F.E. Mills Young (continued 3)

Nevertheless he interested her. He talked well. And he was so manifestly enjoying himself and showed such eagerness to please her that Prudence made an effort to shake off her uneasiness and share his pleasure in the excursion. But when he stopped at a little village some miles further on and took her into a place where they catered for tourists, the old disquieting feeling came back intensified; and she knew that she was not enjoying herself, that she shrank from appearing in public with a man whose acquaintance she had been forbidden. There was no longer any doubt in her mind that she had acted indiscreetly.

“I would rather go on,” she said. “I don’t want tea, and I mustn’t be late.”

“We shan’t be here many minutes,” he replied. “And you must have something. Rushing through the air gives me an appetite. I’ll get you back in good time, if I have to exceed the speed limit. We’ve been doing that already.”

He carried his point and led her within. They were shown into a little room where a table was laid for tea. There was no one else in the room, though from across the passage voices were audible and the sound of clinking china in proof that other travellers were taking refreshment. Major Stotford looked about him critically, flung his gloves on a chair, and advised Prudence to sit down and rest.

“I’ll go and order something to eat,” he said.

Prudence, who was standing near the window, looking out on a regiment of tall hollyhocks and a group of flaming dahlias blooming in the little garden, made no response; and he left the room, closing the door behind him.

With the closing of the door she faced about, feeling extraordinarily like a person trapped. It was absurd of course; but her heart beat with uncomfortable rapidity, and excitement flushed her face and lent a brightness to her eyes. She moved about the room restlessly examining the gaudy prints on the walls and the hideous design of the Brussels carpet; but was unable to fix her attention on anything, and wandered back to the window again.

There was a flavour of wrong-doing in this adventure which troubled her. The fear of being found out loomed with ugly insistence in the foreground of her ideas. She wished he had been satisfied simply to drive with her. This unforeseen development with its intimate suggestion of confidential relations vexed her. Intuition told her that in the circumstances he should have refrained from taking this step.

Then the door opened again to admit him. He came in, confident and smiling, and joined her where she stood at the window.

Chapter Twenty.

Prudence poured out the tea while Major Stotford sat with his back to the light, attentively observant of her actions, causing her considerable confusion by the intensity of his regard, and by the fact that he had fallen upon a quite unusual silence and seemed content simply to sit and watch her.

“We must hurry,” she said, handing him a cup. “If I cause them anxiety at home through being late they will make such a fuss about my cycling in future.”

“Oh, Lord!” he murmured. “What a nuisance a family can become. I wish you were an orphan.” He stirred his tea slowly, and smiled at her. “You are living up to your name. Do you know, when I first heard it, I thought it strangely unsuited.”

“I suppose you think me imprudent?” she said, without looking at him.

“No; not that,” he hastened to assure her. “But Prudence is such a Puritanic appellation. It suggests a nun. I’m not sure on the whole that I don’t prefer Imprudence. It’s purely a matter of taste.”

“Never mind my name,” she said, and looked vexed. “You are not the first to discover its unsuitability. Will you have another cup of tea?”

“I haven’t started on my first cup yet,” he answered, and lifted it to his lips to conceal his amusement. “You are in a hurry. See here!” He placed a gun-metal watch on the table beside his plate. “We’ll give it ten minutes. If you attempt to finish under you will ruin your digestion. I would, if permitted a choice, allow half an hour for tea and another half-hour for digestion; but since that doesn’t fit in with your wishes, I sacrifice mine. Try this plum cake; it’s rather good. The woman who runs this place was formerly a servant of mine, and her plum cakes are excellent.”

He cut the cake into generous slices. Prudence took a slice and pronounced it as good as he had promised. Although she had declared that she was not hungry, with the food before her she discovered a very healthy appetite. Her spirits began to revive. After all, it was rather jolly having tea in this quaint place, with the autumn sunshine streaming in through the little window and falling brightly across the tea-table, till the honey in its glass pot shone like liquid amber, and the dahlias, which Major Stotford had removed from the centre of the table because they obstructed his view, were ruby red against the snowy cloth. The sunlight fell too upon the man’s dark hair and showed it thinning on the top and about the temples. Prudence noted these things with interest. She wondered what his age was, and decided that he was older than he appeared. She began to feel more at ease with him. He ate surprising quantities of cake in the limited time at his disposal, and dispatched several cups of tea. At the expiration of the ten minutes he returned the watch to his pocket and rose briskly.

“Time’s up,” he said, coming round to her seat and standing over her with his hand on the back of her chair. “I think I deserve thanks for my self-sacrifice, don’t you?”

Prudence would have risen too, but it was impossible to do so without coming into collision with him. She wished he would not stand so close.

“I can’t see where the self-sacrifice comes in,” she replied. “You made an excellent tea.”

He laughed and leant over her chair, so that their faces were on a level. The expression in his eyes startled her. She jerked back her chair quickly and stood up, but immediately his hand slipped to her arm and held her.

“Do you know,” he said, “I think you are a little afraid of me.”

“Let me go—please!” She was thoroughly alarmed now. The old uneasiness gripped her. She experienced again the sensation of being trapped. And his eyes frightened her. They held hers with strangely compelling force, and there was a look in them such as she had never seen in a man’s eyes before—such as she had never imagined human eyes could express. “I wish you—wouldn’t look at me—like that.”

The grip on her arm tightened. He drew her close to him, and his other hand came to rest on her shoulder, slipped round her shoulders and held her.

“Look into my eyes,” he said. “Don’t be frightened. There is nothing to be frightened about.”

“Oh, please!” said Prudence, near to tears. “Let me go.”

“In a minute,” he returned softly. “I’ve something to say first. You shy child, what are you afraid of? I’ve a great affection for you. You are the dearest, sweetest little girl I have met for many a long year. I want to be friends—now and for ever. And I’m going to seal the compact right here.”

Swiftly with the words his clasp of her became vicelike. It was useless for Prudence to struggle against him. Her resistance served only to strengthen his resolve. He crushed her to him, set his lips to hers, and kissed her—kissed her with a passion that was as a flame which burned into her soul. Then he released her; and she fell back with a gasp of anger, her face white, her eyes ablaze with rage and mortification. She leaned with her clenched hand upon the tablecloth, panting and inarticulate. He turned to give her time to recover, picked his cap up from a chair, and faced round again deliberately.

“I couldn’t help it,” he said; “you were so sweet. I’ve been wanting to do that all the time. Don’t look so tragic. I won’t offend again.”

“How dare you?” she breathed; and with difficulty he forced back the smile that threatened to break over his features. That was exactly what he had expected her to say, what he had known she would say, as soon as she found any voice to speak with.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Upon my soul, I don’t know how it happened. I’m sorry—to have annoyed you. I’m not sorry about anything else. I had to kiss you.”

“I want,” Prudence said, with a faint sob in her voice, “to go home.”

“You aren’t angry with me?” he said, and became suddenly humble. “You aren’t going to punish me? I’m really ashamed of my roughness. Forgive me. Say you forgive me. I will not offend again. Please...”

