Mrs Molesworth (continued 6)

Captain Beverley misinterpreted her silence. His face grew still paler.

“I see what you mean,” he said, excitedly. “She is dead, and you shrink from telling me. Good God, what an ending to it all!”

A new sensation seized Lilias—a strange rush of indignation against this man, so false, yet so wanting in self-control and delicacy as to parade his grief for the girl he imagined he had lost, to the girl whose heart he had gained, but to toss it aside! She turned upon him fierily.

“No,” she said, “she is not dead, nor the least likely to die. I have nothing more to say to you, Captain Beverley. Be so good as to let me pass.”

For he was standing right in front of her, blocking up the path. At her first words he drew a deep breath of relief and was on the point of interrupting her, but her last sentences seemed to stagger, and then to petrify him. He did not speak, he only stood and looked at her as if stupefied.

“Why are you so indignant?” he said at last. “Why should I not ask you how Alys is?”

“Why should you?” Lilias replied. “She is your own cousin. I scarcely know her by sight—we are not even acquaintances. Captain Beverley, I must again ask you to let me pass on.”

Half mechanically the young man stood aside, but as Lilias was about to pass him he again made a step forward.

“Miss Western—Lilias,” he exclaimed, “I shall go mad if you leave me like this. I had been thinking, hoping wildly and presumptuously, you may say, that, in spite of all, in spite of the frightful way appearances have been against me, you—you were still,” he dropped his voice so low that Lilias could scarcely catch the words, “still trusting me.”

Lilias looked up bravely.

“So I was,” she said.

“And why not ‘so I am’?” he said, eagerly, his fair fare flushing painfully.

Lilias hesitated.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I cannot understand you and—and your manner to-day.”

Captain Beverley sighed deeply.

“And I—I cannot, dare not explain,” he said, sorrowfully. “Don’t misunderstand me,” he added, hastily, seeing a quick, questioning glance from Lilias at the word “dare.”

“I mean I am bound for the sake of others not to explain. I have, indeed, I now see, been bound hand and foot by the folly of others almost ever since I was born! There is nothing I would not wish to explain to you, nothing that I should not be thankful for you to know—but I cannot tell it you! Was ever man placed in such a position before?” He stopped and appeared to be considering deeply. “Lilias,” he went on, earnestly, “it seems to me that I am so placed that I must do one or other of two wrong things. I must break my pledged word, or I must behave dishonourably to you—which shall it be? Decide for me.”

“Neither,” said Lilias, without an instant’s hesitation. “You shall not break your word, Arthur, for my sake. And you shall not behave dishonourably to me, for, whatever you do or don’t do, I promise you to believe that you have done the best you could; I have trusted you, hitherto, against everybody. Shall I, may I, go on trusting you?”

Arthur looked at her—looked straight into her eyes, and that look was enough.

“Yes,” he said, “you may.”

There was silence for a moment or two. Then Arthur added:

“Lilias,” he said, “I have not in the past behaved unselfishly—hardly, some would say, honourably to you. But it was out of thoughtlessness and ignorance; till I knew you, I did not know myself. I had no idea how I could care for any woman, and I had ignorantly fancied I never should. I cannot explain, but I may say one thing. Should you be afraid of marrying a poor man—a really poor man?”

Lilias smiled.

“I half fancied there was something of that kind,” she said. “No,” she went on, “I should not be afraid of marrying you as a poor man. I have no special love for poverty in the abstract. I know too much of it. And I am no longer, you know, what people call ‘a mere girl.’ I am two-and-twenty, and have had time to become practical.”

“It looks like it,” said Arthur, smiling too.

“But my practicalness makes me not afraid of poverty on the other hand,” pursued Lilias. “I have seen how much happiness can co-exist with it. My only misgiving is,” she hesitated—“you would like me to speak frankly?”

“Whatever you do I entreat you to be frank,” said Arthur, earnestly. “I don’t deserve it, I know, but Heaven knows I would be frank to you if I could.”

“I was only going to say—my people—my parents and Mary, perhaps, might be more mercenary for me—because they have all spoiled me, and I have been horribly selfish, and they might think me less fit for a struggling life than I believe I really am.”

“Yes, I can fancy their feelings for you by my own,” said Arthur, sighing. “And how I would have enjoyed enabling you to be a comfort to them—to your mother, for instance. Lilias, I am cruelly placed.”

“Poor fellow!” said Lilias, mischievously.

“Yes,” said Arthur, “I am indeed. Will you now,” he went on, “tell me about Alys? How is she, and where?”

Lilias told him all she knew.

“And your sister nursing her,” said Arthur. “How extraordinary!”

Notwithstanding his surprise, however, Lilias could see that the idea of the thing was not unpleasing to him.

“But for that—but for Mary’s being with her, you and I would not have met this morning,” she said.

“You may go further and say that but for Alys’s accident I should not have been here,” said Arthur, while a shade fell over his sunny countenance. “It is too cold for you standing here. Let us walk on a little.”

“Are you not going to the farm?” Lilias asked.

“No. Now that I have seen you I shall hurry back the way I came. You have told me all there is to hear. Poor Alys! Lilias, I wish I could explain to you why I felt so horribly, so unbearably anxious about her. I am very fond of her; but once lately when I was nearly beside myself with perplexity and misery, Laurence—her brother, you know—to bring me to what he would call my senses, I suppose, said something which has haunted me ever since I heard of her accident yesterday morning. If she had been killed I should have felt as if I had killed her.”

He looked at Lilias, with a self-reproach and distress in his open boyish face which touched her greatly—the more as, now that the brightness had for the moment faded out of his countenance, she could see how much changed he was, how thin and pale and worn he looked.

“I think I can understand—a very little,” she said, gently, “without your explaining. But you have grown morbid, Arthur. You know you would suffer anything yourself rather than wish injury to any one.”

“I suppose I have grown morbid,” he said. “Morbid for want of hope, and still more from the constant horrible dread of what you must be thinking of me. I shall not know myself when I get back to C. I may have dark fits of blaming myself for involving you in my misfortunes—but then to know that you trust me again! Surely, whatever the world might say, I have not done wrong, Lilias? To you, I mean?”

“You have given me back my life, and youth, and faith and everything good,” she replied. “Can that be doing me wrong?”

They walked on a little way in silence. Then Arthur stopped.

“I must go, I fear,” he said, reluctantly. “And I suppose we must not write to each other. No, it would not be fair to you to ask it.”

“I should not like to write to you without my father and mother’s knowledge,” said Lilias.

“No, of course not. And, as I am placed—my difficulties involve others, that is the worst of it—I do not see that I can avoid asking you not to mention what has passed to your people, at present. Does that make you uncomfortable?”

Lilias considered.

“No,” she said, “I do not see that it alters my position. Hitherto I have gone on trusting you, without saying anything about it to any one. Till I met you this afternoon, and your own manner and words misled me, I have never left off trusting you, Arthur, never. And so I shall go on the same way. But I couldn’t write to you without them all knowing. I mean I should not feel happy in doing so. Besides, it would not be very much good. You see you cannot explain things to me yet, so we could not consult together.”

“Not yet,” said Arthur. “But as you trust me, trust me in this. If any effort of mine can hasten the explanation, you shall not long be left in this position. You are doing for me what few girls would do for a man—do not think I do not know that, and believe that I shall never forget it. Two years,” he went on, in a lower voice, almost as if speaking to himself, but Lilias caught the words—“two years at longest, but two years are a long time. And if I take my fate in my own hands, there is no need for waiting two years.”

“Do nothing rash or hasty,” said Lilias, earnestly. “Do nothing for my sake that might injure you. Arthur,” she exclaimed, hastily, as a new light burst upon her, and her face grew pale with anxiety—“Arthur, I am surely not to be the cause of misfortune to you? Your pledging yourself to me is surely not going to ruin you? If I thought so! Oh! Arthur, what would—what could I do?”

Arthur was startled. He felt that already he had all but gone too far, and Mr Cheviott’s words recurred to him. “If the girl be what you think her, would she accept you if she knew it would be to ruin you?” Recurred to him, however, but to be rejected as a plausible piece of special pleading. “Ruin him,” yes, indeed, if she, the only woman he had ever cared for, threw him over, then they might talk of ruining him. And were there no Lilias in the world, could he have asked Alys to marry him—Alys, his little sister—now that he knew what it was to love with a man’s whole love?

“Lilias,” he said, with earnestness almost approaching solemnity in his voice, “you must never say such words as those, never; whatever happens, you are the best of life to me. And even if I had returned to find you married to some one else, my position would have remained the same. That is all I can say to you. No, I will do nothing rash or hasty. For your sake I will be careful and deliberate where I would not be, or might not have been so, for myself.”

“Can you not tell me where you are going, or what you are doing?” said Lilias, with some hesitation.

“Oh, dear, yes! Somehow I fancied you knew. I am at C, studying at the Agricultural College, studying hard for the first time in my life. My idea is,” he added, speaking more slowly, “to fit myself, if need be, for employment of a kind I fancy I could get on in—something like becoming agent to a property—that sort of thing.”

Lilias looked up at him with surprise and admiration. This, then, was what he had been busy about all these weary months, during which everybody had been speaking or hinting ill of him. Working hard—with what object was only too clear—to make a home for her, should the mysterious ill-fortune to which he alluded leave him a poor and homeless man! Lilias’s eyes filled with tears—was he not a man to trust?

