Front matter (continued 5)

"My darling, how pale you are! And you have been crying! What has troubled you?"

His words recalled the truth to her. She turned away and strove to answer coldly.

"My head aches this evening," she said. "I must get off to bed early. I—I dare say it is the fog."

"Let me come in with you and speak to Mrs. Vaudeleur about you. I have a great deal to say to her."

"No, no—not to-night, and not until you have spoken to me first! You must come to-morrow and have a long talk with me. It is too late now, and I feel ill and tired—very tired!"

He drew her hand tenderly through his arm.

"You are crying again, my dear one!" he said. "I have a right to know what is troubling you. Let me take you home and stay with you a little while. Mrs. Vandeleur will, I am sure, excuse the informality of the visit now that she knows that we are so soon to be married."

"She knows nothing of all that."

"What? You have not told her?"

"Not yet. Don't be vexed, Lorin. I have not even seen her since you left me at the door last night."

"Well, at least you have told Miss Cavan?"

"Yes," Laline admitted, reluctantly, "I did say something about you to Miss Cavan."

"Something about me? Well, I suppose I must be content with that! But, Lina dear, are you so very much ashamed of me that you don't like to mention to any one that we are engaged?"

"No, of course not! How can you ask such an absurd question! But"—and here Laline was seized by a brilliant idea—"you know Mrs. Vandeleur will be very much annoyed at the idea of losing me just when I am beginning to be so useful to her as a secretary. We are exceedingly busy over her two books, and she has often told me that my value to her lies in the fact that my mind is not distracted by thoughts of love or money. She has been exceedingly kind to me, and it really seems too bad to talk about leaving her to get married almost as soon as we have started comfortably working together. It isn't fair to her, you see."

She spoke very fast, and lowered her head that he might not see the anxiety and distress in her eyes.

He laughed and drew her arm closer against his.

"Not fair to her!" he said. "How about being fair to me? Which is the more important—that Mrs. Vandeleur should lose an amanuensis to assist her in the compilation of her interesting but mischievous mysticism, or that you and I should miss the happiness of both our lives? Under the circumstances I should say it was rather wise of her to foretell terrible troubles to you should you fall in love. You are in love, I hope, dearest! And where are all these prophesied griefs and woes? No future can look brighter than ours."

She shuddered and clung closer to his arm. If he only knew!

"My uncle," Lorin continued, "is in the highest state of delight about our coming marriage. He wants you to have luncheon with him to-morrow. Bring Mrs. Vandeleur, if she will come at such short notice; but don't disappoint him. He was most anxious that I should bring you round to-day to receive his congratulations. I told him you had forbidden me to call until Monday. What I did not tell him was that I have been hanging round St. Mary's Crescent at intervals the whole day, hoping to catch you as you went in or out. I had a presentiment that you would be in trouble or low spirits, the result, I suppose, of a bad dream I had about you last night."

"What was that?"

"Oh, just as utterly meaningless and inconsequent as are most dreams! I thought I was in a forest, looking for you and following you. Every now and then I caught a glimpse of your white dress—you wore that gown you had on when I first saw you—glimmering through an opening in the trees. But as soon as I dashed forward in pursuit the branches closed together, as in the 'Sleeping Beauty' story, and you were lost to me again, while the whole wood seemed filled with mocking laughter."

"What sort of laughter?" she inquired, eagerly. "Was it like the laughter of any one you know?"

"Why do you ask? Perhaps it was—a little. But, Lina dear, you are trembling. It is horribly selfish of me to keep you walking about in the fog when you told me you were so tired! Let me take you home!"

"No—not yet, Lorin! I have a great deal to say to you, and I must say it now while no one can hear me. I—I have been thinking deeply all to-day, and I have decided that you and I have been too hasty—we have not given ourselves time to know our own minds."

"Wait!" he exclaimed. "I felt sure something was weighing on your mind; but I can't listen here in the noise of the streets. We will pass into the Park while you tell me."

They had reached the Albert Hall, and he led her at this point into Hyde Park, deserted but for a few devoted sweethearts, as regardless as themselves of the cold and fog and frost.

"Now tell me again, dear," he said, gently, "what you have to say about our engagement!"

In the obscurity he slipped his arm about her waist, and at his touch a restful delight crept over her senses. For a few seconds she kept silence. Very soon they must part, and with a whole lifetime of dreary lovelessness before her, surely she might without great sin afford herself the momentary joy of revelling in his caresses.

But duty, stern and forbidding, lay before her, and suddenly nerving herself to the effort, she drew away from him.

"I have something to say to you," she began, "and I want you to walk quietly by my side listening, and not to touch me while I speak. Lorin, we have made a great mistake; I, at least, know that I was only flirting with you. I had made up my mind before I met you not to marry, and I am still of the same mind. Let us just be friends again!"

"Never! We never have been friends, my darling, and we never can be! I loved you from the first moment when I heard your voice, from the first moment when I saw your face in the full lamplight. I was never your friend only, and I never shall be. I was and am your lover, and I shall be your husband!"

"I was only flirting!" she cried in desperation. "I thought you were in love with Clare Cavan! You flirted with her, I flirted with you. I—I have no real feeling for you at all! It was just a little petty triumph to get you away from her!"

The words died on her lips. He had stopped in the middle of the gravel-path and had drawn up her hands upon his shoulders.

"I told you not to touch me!" she faltered.

"Lina," he whispered, "Lina dear, even in fun I can't let you speak of yourself like that!"

He drew her tenderly into his arms. Her heart was beating madly and convulsive sobs began to shake her frame.

"Why do you torment me?" she cried, breaking into a storm of tears. "Can't you see that I am in earnest—that I am trying to find any excuse to free myself from my promise to you? I cannot marry you—I will not marry you! It is of no use to ask me for reasons! On my word of honour I am in earnest—I was never more in earnest in my life! It has all been a mistake from the beginning. I can never be your wife!"

"Lina!"

"It is of no use," she cried, hysterically, "to remonstrate with me or to appeal to my feelings. I have no feelings where men are concerned. I was always a flirt—Mrs. Melville could have told you that. At Norwood the foreign masters used to propose to me; but I never cared. It is all vanity with me and I don't know what love means!"

"Lina!"

"Oh, don't stand repeating my name like that! It would be more dignified if you get angry. But nothing can make any difference. You might spend the rest of your life and mine on your knees to me, but I cannot marry you—cannot! Do you understand, Mr. Armstrong? It is all over, this love-story of ours, and all we have to do now is to forget it!"

Through all the hysterical excitement of her talk there rang a note of despair which Lorin failed not to recognise and for which he was greatly at a loss to account.

"Lina," he said, again, "you are ill and unstrung; you don't know what you are saying. Something very serious has happened to trouble you to-day. Presently, when you feel better and calmer, you must tell me all about it. But, my darling, it is useless to try and persuade me that you did not love me yesterday or that you do not love me now!"

"I do not!"

"Lina, it is horribly dark and foggy and you don't see very well with those lovely, tearful eyes of yours. But look up now into my face, with your hands in mine—so—and your heart beating near mine, and tell me again that you do not love me!"

She stood still as he directed, and, clasping her hands, he held them up against his breast. Her face was ashen pale and even her lips were white. She strove to keep up the pitch of unnatural nervous excitement to which she had worked herself; but gradually, as he clasped her hands close in his, he felt their tension relax. Her form lost its defiant erectness; she quivered and swayed towards him, and would have fallen had he not caught her in his arms.

"Oh, Lorin, Lorin, I am so unhappy! I think my heart will break!"

Very weak and pitiful her accents sounded now as, like a tired child, she rested her cheek upon his shoulder for a few seconds, weeping bitterly. Lorin asked her no questions and contented himself with gently soothing her. Presently her sobs ceased, and suddenly raising her head, she tried to laugh.

"It's like a servant on her 'Sunday out,' isn't it," she said, with a feeble attempt at cheerfulness, "to meet my 'young man' after church, and walk in Hyde Park, with his arm round my waist, crying? Servants, when they get engaged, always cry a great deal. I remember when our parlour-maid at Norwood got engaged to the baker, she used to shed floods of tears in the pantry, and even weep while waiting at table. She and her young man were perpetually having what she called 'words'—about three times a week it used to happen—and then Emma cried her eyes out until they made it up. And after all she married the postman."

"Well, and, now that we have had our 'words,' darling, and you have had your weeping, and we have made it up, since we are having our 'Sunday evening out' in the Park, and it's so dark one can't see across the road, you must kiss me in sign of reconciliation."

But she shrank away from him, remembering, with a pang, that she was another man's wife, and that her love for Lorin was no longer a pride to her but a grievous fault.

"Not now," she said; and then, before he had time to complain of her coldness, she suddenly asked him why he had never, in speaking to her, alluded to his namesake and cousin.

Lorin did not answer for a moment, and when he spoke, it was in a somewhat constrained tone.