“I will never willingly speak to you again,” Prudence said. “If I had any means at all of getting back without you I wouldn’t drive with you now. Please don’t say any more. Let us start at once.”

“You are as hard as a piece of flint,” he said, “for all your sweetness. I didn’t think you could be so unkind. Come then!”

He opened the door for her and followed her into the passage. From across the passage the sound of merry voices broke upon their ears. Major Stotford glanced in the direction from whence the sounds came, and then glanced curiously at Prudence. She walked on, very erect and quiet, with a white chilled face, and a hurt look in her eyes, seeming to notice nothing.

Once during the drive back he broke the silence which up to that moment had endured between them since they had taken their seats in the car. He had been driving at top speed; but they were nearing the inn where they had left the bicycle, and he slowed the car down and turned his face towards his quiet companion.

“Prudence,” he said, “you aren’t for keeping it up, are you? I’ve apologised. I’m really awfully sorry. Let bygones be bygones, won’t you? I wish I hadn’t made such an ass of myself. You surprised and delighted me. I didn’t think you’d take it like that.”

“Major Stotford,” Prudence returned with her face averted, “I have never given you permission to use my name.”

He reddened angrily, turned his attention to the steering and made no response. Nothing further passed between them. He let the car out, taking, with a recklessness that at another time would have made the girl nervous, the sharp curves of the winding road. Had they met any traffic along the road his driving would have caused an accident, as it was he nearly ran down a cyclist whom they overtook, and who saved himself and his machine by riding into the hedge.

Prudence’s heart stood still on perceiving the cyclist. She had taken one swift look at him as they rushed past, had met his eyes fully, eyes in which indignation yielded to amazement and a most unflattering criticism as they rested upon her face, which from white flamed swiftly to a shamed distressed crimson in the moment of mutual recognition.

The Rev. Ernest Jones extricated himself and his bicycle from the hedge and pursued the racing car. Why he pursued it he could not have explained; he had certainly no hope of overtaking it, and he had no idea that the car would come to a standstill shortly after passing him. He discovered it half a mile further on at the bottom of the hill, with Major Stotford standing beside it, and Prudence in the road, holding her bicycle which the man at the inn had brought out for her. These proceedings were nothing short of astounding. Mr Jones felt they needed explaining. He put on a fresh spurt, and in a cloud of dust rode almost into Prudence, and alighted.

Major Stotford uttered an exclamation of disgust and started to beat the dust from his clothes, while Prudence silently regarded her brother-in-law, and he in turn surveyed the general grouping with manifest disfavour in his curious eyes.

“You are riding home,” he said to Prudence, not in the manner of a question, but simply stating a fact. “I will accompany you—when you are ready.”

“I am ready now,” she answered, and led her bicycle into the middle of the road.

Major Stotford, still beating the dust from his clothes, did not look round. Mr Jones held his bicycle ready; he had no intention of mounting until he had seen Prudence in the saddle. Instantly with the placing of her foot on the pedal, Major Stotford swung round and approached her. He held out his hand to her.

“Just for appearances,” he said in an undertone. “You must... It’s too silly... parting like that—before him.”

She shook hands gravely. He put his hand to his cap and stepped back.

“Good-bye,” he called after her. “Sorry you couldn’t come for a longer spin. I’m off to-morrow.”

He paid no attention to Mr Jones, who was already in pursuit of Prudence, and ringing his bell fussily; he turned his back on him and went into the inn for the purpose of washing some of the curate’s dust from his throat, reflecting while he did so that, had Prudence been more reasonable, she would have avoided the parson. Despite the fact that he felt annoyed with her, he regretted the complication of the meeting which he foresaw would create new difficulties for her.

“He’ll tell of course,” he mused. “He’s the sneaking sort of little cad who feels it his special mission in life to use the lash where he can. Well, she ran into it, poor little Imprudence!”

Chapter Twenty One.

Mr Jones was spared the necessity of describing the conditions under which he had met Prudence by Prudence’s own frank confession immediately on her arrival at the house. She was either too proud to appeal to Mr Jones’ generosity, or she did not credit him with the possession of this quality. He had quite expected an appeal from her, urging him to secrecy in the matter, and was a little uncertain as to the attitude he should adopt. But he was fully determined to improve the occasion with spiritual advice and a little brotherly reproof; also he intended that she should thoroughly appreciate his magnanimity in shielding her from the consequences of her very indiscreet behaviour. And she spoilt his pleasing rôle by refusing to give him the cue. This annoyed him, and showed him plainly that his first duty was to his father-in-law, who had every right to be informed of his daughter’s indiscretions. He followed Prudence into the drawing-room, the sense of responsibility sitting heavily upon him, and was received by Mr Graynor and by his sisters-in-law with marked cordiality.

“You should have arrived earlier,” Agatha said. “The tea is cold. Where is Matilda?”

“I didn’t come from home,” he answered. “I’ve just cycled in from Hatchett. I’ve had tea, thanks.”

And then Prudence’s bombshell was delivered.

“So have I,” she said. “I met Major Stotford, and we had tea at a Cyclists’ Rest.”

“You did what?”

On any other occasion the scandalised horror in Agatha’s voice would have roused Prudence to a defiant retort; but the afternoon’s experience had subdued her spirit; she felt too crushed and miserable to resent her sister’s amazed anger, or to heed the exchange of significant glances between the others. She was dimly aware that her father rose and approached her, but the pained displeasure of his look left her unmoved. It did not seem to her to matter particularly what happened, or what they thought of her; she was past caring about such things.

“I thought I had given you quite clearly to understand that I did not wish you to pursue the acquaintance with Major Stotford,” Mr Graynor said. Prudence’s eyes fell. “I believed I could trust you,” he added reproachfully; “and you don’t even respect my wishes.”

“I will in future,” she answered with unusual meekness. “It seemed ungracious to refuse after his kindness.”

“More particularly when it was against your own inclination,” broke in Agatha.

Mr Graynor raised a protesting hand.

“Not now,” he said. “We will speak of this later.”

And with a word of apology to Mr Jones, he left the room. Prudence followed him into the hall.

“Daddy, I’m sorry,” she said, and caught at his sleeve; but, for the first time within her memory, he repulsed her.

“I don’t want to hear any more,” he said. “You have annoyed me exceedingly.”

He went on, leaving Prudence to realise the enormity of her conduct, and the hopelessness of expecting forgiveness in this quarter. She had offended him deeply. She ran upstairs and locked herself in her bedroom and sought relief from tears.

The exasperating part of the affair lay in the wholly unnecessary attitude of inflexible veto adopted by her family. Prudence was not likely to repeat her mistake. Experience teaches its own lessons, and her experience had been sufficiently humiliating without any additional disgrace. She bore for a time with this state of affairs: when the general hostility became insupportable she set her mind to work to discover a remedy. As a result of this mental activity, Mr Edward Morgan received one morning the letter for which he had so long and so patiently waited.

Mr Morgan read the letter in the privacy of his office, smiled, re-read it, examined it from all angles, and promptly proceeded to answer it, a light of satisfaction illumining his features as he wrote.