Then at last they parted—each feeling too deeply for words—but yet what a happy parting it was!

“To think,” said Lilias to herself as she hurried home, “to think how I was wondering what might happen in the next six weeks—to think what has happened in the last half hour!”

And Arthur, all the way back to C, his heart filled with the energy and hopefulness born of a great happiness, could not refrain from going over and over again the old ground as to whether something could not be done—could not the Court of Chancery be appealed to? He wished he could talk it over with Laurence—Laurence who was just as anxious as he to undo the cruel complication in which they were both placed.

“Only then again,” thought Arthur, “that foolish, ridiculous prejudice of his against the Westerns comes in and prevents his helping me if he could. And to think of Mary being there as Alys’s nurse! How he will hate the obligation—If it were not so serious for poor Alys, I really could laugh when I think of Laurence’s ruffled dignity in such a position!”

Chapter Twenty Two.

Alys’s Brother.

“In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind.” Wordsworth.

Days passed—a week, ten days of Mr Brandreth’s fortnight were over, but still he would say nothing definite as to the possibility of moving Alys to Romary. And Alys herself seemed marvellously contented—the reason of which she made no secret of to Mary.

“You see I have never had a really close friend of near my own age—and you are only two years older,” she said one day. “And I never could have got to know you so well in any other circumstances—could I? You do understand me so well, Mary. It is perfectly wonderful. If I were never to see you again, I could not regret my accident since it has made me know you.”

Mary was silent.

“Why don’t you answer?” said Alys, anxiously. “Am I horribly selfish to speak so, when this time you have given up to me has kept you away from your dear home and all of them, and interfered with your regular duties?”

“No, dear,” said Mary, “it isn’t that at all. My being away from home has not mattered in the least; besides, I am near enough to hear at once if they really needed me. No, I was only thinking I could not say I did not regret your accident, because, though I am thankful you are so far better, I feel so anxious about you afterwards. Even though Mr Brandreth does not anticipate seriously-lasting injury, you may have a good deal of weariness and endurance before you. He told you?”

“Yes,” said Alys, composedly. “I know I shall not feel strong and well, as I used, for a long time, if ever. I shall have to rest a great deal, hanging about sofas, and all that—just what I hate. But I don’t mind. I am still glad it happened. It has done me good, and it has done some one else good too. Was that all you hesitated about, Mary?”

“Not quite.”

“Well, say the rest—do!”

“I was only thinking that I could not respond as heartily as I would like to your affection, Alys, because I hardly see that my friendship can be much good to you in the future.”

“Why?”

“Our lives are so differently placed—we are in such totally different spheres—”

“Oh! Mary,” exclaimed Alys, reproachfully, “you are not going to be proud, and refuse to know us because we are rich and you are—”

“Poor,” added Mary, smiling. “No, not on that account exactly.”

“Why, then? Is it because you suspect that at one time Laurence discouraged my knowing you? You can afford to forgive that, surely, now. And it was his duty, I suppose, to be very careful about whom I knew, having no mother or sister, you know; and at that time he did not know you.”

“No, he did not; and it was his duty, as you say, to be very careful. He did not know us, true, but at least he knew no harm of us, except that we were out of the charmed circle. And did that justify him in—Oh! Alys, dear, don’t make me speak about it. Let us be happy this little while we are together.”

“Mary, do you dislike Laurence?”

“I do not like unfounded prejudices,” replied Mary, evasively.

“That means Laurence, I suppose. But, Mary, people can outgrow their prejudices. I am not sure that you yourself are not at present partly affected by prejudice.”

“No,” said Mary, in a firm but somewhat low voice. “I am not, indeed. I cannot defend myself from the appearance of being so, but it is not the case, truly.”

Alys sighed.

“Don’t make yourself unhappy about it, dear,” said Mary.

“I can’t help it,” said Alys, dejectedly. “There is something I don’t understand. I don’t ask you to tell me anything you would rather not, but I am so disappointed. I wanted you to get to like Laurence. I know—I can see he likes you, and that was why I thought it had all happened so well. I did not mind the idea of being a sort of invalid for some time when I thought of your coming to see me often at Romary, and staying with us there. Mary, won’t you come? I was speaking to Laurence about it last night, and he said, if I could persuade you to come, he would be most grateful to you.”

“I don’t want him to be grateful to me,” said Mary, lightly.

“How can he help being so? What he meant was, of course, that if you came it would be out of goodness to me. You must know that he would consider it a favour.”

“Yes, I do. Mr Cheviott is not the least inclined to patronise people, I will say that for him,” said Mary, laughing.

“Then you will come to Romary?” said Alys, coaxingly.

Mary shook her head.

“I must be honest, Alys dear,” she said, “and to tell you the truth, I can’t imagine myself going to Romary ag—ever going to Romary, I mean, under any circumstances whatever.”

“How you must dislike Laurence!” said Alys. “Has he displeased you since you have been here?”

“Oh dear, no,” said Mary, eagerly. “He has been as kind and considerate as possible. I wish I could help hurting you, Alys. I can say one thing, I do like Mr Cheviott as your brother, more than I could have believed it possible I could ever like him.”

“Faint praise,” said Alys.

“But not of the ‘damning’ kind. I mean what I say,” persisted Mary. “And—perhaps you will think this worse than ‘faint praise’—since I have seen him in this way—as your brother—I cannot help thinking that circumstances, the way he has been brought up, have a good deal to answer for in his case.”

Alys’s face flushed a little, yet she was not offended.

“And why not in mine?” she said. “I have had more reason to be spoiled than poor Laurence. His youth was anything but a very smooth or happy one. My father was not rich always, you know.”

“Was he not? Still ‘rich’ is a comparative word. Mr Cheviott has always ‘moved in a certain sphere,’ as newspapers say, and he cannot have had much chance of seeing outside that sphere,” said Mary, with the calm philosophy of her twenty years’ thorough knowledge of the world in all its phases. “As for you, Alys, you are not spoiled, just because you are not. You are a duck—at least you have a duck’s back—it has run off you.”

And both girls were laughing at this when Mr Cheviott, just returned from his daily expedition to Romary, entered the room.

“You are very merry,” he said, questioningly. “By-the-bye, Miss Western,” he went on, with some constraint but, nevertheless, resolution in his voice, “I hope you have good news of your sister?”

“Excellent, thank you,” replied Mary, looking up bravely into his face. “She is as happy and well as possible.”

There was a ring of truth in her voice, and, indeed, Mr Cheviott would have found it hard to doubt the truth of anything that voice of hers said.

“There is no bravado in that statement,” he said to himself. “I cannot understand it.”

“And what were you laughing at when I came in?” he said, turning to Alys, as if to change the subject.

Alys looked at Mary.

“Mary,” she said, mischievously, “shall I tell?”

“If you like,” said Mary, quietly.

“Oh, Mary, was just giving me her opinion of us—of you and me, Laurence—the result of her observations during the last ten days,” said Alys.

Mary looked up quickly.

“Alys,” was all she said; but Alys understood her. Mr Cheviott was listening attentively.

“Well,” Alys went on, “perhaps that is not putting it quite fairly. I must confess, Laurence, I forced the opinion out of her, and it took a good deal of forcing, too.”

“And what was the opinion—favourable or the reverse? May I not hear that?” asked Mr Cheviott.

“It was pretty favourable,” Alys replied. “On the whole, taking everything into consideration, the enormous disadvantages of our up-bringing, etc, etc, Miss Western is disposed to think that, on the whole, mind you, Laurence, only ‘on the whole,’ we are neither of us quite so bad as might have been expected. But then we must remember, for fear of this verdict making us too conceited, you see, Laurence—upsetting our ill-balanced minds, or anything of that sort—we must remember that it is not every day we can hope to meet with a judge so wide-minded, and philosophical, and unprejudiced, absolutely unprejudiced, as Miss Western.”

During this long tirade Mary remained perfectly silent, only towards its close her face flushed a little.

“Alys,” she said, when Alys at last left off speaking, the colour deepening in her face—“Alys, I don’t think that is quite fair.”

“Nor do I,” said Mr Cheviott, suddenly, for he too had been sitting silent, in apparent consideration. “But, Miss Western, I know Alys’s style pretty well. I can pick out with great precision the grains of fact from amongst her bewildering flowers of rhetoric, so, on the whole, mind you, Miss Western, only ‘on the whole,’ I feel rather gratified than the reverse by what she rails your verdict.”

“I am sorry for it,” said Mary, dryly.

“Why so?”

“I should think poorly of myself were I to feel any gratification at being told that, on the whole, I was not as bad as I might have been. There is no one hardly, I suppose, so bad but that it might be possible to conceive him worse.”

“That was not quite Alys’s wording of your opinion,” said Mr Cheviott. “Nor, I venture to say, quite the sentiment of the opinion itself. But in another sense I agree with you; there is hardly any one—no one, in fact—of whom we might not say, if we knew all the circumstances of his or her history—of his or her existence, in fact—that it was a wonder he or she was so good—not so bad.”

“That is taking the purely—I don’t know what to call it—the purely human view of it all,” said Mary, growing interested and losing her feeling of discomfort. “My father would say we are forgetting what should be and may be the most powerful influences of all, in whatever guise they come, on every life—the spiritual influences, I mean. And these can never be reduced to calculation and estimate, however wise men become.”