"I may not have mentioned him by name," he said, "but we have certainly alluded to him in our conversations. I have spoken to you of the responsibility I undertook more than five years ago, when I brought my cousin over from Boulogne to England after his wife's death——"

"You brought him over?"

"Yes. Uncle Alec thought he had reason to distrust him; but I believed my cousin's letters and went to him. It was a very sad and painful experience in many ways. He had only been married a month when the poor girl died. I was shown her grave and a picture of her, painted when she was a child. She must have been very pretty; but from what my cousin subsequently told me, I should say that she and old Garth, who called himself her uncle, but who impressed me very unfavourably, and who, I strongly suspect, was really her father, were nothing better than a couple of needy and swindling adventurers. Wallace always speaks of them both with intense bitterness; but Uncle Alec has never heard him, and persists in believing that this Laline is an angel of goodness, and that, had she lived, Wallace would have been very different. And I think he is probably right. A good wife is a man's salvation if she will only cling to him through good report and ill, and may well redeem him by her unselfish love."

"You overrate me, I know," Laline said, in a stifled voice, "and think me much better than I am. Tell me truly, Lorin, knowing me and knowing him, do you think that if your cousin Wallace had been married to me, for instance, he would have been induced to lead a better life?"

He pressed both her hands tightly in his.

"It seems sacrilege," he exclaimed, "to think of you as married to him! But I believe that, if you had met him at the time I speak of, you might have saved him."

CHAPTER XXIII.

Lorin little guessed how his words, "You might have saved him," concerning his cousin Wallace stung Laline.

It was a view of the matter which had never presented itself to her that she had failed in her duty when she fled from her husband and her father at Boulogne. The formal and business-like contract before the Consul had meant so little to her, and the shock of discovering Wallace's real feelings and character was so great, that flight seemed the only course open to her at the time. But now, from the mouth of the man she loved, she heard the first judgment and condemnation of her conduct which had ever reached her, and as she walked on in silence by his side in her heart she rebelled against the sentence.

She was so young. What possible influence could a girl of sixteen have had over a man of determined temper and confirmed bad habits such as Wallace Armstrong? He did not even love her. Had she not heard him avow to her father that he considered her in the light of an encumbrance? More than that—his words had clearly foreshadowed the rough and even brutal treatment she would receive should she refuse to tell a series of lies to gain his ends. And by her help he had attained them. He had been taken to England, had been received into his uncle's house and given that start in life of which he professed to stand in need. Had she sacrificed her life to him as well, what more could he have secured? He had had his chance and had miserably failed to make use of it. With a wife or without a wife, in all probability he would still have been the same worthless, reckless, ne'er-do-well he had that evening shown himself to be.

Another point presented itself clearly to Laline in the pause that followed Lorin's speech. It was evident that he had formed an unfavourable opinion of his cousin's lost bride. On the strength of the falsified certificate and Wallace's misrepresentations he believed that she had been married for rather more than a month before she died. Should Laline therefore have been minded to tell him the whole truth, she would not only have had the greatest difficulty in making it credible and comprehensible to him, but she would have had to persuade him, in the face of her husband's and her late father's testimony and that of the certificate, that she had never been more than a nominal wife to his cousin.

A hot blush enveloped her from head to feet at the thought. Lorin was inclined to be jealous. How would he ever believe her again when he recalled her oft-repeated assertions that never before had she known the happiness of loving and being loved, and that his kisses were the first she had ever received, in the face of the fact of that early marriage?

To confide in him was clearly impossible. From what he had already stated as his opinions he might even think it right for her to go back to her husband, a course of which the mere idea sickened and terrified her. And yet, while he ignored the fact of her marriage, how could she possibly sever the link between them?

"Lorin," she asked him, suddenly, "what would you do, loving me as you say you do—and I believe you—if some terrible obstacle were to come between us?"

"I should fight against it until it was destroyed, of course."

"No—don't answer lightly. I am in earnest—in terrible earnest! Suppose it was with you as with some people in a book I read not long ago—that you had, while very young, contracted a marriage, a wholly unsuitable marriage, with a woman, whom you had left immediately because you found you had been terribly mistaken in her; suppose that you saw and heard nothing of her for years, and that then, having good reason for believing your wife dead, you had met me—just as you did, you know—and had grown to love me, as a man can love, with all your heart and mind and soul?"

"Well?"

"Then—say, at just this point where we are now—either to-night or to-morrow—say that you learned that the woman you married was not dead, but that, so far from wanting you, she ignored your existence, that she was practically insane, and that you could neither get free from her nor render her the least assistance, what would you do? Now think well, dearest, before you answer, for a great deal depends upon it."

"What can you mean?"

"Nothing; but that, much as I love you, I can't love you wholly unless I understand you wholly. Remember how short a time we have really known each other. I know you always tell me the truth; and so, by putting these imaginary cases and learning how you would act in them, I can grow to understand you better. Tell me what you would do?"

"It's so difficult to say," he answered, after a short pause, knitting his brows. "And you have made it more difficult by something you have just said—'I know you always tell me the truth.' A man might be terribly tempted in such a case as you described to say nothing, and to seize his happiness while it lay within reach. Life is so short and happiness so hard to get. But, if a woman trusted a man as you say you trust me, that would be a cowardly and treacherous act towards her."

"How, cowardly and treacherous if it made her happy—if it would have broken her heart to part from him?"

"My darling, you are exciting yourself very unnecessarily over these imaginary difficulties! There are actually tears in your eyes! Surely life has enough worries without inventing others? Let us dismiss the subject and be happy together while we may."

"I can't be happy unless you satisfy me. I am fanciful to-night, I know, but my head aches; and—and please humour me, Lorin dear, and answer me about yourself and what you would do. Don't say 'a man might,' but 'I should do' so and so. Think again! If you told me the truth in such a case, I suppose the only word you could expect would be 'Good-bye'?"

"I wonder," he said, thoughtfully—"I wonder if you would say that?"

"No—I shouldn't—I couldn't!" she cried, suddenly clinging to his arm. "And if I refused to part from you, knowing all, what would you do?"

"I suppose a man ought to protect a woman even against herself," he replied. "But I don't like to think of what I might do if losing you were at stake. You see, Lina, I have been waiting for you all my life; and I am twenty-eight this year—approaching middle life, in fact. Women have often charmed and interested me. I have wanted to talk to them, to sketch them, to look at them, but never to marry them. But as soon as I saw your face, and even before I saw it, when I had only stood near you and heard you speak, a voice within me said, 'That is my wife.' If you had been in quite another rank of life it would have been the same. Had you been a princess of the blood-royal or a laundress, I should have had to what is called 'make a fool of myself' for you. I was bound to follow you, to tell you of my love, to try and make you love me, but in any case to marry you. There was nothing else to be done, even if it involved Israel's seven years' courtship, though I should certainly have rebelled against such a long engagement! All my nature cried out for you. It is not only your beauty—though I love that most heartily—but it is the beautiful soul looking from your eyes that I love. Your voice, your touch, your presence, your mind and thoughts, are all just what I have dreamed of as my ideal, just what I require to make my life complete. Selfish that sounds, doesn't it? But I could not quite feel all that unless you had almost equal need of me. That is why I say that nothing must part us; and it would be not only folly but absolute wickedness either for you or for me to try to break the bond between us."

"Even if either of us was—married?" she faltered almost inaudibly.

"To some one else? But that would be impossible. I could not have felt as I did about you if I had not been, as you have often told me, the first and only man who ever spoke to you of love; nor could your eyes have met mine as they did and shown me your sweet child-mind shining through had you ever before cared for any man. There—are all your questions answered, and all your doubts set at rest?"

"Yes—I suppose so," she conceded. "I am tired, Lorin. Take me home now."

They passed out of the Park into the high road, and she walked by his side in silence while he spoke to her, tentatively at first, but with more assurance as she did not attempt to interrupt him, concerning their future plans, gently urging her to fix the exact date of their wedding.

"It seems odd that Mrs. Vandeleur should know nothing as yet direct from you about our engagement," he said; "but of course as you have not seen her that could not be helped. She will be in when you return, no doubt; and then you can tell her and arrange about the purchase of this wonderful trousseau which seems to trouble you so much. Surely a fortnight will be amply sufficient to buy all the finery you want? My uncle sends you, with his love, a blank cheque, to be filled in with what amount you please. Shall I give it to you now, or will you take it to-morrow when you are coming to luncheon with us?"

"Oh, to-morrow—to-morrow!" she answered, hurriedly, snatching at the chance of deferring that explanation which sooner or later was bound to come.

If she could only put off the marriage indefinitely the while she could enjoy the solace of Lorin's society, she told herself she would be well content.

"We are so happy as we are," she observed, presently, "that it seems to me to be very silly to hurry to another state of things. Old married people always look back to their courting days as to the happiest period of their lives. Personally I don't in the least want to be married for years to come. We can be dear friends and companions, and can meet when we please——"

"That is not nearly enough for me," he interrupted. "It is like offering a starving man a caramel to expect me to be satisfied with seeing you occasionally. I must not only see you all the time, but you must belong to me and I to you. My friend Robert Browning, whom you must grow to read and love, has glorified married love, which is the only happy love, in some of the finest lines ever written. Listen!

