"The Story of a Beauty" (continued 3)

Chapter Sixteen.

Better.

The last day of July had come, the day that should have been the wedding-day was over and past, the fresh green turf of the Cleverley garden was brown and dry, with long hours of scorching sunshine, the flowers looked hot and overblown in the blazing afternoon light. Some empty chairs, and a tea-table with empty tea-cups, stood on the edge of a group of trees, and on the rug in front of them lay Una in a faded shabby frock, and with a face in which there seemed to be no girlish freshness remaining. Her long hair hung heavily round her, her eyes stared wearily out of their dark circles; she had nothing to do but to play with every morbid and unwholesome fancy that can enter the brain of an ill-trained and unhappy girl.

Tony’s wedding-day was fixed. He did not love her now. By and by, when she was grown-up, she would meet him, and make him care for her again, if she didn’t die first. Why not drown herself in the pond in the wood? Una pictured the plunge, the stillness, and herself and her hair floating on the top, like ‘The Christian Martyr.’ But Amethyst did not love her now. How should she? Her life was a ruin too; dying would be much better for them both. Una thought again of the cool dark pond in the wood, with a sense of desire; but her exceeding weariness and languor kept her still. It was not worth while to get up, even to commit suicide.

As she lay still, getting a dreary sort of amusement out of these miserable fancies, she saw Amethyst come out of the house, walk slowly across the brown scorched grass, and sit down on one of the chairs, without noticing her sister’s presence.

She sat perfectly still, with a hard unsmiling face, at variance with the gay trim dress in which she had been entertaining some recent visitors. They were gone, and she could sit still now, and think—think the bitter thoughts in which her cruel disappointment took form.

All that she had lost, still more all that she now had left, passed before her mind, and was weighed in the balance. She had no illusions now. Perhaps the bitterest drop was not so much the loss of Lucian, as the sense that he ought to have read her more truly. He himself had failed her. As for her mother, her eyes were as clear as Tory’s; and her heart, how hard and bitter! And the days had to go on. It was not only that she was not Lucian’s happy wife, she was Amethyst Haredale, with parents whom she despised, and a house in which no good thing could flourish; and yet, her aunt’s anxious entreaty to join her as soon as she would, had no attraction for her. Religion—goodness? Mrs Leigh and Lucian were good and religious, and had cruelly misjudged her. Were good people really much better than bad ones? She had thought herself religious; but she had got below all the religion that she had ever experienced, and with the distrust of all earthly love, came also distrust of the Divine love, from which she had scarcely distinguished it. Amethyst was one of those, to whom trouble comes, not only in vague and overwhelming feelings, but in keen sharp thoughts; and, young as she was, her thoughts hit life’s hard problems like well-aimed arrows.

“Well, Amethyst, do you think, now, there’s any good in being good?”

Una’s voice, with a hard ring through its weary languor, roused her with a start.

“Una! Why do you lie there in the sun? It’s very bad for you!” she said petulantly.

“Suppose it is, what does it matter? There’s nothing doing, and nothing worth living for, that I can see. You can’t say there is.”

“You ought not to say things like that, Una,” said Amethyst. “It is not right.”

“As if being right mattered!” said Una, and then with a sudden change the ready tears filled her eyes. “I am so—so miserable,” she sobbed, “and you are unkind to me now, Amethyst. The children tease me, and you don’t care for me now.”

Amethyst looked round at her. It was quite true. She had not cared. Even now she felt impatient of the trouble that was like a caricature of her own.

“It’s natural you should hate me, when I did all the mischief. But oh, I did try to make up for it—I did!”

“Nonsense!” said Amethyst. “I don’t hate you, but I don’t know that I can say anything to do you any good.”

She started up, and walked away as she spoke, her nerves were all on edge, her temper irritated, her conscience beginning to struggle with her sense of injury. The craving for Lucian came over her, as, with unconscious force, she said to herself, “like a flood of hot lava.” How could she think about other people? She escaped from the sight of Una, and walked along the little path across the fields, towards the village. Then the place recalled the beginning of her troubles. She had come this way to post the fatal letter which Sylvester Riddell had seen. She believed Sylvester to be her worst enemy, and it was with a sense of angry recoil that she saw his father and aunt coming to meet her. What part they had taken, if any, in her affairs, she did not know, and she had seen neither of them since the party at Loseby. Probably they thought that she was a bad girl, and would show it in their manner to her. She stiffened up her head, and would have passed with a bow; but the Rector, who was nearest to her, stopped, raised his hat, and held out his hand.

“How do you do, my dear?” he said in his kindest voice; “my sister was coming to ask a little favour of you.”

“It is this,” said Miss Riddell, without waiting for Amethyst to speak; “I want to interest some of the young girls about here in improving their minds. There are a good many in Cleverley without much object in life; I think some of them might be encouraged to work for an examination. As your experience is so fresh, and you were so successful, I wondered if you would come to tea to-morrow afternoon, and tell us a little about it.”

“So fresh?” Yes, only three months old; but what a fiery gulf seemed to roll between. Amethyst was quick enough to see that this proposal was meant most kindly as a link with her old life, and also, to show the neighbourhood that, in the opinion of the Rectory, Miss Haredale was an example to be followed, a companion to be desired.

She hesitated and was silent.

“The kindness would be very great,” said the Rector. Miss Riddell moved a little away, and he continued, “You have had a great trial, nothing seems attractive to you now. Will this be more than you are ready for?”

“I don’t feel as if I could remember about it,” said Amethyst, with a sudden impulse, the change in her face showing that she was still child enough to be touched by the first kind word.

“No, my dear, but don’t you think it would be good for you to recall it?”

“I can’t be good, I wasn’t made to be,” said Amethyst, in a tone which she thought was wickedly defiant, but which really showed confidence in her listener’s comprehension.

“No, my dear,” said the Rector again; “very few of us are. But we are all made to be a little better by effort, and prayer.”

“I am worse,” said Amethyst, tears filling her eyes, while her whole figure trembled.

“Yes, no doubt; but I think you will find it possible to make each day a little better. And I have always found it worth while, Amethyst. It makes all the difference in the long run between one man and another. I am sure there is a better and a worse before you in life, my dear, even if you think there is not a very good.”

Perhaps this was the consolation of age rather than of youth. But it came to Amethyst as a truth. It might not be worth while to be a little less self-absorbed, a little less wretched; but she knew that it was possible.

“God bless you, my dear child, and good-bye,” said Mr Riddell, “you shall come or not to the Rectory to-morrow, as you like.”

Miss Riddell went away with only a kind smile and hand-shake, and Amethyst, left alone, burst into a rain of tears. The kindness, the sense of trust in the speakers had been like her native tongue in a foreign land. It was natural; while her own people were strange. She remembered the kind of girl she used to be, as if her girlhood were twenty years away; bliss and misery had alike blotted it out.

But the habits and the instincts of her whole training were not utterly killed; the sense of duty began to lift its head. It was better to be kind to Una, and to show her that there was “a better” in life, than to acquiesce in her despair. It was better to read history, and to practise or to walk with the girls, than to sit alone and brood over her injuries, or to read, in the novels left about by her mother, of far worse injuries leading to worse despair, to learn from these books to what her infant passions were akin, and to bite deeper into the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge—of herself. Of course, she did not put it so. “It was better not to feel like those wicked people, at least not to think of feeling like them.” And slowly and dully she turned her steps homewards through the wood; a bad way to come, since she and Lucian had loved it together. Oh, what was he doing? Did he feel as if life was done? Perhaps the most agonising moment she had known, was when the conviction came to her that it was not in him to feel as she did.

“If I had thought that he had gambled or betted, or been wicked, I would have held on tighter, to help him to be good. But he gave up me!”

“But if you had thought he was faithless to you?” came an answering voice in her soul. It was no thought, but an impulse of fury, that seized upon Amethyst in reply. And then—

“But I could not think so, he could not be bad, he could not be false. But oh, he is—he is—for he has no faith in me. ‘Better!’ There’s no ‘better.’ If he were to come back now, if he ever finds out and believes, I shall never forget?”

She flung herself down on the ground, on the bank where they had sat together by the little pool where they had fished for water-lilies, where they had exchanged forget-me-nots; the very revival of spirit, caused by the friendly words, making her grief more articulate, and for the moment more bitter.

Her tears were dried up; she lay with her hands clenched in the grass, absolutely still. Suddenly a rustling, creeping sound came among the herbs and water-weeds near, then panting, sobbing breath.

Amethyst lifted her head. Not twenty yards from her stood Una, her hands clasped, her eyes fixed on the water, her foot extended. Amethyst sprang to her feet, Una gave a violent start, and either lost her balance and fell, or suddenly jumped into the water.

“Una, Una!” screamed Amethyst, all else forgotten in a moment. She scrambled through the rushes, and caught at her sister’s hands and dress.

Una was on her feet, the water was shallow, but the bottom was soft and muddy; she sank to her knees, and Amethyst, her own foothold insecure in the rushes, could not hold her up.

The young life woke up strong in them both, they screamed and struggled; Amethyst slipped off the bank up to her knees in the pool. As the cold water, the slimy mud, touched her feet, the warm sun struck on her head, the light and the blue of the sky were round and over her.

“Oh, God—oh, God! I don’t want to die! Oh, save us! oh, save us!” she cried.

There was a ringing shout.