“Yes, but think of the terrible forest of ill-growing weeds, the awful barrier of evil, individual and inherited, these influences have to make their way through!”

He rose from his chair and went across the room to the fire-place, where he stood contemplating the two girls. Mary, in her plain grey tweed, unrelieved by any colour, except a blue knot at the throat, but fitting her tall figure to perfection. Her “browny-pink” complexion, hazel eyes, and bright chestnut hair, all speaking of youth and strength and healthfulness, contrasting with Alys, who lay loosely wrapped in the invalid shawls and mantles Mary had carefully arranged about her—prettier, more really lovely, perhaps, than her brother had ever seen her, her dark hair and eyes seeming darker than their wont, from the unusual whiteness of her face. She looked too lovely, thought Mr Cheviott, with a sigh, her fragility striking him sharply, in comparison with the firmness and yet elasticity of Mary’s movements, as she leaned over Alys to raise her a little. How natural, how strangely natural it all seemed! Mr Cheviott sighed.

“Laurence,” exclaimed Alys, “what in the world is the matter?”

Her brother smiled.

“Nothing—that is to say, I can’t say what makes me sigh. I was thinking just then what a strange power of adaptation we human beings have. It seems to me so natural to be living here in this queer sort of way. You ill, Alys, and Miss Western nursing you. I could fancy it had always been so—in a dreamy, vague sort of way.”

“I know how you mean,” said Mary.

“Shall you be sorry when it is over, Laurence,” said Alys, “and we are back again at Romary, without our guardian angel?”

“One is always sorry, in a sense, when anything is over, at least, I am. I suppose I have the power of settling myself in a groove to an unusual degree,” said Mr Cheviott, evasively.

“You certainly have not the power of making pretty speeches,” said Alys. “I called Mary ‘our guardian angel,’ and you call her a ‘groove’.”

Just then Mrs Wills put her head in at the door with an inquiry for Miss Western, and Mary went out of the room.

“I wanted you to say something about Mary’s perhaps coming to Romary,” said Alys.

“Why? Do you think she would come?” asked Mr Cheviott, doubtfully.

“No, I do not think she would,” Alys replied, “but I wanted her to see that you would like her to come.”

“Did she say that she would never come to see you at Romary?” Mr Cheviott said.

“Yes, decidedly. Her words were, ‘I cannot fancy myself, under any circumstances whatever, going to Romary,’ and I thought I heard her half say ‘again’—‘going to Romary again.’ But she has never been there?” Mr Cheviott did not reply; he turned to the fire and began poking it vigorously.

“Laurence,” said Alys, feebly.

“What, dear?”

“Please don’t poke the fire so. It seems to hurt me.”

“I am so sorry,” said her brother, penitently. “It’s the same with everything,” he added to himself. “I seem fated to make a mess of everything I have to do with.—I wish I were not so clumsy,” he went on aloud to his sister. “What shall I do with you at Romary? How shall we ever get on without Miss Western?”

“I shall have to make the best of Mrs Golding, I suppose,” said Alys, in a melancholy voice. “But she fusses so! Oh, Laurence, isn’t it a pity? Just as I have found a girl who could be to me the friend I have wished for and needed all my life, a friend whom even you, now that you know her, approve of for me, that she should have this prejudice against knowing us. Indeed, it must be more than prejudice. She is too sensible and right-minded to be influenced by that.”

“Does she know that I, at one time, objected to your knowing her?” said Mr Cheviott.

“She knows something of it—not, of course, that I ever said so to her—but she is very quick, and gathered the impression somehow. But it is not that. She said you were quite right to be careful whom I knew, and that, of course, she and her people were strangers to you. I don’t think Mary would resent anything that she felt any one had a right to do. No, it is not that,” said Alys.

“What can it be, then? Is it her horror of putting herself under any obligation?”

“Obligation, Laurence! As if all the obligation were not on our side!”

“Well, yes. I don’t think I meant that exactly. I mean that, perhaps, she may feel that, owing her so much, we could not do less than invite her to Romary. She may have an exaggerated horror of any approach to being patronised.”

“No, she is not so silly. She knows we should be grateful to her for coming. She is neither so silly, nor, I must say, so vulgar-minded, as you imagine. Laurence, even though you own to liking and admiring her now, it seems as if you could not throw off that inveterate prejudice of yours,” said Alys, rather hotly.

Mr Cheviott, under his breath, gave vent to a slight exclamation.

“Good Heavens, Alys,” he said, aloud, “I think the prejudice is on your side. You cannot believe that I can act or feel unprejudicedly.”

“I do not know what to believe,” said Alys, dejectedly. “I am bewildered and disappointed. There is something that has been concealed from me, that much I am sure of. And I do think you might trust me, Laurence.”

It sounded to Laurence as if there were tears in her voice. He went over to her bed-side, and kissed her tenderly.

“My poor little Alys,” he said, “indeed I do trust you, and, indeed, I would gladly tell you anything you want to know, if I could. But there are times in one’s life when one cannot do what one would like. Can’t you trust me, Alys?”

Alys stroked his hand.

“Could I ever leave off trusting you, Laurence?” she said, fondly. “I do not mind so much when you tell me there is something you can’t tell—that is treating me like a sensible person, and not like a baby.”

That was all she said, but, like the owl, “she thought the more.”

And Mr Cheviott too—his thoughts had no lack of material on which to exert themselves just then. He was sorry for Alys—very sorry—and not a little uneasy and ready to do anything in his power to please and gratify her. But how to do it?

“She cannot, under any circumstances whatever, imagine herself ever coming to Romary again,” he said to himself, over and over, as if there were a fascination in the words. “Ah, well, it is a part of the whole,” he added, bitterly, “and Alys must try to content herself with something else.”

A slight cloud seemed, for a day or two, to come over the comfort and cheerfulness of the little party at the farm. Mary was conscious of it without being able, exactly, to explain it. “But for Alys,” she felt satisfied that she would not care in the least.

“Mr Cheviott may ‘glower’ at me if he likes,” she said to herself. “I really don’t mind. I am not likely ever to see him again, so what does it matter? He is offended, I suppose, because I did not at once accept with delight the invitation which he condescended, grudgingly enough, no doubt, to allow poor Alys to give me.”

So in her own thoughts, as was her way, she made fun of the whole situation and imagined that Mr Cheviott’s decrease of cordiality and friendliness had not the slightest power to disturb her equanimity. Yet somehow in her honest conscience there lurked a faint misgiving. It was difficult to call his evident dejection haughtiness or temper, difficult to accuse of offensive condescension the man whose every word and tone was full of the gentlest, almost deprecating, deference and respect—most difficult of all to hold loyally to her old position of contempt for and repugnance to a man so unmistakably unselfish, so almost woman-like in his tender devotion to the sister dependent on his care.

“Yet he must be heartless,” persisted Mary, valiantly, “he must be narrow-minded and cruel, and he must be what any straightforward, honourable person would call unprincipled and intriguing, wherever the carrying out of his own designs is in question.”

“I shall be so glad to be home again, mamma,” she said to her mother one afternoon when she had left Alys for an hour or two, to go home to see how the Rectory was getting on without her.

“Yes, dear, I can well fancy it,” replied Mrs Western, sympathisingly. “You must just remember, you know, Mary, that your present task, however distasteful, is just as much a duty as if that poor girl were one of the cottagers about here. Indeed, almost more so. I dare say, in spite of their wealth and position, she is far more really friendless than any other of our poor neighbours. But she is a sweet girl, you say?”

“Very,” said Mary, warmly. “It is a pleasure to do anything for her.”

“Poor child! And with such a brother! A most disagreeable, cold, haughty man, I hear. But he surely cannot be anything but courteous to you, Mary? Under the circumstances, anything else would be too outrageous.”

“Oh dear, no,” said Mary, hastily, startled a little somehow by her mother’s tone. “He is perfectly civil to me—most considerate, and I suppose I should say ‘kind.’ Only I shall be glad to be at home—they are talking now of moving Miss Cheviott to Romary on Thursday—and back into my regular ways. Mother, I’m an awful old maid already, I get into a groove and like to stay there.”

The words recurred to her on her way back to the Edge. Would she really be so glad to be home again? She had used Mr Cheviott’s expression, and it led her into the train of thought which had suggested it to him. Yes, there was truth in what he said. In almost every kind of life, in almost any circumstances, even if painful in themselves, there grows up secretly, as the days pass on, a curious, undefinable charm—a something it hurts us to break, though, till the necessity for so doing is upon us, we had been unconscious of its existence.

“It must be that,” said Mary. “I have got into the groove of my present life, and now that it is coming to an end, disagreeable though it has been, I feel it strangely painful to leave it. Of course it is natural I should feel pain in parting from Alys, whom I can never be with again; but, besides that, I am sorry to have done with the whole affair—the queer incongruous life, the old kitchen in the evenings, and Mr Cheviott and his books in the corner, the feeling I am of use to her, to them both, that they would have been wretchedly uncomfortable without me, and that even now that I am away for an hour they will be missing me. What queer, inconsistent complications we human beings are! It is just the coming to an end of it all, the beginning to see it in the haze of the past, that gives it a charm.”