"'Life will just hold out the proving both our powers, alone and blended; And then, come next life quickly! This world's use will have been ended.'"

A sob rose in Laline's throat as Lorin, holding her hand close within his arm, bent his head to murmur the words in her ear. The picture they presented before her mind's eye was tantalisingly happy, and yet it was just such perfect happiness that she must nerve herself to banish from her life. Tears blinded her as, with lowered head, she walked on by his side.

They had by this time reached the High Street, deserted at this late hour on Sunday night but for a small group of dirty loiterers outside a public-house, from the doors of which a man was apparently being forcibly thrown.

Laline, who had a feminine terror of drunken men, clung closer to Lorin's arm; but as he moved quickly to the outer edge of the pavement in order to give the group a wide berth, she felt him suddenly start violently, and looking up, perceived that he was frowning heavily and that he wore a look of deep annoyance.

Following the direction of his eyes, Laline instantly understood the cause of his vexation; for the man who, lividly pale and madly intoxicated, was struggling in the grasp of three others, shouting curses and dealing murderous blows to right and left of him, was Wallace Armstrong, Lorin's cousin and her husband.

Tightening the pressure of her hand within his arm, Lorin was hurrying Laline past the shameful spectacle, when she suddenly stopped him.

"Leave me," she whispered, with pale lips—"go to him! Take him away before he does more mischief!"

Lorin stared at her in astonishment.

"What—do you know——" he began, when she cut him short.

"I know everything. Leave me and take him home!"

Then, before he could speak, she drew her hand from his arm and flew rather than walked the short distance to St. Mary's Crescent.

Once she had re-entered the house and gained the privacy of her own room, she threw herself face downwards on the bed, feeling utterly worn out and exhausted by the experiences of the past twenty-four hours. Before her closed eyes two faces arose in the darkness—those of the man she loved and the man who was her husband.

As she had last seen them, so they flitted before her, Lorin's face clouded by a look of distress and indignation, which changed to deep tenderness as his eyes met hers, and Wallace's distorted by drink and by fury, as she had seen it years ago upon her wedding-day and again beheld it on this eventful evening.

And as she marked the contrast between them and compared her instinctive dislike and disgust in the presence of her husband with the passionate delight which thrilled her at the proximity of her lover, a temptation stole into her mind and grew stronger every moment.

Why, she asked herself, should not the dead past bury its dead? Laline Armstrong had disappeared—Wallace himself had given out that she was dead and his cousin and uncle believed him. She would even have some difficulty in proving her identity; and without the testimony of Mrs. Melville, between whom and herself many miles of ocean rolled, she would find it almost impossible to connect Lina Grahame with Laline Garth. The latter was dead and her actions had died with her. Why should she, Lina Grahame, hesitate to marry the man she loved because that dead Laline had once gone through a form of marriage with his cousin?

It was quite clear that Wallace did not recognise his over-grown child-bride in the tall and slender woman who was engaged to his cousin; and even Lorin, who had at first been haunted by her likeness to a portrait he had seen of Laline as a child, failed to recall where the picture had met his eyes. Only her own word could betray her, and that word she was strenuously resolved not to utter.

Surely—surely, she argued, as she lay there like some dead thing, scarcely breathing, so intent she was in thought, she would be committing no great sin if she ignored the past? It was not as if Wallace wanted her, remembered her, or had even ever loved her. Wallace was hopeless; and she almost wondered now at her own conduct when she despatched Lorin to his cousin's aid that night. Was she to spoil Lorin's life, and her own as well, for the sake of a degraded and drunken creature, alike incapable of gratitude and of love?

And yet the next moment, through all her horror of the man, there shone a gleam of compassion. Was it wholly his own fault that he was a pariah, driven to herd with social outcasts, to sit and drink his brains away amid tavern surroundings? To her personally, in those far-away Boulogne days, he had seemed extremely kind. She well remembered the treats he had given her and the children, the drives and sweets and pastry, and the pretty things he had bought for her. Her childish mind had been fascinated and interested by the man whose sable locks and stalwart frame reminded her of Brian de Bois-Guilbert.

Since those days he had indeed degenerated rapidly; but some good there must certainly be in him, or he could not have retained through all these years the affection of his uncle and his cousin. Her own father, too, had helped to ruin him as a very young man; and it was to settle debts incurred in Captain Garth's gaming establishment that Wallace had committed the forgery which first brought about his banishment from his native land.

These thoughts tortured Laline; and through the long hours of the night she lay awake, torn by conflicting sentiments of pity for Lorin, pity for herself, and pity for her husband. Towards morning she had half decided on flight as the sole way out of her difficulties, until the thought of a confession to old Alexander Wallace of all but the name of her husband suggested itself as an alternative course.

Throughout the wakeful hours she strove to fight down the insidious temptation to hold her peace and fulfil her engagement with the man she loved. No happiness could come, she repeatedly reminded herself, of a union founded on a lie. And how could she ever meet Lorin's eyes and hear him asseverate his trust and his belief in her with such a secret between them?

So all through the night the turmoil of her mind endured; and, when she rose in the morning, it was with the feeling that many years of thought and suffering had passed over her head.

Not one word of Lorin did she speak to Mrs. Vandeleur when she asked permission to go out to luncheon; and, once arrived at the bank, she half dreaded meeting him. Adams, the sedate-looking man-servant, showed her into the cosy sitting-room up-stairs, in which tea had been served on the occasion of her former visit.

A man, who was seated by the fire, with his back to the door, reading a newspaper, rose on her entrance and faced her. And Laline saw, to her intense vexation and alarm, that it was not Lorin, but his cousin Wallace Armstrong.

CHAPTER XXIV.

The colour fled from Laline's face as she found herself in the full daylight face to face with the man whom of all the world she least wished to meet.

Wallace on his part was deeply moved by her beauty, by the grace and refinement that distinguished her, and stirred to wonder where he had met the direct gaze of those wistful hazel eyes before. A sleepless night, together with the emotions she had recently experienced, rendered Laline unusually pale; but her pallor and extreme slightness only served to emphasise the spirituality and fragility of her appearance; and, standing there before him in her broad-brimmed black-velvet hat and rich furs, she looked like one of Gainsborough's dainty great ladies come to life in modern costume.

But the daylight, which revealed no flaw in the girl's clear skin and delicate features, touched the man less becomingly. Hard living had furrowed his face and prematurely silvered his hair and the light in his eyes was fitful and sunken. He looked what he was—the wreck of a man gifted by nature with exceptional strength and beauty, one who should have been a king among men, but who had let himself drift downward to the dregs of society.

He would have held out his hand, but her cold glance and still colder bow restrained him. An angry flush passed over his face as he noted them.

"Oh, I remember!" he said, trying to speak with defiant carelessness. "We insulted each other at our last merry meeting, didn't we, Miss Graham? But won't you let by-gones be by-gones?"

"I expected to meet Mr. Wallace and his nephew," she said icily, turning away that he might no longer study her face. She was trembling with excitement and nervousness and almost sick with fear lest he should recognise her. But her secret alarm was only indicated by an unsympathetic staccato of utterance.

"My cousin was telegraphed for to the City this morning, and cannot be here for at least half an hour. As to my uncle, he is at present in his rooms, and I have given particular instructions that he is not to know that you are here."

She turned upon him, white with indignant surprise.

"Do I understand you to say that you have given such an order?" she inquired.

"Yes."

"May I ask, Mr. Armstrong, your reason for taking so extraordinary a step?"

"I wanted to talk to you."

Laline's heart sank within her. Surely he could not have recognised her?

"I have not the slightest wish for any conversation with you, Mr. Armstrong!" she said, in a voice which it needed all her self-control to render firm. "May I ask you to ring the bell, that the servant may inform Mr. Alexander Wallace that I am here?"

"Wait a minute! I want to go back to something you said the last time I saw you!"

"There is no need, and I must decline to discuss the subject. If you do not ring the bell, Mr. Armstrong, I shall!"

She moved quickly towards the fireplace. She was horribly afraid of being left alone with him. Something in his coarse and masterful personality affected her with a sense of mingled fear and repulsion, and it seemed difficult for her to breathe the same air with him.

"I want," he repeated, doggedly, coming between her and the fireplace, "to speak to you about what you said when I last saw you."

"Pardon me," she exclaimed, flashing a look of deep scorn upon him, "that was not the last time I saw you! Much later, between ten and eleven at night, I was passing along the High Street, Kensington, and I saw you again!"

She lowered her voice on the last words, and a deep blush of shame for him passed over her face. Wallace saw the colour, and recognised the sentiment that called it there. Something like a flush crossed his face too.