“Stand still—stand still! For your lives, don’t struggle! It’s all right, I’ll help you!” And Sylvester Riddell came with a rush towards them, set his foot on a firmer tuft of rushes, grasped Una by the waist, and lifted her, sobbing and shaking, on to dry land, then pulled Amethyst out of the water, and in another moment they were safe on a mass of chervil, campion, stitchwort and sting-nettles high above the water’s edge, wet and miserable, covered with mud and water-weed.

Half an hour later, Sylvester came back to the Rectory with a rapid step and brilliant eyes, but with an amount of mud on his trousers that required explanation. This he gave in rather an off-hand fashion. Una Haredale had slipped into the pond, gathering lilies he supposed, and he had helped her sister to pull her out.

“Was she hurt?” said Miss Riddell, rather curiously.

“No, but she was faint and frightened, and wet through. I helped Miss Haredale to get her home. It was an awkward accident.”

It seemed, however, to have raised Sylvester’s spirits, which had been down to zero of late. He was going abroad with a friend, but he had lingered and put off his start in the hope of once more seeing Amethyst, a sight which he had nevertheless dreaded unspeakably. They had met now, with no time for resentment or embarrassment, and his one feeling was that she was now free. He saw her once again; for she came to the Rectory on the next afternoon, just as he was setting out on his journey.

The weather had changed, and the sky was grey. Amethyst wore a grey frock and hat. She was pale, and looked much less pretty than usual, and her manner was cold, and, he fancied, showed displeasure.

Sylvester’s train was due, he could only shake hands and inquire for her sister.

“She was very much upset and frightened; but she has not been well lately. We must take much more care of her, then I hope she will be better.”

With the last word, she lifted her eyes for a moment to the Rector’s face as he stood behind his son; but they did not meet Sylvester’s, and in a moment she had passed into the drawing-room out of his sight.

He thought of her, as he had seen her first with the glowing amethysts on her brow and neck, an angelic vision; at the primrose-picking, a fresh and joyous girl; when he had come home at Midsummer, happy and proud in her betrothal; at the fatal garden-party, with eyes that had fallen before his own, with a cloud of doubt on her face. He had admired her, idealised her, and, he knew it now, all the while he had loved her, and yet his fate had given him a share in breaking her heart. Now he had seen her again, pale and sad, in the light of common day.

Sylvester took his ticket for London, labelled his luggage, got into the train, and exchanged a newspaper with a friend.

But, in his heart, he vowed himself to Amethyst’s service, he took her for the lady of his love, as if with her colours in his helmet, he had ridden forth to cry her name in the battle-field, and die with it on his lips.

Chapter Seventeen.

“Iris.”

One sunny afternoon in spring, Lucian Leigh was sitting on a bench in the garden at Ashfield Mount. Nearly two years had passed since he had left Cleverley in the agony of his great disappointment, and he had now come back to it for the first time.

The flowers were as gay as when he had walked among them during the brief days of his betrothal, the house looked as cheerful and comfortable as of old; the great deer-hound that sat at his feet was unchanged during his absence, but Lucian himself had grown from youth to manhood, and though the expression of his impassive, regular-featured face had changed but little, it was so effectually bronzed, that hair, and even eyes, showed light against the sunburn.

He sat still and smoked, and patted Donald’s head—he liked the feel of it—till footsteps approached, and he was hailed from the neighbouring shrubbery.

“Ha, Syl!” he said, jumping up, “so there you are. Glad to see you.”

“I’m uncommonly glad to see you,” said Sylvester, grasping his hand. “I began to think you were never coming home any more, but were permanently given over to tigers and elephants. Did you like India?”

“No,” said Lucian, “the big game is the only thing worth going there for. I’ve had a shot, I believe, at everything there is there to shoot at I know all the tracks of them, but so do so many other men. Now I think of trying bears in the Rockies for a change; and I should like to go north—an arctic expedition would be rather jolly.”

“You want to add a polar bear’s hide to all the tiger skins you have sent home to adorn the hall at Toppings, before you settle down to pot your own partridges.”

“Yes,” said Lucian.

“But what does Mrs Leigh say to that?”

“She doesn’t like it. She wants me to go to London now, and, as she calls it, ‘keep up our old connection,’ and then keep open house at Toppings in the autumn, have shoots, and so on. I have been there with her now, you know, for two months.”

“And you don’t see it?”

“No, not yet. I must, of course, finally. But Evans is a very good agent, and the Rectory people look after the tenants. I subscribe properly to everything,—schools, and hunt, and county show, and so on; but I’m not going to live there now. Why should I?”

“Well, you might see a little more of the world first, certainly.”

“In two years’ time Miss Carisbrooke comes of age, and the lease of this house will be up. The mother will have to make a new start somewhere then, and it will be time for Kate, at any rate, to come out. That ought to be in our own neighbourhood, so I must be in England then.”

“Does Miss Carisbrooke mean to live here?”

“I believe so. My mother had her to stay here, and liked her, before I came home. You might try your luck, Syl, she’s a catch. Her only relation is a youngish uncle, her guardian. I believe he lives abroad a good deal.”

Lucian paused, then said—

“She has been living for the last year with that old Miss Haredale, who lost her money. She chaperons Miss Carisbrooke, and is to bring her out, I believe, in London this year.”

There was a little silence. Perhaps it had been from a kind of embarrassment that Lucian had at once rained facts upon Sylvester, and put him in possession of his intentions. Now he said—

“Don’t let the mother set you on to bully me about staying at home. I always meant to have a shot at a white bear some time—except once, for about three months.—And that’s quite over, for good and all. I’ve no more concern with it. So I must do something else, you know; and I like sport, and seeing new places.”

Lucian paused again, and Sylvester looked at him keenly, hardly knowing what to say in answer.

“I am convinced,” continued Lucian, with the same unmoved voice and face, “that I acted rightly. So we’ll say no more about it. What have you been about? The mother says you’re writing a poem.”

“Yes,” said Sylvester; “will you read it?”

“I’ll buy it,” said Lucian, gravely; “and, yes, I’ll read it, if you like, as it’s yours. I hope you’ll make Tennyson take a back seat.”

“Thank you,” said Sylvester, laughing. “I’ll be content to hang on behind his coach. But of course I’m rather full of it. I’ve had several things in reviews and magazines, and some men, whose word is worth something, like them. But it’s all luck. The public’s harder to hit than a tiger, Lucy.”

“I hope it won’t turn and rend you. Well, it’s jolly to see you again, after all. Come in, I’ve got some curiosities for you—art objects, don’t you call them?—to adorn your rooms at Cuthbert’s.”

“Thanks. And then come down and see Aunt Meg and the governor. They’ll be delighted.”

If Lucian had not known Sylvester from babyhood, he would have had little in common with him; but, as it was, whatever he had to say, he said to Sylvester; he took all his alien tastes for granted, and never supposed it possible to be so intimate with any one else. Absence, probably, neither made his heart grow fonder, nor the reverse; he would have given and expected exactly the same amount of regard, after an absence of five-and-twenty years instead of two.

Sylvester had other friends, and his notion of sympathetic intercourse included more than this, but he had a brotherly regard for “Miss Lucy,” as the pretty-faced, but manly little boy had been called in his early school-days, and liked his company. Lucian now took him into the house, and bestowed various Indian valuables on him, stating where and when they had been bought on purpose for him, and giving him many distinct pictures of places and people; for he was very observant, and had an accurate memory.

Then, as they walked down together to the Rectory, he asked after old friends, and neighbours, till they turned into the Rectory drive, opposite which, half open, were the great iron gates of Cleverley Hall.

“There’s Aunt Meg,” said Sylvester. “Who’s that girl?—Good heavens,” as Lucian suddenly stopped, and held him back; for there, not fifty feet from them, in the act of parting from Miss Riddell, stood Amethyst Haredale.

Retreat was for her impossible. As she turned and saw them, Lucian, without an instant’s pause, raised his hat, turned and went off up a side path into the garden.

Sylvester moved forward, blushing and confused, but with an eager light in his eyes. She came straight on towards him, stopped, and held out her hand.

“How do you do, Mr Riddell?” she said, in soft gracious tones, like Lady Haredale’s own. “I have come down for a few hours on business for my mother, and I came to see Miss Riddell. I am hurrying now to catch the London train. Good-bye.”

She did not speak hurriedly, she left time for Sylvester’s confused murmurs of reply between her sentences, but she had walked on and turned out of sight before Miss Riddell had time to come up to them.

“The hand of fate!” she exclaimed. “It is months since she was here, and now only for an hour or two.”

“I’ll find Lucian,” stammered Sylvester, turning into the garden, where Lucian came quickly to meet him.

“I was told they were away,” he said abruptly.

“So they are. She came down on business. She—she—”

“Don’t talk about her,” said Lucian, sternly. “There’s the Rector, and Miss Riddell with him.”

He came up to them, shook hands cordially, presented his little offerings of Indian curios, and after a very short visit, took his leave, and went away by himself.

“Unlucky!” exclaimed Miss Riddell. “I wish it had not occurred.”

“But, Aunt Meg, are they coming down here?” said Sylvester, hurriedly.

