A Pair of Blue Eyes

by Thomas Hardy

'A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute;
No more.'

PREFACE

The following chapters were written at a time when the craze for
indiscriminate church-restoration had just reached the remotest
nooks of western England, where the wild and tragic features of
the coast had long combined in perfect harmony with the crude
Gothic Art of the ecclesiastical buildings scattered along it,
throwing into extraordinary discord all architectural attempts at
newness there. To restore the grey carcases of a mediaevalism
whose spirit had fled, seemed a not less incongruous act than to
set about renovating the adjoining crags themselves.

Hence it happened that an imaginary history of three human hearts,
whose emotions were not without correspondence with these material
circumstances, found in the ordinary incidents of such church-
renovations a fitting frame for its presentation.

The shore and country about 'Castle Boterel' is now getting well
known, and will be readily recognized. The spot is, I may add,
the furthest westward of all those convenient corners wherein I
have ventured to erect my theatre for these imperfect little
dramas of country life and passions; and it lies near to, or no
great way beyond, the vague border of the Wessex kingdom on that
side, which, like the westering verge of modern American
settlements, was progressive and uncertain.

This, however, is of little importance. The place is pre-
eminently (for one person at least) the region of dream and
mystery. The ghostly birds, the pall-like sea, the frothy wind,
the eternal soliloquy of the waters, the bloom of dark purple
cast, that seems to exhale from the shoreward precipices, in
themselves lend to the scene an atmosphere like the twilight of a
night vision.

One enormous sea-bord cliff in particular figures in the
narrative; and for some forgotten reason or other this cliff was
described in the story as being without a name. Accuracy would
require the statement to be that a remarkable cliff which
resembles in many points the cliff of the description bears a name
that no event has made famous.

T. H.
March 1899

THE PERSONS

ELFRIDE SWANCOURT a young Lady
CHRISTOPHER SWANCOURT a Clergyman
STEPHEN SMITH an Architect
HENRY KNIGHT a Reviewer and Essayist
CHARLOTTE TROYTON a rich Widow
GERTRUDE JETHWAY a poor Widow
SPENSER HUGO LUXELLIAN a Peer
LADY LUXELLIAN his Wife
MARY AND KATE two little Girls
WILLIAM WORM a dazed Factotum
JOHN SMITH a Master-mason
JANE SMITH his Wife
MARTIN CANNISTER a Sexton
UNITY a Maid-servant

Other servants, masons, labourers, grooms, nondescripts, etc., etc.

THE SCENE
Mostly on the outskirts of Lower Wessex.

Chapter I

'A fair vestal, throned in the west'

Elfride Swancourt was a girl whose emotions lay very near the
surface. Their nature more precisely, and as modified by the
creeping hours of time, was known only to those who watched the
circumstances of her history.

Personally, she was the combination of very interesting
particulars, whose rarity, however, lay in the combination itself
rather than in the individual elements combined. As a matter of
fact, you did not see the form and substance of her features when
conversing with her; and this charming power of preventing a
material study of her lineaments by an interlocutor, originated
not in the cloaking effect of a well-formed manner (for her manner
was childish and scarcely formed), but in the attractive crudeness
of the remarks themselves. She had lived all her life in
retirement--the monstrari gigito of idle men had not flattered
her, and at the age of nineteen or twenty she was no further on in
social consciousness than an urban young lady of fifteen.

One point in her, however, you did notice: that was her eyes. In
them was seen a sublimation of all of her; it was not necessary to
look further: there she lived.

These eyes were blue; blue as autumn distance--blue as the blue we
see between the retreating mouldings of hills and woody slopes on
a sunny September morning. A misty and shady blue, that had no
beginning or surface, and was looked INTO rather than AT.

As to her presence, it was not powerful; it was weak. Some women
can make their personality pervade the atmosphere of a whole
banqueting hall; Elfride's was no more pervasive than that of a
kitten.

Elfride had as her own the thoughtfulness which appears in the
face of the Madonna della Sedia, without its rapture: the warmth
and spirit of the type of woman's feature most common to the
beauties--mortal and immortal--of Rubens, without their insistent
fleshiness. The characteristic expression of the female faces of
Correggio--that of the yearning human thoughts that lie too deep
for tears--was hers sometimes, but seldom under ordinary
conditions.

The point in Elfride Swancourt's life at which a deeper current
may be said to have permanently set in, was one winter afternoon
when she found herself standing, in the character of hostess, face
to face with a man she had never seen before--moreover, looking at
him with a Miranda-like curiosity and interest that she had never
yet bestowed on a mortal.

On this particular day her father, the vicar of a parish on the
sea-swept outskirts of Lower Wessex, and a widower, was suffering
from an attack of gout. After finishing her household
supervisions Elfride became restless, and several times left the
room, ascended the staircase, and knocked at her father's chamber-
door.

'Come in!' was always answered in a hearty out-of-door voice from
the inside.

'Papa,' she said on one occasion to the fine, red-faced, handsome
man of forty, who, puffing and fizzing like a bursting bottle, lay
on the bed wrapped in a dressing-gown, and every now and then
enunciating, in spite of himself, about one letter of some word or
words that were almost oaths; 'papa, will you not come downstairs
this evening?' She spoke distinctly: he was rather deaf.

'Afraid not--eh-hh !--very much afraid I shall not, Elfride.
Piph-ph-ph! I can't bear even a handkerchief upon this deuced toe
of mine, much less a stocking or slipper--piph-ph-ph! There 'tis
again! No, I shan't get up till to-morrow.'

'Then I hope this London man won't come; for I don't know what I
should do, papa.'

'Well, it would be awkward, certainly.'

'I should hardly think he would come to-day.'

'Why?'

'Because the wind blows so.'

'Wind! What ideas you have, Elfride! Who ever heard of wind
stopping a man from doing his business? The idea of this toe of
mine coming on so suddenly!...If he should come, you must send him
up to me, I suppose, and then give him some food and put him to
bed in some way. Dear me, what a nuisance all this is!'

'Must he have dinner?'

'Too heavy for a tired man at the end of a tedious journey.'

'Tea, then?'

'Not substantial enough.'

'High tea, then? There is cold fowl, rabbit-pie, some pasties, and
things of that kind.'

'Yes, high tea.'

'Must I pour out his tea, papa?'

'Of course; you are the mistress of the house.'

'What! sit there all the time with a stranger, just as if I knew
him, and not anybody to introduce us?'

'Nonsense, child, about introducing; you know better than that. A
practical professional man, tired and hungry, who has been
travelling ever since daylight this morning, will hardly be
inclined to talk and air courtesies to-night. He wants food and
shelter, and you must see that he has it, simply because I am
suddenly laid up and cannot. There is nothing so dreadful in
that, I hope? You get all kinds of stuff into your head from
reading so many of those novels.'

'Oh no; there is nothing dreadful in it when it becomes plainly a
case of necessity like this. But, you see, you are always there
when people come to dinner, even if we know them; and this is some
strange London man of the world, who will think it odd, perhaps.'

'Very well; let him.'

'Is he Mr. Hewby's partner?'

'I should scarcely think so: he may be.'

'How old is he, I wonder?'

'That I cannot tell. You will find the copy of my letter to Mr.
Hewby, and his answer, upon the table in the study. You may read
them, and then you'll know as much as I do about our visitor.'

'I have read them.'

'Well, what's the use of asking questions, then? They contain all
I know. Ugh-h-h!...Od plague you, you young scamp! don't put
anything there! I can't bear the weight of a fly.'

'Oh, I am sorry, papa. I forgot; I thought you might be cold,'
she said, hastily removing the rug she had thrown upon the feet of
the sufferer; and waiting till she saw that consciousness of her
offence had passed from his face, she withdrew from the room, and
retired again downstairs.

Chapter II

'Twas on the evening of a winter's day.'

When two or three additional hours had merged
the same afternoon in evening, some moving outlines might have
been observed against the sky on the summit of a wild lone hill in
that district. They circumscribed two men, having at present the
aspect of silhouettes, sitting in a dog-cart and pushing along in
the teeth of the wind. Scarcely a solitary house or man had been
visible along the whole dreary distance of open country they were
traversing; and now that night had begun to fall, the faint
twilight, which still gave an idea of the landscape to their
observation, was enlivened by the quiet appearance of the planet
Jupiter, momentarily gleaming in intenser brilliancy in front of
them, and by Sirius shedding his rays in rivalry from his position
over their shoulders. The only lights apparent on earth were some
spots of dull red, glowing here and there upon the distant hills,
which, as the driver of the vehicle gratuitously remarked to the
hirer, were smouldering fires for the consumption of peat and
gorse-roots, where the common was being broken up for agricultural
purposes. The wind prevailed with but little abatement from its
daytime boisterousness, three or four small clouds, delicate and
pale, creeping along under the sky southward to the Channel.

Fourteen of the sixteen miles intervening between the railway
terminus and the end of their journey had been gone over, when
they began to pass along the brink of a valley some miles in
extent, wherein the wintry skeletons of a more luxuriant
vegetation than had hitherto surrounded them proclaimed an
increased richness of soil, which showed signs of far more careful
enclosure and management than had any slopes they had yet passed.
A little farther, and an opening in the elms stretching up from
this fertile valley revealed a mansion.

'That's Endelstow House, Lord Luxellian's,' said the driver.

'Endelstow House, Lord Luxellian's,' repeated the other
mechanically. He then turned himself sideways, and keenly
scrutinized the almost invisible house with an interest which the
indistinct picture itself seemed far from adequate to create.
'Yes, that's Lord Luxellian's,' he said yet again after a while,
as he still looked in the same direction.

'What, be we going there?'

'No; Endelstow Vicarage, as I have told you.'

'I thought you m't have altered your mind, sir, as ye have stared
that way at nothing so long.'

'Oh no; I am interested in the house, that's all.'

'Most people be, as the saying is.'

'Not in the sense that I am.'

'Oh!...Well, his family is no better than my own, 'a b'lieve.'

'How is that?'

'Hedgers and ditchers by rights. But once in ancient times one of
'em, when he was at work, changed clothes with King Charles the
Second, and saved the king's life. King Charles came up to him
like a common man, and said off-hand, "Man in the smock-frock, my
name is Charles the Second, and that's the truth on't. Will you
lend me your clothes?" "I don't mind if I do," said Hedger
Luxellian; and they changed there and then. "Now mind ye," King
Charles the Second said, like a common man, as he rode away, "if
ever I come to the crown, you come to court, knock at the door,
and say out bold, 'Is King Charles the Second at home?' Tell your
name, and they shall let you in, and you shall be made a lord."
Now, that was very nice of Master Charley?'

'Very nice indeed.'

'Well, as the story is, the king came to the throne; and some
years after that, away went Hedger Luxellian, knocked at the
king's door, and asked if King Charles the Second was in. "No, he
isn't," they said. "Then, is Charles the Third?" said Hedger
Luxellian. "Yes," said a young feller standing by like a common
man, only he had a crown on, "my name is Charles the Third." And----'

'I really fancy that must be a mistake. I don't recollect
anything in English history about Charles the Third,' said the
other in a tone of mild remonstrance.

'Oh, that's right history enough, only 'twasn't prented; he was
rather a queer-tempered man, if you remember.'

'Very well; go on.'

'And, by hook or by crook, Hedger Luxellian was made a lord, and
everything went on well till some time after, when he got into a
most terrible row with King Charles the Fourth

'I can't stand Charles the Fourth. Upon my word, that's too
much.'

'Why? There was a George the Fourth, wasn't there?'

'Certainly.'

'Well, Charleses be as common as Georges. However I'll say no
more about it....Ah, well! 'tis the funniest world ever I lived
in--upon my life 'tis. Ah, that such should be!'

The dusk had thickened into darkness while they thus conversed,
and the outline and surface of the mansion gradually disappeared.
The windows, which had before been as black blots on a lighter
expanse of wall, became illuminated, and were transfigured to
squares of light on the general dark body of the night landscape
as it absorbed the outlines of the edifice into its gloomy
monochrome.

Not another word was spoken for some time, and they climbed a
hill, then another hill piled on the summit of the first. An
additional mile of plateau followed, from which could be discerned
two light-houses on the coast they were nearing, reposing on the
horizon with a calm lustre of benignity. Another oasis was
reached; a little dell lay like a nest at their feet, towards
which the driver pulled the horse at a sharp angle, and descended
a steep slope which dived under the trees like a rabbit's burrow.
They sank lower and lower.

'Endelstow Vicarage is inside here,' continued the man with the
reins. 'This part about here is West Endelstow; Lord Luxellian's
is East Endelstow, and has a church to itself. Pa'son Swancourt
is the pa'son of both, and bobs backward and forward. Ah, well!
'tis a funny world. 'A b'lieve there was once a quarry where this
house stands. The man who built it in past time scraped all the
glebe for earth to put round the vicarage, and laid out a little
paradise of flowers and trees in the soil he had got together in
this way, whilst the fields he scraped have been good for nothing
ever since.'

'How long has the present incumbent been here?'

'Maybe about a year, or a year and half: 'tisn't two years; for
they don't scandalize him yet; and, as a rule, a parish begins to
scandalize the pa'son at the end of two years among 'em familiar.
But he's a very nice party. Ay, Pa'son Swancourt knows me pretty
well from often driving over; and I know Pa'son Swancourt.'

They emerged from the bower, swept round in a curve, and the
chimneys and gables of the vicarage became darkly visible. Not a
light showed anywhere. They alighted; the man felt his way into
the porch, and rang the bell.

At the end of three or four minutes, spent in patient waiting
without hearing any sounds of a response, the stranger advanced
and repeated the call in a more decided manner. He then fancied
he heard footsteps in the hall, and sundry movements of the door-
knob, but nobody appeared.

'Perhaps they beant at home,' sighed the driver. 'And I promised
myself a bit of supper in Pa'son Swancourt's kitchen. Sich lovely
mate-pize and figged keakes, and cider, and drops o' cordial that
they do keep here!'

'All right, naibours! Be ye rich men or be ye poor men, that ye
must needs come to the world's end at this time o' night?'
exclaimed a voice at this instant; and, turning their heads, they
saw a rickety individual shambling round from the back door with a
horn lantern dangling from his hand.

'Time o' night, 'a b'lieve! and the clock only gone seven of 'em.
Show a light, and let us in, William Worm.'

'Oh, that you, Robert Lickpan?'

'Nobody else, William Worm.'

'And is the visiting man a-come?'

'Yes,' said the stranger. 'Is Mr. Swancourt at home?'

'That 'a is, sir. And would ye mind coming round by the back way?
The front door is got stuck wi' the wet, as he will do sometimes;
and the Turk can't open en. I know I am only a poor wambling man
that 'ill never pay the Lord for my making, sir; but I can show
the way in, sir.'

The new arrival followed his guide through a little door in a
wall, and then promenaded a scullery and a kitchen, along which he
passed with eyes rigidly fixed in advance, an inbred horror of
prying forbidding him to gaze around apartments that formed the
back side of the household tapestry. Entering the hall, he was
about to be shown to his room, when from the inner lobby of the
front entrance, whither she had gone to learn the cause of the
delay, sailed forth the form of Elfride. Her start of amazement
at the sight of the visitor coming forth from under the stairs
proved that she had not been expecting this surprising flank
movement, which had been originated entirely by the ingenuity of
William Worm.

She appeared in the prettiest of all feminine guises, that is to
say, in demi-toilette, with plenty of loose curly hair tumbling
down about her shoulders. An expression of uneasiness pervaded
her countenance; and altogether she scarcely appeared woman enough
for the situation. The visitor removed his hat, and the first
words were spoken; Elfride prelusively looking with a deal of
interest, not unmixed with surprise, at the person towards whom
she was to do the duties of hospitality.

'I am Mr. Smith,' said the stranger in a musical voice.

'I am Miss Swancourt,' said Elfride.

Her constraint was over. The great contrast between the reality
she beheld before her, and the dark, taciturn, sharp, elderly man
of business who had lurked in her imagination--a man with clothes
smelling of city smoke, skin sallow from want of sun, and talk
flavoured with epigram--was such a relief to her that Elfride
smiled, almost laughed, in the new-comer's face.

Stephen Smith, who has hitherto been hidden from us by the
darkness, was at this time of his life but a youth in appearance,
and barely a man in years. Judging from his look, London was the
last place in the world that one would have imagined to be the
scene of his activities: such a face surely could not be nourished
amid smoke and mud and fog and dust; such an open countenance
could never even have seen anything of 'the weariness, the fever,
and the fret' of Babylon the Second.

His complexion was as fine as Elfride's own; the pink of his
cheeks as delicate. His mouth as perfect as Cupid's bow in form,
and as cherry-red in colour as hers. Bright curly hair; bright
sparkling blue-gray eyes; a boy's blush and manner; neither
whisker nor moustache, unless a little light-brown fur on his
upper lip deserved the latter title: this composed the London
professional man, the prospect of whose advent had so troubled
Elfride.

Elfride hastened to say she was sorry to tell him that Mr.
Swancourt was not able to receive him that evening, and gave the
reason why. Mr. Smith replied, in a voice boyish by nature and
manly by art, that he was very sorry to hear this news; but that
as far as his reception was concerned, it did not matter in the
least.

Stephen was shown up to his room. In his absence Elfride
stealthily glided into her father's.

'He's come, papa. Such a young man for a business man!'

'Oh, indeed!'

'His face is--well--PRETTY; just like mine.'

'H'm! what next?'

'Nothing; that's all I know of him yet. It is rather nice, is it
not?'

'Well, we shall see that when we know him better. Go down and
give the poor fellow something to eat and drink, for Heaven's
sake. And when he has done eating, say I should like to have a
few words with him, if he doesn't mind coming up here.'

The young lady glided downstairs again, and whilst she awaits
young Smith's entry, the letters referring to his visit had better
be given.

1.--MR. SWANCOURT TO MR. HEWBY.

'ENDELSTOW VICARAGE, Feb. 18, 18--.

'SIR,--We are thinking of restoring the tower and aisle of the
church in this parish; and Lord Luxellian, the patron of the
living, has mentioned your name as that of a trustworthy architect
whom it would be desirable to ask to superintend the work.

'I am exceedingly ignorant of the necessary preliminary steps.
Probably, however, the first is that (should you be, as Lord
Luxellian says you are, disposed to assist us) yourself or some
member of your staff come and see the building, and report
thereupon for the satisfaction of parishioners and others.

'The spot is a very remote one: we have no railway within fourteen
miles; and the nearest place for putting up at--called a town,
though merely a large village--is Castle Boterel, two miles
further on; so that it would be most convenient for you to stay at
the vicarage--which I am glad to place at your disposal--instead
of pushing on to the hotel at Castle Boterel, and coming back
again in the morning.

'Any day of the next week that you like to name for the visit will
find us quite ready to receive you.--Yours very truly, CHRISTOPHER
SWANCOURT.

2.--MR. HEWBY TO MR. SWANCOURT.

"PERCY PLACE, CHARING CROSS, Feb. 20, 18--.

'DEAR SIR,--Agreeably to your request of the 18th instant, I have
arranged to survey and make drawings of the aisle and tower of
your parish church, and of the dilapidations which have been
suffered to accrue thereto, with a view to its restoration.

'My assistant, Mr. Stephen Smith, will leave London by the early
train to-morrow morning for the purpose. Many thanks for your
proposal to accommodate him. He will take advantage of your
offer, and will probably reach your house at some hour of the
evening. You may put every confidence in him, and may rely upon
his discernment in the matter of church architecture.

'Trusting that the plans for the restoration, which I shall
prepare from the details of his survey, will prove satisfactory to
yourself and Lord Luxellian, I am, dear sir, yours faithfully,
WALTER HEWBY.'

Chapter III

'Melodious birds sing madrigals'

That first repast in Endelstow Vicarage was a very agreeable one
to young Stephen Smith. The table was spread, as Elfride had
suggested to her father, with the materials for the heterogeneous
meal called high tea--a class of refection welcome to all when
away from men and towns, and particularly attractive to youthful
palates. The table was prettily decked with winter flowers and
leaves, amid which the eye was greeted by chops, chicken, pie,
&c., and two huge pasties overhanging the sides of the dish with a
cheerful aspect of abundance.

At the end, towards the fireplace, appeared the tea-service, of
old-fashioned Worcester porcelain, and behind this arose the
slight form of Elfride, attempting to add matronly dignity to the
movement of pouring out tea, and to have a weighty and concerned
look in matters of marmalade, honey, and clotted cream. Having
made her own meal before he arrived, she found to her
embarrassment that there was nothing left for her to do but talk
when not assisting him. She asked him if he would excuse her
finishing a letter she had been writing at a side-table, and,
after sitting down to it, tingled with a sense of being grossly
rude. However, seeing that he noticed nothing personally wrong in
her, and that he too was embarrassed when she attentively watched
his cup to refill it, Elfride became better at ease; and when
furthermore he accidentally kicked the leg of the table, and then
nearly upset his tea-cup, just as schoolboys did, she felt herself
mistress of the situation, and could talk very well. In a few
minutes ingenuousness and a common term of years obliterated all
recollection that they were strangers just met. Stephen began to
wax eloquent on extremely slight experiences connected with his
professional pursuits; and she, having no experiences to fall back
upon, recounted with much animation stories that had been related
to her by her father, which would have astonished him had he heard
with what fidelity of action and tone they were rendered. Upon
the whole, a very interesting picture of Sweet-and-Twenty was on
view that evening in Mr. Swancourt's house.

Ultimately Stephen had to go upstairs and talk loud to the vicar,
receiving from him between his puffs a great many apologies for
calling him so unceremoniously to a stranger's bedroom. 'But,'
continued Mr. Swancourt, 'I felt that I wanted to say a few words
to you before the morning, on the business of your visit. One's
patience gets exhausted by staying a prisoner in bed all day
through a sudden freak of one's enemy--new to me, though--for I
have known very little of gout as yet. However, he's gone to my
other toe in a very mild manner, and I expect he'll slink off
altogether by the morning. I hope you have been well attended to
downstairs?'

'Perfectly. And though it is unfortunate, and I am sorry to see
you laid up, I beg you will not take the slightest notice of my
being in the house the while.'

'I will not. But I shall be down to-morrow. My daughter is an
excellent doctor. A dose or two of her mild mixtures will fetch
me round quicker than all the drug stuff in the world. Well, now
about the church business. Take a seat, do. We can't afford to
stand upon ceremony in these parts as you see, and for this
reason, that a civilized human being seldom stays long with us;
and so we cannot waste time in approaching him, or he will be gone
before we have had the pleasure of close acquaintance. This tower
of ours is, as you will notice, entirely gone beyond the
possibility of restoration; but the church itself is well enough.
You should see some of the churches in this county. Floors
rotten: ivy lining the walls.'

'Dear me!'

'Oh, that's nothing. The congregation of a neighbour of mine,
whenever a storm of rain comes on during service, open their
umbrellas and hold them up till the dripping ceases from the roof.
Now, if you will kindly bring me those papers and letters you see
lying on the table, I will show you how far we have got.'

Stephen crossed the room to fetch them, and the vicar seemed to
notice more particularly the slim figure of his visitor.

'I suppose you are quite competent?' he said.

'Quite,' said the young man, colouring slightly.

'You are very young, I fancy--I should say you are not more than
nineteen?'

I am nearly twenty-one.'

'Exactly half my age; I am forty-two.'

'By the way,' said Mr. Swancourt, after some conversation, 'you
said your whole name was Stephen Fitzmaurice, and that your
grandfather came originally from Caxbury. Since I have been
speaking, it has occurred to me that I know something of you. You
belong to a well-known ancient county family--not ordinary Smiths
in the least.'

'I don't think we have any of their blood in our veins.'

'Nonsense! you must. Hand me the "Landed Gentry." Now, let me
see. There, Stephen Fitzmaurice Smith--he lies in St. Mary's
Church, doesn't he? Well, out of that family Sprang the
Leaseworthy Smiths, and collaterally came General Sir Stephen
Fitzmaurice Smith of Caxbury----'

'Yes; I have seen his monument there,' shouted Stephen. 'But
there is no connection between his family and mine: there cannot
be.'

'There is none, possibly, to your knowledge. But look at this, my
dear sir,' said the vicar, striking his fist upon the bedpost for
emphasis. 'Here are you, Stephen Fitzmaurice Smith, living in
London, but springing from Caxbury. Here in this book is a
genealogical tree of the Stephen Fitzmaurice Smiths of Caxbury
Manor. You may be only a family of professional men now--I am not
inquisitive: I don't ask questions of that kind; it is not in me
to do so--but it is as plain as the nose in your face that there's
your origin! And, Mr. Smith, I congratulate you upon your blood;
blue blood, sir; and, upon my life, a very desirable colour, as
the world goes.'

'I wish you could congratulate me upon some more tangible
quality,' said the younger man, sadly no less than modestly.

'Nonsense! that will come with time. You are young: all your life
is before you. Now look--see how far back in the mists of
antiquity my own family of Swancourt have a root. Here, you see,'
he continued, turning to the page, 'is Geoffrey, the one among my
ancestors who lost a barony because he would cut his joke. Ah,
it's the sort of us! But the story is too long to tell now. Ay,
I'm a poor man--a poor gentleman, in fact: those I would be
friends with, won't be friends with me; those who are willing to
be friends with me, I am above being friends with. Beyond dining
with a neighbouring incumbent or two. and an occasional chat--
sometimes dinner--with Lord Luxellian, a connection of mine, I am
in absolute solitude--absolute.'

'You have your studies, your books, and your--daughter.'

'Oh yes, yes; and I don't complain of poverty. Canto coram
latrone. Well, Mr. Smith, don't let me detain you any longer in a
sick room. Ha! that reminds me of a story I once heard in my
younger days.' Here the vicar began a series of small private
laughs, and Stephen looked inquiry. 'Oh, no, no! it is too bad--
too bad to tell!' continued Mr. Swancourt in undertones of grim
mirth. 'Well, go downstairs; my daughter must do the best she can
with you this evening. Ask her to sing to you--she plays and
sings very nicely. Good-night; I feel as if I had known you for
five or six years. I'll ring for somebody to show you down.'

'Never mind,' said Stephen, 'I can find the way.' And he went
downstairs, thinking of the delightful freedom of manner in the
remoter counties in comparison with the reserve of London.

'I forgot to tell you that my father was rather deaf,' said
Elfride anxiously, when Stephen entered the little drawing-room.

'Never mind; I know all about it, and we are great friends,' the
man of business replied enthusiastically. 'And, Miss Swancourt,
will you kindly sing to me?'

To Miss Swancourt this request seemed, what in fact it was,
exceptionally point-blank; though she guessed that her father had
some hand in framing it, knowing, rather to her cost, of his
unceremonious way of utilizing her for the benefit of dull
sojourners. At the same time, as Mr. Smith's manner was too frank
to provoke criticism, and his age too little to inspire fear, she
was ready--not to say pleased--to accede. Selecting from the
canterbury some old family ditties, that in years gone by had been
played and sung by her mother, Elfride sat down to the pianoforte,
and began, "Twas on the evening of a winter's day,' in a pretty
contralto voice.

'Do you like that old thing, Mr. Smith?' she said at the end.

'Yes, I do much,' said Stephen--words he would have uttered, and
sincerely, to anything on earth, from glee to requiem, that she
might have chosen.

'You shall have a little one by De Leyre, that was given me by a
young French lady who was staying at Endelstow House:

'"Je l'ai plante, je l'ai vu naitre,
Ce beau rosier ou les oiseaux," &c.;

and then I shall want to give you my own favourite for the very
last, Shelley's "When the lamp is shattered," as set to music by
my poor mother. I so much like singing to anybody who REALLY
cares to hear me.'

Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is usually
recalled to his mind's eye as she appeared in one particular
scene, which seems ordained to be her special form of
manifestation throughout the pages of his memory. As the patron
Saint has her attitude and accessories in mediaeval illumination,
so the sweetheart may be said to have hers upon the table of her
true Love's fancy, without which she is rarely introduced there
except by effort; and this though she may, on further
acquaintance, have been observed in many other phases which one
would imagine to be far more appropriate to love's young dream.

Miss Elfride's image chose the form in which she was beheld during
these minutes of singing, for her permanent attitude of visitation
to Stephen's eyes during his sleeping and waking hours in after
days. The profile is seen of a young woman in a pale gray silk
dress with trimmings of swan's-down, and opening up from a point
in front, like a waistcoat without a shirt; the cool colour
contrasting admirably with the warm bloom of her neck and face.
The furthermost candle on the piano comes immediately in a line
with her head, and half invisible itself, forms the accidentally
frizzled hair into a nebulous haze of light, surrounding her crown
like an aureola. Her hands are in their place on the keys, her
lips parted, and trilling forth, in a tender diminuendo, the
closing words of the sad apostrophe:

'O Love, who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier!'

Her head is forward a little, and her eyes directed keenly upward
to the top of the page of music confronting her. Then comes a
rapid look into Stephen's face, and a still more rapid look back
again to her business, her face having dropped its sadness, and
acquired a certain expression of mischievous archness the while;
which lingered there for some time, but was never developed into a
positive smile of flirtation.

Stephen suddenly shifted his position from her right hand to her
left, where there was just room enough for a small ottoman to
stand between the piano and the corner of the room. Into this
nook he squeezed himself, and gazed wistfully up into Elfride's
face. So long and so earnestly gazed he, that her cheek deepened
to a more and more crimson tint as each line was added to her
song. Concluding, and pausing motionless after the last word for
a minute or two, she ventured to look at him again. His features
wore an expression of unutterable heaviness.

'You don't hear many songs, do you, Mr. Smith, to take so much
notice of these of mine?'

'Perhaps it was the means and vehicle of the song that I was
noticing: I mean yourself,' he answered gently.

'Now, Mr. Smith!'

'It is perfectly true; I don't hear much singing. You mistake
what I am, I fancy. Because I come as a stranger to a secluded
spot, you think I must needs come from a life of bustle, and know
the latest movements of the day. But I don't. My life is as
quiet as yours, and more solitary; solitary as death.'

'The death which comes from a plethora of life? But seriously, I
can quite see that you are not the least what I thought you would
be before I saw you. You are not critical, or experienced, or--
much to mind. That's why I don't mind singing airs to you that I
only half know.' Finding that by this confession she had vexed him
in a way she did not intend, she added naively, 'I mean, Mr.
Smith, that you are better, not worse, for being only young and
not very experienced. You don't think my life here so very tame
and dull, I know.'

'I do not, indeed,' he said with fervour. 'It must be
delightfully poetical, and sparkling, and fresh, and----'

'There you go, Mr. Smith! Well, men of another kind, when I get
them to be honest enough to own the truth, think just the reverse:
that my life must be a dreadful bore in its normal state, though
pleasant for the exceptional few days they pass here.'

'I could live here always!' he said, and with such a tone and look
of unconscious revelation that Elfride was startled to find that
her harmonies had fired a small Troy, in the shape of Stephen's
heart. She said quickly:

'But you can't live here always.'

'Oh no.' And he drew himself in with the sensitiveness of a snail.

Elfride's emotions were sudden as his in kindling, but the least
of woman's lesser infirmities--love of admiration--caused an
inflammable disposition on his part, so exactly similar to her
own, to appear as meritorious in him as modesty made her own seem
culpable in her.

Chapter IV

'Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap.'

For reasons of his own, Stephen Smith was stirring a short time
after dawn the next morning. From the window of his room he could
see, first, two bold escarpments sloping down together like the
letter V. Towards the bottom, like liquid in a funnel, appeared
the sea, gray and small. On the brow of one hill, of rather
greater altitude than its neighbour, stood the church which was to
be the scene of his operations. The lonely edifice was black and
bare, cutting up into the sky from the very tip of the hill. It
had a square mouldering tower, owning neither battlement nor
pinnacle, and seemed a monolithic termination, of one substance
with the ridge, rather than a structure raised thereon. Round the
church ran a low wall; over-topping the wall in general level was
the graveyard; not as a graveyard usually is, a fragment of
landscape with its due variety of chiaro-oscuro, but a mere
profile against the sky, serrated with the outlines of graves and
a very few memorial stones. Not a tree could exist up there:
nothing but the monotonous gray-green grass.

Five minutes after this casual survey was made his bedroom was
empty, and its occupant had vanished quietly from the house.

At the end of two hours he was again in the room, looking warm and
glowing. He now pursued the artistic details of dressing, which
on his first rising had been entirely omitted. And a very
blooming boy he looked, after that mysterious morning scamper.
His mouth was a triumph of its class. It was the cleanly-cut,
piquantly pursed-up mouth of William Pitt, as represented in the
well or little known bust by Nollekens--a mouth which is in itself
a young man's fortune, if properly exercised. His round chin,
where its upper part turned inward, still continued its perfect
and full curve, seeming to press in to a point the bottom of his
nether lip at their place of junction.

Once he murmured the name of Elfride. Ah, there she was! On the
lawn in a plain dress, without hat or bonnet, running with a boy's
velocity, superadded to a girl's lightness, after a tame rabbit
she was endeavouring to capture, her strategic intonations of
coaxing words alternating with desperate rushes so much out of
keeping with them, that the hollowness of such expressions was but
too evident to her pet, who darted and dodged in carefully timed
counterpart.

The scene down there was altogether different from that of the
hills. A thicket of shrubs and trees enclosed the favoured spot
from the wilderness without; even at this time of the year the
grass was luxuriant there. No wind blew inside the protecting
belt of evergreens, wasting its force upon the higher and stronger
trees forming the outer margin of the grove.

Then he heard a heavy person shuffling about in slippers, and
calling 'Mr. Smith!' Smith proceeded to the study, and found Mr.
Swancourt. The young man expressed his gladness to see his host
downstairs.

'Oh yes; I knew I should soon be right again. I have not made the
acquaintance of gout for more than two years, and it generally
goes off the second night. Well, where have you been this
morning? I saw you come in just now, I think!'

'Yes; I have been for a walk.'

'Start early?'

'Yes.'

'Very early, I think?'

'Yes, it was rather early.'

'Which way did you go? To the sea, I suppose. Everybody goes
seaward.'

'No; I followed up the river as far as the park wall.'

'You are different from your kind. Well, I suppose such a wild
place is a novelty, and so tempted you out of bed?'

'Not altogether a novelty. I like it.'

The youth seemed averse to explanation.

'You must, you must; to go cock-watching the morning after a
journey of fourteen or sixteen hours. But there's no accounting
for tastes, and I am glad to see that yours are no meaner. After
breakfast, but not before, I shall be good for a ten miles' walk,
Master Smith.'

Certainly there seemed nothing exaggerated in that assertion. Mr.
Swancourt by daylight showed himself to be a man who, in common
with the other two people under his roof, had really strong claims
to be considered handsome,--handsome, that is, in the sense in
which the moon is bright: the ravines and valleys which, on a
close inspection, are seen to diversify its surface being left out
of the argument. His face was of a tint that never deepened upon
his cheeks nor lightened upon his forehead, but remained uniform
throughout; the usual neutral salmon-colour of a man who feeds
well--not to say too well--and does not think hard; every pore
being in visible working order. His tout ensemble was that of a
highly improved class of farmer, dressed up in the wrong clothes;
that of a firm-standing perpendicular man, whose fall would have
been backwards indirection if he had ever lost his balance.

The vicar's background was at present what a vicar's background
should be, his study. Here the consistency ends. All along the
chimneypiece were ranged bottles of horse, pig, and cow medicines,
and against the wall was a high table, made up of the fragments of
an old oak Iychgate. Upon this stood stuffed specimens of owls,
divers, and gulls, and over them bunches of wheat and barley ears,
labelled with the date of the year that produced them. Some cases
and shelves, more or less laden with books, the prominent titles
of which were Dr. Brown's 'Notes on the Romans,' Dr. Smith's
'Notes on the Corinthians,' and Dr. Robinson's 'Notes on the
Galatians, Ephesians, and Philippians,' just saved the character
of the place, in spite of a girl's doll's-house standing above
them, a marine aquarium in the window, and Elfride's hat hanging
on its corner.

'Business, business!' said Mr. Swancourt after breakfast. He began
to find it necessary to act the part of a fly-wheel towards the
somewhat irregular forces of his visitor.

They prepared to go to the church; the vicar, on second thoughts,
mounting his coal-black mare to avoid exerting his foot too much
at starting. Stephen said he should want a man to assist him.
'Worm!' the vicar shouted.

A minute or two after a voice was heard round the corner of the
building, mumbling, 'Ah, I used to be strong enough, but 'tis
altered now! Well, there, I'm as independent as one here and
there, even if they do write 'squire after their names.'

'What's the matter?' said the vicar, as William Worm appeared;
when the remarks were repeated to him.

'Worm says some very true things sometimes,' Mr. Swancourt said,
turning to Stephen. 'Now, as regards that word "esquire." Why,
Mr. Smith, that word "esquire" is gone to the dogs,--used on the
letters of every jackanapes who has a black coat. Anything else,
Worm?'

'Ay, the folk have begun frying again!'

'Dear me! I'm sorry to hear that.'

'Yes,' Worm said groaningly to Stephen, 'I've got such a noise in
my head that there's no living night nor day. 'Tis just for all
the world like people frying fish: fry, fry, fry, all day long in
my poor head, till I don't know whe'r I'm here or yonder. There,
God A'mighty will find it out sooner or later, I hope, and relieve
me.'

'Now, my deafness,' said Mr. Swancourt impressively, 'is a dead
silence; but William Worm's is that of people frying fish in his
head. Very remarkable, isn't it?'

'I can hear the frying-pan a-fizzing as naterel as life,' said
Worm corroboratively.

'Yes, it is remarkable,' said Mr. Smith.

'Very peculiar, very peculiar,' echoed the vicar; and they all
then followed the path up the hill, bounded on each side by a
little stone wall, from which gleamed fragments of quartz and
blood-red marbles, apparently of inestimable value, in their
setting of brown alluvium. Stephen walked with the dignity of a
man close to the horse's head, Worm stumbled along a stone's throw
in the rear, and Elfride was nowhere in particular, yet
everywhere; sometimes in front, sometimes behind, sometimes at the
sides, hovering about the procession like a butterfly; not
definitely engaged in travelling, yet somehow chiming in at points
with the general progress.

The vicar explained things as he went on: 'The fact is, Mr. Smith,
I didn't want this bother of church restoration at all, but it was
necessary to do something in self-defence, on account of those d----
dissenters: I use the word in its scriptural meaning, of
course, not as an expletive.'

'How very odd!' said Stephen, with the concern demanded of serious
friendliness.

'Odd? That's nothing to how it is in the parish of Twinkley. Both
the churchwardens are----; there, I won't say what they are; and
the clerk and the sexton as well.'

'How very strange!' said Stephen.

'Strange? My dear sir, that's nothing to how it is in the parish
of Sinnerton. However, as to our own parish, I hope we shall make
some progress soon.'

'You must trust to circumstances.'

'There are no circumstances to trust to. We may as well trust in
Providence if we trust at all. But here we are. A wild place,
isn't it? But I like it on such days as these.'

The churchyard was entered on this side by a stone stile, over
which having clambered, you remained still on the wild hill, the
within not being so divided from the without as to obliterate the
sense of open freedom. A delightful place to be buried in,
postulating that delight can accompany a man to his tomb under any
circumstances. There was nothing horrible in this churchyard, in
the shape of tight mounds bonded with sticks, which shout
imprisonment in the ears rather than whisper rest; or trim garden-
flowers, which only raise images of people in new black crape and
white handkerchiefs coming to tend them; or wheel-marks, which
remind us of hearses and mourning coaches; or cypress-bushes,
which make a parade of sorrow; or coffin-boards and bones lying
behind trees, showing that we are only leaseholders of our graves.
No; nothing but long, wild, untutored grass, diversifying the
forms of the mounds it covered,--themselves irregularly shaped,
with no eye to effect; the impressive presence of the old mountain
that all this was a part of being nowhere excluded by disguising
art. Outside were similar slopes and similar grass; and then the
serene impassive sea, visible to a width of half the horizon, and
meeting the eye with the effect of a vast concave, like the
interior of a blue vessel. Detached rocks stood upright afar, a
collar of foam girding their bases, and repeating in its whiteness
the plumage of a countless multitude of gulls that restlessly
hovered about.

'Now, Worm!' said Mr. Swancourt sharply; and Worm started into an
attitude of attention at once to receive orders. Stephen and
himself were then left in possession, and the work went on till
early in the afternoon, when dinner was announced by Unity of the
vicarage kitchen running up the hill without a bonnet.

Elfride did not make her appearance inside the building till late
in the afternoon, and came then by special invitation from Stephen
during dinner. She looked so intensely LIVING and full of
movement as she came into the old silent place, that young Smith's
world began to be lit by 'the purple light' in all its
definiteness. Worm was got rid of by sending him to measure the
height of the tower.

What could she do but come close--so close that a minute arc of
her skirt touched his foot--and asked him how he was getting on
with his sketches, and set herself to learn the principles of
practical mensuration as applied to irregular buildings? Then she
must ascend the pulpit to re-imagine for the hundredth time how it
would seem to be a preacher.

Presently she leant over the front of the pulpit.

'Don't you tell papa, will you, Mr. Smith, if I tell you
something?' she said with a sudden impulse to make a confidence.

'Oh no, that I won't,' said he, staring up.

'Well, I write papa's sermons for him very often, and he preaches
them better than he does his own; and then afterwards he talks to
people and to me about what he said in his sermon to-day, and
forgets that I wrote it for him. Isn't it absurd?'

'How clever you must be!' said Stephen. 'I couldn't write a
sermon for the world.'

'Oh, it's easy enough,' she said, descending from the pulpit and
coming close to him to explain more vividly. 'You do it like
this. Did you ever play a game of forfeits called "When is it?
where is it? what is it?"'

'No, never.'

'Ah, that's a pity, because writing a sermon is very much like
playing that game. You take the text. You think, why is it? what
is it? and so on. You put that down under "Generally." Then you
proceed to the First, Secondly, and Thirdly. Papa won't have
Fourthlys--says they are all my eye. Then you have a final
Collectively, several pages of this being put in great black
brackets, writing opposite, "LEAVE THIS OUT IF THE FARMERS ARE
FALLING ASLEEP." Then comes your In Conclusion, then A Few Words
And I Have Done. Well, all this time you have put on the back of
each page, "KEEP YOUR VOICE DOWN"--I mean,' she added, correcting
herself, 'that's how I do in papa's sermon-book, because otherwise
he gets louder and louder, till at last he shouts like a farmer up
a-field. Oh, papa is so funny in some things!'

Then, after this childish burst of confidence, she was frightened,
as if warned by womanly instinct, which for the moment her ardour
had outrun, that she had been too forward to a comparative
stranger.

Elfride saw her father then, and went away into the wind, being
caught by a gust as she ascended the churchyard slope, in which
gust she had the motions, without the motives, of a hoiden; the
grace, without the self-consciousness, of a pirouetter. She
conversed for a minute or two with her father, and proceeded
homeward, Mr. Swancourt coming on to the church to Stephen. The
wind had freshened his warm complexion as it freshens the glow of
a brand. He was in a mood of jollity, and watched Elfride down
the hill with a smile.

'You little flyaway! you look wild enough now,' he said, and
turned to Stephen. 'But she's not a wild child at all, Mr. Smith.
As steady as you; and that you are steady I see from your
diligence here.'

'I think Miss Swancourt very clever,' Stephen observed.

'Yes, she is; certainly, she is,' said papa, turning his voice as
much as possible to the neutral tone of disinterested criticism.
'Now, Smith, I'll tell you something; but she mustn't know it for
the world--not for the world, mind, for she insists upon keeping
it a dead secret. Why, SHE WRITES MY SERMONS FOR ME OFTEN, and a
very good job she makes of them!'

'She can do anything.'

'She can do that. The little rascal has the very trick of the
trade. But, mind you, Smith, not a word about it to her, not a
single word!'

'Not a word,' said Smith.

'Look there,' said Mr. Swancourt. 'What do you think of my
roofing?' He pointed with his walking-stick at the chancel roof

'Did you do that, sir?'

'Yes, I worked in shirt-sleeves all the time that was going on. I
pulled down the old rafters, fixed the new ones, put on the
battens, slated the roof, all with my own hands, Worm being my
assistant. We worked like slaves, didn't we, Worm?'

'Ay, sure, we did; harder than some here and there--hee, hee!'
said William Worm, cropping up from somewhere. 'Like slaves, 'a
b'lieve--hee, hee! And weren't ye foaming mad, sir, when the nails
wouldn't go straight? Mighty I! There, 'tisn't so bad to cuss and
keep it in as to cuss and let it out, is it, sir?'

'Well--why?'

'Because you, sir, when ye were a-putting on the roof, only used
to cuss in your mind, which is, I suppose, no harm at all.'

'I don't think you know what goes on in my mind, Worm.'

'Oh, doan't I, sir--hee, hee! Maybe I'm but a poor wambling thing,
sir, and can't read much; but I can spell as well as some here and
there. Doan't ye mind, sir, that blustrous night when ye asked me
to hold the candle to ye in yer workshop, when you were making a
new chair for the chancel?'

'Yes; what of that?'

'I stood with the candle, and you said you liked company, if 'twas
only a dog or cat--maning me; and the chair wouldn't do nohow.'

'Ah, I remember.'

'No; the chair wouldn't do nohow. 'A was very well to look at;
but, Lord!----'

'Worm, how often have I corrected you for irreverent speaking?'

'--'A was very well to look at, but you couldn't sit in the chair
nohow. 'Twas all a-twist wi' the chair, like the letter Z,
directly you sat down upon the chair. "Get up, Worm," says you,
when you seed the chair go all a-sway wi' me. Up you took the
chair, and flung en like fire and brimstone to t'other end of your
shop--all in a passion. "Damn the chair!" says I. "Just what I
was thinking," says you, sir. "I could see it in your face, sir,"
says I, "and I hope you and God will forgi'e me for saying what
you wouldn't." To save your life you couldn't help laughing, sir,
at a poor wambler reading your thoughts so plain. Ay, I'm as wise
as one here and there.'

'I thought you had better have a practical man to go over the
church and tower with you,' Mr. Swancourt said to Stephen the
following morning, 'so I got Lord Luxellian's permission to send
for a man when you came. I told him to be there at ten o'clock.
He's a very intelligent man, and he will tell you all you want to
know about the state of the walls. His name is John Smith.'

Elfride did not like to be seen again at the church with Stephen.
'I will watch here for your appearance at the top of the tower,'
she said laughingly. 'I shall see your figure against the sky.'