And yet there was in the briefly worded note not much that a man could have twisted into any meaning conveying particular encouragement; nevertheless, the invitation for which he had waited had come at last; that sufficed for Mr Morgan.

“It is so dull,” Prudence had written. “When are you coming to pay your promised visit?”

His answer read:

“My dear Miss Prudence,—

“I was delighted to get your letter. It would be selfish on my part to say that I am rejoiced to know you feel dull; but at least I cannot express sincere regret since the admission is followed by what I have been hoping for ever since we parted—your permission to visit you again. I am coming immediately. I was only waiting for just this dear little letter.

“Yours very truly,—

“Edward Morgan.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Prudence when she read this letter, and bit her lip in vexation, her face aflame at the thought that she had taken the irrevocable step, and brought very close the moment for the great decision of her life.

She knew that he would ask her to marry him, that he would take her consent for granted; and, although in sending the letter she had decided upon taking this step, now that the thing was upon her she felt reluctant and afraid.

“You’ve done it now,” she told herself, for the purpose of stiffening her resolution. “You ought to have realised your doubts sooner. It is impossible to draw back.”

Impossible to draw back! The finality of the phrase gripped her imagination with the startled sensation of a lost cause. She had burnt her boats. The prospect ahead was not entirely lacking in fascination; but she wished none the less that some kind of raft might discover itself on which she could retreat conveniently if the alternative proved very distasteful. The thought of being kissed by Mr Morgan, as Major Stotford had kissed her, the idea of giving any man the right to so kiss her, filled her with sick apprehension. The whole process of love-making thrilled her with disgust.

She leaned from her window and looked out upon the glistening darkness of the wet November night, and her thoughts became detached from present complexities, and attuned themselves to memories that were becoming old. They were nearly two years old, but they wore the stark vividness of very recent things. She allowed her fancy to riot unchecked around these bitter-sweet memories of a romance which had started from slumber only to fall back again into sleep, a sleep no longer sound and reposeful but disturbed by haunting dreams, dreams that were elusive and disconnected, and which belonged to the might-have-been. There was no shrinking from these dreams; they floated before her mind arrayed in the gracious beauty of simple and sincere emotions. The thought of love, of passion even, in this connection, had no qualm of revulsion in it. To be held in strong arms a willing captive, to be kissed by lips to which her own responded, that was a different matter. There would be no sense of shame in that, only a great wonder and a vast content.

“Dreams! dreams!” Prudence murmured, and listened to the falling of the rain without—wet darkness everywhere, the dismal darkness of a winter world sodden with the sky’s incessant weeping.

She clenched her hands upon the wet sill, and felt the rain drops on her hair.

“He is out there in the sunshine,” she thought; “and I’m here in the dark and the rain alone. It is easy to forget when the sun shines always.”

Abruptly she drew back and closed the window and turned up the lights in the room.

“I wish he wasn’t coming quite so soon,” she said, crouching down by the dying fire, a shivering, shrinking figure, with rain-wet hair, and eyes which were wet also, but not with rain.

The memories were shut out with the rain-washed night. She was back in the present again, with the disturbing reflection that the morrow, the last day of sad November, would see the arrival of Edward Morgan and the end of her girlish dreams.

Chapter Twenty Two.

Mr Edward Morgan arrived on the following afternoon. Prudence watched him from the window disentangling himself from the carriage rugs, and fussing with the muffler which he wore wound carefully about his throat. The wind was in the north-east, and he was subject to bronchitis.

Swathed in wraps he did not cut a romantic figure: he looked what he was, a prosperous, middle-aged man who valued his health and refrained from taking liberties with it. Prudence told herself that he was wise to be cautious, at the same time she wished that he was of an age at which such caution was unnecessary.

He mounted the steps, and was welcomed in the hall by Mr Graynor and taken to the library for purposes of refreshment stronger than tea after his cold and tedious journey. Later, he made his appearance in the drawing-room, divested of his outdoor wear and improved on that account. A subtle blending of whisky and cigar smoke emanated from his person, of which Prudence was critically aware as she shook hands and replied to his inquiries as to her health. He was in immense spirits, as became a successful lover; also he was a little shy and nervously anxious to please.

He talked about his journey and discussed politics and business and the weather; and Prudence listened, taking no part in the conversation, and feeling grateful to him for refraining from addressing her directly. He was, while intensely alive to her presence, seemingly unmindful of it. He credited her, not without reason, with sharing his shyness; and was anxious to give her time to get used to him and feel her way back to their former easy relations. Miss Agatha received the greater part of his attention, and in return pressed the hot scones on him hospitably. He refused these on the plea that they gave him indigestion; but he accepted cake, and a cup of the eighteenpenny tea, which he pronounced excellent.

“Mrs Morgan is well, I hope?” Miss Agatha inquired conversationally, filling in one of those abrupt, unaccountable, and disconcerting pauses in the talk, which flowed with even dulness between the hitches.

“Thank you, yes. My mother enjoys excellent health. Henry’s wife has been laid up; they had to operate for appendicitis. She’s about again now. Henry and the boys are flourishing.”

There followed polite expressions of regret for Mrs Henry Morgan’s indisposition, broken into by the arrival of William, whose greeting of Mr Morgan overflowed with cordiality.

“Been looking to see you in these parts for months,” he said. “Beastly weather for travelling; the wind is cutting. Are those hot scones, Prudence?”

William was so accustomed to being waited upon by the different members of his family that it never occurred to him to attend to his own needs. He did not observe the flush of annoyance that overspread Prudence’s face, nor the reluctance with which she rose to fetch the scones in question; Mr Morgan observed it, however, and was before her in reaching the fireplace where the scones lay on a hot plate inside the fender. He stooped for the plate; and the stiffness of his movements, while apparent to Prudence, passed uncriticised on this occasion. William protested loudly.

“Oh, come!” he said. “You shouldn’t do that. I can’t allow a visitor to wait on me. One of the girls will do it.”

Mr Morgan disregarded the remonstrance, refusing to relinquish the dish of scones.

“My mother brought me up to wait upon her,” he said, smiling. “It comes natural to me.”

Prudence felt pleased; but she had no faith in the lesson proving beneficial to William; he would assuredly miss the point.

“Well, you’re a younger man than I,” said William jocularly. “I shouldn’t show such energy after a long journey.”

Which speech, delivered for Prudence’s benefit, William considered particularly tactful. He had in mind his sister’s reflections on Mr Morgan’s age. But Mr Morgan was not helpful.

“I’m forty-three to-day,” he acknowledged, with, in William’s opinion, quite unnecessary candour. “I decided on this date for making the journey from sentimental reasons; it occurred to me as an altogether agreeable way of celebrating the occasion.”

He did not look in Prudence’s direction while he spoke, for which consideration she was obliged to him: she felt the eyes of the rest focussed upon herself, and guessed what was in their thoughts in connection with these confidences. It did not in the least surprise her to hear William playfully observe that they would have to contrive something special in the way of entertainment to mark the event and make this birthday a memorable one. He looked meaningly at Prudence, and slyly at Mr Morgan, and remarked that birthdays conferred peculiar privileges and gave a right to indulgence. But Mr Morgan repudiated this.