“No, they are to be in London for the season, Amethyst is to be presented. I suppose their affairs are looking up. They have been abroad, you know, for some time, and visiting-about; but Amethyst was in town last year for a very short time, with their cousin, Lady Molyneux, at the end of the season. You heard that? She was only there long enough to show that she would make a sensation. R, the new artist, asked to paint her, the picture is to be in the Academy this year. She will have every chance now. She looks well, and has not lost her sweet manner, but her girlishness has all gone, and she is more the grand lady than her mother.”

“I—I hardly remember what a beauty she was,” said Sylvester, rather nervously. “And that fellow, Fowler, he married the heiress, didn’t he?”

“Yes. They live in London. Haven’t you ever met them at Loseby? The marriage turned out very well. There is something very engaging about Amethyst, and she spoke nicely of her sister Una, who is very delicate, she tells me. But, dear me, it was a bad business for Lucian. I don’t know when he will settle down. His mother longs for him to marry and live at Toppings.”

“He had much better see the world first,” said Sylvester.

“One doesn’t quite see the end of it for him,” said Mr Riddell, thoughtfully. “But, Syl, I thought I was to see the magnum opus. I like to know what you young men are doing.”

Sylvester recalled himself with a start, to what had been an hour before an important ordeal to him. Now, part of the poem seemed to have come to life, and the picture faded before the original.

That same brief three months, which had turned Lucian Leigh’s outward life away from the course that had seemed marked out for it, had given a colour to all Sylvester Riddell’s inward existence. When he began to add another to the many poetical versions of a youth in search of an ideal, that ideal was, for him, embodied in his memory of Amethyst Haredale. He might call her Art, Truth, Womanhood, Beauty, anything he would, she looked at him from the deep grave eyes, and smiled the enchanting smile which had filled his imagination at first sight. To Lucian, every thought of Amethyst was painful, never, if possible, to be recalled; to Sylvester, she was a dream of beauty and delight, and, as he had never seen her since the fatal summer, there was a certain dreaminess in his feelings with regard to her.

But when, encouraged by various successes in the way of criticism and of occasional verses, and having a good deal of leisure on his hands, he began to write a long poem, he had no doubt as to the source of his inspiration.

He had called his poem ‘Iris,’ and the subject was that of a youth pursuing an ideal love. The hero was a minnesinger of the early middle ages, and the story was related in sections of narrative interspersed with suitable lyrics. The subject was not new, and he could only hope that the treatment was. He had not yet decided whether Iris should be for ever unattainable, a rainbow of promise, melt mystically into his hero’s being in some ineffable manner, as a final reward, or identify herself with the maiden who had been his childish friend.

But the sight of the real Amethyst had dimmed this ideal Iris, and he hardly knew whether it was as lover or author, that he blushed and hesitated as his father settled himself in his study to listen. He was so nervous that he read hurriedly and badly, and his father told him that he was not doing himself justice, and made him read a passage over again, in which Amelot, as the minstrel boy was called, played and sang to himself in the sunset, his heart full of longing to express itself in song, till, with the sweetest strains that he had ever uttered, the soft and amethystine colours of sun and air took shape and form, and the lovely eyes of Iris shone upon him, amid rainbow hues and gleaming mists, beckoning him ever onward and upward to more strenuous efforts to attain her.

“Of course,” said Sylvester, hurriedly, as he paused, “I suppose he never did reach her—I think she was always the end of the rainbow.”

Mr Riddell did not appear deeply interested in this question. It did not, he said, affect the intrinsic merit of the poem.

But he pounced on the song with which Iris had inspired Amelot, and after declaring it to be smooth, and not without sweetness, tore it to pieces in its author’s sight, proclaimed one epithet commonplace and another redundant, and finally told him, that he should aim at simplicity of sentiment and perfection of expression.

“What all the world can feel, my dear boy, and only you can say,—that’s poetry.”

“I—I am afraid,” said Sylvester, “that Amelot’s devotion to Iris is rather unusual—the lot of the few. Dante is of course the eternal model, after which one can only labour.”

“A case in point, Syl,” said Mr Riddell, briskly. “Thousands of young men have fallen in love, like Dante, with unattainable young women. He knew how to tell the world of it. Besides, Dante was a prophet; he had another function to fulfil. But the simplest things are the greatest.”

Sylvester did not agree, he was not at all prepared to consider that the devotion of Amelot to Iris was usual; quite the contrary. It was an exceptional grace bestowed on such as could receive it.

The point was, however, rather too personal for comfortable argument. Besides, he did not know yet what his father thought about the poem.

“I gather,” he said, “that you think the sentiment of the poem rather too finespun.”

“Oh dear, no,” said Mr Riddell. “Not at all. I’ve often felt the sort of thing myself. I’m glad young men can still be honestly sentimental. Don’t get too mystical, and avoid unusual words—all sorts of aesthetic slang. The thing has a good deal of merit in its own way. I must go down and see old Tomkins.”

And while Sylvester hardly knew whether he was pleased or not, the Rector rammed on his shabby soft hat, stuck his walking-stick under his arm, and remarked—

“Glad you employ your leisure time so well Very pretty lines—many of them—excellent tone and feeling. Of course the genuine lilt of a perfect love-song only drops from the sky once in a generation.”

Sylvester had hardly expected that his father would tell him that, in Lucian’s language, he had made Tennyson take a back seat; but he felt ruffled and dissatisfied.

Sympathetic as Mr Riddell was, he did not quite know what his verdict was to his son. He had written many a smooth and graceful copy of verses in his own young days, reflecting more or less the style and taste of his generation, and he had long survived the discovery that they had not added much to what it had to tell the world. He had found quite enough to live for, without poetry.

Sylvester was of a more intense and less many-sided nature; worthy and sufficient objects in life did not seem to him so easy to find. He had secretly lived much for his poem, and he needed to find it worth living for.

Now, the thing most worth living for seemed to be the hope of seeing Amethyst again. Fate had kept them apart hitherto by a series of chances; but now, if the poem was finished, if it came out and was a success, if he met her in London, if she did not cherish any resentment against him—if she could ever know that Iris—

So Sylvester dreamed. But Lucian went up to London to meet the friend who shared his aspirations as to the bears of the Rocky Mountains, and made arrangements for an immediate start in pursuit of them.

Chapter Eighteen.

Glimpses of Heaven.

Miss Haredale’s pretty little drawing-room at Silverfold was gay with tulips and hyacinths, and bright with a cheery mingling of sun and firelight.

In the sunny bay-window sat Una Haredale, with a book in her lap, but with eyes eagerly gazing down the pleasant bit of country road, shaded with tall trees and edged with broad pieces of turf and freely growing hedges, that was visible from the window.

Una was now seventeen, a slender, limp creature, with languor and want of strength apparent in every gesture, and a look of extreme delicacy in her pale face and large eager eyes. Her expression had softened and sweetened, her hair was fastened up on the top of her head, though its thick coils still seemed as if they were too heavy for the long over-slender neck. As she caught sight of a figure approaching the garden gate, her face lighted up into a look of positive rapture. She sprang up, and flew out to the door.

“Amethyst, Amethyst! my darling, my darling! Here you are at last I’ll never, never let you go again!”

The last words were spoken as she clung round her sister’s neck, almost stifling Amethyst’s words of greeting.

“My darling, you won’t let me speak, or look at you! Where’s Aunt Anna,—not at home?”

“She has taken Carrie to have a singing lesson. Come in; I am to give you tea, and take care of you.”

Soon Amethyst was sitting in a low chair by the fire, with Una kneeling at her side, leaning against her, and clinging to her, as some one had once said, like bindweed round a lily, a comparison resented by Amethyst as derogatory to Una. She alone knew what this clinging, dependent creature had been to her ever since, for Una’s sake, she had tried to “make things better.”

“Are you quite well, dear? and do you like being here? Have you got on with Aunt Anna?” she asked, tenderly.

“Oh, as well as can be without you. I do like it. Oh! I have a great deal to tell you. Only first I want to hear how everything is settled. Is the house in Eaton Square nice?”

“Yes, there will be plenty of room for Auntie and Carrie Carisbrooke, and you know mother will let them be quite independent. And you are all to be there. Mother wouldn’t hear of sending even Kattern and Tory to Cleverley; and as for you, she insisted on your going to the Drawing-room, and coming out regularly.”

“I? I should be half-killed with an hour of a London party. What can my lady want me for?” said Una, with a startled look.

“She says she may never be able to give you so good a chance. I said I thought that London was bad for you, and that I was sure you could not do much. But she said that it was more amusing for you to do what you could, and she liked to have us all with her. So I must take great care of you, and we must see how it answers for you.”

Una gave a long sigh.

“It keeps me with you,” she said. “But oh, it tires me to think of it! and I shall want heaps of new clothes.”

“Mother says you had better have them when you can. She is delighted at getting the London house.”

“I dare say,” said Una. “You’ll see, Kattern and Tory will get everywhere, except to the Drawing-room and the stiff balls. Kat looks grown-up, and she’s getting rather sweet in her own way—pretty milk-maid style, you know. And she looks best in a straw hat and pink cotton—which is cheap.” Amethyst laughed.

“I don’t know about Kat,” she said, “but Tory declares she’s not going to spoil her chances by and by. She means to wear a sailor hat, and go to classes. She has found out some, and I do think she will, she is very clever.”

Una twisted herself round so as to look up into Amethyst’s face.

“There’ll be the rich heiress,” she said, “and the great beauty. There’s only the good girl left for me! Which will win, I wonder—you or Carrie? She ought to have a poor peer, and you a rich cotton-spinner. But you might pull caps for a duke.”

