in those younger days when New York had been less advanced
+in its news and methods, and slim little blonde Rosalie had
+come out in white tulle and waltzed like a fairy with a
+hundred partners.
+
+"I wonder what Rosy looks like now," the poor woman said
+involuntarily one day.  Bettina was not a fairy.  When her
+mother uttered her exclamation Bettina was on the point of
+going out, and as she stood near her, wrapped in splendid furs,
+she had the air of a Russian princess.
+
+"She could not have worn the things you do, Betty, said
+the affectionate maternal creature.  "She was such a little,
+slight thing.  But she was very pretty.  I wonder if twelve
+years have changed her much?"
+
+Betty turned towards her rather suddenly.
+
+"Mother," she said, "sometime, before very long, I am going
+to see."
+
+"To see!" exclaimed Mrs. Vanderpoel.  "To see Rosy!"
+
+"Yes," Betty answered.  "I have a plan.  I have never
+told you of it, but I have been thinking over it ever since I
+was fifteen years old."
+
+She went to her mother and kissed her.  She wore a
+becoming but resolute expression.
+
+"We will not talk about it now," she said.  "There are
+some things I must find out."
+
+When she had left the room, which she did almost immediately,
+Mrs. Vanderpoel sat down and cried.  She nearly always
+shed a few tears when anyone touched upon the subject of
+Rosy.  On her desk were some photographs.  One was of
+Rosy as a little girl with long hair, one was of Lady Anstruthers
+in her wedding dress, and one was of Sir Nigel.
+
+"I never felt as if I quite liked him," she said, looking at
+this last, "but I suppose she does, or she would not be so
+happy that she could forget her mother and sister.
+
+There was another picture she looked at.  Rosalie had sent
+it with the letter she wrote to her father after he had forwarded
+the money she asked for.  It was a little study in water
+colours of the head of her boy.  It was nothing but a head, the
+shoulders being fancifully draped, but the face was a peculiar
+one.  It was over-mature, and unlovely, but for a mouth at
+once pathetic and sweet.
+
+"He is not a pretty child," sighed Mrs. Vanderpoel.  "I
+should have thought Rosy would have had pretty babies. 
+Ughtred is more like his father than his mother."
+
+She spoke to her husband later, of what Betty had said.
+
+"What do you think she has in her mind, Reuben?" she asked.
+
+"What Betty has in her mind is usually good sense," was
+his response.  "She will begin to talk to me about it presently. 
+I shall not ask questions yet.  She is probably thinking: things
+over."
+
+She was, in truth, thinking things over, as she had been
+doing for some time.  She had asked questions on several
+occasions of English people she had met abroad.  But a school-
+girl cannot ask many questions, and though she had once met
+someone who knew Sir Nigel Anstruthers, it was a person who
+did not know him well, for the reason that she had not desired
+to increase her slight acquaintance.  This lady was the aunt
+of one of Bettina's fellow pupils, and she was not aware of
+the girl's relationship to Sir Nigel.  What Betty gathered
+was that her brother-in-law was regarded as a decidedly bad
+lot, that since his marriage to some American girl he had
+seemed to have money which he spent in riotous living, and that
+the wife, who was said to be a silly creature, was kept in the
+country, either because her husband did not want her in London,
+or because she preferred to stay at Stornham.  About
+the wife no one appeared to know anything, in fact.
+
+"She is rather a fool, I believe, and Sir Nigel Anstruthers
+is the kind of man a simpleton would be obliged to submit to,"
+Bettina had heard the lady say.
+
+Her own reflections upon these comments had led her
+through various paths of thought.  She could recall Rosalie's
+girlhood, and what she herself, as an unconsciously observing
+child, had known of her character.  She remembered the simple
+impressionability of her mind.  She had been the most amenable
+little creature in the world.  Her yielding amiability
+could always be counted upon as a factor by the calculating;
+sweet-tempered to weakness, she could be beguiled or
+distressed into any course the desires of others dictated.  An
+ill-tempered or self-pitying person could alter any line of
+conduct she herself wished to pursue.
+
+"She was neither clever nor strong-minded," Betty said to
+herself. " A man like Sir Nigel Anstruthers could make what
+he chose of her.  I wonder what he has done to her?"
+
+Of one thing she thought she was sure.  This was that
+Rosalie's aloofness from her family was the result of his design.
+
+She comprehended, in her maturer years, the dislike of her
+childhood.  She remembered a certain look in his face which
+she had detested.  She had not known then that it was the
+look of a rather clever brute, who was malignant, but she
+knew now.
+
+"He used to hate us all," she said to herself.  "He did not
+mean to know us when he had taken Rosalie away, and he did
+not intend that she should know us."
+
+She had heard rumours of cases somewhat parallel, cases in
+which girls' lives had become swamped in those of their
+husbands, and their husbands' families.  And she had also
+heard unpleasant details of the means employed to reach the
+desired results.  Annie Butterfield's husband had forbidden her
+to correspond with her American relatives.  He had argued
+that such correspondence was disturbing to her mind, and to
+the domestic duties which should be every decent woman's
+religion.  One of the occasions of his beating her had been in
+consequence of his finding her writing to her mother a letter
+blotted with tears.  Husbands frequently objected to their
+wives' relatives, but there was a special order of European
+husband who opposed violently any intimacy with American
+relations on the practical ground that their views of a wife's
+position, with regard to her husband, were of a revolutionary
+nature.
+
+Mrs. Vanderpoel had in her possession every letter Rosalie
+or her husband had ever written.  Bettina asked to be allowed
+to read them, and one morning seated herself in her own room
+before a blazing fire, with the collection on a table at her
+side.  She read them in order.  Nigel's began as they went on. 
+They were all in one tone, formal, uninteresting, and requiring
+no answers.  There was not a suggestion of human feeling in one
+of them.
+
+"He wrote them," said Betty, "so that we could not say
+that he had never written."
+
+Rosalie's first epistles were affectionate, but timid.  At the
+outset she was evidently trying to conceal the fact that she
+was homesick.  Gradually she became briefer and more
+constrained.  In one she said pathetically, "I am such a bad
+letter writer.  I always feel as if I want to tear up what I
+have written, because I never say half that is in my heart. 
+Mrs. Vanderpoel had kissed that letter many a time.  She
+was sure that a mark on the paper near this particular sentence
+was where a tear had fallen.  Bettina was sure of this, too, and
+sat and looked at the fire for some time.
+
+That night she went to a ball, and when she returned home,
+she persuaded her mother to go to bed.
+
+"I want to have a talk with father," she exclaimed.  "I
+am going to ask him something."
+
+She went to the great man's private room, where he sat at
+work, even after the hours when less seriously engaged people
+come home from balls.  The room he sat in was one of the 
+apartments newspapers had with much detail described.  It
+was luxuriously comfortable, and its effect was sober and rich
+and fine.
+
+When Bettina came in, Vanderpoel, looking up to smile at
+her in welcome, was struck by the fact that as a background
+to an entering figure of tall, splendid girlhood in a ball dress
+it was admirable, throwing up all its whiteness and grace and
+sweep of line.  He was always glad to see Betty.  The rich
+strength of the life radiating from her, the reality and glow of
+her were good for him and had the power of detaching him from
+work of which he was tired.
+
+She smiled back at him, and, coming forward took her place
+in a big armchair close to him, her lace-frilled cloak slipping
+from her shoulders with a soft rustling sound which seemed to
+convey her intention to stay.
+
+"Are you too busy to be interrupted?" she asked, her
+mellow voice caressing him.  "I want to talk to you about
+something I am going to do."  She put out her hand and laid it
+on his with a clinging firmness which meant strong feeling. 
+"At least, I am going to do it if you will help me," she ended.
+
+"What is it, Betty?" he inquired, his usual interest in her
+accentuated by her manner.
+
+She laid her other hand on his and he clasped both with
+his own.
+
+"When the Worthingtons sail for England next month,"
+she explained, "I want to go with them.  Mrs. Worthington
+is very kind and will be good enough to take care of me until
+I reach London."
+
+Mr. Vanderpoel moved slightly in his chair.  Then their
+eyes met comprehendingly.  He saw what hers held.
+
+"From there you are going to Stornham Court!" he exclaimed.
+
+"To see Rosy," she answered, leaning a little forward.  "To
+SEE her.
+
+"You believe that what has happened has not been her
+fault?" he said.  There was a look in her face which warmed
+his blood.
+
+"I have always been sure that Nigel Anstruthers arranged it."
+
+"Do you think he has been unkind to her?"
+
+"I am going to see," she answered.
+
+"Betty," he said, "tell me all about it."
+
+He knew that this was no suddenly-formed plan, and he
+knew it would be well worth while to hear the details of its
+growth.  It was so interestingly like her to have remained silent
+through the process of thinking a thing out, evolving her final
+idea without having disturbed him by bringing to him any
+chaotic uncertainties.
+
+"It's a sort of confession," she answered.  "Father, I have
+been thinking about it for years.  I said nothing because for so
+long I knew I was only a child, and a child's judgment might
+be worth so little.  But through all those years I was learning
+things and gathering evidence.  When I was at school,
+first in one country and then another, I used to tell myself
+that I was growing up and preparing myself to do a particular
+thing--to go to rescue Rosy."
+
+"I used to guess you thought of her in a way of your own,"
+Vanderpoel said, "but I did not guess you were thinking that
+much.  You were always a solid, loyal little thing, and there
+was business capacity in your keeping your scheme to yourself. 
+Let us look the matter in the face.  Suppose she does
+not need rescuing.  Suppose, after all, she is a comfortable,
+fine lady and adores her husband.  What then?"
+
+"If I should find that to be true, I will behave myself very
+well--as if we had expected nothing else.  I will make her a
+short visit and come away.  Lady Cecilia Orme, whom I
+knew in Florence, has asked me to stay with her in London.  I
+will go to her.  She is a charming woman.  But I must first
+see Rosy--SEE her."
+
+Mr. Vanderpoel thought the matter over during a few
+moments of silence.
+
+"You do not wish your mother to go with you?" he said presently.
+
+"I believe it will be better that she should not," she
+answered.  "If there are difficulties or disappointments she
+would be too unhappy."
+
+"Yes," he said slowly, "and she could not control her
+feelings.  She would give the whole thing away, poor girl."
+
+He had been looking at the carpet reflectively, and now he
+looked at Bettina.
+
+"What are you expecting to find, at the worst?" he asked
+her.  "The kind of thing which will need management while
+it is being looked into?"
+
+"I do not know what I am expecting to find," was her reply. 
+"We know absolutely nothing; but that Rosy was fond of us,
+and that her marriage has seemed to make her cease to care. 
+She was not like that; she was not like that!  Was she, father?"
+
+"No, she wasn't," he exclaimed.  The memory of her in
+her short-frocked and early girlish days, a pretty, smiling,
+effusive thing, given to lavish caresses and affectionate little
+surprises for them all, came back to him vividly.  "She was the
+most affectionate girl I ever knew," he said.  "She was more
+affectionate than you, Betty," with a smile.
+
+Bettina smiled in return and bent her head to put a kiss on
+his hand, a warm, lovely, comprehending kiss.
+
+"If she had been different I should not have thought so
+much of the change," she said.  "I believe that people are
+always more or less LIKE themselves as long as they live.  What
+has seemed to happen has been so unlike Rosy that there must
+be some reason for it."
+
+"You think that she has been prevented from seeing us?"
+
+"I think it so possible that I am not going to announce my
+visit beforehand."
+
+"You have a good head, Betty," her father said.
+
+"If Sir Nigel has put obstacles in our way before, he will
+do it again.  I shall try to find out, when I reach London, if
+Rosalie is at Stornham.  When I am sure she is there, I shall
+go and present myself.  If Sir Nigel meets me at the park
+gates and orders his gamekeepers to drive me off the premises,
+we shall at least know that he has some reason for not wishing
+to regard the usual social and domestic amenities.  I feel rather
+like a detective.  It entertains me and excites me a little."
+
+The deep blue of her eyes shone under the shadow of the
+extravagant lashes as she laughed.
+
+"Are you willing that I should go, father?" she said next.
+
+"Yes," he answered.  "I am willing to trust you, Betty, to
+do things I would not trust other girls to try at.  If you were
+not my girl at all, if you were a man on Wall Street, I should
+know you would be pretty safe to come out a little more than
+even in any venture you made.  You know how to keep cool."
+
+Bettina picked up her fallen cloak and laid it over her arm. 
+It was made of billowy frills of Malines lace, such as only
+Vanderpoels could buy.  She looked down at the amazing
+thing and touched up the frills with her fingers as she
+whimsically smiled.
+
+"There are a good many girls who can he trusted to do 
+things in these days," she said.  "Women have found out so
+much.  Perhaps it is because the heroines of novels have
+informed them.  Heroines and heroes always bring in the new
+fashions in character.  I believe it is years since a heroine
+`burst into a flood of tears.'  It has been discovered, really,
+that nothing is to be gained by it.  Whatsoever I find at
+Stornham Court, I shall neither weep nor be helpless.  There is
+the Atlantic cable, you know.  Perhaps that is one of the reasons
+why heroines have changed.  When they could not escape from
+their persecutors except in a stage coach, and could not send
+telegrams, they were more or less in everyone's hands.  It is
+different now.  Thank you, father, you are very good to believe
+in me."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+ON BOARD THE "MERIDIANA"
+
+A large transatlantic steamer lying at the wharf on a brilliant,
+sunny morning just before its departure is an interesting
+and suggestive object to those who are fond of following
+suggestion to its end.  One sometimes wonders if it is possible
+that the excitement in the dock atmosphere could ever become a
+thing to which one was sufficiently accustomed to be able to
+regard it as among things commonplace.  The rumbling and
+rattling of waggons and carts, the loading and unloading of
+boxes and bales, the people who are late, and the people who
+are early, the faces which are excited, and the faces which are
+sad, the trunks and bales, and cranes which creak and groan,
+the shouts and cries, the hurry and confusion of movement,
+notwithstanding that every day has seen them all for years, have
+a sort of perennial interest to the looker-on.
+
+This is, perhaps, more especially the case when the looker-on
+is to be a passenger on the outgoing ship; and the exhilaration
+of his point of view may greatly depend upon the reason for his
+voyage and the class by which he travels.  Gaiety and youth
+usually appear upon the promenade deck, having taken saloon
+passage.  Dulness, commerce, and eld mingling with them, it
+is true, but with a discretion which does not seem to dominate. 
+Second-class passengers wear a more practical aspect, and youth
+among them is rarer and more grave.  People who must travel
+second and third class make voyages for utilitarian reasons. 
+Their object is usually to better themselves in one way or
+another.  When they are going from Liverpool to New York,
+it is usually to enter upon new efforts and new labours.  When
+they are returning from New York to Liverpool, it is often
+because the new life has proved less to be depended upon than
+the old, and they are bearing back with them bitterness of
+soul and discouragement of spirit.
+
+On the brilliant spring morning when the huge liner
+Meridiana was to sail for England a young man, who was a
+second-class passenger, leaned upon the ship's rail and watched
+the turmoil on the wharf with a detached and not at all buoyant
+air.
+
+His air was detached because he had other things in his
+mind than those merely passing before him, and he was not
+buoyant because they were not cheerful or encouraging subjects
+for reflection.  He was a big young man, well hung together,
+and carrying himself well; his face was square-jawed
+and rugged, and he had dark red hair restrained by its close
+cut from waving strongly on his forehead.  His eyes were
+red brown, and a few dark freckles marked his clear skin.  He
+was of the order of man one looks at twice, having looked at
+him once, though one does not in the least know why, unless
+one finally reaches some degree of intimacy.
+
+He watched the vehicles, heavy and light, roll into the big
+shed-like building and deposit their freight; he heard the voices
+and caught the sentences of instruction and comment; he saw
+boxes and bales hauled from the dock side to the deck and
+swung below with the rattling of machinery and chains.  But
+these formed merely a noisy background to his mood, which
+was self-centred and gloomy.  He was one of those who go
+back to their native land knowing themselves conquered.  He
+had left England two years before, feeling obstinately determined
+to accomplish a certain difficult thing, but forces of
+nature combining with the circumstances of previous education
+and living had beaten him.  He had lost two years and all the
+money he had ventured.  He was going back to the place he
+had come from, and he was carrying with him a sense of having
+been used hardly by fortune, and in a way he had not deserved.
+
+He had gone out to the West with the intention of working
+hard and using his hands as well as his brains; he had not
+been squeamish; he had, in fact, laboured like a ploughman; and
+to be obliged to give in had been galling and bitter.  There are
+human beings into whose consciousness of themselves the
+possibility of being beaten does not enter.  This man was one of
+them.
+
+The ship was of the huge and luxuriously-fitted class by
+which the rich and fortunate are transported from one continent
+to another.  Passengers could indulge themselves in suites
+of rooms and live sumptuously.  As the man leaning on the
+rail looked on, he saw messengers bearing baskets and boxes of
+fruit and flowers with cards and notes attached, hurrying up
+the gangway to deliver them to waiting stewards.  These were
+the farewell offerings to be placed in staterooms, or to await
+their owners on the saloon tables.  Salter--the second-class
+passenger's name was Salter--had seen a few such offerings
+before on the first crossing.  But there had not been such
+lavishness at Liverpool.  It was the New Yorkers who were
+sumptuous in such matters, as he had been told.  He had also
+heard casually that the passenger list on this voyage was to
+record important names, the names of multi-millionaire people
+who were going over for the London season.
+
+Two stewards talking near him, earlier in the morning, had
+been exulting over the probable largesse such a list would result
+in at the end of the passage.
+
+"The Worthingtons and the Hirams and the John William
+Spayters," said one.  "They travel all right.  They know what
+they want and they want a good deal, and they're willing to
+pay for it."
+
+"Yes.  They're not school teachers going over to improve
+their minds and contriving to cross in a big ship by economising
+in everything else.  Miss Vanderpoel's sailing with the
+Worthingtons.  She's got the best suite all to herself.  She'll
+bring back a duke or one of those prince fellows. How many
+millions has Vanderpoel?"
+
+"How many millions.  How many hundred millions!" said
+his companion, gloating cheerfully over the vastness of unknown
+possibilities.  "I've crossed with Miss Vanderpoel often, two
+or three times when she was in short frocks.  She's the kind
+of girl you read about.  And she's got money enough to buy
+in half a dozen princes."
+
+"There are New Yorkers who won't like it if she does,"
+returned the other.  "There's been too much money going out
+of the country.  Her suite is crammed full of Jack roses, now,
+and there are boxes waiting outside."
+
+Salter moved away and heard no more.  He moved away, in
+fact, because he was conscious that to a man in his case, this 
+dwelling upon millions, this plethora of wealth, was a little
+revolting.  He had walked down Broadway and seen the price
+of Jacqueminot roses, and he was not soothed or allured at this
+particular moment by the picture of a girl whose half-dozen
+cabins were crowded with them.
+
+"Oh, the devil!" he said.  "It sounds vulgar."  And he
+walked up and down fast, squaring his shoulders, with his
+hands in the pockets of his rough, well-worn coat.  He had
+seen in England something of the American young woman
+with millionaire relatives.  He had been scarcely more than a
+boy when the American flood first began to rise.  He had been
+old enough, however, to hear people talk.  As he had grown
+older, Salter had observed its advance.  Englishmen had married
+American beauties.  American fortunes had built up English
+houses, which otherwise threatened to fall into decay.  Then
+the American faculty of adaptability came into play.  Anglo-
+American wives became sometimes more English than their
+husbands.  They proceeded to Anglicise their relations, their
+relations' clothes, even, in time, their speech.  They carried or
+sent English conventions to the States, their brothers ordered
+their clothes from West End tailors, their sisters began to wear
+walking dresses, to play out-of-door games and take active
+exercise.  Their mothers tentatively took houses in London or
+Paris, there came a period when their fathers or uncles, serious
+or anxious business men, the most unsporting of human beings,
+rented castles or manors with huge moors and covers attached
+and entertained large parties of shooters or fishers who could
+be lured to any quarter by the promise of the particular form
+of slaughter for which they burned.
+
+"Sheer American business perspicacity, that," said Salter, as
+he marched up and down, thinking of a particular case of this
+order.  "There's something admirable in the practical way they
+make for what they want.  They want to amalgamate with
+English people, not for their own sake, but because their women
+like it, and so they offer the men thousands of acres full of
+things to kill.  They can get them by paying for them, and they
+know how to pay."  He laughed a little, lifting his square
+shoulders.  "Balthamor's six thousand acres of grouse moor
+and Elsty's salmon fishing are rented by the Chicago man.  He
+doesn't care twopence for them, and does not know a pheasant
+from a caper-cailzie, but his wife wants to know men who do."
+
+It must be confessed that Salter was of the English who
+were not pleased with the American Invasion.  In some of his
+views of the matter he was a little prehistoric and savage, but
+the modern side of his character was too intelligent to lack
+reason.  He was by no means entirely modern, however; a large
+part of his nature belonged to the age in which men had
+fought fiercely for what they wanted to get or keep, and when
+the amenities of commerce had not become powerful factors in
+existence.
+
+"They're not a bad lot," he was thinking at this moment. 
+"They are rather fine in a way.  They are clever and powerful
+and interesting--more so than they know themselves.  But it
+is all commerce.  They don't come and fight with us and get
+possession of us by force.  They come and buy us.  They buy
+our land and our homes, and our landowners, for that matter--
+when they don't buy them, they send their women to marry
+them, confound it! "
+
+He took half a dozen more strides and lifted his shoulders
+again.
+
+"Beggarly lot as I am," he said, "unlikely as it seems that
+I can marry at all, I'm hanged if I don't marry an Englishwoman,
+if I give my life to a woman at all."
+
+But, in fact, he was of the opinion that he should never give
+his life to any woman, and this was because he was, at this
+period, also of the opinion that there was small prospect of
+its ever being worth the giving or taking.  It had been one of
+those lives which begin untowardly and are ruled by unfair
+circumstances.
+
+He had a particularly well-cut and expressive mouth, and, as
+he went back to the ship's side and leaned on his folded arms
+on the rail again, its curves concealed a good deal of strong
+feeling.
+
+The wharf was busier than before.  In less than half an
+hour the ship was to sail.  The bustle and confusion had
+increased.  There were people hurrying about looking for friends,
+and there were people scribbling off excited farewell messages
+at the telegraph office.  The situation was working up to its
+climax.  An observing looker-on might catch glimpses of emotional
+scenes.  Many of the passengers were already on board, parties of
+them accompanied by their friends were making their
+way up the gangplank.
+
+Salter had just been watching a luxuriously cared-for little
+invalid woman being carried on deck in a reclining chair, when
+his attention was attracted by the sound of trampling hoofs
+and rolling wheels.  Two noticeably big and smart carriages 
+had driven up to the stopping-place for vehicles.  They were
+gorgeously of the latest mode, and their tall, satin-skinned
+horses jangled silver chains and stepped up to their noses.
+
+"Here come the Worthingtons, whosoever they may be,"
+thought Salter.  "The fine up-standing young woman is, no
+doubt, the multi-millionairess."
+
+The fine, up-standing young woman WAS the multi-millionairess. 
+Bettina walked up the gangway in the sunshine, and
+the passengers upon the upper deck craned their necks to look
+at her.  Her carriage of her head and shoulders invariably made
+people turn to look.
+
+"My, ain't she fine-looking!" exclaimed an excited lady
+beholder above.  "I guess that must be Miss Vanderpoel, the
+multi-millionaire's daughter.  Jane told me she'd heard she was
+crossing this trip."
+
+Bettina heard her.  She sometimes wondered if she was ever
+pointed out, if her name was ever mentioned without the addition
+of the explanatory statement that she was the multi-millionaire's
+daughter.  As a child she had thought it ridiculous
+and tiresome, as she had grown older she had felt that only
+a remarkable individuality could surmount a fact so ever present.
+
+It was like a tremendous quality which overshadowed
+everything else.
+
+"It wounds my vanity, I have no doubt," she had said to
+her father.  "Nobody ever sees me, they only see you and your
+millions and millions of dollars."
+
+Salter watched her pass up the gangway.  The phase
+through which he was living was not of the order which leads
+a man to dwell upon the beautiful and inspiriting as expressed
+by the female image.  Success and the hopefulness which
+engender warmth of soul and quickness of heart are required for
+the development of such allurements.  He thought of the
+Vanderpoel millions as the lady on the deck had thought of them,
+and in his mind somehow the girl herself appeared to express
+them.  The rich up-springing sweep of her abundant hair, her
+height, her colouring, the remarkable shade and length of her
+lashes, the full curve of her mouth, all, he told himself, looked
+expensive, as if even nature herself had been given carte
+blanche, and the best possible articles procured for the money.
+
+"She moves," he thought sardonically, "as if she were
+perfectly aware that she could pay for anything.  An unlimited
+income, no doubt, establishes in the owner the equivalent to
+a sense of rank."
+
+He changed his position for one in which he could command 
+a view of the promenade deck where the arriving passengers
+were gradually appearing.  He did this from the idle and
+careless curiosity which, though it is not a matter of absolute
+interest, does not object to being entertained by passing
+objects.  He saw the Worthington party reappear.  It struck
+Salter that they looked not so much like persons coming on board
+a ship, as like people who were returning to a hotel to which
+they were accustomed, and which was also accustomed to them.  He
+argued that they had probably crossed the Atlantic innumerable
+times in this particular steamer.  The deck stewards knew them
+and made obeisance with empressement.  Miss Vanderpoel
+nodded to the steward Salter had heard discussing her.  She
+gave him a smile of recognition and paused a moment to speak
+to him.  Salter saw her sweep the deck with her glance and
+then designate a sequestered corner, such as the experienced
+voyager would recognise as being desirably sheltered.  She was
+evidently giving an order concerning the placing of her deck
+chair, which was presently brought.  An elegantly neat and
+decorous person in black, who was evidently her maid, appeared
+later, followed by a steward who carried cushions and sumptuous
+fur rugs.  These being arranged, a delightful corner was
+left alluringly prepared.  Miss Vanderpoel, after her
+instructions to the deck steward, had joined her party and seemed
+to be awaiting some arrival anxiously.
+
+"She knows how to do herself well," Salter commented, "and she
+realises that forethought is a practical factor.  Millions have
+been productive of composure.  It is not unnatural, either."
+
+It was but a short time later that the warning bell was
+rung.  Stewards passed through the crowds calling out, "All
+ashore, if you please--all ashore."  Final embraces were in
+order on all sides.  People shook hands with fervour and
+laughed a little nervously.  Women kissed each other and
+poured forth hurried messages to be delivered on the other side
+of the Atlantic.  Having kissed and parted, some of them rushed
+back and indulged in little clutches again.  Notwithstanding
+that the tide of humanity surges across the Atlantic almost as
+regularly as the daily tide surges in on its shores, a wave of
+emotion sweeps through every ship at such partings.
+
+Salter stood on deck and watched the crowd dispersing. 
+Some of the people were laughing and some had red eyes. 
+Groups collected on the wharf and tried to say still more last
+words to their friends crowding against the rail.
+
+The Worthingtons kept their places and were still looking 
+out, by this time disappointedly.  It seemed that the friend or
+friends they expected were not coming.  Salter saw that Miss
+Vanderpoel looked more disappointed than the rest.  She leaned
+forward and strained her eyes to see.  Just at the last moment
+there was the sound of trampling horses and rolling wheels
+again.  From the arriving carriage descended hastily an elderly
+woman, who lifted out a little boy excited almost to tears.  He
+was a dear, chubby little person in flapping sailor trousers, and
+he carried a splendidly-caparisoned toy donkey in his arms. 
+Salter could not help feeling slightly excited himself as they
+rushed forward.  He wondered if they were passengers who
+would be left behind.
+
+They were not passengers, but the arrivals Miss Vanderpoel
+had been expecting so ardently.  They had come to say
+good-bye to her and were too late for that, at least, as the
+gangway was just about to be withdrawn.
+
+Miss Vanderpoel leaned forward with an amazingly fervid
+expression on her face.
+
+"Tommy!  Tommy!" she cried to the little boy.  "Here
+I am, Tommy.  We can say good-bye from here."
+
+The little boy, looking up, broke into a wail of despair.
+
+"Betty!  Betty!  Betty!" he cried.  "I wanted to kiss you,
+Betty."
+
+Betty held out her arms.  She did it with entire forgetfulness
+of the existence of any lookers-on, and with such outreaching
+love on her face that it seemed as if the child must feel her
+touch.  She made a beautiful, warm, consoling bud of her mouth.
+
+"We'll kiss each other from here, Tommy," she said. 
+"See, we can.  Kiss me, and I will kiss you."
+
+Tommy held out his arms and the magnificent donkey. 
+"Betty," he cried, "I brought you my donkey.  I wanted to
+give it to you for a present, because you liked it."
+
+Miss Vanderpoel bent further forward and addressed the
+elderly woman.
+
+"Matilda," she said, "please pack Master Tommy's present
+and send it to me!  I want it very much."
+
+Tender smiles irradiated the small face.  The gangway
+was withdrawn, and, amid the familiar sounds of a big craft's
+first struggle, the ship began to move.  Miss Vanderpoel still
+bent forward and held out her arms.
+
+"I will soon come back, Tommy," she cried, "and we are
+always friends."
+
+The child held out his short blue serge arms also, and Salter
+watching him could not but be touched for all his gloom of
+mind.
+
+"I wanted to kiss you, Betty," he heard in farewell.  "I
+did so want to kiss you."
+
+And so they steamed away upon the blue.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE SECOND-CLASS PASSENGER
+
+Up to a certain point the voyage was like all other voyages. 
+During the first two days there were passengers who did not
+appear on deck, but as the weather was fair for the season of
+the year, there were fewer absentees than is usual.  Indeed, on
+the third day the deck chairs were all filled, people who were
+given to tramping during their voyages had begun to walk
+their customary quota of carefully-measured miles the day. 
+There were a few pale faces dozing here and there, but the
+general aspect of things had begun to be sprightly.  Shuffleboard
+players and quoit enthusiasts began to bestir themselves,
+the deck steward appeared regularly with light repasts of beef
+tea and biscuits, and the brilliant hues of red, blue, or yellow
+novels made frequent spots of colour upon the promenade. 
+Persons of some initiative went to the length of making
+tentative observations to their next-chair neighbours.  The
+second-cabin passengers were cheerful, and the steerage
+passengers, having tumbled up, formed friendly groups and began
+to joke with each other.
+
+The Worthingtons had plainly the good fortune to be
+respectable sailors.  They reappeared on the second day and
+established regular habits, after the manner of accustomed
+travellers.  Miss Vanderpoel's habits were regular from the
+first, and when Salter saw her he was impressed even more
+at the outset with her air of being at home instead of on board
+ship.  Her practically well-chosen corner was an agreeable
+place to look at.  Her chair was built for ease of angle and
+width, her cushions were of dark rich colours, her travelling
+rugs were of black fox fur, and she owned an adjustable table
+for books and accompaniments.  She appeared early in the
+morning and walked until the sea air crimsoned her cheeks,
+she sat and read with evident enjoyment, she talked to her
+companions and plainly entertained them.
+
+Salter, being bored and in bad spirits, found himself watching
+her rather often, but he knew that but for the small, comic
+episode of Tommy, he would have definitely disliked her.  The
+dislike would not have been fair, but it would have existed in
+spite of himself.  It would not have been fair because it would
+have been founded simply upon the ignoble resentment of envy,
+upon the poor truth that he was not in the state of mind to
+avoid resenting the injustice of fate in bestowing multi-millions
+upon one person and his offspring.  He resented his own
+resentment, but was obliged to acknowledge its existence in his
+humour.  He himself, especially and peculiarly, had always
+known the bitterness of poverty, the humiliation of seeing where
+money could be well used, indeed, ought to be used, and at
+the same time having ground into him the fact that there was
+no money to lay one's hand on.  He had hated it even as a
+boy, because in his case, and that of his people, the whole
+thing was undignified and unbecoming.  It was humiliating
+to him now to bring home to himself the fact that the thing
+for which he was inclined to dislike this tall, up-standing girl
+was her unconscious (he realised the unconsciousness of it) air
+of having always lived in the atmosphere of millions, of never
+having known a reason why she should not have anything she
+had a desire for.  Perhaps, upon the whole, he said to himself,
+it was his own ill luck and sense of defeat which made her
+corner, with its cushions and comforts, her properly attentive
+maid, and her cold weather sables expressive of a fortune too
+colossal to be decent.
+
+The episode of the plump, despairing Tommy he had liked,
+however.  There had been a fine naturalness about it and a
+fine practicalness in her prompt order to the elderly nurse that
+the richly-caparisoned donkey should be sent to her.  This
+had at once made it clear to the donor that his gift was too
+valuable to be left behind.
+
+"She did not care twopence for the lot of us," was his
+summing up.  "She might have been nothing but the nicest
+possible warm-hearted nursemaid or a cottage woman who loved
+the child."
+
+He was quite aware that though he had found himself more
+than once observing her, she herself had probably not recognised
+the trivial fact of his existing upon that other side of
+the barrier which separated the higher grade of passenger from
+the lower.  There was, indeed, no reason why she should have
+singled him out for observation, and she was, in fact, too
+frequently absorbed in her own reflections to be in the frame
+of mind to remark her fellow passengers to the extent which
+was generally customary with her.  During her crossings of
+the Atlantic she usually made mental observation of the people
+on board.  This time, when she was not talking to the
+Worthingtons, or reading, she was thinking of the possibilities
+of her visit to Stornham.  She used to walk about the deck
+thinking of them and, sitting in her chair, sum them up as her
+eyes rested on the rolling and breaking waves.
+
+There were many things to be considered, and one of the
+first was the perfectly sane suggestion her father had made.
+
+"Suppose she does not want to be rescued?  Suppose you
+find her a comfortable fine lady who adores her husband."
+
+Such a thing was possible, though Bettina did not think it
+probable.  She intended, however, to prepare herself even for
+this.  If she found Lady Anstruthers plump and roseate, pleased
+with herself and her position, she was quite equal to making
+her visit appear a casual and conventional affair.
+
+"I ought to wish it to be so," she thought, "and, yet, how
+disappointingly I should feel she had changed.  Still, even
+ethical reasons would not excuse one for wishing her to be
+miserable."  She was a creature with a number of passionate
+ideals which warred frequently with the practical side of her
+mentality.  Often she used to walk up and down the deck or lean
+upon the ship's side, her eyes stormy with emotions.
+
+"I do not want to find Rosy a heartless woman, and I do
+not want to find her wretched.  What do I want?  Only the
+usual thing--that what cannot be undone had never been done. 
+People are always wishing that."
+
+She was standing near the second-cabin barrier thinking
+this, the first time she saw the passenger with the red hair. 
+She had paused by mere chance, and while her eyes were stormy
+with her thought, she suddenly became conscious that she was
+looking directly into other eyes as darkling as her own.  They
+were those of a man on the wrong side of the barrier.  He
+had a troubled, brooding face, and, as their gaze met, each of
+them started slightly and turned away with the sense of having
+unconsciously intruded and having been intruded upon.
+
+"That rough-looking man," she commented to herself, "is
+as anxious and disturbed as I am."
+
+Salter did look rough, it was true.  His well-worn clothes 
+had suffered somewhat from the restrictions of a second-class
+cabin shared with two other men.  But the aspect which had
+presented itself to her brief glance had been not so much
+roughness of clothing as of mood expressing itself in his
+countenance.  He was thinking harshly and angrily of the life
+ahead of him.
+
+These looks of theirs which had so inadvertently encountered
+each other were of that order which sometimes startles
+one when in passing a stranger one finds one's eyes entangled
+for a second in his or hers, as the case may be.  At such times
+it seems for that instant difficult to disentangle one's gaze. 
+But neither of these two thought of the other much, after
+hurrying away.  Each was too fully mastered by personal mood.
+
+There would, indeed, have been no reason for their
+encountering each other further but for "the accident," as it was
+called when spoken of afterwards, the accident which might
+so easily have been a catastrophe.  It occurred that night.  This
+was two nights before they were to land.
+
+Everybody had begun to come under the influence of that
+cheerfulness of humour, the sense of relief bordering on gaiety,
+which generally elates people when a voyage is drawing to a
+close.  If one has been dull, one begins to gather one's self
+together, rejoiced that the boredom is over.  In any case, there
+are plans to be made, thought of, or discussed.
+
+"You wish to go to Stornham at once?" Mrs. Worthington
+said to Bettina.  "How pleased Lady Anstruthers and Sir Nigel
+must be at the idea of seeing you with them after so long."
+
+"I can scarcely tell you how I am looking forward to it,"
+Betty answered.
+
+She sat in her corner among her cushions looking at the dark
+water which seemed to sweep past the ship, and listening to
+the throb of the engines.  She was not gay.  She was wondering
+how far the plans she had made would prove feasible. 
+Mrs. Worthington was not aware that her visit to Stornham
+Court was to be unannounced.  It had not been necessary to
+explain the matter.  The whole affair was simple and decorous
+enough.  Miss Vanderpoel was to bid good-bye to her
+friends and go at once to her sister, Lady Anstruthers, whose
+husband's country seat was but a short journey from London. 
+Bettina and her father had arranged that the fact should
+be kept from the society paragraphist.  This had required some
+adroit management, but had actually been accomplished.
+
+As the waves swished past her, Bettina was saying to herself,
+"What will Rosy say when she sees me!  What shall I say
+when I see Rosy?  We are drawing nearer to each other with
+every wave that passes."
+
+A fog which swept up suddenly sent them all below rather
+early.  The Worthingtons laughed and talked a little in their
+staterooms, but presently became quiet and had evidently gone
+to bed.  Bettina was restless and moved about her room alone
+after she had sent away her maid.  She at last sat down and
+finished a letter she had been writing to her father.
+
+"As I near the land," she wrote, "I feel a sort of excitement. 
+Several times to-day I have recalled so distinctly the
+picture of Rosy as I saw her last, when we all stood crowded
+upon the wharf at New York to see her off.  She and Nigel
+were leaning upon the rail of the upper deck.  She looked such
+a delicate, airy little creature, quite like a pretty schoolgirl
+with tears in her eyes.  She was laughing and crying at the same
+time, and kissing both her hands to us again and again.  I was
+crying passionately myself, though I tried to conceal the fact,
+and I remember that each time I looked from Rosy to Nigel's
+heavy face the poignancy of my anguish made me break forth
+again.  I wonder if it was because I was a child, that he looked
+such a contemptuous brute, even when he pretended to smile. 
+It is twelve years since then.  I wonder--how I wonder, what
+I shall find."
+
+She stopped writing and sat a few moments, her chin upon
+her hand, thinking.  Suddenly she sprang to her feet in alarm. 
+The stillness of the night was broken by wild shouts, a running
+of feet outside, a tumult of mingled sounds and motion, a dash
+and rush of surging water, a strange thumping and straining of
+engines, and a moment later she was hurled from one side of
+her stateroom to the other by a crashing shock which seemed
+to heave the ship out of the sea, shuddering as if the end of
+all things had come.
+
+It was so sudden and horrible a thing that, though she had
+only been flung upon a pile of rugs and cushions and was
+unhurt, she felt as if she had been struck on the head and
+plunged into wild delirium.  Above the sound of the dashing
+and rocking waves, the straining and roaring of hacking engines
+and the pandemonium of voices rose from one end of the ship
+to the other, one wild, despairing, long-drawn shriek of women
+and children.  Bettina turned sick at the mad terror in it--
+the insensate, awful horror.
+
+
+"Something has run into us!" she gasped, getting up with
+her heart leaping in her throat.
+
+She could hear the Worthingtons' tempest of terrified
+confusion through the partitions between them, and she remembered
+afterwards that in the space of two or three seconds, and
+in the midst of their clamour, a hundred incongruous thoughts
+leaped through her brain.  Perhaps they were this moment
+going down.  Now she knew what it was like!  This thing
+she had read of in newspapers!  Now she was going down
+in mid-ocean, she, Betty Vanderpoel!  And, as she sprang to
+clutch her fur coat, there flashed before her mental vision a
+gruesome picture of the headlines in the newspapers and the
+inevitable reference to the millions she represented.
+
+"I must keep calm," she heard herself say, as she fastened
+the long coat, clenching her teeth to keep them from chattering. 
+"Poor Daddy--poor Daddy!"
+
+Maddening new sounds were all about her, sounds of water
+dashing and churning, sounds of voices bellowing out commands,
+straining and leaping sounds of the engines.  What
+was it--what was it?  She must at least find out.  Everybody
+was going mad in the staterooms, the stewards were rushing
+about, trying to quiet people, their own voices shaking and
+breaking into cracked notes.  If the worst had happened,
+everyone would be fighting for life in a few minutes.  Out on
+deck she must get and find out for herself what the worst was.
+
+She was the first woman outside, though the wails and shrieks
+swelled below, and half-dressed, ghastly creatures tumbled
+gasping up the companion-way.
+
+"What is it?" she heard.  "My God! what's happened?  Where's the
+Captain!  Are we going down!  The boats!  The boats!"
+
+It was useless to speak to the seamen rushing by.  They did
+not see, much less hear!  She caught sight of a man who
+could not be a sailor, since he was standing still.  She made her
+way to him, thankful that she had managed to stop her teeth
+chattering.
+
+"What has happened to us?" she said.
+
+He turned and looked at her straitly.  He was the second-
+cabin passenger with the red hair.
+
+"A tramp steamer has run into us in the fog," he answered.
+
+"How much harm is done?"
+
+"They are trying to find out.  I am standing here on the
+chance of hearing something.  It is madness to ask any man
+questions."
+
+They spoke to each other in short, sharp sentences,
+knowing there was no time to lose.
+
+"Are you horribly frightened?" he asked.
+
+She stamped her foot.
+
+"I hate it--I hate it!" she said, flinging out her hand
+towards the black, heaving water.  "The plunge--the choking!  No
+one could hate it more.  But I want to DO something!"
+
+She was turning away when he caught her hand and held her.
+
+"Wait a second," he said.  "I hate it as much as you do,
+but I believe we two can keep our heads.  Those who can
+do that may help, perhaps.  Let us try to quiet the people. 
+As soon as I find out anything I will come to your friends'
+stateroom.  You are near the boats there.  Then I shall go
+back to the second cabin.  You work on your side and I'll work
+on mine.  That's all."
+
+"Thank you.  Tell the Worthingtons.  I'm going to the
+saloon deck."  She was off as she spoke.
+
+Upon the stairway she found herself in the midst of a
+struggling panic-stricken mob, tripping over each other on the
+steps, and clutching at any garment nearest, to drag themselves
+up as they fell, or were on the point of falling.  Everyone
+was crying out in question and appeal.
+
+Bettina stood still, a firm, tall obstacle, and clutched at the
+hysteric woman who was hurled against her.
+
+"I've been on deck," she said.  "A tramp steamer has
+run into us.  No one has time to answer questions.  The first
+thing to do is to put on warm clothes and secure the life
+belts in case you need them."
+
+At once everyone turned upon her as if she was an authority. 
+She replied with almost fierce determination to the torrent of
+words poured forth.
+
+"I know nothing further--only that if one is not a fool
+one must make sure of clothes and belts."
+
+"Quite right, Miss Vanderpoel," said one young man,
+touching his cap in nervous propitiation.
+
+"Stop screaming," Betty said mercilessly to the woman.  "It's
+idiotic--the more noise you make the less chance you have.  How
+can men keep their wits among a mob of shrieking, mad women?"
+
+That the remote Miss Vanderpoel should have emerged
+from her luxurious corner to frankly bully the lot of them
+was an excellent shock for the crowd.  Men, who had been
+in danger of losing their heads and becoming as uncontrolled
+as the women, suddenly realised the fact and pulled themselves
+together.  Bettina made her way at once to the Worthingtons'
+staterooms.
+
+There she found frenzy reigning.  Blanche and Marie
+Worthington were darting to and fro, dragging about first
+one thing and then another.  They were silly with fright,
+and dashed at, and dropped alternately, life belts, shoes, jewel
+cases, and wraps, while they sobbed and cried out hysterically. 
+"Oh, what shall we do with mother!  What shall we do!"
+
+The manners of Betty Vanderpoel's sharp schoolgirl days
+returned to her in full force.  She seized Blanche by the
+shoulder and shook her.
+
+"What a donkey you are!" she said.  "Put on your
+clothes.  There they are," pushing her to the place where
+they hung.  "Marie--dress yourself this moment.  We may
+be in no real danger at all."
+
+"Do you think not!  Oh, Betty!" they wailed in concert. 
+"Oh, what shall we do with mother!"
+
+"Where is your mother?"
+
+"She fainted--Louise----"
+
+Betty was in Mrs. Worthington's cabin before they had
+finished speaking.  The poor woman had fainted, and struck
+her cheek against a chair.  She lay on the floor in her
+nightgown, with blood trickling from a cut on her face.  Her
+maid, Louise, was wringing her hands, and doing nothing whatever.
+
+"If you don't bring the brandy this minute," said the
+beautiful Miss Vanderpoel, "I'll box your ears.  Believe me,
+my girl."  She looked so capable of doing it that the woman was
+startled and actually offended into a return of her senses. 
+Miss Vanderpoel had usually the best possible manners in
+dealing with her inferiors.
+
+Betty poured brandy down Mrs. Worthington's throat and
+applied strong smelling salts until she gasped back to
+consciousness.  She had just burst into frightened sobs, when
+Betty heard confusion and exclamations in the adjoining room. 
+Blanche and Marie had cried out, and a man's voice was speaking. 
+Betty went to them.  They were in various stages of undress, and
+the red-haired second-cabin passenger was standing at the door.
+
+"I promised Miss Vanderpoel----" he was saying, when
+Betty came forward.  He turned to her promptly.
+
+"I come to tell you that it seems absolutely to be relied
+on that there is no immediate danger.  The tramp is more
+injured than we are."
+
+"Oh, are you sure?  Are you sure?" panted Blanche,
+catching at his sleeve.
+
+"Yes," he answered.  "Can I do anything for you?" he
+said to Bettina, who was on the point of speaking.
+
+"Will you be good enough to help me to assist Mrs.
+Worthington into her berth, and then try to find the doctor."
+
+He went into the next room without speaking.  To Mrs.
+Worthington he spoke briefly a few words of reassurance.  He
+was a powerful man, and laid her on her berth without dragging
+her about uncomfortably, or making her feel that her
+weight was greater than even in her most desponding moments
+she had suspected.  Even her helplessly hysteric mood was
+illuminated by a ray of grateful appreciation.
+
+"Oh, thank you--thank you," she murmured.  "And you
+are quite sure there is no actual danger, Mr.----?"
+
+"Salter," he terminated for her.  "You may feel safe.  The
+damage is really only slight, after all."
+
+"It is so good of you to come and tell us," said the poor
+lady, still tremulous.  "The shock was awful.  Our introduction
+has been an alarming one.  I--I don't think we have
+met during the voyage."
+
+"No," replied Salter.  "I am in the second cabin."
+
+"Oh! thank you.  It's so good of you," she faltered
+amiably, for want of inspiration.  As he went out of the
+stateroom, Salter spoke to Bettina.
+
+"I will send the doctor, if I can find him," he said.  "I
+think, perhaps, you had better take some brandy yourself. 
+I shall."
+
+"It's queer how little one seems to realise even that there
+are second-cabin passengers," commented Mrs. Worthington
+feebly.  "That was a nice man, and perfectly respectable.  He
+even had a kind of--of manner."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+LADY JANE GREY
+
+It seemed upon the whole even absurd that after a shock
+so awful and a panic wild enough to cause people to expose
+their very souls--for there were, of course, endless anecdotes
+to be related afterwards, illustrative of grotesque terror,
+cowardice, and utter abandonment of all shadows of convention--
+that all should end in an anticlimax of trifling danger, upon
+which, in a day or two, jokes might be made.  Even the tramp
+steamer had not been seriously injured, though its injuries
+were likely to be less easy of repair than those of the
+Meridiana.
+
+"Still," as a passenger remarked, when she steamed into
+the dock at Liverpool, "we might all be at the bottom of
+the Atlantic Ocean this morning.  Just think what columns
+there would have been in the newspapers.  Imagine Miss
+Vanderpoel's being drowned."
+
+"I was very rude to Louise, when I found her wringing
+her hands over you, and I was rude to Blanche," Bettina
+said to Mrs. Worthington.  "In fact I believe I was rude to
+a number of people that night.  I am rather ashamed."
+
+"You called me a donkey," said Blanche, "but it was the
+best thing you could have done.  You frightened me into
+putting on my shoes, instead of trying to comb my hair with
+them.  It was startling to see you march into the stateroom,
+the only person who had not been turned into a gibbering idiot. 
+I know I was gibbering, and I know Marie was."
+
+"We both gibbered at the red-haired man when he came
+in," said Marie.  "We clutched at him and gibbered together. 
+Where is the red-haired man, Betty?  Perhaps we made him
+ill.  I've not seen him since that moment."
+
+"He is in the second cabin, I suppose," Bettina answered,
+"but I have not seen him, either."
+
+"We ought to get up a testimonial and give it to him,
+because he did not gibber," said Blanche.  "He was as rude
+and as sensible as you were, Betty."
+
+They did not see him again, in fact, at that time.  He had
+reasons of his own for preferring to remain unseen.  The
+truth was that the nearer his approach to his native shores,
+the nastier, he was perfectly conscious, his temper became,
+and he did not wish to expose himself by any incident which
+might cause him stupidly and obviously to lose it.
+
+The maid, Louise, however, recognised him among her
+companions in the third-class carriage in which she travelled
+to town.  To her mind, whose opinions were regulated by
+neatly arranged standards, he looked morose and shabbily
+dressed.  Some of the other second-cabin passengers had made
+themselves quite smart in various, not too distinguished ways. 
+He had not changed his dress at all, and the large valise upon
+the luggage rack was worn and battered as if with long and
+rough usage.  The woman wondered a little if he would address
+her, and inquire after the health of her mistress.  But,
+being an astute creature, she only wondered this for an instant,
+the next she realised that, for one reason or another, it was
+clear that he was not of the tribe of second-rate persons who
+pursue an accidental acquaintance with their superiors in
+fortune, through sociable interchange with their footmen or
+maids.
+
+When the train slackened its speed at the platform of the
+station, he got up, reaching down his valise and leaving the
+carriage, strode to the nearest hansom cab, waving the porter
+aside.
+
+"Charing Cross," he called out to the driver, jumped in,
+and was rattled away.
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+During the years which had passed since Rosalie Vanderpoel
+first came to London as Lady Anstruthers, numbers of
+huge luxurious hotels had grown up, principally, as it seemed,
+that Americans should swarm into them and live at an expense
+which reminded them of their native land.  Such establishments
+would never have been built for English people,
+whose habit it is merely to "stop" at hotels, not to LIVE in
+them.  The tendency of the American is to live in his hotel,
+even though his intention may be only to remain in it two
+days.  He is accustomed to doing himself extremely well in
+proportion to his resources, whether they be great or small,
+and the comforts, as also the luxuries, he allows himself and
+his domestic appendages are in a proportion much higher in
+its relation to these resources than it would be were he English,
+French, German, or Italians.  As a consequence, he expects,
+when he goes forth, whether holiday-making or on
+business, that his hostelry shall surround him, either with
+holiday luxuries and gaiety, or with such lavishness of comfort
+as shall alleviate the wear and tear of business cares and
+fatigues.  The rich man demands something almost as good
+as he has left at home, the man of moderate means something
+much better.  Certain persons given to regarding public wants
+and desires as foundations for the fortune of business schemes
+having discovered this, the enormous and sumptuous hotel
+evolved itself from their astute knowledge of common facts. 
+At the entrances of these hotels, omnibuses and cabs, laden
+with trunks and packages frequently bearing labels marked
+with red letters "S. S.  So-and-So, Stateroom--Hold--Baggage-
+room," drew up and deposited their contents and burdens
+at regular intervals.  Then men with keen, and often humorous
+faces or almost painfully anxious ones, their exceedingly
+well-dressed wives, and more or less attractive and
+vivacious-looking daughters, their eager little girls, and un-
+English-looking little boys, passed through the corridors in
+flocks and took possession of suites of rooms, sometimes for
+twenty-four hours, sometimes for six weeks.
+
+The Worthingtons took possession of such a suite in such
+a hotel.  Bettina Vanderpoel's apartments faced the Embankment. 
+From her windows she could look out at the broad
+splendid, muddy Thames, slowly rolling in its grave, stately
+way beneath its bridges, bearing with it heavy lumbering
+barges, excited tooting little penny steamers and craft of
+various shapes and sizes, the errand or burden of each meaning
+a different story.
+
+It had been to Bettina one of her pleasures of the finest
+epicurean flavour to reflect that she had never had any brief
+and superficial knowledge of England, as she had never been
+to the country at all in those earlier years, when her knowledge
+of places must necessarily have been always the incomplete
+one of either a schoolgirl traveller or a schoolgirl resident,
+whose views were limited by the walls of restriction built
+around her.
+
+If relations of the usual ease and friendliness had existed
+between Lady Anstruthers and her family, Bettina would,
+doubtless, have known her sister's adopted country well.  It
+would have been a thing so natural as to be almost inevitable,
+that she would have crossed the Channel to spend her holidays
+at Stornham.  As matters had stood, however, the child
+herself, in the days when she had been a child, had had most
+definite private views on the subject of visits to England. 
+She had made up her young mind absolutely that she would 
+not, if it were decently possible to avoid it, set her foot upon
+English soil until she was old enough and strong enough to
+carry out what had been at first her passionately romantic
+plans for discovering and facing the truth of the reason for
+the apparent change in Rosy.  When she went to England,she would
+go to Rosy.  As she had grown older, having in the course of
+education and travel seen most Continental countries, she had
+liked to think that she had saved, put aside for less hasty
+consumption and more delicate appreciation of flavours, as it
+were, the country she was conscious she cared for most.
+
+"It is England we love, we Americans," she had said to
+her father.  "What could be more natural?  We belong to
+it--it belongs to us.  I could never be convinced that the old
+tie of blood does not count.  All nationalities have come to us
+since we became a nation, but most of us in the beginning
+came from England.  We are touching about it, too.  We
+trifle with France and labour with Germany, we sentimentalise
+over Italy and ecstacise over Spain--but England we love. 
+How it moves us when we go to it, how we gush if we are
+simple and effusive, how we are stirred imaginatively if we
+are of the perceptive class.  I have heard the commonest little
+half-educated woman say the prettiest, clumsy, emotional
+things about what she has seen there.  A New England
+schoolma'am, who has made a Cook's tour, will almost have
+tears in her voice as she wanders on with her commonplaces
+about hawthorn hedges and thatched cottages and white or
+red farms.  Why are we not unconsciously pathetic about
+German cottages and Italian villas?  Because we have not,
+in centuries past, had the habit of being born in them.  It
+is only an English cottage and an English lane, whether white
+with hawthorn blossoms or bare with winter, that wakes in
+us that little yearning, grovelling tenderness that is so sweet. 
+It is only nature calling us home."
+
+Mrs. Worthington came in during the course of the morning
+to find her standing before her window looking out at
+the Thames, the Embankment, the hansom cabs themselves,
+with an absolutely serious absorption.  This changed to a
+smile as she turned to greet her.
+
+"I am delighted," she said.  "I could scarcely tell you
+how much.  The impression is all new and I am excited a
+little by everything.  I am so intensely glad that I have saved
+it so long and that I have known it only as part of literature. 
+I am even charmed that it rains, and that the cabmen's
+mackintoshes are shining and wet."  She drew forward a chair, and
+Mrs. Worthington sat down, looking at her with involuntary
+admiration.
+
+"You look as if you were delighted," she said.  "Your
+eyes--you have amazing eyes, Betty!  I am trying to picture
+to myself what Lady Anstruthers will feel when she sees
+you.  What were you like when she married?"
+
+Bettina sat down, smiling and looking, indeed, quite
+incredibly lovely.  She was capable of a warmth and a sweetness
+which were as embracing as other qualities she possessed
+were powerful.
+
+"I was eight years old," she said.  "I was a rude little
+girl, with long legs and a high, determined voice.  I know I
+was rude.  I remember answering back."
+
+"I seem to have heard that you did not like your brother-
+in-law, and that you were opposed to the marriage."
+
+"Imagine the undisciplined audacity of a child of eight
+`opposing' the marriage of her grown-up sister.  I was quite
+capable of it.  You see in those days we had not been trained
+at all (one had only been allowed tremendous liberty), and
+interfered conversationally with one's elders and betters at any
+moment.  I was an American little girl, and American little
+girls were really--they really were!" with a laugh, whose
+musical sound was after all wholly non-committal.
+
+"You did not treat Sir Nigel Anstruthers as one of your
+betters."
+
+"He was one of my elders, at all events, and becomingness
+of bearing should have taught me to hold my little
+tongue.  I am giving some thought now to the kind of thing
+I must invent as a suitable apology when I find him a really
+delightful person, full of virtues and accomplishments.  Perhaps
+he has a horror of me."
+
+"I should like to be present at your first meeting," Mrs.
+Worthington reflected.  "You are going down to Stornham
+to-morrow?"
+
+"That is my plan.  When I write to you on my arrival, I
+will tell you if I encountered the horror."  Then, with a
+swift change of subject and a lifting of her slender, velvet
+line of eyebrow, "I am only deploring that I have not time
+to visit the Tower."
+
+Mrs. Worthington was betrayed into a momentary glance
+of uncertainty, almost verging in its significance on a gasp.
+
+"The Tower?  Of London?  Dear Betty!"
+
+Bettina's laugh was mellow with revelation.
+
+"Ah!" she said.  "You don't know my point of view; it's
+plain enough.  You see, when I delight in these things, I think
+I delight most in my delight in them.  It means that I am
+almost having the kind of feeling the fresh American souls
+had who landed here thirty years ago and revelled in the
+resemblance to Dickens's characters they met with in the streets,
+and were historically thrilled by the places where people's
+heads were chopped off.  Imagine their reflections on Charles
+I., when they stood in Whitehall gazing on the very spot
+where that poor last word was uttered--`Remember.'  And
+think of their joy when each crossing sweeper they gave
+disproportionate largess to, seemed Joe All Alones in the
+slightest disguise."
+
+"You don't mean to say----"  Mrs. Worthington was
+vaguely awakening to the situation.
+
+"That the charm of my visit, to myself, is that I realise
+that I am rather like that.  I have positively preserved
+something because I have kept away.  You have been here so
+often and know things so well, and you were even so sophisticated
+when you began, that you have never really had the
+flavours and emotions.  I am sophisticated, too, sophisticated
+enough to have cherished my flavours as a gourmet tries to
+save the bouquet of old wine.  You think that the Tower is
+the pleasure of housemaids on a Bank Holiday.  But it quite
+makes me quiver to think of it," laughing again.  "That I
+laugh, is the sign that I am not as beautifully, freshly capable
+of enjoyment as those genuine first Americans were, and in
+a way I am sorry for it."
+
+Mrs. Worthington laughed also, and with an enjoyment.
+
+"You are very clever, Betty," she said.
+
+"No, no," answered Bettina, "or, if I am, almost
+everybody is clever in these days.  We are nearly all of us
+comparatively intelligent."
+
+"You are very interesting at all events, and the Anstruthers
+will exult in you.  If they are dull in the country, you
+will save them."
+
+"I am very interested, at all events," said Bettina, "and
+interest like mine is quite passe.  A clever American who lives
+in England, and is the pet of duchesses, once said to me (he
+always speaks of Americans as if they were a distant and
+recently discovered species), `When they first came over
+they were a novelty.  Their enthusiasm amused people, but
+now, you see, it has become vieux jeu.  Young women, whose
+specialty was to be excited by the Tower of London and
+Westminster Abbey, are not novelties any longer.  In fact, it's
+been done, and it's done FOR as a specialty.'  And I am excited
+about the Tower of London.  I may be able to restrain my
+feelings at the sight of the Beef Eaters, but they will upset
+me a little, and I must brace myself, I must indeed."
+
+"Truly, Betty?" said Mrs. Worthington, regarding her
+with curiosity, arising from a faint doubt of her entire
+seriousness,mingled with a fainter doubt of her entire levity.
+
+Betty flung out her hands in a slight, but very involuntary-
+looking, gesture, and shook her head.
+
+"Ah!" she said, "it was all TRUE, you know.  They were all
+horribly real--the things that were shuddered over and
+sentimentalised about.  Sophistication, combined with
+imagination, makes them materialise again, to me, at least, now I
+am here.  The gulf between a historical figure and a man or
+woman who could bleed and cry out in human words was
+broad when one was at school.  Lady Jane Grey, for instance,
+how nebulous she was and how little one cared.  She seemed
+invented merely to add a detail to one's lesson in English
+history.  But, as we drove across Waterloo Bridge, I caught
+a glimpse of the Tower, and what do you suppose I began
+to think of?  It was monstrous.  I saw a door in the Tower
+and the stone steps, and the square space, and in the chill
+clear, early morning a little slender, helpless girl led out, a
+little, fair, real thing like Rosy, all alone--everyone she
+belonged to far away, not a man near who dared utter a word
+of pity when she turned her awful, meek, young, desperate
+eyes upon him.  She was a pious child, and, no doubt, she
+lifted her eyes to the sky.  I wonder if it was blue and its
+blueness broke her heart, because it looked as if it might have
+pitied such a young, patient girl thing led out in the fair
+morning to walk to the hacked block and give her trembling pardon
+to the black-visored man with the axe, and then `commending
+her soul to God' to stretch her sweet slim neck out upon it."
+
+"Oh, Betty, dear!" Mrs. Worthington expostulated.
+
+Bettina sprang to her and took her hand in pretty appeal.
+
+"I beg pardon!  I beg pardon, I really do," she exclaimed. 
+"I did not intend deliberately to be painful.  But that--
+beneath the sophistication--is something of what I bring to
+England."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+"IS LADY ANSTRUTHERS AT HOME?"
+
+All that she had brought with her to England, combined
+with what she had called "sophistication," but which was rather
+her exquisite appreciation of values and effects, she took with
+her when she went the next day to Charing Cross Station
+and arranged herself at her ease in the railway carriage, while
+her maid bought their tickets for Stornham.
+
+What the people in the station saw, the guards and porters,
+the men in the book stalls, the travellers hurrying past, was a
+striking-looking girl, whose colouring and carriage made one
+turn to glance after her, and who, having bought some periodicals
+and papers, took her place in a first-class compartment
+and watched the passersby interestedly through the open
+window.  Having been looked at and remarked on during her
+whole life, Bettina did not find it disturbing that more than
+one corduroy-clothed porter and fresh-coloured, elderly
+gentleman, or freshly attired young one, having caught a glimpse
+of her through her window, made it convenient to saunter
+past or hover round.  She looked at them much more frankly
+than they looked at her.  To her they were all specimens of
+the types she was at present interested in.  For practical
+reasons she was summing up English character with more
+deliberate intention than she had felt in the years when she
+had gradually learned to know Continental types and differentiate
+such peculiarities as were significant of their ranks and
+nations.  As the first Reuben Vanderpoel had studied the
+countenances and indicative methods of the inhabitants of the
+new parts of the country in which it was his intention to do
+business, so the modernity of his descendant applied itself to
+observation for reasons parallel in nature though not in actual
+kind.  As he had brought beads and firewater to bear as
+agents upon savages who would barter for them skins and
+products which might be turned into money, so she brought
+her nineteenth-century beauty, steadfastness of purpose and
+alertness of brain to bear upon the matter the practical dealing
+with which was the end she held in view.  To bear herself
+in this matter with as practical a control of situations as that
+with which her great-grandfather would have borne himself
+in making a trade with a previously unknown tribe of
+Indians was quite her intention, though it had not occurred
+to her to put it to herself in any such form.  Still, whether
+she was aware of the fact or not, her point of view was
+exactly what the first Reuben Vanderpoel's had been on many
+very different occasions.  She had before her the task of dealing
+with facts and factors of which at present she knew but
+little.  Astuteness of perception, self-command, and adaptability
+were her chief resources.  She was ready, either for calm, bold
+approach, or equally calm and wholly non-committal retreat.
+
+The perceptions she had brought with her filled her journey
+into Kent with delicious things, delicious recognition of
+beauties she had before known the existence of only through the
+reading of books, and the dwelling upon their charms as
+reproduced, more or less perfectly, on canvas.  She saw roll by
+her, with the passing of the train, the loveliness of land and
+picturesqueness of living which she had saved for herself
+with epicurean intention for years.  Her fancy, when detached
+from her thoughts of her sister, had been epicurean, and she
+had been quite aware that it was so.  When she had left
+the suburbs and those villages already touched with suburbanity
+behind, she felt herself settle into a glow of luxurious
+enjoyment in the freshness of her pleasure in the familiar, and
+yet unfamiliar, objects in the thick-hedged fields, whose broad-
+branched, thick-foliaged oaks and beeches were more embowering
+in their shade, and sweeter in their green than anything
+she remembered that other countries had offered her, even at
+their best.  Within the fields the hawthorn hedges beautifully
+enclosed were groups of resigned mother sheep with
+their young lambs about them.  The curious pointed tops of
+the red hopkilns, piercing the trees near the farmhouses,
+wore an almost intentional air of adding picturesque detail. 
+There were clusters of old buildings and dots of cottages and
+cottage gardens which made her now and then utter exclamations
+of delight.  Little inarticulate Rosy had seen and felt it
+all twelve years before on her hopeless bridal home-coming
+when Nigel had sat huddled unbecomingly in the corner of
+the railway carriage.  Her power of expression had been limited
+to little joyful gasps and obvious laudatory adjectives,
+smothered in their birth by her first glance at her bridegroom. 
+Betty, in seeing it, knew all the exquisiteness of her own
+pleasure, and all the meanings of it.
+
+Yes, it was England--England.  It was the England of 
+Constable and Morland, of Miss Mitford and Miss Austen,
+the Brontes and George Eliot.  The land which softly rolled
+and clothed itself in the rich verdure of many trees,
+sometimes in lovely clusters, sometimes in covering copse, was
+Constable's; the ripe young woman with the fat-legged children
+and the farmyard beasts about her, as she fed the hens
+from the wooden piggin under her arm, was Morland's own. 
+The village street might be Miss Mitford's, the well-to-do
+house Jane Austen's own fancy, in its warm brick and comfortable
+decorum.  She laughed a little as she thought it.
+
+"That is American," she said, "the habit of comparing
+every stick and stone and breathing thing to some literary
+parallel.  We almost invariably say that things remind us
+of pictures or books--most usually books.  It seems a little
+crude, but perhaps it means that we are an intensely literary
+and artistic people."
+
+She continued to find comparisons revealing to her their
+appositeness, until her journey had ended by the train's
+slackening speed and coming to a standstill before the
+rural-looking little station which had presented its quaint
+aspect to Lady Anstruthers on her home-coming of years before.
+
+It had not, during the years which certainly had given time
+for change, altered in the least.  The station master had
+grown stouter and more rosy, and came forward with his
+respectful, hospitable air, to attend to the unusual-looking
+young lady, who was the only first-class passenger.  He
+thought she must be a visitor expected at some country house,
+but none of the carriages, whose coachmen were his familiar
+acquaintances, were in waiting.  That such a fine young lady
+should be paying a visit at any house whose owners did not
+send an equipage to attend her coming, struck him as unusual. 
+The brougham from the "Crown," though a decent country
+town vehicle, seemed inadequate.  Yet, there it stood drawn
+up outside the station, and she went to it with the manner of
+a young lady who had ordered its attendance and knew it
+would be there.
+
+Wells felt a good deal of interest.  Among the many young
+ladies who descended from the first-class compartments and
+passed through the little waiting-room on their way to the
+carriages of the gentry they were going to visit, he did not
+know when a young lady had "caught his eye," so to speak,
+as this one did.  She was not exactly the kind of young lady
+one would immediately class mentally as "a foreigner," but
+the blue of her eyes was so deep.  and her hair and eyelashes
+so dark, that these things, combining themselves with a certain
+"way" she had, made him feel her to be of a type unfamiliar
+to the region, at least.
+
+He was struck, also, by the fact that the young lady had no
+maid with her.  The truth was that Bettina had purposely
+left her maid in town.  If awkward things occurred, the
+presence of an attendant would be a sort of complication.  It
+was better, on the first approach, to be wholly unencumbered.
+
+"How far are we from Stornham Court?" she inquired.
+
+"Five miles, my lady," he answered, touching his cap.  She
+expressed something which to the rural and ingenuous, whose
+standards were defined, demanded a recognition of probable rank.
+
+"I'd like to know," was his comment to his wife when he went
+home to dinner, "who has gone to Stornham Court to-day. 
+There's few enough visitors go there, and none such as her, for
+certain.  She don't live anywhere on the line above here, either,
+for I've never seen her face before.  She was a tall, handsome
+one--she was, but it isn't just that made you look after her. 
+She was a clever one with a spirit, I'll be bound.  I was
+wondering what her ladyship would have to say to her."
+
+"Perhaps she was one of HIS fine ladies?" suggestively.
+
+"That she wasn't, either.  And, as for that, I wonder what
+he'd have to say to such as she is."
+
+There was complexity of element enough in the thing she
+was on her way to do, Bettina was thinking, as she was
+driven over the white ribbon of country road that unrolled over
+rise and hollow, between the sheep-dotted greenness of fields
+and the scented hedges.  The soft beauty enclosing her was
+a little shut out from her by her mental attitude.  She brought
+forward for her own decisions upon suitable action a number
+of possible situations she might find herself called upon to
+confront.  The one thing necessary was that she should be
+prepared for anything whatever, even for Rosy's not being
+pleased to see her, or for finding Sir Nigel a thoroughly
+reformed and amiable character
+
+"It is the thing which seemingly CANNOT happen which one
+is most likely to find one's self face to face with.  It will be
+a little awkward to arrange, if he has developed every domestic
+virtue, and is delighted to see me."
+
+Under such rather confusing conditions her plan would be
+to present to them, as an affectionate surprise, the unheralded 
+visit, which might appear a trifle uncalled for.  She felt
+happily sure of herself under any circumstances not partaking
+of the nature of collisions at sea.  Yet she had not behaved
+absolutely ill at the time of the threatened catastrophe in the
+Meridiana.  Her remembrance, an oddly sudden one, of the
+definite manner of the red-haired second-class passenger,
+assured her of that.  He had certainly had all his senses about
+him, and he had spoken to her as a person to be counted on.
+
+Her pulse beat a little more hurriedly as the brougham
+entered Stornham village.  It was picturesque, but struck her
+as looking neglected.  Many of the cottages had an air of
+dilapidation.  There were many broken windows and unmended
+garden palings.  A suggested lack of whitewash in several cases
+was not cheerful.
+
+"I know nothing of the duties of English landlords," she
+said, looking through her carriage window, "but I should
+do it myself, if I were Rosy."
+
+She saw, as she was taken through the park gateway, that that
+structure was out of order, and that damaged diamond panes
+peered out from under the thickness of the ivy massing itself
+over the lodge.
+
+"Ah!" was her thought, "it does not promise as it should. 
+Happy people do not let things fall to pieces."
+
+Even winding avenue, and spreading sward, and gorse, and
+broom, and bracken, enfolding all the earth beneath huge
+trees, were not fair enough to remove a sudden remote fear
+which arose in her rapidly reasoning mind.  It suggested to
+her a point of view so new that, while she was amazed at
+herself for not having contemplated it before, she found
+herself wishing that the coachman would drive rather more
+slowly, actually that she might have more time to reflect.
+
+They were nearing a dip in the park, where there was a
+lonely looking pool.  The bracken was thick and high there,
+and the sun, which had just broken through a cloud, had
+pierced the trees with a golden gleam.
+
+A little withdrawn from this shaft of brightness stood two
+figures, a dowdy little woman and a hunchbacked boy.  The
+woman held some ferns in her hand, and the boy was sitting
+down and resting his chin on his hands, which were folded
+on the top of a stick.
+
+"Stop here for a moment," Bettina said to the coachman. 
+"I want to ask that woman a question."
+
+She had thought that she might discover if her sister was at
+the Court.  She realised that to know would be a point of
+advantage.  She leaned forward and spoke.
+
+"I beg your pardon," she said, "I wonder if you can tell
+me----"
+
+The woman came forward a little.  She had a listless step
+and a faded, listless face.
+
+"What did you ask?" she said.
+
+Betty leaned still further forward.
+
+"Can you tell me----" she began and stopped.  A sense
+of stricture in the throat stopped her, as her eyes took in the
+washed-out colour of the thin face, the washed-out colour of
+the thin hair--thin drab hair, dragged in straight, hard
+unbecomingness from the forehead and cheeks.
+
+Was it true that her heart was thumping, as she had heard
+it said that agitation made hearts thump?
+
+She began again.
+
+"Can you--tell me if--Lady Anstruthers is at home?"
+she inquired.  As she said it she felt the blood surge up from
+the furious heart, and the hand she had laid on the handle of
+the door of the brougham clutched it involuntarily.
+
+The dowdy little woman answered her indifferently,
+staring at her a little.
+
+"I am Lady Anstruthers," she said.
+
+Bettina opened the carriage door and stood upon the ground.
+
+"Go on to the house," she gave order to the coachman,
+and, with a somewhat startled look, he drove away.
+
+"Rosy!"  Bettina's voice was a hushed, almost awed, thing. 
+"YOU are Rosy?"
+
+The faded little wreck of a creature began to look frightened.
+
+"Rosy!" she repeated, with a small, wry, painful smile.
+
+She was the next moment held in the folding of strong, young
+arms, against a quickly beating heart.  She was being wildly
+kissed, and the very air seemed rich with warmth and life.
+
+"I am Betty," she heard.  "Look at me, Rosy!  I am
+Betty.  Look at me and remember!"
+
+Lady Anstruthers gasped, and broke into a faint, hysteric
+laugh.  She suddenly clutched at Bettina's arm.  For a minute
+her gaze was wild as she looked up.
+
+"Betty," she cried out.  "No!  No!  No!  I can't believe
+it!  I can't!  I can't!"
+
+That just this thing could have taken place in her, Bettina
+had never thought.  As she had reflected on her way from the
+station, the impossible is what one finds one's self face
+to face with.  Twelve years should not have changed a pretty
+blonde thing of nineteen to a worn, unintelligent-looking
+dowdy of the order of dowdiness which seems to have lived
+beyond age and sex.  She looked even stupid, or at least
+stupefied.  At this moment she was a silly, middle-aged woman,
+who did not know what to do.  For a few seconds Bettina wondered
+if she was glad to see her, or only felt awkward and unequal
+to the situation.
+
+"I can't believe you," she cried out again, and began to
+shiver.  "Betty!  Little Betty?  No!  No! it isn't!"
+
+She turned to the boy, who had lifted his chin from his
+stick, and was staring.
+
+"Ughtred!  Ughtred!" she called to him.  "Come!  She
+says--she says----"
+
+She sat down upon a clump of heather and began to cry. 
+She hid her face in her spare hands and broke into sobbing.
+
+"Oh, Betty!  No!" she gasped.  "It's so long ago--it's
+so far away.  You never came--no one--no one--came!"
+
+The hunchbacked boy drew near.  He had limped up on
+his stick.  He spoke like an elderly, affectionate gnome, not
+like a child.
+
+"Don't do that, mother," he said.  "Don't let it upset you
+so, whatever it is."
+
+"It's so long ago; it's so far away!" she wept, with catches
+in her breath and voice.  "You never came!"
+
+Betty knelt down and enfolded her again.  Her bell-like
+voice was firm and clear.
+
+"I have come now," she said.  "And it is not far away. 
+A cable will reach father in two hours."
+
+Pursuing a certain vivid thought in her mind, she looked
+at her watch.
+
+"If you spoke to mother by cable this moment," she added,
+with accustomed coolness, and she felt her sister actually
+start as she spoke, "she could answer you by five o'clock."
+
+Lady Anstruther's start ended in a laugh and gasp more
+hysteric than her first.  There was even a kind of wan awakening
+in her face, as she lifted it to look at the wonderful
+newcomer.  She caught her hand and held it, trembling, as she
+weakly laughed.
+
+"It must be Betty," she cried.  "That little stern way! 
+It is so like her.  Betty--Betty--dear!"  She fell into a
+sobbing, shaken heap upon the heather.  The harrowing thought
+passed through Betty's mind that she looked almost like a limp
+bundle of shabby clothes.  She was so helpless in her pathetic,
+apologetic hysteria.
+
+"I shall--be better," she gasped.  "It's nothing.  Ughtred,
+tell her."
+
+"She's very weak, really," said the boy Ughtred, in his
+mature way.  "She can't help it sometimes.  I'll get some
+water from the pool."
+
+"Let me go," said Betty, and she darted down to the water. 
+She was back in a moment.  The boy was rubbing and patting
+his mother's hands tenderly.
+
+"At any rate," he remarked, as one consoled by a reflection,
+"father is not at home."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+"I THOUGHT YOU HAD ALL FORGOTTEN "
+
+As, after a singular half hour spent among the bracken under
+the trees, they began their return to the house, Bettina felt
+that her sense of adventure had altered its character.  She was
+still in the midst of a remarkable sort of exploit, which might
+end anywhere or in anything, but it had become at once more
+prosaic in detail and more intense in its significance.  What
+its significance might prove likely to be when she faced it, she
+had not known, it is true.  But this was different from--
+from anything.  As they walked up the sun-dappled avenue
+she kept glancing aside at Rosy, and endeavouring to draw
+useful conclusions.  The poor girl's air of being a plain,
+insignificant frump, long past youth, struck an extraordinary
+and, for the time, unexplainable note.  Her ill-cut, out-of-
+date dress, the cheap suit of the hunchbacked boy, who limped
+patiently along, helped by his crutch, suggested possible
+explanations which were without doubt connected with the
+thought which had risen in Bettina's mind, as she had been
+driven through the broken-hinged entrance gate.  What
+extraordinary disposal was being made of Rosy's money?  But her
+each glance at her sister also suggested complication upon
+complication.
+
+The singular half hour under the trees by the pool, spent,
+after the first hysteric moments were over, in vague exclaimings
+and questions, which seemed half frightened and all at 
+sea, had gradually shown her that she was talking to a creature
+wholly other than the Rosalie who had so well known and
+loved them all, and whom they had so well loved and known. 
+They did not know this one, and she did not know them, she
+was even a little afraid of the stir and movement of their
+life and being.  The Rosy they had known seemed to be
+imprisoned within the wall the years of her separated life had
+built about her.  At each breath she drew Bettina saw how
+long the years had been to her, and how far her home had
+seemed to lie away, so far that it could not touch her, and was
+only a sort of dream, the recalling of which made her suddenly
+begin to cry again every few minutes.  To Bettina's
+sensitively alert mind it was plain that it would not do in
+the least to drag her suddenly out of her prison, or cloister,
+whichsoever it might be.  To do so would be like forcing a
+creature accustomed only to darkness, to stare at the blazing
+sun.  To have burst upon her with the old impetuous, candid
+fondness would have been to frighten and shock her
+as if with something bordering on indecency.  She could not
+have stood it; perhaps such fondness was so remote from her in
+these days that she had even ceased to be able to understand it.
+
+"Where are your little girls?" Bettina asked, remembering that
+there had been notice given of the advent of two girl babies.
+
+"They died," Lady Anstruthers answered unemotionally.  "They both
+died before they were a year old.  There is only Ughtred."
+
+Betty glanced at the boy and saw a small flame of red creep
+up on his cheek.  Instinctively she knew what it meant, and
+she put out her hand and lightly touched his shoulder.
+
+"I hope you'll like me, Ughtred," she said.
+
+He almost started at the sound of her voice, but when he
+turned his face towards her he only grew redder, and looked
+awkward without answering.  His manner was that of a boy
+who was unused to the amenities of polite society, and who
+was only made shy by them.
+
+Without warning, a moment or so later, Bettina stopped in
+the middle of the avenue, and looked up at the arching giant
+branches of the trees which had reached out from one side
+to the other, as if to clasp hands or encompass an interlacing
+embrace.  As far as the eye reached, they did this, and the
+beholder stood as in a high stately pergola, with breaks of deep
+azure sky between.  Several mellow, cawing rooks were floating
+solemnly beneath or above the branches, now wand then
+settling in some highest one or disappearing in the thick
+greenness.
+
+Lady Anstruthers stopped when her sister did so, and glanced
+at her in vague inquiry.  It was plain that she had outlived
+even her sense of the beauty surrounding her.
+
+"What are you looking at, Betty?" she asked.
+
+"At all of it," Betty answered.  "It is so wonderful."
+
+"She likes it," said Ughtred, and then rather slunk a step
+behind his mother, as if he were ashamed of himself.
+
+"The house is just beyond those trees," said Lady Anstruthers.
+
+They came in full view of it three minutes later.  When she
+saw it, Betty uttered an exclamation and stopped again to
+enjoy effects.
+
+"She likes that, too," said Ughtred, and, although he said
+it sheepishly, there was imperfectly concealed beneath the
+awkwardness a pleasure in the fact.
+
+"Do you?" asked Rosalie, with her small, painful smile.
+
+Betty laughed.
+
+"It is too picturesque, in its special way, to be quite
+credible," she said.
+
+"I thought that when I first saw it," said Rosy.
+
+"Don't you think so, now?"
+
+"Well," was the rather uncertain reply, "as Nigel says,
+there's not much good in a place that is falling to pieces."
+
+"Why let it fall to pieces?" Betty put it to her with
+impartial promptness.
+
+"We haven't money enough to hold it together," resignedly.
+
+As they climbed the low, broad, lichen-blotched steps, whose
+broken stone balustrades were almost hidden in clutching,
+untrimmed ivy, Betty felt them to be almost incredible, too.  The
+uneven stones of the terrace the steps mounted to were lichen-
+blotched and broken also.  Tufts of green growths had forced
+themselves between the flags, and added an untidy beauty. 
+The ivy tossed in branches over the red roof and walls of
+the house.  It had been left unclipped, until it was rather
+an endlessly clambering tree than a creeper.  The hall they
+entered had the beauty of spacious form and good, old oaken
+panelling.  There were deep window seats and an ancient
+high-backed settle or so, and a massive table by the fireless
+hearth.  But there were no pictures in places where pictures
+had evidently once hung, and the only coverings on the stone
+floor were the faded remnants of a central rug and a worn
+tiger skin, the head almost bald and a glass eye knocked out.
+
+Bettina took in the unpromising details without a quiver of the
+extravagant lashes.  These, indeed, and the eyes pertaining to
+them, seemed rather to sweep the fine roof, and a certain
+minstrel's gallery and staircase, than which nothing could have
+been much finer, with the look of an appreciative admirer of
+architectural features and old oak.  She had not journeyed to
+Stornham Court with the intention of disturbing Rosy, or of
+being herself obviously disturbed.  She had come to observe
+situations and rearrange them with that intelligence of which
+unconsidered emotion or exclamation form no part.
+
+"It is the first old English house I have seen," she said,
+with a sigh of pleasure.  "I am so glad, Rosy--I am so glad
+that it is yours."
+
+She put a hand on each of Rosy's thin shoulders--she felt
+sharply defined bones as she did so--and bent to kiss her.  It
+was the natural affectionate expression of her feeling, but tears
+started to Rosy's eyes, and the boy Ughtred, who had sat down
+in a window seat, turned red again, and shifted in his place.
+
+"Oh, Betty!" was Rosy's faint nervous exclamation, "you
+seem so beautiful and--so--so strange--that you frighten me."
+
+Betty laughed with the softest possible cheerfulness, shaking
+her a little.
+
+"I shall not seem strange long," she said, "after I have
+stayed with you a few weeks, if you will let me stay with you."
+
+"Let you!  Let you!" in a sort of gasp.
+
+Poor little Lady Anstruthers sank on to a settle and began
+to cry again.  It was plain that she always cried when things
+occurred.  Ughtred's speech from his window seat testified
+at once to that.
+
+"Don't cry, mother," he said.  "You know how we've
+talked that over together.  It's her nerves," he explained to
+Bettina.  "We know it only makes things worse, but she
+can't stop it."
+
+Bettina sat on the settle, too.  She herself was not then
+aware of the wonderful feeling the poor little spare figure
+experienced, as her softly strong young arms curved about
+it.  She was only aware that she herself felt that this was a
+heart-breaking thing, and that she must not--MUST not let it
+be seen how much she recognised its woefulness.  This was
+pretty, fair Rosy, who had never done a harm in her happy
+life--this forlorn thing was her Rosy.
+
+"Never mind," she said, half laughing again.  "I rather
+want to cry myself, and I am stronger than she is.  I am
+immensely strong."
+
+"Yes!  Yes!" said Lady Anstruthers, wiping her eyes, and
+making a tremendous effort at self-respecting composure. 
+"You are strong.  I have grown so weak in--well, in every
+way.  Betty, I'm afraid this is a poor welcome.  You see--I'm
+afraid you'll find it all so different from--from New York."
+
+"I wanted to find it different," said Betty.
+
+"But--but--I mean--you know----" Lady Anstruthers
+turned helplessly to the boy.  Bettina was struck with the
+painful truth that she looked even silly as she turned to him. 
+"Ughtred--tell her," she ended, and hung her head.
+
+Ughtred had got down at once from his seat and limped
+forward.  His unprepossessing face looked as if he pulled his
+childishness together with an unchildish effort.
+
+"She means," he said, in his awkward way, "that she doesn't
+know how to make you comfortable.  The rooms are all so
+shabby--everything is so shabby.  Perhaps you won't stay
+when you see."
+
+Bettina perceptibly increased the firmness of her hold on
+her sister's body.  It was as if she drew it nearer to her side
+in a kind of taking possession.  She knew that the moment had
+come when she might go this far, at least, without expressing
+alarming things.
+
+"You cannot show me anything that will frighten me,"
+was the answer she made.  "I have come to stay, Rosy.  We
+can make things right if they require it.  Why not?"
+
+Lady Anstruthers started a little, and stared at her.  She
+knew ten thousand reasons why things had not been made
+right, and the casual inference that such reasons could be
+lightly swept away as if by the mere wave of a hand, implied
+a power appertaining to a time seeming so lost forever that it
+was too much for her.
+
+"Oh, Betty, Betty!" she cried, "you talk as if--you are
+so----!"
+
+The fact, so simple to the members of the abnormal class
+to which she of a truth belonged, the class which heaped up
+its millions, the absolute knowledge that there was a great
+deal of money in the world and that she was of those who 
+were among its chief owners, had ceased to seem a fact, and
+had vanished into the region of fairy stories.
+
+That she could not believe it a reality revealed itself to
+Bettina, as by a flash, which was also a revelation of many
+things.  There would be unpleasing truths to be learned, and
+she had not made her pilgrimage for nothing.  But--in any
+event--there were advantages without doubt in the circumstance
+which subjected one to being perpetually pointed out as
+a daughter of a multi-millionaire.  As this argued itself out
+for her with rapid lucidity, she bent and kissed Rosy once
+more.  She even tried to do it lightly, and not to allow the
+rush of love and pity in her soul to betray her.
+
+"I talk as if--as if I were Betty," she said.  "You have
+forgotten.  I have not.  I have been looking forward to this
+for years.  I have been planning to come to you since I was
+eleven years old.  And here we sit."
+
+"You didn't forget?  You didn't?" faltered the poor
+wreck of Rosy.  "Oh!  Oh!  I thought you had all forgotten
+me--quite--quite!"
+
+And her face went down in her spare, small hands, and she
+began to cry again.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+UGHTRED
+
+Bettina stood alone in her bedroom a couple of hours later. 
+Lady Anstruthers had taken her to it, preparing her for its
+limitations by explaining that she would find it quite different
+from her room in New York.  She had been pathetically nervous
+and flushed about it, and Bettina had also been aware that the
+apartment itself had been hastily, and with much moving of
+objects from one chamber to another, made ready for her.
+
+The room was large and square and low.  It was panelled
+in small squares of white wood.  The panels were old enough
+to be cracked here and there, and the paint was stained and
+yellow with time, where it was not knocked or worn off. 
+There was a small paned, leaded window which filled a large
+part of one side of the room, and its deep seat was an agreeable
+feature.  Sitting in it, one looked out over several red-
+walled gardens, and through breaks in the trees of the park to
+a fair beyond.  Bettina stood before this window for a few
+moments, and then took a seat in the embrasure, that she
+might gaze out and reflect at leisure.
+
+Her genius, as has before been mentioned, was the genius
+for living, for being vital.  Many people merely exist, are
+kept alive by others, or continue to vegetate because the
+persistent action of normal functions will allow of their doing
+no less.  Bettina Vanderpoel had lived vividly, and in the
+midst of a self-created atmosphere of action from her first
+hour.  It was not possible for her to be one of the horde of
+mere spectators.  Wheresoever she moved there was some
+occult stirring of the mental, and even physical, air.  Her
+pulses beat too strongly, her blood ran too fast to allow of
+inaction of mind or body.  When, in passing through the village,
+she had seen the broken windows and the hanging palings
+of the cottages, it had been inevitable that, at once, she
+should, in thought, repair them, set them straight.  Disorder
+filled her with a sort of impatience which was akin to physical
+distress.  If she had been born a poor woman she would have
+worked hard for her living, and found an interest, almost an
+exhilaration, in her labour.  Such gifts as she had would have
+been applied to the tasks she undertook.  It had frequently
+given her pleasure to imagine herself earning her livelihood
+as a seamstress, a housemaid, a nurse.  She knew what she
+could have put into her service, and how she could have found
+it absorbing.  Imagination and initiative could make any service
+absorbing.  The actual truth was that if she had been a
+housemaid, the room she set in order would have taken a
+character under her touch; if she had been a seamstress, her work
+would have been swiftly done, her imagination would have
+invented for her combinations of form and colour; if she
+had been a nursemaid, the children under her care would
+never have been sufficiently bored to become tiresome or
+intractable, and they also would have gained character to which
+would have been added an undeniable vividness of outlook. 
+She could not have left them alone, so to speak.  In obeying
+the mere laws of her being, she would have stimulated them. 
+Unconsciously she had stimulated her fellow pupils at school;
+when she was his companion, her father had always felt himself
+stirred to interest and enterprise.
+
+"You ought to have been a man, Betty," he used to say to
+her sometimes.
+
+But Betty had not agreed with him.
+
+"You say that," she once replied to him, "because you see
+I am inclined to do things, to change them, if they need
+changing.  Well, one is either born like that, or one is not. 
+Sometimes I think that perhaps the people who must ACT are of
+a distinct race.  A kind of vigorous restlessness drives them. 
+I remember that when I was a child I could not see a pin
+lying upon the ground without picking it up, or pass a drawer
+which needed closing, without giving it a push.  But there
+has always been as much for women to do as for men."
+
+There was much to be done here of one sort of thing and
+another.  That was certain.  As she gazed through the small
+panes of her large windows, she found herself overlooking
+part of a wilderness of garden, which revealed itself through
+an arch in an overgrown laurel hedge.  She had glimpses of
+unkempt grass paths and unclipped topiary work which had
+lost its original form.  Among a tangle of weeds rose the
+heads of clumps of daffodils, stirred by a passing wind of
+spring.  In the park beyond a cuckoo was calling.
+
+She was conscious both of the forlorn beauty and significance
+of the neglected garden, and of the clear quaintness of
+the cuckoo call, as she thought of other things.
+
+"Her spirit and her health are broken," was her summing
+up.  "Her prettiness has faded to a rag.  She is as nervous
+as an ill-treated child.  She has lost her wits.  I do not know
+where to begin with her.  I must let her tell me things as
+gradually as she chooses.  Until I see Nigel I shall not know
+what his method with her has been.  She looks as if she had
+ceased to care for things, even for herself.  What shall I write
+to mother?"
+
+She knew what she should write to her father.  With him
+she could be explicit.  She could record what she had found
+and what it suggested to her.  She could also make clear
+her reason for hesitance and deliberation.  His discretion and
+affection would comprehend the thing which she herself felt
+and which affection not combined with discretion might not
+take in.  He would understand, when she told him that one
+of the first things which had struck her, had been that Rosy
+herself, her helplessness and timidity, might, for a period at
+least, form obstacles in their path of action.  He not only
+loved Rosy, but realised how slight a sweet thing she had
+always been, and he would know how far a slight creature's
+gentleness might be overpowered and beaten down.
+
+There was so much that her mother must be spared, there
+was indeed so little that it would be wise to tell her, that 
+Bettina sat gently rubbing her forehead as she thought of it. 
+The truth was that she must tell her nothing, until all was
+over, accomplished, decided.  Whatsoever there was to be
+"over," whatsoever the action finally taken, must be a
+matter lying as far as possible between her father and herself. 
+Mrs. Vanderpoel's trouble would be too keen, her anxiety
+too great to keep to herself, even if she were not overwhelmed
+by them.  She must be told of the beauties and dimensions of
+Stornham, all relatable details of Rosy's life must be generously
+dwelt on.  Above all Rosy must be made to write letters,
+and with an air of freedom however specious.
+
+A knock on the door broke the thread of her reflection.  It
+was a low-sounding knock, and she answered the summons
+herself, because she thought it might be Rosy's.
+
+It was not Lady Anstruthers who stood outside, but
+Ughtred, who balanced himself on his crutches, and lifted his
+small, too mature, face.
+
+"May I come in?" he asked.
+
+Here was the unexpected again, but she did not allow him
+to see her surprise.
+
+"Yes," she said.  "Certainly you may."
+
+He swung in and then turned to speak to her.
+
+"Please shut the door and lock it," he said.
+
+There was sudden illumination in this, but of an order almost
+whimsical.  That modern people in modern days should feel bolts
+and bars a necessity of ordinary intercourse was suggestive.  She
+was plainly about to receive enlightenment.  She turned the key
+and followed the halting figure across the room.
+
+"What are you afraid of?" she asked.
+
+"When mother and I talk things over," he said, "we always do it
+where no one can see or hear.  It's the only way to be safe."
+
+"Safe from what?"
+
+His eyes fixed themselves on her as he answered her almost
+sullenly.
+
+"Safe from people who might listen and go and tell that
+we had been talking."
+
+In his thwarted-looking, odd child-face there was a shade
+of appeal not wholly hidden by his evident wish not to be
+boylike.  Betty felt a desire to kneel down suddenly and
+embrace him, but she knew he was not prepared for such a
+demonstration.  He looked like a creature who had lived
+continually at bay, and had learned to adjust himself to any
+situation with caution and restraint.
+
+"Sit down, Ughtred," she said, and when he did so she
+herself sat down, but not too near him.
+
+Resting his chin on the handle of a crutch, he gazed at her
+almost protestingly.
+
+"I always have to do these things," he said, "and I am
+not clever enough, or old enough.  I am only eleven."
+
+The mention of the number of his years was plainly not
+apologetic, but was a mere statement of his limitations.  There
+the fact was, and he must make the best of it he could.
+
+"What things do you mean?"
+
+"Trying to make things easier--explaining things when
+she cannot think of excuses.  To-day it is telling you what
+she is too frightened to tell you herself.  I said to her that
+you must be told.  It made her nervous and miserable, but
+I knew you must."
+
+"Yes, I must," Betty answered.  "I am glad she has you
+to depend on, Ughtred."
+
+His crutch grated on the floor and his boy eyes forbade her
+to believe that their sudden lustre was in any way connected
+with restrained emotion.
+
+"I know I seem queer and like a little old man," he said. 
+"Mother cries about it sometimes.  But it can't be helped. 
+It is because she has never had anyone but me to help her. 
+When I was very little, I found out how frightened and
+miserable she was.  After his rages," he used no name, "she
+used to run into my nursery and snatch me up in her arms and
+hide her face in my pinafore.  Sometimes she stuffed it into
+her mouth and bit it to keep herself from screaming.  Once--
+before I was seven--I ran into their room and shouted out,
+and tried to fight for her.  He was going out, and had his
+riding whip in his hand, and he caught hold of me and struck
+me with it--until he was tired."
+
+Betty stood upright.
+
+"What!  What!  What!" she cried out.
+
+He merely nodded his head shortly.  She saw what the
+thing had been by the way his face lost colour.
+
+"Of course he said it was because I was impudent, and
+needed punishment," he said.  "He said she had encouraged
+me in American impudence.  It was worse for her than for
+me.  She kneeled down and screamed out as if she was crazy,
+that she would give him what he wanted if he would stop."
+
+"Wait," said Betty, drawing in her breath sharply.  " `He,'
+is Sir Nigel?  And he wanted something."
+
+He nodded again
+
+"Tell me," she demanded, "has he ever struck her?"
+
+"Once," he answered slowly, "before I was born--he
+struck her and she fell against something.  That is why I am
+like this."  And he touched his shoulder.
+
+The feeling which surged through Betty Vanderpoel's
+being forced her to go and stand with her face turned towards the
+windows, her hands holding each other tightly behind her back.
+
+"I must keep still," she said.  "I must make myself keep still."
+
+She spoke unconsciously half aloud, and Ughtred heard her
+and replied hurriedly.
+
+"Yes," he said, "you must make yourself keep still.  That
+is what we have to do whatever happens.  That is one of the
+things mother wanted you to know.  She is afraid.  She daren't
+let you----"
+
+She turned from the window, standing at her full height
+and looking very tall for a girl.
+
+"She is afraid?  She daren't?  See--that will come to an
+end now.  There are things which can be done."
+
+He flushed nervously.
+
+"That is what she was afraid you would say," he spoke
+fast and his hands trembled.  "She is nearly wild about it,
+because she knows he will try to do something that will make
+you feel as if she does not want you."
+
+"She is afraid of that?" Betty exclaimed.
+
+"He'd do it!  He'd do it--if you did not know beforehand."
+
+"Oh!" said Betty, with unflinching clearness.  "He is a liar, is
+he?"
+
+The helpless rage in the unchildish eyes, the shaking voice, as
+he cried out in answer, were a shock.  It was as if he wildly
+rejoiced that she had spoken the word.
+
+"Yes, he's a liar--a liar!" he shrilled.  "He's a liar and
+a bully and a coward.  He'd--he'd be a murderer if he dared
+--but he daren't."  And his face dropped on his arms folded
+on his crutch, and he broke into a passion of crying.  Then
+Betty knew she might go to him.  She went and knelt down
+and put her arm round him.
+
+"Ughtred," she said, "cry, if you like, I should do it, if I were
+you.  But I tell you it can all be altered--and it shall be."
+
+He seemed quite like a little boy when he put out his hand
+to hers and spoke sobbingly:
+
+"She--she says--that because you have only just come from
+America--and in America people--can do things--you will
+think you can do things here--and you don't know.  He will
+tell lies about you lies you can't bear.  She sat wringing her
+hands when she thought of it.  She won't let you be hurt
+because you want to help her."  He stopped abruptly and
+clutched her shoulder.
+
+"Aunt Betty!  Aunt Betty--whatever happens--whatever
+he makes her seem like--you are to know that it is not true. 
+Now you have come--now she has seen you it would KILL her
+if you were driven away and thought she wanted you to go."
+
+"I shall not think that," she answered, slowly, because she
+realised that it was well that she had been warned in time. 
+"Ughtred, are you trying to tell me that above all things I
+must not let him think that I came here to help you, because
+if he is angry he will make us all suffer--and your mother
+most of all?"
+
+"He'll find a way.  We always know he will.  He would
+either be so rude that you would not stay here--or he would
+make mother seem rude--or he would write lies to grandfather. 
+Aunt Betty, she scarcely believes you are real yet.  If
+she won't tell you things at first, please don't mind."  He
+looked quite like a child again in his appeal to her, to try to
+understand a state of affairs so complicated.  "Could you--
+could you wait until you have let her get--get used to you?"
+
+"Used to thinking that there may be someone in the world
+to help her?" slowly.  "Yes, I will.  Has anyone ever tried
+to help her?"
+
+"Once or twice people found out and were sorry at first,
+but it only made it worse, because he made them believe things."
+
+"I shall not TRY, Ughtred," said Betty, a remote spark
+kindling in the deeps of the pupils of her steel-blue eyes.  "I
+shall not TRY.  Now I am going to ask you some questions."
+
+Before he left her she had asked many questions which were
+pertinent and searching, and she had learned things she realised
+she could have learned in no other way and from no other
+person.  But for his uncanny sense of the responsibility he
+clearly had assumed in the days when he wore pinafores, and
+which had brought him to her room to prepare her mind for 
+what she would find herself confronted with in the way of
+apparently unexplainable obstacles, there was a strong likelihood
+that at the outset she might have found herself more
+than once dangerously at a loss.  Yes, she would have been at
+a loss, puzzled, perhaps greatly discouraged.  She was face to
+face with a complication so extraordinary.
+
+That one man, through mere persistent steadiness in evil
+temper and domestic tyranny, should have so broken the creatures
+of his household into abject submission and hopelessness,
+seemed too incredible.  Such a power appeared as remote from
+civilised existence in London and New York as did that which
+had inflicted tortures in the dungeons of castles of old. 
+Prisoners in such dungeons could utter no cry which could reach
+the outside world; the prisoners at Stornham Court, not four
+hours from Hyde Park Corner, could utter none the world
+could hear, or comprehend if it heard it.  Sheer lack of power
+to resist bound them hand and foot.  And she, Betty Vanderpoel,
+was here upon the spot, and, as far as she could understand,
+was being implored to take no steps, to do nothing. 
+The atmosphere in which she had spent her life, the world she
+had been born into, had not made for fearfulness that one
+would be at any time defenceless against circumstances and
+be obliged to submit to outrage.  To be a Vanderpoel was, it
+was true, to be a shining mark for envy as for admiration, but
+the fact removed obstacles as a rule, and to find one's self
+standing before a situation with one's hands, figuratively
+speaking, tied, was new enough to arouse unusual sensations.  She
+recalled, with an ironic sense of bewilderment, as a sort of
+material evidence of her own reality, the fact that not a week
+ago she had stepped on to English soil from the gangway of
+a solid Atlantic liner.  It aided her to resist the feeling that
+she had been swept back into the Middle Ages.
+
+"When he is angry," was one of the first questions she put
+to Ughtred, "what does he give as his reason?  He must
+profess to have a reason."
+
+"When he gets in a rage he says it is because mother is
+silly and common, and I am badly brought up.  But we always
+know he wants money, and it makes him furious.  He could
+kill us with rage."
+
+"Oh!" said Betty.  "I see."
+
+"It began that time when he struck her.  He said then that
+it was not decent that a woman who was married should keep
+her own money.  He made her give him almost everything she 
+had, but she wants to keep some for me.  He tries to make
+her get more from grandfather, but she will not write begging
+letters, and she won't give him what she is saving for me."
+
+It was a simple and sordid enough explanation in one sense,
+and it was one of which Bettina had known, not one parallel,
+but several.  Having married to ensure himself power over
+unquestioned resources, the man had felt himself disgustingly
+taken in, and avenged himself accordingly.  In him had been
+born the makings of a domestic tyrant who, even had he been
+favoured by fortune, would have wreaked his humours upon the
+defenceless things made his property by ties of blood and
+marriage, and who, being unfavoured, would do worse.  Betty
+could see what the years had held for Rosy, and how her weakness
+and timidity had been considered as positive assets.  A
+woman who will cry when she is bullied, may be counted upon
+to submit after she has cried.  Rosy had submitted up to a
+certain point and then, with the stubbornness of a weak
+creature, had stood at timid bay for her young.
+
+What Betty gathered was that, after the long and terrible
+illness which had followed Ughtred's birth, she had risen from
+what had been so nearly her deathbed, prostrated in both mind
+and body.  Ughtred did not know all that he revealed when
+he touched upon the time which he said his mother could not
+quite remember--when she had sat for months staring vacantly
+out of her window, trying to recall something terrible which
+had happened, and which she wanted to tell her mother, if the
+day ever came when she could write to her again.  She had
+never remembered clearly the details of the thing she had wanted
+to tell, and Nigel had insisted that her fancy was part of her
+past delirium.  He had said that at the beginning of her
+delirium she had attacked and insulted his mother and himself
+but they had excused her because they realised afterwards what
+the cause of her excitement had been.  For a long time she
+had been too brokenly weak to question or disbelieve, but, later
+she had vaguely known that he had been lying to her, though
+she could not refute what he said.  She recalled, in course of
+time, a horrible scene in which all three of them had raved at
+each other, and she herself had shrieked and laughed and hurled
+wild words at Nigel, and he had struck her.  That she knew
+and never forgot.  She had been ill a year, her hair had fallen
+out, her skin had faded and she had begun to feel like a
+nervous, tired old woman instead of a girl.  Girlhood, with
+all the past, had become unreal and too far away to be more 
+than a dream.  Nothing had remained real but Stornham and
+Nigel and the little hunchbacked baby.  She was glad when
+the Dowager died and when Nigel spent his time in London or
+on the Continent and left her with Ughtred.  When he said
+that he must spend her money on the estate, she had acquiesced
+without comment, because that insured his going away.  She
+saw that no improvement or repairs were made, but she could
+do nothing and was too listless to make the attempt.  She only
+wanted to be left alone with Ughtred, and she exhibited will-
+power only in defence of her child and in her obstinacy with
+regard to asking money of her father.
+
+"She thought, somehow, that grandfather and grandmother
+did not care for her any more--that they had forgotten her
+and only cared for you," Ughtred explained.  "She used to
+talk to me about you.  She said you must be so clever and so
+handsome that no one could remember her.  Sometimes she
+cried and said she did not want any of you to see her again,
+because she was only a hideous, little, thin, yellow old woman. 
+When I was very little she told me stories about New York
+and Fifth Avenue.  I thought they were not real places--I
+though they were places in fairyland."
+
+Betty patted his shoulder and looked away for a moment
+when he said this.  In her remote and helpless loneliness, to
+Rosy's homesick, yearning soul, noisy, rattling New York,
+Fifth Avenue with its traffic and people, its brown-stone houses
+and ricketty stages, had seemed like THAT--so splendid and bright
+and heart-filling, that she had painted them in colours which
+could belong only to fairyland.  It said so much.
+
+The thing she had suspected as she had talked to her sister
+was, before the interview ended, made curiously clear.  The
+first obstacle in her pathway would be the shrinking of a
+creature who had been so long under dominion that the mere
+thought of seeing any steps taken towards her rescue filled her
+with alarm.  One might be prepared for her almost praying
+to be let alone, because she felt that the process of her
+salvation would bring about such shocks and torments as she could
+not endure the facing of.
+
+"She will have to get used to you," Ughtred kept saying. 
+"She will have to get used to thinking things."
+
+"I will be careful," Bettina answered.  "She shall not be
+troubled.  I did not come to trouble her,"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+ONE OF THE NEW YORK DRESSES
+
+As she went down the staircase later, on her way to dinner,
+Miss Vanderpoel saw on all sides signs of the extent of the
+nakedness of the land.  She was in a fine old house, stripped of
+most of its saleable belongings, uncared for, deteriorating year
+by year, gradually going to ruin.  One need not possess
+particular keenness of sight to observe this, and she had chanced
+to see old houses in like condition in other countries than
+England.  A man-servant, in a shabby livery, opened the drawing-
+room door for her.  He was not a picturesque servitor of fallen
+fortunes, but an awkward person who was not accustomed to
+his duties.  Betty wondered if he had been called in from the
+gardens to meet the necessities of the moment.  His furtive
+glance at the tall young woman who passed him, took in with
+sudden embarrassment the fact that she plainly did not belong
+to the dispirited world bounded by Stornham Court.  Without
+sparkling gems or trailing richness in her wake, she was
+suggestively splendid.  He did not know whether it was her hair
+or the build of her neck and shoulders that did it, but it was
+revealed to him that tiaras and collars of stones which blazed
+belonged without doubt to her equipment.  He recalled that
+there was a legend to the effect that the present Lady
+Anstruthers, who looked like a rag doll, had been the daughter of
+a rich American, and that better things might have been expected
+of her if she had not been such a poor-spirited creature. 
+If this was her sister, she perhaps was a young woman of
+fortune, and that she was not of poor spirit was plain.
+
+The large drawing-room presented but another aspect of
+the bareness of the rest of the house.  In times probably long
+past, possibly in the Dowager Lady Anstruthers' early years
+of marriage, the walls had been hung with white and gold
+paper of a pattern which dominated the scene, and had been
+furnished with gilded chairs, tables, and ottomans.  Some of
+these last had evidently been removed as they became too much
+out of repair for use or ornament.  Such as remained, tarnished
+as to gilding and worn in the matter of upholstery, stood
+sparsely scattered on a desert of carpet, whose huge, flowered
+medallions had faded almost from view.
+
+Lady Anstruthers, looking shy and awkward as she fingered
+an ornament on a small table, seemed singularly a part of her
+background.  Her evening dress, slipping off her thin shoulders,
+was as faded and out of date as her carpet.  It had once been
+delicately blue and gauzy, but its gauziness hung in crushed
+folds and its blue was almost grey.  It was also the dress of
+a girl, not that of a colourless, worn woman, and her
+consciousness of its unfitness showed in her small-featured face
+as she came forward.
+
+"Do you--recognise it, Betty?" she asked hesitatingly.  "It
+was one of my New York dresses.  I put it on because--
+because----" and her stammering ended helplessly.
+
+"Because you wanted to remind me," Betty said.  If she
+felt it easier to begin with an excuse she should be provided
+with one.
+
+Perhaps but for this readiness to fall into any tone she chose
+to adopt Rosy might have endeavoured to carry her poor
+farce on, but as it was she suddenly gave it up.
+
+"I put it on because I have no other," she said.  "We never
+have visitors and I haven't dressed for dinner for so long that
+I seem to have nothing left that is fit to wear.  I dragged this
+out because it was better than anything else.  It was pretty
+once----" she gave a little laugh, "twelve years ago.  How long
+years seem!  Was I--was I pretty, Betty--twelve years ago?"
+
+"Twelve years is not such a long time."  Betty took her hand and
+drew her to a sofa.  "Let us sit down and talk about it."
+
+"There is nothing much to talk about.  This is it----"
+taking in the room with a wave of her hand.  "I am it. 
+Ughtred is it."
+
+"Then let us talk about England," was Bettina's light skim
+over the thin ice.
+
+A red spot grew on each of Lady Anstruthers' cheek bones
+and made her faded eyes look intense.
+
+"Let us talk about America," her little birdclaw of a hand
+clinging feverishly.  "Is New York still--still----"
+
+"It is still there," Betty answered with one of the adorable
+smiles which showed a deep dimple near her lip.  "But it is
+much nearer England than it used to be."
+
+"Nearer!"  The hand tightened as Rosy caught her breath.
+
+Betty bent rather suddenly and kissed her.  It was the easiest
+way of hiding the look she knew had risen to her eyes. 
+She began to talk gaily, half laughingly.
+
+"It is quite near," she said.  "Don't you realise it? 
+Americans swoop over here by thousands every year.  They come
+for business, they come for pleasure, they come for rest.  They
+cannot keep away.  They come to buy and sell--pictures and
+books and luxuries and lands.  They come to give and take. 
+They are building a bridge from shore to shore of their work,
+and their thoughts, and their plannings, out of the lives and
+souls of them.  It will be a great bridge and great things
+will pass over it."  She kissed the faded cheek again.  She
+wanted to sweep Rosy away from the dreariness of "it."  Lady
+Anstruthers looked at her with faintly smiling eyes.  She did
+not follow all this quite readily, but she felt pleased and
+vaguely comforted.
+
+"I know how they come here and marry," she said.  "The
+new Duchess of Downes is an American.  She had a fortune
+of two million pounds."
+
+"If she chooses to rebuild a great house and a great name,"
+said Betty, lifting her shoulders lightly, "why not--if it is an
+honest bargain?  I suppose it is part of the building of the
+bridge."
+
+Little Lady Anstruthers, trying to pull up the sleeves of
+the gauzy bodice slipping off her small, sharp bones, stared at
+her half in wondering adoration, half in alarm.
+
+"Betty--you--you are so handsome--and so clever and
+strange," she fluttered.  "Oh, Betty, stand up so that I can
+see how tall and handsome you are!"
+
+Betty did as she was told, and upon her feet she was a young
+woman of long lines, and fine curves so inspiring to behold that
+Lady Anstruthers clasped her hands together on her knees in
+an excited gesture.
+
+"Oh, yes!  Oh, yes!" she cried.  "You are just as
+wonderful as you looked when I turned and saw you under the
+trees.  You almost make me afraid."
+
+"Because I am wonderful?" said Betty.  "Then I will not
+be wonderful any more."
+
+"It is not because I think you wonderful, but because other
+people will.  Would you rebuild a great house?" hesitatingly.
+
+The fine line of Betty's black brows drew itself slightly
+together.
+
+"No," she said.
+
+
+"Wouldn't you?"
+
+"How could the man who owned it persuade me that he
+was in earnest if he said he loved me?  How could I persuade
+him that I was worth caring for and not a mere ambitious fool? 
+There would be too much against us."
+
+"Against you?" repeated Lady Anstruthers.
+
+"I don't say I am fair," said Betty.  "People who are
+proud are often not fair.  But we should both of us have seen
+and known too much."
+
+"You have seen me now," said Lady Anstruthers in her
+listless voice, and at the same moment dinner was announced
+and she got up from the sofa, so that, luckily, there was no
+time for the impersonal answer it would have been difficult to
+invent at a moment's notice.  As they went into the dining-
+room Betty was thinking restlessly.  She remembered all the
+material she had collected during her education in France and
+Germany, and there was added to it the fact that she HAD
+seen Rosy, and having her before her eyes she felt that there
+was small prospect of her contemplating the rebuilding of any
+great house requiring reconstruction.
+
+There was fine panelling in the dining-room and a great
+fireplace and a few family portraits.  The service upon the
+table was shabby and the dinner was not a bounteous meal. 
+Lady Anstruthers in her girlish, gauzy dress and looking too
+small for her big, high-backed chair tried to talk rapidly, and
+every few minutes forgot herself and sank into silence, with
+her eyes unconsciously fixed upon her sister's face.  Ughtred
+watched Betty also, and with a hungry questioning.  The man-
+servant in the worn livery was not a sufficiently well-trained
+and experienced domestic to make any effort to keep his eyes
+from her.  He was young enough to be excited by an innovation
+so unusual as the presence of a young and beautiful
+person surrounded by an unmistakable atmosphere of ease and
+fearlessness.  He had been talking of her below stairs and felt
+that he had failed in describing her.  He had found himself
+barely supported by the suggestion of a housemaid that sometimes
+these dresses that looked plain had been made in Paris
+at expensive places and had cost "a lot."  He furtively
+examined the dress which looked plain, and while he admitted that
+for some mysterious reason it might represent expensiveness, it
+was not the dress which was the secret of the effect, but a
+something, not altogether mere good looks, expressed by the
+wearer.  It was, in fact, the thing which the second-class
+passenger, Salter, had been at once attracted and stirred to
+rebellion by when Miss Vanderpoel came on board the Meridiana.