“At my age one doesn’t insist on those prerogatives,” he said. “The only advantage I take of the day is to give myself pleasure. I have done that.”

From which Prudence gathered to her relief that he did not intend to press his suit that day. Nor did he. He rather skilfully evaded the tête-à-têtes with her, which every member of the household seemed in conspiracy to bring about. He was giving her time to commit to heart the lesson which he had told her he wanted her to learn. It was a lesson which she could not master with him for teacher; but she came to feel a very warm friendship for him, which in lieu of anything better seemed not insufficient to begin with.

Mr Morgan had been at Court Heatherleigh a week before he broached the question of marriage with her; and Prudence, lulled into a sense of security by his avoidance of the subject, doubted whether he intended to propose to her, and was divided between a state of mortification and relief. The proposal when it came startled her the more by reason of this adaptation of Mr Morgan from the rôle he had been cast for to the less romantic rôle of friend. It found her immensely unprepared, as the delayed falling of anything long expected is apt to do when launched suddenly and with irrelevant haste. She was altogether unaware of what was in his mind at the moment when he sprung the thing upon her.

They were playing billiards together after dinner, with Mary acting as marker and making a third in the conversation that confined itself almost exclusively to the game. Prudence, in the interest of making a brake, did not observe when Mary left the room; she became aware of her absence for the first time on looking round to call the score. Mr Morgan marked for her. When he approached the table, instead of playing, he laid his cue on the cloth and took Prudence’s hand.

“Come and sit down,” he said, drawing her to the settee. “We’ll finish the game presently.”

Prudence relinquished her cue to him and sat down. He put the cue away in the rack and seated himself beside her.

“I’ve been a long time coming to my point,” he said, coming to it rather abruptly now that he was once started; “but I think you must have understood my reason for delay. I did not want to hurry you. You know why I came down... Prudence, will you marry me?”

Prudence gave a little sigh, and sat perfectly still, staring with amazed eyes at the neglected balls on the green cloth. Oddly, the thought which struck her at the moment was that it was unnecessary to break off in the middle of a game to ask her that. There was no need to make opportunities; they were thrust at him.

“Let me think,” she said. “Give me time. You—startled me.”

“But you knew that I meant to ask you that question?” He took her hand again and pressed it gently. “When you sent that letter, wasn’t it intended for permission to speak? I interpreted it that way.”

“I—don’t—know.” She was still for a moment; then she turned to him and looked him uncertainly in the eyes. “I was very miserable when I wrote that letter. Yes; I suppose that was what I meant—then.”

She broke off, and her gaze wandered away and came to rest again on the balls.

“It’s silly of me,” she said, speaking very low. “I feel a little afraid.”

“Just shyness,” he said reassuringly, stroking the hand which lay limply in his. “I am old for you; but you will find me the more gentle, possibly the more understanding, on that account. My darling, I love you very dearly. You are so young—you don’t know yet what love is. I did not know either until recently. I come to it rather late. But my feeling for you is very deep. Prudence, my dear, I want you. I love you. If you give yourself to me I will do everything in my power to make your life happy. Will you marry me, dear?”

It seemed to Prudence that there was only one possible answer. She had understood when she invited him to come down the significance of what she did. She had no right to encourage him to hope and then fail in her part. He was too good a man to play with. She kept her face averted while she answered him, staring fixedly at the shining balls, lying where her last stroke had left them placed conveniently, she realised with grim appreciation of her mistake, for him to score off.

“I want to be quite frank with you,” she said, her breathing fast through sheer nervousness, an earnest expression on her face, which he thought very modest and gentle. “I don’t love you, Mr Morgan,—not in that way—not, I mean, as you love me. I’ve thought—I should like to marry you. I think that still—only I’m afraid sometimes,—afraid that you’ll find me disappointing.”

He placed his arm very gently round her shoulders and held her so without attempting any warmer caress. He smiled into her troubled eyes.

“There is only one thing that could possibly disappoint me,” he said, “and that is if I fail to make you happy. Trust me, and all will be well.”

And so Prudence secured her passage through the door which it seemed he alone could open for her into those wider spaces where she imagined freedom was to be found. But emerging with Edward Morgan at her side, it gradually became clear to her that she was doubly fettered. In blindly groping for her freedom she had given herself to a new and more complete bondage. She would leave the old tyranny behind her, only to pass to another condition of fresh and more pressing obligations. The certainty of these things came to her with the realisation of her distaste for her new responsibility.

Chapter Twenty Three.

Prudence insisted upon a long engagement.

That was the first hitch in the amicable relations between her and her fiancé. Mr Morgan could see no reason why they should not marry immediately. He had less time than she to waste, and he was impatient of delay. But Prudence remained firm. She held out for a six months’ engagement; and Mr Graynor from purely selfish reasons ranged himself on her side. He was glad that her choice had fallen so wisely on this trusty friend of long standing. He could hand her over to the care of Edward Morgan with no anxiety for her future well-being; but he did not want to part with her too soon. When she was married the opportunities for seeing her would be few, and he dreaded the separation.

“Six months is not so very long,” he told the exasperated Mr Morgan. “And Prudence is only twenty.”

“If I were twenty,” Mr Morgan retorted, “I might see the matter in that light. Unfortunately I am not that age. But I shall have to exercise patience, I suppose.”

He bought his fiancée a magnificent half hoop of diamonds, and slipped it on her fingers, where it looked, Prudence considered, oddly out of place. It was altogether too valuable for constant wear. She did not tell him so for fear of hurting his feelings; but she wished that he would buy her less extravagant gifts. Whenever he gave her anything it was of the costliest description that he could procure. It seemed to give him peculiar satisfaction to surround her with expensive things. And he was amazingly kind and considerate for her unexpressed wishes. Prudence never knew how much it cost him in self-restraint in those early days of their engagement to keep under the ardour of his love for her, and school his passionate desire to take her in his arms and kiss madly her cool unresponding lips. He was wise, this mature lover. He knew that he had to foster her kindly affection for him; that he would need to tend and cherish it a long time before he could look to see it blossom into love. But he did not despair. He believed that she would give him eventually a full and willing response.

The engagement brought unforeseen consequences in the form of affectionate and intimate letters from the different members of Mr Morgan’s family. All these people were unknown to Prudence; yet they wrote to her as though the prospective relationship admitted them to terms of confidential familiarity.

Old Mrs Morgan wrote approving her son’s choice, and congratulating Prudence on having won so excellent a husband. She was glad, she added, that Prudence was young; she liked young people about her. She looked forward to having Prudence on a visit, when she would instruct her in regard to Edward’s likes and dislikes, the care of his health, and other matters of similar importance.

Mrs Henry Morgan’s letter was gushing and insincere in tone. As a matter of fact Mr Morgan’s sister-in-law was not very pleased to hear of his engagement. She had come to regard him as a confirmed bachelor, and her two sons, for whom she was very ambitious as quite certain of inheriting their uncle’s immense wealth. She had mapped out a brilliant future for them in which Morgan Bros, played no part; and she considered it indelicate on Edward’s side to upset her plans by marrying—at his time of life.