“He should fall to you, if you are to be the good girl,” said Amethyst. “But I don’t see him anywhere on the horizon at present.”

“No, but the cotton-spinner? Of course the Grattons are going to be in town? In Eaton Square too, perhaps?”

“Yes,” said Amethyst, “on the opposite side. Carrie is to ride with the girls.”

“And you?”

“Too expensive!” said Amethyst, with an odd slow smile. “There’ll be enough to contrive for without that.”

“Where is the money coming from? Is the house all Carrie’s?”

“Well, no. The fact is, father has made it up with Charles, and they have agreed to sell some farms in Derbyshire. We are to see Charles sometimes. He is going on better—”

“And is meant for Carrie! I declare, Amethyst, that’s too bad!” said Una, sitting up. “And have you seen him?”

“No, and I can’t recollect him at all. Can you?”

“I can. Amethyst, he’s a horror! Even long ago we all hated him. I should hate him to come near you?”

“Well, Una,” said Amethyst, shrugging her shoulders. “We must just do the best we can. Least said, soonest mended—as we settled long ago.”

“Oh,” said Una, with tears in her eyes, “it’s awfully hard lines on us! I want to tell you—somehow I couldn’t write. I see everything differently—since I came here—”

She broke off, and hid her face on Amethyst’s shoulder.

“What is it, dear? What do you mean? Has anything happened to you?” said Amethyst, anxiously.

“The greatest of all things, Amethyst. I know about religion now—I know about Him! The confirmation classes, and all Mr Ross has taught us—and his sermons—oh, it is all so beautiful. I longed, I wanted to be good. If one could go and live in a place like Saint Etheldred’s, out of the temptations of the world! But yesterday he talked to us separately, and I couldn’t help telling him a little, what a bad, wicked child I had been. And he said things. And somehow, last night, as I lay awake, there came the most wonderful feeling, and I knew it was all true, and that there is peace and rest I knew it. One can be happy without earthly love, and—and all the things people care for. It’s quite true, Amethyst, I—I saw Him right in my heart, and I know...”

She lifted her face, all transfigured and radiant, as she uttered the holiest of names in an awe-struck whisper.

Amethyst looked at her, with the dreaming, seeking, unsatisfied eyes which were in such curious contrast to the repose of her beautiful face.

“You knew always,” said Una. “That was what made you so different to us all, when first you came.”

Amethyst smiled a smile that would have been a little cynical, if it had not been so intensely sad.

“I’m not very good, darling,” she said. “Life’s rather a complicated business, as you know very well.”

“Yes,” said Una, “but I feel as if I should not mind anything very much, now. Now there is something to get back into, to hide oneself in. But it is all your doing, my jewel. What should I have been like but for you?”

Una believed, poor child, that the struggle of life was over for her, or at least robbed of all its hardness. These weeks at Silverfold had lifted her into a new world; and when, a day or two after Amethyst’s arrival, the confirmation for which she had been preparing took place, the fervour of her self-dedication seemed to shine through her, as, with a face white as her dress, but beautiful with peace and joy, she came down the little church amid the crowd of stolid white-capped country girls, experiencing a sense of ineffable rest and joy.

Was this but another and more dangerous phase of the varying emotions to which she was subject, a lifting up that was likely to end in a more violent fall?

It might be so. But, only through the higher possibilities of her emotions could salvation come to so emotional a creature; she was one to whom all good must come at risk of fatal loss.

Amethyst had no answering experience. She was a strong and healthy creature, with vigorous spirits and growing energies, which one blow could not crush. In spite of many bitter hours, she had found interests and enjoyments. Vexatious as in many ways the long months abroad with her mother had been, uncongenial as were many of the visits which she had paid with her, she enjoyed seeing new places, she made new friends, took up new pursuits, thought new thoughts.

As for home, the veil had been torn from her eyes, and she never had an illusion again. She did not make herself miserable, but she had learned to expect nothing.

She knew, as far as the London season was concerned, and the career of which she had had last year a foretaste, both that she had claims to a very brilliant one, and also that she was heavily handicapped by poverty and by want of family good repute. She thought that romance and passion were over for her, and that she was free to do the best possible for herself in life; but she meant to be honourable, upright, and modest, there were bounds that she did not intend to pass. Truly, it was in her to be more a woman of the world than her mother, she had so much more forethought, and was so much less swayed by the pleasure and amusement of the moment.

The momentary sight of Lucian and Sylvester had brought back, not the love which she believed herself to have outlived, but a sudden realisation of what that love had been, and an intense resentment against the misjudgment that had destroyed it. She hated Sylvester, and yet felt that she would have died rather than let him guess that the sight of him gave her a moment’s pang.

Into her old place in her aunt’s household she had never again quite fitted. She had spent some time with her after her return from abroad, but she could not take up her former life; she went back to her school as a splendid visitor, and wondered how she could have pictured herself as one of its teachers. Miss Carisbrooke, too, had in some measure taken her place. The little heiress was a pleasant-looking, round-faced, rosy-cheeked girl, with simple tastes and a warm heart. She loved her chaperon heartily, and found life at Silverfold delightful, even while she looked forward eagerly to her London season. She had an enthusiasm for Amethyst’s grace and beauty, and scouted the idea that her own fortune could be a better passport to partners, a constant succession of whom was her idea of social triumph.

“You will be able to have a great many more pretty frocks than we shall, Carrie,” said Una, one day when the three girls were together.

“Ah, but if I was a partner, I shouldn’t think about Amethyst’s frock. I wish I was a man. I would fall in love with her, and give her the most lovely flowers, and when she said yes, I would take her to Ashfield Mount and live there. Don’t you think it’s a pretty place, Amethyst?”

“It is a very pretty place,” said Amethyst, coolly.

“You wouldn’t marry me for the sake of it?” laughed Carrie. “Nobody else shall! But I’m so glad I am going to be with you all in London. You don’t know how much happier I’ve been since I came to live with dear Miss Haredale. She’s much more like a relation than Uncle Oliver is.”

“Don’t you like your uncle?” asked Una.

“No,” said Carrie, with some emphasis, “I don’t, but there are a great many people who do. Don’t fall in love with him, Amethyst; he will with you, directly he sees you.”

Carrie laughed as she gave this warning; but it struck both the shrewd, observant Haredales, that she had made a point of uttering it.

“I shall take the dogs for a walk,” she said, without waiting for an answer. “Poor things, they will be very dull when we are in London.”

“You should go too, Amethyst,” said Una, as Carrie went out; “you are pale. If you did your duty, you would be considering exactly what amount of exercise would give the right shade of pink to your cheeks.”

“I shall consider nothing of the kind,” said Amethyst, crossly. “Even my lady wouldn’t plan and scheme in that way. At least she does things because she likes them.”

“Darling, I did not mean to vex you,” said Una, distressed, as Amethyst started up and went over to the window, with an impetuous movement, unlike her ordinary self-restraint.

“Oh, not you, Una. But every one plans and schemes; Aunt Annabel does. I know what all this talking about ‘poor Charles’ means very well. She would do anything, in spite of all her religion, to ‘support the title,’ as she calls it. I’d rather live honestly for my own pleasure. But, there—we all plan and scheme, as I say, and make up our lives. And we can never make them as they were once intended to be.”

Her breast heaved and her eyes filled, as the thought forced itself upon her, that, let her success in life be what it would, it could never give her anything better, anything nearly so good as one hour with Lucian in the woods at Cleverley.

“That was Paradise,” she thought; “but I couldn’t live in it now!”

“I’d rather be downright wicked than worldly,” she said, defiantly.

“Oh, my darling,” said Una, “you don’t know what being wicked is like! But, Amethyst, our lives are made for us. That is what I have found out—made just as they ought to be.”

“Oh yes, in a sense, of course,” said Amethyst, “but there’s a good deal of making left for ourselves and other people, and we, or they, don’t make them very well.”

“Yes,” said Una, with shining eyes, “outside things; but not the real life, not the life within. Amethyst, the feel of that Presence is as real to me, as the feel of your arms round me when I am tired and miserable—as real, and even better. Come what may, I shall have it to remember. I know now, how the Martyrs could smile when they were burnt to death!”

Amethyst gazed at her, uncomprehending, almost wishing that Una was not going to enter on grown-up life with this new strange force within her. She recalled a saying that she had once heard Mr Riddell quote, “that a great deal of religion needed a great deal of looking after,” and she felt half afraid. She was correct and careful in the performance of the religious duties in which she had been trained; but all the glow of feeling, with which she had knelt by Lucian’s side in Cleverley Church, had departed with the earthly love from which she had hardly distinguished it.

“I’m afraid, dear,” she said gently, “that Eaton Square won’t be a very heavenly sort of place for either of us. If we are tied to any stakes there, no doubt we shall have to smile at them, but I doubt whether the smiles will come from heaven!”

“I shall not mind Eaton Square now,” said Una.

“Well,” said Amethyst, giving herself a sort of mental shake, “anyhow, we have to live there for the next three months. So we must do the best we can.”

Chapter Nineteen.

Marshalling the Company.

“I never did see any use in making pretences. People always see through them, and then where are you? If I did try to look as if I had thousands to spare, not a soul would believe me. Nothing answers like telling the truth.”