She stood still and gazed across over the bare, long stretch of meadow land before her to the far distant horizon, radiant already in the colours of the fast setting sun. Suddenly a voice behind her made her start.

“Are you bidding the sun good-night?” it said.

Mary turned round and saw Mr Cheviott.

“Yes,” she replied. “I suppose I was. There, is something rather melancholy about a sunset, is there not?” she added after a little pause.

“There is something not rather, but very melancholy about all farewells. And sunset is good-bye forever to a day, though not to the sun,” said Mr Cheviott.

”‘Out of Eternity This new day is born; Into Eternity At night will return.’”

“Yes,” said Mary again. “It is like what my little sister Francie once said, ‘What a sad thing pastness is.’”

“How pretty!” said Mr Cheviott. “Pastness! Yes, it is a sad thing, but fortunately not an ugly thing. Distance in time as well as in space, ‘lends enchantment to the view.’ How strangely little things affect us sometimes,” he went on. “There are occasions, little events of my life, that I cannot recall without an indescribable thrill, neither of pleasure nor pain, but a strange, acute mixture of both. And yet they are so trifling in themselves that I cannot explain why they should so affect me.”

“I think I have felt what you mean,” said Mary.

“And in the same way I have felt extraordinarily affected by a far-off view sometimes,” pursued Mr Cheviott. “When I was a boy, from my nursery window we had, on clear days, a view of the shire hills, and on the top, or nearly on the top of one of them, we could, on very clear days, distinguish a little white cottage. Do you know, I could never look at it without the tears coming into my eyes, and yet, if it had been near enough to see it plainly, most likely it was the most prosaic of white cottages.”

“I have had the same feeling about things not ‘enchanted’ by distance,” said Mary. “Once, on a journey, driving rapidly, we suddenly passed a cottage with two girls sitting on the door-step. A ray of rather faint evening sunlight fell across them as they sat, otherwise everything about the scene was commonplace in the extreme. But yet something made me feel as if I were going to cry. I had to turn my head away and shut my eyes.”

“That’s just what I mean,” said Mr Cheviott, and then for a minute or two they both stood silent, gazing at the sunset.

“Miss Western,” said Mr Cheviott, at last, “when you are back at the Rectory again, and the present little phase of your life is past and done with, I trust its ‘pastness’ may soften all the annoyance you have had to put up with. Even I, I would fain hope, may come in for a little of the benefit of the mellowing haze of distance and bygoneness?”

“I do not feel that I have had any annoyances to bear,” said Mary, cordially. “Alys has been only too unselfish, and—and—you, yourself, Mr Cheviott, have been most considerate of my comfort. My associations with the Edge can never be unpleasant.”

“Thank you—thank you, so very much,” said Mr Cheviott, so earnestly that Mary forthwith began to call hereof a humbug.

Would it not have been honest to have said a little more—to have told him that, while she really did thank him for his courtesy and thoughtfulness, nothing that had happened had, in the least, shaken her real opinion of his character? Of the other side of his character, so she mentally worded it in instinctive self-defence of her constancy. For, indeed, to her there had come to be two Mr Cheviotts—Alys’s brother, and, alas! Arthur Beverley’s cousin!

Chapter Twenty Three.

Arthur’s Cousin.

“I loved him not, and yet, now he is gone, I checked him when he spoke; yet could he speak—” W.S. Landor.

The evening that followed this little conversation was one of the—if not the—pleasantest of those Mary had spent at the farm. Alys seemed wonderfully stronger and better, or else she had caught the infection of her brother’s unusually good spirits, and, till considerably past her ordinary hour of settling for the night, Mr Cheviott and Mary stayed in her room, laughing, chattering, and joking till Mrs Wills began to think more experienced nurses would be better fitted to take care of the young lady.

“Not that Miss Mary has not an old head on young shoulders, if ever such could be,” she remarked to her husband, “but Miss Cheviott, for all that she’s a-lying there so weakly-like, and many a month, it’s my opinion, when they get her home again, will have to lie; she do have a sperrit of her own. And the master, as I’m always a-going to call him, thinking of our Captain Beverley it must be, he has a deal of fun in him, has Mr Cheviott, for all his quiet ways, as no one would fancy was there.”

But, by and by, Mary exerted her authority. Alys must go to sleep. What would Mr Brandreth say if he found her knocked up and wearied the next day—Wednesday, too, the day before the move to Romary, for which all her strength would be required? So whether sleepy or not, Alys had to obey orders, and, as Mary had a long letter to Lilias to write, Mr Cheviott volunteered to read his sister to sleep, for which Mary sincerely thanked him.

He came into the kitchen an hour or so later, while she was still busy with her letter. He had a book in his hand, and sat down quietly to read it beside the fire. After a while the kitchen clock struck ten.

“Miss Western,” said Mr Cheviott, “I think if I had any authority over you, as you have over Alys, I would exert it to make you go to bed. You were up very early, you have been on your feet, about one thing and another, nearly all day, besides a good long walk; and now you are writing I should be afraid to say how many sheets full. Don’t you intend to take any rest? I feel responsible, remember, for the condition in which you go back to the Rectory, and I don’t want your father and mother to think Alys and I have no conscience about overworking you.”

Mary left off writing, and looked up with a smile. Her wavy brown hair was somewhat disarranged, and she pushed it back off her temples with a slight gesture of weariness. Her face was a little flushed, but her eyes were bright and happy-looking. Those dear, good, honest eyes of hers, ready to tell of pleasure and content, as of, it must be confessed, disapproval or indignation! She made a pleasant picture, tumbled hair notwithstanding—she reminded Mr Cheviott, somehow, of the day he had first seen her under the porch of the old church, when she had looked up in his face with that peculiarly attractive expression of hers of hearty, fearless good-will.

“I do believe, now that I leave off writing and can think about it,” she said, “I do believe I am a little tired. Not that I have done anything unusual to-day by any means. I suppose I must go to bed,” looking regretfully at her not yet completed letter; “but writing to Lilias is such a temptation.”

“She is enjoying herself very much, you say,” observed Mr Cheviott, in so natural and unconstrained a manner that, for the moment, Mary actually forgot that he was the speaker, forgot her ordinarily quick rising indignation whenever he ventured to name Lilias at all.

“Exceedingly,” she replied, warmly. “I have never had such cheerful, almost merry, letters from her before when she has been away. I am delighted; but a little astonished all the same,” she added, in a lower voice, almost as if speaking to herself.

“I am so very glad of it,” said Mr Cheviott, fervently, yet with a sort of hesitation which recalled Mary to herself. Quick as thought the blood mounted to her temple—she turned sharply, the whole expression of her being, even to the pretty curves of her slight firm figure, seeming to her observer to change and harden. She gathered up the loose sheets of her letter and made a step or two towards the door. Then her habitual instincts of consideration and courtesy asserting themselves, she stopped short.

“I think I had better go to bed,” she said. “Goodnight, Mr Cheviott.”

Hitherto, latterly that is to say, in the prevalence of a tacit truce between these two, the usual amenities of intimate and friendly social relations had half unconsciously crept in.

“For Alys’s sake,” Mary had decided, when for the first time she found herself shaking hands with the man she had prayed she might “never see again,” “for Alys’s sake it is necessary to make no fuss, and perhaps for my own, too, it is on the whole more dignified to behave in an ordinary way.”

But to-night, dignity or no dignity, her indignation was again too fully aroused to allow anything to interfere with its expression, and she was proceeding in queenly fashion to the door, when, to her amazement, Mr Cheviott stepped forward and stood in her way.

“Miss Western,” he said, quietly, “won’t you say goodnight? Won’t you shake hands with me as usual?”

Mary hesitated. She did not want to make herself ridiculous—for Lilias’s sake even, she shrank from the slightest appearance of petulance or small resentment. She hesitated; then looking up bravely, said, honestly:

“I would rather not, but—” A pair of dark eyes were gazing down upon her—gazing as if they would read her very soul, so earnest, so true in their expression that Mary could not but own to herself that it was difficult to realise that they belonged to an unprincipled and dishonourable man.

“But?” he said, gravely.

“I was only going to say, if you think so much of shaking hands, I don’t mind,” said Mary, with a curious mixture of deprecation and defiance in her tone. “I don’t want to be uncourteous or exaggerated—besides, what is there in shaking hands? We do so half a dozen times a day with people we do not care the least for.”

“Yes,” said Mr Cheviott, gravely still, “we do. But people one doesn’t care the least for are different from people one positively dislikes, or worse still, distrusts.”

“Can’t you leave all that?” said Mary, sadly. “I cannot help what—what happened, and, indeed”—her voice trembling a little—“towards the Mr Cheviott I have known here I should be most wrong to have any but friendly feelings.”

She held out her hand. Mr Cheviott took it in his, holding it for one little moment longer than was really necessary.

“Is it always to be war between us, Miss Western?” as if the words could not be kept back. “Heaven knows how glad I should be to leave forever all the painful part of the past.”

Mary slowly shook her head. Then looking up suddenly again, she said, gently:

“We have got on very well here without fighting. Why should not the truce last till the end of the time here? There is only another day.”

“Yes,” repeated Mr Cheviott. “Only one other day.”

Then Mary went off to bed, but not, for much longer than her wont, to sleep. Her mind seemed strangely bewildered and perplexed.