'And when I am up there I'll wave my handkerchief to you, Miss
Swancourt,' said Stephen. 'In twelve minutes from this present
moment,' he added, looking at his watch, 'I'll be at the summit
and look out for you.'

She went round to the corner of the sbrubbery, whence she could
watch him down the slope leading to the foot of the hill on which
the church stood. There she saw waiting for him a white spot--a
mason in his working clothes. Stephen met this man and stopped.

To her surprise, instead of their moving on to the churchyard,
they both leisurely sat down upon a stone close by their meeting-
place, and remained as if in deep conversation. Elfride looked at
the time; nine of the twelve minutes had passed, and Stephen
showed no signs of moving. More minutes passed--she grew cold
with waiting, and shivered. It was not till the end of a quarter
of an hour that they began to slowly wend up the hill at a snail's
pace.

'Rude and unmannerly!' she said to herself, colouring with pique.
'Anybody would think he was in love with that horrid mason instead
of with----'

The sentence remained unspoken, though not unthought.

She returned to the porch.

'Is the man you sent for a lazy, sit-still, do-nothing kind of
man?' she inquired of her father.

'No,' he said surprised; 'quite the reverse. He is Lord
Luxellian's master-mason, John Smith.'

'Oh,' said Elfride indifferently, and returned towards her bleak
station, and waited and shivered again. It was a trifle, after
all--a childish thing--looking out from a tower and waving a
handkerchief. But her new friend had promised, and why should he
tease her so? The effect of a blow is as proportionate to the
texture of the object struck as to its own momentum; and she had
such a superlative capacity for being wounded that little hits
struck her hard.

It was not till the end of half an hour that two figures were seen
above the parapet of the dreary old pile, motionless as bitterns
on a ruined mosque. Even then Stephen was not true enough to
perform what he was so courteous to promise, and he vanished
without making a sign.

He returned at midday. Elfride looked vexed when unconscious that
his eyes were upon her; when conscious, severe. However, her
attitude of coldness had long outlived the coldness itself, and
she could no longer utter feigned words of indifference.

'Ah, you weren't kind to keep me waiting in the cold, and break
your promise,' she said at last reproachfully, in tones too low
for her father's powers of hearing.

'Forgive, forgive me!' said Stephen with dismay. 'I had
forgotten--quite forgotten! Something prevented my remembering.'

'Any further explanation?' said Miss Capricious, pouting.

He was silent for a few minutes, and looked askance.

'None,' he said, with the accent of one who concealed a sin.

Chapter V

'Bosom'd high in tufted trees.'

It was breakfast time.

As seen from the vicarage dining-room, which took a warm tone of
light from the fire, the weather and scene outside seemed to have
stereotyped themselves in unrelieved shades of gray. The long-
armed trees and shrubs of juniper, cedar, and pine varieties, were
grayish black; those of the broad-leaved sort, together with the
herbage, were grayish-green; the eternal hills and tower behind
them were grayish-brown; the sky, dropping behind all, gray of the
purest melancholy.

Yet in spite of this sombre artistic effect, the morning was not
one which tended to lower the spirits. It was even cheering. For
it did not rain, nor was rain likely to fall for many days to
come.

Elfride had turned from the table towards the fire and was idly
elevating a hand-screen before her face, when she heard the click
of a little gate outside.

'Ah, here's the postman!' she said, as a shuffling, active man
came through an opening in the shrubbery and across the lawn. She
vanished, and met him in the porch, afterwards coming in with her
hands behind her back.

'How many are there? Three for papa, one for Mr. Smith, none for
Miss Swancourt. And, papa, look here, one of yours is from--whom
do you think?--Lord Luxellian. And it has something HARD in it--a
lump of something. I've been feeling it through the envelope, and
can't think what it is.'

'What does Luxellian write for, I wonder?' Mr. Swancourt had said
simultaneously with her words. He handed Stephen his letter, and
took his own, putting on his countenance a higher class of look
than was customary, as became a poor gentleman who was going to
read a letter from a peer.

Stephen read his missive with a countenance quite the reverse of
the vicar's.

'PERCY PLACE, Thursday Evening.
'DEAR SMITH,--Old H. is in a towering rage with you for being so
long about the church sketches. Swears you are more trouble than
you are worth. He says I am to write and say you are to stay no
longer on any consideration--that he would have done it all in
three hours very easily. I told him that you were not like an
experienced hand, which he seemed to forget, but it did not make
much difference. However, between you and me privately, if I were
you I would not alarm myself for a day or so, if I were not
inclined to return. I would make out the week and finish my
spree. He will blow up just as much if you appear here on
Saturday as if you keep away till Monday morning.--Yours very
truly,
'SIMPKINS JENKINS.

'Dear me--very awkward!' said Stephen, rather en l'air, and
confused with the kind of confusion that assails an understrapper
when he has been enlarged by accident to the dimensions of a
superior, and is somewhat rudely pared down to his original size.

'What is awkward?' said Miss Swancourt.

Smith by this time recovered his equanimity, and with it the
professional dignity of an experienced architect.

'Important business demands my immediate presence in London, I
regret to say,' he replied.

'What! Must you go at once?' said Mr. Swancourt, looking over the
edge of his letter. 'Important business? A young fellow like you
to have important business!'

'The truth is,' said Stephen blushing, and rather ashamed of
having pretended even so slightly to a consequence which did not
belong to him,--'the truth is, Mr. Hewby has sent to say I am to
come home; and I must obey him.'

'I see; I see. It is politic to do so, you mean. Now I can see
more than you think. You are to be his partner. I booked you for
that directly I read his letter to me the other day, and the way
he spoke of you. He thinks a great deal of you, Mr. Smith, or he
wouldn't be so anxious for your return.'

Unpleasant to Stephen such remarks as these could not sound; to
have the expectancy of partnership with one of the largest-
practising architects in London thrust upon him was cheering,
however untenable he felt the idea to be. He saw that, whatever
Mr. Hewby might think, Mr. Swancourt certainly thought much of him
to entertain such an idea on such slender ground as to be
absolutely no ground at all. And then, unaccountably, his
speaking face exhibited a cloud of sadness, which a reflection on
the remoteness of any such contingency could hardly have sufficed
to cause.

Elfride was struck with that look of his; even Mr. Swancourt
noticed it.

'Well,' he said cheerfully, 'never mind that now. You must come
again on your own account; not on business. Come to see me as a
visitor, you know--say, in your holidays--all you town men have
holidays like schoolboys. When are they?'

'In August, I believe.'

'Very well; come in August; and then you need not hurry away so.
I am glad to get somebody decent to talk to, or at, in this
outlandish ultima Thule. But, by the bye, I have something to
say--you won't go to-day?'

'No; I need not,' said Stephen hesitatingly. 'I am not obliged to
get back before Monday morning.'

'Very well, then, that brings me to what I am going to propose.
This is a letter from Lord Luxellian. I think you heard me speak
of him as the resident landowner in this district, and patron of
this living?'

'I--know of him.'

'He is in London now. It seems that he has run up on business for
a day or two, and taken Lady Luxellian with him. He has written
to ask me to go to his house, and search for a paper among his
private memoranda, which he forgot to take with him.'

'What did he send in the letter?' inquired Elfride.

'The key of a private desk in which the papers are. He doesn't
like to trust such a matter to any body else. I have done such
things for him before. And what I propose is, that we make an
afternoon of it--all three of us. Go for a drive to Targan Bay,
come home by way of Endelstow House; and whilst I am looking over
the documents you can ramble about the rooms where you like. I
have the run of the house at any time, you know. The building,
though nothing but a mass of gables outside, has a splendid hall,
staircase, and gallery within; and there are a few good pictures.'

'Yes, there are,' said Stephen.

'Have you seen the place, then?

'I saw it as I came by,' he said hastily.

'Oh yes; but I was alluding to the interior. And the church--St.
Eval's--is much older than our St. Agnes' here. I do duty in that
and this alternately, you know. The fact is, I ought to have some
help; riding across that park for two miles on a wet morning is
not at all the thing. If my constitution were not well seasoned,
as thank God it is,'--here Mr. Swancourt looked down his front, as
if his constitution were visible there,--'I should be coughing and
barking all the year round. And when the family goes away, there
are only about three servants to preach to when I get there.
Well, that shall be the arrangement, then. Elfride, you will like
to go?'

Elfride assented; and the little breakfast-party separated.
Stephen rose to go and take a few final measurements at the
church, the vicar following him to the door with a mysterious
expression of inquiry on his face.

'You'll put up with our not having family prayer this morning, I
hope?' he whispered.

'Yes; quite so,' said Stephen.

'To tell you the truth,' he continued in the same undertone, 'we
don't make a regular thing of it; but when we have strangers
visiting us, I am strongly of opinion that it is the proper thing
to do, and I always do it. I am very strict on that point. But
you, Smith, there is something in your face which makes me feel
quite at home; no nonsense about you, in short. Ah, it reminds me
of a splendid story I used to hear when I was a helter-skelter
young fellow--such a story! But'--here the vicar shook his head
self-forbiddingly, and grimly laughed.

'Was it a good story?' said young Smith, smiling too.

'Oh yes; but 'tis too bad--too bad! Couldn't tell it to you for
the world!'

Stephen went across the lawn, hearing the vicar chuckling
privately at the recollection as he withdrew.

They started at three o'clock. The gray morning had resolved
itself into an afternoon bright with a pale pervasive sunlight,
without the sun itself being visible. Lightly they trotted along--
the wheels nearly silent, the horse's hoofs clapping, almost
ringing, upon the hard, white, turnpike road as it followed the
level ridge in a perfectly straight line, seeming to be absorbed
ultimately by the white of the sky.

Targan Bay--which had the merit of being easily got at--was duly
visited. They then swept round by innumerable lanes, in which not
twenty consecutive yards were either straight or level, to the
domain of Lord Luxellian. A woman with a double chin and thick
neck, like Queen Anne by Dahl, threw open the lodge gate, a little
boy standing behind her.

'I'll give him something, poor little fellow,' said Elfride,
pulling out her purse and hastily opening it. From the interior
of her purse a host of bits of paper, like a flock of white birds,
floated into the air, and were blown about in all directions.

'Well, to be sure!' said Stephen with a slight laugh.

'What the dickens is all that?' said Mr. Swancourt. 'Not halves
of bank-notes, Elfride?'

Elfride looked annoyed and guilty. 'They are only something of
mine, papa,' she faltered, whilst Stephen leapt out, and, assisted
by the lodge-keeper's little boy, crept about round the wheels and
horse's hoofs till the papers were all gathered together again.
He handed them back to her, and remounted.

'I suppose you are wondering what those scraps were?' she said, as
they bowled along up the sycamore avenue. 'And so I may as well
tell you. They are notes for a romance I am writing.'

She could not help colouring at the confession, much as she tried
to avoid it.

'A story, do you mean?' said Stephen, Mr. Swancourt half
listening, and catching a word of the conversation now and then.

'Yes; THE COURT OF KELLYON CASTLE; a romance of the fifteenth
century. Such writing is out of date now, I know; but I like
doing it.'

'A romance carried in a purse! If a highwayman were to rob you, he
would be taken in.'

'Yes; that's my way of carrying manuscript. The real reason is,
that I mostly write bits of it on scraps of paper when I am on
horseback; and I put them there for convenience.'

'What are you going to do with your romance when you have written
it?' said Stephen.

'I don't know,' she replied, and turned her head to look at the
prospect.

For by this time they had reached the precincts of Endelstow
House. Driving through an ancient gate-way of dun-coloured stone,
spanned by the high-shouldered Tudor arch, they found themselves
in a spacious court, closed by a facade on each of its three
sides. The substantial portions of the existing building dated
from the reign of Henry VIII.; but the picturesque and sheltered
spot had been the site of an erection of a much earlier date. A
licence to crenellate mansum infra manerium suum was granted by
Edward II. to 'Hugo Luxellen chivaler;' but though the faint
outline of the ditch and mound was visible at points, no sign of
the original building remained.

The windows on all sides were long and many-mullioned; the roof
lines broken up by dormer lights of the same pattern. The apex
stones of these dormers, together with those of the gables, were
surmounted by grotesque figures in rampant, passant, and couchant
variety. Tall octagonal and twisted chimneys thrust themselves
high up into the sky, surpassed in height, however, by some
poplars and sycamores at the back, which showed their gently
rocking summits over ridge and parapet. In the corners of the
court polygonal bays, whose surfaces were entirely occupied by
buttresses and windows, broke into the squareness of the
enclosure; and a far-projecting oriel, springing from a fantastic
series of mouldings, overhung the archway of the chief entrance to
the house.

As Mr. Swancourt had remarked, he had the freedom of the mansion
in the absence of its owner. Upon a statement of his errand they
were all admitted to the library, and left entirely to themselves.
Mr. Swancourt was soon up to his eyes in the examination of a heap
of papers he had taken from the cabinet described by his
correspondent. Stephen and Elfride had nothing to do but to
wander about till her father was ready.

Elfride entered the gallery, and Stephen followed her without
seeming to do so. It was a long sombre apartment, enriched with
fittings a century or so later in style than the walls of the
mansion. Pilasters of Renaissance workmanship supported a cornice
from which sprang a curved ceiling, panelled in the awkward twists
and curls of the period. The old Gothic quarries still remained
in the upper portion of the large window at the end, though they
had made way for a more modern form of glazing elsewhere.

Stephen was at one end of the gallery looking towards Elfride, who
stood in the midst, beginning to feel somewhat depressed by the
society of Luxellian shades of cadaverous complexion fixed by
Holbein, Kneller, and Lely, and seeming to gaze at and through her
in a moralizing mood. The silence, which cast almost a spell upon
them, was broken by the sudden opening of a door at the far end.

Out bounded a pair of little girls, lightly yet warmly dressed.
Their eyes were sparkling; their hair swinging about and around;
their red mouths laughing with unalloyed gladness.

'Ah, Miss Swancourt: dearest Elfie! we heard you. Are you going
to stay here? You are our little mamma, are you not--our big mamma
is gone to London,' said one.

'Let me tiss you,' said the other, in appearance very much like
the first, but to a smaller pattern.

Their pink cheeks and yellow hair were speedily intermingled with
the folds of Elfride's dress; she then stooped and tenderly
embraced them both.

'Such an odd thing,' said Elfride, smiling, and turning to
Stephen. 'They have taken it into their heads lately to call me
"little mamma," because I am very fond of them, and wore a dress
the other day something like one of Lady Luxellian's.'

These two young creatures were the Honourable Mary and the
Honourable Kate--scarcely appearing large enough as yet to bear
the weight of such ponderous prefixes. They were the only two
children of Lord and Lady Luxellian, and, as it proved, had been
left at home during their parents' temporary absence, in the
custody of nurse and governess. Lord Luxellian was dotingly fond
of the children; rather indifferent towards his wife, since she
had begun to show an inclination not to please him by giving him a
boy.

All children instinctively ran after Elfride, looking upon her
more as an unusually nice large specimen of their own tribe than
as a grown-up elder. It had now become an established rule, that
whenever she met them--indoors or out-of-doors, weekdays or
Sundays--they were to be severally pressed against her face and
bosom for the space of a quarter of a minute, and other--wise made
much of on the delightful system of cumulative epithet and caress
to which unpractised girls will occasionally abandon themselves.

A look of misgiving by the youngsters towards the door by which
they had entered directed attention to a maid-servant appearing
from the same quarter, to put an end to this sweet freedom of the
poor Honourables Mary and Kate.

'I wish you lived here, Miss Swancourt,' piped one like a
melancholy bullfinch.

'So do I,' piped the other like a rather more melancholy
bullfinch. 'Mamma can't play with us so nicely as you do. I
don't think she ever learnt playing when she was little. When
shall we come to see you?'

'As soon as you like, dears.'

'And sleep at your house all night? That's what I mean by coming
to see you. I don't care to see people with hats and bonnets on,
and all standing up and walking about.'

'As soon as we can get mamma's permission you shall come and stay
as long as ever you like. Good-bye!'

The prisoners were then led off, Elfride again turning her
attention to her guest, whom she had left standing at the remote
end of the gallery. On looking around for him he was nowhere to
be seen. Elfride stepped down to the library, thinking he might
have rejoined her father there. But Mr. Swancourt, now cheerfully
illuminated by a pair of candles, was still alone, untying packets
of letters and papers, and tying them up again.

As Elfride did not stand on a sufficiently intimate footing with
the object of her interest to justify her, as a proper young lady,
to commence the active search for him that youthful impulsiveness
prompted, and as, nevertheless, for a nascent reason connected
with those divinely cut lips of his, she did not like him to be
absent from her side, she wandered desultorily back to the oak
staircase, pouting and casting her eyes about in hope of
discerning his boyish figure.

Though daylight still prevailed in the rooms, the corridors were
in a depth of shadow--chill, sad, and silent; and it was only by
looking along them towards light spaces beyond that anything or
anybody could be discerned therein. One of these light spots she
found to be caused by a side-door with glass panels in the upper
part. Elfride opened it, and found herself confronting a
secondary or inner lawn, separated from the principal lawn front
by a shrubbery.

And now she saw a perplexing sight. At right angles to the face
of the wing she had emerged from, and within a few feet of the
door, jutted out another wing of the mansion, lower and with less
architectural character. Immediately opposite to her, in the wall
of this wing, was a large broad window, having its blind drawn
down, and illuminated by a light in the room it screened.

On the blind was a shadow from somebody close inside it--a person
in profile. The profile was unmistakably that of Stephen. It was
just possible to see that his arms were uplifted, and that his
hands held an article of some kind. Then another shadow appeared--
also in profile--and came close to him. This was the shadow of a
woman. She turned her back towards Stephen: he lifted and held
out what now proved to be a shawl or mantle--placed it carefully--
so carefully--round the lady; disappeared; reappeared in her
front--fastened the mantle. Did he then kiss her? Surely not.
Yet the motion might have been a kiss. Then both shadows swelled
to colossal dimensions--grew distorted--vanished.

Two minutes elapsed.

'Ah, Miss Swancourt! I am so glad to find you. I was looking for
you,' said a voice at her elbow--Stephen's voice. She stepped
into the passage.

'Do you know any of the members of this establishment?' said she.

'Not a single one: how should I?' he replied.

Chapter VI

'Fare thee weel awhile!'

Simultaneously with the conclusion of Stephen's remark, the sound
of the closing of an external door in their immediate
neighbourhood reached Elfride's ears. It came from the further
side of the wing containing the illuminated room. She then
discerned, by the aid of the dusky departing light, a figure,
whose sex was undistinguishable, walking down the gravelled path
by the parterre towards the river. The figure grew fainter, and
vanished under the trees.

Mr. Swancourt's voice was heard calling out their names from a
distant corridor in the body of the building. They retraced their
steps, and found him with his coat buttoned up and his hat on,
awaiting their advent in a mood of self-satisfaction at having
brought his search to a successful close. The carriage was
brought round, and without further delay the trio drove away from
the mansion, under the echoing gateway arch, and along by the
leafless sycamores, as the stars began to kindle their trembling
lights behind the maze of branches and twigs.

No words were spoken either by youth or maiden. Her unpractised
mind was completely occupied in fathoming its recent acquisition.
The young man who had inspired her with such novelty of feeling,
who had come directly from London on business to her father,
having been brought by chance to Endelstow House had, by some
means or other, acquired the privilege of approaching some lady he
had found therein, and of honouring her by petits soins of a
marked kind,--all in the space of half an hour.

What room were they standing in? thought Elfride. As nearly as
she could guess, it was Lord Luxellian's business-room, or office.
What people were in the house? None but the governess and
servants, as far as she knew, and of these he had professed a
total ignorance. Had the person she had indistinctly seen leaving
the house anything to do with the performance? It was impossible
to say without appealing to the culprit himself, and that she
would never do. The more Elfride reflected, the more certain did
it appear that the meeting was a chance rencounter, and not an
appointment. On the ultimate inquiry as to the individuality of
the woman, Elfride at once assumed that she could not be an
inferior. Stephen Smith was not the man to care about passages-
at-love with women beneath him. Though gentle, ambition was
visible in his kindling eyes; he evidently hoped for much; hoped
indefinitely, but extensively. Elfride was puzzled, and being
puzzled, was, by a natural sequence of girlish sensations, vexed
with him. No more pleasure came in recognizing that from liking
to attract him she was getting on to love him, boyish as he was
and innocent as he had seemed.

They reached the bridge which formed a link between the eastern
and western halves of the parish. Situated in a valley that was
bounded outwardly by the sea, it formed a point of depression from
which the road ascended with great steepness to West Endelstow and
the Vicarage. There was no absolute necessity for either of them
to alight, but as it was the vicar's custom after a long journey
to humour the horse in making this winding ascent, Elfride, moved
by an imitative instinct, suddenly jumped out when Pleasant had
just begun to adopt the deliberate stalk he associated with this
portion of the road.

The young man seemed glad of any excuse for breaking the silence.
'Why, Miss Swancourt, what a risky thing to do!' he exclaimed,
immediately following her example by jumping down on the other
side.

'Oh no, not at all,' replied she coldly; the shadow phenomenon at
Endelstow House still paramount within her.

Stephen walked along by himself for two or three minutes, wrapped
in the rigid reserve dictated by her tone. Then apparently
thinking that it was only for girls to pout, he came serenely
round to her side, and offered his arm with Castilian gallantry,
to assist her in ascending the remaining three-quarters of the
steep.

Here was a temptation: it was the first time in her life that
Elfride had been treated as a grown-up woman in this way--offered
an arm in a manner implying that she had a right to refuse it.
Till to-night she had never received masculine attentions beyond
those which might be contained in such homely remarks as 'Elfride,
give me your hand;' 'Elfride, take hold of my arm,' from her
father. Her callow heart made an epoch of the incident; she
considered her array of feelings, for and against. Collectively
they were for taking this offered arm; the single one of pique
determined her to punish Stephen by refusing.

'No, thank you, Mr. Smith; I can get along better by myself'

It was Elfride's first fragile attempt at browbeating a lover.
Fearing more the issue of such an undertaking than what a gentle
young man might think of her waywardness, she immediately
afterwards determined to please herself by reversing her
statement.

'On second thoughts, I will take it,' she said.

They slowly went their way up the hill, a few yards behind the
carriage.

'How silent you are, Miss Swancourt!' Stephen observed.

'Perhaps I think you silent too,' she returned.

'I may have reason to be.'

'Scarcely; it is sadness that makes people silent, and you can
have none.'

'You don't know: I have a trouble; though some might think it less
a trouble than a dilemma.'

'What is it?' she asked impulsively.

Stephen hesitated. 'I might tell,' he said; 'at the same time,
perhaps, it is as well----'

She let go his arm and imperatively pushed it from her, tossing
her head. She had just learnt that a good deal of dignity is lost
by asking a question to which an answer is refused, even ever so
politely; for though politeness does good service in cases of
requisition and compromise, it but little helps a direct refusal.
'I don't wish to know anything of it; I don't wish it,' she went
on. 'The carriage is waiting for us at the top of the hill; we
must get in;' and Elfride flitted to the front. 'Papa, here is
your Elfride!' she exclaimed to the dusky figure of the old
gentleman, as she sprang up and sank by his side without deigning
to accept aid from Stephen.

'Ah, yes!' uttered the vicar in artificially alert tones, awaking
from a most profound sleep, and suddenly preparing to alight.

'Why, what are you doing, papa? We are not home yet.'

'Oh no, no; of course not; we are not at home yet,' Mr. Swancourt
said very hastily, endeavouring to dodge back to his original
position with the air of a man who had not moved at all. 'The
fact is I was so lost in deep meditation that I forgot whereabouts
we were.' And in a minute the vicar was snoring again.

That evening, being the last, seemed to throw an exceptional shade
of sadness over Stephen Smith, and the repeated injunctions of the
vicar, that he was to come and revisit them in the summer,
apparently tended less to raise his spirits than to unearth some
misgiving.

He left them in the gray light of dawn, whilst the colours of
earth were sombre, and the sun was yet hidden in the east. Elfride
had fidgeted all night in her little bed lest none of the
household should be awake soon enough to start him, and also lest
she might miss seeing again the bright eyes and curly hair, to
which their owner's possession of a hidden mystery added a deeper
tinge of romance. To some extent--so soon does womanly interest
take a solicitous turn--she felt herself responsible for his safe
conduct. They breakfasted before daylight; Mr. Swancourt, being
more and more taken with his guest's ingenuous appearance, having
determined to rise early and bid him a friendly farewell. It was,
however, rather to the vicar's astonishment, that he saw Elfride
walk in to the breakfast-table, candle in hand.

Whilst William Worm performed his toilet (during which performance
the inmates of the vicarage were always in the habit of waiting
with exemplary patience), Elfride wandered desultorily to the
summer house. Stephen followed her thither. The copse-covered
valley was visible from this position, a mist now lying all along
its length, hiding the stream which trickled through it, though
the observers themselves were in clear air.

They stood close together, leaning over the rustic balustrading
which bounded the arbour on the outward side, and formed the crest
of a steep slope beneath Elfride constrainedly pointed out some
features of the distant uplands rising irregularly opposite. But
the artistic eye was, either from nature or circumstance, very
faint in Stephen now, and he only half attended to her
description, as if he spared time from some other thought going on
within him.

'Well, good-bye,' he said suddenly; 'I must never see you again, I
suppose, Miss Swancourt, in spite of invitations.'

His genuine tribulation played directly upon the delicate chords
of her nature. She could afford to forgive him for a concealment
or two. Moreover, the shyness which would not allow him to look
her in the face lent bravery to her own eyes and tongue.

'Oh, DO come again, Mr. Smith!' she said prettily.

'I should delight in it; but it will be better if I do not.'

'Why?'

'Certain circumstances in connection with me make it undesirable.
Not on my account; on yours.'

'Goodness! As if anything in connection with you could hurt me,'
she said with serene supremacy; but seeing that this plan of
treatment was inappropriate, she tuned a smaller note. 'Ah, I
know why you will not come. You don't want to. You'll go home to
London and to all the stirring people there, and will never want
to see us any more!'

'You know I have no such reason.'

'And go on writing letters to the lady you are engaged to, just as
before.'

'What does that mean? I am not engaged.'

'You wrote a letter to a Miss Somebody; I saw it in the letter-
rack.'

'Pooh! an elderly woman who keeps a stationer's shop; and it was
to tell her to keep my newspapers till I get back.'

'You needn't have explained: it was not my business at all.' Miss
Elfride was rather relieved to hear that statement, nevertheless.
'And you won't come again to see my father?' she insisted.

'I should like to--and to see you again, but----'

'Will you reveal to me that matter you hide?' she interrupted
petulantly.

'No; not now.'

She could not but go on, graceless as it might seem.

'Tell me this,' she importuned with a trembling mouth. 'Does any
meeting of yours with a lady at Endelstow Vicarage clash with--any
interest you may take in me?'

He started a little. 'It does not,' he said emphatically; and
looked into the pupils of her eyes with the confidence that only
honesty can give, and even that to youth alone.

The explanation had not come, but a gloom left her. She could not
but believe that utterance. Whatever enigma might lie in the
shadow on the blind, it was not an enigma of underhand passion.

She turned towards the house, entering it through the
conservatory. Stephen went round to the front door. Mr.
Swancourt was standing on the step in his slippers. Worm was
adjusting a buckle in the harness, and murmuring about his poor
head; and everything was ready for Stephen's departure.

'You named August for your visit. August it shall be; that is, if
you care for the society of such a fossilized Tory,' said Mr.
Swancourt.

Mr. Smith only responded hesitatingly, that he should like to come
again.

'You said you would, and you must,' insisted Elfride, coming to
the door and speaking under her father's arm.

Whatever reason the youth may have had for not wishing to enter
the house as a guest, it no longer predominated. He promised, and
bade them adieu, and got into the pony-carriage, which crept up
the slope, and bore him out of their sight.

'I never was so much taken with anybody in my life as I am with
that young fellow--never! I cannot understand it--can't understand
it anyhow,' said Mr. Swancourt quite energetically to himself; and
went indoors.

Chapter VII

'No more of me you knew, my love!'

Stephen Smith revisited Endelstow Vicarage, agreeably to his
promise. He had a genuine artistic reason for coming, though no
such reason seemed to be required. Six-and-thirty old seat ends,
of exquisite fifteenth-century workmanship, were rapidly decaying
in an aisle of the church; and it became politic to make drawings
of their worm-eaten contours ere they were battered past
recognition in the turmoil of the so-called restoration.

He entered the house at sunset, and the world was pleasant again
to the two fair-haired ones. A momentary pang of disappointment
had, nevertheless, passed through Elfride when she casually
discovered that he had not come that minute post-haste from
London, but had reached the neighbourhood the previous evening.
Surprise would have accompanied the feeling, had she not
remembered that several tourists were haunting the coast at this
season, and that Stephen might have chosen to do likewise.

They did little besides chat that evening, Mr. Swancourt beginning
to question his visitor, closely yet paternally, and in good part,
on his hopes and prospects from the profession he had embraced.
Stephen gave vague answers. The next day it rained. In the
evening, when twenty-four hours of Elfride had completely
rekindled her admirer's ardour, a game of chess was proposed
between them.

The game had its value in helping on the developments of their
future.

Elfride soon perceived that her opponent was but a learner. She
next noticed that he had a very odd way of handling the pieces
when castling or taking a man. Antecedently she would have
supposed that the same performance must be gone through by all
players in the same manner; she was taught by his differing action
that all ordinary players, who learn the game by sight,
unconsciously touch the men in a stereotyped way. This impression
of indescribable oddness in Stephen's touch culminated in speech
when she saw him, at the taking of one of her bishops, push it
aside with the taking man instead of lifting it as a preliminary
to the move.

'How strangely you handle the men, Mr. Smith!'

'Do I? I am sorry for that.'

'Oh no--don't be sorry; it is not a matter great enough for
sorrow. But who taught you to play?'

'Nobody, Miss Swancourt,' he said. 'I learnt from a book lent me
by my friend Mr. Knight, the noblest man in the world.'

'But you have seen people play?'

'I have never seen the playing of a single game. This is the
first time I ever had the opportunity of playing with a living
opponent. I have worked out many games from books, and studied
the reasons of the different moves, but that is all.'

This was a full explanation of his mannerism; but the fact that a
man with the desire for chess should have grown up without being
able to see or engage in a game astonished her not a little. She
pondered on the circumstance for some time, looking into vacancy
and hindering the play.

Mr. Swancourt was sitting with his eyes fixed on the board, but
apparently thinking of other things. Half to himself he said,
pending the move of Elfride:

'"Quae finis aut quod me manet stipendium?"'

Stephen replied instantly:

'"Effare: jussas cum fide poenas luam."'

'Excellent--prompt--gratifying!' said Mr. Swancourt with feeling,
bringing down his hand upon the table, and making three pawns and
a knight dance over their borders by the shaking. 'I was musing
on those words as applicable to a strange course I am steering--
but enough of that. I am delighted with you, Mr. Smith, for it is
so seldom in this desert that I meet with a man who is gentleman
and scholar enough to continue a quotation, however trite it may
be.'

'I also apply the words to myself,' said Stephen quietly.

'You? The last man in the world to do that, I should have
thought.'

'Come,' murmured Elfride poutingly, and insinuating herself
between them, 'tell me all about it. Come, construe, construe!'

Stephen looked steadfastly into her face, and said slowly, and in
a voice full of a far-off meaning that seemed quaintly premature
in one so young:

'Quae finis WHAT WILL BE THE END, aut OR, quod stipendium WHAT
FINE, manet me AWAITS ME? Effare SPEAK OUT; luam I WILL PAY, cum
fide WITH FAITH, jussas poenas THE PENALTY REQUIRED.'

The vicar, who had listened with a critical compression of the
lips to this school-boy recitation, and by reason of his imperfect
hearing had missed the marked realism of Stephen's tone in the
English words, now said hesitatingly: 'By the bye, Mr. Smith (I
know you'll excuse my curiosity), though your translation was
unexceptionably correct and close, you have a way of pronouncing
your Latin which to me seems most peculiar. Not that the
pronunciation of a dead language is of much importance; yet your
accents and quantities have a grotesque sound to my ears. I
thought first that you had acquired your way of breathing the
vowels from some of the northern colleges; but it cannot be so
with the quantities. What I was going to ask was, if your
instructor in the classics could possibly have been an Oxford or
Cambridge man?'

'Yes; he was an Oxford man--Fellow of St. Cyprian's.'

'Really?'

'Oh yes; there's no doubt about it.

'The oddest thing ever I heard of!' said Mr. Swancourt, starting
with astonishment. 'That the pupil of such a man----'

'The best and cleverest man in England!' cried Stephen
enthusiastically.

'That the pupil of such a man should pronounce Latin in the way
you pronounce it beats all I ever heard. How long did he instruct
you?'

'Four years.'

'Four years!'

'It is not so strange when I explain,' Stephen hastened to say.
'It was done in this way--by letter. I sent him exercises and
construing twice a week, and twice a week he sent them back to me
corrected, with marginal notes of instruction. That is how I
learnt my Latin and Greek, such as it is. He is not responsible
for my scanning. He has never heard me scan a line.'

'A novel case, and a singular instance of patience!' cried the
vicar.

'On his part, not on mine. Ah, Henry Knight is one in a thousand!
I remember his speaking to me on this very subject of
pronunciation. He says that, much to his regret, he sees a time
coming when every man will pronounce even the common words of his
own tongue as seems right in his own ears, and be thought none the
worse for it; that the speaking age is passing away, to make room
for the writing age.'

Both Elfride and her father had waited attentively to hear Stephen
go on to what would have been the most interesting part of the
story, namely, what circumstances could have necessitated such an
unusual method of education. But no further explanation was
volunteered; and they saw, by the young man's manner of
concentrating himself upon the chess-board, that he was anxious to
drop the subject.

The game proceeded. Elfride played by rote; Stephen by thought.
It was the cruellest thing to checkmate him after so much labour,
she considered. What was she dishonest enough to do in her
compassion? To let him checkmate her. A second game followed; and
being herself absolutely indifferent as to the result (her playing
was above the average among women, and she knew it), she allowed
him to give checkmate again. A final game, in which she adopted
the Muzio gambit as her opening, was terminated by Elfride's
victory at the twelfth move.

Stephen looked up suspiciously. His heart was throbbing even more
excitedly than was hers, which itself had quickened when she
seriously set to work on this last occasion. Mr. Swancourt had
left the room.

'You have been trifling with me till now!' he exclaimed, his face
flushing. 'You did not play your best in the first two games?'

Elfride's guilt showed in her face. Stephen became the picture of
vexation and sadness, which, relishable for a moment, caused her
the next instant to regret the mistake she had made.

'Mr. Smith, forgive me!' she said sweetly. 'I see now, though I
did not at first, that what I have done seems like contempt for
your skill. But, indeed, I did not mean it in that sense. I
could not, upon my conscience, win a victory in those first and
second games over one who fought at such a disadvantage and so
manfully.'

He drew a long breath, and murmured bitterly, 'Ah, you are
cleverer than I. You can do everything--I can do nothing! O Miss
Swancourt!' he burst out wildly, his heart swelling in his throat,
'I must tell you how I love you! All these months of my absence I
have worshipped you.'

He leapt from his seat like the impulsive lad that he was, slid
round to her side, and almost before she suspected it his arm was
round her waist, and the two sets of curls intermingled.

So entirely new was full-blown love to Elfride, that she trembled
as much from the novelty of the emotion as from the emotion
itself. Then she suddenly withdrew herself and stood upright,
vexed that she had submitted unresistingly even to his momentary
pressure. She resolved to consider this demonstration as
premature.

'You must not begin such things as those,' she said with
coquettish hauteur of a very transparent nature 'And--you must not
do so again--and papa is coming.'

'Let me kiss you--only a little one,' he said with his usual
delicacy, and without reading the factitiousness of her manner.

'No; not one.'

'Only on your cheek?'

'No.'

'Forehead?'

'Certainly not.'

'You care for somebody else, then? Ah, I thought so!'

'I am sure I do not.'

'Nor for me either?'

'How can I tell?' she said simply, the simplicity lying merely in
the broad outlines of her manner and speech. There were the
semitone of voice and half-hidden expression of eyes which tell
the initiated how very fragile is the ice of reserve at these
times.

Footsteps were heard. Mr. Swancourt then entered the room, and
their private colloquy ended.

The day after this partial revelation, Mr. Swancourt proposed a
drive to the cliffs beyond Targan Bay, a distance of three or four
miles.

Half an hour before the time of departure a crash was heard in the
back yard, and presently Worm came in, saying partly to the world
in general, part]y to himself, and slightly to his auditors:

'Ay, ay, sure! That frying of fish will be the end of William
Worm. They be at it again this morning--same as ever--fizz, fizz,
fizz!'

'Your head bad again, Worm?' said Mr. Swancourt. 'What was that
noise we heard in the yard?'

'Ay, sir, a weak wambling man am I; and the frying have been going
on in my poor head all through the long night and this morning as
usual; and I was so dazed wi' it that down fell a piece of leg-
wood across the shaft of the pony-shay, and splintered it off.
"Ay," says I, "I feel it as if 'twas my own shay; and though I've
done it, and parish pay is my lot if I go from here, perhaps I am
as independent as one here and there."'

'Dear me, the shaft of the carriage broken!' cried Elfride. She
was disappointed: Stephen doubly so. The vicar showed more warmth
of temper than the accident seemed to demand, much to Stephen's
uneasiness and rather to his surprise. He had not supposed so
much latent sternness could co-exist with Mr. Swancourt's
frankness and good-nature.

'You shall not be disappointed,' said the vicar at length. 'It is
almost too long a distance for you to walk. Elfride can trot down
on her pony, and you shall have my old nag, Smith.'

Elfride exclaimed triumphantly, 'You have never seen me on
horseback--Oh, you must!' She looked at Stephen and read his
thoughts immediately. 'Ah, you don't ride, Mr. Smith?'

'I am sorry to say I don't.'

'Fancy a man not able to ride!' said she rather pertly.

The vicar came to his rescue. 'That's common enough; he has had
other lessons to learn. Now, I recommend this plan: let Elfride
ride on horseback, and you, Mr. Smith, walk beside her.'

The arrangement was welcomed with secret delight by Stephen. It
seemed to combine in itself all the advantages of a long slow
ramble with Elfride, without the contingent possibility of the
enjoyment being spoilt by her becoming weary. The pony was
saddled and brought round.

'Now, Mr. Smith,' said the lady imperatively, coming downstairs,
and appearing in her riding-habit, as she always did in a change
of dress, like a new edition of a delightful volume, 'you have a
task to perform to-day. These earrings are my very favourite
darling ones; but the worst of it is that they have such short
hooks that they are liable to be dropped if I toss my head about
much, and when I am riding I can't give my mind to them. It would
be doing me knight service if you keep your eyes fixed upon them,
and remember them every minute of the day, and tell me directly I
drop one. They have had such hairbreadth escapes, haven't they,
Unity?' she continued to the parlour-maid who was standing at the
door.

'Yes, miss, that they have!' said Unity with round-eyed
commiseration.

'Once 'twas in the lane that I found one of them,' pursued Elfride
reflectively.

'And then 'twas by the gate into Eighteen Acres,' Unity chimed in.

'And then 'twas on the carpet in my own room,' rejoined Elfride
merrily.

'And then 'twas dangling on the embroidery of your petticoat,
miss; and then 'twas down your back, miss, wasn't it? And oh, what
a way you was in, miss, wasn't you? my! until you found it!'

Stephen took Elfride's slight foot upon his hand: 'One, two,
three, and up!' she said.

Unfortunately not so. He staggered and lifted, and the horse
edged round; and Elfride was ultimately deposited upon the ground
rather more forcibly than was pleasant. Smith looked all
contrition.

'Never mind,' said the vicar encouragingly; 'try again! 'Tis a
little accomplishment that requires some practice, although it
looks so easy. Stand closer to the horse's head, Mr. Smith.'

'Indeed, I shan't let him try again,' said she with a microscopic
look of indignation. 'Worm, come here, and help me to mount.'
Worm stepped forward, and she was in the saddle in a trice.

Then they moved on, going for some distance in silence, the hot
air of the valley being occasionally brushed from their faces by a
cool breeze, which wound its way along ravines leading up from the
sea.

'I suppose,' said Stephen, 'that a man who can neither sit in a
saddle himself nor help another person into one seems a useless
incumbrance; but, Miss Swancourt, I'll learn to do it all for your
sake; I will, indeed.'

'What is so unusual in you,' she said, in a didactic tone
justifiable in a horsewoman's address to a benighted walker, 'is
that your knowledge of certain things should be combined with your
ignorance of certain other things.'

Stephen lifted his eyes earnestly to hers.

'You know,' he said, 'it is simply because there are so many other
things to be learnt in this wide world that I didn't trouble about
that particular bit of knowledge. I thought it would be useless
to me; but I don't think so now. I will learn riding, and all
connected with it, because then you would like me better. Do you
like me much less for this?'

She looked sideways at him with critical meditation tenderly
rendered.

'Do I seem like LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI?' she began suddenly,
without replying to his question. 'Fancy yourself saying, Mr.
Smith:

"I sat her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A fairy's song,
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew; "

and that's all she did.'

'No, no,' said the young man stilly, and with a rising colour.

'"And sure in language strange she said,
I love thee true."'

'Not at all,' she rejoined quickly. 'See how I can gallop. Now,
Pansy, off!' And Elfride started; and Stephen beheld her light
figure contracting to the dimensions of a bird as she sank into
the distance--her hair flowing.

He walked on in the same direction, and for a considerable time
could see no signs of her returning. Dull as a flower without the
sun he sat down upon a stone, and not for fifteen minutes was any
sound of horse or rider to be heard. Then Elfride and Pansy
appeared on the hill in a round trot.

'Such a delightful scamper as we have had!' she said, her face
flushed and her eyes sparkling. She turned the horse's head,
Stephen arose, and they went on again.

'Well, what have you to say to me, Mr. Smith, after my long
absence?'

'Do you remember a question you could not exactly answer last
night--whether I was more to you than anybody else?' said he.

'I cannot exactly answer now, either.'

'Why can't you?'

'Because I don't know if I am more to you than any one else.'

'Yes, indeed, you are!' he exclaimed in a voice of intensest
appreciation, at the same time gliding round and looking into her
face.

'Eyes in eyes,' he murmured playfully; and she blushingly obeyed,
looking back into his.

'And why not lips on lips?' continued Stephen daringly.

'No, certainly not. Anybody might look; and it would be the death
of me. You may kiss my hand if you like.'

He expressed by a look that to kiss a hand through a glove, and
that a riding-glove, was not a great treat under the
circumstances.

'There, then; I'll take my glove off. Isn't it a pretty white
hand? Ah, you don't want to kiss it, and you shall not now!'

'If I do not, may I never kiss again, you severe Elfride! You know
I think more of you than I can tell; that you are my queen. I
would die for you, Elfride!'

A rapid red again filled her cheeks, and she looked at him
meditatively. What a proud moment it was for Elfride then! She
was ruling a heart with absolute despotism for the first time in
her life.

Stephen stealthily pounced upon her hand.

'No; I won't, I won't!' she said intractably; 'and you shouldn't
take me by surprise.'

There ensued a mild form of tussle for absolute possession of the
much-coveted hand, in which the boisterousness of boy and girl was
far more prominent than the dignity of man and woman. Then Pansy
became restless. Elfride recovered her position and remembered
herself.

'You make me behave in not a nice way at all!' she exclaimed, in a
tone neither of pleasure nor anger, but partaking of both. 'I
ought not to have allowed such a romp! We are too old now for that
sort of thing.'

'I hope you don't think me too--too much of a creeping-round sort
of man,' said he in a penitent tone, conscious that he too had
lost a little dignity by the proceeding.

'You are too familiar; and I can't have it! Considering the
shortness of the time we have known each other, Mr. Smith, you
take too much upon you. You think I am a country girl, and it
doesn't matter how you behave to me!'

'I assure you, Miss Swancourt, that I had no idea of freak in my
mind. I wanted to imprint a sweet--serious kiss upon your hand;
and that's all.'

'Now, that's creeping round again! And you mustn't look into my
eyes so,' she said, shaking her head at him, and trotting on a few
paces in advance. Thus she led the way out of the lane and across
some fields in the direction of the cliffs. At the boundary of
the fields nearest the sea she expressed a wish to dismount. The
horse was tied to a post. and they both followed an irregular
path, which ultimately terminated upon a flat ledge passing round
the face of the huge blue-black rock at a height about midway
between the sea and the topmost verge. There, far beneath and
before them, lay the everlasting stretch of ocean; there, upon
detached rocks, were the white screaming gulls, seeming ever
intending to settle, and yet always passing on. Right and left
ranked the toothed and zigzag line of storm-torn heights, forming
the series which culminated in the one beneath their feet.

Behind the youth and maiden was a tempting alcove and seat, formed
naturally in the beetling mass, and wide enough to admit two or
three persons. Elfride sat down, and Stephen sat beside her.

'I am afraid it is hardly proper of us to be here, either,' she
said half inquiringly. 'We have not known each other long enough
for this kind of thing, have we!'

'Oh yes,' he replied judicially; 'quite long enough.'

'How do you know?'

'It is not length of time, but the manner in which our minutes
beat, that makes enough or not enough in our acquaintanceship.'

'Yes, I see that. But I wish papa suspected or knew what a VERY
NEW THING I am doing. He does not think of it at all.'

'Darling Elfie, I wish we could be married! It is wrong for me to
say it--I know it is--before you know more; but I wish we might
be, all the same. Do you love me deeply, deeply?'

'No!' she said in a fluster.

At this point-blank denial, Stephen turned his face away
decisively, and preserved an ominous silence; the only objects of
interest on earth for him being apparently the three or four-score
sea-birds circling in the air afar off.

'I didn't mean to stop you quite,' she faltered with some alarm;
and seeing that he still remained silent, she added more
anxiously, 'If you say that again, perhaps, I will not be quite--
quite so obstinate--if--if you don't like me to be.'

'Oh, my Elfride!' he exclaimed, and kissed her.

It was Elfride's first kiss. And so awkward and unused was she;
full of striving--no relenting. There was none of those apparent
struggles to get out of the trap which only results in getting
further in: no final attitude of receptivity: no easy close of
shoulder to shoulder, hand upon hand, face upon face, and, in
spite of coyness, the lips in the right place at the supreme
moment. That graceful though apparently accidental falling into
position, which many have noticed as precipitating the end and
making sweethearts the sweeter, was not here. Why? Because
experience was absent. A woman must have had many kisses before
she kisses well.