"So you were with Lorin," he said. "I thought as much! All the more reason why I should speak to you. Miss Grahame, it was you who drove me to drink last night—you and no one else!"

For almost the first time in her life Laline smiled satirically. Clearly she did not believe him.

"It is true, all the same," he said, answering her look. "When Lorin got me out of that hole last night—and I admit he's had to do the same thing before—he took me home to my diggings; and presently, when I had had a cooling draught and put my head under the tap, it came out in a little talk that I had called on that table-rapping little woman yesterday afternoon in order to have a look at you. Then, for once in his life, my immaculate cousin lost his temper. I have hardly ever seen him so angry. It appears that he had been trying hard to keep me dark. Such men as I, he had the impudence to tell me, were not fit to cross the paths of such women as you, and it was sacrilege for me even to mention your name. 'Now I know why she wanted to break off her engagement with me!' he cried out. 'She could not bear the thought of being even distantly connected with you!' It was the first time that Lorin had ever rounded on me like that, and I could have killed him but for the fact that he had just bruised his arm a bit getting me out of a scrape."

"Bruised his arm! Oh, is he much hurt?" Laline cried, anxiously.

An ugly smile crossed Wallace's face.

"A bruise on his arm is of more importance to you than my whole existence—isn't it?" he asked, bitterly.

Laline's spirit was roused.

"Certainly it is, Mr. Armstrong," she retorted; "and I should never forgive myself if, after I had sent your cousin to rescue you in a disreputable scuffle, he had been hurt while protecting you."

"Don't distress yourself. A little arnica, together with your sympathy, will soon cure him!" he sneered. "What I want to speak about is this. When you met me yesterday you told me my cousin had never mentioned my name to you; he confirmed your statement, and he is one of those George Washington sort of prodigies who scorn to tell a lie. I was sober enough yesterday afternoon in all conscience; and yet, from what he said, you at once hated me so much that you wanted to break with him on my account. Is that true?"

The colour came and went in Laline's face, and her heart beat fast. It was indeed only too true that on his account she must part from Lorin—but true in a far deeper and distant sense than Wallace knew or could guess.

"I cannot discuss my private affairs with you," she said in a very low voice, and without looking him in the face.

"But if you have any sense of justice," he returned, quickly, "you will tell me what reason you had for the scorn and hatred—for it was nothing short of that—you showed from the moment that you found out it was not my cousin but I to whose arms you had rushed. Those few seconds, while you clung to me before you found out your mistake, were among the sweetest in my life."

"Mr. Armstrong," she said, growing hot with anger, "if you are only detaining me here to insult me, your conduct is even worse than I expected from you."

"Is it an insult," he asked, "to tell you that a spontaneous caress from a woman as good as she is beautiful made me feel another man? Is it an insult to tell you that, during those few seconds, while you rested your head on my shoulder and I felt the touch of your hands about my neck, I would have given the rest of my life to have been for a few moments only the man you loved?"

"It is impossible!" she cried, in great agitation. "You had not even seen my face!"

"Just a fleeting glimpse in the twilight of beautiful appealing eyes and beautiful arms outstretched towards me. But it was the love in your touch, Miss Grahame, and the love in your voice which moved me. No woman has ever loved me like that. The women I have known have been fools, or worse. But as you nestled in my arms for those few seconds and I smoothed your hair, I understand what a woman like you might make of a man like me."

Instinctively he moved one step towards her, and as instinctively Laline put up her hand, as though to ward him off, and drew a step farther away from him. He saw the action and frowned impatiently.

"Why should you hate me as you do?" he asked, in tones of passionate anger. "Can you not love my cousin without hating me? I tell you it was the thought of your scornful eyes and your scornful voice that drove me to drink yesterday. I had been half inclined to swear off and reform and be reconciled to my uncle, and all that; but your disdain seemed to choke me. I couldn't go home and think about it, so I tried to drown the memory of you and your words too. Now be frank with me, Miss Grahame. What could have made you hate me even before we had ever met, unless it was Lorin's account of me?"

"I had heard about you from others," she answered, in a confused tone, averting her face from him. "I—I have a horror of people who drink. I had seen things about you in the papers——"

"Oh, I don't pretend to be a saint!" he broke in. "My life is my own—it's of no value to any one but myself; and what I do with it is no one's concern but my own. My flawless cousin is perpetually playing guardian angel to me. It is a part he enjoys, and he ought to be grateful to me for providing employment for him in that capacity."

"It is your paltry sneers about your cousin that make me dislike you, Mr. Armstrong!" Laline flashed out at last. "I am not one of the women who care for dissipated heroes or who believe in the love of reformed rakes; and I see nothing to sneer at in the unselfish goodness of an honourable man towards an ungrateful relative. The sneers and sarcasm, to my mind, should be for the man who deliberately indulges in degrading vices and then poses as unloved and misunderstood because well-conducted people have no wish to know him."

Just for one second a look of furious anger shot from Wallace's eyes. Then he turned humble again.

"I beg your pardon," he said, "for seeming to disparage my cousin. But why should he have everything and I nothing? Is it not enough to be accepted as my uncle's heir—to be rich, successful, and popular, and a partner in one of the finest businesses in London—but he must also have the love of one of the best and purest and most beautiful of women? Why should he have everything and I nothing? In this very house, every corner of which I knew as a boy, I have had for weeks and months past to slink about like a hunted thief, flying from the man who should by rights stand to me in the place of a father. I have been allowed here on sufferance by my cousin and the butler, who take it upon them to lock up everything but tea and soda-water while I am about, and who watch me as though I were a dangerous wild beast. Do you think such treatment tends to sweeten a man's disposition or to make him think better of his fellow-creatures?"

"You did not look, when I entered, as though you were here on sufferance, or as if you greatly feared being found here by Mr. Wallace," Laline remarked, coldly.

"No; but for this immunity I have had to do penance with bell and candle. I was only taken back into favour this morning at Lorin's intervention, and have had to promise and vow unheard-of things in the way of reformation before my uncle would condescend to shake hands with me."

"And it was Lorin who brought the reconciliation about?"

"Oh, Lorin—always Lorin to the fore in good works!" he sneered. "I think in this case it was as a set-off in the ledger of his conscience against having gone for me and called me bad names last night."

"Is it possible you feel no gratitude towards him?"

"No," he answered, roughly; "I don't understand gratitude! Love and hate I know, and scorn, and even now and then, in weak moments, something like regret. But that last is waste of time; and as to gratitude—why should one be grateful? No man does more for another than he feels inclined to. Some people enjoy giving up things and being unselfish and denying themselves and so on. I don't. I have never yet met the man or woman who, in my opinion, was worth the slightest sacrifice from me, and I don't suppose I ever shall. Don't turn from me in such disgust, Miss Grahame. Most people think as I do, but fear of others make them hold their tongue about it and pose as being fond of doing good and all that sort of humbug. Now I am not like that."

"No," she returned; "I see you are not. You like to boast of your evil qualities as though you were proud of them; and you think it a fine thing to utter bitter and uncalled-for jests at the expense of others, under the pretence of loving truth."

"Miss Grahame," he said, suddenly seizing her gloved hands and turning her face to the light, "what makes you hate me as you do? It sounds in your voice, which vibrates with dislike; you shrink back from my touch as though I were a viper; you can't even look me in the face; and your scorn breaks out in every word you utter. What possible harm have I ever done you that you should hate me as you do?"

His fierce pressure of her hands hurt her, and the very touch of his fingers had the effect of making her tingle from head to foot with aversion. A desire, which was almost hysterical in its intensity, came upon Laline to answer him back the truth, and cry,—

"I hate you because you are my husband, because you won me by a cruel and heartless trick, because I understand your nature and my own revolts against it, and because you stand between me and the man I love with all my heart and soul!"

"Why won't you look at me?" he was asking. "Is my appearance so loathsome that you daren't even do that? Look in my eyes, and you will read there whether, if I had Lorin's chance, I could not love you a thousand times better than he is capable of doing. Love! He doesn't know what it means. How can a man with beautiful manners and beautiful clothes, a man who paints pretty pictures and plays tennis with pretty girls, a man of flawless character with his pockets full of money and his future nicely garden-rolled before him, know of the passion that burns in the veins of a friendless scamp such as I? Your good men who go to church on Sunday and stick to their desks so many hours on weekdays don't know the meaning of the word passion. Lorin has everything in life—why should he want you too? Good women like you are sent into the world to redeem bad men like me, not to carve beef and mutton for such estimable citizens as my cousin Lorin. A good woman whom I loved and who loved me might do what she liked with me; and, Lina, from the moment when yesterday you ran into my arms, I have loved you and longed to hold you there again!"

"You must be mad!" she exclaimed, struggling to free her hands from his grasp. "If you were in your right senses you would not dare to speak to me like this! I have only once before seen you—I have no feeling for you but contempt and dislike—and yet you talk to me of love! Let my hands go this instant, and never presume to so insult me again!"