“You are a brave little person,” ran one passage in her letter; “a man past forty is not adaptable. But I’ll give you all sorts of wrinkles how to manage him. And of course his mother will live with you. She and I don’t get on.”

“Of course his mother won’t live with us,” Prudence told herself.

But she learned later that Mrs Henry’s statement was correct. Old Mrs Morgan had managed Edward’s house always, and would continue to do so.

“You will love her,” he assured Prudence; “and most certainly she will love you.”

An invitation to spend Christmas in Derbyshire followed; but Prudence, panic-stricken at the thought of meeting these people, insisted on spending her last Christmas at home; and it was finally settled that the visit should be deferred till the spring, when Mr Morgan promised himself the pleasure of fetching her to spend a fortnight with his mother, and of bringing her home again at the finish of the visit. There was little likelihood of seeing much of her in the interval; but she promised to write to him regularly once a week, setting aside his tentative suggestion that a daily correspondence would be welcome by frankly admitting that she would find nothing to say. He was disappointed. The ink on his own pen would not have dried from a dearth of ideas. At forty-three a man’s passion is no whit less ardent than that of a boy of twenty; but the man knows how to practise restraint. It was this knowledge which helped Edward Morgan over the difficulties of his courtship with a girl whose heart he had yet to win, and to whom passion was an unknown quantity.

Prudence was rather sexless in those days. The realities of love and marriage were mysteries to her. Marriage meant no more than the solution of a problem that had occupied her attention on and off for years. She saw no other way of obtaining her emancipation. And he was very unexacting in his devotion, and patient and kind.

The kindly attentions of Mr Morgan, the cessation of general hostilities, and the patronising approval of brother William, effected a wonderful clearance in the domestic atmosphere. Prudence was once more in favour, and the indiscretions of the past were tacitly overlooked. She discovered also that by virtue of her engagement she had achieved a new importance in Wortheton social life. People called to offer their congratulations; and the vicar talked affably of the imitative tendency of marriage, seeming to ascribe Prudence’s good fortune to the example set by her sister. He informed Mr Morgan rather unnecessarily that he was rich in this world’s goods.

Amid the general rejoicings Bobby alone stood aloof, critical and disapproving and altogether unimpressed with the splendour of the match.

“You don’t need to marry money,” he wrote. “There’s more than enough of the beastly commodity in the family as it is. And Morgan! ... Of course he’s all right in himself, and a good fellow; but he’s more than double your age. Imagine what you would say if I wanted to marry a woman old enough to be my mother! Break it off, Prue. I’ll be home shortly, and I’ll stand by you.”

Prudence shed a few surreptitious tears over this letter, though it moved her to mirth as well; it was so characteristic of the writer. But, save for glimpses during the holidays, Bobby had no idea of the flatness of life at Court Heatherleigh, its repression, its sneaking pose—there was no other term for it—of pious superiority which crushed the spirit and the natural honesty of those upon whom its influence was exerted. She was not marrying Mr Morgan for his wealth; she was not marrying him for love. Her reasons, when she came to analyse them, occurred to her singularly inadequate. She felt very doubtful as to the wisdom of the step she had taken. The idea of a triangular household, with a mother-in-law in supreme command, seemed to her rather like a repetition of the unsatisfactory home conditions. She felt that Edward Morgan owed it to her to set up a separate establishment, and even ventured to suggest this rearrangement to him. He heard her in pained surprise.

“My mother will not intrude on us,” he said. “Morningside has been her home always. I could not agree to her living elsewhere.”

“Couldn’t we live elsewhere?” Prudence insisted. “I should like a house of my own.”

“You don’t understand,” he said, with his hands on her shoulders, and his grave eyes looking tenderly down upon her. “Home for my mother is where I am.”

He stooped and kissed her as a sort of act of forgiveness for the want of consideration she had shown.

Chapter Twenty Four.

On the morning that Edward Morgan left Wortheton it was arranged that Prudence should drive with him to the junction and see the train off. It was never clear to Prudence with whom the idea originated; it certainly did not emanate from her own brain. She was even a little embarrassed at the thought of the four-mile drive with her heavily coated and bemuffled fiancé, and the prospective ordeal of standing by the door of his compartment during those exasperating, interminable minutes before the starting of the train.

She came downstairs into the hall dressed for the drive in a navy costume which accentuated the girlish slenderness of her figure to discover Mr Morgan winding his many wraps about him, and talking cheerfully with her father and sisters, who were gathered together to see him off.

He paused in the business of buttoning his coat to inquire anxiously if she were sufficiently warmly clad for the day, which was bright and cold, with a touch of December frost in the air. She replied carelessly that she did not feel cold; and Mr Graynor, with his arm about her shoulders, remarked thoughtlessly:

“Young blood, Morgan, defies the weather.”

“I think Prudence should wear a fur about her throat,” Agatha said. “It would look more suitable.”

Mary was despatched forthwith to fetch the unwanted addition, which, when it appeared, Mr Morgan insisted on placing round her shoulders. Prudence took her seat in the carriage, feeling oppressed with the warmth of the sable and the confined heated atmosphere of the artificially warmed brougham, with its windows carefully closed against the cold clear air. She dragged at the fur impatiently.

“I must take it off,” she said. “I feel stifled.”

“All right,” he acquiesced, and passed his arm round her waist in a clumsy caress. “I’ll keep you warm. Comfy, eh?”

She smiled at him a little nervously.

“You are just a mountain of clothes,” she said.

During the long drive Mr Morgan kept his arm about her, and held her so closely that Prudence felt suffocated. She proposed letting down the window part way; but Mr Morgan showed such alarm at the idea that she did not persist.

“You don’t understand the risk,” he said. “This winter travelling... It’s how people contract pneumonia, risking chills through open windows. You don’t know how to take care of yourself. It’s time I took a hand at it. I’m going to take great care of you, little girl,—all my life. Open windows!—no! This open-air craze is the cause of most of the ills of life.”

Prudence laughed.

“I understood it was the cure for them,” she replied. “I live in the open air—and sleep in it.”

“Sleep in it!” he ejaculated in horrified accents.

“Well, not actually that,” she said; “but with the bedroom window wide—always.”

He stared at her. He had never supposed that any one, save those undergoing the outrageous experiment of the new-fangled open-air cure, which he considered stark madness, slept with open windows in the winter. His own windows were always carefully secured and heavily curtained. Occasionally, during the very warm summer months, he allowed an inch at the top to remain open for purposes of ventilation.

“You will grow wiser as you grow older,” he said, and determined that on that point anyhow he would have his own way.

It was a relief to Prudence when they arrived at the station. She walked on to the platform, declining to accompany Mr Morgan to the booking-office while he procured his ticket. She wanted to fill her lungs with fresh air before the further ordeal of final leave-taking; and she wanted for a few minutes to be rid of his kindly presence, and the necessity of responding to his lover-like advances. It was all so dull and irksome; there was only one word which occurred to her as applicable to the situation, and that was stodgy. The stodginess of it was getting on her nerves.