In fact, the art of tendering the lips for these amatory salutes
follows the principles laid down in treatises on legerdemain for
performing the trick called Forcing a Card. The card is to be
shifted nimbly, withdrawn, edged under, and withal not to be
offered till the moment the unsuspecting person's hand reaches the
pack; this forcing to be done so modestly and yet so coaxingly,
that the person trifled with imagines he is really choosing what
is in fact thrust into his hand.

Well, there were no such facilities now; and Stephen was conscious
of it--first with a momentary regret that his kiss should be
spoilt by her confused receipt of it, and then with the pleasant
perception that her awkwardness was her charm.

'And you do care for me and love me?' said he.

'Yes.'

'Very much?'

'Yes.'

'And I mustn't ask you if you'll wait for me, and be my wife some
day?'

'Why not?' she said naively.

'There is a reason why, my Elfride.'

'Not any one that I know of.'

'Suppose there is something connected with me which makes it
almost impossible for you to agree to be my wife, or for your
father to countenance such an idea?'

'Nothing shall make me cease to love you: no blemish can be found
upon your personal nature. That is pure and generous, I know; and
having that, how can I be cold to you?'

'And shall nothing else affect us--shall nothing beyond my nature
be a part of my quality in your eyes, Elfie?'

'Nothing whatever,' she said with a breath of relief. 'Is that
all? Some outside circumstance? What do I care?'

'You can hardly judge, dear, till you know what has to be judged.
For that, we will stop till we get home. I believe in you, but I
cannot feel bright.'

'Love is new, and fresh to us as the dew; and we are together. As
the lover's world goes, this is a great deal. Stephen, I fancy I
see the difference between me and you--between men and women
generally, perhaps. I am content to build happiness on any
accidental basis that may lie near at hand; you are for making a
world to suit your happiness.'

'Elfride, you sometimes say things which make you seem suddenly to
become five years older than you are, or than I am; and that
remark is one. I couldn't think so OLD as that, try how I
might....And no lover has ever kissed you before?'

'Never.'

'I knew that; you were so unused. You ride well, but you don't
kiss nicely at all; and I was told once, by my friend Knight, that
that is an excellent fault in woman.'

'Now, come; I must mount again, or we shall not be home by dinner-
time.' And they returned to where Pansy stood tethered. 'Instead
of entrusting my weight to a young man's unstable palm,' she
continued gaily, 'I prefer a surer "upping-stock" (as the
villagers call it), in the form of a gate. There--now I am myself
again.'

They proceeded homeward at the same walking pace.

Her blitheness won Stephen out of his thoughtfulness, and each
forgot everything but the tone of the moment.

'What did you love me for?' she said, after a long musing look at
a flying bird.

'I don't know,' he replied idly.

'Oh yes, you do,' insisted Elfride.

'Perhaps, for your eyes.'

'What of them?--now, don't vex me by a light answer. What of my
eyes?'

'Oh, nothing to be mentioned. They are indifferently good.'

'Come, Stephen, I won't have that. What did you love me for?'

'It might have been for your mouth?'

'Well, what about my mouth?'

'I thought it was a passable mouth enough----'

'That's not very comforting.'

'With a pretty pout and sweet lips; but actually, nothing more
than what everybody has.'

'Don't make up things out of your head as you go on, there's a
dear Stephen. Now--what--did--you--love--me--for?'

'Perhaps, 'twas for your neck and hair; though I am not sure: or
for your idle blood, that did nothing but wander away from your
cheeks and back again; but I am not sure. Or your hands and arms,
that they eclipsed all other hands and arms; or your feet, that
they played about under your dress like little mice; or your
tongue, that it was of a dear delicate tone. But I am not
altogether sure.'

'Ah, that's pretty to say; but I don't care for your love, if it
made a mere flat picture of me in that way, and not being sure,
and such cold reasoning; but what you FELT I was, you know,
Stephen' (at this a stealthy laugh and frisky look into his face),
'when you said to yourself, "I'll certainly love that young
lady."'

'I never said it.'

'When you said to yourself, then, "I never will love that young
lady."'

'I didn't say that, either.'

'Then was it, "I suppose I must love that young lady?"'

'No.'

'What, then?'

''Twas much more fluctuating--not so definite.'

'Tell me; do, do.'

'It was that I ought not to think about you if I loved you truly.'

'Ah, that I don't understand. There's no getting it out of you.
And I'll not ask you ever any more--never more--to say out of the
deep reality of your heart what you loved me for.'

'Sweet tantalizer, what's the use? It comes to this sole simple
thing: That at one time I had never seen you, and I didn't love
you; that then I saw you, and I did love you. Is that enough?'

'Yes; I will make it do....I know, I think, what I love you for.
You are nice-looking, of course; but I didn't mean for that. It
is because you are so docile and gentle.'

'Those are not quite the correct qualities for a man to be loved
for,' said Stephen, in rather a dissatisfied tone of self-
criticism. 'Well, never mind. I must ask your father to allow us
to be engaged directly we get indoors. It will be for a long
time.'

'I like it the better....Stephen, don't mention it till to-
morrow.'

'Why?'

'Because, if he should object--I don't think he will; but if he
should--we shall have a day longer of happiness from our
ignorance....Well, what are you thinking of so deeply?'

'I was thinking how my dear friend Knight would enjoy this scene.
I wish he could come here.'

'You seem very much engrossed with him,' she answered, with a
jealous little toss. 'He must be an interesting man to take up so
much of your attention.'

'Interesting!' said Stephen, his face glowing with his fervour;
'noble, you ought to say.'

'Oh yes, yes; I forgot,' she said half satirically. 'The noblest
man in England, as you told us last night.'

'He is a fine fellow, laugh as you will, Miss Elfie.'

'I know he is your hero. But what does he do? anything?'

'He writes.'

'What does he write? I have never heard of his name.'

'Because his personality, and that of several others like him, is
absorbed into a huge WE, namely, the impalpable entity called the
PRESENT--a social and literary Review.'

'Is he only a reviewer?'

'ONLY, Elfie! Why, I can tell you it is a fine thing to be on the
staff of the PRESENT. Finer than being a novelist considerably.'

'That's a hit at me, and my poor COURT OF KELLYON CASTLE.'

'No, Elfride,' he whispered; 'I didn't mean that. I mean that he
is really a literary man of some eminence, and not altogether a
reviewer. He writes things of a higher class than reviews, though
he reviews a book occasionally. His ordinary productions are
social and ethical essays--all that the PRESENT contains which is
not literary reviewing.'

'I admit he must be talented if he writes for the PRESENT. We
have it sent to us irregularly. I want papa to be a subscriber,
but he's so conservative. Now the next point in this Mr. Knight--
I suppose he is a very good man.'

'An excellent man. I shall try to be his intimate friend some
day.'

'But aren't you now?'

'No; not so much as that,' replied Stephen, as if such a
supposition were extravagant. 'You see, it was in this way--he
came originally from the same place as I, and taught me things;
but I am not intimate with him. Shan't I be glad when I get
richer and better known, and hob and nob with him!' Stephen's eyes
sparkled.

A pout began to shape itself upon Elfride's soft lips. 'You think
always of him, and like him better than you do me!'

'No, indeed, Elfride. The feeling is different quite. But I do
like him, and he deserves even more affection from me than I
give.'

'You are not nice now, and you make me as jealous as possible!'
she exclaimed perversely. 'I know you will never speak to any
third person of me so warmly as you do to me of him.'

'But you don't understand, Elfride,' he said with an anxious
movement. 'You shall know him some day. He is so brilliant--no,
it isn't exactly brilliant; so thoughtful--nor does thoughtful
express him--that it would charm you to talk to him. He's a most
desirable friend, and that isn't half I could say.'

'I don't care how good he is; I don't want to know him, because he
comes between me and you. You think of him night and day, ever so
much more than of anybody else; and when you are thinking of him,
I am shut out of your mind.'

'No, dear Elfride; I love you dearly.'

'And I don't like you to tell me so warmly about him when you are
in the middle of loving me. Stephen, suppose that I and this man
Knight of yours were both drowning, and you could only save one of
us----'

'Yes--the stupid old proposition--which would I save?

'Well, which? Not me.'

'Both of you,' he said, pressing her pendent hand.

'No, that won't do; only one of us.'

'I cannot say; I don't know. It is disagreeable--quite a horrid
idea to have to handle.'

'A-ha, I know. You would save him, and let me drown, drown,
drown; and I don't care about your love!'

She had endeavoured to give a playful tone to her words, but the
latter speech was rather forced in its gaiety.

At this point in the discussion she trotted off to turn a corner
which was avoided by the footpath, the road and the path reuniting
at a point a little further on. On again making her appearance
she continually managed to look in a direction away from him, and
left him in the cool shade of her displeasure. Stephen was soon
beaten at this game of indifference. He went round and entered
the range of her vision.

'Are you offended, Elfie? Why don't you talk?'

'Save me, then, and let that Mr. Clever of yours drown. I hate
him. Now, which would you?'

'Really, Elfride, you should not press such a hard question. It
is ridiculous.'

'Then I won't be alone with you any more. Unkind, to wound me
so!' She laughed at her own absurdity but persisted.

'Come, Elfie, let's make it up and be friends.'

'Say you would save me, then, and let him drown.'

'I would save you--and him too.'

'And let him drown. Come, or you don't love me!' she teasingly
went on.

'And let him drown,' he ejaculated despairingly.

'There; now I am yours!' she said, and a woman's flush of triumph
lit her eyes.

'Only one earring, miss, as I'm alive,' said Unity on their
entering the hall.

With a face expressive of wretched misgiving, Elfride's hand flew
like an arrow to her ear.

'There!' she exclaimed to Stephen, looking at him with eyes full
of reproach.

'I quite forgot, indeed. If I had only remembered!' he answered,
with a conscience-stricken face.

She wheeled herself round, and turned into the shrubbery. Stephen
followed.

'If you had told me to watch anything, Stephen, I should have
religiously done it,' she capriciously went on, as soon as she
heard him behind her.

'Forgetting is forgivable.'

'Well, you will find it, if you want me to respect you and be
engaged to you when we have asked papa.' She considered a moment,
and added more seriously, 'I know now where I dropped it, Stephen.
It was on the cliff. I remember a faint sensation of some change
about me, but I was too absent to think of it then. And that's
where it is now, and you must go and look there.'

'I'll go at once.'

And he strode away up the valley, under a broiling sun and amid
the deathlike silence of early afternoon. He ascended, with
giddy-paced haste, the windy range of rocks to where they had sat,
felt and peered about the stones and crannies, but Elfride's stray
jewel was nowhere to be seen. Next Stephen slowly retraced his
steps, and, pausing at a cross-road to reflect a while, he left
the plateau and struck downwards across some fields, in the
direction of Endelstow House.

He walked along the path by the river without the slightest
hesitation as to its bearing, apparently quite familiar with every
inch of the ground. As the shadows began to lengthen and the
sunlight to mellow, he passed through two wicket-gates, and drew
near the outskirts of Endelstow Park. The river now ran along
under the park fence, previous to entering the grove itself, a
little further on.

Here stood a cottage, between the fence and the stream, on a
slightly elevated spot of ground, round which the river took a
turn. The characteristic feature of this snug habitation was its
one chimney in the gable end, its squareness of form disguised by
a huge cloak of ivy, which had grown so luxuriantly and extended
so far from its base, as to increase the apparent bulk of the
chimney to the dimensions of a tower. Some little distance from
the back of the house rose the park boundary, and over this were
to be seen the sycamores of the grove, making slow inclinations to
the just-awakening air.

Stephen crossed the little wood bridge in front, went up to the
cottage door, and opened it without knock or signal of any kind.

Exclamations of welcome burst from some person or persons when the
door was thrust ajar, followed by the scrape of chairs on a stone
floor, as if pushed back by their occupiers in rising from a
table. The door was closed again, and nothing could now be heard
from within, save a lively chatter and the rattle of plates.

Chapter VIII

'Allen-a-Dale is no baron or lord.'

The mists were creeping out of pools and swamps for their
pilgrimages of the night when Stephen came up to the front door of
the vicarage. Elfride was standing on the step illuminated by a
lemon-hued expanse of western sky.

'You never have been all this time looking for that earring?' she
said anxiously.

'Oh no; and I have not found it.'

'Never mind. Though I am much vexed; they are my prettiest. But,
Stephen, what ever have you been doing--where have you been? I
have been so uneasy. I feared for you, knowing not an inch of the
country. I thought, suppose he has fallen over the cliff! But now
I am inclined to scold you for frightening me so.'

'I must speak to your father now,' he said rather abruptly; 'I
have so much to say to him--and to you, Elfride.'

'Will what you have to say endanger this nice time of ours, and is
it that same shadowy secret you allude to so frequently, and will
it make me unhappy?'

'Possibly.'

She breathed heavily, and looked around as if for a prompter.

'Put it off till to-morrow,' she said.

He involuntarily sighed too.

'No; it must come to-night. Where is your father, Elfride?'

'Somewhere in the kitchen garden, I think,' she replied. 'That is
his favourite evening retreat. I will leave you now. Say all
that's to be said--do all there is to be done. Think of me
waiting anxiously for the end.' And she re-entered the house.

She waited in the drawing-room, watching the lights sink to
shadows, the shadows sink to darkness, until her impatience to
know what had occurred in the garden could no longer be
controlled. She passed round the shrubbery, unlatched the garden
door, and skimmed with her keen eyes the whole twilighted space
that the four walls enclosed and sheltered: they were not there.
She mounted a little ladder, which had been used for gathering
fruit, and looked over the wall into the field. This field
extended to the limits of the glebe, which was enclosed on that
side by a privet-hedge. Under the hedge was Mr. Swancourt,
walking up and down, and talking aloud--to himself, as it sounded
at first. No: another voice shouted occasional replies ; and this
interlocutor seemed to be on the other side of the hedge. The
voice, though soft in quality, was not Stephen's.

The second speaker must have been in the long-neglected garden of
an old manor-house hard by, which, together with a small estate
attached, had lately been purchased by a person named Troyton,
whom Elfride had never seen. Her father might have struck up an
acquaintanceship with some member of that family through the
privet-hedge, or a stranger to the neighbourhood might have
wandered thither.

Well, there was no necessity for disturbing him.

And it seemed that, after all, Stephen had not yet made his
desired communication to her father. Again she went indoors,
wondering where Stephen could be. For want of something better to
do, she went upstairs to her own little room. Here she sat down
at the open window, and, leaning with her elbow on the table and
her cheek upon her hand, she fell into meditation.

It was a hot and still August night. Every disturbance of the
silence which rose to the dignity of a noise could be heard for
miles, and the merest sound for a long distance. So she remained,
thinking of Stephen, and wishing he had not deprived her of his
company to no purpose, as it appeared. How delicate and sensitive
he was, she reflected; and yet he was man enough to have a private
mystery, which considerably elevated him in her eyes. Thus,
looking at things with an inward vision, she lost consciousness of
the flight of time.

Strange conjunctions of circumstances, particularly those of a
trivial everyday kind, are so frequent in an ordinary life, that
we grow used to their unaccountableness, and forget the question
whether the very long odds against such juxtaposition is not
almost a disproof of it being a matter of chance at all. What
occurred to Elfride at this moment was a case in point. She was
vividly imagining, for the twentieth time, the kiss of the
morning, and putting her lips together in the position another
such a one would demand, when she heard the identical operation
performed on the lawn, immediately beneath her window.

A kiss--not of the quiet and stealthy kind, but decisive, loud,
and smart.

Her face flushed and she looked out, but to no purpose. The dark
rim of the upland drew a keen sad line against the pale glow of
the sky, unbroken except where a young cedar on the lawn, that had
outgrown its fellow trees, shot its pointed head across the
horizon, piercing the firmamental lustre like a sting.

It was just possible that, had any persons been standing on the
grassy portions of the lawn, Elfride might have seen their dusky
forms. But the shrubs, which once had merely dotted the glade,
had now grown bushy and large, till they hid at least half the
enclosure containing them. The kissing pair might have been
behind some of these; at any rate, nobody was in sight.

Had no enigma ever been connected with her lover by his hints and
absences, Elfride would never have thought of admitting into her
mind a suspicion that he might be concerned in the foregoing
enactment. But the reservations he at present insisted on, while
they added to the mystery without which perhaps she would never
have seriously loved him at all, were calculated to nourish doubts
of all kinds, and with a slow flush of jealousy she asked herself,
might he not be the culprit?

Elfride glided downstairs on tiptoe, and out to the precise spot
on which she had parted from Stephen to enable him to speak
privately to her father. Thence she wandered into all the nooks
around the place from which the sound seemed to proceed--among the
huge laurestines, about the tufts of pampas grasses, amid the
variegated hollies, under the weeping wych-elm--nobody was there.
Returning indoors she called 'Unity!'

'She is gone to her aunt's, to spend the evening,' said Mr.
Swancourt, thrusting his head out of his study door, and letting
the light of his candles stream upon Elfride's face--less
revealing than, as it seemed to herself, creating the blush of
uneasy perplexity that was burning upon her cheek.

'I didn't know you were indoors, papa,' she said with surprise.
'Surely no light was shining from the window when I was on the
lawn?' and she looked and saw that the shutters were still open.

'Oh yes, I am in,' he said indifferently. 'What did you want
Unity for? I think she laid supper before she went out.'

'Did she?--I have not been to see--I didn't want her for that.'

Elfride scarcely knew, now that a definite reason was required,
what that reason was. Her mind for a moment strayed to another
subject, unimportant as it seemed. The red ember of a match was
lying inside the fender, which explained that why she had seen no
rays from the window was because the candles had only just been
lighted.

'I'll come directly,' said the vicar. 'I thought you were out
somewhere with Mr. Smith.'

Even the inexperienced Elfride could not help thinking that her
father must be wonderfully blind if he failed to perceive what was
the nascent consequence of herself and Stephen being so
unceremoniously left together; wonderfully careless, if he saw it
and did not think about it; wonderfully good, if, as seemed to her
by far the most probable supposition, he saw it and thought about
it and approved of it. These reflections were cut short by the
appearance of Stephen just outside the porch, silvered about the
head and shoulders with touches of moonlight, that had begun to
creep through the trees.

'Has your trouble anything to do with a kiss on the lawn?' she
asked abruptly, almost passionately.

'Kiss on the lawn?'

'Yes!' she said, imperiously now.

'I didn't comprehend your meaning, nor do I now exactly. I
certainly have kissed nobody on the lawn, if that is really what
you want to know, Elfride.'

'You know nothing about such a performance?'

'Nothing whatever. What makes you ask?'

'Don't press me to tell; it is nothing of importance. And,
Stephen, you have not yet spoken to papa about our engagement?'

'No,' he said regretfully, 'I could not find him directly; and
then I went on thinking so much of what you said about objections,
refusals--bitter words possibly--ending our happiness, that I
resolved to put it off till to-morrow; that gives us one more day
of delight--delight of a tremulous kind.'

'Yes; but it would be improper to be silent too long, I think,'
she said in a delicate voice, which implied that her face had
grown warm. 'I want him to know we love, Stephen. Why did you
adopt as your own my thought of delay?'

'I will explain; but I want to tell you of my secret first--to
tell you now. It is two or three hours yet to bedtime. Let us
walk up the hill to the church.'

Elfride passively assented, and they went from the lawn by a side
wicket, and ascended into the open expanse of moonlight which
streamed around the lonely edifice on the summit of the hill.

The door was locked. They turned from the porch, and walked hand
in hand to find a resting-place in the churchyard. Stephen chose
a flat tomb, showing itself to be newer and whiter than those
around it, and sitting down himself, gently drew her hand towards
him.

'No, not there,' she said.

'Why not here?'

'A mere fancy; but never mind.' And she sat down.

'Elfie, will you love me, in spite of everything that may be said
against me?'

'O Stephen, what makes you repeat that so continually and so
sadly? You know I will. Yes, indeed,' she said, drawing closer,
'whatever may be said of you--and nothing bad can be--I will cling
to you just the same. Your ways shall be my ways until I die.'

'Did you ever think what my parents might be, or what society I
originally moved in?'

'No, not particularly. I have observed one or two little points
in your manners which are rather quaint--no more. I suppose you
have moved in the ordinary society of professional people.'

'Supposing I have not--that none of my family have a profession
except me?'

'I don't mind. What you are only concerns me.'

'Where do you think I went to school--I mean, to what kind of
school?'

'Dr. Somebody's academy,' she said simply.

'No. To a dame school originally, then to a national school.'

'Only to those! Well, I love you just as much, Stephen, dear
Stephen,' she murmured tenderly, 'I do indeed. And why should you
tell me these things so impressively? What do they matter to me?'

He held her closer and proceeded:

'What do you think my father is--does for his living, that is to
say?'

'He practises some profession or calling, I suppose.'

'No; he is a mason.'

'A Freemason?'

'No; a cottager and journeyman mason.'

Elfride said nothing at first. After a while she whispered:

'That is a strange idea to me. But never mind; what does it
matter?'

'But aren't you angry with me for not telling you before?'

'No, not at all. Is your mother alive?'

'Yes.'

'Is she a nice lady?'

'Very--the best mother in the world. Her people had been well-to-
do yeomen for centuries, but she was only a dairymaid.'

'O Stephen!' came from her in whispered exclamation.

'She continued to attend to a dairy long after my father married
her,' pursued Stephen, without further hesitation. 'And I
remember very well how, when I was very young, I used to go to the
milking, look on at the skimming, sleep through the churning, and
make believe I helped her. Ah, that was a happy time enough!'

'No, never--not happy.'

'Yes, it was.'

'I don't see how happiness could be where the drudgery of dairy-
work had to be done for a living--the hands red and chapped, and
the shoes clogged....Stephen, I do own that it seems odd to regard
you in the light of--of--having been so rough in your youth, and
done menial things of that kind.' (Stephen withdrew an inch or two
from her side.) 'But I DO LOVE YOU just the same,' she continued,
getting closer under his shoulder again, 'and I don't care
anything about the past; and I see that you are all the worthier
for having pushed on in the world in such a way.'

'It is not my worthiness; it is Knight's, who pushed me.'

'Ah, always he--always he!'

'Yes, and properly so. Now, Elfride, you see the reason of his
teaching me by letter. I knew him years before he went to Oxford,
but I had not got far enough in my reading for him to entertain
the idea of helping me in classics till he left home. Then I was
sent away from the village, and we very seldom met; but he kept up
this system of tuition by correspondence with the greatest
regularity. I will tell you all the story, but not now. There is
nothing more to say now, beyond giving places, persons, and
dates.' His voice became timidly slow at this point.

'No; don't take trouble to say more. You are a dear honest fellow
to say so much as you have; and it is not so dreadful either. It
has become a normal thing that millionaires commence by going up
to London with their tools at their back, and half-a-crown in
their pockets. That sort of origin is getting so respected,' she
continued cheerfully, 'that it is acquiring some of the odour of
Norman ancestry.'

'Ah, if I had MADE my fortune, I shouldn't mind. But I am only a
possible maker of it as yet.'

'It is quite enough. And so THIS is what your trouble was?'

'I thought I was doing wrong in letting you love me without
telling you my story; and yet I feared to do so, Elfie. I dreaded
to lose you, and I was cowardly on that account.'

'How plain everything about you seems after this explanation! Your
peculiarities in chess-playing, the pronunciation papa noticed in
your Latin, your odd mixture of book-knowledge with ignorance of
ordinary social accomplishments, are accounted for in a moment.
And has this anything to do with what I saw at Lord Luxellian's?'

'What did you see?'

'I saw the shadow of yourself putting a cloak round a lady. I was
at the side door; you two were in a room with the window towards
me. You came to me a moment later.'

'She was my mother.'

'Your mother THERE!' She withdrew herself to look at him silently
in her interest.

'Elfride,' said Stephen, 'I was going to tell you the remainder
to-morrow--I have been keeping it back--I must tell it now, after
all. The remainder of my revelation refers to where my parents
are. Where do you think they live? You know them--by sight at any
rate.'

'I know them!' she said in suspended amazement.

'Yes. My father is John Smith, Lord Luxellian's master-mason, who
lives under the park wall by the river.'

'O Stephen! can it be?'

'He built--or assisted at the building of the house you live in,
years ago. He put up those stone gate piers at the lodge entrance
to Lord Luxellian's park. My grandfather planted the trees that
belt in your lawn; my grandmother--who worked in the fields with
him--held each tree upright whilst he filled in the earth: they
told me so when I was a child. He was the sexton, too, and dug
many of the graves around us.'

'And was your unaccountable vanishing on the first morning of your
arrival, and again this afternoon, a run to see your father and
mother?...I understand now; no wonder you seemed to know your way
about the village!'

'No wonder. But remember, I have not lived here since I was nine
years old. I then went to live with my uncle, a blacksmith, near
Exonbury, in order to be able to attend a national school as a day
scholar; there was none on this remote coast then. It was there I
met with my friend Knight. And when I was fifteen and had been
fairly educated by the school-master--and more particularly by
Knight--I was put as a pupil in an architect's office in that
town, because I was skilful in the use of the pencil. A full
premium was paid by the efforts of my mother and father, rather
against the wishes of Lord Luxellian, who likes my father,
however, and thinks a great deal of him. There I stayed till six
months ago, when I obtained a situation as improver, as it is
called, in a London office. That's all of me.'

'To think YOU, the London visitor, the town man, should have been
born here, and have known this village so many years before I did.
How strange--how very strange it seems to me!' she murmured.

'My mother curtseyed to you and your father last Sunday,' said
Stephen, with a pained smile at the thought of the incongruity.
'And your papa said to her, "I am glad to see you so regular at
church, JANE."'

'I remember it, but I have never spoken to her. We have only been
here eighteen months, and the parish is so large.'

'Contrast with this,' said Stephen, with a miserable laugh, 'your
father's belief in my "blue blood," which is still prevalent in
his mind. The first night I came, he insisted upon proving my
descent from one of the most ancient west-county families, on
account of my second Christian name; when the truth is, it was
given me because my grandfather was assistant gardener in the
Fitzmaurice-Smith family for thirty years. Having seen your face,
my darling, I had not heart to contradict him, and tell him what
would have cut me off from a friendly knowledge of you.'

She sighed deeply. 'Yes, I see now how this inequality may be
made to trouble us,' she murmured, and continued in a low, sad
whisper, 'I wouldn't have minded if they had lived far away. Papa
might have consented to an engagement between us if your
connection had been with villagers a hundred miles off; remoteness
softens family contrasts. But he will not like--O Stephen,
Stephen! what can I do?'

'Do?' he said tentatively, yet with heaviness. 'Give me up; let
me go back to London, and think no more of me.'

'No, no; I cannot give you up! This hopelessness in our affairs
makes me care more for you....I see what did not strike me at
first. Stephen, why do we trouble? Why should papa object? An
architect in London is an architect in London. Who inquires
there? Nobody. We shall live there, shall we not? Why need we be
so alarmed?'

'And Elfie,' said Stephen, his hopes kindling with hers, 'Knight
thinks nothing of my being only a cottager's son; he says I am as
worthy of his friendship as if I were a lord's; and if I am worthy
of his friendship, I am worthy of you, am I not, Elfride?'

'I not only have never loved anybody but you,' she said, instead
of giving an answer, 'but I have not even formed a strong
friendship, such as you have for Knight. I wish you hadn't. It
diminishes me.'

'Now, Elfride, you know better,' he said wooingly. 'And had you
really never any sweetheart at all?'

'None that was ever recognized by me as such.'

'But did nobody ever love you?'

'Yes--a man did once; very much, he said.'

'How long ago?'

'Oh, a long time.'

'How long, dearest?

'A twelvemonth.'

'That's not VERY long' (rather disappointedly).

'I said long, not very long.'

'And did he want to marry you?'

'I believe he did. But I didn't see anything in him. He was not
good enough, even if I had loved him.'

'May I ask what he was?'

'A farmer.'

'A farmer not good enough--how much better than my family!'
Stephen murmured.

'Where is he now?' he continued to Elfride.

'HERE.'

'Here! what do you mean by that?'

'I mean that he is here.'

'Where here?'

'Under us. He is under this tomb. He is dead, and we are sitting
on his grave.'

'Elfie,' said the young man, standing up and looking at the tomb,
'how odd and sad that revelation seems! It quite depresses me for
the moment.'

'Stephen! I didn't wish to sit here; but you would do so.'

'You never encouraged him?'

'Never by look, word, or sign,' she said solemnly. 'He died of
consumption, and was buried the day you first came.'

'Let us go away. I don't like standing by HIM, even if you never
loved him. He was BEFORE me.'

'Worries make you unreasonable,' she half pouted, following
Stephen at the distance of a few steps. 'Perhaps I ought to have
told you before we sat down. Yes; let us go.'

Chapter IX

'Her father did fume'

Oppressed, in spite of themselves, by a foresight of impending
complications, Elfride and Stephen returned down the hill hand in
hand. At the door they paused wistfully, like children late at
school.

Women accept their destiny more readily than men. Elfride had now
resigned herself to the overwhelming idea of her lover's sorry
antecedents; Stephen had not forgotten the trifling grievance that
Elfride had known earlier admiration than his own.

'What was that young man's name?' he inquired.

'Felix Jethway; a widow's only son.'

'I remember the family.'

'She hates me now. She says I killed him.'

Stephen mused, and they entered the porch.

'Stephen, I love only you,' she tremulously whispered. He pressed
her fingers, and the trifling shadow passed away, to admit again
the mutual and more tangible trouble.

The study appeared to be the only room lighted up. They entered,
each with a demeanour intended to conceal the inconcealable fact
that reciprocal love was their dominant chord. Elfride perceived
a man, sitting with his back towards herself, talking to her
father. She would have retired, but Mr. Swancourt had seen her.

'Come in,' he said; 'it is only Martin Cannister, come for a copy
of the register for poor Mrs. Jethway.'

Martin Cannister, the sexton, was rather a favourite with Elfride.
He used to absorb her attention by telling her of his strange
experiences in digging up after long years the bodies of persons
he had known, and recognizing them by some little sign (though in
reality he had never recognized any). He had shrewd small eyes
and a great wealth of double chin, which compensated in some
measure for considerable poverty of nose.

The appearance of a slip of paper in Cannister's hand, and a few
shillings lying on the table in front of him, denoted that the
business had been transacted, and the tenor of their conversation
went to show that a summary of village news was now engaging the
attention of parishioner and parson.

Mr. Cannister stood up and touched his forehead over his eye with
his finger, in respectful salutation of Elfride, gave half as much
salute to Stephen (whom he, in common with other villagers, had
never for a moment recognized), then sat down again and resumed
his discourse.

'Where had I got on to, sir?'

'To driving the pile,' said Mr. Swancourt.

'The pile 'twas. So, as I was saying, Nat was driving the pile in
this manner, as I might say.' Here Mr. Cannister held his walking-
stick scrupulously vertical with his left hand, and struck a blow
with great force on the knob of the stick with his right. 'John
was steadying the pile so, as I might say.' Here he gave the stick
a slight shake, and looked firmly in the various eyes around to
see that before proceeding further his listeners well grasped the
subject at that stage. 'Well, when Nat had struck some half-dozen
blows more upon the pile, 'a stopped for a second or two. John,
thinking he had done striking, put his hand upon the top o' the
pile to gie en a pull, and see if 'a were firm in the ground.' Mr.
Cannister spread his hand over the top of the stick, completely
covering it with his palm. 'Well, so to speak, Nat hadn't maned
to stop striking, and when John had put his hand upon the pile,
the beetle----'

'Oh dreadful!' said Elfride.

'The beetle was already coming down, you see, sir. Nat just
caught sight of his hand, but couldn't stop the blow in time.
Down came the beetle upon poor John Smith's hand, and squashed en
to a pummy.'

'Dear me, dear me! poor fellow!' said the vicar, with an
intonation like the groans of the wounded in a pianoforte
performance of the 'Battle of Prague.'

'John Smith, the master-mason?' cried Stephen hurriedly.

'Ay, no other; and a better-hearted man God A'mighty never made.'

'Is he so much hurt?'

'I have heard,' said Mr. Swancourt, not noticing Stephen, 'that he
has a son in London, a very promising young fellow.'

'Oh, how he must be hurt!' repeated Stephen.

'A beetle couldn't hurt very little. Well, sir, good-night t'ye;
and ye, sir; and you, miss, I'm sure.'

Mr. Cannister had been making unnoticeable motions of withdrawal,
and by the time this farewell remark came from his lips he was
just outside the door of the room. He tramped along the hall,
stayed more than a minute endeavouring to close the door properly,
and then was lost to their hearing.

Stephen had meanwhile turned and said to the vicar:

'Please excuse me this evening! I must leave. John Smith is my
father.'

The vicar did not comprehend at first.

'What did you say?' he inquired.

'John Smith is my father,' said Stephen deliberately.

A surplus tinge of redness rose from Mr. Swancourt's neck, and
came round over his face, the lines of his features became more
firmly defined, and his lips seemed to get thinner. It was
evident that a series of little circumstances, hitherto unheeded,
were now fitting themselves together, and forming a lucid picture
in Mr. Swancourt's mind in such a manner as to render useless
further explanation on Stephen's part.

'Indeed,' the vicar said, in a voice dry and without inflection.

This being a word which depends entirely upon its tone for its
meaning, Mr. Swancourt's enunciation was equivalent to no
expression at all.

'I have to go now,' said Stephen, with an agitated bearing, and a
movement as if he scarcely knew whether he ought to run off or
stay longer. 'On my return, sir, will you kindly grant me a few
minutes' private conversation?'

'Certainly. Though antecedently it does not seem possible that
there can be anything of the nature of private business between
us.'

Mr. Swancourt put on his straw hat, crossed the drawing-room, into
which the moonlight was shining, and stepped out of the French
window into the verandah. It required no further effort to
perceive what, indeed, reasoning might have foretold as the
natural colour of a mind whose pleasures were taken amid
genealogies, good dinners, and patrician reminiscences, that Mr.
Swancourt's prejudices were too strong for his generosity, and
that Stephen's moments as his friend and equal were numbered, or
had even now ceased.

Stephen moved forward as if he would follow the vicar, then as if
he would not, and in absolute perplexity whither to turn himself,
went awkwardly to the door. Elfride followed lingeringly behind
him. Before he had receded two yards from the doorstep, Unity and
Ann the housemaid came home from their visit to the village.

'Have you heard anything about John Smith? The accident is not so
bad as was reported, is it?' said Elfride intuitively.

'Oh no; the doctor says it is only a bad bruise.'

'I thought so!' cried Elfride gladly.

'He says that, although Nat believes he did not check the beetle
as it came down, he must have done so without knowing it--checked
it very considerably too; for the full blow would have knocked his
hand abroad, and in reality it is only made black-and-blue like.'

'How thankful I am!' said Stephen.

The perplexed Unity looked at him with her mouth rather than with
her eyes.

'That will do, Unity,' said Elfride magisterially; and the two
maids passed on.

'Elfride, do you forgive me?' said Stephen with a faint smile.
'No man is fair in love;' and he took her fingers lightly in his
own.

With her head thrown sideways in the Greuze attitude, she looked a
tender reproach at his doubt and pressed his hand. Stephen
returned the pressure threefold, then hastily went off to his
father's cottage by the wall of Endelstow Park.

'Elfride, what have you to say to this?' inquired her father,
coming up immediately Stephen had retired.

With feminine quickness she grasped at any straw that would enable
her to plead his cause. 'He had told me of it,' she faltered; 'so
that it is not a discovery in spite of him. He was just coming in
to tell you.'

'COMING to tell! Why hadn't he already told? I object as much, if
not more, to his underhand concealment of this, than I do to the
fact itself. It looks very much like his making a fool of me, and
of you too. You and he have been about together, and
corresponding together, in a way I don't at all approve of--in a
most unseemly way. You should have known how improper such
conduct is. A woman can't be too careful not to be seen alone
with I-don't-know-whom.'

'You saw us, papa, and have never said a word.'

'My fault, of course; my fault. What the deuce could I be
thinking of! He, a villager's son; and we, Swancourts, connections
of the Luxellians. We have been coming to nothing for centuries,
and now I believe we have got there. What shall I next invite
here, I wonder!'

Elfride began to cry at this very unpropitious aspect of affairs.
'O papa, papa, forgive me and him! We care so much for one
another, papa--O, so much! And what he was going to ask you is, if
you will allow of an engagement between us till he is a gentleman
as good as you. We are not in a hurry, dear papa; we don't want
in the least to marry now; not until he is richer. Only will you
let us be engaged, because I love him so, and he loves me?'

Mr. Swancourt's feelings were a little touched by this appeal, and
he was annoyed that such should be the case. 'Certainly not!' he
replied. He pronounced the inhibition lengthily and sonorously,
so that the 'not' sounded like 'n-o-o-o-t!'

'No, no, no; don't say it!'

'Foh! A fine story. It is not enough that I have been deluded and
disgraced by having him here,--the son of one of my village
peasants,--but now I am to make him my son-in-law! Heavens above
us, are you mad, Elfride?'

'You have seen his letters come to me ever since his first visit,
papa, and you knew they were a sort of--love-letters; and since he
has been here you have let him be alone with me almost entirely;
and you guessed, you must have guessed, what we were thinking of,
and doing, and you didn't stop him. Next to love-making comes
love-winning, and you knew it would come to that, papa.'

The vicar parried this common-sense thrust. 'I know--since you
press me so--I know I did guess some childish attachment might
arise between you; I own I did not take much trouble to prevent
it; but I have not particularly countenanced it; and, Elfride, how
can you expect that I should now? It is impossible; no father in
England would hear of such a thing.'

'But he is the same man, papa; the same in every particular; and
how can he be less fit for me than he was before?'

'He appeared a young man with well-to-do friends, and a little
property; but having neither, he is another man.'

'You inquired nothing about him?'

'I went by Hewby's introduction. He should have told me. So
should the young man himself; of course he should. I consider it
a most dishonourable thing to come into a man's house like a
treacherous I-don't-know-what.'

'But he was afraid to tell you, and so should I have been. He
loved me too well to like to run the risk. And as to speaking of
his friends on his first visit, I don't see why he should have
done so at all. He came here on business: it was no affair of
ours who his parents were. And then he knew that if he told you
he would never be asked here, and would perhaps never see me
again. And he wanted to see me. Who can blame him for trying, by
any means, to stay near me--the girl he loves? All is fair in
love. I have heard you say so yourself, papa; and you yourself
would have done just as he has--so would any man.'

'And any man, on discovering what I have discovered, would also do
as I do, and mend my mistake; that is, get shot of him again, as
soon as the laws of hospitality will allow.' But Mr. Swancourt
then remembered that he was a Christian. 'I would not, for the
world, seem to turn him out of doors,' he added; 'but I think he
will have the tact to see that he cannot stay long after this,
with good taste.'

'He will, because he's a gentleman. See how graceful his manners
are,' Elfride went on; though perhaps Stephen's manners, like the
feats of Euryalus, owed their attractiveness in her eyes rather to
the attractiveness of his person than to their own excellence.

'Ay; anybody can be what you call graceful, if he lives a little
time in a city, and keeps his eyes open. And he might have picked
up his gentlemanliness by going to the galleries of theatres, and
watching stage drawing-room manners. He reminds me of one of the
worst stories I ever heard in my life.'

'What story was that?'

'Oh no, thank you! I wouldn't tell you such an improper matter for
the world!'

'If his father and mother had lived in the north or east of
England,' gallantly persisted Elfride, though her sobs began to
interrupt her articulation, 'anywhere but here--you--would have--
only regarded--HIM, and not THEM! His station--would have--been
what--his profession makes it,--and not fixed by--his father's
humble position--at all; whom he never lives with--now. Though
John Smith has saved lots of money, and is better off than we are,
they say, or he couldn't have put his son to such an expensive
profession. And it is clever and--honourable--of Stephen, to be
the best of his family.'

'Yes. "Let a beast be lord of beasts, and his crib shall stand at
the king's mess."'

'You insult me, papa!' she burst out. 'You do, you do! He is my
own Stephen, he is!'

'That may or may not be true, Elfride,' returned her father, again
uncomfortably agitated in spite of himself 'You confuse future
probabilities with present facts,--what the young man may be with
what he is. We must look at what he is, not what an improbable
degree of success in his profession may make him. The case is
this: the son of a working-man in my parish who may or may not be
able to buy me up--a youth who has not yet advanced so far into
life as to have any income of his own deserving the name, and
therefore of his father's degree as regards station--wants to be
engaged to you. His family are living in precisely the same spot
in England as yours, so throughout this county--which is the world
to us--you would always be known as the wife of Jack Smith the
mason's son, and not under any circumstances as the wife of a
London professional man. It is the drawback, not the compensating
fact, that is talked of always. There, say no more. You may
argue all night, and prove what you will; I'll stick to my words.'

Elfride looked silently and hopelessly out of the window with
large heavy eyes and wet cheeks.

'I call it great temerity--and long to call it audacity--in
Hewby,' resumed her father. 'I never heard such a thing--giving
such a hobbledehoy native of this place such an introduction to me
as he did. Naturally you were deceived as well as I was. I don't
blame you at all, so far.' He went and searched for Mr. Hewby's
original letter. 'Here's what he said to me: "Dear Sir,--
Agreeably to your request of the 18th instant, I have arranged to
survey and make drawings," et cetera. "My assistant, Mr. Stephen
Smith"--assistant, you see he called him, and naturally I
understood him to mean a sort of partner. Why didn't he say
"clerk"?'

'They never call them clerks in that profession, because they do
not write. Stephen--Mr. Smith--told me so. So that Mr. Hewby
simply used the accepted word.'

'Let me speak, please, Elfride! "My assistant, Mr. Stephen Smith,
will leave London by the early train to-morrow morning...MANY
THANKS FOR YOUR PROPOSAL TO ACCOMMODATE HIM...YOU MAY PUT EVERY
CONFIDENCE IN HIM, and may rely upon his discernment in the matter
of church architecture." Well, I repeat that Hewby ought to be
ashamed of himself for making so much of a poor lad of that sort.'

'Professional men in London,' Elfride argued, 'don't know anything
about their clerks' fathers and mothers. They have assistants who
come to their offices and shops for years, and hardly even know
where they live. What they can do--what profits they can bring
the firm--that's all London men care about. And that is helped in
him by his faculty of being uniformly pleasant.'

'Uniform pleasantness is rather a defect than a faculty. It shows
that a man hasn't sense enough to know whom to despise.'

'It shows that he acts by faith and not by sight, as those you
claim succession from directed.'

'That's some more of what he's been telling you, I suppose! Yes, I
was inclined to suspect him, because he didn't care about sauces
of any kind. I always did doubt a man's being a gentleman if his
palate had no acquired tastes. An unedified palate is the
irrepressible cloven foot of the upstart. The idea of my bringing
out a bottle of my '40 Martinez--only eleven of them left now--to
a man who didn't know it from eighteenpenny! Then the Latin line
he gave to my quotation; it was very cut-and-dried, very; or I,
who haven't looked into a classical author for the last eighteen
years, shouldn't have remembered it. Well, Elfride, you had
better go to your room; you'll get over this bit of tomfoolery in
time.'

'No, no, no, papa,' she moaned. For of all the miseries attaching
to miserable love, the worst is the misery of thinking that the
passion which is the cause of them all may cease.

'Elfride,' said her father with rough friendliness, 'I have an
excellent scheme on hand, which I cannot tell you of now. A
scheme to benefit you and me. It has been thrust upon me for some
little time--yes, thrust upon me--but I didn't dream of its value
till this afternoon, when the revelation came. I should be most
unwise to refuse to entertain it.'

'I don't like that word,' she returned wearily. 'You have lost so
much already by schemes. Is it those wretched mines again?'

'No; not a mining scheme.'

'Railways?'

'Nor railways. It is like those mysterious offers we see
advertised, by which any gentleman with no brains at all may make
so much a week without risk, trouble, or soiling his fingers.
However, I am intending to say nothing till it is settled, though
I will just say this much, that you soon may have other fish to
fry than to think of Stephen Smith. Remember, I wish, not to be
angry, but friendly, to the young man; for your sake I'll regard
him as a friend in a certain sense. But this is enough; in a few
days you will be quite my way of thinking. There, now, go to your
bedroom. Unity shall bring you up some supper. I wish you not to
be here when he comes back.'

Chapter X

'Beneath the shelter of an aged tree.'

Stephen retraced his steps towards the cottage he had visited only
two or three hours previously. He drew near and under the rich
foliage growing about the outskirts of Endelstow Park, the spotty
lights and shades from the shining moon maintaining a race over
his head and down his back in an endless gambol. When he crossed
the plank bridge and entered the garden-gate, he saw an
illuminated figure coming from the enclosed plot towards the house
on the other side. It was his father, with his hand in a sling,
taking a general moonlight view of the garden, and particularly of
a plot of the youngest of young turnips, previous to closing the
cottage for the night.

He saluted his son with customary force. 'Hallo, Stephen! We
should ha' been in bed in another ten minutes. Come to see what's
the matter wi' me, I suppose, my lad?'

The doctor had come and gone, and the hand had been pronounced as
injured but slightly, though it might possibly have been
considered a far more serious case if Mr. Smith had been a more
important man. Stephen's anxious inquiry drew from his father
words of regret at the inconvenience to the world of his doing
nothing for the next two days, rather than of concern for the pain
of the accident. Together they entered the house.

John Smith--brown as autumn as to skin, white as winter as to
clothes--was a satisfactory specimen of the village artificer in
stone. In common with most rural mechanics, he had too much
individuality to be a typical 'working-man'--a resultant of that
beach-pebble attrition with his kind only to be experienced in
large towns, which metamorphoses the unit Self into a fraction of
the unit Class.

There was not the speciality in his labour which distinguishes the
handicraftsmen of towns. Though only a mason, strictly speaking,
he was not above handling a brick, if bricks were the order of the
day; or a slate or tile, if a roof had to be covered before the
wet weather set in, and nobody was near who could do it better.
Indeed, on one or two occasions in the depth of winter, when frost
peremptorily forbids all use of the trowel, making foundations to
settle, stones to fly, and mortar to crumble, he had taken to
felling and sawing trees. Moreover, he had practised gardening in
his own plot for so many years that, on an emergency, he might
have made a living by that calling.