+
+Betty did not look too small for her high-backed chair, and
+she did not forget herself when she talked.  In spite of all
+she had found, her imagination was stirred by the surroundings. 
+Her sense of the fine spaces and possibilities of dignity
+in the barren house, her knowledge that outside the windows
+there lay stretched broad views of the park and its heavy-
+branched trees, and that outside the gates stood the neglected
+picturesqueness of the village and all the rural and--to her--
+interesting life it slowly lived--this pleased and attracted her.
+
+If she had been as helpless and discouraged as Rosalie she could
+see that it would all have meant a totally different and
+depressing thing, but, strong and spirited, and with the power
+of full hands, she was remotely rejoicing in what might be done
+with it all.  As she talked she was gradually learning detail. 
+Sir Nigel was on the Continent.  Apparently he often went
+there; also it revealed itself that no one knew at what moment
+he might return, for what reason he would return, or if he
+would return at all during the summer.  It was evident that
+no one had been at any time encouraged to ask questions as to
+his intentions, or to feel that they had a right to do so.
+
+This she knew, and a number of other things, before they left the
+table.  When they did so they went out to stroll upon the
+moss-grown stone terrace and listened to the nightingales
+throwingminto the air silver fountains of trilling song.  When
+Bettinapaused, leaning against the balustrade of the terrace that
+she might hear all the beauty of it, and feel all the beauty of
+the warm spring night, Rosy went on making her effort to talk.
+
+"It is not much of a neighbourhood, Betty," she said.  "You
+are too accustomed to livelier places to like it."
+
+"That is my reason for feeling that I shall like it.  I don't
+think I could be called a lively person, and I rather hate
+lively places."
+
+"But you are accustomed--accustomed----" Rosy harked
+back uncertainly.
+
+"I have been accustomed to wishing that I could come to
+you," said Betty.  "And now I am here."
+
+Lady Anstruthers laid a hand on her dress.
+
+"I can't believe it!  I can't believe it!" she breathed.
+
+"You will believe it," said Betty, drawing the hand around
+her waist and enclosing in her own arm the narrow shoulders.
+"Tell me about the neighbourhood."
+
+"There isn't any, really," said Lady Anstruthers.  "The
+houses are so far away from each other.  The nearest is six
+miles from here, and it is one that doesn't count.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"There is no family, and the man who owns it is so poor. 
+It is a big place, but it is falling to pieces as this is.
+
+"What is it called?"
+
+"Mount Dunstan.  The present earl only succeeded about three
+years ago.  Nigel doesn't know him.  He is queer and not liked. 
+He has been away."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"No one knows.  To Australia or somewhere.  He has odd
+ideas.  The Mount Dunstans have been awful people for two
+generations.  This man's father was almost mad with wickedness. 
+So was the elder son.  This is a second son, and he came
+into nothing but debt.  Perhaps he feels the disgrace and it
+makes him rude and ill-tempered.  His father and elder brother
+had been in such scandals that people did not invite them.
+
+"Do they invite this man?"
+
+"No.  He probably would not go to their houses if they
+did.  And he went away soon after he came into the title."
+
+"Is the place beautiful?"
+
+"There is a fine deer park, and the gardens were wonderful
+a long time ago.  The house is worth looking at--outside."
+
+"I will go and look at it," said Betty.
+
+"The carriage is out of order.  There is only Ughtred's cart."
+
+"I am a good walker," said Betty.
+
+"Are you?  It would be twelve miles--there and back.  When I was
+in New York people didn't walk much, particularly girls."
+
+"They do now," Betty answered.  "They have learned to
+do it in England.  They live out of doors and play games. 
+They have grown athletic and tall."
+
+As they talked the nightingales sang, sometimes near,
+sometimes in the distance, and scents of dewy grass and leaves
+and earth were wafted towards them.  Sometimes they strolled up
+and down the terrace, sometimes they paused and leaned
+against the stone balustrade.  Betty allowed Rosy to talk as
+she chose.  She herself asked no obviously leading questions and
+passed over trying moments with lightness.  Her desire was
+to place herself in a position where she might hear the things
+which would aid her to draw conclusions.  Lady Anstruthers
+gradually grew less nervous and afraid of her subjects.  In the
+wonder of the luxury of talking to someone who listened
+with sympathy, she once or twice almost forgot herself and
+made revelations she had not intended to make.  She had often
+the manner of a person who was afraid of being overheard;
+sometimes, even when she was making speeches quite simple in
+themselves, her voice dropped and she glanced furtively aside
+as if there were chances that something she dreaded might step
+out of the shadow.
+
+When they went upstairs together and parted for the night, the
+clinging of Rosy's embrace was for a moment almost convulsive. 
+But she tried to laugh off its suggestion of intensity.
+
+"I held you tight so that I could feel sure that you were
+real and would not melt away," she said.  "I hope you will
+be here in the morning."
+
+"I shall never really go quite away again, now I have come,"
+Betty answered.  "It is not only your house I have come into. 
+I have come back into your life."
+
+After she had entered her room and locked the door she
+sat down and wrote a letter to her father.  It was a long
+letter, but a clear one.  She painted a definite and detailed
+picture and made distinct her chief point.
+
+"She is afraid of me," she wrote.  "That is the first and
+worst obstacle.  She is actually afraid that I will do something
+which will only add to her trouble.  She has lived under
+dominion so long that she has forgotten that there are people
+who have no reason for fear.  Her old life seems nothing but
+a dream.  The first thing I must teach her is that I am to
+be trusted not to do futile things, and that she need neither be
+afraid of nor for me."
+
+After writing these sentences she found herself leaving her
+desk and walking up and down the room to relieve herself. 
+She could not sit still, because suddenly the blood ran fast and
+hot through her veins.  She put her hands against her cheeks
+and laughed a little, low laugh.
+
+"I feel violent," she said.  "I feel violent and I must get
+over it.  This is rage.  Rage is worth nothing."
+
+It was rage--the rage of splendid hot blood which surged
+in answer to leaping hot thoughts.  There would have been a
+sort of luxury in giving way to the sway of it.  But the self-
+indulgence would have been no aid to future action.  Rage
+was worth nothing.  She said it as the first Reuben Vanderpoel
+might have said of a useless but glittering weapon.  "This gun
+is worth nothing," and cast it aside.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+IN THE GARDENS
+
+She came out upon the stone terrace again rather early in the
+morning.  She wanted to wander about in the first freshness
+of the day, which was always an uplifting thing to her.  She
+wanted to see the dew on the grass and on the ragged flower
+borders and to hear the tender, broken fluting of birds in the
+trees.  One cuckoo was calling to another in the park, and
+she stopped and listened intently.  Until yesterday she had
+never heard a cuckoo call, and its hollow mellowness gave
+her delight.  It meant the spring in England, and nowhere else.
+
+There was space enough to ramble about in the gardens. 
+Paths and beds were alike overgrown with weeds, but some
+strong, early-blooming things were fighting for life, refusing
+to be strangled.  Against the beautiful old red walls, over
+which age had stolen with a wonderful grey bloom, venerable
+fruit trees were spread and nailed, and here and there showed
+bloom, clumps of low-growing things sturdily advanced their
+yellowness or whiteness, as if defying neglect.  In one place
+a wall slanted and threatened to fall, bearing its nectarine
+trees with it; in another there was a gap so evidently not of
+to-day that the heap of its masonry upon the border bed was
+already covered with greenery, and the roots of the fruit tree it
+had supported had sent up strong, insistent shoots.
+
+She passed down broad paths and narrow ones, sometimes
+walking under trees, sometimes pushing her way between
+encroaching shrubs; she descended delightful mossy and broken
+steps and came upon dilapidated urns, in which weeds grew
+instead of flowers, and over which rampant but lovely, savage
+little creepers clambered and clung.
+
+In one of the walled kitchen gardens she came upon an
+elderly gardener at work.  At the sound of her approaching
+steps he glanced round and then stood up, touching his forelock
+in respectful but startled salute.  He was so plainly
+amazed at the sight of her that she explained herself.
+
+"Good-morning," she said.  "I am her ladyship's sister,
+Miss Vanderpoel.  I came yesterday evening.  I am looking
+over your gardens."
+
+He touched his forehead again and looked round him.  His
+manner was not cheerful.  He cast a troubled eye about him.
+
+"They're not much to see, miss," he said.  "They'd ought to be,
+but they're not.  Growing things has to be fed and took care of. 
+A man and a boy can't do it--nor yet four or five of 'em."
+
+"How many ought there to be?" Betty inquired, with business-like
+directness.  It was not only the dew on the grass she had come
+out to see.
+
+"If there was eight or ten of us we might put it in order
+and keep it that way.  It's a big place, miss."
+
+Betty looked about her as he had done, but with a less
+discouraged eye.
+
+"It is a beautiful place, as well as a large one," she said. 
+"I can see that there ought to be more workers."
+
+"There's no one," said the gardener, "as has as many enemies as a
+gardener, an' as many things to fight.  There's grubs an' there's
+greenfly, an' there's drout', an' wet an' cold, an' mildew, an'
+there's what the soil wants and starves without, an' if you
+haven't got it nor yet hands an' feet an' tools enough, how's
+things to feed, an' fight an' live--let alone bloom an' bear?"
+
+"I don't know much about gardens," said Miss Vanderpoel,
+"but I can understand that."
+
+The scent of fresh bedewed things was in the air.  It was
+true that she had not known much about gardens, but here
+standing in the midst of one she began to awaken to a new,
+practical interest.  A creature of initiative could not let such
+a place as this alone.  It was beauty being slowly slain.  One
+could not pass it by and do nothing.
+
+"What is your name?" she asked
+
+"Kedgers, miss.  I've only been here about a twelve-month. 
+I was took on because I'm getting on in years an' can't ask
+much wage."
+
+"Can you spare time to take me through the gardens and
+show me things?"
+
+Yes, he could do it.  In truth, he privately welcomed an
+opportunity offering a prospect of excitement so novel.  He
+had shown more flourishing gardens to other young ladies in
+his past years of service, but young ladies did not come to
+Stornham, and that one having, with such extraordinary
+unexpectedness arrived, should want to look over the desolation
+of these, was curious enough to rouse anyone to a sense of a
+break in accustomed monotony.  The young lady herself mystified
+him by her difference from such others as he had seen. 
+What the man in the shabby livery had felt, he felt also, and
+added to this was a sense of the practicalness of the questions
+she asked and the interest she showed and a way she had of
+seeming singularly to suggest by the look in her eyes and the
+tone of her voice that nothing was necessarily without remedy. 
+When her ladyship walked through the place and looked at
+things, a pale resignation expressed itself in the very droop of
+her figure.  When this one walked through the tumbled-down
+grape-houses, potting-sheds and conservatories, she saw where
+glass was broken, where benches had fallen and where roofs
+sagged and leaked.  She inquired about the heating apparatus
+and asked that she might see it.  She asked about the village
+and its resources, about labourers and their wages.
+
+"As if," commented Kedgers mentally, "she was what
+Sir Nigel is--leastways what he'd ought to be an' ain't."
+
+She led the way back to the fallen wall and stood and
+looked at it.
+
+"It's a beautiful old wall," she said.  "It should be rebuilt
+with the old brick.  New would spoil it."
+
+"Some of this is broken and crumbled away," said Kedgers,
+picking up a piece to show it to her.
+
+"Perhaps old brick could be bought somewhere," replied
+the young lady speculatively.  "One ought to be able to buy
+old brick in England, if one is willing to pay for it."
+
+Kedgers scratched his head and gazed at her in respectful
+wonder which was almost trouble.  Who was going to pay for
+things, and who was going to look for things which were not
+on the spot?  Enterprise like this was not to be explained.
+
+When she left him he stood and watched her upright figure
+disappear through the ivy-grown door of the kitchen gardens
+with a disturbed but elated expression on his countenance.  He
+did not know why he felt elated, but he was conscious of
+elation.  Something new had walked into the place.  He stopped
+his work and grinned and scratched his head several times after
+he went back to his pottering among the cabbage plants.
+
+"My word," he muttered.  "She's a fine, straight young
+woman.  If she was her ladyship things 'ud be different.  Sir
+Nigel 'ud be different, too--or there'd be some fine upsets."
+
+There was a huge stable yard, and Betty passed through
+that on her way back.  The door of the carriage house was
+open and she saw two or three tumbled-down vehicles.  One
+was a landau with a wheel off, one was a shabby, old-fashioned,
+low phaeton.  She caught sight of a patently venerable cob in
+one of the stables.  The stalls near him were empty.
+
+"I suppose that is all they have to depend upon," she
+thought.  "And the stables are like the gardens."
+
+She found Lady Anstruthers and Ughtred waiting for her upon the
+terrace, each of them regarding her with an expression
+suggestive of repressed curiosity as she approached.  Lady
+Anstruthers flushed a little and went to meet her with an
+eager kiss.
+
+"You look like--I don't know quite what you look like,
+Betty!" she exclaimed.
+
+The girl's dimple deepened and her eyes said smiling things.
+
+"It is the morning--and your gardens," she answered.  "I
+have been round your gardens."
+
+"They were beautiful once, I suppose," said Rosy deprecatingly.
+
+"They are beautiful now.  There is nothing like them in
+America at least."
+
+"I don't remember any gardens in America," Lady
+Anstruthers owned reluctantly, "but everything seemed so cheerful
+and well cared for and--and new.  Don't laugh, Betty.  I
+have begun to like new things.  You would if you had watched
+old ones tumbling to pieces for twelve years."
+
+"They ought not to be allowed to tumble to pieces," said
+Betty.  She added her next words with simple directness.  She
+could only discover how any advancing steps would be taken
+by taking them.  "Why do you allow them to do it?"
+
+Lady Anstruthers looked away, but as she looked her eyes
+passed Ughtred's.
+
+"I!" she said.  "There are so many other things to do. 
+It would cost so much--such an enormity to keep it all in
+order."
+
+"But it ought to be done--for Ughtred's sake."
+
+"I know that," faltered Rosy, "but I can't help it."
+
+"You can," answered Betty, and she put her arm round her as they
+turned to enter the house.  "When you have become more used to me
+and my driving American ways I will show you how."
+
+The lightness with which she said it had an odd effect on Lady
+Anstruthers.  Such casual readiness was so full of the suggestion
+of unheard of possibilities that it was a kind of shock.
+
+"I have been twelve years in getting un-used to you--I feel as if
+it would take twelve years more to get used again," she said.
+
+"It won't take twelve weeks," said Betty.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE FIRST MAN
+
+The mystery of the apparently occult methods of communication
+among the natives of India, between whom, it is said,
+news flies by means too strange and subtle to be humanly
+explainable, is no more difficult a problem to solve than that
+of the lightning rapidity with which a knowledge of the
+transpiring of any new local event darts through the slowest,
+and, as far as outward signs go, the least communicative
+English village slumbering drowsily among its pastures and trees.
+
+That which the Hall or Manor House believed last night,
+known only to the four walls of its drawing-room, is discussed
+over the cottage breakfast tables as though presented in detail
+through the columns of the Morning Post.  The vicarage, the
+smithy, the post office, the little provision shop, are
+instantaneously informed as by magic of such incidents of
+interest as occur, and are prepared to assist vicariously at any
+future developments.  Through what agency information is given no
+one can tell, and, indeed, the agency is of small moment.  Facts
+of interest are perhaps like flights of swallows and dart
+chattering from one red roof to another, proclaiming themselves
+aloud.  Nothing is so true as that in such villages they are the
+property and innocent playthings of man, woman, and child,
+providing conversation and drama otherwise likely to be lacked.
+
+When Miss Vanderpoel walked through Stornham village
+street she became aware that she was an exciting object of
+interest.  Faces appeared at cottage windows, women sauntered
+to doors, men in the taproom of the Clock Inn left beer
+mugs to cast an eye on her; children pushed open gates and
+stared as they bobbed their curtsies; the young woman who
+kept the shop left her counter and came out upon her door
+step to pick up her straying baby and glance over its shoulder
+at the face with the red mouth, and the mass of black hair
+rolled upward under a rough blue straw hat.  Everyone knew
+who this exotic-looking young lady was.  She had arrived
+yesterday from London, and a week ago by means of a ship from
+far-away America, from the country in connection with which
+the rural mind curiously mixed up large wages, great fortunes
+and Indians.  "Gaarge" Lunsden, having spent five years of his
+youth labouring heavily for sixteen shillings a week, had gone 
+to "Meriker" and had earned there eight shillings a day.  This
+was a well-known and much-talked over fact, and had elevated 
+the western continent to a position of trust and importance 
+it had seriously lacked before the emigration
+of Lunsden.  A place where a man could earn eight shillings
+a day inspired interest as well as confidence.  When Sir
+Nigel's wife had arrived twelve years ago as the new Lady
+Anstruthers, the story that she herself "had money" had
+been verified by her fine clothes and her way of handing out
+sovereigns in cases where the rest of the gentry, if they gave
+at all, would have bestowed tea and flannel or shillings.  There
+had been for a few months a period of unheard of well-being
+in Stornham village; everyone remembered the hundred pounds
+the bride had given to poor Wilson when his place had burned
+down, but the village had of course learned, by its occult means,
+that Sir Nigel and the Dowager had been angry and that there
+had been a quarrel.  Afterwards her ladyship had been dangerously
+ill, the baby had been born a hunchback, and a year had
+passed before its mother had been seen again.  Since then she
+had been a changed creature; she had lost her looks and
+seemed to care for nothing but the child.  Stornham village
+saw next to nothing of her, and it certainly was not she who
+had the dispensing of her fortune.  Rumour said Sir Nigel
+lived high in London and foreign parts, but there was no high
+living at the Court.  Her ladyship's family had never been near
+her, and belief in them and their wealth almost ceased to exist. 
+If they were rich, Stornham felt that it was their business to
+mend roofs and windows and not allow chimneys and kitchen boilers
+to fall into ruin, the simple, leading article of faith being
+that even American money belonged properly to England.
+
+As Miss Vanderpoel walked at a light, swinging pace
+through the one village street the gazers felt with Kedgers that
+something new was passing and stirring the atmosphere.  She 
+looked straight, and with a friendliness somehow dominating, at
+the curious women; her handsome eyes met those of the men
+in a human questioning; she smiled and nodded to the bobbing
+children.  One of these, young enough to be uncertain on its
+feet, in running to join some others stumbled and fell on the
+path before her.  Opening its mouth in the inevitable resultant
+roar, it was shocked almost into silence by the tall young
+lady stooping at once, picking it up, and cheerfully dusting its
+pinafore.
+
+"Don't cry," she said; "you are not hurt, you know."
+
+The deep dimple near her mouth showed itself, and the
+laugh in her eyes was so reassuring that the penny she put into
+the grubby hand was less productive of effect than her mere
+self.  She walked on, leaving the group staring after her
+breathless, because of a sense of having met with a wonderful
+adventure.  The grand young lady with the black hair and the
+blue hat and tall, straight body was the adventure.  She left
+the same sense of event with the village itself.  They talked of
+her all day over their garden palings, on their doorsteps, in the
+street; of her looks, of her height, of the black rim of lashes
+round her eyes, of the chance that she might be rich and ready
+to give half-crowns and sovereigns, of the "Meriker" she had
+come from, and above all of the reason for her coming.
+
+Betty swung with the light, firm step of a good walker out
+on to the highway.  To walk upon the fine, smooth old Roman
+road was a pleasure in itself, but she soon struck away from
+it and went through lanes and by-ways, following sign-posts
+because she knew where she was going.  Her walk was to take
+her to Mount Dunstan and home again by another road.  In
+walking, an objective point forms an interest, and what she
+had heard of the estate from Rosalie was a vague reason for
+her caring to see it.  It was another place like Stornham, once
+dignified and nobly representative of fine things, now losing
+their meanings and values.  Values and meanings, other than
+mere signs of wealth and power, there had been.  Centuries
+ago strong creatures had planned and built it for such reasons
+as strength has for its planning and building.  In Bettina
+Vanderpoel's imagination the First Man held powerful and moving
+sway.  It was he whom she always saw.  In history, as a child
+at school, she had understood and drawn close to him.  There
+was always a First Man behind all that one saw or was told,
+one who was the fighter, the human thing who snatched weapons
+and tools from stones and trees and wielded them in the
+carrying out of the thought which was his possession and his
+strength.  He was the God made human; others waited, without
+knowledge of their waiting, for the signal he gave.  A
+man like others--with man's body, hands, and limbs, and eyes--
+the moving of a whole world was subtly altered by his birth. 
+One could not always trace him, but with stone axe and spear
+point he had won savage lands in savage ways, and so ruled
+them that, leaving them to other hands, their march towards
+less savage life could not stay itself, but must sweep on; others
+of his kind, striking rude harps, had so sung that the loud
+clearness of their wild songs had rung through the ages, and echo
+still in strains which are theirs, though voices of to-day repeat
+the note of them.  The First Man, a Briton stained with woad
+and hung with skins, had tilled the luscious greenness of the
+lands richly rolling now within hedge boundaries.  The square
+church towers rose, holding their slender corner spires above
+the trees, as a result of the First Man, Norman William.  The
+thought which held its place, the work which did not pass
+away, had paid its First Man wages; but beauties crumbling,
+homes falling to waste, were bitter things.  The First Man,
+who, having won his splendid acres, had built his home upon
+them and reared his young and passed his possession on with a
+proud heart, seemed but ill treated.  Through centuries the
+home had enriched itself, its acres had borne harvests, its trees
+had grown and spread huge branches, full lives had been lived
+within the embrace of the massive walls, there had been loves
+and lives and marriages and births, the breathings of them
+made warm and full the very air.  To Betty it seemed that the
+land itself would have worn another face if it had not been
+trodden by so many springing feet, if so many harvests had not
+waved above it, if so many eyes had not looked upon and loved it.
+
+She passed through variations of the rural loveliness she had
+seen on her way from the station to the Court, and felt them
+grow in beauty as she saw them again.  She came at last to a
+village somewhat larger than Stornham and marked by the
+signs of the lack of money-spending care which Stornham
+showed.  Just beyond its limits a big park gate opened on to
+an avenue of massive trees.  She stopped and looked down it,
+but could see nothing but its curves and, under the branches,
+glimpses of a spacious sweep of park with other trees standing
+in groups or alone in the sward.  The avenue was unswept and
+untended, and here and there boughs broken off by wind
+
+storms lay upon it.  She turned to the road again and followed
+it, because it enclosed the park and she wanted to see more of
+its evident beauty.  It was very beautiful.  As she walked on
+she saw it rolled into woods and deeps filled with bracken; she
+saw stretches of hillocky, fine-grassed rabbit warren, and
+hollows holding shadowy pools; she caught the gleam of a lake
+with swans sailing slowly upon it with curved necks; there were
+wonderful lights and wonderful shadows, and brooding stillness,
+which made her footfall upon the road a too material thing.
+
+Suddenly she heard a stirring in the bracken a yard or two
+away from her.  Something was moving slowly among the
+waving masses of huge fronds and caused them to sway to and
+fro.  It was an antlered stag who rose from his bed in the
+midst of them, and with majestic deliberation got upon his feet
+and stood gazing at her with a calmness of pose so splendid, and
+a liquid darkness and lustre of eye so stilly and fearlessly
+beautiful, that she caught her breath.  He simply gazed as her
+as a great king might gaze at an intruder, scarcely deigning
+wonder.
+
+As she had passed on her way, Betty had seen that the enclosing
+park palings were decaying, covered with lichen and falling
+at intervals.  It had even passed through her mind that here
+was one of the demands for expenditure on a large estate, which
+limited resources could not confront with composure.  The
+deer fence itself, a thing of wire ten feet high, to form an
+obstacle to leaps, she had marked to be in such condition as to
+threaten to become shortly a useless thing.  Until this moment
+she had seen no deer, but looking beyond the stag and across
+the sward she now saw groups near each other, stags cropping
+or looking towards her with lifted heads, does at a respectful
+but affectionate distance from them, some caring for their
+fawns.  The stag who had risen near her had merely walked through
+a gap in the boundary and now stood free to go where he would.
+
+"He will get away," said Betty, knitting her black brows. 
+Ah! what a shame!
+
+Even with the best intentions one could not give chase to
+a stag.  She looked up and down the road, but no one was
+within sight.  Her brows continued to knit themselves and
+her eyes ranged over the park itself in the hope that some
+labourer on the estate, some woodman or game-keeper, might
+be about.
+
+
+"It is no affair of mine," she said, "but it would be too
+bad to let him get away, though what happens to stray stags
+one doesn't exactly know."
+
+As she said it she caught sight of someone, a man in
+leggings and shabby clothes and with a gun over his shoulder,
+evidently an under keeper.  He was a big, rather rough-looking
+fellow, but as he lurched out into the open from a wood Betty
+saw that she could reach him if she passed through a narrow
+gate a few yards away and walked quickly.
+
+He was slouching along, his head drooping and his broad
+shoulders expressing the definite antipodes of good spirits. 
+Betty studied his back as she strode after him, her conclusion
+being that he was perhaps not a good-humoured man to
+approach at any time, and that this was by ill luck one of his
+less fortunate hours.
+
+"Wait a moment, if you please," her clear, mellow voice
+flung out after him when she was within hearing distance.  "I
+want to speak to you, keeper."
+
+He turned with an air of far from pleased surprise.  The
+afternoon sun was in his eyes and made him scowl.  For a
+moment he did not see distinctly who was approaching him,
+but he had at once recognised a certain cool tone of command
+in the voice whose suddenness had roused him from a black
+mood.  A few steps brought them to close quarters, and when
+he found himself looking into the eyes of his pursuer he made
+a movement as if to lift his cap, then checking himself, touched
+it, keeper fashion.
+
+"Oh!" he said shortly.  "Miss Vanderpoel!  Beg pardon."
+
+Bettina stood still a second.  She had her surprise also.  Here
+was the unexpected again.  The under keeper was the red- haired
+second-class passenger of the Meridiana.
+
+He did not look pleased to see her, and the suddenness of
+his appearance excluded the possibility of her realising that
+upon the whole she was at least not displeased to see him.
+
+"How do you do?" she said, feeling the remark fantastically
+conventional, but not being inspired by any alternative. 
+"I came to tell you that one of the stags has got through a
+gap in the fence."
+
+"Damn!" she heard him say under his breath.  Aloud he
+said, "Thank you."
+
+"He is a splendid creature," she said.  "I did not know
+what to do.  I was glad to see a keeper coming."
+
+"Thank you," he said again, and strode towards the place
+ where the stag still stood gazing up the road, as if reflecting
+as to whether it allured him or not.
+
+Betty walked back more slowly, watching him with interest. 
+She wondered what he would find it necessary to do.  She
+heard him begin a low, flute-like whistling, and then saw the
+antlered head turn towards him.  The woodland creature
+moved, but it was in his direction.  It had without doubt
+answered his call before and knew its meaning to be friendly. 
+It went towards him, stretching out a tender sniffing nose, and
+he put his hand in the pocket of his rough coat and gave it
+something to eat.  Afterwards he went to the gap in the fence
+and drew the wires together, fastening them with other wire,
+which he also took out of the coat pocket.
+
+"He is not afraid of making himself useful," thought Betty. 
+"And the animals know him.  He is not as bad as he looks."
+
+She lingered a moment watching him, and then walked
+towards the gate through which she had entered.  He glanced
+up as she neared him.
+
+"I don't see your carriage," he said.  "Your man is
+probably round the trees."
+
+"I walked," answered Betty.  "I had heard of this place
+and wanted to see it."
+
+He stood up, putting his wire back into his pocket.
+
+"There is not much to be seen from the road," he said. 
+"Would you like to see more of it?"
+
+His manner was civil enough, but not the correct one for
+a servant.  He did not say "miss" or touch his cap in making
+the suggestion.  Betty hesitated a moment.
+
+"Is the family at home?" she inquired.
+
+"There is no family but--his lordship.  He is off the place."
+
+"Does he object to trespassers?"
+
+"Not if they are respectable and take no liberties."
+
+"I am respectable, and I shall not take liberties," said Miss
+Vanderpoel, with a touch of hauteur.  The truth was that she
+had spent a sufficient number of years on the Continent to have
+become familiar with conventions which led her not to approve
+wholly of his bearing.  Perhaps he had lived long enough in
+America to forget such conventions and to lack something
+which centuries of custom had decided should belong to his
+class.  A certain suggestion of rough force in the man rather
+attracted her, and her slight distaste for his manner arose from
+the realisation that a gentleman's servant who did not address
+his superiors as was required by custom was not doing his
+work in a finished way.  In his place she knew her own
+demeanour would have been finished.
+
+"If you are sure that Lord Mount Dunstan would not
+object to my walking about, I should like very much to see
+the gardens and the house," she said.  "If you show them to
+me, shall I be interfering with your duties?"
+
+"No," he answered, and then for the first time rather glumly
+added, "miss."
+
+"I am interested," she said, as they crossed the grass
+together, "because places like this are quite new to me.  I have
+never been in England before."
+
+"There are not many places like this," he answered, "not
+many as old and fine, and not many as nearly gone to ruin. 
+Even Stornham is not quite as far gone."
+
+"It is far gone," said Miss Vanderpoel.  "I am staying
+there--with my sister, Lady Anstruthers."
+
+"Beg pardon--miss," he said.  This time he touched his cap
+in apology.
+
+Enormous as the gulf between their positions was, he knew
+that he had offered to take her over the place because he was
+in a sense glad to see her again.  Why he was glad he did not
+profess to know or even to ask himself.  Coarsely speaking, it
+might be because she was one of the handsomest young women
+he had ever chanced to meet with, and while her youth was
+apparent in the rich red of her mouth, the mass of her thick,
+soft hair and the splendid blue of her eyes, there spoke in
+every line of face and pose something intensely more interesting
+and compelling than girlhood.  Also, since the night they had
+come together on the ship's deck for an appalling moment, he
+had liked her better and rebelled less against the unnatural
+wealth she represented.  He led her first to the wood from
+which she had seen him emerge.
+
+"I will show you this first," he explained.  "Keep your
+eyes on the ground until I tell you to raise them."
+
+Odd as this was, she obeyed, and her lowered glance showed
+her that she was being guided along a narrow path between
+trees.  The light was mellow golden-green, and birds were
+singing in the boughs above her.  In a few minutes he stopped.
+
+"Now look up," he said.
+
+She uttered an exclamation when she did so.  She was in a
+fairy dell thick with ferns, and at beautiful distances from
+each other incredibly splendid oaks spread and almost trailed
+their lovely giant branches.  The glow shining through and
+between them, the shadows beneath them, their great boles and
+moss-covered roots, and the stately, mellow distances revealed
+under their branches, the ancient wildness and richness, which
+meant, after all, centuries of cultivation, made a picture in
+this exact, perfect moment of ripening afternoon sun of an
+almost unbelievable beauty.
+
+"There is nothing lovelier," he said in a low voice, "in
+all England."
+
+Bettina turned to look at him, because his tone was a
+curious one for a man like himself.  He was standing resting
+on his gun and taking in the loveliness with a strange look
+in his rugged face.
+
+"You--you love it!" she said.
+
+"Yes," but with a suggestion of stubborn reluctance in the
+admission.
+
+She was rather moved.
+
+"Have you been keeper here long?" she asked.
+
+"No--only a few years.  But I have known the place all my life."
+
+"Does Lord Mount Dunstan love it?"
+
+"In his way--yes."
+
+He was plainly not disposed to talk of his master.  He was
+perhaps not on particularly good terms with him.  He led her
+away and volunteered no further information.  He was, upon
+the whole, uncommunicative.  He did not once refer to the
+circumstance of their having met before.  It was plain that he
+had no intention of presuming upon the fact that he, as a
+second-class passenger on a ship, had once been forced by
+accident across the barriers between himself and the saloon deck.
+He was stubbornly resolved to keep his place; so stubbornly
+that Bettina felt that to broach the subject herself would verge
+upon offence.
+
+But the golden ways through which he led her made the
+afternoon one she knew she should never forget.  They wandered
+through moss walks and alleys, through tangled shrubberies
+bursting into bloom, beneath avenues of blossoming horse-
+chestnuts and scented limes, between thickets of budding red
+and white may, and jungles of neglected rhododendrons;
+through sunken gardens and walled ones, past terraces with
+broken balustrades of stone, and fallen Floras and Dianas, past
+moss-grown fountains splashing in lovely corners.  Arches,
+overgrown with yet unblooming roses, crumbled in their time
+stained beauty.  Stillness brooded over it all, and they met
+no one.  They scarcely broke the silence themselves.  The
+man led the way as one who knew it by heart, and Bettina
+followed, not caring for speech herself, because the stillness
+seemed to add a spell of enchantment.  What could one say,
+to a stranger, of such beauty so lost and given over to ruin
+and decay.
+
+"But, oh!" she murmured once, standing still, with in-
+drawn breath, "if it were mine!--if it were mine!"  And she
+said the thing forgetting that her guide was a living creature
+and stood near.
+
+Afterwards her memories of it all seemed to her like the
+memories of a dream.  The lack of speech between herself and
+the man who led her, his often averted face, her own sense of
+the desertedness of each beauteous spot she passed through, the
+mossy paths which gave back no sound of footfalls as they
+walked, suggested, one and all, unreality.  When at last they
+passed through a door half hidden in an ivied wall, and crossing
+a grassed bowling green, mounted a short flight of broken
+steps which led them to a point through which they saw the
+house through a break in the trees, this last was the final
+touch of all.  It was a great place, stately in its masses of
+grey stone to which thick ivy clung.  To Bettina it seemed
+that a hundred windows stared at her with closed, blind eyes. 
+All were shuttered but two or three on the lower floors.  Not
+one showed signs of life.  The silent stone thing stood sightless
+among all of which it was dead master--rolling acres,
+great trees, lost gardens and deserted groves.
+
+"Oh!" she sighed, "Oh!"
+
+Her companion stood still and leaned upon his gun again,
+looking as he had looked before.
+
+"Some of it," he said, "was here before the Conquest.  It
+belonged to Mount Dunstans then."
+
+"And only one of them is left," she cried, "and it is like
+this!"
+
+"They have been a bad lot, the last hundred years," was the
+surly liberty of speech he took, "a bad lot."
+
+It was not his place to speak in such manner of those of
+his master's house, and it was not the part of Miss Vanderpoel
+to encourage him by response.  She remained silent, standing
+perhaps a trifle more lightly erect as she gazed at the rows
+of blind windows in silence.
+
+Neither of them uttered a word for some time, but at length
+Bettina roused herself.  She had a six-mile walk before her
+and must go.
+
+"I am very much obliged to you," she began, and then
+paused a second.  A curious hesitance came upon her, though
+she knew that under ordinary circumstances such hesitation
+would have been totally out of place.  She had occupied the
+man's time for an hour or more, he was of the working class,
+and one must not be guilty of the error of imagining that a man
+who has work to do can justly spend his time in one's service
+for the mere pleasure of it.  She knew what custom demanded. 
+Why should she hesitate before this man, with his not too
+courteous, surly face.  She felt slightly irritated by her own
+unpractical embarrassment as she put her hand into the small,
+latched bag at her belt.
+
+"I am very much obliged, keeper," she said.  "You have
+given me a great deal of your time.  You know the place so
+well that it has been a pleasure to be taken about by you.  I
+have never seen anything so beautiful--and so sad.  Thank you
+--thank you."  And she put a goldpiece in his palm.
+
+His fingers closed over it quietly.  Why it was to her great
+relief she did not know--because something in the simple act
+annoyed her, even while she congratulated herself that her
+hesitance had been absurd.  The next moment she wondered if
+it could be possible that he had expected a larger fee.  He
+opened his hand and looked at the money with a grim steadiness.
+
+"Thank you, miss," he said, and touched his cap in the
+proper manner.
+
+He did not look gracious or grateful, but he began to put
+it in a small pocket in the breast of his worn corduroy shooting
+jacket.  Suddenly he stopped, as if with abrupt resolve. 
+He handed the coin back without any change of his glum look.
+
+"Hang it all," he said, "I can't take this, you know.  I suppose
+I ought to have told you.  It would have been less awkward for us
+both.  I am that unfortunate beggar, Mount Dunstan, myself."
+
+A pause was inevitable.  It was a rather long one.  After
+it, Betty took back her half-sovereign and returned it to her
+bag, but she pleased a certain perversity in him by looking
+more annoyed than confused.
+
+"Yes," she said.  "You ought to have told me, Lord Mount
+Dunstan."
+
+He slightly shrugged his big shoulders.
+
+
+"Why shouldn't you take me for a keeper?  You crossed
+the Atlantic with a fourth-rate looking fellow separated from
+you by barriers of wood and iron.  You came upon him tramping
+over a nobleman's estate in shabby corduroys and gaiters,
+with a gun over his shoulder and a scowl on his ugly face.  Why
+should you leap to the conclusion that he is the belted Earl
+himself?  There is no cause for embarrassment."
+
+"I am not embarrassed," said Bettina.
+
+"That is what I like," gruffly.
+
+"I am pleased," in her mellowest velvet voice, "that you
+like it."
+
+Their eyes met with a singular directness of gaze.  Between
+them a spark passed which was not afterwards to be extinguished,
+though neither of them knew the moment of its kindling,
+and Mount Dunstan slightly frowned.
+
+"I beg pardon," he said.  "You are quite right.  It had a
+deucedly patronising sound."
+
+As he stood before her Betty was given her opportunity to
+see him as she had not seen him before, to confront the sum
+total of his physique.  His red-brown eyes looked out from
+rather fine heavy brows, his features were strong and clear,
+though ruggedly cut, his build showed weight of bone, not of
+flesh, and his limbs were big and long.  He would have wielded
+a battle-axe with power in centuries in which men hewed their
+way with them.  Also it occurred to her he would have looked
+well in a coat of mail.  He did not look ill in his corduroys
+and gaiters.
+
+"I am a self-absorbed beggar," he went on.  "I had been
+slouching about the place, almost driven mad by my thoughts,
+and when I saw you took me for a servant my fancy was for
+letting the thing go on.  If I had been a rich man instead of
+a pauper I would have kept your half-sovereign."
+
+"I should not have enjoyed that when I found out the
+truth," said Miss Vanderpoel
+
+"No, I suppose you wouldn't.  But I should not have cared."
+
+He was looking at her straightly and summing her up as
+she had summed him up.  A man and young, he did not miss
+a line or a tint of her chin or cheek, shoulder, or brow, or
+dense, lifted hair.  He had already, even in his guise of keeper,
+noticed one thing, which was that while at times her eyes were
+the blue of steel, sometimes they melted to the colour of
+bluebells under water.  They had been of this last hue when she
+had stood in the sunken garden, forgetting him and crying low:
+
+"Oh, if it were mine!  If it were mine!"
+
+He did not like American women with millions, but while
+he would not have said that he liked her, he did not wish her
+yet to move away.  And she, too, did not wish, just yet, to move
+away.  There was something dramatic and absorbing in the
+situation.  She looked over the softly stirring grass and saw
+the sunshine was deepening its gold and the shadows were
+growing long.  It was not a habit of hers to ask questions, but
+she asked one.
+
+"Did you not like America?" was what she said.
+
+"Hated it!  Hated it!  I went there lured by a belief that
+a man like myself, with muscle and will, even without experience,
+could make a fortune out of small capital on a sheep
+ranch.  Wind and weather and disease played the devil with
+me.  I lost the little I had and came back to begin over again--
+on nothing--here!"  And he waved his hand over the park
+with its sward and coppice and bracken and the deer cropping
+in the late afternoon gold.
+
+"To begin what again?" said Betty.  It was an extraordinary
+enough thing, seen in the light of conventions, that they
+should stand and talk like this.  But the spark had kindled
+between eye and eye, and because of it they suddenly had
+forgotten that they were strangers.
+
+"You are an American, so it may not seem as mad to you as it
+would to others.  To begin to build up again, in one man's life,
+what has taken centuries to grow--and fall into this."
+
+"It would be a splendid thing to do," she said slowly, and
+as she said it her eyes took on their colour of bluebells,
+because what she had seen had moved her.  She had not looked at
+him, but at the cropping deer as she spoke, but at her next
+sentence she turned to him again.
+
+"Where should you begin?" she asked, and in saying it
+thought of Stornham.
+
+He laughed shortly.
+
+"That is American enough," he said.  "Your people have
+not finished their beginnings yet and live in the spirit of them.
+
+I tell you of a wild fancy, and you accept it as a possibility
+and turn on me with, `Where should you begin?' "
+
+"That is one way of beginning," said Bettina.  "In fact,
+it is the only way."
+
+He did not tell her that he liked that, but he knew that he
+did like it and that her mere words touched him like a spur. 
+It was, of course, her lifelong breathing of the atmosphere of
+millions which made for this fashion of moving at once in the
+direction of obstacles presenting to the rest of the world
+barriers seemingly insurmountable.  And yet there was something
+else in it, some quality of nature which did not alone suggest
+the omnipotence of wealth, but another thing which might be
+even stronger and therefore carried conviction.  He who had
+raged and clenched his hands in the face of his knowledge of
+the aspect his dream would have presented if he had revealed
+it to the ordinary practical mind, felt that a point of view like
+this was good for him.  There was in it stimulus for a fleeting
+moment at least.
+
+"That is a good idea," he answered.  "Where should you begin?"
+
+She replied quite seriously, though he could have imagined
+some girls rather simpering over the question as a casual joke.
+
+"One would begin at the fences," she said.  "Don't you
+think so?"
+
+"That is practical."
+
+"That is where I shall begin at Stornham," reflectively.
+
+"You are going to begin at Stornham?"
+
+"How could one help it?  It is not as large or as splendid
+as this has been, but it is like it in a way.  And it will belong
+to my sister's son.  No, I could not help it."
+
+"I suppose you could not."  There was a hint of wholly
+unconscious resentment in his tone.  He was thinking that the
+effect produced by their boundless wealth was to make these
+people feel as a race of giants might--even their women
+unknowingly revealed it.
+
+"No, I could not," was her reply.  "I suppose I am on
+the whole a sort of commercial working person.  I have no
+doubt it is commercial, that instinct which makes one resent
+seeing things lose their value."
+
+"Shall you begin it for that reason?"
+
+"Partly for that one--partly for another."  She held out
+her hand to him.  "Look at the length of the shadows.  I
+must go.  Thank you, Lord Mount Dunstan, for showing me
+the place, and thank you for undeceiving me."
+
+He held the side gate open for her and lifted his cap as
+she passed through.  He admitted to himself, with some
+reluctance, that he was not content that she should go even yet,
+but, of course, she must go.  There passed through his mind
+a remote wonder why he had suddenly unbosomed himself to
+her in a way so extraordinarily unlike himself.  It was, he
+thought next, because as he had taken her about from one
+place to another he had known that she had seen in things
+what he had seen in them so long--the melancholy loneliness,
+the significance of it, the lost hopes that lay behind it, the
+touching pain of the stateliness wrecked.  She had shown it in
+the way in which she tenderly looked from side to side, in the
+very lightness of her footfall, in the bluebell softening of her
+eyes.  Oh, yes, she had understood and cared, American as
+she was!  She had felt it all, even with her hideous background
+of Fifth Avenue behind her.
+
+When he had spoken it had been in involuntary response to
+an emotion in herself.
+
+So he stood, thinking, as he for some time watched her
+walking up the sunset-glowing road.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE PARTICULAR INCIDENT
+
+Betty Vanderpoel's walk back to Stornham did not, long
+though it was, give her time to follow to its end the thread of
+her thoughts.  Mentally she walked again with her
+uncommunicative guide, through woodpaths and gardens, and stood
+gazing at the great blind-faced house.  She had not given the
+man more than an occasional glance until he had told her his
+name.  She had been too much absorbed, too much moved,
+by what she had been seeing.  She wondered, if she had been
+more aware of him, whether his face would have revealed a
+great deal.  She believed it would not.  He had made himself
+outwardly stolid.  But the thing must have been bitter. 
+To him the whole story of the splendid past was familiar
+even if through his own life he had looked on only at gradual
+decay.  There must be stories enough of men and women who
+had lived in the place, of what they had done, of how they had
+loved, of what they had counted for in their country's wars
+and peacemakings, great functions and law-building.  To be
+able to look back through centuries and know of one's blood
+that sometimes it had been shed in the doing of great deeds,
+must be a thing to remember.  To realise that the courage and
+honour had been lost in ignoble modern vices, which no sense
+of dignity and reverence for race and name had restrained--
+must be bitter--bitter!  And in the role of a servant to lead a
+stranger about among the ruins of what had been--that must
+have been bitter, too.  For a moment Betty felt the bitterness
+of it herself and her red mouth took upon itself a grim line. 
+The worst of it for him was that he was not of that strain
+of his race who had been the "bad lot."  The "bad
+lot" had been the weak lot, the vicious, the self-degrading. 
+Scandals which had shut men out from their class and kind
+were usually of an ugly type.  This man had a strong jaw, a
+powerful, healthy body, and clean, though perhaps hard, eyes. 
+The First Man of them, who hewed his way to the front,
+who stood fierce in the face of things, who won the first lands
+and laid the first stones, might have been like him in build
+and look.
+
+"It's a disgusting thing," she said to herself, "to think of
+the corrupt weaklings the strong ones dwindled down to.  I
+hate them.  So does he."
+
+There had been many such of late years, she knew.  She had
+seen them in Paris, in Rome, even in New York.  Things
+with thin or over-thick bodies and receding chins and foreheads;
+things haunting places of amusement and finding inordinate
+entertainment in strange jokes and horseplay.  She herself
+had hot blood and a fierce strength of rebellion, and she
+was wondering how, if the father and elder brother had been
+the "bad lot," he had managed to stand still, looking on, and
+keeping his hands off them.
+
+The last gold of the sun was mellowing the grey stone of
+the terrace and enriching the green of the weeds thrusting
+themselves into life between the uneven flags when she reached
+Stornham, and passing through the house found Lady
+Anstruthers sitting there.  In sustenance of her effort to keep
+up appearances, she had put on a weird little muslin dress and
+had elaborated the dressing of her thin hair.  It was no longer
+dragged back straight from her face, and she looked a trifle
+less abject, even a shade prettier.  Bettina sat upon the edge
+of the balustrade and touched the hair with light fingers,
+ruffling it a little becomingly.
+
+"If you had worn it like this yesterday," she said, "I should
+have known you."
+
+"Should you, Betty?  I never look into a mirror if I can
+help it, but when I do I never know myself.  The thing that
+stares back at me with its pale eyes is not Rosy.  But, of
+course, everyone grows old."
+
+"Not now!  People are just discovering how to grow young
+instead."
+
+Lady Anstruthers looked into the clear courage of her laughing
+eyes.
+
+"Somehow," she said, "you say strange things in such a
+way that one feels as if they must be true, however--however
+unlike anything else they are."
+
+"They are not as new as they seem," said Betty.  "Ancient
+philosophers said things like them centuries ago, but
+people did not believe them.  We are just beginning to drag
+them out of the dust and furbish them up and pretend they
+are ours, just as people rub up and adorn themselves with
+jewels dug out of excavations."
+
+"In America people think so many new things," said poor
+little Lady Anstruthers with yearning humbleness.
+
+"The whole civilised world is thinking what you call new
+things," said Betty.  "The old ones won't do.  They have
+been tried, and though they have helped us to the place we have
+reached, they cannot help us any farther.  We must begin again."
+
+"It is such a long time since I began," said Rosy, "such
+a long time."
+
+"Then there must be another beginning for you, too.  The
+hour has struck."
+
+Lady Anstruthers rose with as involuntary a movement as
+if a strong hand had drawn her to her feet.  She stood facing
+Betty, a pathetic little figure in her washed-out muslin frock
+and with her washed-out face and eyes and being, though on
+her faded cheeks a flush was rising.
+
+"Oh, Betty!" she said, "I don't know what there is about
+you, but there is something which makes one feel as if you
+believed everything and could do everything, and as if one
+believes YOU.  Whatever you were to say, you would make it
+seem TRUE.  If you said the wildest thing in the world I should
+BELIEVE you."
+
+Betty got up, too, and there was an extraordinary steadiness
+in her eyes.
+
+"You may," she answered.  "I shall never say one thing
+to you which is not a truth, not one single thing."
+
+"I believe that," said Rosy Anstruthers, with a quivering
+mouth.  "I do believe it so."
+
+"I walked to Mount Dunstan," Betty said later.
+
+"Really?" said Rosy.  "There and back?"
+
+"Yes, and all round the park and the gardens."
+
+Rosy looked rather uncertain.
+
+"Weren't you a little afraid of meeting someone?"
+
+"I did meet someone.  At first I took him for a game-
+keeper.  But he turned out to be Lord Mount Dunstan."
+
+Lady Anstruthers gasped.
+
+"What did he do?" she exclaimed.  "Did he look angry
+at seeing a stranger?  They say he is so ill-tempered and rude."
+
+"I should feel ill-tempered if I were in his place," said
+Betty.  "He has enough to rouse his evil passions and make
+him savage.  What a fate for a man with any sense and
+decency of feeling!  What fools and criminals the last
+generation of his house must have produced!  I wonder how such
+things evolve themselves.  But he is different--different.  One
+can see it.  If he had a chance--just half a chance--he would
+build it all up again.  And I don't mean merely the place, but
+all that one means when one says `his house.' "
+
+"He would need a great deal of money," sighed Lady Anstruthers.
+
+Betty nodded slowly as she looked out, reflecting, into the
+park.
+
+"Yes, it would require money," was her admission.
+
+"And he has none," Lady Anstruthers added.  "None whatever."
+
+"He will get some," said Betty, still reflecting.  "He will
+make it, or dig it up, or someone will leave it to him.  There
+is a great deal of money in the world, and when a strong
+creature ought to have some of it he gets it."
+
+"Oh, Betty!" said Rosy.  "Oh, Betty! "
+
+"Watch that man," said Betty; "you will see.  It will come."
+
+Lady Anstruthers' mind, working at no time on complex
+lines, presented her with a simple modern solution.
+
+"Perhaps he will marry an American," she said, and saying
+it, sighed again.
+
+"He will not do it on purpose."  Bettina answered slowly and with
+such an air of absence of mind that Rosy laughed a little.
+
+"Will he do it accidentally, or against his will?" she said.
+
+Betty herself smiled.
+
+"Perhaps he will," she said.  "There are Englishmen who
+rather dislike Americans.  I think he is one of them."
+
+It apparently became necessary for Lady Anstruthers, a
+moment later, to lean upon the stone balustrade and pick off
+a young leaf or so, for no reason whatever, unless that in doing
+so she averted her look from her sister as she made her next
+remark.
+
+"Are you--when are you going to write to father and mother?"
+
+"I have written," with unembarrassed evenness of tone. 
+"Mother will be counting the days."
+
+"Mother!" Rosy breathed, with a soft little gasp.  "Mother!" and
+turned her face farther away.  "What did you tell her?"
+
+Betty moved over to her and stood close at her side.  The
+power of her personality enveloped the tremulous creature as
+if it had been a sense of warmth.
+
+"I told her how beautiful the place was, and how Ughtred
+adored you--and how you loved us all, and longed to see New
+York again."
+
+The relief in the poor little face was so immense that Betty's
+heart shook before it.  Lady Anstruthers looked up at her
+with adoring eyes.
+
+"I might have known," she said; "I might have known
+that--that you would only say the right thing.  You couldn't
+say the wrong thing, Betty."
+
+Betty bent over her and spoke almost yearningly.
+
+"Whatever happens," she said, "we will take care that mother is
+not hurt.  She's too kind--she's too good--she's too tender."
+
+"That is what I have remembered," said Lady Anstruthers
+brokenly.  "She used to hold me on her lap when I was
+quite grown up.  Oh! her soft, warm arms--her warm shoulder! 
+I have so wanted her."
+
+"She has wanted you," Betty answered.  "She thinks of
+you just as she did when she held you on her lap."
+
+"But if she saw me now--looking like this!  If she saw
+me!  Sometimes I have even been glad to think she never
+would."
+
+"She will."  Betty's tone was cool and clear.  "But before
+she does I shall have made you look like yourself."
+
+Lady Anstruthers' thin hand closed on her plucked leaves
+convulsively, and then opening let them drop upon the stone of
+the terrace.
+
+"We shall never see each other.  It wouldn't be possible,"
+she said.  "And there is no magic in the world now, Betty. 
+You can't bring back----"
+
+"Yes, you can," said Bettina.  "And what used to be
+called magic is only the controlled working of the law and
+order of things in these days.  We must talk it all over."
+
+Lady Anstruthers became a little pale.
+
+"What?" she asked, low and nervously, and Betty saw
+her glance sideways at the windows of the room which opened
+on to the terrace.
+
+Betty took her hand and drew her down into a chair.  She
+sat near her and looked her straight in the face.
+
+"Don't be frightened," she said.  "I tell you there is no
+need to be frightened.  We are not living in the Middle
+Ages.  There is a policeman even in Stornham village, and
+we are within four hours of London, where there are thousands."
+
+Lady Anstruthers tried to laugh, but did not succeed very
+well, and her forehead flushed.
+
+"I don't quite know why I seem so nervous," she said. 
+"It's very silly of me."
+
+She was still timid enough to cling to some rag of pretence,
+but Betty knew that it would fall away.  She did the wisest
+possible thing, which was to make an apparently impersonal
+remark.
+
+"I want you to go over the place with me and show me
+everything.  Walls and fences and greenhouses and outbuildings
+must not be allowed to crumble away."
+
+"What?" cried Rosy.  "Have you seen all that already?" 
+She actually stared at her.  "How practical and--and American!"
+
+"To see that a wall has fallen when you find yourself
+obliged to walk round a pile of grass-grown brickwork?" said
+Betty.
+
+Lady Anstruthers still softly stared.
+
+"What--what are you thinking of?" she asked.
+
+"Thinking that it is all too beautiful----" Betty's look swept
+the loveliness spread about her, "too beautiful and too valuable
+to be allowed to lose its value and its beauty."  She turned
+her eyes back to Rosy and the deep dimple near her mouth
+showed itself delightfully.  "It is a throwing away of capital,"
+she added.
+
+"Oh!" cried Lady Anstruthers, "how clever you are! 
+And you look so different, Betty."
+
+"Do I look stupid?" the dimple deepening.  "I must try
+to alter that."
+
+"Don't try to alter your looks," said Rosy.  "It is your
+looks that make you so--so wonderful.  But usually women--
+girls----" Rosy paused.
+
+"Oh, I have been trained," laughed Betty.  "I am the
+spoiled daughter of a business man of genius.  His business is
+an art and a science.  I have had advantages.  He has let me
+hear him talk.  I even know some trifling things about stocks. 
+Not enough to do me vital injury--but something.  What I
+know best of all,"--her laugh ended and her eyes changed
+their look,--"is that it is a blunder to think that beauty is not
+capital--that happiness is not--and that both are not the
+greatest assets in the scheme.  This," with a wave of her hand,
+taking in all they saw, "is beauty, and it ought to be happiness,
+and it must be taken care of.  It is your home and Ughtred's----"
+
+"It is Nigel's," put in Rosy.
+
+"It is entailed, isn't it?" turning quickly.  "He cannot
+sell it?"
+
+"If he could we should not be sitting here," ruefully.
+
+"Then he cannot object to its being rescued from ruin."
+
+"He will object to--to money being spent on things he
+does not care for."  Lady Anstruthers' voice lowered itself, as
+it always did when she spoke of her husband, and she indulged
+in the involuntary hasty glance about her.
+
+"I am going to my room to take off my hat," Betty said. 
+"Will you come with me?"
+
+She went into the house, talking quietly of ordinary things,
+and in this way they mounted the stairway together and passed
+along the gallery which led to her room.  When they entered
+it she closed the door, locked it, and, taking off her hat, laid
+it aside.  After doing which she sat.
+
+"No one can hear and no one can come in," she said.  "And
+if they could, you are afraid of things you need not be afraid
+of now.  Tell me what happened when you were so ill after
+Ughtred was born."
+
+"You guessed that it happened then," gasped Lady Anstruthers.
+
+
+"It was a good time to make anything happen," replied
+Bettina.  "You were prostrated, you were a child, and
+felt yourself cast off hopelessly from the people who loved
+you."
+
+"Forever!  Forever!" Lady Anstruthers' voice was a
+sharp little moan.  "That was what I felt--that nothing
+could ever help me.  I dared not write things.  He told me
+he would not have it--that he would stop any hysterical
+complaints--that his mother could testify that he behaved
+perfectly to me.  She was the only person in the room with us
+when-- when----"
+
+"When?" said Betty.
+
+Lady Anstruthers shuddered.  She leaned forward and
+caught Betty's hand between her own shaking ones.
+
+"He struck me!  He struck me!  He said it never happened--
+but it did--it did!  Betty, it did!  That was the one
+thing that came back to me clearest.  He said that I was in
+delirious hysterics, and that I had struggled with his mother
+and himself, because they tried to keep me quiet, and prevent
+the servants hearing.  One awful day he brought Lady
+Anstruthers into the room, and they stood over me, as I lay in
+bed, and she fixed her eyes on me and said that she--being
+an Englishwoman, and a person whose word would be believed,
+could tell people the truth--my father and mother, if
+necessary, that my spoiled, hysterical American tempers had
+created unhappiness for me--merely because I was bored by
+life in the country and wanted excitement.  I tried to
+answer, but they would not let me, and when I began to shake
+all over, they said that I was throwing myself into hysterics
+again.  And they told the doctor so, and he believed it."
+
+The possibilities of the situation were plainly to be seen. 
+Fate, in the form of temperament itself, had been against her. 
+It was clear enough to Betty as she patted and stroked the
+thin hands.  "I understand.  Tell me the rest," she said.
+
+Lady Anstruthers' head dropped.
+
+"When I was loneliest, and dying of homesickness, and so
+weak that I could not speak without sobbing, he came to
+me--it was one morning after I had been lying awake all
+night--and he began to seem kinder.  He had not been near
+me for two days, and I had thought I was going to be left
+to die alone--and mother would never know.  He said he had been
+reflecting and that he was afraid that we had misunderstood each
+other--because we belonged to different countries, and had been
+brought up in different ways----" she paused.
+
+"And that if you understood his position and considered
+it, you might both be quite happy," Betty gave in quiet
+termination.
+
+Lady Anstruthers started.
+
+"Oh, you know it all!" she exclaimed
+
+"Only because I have heard it before.  It is an old trick. 
+And because he seemed kind and relenting, you tried to
+understand--and signed something."
+
+"I WANTED to understand.  I WANTED to believe.  What did
+it matter which of us had the money, if we liked each other
+and were happy?  He told me things about the estate, and
+about the enormous cost of it, and his bad luck, and debts he
+could not help.  And I said that I would do anything if--if we
+could only be like mother and father.  And he kissed me and
+I signed the paper."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"He went to London the next day, and then to Paris.  He
+said he was obliged to go on business.  He was away a month. 
+And after a week had passed, Lady Anstruthers began to be
+restless and angry, and once she flew into a rage, and told
+me I was a fool, and that if I had been an Englishwoman,
+I should have had some decent control over my husband,
+because he would have respected me.  In time I found out what
+I had done.  It did not take long."
+
+"The paper you signed," said Betty, "gave him control
+over your money?"
+
+A forlorn nod was the answer.
+
+"And since then he has done as he chose, and he has not
+chosen to care for Stornham.  And once he made you write
+to father, to ask for more money?"
+
+"I did it once.  I never would do it again.  He has tried
+to make me.  He always says it is to save Stornham for Ughtred."
+
+"Nothing can take Stornham from Ughtred.  It may come
+to him a ruin, but it will come to him."
+
+"He says there are legal points I cannot understand.  And
+he says he is spending money on it."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"He--doesn't go into that.  If I were to ask questions, he
+would make me know that I had better stop.  He says I know
+nothing about things.  And he is right.  He has never allowed
+me to know and--and I am not like you, Betty."
+
+"When you signed the paper, you did not realise that
+you were doing something you could never undo and that
+you would be forced to submit to the consequences?"
+
+"I--I didn't realise anything but that it would kill me to
+live as I had been living--feeling as if they hated me.  And
+I was so glad and thankful that he seemed kinder.  It was
+as if I had been on the rack, and he turned the screws back,
+and I was ready to do anything--anything--if I might be
+taken off.  Oh, Betty! you know, don't you, that--that if
+he would only have been a little kind--just a little--I would
+have obeyed him always, and given him everything."
+
+Betty sat and looked at her, with deeply pondering eyes. 
+She was confronting the fact that it seemed possible that one
+must build a new soul for her as well as a new body.  In
+these days of science and growing sanity of thought, one did
+not stand helpless before the problem of physical rebuilding,
+and--and perhaps, if one could pour life into a creature, the
+soul of it would respond, and wake again, and grow.
+
+"You do not know where he is?" she said aloud.  "You
+absolutely do not know?"
+
+"I never know exactly," Lady Anstruthers answered.  "He
+was here for a few days the week before you came.  He said
+he was going abroad.  He might appear to-morrow, I might
+not hear of him for six months.  I can't help hoping now that
+it will be the six months."
+
+"Why particularly now?" inquired Betty.
+
+Lady Anstruthers flushed and looked shy and awkward.
+
+"Because of--you.  I don't know what he would say.  I
+don't know what he would do."
+
+"To me?" said Betty.
+
+"It would be sure to be something unreasonable and
+wicked," said Lady Anstruthers.  "It would, Betty."
+
+"I wonder what it would be?"  Betty said musingly.
+
+"He has told lies for years to keep you all from me.  If
+he came now, he would know that he had been found out. 
+He would say that I had told you things.  He would be
+furious because you have seen what there is to see.  He would
+know that you could not help but realise that the money he
+made me ask for had not been spent on the estate.  He,--
+Betty, he would try to force you to go away."
+
+"I wonder what he would do?" Betty said again musingly. 
+She felt interested, not afraid.
+
+"It would be something cunning," Rosy protested.  "It
+would be something no one could expect.  He might be so
+rude that you could not remain in the room with him,
+or he might be quite polite, and pretend he was rather glad
+to see you.  If he was only frightfully rude we should be
+safer, because that would not be an unexpected thing, but if
+he was polite, it would be because he was arranging something
+hideous, which you could not defend yourself against."
+
+"Can you tell me," said Betty quite slowly, because, as she
+looked down at the carpet, she was thinking very hard, "the
+kind of unexpected thing he has done to you?"  Lifting her
+eyes, she saw that a troubled flush was creeping over Lady
+Anstruthers' face.
+
+"There--have been--so many queer things," she faltered. 
+Then Betty knew there was some special thing she was afraid
+to talk about, and that if she desired to obtain illuminating
+information it would be well to go into the matter.
+
+"Try," she said, "to remember some particular incident."
+
+Lady Anstruthers looked nervous.
+
+"Rosy," in the level voice, "there has been a particular
+incident--and I would rather hear of it from you than from him.
+
+Rosy's lap held little shaking hands.
+
+"He has held it over me for years," she said breathlessly. 
+"He said he would write about it to father and mother.  He
+says he could use it against me as evidence in--in the divorce
+court.  He says that divorce courts in America are for women,
+but in England they are for men, and--he could defend himself
+against me."
+
+The incongruity of the picture of the small, faded creature
+arraigned in a divorce court on charges of misbehaviour would
+have made Betty smile if she had been in smiling mood.
+
+"What did he accuse you of?"
+
+"That was the--the unexpected thing," miserably.
+
+Betty took the unsteady hands firmly in her own.
+
+"Don't be afraid to tell me," she said.  "He knew you
+so well that he understood what would terrify you the most.  I
+know you so well that I understand how he does it.  Did he do
+this unexpected thing just before you wrote to father for the
+money?"  As she quite suddenly presented the question, Rosy
+exclaimed aloud.
+
+
+"How did you know?" she said.  "You--you are like a
+lawyer.  How could you know?"
+
+How simple she was!  How obviously an easy prey! 
+She had been unconsciously giving evidence with every word.
+
+"I have been thinking him over," Betty said.  "He
+interests me.  I have begun to guess that he always wants
+something when he professes that he has a grievance."
+
+Then with drooping head, Rosy told the story.
+
+"Yes, it happened before he made me write to father for
+so much money.  The vicar was ill and was obliged to go away
+for six months.  The clergyman who came to take his place
+was a young man.  He was kind and gentle, and wanted to
+help people.  His mother was with him and she was like him. 
+They loved each other, and they were quite poor.  His name
+was Ffolliott.  I liked to hear him preach.  He said things
+that comforted me.  Nigel found out that he comforted me,
+and--when he called here, he was more polite to him than
+he had ever been to Mr. Brent.  He seemed almost as if he
+liked him.  He actually asked him to dinner two or three
+times.  After dinner, he would go out of the room and leave
+us together.  Oh, Betty!" clinging to her hands, "I was so
+wretched then, that sometimes I thought I was going out of
+my mind.  I think I looked wild.  I used to kneel down and
+try to pray, and I could not."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Betty.
+
+"I used to feel that if I could only have one friend, just
+one, I could bear it better.  Once I said something like that
+to Nigel.  He only shrugged his shoulders and sneered when
+I said it.  But afterwards I knew he had remembered.  One
+evening, when he had asked Mr. Ffolliott to dinner, he led
+him to talk about religion.  Oh, Betty!  It made my blood
+turn cold when he began.  I knew he was doing it for some
+wicked reason.  I knew the look in his eyes and the awful,
+agreeable smile on his mouth.  When he said at last, `If
+you could help my poor wife to find comfort in such things,'
+I began to see.  I could not explain to anyone how he did it,
+but with just a sentence, dropped here and there, he seemed
+to tell the whole story of a silly, selfish, American girl,
+thwarted in her vulgar little ambitions, and posing as a martyr,
+because she could not have her own way in everything. 
+He said once, quite casually, `I'm afraid American women are
+rather spoiled.'  And then he said, in the same tolerant way--
+`A poor man is a disappointment to an American girl.  America
+does not believe in rank combined with lack of fortune.' 
+I dared not defend myself.  I am not clever enough to think
+of the right things to say.  He meant Mr. Ffolliott to understand
+that I had married him because I thought he was grand
+and rich, and that I was a disappointed little spiteful shrew.  I
+tried to act as if he was not hurting me, but my hands trembled,
+and a lump kept rising in my throat.  When we returned to
+the drawing-room, and at last he left us together, I was praying
+and praying that I might be able to keep from breaking down.
+
+She stopped and swallowed hard.  Betty held her hands
+firmly until she went on.
+
+"For a few minutes, I sat still, and tried to think of some
+new subject--something about the church or the village.  But
+I could not begin to speak because of the lump in my throat. 
+And then, suddenly, but quietly, Mr. Ffolliott got up.  And
+though I dared not lift my eyes, I knew he was standing
+before the fire, quite near me.  And, oh! what do you think
+he said, as low and gently as if his voice was a woman's. 
+I did not know that people ever said such things now, or even
+thought them.  But never, never shall I forget that strange
+minute.  He said just this:
+
+" `God will help you.  He will.  He will.'
+
+"As if it was true, Betty!  As if there was a God--and--
+He had not forgotten me.  I did not know what I was doing,
+but I put out my hand and caught at his sleeve, and when
+I looked up into his face, I saw in his kind, good eyes, that
+he knew--that somehow--God knows how--he understood
+and that I need not utter a word to explain to him that he
+had been listening to lies."
+
+"Did you talk to him?" Betty asked quietly.
+
+"He talked to me.  We did not even speak of Nigel.  He
+talked to me as I had never heard anyone talk before.  Somehow
+he filled the room with something real, which was hope
+and comfort and like warmth, which kept my soul from
+shivering.  The tears poured from my eyes at first, but the lump
+in my throat went away, and when Nigel came back I actually did
+not feel frightened, though he looked at me and sneered quietly."
+
+"Did he say anything afterwards?"
+
+"He laughed a little cold laugh and said, `I see you have
+been seeking the consolation of religion.  Neurotic women
+like confessors.  I do not object to your confessing, if you
+confess your own backslidings and not mine.' "
+
+"That was the beginning," said Betty speculatively.  "The
+unexpected thing was the end.  Tell me the rest?"
+
+"No one could have dreamed of it," Rosy broke forth. 
+"For weeks he was almost like other people.  He stayed at
+Stornham and spent his days in shooting.  He professed that
+he was rather enjoying himself in a dull way.  He encouraged
+me to go to the vicarage, he invited the Ffolliotts here.  He
+said Mrs. Ffolliott was a gentlewoman and good for me. 
+He said it was proper that I should interest myself in parish
+work.  Once or twice he even brought some little message
+to me from Mr. Ffolliott."
+
+It was a pitiably simple story.  Betty saw, through its
+relation, the unconsciousness of the easily allured victim, the
+adroit leading on from step to step, the ordinary, natural,
+seeming method which arranged opportunities.  The two had been
+thrown together at the Court, at the vicarage, the church
+and in the village, and the hawk had looked on and bided his
+time.  For the first time in her years of exile, Rosy had begun
+to feel that she might be allowed a friend--though she lived in
+secret tremor lest the normal liberty permitted her should
+suddenly be snatched away.
+
+"We never talked of Nigel," she said, twisting her hands. 
+"But he made me begin to live again.  He talked to me of
+Something that watched and would not leave me--would never
+leave me.  I was learning to believe it.  Sometimes when
+I walked through the wood to the village, I used to stop among
+the trees and look up at the bits of sky between the branches,
+and listen to the sound in the leaves--the sound that never
+stops--and it seemed as if it was saying something to me. 
+And I would clasp my hands and whisper, `Yes, yes,' `I
+will,' `I will.'  I used to see Nigel looking at me at table
+with a queer smile in his eyes and once he said to me--`You
+are growing young and lovely, my dear.  Your colour is
+improving.  The counsels of our friend are of a salutary nature.'
+
+It would have made me nervous, but he said it almost good-
+naturedly, and I was silly enough even to wonder if it could
+be possible that he was pleased to see me looking less ill.  It
+was true, Betty, that I was growing stronger.  But it did not
+last long."
+
+"I was afraid not," said Betty.
+
+"An old woman in the lane near Bartyon Wood was ill.  Mr.
+Ffolliott had asked me to go to see her, and I used to go. 
+She suffered a great deal and clung to us both.  He comforted
+her, as he comforted me.  Sometimes when he was called away
+he would send a note to me, asking me to go to her.  One
+day he wrote hastily, saying that she was dying, and asked
+if I would go with him to her cottage at once.  I knew it
+would save time if I met him in the path which was a short cut. 
+So I wrote a few words and gave them to the messenger. 
+I said, `Do not come to the house.  I will meet you in
+Bartyon Wood.' "
+
+Betty made a slight movement, and in her face there was a
+dawning of mingled amazement and incredulity.  The thought
+which had come to her seemed--as Ughtred's locking of the
+door had seemed--too wild for modern days.
+
+Lady Anstruthers saw her expression and understood it. 
+She made a hopeless gesture with her small, bony hand.
+
+"Yes," she said, "it is just like that.  No one would
+believe it.  The worst cleverness of the things he does, is
+that when one tells of them, they sound like lies.  I have a
+bewildered feeling that I should not believe them myself if
+I had not seen them.  He met the boy in the park and took
+the note from him.  He came back to the house and up to
+my room, where I was dressing quickly to go to Mr. Ffolliott."
+
+She stopped for quite a minute, rather as if to recover breath.
+
+"He closed the door behind him and came towards me
+with the note in his hand.  And I saw in a second the look
+that always terrifies me, in his face.  He had opened the note
+and he smoothed out the paper quietly and said, `What is
+this.  I could not help it--I turned cold and began to shiver. 
+I could not imagine what was coming."
+
+" `Is it my note to Mr. Ffolliott?' I asked.
+
+" `Yes, it is your note to Mr. Ffolliott,' and he read it
+aloud.  ` "Do not come to the house.  I will meet you in
+Bartyon Wood."  That is a nice note for a man's wife to have
+written, to be picked up and read by a stranger, if your
+confessor is not cautious in the matter of letters from
+women----'
+
+"When he begins a thing in that way, you may always know
+that he has planned everything--that you can do nothing--I
+always know.  I knew then, and I knew I was quite white
+when I answered him:
+
+" `I wrote it in a great hurry, Mrs. Farne is worse.  We are
+going together to her.  I said I would meet him--to save time.'
+
+"He laughed, his awful little laugh, and touched the paper.
+
+" `I have no doubt.  And I have no doubt that if other
+persons saw this, they would believe it.  It is very likely.
+
+" `But you believe it,' I said.  `You know it is true.  No
+one would be so silly--so silly and wicked as to----'  Then
+I broke down and cried out.  `What do you mean?  What
+could anyone think it meant?'  I was so wild that I felt
+as if I was going crazy.  He clenched my wrist and shook me.
+
+" `Don't think you can play the fool with me,' he said.  `I
+have been watching this thing from the first.  The first time
+I leave you alone with the fellow, I come back to find you
+have been giving him an emotional scene.  Do you suppose
+your simpering good spirits and your imbecile pink cheeks told
+me nothing?  They told me exactly this.  I have waited to
+come upon it, and here it is.  "Do not come to the house--I
+will meet you in the wood."
+
+"That was the unexpected thing.  It was no use to argue
+and try to explain.  I knew he did not believe what he was
+saying, but he worked himself into a rage, he accused me of
+awful things, and called me awful names in a loud voice, so
+that he could be heard, until I was dumb and staggering. 
+All the time, I knew there was a reason, but I could not tell
+then what it was.  He said at last, that he was going to Mr.
+Ffolliott.  He said, `I will meet him in the wood and I
+will take your note with me.'
+
+"Betty, it was so shameful that I fell down on my knees. 
+`Oh, don't--don't--do that,' I said.  `I beg of you, Nigel. 
+He is a gentleman and a clergyman.  I beg and beg of you. 
+If you will not, I will do anything--anything.'  And at that
+minute I remembered how he had tried to make me write
+to father for money.  And I cried out--catching at his coat,
+and holding him back.  `I will write to father as you asked
+me.  I will do anything.  I can't bear it.' "
+
+"That was the whole meaning of the whole thing," said
+Betty with eyes ablaze.  "That was the beginning, the middle
+and the end.  What did he say?"
+
+"He pretended to be made more angry.  He said, `Don't
+insult me by trying to bribe me with your vulgar money. 
+Don't insult me.'  But he gradually grew sulky instead of
+raging, and though he put the note in his pocket, he did not
+go to Mr. Ffolliott.  And--I wrote to father."
+
+"I remember that," Betty answered.  "Did you ever speak
+to Mr. Ffolliott again?"
+
+"He guessed--he knew--I saw it in his kind, brown eyes
+when he passed me without speaking, in the village.  I daresay
+the villagers were told about the awful thing by some
+servant, who heard Nigel's voice.  Villagers always know what
+is happening.  He went away a few weeks later.  The day
+before he went, I had walked through the wood, and just
+outside it, I met him.  He stopped for one minute--just
+one--he lifted his hat and said, just as he had spoken them
+that first night--just the same words, `God will help you.
+He will.  He will.' "
+
+A strange, almost unearthly joy suddenly flashed across her
+face.
+
+"It must be true," she said.  "It must be true.  He has
+sent you, Betty.  It has been a long time--it has been so
+long that sometimes I have forgotten his words.  But you
+have come!"
+
+"Yes, I have come," Betty answered.  And she bent forward
+and kissed her gently, as if she had been soothing a child.
+
+There were other questions to ask.  She was obliged to ask
+them.  "The unexpected thing" had been used as an instrument
+for years.  It was always efficacious.  Over the yearningly
+homesick creature had hung the threat that her father
+and mother, those she ached and longed for, could be told the
+story in such a manner as would brand her as a woman with a
+shameful secret.  How could she explain herself?  There
+were the awful, written words.  He was her husband.  He
+was remorseless, plausible.  She dared not write freely.  She
+had no witnesses to call upon.  She had discovered that he
+had planned with composed steadiness that misleading
+impressions should be given to servants and village people. 
+When the Brents returned to the vicarage, she had observed,
+with terror, that for some reason they stiffened, and looked
+askance when the Ffolliotts were mentioned.
+
+"I am afraid, Lady Anstruthers, that Mr. Ffolliott was
+a great mistake," Mrs. Brent said once.
+
+Lady Anstruthers had not dared to ask any questions.  She
+had felt the awkward colour rising in her face and had known
+that she looked guilty.  But if she had protested against the
+injustice of the remark, Sir Nigel would have heard of her
+words before the day had passed, and she shuddered to think
+of the result.  He had by that time reached the point of
+referring to Ffolliott with sneering lightness, as "Your lover."
+
+"Do you defend your lover to me," he had said on one
+occasion, when she had entered a timid protest.  And her
+white face and wild helpless eyes had been such evidence
+as to the effect the word had produced, that he had seen the
+expediency of making a point of using it.
+
+The blood beat in Betty Vanderpoel's veins.
+
+"Rosy," she said, looking steadily in the faded face, "tell
+me this.  Did you never think of getting away from him, of
+going somewhere, and trying to reach father, by cable, or letter,
+by some means?"
+
+Lady Anstruthers' weary and wrinkled little smile was a
+pitiably illuminating thing.
+
+"My dear" she said, "if you are strong and beautiful and
+rich and well dressed, so that people care to look at you, and
+listen to what you say, you can do things.  But who, in
+England, will listen to a shabby, dowdy, frightened woman,
+when she runs away from her husband, if he follows her and
+tells people she is hysterical or mad or bad?  It is the shabby,
+dowdy woman who is in the wrong.  At first, I thought of nothing
+else but trying to get away.  And once I went to Stornham
+station.  I walked all the way, on a hot day.  And just as I
+was getting into a third-class carriage, Nigel marched in and
+caught my arm, and held me back.  I fainted and when I
+came to myself I was in the carriage, being driven back to
+the Court, and he was sitting opposite to me.  He said, `You
+fool!  It would take a cleverer woman than you to carry that
+out.'  And I knew it was the awful truth."
+
+"It is not the awful truth now," said Betty, and she rose
+to her feet and stood looking before her, but with a look which
+did not rest on chairs and tables.  She remained so, standing
+for a few moments of dead silence.
+
+"What a fool he was!" she said at last.  "And what a
+villain!  But a villain is always a fool."
+
+She bent, and taking Rosy's face between her hands, kissed
+it with a kiss which seemed like a seal.  "That will do," she
+said.  "Now I know.  One must know what is in one's
+hands and what is not.  Then one need not waste time in
+talking of miserable things.  One can save one's strength for
+doing what can be done."
+
+"I believe you would always think about DOING things,"
+said Lady Anstruthers.  "That is American, too."
+
+"It is a quality Americans inherited from England," lightly;
+"one of the results of it is that England covers a rather
+large share of the map of the world.  It is a practical quality. 
+You and I might spend hours in talking to each other of what
+Nigel has done and what you have done, of what he has said,
+and of what you have said.  We might give some hours, I
+daresay, to what the Dowager did and said.  But wiser people
+than we are have found out that thinking of black things
+past is living them again, and it is like poisoning one's blood. 
+It is deterioration of property."
+
+She said the last words as if she had ended with a jest. 
+But she knew what she was doing.
+
+"You were tricked into giving up what was yours, to a
+person who could not be trusted.  What has been done with
+it, scarcely matters.  It is not yours, but Sir Nigel's.  But we
+are not helpless, because we have in our hands the most powerful
+material agent in the world.
+
+"Come, Rosy, and let us walk over the house.  We will
+begin with that."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+TOWNLINSON & SHEPPARD
+
+During the whole course of her interesting life--and she
+had always found life interesting--Betty Vanderpoel decided
+that she had known no experience more absorbing than this
+morning spent in going over the long-closed and deserted
+portions of the neglected house.  She had never seen anything
+like the place, or as full of suggestion.  The greater part of
+it had simply been shut up and left to time and weather,
+both of which had had their effects.  The fine old red roof,
+having lost tiles, had fallen into leaks that let in rain, which
+had stained and rotted walls, plaster, and woodwork; wind and
+storm had beaten through broken window panes and done their
+worst with such furniture and hangings as they found to whip
+and toss and leave damp and spotted with mould.  They passed
+through corridors, and up and down short or long stairways,
+with stained or faded walls, and sometimes with cracked or
+fallen plastering and wainscotting.  Here and there the oak
+flooring itself was uncertain.  The rooms, whether large or
+small, all presented a like aspect of potential beauty and
+comfort, utterly uncared for and forlorn.  There were many
+rooms, but none more than scantily furnished, and a number
+of them were stripped bare.  Betty found herself wondering
+how long a time it had taken the belongings of the big place
+to dwindle and melt away into such bareness.
+
+"There was a time, I suppose, when it was all furnished,"
+she said.
+
+"All these rooms were shut up when I came here," Rosy
+answered.  "I suppose things worth selling have been sold. 
+When pieces of furniture were broken in one part of the house,
+they were replaced by things brought from another.  No one
+cared.  Nigel hates it all.  He calls it a rathole.  He detests
+the country everywhere, but particularly this part of it.  After
+the first year I had learned better than to speak to him of
+spending money on repairs."
+
+"A good deal of money should be spent on repairs,"
+reflected Betty, looking about her.
+
+She was standing in the middle of a room whose walls
+were hung with the remains of what had been chintz, covered
+with a pattern of loose clusters of moss rosebuds.  The
+dampness had rotted it until, in some places, it had fallen away
+in strips from its fastenings.  A quaint, embroidered couch
+stood in one corner, and as Betty looked at it, a mouse crept
+from under the tattered valance, stared at her in alarm and
+suddenly darted back again, in terror of intrusion so unusual. 
+A casement window swung open, on a broken hinge, and a
+strong branch of ivy, having forced its way inside, had thrown
+a covering of leaves over the deep ledge, and was beginning to
+climb the inner woodwork.  Through the casement was to
+be seen a heavenly spread of country, whose rolling lands were
+clad softly in green pastures and thick-branched trees.
+
+"This is the Rosebud Boudoir," said Lady Anstruthers,
+smiling faintly.  "All the rooms have names.  I thought them
+so delightful, when I first heard them.  The Damask Room--
+the Tapestry Room--the White Wainscot Room--My Lady's Chamber. 
+It almost broke my heart when I saw what they looked like."
+
+"It would be very interesting," Betty commented slowly,
+"to make them look as they ought to look."
+
+A remote fear rose to the surface of the expression in Lady
+Anstruthers' eyes.  She could not detach herself from certain
+recollections of Nigel--of his opinions of her family--of his
+determination not to allow it to enter as a factor in either his
+life or hers.  And Betty had come to Stornham--Betty whom
+he had detested as a child--and in the course of two days,
+she had seemed to become a new part of the atmosphere, and
+to make the dead despair of the place begin to stir with life. 
+What other thing than this was happening as she spoke of
+making such rooms as the Rosebud Boudoir "look as they
+ought to look," and said the words not as if they were part
+of a fantastic vision, but as if they expressed a perfectly
+possible thing?
+
+Betty saw the doubt in her eyes, and in a measure, guessed
+at its meaning.  The time to pause for argument had, however
+not arrived.  There was too much to be investigated, too
+much to be seen.  She swept her on her way.  They wandered
+on through some forty rooms, more or less; they opened
+doors and closed them; they unbarred shutters and let the sun
+stream in on dust and dampness and cobwebs.  The comprehension
+of the situation which Betty gained was as valuable
+as it was enlightening.
+
+The descent into the lower part of the house was a new
+experience.  Betty had not before seen huge, flagged kitchens,
+vaulted servants' halls, stone passages, butteries and dairies. 
+The substantial masonry of the walls and arched ceilings, the
+stone stairway, and the seemingly endless offices, were
+interestingly remote in idea from such domestic modernities as
+chance views of up-to-date American household workings had
+provided her.
+
+In the huge kitchen itself, an elderly woman, rolling pastry,
+paused to curtsy to them, with stolid curiosity in her heavy-
+featured face.  In her character as "single-handed" cook,
+Mrs. Noakes had sent up uninviting meals to Lady Anstruthers
+for several years, but she had not seen her ladyship below stairs
+before.  And this was the unexpected arrival--the young
+lady there had been "talk of" from the moment of her
+appearance.  Mrs. Noakes admitted with the grudgingness of
+a person of uncheerful temperament, that looks like that
+always would make talk.  A certain degree of vague mental
+illumination led her to agree with Robert, the footman, that
+the stranger's effectiveness was, perhaps, also, not altogether
+a matter of good looks, and certainly it was not an affair of
+clothes.  Her brightish blue dress, of rough cloth, was nothing
+particular, notwithstanding the fit of it.  There was "something
+else about her."  She looked round the place, not with
+the casual indifference of a fine young lady, carelessly curious
+to see what she had not seen before, but with an alert,
+questioning interest.
+
+"What a big place," she said to her ladyship.  "What
+substantial walls!  What huge joints must have been roasted
+before such a fireplace."
+
+She drew near to the enormous, antiquated cooking place.
+
+"People were not very practical when this was built," she
+said.  "It looks as if it must waste a great deal of coal.  Is
+it----?" she looked at Mrs. Noakes.  "Do you like it?"
+
+There was a practical directness in the question for which
+Mrs. Noakes was not prepared.  Until this moment, it had
+apparently mattered little whether she liked things or not. 
+The condition of her implements of trade was one of her
+grievances--the ancient fireplace and ovens the bitterest.
+
+"It's out of order, miss," she answered.  "And they don't
+use 'em like this in these days."
+
+"I thought not," said Miss Vanderpoel.
+
+She made other inquiries as direct and significant of the
+observing eye, and her passage through the lower part of the
+establishment left Mrs. Noakes and her companions in a
+strange but not unpleasurable state of ferment.
+
+"Think of a young lady that's never had nothing to do
+with kitchens, going straight to that shameful old fireplace,
+and seeing what it meant to the woman that's got to use it. 
+`Do you like it?' she says.  If she'd been a cook herself, she
+couldn't have put it straighter.  She's got eyes."
+
+"She's been using them all over the place, said Robert. 
+"Her and her ladyship's been into rooms that's not been opened
+for years."
+
+"More shame to them that should have opened 'em,"
+remarked Mrs. Noakes.  "Her ladyship's a poor, listless thing--
+but her spirit was broken long ago.
+
+"This one will mend it for her, perhaps," said the man
+servant.  "I wonder what's going to happen."
+
+"Well, she's got a look with her--the new one--as if where
+she was things would be likely to happen.  You look out. 
+The place won't seem so dead and alive if we've got something
+to think of and expect."
+
+"Who are the solicitors Sir Nigel employs?"  Betty had asked
+her sister, when their pilgrimage through the house had been
+completed.
+
+Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard, a firm which for several
+generations had transacted the legal business of much more
+important estates than Stornham, held its affairs in hand. 
+Lady Anstruthers knew nothing of them, but that they evidently
+did not approve of the conduct of their client.  Nigel
+was frequently angry when he spoke of them.  It could be
+gathered that they had refused to allow him to do things he
+wished to do--sell things, or borrow money on them.
+
+"I think we must go to London and see them," Betty suggested.
+
+Rosy was agitated.  Why should one see them?  What
+was there to be spoken of?  Their going, Betty explained
+would be a sort of visit of ceremony--in a measure a precaution. 
+Since Sir Nigel was apparently not to be reached, having
+given no clue as to where he intended to go, it might be
+discreet to consult Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard with
+regard to the things it might be well to do--the repairs it
+appeared necessary to make at once.  If Messrs. Townlinson &
+Sheppard approved of the doing of such work, Sir Nigel could
+not resent their action, and say that in his absence liberties
+had been taken.  Such a course seemed businesslike and dignified.
+
+It was what Betty felt that her father would do. 
+Nothing could be complained of, which was done with the
+knowledge and under the sanction of the family solicitors.
+
+"Then there are other things we must do.  We must go
+to shops and theatres.  It will be good for you to go to shops
+and theatres, Rosy."
+
+"I have nothing but rags to wear," answered Lady
+Anstruthers, reddening.
+
+"Then before we go we will have things sent down. 
+People can be sent from the shops to arrange what we want."
+
+The magic of the name, standing for great wealth, could,
+it was true, bring to them, not only the contents of shops, but
+the people who showed them, and were ready to carry out
+any orders.  The name of Vanderpoel already stood, in London,
+for inexhaustible resource.  Yes, it was simple enough to send
+for politely subservient saleswomen to bring what one wanted.
+
+The being reminded in every-day matters of the still real
+existence of the power of this magic was the first step in the
+rebuilding of Lady Anstruthers.  To realise that the wonderful
+and yet simple necromancy was gradually encircling her
+again, had its parallel in the taking of a tonic, whose effect
+was cumulative.  She herself did not realise the working of it. 
+But Betty regarded it with interest.  She saw it was good for
+her, merely to look on at the unpacking of the New York boxes,
+which the maid, sent for from London, brought down with her.
+
+As the woman removed, from tray after tray, the tissue-
+paper-enfolded layers of garments, Lady Anstruthers sat and
+watched her with normal, simply feminine interest growing
+in her eyes.  The things were made with the absence of any
+limit in expenditure, the freedom with delicate stuffs and
+priceless laces which belonged only to her faint memories
+of a lost past.
+
+Nothing had limited the time spent in the embroidering of
+this apparently simple linen frock and coat; nothing had
+restrained the hand holding the scissors which had cut into the
+lace which adorned in appliques and filmy frills this exquisitely
+charming ball dress.
+
+"It is looking back so far," she said, waving her hand
+towards them with an odd gesture.  "To think that it was
+once all like--like that."
+
+She got up and went to the things, turning them over,
+and touching them with a softness, almost expressing a caress. 
+The names of the makers stamped on bands and collars, the
+names of the streets in which their shops stood, moved her. 
+She heard again the once familiar rattle of wheels, and the
+rush and roar of New York traffic.
+
+Betty carried on the whole matter with lightness.  She
+talked easily and casually, giving local colour to what she said.
+She described the abnormally rapid growth of the places her
+sister had known in her teens, the new buildings, new theatres,
+new shops, new people, the later mode of living, much of it
+learned from England, through the unceasing weaving of the
+Shuttle.
+
+"Changing--changing--changing.  That is what it is always
+doing--America.  We have not reached repose yet.  One
+wonders how long it will be before we shall.  Now we are
+always hurrying breathlessly after the next thing--the new
+one--which we always think will be the better one.  Other
+countries built themselves slowly.  In the days of their
+building, the pace of life was a march.  When America was born,
+the march had already begun to hasten, and as a nation we
+began, in our first hour, at the quickening speed.  Now the
+pace is a race.  New York is a kaleidoscope.  I myself can
+remember it a wholly different thing.  One passes down a
+street one day, and the next there is a great gap where some
+building is being torn down--a few days later, a tall structure
+of some sort is touching the sky.  It is wonderful, but it does
+not tend to calm the mind.  That is why we cross the
+Atlantic so much.  The sober, quiet-loving blood our forbears
+brought from older countries goes in search of rest.  Mixed
+with other things, I feel in my own being a resentment
+against newness and disorder, and an insistence on the
+atmosphere of long-established things."
+
+But for years Lady Anstruthers had been living in the
+atmosphere of long-established things, and felt no insistence
+upon it.  She yearned to hear of the great, changing Western
+world--of the great, changing city.  Betty must tell her what
+the changes were.  What were the differences in the streets--
+where had the new buildings been placed?  How had Fifth
+Avenue and Madison Avenue and Broadway altered?  Were not
+Gramercy Park and Madison Square still green with grass and
+trees?  Was it all different?  Would she not know the old places
+herself?  Though it seemed a lifetime since she had seen them,
+the years which had passed were really not so many.
+
+It was good for her to talk and be talked to in this manner
+Betty saw.  Still handling her subject lightly, she presented
+picture after picture.  Some of them were of the wonderful,
+feverish city itself--the place quite passionately loved by some,
+as passionately disliked by others.  She herself had fallen into
+the habit, as she left childhood behind her, of looking at it
+with interested wonder--at its riot of life and power, of huge
+schemes, and almost superhuman labours, of fortunes so colossal
+that they seemed monstrosities in their relation to the
+world.  People who in Rosalie's girlhood had lived in big
+ugly brownstone fronts, had built for themselves or for
+their children, houses such as, in other countries, would have
+belonged to nobles and princes, spending fortunes upon their
+building, filling them with treasures brought from foreign
+lands, from palaces, from art galleries, from collectors. 
+Sometimes strange people built such houses and lived strange
+lavish, ostentatious lives in them, forming an overstrained,
+abnormal, pleasure-chasing world of their own.  The passing of
+even ten years in New York counted itself almost as a generation;
+the fashions, customs, belongings of twenty years ago
+wore an air of almost picturesque antiquity.
+
+"It does not take long to make an `old New Yorker,' "
+she said.  "Each day brings so many new ones."
+
+There were, indeed, many new ones, Lady Anstruthers
+found.  People who had been poor had become hugely rich,
+a few who had been rich had become poor, possessions which
+had been large had swelled to unnatural proportions.  Out of
+the West had risen fortunes more monstrous than all others. 
+As she told one story after another, Bettina realised, as she
+had done often before, that it was impossible to enter into
+description of the life and movements of the place, without its
+curiously involving some connection with the huge wealth of
+it--with its influence, its rise, its swelling, or waning.
+
+"Somehow one cannot free one's self from it.  This is the
+age of wealth and invention--but of wealth before all else. 
+Sometimes one is tired--tired of it."
+
+"You would not be tired of it if--well, if you were I,
+said Lady Anstruthers rather pathetically.
+
+"Perhaps not," Betty answered.  "Perhaps not."
+
+She herself had seen people who were not tired of it in
+the sense in which she was--the men and women, with worn
+or intently anxious faces, hastening with the crowds upon
+the pavements, all hastening somewhere, in chase of that small
+portion of the wealth which they earned by their labour as
+their daily share; the same men and women surging towards
+elevated railroad stations, to seize on places in the homeward-
+bound trains; or standing in tired-looking groups, waiting for
+the approach of an already overfull street car, in which they
+must be packed together, and swing to the hanging straps,
+to keep upon their feet.  Their way of being weary of it
+would be different from hers, they would be weary only of
+hearing of the mountains of it which rolled themselves up, as
+it seemed, in obedience to some irresistible, occult force.
+
+On the day after Stornham village had learned that her
+ladyship and Miss Vanderpoel had actually gone to London,
+the dignified firm of Townlinson & Sheppard received a visit
+which created some slight sensation in their establishment,
+though it had not been entirely unexpected.  It had, indeed,
+been heralded by a note from Miss Vanderpoel herself, who had
+asked that the appointment be made.  Men of Messrs. Townlinson
+& Sheppard's indubitable rank in their profession could
+not fail to know the significance of the Vanderpoel name. 
+They knew and understood its weight perfectly well.  When
+their client had married one of Reuben Vanderpoel's daughters, 
+they had felt that extraordinary good fortune had befallen him
+and his estate.  Their private opinion had been that Mr.
+Vanderpoel's knowledge of his son-in-law must have been
+limited, or that he had curiously lax American views of
+paternal duty.  The firm was highly reputable, long established
+strictly conservative, and somewhat insular in its point of
+view.  It did not understand, or seek to understand, America. 
+It had excellent reasons for thoroughly understanding Sir
+Nigel Anstruthers.  Its opinions of him it reserved to itself. 
+If Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard had been asked to give
+a daughter into their client's keeping, they would have flatly
+refused to accept the honour proposed.  Mr. Townlinson
+had, indeed, at the time of the marriage, admitted in strict
+confidence to his partner that for his part he would have
+somewhat preferred to follow a daughter of his own to her
+tomb.  After the marriage the firm had found the situation
+confusing and un-English.  There had been trouble with Sir
+Nigel, who had plainly been disappointed.  At first it had
+appeared that the American magnate had shown astuteness
+in refraining from leaving his son-in-law a free hand.  Lady
+Anstruthers' fortune was her own and not her husband's.  Mr.
+Townlinson, paying a visit to Stornham and finding the bride
+a gentle, childish-looking girl, whose most marked expression
+was one of growing timorousness, had returned with a grave
+face.  He foresaw the result, if her family did not stand
+by her with firmness, which he also foresaw her husband
+would prevent if possible.  It became apparent that the family
+did not stand by her--or were cleverly kept at a distance. 
+There was a long illness, which seemed to end in the
+seclusion from the world, brought about by broken health. 
+Then it was certain that what Mr. Townlinson had foreseen
+had occurred.  The inexperienced girl had been bullied
+into submission.  Sir Nigel had gained the free hand,
+whatever the means he had chosen to employ.  Most
+improper--most improper, the whole affair.  He had a great
+deal of money, but none of it was used for the benefit of the
+estate--his deformed boy's estate.  Advice, dignified
+remonstrance, resulted only in most disagreeable scenes.  Messrs.
+Townlinson & Sheppard could not exceed certain limits.  The
+manner in which the money was spent was discreditable.  There
+were avenues a respectable firm knew only by rumour, there
+were insane gambling speculations, which could only end in
+disaster, there were things one could not decently concern 
+one's self with.  Lady Anstruthers' family had doubtless become
+indignant and disgusted, and had dropped the whole affair. 
+Sad for the poor woman, but not unnatural.
+
+And now appears a Miss Vanderpoel, who wishes to
+appoint an interview with Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard. 
+What does she wish to say?  The family is apparently taking
+the matter up.  Is this lady an elder or a younger sister of
+Lady Anstruthers?  Is she an older woman of that strong
+and rather trying American type one hears of, or is she younger
+than her ladyship, a pretty, indignant, totally unpractical
+girl, outraged by the state of affairs she has discovered,
+foolishly coming to demand of Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard
+an explanation of things they are not responsible for?  Will
+she, perhaps, lose her temper, and accuse and reproach, or
+even--most unpleasant to contemplate--shed hysterical tears?
+
+It fell to Mr. Townlinson to receive her in the absence
+of Mr. Sheppard, who had been called to Northamptonshire
+to attend to great affairs.  He was a stout, grave man with a
+heavy, well-cut face, and, when Bettina entered his room, his
+courteous reception of her reserved his view of the situation
+entirely.
+
+She was not of the mature and rather alarming American
+type he had imagined possible, he felt some relief in marking
+at once.  She was also not the pretty, fashionable young lady
+who might have come to scold him, and ask silly, irrational
+questions.
+
+His ordinarily rather unillumined countenance changed
+somewhat in expression when she sat down and began to speak. 
+Mr. Townlinson was impressed by the fact that it was at
+once unmistakably evident that whatsoever her reason for
+coming, she had not presented herself to ask irrelevant or
+unreasonable questions.  Lady Anstruthers, she explained without
+superfluous phrase, had no definite knowledge of her husband's
+whereabouts, and it had seemed possible that Messrs. Townlinson
+& Sheppard might have received some information more
+recent that her own.  The impersonal framing of this inquiry
+struck Mr. Townlinson as being in remarkably good taste, since
+it conveyed no condemnation of Sir Nigel, and no desire to
+involve Mr. Townlinson in expressing any.  It refrained even from
+implying that the situation was an unusual one, which might
+be open to criticism.  Excellent reserve and great cleverness,
+Mr. Townlinson commented inwardly.  There were certainly
+few young ladies who would have clearly realised that a solicitor
+cannot be called upon to commit himself, until he has
+had time to weigh matters and decide upon them.  His long
+and varied experience had included interviews in which charming,
+emotional women had expected him at once to "take
+sides."  Miss Vanderpoel exhibited no signs of expecting
+anything of this kind, even when she went on with what she had
+come to say.  Stornham Court and its surroundings were
+depreciating seriously in value through need of radical repairs
+etc.  Her sister's comfort was naturally involved, and, as Mr.
+Townlinson would fully understand, her nephew's future. 
+The sooner the process of dilapidation was arrested, the better
+and with the less difficulty.  The present time was without
+doubt better than an indefinite future.  Miss Vanderpoel,
+having fortunately been able to come to Stornham, was
+greatly interested, and naturally desirous of seeing the work
+begun.  Her father also would be interested.  Since it was
+not possible to consult Sir Nigel, it had seemed proper to
+consult his solicitors in whose hands the estate had been for
+so long a time.  She was aware, it seemed, that not only Mr.
+Townlinson, but Mr. Townlinson's father, and also his
+grandfather, had legally represented the Anstruthers, as well as
+many other families.  As there seemed no necessity for any
+structural changes, and the work done was such as could only
+rescue and increase the value of the estate, could there be
+any objection to its being begun without delay?
+
+Certainly an unusual young lady.  It would be interesting
+to discover how well she knew Sir Nigel, since it seemed that
+only a knowledge of him--his temper, his bitter, irritable
+vanity, could have revealed to her the necessity of the
+precaution she was taking without even intimating that it was a
+precaution.  Extraordinarily clever girl.
+
+Mr. Townlinson wore an air of quiet, business-like reflection.
+
+"You are aware, Miss Vanderpoel, that the present income
+from the estate is not such as would justify anything approaching
+the required expenditure?"
+
+"Yes, I am aware of that.  The expense would be provided
+for by my father."
+
+"Most generous on Mr. Vanderpoel's part," Mr. Townlinson
+commented.  "The estate would, of course, increase greatly
+in value."
+
+Circumstances had prevented her father from visiting Stornham,
+Miss Vanderpoel explained, and this had led to his being
+ignorant of a condition of things which he might have remedied. 
+She did not explain what the particular circumstances
+which had separated the families had been, but Mr. Townlinson
+thought he understood.  The condition existing could
+be remedied now, if Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard saw no
+obstacles other than scarcity of money.
+
+Mr. Townlinson's summing up of the matter expressed in
+effect that he saw none.  The estate had been a fine one in
+its day.  During the last sixty years it had become much
+impoverished.  With conservative decorum of manner, he
+admitted that there had not been, since Sir Nigel's marriage,
+sufficient reason for the neglect of dilapidations.  The firm
+had strongly represented to Sir Nigel that certain resources
+should not be diverted from the proper object of restoring the
+property, which was entailed upon his son.  The son's future
+should beyond all have been considered in the dispensing of
+his mother's fortune.
+
+He, by this time, comprehended fully that he need restrain
+no dignified expression of opinion in his speech with this
+young lady.  She had come to consult with him with as clear
+a view of the proprieties and discretions demanded by his
+position as he had himself.  And yet each, before the close
+of the interview, understood the point of view of the other. 
+What he recognised was that, though she had not seen Sir
+Nigel since her childhood, she had in some astonishing way
+obtained an extraordinary insight into his character, and it was
+this which had led her to take her present step.  She might
+not realise all she might have to contend with, but her
+conservative and formal action had surrounded her and her sister
+with a certain barrier of conventional protection, at once
+self-controlled, dignified, and astutely intelligent.
+
+"Since, as you say, no structural changes are proposed, such
+as an owner might resent, and as Lady Anstruthers is the
+mother of the heir, and as Lady Anstruthers' father undertakes
+to defray all expenditure, no sane man could object to
+the restoration of the property.  To do so would be to cause
+public opinion to express itself strongly against him.  Such
+action would place him grossly in the wrong."  Then he added
+with deliberation, realising that he was committing himself,
+and feeling firmly willing to do so for reasons of his own,
+"Sir Nigel is a man who objects strongly to putting himself
+--publicly--in the wrong."
+
+"Thank you," said Miss Vanderpoel.
+
+He had said this of intention for her enlightenment, and
+she was aware that he had done so.
+
+"This will not be the first time that American fortunes
+have restored English estates," Mr. Townlinson continued
+amiably.  "There have been many notable cases of late years. 
+We shall be happy to place ourselves at your disposal at all
+times, Miss Vanderpoel.  We are obliged to you for your
+consideration in the matter."
+
+"Thank you," said Miss Vanderpoel again.  "I wished
+to be sure that I should not be infringing any English rule
+I had no knowledge of."
+
+"You will be infringing none.  You have been most correct
+and courteous."
+
+Before she went away Mr. Townlinson felt that he had
+been greatly enlightened as to what a young lady might know
+and be.  She gave him singularly clear details as to what was
+proposed.  There was so much to be done that he found himself
+opening his eyes slightly once or twice.  But, of course, if
+Mr. Vanderpoel was prepared to spend money in a lavish
+manner, it was all to the good so far as the estate was
+concerned.  They were stupendous, these people, and after all
+the heir was his grandson.  And how striking it was that
+with all this power and readiness to use it, was evidently
+combined, even in this beautiful young person, the clearest
+business sense of the situation.  What was done would be for the
+comfort of Lady Anstruthers and the future of her son.  Sir
+Nigel, being unable to sell either house or lands, could not
+undo it.
+
+When Mr. Townlinson accompanied his visitor to her
+carriage with dignified politeness he felt somewhat like an
+elderly solicitor who had found himself drawn into the
+atmosphere of a sort of intensely modern fairy tale.  He saw
+two of his under clerks, with the impropriety of middle-class
+youth, looking out of an office window at the dark blue
+brougham and the tall young lady, whose beauty bloomed in
+the sunshine.  He did not, on the whole, wonder at, though
+he deplored, the conduct of the young men.  But they, of
+course, saw only what they colloquially described to each other
+as a "rippin' handsome girl."  They knew nothing of the
+interesting interview.
+
+He himself returned to his private room in a musing mood
+and thought it all over, his mind dwelling on various features
+of the international situation, and more than once he said aloud:
+
+"Most remarkable.  Very remarkable, indeed."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE FIFTEENTH EARL OF MOUNT DUNSTAN
+
+James Hubert John Fergus Saltyre--fifteenth Earl of
+Mount Dunstan, "Jem Salter," as his neighbours on the Western
+ranches had called him, the red-haired, second-class passenger
+of the Meridiana, sat in the great library of his desolate
+great house, and stared fixedly through the open window at
+the lovely land spread out before him.  From this particular
+window was to be seen one of the greatest views in England. 
+From the upper nurseries he had lived in as a child he had
+seen it every day from morning until night, and it had seemed
+to his young fancy to cover all the plains of the earth.  Surely
+the rest of the world, he had thought, could be but small--
+though somewhere he knew there was London where the
+Queen lived, and in London were Buckingham Palace and
+St. James Palace and Kensington and the Tower, where heads
+had been chopped off; and the Horse Guards, where splendid,
+plumed soldiers rode forth glittering, with thrilling trumpets
+sounding as they moved.  These last he always remembered,
+because he had seen them, and once when he had walked
+in the park with his nurse there had been an excited stir in
+the Row, and people had crowded about a certain gate, through
+which an escorted carriage had been driven, and he had been
+made at once to take off his hat and stand bareheaded until
+it passed, because it was the Queen.  Somehow from that
+afternoon he dated the first presentation of certain vaguely
+miserable ideas.  Inquiries made of his attendant, when the
+cortege had swept by, had elicited the fact that the Royal
+Lady herself had children--little boys who were princes and
+little girls who were princesses.  What curious and persistent
+child cross-examination on his part had drawn forth the fact
+that almost all the people who drove about and looked so
+happy and brilliant, were the fathers or mothers of little boys
+like, yet--in some mysterious way--unlike himself?  And in
+what manner had he gathered that he was different from
+them?  His nurse, it is true, was not a pleasant person, and
+had an injured and resentful bearing.  In later years he realised
+that it had been the bearing of an irregularly paid
+menial, who rebelled against the fact that her place was not
+among people who were of distinction and high repute, and
+whose households bestowed a certain social status upon their
+servitors.  She was a tall woman with a sour face and a
+bearing which conveyed a glum endurance of a position
+beneath her.  Yes, it had been from her--Brough her name was
+--that he had mysteriously gathered that he was not a desirable
+charge, as regarded from the point of the servants' hall
+--or, in fact, from any other point.  His people were not the
+people whose patronage was sought with anxious eagerness. 
+For some reason their town house was objectionable, and
+Mount Dunstan was without attractions.  Other big houses
+were, in some marked way, different.  The town house he
+objected to himself as being gloomy and ugly, and possessing
+only a bare and battered nursery, from whose windows one
+could not even obtain a satisfactory view of the Mews, where
+at least, there were horses and grooms who hissed cheerfully
+while they curried and brushed them.  He hated the town
+house and was, in fact, very glad that he was scarcely ever
+taken to it.  People, it seemed, did not care to come either to
+the town house or to Mount Dunstan.  That was why he did
+not know other little boys.  Again--for the mysterious reason
+--people did not care that their children should associate with
+him.  How did he discover this?  He never knew exactly. 
+He realised, however, that without distinct statements, he
+seemed to have gathered it through various disconnected talks
+with Brough.  She had not remained with him long, having
+"bettered herself" greatly and gone away in glum satisfaction,
+but she had stayed long enough to convey to him things
+which became part of his existence, and smouldered in his
+little soul until they became part of himself.  The ancestors
+who had hewn their way through their enemies with battle-
+axes, who had been fierce and cruel and unconquerable in
+their savage pride, had handed down to him a burning and
+unsubmissive soul.  At six years old, walking with Brough
+in Kensington Gardens, and seeing other children playing
+under the care of nurses, who, he learned, were not inclined
+to make advances to his attendant, he dragged Brough away
+with a fierce little hand and stood apart with her, scowling
+haughtily, his head in the air, pretending that he disdained
+all childish gambols, and would have declined to join in
+them, even if he had been besought to so far unbend. 
+Bitterness had been planted in him then, though he had not
+understood, and the sourness of Brough had been connected
+with no intelligence which might have caused her to suspect
+his feelings, and no one had noticed, and if anyone had noticed,
+no one would have cared in the very least.
+
+When Brough had gone away to her far superior place, and
+she had been succeeded by one variety of objectionable or
+incompetent person after another, he had still continued to
+learn.  In different ways he silently collected information, and
+all of it was unpleasant, and, as he grew older, it took for
+some years one form.  Lack of resources, which should of right
+belong to persons of rank, was the radical objection to his
+people.  At the town house there was no money, at Mount
+Dunstan there was no money.  There had been so little money
+even in his grandfather's time that his father had inherited
+comparative beggary.  The fourteenth Earl of Mount Dunstan
+did not call it "comparative" beggary, he called it beggary
+pure and simple, and cursed his progenitors with engaging
+frankness.  He never referred to the fact that in his personable
+youth he had married a wife whose fortune, if it had not
+been squandered, might have restored his own.  The fortune
+had been squandered in the course of a few years of riotous
+living, the wife had died when her third son was born, which
+event took place ten years after the birth of her second, whom
+she had lost through scarlet fever.  James Hubert John Fergus
+Saltyre never heard much of her, and barely knew of her past
+existence because in the picture gallery he had seen a portrait
+of a tall, thin, fretful-looking young lady, with light ringlets,
+and pearls round her neck.  She had not attracted him as a
+child, and the fact that he gathered that she had been his
+mother left him entirely unmoved.  She was not a loveable-
+looking person, and, indeed, had been at once empty-headed,
+irritable, and worldly.  He would probably have been no less
+lonely if she had lived.  Lonely he was.  His father was
+engaged in a career much too lively and interesting to himself
+to admit of his allowing himself to be bored by an unwanted
+and entirely superfluous child.  The elder son, who was Lord
+Tenham, had reached a premature and degenerate maturity
+by the time the younger one made his belated appearance, and
+regarded him with unconcealed dislike.  The worst thing which
+could have befallen the younger boy would have been intimate
+association with this degenerate youth.
+
+As Saltyre left nursery days behind, he learned by degrees
+that the objection to himself and his people, which had at
+first endeavoured to explain itself as being the result of an
+unseemly lack of money, combined with that unpleasant feature,
+an uglier one--namely, lack of decent reputation.  Angry
+duns, beggarliness of income, scarcity of the necessaries and
+luxuries which dignity of rank demanded, the indifference
+and slights of one's equals, and the ignoring of one's existence
+by exalted persons, were all hideous enough to Lord Mount
+Dunstan and his elder son--but they were not so hideous
+as was, to his younger son, the childish, shamed frenzy of
+awakening to the truth that he was one of a bad lot--a
+disgraceful lot, from whom nothing was expected but shifty
+ways, low vices, and scandals, which in the end could not even
+be kept out of the newspapers.  The day came, in fact, when
+the worst of these was seized upon by them and filled their
+sheets with matter which for a whole season decent London
+avoided reading, and the fast and indecent element laughed,
+derided, or gloated over.
+
+The memory of the fever of the monstrous weeks which
+had passed at this time was not one it was wise for a man
+to recall.  But it was not to be forgotten--the hasty midnight
+arrival at Mount Dunstan of father and son, their haggard,
+nervous faces, their terrified discussions, and argumentative
+raging when they were shut up together behind locked doors,
+the appearance of legal advisers who looked as anxious as
+themselves, but failed to conceal the disgust with which they
+were battling, the knowledge that tongues were clacking
+almost hysterically in the village, and that curious faces
+hurried to the windows when even a menial from the great house
+passed, the atmosphere of below-stairs whispers, and jogged
+elbows, and winks, and giggles; the final desperate, excited
+preparations for flight, which might be ignominiously stopped
+at any moment by the intervention of the law, the huddling
+away at night time, the hot-throated fear that the shameful,
+self-branding move might be too late--the burning humiliation
+of knowing the inevitable result of public contempt or laughter
+when the world next day heard that the fugitives had put
+the English Channel between themselves and their country's laws.
+
+Lord Tenham had died a few years later at Port Said,
+after descending into all the hells of degenerate debauch. 
+His father had lived longer--long enough to make of himself 
+something horribly near an imbecile, before he died suddenly
+in Paris.  The Mount Dunstan who succeeded him, having
+spent his childhood and boyhood under the shadow of the
+"bad lot," had the character of being a big, surly, unattractive
+young fellow, whose eccentricity presented itself to those
+who knew his stock, as being of a kind which might develop
+at any time into any objectionable tendency.  His bearing was
+not such as allured, and his fortune was not of the order
+which placed a man in the view of the world.  He had no
+money to expend, no hospitalities to offer and apparently no
+disposition to connect himself with society.  His wild-goose
+chase to America had, when it had been considered worth
+while discussing at all, been regarded as being very much
+the kind of thing a Mount Dunstan might do with some
+secret and disreputable end in view.  No one had heard
+the exact truth, and no one would have been inclined to
+believe if they had heard it.  That he had lived as plain
+Jem Salter, and laboured as any hind might have done, in
+desperate effort and mad hope, would not have been regarded
+as a fact to be credited.  He had gone away, he had squandered
+money, he had returned, he was at Mount Dunstan again,
+living the life of an objectionable recluse--objectionable,
+because the owner of a place like Mount Dunstan should be a
+power and an influence in the county, should be counted upon
+as a dispenser of hospitalities, as a supporter of charities, as
+a dignitary of weight.  He was none of these--living no one
+knew how, slouching about with his gun, riding or walking
+sullenly over the roads and marshland.