When finally the big over-coated figure emerged upon the platform and came towards her Prudence felt a touch of compunction because she could not return the smiling gladness of his look with eyes which expressed a like pleasure at his approach; her own gaze was critical and entirely matter-of-fact.

His train was in. She opened the door of an empty compartment and stood beside it. He joined her, waited until the porter had placed his luggage on the rack, and dismissed him handsomely; then he motioned Prudence to get into the compartment, and followed her quickly and closed the door upon themselves.

“We’ve just time,” he said, “for a last good-bye.” And took her in his arms.

She had never felt so embarrassed in his presence before, perhaps because he had never before assumed so lover-like and determined an attitude. He tilted back her face and kissed her lips, and continued to hold and kiss her in this extravagant manner, despite the fact that people passed the carriage at intervals and stared in as they passed. Mr Morgan was indifferent to this manifest curiosity in his doings, and his broad figure blocked the middle window and screened Prudence from intrusive eyes.

“Oh!” she said, and attempted to withdraw from his embrace. “The train will be starting immediately. I had better get out.”

“Shy little girl!” he returned, and laughed joyously. “You’ve never been very free with your kisses, Prudence; and it will be a long time before I see you again. All right! You shall get out now. One good kiss before I let you go.”

He fairly hugged her. Prudence gave him a cool hasty peck on the cheek, slipped from his hold, and was out on the platform as soon as he opened the door. He closed the door and fastened it and leaned from the window to talk to her, holding her hand until the guard’s flag waved the signal for her release.

“Good-bye, my darling,” he called to her.

Prudence stood back and waved her hand to him, waved it gaily with a glad sense of relief. The last she saw of him as the train began to move out of the station was his grave face regarding her mournfully as he pulled up the window before settling down in his corner.

Prudence hurried out to the waiting carriage with her thoughts in a whirl. This business of being engaged was an altogether perplexing affair. She had not expected things to be like this somehow. She did not know quite what she had expected; but she had never imagined that the stolid Edward Morgan could assume the rôle of lover and confidently look for a similar response from her; she had believed he would maintain the more dignified attitude of a warm and affectionate friendliness throughout their engagement; and she felt vexed and cheated because he had disappointed her in this belief.

“It’s absurd,” she told herself, with her hot face turned to the sharp crisp air which came through the open window, “for him to imagine I am going to let him make love to me when I only want him to be nice and kind always.”

But she began dimly to apprehend that the absurdity was likely to go on.

Bobby came home for the Christmas holidays and talked to her seriously of the mistake she was making. He did not look forward to the prospect of coming home finally to find Prudence gone; and the next term at school was his last.

“Beastly rotten it will be here without you,” he remarked. “You might have waited, Prue, a little longer. You don’t love old Morgan, do you?”

That was a poser for Prudence.

“I’m fond of him,” she answered guardedly. “He’s kind, and generous. When I am married I shall be able to do as I like.”

“Rot!” he retorted. “It will mean simply exchanging one dulness for another. Then you’ll vary the dullness by falling in love with some one else, and there’ll be a scandal. I know you. You’ll never settle down to a stick-in-the-mud existence with old Morgan. And serve him jolly well right for being such an ass.”

Prudence regarded him with newly awakened interest, her expression slightly aggrieved.

“I had no idea you held such a low opinion of me,” she said.

He laughed.

“That’s human nature, old girl. If you intend to remain faithful to old Morgan you’ll not have to look at another man, because when the right man comes along you’ll know it; all the wedding rings in the world won’t keep you blind to facts. You chuck the silly old geyser,” he counselled in the inelegant phraseology he affected, “before you tie your life into a hopeless knot.”

She shook her head.

“It’s not so easy,” she said.

“They’d be down on you, of course. But I’d stand by you. We’d worry through.”

“I didn’t mean that.” She attempted explanations. “He’s so good and kind. You don’t understand. I’d feel the meanest thing on the face of the earth if I hurt him deliberately like that. And there isn’t any need. I want to marry him.”

“There’s no accounting for tastes, of course,” he said rudely, and flung out of the room in a mood of deep disgust.

The whole business of Prudence’s engagement was profoundly exasperating to him. It obtruded itself at unexpected moments with an insistence that was to his way of thinking indecent. It interfered with his arrangements. So many hours of her time were given to letter writing that the size of the weekly epistle was ever a matter of suspicious amazement to him. He had no means of knowing how long those bald sentences which Prudence sprawled largely with a generous marginal space over the sheet of notepaper took in their composition. He suspected that she wrote reams to the fellow and posted them on the sly.

The regular arrival of Mr Morgan’s weekly effusion was a further irritation. This was handed usually to Prudence across the breakfast table with ponderous playfulness on brother William’s part, and a show of sly surreptitiousness, that drew general attention to the transit from his pocket to her reluctant hand.

The sorting of the letters was accompanied by such facetious subtleties as “Do we behold a billet doux?” or the murmured misquotation: “He sent a letter to his love.” And the bulky envelope would be passed to her to the accompaniment of appreciative giggles from his sisters, and received by Prudence with as unconcerned an air as the trying circumstances made possible, and left by her lying unopened on the table exposed to the general gaze while she finished her meal. She carried her letter away with her and read it in the privacy of her room.

“I can’t think how you stand it,” Bobby said once, when they were alone together. “If Uncle William made such fatuous remarks to me I’d hit him.”

“I won’t give him the satisfaction of seeing how he annoys me,” she answered. “William would vulgarise the most sacred thing.”

“You aren’t for calling this luke-warm affair sacred, I hope?” Bobby asked with fine sarcasm. Whereupon she smiled suddenly and pulled his scornful young face down to hers and kissed it.

“It’s one way out,” she explained; and he was silent in face of the reasonableness of her reply.

Chapter Twenty Five.

Christmas came and brought with it Edward Morgan’s gift to his fiancée, a rope of pearls, so beautiful and costly that Prudence, on taking the shining thing from its bed of velvet, and holding it in her hands, was moved with a sense of remorse at the inadequacy of the return she was making this man, who showered gifts upon her in token of his love. She did not want his presents; they were an embarrassment and a distress.

The thought of wearing the pearls, as in the letter which accompanied them he requested her to do, on Christmas night, was distasteful to her on account of the continuous flow of witticism she would be forced to meet from William, who already had revealed a new inventiveness on presenting the registered package to her, and had manifested open curiosity as to its contents, which she had failed to gratify. And she dreaded the cold criticism of Bobby’s appraising eye. Bobby would possibly refrain from verbal comment, but his face would express the more.

She locked the pearls away and decided that she would show them to no one; she would ignore the request that came with them. In any case they were too valuable to wear at a quiet dinner at home, at which the only guests would be Matilda and her husband, who, still in uncertainty as to his living, waited on in Wortheton in hopeful expectation. To wear the pearls in Ernest’s presence, and suffer William’s sly pleasantries unmoved, was more than she felt equal to. Ernest, through the medium of his wife, had expressed amazement at her engagement, which he attributed to worldly considerations.