Probably our countryman was not such an accomplished artificer in
a particular direction as his town brethren in the trades. But he
was, in truth, like that clumsy pin-maker who made the whole pin,
and who was despised by Adam Smith on that account and respected
by Macaulay, much more the artist nevertheless.

Appearing now, indoors, by the light of the candle, his stalwart
healthiness was a sight to see. His beard was close and knotted
as that of a chiselled Hercules; his shirt sleeves were partly
rolled up, his waistcoat unbuttoned; the difference in hue between
the snowy linen and the ruddy arms and face contrasting like the
white of an egg and its yolk. Mrs. Smith, on hearing them enter,
advanced from the pantry.

Mrs. Smith was a matron whose countenance addressed itself to the
mind rather than to the eye, though not exclusively. She retained
her personal freshness even now, in the prosy afternoon-time of
her life; but what her features were primarily indicative of was a
sound common sense behind them; as a whole, appearing to carry
with them a sort of argumentative commentary on the world in
general.

The details of the accident were then rehearsed by Stephen's
father, in the dramatic manner also common to Martin Cannister,
other individuals of the neighbourhood, and the rural world
generally. Mrs. Smith threw in her sentiments between the acts,
as Coryphaeus of the tragedy, to make the description complete.
The story at last came to an end, as the longest will, and Stephen
directed the conversation into another channel.

'Well, mother, they know everything about me now,' he said
quietly.

'Well done!' replied his father; 'now my mind's at peace.'

'I blame myself--I never shall forgive myself--for not telling
them before,' continued the young man.

Mrs. Smith at this point abstracted her mind from the former
subject. 'I don't see what you have to grieve about, Stephen,'
she said. 'People who accidentally get friends don't, as a first
stroke, tell the history of their families.'

'Ye've done no wrong, certainly,' said his father.

'No; but I should have spoken sooner. There's more in this visit
of mine than you think--a good deal more.'

'Not more than I think,' Mrs. Smith replied, looking
contemplatively at him. Stephen blushed; and his father looked
from one to the other in a state of utter incomprehension.

'She's a pretty piece enough,' Mrs. Smith continued, 'and very
lady-like and clever too. But though she's very well fit for you
as far as that is, why, mercy 'pon me, what ever do you want any
woman at all for yet?'

John made his naturally short mouth a long one, and wrinkled his
forehead, 'That's the way the wind d'blow, is it?' he said.

'Mother,' exclaimed Stephen, 'how absurdly you speak! Criticizing
whether she's fit for me or no, as if there were room for doubt on
the matter! Why, to marry her would be the great blessing of my
life--socially and practically, as well as in other respects. No
such good fortune as that, I'm afraid; she's too far above me.
Her family doesn't want such country lads as I in it.'

'Then if they don't want you, I'd see them dead corpses before I'd
want them, and go to better families who do want you.'

'Ah, yes; but I could never put up with the distaste of being
welcomed among such people as you mean, whilst I could get
indifference among such people as hers.'

'What crazy twist o' thinking will enter your head next?' said his
mother. 'And come to that, she's not a bit too high for you, or
you too low for her. See how careful I be to keep myself up. I'm
sure I never stop for more than a minute together to talk to any
journeymen people; and I never invite anybody to our party o'
Christmases who are not in business for themselves. And I talk to
several toppermost carriage people that come to my lord's without
saying ma'am or sir to 'em, and they take it as quiet as lambs.'

'You curtseyed to the vicar, mother; and I wish you hadn't.'

'But it was before he called me by my Christian name, or he would
have got very little curtseying from me!' said Mrs. Smith,
bridling and sparkling with vexation. 'You go on at me, Stephen,
as if I were your worst enemy! What else could I do with the man
to get rid of him, banging it into me and your father by side and
by seam, about his greatness, and what happened when he was a
young fellow at college, and I don't know what-all; the tongue o'
en flopping round his mouth like a mop-rag round a dairy. That 'a
did, didn't he, John?'

'That's about the size o't,' replied her husband.

'Every woman now-a-days,' resumed Mrs. Smith, 'if she marry at
all, must expect a father-in-law of a rank lower than her father.
The men have gone up so, and the women have stood still. Every
man you meet is more the dand than his father; and you are just
level wi' her.'

'That's what she thinks herself.'

'It only shows her sense. I knew she was after 'ee, Stephen--I
knew it.'

'After me! Good Lord, what next!'

'And I really must say again that you ought not to be in such a
hurry, and wait for a few years. You might go higher than a
bankrupt pa'son's girl then.'

'The fact is, mother,' said Stephen impatiently, 'you don't know
anything about it. I shall never go higher, because I don't want
to, nor should I if I lived to be a hundred. As to you saying
that she's after me, I don't like such a remark about her, for it
implies a scheming woman, and a man worth scheming for, both of
which are not only untrue, but ludicrously untrue, of this case.
Isn't it so, father?'

'I'm afraid I don't understand the matter well enough to gie my
opinion,' said his father, in the tone of the fox who had a cold
and could not smell.

'She couldn't have been very backward anyhow, considering the
short time you have known her,' said his mother. 'Well I think
that five years hence you'll be plenty young enough to think of
such things. And really she can very well afford to wait, and
will too, take my word. Living down in an out-step place like
this, I am sure she ought to be very thankful that you took notice
of her. She'd most likely have died an old maid if you hadn't
turned up.'

'All nonsense,' said Stephen, but not aloud.

'A nice little thing she is,' Mrs. Smith went on in a more
complacent tone now that Stephen had been talked down; 'there's
not a word to say against her, I'll own. I see her sometimes
decked out like a horse going to fair, and I admire her for't. A
perfect little lady. But people can't help their thoughts, and if
she'd learnt to make figures instead of letters when she was at
school 'twould have been better for her pocket; for as I said,
there never were worse times for such as she than now.'

'Now, now, mother!' said Stephen with smiling deprecation.

'But I will!' said his mother with asperity. 'I don't read the
papers for nothing, and I know men all move up a stage by
marriage. Men of her class, that is, parsons, marry squires'
daughters; squires marry lords' daughters; lords marry dukes'
daughters; dukes marry queens' daughters. All stages of gentlemen
mate a stage higher; and the lowest stage of gentlewomen are left
single, or marry out of their class.'

'But you said just now, dear mother----' retorted Stephen, unable
to resist the temptation of showing his mother her inconsistency.
Then he paused.

'Well, what did I say?' And Mrs. Smith prepared her lips for a new
campaign.

Stephen, regretting that he had begun, since a volcano might be
the consequence, was obliged to go on.

'You said I wasn't out of her class just before.'

'Yes, there, there! That's you; that's my own flesh and blood.
I'll warrant that you'll pick holes in everything your mother
says, if you can, Stephen. You are just like your father for
that; take anybody's part but mine. Whilst I am speaking and
talking and trying and slaving away for your good, you are waiting
to catch me out in that way. So you are in her class, but 'tis
what HER people would CALL marrying out of her class. Don't be so
quarrelsome, Stephen!'

Stephen preserved a discreet silence, in which he was imitated by
his father, and for several minutes nothing was heard but the
ticking of the green-faced case-clock against the wall.

'I'm sure,' added Mrs. Smith in a more philosophic tone, and as a
terminative speech, 'if there'd been so much trouble to get a
husband in my time as there is in these days--when you must make a
god-almighty of a man to get en to hae ye--I'd have trod clay for
bricks before I'd ever have lowered my dignity to marry, or
there's no bread in nine loaves.'

The discussion now dropped, and as it was getting late, Stephen
bade his parents farewell for the evening, his mother none the
less warmly for their sparring; for although Mrs. Smith and
Stephen were always contending, they were never at enmity.

'And possibly,' said Stephen, 'I may leave here altogether to-
morrow; I don't know. So that if I shouldn't call again before
returning to London, don't be alarmed, will you?'

'But didn't you come for a fortnight?' said his mother. 'And
haven't you a month's holiday altogether? They are going to turn
you out, then?'

'Not at all. I may stay longer; I may go. If I go, you had
better say nothing about my having been here, for her sake. At
what time of the morning does the carrier pass Endelstow lane?'

'Seven o'clock.'

And then he left them. His thoughts were, that should the vicar
permit him to become engaged, to hope for an engagement, or in any
way to think of his beloved Elfride, he might stay longer. Should
he be forbidden to think of any such thing, he resolved to go at
once. And the latter, even to young hopefulness, seemed the more
probable alternative.

Stephen walked back to the vicarage through the meadows, as he had
come, surrounded by the soft musical purl of the water through
little weirs, the modest light of the moon, the freshening smell
of the dews out-spread around. It was a time when mere seeing is
meditation, and meditation peace. Stephen was hardly philosopher
enough to avail himself of Nature's offer. His constitution was
made up of very simple particulars; was one which, rare in the
spring-time of civilizations, seems to grow abundant as a nation
gets older, individuality fades, and education spreads; that is,
his brain had extraordinary receptive powers, and no great
creativeness. Quickly acquiring any kind of knowledge he saw
around him, and having a plastic adaptability more common in woman
than in man, he changed colour like a chameleon as the society he
found himself in assumed a higher and more artificial tone. He
had not many original ideas, and yet there was scarcely an idea to
which, under proper training, he could not have added a
respectable co-ordinate.

He saw nothing outside himself to-night; and what he saw within
was a weariness to his flesh. Yet to a dispassionate observer,
his pretensions to Elfride, though rather premature, were far from
absurd as marriages go, unless the accidental proximity of simple
but honest parents could be said to make them so.

The clock struck eleven when he entered the house. Elfride had
been waiting with scarcely a movement since he departed. Before
he had spoken to her she caught sight of him passing into the
study with her father. She saw that he had by some means obtained
the private interview he desired.

A nervous headache had been growing on the excitable girl during
the absence of Stephen, and now she could do nothing beyond going
up again to her room as she had done before. Instead of lying
down she sat again in the darkness without closing the door, and
listened with a beating heart to every sound from downstairs. The
servants had gone to bed. She ultimately heard the two men come
from the study and cross to the dining-room, where supper had been
lingering for more than an hour. The door was left open, and she
found that the meal, such as it was, passed off between her father
and her lover without any remark, save commonplaces as to
cucumbers and melons, their wholesomeness and culture, uttered in
a stiff and formal way. It seemed to prefigure failure.

Shortly afterwards Stephen came upstairs to his bedroom, and was
almost immediately followed by her father, who also retired for
the night. Not inclined to get a light, she partly undressed and
sat on the bed, where she remained in pained thought for some
time, possibly an hour. Then rising to close her door previously
to fully unrobing, she saw a streak of light shining across the
landing. Her father's door was shut, and he could be heard
snoring regularly. The light came from Stephen's room, and the
slight sounds also coming thence emphatically denoted what he was
doing. In the perfect silence she could hear the closing of a lid
and the clicking of a lock,--he was fastening his hat-box. Then
the buckling of straps and the click of another key,--he was
securing his portmanteau. With trebled foreboding she opened her
door softly, and went towards his. One sensation pervaded her to
distraction. Stephen, her handsome youth and darling, was going
away, and she might never see him again except in secret and in
sadness--perhaps never more. At any rate, she could no longer
wait till the morning to hear the result of the interview, as she
had intended. She flung her dressing-gown round her, tapped
lightly at his door, and whispered 'Stephen!' He came instantly,
opened the door, and stepped out.

'Tell me; are we to hope?'

He replied in a disturbed whisper, and a tear approached its
outlet, though none fell.

'I am not to think of such a preposterous thing--that's what he
said. And I am going to-morrow. I should have called you up to
bid you good-bye.'

'But he didn't say you were to go--O Stephen, he didn't say that?'

'No; not in words. But I cannot stay.'

'Oh, don't, don't go! Do come and let us talk. Let us come down
to the drawing-room for a few minutes; he will hear us here.'

She preceded him down the staircase with the taper light in her
hand, looking unnaturally tall and thin in the long dove-coloured
dressing-gown she wore. She did not stop to think of the
propriety or otherwise of this midnight interview under such
circumstances. She thought that the tragedy of her life was
beginning, and, for the first time almost, felt that her existence
might have a grave side, the shade of which enveloped and rendered
invisible the delicate gradations of custom and punctilio.
Elfride softly opened the drawing-room door and they both went in.
When she had placed the candle on the table, he enclosed her with
his arms, dried her eyes with his handkerchief, and kissed their
lids.

'Stephen, it is over--happy love is over; and there is no more
sunshine now!'

'I will make a fortune, and come to you, and have you. Yes, I
will!'

'Papa will never hear of it--never--never! You don't know him. I
do. He is either biassed in favour of a thing, or prejudiced
against it. Argument is powerless against either feeling.'

'No; I won't think of him so,' said Stephen. 'If I appear before
him some time hence as a man of established name, he will accept
me--I know he will. He is not a wicked man.'

'No, he is not wicked. But you say "some time hence," as if it
were no time. To you, among bustle and excitement, it will be
comparatively a short time, perhaps; oh, to me, it will be its
real length trebled! Every summer will be a year--autumn a year--
winter a year! O Stephen! and you may forget me!'

Forget: that was, and is, the real sting of waiting to fond-
hearted woman. The remark awoke in Stephen the converse fear.
'You, too, may be persuaded to give me up, when time has made me
fainter in your memory. For, remember, your love for me must be
nourished in secret; there will be no long visits from me to
support you. Circumstances will always tend to obliterate me.'

'Stephen,' she said, filled with her own misgivings, and unheeding
his last words, 'there are beautiful women where you live--of
course I know there are--and they may win you away from me.' Her
tears came visibly as she drew a mental picture of his
faithlessness. 'And it won't be your fault,' she continued,
looking into the candle with doleful eyes. 'No! You will think
that our family don't want you, and get to include me with them.
And there will be a vacancy in your heart, and some others will be
let in.'

'I could not, I would not. Elfie, do not be so full of
forebodings.'

'Oh yes, they will,' she replied. 'And you will look at them, not
caring at first, and then you will look and be interested, and
after a while you will think, "Ah, they know all about city life,
and assemblies, and coteries, and the manners of the titled, and
poor little Elfie, with all the fuss that's made about her having
me, doesn't know about anything but a little house and a few
cliffs and a space of sea, far away." And then you'll be more
interested in them, and they'll make you have them instead of me,
on purpose to be cruel to me because I am silly, and they are
clever and hate me. And I hate them, too; yes, I do!'

Her impulsive words had power to impress him at any rate with the
recognition of the uncertainty of all that is not accomplished.
And, worse than that general feeling, there of course remained the
sadness which arose from the special features of his own case.
However remote a desired issue may be, the mere fact of having
entered the groove which leads to it, cheers to some extent with a
sense of accomplishment. Had Mr. Swancourt consented to an
engagement of no less length than ten years, Stephen would have
been comparatively cheerful in waiting; they would have felt that
they were somewhere on the road to Cupid's garden. But, with a
possibility of a shorter probation, they had not as yet any
prospect of the beginning; the zero of hope had yet to be reached.
Mr. Swancourt would have to revoke his formidable words before the
waiting for marriage could even set in. And this was despair.

'I wish we could marry now,' murmured Stephen, as an impossible
fancy.

'So do I,' said she also, as if regarding an idle dream. ''Tis
the only thing that ever does sweethearts good!'

'Secretly would do, would it not, Elfie?'

'Yes, secretly would do; secretly would indeed be best,' she said,
and went on reflectively: 'All we want is to render it absolutely
impossible for any future circumstance to upset our future
intention of being happy together; not to begin being happy now.'

'Exactly,' he murmured in a voice and manner the counterpart of
hers. 'To marry and part secretly, and live on as we are living
now; merely to put it out of anybody's power to force you away
from me, dearest.'

'Or you away from me, Stephen.'

'Or me from you. It is possible to conceive a force of
circumstance strong enough to make any woman in the world marry
against her will: no conceivable pressure, up to torture or
starvation, can make a woman once married to her lover anybody
else's wife.'

Now up to this point the idea of an immediate secret marriage had
been held by both as an untenable hypothesis, wherewith simply to
beguile a miserable moment. During a pause which followed
Stephen's last remark, a fascinating perception, then an alluring
conviction, flashed along the brain of both. The perception was
that an immediate marriage COULD be contrived; the conviction that
such an act, in spite of its daring, its fathomless results, its
deceptiveness, would be preferred by each to the life they must
lead under any other conditions.

The youth spoke first, and his voice trembled with the magnitude
of the conception he was cherishing. 'How strong we should feel,
Elfride! going on our separate courses as before, without the fear
of ultimate separation! O Elfride! think of it; think of it!'

It is certain that the young girl's love for Stephen received a
fanning from her father's opposition which made it blaze with a
dozen times the intensity it would have exhibited if left alone.
Never were conditions more favourable for developing a girl's
first passing fancy for a handsome boyish face--a fancy rooted in
inexperience and nourished by seclusion--into a wild unreflecting
passion fervid enough for anything. All the elements of such a
development were there, the chief one being hopelessness--a
necessary ingredient always to perfect the mixture of feelings
united under the name of loving to distraction.

'We would tell papa soon, would we not?' she inquired timidly.
'Nobody else need know. He would then be convinced that hearts
cannot be played with; love encouraged be ready to grow, love
discouraged be ready to die, at a moment's notice. Stephen, do
you not think that if marriages against a parent's consent are
ever justifiable, they are when young people have been favoured up
to a point, as we have, and then have had that favour suddenly
withdrawn?'

'Yes. It is not as if we had from the beginning acted in
opposition to your papa's wishes. Only think, Elfie, how pleasant
he was towards me but six hours ago! He liked me, praised me,
never objected to my being alone with you.'

'I believe he MUST like you now,' she cried. 'And if he found
that you irremediably belonged to me, he would own it and help
you. 'O Stephen, Stephen,' she burst out again, as the
remembrance of his packing came afresh to her mind, 'I cannot bear
your going away like this! It is too dreadful. All I have been
expecting miserably killed within me like this!'

Stephen flushed hot with impulse. 'I will not be a doubt to you--
thought of you shall not be a misery to me!' he said. 'We will be
wife and husband before we part for long!'

She hid her face on his shoulder. 'Anything to make SURE!' she
whispered.

'I did not like to propose it immediately,' continued Stephen.
'It seemed to me--it seems to me now--like trying to catch you--a
girl better in the world than I.'

'Not that, indeed! And am I better in worldly station? What's the
use of have beens? We may have been something once; we are nothing
now.'

Then they whispered long and earnestly together; Stephen
hesitatingly proposing this and that plan, Elfride modifying them,
with quick breathings, and hectic flush, and unnaturally bright
eyes. It was two o'clock before an arrangement was finally
concluded.

She then told him to leave her, giving him his light to go up to
his own room. They parted with an agreement not to meet again in
the morning. After his door had been some time closed he heard
her softly gliding into her chamber.

Chapter XI

'Journeys end in lovers meeting.'

Stephen lay watching the Great Bear; Elfride was regarding a
monotonous parallelogram of window blind. Neither slept that
night.

Early the next morning--that is to say, four hours after their
stolen interview, and just as the earliest servant was heard
moving about--Stephen Smith went downstairs, portmanteau in hand.
Throughout the night he had intended to see Mr. Swancourt again,
but the sharp rebuff of the previous evening rendered such an
interview particularly distasteful. Perhaps there was another and
less honest reason. He decided to put it off. Whatever of moral
timidity or obliquity may have lain in such a decision, no
perception of it was strong enough to detain him. He wrote a note
in his room, which stated simply that he did not feel happy in the
house after Mr. Swancourt's sudden veto on what he had favoured a
few hours before; but that he hoped a time would come, and that
soon, when his original feelings of pleasure as Mr. Swancourt's
guest might be recovered.

He expected to find the downstairs rooms wearing the gray and
cheerless aspect that early morning gives to everything out of the
sun. He found in the dining room a breakfast laid, of which
somebody had just partaken.

Stephen gave the maid-servant his note of adieu. She stated that
Mr. Swancourt had risen early that morning, and made an early
breakfast. He was not going away that she knew of.

Stephen took a cup of coffee, left the house of his love, and
turned into the lane. It was so early that the shaded places
still smelt like night time, and the sunny spots had hardly felt
the sun. The horizontal rays made every shallow dip in the ground
to show as a well-marked hollow. Even the channel of the path was
enough to throw shade, and the very stones of the road cast
tapering dashes of darkness westward, as long as Jael's tent-nail.

At a spot not more than a hundred yards from the vicar's residence
the lane leading thence crossed the high road. Stephen reached
the point of intersection, stood still and listened. Nothing
could be heard save the lengthy, murmuring line of the sea upon
the adjacent shore. He looked at his watch, and then mounted a
gate upon which he seated himself, to await the arrival of the
carrier. Whilst he sat he heard wheels coming in two directions.

The vehicle approaching on his right he soon recognized as the
carrier's. There were the accompanying sounds of the owner's
voice and the smack of his whip, distinct in the still morning
air, by which he encouraged his horses up the hill.

The other set of wheels sounded from the lane Stephen had just
traversed. On closer observation, he perceived that they were
moving from the precincts of the ancient manor-house adjoining the
vicarage grounds. A carriage then left the entrance gates of the
house, and wheeling round came fully in sight. It was a plain
travelling carriage, with a small quantity of luggage, apparently
a lady's. The vehicle came to the junction of the four ways half-
a-minute before the carrier reached the same spot, and crossed
directly in his front, proceeding by the lane on the other side.

Inside the carriage Stephen could just discern an elderly lady
with a younger woman, who seemed to be her maid. The road they
had taken led to Stratleigh, a small watering-place sixteen miles
north.

He heard the manor-house gates swing again, and looking up saw
another person leaving them, and walking off in the direction of
the parsonage. 'Ah, how much I wish I were moving that way!' felt
he parenthetically. The gentleman was tall, and resembled Mr.
Swancourt in outline and attire. He opened the vicarage gate and
went in. Mr. Swancourt, then, it certainly was. Instead of
remaining in bed that morning Mr. Swancourt must have taken it
into his head to see his new neighbour off on a journey. He must
have been greatly interested in that neighbour to do such an
unusual thing.

The carrier's conveyance had pulled up, and Stephen now handed in
his portmanteau and mounted the shafts. 'Who is that lady in the
carriage?' he inquired indifferently of Lickpan the carrier.

'That, sir, is Mrs. Troyton, a widder wi' a mint o' money. She's
the owner of all that part of Endelstow that is not Lord
Luxellian's. Only been here a short time; she came into it by
law. The owner formerly was a terrible mysterious party--never
lived here--hardly ever was seen here except in the month of
September, as I might say.'

The horses were started again, and noise rendered further
discourse a matter of too great exertion. Stephen crept inside
under the tilt, and was soon lost in reverie.

Three hours and a half of straining up hills and jogging down
brought them to St. Launce's, the market town and railway station
nearest to Endelstow, and the place from which Stephen Smith had
journeyed over the downs on the, to him, memorable winter evening
at the beginning of the same year. The carrier's van was so timed
as to meet a starting up-train, which Stephen entered. Two or
three hours' railway travel through vertical cuttings in
metamorphic rock, through oak copses rich and green, stretching
over slopes and down delightful valleys, glens, and ravines,
sparkling with water like many-rilled Ida, and he plunged amid the
hundred and fifty thousand people composing the town of Plymouth.

There being some time upon his hands he left his luggage at the
cloak-room, and went on foot along Bedford Street to the nearest
church. Here Stephen wandered among the multifarious tombstones
and looked in at the chancel window, dreaming of something that
was likely to happen by the altar there in the course of the
coming month. He turned away and ascended the Hoe, viewed the
magnificent stretch of sea and massive promontories of land, but
without particularly discerning one feature of the varied
perspective. He still saw that inner prospect--the event he hoped
for in yonder church. The wide Sound, the Breakwater, the light-
house on far-off Eddystone, the dark steam vessels, brigs,
barques, and schooners, either floating stilly, or gliding with
tiniest motion, were as the dream, then; the dreamed-of event was
as the reality.

Soon Stephen went down from the Hoe, and returned to the railway
station. He took his ticket, and entered the London train.

That day was an irksome time at Endelstow vicarage. Neither
father nor daughter alluded to the departure of Stephen. Mr.
Swancourt's manner towards her partook of the compunctious
kindness that arises from a misgiving as to the justice of some
previous act.

Either from lack of the capacity to grasp the whole coup d'oeil,
or from a natural endowment for certain kinds of stoicism, women
are cooler than men in critical situations of the passive form.
Probably, in Elfride's case at least, it was blindness to the
greater contingencies of the future she was preparing for herself,
which enabled her to ask her father in a quiet voice if he could
give her a holiday soon, to ride to St. Launce's and go on to
Plymouth.

Now, she had only once before gone alone to Plymouth, and that was
in consequence of some unavoidable difficulty. Being a country
girl, and a good, not to say a wild, horsewoman, it had been her
delight to canter, without the ghost of an attendant, over the
fourteen or sixteen miles of hard road intervening between their
home and the station at St. Launce's, put up the horse, and go on
the remainder of the distance by train, returning in the same
manner in the evening. It was then resolved that, though she had
successfully accomplished this journey once, it was not to be
repeated without some attendance.

But Elfride must not be confounded with ordinary young feminine
equestrians. The circumstances of her lonely and narrow life made
it imperative that in trotting about the neighbourhood she must
trot alone or else not at all. Usage soon rendered this perfectly
natural to herself. Her father, who had had other experiences,
did not much like the idea of a Swancourt, whose pedigree could be
as distinctly traced as a thread in a skein of silk, scampering
over the hills like a farmer's daughter, even though he could
habitually neglect her. But what with his not being able to
afford her a regular attendant, and his inveterate habit of
letting anything be to save himself trouble, the circumstance grew
customary. And so there arose a chronic notion in the villagers'
minds that all ladies rode without an attendant, like Miss
Swancourt, except a few who were sometimes visiting at Lord
Luxellian's.

'I don't like your going to Plymouth alone, particularly going to
St. Launce's on horseback. Why not drive, and take the man?'

'It is not nice to be so overlooked.' Worm's company would not
seriously have interfered with her plans, but it was her humour to
go without him.

'When do you want to go?' said her father.

She only answered, 'Soon.'

'I will consider,' he said.

Only a few days elapsed before she asked again. A letter had
reached her from Stephen. It had been timed to come on that day
by special arrangement between them. In it he named the earliest
morning on which he could meet her at Plymouth. Her father had
been on a journey to Stratleigh, and returned in unusual buoyancy
of spirit. It was a good opportunity; and since the dismissal of
Stephen her father had been generally in a mood to make small
concessions, that he might steer clear of large ones connected
with that outcast lover of hers.

'Next Thursday week I am going from home in a different
direction,' said her father. 'In fact, I shall leave home the
night before. You might choose the same day, for they wish to
take up the carpets, or some such thing, I think. As I said, I
don't like you to be seen in a town on horseback alone; but go if
you will.'

Thursday week. Her father had named the very day that Stephen
also had named that morning as the earliest on which it would be
of any use to meet her; that was, about fifteen days from the day
on which he had left Endelstow. Fifteen days--that fragment of
duration which has acquired such an interesting individuality from
its connection with the English marriage law.

She involuntarily looked at her father so strangely, that on
becoming conscious of the look she paled with embarrassment. Her
father, too, looked confused. What was he thinking of?

There seemed to be a special facility offered her by a power
external to herself in the circumstance that Mr. Swancourt had
proposed to leave home the night previous to her wished-for day.
Her father seldom took long journeys; seldom slept from home
except perhaps on the night following a remote Visitation. Well,
she would not inquire too curiously into the reason of the
opportunity, nor did he, as would have been natural, proceed to
explain it of his own accord. In matters of fact there had
hitherto been no reserve between them, though they were not
usually confidential in its full sense. But the divergence of
their emotions on Stephen's account had produced an estrangement
which just at present went even to the extent of reticence on the
most ordinary household topics.

Elfride was almost unconsciously relieved, persuading herself that
her father's reserve on his business justified her in secrecy as
regarded her own--a secrecy which was necessarily a foregone
decision with her. So anxious is a young conscience to discover a
palliative, that the ex post facto nature of a reason is of no
account in excluding it.

The intervening fortnight was spent by her mostly in walking by
herself among the shrubs and trees, indulging sometimes in
sanguine anticipations; more, far more frequently, in misgivings.
All her flowers seemed dull of hue; her pets seemed to look
wistfully into her eyes, as if they no longer stood in the same
friendly relation to her as formerly. She wore melancholy
jewellery, gazed at sunsets, and talked to old men and women. It
was the first time that she had had an inner and private world
apart from the visible one about her. She wished that her father,
instead of neglecting her even more than usual, would make some
advance--just one word; she would then tell all, and risk
Stephen's displeasure. Thus brought round to the youth again, she
saw him in her fancy, standing, touching her, his eyes full of sad
affection, hopelessly renouncing his attempt because she had
renounced hers; and she could not recede.

On the Wednesday she was to receive another letter. She had
resolved to let her father see the arrival of this one, be the
consequences what they might: the dread of losing her lover by
this deed of honesty prevented her acting upon the resolve. Five
minutes before the postman's expected arrival she slipped out, and
down the lane to meet him. She met him immediately upon turning a
sharp angle, which hid her from view in the direction of the
vicarage. The man smilingly handed one missive, and was going on
to hand another, a circular from some tradesman.

'No,' she said; 'take that on to the house.'

'Why, miss, you are doing what your father has done for the last
fortnight.'

She did not comprehend.

'Why, come to this corner, and take a letter of me every morning,
all writ in the same handwriting, and letting any others for him
go on to the house.' And on the postman went.

No sooner had he turned the corner behind her back than she heard
her father meet and address the man. She had saved her letter by
two minutes. Her father audibly went through precisely the same
performance as she had just been guilty of herself.

This stealthy conduct of his was, to say the least, peculiar.

Given an impulsive inconsequent girl, neglected as to her inner
life by her only parent, and the following forces alive within
her; to determine a resultant:

First love acted upon by a deadly fear of separation from its
object: inexperience, guiding onward a frantic wish to prevent the
above-named issue: misgivings as to propriety, met by hope of
ultimate exoneration: indignation at parental inconsistency in
first encouraging, then forbidding: a chilling sense of
disobedience, overpowered by a conscientious inability to brook a
breaking of plighted faith with a man who, in essentials, had
remained unaltered from the beginning: a blessed hope that
opposition would turn an erroneous judgement: a bright faith that
things would mend thereby, and wind up well.

Probably the result would, after all, have been nil, had not the
following few remarks been made one day at breakfast.

Her father was in his old hearty spirits. He smiled to himself at
stories too bad to tell, and called Elfride a little scamp for
surreptitiously preserving some blind kittens that ought to have
been drowned. After this expression, she said to him suddenly:

If Mr. Smith had been already in the family, you would not have
been made wretched by discovering he had poor relations?'

'Do you mean in the family by marriage?' he replied inattentively,
and continuing to peel his egg.

The accumulating scarlet told that was her meaning, as much as the
affirmative reply.

'I should have put up with it, no doubt,' Mr. Swancourt observed.

'So that you would not have been driven into hopeless melancholy,
but have made the best of him?'

Elfride's erratic mind had from her youth upwards been constantly
in the habit of perplexing her father by hypothetical questions,
based on absurd conditions. The present seemed to be cast so
precisely in the mould of previous ones that, not being given to
syntheses of circumstances, he answered it with customary
complacency.

'If he were allied to us irretrievably, of course I, or any
sensible man, should accept conditions that could not be altered;
certainly not be hopelessly melancholy about it. I don't believe
anything in the world would make me hopelessly melancholy. And
don't let anything make you so, either.'

'I won't, papa,' she cried, with a serene brightness that pleased
him.

Certainly Mr. Swancourt must have been far from thinking that the
brightness came from an exhilarating intention to hold back no
longer from the mad action she had planned.

In the evening he drove away towards Stratleigh, quite alone. It
was an unusual course for him. At the door Elfride had been again
almost impelled by her feelings to pour out all.

'Why are you going to Stratleigh, papa?' she said, and looked at
him longingly.

'I will tell you to-morrow when I come back,' he said cheerily;
'not before then, Elfride. Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not
know, and so far will I trust thee, gentle Elfride.'

She was repressed and hurt.

'I will tell you my errand to Plymouth, too, when I come back,'
she murmured.

He went away. His jocularity made her intention seem the lighter,
as his indifference made her more resolved to do as she liked.

It was a familiar September sunset, dark-blue fragments of cloud
upon an orange-yellow sky. These sunsets used to tempt her to
walk towards them, as any beautiful thing tempts a near approach.
She went through the field to the privet hedge, clambered into the
middle of it, and reclined upon the thick boughs. After looking
westward for a considerable time, she blamed herself for not
looking eastward to where Stephen was, and turned round.
Ultimately her eyes fell upon the ground.

A peculiarity was observable beneath her. A green field spread
itself on each side of the hedge, one belonging to the glebe, the
other being a part of the land attached to the manor-house
adjoining. On the vicarage side she saw a little footpath, the
distinctive and altogether exceptional feature of which consisted
in its being only about ten yards long; it terminated abruptly at
each end.

A footpath, suddenly beginning and suddenly ending, coming from
nowhere and leading nowhere, she had never seen before.

Yes, she had, on second thoughts. She had seen exactly such a
path trodden in the front of barracks by the sentry.

And this recollection explained the origin of the path here. Her
father had trodden it by pacing up and down, as she had once seen
him doing.

Sitting on the hedge as she sat now, her eyes commanded a view of
both sides of it. And a few minutes later, Elfride looked over to
the manor side.

Here was another sentry path. It was like the first in length,
and it began and ended exactly opposite the beginning and ending
of its neighbour, but it was thinner, and less distinct.

Two reasons existed for the difference. This one might have been
trodden by a similar weight of tread to the other, exercised a
less number of times; or it might have been walked just as
frequently, but by lighter feet.

Probably a gentleman from Scotland-yard, had he been passing at
the time, might have considered the latter alternative as the more
probable. Elfride thought otherwise, so far as she thought at
all. But her own great To-Morrow was now imminent; all thoughts
inspired by casual sights of the eye were only allowed to exercise
themselves in inferior corners of her brain, previously to being
banished altogether.

Elfride was at length compelled to reason practically upon her
undertaking. All her definite perceptions thereon, when the
emotion accompanying them was abstracted, amounted to no more than
these:

'Say an hour and three-quarters to ride to St. Launce's.

'Say half an hour at the Falcon to change my dress.

'Say two hours waiting for some train and getting to Plymouth.

'Say an hour to spare before twelve o'clock.

'Total time from leaving Endelstow till twelve o'clock, five
hours.

'Therefore I shall have to start at seven.'

No surprise or sense of unwontedness entered the minds of the
servants at her early ride. The monotony of life we associate
with people of small incomes in districts out of the sound of the
railway whistle, has one exception, which puts into shade the
experience of dwellers about the great centres of population--that
is, in travelling. Every journey there is more or less an
adventure; adventurous hours are necessarily chosen for the most
commonplace outing. Miss Elfride had to leave early--that was
all.

Elfride never went out on horseback but she brought home
something--something found, or something bought. If she trotted
to town or village, her burden was books. If to hills, woods, or
the seashore, it was wonderful mosses, abnormal twigs, a
handkerchief of wet shells or seaweed.

Once, in muddy weather, when Pansy was walking with her down the
street of Castle Boterel, on a fair-day, a packet in front of her
and a packet under her arm, an accident befell the packets, and
they slipped down. On one side of her, three volumes of fiction
lay kissing the mud; on the other numerous skeins of polychromatic
wools lay absorbing it. Unpleasant women smiled through windows
at the mishap, the men all looked round, and a boy, who was
minding a ginger-bread stall whilst the owner had gone to get
drunk, laughed loudly. The blue eyes turned to sapphires, and the
cheeks crimsoned with vexation.

After that misadventure she set her wits to work, and was
ingenious enough to invent an arrangement of small straps about
the saddle, by which a great deal could be safely carried thereon,
in a small compass. Here she now spread out and fastened a plain
dark walking-dress and a few other trifles of apparel. Worm
opened the gate for her, and she vanished away.

One of the brightest mornings of late summer shone upon her. The
heather was at its purplest, the furze at its yellowest, the
grasshoppers chirped loud enough for birds, the snakes hissed like
little engines, and Elfride at first felt lively. Sitting at ease
upon Pansy, in her orthodox riding-habit and nondescript hat, she
looked what she felt. But the mercury of those days had a trick
of falling unexpectedly. First, only for one minute in ten had
she a sense of depression. Then a large cloud, that had been
hanging in the north like a black fleece, came and placed itself
between her and the sun. It helped on what was already
inevitable, and she sank into a uniformity of sadness.

She turned in the saddle and looked back. They were now on an
open table-land, whose altitude still gave her a view of the sea
by Endelstow. She looked longingly at that spot.

During this little revulsion of feeling Pansy had been still
advancing, and Elfride felt it would be absurd to turn her little
mare's head the other way. 'Still,' she thought, 'if I had a
mamma at home I WOULD go back!'

And making one of those stealthy movements by which women let
their hearts juggle with their brains, she did put the horse's
head about, as if unconsciously, and went at a hand-gallop towards
home for more than a mile. By this time, from the inveterate
habit of valuing what we have renounced directly the alternative
is chosen, the thought of her forsaken Stephen recalled her, and
she turned about, and cantered on to St. Launce's again.

This miserable strife of thought now began to rage in all its
wildness. Overwrought and trembling, she dropped the rein upon
Pansy's shoulders, and vowed she would be led whither the horse
would take her.

Pansy slackened her pace to a walk, and walked on with her
agitated burden for three or four minutes. At the expiration of
this time they had come to a little by-way on the right, leading
down a slope to a pool of water. The pony stopped, looked towards
the pool, and then advanced and stooped to drink.

Elfride looked at her watch and discovered that if she were going
to reach St. Launce's early enough to change her dress at the
Falcon, and get a chance of some early train to Plymouth--there
were only two available--it was necessary to proceed at once.

She was impatient. It seemed as if Pansy would never stop
drinking; and the repose of the pool, the idle motions of the
insects and flies upon it, the placid waving of the flags, the
leaf-skeletons, like Genoese filigree, placidly sleeping at the
bottom, by their contrast with her own turmoil made her impatience
greater.

Pansy did turn at last, and went up the slope again to the high-
road. The pony came upon it, and stood cross-wise, looking up and
down. Elfride's heart throbbed erratically, and she thought,
'Horses, if left to themselves, make for where they are best fed.
Pansy will go home.'

Pansy turned and walked on towards St. Launce's

Pansy at home, during summer, had little but grass to live on.
After a run to St. Launce's she always had a feed of corn to
support her on the return journey. Therefore, being now more than
half way, she preferred St. Launce's.

But Elfride did not remember this now. All she cared to recognize
was a dreamy fancy that to-day's rash action was not her own. She
was disabled by her moods, and it seemed indispensable to adhere
to the programme. So strangely involved are motives that, more
than by her promise to Stephen, more even than by her love, she
was forced on by a sense of the necessity of keeping faith with
herself, as promised in the inane vow of ten minutes ago.

She hesitated no longer. Pansy went, like the steed of Adonis, as
if she told the steps. Presently the quaint gables and jumbled
roofs of St. Launce's were spread beneath her, and going down the
hill she entered the courtyard of the Falcon. Mrs. Buckle, the
landlady, came to the door to meet her.

The Swancourts were well known here. The transition from
equestrian to the ordinary guise of railway travellers had been
more than once performed by father and daughter in this
establishment.

In less than a quarter of an hour Elfride emerged from the door in
her walking dress, and went to the railway. She had not told Mrs.
Buckle anything as to her intentions, and was supposed to have
gone out shopping.

An hour and forty minutes later, and she was in Stephen's arms at
the Plymouth station. Not upon the platform--in the secret
retreat of a deserted waiting-room.

Stephen's face boded ill. He was pale and despondent.

What is the matter?' she asked.

'We cannot be married here to-day, my Elfie! I ought to have known
it and stayed here. In my ignorance I did not. I have the
licence, but it can only be used in my parish in London. I only
came down last night, as you know.'

'What shall we do?' she said blankly.

'There's only one thing we can do, darling.'

'What's that?'

'Go on to London by a train just starting, and be married there
to-morrow.'

'Passengers for the 11.5 up-train take their seats!' said a
guard's voice on the platform.

'Will you go, Elfride?'

'I will.'

In three minutes the train had moved off, bearing away with it
Stephen and Elfride.

Chapter XII

'Adieu! she cries, and waved her lily hand.'

The few tattered clouds of the morning enlarged and united, the
sun withdrew behind them to emerge no more that day, and the
evening drew to a close in drifts of rain. The water-drops beat
like duck shot against the window of the railway-carriage
containing Stephen and Elfride.

The journey from Plymouth to Paddington, by even the most headlong
express, allows quite enough leisure for passion of any sort to
cool. Elfride's excitement had passed off, and she sat in a kind
of stupor during the latter half of the journey. She was aroused
by the clanging of the maze of rails over which they traced their
way at the entrance to the station.

Is this London?' she said.

'Yes, darling,' said Stephen in a tone of assurance he was far
from feeling. To him, no less than to her, the reality so greatly
differed from the prefiguring.

She peered out as well as the window, beaded with drops, would
allow her, and saw only the lamps, which had just been lit,
blinking in the wet atmosphere, and rows of hideous zinc chimney-
pipes in dim relief against the sky. She writhed uneasily, as
when a thought is swelling in the mind which must cause much pain
at its deliverance in words. Elfride had known no more about the
stings of evil report than the native wild-fowl knew of the
effects of Crusoe's first shot. Now she saw a little further, and
a little further still.

The train stopped. Stephen relinquished the soft hand he had held
all the day, and proceeded to assist her on to the platform.

This act of alighting upon strange ground seemed all that was
wanted to complete a resolution within her.

She looked at her betrothed with despairing eyes.

'O Stephen,' she exclaimed, 'I am so miserable! I must go home
again--I must--I must! Forgive my wretched vacillation. I don't
like it here--nor myself--nor you!'

Stephen looked bewildered, and did not speak.

'Will you allow me to go home?' she implored. 'I won't trouble
you to go with me. I will not be any weight upon you; only say
you will agree to my returning; that you will not hate me for it,
Stephen! It is better that I should return again; indeed it is,
Stephen.'

'But we can't return now,' he said in a deprecatory tone.

'I must! I will!'

'How? When do you want to go?'

'Now. Can we go at once?'

The lad looked hopelessly along the platform.

'If you must go, and think it wrong to remain, dearest,' said he
sadly, 'you shall. You shall do whatever you like, my Elfride.
But would you in reality rather go now than stay till to-morrow,
and go as my wife?'

'Yes, yes--much--anything to go now. I must; I must!' she cried.

'We ought to have done one of two things,' he answered gloomily.
'Never to have started, or not to have returned without being
married. I don't like to say it, Elfride--indeed I don't; but you
must be told this, that going back unmarried may compromise your
good name in the eyes of people who may hear of it.'

'They will not; and I must go.'

'O Elfride! I am to blame for bringing you away.'

'Not at all. I am the elder.'

'By a month; and what's that? But never mind that now.' He looked
around. 'Is there a train for Plymouth to-night?' he inquired of
a guard. The guard passed on and did not speak.

'Is there a train for Plymouth to-night?' said Elfride to another.

'Yes, miss; the 8.10--leaves in ten minutes. You have come to the
wrong platform; it is the other side. Change at Bristol into the
night mail. Down that staircase, and under the line.'

They ran down the staircase--Elfride first--to the booking-office,
and into a carriage with an official standing beside the door.
'Show your tickets, please.' They are locked in--men about the
platform accelerate their velocities till they fly up and down
like shuttles in a loom--a whistle--the waving of a flag--a human
cry--a steam groan--and away they go to Plymouth again, just
catching these words as they glide off:

'Those two youngsters had a near run for it, and no mistake!'

Elfride found her breath.

'And have you come too, Stephen? Why did you?'

'I shall not leave you till I see you safe at St. Launce's. Do
not think worse of me than I am, Elfride.'

And then they rattled along through the night, back again by the
way they had come. The weather cleared, and the stars shone in
upon them. Their two or three fellow-passengers sat for most of
the time with closed eyes. Stephen sometimes slept; Elfride alone
was wakeful and palpitating hour after hour.

The day began to break, and revealed that they were by the sea.
Red rocks overhung them, and, receding into distance, grew livid
in the blue grey atmosphere. The sun rose, and sent penetrating
shafts of light in upon their weary faces. Another hour, and the
world began to be busy. They waited yet a little, and the train
slackened its speed in view of the platform at St. Launce's.

She shivered, and mused sadly.

'I did not see all the consequences,' she said. 'Appearances are
wofully against me. If anybody finds me out, I am, I suppose,
disgraced.'

'Then appearances will speak falsely; and how can that matter,
even if they do? I shall be your husband sooner or later, for
certain, and so prove your purity.'

'Stephen, once in London I ought to have married you,' she said
firmly. 'It was my only safe defence. I see more things now than
I did yesterday. My only remaining chance is not to be
discovered; and that we must fight for most desperately.'

They stepped out. Elfride pulled a thick veil over her face.

A woman with red and scaly eyelids and glistening eyes was sitting
on a bench just inside the office-door. She fixed her eyes upon
Elfride with an expression whose force it was impossible to doubt,
but the meaning of which was not clear; then upon the carriage
they had left. She seemed to read a sinister story in the scene.

Elfride shrank back, and turned the other way.

'Who is that woman?' said Stephen. 'She looked hard at you.'

'Mrs. Jethway--a widow, and mother of that young man whose tomb we
sat on the other night. Stephen, she is my enemy. Would that God
had had mercy enough upon me to have hidden this from HER!'

'Do not talk so hopelessly,' he remonstrated. 'I don't think she
recognized us.'

'I pray that she did not.'

He put on a more vigorous mood.

'Now, we will go and get some breakfast.'

'No, no!' she begged. 'I cannot eat. I MUST get back to
Endelstow.'

Elfride was as if she had grown years older than Stephen now.

'But you have had nothing since last night but that cup of tea at
Bristol.'

'I can't eat, Stephen.'

'Wine and biscuit?'

'No.'

'Nor tea, nor coffee?'

'No.'

'A glass of water?'

'No. I want something that makes people strong and energetic for
the present, that borrows the strength of to-morrow for use to-
day--leaving to-morrow without any at all for that matter; or even
that would take all life away to-morrow, so long as it enabled me
to get home again now. Brandy, that's what I want. That woman's
eyes have eaten my heart away!'

'You are wild; and you grieve me, darling. Must it be brandy?'