“I have lost all my mile-stones,” she said to herself. “I feel as if I were being forced to think black white in the strangest way. But I won’t—no, I won’t, won’t, won’t!”

And with this laudable determination she went to sleep.

It was late before Mr Cheviott left the kitchen fire-side that night.

“Will the truce last,” he was saying to himself, “even through another day? Twenty times in an hour I have been on the point of saying what, indeed, would end it one way or another. And Arthur thought I could not sympathise with him! I wonder on which of the two of us that idiotic will has entailed the greater suffering?”

His good spirits seemed all to have deserted him by the next morning. He was grave and almost stern, and, so said Alys, “objectionably affairé about some stupid letters sent on from Romary.” Alys was unusually talkative and obtrusively cheerful, but Mary understood her through it all. A cloud of real sorrow was over both girls, more heavily on Mary, for she knew what Alys was still silently determined to hope against, that this was far more than the “last day” of their queer life at the farm, that it was the end of the strange but strong friendship that, despite all obstacles, had sprung up between them.

For though Alys had almost pointedly refrained from any recurrence to the question of their meeting again at Romary, and Mary had been only too ready to second her in all avoidance of the subject, this absence of discussion had in no wise softened the girl’s resolution.

“Never,” she repeated to herself, “never under any circumstances can I imagine myself entering that house again.”

And the day wore on without any allusion being made to the when or the where of their ever meeting again.

Late in the afternoon Mary had gone at Alys’s request to pick some of the pretty spring flowers to be found in profusion in the Balner woods hard by, when, as she was returning homewards, laden with primroses and violets, looking up she saw Mr Cheviott coming quickly along the path to meet her.

“Alys?” she exclaimed, quickly, with just the slightest shade of anxiety in her voice. “Does she want me?”

“Oh, no,” replied Mr Cheviott, with a smile. “Alys is all right. What an anxious nurse you are, Miss Western!”

“Yes,” said Mary, “it is silly. I must get accustomed to the idea of her doing without me. But I could not help having a feeling to-day of a different kind of anxiety—a feeling of almost superstitious fear lest anything should go wrong with her to-day—the last day. It would be so hard to leave her less well than she is, and—of course,” she went on, looking up with a slight flush on her face, “I own to being a little proud of her! It is a great satisfaction to hear Mr Brandreth say that, considering all, she could not have got on better than she has done.”

“Of course it is,” said Mr Cheviott, warmly. “And I am more glad than I can say that you feel it so. It is a little bit of a reward for you.”

Mary did not reply, and they walked on slowly for a few moments in silence.

“How pretty your flowers are,” said Mr Cheviott, at last.

“Lovely, are they not?” replied Mary, half burying her face, as she spoke, in a great rich cluster of primroses that she had tied up together into a sort of ball. “They are the best flowers of all—these spring ones—there can be no doubt about it.”

“Or is it that they are the spring ones,” suggested Mr Cheviott.

“A little perhaps,” allowed Mary. “Have I not got a quantity? Alys took a fancy for some to take home to Romary.”

“Poor child, she will not be able to gather any for herself this year,” said Mr Cheviott.

“No,” said Mary.

“And she will not have you to gather them for her after to-day.”

“No,” said Mary again, this time more dryly.

Mr Cheviott stopped short, and as they were placed in the path, Mary, without positive rudeness, could not help stopping too.

“Miss Western,” said Mr Cheviott, abruptly, “is your decision quite unshaken?”

“What decision?” said Mary, quietly.

“About coming to see us at Romary, about, in fact, continuing to honour us with your acquaintanceship—I would like to say friendship, but I am afraid of vexing you—or the reverse.”

Mary pulled a poor primrose to pieces, petal by petal, before she replied.

“I wish,” she said, at last, with an appeal almost approaching to pathos in her tones, “I wish you had done as I begged you last night—let this last day end peacefully without rousing anything discordant. Mr Cheviott,” she went on, with an attempt at a smile, “you don’t know me. There are certain directions in which I feel so intensely that it would not take much to make me actually fierce—there is something of the Tartar underlying what you think cool self-possession—and one of those directions is my sister Lilias.” Her voice faltered a little. “Now won’t you be warned,” she added, speaking more lightly, “won’t you be warned, and let our pleasant truce last to the end?”

“To the end,” he repeated, with some bitterness. “A matter of a few hours, and, for the sake of keeping those peaceful, I am to relinquish my only chance of—of ever coming to a better understanding with you? No, Miss Western, I cannot let the subject drop thus.”

“Then what do you want to know?” she said, facing round upon him.

“I want to know if you keep to your determination never to come to see my sister at Romary, never to enter my house again, never, in fact, to have anything more to say to Alys, who is attached to you, and whom I know you care for? You may say she might come to see you, but at present, at any rate, that is impossible—besides, in such forced intercourse there could be no real enjoyment.”

“No,” said Mary, “there could not be. It is best to call things by their right names. I do care for Alys, deeply and truly, but I do not wish or intend to go on knowing her. I would not ask her to come to my home to see me, because I cannot go to her home to see her.”

“And why not?”

“Because she is your sister,” replied Mary, calmly. “And because I could not receive the hospitality of a man who has behaved as I believe you to have behaved.”

Mr Cheviott drew a step nearer her, and Mary, impelled, in spite of herself, to look up in his face, saw that it had grown to a deadly whiteness. She saw, too, something which she was half puzzled, half frightened at—something which in her short, peaceful experience of life, she had never come into close contact with—a strong man’s overwhelming indignation at unjust accusation. She stood silent. What could she say?

“This is fearfully hard to bear,” he said, at last. “I thought I was prepared for it, but—in spite of myself, I suppose—I had cherished hopes that recently your opinion of me had begun to soften. Miss Western, has it never occurred to you as possible that you have misjudged me?”

Mary hesitated.

“Yes,” she said, at last. “I may own to you that—lately—I have tried to think if it was possible.”

“You have wished to find it possible?” said Mr Cheviott, eagerly.

“Sometimes,” said Mary.

“God bless you for that,” he exclaimed, “and—”

“No, do not say that,” she interrupted. “I have more often wished not to find it so, for I—I gave you every chance—I put it all so plainly to you that horrible day at Romary—no, it is impossible that I have done you injustice. Were I to begin to think so, I should feel that I was losing my judgment, my right estimate of things altogether. But I do not wish to continue thinking worse of you than you deserve—you may have learned to see things differently—is it that you were going to tell me? Heaven knows if your interference has done what can never be undone, or not; but, however this is, I do not want to refuse to hear that you have changed.”

Mr Cheviott’s face grew sterner and darker.

“I have not changed,” he said. “What I did was for the best, and I could not but do the same again in similar circumstances.”

“Then,” said Mary, hardening at once, “I really have nothing more to say or to hear. Please let me pass.”

“No,” he replied. “Not yet. Miss Western, I value your good opinion more than that of any one living. I cannot let you go like this. It is my last chance. Do you not know what I feel for you—can you not see what you are making me suffer? I have never loved any woman before—am I to give up all hope on account of this terrible prejudice of yours? But for that I could have made you care for me—I know I could—could I not? Mary, tell me.”

His voice softened into a tenderness, compared with which the gentlest tones he had ever addressed to his sister were hard. But little heard Mary of tenderness or softness in his words. She stood aghast, literally aghast with astonishment—amazement rather—so intense that at first she could scarcely believe that her ears were not deceiving her. Then, as the full meaning of his words came home to her, indignation, overwhelming indignation, took the place of every other feeling, and burning words rose to her lips. For the moment “the Tartar” was, indeed, uppermost.

“You say this to me!” she exclaimed. “You dare to say this to me. You, the man who, in deference to contemptible class-prejudice and to gratify some selfish schemes, did not hesitate to trample a woman’s heart under foot, and to spoil the best chance for good that ever came to a man you profess to care for—you, selfish, heartless, unprincipled man, dare to tell me, Mary Western, that you love me! Are you going out of your senses, Mr Cheviott? Do you forget that I am Lilias’s sister?”

“No,” he said, in atone which somehow compelled her attention. “I do not forget it, and I am not ashamed to say so. I do not offer you—for it would but be thrown at my feet with scorn—but I would have offered you a man’s honest, disinterested devotion, were you able to believe in such a thing as coming from me. But you are blinded by prejudice—you will take into account nothing but your own preconceived interpretation. You will not allow the possibility of my being innocent of what you accuse me of. So be it. But there have been women who have known an honest man when they found such a one, and have not found their trust misplaced.”

Some answering chord was touched for the instant in Mary’s heart. Her tone was less hard, less cruelly contemptuous when she spoke again.

“I am not doubting your sincerity as regards myself,” she said, her voice trembling a little. “I suppose you do mean what you say, however extraordinarily incomprehensible it appears to me. But that makes things no better—oh! if you had but left me under the delusion that there was something to respect in you! I thought you narrow-minded and prejudiced to a degree, but I had grown to think you had some principle—that in what you did you were actuated by what you believed to be right. But what am I to think now? Where are all the well-considered reasons for interfering between your cousin and my sister that you would have had me believe in, now that—that—you find the case your own, or fancy it is so? What can I, too, think of your principle and disinterestedness?”