“She is incapable of appreciating the seriousness of marriage,” he had told Matilda. “Her mind is light and inclines to frivolity, and material advantages.”

That his own inclination had been towards a comfortable income, was a point he was apt to overlook.

Prudence found some difficulty in writing a sufficiently appreciative acknowledgment of her lover’s gift. She hated the necessity for expressing a pleasure which she did not feel.

“Your present is much too beautiful,” she wrote. “I don’t know how to thank you. I am overpowered. You give such wonderful things...”

She added nothing about locking the pearls away, but left it to his imagination to picture her, as he had said he would do, shining in all her girlish beauty with his pearls about her throat. She determined to take them with her to Morningside when she went in April. If he wished to see her wearing pearls, she would gratify him then.

The visit to Morningside hung over her like a nightmare. She was not allowed to forget it; Mr Morgan continually referred to it in his letters. He was having the whole place re-decorated for her; and he wrote consulting her preference in the matter of wall-papers, and her taste in tapestries. The furnishing of the house was Victorian; and he feared she might consider it a little heavy and inartistic. He wanted her to express her wishes in regard to furniture and other matters. But Prudence, taking alarm at the thought of this responsibility, flung the onus of everything on to him, and insisted that the furniture which had sufficed hitherto would assuredly serve for her needs. She did not want anything changed. This proved disappointing to him. He would have liked her to show a greater interest in the home which was to be hers. Her indifference chilled his enthusiasm in the plans he was making for her pleasure; and the arrangements were left more and more in the entirely capable hands of the decorator. “We can alter things later,” he told himself. “And Prudence can buy any new stuff she wants.”

The agreeable prospect of shopping with her compensated for the earlier disappointment. It would be so much pleasanter to choose things together.

When she first beheld Morningside Prudence thought it the ugliest house she had ever been in; but later, when better acquainted with its solid splendour, she decided that it had possibilities, and was really a nice house made to look ugly. There was a dingy serviceable effect about everything.

She arrived on a fine evening in April, soft and balmy, following a day of intermittent showers and blazing sunshine. Mr Morgan accompanied her. He had spent the week-end at Wortheton, and made the journey back with her, as had been arranged. His manner during the journey was kindly and attentive. He displayed great consideration for her comfort, and, because she enjoyed fresh air, lowered one window a couple of inches and buttoned his coat from fear of the draught. The absence of lover-like attentions, which he had sufficient perception to see disturbed her, reassured Prudence, and placed their relations on an easier footing.

When she arrived at his home and was conducted to the drawing-room to be received by his mother, she was conscious of a new feeling in regard to him; he inspired her with a sense of support. She turned to him instinctively as to some one reliable and familiar; and was grateful to him when he slipped his hand within her arm and kept it there while they advanced together down the long room to where old Mrs Morgan, stout and severe of feature, sat in a big chair, quietly observant of her, scrutinising her in the close disconcerting way peculiar to short-sighted people.

“This is the daughter I promised you, mother,” Edward Morgan said.

Mrs Morgan rose slowly and confronted them. She took the girl’s outstretched hand.

“What a child!” she said, and bent forward and kissed Prudence on the cheek.

She was, nor did she hide it altogether successfully, a little disappointed. Edward had prepared her for a young daughter-in-law, but she had not expected to see any one quite so youthful in appearance. Comparing them as they stood side by side, the disparity in age struck her unpleasantly.

“My dear,” she said, “I had not realised you were so young.”

“I don’t think I realised it myself,” Prudence returned, feeling her courage oozing away before the hard scrutiny of those critical eyes, “until to-day. I’ve an unfledged feeling since leaving home. But I’m twenty.”

Twenty! And the man who proposed to make her his wife might, had circumstances so ordained it, have been her father.

“She’ll grow up, mother,” Mr Morgan observed, and pressed the girl’s arm reassuringly. “I must try to equalise matters by growing younger myself.”

But the old lady was not encouraging.

“You won’t succeed, Edward. It’s like planting a bulb the wrong way in the soil; it grows against nature downwards, curves about, and works its way to the surface, crooked. Prudence will have to grow to you; you can’t go backwards.”

He reddened and laughed a little constrainedly.

“I feel as young as I did at twenty,” he said. “Prudence will help to rejuvenate me. I refuse to be discouraged.”

He crossed to the tea-table, poured the girl out a cup of tea, and brought it to her.

“We’ve had a tiring journey,” he said. “I expect you’ll be glad to go to your room and rest. There’s a family gathering to-night—in your honour.” He smiled down into the startled upraised eyes, and added: “Just my brother and his wife. You’ll find Mrs Henry amusing. She’s very eager to meet you.”

“Rose always gushes over new acquaintances,” Mrs Morgan interposed. “She is making plans for Prudence’s entertainment, although I told her that Prudence was coming for the purpose of making our acquaintance, and might prefer to avoid festivities. I think she might have waited to consult her wishes.”

“Oh!” cried Prudence, with a ring of pleasurable excitement in her tones. “But that’s awfully kind of her.”

“You see,” Mr Morgan said, enjoying the sight of her pleasure, and feeling grateful to his sister-in-law for her forethought, “the idea is not amiss. We are out for amusement and agreeable to anything that offers. Rose’s plan is excellent.”

“Rose is glad of any excuse for gaiety,” Mrs Morgan said. “It is ridiculous for a woman of her age, with two big boys, to amuse herself in the undignified manner in which she does. There is to be a dance next week. She says it will introduce Prudence to the neighbourhood. In reality it is an excuse for indulging in a form of exercise which she has outgrown.”

“Do you enjoy dancing, Prudence?” Mr Morgan asked.

Her sparkling eyes answered him.

“Oh! yes,” she murmured eagerly, and was conscious from the expression on Mrs Morgan’s face, of giving offence. “I’ve never been to a dance—a real dance in my life,” she added.

“Too much thought is given to amusement nowadays,” Mrs Morgan observed. “When I was a girl we seldom went to evening parties. Late hours rob young people of their freshness, and these modern dances are very vulgar. Edward dislikes dancing.”

“Oh! once in a way I can put up with that sort of thing,” he interposed quickly. “If Prudence enjoys it, I expect I shall get some pleasure out of the evening.”

Prudence gave him a grateful look, and, in reward for his consideration, remarked:

“It’s fortunate that I brought my pearls. It’s such a splendid opportunity for wearing them. You didn’t prepare me for these festivities.”

“Upon my word,” he returned, laughing, “I never gave it a thought.” He became aware of his mother’s silence, her tight-lipped disapproval, and turned the subject diplomatically. “There’s a busy time ahead for you. We’ve quite a lot of things calling for your attention. And my mother is looking forward to showing you over the house, and letting you into the inner mysteries. She is quite a wonderful housewife.”

“Prudence is probably not domesticated,” Mrs Morgan said. “Girls show no interest in their homes nowadays. Things are left to servants.”

“I’ve never had much chance,” Prudence explained apologetically. “You see, I am the youngest of six daughters. But I’d like to learn.”