'Yes, if you please.'

'How much?'

'I don't know. I have never drunk more than a teaspoonful at
once. All I know is that I want it. Don't get it at the Falcon.'

He left her in the fields, and went to the nearest inn in that
direction. Presently he returned with a small flask nearly full,
and some slices of bread-and-butter, thin as wafers, in a paper-
bag. Elfride took a sip or two.

'It goes into my eyes,' she said wearily. 'I can't take any more.
Yes, I will; I will close my eyes. Ah, it goes to them by an
inside route. I don't want it; throw it away.'

However, she could eat, and did eat. Her chief attention was
concentrated upon how to get the horse from the Falcon stables
without suspicion. Stephen was not allowed to accompany her into
the town. She acted now upon conclusions reached without any aid
from him: his power over her seemed to have departed.

'You had better not be seen with me, even here where I am so
little known. We have begun stealthily as thieves, and we must
end stealthily as thieves, at all hazards. Until papa has been
told by me myself, a discovery would be terrible.'

Walking and gloomily talking thus they waited till nearly nine
o'clock, at which time Elfride thought she might call at the
Falcon without creating much surprise. Behind the railway-station
was the river, spanned by an old Tudor bridge, whence the road
diverged in two directions, one skirting the suburbs of the town,
and winding round again into the high-road to Endelstow. Beside
this road Stephen sat, and awaited her return from the Falcon.

He sat as one sitting for a portrait, motionless, watching the
chequered lights and shades on the tree-trunks, the children
playing opposite the school previous to entering for the morning
lesson, the reapers in a field afar off. The certainty of
possession had not come, and there was nothing to mitigate the
youth's gloom, that increased with the thought of the parting now
so near.

At length she came trotting round to him, in appearance much as on
the romantic morning of their visit to the cliff, but shorn of the
radiance which glistened about her then. However, her comparative
immunity from further risk and trouble had considerably composed
her. Elfride's capacity for being wounded was only surpassed by
her capacity for healing, which rightly or wrongly is by some
considered an index of transientness of feeling in general.

'Elfride, what did they say at the Falcon?'

'Nothing. Nobody seemed curious about me. They knew I went to
Plymouth, and I have stayed there a night now and then with Miss
Bicknell. I rather calculated upon that.'

And now parting arose like a death to these children, for it was
imperative that she should start at once. Stephen walked beside
her for nearly a mile. During the walk he said sadly:

'Elfride, four-and-twenty hours have passed, and the thing is not
done.'

'But you have insured that it shall be done.'

'How have I?'

'O Stephen, you ask how! Do you think I could marry another man on
earth after having gone thus far with you? Have I not shown beyond
possibility of doubt that I can be nobody else's? Have I not
irretrievably committed myself?--pride has stood for nothing in
the face of my great love. You misunderstood my turning back, and
I cannot explain it. It was wrong to go with you at all; and
though it would have been worse to go further, it would have been
better policy, perhaps. Be assured of this, that whenever you
have a home for me--however poor and humble--and come and claim
me, I am ready.' She added bitterly, 'When my father knows of this
day's work, he may be only too glad to let me go.'

'Perhaps he may, then, insist upon our marriage at once!' Stephen
answered, seeing a ray of hope in the very focus of her remorse.
'I hope he may, even if we had still to part till I am ready for
you, as we intended.'

Elfride did not reply.

'You don't seem the same woman, Elfie, that you were yesterday.'

'Nor am I. But good-bye. Go back now.' And she reined the horse
for parting. 'O Stephen,' she cried, 'I feel so weak! I don't
know how to meet him. Cannot you, after all, come back with me?'

'Shall I come?'

Elfride paused to think.

'No; it will not do. It is my utter foolishness that makes me say
such words. But he will send for you.'

'Say to him,' continued Stephen, 'that we did this in the absolute
despair of our minds. Tell him we don't wish him to favour us--
only to deal justly with us. If he says, marry now, so much the
better. If not, say that all may be put right by his promise to
allow me to have you when I am good enough for you--which may be
soon. Say I have nothing to offer him in exchange for his
treasure--the more sorry I; but all the love, and all the life,
and all the labour of an honest man shall be yours. As to when
this had better be told, I leave you to judge.'

His words made her cheerful enough to toy with her position.

'And if ill report should come, Stephen,' she said smiling, 'why,
the orange-tree must save me, as it saved virgins in St. George's
time from the poisonous breath of the dragon. There, forgive me
for forwardness: I am going.'

Then the boy and girl beguiled themselves with words of half-
parting only.

'Own wifie, God bless you till we meet again!'

'Till we meet again, good-bye!'

And the pony went on, and she spoke to him no more. He saw her
figure diminish and her blue veil grow gray--saw it with the
agonizing sensations of a slow death.

After thus parting from a man than whom she had known none greater
as yet, Elfride rode rapidly onwards, a tear being occasionally
shaken from her eyes into the road. What yesterday had seemed so
desirable, so promising, even trifling, had now acquired the
complexion of a tragedy.

She saw the rocks and sea in the neighbourhood of Endelstow, and
heaved a sigh of relief

When she passed a field behind the vicarage she heard the voices
of Unity and William Worm. They were hanging a carpet upon a
line. Unity was uttering a sentence that concluded with 'when
Miss Elfride comes.'

'When d'ye expect her?'

'Not till evening now. She's safe enough at Miss Bicknell's,
bless ye.'

Elfride went round to the door. She did not knock or ring; and
seeing nobody to take the horse, Elfride led her round to the
yard, slipped off the bridle and saddle, drove her towards the
paddock, and turned her in. Then Elfride crept indoors, and
looked into all the ground-floor rooms. Her father was not there.

On the mantelpiece of the drawing-room stood a letter addressed to
her in his handwriting. She took it and read it as she went
upstairs to change her habit.

STRATLEIGH, Thursday.

'DEAR ELFRIDE,--On second thoughts I will not return to-day, but
only come as far as Wadcombe. I shall be at home by to-morrow
afternoon, and bring a friend with me.--Yours, in haste,
C. S.'

After making a quick toilet she felt more revived, though still
suffering from a headache. On going out of the door she met Unity
at the top of the stair.

'O Miss Elfride! I said to myself 'tis her sperrit! We didn't
dream o' you not coming home last night. You didn't say anything
about staying.'

'I intended to come home the same evening, but altered my plan. I
wished I hadn't afterwards. Papa will be angry, I suppose?'

'Better not tell him, miss,' said Unity.

'I do fear to,' she murmured. 'Unity, would you just begin
telling him when he comes home?'

'What! and get you into trouble?'

'I deserve it.'

'No, indeed, I won't,' said Unity. 'It is not such a mighty
matter, Miss Elfride. I says to myself, master's taking a
hollerday, and because he's not been kind lately to Miss Elfride,
she----'

'Is imitating him. Well, do as you like. And will you now bring
me some luncheon?'

After satisfying an appetite which the fresh marine air had given
her in its victory over an agitated mind, she put on her hat and
went to the garden and summer-house. She sat down, and leant with
her head in a corner. Here she fell asleep.

Half-awake, she hurriedly looked at the time. She had been there
three hours. At the same moment she heard the outer gate swing
together, and wheels sweep round the entrance; some prior noise
from the same source having probably been the cause of her
awaking. Next her father's voice was heard calling to Worm.

Elfride passed along a walk towards the house behind a belt of
shrubs. She heard a tongue holding converse with her father,
which was not that of either of the servants. Her father and the
stranger were laughing together. Then there was a rustling of
silk, and Mr. Swancourt and his companion, or companions, to all
seeming entered the door of the house, for nothing more of them
was audible. Elfride had turned back to meditate on what friends
these could be, when she heard footsteps, and her father
exclaiming behind her:

'O Elfride, here you are! I hope you got on well?'

Elfride's heart smote her, and she did not speak.

'Come back to the summer-house a minute,' continued Mr. Swancourt;
'I have to tell you of that I promised to.'

They entered the summer-house, and stood leaning over the knotty
woodwork of the balustrade.

'Now,' said her father radiantly, 'guess what I have to say.' He
seemed to be regarding his own existence so intently, that he took
no interest in nor even saw the complexion of hers.

'I cannot, papa,' she said sadly.

'Try, dear.'

'I would rather not, indeed.'

'You are tired. You look worn. The ride was too much for you.
Well, this is what I went away for. I went to be married!'

'Married!' she faltered, and could hardly check an involuntary 'So
did I.' A moment after and her resolve to confess perished like a
bubble.

'Yes; to whom do you think? Mrs. Troyton, the new owner of the
estate over the hedge, and of the old manor-house. It was only
finally settled between us when I went to Stratleigh a few days
ago.' He lowered his voice to a sly tone of merriment. 'Now, as
to your stepmother, you'll find she is not much to look at, though
a good deal to listen to. She is twenty years older than myself,
for one thing.'

'You forget that I know her. She called here once, after we had
been, and found her away from home.'

'Of course, of course. Well, whatever her looks are, she's as
excellent a woman as ever breathed. She has had lately left her
as absolute property three thousand five hundred a year, besides
the devise of this estate--and, by the way, a large legacy came to
her in satisfaction of dower, as it is called.'

'Three thousand five hundred a year!'

'And a large--well, a fair-sized--mansion in town, and a pedigree
as long as my walking-stick; though that bears evidence of being
rather a raked-up affair--done since the family got rich--people
do those things now as they build ruins on maiden estates and cast
antiques at Birmingham.'

Elfride merely listened and said nothing.

He continued more quietly and impressively. 'Yes, Elfride, she is
wealthy in comparison with us, though with few connections.
However, she will introduce you to the world a little. We are
going to exchange her house in Baker Street for one at Kensington,
for your sake. Everybody is going there now, she says. At
Easters we shall fly to town for the usual three months--I shall
have a curate of course by that time. Elfride, I am past love,
you know, and I honestly confess that I married her for your sake.
Why a woman of her standing should have thrown herself away upon
me, God knows. But I suppose her age and plainness were too
pronounced for a town man. With your good looks, if you now play
your cards well, you may marry anybody. Of course, a little
contrivance will be necessary; but there's nothing to stand
between you and a husband with a title, that I can see. Lady
Luxellian was only a squire's daughter. Now, don't you see how
foolish the old fancy was? But come, she is indoors waiting to see
you. It is as good as a play, too,' continued the vicar, as they
walked towards the house. 'I courted her through the privet hedge
yonder: not entirely, you know, but we used to walk there of an
evening--nearly every evening at last. But I needn't tell you
details now; everything was terribly matter-of-fact, I assure you.
At last, that day I saw her at Stratleigh, we determined to settle
it off-hand.'

'And you never said a word to me,' replied Elfride, not
reproachfully either in tone or thought. Indeed, her feeling was
the very reverse of reproachful. She felt relieved and even
thankful. Where confidence had not been given, how could
confidence be expected?

Her father mistook her dispassionateness for a veil of politeness
over a sense of ill-usage. 'I am not altogether to blame,' he
said. 'There were two or three reasons for secrecy. One was the
recent death of her relative the testator, though that did not
apply to you. But remember, Elfride,' he continued in a stiffer
tone, 'you had mixed yourself up so foolishly with those low
people, the Smiths--and it was just, too, when Mrs. Troyton and
myself were beginning to understand each other--that I resolved to
say nothing even to you. How did I know how far you had gone with
them and their son? You might have made a point of taking tea with
them every day, for all that I knew.'

Elfride swallowed her feelings as she best could, and languidly
though flatly asked a question.

'Did you kiss Mrs. Troyton on the lawn about three weeks ago? That
evening I came into the study and found you had just had candles
in?'

Mr. Swancourt looked rather red and abashed, as middle-aged lovers
are apt to do when caught in the tricks of younger ones.

'Well, yes; I think I did,' he stammered; 'just to please her, you
know.' And then recovering himself he laughed heartily.

'And was this what your Horatian quotation referred to?'

'It was, Elfride.'

They stepped into the drawing-room from the verandah. At that
moment Mrs. Swancourt came downstairs, and entered the same room
by the door.

'Here, Charlotte, is my little Elfride,' said Mr. Swancourt, with
the increased affection of tone often adopted towards relations
when newly produced.

Poor Elfride, not knowing what to do, did nothing at all; but
stood receptive of all that came to her by sight, hearing, and
touch.

Mrs. Swancourt moved forward, took her step-daughter's hand, then
kissed her.

'Ah, darling!' she exclaimed good-humouredly, 'you didn't think
when you showed a strange old woman over the conservatory a month
or two ago, and explained the flowers to her so prettily, that she
would so soon be here in new colours. Nor did she, I am sure.'

The new mother had been truthfully enough described by Mr.
Swancourt. She was not physically attractive. She was dark--very
dark--in complexion, portly in figure, and with a plentiful
residuum of hair in the proportion of half a dozen white ones to
half a dozen black ones, though the latter were black indeed. No
further observed, she was not a woman to like. But there was more
to see. To the most superficial critic it was apparent that she
made no attempt to disguise her age. She looked sixty at the
first glance, and close acquaintanceship never proved her older.

Another and still more winning trait was one attaching to the
corners of her mouth. Before she made a remark these often
twitched gently: not backwards and forwards, the index of
nervousness; not down upon the jaw, the sign of determination; but
palpably upwards, in precisely the curve adopted to represent
mirth in the broad caricatures of schoolboys. Only this element
in her face was expressive of anything within the woman, but it
was unmistakable. It expressed humour subjective as well as
objective--which could survey the peculiarities of self in as
whimsical a light as those of other people.

This is not all of Mrs. Swancourt. She had held out to Elfride
hands whose fingers were literally stiff with rings, signis
auroque rigentes, like Helen's robe. These rows of rings were not
worn in vanity apparently. They were mostly antique and dull,
though a few were the reverse.

RIGHT HAND.

1st. Plainly set oval onyx, representing a devil's head. 2nd.
Green jasper intaglio, with red veins. 3rd. Entirely gold,
bearing figure of a hideous griffin. 4th. A sea-green monster
diamond, with small diamonds round it. 5th. Antique cornelian
intaglio of dancing figure of a satyr. 6th. An angular band
chased with dragons' heads. 7th. A facetted carbuncle accompanied
by ten little twinkling emeralds; &c. &c.

LEFT HAND.

1st. A reddish-yellow toadstone. 2nd. A heavy ring enamelled in
colours, and bearing a jacynth. 3rd. An amethystine sapphire.
4th. A polished ruby, surrounded by diamonds. 5th. The engraved
ring of an abbess. 6th. A gloomy intaglio; &c. &c.

Beyond this rather quaint array of stone and metal Mrs. Swancourt
wore no ornament whatever.

Elfride had been favourably impressed with Mrs. Troyton at their
meeting about two months earlier; but to be pleased with a woman
as a momentary acquaintance was different from being taken with
her as a stepmother. However, the suspension of feeling was but
for a moment. Elfride decided to like her still.

Mrs. Swancourt was a woman of the world as to knowledge, the
reverse as to action, as her marriage suggested. Elfride and the
lady were soon inextricably involved in conversation, and Mr.
Swancourt left them to themselves.

'And what do you find to do with yourself here?' Mrs. Swancourt
said, after a few remarks about the wedding. 'You ride, I know.'

'Yes, I ride. But not much, because papa doesn't like my going
alone.'

'You must have somebody to look after you.'

'And I read, and write a little.'

'You should write a novel. The regular resource of people who
don't go enough into the world to live a novel is to write one.'

'I have done it,' said Elfride, looking dubiously at Mrs.
Swancourt, as if in doubt whether she would meet with ridicule
there.

'That's right. Now, then, what is it about, dear?'

'About--well, it is a romance of the Middle Ages.'

'Knowing nothing of the present age, which everybody knows about,
for safety you chose an age known neither to you nor other people.
That's it, eh? No, no; I don't mean it, dear.'

'Well, I have had some opportunities of studying mediaeval art and
manners in the library and private museum at Endelstow House, and
I thought I should like to try my hand upon a fiction. I know the
time for these tales is past; but I was interested in it, very
much interested.'

'When is it to appear?'

'Oh, never, I suppose.'

'Nonsense, my dear girl. Publish it, by all means. All ladies do
that sort of thing now; not for profit, you know, but as a
guarantee of mental respectability to their future husbands.'

'An excellent idea of us ladies.'

'Though I am afraid it rather resembles the melancholy ruse of
throwing loaves over castle-walls at besiegers, and suggests
desperation rather than plenty inside.'

'Did you ever try it?'

'No; I was too far gone even for that.'

'Papa says no publisher will take my book.'

'That remains to be proved. I'll give my word, my dear, that by
this time next year it shall be printed.'

'Will you, indeed?' said Elfride, partially brightening with
pleasure, though she was sad enough in her depths. 'I thought
brains were the indispensable, even if the only, qualification for
admission to the republic of letters. A mere commonplace creature
like me will soon be turned out again.'

'Oh no; once you are there you'll be like a drop of water in a
piece of rock-crystal--your medium will dignify your commonness.'

'It will be a great satisfaction,' Elfride murmured, and thought
of Stephen, and wished she could make a great fortune by writing
romances, and marry him and live happily.

'And then we'll go to London, and then to Paris,' said Mrs.
Swancourt. 'I have been talking to your father about it. But we
have first to move into the manor-house, and we think of staying
at Torquay whilst that is going on. Meanwhile, instead of going
on a honeymoon scamper by ourselves, we have come home to fetch
you, and go all together to Bath for two or three weeks.'

Elfride assented pleasantly, even gladly; but she saw that, by
this marriage, her father and herself had ceased for ever to be
the close relations they had been up to a few weeks ago. It was
impossible now to tell him the tale of her wild elopement with
Stephen Smith.

He was still snugly housed in her heart. His absence had regained
for him much of that aureola of saintship which had been nearly
abstracted during her reproachful mood on that miserable journey
from London. Rapture is often cooled by contact with its cause,
especially if under awkward conditions. And that last experience
with Stephen had done anything but make him shine in her eyes.
His very kindness in letting her return was his offence. Elfride
had her sex's love of sheer force in a man, however ill-directed;
and at that critical juncture in London Stephen's only chance of
retaining the ascendancy over her that his face and not his parts
had acquired for him, would have been by doing what, for one
thing, he was too youthful to undertake--that was, dragging her by
the wrist to the rails of some altar, and peremptorily marrying
her. Decisive action is seen by appreciative minds to be
frequently objectless, and sometimes fatal; but decision, however
suicidal, has more charm for a woman than the most unequivocal
Fabian success.

However, some of the unpleasant accessories of that occasion were
now out of sight again, and Stephen had resumed not a few of his
fancy colours.

Chapter XIII

'He set in order many proverbs.'

It is London in October--two months further on in the story.

Bede's Inn has this peculiarity, that it faces, receives from, and
discharges into a bustling thoroughfare speaking only of wealth
and respectability, whilst its postern abuts on as crowded and
poverty-stricken a network of alleys as are to be found anywhere
in the metropolis. The moral consequences are, first, that those
who occupy chambers in the Inn may see a great deal of shirtless
humanity's habits and enjoyments without doing more than look down
from a back window; and second they may hear wholesome though
unpleasant social reminders through the medium of a harsh voice,
an unequal footstep, the echo of a blow or a fall, which
originates in the person of some drunkard or wife-beater, as he
crosses and interferes with the quiet of the square. Characters
of this kind frequently pass through the Inn from a little foxhole
of an alley at the back, but they never loiter there.

It is hardly necessary to state that all the sights and movements
proper to the Inn are most orderly. On the fine October evening
on which we follow Stephen Smith to this place, a placid porter is
sitting on a stool under a sycamore-tree in the midst, with a
little cane in his hand. We notice the thick coat of soot upon
the branches, hanging underneath them in flakes, as in a chimney.
The blackness of these boughs does not at present improve the
tree--nearly forsaken by its leaves as it is--but in the spring
their green fresh beauty is made doubly beautiful by the contrast.
Within the railings is a flower-garden of respectable dahlias and
chrysanthemums, where a man is sweeping the leaves from the grass.

Stephen selects a doorway, and ascends an old though wide wooden
staircase, with moulded balusters and handrail, which in a country
manor-house would be considered a noteworthy specimen of
Renaissance workmanship. He reaches a door on the first floor,
over which is painted, in black letters, 'Mr. Henry Knight'--
'Barrister-at-law' being understood but not expressed. The wall
is thick, and there is a door at its outer and inner face. The
outer one happens to be ajar: Stephen goes to the other, and taps.

'Come in!' from distant penetralia.

First was a small anteroom, divided from the inner apartment by a
wainscoted archway two or three yards wide. Across this archway
hung a pair of dark-green curtains, making a mystery of all within
the arch except the spasmodic scratching of a quill pen. Here was
grouped a chaotic assemblage of articles--mainly old framed prints
and paintings--leaning edgewise against the wall, like roofing
slates in a builder's yard. All the books visible here were
folios too big to be stolen--some lying on a heavy oak table in
one corner, some on the floor among the pictures, the whole
intermingled with old coats, hats, umbrellas, and walking-sticks.

Stephen pushed aside the curtain, and before him sat a man writing
away as if his life depended upon it--which it did.

A man of thirty in a speckled coat, with dark brown hair, curly
beard, and crisp moustache: the latter running into the beard on
each side of the mouth, and, as usual, hiding the real expression
of that organ under a chronic aspect of impassivity.

'Ah, my dear fellow, I knew 'twas you,' said Knight, looking up
with a smile, and holding out his hand.

Knight's mouth and eyes came to view now. Both features were
good, and had the peculiarity of appearing younger and fresher
than the brow and face they belonged to, which were getting
sicklied o'er by the unmistakable pale cast. The mouth had not
quite relinquished rotundity of curve for the firm angularities of
middle life; and the eyes, though keen, permeated rather than
penetrated: what they had lost of their boy-time brightness by a
dozen years of hard reading lending a quietness to their gaze
which suited them well.

A lady would have said there was a smell of tobacco in the room: a
man that there was not.

Knight did not rise. He looked at a timepiece on the mantelshelf,
then turned again to his letters, pointing to a chair.

'Well, I am glad you have come. I only returned to town
yesterday; now, don't speak, Stephen, for ten minutes; I have just
that time to the late post. At the eleventh minute, I'm your man.'

Stephen sat down as if this kind of reception was by no means new,
and away went Knight's pen, beating up and down like a ship in a
storm.

Cicero called the library the soul of the house; here the house
was all soul. Portions of the floor, and half the wall-space,
were taken up by book-shelves ordinary and extraordinary; the
remaining parts, together with brackets, side-tables, &c., being
occupied by casts, statuettes, medallions, and plaques of various
descriptions, picked up by the owner in his wanderings through
France and Italy.

One stream only of evening sunlight came into the room from a
window quite in the corner, overlooking a court. An aquarium
stood in the window. It was a dull parallelopipedon enough for
living creatures at most hours of the day; but for a few minutes
in the evening, as now, an errant, kindly ray lighted up and
warmed the little world therein, when the many-coloured zoophytes
opened and put forth their arms, the weeds acquired a rich
transparency, the shells gleamed of a more golden yellow, and the
timid community expressed gladness more plainly than in words.

Within the prescribed ten minutes Knight flung down his pen, rang
for the boy to take the letters to the post, and at the closing of
the door exclaimed, 'There; thank God, that's done. Now, Stephen,
pull your chair round, and tell me what you have been doing all
this time. Have you kept up your Greek?'

'No.'

'How's that?'

'I haven't enough spare time.'

'That's nonsense.'

'Well, I have done a great many things, if not that. And I have
done one extraordinary thing.'

Knight turned full upon Stephen. 'Ah-ha! Now, then, let me look
into your face, put two and two together, and make a shrewd
guess.'

Stephen changed to a redder colour.

'Why, Smith,' said Knight, after holding him rigidly by the
shoulders, and keenly scrutinising his countenance for a minute in
silence, 'you have fallen in love.'

'Well--the fact is----'

'Now, out with it.' But seeing that Stephen looked rather
distressed, he changed to a kindly tone. 'Now Smith, my lad, you
know me well enough by this time, or you ought to; and you know
very well that if you choose to give me a detailed account of the
phenomenon within you, I shall listen; if you don't, I am the last
man in the world to care to hear it.'

'I'll tell this much: I HAVE fallen in love, and I want to be
MARRIED.'

Knight looked ominous as this passed Stephen's lips.

'Don't judge me before you have heard more,' cried Stephen
anxiously, seeing the change in his friend's countenance.

'I don't judge. Does your mother know about it?'

'Nothing definite.'

'Father?'

'No. But I'll tell you. The young person----'

'Come, that's dreadfully ungallant. But perhaps I understand the
frame of mind a little, so go on. Your sweetheart----'

'She is rather higher in the world than I am.'

'As it should be.'

'And her father won't hear of it, as I now stand.'

'Not an uncommon case.'

'And now comes what I want your advice upon. Something has
happened at her house which makes it out of the question for us to
ask her father again now. So we are keeping silent. In the
meantime an architect in India has just written to Mr. Hewby to
ask whether he can find for him a young assistant willing to go
over to Bombay to prepare drawings for work formerly done by the
engineers. The salary he offers is 350 rupees a month, or about
35 Pounds. Hewby has mentioned it to me, and I have been to Dr.
Wray, who says I shall acclimatise without much illness. Now,
would you go?'

'You mean to say, because it is a possible road to the young
lady.'

'Yes; I was thinking I could go over and make a little money, and
then come back and ask for her. I have the option of practising
for myself after a year.'

'Would she be staunch?'

'Oh yes! For ever--to the end of her life!'

'How do you know?'

'Why, how do people know? Of course, she will.'

Knight leant back in his chair. 'Now, though I know her
thoroughly as she exists in your heart, Stephen, I don't know her
in the flesh. All I want to ask is, is this idea of going to
India based entirely upon a belief in her fidelity?'

'Yes; I should not go if it were not for her.'

'Well, Stephen, you have put me in rather an awkward position. If
I give my true sentiments, I shall hurt your feelings; if I don't,
I shall hurt my own judgment. And remember, I don't know much
about women.'

'But you have had attachments, although you tell me very little
about them.'

'And I only hope you'll continue to prosper till I tell you more.'

Stephen winced at this rap. 'I have never formed a deep
attachment,' continued Knight. 'I never have found a woman worth
it. Nor have I been once engaged to be married.'

'You write as if you had been engaged a hundred times, if I may be
allowed to say so,' said Stephen in an injured tone.

'Yes, that may be. But, my dear Stephen, it is only those who
half know a thing that write about it. Those who know it
thoroughly don't take the trouble. All I know about women, or men
either, is a mass of generalities. I plod along, and occasionally
lift my eyes and skim the weltering surface of mankind lying
between me and the horizon, as a crow might; no more.'

Knight stopped as if he had fallen into a train of thought, and
Stephen looked with affectionate awe at a master whose mind, he
believed, could swallow up at one meal all that his own head
contained.

There was affective sympathy, but no great intellectual
fellowship, between Knight and Stephen Smith. Knight had seen his
young friend when the latter was a cherry-cheeked happy boy, had
been interested in him, had kept his eye upon him, and generously
helped the lad to books, till the mere connection of patronage
grew to acquaintance, and that ripened to friendship. And so,
though Smith was not at all the man Knight would have deliberately
chosen as a friend--or even for one of a group of a dozen friends--
he somehow was his friend. Circumstance, as usual, did it all.
How many of us can say of our most intimate alter ego, leaving
alone friends of the outer circle, that he is the man we should
have chosen, as embodying the net result after adding up all the
points in human nature that we love, and principles we hold, and
subtracting all that we hate? The man is really somebody we got to
know by mere physical juxtaposition long maintained, and was taken
into our confidence, and even heart, as a makeshift.

'And what do you think of her?' Stephen ventured to say, after a
silence.

'Taking her merits on trust from you,' said Knight, 'as we do
those of the Roman poets of whom we know nothing but that they
lived, I still think she will not stick to you through, say, three
years of absence in India.'

'But she will!' cried Stephen desperately. 'She is a girl all
delicacy and honour. And no woman of that kind, who has committed
herself so into a man's hands as she has into mine, could possibly
marry another.'

'How has she committed herself?' asked Knight cunously.

Stephen did not answer. Knight had looked on his love so
sceptically that it would not do to say all that he had intended
to say by any means.

'Well, don't tell,' said Knight. 'But you are begging the
question, which is, I suppose, inevitable in love.'

'And I'll tell you another thing,' the younger man pleaded. 'You
remember what you said to me once about women receiving a kiss.
Don't you? Why, that instead of our being charmed by the
fascination of their bearing at such a time, we should immediately
doubt them if their confusion has any GRACE in it--that awkward
bungling was the true charm of the occasion, implying that we are
the first who has played such a part with them.'

'It is true, quite,' said Knight musingly.

It often happened that the disciple thus remembered the lessons of
the master long after the master himself had forgotten them.

'Well, that was like her!' cried Stephen triumphantly. 'She was
in such a flurry that she didn't know what she was doing.'

'Splendid, splendid!' said Knight soothingly. 'So that all I have
to say is, that if you see a good opening in Bombay there's no
reason why you should not go without troubling to draw fine
distinctions as to reasons. No man fully realizes what opinions
he acts upon, or what his actions mean.'

'Yes; I go to Bombay. I'll write a note here, if you don't mind.'

'Sleep over it--it is the best plan--and write to-morrow.
Meantime, go there to that window and sit down, and look at my
Humanity Show. I am going to dine out this evening, and have to
dress here out of my portmanteau. I bring up my things like this
to save the trouble of going down to my place at Richmond and back
again.'

Knight then went to the middle of the room and flung open his
portmanteau, and Stephen drew near the window. The streak of
sunlight had crept upward, edged away, and vanished; the zoophytes
slept: a dusky gloom pervaded the room. And now another volume of
light shone over the window.

'There!' said Knight, 'where is there in England a spectacle to
equal that? I sit there and watch them every night before I go
home. Softly open the sash.'

Beneath them was an alley running up to the wall, and thence
turning sideways and passing under an arch, so that Knight's back
window was immediately over the angle, and commanded a view of the
alley lengthwise. Crowds--mostly of women--were surging,
bustling, and pacing up and down. Gaslights glared from butchers'
stalls, illuminating the lumps of flesh to splotches of orange and
vermilion, like the wild colouring of Turner's later pictures,
whilst the purl and babble of tongues of every pitch and mood was
to this human wild-wood what the ripple of a brook is to the
natural forest.

Nearly ten minutes passed. Then Knight also came to the window.

'Well, now, I call a cab and vanish down the street in the
direction of Berkeley Square,' he said, buttoning his waistcoat
and kicking his morning suit into a corner. Stephen rose to
leave.

'What a heap of literature!' remarked the young man, taking a
final longing survey round the room, as if to abide there for ever
would be the great pleasure of his life, yet feeling that he had
almost outstayed his welcome-while. His eyes rested upon an arm-
chair piled full of newspapers, magazines, and bright new volumes
in green and red.

'Yes,' said Knight, also looking at them and breathing a sigh of
weariness; 'something must be done with several of them soon, I
suppose. Stephen, you needn't hurry away for a few minutes, you
know, if you want to stay; I am not quite ready. Overhaul those
volumes whilst I put on my coat, and I'll walk a little way with
you.'

Stephen sat down beside the arm-chair and began to tumble the
books about. Among the rest he found a novelette in one volume,
THE COURT OF KELLYON CASTLE. By Ernest Field.

'Are you going to review this?' inquired Stephen with apparent
unconcern, and holding up Elfride's effusion.

'Which? Oh, that! I may--though I don't do much light reviewing
now. But it is reviewable.'

'How do you mean?'

Knight never liked to be asked what he meant. 'Mean! I mean that
the majority of books published are neither good enough nor bad
enough to provoke criticism, and that that book does provoke it.'

'By its goodness or its badness?' Stephen said with some anxiety
on poor little Elfride's score.

'Its badness. It seems to be written by some girl in her teens.'

Stephen said not another word. He did not care to speak plainly
of Elfride after that unfortunate slip his tongue had made in
respect of her having committed herself; and, apart from that,
Knight's severe--almost dogged and self-willed--honesty in
criticizing was unassailable by the humble wish of a youthful
friend like Stephen.

Knight was now ready. Turning off the gas, and slamming together
the door, they went downstairs and into the street.

Chapter XIV

'We frolic while 'tis May.'

It has now to be realized that nearly three-quarters of a year
have passed away. In place of the autumnal scenery which formed a
setting to the previous enactments, we have the culminating blooms
of summer in the year following.

Stephen is in India, slaving away at an office in Bombay;
occasionally going up the country on professional errands, and
wondering why people who had been there longer than he complained
so much of the effect of the climate upon their constitutions.
Never had a young man a finer start than seemed now to present
itself to Stephen. It was just in that exceptional heyday of
prosperity which shone over Bombay some few years ago, that he
arrived on the scene. Building and engineering partook of the
general impetus. Speculation moved with an accelerated velocity
every successive day, the only disagreeable contingency connected
with it being the possibility of a collapse.

Elfride had never told her father of the four-and-twenty-hours'
escapade with Stephen, nor had it, to her knowledge, come to his
ears by any other route. It was a secret trouble and grief to the
girl for a short time, and Stephen's departure was another
ingredient in her sorrow. But Elfride possessed special
facilities for getting rid of trouble after a decent interval.
Whilst a slow nature was imbibing a misfortune little by little,
she had swallowed the whole agony of it at a draught and was
brightening again. She could slough off a sadness and replace it
by a hope as easily as a lizard renews a diseased limb.

And two such excellent distractions had presented themselves. One
was bringing out the romance and looking for notices in the
papers, which, though they had been significantly short so far,
had served to divert her thoughts. The other was migrating from
the vicarage to the more commodious old house of Mrs. Swancourt's,
overlooking the same valley. Mr. Swancourt at first disliked the
idea of being transplanted to feminine soil, but the obvious
advantages of such an accession of dignity reconciled him to the
change. So there was a radical 'move;' the two ladies staying at
Torquay as had been arranged, the vicar going to and fro.

Mrs. Swancourt considerably enlarged Elfride's ideas in an
aristocratic direction, and she began to forgive her father for
his politic marriage. Certainly, in a worldly sense, a handsome
face at three-and-forty had never served a man in better stead.

The new house at Kensington was ready, and they were all in town.

The Hyde Park shrubs had been transplanted as usual, the chairs
ranked in line, the grass edgings trimmed, the roads made to look
as if they were suffering from a heavy thunderstorm; carriages had
been called for by the easeful, horses by the brisk, and the Drive
and Row were again the groove of gaiety for an hour. We gaze upon
the spectacle, at six o'clock on this midsummer afternoon, in a
melon-frame atmosphere and beneath a violet sky. The Swancourt
equipage formed one in the stream.

Mrs. Swancourt was a talker of talk of the incisive kind, which
her low musical voice--the only beautiful point in the old woman--
prevented from being wearisome.

'Now,' she said to Elfride, who, like AEneas at Carthage, was full
of admiration for the brilliant scene, 'you will find that our
companionless state will give us, as it does everybody, an
extraordinary power in reading the features of our fellow-
creatures here. I always am a listener in such places as these--
not to the narratives told by my neighbours' tongues, but by their
faces--the advantage of which is, that whether I am in Row,
Boulevard, Rialto, or Prado, they all speak the same language. I
may have acquired some skill in this practice through having been
an ugly lonely woman for so many years, with nobody to give me
information; a thing you will not consider strange when the
parallel case is borne in mind,--how truly people who have no
clocks will tell the time of day.'

'Ay, that they will,' said Mr. Swancourt corroboratively. 'I have
known labouring men at Endelstow and other farms who had framed
complete systems of observation for that purpose. By means of
shadows, winds, clouds, the movements of sheep and oxen, the
singing of birds, the crowing of cocks, and a hundred other sights
and sounds which people with watches in their pockets never know
the existence of, they are able to pronounce within ten minutes of
the hour almost at any required instant. That reminds me of an
old story which I'm afraid is too bad--too bad to repeat.' Here
the vicar shook his head and laughed inwardly.

'Tell it--do!' said the ladies.

'I mustn't quite tell it.'

'That's absurd,' said Mrs. Swancourt.

'It was only about a man who, by the same careful system of
observation, was known to deceive persons for more than two years
into the belief that he kept a barometer by stealth, so exactly
did he foretell all changes in the weather by the braying of his
ass and the temper of his wife.'

Elfride laughed.

'Exactly,' said Mrs. Swancourt. 'And in just the way that those
learnt the signs of nature, I have learnt the language of her
illegitimate sister--artificiality; and the fibbing of eyes, the
contempt of nose-tips, the indignation of back hair, the laughter
of clothes, the cynicism of footsteps, and the various emotions
lying in walking-stick twirls, hat-liftings, the elevation of
parasols, the carriage of umbrellas, become as A B C to me.

'Just look at that daughter's sister class of mamma in the
carriage across there,' she continued to Elfride, pointing with
merely a turn of her eye. 'The absorbing self-consciousness of
her position that is shown by her countenance is most humiliating
to a lover of one's country. You would hardly believe, would you,
that members of a Fashionable World, whose professed zero is far
above the highest degree of the humble, could be so ignorant of
the elementary instincts of reticence.'

'How?'

'Why, to bear on their faces, as plainly as on a phylactery, the
inscription, "Do, pray, look at the coronet on my panels."'

'Really, Charlotte,' said the vicar, 'you see as much in faces as
Mr. Puff saw in Lord Burleigh's nod.'

Elfride could not but admire the beauty of her fellow
countrywomen, especially since herself and her own few
acquaintances had always been slightly sunburnt or marked on the
back of the hands by a bramble-scratch at this time of the year.

'And what lovely flowers and leaves they wear in their bonnets!'
she exclaimed.

'Oh yes,' returned Mrs. Swancourt. 'Some of them are even more
striking in colour than any real ones. Look at that beautiful
rose worn by the lady inside the rails. Elegant vine-tendrils
introduced upon the stem as an improvement upon prickles, and all
growing so naturally just over her ear--I say growing advisedly,
for the pink of the petals and the pink of her handsome cheeks are
equally from Nature's hand to the eyes of the most casual
observer.'

'But praise them a little, they do deserve it!' said generous
Elfride.

'Well, I do. See how the Duchess of----waves to and fro in her
seat, utilizing the sway of her landau by looking around only when
her head is swung forward, with a passive pride which forbids a
resistance to the force of circumstance. Look at the pretty pout
on the mouths of that family there, retaining no traces of being
arranged beforehand, so well is it done. Look at the demure close
of the little fists holding the parasols; the tiny alert thumb,
sticking up erect against the ivory stem as knowing as can be, the
satin of the parasol invariably matching the complexion of the
face beneath it, yet seemingly by an accident, which makes the
thing so attractive. There's the red book lying on the opposite
seat, bespeaking the vast numbers of their acquaintance. And I
particularly admire the aspect of that abundantly daughtered woman
on the other side--I mean her look of unconsciousness that the
girls are stared at by the walkers, and above all the look of the
girls themselves--losing their gaze in the depths of handsome
men's eyes without appearing to notice whether they are observing
masculine eyes or the leaves of the trees. There's praise for
you. But I am only jesting, child--you know that.'

'Piph-ph-ph--how warm it is, to be sure!' said Mr. Swancourt, as
if his mind were a long distance from all he saw. 'I declare that
my watch is so hot that I can scarcely bear to touch it to see
what the time is, and all the world smells like the inside of a
hat.'

'How the men stare at you, Elfride!' said the elder lady. 'You
will kill me quite, I am afraid.'

'Kill you?'

'As a diamond kills an opal in the same setting.'

'I have noticed several ladies and gentlemen looking at me,' said
Elfride artlessly, showing her pleasure at being observed.

'My dear, you mustn't say "gentlemen" nowadays,' her stepmother
answered in the tones of arch concern that so well became her
ugliness. 'We have handed over "gentlemen" to the lower middle
class, where the word is still to be heard at tradesmen's balls
and provincial tea-parties, I believe. It is done with here.'

'What must I say, then?'

'"Ladies and MEN" always.'

At this moment appeared in the stream of vehicles moving in the
contrary direction a chariot presenting in its general surface the
rich indigo hue of a midnight sky, the wheels and margins being
picked out in delicate lines of ultramarine; the servants'
liveries were dark-blue coats and silver lace, and breeches of
neutral Indian red. The whole concern formed an organic whole,
and moved along behind a pair of dark chestnut geldings, who
advanced in an indifferently zealous trot, very daintily
performed, and occasionally shrugged divers points of their veiny
surface as if they were rather above the business.

In this sat a gentleman with no decided characteristics more than
that he somewhat resembled a good-natured commercial traveller of
the superior class. Beside him was a lady with skim-milky eyes
and complexion, belonging to the "interesting" class of women,
where that class merges in the sickly, her greatest pleasure being
apparently to enjoy nothing. Opposite this pair sat two little
girls in white hats and blue feathers.

The lady saw Elfride, smiled and bowed, and touched her husband's
elbow, who turned and received Elfride's movement of recognition
with a gallant elevation of his hat. Then the two children held
up their arms to Elfride, and laughed gleefully.

'Who is that?'

'Why, Lord Luxellian, isn't it?' said Mrs. Swancourt, who with the
vicar had been seated with her back towards them.

'Yes,' replied Elfride. 'He is the one man of those I have seen
here whom I consider handsomer than papa.'

'Thank you, dear,' said Mr. Swancourt.

'Yes; but your father is so much older. When Lord Luxellian gets
a little further on in life, he won't be half so good-looking as
our man.'

'Thank you, dear, likewise,' said Mr. Swancourt.

'See,' exclaimed Elfride, still looking towards them, 'how those
little dears want me! Actually one of them is crying for me to
come.'

'We were talking of bracelets just now. Look at Lady
Luxellian's,' said Mrs. Swancourt, as that baroness lifted up her
arm to support one of the children. 'It is slipping up her arm--
too large by half. I hate to see daylight between a bracelet and
a wrist; I wonder women haven't better taste.'

'It is not on that account, indeed,' Elfride expostulated. 'It is
that her arm has got thin, poor thing. You cannot think how much
she has altered in this last twelvemonth.'

The carriages were now nearer together, and there was an exchange
of more familiar greetings between the two families. Then the
Luxellians crossed over and drew up under the plane-trees, just in
the rear of the Swancourts. Lord Luxellian alighted, and came
forward with a musical laugh.

It was his attraction as a man. People liked him for those tones,
and forgot that he had no talents. Acquaintances remembered Mr.
Swancourt by his manner; they remembered Stephen Smith by his
face, Lord Luxellian by his laugh.

Mr. Swancourt made some friendly remarks--among others things upon
the heat.

'Yes,' said Lord Luxellian, 'we were driving by a furrier's window
this afternoon, and the sight filled us all with such a sense of
suffocation that we were glad to get away. Ha-ha!' He turned to
Elfride. 'Miss Swancourt, I have hardly seen or spoken to you
since your literary feat was made public. I had no idea a chiel
was taking notes down at quiet Endelstow, or I should certainly
have put myself and friends upon our best behaviour. Swancourt,
why didn't you give me a hint!'

Elfride fluttered, blushed, laughed, said it was nothing to speak
of, &c. &c.

'Well, I think you were rather unfairly treated by the PRESENT, I
certainly do. Writing a heavy review like that upon an elegant
trifle like the COURT OF KELLYON CASTLE was absurd.'

'What?' said Elfride, opening her eyes. 'Was I reviewed in the
PRESENT?'

'Oh yes; didn't you see it? Why, it was four or five months ago!'

'No, I never saw it. How sorry I am! What a shame of my
publishers! They promised to send me every notice that appeared.'

'Ah, then, I am almost afraid I have been giving you disagreeable
information, intentionally withheld out of courtesy. Depend upon
it they thought no good would come of sending it, and so would not
pain you unnecessarily.'

'Oh no; I am indeed glad you have told me, Lord Luxellian. It is
quite a mistaken kindness on their part. Is the review so much
against me?' she inquired tremulously.

'No, no; not that exactly--though I almost forget its exact
purport now. It was merely--merely sharp, you know--ungenerous, I
might say. But really my memory does not enable me to speak
decidedly.'

'We'll drive to the PRESENT office, and get one directly; shall
we, papa?'

'If you are so anxious, dear, we will, or send. But to-morrow
will do.'

'And do oblige me in a little matter now, Elfride,' said Lord
Luxellian warmly, and looking as if he were sorry he had brought
news that disturbed her. 'I am in reality sent here as a special
messenger by my little Polly and Katie to ask you to come into our
carriage with them for a short time. I am just going to walk
across into Piccadilly, and my wife is left alone with them. I am
afraid they are rather spoilt children; but I have half promised
them you shall come.'

The steps were let down, and Elfride was transferred--to the
intense delight of the little girls, and to the mild interest of
loungers with red skins and long necks, who cursorily eyed the
performance with their walking-sticks to their lips, occasionally
laughing from far down their throats and with their eyes, their
mouths not being concerned in the operation at all. Lord
Luxellian then told the coachman to drive on, lifted his hat,
smiled a smile that missed its mark and alighted on a total
stranger, who bowed in bewilderment. Lord Luxellian looked long
at Elfride.

The look was a manly, open, and genuine look of admiration; a
momentary tribute of a kind which any honest Englishman might have
paid to fairness without being ashamed of the feeling, or
permitting it to encroach in the slightest degree upon his
emotional obligations as a husband and head of a family. Then
Lord Luxellian turned away, and walked musingly to the upper end
of the promenade.

Mr. Swancourt had alighted at the same time with Elfride, crossing
over to the Row for a few minutes to speak to a friend he
recognized there; and his wife was thus left sole tenant of the
carriage.

Now, whilst this little act had been in course of performance,
there stood among the promenading spectators a man of somewhat
different description from the rest. Behind the general throng, in
the rear of the chairs, and leaning against the trunk of a tree,
he looked at Elfride with quiet and critical interest.

Three points about this unobtrusive person showed promptly to the
exercised eye that he was not a Row man pur sang. First, an
irrepressible wrinkle or two in the waist of his frock-coat--
denoting that he had not damned his tailor sufficiently to drive
that tradesman up to the orthodox high pressure of cunning
workmanship. Second, a slight slovenliness of umbrella,
occasioned by its owner's habit of resting heavily upon it, and
using it as a veritable walking-stick, instead of letting its
point touch the ground in the most coquettish of kisses, as is the
proper Row manner to do. Third, and chief reason, that try how
you might, you could scarcely help supposing, on looking at his
face, that your eyes were not far from a well-finished mind,
instead of the well-finished skin et praeterea nihil, which is by
rights the Mark of the Row.