“What you choose,” said Mr Cheviott, bitterly. “It can matter little. But you make one mistake. I never gave you any reasons for my interference. I told you I had acted for the best, and I madly imagined it possible that having come to know me, you might have begun to believe it possible that my conduct was honest and disinterested. I had not intended to confess to you what I have done. My object in speaking to you again was purely—believe me or not, as you like—to try to gain for my sister the hope of sometimes seeing you. I was going on to volunteer to absent myself from Romary, if personal repugnance to me was the obstacle, if only you would sometimes come. But I am only human; your words and your tone drove me into what I little intended—into what I must have been mad to say to you.”

He stopped; he had spoken in a strangely low tone, but he had spoken very fast, and Mary’s first sensation when his voice ceased was of bewilderment approaching almost to a kind of mental chaos, and of vague but galling self-reproach. But for a moment she said nothing, and Mr Cheviott was already turning away, when she called him back, faintly and irresolutely, but he heard her still.

“I don’t know what to say,” she said, brokenly. “I suppose I have said what I should not. I suppose I let my anger get the better of me. But I have never learned to dissimulate. Your words seemed to me, remembering what I did, an insult. I suppose I should have thanked you for—for the honour. But it has all been a mistake. You must see I could never have cared for you—never; were I ten times satisfied you had done Lilias no wrong, your conduct to her remains the same. But I wish to be reasonable. Let us forget all this, and, so far as can be, let us part friends.”

She held out her hand, this time in vain.

“No,” said Mr Cheviott. “I cannot shake hands on such terms. I run no risk of hurting your feelings by saying so; you, I know, do not attach much consequence to so empty a ceremony, but unfortunately I do. Goodbye, Miss Western.”

He raised his hat and turned away.

When he was fairly out of sight, Mary sat down on the short grass that bordered the wood-path, leaned her head against the stump of an old tree standing close by and burst into tears. Then she took her flowers, the pretty, winsome things she had plucked so carefully, gathered them all into one heap, and, rising from her seat, moved by some sudden instinct of remorse, threw them—threw them, with all the strength of her vigorous young arms, away, back among the underwood and grassy tangle where they had grown.

“Primroses and violets,” she said as she did so, “I shall never be able to endure the sight of you again.”

Chapter Twenty Four.

Et Tu, Brute!

”... How strange the tangle is! What old perplexity is this?” Songs of Two Worlds.

And Alys did not get her flowers, poor girl. Nor was she told the reason why. But late that last evening, when the packing was done, and the various little personalities that, even in an enforced sojourn of the kind, are sure to collect about people, above all about people of individuality and refinement, were all collected together and put away, and the farm-house rooms had resumed their ordinary consistent bareness, Mary sat down by Alys’s bed and put her arms round the girl’s neck and kissed her with a clinging tenderness that brought the tears to Alys’s eyes.

“Dear Alys,” she said, softly, “I want to thank you.”

“To thank me,” replied Alys, in astonishment. “Oh, no, Mary, all the thanks are, must be, on one side.”

“No,” said Mary, “I have many things to thank you for. You have been so patient and sweet, and so grateful for the little I have been able to do for you. And one thing I may thank you for certainly.”

“What?” whispered Alys.

“For loving me,” said Mary. “You have done me good, Alys. I was growing, not perhaps exactly selfish, but self-centred. I put my own home and my own people before everything else, in a narrow-minded way, and I fancied that people who were different from us externally—people who had had fewer struggles and more luxuries than my parents—must of necessity be narrow-minded and self-absorbed and unsympathising. Alys, it is absurd, but do you know I do believe I have myself been growing into the very thing I so detested—I do believe, in a sense, I was encouraging a kind of class prejudice?”

Alys listened attentively.

“I see what you mean,” she said. “Mary, you are awfully honest.”

“I don’t know,” replied Mary, vaguely. “Self-deception must be a kind of dishonesty.”

Alys hardly heard her. She was watching eagerly for the upshot of this confession, yet afraid of startling away the concession she was hoping for by any premature congratulation on her friend’s altered views. So she lay, without speaking, till at last Mary’s silence roused her to new misgiving.

“Won’t you go on with what you were saying?” she ventured at last.

“What was it?” said Mary.

“Oh! about your being glad you had got to know us, and—”

“Nay,” exclaimed Mary, “I am sure I did not say that, Alys. What I said was that I thanked you for showing me how loving and sympathising you are, and that being prosperous and rich and courted and all that, as you are, need not necessarily make one narrow-minded and selfish.”

“Well,” said Alys, “it comes to much the same thing. I don’t see why you need have flown up so at my way of putting it.”

“Because,” said Mary, with vehemence, disproportionate to the occasion, “I was speaking of and to you, Alys—you alone.”

“I am sorry to hear it,” said Alys, “I would like my praise far, far more, Mary, if you would give poor Laurence a little bit of it too. He deserves it, while I—”

“Never mind,” said Mary, uneasily. “Don’t let us get into a discussion, dear Alys.”

“I am sure I don’t want to discuss anything except the end of your sentence. Do finish, Mary. Now that you have got to know me, or like me a little, you are not going to keep to your horrible resolution?”

Mary’s face clouded.

“I see, what you mean,” she said. “Oh! Alys, I am sorry to pain you, and very, very sorry not to be able to look forward to seeing you again, but I cannot change. I cannot—”

Alys leaned forward and put her hand over Mary’s mouth.

“No,” she said, “I won’t let you repeat that. I know what is coming, ‘I cannot under any circumstances whatever imagine myself, etc.’ No, Mary, you are not to say that. It is a sort of tempting Providence to be obstinate. Fancy now what might happen. Suppose I get much worse, Mary,—suppose that great London doctor that Laurence is going to have down to see me, says I can’t get better—that I am going to die—wouldn’t you come to Romary then, to say good-bye, Mary?”

Mary turned away her head and sighed deeply.

“I was not going to say what you thought, Alys,” she said, at length. “I was only going to say that I cannot see any probability of my ever going to you at Romary. If you ever marry, Alys—I should not say that; you are sure to marry—when you do, I shall go to see you in your own home, if you still care to have me, and if your husband has no objection.”

“But yours, Mary? What about his objections or non-objections?” said Alys.

“They will never exist, for there will never be such a person,” said Mary, calmly. “It was settled—oh, I can’t tell you how long ago, always, I think—in all our family conclaves there was never a dissentient voice on the subject—that I was to be an old maid. I am thoroughly cut out for it. Any one can see that. ‘Dans mon coeur il n’y a point d’amour’ of that kind, certainly,” she hummed, lightly.

“But, but, Mary,” said Alys, “finish the verse.”

“How do you know it?” said Mary. “It’s an old Norman or Breton song. Mother sang it when she was a girl.”

“I do know the second line, and that is all that matters,” said Alys, sagely. “Well, good-night, Mary. You are not quite as naughty as you have been, but that is the best I can say for you. However, I shall live in hope. But I am awfully dull, Mary. And how merry we were last night! It is too bad of Laurence to have gone over to Romary so late to-night, just when he might have known our—at least my spirits would need cheering. You, of course, have the getting back to your beloved people to look forward to.”

And, two mornings after this, Mary woke to find herself in her own familiar room at the Rectory. What a dream the last fortnight seemed! And what a long time ago appeared now the day of Alys Cheviott’s accident! Spring had come on fast since then. The leaves of the creeper round Mary’s window were beginning to peep in and to be visible as she lay in bed, the birds’ busy twitter and the early sunlight told that the world was waking up once more to approaching summer. How home-like and peaceful it seemed! yet Mary could not feel as delighted to be at home again as she had expected.

“I am anxious about Alys, I suppose,” she said to herself, “and sorry to have been obliged to disappoint her. If she knew, what would she think or feel? would she ever wish to see me again? I hardly think so, and I could never be at ease in her presence. Another reason in favour of my decision. Yet I wish I could have avoided saying some of the things I did—even to him. Oh, if only I could forget all about it!”

For, notwithstanding all the strength of mind she brought to bear on the subject, that scene in the wood Mary could not succeed in banishing from her thoughts. Over and over again it rose up before her, leaving behind it each time, it seemed to her, a sharper sting of pain, a more humiliating sense of self-reproach. Yet how and where had she been wrong? Was it not better to be honest at all costs? Over and over again she determined to banish it finally from her memory, but no sooner had she done so than some trifle—the sight of a primrose in Francie’s hat, or some apparently entirely disconnected allusion, would bring it back again as vividly as ever, and, with a certain fascination that Mary could not explain to herself, every word that Mr Cheviott had said, every change of expression that had come over his face, would repeat themselves to her imagination. Was it true? she asked herself, was it true what he had said to her?—but for her previous knowledge of his real character, but for the deep-dyed “prejudice,” as he had called it, against him in her mind, could she ever have grown to care for this man? Surely not—yet why did this assertion of his recur to her so often, and not altogether in the sense of re-arousing her indignation?

“He is like two people in one,” she said to herself, “but as to which is the real one, facts, fortunately, leave me in no doubt. And yet I am sorry to have wounded him so deeply, little as he cared for the feelings of others.”

“You look tired, Mary dear,” said her mother, when, after the early Rectory breakfast, Mary was preparing as usual to collect her sisters and little Brooke for lessons in the school-room. “Don’t you think you might leave the children to manage for themselves one other day? You need rest, I am sure, after all you have gone through.”

“No, mother dear, I am really not tired,” said Mary. “I only feel rather—I don’t know how—dissipated, I suppose, unsettled, or whatever you like to call it.”