+
+Just one man knew him intimately, and this one had been
+from his fifteenth year the sole friend of his life.  He had
+come, then--the Reverend Lewis Penzance--a poor and unhealthy
+scholar, to be vicar of the parish of Dunstan.  Only
+a poor and book-absorbed man would have accepted the
+position.  What this man wanted was no more than quiet, pure
+country air to fill frail lungs, a roof over his head, and a
+place to pore over books and manuscripts.  He was a born
+monk and celibate--in by-gone centuries he would have lived
+peacefully in some monastery, spending his years in the reading
+and writing of black letter and the illuminating of missals. 
+At the vicarage he could lead an existence which was almost
+the same thing.
+
+At Mount Dunstan there remained still the large remnant
+of a great library.  A huge room whose neglected and half
+emptied shelves contained some strange things and wonderful
+ones, though all were in disorder, and given up to dust and
+natural dilapidation.  Inevitably the Reverend Lewis Penzance
+had found his way there, inevitably he had gained indifferently
+bestowed permission to entertain himself by endeavouring to
+reduce to order and to make an attempt at cataloguing. 
+Inevitably, also, the hours he spent in the place
+became the chief sustenance of his being.
+
+There, one day, he had come upon an uncouth-looking boy
+with deep eyes and a shaggy crop of red hair.  The boy was
+poring over an old volume, and was plainly not disposed to
+leave it.  He rose, not too graciously, and replied to the elder
+man's greeting, and the friendly questions which followed. 
+Yes, he was the youngest son of the house.  He had nothing
+to do, and he liked the library.  He often came there and sat
+and read things.  There were some queer old books and a lot
+of stupid ones.  The book he was reading now?  Oh, that
+(with a slight reddening of his skin and a little awkwardness
+at the admission) was one of those he liked best.  It was one
+of the queer ones, but interesting for all that.  It was about
+their own people--the generations of Mount Dunstans who had
+lived in the centuries past.  He supposed he liked it because
+there were a lot of odd stories and exciting things in it. 
+Plenty of fighting and adventure.  There had been some splendid
+fellows among them.  (He was beginning to forget himself
+a little by this time.)  They were afraid of nothing.  They
+were rather like savages in the earliest days, but at that
+time all the rest of the world was savage.  But they were
+brave, and it was odd how decent they were very often. 
+What he meant was--what he liked was, that they were men--
+even when they were barbarians.  You couldn't be ashamed
+of them.  Things they did then could not be done now,
+because the world was different, but if--well, the kind of men
+they were might do England a lot of good if they were alive
+to-day.  They would be different themselves, of course, in
+one way--but they must be the same men in others.  Perhaps
+Mr. Penzance (reddening again) understood what he meant. 
+He knew himself very well, because he had thought it all
+out, he was always thinking about it, but he was no good
+at explaining.
+
+Mr. Penzance was interested.  His outlook on the past and
+the present had always been that of a bookworm, but he
+understood enough to see that he had come upon a temperament
+novel enough to awaken curiosity.  The apparently
+entirely neglected boy, of a type singularly unlike that of
+his father and elder brother, living his life virtually alone in
+the big place, and finding food to his taste in stories of those
+of his blood whose dust had mingled with the earth centuries
+ago, provided him with a new subject for reflection.
+
+That had been the beginning of an unusual friendship. 
+Gradually Penzance had reached a clear understanding of all
+the building of the young life, of its rankling humiliation, and
+the qualities of mind and body which made for rebellion.  It
+sometimes thrilled him to see in the big frame and powerful
+muscles, in the strong nature and unconquerable spirit, a
+revival of what had burned and stirred through lives lived
+in a dim, almost mythical, past.  There were legends of men
+with big bodies, fierce faces, and red hair, who had done big
+deeds, and conquered in dark and barbarous days, even Fate's
+self, as it had seemed.  None could overthrow them, none could
+stand before their determination to attain that which they
+chose to claim.  Students of heredity knew that there were
+curious instances of revival of type.  There had been a certain
+Red Godwyn who had ruled his piece of England before
+the Conqueror came, and who had defied the interloper
+with such splendid arrogance and superhuman lack of fear
+that he had won in the end, strangely enough, the admiration
+and friendship of the royal savage himself, who saw, in his,
+a kindred savagery, a power to be well ranged, through love,
+if not through fear, upon his own side.  This Godwyn had
+a deep attraction for his descendant, who knew the whole
+story of his fierce life--as told in one yellow manuscript and
+another--by heart.  Why might not one fancy--Penzance
+was drawn by the imagining--this strong thing reborn, even
+as the offspring of a poorer effete type.  Red Godwyn springing
+into being again, had been stronger than all else, and had
+swept weakness before him as he had done in other and far-off
+days.
+
+In the old library it fell out in time that Penzance and the
+boy spent the greater part of their days.  The man was a
+bookworm and a scholar, young Saltyre had a passion for
+knowledge.  Among the old books and manuscripts he gained
+a singular education.  Without a guide he could not have
+gathered and assimilated all he did gather and assimilate. 
+Together the two rummaged forgotten shelves and chests, and
+found forgotten things.  That which had drawn the boy from
+the first always drew and absorbed him--the annals of his
+own people.  Many a long winter evening the pair turned over
+the pages of volumes and of parchment, and followed with
+eager interest and curiosity the records of wild lives--stories
+of warriors and abbots and bards, of feudal lords at ruthless
+war with each other, of besiegings and battles and captives
+and torments.  Legends there were of small kingdoms torn
+asunder, of the slaughter of their kings, the mad fightings of
+their barons, and the faith or unfaith of their serfs.  Here
+and there the eternal power revealed itself in some story of
+lawful or unlawful love--for dame or damsel, royal lady,
+abbess, or high-born nun--ending in the welding of two lives
+or in rapine, violence, and death.  There were annals of
+early England, and of marauders, monks, and Danes.  And,
+through all these, some thing, some man or woman, place, or
+strife linked by some tie with Mount Dunstan blood.  In
+past generations, it seemed plain, there had been certain of
+the line who had had pride in these records, and had sought
+and collected them; then had been born others who had not
+cared.  Sometimes the relations were inadequate, sometimes they
+wore an unauthentic air, but most of them seemed, even after
+the passing of centuries, human documents, and together built
+a marvellous great drama of life and power, wickedness and
+passion and daring deeds.
+
+When the shameful scandal burst forth young Saltyre was
+seen by neither his father nor his brother.  Neither of them
+had any desire to see him; in fact, each detested the idea of
+confronting by any chance his hot, intolerant eyes.  "The
+Brat," his father had called him in his childhood, "The Lout,"
+when he had grown big-limbed and clumsy.  Both he and
+Tenham were sick enough, without being called upon to
+contemplate "The Lout," whose opinion, in any case, they
+preferred not to hear.
+
+Saltyre, during the hideous days, shut himself up in the
+library.  He did not leave the house, even for exercise, until
+after the pair had fled.  His exercise he took in walking up
+and down from one end of the long room to another.  Devils
+were let loose in him.  When Penzance came to him, he saw their
+fury in his eyes, and heard it in the savagery of his laugh.
+
+He kicked an ancient volume out of his way as he strode to and
+fro.
+
+"There has been plenty of the blood of the beast in us
+in bygone times," he said, "but it was not like this. 
+Savagery in savage days had its excuse.  This is the beast sunk
+into the gibbering, degenerate ape."
+
+Penzance came and spent hours of each day with him. 
+Part of his rage was the rage of a man, but he was a boy
+still, and the boyishness of his bitterly hurt youth was a thing
+to move to pity.  With young blood, and young pride, and
+young expectancy rising within him, he was at an hour when
+he should have felt himself standing upon the threshold of the
+world, gazing out at the splendid joys and promises and
+powerful deeds of it--waiting only the fit moment to step forth
+and win his place.
+
+"But we are done for," he shouted once.  "We are done
+for.  And I am as much done for as they are.  Decent
+people won't touch us.  That is where the last Mount Dunstan
+stands."  And Penzance heard in his voice an absolute
+break.  He stopped and marched to the window at the end of
+the long room, and stood in dead stillness, staring out at the
+down-sweeping lines of heavy rain.
+
+The older man thought many things, as he looked at his
+big back and body.  He stood with his legs astride, and
+Penzance noted that his right hand was clenched on his
+hip, as a man's might be as he clenched the hilt of his sword
+--his one mate who might avenge him even when, standing
+at bay, he knew that the end had come, and he must fall. 
+Primeval Force--the thin-faced, narrow-chested, slightly bald
+clergyman of the Church of England was thinking--never loses its
+way, or fails to sweep a path before it.  The sun rises and sets,
+the seasons come and go, Primeval Force is of them, and as
+unchangeable.  Much of it stood before him embodied in this
+strongly sentient thing.  In this way the Reverend Lewis found
+his thoughts leading him, and he--being moved to the depths of a
+fine soul--felt them profoundly interesting, and even sustaining.
+
+He sat in a high-backed chair, holding its arms with long
+thin hands, and looking for some time at James Hubert John
+Fergus Saltyre.  He said, at last, in a sane level voice:
+
+"Lord Tenham is not the last Mount Dunstan."
+
+After which the stillness remained unbroken again for
+some minutes.  Saltyre did not move or make any response,
+and, when he left his place at the window, he took up a
+book, and they spoke of other things.
+
+When the fourteenth Earl died in Paris, and his younger 
+son succeeded, there came a time when the two companions
+sat together in the library again.  It was the evening of a
+long day spent in discouraging hard work.  In the morning
+they had ridden side by side over the estate, in the afternoon
+they had sat and pored over accounts, leases, maps, plans.  By
+nightfall both were fagged and neither in sanguine mood.
+
+Mount Dunstan had sat silent for some time.  The pair
+often sat silent.  This pause was ended by the young man's
+rising and standing up, stretching his limbs.
+
+"It was a queer thing you said to me in this room a few
+years ago," he said.  "It has just come back to me."
+
+Singularly enough--or perhaps naturally enough--it had
+also just arisen again from the depths of Penzance's
+subconsciousness.
+
+"Yes," he answered, "I remember.  To-night it suggests
+premonition.  Your brother was not the last Mount Dunstan."
+
+"In one sense he never was Mount Dunstan at all,"
+answered the other man.  Then he suddenly threw out his arms
+in a gesture whose whole significance it would have been
+difficult to describe.  There was a kind of passion in it.  "I
+am the last Mount Dunstan," he harshly laughed.  "Moi qui
+vous parle!  The last."
+
+Penzance's eyes resting on him took upon themselves the
+far-seeing look of a man who watches the world of life without
+living in it.  He presently shook his head.
+
+"No," he said.  "I don't see that.  No--not the last. 
+Believe me.
+
+And singularly, in truth, Mount Dunstan stood still and
+gazed at him without speaking.  The eyes of each rested
+in the eyes of the other.  And, as had happened before, they
+followed the subject no further.  From that moment it dropped.
+
+Only Penzance had known of his reasons for going to
+America.  Even the family solicitors, gravely holding interviews
+with him and restraining expression of their absolute
+disapproval of such employment of his inadequate resources,
+knew no more than that this Mount Dunstan, instead of wasting
+his beggarly income at Cairo, or Monte Carlo, or in Paris
+as the last one had done, prefers to waste it in newer places. 
+The head of the firm, when he bids him good-morning and leaves
+him alone, merely shrugs his shoulders and returns to his letter
+writing with the corners of his elderly mouth hard set.
+
+Penzance saw him off--and met him upon his return.  In
+
+the library they sat and talked it over, and, having done
+so, closed the book of the episode.
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+He sat at the table, his eyes upon the wide-spread loveliness
+of the landscape, but his thought elsewhere.  It wandered
+over the years already lived through, wandering backwards
+even to the days when existence, opening before the
+child eyes, was a baffling and vaguely unhappy thing.
+
+When the door opened and Penzance was ushered in by a
+servant, his face wore the look his friend would have been
+rejoiced to see swept away to return no more.
+
+Then let us take our old accustomed seat and begin some
+casual talk, which will draw him out of the shadows, and make
+him forget such things as it is not good to remember.  That
+is what we have done many times in the past, and may find
+it well to do many a time again.
+
+He begins with talk of the village and the country-side. 
+Village stories are often quaint, and stories of the country-
+side are sometimes--not always--interesting.  Tom Benson's
+wife has presented him with triplets, and there is great
+excitement in the village, as to the steps to be taken to secure
+the three guineas given by the Queen as a reward for this
+feat.  Old Benny Bates has announced his intention of taking
+a fifth wife at the age of ninety, and is indignant that it
+has been suggested that the parochial authorities in charge of
+the "Union," in which he must inevitably shortly take refuge,
+may interfere with his rights as a citizen.  The Reverend Lewis
+has been to talk seriously with him, and finds him at once
+irate and obdurate.
+
+"Vicar," says old Benny, "he can't refuse to marry no
+man.  Law won't let him."  Such refusal, he intimates, might
+drive him to wild and riotous living.  Remembering his last
+view of old Benny tottering down the village street in his
+white smock, his nut-cracker face like a withered rosy apple,
+his gnarled hand grasping the knotted staff his bent body
+leaned on, Mount Dunstan grinned a little.  He did not smile
+when Penzance passed to the restoration of the ancient church
+at Mellowdene.  "Restoration" usually meant the tearing
+away of ancient oaken, high-backed pews, and the instalment
+of smug new benches, suggesting suburban Dissenting chapels,
+such as the feudal soul revolts at.  Neither did he smile
+at a reference to the gathering at Dunholm Castle, which
+was twelve miles away.  Dunholm was the possession of a
+man who stood for all that was first and highest in the land,
+dignity, learning, exalted character, generosity, honour.  He
+and the late Lord Mount Dunstan had been born in the same
+year, and had succeeded to their titles almost at the same time. 
+There had arrived a period when they had ceased to know
+each other.  All that the one man intrinsically was, the other
+man was not.  All that the one estate, its castle, its village,
+its tenantry, represented, was the antipodes of that which the
+other stood for.  The one possession held its place a silent,
+and perhaps, unconscious reproach to the other.  Among the
+guests, forming the large house party which London social
+news had already recorded in its columns, were great and
+honourable persons, and interesting ones, men and women
+who counted as factors in all good and dignified things
+accomplished.  Even in the present Mount Dunstan's childhood,
+people of their world had ceased to cross his father's
+threshold.  As one or two of the most noticeable names were
+mentioned, mentally he recalled this, and Penzance, quick to
+see the thought in his eyes, changed the subject.
+
+"At Stornham village an unexpected thing has happened,"
+he said.  "One of the relatives of Lady Anstruthers has
+suddenly appeared--a sister.  You may remember that the
+poor woman was said to be the daughter of some rich American,
+and it seemed unexplainable that none of her family
+ever appeared, and things were allowed to go from bad to
+worse.  As it was understood that there was so much money
+people were mystified by the condition of things."
+
+"Anstruthers has had money to squander," said Mount
+Dunstan.  "Tenham and he were intimates.  The money
+he spends is no doubt his wife's.  As her family deserted her
+she has no one to defend her."
+
+"Certainly her family has seemed to neglect her for years. 
+Perhaps they were disappointed in his position.  Many Americans
+are extremely ambitious.  These international marriages
+are often singular things.  Now--apparently without having
+been expected--the sister appears.  Vanderpoel is the name--
+Miss Vanderpoel."
+
+"I crossed the Atlantic with her in the Meridiana," said
+Mount Dunstan.
+
+"Indeed!  That is interesting.  You did not, of course,
+know that she was coming here."
+
+"I knew nothing of her but that she was a saloon passenger with a
+suite of staterooms, and I was in the second cabin. 
+Nothing?  That is not quite true, perhaps.  Stewards and
+passengers gossip, and one cannot close one's ears.  Of course
+one heard constant reiteration of the number of millions her
+father possessed, and the number of cabins she managed to
+occupy.  During the confusion and alarm of the collision, we
+spoke to each other."
+
+He did not mention the other occasion on which he had seen her. 
+There seemed, on the whole, no special reason why he should.
+
+"Then you would recognise her, if you saw her.  I heard
+to-day that she seems an unusual young woman, and has beauty."
+
+"Her eyes and lashes are remarkable.  She is tall.  The
+Americans are setting up a new type."
+
+"Yes, they used to send over slender, fragile little women. 
+Lady Anstruthers was the type.  I confess to an interest in
+the sister."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"She has made a curious impression.  She has begun to do things. 
+Stornham village has lost its breath."  He laughed a little. 
+"She has been going over the place and discussing repairs."
+
+Mount Dunstan laughed also.  He remembered what she
+had said.  And she had actually begun.
+
+"That is practical," he commented.
+
+"It is really interesting.  Why should a young woman
+turn her attention to repairs?  If it had been her father--the
+omnipotent Mr. Vanderpoel--who had appeared, one would
+not have wondered at such practical activity.  But a young
+lady--with remarkable eyelashes!"
+
+His elbows were on the arm of his chair, and he had placed
+the tips of his fingers together, wearing an expression of such
+absorbed contemplation that Mount Dunstan laughed again.
+
+"You look quite dreamy over it," he said.
+
+"It allures me.  Unknown quantities in character always
+allure me.  I should like to know her.  A community like
+this is made up of the absolutely known quantity--of types
+repeating themselves through centuries.  A new one is almost
+a startling thing.  Gossip over teacups is not usually
+entertaining to me, but I found myself listening to little Miss
+Laura Brunel this afternoon with rather marked attention.  I
+confess to having gone so far as to make an inquiry or so.  Sir
+Nigel Anstruthers is not often at Stornham.  He is away now. 
+It is plainly not he who is interested in repairs."
+
+"He is on the Riviera, in retreat, in a place he is fond
+of," Mount Dunstan said drily.  "He took a companion
+with him.  A new infatuation.  He will not return soon."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+SPRING IN BOND STREET
+
+The visit to London was part of an evolution of both body
+and mind to Rosalie Anstruthers.  In one of the wonderful
+modern hotels a suite of rooms was engaged for them.  The
+luxury which surrounded them was not of the order Rosalie
+had vaguely connected with hotels.  Hotel-keepers had
+apparently learned many things during the years of her seclusion.
+
+Vanderpoels, at least, could so establish themselves as not to
+greatly feel the hotel atmosphere.  Carefully chosen colours
+textures, and appointments formed the background of their
+days, the food they ate was a thing produced by art, the
+servants who attended them were completely-trained mechanisms. 
+To sit by a window and watch the kaleidoscopic human tide
+passing by on its way to its pleasure, to reach its work, to
+spend its money in unending shops, to show itself and its
+equipage in the park, was a wonderful thing to Lady Anstruthers. 
+It all seemed to be a part of the life and quality of Betty,
+little Betty, whom she had remembered only as a child, and who
+had come to her a tall, strong young beauty, who had--it was
+resplendently clear--never known a fear in her life, and whose
+mere personality had the effect of making fears seem unreal.
+
+She was taken out in a luxurious little brougham to shops
+whose varied allurements were placed eagerly at her disposal. 
+Respectful persons, obedient to her most faintly-expressed
+desire, displayed garments as wonderful as those the New York
+trunks had revealed.  She was besought to consider the fitness of
+articles whose exquisiteness she was almost afraid to look at. 
+Her thin little body was wonderfully fitted, managed,
+encouraged to make the most of its long-ignored outlines.
+
+"Her ladyship's slenderness is a great advantage," said the
+wisely inciting ones.  "There is no such advantage as delicacy
+of line."
+
+Summing up the character of their customer with the sales-
+woman's eye, they realised the discretion of turning to Miss
+Vanderpoel for encouragement, though she was the younger of
+the two, and bore no title.  They were aware of the existence
+of persons of rank who were not lavish patrons, but the name
+of Vanderpoel held most promising suggestions.  To an English
+shopkeeper the American has, of late years, represented the
+spender--the type which, whatsoever its rank and resources,
+has, mysteriously, always money to hand over counters in
+exchange for things it chances to desire to possess.  Each year
+surges across the Atlantic a horde of these fortunate persons,
+who, to the sober, commercial British mind, appear to be free
+to devote their existences to travel and expenditure.  This
+contingent appears shopping in the various shopping
+thoroughfares; it buys clothes, jewels, miscellaneous attractive
+things, making its purchases of articles useful or decorative
+with a freedom from anxiety in its enjoyment which does not mark
+the mood of the ordinary shopper.  In the everyday purchaser one
+is accustomed to take for granted, as a factor in his
+expenditure, a certain deliberation and uncertainty; to the
+travelling American in Europe, shopping appears to be part of the
+holiday which is being made the most of.  Surely, all the neat,
+smart young persons who buy frocks and blouses, hats and coats,
+hosiery and chains, cannot be the possessors of large incomes;
+there must be, even in America, a middle class of middle-class
+resources, yet these young persons, male and female, and most
+frequently unaccompanied by older persons--seeing what they want,
+greet it with expressions of pleasure, waste no time in
+appropriating and paying for it, and go away as in relief and
+triumph--not as in that sober joy which is clouded by
+afterthought.  Thesalespeople are sometimes even vaguely cheered
+by their gay lack of any doubt as to the wisdom of their getting
+what theyadmire, and rejoicing in it.  If America always buys in
+this holiday mood, it must be an enviable thing to be a
+shopkeeper in their New York or Boston or San Francisco.  Who
+would not make a fortune among them?  They want what they want,
+and not something which seems to them less desirable, but they
+open their purses and--frequently with some amused uncertainty
+as to the differences between sovereigns and half-sovereigns,
+florins and half-crowns--they pay their bills with something
+almost like glee.  They are remarkably prompt about bills
+--which is an excellent thing, as they are nearly always just
+going somewhere else, to France or Germany or Italy or Scotland
+or Siberia.  Those of us who are shopkeepers, or their salesmen,
+do not dream that some of them have incomes no larger than
+our own, that they work for their livings, that they are teachers
+journalists, small writers or illustrators of papers or magazines
+that they are unimportant soldiers of fortune, but, with their
+queer American insistence on exploration, and the ignoring of
+limitations, they have, somehow, managed to make this exultant
+dash for a few daring weeks or months of freedom and
+new experience.  If we knew this, we should regard them from
+our conservative standpoint of provident decorum as improvident
+lunatics, being ourselves unable to calculate with their
+odd courage and their cheerful belief in themselves.  What we
+do know is that they spend, and we are far from disdaining their
+patronage, though most of them have an odd little familiarity
+of address and are not stamped with that distinction which
+causes us to realise the enormous difference between the patron
+and the tradesman, and makes us feel the worm we remotely
+like to feel ourselves, though we would not for worlds
+acknowledge the fact.  Mentally, and in our speech, both among
+our equals and our superiors, we condescend to and patronise
+them a little, though that, of course, is the fine old insular
+attitude it would be un-British to discourage.  But, if we are
+not in the least definite concerning the position and resources
+of these spenders as a mass, we are quite sure of a select
+number.  There is mention of them in the newspapers, of the town
+houses, the castles, moors, and salmon fishings they rent, of
+their yachts, their presentations actually at our own courts, of
+their presence at great balls, at Ascot and Goodwood, at the
+opera on gala nights.  One staggers sometimes before the
+public summing-up of the amount of their fortunes.  These
+people who have neither blood nor rank, these men who labour
+in their business offices, are richer than our great dukes, at
+the realising of whose wealth and possessions we have at times
+almost turned pale.
+
+"Them!" chaffed a costermonger over his barrow.  "Blimme,
+if some o' them blokes won't buy Buckin'am Pallis an' the
+'ole R'yal Fambly some mornin' when they're out shoppin'."
+
+The subservient attendants in more than one fashionable shop
+Betty and her sister visit, know that Miss Vanderpoel is of the
+circle, though her father has not as yet bought or hired any
+great estate, and his daughter has not been seen in London.
+
+"Its queer we've never heard of her being presented," one
+shopgirl says to another.  "Just you look at her."
+
+She evidently knows what her ladyship ought to buy--what
+can be trusted not to overpower her faded fragility.  The
+saleswomen, even if they had not been devoured by alert
+curiosity, could not have avoided seeing that her ladyship did
+not seem to know what should be bought, and that Miss Vanderpoel
+did, though she did not direct her sister's selection, but merely
+seemed to suggest with delicate restraint.  Her taste was
+wonderfully perceptive.  The things bought were exquisite, but a
+little colourless woman could wear them all with advantage
+to her restrictions of type.
+
+As the brougham drove down Bond Street, Betty called Lady
+Anstruthers' attention to more than one passer-by.
+
+"Look, Rosy," she said.  "There is Mrs. Treat Hilyar in
+the second carriage to the right.  You remember Josie Treat
+Hilyar married Lord Varick's son."
+
+In the landau designated an elderly woman with wonderfully-
+dressed white hair sat smiling and bowing to friends who
+were walking.  Lady Anstruthers, despite her eagerness, shrank
+back a little, hoping to escape being seen.
+
+"Oh, it is the Lows she is speaking to--Tom and Alice--I
+did not know they had sailed yet."
+
+The tall, well-groomed young man, with the nice, ugly face,
+was showing white teeth in a gay smile of recognition, and his
+pretty wife was lightly waving a slim hand in a grey suede glove.
+
+"How cheerful and nice-tempered they look," said Rosy. 
+"Tom was only twenty when I saw him last.  Whom did he marry?"
+
+"An English girl.  Such a love.  A Devonshire gentleman's
+daughter.  In New York his friends called her Devonshire
+Cream and Roses.  She is one of the pretty, flushy, pink ones."
+
+"How nice Bond Street is on a spring morning like this,"
+said Lady Anstruthers.  "You may laugh at me for saying it,
+Betty, but somehow it seems to me more spring-like than the
+country."
+
+"How clever of you!" laughed Betty.  "There is so much
+truth in it."  The people walking in the sunshine were all full
+of spring thoughts and plans.  The colours they wore, the
+flowers in the women's hats and the men's buttonholes belonged
+to the season.  The cheerful crowds of people and carriages had
+a sort of rushing stir of movement which suggested freshness. 
+Later in the year everything looks more tired.  Now things
+were beginning and everyone was rather inclined to believe that
+this year would be better than last.  "Look at the shop windows,
+said Betty, "full of whites and pinks and yellows and
+blues--the colours of hyacinth and daffodil beds.  It seems as
+if they insist that there never has been a winter and never will
+be one.  They insist that there never was and never will be
+anything but spring."
+
+"It's in the air."  Lady Anstruthers' sigh was actually a
+happy one.  "It is just what I used to feel in April when we
+drove down Fifth Avenue."
+
+Among the crowds of freshly-dressed passers-by, women with
+flowery hats and light frocks and parasols, men with touches of
+flower-colour on the lapels of their coats, and the holiday look
+in their faces, she noted so many of a familiar type that she
+began to look for and try to pick them out with quite excited
+interest.
+
+"I believe that woman is an American," she would say. 
+"That girl looks as if she were a New Yorker," again.  "That
+man's face looks as if it belonged to Broadway.  Oh, Betty! do
+you think I am right?  I should say those girls getting out of
+the hansom to go into Burnham & Staples' came from out West
+and are going to buy thousands of things.  Don't they look
+like it?"
+
+She began to lean forward and look on at things with an interest
+so unlike her Stornham listlessness that Betty's heart was moved.
+
+Her face looked alive, and little waves of colour rose under her
+skin.  Several times she laughed the natural little
+laugh of her girlhood which it had seemed almost too much to
+expect to hear again.  The first of these laughs came when she
+counted her tenth American, a tall Westerner of the cartoon
+type, sauntering along with an expression of speculative
+enjoyment on his odd face, and evidently, though furtively,
+chewing tobacco.
+
+"I absolutely love him, Betty," she cried.  "You couldn't
+mistake him for anything else."
+
+"No," answered Betty, feeling that she loved him herself,
+"not if you found him embalmed in the Pyramids."
+
+They pleased themselves immensely, trying to guess what he
+would buy and take home to his wife and girls in his Western
+town--though Western towns were very grand and amazing
+in these days, Betty explained, and knew they could give points
+to New York.  He would not buy the things he would have
+bought fifteen years ago.  Perhaps, in fact, his wife and
+daughters had come with him to London and stayed at the Metropole
+or the Savoy, and were at this moment being fitted by tailors
+and modistes patronised by Royalty.
+
+"Rosy, look!  Do you see who that is?  Do you recognise
+her?  It is Mrs. Bellingham.  She was little Mina Thalberg. 
+She married Captain Bellingham.  He was quite poor, but
+very well born--a nephew of Lord Dunholm's.  He could not
+have married a poor girl--but they have been so happy together
+that Mina is growing fat, and spends her days in taking
+reducing treatments.  She says she wouldn't care in the least,
+but Dicky fell in love with her waist and shoulder line."
+
+The plump, pretty young woman getting out of her victoria
+before a fashionable hairdresser's looked radiant enough.  She
+had not yet lost the waist and shoulder line, though her pink
+frock fitted her with discreet tightness.  She paused a moment
+to pat and fuss prettily over the two blooming, curly children
+who were to remain under the care of the nurse, who sat on the
+back seat, holding the baby on her lap.
+
+"I should not have known her," said Rosy.  "She has grown
+pretty.  She wasn't a pretty child."
+
+"It's happiness--and the English climate--and Captain
+Dicky.  They adore each other, and laugh at everything like
+a pair of children.  They were immensely popular in New
+York last winter, when they visited Mina's people."
+
+The effect of the morning upon Lady Anstruthers was what
+Betty had hoped it might be.  The curious drawing near of
+the two nations began to dawn upon her as a truth.  Immured
+in the country, not sufficiently interested in life to read
+newspapers, she had heard rumours of some of the more important
+marriages, but had known nothing of the thousand small details
+which made for the weaving of the web.  Mrs. Treat Hilyar
+driving in a leisurely, accustomed fashion down Bond Street,
+and smiling casually at her compatriots, whose "sailing" was
+as much part of the natural order of their luxurious lives as
+their carriages, gave a definiteness to the situation.  Mina
+Thalberg, pulling down the embroidered frocks over the round legs
+of her English-looking children, seemed to narrow the width
+of the Atlantic Ocean between Liverpool and the docks on
+the Hudson River.
+
+She returned to the hotel with an appetite for lunch and a
+new expression in her eyes which made Ughtred stare at her.
+
+"Mother," he said, "you look different.  You look well. 
+It isn't only your new dress and your hair."
+
+The new style of her attire had certainly done much, and
+the maid who had been engaged to attend her was a woman
+who knew her duties.  She had been called upon in her time
+to make the most of hair offering much less assistance to her
+skill than was supplied by the fine, fair colourlessness she had
+found dragged back from her new mistress's forehead.  It was
+not dragged back now, but had really been done wonders with. 
+Rosalie had smiled a little when she had looked at herself in
+the glass after the first time it was so dressed.
+
+"You are trying to make me look as I did when mother saw
+me last, Betty," she said.  "I wonder if you possibly could."
+
+"Let us believe we can," laughed Betty.  "And wait and see."
+
+It seemed wise neither to make nor receive visits.  The time
+for such things had evidently not yet come.  Even the mention
+of the Worthingtons led to the revelation that Rosalie
+shrank from immediate contact with people.  When she felt
+stronger, when she became more accustomed to the thought, she
+might feel differently, but just now, to be luxuriously one with
+the enviable part of London, to look on, to drink in, to drive
+here and there, doing the things she liked to do, ordering what
+was required at Stornham, was like the creating for her of a
+new heaven and a new earth.
+
+When, one night, Betty took her with Ughtred to the
+theatre, it was to see a play written by an American, played by
+American actors, produced by an American manager.  They
+had even engaged in theatrical enterprise, it seemed, their
+actors played before London audiences, London actors played in
+American theatres, vibrating almost yearly between the two
+continents and reaping rich harvests.  Hearing rumours of this
+in the past, Lady Anstruthers had scarcely believed it entirely
+true.  Now the practical reality was brought before her.  The
+French, who were only separated from the English metropolis
+by a mere few miles of Channel, did not exchange their actors
+year after year in increasing numbers, making a mere friendly
+barter of each other's territory, as though each land was
+common ground and not divided by leagues of ocean travel.
+
+"It seems so wonderful," Lady Anstruthers argued.  "I
+have always felt as if they hated each other."
+
+"They did once--but how could it last between those of
+the same blood--of the same tongue?  If we were really aliens
+we might be a menace.  But we are of their own."  Betty
+leaned forward on the edge of the box, looking out over the
+crowded house, filled with almost as many Americans as English
+faces.  She smiled, reflecting.  "We were children put out
+to nurse and breathe new air in the country, and now we are
+coming home, vigorous, and full-grown."
+
+She studied the audience for some minutes, and, as her glance
+wandered over the stalls, it took in more than one marked variety
+of type.  Suddenly it fell on a face she delightedly recognised. 
+It was that of the nice, speculative-eyed Westerner they had seen
+enjoying himself in Bond Street.
+
+"Rosy," she said, "there is the Western man we love.  Near
+the end of the fourth row."
+
+Lady Anstruthers looked for him with eagerness.
+
+"Oh, I see him!  Next to the big one with the reddish hair."
+
+Betty turned her attention to the man in question, whom she
+had not chanced to notice.  She uttered an exclamation of
+surprise and interest.
+
+"The big man with the red hair.  How lovely that they
+should chance to sit side by side--the big one is Lord Mount
+Dunstan!"
+
+The necessity of seeing his solicitors, who happened to be
+Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard, had brought Lord Mount
+Dunstan to town.  After a day devoted to business affairs, he
+had been attracted by the idea of going to the theatre to see
+again a play he had already seen in New York.  It would
+interest him to observe its exact effect upon a London audience. 
+While he had been in New York, he had gone with something
+of the same feeling to see a great English actor play to a
+crowded house.  The great actor had been one who had
+returned to the country for a third or fourth time, and, in the
+enthusiasm he had felt in the atmosphere about him, Mount
+Dunstan had seen not only pleasure and appreciation of the
+man's perfect art, but--at certain tumultuous outbursts--an
+almost emotional welcome.  The Americans, he had said to
+himself, were creatures of warmer blood than the English.  The
+audience on that occasion had been, in mass, American.  The
+audience he made one of now, was made up of both nationalities,
+and, in glancing over it, he realised how large was the number
+of Americans who came yearly to London.  As Lady Anstruthers
+had done, he found himself selecting from the assemblage
+the types which were manifestly American, and those obviously
+English.  In the seat next to himself sat a man of a type he
+felt he had learned by heart in the days of his life as Jem
+Salter.  At a short distance fluttered brilliantly an English
+professional beauty, with her male and female court about her. 
+In the stage box, made sumptuous with flowers, was a royal party.
+
+As this party had entered, "God save the Queen" had been played,
+and, in rising with the audience during the entry, he had
+recalled that the tune was identical with that of an American
+national air.  How unconsciously inseparable--in spite of the
+lightness with which they regarded the curious tie between them
+--the two countries were.  The people upon the stage were
+acting as if they knew their public, their bearing suggesting no
+sense of any barrier beyond the footlights.  It was the
+unconsciousness and lightness of the mutual attitude which had
+struck him of late.  Punch had long jested about "Fair
+Americans," who, in their first introduction to its pages, used
+exotic and cryptic language, beginning every sentence either with
+"I guess," or "Say, Stranger"; its male American had been of the
+Uncle Sam order and had invariably worn a "goatee."  American
+witticisms had represented the Englishman in plaid trousers,
+opening his remarks with "Chawley, deah fellah," and unfailingly
+missing the point of any joke.  Each country had cherished
+its type and good-naturedly derided it.  In time this had
+modified itself and the joke had changed in kind.  Many other
+things had changed, but the lightness of treatment still
+remained.  And yet their blood was mingling itself with that of
+England's noblest and oldest of name, their wealth was making
+solid again towers and halls which had threatened to crumble. 
+Ancient family jewels glittered on slender, young American
+necks, and above--sometimes somewhat careless--young American
+brows.  And yet, so far, one was casual in one's thought of
+it all, still.  On his own part he was obstinate Briton enough
+to rebel against and resent it.  They were intruders.  He
+resented them as he had resented in his boyhood the historical
+fact that, after all, an Englishman was a German--a savage
+who, five hundred years after the birth of Christ, had swooped
+upon Early Briton from his Engleland and Jutland, and ravaging
+with fire and sword, had conquered and made the land his
+possession, ravishing its very name from it and giving it his
+own.  These people did not come with fire and sword, but with
+cable and telephone, and bribes of gold and fair women, but
+they were encroaching like the sea, which, in certain parts of
+the coast, gained a few inches or so each year.  He shook his
+shoulders impatiently, and stiffened, feeling illogically
+antagonistic towards the good-natured, lantern-jawed man at his
+side.
+
+The lantern-jawed man looked good-natured because he was
+smiling, and he was smiling because he saw something which
+pleased him in one of the boxes.
+
+His expression of unqualified approval naturally directed
+Mount Dunstan's eye to the point in question, where it
+remained for some moments.  This was because he found it
+resting upon Miss Vanderpoel, who sat before him in luminous
+white garments, and with a brilliant spark of ornament in the
+dense shadow of her hair.  His sensation at the unexpected sight
+of her would, if it had expressed itself physically, have taken
+the form of a slight start.  The luminous quality did not confine
+itself to the whiteness of her garments.  He was aware of
+feeling that she looked luminous herself--her eyes, her cheek,
+the smile she bent upon the little woman who was her companion. 
+She was a beautifully living thing.
+
+Naturally, she was being looked at by others than himself. 
+She was one of those towards whom glasses in a theatre turn
+themselves inevitably.  The sweep and lift of her black hair
+would have drawn them, even if she had offered no other charm. 
+Yes, he thought, here was another of them.  To whom was
+she bringing her good looks and her millions?  There were
+men enough who needed money, even if they must accept it
+under less alluring conditions.  In the box next to the one
+occupied by the royal party was a man who was known to be
+waiting for the advent of some such opportunity.  His was a
+case of dire, if outwardly stately, need.  He was young, but a
+fool, and not noted for personal charms, yet he had, in one
+sense, great things to offer.  There were, of course, many
+chances that he might offer them to her.  If this happened,
+would she accept them?  There was really no objection to
+him but his dulness, consequently there seemed many chances
+that she might.  There was something akin to the pomp of
+royalty in the power her father's wealth implied.  She could
+scarcely make an ordinary marriage.  It would naturally be a
+sort of state affair.  There were few men who had enough to
+offer in exchange for Vanderpoel millions, and of the few none
+had special attractions.  The one in the box next to the royal
+party was a decent enough fellow.  As young princesses were
+not infrequently called upon, by the mere exclusion of royal
+blood, to become united to young or mature princes without
+charm, so American young persons who were of royal possessions
+must find themselves limited.  If you felt free to pick
+and choose from among young men in the Guards or young
+attaches in the Diplomatic Service with twopence a year, you
+might get beauty or wit or temperament or all three by good
+luck, but if you were of a royal house of New York or Chicago,
+you would probably feel you must draw lines and choose only
+such splendours as accorded with, even while differing from,
+your own.
+
+Any possible connection of himself with such a case did not
+present itself to him.  If it had done so, he would have counted
+himself, haughtily, as beyond the pale.  It was for other men
+to do things of the sort; a remote antagonism of his whole
+being warred against the mere idea.  It was bigoted prejudice,
+perhaps, but it was a strong thing.
+
+A lovely shoulder and a brilliant head set on a long and
+slender neck have no nationality which can prevent a man's
+glance turning naturally towards them.  His turned again during
+the last act of the play, and at a moment when he saw
+something rather like the thing he had seen when the Meridiana
+moved away from the dock and the exalted Miss Vanderpoel
+leaning upon the rail had held out her arms towards the child
+who had brought his toy to her as a farewell offering.
+
+Sitting by her to-night was a boy with a crooked back--
+Mount Dunstan remembered hearing that the Anstruthers had
+a deformed son--and she was leaning towards him, her hand
+resting on his shoulder, explaining something he had not quite
+grasped in the action of the play.  The absolute adoration in
+the boy's uplifted eyes was an interesting thing to take in, and
+the radiant warmth of her bright look was as unconscious of
+onlookers as it had been when he had seen it yearning towards
+the child on the wharf.  Hers was the temperament which gave
+--which gave.  He found himself restraining a smile because
+her look brought back to him the actual sound of the New
+York youngster's voice.
+
+"I wanted to kiss you, Betty, oh, I did so want to kiss you!"
+
+Anstruthers' boy--poor little beggar--looked as if he, too,
+in the face of actors and audience, and brilliance of light,
+wanted to kiss her.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THINGS OCCUR IN STORNHAM VILLAGE
+
+It would not have been possible for Miss Vanderpoel to remain
+long in social seclusion in London, and, before many days had
+passed, Stornham village was enlivened by the knowledge that
+her ladyship and her sister had returned to the Court.  It
+was also evident that their visit to London had not been made
+to no purpose.  The stagnation of the waters of village life
+threatened to become a whirlpool.  A respectable person, who
+was to be her ladyship's maid, had come with them, and her
+ladyship had not been served by a personal attendant for years. 
+Her ladyship had also appeared at the dinner-table in new
+garments, and with her hair done as other ladies wore theirs. 
+She looked like a different woman, and actually had a bit of
+colour, and was beginning to lose her frightened way.  Now
+it dawned upon even the dullest and least active mind that
+something had begun to stir.
+
+It had been felt vaguely when the new young lady from "Meriker"
+had walked through the village street, and had drawn people to
+doors and windows by her mere passing.  After the return from
+London the signs of activity were such as made the villagers
+catch their breaths in uttering uncertain exclamations, and
+caused the feminine element to catch up offspring or, dragging it
+by its hand, run into neighbours' cottages and stand talking the
+incredible thing over in lowered and rather breathless voices. 
+Yet the incredible thing in question was--had it been seen from
+the standpoint of more prosperous villagers-- anything but
+extraordinary.  In entirely rural places the Castle, the Hall or
+the Manor, the Great House--in short--still
+retains somewhat of the old feudal power to bestow benefits or
+withhold them.  Wealth and good will at the Manor supply
+work and resultant comfort in the village and its surrounding
+holdings.  Patronised by the Great House the two or three
+small village shops bestir themselves and awaken to activity. 
+The blacksmith swings his hammer with renewed spirit over
+the numerous jobs the gentry's stables, carriage houses, garden
+tools, and household repairs give to him.  The carpenter mends
+and makes, the vicarage feels at ease, realising that its church
+and its charities do not stand unsupported.  Small farmers and
+larger ones, under a rich and interested landlord, thrive and
+are able to hold their own even against the tricks of wind and
+weather.  Farm labourers being, as a result, certain of steady
+and decent wage, trudge to and fro, with stolid cheerfulness,
+knowing that the pot boils and the children's feet are shod. 
+Superannuated old men and women are sure of their broth and
+Sunday dinner, and their dread of the impending "Union"
+fades away.  The squire or my lord or my lady can be depended
+upon to care for their old bones until they are laid under the
+sod in the green churchyard.  With wealth and good will at
+the Great House, life warms and offers prospects.  There are
+Christmas feasts and gifts and village treats, and the big
+carriage or the smaller ones stop at cottage doors and at once
+confer exciting distinction and carry good cheer.
+
+But Stornham village had scarcely a remote memory of any
+period of such prosperity.  It had not existed even in the older
+Sir Nigel's time, and certainly the present Sir Nigel's reign
+had been marked only by neglect, ill-temper, indifference, and
+a falling into disorder and decay.  Farms were poorly worked,
+labourers were unemployed, there was no trade from the manor
+household, no carriages, no horses, no company, no spending of
+money.  Cottages leaked, floors were damp, the church roof
+itself was falling to pieces, and the vicar had nothing to give. 
+The helpless and old cottagers were carried to the "Union" and,
+dying there, were buried by the stinted parish in parish coffins.
+
+Her ladyship had not visited the cottages since her child's
+birth.  And now such inspiriting events as were everyday
+happenings in lucky places like Westerbridge and Wratcham and
+Yangford, showed signs of being about to occur in Stornham
+itself.
+
+To begin with, even before the journey to London, Kedgers
+had made two or three visits to The Clock, and had been in a
+communicative mood.  He had related the story of the morning
+when he had looked up from his work and had found the
+strange young lady standing before him, with the result that
+he had been "struck all of a heap."  And then he had given a
+detailed account of their walk round the place, and of the way
+in which she had looked at things and asked questions, such as
+would have done credit to a man "with a 'ead on 'im."
+
+"Nay!  Nay!" commented Kedgers, shaking his own head
+doubtfully, even while with admiration.  "I've never seen the
+like before--in young women--neither in lady young women
+nor in them that's otherwise."
+
+Afterwards had transpired the story of Mrs. Noakes, and the
+kitchen grate, Mrs. Noakes having a friend in Miss Lupin, the
+village dressmaker.
+
+"I'd not put it past her," was Mrs. Noakes' summing up,
+"to order a new one, I wouldn't."
+
+The footman in the shabby livery had been a little wild
+in his statements, being rendered so by the admiring and
+excited state of his mind.  He dwelt upon the matter of her
+"looks," and the way she lighted up the dingy dining-room, and
+so conversed that a man found himself listening and glancing
+when it was his business to be an unhearing, unseeing piece of
+mechanism.
+
+Such simple records of servitors' impressions were quite
+enough for Stornham village, and produced in it a sense of
+being roused a little from sleep to listen to distant and
+uncomprehended, but not unagreeable, sounds.
+
+One morning Buttle, the carpenter, looked up as Kedgers had done,
+and saw standing on the threshold of his shop the tall young
+woman, who was a sensation and an event in herself.
+
+"You are the master of this shop?" she asked.
+
+Buttle came forward, touching his brow in hasty salute.
+
+"Yes, my lady," he answered.  "Joseph Buttle, your ladyship."
+
+"I am Miss Vanderpoel," dismissing the suddenly bestowed title
+with easy directness.  "Are you busy?  I want to talk to you."
+
+No one had any reason to be "busy" at any time in Stornham
+village, no such luck; but Buttle did not smile as he replied
+that he was at liberty and placed himself at his visitor's
+disposal.  The tall young lady came into the little shop, and
+took the chair respectfully offered to her.  Buttle saw her eyes
+sweep the place as if taking in its resources.
+
+"I want to talk to you about some work which must be done
+at the Court," she explained at once.  "I want to know how
+much can be done by workmen of the village.  How many men
+have you?"
+
+"How many men had he?" Buttle wavered between gratification at
+its being supposed that he had "men" under him and grumpy
+depression because the illusion must be dispelled.
+
+"There's me and Sim Soames, miss," he answered.  "No more, an' no
+less."
+
+"Where can you get more?" asked Miss Vanderpoel.
+
+It could not be denied that Buttle received a mental shock
+which verged in its suddenness on being almost a physical one. 
+The promptness and decision of such a query swept him off his
+feet.  That Sim Soames and himself should be an insufficient
+force to combat with such repairs as the Court could afford
+was an idea presenting an aspect of unheard-of novelty, but that
+methods as coolly radical as those this questioning implied,
+should be resorted to, was staggering.
+
+"Me and Sim has always done what work was done," he stammered. 
+"It hasn't been much."
+
+Miss Vanderpoel neither assented to nor dissented from this
+last palpable truth.  She regarded Buttle with searching eyes. 
+She was wondering if any practical ability concealed itself
+behind his dullness.  If she gave him work, could he do it?  If
+she gave the whole village work, was it too far gone in its
+unspurred stodginess to be roused to carrying it out?
+
+"There is a great deal to be done now," she said.  "All
+that can be done in the village should be done here.  It seems to
+me that the villagers want work--new work.  Do they?"
+
+Work!  New work!  The spark of life in her steady eyes
+actually lighted a spark in the being of Joe Buttle.  Young
+ladies in villages--gentry--usually visited the cottagers a bit
+if they were well-meaning young women--left good books and
+broth or jelly, pottered about and were seen at church, and
+playing croquet, and finally married and removed to other
+places, or gradually faded year by year into respectable
+spinsterhood.  And this one comes in, and in two or three minutes
+shows that she knows things about the place and understands. 
+A man might then take it for granted that she would understand
+the thing he daringly gathered courage to say.
+
+"They want any work, miss--that they are sure of decent
+pay for--sure of it."
+
+She did understand.  And she did not treat his implication as
+an impertinence.  She knew it was not intended as one, and,
+indeed, she saw in it a sort of earnest of a possible practical
+quality in Buttle.  Such work as the Court had demanded had
+remained unpaid for with quiet persistence, until even bills
+had begun to lag and fall off.  She could see exactly how it
+had been done, and comprehended quite clearly a lack of
+enthusiasm in the presence of orders from the Great House.
+
+"All work will be paid for," she said.  "Each week the
+workmen will receive their wages.  They may be sure.  I will
+be responsible."
+
+"Thank you, miss," said Buttle, and he half unconsciously
+touched his forehead again.
+
+"In a place like this," the young lady went on in her
+mellow voice, and with a reflective thoughtfulness in her
+handsome eyes, "on an estate like Stornham, no work that can be
+done by the villagers should be done by anyone else.  The people
+of the land should be trained to do such work as the manor
+house, or cottages, or farms require to have done."
+
+"How did she think that out?" was Buttle's reflection.  In
+places such as Stornham, through generation after generation,
+the thing she had just said was accepted as law, clung to as a
+possession, any divergence from it being a grievance sullenly
+and bitterly grumbled over.  And in places enough there was
+divergence in these days--the gentry sending to London for
+things, and having up workmen to do their best-paying jobs for
+them.  The law had been so long a law that no village could
+see justice in outsiders being sent for, even to do work they
+could not do well themselves.  It showed what she was, this
+handsome young woman--even though she did come from
+America--that she should know what was right.
+
+She took a note-book out and opened it on the rough table
+before her.
+
+"I have made some notes here," she said, "and a sketch or
+two.  We must talk them over together."
+
+If she had given Joe Buttle cause for surprise at the outset,
+she gave him further cause during the next half-hour.  The
+work that was to be done was such as made him open his eyes,
+and draw in his breath.  If he was to be allowed to do it--if
+he could do it--if it was to be paid for--it struck him that he
+would be a man set up for life.  If her ladyship had come and
+ordered it to be done, he would have thought the poor thing
+had gone mad.  But this one had it all jotted down in a clear
+hand, without the least feminine confusion of detail, and with
+here and there a little sharply-drawn sketch, such as a
+carpenter, if he could draw, which Buttle could not, might have
+made.
+
+"There's not workmen enough in the village to do it in a
+year, miss," he said at last, with a gasp of disappointment.
+
+She thought it over a minute, her pencil poised in her hand
+and her eyes on his face
+
+"Can you," she said, "undertake to get men from other
+villages, and superintend what they do?  If you can do that,
+the work is still passing through your hands, and Stornham will
+reap the benefit of it.  Your workmen will lodge at the cottages
+and spend part of their wages at the shops, and you who
+are a Stornham workman will earn the money to be made out
+of a rather large contract."
+
+Joe Buttle became quite hot.  If you have brought up a
+family for years on the proceeds of such jobs as driving a ten-
+penny nail in here or there, tinkering a hole in a cottage roof,
+knocking up a shelf in the vicarage kitchen, and mending a
+panel of fence, to be suddenly confronted with a proposal to
+engage workmen and undertake "contracts" is shortening to
+the breath and heating to the blood.
+
+"Miss," he said, "we've never done big jobs, Sim Soames an' me. 
+P'raps we're not up to it--but it'd be a fortune to us."
+
+She was looking down at one of her papers and making
+pencil marks on it.
+
+"You did some work last year on a little house at Tidhurst,
+didn't you?" she said.
+
+To think of her knowing that!  Yes, the unaccountable
+good luck had actually come to him that two Tidhurst carpenters,
+falling ill of the same typhoid at the same time, through living
+side by side in the same order of unsanitary cottage, he and Sim
+had been given their work to finish, and had done their best.
+
+"Yes, miss," he answered.
+
+"I heard that when I was inquiring about you.  I drove
+over to Tidhurst to see the work, and it was very sound and
+well done.  If you did that, I can at least trust you to do
+something at the Court which will prove to me what you are
+equal to.  I want a Stornham man to undertake this."
+
+"No Tidhurst man," said Joe Buttle, with sudden courage,
+"nor yet no Barnhurst, nor yet no Yangford, nor Wratcham
+shall do it, if I can look it in the face.  It's Stornham work
+and Stornham had ought to have it.  It gives me a brace-up to
+hear of it."
+
+The tall young lady laughed beautifully and got up.
+
+"Come to the Court to-morrow morning at ten, and we will
+look it over together," she said.  "Good-morning, Buttle." 
+And she went away.
+
+In the taproom of The Clock, when Joe Buttle dropped in
+for his pot of beer, he found Fox, the saddler, and Tread, the
+blacksmith, and each of them fell upon the others with something
+of the same story to tell.  The new young lady from
+the Court had been to see them, too, and had brought to each
+
+her definite little note-book.  Harness was to be repaired and
+furbished up, the big carriage and the old phaeton were to be
+put in order, and Master Ughtred's cart was to be given new
+paint and springs.
+
+"This is what she said," Fox's story ran, "and she said it
+so straightforward and business-like that the conceitedest man
+that lived couldn't be upset by it.  `I want to see what you can
+do,' she says.  `I am new to the place and I must find out what
+everyone can do, then I shall know what to do myself.'  The
+way she sets them eyes on a man is a sight.  It's the sense in
+them and the human nature that takes you."
+
+"Yes, it's the sense," said Tread, "and her looking at you as
+if she expected you to have sense yourself, and understand
+that she's doing fair business.  It's clear-headed like--her
+asking questions and finding out what Stornham men can do. 
+She's having the old things done up so that she can find out,
+and so that she can prove that the Court work is going to be
+paid for.  That's my belief."
+
+"But what does it all mean?" said Joe Buttle, setting his
+pot of beer down on the taproom table, round which they sat
+in conclave.  "Where's the money coming from?  There's
+money somewhere."
+
+Tread was the advanced thinker of the village.  He had
+come--through reverses--from a bigger place.  He read the
+newspapers.
+
+"It'll come from where it's got a way of coming," he gave
+forth portentously.  "It'll come from America.  How they
+manage to get hold of so much of it there is past me.  But
+they've got it, dang 'em, and they're ready to spend it for what
+they want, though they're a sharp lot.  Twelve years ago there
+was a good bit of talk about her ladyship's father being one of
+them with the fullest pockets.  She came here with plenty, but
+Sir Nigel got hold of it for his games, and they're the games
+that cost money.  Her ladyship wasn't born with a backbone,
+poor thing, but this new one was, and her ladyship's father is
+her father, and you mark my words, there's money coming into
+Stornham, though it's not going to be played the fool with. 
+Lord, yes! this new one has a backbone and good strong wrists
+and a good strong head, though I must say"--with a little
+masculine chuckle of admission--"it's a bit unnatural with
+them eyelashes and them eyes looking at you between 'em. 
+Like blue water between rushes in the marsh."
+
+Before the next twenty-four hours had passed a still more
+unlooked-for event had taken place.  Long outstanding bills had
+been paid, and in as matter-of-fact manner as if they had not
+been sent in and ignored, in some cases for years.  The
+settlement of Joe Buttle's account sent him to bed at the day's
+end almost light-headed.  To become suddenly the possessor of
+thirty-seven pounds, fifteen and tenpence half-penny, of which
+all hope had been lost three years ago, was almost too much for
+any man.  Six pounds, eight pounds, ten pounds, came into places
+as if sovereigns had been sixpences, and shillings farthings. 
+More than one cottage woman, at the sight of the
+hoarded wealth in her staring goodman's hand, gulped and
+began to cry.  If they had had it before, and in driblets, it
+would have been spent long since, now, in a lump, it meant
+shoes and petticoats and tea and sugar in temporary abundance,
+and the sense of this abundance was felt to be entirely due
+to American magic.  America was, in fact, greatly lauded
+and discussed, the case of "Gaarge" Lumsden being much quoted.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+KEDGERS
+
+The work at Stornham Court went on steadily, though with
+no greater rapidity than is usually achieved by rural labourers. 
+There was, however, without doubt, a certain stimulus in the
+occasional appearance of Miss Vanderpoel, who almost daily
+sauntered round the place to look on, and exchange a few words
+with the workmen.  When they saw her coming, the men,
+hastily standing up to touch their foreheads, were conscious of
+a slight acceleration of being which was not quite the ordinary
+quickening produced by the presence of employers.  It was,
+in fact, a sensation rather pleasing than anxious.  Her interest
+in the work was, upon the whole, one which they found themselves
+beginning to share.  The unusualness of the situation--a
+young woman, who evidently stood for many things and powers
+desirable, employing labourers and seeming to know what she
+intended them to do--was a thing not easy to get over, or be
+come accustomed to.  But there she was, as easy and well
+mannered as you please--and with gentlefolks' ways, though,
+as an American, such finish could scarcely be expected from
+her.  She knew each man's name, it was revealed gradually,
+and, what was more, knew what he stood for in the village,
+what cottage he lived in, how many children he had, and
+something about his wife.  She remembered things and made
+inquiries which showed knowledge.  Besides this, she represented,
+though perhaps they were scarcely yet fully awake to the fact,
+the promise their discouraged dulness had long lost sight of.
+
+It actually became apparent that her ladyship, who walked
+with her, was altering day by day.  Was it true that the bit of
+colour they had heard spoken of when she returned from town
+was deepening and fixing itself on her cheek?  It sometimes
+looked like it.  Was she a bit less stiff and shy-like and
+frightened in her way?  Buttle mentioned to his friends at The
+Clock that he was sure of it.  She had begun to look a man in
+the face when she talked, and more than once he had heard
+her laugh at things her sister said.
+
+To one man more than to any other had come an almost
+unspeakable piece of luck through the new arrival--a thing which
+to himself, at least, was as the opening of the heavens.  This
+man was the discouraged Kedgers.  Miss Vanderpoel, coming
+with her ladyship to talk to him, found that the man was a
+person of more experience than might have been imagined.  In
+his youth he had been an under gardener at a great place, and
+being fond of his work, had learned more than under gardeners
+often learn.  He had been one of a small army of workers under
+the orders of an imposing head gardener, whose knowledge was
+a science.  He had seen and taken part in what was done in
+orchid houses, orangeries, vineries, peach houses, conservatories
+full of wondrous tropical plants.  But it was not easy for a
+man like himself, uneducated and lacking confidence of character,
+to advance as a bolder young man might have done.  The
+all-ruling head gardener had inspired him with awe.  He had
+watched him reverently, accumulating knowledge, but being
+given, as an underling, no opportunity to do more than obey
+orders.  He had spent his life in obeying, and congratulated
+himself that obedience secured him his weekly wage.
+
+"He was a great man--Mr. Timson--he was," he said, in
+talking to Miss Vanderpoel.  "Ay, he was that.  Knew everything
+that could happen to a flower or a s'rub or a vegetable. 
+Knew it all.  Had a lib'ery of books an' read 'em night an'
+day.  Head gardener's cottage was good enough for gentry. 
+The old Markis used to walk round the hothouses an' gardens
+talking to him by the hour.  If you did what he told you EXACTLY
+like he told it to you, then you were all right, but if you
+didn't--well, you was off the place before you'd time to look
+round.  Worked under him from twenty to forty.  Then he died an'
+the new one that came in had new ways.  He made a clean sweep of
+most of us.  The men said he was jealous of Mr. Timson."
+
+"That was bad for you, if you had a wife and children,"
+Miss Vanderpoel said.
+
+"Eight of us to feed," Kedgers answered.  "A man with
+that on him can't wait, miss.  I had to take the first place
+I could get.  It wasn't a good one--poor parsonage with a
+big family an' not room on the place for the vegetables they
+wanted.  Cabbages, an' potatoes, an' beans, an' broccoli.  No
+time nor ground for flowers.  Used to seem as if flowers got
+to be a kind of dream."  Kedgers gave vent to a deprecatory
+half laugh.  "Me--I was fond of flowers.  I wouldn't have
+asked no better than to live among 'em.  Mr. Timson gave me a
+book or two when his lordship sent him a lot of new ones.  I've
+bought a few myself--though I suppose I couldn't afford it."
+
+From the poor parsonage he had gone to a market gardener,
+and had evidently liked the work better, hard and
+unceasing as it had been, because he had been among flowers
+again.  Sudden changes from forcing houses to chill outside
+dampness had resulted in rheumatism.  After that things had
+gone badly.  He began to be regarded as past his prime of
+strength.  Lower wages and labour still as hard as ever,
+though it professed to be lighter, and therefore cheaper.  At
+last the big neglected gardens of Stornham.
+
+"What I'm seeing, miss, all the time, is what could be
+done with 'em.  Wonderful it'd be.  They might be the
+show of the county-if we had Mr. Timson here."
+
+Miss Vanderpoel, standing in the sunshine on the broad
+weed-grown pathway, was conscious that he was remotely
+moving.  His flowers--his flowers.  They had been the centre
+of his rudimentary rural being.  Each man or woman cared
+for some one thing, and the unfed longing for it left the
+life of the creature a thwarted passion.  Kedgers, yearning
+to stir the earth about the roots of blooming things, and
+doomed to broccoli and cabbage, had spent his years unfed.
+No thing is a small thing.  Kedgers, with the earth under
+his broad finger nails, and his half apologetic laugh, being
+the centre of his own world, was as large as Mount Dunstan,
+who stood thwarted in the centre of his.  Chancing-for God knows
+what mystery of reason-to be born one of those having power, one
+might perhaps set in order a world like Kedgers'.
+
+"In the course of twenty years' work under Timson," she
+said, "you must have learned a great deal from him."
+
+"A good bit, miss-a good bit," admitted Kedgers.  " If
+I hadn't ha' cared for the work, I might ha' gone on doing
+it with my eyes shut, but I didn't.  Mr. Timson's heart was
+set on it as well as his head.  An' mine got to be.  But I
+wasn't even second or third under him--I was only one of a
+lot.  He would have thought me fine an' impident if I'd
+told him I'd got to know a good deal of what he knew--and
+had some bits of ideas of my own."
+
+"If you had men enough under you, and could order all
+you want," Miss Vanderpoel said tentatively, "you know what
+the place should be, no doubt."
+
+"That I do, miss," answered Kedgers, turning red with
+feeling.  "Why, if the soil was well treated, anything would
+grow here.  There's situations for everything.  There's shade
+for things that wants it, and south aspects for things that won't
+grow without the warmth of 'em.  Well, I've gone about
+many a day when I was low down in my mind and worked
+myself up to being cheerful by just planning where I could put
+things and what they'd look like.  Liliums, now, I could
+grow them in masses from June to October."  He was becoming
+excited, like a war horse scenting battle from afar, and
+forgot himself.  "The Lilium Giganteum--I don't know
+whether you've ever seen one, miss--but if you did, it'd
+almost take your breath away.  A Lilium that grows twelve
+feet high and more, and has a flower like a great snow-white
+trumpet, and the scent pouring out of it so that it floats for
+yards.  There's a place where I could grow them so that you'd
+come on them sudden, and you'd think they couldn't be true."
+
+"Grow them, Kedgers, begin to grow them," said Miss
+Vanderpoel.  "I have never seen them--I must see them."
+
+Kedgers' low, deprecatory chuckle made itself heard again,
+
+"Perhaps I'm going too fast," he said.  "It would take
+a good bit of expense to do it, miss.  A good bit."
+
+Then Miss Vanderpoel made--and she made it in the
+simplest matter-of-fact manner, too--the startling remark which,
+three hours later, all Stornham village had heard of.  The
+most astounding part of the remark was that it was uttered
+as if there was nothing in it which was not the absolutely
+natural outcome of the circumstances of the case.
+
+"Expense which is proper and necessary need not be
+considered," she said.  "Regular accounts will be kept and
+supervised, but you can have all that is required."
+
+Then it appeared that Kedgers almost became pale.  Being
+a foreigner, perhaps she did not know how much she was
+implying when she said such a thing to a man who had never
+held a place like Timson's.
+
+"Miss," he hesitated, even shamefacedly, because to
+suggest to such a fine-mannered, calm young lady that she might
+be ignorant, seemed perilously near impertinence.  "Miss,
+did you mean you wanted only the Lilium Giganteum, or--or
+other things, as well."
+
+"I should like to see," she answered him, "all that you see.  I
+should like to hear more of it all, when we have time to talk it
+over.  I understand we should need time to discuss plans."
+
+The quiet way she went on!  Seeming to believe in him,
+almost as if he was Mr. Timson.  The old feeling, born and
+fostered by the great head gardener's rule, reasserted itself.
+
+"It means more to work--and someone over them, miss,"
+he said.  "If--if you had a man like Mr. Timson----"
+
+"You have not forgotten what you learned.  With men
+enough under you it can be put into practice."
+
+"You mean you'd trust me, miss--same as if I was Mr. Timson?"
+
+"Yes.  If you ever feel the need of a man like Timson, no
+doubt we can find one.  But you will not.  You love the work
+too much."
+
+Then still standing in the sunshine, on the weed-grown
+path, she continued to talk to him.  It revealed itself that
+she understood a good deal.  As he was to assume heavier
+responsibilities, he was to receive higher wages.  It was his
+experience which was to be considered, not his years.  This
+was a new point of view.  The mere propeller of wheel-
+barrows and digger of the soil--particularly after having
+been attacked by rheumatism--depreciates in value after youth
+is past.  Kedgers knew that a Mr. Timson, with a regiment
+of under gardeners, and daily increasing knowledge of his
+profession, could continue to direct, though years rolled by. 
+But to such fortune he had not dared to aspire.
+
+One of the lodges might be put in order for him to live
+in.  He might have the hothouses to put in order, too; he
+might have implements, plants, shrubs, even some of the newer
+books to consult.  Kedgers' brain reeled.
+
+"You--think I am to be trusted, miss?" he said more
+than once.  "You think it would be all right?  I wasn't even
+second or third under Mr. Timson--but--if I say it as
+shouldn't--I never lost a chance of learning things.  I was
+just mad about it.  T'aint only Liliums--Lord, I know 'em
+all, as if they were my own children born an' bred--shrubs,
+coniferas, herbaceous borders that bloom in succession.  My
+word! what you can do with just delphiniums an' campanula
+an' acquilegia an' poppies, everyday things like them, that'll
+grow in any cottage garden, an' bulbs an' annuals!  Roses,
+miss--why, Mr. Timson had them in thickets--an' carpets--
+an' clambering over trees and tumbling over walls in sheets
+an' torrents--just know their ways an' what they want, an'
+they'll grow in a riot.  But they want feeding--feeding.  A
+rose is a gross feeder.  Feed a Glory deejon, and watch over
+him, an' he'll cover a housetop an' give you two bloomings."
+
+"I have never lived in an English garden.  I should like
+to see this one at its best."
+
+Leaving her with salutes of abject gratitude, Kedgers moved
+away bewildered.  What man could believe it true?  At three
+or four yards' distance he stopped and, turning, came back to
+touch his cap again.
+
+"You understand, miss," he said.  "I wasn't even second or third
+under Mr. Timson.  I'm not deceiving you, am I, miss?"
+
+"You are to be trusted," said Miss Vanderpoel, "first
+because you love the things--and next because of Timson."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+ONE OF MR. VANDERPOEL'S LETTERS
+
+Mr. Germen, the secretary of the great Mr. Vanderpoel, in
+arranging the neat stacks of letters preparatory to his
+chief's entrance to his private room each morning, knowing where
+each should be placed, understood that such as were addressed
+in Miss Vanderpoel's hand would be read before anything
+else.  This had been the case even when she had just been
+placed in a French school, a tall, slim little girl, with immense
+demanding eyes, and a thick black plait of hair swinging
+between her straight, rather thin, shoulders.  Between other
+financial potentates and their little girls, Mr. Germen knew
+that the oddly confidential relation which existed between
+these two was unusual.  Her schoolgirl letters, it had been
+understood, should be given the first place on the stacks of
+envelopes each incoming ocean steamer brought in its mail
+bags.  Since the beginning of her visit to her sister, Lady
+Anstruthers, the exact dates of mail steamers seemed to be of
+increased importance.  Miss Vanderpoel evidently found much
+to write about.  Each steamer brought a full-looking envelope
+to be placed in a prominent position.
+
+On a hot morning in the early summer Mr. Germen found
+two or three--two of them of larger size and seeming to
+contain business papers.  These he placed where they would
+be seen at once.  Mr. Vanderpoel was a little later than usual
+in his arrival.  At this season he came from his place in the
+country, and before leaving it this morning he had been
+talking to his wife, whom he found rather disturbed by a chance
+encounter with a young woman who had returned to visit
+her mother after a year spent in England with her English
+husband.  This young woman, now Lady Bowen, once Milly
+Jones, had been one of the amusing marvels of New York. 
+A girl neither rich nor so endowed by nature as to be able
+to press upon the world any special claim to consideration
+as a beauty, her enterprise, and the daring of her tactics, had
+been the delight of many a satiric onlooker.  In her school-
+days she had ingenuously mapped out her future career.  Other
+American girls married men with titles, and she intended to
+do the same thing.  The other little girls laughed, but they
+liked to hear her talk.  All information regarding such unions
+as was to be found in the newspapers and magazines, she
+collected and studiously read--sometimes aloud to her companions.
+
+Social paragraphs about royalties, dukes and duchesses,
+lords and ladies, court balls and glittering functions, she
+devoured and learned by heart.  An abominably vulgar little
+person, she was an interestingly pertinacious creature, and
+wrought night and day at acquiring an air of fashionable
+elegance, at first naturally laying it on in such manner as
+suggested that it should be scraped off with a knife, but with
+experience gaining a certain specious knowledge of forms. 
+How the over-mature child at school had assimilated her
+uncanny young worldliness, it would have been less difficult
+to decide, if possible sources had been less numerous.  The
+air was full of it, the literature of the day, the chatter of
+afternoon teas, the gossip of the hour.  Before she was fifteen
+she saw the indiscretion of her childish frankness, and realised
+that it might easily be detrimental to her ambitions.  She
+said no more of her plans for her future, and even took the
+astute tone of carelessly treating as a joke her vulgar little
+past.  But no titled foreigner appeared upon the horizon
+without setting her small, but business-like, brain at work. 
+Her lack of wealth and assured position made her situation
+rather hopeless.  She was not of the class of lucky young
+women whose parents' gorgeous establishments offered attractions
+to wandering persons of rank.  She and her mother lived
+in a flat, and gave rather pathetic afternoon teas in return
+for such more brilliant hospitalities as careful and pertinacious
+calling and recalling obliged their acquaintances to feel they
+could not decently be left wholly out of.  Milly and her
+anxious mother had worked hard.  They lost no opportunity
+of writing a note, or sending a Christmas card, or an economical
+funeral wreath.  By daily toil and the amicable ignoring
+of casualness of manner or slights, they managed to cling to
+the edge of the precipice of social oblivion, into whose depths
+a lesser degree of assiduity, or a greater sensitiveness, would
+have plunged them.  Once--early in Milly's career, when
+her ever-ready chatter and her superficial brightness were a
+novelty, it had seemed for a short time that luck might be
+glancing towards her.  A young man of foreign title and of
+Bohemian tastes met her at a studio dance, and, misled by the
+smartness of her dress and her always carefully carried air of
+careless prosperity, began to pay a delusive court to her.  For
+a few weeks all her freshest frocks were worn assiduously and
+credit was strained to buy new ones.  The flat was adorned
+with fresh flowers and several new yellow and pale blue
+cushions appeared at the little teas, which began to assume
+a more festive air.  Desirable people, who went ordinarily
+to the teas at long intervals and through reluctant weakness,
+or sometimes rebellious amiability, were drummed up and
+brought firmly to the fore.  Milly herself began to look pink
+and fluffy through mere hopeful good spirits.  Her thin little
+laugh was heard incessantly, and people amusedly if they
+were good-tempered, derisively if they were spiteful, wondered
+if it really would come to something.  But it did not.  The
+young foreigner suddenly left New York, making his adieus
+with entire lightness.  There was the end of it.  He had
+heard something about lack of income and uncertainty of
+credit, which had suggested to him that discretion was the
+better part of valour.  He married later a young lady in the
+West, whose father was a solid person.
+
+Less astute young women, under the circumstances, would
+have allowed themselves a week or so of headache or influenza,
+but Milly did not.  She made calls in the new frocks,
+and with such persistent spirit that she fished forth from the
+depths of indifferent hospitality two or three excellent
+invitations.  She wore her freshest pink frock, and an amazingly
+clever little Parisian diamond crescent in her hair, at the
+huge Monson ball at Delmonico's, and it was recorded that
+it was on that glittering occasion that her "Uncle James"
+was first brought upon the scene.  He was only mentioned
+lightly at first.  It was to Milly's credit that he was not made
+too much of.  He was casually touched upon as a very rich
+uncle, who lived in Dakota, and had actually lived there
+since his youth, letting his few relations know nothing of him. 
+He had been rather a black sheep as a boy, but Milly's mother
+had liked him, and, when he had run away from New York,
+he had told her what he was going to do, and had kissed her
+when she cried, and had taken her daguerreotype with him.  Now
+he had written, and it turned out that he was enormously
+rich, and was interested in Milly.  From that time Uncle
+James formed an atmosphere.  He did not appear in New
+York, but Milly spent the next season in London, and the
+Monsons, being at Hurlingham one day, had her pointed out
+to them as a new American girl, who was the idol of a millionaire
+uncle.  She was not living in an ultra fashionable
+quarter, or with ultra fashionable people, but she was, on all
+occasions, they heard, beautifully dressed and beautifully--if
+a little heavily--hung with gauds and gems, her rings being
+said to be quite amazing and suggesting an impassioned
+lavishness on the part of Uncle James.  London, having
+become inured to American marvels--Milly's bit of it--accepted
+and enjoyed Uncle James and all the sumptuous attributes of
+his Dakota.
+
+English people would swallow anything sometimes, Mrs.
+Monson commented sagely, and yet sometimes they stared
+and evidently thought you were lying about the simplest things. 
+Milly's corner of South Kensington had gulped down the
+Dakota uncle.  Her managing in this way, if there was no
+uncle, was too clever and amusing.  She had left her mother
+at home to scrimp and save, and by hook or by crook she had
+contrived to get a number of quite good things to wear.  She
+wore them with such an air of accustomed resource that the
+jewels might easily--mixed with some relics of her mother's
+better days--be of the order of the clever little Parisian
+diamond crescent.  It was Milly's never-laid-aside manner which
+did it.  The announcement of her union with Sir Arthur
+Bowen was received in certain New York circles with little
+suppressed shrieks of glee.  It had been so sharp of her to aim
+low and to realise so quickly that she could not aim high. 
+The baronetcy was a recent one, and not unconnected with
+trade.  Sir Arthur was not a rich man, and, had it leaked out,
+believed in Uncle James.  If he did not find him all his fancy
+painted, Milly was clever enough to keep him quiet.  She
+was, when all was said and done, one of the American women
+of title, her servants and the tradespeople addressed her as
+"my lady," and with her capacity for appropriating what
+was most useful, and her easy assumption of possessing all
+required, she was a very smart person indeed.  She provided
+herself with an English accent, an English vocabulary, and
+an English manner, and in certain circles was felt to be most
+impressive.
+
+At an afternoon function in the country Mrs. Vanderpoel
+had met Lady Bowen.  She had been one of the few kindly
+ones, who in the past had given an occasional treat to Milly
+Jones for her girlhood's sake.  Lady Bowen, having gathered
+a small group of hearers, was talking volubly to it, when
+the nice woman entered, and, catching sight of her, she swept
+across the room.  It would not have been like Milly to fail
+to see and greet at once the wife of Reuben Vanderpoel.  She
+would count anywhere, even in London sets it was not easy
+to connect one's self with.  She had already discovered that
+there were almost as many difficulties to be surmounted in
+London by the wife of an unimportant baronet as there had
+been to be overcome in New York by a girl without money
+or place.  It was well to have something in the way of
+information to offer in one's small talk with the lucky ones
+and Milly knew what subject lay nearest to Mrs. Vanderpoel's
+heart.
+
+"Miss Vanderpoel has evidently been enjoying her visit
+to Stornham Court," she said, after her first few sentences. 
+"I met Mrs. Worthington at the Embassy, and she said she
+had buried herself in the country.  But I think she must
+have run up to town quietly for shopping.  I saw her one day
+in Piccadilly, and I was almost sure Lady Anstruthers was
+with her in the carriage--almost sure."
+
+Mrs. Vanderpoel's heart quickened its beat.
+
+"You were so young when she married," she said.  "I
+daresay you have forgotten her face."
+
+"Oh, no!" Milly protested effusively.  "I remember her
+quite well.  She was so pretty and pink and happy-looking,
+and her hair curled naturally.  I used to pray every night that
+when I grew up I might have hair and a complexion like hers."
+
+Mrs. Vanderpoel's kind, maternal face fell.
+
+"And you were not sure you recognised her?  Well, I
+suppose twelve years does make a difference," her voice dragging
+a little.
+
+Milly saw that she had made a blunder.  The fact was she
+had not even guessed at Rosy's identity until long after the
+carriage had passed her.
+
+"Oh, you see," she hesitated, "their carriage was not near
+me, and I was not expecting to see them.  And perhaps she
+looked a little delicate.  I heard she had been rather delicate."
+
+She felt she was floundering, and bravely floundered away
+from the subject.  She plunged into talk of Betty and people's
+anxiety to see her, and the fact that the society columns were
+already faintly heralding her.  She would surely come soon
+to town.  It was too late for the first Drawing-room this
+year.  When did Mrs. Vanderpoel think she would be presented? 
+Would Lady Anstruthers present her?  Mrs. Vanderpoel
+could not bring her back to Rosy, and the nature of
+the change which had made it difficult to recognise her.
+
+The result of this chance encounter was that she did not
+sleep very well, and the next morning talked anxiously to
+her husband.
+
+"What I could see, Reuben, was that Milly Bowen had
+not known her at all, even when she saw her in the carriage
+with Betty.  She couldn't have changed as much as that, if
+she had been taken care of, and happy."
+
+Her affection and admiration for her husband were such
+as made the task of soothing her a comparatively simple thing. 
+The instinct of tenderness for the mate his youth had chosen
+was an unchangeable one in Reuben Vanderpoel.  He was not
+a primitive man, but in this he was as unquestioningly 
+simple as if he had been a kindly New England farmer.  He
+had outgrown his wife, but he had always loved and protected
+her gentle goodness.  He had never failed her in her smallest
+difficulty, he could not bear to see her hurt.  Betty had been
+his compeer and his companion almost since her childhood,
+but his wife was the tenderest care of his days.  There was
+a strong sense of relief in his thought of Betty now.  It was
+good to remember the fineness of her perceptions, her clearness
+of judgment, and recall that they were qualities he might
+rely upon.
+
+When he left his wife to take his train to town, he left
+her smiling again.  She scarcely knew how her fears had been
+dispelled.  His talk had all been kindly, practical, and
+reasonable.  It was true Betty had said in her letter that Rosy
+had been rather delicate, and had not been taking very good care
+of herself, but that was to be remedied.  Rosy had made a
+little joke or so about it herself.
+
+"Betty says I am not fat enough for an English matron. 
+I am drinking milk and breakfasting in bed, and am going to
+be massaged to please her.  I believe we all used to obey
+Betty when she was a child, and now she is so tall and splendid,
+one would never dare to cross her.  Oh, mother!  I am
+so happy at having her with me!"
+
+To reread just these simple things caused the suggestion
+of things not comfortably normal to melt away.  Mrs.
+Vanderpoel sat down at a sunny window with her lap full of
+letters, and forgot Milly Bowen's floundering.
+
+When Mr. Vanderpoel reached his office and glanced at
+his carefully arranged morning's mail, Mr. Germen saw him
+smile at the sight of the envelopes addressed in his daughter's
+hand.  He sat down to read them at once, and, as he read, the
+smile of welcome became a shrewd and deeply interested one.
+
+"She has undertaken a good-sized contract," he was saying
+to himself, "and she's to be trusted to see it through.  It is
+rather fine, the way she manages to combine emotions and
+romance and sentiments with practical good business, without
+letting one interfere with the other.  It's none of it bad
+business this, as the estate is entailed, and the boy is Rosy's. 
+It's good business."
+
+This was what Betty had written to her father in New
+York from Stornham Court.
+
+"The things I am beginning to do, it would be impossible
+for me to resist doing, and it would certainly be impossible
+for you.  The thing I am seeing I have never seen, at close
+hand, before, though I have taken in something almost its
+parallel as part of certain picturesqueness of scenes in other
+countries.  But I am LIVING with this and also, through
+relationship to Rosy, I, in a measure, belong to it, and it
+belongs to me.  You and I may have often seen in American
+villages crudeness, incompleteness, lack of comfort, and the
+composition of a picture, a rough ugliness the result of haste
+and unsettled life which stays nowhere long, but packs up its
+goods and chattels and wanders farther afield in search of
+something better or worse, in any case in search of change, but
+we have never seen ripe, gradual falling to ruin of what
+generations ago was beautiful.  To me it is wonderful and tragic
+and touching.  If you could see the Court, if you could see the
+village, if you could see the church, if you could see the
+people, all quietly disintegrating, and so dearly perfect in
+their way that if one knew absolutely that nothing could be done
+to save them, one could only stand still and catch one's breath
+and burst into tears.  The church has stood since the Conquest,
+and, as it still stands, grey and fine, with its mass of
+square tower, and despite the state of its roof, is not yet
+given wholly to the winds and weather, it will, no doubt, stand
+a few centuries longer.  The Court, however, cannot long
+remain a possible habitation, if it is not given a new lease
+of life.  I do not mean that it will crumble to-morrow, or
+the day after, but we should not think it habitable now, even
+while we should admit that nothing could be more delightful
+to look at.  The cottages in the village are already, many of
+them, amazing, when regarded as the dwellings of human
+beings.  How long ago the cottagers gave up expecting that
+anything in particular would be done for them, I do not
+know.  I am impressed by the fact that they are an
+unexpecting people.  Their calm non-expectancy fills me with
+interest.  Only centuries of waiting for their superiors in
+rank to do things for them, and the slow formation of the
+habit of realising that not to submit to disappointment was
+no use, could have produced the almost SERENITY of their
+attitude.  It is all very well for newborn republican nations
+--meaning my native land--to sniff sternly and say that
+such a state of affairs is an insult to the spirit of the race. 
+Perhaps it is now, but it was not apparently centuries ago,
+which was when it all began and when `Man' and the `Race'
+had not developed to the point of asking questions, to which
+they demand replies, about themselves and the things which
+happened to them.  It began in the time of Egbert and Canute,
+and earlier, in the days of the Druids, when they used peacefully
+to allow themselves to be burned by the score, enclosed
+in wicker idols, as natural offerings to placate the gods.  The
+modern acceptance of things is only a somewhat attenuated
+remnant of the ancient idea.  And this is what I have to deal
+with and understand.  When I begin to do the things I am going to
+do, with the aid of your practical advice, if I have your
+approval, the people will be at first rather afraid of me.  They
+will privately suspect I am mad.  It will, also, not seem at all
+unlikely that an American should be of unreasoningly
+extravagant and flighty mind.  Stornham, having long slumbered
+in remote peace through lack of railroad convenience, still
+regards America as almost of the character of wild rumour.  Rosy
+was their one American, and she disappeared from their view so
+soon that she had not time to make any lasting impression. 
+I am asking myself how difficult, or how simple, it will
+be to quite understand these people, and to make them understand
+me.  I greatly doubt its being simple.  Layers and
+layers and layers of centuries must be far from easy to burrow
+through.  They look simple, they do not know that they
+are not simple, but really they are not.  Their point of view
+has been the point of view of the English peasant so many
+hundred years that an American point of view, which has had
+no more than a trifling century and a half to form itself in,
+may find its thews and sinews the less powerful of the two. 
+When I walk down the village street, faces appear at windows,
+and figures, stolidly, at doors.  What I see is that, vaguely
+and remotely, American though I am, the fact that I am of
+`her ladyship's blood,' and that her ladyship--American
+though she is--has the claim on them of being the mother of
+the son of the owner of the land--stirs in them a feeling that
+I have a shadowy sort of relationship in the whole thing, and
+with regard to their bad roofs and bad chimneys, to their
+broken palings, and damp floors, to their comforts and
+discomforts,a sort of responsibility.  That is the whole thing,
+and you--just you, father--will understand me when I say that I
+actually like it.  I might not like it if I were poor Rosy, but,
+being myself, I love it.  There is something patriarchal in it
+which moves me.
+
+"Is it an abounding and arrogant delight in power which
+makes it appeal to me, or is it something better?  To feel that
+every man on the land, every woman, every child knew one,
+counted on one's honour and friendship, turned to one believingly
+in time of stress, to know that one could help and be a
+finely faithful thing, the very knowledge of it would give
+one vigour and warm blood in the veins.  I wish I had been
+born to it, I wish the first sounds falling on my newborn ears
+had been the clanging of the peal from an old Norman church
+tower, calling out to me, `Welcome; newcomer of our house,
+long life among us!  Welcome!'  Still, though the first sounds
+that greeted me were probably the rattling of a Fifth Avenue
+stage, I have brought them SOMETHING, and who knows whether
+I could have brought it from without the range of that prosaic,
+but cheerful, rattle."
+
+The rest of the letter was detail of a business-like order. 
+A large envelope contained the detail-notes of things to be
+done, notes concerning roofs, windows, flooring, park fences,
+gardens, greenhouses, tool houses, potting sheds, garden walls,
+gates, woodwork, masonry.  Sharp little sketches, such as Buttle
+had seen, notes concerning Buttle, Fox, Tread, Kedgers, and
+less accomplished workmen; concerning wages of day labourers,
+hours, capabilities.  Buttle, if he had chanced to see them,
+would have broken into a light perspiration at the idea of a
+young woman having compiled the documents.  He had never
+heard of the first Reuben Vanderpoel.
+
+Her father's reply to Betty was as long as her own to him, and
+gave her keen pleasure by its support, both of sympathetic
+interest and practical advice.  He left none of her points
+unnoted, and dealt with each of them as she had most hoped and
+indeed had felt she knew he would.  This was his final summing
+up:
+
+"If you had been a boy, and I own I am glad you were not
+--a man wants a daughter--I should have been quite willing
+to allow you your flutter on Wall Street, or your try at anything
+you felt you would like to handle.  It would have interested
+me to look on and see what you were made of, what you
+wanted, and how you set about trying to get it.  It's a new
+kind of deal you have undertaken.  It's more romantic than
+Wall Street, but I think I do see what you see in it.  Even
+apart from Rosy and the boy, it would interest me to see what
+you would do with it.  This is your `flutter.'  I like the way
+you face it.  If you were a son instead of a daughter, I should
+see I might have confidence in you.  I could not confide to
+Wall Street what I will tell you--which is that in the midst of
+the drive and swirl and tumult of my life here, I like what you
+see in the thing, I like your idea of the lord of the land, who
+should love the land and the souls born on it, and be the friend
+and strength of them and give the best and get it back in fair
+exchange.  There's a steadiness in the thought of such a life
+among one's kind which has attractions for a man who has
+spent years in a maelstrom, snatching at what whirls among the
+eddies of it.  Your notes and sketches and summing up of
+probable costs did us both credit--I say `both' because your
+business education is the result of our long talks and
+journeyings together.  You began to train for this when you began
+going to visit mines and railroads with me at twelve years old. 
+I leave the whole thing in your hands, my girl, I leave Rosy in
+your hands, and in leaving Rosy to you, you know how I am
+trusting you with your mother.  Your letters to her tell her
+only what is good for her.  She is beginning to look happier
+and younger already, and is looking forward to the day when
+Rosy and the boy will come home to visit us, and when we shall
+go in state to Stornham Court.  God bless her, she is made up
+of affection and simple trust, and that makes it easy to keep
+things from her.  She has never been ill-treated, and she knows
+I love her, so when I tell her that things are coming right, she
+never doubts me.
+
+"While you are rebuilding the place you will rebuild Rosy
+so that the sight of her may not be a pain when her mother
+sees her again, which is what she is living for."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+INTRODUCING G. SELDEN
+
+A bird was perched upon a swaying branch of a slim young
+sapling near the fence-supported hedge which bounded the
+park, and Mount Dunstan had stopped to look at it and
+listen.  A soft shower had fallen, and after its passing, the sun
+coming through the light clouds, there had broken forth again
+in the trees brief trills and calls and fluting of bird notes. 
+The sward and ferns glittered fresh green under the raindrops;
+the young leaves on trees and hedge seemed visibly to uncurl,
+
+the uncovered earth looked richly dark and moist, and sent forth
+the fragrance from its deeps, which, rising to a man's nostrils,
+stirs and thrills him because it is the scent of life's self. 
+The bird upon the sapling was a robin, the tiny round body
+perched upon his delicate legs, plump and bright plumaged for
+mating.  He touched his warm red breast with his beak, fluffed
+out and shook his feathers, and, swelling his throat, poured
+forth his small, entranced song.  It was a gay, brief, jaunty
+thing, but pure, joyous, gallant, liquid melody.  There was
+dainty bravado in it, saucy demand and allurement.  It was
+addressed to some invisible hearer of the tender sex, and
+wheresoever she might be hidden--whether in great branch or low
+thicket or hedge --there was hinted no doubt in her small wooer's
+note that she would hear it and in due time respond.  Mount
+Dunstan, listening, even laughed at its confident music.  The
+tiny thing uttering its Call of the World--jubilant in the surety
+of answer!
+
+Having flung it forth, he paused a moment and waited,
+his small head turned sideways, his big, round, dew-bright black
+eye roguishly attentive.  Then with more swelling of the throat
+he trilled and rippled gayly anew, undisturbed and undoubting,
+but with a trifle of insistence.  Then he listened, tried again
+two or three times, with brave chirps and exultant little
+roulades.  "Here am I, the bright-breasted, the liquid-eyed,
+the slender-legged, the joyous and conquering!  Listen to me
+--listen to me.  Listen and answer in the call of God's world." 
+It was the joy and triumphant faith in the tiny note of the
+tiny thing--Life as he himself was, though Life whose mystery
+his man's hand could have crushed--which, while he laughed,
+set Mount Dunstan thinking.  Spring warmth and spring scents and
+spring notes set a man's being in tune with infinite things.
+
+The bright roulade began again, prolonged itself with
+renewed effort, rose to its height, and ended.  From a bush in
+the thicket farther up the road a liquid answer came.  And
+Mount Dunstan's laugh at the sound of it was echoed by
+another which came apparently from the bank rising from the
+road on the other side of the hedge, and accompanying the laugh
+was a good-natured nasal voice.
+
+"She's caught on.  There's no mistake about that.  I guess
+it's time for you to hustle, Mr. Rob."
+
+Mount Dunstan laughed again.  Jem Salter had heard voices
+like it, and cheerful slang phrases of the same order in his
+ranch days.  On the other side of his park fence there was
+evidently sitting, through some odd chance, an American of
+the cheery, casual order, not sufficiently polished by travel to
+have lost his picturesque national characteristics.
+
+Mount Dunstan put a hand on a broken panel of fence and
+leaped over into the road.
+
+A bicycle was lying upon the roadside grass, and on the
+bank, looking as though he had been sheltering himself under
+the hedge from the rain, sat a young man in a cheap bicycling
+suit.  His features were sharply cut and keen, his cap was
+pushed back from his forehead, and he had a pair of shrewdly
+careless boyish eves.
+
+Mount Dunstan liked the look of him, and seeing his natural
+start at the unheralded leap over the gap, which was quite close
+to him, he spoke.
+
+"Good-morning," he said.  "I am afraid I startled you."
+
+"Good-morning," was the response.  "It was a bit of a
+jolt seeing you jump almost over my shoulder.  Where did
+you come from?  You must have been just behind me."
+
+"I was," explained Mount Dunstan.  "Standing in the
+park listening to the robin."
+
+The young fellow laughed outright.
+
+"Say," he said, "that was pretty fine, wasn't it?  Wasn't
+he getting it off his chest!  He was an English robin, I guess. 
+American robins are three or four times as big.  I liked that
+little chap.  He was a winner."
+
+"You are an American?"
+
+"Sure," nodding.  "Good old Stars and Stripes for mine. 
+First time I've been here.  Came part for business and part
+for pleasure.  Having the time of my life."
+
+Mount Dunstan sat down beside him.  He wanted to hear
+him talk.  He had liked to hear the ranchmen talk.  This one
+was of the city type, but his genial conversational wanderings
+would be full of quaint slang and good spirits.  He was quite
+ready to converse, as was made manifest by his next speech.
+
+"I'm biking through the country because I once had an
+old grandmother that was English, and she was always talking
+about English country, and how green things was, and how
+there was hedges instead of rail fences.  She thought there was
+nothing like little old England.  Well, as far as roads and
+hedges go, I'm with her.  They're all right.  I wanted a fellow I
+met crossing, to come with me, but he took a Cook's trip
+to Paris.  He's a gay sort of boy.  Said he didn't want any
+green lanes in his.  He wanted Boolyvard."  He laughed again
+and pushed his cap farther back on his forehead.  "Said I
+wasn't much of a sport.  I tell YOU, a chap that's got to earn
+his fifteen per, and live on it, can't be TOO much of a sport."
+
+"Fifteen per?" Mount Dunstan repeated doubtfully.
+
+His companion chuckled.
+
+"I forgot I was talking to an Englishman.  Fifteen dollars
+per week--that's what `fifteen per' means.  That's what he
+told me he gets at Lobenstien's brewery in New York.  Fifteen
+per.  Not much, is it?"
+
+"How does he manage Continental travel on fifteen per?"
+Mount Dunstan inquired.
+
+"He's a typewriter and stenographer, and he dug up some
+extra jobs to do at night.  He's been working and saving two
+years to do this.  We didn't come over on one of the big liners
+with the Four Hundred, you can bet.  Took a cheap one, inside
+cabin, second class."
+
+"By George!" said Mount Dunstan.  "That was American."
+
+The American eagle slightly flapped his wings.  The young man
+pushed his cap a trifle sideways this time, and flushed a little.
+
+"Well, when an American wants anything he generally
+reaches out for it."
+
+"Wasn't it rather--rash, considering the fifteen per?"  Mount
+Dunstan suggested.  He was really beginning to enjoy himself.
+
+"What's the use of making a dollar and sitting on it.  I've
+not got fifteen per--steady--and here I am."
+
+Mount Dunstan knew his man, and looked at him with
+inquiring interest.  He was quite sure he would go on.  This was
+a thing he had seen before--an utter freedom from the insular
+grudging reserve, a sort of occult perception of the presence of
+friendly sympathy, and an ingenuous readiness to meet it half
+way.  The youngster, having missed his fellow-traveler, and
+probably feeling the lack of companionship in his country rides,
+was in the mood for self-revelation.
+
+"I'm selling for a big concern," he said, "and I've got a
+first-class article to carry.  Up to date, you know, and all
+that.  It's the top notch of typewriting machines, the Delkoff. 
+Ever seen it?  Here's my card," taking a card from an inside
+pocket and handing it to him.  It was inscribed:
+
+                       J. BURRIDGE & SON,
+                      DELKOFF TYPEWRITER CO.
+
+                 BROADWAY, NEW YORK.    G. SELDEN.
+
+
+"That's my name," he said, pointing to the inscription in
+the corner.  "I'm G. Selden, the junior assistant of Mr. Jones."
+
+At the sight of the insignia of his trade, his holiday air
+dropped from him, and he hastily drew from another pocket an
+illustrated catalogue.
+
+"If you use a typewriter," he broke forth, "I can assure you it
+would be to your interest to look at this."  And as Mount Dunstan
+took the proffered pamphlet, and with amiable gravity opened it,
+he rapidly poured forth his salesman's patter, scarcely
+pausing to take his breath:  "It's the most up-to-date machine
+on the market.  It has all the latest improved mechanical
+appliances.  You will see from the cut in the catalogue that
+the platen roller is easily removed without a long mechanical
+operation.  All you do is to slip two pins back and off comes
+the roller.  There is also another point worth mentioning--the
+ribbon switch.  By using this ribbon switch you can write in
+either red or blue ink while you are using only one ribbon. 
+By throwing the switch on this side, you can use thirteen yards
+on the upper edge of the ribbon, by reversing it, you use
+thirteen yards on the lower edge--thus getting practically
+twenty-six yards of good, serviceable ribbon out of one that is
+only thirteen yards long--making a saving of fifty per cent. in
+your ribbon expenditure alone, which you will see is quite an
+item
+to any enterprising firm."
+
+He was obliged to pause here for a second or so, but as
+Mount Dunstan exhibited no signs of intending to use violence,
+and, on the contrary, continued to inspect the catalogue, he
+broke forth with renewed cheery volubility:
+
+"Another advantage is the new basket shift.  Also, the
+carriage on this machine is perfectly stationary and rigid.  On
+all other machines it is fastened by a series of connecting bolts
+and links, which you will readily understand makes perfect
+alignment uncertain.  Then our tabulator is a part and parcel
+of the instrument, costing you nothing more than the original
+price of the machine, which is one hundred dollars--without
+discount."
+
+"It seems a good thing," said Mount Dunstan.  "If I had
+much business to transact, I should buy one."
+
+"If you bought one you'd HAVE business," responded Selden. 
+"That's what's the matter.  It's the up-to-date machines that
+set things humming.  A slow, old-fashioned typewriter uses a
+firm's time, and time's money."
+
+"I don't find it so," said Mount Dunstan.  "I have more
+time than I can possibly use--and no money."
+
+G. Selden looked at him with friendly interest.  His
+experience, which was varied, had taught him to recognize
+symptoms.  This nice, rough-looking chap, who, despite his rather
+shabby clothes, looked like a gentleman, wore an expression
+Jones's junior assistant had seen many a time before.  He had
+seen it frequently on the countenances of other junior assistants
+who had tramped the streets and met more or less savage rebuffs
+through a day's length, without disposing of a single Delkoff,
+and thereby adding five dollars to the ten per.  It
+was the kind of thing which wiped the youth out of a man's
+face and gave him a hard, worn look about the eyes.  He had
+looked like that himself many an unfeeling day before he had
+learned to "know the ropes and not mind a bit of hot air." 
+His buoyant, slangy soul was a friendly thing.  He was a
+gregarious creature, and liked his fellow man.  He felt, indeed,
+more at ease with him when he needed "jollying along." 
+Reticence was not even etiquette in a case as usual as this.
+
+"Say," he broke out, "perhaps I oughtn't to have worried you. 
+Are you up against it?  Down on your luck, I mean," in hasty
+translation.
+
+Mount Dunstan grinned a little.
+
+"That's a very good way of putting it," he answered.  "I
+never heard `up against it' before.  It's good.  Yes, I'm up
+against it.
+
+"Out of a job?" with genial sympathy.
+
+"Well, the job I had was too big for me.  It needed
+capital."  He grinned slightly again, recalling a phrase of his
+Western past.  "I'm afraid I'm down and out."
+
+"No, you're not," with cheerful scorn.  "You're not dead,
+are you?  S'long as a man's not been dead a month, there's
+always a chance that there's luck round the corner.  How did
+you happen here?  Are you piking it?"
+
+Momentarily Mount Dunstan was baffled.  G. Selden, recognising
+the fact, enlightened him.  "That's New York again,"
+he said, with a boyish touch of apology.  "It means on the
+tramp.  Travelling along the turnpike.  You don't look as if
+you had come to that--though it's queer the sort of fellows
+you do meet piking sometimes.  Theatrical companies that
+have gone to pieces on the road, you know.  Perhaps--" with
+a sudden thought, "you're an actor.  Are you?"
+
+Mount Dunstan admitted to himself that he liked the junior
+assistant of Jones immensely.  A more ingenuously common
+young man, a more innocent outsider, it had never been his
+blessed privilege to enter into close converse with, but his
+very commonness was a healthy, normal thing.  It made no
+effort to wreathe itself with chaplets of elegance; it was
+beautifully unaware that such adornment was necessary.  It
+enjoyed itself, youthfully; attacked the earning of its bread
+with genial pluck, and its good-natured humanness had touched
+him.  He had enjoyed his talk; he wanted to hear more of it.  He
+was not in the mood to let him go his way.  To Penzance,
+who was to lunch with him to-day, he would present a study
+of absorbing interest.
+
+"No," he answered.  "I'm not an actor.  My name is
+Mount Dunstan, and this place," with a nod over his shoulder,
+"is mine--but I'm up against it, nevertheless."
+
+Selden looked a trifle disgusted.  He began to pick up his
+bicycle.  He had given a degree of natural sympathy, and
+this was an English chap's idea of a joke.
+
+"I'm the Prince of Wales, myself," he remarked, "and
+my mother's expecting me to lunch at Windsor.  So long, me
+lord," and he set his foot on the treadle.
+
+Mount Dunstan rose, feeling rather awkward.  The point
+seemed somewhat difficult to contend.
+
+"It is not a joke," he said, conscious that he spoke rather
+stiffly.
+
+"Little Willie's not quite as easy as he looks," was the
+cryptic remark of Mr. Selden.
+
+Mount Dunstan lost his rather easily lost temper, which
+happened to be the best thing he could have done under the
+circumstances.
+
+"Damn it," he burst out.  "I'm not such a fool as I evidently
+look.  A nice ass I should be to play an idiot joke like that. 
+I'm speaking the truth.  Go if you like--and be hanged."
+
+Selden's attention was arrested.  The fellow was in earnest. 
+The place was his.  He must be the earl chap he had heard
+spoken of at the wayside public house he had stopped at for
+a pot of beer.  He dismounted from his bicycle, and came
+back, pushing it before him, good-natured relenting and
+awkwardness combining in his look.
+
+"All right," he said.  "I apologise--if it's cold fact.  I'm
+not calling you a liar."
+
+"Thank you," still a little stiffly, from Mount Dunstan.
+
+The unabashed good cheer of G. Selden carried him lightly
+over a slightly difficult moment.  He laughed, pushing his
+cap back, of course, and looking over the hedge at the sweep
+of park, with a group of deer cropping softly in the foreground.
+
+"I guess I should get a bit hot myself," he volunteered
+handsomely, "if I was an earl, and owned a place like this,
+and a fool fellow came along and took me for a tramp.  That
+was a pretty bad break, wasn't it?  But I did say you didn't
+look like it.  Anyway you needn't mind me.  I shouldn't get
+onto Pierpont Morgan or W. K. Vanderbilt, if I met 'em
+in the street."
+
+He spoke the two names as an Englishman of his class would
+have spoken of the Dukes of Westminster or Marlborough. 
+These were his nobles--the heads of the great American houses,
+and entirely parallel, in his mind, with the heads of any great
+house in England.  They wielded the power of the world, and
+could wield it for evil or good, as any prince or duke might. 
+Mount Dunstan saw the parallel.
+
+"I apologise, all right," G. Selden ended genially.
+
+"I am not offended," Mount Dunstan answered.  "There
+was no reason why you should know me from another man. 
+I was taken for a gamekeeper a few weeks since.  I was savage
+a moment, because you refused to believe me--and why
+should you believe me after all?"
+
+G. Selden hesitated.  He liked the fellow anyhow.
+
+"You said you were up against it--that was it.  And--and
+I've seen chaps down on their luck often enough.  Good Lord,
+the hard-luck stories I hear every day of my life.  And they
+get a sort of look about the eyes and mouth.  I hate to see
+it on any fellow.  It makes me sort of sick to come across
+it even in a chap that's only got his fool self to blame.  I may
+be making another break, telling you--but you looked sort of
+that way."
+
+"Perhaps," stolidly, "I did."  Then, his voice warming,
+
+"It was jolly good-natured of you to think about it at all. 
+Thank you."
+
+"That's all right," in polite acknowledgment.  Then with
+another look over the hedge, "Say--what ought I to call you? 
+Earl, or my Lord?"
+
+"It's not necessary for you to call me anything in
+particular--as a rule.  If you were speaking of me, you might
+say Lord Mount Dunstan."
+
+G. Selden looked relieved.
+
+"I don't want to be too much off," he said.  "And I'd
+like to ask you a favour.  I've only three weeks here, and I
+don't want to miss any chances."
+
+"What chance would you like?"
+
+"One of the things I'm biking over the country for, is to
+get a look at just such a place as this.  We haven't got 'em
+in America.  My old grandmother was always talking about
+them.  Before her mother brought her to New York she'd
+lived in a village near some park gates, and she chinned about
+it till she died.  When I was a little chap I liked to hear
+her.  She wasn't much of an American.  Wore a black net
+cap with purple ribbons in it, and hadn't outlived her respect
+for aristocracy.  Gee!" chuckling, "if she'd heard what I
+said to you just now, I reckon she'd have thrown a fit.  Anyhow
+she made me feel I'd like to see the kind of places she
+talked about.  And I shall think myself in luck if you'll let
+me have a look at yours--just a bike around the park, if you
+don't object--or I'll leave the bike outside, if you'd rather."
+
+"I don't object at all," said Mount Dunstan.  "The fact
+is, I happened to be on the point of asking you to come and
+have some lunch--when you got on your bicycle."
+
+Selden pushed his cap and cleared his throat.
+
+"I wasn't expecting that," he said.  "I'm pretty dusty,"
+with a glance at his clothes.  "I need a wash and brush up--
+particularly if there are ladies."
+
+There were no ladies, and he could be made comfortable. 
+This being explained to him, he was obviously rejoiced.  With
+unembarrassed frankness, he expressed exultation.  Such luck
+had not, at any time, presented itself to him as a possibility
+in his holiday scheme.
+
+"By gee," he ejaculated, as they walked under the broad
+oaks of the avenue leading to the house.  "Speaking of luck,
+this is the limit!  I can't help thinking of what my grandmother
+would say if she saw me."
+
+He was a new order of companion, but before they had
+reached the house, Mount Dunstan had begun to find him inspiring
+to the spirits.  His jovial, if crude youth, his unaffected
+acknowledgment of unaccustomedness to grandeur, even when
+in dilapidation, his delight in the novelty of the particular
+forms of everything about him--trees and sward, ferns and moss,
+his open self-congratulation, were without doubt cheerful things.
+
+His exclamation, when they came within sight of the house
+itself, was for a moment disturbing to Mount Dunstan's composure.
+
+"Hully gee!" he said.  "The old lady was right.  All
+I've thought about 'em was 'way off.  It's bigger than a
+museum."  His approval was immense.
+
+During the absence in which he was supplied with the
+"wash and brush up," Mount Dunstan found Mr. Penzance
+in the library.  He explained to him what he had encountered,
+and how it had attracted him.
+
+"You have liked to hear me describe my Western neighbours,"
+he said.  "This youngster is a New York development,
+and of a different type.  But there is a likeness.  I have
+invited to lunch with us, a young man whom--Tenham, for instance,
+if he were here--would call `a bounder.'  He is nothing of
+the sort.  In his junior-assistant-salesman way, he is rather a
+fine thing.  I never saw anything more decently human than
+his way of asking me--man to man, making friends by the
+roadside if I was `up against it.'  No other fellow I have
+known has ever exhibited the same healthy sympathy."
+
+The Reverend Lewis was entranced.  Already he was really
+quite flushed with interest.  As Assyrian character, engraved
+upon sarcophogi, would have allured and thrilled him, so was
+he allured by the cryptic nature of the two or three American
+slang phrases Mount Dunstan had repeated to him.  His was
+the student's simple ardour.
+
+"Up against it," he echoed.  "Really!  Dear!  Dear!  And
+that signifies, you say----"
+
+"Apparently it means that a man has come face to face with
+an obstacle difficult or impossible to overcome."
+
+"But, upon my word, that is not bad.  It is strong figure
+of speech.  It brings up a picture.  A man hurrying to an
+end--much desired--comes unexpectedly upon a stone wall. 
+One can almost hear the impact.  He is up against it.  Most
+vivid.  Excellent!  Excellent!"
+
+The nature of Selden's calling was such that he was not
+accustomed to being received with a hint of enthusiastic welcome.
+There was something almost akin to this in the vicar's
+courteously amiable, aquiline countenance when he rose to
+shake hands with the young man on his entrance.  Mr. Penzance was
+indeed slightly disappointed that his greeting was not responded
+to by some characteristic phrasing.  His American was that of Sam
+Slick and Artemus Ward, Punch and various English witticisms in
+anecdote.  Life at the vicarage of Dunstan had not revealed to
+him that the model had become archaic.
+
+The revelation dawned upon him during his intercourse
+with G. Selden.  The young man in his cheap bicycling suit
+was a new development.  He was markedly unlike an English
+youth of his class, as he was neither shy, nor laboriously at his
+ease.  That he was at his ease to quite an amazing degree
+might perhaps have been remotely resented by the insular
+mind, accustomed to another order of bearing in its social
+inferiors, had it not been so obviously founded on entire
+unconsciousness of self, and so mingled with open appreciation
+of the unanticipated pleasures of the occasion.  Nothing could
+have been farther from G. Selden than any desire to attempt
+to convey the impression that he had enjoyed the hospitality
+of persons of rank on previous occasions.  He found indeed a
+gleeful point in the joke of the incongruousness of his own
+presence amid such surroundings.
+
+"What Little Willie was expecting," he remarked once, to
+the keen joy of Mr. Penzance, "was a hunk of bread and
+cheese at a village saloon somewhere.  I ought to have said
+`pub,' oughtn't I?  You don't call them saloons here."
+
+He was encouraged to talk, and in his care-free fluency he
+opened up many vistas to the interested Mr. Penzance, who
+found himself, so to speak, whirled along Broadway, rushed
+up the steps of the elevated railroad and struggling to obtain
+a seat, or a strap to hang to on a Sixth Avenue train. 
+The man was saturated with the atmosphere of the hot battle
+he lived in.  From his childhood he had known nothing but
+the fever heat of his "little old New York," as he called it
+with affectionate slanginess, and any temperature lower than
+that he was accustomed to would have struck him as being
+below normal.  Penzance was impressed by his feeling of
+affection for the amazing city of his birth.  He admired, he
+adored it, he boasted joyously of its perfervid charm.
+
+"Something doing," he said.  "That's what my sort of
+a fellow likes--something doing.  You feel it right there
+when you walk along the streets.  Little old New York for
+mine.  It's good enough for Little Willie.  And it never
+stops.  Why, Broadway at night----"
+
+He forgot his chop, and leaned forward on the table to
+pour forth his description.  The manservant, standing behind
+Mount Dunstan's chair, forgot himself also, thought he was a
+trained domestic whose duty it was to present dishes to the
+attention without any apparent mental processes.  Certainly
+it was not his business to listen, and gaze fascinated.  This
+he did, however, actually for the time unconscious of his
+breach of manners.  The very crudity of the language used,
+the oddly sounding, sometimes not easily translatable slang
+phrases, used as if they were a necessary part of any
+conversation--the blunt, uneducated bareness of figure--seemed to
+Penzance to make more roughly vivid the picture dashed off. 
+The broad thoroughfare almost as thronged by night as by
+day.  Crowds going to theatres, loaded electric cars, whizzing
+and clanging bells, the elevated railroad rushing and roaring
+past within hearing, theatre fronts flaming with electric light,
+announcements of names of theatrical stars and the plays
+they appeared in, electric light advertisements of brands of
+cigars, whiskies, breakfast foods, all blazing high in the night
+air in such number and with such strength of brilliancy that
+the whole thoroughfare was as bright with light as a ballroom
+or a theatre.  The vicar felt himself standing in the midst
+of it all, blinded by the glare.
+
+"Sit down on the sidewalk and read your newspaper, a book, a
+magazine--any old thing you like," with an exultant laugh.
+
+The names of the dramatic stars blazing over entrances to
+the theatres were often English names, their plays English
+plays, their companies made up of English men and women. 
+G. Selden was as familiar with them and commented upon
+their gifts as easily as if he had drawn his drama from the
+Strand instead of from Broadway.  The novels piled up in
+the stations of what he called "the L" (which revealed itself
+as being a New-York-haste abbreviation of Elevated railroad),
+were in large proportion English novels, and he had his
+ingenuous estimate of English novelists, as well as of all else.
+
+"Ruddy, now," he said; "I like him.  He's all right, even
+though we haven't quite caught onto India yet."
+
+The dazzle and brilliancy of Broadway so surrounded Penzance that
+he found it necessary to withdraw himself and return to his
+immediate surroundings, that he might recover from his sense of
+interested bewilderment.  His eyes fell upon the stern lineaments
+of a Mount Dunstan in a costume of the time of Henry VIII.  He
+was a burly gentleman, whose ruff-shortened thick neck and
+haughty fixedness of stare from the background of his portrait
+were such as seemed to eliminate him from the scheme of things,
+the clanging of electric cars, and the prevailing roar of the L. 
+Confronted by his gaze, electric light advertisements of
+whiskies, cigars, and corsets seemed impossible.
+
+"He's all right," continued G. Selden.  "I'm ready to
+separate myself from one fifty any time I see a new book of
+his.  He's got the goods with him."
+
+The richness of colloquialism moved the vicar of Mount
+Dunstan to deep enjoyment.
+
+"Would you mind--I trust you won't," he apologised
+courteously, "telling me exactly the significance of those two
+last sentences.  In think I see their meaning, but----"
+
+G. Selden looked good-naturedly apologetic himself.
+
+"Well, it's slang--you see," he explained.  "I guess I can't
+help it.  You--" flushing a trifle, but without any touch of
+resentment in the boyish colour, "you know what sort of a
+chap I am.  I'm not passing myself off as anything but an
+ordinary business hustler, am I--just under salesman to a
+typewriter concern?  I shouldn't like to think I'd got in here
+on any bluff.  I guess I sling in slang every half dozen
+words----."
+
+"My dear boy," Penzance was absolutely moved and he
+spoke with warmth quite paternal, "Lord Mount Dunstan
+and I are genuinely interested--genuinely.  He, because he
+knows New York a little, and I because I don't.  I am an
+elderly man, and have spent my life buried in my books in
+drowsy villages.  Pray go on.  Your American slang has
+frequently a delightful meaning--a fantastic hilarity, or common
+sense, or philosophy, hidden in its origin.  In that it generally
+differs from English slang, which--I regret to say--is usually
+founded on some silly catch word.  Pray go on.  When you
+see a new book by Mr. Kipling, you are ready to `separate
+yourself from one fifty' because he `has the goods with him.' "
+
+G.  Selden suppressed an involuntary young laugh.
+
+"One dollar and fifty cents is usually the price of a book,"
+he said.  "You separate yourself from it when you take it
+out of your clothes--I mean out of your pocket--and pay it
+over the counter."
+
+"There's a careless humour in it," said Mount Dunstan
+grimly.  "The suggestion of parting is not half bad.  On
+the whole, it is subtle."
+
+"A great deal of it is subtle," said Penzance, "though it
+all professes to be obvious.  The other sentence has a
+commercial sound."
+
+"When a man goes about selling for a concern," said the
+junior assistant of Jones, "he can prove what he says, if
+he has the goods with him.  I guess it came from that. 