The probability is that, had not Mrs. Swancourt been left alone in
her carriage under the tree, this man would have remained in his
unobserved seclusion. But seeing her thus, he came round to the
front, stooped under the rail, and stood beside the carriage-door.

Mrs. Swancourt looked reflectively at him for a quarter of a
minute, then held out her hand laughingly:

'Why, Henry Knight--of course it is! My--second--third--fourth
cousin--what shall I say? At any rate, my kinsman.'

'Yes, one of a remnant not yet cut off. I scarcely was certain of
you, either, from where I was standing.'

'I have not seen you since you first went to Oxford; consider the
number of years! You know, I suppose, of my marriage?'

And there sprang up a dialogue concerning family matters of birth,
death, and marriage, which it is not necessary to detail. Knight
presently inquired:

'The young lady who changed into the other carriage is, then, your
stepdaughter?'

'Yes, Elfride. You must know her.'

'And who was the lady in the carriage Elfride entered; who had an
ill-defined and watery look, as if she were only the reflection of
herself in a pool?'

'Lady Luxellian; very weakly, Elfride says. My husband is
remotely connected with them; but there is not much intimacy on
account of----. However, Henry, you'll come and see us, of
course. 24 Chevron Square. Come this week. We shall only be in
town a week or two longer.'

'Let me see. I've got to run up to Oxford to-morrow, where I
shall be for several days; so that I must, I fear, lose the
pleasure of seeing you in London this year.'

'Then come to Endelstow; why not return with us?'

'I am afraid if I were to come before August I should have to
leave again in a day or two. I should be delighted to be with you
at the beginning of that month; and I could stay a nice long time.
I have thought of going westward all the summer.'

'Very well. Now remember that's a compact. And won't you wait
now and see Mr. Swancourt? He will not be away ten minutes
longer.'

'No; I'll beg to be excused; for I must get to my chambers again
this evening before I go home; indeed, I ought to have been there
now--I have such a press of matters to attend to just at present.
You will explain to him, please. Good-bye.'

'And let us know the day of your appearance as soon as you can.'

'I will'

Chapter XV

'A wandering voice.'

Though sheer and intelligible griefs are not charmed away by being
confided to mere acquaintances, the process is a palliative to
certain ill-humours. Among these, perplexed vexation is one--a
species of trouble which, like a stream, gets shallower by the
simple operation of widening it in any quarter.

On the evening of the day succeeding that of the meeting in the
Park, Elfride and Mrs. Swancourt were engaged in conversation in
the dressing-room of the latter. Such a treatment of such a case
was in course of adoption here.

Elfride had just before received an affectionate letter from
Stephen Smith in Bombay, which had been forwarded to her from
Endelstow. But since this is not the case referred to, it is not
worth while to pry further into the contents of the letter than to
discover that, with rash though pardonable confidence in coming
times, he addressed her in high spirits as his darling future
wife. Probably there cannot be instanced a briefer and surer rule-
of-thumb test of a man's temperament--sanguine or cautious--than
this: did he or does he ante-date the word wife in corresponding
with a sweet-heart he honestly loves?

She had taken this epistle into her own room, read a little of it,
then SAVED the rest for to-morrow, not wishing to be so
extravagant as to consume the pleasure all at once. Nevertheless,
she could not resist the wish to enjoy yet a little more, so out
came the letter again, and in spite of misgivings as to
prodigality the whole was devoured. The letter was finally
reperused and placed in her pocket.

What was this? Also a newspaper for Elfride, which she had
overlooked in her hurry to open the letter. It was the old number
of the PRESENT, containing the article upon her book, forwarded as
had been requested.

Elfride had hastily read it through, shrunk perceptibly smaller,
and had then gone with the paper in her hand to Mrs. Swancourt's
dressing-room, to lighten or at least modify her vexation by a
discriminating estimate from her stepmother.

She was now looking disconsolately out of the window.

'Never mind, my child,' said Mrs. Swancourt after a careful
perusal of the matter indicated. 'I don't see that the review is
such a terrible one, after all. Besides, everybody has forgotten
about it by this time. I'm sure the opening is good enough for
any book ever written. Just listen--it sounds better read aloud
than when you pore over it silently: "THE COURT OF KELLYON CASTLE.
A ROMANCE OF THE MIDDLE AGES. BY ERNEST FIELD. In the belief
that we were for a while escaping the monotonous repetition of
wearisome details in modern social scenery, analyses of
uninteresting character, or the unnatural unfoldings of a
sensation plot, we took this volume into our hands with a feeling
of pleasure. We were disposed to beguile ourselves with the fancy
that some new change might possibly be rung upon donjon keeps,
chain and plate armour, deeply scarred cheeks, tender maidens
disguised as pages, to which we had not listened long ago." Now,
that's a very good beginning, in my opinion, and one to be proud
of having brought out of a man who has never seen you.'

'Ah, yes,' murmured Elfride wofully. 'But, then, see further on!'

'Well the next bit is rather unkind, I must own,' said Mrs.
Swancourt, and read on. '"Instead of this we found ourselves in
the hands of some young lady, hardly arrived at years of
discretion, to judge by the silly device it has been thought worth
while to adopt on the title-page, with the idea of disguising her
sex."'

'I am not "silly"!' said Elfride indignantly. 'He might have
called me anything but that.'

'You are not, indeed. Well:--"Hands of a young lady...whose
chapters are simply devoted to impossible tournaments, towers, and
escapades, which read like flat copies of like scenes in the
stories of Mr. G. P. R. James, and the most unreal portions of
IVANHOE. The bait is so palpably artificial that the most
credulous gudgeon turns away." Now, my dear, I don't see overmuch
to complain of in that. It proves that you were clever enough to
make him think of Sir Walter Scott, which is a great deal.'

'Oh yes; though I cannot romance myself, I am able to remind him
of those who can!' Elfride intended to hurl these words
sarcastically at her invisible enemy, but as she had no more
satirical power than a wood-pigeon, they merely fell in a pretty
murmur from lips shaped to a pout.

'Certainly: and that's something. Your book is good enough to be
bad in an ordinary literary manner, and doesn't stand by itself in
a melancholy position altogether worse than assailable.--"That
interest in an historical romance may nowadays have any chance of
being sustained, it is indispensable that the reader find himself
under the guidance of some nearly extinct species of legendary,
who, in addition to an impulse towards antiquarian research and an
unweakened faith in the mediaeval halo, shall possess an inventive
faculty in which delicacy of sentiment is far overtopped by a
power of welding to stirring incident a spirited variety of the
elementary human passions." Well, that long-winded effusion
doesn't refer to you at all, Elfride, merely something put in to
fill up. Let me see, when does he come to you again;...not till
the very end, actually. Here you are finally polished off:

'"But to return to the little work we have used as the text of
this article. We are far from altogether disparaging the author's
powers. She has a certain versatility that enables her to use
with effect a style of narration peculiar to herself, which may be
called a murmuring of delicate emotional trifles, the particular
gift of those to whom the social sympathies of a peaceful time are
as daily food. Hence, where matters of domestic experience, and
the natural touches which make people real, can be introduced
without anachronisms too striking, she is occasionally felicitous;
and upon the whole we feel justified in saying that the book will
bear looking into for the sake of those portions which have
nothing whatever to do with the story."

'Well, I suppose it is intended for satire; but don't think
anything more of it now, my dear. It is seven o'clock.' And Mrs.
Swancourt rang for her maid.

Attack is more piquant than concord. Stephen's letter was
concerning nothing but oneness with her: the review was the very
reverse. And a stranger with neither name nor shape, age nor
appearance, but a mighty voice, is naturally rather an interesting
novelty to a lady he chooses to address. When Elfride fell asleep
that night she was loving the writer of the letter, but thinking
of the writer of that article.

Chapter XVI

'Then fancy shapes--as fancy can.'

On a day about three weeks later, the Swancourt trio were sitting
quietly in the drawing-room of The Crags, Mrs. Swancourt's house
at Endelstow, chatting, and taking easeful survey of their
previous month or two of town--a tangible weariness even to people
whose acquaintances there might be counted on the fingers.

A mere season in London with her practised step-mother had so
advanced Elfride's perceptions, that her courtship by Stephen
seemed emotionally meagre, and to have drifted back several years
into a childish past. In regarding our mental experiences, as in
visual observation, our own progress reads like a dwindling of
that we progress from.

She was seated on a low chair, looking over her romance with
melancholy interest for the first time since she had become
acquainted with the remarks of the PRESENT thereupon.

'Still thinking of that reviewer, Elfie?'

'Not of him personally; but I am thinking of his opinion. Really,
on looking into the volume after this long time has elapsed, he
seems to have estimated one part of it fairly enough.'

'No, no; I wouldn't show the white feather now! Fancy that of all
people in the world the writer herself should go over to the
enemy. How shall Monmouth's men fight when Monmouth runs away?'

'I don't do that. But I think he is right in some of his
arguments, though wrong in others. And because he has some claim
to my respect I regret all the more that he should think so
mistakenly of my motives in one or two instances. It is more
vexing to be misunderstood than to be misrepresented; and he
misunderstands me. I cannot be easy whilst a person goes to rest
night after night attributing to me intentions I never had.'

'He doesn't know your name, or anything about you. And he has
doubtless forgotten there is such a book in existence by this
time.'

'I myself should certainly like him to be put right upon one or
two matters,' said the vicar, who had hitherto been silent. 'You
see, critics go on writing, and are never corrected or argued
with, and therefore are never improved.'

'Papa,' said Elfride brightening, 'write to him!'

'I would as soon write to him as look at him, for the matter of
that,' said Mr. Swancourt.

'Do! And say, the young person who wrote the book did not adopt a
masculine pseudonym in vanity or conceit, but because she was
afraid it would be thought presumptuous to publish her name, and
that she did not mean the story for such as he, but as a sweetener
of history for young people, who might thereby acquire a taste for
what went on in their own country hundreds of years ago, and be
tempted to dive deeper into the subject. Oh, there is so much to
explain; I wish I might write myself!'

'Now, Elfie, I'll tell you what we will do,' answered Mr.
Swancourt, tickled with a sort of bucolic humour at the idea of
criticizing the critic. 'You shall write a clear account of what
he is wrong in, and I will copy it and send it as mine.'

'Yes, now, directly!' said Elfride, jumping up. 'When will you
send it, papa? '

'Oh, in a day or two, I suppose,' he returned. Then the vicar
paused and slightly yawned, and in the manner of elderly people
began to cool from his ardour for the undertaking now that it came
to the point. 'But, really, it is hardly worth while,' he said.

'O papa!' said Elfride, with much disappointment. 'You said you
would, and now you won't. That is not fair!'

'But how can we send it if we don't know whom to send it to?'

'If you really want to send such a thing it can easily be done,'
said Mrs. Swancourt, coming to her step-daughter's rescue. 'An
envelope addressed, "To the Critic of THE COURT OF KELLYON CASTLE,
care of the Editor of the PRESENT," would find him.'

'Yes, I suppose it would.'

'Why not write your answer yourself, Elfride?' Mrs. Swancourt
inquired.

'I might,' she said hesitatingly; 'and send it anonymously: that
would be treating him as he has treated me.'

'No use in the world!'

'But I don't like to let him know my exact name. Suppose I put my
initials only? The less you are known the more you are thought
of.'

'Yes; you might do that.'

Elfride set to work there and then. Her one desire for the last
fortnight seemed likely to be realized. As happens with sensitive
and secluded minds, a continual dwelling upon the subject had
magnified to colossal proportions the space she assumed herself to
occupy or to have occupied in the occult critic's mind. At noon
and at night she had been pestering herself with endeavours to
perceive more distinctly his conception of her as a woman apart
from an author: whether he really despised her; whether he thought
more or less of her than of ordinary young women who never
ventured into the fire of criticism at all. Now she would have
the satisfaction of feeling that at any rate he knew her true
intent in crossing his path, and annoying him so by her
performance, and be taught perhaps to despise it a little less.

Four days later an envelope, directed to Miss Swancourt in a
strange hand, made its appearance from the post-bag.

'0h,' said Elfride, her heart sinking within her. 'Can it be from
that man--a lecture for impertinence? And actually one for Mrs.
Swancourt in the same hand-writing!' She feared to open hers.
'Yet how can he know my name? No; it is somebody else.'

'Nonsense!' said her father grimly. 'You sent your initials, and
the Directory was available. Though he wouldn't have taken the
trouble to look there unless he had been thoroughly savage with
you. I thought you wrote with rather more asperity than simple
literary discussion required.' This timely clause was introduced
to save the character of the vicar's judgment under any issue of
affairs.

'Well, here I go,' said Elfride, desperately tearing open the
seal.

'To be sure, of course,' exclaimed Mrs. Swancourt; and looking up
from her own letter. 'Christopher, I quite forgot to tell you,
when I mentioned that I had seen my distant relative, Harry
Knight, that I invited him here for whatever length of time he
could spare. And now he says he can come any day in August.'

'Write, and say the first of the month,' replied the
indiscriminate vicar.

She read om 'Goodness me--and that isn't all. He is actually the
reviewer of Elfride's book. How absurd, to be sure! I had no idea
he reviewed novels or had anything to do with the PRESENT. He is
a barrister--and I thought he only wrote in the Quarterlies. Why,
Elfride, you have brought about an odd entanglement! What does he
say to you?'

Elfride had put down her letter with a dissatisfied flush on her
face. 'I don't know. The idea of his knowing my name and all
about me!...Why, he says nothing particular, only this--

'"MY DEAR MADAM,--Though I am sorry that my remarks should have
seemed harsh to you, it is a pleasure to find that they have been
the means of bringing forth such an ingeniously argued reply.
Unfortunately, it is so long since I wrote my review, that my
memory does not serve me sufficiently to say a single word in my
defence, even supposing there remains one to be said, which is
doubtful. You, will find from a letter I have written to Mrs.
Swancourt, that we are not such strangers to each other as we have
been imagining. Possibly, I may have the pleasure of seeing you
soon, when any argument you choose to advance shall receive all
the attention it deserves."

'That is dim sarcasm--I know it is.'

'Oh no, Elfride.'

'And then, his remarks didn't seem harsh--I mean I did not say
so.'

'He thinks you are in a frightful temper,' said Mr. Swancourt,
chuckling in undertones.

'And he will come and see me, and find the authoress as
contemptible in speech as she has been impertinent in manner. I
do heartily wish I had never written a word to him!'

'Never mind,' said Mrs. Swancourt, also laughing in low quiet
jerks; 'it will make the meeting such a comical affair, and afford
splendid by-play for your father and myself. The idea of our
running our heads against Harry Knight all the time! I cannot get
over that.'

The vicar had immediately remembered the name to be that of
Stephen Smith's preceptor and friend; but having ceased to concern
himself in the matter he made no remark to that effect,
consistently forbearing to allude to anything which could restore
recollection of the (to him) disagreeable mistake with regard to
poor Stephen's lineage and position. Elfride had of course
perceived the same thing, which added to the complication of
relationship a mesh that her stepmother knew nothing of.

The identification scarcely heightened Knight's attractions now,
though a twelvemonth ago she would only have cared to see him for
the interest he possessed as Stephen's friend. Fortunately for
Knight's advent, such a reason for welcome had only begun to be
awkward to her at a time when the interest he had acquired on his
own account made it no longer necessary.

These coincidences, in common with all relating to him, tended to
keep Elfride's mind upon the stretch concerning Knight. As was
her custom when upon the horns of a dilemma, she walked off by
herself among the laurel bushes, and there, standing still and
splitting up a leaf without removing it from its stalk, fetched
back recollections of Stephen's frequent words in praise of his
friend, and wished she had listened more attentively. Then, still
pulling the leaf, she would blush at some fancied mortification
that would accrue to her from his words when they met, in
consequence of her intrusiveness, as she now considered it, in
writing to him.

The next development of her meditations was the subject of what
this man's personal appearance might be--was he tall or short,
dark or fair, gay or grim? She would have asked Mrs. Swancourt but
for the risk she might thereby incur of some teasing remark being
returned. Ultimately Elfride would say, 'Oh, what a plague that
reviewer is to me!' and turn her face to where she imagined India
lay, and murmur to herself, 'Ah, my little husband, what are you
doing now? Let me see, where are you--south, east, where? Behind
that hill, ever so far behind!'

Chapter XVII

'Her welcome, spoke in faltering phrase.'

'There is Henry Knight, I declare!' said Mrs. Swancourt one day.

They were gazing from the jutting angle of a wild enclosure not
far from The Crags, which almost overhung the valley already
described as leading up from the sea and little port of Castle
Boterel. The stony escarpment upon which they stood had the
contour of a man's face, and it was covered with furze as with a
beard. People in the field above were preserved from an
accidental roll down these prominences and hollows by a hedge on
the very crest, which was doing that kindly service for Elfride
and her mother now.

Scrambling higher into the hedge and stretching her neck further
over the furze, Elfride beheld the individual signified. He was
walking leisurely along the little green path at the bottom,
beside the stream, a satchel slung upon his left hip, a stout
walking-stick in his hand, and a brown-holland sun-hat upon his
head. The satchel was worn and old, and the outer polished
surface of the leather was cracked and peeling off.

Knight having arrived over the hills to Castle Boterel upon the
top of a crazy omnibus, preferred to walk the remaining two miles
up the valley, leaving his luggage to be brought on.

Behind him wandered, helter-skelter, a boy of whom Knight had
briefly inquired the way to Endelstow; and by that natural law of
physics which causes lesser bodies to gravitate towards the
greater, this boy had kept near to Knight, and trotted like a
little dog close at his heels, whistling as he went, with his eyes
fixed upon Knight's boots as they rose and fell.

When they had reached a point precisely opposite that in which
Mrs. and Miss Swancourt lay in ambush, Knight stopped and turned
round.

'Look here, my boy,' he said.

The boy parted his lips, opened his eyes, and answered nothing.

'Here's sixpence for you, on condition that you don't again come
within twenty yards of my heels, all the way up the valley.'

The boy, who apparently had not known he had been looking at
Knight's heels at all, took the sixpence mechanically, and Knight
went on again, wrapt in meditation.

'A nice voice,' Elfride thought; 'but what a singular temper!'

'Now we must get indoors before he ascends the slope,' said Mrs.
Swancourt softly. And they went across by a short cut over a
stile, entering the lawn by a side door, and so on to the house.

Mr. Swancourt had gone into the village with the curate, and
Elfride felt too nervous to await their visitor's arrival in the
drawing-room with Mrs. Swancourt. So that when the elder lady
entered, Elfride made some pretence of perceiving a new variety of
crimson geranium, and lingered behind among the flower beds.

There was nothing gained by this, after all, she thought; and a
few minutes after boldly came into the house by the glass side-
door. She walked along the corridor, and entered the drawing-
room. Nobody was there.

A window at the angle of the room opened directly into an
octagonal conservatory, enclosing the corner of the building.
From the conservatory came voices in conversation--Mrs.
Swancourt's and the stranger's.

She had expected him to talk brilliantly. To her surprise he was
asking questions in quite a learner's manner, on subjects
connected with the flowers and shrubs that she had known for
years. When after the lapse of a few minutes he spoke at some
length, she considered there was a hard square decisiveness in the
shape of his sentences, as if, unlike her own and Stephen's, they
were not there and then newly constructed, but were drawn forth
from a large store ready-made. They were now approaching the
window to come in again.

'That is a flesh-coloured variety,' said Mrs. Swancourt. 'But
oleanders, though they are such bulky shrubs, are so very easily
wounded as to be unprunable--giants with the sensitiveness of
young ladies. Oh, here is Elfride!'

Elfride looked as guilty and crestfallen as Lady Teazle at the
dropping of the screen. Mrs. Swancourt presented him half
comically, and Knight in a minute or two placed himself beside the
young lady.

A complexity of instincts checked Elfride's conventional smiles of
complaisance and hospitality; and, to make her still less
comfortable, Mrs. Swancourt immediately afterwards left them
together to seek her husband. Mr. Knight, however, did not seem
at all incommoded by his feelings, and he said with light
easefulness:

'So, Miss Swancourt, I have met you at last. You escaped me by a
few minutes only when we were in London.'

'Yes. I found that you had seen Mrs. Swancourt.'

'And now reviewer and reviewed are face to face,' he added
unconcernedly.

'Yes: though the fact of your being a relation of Mrs. Swancourt's
takes off the edge of it. It was strange that you should be one
of her family all the time.' Elfride began to recover herself now,
and to look into Knight's face. 'I was merely anxious to let you
know my REAL meaning in writing the book--extremely anxious.'

'I can quite understand the wish; and I was gratified that my
remarks should have reached home. They very seldom do, I am
afraid.'

Elfride drew herself in. Here he was, sticking to his opinions as
firmly as if friendship and politeness did not in the least
require an immediate renunciation of them.

'You made me very uneasy and sorry by writing such things!' she
murmured, suddenly dropping the mere cacueterie of a fashionable
first introduction, and speaking with some of the dudgeon of a
child towards a severe schoolmaster.

'That is rather the object of honest critics in such a case. Not
to cause unnecessary sorrow, but: "To make you sorry after a
proper manner, that ye may receive damage by us in nothing," as a
powerful pen once wrote to the Gentiles. Are you going to write
another romance?'

'Write another?' she said. 'That somebody may pen a condemnation
and "nail't wi' Scripture" again, as you do now, Mr. Knight?'

'You may do better next time,' he said placidly: 'I think you
will. But I would advise you to confine yourself to domestic
scenes.'

'Thank you. But never again!'

'Well, you may be right. That a young woman has taken to writing
is not by any means the best thing to hear about her.'

'What is the best?'

'I prefer not to say.'

'Do you know? Then, do tell me, please.'

'Well'--(Knight was evidently changing his meaning)--'I suppose to
hear that she has married.'

Elfride hesitated. 'And what when she has been married?' she said
at last, partly in order to withdraw her own person from the
argument.

'Then to hear no more about her. It is as Smeaton said of his
lighthouse: her greatest real praise, when the novelty of her
inauguration has worn off, is that nothing happens to keep the
talk of her alive.'

'Yes, I see,' said Elfride softly and thoughtfully. 'But of
course it is different quite with men. Why don't you write
novels, Mr. Knight?'

'Because I couldn't write one that would interest anybody.'

'Why?'

'For several reasons. It requires a judicious omission of your
real thoughts to make a novel popular, for one thing.'

'Is that really necessary? Well, I am sure you could learn to do
that with practice,' said Elfride with an ex-cathedra air, as
became a person who spoke from experience in the art. 'You would
make a great name for certain,' she continued.

'So many people make a name nowadays, that it is more
distinguished to remain in obscurity.'

'Tell me seriously--apart from the subject--why don't you write a
volume instead of loose articles?' she insisted.

'Since you are pleased to make me talk of myself, I will tell you
seriously,' said Knight, not less amused at this catechism by his
young friend than he was interested in her appearance. 'As I have
implied, I have not the wish. And if I had the wish, I could not
now concentrate sufficiently. We all have only our one cruse of
energy given us to make the best of. And where that energy has
been leaked away week by week, quarter by quarter, as mine has for
the last nine or ten years, there is not enough dammed back behind
the mill at any given period to supply the force a complete book
on any subject requires. Then there is the self-confidence and
waiting power. Where quick results have grown customary, they are
fatal to a lively faith in the future.'

'Yes, I comprehend; and so you choose to write in fragments?'

'No, I don't choose to do it in the sense you mean; choosing from
a whole world of professions, all possible. It was by the
constraint of accident merely. Not that I object to the
accident.'

'Why don't you object--I mean, why do you feel so quiet about
things?' Elfride was half afraid to question him so, but her
intense curiosity to see what the inside of literary Mr. Knight
was like, kept her going on.

Knight certainly did not mind being frank with her. Instances of
this trait in men who are not without feeling, but are reticent
from habit, may be recalled by all of us. When they find a
listener who can by no possibility make use of them, rival them,
or condemn them, reserved and even suspicious men of the world
become frank, keenly enjoying the inner side of their frankness.

'Why I don't mind the accidental constraint,' he replied, 'is
because, in making beginnings, a chance limitation of direction is
often better than absolute freedom.'

'I see--that is, I should if I quite understood what all those
generalities mean.'

'Why, this: That an arbitrary foundation for one's work, which no
length of thought can alter, leaves the attention free to fix
itself on the work itself, and make the best of it.'

'Lateral compression forcing altitude, as would be said in that
tongue,' she said mischievously. 'And I suppose where no limit
exists, as in the case of a rich man with a wide taste who wants
to do something, it will be better to choose a limit capriciously
than to have none.'

'Yes,' he said meditatively. 'I can go as far as that.'

'Well,' resumed Elfride, 'I think it better for a man's nature if
he does nothing in particular.'

'There is such a case as being obliged to.'

'Yes, yes; I was speaking of when you are not obliged for any
other reason than delight in the prospect of fame. I have thought
many times lately that a thin widespread happiness, commencing
now, and of a piece with the days of your life, is preferable to
an anticipated heap far away in the future, and none now.'

'Why, that's the very thing I said just now as being the principle
of all ephemeral doers like myself.'

'Oh, I am sorry to have parodied you,' she said with some
confusion. 'Yes, of course. That is what you meant about not
trying to be famous.' And she added, with the quickness of
conviction characteristic of her mind: 'There is much littleness
in trying to be great. A man must think a good deal of himself,
and be conceited enough to believe in himself, before he tries at
all.'

'But it is soon enough to say there is harm in a man's thinking a
good deal of himself when it is proved he has been thinking wrong,
and too soon then sometimes. Besides, we should not conclude that
a man who strives earnestly for success does so with a strong
sense of his own merit. He may see how little success has to do
with merit, and his motive may be his very humility.'

This manner of treating her rather provoked Elfride. No sooner
did she agree with him than he ceased to seem to wish it, and took
the other side. 'Ah,' she thought inwardly, 'I shall have nothing
to do with a man of this kind, though he is our visitor.'

'I think you will find,' resumed Knight, pursuing the conversation
more for the sake of finishing off his thoughts on the subject
than for engaging her attention, 'that in actual life it is merely
a matter of instinct with men--this trying to push on. They awake
to a recognition that they have, without premeditation, begun to
try a little, and they say to themselves, "Since I have tried thus
much, I will try a little more." They go on because they have
begun.'

Elfride, in her turn, was not particularly attending to his words
at this moment. She had, unconsciously to herself, a way of
seizing any point in the remarks of an interlocutor which
interested her, and dwelling upon it, and thinking thoughts of her
own thereupon, totally oblivious of all that he might say in
continuation. On such occasions she artlessly surveyed the person
speaking; and then there was a time for a painter. Her eyes
seemed to look at you, and past you, as you were then, into your
future; and past your future into your eternity--not reading it,
but gazing in an unused, unconscious way--her mind still clinging
to its original thought.

This is how she was looking at Knight.

Suddenly Elfride became conscious of what she was doing, and was
painfully confused.

'What were you so intent upon in me?' he inquired.

'As far as I was thinking of you at all, I was thinking how clever
you are,' she said, with a want of premeditation that was
startling in its honesty and simplicity.

Feeling restless now that she had so unwittingly spoken, she arose
and stepped to the window, having heard the voices of her father
and Mrs. Swancourt coming up below the terrace. 'Here they are,'
she said, going out. Knight walked out upon the lawn behind her.
She stood upon the edge of the terrace, close to the stone
balustrade, and looked towards the sun, hanging over a glade just
now fair as Tempe's vale, up which her father was walking.

Knight could not help looking at her. The sun was within ten
degrees of the horizon, and its warm light flooded her face and
heightened the bright rose colour of her cheeks to a vermilion
red, their moderate pink hue being only seen in its natural tone
where the cheek curved round into shadow. The ends of her hanging
hair softly dragged themselves backwards and forwards upon her
shoulder as each faint breeze thrust against or relinquished it.
Fringes and ribbons of her dress, moved by the same breeze, licked
like tongues upon the parts around them, and fluttering forward
from shady folds caught likewise their share of the lustrous
orange glow.

Mr. Swancourt shouted out a welcome to Knight from a distance of
about thirty yards, and after a few preliminary words proceeded to
a conversation of deep earnestness on Knight's fine old family
name, and theories as to lineage and intermarriage connected
therewith. Knight's portmanteau having in the meantime arrived,
they soon retired to prepare for dinner, which had been postponed
two hours later than the usual time of that meal.

An arrival was an event in the life of Elfride, now that they were
again in the country, and that of Knight necessarily an engrossing
one. And that evening she went to bed for the first time without
thinking of Stephen at all.

Chapter XVIII

'He heard her musical pants.'

The old tower of West Endelstow Church had reached the last weeks
of its existence. It was to be replaced by a new one from the
designs of Mr. Hewby, the architect who had sent down Stephen.
Planks and poles had arrived in the churchyard, iron bars had been
thrust into the venerable crack extending down the belfry wall to
the foundation, the bells had been taken down, the owls had
forsaken this home of their forefathers, and six iconoclasts in
white fustian, to whom a cracked edifice was a species of Mumbo
Jumbo, had taken lodgings in the village previous to beginning the
actual removal of the stones.

This was the day after Knight's arrival. To enjoy for the last
time the prospect seaward from the summit, the vicar, Mrs.
Swancourt, Knight, and Elfride, all ascended the winding turret--
Mr. Swancourt stepping forward with many loud breaths, his wife
struggling along silently, but suffering none the less. They had
hardly reached the top when a large lurid cloud, palpably a
reservoir of rain, thunder, and lightning, was seen to be
advancing overhead from the north.

The two cautious elders suggested an immediate return, and
proceeded to put it in practice as regarded themselves.

'Dear me, I wish I had not come up,' exclaimed Mrs. Swancourt.

'We shall be slower than you two in going down,' the vicar said
over his shoulder, 'and so, don't you start till we are nearly at
the bottom, or you will run over us and break our necks somewhere
in the darkness of the turret.'

Accordingly Elfride and Knight waited on the leads till the
staircase should be clear. Knight was not in a talkative mood
that morning. Elfride was rather wilful, by reason of his
inattention, which she privately set down to his thinking her not
worth talking to. Whilst Knight stood watching the rise of the
cloud, she sauntered to the other side of the tower, and there
remembered a giddy feat she had performed the year before. It was
to walk round upon the parapet of the tower--which was quite
without battlement or pinnacle, and presented a smooth flat
surface about two feet wide, forming a pathway on all the four
sides. Without reflecting in the least upon what she was doing
she now stepped upon the parapet in the old way, and began walking
along.

'We are down, cousin Henry,' cried Mrs. Swancourt up the turret.
'Follow us when you like.'

Knight turned and saw Elfride beginning her elevated promenade.
His face flushed with mingled concern and anger at her rashness.

'I certainly gave you credit for more common sense,' he said.

She reddened a little and walked on.

'Miss Swancourt, I insist upon your coming down,' he exclaimed.

'I will in a minute. I am safe enough. I have done it often.'

At that moment, by reason of a slight perturbation his words had
caused in her, Elfride's foot caught itself in a little tuft of
grass growing in a joint of the stone-work, and she almost lost
her balance. Knight sprang forward with a face of horror. By
what seemed the special interposition of a considerate Providence
she tottered to the inner edge of the parapet instead of to the
outer, and reeled over upon the lead roof two or three feet below
the wall.

Knight seized her as in a vice, and he said, panting, 'That ever I
should have met a woman fool enough to do a thing of that kind!
Good God, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!'

The close proximity of the Shadow of Death had made her sick and
pale as a corpse before he spoke. Already lowered to that state,
his words completely over-powered her, and she swooned away as he
held her.

Elfride's eyes were not closed for more than forty seconds. She
opened them, and remembered the position instantly. His face had
altered its expression from stern anger to pity. But his severe
remarks had rather frightened her, and she struggled to be free.

'If you can stand, of course you may,' he said, and loosened his
arms. 'I hardly know whether most to laugh at your freak or to
chide you for its folly.'

She immediately sank upon the lead-work. Knight lifted her again.
'Are you hurt?' he said.

She murmured an incoherent expression, and tried to smile; saying,
with a fitful aversion of her face, 'I am only frightened. Put me
down, do put me down!'

'But you can't walk,' said Knight.

'You don't know that; how can you? I am only frightened, I tell
you,' she answered petulantly, and raised her hand to her
forehead. Knight then saw that she was bleeding from a severe cut
in her wrist, apparently where it had descended upon a salient
corner of the lead-work. Elfride, too, seemed to perceive and
feel this now for the first time, and for a minute nearly lost
consciousness again. Knight rapidly bound his handkerchief round
the place, and to add to the complication, the thundercloud he had
been watching began to shed some heavy drops of rain. Knight
looked up and saw the vicar striding towards the house, and Mrs.
Swancourt waddling beside him like a hard-driven duck.

'As you are so faint, it will be much better to let me carry you
down,' said Knight; 'or at any rate inside out of the rain.' But
her objection to be lifted made it impossible for him to support
her for more than five steps.

'This is folly, great folly,' he exclaimed, setting her down.

'Indeed!' she murmured, with tears in her eyes. 'I say I will not
be carried, and you say this is folly!'

'So it is.'

'No, it isn't!'

'It is folly, I think. At any rate, the origin of it all is.'

'I don't agree to it. And you needn't get so angry with me; I am
not worth it.'

'Indeed you are. You are worth the enmity of princes, as was said
of such another. Now, then, will you clasp your hands behind my
neck, that I may carry you down without hurting you?'

'No, no.'

'You had better, or I shall foreclose.'

'What's that!'

'Deprive you of your chance.'

Elfride gave a little toss.

'Now, don't writhe so when I attempt to carry you.'

'I can't help it.'

'Then submit quietly.'

'I don't care. I don't care,' she murmured in languid tones and
with closed eyes.

He took her into his arms, entered the turret, and with slow and
cautious steps descended round and round. Then, with the
gentleness of a nursing mother, he attended to the cut on her arm.
During his progress through the operations of wiping it and
binding it up anew, her face changed its aspect from pained
indifference to something like bashful interest, interspersed with
small tremors and shudders of a trifling kind.

In the centre of each pale cheek a small red spot the size of a
wafer had now made its appearance, and continued to grow larger.
Elfride momentarily expected a recurrence to the lecture on her
foolishness, but Knight said no more than this--

'Promise me NEVER to walk on that parapet again.'

'It will be pulled down soon: so I do.' In a few minutes she
continued in a lower tone, and seriously, 'You are familiar of
course, as everybody is, with those strange sensations we
sometimes have, that our life for the moment exists in duplicate.'

'That we have lived through that moment before?'

'Or shall again. Well, I felt on the tower that something similar
to that scene is again to be common to us both.'

'God forbid!' said Knight. 'Promise me that you will never again
walk on any such place on any consideration.'

'I do.'

'That such a thing has not been before, we know. That it shall
not be again, you vow. Therefore think no more of such a foolish
fancy.'

There had fallen a great deal of rain, but unaccompanied by
lightning. A few minutes longer, and the storm had ceased.

'Now, take my arm, please.'

'Oh no, it is not necessary.' This relapse into wilfulness was
because he had again connected the epithet foolish with her.

'Nonsense: it is quite necessary; it will rain again directly, and
you are not half recovered.' And without more ado Knight took her
hand, drew it under his arm, and held it there so firmly that she
could not have removed it without a struggle. Feeling like a colt
in a halter for the first time, at thus being led along, yet
afraid to be angry, it was to her great relief that she saw the
carriage coming round the corner to fetch them.

Her fall upon the roof was necessarily explained to some extent
upon their entering the house; but both forbore to mention a word
of what she had been doing to cause such an accident. During the
remainder of the afternoon Elfride was invisible; but at dinner-
time she appeared as bright as ever.

In the drawing-room, after having been exclusively engaged with
Mr. and Mrs. Swancourt through the intervening hour, Knight again
found himself thrown with Elfride. She had been looking over a
chess problem in one of the illustrated periodicals.

'You like chess, Miss Swancourt?'

'Yes. It is my favourite scientific game; indeed, excludes every
other. Do you play?'

'I have played; though not lately.'

'Challenge him, Elfride,' said the vicar heartily. 'She plays
very well for a lady, Mr. Knight.'

'Shall we play?' asked Elfride tentatively.

'Oh, certainly. I shall be delighted.'

The game began. Mr. Swancourt had forgotten a similar performance
with Stephen Smith the year before. Elfride had not; but she had
begun to take for her maxim the undoubted truth that the necessity
of continuing faithful to Stephen, without suspicion, dictated a
fickle behaviour almost as imperatively as fickleness itself; a
fact, however, which would give a startling advantage to the
latter quality should it ever appear.

Knight, by one of those inexcusable oversights which will
sometimes afflict the best of players, placed his rook in the arms
of one of her pawns. It was her first advantage. She looked
triumphant--even ruthless.

'By George! what was I thinking of?' said Knight quietly; and then
dismissed all concern at his accident.

'Club laws we'll have, won't we, Mr. Knight?' said Elfride
suasively.

'Oh yes, certainly,' said Mr. Knight, a thought, however, just
occurring to his mind, that he had two or three times allowed her
to replace a man on her religiously assuring him that such a move
was an absolute blunder.

She immediately took up the unfortunate rook and the contest
proceeded, Elfride having now rather the better of the game. Then
he won the exchange, regained his position, and began to press her
hard. Elfride grew flurried, and placed her queen on his
remaining rook's file.

'There--how stupid! Upon my word, I did not see your rook. Of
course nobody but a fool would have put a queen there knowingly!'

She spoke excitedly, half expecting her antagonist to give her
back the move.

'Nobody, of course,' said Knight serenely, and stretched out his
hand towards his royal victim.

'It is not very pleasant to have it taken advantage of, then,' she
said with some vexation.

'Club laws, I think you said?' returned Knight blandly, and
mercilessly appropriating the queen.

She was on the brink of pouting, but was ashamed to show it; tears
almost stood in her eyes. She had been trying so hard--so very
hard--thinking and thinking till her brain was in a whirl; and it
seemed so heartless of him to treat her so, after all.

'I think it is----' she began.

'What?'

--'Unkind to take advantage of a pure mistake I make in that way.'

'I lost my rook by even a purer mistake,' said the enemy in an
inexorable tone, without lifting his eyes.

'Yes, but----' However, as his logic was absolutely unanswerable,
she merely registered a protest. 'I cannot endure those cold-
blooded ways of clubs and professional players, like Staunton and
Morphy. Just as if it really mattered whether you have raised
your fingers from a man or no!'

Knight smiled as pitilessly as before, and they went on in
silence.

'Checkmate,' said Knight.

'Another game,' said Elfride peremptorily, and looking very warm.

'With all my heart,' said Knight.

'Checkmate,' said Knight again at the end of forty minutes.

'Another game,' she returned resolutely.

'I'll give you the odds of a bishop,' Knight said to her kindly.

'No, thank you,' Elfride replied in a tone intended for courteous
indifference; but, as a fact, very cavalier indeed.

'Checkmate,' said her opponent without the least emotion.

Oh, the difference between Elfride's condition of mind now, and
when she purposely made blunders that Stephen Smith might win!

It was bedtime. Her mind as distracted as if it would throb
itself out of her head, she went off to her chamber, full of
mortification at being beaten time after time when she herself was
the aggressor. Having for two or three years enjoyed the
reputation throughout the globe of her father's brain--which
almost constituted her entire world--of being an excellent player,
this fiasco was intolerable; for unfortunately the person most
dogged in the belief in a false reputation is always that one, the
possessor, who has the best means of knowing that it is not true.

In bed no sleep came to soothe her; that gentle thing being the
very middle-of-summer friend in this respect of flying away at the
merest troublous cloud. After lying awake till two o'clock an
idea seemed to strike her. She softly arose, got a light, and
fetched a Chess Praxis from the library. Returning and sitting up
in bed, she diligently studied the volume till the clock struck
five, and her eyelids felt thick and heavy. She then extinguished
the light and lay down again.

'You look pale, Elfride,' said Mrs. Swancourt the next morning at
breakfast. 'Isn't she, cousin Harry?'

A young girl who is scarcely ill at all can hardly help becoming
so when regarded as such by all eyes turning upon her at the table
in obedience to some remark. Everybody looked at Elfride. She
certainly was pale.

'Am I pale?' she said with a faint smile. 'I did not sleep much.
I could not get rid of armies of bishops and knights, try how I
would.'

'Chess is a bad thing just before bedtime; especially for
excitable people like yourself, dear. Don't ever play late
again.'

'I'll play early instead. Cousin Knight,' she said in imitation
of Mrs. Swancourt, 'will you oblige me in something?'

'Even to half my kingdom.'

'Well, it is to play one game more.'

'When?'

'Now, instantly; the moment we have breakfasted.'

'Nonsense, Elfride,' said her father. 'Making yourself a slave to
the game like that.'

'But I want to, papa! Honestly, I am restless at having been so
ignominiously overcome. And Mr. Knight doesn't mind. So what
harm can there be?'

'Let us play, by all means, if you wish it,' said Knight.

So, when breakfast was over, the combatants withdrew to the quiet
of the library, and the door was closed. Elfride seemed to have
an idea that her conduct was rather ill-regulated and startlingly
free from conventional restraint. And worse, she fancied upon
Knight's face a slightly amused look at her proceedings.

'You think me foolish, I suppose,' she said recklessly; 'but I
want to do my very best just once, and see whether I can overcome
you.'

'Certainly: nothing more natural. Though I am afraid it is not
the plan adopted by women of the world after a defeat.'

'Why, pray?'

'Because they know that as good as overcoming is skill in effacing
recollection of being overcome, and turn their attention to that
entirely.'

'I am wrong again, of course.'

'Perhaps your wrong is more pleasing than their right.'

'I don't quite know whether you mean that, or whether you are
laughing at me,' she said, looking doubtingly at him, yet
inclining to accept the more flattering interpretation. 'I am
almost sure you think it vanity in me to think I am a match for
you. Well, if you do, I say that vanity is no crime in such a
case.'

'Well, perhaps not. Though it is hardly a virtue.'

'Oh yes, in battle! Nelson's bravery lay in his vanity.'

'Indeed! Then so did his death.'

Oh no, no! For it is written in the book of the prophet
Shakespeare--

"Fear and be slain? no worse can come to fight;
And fight and die, is death destroying death!"

And down they sat, and the contest began, Elfride having the first
move. The game progressed. Elfride's heart beat so violently
that she could not sit still. Her dread was lest he should hear
it. And he did discover it at last--some flowers upon the table
being set throbbing by its pulsations.

'I think we had better give over,' said Knight, looking at her
gently. 'It is too much for you, I know. Let us write down the
position, and finish another time.'

'No, please not,' she implored. 'I should not rest if I did not
know the result at once. It is your move.'

Ten minutes passed.

She started up suddenly. 'I know what you are doing?' she cried,
an angry colour upon her cheeks, and her eyes indignant. 'You
were thinking of letting me win to please me!'

'I don't mind owning that I was,' Knight responded phlegmatically,
and appearing all the more so by contrast with her own turmoil.

'But you must not! I won't have it.'

'Very well.'

'No, that will not do; I insist that you promise not to do any
such absurd thing. It is insulting me!'

'Very well, madam. I won't do any such absurd thing. You shall
not win.'

'That is to be proved!' she returned proudly; and the play went
on.

Nothing is now heard but the ticking of a quaint old timepiece on
the summit of a bookcase. Ten minutes pass; he captures her
knight; she takes his knight, and looks a very Rhadamanthus.

More minutes tick away; she takes his pawn and has the advantage,
showing her sense of it rather prominently.

Five minutes more: he takes her bishop: she brings things even by
taking his knight.

Three minutes: she looks bold, and takes his queen: he looks
placid, and takes hers.

Eight or ten minutes pass: he takes a pawn; she utters a little
pooh! but not the ghost of a pawn can she take in retaliation.

Ten minutes pass: he takes another pawn and says, 'Check!' She
flushes, extricates herself by capturing his bishop, and looks
triumphant. He immediately takes her bishop: she looks surprised.

Five minutes longer: she makes a dash and takes his only remaining
bishop; he replies by taking her only remaining knight.

Two minutes: he gives check; her mind is now in a painful state of
tension, and she shades her face with her hand.

Yet a few minutes more: he takes her rook and checks again. She
literally trembles now lest an artful surprise she has in store
for him shall be anticipated by the artful surprise he evidently
has in store for her.

Five minutes: 'Checkmate in two moves!' exclaims Elfride.

'If you can,' says Knight.

'Oh, I have miscalculated; that is cruel!'

'Checkmate,' says Knight; and the victory is won.

Elfride arose and turned away without letting him see her face.
Once in the hall she ran upstairs and into her room, and flung
herself down upon her bed, weeping bitterly.

'Where is Elfride?' said her father at luncheon.

Knight listened anxiously for the answer. He had been hoping to
see her again before this time.

'She isn't well, sir,' was the reply.

Mrs. Swancourt rose and left the room, going upstairs to Elfride's
apartment.

At the door was Unity, who occupied in the new establishment a
position between young lady's maid and middle-housemaid.

'She is sound asleep, ma'am,' Unity whispered.

Mrs. Swancourt opened the door. Elfride was lying full-dressed on
the bed, her face hot and red, her arms thrown abroad. At
intervals of a minute she tossed restlessly from side to side, and
indistinctly moaned words used in the game of chess.

Mrs. Swancourt had a turn for doctoring, and felt her pulse. It
was twanging like a harp-string, at the rate of nearly a hundred
and fifty a minute. Softly moving the sleeping girl to a little
less cramped position, she went downstairs again.

'She is asleep now,' said Mrs. Swancourt. 'She does not seem very
well. Cousin Knight, what were you thinking of? her tender brain
won't bear cudgelling like your great head. You should have
strictly forbidden her to play again.'

In truth, the essayist's experience of the nature of young women
was far less extensive than his abstract knowledge of them led
himself and others to believe. He could pack them into sentences
like a workman, but practically was nowhere.

'I am indeed sorry,' said Knight, feeling even more than he
expressed. 'But surely, the young lady knows best what is good
for her!'

'Bless you, that's just what she doesn't know. She never thinks
of such things, does she, Christopher? Her father and I have to
command her and keep her in order, as you would a child. She will
say things worthy of a French epigrammatist, and act like a robin
in a greenhouse. But I think we will send for Dr. Granson--there
can be no harm.'

A man was straightway despatched on horseback to Castle Boterel,
and the gentleman known as Dr. Granson came in the course of the
afternoon. He pronounced her nervous system to be in a decided
state of disorder; forwarded some soothing draught, and gave
orders that on no account whatever was she to play chess again.