This beautiful sentiment was uttered by Lady Haredale one bright afternoon, some few weeks after the arrival of the party from Silverfold at the house in Eaton Square.

The big drawing-rooms were flooded with all the sunlight that a spring day in London could supply, perhaps in illustration of Lady Haredale’s contempt of pretences; for their handsome fittings and furniture had seen many sets of tenants for the season, and were by no means in their first freshness. But, as Lady Haredale said, “Who cared?—There were some houses, she believed, where people were asked to come and see the furniture, but she asked people to come and see herself and her girls—and they generally came.”

Liberally supplied with flowers, and filled with graceful inhabitants, the effect of the shabby, elegant drawing-room, with its open windows and fearless daylight, was not amiss.

Indeed, there was a touch of genius in the way Lady Haredale faced the situation, and, spite of the ineffaceable memories behind her, Amethyst was sometimes almost bewitched into believing her mother to be the most ingenuous of women. Lady Haredale often bought trifles for herself or for her daughters, which took her fancy, and which were always tasteful and becoming, quite regardless of the cost; but she never bought anything, or chose anything, to conceal the fact that they had less than the usual amount to spend on their clothes. She forestalled the comments of acquaintances by the simplest confession.

“You see,” she would sometimes say, with her wide-open eyes and her sweet smile, “we have scraped every farthing we can get together, and joined with Miss Haredale’s nice little heiress to give our girls a chance. We think Amethyst is so pretty, that it is quite a duty to make a great effort. Of course we shall have to pay for it afterwards, or perhaps we shan’t—Dear me!—one can’t always, you know. We can no more afford, properly, to have a London season, than we can fly, but I can’t sacrifice such a beauty as I think my girl is, and I’ve brought all her sisters to town, that they may get a little pleasure when they can. Perhaps we shall never be able to come up again. But here we are—and so enjoying it. We have to do it all simply, but we don’t mind that the least little bit.”

Simplicity is comparative, but it was quite true that Lady Haredale wasted far less regret than most women would have done, on the defects of the turn-out in which she drove in the park with her beautiful daughter.

“What does it matter?” she would say. “My lord has had good horses more than once, and every one knows that he has always had to sell them.”

She did not mind wearing her dresses several times over; she knew that they always suited her. She appeared to be the least scheming of mothers, would throw over an invitation, for which many women would have plotted in vain, for another that seemed to her more amusing. She let Amethyst dance and talk with whom she would, cared little apparently where the young beauty was seen, or where she was not seen; and when Miss Haredale would have anxiously guarded Amethyst’s footsteps, chosen her acquaintances, and guided her smallest actions, as she would have said “for the best,” Lady Haredale observed—

“My dear Anna, you are much more worldly than I am. Let the child alone. She is getting on well enough. Let her enjoy herself, she looks much prettier when she is happy. She is getting quite enough talked about, and written about too in the Society papers. And that is the great point, you know, in getting her started.”

“I should be very sorry,” said Miss Haredale, “if anything came of the attentions of that Italian Prince.”

“What, Prince Pontresina?—Very old family. But, for my part, I’ve learned prudence, and I should be very well content if she chose Sir Richard Grattan. No—I don’t think Lord Broadstairs would do; he is nearly as badly off as we are—and a very bad character into the bargain. Amethyst wouldn’t like that.”

Miss Haredale sighed, and felt that she would have to swallow a great deal of old-fashioned prejudice before she could willingly see her niece marry a man in business, whose father had got a baronetcy through being mayor on the occasion of a royal visit to his borough; while to see her given to an old roué nobleman would nearly break her heart. It vexed her that Amethyst should be allowed to give up an eligible partner because Una was tired and wanted to go home, and she would much rather have taken her to a morning concert at a duchesss, than to look at pictures in an artist’s studio, farther west than Miss Haredale had ever paid a visit in her life, where she saw celebrities, and was seen by them.

“They will write about her and criticise her picture, and besides, it will be more amusing,” said Lady Haredale. “Take Carrie to the duchess’s.—Quite the best thing for her. And as for Una, it’s very pretty to see Amethyst taken up with her.”

By the sunshiny afternoon on which we lift the curtain, Lady Haredale’s method, or no method, had had time to work, and Amethyst’s name as a beauty was being rapidly made. She had danced with princes, and been praised by painters; her help at a coming fancy-fair, where princesses and actresses held the stalls, had been asked as a special favour, her presence and her costume was mentioned in accounts of fashionable gatherings; all was going well, and Lady Haredale, as she said, was enjoying herself immensely.

Her endorsement of the old proverb that honesty is the best policy, though illustrated by Amethyst’s career, had not, however, been intended to apply to it.

The party had come in from their various afternoon engagements. Amethyst, looking bright and fresh, and Carrie Carisbrooke, with much improved costume and manner, were touching up some flowers at a side table, while the elder ladies rested and talked before dressing for dinner.

“You know,” said Lady Haredale, “there’s not the least use in making pretences about Charles. Every one knows that he has been quite a trial. Now he is going to turn over a new leaf, and I think it is quite my duty to help him, now his debts are paid.”

“It’s very clever of him to have got his debts paid. I can’t think how he has done it,” said a slow, high voice from the end of the long room.

“Tory!” exclaimed Lady Haredale, “what are you doing there?”

“I’m learning a German verb, mother,” said Tory, standing up. “Don’t you think that, as our brother is coming home for the first time, Kat and I might dine down-stairs? We won’t speak unless we’re spoken to.”

“You had much better go up-stairs and finish your lessons,” said Amethyst, who preferred Tory’s absence at critical moments.

“Now don’t try to suppress us, Amethyst. It isn’t worthy of you. It isn’t, indeed,” said Tory, holding the end of her long tail of hair, and arranging the ribbon on it, with an absurdly childish look.

“Well,” said Lady Haredale, “as there are only the Grattans and Mr Carisbrooke coming, I don’t see why you should not come in.—But, as I was saying, we must try to make it pleasant and home-like for Charles. He has not been all he should have been, but we must forget that.”

“Yes, we know all about it, mother, all of us,” said Tory,—“except Carrie.”

“Carrie is one of us now,” said Lady Haredale, “so we won’t make a stranger of her.”

Carrie, who adored Lady Haredale, smiled and coloured as she ran away to dress for dinner; while Amethyst, as she too went up-stairs, remembered the conversation they had held at Silverfold, and thought it strange that Mr Oliver Carisbrooke and Charles Haredale should both make their first visit on the same day.

Amethyst, like her mother, was “enjoying herself very much.” She did inherit the same liking for life, and for the pleasant things of life, and, in spite of the occasional pressure of the past and of the future, it was not wonderful that the present was enchanting to her. A cup, rare, sweet, and intoxicating, was held to her lips, it was something to taste so fine a flavour.

She was so full of life, that she would have enjoyed all the elements of a London season heartily, if she had been but an insignificant figure in it, and to feel herself to be one of its chief attractions, naturally enhanced the charm. While the leaves in the Park were still young and green, the air cool, and all the fine clothes fresh, the end of the season seemed far away, and the result of it needed not to be forestalled.

Neither success nor amusement ever made her forget Una, who played a much more passive part in the great Masque of Pleasure in which they were all engaged. It was for her, at any rate for the time being, an outward show. Her real life was elsewhere. This was partly, of course, because fatigue took off the edge of the pleasure, but quite as much because nothing really interested her but her emotions. She did not pass unnoticed even by Amethyst’s side, being an uncommon and interesting creature, with her extreme fragility and delicacy of appearance, and absolute self-possession and indifference of manner.

She recollected, and probably knew more about, the prodigal brother than Amethyst did, and she shrank nervously from his return. Amethyst had learned to shrug her shoulders, and “make the best of a bad business.” She encouraged Una, and would not let her dwell on what Tory called “the family crisis,” but she was a little surprised that the two younger ones also were evidently uncomfortable, and made a point of going down-stairs under her protection.

Probably they were none of them nearly so uncomfortable as the man who had lived for years under a cloud, whose reputation was tarnished, not only in the eyes of innocent girls, but in those of the men of the world with whom he ought to have associated, whose ways of life had unfitted him for a family circle, and who knew that he was watched, criticised, and tolerated.

Charles Haredale had never dined in his father’s house since his own sister Blanche had left home. He hated his step-mother, and, in blaming her for her share in the family misfortunes, eased himself a little of his self-blame. He received the kindest welcome from his aunt, who had once been fond of him, and still regarded him as the “hope” of the family, still believed that all should be pardoned to the heir.

He was meant to be an easy-going, good-natured man like his father; but his conduct had passed the bounds which he could justify to himself, his present situation contained elements difficult to swallow, and a sense of shame-faced discomfort made him look sulky.

“Here is Amethyst, Charles,” said Lady Haredale, in her sweetest tones, “you have hardly seen her since she was a baby.”

“Oh yes, I have,” said Charles, “of course I’ve seen her. Every one’s seen her. Very glad to know her, I’m sure. Great privilege.”

Amethyst shook hands, rather glad that this strange brother did not offer to kiss her, and he nodded shyly at the younger ones.

“Una? No—should never have known her. Oh yes—that’s Tory. No mistake about her.”

“You used to give me rides on your back,” said Tory, in a tone that made her sisters inclined to shake her; but just then Carrie came in, trim and fashionable in blue silk, and was introduced in due form, as Sir Richard Grattan and his sister were announced.