+I don't know.  I only know that when a man is a straight
+sort of fellow, and can show up, we say he's got the goods
+with him."
+
+They sat after lunch in the library, before an open window,
+looking into a lovely sunken garden.  Blossoms were breaking
+out on every side, and robins, thrushes, and blackbirds chirped
+and trilled and whistled, as Mount Dunstan and Penzance
+led G. Selden on to paint further pictures for them.
+
+Some of them were rather painful, Penzance thought.  As
+connected with youth, they held a touch of pathos Selden
+was all unconscious of.  He had had a hard life, made
+up, since his tenth year, of struggles to earn his living.  He
+had sold newspapers, he had run errands, he had swept out a
+"candy store."  He had had a few years at the public school,
+and a few months at a business college, to which he went at
+night, after work hours.  He had been "up against it good and
+plenty," he told them.  He seemed, however, to have had a
+knack of making friends and of giving them "a boost along"
+when such a chance was possible.  Both of his listeners realised
+that a good many people had liked him, and the reason was
+apparent enough to them.
+
+"When a chap gets sorry for himself," he remarked once, "he's
+down and out.  That's a stone-cold fact.  There's lots of
+hard-luck stories that you've got to hear anyhow.  The fellow
+that can keep his to himself is the fellow that's likely to get
+there."
+
+"Get there?" the vicar murmured reflectively, and Selden
+chuckled again.
+
+"Get where he started out to go to--the White House,
+if you like.  The fellows that have got there kept their hard-
+luck stories quiet, I bet.  Guess most of 'em had plenty during 
+election, if they were the kind to lie awake sobbing on their
+pillows because their feelings were hurt."
+
+He had never been sorry for himself, it was evident, though
+it must be admitted that there were moments when the elderly
+English clergyman, whose most serious encounters had been
+annoying interviews with cottagers of disrespectful manner,
+rather shuddered as he heard his simple recital of days when
+he had tramped street after street, carrying his catalogue with
+him, and trying to tell his story of the Delkoff to frantically
+busy men who were driven mad by the importunate sight of
+him, to worried, ill-tempered ones who broke into fury when
+they heard his voice, and to savage brutes who were only
+restrained by law from kicking him into the street.
+
+"You've got to take it, if you don't want to lose your job. 
+Some of them's as tired as you are.  Sometimes, if you can
+give 'em a jolly and make 'em laugh, they'll listen, and you
+may unload a machine.  But it's no merry jest just at first--
+particularly in bad weather.  The first five weeks I was with
+the Delkoff I never made a sale.  Had to live on my ten
+per, and that's pretty hard in New York.  Three and a half
+for your hall bedroom, and the rest for your hash and shoes. 
+But I held on, and gradually luck began to turn, and I began
+not to care so much when a man gave it to me hot."
+
+The vicar of Mount Dunstan had never heard of the "hall
+bedroom" as an institution.  A dozen unconscious sentences
+placed it before his mental vision.  He thought it horribly
+touching.  A narrow room at the back of a cheap lodging
+house, a bed, a strip of carpet, a washstand--this the sole
+refuge of a male human creature, in the flood tide of youth,
+no more than this to come back to nightly, footsore and
+resentful of soul, after a day's tramp spent in forcing himself
+and his wares on people who did not want him or them,
+and who found infinite variety in the forcefulness of their
+method of saying so.
+
+"What you know, when you go into a place, is that nobody
+wants to see you, and no one will let you talk if they can help
+it.  The only thing is to get in and rattle off your stunt
+before you can be fired out."
+
+Sometimes at first he had gone back at night to the hall
+bedroom, and sat on the edge of the narrow bed, swinging his
+feet, and asking himself how long he could hold out.  But
+he had held out, and evidently developed into a good salesman,
+being bold and of imperturbable good spirits and temper, and
+not troubled by hypersensitiveness.  Hearing of the "hall
+bedroom," the coldness of it in winter, and the breathless heat
+in summer, the utter loneliness of it at all times and seasons,
+one could not have felt surprise if the grown-up lad
+doomed to its narrowness as home had been drawn into the
+electric-lighted gaiety of Broadway, and being caught in its
+maelstrom, had been sucked under to its lowest depths.  But
+it was to be observed that G. Selden had a clear eye, and a
+healthy skin, and a healthy young laugh yet, which were all
+wonderfully to his credit, and added enormously to one's
+liking for him.
+
+"Do you use a typewriter?" he said at last to Mr.
+Penzance.  "It would cut out half your work with your sermons. 
+If you do use one, I'd just like to call your attention to the
+Delkoff.  It's the most up-to-date machine on the market
+to-day," drawing out the catalogue.
+
+"I do not use one, and I am extremely sorry to say that
+I could not afford to buy one," said Mr. Penzance with
+considerate courtesy, "but do tell me about it.  I am afraid I
+never saw a typewriter."
+
+It was the most hospitable thing he could have done, and
+was of the tact of courts.  He arranged his pince nez, and
+taking the catalogue, applied himself to it.  G. Selden's soul
+warmed within him.  To be listened to like this.  To be
+treated as a gentleman by a gentleman--by "a fine old swell
+like this--Hully gee!"
+
+"This isn't what I'm used to," he said with genuine
+enjoyment.  "It doesn't matter, your not being ready to buy
+now.  You may be sometime, or you may run up against
+someone who is.  Little Willie's always ready to say his piece."
+
+He poured it forth with glee--the improved mechanical
+appliances, the cuts in the catalogue, the platen roller, the
+ribbon switch, the twenty-six yards of red or blue typing, the
+fifty per cent. saving in ribbon expenditure alone, the new
+basket shift, the stationary carriage, the tabulator, the
+superiority to all other typewriting machines--the price one
+hundred dollars without discount.  And both Mount Dunstan
+and Mr. Penzance listened entranced, examined cuts in the
+catalogue, asked questions, and in fact ended by finding that
+they must repress an actual desire to possess the luxury.  The
+joy their attitude bestowed upon Selden was the thing he
+would feel gave the finishing touch to the hours which he
+would recall to the end of his days as the "time of his life." 
+Yes, by gee! he was having "the time of his life."
+
+Later he found himself feeling--as Miss Vanderpoel had
+felt--rather as if the whole thing was a dream.  This came
+upon him when, with Mount Dunstan and Penzance, he walked
+through the park and the curiously beautiful old gardens. 
+The lovely, soundless quiet, broken into only by bird notes, or
+his companions' voices, had an extraordinary effect on him.
+
+"It's so still you can hear it," he said once, stopping in a
+velvet, moss-covered path.  "Seems like you've got quiet
+shut up here, and you've turned it on till the air's thick with
+it.  Good Lord, think of little old Broadway keeping it up,
+and the L whizzing and thundering along every three minutes,
+just the same, while we're standing here!  You can't believe it."
+
+It would have gone hard with him to describe to them the
+value of his enjoyment.  Again and again there came back
+to him the memory of the grandmother who wore the black
+net cap trimmed with purple ribbons.  Apparently she had
+remained to the last almost contumaciously British.  She had
+kept photographs of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort
+on her bedroom mantelpiece, and had made caustic, international
+comparisons.  But she had seen places like this, and her
+stories became realities to him now.  But she had never thought
+of the possibility of any chance of his being shown about by
+the lord of the manor himself--lunching, by gee! and talking
+to them about typewriters.  He vaguely knew that if the
+grandmother had not emigrated, and he had been born in
+Dunstan village, he would naturally have touched his forehead
+to Mount Dunstan and the vicar when they passed him in the
+road, and conversation between them would have been an
+unlikely thing.  Somehow things had been changed by Destiny--
+perhaps for the whole of them, as years had passed.
+
+What he felt when he stood in the picture gallery neither
+of his companions could at first guess.  He ceased to talk, and
+wandered silently about.  Secretly he found himself a trifle
+awed by being looked down upon by the unchanging eyes of
+men in strange, rich garments--in corslet, ruff, and doublet,
+velvet, powder, curled love locks, brocade and lace.  The face
+of long-dead loveliness smiled out from its canvas, or withheld
+itself haughtily from his salesman's gaze.  Wonderful bare white
+shoulders, and bosoms clasped with gems or flowers and lace,
+defied him to recall any treasures of Broadway to compare with
+them.  Elderly dames, garbed in stiff splendour, held
+stiff, unsympathetic inquiry in their eyes, as they looked back
+upon him.  What exactly was a thirty shilling bicycle suit
+doing there?  In the Delkoff, plainly none were interested. 
+A pretty, masquerading shepherdess, with a lamb and a crook,
+seemed to laugh at him from under her broad beribboned straw
+hat.  After looking at her for a minute or so, he gave a half
+laugh himself--but it was an awkward one.
+
+"She's a looker," he remarked.  "They're a lot of them
+lookers--not all--but a fair show----"
+
+"A looker," translated Mount Dunstan in a low voice to
+Penzance, "means, I believe, a young women with good
+looks--a beauty."
+
+"Yes, she IS a looker, by gee," said G. Selden, "but--
+but--" the awkward half laugh, taking on a depressed touch
+of sheepishness, "she makes me feel 'way off--they all do."
+
+That was it.  Surrounded by them, he was fascinated but
+not cheered.  They were all so smilingly, or disdainfully, or
+indifferently unconscious of the existence of the human thing
+of his class.  His aspect, his life, and his desires were as
+remote as those of prehistoric man.  His Broadway, his L
+railroad, his Delkoff--what were they where did they come into
+the scheme of the Universe?  They silently gazed and lightly
+smiled or frowned THROUGH him as he stood.  He was probably
+not in the least aware that he rather loudly sighed.
+
+"Yes," he said, "they make me feel 'way off.  I'm not
+in it.  But she is a looker.  Get onto that dimple in her cheek."
+
+Mount Dunstan and Penzance spent the afternoon in doing their
+best for him.  He was well worth it.  Mr. Penzance was filled
+with delight, and saturated with the atmosphere of New York.
+
+"I feel," he said, softly polishing his eyeglasses and almost
+affectionately smiling, "I really feel as if I had been walking
+down Broadway or Fifth Avenue.  I believe that I might find
+my way to--well, suppose we say Weber & Field's," and G.
+Selden shouted with glee.
+
+Never before, in fact, had he felt his heart so warmed by
+spontaneous affection as it was by this elderly, somewhat bald
+and thin-faced clergyman of the Church of England.  This
+he had never seen before.  Without the trained subtlety to have
+explained to himself the finely sweet and simply gracious deeps
+of it, he was moved and uplifted.  He was glad he had "come
+across" it, he felt a vague regret at passing on his way, and
+leaving it behind.  He would have liked to feel that perhaps
+he might come back.  He would have liked to present him
+with a Delkoff, and teach him how to run it.  He had
+delighted in Mount Dunstan, and rejoiced in him, but he had
+rather fallen in love with Penzance.  Certain American doubts
+he had had of the solidity and permanency of England's
+position and power were somewhat modified.  When fellows
+like these two stood at the first rank, little old England was
+a pretty safe proposition.
+
+After they had given him tea among the scents and songs
+of the sunken garden outside the library window, they set
+him on his way.  The shadows were lengthening and the
+sunlight falling in deepening gold when they walked up the
+avenue and shook hands with him at the big entrance gates.
+
+"Well, gentlemen," he said, "you've treated me grand--as
+fine as silk, and it won't be like Little Willie to forget it. 
+When I go back to New York it'll be all I can do to keep from
+getting the swell head and bragging about it.  I've enjoyed
+myself down to the ground, every minute.  I'm not the kind
+of fellow to be likely to be able to pay you back your kindness,
+but, hully gee! if I could I'd do it to beat the band. 
+Good-bye, gentlemen--and thank you--thank you."
+
+Across which one of their minds passed the thought that
+the sound of the hollow impact of a trotting horse's hoofs on
+the road, which each that moment became conscious of hearing
+was the sound of the advancing foot of Fate?  It crossed no
+mind among the three.  There was no reason why it should. 
+And yet at that moment the meaning of the regular, stirring
+sound was a fateful thing.
+
+"Someone on horseback," said Penzance.
+
+He had scarcely spoken before round the curve of the road
+she came.  A finely slender and spiritedly erect girl's figure,
+upon a satin-skinned bright chestnut with a thoroughbred gait,
+a smart groom riding behind her.  She came towards them,
+was abreast them, looked at Mount Dunstan, a smiling dimple
+near her lip as she returned his quick salute.
+
+"Miss Vanderpoel," he said low to the vicar, "Lady
+Anstruther's sister."
+
+Mr. Penzance, replacing his own hat, looked after her
+with surprised pleasure.
+
+"Really," he exclaimed, "Miss Vanderpoel!  What a fine
+girl!  How unusually handsome!"
+
+Selden turned with a gasp of delighted, amazed recognition.
+
+"Miss Vanderpoel," he burst forth, "Reuben Vanderpoel's
+daughter!  The one that's over here visiting her sister.  Is it
+that one--sure?"
+
+"Yes," from Mount Dunstan without fervour.  "Lady
+Anstruthers lives at Stornham, about six miles from here."
+
+"Gee," with feverish regret.  "If her father was there, and
+I could get next to him, my fortune would be made."
+
+"Should you," ventured Penzance politely, "endeavour to
+sell him a typewriter?"
+
+"A typewriter!  Holy smoke!  I'd try to sell him ten thousand.  A
+fellow like that syndicates the world.  If I could get next to
+him----" and he mounted his bicycle with a laugh.
+
+"Get next," murmured Penzance.
+
+"Get on the good side of him," Mount Dunstan murmured in reply.
+
+"So long, gentlemen, good-bye, and thank you again," called
+G. Selden as he wheeled off, and was carried soundlessly down
+the golden road.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF STORNHAM
+
+The satin-skinned chestnut was one of the new horses now
+standing in the Stornham stables.  There were several of
+them--a pair for the landau, saddle horses, smart young cobs
+for phaeton or dog cart, a pony for Ughtred--the animals
+necessary at such a place at Stornham.  The stables themselves
+had been quickly put in order, grooms and stable boys kept
+them as they had not been kept for years.  The men learned
+in a week's time that their work could not be done too well. 
+There were new carriages as well as horses.  They had come
+from London after Lady Anstruthers and her sister returned
+from town.  The horses had been brought down by their
+grooms--immensely looked after, blanketed, hooded, and altogether
+cared for as if they were visiting dukes and duchesses. 
+They were all fine, handsome, carefully chosen creatures. 
+When they danced and sidled through the village on their
+way to the Court, they created a sensation.  Whosoever had
+chosen them had known his business.  The older vehicles had
+been repaired in the village by Tread, and did him credit. 
+Fox had also done his work well.
+
+Plenty more of it had come into their work-shops.  Tools
+to be used on the estate, garden implements, wheelbarrows,
+lawn rollers, things needed about the house, stables, and
+cottages, were to be attended to.  The church roof was being
+repaired.  Taking all these things and the "doing up" of the
+Court itself, there was more work than the village could manage,
+and carpenters, bricklayers, and decorators were necessarily
+brought from other places.  Still Joe Buttle and Sim Soames
+were allowed to lead in all such things as lay within their
+capabilities.  It was they who made such a splendid job of the
+entrance gates and the lodges.  It was astonishing how much
+was done, and how the sense of life in the air--the work of
+resulting prosperity, made men begin to tread with less listless
+steps as they went to and from their labour.  In the cottages
+things were being done which made downcast women bestir
+themselves and look less slatternly.  Leaks mended here, windows
+there, the hopeless copper in the tiny washhouse replaced
+by a new one, chimneys cured of the habit of smoking,
+a clean, flowered paper put on a wall, a coat of whitewash--
+they were small matters, but produced great effect.
+
+Betty had begun to drop into the cottages, and make the
+acquaintance of their owners.  Her first visits, she observed,
+created great consternation.  Women looked frightened or
+sullen, children stared and refused to speak, clinging to skirts
+and aprons.  She found the atmosphere clear after her second
+visit.  The women began to talk, and the children collected in
+groups and listened with cheerful grins.  She could pick up
+little Jane's kitten, or give a pat to small Thomas' mongrel
+dog, in a manner which threw down barriers.
+
+"Don't put out your pipe," she said to old Grandfather
+Doby, rising totteringly respectful from his chimney-side chair. 
+"You have only just lighted it.  You mustn't waste a whole
+pipeful of tobacco because I have come in."
+
+The old man, grown childish with age, tittered and shuffled
+and giggled.  Such a joke as the grand young lady was having
+with him.  She saw he had only just lighted his pipe. 
+The gentry joked a bit sometimes.  But he was afraid of
+his grandson's wife, who was frowning and shaking her head.
+
+Betty went to him, and put her hand on his arm.
+
+"Sit down," she said, "and I will sit by you."  And she
+sat down and showed him that she had brought a package of
+tobacco with her, and actually a wonder of a red and yellow
+jar to hold it, at the sight of which unheard-of joys his rapture
+was so great that his trembling hands could scarcely clasp
+his treasures.
+
+"Tee-hee!  Tee-hee-ee!  Deary me!  Thankee--thankee, my
+lady," he tittered, and he gazed and blinked at her beauty
+through heavenly tears.
+
+"Nearly a hundred years old, and he has lived on sixteen
+shillings a week all his life, and earned it by working every
+hour between sunrise and sunset," Betty said to her sister,
+when she went home.  "A man has one life, and his has passed
+like that.  It is done now, and all the years and work have
+left nothing in his old hands but his pipe.  That's all.  I
+should not like to put it out for him.  Who am I that I
+can buy him a new one, and keep it filled for him until the
+end?  How did it happen?  No," suddenly, "I must not lose time in
+asking myself that.  I must get the new pipe."
+
+She did it--a pipe of great magnificence--such as drew to
+the Doby cottage as many callers as the village could provide,
+each coming with fevered interest, to look at it--to be allowed
+to hold and examine it for a few moments, guessing at its
+probable enormous cost, and returning it reverently, to gaze
+at Doby with respect--the increase of which can be imagined
+when it was known that he was not only possessor of the pipe,
+but of an assurance that he would be supplied with as much
+tobacco as he could use, to the end of his days.  From the
+time of the advent of the pipe, Grandfather Doby became
+a man of mark, and his life in the chimney corner a changed
+thing.  A man who owns splendours and unlimited, excellent
+shag may like friends to drop in and crack jokes--and even
+smoke a pipe with him--a common pipe, which, however, is not
+amiss when excellent shag comes free.
+
+"He lives in a wild whirl of gaiety--a social vortex," said
+Betty to Lady Anstruthers, after one of her visits.  "He is
+actually rejuvenated.  I must order some new white smocks for him
+to receive his visitors in.  Someone brought him an old copy
+of the Illustrated London News last night.  We will send him
+illustrated papers every week."
+
+In the dull old brain, God knows what spark of life had
+been relighted.  Young Mrs. Doby related with chuckles that
+granddad had begged that his chair might be dragged to the
+window, that he might sit and watch the village street.  Sitting
+there, day after day, he smoked and looked at his pictures,
+and dozed and dreamed, his pipe and tobacco jar beside him on
+the window ledge.  At any sound of wheels or footsteps his
+face lighted, and if, by chance, he caught a glimpse of Betty,
+he tottered to his feet, and stood hurriedly touching his bald
+forehead with a reverent, palsied hand.
+
+" 'Tis 'urr," he would say, enrapt.  "I seen 'urr--I did." 
+And young Mrs. Doby knew that this was his joy, and what
+he waited for as one waits for the coming of the sun.
+
+" 'Tis 'urr!  'Tis 'urr!"
+
+The vicar's wife, Mrs. Brent, who since the affair of John
+Wilson's fire had dropped into the background and felt it
+indiscreet to present tales of distress at the Court, began to
+recover her courage.  Her perfunctory visits assumed a new
+character.  The vicarage had, of course, called promptly upon
+Miss Vanderpoel, after her arrival.  Mrs. Brent admired Miss
+Vanderpoel hugely.
+
+"You seem so unlike an American," she said once in her most
+tactful, ingratiating manner--which was very ingratiating indeed.
+
+"Do I?  What is one like when one is like an American? 
+I am one, you know."
+
+"I can scarcely believe it," with sweet ardour.
+
+"Pray try," said Betty with simple brevity, and Mrs. Brent
+felt that perhaps Miss Vanderpoel was not really very easy
+to get on with.
+
+"She meant to imply that I did not speak through my nose,
+and talk too much, and too vivaciously, in a shrill voice,"
+Betty said afterwards, in talking the interview over with Rosy. 
+"I like to convince myself that is not one's sole national
+characteristic.  Also it was not exactly Mrs. Brent's place to
+kindly encourage me with the information that I do not seem
+to belong to my own country."
+
+Lady Anstruthers laughed, and Betty looked at her inquiringly.
+
+"You said that just like--just like an Englishwoman."
+
+"Did I?" said Betty.
+
+Mrs. Brent had come to talk to her because she did not
+wish to trouble dear Lady Anstruthers.  Lady Anstruthers
+already looked much stronger, but she had been delicate so
+long that one hesitated to distress her with village matters. 
+She did not add that she realised that she was coming to
+headquarters.  The vicar and herself were much disturbed about
+a rather tiresome old woman--old Mrs. Welden--who lived
+in a tiny cottage in the village.  She was eighty-three years
+old, and a respectable old person--a widow, who had reared
+ten children.  The children had all grown up, and scattered,
+and old Mrs. Welden had nothing whatever to live on.  No
+one knew how she lived, and really she would be better off
+in the workhouse.  She could be sent to Brexley Union, and
+comfortably taken care of, but she had that singular, obstinate
+dislike to going, which it was so difficult to manage.  She
+had asked for a shilling a week from the parish, but that
+could not be allowed her, as it would merely uphold her in
+her obstinate intention of remaining in her cottage, and taking
+care of herself--which she could not do.  Betty gathered that
+the shilling a week would be a drain on the parish funds, and
+would so raise the old creature to affluence that she would feel
+she could defy fate.  And the contumacity of old men and
+women should not be strengthened by the reckless bestowal of
+shillings.
+
+Knowing that Miss Vanderpoel had already gained influence
+among the village people, Mrs. Brent said, she had come to
+ask her if she would see old Mrs. Welden and argue with her
+in such a manner as would convince her that the workhouse was the
+best place for her.  It was, of course, so much pleasanter
+if these old people could be induced to go to Brexley willingly.
+
+"Shall I be undermining the whole Political Economy of
+Stornham if I take care of her myself?" suggested Betty.
+
+"You--you will lead others to expect the same thing will
+be done for them."
+
+"When one has resources to draw on," Miss Vanderpoel
+commented, "in the case of a woman who has lived eighty-
+three years and brought up ten children until they were old
+and strong enough to leave her to take care of herself, it is
+difficult for the weak of mind to apply the laws of Political
+Economics.  I will go and see old Mrs. Welden."
+
+If the Vanderpoels would provide for all the obstinate old
+men and women in the parish, the Political Economics of
+Stornham would proffer no marked objections.  "A good many
+Americans," Mrs. Brent reflected, "seemed to have those odd,
+lavish ways," as witness Lady Anstruthers herself, on her first
+introduction to village life.  Miss Vanderpoel was evidently
+a much stronger character, and extremely clever, and somehow
+the stream of the American fortune was at last being directed
+towards Stornham--which, of course, should have happened long
+ago.  A good deal was "being done," and the whole situation
+looked more promising.  So was the matter discussed and summed
+up, the same evening after dinner, at the vicarage.
+
+Betty found old Mrs. Welden's cottage.  It was in a green
+lane, turning from the village street--which was almost a
+green lane itself.  A tiny hedged-in front garden was before
+the cottage door.  A crazy-looking wicket gate was in the
+hedge, and a fuschia bush and a few old roses were in the
+few yards of garden.  There were actually two or three
+geraniums in the window, showing cheerful scarlet between the
+short, white dimity curtains.
+
+"A house this size and of this poverty in an American
+village," was Betty's thought, "would be a bare and straggling
+hideousness, with old tomato cans in the front yard.  Here is
+one of the things we have to learn from them."
+
+When she knocked at the door an old woman opened it. 
+She was a well-preserved and markedly respectable old person,
+in a decent print frock and a cap.  At the sight of her
+visitor she beamed and made a suggestion of curtsey.
+
+"How do you do, Mrs. Welden?" said Betty.  "I am Lady
+Anstruthers' sister, Miss Vanderpoel.  I thought I would like
+to come and see you."
+
+"Thank you, miss, I am obliged for the kindness, miss. 
+Won't you come in and have a chair?"
+
+There were no signs of decrepitude about her, and she had
+a cheery old eye.  The tiny front room was neat, though
+there was scarcely space enough in it to contain the table
+covered with its blue-checked cotton cloth, the narrow sofa, and
+two or three chairs.  There were a few small coloured prints,
+and a framed photograph or so on the walls, and on the table
+was a Bible, and a brown earthenware teapot, and a plate.
+
+"Tom Wood's wife, that's neighbour next door to me," she
+said, "gave me a pinch o' tea--an' I've just been 'avin it. 
+Tom Woods, miss, 'as just been took on by Muster Kedgers
+as one of the new under gardeners at the Court."
+
+Betty found her delightful.  She made no complaints, and
+was evidently pleased with the excitement of receiving a
+visitor.  The truth was, that in common with every other old
+woman, she had secretly aspired to being visited some day
+by the amazing young lady from "Meriker."  Betty had yet to
+learn of the heartburnings which may be occasioned by an
+unconscious favouritism.  She was not aware that when she
+dropped in to talk to old Doby, his neighbour, old Megworth,
+peered from behind his curtains, with the dew of envy in his
+rheumy eyes.
+
+"S'ems," he mumbled, "as if they wasn't nobody now in
+Stornham village but Gaarge Doby--s'ems not."  They were
+very fierce in their jealousy of attention, and one must beware
+of rousing evil passions in the octogenarian breast.
+
+The young lady from "Meriker" had not so far had time
+to make a call at any cottage in old Mrs. Welden's lane--and
+she had knocked just at old Mrs. Welden's door.  This was
+enough to put in good spirits even a less cheery old person.
+
+At first Betty wondered how she could with delicacy ask
+personal questions.  A few minutes' conversation, however,
+showed her that the personal affairs of Sir Nigel's tenants
+were also the affairs of not only himself, but of such of his
+relatives as attended to their natural duty.  Her presence in
+the cottage, and her interest in Mrs. Welden's ready flow of
+simple talk, were desirable and proper compliments to the old
+woman herself.  She was a decent and self-respecting old person,
+but in her mind there was no faintest glimmer of resentment
+of questions concerning rent and food and the needs of
+her simple, hard-driven existence.  She had answered such
+questions on many occasions, when they had not been asked in
+the manner in which her ladyship's sister asked them.  Mrs.
+Brent had scolded her and "poked about" her cottage, going
+into her tiny "wash 'us," and up into her infinitesimal bedroom
+under the slanting roof, to see that they were kept clean. 
+Miss Vanderpoel showed no disposition to "poke."  She sat
+and listened, and made an inquiry here and there, in a nice
+voice and with a smile in her eyes.  There was some pleasure
+in relating the whole history of your eighty-three years to
+a young lady who listened as if she wanted to hear it.  So
+old Mrs. Welden prattled on.  About her good days, when
+she was young, and was kitchenmaid at the parsonage in a
+village twenty miles away; about her marriage with a young
+farm labourer; about his "steady" habits, and the comfort
+they had together, in spite of the yearly arrival of a new
+baby, and the crowding of the bit of a cottage his master
+allowed them.  Ten of 'em, and it had been "up before sunrise,
+and a good bit of hard work to keep them all fed and clean." 
+But she had not minded that until Jack died quite sudden
+after a sunstroke.  It was odd how much colour her rustic
+phraseology held.  She made Betty see it all.  The apparent
+natural inevitableness of their being turned out of the cottage,
+because another man must have it; the years during which
+she worked her way while the ten were growing up, having
+measles, and chicken pox, and scarlet fever, one dying here
+and there, dropping out quite in the natural order of things,
+and being buried by the parish in corners of the ancient church
+yard.  Three of them "was took" by scarlet fever, then one
+of a "decline," then one or two by other illnesses.  Only four
+reached man and womanhood.  One had gone to Australia,
+but he never was one to write, and after a year or two, Betty
+gathered, he had seemed to melt away into the great distance. 
+Two girls had married, and Mrs. Welden could not say they
+had been "comf'able."  They could barely feed themselves and
+their swarms of children.  The other son had never been steady
+like his father.  He had at last gone to London, and London had
+swallowed him up.  Betty was struck by the fact that she did
+not seem to feel that the mother of ten might have expected
+some return for her labours, at eighty-three.
+
+Her unresentful acceptance of things was at once significant
+and moving.  Betty found her amazing.  What she lived
+on it was not easy to understand.  She seemed rather like a
+cheerful old bird, getting up each unprovided-for morning, and
+picking up her sustenance where she found it.
+
+"There's more in the sayin' `the Lord pervides' than a good
+many thinks," she said with a small chuckle, marked more by
+a genial and comfortable sense of humour than by an air of
+meritoriously quoting the vicar.  "He DO."
+
+She paid one and threepence a week in rent for her cottage,
+and this was the most serious drain upon her resources. 
+She apparently could live without food or fire, but the rent
+must be paid.  "An' I do get a bit be'ind sometimes," she
+confessed apologetically, "an' then it's a trouble to get
+straight."
+
+Her cottage was one of a short row, and she did odd jobs
+for the women who were her neighbours.  There were always
+babies to be looked after, and "bits of 'elp" needed, sometimes
+there were "movings" from one cottage to another, and
+"confinements" were plainly at once exhilarating and enriching. 
+Her temperamental good cheer, combined with her experience,
+made her a desirable companion and assistant.  She
+was engagingly frank.
+
+"When they're new to it, an' a bit frightened, I just give
+'em a cup of 'ot tea, an' joke with 'em to cheer 'em up,"
+she said.  "I says to Charles Jenkins' wife, as lives next door,
+`come now, me girl, it's been goin' on since Adam an' Eve,
+an' there's a good many of us left, isn't there?' An' a fine
+boy it was, too, miss, an' 'er up an' about before 'er month."
+
+She was paid in sixpences and spare shillings, and in cups
+of tea, or a fresh-baked loaf, or screws of sugar, or even in
+a garment not yet worn beyond repair.  And she was free
+to run in and out, and grow a flower or so in her garden, and
+talk with a neighbour over the low dividing hedge.
+
+"They want me to go into the `Ouse,' " reaching the
+dangerous subject at last.  "They say I'll be took care of an'
+looked after.  But I don't want to do it, miss.  I want to
+keep my bit of a 'ome if I can, an' be free to come an' go. 
+I'm eighty-three, an' it won't be long.  I 'ad a shilling a
+week from the parish, but they stopped it because they said
+I ought to go into the `Ouse.' "
+
+She looked at Betty with a momentarily anxious smile.
+
+"P'raps you don't quite understand, miss," she said.  "It'll
+seem like nothin' to you--a place like this."
+
+"It doesn't," Betty answered, smiling bravely back into the
+old eyes, though she felt a slight fulness of the throat.  "I
+understand all about it."
+
+It is possible that old Mrs. Welden was a little taken aback
+by an attitude which, satisfactory to her own prejudices
+though it might be, was, taken in connection with fixed customs,
+a trifle unnatural.
+
+"You don't mind me not wantin' to go?" she said.
+
+"No," was the answer, "not at all."
+
+Betty began to ask questions.  How much tea, sugar, soap,
+candles, bread, butter, bacon, could Mrs. Welden use in a week? 
+It was not very easy to find out the exact quantities, as Mrs.
+Welden's estimates of such things had been based, during her
+entire existence, upon calculation as to how little, not how
+much she could use.
+
+When Betty suggested a pound of tea, a half pound--the old
+woman smiled at the innocent ignorance the suggestion of such
+reckless profusion implied.
+
+"Oh, no!  Bless you, miss, no!  I couldn't never do away
+with it.  A quarter, miss--that'd be plenty--a quarter."
+
+Mrs. Welden's idea of "the best," was that at two shillings
+a pound.  Quarter of a pound would cost sixpence (twelve
+cents, thought Betty).  A pound of sugar would be twopence,
+Mrs. Welden would use half a pound (the riotous extravagance
+of two cents).  Half a pound of butter, "Good tub
+butter, miss," would be ten pence three farthings a pound. 
+Soap, candles, bacon, bread, coal, wood, in the quantities
+required by Mrs. Welden, might, with the addition of rent,
+amount to the dizzying height of eight or ten shillings.
+
+"With careful extravagance," Betty mentally summed up,
+"I might spend almost two dollars a week in surrounding her
+with a riot of luxury."
+
+She made a list of the things, and added some extras as an
+idea of her own.  Life had not afforded her this kind of
+thing before, she realised.  She felt for the first time the joy
+of reckless extravagance, and thrilled with the excitement of it.
+
+"You need not think of Brexley Union any more," she said,
+when she, having risen to go, stood at the cottage door with
+old Mrs. Welden.  "The things I have written down here shall be
+sent to you every Saturday night.  I will pay your rent."
+
+"Miss--miss!" Mrs. Welden looked affrighted.  "It's
+too much, miss.  An' coals eighteen pence a hundred!"
+
+"Never mind," said her ladyship's sister, and the old woman,
+looking up into her eyes, found there the colour Mount Dunstan
+had thought of as being that of bluebells under water. 
+"I think we can manage it, Mrs. Welden.  Keep yourself as
+warm as you like, and sometime I will come and have a cup
+of tea with you and see if the tea is good."
+
+"Oh!  Deary me!" said Mrs. Welden.  "I can't think
+what to say, miss.  It lifts everythin'--everythin'.  It's not
+to be believed.  It's like bein' left a fortune."
+
+When the wicket gate swung to and the young lady went
+up the lane, the old woman stood staring after her.  And here
+was a piece of news to run into Charley Jenkins' cottage and
+tell--and what woman or man in the row would quite believe it?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+"WE BEGAN TO MARRY THEM, MY GOOD FELLOW!"
+
+Lord Dunholm and his eldest son, Lord Westholt, sauntered
+together smoking their after-dinner cigars on the broad-
+turfed terrace overlooking park and gardens which seemed to
+sweep without boundary line into the purplish land beyond. 
+The grey mass of the castle stood clear-cut against the blue of
+a sky whose twilight was still almost daylight, though in the
+purity of its evening stillness a star already hung, here and
+there, and a young moon swung low.  The great spaces about
+them held a silence whose exquisite entirety was marked at
+intervals by the distant bark of a shepherd dog driving his
+master's sheep to the fold, their soft, intermittent plaints--the
+mother ewes' mellow answering to the tender, fretful lambs--
+floated on the air, a lovely part of the ending day's repose. 
+Where two who are friends stroll together at such hours, the
+great beauty makes for silence or for thoughtful talk.  These
+two men--father and son--were friends and intimates, and
+had been so from Westholt's first memory of the time when
+his childish individuality began to detach itself from the
+background of misty and indistinct things.  They had liked each
+other, and their liking and intimacy had increased with the
+onward moving and change of years.  After sixty sane and
+decently spent active years of life, Lord Dunholm, in either
+country tweed or evening dress, was a well-built and handsome
+man; at thirty-three his son was still like him.
+
+"Have you seen her?" he was saying.
+
+"Only at a distance.  She was driving Lady Anstruthers
+across the marshes in a cart.  She drove well and----" he
+laughed as he flicked the ash from his cigar--"the back of her
+head and shoulders looked handsome."
+
+"The American young woman is at present a factor which
+is without doubt to be counted with," Lord Dunholm put the
+matter without lightness.  "Any young woman is a factor, but
+the American young woman just now--just now----"  He
+paused a moment as though considering.  "It did not seem at
+all necessary to count with them at first, when they began to
+appear among us.  They were generally curiously exotic, funny
+little creatures with odd manners and voices.  They were often
+most amusing, and one liked to hear them chatter and see the
+airy lightness with which they took superfluous, and sometimes
+unsuperfluous, conventions, as a hunter takes a five-barred
+gate.  But it never occurred to us to marry them.  We did not
+take them seriously enough.  But we began to marry them--
+we began to marry them, my good fellow!"
+
+The final words broke forth with such a suggestion of sudden
+anxiety that, in spite of himself, Westholt laughed
+involuntarily, and his father, turning to look at him, laughed
+also.  But he recovered his seriousness.
+
+"It was all rather a muddle at first," he went on.  "Things
+were not fairly done, and certain bad lots looked on it as a
+paying scheme on the one side, while it was a matter of silly,
+little ambitions on the other.  But that it is an extraordinary
+country there is no sane denying--huge, fabulously resourceful
+in every way--area, variety of climate, wealth of minerals,
+products of all sorts, soil to grow anything, and sun and rain
+enough to give each thing what it needs; last, or rather first, a
+people who, considered as a nation, are in the riot of youth, and
+who began by being English--which we Englishmen have an
+innocent belief is the one method of `owning the earth.'  That
+figure of speech is an Americanism I carefully committed to
+memory.  Well, after all, look at the map--look at the map! 
+There we are."
+
+They had frequently discussed together the question of the
+development of international relations.  Lord Dunholm, a man
+of far-reaching and clear logic, had realised that the oddly
+unaccentuated growth of intercourse between the two countries
+might be a subject to be reflected on without lightness.
+
+"The habit we have of regarding America and Americans
+as rather a joke," he had once said, "has a sort of parallel in
+the condescendingly amiable amusement of a parent at the
+precocity or whimsicalness of a child.  But the child is shooting
+up amazingly--amazingly.  In a way which suggests divers
+possibilities."
+
+The exchange of visits between Dunholm and Stornham had
+been rare and formal.  From the call made upon the younger
+Lady Anstruthers on her marriage, the Dunholms had returned
+with a sense of puzzled pity for the little American bride, with
+her wonderful frock and her uneasy, childish eyes.  For some
+years Lady Anstruthers had been too delicate to make or return
+calls.  One heard painful accounts of her apparent wretched
+ill-health and of the condition of her husband's estate.
+
+"As the relations between the two families have evidently
+been strained for years," Lord Dunholm said, "it is interesting
+to hear of the sudden advent of the sister.  It seems to point to
+reconciliation.  And you say the girl is an unusual person.
+
+"From what one hears, she would be unusual if she were
+an English girl who had spent her life on an English estate. 
+That an American who is making her first visit to England
+should seem to see at once the practical needs of a neglected
+place is a thing to wonder at.  What can she know about it,
+one thinks.  But she apparently does know.  They say she has
+made no mistakes--even with the village people.  She is managing,
+in one way or another, to give work to every man who
+wants it.  Result, of course--unbounded rustic enthusiasm."
+
+Lord Dunholm laughed between the soothing whiffs of his cigar.
+
+"How clever of her!  And what sensible good feeling! 
+Yes--yes!  She evidently has learned things somewhere.  Perhaps
+New York has found it wise to begin to give young
+women professional training in the management of English
+estates.  Who knows?  Not a bad idea."
+
+It was the rustic enthusiasm, Westholt explained, which had
+in a manner spread her fame.  One heard enlightening and
+illustrative anecdotes of her.  He related several well worth
+hearing.  She had evidently a sense of humour and unexpected
+perceptions.
+
+"One detail of the story of old Doby's meerschaum,"
+Westholt said, "pleased me enormously.  She managed to convey
+to him--without hurting his aged feelings or overwhelming him
+with embarrassment--that if he preferred a clean churchwarden
+or his old briarwood, he need not feel obliged to smoke the
+new pipe.  He could regard it as a trophy.  Now, how did
+she do that without filling him with fright and confusion, lest
+she might think him not sufficiently grateful for her present? 
+But they tell me she did it, and that old Doby is rapturously
+happy and takes the meerschaum to bed with him, but only
+smokes it on Sundays--sitting at his window blowing great
+clouds when his neighbours are coming from church.  It was
+a clever girl who knew that an old fellow might secretly like
+his old pipe best."
+
+"It was a deliciously clever girl," said Lord Dunholm. 
+"One wants to know and make friends with her.  We must
+drive over and call.  I confess, I rather congratulate myself
+that Anstruthers is not at home."
+
+"So do I," Westholt answered.  "One wonders a little
+how far he and his sister-in-law will `foregather' when he
+returns.  He's an unpleasant beggar."
+
+A few days later Mrs. Brent, returning from a call on Mrs.
+Charley Jenkins, was passed by a carriage whose liveries she
+recognised half way up the village street.  It was the carriage
+from Dunholm Castle.  Lord and Lady Dunholm and Lord
+Westholt sat in it.  They were, of course, going to call at the
+Court.  Miss Vanderpoel was beginning to draw people.  She
+naturally would.  She would be likely to make quite a difference
+in the neighbourhood now that it had heard of her and
+Lady Anstruthers had been seen driving with her, evidently
+no longer an unvisitable invalid, but actually decently clothed
+and in her right mind.  Mrs. Brent slackened her steps that
+she might have the pleasure of receiving and responding
+gracefully to salutations from the important personages in the
+landau.  She felt that the Dunholms were important.  There
+were earldoms AND earldoms, and that of Dunholm was dignified
+and of distinction.
+
+A common-looking young man on a bicycle, who had wheeled
+into the village with the carriage, riding alongside it for a
+hundred yards or so, stopped before the Clock Inn and
+dismounted, just as Mrs. Brent neared him.  He saw her looking
+after the equipage, and lifting his cap spoke to her civilly.
+
+"This is Stornham village, ain't it, ma'am?" he inquired.
+
+"Yes, my man."  His costume and general aspect seemed to
+indicate that he was of the class one addressed as "my man,"
+though there was something a little odd about him.
+
+"Thank you.  That wasn't Miss Vanderpoel's eldest sister
+in that carriage, was it?"
+
+"Miss Vanderpoel's----" Mrs. Brent hesitated.  "Do you
+mean Lady Anstruthers?"
+
+"I'd forgotten her name.  I know Miss Vanderpoel's
+eldest sister lives at Stornham--Reuben S. Vanderpoel's
+daughter."
+
+"Lady Anstruthers' younger sister is a Miss Vanderpoel,
+and she is visiting at Stornham Court now."  Mrs. Brent could
+not help adding, curiously, "Why do you ask?"
+
+"I am going to see her.  I'm an American."
+
+Mrs. Brent coughed to cover a slight gasp.  She had heard
+remarkable things of the democratic customs of America.  It
+was painful not to be able to ask questions.
+
+"The lady in the carriage was the Countess of Dunholm,"
+she said rather grandly.  "They are going to the Court to
+call on Miss Vanderpoel."
+
+"Then Miss Vanderpoel's there yet.  That's all right. 
+Thank you, ma'am," and lifting his cap again he turned into
+the little public house.
+
+The Dunholm party had been accustomed on their rare
+visits to Stornham to be received by the kind of man-servant
+in the kind of livery which is a manifest, though unwilling,
+confession.  The men who threw open the doors were of regulation
+height, well dressed, and of trained bearing.  The entrance hall
+had lost its hopeless shabbiness.  It was a complete and
+picturesquely luxurious thing.  The change suggested
+magic.  The magic which had been used, Lord Dunholm
+reflected, was the simplest and most powerful on earth.  Given
+surroundings, combined with a gift for knowing values of
+form and colour, if you have the power to spend thousands
+of guineas on tiger skins, Oriental rugs, and other beauties,
+barrenness is easily transformed.
+
+The drawing-room wore a changed aspect, and at a first glance it
+was to be seen that in poor little Lady Anstruthers, as she had
+generally been called, there was to be noted alteration
+also.  In her case the change, being in its first stages,
+could not perhaps be yet called transformation, but, aided by
+softly pretty arrangement of dress and hair, a light in her
+eyes, and a suggestion of pink under her skin, one recalled that
+she had once been a pretty little woman, and that after all
+she was only about thirty-two years old
+
+That her sister, Miss Vanderpoel, had beauty, it was not
+necessary to hesitate in deciding.  Neither Lord Dunholm nor
+his wife nor their son did hesitate.  A girl with long limbs
+an alluring profile, and extraordinary black lashes set round
+lovely Irish-blue eyes, possesses physical capital not to be
+argued about.
+
+She was not one of the curious, exotic little creatures, whose
+thin, though sometimes rather sweet, and always gay, high-
+pitched young voices Lord Dunholm had been so especially
+struck by in the early days of the American invasion.  Her
+voice had a tone one would be likely to remember with pleasure. 
+How well she moved--how well her black head was set
+on her neck!  Yes, she was of the new type--the later generation.
+
+These amazing, oddly practical people had evolved it-- planned
+it, perhaps, bought--figuratively speaking--the architects
+and material to design and build it--bought them in
+whatever country they found them, England, France, Italy
+Germany--pocketing them coolly and carrying them back
+home to develop, complete, and send forth into the world when
+their invention was a perfected thing.  Struck by the humour
+of his fancy, Lord Dunholm found himself smiling into the
+Irish-blue eyes.  They smiled back at him in a way which
+warmed his heart.  There were no pauses in the conversation
+which followed.  In times past, calls at Stornham had generally
+held painfully blank moments.  Lady Dunholm was as 
+pleased as her husband.  A really charming girl was an enormous
+acquisition to the neighbourhood.
+
+Westholt, his father saw, had found even more than the
+story of old Doby's pipe had prepared him to expect.
+
+Country calls were not usually interesting or stimulating,
+and this one was.  Lord Dunholm laid subtly brilliant plans
+to lead Miss Vanderpoel to talk of her native land and her
+views of it.  He knew that she would say things worth hearing. 
+Incidentally one gathered picturesque detail.  To have
+vibrated between the two continents since her thirteenth year,
+to have spent a few years at school in one country, a few
+years in another, and yet a few years more in still another,
+as part of an arranged educational plan; to have crossed the
+Atlantic for the holidays, and to have journeyed thousands of
+miles with her father in his private car; to make the visits of a
+man of great schemes to his possessions of mines, railroads, and
+lands which were almost principalities--these things had been
+merely details of her life, adding interest and variety, it was
+true, but seeming the merely normal outcome of existence. 
+They were normal to Vanderpoels and others of their class
+who were abnormalities in themselves when compared with the
+rest of the world.
+
+Her own very lack of any abnormality reached, in Lord
+Dunholm's mind, the highest point of illustration of the phase
+of life she beautifully represented--for beautiful he felt its
+rare charms were.
+
+When they strolled out to look at the gardens he found
+talk with her no less a stimulating thing.  She told her story
+of Kedgers, and showed the chosen spot where thickets of lilies
+were to bloom, with the giants lifting white archangel trumpets
+above them in the centre.
+
+"He can be trusted," she said.  "I feel sure he can be
+trusted.  He loves them.  He could not love them so much
+and not be able to take care of them."  And as she looked at
+him in frank appeal for sympathy, Lord Dunholm felt that
+for the moment she looked like a tall, queenly child.
+
+But pleased as he was, he presently gave up his place at her
+side to Westholt.  He must not be a selfish old fellow and
+monopolise her.  He hoped they would see each other often, he
+said charmingly.  He thought she would be sure to like Dunholm,
+which was really a thoroughly English old place, marked
+by all the features she seemed so much attracted by.  There
+were some beautiful relics of the past there, and some rather
+shocking ones--certain dungeons, for instance, and a gallows
+mount, on which in good old times the family gallows had
+stood.  This had apparently been a working adjunct to the
+domestic arrangements of every respectable family, and that
+irritating persons should dangle from it had been a simple
+domestic necessity, if one were to believe old stories.
+
+"It was then that nobles were regarded with respect," he
+said, with his fine smile.  "In the days when a man appeared
+with clang of arms and with javelins and spears before, and
+donjon keeps in the background, the attitude of bent knees
+and awful reverence were the inevitable results.  When one
+could hang a servant on one's own private gallows, or chop
+off his hand for irreverence or disobedience--obedience and
+reverence were a rule.  Now, a month's notice is the extremity
+of punishment, and the old pomp of armed servitors suggests
+comic opera.  But we can show you relics of it at Dunholm."
+
+He joined his wife and began at once to make himself so
+delightful to Rosy that she ceased to be afraid of him, and
+ended by talking almost gaily of her London visit.
+
+Betty and Westholt walked together.  The afternoon being
+lovely, they had all sauntered into the park to look at certain
+views, and the sun was shining between the trees.  Betty
+thought the young man almost as charming as his father,
+which was saying much.  She had fallen wholly in love with
+Lord Dunholm--with his handsome, elderly face, his voice,
+his erect bearing, his fine smile, his attraction of manner,
+his courteous ease and wit.  He was one of the men who
+stood for the best of all they had been born to represent. 
+Her own father, she felt, stood for the best of all such an
+American as himself should be.  Lord Westholt would in time
+be what his father was.  He had inherited from him good
+looks, good feeling, and a sense of humour.  Yes, he had been
+given from the outset all that the other man had been denied. 
+She was thinking of Mount Dunstan as "the other man," and
+spoke of him.
+
+"You know Lord Mount Dunstan?" she said.
+
+Westholt hesitated slightly.
+
+"Yes--and no," he answered, after the hesitation.  "No
+one knows him very well.  You have not met him?" with a
+touch of surprise in his tone.
+
+"He was a passenger on the Meridiana when I last crossed
+the Atlantic.  There was a slight accident and we were thrown
+together for a few moments.  Afterwards I met him by chance
+again.  I did not know who he was."
+
+Lord Westholt showed signs of hesitation anew.  In fact,
+he was rather disturbed.  She evidently did not know anything
+whatever of the Mount Dunstans.  She would not be
+likely to hear the details of the scandal which had obliterated
+them, as it were, from the decent world.
+
+The present man, though he had not openly been mixed up
+with the hideous thing, had borne the brand because he had
+not proved himself to possess any qualities likely to recommend
+him.  It was generally understood that he was a bad lot also. 
+To such a man the allurements such a young woman as Miss
+Vanderpoel would present would be extraordinary.  It was
+unfortunate that she should have been thrown in his way.  At
+the same time it was not possible to state the case clearly
+during one's first call on a beautiful stranger.
+
+"His going to America was rather spirited," said the
+mellow voice beside him.  "I thought only Americans took their
+fates in their hands in that way.  For a man of his class to face
+a rancher's life means determination.  It means the spirit----"
+with a low little laugh at the leap of her imagination--"of the
+men who were Mount Dunstans in early days and went forth
+to fight for what they meant to have.  He went to fight.  He
+ought to have won.  He will win some day."
+
+"I do not know about fighting," Lord Westholt answered. 
+Had the fellow been telling her romantic stories?  "The general
+impression was that he went to America to amuse himself."
+
+"No, he did not do that," said Betty, with simple finality. 
+"A sheep ranch is not amusing----"  She stopped short and
+stood still for a moment.  They had been walking down the
+avenue, and she stopped because her eyes had been caught by
+a figure half sitting, half lying in the middle of the road, a
+prostrate bicycle near it.  It was the figure of a cheaply
+dressed young man, who, as she looked, seemed to make an
+ineffectual effort to rise.
+
+"Is that man ill?" she exclaimed.  "I think he must be." 
+They went towards him at once, and when they reached him he
+lifted a dazed white face, down which a stream of blood was
+trickling from a cut on his forehead.  He was, in fact, very
+white indeed, and did not seem to know what he was doing.
+
+"I am afraid you are hurt," Betty said, and as she spoke
+the rest of the party joined them.  The young man vacantly
+smiled, and making an unconscious-looking pass across his face
+with his hand, smeared the blood over his features painfully. 
+Betty kneeled down, and drawing out her handkerchief, lightly
+wiped the gruesome smears away.  Lord Westholt saw what
+had happened, having given a look at the bicycle.
+
+"His chain broke as he was coming down the incline, and
+as he fell he got a nasty knock on this stone," touching with his
+foot a rather large one, which had evidently fallen from some
+cartload of building material.
+
+The young man, still vacantly smiling, was fumbling at his
+breast pocket.  He began to talk incoherently in good, nasal
+New York, at the mere sound of which Lady Anstruthers
+made a little yearning step forward.
+
+"Superior any other," he muttered.  "Tabulator spacer--
+marginal release key--call your 'tention--instantly--'justable
+--Delkoff--no equal on market."  And having found what he
+had fumbled for, he handed a card to Miss Vanderpoel and
+sank unconscious on her breast.
+
+"Let me support him, Miss Vanderpoel," said Westholt,
+starting forward.
+
+"Never mind, thank you," said Betty.  "If he has fainted
+I suppose he must be laid flat on the ground.  Will you please
+to read the card.
+
+It was the card Mount Dunstan had read the day before.
+
+                       J. BURRIDGE & SON,
+                      DELKOFF TYPEWRITER CO.
+              BROADWAY, NEW YORK.     G. SELDEN.
+
+
+"He is probably G. Selden," said Westholt.  "Travelling
+in the interests of his firm, poor chap.  The clue is not of much
+immediate use, however."
+
+They were fortunately not far from the house, and Westholt
+went back quickly to summon servants and send for the
+village doctor.  The Dunholms were kindly sympathetic, and
+each of the party lent a handkerchief to staunch the bleeding. 
+Lord Dunholm helped Miss Vanderpoel to lay the young man
+down carefully.
+
+"I am afraid," he said; "I am really afraid his leg is broken. 
+It was twisted under him.  What can be done with him?"
+
+Miss Vanderpoel looked at her sister.
+
+"Will you allow him to be carried to the house temporarily,
+Rosy?" she asked.  "There is apparently nothing else to be done."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Lady Anstruthers.  "How could one send
+him away, poor fellow!  Let him be carried to the house."
+
+Miss Vanderpoel smiled into Lord Dunholm's much approving,
+elderly eyes.
+
+"G. Selden is a compatriot," she said.  "Perhaps he heard
+I was here and came to sell me a typewriter."
+
+Lord Westholt returning with two footmen and a light
+mattress, G. Selden was carried with cautious care to the house. 
+The afternoon sun, breaking through the branches of the
+ancestral oaks, kindly touched his keen-featured, white young
+face.  Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt each lent a friendly
+hand, and Miss Vanderpoel, keeping near, once or twice wiped
+away an insistent trickle of blood which showed itself from
+beneath the handkerchiefs.  Lady Dunholm followed with
+Lady Anstruthers.
+
+Afterwards, during his convalescence, G. Selden frequently
+felt with regret that by his unconsciousness of the dignity of
+his cortege at the moment he had missed feeling himself to be
+for once in a position he would have designated as "out of
+sight" in the novelty of its importance.  To have beheld him,
+borne by nobles and liveried menials, accompanied by ladies
+of title, up the avenue of an English park on his way to be
+cared for in baronial halls, would, he knew, have added a joy
+to the final moments of his grandmother, which the consolations
+of religion could scarcely have met equally in competition. 
+His own point of view, however, would not, it is true,
+have been that of the old woman in the black net cap and
+purple ribbons, but of a less reverent nature.  His enjoyment, in
+fact, would have been based upon that transatlantic sense of
+humour, whose soul is glee at the incompatible, which would
+have been full fed by the incongruity of "Little Willie being
+yanked along by a bunch of earls, and Reuben S. Vanderpoel's
+daughters following the funeral."  That he himself should have
+been unconscious of the situation seemed to him like "throwing
+away money."
+
+The doctor arriving after he had been put to bed found
+slight concussion of the brain and a broken leg.  With Lady
+Anstruthers' kind permission, it would certainly be best that
+he should remain for the present where he was.  So, in a
+bedroom whose windows looked out upon spreading lawns and
+broad-branched trees, he was as comfortably established as was
+possible.  G. Selden, through the capricious intervention of
+Fate, if he had not "got next" to Reuben S. Vanderpoel himself,
+had most undisputably "got next" to his favourite daughter.
+
+As the Dunholm carriage rolled down the avenue there
+reigned for a few minutes a reflective silence.  It was Lady
+Dunholm who broke it.  "That," she said in her softly
+decided voice, "that is a nice girl."
+
+Lord Dunholm's agreeable, humorous smile flickered into
+evidence.
+
+"That is it," he said.  "Thank you, Eleanor, for supplying
+me with a quite delightful early Victorian word.  I believe
+I wanted it.  She is a beauty and she is clever.  She is a
+number of other things--but she is also a nice girl.  If you will
+allow me to say so, I have fallen in love with her."
+
+"If you will allow me to say so," put in Westholt, "so have
+I--quite fatally."
+
+"That," said his father, with speculation in his eye, "is
+more serious."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+"WHAT IT MUST BE TO YOU--JUST YOU!"
+
+G. Selden, awakening to consciousness two days later, lay and
+stared at the chintz covering of the top of his four-post bed
+through a few minutes of vacant amazement.  It was a four-
+post bed he was lying on, wasn't it?  And his leg was bandaged
+and felt unmovable.  The last thing he remembered was
+going down an incline in a tree-bordered avenue.  There was
+nothing more.  He had been all right then.  Was this a four-
+post bed or was it not?  Yes, it was.  And was it part of the
+furnishings of a swell bedroom--the kind of bedroom he had
+never been in before?  Tip top, in fact?  He stared and tried
+to recall things--but could not, and in his bewilderment
+exclaimed aloud.
+
+"Well," he said, "if this ain't the limit!  You may search ME!"
+
+A respectable person in a white apron came to him from the
+other side of the room.  It was Buttle's wife, who had been
+hastily called in.
+
+"Sh--sh," she said soothingly.  "Don't you worry. 
+Nobody ain't goin' to search you.  Nobody ain't.  There!  Sh,
+sh, sh," rather as if he were a baby.  Beginning to be conscious
+of a curious sense of weakness, Selden lay and stared at her
+in a helplessness which might have been considered pathetic. 
+Perhaps he had got "bats in his belfry," and there was no use
+in talking.
+
+At that moment, however, the door opened and a young
+lady entered.  She was "a looker," G. Selden's weakness did
+not interfere with his perceiving.  "A looker, by gee!"  She
+was dressed, as if for going out, in softly tinted, exquisite
+things, and a large, strange hydrangea blue flower under the
+brim of her hat rested on soft and full black hair.  The black
+hair gave him a clue.  It was hair like that he had seen as
+Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter rode by when he stood at the park
+gates at Mount Dunstan.  "Bats in his belfry," of course.
+
+"How is he?" she said to the nurse.
+
+"He's been seeming comfortable all day, miss," the woman
+answered, "but he's light-headed yet.  He opened his eyes
+quite sensible looking a bit ago, but he spoke queer.  He said
+something was the limit, and that we might search him."
+
+Betty approached the bedside to look at him, and meeting the
+disturbed inquiry in his uplifted eyes, laughed, because, seeing
+that he was not delirious, she thought she understood.  She
+had not lived in New York without hearing its argot, and she
+realised that the exclamation which had appeared delirium to
+Mrs. Buttle had probably indicated that the unexplainableness
+of the situation in which G. Selden found himself struck
+him as reaching the limit of probability, and that the most
+extended search of his person would fail to reveal any clue to
+satisfactory explanation.
+
+She bent over him, with her laugh still shining in her eyes.
+
+"I hope you feel better.  Can you tell me?" she said.
+
+His voice was not strong, but his answer was that of a
+young man who knew what he was saying.
+
+"If I'm not off my head, ma'am, I'm quite comfortable,
+thank you," he replied.
+
+"I am glad to hear that," said Betty.  "Don't be disturbed. 
+Your mind is quite clear."
+
+"All I want," said G. Selden impartially, "is just to know
+where I'm at, and how I blew in here.  It would help me
+to rest better."
+
+"You met with an accident," the "looker" explained, still
+smiling with both lips and eyes.  "Your bicycle chain broke
+and you were thrown and hurt yourself.  It happened in the
+avenue in the park.  We found you and brought you in.  You
+are at Stornham Court, which belongs to Sir Nigel
+Anstruthers.  Lady Anstruthers is my sister.  I am Miss
+Vanderpoel."
+
+"Hully gee!" ejaculated G. Selden inevitably.  "Hully
+GEE!"  The splendour of the moment was such that his brain
+whirled.  As it was not yet in the physical condition to whirl
+with any comfort, he found himself closing his eyes weakly.
+
+"That's right," Miss Vanderpoel said.  "Keep them
+closed.  I must not talk to you until you are stronger.  Lie
+still and try not to think.  The doctor says you are getting
+on very well.  I will come and see you again."
+
+As the soft sweep of her dress reached the door he managed
+to open his eyes.
+
+"Thank you, Miss Vanderpoel," he said.  "Thank you, ma'am.  And
+as his eyelids closed again he murmured in luxurious peace: 
+"Well, if that's her--she can have ME--and welcome!"
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+She came to see him again each day--sometimes in a linen
+frock and garden hat, sometimes in her soft tints and lace and
+flowers before or after her drive in the afternoon, and two or
+three times in the evening, with lovely shoulders and
+wonderfully trailing draperies--looking like the women he had
+caught far-off glimpses of on the rare occasion of his having
+indulged himself in the highest and most remotely placed seat
+in the gallery at the opera, which inconvenience he had borne
+not through any ardent desire to hear the music, but because
+he wanted to see the show and get "a look-in" at the Four
+Hundred.  He believed very implicitly in his Four Hundred,
+and privately--though perhaps almost unconsciously--cherished
+the distinction his share of them conferred upon him, as fondly
+as the English young man of his rudimentary type cherishes
+his dukes and duchesses.  The English young man may revel
+in his coroneted beauties in photograph shops, the young American
+dwells fondly on flattering, or very unflattering, reproductions
+of his multi-millionaires' wives and daughters in the
+voluminous illustrated sheets of his Sunday paper, without
+which life would be a wretched and savourless thing.
+
+Selden had never seen Miss Vanderpoel in his Sunday
+paper, and here he was lying in a room in the same house with
+her.  And she coming in to see him and talk to him as if he
+was one of the Four Hundred himself!  The comfort and
+luxury with which he found himself surrounded sank into
+insignificance when compared with such unearthly luck as this. 
+Lady Anstruthers came in to see him also, and she several
+times brought with her a queer little lame fellow, who was
+spoken of as "Master Ughtred."  "Master" was supposed
+by G. Selden to be a sort of title conferred upon the small
+sons of baronets and the like.  The children he knew in New
+York and elsewhere answered to the names of Bob, or Jimmy,
+or Bill.  No parallel to "Master" had been in vogue among them.
+
+Lady Anstruthers was not like her sister.  She was a little
+thing, and both she and Master Ughtred seemed fond of talking
+of New York.  She had not been home for years, and the
+youngster had never seen it at all.  He had some queer ideas
+about America, and seemed never to have seen anything but
+Stornham and the village.  G. Selden liked him, and was
+vaguely sorry for a little chap to whom a description of the
+festivities attendant upon the Fourth of July and a Presidential
+election seemed like stories from the Arabian Nights.
+
+"Tell me about the Tammany Tiger, if you please," he
+said once.  "I want to know what kind of an animal it is."
+
+From a point of view somewhat different from that of
+Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance, Betty Vanderpoel found
+talk with him interesting.  To her he did not wear the aspect
+of a foreign product.  She had not met and conversed with
+young men like him, but she knew of them.  Stringent precautions
+were taken to protect her father from their ingenuous
+enterprises.  They were not permitted to enter his offices; they
+were even discouraged from hovering about their neighbourhood
+when seen and suspected.  The atmosphere, it was understood,
+was to be, if possible, disinfected of agents.  This one,
+lying softly in the four-post bed, cheerfully grateful for the
+kindness shown him, and plainly filled with delight in his
+adventure, despite the physical discomforts attending it, gave
+her, as he began to recover, new views of the life he lived in
+common with his kind.  It was like reading scenes from a
+realistic novel of New York life to listen to his frank, slangy
+conversation.  To her, as well as to Mr. Penzance, sidelights
+were thrown upon existence in the "hall bedroom" and upon
+previously unknown phases of business life in Broadway and
+roaring "downtown" streets.
+
+His determination, his sharp readiness, his control of temper
+under rebuff and superfluous harshness, his odd, impersonal
+summing up of men and things, and good-natured patience
+with the world in general, were, she knew, business
+assets.  She was even moved--no less--by the remote connection
+of such a life with that of the first Reuben Vanderpoel
+who had laid the huge, solid foundations of their modern
+fortune.  The first Reuben Vanderpoel must have seen and
+known the faces of men as G. Selden saw and knew them. 
+Fighting his way step by step, knocking pertinaciously at every
+gateway which might give ingress to some passage leading to
+even the smallest gain, meeting with rebuff and indifference
+only to be overcome by steady and continued assault--if G.
+Selden was a nuisance, the first Vanderpoel had without doubt
+worn that aspect upon innumerable occasions.  No one desires
+the presence of the man who while having nothing to give must
+persist in keeping himself in evidence, even if by strategy or
+force.  From stories she was familiar with, she had gathered
+that the first Reuben Vanderpoel had certainly lacked a certain
+youth of soul she felt in this modern struggler for life.  He had
+been the cleverer man of the two; G. Selden she secretly liked
+the better.
+
+The curiosity of Mrs. Buttle, who was the nurse, had been
+awakened by a singular feature of her patient's feverish
+wanderings.
+
+"He keeps muttering, miss, things I can't make out about
+Lord Mount Dunstan, and Mr. Penzance, and some child he
+calls Little Willie.  He talks to them the same as if he knew
+them--same as if he was with them and they were talking to
+him quite friendly."
+
+One morning Betty, coming to make her visit of inquiry
+found the patient looking thoughtful, and when she commented
+upon his air of pondering, his reply cast light upon the mystery.
+
+"Well, Miss Vanderpoel," he explained, "I was lying here
+thinking of Lord Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance, and
+how well they treated me--I haven't told you about that, have I?
+
+"That explains what Mrs. Buttle said," she answered. 
+"When you were delirious you talked frequently to Lord
+Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance.  We both wondered why."
+
+Then he told her the whole story.  Beginning with his sitting on
+the grassy bank outside the park, listening to the song of the
+robin, he ended with the adieux at the entrance gates when the
+sound of her horse's trotting hoofs had been heard by each of
+them.
+
+"What I've been lying here thinking of," he said, "is how
+queer it was it happened just that way.  If I hadn't stopped
+just that minute, and if you hadn't gone by, and if Lord
+Mount Dunstan hadn't known you and said who you were,
+Little Willie would have been in London by this time, hustling
+to get a cheap bunk back to New York in."
+
+"Because?" inquired Miss Vanderpoel.
+
+G. Selden laughed and hesitated a moment.  Then he made
+a clean breast of it.
+
+"Say, Miss Vanderpoel," he said, "I hope it won't make
+you mad if I own up.  Ladies like you don't know anything
+about chaps like me.  On the square and straight out, when
+I seen you and heard your name I couldn't help remembering
+whose daughter you was.  Reuben S. Vanderpoel spells a big
+thing.  Why, when I was in New York we fellows used to
+get together and talk about what it'd mean to the chap who
+could get next to Reuben S. Vanderpoel.  We used to count
+up all the business he does, and all the clerks he's got under
+him pounding away on typewriters, and how they'd be bound to
+get worn out and need new ones.  And we'd make calculations
+how many a man could unload, if he could get next.  It
+was a kind of typewriting junior assistant fairy story, and we
+knew it couldn't happen really.  But we used to chin about
+it just for the fun of the thing.  One of the boys made up a
+thing about one of us saving Reuben S.'s life--dragging him
+from under a runaway auto and, when he says, `What can I
+do to show my gratitude, young man?' him handing out his
+catalogue and saying, `I should like to call your attention to
+the Delkoff, sir,' and getting him to promise he'd never use
+any other, as long as he lived!"
+
+Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter laughed as spontaneously
+as any girl might have done.  G. Selden laughed with her. 
+At any rate, she hadn't got mad, so far.
+
+"That was what did it," he went on.  "When I rode away
+on my bike I got thinking about it and could not get it out
+of my head.  The next day I just stopped on the road and
+got off my wheel, and I says to myself:  `Look here, business is
+business, if you ARE travelling in Europe and lunching at
+Buckingham Palace with the main squeeze.  Get busy!  What'll the 
+boys say if they hear you've missed a chance like this?  YOU
+hit the pike for Stornham Castle, or whatever it's called, and
+take your nerve with you!  She can't do more than have you
+fired out, and you've been fired before and got your breath after
+it.  So I turned round and made time.  And that was how I
+happened on your avenue.  And perhaps it was because I was
+feeling a bit rattled I lost my hold when the chain broke, and
+pitched over on my head.  There, I've got it off my chest.  I
+was thinking I should have to explain somehow."
+
+Something akin to her feeling of affection for the nice, long-
+legged Westerner she had seen rambling in Bond Street touched
+Betty again.  The Delkoff was the centre of G. Selden's world
+as the flowers were of Kedgers', as the "little 'ome" was of
+Mrs. Welden's.
+
+"Were you going to try to sell ME a typewriter?" she asked.
+
+"Well," G. Selden admitted, "I didn't know but what
+there might be use for one, writing business letters on a big
+place like this.  Straight, I won't say I wasn't going to try
+pretty hard.  It may look like gall, but you see a fellow has
+to rush things or he'll never get there.  A chap like me HAS
+to get there, somehow."
+
+She was silent a few moments and looked as if she was thinking
+something over.  Her silence and this look on her face
+actually caused to dawn in the breast of Selden a gleam of
+daring hope.  He looked round at her with a faint rising of
+colour.
+
+"Say, Miss Vanderpoel--say----" he began, and then broke off.
+
+"Yes?" said Betty, still thinking.
+
+"C-COULD you use one--anywhere?" he said.  "I don't
+want to rush things too much, but--COULD you?"
+
+"Is it easy to learn to use it?"
+
+"Easy!" his head lifted from his pillow.  "It's as easy as
+falling off a log.  A baby in a perambulator could learn to
+tick off orders for its bottle.  And--on the square--there isn't
+its equal on the market, Miss Vanderpoel--there isn't."  He
+fumbled beneath his pillow and actually brought forth his
+catalogue.
+
+"I asked the nurse to put it there.  I wanted to study it
+now and then and think up arguments.  See--adjustable to
+hold with perfect ease an envelope, an index card, or a strip
+of paper no wider than a postage stamp.  Unsurpassed paper
+feed, practical ribbon mechanism--perfect and permanent
+alignment.  "
+
+As Mount Dunstan had taken the book, Betty Vanderpoel
+took it.  Never had G. Selden beheld such smiling in eyes about
+to bend upon his catalogue.
+
+"You will raise your temperature," she said, "if you excite
+yourself.  You mustn't do that.  I believe there are two or
+three people on the estate who might be taught to use a
+typewriter.  I will buy three.  Yes--we will say three."
+
+She would buy three.  He soared to heights.  He did not
+know how to thank her, though he did his best.  Dizzying
+visions of what he would have to tell "the boys" when he
+returned to New York flashed across his mind.  The daughter of
+Reuben S. Vanderpoel had bought three Delkoffs, and he was
+the junior assistant who had sold them to her.
+
+"You don't know what it means to me, Miss Vanderpoel,"
+he said, "but if you were a junior salesman you'd know.  It's
+not only the sale--though that's a rake-off of fifteen dollars
+to me--but it's because it's YOU that's bought them.  Gee!"
+gazing at her with a frank awe whose obvious sincerity held a
+queer touch of pathos.  "What it must be to be YOU--just YOU!"
+
+She did not laugh.  She felt as if a hand had lightly touched
+her on her naked heart.  She had thought of it so often--had
+been bewildered restlessly by it as a mere child--this difference
+in human lot--this chance.  Was it chance which had placed
+her entity in the centre of Bettina Vanderpoel's world instead
+of in that of some little cash girl with hair raked back from
+a sallow face, who stared at her as she passed in a shop--or in
+that of the young Frenchwoman whose life was spent in serving
+her, in caring for delicate dresses and keeping guard over
+ornaments whose price would have given to her own humbleness
+ease for the rest of existence?  What did it mean?  And
+what Law was laid upon her?  What Law which could only
+work through her and such as she who had been born with
+almost unearthly power laid in their hands--the reins of
+monstrous wealth, which guided or drove the world?  Sometimes
+fear touched her, as with this light touch an her heart, because
+she did not KNOW the Law and could only pray that her guessing
+at it might be right.  And, even as she thought these things, G.
+Selden went on.
+
+"You never can know," he said, "because you've always
+been in it.  And the rest of the world can't know, because 
+they've never been anywhere near it."  He stopped and
+evidently fell to thinking.
+
+"Tell me about the rest of the world," said Betty quietly.
+
+He laughed again.
+
+"Why, I was just thinking to myself you didn't know a
+thing about it.  And it's queer.  It's the rest of us that mounts
+up when you come to numbers.  I guess it'd run into millions. 
+I'm not thinking of beggars and starving people, I've been
+rushing the Delkoff too steady to get onto any swell charity
+organisation, so I don't know about them.  I'm just thinking
+of the millions of fellows, and women, too, for the matter of
+that, that waken up every morning and know they've got to
+hustle for their ten per or their fifteen per--if they can stir
+it up as thick as that.  If it's as much as fifty per, of course,
+seems like to me, they're on Easy Street.  But sometimes those
+that's got to fifty per--or even more--have got more things to do
+with it--kids, you know, and more rent and clothes.  They've
+got to get at it just as hard as we have.  Why, Miss Vanderpoel,
+how many people do you suppose there are in a million
+that don't have to worry over their next month's grocery bills,
+and the rent of their flat?  I bet there's not ten--and I don't
+know the ten."
+
+He did not state his case uncheerfully.  "The rest of the
+world" represented to him the normal condition of things.
+
+"Most married men's a bit afraid to look an honest grocery
+bill in the face.  And they WILL come in--as regular as spring
+hats.  And I tell YOU, when a man's got to live on seventy-five
+a month, a thing that'll take all the strength and energy out of
+a twenty-dollar bill sorter gets him down on the mat."
+
+Like old Mrs. Welden's, his roughly sketched picture was a
+graphic one.
+
+" 'Tain't the working that bothers most of us.  We were
+born to that, and most of us would feel like deadbeats if we
+were doing nothing.  It's the earning less than you can live
+on, and getting a sort of tired feeling over it.  It's the having
+to make a dollar-bill look like two, and watching every other
+fellow try to do the same thing, and not often make the trip. 
+There's millions of us--just millions--every one of us with
+his Delkoff to sell----" his figure of speech pleased him and
+he chuckled at his own cleverness--"and thinking of it, and
+talking about it, and--under his vest--half afraid that he can't
+make it.  And what you say in the morning when you open
+your eyes and stretch yourself is, `Hully gee!  I've GOT to sell
+a Delkoff to-day, and suppose I shouldn't, and couldn't hold
+down my job!'  I began it over my feeding bottle.  So did all
+the people I know.  That's what gave me a sort of a jolt just
+now when I looked at you and thought about you being YOU--
+and what it meant."
+
+When their conversation ended she had a much more intimate
+knowledge of New York than she had ever had before,
+and she felt it a rich possession.  She had heard of the "hall
+bedroom" previously, and she had seen from the outside the
+"quick lunch" counter, but G. Selden unconsciously escorted
+her inside and threw upon faces and lives the glare of a
+flashlight.
+
+"There was a thing I've been thinking I'd ask you, Miss
+Vanderpoel," he said just before she left him.  "I'd like you
+to tell me, if you please.  It's like this.  You see those two
+fellows treated me as fine as silk.  I mean Lord Mount Dunstan
+and Mr. Penzance.  I never expected it.  I never saw a
+lord before, much less spoke to one, but I can tell you that
+one's just about all right--Mount Dunstan.  And the other one--
+the old vicar--I've never taken to anyone since I was born
+like I took to him.  The way he puts on his eye-glasses and
+looks at you, sorter kind and curious about you at the same
+time!  And his voice and his way of saying his words
+--well, they just GOT me--sure.  And they both of 'em
+did say they'd like to see me again.  Now do you think, Miss
+Vanderpoel, it would look too fresh--if I was to write a polite
+note and ask if either of them could make it convenient to come
+and take a look at me, if it wouldn't be too much trouble.  I
+don't WANT to be too fresh--and perhaps they wouldn't come
+anyhow--and if it is, please won't you tell me, Miss Vanderpoel?"
+
+Betty thought of Mount Dunstan as he had stood and talked
+to her in the deepening afternoon sun.  She did not know
+much of him, but she thought--having heard G. Selden's story
+of the lunch--that he would come.  She had never seen Mr.
+Penzance, but she knew she should like to see him.
+
+"I think you might write the note," she said.  "I believe
+they would come to see you."
+
+"Do you?" with eager pleasure.  "Then I'll do it.  I'd
+give a good deal to see them again.  I tell you, they are just
+It--both of them."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+LIFE
+
+Mount Dunstan, walking through the park next morning
+on his way to the vicarage, just after post time, met Mr.
+Penzance himself coming to make an equally early call at
+the Mount.  Each of them had a letter in his hand, and each
+met the other's glance with a smile.
+
+"G. Selden," Mount Dunstan said.  "And yours?"
+
+"G. Selden also," answered the vicar.  "Poor young
+fellow, what ill-luck.  And yet--is it ill-luck?  He says not."
+
+"He tells me it is not," said Mount Dunstan.  "And I agree with
+him."
+
+Mr. Penzance read his letter aloud.
+
+
+"DEAR SIR:
+
+"This is to notify you that owing to my bike going back on
+me when going down hill, I met with an accident in Stornham
+Park.  Was cut about the head and leg broken.  Little Willie
+being far from home and mother, you can see what sort of fix
+he'd been in if it hadn't been for the kindness of Reuben S.
+Vanderpoel's daughters--Miss Bettina and her sister Lady
+Anstruthers.  The way they've had me taken care of has been
+great.  I've been under a nurse and doctor same as if I was
+Albert Edward with appendycytus (I apologise if that's not
+spelt right).  Dear Sir, this is to say that I asked Miss
+Vanderpoel if I should be butting in too much if I dropped a line
+to ask if you could spare the time to call and see me.  It would
+be considered a favour and appreciated by
+                                   "G. SELDEN,
+                    "Delkoff Typewriter Co.  Broadway.
+
+"P. S.  Have already sold three Delkoffs to Miss Vanderpoel."
+
+
+"Upon my word," Mr. Penzance commented, and his amiable
+fervour quite glowed, "I like that queer young fellow--
+I like him.  He does not wish to `butt in too much.'  Now,
+there is rudimentary delicacy in that.  And what a humorous,
+forceful figure of speech!  Some butting animal--a goat, I
+seem to see, preferably--forcing its way into a group or closed
+circle of persons."
+
+His gleeful analysis of the phrase had such evident charm
+for him that Mount Dunstan broke into a shout of laughter,
+even as G. Selden had done at the adroit mention of Weber
+& Fields.
+
+"Shall we ride over together to see him this morning?  An
+hour with G. Selden, surrounded by the atmosphere of Reuben
+S. Vanderpoel, would be a cheering thing," he said.
+
+"It would," Mr. Penzance answered.  "Let us go by all
+means.  We should not, I suppose," with keen delight, "be
+`butting in' upon Lady Anstruthers too early?"  He was
+quite enraptured with his own aptness.  "Like G. Selden, I
+should not like to `butt in,' " he added.
+
+The scent and warmth and glow of a glorious morning
+filled the hour.  Combining themselves with a certain normal
+human gaiety which surrounded the mere thought of G. Selden,
+they were good things for Mount Dunstan.  Life was
+strong and young in him, and he had laughed a big young laugh,
+which had, perhaps tended to the waking in him of the feeling
+he was suddenly conscious of--that a six-mile ride over a white,
+tree-dappled, sunlit road would be pleasant enough, and, after
+all, if at the end of the gallop one came again upon that other
+in whom life was strong and young, and bloomed on rose-cheek
+and was the far fire in the blue deeps of lovely eyes, and the
+slim straightness of the fair body, why would it not be, in a
+way, all to the good?  He had thought of her on more than
+one day, and felt that he wanted to see her again.
+
+"Let us go," he answered Penzance.  "One can call on an
+invalid at any time.  Lady Anstruthers will forgive us."
+
+In less than an hour's time they were on their way.  They
+laughed and talked as they rode, their horses' hoofs striking
+out a cheerful ringing accompaniment to their voices.  There
+is nothing more exhilarating than the hollow, regular ring and
+click-clack of good hoofs going well over a fine old Roman
+road in the morning sunlight.  They talked of the junior
+assistant salesman and of Miss Vanderpoel.  Penzance was much
+pleased by the prospect of seeing "this delightful and unusual
+girl."  He had heard stories of her, as had Lord Westholt. 
+He knew of old Doby's pipe, and of Mrs. Welden's respite
+from the Union, and though such incidents would seem mere
+trifles to the dweller in great towns, he had himself lived and
+done his work long enough in villages to know the village
+mind and the scale of proportions by which its gladness and
+sadness were measured.  He knew more of all this than Mount 
+Dunstan could, since Mount Dunstan's existence had isolated
+itself, from rather gloomy choice.  But as he rode, Mount
+Dunstan knew that he liked to hear these things.  There was
+the suggestion of new life and new thought in them, and such
+suggestion was good for any man--or woman, either--who had
+fallen into living in a dull, narrow groove.
+
+"It is the new life in her which strikes me," he said.  "She
+has brought wealth with her, and wealth is power to do the
+good or evil that grows in a man's soul; but she has brought
+something more.  She might have come here and brought all
+the sumptuousness of a fashionable young beauty, who drove
+through the village and drew people to their windows, and
+made clodhoppers scratch their heads and pull their forelocks,
+and children bob curtsies and stare.  She might have come and
+gone and left a mind-dazzling memory and nothing else.  A
+few sovereigns tossed here and there would have earned her
+a reputation--but, by gee! to quote Selden--she has begun
+LIVING with them, as if her ancestors had done it for six
+hundred years.  And what _I_ see is that if she had come without
+a penny in her pocket she would have done the same thing." 
+He paused a pondering moment, and then drew a sharp breath
+which was an exclamation in itself.  "She's Life!" he said. 
+"She's Life itself!  Good God! what a thing it is for a man
+or woman to be Life--instead of a mass of tissue and muscle
+and nerve, dragged about by the mere mechanism of living!"
+
+Penzance had listened seriously.
+
+"What you say is very suggestive," he commented.  "It
+strikes me as true, too.  You have seen something of her also,
+at least more than I have."
+
+"I did not think these things when I saw her--though I suppose I
+felt them unconsciously.  I have reached this way of summing her
+up by processes of exclusion and inclusion.  One hears of her, as
+you know yourself, and one thinks her over."
+
+"You have thought her over?"
+
+"A lot," rather grumpily.  "A beautiful female creature
+inevitably gives an unbeautiful male creature something to
+think of--if he is not otherwise actively employed.  I am not. 
+She has become a sort of dawning relief to my hopeless humours. 
+Being a low and unworthy beast, I am sometimes resentful enough
+of the unfairness of things.  She has too much."
+
+When they rode through Stornham village they saw signs of
+work already done and work still in hand.  There were no
+broken windows or palings or hanging wicket gates; cottage
+gardens had been put in order, and there were evidences of
+such cheering touches as new bits of window curtain and
+strong-looking young plants blooming between them.  So many
+small, but necessary, things had been done that the whole
+village wore the aspect of a place which had taken heart, and was
+facing existence in a hopeful spirit.  A year ago Mount Dunstan
+and his vicar riding through it had been struck by its
+neglected and dispirited look.
+
+As they entered the hall of the Court Miss Vanderpoel was
+descending the staircase.  She was laughing a little to herself,
+and she looked pleased when she saw them.
+
+"It is good of you to come," she said, as they crossed the hall
+to the drawing-room.  "But I told him I really thought you
+would.  I have just been talking to him, and he was a little
+uncertain as to whether he had assumed too much."
+
+"As to whether he had `butted in,' " said Mr. Penzance. 
+"I think he must have said that."
+
+"He did.  He also was afraid that he might have been
+`too fresh.' " answered Betty.
+
+"On our part," said Mr. Penzance, with gentle glee, "we
+hesitated a moment in fear lest we also might appear to be
+`butting in.' "
+
+Then they all laughed together.  They were laughing when
+Lady Anstruthers entered, and she herself joined them.  But to
+Mount Dunstan, who felt her to be somehow a touching little
+person, there was manifest a tenderness in her feeling for G.
+Selden.  For that matter, however, there was something already
+beginning to be rather affectionate in the attitude of each of
+them.  They went upstairs to find him lying in state upon a
+big sofa placed near a window, and his joy at the sight of them
+was a genuine, human thing.  In fact, he had pondered a
+good deal in secret on the possibility of these swell people
+thinking he had "more than his share of gall" to expect them
+to remember him after he passed on his junior assistant
+salesman's way.  Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughters were of the
+highest of his Four Hundred, but they were Americans, and
+Americans were not as a rule so "stuck on themselves" as the
+English.  And here these two swells came as friendly as you
+please.  And that nice old chap that was a vicar, smiling and
+giving him "the glad hand"!
+
+Betty and Mount Dunstan left Mr. Penzance talking to the
+convalescent after a short time.  Mount Dunstan had asked
+to be shown the gardens.  He wanted to see the wonderful
+things he had heard had been already done to them.
+
+They went down the stairs together and passed through the
+drawing-room into the pleasure grounds.  The once neglected
+lawns had already been mown and rolled, clipped and trimmed,
+until they spread before the eye huge measures of green velvet;
+even the beds girdling and adorning them were brilliant with
+flowers.
+
+"Kedgers!" said Betty, waving her hand.  "In my
+ignorance I thought we must wait for blossoms until next year;
+but it appears that wonders can be brought all ready to bloom
+for one from nursery gardens, and can be made to grow with
+care--and daring--and passionate affection.  I have seen Kedgers
+turn pale with anguish as he hung over a bed of transplanted
+things which seemed to droop too long.  They droop
+just at first, you know, and then they slowly lift their heads,
+slowly, as if to listen to a Voice calling--calling.  Once I sat
+for quite a long time before a rose, watching it.  When I saw
+it BEGIN to listen, I felt a little trembling pass over my body. 
+I seemed to be so strangely near to such a strange thing.  It
+was Life--Life coming back--in answer to what we cannot hear."
+
+She had begun lightly, and then her voice had changed.  It
+was very quiet at the end of her speaking.  Mount Dunstan
+simply repeated her last words.
+
+"To what we cannot hear."
+
+"One feels it so much in a garden," she said.  "I have never
+lived in a garden of my own.  This is not mine, but I have
+been living in it--with Kedgers.  One is so close to Life in it--
+the stirring in the brown earth, the piercing through of green
+spears, that breaking of buds and pouring forth of scent!  Why
+shouldn't one tremble, if one thinks?  I have stood in a potting
+shed and watched Kedgers fill a shallow box with damp
+rich mould and scatter over it a thin layer of infinitesimal
+seeds; then he moistens them and carries them reverently to
+his altars in a greenhouse.  The ledges in Kedgers' green-
+houses are altars.  I think he offers prayers before them.  Why
+not?  I should.  And when one comes to see them, the moist
+seeds are swelled to fulness, and when one comes again they
+are bursting.  And the next time, tiny green things are curling
+outward.  And, at last, there is a fairy forest of tiniest pale
+
+green stems and leaves.  And one is standing close to the
+Secret of the World!  And why should not one prostrate one's
+self, breathing softly--and touching one's awed forehead to
+the earth?"
+
+Mount Dunstan turned and looked at her--a pause in his
+step--they were walking down a turfed path, and over their
+heads meeting branches of new leaves hung.  Something in his
+movement made her turn and pause also.  They both paused
+--and quite unknowingly.
+
+"Do you know," he said, in a low and rather unusual voice,
+"that as we were on our way here, I said of you to Penzance,
+that you were Life--YOU!"
+
+For a few seconds, as they stood so, his look held her--their
+eyes involuntarily and strangely held each other.  Something
+softly glowing in the sunlight falling on them both, something
+raining down in the song of a rising skylark trilling in the
+blue a field away, something in the warmed incense of blossoms
+near them, was calling--calling in the Voice, though they
+did not know they heard.  Strangely, a splendid blush rose in
+a fair flood under her skin.  She was conscious of it, and felt
+a second's amazed impatience that she should colour like a
+schoolgirl suspecting a compliment.  He did not look at her
+as a man looks who has made a pretty speech.  His eyes met
+hers straight and thoughtfully, and he repeated his last words
+as he had before repeated hers.
+
+"That YOU were Life--you!"
+
+The bluebells under water were for the moment incredibly lovely. 
+Her feeling about the blush melted away as the blush itself had
+done.
+
+"I am glad you said that!" she answered.  "It was a beautiful
+thing to say.  I have often thought that I should like it to be
+true."
+
+"It is true," he said.
+
+Then the skylark, showering golden rain, swept down to
+earth and its nest in the meadow, and they walked on.
+
+She learned from him, as they walked together, and he also
+learned from her, in a manner which built for them as they
+went from point to point, a certain degree of delicate intimacy,
+gradually, during their ramble, tending to make discussion and
+question possible.  Her intelligent and broad interest in the
+work on the estate, her frank desire to acquire such practical
+information as she lacked, aroused in himself an interest he 
+had previously seen no reason that he should feel.  He realised
+that his outlook upon the unusual situation was being
+illuminated by an intelligence at once brilliant and fine, while
+it was also full of nice shading.  The situation, of course, WAS
+unusual.  A beautiful young sister-in-law appearing upon the
+dark horizon of a shamefully ill-used estate, and restoring, with
+touches of a wand of gold, what a fellow who was a blackguard
+should have set in order years ago.  That Lady Anstruthers'
+money should have rescued her boy's inheritance
+instead of being spent upon lavish viciousness went without
+saying.  What Mount Dunstan was most struck by was the perfect
+clearness, and its combination with a certain judicial good
+breeding, in Miss Vanderpoel's view of the matter.  She made
+no confidences, beautifully candid as her manner was, but he
+saw that she clearly understood the thing she was doing, and
+that if her sister had had no son she would not have done
+this, but something totally different.  He had an idea that
+Lady Anstruthers would have been swiftly and lightly swept
+back to New York, and Sir Nigel left to his own devices, in
+which case Stornham Court and its village would gradually
+have crumbled to decay.  It was for Sir Ughtred Anstruthers
+the place was being restored.  She was quite clear on the matter
+of entail.  He wondered at first--not unnaturally--how a girl
+had learned certain things she had an obviously clear knowledge
+of.  As they continued to converse he learned.  Reuben
+S. Vanderpoel was without doubt a man remarkable not only
+in the matter of being the owner of vast wealth.  The rising
+flood of his millions had borne him upon its strange surface a
+thinking, not an unthinking being--in fact, a strong and fine
+intelligence.  His thousands of miles of yearly journeying in
+his sumptuous private car had been the means of his accumulating
+not merely added gains, but ideas, points of view, emotions,
+a human outlook worth counting as an asset.  His daughter,
+when she had travelled with him, had seen and talked with
+him of all he himself had seen.  When she had not been his
+companion she had heard from him afterwards all best worth
+hearing.  She had become--without any special process--familiar
+with the technicalities of huge business schemes, with law and
+commerce and political situations.  Even her childish interest
+in the world of enterprise and labour had been passionate.  So
+she had acquired--inevitably, while almost unconsciously--a
+remarkable education.
+
+"If he had not been HIMSELF he might easily have grown tired of a
+little girl constantly wanting to hear things-- constantly asking
+questions," she said.  "But he did not get tired.  We invented a
+special knock on the door of his private room.  It said, `May I
+come in, father?'  If he was busy he answered with one knock on
+his desk, and I went away.  If he had time to talk he called out,
+`Come, Betty,' and I went to him.  I used to sit upon the floor
+and lean against his knee.  He had a beautiful way of stroking my
+hair or my hand as he talked.  He trusted me.  He told me of
+great things even before he had talked of them to men.  He knew I
+would never speak of what was said between us in his room.  That
+was part of his trust.  He said once that it was a part of the
+evolution of race, that men had begun to expect of women
+what in past ages they really only expected of each other."
+
+Mount Dunstan hesitated before speaking.
+
+"You mean--absolute faith--apart from affection?"
+
+"Yes.  The power to be quite silent, even when one is tempted to
+speak--if to speak might betray what it is wiser to keep to one's
+self because it is another man's affair.  The kind of thing which
+is good faith among business men.  It applies to small things as
+much as to large, and to other things than business."
+
+Mount Dunstan, recalling his own childhood and his own
+father, felt again the pressure of the remote mental suggestion
+that she had had too much, a childhood and girlhood like this,
+the affection and companionship of a man of large and
+ordered intelligence, of clear and judicial outlook upon an
+immense area of life and experience.  There was no cause for
+wonder that her young womanhood was all it presented to
+himself, as well as to others.  Recognising the shadow of
+resentment in his thought, he swept it away, an inward sense
+making it clear to him that if their positions had been
+reversed, she would have been more generous than himself.
+
+He pulled himself together with an unconscious movement of
+his shoulders.  Here was the day of early June, the gold of
+the sun in its morning, the green shadows, the turf they
+walked on together, the skylark rising again from the meadow
+and showering down its song.  Why think of anything else. 
+What a line that was which swept from her chin down her
+long slim throat to its hollow!  The colour between the velvet
+of her close-set lashes--the remembrance of her curious splendid
+blush--made the man's lost and unlived youth come back
+to him.  What did it matter whether she was American or 
+English--what did it matter whether she was insolently rich or
+beggarly poor?  He would let himself go and forget all but
+the pleasure of the sight and hearing of her.
+
+So as they went they found themselves laughing together
+and talking without restraint.  They went through the flower
+and kitchen gardens; they saw the once fallen wall rebuilt
+now with the old brick; they visited the greenhouses and came
+upon Kedgers entranced with business, but enraptured at being
+called upon to show his treasures.  His eyes, turning magnetised
+upon Betty, revealed the story of his soul.  Mount Dunstan
+remarked that when he spoke to her of his flowers it was
+as if there existed between them the sympathy which might
+be engendered between two who had sat up together night after
+night with delicate children.
+
+"He's stronger to-day, miss," he said, as they paused before
+a new wonderful bloom.  "What he's getting now is good
+for him.  I had to change his food, miss, but this seems all
+right.  His colour's better."
+
+Betty herself bent over the flower as she might have bent
+over a child.  Her eyes softened, she touched a leaf with a
+slim finger, as delicately as if it had been a new-born baby's
+cheek.  As Mount Dunstan watched her he drew a step nearer
+to her side.  For the first time in his life he felt the glow
+of a normal and simple pleasure untouched by any bitterness.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+SETTING THEM THINKING
+
+Old Doby, sitting at his open window, with his pipe and
+illustrated papers on the table by his side, began to find life
+a series of thrills.  The advantage of a window giving upon
+the village street unspeakably increased.  For many years
+he had preferred the chimney corner greatly, and had rejoiced
+at the drawing in of winter days when a fire must be well
+kept up, and a man might bend over it, and rub his hands
+slowly gazing into the red coals or little pointed flames which
+seemed the only things alive and worthy the watching.  The
+flames were blue at the base and yellow at the top, and jumped
+looking merry, and caught at bits of black coal, and set them
+crackling and throwing off splinters till they were ablaze
+and as much alive as the rest.  A man could get comfort and
+entertainment therefrom.  There was naught else so good to
+live with.  Nothing happened in the street, and every dull
+face that passed was an old story, and told an old tale of
+stupefying hard labour and hard days.
+
+But now the window was a better place to sit near.  Carts
+went by with men whistling as they walked by the horses
+heads.  Loads of things wanted for work at the Court.  New
+faces passed faces of workmen--sometimes grinning, "impident
+youngsters," who larked with the young women, and
+called out to them as they passed their cottages, if a good-
+looking one was loitering about her garden gate.  Old Doby
+chuckled at their love-making chaff, remembering dimly that
+seventy years ago he had been just as proper a young chap,
+and had made love in the same way.  Lord, Lord, yes!  He
+had been a bold young chap as ever winked an eye.  Then, too,
+there were the vans, heavy-loaded and closed, and coming along
+slowly.  Every few days, at first, there had come a van from
+"Lunnon."  Going to the Court, of course.  And to sit there,
+and hear the women talk about what might be in them, and
+to try to guess one's self, that was a rare pastime.  Fine things
+going to the Court these days--furniture and grandeur filling
+up the shabby or empty old rooms, and making them look like
+other big houses--same as Westerbridge even, so the women
+said.  The women were always talking and getting bits of news
+somehow, and were beginning to be worth listening to, because
+they had something more interesting to talk about than children's
+worn-out shoes, and whooping cough.
+
+Doby heard everything first from them.  "Dang the women,
+they always knowed things fust."  It was them as knowed
+about the smart carriages as began to roll through the one
+village street.  They were gentry's carriages, with fine,
+stamping horses, and jingling silver harness, and big coachmen,
+and tall footmen, and such like had long ago dropped off showing
+themselves at Stornham.
+
+"But now the gentry has heard about Miss Vanderpoel,
+and what's being done at the Court, and they know what it
+means," said young Mrs. Doby.  "And they want to see her,
+and find out what she's like.  It's her brings them."
+
+Old Doby chuckled and rubbed his hands.  He knew what
+she was like.  That straight, slim back of hers, and the thick
+twist of black hair, and the way she had of laughing at you, as
+cheery as if a bell was ringing.  Aye, he knew all about that.
+
+"When they see her once, they'll come agen, for sure,"
+he quavered shrilly, and day by day he watched for the grand
+carriages with vivid eagerness.  If a day or two passed without
+his seeing one, he grew fretful, and was injured, feeling that
+his beauty was being neglected!  "None to-day, nor yet yest'day,"
+he would cackle.  "What be they folk a-doin'?"
+
+Old Mrs. Welden, having heard of the pipe, and come to
+see it, had struck up an acquaintance with him, and dropped
+in almost every day to talk and sit at his window.  She was
+a young thing, by comparison, and could bring him lively
+news, and, indeed, so stir him up with her gossip that he was
+in danger of becoming a young thing himself.  Her groceries
+and his tobacco were subjects whose interest was undying.
+
+A great curiosity had been awakened in the county, and
+visitors came from distances greater than such as ordinarily
+include usual calls.  Naturally, one was curious about
+the daughter of the Vanderpoel who was a sort of national
+institution in his own country.  His name had not been so
+much heard of in England when Lady Anstruthers had arrived
+but there had, at first, been felt an interest in her.  But she
+had been a failure--a childish-looking girl--whose thin, fair,
+prettiness had no distinction, and who was obviously overwhelmed
+by her surroundings.  She had evidently had no influence
+over Sir Nigel, and had not been able to prevent his making ducks
+and drakes of her money, which of course ought to have been spent
+on the estate.  Besides which a married woman represented fewer
+potentialities than a handsome unmarried girl entitled to
+expectations from huge American wealth.
+
+So the carriages came and came again, and, stately or
+unstately far-off neighbours sat at tea upon the lawn under the
+trees, and it was observed that the methods and appointments
+of the Court had entirely changed.  Nothing looked new and
+American.  The silently moving men-servants could not have
+been improved upon, there was plainly an excellent chef
+somewhere, and the massive silver was old and wonderful.  Upon
+everybody's word, the change was such as it was worth a long
+drive merely to see!
+
+The most wonderful thing, however, was Lady Anstruthers
+herself.  She had begun to grow delicately plump, her once
+drawn and haggard face had rounded out, her skin had
+smoothed, and was actually becoming pink and fair, a nimbus
+of pale fine hair puffed airily over her forehead, and she wore
+the most charming little clothes, all of which made her look
+fifteen years younger than she had seemed when, on the grounds
+of ill-health, she had retired into seclusion.  The renewed
+relations with her family, the atmosphere by which she was
+surrounded, had evidently given her a fresh lease of life, and
+awakened in her a new courage.
+
+When the summer epidemic of garden parties broke forth,
+old Doby gleefully beheld, day after day, the Court carriage
+drive by bearing her ladyship and her sister attired in fairest
+shades and tints "same as if they was flowers."  Their delicate
+vaporousness, and rare colours, were sweet delights to the
+old man, and he and Mrs. Welden spent happy evenings discussing
+them as personal possessions.  To these two Betty
+WAS a personal possession, bestowing upon them a marked
+distinction.  They were hers and she was theirs.  No one else
+so owned her.  Heaven had given her to them that their last
+years might be lighted with splendour.
+
+On her way to one of the garden parties she stopped the
+carriage before old Doby's cottage, and went in to him to speak
+a few words.  She was of pale convolvulus blue that afternoon,
+and Doby, standing up touching his forelock and
+Mrs. Welden curtsying, gazed at her with prayer in their
+eyes.  She had a few flowers in her hand, and a book of
+coloured photographs of Venice.
+
+"These are pictures of the city I told you about--the city
+built in the sea--where the streets are water.  You and Mrs.
+Welden can look at them together," she said, as she laid
+flowers and book down.  "I am going to Dunholm Castle
+to a garden party this afternoon.  Some day I will come and
+tell you about it."
+
+The two were at the window staring spellbound, as she
+swept back to the carriage between the sweet-williams and
+Canterbury bells bordering the narrow garden path.
+
+"Do you know I really went in to let them see my dress,"
+she said, when she rejoined Lady Anstruthers.  "Old Doby's
+granddaughter told me that he and Mrs. Welden have little
+quarrels about the colours I wear.  It seems that they find
+my wardrobe an absorbing interest.  When I put the book
+on the table, I felt Doby touch my sleeve with his trembling
+old hand.  He thought I did not know."
+
+"What will they do with Venice?" asked Rosy.
+
+"They will believe the water is as blue as the photographs
+make it--and the palaces as pink.  It will seem like a chapter
+out of Revelations, which they can believe is true and not
+merely `Scriptur,'--because _I_ have been there.  I wish I
+had been to the City of the Gates of Pearl, and could tell
+them about that."
+
+On the lawns at the garden parties she was much gazed
+at and commented upon.  Her height and her long slender
+neck held her head above those of other girls, the dense black
+of her hair made a rich note of shadow amid the prevailing
+English blondness.  Her mere colouring set her apart.  Rosy
+used to watch her with tender wonder, recalling her memory
+of nine-year-old Betty, with the long slim legs and the
+demanding and accusing child-eyes.  She had always been this
+creature even in those far-off days.  At the garden party at
+Dunholm Castle it became evident that she was, after a manner,
+unusually the central figure of the occasion.  It was not
+at all surprising, people said to each other.  Nothing could have
+been more desirable for Lord Westholt.  He combined rank
+with fortune, and the Vanderpoel wealth almost constituted
+rank in itself.  Both Lord and Lady Dunholm seemed pleased
+with the girl.  Lord Dunholm showed her great attention. 
+When she took part in the dancing on the lawn, he looked on
+delightedly.  He walked about the gardens with her, and it
+was plain to see that their conversation was not the ordinary
+polite effort to accord, usually marking the talk between a
+mature man and a merely pretty girl.  Lord Dunholm sometimes
+laughed with unfeigned delight, and sometimes the two
+seemed to talk of grave things.
+
+"Such occasions as these are a sort of yearly taking of the
+social census of the county," Lord Dunholm explained.  "One
+invites ALL one's neighbours and is invited again.  It is a
+friendly duty one owes."
+
+"I do not see Lord Mount Dunstan," Betty answered.  "Is he here?"
+
+She had never denied to herself her interest in Mount
+Dunstan, and she had looked for him.  Lord Dunholm hesitated
+a second, as his son had done at Miss Vanderpoel's mention
+of the tabooed name.  But, being an older man, he felt
+more at liberty to speak, and gave her a rather long kind look.
+
+"My dear young lady," he said, "did you expect to see him here?"
+
+"Yes, I think I did," Betty replied, with slow softness. 
+"I believe I rather hoped I should."
+
+"Indeed!  You are interested in him?"
+
+"I know him very little.  But I am interested.  I will tell you
+why."
+
+She paused by a seat beneath a tree, and they sat down
+together.  She gave, with a few swift vivid touches, a sketch
+of the red-haired second-class passenger on the Meridiana, of
+whom she had only thought that he was an unhappy, rough-
+looking young man, until the brief moment in which they
+had stood face to face, each comprehending that the other was
+to be relied on if the worst should come to the worst.  She
+had understood his prompt disappearance from the scene, and
+had liked it.  When she related the incident of her meeting
+with him when she thought him a mere keeper on his own
+lands, Lord Dunholm listened with a changed and thoughtful
+expression.  The effect produced upon her imagination by
+what she had seen, her silent wandering through the sad
+beauty of the wronged place, led by the man who tried stiffly
+to bear himself as a servant, his unintended self-revelations,
+her clear, well-argued point of view charmed him.  She had seen
+the thing set apart from its county scandal, and so had read
+possibilities others had been blind to.  He was immensely
+touched by certain things she said about the First Man.
+
+"He is one of them," she said.  "They find their way in
+the end--they find their way.  But just now he thinks there
+is none.  He is standing in the dark--where the roads meet."
+
+"You think he will find his way?" Lord Dunholm said. 
+"Why do you think so? "
+
+"Because I KNOW he will," she answered.  "But I cannot
+tell you WHY I know."
+
+"What you have said has been interesting to me, because
+of the light your own thought threw upon what you saw.  It
+has not been Mount Dunstan I have been caring for, but for
+the light you saw him in.  You met him without prejudice,
+and you carried the light in your hand.  You always carry
+a light, my impression is," very quietly.  "Some women do."
+
+"The prejudice you speak of must be a bitter thing for a
+proud man to bear.  Is it a just prejudice?  What has he done?"
+
+Lord Dunholm was gravely silent for a few moments.
+
+"It is an extraordinary thing to reflect,"--his words came
+slowly--"that it may NOT be a just prejudice.  _I_ do not
+know that he has done anything--but seem rather sulky, and
+be the son of his father, and the brother of his brother."
+
+"And go to America," said Betty.  "He could have avoided
+doing that--but he cannot be called to account for his relations.
+If that is all--the prejudice is NOT just."
+
+"No, it is not," said Lord Dunholm, "and one feels rather
+awkward at having shared it.  You have set me thinking
+again, Miss Vanderpoel."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+THE THREAD OF G. SELDEN
+
+The Shuttle having in its weaving caught up the thread
+of G. Selden's rudimentary existence and drawn it, with the
+young man himself, across the sea, used curiously the thread
+in question, in the forming of the design of its huge web.  As
+wool and coarse linen are sometimes interwoven with rich
+silk for decorative or utilitarian purposes, so perhaps was this
+previously unvalued material employed.
+
+It was, indeed, an interesting truth that the young man,
+during his convalescence, without his own knowledge, acted
+as a species of magnet which drew together persons who might
+not easily otherwise have met.  Mr. Penzance and Mount
+Dunstan rode over to see him every few days, and their visits
+naturally established relations with Stornham Court much more
+intimate than could have formed themselves in the same length
+of time under any of the ordinary circumstances of country
+life.  Conventionalities lost their prominence in friendly
+intercourse with Selden.  It was not, however, that he himself
+desired to dispense with convention.  His intense wish to "do
+the right thing," and avoid giving offence was the most ingenuous
+and touching feature of his broad cosmopolitan good nature.
+
+"If I ever make a break, sir," he had once said, with
+almost passionate fervour, in talking to Mr. Penzance, "please
+tell me, and set me on the right track.  No fellow likes to look
+like a hoosier, but I don't mind that half as much as--as
+seeming not to APPRECIATE."
+
+He used the word "appreciate" frequently.  It expressed
+for him many degrees of thanks.
+
+"I tell you that's fine," he said to Ughtred, who brought
+him a flower from the garden.  "I appreciate that."
+
+To Betty he said more than once:
+
+"You know how I appreciate all this, Miss Vanderpoel. 
+You DO know I appreciate it, don't you?"
+
+He had an immense admiration for Mount Dunstan, and
+talked to him a great deal about America, often about the
+sheep ranch, and what it might have done and ought to have
+done.  But his admiration for Mr. Penzance became affection. 
+To him he talked oftener about England, and listened
+to the vicar's scholarly stories of its history, its past glories
+and its present ones, as he might have listened at fourteen to
+stories from the Arabian Nights.
+
+These two being frequently absorbed in conversation,
+Mount Dunstan was rather thrown upon Betty's hands.  When
+they strolled together about the place or sat under the deep
+shade of green trees, they talked not only of England and
+America, but of divers things which increased their knowledge
+of each other.  It is points of view which reveal qualities,
+tendencies, and innate differences, or accordances of thought,
+and the points of view of each interested the other.
+
+"Mr. Selden is asking Mr. Penzance questions about
+English history," Betty said, on one of the afternoons in which
+they sat in the shade.  "I need not ask you questions.  You
+ARE English history."
+
+"And you are American history," Mount Dunstan answered.
+
+"I suppose I am."
+
+At one of their chance meetings Miss Vanderpoel had told
+Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt something of the story
+of G. Selden.  The novelty of it had delighted and amused
+them.  Lord Dunholm had, at points, been touched as Penzance
+had been.  Westholt had felt that he must ride over to Stornham
+to see the convalescent.  He wanted to learn some New York slang.
+
+He would take lessons from Selden, and he would also buy a
+Delkoff--two Delkoffs, if that would be better.  He knew a
+hard-working fellow who ought to have a typewriter.
+
+"Heath ought to have one," he had said to his father. 
+Heath was the house-steward.  "Think of the letters the poor
+chap has to write to trades-people to order things, and un-
+order them, and blackguard the shopkeepers when they are
+not satisfactory.  Invest in one for Heath, father."
+
+"It is by no means a bad idea," Lord Dunholm reflected. 
+"Time would be saved by the use of it, I have no doubt."
+
+"It saves time in any department where it can be used," 
+Betty had answered.  "Three are now in use at Stornham,
+and I am going to present one to Kedgers.  This is a
+testimonial I am offering.  Three weeks ago I began to use the
+Delkoff.  Since then I have used no other.  If YOU use them
+you will introduce them to the county."
+
+She understood the feeling of the junior assistant, when
+he found himself in the presence of possible purchasers.  Her
+blood tingled slightly.  She wished she had brought a catalogue.
+
+"We will come to Stornham to see the catalogue," Lord
+Dunholm promised.
+
+"Perhaps you will read it aloud to us," Westholt suggested
+gleefully.
+
+"G. Selden knows it by heart, and will repeat it to you
+with running comments.  Do you know I shall be very glad
+if you decide to buy one--or two--or three," with an uplift
+of the Irish blue eyes to Lord Dunholm.  "The blood of the
+first Reuben Vanderpoel stirs in my veins--also I have begun
+to be fond of G. Selden."
+
+Therefore it occurred that on the afternoon referred to
+Lady Anstruthers appeared crossing the sward with two male
+visitors in her wake.
+
+"Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt," said Betty, rising.
+
+For this meeting between the men Selden was, without
+doubt, responsible.  While his father talked to Mount
+Dunstan, Westholt explained that they had come athirst for the
+catalogue.  Presently Betty took him to the sheltered corner
+of the lawn, where the convalescent sat with Mr. Penzance.
+
+But, for a short time, Lord Dunholm remained to converse
+with Mount Dunstan.  In a way the situation was
+delicate.  To encounter by chance a neighbour whom one--
+for reasons--has not seen since his childhood, and to be equal
+to passing over and gracefully obliterating the intervening
+years, makes demand even upon finished tact.  Lord Dunholm's
+world had been a large one, and he had acquired experience
+tending to the development of the most perfect
+methods.  If G. Selden had chanced to be the magnet which
+had decided his course this special afternoon, Miss Vanderpoel
+it was who had stirred in him sufficient interest in Mount
+Dunstan to cause him to use the best of these methods when
+he found himself face to face with him.
+
+He beautifully eliminated the years, he eliminated all but
+the facts that the young man's father and himself had been
+acquaintances in youth, that he remembered Mount Dunstan
+himself as a child, that he had heard with interest of his visit
+to America.  Whatsoever the young man felt, he made no
+sign which presented obstacles.  He accepted the eliminations
+with outward composure.  He was a powerful-looking fellow,
+with a fine way of carrying his shoulders, and an eye
+which might be able to light savagely, but just now, at least,
+he showed nothing of the sulkiness he was accused of.
+
+Lord Dunholm progressed admirably with him.  He soon
+found that he need not be upon any strain with regard to the
+eliminations.  The man himself could eliminate, which was
+an assistance.
+
+They talked together when they turned to follow the others
+to the retreat of G. Selden.
+
+"Have you bought a Delkoff?" Lord Dunholm inquired.
+
+"If I could have afforded it, I should have bought one."
+
+"I think that we have come here with the intention of
+buying three.  We did not know we required them until
+Miss Vanderpoel recited half a page of the catalogue to us."
+
+"Three will mean a `rake off' of fifteen dollars to G.
+Selden," said Mount Dunstan.  It was, he saw, necessary that
+he should explain the meaning of a "rake off," and he did so
+to his companion's entertainment.
+
+The afternoon was a satisfactory one.  They were all kind
+to G. Selden, and he on his part was an aid to them.  In his
+innocence he steered three of them, at least, through narrow
+places into an open sea of easy intercourse.  This was a good
+beginning.  The junior assistant was recovering rapidly, and
+looked remarkably well.  The doctor had told him that he
+might try to use his leg.  The inside cabin of the cheap
+Liner and "little old New York" were looming up before
+him.  But what luck he had had, and what a holiday!  It
+had been enough to set a fellow up for ten years' work.  It
+would set up the boys merely to be told about it.  He didn't
+know what HE had ever done to deserve such luck as had
+happened to him.  For the rest of his life he would he waving
+the Union Jack alongside of the Stars and Stripes.
+
+Mr. Penzance it was who suggested that he should try the
+strength of the leg now.
+
+"Yes," Mount Dunstan said.  "Let me help you."
+
+As he rose to go to him, Westholt good-naturedly got up
+also.  They took their places at either side of his invalid chair
+and assisted him to rise and stand on his feet.
+
+"It's all right, gentlemen.  It's all right," he called out
+with a delighted flush, when he found himself upright.  "I
+believe I could stand alone.  Thank you.  Thank you."
+
+He was able, leaning on Mount Dunstan's arm, to take a few
+steps.  Evidently, in a short time, he would find himself no
+longer disabled.
+
+Mr. Penzance had invited him to spend a week at the
+vicarage.  He was to do this as soon as he could comfortably
+drive from the one place to the other.  After receiving
+the invitation he had sent secretly to London for one of the
+Delkoffs he had brought with him from America as a specimen. 
+He cherished in private a plan of gently entertaining his
+host by teaching him to use the machine.  The vicar would
+thus be prepared for that future in which surely a Delkoff
+must in some way fall into his hands.  Indeed, Fortune having
+at length cast an eye on himself, might chance to favour
+him further, and in time he might be able to send a "high-
+class machine" as a grateful gift to the vicarage.  Perhaps
+Mr. Penzance would accept it because he would understand
+what it meant of feeling and appreciation.
+
+During the afternoon Lord Dunholm managed to talk
+a good deal with Mount Dunstan.  There was no air of intention
+in his manner, nevertheless intention was concealed
+beneath its courteous amiability.  He wanted to get at the
+man.  Before they parted he felt he had, perhaps, learned
+things opening up new points of view.