The next morning Knight, much vexed with himself, waited with a
curiously compounded feeling for her entry to breakfast. The
women servants came in to prayers at irregular intervals, and as
each entered, he could not, to save his life, avoid turning his
head with the hope that she might be Elfride. Mr. Swancourt began
reading without waiting for her. Then somebody glided in
noiselessly; Knight softly glanced up: it was only the little
kitchen-maid. Knight thought reading prayers a bore.

He went out alone, and for almost the first time failed to
recognize that holding converse with Nature's charms was not
solitude. On nearing the house again he perceived his young
friend crossing a slope by a path which ran into the one he was
following in the angle of the field. Here they met. Elfride was
at once exultant and abashed: coming into his presence had upon
her the effect of entering a cathedral.

Knight had his note-book in his hand, and had, in fact, been in
the very act of writing therein when they came in view of each
other. He left off in the midst of a sentence, and proceeded to
inquire warmly concerning her state of health. She said she was
perfectly well, and indeed had never looked better. Her health
was as inconsequent as her actions. Her lips were red, WITHOUT
the polish that cherries have, and their redness margined with the
white skin in a clearly defined line, which had nothing of jagged
confusion in it. Altogether she stood as the last person in the
world to be knocked over by a game of chess, because too
ephemeral-looking to play one.

'Are you taking notes?' she inquired with an alacrity plainly
arising less from interest in the subject than from a wish to
divert his thoughts from herself.

'Yes; I was making an entry. And with your permission I will
complete it.' Knight then stood still and wrote. Elfride remained
beside him a moment, and afterwards walked on.

'I should like to see all the secrets that are in that book,' she
gaily flung back to him over her shoulder.

'I don't think you would find much to interest you.'

'I know I should.'

'Then of course I have no more to say.'

'But I would ask this question first. Is it a book of mere facts
concerning journeys and expenditure, and so on, or a book of
thoughts?'

'Well, to tell the truth, it is not exactly either. It consists
for the most part of jottings for articles and essays, disjointed
and disconnected, of no possible interest to anybody but myself.'

'It contains, I suppose, your developed thoughts in embryo?'

'Yes.'

'If they are interesting when enlarged to the size of an article,
what must they be in their concentrated form? Pure rectified
spirit, above proof; before it is lowered to be fit for human
consumption: "words that burn" indeed.'

'Rather like a balloon before it is inflated: flabby, shapeless,
dead. You could hardly read them.'

'May I try?' she said coaxingly. 'I wrote my poor romance in that
way--I mean in bits, out of doors--and I should like to see
whether your way of entering things is the same as mine.'

'Really, that's rather an awkward request. I suppose I can hardly
refuse now you have asked so directly; but----'

'You think me ill-mannered in asking. But does not this justify
me--your writing in my presence, Mr. Knight? If I had lighted upon
your book by chance, it would have been different; but you stand
before me, and say, "Excuse me," without caring whether I do or
not, and write on, and then tell me they are not private facts but
public ideas.'

'Very well, Miss Swancourt. If you really must see, the
consequences be upon your own head. Remember, my advice to you is
to leave my book alone.'

'But with that caution I have your permission?'

'Yes.'

She hesitated a moment, looked at his hand containing the book,
then laughed, and saying, 'I must see it,' withdrew it from his
fingers.

Knight rambled on towards the house, leaving her standing in the
path turning over the leaves. By the time he had reached the
wicket-gate he saw that she had moved, and waited till she came
up.

Elfride had closed the note-book, and was carrying it disdainfully
by the corner between her finger and thumb; her face wore a
nettled look. She silently extended the volume towards him,
raising her eyes no higher than her hand was lifted.

'Take it,' said Elfride quickly. 'I don't want to read it.'

'Could you understand it?' said Knight.

'As far as I looked. But I didn't care to read much.'

'Why, Miss Swancourt?'

'Only because I didn't wish to--that's all.'

'I warned you that you might not.'

'Yes, but I never supposed you would have put me there.'

'Your name is not mentioned once within the four corners.'

'Not my name--I know that.'

'Nor your description, nor anything by which anybody would
recognize you.'

'Except myself. For what is this?' she exclaimed, taking it from
him and opening a page. 'August 7. That's the day before
yesterday. But I won't read it,' Elfride said, closing the book
again with pretty hauteur. 'Why should I? I had no business to
ask to see your hook, and it serves me right.'

Knight hardly recollected what he had written, and turned over the
book to see. He came to this:

'Aug. 7. Girl gets into her teens, and her self-consciousness is
born. After a certain interval passed in infantine helplessness
it begins to act. Simple, young, and inexperienced at first.
Persons of observation can tell to a nicety how old this
consciousness is by the skill it has acquired in the art necessary
to its success--the art of hiding itself. Generally begins career
by actions which are popularly termed showing-off. Method adopted
depends in each case upon the disposition, rank, residence, of the
young lady attempting it. Town-bred girl will utter some moral
paradox on fast men, or love. Country miss adopts the more
material media of taking a ghastly fence, whistling, or making
your blood run cold by appearing to risk her neck. (MEM. On
Endelstow Tower.)

'An innocent vanity is of course the origin of these displays.
"Look at me," say these youthful beginners in womanly artifice,
without reflecting whether or not it be to their advantage to show
so very much of themselves. (Amplify and correct for paper on
Artless Arts.)'

'Yes, I remember now,' said Knight. 'The notes were certainly
suggested by your manoeuvre on the church tower. But you must not
think too much of such random observations,' he continued
encouragingly, as he noticed her injured looks. 'A mere fancy
passing through my head assumes a factitious importance to you,
because it has been made permanent by being written down. All
mankind think thoughts as bad as those of people they most love on
earth, but such thoughts never getting embodied on paper, it
becomes assumed that they never existed. I daresay that you
yourself have thought some disagreeable thing or other of me,
which would seem just as bad as this if written. I challenge you,
now, to tell me.'

'The worst thing I have thought of you?'

'Yes.'

'I must not.'

'Oh yes.'

'I thought you were rather round-shouldered.'

Knight looked slightly redder.

'And that there was a little bald spot on the top of your head.'

'Heh-heh! Two ineradicable defects,' said Knight, there being a
faint ghastliness discernible in his laugh. 'They are much worse
in a lady's eye than being thought self-conscious, I suppose.'

'Ah, that's very fine,' she said, too inexperienced to perceive
her hit, and hence not quite disposed to forgive his notes. 'You
alluded to me in that entry as if I were such a child, too.
Everybody does that. I cannot understand it. I am quite a woman,
you know. How old do you think I am?'

'How old? Why, seventeen, I should say. All girls are seventeen.'

'You are wrong. I am nearly nineteen. Which class of women do
you like best, those who seem younger, or those who seem older
than they are?'

'Off-hand I should be inclined to say those who seem older.'

So it was not Elfride's class.

'But it is well known,' she said eagerly, and there was something
touching in the artless anxiety to be thought much of which she
revealed by her words, 'that the slower a nature is to develop,
the richer the nature. Youths and girls who are men and women
before they come of age are nobodies by the time that backward
people have shown their full compass.'

'Yes,' said Knight thoughtfully. 'There is really something in
that remark. But at the risk of offence I must remind you that
you there take it for granted that the woman behind her time at a
given age has not reached the end of her tether. Her backwardness
may be not because she is slow to develop, but because she soon
exhausted her capacity for developing.'

Elfride looked disappointed. By this time they were indoors.
Mrs. Swancourt, to whom match-making by any honest means was meat
and drink, had now a little scheme of that nature concerning this
pair. The morning-room, in which they both expected to find her,
was empty; the old lady having, for the above reason, vacated it
by the second door as they entered by the first.

Knight went to the chimney-piece, and carelessly surveyed two
portraits on ivory.

'Though these pink ladies had very rudimentary features, judging
by what I see here,' he observed, 'they had unquestionably
beautiful heads of hair.'

'Yes; and that is everything,' said Elfride, possibly conscious of
her own, possibly not.

'Not everything; though a great deal, certainly.'

'Which colour do you like best?' she ventured to ask.

'More depends on its abundance than on its colour.'

'Abundances being equal, may I inquire your favourite colour?'

'Dark.'

'I mean for women,' she said, with the minutest fall of
countenance, and a hope that she had been misunderstood.

'So do I,' Knight replied.

It was impossible for any man not to know the colour of Elfride's
hair. In women who wear it plainly such a feature may be
overlooked by men not given to ocular intentness. But hers was
always in the way. You saw her hair as far as you could see her
sex, and knew that it was the palest brown. She knew instantly
that Knight, being perfectly aware of this, had an independent
standard of admiration in the matter.

Elfride was thoroughly vexed. She could not but be struck with
the honesty of his opinions, and the worst of it was, that the
more they went against her, the more she respected them. And now,
like a reckless gambler, she hazarded her last and best treasure.
Her eyes: they were her all now.

'What coloured eyes do you like best, Mr. Knight?' she said
slowly.

'Honestly, or as a compliment?'

'Of course honestly; I don't want anybody's compliment!'

And yet Elfride knew otherwise: that a compliment or word of
approval from that man then would have been like a well to a
famished Arab.

'I prefer hazel,' he said serenely.

She had played and lost again.

Chapter XIX

'Love was in the next degree.'

Knight had none of those light familiarities of speech which, by
judicious touches of epigrammatic flattery, obliterate a woman's
recollection of the speaker's abstract opinions. So no more was
said by either on the subject of hair, eyes, or development.
Elfride's mind had been impregnated with sentiments of her own
smallness to an uncomfortable degree of distinctness, and her
discomfort was visible in her face. The whole tendency of the
conversation latterly had been to quietly but surely disparage
her; and she was fain to take Stephen into favour in self-defence.
He would not have been so unloving, she said, as to admire an
idiosyncrasy and features different from her own. True, Stephen
had declared he loved her: Mr. Knight had never done anything of
the sort. Somehow this did not mend matters, and the sensation of
her smallness in Knight's eyes still remained. Had the position
been reversed--had Stephen loved her in spite of a differing
taste, and had Knight been indifferent in spite of her resemblance
to his ideal, it would have engendered far happier thoughts. As
matters stood, Stephen's admiration might have its root in a
blindness the result of passion. Perhaps any keen man's judgment
was condemnatory of her.

During the remainder of Saturday they were more or less thrown
with their seniors, and no conversation arose which was
exclusively their own. When Elfride was in bed that night her
thoughts recurred to the same subject. At one moment she insisted
that it was ill-natured of him to speak so decisively as he had
done; the next, that it was sterling honesty.

'Ah, what a poor nobody I am!' she said, sighing. 'People like
him, who go about the great world, don't care in the least what I
am like either in mood or feature.'

Perhaps a man who has got thoroughly into a woman's mind in this
manner, is half way to her heart; the distance between those two
stations is proverbially short.

'And are you really going away this week?' said Mrs. Swancourt to
Knight on the following evening, which was Sunday.

They were all leisurely climbing the hill to the church, where a
last service was now to be held at the rather exceptional time of
evening instead of in the afternoon, previous to the demolition of
the ruinous portions.

'I am intending to cross to Cork from Bristol,' returned Knight;
'and then I go on to Dublin.'

'Return this way, and stay a little longer with us,' said the
vicar. 'A week is nothing. We have hardly been able to realize
your presence yet. I remember a story which----'

The vicar suddenly stopped. He had forgotten it was Sunday, and
would probably have gone on in his week-day mode of thought had
not a turn in the breeze blown the skirt of his college gown
within the range of his vision, and so reminded him. He at once
diverted the current of his narrative with the dexterity the
occasion demanded.

'The story of the Levite who journeyed to Bethlehem-judah, from
which I took my text the Sunday before last, is quite to the
point,' he continued, with the pronunciation of a man who, far
from having intended to tell a week-day story a moment earlier,
had thought of nothing but Sabbath matters for several weeks.
'What did he gain after all by his restlessness? Had he remained
in the city of the Jebusites, and not been so anxious for Gibeah,
none of his troubles would have arisen.'

'But he had wasted five days already,' said Knight, closing his
eyes to the vicar's commendable diversion. 'His fault lay in
beginning the tarrying system originally.'

'True, true; my illustration fails.'

'But not the hospitality which prompted the story.'

'So you are to come just the same,' urged Mrs. Swancourt, for she
had seen an almost imperceptible fall of countenance in her
stepdaughter at Knight's announcement.

Knight half promised to call on his return journey; but the
uncertainty with which he spoke was quite enough to fill Elfride
with a regretful interest in all he did during the few remaining
hours. The curate having already officiated twice that day in the
two churches, Mr. Swancourt had undertaken the whole of the
evening service, and Knight read the lessons for him. The sun
streamed across from the dilapidated west window, and lighted all
the assembled worshippers with a golden glow, Knight as he read
being illuminated by the same mellow lustre. Elfride at the organ
regarded him with a throbbing sadness of mood which was fed by a
sense of being far removed from his sphere. As he went
deliberately through the chapter appointed--a portion of the
history of Elijah--and ascended that magnificent climax of the
wind, the earthquake, the fire, and the still small voice, his
deep tones echoed past with such apparent disregard of her
existence, that his presence inspired her with a forlorn sense of
unapproachableness, which his absence would hardly have been able
to cause.

At the same time, turning her face for a moment to catch the glory
of the dying sun as it fell on his form, her eyes were arrested by
the shape and aspect of a woman in the west gallery. It was the
bleak barren countenance of the widow Jethway, whom Elfride had
not seen much of since the morning of her return with Stephen
Smith. Possessing the smallest of competencies, this unhappy
woman appeared to spend her life in journeyings between Endelstow
Churchyard and that of a village near Southampton, where her
father and mother were laid.

She had not attended the service here for a considerable time, and
she now seemed to have a reason for her choice of seat. From the
gallery window the tomb of her son was plainly visible--standing
as the nearest object in a prospect which was closed outwardly by
the changeless horizon of the sea.

The streaming rays, too, flooded her face, now bent towards
Elfride with a hard and bitter expression that the solemnity of
the place raised to a tragic dignity it did not intrinsically
possess. The girl resumed her normal attitude with an added
disquiet.

Elfride's emotion was cumulative, and after a while would assert
itself on a sudden. A slight touch was enough to set it free--a
poem, a sunset, a cunningly contrived chord of music, a vague
imagining, being the usual accidents of its exhibition. The
longing for Knight's respect, which was leading up to an incipient
yearning for his love, made the present conjuncture a sufficient
one. Whilst kneeling down previous to leaving, when the sunny
streaks had gone upward to the roof, and the lower part of the
church was in soft shadow, she could not help thinking of
Coleridge's morbid poem 'The Three Graves,' and shuddering as she
wondered if Mrs. Jethway were cursing her, she wept as if her
heart would break.

They came out of church just as the sun went down, leaving the
landscape like a platform from which an eloquent speaker has
retired, and nothing remains for the audience to do but to rise
and go home. Mr. and Mrs. Swancourt went off in the carriage,
Knight and Elfride preferring to walk, as the skilful old
matchmaker had imagined. They descended the hill together.

'I liked your reading, Mr. Knight,' Elfride presently found
herself saying. 'You read better than papa.'

'I will praise anybody that will praise me. You played
excellently, Miss Swancourt, and very correctly.'

'Correctly--yes.'

'It must be a great pleasure to you to take an active part in the
service.'

'I want to be able to play with more feeling. But I have not a
good selection of music, sacred or secular. I wish I had a nice
little music-library--well chosen, and that the only new pieces
sent me were those of genuine merit.'

'I am glad to hear such a wish from you. It is extraordinary how
many women have no honest love of music as an end and not as a
means, even leaving out those who have nothing in them. They
mostly like it for its accessories. I have never met a woman who
loves music as do ten or a dozen men I know.'

'How would you draw the line between women with something and
women with nothing in them?'

'Well,' said Knight, reflecting a moment, 'I mean by nothing in
them those who don't care about anything solid. This is an
instance: I knew a man who had a young friend in whom he was much
interested; in fact, they were going to be married. She was
seemingly poetical, and he offered her a choice of two editions of
the British poets, which she pretended to want badly. He said,
"Which of them would you like best for me to send?" She said, "A
pair of the prettiest earrings in Bond Street, if you don't mind,
would be nicer than either." Now I call her a girl with not much
in her but vanity; and so do you, I daresay.'

'Oh yes,' replied Elfride with an effort.

Happening to catch a glimpse of her face as she was speaking, and
noticing that her attempt at heartiness was a miserable failure,
he appeared to have misgivings.

'You, Miss Swancourt, would not, under such circumstances, have
preferred the nicknacks?'

'No, I don't think I should, indeed,' she stammered.

'I'll put it to you,' said the inflexible Knight. 'Which will you
have of these two things of about equal value--the well-chosen
little library of the best music you spoke of--bound in morocco,
walnut case, lock and key--or a pair of the very prettiest
earrings in Bond Street windows?'

'Of course the music,' Elfride replied with forced earnestness.

'You are quite certain?' he said emphatically.

'Quite,' she faltered; 'if I could for certain buy the earrings
afterwards.'

Knight, somewhat blamably, keenly enjoyed sparring with the
palpitating mobile creature, whose excitable nature made any such
thing a species of cruelty.

He looked at her rather oddly, and said, 'Fie!'

'Forgive me,' she said, laughing a little, a little frightened,
and blushing very deeply.

'Ah, Miss Elfie, why didn't you say at first, as any firm woman
would have said, I am as bad as she, and shall choose the same?'

'I don't know,' said Elfride wofully, and with a distressful
smile.

'I thought you were exceptionally musical?'

'So I am, I think. But the test is so severe--quite painful.'

'I don't understand.'

'Music doesn't do any real good, or rather----'

'That IS a thing to say, Miss Swancourt! Why, what----'

'You don't understand! you don't understand!'

'Why, what conceivable use is there in jimcrack jewellery?'

'No, no, no, no!' she cried petulantly; 'I didn't mean what you
think. I like the music best, only I like----'

'Earrings better--own it!' he said in a teasing tone. 'Well, I
think I should have had the moral courage to own it at once,
without pretending to an elevation I could not reach.'

Like the French soldiery, Elfride was not brave when on the
defensive. So it was almost with tears in her eyes that she
answered desperately:

'My meaning is, that I like earrings best just now, because I lost
one of my prettiest pair last year, and papa said he would not buy
any more, or allow me to myself, because I was careless; and now I
wish I had some like them--that's what my meaning is--indeed it
is, Mr. Knight.'

'I am afraid I have been very harsh and rude,' said Knight, with a
look of regret at seeing how disturbed she was. 'But seriously,
if women only knew how they ruin their good looks by such
appurtenances, I am sure they would never want them.'

'They were lovely, and became me so!'

'Not if they were like the ordinary hideous things women stuff
their ears with nowadays--like the governor of a steam-engine, or
a pair of scales, or gold gibbets and chains, and artists'
palettes, and compensation pendulums, and Heaven knows what
besides.'

'No; they were not one of those things. So pretty--like this,'
she said with eager animation. And she drew with the point of her
parasol an enlarged view of one of the lamented darlings, to a
scale that would have suited a giantess half-a-mile high.

'Yes, very pretty--very,' said Knight dryly. 'How did you come to
lose such a precious pair of articles?'

'I only lost one--nobody ever loses both at the same time.'

She made this remark with embarrassment, and a nervous movement of
the fingers. Seeing that the loss occurred whilst Stephen Smith
was attempting to kiss her for the first time on the cliff, her
confusion was hardly to be wondered at. The question had been
awkward, and received no direct answer.

Knight seemed not to notice her manner.

'Oh, nobody ever loses both--I see. And certainly the fact that
it was a case of loss takes away all odour of vanity from your
choice.'

'As I never know whether you are in earnest, I don't now,' she
said, looking up inquiringly at the hairy face of the oracle. And
coming gallantly to her own rescue, 'If I really seem vain, it is
that I am only vain in my ways--not in my heart. The worst women
are those vain in their hearts, and not in their ways.'

'An adroit distinction. Well, they are certainly the more
objectionable of the two,' said Knight.

'Is vanity a mortal or a venial sin? You know what life is: tell
me.'

'I am very far from knowing what life is. A just conception of
life is too large a thing to grasp during the short interval of
passing through it.'

'Will the fact of a woman being fond of jewellery be likely to
make her life, in its higher sense, a failure?'

'Nobody's life is altogether a failure.'

'Well, you know what I mean, even though my words are badly
selected and commonplace,' she said impatiently. 'Because I utter
commonplace words, you must not suppose I think only commonplace
thoughts. My poor stock of words are like a limited number of
rough moulds I have to cast all my materials in, good and bad; and
the novelty or delicacy of the substance is often lost in the
coarse triteness of the form.'

'Very well; I'll believe that ingenious representation. As to the
subject in hand--lives which are failures--you need not trouble
yourself. Anybody's life may be just as romantic and strange and
interesting if he or she fails as if he or she succeed. All the
difference is, that the last chapter is wanting in the story. If
a man of power tries to do a great deed, and just falls short of
it by an accident not his fault, up to that time his history had
as much in it as that of a great man who has done his great deed.
It is whimsical of the world to hold that particulars of how a lad
went to school and so on should be as an interesting romance or as
nothing to them, precisely in proportion to his after renown.'

They were walking between the sunset and the moonrise. With the
dropping of the sun a nearly full moon had begun to raise itself.
Their shadows, as cast by the western glare, showed signs of
becoming obliterated in the interest of a rival pair in the
opposite direction which the moon was bringing to distinctness.

'I consider my life to some extent a failure,' said Knight again
after a pause, during which he had noticed the antagonistic
shadows.

'You! How?'

'I don't precisely know. But in some way I have missed the mark.'

'Really? To have done it is not much to be sad about, but to feel
that you have done it must be a cause of sorrow. Am I right?'

'Partly, though not quite. For a sensation of being profoundly
experienced serves as a sort of consolation to people who are
conscious of having taken wrong turnings. Contradictory as it
seems, there is nothing truer than that people who have always
gone right don't know half as much about the nature and ways of
going right as those do who have gone wrong. However, it is not
desirable for me to chill your summer-time by going into this.'

'You have not told me even now if I am really vain.'

'If I say Yes, I shall offend you; if I say No, you'll think I
don't mean it,' he replied, looking curiously into her face.

'Ah, well,' she replied, with a little breath of distress, '"That
which is exceeding deep, who will find it out?" I suppose I must
take you as I do the Bible--find out and understand all I can; and
on the strength of that, swallow the rest in a lump, by simple
faith. Think me vain, if you will. Worldly greatness requires so
much littleness to grow up in, that an infirmity more or less is
not a matter for regret.'

'As regards women, I can't say,' answered Knight carelessly; 'but
it is without doubt a misfortune for a man who has a living to
get, to be born of a truly noble nature. A high soul will bring a
man to the workhouse; so you may be right in sticking up for
vanity.'

'No, no, I don't do that,' she said regretfully.

Mr. Knight, when you are gone, will you send me something you have
written? I think I should like to see whether you write as you
have lately spoken, or in your better mood. Which is your true
self--the cynic you have been this evening, or the nice
philosopher you were up to to-night?'

'Ah, which? You know as well as I.'

Their conversation detained them on the lawn and in the portico
till the stars blinked out. Elfride flung back her head, and said
idly--

'There's a bright star exactly over me.'

'Each bright star is overhead somewhere.'

'Is it? Oh yes, of course. Where is that one?' and she pointed
with her finger.

'That is poised like a white hawk over one of the Cape Verde
Islands.'

'And that?'

'Looking down upon the source of the Nile.'

'And that lonely quiet-looking one?'

'He watches the North Pole, and has no less than the whole equator
for his horizon. And that idle one low down upon the ground, that
we have almost rolled away from, is in India--over the head of a
young friend of mine, who very possibly looks at the star in our
zenith, as it hangs low upon his horizon, and thinks of it as
marking where his true love dwells.'

Elfride glanced at Knight with misgiving. Did he mean her? She
could not see his features; but his attitude seemed to show
unconsciousness.

'The star is over MY head,' she said with hesitation.

'Or anybody else's in England.'

'Oh yes, I see:' she breathed her relief.

'His parents, I believe, are natives of this county. I don't know
them, though I have been in correspondence with him for many years
till lately. Fortunately or unfortunately for him he fell in
love, and then went to Bombay. Since that time I have heard very
little of him.'

Knight went no further in his volunteered statement, and though
Elfride at one moment was inclined to profit by the lessons in
honesty he had just been giving her, the flesh was weak, and the
intention dispersed into silence. There seemed a reproach in
Knight's blind words, and yet she was not able to clearly define
any disloyalty that she had been guilty of.

Chapter XX

'A distant dearness in the hill.'

Knight turned his back upon the parish of Endelstow, and crossed
over to Cork.

One day of absence superimposed itself on another, and
proportionately weighted his heart. He pushed on to the Lakes of
Killarney, rambled amid their luxuriant woods, surveyed the
infinite variety of island, hill, and dale there to be found,
listened to the marvellous echoes of that romantic spot; but
altogether missed the glory and the dream he formerly found in
such favoured regions.

Whilst in the company of Elfride, her girlish presence had not
perceptibly affected him to any depth. He had not been conscious
that her entry into his sphere had added anything to himself; but
now that she was taken away he was very conscious of a great deal
being abstracted. The superfluity had become a necessity, and
Knight was in love.

Stephen fell in love with Elfride by looking at her: Knight by
ceasing to do so. When or how the spirit entered into him he knew
not: certain he was that when on the point of leaving Endelstow he
had felt none of that exquisite nicety of poignant sadness natural
to such severances, seeing how delightful a subject of
contemplation Elfride had been ever since. Had he begun to love
her when she met his eye after her mishap on the tower? He had
simply thought her weak. Had he grown to love her whilst standing
on the lawn brightened all over by the evening sun? He had thought
her complexion good: no more. Was it her conversation that had
sown the seed? He had thought her words ingenious, and very
creditable to a young woman, but not noteworthy. Had the chess-
playing anything to do with it? Certainly not: he had thought her
at that time a rather conceited child.

Knight's experience was a complete disproof of the assumption that
love always comes by glances of the eye and sympathetic touches of
the fingers: that, like flame, it makes itself palpable at the
moment of generation. Not till they were parted, and she had
become sublimated in his memory, could he be said to have even
attentively regarded her.

Thus, having passively gathered up images of her which his mind
did not act upon till the cause of them was no longer before him,
he appeared to himself to have fallen in love with her soul, which
had temporarily assumed its disembodiment to accompany him on his
way.

She began to rule him so imperiously now that, accustomed to
analysis, he almost trembled at the possible result of the
introduction of this new force among the nicely adjusted ones of
his ordinary life. He became restless: then he forgot all
collateral subjects in the pleasure of thinking about her.

Yet it must be said that Knight loved philosophically rather than
with romance.

He thought of her manner towards him. Simplicity verges on
coquetry. Was she flirting? he said to himself. No forcible
translation of favour into suspicion was able to uphold such a
theory. The performance had been too well done to be anything but
real. It had the defects without which nothing is genuine. No
actress of twenty years' standing, no bald-necked lady whose
earliest season 'out' was lost in the discreet mist of evasive
talk, could have played before him the part of ingenuous girl as
Elfride lived it. She had the little artful ways which partly
make up ingenuousness.

There are bachelors by nature and bachelors by circumstance:
spinsters there doubtless are also of both kinds, though some
think only those of the latter. However, Knight had been looked
upon as a bachelor by nature. What was he coming to? It was very
odd to himself to look at his theories on the subject of love, and
reading them now by the full light of a new experience, to see how
much more his sentences meant than he had felt them to mean when
they were written. People often discover the real force of a
trite old maxim only when it is thrust upon them by a chance
adventure; but Knight had never before known the case of a man who
learnt the full compass of his own epigrams by such means.

He was intensely satisfied with one aspect of the affair. Inbred
in him was an invincible objection to be any but the first comer
in a woman's heart. He had discovered within himself the
condition that if ever he did make up his mind to marry, it must
be on the certainty that no cropping out of inconvenient old
letters, no bow and blush to a mysterious stranger casually met,
should be a possible source of discomposure. Knight's sentiments
were only the ordinary ones of a man of his age who loves
genuinely, perhaps exaggerated a little by his pursuits. When men
first love as lads, it is with the very centre of their hearts,
nothing else being concerned in the operation. With added years,
more of the faculties attempt a partnership in the passion, till
at Knight's age the understanding is fain to have a hand in it.
It may as well be left out. A man in love setting up his brains
as a gauge of his position is as one determining a ship's
longitude from a light at the mast-head.

Knight argued from Elfride's unwontedness of manner, which was
matter of fact, to an unwontedness in love, which was matter of
inference only. Incredules les plus credules. 'Elfride,' he
said, 'had hardly looked upon a man till she saw me.'

He had never forgotten his severity to her because she preferred
ornament to edification, and had since excused her a hundred times
by thinking how natural to womankind was a love of adornment, and
how necessary became a mild infusion of personal vanity to
complete the delicate and fascinating dye of the feminine mind.
So at the end of the week's absence, which had brought him as far
as Dublin, he resolved to curtail his tour, return to Endelstow,
and commit himself by making a reality of the hypothetical offer
of that Sunday evening.

Notwithstanding that he had concocted a great deal of paper theory
on social amenities and modern manners generally, the special
ounce of practice was wanting, and now for his life Knight could
not recollect whether it was considered correct to give a young
lady personal ornaments before a regular engagement to marry had
been initiated. But the day before leaving Dublin he looked
around anxiously for a high-class jewellery establishment, in
which he purchased what he considered would suit her best.

It was with a most awkward and unwonted feeling that after
entering and closing the door of his room he sat down, opened the
morocco case, and held up each of the fragile bits of gold-work
before his eyes. Many things had become old to the solitary man
of letters, but these were new, and he handled like a child an
outcome of civilization which had never before been touched by his
fingers. A sudden fastidious decision that the pattern chosen
would not suit her after all caused him to rise in a flurry and
tear down the street to change them for others. After a great
deal of trouble in reselecting, during which his mind became so
bewildered that the critical faculty on objects of art seemed to
have vacated his person altogether, Knight carried off another
pair of ear-rings. These remained in his possession till the
afternoon, when, after contemplating them fifty times with a
growing misgiving that the last choice was worse than the first,
he felt that no sleep would visit his pillow till he had improved
upon his previous purchases yet again. In a perfect heat of
vexation with himself for such tergiversation, he went anew to the
shop-door, was absolutely ashamed to enter and give further
trouble, went to another shop, bought a pair at an enormously
increased price, because they seemed the very thing, asked the
goldsmiths if they would take the other pair in exchange, was told
that they could not exchange articles bought of another maker,
paid down the money, and went off with the two pairs in his
possession, wondering what on earth to do with the superfluous
pair. He almost wished he could lose them, or that somebody would
steal them, and was burdened with an interposing sense that, as a
capable man, with true ideas of economy, he must necessarily sell
them somewhere, which he did at last for a mere song. Mingled
with a blank feeling of a whole day being lost to him in running
about the city on this new and extraordinary class of errand, and
of several pounds being lost through his bungling, was a slight
sense of satisfaction that he had emerged for ever from his
antediluvian ignorance on the subject of ladies' jewellery, as
well as secured a truly artistic production at last. During the
remainder of that day he scanned the ornaments of every lady he
met with the profoundly experienced eye of an appraiser.

Next morning Knight was again crossing St. George's Channel--not
returning to London by the Holyhead route as he had originally
intended, but towards Bristol--availing himself of Mr. and Mrs.
Swancourt's invitation to revisit them on his homeward journey.

We flit forward to Elfride.

Woman's ruling passion--to fascinate and influence those more
powerful than she--though operant in Elfride, was decidedly
purposeless. She had wanted her friend Knight's good opinion from
the first: how much more than that elementary ingredient of
friendship she now desired, her fears would hardly allow her to
think. In originally wishing to please the highest class of man
she had ever intimately known, there was no disloyalty to Stephen
Smith. She could not--and few women can--realize the possible
vastness of an issue which has only an insignificant begetting.

Her letters from Stephen were necessarily few, and her sense of
fidelity clung to the last she had received as a wrecked mariner
clings to flotsam. The young girl persuaded herself that she was
glad Stephen had such a right to her hand as he had acquired (in
her eyes) by the elopement. She beguiled herself by saying,
'Perhaps if I had not so committed myself I might fall in love
with Mr. Knight.'

All this made the week of Knight's absence very gloomy and
distasteful to her. She retained Stephen in her prayers, and his
old letters were re-read--as a medicine in reality, though she
deceived herself into the belief that it was as a pleasure.

These letters had grown more and more hopeful. He told her that
he finished his work every day with a pleasant consciousness of
having removed one more stone from the barrier which divided them.
Then he drew images of what a fine figure they two would cut some
day. People would turn their heads and say, 'What a prize he has
won!' She was not to be sad about that wild runaway attempt of
theirs (Elfride had repeatedly said that it grieved her).
Whatever any other person who knew of it might think, he knew well
enough the modesty of her nature. The only reproach was a gentle
one for not having written quite so devotedly during her visit to
London. Her letter had seemed to have a liveliness derived from
other thoughts than thoughts of him.

Knight's intention of an early return to Endelstow having
originally been faint, his promise to do so had been fainter. He
was a man who kept his words well to the rear of his possible
actions. The vicar was rather surprised to see him again so soon:
Mrs. Swancourt was not. Knight found, on meeting them all, after
his arrival had been announced, that they had formed an intention
to go to St. Leonards for a few days at the end of the month.

No satisfactory conjuncture offered itself on this first evening
of his return for presenting Elfride with what he had been at such
pains to procure. He was fastidious in his reading of
opportunities for such an intended act. The next morning chancing
to break fine after a week of cloudy weather, it was proposed and
decided that they should all drive to Barwith Strand, a local lion
which neither Mrs. Swancourt nor Knight had seen. Knight scented
romantic occasions from afar, and foresaw that such a one might be
expected before the coming night.

The journey was along a road by neutral green hills, upon which
hedgerows lay trailing like ropes on a quay. Gaps in these
uplands revealed the blue sea, flecked with a few dashes of white
and a solitary white sail, the whole brimming up to a keen horizon
which lay like a line ruled from hillside to hillside. Then they
rolled down a pass, the chocolate-toned rocks forming a wall on
both sides, from one of which fell a heavy jagged shade over half
the roadway. A spout of fresh water burst from an occasional
crevice, and pattering down upon broad green leaves, ran along as
a rivulet at the bottom. Unkempt locks of heather overhung the
brow of each steep, whence at divers points a bramble swung forth
into mid-air, snatching at their head-dresses like a claw.

They mounted the last crest, and the bay which was to be the end
of their pilgrimage burst upon them. The ocean blueness deepened
its colour as it stretched to the foot of the crags, where it
terminated in a fringe of white--silent at this distance, though
moving and heaving like a counterpane upon a restless sleeper.
The shadowed hollows of the purple and brown rocks would have been
called blue had not that tint been so entirely appropriated by the
water beside them.

The carriage was put up at a little cottage with a shed attached,
and an ostler and the coachman carried the hamper of provisions
down to the shore.

Knight found his opportunity. 'I did not forget your wish,' he
began, when they were apart from their friends.

Elfride looked as if she did not understand.

'And I have brought you these,' he continued, awkwardly pulling
out the case, and opening it while holding it towards her.

'O Mr. Knight!' said Elfride confusedly, and turning to a lively
red; 'I didn't know you had any intention or meaning in what you
said. I thought it a mere supposition. I don't want them.'

A thought which had flashed into her mind gave the reply a greater
decisiveness than it might otherwise have possessed. To-morrow
was the day for Stephen's letter.

'But will you not accept them?' Knight returned, feeling less her
master than heretofore.

'I would rather not. They are beautiful--more beautiful than any
I have ever seen,' she answered earnestly, looking half-wishfully
at the temptation, as Eve may have looked at the apple. 'But I
don't want to have them, if you will kindly forgive me, Mr.
Knight.'

'No kindness at all,' said Mr. Knight, brought to a full stop at
this unexpected turn of events.

A silence followed. Knight held the open case, looking rather
wofully at the glittering forms he had forsaken his orbit to
procure; turning it about and holding it up as if, feeling his
gift to be slighted by her, he were endeavouring to admire it very
much himself.

'Shut them up, and don't let me see them any longer--do!' she said
laughingly, and with a quaint mixture of reluctance and entreaty.

'Why, Elfie?'

'Not Elfie to you, Mr. Knight. Oh, because I shall want them.
There, I am silly, I know, to say that! But I have a reason for
not taking them--now.' She kept in the last word for a moment,
intending to imply that her refusal was finite, but somehow the
word slipped out, and undid all the rest.

'You will take them some day?'

'I don't want to.'

'Why don't you want to, Elfride Swancourt?'

'Because I don't. I don't like to take them.'

'I have read a fact of distressing significance in that,' said
Knight. 'Since you like them, your dislike to having them must be
towards me?'

'No, it isn't.'

'What, then? Do you like me?'

Elfride deepened in tint, and looked into the distance with
features shaped to an expression of the nicest criticism as
regarded her answer.

'I like you pretty well,' she at length murmured mildly.

'Not very much?'

'You are so sharp with me, and say hard things, and so how can I?'
she replied evasively.

'You think me a fogey, I suppose?'

'No, I don't--I mean I do--I don't know what I think you, I mean.
Let us go to papa,' responded Elfride, with somewhat of a flurried
delivery.

'Well, I'll tell you my object in getting the present,' said
Knight, with a composure intended to remove from her mind any
possible impression of his being what he was--her lover. 'You see
it was the very least I could do in common civility.'

Elfride felt rather blank at this lucid statement.

Knight continued, putting away the case: 'I felt as anybody
naturally would have, you know, that my words on your choice the
other day were invidious and unfair, and thought an apology should
take a practical shape.'

'Oh yes.'

Elfride was sorry--she could not tell why--that he gave such a
legitimate reason. It was a disappointment that he had all the
time a cool motive, which might be stated to anybody without
raising a smile. Had she known they were offered in that spirit,
she would certainly have accepted the seductive gift. And the
tantalizing feature was that perhaps he suspected her to imagine
them offered as a lover's token, which was mortifying enough if
they were not.

Mrs. Swancourt came now to where they were sitting, to select a
flat boulder for spreading their table-cloth upon, and, amid the
discussion on that subject, the matter pending between Knight and
Elfride was shelved for a while. He read her refusal so certainly
as the bashfulness of a girl in a novel position, that, upon the
whole, he could tolerate such a beginning. Could Knight have been
told that it was a sense of fidelity struggling against new love,
whilst no less assuring as to his ultimate victory, it might have
entirely abstracted the wish to secure it.

At the same time a slight constraint of manner was visible between
them for the remainder of the afternoon. The tide turned, and
they were obliged to ascend to higher ground. The day glided on
to its end with the usual quiet dreamy passivity of such
occasions--when every deed done and thing thought is in
endeavouring to avoid doing and thinking more. Looking idly over
the verge of a crag, they beheld their stone dining-table
gradually being splashed upon and their crumbs and fragments all
washed away by the incoming sea. The vicar drew a moral lesson
from the scene; Knight replied in the same satisfied strain. And
then the waves rolled in furiously--the neutral green-and-blue
tongues of water slid up the slopes, and were metamorphosed into
foam by a careless blow, falling back white and faint, and leaving
trailing followers behind.

The passing of a heavy shower was the next scene--driving them to
shelter in a shallow cave--after which the horses were put in, and
they started to return homeward. By the time they reached the
higher levels the sky had again cleared, and the sunset rays
glanced directly upon the wet uphill road they had climbed. The
ruts formed by their carriage-wheels on the ascent--a pair of
Liliputian canals--were as shining bars of gold, tapering to
nothing in the distance. Upon this also they turned their backs,
and night spread over the sea.

The evening was chilly, and there was no moon. Knight sat close
to Elfride, and, when the darkness rendered the position of a
person a matter of uncertainty, particularly close. Elfride edged
away.

'I hope you allow me my place ungrudgingly?' he whispered.

'Oh yes; 'tis the least I can do in common civility,' she said,
accenting the words so that he might recognize them as his own
returned.

Both of them felt delicately balanced between two possibilities.
Thus they reached home.

To Knight this mild experience was delightful. It was to him a
gentle innocent time--a time which, though there may not be much
in it, seldom repeats itself in a man's life, and has a peculiar
dearness when glanced at retrospectively. He is not
inconveniently deep in love, and is lulled by a peaceful sense of
being able to enjoy the most trivial thing with a childlike
enjoyment. The movement of a wave, the colour of a stone,
anything, was enough for Knight's drowsy thoughts of that day to
precipitate themselves upon. Even the sermonizing platitudes the
vicar had delivered himself of--chiefly because something seemed
to be professionally required of him in the presence of a man of
Knight's proclivities--were swallowed whole. The presence of
Elfride led him not merely to tolerate that kind of talk from the
necessities of ordinary courtesy; but he listened to it--took in
the ideas with an enjoyable make-believe that they were proper and
necessary, and indulged in a conservative feeling that the face of
things was complete.

Entering her room that evening Elfride found a packet for herself
on the dressing-table. How it came there she did not know. She
tremblingly undid the folds of white paper that covered it. Yes;
it was the treasure of a morocco case, containing those treasures
of ornament she had refused in the daytime.

Elfride dressed herself in them for a moment, looked at herself in
the glass, blushed red, and put them away. They filled her dreams
all that night. Never had she seen anything so lovely, and never
was it more clear that as an honest woman she was in duty bound to
refuse them. Why it was not equally clear to her that duty
required more vigorous co-ordinate conduct as well, let those who
dissect her say.

The next morning glared in like a spectre upon her. It was
Stephen's letter-day, and she was bound to meet the postman--to
stealthily do a deed she had never liked, to secure an end she now
had ceased to desire.

But she went.

There were two letters.

One was from the bank at St. Launce's, in which she had a small
private deposit--probably something about interest. She put that
in her pocket for a moment, and going indoors and upstairs to be
safer from observation, tremblingly opened Stephen's.

What was this he said to her?

She was to go to the St. Launce's Bank and take a sum of money
which they had received private advices to pay her.

The sum was two hundred pounds.

There was no check, order, or anything of the nature of guarantee.
In fact the information amounted to this: the money was now in the
St. Launce's Bank, standing in her name.

She instantly opened the other letter. It contained a deposit-
note from the bank for the sum of two hundred pounds which had
that day been added to her account. Stephen's information, then,
was correct, and the transfer made.

'I have saved this in one year,' Stephen's letter went on to say,
'and what so proper as well as pleasant for me to do as to hand it
over to you to keep for your use? I have plenty for myself,
independently of this. Should you not be disposed to let it lie
idle in the bank, get your father to invest it in your name on
good security. It is a little present to you from your more than
betrothed. He will, I think, Elfride, feel now that my
pretensions to your hand are anything but the dream of a silly boy
not worth rational consideration.'

With a natural delicacy, Elfride, in mentioning her father's
marriage, had refrained from all allusion to the pecuniary
resources of the lady.

Leaving this matter-of-fact subject, he went on, somewhat after
his boyish manner:

'Do you remember, darling, that first morning of my arrival at
your house, when your father read at prayers the miracle of
healing the sick of the palsy--where he is told to take up his bed
and walk? I do, and I can now so well realize the force of that
passage. The smallest piece of mat is the bed of the Oriental,
and yesterday I saw a native perform the very action, which
reminded me to mention it. But you are better read than I, and
perhaps you knew all this long ago....One day I bought some small
native idols to send home to you as curiosities, but afterwards
finding they had been cast in England, made to look old, and
shipped over, I threw them away in disgust.

'Speaking of this reminds me that we are obliged to import all our
house-building ironwork from England. Never was such foresight
required to be exercised in building houses as here. Before we
begin, we have to order every column, lock, hinge, and screw that
will be required. We cannot go into the next street, as in
London, and get them cast at a minute's notice. Mr. L. says
somebody will have to go to England very soon and superintend the
selection of a large order of this kind. I only wish I may be the
man.'

There before her lay the deposit-receipt for the two hundred
pounds, and beside it the elegant present of Knight. Elfride grew
cold--then her cheeks felt heated by beating blood. If by
destroying the piece of paper the whole transaction could have
been withdrawn from her experience, she would willingly have
sacrificed the money it represented. She did not know what to do
in either case. She almost feared to let the two articles lie in
juxtaposition: so antagonistic were the interests they represented
that a miraculous repulsion of one by the other was almost to be
expected.

That day she was seen little of. By the evening she had come to a
resolution, and acted upon it. The packet was sealed up--with a
tear of regret as she closed the case upon the pretty forms it
contained--directed, and placed upon the writing-table in Knight's
room. And a letter was written to Stephen, stating that as yet
she hardly understood her position with regard to the money sent;
but declaring that she was ready to fulfil her promise to marry
him. After this letter had been written she delayed posting it--
although never ceasing to feel strenuously that the deed must be
done.

Several days passed. There was another Indian letter for Elfride.
Coming unexpectedly, her father saw it, but made no remark--why,
she could not tell. The news this time was absolutely
overwhelming. Stephen, as he had wished, had been actually chosen
as the most fitting to execute the iron-work commission he had
alluded to as impending. This duty completed he would have three
months' leave. His letter continued that he should follow it in a
week, and should take the opportunity to plainly ask her father to
permit the engagement. Then came a page expressive of his delight
and hers at the reunion; and finally, the information that he
would write to the shipping agents, asking them to telegraph and
tell her when the ship bringing him home should be in sight--
knowing how acceptable such information would be.

Elfride lived and moved now as in a dream. Knight had at first
become almost angry at her persistent refusal of his offering--and
no less with the manner than the fact of it. But he saw that she
began to look worn and ill--and his vexation lessened to simple
perplexity.

He ceased now to remain in the house for long hours together as
before, but made it a mere centre for antiquarian and geological
excursions in the neighbourhood. Throw up his cards and go away
he fain would have done, but could not. And, thus, availing
himself of the privileges of a relative, he went in and out the
premises as fancy led him--but still lingered on.

'I don't wish to stay here another day if my presence is
distasteful,' he said one afternoon. 'At first you used to imply
that I was severe with you; and when I am kind you treat me
unfairly.'

'No, no. Don't say so.'

The origin of their acquaintanceship had been such as to render
their manner towards each other peculiar and uncommon. It was of
a kind to cause them to speak out their minds on any feelings of
objection and difference: to be reticent on gentler matters.

'I have a good mind to go away and never trouble you again,'
continued Knight.

She said nothing, but the eloquent expression of her eyes and wan
face was enough to reproach him for harshness.