“That only means tired, dear,” repeated her mother, fondly, so fondly—for Mrs Western was not, as a rule, demonstrative with her children—that Mary felt angry with herself for not being able to respond more gratefully to her solicitude, for, in fact, feeling rather irritated than soothed by it.

“But I have really had nothing to tire me, mother,” she persisted. “Alys Cheviott was as considerate as possible, and, except the first two nights, I had no watching or anxiety. It was hardly to be called ‘nursing’.”

“Perhaps not,” allowed Mrs Western, “but there was the constraint and discomfort of the life—above all, the enforced intercourse with that disagreeable man—that Mr Cheviott, whom you dislike so. I really cannot tell you, Mary dear, how much I have admired your unselfishness and moral courage during this trying time. But you will never regret it. Who knows how much good you may have done that poor girl for all her life—poor I cannot but call her, notwithstanding her riches and position, and everything—fatherless and motherless, and with such a cold, selfish brother as her only protector.”

“He is a very good brother to her, mother. I cannot but confess that I was astonished at his devotion and tenderness to her, and they are deeply attached to each other,” said Mary, her colour rising a little as she spoke. “I am afraid, mother, I sometimes am too wholesale in my opinion of people. Once I take a dislike to them it is difficult for me to see any good in them. I want to correct this in myself.”

“You are so honest, dear,” said her mother.

“And as for my doing good to Alys Cheviott,” continued Mary, “it seems to me rather that she might do me good. She is so simple, so unselfish and unspoiled.”

“Anyway, I am glad they were considerate, and, I suppose, grateful,” said Mrs Western. “How, indeed, could they be otherwise?”

And Mary went off to her pupils.

But lessons seemed rather heavy work this morning. The fortnight’s interregnum had been far from salutary in its effects. Alexa was languid and uninterested, Josey pert and self-willed, Brooke and Francie quarrelsome and careless. And, lessons over, there was no Lilias to whom to resort for ever ready sympathy. Mary felt strangely dull and dispirited. She missed Alys’s bright yet gentle companionship, Mr Cheviott’s constant watchful attention, of which at the time she had hardly been conscious. She missed the quiet and refinement which had of late surrounded her even in the homely farm-house. Not that “home” was unrefined in the coarser sense of the word, but it seemed strangely full of small worries and irksomenesses and “fuss,” and Mary hated herself for feeling less heartily ready than usual to take her share in them. She looked round her with vague dissatisfaction and misgiving. How hard a thing it was, after all, to be poor! How difficult, increasingly difficult, it appeared to bring up these younger girls as could be desired! The boys must make their own way in the world; but with regard to Alexa and Josey, there was no doubt that they stood at a disadvantage both as to the present and the future.

“Lilias and I had our own places in the family even at their ages,” thought Mary; “but the third and fourth daughters of a poor clergyman—what are they to do? If it were possible to give them a couple of years’ training at some first-rate school they might be fitted to be governesses. But such a thing is not to be thought of,” and, with a sigh, she turned to the letter to Lilias which was costing her unusual pains from her excessive anxiety not to let it seem less cheerful in tone than usual. “What would Lilias say if she knew?” she said to herself as she wrote. “I do not think I need ever tell her, or any one, that is one comfort, and—oh, if only I could forget all about it myself!”

The next morning brought a letter from Lilias. It came, as the letters generally did, at breakfast-time, an hour at which there was but little possibility of privacy for any of the Rectory party. Mary opened, but merely glanced at it, and put it in her pocket to read when alone.

“From Lilias,” she said, calmly. “It is a long letter. I will read it afterwards. She begins by saying she is quite well, and sends her love to everybody, so no one need feel anxious about her.”

“You might read it now, Mary,” said Josey. “It would be something to talk about. You forget how dull it is for Alexa and me—never any change from year’s end to year’s end—while Lilias and you go about paying visits. The least you can do is to amuse us when you return, and you haven’t told us a thing about the Cheviotts.”

“Josephine, be quiet at once,” said Mr Western, severely, and to every one’s surprise. “That shrill voice of yours seems to stab my head through and through.”

“Have you a headache, father dear?” said Mary, with concern. Such an occurrence was a rare one.

“Not exactly, but my head seems oppressed and uneasy. I long for quiet,” said the Rector, nervously passing his hand across his forehead. “Lilias—did you say there was a letter from her? How is she? When does she return?”

“Return?” repeated Mary, in surprise. “Why, dear papa, she has not been away a fortnight yet! The London doctors cannot yet say how soon Mr Greville is to go to Hastings, and they mean to stay there a month at least.”

“Ah, yes, to be sure. I am glad she is enjoying herself, poor child, but I shall be glad to have her back again,” said Mr Western, vaguely, but with a slight confusion of manner which struck Mary as unlike his usual clear way of expressing himself. She put it all down to the “headache,” however, as her mother said he had been suffering a little from something of the kind lately. And by the afternoon he seemed quite like himself again.

It was not till after morning school hours that conscientious Mary felt herself free to read the precious letter. She had looked forward to it as a treat all the morning, and had, from the thoughts of it, gathered extra patience with which to deal with her somewhat unruly pupils. They got on rather better this morning, however.

“I shall get them into shape again in a little,” said Mary, to herself, as at last she sat down on the low window-seat in her own room at leisure to read all that Lilias had to say; “but it certainly does not do for me to leave home even for a few days. Even if I could have agreed to go to Romary sometimes, that is another reason against it. And, besides, the life there would spoil me for my home duties.”

A vision, a tempting vision, came over her for a moment of how pleasant a thing “the life there” must be. The quiet and regularity of a well-trained and well-managed household were in themselves a delightful thing to one of Mary’s naturally methodical and orderly nature; then the prettiness of the surroundings, the gardens, and the flowers, and the tastefully furnished rooms, the pictures, and the books, and the pleasant voices whose tones seemed still to ring in her ears. What pleasant talks they could have had, they three together; how kind and attentive to every wish or fancy of hers they would have been; how they would have fêted and made much of her in return for her easy task of nursing Alys, had she but “given in” and agreed to forsake her colours! Mary was by no means indifferent, in her own way, to the agreeableness of much that would have surrounded her position as a guest at Romary; she was a perfectly healthy-natured girl, well able to enjoy when enjoyment came in her way, and a girl too of barely one-and-twenty. She gave a little sigh as she re-opened her letter, hoping, in some vague, half-unconscious way, therein to find consolation and support and tacit approval—ignorant though Lilias was of all details of the sturdy stand she had made.

But she was disappointed.

The letter was a nice letter, a very nice letter, as affectionate, sympathising, and sister-like as a letter could be. Written too in very good spirits, it was evident to see; the very result that Mary had so hoped for from Lilias’s visit seemed already to be accomplished à merveille. Why was not Mary pleased?

“What an inconsistent, selfish creature I must be,” she said to herself, when she had finished it. “Why am I not glad, delighted, to see that Lilias is happy again? If she did not care much for Captain Beverley, if I was mistaken in imagining her whole heart to be given to him, should I not rejoice? It does not alter my position, it does not in the least condone the cruel interference that might have ruined her life.”

She turned again to a passage in which Lilias spoke of the Cheviotts.

“Now that you are at home again,” wrote Miss Western, “you will have more time—at least, you will feel freer to tell me all about the Cheviotts. For it always seems to me a mean sort of thing to sit down and write elaborate pulling to pieces of people whose hospitality one is in the act of receiving, even though in your case the receiving it was certainly enforced and not voluntary. I cannot help thinking Miss Cheviott an unusually lovable girl, and I shall not be at all sorry to hear that you have got rid of your terrible prejudice against the brother; I feel so sure that it is to a great extent undeserved.”

Mary turned over the page impatiently.

“I wish people would not write about what they don’t understand,” she said to herself. “How can Lilias’s ‘feeling sure’ affect the question one way or the other?”

Then glancing again at the letter, she saw that there was a long postscript on a separate sheet yet unread.

“I am forgetting to tell you,” it said, “that I do believe I have come across those cousins of mother of whom you heard something from those Miss Morpeths when you were staying at the Grevilles. It was at the doctor’s. I had gone there with Mr Greville, as he hated going alone, and Mrs Greville had a cold. While we were in the waiting-room, an elderly, very nice-looking lady came in with a tall, thin, dreadfully delicate-looking boy of about seventeen. As Mr Greville was first summoned to the doctor, he happened to say as he left the room, ‘I shall only be a very few minutes this morning, Miss Western.’ Immediately the lady turned to me and asked me very nicely if I happened to be any relation of the Westerns of Hathercourt, and did I know Miss Cheviott of Romary? I was so astonished, but, of course, answered civilly. She seemed so pleased, and so did the boy, poor fellow, when I told them who I was. Mr Greville was back before there was time for any more explanation. But she gave me her card—‘Mrs Brabazon’—and asked where I was staying, and said she would hope to see me before we left town. The boy’s name she said was Anselm Brooke, and her own maiden name was Brooke, so they must be mamma’s people. Use your own discretion as to telling mother or not. It may only revive painful associations with her if nothing more comes of it.”

“It is curious,” thought Mary. “I think I may as well tell mother about it. It will give them all something else to talk of besides my adventures at the farm.”