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+In the smoking-room at Dunholm that night he and his
+son talked of their chance encounter.  It seemed possible that
+mistakes had been made about Mount Dunstan.  One did not
+form a definite idea of a man's character in the course of an
+afternoon, but he himself had been impressed by a conviction
+that there had been mistakes.
+
+"We are rather a stiff-necked lot--in the country--when
+we allow ourselves to be taken possession of by an idea,"
+Westholt commented.
+
+"I am not at all proud of the way in which we have taken
+things for granted," was his father's summing up.  "It is,
+perhaps, worth observing," taking his cigar from his mouth
+and smiling at the end of it, as he removed the ash, "that, but
+for Miss Vanderpoel and G. Selden, we might never have
+had an opportunity of facing the fact that we may not have
+been giving fair play.  And one has prided one's self on one's
+fair play."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+A RETURN
+
+At the close of a long, warm afternoon Betty Vanderpoel
+came out upon the square stone terrace overlooking the gardens,
+and that part of the park which, enclosing them, caused
+them, as they melted into its greenness, to lose all limitations
+and appear to be only a more blooming bit of the landscape.
+
+Upon the garden Betty's eyes dwelt, as she stood still for
+some minutes taking in their effect thoughtfully.
+
+Kedgers had certainly accomplished much.  His close-
+trimmed lawns did him credit, his flower beds were flushed
+and azured, purpled and snowed with bloom.  Sweet tall spires,
+hung with blue or white or rosy flower bells, lifted their
+heads above the colour of lower growths.  Only the fervent
+affection, the fasting and prayer of a Kedgers could have
+done such wonders with new things and old.  The old ones
+he had cherished and allured into a renewal of existence--
+the new ones he had so coaxed out of their earthen pots into
+the soil, luxuriously prepared for their reception, and had
+afterwards so nourished and bedewed with soft waterings, so
+supported, watched over and adored that they had been almost
+unconscious of their transplanting.  Without assistants he
+could have done nothing, but he had been given a sufficient
+number of under gardeners, and had even managed to inspire
+them with something of his own ambition and solicitude.  The
+result was before Betty's eyes in an aspect which, to such as
+knew the gardens well,--the Dunholms, for instance,--was
+astonishing in its success.
+
+"I've had privileges, miss, and so have the flowers,"
+Kedgers had said warmly, when Miss Vanderpoel had reported
+to him, for his encouragement, Dunholm Castle's praise. 
+"Not one of 'em has ever had to wait for his food and drink,
+nor to complain of his bed not being what he was accustomed
+to.  They've not had to wait for rain, for we've given it to
+'em from watering cans, and, thank goodness, the season's
+been kind to 'em."
+
+Betty, descending the terrace steps, wandered down the
+paths between the flower beds, glancing about her as she
+went.  The air of neglect and desolation had been swept
+away.  Buttle and Tim Soames had been given as many
+privileges as Kedgers.  The chief points impressed upon them
+had been that the work must be done, not only thoroughly, but
+quickly.  As many additional workmen as they required, as
+much solid material as they needed, but there must be a
+despatch which at first it staggered them to contemplate.  They
+had not known such methods before.  They had been
+accustomed to work under money limitation throughout their
+lives, and, when work must be done with insufficient aid, it
+must be done slowly.  Economy had been the chief factor in
+all calculations, speed had not entered into them, so
+leisureliness had become a fixed habit.  But it seemed American
+to sweep leisureliness away into space with a free gesture.
+
+"It must be done QUICKLY," Miss Vanderpoel had said. 
+"If ten men cannot do it quickly enough, you must have
+twenty--or as many more as are needed.  It is time which
+must be saved just now."
+
+Time more than money, it appeared.  Buttle's experience
+had been that you might take time, if you did not charge for
+it.  When time began to mean money, that was a different
+matter.  If you did work by the job, you might drive in a
+few nails, loiter, and return without haste; if you worked
+by the hour, your absence would be inquired into.  In the
+present case no one could loiter.  That was realised early. 
+The tall girl, with the deep straight look at you, made you
+realise that without spoken words.  She expected energy
+something like her own.  She was a new force and spurred them. 
+No man knew how it was done, but, when she appeared among
+them--even in the afternoon--"lookin' that womany," holding
+up her thin dress over lace petticoats, the like of which had
+not been seen before, she looked on with just the same straight,
+expecting eyes.  They did not seem to doubt in the least that
+she would find that great advance had been made.
+
+So advance had been made, and work accomplished.  As
+Betty walked from one place to another she saw the signs
+of it with gratification.  The place was not the one she had
+come to a few months ago.  Hothouses, outbuildings, stables
+were in repair.  Work was still being done in different places. 
+In the house itself carpenters or decorators were enclosed
+in some rooms, and at their business, but exterior order
+prevailed.  In the courtyard stablemen were at work, and her
+own groom came forward touching his forehead.  She paid a
+visit to the horses.  They were fine creatures, and, when she
+entered their stalls, made room for her and whinnied gently,
+in well-founded expectation of sugar and bread which were
+kept in a cupboard awaiting her visits.  She smoothed velvet
+noses and patted satin sides, talking to Mason a little before
+she went her way.
+
+Then she strolled into the park.  The park was always a
+pleasure.  She was in a thoughtful mood, and the soft green
+shadowed silence lured her.  The summer wind hus-s-shed
+the branches as it lightly waved them, the brown earth of the
+avenue was sun-dappled, there were bird notes and calls to be
+heard here and there and everywhere, if one only arrested
+one's attention a moment to listen.  And she was in a listening
+and dreaming mood--one of the moods in which bird, leaf,
+and wind, sun, shade, and scent of growing things have part.
+
+And yet her thoughts were of mundane things.
+
+It was on this avenue that G. Selden had met with his
+accident.  He was still at Dunstan vicarage, and yesterday Mount
+Dunstan, in calling, had told them that Mr. Penzance was
+applying himself with delighted interest to a study of the
+manipulation of the Delkoff.
+
+The thought of Mount Dunstan brought with it the thought
+of her father.  This was because there was frequently in her
+mind a connection between the two.  How would the man
+of schemes, of wealth, and power almost unbounded, regard
+the man born with a load about his neck--chained to earth
+by it, standing in the midst of his hungering and thirsting
+possessions, his hands empty of what would feed them and
+restore their strength?  Would he see any solution of the
+problem?  She could imagine his looking at the situation
+through his gaze at the man, and considering both in his
+summing up.
+
+"Circumstances and the man," she had heard him say. 
+"But always the man first."
+
+Being no visionary, he did not underestimate the power of
+circumstance.  This Betty had learned from him.  And what
+could practically be done with circumstance such as this?  The
+question had begun to recur to her.  What could she herself
+have done in the care of Rosy and Stornham, if chance had
+not placed in her hand the strongest lever?  What she had
+accomplished had been easy--easy.  All that had been required
+had been the qualities which control of the lever might itself
+tend to create in one.  Given--by mere chance again--imagination
+and initiative, the moving of the lever did the rest. 
+If chance had not been on one's side, what then?  And
+where was this man's chance?  She had said to Rosy, in speaking
+of the wealth of America, "Sometimes one is tired of
+it."  And Rosy had reminded her that there were those who
+were not tired of it, who could bear some of the burden of it,
+if it might be laid on their own shoulders.  The great
+beautiful, blind-faced house, awaiting its slow doom in the midst
+of its lonely unfed lands--what could save it, and all it
+represented of race and name, and the stately history of men,
+but the power one professed to call base and sordid--mere
+money?  She felt a sudden impatience at herself for having
+said she was tired of it.  That was a folly which took upon
+itself the aspect of an affectation.
+
+And, if a man could not earn money--or go forth to rob
+richer neighbours of it as in the good old marauding days--
+or accept it if it were offered to him as a gift--what could
+he do?  Nothing.  If he had been born a village labourer, he
+could have earned by the work of his hands enough to keep
+his cottage roof over him, and have held up his head among
+his fellows.  But for such as himself there was no mere labour
+which would avail.  He had not that rough honest resource. 
+Only the decent living and orderly management of the generations
+behind him would have left to him fairly his own chance
+to hold with dignity the place in the world into which Fate
+had thrust him at the outset--a blind, newborn thing of
+whom no permission had been asked.
+
+"If I broke stones upon the highway for twelve hours
+a day, I might earn two shillings," he had said to Betty, on
+the previous day.  "I could break stones well," holding out
+a big arm, "but fourteen shillings a week will do no more
+than buy bread and bacon for a stonebreaker."
+
+He was ordinarily rather silent and stiff in his conversational
+attitude towards his own affairs.  Betty sometimes wondered
+how she herself knew so much about them--how it happened
+that her thoughts so often dwelt upon them.  The explanation
+she had once made to herself had been half irony, half serious
+reflection.
+
+"It is a result of the first Reuben Vanderpoel.  It is because I
+am of the fighting commercial stock, and, when I see a business
+problem, I cannot leave it alone, even when it is no affair of
+mine."
+
+As an exposition of the type of the commercial fighting-stock
+she presented, as she paused beneath overshadowing trees, an
+aspect beautifully suggesting a far different thing.
+
+She stood--all white from slim shoe to tilted parasol,--and
+either the result of her inspection of the work done by her
+order, or a combination of her summer-day mood with her
+feeling for the problem, had given her a special radiance. 
+It glowed on lip and cheek, and shone in her Irish eyes.
+
+She had paused to look at a man approaching down the
+avenue.  He was not a labourer, and she did not know him. 
+Men who were not labourers usually rode or drove, and this
+one was walking.  He was neither young nor old, and, though
+at a distance his aspect was not attracting, she found that she
+regarded him curiously, and waited for him to draw nearer.
+
+The man himself was glancing about him with a puzzled
+look and knitted forehead.  When he had passed through the
+village he had seen things he had not expected to see; when
+he had reached the entrance gate, and--for reasons of his own
+--dismissed his station trap, he had looked at the lodge
+scrutinisingly, because he was not prepared for its picturesque
+trimness.  The avenue was free from weeds and in order, the
+two gates beyond him were new and substantial.  As he went on his
+way and reached the first, he saw at about a hundred yards
+distance a tall girl in white standing watching him. 
+Things which were not easily explainable always irritated
+him.  That this place--which was his own affair--should present
+an air of mystery, did not improve his humour, which
+was bad to begin with.  He had lately been passing through
+unpleasant things, which had left him feeling himself tricked
+and made ridiculous--as only women can trick a man and
+make him ridiculous, he had said to himself.  And there had
+been an acrid consolation in looking forward to the relief of
+venting one's self on a woman who dare not resent.
+
+"What has happened, confound it!" he muttered, when
+he caught sight of the girl.  "Have we set up a house party?" 
+And then, as he saw more distinctly, "Damn!  What a figure!"
+
+By this time Betty herself had begun to see more clearly. 
+Surely this was a face she remembered--though the passing
+of years and ugly living had thickened and blurred, somewhat,
+its always heavy features.  Suddenly she knew it, and the look
+in its eyes--the look she had, as a child, unreasoningly hated.
+
+Nigel Anstruthers had returned from his private holiday.
+
+As she took a few quiet steps forward to meet him, their eyes
+rested on each other.  After a night or two in town his were
+slightly bloodshot, and the light in them was not agreeable.
+
+It was he who spoke first, and it is possible that he did
+not quite intend to use the expletive which broke from him. 
+But he was remembering things also.  Here were eyes he, too,
+had seen before--twelve years ago in the face of an
+objectionable, long-legged child in New York.  And his own hatred
+of them had been founded in his own opinion on the best of
+reasons.  And here they gazed at him from the face of a
+young beauty--for a beauty she was.
+
+"Damn it!" he exclaimed; "it is Betty."
+
+"Yes," she answered, with a faint, but entirely courteous,
+smile.  "It is.  I hope you are very well."
+
+She held out her hand.  "A delicious hand," was what he
+said to himself, as he took it.  And what eyes for a girl to
+have in her head were those which looked out at him between
+shadows.  Was there a hint of the devil in them?  He
+thought so--he hoped so, since she had descended on the place
+in this way.  But WHAT the devil was the meaning of her
+being on the spot at all?  He was, however, far beyond the
+lack of astuteness which might have permitted him to express
+this last thought at this particular juncture.  He was only
+betrayed into stupid mistakes, afterwards to be regretted, when
+rage caused him utterly to lose control of his wits.  And,
+though he was startled and not exactly pleased, he was not in
+a rage now.  The eyelashes and the figure gave an agreeable
+fillip to his humour.  Howsoever she had come, she was worth
+looking at.
+
+"How could one expect such a delightful thing as this?"
+he said, with a touch of ironic amiability.  "It is more than
+one deserves."
+
+"It is very polite of you to say that," answered Betty.
+
+He was thinking rapidly as he stood and gazed at her.  There
+were, in truth, many things to think of under circumstances
+so unexpected.
+
+"May I ask you to excuse my staring at you?" he inquired
+with what Rosy had called his "awful, agreeable smile." 
+"When I saw you last you were a fierce nine-year-old American
+child.  I use the word `fierce' because--if you'll pardon
+my saying so--there was a certain ferocity about you."
+
+"I have learned at various educational institutions to
+conceal it," smiled Betty.
+
+
+"May I ask when you arrived?"
+
+"A short time after you went abroad."
+
+"Rosalie did not inform me of your arrival."
+
+"She did not know your address.  You had forgotten to leave it."
+
+He had made a mistake and realised it.  But she presented
+to him no air of having observed his slip.  He paused a few
+seconds, still regarding her and still thinking rapidly.  He
+recalled the mended windows and roofs and palings in the village,
+the park gates and entrance.  Who the devil had done all that? 
+How could a mere handsome girl be concerned in it?  And
+yet--here she was.
+
+"When I drove through the village," he said next, "I saw
+that some remarkable changes had taken place on my property. 
+I feel as if you can explain them to me."
+
+"I hope they are changes which meet with your approval."
+
+"Quite--quite," a little curtly.  "Though I confess they
+mystify me.  Though I am the son-in-law of an American
+multimillionaire, I could not afford to make such repairs
+myself."
+
+A certain small spitefulness which was his most frequent
+undoing made it impossible for him to resist adding the innuendo
+in his last sentence.  And again he saw it was a folly.  The
+impersonal tone of her reply simply left him where he had placed
+himself.
+
+"We were sorry not to be able to reach you.  As it seemed
+well to begin the work at once, we consulted Messrs. Townlinson
+& Sheppard."
+
+"We?" he repeated.  "Am I to have the pleasure," with a
+slight wryness of the mouth, "of finding Mr. Vanderpoel also
+at Stornham?"
+
+"No--not yet.  As I was on the spot, I saw your solicitors
+and asked their advice and approval--for my father.  If he
+had known how necessary the work was, it would have been
+done before, for Ughtred's sake."
+
+Her voice was that of a person who, in stating obvious facts,
+provides no approach to enlightening comment upon them. 
+And there was in her manner the merest gracious impersonality.
+
+"Do I understand that Mr. Vanderpoel employed someone
+to visit the place and direct the work?"
+
+"It was really not difficult to direct.  It was merely a
+matter of engaging labour and competent foremen."
+
+An odd expression rose in his eyes.
+
+"You suggest a novel idea, upon my word," he said.  "Is
+it possible--you see I know something of America--is it possible
+I must thank YOU for the working of this magic?"
+
+"You need not thank me," she said, rather slowly, because
+it was necessary that she also should think of many things at
+once.  "I could not have helped doing it."
+
+She wished to make all clear to him before he met Rosy. 
+She knew it was not unnatural that the unexpectedness of his
+appearance might deprive Lady Anstruthers of presence of
+mind.  Instinct told her that what was needed in intercourse
+with him was, above all things, presence of mind.
+
+"I will tell you about it," she said.  "We will walk
+slowly up and down here, if you do not object."
+
+He did not object.  He wanted to hear the story as he could
+not hear it from his nervous little fool of a wife, who would
+be frightened into forgetting things and their sequence.  What
+he meant to discover was where he stood in the matter--where
+his father-in-law stood, and, rather specially, to have a chance
+to sum up the weaknesses and strengths of the new arrival. 
+That would be to his interest.  In talking this thing over
+she would unconsciously reveal how much vanity or emotion
+or inexperience he might count upon as factors safe to use
+in one's dealings with her in the future.
+
+As he listened he was supported by the fact that he did not
+lose consciousness of the eyes and the figure.  But for these it
+is probable that he would have gone blind with fury at certain
+points which forced themselves upon him.  The first was that
+there had been an absurd and immense expenditure which
+would simply benefit his son and not himself.  He could not
+sell or borrow money on what had been given.  Apparently
+the place had been re-established on a footing such as it had not
+rested upon during his own generation, or his father's.  As
+he loathed life in the country, it was not he who would enjoy
+its luxury, but his wife and her child.  The second point was
+that these people--this girl--had somehow had the sharpness
+to put themselves in the right, and to place him in a position
+at which he could not complain without putting himself in the
+wrong.  Public opinion would say that benefits had been heaped
+upon him, that the correct thing had been done correctly with
+the knowledge and approval of the legal advisers of his family. 
+It had been a masterly thing, that visit to Townlinson &
+Sheppard.  He was obliged to aid his self-control by a glance at
+the eyelashes.  She was a new sort of girl, this Betty, whose
+childhood he had loathed, and, to his jaded taste, novelty
+appealed enormously.  Her attraction for him was also added to
+by the fact that he was not at all sure that there was not
+combined with it a pungent spice of the old detestation.  He was
+repelled as well as allured.  She represented things which he
+hated.  First, the mere material power, which no man can
+bully, whatsoever his humour.  It was the power he most longed
+for and, as he could not hope to possess it, most sneered at and
+raged against.  Also, as she talked, it was plain that her habit
+of self-control and her sense of resource would be difficult
+to deal with.  He was a survival of the type of man whose
+simple creed was that women should not possess resources, as
+when they possessed them they could rarely be made to behave
+themselves.
+
+But while he thought these things, he walked by her side
+and both listened and talked smiling the agreeable smile.
+
+"You will pardon my dull bewilderment," he said.  "It is
+not unnatural, is it--in a mere outsider?"
+
+And Betty, with the beautiful impersonal smile, said:
+
+"We felt it so unfortunate that even your solicitors did not
+know your address."
+
+When, at length, they turned and strolled towards the house,
+a carriage was drawing up before the door, and at the sight of
+it, Betty saw her companion slightly lift his eyebrows.  Lady
+Anstruthers had been out and was returning.  The groom got
+down from the box, and two men-servants appeared upon the
+steps.  Lady Anstruthers descended, laughing a little as she
+talked to Ughtred, who had been with her.  She was dressed in
+clear, pale grey, and the soft rose lining of her parasol warmed
+the colour of her skin.
+
+Sir Nigel paused a second and put up his glass.
+
+"Is that my wife?" he said.  "Really!  She quite recalls New
+York."
+
+The agreeable smile was on his lips as he hastened forward. 
+He always more or less enjoyed coming upon Rosalie suddenly. 
+The obvious result was a pleasing tribute to his power.
+
+Betty, following him, saw what occurred.
+
+Ughtred saw him first, and spoke quick and low.
+
+"Mother!" he said.
+
+The tone of his voice was evidently enough.  Lady Anstruthers
+turned with an unmistakable start.  The rose lining of her
+parasol ceased to warm her colour.  In fact, the parasol itself
+stepped aside, and she stood with a blank, stiff, white face.
+
+
+"My dear Rosalie," said Sir Nigel, going towards her. 
+"You don't look very glad to see me."
+
+He bent and kissed her quite with the air of a devoted
+husband.  Knowing what the caress meant, and seeing Rosy's
+face as she submitted to it, Betty felt rather cold.  After the
+conjugal greeting he turned to Ughtred.
+
+"You look remarkably well," he said.
+
+Betty came forward.
+
+"We met in the park, Rosy," she explained.  "We have been
+talking to each other for half an hour."
+
+The atmosphere which had surrounded her during the last
+three months had done much for Lady Anstruthers' nerves. 
+She had the power to recover herself.  Sir Nigel himself saw
+this when she spoke.
+
+"I was startled because I was not expecting to see you," she
+said.  "I thought you were still on the Riviera.  I hope you
+had a pleasant journey home."
+
+"I had an extraordinarily pleasant surprise in finding your
+sister here," he answered.  And they went into the house.
+
+In descending the staircase on his way to the drawing-room
+before dinner, Sir Nigel glanced about him with interested
+curiosity.  If the village had been put in order, something more
+had been done here.  Remembering the worn rugs and the bald-
+headed tiger, he lifted his brows.  To leave one's house in a
+state of resigned dilapidation and return to find it filled with
+all such things as comfort combined with excellent taste might
+demand, was an enlivening experience--or would have been so
+under some circumstances.  As matters stood, perhaps, he might
+have felt better pleased if things had been less well done.  But
+they were very well done.  They had managed to put themselves
+in the right in this also.  The rich sobriety of colour and
+form left no opening for supercilious comment--which was a
+neat weapon it was annoying to be robbed of.
+
+The drawing-room was fresh, brightly charming, and full of
+flowers.  Betty was standing before an open window with her
+sister.  His wife's shoulders, he observed at once, had
+absolutely begun to suggest contours.  At all events, her bones
+no longer stuck out.  But one did not look at one's wife's
+shoulders when one could turn from them to a fairness of velvet
+and ivory. "You know," he said, approaching them, "I find all
+this very amazing.  I have been looking out of my window on to
+the gardens."
+
+"It is Betty who has done it all," said Rosy.
+
+"I did not suspect you of doing it, my dear Rosalie," smiling. 
+"When I saw Betty standing in the avenue, I knew at once
+that it was she who had mended the chimney-pots in the village
+and rehung the gates."
+
+For the present, at least, it was evident that he meant to
+be sufficiently amiable.  At the dinner table he was
+conversational and asked many questions, professing a natural
+interest in what had been done.  It was not difficult to talk to
+a girl whose eyes and shoulders combined themselves with a quick
+wit and a power to attract which he reluctantly owned he had
+never seen equalled.  His reluctance arose from the fact that
+such a power complicated matters.  He must be on the defensive
+until he knew what she was going to do, what he must
+do himself, and what results were probable or possible.  He
+had spent his life in intrigue of one order or another.  He
+enjoyed outwitting people and rather preferred to attain an end
+by devious paths.  He began every acquaintance on the defensive. 
+His argument was that you never knew how things would turn out,
+consequently, it was as well to conduct one's self
+at the outset with the discreet forethought of a man in the
+presence of an enemy.  He did not know how things would
+turn out in Betty's case, and it was a little confusing to find
+one's self watching her with a sense of excitement.  He would
+have preferred to be cool--to be cold--and he realised that he
+could not keep his eyes off her.
+
+"I remember, with regret," he said to her later in the
+evening, "that when you were a child we were enemies."
+
+"I am afraid we were," was Betty's impartial answer.
+
+"I am sure it was my fault," he said.  "Pray forget it. 
+Since you have accomplished such wonders, will you not, in
+the morning, take me about the place and explain to me how
+it has been done?"
+
+When Betty went to her room she dismissed her maid as
+soon as possible, and sat for some time alone and waiting.  She
+had had no opportunity to speak to Rosy in private, and she
+was sure she would come to her.  In the course of half an hour
+she heard a knock at the door.
+
+Yes, it was Rosy, and her newly-born colour had fled and left
+her looking dragged again.  She came forward and dropped into a
+low chair near Betty, letting her face fall into her hands.
+
+"I'm very sorry, Betty," she half whispered, "but it is no use."
+
+"What is no use?" Betty asked.
+
+"Nothing is any use.  All these years have made me such
+a coward.  I suppose I always was a coward, but in the old days
+there never was anything to be afraid of."
+
+"What are you most afraid of now?"
+
+"I don't know.  That is the worst.  I am afraid of HIM--
+just of himself--of the look in his eyes--of what he may be
+planning quietly.  My strength dies away when he comes near me."
+
+"What has he said to you?" she asked.
+
+"He came into my dressing-room and sat and talked.  He
+looked about from one thing to another and pretended to admire
+it all and congratulated me.  But though he did not sneer at
+what he saw, his eyes were sneering at me.  He talked about
+you.  He said that you were a very clever woman.  I don't
+know how he manages to imply that a very clever woman is
+something cunning and debased--but it means that when he says it.
+
+It seems to insinuate things which make one grow hot all over."
+
+She put out a hand and caught one of Betty's.
+
+"Betty, Betty," she implored.  "Don't make him angry.  Don't."
+
+"I am not going to begin by making him angry," Betty said.  "And
+I do not think he will try to make me angry-- at first."
+
+"No, he will not," cried Rosalie.  "And--and you
+remember what I told you when first we talked about him?"
+
+"And do you remember," was Betty's answer, "what I said to you
+when I first met you in the park?  If we were to cable to New
+York this moment, we could receive an answer in a few hours."
+
+"He would not let us do it," said Rosy.  "He would stop us in
+some way--as he stopped my letters to mother--as he stopped me
+when I tried to run away.  Oh, Betty, I know him and you do not."
+
+"I shall know him better every day.  That is what I must
+do.  I must learn to know him.  He said something more to
+you than you have told me, Rosy.  What was it?"
+
+"He waited until Detcham left me," Lady Anstruthers
+confessed, more than half reluctantly.  "And then he got up to
+go away, and stood with his hands resting on the chairback, and
+spoke to me in a low, queer voice.  He said, `Don't try to
+play any tricks on me, my good girl--and don't let your sister
+try to play any.  You would both have reason to regret it.' "
+
+She was a half-hypnotised thing, and Betty, watching her
+with curious but tender eyes, recognised the abnormality.
+
+"Ah, if I am a clever woman," she said, "he is a clever
+man.  He is beginning to see that his power is slipping away. 
+That was what G. Selden would call `bluff.' "
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+NO, SHE WOULD NOT
+
+Sir Nigel did not invite Rosalie to accompany them, when the
+next morning, after breakfast, he reminded Betty of his
+suggestion of the night before, that she should walk over the
+place with him, and show him what had been done.  He preferred
+to make his study of his sister-in-law undisturbed.
+
+There was no detail whose significance he missed as they went
+about together.  He had keen eyes and was a quite sufficiently
+practical person on such matters as concerned his own
+interests.  In this case it was to his interest to make up his
+mind as to what he might gain or lose by the appearance of his
+wife's family.  He did not mean to lose--if it could be helped--
+anything either of personal importance or material benefit.  And
+it could only be helped by his comprehending clearly what he had
+to deal with.  Betty was, at present, the chief factor in the
+situation, and he was sufficiently astute to see that she might
+not be easy to read.  His personal theories concerning women
+presented to him two or three effective ways of managing them. 
+You made love to them, you flattered them either subtly or
+grossly, you roughly or smoothly bullied them, or you harrowed
+them with haughty indifference--if your love-making had produced
+its proper effect--when it was necessary to lure or drive
+or trick them into submission.  Women should be made useful
+in one way or another.  Little fool as she was, Rosalie had been
+useful.  He had, after all was said and done, had some
+comparatively easy years as the result of her existence.  But she
+had not been useful enough, and there had even been moments
+when he had wondered if he had made a mistake in separating
+her entirely from her family.  There might have been more
+to be gained if he had allowed them to visit her and had played
+the part of a devoted husband in their presence.  A great bore,
+
+of course, but they could not have spent their entire lives at
+Stornham.  Twelve years ago, however, he had known very
+little of Americans, and he had lost his temper.  He was really
+very fond of his temper, and rather enjoyed referring to it with
+tolerant regret as being a bad one and beyond his control--with
+a manner which suggested that the attribute was the inevitable
+result of strength of character and masculine spirit.  The luxury
+of giving way to it was a great one, and it was exasperating
+as he walked about with this handsome girl to find himself
+beginning to suspect that, where she was concerned, some self-
+control might be necessary.  He was led to this thought because
+the things he took in on all sides could only have been achieved
+by a person whose mind was a steadily-balanced thing.  In one's
+treatment of such a creature, methods must be well chosen. 
+The crudest had sufficed to overwhelm Rosalie.  He tried two
+or three little things as experiments during their walk.
+
+The first was to touch with dignified pathos on the subject of
+Ughtred.  Betty, he intimated gently, could imagine what a man's
+grief and disappointment might be on finding his son and heir
+deformed in such a manner.  The delicate reserve with which he
+managed to convey his fear that Rosalie's own uncontrolled
+hysteric attacks had been the cause of the misfortune was very
+well done.  She had, of course, been very young and much spoiled,
+and had not learned self-restraint, poor girl.
+
+It was at this point that Betty first realised a certain hideous
+thing.  She must actually remain silent--there would be at
+the outset many times when she could only protect her sister
+by refraining from either denial or argument.  If she turned
+upon him now with refutation, it was Rosy who would be
+called upon to bear the consequences.  He would go at once to
+Rosy, and she herself would have done what she had said she
+would not do--she would have brought trouble upon the poor
+girl before she was strong enough to bear it.  She suspected
+also that his intention was to discover how much she had heard,
+and if she might be goaded into betraying her attitude in the
+matter.
+
+But she was not to be so goaded.  He watched her closely
+and her very colour itself seemed to be under her own control. 
+He had expected--if she had heard hysteric, garbled stories
+from his wife--to see a flame of scarlet leap up on the cheek he
+was admiring.  There was no such leap, which was baffling in
+itself.  Could it be that experience had taught Rosalie the
+discretion of keeping her mouth shut?
+
+"I am very fond of Ughtred," was the sole comment he was
+granted.  "We made friends from the first.  As he grows
+older and stronger, his misfortune may be less apparent.  He
+will be a very clever man."
+
+"He will be a very clever man if he is at all like----"  He
+checked himself with a slight movement of his shoulders.  "I
+was going to say a thing utterly banal.  I beg your pardon.  I
+forgot for the moment that I was not talking to an English girl."
+
+It was so stupid that she turned and looked at him,
+smiling faintly.  But her answer was quite mild and soft.
+
+"Do not deprive me of compliments because I am a mere American,"
+she said.  "I am very fond of them, and respond at once."
+
+"You are very daring," he said, looking straight into her
+eyes--"deliciously so.  American women always are, I think."
+
+"The young devil," he was saying internally.  "The
+beautiful young devil!  She throws one off the track."
+
+He found himself more and more attracted and exasperated
+as they made their rounds.  It was his sense of being attracted
+which was the cause of his exasperation.  A girl who could stir
+one like this would be a dangerous enemy.  Even as a friend
+she would not be safe, because one faced the absurd peril of
+losing one's head a little and forgetting the precautions one
+should never lose sight of where a woman was concerned--the
+precautions which provided for one's holding a good taut rein
+in one's own hands.
+
+They went from gardens to greenhouses, from greenhouses
+to stables, and he was on the watch for the moment when she
+would reveal some little feminine pose or vanity, but, this
+morning, at least, she laid none bare.  She did not strike him
+as a being of angelic perfections, but she was very modern and
+not likely to show easily any openings in her armour.
+
+"Of course, I continue to be amazed," he commented,
+"though one ought not to be amazed at anything which evolves
+from your extraordinary country.  In spite of your impersonal
+air, I shall persist in regarding you as my benefactor.  But, to
+be frank, I always told Rosalie that if she would write to your
+father he would certainly put things in order."
+
+"She did write once, you will remember," answered Betty.
+
+"Did she?" with courteous vagueness.  "Really, I am
+afraid I did not hear of it.  My poor wife has her own little
+ideas about the disposal of her income."
+
+And Betty knew that she was expected to believe that Rosy
+had hoarded the money sent to restore the place, and from
+sheer weak miserliness had allowed her son's heritage to fall
+to ruin.  And but for Rosy's sake, she might have stopped upon
+the path and, looking at him squarely, have said, "You are
+lying to me.  And I know the truth."
+
+He continued to converse amiably.
+
+"Of course, it is you one must thank, not only for rousing
+in the poor girl some interest in her personal appearance, but
+also some interest in her neighbours.  Some women, after they
+marry and pass girlhood, seem to release their hold on all desire
+to attract or retain friends.  For years Rosalie has given
+herself up to a chronic semi-invalidism.  When the mistress of a
+house is always depressed and languid and does not return visits,
+neighbours become discouraged and drop off, as it were."
+
+If his wife had told stories to gain her sympathy his companion
+would be sure to lose her temper and show her hand.  If he could
+make her openly lose her temper, he would have made an advance.
+
+"One can quite understand that," she said.  "It is a great
+happiness to me to see Rosy gaining ground every day.  She
+has taken me out with her a good many times, and people are
+beginning to realise that she likes to see them at Stornham."
+
+"You are very delightful," he said, "with your `She has
+taken me out.'  When I glanced at the magnificent array of
+cards on the salver in the hall, I realised a number of things,
+and quite vulgarly lost my breath.  The Dunholms have been
+very amiable in recalling our existence.  But charming
+Americans--of your order--arouse amiable emotions."
+
+"I am very amiable myself," said Betty.
+
+It was he who flushed now.  He was losing patience at feeling
+himself held with such lightness at arm's length, and at
+being, in spite of himself, somehow compelled to continue to
+assume a jocular courtesy.
+
+"No, you are not," he answered.
+
+"Not?" repeated Betty, with an incredulous lifting of her brows.
+
+"You are charming and clever, but I rather suspect you of
+being a vixen.  At all events you are a spirited young woman
+and quick-witted enough to understand the attraction you must
+have for the sordid herd."
+
+And then he became aware--if not of an opening in her
+armour--at least of a joint in it.  For he saw, near her ear, a
+deepening warmth.  That was it.  She was quick-witted, and
+she hid somewhere a hot pride.
+
+"I confess, however," he proceeded cheerfully, "that
+notwithstanding my own experience of the habits of the sordid
+herd, I saw one card I was surprised to find, though really"
+--shrugging his shoulders--"I ought to have been less surprised
+to find it than to find any other.  But it was bold.  I
+suppose the fellow is desperate."
+
+"You are speaking of----?" suggested Betty.
+
+"Of Mount Dunstan.  Hang it all, it WAS bold!"  As if
+in half-amused disgust.
+
+As she had walked through the garden paths, Betty had at
+intervals bent and gathered a flower, until she held in one hand
+a loose, fair sheaf.  At this moment she stooped to break off a
+spire of pale blue campanula.  And she was--as with a shock
+--struck with a consciousness that she bent because she must--
+because to do so was a refuge--a concealment of something she
+must hide.  It had come upon her without a second's warning. 
+Sir Nigel was right.  She was a vixen--a virago.  She was in
+such a rage that her heart sprang up and down and her cheek
+and eyes were on fire.  Her long-trained control of herself
+was gone.  And her shock was a lightning-swift awakening to
+the fact that she felt all this--she must hide her face--because
+it was this one man--just this one and no other--who was
+being dragged into this thing with insult.
+
+It was an awakening, and she broke off, rather slowly, one--
+two--three--even four campanula stems before she stood upright
+again.
+
+As for Nigel Anstruthers--he went on talking in his low-
+pitched, disgusted voice.
+
+"Surely he might count himself out of the running.  There
+will be a good deal of running, my dear Betty.  You fair
+Americans have learned that by this time.  But that a man who
+has not even a decent name to offer--who is blackballed by his
+county--should coolly present himself as a pretendant is an
+insolence he should be kicked for."
+
+Betty arranged her campanulas carefully.  There was no
+exterior reason why she should draw sword in Lord Mount
+Dunstan's defence.  He had certainly not seemed to expect
+anything intimately interested from her.  His manner she had
+generally felt to be rather restrained.  But one could, in a
+measure, express one's self.
+
+"Whatsoever the `running,' " she remarked, "no pretendant
+has complimented me by presenting himself, so far--and Lord
+Mount Dunstan is physically an unusually strong man."
+
+"You mean it would be difficult to kick him?  Is this
+partisanship?  I hope not.  Am I to understand," he added with
+deliberation, "that Rosalie has received him here?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And that you have received him, also--as you have received
+Lord Westholt?"
+
+"Quite."
+
+"Then I must discuss the matter with Rosalie.  It is not to
+be discussed with you."
+
+"You mean that you will exercise your authority in the matter?"
+
+"In England, my dear girl, the master of a house is still
+sometimes guilty of exercising authority in matters which concern
+the reputation of his female relatives.  In the absence of
+your father, I shall not allow you, while you are under my roof,
+to endanger your name in any degree.  I am, at least, your
+brother by marriage.  I intend to protect you."
+
+"Thank you," said Betty.
+
+"You are young and extremely handsome, you will have an
+enormous fortune, and you have evidently had your own way
+all your life.  A girl, such as you are, may either make a
+magnificent marriage or a ridiculous and humiliating one. 
+Neither American young women, nor English young men, are as
+disinterested as they were some years ago.  Each has begun to
+learn what the other has to give."
+
+"I think that is true," commented Betty.
+
+"In some cases there is a good deal to be exchanged on both
+sides.  You have a great deal to give, and should get exchange
+worth accepting.  A beggared estate and a tainted title are not
+good enough."
+
+"That is businesslike," Betty made comment again.
+
+Sir Nigel laughed quietly.
+
+"The fact is--I hope you won't misunderstand my saying
+it--you do not strike me as being UN-businesslike, yourself."
+
+"I am not," answered Betty.
+
+"I thought not," rather narrowing his eyes as he watched
+her, because he believed that she must involuntarily show her
+hand if he irritated her sufficiently.  "You do not impress me
+as being one of the girls who make unsuccessful marriages. 
+You are a modern New York beauty--not an early Victorian
+sentimentalist."  He did not despair of results from his process
+of irritation.  To gently but steadily convey to a beautiful and
+spirited young creature that no man could approach her without
+ulterior motive was rather a good idea.  If one could make
+it clear--with a casual air of sensibly taking it for granted--
+that the natural power of youth, wit, and beauty were rendered
+impotent by a greatness of fortune whose proportions obliterated
+all else; if one simply argued from the premise that young love
+was no affair of hers, since she must always be regarded as a
+gilded chattel, whose cost was writ large in plain figures,
+what girl, with blood in her veins, could endure it long without
+wincing?  This girl had undue, and, as he regarded such
+matters, unseemly control over her temper and her nerves,
+but she had blood enough in her veins, and presently she would
+say or do something which would give him a lead.
+
+"When you marry----" he began.
+
+She lifted her head delicately, but ended the sentence for
+him with eyes which were actually not unsmiling.
+
+"When I marry, I shall ask something in exchange for what I have
+to give."
+
+"If the exchange is to be equal, you must ask a great deal,"
+he answered.  "That is why you must be protected from such
+fellows as Mount Dunstan."
+
+"If it becomes necessary, perhaps I shall be able to protect
+myself," she said.
+
+"Ah!" regretfully, "I am afraid I have annoyed you--
+and that you need protection more than you suspect."  If
+she were flesh and blood, she could scarcely resist resenting
+the implication contained in this.  But resist it she did, and
+with a cool little smile which stirred him to sudden, if
+irritated, admiration.
+
+She paused a second, and used the touch of gentle regret
+herself.
+
+"You have wounded my vanity by intimating that my
+admirers do not love me for myself alone."
+
+He paused, also, and, narrowing his eyes again, looked
+straight between her lashes.
+
+"They ought to love you for yourself alone," he said, in a
+low voice.  "You are a deucedly attractive girl."
+
+"Oh, Betty," Rosy had pleaded, "don't make him angry
+--don't make him angry."
+
+So Betty lifted her shoulders slightly without comment.
+
+"Shall we go back to the house now?" she said.  "Rosalie
+will naturally be anxious to hear that what has been done in
+your absence has met with your approval."
+
+In what manner his approval was expressed to Rosalie, Betty
+did not hear this morning, at least.  Externally cool though
+she had appeared, the process had not been without its results,
+and she felt that she would prefer to be alone.
+
+"I must write some letters to catch the next steamer,"
+she said, as she went upstairs.
+
+When she entered her room, she went to her writing table
+and sat down, with pen and paper before her.  She drew the
+paper towards her and took up the pen, but the next moment
+she laid it down and gave a slight push to the paper.  As she
+did so she realised that her hand trembled.
+
+"I must not let myself form the habit of falling into
+rages--or I shall not be able to keep still some day, when
+I ought to do it," she whispered.  "I am in a fury--a fury." 
+And for a moment she covered her face.
+
+She was a strong girl, but a girl, notwithstanding her
+powers.  What she suddenly saw was that, as if by one movement
+of some powerful unseen hand, Rosy, who had been the centre
+of all things, had been swept out of her thought.  Her
+anger at the injustice done to Rosy had been as nothing
+before the fire which had flamed in her at the insult flung
+at the other.  And all that was undue and unbalanced.  One
+might as well look the thing straightly in the face.  Her old
+child hatred of Nigel Anstruthers had sprung up again in
+ten-fold strength.  There was, it was true, something
+abominable about him, something which made his words more
+abominable than they would have been if another man had
+uttered them--but, though it was inevitable that his method
+should rouse one, where those of one's own blood were
+concerned, it was not enough to fill one with raging flame when
+his malignity was dealing with those who were almost
+strangers.  Mount Dunstan was almost a stranger--she had met
+Lord Westholt oftener.  Would she have felt the same hot
+beat of the blood, if Lord Westholt had been concerned? 
+No, she answered herself frankly, she would not.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+A GREAT BALL
+
+A certain great ball, given yearly at Dunholm Castle, was
+one of the most notable social features of the county.  It took
+place when the house was full of its most interestingly
+distinguished guests, and, though other balls might be given at
+other times, this one was marked by a degree of greater state. 
+On several occasions the chief guests had been great personages
+indeed, and to be bidden to meet them implied a selection
+flattering in itself.  One's invitation must convey by inference
+that one was either brilliant, beautiful, or admirable, if not
+important.
+
+Nigel Anstruthers had never appeared at what the uninvited
+were wont, with derisive smiles, to call The Great Panjandrum
+Function--which was an ironic designation not
+employed by such persons as received cards bidding them to
+the festivity.  Stornham Court was not popular in the county;
+no one had yearned for the society of the Dowager Lady
+Anstruthers, even in her youth; and a not too well-favoured young
+man with an ill-favoured temper, noticeably on the lookout
+for grievances, is not an addition to one's circle.  At nineteen
+Nigel had discovered the older Lord Mount Dunstan and
+his son Tenham to be congenial acquaintances, and had been
+so often absent from home that his neighbours would have
+found social intercourse with him difficult, even if desirable. 
+Accordingly, when the county paper recorded the splendours
+of The Great Panjandrum Function--which it by no means
+mentioned by that name--the list of "Among those present "
+had not so far contained the name of Sir Nigel Anstruthers.
+
+So, on a morning a few days after his return, the master
+of Stornham turned over a card of invitation and read it
+several times before speaking.
+
+"I suppose you know what this means," he said at last to
+Rosalie, who was alone with him.
+
+"It means that we are invited to Dunholm Castle for the
+ball, doesn't it?"
+
+Her husband tossed the card aside on the table.
+
+"It means that Betty will be invited to every house where
+there is a son who must be disposed of profitably.
+
+"She is invited because she is beautiful and clever.  She
+would be invited if she had no money at all," said Rosy
+daringly.  She was actually growing daring, she thought
+sometimes.  It would not have been possible to say anything like
+this a few months ago.
+
+"Don't make silly mistakes," said Nigel.  "There are a
+good many handsome girls who receive comparatively little
+attention.  But the hounds of war are let loose, when one of
+your swollen American fortunes appears.  The obviousness of
+it `virtuously' makes me sick.  It's as vulgar--as New York."
+
+What befel next brought to Sir Nigel a shock of curious
+enlightenment, but no one was more amazed than Rosy herself. 
+She felt, when she heard her own voice, as if she must be
+rather mad.
+
+"I would rather," she said quite distinctly, "that you did
+not speak to me of New York in that way."
+
+"What!" said Anstruthers, staring at her with contempt
+which was derision.
+
+"It is my home," she answered.  "It is not proper that I
+should hear it spoken of slightingly."
+
+"Your home!  It has not taken the slightest notice of you
+for twelve years.  Your people dropped you as if you were a
+hot potato."
+
+"They have taken me up again."  Still in amazement at her own
+boldness, but somehow learning something as she went on.
+
+He walked over to her side, and stood before her.
+
+"Look here, Rosalie," he said.  "You have been taking
+lessons from your sister.  She is a beauty and young and you
+are not.  People will stand things from her they will not take
+from you.  I would stand some things myself, because it rather
+amuses a man to see a fine girl peacocking.  It's merely
+ridiculous in you, and I won't stand it--not a bit of it."
+
+It was not specially fortunate for him that the door opened
+as he was speaking, and Betty came in with her own invitation
+in her hand.  He was quick enough, however, to turn to
+greet her with a shrug of his shoulders.
+
+"I am being favoured with a little scene by my wife," he
+explained.  "She is capable of getting up excellent little
+scenes, but I daresay she does not show you that side of her
+temper."
+
+Betty took a comfortable chintz-covered, easy chair.  Her
+expression was evasively speculative.
+
+"Was it a scene I interrupted?" she said.  "Then I must
+not go away and leave you to finish it.  You were saying that
+you would not `stand' something.  What does a man do
+when he will not `stand' a thing?  It always sounds so final
+and appalling--as if he were threatening horrible things such
+as, perhaps, were a resource in feudal times.  What IS the
+resource in these dull days of law and order--and policemen?"
+
+"Is this American chaff?" he was disagreeably conscious
+that he was not wholly successful in his effort to be lofty.
+
+The frankness of Betty's smile was quite without prejudice.
+
+"Dear me, no," she said.  "It is only the unpicturesque
+result of an unfeminine knowledge of the law.  And I was
+thinking how one is limited--and yet how things are simplified
+after all."
+
+"Simplified!" disgustedly.
+
+"Yes, really.  You see, if Rosy were violent she could not
+beat you--even if she were strong enough--because you could
+ring the bell and give her into custody.  And you could not
+beat her because the same unpleasant thing would happen to
+you.  Policemen do rob things of colour, don't they?  And
+besides, when one remembers that mere vulgar law insists
+that no one can be forced to live with another person who is
+brutal or loathsome, that's simple, isn't it?  You could go
+away from Rosy," with sweet clearness, "at any moment
+you wished--as far away as you liked."
+
+"You seem to forget," still feeling that convincing loftiness was
+not easy, "that when a man leaves his wife, or she deserts him,
+it is she who is likely to be called upon to bear the onus of
+public opinion."
+
+"Would she be called upon to bear it under all circumstances?"
+
+"Damned clever woman as you are, you know that she would,
+as well as I know it."  He made an abrupt gesture with his
+hand.  "You know that what I say is true.  Women who take
+to their heels are deucedly unpopular in England."
+
+"I have not been long in England, but I have been struck
+by the prevalence of a sort of constitutional British sense of
+fair play among the people who really count.  The Dunholms,
+for instance, have it markedly.  In America it is the men
+who force women to take to their heels who are deucedly
+unpopular.  The Americans' sense of fair play is their most
+English quality.  It was brought over in ships by the first
+colonists--like the pieces of fine solid old furniture, one even
+now sees, here and there, in houses in Virginia."
+
+"But the fact remains," said Nigel, with an unpleasant
+laugh, "the fact remains, my dear girl."
+
+"The fact that does remain," said Betty, not unpleasantly
+at all, and still with her gentle air of mere unprejudiced
+speculation, "is that, if a man or woman is properly ill-
+treated--PROPERLY--not in any amateurish way--they reach
+the point of not caring in the least--nothing matters, but that
+they must get away from the horror of the unbearable thing
+--never to see or hear of it again is heaven enough to make
+anything else a thing to smile at.  But one could settle the
+other point by experimenting.  Suppose you run away from
+Rosy, and then we can see if she is cut by the county."
+
+His laugh was unpleasant again.
+
+"So long as you are with her, she will not be cut.  There
+are a number of penniless young men of family in this, as
+well as the adjoining, counties.  Do you think Mount Dunstan
+would cut her?"
+
+She looked down at the carpet thoughtfully a moment, and
+then lifted her eyes.
+
+"I do not think so," she answered.  "But I will ask him."
+
+He was startled by a sudden feeling that she might be
+capable of it.
+
+"Oh, come now," he said, "that goes beyond a joke.  You
+will not do any such absurd thing.  One does not want one's
+domestic difficulties discussed by one's neighbours."
+
+Betty opened coolly surprised eyes.
+
+"I did not understand it was a personal matter," she
+remarked.  "Where do the domestic difficulties come in?"
+
+He stared at her a few seconds with the look she did not
+like, which was less likeable at the moment, because it combined
+itself with other things.
+
+"Hang it," he muttered.  "I wish I could keep my temper as you
+can keep yours," and he turned on his heel and left the room.
+
+Rosy had not spoken.  She had sat with her hands in her
+lap, looking out of the window.  She had at first had a moment
+of terror.  She had, indeed, once uttered in her soul
+the abject cry:  "Don't make him angry, Betty--oh, don't,
+don't!"  And suddenly it had been stilled, and she had
+listened.  This was because she realised that Nigel himself was
+listening.  That made her see what she had not dared to allow
+herself to see before.  These trite things were true.  There
+were laws to protect one.  If Betty had not been dealing with
+mere truths, Nigel would have stopped her.  He
+had been supercilious, but he could not contradict her.
+
+"Betty," she said, when her sister came to her, "you said
+that to show ME things, as well as to show them to him.  I
+knew you did, and listened to every word.  It was good for
+me to hear you."
+
+"Clear-cut, unadorned facts are like bullets," said Betty. 
+"They reach home, if one's aim is good.  The shiftiest people
+cannot evade them."
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+A certain thing became evident to Betty during the time
+which elapsed between the arrival of the invitations and the
+great ball.  Despite an obvious intention to assume an amiable
+pose for the time being, Sir Nigel could not conceal a not
+quite unexplainable antipathy to one individual.  This
+individual was Mount Dunstan, whom it did not seem easy for
+him to leave alone.  He seemed to recur to him as a subject,
+without any special reason, and this somewhat puzzled Betty
+until she heard from Rosalie of his intimacy with Lord Tenham,
+which, in a measure, explained it.  The whole truth
+was that "The Lout," as he had been called, had indulged
+in frank speech in his rare intercourse with his brother and
+his friends, and had once interfered with hot young fury in
+a matter in which the pair had specially wished to avoid all
+interference.  His open scorn of their methods of entertaining
+themselves they had felt to be disgusting impudence, which
+would have been deservedly punished with a horsewhip, if the
+youngster had not been a big-muscled, clumsy oaf, with a
+dangerous eye.  Upon this footing their acquaintance had stood
+in past years, and to decide--as Sir Nigel had decided--that
+the oaf in question had begun to make his bid for splendid
+fortune under the roof of Stornham Court itself was a thing
+not to be regarded calmly.  It was more than he could stand,
+and the folly of temper, which was forever his undoing,
+betrayed him into mistakes more than once.  This girl, with
+her beauty and her wealth, he chose to regard as a sort of
+property rightfully his own.  She was his sister-in-law, at
+least;
+she was living under his roof; he had more or less the power
+to encourage or discourage such aspirants as appeared.  Upon
+the whole there was something soothing to one's vanity in
+appearing before the world as the person at present responsible
+for her.  It gave a man a certain dignity of position, and his
+chief girding at fate had always risen from the fact that he
+had not had dignity of position.  He would not be held cheap in
+this matter, at least.  But sometimes, as he looked at the girl
+he turned hot and sick, as it was driven home to him that
+he was no longer young, that he had never been good-looking,
+and that he had cut the ground from under his feet twelve
+years ago, when he had married Rosalie!  If he could have
+waited--if he could have done several other things--perhaps
+the clever acting of a part, and his power of domination
+might have given him a chance.  Even that blackguard of a
+Mount Dunstan had a better one now.  He was young, at least,
+and free--and a big strong beast.  He was forced, with bitter
+reluctance, to admit that he himself was not even particularly
+strong--of late he had felt it hideously.
+
+So he detested Mount Dunstan the more for increasing
+reasons, as he thought the matter over.  It would seem, perhaps,
+but a subtle pleasure to the normal mind, but to him there was
+pleasure--support--aggrandisement--in referring to the ill case
+of the Mount Dunstan estate, in relating illustrative
+anecdotes, in dwelling upon the hopelessness of the outlook,
+and the notable unpopularity of the man himself.  A
+confiding young lady from the States was required, he said
+on one occasion, but it would be necessary that she should be
+a young person of much simplicity, who would not be alarmed
+or chilled by the obvious.  No one would realise this more
+clearly than Mount Dunstan himself.  He said it coldly and
+casually, as if it were the simplest matter of fact.  If the
+fellow had been making himself agreeable to Betty, it was as
+well that certain points should be--as it were inadvertently
+--brought before her.
+
+Miss Vanderpoel was really rather fine, people said to each
+other afterwards, when she entered the ballroom at Dunholm
+Castle with her brother-in-law.  She bore herself as composedly
+as if she had been escorted by the most admirable
+and dignified of conservative relatives, instead of by a man who
+was more definitely disliked and disapproved of than any other
+man in the county whom decent people were likely to meet. 
+Yet, she was far too clever a girl not to realise the situation
+clearly, they said to each other.  She had arrived in England
+to find her sister a neglected wreck, her fortune squandered,
+and her existence stripped bare of even such things as one felt
+to be the mere decencies.  There was but one thing to be
+deduced from the facts which had stared her in the face.  But
+of her deductions she had said nothing whatever, which was,
+of course, remarkable in a young person.  It may be mentioned
+that, perhaps, there had been those who would not have been
+reluctant to hear what she must have had to say, and who had
+even possibly given her a delicate lead.  But the lead had never
+been taken.  One lady had even remarked that, on her part,
+she felt that a too great reserve verged upon secretiveness,
+which was not a desirable girlish quality.
+
+Of course the situation had been so much discussed that
+people were naturally on the lookout for the arrival of the
+Stornham party, as it was known that Sir Nigel had returned
+home, and would be likely to present himself with his wife
+and sister-in-law.  There was not a dowager present who did
+not know how and where he had reprehensibly spent the last
+months.  It served him quite right that the Spanish dancing
+person had coolly left him in the lurch for a younger and
+more attractive, as well as a richer man.  If it were not for
+Miss Vanderpoel, one need not pretend that one knew nothing
+about the affair--in fact, if it had not been for Miss
+Vanderpoel, he would not have received an invitation--and poor
+Lady Anstruthers would be sitting at home, still the forlorn
+little frump and invalid she had so wonderfully ceased to be
+since her sister had taken her in hand.  She was absolutely
+growing even pretty and young, and her clothes were really
+beautiful.  The whole thing was amazing.
+
+Betty, as well as Rosalie and Nigel--knew that many people
+turned undisguisedly to look at them--even to watch them
+as they came into the splendid ballroom.  It was a splendid
+ballroom and a stately one, and Lord Dunholm and Lord
+Westholt shared a certain thought when they met her, which
+was that hers was distinctly the proud young brilliance of
+presence which figured most perfectly against its background. 
+Much as people wanted to look at Sir Nigel, their eyes were
+drawn from him to Miss Vanderpoel.  After all it was she
+who made him an object of interest.  One wanted to know
+what she would do with him--how she would "carry him off." 
+How much did she know of the distaste people felt for him,
+since she would not talk or encourage talk?  The Dunholms
+could not have invited her and her sister, and have ignored
+him; but did she not guess that they would have ignored him, if
+they could? and was there not natural embarrassment in feeling
+forced to appear in pomp, as it were, under his escort?
+
+
+But no embarrassment was perceptible.  Her manner
+committed her to no recognition of a shadow of a flaw in the
+character of her companion.  It even carried a certain conviction
+with it, and the lookers-on felt the impossibility of
+suggesting any such flaw by their own manner.  For this evening,
+at least, the man must actually be treated as if he were an
+entirely unobjectionable person.  It appeared as if that was
+what the girl wanted, and intended should happen.
+
+This was what Nigel himself had begun to perceive, but
+he did not put it pleasantly.  Deucedly clever girl as she was,
+he said to himself, she saw that it would be more agreeable
+to have no nonsense talked, and no ruffling of tempers.  He
+had always been able to convey to people that the ruffling of
+his temper was a thing to be avoided, and perhaps she had
+already been sharp enough to realise this was a fact to be
+counted with.  She was sharp enough, he said to himself, to
+see anything.
+
+The function was a superb one.  The house was superb,
+the rooms of entertainment were in every proportion perfect, 
+and were quite renowned for the beauty of the space 
+they offered; the people themselves were, through centuries 
+of dignified living, so placed that intercourse with their 
+kind was an easy and delightful thing.  They need never doubt
+either their own effect, or the effect of their hospitalities. 
+Sir Nigel saw about him all the people who held enviable
+place in the county.  Some of them he had never known, some
+of them had long ceased to recall his existence.  There were
+those among them who lifted lorgnettes or stuck monocles into
+their eyes as he passed, asking each other in politely subdued
+tones who the man was who seemed to be in attendance on
+Miss Vanderpoel.  Nigel knew this and girded at it internally,
+while he made the most of his suave smile.
+
+The distinguished personage who was the chief guest was
+to be seen at the upper end of the room talking to a tall man
+with broad shoulders, who was plainly interesting him for the
+moment.  As the Stornham party passed on, this person, making his
+bow, retired, and, as he turned towards them, Sir Nigel
+recognising him, the agreeable smile was for the moment lost.
+
+"How in the name of Heaven did Mount Dunstan come
+here?" broke from him with involuntary heat.
+
+"Would it be rash to conclude," said Betty, as she
+returned the bow of a very grand old lady in black velvet
+and an imposing tiara, "that he came in response to invitation?"
+
+The very grand old lady seemed pleased to see her, and, with
+a royal little sign, called her to her side.  As Betty Vanderpoel
+was a great success with the Mrs. Weldens and old
+Dobys of village life, she was also a success among grand old
+ladies.  When she stood before them there was a delicate
+submission in her air which was suggestive of obedience to the
+dignity of their years and state.  Strongly conservative and
+rather feudal old persons were much pleased by this.  In
+the present irreverent iconoclasm of modern times, it was most
+agreeable to talk to a handsome creature who was as beautifully
+attentive as if she had been a specially perfect young
+lady-in-waiting.
+
+This one even patted Betty's hand a little, when she took
+it.  She was a great county potentate, who was known as
+Lady Alanby of Dole--her house being one of the most
+ancient and interesting in England.
+
+"I am glad to see you here to-night," she said.  "You are
+looking very nice.  But you cannot help that."
+
+Betty asked permission to present her sister and brother-in-
+law.  Lady Alanby was polite to both of them, but she gave
+Nigel a rather sharp glance through her gold pince-nez as
+she greeted him.
+
+"Janey and Mary," she said to the two girls nearest her,
+"I daresay you will kindly change your chairs and let Lady
+Anstruthers and Miss Vanderpoel sit next to me."
+
+The Ladies Jane and Mary Lithcom, who had been ordered
+about by her from their infancy, obeyed with polite smiles. 
+They were not particularly pretty girls, and were of the
+indigent noble.  Jane, who had almost overlarge blue eyes,
+sighed as she reseated herself a few chairs lower down.
+
+"It does seem beastly unfair," she said in a low voice to
+her sister, "that a girl such as that should be so awfully
+good-looking.  She ought to have a turned-up nose."
+
+"Thank you," said Mary, "I have a turned-up nose myself,
+and I've got nothing to balance it."
+
+"Oh, I didn't mean a nice turned-up nose like yours," said
+Jane; "I meant an ugly one.  Of course Lady Alanby wants
+her for Tommy."  And her manner was not resigned.
+
+"What she, or anyone else for that matter," disdainfully,
+"could want with Tommy, I don't know," replied Mary.
+
+"I do," answered Jane obstinately.  "I played cricket with 
+him when I was eight, and I've liked him ever since.  It is
+AWFUL," in a smothered outburst, "what girls like us have to
+suffer."
+
+Lady Mary turned to look at her curiously.
+
+"Jane," she said, "are you SUFFERING about Tommy?"
+
+"Yes, I am.  Oh, what a question to ask in a ballroom! 
+Do you want me to burst out crying?"
+
+"No," sharply, "look at the Prince.  Stare at that fat
+woman curtsying to him.  Stare and then wink your eyes."
+
+Lady Alanby was talking about Mount Dunstan.
+
+"Lord Dunholm has given us a lead.  He is an old friend
+of mine, and he has been talking to me about it.  It appears
+that he has been looking into things seriously.  Modern as he
+is, he rather tilts at injustices, in a quiet way.  He has
+satisfactorily convinced himself that Lord Mount Dunstan has
+been suffering for the sins of the fathers--which must be
+annoying."
+
+"Is Lord Dunholm quite sure of that?" put in Sir Nigel,
+with a suggestively civil air.
+
+Old Lady Alanby gave him an unencouraging look.
+
+"Quite," she said.  "He would be likely to be before he
+took any steps."
+
+"Ah," remarked Nigel.  "I knew Lord Tenham, you see."
+
+Lady Alanby's look was more unencouraging still.  She
+quietly and openly put up her glass and stared.  There were
+times when she had not the remotest objection to being rude
+to certain people.
+
+"I am sorry to hear that," she observed.  "There never was any
+room for mistake about Tenham.  He is not usually mentioned."
+
+"I do not think this man would be usually mentioned, if
+everything were known," said Nigel.
+
+Then an appalling thing happened.  Lady Alanby gazed
+at him a few seconds, and made no reply whatever.  She
+dropped her glass, and turned again to talk to Betty.  It was
+as if she had turned her back on him, and Sir Nigel, still
+wearing an amiable exterior, used internally some bad language.
+
+"But I was a fool to speak of Tenham," he thought.  "A great
+fool."
+
+A little later Miss Vanderpoel made her curtsy to the
+exalted guest, and was commented upon again by those who
+looked on.  It was not at all unnatural that one should find
+ones eyes following a girl who, representing a sort of royal
+power, should have the good fortune of possessing such looks
+and bearing.
+
+Remembering his child bete noir of the long legs and square,
+audacious little face, Nigel Anstruthers found himself
+restraining a slight grin as he looked on at her dancing. 
+Partners flocked about her like bees, and Lady Alanby of Dole,
+and other very grand old or middle-aged ladies all found the
+evening more interesting because they could watch her.
+
+"She is full of spirit," said Lady Alanby, "and she enjoys
+herself as a girl should.  It is a pleasure to look at her.  I
+like a girl who gets a magnificent colour and stars in her eyes
+when she dances.  It looks healthy and young."
+
+It was Tommy Miss Vanderpoel was dancing with when her
+ladyship said this.  Tommy was her grandson and a young man
+of greater rank than fortune.  He was a nice, frank, heavy
+youth, who loved a simple county life spent in tramping about
+with guns, and in friendly hobnobbing with the neighbours, and
+eating great afternoon teas with people whose jokes were easy
+to understand, and who were ready to laugh if you tried a joke
+yourself.  He liked girls, and especially he liked Jane Lithcom,
+but that was a weakness his grandmother did not at all
+encourage, and, as he danced with Betty Vanderpoel, he looked
+over her shoulder more than once at a pair of big, unhappy blue
+eyes, whose owner sat against the wall.
+
+Betty Vanderpoel herself was not thinking of Tommy.  In
+fact, during this brilliant evening she faced still further
+developments of her own strange case.  Certain new things were
+happening to her.  When she had entered the ballroom she had
+known at once who the man was who stood before the royal
+guest--she had known before he bowed low and withdrew.  And
+her recognition had brought with it a shock of joy.  For a few
+moments her throat felt hot and pulsing.  It was true--the
+things which concerned him concerned her.  All that happened
+to him suddenly became her affair, as if in some way they
+were of the same blood.  Nigel's slighting of him had
+infuriated her; that Lord Dunholm had offered him friendship
+and hospitality was a thing which seemed done to herself, and
+filled her with gratitude and affection; that he should be at
+this place, on this special occasion, swept away dark things from
+his path.  It was as if it were stated without words that a
+conservative man of the world, who knew things as they were,
+having means of reaching truths, vouched for him and placed
+his dignity and firmness at his side.
+
+And there was the gladness at the sight of him.  It was an
+overpoweringly strong thing.  She had never known anything
+like it.  She had not seen him since Nigel's return, and here he
+was, and she knew that her life quickened in her because they
+were together in the same room.  He had come to them and said
+a few courteous words, but he had soon gone away.  At first
+she wondered if it was because of Nigel, who at the time was
+making himself rather ostentatiously amiable to her.  Afterwards
+she saw him dancing, talking, being presented to people,
+being, with a tactful easiness, taken care of by his host and
+hostess, and Lord Westholt.  She was struck by the graceful
+magic with which this tactful ease surrounded him without any
+obviousness.  The Dunholms had given a lead, as Lady Alanby
+had said, and the rest were following it and ignoring intervals
+with reposeful readiness.  It was wonderfully well done. 
+Apparently there had been no past at all.  All began with this
+large young man, who, despite his Viking type, really looked
+particularly well in evening dress.  Lady Alanby held him by her
+chair for some time, openly enjoying her talk with him, and
+calling up Tommy, that they might make friends.
+
+After a while, Betty said to herself, he would come and ask
+for a dance.  But he did not come, and she danced with one
+man after another.  Westholt came to her several times and
+had more dances than one.  Why did the other not come?  Several
+times they whirled past each other, and when it occurred
+they looked--both feeling it an accident--into each other's eyes.
+
+The strong and strange thing--that which moves on its way
+as do birth and death, and the rising and setting of the sun--
+had begun to move in them.  It was no new and rare thing, but
+an ancient and common one--as common and ancient as death
+and birth themselves; and part of the law as they are.  As it
+comes to royal persons to whom one makes obeisance at their
+mere passing by, as it comes to scullery maids in royal kitchens,
+and grooms in royal stables, as it comes to ladies-in-waiting
+and the women who serve them, so it had come to these two
+who had been drawn near to each other from the opposite sides
+of the earth, and each started at the touch of it, and withdrew
+a pace in bewilderment, and some fear.
+
+"I wish," Mount Dunstan was feeling throughout the evening,
+"that her eyes had some fault in their expression--that they drew
+one less--that they drew ME less.  I am losing my head."
+
+"It would be better," Betty thought, "if I did not wish
+so much that he would come and ask me to dance with him--
+that he would not keep away so.  He is keeping away for a
+reason.  Why is he doing it?"
+
+The music swung on in lovely measures, and the dancers
+swung with it.  Sir Nigel walked dutifully through the Lancers
+once with his wife, and once with his beautiful sister-in-law.
+Lady Anstruthers, in her new bloom, had not lacked partners,
+who discovered that she was a childishly light creature who
+danced extremely well.  Everyone was kind to her, and the very
+grand old ladies, who admired Betty, were absolutely benign in
+their manner.  Betty's partners paid ingenuous court to her, and
+Sir Nigel found he had not been mistaken in his estimate of the
+dignity his position of escort and male relation gave to him.
+
+Rosy, standing for a moment looking out on the brilliancy
+and state about her, meeting Betty's eyes, laughed quiveringly.
+
+"I am in a dream," she said.
+
+"You have awakened from a dream," Betty answered.
+
+From the opposite side of the room someone was coming
+towards them, and, seeing him, Rosy smiled in welcome.
+
+"I am sure Lord Mount Dunstan is coming to ask you to dance with
+him," she said.  "Why have you not danced with him before,
+Betty?"
+
+"He has not asked me," Betty answered.  "That is the only
+reason."
+
+"Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt called at the Mount a
+few days after they met him at Stornham," Rosalie explained
+in an undertone.  "They wanted to know him.  Then it seems
+they found they liked each other.  Lady Dunholm has been
+telling me about it.  She says Lord Dunholm thanks you,
+because you said something illuminating.  That was the word
+she used--`illuminating.'  I believe you are always illuminating,
+Betty."
+
+Mount Dunstan was certainly coming to them.  How broad
+his shoulders looked in his close-fitting black coat, how well
+built his whole strong body was, and how steadily he held his
+eyes!  Here and there one sees a man or woman who is, through
+some trick of fate, by nature a compelling thing unconsciously
+demanding that one should submit to some domineering attraction. 
+One does not call it domineering, but it is so.  This
+special creature is charged unfairly with more than his or her
+single share of force.  Betty Vanderpoel thought this out as
+this "other one" came to her.  He did not use the ballroom
+formula when he spoke to her.  He said in rather a low voice:
+
+"Will you dance with me?"
+
+"Yes," she answered.
+
+Lord Dunholm and his wife agreed afterwards that so noticeable
+a pair had never before danced together in their ballroom. 
+Certainly no pair had ever been watched with quite the same
+interested curiosity.  Some onlookers thought it singular that
+they should dance together at all, some pleased themselves by
+reflecting on the fact that no other two could have represented
+with such picturesqueness the opposite poles of fate and
+circumstance.  No one attempted to deny that they were an
+extraordinarily striking-looking couple, and that one's eyes
+followed them in spite of one's self.
+
+"Taken together they produce an effect that is somehow
+rather amazing," old Lady Alanby commented.  "He is a
+magnificently built man, you know, and she is a magnificently
+built girl.  Everybody should look like that.  My impression
+would be that Adam and Eve did, but for the fact that neither of
+them had any particular character.  That affair of the apple was
+so silly.  Eve has always struck me as being the kind of woman
+who, if she lived to-day, would run up stupid bills at her
+dressmakers and be afraid to tell her husband.  That wonderful
+black head of Miss Vanderpoel's looks very nice poised near
+Mount Dunstan's dark red one."
+
+"I am glad to be dancing with him," Betty was thinking.
+"I am glad to be near him."
+
+"Will you dance this with me to the very end," asked Mount
+Dunstan--"to the very late note?"
+
+"Yes," answered Betty.
+
+He had spoken in a low but level voice--the kind of voice
+whose tone places a man and woman alone together, and wholly
+apart from all others by whomsoever they are surrounded. 
+There had been no preliminary speech and no explanation of
+the request followed.  The music was a perfect thing, the
+brilliant, lofty ballroom, the beauty of colour and sound about
+them, the jewels and fair faces, the warm breath of flowers
+in the air, the very sense of royal presence and its accompanying
+state and ceremony, seemed merely a naturally arranged
+background for the strange consciousness each held close and
+silently--knowing nothing of the mind of the other.
+
+This was what was passing through the man's mind.
+
+"This is the thing which most men experience several times during
+their lives.  It would be reason enough for all the great deeds
+and all the crimes one hears of.  It is an enormous kind of
+anguish and a fearful kind of joy.  It is scarcely to be borne,
+and yet, at this moment, I could kill myself and her, at the
+thought of losing it.  If I had begun earlier, would it have
+been easier?  No, it would not.  With me it is bound to go
+hard.  At twenty I should probably not have been able to keep
+myself from shouting it aloud, and I should not have known that
+it was only the working of the Law.  `Only!'  Good God,
+what a fool I am!  It is because it is only the Law that I cannot
+escape, and must go on to the end, grinding my teeth together
+because I cannot speak.  Oh, her smooth young cheek! 
+Oh, the deep shadows of her lashes!  And while we sway
+round and round together, I hold her slim strong body in the
+hollow of my arm."
+
+It was, quite possibly, as he thought this that Nigel
+Anstruthers, following him with his eyes as he passed, began to
+frown.  He had been watching the pair as others had, he had
+seen what others saw, and now he had an idea that he saw
+something more, and it was something which did not please him. 
+The instinct of the male bestirred itself--the curious instinct
+of resentment against another man--any other man.  And, in
+this case, Mount Dunstan was not any other man, but one for
+whom his antipathy was personal.
+
+"I won't have that," he said to himself.  "I won't have it."
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+The music rose and swelled, and then sank into soft breathing,
+as they moved in harmony together, gliding and swirling
+as they threaded their way among other couples who swirled and
+glided also, some of them light and smiling, some exchanging
+low-toned speech--perhaps saying words which, unheard by
+others, touched on deep things.  The exalted guest fell into
+momentary silence as he looked on, being a man much attracted
+by physical fineness and temperamental power and charm.  A
+girl like that would bring a great deal to a man and to the
+country he belonged to.  A great race might be founded on such
+superbness of physique and health and beauty.  Combined
+with abnormal resources, certainly no more could be asked. 
+He expressed something of the kind to Lord Dunholm, who
+stood near him in attendance.
+
+To herself Betty was saying:  "That was a strange thing
+he asked me.  It is curious that we say so little.  I should
+never know much about him.  I have no intelligence where
+he is concerned--only a strong, stupid feeling, which is not
+like a feeling of my own.  I am no longer Betty Vanderpoel--
+and I wish to go on dancing with him--on and on--to the
+last note, as he said."
+
+She felt a little hot wave run over her cheek uncomfortably,
+and the next instant the big arm tightened its clasp of her--
+for just one second--not more than one.  She did not know
+that he, himself, had seen the sudden ripple of red colour,
+and that the equally sudden contraction of the arm had been
+as unexpected to him and as involuntary as the quick wave
+itself.  It had horrified and made him angry.  He looked the
+next instant entirely stiff and cold.
+
+"He did not know it happened," Betty resolved.
+
+"The music is going to stop," said Mount Dunstan.  "I
+know the waltz.  We can get once round the room again before
+the final chord.  It was to be the last note--the very last,"
+but he said it quite rigidly, and Betty laughed.
+
+"Quite the last," she answered.
+
+The music hastened a little, and their gliding whirl became
+more rapid--a little faster--a little faster still--a running
+sweep of notes, a big, terminating harmony, and the thing was
+over.
+
+"Thank you," said Mount Dunstan.  "One will have it to
+remember."  And his tone was slightly sardonic.
+
+"Yes," Betty acquiesced politely.
+
+"Oh, not you.  Only I.  I have never waltzed before."
+
+Betty turned to look at him curiously.
+
+"Under circumstances such as these," he explained.  "I
+learned to dance at a particularly hideous boys' school in
+France.  I abhorred it.  And the trend of my life has made it
+quite easy for me to keep my twelve-year-old vow that I would
+never dance after I left the place, unless I WANTED to do it, and
+that, especially, nothing should make me waltz until certain
+agreeable conditions were fulfilled.  Waltzing I approved of
+--out of hideous schools.  I was a pig-headed, objectionable
+child.  I detested myself even, then."
+
+Betty's composure returned to her.
+
+"I am trusting," she remarked, "that I may secretly regard
+myself as one of the agreeable conditions to be fulfilled.  Do
+not dispel my hopes roughly."
+
+"I will not," he answered.  "You are, in fact, several of them."
+
+"One breathes with much greater freedom," she responded.
+
+This sort of cool nonsense was safe.  It dispelled feelings
+of tenseness, and carried them to the place where Sir Nigel
+and Lady Anstruthers awaited them.  A slight stir was
+beginning to be felt throughout the ballroom.  The royal guest
+was retiring, and soon the rest began to melt away.  The
+Anstruthers, who had a long return drive before them, were
+among those who went first.
+
+When Lady Anstruthers and her sister returned from the
+cloak room, they found Sir Nigel standing near Mount Dunstan,
+who was going also, and talking to him in an amiably
+detached manner.  Mount Dunstan, himself, did not look
+amiable, or seem to be saying much, but Sir Nigel showed
+no signs of being disturbed.
+
+"Now that you have ceased to forswear the world," he said as his
+wife approached, "I hope we shall see you at Stornham.  Your
+visits must not cease because we cannot offer you G. Selden any
+longer."
+
+He had his own reasons for giving the invitation--several
+of them.  And there was a satisfaction in letting the fellow
+know, casually, that he was not in the ridiculous position of
+being unaware of what had occurred during his absence--that
+there had been visits--and also the objectionable episode of
+the American bounder.  That the episode had been objectionable,
+he knew he had adroitly conveyed by mere tone and manner.
+
+Mount Dunstan thanked him in the usual formula, and
+then spoke to Betty.
+
+"G. Selden left us tremulous and fevered with ecstatic
+anticipation.  He carried your kind letter to Mr. Vanderpoel,
+next to his heart.  His brain seemed to whirl at the thought
+of what `the boys' would say, when he arrived with it in
+New York.  You have materialised the dream of his life!"
+
+"I have interested my father," Betty answered, with a
+brilliant smile.  "He liked the romance of the Reuben S.
+Vanderpoel who rewarded the saver of his life by unbounded
+orders for the Delkoff."
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+As their carriage drove away, Sir Nigel bent forward to
+look out of the window, and having done it, laughed a little.
+
+"Mount Dunstan does not play the game well," he remarked.
+
+It was annoying that neither Betty nor his wife inquired
+what the game in question might be, and that his temperament
+forced him into explaining without encouragement.
+
+"He should have `stood motionless with folded arms,' or
+something of the sort, and `watched her equipage until it
+was out of sight.' "
+
+"And he did not?" said Betty
+
+"He turned on his heel as soon as the door was shut."
+
+"People ought not to do such things," was her simple
+comment.  To which it seemed useless to reply.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+FOR LADY JANE
+
+There is no one thing on earth of such interest as the study
+of the laws of temperament, which impel, support, or entrap
+into folly and danger the being they rule.  As a child, not
+old enough to give a definite name to the thing she watched
+and pondered on, in child fashion, Bettina Vanderpoel had
+thought much on this subject.  As she had grown older, she
+had never been ignorant of the workings of her own temperament,
+and she had looked on for years at the laws which had wrought in
+her father's being--the laws of strength, executive capacity, 
+and that pleasure in great schemes, which is roused less 
+by a desire for gain than for a strongly-felt necessity
+for action, resulting in success.  She mentally followed
+other people on their way, sometimes asking herself how far
+the individual was to be praised or blamed for his treading
+of the path he seemed to choose.  And now there was given
+her the opportunity to study the workings of the nature of
+Nigel Anstruthers, which was a curious thing.
+
+He was not an individual to be envied.  Never was man
+more tormented by lack of power to control his special devil,
+at the right moment of time, and therefore, never was there
+one so inevitably his own frustration.  This Betty saw after
+the passing of but a few days, and wondered how far he was
+conscious or unconscious of the thing.  At times it appeared
+to her that he was in a state of unrest--that he was as a man
+wavering between lines of action, swayed at one moment by
+one thought, at another by an idea quite different, and that
+he was harried because he could not hold his own with himself.
+
+This was true.  The ball at Dunholm Castle had been
+enlightening, and had wrought some changes in his points of
+view.  Also other factors had influenced him.  In the first
+place, the changed atmosphere of Stornham, the fitness and
+luxury of his surroundings, the new dignity given to his
+position by the altered aspect of things, rendered external
+amiability more easy.  To ride about the country on a good
+horse, or drive in a smart phaeton, or suitable carriage, and to
+find that people who a year ago had passed him with the
+merest recognition, saluted him with polite intention, was, to
+a certain degree, stimulating to a vanity which had been long
+ill-fed.  The power which produced these results should, of
+course, have been in his own hands--his money-making father-
+in-law should have seen that it was his affair to provide for
+that--but since he had not done so, it was rather entertaining
+that it should be, for the present, in the hands of this
+extraordinarily good-looking girl.
+
+He had begun by merely thinking of her in this manner--
+as "this extraordinarily good-looking girl," and had not, for a
+moment, hesitated before the edifying idea of its not being
+impossible to arrange a lively flirtation with her.  She was at
+an age when, in his opinion, girlhood was poised for flight
+with adventure, and his tastes had not led him in the direction
+of youth which was fastidious.  His Riviera episode had left his
+vanity blistered and requiring some soothing application. 
+His life had worked evil with him, and he had fallen
+ill on the hands of a woman who had treated him as a shattered,
+useless thing whose day was done and with whom
+strength and bloom could not be burdened.  He had kept
+his illness a hidden secret, on his return to Stornham, his one
+desire having been to forget--even to disbelieve in it, but
+dreams of its suggestion sometimes awakened him at night with
+shudders and cold sweat.  He was hideously afraid of death and
+pain, and he had had monstrous pain--and while he had lain
+battling with it, upon his bed in the villa on the Mediterranean,
+he had been able to hear, in the garden outside, the low voices
+and laughter of the Spanish dancer and the healthy, strong
+young fool who was her new adorer.
+
+When he had found himself face to face with Betty in
+the avenue, after the first leap of annoyance, which had suddenly
+died down into perversely interested curiosity, he could
+have laughed outright at the novelty and odd unexpectedness
+of the situation.  The ill-mannered, impudently-staring, little
+New York beast had developed into THIS!  Hang it!  No man
+could guess what the embryo female creature might result in. 
+His mere shakiness of physical condition added strength to
+her attraction.  She was like a young goddess of health and
+life and fire; the very spring of her firm foot upon the moss
+beneath it was a stimulating thing to a man whose nerves
+sprung secret fears upon him.  There were sparks between the
+sweep of her lashes, but she managed to carry herself with
+the air of being as cool as a cucumber, which gave spice to
+the effort to "upset" her.  If she did not prove suitably
+amenable, there would be piquancy in getting the better of her
+--in stirring up unpleasant little things, which would make it
+easier for her to go away than remain on the spot--if one
+should end by choosing to get rid of her.  But, for the moment,
+he had no desire to get rid of her.  He wanted to see what
+she intended to do--to see the thing out, in fact.  It amused
+him to hear that Mount Dunstan was on her track.  There
+exists for persons of a certain type a pleasure full-fed by the
+mere sense of having "got even" with an opponent.  Throughout
+his life he had made a point of "getting even" with
+those who had irritatingly crossed his path, or much disliked
+him.  The working out of small or large plans to achieve this
+end had formed one of his most agreeable recreations.  He
+had long owed Mount Dunstan a debt, which he had always
+meant to pay.  He had not intended to forget the episode of
+the nice little village girl with whom Tenham and himself
+had been getting along so enormously well, when the raging
+young ass had found them out, and made an absurdly exaggerated
+scene, even going so far as threatening to smash the pair of
+them, marching off to the father and mother, and
+setting the vicar on, and then scratching together--God knows
+how--money enough to pack the lot off to America, where
+they had since done well.  Why should a man forgive another
+who had made him look like a schoolboy and a fool?  So, to
+find Mount Dunstan rushing down a steep hill into this
+thing, was edifying.  You cannot take much out of a man
+if you never encounter him.  If you meet him, you are provided
+by Heaven with opportunities.  You can find out what
+he feels most sharply, and what he will suffer most by being
+deprived of.  His impression was that there was a good deal
+to be got out of Mount Dunstan.  He was an obstinate,
+haughty devil, and just the fellow to conceal with a fury of
+pride a score of tender places in his hide.
+
+At the ball he had seen that the girl's effect had been of
+a kind which even money and good looks uncombined with
+another thing might not have produced.  And she had the
+other thing--whatsoever it might be.  He observed the way
+in which the Dunholms met and greeted her, he marked the
+glance of the royal personage, and his manner, when after
+her presentation he conversed with and detained her, he saw
+the turning of heads and exchange of remarks as she moved
+through the rooms.  Most especially, he took in the bearing
+of the very grand old ladies, led by Lady Alanby of Dole. 
+Barriers had thrown themselves down, these portentous,
+rigorous old pussycats admired her, even liked her.
+
+"Upon my word," he said to himself.  "She has a way with
+her, you know.  She is a combination of Ethel Newcome and
+Becky Sharp.  But she is more level-headed than either of them,
+There's a touch of Trix Esmond, too."
+
+The sense of the success which followed her, and the gradually-
+growing excitement of looking on at her light whirls of
+dance, the carnation of her cheek, and the laughter and pleasure
+she drew about her, had affected him in a way by which
+he was secretly a little exhilarated.  He was conscious of a
+rash desire to force his way through these laughing, vaunting
+young idiots, juggle or snatch their dances away from them,
+and seize on the girl himself.  He had not for so long a time
+been impelled by such agreeable folly that he had sometimes
+felt the stab of the thought that he was past it.  That it
+should rise in him again made him feel young.  There was
+nothing which so irritated him against Mount Dunstan as
+his own rebelling recognition of the man's youth, the strength
+of his fine body, his high-held head and clear eye.
+
+These things and others it was which swayed him, as was plain to
+Betty in the time which followed, to many changes of mood.
+
+"Are you sorry for a man who is ill and depressed," he
+asked one day, "or do you despise him?"
+
+"I am sorry."
+
+"Then be sorry for me."
+
+He had come out of the house to her as she sat on the lawn,
+under a broad, level-branched tree, and had thrown himself
+upon a rug with his hands clasped behind his head.
+
+"Are you ill?"
+
+"When I was on the Riviera I had a fall."  He lied simply. 
+"I strained some muscle or other, and it has left me
+rather lame.  Sometimes I have a good deal of pain."
+
+"I am very sorry," said Betty.  "Very."
+
+A woman who can be made sorry it is rarely impossible to
+manage.  To dwell with pathetic patience on your grievances,
+if she is weak and unintelligent, to deplore, with honest regret,
+your faults and blunders, if she is strong, are not bad ideas.
+
+He looked at her reflectively.
+
+"Yes, you are capable of being sorry," he decided.  For
+a few moments of silence his eyes rested upon the view spread
+before him.  To give the expression of dignified reflection
+was not a bad idea either.
+
+"Do you know," he said at length, "that you produce an
+extraordinary effect upon me, Betty?"
+
+She was occupying herself by adding a few stitches to one
+of Rosy's ancient strips of embroidery, and as she answered,
+she laid it flat upon her knee to consider its effect
+
+"Good or bad?" she inquired, with delicate abstraction.
+
+He turned his face towards her again--this time quickly.
+
+"Both," he answered.  "Both."
+
+His tone held the flash of a heat which he felt should have
+startled her slightly.  But apparently it did not.
+
+"I do not like `both,' " with composed lightness.  "If you
+had said that you felt yourself develop angelic qualities when
+you were near me, I should feel flattered, and swell with
+pride.  But `both' leaves me unsatisfied.  It interferes with
+the happy little conceit that one is an all-pervading, beneficent
+power.  One likes to contemplate a large picture of one's self--
+not plain, but coloured--as a wholesale reformer."
+
+"I see.  Thank you," stiffly and flushing.  "You do not
+believe me."
+
+Her effect upon him was such that, for the moment, he
+found himself choosing to believe that he was in earnest.  His
+desire to impress her with his mood had actually led to this
+result.  She ought to have been rather moved--a little fluttered,
+perhaps, at hearing that she disturbed his equilibrium.
+
+"You set yourself against me, as a child, Betty," he said. 
+"And you set yourself against me now.  You will not give
+me fair play.  You might give me fair play."  He dropped his
+voice at the last sentence, and knew it was well done.  A
+touch of hopelessness is not often lost on a woman.
+
+"What would you consider fair play?" she inquired.
+
+"It would be fair to listen to me without prejudice--to let
+me explain how it has happened that I have appeared to you
+a--a blackguard--I have no doubt you would call it--and a
+fool."  He threw out his hand in an impatient gesture--impatient
+of himself--his fate--the tricks of bad fortune which it
+implied had made of him a more erring mortal than he would
+have been if left to himself, and treated decently.
+
+"Do not put it so strongly," with conservative politeness.
+
+"I don't refuse to admit that I am handicapped by a
+devil of a temperament.  That is an inherited thing."
+
+"Ah!" said Betty.  "One of the temperaments one reads
+about--for which no one is to be blamed but one's deceased
+relatives.  After all, that is comparatively easy to deal with. 
+One can just go on doing what one wants to do--and then
+condemn one's grandparents severely."
+
+A repellent quality in her--which had also the trick of
+transforming itself into an exasperating attraction--was that
+she deprived him of the luxury he had been most tenacious
+of throughout his existence.  If the injustice of fate has failed
+to bestow upon a man fortune, good looks or brilliance, his
+exercise of the power to disturb, to enrage those who dare not
+resent, to wound and take the nonsense out of those about him,
+will, at all events, preclude the possibility of his being passed
+over as a factor not to be considered.  If to charm and bestow
+gives the sense of power, to thwart and humiliate may be
+found not wholly unsatisfying.
+
+But in her case the inadequacy of the usual methods had
+forced itself upon him.  It was as if the dart being aimed
+at her, she caught it in her hand in its flight, broke off its
+point and threw it lightly aside without comment.  Most
+women cannot resist the temptation to answer a speech containing
+a sting or a reproach.  It was part of her abnormality that
+she could let such things go by in a detached silence, which
+did not express even the germ of comment or opinion upon
+them.  This, he said, was the result of her beastly sense of
+security, which, in its turn, was the result of the atmosphere
+of wealth she had breathed since her birth.  There had been
+no obstacle which could not be removed for her, no law of
+limitation had laid its rein on her neck.  She had not been
+taught by her existence the importance of propitiating opinion. 
+Under such conditions, how was fear to be learned?  She had
+not learned it.  But for the devil in the blue between her
+lashes, he realised that he should have broken loose long ago.
+
+"I suppose I deserved that for making a stupid appeal to
+sympathy," he remarked.  "I will not do it again."
+
+If she had been the woman who can be gently goaded into
+reply, she would have made answer to this.  But she allowed
+the observation to pass, giving it free flight into space, where
+it lost itself after the annoying manner of its kind.
+
+"Have you any objection to telling me why you decided
+to come to England this year?" he inquired, with a casual
+air, after the pause which she did not fill in.
+
+The bluntness of the question did not seem to disturb her. 
+She was not sorry, in fact, that he had asked it.  She let her
+work lie upon her knee, and leaned back in her low garden
+chair, her hands resting upon its wicker arms.  She turned on
+him a clear unprejudiced gaze.
+
+"I came to see Rosy.  I have always been very fond of
+her.  I did not believe that she had forgotten how much we
+had loved her, or how much she had loved us.  I knew that
+if I could see her again I should understand why she had
+seemed to forget us."
+
+"And when you saw her, you, of course, decided that I had
+behaved, to quote my own words--like a blackguard and a
+fool."
+
+"It is, of course, very rude to say you have behaved like
+a fool, but--if you'll excuse my saying so--that is what has
+impressed me very much.  Don't you know," with a moderation,
+which singularly drove itself home, "that if you had
+been kind to her, and had made her happy, you could have
+had anything you wished for--without trouble?"
+
+This was one of the unadorned facts which are like bullets. 
+Disgustedly, he found himself veering towards an outlook
+which forced him to admit that there was probably truth in
+what she said, and he knew he heard more truth as she went on.
+
+"She would have wanted only what you wanted, and she
+would not have asked much in return.  She would not have
+asked as much as I should.  What you did was not business-
+like."  She paused a moment to give thought to it.  "You paid
+too high a price for the luxury of indulging the inherited
+temperament.  Your luxury was not to control it.  But it was a
+bad investment."
+
+"The figure of speech is rather commercial," coldly.
+
+"It is curious that most things are, as a rule.  There is
+always the parallel of profit and loss whether one sees it or
+not.  The profits are happiness and friendship--enjoyment of
+life and approbation.  If the inherited temperament supplies
+one with all one wants of such things, it cannot be called a
+loss, of course."
+
+
+"You think, however, that mine has not brought me much?"
+
+"I do not know.  It is you who know."
+
+"Well," viciously, "there HAS been a sort of luxury in it
+in lashing out with one's heels, and smashing things--and in
+knowing that people prefer to keep clear."
+
+She lifted her shoulders a little.
+
+"Then perhaps it has paid."
+
+"No," suddenly and fiercely, "damn it, it has not!"
+
+And she actually made no reply to that.
+
+"What do you mean to do?" he questioned as bluntly as
+before.  He knew she would understand what he meant.
+
+"Not much.  To see that Rosy is not unhappy any more. 
+We can prevent that.  She was out of repair--as the house
+was.  She is being rebuilt and decorated.  She knows that she
+will be taken care of."
+
+"I know her better than you do," with a laugh.  "She will
+not go away.  She is too frightened of the row it would make--
+of what I should say.  I should have plenty to say.  I can make
+her shake in her shoes."
+
+Betty let her eyes rest full upon him, and he saw that she
+was softly summing him up--quite without prejudice, merely
+in interested speculation upon the workings of type.
+
+"You are letting the inherited temperament run away with
+you at this moment," she reflected aloud--her quiet scrutiny
+almost abstracted.  "It was foolish to say that."
+
+He had known it was foolish two seconds after the words
+had left his lips.  But a temper which has been allowed to
+leap hedges, unchecked throughout life, is in peril of forming
+a habit of taking them even at such times as a leap may land
+its owner in a ditch.  This last was what her interested eyes
+were obviously saying.  It suited him best at the moment to
+try to laugh.
+
+"Don't look at me like that," he threw off.  "As if you
+were calculating that two and two make four."
+
+"No prejudice of mine can induce them to make five or
+six--or three and a half," she said.  "No prejudice of mine--
+or of yours."
+
+The two and two she was calculating with were the
+likelihoods and unlikelihoods of the inherited temperament, and
+the practical powers she could absolutely count on if difficulty
+arose with regard to Rosy.
+
+He guessed at this, and began to make calculations himself. 
+
+But there was no further conversation for them, as they
+were obliged to rise to their feet to receive visitors.  Lady
+Alanby of Dole and Sir Thomas, her grandson, were being
+brought out of the house to them by Rosalie.
+
+He went forward to meet them--his manner that of the
+graceful host.  Lady Alanby, having been welcomed by him,
+and led to the most comfortable, tree-shaded chair, found his
+bearing so elegantly chastened that she gazed at him with
+private curiosity.  To her far-seeing and highly experienced
+old mind it seemed the bearing of a man who was "up to
+something."  What special thing did he chance to be "up
+to"?  His glance certainly lurked after Miss Vanderpoel oddly. 
+Was he falling in unholy love with the girl, under his stupid
+little wife's very nose?
+
+She could not, however, give her undivided attention to him,
+as she wished to keep her eye on her grandson and--outrageously
+enough fit happened that just as tea was brought out
+and Tommy was beginning to cheer up and quite come out
+a little under the spur of the activities of handing bread and
+butter and cress sandwiches, who should appear but the two
+Lithcom girls, escorted by their aunt, Mrs. Manners, with
+whom they lived.  As they were orphans without money, if
+the Manners, who were rather well off, had not taken them
+in, they would have had to go to the workhouse, or into genteel
+amateur shops, as they were not clever enough for governesses.
+
+Mary, with her turned-up nose, looked just about as usual,
+but Jane had a new frock on which was exactly the colour
+of the big, appealing eyes, with their trick of following people
+about.  She looked a little pale and pathetic, which somehow
+gave her a specious air of being pretty, which she really was
+not at all.  The swaying young thinness of those very slight
+girls whose soft summer muslins make them look like delicate
+bags tied in the middle with fluttering ribbons, has almost
+invariably a foolish attraction for burly young men whose
+characters are chiefly marked by lack of forethought, and Lady
+Alanby saw Tommy's robust young body give a sort of jerk
+as the party of three was brought across the grass.  After
+it he pulled himself together hastily, and looked stiff and
+pink, shaking hands as if his elbow joint was out of order,
+being at once too loose and too rigid.  He began to be clumsy
+with the bread and butter, and, ceasing his talk with Miss
+Vanderpoel, fell into silence.  Why should he go on talking?
+he thought.  Miss Vanderpoel was a cracking handsome girl,
+but she was too clever for him, and he had to think of all
+sorts of new things to say when he talked to her.  And--
+well, a fellow could never imagine himself stretched out on
+the grass, puffing happily away at a pipe, with a girl like
+that sitting near him, smiling--the hot turf smelling almost
+like hay, the hot blue sky curving overhead, and both the girl
+and himself perfectly happy--chock full of joy--though neither
+of them were saying anything at all.  You could imagine it
+with some girls--you DID imagine it when you wakened early
+on a summer morning, and lay in luxurious stillness listening
+to the birds singing like mad.
+
+Lady Jane was a nicely-behaved girl, and she tried to keep
+her following blue eyes fixed on the grass, or on Lady
+Anstruthers, or Miss Vanderpoel, but there was something like
+a string, which sometimes pulled them in another direction,
+and once when this had happened--quite against her will--she
+was terrified to find Lady Alanby's glass lifted and fixed upon
+her.
+
+As Lady Alanby's opinion of Mrs. Manners was but a poor
+one, and as Mrs. Manners was stricken dumb by her combined
+dislike and awe of Lady Alanby, a slight stiffness might
+have settled upon the gathering if Betty had not made an
+effort.  She applied herself to Lady Alanby and Mrs. Manners
+at once, and ended by making them talk to each other. 
+When they left the tea table under the trees to look at the
+gardens, she walked between them, playing upon the primeval
+horticultural passions which dominate the existence of all
+respectable and normal country ladies, until the gulf between
+them was temporarily bridged.  This being achieved, she adroitly
+passed them over to Lady Anstruthers, who, Nigel observed
+with some curiosity, accepted the casual responsibility without
+manifest discomfiture.
+
+To the aching Tommy the manner in which, a few minutes
+later, he found himself standing alone with Jane Lithcom in
+a path of clipped laurels was almost bewilderingly simple. 
+At the end of the laurel walk was a pretty peep of the country,
+and Miss Vanderpoel had brought him to see it.  Nigel
+Anstruthers had been loitering behind with Jane and Mary.  As
+Miss Vanderpoel turned with him into the path, she stooped
+and picked a blossom from a clump of speedwell growing
+at the foot of a bit of wall.
+
+"Lady Jane's eyes are just the colour of this flower," she
+said.
+
+"Yes, they are," he answered, glancing down at the lovely
+little blue thing as she held it in her hand.  And then, with
+a thump of the heart, "Most people do not think she is
+pretty, but I--" quite desperately--"I DO."  His mood had
+become rash.
+
+"So do I," Betty Vanderpoel answered.
+
+Then the others joined them, and Miss Vanderpoel paused
+to talk a little--and when they went on she was with Mary
+and Nigel Anstruthers, and he was with Jane, walking slowly,
+and somehow the others melted away, turning in a perfectly
+natural manner into a side path.  Their own slow pace became
+slower.  In fact, in a few moments, they were standing quite
+still between the green walls.  Jane turned a little aside, and
+picked off some small leaves, nervously.  He saw the muslin
+on her chest lift quiveringly.
+
+"Oh, little Jane!" he said in a big, shaky whisper.  The
+following eyes incontinently brimmed over.  Some shining
+drops fell on the softness of the blue muslin.
+
+"Oh, Tommy," giving up, "it's no use--talking at all."
+
+"You mustn't think--you mustn't think--ANYTHING," he falteringly
+commanded, drawing nearer, because it was impossible not to do
+it.
+
+What he really meant, though he did not know how
+decorously to say it, was that she must not think that he could
+be moved by any tall beauty, towards the splendour of whose
+possessions his revered grandmother might be driving him.
+
+"I am not thinking anything," cried Jane in answer.  "But
+she is everything, and I am nothing.  Just look at her--and
+then look at me, Tommy."
+
+"I'll look at you as long as you'll let me," gulped Tommy,
+and he was boy enough and man enough to put a hand on each of her
+shoulders, and drown his longing in her brimming eyes.
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+Mary and Miss Vanderpoel were talking with a curious
+intimacy, in another part of the garden, where they were
+together alone, Sir Nigel having been reattached to Lady Alanby.
+
+"You have known Sir Thomas a long time?" Betty had just said.
+
+"Since we were children.  Jane reminded me at the Dunholms' ball
+that she had played cricket with him when she was eight."
+
+"They have always liked each other?" Miss Vanderpoel suggested.
+
+Mary looked up at her, and the meeting of their eyes was
+frank to revelation.  But for the clear girlish liking for
+herself she saw in Betty Vanderpoel's, Mary would have known
+her next speech to be of imbecile bluntness.  She had heard
+that Americans often had a queer, delightful understanding of
+unconventional things.  This splendid girl was understanding her.
+
+"Oh!  You SEE!" she broke out.  "You left them together on
+purpose!"
+
+"Yes, I did."  And there was a comprehension so deep in
+her look that Mary knew it was deeper than her own, and
+somehow founded on some subtler feeling than her own. 
+"When two people want so much--care so much to be
+together," Miss Vanderpoel added quite slowly--even as if the
+words rather forced themselves from her, "it seems as if the
+whole world ought to help them--everything in the world--
+the very wind, and rain, and sun, and stars--oh, things have
+no RIGHT to keep them apart."
+
+Mary stared at her, moved and fascinated.  She scarcely
+knew that she caught at her hand.
+
+"I have never been in the state that Jane is," she poured
+forth.  "And I can't understand how she can be such a fool,
+but--but we care about each other more than most girls do--
+perhaps because we have had no people.  And it's the kind
+of thing there is no use talking against, it seems.  It's killing
+the youngness in her.  If it ends miserably, it will be as if
+she had had an illness, and got up from it a faded, done-for
+spinster with a stretch of hideous years to live.  Her blue
+eyes will look like boiled gooseberries, because she will have
+cried all the colour out of them.  Oh!  You UNDERSTAND!  I
+see you do."
+
+Before she had finished both Miss Vanderpoel's hands were
+holding hers.
+
+"I do!  I do," she said.  And she did, as a year ago she
+had not known she could.  "Is it Lady Alanby?" she ventured.
+
+"Yes.  Tommy will be helplessly poor if she does not leave
+him her money.  And she won't if he makes her angry.  She
+is very determined.  She will leave it to an awful cousin if
+she gets in a rage.  And Tommy is not clever.  He could never
+earn his living.  Neither could Jane.  They could NEVER marry. 
+You CAN'T defy relatives, and marry on nothing, unless you are
+a character in a book."
+
+"Has she liked Lady Jane in the past?" Miss Vanderpoel
+asked, as if she was, mentally, rapidly going over the ground,
+that she might quite comprehend everything.
+
+"Yes.  She used to make rather a pet of her.  She didn't
+like me.  She was taken by Jane's meek, attentive, obedient
+ways.  Jane was born a sweet little affectionate worm.  Lady
+Alanby can't hate her, even now.  She just pushes her out of
+her path."
+
+"Because?" said Betty Vanderpoel.
+
+Mary prefaced her answer with a brief, half-embarrassed laugh.
+
+"Because of YOU."
+
+"Because she thinks----?"
+
+"I don't see how she can believe he has much of a chance. 
+I don't think she does--but she will never forgive him if
+he doesn't make a try at finding out whether he has one or not."
+
+"It is very businesslike," Betty made observation.
+
+Mary laughed.
+
+"We talk of American business outlook," she said, "but
+very few of us English people are dreamy idealists.  We are
+of a coolness and a daring--when we are dealing with questions
+of this sort.  I don't think you can know the thing you
+have brought here.  You descend on a dull country place,
+with your money and your looks, and you simply STAY and
+amuse yourself by doing extraordinary things, as if there was
+no London waiting for you.  Everyone knows this won't last. 
+Next season you will be presented, and have a huge success. 
+You will be whirled about in a vortex, and people will sit
+on the edge, and cast big strong lines, baited with the most
+glittering things they can get together.  You won't be able
+to get away.  Lady Alanby knows there would be no chance
+for Tommy then.  It would be too idiotic to expect it.  He
+must make his try now."
+
+Their eyes met again, and Miss Vanderpoel looked neither shocked
+nor angry, but an odd small shadow swept across her face.  Mary,
+of course, did not know that she was thinking of the thing she
+had realised so often--that it was not easy to detach one's self
+from the fact that one was Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter.  As a
+result of it here one was indecently and unwillingly disturbing
+the lives of innocent, unassuming lovers.
+
+"And so long as Sir Thomas has not tried--and found out--
+Lady Jane will be made unhappy?"
+
+"If he were to let you escape without trying, he would not
+be forgiven.  His grandmother has had her own way all her
+life."
+
+"But suppose after I went away someone else came?"
+
+Mary shook her head.
+
+"People like you don't HAPPEN in one neighbourhood twice in a
+lifetime.  I am twenty-six and you are the first I have seen."
+
+"And he will only be safe if?"
+
+Mary Lithcom nodded.
+
+"Yes--IF," she answered.  "It's silly--and frightful--but
+it is true."
+
+Miss Vanderpoel looked down on the grass a few moments,
+and then seemed to arrive at a decision.
+
+"He likes you?  You can make him understand things?"  she
+inquired.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then go and tell him that if he will come here and ask
+me a direct question, I will give him a direct answer--which
+will satisfy Lady Alanby."
+
+Lady Mary caught her breath.
+
+"Do you know, you are the most wonderful girl I ever
+saw!" she exclaimed.  "But if you only knew what I feel about
+Janie!"  And tears rushed into her eyes.
+
+"I feel just the same thing about my sister," said Miss
+Vanderpoel.  "I think Rosy and Lady Jane are rather alike."
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+When Tommy tramped across the grass towards her he was
+turning red and white by turns, and looking somewhat like
+a young man who was being marched up to a cannon's mouth. 
+It struck him that it was an American kind of thing he was
+called upon to do, and he was not an American, but British
+from the top of his closely-cropped head to the rather thick
+soles of his boots.  He was, in truth, overwhelmed by his
+sense of his inadequacy to the demands of the brilliantly
+conceived, but unheard-of situation.  Joy and terror swept over
+his being in waves.
+
+The tall, proud, wood-nymph look of her as she stood under
+a tree, waiting for him, would have struck his courage dead
+on the spot and caused him to turn and flee in anguish, if she
+had not made a little move towards him, with a heavenly,
+every-day humanness in her eyes.  The way she managed it was an
+amazing thing.  He could never have managed it at all himself.
+
+
+She came forward and gave him her hand, and really it was
+HER hand which held his own comparatively steady.
+
+"It is for Lady Jane," she said.  "That prevents it from being
+ridiculous or improper.  It is for Lady Jane.  Her eyes," with a
+soft-touched laugh, "are the colour of the blue speedwell I
+showed you.  It is the colour of babies' eyes.  And hers look as
+theirs do--as if they asked everybody not to hurt them."
+
+He actually fell upon his knee, and bending his head over
+her hand, kissed it half a dozen times with adoration.  Good
+Lord, how she SAW and KNEW!
+
+"If Jane were not Jane, and you were not YOU," the words
+rushed from him, "it would be the most outrageous--the most
+impudent thing a man ever had the cheek to do."
+
+"But it is not."  She did not draw her hand away, and
+oh, the girlish kindness of her smiling, supporting look.  "You
+came to ask me if----"
+
+"If you would marry me, Miss Vanderpoel," his head bending
+over her hand again.  "I beg your pardon, I beg your pardon. 
+Oh Lord, I do.'
+
+"I thank you for the compliment you pay me," she answered.  "I
+like you very much, Sir Thomas--and I like you just now more than
+ever--but I could not marry you.  I should not make you happy,
+and I should not be happy myself.  The truth is----" thinking a
+moment, "each of us really belongs to a different kind of person.
+
+And each of knows the fact."
+
+"God bless you," he said.  "I think you know everything
+in the world a woman can know--and remain an angel."
+
+It was an outburst of eloquence, and she took it in the
+prettiest way--with the prettiest laugh, which had in it no touch
+of mockery or disbelief in him.
+
+"What I have said is quite final--if Lady Alanby should
+inquire," she said--adding rather quickly, "Someone is coming."
+
+It pleased her to see that he did not hurry to his feet clumsily,
+but even stood upright, with a shade of boyish dignity, and did
+not release her hand before he had bent his head low over it
+again.
+
+Sir Nigel was bringing with him Lady Alanby, Mrs. Manners,
+and his wife, and when Betty met his eyes, she knew
+at once that he had not made his way to this particular
+garden without intention.  He had discovered that she was
+with Tommy, and it had entertained him to break in upon them.
+
+"I did not intend to interrupt Sir Thomas at his devotions,"
+he remarked to her after dinner.  "Accept my apologies."
+
+"It did not matter in the least, thank you," said Betty.
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+"I am glad to be able to say, Thomas, that you did not look
+an entire fool when you got up from your knees, as we came
+into the rose garden."  Thus Lady Alanby, as their carriage
+turned out of Stornham village.
+
+"I'm glad myself," Tommy answered.
+
+"What were you doing there?  Even if you were asking
+her to marry you, it was not necessary to go that far.  We
+are not in the seventeenth century.
+
+Then Tommy flushed.
+
+"I did not intend to do it.  I could not help it.  She was
+so--so nice about everything.  That girl is an angel.  I told
+her so."
+
+"Very right and proper spirit to approach her in," answered
+the old woman, watching him keenly.  "Was she angel enough
+to say she would marry you?"
+
+Tommy, for some occult reason, had the courage to stare
+back into his grandmother's eyes, quite as if he were a man,
+and not a hobbledehoy, expecting to be bullied.
+
+"She does not want me," he answered.  "And I knew she
+wouldn't.  Why should she?  I did what you ordered me to
+do, and she answered me as I knew she would.  She might
+have snubbed me, but she has such a way with her--such a
+way of saying things and understanding, that--that--well, I
+found myself on one knee, kissing her hand--as if I was being
+presented at court."
+
+Old Lady Alanby looked out on the passing landscape.
+
+"Well, you did your best," she summed the matter up at
+last, "if you went down on your knees involuntarily.  If you
+had done it on purpose, it would have been unpardonable."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+RED GODWYN
+
+Stornham Court had taken its proper position in the county
+as a place which was equal to social exchange in the matter
+of entertainment.  Sir Nigel and Lady Anstruthers had given
+a garden party, according to the decrees of the law obtaining
+in country neighbourhoods.  The curiosity to behold Miss
+Vanderpoel, and the change which had been worked in the well-
+known desolation and disrepair, precluded the possibility of the
+refusal of any invitations sent, the recipient being in his or
+her right mind, and sound in wind and limb.  That astonishing
+things had been accomplished, and that the party was a
+successful affair, could not but be accepted as truths.  Garden
+parties had been heard of, were a trifle repetitional, and
+even dull, but at this one there was real music and real dancing,
+and clever entertainments were given at intervals in a
+green-embowered little theatre, erected for the occasion.  These
+were agreeable additions to mere food and conversation, which
+were capable of palling.
+
+To the garden party the Anstruthers did not confine
+themselves.  There were dinner parties at Stornham, and they also
+were successful functions.  The guests were of those who
+make for the success of such entertainments.
+
+"I called upon Mount Dunstan this afternoon," Sir Nigel
+said one evening, before the first of these dinners.  "He might
+expect it, as one is asking him to dine.  I wish him to be asked.
+The Dunholms have taken him up so tremendously that no
+festivity seems complete without him."
+
+He had been invited to the garden party, and had appeared, but
+Betty had seen little of him.  It is easy to see little of a
+guest at an out-of-door festivity.  In assisting Rosalie to
+attend to her visitors she had been much occupied, but she had
+known that she might have seen more of him, if he had intended
+that it should be so.  He did not--for reasons of his own--intend
+that it should be so, and this she became aware of.  So she
+walked, played in the bowling green, danced and talked with
+Westholt, Tommy Alanby and others.
+
+"He does not want to talk to me.  He will not, if he can
+avoid it," was what she said to herself.
+
+She saw that he rather sought out Mary Lithcom, who was not
+accustomed to receiving special attention.  The two walked
+together, danced together, and in adjoining chairs watched the
+performance in the embowered theatre.  Lady Mary enjoyed her
+companion very much, but she wondered why he had
+attached himself to her.
+
+Betty Vanderpoel asked herself what they talked to each
+other about, and did not suspect the truth, which was that
+they talked a good deal of herself.
+
+"Have you seen much of Miss Vanderpoel?" Lady Mary had begun by
+asking.
+
+"I have SEEN her a good deal, as no doubt you have."
+
+Lady Mary's plain face expressed a somewhat touched
+reflectiveness.
+
+"Do you know," she said, "that the garden parties have
+been a different thing this whole summer, just because one
+always knew one would see her at them?"
+
+A short laugh from Mount Dunstan.
+
+"Jane and I have gone to every garden party within twenty
+miles, ever since we left the schoolroom.  And we are very
+tired of them.  But this year we have quite cheered up.  When
+we are dressing to go to something dull, we say to each other,
+`Well, at any rate, Miss Vanderpoel will be there, and we
+shall see what she has on, and how her things are made,' and
+that's something--besides the fun of watching people make
+up to her, and hearing them talk about the men who want to
+marry her, and wonder which one she will take.  She will not
+take anyone in this place," the nice turned-up nose slightly
+suggesting a derisive sniff.  "Who is there who is suitable?"
+
+Mount Dunstan laughed shortly again.
+
+"How do you know I am not an aspirant myself?" he said. 
+He had a mirthless sense of enjoyment in his own brazenness. 
+Only he himself knew how brazen the speech was.
+
+Lady Mary looked at him with entire composure.
+
+"I am quite sure you are not an aspirant for anybody.  And I
+happen to know that you dislike moneyed international marriages. 
+You are so obviously British that, even if I had not been
+told that, I should know it was true.  Miss Vanderpoel herself
+knows it is true."
+
+"Does she?"
+
+"Lady Alanby spoke of it to Sir Nigel, and I heard Sir Nigel
+tell her."
+
+"Exactly the kind of unnecessary thing he would be likely
+to repeat."  He cast the subject aside as if it were a worthless
+superfluity and went on:  "When you say there is no one suitable,
+you surely forget Lord Westholt."
+
+"Yes, it's true I forgot him for the moment.  But--" with
+a laugh--"one rather feels as if she would require a royal duke
+or something of that sort."
+
+"You think she expects that kind of thing?" rather indifferently.
+
+"She?  She doesn't think of the subject.  She simply thinks
+of other things--of Lady Anstruthers and Ughtred, of the work
+at Stornham and the village life, which gives her new emotions
+and interest.  She also thinks about being nice to people.  She
+is nicer than any girl I know."
+
+"You feel, however, she has a right to expect it?" still
+without more than a casual air of interest.
+
+"Well, what do you feel yourself?" said Lady Mary.  "Women who
+look like that--even when they are not millionairesses--
+usually marry whom they choose.  I do not believe
+that the two beautiful Miss Gunnings rolled into one would
+have made anything as undeniable as she is.  One has seen
+portraits of them.  Look at her as she stands there talking to
+Tommy and Lord Dunholm!"
+
+Internally Mount Dunstan was saying:  "I am looking at
+her, thank you," and setting his teeth a little.
+
+But Lady Mary was launched upon a subject which swept
+her along with it, and she--so to speak--ground the thing in.
+
+"Look at the turn of her head!  Look at her mouth and chin, and
+her eyes with the lashes sweeping over them when she looks down! 
+You must have noticed the effect when she lifts them suddenly to
+look at you.  It's so odd and lovely that it--it almost----"
+
+"Almost makes you jump," ended Mount Dunstan drily.
+
+She did not laugh and, in fact, her expression became rather
+sympathetically serious.
+
+"Ah," she said, "I believe you feel a sort of rebellion
+against the unfairness of the way things are dealt out.  It does
+seem unfair, of course.  It would be perfectly disgraceful--if
+she were different.  I had moments of almost hating her until
+one day not long ago she did something so bewitchingly kind
+and understanding of other people's feelings that I gave up.  It
+was clever, too," with a laugh, "clever and daring.  If she
+were a young man she would make a dashing soldier."