Sir Richard was a fair, fresh-coloured man of thirty, well-dressed and well-looking. There was nothing against him in manner, character, or appearance, and his wealth was so great, that he was worthy spoil—“big game” for the beauty of the season; while it was an open secret that the beauty of the season was the prize he meant to win. He had met Amethyst at a country house in the winter, and, with the inherited energy and determination that had made his great fortune, took measures to win what, he was enough in love to know, was not to be had without trouble and pains. He had won the good will of all her family, and he did not think the lady discouraging; but he recognised that he must let her have her great success, and submit to the approach of at any rate apparent rivals.

The right of intimacy in the house was allowed both to him and to his sisters, and he took full advantage of it. He now greeted Charles, to the surprise of the girls, as an old acquaintance, with slightly patronising friendliness, and Tory, watching with her keen eyes, caught a look, under the polite response, of savage annoyance.

“We are all here but your uncle, my dear Carrie,” said Lady Haredale, glancing round.

“Perhaps he won’t come. Sometimes he doesn’t,” said Carrie, in her clear abrupt voice.

But “Mr Oliver Carisbrooke,” chimed in with the end of her sentence, and a small slight man, with a bronzed face and a little grey pointed beard, came in. There was a little greeting and introducing, and then, men being scarce, there was a difficulty as to pairing off for dinner. Lady Haredale laughed, apologised, and went in with her two little girls. Mr Carisbrooke was given to Miss Haredale, but Amethyst found herself on his other side, and when she turned away from Sir Richard Grattan to give him courteously a small share of her attention, making some trivial remark about the London season, he looked at her keenly for a moment, and said—

“You find it very delightful?”

Amethyst was suddenly seized with the most curious self-questioning, and felt as if she wanted to settle with herself, first of all the fact of her delight, and then the why and the wherefore of it, before she answered—as of course she did—

“Oh yes, I do indeed.”

Chapter Twenty.

The Beauty.

A soirée was held at a new and fashionable Art Gallery, the shining lights alike of Fame and Fashion were streaming in at the doors, and spreading themselves through the rooms, when Sylvester Riddell sprang out of a hansom cab, and mounted the steps, glancing about him at the various celebrities as he passed, exchanging greetings with his friends, and watching secretly for one face.

“Iris” had just made its appearance before the public. Sylvester, at present, was suffering from a fit of depression as to its merits, and was disposed to think that it would be an utter failure. His father’s criticisms rang in his ears, and were echoed by his own understanding, and he had felt himself so unable to decide as to the hero’s final fate, that he had left the poem unfinished, calling it “Iris, as far as Manifested” and had taken leave of Amelot, still straining after the mystic vision.

Some of his friends told him that this indefiniteness was far more artistic than a commonplace conclusion, but he knew that his father would never grant that imagination could result in vagueness. He did not think himself that it could, but for him the story of Iris was still incomplete, and he could not decide on its outcome. Lucian was off to the Rocky Mountains; and the interest of Sylvester’s life had consisted in picking up reports as to the success of the new beauty.

He was engaged as art critic to a very select and enlightened journal, hence his presence to-night, and he made his way at once to the portrait of the “Hon. Amethyst Haredale, by —,” and so encountered several of his acquaintance, all looking and criticising, for the picture was much talked of, and was painted by a rising artist. It represented Amethyst in a simple white dress, showing the long soft curves of her neck and arms, her ideal perfection of form and feature. The head was slightly turned over the shoulder, and the eyes looked out at the spectators, with the mystical far-away look which Sylvester had caught in their depths, even in the first freshness of her happy girlhood. It was somewhat faintly coloured, less blooming than the original.

“Miss Haredale is more of a flesh and blood beauty than that,” said one of the young men; “I don’t see that she looks visionary at all, but as if she enjoyed herself immensely.”

“That is altogether too etherealised,” said another, “and misses the young lady of fashion!”

“It’s a lovely picture,” said a third, “like a statue with a soul—Galatea, possibly.”

“Yes,—I say, just look,”—said the first. “It’s ideal beauty—look at the sweep of her throat and shoulder.” And he continued to call attention to the “points” of the picture, with perfectly legitimate and artistic enthusiasm, but to the distraction of Sylvester, who, on being appealed to as “a lucky fellow who knew her at home in the country,” replied sharply and untruly, that the picture did not strike him as a good likeness of Miss Haredale at all.

“No?” said another voice, as Mr Oliver Carisbrooke came up, and joined the group. “I saw her once last year—though I had not the pleasure of an introduction. I should have thought it like her then. But she is altered. Ah, Mr Sylvester Riddell, let me claim our slight acquaintance. Like every one else, I am admiring your poem.”

Sylvester ought to have been gratified, and was obliged to be civil; but his nerves were all on edge, and something in Mr Carisbrooke’s tone jarred on him.

He glanced round at the brilliant throng, noticed the Prime Minister and the leader of the Opposition apparently comparing notes as to each other’s portraits, saw the artist, who had painted Miss Haredale, stop and speak to a new novelist, whose book was on every one’s table; and then, down the room, behind her mother, came Amethyst herself, flashing as suddenly on his vision as when first he had seen her in the drawing-room at Cleverley, with the jewels on her neck, and the happy light in her eyes.

She looked happy and eager now, the fatal amethysts were once more clasped round her throat and shining in her hair; her dress was of some faint indescribable tint that harmonised with the jewels, it hung in soft, simple folds. She carried some quaint rare orchids in her hand. Her dress was noticeable, as well as her person, and it seemed to Sylvester that she came like a queen with her court, for she was with a large party, who all made for the portrait, near which Sylvester stood.

It was neither Lady Haredale’s way to resent the past, nor to slight an unprofitable acquaintance; and, though Sylvester stepped aside, feeling acutely that she had a right to refuse to know him, she paused and said quite sweetly,—

“Why, it’s young Mr Riddell! How do you do? And how is our dear old Rector, and your aunt? Amethyst—Una—Mr Sylvester Riddell is here!”

What could be sweeter? Sylvester’s friends were envious, as Amethyst turned away from the tall foreigner to whom she had been speaking, and gave her hand to Sylvester, courteously, but without the slightest effusion. She was perfectly at her ease, but he felt that she did not mean to be cordial, while he coloured and looked embarrassed, as he answered, and Lady Haredale asked him to dinner for the next day. “So lucky that we are dining at home.” He accepted of course, and Lady Haredale went on talking to him; whether from mere purposeless geniality, or from a “wish to tease”—as the nursery poem has it—the other men in attendance, he could not tell. The young lady remained passive. She stood still, and gave words when they were demanded of her, “as if they had been flowers from her bouquet,” thought the poetical Sylvester. When Sir Richard Grattan asked her to come and look at a landscape which he thought of buying, and to give her opinion on it, she went at once, and studied the picture, appraising its merits, and appearing genuinely to forget herself in admiring it. That was like the old Amethyst, but the action was noted, and conclusions drawn by every bystander. The odds were certainly with Sir Richard Grattan. Sylvester managed to stand about within sight, and more or less within hearing.

“The advantage of modern pictures,” said Sir Richard Grattan, “is that one knows their real value. ‘Old Masters’ are a mere swindle. I don’t believe even the experts can tell if they’re genuine.”

“I like modern landscapes—they are so real,” said Amethyst.

“There is a picture by Titian, as you call him, in my house in Rome,” said Prince Pontresina in delicate careful English, “which was painted for my ancestor by the master himself, and we possess his receipt for the money that was paid to him.”

“Oh, that is interesting! I should like to see Titian’s handwriting,” said Amethyst with enthusiasm.

“If I have ever the privilege of showing that precious heirloom to Miss Haredale, the moment for which it has been preserved for ages will have come. I can then destroy it,” said the prince.

“Then, since you like this picture, I shall add it to the landscapes by modern artists with which I am filling the dining-room at Merrifield House,” said Sir Richard. “I have secured the refusal of it. You think it good, Miss Haredale.”

Amethyst stood between the two men, and glanced from one to the other, from the pale, finely-finished prince, like one of his own old pictures, to the florid, substantial baronet, who seemed to carry his prosperity written on his face.

Was she really weighing their merits in the balance? Or was she amusing herself with their pretensions, like any little suburban belle with a pair of rival partners, playing a common game with exceptionally splendid playthings?

It did not occur to the miserable Sylvester that she was actuated by another motive, that she was showing the man who had once misjudged and injured her, how little harm he had been able to do; that the person she was chiefly conscious of was himself. He only felt that he had lost Iris, in seeing Amethyst.

She plunged into a discussion on the respective merits of ancient and modern art, in which Sylvester perceived that she talked with skill, and pulled both her admirers out of their depths. Suddenly she paused, looked across the room, with attention suddenly caught, turned to Sir Richard Grattan, and said—

“I should like to find my sister now. Will you take me to her?”

Una, dressed in pale yellow, with some large delicate daffodils on her shoulder, rather like a pale daffodil herself in her fragile slenderness, was not without admirers, but she had little attention to spare for them. To her, at any rate, the sight of Sylvester recalled the most miserable hours of her life; and, with a self-absorption and want of appreciation only possible to early youth, the thought of the conservatory at Loseby, of the pond in the wood at Cleverley, blotted out alike the brilliant people and the beautiful pictures now before her eyes. In her excuse, it may be said that she was very tired, her head and back were aching. Standing was a painful effort, so she sat down on a bench, near the rest of her party, and lost herself in wondering, whether the wretched impulse that had once driven her to plunge into the cold muddy pool from which Sylvester had rescued her, had been the unpardonable sin that she often felt it to be. How hateful were the memories of that childish delusion and folly! Her life, since then, had indeed become new.