She was looking him full in the face this time, with mingled terror and aversion shining in her soft, dark eyes. As he met their gaze, Wallace Armstrong suddenly dropped his hands and fell back a step with a muttered expletive—

"What a likeness!" he ejaculated, and continued staring fixedly at Laline.

In terror lest he should have recognised her, the girl turned abruptly from him and hurried towards the door. Before she could reach it he had arrested her steps by laying his hand on her arm.

"I beg your pardon," he stammered, "but just for one moment you looked so strangely like some one I once knew—my wife, in fact—a worthless hussy, who deserted me on our wedding-day. I meant to treat her well, for I liked her, and she might have made something of me if she had tried; but she was a true daughter of her father, and bad to the core. For just an instant, though, you looked so like her that it was quite startling."

During this speech Laline had had full time to recover her self-possession.

"Thank you," she said, with glacial politeness. "From your description it is hardly flattering to be likened to such a person. Your uncle and your cousin must have been misinformed. They told me that your wife was an orphan when you first met her, and that she died, deeply regretted, of typhoid fever about a month after your marriage."

He gazed at her curiously, still with his hand on her arm.

"So that is the story you heard—eh?" he remarked. "I said my wife bolted from me on her wedding-day; but I never said I didn't get her back, did I? As to the 'deeply-regretted'—well, we are all deeply-regretted on our tombstones, aren't we? No—don't shake my hand off; if we are to be cousins by marriage, mayn't I even touch your sleeve?"

And at that identical moment, as they stood close together facing each other, Wallace with his hand on Laline's arm and both clearly agitated, the door opened quickly, and Lorin and his uncle came upon them.

CHAPTER XXV.

A look of astonishment passed into old Alexander Wallace's face, and into that of Lorin an expression of acute vexation as they stood in the open doorway.

"Lina," the latter exclaimed, "I am so sorry I could not come before. Apparently I need not introduce you to my cousin. You never told me that you had met him?"

"Your cousin visited Mrs. Vandeleur's yesterday afternoon, but I was out of the room nearly all the time," said Laline, constrainedly. "Didn't I mention it to you? Now please let me say 'How do you do?' to your uncle."

"Welcome to my niece Lina!" exclaimed old Alexander, beaming with benevolent joy. "May I have an uncle's privilege, my dear?"

With paternal tenderness he took both the girl's hands in his and kissed her on the cheek.

Luncheon was served in the dining-room on the ground-floor. To Laline it was a terrible ordeal to sit between Lorin and Wallace. The latter, as she afterwards learned, had insisted upon being included in the party, maintaining that his presence at such a family gathering would be the clinching proof that he had been taken back into favour. He was in the highest possible spirits, devoting himself to Laline, paying her compliments, and forestalling her wants at table, the while he, with what appeared like irresponsible gaiety, rallied Lorin on his backwardness in looking after his fiancée.

"'A laggard in love,' that's what you are, Lorin!" he cried. "This is the second time you have neglected to hand the salt to Miss Grahame. Take care I don't prove another young Lochinvar, and carry off your prize under your nose."

"In the case of young Lochinvar, Mr. Armstrong, the bride was willing to go," Laline remarked with some acerbity, whereat old Alexander, who in no way understood the undercurrent of bitterness which lay in both sallies, laughed heartily and declared that Wallace had met his match.

"I wish I had with all my heart, sir!" his nephew retorted, directing a bold glance of admiration at Laline's face; and the old gentleman laughed again in childish enjoyment.

It hurt Laline to see how, in spite of his serious and repeated delinquencies, Wallace was clearly the favourite of Alexander, who was delighted to kill the fatted calf in his behalf, Lorin's years of filial devotion and unselfishness counting for nothing against the shallow good humour and assumed affection of this showy ne'er-do-well. Old Alexander's eyes rested constantly, with evident content, upon his elder nephew's face; and, pleased as he was by the prospect of Lorin's marriage, to him it was clearly an even greater subject for thankfulness that his boy Wallace had humbled himself before him and been forgiven.

"You must make allowance for me if my high spirits carry me away this afternoon, Miss Grahame," Wallace said. "The fact is—and as you are so soon to be a member of the family I can talk freely before you—I have been a very, very bad boy, and a dreadful disgrace to everybody about me. So I was punished, as bad boys ought to be. The worst part of my punishment was the knowledge that I had deeply hurt the best man in the world, and that I was shut out from my old home and my old place in his affections. So this morning I went to him and appealed for another chance; and he, having, as I believe, a corner in his heart somewhere for me, took me home there again. That is the reason of my gaiety to-day, cousin Lina, and I feel sure you will sympathise with me and understand."

As Wallace spoke he laid his hand, with what looked like spontaneous affection, upon that of his uncle, to the left of whom he was sitting. Old Alexander grasped his hand warmly and tears filled his eyes. But the little scene failed altogether to move Laline, who felt only indignant that the simple-natured and kindly old man should be so flagrantly deceived in his worthless nephew, whose sneers and gibes at his uncle's expense were still fresh in her mind.

Lorin for his part talked very little. He had considerable difficulty in concealing his deep annoyance at the attitude which Wallace had adopted towards Laline. He had opposed as strongly as he could the suggestion that Wallace should form one of the luncheon-party that day. Knowing his cousin's record, he disliked the idea that anything approaching familiar friendship should be instituted between his cousin and the woman he loved. Lorin's sense of character was as keen as that of his uncle was deficient. Wallace's pretended affection and pretended reformation in no way deceived him, and, although, from the associations of his boyhood, he still retained some little love for the scapegrace elder who had taught him cricket and football years ago, experience had taught him that no reliance was to be placed in Wallace's honour or Wallace's word.

He grew hot with indignation, therefore, when he marked the insolent admiration in his cousin's gaze, and heard the familiar "cousin Lina" he addressed to Laline. One of Wallace's favourite boasts was that he could fascinate any woman if he choose to try, and beautiful, pure-minded Laline would not be the first woman who has been temporarily attracted by a plausible scamp.

It was clear to Lorin that, since his cousin's visit to Mrs. Vandeleur's house on the preceding day, Laline had changed towards him. All their talk during their foggy walk in the Park after church had been of deferring their marriage, and to-day her manner towards him was strangely cold and absent. He had surprised her with his cousin's hand on her arm, an incident concerning which neither she nor Wallace had volunteered the slightest explanation, and even now she was passively receiving his flattery and thinly-veiled love-making without any evident signs of disapproval. Not one look, not one word had he a chance of exchanging with her unnoticed by his cousin, although there was very much that he was longing to communicate to her. He had hoped that the occasion of seeing her home might give him the opportunity he longed for; but his presence was required in the bank that afternoon, and old Alexander was loath to let Laline leave so early.

"Even if Lorin is busy, and Wallace here finds for once something useful to do, my dear," he said, "you can stay and have a cup of tea with me at four o'clock, can't you?"

"I have nothing more useful or more pleasant to do than to stay also," Wallace was beginning, when Laline cut him short.

"I will stay alone with you, Mr. Wallace," she said. "You and I can have a nice quiet tête-à-tête together."

The idea had been strengthening in her mind ever since her arrival that by old Alexander's assistance she might contrive to break her engagement. The presence of Wallace, looming large and aggressive upon her mental horizon, made all hope of association with his cousin impossible. Laline was suffering acutely. The watchfulness of Wallace's bold eyes incessantly fixed upon her face wrought her to such a pitch of nervous excitement that she was hardly conscious of what she said or did. The man exercised a magnetic power over her, so that, much as she disliked and even detested him, she was profoundly affected by his presence. A knowledge of the suffering she would shortly bring upon Lorin increased her distress of mind; she felt she dared not look in his face, lest her glance should be intercepted, or lest he should read in her eyes the consciousness that she was deceiving him.

Yet the very strength of her love and pity for Lorin, and the necessity for putting a severe curb upon her emotions, made her manner of parting with him seem strangely cold.

"Good-bye, Lina dear! At about five o'clock I will return and take you home."

"I may not be able to wait until then. Good-bye!"

How could he tell that her indifferent manner was only assumed, and that her woman's heart was throbbing with grief and vain regret? She could not even trust herself to return his look as he gazed down into her face, his own full of surprise and pain. She drew her fingers swiftly from the caressing clasp of his hand, lest his touch should unnerve her for the work before her, and she let him go from her presence thus, without one word or look to tell him that she loved him.

Wallace Armstrong noted the parting, and formed his own conclusions thereon. He would have given a good deal to win this girl from his cousin. Her beauty, her disdain, and something reminiscent in her face and voice at once piqued and fascinated him. So far as he was capable of loving a woman, he loved her, and he longed most ardently to humble her pride and to make her will subservient to his. He was nearly thirty-one, and his constitution was prematurely aged by his irregular method of life. Possibly he knew that he was on the downward road, and seized at the idea that he could be saved by the sacrifice of the love of a pure and beautiful girl. Certain it was that he definitely resolved, if the thing could be done, to win Laline from her allegiance to his cousin, either before or after her marriage. Pity and remorse were qualities as foreign to Wallace's nature, where his own selfish enjoyment was concerned, as reverence and gratitude; and on this very day of reconciliation and forgiveness, which was to herald a new era of reformation, when he unwillingly left his uncle and Laline to their tête-à-tête, he betook himself, not to the office, in which he had again been offered a position, but to one of his favourite drinking haunts, where he speedily made amends for his comparative abstinence at luncheon.