+
+She did not give him the details of the story, but went on
+to say in effect what she had said to Betty herself of the
+inevitable incidentalness of her stay in the country.  If she had
+not evidently come to Stornham this year with a purpose, she
+would have spent the season in London and done the usual thing. 
+Americans were generally presented promptly, if they had any
+position--sometimes when they had not.  Lady Alanby had
+heard that the fact that she was with her sister had awakened
+curiosity and people were talking about her.
+
+"Lady Alanby said in that dry way of hers that the arrival
+of an unmarried American fortune in England was becoming
+rather like the visit of an unmarried royalty.  People ask each
+other what it means and begin to arrange for it.  So far, only
+the women have come, but Lady Alanby says that is because the
+men have had no time to do anything but stay at home and
+make the fortunes.  She believes that in another generation
+there will be a male leisure class, and then it will swoop down
+too, and marry people.  She was very sharp and amusing about
+it.  She said it would help them to rid themselves of a plethora
+of wealth and keep them from bursting."
+
+She was an amiable, if unsentimental person, Mary Lithcom
+--and was, quite without ill nature, expressing the consensus
+of public opinion.  These young women came to the country
+with something practical to exchange in these days, and as
+there were men who had certain equivalents to offer, so also
+there were men who had none, and whom decency should cause
+to stand aside.  Mount Dunstan knew that when she had said,
+"Who is there who is suitable?" any shadow of a thought of
+himself as being in the running had not crossed her mind. 
+And this was not only for the reasons she had had the ready
+composure to name, but for one less conquerable.
+
+Later, having left Mary Lithcom, he decided to take a turn
+by himself.  He had done his duty as a masculine guest.  He
+had conversed with young women and old ones, had danced, visited
+gardens and greenhouses, and taken his part in all things. 
+Also he had, in fact, reached a point when a few minutes of
+solitude seemed a good thing.  He found himself turning into
+the clipped laurel walk, where Tommy Alanby had stood with
+Jane Lithcom, and he went to the end of it and stood looking
+out on the view.
+
+"Look at the turn of her head," Lady Mary had said. 
+"Look at her mouth and chin."  And he had been looking at
+them the whole afternoon, not because he had intended to do
+so, but because it was not possible to prevent himself from
+doing it.
+
+This was one of the ironies of fate.  Orthodox doctrine might
+suggest that it was to teach him that his past rebellion had
+been undue.  Orthodox doctrine was ever ready with these
+soothing little explanations.  He had raged and sulked at
+Destiny, and now he had been given something to rage for.
+
+"No one knows anything about it until it takes him by
+the throat," he was thinking, "and until it happens to a man
+he has no right to complain.  I was not starving before.  I was
+not hungering and thirsting--in sight of food and water.  I
+suppose one of the most awful things in the world is to feel this
+and know it is no use."
+
+He was not in the condition to reason calmly enough to see
+that there might be one chance in a thousand that it was of
+use.  At such times the most intelligent of men and women lose
+balance and mental perspicacity.  A certain degree of unreasoning
+madness possesses them.  They see too much and too little. 
+There were, it was true, a thousand chances against him, but
+there was one for him--the chance that selection might be on
+his side.  He had not that balance of thought left which might
+have suggested to him that he was a man young and powerful,
+and filled with an immense passion which might count for
+something.  All he saw was that he was notably in the position
+of the men whom he had privately disdained when they helped
+themselves by marriage.  Such marriages he had held were
+insults to the manhood of any man and the womanhood of any
+woman.  In such unions neither party could respect himself or
+his companion.  They must always in secret doubt each other,
+fret at themselves, feel distaste for the whole thing.  Even if a
+man loved such a woman, and the feeling was mutual, to whom
+would it occur to believe it--to see that they were not gross
+and contemptible?  To no one.  Would it have occurred to
+himself that such an extenuating circumstance was possible? 
+Certainly it would not.  Pig-headed pride and obstinacy it
+might be, but he could not yet face even the mere thought of
+it--even if his whole position had not been grotesque.  Because,
+after all, it was grotesque that he should even argue with
+himself.  She--before his eyes and the eyes of all others--the
+most desirable of women; people dinning it in one's ears that she
+was surrounded by besiegers who waited for her to hold out
+her sceptre, and he--well, what was he!  Not that his mental
+attitude was that of a meek and humble lover who felt himself
+unworthy and prostrated himself before her shrine with prayers
+--he was, on the contrary, a stout and obstinate Briton finding
+his stubbornly-held beliefs made as naught by a certain obsession
+--an intolerable longing which wakened with him in the morning,
+which sank into troubled sleep with him at night--the longing to
+see her, to speak to her, to stand near her, to breathe
+the air of her.  And possessed by this--full of the overpowering
+strength of it--was a man likely to go to a woman and say,
+"Give your life and desirableness to me; and incidentally support
+me, feed me, clothe me, keep the roof over my head, as if
+I were an impotent beggar"?
+
+"No, by God!" he said.  "If she thinks of me at all it
+shall be as a man.  No, by God, I will not sink to that!"
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+A moving touch of colour caught his eye.  It was the rose of
+a parasol seen above the laurel hedge, as someone turned into
+the walk.  He knew the colour of it and expected to see other
+parasols and hear voices.  But there was no sound, and
+unaccompanied, the wonderful rose-thing moved towards him.
+
+"The usual things are happening to me," was his thought
+as it advanced.  "I am hot and cold, and just now my heart
+leaped like a rabbit.  It would be wise to walk off, but I shall
+not do it.  I shall stay here, because I am no longer a reasoning
+being.  I suppose that a horse who refuses to back out of his
+stall when his stable is on fire feels something of the same
+thing."
+
+When she saw him she made an involuntary-looking pause,
+and then recovering herself, came forward.
+
+"I seem to have come in search of you," she said.  "You
+ought to be showing someone the view really--and so ought I."
+
+"Shall we show it to each other?" was his reply.
+
+"Yes."  And she sat down on the stone seat which had been
+placed for the comfort of view lovers.  "I am a little tired--
+just enough to feel that to slink away for a moment alone
+would be agreeable.  It IS slinking to leave Rosalie to battle
+with half the county.  But I shall only stay a few minutes."
+
+She sat still and gazed at the beautiful lands spread before
+her, but there was no stillness in her mind, neither was there
+stillness in his.  He did not look at the view, but at her, and
+he was asking himself what he should be saying to her if he
+were such a man as Westholt.  Though he had boldness enough,
+he knew that no man--even though he is free to speak the best
+and most passionate thoughts of his soul--could be sure that
+he would gain what he desired.  The good fortune of Westholt,
+or of any other, could but give him one man's fair chance. 
+
+But having that chance, he knew he should not relinquish it
+soon.  There swept back into his mind the story of the marriage
+of his ancestor, Red Godwyn, and he laughed low in spite
+of himself.
+
+Miss Vanderpoel looked up at him quickly.
+
+"Please tell me about it, if it is very amusing," she said.
+
+"I wonder if it will amuse you," was his answer.  "Do you
+like savage romance?"
+
+"Very much."
+
+It might seem a propos de rien, but he did not care in the
+least.  He wanted to hear what she would say.
+
+"An ancestor of mine--a certain Red Godwyn--was a barbarian
+immensely to my taste.  He became enamoured of rumours of the
+beauty of the daughter and heiress of his bitterest
+enemy.  In his day, when one wanted a thing, one rode forth
+with axe and spear to fight for it."
+
+"A simple and alluring method," commented Betty.  "What
+was her name?"
+
+She leaned in light ease against the stone back of her seat,
+the rose light cast by her parasol faintly flushed her.  The
+silence of their retreat seemed accentuated by its background
+of music from the gardens.  They smiled a second bravely into
+each other's eyes, then their glances became entangled, as they
+had done for a moment when they had stood together in Mount
+Dunstan park.  For one moment each had been held prisoner
+then--now it was for longer.
+
+"Alys of the Sea-Blue Eyes."
+
+Betty tried to release herself, but could not.
+
+"Sometimes the sea is grey," she said.
+
+His own eyes were still in hers.
+
+"Hers were the colour of the sea on a day when the sun shines on
+it, and there are large fleece-white clouds floating in the blue
+above.  They sparkled and were often like bluebells under water."
+
+"Bluebells under water sounds entrancing," said Betty.
+
+He caught his breath slightly.
+
+"They were--entrancing," he said.  "That was evidently
+the devil of it--saving your presence."
+
+"I have never objected to the devil," said Betty.  "He is
+an energetic, hard-working creature and paints himself an
+honest black.  Please tell me the rest."
+
+"Red Godwyn went forth, and after a bloody fight took his
+enemy's castle.  If we still lived in like simple, honest times,
+I should take Dunholm Castle in the same way.  He also took
+Alys of the Eyes and bore her away captive."
+
+"From such incidents developed the germs of the desire for
+female suffrage," Miss Vanderpoel observed gently.
+
+"The interest of the story lies in the fact that apparently
+the savage was either epicure or sentimentalist, or both.  He
+did not treat the lady ill.  He shut her in a tower chamber
+overlooking his courtyard, and after allowing her three days to
+weep, he began his barbarian wooing.  Arraying himself in
+splendour he ordered her to appear before him.  He sat upon
+the dais in his banquet hall, his retainers gathered about him--
+a great feast spread.  In archaic English we are told that the
+board groaned beneath the weight of golden trenchers and
+flagons.  Minstrels played and sang, while he displayed all
+his splendour."
+
+"They do it yet," said Miss Vanderpoel, "in London and
+New York and other places."
+
+"The next day, attended by his followers, he took her with
+him to ride over his lands.  When she returned to her tower
+chamber she had learned how powerful and great a chieftain
+he was.  She `laye softely' and was attended by many maidens,
+but she had no entertainment but to look out upon the great
+green court.  There he arranged games and trials of strength
+and skill, and she saw him bigger, stronger, and more splendid
+than any other man.  He did not even lift his eyes to her
+window.  He also sent her daily a rich gift."
+
+"How long did this go on?"
+
+"Three months.  At the end of that time he commanded
+her presence again in his banquet hall.  He told her the gates
+were opened, the drawbridge down and an escort waiting to take
+her back to her father's lands, if she would."
+
+"What did she do?"
+
+"She looked at him long--and long.  She turned proudly away--in
+the sea-blue eyes were heavy and stormy tears, which seeing----"
+
+"Ah, he saw them?" from Miss Vanderpoel.
+
+"Yes.  And seizing her in his arms caught her to his breast,
+calling for a priest to make them one within the hour.  I am
+quoting the chronicle.  I was fifteen when I read it first."
+
+"It is spirited," said Betty, "and Red Godwyn was almost
+modern in his methods."
+
+While professing composure and lightness of mood, the spell
+which works between two creatures of opposite sex when in 
+such case wrought in them and made them feel awkward and
+stiff.  When each is held apart from the other by fate, or will,
+or circumstance, the spell is a stupefying thing, deadening even
+the clearness of sight and wit.
+
+"I must slink back now," Betty said, rising.  "Will you
+slink back with me to give me countenance?  I have greatly
+liked Red Godwyn."
+
+So it occurred that when Nigel Anstruthers saw them again
+it was as they crossed the lawn together, and people looked up
+from ices and cups of tea to follow their slow progress with
+questioning or approving eyes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+THE TIDAL WAVE
+
+There was only one man to speak to, and it being the nature
+of the beast--so he harshly put it to himself--to be absolutely
+impelled to speech at such times, Mount Dunstan laid bare his
+breast to him, tearing aside all the coverings pride would have
+folded about him.  The man was, of course, Penzance, and the
+laying bare was done the evening after the story of Red Godwyn
+had been told in the laurel walk.
+
+They had driven home together in a profound silence, the
+elder man as deep in thought as the younger one.  Penzance
+was thinking that there was a calmness in having reached sixty
+and in knowing that the pain and hunger of earlier years would
+not tear one again.  And yet, he himself was not untorn by
+that which shook the man for whom his affection had grown
+year by year.  It was evidently very bad--very bad, indeed. 
+He wondered if he would speak of it, and wished he would, not
+because he himself had much to say in answer, but because he
+knew that speech would be better than hard silence.
+
+"Stay with me to-night," Mount Dunstan said, as they
+drove through the avenue to the house.  "I want you to dine
+with me and sit and talk late.  I am not sleeping well."
+
+They often dined together, and the vicar not infrequently
+slept at the Mount for mere companionship's sake.  Sometimes
+they read, sometimes went over accounts, planned economies,
+and balanced expenditures.  A chamber still called the Chaplain's
+room was always kept in readiness.  It had been used
+in long past days, when a household chaplain had sat below 
+the salt and left his patron's table before the sweets were
+served.  They dined together this night almost as silently as
+they had driven homeward, and after the meal they went and sat
+alone in the library.
+
+The huge room was never more than dimly lighted, and the
+far-off corners seemed more darkling than usual in the
+insufficient illumination of the far from brilliant lamps.  Mount
+Dunstan, after standing upon the hearth for a few minutes
+smoking a pipe, which would have compared ill with old Doby's
+Sunday splendour, left his coffee cup upon the mantel and
+began to tramp up and down--out of the dim light into the
+shadows, back out of the shadows into the poor light.
+
+"You know," he said, "what I think about most things-- you know
+what I feel."
+
+"I think I do."
+
+"You know what I feel about Englishmen who brand themselves
+as half men and marked merchandise by selling themselves
+and their houses and their blood to foreign women who
+can buy them.  You know how savage I have been at the mere
+thought of it.  And how I have sworn----"
+
+"Yes, I know what you have sworn," said Mr. Penzance.
+
+It struck him that Mount Dunstan shook and tossed his
+head rather like a bull about to charge an enemy.
+
+"You know how I have felt myself perfectly within my rights when
+I blackguarded such men and sneered at such women--taking it for
+granted that each was merchandise of his or her kind and beneath
+contempt.  I am not a foul-mouthed man, but I have used gross
+words and rough ones to describe them."
+
+"I have heard you."
+
+Mount Dunstan threw back his head with a big, harsh
+laugh.  He came out of the shadow and stood still.
+
+"Well," he said, "I am in love--as much in love as any
+lunatic ever was--with the daughter of Reuben S. Vanderpoel. 
+There you are--and there _I_ am!"
+
+"It has seemed to me," Penzance answered, "that it was
+almost inevitable."
+
+"My condition is such that it seems to ME that it would
+be inevitable in the case of any man.  When I see another man
+look at her my blood races through my veins with an awful
+fear and a wicked heat.  That will show you the point I have
+reached."  He walked over to the mantelpiece and laid his
+pipe down with a hand Penzance saw was unsteady.  "In
+turning over the pages of the volume of Life," he said, "I
+have come upon the Book of Revelations."
+
+"That is true," Penzance said.
+
+"Until one has come upon it one is an inchoate fool," Mount
+Dunstan went on.  "And afterwards one is--for a time at
+least--a sort of madman raving to one's self, either in or out of
+a straitjacket--as the case may be.  I am wearing the jacket
+--worse luck!  Do you know anything of the state of a man
+who cannot utter the most ordinary words to a woman without
+being conscious that he is making mad love to her?  This
+afternoon I found myself telling Miss Vanderpoel the story of Red
+Godwyn and Alys of the Sea-Blue Eyes.  I did not make a
+single statement having any connection with myself, but
+throughout I was calling on her to think of herself and of me
+as of those two.  I saw her in my own arms, with the tears
+of Alys on her lashes.  I was making mad love, though she
+was unconscious of my doing it."
+
+"How do you know she was unconscious?" remarked Mr.
+Penzance.  "You are a very strong man."
+
+Mount Dunstan's short laugh was even a little awful,
+because it meant so much.  He let his forehead drop a moment
+on to his arms as they rested on the mantelpiece.
+
+"Oh, my God!" he said.  But the next instant his head lifted
+itself.  "It is the mystery of the world--this thing.  A tidal
+wave gathering itself mountain high and crashing down upon one's
+helplessness might be as easily defied.  It is supposed
+to disperse, I believe.  That has been said so often that there
+must be truth in it.  In twenty or thirty or forty years one is
+told one will have got over it.  But one must live through the
+years--one must LIVE through them--and the chief feature of
+one's madness is that one is convinced that they will last
+forever."
+
+"Go on," said Mr. Penzance, because he had paused and
+stood biting his lip.  "Say all that you feel inclined to say. 
+It is the best thing you can do.  I have never gone through this
+myself, but I have seen and known the amazingness of it for
+many years.  I have seen it come and go."
+
+"Can you imagine," Mount Dunstan said, "that the most
+damnable thought of all--when a man is passing through it--
+is the possibility of its GOING?  Anything else rather than the
+knowledge that years could change or death could end it! 
+Eternity seems only to offer space for it.  One knows--but one
+does not believe.  It does something to one's brain."
+
+"No scientist, howsoever profound, has ever discovered
+what," the vicar mused aloud.
+
+"The Book of Revelations has shown to me how--how
+MAGNIFICENT life might be!"  Mount Dunstan clenched and
+unclenched his hands, his eyes flashing.  "Magnificent--that is
+the word.  To go to her on equal ground to take her hands
+and speak one's passion as one would--as her eyes answered. 
+Oh, one would know!  To bring her home to this place--having
+made it as it once was--to live with her here--to be WITH
+her as the sun rose and set and the seasons changed--with the
+joy of life filling each of them.  SHE is the joy of Life--the
+very heart of it.  You see where I am--you see!"
+
+"Yes," Penzance answered.  He saw, and bowed his head,
+and Mount Dunstan knew he wished him to continue.
+
+"Sometimes--of late--it has been too much for me and I
+have given free rein to my fancy--knowing that there could
+never be more than fancy.  I was doing it this afternoon as I
+watched her move about among the people.  And Mary Lithcom
+began to talk about her."  He smiled a grim smile. 
+"Perhaps it was an intervention of the gods to drag me down
+from my impious heights.  She was quite unconscious that she
+was driving home facts like nails--the facts that every man who
+wanted money wanted Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter--and
+that the young lady, not being dull, was not unaware of the
+obvious truth!  And that men with prizes to offer were ready
+to offer them in a proper manner.  Also that she was only a
+brilliant bird of passage, who, in a few months, would be
+caught in the dazzling net of the great world.  And that even
+Lord Westholt and Dunholm Castle were not quite what she
+might expect.  Lady Mary was sincerely interested.  She drove
+it home in her ardour.  She told me to LOOK at her--to LOOK
+at her mouth and chin and eyelashes--and to make note of
+what she stood for in a crowd of ordinary people.  I could
+have laughed aloud with rage and self-mockery."
+
+Mr. Penzance was resting his forehead on his hand, his elbow
+on his chair's arm.
+
+"This is profound unhappiness," he said.  "It is profound
+unhappiness."
+
+Mount Dunstan answered by a brusque gesture.
+
+"But it will pass away," went on Penzance, "and not as you fear
+it must," in answer to another gesture, fiercely impatient. "Not
+that way.  Some day--or night--you will stand heretogether, and
+you will tell her all you have told me.  I KNOW it will be so."
+
+"What!" Mount Dunstan cried out.  But the words had been spoken
+with such absolute conviction that he felt himself become pale.
+
+It was with the same conviction that Penzance went on.
+
+"I have spent my quiet life in thinking of the forces for
+which we find no explanation--of the causes of which we only
+see the effects.  Long ago in looking at you in one of my
+pondering moments I said to myself that YOU were of the Primeval
+Force which cannot lose its way--which sweeps a clear pathway
+for itself as it moves--and which cannot be held back.  I said
+to you just now that because you are a strong man you cannot
+be sure that a woman you are--even in spite of yourself--
+making mad love to, is unconscious that you are doing it.  You
+do not know what your strength lies in.  I do not, the woman
+does not, but we must all feel it, whether we comprehend it or
+no.  You said of this fine creature, some time since, that she
+was Life, and you have just said again something of the same
+kind. It is quite true.  She is Life, and the joy of it.  You are
+two strong forces, and you are drawing together."
+
+He rose from his chair, and going to Mount Dunstan put hishand on
+his shoulder, his fine old face singularly rapt and glowing.
+
+"She is drawing you and you are drawing her, and each is too
+strong to release the other.  I believe that to be true. 
+Both bodies and souls do it.  They are not separate things.  They
+move on their way as the stars do--they move on their way."
+
+As he spoke, Mount Dunstan's eyes looked into his fixedly.
+Then they turned aside and looked down upon the mantel
+against which he was leaning.  He aimlessly picked up his pipe
+and laid it down again.  He was paler than before, but he
+said no single word.
+
+"You think your reasons for holding aloof from her are the
+reasons of a man."  Mr. Penzance's voice sounded to him
+remote.  "They are the reasons of a man's pride--but that is not
+the strongest thing in the world.  It only imagines it is.  You
+think that you cannot go to her as a luckier man could.  You
+think nothing shall force you to speak.  Ask yourself why.  It
+is because you believe that to show your heart would be to
+place yourself in the humiliating position of a man who might
+seem to her and to the world to be a base fellow."
+
+"An impudent, pushing, base fellow," thrust in Mount Dunstan
+fiercely.  "One of a vulgar lot.  A thing fancying even
+its beggary worth buying.  What has a man--whose very name
+is hung with tattered ugliness--to offer?"
+
+Penzance's hand was still on his shoulder and his look at
+him was long.
+
+"His very pride," he said at last, "his very obstinacy and
+haughty, stubborn determination.  Those broken because the
+other feeling is the stronger and overcomes him utterly."
+
+A flush leaped to Mount Dunstan's forehead.  He set both
+elbows on the mantel and let his forehead fall on his clenched
+fists.  And the savage Briton rose in him.
+
+"No!" he said passionately.  "By God, no!"
+
+"You say that," said the older man, "because you have not
+yet reached the end of your tether.  Unhappy as you are, you
+are not unhappy enough.  Of the two, you love yourself the
+more--your pride and your stubbornness."
+
+"Yes," between his teeth.  "I suppose I retain yet a sort of
+respect--and affection--for my pride.  May God leave it to me!"
+
+Penzance felt himself curiously exalted; he knew himself
+unreasoningly passing through an oddly unpractical, uplifted
+moment, in whose impelling he singularly believed.
+
+"You are drawing her and she is drawing you," he said.
+"Perhaps you drew each other across seas.  You will stand
+here together and you will tell her of this--on this very spot."
+
+Mount Dunstan changed his position and laughed roughly, as
+if to rouse himself.  He threw out his arm in a big, uneasy
+gesture, taking in the room.
+
+"Oh, come," he said.  "You talk like a seer.  Look about
+you.  Look!  I am to bring her here!"
+
+"If it is the primeval thing she will not care.  Why should she?"
+
+"She!  Bring a life like hers to this!  Or perhaps you mean
+that her own wealth might make her surroundings becoming--
+that a man would endure that?"
+
+"If it is the primeval thing, YOU would not care.  You would
+have forgotten that you two had ever lived an hour apart."
+
+He spoke with a deep, moved gravity--almost as if he were
+speaking of the first Titan building of the earth.  Mount Dunstan
+staring at his delicate, insistent, elderly face, tried to laugh
+again--and failed because the effort seemed actually irreverent.
+It was a singular hypnotic moment, indeed.  He himself was
+hypnotised.  A flashlight of new vision blazed before him and
+left him dumb.  He took up his pipe hurriedly, and with still
+unsteady fingers began to refill it.  When it was filled he
+lighted it, and then without a word of answer left the hearth
+and began to tramp up and down the room again--out of the
+dim light into the shadows, back out of the shadows and into
+the dim light again, his brow working and his teeth holding
+hard his amber mouthpiece.
+
+The morning awakening of a normal healthy human creature
+should be a joyous thing.  After the soul's long hours of
+release from the burden of the body, its long hours spent--
+one can only say in awe at the mystery of it, "away, away"--
+in flight, perhaps, on broad, tireless wings, beating softly in
+fair, far skies, breathing pure life, to be brought back to renew
+the strength of each dawning day; after these hours of quiescence
+of limb and nerve and brain, the morning life returning
+should unseal for the body clear eyes of peace at least.  In
+time to come this will be so, when the soul's wings are
+stronger, the body more attuned to infinite law and the race a
+greater power--but as yet it often seems as though the winged
+thing came back a lagging and reluctant rebel against its fate
+and the chain which draws it back a prisoner to its toil.
+
+It had seemed so often to Mount Dunstan--oftener than
+not.  Youth should not know such awakening, he was well
+aware; but he had known it sometimes even when he had been
+a child, and since his return from his ill-starred struggle in
+America, the dull and reluctant facing of the day had become
+a habit.  Yet on the morning after his talk with his friend--
+the curious, uplifted, unpractical talk which had seemed to
+hypnotise him--he knew when he opened his eyes to the light
+that he had awakened as a man should awake--with an unreasoning
+sense of pleasure in the life and health of his own body,
+as he stretched mighty limbs, strong after the night's rest, and
+feeling that there was work to be done.  It was all unreasoning--
+there was no more to be done than on those other days
+which he had wakened to with bitterness, because they seemed
+useless and empty of any worth--but this morning the mere
+light of the sun was of use, the rustle of the small breeze in
+the leaves, the soft floating past of the white clouds, the mere
+fact that the great blind-faced, stately house was his own, that
+he could tramp far over lands which were his heritage, unfed
+though they might be, and that the very rustics who would pass
+him in the lanes were, so to speak, his own people: that he had
+name, life, even the common thing of hunger for his morning
+food--it was all of use.
+
+An alluring picture--of a certain deep, clear bathing pool in
+the park rose before him.  It had not called to him for many
+a day, and now he saw its dark blueness gleam between flags
+and green rushes in its encircling thickness of shrubs and trees.
+
+He sprang from his bed, and in a few minutes was striding
+across the grass of the park, his towels over his arm, his head
+thrown back as he drank in the freshness of the morning-
+scented air.  It was scented with dew and grass and the
+breath of waking trees and growing things; early twitters and
+thrills were to be heard here and there, insisting on morning
+joyfulness; rabbits frisked about among the fine-grassed hummocks
+of their warren and, as he passed, scuttled back into their
+holes, with a whisking of short white tails, at which he laughed
+with friendly amusement.  Cropping stags lifted their antlered
+heads, and fawns with dappled sides and immense lustrous eyes
+gazed at him without actual fear, even while they sidled closer
+to their mothers.  A skylark springing suddenly from the
+grass a few yards from his feet made him stop short once and
+stand looking upward and listening.  Who could pass by a
+skylark at five o'clock on a summer's morning--the little,
+heavenly light-heart circling and wheeling, showering down
+diamonds, showering down pearls, from its tiny pulsating,
+trilling throat?
+
+"Do you know why they sing like that?  It is because all
+but the joy of things has been kept hidden from them.  They
+knew nothing but life and flight and mating, and the gold of
+the sun.  So they sing."  That she had once said.
+
+He listened until the jewelled rain seemed to have fallen into
+his soul.  Then he went on his way smiling as he knew he had
+never smiled in his life before.  He knew it because he realised
+that he had never before felt the same vigorous, light normality
+of spirit, the same sense of being as other men.  It was as
+though something had swept a great clear space about him, and
+having room for air he breathed deep and was glad of the
+commonest gifts of being.
+
+The bathing pool had been the greatest pleasure of his
+uncared-for boyhood.  No one knew which long passed away
+Mount Dunstan had made it.  The oldest villager had told him
+that it had "allus ben there," even in his father's time.  Since
+he himself had known it he had seen that it was kept at its best.
+
+Its dark blue depths reflected in their pellucid clearness the
+water plants growing at its edge and the enclosing shrubs and
+trees.  The turf bordering it was velvet-thick and green, and a
+few flag-steps led down to the water.  Birds came there to drink
+and bathe and preen and dress their feathers.  He knew there were
+often nests in the bushes--sometimes the nests of nightingales
+who filled the soft darkness or moonlight of early June with
+the wonderfulness of nesting song.  Sometimes a straying fawn
+poked in a tender nose, and after drinking delicately stole away,
+as if it knew itself a trespasser.
+
+To undress and plunge headlong into the dark sapphire water
+was a rapturous thing.  He swam swiftly and slowly by turns,
+he floated, looking upward at heaven's blue, listening to birds'
+song and inhaling all the fragrance of the early day.  Strength
+grew in him and life pulsed as the water lapped his limbs.  He
+found himself thinking with pleasure of a long walk he intended
+to take to see a farmer he must talk to about his hop gardens;
+he found himself thinking with pleasure of other things as simple
+and common to everyday life--such things as he ordinarily
+faced merely because he must, since he could not afford an
+experienced bailiff.  He was his own bailiff, his own steward,
+merely, he had often thought, an unsuccessful farmer of half-
+starved lands.  But this morning neither he nor they seemed
+so starved, and--for no reason--there was a future of some sort.
+
+He emerged from his pool glowing, the turf feeling like
+velvet beneath his feet, a fine light in his eyes.
+
+"Yes," he said, throwing out his arms in a lordly stretch of
+physical well-being, "it might be a magnificent thing--mere
+strong living.  THIS is magnificent."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+BY THE ROADSIDE EVERYWHERE
+
+His breakfast and the talk over it with Penzance seemed good
+things.  It suddenly had become worth while to discuss the
+approaching hop harvest and the yearly influx of the hop
+pickers from London.  Yesterday the subject had appeared
+discouraging enough.  The great hop gardens of the estate had
+been in times past its most prolific source of agricultural
+revenue and the boast and wonder of the hop-growing county.
+The neglect and scant food of the lean years had cost them 
+their reputation.  Each season they had needed smaller bands
+of "hoppers," and their standard had been lowered.  It had
+been his habit to think of them gloomily, as of hopeless and
+irretrievable loss.  Because this morning, for a remote reason,
+the pulse of life beat strong in him he was taking a new view.
+Might not study of the subject, constant attention and the
+application of all available resource to one end produce
+appreciable results?  The idea presented itself in the form of a
+thing worth thinking of.
+
+"It would provide an outlook and give one work to do," he
+put it to his companion.  "To have a roof over one's head, a
+sound body, and work to do, is not so bad.  Such things form
+the whole of G. Selden's cheerful aim.  His spirit is alight
+within me.  I will walk over and talk to Bolter."
+
+Bolter was a farmer whose struggle to make ends meet was almost
+too much for him.  Holdings whose owners, either through neglect
+or lack of money, have failed to do their duty as landlords in
+the matter of repairs of farmhouses, outbuildings, fences, and
+other things, gradually fall into poor hands.  Resourceful 
+and prosperous farmers do not care to hold lands under
+unprosperous landlords.  There were farms lying vacant on the
+Mount Dunstan estate, there were others whose tenants were
+uncertain rent payers or slipshod workers or dishonest in small
+ways.  Waste or sale of the fertiliser which should have been
+given to the soil as its due, neglect in the case of things whose
+decay meant depreciation of property and expense to the landlord,
+were dishonesties.  But Mount Dunstan knew that if he
+turned out Thorn and Fittle, whom no watching could wholly
+frustrate in their tricks, Under Mount Farm and Oakfield
+Rise would stand empty for many a year.  But for his poverty
+Bolter would have been a good tenant enough.  He was in trouble
+now because, though his hops promised well, he faced difficulties
+in the matter of "pickers."  Last year he had not been able to
+pay satisfactory prices in return for labour, and as a result the
+prospect of securing good workers was an unpromising one.
+
+The hordes of men, women, and children who flock year after
+year to the hop-growing districts know each other.  They learn
+also which may be called the good neighbourhoods and which
+the bad; the gardens whose holders are considered satisfactory
+as masters, and those who are undesirable.  They know by
+experience or report where the best "huts" are provided, where
+tents are supplied, and where one must get along as one can.
+
+Generally the regular flocks are under a "captain," who gathers
+his followers each season, manages them and looks after their
+interests and their employers'.  In some cases the same captain
+brings his regiment to the same gardens year after year, and
+ends by counting himself as of the soil and almost of the
+family of his employer.  Each hard, thick-fogged winter they
+fight through in their East End courts and streets, they look
+forward to the open-air weeks spent between long, narrow
+green groves of tall garlanded poles, whose wreathings hang
+thick with fresh and pungent-scented hop clusters.  Children
+play " 'oppin" in dingy rooms and alleys, and talk to each
+other of days when the sun shone hot and birds were singing
+and flowers smelling sweet in the hedgerows; of others when
+the rain streamed down and made mud of the soft earth, and
+yet there was pleasure in the gipsying life, and high cheer
+in the fire of sticks built in the field by some bold spirit, who
+hung over it a tin kettle to boil for tea.  They never forgot
+the gentry they had caught sight of riding or driving by on
+the road, the parson who came to talk, and the occasional
+groups of ladies from the "great house" who came into the
+gardens to walk about and look at the bins and ask queer
+questions in their gentry-sounding voices.  They never knew
+anything, and they always seemed to be entertained.  Sometimes
+there were enterprising, laughing ones, who asked to be
+shown how to strip the hops into the bins, and after being
+shown played at the work for a little while, taking off their
+gloves and showing white fingers with rings on.  They always
+looked as if they had just been washed, and as if all of their
+clothes were fresh from the tub, and when anyone stood near
+them it was observable that they smelt nice.  Generally they
+gave pennies to the children before they left the garden, and
+sometimes shillings to the women.  The hop picking was, in
+fact, a wonderful blend of work and holiday combined.
+
+Mount Dunstan had liked the "hopping" from his first
+memories of it.  He could recall his sensations of welcoming a
+renewal of interesting things when, season after season, he had
+begun to mark the early stragglers on the road.  The stragglers
+were not of the class gathered under captains.  They
+were derelicts--tramps who spent their summers on the highways
+and their winters in such workhouses as would take
+them in; tinkers, who differ from the tramps only because
+sometimes they owned a rickety cart full of strange
+household goods and drunken tenth-hand perambulators piled
+with dirty bundles and babies, these last propelled by robust
+or worn-out, slatternly women, who sat by the small roadside
+fire stirring the battered pot or tending the battered
+kettle, when resting time had come and food must be cooked. 
+Gipsies there were who had cooking fires also, and hobbled
+horses cropping the grass.  Now and then appeared a grand
+one, who was rumoured to be a Lee and therefore royal, and
+who came and lived regally in a gaily painted caravan.  During
+the late summer weeks one began to see slouching figures
+tramping along the high road at intervals.  These were men who
+were old, men who were middle-aged and some who were
+young, all of them more or less dust-grimed, weather-beaten,
+or ragged.  Occasionally one was to be seen in heavy beery
+slumber under the hedgerow, or lying on the grass smoking
+lazily, or with painful thrift cobbling up a hole in a garment. 
+Such as these were drifting in early that they might be on the
+ground when pickers were wanted.  They were the forerunners
+of the regular army.
+
+On his walk to West Ways, the farm Bolter lived on, Mount
+Dunstan passed two or three of these strays.  They were the
+usual flotsam and jetsam, but on the roadside near a hop
+garden he came upon a group of an aspect so unusual that it
+attracted his attention.  Its unusualness consisted in its air of
+exceeding bustling cheerfulness.  It was a domestic group of
+the most luckless type, and ragged, dirty, and worn by an
+evidently long tramp, might well have been expected to look
+forlorn, discouraged, and out of spirits.  A slouching father of
+five children, one plainly but a few weeks old, and slung in a
+dirty shawl at its mother's breast, an unhealthy looking slattern
+mother, two ancient perambulators, one piled with dingy bundles
+and cooking utensils, the seven-year-old eldest girl unpacking
+things and keeping an eye at the same time on the two
+youngest, who were neither of them old enough to be steady
+on their feet, the six-year-old gleefully aiding the slouching
+father to build the wayside fire.  The mother sat upon the
+grass nursing her baby and staring about her with an expression
+at once stupefied and illuminated by some temporary bliss. 
+Even the slouching father was grinning, as if good luck had
+befallen him, and the two youngest were tumbling about with
+squeals of good cheer.  This was not the humour in which such
+a group usually dropped wearily on the grass at the wayside
+to eat its meagre and uninviting meal and rest its dragging
+limbs.  As he drew near, Mount Dunstan saw that at the woman's
+side there stood a basket full of food and a can full of milk.
+
+Ordinarily he would have passed on, but, perhaps because of
+the human glow the morning had brought him, he stopped and spoke.
+
+"Have you come for the hopping?" he asked.
+
+The man touched his forehead, apparently not conscious that
+the grin was yet on his face.
+
+"Yes, sir," he answered.
+
+"How far have you walked?"
+
+"A good fifty miles since we started, sir.  It took us a good
+bit.  We was pretty done up when we stopped here.  But
+we've 'ad a wonderful piece of good luck."  And his grin
+broadened immensely.
+
+"I am glad to hear that," said Mount Dunstan.  The good
+luck was plainly of a nature to have excited them greatly. 
+Chance good luck did not happen to people like themselves. 
+They were in the state of mind which in their class can only
+be relieved by talk.  The woman broke in, her weak mouth
+and chin quite unsteady.
+
+"Seems like it can't be true, sir," she said.  "I'd only just
+come out of the Union--after this one," signifying the new
+baby at her breast.  "I wasn't fit to drag along day after
+day.  We 'ad to stop 'ere 'cos I was near fainting away."
+
+"She looked fair white when she sat down," put in the man. 
+"Like she was goin' off."
+
+"And that very minute," said the woman, "a young lady
+came by on 'orseback, an' the minute she sees me she stops her
+'orse an' gets down."
+
+"I never seen nothing like the quick way she done it," said
+the husband.  "Sharp, like she was a soldier under order. 
+Down an' give the bridle to the groom an' comes over"
+
+"And kneels down," the woman took him up, "right by me an' says,
+`What's the matter?  What can I do?' an' finds out in two minutes
+an' sends to the farm for some brandy an' all this basketful of
+stuff," jerking her head towards the treasure at her side.  "An'
+gives 'IM," with another jerk towards her mate, "money enough to
+'elp us along till I'm fair on my feet.  That quick it was--that
+quick," passing her hand over her forehead, "as if it wasn't for
+the basket," with a nervous, half-hysteric giggle, "I wouldn't
+believe but what it was a dream--I wouldn't."
+
+"She was a very kind young lady," said Mount Dunstan,
+"and you were in luck."
+
+He gave a few coppers to the children and strode on his way.  The
+glow was hot in his heart, and he held his head high.
+
+"She has gone by," he said.  "She has gone by."
+
+He knew he should find her at West Ways Farm, and he
+did so.  Slim and straight as a young birch tree, and elate with
+her ride in the morning air, she stood silhouetted in her black
+habit against the ancient whitewashed brick porch as she talked
+to Bolter.
+
+"I have been drinking a glass of milk and asking questions
+about hops," she said, giving him her hand bare of glove. 
+"Until this year I have never seen a hop garden or a hop picker."
+
+After the exchange of a few words Bolter respectfully melted
+away and left them together.
+
+"It was such a wonderful day that I wanted to be out
+under the sky for a long time--to ride a long way," she
+explained.  "I have been looking at hop gardens as I rode.  I
+have watched them all the summer--from the time when there
+was only a little thing with two or three pale green leaves
+looking imploringly all the way up to the top of each immensely
+tall hop pole, from its place in the earth at the bottom of it--
+as if it was saying over and over again, under its breath, `Can
+I get up there?  Can I get up?  Can I do it in time?  Can
+I do it in time?'  Yes, that was what they were saying, the
+little bold things.  I have watched them ever since, putting out
+tendrils and taking hold of the poles and pulling and climbing
+like little acrobats.  And curling round and unfolding leaves
+and more leaves, until at last they threw them out as if they
+were beginning to boast that they could climb up into the blue
+of the sky if the summer were long enough.  And now, look
+at them!" her hand waved towards the great gardens.  "Forests
+of them, cool green pathways and avenues with leaf canopies
+over them."
+
+"You have seen it all," he said.  "You do see things, don't
+you?  A few hundred yards down the road I passed something
+you had seen.  I knew it was you who had seen it, though the
+poor wretches had not heard your name."
+
+She hesitated a moment, then stooped down and took up in
+her hand a bit of pebbled earth from the pathway.  There was 
+storm in the blue of her eyes as she held it out for him to
+look at as it lay on the bare rose-flesh of her palm.
+
+"See," she said, "see, it is like that--what we give.  It is
+like that."  And she tossed the earth away.
+
+"It does not seem like that to those others."
+
+"No, thank God, it does not.  But to one's self it is the mere
+luxury of self-indulgence, and the realisation of it sometimes
+tempts one to be even a trifle morbid.  Don't you see," a
+sudden thrill in her voice startled him, "they are on the
+roadside everywhere all over the world."
+
+"Yes.  All over the world."
+
+"Once when I was a child of ten I read a magazine article
+about the suffering millions and the monstrously rich, who were
+obviously to blame for every starved sob and cry.  It almost
+drove me out of my childish senses.  I went to my father and
+threw myself into his arms in a violent fit of crying.  I clung
+to him and sobbed out, `Let us give it all away; let us give
+it all away and be like other people!' "
+
+"What did he say?"
+
+"He said we could never be quite like other people.  We
+had a certain load to carry along the highway.  It was the
+thing the whole world wanted and which we ourselves wanted
+as much as the rest, and we could not sanely throw it away.  It
+was my first lesson in political economy and I abhorred it.  I
+was a passionate child and beat furiously against the stone walls
+enclosing present suffering.  It was horrible to know that they
+could not be torn down.  I cried out, `When I see anyone who
+is miserable by the roadside I shall stop and give him everything
+he wants--everything!'  I was ten years old, and thought
+it could be done."
+
+"But you stop by the roadside even now."
+
+"Yes.  That one can do."
+
+"You are two strong creatures and you draw each other,"
+Penzance had said.  "Perhaps you drew each other across seas.
+Who knows?"
+
+Coming to West Ways on a chance errand he had, as it
+were, found her awaiting him on the threshold.  On her part
+she had certainly not anticipated seeing him there, but--when
+one rides far afield in the sun there are roads towards which
+one turns as if answering a summoning call, and as her horse
+had obeyed a certain touch of the rein at a certain point her
+cheek had felt momentarily hot.
+
+Until later, when the "picking" had fairly begun, the kilns
+would not be at work; but there was some interest even now
+in going over the ground for the first time.
+
+"I have never been inside an oast house," she said; "Bolter
+is going to show me his, and explain technicalities."
+
+"May I come with you?" he asked.
+
+There was a change in him.  Something had lighted in his
+eyes since the day before, when he had told her his story of
+Red Godwyn.  She wondered what it was.  They went together
+over the place, escorted by Bolter.  They looked into
+the great circular ovens, on whose floors the hops would be
+laid for drying, they mounted ladder-like steps to the upper
+room where, when dried, the same hops would lie in soft, light
+piles, until pushed with wooden shovels into the long "pokes"
+to be pressed and packed into a solid marketable mass.  Bolter
+was allowed to explain the technicalities, but it was plain that
+Mount Dunstan was familiar with all of them, and it was he
+who, with a sentence here and there, gave her the colour of
+things.
+
+"When it is being done there is nearly always outside a
+touch of the sharp sweetness of early autumn," he said "The
+sun slanting through the little window falls on the pale yellow
+heaps, and there is a pungent scent of hops in the air which is
+rather intoxicating."
+
+"I am coming later to see the entire process," she answered.
+
+It was a mere matter of seeing common things together and
+exchanging common speech concerning them, but each was so
+strongly conscious of the other that no sentence could seem
+wholly impersonal.  There are times when the whole world is
+personal to a mood whose intensity seems a reason for all
+things.  Words are of small moment when the mere sound
+of a voice makes an unreasonable joy
+
+"There was that touch of sharp autumn sweetness in the
+air yesterday morning," she said.  "And the chaplets of briony
+berries that look as if they had been thrown over the hedges
+are beginning to change to scarlet here and there.  The wild
+rose-haws are reddening, and so are the clusters of berries on
+the thorn trees and bushes."
+
+"There are millions of them," Mount Dunstan said, "and
+in a few weeks' time they will look like bunches of crimson
+coral.  When the sun shines on them they will be wonderful
+to see."
+
+What was there in such speeches as these to draw any two
+nearer and nearer to each other as they walked side by side--
+to fill the morning air with an intensity of life, to seem to
+cause the world to drop away and become as nothing?  As
+they had been isolated during their waltz in the crowded
+ballroom at Dunholm Castle, so they were isolated now.  When
+they stood in the narrow green groves of the hop garden, talking
+simply of the placing of the bins and the stripping and
+measuring of the vines, there might have been no human thing
+within a hundred miles--within a thousand.  For the first
+time his height and strength conveyed to her an impression of
+physical beauty.  His walk and bearing gave her pleasure. 
+When he turned his red-brown eyes upon her suddenly she
+was conscious that she liked their colour, their shape, the power
+of the look in them.  On his part, he--for the twentieth time--
+found himself newly moved by the dower nature had bestowed
+on her.  Had the world ever held before a woman creature so
+much to be longed for?--abnormal wealth, New York and Fifth
+Avenue notwithstanding, a man could only think of folding
+arms round her and whispering in her lovely ear--follies, oaths,
+prayers, gratitude.
+
+And yet as they went about together there was growing in
+Betty Vanderpoel's mind a certain realisation.  It grew in
+spite of the recognition of the change in him--the new thing
+lighted in his eyes.  Whatsoever he felt--if he felt anything--
+he would never allow himself speech.  How could he?  In
+his place she could not speak herself.  Because he was the
+strong thing which drew her thoughts, he would not come to
+any woman only to cast at her feet a burden which, in the
+nature of things, she must take up.  And suddenly she
+comprehended that the mere obstinate Briton in him--even apart
+from greater things--had an immense attraction for her.  As
+she liked now the red-brown colour of his eyes and saw beauty
+in his rugged features, so she liked his British stubbornness and
+the pride which would not be beaten.
+
+"It is the unconquerable thing, which leads them in their
+battles and makes them bear any horror rather than give in. 
+They have taken half the world with it; they are like bulldogs
+and lions," she thought.  "And--and I am glorying in it."
+
+"Do you know," said Mount Dunstan, "that sometimes you
+suddenly fling out the most magnificent flag of colour--as if
+some splendid flame of thought had sent up a blaze?"
+
+"I hope it is not a habit," she answered.  "When one has a
+splendid flare of thought one should be modest about it."
+
+What was there worth recording in the whole hour they spent
+together?  Outwardly there had only been a chance meeting and a
+mere passing by.  But each left something with the other and each
+learned something; and the record made was deep.
+
+At last she was on her horse again, on the road outside the
+white gate.
+
+"This morning has been so much to the good," he said.  "I
+had thought that perhaps we might scarcely meet again this
+year.  I shall become absorbed in hops and you will no doubt
+go away.  You will make visits or go to the Riviera--or to
+New York for the winter?"
+
+"I do not know yet.  But at least I shall stay to watch the
+thorn trees load themselves with coral."  To herself she was
+saying:  "He means to keep away.  I shall not see him."
+
+As she rode off Mount Dunstan stood for a few moments,
+not moving from his place.  At a short distance from the
+farmhouse gate a side lane opened upon the highway, and as
+she cantered in its direction a horseman turned in from it--
+a man who was young and well dressed and who sat well a
+spirited animal.  He came out upon the road almost face to
+face with Miss Vanderpoel, and from where he stood Mount
+Dunstan could see his delighted smile as he lifted his hat in
+salute.  It was Lord Westholt, and what more natural than
+that after an exchange of greetings the two should ride
+together on their way!  For nearly three miles their homeward
+road would be the same.
+
+But in a breath's space Mount Dunstan realised a certain
+truth--a simple, elemental thing.  All the exaltation of the
+morning swooped and fell as a bird seems to swoop and fall
+through space.  It was all over and done with, and he understood
+it.  His normal awakening in the morning, the physical
+and mental elation of the first clear hours, the spring of his
+foot as he had trod the road, had all had but one meaning. 
+In some occult way the hypnotic talk of the night before had
+formed itself into a reality, fantastic and unreasoning as it had
+been.  Some insistent inner consciousness had seized upon and
+believed it in spite of him and had set all his waking being in
+tune to it.  That was the explanation of his undue spirits and
+hope.  If Penzance had spoken a truth he would have had a
+natural, sane right to feel all this and more.  But the truth
+was that he, in his guise--was one of those who are "on the
+roadside everywhere--all over the world."  Poetically figurative
+as the thing sounded, it was prosaic fact.
+
+So, still hearing the distant sounds of the hoofs beating in
+cheerful diminuendo on the roadway, he turned about and went
+back to talk to Bolter.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+CLOSED CORRIDORS
+
+To spend one's days perforce in an enormous house alone is a
+thing likely to play unholy tricks with a man's mind and lead
+it to gloomy workings.  To know the existence of a hundred
+or so of closed doors shut on the darkness of unoccupied rooms;
+to be conscious of flights of unmounted stairs, of stretches of
+untrodden corridors, of unending walls, from which the
+pictured eyes of long dead men and women stare, as if seeing
+things which human eyes behold not--is an eerie and unwholesome
+thing.  Mount Dunstan slept in a large four-post bed in
+a chamber in which he might have died or been murdered a
+score of times without being able to communicate with the
+remote servants' quarters below stairs, where lay the one man
+and one woman who attended him.  When he came late to his
+room and prepared for sleep by the light of two flickering
+candles the silence of the dead in tombs was about him; but it
+was only a more profound and insistent thing than the silence
+of the day, because it was the silence of the night, which is a
+presence.  He used to tell himself with secret smiles at the fact
+that at certain times the fantasy was half believable--that there
+were things which walked about softly at night--things which
+did not want to be dead.  He himself had picked them out
+from among the pictures in the gallery--pretty, light, petulant
+women; adventurous-eyed, full-blooded, eager men.  His theory
+was that they hated their stone coffins, and fought their way
+back through the grey mists to try to talk and make love and
+to be seen of warm things which were alive.  But it was not
+to be done, because they had no bodies and no voices, and when
+they beat upon closed doors they would not open.  Still they
+came back--came back.  And sometimes there was a rustle and
+a sweep through the air in a passage, or a creak, or a sense of
+waiting which was almost a sound.
+
+"Perhaps some of them have gone when they have been
+as I am," he had said one black night, when he had sat in
+his room staring at the floor.  "If a man was dragged out when
+he had not LIVED a day, he would come back I should come
+back if--God!  A man COULD not be dragged away--like THIS!"
+
+And to sit alone and think of it was an awful and a lonely
+thing--a lonely thing.
+
+But loneliness was nothing new, only that in these months
+his had strangely intensified itself.  This, though he was not
+aware of it, was because the soul and body which were the
+completing parts of him were within reach--and without it. 
+When he went down to breakfast he sat singly at his table,
+round which twenty people might have laughed and talked. 
+Between the dining-room and the library he spent his days
+when he was not out of doors.  Since he could not afford
+servants, the many other rooms must be kept closed.  It was a
+ghastly and melancholy thing to make, as he must sometimes,
+a sort of precautionary visit to the state apartments.  He was
+the last Mount Dunstan, and he would never see them opened
+again for use, but so long as he lived under the roof he might
+by prevision check, in a measure, the too rapid encroachments
+of decay.  To have a leak stopped here, a nail driven or a
+support put there, seemed decent things to do.
+
+"Whom am I doing it for?" he said to Mr. Penzance.  "I
+am doing it for myself--because I cannot help it. The place
+seems to me like some gorgeous old warrior come to the end of
+his days It has stood the war of things for century after
+century--the war of things.  It is going now I am all that is
+left to it.  It is all I have.  So I patch it up when I can
+afford it, with a crutch or a splint and a bandage."
+
+Late in the afternoon of the day on which Miss Vanderpoel
+rode away from West Ways with Lord Westholt, a stealthy
+and darkly purple cloud rose, lifting its ominous bulk against
+a chrysoprase and pink horizon.  It was the kind of cloud
+which speaks of but one thing to those who watch clouds, or
+even casually consider them.  So Lady Anstruthers felt some
+surprise when she saw Sir Nigel mount his horse before the
+stone steps and ride away, as it were, into the very heart of
+the coming storm.
+
+"Nigel will be caught in the rain," she said to her sister. 
+"I wonder why he goes out now.  It would be better to wait
+until to-morrow."
+
+But Sir Nigel did not think so.  He had calculated matters
+with some nicety.  He was not exactly on such terms with
+Mount Dunstan as would make a casual call seem an entirely
+natural thing, and he wished to drop in upon him for a casual
+call and in an unpremeditated manner.  He meant to reach
+the Mount about the time the storm broke, under which
+circumstance nothing could bear more lightly an air of being
+unpremeditated than to take refuge in a chance passing.
+
+Mount Dunstan was in the library.  He had sat smoking
+his pipe while he watched the purple cloud roll up and spread
+itself, blotting out the chrysoprase and pink and blue, and when
+the branches of the trees began to toss about he had looked on
+with pleasure as the rush of big rain drops came down and
+pelted things.  It was a fine storm, and there were some imposing
+claps of thunder and jagged flashes of lightning.  As one
+splendid rattle shook the air he was surprised to hear a
+summons at the great hall door.  Who on earth could be turning
+up at this time?  His man Reeve announced the arrival a few
+moments later, and it was Sir Nigel Anstruthers.  He had, he
+explained, been riding through the village when the deluge
+descended, and it had occurred to him to turn in at the park
+gates and ask a temporary shelter.  Mount Dunstan received
+him with sufficient courtesy.  His appearance was not a thing
+to rejoice over, but it could be endured.  Whisky and soda and
+a smoke would serve to pass the hour, if the storm lasted so
+long.
+
+Conversation was not the easiest thing in the world under
+the circumstances, but Sir Nigel led the way steadily after
+he had taken his seat and accepted the hospitalities offered. 
+What a place it was--this!  He had been struck for the hundredth
+time with the impressiveness of the mass of it, the sweep
+of the park and the splendid grouping of the timber, as he had
+ridden up the avenue.  There was no other place like it in the
+county.  Was there another like it in England?
+
+"Not in its case, I hope," Mount Dunstan said.
+
+There were a few seconds of silence.  The rain poured down
+in splashing sheets and was swept in rattling gusts against the
+window panes.
+
+"What the place needs is--an heiress," Anstruthers observed
+in the tone of a practical man.  "I believe I have heard that
+your views of things are such that she should preferably NOT
+be an American."
+
+Mount Dunstan did not smile, though he slightly showed his
+teeth.
+
+"When I am driven to the wall," he answered, "I may not
+be fastidious as to nationality."
+
+Nigel Anstruthers' manner was not a bad one.  He chose
+that tone of casual openness which, while it does not wholly
+commit itself, may be regarded as suggestive of the amiable half
+confidence of speeches made as "man to man."
+
+"My own opportunity of studying the genus American heiress
+within my own gates is a first-class one.  I find that it knows
+what it wants and that its intention is to get it."  A short
+laugh broke from him as he flicked the ash from his cigar on
+to the small bronze receptacle at his elbow.  "It is not many
+years since it would have been difficult for a girl to be frank
+enough to say, `When I marry I shall ask something in exchange
+for what I have to give.' "
+
+"There are not many who have as much to give," said
+Mount Dunstan coolly.
+
+"True," with a slight shrug.  "You are thinking that men
+are glad enough to take a girl like that--even one who has not
+a shape like Diana's and eyes like the sea.  Yes, by George,"
+softly, and narrowing his lids, "she IS a handsome creature."
+
+Mount Dunstan did not attempt to refute the statement, and
+Anstruthers laughed low again.
+
+"It is an asset she knows the value of quite clearly.  That
+is the interesting part of it.  She has inherited the far-seeing
+commercial mind.  She does not object to admitting it.  She
+educated herself in delightful cold blood that she might be
+prepared for the largest prize appearing upon the horizon.  She
+held things in view when she was a child at school, and obviously
+attacked her French, German, and Italian conjugations
+with a twelve-year-old eye on the future."
+
+Mount Dunstan leaning back carelessly in his chair, laughed--
+as it seemed--with him.  Internally he was saying that the man
+was a liar who might always be trusted to lie, but he knew with
+shamed fury that the lies were doing something to his
+soul--rolling dark vapours over it--stinging him, dragging away
+props, and making him feel they had been foolish things to lean
+on.  This can always be done with a man in love who has slight
+foundation for hope.  For some mysterious and occult reason
+civilisation has elected to treat the strange and great passion
+as if it were an unholy and indecent thing, whose dominion over
+him proper social training prevents any man from admitting
+openly.  In passing through its cruelest phases he must bear
+himself as if he were immune, and this being the custom, he may
+be called upon to endure much without the relief of striking out
+with manly blows.  An enemy guessing his case and possessing the
+infernal gift whose joy is to dishearten and do hurt with
+courteous despitefulness, may plant a poisoned arrow here and
+there with neatness and fine touch, while his bound victim can,
+with decency, neither start, nor utter brave howls, nor guard
+himself, but must sit still and listen, hospitably supplying
+smoke and drink and being careful not to make an ass of himself.
+
+Therefore Mount Dunstan pushed the cigars nearer to his
+visitor and waved his hand hospitably towards the whisky and
+soda.  There was no reason, in fact, why Anstruthers--or any
+one indeed, but Penzance, should suspect that he had become
+somewhat mad in secret.  The man's talk was marked merely
+by the lightly disparaging malice which was rarely to be missed
+from any speech of his which touched on others.  Yet it might
+have been a thing arranged beforehand, to suggest adroitly
+either lies or truth which would make a man see every
+sickeningly good reason for feeling that in this contest he did
+not count for a man at all.
+
+"It has all been pretty obvious," said Sir Nigel.  "There
+is a sort of cynicism in the openness of the siege.  My
+impression is that almost every youngster who has met her has
+taken a shot.  Tommy Alanby scrambling up from his knees in one
+of the rose-gardens was a satisfying sight.  His much-talked-of-
+passion for Jane Lithcom was temporarily in abeyance."
+
+The rain swirled in a torrent against the window, and
+casually glancing outside at the tossing gardens he went on.
+
+"She is enjoying herself.  Why not?  She has the spirit of
+the huntress.  I don't think she talks nonsense about friendship
+to the captives of her bow and spear.  She knows she can
+always get what she wants.  A girl like that MUST have an
+arrogance of mind.  And she is not a young saint.  She is one
+of the women born with THE LOOK in her eyes.  I own I should
+not like to be in the place of any primeval poor brute who
+really went mad over her--and counted her millions as so much
+dirt."
+
+Mount Dunstan answered with a shrug of his big shoulders:
+
+"Apparently he would seem as remote from the reason of
+to-day as the men who lived on the land when Hengist and
+Horsa came--or when Caesar landed at Deal."
+
+"He would seem as remote to her," with a shrug also. 
+"I should not like to contend that his point of view would not
+interest her or that she would particularly discourage him.  Her
+eyes would call him--without malice or intention, no doubt, but
+your early Briton ceorl or earl would be as well understood
+by her.  Your New York beauty who has lived in the market
+place knows principally the prices of things."
+
+He was not ill pleased with himself.  He was putting it
+well and getting rather even with her.  If this fellow with his
+shut mouth had a sore spot hidden anywhere he was giving him
+"to think."  And he would find himself thinking, while,
+whatsoever he thought, he would be obliged to continue to keep
+his ugly mouth shut.  The great idea was to say things WITHOUT
+saying them, to set your hearer's mind to saying them for you.
+
+"What strikes one most is a sort of commercial brilliance
+in her," taking up his thread again after a smilingly reflective
+pause.  "It quite exhilarates one by its novelty.  There's spice
+in it.  We English have not a look-in when we are dealing
+with Americans, and yet France calls us a nation of shop-
+keepers.  My impression is that their women take little
+inventories of every house they enter, of every man they meet.  I
+heard her once speaking to my wife about this place, as if she
+had lived in it.  She spoke of the closed windows and the state
+of the gardens--of broken fountains and fallen arches.  She
+evidently deplored the deterioration of things which represented
+capital.  She has inventoried Dunholm, no doubt.  That will
+give Westholt a chance.  But she will do nothing until after
+her next year's season in London--that I'd swear.  I look forward
+to next year.  It will be worth watching.  She has been
+training my wife.  A sister who has married an Englishman
+and has at least spent some years of her life in England has a
+certain established air.  When she is presented one knows she
+will be a sensation.  After that----" he hesitated a moment,
+smiling not too pleasantly.
+
+"After that," said Mount Dunstan, "the Deluge."
+
+"Exactly.  The Deluge which usually sweeps girls off their
+feet--but it will not sweep her off hers.  She will stand quite
+firm in the flood and lose sight of nothing of importance which
+floats past."
+
+Mount Dunstan took him up.  He was sick of hearing the
+fellow's voice.
+
+"There will be a good many things," he said; "there will be
+great personages and small ones, pomps and vanities, glittering
+things and heavy ones."
+
+"When she sees what she wants," said Anstruthers, "she
+will hold out her hand, knowing it will come to her.  The
+things which drown will not disturb her.  I once made the
+blunder of suggesting that she might need protection against
+the importunate--as if she had been an English girl.  It was
+an idiotic thing to do."
+
+"Because?" Mount Dunstan for the moment had lost his
+head.  Anstruthers had maddeningly paused.
+
+"She answered that if it became necessary she might
+perhaps be able to protect herself.  She was as cool and frank as
+a boy.  No air pince about it--merely consciousness of being
+able to put things in their right places.  Made a mere male
+relative feel like a fool."
+
+"When ARE things in their right places?"  To his credit be
+it spoken, Mount Dunstan managed to say it as if in the mere
+putting together of idle words.  What man likes to be reminded
+of his right place!  No man wants to be put in his right place. 
+There is always another place which seems more desirable.
+
+"She knows--if we others do not.  I suppose my right place
+is at Stornham, conducting myself as the brother-in-law of a
+fair American should.  I suppose yours is here--shut up among
+your closed corridors and locked doors.  There must be a lot
+of them in a house like this.  Don't you sometimes feel it too
+large for you?"
+
+"Always," answered Mount Dunstan.
+
+The fact that he added nothing else and met a rapid side
+glance with unmoving red-brown eyes gazing out from under
+rugged brows, perhaps irritated Anstruthers.  He had been
+rather enjoying himself, but he had not enjoyed himself enough. 
+There was no denying that his plaything had not openly
+flinched.  Plainly he was not good at flinching.  Anstruthers
+wondered how far a man might go.  He tried again.
+
+"She likes the place, though she has a natural disdain for
+its condition.  That is practical American.  Things which are
+going to pieces because money is not spent upon them--mere
+money, of which all the people who count for anything have
+so much--are inevitably rather disdained.  They are `out of
+it.'  But she likes the estate."  As he watched Mount Dunstan
+he felt sure he had got it at last--the right thing.  "If
+you were a duke with fifty thousand a year," with a distinctly
+nasty, amicably humorous, faint laugh, "she would--by the
+Lord, I believe, she would take it over--and you with it."
+
+Mount Dunstan got up.  In his rough walking tweeds he
+looked over-big--and heavy--and perilous.  For two seconds
+Nigel Anstruthers would not have been surprised if he had
+without warning slapped his face, or knocked him over, or
+whirled him out of his chair and kicked him.  He would not
+have liked it, but--for two seconds--it would have been no
+surprise.  In fact, he instinctively braced his not too firm
+muscles.  But nothing of the sort occurred.  During the two
+seconds--perhaps three--Mount Dunstan stood still and looked
+down at him.  The brief space at an end, he walked over to the
+hearth and stood with his back to the big fireplace.
+
+"You don't like her," he said, and his manner was that of a man
+dealing with a matter of fact.  "Why do you talk about her?"
+
+He had got away again--quite away.
+
+An ugly flush shot over Anstruthers' face.  There was one
+more thing to say--whether it was idiotic to say it or not. 
+Things can always be denied afterwards, should denial appear
+necessary--and for the moment his special devil possessed him.
+
+"I do not like her!"  And his mouth twisted.  "Do I not? 
+I am not an old woman.  I am a man--like others.  I chance to
+like her--too much."
+
+There was a short silence.  Mount Dunstan broke it.
+
+"Then," he remarked, "you had better emigrate to some
+country with a climate which suits you.  I should say that
+England--for the present--does not."
+
+"I shall stay where I am," answered Anstruthers, with a
+slight hoarseness of voice, which made it necessary for him
+to clear his throat.  "I shall stay where she is.  I will have
+that satisfaction, at least.  She does not mind.  I am only a
+racketty, middle-aged brother-in-law, and she can take care
+of herself.  As I told you, she has the spirit of the huntress."
+
+"Look here," said Mount Dunstan, quite without haste,
+and with an iron civility.  "I am going to take the liberty
+of suggesting something.  If this thing is true, it would be as
+well not to talk about it."
+
+"As well for me--or for her?" and there was a serene
+significance in the query.
+
+Mount Dunstan thought a few seconds.
+
+"I confess," he said slowly, and he planted his fine blow
+between the eyes well and with directness.  "I confess that
+it would not have occurred to me to ask you to do anything
+or refrain from doing it for her sake."
+
+"Thank you.  Perhaps you are right.  One learns that one
+must protect one's self.  I shall not talk--neither will you.  I
+know that.  I was a fool to let it out.  The storm is over. 
+I must ride home."  He rose from his seat and stood smiling. 
+"It would smash up things nicely if the new beauty's appearance
+in the great world were preceded by chatter of the unseemly
+affection of some adorer of ill repute.  Unfairly enough
+it is always the woman who is hurt."
+
+"Unless," said Mount Dunstan civilly, "there should arise
+the poor, primeval brute, in his neolithic wrath, to seize on the
+man to blame, and break every bone and sinew in his damned body."
+
+"The newspapers would enjoy that more than she would,"
+answered Sir Nigel.  "She does not like the newspapers. 
+They are too ready to disparage the multi-millionaire, and
+cackle about members of his family."
+
+The unhidden hatred which still professed to hide itself in
+the depths of their pupils, as they regarded each other, had its
+birth in a passion as elemental as the quakings of the earth,
+or the rage of two lions in a desert, lashing their flanks in the
+blazing sun.  It was well that at this moment they should
+part ways.
+
+Sir Nigel's horse being brought, he went on the way which
+was his.
+
+"It was a mistake to say what I did," he said before going. 
+"I ought to have held my tongue.  But I am under the same
+roof with her.  At any rate, that is a privilege no other man
+shares with me."
+
+He rode off smartly, his horse's hoofs splashing in the rain
+pools left in the avenue after the storm.  He was not so sure
+after all that he had made a mistake, and for the moment
+he was not in the mood to care whether he had made one or not. 
+His agreeable smile showed itself as he thought of the obstinate,
+proud brute he had left behind, sitting alone among his
+shut doors and closed corridors.  They had not shaken hands
+either at meeting or parting.  Queer thing it was--the kind
+of enmity a man could feel for another when he was upset
+by a woman.  It was amusing enough that it should be
+she who was upsetting him after all these years--impudent little
+Betty, with the ferocious manner.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+AT SHANDY'S
+
+On a late-summer evening in New York the atmosphere
+surrounding a certain corner table at Shandy's cheap restaurant
+in Fourteenth Street was stirred by a sense of excitement. 
+
+The corner table in question was the favourite meeting place
+of a group of young men of the G. Selden type, who usually
+took possession of it at dinner time--having decided that
+Shandy's supplied more decent food for fifty cents, or even for
+twenty-five, than was to be found at other places of its order. 
+Shandy's was "about all right," they said to each other, and
+patronised it accordingly, three or four of them generally dining
+together, with a friendly and adroit manipulation of "portions"
+and "half portions" which enabled them to add variety
+to their bill of fare.
+
+The street outside was lighted, the tide of passers-by was
+less full and more leisurely in its movements than it was
+during the seething, working hours of daylight, but the electric
+cars swung past each other with whiz and clang of bell almost
+unceasingly, their sound being swelled, at short intervals,
+by the roar and rumbling rattle of the trains dashing by on
+the elevated railroad.  This, however, to the frequenters of
+Shandy's, was the usual accompaniment of every-day New
+York life and was regarded as a rather cheerful sort of thing.
+
+This evening the four claimants of the favourite corner
+table had met together earlier than usual.  Jem Belter, who
+"hammered" a typewriter at Schwab's Brewery, Tom Wetherbee,
+who was "in a downtown office," Bert Johnson, who
+was "out for the Delkoff," and Nick Baumgarten, who having
+for some time "beaten" certain streets as assistant salesman
+for the same illustrious machine, had been recently elevated to
+a "territory" of his own, and was therefore in high spirits.
+
+"Say!" he said.  "Let's give him a fine dinner.  We can
+make it between us.  Beefsteak and mushrooms, and potatoes
+hashed brown.  He likes them.  Good old G. S.  I shall be
+right glad to see him.  Hope foreign travel has not given him
+the swell head."
+
+"Don't believe it's hurt him a bit.  His letter didn't sound
+like it.  Little Georgie ain't a fool," said Jem Belter.
+
+Tom Wetherbee was looking over the letter referred to. 
+It had been written to the four conjointly, towards the
+termination of Selden's visit to Mr. Penzance.  The young man
+was not an ardent or fluent correspondent; but Tom Wetherbee
+was chuckling as he read the epistle.
+
+"Say, boys," he said, "this big thing he's keeping back
+to tell us when he sees us is all right, but what takes me is
+old George paying a visit to a parson.  He ain't no Young
+Men's Christian Association."
+
+
+Bert Johnson leaned forward, and looked at the address
+on the letter paper.
+
+"Mount Dunstan Vicarage," he read aloud.  "That looks
+pretty swell, doesn't it?" with a laugh.  "Say, fellows, you
+know Jepson at the office, the chap that prides himself on
+reading such a lot?  He said it reminded him of the names
+of places in English novels.  That Johnny's the biggest snob
+you ever set your tooth into.  When I told him about the
+lord fellow that owns the castle, and that George seemed to
+have seen him, he nearly fell over himself.  Never had any use
+for George before, but just you watch him make up to him
+when he sees him next."
+
+People were dropping in and taking seats at the tables. 
+They were all of one class.  Young men who lived in hall
+bedrooms.  Young women who worked in shops or offices, a
+couple here and there, who, living far uptown, had come to
+Shandy's to dinner, that they might go to cheap seats in some
+theatre afterwards.  In the latter case, the girls wore their
+best hats, had bright eyes, and cheeks lightly flushed by their
+sense of festivity.  Two or three were very pretty in their
+thin summer dresses and flowered or feathered head gear,
+tilted at picturesque angles over their thick hair.  When each
+one entered the eyes of the young men at the corner table
+followed her with curiosity and interest, but the glances at
+her escort were always of a disparaging nature.
+
+"There's a beaut!" said Nick Baumgarten.  "Get onto
+that pink stuff on her hat, will you.  She done it because it's
+just the colour of her cheeks."
+
+They all looked, and the girl was aware of it, and began to
+laugh and talk coquettishly to the young man who was her
+companion.
+
+"I wonder where she got Clarence?" said Jem Belter in
+sarcastic allusion to her escort.  "The things those lookers
+have fastened on to them gets ME."
+
+"If it was one of US, now," said Bert Johnson.  Upon which
+they broke into simultaneous good-natured laughter.
+
+"It's queer, isn't it," young Baumgarten put in, "how a
+fellow always feels sore when he sees another fellow with
+a peach like that?  It's just straight human nature, I guess."
+
+The door swung open to admit a newcomer, at the sight
+of whom Jem Belter exclaimed joyously:  "Good old Georgie! 
+Here he is, fellows!  Get on to his glad rags."
+
+"Glad rags" is supposed to buoyantly describe such attire 
+as, by its freshness or elegance of style, is rendered a suitable
+adornment for festive occasions or loftier leisure moments. 
+"Glad rags" may mean evening dress, when a young gentleman's
+wardrobe can aspire to splendour so marked, but it also
+applies to one's best and latest-purchased garb, in
+contradistinction to the less ornamental habiliments worn every
+day, and designated as "office clothes."
+
+G. Selden's economies had not enabled him to give himself
+into the hands of a Bond Street tailor, but a careful study of
+cut and material, as spread before the eye in elegant coloured
+illustrations in the windows of respectable shops in less
+ambitious quarters, had resulted in the purchase of a well-made
+suit of smart English cut.  He had a nice young figure, and
+looked extremely neat and tremendously new and clean, so
+much so, indeed, that several persons glanced at him a little
+admiringly as he was met half way to the corner table by his
+friends.
+
+"Hello, old chap!  Glad to see you.  What sort of a voyage?  How
+did you leave the royal family?  Glad to get back?"
+
+They all greeted him at once, shaking hands and slapping
+him on the back, as they hustled him gleefully back to the
+corner table and made him sit down.
+
+"Say, garsong," said Nick Baumgarten to their favourite
+waiter, who came at once in answer to his summons, "let's
+have a porterhouse steak, half the size of this table, and with
+plenty of mushrooms and potatoes hashed brown.  Here's Mr.
+Selden just returned from visiting at Windsor Castle, and if
+we don't treat him well, he'll look down on us."
+
+G. Selden grinned.  "How have you been getting on,
+Sam?" he said, nodding cheerfully to the man.  They were
+old and tried friends.  Sam knew all about the days when
+a fellow could not come into Shandy's at all, or must satisfy
+his strong young hunger with a bowl of soup, or coffee and a
+roll.  Sam did his best for them in the matter of the size
+of portions, and they did their good-natured utmost for him in
+the affair of the pooled tip.
+
+"Been getting on as well as can be expected," Sam grinned
+back.  "Hope you had a fine time, Mr. Selden?"
+
+"Fine!  I should smile!  Fine wasn't in it," answered
+Selden.  "But I'm looking forward to a Shandy porterhouse
+steak, all the same."
+
+"Did they give you a better one in the Strawnd?" asked
+Baumgarten, in what he believed to be a correct Cockney
+accent.
+
+"You bet they didn't," said Selden.  "Shandy's takes a lot
+of beating."  That last is English.
+
+The people at the other tables cast involuntary glances at
+them.  Their eager, hearty young pleasure in the festivity of
+the occasion was a healthy thing to see.  As they sat round
+the corner table, they produced the effect of gathering close
+about G. Selden.  They concentrated their combined attention
+upon him, Belter and Johnson leaning forward on their folded
+arms, to watch him as he talked.
+
+"Billy Page came back in August, looking pretty bum,"
+Nick Baumgarten began.  "He'd been painting gay Paree
+brick red, and he'd spent more money than he'd meant to, and
+that wasn't half enough.  Landed dead broke.  He said he'd
+had a great time, but he'd come home with rather a dark brown
+taste in his mouth, that he'd like to get rid of."
+
+"He thought you were a fool to go off cycling into the
+country," put in Wetherbee, "but I told him I guessed that
+was where he was 'way off.  I believed you'd had the best time
+of the two of you."
+
+"Boys," said Selden, "I had the time of my life."  He
+said it almost solemnly, and laid his hand on the table.  "It
+was like one of those yarns Bert tells us.  Half the time I
+didn't believe it, and half the time I was ashamed of myself
+to think it was all happening to me and none of your fellows
+were in it."
+
+"Oh, well," said Jem Belter, "luck chases some fellows,
+anyhow.  Look at Nick, there."
+
+"Well," Selden summed the whole thing up, "I just FELL
+into it where it was so deep that I had to strike out all I knew
+how to keep from drowning."
+
+"Tell us the whole thing," Nick Baumgarten put in; "from
+beginning to end.  Your letter didn't give anything away."
+
+"A letter would have spoiled it.  I can't write letters
+anyhow.  I wanted to wait till I got right here with you fellows
+round where I could answer questions.  First off," with the
+deliberation befitting such an opening, "I've sold machines
+enough to pay my expenses, and leave some over."
+
+"You have?  Gee whiz!  Say, give us your prescription. 
+Glad I know you, Georgy!"
+
+"And who do you suppose bought the first three?"  At
+this point, it was he who leaned forward upon the table--his 
+climax being a thing to concentrate upon.  "Reuben S.
+Vanderpoel's daughter--Miss Bettina!  And, boys, she gave me a
+letter to Reuben S., himself, and here it is."
+
+He produced a flat leather pocketbook and took an envelope
+from an inner flap, laying it before them on the tablecloth. 
+His knowledge that they would not have believed him if he
+had not brought his proof was founded on everyday facts. 
+They would not have doubted his veracity, but the possibility
+of such delirious good fortune.  What they would have
+believed would have been that he was playing a hilarious joke
+on them.  Jokes of this kind, but not of this proportion, were
+common entertainments.
+
+Their first impulse had been towards an outburst of laughter, but
+even before he produced his letter a certain truthful
+seriousness in his look had startled them.  When he laid the
+envelope down each man caught his breath.  It could not be
+denied that Jem Belter turned pale with emotion.  Jem had
+never been one of the lucky ones.
+
+"She let me read it," said G. Selden, taking the letter from
+its envelope with great care.  "And I said to her:  `Miss
+Vanderpoel, would you let me just show that to the boys the first
+night I go to Shandy's?'  I knew she'd tell me if it wasn't
+all right to do it.  She'd know I'd want to be told.  And she
+just laughed and said:  `I don't mind at all.  I like "the
+boys."  Here is a message to them.  `Good luck to you all.' "
+
+"She said that?" from Nick Baumgarten.
+
+"Yes, she did, and she meant it.  Look at this."
+
+This was the letter.  It was quite short, and written in a
+clear, definite hand.
+
+
+"DEAR FATHER:  This will be brought to you by Mr. G.
+Selden, of whom I have written to you.  Please be good to
+him.
+                         "Affectionately,
+                                             "BETTY."
+
+
+Each young man read it in turn.  None of them said
+anything just at first.  A kind of awe had descended upon them--
+not in the least awe of Vanderpoel, who, with other multi-
+millionaires, were served up each week with cheerful
+neighbourly comment or equally neighbourly disrespect, in huge
+Sunday papers read throughout the land--but awe of the
+unearthly luck which had fallen without warning to good old 
+G. S., who lived like the rest of them in a hall bedroom on
+ten per, earned by tramping the streets for the Delkoff.
+
+"That girl," said G. Selden gravely, "that girl is a
+winner from Winnersville.  I take off my hat to her.  If it's the
+scheme that some people's got to have millions, and others
+have got to sell Delkoffs, that girl's one of those that's
+entitled to the millions.  It's all right she should have 'em. 
+There's no kick coming from me."
+
+Nick Baumgarten was the first to resume wholly normal
+condition of mind.
+
+"Well, I guess after you've told us about her there'll be
+no kick coming from any of us.  Of course there's something
+about you that royal families cry for, and they won't be
+happy till they get.  All of us boys knows that.  But what
+we want to find out is how you worked it so that they saw
+the kind of pearl-studded hairpin you were."
+
+"Worked it!" Selden answered.  "I didn't work it.  I've
+got a good bit of nerve, but I never should have had enough
+to invent what happened--just HAPPENED.  I broke my leg
+falling off my bike, and fell right into a whole bunch of them
+--earls and countesses and viscounts and Vanderpoels.  And
+it was Miss Vanderpoel who saw me first lying on the ground. 
+And I was in Stornham Court where Lady Anstruthers lives
+--and she used to be Miss Rosalie Vanderpoel."
+
+"Boys," said Bert Johnson, with friendly disgust, "he's
+been up to his neck in 'em."
+
+"Cheer up.  The worst is yet to come," chaffed Tom Wetherbee.
+
+Never had such a dinner taken place at the corner table, or,
+in fact, at any other table at Shandy's.  Sam brought beefsteaks,
+which were princely, mushrooms, and hashed brown
+potatoes in portions whose generosity reached the heart.  Sam
+was on good terms with Shandy's carver, and had worked
+upon his nobler feelings.  Steins of lager beer were ventured
+upon.  There was hearty satisfying of fine hungers.  Two of
+the party had eaten nothing but one "Quick Lunch" throughout
+the day, one of them because he was short of time, the
+other for economy's sake, because he was short of money. 
+The meal was a splendid thing.  The telling of the story
+could not be wholly checked by the eating of food.  It
+advanced between mouthfuls, questions being asked and details
+given in answers.  Shandy's became more crowded, as the
+hour advanced.  People all over the room cast interested looks
+at the party at the corner table, enjoying itself so hugely. 
+Groups sitting at the tables nearest to it found themselves
+excited by the things they heard.
+
+"That young fellow in the new suit has just come back
+from Europe," said a man to his wife and daughter.  "He
+seems to have had a good time."
+
+"Papa," the daughter leaned forward, and spoke in a low
+voice, "I heard him say `Lord Mount Dunstan said Lady
+Anstruthers and Miss Vanderpoel were at the garden party.' 
+Who do you suppose he is? "
+
+"Well, he's a nice young fellow, and he has English clothes
+on, but he doesn't look like one of the Four Hundred.  Will
+you have pie or vanilla ice cream, Bessy?"
+
+Bessy--who chose vanilla ice cream--lost all knowledge of
+its flavour in her absorption in the conversation at the next
+table, which she could not have avoided hearing, even if she
+had wished.
+
+"She bent over the bed and laughed--just like any other
+nice girl--and she said, `You are at Stornham Court, which
+belongs to Sir Nigel Anstruthers.  Lady Anstruthers is my
+sister.  I am Miss Vanderpoel.'  And, boys, she used to come
+and talk to me every day."
+
+"George," said Nick Baumgarten, "you take about seventy-
+five bottles of Warner's Safe Cure, and rub yourself all over
+with St. Jacob's Oil.  Luck like that ain't HEALTHY!"
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+Mr. Vanderpoel, sitting in his study, wore the interestedly
+grave look of a man thinking of absorbing things.  He had
+just given orders that a young man who would call in the
+course of the evening should be brought to him at once, and he
+was incidentally considering this young man, as he reflected
+upon matters recalled to his mind by his impending arrival. 
+They were matters he had thought of with gradually increasing
+seriousness for some months, and they had, at first, been
+the result of the letters from Stornham, which each "steamer
+day" brought.  They had been of immense interest to him--
+these letters.  He would have found them absorbing as a
+study, even if he had not deeply loved Betty.  He read in
+them things she did not state in words, and they set him
+thinking. 
+
+He was not suspected by men like himself of concealing
+an imagination beneath the trained steadiness of his
+exterior, but he possessed more than the world knew, and it
+singularly combined itself with powers of logical deduction. 
+
+If he had been with his daughter, he would have seen, day
+by day, where her thoughts were leading her, and in what
+direction she was developing, but, at a distance of three
+thousand miles, he found himself asking questions, and
+endeavouring to reach conclusions.  His affection for Betty was
+the central emotion of his existence.  He had never told himself
+that he had outgrown the kind and pretty creature he had
+married in his early youth, and certainly his tender care for
+her and pleasure in her simple goodness had never wavered,
+but Betty had given him a companionship which had counted
+greatly in the sum of his happiness.  Because imagination
+was not suspected in him, no one knew what she stood for
+in his life.  He had no son; he stood at the head of a great
+house, so to speak--the American parallel of what a great
+house is in non-republican countries.  The power of it counted
+for great things, not in America alone, but throughout the
+world.  As international intimacies increased, the influence
+of such houses might end in aiding in the making of history. 
+Enormous constantly increasing wealth and huge financial
+schemes could not confine their influence, but must reach far.
+The man whose hand held the lever controlling them was
+doing well when he thought of them gravely.  Such a man
+had to do with more than his own mere life and living. 
+This man had confronted many problems as the years had
+passed.  He had seen men like himself die, leaving behind them
+the force they had controlled, and he had seen this force--
+controlled no longer--let loose upon the world, sometimes a power
+of evil, sometimes scattering itself aimlessly into nothingness
+and folly, which wrought harm.  He was not an ambitious
+man, but--perhaps because he was not only a man of thought,
+but a Vanderpoel of the blood of the first Reuben--these were
+things he did not contemplate without restlessness.  When
+Rosy had gone away and seemed lost to them, he had been
+glad when he had seen Betty growing, day by day, into a strong
+thing.  Feminine though she was, she sometimes suggested
+to him the son who might have been his, but was not.  As
+the closeness of their companionship increased with her years,
+his admiration for her grew with his love.  Power left in
+her hands must work for the advancement of things, and would
+not be idly disseminated--if no antagonistic influence wrought
+against her.  He had found himself reflecting that, after all
+was said, the marriage of such a girl had a sort of parallel in
+that of some young royal creature, whose union might make
+or mar things, which must be considered.  The man who must
+inevitably strongly colour her whole being, and vitally mark
+her life, would, in a sense, lay his hand upon the lever also. 
+If he brought sorrow and disorder with him, the lever would
+not move steadily.  Fortunes such as his grow rapidly, and
+he was a richer man by millions than he had been when
+Rosalie had married Nigel Anstruthers.  The memory of
+that marriage had been a painful thing to him, even before
+he had known the whole truth of its results.  The man had
+been a common adventurer and scoundrel, despite the facts
+of good birth and the air of decent breeding.  If a man who
+was as much a scoundrel, but cleverer--it would be necessary
+that he should be much cleverer--made the best of himself to
+Betty----!  It was folly to think one could guess what a
+woman--or a man, either, for that matter--would love.  He
+knew Betty, but no man knows the thing which comes, as it
+were, in the dark and claims its own--whether for good or
+evil.  He had lived long enough to see beautiful, strong-
+spirited creatures do strange things, follow strange gods, swept
+away into seas of pain by strange waves.
+
+"Even Betty," he had said to himself, now and then.  "Even
+my Betty.  Good God--who knows! "
+
+Because of this, he had read each letter with keen eyes. 
+They were long letters, full of detail and colour, because she
+knew he enjoyed them.  She had a delightful touch.  He
+sometimes felt as if they walked the English lanes together. 
+His intimacy with her neighbours, and her neighbourhood, was
+one of his relaxations.  He found himself thinking of old
+Doby and Mrs. Welden, as a sort of soporific measure, when
+he lay awake at night.  She had sent photographs of Stornham,
+of Dunholm Castle, and of Dole, and had even found an
+old engraving of Lady Alanby in her youth.  Her evident
+liking for the Dunholms had pleased him.  They were people
+whose dignity and admirableness were part of general
+knowledge.  Lord Westholt was plainly a young man of many
+attractions.  If the two were drawn to each other--and what
+more natural--all would be well.  He wondered if it would
+be Westholt.  But his love quickened a sagacity which needed
+no stimulus.  He said to himself in time that, though she liked
+and admired Westholt, she went no farther.  That others
+paid court to her he could guess without being told.  He had
+seen the effect she had produced when she had been at home,
+and also an unexpected letter to his wife from Milly Bowen
+had revealed many things.  Milly, having noted Mrs. Vanderpoel's
+eager anxiety to hear direct news of Lady Anstruthers,
+was not the person to let fall from her hand a useful
+thread of connection.  She had written quite at length, managing
+adroitly to convey all that she had seen, and all that she
+had heard.  She had been making a visit within driving
+distance of Stornham, and had had the pleasure of meeting
+both Lady Anstruthers and Miss Vanderpoel at various parties.
+She was so sure that Mrs. Vanderpoel would like to hear
+how well Lady Anstruthers was looking, that she ventured
+to write.  Betty's effect upon the county was made quite
+clear, as also was the interested expectation of her appearance
+in town next season.  Mr. Vanderpoel, perhaps, gathered more
+from the letter than his wife did.  In her mind, relieved
+happiness and consternation were mingled.
+
+"Do you think, Reuben, that Betty will marry that Lord
+Westholt?" she rather faltered.  "He seems very nice, but
+I would rather she married an American.  I should feel as
+if I had no girls at all, if they both lived in England."
+
+"Lady Bowen gives him a good character," her husband
+said, smiling.  "But if anything untoward happens, Annie,
+you shall have a house of your own half way between Dunholm
+Castle and Stornham Court."
+
+When he had begun to decide that Lord Westholt did not
+seem to be the man Fate was veering towards, he not
+unnaturally cast a mental eye over such other persons as the
+letters mentioned.  At exactly what period his thought first
+dwelt a shade anxiously on Mount Dunstan he could not
+have told, but he at length became conscious that it so dwelt. 
+He had begun by feeling an interest in his story, and had asked
+questions about him, because a situation such as his suggested
+query to a man of affairs.  Thus, it had been natural that the
+letters should speak of him.  What she had written had
+recalled to him certain rumours of the disgraceful old scandal. 
+Yes, they had been a bad lot.  He arranged to put a casual-
+sounding question or so to certain persons who knew English
+society well.  What he gathered was not encouraging.  The
+present Lord Mount Dunstan was considered rather a surly
+brute, and lived a mysterious sort of life which might cover
+many things.  It was bad blood, and people were naturally
+shy of it.  Of course, the man was a pauper, and his place a
+barrack falling to ruin.  There had been something rather
+shady in his going to America or Australia a few years ago.
+
+Good looking?  Well, so few people had seen him.  The lady,
+who was speaking, had heard that he was one of those big,
+rather lumpy men, and had an ill-tempered expression.  She
+always gave a wide berth to a man who looked nasty-tempered. 
+One or two other persons who had spoken of him had conveyed
+to Mr. Vanderpoel about the same amount of vaguely
+unpromising information.  The episode of G. Selden had been
+interesting enough, with its suggestions of picturesque
+contrasts and combinations.  Betty's touch had made the junior
+salesman attracting.  It was a good type this, of a young
+fellow who, battling with the discouragements of a hard life,
+still did not lose his amazing good cheer and patience, and
+found healthy sleep and honest waking, even in the hall
+bedroom.  He had consented to Betty's request that he would
+see him, partly because he was inclined to like what he had
+heard, and partly for a reason which Betty did not suspect. 
+By extraordinary chance G. Selden had seen Mount Dunstan
+and his surroundings at close range.  Mr. Vanderpoel had liked
+what he had gathered of Mount Dunstan's attitude towards a
+personality so singularly exotic to himself.  Crude, uneducated,
+and slangy, the junior salesman was not in any degree a fool. 
+To an American father with a daughter like Betty, the summing-
+up of a normal, nice-natured, common young denizen of the
+United States, fresh from contact with the effete, might be
+subtly instructive, and well worth hearing, if it was
+unconsciously expressed.  Mr. Vanderpoel thought he knew how,
+after he had overcome his visitor's first awkwardness--if he
+chanced to be self-conscious--he could lead him to talk.  What
+he hoped to do was to make him forget himself and begin
+to talk to him as he had talked to Betty, to ingenuously reveal
+impressions and points of view.  Young men of his clean,
+rudimentary type were very definite about the things they liked
+and disliked, and could be trusted to reveal admiration, or
+lack of it, without absolute intention or actual statement. 
+Being elemental and undismayed, they saw things cleared of
+the mists of social prejudice and modification.  Yes, he felt
+he should be glad to hear of Lord Mount Dunstan and the
+Mount Dunstan estate from G. Selden in a happy moment of
+unawareness.
+
+Why was it that it happened to be Mount Dunstan he was
+desirous to hear of?  Well, the absolute reason for that he
+could not have explained, either.  He had asked himself
+questions on the subject more than once.  There was no well-
+founded reason, perhaps.  If Betty's letters had spoken of Mount
+Dunstan and his home, they had also described Lord Westholt
+and Dunholm Castle.  Of these two men she had certainly
+spoken more fully than of others.  Of Mount Dunstan she
+had had more to relate through the incident of G. Selden.  He
+smiled as he realised the importance of the figure of G. Selden. 
+It was Selden and his broken leg the two men had ridden over
+from Mount Dunstan to visit.  But for Selden, Betty might
+not have met Mount Dunstan again.  He was reason enough
+for all she had said.  And yet----!  Perhaps, between Betty
+and himself there existed the thing which impresses and
+communicates without words.  Perhaps, because their affection was
+unusual, they realised each other's emotions.  The half-defined
+anxiety he felt now was not a new thing, but he confessed to
+himself that it had been spurred a little by the letter the last
+steamer had brought him.  It was NOT Lord Westholt, it
+definitely appeared.  He had asked her to be his wife, and she
+had declined his proposal.
+
+"I could not have LIKED a man any more without being in
+love with him," she wrote.  "I LIKE him more than I can say
+--so much, indeed, that I feel a little depressed by my certainty
+that I do not love him."
+
+If she had loved him, the whole matter would have been
+simplified.  If the other man had drawn her, the thing would
+not be simple.  Her father foresaw all the complications--and
+he did not want complications for Betty.  Yet emotions were
+perverse and irresistible things, and the stronger the creature
+swayed by them, the more enormous their power.  But, as he
+sat in his easy chair and thought over it all, the one feeling
+predominant in his mind was that nothing mattered but
+Betty--nothing really mattered but Betty.
+
+In the meantime G. Selden was walking up Fifth Avenue, at
+once touched and exhilarated by the stir about him and his
+sense of home-coming.  It was pretty good to be in little old
+New York again.  The hurried pace of the life about him
+stimulated his young blood.  There were no street cars in Fifth
+Avenue, but there were carriages, waggons, carts, motors, all
+pantingly hurried, and fretting and struggling when the
+crowded state of the thoroughfare held them back.  The
+beautifully dressed women in the carriages wore no light air of
+being at leisure.  It was evident that they were going to keep
+engagements, to do things, to achieve objects.
+
+"Something doing.  Something doing," was his cheerful
+self-congratulatory thought.  He had spent his life in the
+midst of it, he liked it, and it welcomed him back.
+
+The appointment he was on his way to keep thrilled him
+into an uplifted mood.  Once or twice a half-nervous chuckle
+broke from him as he tried to realise that he had been given
+the chance which a year ago had seemed so impossible that
+its mere incredibleness had made it a natural subject for jokes. 
+He was going to call on Reuben S. Vanderpoel, and he was
+going because Reuben S. had made an appointment with him.
+
+He wore his London suit of clothes and he felt that he
+looked pretty decent.  He could only do his best in the matter
+of bearing.  He always thought that, so long as a fellow
+didn't get "chesty" and kept his head from swelling, he was
+all right.  Of course he had never been in one of these swell
+Fifth Avenue houses, and he felt a bit nervous--but Miss
+Vanderpoel would have told her father what sort of fellow
+he was, and her father was likely to be something like herself. 
+The house, which had been built since Lady Anstruthers'
+marriage, was well "up-town," and was big and imposing. 
+When a manservant opened the front door, the square hall
+looked very splendid to Selden.  It was full of light, and of
+rich furniture, which was like the stuff he had seen in one
+or two special shop windows in Fifth Avenue--places where
+they sold magnificent gilded or carven coffers and vases, pieces
+of tapestry and marvellous embroideries, antiquities from
+foreign palaces.  Though it was quite different, it was as swell
+in its way as the house at Mount Dunstan, and there were
+gleams of pictures on the walls that looked fine, and no mistake.
+
+He was expected.  The man led him across the hall to Mr.
+Vanderpoel's room.  After he had announced his name
+he closed the door quietly and went away.  Mr. Vanderpoel
+rose from an armchair to come forward to meet his visitor. 
+He was tall and straight--Betty had inherited her slender
+height from him.  His well-balanced face suggested the
+relationship between them.  He had a steady mouth, and eyes
+which looked as if they saw much and far.
+
+"I am glad to see you, Mr. Selden," he said, shaking hands
+with him.  "You have seen my daughters, and can tell me
+how they are.  Miss Vanderpoel has written to me of you
+several times."
+
+He asked him to sit down, and as he took his chair Selden
+felt that he had been right in telling himself that Reuben
+S. Vanderpoel would be somehow like his girl.  She was a
+girl, and he was an elderly man of business, but they were like
+each other.  There was the same kind of straight way of doing
+things, and the same straight-seeing look in both of them.
+
+It was queer how natural things seemed, when they really
+happened to a fellow.  Here he was sitting in a big leather
+chair and opposite to him in its fellow sat Reuben S.
+Vanderpoel, looking at him with friendly eyes.  And it seemed
+all right, too--not as if he had managed to "butt in," and
+would find himself politely fired out directly.  He might have
+been one of the Four Hundred making a call.  Reuben S.
+knew how to make a man feel easy, and no mistake.  This
+G. Selden observed at once, though he had, in fact, no knowledge
+of the practical tact which dealt with him.  He found
+himself answering questions about Lady Anstruthers and her
+sister, which led to the opening up of other subjects.  He
+did not realise that he began to express ingenuous opinions
+and describe things.  His listener's interest led him on, a
+question here, a rather pleased laugh there, were encouraging. 
+He had enjoyed himself so much during his stay in England, and
+had felt his experiences so greatly to be rejoiced over, that
+they were easy to talk of at any time--in fact, it was even a
+trifle difficult not to talk of them--but, stimulated by the
+look which rested on him, by the deft word and ready smile,
+words flowed readily and without the restraint of
+self-consciousness.
+
+"When you think that all of it sort of began with a robin,
+it's queer enough," he said.  "But for that robin I shouldn't
+be here, sir," with a boyish laugh.  "And he was an English
+robin--a little fellow not half the size of the kind that hops
+about Central Park."
+
+"Let me hear about that," said Mr. Vanderpoel.
+
+It was a good story, and he told it well, though in his own
+junior salesman phrasing.  He began with his bicycle ride into
+the green country, his spin over the fine roads, his rest under
+the hedge during the shower, and then the song of the robin
+perched among the fresh wet leafage, his feathers puffed out,
+his red young satin-glossed breast pulsating and swelling.  His
+words were colloquial enough, but they called up the picture.
+
+"Everything sort of glittering with the sunshine on the
+wet drops, and things smelling good, like they do after rain--
+leaves, and grass, and good earth.  I tell you it made a fellow
+feel as if the whole world was his brother.  And when Mr.
+Rob. lit on that twig and swelled his red breast as if he knew
+the whole thing was his, and began to let them notes out, calling
+for his lady friend to come and go halves with him, I
+just had to laugh and speak to him, and that was when Lord
+Mount Dunstan heard me and jumped over the hedge.  He'd
+been listening, too."
+
+The expression Reuben S. Vanderpoel wore made it an
+agreeable thing to talk--to go on.  He evidently cared to
+hear.  So Selden did his best, and enjoyed himself in doing
+it.  His style made for realism and brought things clearly
+before one.  The big-built man in the rough and shabby shooting
+clothes, his way when he dropped into the grass to sit
+beside the stranger and talk, certain meanings in his words
+which conveyed to Vanderpoel what had not been conveyed
+to G. Selden.  Yes, the man carried a heaviness about with
+him and hated the burden.  Selden quite unconsciously brought
+him out strongly.
+
+"I don't know whether I'm the kind of fellow who is
+always making breaks," he said, with his boy's laugh again,
+"but if I am, I never made a worse one than when I asked
+him straight if he was out of a job, and on the tramp.  It
+showed what a nice fellow he was that he didn't get hot about
+it.  Some fellows would.  He only laughed--sort of short--
+and said his job had been more than he could handle, and
+he was afraid he was down and out."
+
+Mr. Vanderpoel was conscious that so far he was somewhat
+attracted by this central figure.  G. Selden was also proving
+satisfactory in the matter of revealing his excellently simple
+views of persons and things.
+
+"The only time he got mad was when I wouldn't believe
+him when he told me who he was.  I was a bit hot in the
+collar myself.  I'd felt sorry for him, because I thought he
+was a chap like myself, and he was up against it.  I know what
+that is, and I'd wanted to jolly him along a bit.  When he
+said his name was Mount Dunstan, and the place belonged
+to him, I guessed he thought he was making a joke.  So I
+got on my wheel and started off, and then he got mad for
+keeps.  He said he wasn't such a damned fool as he looked,
+and what he'd said was true, and I could go and be hanged."
+
+Reuben S. Vanderpoel laughed.  He liked that.  It sounded
+like decent British hot temper, which he had often found
+accompanied honest British decencies.
+
+He liked other things, as the story proceeded.  The
+picture of the huge house with the shut windows, made him
+slightly restless.  The concealed imagination, combined with
+the financier's resentment of dormant interests, disturbed him. 
+That which had attracted Selden in the Reverend Lewis
+Penzance strongly attracted himself.  Also, a man was a good deal
+to be judged by his friends.  The man who lived alone in
+the midst of stately desolateness and held as his chief intimate
+a high-bred and gentle-minded scholar of ripe years, gave, in
+doing this, certain evidence which did not tell against him. 
+The whole situation meant something a splendid, vivid-minded
+young creature might be moved by--might be allured by, even
+despite herself.
+
+There was something fantastic in the odd linking of
+incidents--Selden's chance view of Betty as she rode by, his
+next day's sudden resolve to turn back and go to Stornham,
+his accident, all that followed seemed, if one were fanciful
+--part of a scheme prearranged
+
+"When I came to myself," G. Selden said, "I felt like
+that fellow in the Shakespeare play that they dress up and put
+to bed in the palace when he's drunk.  I thought I'd gone off
+my head.  And then Miss Vanderpoel came."  He paused
+a moment and looked down on the carpet, thinking.  "Gee
+whiz!  It WAS queer," he said.
+
+Betty Vanderpoel's father could almost hear her voice as
+the rest was told.  He knew how her laugh had sounded, and
+what her presence must have been to the young fellow.  His
+delightful, human, always satisfying Betty!
+
+Through this odd trick of fortune, Mount Dunstan had
+begun to see her.  Since, through the unfair endowment of
+Nature--that it was not wholly fair he had often told himself--
+she was all the things that desire could yearn for, there
+were many chances that when a man saw her he must long to
+see her again, and there were the same chances that such an
+one as Mount Dunstan might long also, and, if Fate was
+against him, long with a bitter strength.  Selden was not
+aware that he had spoken more fully of Mount Dunstan
+and his place than of other things.  That this had been the
+case, had been because Mr. Vanderpoel had intended it should
+be so.  He had subtly drawn out and encouraged a detailed
+account of the time spent at Mount Dunstan vicarage.  It was
+easily encouraged.  Selden's affectionate admiration for the
+vicar led him on to enthusiasm.  The quiet house and garden,
+the old books, the afternoon tea under the copper beech, and
+the long talks of old things, which had been so new to the
+young New Yorker, had plainly made a mark upon his life,
+not likely to be erased even by the rush of after years.
+
+"The way he knew history was what got me," he said. 
+"And the way you got interested in it, when he talked.  It
+wasn't just HISTORY, like you learn at school, and forget, and
+never see the use of, anyhow.  It was things about men, just
+like yourself--hustling for a living in their way, just as we're
+hustling in Broadway.  Most of it was fighting, and there are
+mounds scattered about that are the remains of their forts and
+camps.  Roman camps, some of them.  He took me to see
+them.  He had a little old pony chaise we trundled about in,
+and he'd draw up and we'd sit and talk.  `There were men
+here on this very spot,' he'd say, `looking out for attack,
+eating, drinking, cooking their food, polishing their weapons,
+laughing, and shouting--MEN--Selden, fifty-five years before
+Christ was born--and sometimes the New Testament times
+seem to us so far away that they are half a dream.' That was
+the kind of thing he'd say, and I'd sometimes feel as if I
+heard the Romans shouting.  The country about there was full
+of queer places, and both he and Lord Dunstan knew more
+about them than I know about Twenty-third Street."
+
+"You saw Lord Mount Dunstan often?" Mr. Vanderpoel suggested.
+
+"Every day, sir.  And the more I saw him, the more I got
+to like him.  He's all right.  But it's hard luck to be fixed
+as he is--that's stone-cold truth.  What's a man to do?  The
+money he ought to have to keep up his place was spent before
+he was born.  His father and his eldest brother were a bum
+lot, and his grandfather and great-grandfather were fools. 
+He can't sell the place, and he wouldn't if he could.  Mr.
+Penzance was so fond of him that sometimes he'd say things. 
+But," hastily, "perhaps I'm talking too much."
+
+"You happen to be talking about questions I have been
+greatly interested in.  I have thought a good deal at times
+of the position of the holders of large estates they cannot
+afford to keep up.  This special instance is a case in point."
+
+G. Selden felt himself in luck again.  Reuben S., quite
+evidently, found his subject worthy of undivided attention. 
+Selden had not heartily liked Lord Mount Dunstan, and lived
+in the atmosphere surrounding him, looking about him with
+sharp young New York eyes, without learning a good deal. 
+
+He had seen the practical hardship of the situation, and laid
+it bare.
+
+"What Mr. Penzance says is that he's like the men that
+built things in the beginning--fought for them--fought
+Romans and Saxons and Normans--perhaps the whole lot at
+different times.  I used to like to get Mr. Penzance to tell
+stories about the Mount Dunstans.  They were splendid.  It
+must be pretty fine to look back about a thousand years and
+know your folks have been something.  All the same its
+pretty fierce to have to stand alone at the end of it, not able
+to help yourself, because some of your relations were crazy
+fools.  I don't wonder he feels mad."
+
+"Does he?" Mr. Vanderpoel inquired.
+
+"He's straight," said G. Selden sympathetically.  "He's all
+right.  But only money can help him, and he's got none, so he
+has to stand and stare at things falling to pieces.  And--well,
+I tell you, Mr. Vanderpoel, he LOVES that place--he's crazy
+about it.  And he's proud--I don't mean he's got the swell-
+head, because he hasn't--but he's just proud.  Now, for
+instance, he hasn't any use for men like himself that marry
+just for money.  He's seen a lot of it, and it's made him sick. 
+He's not that kind."
+
+He had been asked and had answered a good many questions
+before he went away, but each had dropped into the
+talk so incidentally that he had not recognised them as queries. 
+He did not know that Lord Mount Dunstan stood out a
+clearly defined figure in Mr. Vanderpoel's mind, a figure to
+be reflected upon, and one not without its attraction.
+
+"Miss Vanderpoel tells me," Mr. Vanderpoel said, when
+the interview was drawing to a close, "that you are an agent
+for the Delkoff typewriter."
+
+G. Selden flushed slightly.
+
+"Yes, sir," he answered, "but I didn't----"
+
+"I hear that three machines are in use on the Stornham
+estate, and that they have proved satisfactory."
+
+"It's a good machine," said G. Selden, his flush a little
+deeper.
+
+Mr. Vanderpoel smiled.
+
+"You are a business-like young man," he said, "and I
+have no doubt you have a catalogue in your pocket."
+
+G. Selden was a business-like young man.  He gave Mr.
+Vanderpoel one serious look, and the catalogue was drawn forth.
+
+"It wouldn't be business, sir, for me to be caught out
+without it," he said.  "I shouldn't leave it behind if I went to
+a funeral.  A man's got to run no risks."
+
+"I should like to look at it."
+
+The thing had happened.  It was not a dream.  Reuben S.
+Vanderpoel, clothed and in his right mind, had, without pressure
+being exerted upon him, expressed his desire to look at the
+catalogue--to examine it--to have it explained to him at length.
+
+He listened attentively, while G. Selden did his best.  He
+asked a question now and then, or made a comment.  His
+manner was that of a thoroughly composed man of business,
+but he was remembering what Betty had told him of the
+"ten per," and a number of other things.  He saw the flush
+come and go under the still boyish skin, he observed that G. 
+Selden's hand was not wholly steady, though he was making
+an effort not to seem excited.  But he was excited.  This
+actually meant--this thing so unimportant to multi-millionaires
+--that he was having his "chance," and his young fortunes
+were, perhaps, in the balance.
+
+"Yes," said Reuben S., when he had finished, "it seems
+a good, up-to-date machine."
+
+"It's the best on the market," said G. Selden, "out and out,
+the best."
+
+"I understand you are only junior salesman?"
+
+"Yes, sir.  Ten per and five dollars on every machine I
+sell.  If I had a territory, I should get ten."
+
+"Then," reflectively, "the first thing is to get a territory."
+
+"Perhaps I shall get one in time, if I keep at it," said Selden
+courageously.
+
+"It is a good machine.  I like it," said Mr. Vanderpoel. 
+"I can see a good many places where it could be used.  Perhaps,
+if you make it known at your office that when you
+are given a good territory, I shall give preference to the
+Delkoff over other typewriting machines, it might--eh?"
+
+A light broke out upon G. Selden's countenance--a light
+radiant and magnificent.  He caught his breath.  A desire
+to shout--to yell--to whoop, as when in the society of "the
+boys," was barely conquered in time.
+
+"Mr. Vanderpoel," he said, standing up, "I--Mr.
+Vanderpoel--sir--I feel as if I was having a pipe dream.  I'm
+not, am I?"
+
+"No," answered Mr. Vanderpoel, "you are not.  I like
+you, Mr. Selden.  My daughter liked you.  I do not mean
+to lose sight of you.  We will begin, however, with the
+territory, and the Delkoff.  I don't think there will be any
+difficulty about it."
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+Ten minutes later G. Selden was walking down Fifth
+Avenue, wondering if there was any chance of his being
+arrested by a policeman upon the charge that he was reeling,
+instead of walking steadily.  He hoped he should get back to
+the hall bedroom safely.  Nick Baumgarten and Jem Bolter
+both "roomed" in the house with him.  He could tell them
+both.  It was Jem who had made up the yarn about one of
+them saving Reuben S. Vanderpoel's life.  There had been
+no life-saving, but the thing had come true.
+
+"But, if it hadn't been for Lord Mount Dunstan," he
+said, thinking it over excitedly, "I should never have seen
+Miss Vanderpoel, and, if it hadn't been for Miss Vanderpoel,
+I should never have got next to Reuben S. in my life.  Both
+sides of the Atlantic Ocean got busy to do a good turn to
+Little Willie.  Hully gee!"
+
+In his study Mr. Vanderpoel was rereading Betty's letters. 
+He felt that he had gained a certain knowledge of Lord Mount
+Dunstan.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+ON THE MARSHES
+
+THE marshes stretched mellow in the autumn sun, sheep wandered
+about, nibbling contentedly, or lay down to rest in groups,
+the sky reflecting itself in the narrow dykes gave a blue colour
+to the water, a scent of the sea was in the air as one breathed
+it, flocks of plover rose, now and then, crying softly.  Betty,
+walking with her dog, had passed a heron standing at the edge
+of a pool.
+
+From her first discovery of them, she had been attracted by
+the marshes with their English suggestion of the Roman
+Campagna, their broad expanse of level land spread out to the
+sun and wind, the thousands of white sheep dotted or clustered
+as far as eye could reach, the hues of the marsh grass and the
+plants growing thick at the borders of the strips of water.  Its
+beauty was all its own and curiously aloof from the softly-
+wooded, undulating world about it.  Driving or walking along
+the high road--the road the Romans had built to London town
+long centuries ago--on either side of one were meadows, farms,
+scattered cottages, and hop gardens, but beyond and below
+stretched the marsh land, golden and grey, and always alluring
+one by its silence.
+
+"I never pass it without wanting to go to it--to take solitary
+walks over it, to be one of the spots on it as the sheep are.  It
+seems as if, lying there under the blue sky or the low grey
+clouds with all the world held at bay by mere space and
+stillness, they must feel something we know nothing of.  I want
+to go and find out what it is."
+
+This she had once said to Mount Dunstan.
+
+So she had fallen into the habit of walking there with her
+dog at her side as her sole companion, for having need for time
+and space for thought, she had found them in the silence and
+aloofness.
+
+Life had been a vivid and pleasurable thing to her, as far
+as she could look back upon it.  She began to realise that she
+must have been very happy, because she had never found herself
+desiring existence other than such as had come to her day
+by day.  Except for her passionate childish regret at Rosy's
+marriage, she had experienced no painful feeling.  In fact,
+she had faced no hurt in her life, and certainly had been
+confronted by no limitations.  Arguing that girls in their teens
+usually fall in love, her father had occasionally wondered that
+she passed through no little episodes of sentiment, but the fact
+was that her interests had been larger and more numerous than
+the interests of girls generally are, and her affectionate
+intimacy with himself had left no such small vacant spaces as are
+frequently filled by unimportant young emotions.  Because she
+was a logical creature, and had watched life and those living
+it with clear and interested eyes, she had not been blind to the
+path which had marked itself before her during the summer's
+growth and waning.  She had not, at first, perhaps, known
+exactly when things began to change for her--when the clarity
+of her mind began to be disturbed.  She had thought in the
+beginning--as people have a habit of doing--that an instance
+--a problem--a situation had attracted her attention because
+it was absorbing enough to think over.  Her view of the matter
+had been that as the same thing would have interested her
+father, it had interested herself.  But from the morning when
+she had been conscious of the sudden fury roused in her by
+Nigel Anstruthers' ugly sneer at Mount Dunstan, she had
+better understood the thing which had come upon her.  Day
+by day it had increased and gathered power, and she realised
+with a certain sense of impatience that she had not in any
+degree understood it when she had seen and wondered at its
+effect on other women.  Each day had been like a wave
+encroaching farther upon the shore she stood upon.  At the outset
+a certain ignoble pride--she knew it ignoble--filled her with
+rebellion.  She had seen so much of this kind of situation, and
+had heard so much of the general comment.  People had learned
+how to sneer because experience had taught them.  If she gave
+them cause, why should they not sneer at her as at things?  She
+recalled what she had herself thought of such things--the folly
+of them, the obviousness--the almost deserved disaster.  She
+had arrogated to herself judgment of women--and men--who
+might, yes, who might have stood upon their strip of sand, as
+she stood, with the waves creeping in, each one higher, stronger,
+and more engulfing than the last.  There might have been those
+among them who also had knowledge of that sudden deadly
+joy at the sight of one face, at the drop of one voice.  When
+that wave submerged one's pulsing being, what had the world
+to do with one--how could one hear and think of what its
+speech might be?  Its voice clamoured too far off.
+
+As she walked across the marsh she was thinking this first
+phase over.  She had reached a new one, and at first she looked
+back with a faint, even rather hard, smile.  She walked straight
+ahead, her mastiff, Roland, padding along heavily close at her
+side.  How still and wide and golden it was; how the cry of
+plover and lifting trill of skylark assured one that one was
+wholly encircled by solitude and space which were more
+enclosing than any walls!  She was going to the mounds to which
+Mr. Penzance had trundled G. Selden in the pony chaise, when
+he had given him the marvellous hour which had brought
+Roman camp and Roman legions to life again.  Up on the
+largest hillock one could sit enthroned, resting chin in hand and
+looking out under level lids at the unstirring, softly-living
+loveliness of the marsh-land world.  So she was presently seated,
+with her heavy-limbed Roland at her feet.  She had come here to
+try to put things clearly to herself, to plan with such reason as
+she could control.  She had begun to be unhappy, she had begun
+--with some unfairness--to look back upon the Betty Vanderpoel
+of the past as an unwittingly self-sufficient young woman,
+to find herself suddenly entangled by things, even to know a
+touch of desperateness.
+
+"Not to take a remnant from the ducal bargain counter,"
+she was saying mentally.  That was why her smile was a little
+hard.  What if the remnant from the ducal bargain counter
+had prejudices of his own?
+
+"If he were passionately--passionately in love with me," she
+said, with red staining her cheeks, "he would not come--he
+would not come--he would not come.  And, because of that,
+he is more to me--MORE!  And more he will become every day
+--and the more strongly he will hold me.  And there we stand."
+
+Roland lifted his fine head from his paws, and, holding it
+erect on a stiff, strong neck, stared at her in obvious inquiry. 
+She put out her hand and tenderly patted him.