'Do you like me to be here, then?' inquired Knight gently.

'Yes,' she said. Fidelity to the old love and truth to the new
were ranged on opposite sides, and truth virtuelessly prevailed.

'Then I'll stay a little longer,' said Knight.

'Don't be vexed if I keep by myself a good deal, will you? Perhaps
something may happen, and I may tell you something.'

'Mere coyness,' said Knight to himself; and went away with a
lighter heart. The trick of reading truly the enigmatical forces
at work in women at given times, which with some men is an
unerring instinct, is peculiar to minds less direct and honest
than Knight's.

The next evening, about five o'clock, before Knight had returned
from a pilgrimage along the shore, a man walked up to the house.
He was a messenger from Camelton, a town a few miles off, to which
place the railway had been advanced during the summer.

'A telegram for Miss Swancourt, and three and sixpence to pay for
the special messenger.' Miss Swancourt sent out the money, signed
the paper, and opened her letter with a trembling hand. She read:

'Johnson, Liverpool, to Miss Swancourt, Endelstow, near Castle
Boterel.

'Amaryllis telegraphed off Holyhead, four o'clock. Expect will
dock and land passengers at Canning's Basin ten o'clock to-morrow
morning.'

Her father called her into the study.

'Elfride, who sent you that message?' he asked suspiciously.

'Johnson.'
'Who is Johnson, for Heaven's sake?'

'I don't know.'

'The deuce you don't! Who is to know, then?'

'I have never heard of him till now.'

'That's a singular story, isn't it.'

'I don't know.'

'Come, come, miss! What was the telegram?'

'Do you really wish to know, papa?'

'Well, I do.'

'Remember, I am a full-grown woman now.'

'Well, what then?'

'Being a woman, and not a child, I may, I think, have a secret or
two.'

'You will, it seems.'

'Women have, as a rule.'

'But don't keep them. So speak out.'

'If you will not press me now, I give my word to tell you the
meaning of all this before the week is past.'

'On your honour?'

'On my honour.'

'Very well. I have had a certain suspicion, you know; and I shall
be glad to find it false. I don't like your manner lately.'

'At the end of the week, I said, papa.'

Her father did not reply, and Elfride left the room.

She began to look out for the postman again. Three mornings later
he brought an inland letter from Stephen. It contained very
little matter, having been written in haste; but the meaning was
bulky enough. Stephen said that, having executed a commission in
Liverpool, he should arrive at his father's house, East Endelstow,
at five or six o'clock that same evening; that he would after dusk
walk on to the next village, and meet her, if she would, in the
church porch, as in the old time. He proposed this plan because
he thought it unadvisable to call formally at her house so late in
the evening; yet he could not sleep without having seen her. The
minutes would seem hours till he clasped her in his arms.

Elfride was still steadfast in her opinion that honour compelled
her to meet him. Probably the very longing to avoid him lent
additional weight to the conviction; for she was markedly one of
those who sigh for the unattainable--to whom, superlatively, a
hope is pleasing because not a possession. And she knew it so
well that her intellect was inclined to exaggerate this defect in
herself.

So during the day she looked her duty steadfastly in the face;
read Wordsworth's astringent yet depressing ode to that Deity;
committed herself to her guidance; and still felt the weight of
chance desires.

But she began to take a melancholy pleasure in contemplating the
sacrifice of herself to the man whom a maidenly sense of propriety
compelled her to regard as her only possible husband. She would
meet him, and do all that lay in her power to marry him. To guard
against a relapse, a note was at once despatched to his father's
cottage for Stephen on his arrival, fixing an hour for the
interview.

Chapter XXI

'On thy cold grey stones, O sea!'

Stephen had said that he should come by way of Bristol, and thence
by a steamer to Castle Boterel, in order to avoid the long journey
over the hills from St. Launce's. He did not know of the
extension of the railway to Camelton.

During the afternoon a thought occurred to Elfride, that from any
cliff along the shore it would be possible to see the steamer some
hours before its arrival.

She had accumulated religious force enough to do an act of
supererogation. The act was this--to go to some point of land and
watch for the ship that brought her future husband home.

It was a cloudy afternoon. Elfride was often diverted from a
purpose by a dull sky; and though she used to persuade herself
that the weather was as fine as possible on the other side of the
clouds, she could not bring about any practical result from this
fancy. Now, her mood was such that the humid sky harmonized with
it.

Having ascended and passed over a hill behind the house, Elfride
came to a small stream. She used it as a guide to the coast. It
was smaller than that in her own valley, and flowed altogether at
a higher level. Bushes lined the slopes of its shallow trough;
but at the bottom, where the water ran, was a soft green carpet,
in a strip two or three yards wide.

In winter, the water flowed over the grass; in summer, as now, it
trickled along a channel in the midst.

Elfride had a sensation of eyes regarding her from somewhere. She
turned, and there was Mr. Knight. He had dropped into the valley
from the side of the hill. She felt a thrill of pleasure, and
rebelliously allowed it to exist.

'What utter loneliness to find you in!'

'I am going to the shore by tracking the stream. I believe it
empties itself not far off, in a silver thread of water, over a
cascade of great height.'

'Why do you load yourself with that heavy telescope?'

'To look over the sea with it,' she said faintly.

'I'll carry it for you to your journey's end.' And he took the
glass from her unresisting hands. 'It cannot be half a mile
further. See, there is the water.' He pointed to a short fragment
of level muddy-gray colour, cutting against the sky.

Elfride had already scanned the small surface of ocean visible,
and had seen no ship.

They walked along in company, sometimes with the brook between
them--for it was no wider than a man's stride--sometimes close
together. The green carpet grew swampy, and they kept higher up.

One of the two ridges between which they walked dwindled lower and
became insignificant. That on the right hand rose with their
advance, and terminated in a clearly defined edge against the
light, as if it were abruptly sawn off. A little further, and the
bed of the rivulet ended in the same fashion.

They had come to a bank breast-high, and over it the valley was no
longer to be seen. It was withdrawn cleanly and completely. In
its place was sky and boundless atmosphere; and perpendicularly
down beneath them--small and far off--lay the corrugated surface
of the Atlantic.

The small stream here found its death. Running over the precipice
it was dispersed in spray before it was half-way down, and falling
like rain upon projecting ledges, made minute grassy meadows of
them. At the bottom the water-drops soaked away amid the debris
of the cliff. This was the inglorious end of the river.

'What are you looking for? said Knight, following the direction of
her eyes.

She was gazing hard at a black object--nearer to the shore than to
the horizon--from the summit of which came a nebulous haze,
stretching like gauze over the sea.

'The Puffin, a little summer steamboat--from Bristol to Castle
Boterel,' she said. 'I think that is it--look. Will you give me
the glass?'

Knight pulled open the old-fashioned but powerful telescope, and
handed it to Elfride, who had looked on with heavy eyes.

'I can't keep it up now,' she said.

'Rest it on my shoulder.'

'It is too high.'

'Under my arm.'

'Too low. You may look instead,' she murmured weakly.

Knight raised the glass to his eye, and swept the sea till the
Puffin entered its field.

'Yes, it is the Puffin--a tiny craft. I can see her figure-head
distinctly--a bird with a beak as big as its head.'

'Can you see the deck?'

"Wait a minute; yes, pretty clearly. And I can see the black
forms of the passengers against its white surface. One of them
has taken something from another--a glass, I think--yes, it is--
and he is levelling it in this direction. Depend upon it we are
conspicuous objects against the sky to them. Now, it seems to
rain upon them, and they put on overcoats and open umbrellas.
They vanish and go below--all but that one who has borrowed the
glass. He is a slim young fellow, and still watches us.'

Elfride grew pale, and shifted her little feet uneasily.

Knight lowered the glass.

'I think we had better return,' he said. 'That cloud which is
raining on them may soon reach us. Why, you look ill. How is
that?'

'Something in the air affects my face.'

'Those fair cheeks are very fastidious, I fear,' returned Knight
tenderly. 'This air would make those rosy that were never so
before, one would think--eh, Nature's spoilt child?'

Elfride's colour returned again.

'There is more to see behind us, after all,' said Knight.

She turned her back upon the boat and Stephen Smith, and saw,
towering still higher than themselves, the vertical face of the
hill on the right, which did not project seaward so far as the bed
of the valley, but formed the back of a small cove, and so was
visible like a concave wall, bending round from their position
towards the left.

The composition of the huge hill was revealed to its backbone and
marrow here at its rent extremity. It consisted of a vast
stratification of blackish-gray slate, unvaried in its whole
height by a single change of shade.

It is with cliffs and mountains as with persons; they have what is
called a presence, which is not necessarily proportionate to their
actual bulk. A little cliff will impress you powerfully; a great
one not at all. It depends, as with man, upon the countenance of
the cliff.

'I cannot bear to look at that cliff,' said Elfride. 'It has a
horrid personality, and makes me shudder. We will go.'

'Can you climb?' said Knight. 'If so, we will ascend by that path
over the grim old fellow's brow.'

'Try me,' said Elfride disdainfully. 'I have ascended steeper
slopes than that.'

From where they had been loitering, a grassy path wound along
inside a bank, placed as a safeguard for unwary pedestrians, to
the top of the precipice, and over it along the hill in an inland
direction.

'Take my arm, Miss Swancourt,' said Knight.

'I can get on better without it, thank you.'

When they were one quarter of the way up, Elfride stopped to take
breath. Knight stretched out his hand.

She took it, and they ascended the remaining slope together.
Reaching the very top, they sat down to rest by mutual consent.

'Heavens, what an altitude!' said Knight between his pants, and
looking far over the sea. The cascade at the bottom of the slope
appeared a mere span in height from where they were now.

Elfride was looking to the left. The steamboat was in full view
again, and by reason of the vast surface of sea their higher
position uncovered it seemed almost close to the shore.

'Over that edge,' said Knight, 'where nothing but vacancy appears,
is a moving compact mass. The wind strikes the face of the rock,
runs up it, rises like a fountain to a height far above our heads,
curls over us in an arch, and disperses behind us. In fact, an
inverted cascade is there--as perfect as the Niagara Falls--but
rising instead of falling, and air instead of water. Now look
here.'

Knight threw a stone over the bank, aiming it as if to go onward
over the cliff. Reaching the verge, it towered into the air like
a bird, turned back, and alighted on the ground behind them. They
themselves were in a dead calm.

'A boat crosses Niagara immediately at the foot of the falls,
where the water is quite still, the fallen mass curving under it.
We are in precisely the same position with regard to our
atmospheric cataract here. If you run back from the cliff fifty
yards, you will be in a brisk wind. Now I daresay over the bank
is a little backward current.'

Knight rose and leant over the bank. No sooner was his head above
it than his hat appeared to be sucked from his head--slipping over
his forehead in a seaward direction.

'That's the backward eddy, as I told you,' he cried, and vanished
over the little bank after his hat.

Elfride waited one minute; he did not return. She waited another,
and there was no sign of him.

A few drops of rain fell, then a sudden shower.

She arose, and looked over the bank. On the other side were two
or three yards of level ground--then a short steep preparatory
slope--then the verge of the precipice.

On the slope was Knight, his hat on his head. He was on his hands
and knees, trying to climb back to the level ground. The rain had
wetted the shaly surface of the incline. A slight superficial
wetting of the soil hereabout made it far more slippery to stand
on than the same soil thoroughly drenched. The inner substance
was still hard, and was lubricated by the moistened film.

'I find a difficulty in getting back,' said Knight.

Elfride's heart fell like lead.

'But you can get back?' she wildly inquired.

Knight strove with all his might for two or three minutes, and the
drops of perspiration began to bead his brow.

'No, I am unable to do it,' he answered.

Elfride, by a wrench of thought, forced away from her mind the
sensation that Knight was in bodily danger. But attempt to help
him she must. She ventured upon the treacherous incline, propped
herself with the closed telescope, and gave him her hand before he
saw her movements.

'O Elfride! why did you?' said he. 'I am afraid you have only
endangered yourself.'

And as if to prove his statement, in making an endeavour by her
assistance they both slipped lower, and then he was again stayed.
His foot was propped by a bracket of quartz rock, balanced on the
verge of the precipice. Fixed by this, he steadied her, her head
being about a foot below the beginning of the slope. Elfride had
dropped the glass; it rolled to the edge and vanished over it into
a nether sky.

'Hold tightly to me,' he said.

She flung her arms round his neck with such a firm grasp that
whilst he remained it was impossible for her to fall.

'Don't be flurried,' Knight continued. 'So long as we stay above
this block we are perfectly safe. Wait a moment whilst I consider
what we had better do.'

He turned his eyes to the dizzy depths beneath them, and surveyed
the position of affairs.

Two glances told him a tale with ghastly distinctness. It was
that, unless they performed their feat of getting up the slope
with the precision of machines, they were over the edge and
whirling in mid-air.

For this purpose it was necessary that he should recover the
breath and strength which his previous efforts had cost him. So
he still waited, and looked in the face of the enemy.

The crest of this terrible natural facade passed among the
neighbouring inhabitants as being seven hundred feet above the
water it overhung. It had been proved by actual measurement to be
not a foot less than six hundred and fifty.

That is to say, it is nearly three times the height of
Flamborough, half as high again as the South Foreland, a hundred
feet higher than Beachy Head--the loftiest promontory on the east
or south side of this island--twice the height of St. Aldhelm's,
thrice as high as the Lizard, and just double the height of St.
Bee's. One sea-bord point on the western coast is known to
surpass it in altitude, but only by a few feet. This is Great
Orme's Head, in Caernarvonshire.

And it must be remembered that the cliff exhibits an intensifying
feature which some of those are without--sheer perpendicularity
from the half-tide level.

Yet this remarkable rampart forms no headland: it rather walls in
an inlet--the promontory on each side being much lower. Thus, far
from being salient, its horizontal section is concave. The sea,
rolling direct from the shores of North America, has in fact eaten
a chasm into the middle of a hill, and the giant, embayed and
unobtrusive, stands in the rear of pigmy supporters. Not least
singularly, neither hill, chasm, nor precipice has a name. On
this account I will call the precipice the Cliff without a Name.*

* See Preface

What gave an added terror to its height was its blackness. And
upon this dark face the beating of ten thousand west winds had
formed a kind of bloom, which had a visual effect not unlike that
of a Hambro' grape. Moreover it seemed to float off into the
atmosphere, and inspire terror through the lungs.

'This piece of quartz, supporting my feet, is on the very nose of
the cliff,' said Knight, breaking the silence after his rigid
stoical meditation. 'Now what you are to do is this. Clamber up
my body till your feet are on my shoulders: when you are there you
will, I think, be able to climb on to level ground.'

'What will you do?'

'Wait whilst you run for assistance.'

'I ought to have done that in the first place, ought I not?'

'I was in the act of slipping, and should have reached no stand-
point without your weight, in all probability. But don't let us
talk. Be brave, Elfride, and climb.'

She prepared to ascend, saying, 'This is the moment I anticipated
when on the tower. I thought it would come!'

'This is not a time for superstition,' said Knight. 'Dismiss all
that.'

'I will,' she said humbly.

'Now put your foot into my hand: next the other. That's good--
well done. Hold to my shoulder.'

She placed her feet upon the stirrup he made of his hand, and was
high enough to get a view of the natural surface of the hill over
the bank.

'Can you now climb on to level ground?'

'I am afraid not. I will try.'

'What can you see?'

'The sloping common.'

'What upon it?'

'Purple heather and some grass.'

'Nothing more--no man or human being of any kind?'

'Nobody.'

'Now try to get higher in this way. You see that tuft of sea-pink
above you. Get that well into your hand, but don't trust to it
entirely. Then step upon my shoulder, and I think you will reach
the top.'

With trembling limbs she did exactly as he told her. The
preternatural quiet and solemnity of his manner overspread upon
herself, and gave her a courage not her own. She made a spring
from the top of his shoulder, and was up.

Then she turned to look at him.

By an ill fate, the force downwards of her bound, added to his own
weight, had been too much for the block of quartz upon which his
feet depended. It was, indeed, originally an igneous protrusion
into the enormous masses of black strata, which had since been
worn away from the sides of the alien fragment by centuries of
frost and rain, and now left it without much support.

It moved. Knight seized a tuft of sea-pink with each hand.

The quartz rock which had been his salvation was worse than
useless now. It rolled over, out of sight, and away into the same
nether sky that had engulfed the telescope.

One of the tufts by which he held came out at the root, and Knight
began to follow the quartz. It was a terrible moment. Elfride
uttered a low wild wail of agony, bowed her head, and covered her
face with her hands.

Between the turf-covered slope and the gigantic perpendicular rock
intervened a weather-worn series of jagged edges, forming a face
yet steeper than the former slope. As he slowly slid inch by inch
upon these, Knight made a last desperate dash at the lowest tuft
of vegetation--the last outlying knot of starved herbage ere the
rock appeared in all its bareness. It arrested his further
descent. Knight was now literally suspended by his arms; but the
incline of the brow being what engineers would call about a
quarter in one, it was sufficient to relieve his arms of a portion
of his weight, but was very far from offering an adequately flat
face to support him.

In spite of this dreadful tension of body and mind, Knight found
time for a moment of thankfulness. Elfride was safe.

She lay on her side above him--her fingers clasped. Seeing him
again steady, she jumped upon her feet.

'Now, if I can only save you by running for help!' she cried.
'Oh, I would have died instead! Why did you try so hard to deliver
me?' And she turned away wildly to run for assistance.

'Elfride, how long will it take you to run to Endelstow and back?'

'Three-quarters of an hour.'

'That won't do; my hands will not hold out ten minutes. And is
there nobody nearer?'

'No; unless a chance passer may happen to be.'

'He would have nothing with him that could save me. Is there a
pole or stick of any kind on the common?'

She gazed around. The common was bare of everything but heather
and grass.

A minute--perhaps more time--was passed in mute thought by both.
On a sudden the blank and helpless agony left her face. She
vanished over the bank from his sight.

Knight felt himself in the presence of a personalized lonliness.

Chapter XXII

'A woman's way.'

Haggard cliffs, of every ugly altitude, are as common as sea-fowl
along the line of coast between Exmoor and Land's End; but this
outflanked and encompassed specimen was the ugliest of them all.
Their summits are not safe places for scientific experiment on the
principles of air-currents, as Knight had now found, to his
dismay.

He still clutched the face of the escarpment--not with the
frenzied hold of despair, but with a dogged determination to make
the most of his every jot of endurance, and so give the longest
possible scope to Elfride's intentions, whatever they might be.

He reclined hand in hand with the world in its infancy. Not a
blade, not an insect, which spoke of the present, was between him
and the past. The inveterate antagonism of these black precipices
to all strugglers for life is in no way more forcibly suggested
than by the paucity of tufts of grass, lichens, or confervae on
their outermost ledges.

Knight pondered on the meaning of Elfride's hasty disappearance,
but could not avoid an instinctive conclusion that there existed
but a doubtful hope for him. As far as he could judge, his sole
chance of deliverance lay in the possibility of a rope or pole
being brought; and this possibility was remote indeed. The soil
upon these high downs was left so untended that they were
unenclosed for miles, except by a casual bank or dry wall, and
were rarely visited but for the purpose of collecting or counting
the flock which found a scanty means of subsistence thereon.

At first, when death appeared improbable, because it had never
visited him before, Knight could think of no future, nor of
anything connected with his past. He could only look sternly at
Nature's treacherous attempt to put an end to him, and strive to
thwart her.

From the fact that the cliff formed the inner face of the segment
of a huge cylinder, having the sky for a top and the sea for a
bottom, which enclosed the cove to the extent of more than a
semicircle, he could see the vertical face curving round on each
side of him. He looked far down the facade, and realized more
thoroughly how it threatened him. Grimness was in every feature,
and to its very bowels the inimical shape was desolation.

By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the
inanimate world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of
suspense, opposite Knight's eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing
forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes.
The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him.
It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated
by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling
seemed to have met in their death. It was the single instance
within reach of his vision of anything that had ever been alive
and had had a body to save, as he himself had now.

The creature represented but a low type of animal existence, for
never in their vernal years had the plains indicated by those
numberless slaty layers been traversed by an intelligence worthy
of the name. Zoophytes, mollusca, shell-fish, were the highest
developments of those ancient dates. The immense lapses of time
each formation represented had known nothing of the dignity of
man. They were grand times, but they were mean times too, and
mean were their relics. He was to be with the small in his death.

Knight was a geologist; and such is the supremacy of habit over
occasion, as a pioneer of the thoughts of men, that at this
dreadful juncture his mind found time to take in, by a momentary
sweep, the varied scenes that had had their day between this
creature's epoch and his own. There is no place like a cleft
landscape for bringing home such imaginings as these.

Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one
extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning and all
the intermediate centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in
the hides of beasts, and carrying, for defence and attack, huge
clubs and pointed spears, rose from the rock, like the phantoms
before the doomed Macbeth. They lived in hollows, woods, and mud
huts--perhaps in caves of the neighbouring rocks. Behind them
stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine forms,
the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous
size, the megatherium, and the myledon--all, for the moment, in
juxtaposition. Further back, and overlapped by these, were
perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as
horses. Still more shadowy were the sinister crocodilian
outlines--alligators and other uncouth shapes, culminating in the
colossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind were dragon forms
and clouds of flying reptiles: still underneath were fishy beings
of lower development; and so on, till the lifetime scenes of the
fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of
things. These images passed before Knight's inner eye in less
than half a minute, and he was again considering the actual
present. Was he to die? The mental picture of Elfride in the
world, without himself to cherish her, smote his heart like a
whip. He had hoped for deliverance, but what could a girl do? He
dared not move an inch. Was Death really stretching out his hand?
The previous sensation, that it was improbable he would die, was
fainter now.

However, Knight still clung to the cliff.

To those musing weather-beaten West-country folk who pass the
greater part of their days and nights out of doors, Nature seems
to have moods in other than a poetical sense: predilections for
certain deeds at certain times, without any apparent law to govern
or season to account for them. She is read as a person with a
curious temper; as one who does not scatter kindnesses and
cruelties alternately, impartially, and in order, but heartless
severities or overwhelming generosities in lawless caprice. Man's
case is always that of the prodigal's favourite or the miser's
pensioner. In her unfriendly moments there seems a feline fun in
her tricks, begotten by a foretaste of her pleasure in swallowing
the victim.

Such a way of thinking had been absurd to Knight, but he began to
adopt it now. He was first spitted on to a rock. New tortures
followed. The rain increased, and persecuted him with an
exceptional persistency which he was moved to believe owed its
cause to the fact that he was in such a wretched state already.
An entirely new order of things could be observed in this
introduction of rain upon the scene. It rained upwards instead of
down. The strong ascending air carried the rain-drops with it in
its race up the escarpment, coming to him with such velocity that
they stuck into his flesh like cold needles. Each drop was
virtually a shaft, and it pierced him to his skin. The water-
shafts seemed to lift him on their points: no downward rain ever
had such a torturing effect. In a brief space he was drenched,
except in two places. These were on the top of his shoulders and
on the crown of his hat.

The wind, though not intense in other situations was strong here.
It tugged at his coat and lifted it. We are mostly accustomed to
look upon all opposition which is not animate, as that of the
stolid, inexorable hand of indifference, which wears out the
patience more than the strength. Here, at any rate, hostility did
not assume that slow and sickening form. It was a cosmic agency,
active, lashing, eager for conquest: determination; not an
insensate standing in the way.

Knight had over-estimated the strength of his hands. They were
getting weak already. 'She will never come again; she has been
gone ten minutes,' he said to himself.

This mistake arose from the unusual compression of his experiences
just now: she had really been gone but three.

'As many more minutes will be my end,' he thought.

Next came another instance of the incapacity of the mind to make
comparisons at such times.

'This is a summer afternoon,' he said, 'and there can never have
been such a heavy and cold rain on a summer day in my life
before.'

He was again mistaken. The rain was quite ordinary in quantity;
the air in temperature. It was, as is usual, the menacing
attitude in which they approached him that magnified their powers.

He again looked straight downwards, the wind and the water-dashes
lifting his moustache, scudding up his cheeks, under his eyelids,
and into his eyes. This is what he saw down there: the surface of
the sea--visually just past his toes, and under his feet; actually
one-eighth of a mile, or more than two hundred yards, below them.
We colour according to our moods the objects we survey. The sea
would have been a deep neutral blue, had happier auspices attended
the gazer it was now no otherwise than distinctly black to his
vision. That narrow white border was foam, he knew well; but its
boisterous tosses were so distant as to appear a pulsation only,
and its plashing was barely audible. A white border to a black
sea--his funeral pall and its edging.

The world was to some extent turned upside down for him. Rain
descended from below. Beneath his feet was aerial space and the
unknown; above him was the firm, familiar ground, and upon it all
that he loved best.

Pitiless nature had then two voices, and two only. The nearer was
the voice of the wind in his ears rising and falling as it mauled
and thrust him hard or softly. The second and distant one was the
moan of that unplummetted ocean below and afar--rubbing its
restless flank against the Cliff without a Name.

Knight perseveringly held fast. Had he any faith in Elfride?
Perhaps. Love is faith, and faith, like a gathered flower, will
rootlessly live on.

Nobody would have expected the sun to shine on such an evening as
this. Yet it appeared, low down upon the sea. Not with its
natural golden fringe, sweeping the furthest ends of the
landscape, not with the strange glare of whiteness which it
sometimes puts on as an alternative to colour, but as a splotch of
vermilion red upon a leaden ground--a red face looking on with a
drunken leer.

Most men who have brains know it, and few are so foolish as to
disguise this fact from themselves or others, even though an
ostentatious display may be called self-conceit. Knight, without
showing it much, knew that his intellect was above the average.
And he thought--he could not help thinking--that his death would
be a deliberate loss to earth of good material; that such an
experiment in killing might have been practised upon some less
developed life.

A fancy some people hold, when in a bitter mood, is that
inexorable circumstance only tries to prevent what intelligence
attempts. Renounce a desire for a long-contested position, and go
on another tack, and after a while the prize is thrown at you,
seemingly in disappointment that no more tantalizing is possible.

Knight gave up thoughts of life utterly and entirely, and turned
to contemplate the Dark Valley and the unknown future beyond.
Into the shadowy depths of these speculations we will not follow
him. Let it suffice to state what ensued.

At that moment of taking no more thought for this life, something
disturbed the outline of the bank above him. A spot appeared. It
was the head of Elfride.

Knight immediately prepared to welcome life again.

The expression of a face consigned to utter loneliness, when a
friend first looks in upon it, is moving in the extreme. In
rowing seaward to a light-ship or sea-girt lighthouse, where,
without any immediate terror of death, the inmates experience the
gloom of monotonous seclusion, the grateful eloquence of their
countenances at the greeting, expressive of thankfulness for the
visit, is enough to stir the emotions of the most careless
observer.

Knight's upward look at Elfride was of a nature with, but far
transcending, such an instance as this. The lines of his face had
deepened to furrows, and every one of them thanked her visibly.
His lips moved to the word 'Elfride,' though the emotion evolved
no sound. His eyes passed all description in their combination of
the whole diapason of eloquence, from lover's deep love to fellow-
man's gratitude for a token of remembrance from one of his kind.

Elfride had come back. What she had come to do he did not know.
She could only look on at his death, perhaps. Still, she had come
back, and not deserted him utterly, and it was much.

It was a novelty in the extreme to see Henry Knight, to whom
Elfride was but a child, who had swayed her as a tree sways a
bird's nest, who mastered her and made her weep most bitterly at
her own insignificance, thus thankful for a sight of her face.
She looked down upon him, her face glistening with rain and tears.
He smiled faintly.

'How calm he is!' she thought. 'How great and noble he is to be
so calm!' She would have died ten times for him then.

The gliding form of the steamboat caught her eye: she heeded it no
longer.

'How much longer can you wait?' came from her pale lips and along
the wind to his position.

'Four minutes,' said Knight in a weaker voice than her own.

'But with a good hope of being saved?'

'Seven or eight.'

He now noticed that in her arms she bore a bundle of white linen,
and that her form was singularly attenuated. So preternaturally
thin and flexible was Elfride at this moment, that she appeared to
bend under the light blows of the rain-shafts, as they struck into
her sides and bosom, and splintered into spray on her face. There
is nothing like a thorough drenching for reducing the
protuberances of clothes, but Elfride's seemed to cling to her
like a glove.

Without heeding the attack of the clouds further than by raising
her hand and wiping away the spirts of rain when they went more
particularly into her eyes, she sat down and hurriedly began
rending the linen into strips. These she knotted end to end, and
afterwards twisted them like the strands of a cord. In a short
space of time she had formed a perfect rope by this means, six or
seven yards long.

'Can you wait while I bind it?' she said, anxiously extending her
gaze down to him.

'Yes, if not very long. Hope has given me a wonderful instalment
of strength.'

Elfride dropped her eyes again, tore the remaining material into
narrow tape-like ligaments, knotted each to each as before, but on
a smaller scale, and wound the lengthy string she had thus formed
round and round the linen rope, which, without this binding, had a
tendency to spread abroad.

'Now,' said Knight, who, watching the proceedings intently, had by
this time not only grasped her scheme, but reasoned further on, 'I
can hold three minutes longer yet. And do you use the time in
testing the strength of the knots, one by one.'

She at once obeyed, tested each singly by putting her foot on the
rope between each knot, and pulling with her hands. One of the
knots slipped.

'Oh, think! It would have broken but for your forethought,'
Elfride exclaimed apprehensively.

She retied the two ends. The rope was now firm in every part.

'When you have let it down,' said Knight, already resuming his
position of ruling power, 'go back from the edge of the slope, and
over the bank as far as the rope will allow you. Then lean down,
and hold the end with both hands.'

He had first thought of a safer plan for his own deliverance, but
it involved the disadvantage of possibly endangering her life.

'I have tied it round my waist,' she cried, 'and I will lean
directly upon the bank, holding with my hands as well.'

It was the arrangement he had thought of, but would not suggest.

'I will raise and drop it three times when I am behind the bank,'
she continued, 'to signify that I am ready. Take care, oh, take
the greatest care, I beg you!'

She dropped the rope over him, to learn how much of its length it
would be necessary to expend on that side of the bank, went back,
and disappeared as she had done before.

The rope was trailing by Knight's shoulders. In a few moments it
twitched three times.

He waited yet a second or two, then laid hold.

The incline of this upper portion of the precipice, to the length
only of a few feet, useless to a climber empty-handed, was
invaluable now. Not more than half his weight depended entirely
on the linen rope. Half a dozen extensions of the arms,
alternating with half a dozen seizures of the rope with his feet,
brought him up to the level of the soil.

He was saved, and by Elfride.

He extended his cramped limbs like an awakened sleeper, and sprang
over the bank.

At sight of him she leapt to her feet with almost a shriek of joy.
Knight's eyes met hers, and with supreme eloquence the glance of
each told a long-concealed tale of emotion in that short half-
moment. Moved by an impulse neither could resist, they ran
together and into each other's arms.

At the moment of embracing, Elfride's eyes involuntarily flashed
towards the Puffin steamboat. It had doubled the point, and was
no longer to be seen.

An overwhelming rush of exultation at having delivered the man she
revered from one of the most terrible forms of death, shook the
gentle girl to the centre of her soul. It merged in a defiance of
duty to Stephen, and a total recklessness as to plighted faith.
Every nerve of her will was now in entire subjection to her
feeling--volition as a guiding power had forsaken her. To remain
passive, as she remained now, encircled by his arms, was a
sufficiently complete result--a glorious crown to all the years of
her life. Perhaps he was only grateful, and did not love her. No
matter: it was infinitely more to be even the slave of the greater
than the queen of the less. Some such sensation as this, though
it was not recognized as a finished thought, raced along the
impressionable soul of Elfride.

Regarding their attitude, it was impossible for two persons to go
nearer to a kiss than went Knight and Elfride during those minutes
of impulsive embrace in the pelting rain. Yet they did not kiss.
Knight's peculiarity of nature was such that it would not allow
him to take advantage of the unguarded and passionate avowal she
had tacitly made.

Elfride recovered herself, and gently struggled to be free.

He reluctantly relinquished her, and then surveyed her from crown
to toe. She seemed as small as an infant. He perceived whence
she had obtained the rope.

'Elfride, my Elfride!' he exclaimed in gratified amazement.

'I must leave you now,' she said, her face doubling its red, with
an expression between gladness and shame 'You follow me, but at
some distance.'

'The rain and wind pierce you through; the chill will kill you.
God bless you for such devotion! Take my coat and put it on.'

'No; I shall get warm running.'

Elfride had absolutely nothing between her and the weather but her
exterior robe or 'costume.' The door had been made upon a woman's
wit, and it had found its way out. Behind the bank, whilst Knight
reclined upon the dizzy slope waiting for death, she had taken off
her whole clothing, and replaced only her outer bodice and skirt.
Every thread of the remainder lay upon the ground in the form of a
woollen and cotton rope.

'I am used to being wet through,' she added. 'I have been
drenched on Pansy dozens of times. Good-bye till we meet, clothed
and in our right minds, by the fireside at home!'

She then ran off from him through the pelting rain like a hare; or
more like a pheasant when, scampering away with a lowered tail, it
has a mind to fly, but does not. Elfride was soon out of sight.

Knight felt uncomfortably wet and chilled, but glowing with
fervour nevertheless. He fully appreciated Elfride's girlish
delicacy in refusing his escort in the meagre habiliments she
wore, yet felt that necessary abstraction of herself for a short
half-hour as a most grievous loss to him.

He gathered up her knotted and twisted plumage of linen, lace, and
embroidery work, and laid it across his arm. He noticed on the
ground an envelope, limp and wet. In endeavouring to restore this
to its proper shape, he loosened from the envelope a piece of
paper it had contained, which was seized by the wind in falling
from Knight's hand. It was blown to the right, blown to the left--
it floated to the edge of the cliff and over the sea, where it
was hurled aloft. It twirled in the air, and then flew back over
his head.

Knight followed the paper, and secured it. Having done so, he
looked to discover if it had been worth securing.

The troublesome sheet was a banker's receipt for two hundred
pounds, placed to the credit of Miss Swancourt, which the
impractical girl had totally forgotten she carried with her.

Knight folded it as carefully as its moist condition would allow,
put it in his pocket, and followed Elfride.

Chapter XXIII

'Should auld acquaintance be forgot?'

By this time Stephen Smith had stepped out upon the quay at Castle
Boterel, and breathed his native air.

A darker skin, a more pronounced moustache, and an incipient
beard, were the chief additions and changes noticeable in his
appearance.

In spite of the falling rain, which had somewhat lessened, he took
a small valise in his hand, and, leaving the remainder of his
luggage at the inn, ascended the hills towards East Endelstow.
This place lay in a vale of its own, further inland than the west
village, and though so near it, had little of physical feature in
common with the latter. East Endelstow was more wooded and
fertile: it boasted of Lord Luxellian's mansion and park, and was
free from those bleak open uplands which lent such an air of
desolation to the vicinage of the coast--always excepting the
small valley in which stood the vicarage and Mrs. Swancourt's old
house, The Crags.

Stephen had arrived nearly at the summit of the ridge when the
rain again increased its volume, and, looking about for temporary
shelter, he ascended a steep path which penetrated dense hazel
bushes in the lower part of its course. Further up it emerged
upon a ledge immediately over the turnpike-road, and sheltered by
an overhanging face of rubble rock, with bushes above. For a
reason of his own he made this spot his refuge from the storm, and
turning his face to the left, conned the landscape as a book.

He was overlooking the valley containing Elfride's residence.

From this point of observation the prospect exhibited the
peculiarity of being either brilliant foreground or the subdued
tone of distance, a sudden dip in the surface of the country
lowering out of sight all the intermediate prospect. In apparent
contact with the trees and bushes growing close beside him
appeared the distant tract, terminated suddenly by the brink of
the series of cliffs which culminated in the tall giant without a
name--small and unimportant as here beheld. A leaf on a bough at
Stephen's elbow blotted out a whole hill in the contrasting
district far away; a green bunch of nuts covered a complete upland
there, and the great cliff itself was outvied by a pigmy crag in
the bank hard by him. Stephen had looked upon these things
hundreds of times before to-day, but he had never viewed them with
such tenderness as now.

Stepping forward in this direction yet a little further, he could
see the tower of West Endelstow Church, beneath which he was to
meet his Elfride that night. And at the same time he noticed,
coming over the hill from the cliffs, a white speck in motion. It
seemed first to be a sea-gull flying low, but ultimately proved to
be a human figure, running with great rapidity. The form flitted
on, heedless of the rain which had caused Stephen's halt in this
place, dropped down the heathery hill, entered the vale, and was
out of sight.

Whilst he meditated upon the meaning of this phenomenon, he was
surprised to see swim into his ken from the same point of
departure another moving speck, as different from the first as
well could be, insomuch that it was perceptible only by its
blackness. Slowly and regularly it took the same course, and
there was not much doubt that this was the form of a man. He,
too, gradually descended from the upper levels, and was lost in
the valley below.

The rain had by this time again abated, and Stephen returned to
the road. Looking ahead, he saw two men and a cart. They were
soon obscured by the intervention of a high hedge. Just before
they emerged again he heard voices in conversation.

''A must soon be in the naibourhood, too, if so be he's a-coming,'
said a tenor tongue, which Stephen instantly recognized as Martin
Cannister's.

''A must 'a b'lieve,' said another voice--that of Stephen's
father.

Stephen stepped forward, and came before them face to face. His
father and Martin were walking, dressed in their second best
suits, and beside them rambled along a grizzel horse and brightly
painted spring-cart.

'All right, Mr. Cannister; here's the lost man!' exclaimed young
Smith, entering at once upon the old style of greeting. 'Father,
here I am.'

'All right, my sonny; and glad I be for't!' returned John Smith,
overjoyed to see the young man. 'How be ye? Well, come along
home, and don't let's bide out here in the damp. Such weather
must be terrible bad for a young chap just come from a fiery
nation like Indy; hey, naibour Cannister?'

'Trew, trew. And about getting home his traps? Boxes, monstrous
bales, and noble packages of foreign description, I make no
doubt?'

'Hardly all that,' said Stephen laughing.

'We brought the cart, maning to go right on to Castle Boterel
afore ye landed,' said his father. '"Put in the horse," says
Martin. "Ay," says I, "so we will;" and did it straightway. Now,
maybe, Martin had better go on wi' the cart for the things, and
you and I walk home-along.'

'And I shall be back a'most as soon as you. Peggy is a pretty
step still, though time d' begin to tell upon her as upon the rest
o' us.'

Stephen told Martin where to find his baggage, and then continued
his journey homeward in the company of his father.

'Owing to your coming a day sooner than we first expected,' said
John, 'you'll find us in a turk of a mess, sir--"sir," says I to
my own son! but ye've gone up so, Stephen. We've killed the pig
this morning for ye, thinking ye'd be hungry, and glad of a morsel
of fresh mate. And 'a won't be cut up till to-night. However, we
can make ye a good supper of fry, which will chaw up well wi' a
dab o' mustard and a few nice new taters, and a drop of shilling
ale to wash it down. Your mother have scrubbed the house through
because ye were coming, and dusted all the chimmer furniture, and
bought a new basin and jug of a travelling crockery-woman that
came to our door, and scoured the cannel-sticks, and claned the
winders! Ay, I don't know what 'a ha'n't a done. Never were such
a steer, 'a b'lieve.'

Conversation of this kind and inquiries of Stephen for his
mother's wellbeing occupied them for the remainder of the journey.
When they drew near the river, and the cottage behind it, they
could hear the master-mason's clock striking off the bygone hours
of the day at intervals of a quarter of a minute, during which
intervals Stephen's imagination readily pictured his mother's
forefinger wandering round the dial in company with the minute-
hand.

'The clock stopped this morning, and your mother in putting en
right seemingly,' said his father in an explanatory tone; and they
went up the garden to the door.

When they had entered, and Stephen had dutifully and warmly
greeted his mother--who appeared in a cotton dress of a dark-blue
ground, covered broadcast with a multitude of new and full moons,
stars, and planets, with an occasional dash of a comet-like aspect
to diversify the scene--the crackle of cart-wheels was heard
outside, and Martin Cannister stamped in at the doorway, in the
form of a pair of legs beneath a great box, his body being nowhere
visible. When the luggage had been all taken down, and Stephen
had gone upstairs to change his clothes, Mrs. Smith's mind seemed
to recover a lost thread.

'Really our clock is not worth a penny,' she said, turning to it
and attempting to start the pendulum.

'Stopped again?' inquired Martin with commiseration.

'Yes, sure,' replied Mrs. Smith; and continued after the manner of
certain matrons, to whose tongues the harmony of a subject with a
casual mood is a greater recommendation than its pertinence to the
occasion, 'John would spend pounds a year upon the jimcrack old
thing, if he might, in having it claned, when at the same time you
may doctor it yourself as well. "The clock's stopped again,
John," I say to him. "Better have en claned," says he. There's
five shillings. "That clock grinds again," I say to en. "Better
have en claned," 'a says again. "That clock strikes wrong, John,"
says I. "Better have en claned," he goes on. The wheels would
have been polished to skeletons by this time if I had listened to
en, and I assure you we could have bought a chainey-faced beauty
wi' the good money we've flung away these last ten years upon this
old green-faced mortal. And, Martin, you must be wet. My son is
gone up to change. John is damper than I should like to be, but
'a calls it nothing. Some of Mrs. Swancourt's servants have been
here--they ran in out of the rain when going for a walk--and I
assure you the state of their bonnets was frightful.'

'How's the folks? We've been over to Castle Boterel, and what wi'
running and stopping out of the storms, my poor head is beyond
everything! fizz, fizz fizz; 'tis frying o' fish from morning to
night,' said a cracked voice in the doorway at this instant.

'Lord so's, who's that?' said Mrs. Smith, in a private
exclamation, and turning round saw William Worm, endeavouring to
make himself look passing civil and friendly by overspreading his
face with a large smile that seemed to have no connection with the
humour he was in. Behind him stood a woman about twice his size,
with a large umbrella over her head. This was Mrs. Worm,
William's wife.

'Come in, William,' said John Smith. 'We don't kill a pig every
day. And you, likewise, Mrs. Worm. I make ye welcome. Since ye
left Parson Swancourt, William, I don't see much of 'ee.'

'No, for to tell the truth, since I took to the turn-pike-gate
line, I've been out but little, coming to church o' Sundays not
being my duty now, as 'twas in a parson's family, you see.
However, our boy is able to mind the gate now, and I said, says I,
"Barbara, let's call and see John Smith."'

'I am sorry to hear yer pore head is so bad still.'

'Ay, I assure you that frying o' fish is going on for nights and
days. And, you know, sometimes 'tisn't only fish, but rashers o'
bacon and inions. Ay, I can hear the fat pop and fizz as nateral
as life; can't I, Barbara?'

Mrs. Worm, who had been all this time engaged in closing her
umbrella, corroborated this statement, and now, coming indoors,
showed herself to be a wide-faced, comfortable-looking woman, with
a wart upon her cheek, bearing a small tuft of hair in its centre.

'Have ye ever tried anything to cure yer noise, Maister Worm?'
inquired Martin Cannister.

'Oh ay; bless ye, I've tried everything. Ay, Providence is a
merciful man, and I have hoped He'd have found it out by this
time, living so many years in a parson's family, too, as I have,
but 'a don't seem to relieve me. Ay, I be a poor wambling man,
and life's a mint o' trouble!'

'True, mournful true, William Worm. 'Tis so. The world wants
looking to, or 'tis all sixes and sevens wi' us.'

'Take your things off, Mrs. Worm,' said Mrs. Smith. 'We be rather
in a muddle, to tell the truth, for my son is just dropped in from
Indy a day sooner than we expected, and the pig-killer is coming
presently to cut up.'

Mrs. Barbara Worm, not wishing to take any mean advantage of
persons in a muddle by observing them, removed her bonnet and
mantle with eyes fixed upon the flowers in the plot outside the
door.

'What beautiful tiger-lilies!' said Mrs. Worm.

'Yes, they be very well, but such a trouble to me on account of
the children that come here. They will go eating the berries on
the stem, and call 'em currants. Taste wi' junivals is quite
fancy, really.'

'And your snapdragons look as fierce as ever.'

'Well, really,' answered Mrs. Smith, entering didactically into
the subject, 'they are more like Christians than flowers. But
they make up well enough wi' the rest, and don't require much
tending. And the same can be said o' these miller's wheels. 'Tis
a flower I like very much, though so simple. John says he never
cares about the flowers o' 'em, but men have no eye for anything
neat. He says his favourite flower is a cauliflower. And I
assure you I tremble in the springtime, for 'tis perfect murder.'

'You don't say so, Mrs. Smith!'

'John digs round the roots, you know. In goes his blundering
spade, through roots, bulbs, everything that hasn't got a good
show above ground, turning 'em up cut all to slices. Only the
very last fall I went to move some tulips, when I found every bulb
upside down, and the stems crooked round. He had turned 'em over
in the spring, and the cunning creatures had soon found that
heaven was not where it used to be.'

'What's that long-favoured flower under the hedge?'

'They? O Lord, they are the horrid Jacob's ladders! Instead of
praising 'em, I be mad wi' 'em for being so ready to bide where
they are not wanted. They be very well in their way, but I do not
care for things that neglect won't kill. Do what I will, dig,
drag, scrap, pull, I get too many of 'em. I chop the roots: up
they'll come, treble strong. Throw 'em over hedge; there they'll
grow, staring me in the face like a hungry dog driven away, and
creep back again in a week or two the same as before. 'Tis
Jacob's ladder here, Jacob's ladder there, and plant 'em where
nothing in the world will grow, you get crowds of 'em in a month
or two. John made a new manure mixen last summer, and he said,
"Maria, now if you've got any flowers or such like, that you don't
want, you may plant 'em round my mixen so as to hide it a bit,
though 'tis not likely anything of much value will grow there." I
thought, "There's them Jacob's ladders; I'll put them there, since
they can't do harm in such a place; "and I planted the Jacob's
ladders sure enough. They growed, and they growed, in the mixen
and out of the mixen, all over the litter, covering it quite up.
When John wanted to use it about the garden, 'a said, "Nation
seize them Jacob's ladders of yours, Maria! They've eat the
goodness out of every morsel of my manure, so that 'tis no better
than sand itself!" Sure enough the hungry mortals had. 'Tis my
belief that in the secret souls o' 'em, Jacob's ladders be weeds,
and not flowers at all, if the truth was known.'