She turned her head idly to look for Amethyst, and suddenly her heart stopped beating, and then began to throb with suffocating violence. Two figures detached themselves from the crowd, and came towards her mother. One was an insignificant little lady, sumptuously dressed, the other, a tall man with stiff moustaches and bold outlooking eyes.

“Why, it’s Tony!” exclaimed Lady Haredale, “and Mrs Fowler too! Why, it’s ages since we met! What a pleasure! How are you? when did you come to town?”

“Only last week; we have been abroad. My wife was intending to call,” said Major Fowler.

“So glad to see you! Why, the little girls will be charmed! Here’s one of your old playmates. You know, Mrs Fowler, he was always the children’s friend—Una.”

Una rose and came forward, holding out her hand.

“How d’ye do?” she said, coolly.

Major Fowler fairly started. His mental vision of Una was so different from the reality.

“Really,” he said, “I should never have known her.”

“No, I’ve grown so much,” said Una, with the languid drawl that was sufficiently familiar. “Ah, here’s Amethyst.”

Amethyst, feeling as if her namesake jewels burnt into her neck and arms, gave a cold, gracious greeting.

“You’ll dine with us to-morrow, quite without ceremony?” said Lady Haredale. “We are in Eaton Square, you know, taking the girls out. I like it as much as they do.”

Mrs Fowler accepted the invitation, Miss Haredale and the rest of the party came up and were introduced, and then they all walked round together, looking at the people and the pictures. Sylvester, quite unable to keep at a distance, was glad to join Mr Carisbrooke and follow in their wake.

Amethyst kept Una by her side, and Major Fowler walked with them. Sylvester caught echoes of his voice in familiar tones, which called up before him the white-robed girl in the sunny garden at Loseby, the mystery and the misery of that fatal afternoon, when the clouds had gathered round his fair ideal, and when his hateful share in her fate had been forced on him.

He was noticed himself. His tall angular figure, marked features, and fine, restless eyes were striking, and suited the author of ‘Iris,’ in the opinion of the literary set which was prepared to admire it, and he had his own little success on his hands, and had to reply to remarks and congratulations, which just then seemed a mere interruption to his eager watch. He caught the remarks too of the passing crowd, the wonder if Sir Richard Grattan was the accepted one, the questions as to who Major Fowler might be. He had not been seen before with the beauty. Then a laugh, and Charles Haredale was pointed out “as a reformed character,” with his heiress, and Sylvester, startled, glanced at his companion. Was he really throwing his nice little niece into the arms of such a man as he must know young Haredale to be?

Mr Oliver Carisbrooke walked calmly on, without apparently hearing the remark. He had large, and peculiarly bright eyes, which now followed Sylvester’s, and were fixed on Amethyst’s graceful head. Then he turned and looked at his companion.

“She will not be satisfied. She shines in these rainbow tints, but they will not be enough for her,” he said, rather sentimentally.

Sylvester was startled, held for a moment by the curious gaze fixed on him, but he resented it.

“If you are speaking of Miss Haredale,” he said, “I do not see what a young lady can desire more. This sort of success is, I suppose, what women desire.”

“Ah,” said Mr Carisbrooke dryly, “ah, Mr Riddell, you keep your soul for your poem, not for real life. You write of passion, you don’t believe in it.”

He moved away before Sylvester could reply, and made his way into the group round Amethyst. Sylvester had no excuse for following him, and presently saw that he had engaged her attention, and was talking to her with earnestness. She turned her head, and Sylvester perceived that she was attentive, interested, and presently a bystander remarked—

“Miss Haredale is looking like her picture.”

Chapter Twenty One.

At the End of the Rainbow.

“Amethyst, Amethyst, I must talk to you. I can’t bear it by myself. Oh, that man, I hate and I loathe him, and my own self! But I can’t get him out of my eyes or my mind, his face blots everything else out. Oh, don’t make me come down to-night!”

This despairing outcry met Amethyst’s ears, as, late in the afternoon of the day after the soirée at the Art Gallery, she came into the little up-stairs sitting-room appropriated to her sisters and herself. Una was lying on a couch by the window. She raised herself, stretching out her hands, as if for help in dire distress, and Amethyst, putting down the flowers she was carrying, came and knelt down by her side.

“Now, Una, there’s a dear child, don’t begin to cry about it. Of course we both hate the sight of him. But he was sure to turn up some time, and you mustn’t put yourself into an agony about it.”

Una hid her face in the comforting arms, the very touch of which brought strength to her.

“I was afraid you might worry yourself,” continued Amethyst, “but I haven’t had a chance of looking after you before. If you stay away to-night, it will still have to be done some time. Take it as easy as you can.”

“I thought he had dropped my lady,” whispered Una.

“Well, you know, they had some intercourse when the amethysts—Ah! talk of hating, I should like to throw them into the sea—when they were got back. It would look very odd if he cut us. And as for you, darling, you are so different now—like another person.”

Una turned round and looked up into her sister’s face.

“Am I so changed?” she said.

“Why, yes, no one would know you for the same silly little girl,” said Amethyst, jestingly, but she felt, as she spoke, that her words gave a pang. “Change is best for us both,” she said steadily, with a certain sombre look in the eyes that were bent on Una’s.

Una was silent. Changed in a sense she was, for two years before she would have sobbed herself into hysterics, if half the same weight of emotion had been stirring in her breast. Now she lay still, enduring a knowledge of herself that never ought to have come to her seventeen years. The anguish that had come upon her might be shame and loathing, but it filled her soul. The face might be hateful that had once been adorable, but it blotted every other out. She had thought herself possessed by a new spirit, a holy spirit of love and peace, and behold the old possession had driven the new one away. There was a Face to which she had learned to turn, a Love she was beginning to know, and now—and now.

She pressed her hand on her heart, and was silent. Instinctively she felt that even Amethyst would not understand. With an effort to turn to a trouble that could be spoken of, she said—

“And Sylvester Riddell—I am ashamed to see him.”

“Sylvester Riddell knows nothing about you, darling,” said Amethyst.

“Amethyst, does seeing him make you—feel?”

“Oh, I don’t mean to feel,” returned Amethyst, lightly, “I have a great deal too much to do; let bygones be bygones. Now then, don’t let us make mountains of molehills. Here is all your hair tumbling down, I’ll do it up prettily. If you had any consideration for the small amount of lady’s-maiding we ever get, you wouldn’t grow such a quantity.”

“My ridiculous hair,” said Una, pulling it through her fingers, and lingering a little on the epithet. Then, with a hot blush she rose.

“Yes, it tires me dreadfully to do it myself.”

A deficiency of personal attendance was one of the forms of “simplicity” with which the Miss Haredales had to put up, and both Amethyst and Kattern spent most of their leisure in “fixing”—to use a convenient Americanism—their own and their sisters’ costumes. A constant attention to frills does not leave much time for feelings, but it was of set purpose that Amethyst absorbed herself in the present.

“You know, dear,” she said, as she divided and twisted the long heavy lengths of Una’s hair, “it is absurd to think that all one’s cargo must be in one ship. No one thing is enough, and there’s always something more. For instance, one can’t think only of society, and of looking well. That’s one thing. It’s a good big thing, but there are so many others. Now last night I should have liked to have looked at all those pictures, and talked about them to some one that understood. If I go to a concert, I feel as if there was enough in music to fill up one’s life. I want to have something of it all. There’s no end to the possibilities of everything. I could talk to that queer Mr Carisbrooke for hours!”

“I wonder what Sir Richard would say if you told him that,” said Una, rather dryly.

“Oh, it’s only that he gave me a new idea. I want to work it out. So you see, no one thing ought to spoil everything else. Of course we’re none of us likely to expect beds of roses, we’ve learned our lesson. But when there are so many chances, it is wise and right to take the life that offers the most—the most chances of doing, and being.”

Una’s hair was finished by this time, and she stood up in her long white dressing-gown, leaning her hand on the toilet-table, and looking at her sister with searching eyes.

“Amethyst,” she said, “I don’t believe you were ever really in love with Lucian Leigh at all.”

The colour flamed into Amethyst’s face, and her bosom heaved.

“Yes, I was,” she said, “but that’s just what I want to show you. That’s over, but one isn’t all heart, any more than I hope and believe one is all face. One has a mind, and a soul, and possibilities. I won’t go to the bottom, if I was shipwrecked once. Nothing can ever take up the whole of one, I suppose. I thought it could then. Now if I don’t get ready quick, I shall be late.”

She ran away as she spoke. It was not her way to neglect the necessity of the moment, and she made such good speed, that she was in the drawing-room before any of the guests arrived. On the table lay a thin square book bound in bluish-green, with a silver iris in the corner.

“Sylvester Riddell’s poem, my dear,” said Lady Haredale. “I bought it when I was out with the children. He’ll like to see it on the table. Look at it, then you can talk to him about it.”

Amethyst took it up, and glanced over the pages. She was a rapid reader, and in a very few minutes, she caught the idea of the poem, the passionate search for an ideal, and it attracted her. Did it contradict the philosophy which she had been preaching to Una, or was it in truth its justification? The look of interest was still on her face, the book in her hand, when its author was announced, and, when she put it down and greeted him with a delightful smile, as of one caught in the act, Sylvester felt that all the reviews in London might cut ‘Iris’ to pieces. She had had her day.