+
+"He will have none of me," she said.  "He will have none
+of me."  And she faintly smiled, but the next instant shook her
+head a little haughtily, and, having done so, looked down with
+an altered expression upon the cloth of her skirt, because she
+had shaken upon it, from the extravagant lashes, two clear
+drops.
+
+It was not the result of chance that she had seen nothing of
+him for weeks.  She had not attempted to persuade herself of
+that.  Twice he had declined an invitation to Stornham, and
+once he had ridden past her on the road when he might have
+stopped to exchange greetings, or have ridden on by her side. 
+He did not mean to seem to desire, ever so lightly, to be counted
+as in the lists.  Whether he was drawn by any liking for her
+or not, it was plain he had determined on this.
+
+If she were to go away now, they would never meet again. 
+Their ways in this world would part forever.  She would not
+know how long it took to break him utterly--if such a man
+could be broken.  If no magic change took place in his fortunes
+--and what change could come?--the decay about him would
+spread day by day.  Stone walls last a long time, so the house
+would stand while every beauty and stateliness within it fell
+into ruin.  Gardens would become wildernesses, terraces and
+fountains crumble and be overgrown, walls that were to-day
+leaning would fall with time.  The years would pass, and his
+youth with them; he would gradually change into an old man
+while he watched the things he loved with passion die slowly
+and hard.  How strange it was that lives should touch and pass
+on the ocean of Time, and nothing should result--nothing at 
+all!  When she went on her way, it would be as if a ship loaded
+with every aid of food and treasure had passed a boat in
+which a strong man tossed, starving to death, and had not even
+run up a flag.
+
+"But one cannot run up a flag," she said, stroking Roland. 
+"One cannot.  There we stand."
+
+To her recognition of this deadlock of Fate, there had been
+adding the growing disturbance caused by yet another thing
+which was increasingly troubling, increasingly difficult to face.
+
+Gradually, and at first with wonderful naturalness of bearing,
+Nigel Anstruthers had managed to create for himself a singular
+place in her everyday life.  It had begun with a certain
+personalness in his attitude, a personalness which was a thing to
+dislike, but almost impossible openly to resent.  Certainly, as
+a self-invited guest in his house, she could scarcely protest
+against the amiability of his demeanour and his exterior
+courtesy and attentiveness of manner in his conduct towards
+her.  She had tried to sweep away the objectionable quality in
+his bearing, by frankness, by indifference, by entire lack of
+response, but she had remained conscious of its increasing as a
+spider's web might increase as the spider spun it quietly over
+one, throwing out threads so impalpable that one could not
+brush them away because they were too slight to be seen.  She
+was aware that in the first years of his married life he had
+alternately resented the scarcity of the invitations sent them
+and rudely refused such as were received.  Since he had
+returned to find her at Stornham, he had insisted that no
+invitations should be declined, and had escorted his wife and
+herself wherever they went.  What could have been conventionally
+more proper--what more improper than that he should have
+persistently have remained at home?  And yet there came a
+time when, as they three drove together at night in the closed
+carriage, Betty was conscious that, as he sat opposite to her in
+the dark, when he spoke, when he touched her in arranging the
+robe over her, or opening or shutting the window, he subtly,
+but persistently, conveyed that the personalness of his voice,
+look, and physical nearness was a sort of hideous confidence
+between them which they were cleverly concealing from
+Rosalie and the outside world.
+
+When she rode about the country, he had a way of appearing
+at some turning and making himself her companion, riding too
+closely at her side, and assuming a noticeable air of being
+engaged in meaningly confidential talk.  Once, when he had been
+leaning towards her with an audaciously tender manner, they
+had been passed by the Dunholm carriage, and Lady Dunholm
+and the friend driving with her had evidently tried not to look
+surprised.  Lady Alanby, meeting them in the same way at
+another time, had put up her glasses and stared in open
+disapproval.  She might admire a strikingly handsome American
+girl, but her favour would not last through any such vulgar
+silliness as flirtations with disgraceful brothers-in-law.  When
+Betty strolled about the park or the lanes, she much too often
+encountered Sir Nigel strolling also, and knew that he did not
+mean to allow her to rid herself of him.  In public, he made
+a point of keeping observably close to her, of hovering in her
+vicinity and looking on at all she did with eyes she rebelled
+against finding fixed on her each time she was obliged to turn in
+his direction.  He had a fashion of coming to her side and
+speaking in a dropped voice, which excluded others, as a favoured
+lover might.  She had seen both men and women glance at her
+in half-embarrassment at their sudden sense of finding
+themselves slightly de trop.  She had said aloud to him on one
+such occasion--and she had said it with smiling casualness for
+the benefit of Lady Alanby, to whom she had been talking:
+
+"Don't alarm me by dropping your voice, Nigel.  I am easily
+frightened--and Lady Alanby will think we are conspirators."
+
+For an instant he was taken by surprise.  He had been pleased
+to believe that there was no way in which she could defend
+herself, unless she would condescend to something stupidly like a
+scene.  He flushed and drew himself up.
+
+"I beg your pardon, my dear Betty," he said, and walked
+away with the manner of an offended adorer, leaving her to
+realise an odiously unpleasant truth--which is that there are
+incidents only made more inexplicable by an effort to explain. 
+She saw also that he was quite aware of this, and that his
+offended departure was a brilliant inspiration, and had left her,
+as it were, in the lurch.  To have said to Lady Alanby:  "My
+brother-in-law, in whose house I am merely staying for my
+sister's sake, is trying to lead you to believe that I allow him
+to make love to me," would have suggested either folly or
+insanity on her own part.  As it was--after a glance at Sir
+Nigel's stiffly retreating back--Lady Alanby merely looked away
+with a wholly uninviting expression.
+
+When Betty spoke to him afterwards, haughtily and with
+determination, he laughed.
+
+"My dearest girl," he said, "if I watch you with interest
+and drop my voice when I get a chance to speak to you, I only
+do what every other man does, and I do it because you are an
+alluring young woman--which no one is more perfectly aware
+of than yourself.  Your pretence that you do not know you
+are alluring is the most captivating thing about you.  And what
+do you think of doing if I continue to offend you?  Do you
+propose to desert us--to leave poor Rosalie to sink back again
+into the bundle of old clothes she was when you came?  For
+Heaven's sake, don't do that!"
+
+All that his words suggested took form before her vividly. 
+How well he understood what he was saying.  But she
+answered him bravely.
+
+"No.  I do not mean to do that."
+
+He watched her for a few seconds.  There was curiosity in
+his eyes.
+
+"Don't make the mistake of imagining that I will let my
+wife go with you to America," he said next.  "She is as far
+off from that as she was when I brought her to Stornham.  I
+have told her so.  A man cannot tie his wife to the bedpost in
+these days, but he can make her efforts to leave him so decidedly
+unpleasant that decent women prefer to stay at home and take
+what is coming.  I have seen that often enough `to bank on it,'
+if I may quote your American friends."
+
+"Do you remember my once saying," Betty remarked, "that
+when a woman has been PROPERLY ill-treated the time comes
+when nothing matters--nothing but release from the life she
+loathes?"
+
+"Yes," he answered.  "And to you nothing would matter
+but--excuse my saying it--your own damnable, headstrong
+pride.  But Rosalie is different.  Everything matters to her. 
+And you will find it so, my dear girl."
+
+And that this was at least half true was brought home to
+her by the fact that late the same night Rosy came to her white
+with crying.
+
+"It is not your fault, Betty," she said.  "Don't think that I
+think it is your fault, but he has been in my room in one of
+those humours when he seems like a devil.  He thinks you will
+go back to America and try to take me with you.  But, Betty,
+you must not think about me.  It will be better for you to go. 
+I have seen you again.  I have had you for--for a time.  You
+will be safer at home with father and mother."
+
+Betty laid a hand on her shoulder and looked at her fixedly.
+
+"What is it, Rosy?" she said.  "What is it he does to you
+--that makes you like this?"
+
+"I don't know--but that he makes me feel that there is
+nothing but evil and lies in the world and nothing can help
+one against them.  Those things he says about everyone--men
+and women--things one can't repeat--make me sick.  And when
+I try to deny them, he laughs."
+
+"Does he say things about me?" Betty inquired, very
+quietly, and suddenly Rosalie threw her arms round her.
+
+"Betty, darling," she cried, "go home--go home.  You
+must not stay here."
+
+"When I go, you will go with me," Betty answered.  "I
+am not going back to mother without you."
+
+She made a collection of many facts before their interview
+was at an end, and they parted for the night.  Among the first
+was that Nigel had prepared for certain possibilities as wise
+holders of a fortress prepare for siege.  A rather long sitting
+alone over whisky and soda had, without making him loquacious,
+heated his blood in such a manner as led him to be less
+subtle than usual.  Drink did not make him drunk, but malignant,
+and when a man is in the malignant mood, he forgets his
+cleverness.  So he revealed more than he absolutely intended. 
+It was to be gathered that he did not mean to permit his wife
+to leave him, even for a visit; he would not allow himself to
+be made ridiculous by such a thing.  A man who could not
+control his wife was a fool and deserved to be a laughing-stock. 
+As Ughtred and his future inheritance seemed to have become
+of interest to his grandfather, and were to be well nursed and
+taken care of, his intention was that the boy should remain under
+his own supervision.  He could amuse himself well enough at
+Stornham, now that it had been put in order, if it was kept
+up properly and he filled it with people who did not bore
+him.  There were people who did not bore him--plenty of
+them.  Rosalie would stay where she was and receive his guests. 
+If she imagined that the little episode of Ffolliott had been
+entirely dormant, she was mistaken.  He knew where the man
+was, and exactly how serious it would be to him if scandal was
+stirred up.  He had been at some trouble to find out.  The
+fellow had recently had the luck to fall into a very fine living.
+It had been bestowed on him by the old Duke of Broadmorlands,
+who was the most strait-laced old boy in England. 
+He had become so in his disgust at the light behaviour of the
+wife he had divorced in his early manhood.  Nigel cackled
+gently as he detailed that, by an agreeable coincidence, it
+happened that her Grace had suddenly become filled with pious
+fervour--roused thereto by a good-looking locum tenens--
+result, painful discoveries--the pair being now rumoured to be
+keeping a lodging-house together somewhere in Australia.  A
+word to good old Broadmorlands would produce the effect of a
+lighted match on a barrel of gunpowder.  It would be the end
+of Ffolliott.  Neither would it be a good introduction to Betty's
+first season in London, neither would it be enjoyed by her
+mother, whom he remembered as a woman with primitive views
+of domestic rectitude.  He smiled the awful smile as he took out
+of his pocket the envelope containing the words his wife had
+written to Mr. Ffolliott, "Do not come to the house.  Meet
+me at Bartyon Wood."  It did not take much to convince people,
+if one managed things with decent forethought.  The
+Brents, for instance, were fond neither of her nor of Betty, and
+they had never forgotten the questionable conduct of their locum
+tenens.  Then, suddenly, he had changed his manner and had
+sat down, laughing, and drawn Rosalie to his knee and kissed
+her--yes, he had kissed her and told her not to look like a
+little fool or act like one.  Nothing unpleasant would happen if
+she behaved herself.  Betty had improved her greatly, and she had
+grown young and pretty again.  She looked quite like a child
+sometimes, now that her bones were covered and she dressed
+well.  If she wanted to please him she could put her arms
+round his neck and kiss him, as he had kissed her.
+
+"That is what has made you look white," said Betty.
+
+"Yes.  There is something about him that sometimes makes
+you feel as if the very blood in your veins turned white,"
+answered Rosy--in a low voice, which the next moment rose. 
+"Don't you see--don't you see," she broke out, "that to
+displease him would be like murdering Mr. Ffolliott--like
+murdering his mother and mine--and like murdering Ughtred,
+because he would be killed by the shame of things--and by being
+taken from me.  We have loved each other so much--so much. 
+Don't you see?"
+
+"I see all that rises up before you," Betty said, "and I
+understand your feeling that you cannot save yourself by bringing
+ruin upon an innocent man who helped you.  I realise that
+one must have time to think it over.  But, Rosy," a sudden ring
+in her voice, "I tell you there is a way out--there is a way
+out!  The end of the misery is coming--and it will not be what
+he thinks."
+
+"You always believe----" began Rosy.
+
+"I know," answered Betty.  "I know there are some things
+so bad that they cannot go on.  They kill themselves through
+their own evil.  I KNOW!  I KNOW!  That is all."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LX
+
+"DON'T GO ON WITH THIS"
+
+Of these things, as of others, she had come to her solitude to
+think.  She looked out over the marshes scarcely seeing the
+wandering or resting sheep, scarcely hearing the crying plover,
+because so much seemed to confront her, and she must look it
+all well in the face.  She had fulfilled the promise she had
+made to herself as a child.  She had come in search of Rosy,
+she had found her as simple and loving of heart as she had ever
+been.  The most painful discoveries she had made had been
+concealed from her mother until their aspect was modified. 
+Mrs. Vanderpoel need now feel no shock at the sight of the
+restored Rosy.  Lady Anstruthers had been still young enough
+to respond both physically and mentally to love, companionship,
+agreeable luxuries, and stimulating interests.  But for Nigel's
+antagonism there was now no reason why she should not be
+taken home for a visit to her family, and her long-yearned-for
+New York, no reason why her father and mother should not
+come to Stornham, and thus establish the customary social
+relations between their daughter's home and their own.  That this
+seemed out of the question was owing to the fact that at the
+outset of his married life Sir Nigel had allowed himself to
+commit errors in tactics.  A perverse egotism, not wholly normal
+in its rancour, had led him into deeds which he had begun to
+suspect of having cost him too much, even before Betty herself
+had pointed out to him their unbusinesslike indiscretion.  He
+had done things he could not undo, and now, to his mind, his
+only resource was to treat them boldly as having been the
+proper results of decision founded on sound judgment, which
+he had no desire to excuse.  A sufficiently arrogant loftiness of
+bearing would, he hoped, carry him through the matter.  This
+Betty herself had guessed, but she had not realised that this
+loftiness of attitude was in danger of losing some of its
+effectiveness through his being increasingly stung and spurred by
+circumstances and feelings connected with herself, which were at
+once exasperating and at times almost overpowering.  When, in
+his mingled dislike and admiration, he had begun to study his
+sister-in-law, and the half-amused weaving of the small plots
+which would make things sufficiently unpleasant to be used as
+factors in her removal from the scene, if necessary, he had not
+calculated, ever so remotely, on the chance of that madness
+besetting him which usually besets men only in their youth.  He
+had imagined no other results to himself than a subtly-exciting
+private entertainment, such as would give spice to the dullness
+of virtuous life in the country.  But, despite himself and his
+intentions, he had found the situation alter.  His first
+uncertainty of himself had arisen at the Dunholm ball, when he
+had suddenly realised that he was detesting men who, being young
+and free, were at liberty to pay gallant court to the new beauty.
+
+Perhaps the most disturbing thing to him had been his
+consciousness of his sudden leap of antagonism towards Mount
+Dunstan, who, despite his obvious lack of chance, somehow
+especially roused in him the rage of warring male instinct. 
+There had been admissions he had been forced, at length, to make
+to himself.  You could not, it appeared, live in the house with a
+splendid creature like this one--with her brilliant eyes, her
+beauty of line and movement before you every hour, her bloom,
+her proud fineness holding themselves wholly in their own
+keeping--without there being the devil to pay.  Lately he had
+sometimes gone hot and cold in realising that, having once told
+himself that he might choose to decide to get rid of her, he now
+knew that the mere thought of her sailing away of her own
+choice was maddening to him.  There WAS the devil to pay! 
+It sometimes brought back to him that hideous shakiness of
+nerve which had been a feature of his illness when he had been
+on the Riviera with Teresita.
+
+Of all this Betty only knew the outward signs which, taken
+at their exterior significance, were detestable enough, and drove
+her hard as she mentally dwelt on them in connection with other
+things.  How easy, if she stood alone, to defy his evil insolence
+to do its worst, and leaving the place at an hour's notice, to
+sail away to protection, or, if she chose to remain in England,
+to surround herself with a bodyguard of the people in whose eyes
+his disrepute relegated a man such as Nigel Anstruthers to
+powerless nonentity.  Alone, she could have smiled and turned
+her back upon him.  But she was here to take care of Rosy. 
+She occupied a position something like that of a woman who
+remains with a man and endures outrage because she cannot
+leave her child.  That thought, in itself, brought Ughtred to
+her mind.  There was Ughtred to be considered as well as his
+mother.  Ughtred's love for and faith in her were deep and
+passionate things.  He fed on her tenderness for him, and had
+grown stronger because he spent hours of each day talking,
+reading, and driving with her.  The simple truth was that
+neither she nor Rosalie could desert Ughtred, and so long as
+Nigel managed cleverly enough, the law would give the boy to
+his father.
+
+"You are obliged to prove things, you know, in a court of
+law," he had said, as if with casual amiability, on a certain
+occasion.  "Proving things is the devil.  People lose their
+tempers and rush into rows which end in lawsuits, and then
+find they can prove nothing.  If I were a villain," slightly
+showing his teeth in an agreeable smile--"instead of a man of
+blameless life, I should go in only for that branch of my
+profession which could be exercised without leaving stupid
+evidence behind."
+
+Since his return to Stornham the outward decorum of his
+own conduct had entertained him and he had kept it up with
+an increasing appreciation of its usefulness in the present
+situation.  Whatsoever happened in the end, it was the part of
+discretion to present to the rural world about him an
+appearance of upright behaviour.  He had even found it amusing
+to go to church and also to occasionally make amiable calls
+at the vicarage.  It was not difficult, at such times, to refer
+delicately to his regret that domestic discomfort had led him
+into the error of remaining much away from Stornham.  He
+knew that he had been even rather touching in his expression
+of interest in the future of his son, and the necessity of the
+boy's being protected from uncontrolled hysteric influences. 
+And, in the years of Rosalie's unprotected wretchedness, he
+had taken excellent care that no "stupid evidence" should be
+exposed to view.
+
+Of all this Betty was thinking and summing up definitely,
+point after point.  Where was the wise and practical course
+of defence?  The most unthinkable thing was that one could
+find one's self in a position in which action seemed inhibited. 
+What could one do?  To send for her father would surely end
+the matter--but at what cost to Rosy, to Ughtred, to Ffolliott,
+before whom the fair path to dignified security had so newly
+opened itself?  What would be the effect of sudden confusion,
+anguish, and public humiliation upon Rosalie's carefully rebuilt
+health and strength--upon her mother's new hope and happiness? 
+At moments it seemed as if almost all that had been done
+might be undone.  She was beset by such a moment now, and
+felt for the time, at least, like a creature tied hand and foot
+while in full strength.
+
+Certainly she was not prepared for the event which
+happened.  Roland stiffened his ears, and, beginning a rumbling
+growl, ended it suddenly, realising it an unnecessary precaution.
+
+He knew the man walking up the incline of the mound from the
+side behind them.  So did Betty know him.  It was Sir Nigel
+looking rather glowering and pale and walking slowly.  He had
+discovered where she had meant to take refuge, and had
+probably ridden to some point where he could leave his horse
+and follow her at the expense of taking a short cut which saved
+walking.
+
+As he climbed the mound to join her, Betty rose to her feet.
+
+"My dear girl," he said, "don't get up as if you meant to
+go away.  It has cost me some exertion to find you."
+
+"It will not cost you any exertion to lose me," was her
+light answer.  "I AM going away."
+
+He had reached her, and stood still before her with scarcely
+a yard's distance between them.  He was slightly out of breath
+and even a trifle livid.  He leaned on his stick and his look
+at her combined leaping bad temper with something deeper.
+
+"Look here!" he broke out, "why do you make such a point
+of treating me like the devil?"
+
+Betty felt her heart give a hastened beat, not of fear, but
+of repulsion.  This was the mood and manner which subjugated
+Rosalie.  He had so raised his voice that two men in the
+distance, who might be either labourers or sportsmen, hearing
+its high tone, glanced curiously towards them.
+
+"Why do you ask me a question which is totally absurd?"
+she said.
+
+"It is not absurd," he answered.  "I am speaking of facts,
+and I intend to come to some understanding about them."
+
+For reply, after meeting his look a few seconds, she simply
+turned her back and began to walk away.  He followed and
+overtook her.
+
+"I shall go with you, and I shall say what I want to say,"
+he persisted.  "If you hasten your pace I shall hasten mine. 
+I cannot exactly see you running away from me across the
+marsh, screaming.  You wouldn't care to be rescued by those
+men over there who are watching us.  I should explain myself
+to them in terms neither you nor Rosalie would enjoy.  There! 
+I knew Rosalie's name would pull you up.  Good God!  I wish
+I were a weak fool with a magnificent creature protecting me
+at all risks."
+
+If she had not had blood and fire in her veins, she might
+have found it easy to answer calmly.  But she had both, and
+both leaped and beat furiously for a few seconds.  It was only
+human that it should be so.  But she was more than a passionate
+girl of high and trenchant spirit, and she had learned, even in
+the days at the French school, what he had never been able to
+learn in his life--self-control.  She held herself in as she
+would have held in a horse of too great fire and action.  She was
+actually able to look--as the first Reuben Vanderpoel would
+have looked--at her capital of resource.  But it meant taut
+holding of the reins.
+
+"Will you tell me," she said, stopping, "what it is you want?"
+
+"I want to talk to you.  I want to tell you truths you would
+rather be told here than on the high road, where people are
+passing--or at Stornham, where the servants would overhear
+and Rosalie be thrown into hysterics.  You will NOT run
+screaming across the marsh, because I should run screaming
+after you, and we should both look silly.  Here is a rather
+scraggy tree.  Will you sit on the mound near it--for Rosalie's
+sake?"
+
+"I will not sit down," replied Betty, "but I will listen,
+because it is not a bad idea that I should understand you.  But
+to begin with, I will tell you something."  She stopped
+beneath the tree and stood with her back against its trunk. 
+"I pick up things by noticing people closely, and I have
+realised that all your life you have counted upon getting
+your own way because you saw that people--especially women
+--have a horror of public scenes, and will submit to almost
+anything to avoid them.  That is true very often, but not
+always." 
+
+Her eyes, which were well opened, were quite the blue of steel,
+and rested directly upon him.  "I, for instance, would let you
+make a scene with me anywhere you chose--in Bond Street--
+in Piccadilly--on the steps of Buckingham Palace, as I was
+getting out of my carriage to attend a drawing-room--and you
+would gain nothing you wanted by it--nothing.  You may place
+entire confidence in that statement."
+
+He stared back at her, momentarily half-magnetised, and then
+broke forth into a harsh half-laugh. 
+
+"You are so damned handsome that nothing else matters. 
+I'm hanged if it does!" and the words were an exclamation. 
+He drew still nearer to her, speaking with a sort of savagery.
+"Cannot you see that you could do what you pleased with
+me?  You are too magnificent a thing for a man to withstand. 
+I have lost my head and gone to the devil through you. 
+That is what I came to say."
+
+In the few seconds of silence that followed, his breath came
+quickly again and he was even paler than before.
+
+"You came to me to say THAT?" asked Betty.
+
+"Yes--to say it before you drove me to other things."
+
+Her gaze was for a moment even slightly wondering.  He
+presented the curious picture of a cynical man of the world, for
+the time being ruled and impelled only by the most primitive
+instincts.  To a clear-headed modern young woman of the
+most powerful class, he--her sister's husband--was making
+threatening love as if he were a savage chief and she a savage
+beauty of his tribe.  All that concerned him was that he should
+speak and she should hear--that he should show her he was
+the stronger of the two.
+
+"Are you QUITE mad?" she said.
+
+"Not quite," he answered; "only three parts--but I am
+beyond my own control.  That is the best proof of what has
+happened to me.  You are an arrogant piece and you would
+defy me if you stood alone, but you don't, and, by the Lord!  I
+have reached a point where I will make use of every lever I
+can lay my hand on--yourself, Rosalie, Ughtred, Ffolliott--
+the whole lot of you!"
+
+The thing which was hardest upon her was her knowledge
+of her own strength--of what she might have allowed herself
+of flaming words and instant action--but for the memory of
+Rosy's ghastly little face, as it had looked when she cried out,
+"You must not think of me.  Betty, go home--go home!" 
+She held the white desperation of it before her mental vision
+and answered him even with a certain interested deliberateness.
+
+"Do you know," she inquired, "that you are talking to me
+as though you were the villain in the melodrama?"
+
+"There is an advantage in that," he answered, with an
+unholy smile.  "If you repeat what I say, people will only think
+that you are indulging in hysterical exaggeration.  They don't
+believe in the existence of melodrama in these days."
+
+The cynical, absolute knowledge of this revealed so much
+that nerve was required to face it with steadiness.
+
+"True," she commented.  "Now I think I understand."
+
+"No, you don't," he burst forth.  "You have spent your
+life standing on a golden pedestal, being kowtowed to, and you
+imagine yourself immune from difficulties because you think
+you can pay your way out of anything.  But you will find that
+you cannot pay your way out of this--or rather you cannot pay
+Rosalie's way out of it."
+
+"I shall not try.  Go on," said the girl.  "What I do not
+understand, you must explain to me.  Don't leave anything
+unsaid."
+
+"Good God, what a woman you are!" he cried out
+bitterly.  He had never seen such beauty in his life as he saw in
+her as she stood with her straight young body flat against the
+tree.  It was not a matter of deep colour of eye, or high spirit
+of profile--but of something which burned him.  Still as she
+was, she looked like a flame.  She made him feel old and body-
+worn, and all the more senselessly furious.
+
+"I believe you hate me," he raged.  "And I may thank my
+wife for that."  Then he lost himself entirely.  "Why cannot
+you behave well to me?  If you will behave well to me, Rosalie
+shall go her own way.  If you even looked at me as you look
+at other men--but you do not.  There is always something
+under your lashes which watches me as if I were a wild beast
+you were studying.  Don't fancy yourself a dompteuse.  I am
+not your man.  I swear to you that you don't know what you
+are dealing with.  I swear to you that if you play this game with
+me I will drag you two down if I drag myself with you.  I
+have nothing much to lose.  You and your sister have everything."
+
+"Go on," Betty said briefly.
+
+"Go on!  Yes, I will go on.  Rosalie and Ffolliott I hold
+in the hollow of my hand.  As for you--do you know that
+people are beginning to discuss you?  Gossip is easily stirred in
+the country, where people are so bored that they chatter in
+self-defence.  I have been considered a bad lot.  I have become
+curiously attached to my sister-in-law.  I am seen hanging about
+her, hanging over her as we ride or walk alone together.  An
+American young woman is not like an English girl--she is
+used to seeing the marriage ceremony juggled with.  There's
+a trifle of prejudice against such young women when they
+are too rich and too handsome.  Don't look at me like that!" he
+burst forth, with maddened sharpness, "I won't have it!"
+
+The girl was regarding him with the expression he most
+resented--the reflection of a normal person watching an
+abnormal one, and studying his abnormality.
+
+"Do you know that you are raving?" she said, with quiet
+curiosity--"raving?"
+
+Suddenly he sat down on the low mound near him, and as he
+touched his forehead with his handkerchief, she saw that his
+hand actually shook.
+
+"Yes," he answered, panting, "but 'ware my ravings! 
+They mean what they say."
+
+"You do yourself an injury when you give way to them"--
+steadily, even with a touch of slow significance--"a physical
+injury.  I have noticed that more than once."
+
+He sprang to his feet again.  Every drop of blood left his
+face.  For a second he looked as if he would strike her.  His
+arm actually flung itself out--and fell.
+
+"You devil!" he gasped.  "You count on that?  You she-devil!"
+
+She left her tree and stood before him.
+
+"Listen to me," she said.  "You intimate that you have
+been laying melodramatic plots against me which will injure
+my good name.  That is rubbish.  Let us leave it at that.  You
+threaten that you will break Rosy's heart and take her child
+from her, you say also that you will wound and hurt my
+mother to her death and do your worst to ruin an honest
+man----"
+
+"And, by God, I will!" he raged.  "And you cannot stop
+me, if----"
+
+"I do not know whether I can stop you or not, though you
+may be sure I will try," she interrupted him, "but that is not
+what I was going to say."  She drew a step nearer, and there
+was something in the intensity of her look which fascinated and
+held him for a moment.  She was curiously grave.  "Nigel, I
+believe in certain things you do not believe in.  I believe black
+thoughts breed black ills to those who think them.  It is not a
+new idea.  There is an old Oriental proverb which says,
+`Curses, like chickens, come home to roost.' I believe also that
+the worst--the very worst CANNOT be done to those who think
+steadily--steadily--only of the best.  To you that is merely
+superstition to be laughed at.  That is a matter of opinion. 
+But--don't go on with this thing--DON'T GO ON WITH IT.  Stop
+and think it over."
+
+He stared at her furiously--tried to laugh outright, and
+failed because the look in her eyes was so odd in its strength
+and stillness.
+
+"You think you can lay some weird spell upon me," he
+jeered sardonically.
+
+"No, I don't," she answered.  "I could not if I would.  It
+is no affair of mine.  It is your affair only--and there is
+nothing weird about it.  Don't go on, I tell you.  Think better
+of it."
+
+She turned about without further speech, and walked away
+from him with light swiftness over the marsh.  Oddly enough,
+he did not even attempt to follow her.  He felt a little weak--
+perhaps because a certain thing she had said had brought back
+to him a familiar touch of the horrors.  She had the eyes of
+a falcon under the odd, soft shade of the extraordinary lashes. 
+She had seen what he thought no one but himself had realised. 
+Having watched her retreating figure for a few seconds, he sat
+down--as suddenly as before--on the mound near the tree.
+
+"Oh, damn her!" he said, his damp forehead on his hands. 
+"Damn the whole universe!"
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+When Betty and Roland reached Stornham, the wicker-work
+pony chaise from the vicarage stood before the stone entrance
+steps.  The drawing-room door was open, and Mrs. Brent was
+standing near it saying some last words to Lady Anstruthers
+before leaving the house, after a visit evidently made with an
+object.  This Betty gathered from the solemnity of her manner.
+
+"Betty," said Lady Anstruthers, catching sight of her, "do
+come in for a moment."
+
+When Betty entered, both her sister and Mrs. Brent looked
+at her questioningly.
+
+"You look a little pale and tired, Miss Vanderpoel," Mrs.
+Brent said, rather as if in haste to be the first to speak.  "I
+hope you are not at all unwell.  We need all our strength just
+now.  I have brought the most painful news.  Malignant
+typhoid fever has broken out among the hop pickers on the
+Mount Dunstan estate.  Some poor creature was evidently
+sickening for it when he came from London.  Three people died
+last night."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+SHE WOULD DO SOMETHING
+
+Sir Nigel's face was not a good thing to see when he appeared
+at the dinner table in the evening.  As he took his seat the two
+footmen glanced quickly at each other, and the butler at the
+sideboard furtively thrust out his underlip.  Not a man or
+woman in the household but had learned the signal denoting
+the moment when no service would please, no word or movement
+be unobjectionable.  Lady Anstruthers' face unconsciously
+assumed its propitiatory expression, and she glanced at her
+sister more than once when Betty was unaware that she did so.
+
+Until the soup had been removed, Sir Nigel scarcely spoke,
+merely making curt replies to any casual remark.  This was one
+of his simple and most engaging methods of at once enjoying
+an ill-humour and making his wife feel that she was in some way
+to blame for it.
+
+"Mount Dunstan is in a deucedly unpleasant position," he
+condescended at last.  "I should not care to stand in his shoes."
+
+He had not returned to the Court until late in the afternoon,
+but having heard in the village the rumour of the outbreak of
+fever, he had made inquiries and gathered detail.
+
+"You are thinking of the outbreak of typhoid among the
+hop pickers?" said Lady Anstruthers.  "Mrs. Brent thinks it
+threatens to be very serious."
+
+"An epidemic, without a doubt," he answered.  "In a
+wretched unsanitary place like Dunstan village, the wretches
+will die like flies."
+
+"What will be done?" inquired Betty.
+
+He gave her one of the unpleasant personal glances and
+laughed derisively.
+
+"Done?  The county authorities, who call themselves
+`guardians,' will be frightened to death and will potter about
+and fuss like old women, and profess to examine and protect
+and lay restrictions, but everyone will manage to keep at a
+discreet distance, and the thing will run riot and do its worst. 
+As far as one can see, there seems no reason why the whole place
+should not be swept away.  No doubt Mount Dunstan has
+wisely taken to his heels already."
+
+"I think that, on the contrary, there would be much doubt
+of that," Betty said.  "He would stay and do what he could."
+
+Sir Nigel shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Would he?  I think you'll find he would not."
+
+"Mrs. Brent tells me," Rosalie broke in somewhat hurriedly,
+"that the huts for the hoppers are in the worst possible
+condition.  They are so dilapidated that the rain pours into
+them.  There is no proper shelter for the people who are ill, and
+Lord Mount Dunstan cannot afford to take care of them."
+
+"But he WILL--he WILL," broke forth Betty.  Her head lifted
+itself and she spoke almost as if through her small, shut teeth. 
+A wave of intense belief--high, proud, and obstinate, swept
+through her.  It was a feeling so strong and vibrant that she
+felt as if Mount Dunstan himself must be reached and upborne
+by it--as if he himself must hear her.
+
+Rosalie looked at her half-startled, and, for the moment held
+fascinated by the sudden force rising in her and by the splendid
+spark of light under her lids.  She was reminded of the fierce
+little Betty of long ago, with her delicate, indomitable
+small face and the spirit which even at nine years old had
+somehow seemed so strong and straitly keen of sight that one
+had known it might always be trusted.  Actually, in one way,
+she had not changed.  She saw the truth of things.  The next
+instant, however, inadvertently glancing towards her husband,
+she caught her breath quickly.  Across his heavy-featured face
+had shot the sudden gleam of a new expression.  It was as if
+he had at the moment recognised something which filled him
+with a rush of fury he himself was not prepared for.  That he
+did not wish it to be seen she knew by his manner.  There was
+a brief silence in which it passed away.  He spoke after it, with
+disagreeable precision.
+
+"He has had an enormous effect on you--that man," he said
+to Betty.
+
+He spoke clearly so that she might have the pleasure of being
+certain that the menservants heard.  They were close to the
+table, handing fruit--professing to be automatons, eyes down,
+faces expressing nothing, but as quick of hearing as it is said
+that blind men are.  He knew that if he had been in her place
+and a thing as insultingly significant had been said to him,
+he should promptly have hurled the nearest object--plate, wine-
+glass, or decanter--in the face of the speaker.  He knew, too,
+that women cannot hurl projectiles without looking like viragos
+and fools.  The weakly-feminine might burst into tears or
+into a silly rage and leave the table.  There was a distinct
+breath's space of pause, and Betty, cutting a cluster from a
+bunch of hothouse grapes presented by the footman at her side,
+answered as clearly as he had spoken himself.
+
+"He is strong enough to produce an effect on anyone," she said. 
+"I think you feel that yourself.  He is a man who will not be
+beaten in the end.  Fortune will give him some good thing."
+
+"He is a fellow who knows well enough on which hand of him good
+things lie," he said.  "He will take all that offers itself."
+
+"Why not?" Betty said impartially.
+
+"There must be no riding or driving in the neighbourhood
+of the place," he said next.  "I will have no risks run."  He
+turned and addressed the butler.  "Jennings, tell the servants
+that those are my orders."
+
+He sat over his wine but a short time that evening, and when
+he joined his wife and sister-in-law in the drawing-room he
+went at once to Betty.  In fact, he was in the condition when
+a man cannot keep away from a woman, but must invent some
+reason for reaching her whether it is fatuous or plausible.
+
+"What I said to Jennings was an order to you as well as to
+the people below stairs.  I know you are particularly fond of
+riding in the direction of Mount Dunstan.  You are in my
+care so long as you are in my house."
+
+"Orders are not necessary," Betty replied.  "The day is
+past when one rushed to smooth pillows and give the wrong
+medicine when one's friends were ill.  If one is not a properly-
+trained nurse, it is wiser not to risk being very much in the
+way."
+
+He spoke over her shoulder, dropping his voice, though Lady
+Anstruthers sat apart, appearing to read.
+
+"Don't think I am fool enough not to understand.  You
+have yourself under magnificent control, but a woman passionately
+in love cannot keep a certain look out of her eyes."
+
+He was standing on the hearth.  Betty swung herself lightly
+round, facing him squarely.  Her full look was splendid.
+
+"If it is there--let it stay," she said.  "I would not keep it
+out of my eyes if I could, and, you are right, I could not if I
+would--if it is there.  If it is--let it stay."
+
+The daring, throbbing, human truth of her made his brain
+whirl.  To a man young and clean and fit to count as in the
+lists, to have heard her say the thing of a rival would have been
+hard enough, but base, degenerate, and of the world behind her
+day, to hear it while frenzied for her, was intolerable.  And
+it was Mount Dunstan she bore herself so highly for.  Whether
+melodrama is out of date or not there are, occasionally, some
+fine melodramatic touches in the enmities of to-day.
+
+"You think you will reach him," he persisted.  "You think you
+will help him in some way.  You will not let the thing alone."
+
+"Excuse my mentioning that whatsoever I take the liberty
+of doing will encroach on no right of yours," she said.
+
+But, alone in her room, after she went upstairs, the face
+reflecting itself in the mirror was pale and its black brows were
+drawn together.
+
+She sat down at the dressing-table, and, seeing the paled face,
+drew the black brows closer, confronting a complicating truth.
+
+"If I were free to take Rosalie and Ughtred home to-morrow," she
+thought, "I could not bear to go.  I should suffer too much."
+
+She was suffering now.  The strong longing in her heart
+was like a physical pain.  No word or look of this one man had
+given her proof that his thoughts turned to her, and yet it was
+intolerable--intolerable--that in his hour of stress and need
+they were as wholly apart as if worlds rolled between them. 
+At any dire moment it was mere nature that she should give
+herself in help and support.  If, on the night at sea, when they
+had first spoken to each other, the ship had gone down, she
+knew that they two, strangers though they were, would have
+worked side by side among the frantic people, and have been
+among the last to take to the boats.  How did she know?  Only
+because, he being he, and she being she, it must have been so
+in accordance with the laws ruling entities.  And now he stood
+facing a calamity almost as terrible--and she with full hands
+sat still.
+
+She had seen the hop pickers' huts and had recognised their
+condition.  Mere brick sheds in which the pickers slept upon
+bundles of hay or straw in their best days; in their decay they
+did not even provide shelter.  In fine weather the hop gatherers
+slept well enough in them, cooking their food in gypsy-fashion
+in the open.  When the rain descended, it must run down walls
+and drip through the holes in the roofs in streams which would
+soak clothes and bedding.  The worst that Nigel and Mrs.
+Brent had implied was true.  Illness of any order, under such
+circumstances, would have small chance of recovery, but malignant
+typhoid without shelter, without proper nourishment or
+nursing, had not one chance in a million.  And he--this one
+man--stood alone in the midst of the tragedy--responsible and
+helpless.  He would feel himself responsible as she herself
+would, if she were in his place.  She was conscious that
+suddenly the event of the afternoon--the interview upon the
+marshes, had receded until it had become an almost unmeaning
+incident.  What did the degenerate, melodramatic folly
+matter----!
+
+She had restlessly left her chair before the dressing-table, and
+was walking to and fro.  She paused and stood looking down
+at the carpet, though she scarcely saw it.
+
+"Nothing matters but one thing--one person," she owned
+to herself aloud.  "I suppose it is always like this.  Rosy,
+Ughtred, even father and mother--everyone seems less near
+than they were.  It is too strong--too strong.  It is----" the
+words dropped slowly from her lips, "the strongest thing--
+in the world."
+
+She lifted her face and threw out her hands, a lovely young
+half-sad smile curling the deep corners of her mouth.  "Sometimes
+one feels so disdained," she said--"so disdained with all
+one's power.  Perhaps I am an unwanted thing."
+
+But even in this case there were aids one might make an
+effort to give.  She went to her writing-table and sat thinking
+for some time.  Afterwards she began to write letters.  Three
+or four were addressed to London--one was to Mr. Penzance.
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+Mount Dunstan and his vicar were walking through the
+village to the vicarage.  They had been to the hop pickers' huts
+to see the people who were ill of the fever.  Both of them
+noticed that cottage doors and windows were shut, and that
+here and there alarmed faces looked out from behind latticed
+panes.
+
+"They are in a panic of fear," Mount Dunstan said, "and
+by way of safeguard they shut out every breath of air and
+stifle indoors.  Something must be done."
+
+Catching the eye of a woman who was peering over her
+short white dimity blind, he beckoned to her authoritatively. 
+She came to the door and hesitated there, curtsying nervously.
+
+Mount Dunstan spoke to her across the hedge.
+
+"You need not come out to me, Mrs. Binner.  You may
+stay where you are," he said.  "Are you obeying the orders
+given by the Guardians?"
+
+"Yes, my lord.  Yes, my lord," with more curtsys.
+
+"Your health is very much in your own hands," he added. 
+
+"You must keep your cottage and your children cleaner than
+you have ever kept them before, and you must use the disinfectant
+I sent you.  Keep away from the huts, and open your
+windows.  If you don't open them, I shall come and do it for
+you.  Bad air is infection itself.  Do you understand?"
+
+"Yes, my lord.  Thank your lordship."
+
+"Go in and open your windows now, and tell your neighbours
+to do the same.  If anyone is ill let me know at once. 
+The vicar and I will do our best for everyone."
+
+By that time curiosity had overcome fear, and other cottage
+doors had opened.  Mount Dunstan passed down the row and
+said a few words to each woman or man who looked out. 
+Questions were asked anxiously and he answered them.  That
+he was personally unafraid was comfortingly plain, and the
+mere sight of him was, on the whole, an unexplainable support.
+
+"We heard said your lordship was going away," put in a
+stout mother with a heavy child on her arm, a slight testiness
+scarcely concealed by respectful good-manners.  She was a
+matron with a temper, and that a Mount Dunstan should
+avoid responsibilities seemed highly credible.
+
+"I shall stay where I am," Mount Dunstan answered. 
+"My place is here."
+
+They believed him, Mount Dunstan though he was.  It
+could not be said that they were fond of him, but gradually
+it had been borne in upon them that his word was to be relied
+on, though his manner was unalluring and they knew he was
+too poor to do his duty by them or his estate.  As he walked
+away with the vicar, windows were opened, and in one or two
+untidy cottages a sudden flourishing of mops and brooms began.
+
+There was dark trouble in Mount Dunstan's face.  In the
+huts they had left two men stiff on their straw, and two
+women and a child in a state of collapse.  Added to these
+were others stricken helpless.  A number of workers in the
+hop gardens, on realising the danger threatening them, had
+gathered together bundles and children, and, leaving the harvest
+behind, had gone on the tramp again.  Those who remained
+were the weaker or less cautious, or were held by some tie
+to those who were already ill of the fever.  The village doctor
+was an old man who had spent his blameless life in bringing
+little cottagers into the world, attending their measles and
+whooping coughs, and their father's and grandfather's
+rheumatics.  He had never faced a village crisis in the course 
+of his seventy-five years, and was aghast and flurried with
+fright.  His methods remained those of his youth, and were
+marked chiefly by a readiness to prescribe calomel in any
+emergency.  A younger and stronger man was needed, as well
+as a man of more modern training.  But even the most
+brilliant practitioner of the hour could not have provided
+shelter and nourishment, and without them his skill would have
+counted as nothing.  For three weeks there had been no rain,
+which was a condition of the barometer not likely to last. 
+Already grey clouds were gathering and obscuring the blueness
+of the sky.
+
+The vicar glanced upwards anxiously.
+
+"When it comes," he said, "there will be a downpour, and
+a persistent one."
+
+"Yes," Mount Dunstan answered.
+
+He had lain awake thinking throughout the night.  How
+was a man to sleep!  It was as Betty Vanderpoel had known
+it would be.  He, who--beggar though he might be--was
+the lord of the land, was the man to face the strait of these
+poor workers on the land, as his own.  Some action must
+be taken.  What action?  As he walked by his friend's side
+from the huts where the dead men lay it revealed itself that
+he saw his way.
+
+They were going to the vicarage to consult a medical book,
+but on the way there they passed a part of the park where,
+through a break in the timber the huge, white, blind-faced
+house stood on view.  Mount Dunstan laid his hand on Mr.
+Penzance's shoulder and stopped him
+
+"Look there!" he said.  "THERE are weather-tight rooms
+enough."
+
+A startled expression showed itself on the vicar's face.
+
+"For what?" he exclaimed
+
+"For a hospital," brusquely "I can give them one thing,
+at least--shelter."
+
+"It is a very remarkable thing to think of doing," Mr.
+Penzance said.
+
+"It is not so remarkable as that labourers on my land
+should die at my gate because I cannot give them decent
+roofs to cover them.  There is a roof that will shield them
+from the weather.  They shall be brought to the Mount."
+
+The vicar was silent a moment, and a flush of sympathy
+warmed his face.
+
+"You are quite right, Fergus," he said, "entirely right."
+
+"Let us go to your study and plan how it shall be done,"
+Mount Dunstan said.
+
+As they walked towards the vicarage, he went on talking.
+
+"When I lie awake at night, there is one thread which
+always winds itself through my thoughts whatsoever they are. 
+I don't find that I can disentangle it.  It connects itself with
+Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter.  You would know that
+without my telling you.  If you had ever struggled with an
+insane passion----"
+
+"It is not insane, I repeat," put in Penzance unflinchingly.
+
+"Thank you--whether you are right or wrong," answered
+Mount Dunstan, striding by his side.  "When I am awake,
+she is as much a part of my existence as my breath itself. 
+When I think things over, I find that I am asking myself
+if her thoughts would be like mine.  She is a creature of
+action.  Last night, as I lay awake, I said to myself, `She
+would DO something.  What would she do?'  She would not
+be held back by fear of comment or convention.  She would
+look about her for the utilisable, and she would find it
+somewhere and use it.  I began to sum up the village resources
+and found nothing--until my thoughts led me to my own
+house.  There it stood--empty and useless.  If it were hers,
+and she stood in my place, she would make it useful.  So I
+decided."
+
+"You are quite right," Mr. Penzance said again.
+
+They spent an hour in his library at the vicarage, arranging
+practical methods for transforming the great ballroom into
+a sort of hospital ward.  It could be done by the removal of
+pieces of furniture from the many unused bedrooms.  There
+was also the transportation of the patients from the huts to be
+provided for.  But, when all this was planned out, each found
+himself looking at the other with an unspoken thought in
+his mind.  Mount Dunstan first expressed it.
+
+"As far as I can gather, the safety of typhoid fever patients
+depends almost entirely on scientific nursing, and the caution
+with which even liquid nourishment is given.  The
+woman whose husband died this morning told me that he had
+seemed better in the night, and had asked for something to eat. 
+She gave him a piece of bread and a slice of cold bacon,
+because he told her he fancied it.  I could not explain to her,
+as she sat sobbing over him, that she had probably killed him. 
+When we have patients in our ward, what shall we feed them
+on, and who will know how to nurse them?  They do not know
+how to nurse each other, and the women in the village would
+not run the risk of undertaking to help us."
+
+But, even before he had left the house, the problem was
+solved for them.  The solving of it lay in the note Miss
+Vanderpoel had written the night before at Stornham.
+
+When it was brought to him Mr. Penzance glanced up
+from certain calculations he was making upon a sheet of note-
+paper.  The accumulating difficulties made him look worn
+and tired.  He opened the note and read it gravely, and
+then as gravely, though with a change of expression, handed
+it to Mount Dunstan.
+
+"Yes, she is a creature of action.  She has heard and
+understood at once, and she has done something.  It is immensely
+practical--it is fine--it--it is lovable."
+
+"Do you mind my keeping it?" Mount Dunstan asked, after he had
+read it.
+
+"Keep it by all means," the vicar answered.  "It is worth
+keeping."
+
+But it was quite brief.  She had heard of the outbreak of
+fever among the hop pickers, and asked to be allowed to give
+help to the people who were suffering.  They would need
+prompt aid.  She chanced to know something of the requirements
+of such cases, and had written to London for certain
+supplies which would be sent to them at once.  She had also
+written for nurses, who would be needed above all else. 
+Might she ask Mr. Penzance to kindly call upon her for
+any further assistance required.
+
+"Tell her we are deeply grateful," said Mount Dunstan,
+"and that she has given us greater help than she knows."
+
+"Why not answer her note yourself?" Penzance suggested.
+
+Mount Dunstan shook his head.
+
+"No," he said shortly.  "No."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+IN THE BALLROOM
+
+Though Dunstan village was cut off, by its misfortune,
+from its usual intercourse with its neighbours, in some mystic
+manner villages even at twenty miles' distance learned all
+it did and suffered, feared or hoped.  It did not hope greatly,
+the rustic habit of mind tending towards a discouraged
+outlook, and cherishing the drama of impending calamity.  As
+far as Yangford and Marling inmates of cottages and farm-
+houses were inclined to think it probable that Dunstan would
+be "swep away," and rumours of spreading death and disaster
+were popular.  Tread, the advanced blacksmith at Stornham,
+having heard in his by-gone, better days of the Great Plague
+of London, was greatly in demand as a narrator of illuminating
+anecdotes at The Clock Inn.
+
+Among the parties gathered at the large houses Mount
+Dunstan himself was much talked of.  If he had been a
+popular man, he might have become a sort of hero; as he was
+not popular, he was merely a subject for discussion.  The
+fever-stricken patients had been carried in carts to the Mount
+and given beds in the ballroom, which had been made into a
+temporary ward.  Nurses and supplies had been sent for from
+London, and two energetic young doctors had taken the place
+of old Dr. Fenwick, who had been frightened and overworked
+into an attack of bronchitis which confined him to his bed. 
+Where the money came from, which must be spent every day
+under such circumstances, it was difficult to say.  To the
+simply conservative of mind, the idea of filling one's house
+with dirty East End hop pickers infected with typhoid seemed
+too radical.  Surely he could have done something less
+extraordinary.  Would everybody be expected to turn their houses
+into hospitals in case of village epidemics, now that he had
+established a precedent?  But there were people who approved,
+and were warm in their sympathy with him.  At the first dinner
+party where the matter was made the subject of argument,
+the beautiful Miss Vanderpoel, who was present, listened
+silently to the talk with such brilliant eyes that Lord Dunholm,
+who was in an elderly way her staunch admirer, spoke to her
+across the table:
+
+"Tell us what YOU think of it, Miss Vanderpoel," he suggested.
+
+She did not hesitate at all.
+
+"I like it," she answered, in her clear, well-heard voice. 
+"I like it better than anything I have ever heard."
+
+"So do I," said old Lady Alanby shortly.  "I should never
+have done it myself--but I like it just as you do."
+
+"I knew you would, Lady Alanby," said the girl.  "And
+you, too, Lord Dunholm."
+
+
+"I like it so much that I shall write and ask if I cannot be
+of assistance," Lord Dunholm answered.
+
+Betty was glad to hear this.  Only quickness of thought
+prevented her from the error of saying, "Thank you," as if
+the matter were personal to herself.  If Mount Dunstan was
+restive under the obviousness of the fact that help was so
+sorely needed, he might feel less so if her offer was only one
+among others.
+
+"It seems rather the duty of the neighbourhood to show
+some interest," put in Lady Alanby.  "I shall write to him
+myself.  He is evidently of a new order of Mount Dunstan. 
+It's to be hoped he won't take the fever himself, and die of it
+He ought to marry some handsome, well-behaved girl, and re-
+found the family."
+
+Nigel Anstruthers spoke from his side of the table, leaning
+slightly forward.
+
+"He won't if he does not take better care of himself. 
+He passed me on the road two days ago, riding like a lunatic. 
+He looks frightfully ill--yellow and drawn and lined.  He
+has not lived the life to prepare him for settling down to a
+fight with typhoid fever.  He would be done for if he caught
+the infection."
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Lord Dunholm, with quiet
+decision.  "Unprejudiced inquiry proves that his life has been
+entirely respectable.  As Lady Alanby says, he seems to be
+of a new order of Mount Dunstan."
+
+"No doubt you are right," said Sir Nigel suavely.  "He
+looked ill, notwithstanding."
+
+"As to looking ill," remarked Lady Alanby to Lord
+Dunholm, who sat near her, "that man looks as if he was going
+to pieces pretty rapidly himself, and unprejudiced inquiry would
+not prove that his past had nothing to do with it."
+
+Betty wondered if her brother-in-law were lying.  It was
+generally safest to argue that he was.  But the fever burned
+high at Mount Dunstan, and she knew by instinct what its
+owner was giving of the strength of his body and brain.  A
+young, unmarried woman cannot go about, however, making
+anxious inquiries concerning the welfare of a man who has
+made no advance towards her.  She must wait for the chance
+which brings news.
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+The fever, having ill-cared for and habitually ill fed bodies
+to work upon, wrought fiercely, despite the energy of the two 
+young doctors and the trained nurses.  There were many dark
+hours in the ballroom ward, hours filled with groans and wild
+ravings.  The floating Terpsichorean goddesses upon the lofty
+ceiling gazed down with wondering eyes at haggard faces
+and plucking hands which sometimes, behind the screen drawn
+round their beds, ceased to look feverish, and grew paler and
+stiller, until they moved no more.  But, at least, none had
+died through want of shelter and care.  The supplies needed
+came from London each day.  Lord Dunholm had sent a generous
+cheque to the aid of the sufferers, and so, also, had old
+Lady Alanby, but Miss Vanderpoel, consulting medical
+authorities and hospitals, learned exactly what was required, and
+necessities were forwarded daily in their most easily utilisable
+form.
+
+"You generously told me to ask you for anything we found
+we required," Mr. Penzance wrote to her in his note of thanks. 
+"My dear and kind young lady, you leave nothing to ask for. 
+Our doctors, who are young and enthusiastic, are filled with
+delight in the completeness of the resources placed in their
+hands."
+
+She had, in fact, gone to London to consult an eminent
+physician, who was an authority of world-wide reputation. 
+Like the head of the legal firm of Townlinson & Sheppard, he
+had experienced a new sensation in the visit paid him by an
+indubitably modern young beauty, who wasted no word, and
+whose eyes, while he answered her amazingly clear questions,
+were as intelligently intent as those of an ardent and serious
+young medical student.  What a surgical nurse she would
+have made!  It seemed almost a pity that she evidently
+belonged to a class the members of which are rich enough to
+undertake the charge of entire epidemics, but who do not
+usually give themselves to such work, especially when they
+are young and astonishing in the matter of looks.
+
+In addition to the work they did in the ballroom ward,
+Mount Dunstan and the vicar found much to do among the
+villagers.  Ignorance and alarm combined to create dangers,
+even where they might not have been feared.  Daily instruction
+and inspection of the cottages and their inmates was
+required.  The knowledge that they were under control and
+supervision was a support to the frightened people and prevented
+their lapsing into careless habits.  Also, there began to
+develop among them a secret dependence upon, and desire to
+please "his lordship," as the existing circumstances drew him 
+nearer to them, and unconsciously they were attracted and
+dominated by his strength.  The strong man carries his power
+with him, and, when Mount Dunstan entered a cottage and
+talked to its inmates, the anxious wife or surlily depressed
+husband was conscious of feeling a certain sense of security. 
+It had been a queer enough thing, this he had done--bundling
+the infected hoppers out of their leaking huts and carrying
+them up to the Mount itself for shelter and care.  At the
+most, gentlefolk generally gave soup or blankets or hospital
+tickets, and left the rest to luck, but, "gentry-way" or not,
+a man who did a thing like that would be likely to do other
+things, if they were needed, and gave folk a feeling of being
+safer than ordinary soup and blankets and hospital tickets
+could make them.
+
+But "where did the money come from?" was asked during
+the first days.  Beds and doctors, nurses and medicine, fine
+brandy and unlimited fowls for broth did not come up from
+London without being paid for.  Pounds and pounds a day
+must be paid out to get the things that were delivered
+"regular" in hampers and boxes.  The women talked to one another
+over their garden palings, the men argued together over their
+beer at the public house.  Was he running into more debt? 
+But even the village knew that Mount Dunstan credit had
+been exhausted long ago, and there had been no money at the
+Mount within the memory of man, so to speak.
+
+One morning the matron with the sharp temper found out
+the truth, though the outburst of gratitude to Mount Dunstan
+which resulted in her enlightenment, was entirely spontaneous
+and without intention.  Her doubt of his Mount Dunstan
+blood had grown into a sturdy liking even for his short speech
+and his often drawn-down brows.
+
+"We've got more to thank your lordship for than common
+help," she said.  "God Almighty knows where we'd all ha'
+been but for what you've done.  Those poor souls you've nursed
+and fed----"
+
+"I've not done it," he broke in promptly.  "You're
+mistaken; I could not have done it.  How could I?"
+
+"Well," exclaimed the matron frankly, "we WAS wondering
+where things came from."
+
+"You might well wonder.  Have any of you seen Lady
+Anstruthers' sister, Miss Vanderpoel, ride through the village? 
+She used sometimes to ride this way.  If you saw her you
+will remember it.'
+
+"The 'Merican young lady!" in ejaculatory delight.  "My
+word, yes!  A fine young woman with black hair?  That rich,
+they say, as millions won't cover it."
+
+"They won't," grimly.  "Lord Dunholm and Lady Alanby
+of Dole kindly sent cheques to help us, but the American
+young lady was first on the field.  She sent both doctors and
+nurses, and has supplied us with food and medicine every day. 
+As you say, Mrs. Brown, God Almighty knows what would
+have become of us, but for what she has done."
+
+Mrs. Brown had listened with rather open mouth.  She
+caught her breath heartily, as a sort of approving exclamation.
+
+"God bless her!" she broke out.  "Girls isn't generally
+like that.  Their heads is too full of finery.  God bless her,
+'Merican or no 'Merican!  That's what I say."
+
+Mount Dunstan's red-brown eyes looked as if she had
+pleased him.
+
+"That's what I say, too," he answered.  "God bless her!"
+
+There was not a day which passed in which he did not
+involuntarily say the words to himself again and again.  She
+had been wrong when she had said in her musings that
+they were as far apart as if worlds rolled between them. 
+Something stronger than sight or speech drew them together. 
+The thread which wove itself through his thoughts grew
+stronger and stronger.  The first day her gifts arrived and he
+walked about the ballroom ward directing the placing of hospital
+cots and hospital aids and comforts, the spirit of her
+thought and intelligence, the individuality and cleverness of
+all her methods, brought her so vividly before him that it was
+almost as if she walked by his side, as if they spoke together,
+as if she said, "I have tried to think of everything.  I want
+you to miss nothing.  Have I helped you?  Tell me if there is
+anything more."  The thing which moved and stirred him
+was his knowledge that when he had thought of her she
+had also been thinking of him, or of what deeply concerned
+him.  When he had said to himself, tossing on his pillow,
+"What would she DO?" she had been planning in such a way
+as answered his question.  Each morning, when the day's supplies
+arrived, it was as if he had received a message from her.
+
+As the people in the cottages felt the power of his
+temperament and depended upon him, so, also, did the patients
+in the ballroom ward.  The feeling had existed from the outset
+and increased daily.  The doctors and nurses told one another 
+that his passing through the room was like the administering
+of a tonic.  Patients who were weak and making no effort,
+were lifted upon the strong wave of his will and carried
+onward towards the shore of greater courage and strength.
+
+Young Doctor Thwaite met him when he came in one
+morning, and spoke in a low voice:
+
+"There is a young man behind the screen there who is
+very low," he said.  "He had an internal haemorrhage towards
+morning, and has lost his pluck.  He has a wife and three
+children.  We have been doing our best for him with hot-
+water bottles and stimulants, but he has not the courage to
+help us.  You have an extraordinary effect on them all, Lord
+Mount Dunstan.  When they are depressed, they always ask
+when you are coming in, and this man--Patton, his name is--
+has asked for you several times.  Upon my word, I believe
+you might set him going again."
+
+Mount Dunstan walked to the bed, and, going behind the
+screen, stood looking down at the young fellow lying breathing
+pantingly.  His eyes were closed as he laboured, and his
+pinched white nostrils drew themselves in and puffed out at
+each breath.  A nurse on the other side of the cot had just
+surrounded him with fresh hot-water bottles.
+
+Suddenly the sunken eyelids flew open, and the eyes met
+Mount Dunstan's in imploring anxiousness.
+
+"Here I am, Patton," Mount Dunstan said.  "You need not speak."
+
+But he must speak.  Here was the strength his sinking soul
+had longed for.
+
+"Cruel bad--goin' fast--m' lord," he panted.
+
+Mount Dunstan made a sign to the nurse, who gave him a
+chair.  He sat down close to the bed, and took the bloodless
+hand in his own.
+
+"No," he said, "you are not going.  You'll stay here.  I
+will see to that."
+
+The poor fellow smiled wanly.  Vague yearnings had led
+him sometimes, in the past, to wander into chapels or stop
+and listen to street preachers, and orthodox platitudes came
+back to him.
+
+"God's--will," he trailed out.
+
+"It's nothing of the sort.  It's God's will that you pull
+yourself together.  A man with a wife and three children has
+no right to slip out."
+
+A yearning look flickered in the lad's eyes--he was scarcely 
+more than a lad, having married at seventeen, and had a child
+each year.
+
+"She's--a good--girl."
+
+"Keep that in your mind while you fight this out," said
+Mount Dunstan.  "Say it over to yourself each time you
+feel yourself letting go.  Hold on to it.  I am going to fight
+it out with you.  I shall sit here and take care of you all day
+--all night, if necessary.  The doctor and the nurse will tell
+me what to do.  Your hand is warmer already.  Shut your eyes."
+
+He did not leave the bedside until the middle of the night.
+
+By that time the worst was over.  He had acted throughout
+the hours under the direction of nurse and doctor.  No one
+but himself had touched the patient.  When Patton's eyes
+were open, they rested on him with a weird growing belief. 
+He begged his lordship to hold his hand, and was uneasy when
+he laid it down.
+
+"Keeps--me--up," he whispered.
+
+"He pours something into them--vigour--magnetic power
+--life.  He's like a charged battery," Dr. Thwaite said to his
+co-workers.  "He sat down by Patton just in time.  It sets
+one to thinking."
+
+Having saved Patton, he must save others.  When a man
+or woman sank, or had increased fever, they believed that he
+alone could give them help.  In delirium patients cried out
+for him.  He found himself doing hard work, but he did not
+flinch from it.  The adoration for him became a sort of
+passion.  Haggard faces lighted up into life at the sound
+of his footstep, and heavy heads turned longingly on their
+pillows as he passed by.  In the winter days to come there
+would be many an hour's talk in East End courts and alleys
+of the queer time when a score or more of them had lain in
+the great room with the dancing and floating goddesses looking
+down at them from the high, painted ceiling, and the swell,
+who was a lord, walking about among them, working for them
+as the nurses did, and sitting by some of them through awful
+hours, sometimes holding burning or slackening and chilling
+hands with a grip whose steadiness seemed to hold them back
+from the brink of the abyss they were slipping into.  The
+mere ignorantly childish desire to do his prowess credit and to
+play him fair saved more than one man and woman from
+going out with the tide.
+
+"It is the first time in my life that I have fairly counted 
+among men.  It's the first time I have known human affection,
+other than yours, Penzance.  They want me, these people;
+they are better for the sight of me.  It is a new experience,
+and it is good for a man's soul," he said.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII
+
+HIS CHANCE
+
+Betty walked much alone upon the marshes with Roland at
+her side.  At intervals she heard from Mr. Penzance, but his
+notes were necessarily brief, and at other times she could only
+rely upon report for news of what was occurring at Mount
+Dunstan.  Lord Mount Dunstan's almost military supervision
+of and command over his villagers had certainly saved them
+from the horrors of an uncontrollable epidemic; his decision
+and energy had filled the alarmed Guardians with respect and this
+respect had begun to be shared by many other persons.  A man as
+prompt in action, and as faithful to such responsibilities
+as many men might have found plausible reasons enough
+for shirking, inevitably assumed a certain dignity of aspect,
+when all was said and done.  Lord Dunholm was most clear
+in his expressions of opinion concerning him.  Lady Alanby
+of Dole made a practice of speaking of him in public frequently,
+always with admiring approval, and in that final manner of
+hers, to whose authority her neighbours had so long submitted. 
+It began to be accepted as a fact that he was a new development
+of his race--as her ladyship had put it, "A new order of Mount
+Dunstan."
+
+The story of his power over the stricken people, and of
+their passionate affection and admiration for him, was one
+likely to spread far, and be immensely popular.  The drama
+of certain incidents appealed greatly to the rustic mind, and by
+cottage firesides he was represented with rapturous awe, as
+raising men, women, and children from the dead, by the mere
+miracle of touch.  Mrs. Welden and old Doby revelled in
+thrilling, almost Biblical, versions of current anecdotes, when
+Betty paid her visits to them.
+
+"It's like the Scripture, wot he done for that young man
+as the last breath had gone out of him, an' him lyin' stiffening
+fast.  `Young man, arise,' he says.  `The Lord Almighty
+calls.  You've got a young wife an' three children to take
+care of.  Take up your bed an' walk.'  Not as he wanted
+him to carry his bed anywheres, but it was a manner of speaking. 
+An' up the young man got.  An' a sensible way," said
+old Mrs. Welden frankly, "for the Lord to look at it--
+for I must say, miss, if I was struck down for it, though I
+s'pose it's only my sinful ignorance--that there's times when
+the Lord seems to think no more of sweepin' away a steady
+eighteen-shillin' a week, and p'raps seven in family, an' one at
+the breast, an' another on the way--than if it was nothin'. 
+But likely enough, eighteen shillin' a week an' confinements
+does seem paltry to the Maker of 'eaven an' earth."
+
+But, to the girl walking over the marshland, the humanness
+of the things she heard gave to her the sense of nearness--of
+being almost within sight and sound--which Mount Dunstan
+himself had felt, when each day was filled with the result
+of her thought of the needs of the poor souls thrown by fate
+into his hands.  In these days, after listening to old Mrs.
+Welden's anecdotes, through which she gathered the simpler truth
+of things, Betty was able to construct for herself a less
+Scriptural version of what she had heard.  She was glad--glad
+in his sitting by a bedside and holding a hand which lay
+in his hot or cold, but always trusting to something which
+his strong body and strong soul gave without stint.  There
+would be no restraint there.  Yes, he was kind--kind--kind
+--with the kindness a woman loves, and which she, of all
+women, loved most.  Sometimes she would sit upon some
+mound, and, while her eyes seemed to rest on the yellowing
+marsh and its birds and pools, they saw other things, and their
+colour grew deep and dark as the marsh water between the
+rushes.
+
+The time was pressing when a change in her life must come. 
+She frequently asked herself if what she saw in Nigel
+Anstruthers' face was the normal thinking of a sane man, which
+he himself could control.  There had been moments when she
+had seriously doubted it.  He was haggard, aging and restless. 
+Sometimes he--always as if by chance--followed her as she
+went from one room to another, and would seat himself and
+fix his miserable eyes upon her for so long a time that it
+seemed he must be unconscious of what he was doing.  Then
+he would appear suddenly to recollect himself and would
+start up with a muttered exclamation, and stalk out of the
+room.  He spent long hours riding or driving alone about
+the country or wandering wretchedly through the Park and
+gardens.  Once he went up to town, and, after a few days'
+absence, came back looking more haggard than before, and
+wearing a hunted look in his eyes.  He had gone to see a
+physician, and, after having seen him, he had tried to lose
+himself in a plunge into deep and turbid enough waters; but
+he found that he had even lost the taste of high flavours, for
+which he had once had an epicurean palate.  The effort had
+ended in his being overpowered again by his horrors--the
+horrors in which he found himself staring at that end of things
+when no pleasure had spice, no debauchery the sting of life,
+and men, such as he, stood upon the shore of time shuddering
+and naked souls, watching the great tide, bearing its treasures,
+recede forever, and leave them to the cold and hideous dark. 
+During one day of his stay in town he had seen Teresita, who
+had at first stared half frightened by the change she saw in
+him, and then had told him truths he could have wrung her
+neck for putting into words.
+
+"You look an old man," she said, with the foreign accent
+he had once found deliciously amusing, but which now seemed
+to add a sting.  "And somesing is eating you op.  You are
+mad in lofe with some beautiful one who will not look at you. 
+I haf seen it in mans before.  It is she who eats you op--your
+evil thinkings of her.  It serve you right.  Your eyes look
+mad."
+
+He himself, at times, suspected that they did, and cursed
+himself because he could not keep cool.  It was part of his
+horrors that he knew his internal furies were worse than
+folly, and yet he could not restrain them.  The creeping
+suspicion that this was only the result of the simple fact that
+he had never tried to restrain any tendency of his own was
+maddening.  His nervous system was a wreck.  He drank a great
+deal of whisky to keep himself "straight" during the day,
+and he rose many times during his black waking hours in the
+night to drink more because he obstinately refused to give up
+the hope that, if he drank enough, it would make him sleep. 
+As through the thoughts of Mount Dunstan, who was a clean
+and healthy human being, there ran one thread which would
+not disentangle itself, so there ran through his unwholesome
+thinking a thread which burned like fire.  His secret ravings
+would not have been good to hear.  His passion was more than
+half hatred, and a desire for vengeance, for the chance to re-
+assert his own power, to prove himself master, to get the better
+in one way or another of this arrogant young outsider and her
+high-handed pride.  The condition of his mind was so far
+from normal that he failed to see that the things he said to
+himself, the plans he laid, were grotesque in their folly.  The
+old cruel dominance of the man over the woman thing, which
+had seemed the mere natural working of the law among men
+of his race in centuries past, was awake in him, amid the
+limitations of modern days.
+
+"My God," he said to himself more than once, "I would
+like to have had her in my hands a few hundred years ago. 
+Women were kept in their places, then."
+
+He was even frenzied enough to think over what he would
+have done, if such a thing had been--of her utter helplessness
+against that which raged in him--of the grey thickness of the
+walls where he might have held and wrought his will upon
+her--insult, torment, death.  His alcohol-excited brain ran
+riot--but, when it did its foolish worst, he was baffled by one
+thing.
+
+"Damn her!" he found himself crying out.  "If I had hung
+her up and cut her into strips she would have died staring
+at me with her big eyes--without uttering a sound."
+
+There was a long reach between his imaginings and the
+time he lived in.  America had not been discovered in those
+decent days, and now a man could not beat even his own
+wife, or spend her money, without being meddled with by
+fools.  He was thinking of a New York young woman of the
+nineteenth century who could actually do as she hanged
+pleased, and who pleased to be damned high and mighty.  For
+that reason in itself it was incumbent upon a man to get even
+with her in one way or another.  High and mightiness was not
+the hardest thing to reach.  It offered a good aim.
+
+His temper when he returned to Stornham was of the order
+which in past years had set Rosalie and her child shuddering
+and had sent the servants about the house with pale or sullen
+faces.  Betty's presence had the odd effect of restraining him,
+and he even told her so with sneering resentment.
+
+"There would be the devil to pay if you were not here," he
+said.  "You keep me in order, by Jove!  I can't work up
+steam properly when you watch me."
+
+He himself knew that it was likely that some change would
+take place.  She would not stay at Stornham and she would not
+leave his wife and child alone with him again.  It would be
+like her to hold her tongue until she was ready with her
+infernal plans and could spring them on him.  Her letters to
+her father had probably prepared him for such action as such
+a man would be likely to take.  He could guess what it would
+be.  They were free and easy enough in America in their
+dealings with the marriage tie.  Their idea would doubtless
+be a divorce with custody of the child.  He wondered a little
+that they had remained quiet so long.  There had been American
+shrewdness in her coming boldly to Stornham to look over
+the ground herself and actually set the place in order.  It did
+not present itself to his mind that what she had done had
+been no part of a scheme, but the mere result of her temperament
+and training.  He told himself that it had been planned
+beforehand and carried out in hard-headed commercial American
+fashion as a matter of business.  The thing which most
+enraged him was the implied cool, practical realisation of the
+fact that he, as inheritor of an entailed estate, was but owner
+in charge, and not young enough to be regarded as an
+insurmountable obstacle to their plans.  He could not undo the
+greater part of what had been done, and they were calculating,
+he argued, that his would not be likely to be a long life, and if
+--if anything happened--Stornham would be Ughtred's and
+the whole vulgar lot of them would come over and take possession
+and swagger about the place as if they had been born on
+it.  As to divorce or separation--if they took that line, he
+would at least give them a good run for their money.  They would
+wish they had let sleeping dogs lie before the thing was over. 
+The right kind of lawyer could bully Rosalie into saying
+anything he chose on the witness-stand.  There was not much limit
+to the evidence a man could bring if he was experienced enough
+to be circumstantial, and knew whom he was dealing with.  The
+very fact that the little fool could be made to appear to have
+been so sly and sanctimonious would stir the gall of any jury
+of men.  His own condoning the matter for the sake of his
+sensitive boy, deformed by his mother's unrestrained and violent
+hysteria before his birth, would go a long way.  Let them get
+their divorce, they would have paid for it, the whole lot of
+them, the beautiful Miss Vanderpoel and all.  Such a story as the
+newspapers would revel in would not be a recommendation to
+Englishmen of unsmirched reputation.  Then his exultation
+would suddenly drop as his mental excitement produced its
+effect of inevitable physical fatigue.  Even if he made them
+pay for getting their own way, what would happen to himself
+afterwards?  No morbid vanity of self-bolstering could make
+the outlook anything but unpromising.  If he had not had such
+diabolical luck in his few investments he could have lived his
+own life.  As it was, old Vanderpoel would possibly condescend
+to make him some insufficient allowance because Rosalie would
+wish that it might be done, and he would be expected to drag
+out to the end the kind of life a man pensioned by his wife's
+relatives inevitably does.  If he attempted to live in the
+country he should blow out his brains.  When his depression was
+at its worst, he saw himself aging and shabby, rambling about
+from one cheap Continental town to another, blackballed by
+good clubs, cold-shouldered even by the Teresitas, cut off from
+society by his limited means and the stories his wife's friends
+would spread.  He ground his teeth when he thought of Betty. 
+Her splendid vitality had done something to life for him--had
+given it savour.  When he had come upon her in the avenue
+his blood had stirred, even though it had been maliciously, and
+there had been spice in his very resentment of her presence. 
+And she would go away.  He would not be likely to see her
+again if his wife broke with him; she would be swept out of
+his days.  It was hideous to think of, and his rage would
+overpower him and his nerves go to pieces again.
+
+"What are you going to do?" he broke forth suddenly one
+evening, when he found himself temporarily alone with her. 
+"You are going to do something.  I see it in your eyes."
+
+He had been for some time watching her from behind his
+newspaper, while she, with an unread book upon her lap, had,
+in fact, been thinking deeply and putting to herself serious
+questions.
+
+Her answer made him stir rather uncomfortably.
+
+"I am going to write to my father to ask him to come to England."
+
+So this was what she had been preparing to spring upon him. 
+He laughed insolently.
+
+"To ask him to come here?"
+
+"With your permission."
+
+"With mine?  Does an American father-in-law wait for permission?"
+
+"Is there any practical reason why you should prefer that
+he should NOT come?"
+
+He left his seat and walked over to her.
+
+"Yes.  Your sending for him is a declaration of war."
+
+"It need not be so.  Why should it?"
+
+"In this case I happen to be aware that it is.  The choice is
+your own, I suppose," with ready bravado, "that you and he
+are prepared to face the consequences.  But is Rosalie, and is
+your mother?"
+
+"My father is a business man and will know what can be
+done.  He will know what is worth doing," she answered, without
+noticing his question.  "But," she added the words slowly,
+"I have been making up my mind--before I write to him--to
+say something to you--to ask you a question."
+
+He made a mock sentimental gesture.
+
+"To ask me to spare my wife, to `remember that she is the
+mother of my child'?"
+
+She passed over that also.
+
+"To ask you if there is no possible way in which all this
+unhappiness can be ended decently."
+
+"The only decent way of ending it would be that there
+should be no further interference.  Let Rosalie supply the
+decency by showing me the consideration due from a wife to
+her husband.  The place has been put in order.  It was not
+for my benefit, and I have no money to keep it up.  Let Rosalie
+be provided with means to do it."
+
+As he spoke the words he realised that he had opened a way
+for embarrassing comment.  He expected her to remind him
+that Rosalie had not come to him without money.  But she
+said nothing about the matter.  She never said the things he
+expected to hear.
+
+"You do not want Rosalie for your wife," she went on
+"but you could treat her courteously without loving her.  You
+could allow her the privileges other men's wives are allowed. 
+You need not separate her from her family.  You could allow
+her father and mother to come to her and leave her free to go
+to them sometimes.  Will you not agree to that?  Will you not
+let her live peaceably in her own simple way?  She is very
+gentle and humble and would ask nothing more."
+
+"She is a fool!" he exclaimed furiously.  "A fool!  She
+will stay where she is and do as I tell her."
+
+"You knew what she was when you married her.  She was
+simple and girlish and pretended to be nothing she was not. 
+You chose to marry her and take her from the people who
+loved her.  You broke her spirit and her heart.  You would
+have killed her if I had not come in time to prevent it."
+
+"I will kill her yet if you leave her," his folly made him
+say.
+
+"You are talking like a feudal lord holding the power of
+life and death in his hands," she said.  "Power like that is
+ancient history.  You can hurt no one who has friends--without
+being punished."
+
+It was the old story.  She filled him with the desire to
+shake or disturb her at any cost, and he did his utmost.  If
+she was proposing to make terms with him, he would show
+her whether he would accept them or not.  He let her hear all
+he had said to himself in his worst moments--all that he had
+argued concerning what she and her people would do, and
+what his own actions would be--all his intention to make them
+pay the uttermost farthing in humiliation if he could not
+frustrate them.  His methods would be definite enough.  He had
+not watched his wife and Ffolliott for weeks to no end.  He
+had known what he was dealing with.  He had put other
+people upon the track and they would testify for him.  He
+poured forth unspeakable statements and intimations, going,
+as usual, further than he had known he should go when he
+began.  Under the spur of excitement his imagination served
+him well.  At last he paused.
+
+"Well," he put it to her, "what have you to say?"
+
+"I?" with the remote intent curiosity growing in her eyes. 
+"I have nothing to say.  I am leaving you to say things."
+
+"You will, of course, try to deny----" he insisted.
+
+"No, I shall not.  Why should I?"
+
+"You may assume your air of magnificence, but I am dealing
+with uncomfortable factors."  He stopped in spite of himself,
+and then burst forth in a new order of rage.  "You are
+trying some confounded experiment on me.  What is it?"
+
+She rose from her chair to go out of the room, and stood a
+moment holding her book half open in her hand.
+
+"Yes.  I suppose it might be called an experiment," was
+her answer.  "Perhaps it was a mistake.  I wanted to make
+quite sure of something."
+
+"Of what?"
+
+"I did not want to leave anything undone.  I did not want
+to believe that any man could exist who had not one touch of
+decent feeling to redeem him.  It did not seem human."
+
+White dints showed themselves about his nostrils.
+
+"Well, you have found one," he cried.  "You have a
+lashing tongue, by God, when you choose to let it go.  But I
+could teach you a good many things, my girl.  And before I
+have done you will have learned most of them."
+
+But though he threw himself into a chair and laughed aloud
+as she left him, he knew that his arrogance and bullying were
+proving poor weapons, though they had done him good service
+all his life.  And he knew, too, that it was mere simple truth
+that, as a result of the intellectual, ethical vagaries he
+scathingly derided--she had actually been giving him a sort of
+chance to retrieve himself, and that if he had been another sort
+of man he might have taken it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV
+
+A FOOTSTEP
+
+It was cold enough for fires in halls and bedrooms, and Lady
+Anstruthers often sat over hers and watched the glowing bed
+of coals with a fixed thoughtfulness of look.  She was so
+sitting when her sister went to her room to talk to her, and she
+looked up questioningly when the door closed and Betty came
+towards her.
+
+"You have come to tell me something," she said.
+
+A slight shade of anxiousness showed itself in her eyes, and
+Betty sat down by her and took her hand.  She had come
+because what she knew was that Rosalie must be prepared for
+any step taken, and the time had arrived when she must not
+be allowed to remain in ignorance even of things it would be
+unpleasant to put into words.
+
+"Yes," she answered.  "I want to talk to you about
+something I have decided to do.  I think I must write to father
+and ask him to come to us."
+
+Rosalie turned white, but though her lips parted as if she
+were going to speak, she said nothing.
+
+"Do not be frightened," Betty said.  "I believe it is the
+only thing to do."
+
+"I know!  I know!"
+
+Betty went on, holding the hand a little closer.  "When I
+came here you were too weak physically to be able to face even
+the thought of a struggle.  I saw that.  I was afraid it must
+come in the end, but I knew that at that time you could not
+bear it.  It would have killed you and might have killed
+mother, if I had not waited; and until you were stronger, I
+knew I must wait and reason coolly about you--about everything."
+
+"I used to guess--sometimes," said Lady Anstruthers.
+
+"I can tell you about it now.  You are not as you were 
+then," Betty said.  "I did not know Nigel at first, and I felt
+I ought to see more of him.  I wanted to make sure that my
+child hatred of him did not make me unfair.  I even tried to
+hope that when he came back and found the place in order and
+things going well, he might recognise the wisdom of behaving
+with decent kindness to you.  If he had done that I knew father
+would have provided for you both, though he would not have
+left him the opportunity to do again what he did before.  No
+business man would allow such a thing as that.  But as time
+has gone by I have seen I was mistaken in hoping for a
+respectable compromise.  Even if he were given a free hand he
+would not change.  And now----"  She hesitated, feeling it
+difficult to choose such words as would not be too unpleasant. 
+How was she to tell Rosy of the ugly, morbid situation which
+made ordinary passiveness impossible.  "Now there is a
+reason----" she began again.
+
+To her surprise and relief it was Rosalie who ended for her. 
+She spoke with the painful courage which strong affection gives
+a weak thing.  Her face was pale no longer, but slightly
+reddened, and she lifted the hand which held hers and kissed it.
+
+"You shall not say it," she interrupted her.  "I will.  There
+is a reason now why you cannot stay here--why you shall not
+stay here.  That was why I begged you to go.  You must go,
+even if I stay behind alone."
+
+Never had the beautiful Miss Vanderpoel's eyes worn so fully
+their look of being bluebells under water.  That this timid
+creature should so stand at bay to defend her was more moving
+than anything else could have been.
+
+"Thank you, Rosy--thank you," she answered.  "But you
+shall not be left alone.  You must go, too.  There is no other
+way.  Difficulties will be made for us, but we must face
+them.  Father will see the situation from a practical man's
+standpoint.  Men know the things other men cannot do. 
+Women don't.  Generally they know nothing about the law
+and can be bullied into feeling that it is dangerous and
+compromising to inquire into it.  Nigel has always seen that it
+was easy to manage women.  A strong business man who has
+more exact legal information than he has himself will be a
+new factor to deal with.  And he cannot make objectionable
+love to him.  It is because he knows these things that he
+says that my sending for father will be a declaration of war."
+
+"Did he say that?" a little breathlessly.
+
+
+"Yes, and I told him that it need not be so.  But he would
+not listen."
+
+"And you are sure father will come?"
+
+"I am sure.  In a week or two he will be here."
+
+Lady Anstruthers' lips shook, her eyes lifted themselves to
+Betty's in a touchingly distressed appeal.  Had her momentary
+courage fled beyond recall?  If so, that would be the worst
+coming to the worst, indeed.  Yet it was not ordinary fear
+which expressed itself in her face, but a deeper piteousness, a
+sudden hopeless pain, baffling because it seemed a new emotion,
+or perhaps the upheaval of an old one long and carefully hidden.
+
+"You will be brave?" Betty appealed to her.  "You will
+not give way, Rosy?"
+
+"Yes, I must be brave--I am not ill now.  I must not fail
+you--I won't, Betty, but----"
+
+She slipped upon the floor and dropped her face upon the
+girl's knee, sobbing.
+
+Betty bent over her, putting her arms round the heaving
+shoulders, and pleading with her to speak.  Was there something
+more to be told, something she did not know?
+
+"Yes, yes.  Oh, I ought to have told you long ago--but I
+have always been afraid and ashamed.  It has made everything
+so much worse.  I was afraid you would not understand
+and would think me wicked--wicked."
+
+It was Betty who now lost a shade of colour.  But she held
+the slim little body closer and kissed her sister's cheek.
+
+"What have you been afraid and ashamed to tell me?  Do
+not be ashamed any more.  You must not hide anything, no
+matter what it is, Rosy.  I shall understand."
+
+"I know I must not hide anything, now that all is over and
+father is coming.  It is--it is about Mr. Ffolliott."
+
+"Mr. Ffolliott?" repeated Betty quite softly.
+
+Lady Anstruthers' face, lifted with desperate effort, was
+like a weeping child's.  So much so in its tear-wet simpleness
+and utter lack of any effort at concealment, that after one
+quick look at it Betty's hastened pulses ceased to beat at
+double-quick time.
+
+"Tell me, dear," she almost whispered.
+
+"Mr. Ffolliott himself does not know--and I could not help
+it.  He was kind to me when I was dying of unkindness.  You
+don't know what it was like to be drowning in loneliness and
+misery, and to see one good hand stretched out to help you. 
+Before he went away--oh, Betty, I know it was awful because
+I was married!--I began to care for him very much, and I
+have cared for him ever since.  I cannot stop myself caring,
+even though I am terrified."
+
+Betty kissed her again with a passion of tender pity.  Poor
+little, simple Rosy, too!  The tide had crept around her also,
+and had swept her off her feet, tossing her upon its surf like
+a wisp of seaweed and bearing her each day farther from firm
+shore.
+
+"Do not be terrified," she said.  "You need only be afraid
+if--if you had told him."
+
+"He will never know--never.  Once in the middle of the
+night," there was anguish in the delicate face, pure anguish,
+"a strange loud cry wakened me, and it was I myself who
+had cried out--because in my sleep it had come home to me
+that the years would go on and on, and at last some day he
+would die and go out of the world--and I should die and go
+out of the world.  And he would never know--even KNOW."
+
+Betty's clasp of her loosened and she sat very still, looking
+straight before her into some unseen place.
+
+"Yes," she said involuntarily.  "Yes, _I_ know--I know--I
+know."
+
+Lady Anstruthers fell back a little to gaze at her.
+
+"YOU know?  YOU know?" she breathed.  "Betty?"
+
+But Betty at first did not speak.  Her lovely eyes dwelt on
+the far-away place.
+
+"Betty," whispered Rosy, "do you know what you have said?"
+
+The lovely eyes turned slowly towards her, and the soft
+corners of Betty's mouth deepened in a curious unsteadiness.
+
+"Yes.  I did not intend to say it.  But it is true.  _I_ know--
+I know--I know.  Do not ask me how."
+
+Rosalie flung her arms round her waist and for a moment
+hid her face.
+
+"YOU! YOU!" she murmured, but stopped herself almost as
+she uttered the exclamation.  "I will not ask you," she said
+when she spoke again.  "But now I shall not be so ashamed. 
+You are a beauty and wonderful, and I am not; but if you
+KNOW, that makes us almost the same.  You will understand
+why I broke down.  It was because I could not bear to think
+of what will happen.  I shall be saved and taken home, but
+Nigel will wreak revenge on HIM.  And I shall be the shame
+that is put upon him--only because he was kind--KIND.  When
+father comes it will all begin."  She wrung her hands, becoming
+almost hysterical.
+
+"Hush," said Betty.  "Hush!  A man like that CANNOT
+be hurt, even by a man like Nigel.  There is a way out--
+there IS.  Oh, Rosy, we must BELIEVE it."
+
+She soothed and caressed her and led her on to relieving her
+long locked-up misery by speech.  It was easy to see the ways
+in which her feeling had made her life harder to bear.  She
+was as inexperienced as a girl, and had accused herself cruelly. 
+When Nigel had tormented her with evil, carefully chosen
+taunts, she had felt half guilty and had coloured scarlet or
+turned pale, afraid to meet his sneeringly smiling face.  She
+had tried to forget the kind voice, the kindly, understanding
+eyes, and had blamed herself as a criminal because she could not.
+
+"I had nothing else to remember--but unhappiness--and it
+seemed as if I could not help but remember HIM," she said as
+simply as the Rosy who had left New York at nineteen might
+have said it.  "I was afraid to trust myself to speak his name. 
+When Nigel made insulting speeches I could not answer him, and he
+used to say that women who had adventures should train their
+faces not to betray them every time they were looked at.
+
+"Oh!" broke from Betty's lips, and she stood up on the
+hearth and threw out her hands.  "I wish that for one day
+I might be a man--and your brother instead of your sister!"
+
+"Why?"
+
+Betty smiled strangely--a smile which was not amused--
+which was perhaps not a smile at all.  Her voice as she
+answered was at once low and tense.
+
+"Because, then I should know what to do.  When a male creature
+cannot be reached through manhood or decency or shame, there is
+one way in which he can be punished.  A man--a real man--should
+take him by his throat and lash him with a whip--while others
+look on--lash him until he howls aloud like a dog."
+
+She had not expected to say it, but she had said it.  Lady
+Anstruthers looked at her fascinated, and then she covered her
+face with her hands, huddling herself in a heap as she knelt
+on the rug, looking singularly small and frail.
+
+"Betty," she said presently, in a new, awful little voice,
+"I--I will tell you something.  I never thought I should dare
+to tell anyone alive.  I have shuddered at it myself.  There
+have been days--awful, helpless days, when I was sure there
+was no hope for me in all the world--when deep down in my
+soul I understood what women felt when they MURDERED people
+--crept to them in their wicked sleep and STRUCK them again
+--and again--and again.  Like that!"  She sat up suddenly,
+as if she did not know what she was doing, and uncovering her
+little ghastly face struck downward three fierce times at
+nothingness--but as if it were not nothingness, and as if she
+held something in her hand.
+
+There was horror in it--Betty sprang at the hand and caught it.
+
+"No! no!" she cried out.  "Poor little Rosy!  Darling
+little Rosy!  No! no! no!"
+
+That instant Lady Anstruthers looked up at her shocked and
+awake.  She was Rosy again, and clung to her, holding to her
+dress, piteous and panting.
+
+"No! no!" she said.  "When it came to me in the night--
+it was always in the night--I used to get out of bed and pray
+that it might never, never come again, and that I might be
+forgiven--just forgiven.  It was too horrible that I should
+even UNDERSTAND it so well."  A woeful, wry little smile twisted
+her mouth.  "I was not brave enough to have done it.  I could
+never have DONE it, Betty; but the thought was there--it was
+there!  I used to think it had made a black mark on my soul."
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+The letter took long to write.  It led a consecutive story
+up to the point where it culminated in a situation which
+presented itself as no longer to be dealt with by means at hand. 
+Parts of the story previous letters had related, though some of
+them it had not seemed absolutely necessary to relate in detail. 
+Now they must be made clear, and Betty made them so.
+
+"Because you trusted me you made me trust myself," was
+one of the things she wrote.  "For some time I felt that it
+was best to fight for my own hand without troubling you.  I
+hoped perhaps I might be able to lead things to a decorous sort
+of issue.  I saw that secretly Rosy hoped and prayed that it
+might be possible.  She gave up expecting happiness before she
+was twenty, and mere decent peace would have seemed heaven
+to her, if she could have been allowed sometimes to see those
+she loved and longed for.  Now that I must give up my hope
+--which was perhaps a rather foolish one--and now that I
+cannot remain at Stornham, she would have no defence at all
+if she were left alone.  Her condition would be more hopeless
+than before, because Nigel would never forget that we had
+tried to rescue her and had failed.  If I were a man, or if I
+were very much older, I need not be actually driven away, but
+as it is I think that you must come and take the matter into
+your own hands."
+
+She had remained in her sister's room until long after
+midnight, and by the time the American letter was completed and
+sealed, a pale touch of dawning light was showing itself.  She
+rose, and going to the window drew the blind up and looked
+out.  The looking out made her open the window, and when
+she had done so she stood feeling the almost unearthly freshness
+of the morning about her.  The mystery of the first faint
+light was almost unearthly, too.  Trees and shrubs were beginning
+to take form and outline themselves against the still pallor
+of the dawn.  Before long the waking of the birds would begin
+--a brief chirping note here and there breaking the silence and
+warning the world with faint insistence that it had begun to
+live again and must bestir itself.  She had got out of her bed
+sometimes on a summer morning to watch the beauty of it, to
+see the flowers gradually reveal their colour to the eye, to hear
+the warmly nesting things begin their joyous day.  There were
+fewer bird sounds now, and the garden beds were autumnal. 
+But how beautiful it all was!  How wonderful life in such a
+place might be if flowers and birds and sweep of sward, and
+mass of stately, broad-branched trees, were parts of the home
+one loved and which surely would in its own way love one in
+return.  But soon all this phase of life would be over.  Rosalie,
+once safe at home, would look back, remembering the place with
+a shudder.  As Ughtred grew older the passing of years would
+dim miserable child memories, and when his inheritance fell
+to him he might return to see it with happier eyes.  She began
+to picture to herself Rosy's voyage in the ship which would
+carry her across the Atlantic to her mother and the scenes
+connected in her mind only with a girl's happiness.  Whatsoever
+happened before it took place, the voyage would be made in the
+end.  And Rosalie would be like a creature in a dream--a
+heavenly, unbelievable dream.  Betty could imagine how she
+would look wrapped up and sitting in her steamer chair, gazing
+out with rapturous eyes upon the racing waves
+
+"She will be happy," she thought.  "But I shall not. No,
+I shall not."
+
+She drew in the morning air and unconsciously turned towards the
+place where, across the rising and falling lands and behind the
+trees, she knew the great white house stood far away, with
+watchers' lights showing dimly behind the line of ballroom
+windows.
+
+"I do not know how such a thing could be!  I do not know
+how such a thing could be!" she said.  "It COULD not."  And
+she lifted a high head, not even asking herself what remote sense
+in her being so obstinately defied and threw down the glove to
+Fate.
+
+Sounds gain a curious distinctness and meaning in the hour
+of the break of the dawn; in such an hour they seem even
+more significant than sounds heard in the dead of night.  When
+she had gone to the window she had fancied that she heard
+something in the corridor outside her door, but when she had
+listened there had been only silence.  Now there was sound
+again--that of a softly moved slippered foot.  She went to the
+room's centre and waited.  Yes, certainly something had stirred
+in the passage.  She went to the door itself.  The dragging
+step had hesitated--stopped.  Could it be Rosalie who had
+come to her for something.  For one second her impulse was
+to open the door herself; the next, she had changed her mind
+with a sense of shock.  Someone had actually touched the
+handle and very delicately turned it.  It was not pleasant to
+stand looking at it and see it turn.  She heard a low, evidently
+unintentionally uttered exclamation, and she turned away, and
+with no attempt at softening the sound of her footsteps walked
+across the room, hot with passionate disgust.  As well as if
+she had flung the door open, she knew who stood outside.  It
+was Nigel Anstruthers, haggard and unseemly, with burned-
+out, sleepless eyes and bitten lip.
+
+Bad and mad as she had at last seen the situation to be, it
+was uglier and more desperate than she could well know.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV
+
+THE PASSING BELL
+
+The following morning Sir Nigel did not appear at the
+breakfast table.  He breakfasted in his own room, and it be
+came known throughout the household that he had suddenly
+decided to go away, and his man was packing for the journey. 
+What the journey or the reason for its being taken happened
+to be were things not explained to anyone but Lady
+Anstruthers, at the door of whose dressing room he appeared
+without warning, just as she was leaving it.
+
+Rosalie started when she found herself confronting him.  His
+eyes looked hot and hollow with feverish sleeplessness.
+
+"You look ill," she exclaimed involuntarily.  "You look as
+if you had not slept."
+
+"Thank you.  You always encourage a man.  I am not in
+the habit of sleeping much," he answered.  "I am going away
+for my health.  It is as well you should know.  I am going to
+look up old Broadmorlands.  I want to know exactly where
+he is, in case it becomes necessary for me to see him.  I also
+require some trifling data connected with Ffolliott.  If your
+father is coming, it will be as well to be able to lay my hands
+on things.  You can explain to Betty.  Good-morning."  He
+waited for no reply, but wheeled about and left her.
+
+Betty herself wore a changed face when she came down.  A
+cloud had passed over her blooming, as clouds pass over a morning
+sky and dim it.  Rosalie asked herself if she had not noticed
+something like this before.  She began to think she had.  Yes,
+she was sure that at intervals there had been moments when
+she had glanced at the brilliant face with an uneasy and yet
+half-unrealising sense of looking at a glowing light temporarily
+waning.  The feeling had been unrealisable, because it was
+not to be explained.  Betty was never ill, she was never low-
+spirited, she was never out of humour or afraid of things--that
+was why it was so wonderful to live with her.  But--yes, it
+was true--there had been days when the strong, fine light of
+her had waned.  Lady Anstruthers' comprehension of it arose
+now from her memory of the look she had seen the night
+before in the eyes which suddenly had gazed straight before her,
+as into an unknown place.
+
+"Yes, I know--I know--I know!"  And the tone in the
+girl's voice had been one Rosy had not heard before.
+
+Slight wonder--if you KNEW--at any outward change which
+showed itself, though in your own most desperate despite.  It
+would be so even with Betty, who, in her sister's eyes, was
+unlike any other creature.  But perhaps it would be better to
+make no comment.  To make comment would be almost like
+asking the question she had been forbidden to ask.
+
+While the servants were in the room during breakfast they
+talked of common things, resorting even to the weather and
+the news of the village.  Afterwards they passed into the morning
+room together, and Betty put her arm around Rosalie and
+kissed her.
+
+"Nigel has suddenly gone away, I hear," she said.  "Do you
+know where he has gone?"
+
+"He came to my dressing-room to tell me."  Betty felt the
+whole slim body stiffen itself with a determination to seem
+calm.  "He said he was going to find out where the old Duke
+of Broadmorlands was staying at present."
+
+"There is some forethought in that," was Betty's answer.  "He is
+not on such terms with the Duke that he can expect to be received
+as a casual visitor.  It will require apt contrivance to arrange
+an interview.  I wonder if he will be able to accomplish it?"
+
+"Yes, he will," said Lady Anstruthers.  "I think he can
+always contrive things like that."  She hesitated a moment, and
+then added:  "He said also that he wished to find out certain
+things about Mr. Ffolliott--`trifling data,' he called it--that
+he might be able to lay his hands on things if father came. 
+He told me to explain to you."
+
+"That was intended for a taunt--but it's a warning," Betty
+said, thinking the thing over.  "We are rather like ladies left
+alone to defend a besieged castle.  He wished us to feel that." 
+She tightened her enclosing arm.  "But we stand together--
+together.  We shall not fail each other.  We can face siege
+until father comes."
+
+"You wrote to him last night?"
+
+"A long letter, which I wish him to receive before he sails. 
+He might decide to act upon it before leaving New York, to
+advise with some legal authority he knows and trusts, to prepare
+our mother in some way--to do some wise thing we cannot
+foresee the value of.  He has known the outline of the story,
+but not exact details--particularly recent ones.  I have held
+back nothing it was necessary he should know.  I am going
+out to post the letter myself.  I shall send a cable asking him
+to prepare to come to us after he has reflected on what I
+have written."
+
+Rosalie was very quiet, but when, having left the room to
+prepare to go to the village, Betty came back to say a last
+word, her sister came to her and laid her hand on her arm.
+
+"I have been so weak and trodden upon for years that it
+would not be natural for you to quite trust me," she said.  "But
+I won't fail you, Betty--I won't."
+
+The winter was drawing in, the last autumn days were
+short and often grey and dreary; the wind had swept the
+leaves from the trees and scattered them over park lands and
+lanes, where they lay a mellow-hued, rustling carpet, shifting
+with each chill breeze that blew.  The berried briony garlands
+clung to the bared hedges, and here and there flared scarlet,
+still holding their red defiantly until hard frosts should come
+to shrivel and blacken them.  The rare hours of sunshine were
+amber hours instead of golden.
+
+As she passed through the park gate Betty was thinking of
+the first morning on which she had walked down the village
+street between the irregular rows of red-tiled cottages with the
+ragged little enclosing gardens.  Then the air and sunshine had
+been of the just awakening spring, now the sky was brightly
+cold, and through the small-paned windows she caught glimpses
+of fireglow.  A bent old man walking very slowly, leaning upon
+two sticks, had a red-brown woollen muffler wrapped round his
+neck.  Seeing her, he stopped and shuffled the two sticks into
+one hand that he might leave the other free to touch his wrinkled
+forehead stiffly, his face stretching into a slow smile as
+she stopped to speak to him.
+
+"Good-morning, Marlow," he said.  "How is the rheumatism to-day?"
+
+He was a deaf old man, whose conversation was carried on
+principally by guesswork, and it was easy for him to gather that
+when her ladyship's handsome young sister had given him
+greeting she had not forgotten to inquire respecting the
+"rheumatics," which formed the greater part of existence.
+
+"Mornin', miss--mornin'," he answered in the high, cracked
+voice of rural ancientry.  "Winter be nigh, an' they damp
+days be full of rheumatiz.  'T'int easy to get about on my old
+legs, but I be main thankful for they warm things you sent,
+miss.  This 'ere," fumbling at his red-brown muffler proudly,
+" 'tis a comfort on windy days, so 'tis, and warmth be a good
+thing to a man when he be goin' down hill in years."
+
+"All of you who are not able to earn your own fires shall be
+warm this winter," her ladyship's handsome sister said, speaking
+closer to his ear.  "You shall all be warm.  Don't be afraid of
+the cold days coming."
+
+He shuffled his sticks and touched his forehead again,
+looking up at her admiringly and chuckling.
+
+" 'T'will be a new tale for Stornham village," he cackled. 
+" 'T'will be a new tale.  Thank ye, miss.  Thank ye."
+
+As she nodded smilingly and passed on, she heard him cackling
+still under his breath as he hobbled on his slow way,
+comforted and elate.  How almost shamefully easy it was; a few
+loads of coal and faggots here and there, a few blankets and
+warm garments whose cost counted for so little when one's
+hands were full, could change a gruesome village winter into
+a season during which labour-stiffened and broken old things,
+closing their cottage doors, could draw their chairs round the
+hearth and hover luxuriously over the red glow, which in its
+comforting fashion of seeming to have understanding of the
+dull dreams in old eyes, was more to be loved than any human
+friend.
+
+But she had not needed her passing speech with Marlow to
+stimulate realisation of how much she had learned to care for
+the mere living among these people, to whom she seemed to have
+begun to belong, and whose comfortably lighting faces when
+they met her showed that they knew her to be one who might
+be turned to in any hour of trouble or dismay.  The centuries
+which had trained them to depend upon their "betters" had
+taught the slowest of them to judge with keen sight those who
+were to be trusted, not alone as power and wealth holders,
+but as creatures humanly upright and merciful with their kind.
+
+"Workin' folk allus knows gentry," old Doby had once
+shrilled to her.  "Gentry's gentry, an' us knows 'em wheresoever
+they be.  Better'n they know theirselves.  So us do!"
+
+Yes, they knew.  And though they accepted many things as
+being merely their natural rights, they gave an unsentimental
+affection and appreciation in return.  The patriarchal note in
+the life was lovable to her.  Each creature she passed was a
+sort of friend who seemed almost of her own blood.  It had
+come to that.  This particular existence was more satisfying
+to her than any other, more heart-filling and warmly complete.
+
+"Though I am only an impostor," she thought; "I was born
+in Fifth Avenue; yet since I have known this I shall be quite
+happy in no other place than an English village, with a Norman
+church tower looking down upon it and rows of little
+gardens with spears of white and blue lupins and Canterbury
+bells standing guard before cottage doors."
+
+And Rosalie--on the evening of that first strange day when
+she had come upon her piteous figure among the heather under
+the trees near the lake--Rosalie had held her arm with a hot
+little hand and had said feverishly:
+
+"If I could hear the roar of Broadway again!  Do the stages
+rattle as they used to, Betty?  I can't help hoping that they
+do."
+
+She carried her letter to the post and stopped to talk a few
+minutes with the postmaster, who transacted his official
+business in a small shop where sides of bacon and hams hung
+suspended from the ceiling, while groceries, flannels, dress
+prints, and glass bottles of sweet stuff filled the shelves. 
+"Mr. Tewson's" was the central point of Stornham in a commercial
+sense.  The establishment had also certain social qualifications.
+
+Mr. Tewson knew the secrets of all hearts within the village
+radius, also the secrets of all constitutions.  He knew by some
+occult means who had been "taken bad," or who had "taken
+a turn," and was aware at once when anyone was "sinkin'
+fast."  With such differences of opinion as occasionally arose
+between the vicar and his churchwardens he was immediately
+familiar.  The history of the fever among the hop pickers at
+Dunstan village he had been able to relate in detail from the
+moment of its outbreak.  It was he who had first dramatically
+revealed the truth of the action Miss Vanderpoel had taken in
+the matter, which revelation had aroused such enthusiasm as
+had filled The Clock Inn to overflowing and given an impetus
+to the sale of beer.  Tread, it was said, had even made a speech
+which he had ended with vague but excellent intentions by
+proposing the joint healths of her ladyship's sister and the
+"President of America."  Mr. Tewson was always glad to see
+Miss Vanderpoel cross his threshold.  This was not alone
+because she represented the custom of the Court, which since her
+arrival had meant large regular orders and large bills promptly
+paid, but that she brought with her an exotic atmosphere of
+interest and excitement.
+
+He had mentioned to friends that somehow a talk with her
+made him feel "set up for the day."  Betty was not at all
+sure that he did not prepare and hoard up choice remarks or
+bits of information as openings to conversation.
+
+This morning he had thrilling news for her and began with
+it at once.
+
+"Dr. Fenwick at Stornham is very low, miss," he said. 
+"He's very low, you'll be sorry to hear.  The worry about
+the fever upset him terrible and his bronchitis took him bad. 
+He's an old man, you know."
+
+Miss Vanderpoel was very sorry to hear it.  It was quite in
+the natural order of things that she should ask other questions
+about Dunstan village and the Mount, and she asked several. 
+
+The fever was dying out and pale convalescents were sometimes
+seen in the village or strolling about the park.  His lordship
+was taking care of the people and doing his best for them
+until they should be strong enough to return to their homes.
+
+"But he's very strict about making it plain that it's you,
+miss, they have to thank for what he does."
+
+"That is not quite just," said Miss Vanderpoel.  "He and
+Mr. Penzance fought on the field.  I only supplied some of
+the ammunition."
+
+"The county doesn't think of him as it did even a year
+ago, miss," said Tewson rather smugly.  "He was very ill
+thought of then among the gentry.  It's wonderful the change
+that's come about.  If he should fall ill there'll be a deal of
+sympathy."
+
+"I hope there is no question of his falling ill," said Miss
+Vanderpoel.
+
+Mr. Tewson lowered his voice confidentially.  This was
+really his most valuable item of news.
+
+"Well, miss," he admitted, "I have heard that he's been
+looking very bad for a good bit, and it was told me quite
+private, because the doctors and the vicar don't want the people
+to be upset by hearing it--that for a week he's not been well
+enough to make his rounds."
+
+"Oh!"  The exclamation was a faint one, but it was an
+exclamation.  "I hope that means nothing really serious,"
+Miss Vanderpoel added.  "Everyone will hope so."
+
+"Yes, miss," said Mr. Tewson, deftly twisting the string
+round the package he was tying up for her.  "A sad reward it
+would be if he lost his life after doing all he has done.  A
+sad reward!  But there'd be a good deal of sympathy."
+
+The small package contained trifles of sewing and knitting
+materials she was going to take to Mrs. Welden, and she held
+out her hand for it.  She knew she did not smile quite naturally
+as she said her good-morning to Tewson.  She went
+out into the pale amber sunshine and stood a few moments,
+glad to find herself bathed in it again.  She suddenly needed
+air and light.  "A sad reward!"  Sometimes people were not
+rewarded.  Brave men were shot dead on the battlefield when
+they were doing brave things; brave physicians and nurses
+died of the plagues they faithfully wrestled with.  Here were
+dread and pain confronting her--Betty Vanderpoel--and while
+almost everyone else seemed to have faced them, she was wholly
+unused to their appalling clutch.  What a life hers had been--
+that in looking back over it she should realise that she had
+never been touched by anything like this before!  There came
+back to her the look of almost awed wonder in G. Selden's
+honest eyes when he said:  "What it must be to be you--just
+YOU!"  He had been thinking only of the millions and of the
+freedom from all everyday anxieties the millions gave.  She
+smiled faintly as the thought crossed her brain.  The millions! 
+The rolling up of them year by year, because millions were
+breeders!  The newspaper stories of them--the wonder at and
+belief in their power!  It was all going on just as before, and
+yet here stood a Vanderpoel in an English village street, of no
+more worth as far as power to aid herself went than Joe Buttle's
+girl with the thick waist and round red cheeks.  Jenny
+Buttle would have believed that her ladyship's rich American
+sister could do anything she chose, open any door, command
+any presence, sweep aside any obstacle with a wave of her hand. 
+But of the two, Jenny Buttle's path would have laid straighter
+before her.  If she had had "a young man" who had fallen
+ill she would have been free if his mother had cherished no
+objection to their "walking out"--to spend all her spare
+hours in his cottage, making gruel and poultices, crying until
+her nose and eyes were red, and pouring forth her hopes and
+fears to any neighbour who came in or out or hung over the
+dividing garden hedge.  If the patient died, the deeper her
+mourning and the louder her sobs at his funeral the more
+respectable and deserving of sympathy and admiration would
+Jenny Buttle have been counted.  Her ladyship's rich American
+sister had no "young man"; she had not at any time been
+asked to "walk out."  Even in the dark days of the fever, each
+of which had carried thought and action of hers to the scene
+of trouble, there had reigned unbroken silence, except for the
+vicar's notes of warm and appreciative gratitude.
+
+"You are very obstinate, Fergus," Mr. Penzance had said.
+
+And Mount Dunstan had shaken his head fiercely and answered:
+
+"Don't speak to me about it.  Only obstinacy will save me
+from behaving like--other blackguards."
+
+Mr. Penzance, carefully polishing his eyeglasses as he
+watched him, was not sparing in his comment.
+
+"That is pure folly," he said, "pure bull-necked, stubborn
+folly, charging with its head down.  Before it has done with
+you it will have made you suffer quite enough."
+
+"Be sure of that," Mount Dunstan had said, setting his
+teeth, as he sat in his chair clasping his hands behind his head
+and glowering into space.
+
+Mr. Penzance quietly, speculatively, looked him over, and
+reflected aloud--or, so it sounded.
+
+"It is a big-boned and big-muscled characteristic, but there
+are things which are stronger.  Some one minute will arrive--
+just one minute--which will be stronger.  One of those moments
+when the mysteries of the universe are at work."
+
+"Don't speak to me like that, I tell you!" Mount Dunstan
+broke out passionately.  And he sprang up and marched out of
+the room like an angry man.
+
+Miss Vanderpoel did not go to Mrs. Welden's cottage at
+once, but walked past its door down the lane, where there
+were no more cottages, but only hedges and fields on either side
+of her.  "Not well enough to make his rounds" might mean
+much or little.  It might mean a temporary breakdown from
+overfatigue or a sickening for deadly illness.  She looked at a
+group of cropping sheep in a field and at a flock of rooks
+which had just alighted near it with cawing and flapping of
+wings.  She kept her eyes on them merely to steady herself. 
+The thoughts she had brought out with her had grown heavier
+and were horribly difficult to control.  One must not allow
+one's self to believe the worst will come--one must not allow it.
+
+She always held this rule before herself, and now she was not
+holding it steadily.  There was nothing to do.  She could write
+a mere note of inquiry to Mr. Penzance, but that was all.  She
+could only walk up and down the lanes and think--whether he
+lay dying or not.  She could do nothing, even if a day came
+when she knew that a pit had been dug in the clay and he had
+been lowered into it with creaking ropes, and the clods shovelled
+back upon him where he lay still--never having told her that
+he was glad that her being had turned to him and her heart cried
+aloud his name.  She recalled with curious distinctness the
+effect of the steady toll of the church bell--the "passing bell."
+
+She could hear it as she had heard it the first time it fell
+upon her ear, and she had inquired what it meant.  Why did
+they call it the "passing bell"?  All had passed before it began
+to toll--all had passed.  If it tolled at Dunstan and the pit
+was dug in the churchyard before her father came, would he
+see, the moment they met, that something had befallen her--that
+the Betty he had known was changed--gone?  Yes, he would
+see.  Affection such as his always saw.  Then he would sit alone
+with her in some quiet room and talk to her, and she would
+tell him the strange thing that had happened.  He would
+understand--perhaps better than she.
+
+She stopped abruptly in her walk and stood still.  The hand
+holding her package was quite cold.  This was what one must
+not allow one's self.  But how the thoughts had raced through
+her brain!  She turned and hastened her steps towards Mrs.
+Welden's cottage.
+
+In Mrs. Welden's tiny back yard there stood a "coal
+lodge" suited to the size of the domicile and already stacked
+with a full winter's supply of coal.  Therefore the well-polished
+and cleanly little grate in the living-room was bright with fire.
+
+Old Doby, who had tottered round the corner to pay his fellow
+gossip a visit, was sitting by it, and old Mrs. Welden, clean as
+to cap and apron and small purple shoulder shawl, had evidently
+been allaying his natural anxiety as to the conduct of
+foreign sovereigns by reading in a loud voice the "print"
+under the pictures in an illustrated paper.
+
+This occupation had, however, been interrupted a few
+moments before Miss Vanderpoel's arrival.  Mrs. Bester, the
+neighbour in the next cottage, had stepped in with her youngest
+on her hip and was talking breathlessly.  She paused to drop
+her curtsy as Betty entered, and old Doby stood up and made
+his salute with a trembling hand
+
+"She'll know," he said.  "Gentry knows the ins an' outs
+of gentry fust.  She'll know the rights."
+
+"What has happened?"
+
+Mrs. Bester unexpectedly burst into tears.  There was an
+element in the female villagers' temperament which Betty had
+found was frequently unexpected in its breaking forth.
+
+"He's down, miss," she said.  "He's down with it crool
+bad.  There'll be no savin' of him--none."
+
+Betty laid her package of sewing cotton and knitting wool
+quietly on the blue and white checked tablecloth.
+
+"Who--is he?" she asked.
+
+"His lordship--and him just saved all Dunstan parish from
+death--to go like this!"