In Lorin's sitting-room a cheery fire was burning, and Laline drew old Mr. Wallace's arm-chair towards the blaze, while she herself stood with one hand on the mantelpiece and one foot on the fender, looking earnestly down into the glowing coals.

"What a slip of a girl you are, to be sure, my dear!" remarked Alexander Wallace, as he noticed the graceful but unduly slender outline of her figure in its severely-cut blue-serge gown. "It's time you had some one to look after you and make life pleasanter for you! And what is the exact day you have fixed for the wedding?"

She turned and faced him suddenly, very pale, with big tears gathering in her eyes.

"Mr. Wallace," she said, "I am going to hurt you dreadfully—but it hurts me even more. My marriage with your nephew Lorin can never take place!"

Alexander started from his seat and gazed at her blankly.

"Never take place?" he repeated slowly. "You are surely joking, my lassie! I thought you seemed a bit cold to the boy; but it's only some lovers' tiff, and you will make it up when you meet again. I am not too old to forget young folks' ways."

"There has been no tiff. I love your nephew far too well to quarrel with him; but we must part, all the same."

"Can it be possible," Alexander asked, in bewildered tones, "that you have taken a fancy to my other nephew? I hope not, my dear. Much as I love Wallace—and he is like my own son to me—I hope not. A good woman might be the making of Wallace, I do believe, but her heart might be broken in the process. He's a wild harum-scarum fellow, and——"

"Do you think for one moment," cried Laline, indignantly, "that I would break off my engagement with Lorin in order to marry your other nephew? I have seldom met any one I dislike so much as he in all my life!"

"Yet he's a fine, handsome fellow, and I have heard that women go crazy about him. There's a lot of good in Wallace, too," said his uncle, anxiously; "and you and he seemed very good friends when Lorin and I came in suddenly and found you together before luncheon."

"He had roughly seized my arm and I could not get it away," returned Laline, shuddering at the remembrance of the scene. "I can't endure even to talk about him! Lorin is worth a whole regiment of such men! Lorin is manly and sincere, unselfish and kind——"

"If he is all this, why don't you want to marry him?"

"But I do want to marry him—I want to marry him with all my heart!" she cried, distractedly. "Oh, Mr. Wallace, listen to me and help me with your advice, for I am very, very unhappy!"

She slipped down on her knees on the hearthrug before his chair, and told her tale thus, nervously clasping and unclasping the slender hands in her lap while she spoke.

"What I am going to tell you you must give me your word to keep secret," she said. "No one must know—not even Lorin. Promise me that."

"I promise; but——"

"I loved Lorin as soon as I met him, and I was proud of loving him, and encouraged him to love me in return. I agreed to marry him directly he asked me. I never tried to hide my feelings for him. You know this, don't you?"

"Why should you hide your feelings? He is a man any girl might be proud to love."

"He is indeed! That's what makes it so hard to give him up!"

Tears were raining down Laline's cheeks now and her voice was choked by sobs.

Alexander Wallace gazed upon her in wondering pity for a moment. Then he gently took her hands, which were pressed to her eyes, and drew her to the side of his chair.

"Tell me all your trouble, my child," he said, tenderly. "Why should you give up Lorin, since you love each other and since there is no quarrel between you?"

"Mr. Wallace," she faltered, "don't think too harshly of me! I have deceived you all. When I was little more than a child I was married!"

"Married?" Alexander repeated, in astonishment. "Then you are a widow?"

"No!"

"Your husband is alive?"

She bowed her head.

A long pause followed. Mr. Wallace let her hands go and rose from his chair.

"Heaven forgive you," he said, solemnly, "for playing with a good man's love! It was an ill deed, whatever prompted it? My poor boy!"

"Mr. Wallace," cried Laline, springing up and facing him, "don't misjudge me! When I met Lorin, I believed myself free to be his wife. It is only quite recently—within the past few days, indeed—I found out that——"

"That your husband was alive?"

"Yes."

"And you have to return to him?"

"No, no—not for the whole world! I——Please—please don't ask me any questions, Mr. Wallace! My marriage was a terrible mistake! I had heard and seen nothing of the man I married for several years; I knew of nothing to prevent my marriage with Lorin. Then, by sheer accident, I learned that that other man was still alive. I cannot tell you how much I hate him; and he never cared for me for one moment, and has forgotten my existence. But he lives, and I cannot marry Lorin!"

"But why tell me all this, my child? Why not go to Lorin, and let him hear the truth from your own lips?"

"No, no—I can't; it is quite impossible! I have made up my mind what to do. I must go away from here, to some place where he cannot follow me; and then you must break it to him. Only remember one thing. You must tell him I loved him with all my heart and soul. Tell him I never knew what love was until I met him. Tell him that my marriage was a miserable farce, that within one hour of the ceremony I was far away from my husband, and that I never went back to him again. Be sure to tell him that. Tell him it is of no use to think of me any more. I don't want him to leave off loving me, but he must love me as though I were dead, for I must be dead to him. I shall leave England, and he must not attempt to find me or follow me. I trust to his honour to respect my wishes, for it is of no use pretending to be better or stronger than I am, Mr. Wallace. I love Lorin so dearly that, if I were to see him or write to him, I don't know what I might say or do. You see it is a great temptation. I am tied to a man I hate, who does not even know that I am alive; yet, because of those words we spoke together years ago when I was too young to understand the meaning of what I did, I must break my own heart and that of the man I love and live lonely and uncared for perhaps all my life. To me it seems bitterly, cruelly hard! Yet I would not for anything let Lorin fall from my ideal of him; and, if we were together, and he asked me to become his wife, in spite of the law, I could not be sure of myself, and perhaps I might say 'Yes.' Now do you understand why you must tell him all this and not I?"

"I understand," the old man answered, in a broken voice. "My poor children!"

CHAPTER XXVI.

Alexander Wallace was, it is to be feared, incapable of keeping a secret.

Had he not been a singularly lucky man with an excellent head for figures, he would never have augmented the splendid business which came to him from his father, for he was almost incapable of deception and by nature as trustful as he was truthful.

His nephews were both men of wider education and more subtle brains than he possessed, and both could read him like a book. As a result of this, Lorin anticipated his wishes and studied his comfort in every detail, while Wallace took advantage of the old man's weak points and sneered at his guilelessness.

It followed therefore that, as soon as Lorin entered his uncle's presence at about five o'clock that day, and found him greatly agitated and Laline already departed, he became convinced that some talk had passed between them intimately connected with his own future happiness, and set himself to work to find out of what it was composed.

"Have you and Lina settled the wedding-day between you, Uncle Alec?" he inquired, taking his stand by the fireplace, so that the lamplight fell full on his companion's face.

Alexander Wallace's features twitched as at some painful remembrance, and there was an embarrassed pause before he replied—

"'There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip,' my boy. I should not tease Lina about the date, if I were you. She has known you so short a time that it is not surprising she should want the wedding put off for a bit."

"Oh, but I shall never agree to that!" Lorin returned, in tones the coolness of which belied his keen anxiety. "The first thing to-morrow I shall buy the licence; and before the end of this month we shall be man and wife."

"Ay, if she will have you."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, nothing!" Alexander returned, confusedly, remembering his promise to reveal nothing until Lina was far away. "But girls change their minds, so people say."

His attempt at acting was a complete failure—a child would not have been deceived by it. Lorin, from his vantage-ground back to the light, stared relentlessly into the old man's face, which gave his words the lie, and a great fear began to creep into his heart.

"Did Lina tell you she does not love me?" he asked, after a pause.

"No, no, my boy—no word of such a thing!"

"Did she tell you she meant to break with me? Answer, for Heaven's sake, and tell me the truth! It is not like you, Uncle Alec, to hesitate and beat about the bush and say what you do not mean, and it is not fair to me. My life's happiness is at stake and I must know what she said to you."

"I cannot break my promise to her!" exclaimed Alexander, rising in deep distress. "Lorin, my boy, you should give up all thoughts of her—for the present, at least. I fear, my lad, it is not to be and that you must forget her."

"You might as well tell me to tear my heart out and not feel the pain! What reason did she give you? But she can't be in earnest; she only means to try me."

"She is absolutely in earnest, and she trusts to you to respect her wishes. Consider what a short time you have known her——"

His words fell upon heedless ears. Before he had finished speaking Lorin darted from the room. In a very few seconds he was down the stairs, out of the house, and in a hansom on his way to 21, St. Mary's Crescent.