He sat by Amethyst at dinner, and neither prince nor millionaire was there to claim her attention. She appeared neither cold nor resentful, and that she was somewhat excited, he did not guess. Her lovely eyes, with their mysterious depths, were turned upon him, and she referred to his poem with a certain modest deference, as if in explaining it, he did her an honour. Sylvester had never known before, how utterly he had failed to express his hero’s rapture, when Iris shone upon him with no cloud between.

“It is no new subject,” he said, modestly, “but the idea possessed me—”

“It seems new, I think,” said Amethyst, who, at twenty, had not quite exhausted all the ideas of life. “It is very interesting, but, practically, when Iris was so unattainable, don’t you think he would have managed to get on without her—by the help of his music—and his battles?”

“You see,” said Sylvester, eagerly and nervously, “in a measure he found her in art, and in the struggle of life, and, in so far as she was embodied in them, she gave them value.”

“I am not sure that I understand,” said Amethyst, in soft considerate tones. “What is it that you intend Iris to signify?”

“She was his dream of perfection,” said Sylvester, very low, “his vision—well, his Beatrice. He found something of perfect beauty in many things—when he sought it with sufficient pains, but—but love, of course, was the higher revelation. He could be content with nothing less.”

“Ah, I must read to the end. Was she always an abstraction?”

“She did not always seem so,” said Sylvester, as for a moment he met her eyes.

Amethyst blushed, with an inward start, she had forgotten for the moment her resentment; now came a throb of triumph. So he did not hate and despise her, this man who had thought her false to his friend. Had she conquered him too? As her thoughts glanced at the other conquest awaiting her disposal, she might be pardoned for feeling that, for her at least, life held many different possibilities.

“I don’t think your father would believe in Iris,” she said suddenly, with girlish abruptness.

“I am afraid he doesn’t,” said Sylvester. “But why do you say so?”

“He gave me some advice once, that I have found out to be true. But it wasn’t at all consistent with dreams of finding perfection.—At least—after all, I am not quite sure of that.”

She sat for a moment with a perfectly simple, considerate expression on her beautiful face, evidently pursuing a new idea. But she did not tell Sylvester what it was; and turned off the subject with an inquiry for Mr Riddell and other Cleverley friends.

Meantime, it was Una’s unlucky fate to find herself sitting by Major Fowler. Outwardly she was mistress of the situation, and behaved with creditable self-possession; while he talked in a good-humoured, half-joking strain, that would have been suitable enough if Tory or Kattern had been his companion. He took up the old intimacy, asked home questions as to this thing and the other, how Charles fitted in to the family circle, how “Aunt Anna” managed to hit it off with my lady, and Una answered like one under a spell. Then he began to talk about himself, praised his wife to her, said certainly he’d done the right thing, laughed a little at the way he was kept in order—all in the old way, the familiar chatter to his little sympathetic friend. It was all very natural—if only to poor Una it had not been such exquisite—rapture or anguish, she could not tell. Then he went back to an old habit of talking about herself. She was quite grown-up—not a little school-girl—such a fine young lady. Somehow, he had always thought of her as a little long-haired girl. All the awkwardness was ignored, and he made their old relation seem the most natural thing in the world. The poor child’s eyes turned to his, and he smiled in the half-familiar, half-flattering fashion of old times. For an instant his hand, as he poured her out some water, touched her ungloved fingers. There was storm and tumult in Una’s soul, she turned her head away, and put all the distance possible into her voice. He gave an odd little smile, took up the cue, and began to talk society chit-chat, but all the while there was an undercurrent, and Una felt that in another moment they would laugh together at the idea of making talk for each other. There was nothing else like it in the world.

The state of things at last caught Amethyst’s notice, and diverted her mind from philosophy and poetry. With the manner of one from whom a word was a favour, she spoke across the table to Major Fowler, and asked him to persuade Mrs Fowler to patronise the approaching bazaar, and so made the conversation general, for everybody began to discuss it at once.

“Shall you sell rosebuds, Miss Haredale?” said Major Fowler. “Anything, of course, for the charity.”

“I shall try to do my duty,” said Amethyst. “Mr Riddell should give us some copies of his beautiful poem,” said Lady Haredale. “Get him to give them to you, Amethyst, to sell yourself!”

“I shall make a point of buying one, then, at any price,” said Major Fowler.

The bazaar was a very magnificent one, the stallholders so high in rank, that the author of ‘Iris’ might well have felt it a lucky chance; but to Sylvester the idea was agony.

“No,” said Amethyst slowly. “Books never sell at bazaars, I can’t undertake them.”

“My dear child,” said her mother, “you are really rude. This book would sell, of course.”

“I couldn’t sell it,” said Amethyst, and Sylvester felt as if he could have gone down on his knees to her, in gratitude.

He was half-wild. The atmosphere of this London world was not pure and sweet enough to hold his Iris. Here again was this old tempter, as he believed Major Fowler to be, by her side. Amethyst was no heavenly spirit, serene herself, to draw and influence struggling manhood; but a woman of the world, for whom an anxious lover saw many dangers, a jewel in which it was easy to find flaws, seen every moment in a changing light. She had indeed no time to dwell on one subject. A theory of life must give place to the exigencies of the bazaar. Una could only have a word and a kiss, as Amethyst hurried away with her mother to a great reception, as soon as the dinner-party was over. Sylvester Riddell had had his word and his thought. Now, on a grand staircase, amid a splendid throng of fine people, Sir Richard Grattan and Prince Pontresina were both awaiting her. She felt that the choice between Titian and the newest R.A. would soon be forced upon her, and was glad to turn to receive the courtesies of the very great lady at whose stall she was to help on the next day.

This was scarcely over, when she caught sight of the peculiar face of Mr Carisbrooke, standing under a group of palms and other tropical plants in the corridor, at the head of the staircase.

Her young intellect must have been vigorous and strong, her interest in new ideas very keen; for, in the midst of all the distracting whirl, her thoughts flashed back to her previous interview with him, and she made an opportunity to join him, and put her question, as if he and she had been alone in the place.

“Mr Carisbrooke,” she said, “you have set me thinking. I should like you to try your experiment. I want to know what my picture told you.”

Probably, if Amethyst had not been accustomed to find her every word taken as a favour, she would not have made so abrupt a demand; but she was quite in earnest, and stood before him as simply as a scholar before a teacher, and he answered her at once, looking straight into her eyes.

“There was the good child,” he said, “there was the young fancy. They have gone by. There is the beautiful lady. She has pleasure and power. She will have wealth, everything that the world can give. I wonder if it will satisfy her.”

“Do you think it ought to be satisfactory?” said Amethyst.

“Do you think it ever is?” he responded. “Ah! If I could have found it so! But I’m an old fellow, you know, Miss Haredale, and it is not my place to put lawless ideas into a young lady’s head, or to take up her time from more worthy claimants.”

“Oh,” said Amethyst, as Sir Richard and his sister bore down upon them, “that is as I think. Tell us the story you were speaking of the other day, Mr Carisbrooke. I want to hear the end of it.”

Mr Carisbrooke told a curious instance of thought transference in a pair of lovers, and told it very well. Amethyst listened with great interest, and perhaps chose to make her interest apparent, though Sir Richard repressed his impatience with difficulty.

When she found herself alone in her room that night, she stood for a moment and looked at herself in the glass. Why had she been so kind to Sylvester Riddell, when she had so much cause for righteous anger against him? Somehow, he belonged so much to days when she had felt kindly to every one, that she had forgotten to be unkind.

Yet he could look at her as he had done to-night, and think of her—what he had made Lucian believe!

“All for my beauty!” she said to herself. “I despise him for it!” she exclaimed, half aloud. “He ought to scorn me!”

But before she went to bed, she finished his poem. It vexed and dissatisfied her. It did not seem that the hero had managed to combine success in life with the search after, much less with the possession of, Iris. And Amethyst was finding that success in life was a very good thing.

Chapter Twenty Two.

The Flaming Sword.

Amethyst held many more conversations with Oliver Carisbrooke during the next few weeks, with the result that a distinct, though peculiar, relation was established between them. He was the only person she ever met—Sylvester of course having returned to Oxbridge—who had any intellectual interests, and Amethyst had so vigorous and inquiring a mind, that even fashion and frivolity could not stifle it. He gave her to understand that he was quite outside the ranks of her suitors, and only aspired to a rational friendship, and flattery of her intelligence was so much rarer, and less a matter of course, than flattery of her beauty, that it had a greater charm. He afforded an outlet to that side of her nature which could not be satisfied with the splendid outside of life.

The world was pressing hard on her soul. What had she come to London for, but to make a great marriage? Her family had made sacrifices for it, her acquaintances looked out for it, she herself intended it.

Every day made her engagement to Sir Richard Grattan more inevitable. She liked him very well, she knew that she could make the position that he offered to her splendid, she believed that she should be happy in it, and yet she was buying it at the cost of the divine spark within her which was her very self. She believed that romantic love was over for her, and that she was no longer the kind of person to whom religion could be an inspiring enthusiasm, though she did find in it a standard below which she did not mean to fall. She thought that she had outgrown a great deal in her short life.