Mrs Western was interested, in her quiet way, in Lilias’s news. Mr Western, somewhat to Mary’s surprise, took it up much more eagerly.

“I should be very thankful, relieved I may say, if some renewal of intercourse could take place with your mother’s relations,” he said when alone with Mary, the subject happening to be alluded to.

“Would you, papa?” said Mary. “I don’t feel as if I cared to know them in the least. We have been very happy and content without them all our lives.”

“Ah, yes! Ah, yes!” said her father. “But who knows, my dear, how long the present state of things may last? Were anything happening to me, I should leave you all strangely friendless and unprotected. The thought of it comes over me very grievously sometimes, and yet I hardly see what I could have done. Basil is so young—a few years hence I trust he may be beginning to get on—but it will be up-hill work.”

“But Lilias and I are strong and ‘capable,’ father,” said Mary, encouragingly. “We could work if needs were, for mother and the younger ones. Besides, you are not an old, or even an elderly man yet, papa.”

“I am not as young and by no means as strong as I have been,” said Mr Western with a sigh. “I don’t like this feeling in my head. I have never had anything like it before, and it makes me fidgety, though I have not said anything to make your mother uneasy. Perhaps it will be better now that I have spoken of it; it may be more nervousness than anything else.”

“I trust so, dear father,” said Mary, anxiously. “Are you not glad to have me back again? Didn’t you miss me dreadfully?” she added, trying to speak more lightly.

“Very much indeed, my dear. I dare say it affected my spirits more than I realised at the time. Yet I could wish, as I was saying, that all of you, you and Lilias especially, had more friends, more outside interests. I hope we have not been selfish and short-sighted in the way we have brought you up—keeping you too much to ourselves, as it were;” again Mr Western sighed. “It is possible, I suppose, to be too devoid of social ambition. By the way,” he went on, “I think that Mr Cheviott must be a very fine fellow. People took up an unreasonable prejudice against him in the country at first from his manner, which, I believe, is cold and stiff. But they are finding themselves mistaken. He must be exceeding clever, and, what is better, thoroughly right-minded. I have been very much pleased by some things I have heard of him lately; he has shown himself so liberal and yet sensible in his dealings with his tenantry.”

“Indeed,” said Mary. She was pleased to see her father roused to his usual healthy interest in such matters, yet wished devoutly the model proprietor in question had not been the master of Romary.

“That place has been grossly mismanaged in the old days,” continued Mr Western. “But it will be a very different story now. How I wish we had a squire of that kind here, there would be some hope then of doing practical and lasting good.”

“Still no squire is better than a bad one,” said Mary. “True, very true. How did you like Mr Cheviott, Mary? I was just thinking I should be rather pleased to make friends with him. He might be a good friend to the boys some day, and no one could say we had courted the acquaintance in the way your mother and I have always so deprecated.”

“No,” said Mary, feebly.

“Coming in such an altogether unexpected way, you see,” pursued Mr Western, who seemed “by the rule of contrary,” thought Mary, to be working himself up to increasing interest on the subject she was so anxious to avoid, “I should not have, by any means, the objection I have always had to such an acquaintance. They are sure to call—in fact, they cannot possibly avoid doing so.”

“I don’t know,” Mary moved herself to say, “I hardly think they will.”

“It will be exceedingly, strangely uncourteous if they do not,” said her father, with unusual warmth. “Surely, my dear, you were not so ill-advised as to say anything to discourage their doing so,” he added, in a tone of most unwonted irritability.

“I am afraid what I said may have indirectly tended to do so,” said poor Mary, feeling as if she were ready on the spot to run all the way to Romary and back to beg Mr Cheviott to call on her father at once.

“You were very foolish, very foolish indeed,” said Mr Western, severely. “It is pride, and very false pride, that is at the root of such things, and I warn you that much future suffering is in store for you if you encourage such a spirit.”

“I can’t imagine any future suffering much worse than the present one of having displeased you,” said Mary, struggling hard to keep back the tears that would come. “But indeed, father, I thought I was doing what you and mamma would like.”

“Your mother has been mistaken before now in such matters,” said Mr Western. “However, there is no more to be said about it. I confess I should have enjoyed seeing more of a man of Mr Cheviott’s character and talents, and it is mortifying at my age to be placed in the position of being unable to receive a friendly call from a neighbour.”

“But I did not put it in that way, papa, indeed I did not,” said Mary. “Oh, papa, cannot you trust me? If there is anything I have thoroughly at heart it is that you should receive all the respect and consideration you so entirely deserve.”

“Ah, well, ah, well, my dear, say no more about it. You have made a mistake, that is all. Do not distress yourself any more about it,” said Mr Western, with some return to his ordinary equanimity. But he pressed his hand wearily against his head as he spoke with the action that was becoming habitual to him, and Mary’s heart felt very heavy. On all sides nothing but reproach. Where or how had she done wrong? Was it all personal pride and offended feeling that had actuated her conduct, under the guise of unselfish devotion? No, take herself to task sharply as she would, her conscience would not say so.

“Though there must have been a mingling of personal feeling and wounded pride, far more than I was conscious of,” she said, regretfully. “And now it is too late. I have myself placed a far more hopeless barrier between us by the scornful way I rejected what—what he said to me, what, indeed, I do not believe he ever would have said had I not in a way goaded him to it. Oh, yes, I must have been wrong—if only I could clearly see how!”

She was too young to have had much experience of that terrible longing, that anguish of yearning “to see how” we have been wrong; too young to understand that, were that cry answered at our entreaty, half our hard battle would be over; too young to have any but the vaguest conception of the bewildering complication of motive in ourselves, as in others, which at times makes “right and wrong” seem but meaningless jargon in our ears, idle words to be presumptuously discarded with other worn-out childishness. As if our childhood were ever over in this world!—as if the existence of eternal truth depended on our understanding of it!

Mr Western’s headache increased to severity that afternoon, and Mary took all the blame of it on to herself, notwithstanding her mother’s consolations and assurances that it would pass off again as it had done before.

Chapter Twenty Five.

A Turn of the Wheel.

“This changing, and great variance Of earthly states, up and down, Is not but casualty and chance (As some men say is without ressown).” Robert Henrysoun.

It did “pass off” again. The next day Mr Western seemed nearly as well as usual, though to Mary’s eyes there was a tired and unrestful expression on his face with which she could not feel familiar.

“He is not looking well. He does not seem like his old self, I am certain,” she said in her own mind over and over again. But what could be done? He declared there was nothing really wrong; the very mention of sending for Mr Brandreth irritated him unaccountably, and he was most urgent with Mary to say nothing to arouse her mother’s anxiety. So the utmost Mary could do was to please him in all the small ways ready affection can always suggest, to exert herself to be even more cheerful and entertaining than her wont.

She wrote to Lilias, begging her to let most of her letters be to her father, and urging upon her the desirability of meeting with all possible cordiality Mrs Brabazon’s friendly overtures. But for some days Lilias had nothing more to tell of the new-found cousins.

A week passed, a week of pretty hard work for Mary. What with “the children’s” extra calls upon her patience and attention, her anxiety about her father, and unusual efforts to seem cheerful and light-hearted, its close found her really tired and dispirited.

“Far more tired than with nursing Alys,” she said to herself, when on Saturday afternoon she was taking Brooke and Francie a walk, thankful to know that the more troublesome members of her charge were safely disposed of for the rest of the day in a holiday expedition to old Mr Halkin’s farm. “That was play compared with the worry and fret of the last few days. And why should I feel it so? There is something not right about me just now. I am changed, though I blame the children. I have grown captious and discontented. I do believe that fortnight at the farm spoiled me—the being thanked and praised for everything I did. What a silly goose I am, after all! How I do wish I could hear how Alys is—I do think she might write again, but I suppose it is my own doing,” with a little sigh.

For two or three pencilled words from Miss Cheviott, saying merely that they had got safe to Romary, that she had borne the drive pretty well, but was woefully dull without Mary, were all the news Mary had had of her late patient.

Her thoughts were interrupted by little Francie. She had been running on in front of her brother, but turning suddenly, fled back to Mary in alarm.

“What’s the matter, dear?” her sister exclaimed, for the child was white and trembling.

“A horse,” whispered Francie, “another naughty horse coming so fast, Mary, and it makes me think of that dedful day.”

Francie’s fears had exaggerated facts. The horse, coming up behind them on the soft turf at the side of the path, which deadened the sound of its approach, was proceeding at an ordinary pace, which slackened somewhat when its rider caught sight of the little party in front of him. Slackened, but that was all. Mr Cheviott, for it was he, passed them at a gentle trot, just lifting his hat to Mary as he did so. Mary’s face flushed as she bowed in return.

“I do think,” she said to herself, “as we are not to be friends, it would be much better taste for him not to come our way at all. It will annoy poor father exceedingly, in his nervous state, to hear of Mr Cheviott almost, as it were, passing our door. But, of course, he may have business at the farm.”

And she called to Brooke and Francie, volunteering to tell them a story, and tried her best bravely to force her mind away from the sore subject. But a surprise was in store for her.

More than an hour later, when she and the children were close to the Rectory gate on their return home, little Brooke, who was of an observant turn of mind, called her attention to some fresh hoof marks on the gravel drive.

“See, Mary,” he said, “some one’s been here since we came out. I wonder if it was that horse we met, that the gentleman belonged to that bowed to you?”