Only one idea filled his brain—he must see Lina, must never leave her until she had sworn to be his as soon as the Church could marry them. To-morrow he would buy a special licence, and, that bought, she must instantly become his wife, so that no more deadly torturing fears of losing her could harass him.

Twice he shouted to the driver to go faster; and a block in the thoroughfare at the top of Sloane Street threw him into a fever of nervous impatience. The hideous supposition that she might be induced to jilt him for his cousin rose more than once in his mind, to be angrily dismissed again. She must be merely wishing to try him out of girlish coquetry, for which she should be punished by being married, trousseau or no trousseau, within the next twenty-four hours. Of that he was fully determined.

"I am too jealous to be an engaged man," he told himself. "Lina must be mine altogether, and I must take her away with me. I know she loves me. What could possibly come between us? It must be some girlish freak on her part. But I am glad I have to see her, for I am starving for a kiss! I must see her alone, and will kiss away from her lips the memory of her coldness to-day. What a confoundedly slow cab this is! I could walk the distance in half the time!"

At St. Mary's Crescent bad news awaited him. Susan, who showed him into the morning-room on the ground-floor, and took his name up-stairs to Miss Grahame, returned to tell him that that young lady could not receive him. She was suffering from a bad headache, and had gone to bed.

"Gone to bed? It isn't six o'clock yet! Is she really ill, Susan?"

"Yes, sir."

Lorin looked doubtfully at Susan; then he drew a sovereign from his pocket and laid it in her hand. While she was feebly affecting to return it, he closed her hand upon it, and spoke in low quick tones in her ear.

"Susan, have you a sweetheart?"

"Dear—no, sir!"

"No one who loves you?"

"Well, sir, I won't quite say that——"

"Susan, remember what your sweetheart would feel if he were disappointed about seeing you, and tell me the truth. Has Miss Grahame really gone to bed?"

"Not quite, sir; but she is in her room, and looks dreadful bad. She's been crying, sir. She was crying while she spoke to me."

"You must take her a note."

"Will you write it in here, sir?" asked Susan, in sympathetic tones, putting pen, ink, and paper on the table before him, and discreetly retiring a few steps.

And Lorin wrote thus—

"My own Darling Heart—I must see you! I can't live another hour unless you speak to me! I have something of the utmost importance to both of us to propose. Lina, my only love, why were you so cold to me to-day? Why won't you see me now? And why are you crying? See me just for one brief instant, and let me kiss your tears away! Lina, I shall go mad if you treat me coldly! You can't possibly understand what you are to me or you would never play with me like this. Lina, you have my very heart and soul in your keeping; I will not even believe it possible that you could treat me badly until I hear it from your lips! See me, my darling, for Heaven's sake, just for one moment! You need not even speak. Come down and give me one kiss, my wife that is to be, and I will go away happy. Only come!

"Yours, through life and death, "Lorin."

A silly, incoherent, lover's letter, but poor Laline's eyes overflowed at each line of it.

Susan waited discreetly outside the door while Miss Grahame read it, and heartily hoped the handsome, pleasant-spoken young gentleman with the beautiful blue eyes and lovely curly black hair would not be disappointed.

Presently Laline's voice came to her from within the bedroom.

"Go to Mr. Armstrong, Susan, and tell him I am very sorry but I am not well enough to see any one to-night."

A stifled sob came after the words, and Susan decided that Miss Grahame was "awful cruel," and did not deserve so fascinating a sweetheart.

"And him a young gentleman of fortune, and she only a sort of governess, too!"

This was Susan's private comment. Aloud she said timidly—

"Mr. Armstrong seems in a dreadful way about you, miss. Shall I tell him you are feeling a little better now?"

"Please tell Mr. Armstrong just what I have said and no more!"

"Fine airs she do give herself, to be sure—and her no better-looking than some other people!" Susan said to herself, as she flounced down-stairs. "It isn't everybody that admires them thin women! She isn't half as pretty as Miss Clare to my way of thinking! Miss Clare and me we have got a bit of flesh on our bones; and I've heard say that's what the men admire, and not your scrag-ends of girls!"

But aloud to Mr. Armstrong, eagerly waiting in the front room, Susan, with demure mien, merely repeated the message Miss Grahame had given her.

Lorin knitted his brows.

"She is really ill, then, Susan?"

"I think she is upset, sir, about something—more than ill, so to say."

"Ah! Is your mistress in?"

"Yes, sir. She is in her study."

"Alone?"

"Yes, sir."

"Will you take her a note, too, Susan, while I wait for an answer?"

"Certainly, sir!"

Susan was growing quite excited over this little romance. Lorin, on his part, understood something of Mrs. Vandeleur's nature, of her shrewdness, her inquisitiveness, and her love of what Americans call "bossing the show," and being appealed to as an arbiter of fate. There was therefore some subtlety in his note, which ran as follows—

"My dear Mrs. Vandeleur—On my memorable first interview with you not many weeks ago you told me various things about myself that were true, and foretold others that have since come to pass. You were also good enough to express yourself in kind and friendly terms towards me, and to advise me to come to you should I need counsel. At this present moment I am in deep distress and perplexity, and should be most grateful for your advice and help. Will you give them? Hoping fervently that your kindness may move you to do so, I remain,

"Yours very faithfully, "Wallace Lorin Armstrong."

He had not long to wait for an answer. In a very few seconds Susan tripped down with a gracious message, and showed the visitor into her mistress's study.

How well he remembered, as he entered, his first meeting with Laline, the slim white figure dimly visible in fog and firelight, and the look of fear and astonishment with which she had turned towards him as she dropped the crystal ball at his feet in her alarm at his unexpected entrance. It had all happened so few days ago, and yet it seemed to Lorin that he must always have known Laline, that she must always have been part of his very existence, and that his hopes and aims must ever have centred wholly in her. The room, with its odd accessories, gleaned from Eastern and mediæval art by modern superstition, recalled her image so vividly before his mind that his eyes turned involuntarily to the low seat by the fire, as if expecting that the form of Laline herself would resolve itself from the shadows and rise on his approach.

But the little gray lady with the jewelled fingers and the bird-bright eyes was alone, peering at him out of her long-handled eye-glass set with garnets and turquoise.

"So you have sought me?" she said, extending a small ivory-like hand towards him. "I thought you would! You were rather sceptical, too. But let that pass. Shall I tell you, or will you tell me, what you have come about?"

"As you like," he answered, sinking into the chair she indicated with a wave of her hand.

"You are passionately in love with my beautiful secretary. For that I owe you a very deep grudge. She was just the white-souled, child-hearted creature I wanted for my work, and you have spoiled her. When she came to me her mind was as a clear page; now it is disfigured by an ideal picture of you. Yes—disfigured, to my way of thinking, in spite of your good looks, Mr. Armstrong. If she had remained the passionless white-flower soul she was when she came to me, we might together have completed my two great works in a comparatively short space of time. But now this tiresome, transient love-rubbish has already rendered her self-conscious, capricious, and hysterical, and from the calm, soulful study of the occult, she has fallen to studying only you. What is the result? Lina can't write, she can't think, she has headaches, and cries when she is looked at. That is not the psychic state in which to approach loftier spheres of thought. That is the worst of our sex. Give them the hope of fortune, of distinction, of a career, a calm and elevated sphere of thought, which would raise them above the little aches and pains and vexations of humanity, and what do they do? At the distant vision of a man, it all goes to the winds! All my secretaries have been like that; and I might have guessed that Lina, who is very much the most beautiful, would not escape this craze for the male sex which is a drag upon the spiritual progress of almost every woman between seventeen and fifty. Why could you not have fallen in love with my niece Clare? That would in no way have interfered with my work or my plans. Clare is very handsome, I suppose, although it is not a type that I personally admire. Were I an elderly man, however, I could imagine myself raving about her. You were supposed to be Clare's admirer at first, and had you continued to be so I should have nothing to complain of. Between my niece and me there is nothing in common. She is too mundane, too full-blooded for me. She is like too much sunlight coming glaringly in one's eyes between Venetian blinds—the shock all the cruder because of the pretence of concealment and shade. But Lina—she is far too good to be wasted on a man! Love and marriage take all life and individuality out of ninety-nine of every hundred Englishwomen; and the better the woman, the more like a cow or a cabbage she becomes under domesticity. There—my sermon is ended! Now you can recount your little love-troubles; but don't suppose for a moment that you have happened upon a sympathetic listener!"

"I would rather be understood than sympathised with," he returned, gravely. "Mrs. Vandeleur, all that you have been saying is extremely interesting. But, to take your own admissions, Lina is young, exceptionally beautiful, and essentially womanly. That being the case, she must necessarily give and inspire love. Although she is exceedingly intelligent, she makes no claim to mental or spiritual gifts above the average. Although you and I may agree that she is made of 'spirit, fire, and dew,' and that the 'good stars stood in her horoscope,' to most people she would only appear a charmingly attractive girl, whom any man might fall in love with. That is the way in which men, and women too, think and speak of girls, and I am inclined to think such a method of thought will prevail as long as this world of ours. Given these premises, isn't it a good thing that Lina, of whom I am sure you are fond, should be going to marry a man whom you dislike so little as you dislike me?"