+
+In Stornham village and in all others of the neighbourhood
+the feminine attitude towards Mount Dunstan had been one
+of strongly emotional admiration.  The thwarted female longing
+for romance--the desire for drama and a hero had been
+fed by him.  A fine, big young man, one that had been "spoke
+ill of" and regarded as an outcast, had suddenly turned the
+tables on fortune and made himself the central figure of the
+county, the talk of gentry in their grand houses, of cottage
+women on their doorsteps, and labourers stopping to speak to
+each other by the roadside.  Magic stories had been told of
+him, beflowered with dramatic detail.  No incident could have
+been related to his credit which would not have been believed
+and improved upon.  Shut up in his village working among his
+people and unseen by outsiders, he had become a popular idol. 
+Any scrap of news of him--any rumour, true or untrue, was
+seized upon and excitedly spread abroad.  Therefore Mrs. Bester
+wept as she talked, and, if the truth must be told, enjoyed the
+situation.  She was the first to tell the story to her ladyship's
+sister herself, as well as to Mrs. Welden and old Doby.
+
+"It's Tom as brought it in," she said.  "He's my brother,
+miss, an' he's one of the ringers.  He heard it from Jem
+Wesgate, an' he heard it at Toomy's farm.  They've been
+keepin' it hid at the Mount because the people that's ill hangs
+on his lordship so that the doctors daren't let them know the
+truth.  They've been told he had to go to London an' may come
+back any day.  What Tom was sayin', miss, was that we'd
+all know when it was over, for we'd hear the church bell toll
+here same as it'd toll at Dunstan, because they ringers have
+talked it over an' they're goin' to talk it over to-day with the
+other parishes--Yangford an' Meltham an' Dunholm an' them. 
+Tom says Stornham ringers met just now at The Clock an' said
+that for a man that's stood by labouring folk like he has, toll
+they will, an' so ought the other parishes, same as if he was
+royalty, for he's made himself nearer.  They'll toll the minute
+they hear it, miss.  Lord help us!" with a fresh outburst of
+crying.  "It don't seem like it's fair as it should be.  When
+we hear the bell toll, miss----"
+
+"Don't!" said her ladyship's handsome sister suddenly. 
+"Please don't say it again."
+
+She sat down by the table, and resting her elbows on the
+blue and white checked cloth, covered her face with her hands. 
+She did not speak at all.  In this tiny room, with these two
+old souls who loved her, she need not explain.  She sat quite
+still, and Mrs. Welden after looking at her for a few seconds
+was prompted by some sublimely simple intuition, and gently
+sidled Mrs. Bester and her youngest into the little kitchen,
+where the copper was.
+
+"Her helpin' him like she did, makes it come near," she
+whispered.  "Dessay it seems as if he was a'most like a
+relation."
+
+Old Doby sat and looked at his goddess.  In his slowly
+moving old brain stirred far-off memories like long-dead things
+striving to come to life.  He did not know what they were, but
+they wakened his dim eyes to a new seeing of the slim young
+shape leaning a little forward, the soft cloud of hair, the fair
+beauty of the cheek.  He had not seen anything like it in his
+youth, but--it was Youth itself, and so was that which the
+ringers were so soon to toll for; and for some remote and
+unformed reason, to his scores of years they were pitiful and
+should be cheered.  He bent forward himself and put out his
+ancient, veined and knotted, gnarled and trembling hand, to
+timorously touch the arm of her he worshipped and adored.
+
+"God bless ye!" he said, his high, cracked voice even more
+shrill and thin than usual.  "God bless ye!"  And as she let
+her hands slip down, and, turning, gently looked at him, he
+nodded to her speakingly, because out of the dimness of his
+being, some part of Nature's working had strangely answered
+and understood.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVI
+
+LISTENING
+
+On her way back to the Court her eyes saw only the white
+road before her feet as she walked.  She did not lift them
+until she found herself passing the lych-gate at the entrance
+to the churchyard.  Then suddenly she looked up at the square
+grey stone tower where the bells hung, and from which they
+called the village to church, or chimed for weddings--or gave
+slowly forth to the silent air one heavy, regular stroke after
+another.  She looked and shuddered, and spoke aloud with a
+curious, passionate imploring, like a child's.
+
+"Oh, don't toll!  Don't toll!  You must not!  You
+cannot!"  Terror had sprung upon her, and her heart was being
+torn in two in her breast.  That was surely what it seemed
+like--this agonising ache of fear.  Now from hour to hour she
+would be waiting and listening to each sound borne on the
+air.  Her thought would be a possession she could not escape. 
+When she spoke or was spoken to, she would be listening--
+when she was silent every echo would hold terror, when she
+slept--if sleep should come to her--her hearing would be
+awake, and she would be listening--listening even then.  It
+was not Betty Vanderpoel who was walking along the white
+road, but another creature--a girl whose brain was full of
+abnormal thought, and whose whole being made passionate
+outcry against the thing which was being slowly forced upon
+her.  If the bell tolled--suddenly, the whole world would be
+swept clean of life--empty and clean.  If the bell tolled.
+
+Before the entrance of the Court she saw, as she approached
+it, the vicarage pony carriage, standing as it had stood on the
+day she had returned from her walk on the marshes.  She felt
+it quite natural that it should be there.  Mrs. Brent always
+seized upon any fragment of news, and having seized on something
+now, she had not been able to resist the excitement of
+bringing it to Lady Anstruthers and her sister.
+
+She was in the drawing-room with Rosalie, and was full of
+her subject and the emotion suitable to the occasion.  She had
+even attained a certain modified dampness of handkerchief. 
+Rosalie's handkerchief, however, was not damp.  She had not
+even attempted to use it, but sat still, her eyes brimming with
+tears, which, when she saw Betty, brimmed over and slipped
+helplessly down her cheeks.
+
+"Betty!" she exclaimed, and got up and went towards her,
+"I believe you have heard."
+
+"In the village, I heard something--yes," Betty answered,
+and after giving greeting to Mrs. Brent, she led her sister
+back to her chair, and sat near her.
+
+This--the thought leaped upon her--was the kind of situation
+she must be prepared to be equal to.  In the presence of
+these who knew nothing, she must bear herself as if there was
+nothing to be known.  No one but herself had the slightest
+knowledge of what the past months had brought to her--no
+one in the world.  If the bell tolled, no one in the world but
+her father ever would know.  She had no excuse for emotion. 
+None had been given to her.  The kind of thing it was proper
+that she should say and do now, in the presence of Mrs. Brent,
+it would be proper and decent that she should say and do in
+all other cases.  She must comport herself as Betty Vanderpoel
+would if she were moved only by ordinary human sympathy
+and regret.
+
+"We must remember that we have only excited rumour to
+depend upon," she said.  "Lord Mount Dunstan has kept his
+village under almost military law.  He has put it into
+quarantine.  No one is allowed to leave it, so there can be no
+direct source of information.  One cannot be sure of the entire
+truth of what one hears.  Often it is exaggerated cottage talk. 
+The whole neighbourhood is wrought up to a fever heat of
+excited sympathy.  And villagers like the drama of things."
+
+Mrs. Brent looked at her admiringly, it being her fixed
+habit to admire Miss Vanderpoel, and all such as Providence
+had set above her.
+
+"Oh, how wise you are, Miss Vanderpoel!" she exclaimed,
+even devoutly.  "It is so nice of you to be calm and logical
+when everybody else is so upset.  You are quite right about
+villagers enjoying the dramatic side of troubles.  They always
+do.  And perhaps things are not so bad as they say.  I ought
+not to have let myself believe the worst.  But I quite broke
+down under the ringers--I was so touched."
+
+"The ringers?" faltered Lady Anstruthers
+
+"The leader came to the vicar to tell him they wanted
+permission to toll--if they heard tolling at Dunstan.  Weaver's
+family lives within hearing of Dunstan church bells, and one
+of his boys is to run across the fields and bring the news to
+Stornham.  And it was most touching, Miss Vanderpoel. 
+They feel, in their rustic way, that Lord Mount Dunstan has
+not been treated fairly in the past.  And now he seems to them
+a hero and a martyr--or like a great soldier who has died
+fighting."
+
+"Who MAY die fighting," broke from Miss Vanderpoel sharply.
+
+"Who--who may----" Mrs. Brent corrected herself,
+"though Heaven grant he will not.  But it was the ringers
+who made me feel as if all really was over.  Thank you, Miss
+Vanderpoel, thank you for being so practical and--and cool."
+
+"It WAS touching," said Lady Anstruthers, her eyes brimming over
+again.  "And what the villagers feel is true.  It goes
+to one's heart," in a little outburst.  "People have been
+unkind to him!  And he has been lonely in that great empty place
+--he has been lonely.  And if he is dying to-day, he is lonely
+even as he dies--even as he dies."
+
+Betty drew a deep breath.  For one moment there seemed to
+rise before her vision of a huge room, whose stately size made
+its bareness a more desolate thing.  And Mr. Penzance bent
+low over the bed.  She tore her thought away from it.
+
+"No!  No!" she cried out in low, passionate protest. "There will
+be love and yearning all about him everywhere. The villagers who
+are waiting--the poor things he has worked for--the very ringers
+themselves, are all pouring forth the same thoughts.  He will
+feel even ours--ours too!  His soul cannot be lonely."
+
+A few minutes earlier, Mrs. Brent had been saying to
+herself inwardly:  "She has not much heart after all, you know." 
+Now she looked at her in amazement.
+
+The blue bells were under water in truth--drenched and
+drowned.  And yet as the girl stood up before her, she looked
+taller--more the magnificent Miss Vanderpoel than ever--
+though she expressed a new meaning.
+
+"There is one thing the villagers can do for him," she said. 
+"One thing we can all do.  The bell has not tolled yet.  There is
+a service for those who are--in peril.  If the vicar will
+call the people to the church, we can all kneel down there--
+and ask to be heard.  The vicar will do that I am sure--and the
+people will join him with all their hearts."
+
+Mrs. Brent was overwhelmed.
+
+"Dear, dear, Miss Vanderpoel!" she exclaimed.  "THAT is touching,
+indeed it is!  And so right and so proper.  I will drive back to
+the village at once.  The vicar's distress is as great
+as mine.  You think of everything.  The service for the sick
+and dying.  How right--how right!"
+
+With a sense of an increase of value in herself, the vicar,
+and the vicarage, she hastened back to the pony carriage, but
+in the hall she seized Betty's hand emotionally.
+
+"I cannot tell you how much I am touched by this," she murmured. 
+"I did not know you were--were a religious girl, my dear."
+
+Betty answered with grave politeness.
+
+"In times of great pain and terror," she said, "I think almost
+everybody is religious--a little.  If that is the right word."
+
+There was no ringing of the ordinary call to service.  In
+less than an hour's time people began to come out of their
+cottages and wend their way towards the church.  No one had
+put on his or her Sunday clothes.  The women had hastily
+rolled down their sleeves, thrown off their aprons, and donned
+everyday bonnets and shawls.  The men were in their corduroys,
+as they had come in from the fields, and the children wore
+their pinafores.  As if by magic, the news had flown from house
+to house, and each one who had heard it had left his or her
+work without a moment's hesitation.  They said but little
+as they made their way to the church.  Betty, walking with
+her sister, was struck by the fact that there were more of
+them than formed the usual Sunday morning congregation. 
+They were doing no perfunctory duty.  The men's faces were
+heavily moved, most of the women wiped their eyes at intervals,
+and the children looked awed.  There was a suggestion
+of hurried movement in the step of each--as if no time must
+be lost--as if they must begin their appeal at once.  Betty
+saw old Doby tottering along stiffly, with his granddaughter
+and Mrs. Welden on either side of him.  Marlow, on his
+two sticks, was to be seen moving slowly, but steadily.
+
+Within the ancient stone walls, stiff old knees bent
+themselves with care, and faces were covered devoutly by work-
+hardened hands.  As she passed through the churchyard Betty
+knew that eyes followed her affectionately, and that the touching
+of foreheads and dropping of curtsies expressed a special
+sympathy.  In each mind she was connected with the man
+they came to pray for--with the work he had done--with the
+danger he was in.  It was vaguely felt that if his life ended, a
+bereavement would have fallen upon her.  This the girl knew.
+
+The vicar lifted his bowed head and began his service. 
+Every man, woman and child before him responded aloud
+and with a curious fervour--not in decorous fear of seeming to
+thrust themselves before the throne, making too much of their
+petitions, in the presence of the gentry.  Here and there sobs
+were to be heard.  Lady Anstruthers followed the service
+timorously and with tears.  But Betty, kneeling at her side, by
+the round table in the centre of the great square Stornham pew,
+which was like a room, bowed her head upon her folded arms,
+and prayed her own intense, insistent prayer.
+
+"God in Heaven!" was her inward cry.  "God of all the
+worlds!  Do not let him die.  `If ye ask anything in my name
+that I will do.'  Christ said it.  In the name of Jesus of
+Nazareth--do not let him die!  All the worlds are yours--all
+the power--listen to us--listen to us.  Lord, I believe--help
+thou my unbelief.  If this terror robs me of faith, and I pray
+madly--forgive, forgive me.  Do not count it against me as
+sin.  You made him.  He has suffered and been alone.  It is
+not time--it is not time yet for him to go.  He has known no
+joy and no bright thing.  Do not let him go out of the warm
+world like a blind man.  Do not let him die.  Perhaps this is
+not prayer, but raging.  Forgive--forgive!  All power is gone
+from me.  God of the worlds, and the great winds, and the
+myriad stars--do not let him die!"
+
+She knew her thoughts were wild, but their torrent bore her
+with them into a strange, great silence.  She did not hear the
+vicar's words, or the responses of the people.  She was not
+within the grey stone walls.  She had been drawn away as into
+the darkness and stillness of the night, and no soul but her
+own seemed near.  Through the stillness and the dark her
+praying seemed to call and echo, clamouring again and again. 
+It must reach Something--it must be heard, because she cried
+so loud, though to the human beings about her she seemed
+kneeling in silence.  She went on and on, repeating her words,
+changing them, ending and beginning again, pouring forth a
+flood of appeal.  She thought later that the flood must have
+been at its highest tide when, singularly, it was stemmed. 
+Without warning, a wave of awe passed over her which
+strangely silenced her--and left her bowed and kneeling, but
+crying out no more.  The darkness had become still, even as
+it had not been still before.  Suddenly she cowered as she knelt
+and held her breath.  Something had drawn a little near. 
+No thoughts--no words--no cries were needed as the great
+stillness grew and spread, and folded her being within it. 
+She waited--only waited.  She did not know how long a time
+passed before she felt herself drawn back from the silent and
+shadowy places--awakening, as it were, to the sounds in the
+church.
+
+"Our Father," she began to say, as simply as a child. 
+"Our Father who art in Heaven--hallowed be thy name." 
+There was a stirring among the congregation, and sounds of
+feet, as the people began to move down the aisle in reverent
+slowness.  She caught again the occasional sound of a subdued
+sob.  Rosalie gently touched her, and she rose, following her
+out of the big pew and passing down the aisle after the
+villagers.
+
+Outside the entrance the people waited as if they wanted
+to see her again.  Foreheads were touched as before, and eyes
+followed her.  She was to the general mind the centre of the
+drama, and "the A'mighty" would do well to hear her.  She
+had been doing his work for him "same as his lordship." 
+They did not expect her to smile at such a time, when she
+returned their greetings, and she did not, but they said
+afterwards, in their cottages, that "trouble or not she was a
+wonder for looks, that she was--Miss Vanderpoel."
+
+Rosalie slipped a hand through her arm, and they walked home
+together, very close to each other.  Now and then there was a
+questioning in Rosy's look.  But neither of them spoke once.
+
+On an oak table in the hall a letter from Mr. Penzance
+was lying.  It was brief, hurried, and anxious.  The rumour
+that Mount Dunstan had been ailing was true, and that they
+had felt they must conceal the matter from the villagers was
+true also.  For some baffling reason the fever had not
+absolutely declared itself, but the young doctors were beset by
+grave forebodings.  In such cases the most serious symptoms
+might suddenly develop.  One never knew.  Mr. Penzance
+was evidently torn by fears which he desperately strove to
+suppress.  But Betty could see the anguish on his fine old face,
+and between the lines she read dread and warning not put
+into words.  She believed that, fearing the worst, he felt he
+must prepare her mind.
+
+"He has lived under a great strain for months," he ended. 
+"It began long before the outbreak of the fever.  I am not
+strong under my sense of the cruelty of things--and I have
+never loved him as I love him to-day."
+
+Betty took the letter to her room, and read it two or three
+times.  Because she had asked intelligent questions of the
+medical authority she had consulted on her visit to London, she
+knew something of the fever and its habits.  Even her unclerical
+knowledge was such as it was not well to reflect upon.  She
+refolded the letter and laid it aside.
+
+"I must not think.  I must do something.  It may prevent
+my listening," she said aloud to the silence of her room.
+
+She cast her eyes about her as if in search.  Upon her
+desk lay a notebook.  She took it up and opened it.  It contained
+lists of plants, of flower seeds, of bulbs, and shrubs. 
+Each list was headed with an explanatory note.
+
+"Yes, this will do," she said.  "I will go and talk to Kedgers."
+
+Kedgers and every man under him had been at the service,
+but they had returned to their respective duties.  Kedgers,
+giving directions to some under gardeners who were clearing
+flower beds and preparing them for their winter rest, turned
+to meet her as she approached.  To Kedgers the sight of her
+coming towards him on a garden path was a joyful thing. 
+He had done wonders, it is true, but if she had not stood by
+his side with inspiration as well as confidence, he knew that
+things might have "come out different."
+
+"You was born a gardener, miss--born one," he had said months
+ago.
+
+It was the time when flower beds must be planned for the
+coming year.  Her notebook was filled with memoranda of
+the things they must talk about.
+
+It was good, normal, healthy work to do.  The scent of the
+rich, damp, upturned mould was a good thing to inhale.  They
+walked from one end to another, stood before clumps of shrubs,
+and studied bits of wall.  Here a mass of blue might grow, here
+low things of white and pale yellow.  A quickly-climbing
+rose would hang sheets of bloom over this dead tree.  This
+sheltered wall would hold warmth for a Marechal Niel.
+
+"You must take care of it all--even if I am not here next
+year," Miss Vanderpoel said.
+
+Kedgers' absorbed face changed.
+
+"Not here, miss," he exclaimed.  "You not here!  Things
+wouldn't grow, miss."  He checked himself, his weather-
+toughened skin reddening because he was afraid he had
+perhaps taken a liberty.  And then moving his hat uneasily on
+his head, he took another.  "But it's true enough," looking
+down on the gravel walk, "we--we couldn't expect to keep you."
+
+She did not look as if she had noticed the liberty, but she did
+not look quite like herself, Kedgers thought.  If she had been
+another young lady, and but for his established feeling that
+she was somehow immune from all ills, he would have thought
+she had a headache, or was low in her mind.
+
+She spent an hour or two with him, and together they
+planned for the changing seasons of the year to come.  How she
+could keep her mind on a thing, and what a head she had for
+planning, and what an eye for colour!  But yes--there was
+something a bit wrong somehow.  Now and then she would
+stop and stand still for a moment, and suddenly it struck
+Kedgers that she looked as if she were listening.
+
+"Did you think you heard something, miss?" he asked her
+once when she paused and wore this look.
+
+"No," she answered, "no."  And drew him on quickly--
+almost as if she did not want him to hear what she had seemed
+listening for.
+
+When she left him and went back to the house, all the
+loveliness of spring, summer and autumn had been thought out
+and provided for.  Kedgers stood on the path and looked after 
+her until she passed through the terrace door.  He chewed his
+lip uneasily.  Then he remembered something and felt a bit
+relieved.  It was the service he remembered.
+
+"Ah! it's that that's upset her--and it's natural, seeing how
+she's helped him and Dunstan village.  It's only natural." 
+He chewed his lip again, and nodded his head in odd reflection. 
+"Ay!  Ay!" he summed her up.  "She's a great lady
+that--she's a great lady--same as if she'd been born in a
+civilised land."
+
+During the rest of the day the look of question in Rosalie's
+eyes changed in its nature.  When her sister was near her
+she found herself glancing at her with a new feeling.  It was
+a growing feeling, which gradually became--anxiousness. 
+Betty presented to her the aspect of one withdrawn into some
+remote space.  She was not living this day as her days were
+usually lived.  She did not sit still or stroll about the gardens
+quietly.  The consecutiveness of her action seemed
+broken.  She did one thing after another, as if she must fill
+each moment.  This was not her Betty.  Lady Anstruthers
+watched and thought until, in the end, a new pained fear
+began to creep slowly into her mind, and make her feel as
+if she were slightly trembling though her hands did not shake. 
+She did not dare to allow herself to think the thing she knew
+she was on the brink of thinking.  She thrust it away from
+her, and tried not to think at all.  Her Betty--her splendid
+Betty, whom nothing could hurt--who could not be touched
+by any awful thing--her dear Betty!
+
+In the afternoon she saw her write notes steadily for an
+hour, then she went out into the stables and visited the horses,
+talked to the coachman and to her own groom.  She was
+very kind to a village boy who had been recently taken on as
+an additional assistant in the stable, and who was rather
+frightened and shy.  She knew his mother, who had a large family,
+and she had, indeed, given the boy his place that he might be
+trained under the great Mr. Buckham, who was coachman
+and head of the stables.  She said encouraging things which
+quite cheered him, and she spoke privately to Mr. Buckham
+about him.  Then she walked in the park a little, but not for
+long.  When she came back Rosalie was waiting for her.
+
+"I want to take a long drive," she said.  "I feel restless. 
+Will you come with me, Betty?"  Yes, she would go with
+her, so Buckham brought the landau with its pair of big
+horses, and they rolled down the avenue, and into the smooth,
+white high road.  He took them far--past the great marshes,
+between miles of bared hedges, past farms and scattered
+cottages.  Sometimes he turned into lanes, where the hedges were
+closer to each other, and where, here and there, they caught
+sight of new points of view between trees.  Betty was glad to
+feel Rosy's slim body near her side, and she was conscious
+that it gradually seemed to draw closer and closer.  Then
+Rosy's hand slipped into hers and held it softly on her lap.
+
+When they drove together in this way they were usually
+both of them rather silent and quiet, but now Rosalie spoke of
+many things--of Ughtred, of Nigel, of the Dunholms, of New
+York, and their father and mother.
+
+"I want to talk because I'm nervous, I think," she said
+half apologetically.  "I do not want to sit still and think too
+much--of father's coming.  You don't mind my talking, do
+you, Betty?"
+
+"No," Betty answered.  "It is good for you and for me." 
+And she met the pressure of Rosy's hand halfway.
+
+But Rosy was talking, not because she did not want to sit
+still and think, but because she did not want Betty to do so. 
+And all the time she was trying to thrust away the thought
+growing in her mind.
+
+They spent the evening together in the library, and Betty
+read aloud.  She read a long time--until quite late.  She
+wished to tire herself as well as to force herself to stop
+listening.
+
+When they said good-night to each other Rosy clung to her
+as desperately as she had clung on the night after her arrival. 
+She kissed her again and again, and then hung her head and
+excused herself.
+
+"Forgive me for being--nervous.  I'm ashamed of myself,"
+she said.  "Perhaps in time I shall get over being a coward."
+
+But she said nothing of the fact that she was not a coward
+for herself, but through a slowly formulating and struggled--
+against fear, which chilled her very heart, and which she could
+best cover by a pretence of being a poltroon.
+
+She could not sleep when she went to bed.  The night
+seemed crowded with strange, terrified thoughts.  They were
+all of Betty, though sometimes she thought of her father's
+coming, of her mother in New York, and of Betty's steady
+working throughout the day.  Sometimes she cried, twisting
+her hands together, and sometimes she dropped into a feverish
+sleep, and dreamed that she was watching Betty's face, yet
+was afraid to look at it.
+
+She awakened suddenly from one of these dreams, and sat
+upright in bed to find the dawn breaking.  She rose and threw
+on a dressing-gown, and went to her sister's room because she
+could not bear to stay away.
+
+The door was not locked, and she pushed it open gently. 
+One of the windows had its blind drawn up, and looked like
+a patch of dull grey.  Betty was standing upright near it. 
+She was in her night-gown, and a long black plait of hair
+hung over one shoulder heavily.  She looked all black and white
+in strong contrast.  The grey light set her forth as a tall
+ghost.
+
+Lady Anstruthers slid forward, feeling a tightness in her
+chest.
+
+"The dawn wakened me too," she said.
+
+"I have been waiting to see it come," answered Betty.  "It
+is going to be a dull, dreary day."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVII
+
+"I HAVE NO WORD OR LOOK TO REMEMBER"
+
+It was a dull and dreary day, as Betty had foreseen it would
+be.  Heavy rain clouds hung and threatened, and the atmosphere
+was damp and chill.  It was one of those days of the
+English autumn which speak only of the end of things,
+bereaving one of the power to remember next year's spring and
+summer, which, after all, must surely come.  Sky is grey,
+trees are grey, dead leaves lie damp beneath the feet, sunlight
+and birds seem forgotten things.  All that has been sad and
+to be regretted or feared hangs heavy in the air and sways all
+thought.  In the passing of these hours there is no hope
+anywhere.  Betty appeared at breakfast in short dress and close
+hat.  She wore thick little boots, as if for walking.
+
+"I am going to make visits in the village," she said.  "I
+want a basket of good things to take with me.  Stourton's
+children need feeding after their measles.  They looked very
+thin when I saw them playing in the road yesterday."
+
+"Yes, dear," Rosalie answered.  "Mrs. Noakes shall
+prepare the basket.  Good chicken broth, and jelly, and
+nourishing things.  Jennings," to the butler, "you know the kind
+of basket Miss Vanderpoel wants.  Speak to Mrs. Noakes, please."
+
+"Yes, my lady," Jennings knew the kind of basket and so
+did Mrs. Noakes.  Below stairs a strong sympathy with Miss
+Vanderpoel's movements had developed.  No one resented the
+preparation of baskets.  Somehow they were always managed,
+even if asked for at untimely hours.
+
+Betty was sitting silent, looking out into the greyness of the
+autumn-smitten park.
+
+"Are--are you listening for anything, Betty?" Lady
+Anstruthers asked rather falteringly.  "You have a sort of
+listening look in your eyes."
+
+Betty came back to the room, as it were.
+
+"Have I," she said.  "Yes, I think I was listening for--
+something."
+
+And Rosalie did not ask her what she listened for.  She was
+afraid she knew.
+
+It was not only the Stourtons Betty visited this morning. 
+She passed from one cottage to another--to see old women,
+and old men, as well as young ones, who for one reason or
+another needed help and encouragement.  By one bedside
+she read aloud; by another she sat and told cheerful stories;
+she listened to talk in little kitchens, and in one house
+welcomed a newborn thing.  As she walked steadily over grey
+road and down grey lanes damp mist rose and hung about
+her.  And she did not walk alone.  Fear walked with her,
+and anguish, a grey ghost by her side.  Once she found herself
+standing quite still on a side path, covering her face with
+her hands.  She filled every moment of the morning, and
+walked until she was tired.  Before she went home she called
+at the post office, and Mr. Tewson greeted her with a solemn
+face.  He did not wait to be questioned.
+
+"There's been no news to-day, miss, so far," he said.  "And
+that seems as if they might be so given up to hard work at a
+dreadful time that there's been no chance for anything to get
+out.  When people's hanging over a man's bed at the end, it's
+as if everything stopped but that--that's stopping for all time."
+
+After luncheon the rain began to fall softly, slowly, and with
+a suggestion of endlessness.  It was a sort of mist itself, and
+became a damp shadow among the bare branches of trees which
+soon began to drip.
+
+"You have been walking about all morning, and you are
+tired, dear," Lady Anstruthers said to her.  "Won't you go
+to your room and rest, Betty?"
+
+Yes, she would go to her room, she said.  Some new books
+had arrived from London this morning, and she would look 
+over them.  She talked a little about her visits before she went,
+and when, as she talked, Ughtred came over to her and stood
+close to her side holding her hand and stroking it, she smiled
+at him sweetly--the smile he adored.  He stroked the hand
+and softly patted it, watching her wistfully.  Suddenly he
+lifted it to his lips, and kissed it again and again with a sort
+of passion.
+
+"I love you so much, Aunt Betty," he cried.  "We both
+love you so much.  Something makes me love you to-day more
+than ever I did before.  It almost makes me cry.  I love you so."
+
+She stooped swiftly and drew him into her arms and kissed
+him close and hard.  He held his head back a little and looked
+into the blue under her lashes.
+
+"I love your eyes," he said.  "Anyone would love your
+eyes, Aunt Betty.  But what is the matter with them?  You
+are not crying at all, but--oh! what is the matter?"
+
+"No, I am not crying at all," she said, and smiled--almost
+laughed.
+
+But after she had kissed him again she took her books and
+went upstairs.
+
+She did not lie down, and she did not read when she was
+alone in her room.  She drew a long chair before the window
+and watched the slow falling of the rain.  There is nothing like
+it--that slow weeping of the rain on an English autumn day. 
+Soft and light though it was, the park began to look sodden. 
+The bare trees held out their branches like imploring arms,
+the brown garden beds were neat and bare.  The same rain
+was drip-dripping at Mount Dunstan--upon the desolate
+great house--upon the village--upon the mounds and ancient
+stone tombs in the churchyard, sinking into the earth--sinking
+deep, sucked in by the clay beneath--the cold damp clay. 
+She shook herself shudderingly.  Why should the thought come
+to her--the cold damp clay?  She would not listen to it, she
+would think of New York, of its roaring streets and crash of
+sound, of the rush of fierce life there--of her father and
+mother.  She tried to force herself to call up pictures of
+Broadway, swarming with crowds of black things, which, seen
+from the windows of its monstrous buildings, seemed like
+swarms of ants, burst out of ant-hills, out of a thousand ant-
+hills.  She tried to remember shop windows, the things in
+them, the throngs going by, and the throngs passing in and out
+of great, swinging glass doors.  She dragged up before her a 
+vision of Rosalie, driving with her mother and herself, looking
+about her at the new buildings and changed streets, flushed and
+made radiant by the accelerated pace and excitement of her
+beloved New York.  But, oh, the slow, penetrating rainfall,
+and--the cold damp clay!
+
+She rose, making an involuntary sound which was half a
+moan.  The long mirror set between two windows showed
+her momentarily an awful young figure, throwing up its arms. 
+Was that Betty Vanderpoel--that?
+
+"What does one do," she said, "when the world comes
+to an end?  What does one do?"
+
+All her days she had done things--there had always been
+something to do.  Now there was nothing.  She went suddenly
+to her bell and rang for her maid.  The woman answered
+the summons at once.
+
+"Send word to the stable that I want Childe Harold.  I
+do not want Mason.  I shall ride alone."
+
+"Yes, miss," Ambleston answered, without any exterior
+sign of emotion.  She was too well-trained a person to express
+any shade of her internal amazement.  After she had transmitted
+the order to the proper manager she returned and
+changed her mistress's costume.
+
+She had contemplated her task, and was standing behind
+Miss Vanderpoel's chair, putting the last touch to her veil,
+when she became conscious of a slight stiffening of the neck
+which held so well the handsome head, then the head slowly
+turned towards the window giving upon the front park.  Miss
+Vanderpoel was listening to something, listening so intently
+that Ambleston felt that, for a few moments, she did not seem
+to breathe.  The maid's hands fell from the veil, and she began
+to listen also.  She had been at the service the day before. 
+Miss Vanderpoel rose from her chair slowly--very slowly, and took
+a step forward.  Then she stood still and listened again.
+
+"Open that window, if you please," she commanded--"as
+if a stone image was speaking"--Ambleston said later.  The
+window was thrown open, and for a few seconds they both
+stood still again.  When Miss Vanderpoel spoke, it was as
+if she had forgotten where she was, or as if she were in a dream.
+
+"It is the ringers," she said.  "They are tolling the passing
+bell."
+
+The serving woman was soft of heart, and had her feminine
+emotions.  There had been much talk of this thing in the
+servant's hall.  She turned upon Betty, and forgot all rules and
+training.
+
+"Oh, miss!" she cried.  "He's gone--he's gone!  That
+good man--out of this hard world.  Oh, miss, excuse me--
+do!"  And as she burst into wild tears, she ran out of the room.
+
+ .  .  .  .  .
+
+Rosalie had been sitting in the morning room.  She also
+had striven to occupy herself with work.  She had written
+to her mother, she had read, she had embroidered, and then read
+again.  What was Betty doing--what was she thinking now? 
+She laid her book down in her lap, and covering her face
+with her hands, breathed a desperate little prayer.  That life
+should be pain and emptiness to herself, seemed somehow natural
+since she had married Nigel--but pain and emptiness for
+Betty--No!  No!  No!  Not for Betty!  Piteous sorrow
+poured upon her like a flood.  She did not know how the time
+passed.  She sat, huddled together in her chair, with hidden
+face.  She could not bear to look at the rain and ghost mist
+out of doors.  Oh, if her mother were only here, and she might
+speak to her!  And as her loving tears broke forth afresh, she
+heard the door open.
+
+"If you please, my lady--I beg your pardon, my lady," as
+she started and uncovered her face.
+
+"What is it, Jennings?"
+
+The figure at the door was that of the serious, elderly
+butler, and he wore a respectfully grave air.
+
+"As your ladyship is sitting in this room, we thought it
+likely you would not hear, the windows being closed, and we
+felt sure, my lady, that you would wish to know----"
+
+Lady Anstruthers' hands shook as they clung to the arms
+of her chair.
+
+"To know----" she faltered.  "Hear what?"
+
+"The passing bell is tolling, my lady.  It has just begun. 
+It is for Lord Mount Dunstan.  There's not a dry eye downstairs,
+your ladyship, not one."
+
+He opened the windows, and she stood up.  Jennings quietly
+left the room.  The slow, heavy knell struck ponderously on
+the damp air, and she stood and shivered.
+
+A moment or two later she turned, because it seemed as if
+she must.
+
+Betty, in her riding habit, was standing motionless against
+the door, her wonderful eyes still as death, gazing at her,
+gazing in an awful, simple silence.
+
+Oh, what was the use of being afraid to speak at such a
+time as this?  In one moment Rosy was kneeling at her feet,
+clinging about her knees, kissing her hands, the very cloth of
+her habit, and sobbing aloud.
+
+"Oh, my darling--my love--my own Betty!  I don't
+know--and I won't ask--but speak to me--speak just a word
+--my dearest dear!"
+
+Betty raised her up and drew her within the room, closing
+the door behind them.
+
+"Kind little Rosy," she said.  "I came to speak--because
+we two love each other.  You need not ask, I will tell you. 
+That bell is tolling for the man who taught me--to KNOW. 
+He never spoke to me of love.  I have not one word or look to
+remember.  And now----  Oh, listen--listen!  I have been
+listening since the morning of yesterday."  It was an awful
+thing--her white face, with all the flame of life swept out
+of it.
+
+"Don't listen--darling--darling!" Rosy cried out in
+anguish.  "Shut your ears--shut your ears!"  And she tried to
+throw her arms around the high black head, and stifle all sound
+with her embrace.
+
+"I don't want to shut them," was the answer.  "All the
+unkindness and misery are over for him, I ought to thank God--
+but I don't.  I shall hear--O Rosy, listen!--I shall hear
+that to the end of my days."
+
+Rosy held her tight, and rocked and sobbed.
+
+"My Betty," she kept saying.  "My Betty," and she could
+say no more.  What more was there to say?  At last Betty
+withdrew herself from her arms, and then Rosalie noticed for
+the first time that she wore the habit.
+
+"Dearest," she whispered, "what are you going to do?"
+
+"I was going to ride, and I am going to do it still.  I
+must do something.  I shall ride a long, long way--and ride
+hard.  You won't try to keep me, Rosy.  You will understand."
+
+"Yes," biting her lip, and looking at her with large, awed
+eyes, as she patted her arm with a hand that trembled.  "I
+would not hold you back, Betty, from anything in the world
+you chose to do."
+
+And with another long, clinging clasp of her, she let her go.
+
+Mason was standing by Childe Harold when she went
+down the broad steps.  He also wore a look of repressed emotion,
+and stood with bared head bent, his eyes fixed on the
+gravel of the drive, listening to the heavy strokes of the bell
+in the church tower, rather as if he were taking part in some
+solemn ceremony.
+
+He mounted her silently, and after he had given her the
+bridle, looked up, and spoke in a somewhat husky voice:
+
+"The order was that you did not want me, miss?  Was that
+correct?"
+
+"Yes, I wish to ride alone."
+
+"Yes, miss.  Thank you, miss."
+
+Childe Harold was in good spirits.  He held up his head,
+and blew the breath through his delicate, dilated, red nostrils
+as he set out with his favourite sidling, dancing steps.  Mason
+watched him down the avenue, saw the lodge keeper come out
+to open the gate, and curtsy as her ladyship's sister passed
+through it.  After that he went slowly back to the stables,
+and sat in the harness-room a long time, staring at the floor, as
+the bell struck ponderously on his ear.
+
+The woman who had opened the gate for her Betty saw
+had red eyes.  She knew why.
+
+"A year ago they all thought of him as an outcast.  They
+would have believed any evil they had heard connected with
+his name.  Now, in every cottage, there is weeping--weeping. 
+And he lies deaf and dumb," was her thought.
+
+She did not wish to pass through the village, and turned
+down a side road, which would lead her to where she could
+cross the marshes, and come upon lonely places.  The more
+lonely, the better.  Every few moments she caught her breath
+with a hard short gasp.  The slow rain fell upon her, big
+round, crystal drops hung on the hedgerows, and dripped upon
+the grass banks below them; the trees, wreathed with mist, were
+like waiting ghosts as she passed them by; Childe Harold's
+hoof upon the road, made a hollow, lonely sound.
+
+A thought began to fill her brain, and make insistent pressure
+upon it.  She tried no more to thrust thought away.  Those
+who lay deaf and dumb, those for whom people wept--where
+were they when the weeping seemed to sound through all the
+world?  How far had they gone?  Was it far?  Could they
+hear and could they see?  If one plead with them aloud, could
+they draw near to listen?  Did they begin a long, long journey
+as soon as they had slipped away?  The "wonder of the
+world," she had said, watching life swelling and bursting the
+seeds in Kedgers' hothouses!  But this was a greater wonder
+still, because of its awesomeness.  This man had been, and who
+dare say he was not--even now?  The strength of his great
+body, the look in his red-brown eyes, the sound of his deep
+voice, the struggle, the meaning of him, where were they? 
+She heard herself followed by the hollow echo of Childe
+Harold's hoofs, as she rode past copse and hedge, and wet
+spreading fields.  She was this hour as he had been a month ago. 
+If, with some strange suddenness, this which was Betty
+Vanderpoel, slipped from its body----She put her hand up to her
+forehead.  It was unthinkable that there would be no more. 
+Where was he now--where was he now?
+
+This was the thought that filled her brain cells to the
+exclusion of all others.  Over the road, down through by-lanes,
+out on the marshes.  Where was he--where was he--WHERE? 
+Childe Harold's hoofs began to beat it out as a refrain.  She
+heard nothing else.  She did not know where she was going
+and did not ask herself.  She went down any road or lane
+which looked empty of life, she took strange turnings, without
+caring; she did not know how far she was afield.
+
+Where was he now--this hour--this moment--where was
+he now?  Did he know the rain, the greyness, the desolation
+of the world?
+
+Once she stopped her horse on the loneliness of the marsh
+land, and looked up at the low clouds about her, at the creeping
+mist, the dank grass.  It seemed a place in which a newly-
+released soul might wander because it did not yet know its way.
+
+"If you should be near, and come to me, you will understand,"
+her clear voice said gravely between the caught breaths,
+"what I gave you was nothing to you--but you took it with
+you.  Perhaps you know without my telling you.  I want
+you to know.  When a man is dead, everything melts away. 
+I loved you.  I wish you had loved me."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVIII
+
+THE MOMENT
+
+In the unnatural unbearableness of her anguish, she lost
+sight of objects as she passed them, she lost all memory of what
+she did.  She did not know how long she had been out, or how
+far she had ridden.  When the thought of time or distance
+vaguely flitted across her mind, it seemed that she had been
+riding for hours, and might have crossed one county and
+entered another.  She had long left familiar places behind. 
+Riding through and inclosed by the mist, she, herself, might
+have been a wandering ghost, lost in unknown places.  Where
+was he now--where was he now?
+
+Afterwards she could not tell how or when it was that
+she found herself becoming conscious of the evidences that
+her horse had been ridden too long and hard, and that he
+was worn out with fatigue.  She did not know that she
+had ridden round and round over the marshes, and had passed
+several times through the same lanes.  Childe Harold, the
+sure of foot, actually stumbled, out of sheer weariness of limb. 
+Perhaps it was this which brought her back to earth, and led
+her to look around her with eyes which saw material objects
+with comprehension.  She had reached the lonely places, indeed
+and the evening was drawing on.  She was at the edge of the
+marsh, and the land about her was strange to her and desolate. 
+At the side of a steep lane, overgrown with grass, and seeming
+a mere cart-path, stood a deserted-looking, black and white,
+timbered cottage, which was half a ruin.  Close to it was a
+dripping spinney, its trees forming a darkling background to
+the tumble-down house, whose thatch was rotting into holes,
+and its walls sagging forward perilously.  The bit of garden
+about it was neglected and untidy, here and there windows
+were broken, and stuffed with pieces of ragged garments. 
+Altogether a sinister and repellent place enough.
+
+She looked at it with heavy eyes.  (Where was he now--
+where was he now?--This repeating itself in the far chambers
+of her brain.)  Her sight seemed dimmed, not only by the
+mist, but by a sinking faintness which possessed her.  She did
+not remember how little food she had eaten during more than
+twenty-four hours.  Her habit was heavy with moisture, and
+clung to her body; she was conscious of a hot tremor passing
+over her, and saw that her hands shook as they held the bridle
+on which they had lost their grip.  She had never fainted
+in her life, and she was not going to faint now--women did
+not faint in these days--but she must reach the cottage and
+dismount, to rest under shelter for a short time.  No smoke
+was rising from the chimney, but surely someone was living
+in the place, and could tell her where she was, and give her
+at least water for herself and her horse.  Poor beast! how
+wickedly she must have been riding him, in her utter absorption
+in her thoughts.  He was wet, not alone with rain, but
+with sweat.  He snorted out hot, smoking breaths.
+
+She spoke to him, and he moved forward at her command. 
+He was trembling too.  Not more than two hundred yards,
+and she turned him into the lane.  But it was wet and slippery,
+and strewn with stones.  His trembling and her uncertain
+hold on the bridle combined to produce disaster.  He set his
+foot upon a stone which slid beneath it, he stumbled, and she
+could not help him to recover, so he fell, and only by Heaven's
+mercy not upon her, with his crushing, big-boned weight, and
+she was able to drag herself free of him before he began to
+kick, in his humiliated efforts to rise.  But he could not rise,
+because he was hurt--and when she, herself, got up, she
+staggered, and caught at the broken gate, because in her
+wrenching leap for safety she had twisted her ankle, and for
+a moment was in cruel pain.
+
+When she recovered from her shock sufficiently to be able
+to look at the cottage, she saw that it was more of a ruin than
+it had seemed, even at a short distance.  Its door hung open
+on broken hinges, no smoke rose from the chimney, because
+there was no one within its walls to light a fire.  It was quite
+empty.  Everything about the place lay in dead and utter
+silence.  In a normal mood she would have liked the mystery
+of the situation, and would have set about planning her way
+out of her difficulty.  But now her mind made no effort,
+because normal interest in things had fallen away from her. 
+She might be twenty miles from Stornham, but the possible
+fact did not, at the moment, seem to concern her.  (Where is
+he now--where is he now?)  Childe Harold was trying to rise,
+despite his hurt, and his evident determination touched her.  He
+was too proud to lie in the mire.  She limped to him, and
+tried to steady him by his bridle.  He was not badly injured,
+though plainly in pain.
+
+"Poor boy, it was my fault," she said to him as he at last
+struggled to his feet.  "I did not know I was doing it.  Poor
+boy!"
+
+He turned a velvet dark eye upon her, and nosed her forgivingly
+with a warm velvet muzzle, but it was plain that, for
+the time, he was done for.  They both moved haltingly to the
+broken gate, and Betty fastened him to a thorn tree near it,
+where he stood on three feet, his fine head drooping.
+
+She pushed the gate open, and went into the house through
+the door which hung on its hinges.  Once inside, she stood still
+and looked about her.  If there was silence and desolateness
+outside, there was within the deserted place a stillness
+like the unresponse of death.  It had been long since anyone
+had lived in the cottage, but tramps or gipsies had at times
+passed through it.  Dead, blackened embers lay on the hearth,
+a bundle of dried grass which had been slept on was piled in
+the corner, an empty nail keg and a wooden box had been
+drawn before the big chimney place for some wanderer to sit
+on when the black embers had been hot and red.
+
+Betty gave one glance around her and sat down upon the
+box standing on the bare hearth, her head sinking forward, her
+hands falling clasped between her knees, her eyes on the brick
+floor.
+
+"Where is he now?" broke from her in a loud whisper,
+whose sound was mechanical and hollow.  "Where is he now?"
+
+And she sat there without moving, while the grey mist from
+the marshes crept close about the door and through it and stole
+about her feet.
+
+So she sat long--long--in a heavy, far-off dream.
+
+Along the road a man was riding with a lowering, fretted
+face.  He had come across country on horseback, because to
+travel by train meant wearisome stops and changes and endlessly
+slow journeying, annoying beyond endurance to those who
+have not patience to spare.  His ride would have been pleasant
+enough but for the slow mist-like rain.  Also he had taken
+a wrong turning, because he did not know the roads he
+travelled.  The last signpost he had passed, however, had given
+him his cue again, and he began to feel something of security. 
+Confound the rain!  The best road was slippery with it, and
+the haze of it made a man's mind feel befogged and lowered
+his spirits horribly--discouraged him--would worry him into
+an ill humour even if he had reason to be in a good one. 
+As for him, he had no reason for cheerfulness--he never had
+for the matter of that, and just now----!  What was the matter
+with his horse?  He was lifting his head and sniffing the
+damp air restlessly, as if he scented or saw something.  Beasts
+often seemed to have a sort of second sight--horses particularly.
+
+What ailed him that he should prick up his ears and snort after
+his sniffing the mist!  Did he hear anything?  Yes, he did, it
+seemed.  He gave forth suddenly a loud shrill whinny, turning his
+head towards a rough lane they were approaching, and
+immediately from the vicinity of a deserted-looking cottage
+behind a hedge came a sharp but mournful-sounding neigh in
+answer.
+
+"What horse is that?" said Nigel Anstruthers, drawing in
+at the entrance to the lane and looking down it.  "There is a
+fine brute with a side-saddle on," he added sharply.  "He is
+waiting for someone.  What is a woman doing there at this
+time?  Is it a rendezvous?  A good place----"
+
+He broke off short and rode forward.  "I'm hanged if it
+is not Childe Harold," he broke out, and he had no sooner
+assured himself of the fact than he threw himself from his
+saddle, tethered his horse and strode up the path to the broken-
+hinged door.
+
+He stood on the threshold and stared.  What a hole it was--
+what a hole!  And there SHE sat--alone--eighteen or twenty
+miles from home--on a turned-up box near the black embers,
+her hands clasped loosely between her knees, her face rather
+awful, her eyes staring at the floor, as if she did not see it.
+
+"Where is he now?" he heard her whisper to herself with
+soft weirdness.  "Where is he now?"
+
+Sir Nigel stepped into the place and stood before her.  He
+had smiled with a wry unpleasantness when he had heard her
+evidently unconscious words.
+
+"My good girl," he said, "I am sure I do not know where
+he is--but it is very evident that he ought to be here, since you
+have amiably put yourself to such trouble.  It is fortunate for
+you perhaps that I am here before him.  What does this mean?"
+the question breaking from him with savage authority.
+
+He had dragged her back to earth.  She sat upright and recognised
+him with a hideous sense of shock, but he did not give her time
+to speak.  His instinct of male fury leaped within him.
+
+"YOU!" he cried out.  "It takes a woman like you to come
+and hide herself in a place of this sort, like a trolloping gipsy
+wench!  It takes a New York millionairess or a Roman empress
+or one of Charles the Second's duchesses to plunge as deep
+as this.  You, with your golden pedestal--you, with your
+ostentatious airs and graces--you, with your condescending to
+give a man a chance to repent his sins and turn over a new leaf! 
+Damn it," rising to a sort of frenzy, "what are you doing
+waiting in a hole like this--in this weather--at this hour--you
+--you!"
+
+The fool's flame leaped high enough to make him start
+forward, as if to seize her by the shoulder and shake her.
+
+But she rose and stepped back to lean against the side of the
+chimney--to brace herself against it, so that she could stand in
+her lame foot's despite.  Every drop of blood had been swept
+from her face, and her eyes looked immense.  His coming was
+a good thing for her, though she did not know it.  It brought
+her back from unearthly places.  All her child hatred woke and
+blazed in her.  Never had she hated a thing so, and it set her
+slow, cold blood running like something molten.
+
+"Hold your tongue!" she said in a clear, awful young voice of
+warning.  "And take care not to touch me.  If you do--I have my
+whip here--I shall lash you across your mouth!"
+
+He broke into ribald laughter.  A certain sudden thought which
+had cut into him like a knife thrust into flesh drove him on.
+
+"Do!" he cried.  "I should like to carry your mark back
+to Stornham--and tell people why it was given.  I know who
+you are here for.  Only such fellows ask such things of women. 
+But he was determined to be safe, if you hid in a ditch.  You
+are here for Mount Dunstan--and he has failed you!"
+
+But she only stood and stared at him, holding her whip
+behind her, knowing that at any moment he might snatch it from
+her hand.  And she knew how poor a weapon it was.  To strike
+out with it would only infuriate him and make him a wild
+beast.  And it was becoming an agony to stand upon her foot. 
+And even if it had not been so--if she had been strong enough
+to make a leap and dash past him, her horse stood outside
+disabled.
+
+Nigel Anstruthers' eyes ran over her from head to foot, down
+the side of her mud-stained habit, while a curious light dawned
+in them.
+
+"You have had a fall from your horse," he exclaimed.  "You
+are lame!"  Then quickly, "That was why Childe Harold
+was trembling and standing on three feet!  By Jove!"
+
+Then he sat down on the nail keg and began to laugh.  He
+laughed for a full minute, but she saw he did not take his
+eyes from her.
+
+"You are in as unpleasant a situation as a young woman
+can well be," he said, when he stopped.  "You came to a dirty
+hole to be alone with a man who felt it safest not to keep his 
+appointment.  Your horse stumbled and disabled himself and
+you.  You are twenty miles from home in a deserted cottage in
+a lane no one passes down even in good weather.  You are
+frightened to death and you have given me even a better story
+to play with than your sister gave me.  By Jove!"
+
+His face was an unholy thing to look upon.  The situation
+and her powerlessness were exciting him.
+
+"No," she answered, keeping her eyes on his, as she might
+have kept them on some wild animal's, "I am not frightened
+to death."
+
+His ugly dark flush rose.
+
+"Well, if you are not," he said, "don't tell me so.  That
+kind of defiance is not your best line just now.  You have been
+disdaining me from magnificent New York heights for some
+time.  Do you think that I am not enjoying this?"
+
+"I cannot imagine anyone else who would enjoy it so much." 
+And she knew the answer was daring, but would have made it
+if he had held a knife's point at her throat.
+
+He got up, and walking to the door drew it back on its
+crazy hinges and managed to shut it close.  There was a big
+wooden bolt inside and he forced it into its socket.
+
+"Presently I shall go and put the horses into the cowshed,"
+he said.  "If I leave them standing outside they will attract
+attention.  I do not intend to be disturbed by any gipsy tramp
+who wants shelter.  I have never had you quite to myself
+before."
+
+He sat down again and nursed his knee gracefully.
+
+"And I have never seen you look as attractive," biting his
+under lip in cynical enjoyment.  "To-day's adventure has roused
+your emotions and actually beautified you--which was not
+necessary.  I daresay you have been furious and have cried. 
+Your eyes do not look like mere eyes, but like splendid blue
+pools of tears.  Perhaps _I_ shall make you cry sometime, my dear
+Betty."
+
+"No, you will not."
+
+"Don't tempt me.  Women always cry when men annoy
+them.  They rage, but they cry as well."
+
+"I shall not."
+
+"It's true that most women would have begun to cry before
+this.  That is what stimulates me.  You will swagger to the
+end.  You put the devil into me.  Half an hour ago I was
+jogging along the road, languid and bored to extinction.  And 
+now----"  He laughed outright in actual exultation.  "By
+Jove!" he cried out.  "Things like this don't happen to a
+man in these dull days!  There's no such luck going about. 
+We've gone back five hundred years, and we've taken New
+York with us."  His laugh shut off in the middle, and he got
+up to thrust his heavy, congested face close to hers.  "Here
+you are, as safe as if you were in a feudal castle, and here is
+your ancient enemy given his chance--given his chance.  Do you
+think, by the Lord, he is going to give it up?  No.  To quote
+your own words, `you may place entire confidence in that.' "
+
+Exaggerated as it all was, somehow the melodrama dropped
+away from it and left bare, simple, hideous fact for her to
+confront.  The evil in him had risen rampant and made him lose
+his head.  He might see his senseless folly to-morrow and know
+he must pay for it, but he would not see it to-day.  The place
+was not a feudal castle, but what he said was insurmountable
+truth.  A ruined cottage on the edge of miles of marsh land, a
+seldom-trodden road, and night upon them!  A wind was rising
+on the marshes now, and making low, steady moan.  Horrible
+things had happened to women before, one heard of them with
+shudders when they were recorded in the newspapers.  Only
+two days ago she had remembered that sometimes there seemed
+blunderings in the great Scheme of things.  Was all this real,
+or was she dreaming that she stood here at bay, her back
+against the chimney-wall, and this degenerate exulting over her,
+while Rosy was waiting for her at Stornham--and at this very
+hour her father was planning his journey across the Atlantic?
+
+"Why did you not behave yourself?" demanded Nigel
+Anstruthers, shaking her by the shoulder.  "Why did you not
+realise that I should get even with you one day, as sure as you
+were woman and I was man?"
+
+She did not shrink back, though the pupils of her eyes dilated. 
+Was it the wildest thing in the world which happened to her--
+or was it not?  Without warning--the sudden rush of a
+thought, immense and strange, swept over her body and soul
+and possessed her--so possessed her that it changed her pallor
+to white flame.  It was actually Anstruthers who shrank back a
+shade because, for the moment, she looked so near unearthly.
+
+"I am not afraid of you," she said, in a clear, unshaken voice. 
+"I am not afraid.  Something is near me which will stand
+between us--something which DIED to-day."
+
+He almost gasped before the strangeness of it, but caught
+back his breath and recovered himself.
+
+"Died to-day!  That's recent enough," he jeered.  "Let us
+hear about it.  Who was it?"
+
+"It was Mount Dunstan," she flung at him.  "The church-
+bells were tolling for him when I rode away.  I could not stay
+to hear them.  It killed me--I loved him.  You were right
+when you said it.  I loved him, though he never knew.  I
+shall always love him--though he never knew.  He knows now. 
+Those who died cannot go away when THAT is holding them. 
+They must stay.  Because I loved him, he may be in this place. 
+I call on him----" raising her clear voice.  "I call on him to
+stand between us."
+
+He backed away from her, staring an evil, enraptured stare.
+
+"What!  There is that much temperament in you?" he said. 
+"That was what I half-suspected when I saw you first.  But
+you have hidden it well.  Now it bursts forth in spite of you. 
+Good Lord!  What luck--what luck!"
+
+He moved to the door and opened it.
+
+"I am a very modern man, and I enjoy this to the utmost,"
+he said.  "What I like best is the melodrama of it--in connection
+with Fifth Avenue.  I am perfectly aware that you will
+not discuss this incident in the future.  You are a clever enough
+young woman to know that it will be more to your interest
+than to mine that it shall be kept exceedingly quiet."
+
+The white fire had not died out of her and she stood straight.
+
+"What I have called on will be near me, and will stand
+between us," she said.
+
+Old though it was, the door was massive and heavy to lift. 
+To open it cost him some muscular effort.
+
+"I am going to the horses now," he explained before he
+dragged it back into its frame and shut her in.  "It is safe
+enough to leave you here.  You will stay where you are."
+
+He felt himself secure in leaving her because he believed she
+could not move, and because his arrogance made it impossible
+for him to count on strength and endurance greater than his
+own.  Of endurance he knew nothing and in his keen and
+cynical exultance his devil made a fool of him.
+
+As she heard him walk down the path to the gate, Betty
+stood amazed at his lack of comprehension of her.
+
+"He thinks I will stay here.  He absolutely thinks I will
+wait until he comes back," she whispered to the emptiness of
+the bare room.
+
+Before he had arrived she had loosened her boot, and now
+she stooped and touched her foot.
+
+"If I were safe at home I should think I could not walk,
+but I can walk now--I can--I can--because I will bear the
+pain."
+
+In such cottages there is always a door opening outside
+from the little bricked kitchen, where the copper stands.  She
+would reach that, and, passing through, would close it behind
+her.  After that SOMETHING would tell her what to do--something
+would lead her.
+
+She put her lame foot upon the floor, and rested some of her
+weight upon it--not all.  A jagged pain shot up from it
+through her whole side it seemed, and, for an instant, she
+swayed and ground her teeth.
+
+"That is because it is the first step," she said.  "But if I
+am to be killed, I will die in the open--I will die in the
+open."
+
+The second and third steps brought cold sweat out upon her,
+but she told herself that the fourth was not quite so unbearable,
+and she stiffened her whole body, and muttered some words
+while she took a fifth and sixth which carried her into the tiny
+back kitchen.
+
+"Father," she said.  "Father, think of me now--think of
+me!  Rosy, love me--love me and pray that I may come home. 
+You--you who have died, stand very near!"
+
+If her father ever held her safe in his arms again--if she ever
+awoke from this nightmare, it would be a thing never to let
+one's mind hark back to again--to shut out of memory with
+iron doors.
+
+The pain had shot up and down, and her forehead was wet
+by the time she had reached the small back door.  Was it locked
+or bolted--was it?  She put her hand gently upon the latch
+and lifted it without making any sound.  Thank God Almighty,
+it was neither bolted nor locked, the latch lifted, the door
+opened, and she slid through it into the shadow of the grey
+which was already almost the darkness of night.  Thank God
+for that, too.
+
+She flattened herself against the outside wall and listened. 
+He was having difficulty in managing Childe Harold, who
+snorted and pulled back, offended and made rebellious by his
+savagely impatient hand.  Good Childe Harold, good boy!  She
+could see the massed outline of the trees of the spinney.  If she
+could bear this long enough to get there--even if she crawled
+part of the way.  Then it darted through her mind that he
+would guess that she would be sure to make for its cover, and
+that he would go there first to search.
+
+"Father, think for me--you were so quick to think!" her
+brain cried out for her, as if she was speaking to one who could
+physically hear.
+
+She almost feared she had spoken aloud, and the thought
+which flashed upon her like lightning seemed to be an answer
+given.  He would be convinced that she would at once try to
+get away from the house.  If she kept near it--somewhere--
+somewhere quite close, and let him search the spinney, she might
+get away to its cover after he gave up the search and came
+back.  The jagged pain had settled in a sort of impossible
+anguish, and once or twice she felt sick.  But she would die in
+the open--and she knew Rosalie was frightened by her absence,
+and was praying for her.  Prayers counted and, yet, they had
+all prayed yesterday.
+
+"If I were not very strong, I should faint," she thought. 
+"But I have been strong all my life.  That great French
+doctor--I have forgotten his name--said that I had the physique
+to endure anything."
+
+She said these things that she might gain steadiness and
+convince herself that she was not merely living through a
+nightmare.  Twice she moved her foot suddenly because she found
+herself in a momentary respite from pain, beginning to believe
+that the thing was a nightmare--that nothing mattered--because
+she would wake up presently--so she need not try to hide.
+
+"But in a nightmare one has no pain.  It is real and I must
+go somewhere," she said, after the foot was moved.  Where
+could she go?  She had not looked at the place as she rode up. 
+She had only half-consciously seen the spinney.  Nigel was
+swearing at the horses.  Having got Childe Harold into the
+shed, there seemed to be nothing to fasten his bridle to.  And
+he had yet to bring his own horse in and secure him.  She must
+get away somewhere before the delay was over.
+
+How dark it was growing!  Thank God for that again! 
+What was the rather high, dark object she could trace in the
+dimness near the hedge?  It was sharply pointed, is if it were
+a narrow tent.  Her heart began to beat like a drum as she
+recalled something.  It was the shape of the sort of wigwam
+structure made of hop poles, after they were taken from the
+fields.  If there was space between it and the hedge--even a
+narrow space--and she could crouch there?  Nigel was furious
+because Childe Harold was backing, plunging, and snorting
+dangerously.  She halted forward, shutting her teeth in her
+terrible pain.  She could scarcely see, and did not recognise
+that near the wigwam was a pile of hop poles laid on top of each
+other horizontally.  It was not quite as high as the hedge whose
+dark background prevented its being seen.  Only a few steps
+more.  No, she was awake--in a nightmare one felt only terror,
+not pain.
+
+"YOU, WHO DIED TO-DAY," she murmured.
+
+She saw the horizontal poles too late.  One of them had
+rolled from its place and lay on the ground, and she trod on
+it, was thrown forward against the heap, and, in her blind
+effort to recover herself, slipped and fell into a narrow,
+grassed hollow behind it, clutching at the hedge.  The great
+French doctor had not been quite right.  For the first time in
+her life she felt herself sinking into bottomless darkness--which
+was what happened to people when they fainted.
+
+When she opened her eyes she could see nothing, because
+on one side of her rose the low mass of the hop poles, and on
+the other was the long-untrimmed hedge, which had thrown
+out a thick, sheltering growth and curved above her like
+a penthouse.  Was she awakening, after all?  No, because
+the pain was awakening with her, and she could hear,
+what seemed at first to be quite loud sounds.  She could
+not have been unconscious long, for she almost immediately
+recognised that they were the echo of a man's hurried foot-
+steps upon the bare wooden stairway, leading to the bedrooms
+in the empty house.  Having secured the horses, Nigel had
+returned to the cottage, and, finding her gone had rushed to
+the upper floor in search of her.  He was calling her name
+angrily, his voice resounding in the emptiness of the rooms.
+
+"Betty; don't play the fool with me!"
+
+She cautiously drew herself further under cover, making
+sure that no end of her habit remained in sight.  The over-
+growth of the hedge was her salvation.  If she had seen the
+spot by daylight, she would not have thought it a possible place
+of concealment.
+
+Once she had read an account of a woman's frantic flight
+from a murderer who was hunting her to her death, while
+she slipped from one poor hiding place to another, sometimes
+crouching behind walls or bushes, sometimes lying flat in
+long grass, once wading waist-deep through a stream, and at
+last finding a miserable little fastness, where she hid shivering
+for hours, until her enemy gave up his search.  One never felt
+the reality of such histories, but there was actually a sort of
+parallel in this.  Mad and crude things were let loose, and the
+world of ordinary life seemed thousands of miles away.
+
+She held her breath, for he was leaving the house by the
+front door.  She heard his footsteps on the bricked path, and
+then in the lane.  He went to the road, and the sound of
+his feet died away for a few moments.  Then she heard
+them returning--he was back in the lane--on the brick path,
+and stood listening or, perhaps, reflecting.  He muttered
+something exclamatory, and she heard a match struck, and shortly
+afterwards he moved across the garden patch towards the
+little spinney.  He had thought of it, as she had believed
+he would.  He would not think of this place, and in the end he
+might get tired or awakened to a sense of his lurid folly, and
+realise that it would be safer for him to go back to Stornham
+with some clever lie, trusting to his belief that there existed
+no girl but would shrink from telling such a story in connection
+with a man who would brazenly deny it with contemptuous
+dramatic detail.  If he would but decide on this, she would be
+safe--and it would be so like him that she dared to hope.  But,
+if he did not, she would lie close, even if she must wait until
+morning, when some labourer's cart would surely pass, and
+she would hear it jolting, and drag herself out, and call aloud
+in such a way that no man could be deaf.  There was more
+room under her hedge than she had thought, and she found
+that she could sit up, by clasping her knees and bending her
+head, while she listened to every sound, even to the rustle
+of the grass in the wind sweeping across the marsh.
+
+She moved very gradually and slowly, and had just settled
+into utter motionlessness when she realised that he was coming
+back through the garden--the straggling currant and
+gooseberry bushes were being trampled through.
+
+"Betty, go home," Rosalie had pleaded.  "Go home--go
+home."  And she had refused, because she could not desert her.
+
+She held her breath and pressed her hand against her side,
+because her heart beat, as it seemed to her, with an actual
+sound.  He moved with unsteady steps from one point to another,
+more than once he stumbled, and his angry oath reached
+her; at last he was so near her hiding place that his short hard
+breathing was a distinct sound.  A moment later he spoke, raising
+his voice, which fact brought to her a rush of relief,
+through its signifying that he had not even guessed her nearness.
+
+"My dear Betty," he said, "you have the pluck of the
+devil, but circumstances are too much for you.  You are not
+on the road, and I have been through the spinney.  Mere
+logic convinces me that you cannot be far away.  You may
+as well give the thing up.  It will be better for you."
+
+"You who died to-day--do not leave me," was Betty's
+inward cry, and she dropped her face on her knees.
+
+"I am not a pleasant-tempered fellow, as you know, and I
+am losing my hold on myself.  The wind is blowing the mist
+away, and there will be a moon.  I shall find you, my good
+girl, in half an hour's time--and then we shall be jolly
+well even."
+
+She had not dropped her whip, and she held it tight.  If,
+when the moonlight revealed the pile of hop poles to him, he
+suspected and sprang at them to tear them away, she would
+be given strength to make one spring, even in her agony, and
+she would strike at his eyes--awfully, without one touch of
+compunction--she would strike--strike.
+
+There was a brief silence, and then a match was struck
+again, and almost immediately she inhaled the fragrance of an
+excellent cigar.
+
+"I am going to have a comfortable smoke and stroll about
+--always within sight and hearing.  I daresay you are watching
+me, and wondering what will happen when I discover you,
+I can tell you what will happen.  You are not a hysterical
+girl, but you will go into hysterics--and no one will hear you."
+
+(All the power of her--body and soul--in one leap on him
+and then a lash that would cut to the bone.  And it was not
+a nightmare--and Rosy was at Stornham, and her father looking
+over steamer lists and choosing his staterooms.)
+
+He walked about slowly, the scent of his cigar floating
+behind him.  She noticed, as she had done more than once
+before, that he seemed to slightly drag one foot, and she
+wondered why.  The wind was blowing the mist away, and there
+was a faint growing of light.  The moon was not full, but
+young, and yet it would make a difference.  But the upper
+part of the hedge grew thick and close to the heap of wood,
+and, but for her fall, she would never have dreamed of the
+refuge.
+
+She could only guess at his movements, but his footsteps
+gave some clue.  He was examining the ground in as far as
+the darkness would allow.  He went into the shed and round
+about it, he opened the door of the tiny coal lodge, and looked
+again into the small back kitchen.  He came near--nearer
+--so near once that, bending sidewise, she could have put out
+a hand and touched him.  He stood quite still, then made a step
+or so away, stood still again, and burst into a laugh once more.
+
+"Oh, you are here, are you?" he said.  "You are a fine
+big girl to be able to crowd yourself into a place like that!"
+
+Hot and cold dew stood out on her forehead and made her
+hair damp as she held her whip hard.
+
+"Come out, my dear!" alluringly.  "It is not too soon.  Or
+do you prefer that I should assist you?"
+
+Her heart stood quite still--quite.  He was standing by the
+wigwam of hop poles and thought she had hidden herself inside
+it.  Her place under the hedge he had not even glanced at.
+
+She knew he bent down and thrust his arm into the wigwam,
+for his fury at the result expressed itself plainly enough.  That
+he had made a fool of himself was worse to him than all else. 
+He actually wheeled about and strode away to the house.
+
+Because minutes seemed hours, she thought he was gone long,
+but he was not away for twenty minutes.  He had, in fact,
+gone into the bare front room again, and sitting upon the box
+near the hearth, let his head drop in his hands and remained
+in this position thinking.  In the end he got up and went out
+to the shed where he had left the horses.
+
+Betty was feeling that before long she might find herself
+making that strange swoop into the darkness of space again, and
+that it did not matter much, as one apparently lay quite still
+when one was unconscious--when she heard that one horse was being
+led out into the lane.  What did that mean?  Had he got tired of
+the chase--as the other man did--and was he going away because
+discomfort and fatigue had cooled and disgusted
+him--perhaps even made him feel that he was playing
+the part of a sensational idiot who was laying himself open to
+derision?  That would be like him, too.
+
+Presently she heard his footsteps once more, but he did not
+come as near her as before--in fact, he stood at some yards'
+distance when he stopped and spoke--in quite a new manner.
+
+"Betty," his tone was even cynically cool, "I shall stalk
+you no more.  The chase is at an end.  I think I have taken
+all out of you I intended to.  Perhaps it was a bad joke and
+was carried too far.  I wanted to prove to you that there were
+circumstances which might be too much even for a young
+woman from New York.  I have done it.  Do you suppose I
+am such a fool as to bring myself within reach of the law? 
+I am going away and will send assistance to you from the
+next house I pass.  I have left some matches and a few broken
+sticks on the hearth in the cottage.  Be a sensible girl.  Limp
+in there and build yourself a fire as soon as you hear me gallop
+away.  You must be chilled through.  Now I am going."
+
+He tramped across the bit of garden, down the brick path,
+mounted his horse and put it to a gallop at once.  Clack, clack,
+clack--clacking fainter and fainter into the distance--and he
+was gone.
+
+When she realised that the thing was true, the effect upon
+her of her sense of relief was that the growing likelihood of
+a second swoop into darkness died away, but one curious sob
+lifted her chest as she leaned back against the rough growth
+behind her.  As she changed her position for a better one she
+felt the jagged pain again and knew that in the tenseness of
+her terror she had actually for some time felt next to nothing
+of her hurt.  She had not even been cold, for the hedge behind
+and over her and the barricade before had protected her from
+both wind and rain.  The grass beneath her was not damp
+for the same reason.  The weary thought rose in her mind that
+she might even lie down and sleep.  But she pulled herself
+together and told herself that this was like the temptation of
+believing in the nightmare.  He was gone, and she had a
+respite--but was it to be anything more?  She did not make
+any attempt to leave her place of concealment, remembering
+the strange things she had learned in watching him, and the
+strange terror in which Rosalie lived.
+
+"One never knows what he will do next; I will not stir,"
+she said through her teeth.  "No, I will not stir from here."
+
+And she did not, but sat still, while the pain came back to
+her body and the anguish to her heart--and sometimes such
+heaviness that her head dropped forward upon her knees again,
+and she fell into a stupefied half-doze.
+
+From one such doze she awakened with a start, hearing a
+slight click of the gate.  After it, there were several seconds
+of dead silence.  It was the slightness of the click which was
+startling--if it had not been caused by the wind, it had been
+caused by someone's having cautiously moved it--and this
+someone wishing to make a soundless approach had immediately
+stood still and was waiting.  There was only one person
+who would do that.  By this time, the mist being blown away,
+the light of the moon began to make a growing clearness. 
+She lifted her hand and delicately held aside a few twigs that
+she might look out.
+
+She had been quite right in deciding not to move.  Nigel
+Anstruthers had come back, and after his pause turned, and
+avoiding the brick path, stole over the grass to the cottage
+door.  His going had merely been an inspiration to trap her,
+and the wood and matches had been intended to make a beacon
+light for him.  That was like him, as well.  His horse he had
+left down the road.
+
+But the relief of his absence had been good for her, and she
+was able to check the shuddering fit which threatened her for a
+moment.  The next, her ears awoke to a new sound.  Something
+was stumbling heavily about the patch of garden--some
+animal.  A cropping of grass, a snorting breath, and more
+stumbling hoofs, and she knew that Childe Harold had managed
+to loosen his bridle and limp out of the shed.  The mere
+sense of his nearness seemed a sort of protection.
+
+He had limped and stumbled to the front part of the garden
+before Nigel heard him.  When he did hear, he came out of the
+house in the humour of a man the inflaming of whose mood
+has been cumulative; Childe Harold's temper also was not to
+be trifled with.  He threw up his head, swinging the bridle
+out of reach; he snorted, and even reared with an ugly lashing
+of his forefeet.
+
+"Good boy!" whispered Betty.  "Do not let him take you
+--do not!"
+
+If he remained where he was he would attract attention if
+anyone passed by.  "Fight, Childe Harold, be as vicious as
+you choose--do not allow yourself to be dragged back."
+
+And fight he did, with an ugliness of temper he had never
+shown before--with snortings and tossed head and lashed--out
+heels, as if he knew he was fighting to gain time and with a
+purpose.
+
+But in the midst of the struggle Nigel Anstruthers stopped
+suddenly.  He had stumbled again, and risen raging and
+stained with damp earth.  Now he stood still, panting for
+breath--as still as he had stood after the click of the gate. 
+Was he--listening?  What was he listening to?  Had she
+moved in her excitement, and was it possible he had caught
+the sound?  No, he was listening to something else.  Far up
+the road it echoed, but coming nearer every moment, and very
+fast.  Another horse--a big one--galloping hard.  Whosoever
+it was would pass this place; it could only be a man--God
+grant that he would not go by so quickly that his attention
+would not be arrested by a shriek!  Cry out she must--and if
+he did not hear and went galloping on his way she would have
+betrayed herself and be lost.
+
+She bit off a groan by biting her lip.
+
+"You who died to-day--now--now!"
+
+Nearer and nearer.  No human creature could pass by a
+thing like this--it would not be possible.  And Childe Harold,
+backing and fighting, scented the other horse and neighed
+fiercely and high.  The rider was slackening his pace; he was
+near the lane.  He had turned into it and stopped.  Now for
+her one frantic cry--but before she could gather power to give
+it forth, the man who had stopped had flung himself from his
+saddle and was inside the garden speaking.  A big voice and
+a clear one, with a ringing tone of authority.
+
+"What are you doing here?  And what is the matter with
+Miss Vanderpoel's horse?" it called out.
+
+Now there was danger of the swoop into the darkness--
+great danger--though she clutched at the hedge that she
+might feel its thorns and hold herself to the earth.
+
+"YOU!" Nigel Anstruthers cried out.  "You!" and flung
+forth a shout of laughter.
+
+"Where is she?" fiercely.  "Lady Anstruthers is terrified. 
+We have been searching for hours.  Only just now I heard on
+the marsh that she had been seen to ride this way.  Where is
+she, I say?"
+
+A strong, angry, earthly voice--not part of the melodrama--
+not part of a dream, but a voice she knew, and whose sound
+caused her heart to leap to her throat, while she trembled from
+head to foot, and a light, cold dampness broke forth on her
+skin.  Something had been a dream--her wild, desolate ride--
+the slew tolling; for the voice which commanded with such
+human fierceness was that of the man for whom the heavy bell
+had struck forth from the church tower.
+
+Sir Nigel recovered himself brilliantly.  Not that he did not
+recognise that he had been a fool again and was in a nasty
+place; but it was not for the first time in his life, and he had
+learned how to brazen himself out of nasty places.
+
+"My dear Mount Dunstan," he answered with tolerant
+irritation, "I have been having a devil of a time with female
+hysterics.  She heard the bell toll and ran away with the idea
+that it was for you, and paid you the compliment of losing her
+head.  I came on her here when she had ridden her horse half
+to death and they had both come a cropper.  Confound women's
+hysterics!  I could do nothing with her.  When I left her for
+a moment she ran away and hid herself.  She is concealed
+somewhere on the place or has limped off on to the marsh.  I
+wish some New York millionairess would work herself into
+hysteria on my humble account."
+
+"Those are lies," Mount Dunstan answered--"every damned
+one of them!"
+
+He wheeled around to look about him, attracted by a sound,
+and in the clearing moonlight saw a figure approaching which
+might have risen from the earth, so far as he could guess where
+it had come from.  He strode over to it, and it was Betty
+Vanderpoel, holding her whip in a clenched hand and showing
+to his eagerness such hunted face and eyes as were barely
+human.  He caught her unsteadiness to support it, and felt
+her fingers clutch at the tweed of his coatsleeve and move
+there as if the mere feeling of its rough texture brought
+heavenly comfort to her and gave her strength.
+
+"Yes, they are lies, Lord Mount Dunstan," she panted. 
+"He said that he meant to get what he called `even' with
+me.  He told me I could not get away from him and that no
+one would hear me if I cried out for help.  I have hidden like
+some hunted animal."  Her shaking voice broke, and she held
+the cloth of his sleeve tightly.  "You are alive--alive!" with
+a sudden sweet wildness.  "But it is true the bell tolled! 
+While I was crouching in the dark I called to you--who died
+to-day--to stand between us!"
+
+The man absolutely shuddered from head to foot.
+
+"I was alive, and you see I heard you and came," he
+answered hoarsely.
+
+He lifted her in his arms and carried her into the cottage. 
+Her cheek felt the enrapturing roughness of his tweed shoulder
+as he did it.  He laid her down on the couch of hay and
+turned away.
+
+"Don't move," he said.  "I will come back.  You are safe."
+
+If there had been more light she would have seen that his
+jaw was set like a bulldog's, and there was a red spark in his
+eyes--a fearsome one.  But though she did not clearly see, she
+KNEW, and the nearness of the last hours swept away all
+relenting.
+
+Nigel Anstruthers having discreetly waited until the two
+had passed into the house, and feeling that a man would be an
+idiot who did not remove himself from an atmosphere so highly
+charged, was making his way toward the lane and was, indeed,
+halfway through the gate when heavy feet were behind him
+and a grip of ugly strength wrenched him backward.
+
+"Your horse is cropping the grass where you left him, but
+you are not going to him," said a singularly meaning voice. 
+"You are coming with me."
+
+Anstruthers endeavoured to convince himself that he did not
+at that moment turn deadly sick and that the brute would not
+make an ass of himself.
+
+"Don't be a bally fool!" he cried out, trying to tear
+himself free.
+
+The muscular hand on his shoulder being reinforced by
+another, which clutched his collar, dragged him back, stumbling
+ignominiously through the gooseberry bushes towards the cart-
+shed.  Betty lying upon her bed of hay heard the scuffling,
+mingled with raging and gasping curses.  Childe Harold, lifting
+his head from his cropping of the grass, looked after the
+violently jerking figures and snorted slightly, snuffing with
+dilated red nostrils.  As a war horse scenting blood and battle,
+he was excited.
+
+When Mount Dunstan got his captive into the shed the blood which
+had surged in Red Godwyn's veins was up and leaping. 
+Anstruthers, his collar held by a hand with fingers of iron,
+writhed about and turned a livid, ghastly face upon his captor.
+
+"You have twice my strength and half my age, you beast
+and devil!" he foamed in a half shriek, and poured forth
+frightful blasphemies.
+
+"That counts between man and man, but not between vermin
+and executioner," gave back Mount Dunstan.
+
+The heavy whip, flung upward, whistled down through the
+air, cutting through cloth and linen as though it would cut
+through flesh to bone.
+
+"By God!" shrieked the writhing thing he held, leaping
+like a man who has been shot.  "Don't do that again!  DAMN
+you!" as the unswerving lash cut down again--again.
+
+What followed would not be good to describe.  Betty
+through the open door heard wild and awful things--and more
+than once a sound as if a dog were howling.
+
+When the thing was over, one of the two--his clothes cut to
+ribbons, his torn white linen exposed, lay, a writhing, huddled
+worm, hiccoughing frenzied sobs upon the earth in a
+corner of the cart-shed.  The other man stood over him,
+breathless and white, but singularly exalted.
+
+"You won't want your horse to-night, because you can't
+use him," he said.  "I shall put Miss Vanderpoel's saddle upon
+him and ride with her back to Stornham.  You think you are
+cut to pieces, but you are not, and you'll get over it.  I'll ask
+you to mark, however, that if you open your foul mouth to
+insinuate lies concerning either Lady Anstruthers or her sister
+I will do this thing again in public some day--on the steps of
+your club--and do it more thoroughly."
+
+He walked into the cottage soon afterwards looking, to Betty
+Vanderpoel's eyes, pale and exceptionally big, and also more
+a man than it is often given even to the most virile male
+creature to look--and he walked to the side of her resting place
+and stood there looking down.
+
+"I thought I heard a dog howl," she said.
+
+"You did hear a dog howl," he answered.  He said no
+other word, and she asked no further question.  She knew what
+he had done, and he was well aware that she knew it.
+
+There was a long, strangely tense silence.  The light of the
+moon was growing.  She made at first no effort to rise, but lay
+still and looked up at him from under splendid lifted lashes,
+while his own gaze fell into the depth of hers like a plummet
+into a deep pool.  This continued for almost a full minute,
+when he turned quickly away and walked to the hearth, indrawing
+a heavy breath.
+
+He could not endure that which beset him; it was unbearable,
+because her eyes had maddeningly seemed to ask him
+some wistful question.  Why did she let her loveliness so call
+to him.  She was not a trifler who could play with meanings. 
+Perhaps she did not know what her power was.  Sometimes he
+could believe that beautiful women did not.
+
+In a few moments, almost before he could reach her, she was
+rising, and when she got up she supported herself against the
+open door, standing in the moonlight.  If he was pale, she
+was pale also, and her large eyes would not move from his
+face, so drawing him that he could not keep away from her.
+
+"Listen," he broke out suddenly.  "Penzance told me--
+warned me--that some time a moment would come which
+would be stronger than all else in a man--than all else in the
+world.  It has come now.  Let me take you home."
+
+"Than what else?" she said slowly, and became even paler
+than before.
+
+He strove to release himself from the possession of the
+moment, and in his struggle answered with a sort of savagery.
+
+"Than scruple--than power--even than a man's determination
+and decent pride."
+
+"Are you proud?" she half whispered quite brokenly.  "I
+am not--since I waited for the ringing of the church bell--
+since I heard it toll.  After that the world was empty--and it
+was as empty of decent pride as of everything else.  There was
+nothing left.  I was the humblest broken thing on earth."
+
+"You!" he gasped.  "Do you know I think I shall go
+mad directly perhaps it is happening now.  YOU were humble
+and broken--your world was empty!  Because----?"
+
+"Look at me, Lord Mount Dunstan," and the sweetest
+voice in the world was a tender, wild little cry to him.  "Oh
+LOOK at me!"
+
+He caught her out-thrown hands and looked down into the
+beautiful passionate soul of her.  The moment had come, and the
+tidal wave rising to its height swept all the common earth away
+when, with a savage sob, he caught and held her close and
+hard against that which thudded racing in his breast.
+
+And they stood and swayed together, folded in each other's
+arms, while the wind from the marshes lifted its voice like an
+exulting human thing as it swept about them.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIX
+
+AT STORNHAM AND AT BROADMORLANDS
+
+The exulting wind had swept the clouds away, and the moon
+rode in a dark blue sea of sky, making the night light purely
+clear, when they drew a little apart, that they might better
+see the wonderfulness in each other's faces.  It was so
+mysteriously great a thing that they felt near to awe.
+
+"I fought too long.  I wore out my body's endurance, and now I am
+quaking like a boy.  Red Godwyn did not begin his wooing like
+this.  Forgive me," Mount Dunstan said at last.
+
+"Do you know," with lovely trembling lips and voice,
+"that for long--long--you have been unkind to me?"
+
+It was merely human that he should swiftly enfold her
+again, and answer with his lips against her cheek.
+
+"Unkind!  Unkind!  Oh, the heavenly woman's sweetness
+of your telling me so--the heavenly sweetness of it!" he
+exclaimed passionately and low.  "And I was one of those who
+are `by the roadside everywhere,' an unkempt, raging beggar,
+who might not decently ask you for a crust."
+
+"It was all wrong--wrong!" she whispered back to him,
+and he poured forth the tenderest, fierce words of confession
+and prayer, and she listened, drinking them in, with now and
+then a soft sob pressed against the roughness of the enrapturing
+tweed.  For a space they had both forgotten her hurt,
+because there are other things than terror which hypnotise
+pain.  Mount Dunstan was to be praised for remembering it
+first.  He must take her back to Stornham and her sister without
+further delay.
+
+"I will put your saddle on Anstruthers' horse, or mine, and
+lift you to your seat.  There is a farmhouse about two miles
+away, where I will take you first for food and warmth.  Perhaps
+it would be well for you to stay there to rest for an hour
+or so, and I will send a message to Lady Anstruthers."
+
+"I will go to the place, and eat and drink what you
+advise," she answered.  "But I beg you to take me back to
+Rosalie without delay.  I feel that I must see her."
+
+"I feel that I must see her, too," he said.  "But for
+her--God bless her!" he added, after his sudden pause.
+
+Betty knew that the exclamation meant strong feeling, and
+that somehow in the past hours Rosalie had awakened it.  But
+it was only when, after their refreshment at the farm, they
+had taken horse again and were riding homeward together,
+that she heard from him what had passed between them.
+
+"All that has led to this may seem the merest chance,"
+he said.  "But surely a strange thing has come about.  I
+know that without understanding it."  He leaned over and
+touched her hand.  "You, who are Life--without understanding
+I ride here beside you, believing that you brought me back."
+
+"I tried--I tried!  With all my strength, I tried."
+
+"After I had seen your sister to-day, I guessed--I knew. 
+But not at first.  I was not ill of the fever, as excited rumour
+had it; but I was ill, and the doctors and the vicar were
+alarmed.  I had fought too long, and I was giving up, as I
+have seen the poor fellows in the ballroom give up.  If they 
+were not dragged back they slipped out of one's hands.  If
+the fever had developed, all would have been over quickly. 
+I knew the doctors feared that, and I am ashamed to say I
+was glad of it.  But, yesterday, in the morning, when I was
+letting myself go with a morbid pleasure in the luxurious relief
+of it--something reached me--some slow rising call to effort
+and life."
+
+She turned towards him in her saddle, listening, her lips
+parted.
+
+"I did not even ask myself what was happening, but I
+began to be conscious of being drawn back, and to long
+intensely to see you again.  I was gradually filled with a
+restless feeling that you were near me, and that, though I could
+not physically hear your voice, you were surely CALLING to
+me.  It was the thing which could not be--but it was--and
+because of it I could not let myself drift."
+
+"I did call you!  I was on my knees in the church asking
+to be forgiven if I prayed mad prayers--but praying the same
+thing over and over.  The villagers were kneeling there, too. 
+They crowded in, leaving everything else.  You are their
+hero, and they were in deep earnest."
+
+His look was gravely pondering.  His life had not made a mystic
+of him--it was Penzance who was the mystic --but he felt himself
+perplexed by mysteriously suggestive thought.
+
+"I was brought back--I was brought back," he said.  "In
+the afternoon I fell asleep and slept profoundly until the
+morning.  When I awoke, I realised that I was a remade man. 
+The doctors were almost awed when I first spoke to them. 
+Old Dr. Fenwick died later, and, after I had heard about it,
+the church bell was tolled.  It was heard at Weaver's farm-
+house, and, as everybody had been excitedly waiting for the
+sound, it conveyed but one idea to them--and the boy was
+sent racing across the fields to Stornham village.  Dearest! 
+Dearest!" he exclaimed.
+
+She had bowed her head and burst into passionate sobbing. 
+Because she was not of the women who wept, her moment's
+passion was strong and bitter.
+
+"It need not have been!" she shuddered.  "One cannot
+bear it--because it need not have been!"
+
+"Stop your horse a moment," he said, reining in his own,
+while, with burning eyes and swelling throat, he held and
+steadied her.  But he did not know that neither her sister
+nor her father had ever seen her in such mood, and that she
+had never so seen herself.
+
+"You shall not remember it," he said to her.
+
+"I will not," she answered, recovering herself.  "But for one
+moment all the awful hours rushed back.  Tell me the rest."
+
+"We did not know that the blunder had been made until
+a messenger from Dole rode over to inquire and bring messages
+of condolence.  Then we understood what had occurred
+and I own a sort of frenzy seized me.  I knew I must see you,
+and, though the doctors were horribly nervous, they dare not
+hold me back.  The day before it would not have been
+believed that I could leave my room.  You were crying out
+to me, and though I did not know, I was answering, body and
+soul.  Penzance knew I must have my way when I spoke to
+him--mad as it seemed.  When I rode through Stornham village,
+more than one woman screamed at sight of me.  I shall
+not be able to blot out of my mind your sister's face.  She
+will tell you what we said to each other.  I rode away from
+the Court quite half mad----" his voice became very gentle,
+"because of something she had told me in the first wild moments."
+
+Lady Anstruthers had spent the night moving restlessly
+from one room to another, and had not been to bed when
+they rode side by side up the avenue in the early morning
+sunlight.  An under keeper, crossing the park a few hundred
+yards above them, after one glance, dashed across the sward
+to the courtyard and the servants' hall.  The news flashed
+electrically through the house, and Rosalie, like a small ghost,
+came out upon the steps as they reined in.  Though her lips
+moved, she could not speak aloud, as she watched Mount
+Dunstan lift her sister from her horse.
+
+"Childe Harold stumbled and I hurt my foot," said Betty,
+trying to be calm.
+
+"I knew he would find you!" Rosalie answered quite
+faintly.  "I knew you would!" turning to Mount Dunstan,
+adoring him with all the meaning of her small paled face.
+
+She would have been afraid of her memory of what she
+had said in the strange scene which had taken place before
+them a few hours ago, but almost before either of the two
+spoke she knew that a great gulf had been crossed in some
+one inevitable, though unforeseen, leap.  How it had been
+taken, when or where, did not in the least matter, when she
+clung to Betty and Betty clung to her.
+
+After a few moments of moved and reverent waiting, the
+admirable Jennings stepped forward and addressed her in
+lowered voice.
+
+"There's been little sleep in the village this night, my lady,"
+he murmured earnestly.  "I promised they should have a sign,
+with your permission.  If the flag was run up--they're all
+looking out, and they'd know."
+
+"Run it up, Jennings," Lady Anstruthers answered, "at once."
+
+When it ran up the staff on the tower and fluttered out in
+gay answering to the morning breeze, children in the village
+began to run about shouting, men and women appeared at
+cottage doors, and more than one cap was thrown up in the
+air.  But old Doby and Mrs. Welden, who had been waiting
+for hours, standing by Mrs. Welden's gate, caught each
+other's dry, trembling old hands and began to cry.
+
+The Broadmorlands divorce scandal, having made conversation
+during a season quite forty years before Miss Vanderpoel
+appeared at Stornham Court, had been laid upon a lower
+shelf and buried beneath other stories long enough to be
+forgotten.  Only one individual had not forgotten it, and he
+was the Duke of Broadmorlands himself, in whose mind it
+remained hideously clear.  He had been a young man,
+honestly and much in love when it first revealed itself to him,
+and for a few months he had even thought it might end by
+being his death, notwithstanding that he was strong and in
+first-rate physical condition.  He had been a fine, hearty
+young man of clean and rather dignified life, though he was
+not understood to be brilliant of mind.  Privately he had
+ideals connected with his rank and name which he was not
+fluent enough clearly to express.  After he had realised that
+he should not die of the public humiliation and disgrace, which
+seemed to point him out as having been the kind of gullible
+fool it is scarcely possible to avoid laughing at--or, so it
+seemed to him in his heart-seared frenzy--he thought it not
+improbable that he should go mad.  He was harried so by
+memories of lovely little soft ways of Edith's (his wife's
+name was Edith), of the pretty sound of her laugh, and of
+her innocent, girlish habit of kneeling down by her bedside
+every night and morning to say her prayers.  This had so
+touched him that he had sometimes knelt down to say his, too,
+saying to her, with slight awkward boyishness, that a fellow
+who had a sort of angel for his wife ought to do his best to
+believe in the things she believed in.
+
+"And all the time----!" a devil who laughed used to
+snigger in his ear over and over again, until it was almost
+like the ticking of a clock during the worst months, when it
+did not seem probable that a man could feel his brain whirling
+like a Catherine wheel night and day, and still manage
+to hold on and not reach the point of howling and shrieking
+and dashing his skull against wails and furniture.
+
+But that passed in time, and he told himself that he passed
+with it.  Since then he had lived chiefly at Broadmorlands
+Castle, and was spoken of as a man who had become religious,
+which was not true, but, having reached the decision that
+religion was good for most people, he paid a good deal of
+attention to his church and schools, and was rigorous in the
+matter of curates.
+
+He had passed seventy now, and was somewhat despotic
+and haughty, because a man who is a Duke and does not go
+out into the world to rub against men of his own class and
+others, but lives altogether on a great and splendid estate,
+saluted by every creature he meets, and universally obeyed and
+counted before all else, is not unlikely to forget that he is a
+quite ordinary human being, and not a sort of monarch.
+
+He had done his best to forget Edith, who had soon died
+of being a shady curate's wife in Australia, but he had not
+been able to encompass it.  He used, occasionally, to dream
+she was kneeling by the bed in her childish nightgown saying
+her prayers aloud, and would waken crying--as he had cried
+in those awful young days.  Against social immorality or
+village light-mindedness he was relentlessly savage.  He
+allowed for no palliating or exonerating facts.  He began to
+see red when he heard of or saw lightness in a married woman,
+and the outside world frequently said that this characteristic
+bordered on monomania.
+
+Nigel Anstruthers, having met him once or twice, had at
+first been much amused by him, and had even, by giving him
+an adroitly careful lead, managed to guide him into an
+expression of opinion.  The Duke, who had heard men of his class
+discussed, did not in the least like him, notwithstanding his
+sympathetic suavity of manner and his air of being intelligently
+impressed by what he heard.  Not long afterwards,
+however, it transpired that the aged rector of Broadmorlands
+having died, the living had been given to Ffolliott, and, hearing
+it, Sir Nigel was not slow to conjecture that quite decently
+utilisable tools would lie ready to his hand if circumstances
+pressed; this point of view, it will be seen, being not
+illogical.  A man who had not been a sort of hermit would have
+heard enough of him to be put on his guard, and one who was a man
+of the world, looking normally on existence, would have
+reasoned coolly, and declined to concern himself about what was
+not his affair.  But a parallel might be drawn between
+Broadmorlands and some old lion wounded sorely in his youth and
+left to drag his unhealed torment through the years of age.  On
+one subject he had no point of view but his own, and could be
+roused to fury almost senseless by wholly inadequately supported
+facts.  He presented exactly the material required--and
+that in mass.
+
+About the time the flag was run up on the tower at Stornham
+Court a carter, driving whistling on the road near the
+deserted cottage, was hailed by a man who was walking slowly
+a few yards ahead of him.  The carter thought that he was a
+tramp, as his clothes were plainly in bad case, which seeing,
+his answer was an unceremonious grunt, and it certainly did
+not occur to him to touch his forehead.  A minute later,
+however, he "got a start," as he related afterwards.  The tramp
+was a gentleman whose riding costume was torn and muddied,
+and who looked "gashly," though he spoke with the manner
+and authority which Binns, the carter, recognised as that of
+one of the "gentry" addressing a day-labourer.
+
+"How far is it from here to Medham?" he inquired.
+
+"Medham be about four mile, sir," was the answer.  "I
+be carryin' these 'taters there to market."
+
+"I want to get there.  I have met with an accident.  My
+horse took fright at a pheasant starting up rocketting under
+his nose.  He threw me into a hedge and bolted.  I'm badly
+enough bruised to want to reach a town and see a doctor.  Can
+you give me a lift?"
+
+"That I will, sir, ready enough," making room on the seat
+beside him.  "You be bruised bad, sir," he said sympathetically,
+as his passenger climbed to his place, with a twisted face
+and uttering blasphemies under his breath.
+
+"Damned badly," he answered.  "No bones broken, however."
+
+"That cut on your cheek and neck'll need plasterin', sir."
+
+"That's a scratch.  Thorn bush," curtly.
+
+Sympathy was plainly not welcome.  In fact Binns was
+soon of the opinion that here was an ugly customer, gentleman
+or no gentleman.  A jolting cart was, however, not the best
+place for a man who seemed sore from head to foot, and done
+for out and out.  He sat and ground his teeth, as he clung
+to the rough seat in the attempt to steady himself.  He became
+more and more "gashly," and a certain awful light in his
+eyes alarmed the carter by leaping up at every jolt.  Binns
+was glad when he left him at Medham Arms, and felt he
+had earned the half-sovereign handed to him.
+
+Four days Anstruthers lay in bed in a room at the Inn.  No
+one saw him but the man who brought him food.  He did
+not send for a doctor, because he did not wish to see one.  He
+sent for such remedies as were needed by a man who had
+been bruised by a fall from his horse.  He made no remark
+which could be considered explanatory, after he had said
+irritably that a man was a fool to go loitering along on a
+nervous brute who needed watching.  Whatsoever happened was his
+own damned fault.
+
+Through hours of day and night he lay staring at the white-
+washed beams or the blue roses on the wall paper.  They were
+long hours, and filled with things not pleasant enough to
+dwell on in detail.  Physical misery which made a man
+writhe at times was not the worst part of them.  There were
+a thousand things less endurable.  More than once he foamed
+at the mouth, and recognised that he gibbered like a madman.
+
+There was but one memory which saved him from feeling
+that this was the very end of things.  That was the memory
+of Broadmorlands.  While a man had a weapon left, even
+though it could not save him, he might pay up with it--get
+almost even.  The whole Vanderpoel lot could be plunged
+neck deep in a morass which would leave mud enough sticking
+to them, even if their money helped them to prevent its
+entirely closing over their heads.  He could attend to that,
+and, after he had set it well going, he could get out.  There
+were India, South Africa, Australia--a dozen places that
+would do.  And then he would remember Betty Vanderpoel,
+and curse horribly under the bed clothes.  It was the memory
+of Betty which outdid all others in its power to torment.
+
+On the morning of the fifth day the Duke of Broadmorlands
+received a note, which he read with somewhat annoyed
+curiosity.  A certain Sir Nigel Anstruthers, whom it appeared
+he ought to be able to recall, was in the neighbourhood, and
+wished to see him on a parochial matter of interest.  "Parochial
+matter" was vague, and so was the Duke's recollection of the
+man who addressed him.  If his memory served him rightly,
+he had met him in a country house in Somersetshire, and had
+heard that he was the acquaintance of the disreputable eldest
+son.  What could a person of that sort have to say of parochial
+matters?  The Duke considered, and then, in obedience to
+a rigorous conscience, decided that one ought, perhaps, to give
+him half an hour.
+
+There was that in the intruder's aspect, when he arrived in
+the afternoon, which produced somewhat the effect of shock.  In
+the first place, a man in his unconcealable physical condition
+had no right to be out of his bed.  Though he plainly refused to
+admit the fact, his manner of bearing himself erect, and even
+with a certain touch of cool swagger, was, it was evident,
+achieved only by determined effort.  He looked like a man
+who had not yet recovered from some evil fever.  Since the
+meeting in Somersetshire he had aged more than the year
+warranted.  Despite his obstinate fight with himself it was
+obvious that he was horribly shaky.  A disagreeable scratch or
+cut, running from cheek to neck, did not improve his personal
+appearance.
+
+He pleased his host no more than he had pleased him at
+their first encounter; he, in fact, repelled him strongly, by
+suggesting a degree of abnormality of mood which was
+smoothed over by an attempt at entire normality of manner. 
+The Duke did not present an approachable front as, after
+Anstruthers had taken a chair, he sat and examined him
+with bright blue old eyes set deep on either side of a dominant
+nose and framed over by white eyebrows.  No, Nigel
+Anstruthers summed him up, it would not be easy to open the
+matter with the old fool.  He held himself magnificently aloof,
+with that lack of modernity in his sense of place which, even
+at this late day, sometimes expressed itself here and there in
+the manner of the feudal survival.
+
+"I am afraid you have been ill," with rigid civility.
+
+"A man feels rather an outsider in confessing he has let
+his horse throw him into a hedge.  It was my own fault
+entirely.  I allowed myself to forget that I was riding a
+dangerously nervous brute.  I was thinking of a painful and
+absorbing subject.  I was badly bruised and scratched, but
+that was all."
+
+"What did your doctor say?"
+
+"That I was in luck not to have broken my neck."
+
+"You had better have a glass of wine," touching a bell. 
+"You do not look equal to any exertion."
+
+In gathering himself together, Sir Nigel felt he was forced
+to use enormous effort.  It had cost him a gruesome physical
+struggle to endure the drive over to Broadmorlands, though it
+was only a few miles from Medham.  There had been something
+unnatural in the exertion necessary to sit upright and keep
+his mind decently clear.  That was the worst of it.  The fever
+and raging hours of the past days and nights had so shaken him
+that he had become exhausted, and his brain was not alert.  He
+was not thinking rapidly, and several times he had lost sight of
+a point it was important to remember.  He grew hot and cold
+and knew his hands and voice shook, as he answered.  But,
+perhaps--he felt desperately--signs of emotion were not bad.
+
+"I am not quite equal to exertion," he began slowly.  "But
+a man cannot lie on his bed while some things are undone--
+a MAN cannot."
+
+As the old Duke sat upright, the blue eyes under his bent
+brows were startled, as well as curious.  Was the man going
+out of his mind about something?  He looked rather like it,
+with the dampness starting out on his haggard face, and the
+ugly look suddenly stamped there.  The fact was that the
+insensate fury which had possessed and torn Anstruthers as he
+had writhed in his inn bedroom had sprung upon him again
+in full force, and his weakness could not control it, though it
+would have been wiser to hold it in check.  He also felt
+frightfully ill, which filled him with despair, and, through
+this fact, he lost sight of the effect he produced, as he stood
+up, shaking all over.
+
+"I come to you because you are the one man who can most
+easily understand the thing I have been concealing for a good
+many years."
+
+The Duke was irritated.  Confound the objectionable idiot,
+what did he mean by taking that intimate tone with a man
+who was not prepared to concern himself in his affairs?
+
+"Excuse me," he said, holding up an authoritative hand,
+"are you going to make a confession?  I don't like such
+things.  I prefer to be excused.  Personal confidences are not
+parochial matters."
+
+"This one is."  And Sir Nigel was sickeningly conscious that
+he was putting the statement rashly, while at the same time
+all better words escaped him.  "It is as much a parochial
+matter," losing all hold on his wits and stammering, "as
+was--as was--the affair of--your wife."
+
+It was the Duke who stood up now, scarlet with anger. 
+He sprang from his chair as if he had been a young man in
+whom some insult had struck blazing fire.
+
+"You--you dare!" he shouted.  "You insolent blackguard! 
+You force your way in here and dare--dare----!" 
+And he clenched his fist, wildly shaking it.
+
+Nigel Anstruthers, staggering on his uncertain feet, would
+have shouted also, but could not, though he tried, and he
+heard his own voice come forth brokenly.
+
+"Yes, I dare!  I--your--my own--my----!"
+
+Swaying and tottering, he swung round to the chair he
+had left, and fell into it, even while the old Duke, who stood
+raging before him, started back in outraged amazement.  What
+was the fellow doing?  Was he making faces at him?  The
+drawn malignant mouth and muscles suggested it.  Was he
+a lunatic, indeed?  But the sense of disgusted outrage changed
+all at once to horror, as, with a countenance still more
+hideously livid and twisted, his visitor slid helplessly from his
+seat and lay a huddling heap of clothes on the floor.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER L
+
+THE PRIMEVAL THING
+
+When Mr. Vanderpoel landed in England his wife was with
+him.  This quiet-faced woman, who was known to be on
+her way to join her daughter in England, was much discussed,
+envied, and glanced at, when she promenaded the deck with
+her husband, or sat in her chair softly wrapped in wonderful
+furs.  Gradually, during the past months, she had been told
+certain modified truths connected with her elder daughter's
+marriage.  They had been painful truths, but had been so
+softened and expurgated of their worst features that it had
+been possible to bear them, when one realised that they did
+not, at least, mean that Rosy had forgotten or ceased to love
+her mother and father, or wish to visit her home.  The steady
+clearness of foresight and readiness of resource which were
+often spoken of as being specially characteristic of Reuben S.
+Vanderpoel, were all required, and employed with great
+tenderness, in the management of this situation.  As little as it
+was possible that his wife should know, was the utmost she
+must hear and be hurt by.  Unless ensuing events compelled
+further revelations, the rest of it should be kept from her.  As
+further protection, her husband had frankly asked her to content
+herself with a degree of limited information.
+
+"I have meant all our lives, Annie, to keep from you the
+unpleasant things a woman need not be troubled with," he
+had said.  "I promised myself I would when you were a girl. 
+I knew you would face things, if I needed your help, but you
+were a gentle little soul, like Rosy, and I never intended that
+you should bear what was useless.  Anstruthers was a blackguard,
+and girls of all nations have married blackguards before. 
+When you have Rosy safe at home, and know nothing can hurt
+her again, you both may feel you would like to talk it over. 
+Till then we won't go into detail.  You trust me, I know, when
+I tell you that you shall hold Rosy in your arms very soon. 
+We may have something of a fight, but there can only be one
+end to it in a country as decent as England.  Anstruthers isn't
+exactly what I should call an Englishman.  Men rather like
+him are to be found in two or three places."  His good-looking,
+shrewd, elderly face lighted with a fine smile.  "My handsome
+Betty has saved us a good deal by carrying out her
+fifteen-year-old plan of going to find her sister," he ended.
+
+Before they landed they had decided that Mrs. Vanderpoel
+should be comfortably established in a hotel in London, and
+that after this was arranged, her husband should go to Stornham
+Court alone.  If Sir Nigel could be induced to listen to logic,
+Rosalie, her child, and Betty should come at once to town.
+
+"And, if he won't listen to logic," added Mr. Vanderpoel,
+with a dry composure, "they shall come just the same, my
+dear."  And his wife put her arms round his neck and kissed
+him because she knew what he said was quite true, and she
+admired him--as she had always done--greatly.
+
+But when the pilot came on board and there began to stir
+in the ship the agreeable and exciting bustle of the delivery
+of letters and welcoming telegrams, among Mr. Vanderpoel's
+many yellow envelopes he opened one the contents of which
+caused him to stand still for some moments--so still, indeed,
+that some of the bystanders began to touch each other's elbows
+and whisper.  He certainly read the message two or three
+times before he folded it up, returned it to its receptacle, and
+walked gravely to his wife's sitting-room.
+
+"Reuben!" she exclaimed, after her first look at him,
+"have you bad news?  Oh, I hope not!"
+
+He came and sat down quietly beside her, taking her hand.
+
+"Don't be frightened, Annie, my dear," he said.  "I have
+just been reminded of a verse in the Bible--about vengeance not
+belonging to mere human beings.  Nigel Anstruthers has had
+a stroke of paralysis, and it is not his first.  Apparently, even
+if he lies on his back for some months thinking of harm, he
+won't be able to do it.  He is finished."
+
+When he was carried by the express train through the
+country, he saw all that Betty had seen, though the summer
+had passed, and there were neither green trees nor hedges. 
+He knew all that the long letters had meant of stirred emotion
+and affection, and he was strongly moved, though his mind
+was full of many things.  There were the farmhouses, the
+square-towered churches, the red-pointed hop oasts, and the
+village children.  How distinctly she had made him see them! 
+His Betty--his splendid Betty!  His heart beat at the thought
+of seeing her high, young black head, and holding her safe
+in his arms again.  Safe!  He resented having used the word,
+because there was a shock in seeming to admit the possibility
+that anything in the universe could do wrong to her.  Yet
+one man had been villain enough to mean her harm, and to
+threaten her with it.  He slightly shuddered as he thought of
+how the man was finished--done for.
+
+The train began to puff more loudly, as it slackened its pace. 
+It was drawing near to a rustic little station, and, as it passed
+in, he saw a carriage standing outside, waiting on the road, and
+a footman in a long coat, glancing into each window as the
+train went by.  Two or three country people were watching it
+intently.  Miss Vanderpoel's father was coming up from London
+on it.  The stationmaster rushed to open the carriage door,
+and the footman hastened forward, but a tall lovely thing
+in grey was opposite the step as Mr. Vanderpoel descended
+it to the platform.  She did not recognise the presence of any
+other human being than himself.  For the moment she seemed
+to forget even the broad-shouldered man who had plainly
+come with her.  As Reuben S. Vanderpoel folded her in his
+arms, she folded him and kissed him as he was not sure she
+had ever kissed him before.
+
+"My splendid Betty!  My own fine girl!" he said.
+
+And when she cried out "Father!  Father!" she bent and
+kissed the breast of his coat.
+
+He knew who the big young man was before she turned to
+present him.
+
+"This is Lord Mount Dunstan, father," she said.  "Since
+Nigel was brought home, he has been very good to us."
+
+Reuben S. Vanderpoel looked well into the man's eyes, as
+he shook hands with him warmly, and this was what he said
+to himself:
+
+"Yes, she's safe.  This is quite safe.  It is to be trusted
+with the whole thing."
+
+Not many days after her husband's arrival at Stornham
+Court, Mrs. Vanderpoel travelled down from London, and,
+during her journey, scarcely saw the wintry hedges and bare
+trees, because, as she sat in her cushioned corner of the railway
+carriage, she was inwardly offering up gentle, pathetically
+ardent prayers of gratitude.  She was the woman who prays,
+and the many sad petitions of the past years were being
+answered at last.  She was being allowed to go to Rosy--
+whatsoever happened, she could never be really parted from her
+girl again.  She asked pardon many times because she had not been
+able to be really sorry when she had heard of her son-in-law's
+desperate condition.  She could feel pity for him in his awful
+case, she told herself, but she could not wish for the thing
+which perhaps she ought to wish for.  She had confided this to
+her husband with innocent, penitent tears, and he had stroked
+her cheek, which had always been his comforting way since
+they had been young things together.
+
+"My dear," he said, "if a tiger with hydrophobia were
+loose among a lot of decent people--or indecent ones, for
+the matter of that--you would not feel it your duty to be very
+sorry if, in springing on a group of them, he impaled himself
+on an iron fence.  Don't reproach yourself too much."  And,
+though the realism of the picture he presented was such as to
+make her exclaim, "No!  No!" there were still occasional
+moments when she breathed a request for pardon if she was
+hard of heart--this softest of creatures human.
+
+It was arranged by the two who best knew and loved her
+that her meeting with Rosalie should have no spectators, and
+that their first hour together should be wholly unbroken in
+upon.
+
+"You have not seen each other for so long," Betty said,
+when, on her arrival, she led her at once to the morning-room
+where Rosy waited, pale with joy, but when the door was
+opened, though the two figures were swept into each other's
+arms by one wild, tremulous rush of movement, there were no
+sounds to be heard, only caught breaths, until the door had
+closed again.
+
+The talks which took place between Mr. Vanderpoel and
+Lord Mount Dunstan were many and long, and were of
+absorbing interest to both.  Each presented to the other a new
+world, and a type of which his previous knowledge had been
+but incomplete.
+
+"I wonder," Mr. Vanderpoel said, in the course of one of
+them, "if my world appeals to you as yours appeals to me. 
+Naturally, from your standpoint, it scarcely seems probable. 
+Perhaps the up-building of large financial schemes presupposes
+a certain degree of imagination.  I am becoming a romantic
+New York man of business, and I revel in it.  Kedgers, for
+instance," with the smile which, somehow, suggested Betty,
+"Kedgers and the Lilium Giganteum, Mrs. Welden and old
+Doby threaten to develop into quite necessary factors in the
+scheme of happiness.  What Betty has felt is even more
+comprehensible than it seemed at first."
+
+They walked and rode together about the countryside; when
+Mount Dunstan itself was swept clean of danger, and only
+a few convalescents lingered to be taken care of in the huge
+ballroom, they spent many days in going over the estate.  The
+desolate beauty of it appealed to and touched Mr. Vanderpoel,
+as it had appealed to and touched his daughter, and, also,
+wakened in him much new and curious delight.  But Mount
+Dunstan, with a touch of his old obstinacy, insisted that he
+should ignore the beauty, and look closely at less admirable
+things.
+
+"You must see the worst of this," he said.  "You must
+understand that I can put no good face upon things, that I
+offer nothing, because I have nothing to offer."
+
+If he had not been swept through and through by a powerful
+and rapturous passion, he would have detested and abhorred
+these days of deliberate proud laying bare of the nakedness of
+the land.  But in the hours he spent with Betty Vanderpoel
+the passion gave him knowledge of the things which, being
+elemental, do not concern themselves with pride and obstinacy,
+and do not remember them.  Too much had ended, and too
+much begun, to leave space or thought for poor things.  In
+their eyes, when they were together, and even when they were
+apart, dwelt a glow which was deeply moving to those who,
+looking on, were sufficiently profound of thought to understand.
+
+Watching the two walking slowly side by side down the
+leafless avenue on a crystal winter day, Mr. Vanderpoel
+conversed with the vicar, whom he greatly liked.
+
+"A young man of the name of Selden," he remarked, "told
+me more of this than he knew."
+
+"G. Selden," said the vicar, with affectionate smiling.  "He
+is not aware that he was largely concerned in the matter.  In
+fact, without G. Selden, I do not know how, exactly, we
+should have got on.  How is he, nice fellow?"
+
+"Extremely well, and in these days in my employ.  He
+is of the honest, indefatigable stuff which makes its way."
+
+His own smiles, as he watched the two tall figures in
+the distance, settled into an expression of speculative
+absorption, because he was reflecting upon profoundly interesting
+matters.
+
+"There is a great primeval thing which sometimes--not
+often, only sometimes--occurs to two people," he went on. 
+"When it leaps into being, it is well if it is not thwarted, or
+done to death.  It has happened to my girl and Mount Dunstan. 
+If they had been two young tinkers by the roadside, they
+would have come together, and defied their beggary.  As it
+is, I recognise, as I sit here, that the outcome of what is to
+be may reach far, and open up broad new ways."
+
+"Yes," said the vicar.  "She will live here and fill a strong
+man's life with wonderful human happiness--her splendid
+children will be born here, and among them will be those who
+lead the van and make history."
+
+.  .  .  .  .
+
+For some time Nigel Anstruthers lay in his room at
+Stornham Court, surrounded by all of aid and luxury that wealth
+and exalted medical science could gather about him.  Sometimes
+he lay a livid unconscious mask, sometimes his nurses and
+doctors knew that in his hollow eyes there was the light of
+a raging half reason, and they saw that he struggled to utter
+coherent sounds which they might comprehend.  This he never
+accomplished, and one day, in the midst of such an effort, he
+was stricken dumb again, and soon afterwards sank into stillness
+and died. 
+
+And the Shuttle in the hand of Fate, through every hour
+of every day, and through the slow, deep breathing of all the
+silent nights, weaves to and fro--to and fro--drawing with
+it the threads of human life and thought which strengthen
+its web: and trace the figures of its yet vague and uncompleted
+design.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Shuttle by F. H. Burnett
+#8 in our series by Frances Hodgson Burnett
+
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