"I don't dislike you at all," said the little lady, smiling graciously enough. "There is much in your nature that I admire, and with which I am in accord. Your cousin, on the other hand, is quite remarkably evil, although extremely interesting. But, to go back to your tiresome little love-affair, which of course to you blocks out all other subjects from your mind, and will for a few weeks—what puzzles me is not that Lina should be trying to part from you, but that she should ever have consented to marry you. Did you really in so many words ask her to be your wife? And did she say 'Yes'?"

"Most certainly."

"It is very extraordinary indeed! And I must tell you it was only through my niece Clare that I heard one word of this love-business between you and Lina. The girl herself can hardly be persuaded to speak of you at all."

"Why should you be surprised at our engagement, Mrs. Vandeleur? You must have seen that I loved her."

"To fall in love and to suffer was marked in your hand. With Lina things were different."

She was thinking of that previous marriage of Lina's, which the girl had half confided after the elder lady had half guessed it.

"And now," said Lorin, rising and coming over to Mrs. Vandeleur's table, "as the mischief is done, and your secretary merged in the woman who loves, I have come to throw myself upon your compassion and implore your help. Something—I don't know what—has come between Lina and me. Last night, when I met her on her return from church, she was strangely agitated, although twenty-four hours before I had left her full of love and happiness. She spoke of deferring our marriage, and to-day, when she came to luncheon, her manner towards me had incomprehensibly altered and she barely spoke to me. Some confidence passed in my absence between her and my uncle, and induced him on my return to speak to me about breaking off our engagement. And when, on realising the purport of his stumbling hints, I hurried off here, Lina refused to see me, and sent a message to say that she had a headache and had gone to bed. Mrs. Vandeleur, there must be some reason for this extraordinary change of front. I do not, I will not, believe that it is mere caprice on Lina's part which induces her to treat me thus. Therefore, I come to claim your help. You understand her, you can influence her, you can find out what is the obstacle her imagination—for it can be nothing else—has placed between us. Do this for me out of the kindness of your heart—I beg, I beseech of you!"

She looked up smiling into his handsome, glowing face.

"I promise you I will do my best to serve your cause," she said, holding out her small pale hand; and Lorin, catching at the hope, raised her fingers gratefully to his lips.

CHAPTER XXVII.

When Lorin Armstrong descended the stairs after his interview with Mrs. Vandeleur he felt that he had secured a valuable ally.

If any one could coax from Lina the reason for her conduct it was the little gray witch, whose manner inspired and almost compelled confidence, and who, however much or little she might understand the world of spirits, was marvellously quick in finding out anything she wanted to know about matters pertaining to this earth.

It had been arranged between them that he should call at noon on the following day, by which time Mrs. Vandeleur was to have had a long interview with Lorin's recalcitrant love-lady. Had the matter rested with him the young man would have gladly waited on the doorstep of Number Twenty-one throughout the whole of that evening, or, with equal celerity, would have presented himself there before dawn on the following day. But Mrs. Vandeleur clearly was not a woman to be hurried in well-doing, and she had no intention of either detaining Lorin this evening or of putting in an appearance before her usual time on the next morning, solely because her secretary had tried to quarrel with her sweetheart.

Lorin had therefore to content himself with impressing upon her the vital importance to his very existence of a speedy reconciliation between himself and his divinity, and had then perforce to depart, full of new hopefulness, until, at the foot of the stairs, he found gleaming at him across the dimly-lighted hall the strange green eyes of Clare Cavan.

Meeting with the girl at this exact moment affected Lorin unpleasantly as an evil omen. From the artist's point of view he admired her immensely, and often hoped he might some day have time and opportunity to sketch her as Vivien tempting Merlin. She was an ideal Vivien, but that fabled lady was also a more or less sinister personage, and at this moment it clearly appeared as though mockery gleamed in Miss Cavan's cat-like eyes and echoed through her purring accents.

"Oh, Mr. Armstrong, I am so sorry you are off just as I have come back! I have never yet been able to offer you my congratulations on your engagement. It was so very sudden, you see, and Lina has said so very little about it. But perhaps I am premature?"

"Not at all," he returned, coolly. "So far as I am concerned I heartily wish my marriage with Miss Grahame could take place to-morrow."

"How perfectly sweet! But you men are all like that; you want us poor little women to scamper off to the altar without a thought of chiffons and bridal costume, and frocks and shoes and gloves and those pretty things which will perhaps last us longer than all your much-vaunted affection! I've been quite longing to meet you for another reason, too. Your cousin and namesake called on us on Sunday afternoon, and I think he is perfectly delightful! So humorous and original, and so unlike the ordinary men one meets in drawing-rooms. I assure you we all found him simply irresistible! Didn't Lina tell you so?"

"I really can't recall it."

"Oh, Mr. Armstrong, I do really believe you are jealous! But I assure you Lina will never have a chance of talking to your cousin while I am about. I do so love eccentrics. And I have just been hearing the quaintest stories about him from my friends the Fitzroy-Cleavers."

Lorin winced. The cat-claws showed through the fur in that last thrust, and he felt he hated the girl and her malignant tongue.

"I am glad my cousin pleased you, Miss Cavan," he said, quietly, "and that his conversation was so well suited to your taste."

She flushed ever so slightly under his remark.

"Shall I tell you a secret?" she asked, assuming her most ingenuous and innocent air. "Women always like that type of man the best, whatever else they may pretend. There's a confession! You must go after that. But you'll find some day that I'm right."

As soon as she had closed the door upon him, Clare summoned Susan and closely cross-questioned her as to the length and other details of Lorin's visit. On these points the maid was voluble and precise, having supplemented her knowledge at first-hand by listening at the library keyhole.

"It wasn't much that I could catch, miss—I was that afraid of misses finding me out and setting her spirits after me, or of cook coming up and down stairs. But something misses is going to do for Mr. Armstrong; and he's to come round about it at twelve o'clock to-morrow. Most likely misses is going to try to make friends between them again—don't you think so, miss?"

"I can't tell, Susan. But it's very interesting, isn't it? Quite like a novel. And you shall have that green-velvet hat of mine."

Clare was intensely curious to know the rights of this quarrel between her rival and Lorin Armstrong. "Pumping" Laline was never any use; but by adroit flattery and artful questions she could sometimes extract information from her aunt, even though the latter resented her intrusion in the study during working hours. But, with the secretary in tears in her room, Clare decided she might risk it, and she accordingly sped lightly to the study door, and, after an admonitory tap, burst in with a great appearance of spontaneity.

"Oh, auntie," she exclaimed, "do let me run in for a few minutes' chat! Why, where is Lina?"

"She is ill—a headache or something. Pray don't flutter, Clare! Fluttering gets on my nerves."

"I wonder what is the matter with Lina?" Clare remarked, taking a seat and slowly removing her hat. "Have you noticed how strangely she has altered since her engagement?"

"All girls alter when they get engaged," said her aunt, maliciously. "Joy turns their heads, I suppose."

"I don't think it's joy in Lina's case," pursued Clare, shaking her head doubtfully. "No; it seems to me she has something on her mind."

"What do you mean?"

By her aunt's tone Clare divined she was on the right tack.

"Well, do you know, Aunt Cissy," she said, with confidential mystery, "I have some reason for supposing that Lina knows of a secret barrier between her and Mr. Armstrong—that is why she is trying to break with him—before he finds it out, I mean."

"Where did you get that idea from?" asked Mrs. Vandeleur, sharply.

"Well, I would rather not say who told me in so many words; but I have suspected the thing before," Clare went on, feeling her way, and wondering whether she was going to stumble on the truth. "Of course you know how people will talk, and this is the sort of thing they say—that it is quite too reckless of Mr. Armstrong, in his position, to offer marriage to a girl about whose antecedents he knows absolutely nothing at all. Why, even you know very little more, do you, auntie? And Lina is twenty, and has had to earn her living somehow since she was a child. And of course she is perfectly lovely, in that thin ethereal style that some people rave about. She is so oddly reticent, too, about her past—haven't you noticed it? But, now that she is going to make such a splendid and unexpected marriage with such an extremely charming man as Mr. Armstrong, no doubt it all comes back to her. She is very religious, you know, and very likely would rather give him up than be married under false pretences, poor girl!"

To the whole of this elaborate speech, evolved bit by bit from Clare's inner consciousness, Mrs. Vandeleur listened, with her brilliant hazel eyes peering intently through her glasses upon her niece's face. But as the girl finished, the little gray lady rose from her chair in her wrath, every fold of her soft brocade bristling with indignation.

"Do you venture to insinuate," she inquired in icily deliberate tones, "that my friend and companion and fellow-worker hesitates to become an honourable gentleman's wife because her past career has rendered her unworthy to fill that position?"