Mr Morgan considered her gentle submissiveness very sweet. He was surprised at his mother’s lack of response to this softly-voiced desire; for himself, he felt a strong temptation to kiss the pretty timid face of the speaker, but his natural shyness restrained him from obeying this impulse.

“Six woman are too many in one household,” Mrs Morgan vouchsafed. “Some of you ought to have married.”

“One of us has,” Prudence answered.

“And another is going to,” Mr Morgan put in, with a tentative smile at his fiancée. She laughed softly.

“It suggests the rhyme of the ten little nigger boys,” she said. “Six women in one house; one of them married, and then there were five.”

Later, when Prudence had gone upstairs to her room, Mrs Morgan voiced her opinion of her to her son in a single expressive phrase.

“I am afraid, Edward, that your choice has fallen on a rather frivolous girl.”

Chapter Twenty Six.

Alone in the spacious bedroom allotted to her, Prudence spent the rest time allowed her before dinner in the indulgence of her favourite occupation, leaning from the window, lost in a maze of thought. It struck her very forcibly with not the slightest intimation of doubt that six women in a household were less assertively too many than two women—two women with conflicting interests and equal authority. She determined that she would not consent to live with a mother-in-law. It was very plain to her that in the event of Mrs Morgan sharing their home, the combined wills of mother and son would force her inevitably to regulate her life on the lines which habit and tradition inclined them naturally to follow. She did not aspire to excel as a housewife; nor did she wish to avoid late hours and unwholesome excitement, and develop a horror of draughts and a cautious regard for her digestion. Mr Morgan was obliged to live simply. His diet consisted mainly, it seemed to Prudence, of boiled mutton and milk puddings. Mrs Morgan had impressed these important details on her in the drawing-room while she drank her tea. Any departure from this rigorous self-denial was followed by tribulation. And invariably he drank a glass of hot water the last thing before retiring.

Old Mrs Morgan partook of hot water also. She proposed that Prudence should adopt this excellent custom.

“It is so good for every one,” she had explained to Prudence’s immense embarrassment. “It flushes the kidneys.”

Recalling this amazing statement in the solitude of her room, Prudence was moved to quiet mirth.

“A kidney bath,” she reflected with a flash of malicious humour at Mrs Morgan’s expense, “before bedtime. Excellent practice! I must certainly introduce Bobby to the beverage. We’ll call it K.B. I suppose I’m expected to dine off boiled mutton every night, and wash it down with K.B. What a prospect! I wonder whether his mother suspects that when he is away from home Edward strengthens his nightly tonic with whisky.”

Prudence lingered at the open window until the first gong, booming through the house, roused her from her meditations to the disquieting realisation that she must dress and go down and face a resumption of these surprisingly intimate confidences. Mrs Morgan had given her to understand that she was to be fully informed in everything relating to Edward’s well-being and comfort. The first duty of a wife, indeed the duty which embraced all others, consisted in having always in mind a regard for her husband’s wishes and care for his health and happiness.

“I fail to see where I come in,” Prudence thought. “Presumably my wishes don’t count.”

Mr Morgan was waiting for her alone in the drawing-room when she descended. He came forward quickly at sight of her and took her in his arms and kissed her gently.

“I want to thank you,” he said, “while I have the opportunity, for your sweetness and patience. My mother has coddled me so long; she loves doing it; and I let her because—well, because she is my mother. But don’t be alarmed into believing I am the faddist she would make me appear. You will find, when we are married, it is I who will do the thinking for both. Don’t worry your pretty head with trying to absorb these ideas. They amuse her; we need not distress ourselves about them.”

Prudence looked up at him with a smile in her wide blue eyes.

“Have I really to see to the airing of your flannels before you change?” she asked.

He laughed with her.

“There is an airing cupboard. I don’t think you need bother. But I believe she does.”

“You really are a reassuring person,” she said, and held up her face to him to be kissed.

“You are crumpling your shirt, Edward,” Mrs Morgan said, entering the room at the moment, a commanding figure in black silk and fine old lace, with a critical eye on their grouping and an absence of sympathy in her look.

Prudence moved away quickly with the feeling that she had been rebuked.

The Henry Morgans arrived exactly five minutes in advance of dinner, and were received with restrained cordiality, and duly presented to Prudence. Mrs Henry, a bright little woman in the middle thirties, with a gay audacity of manner and a ready infectious laugh, took Prudence by the shoulders and kissed her effusively. Then she held her off at arm’s length and scrutinised her closely.

“It is absurd,” she remarked, her amused eyes on the girl’s blushing face; “you’ll take precedence of me. You’re the senior partner, you know. We really ought to change husbands.”

“Prudence is better suited to a serious-minded husband than you are, Rose, in everything but years,” old Mrs Morgan retorted.

Mrs Henry did not appear to resent this remark. She and her mother-in-law never met without an interchange of polite hostilities.

“Now you know where to place me,” she said to Prudence. “I’m the little lump of leaven amid the dough of Morgan responsibility. You and I have got to be friends. I’ve been blessing Edward ever since he broke the amazing news for introducing something youthful into the firm. We didn’t expect it of him.”

The gong broke in on these indiscretions with its booming summons to the dining-room. Prudence went in with her fiancé, and faced Henry Morgan and his wife at table. Henry was a younger edition of his brother, and not much more animated. It occurred to Prudence that Mrs Henry struck a bright note of contrast amid the semitones of the Morgan household.

Mrs Henry could on occasions make herself peculiarly offensive to her mother-in-law; but it suited her to cultivate Prudence’s acquaintance, and so she exercised for that evening a certain tact in fencing with Mrs Morgan that gave no substantial ground for disagreement. She contrived none the less to reveal Edward’s mother to his fiancée in an altogether unfavourable light.

“Mother is such an autocrat,” she remarked once laughingly. “I suppose that is due to the fact that she has never had a daughter.”

“If I had had a daughter,” Mrs Morgan replied, “I would have brought her up to respect authority.”

“You’ll be able to practise on Prudence,” Mrs Henry suggested pleasantly, giving the old lady, who was more shrewd than she suspected, an insight into her game. She was trying to prejudice Prudence against her.

Mrs Morgan said nothing; but she determined to counterstroke that move. With the laudable desire of getting on to easier ground, Edward Morgan spoke of the coming dance and Prudence’s anticipatory pleasure. Mrs Henry discussed it happily.

“I love dancing,” she confessed to Prudence. “And of course I knew you would. It’s one way of giving you a glimpse of the aborigines. They are a dull lot on the whole. And I’m afraid we’ll be short of dancing men. I shall have to import a few. I’m glad you approve of the idea; mother, of course, doesn’t.”

“You could scarcely expect dancing to appeal to me at my time of life,” Mrs Morgan observed, her short-sighted eyes scrutinising her daughter-in-law’s face with unflattering attentiveness. “I confess to surprise that it should still attract you so strongly. But for Prudence it is a different matter. At her age dancing is quite suitable. Since Edward is willing to accompany her, I am sure she will enjoy it.” She smiled agreeably at Prudence. “I shall enjoy hearing all about it afterwards.”

Mrs Henry had not calculated on this neat turning of her weapon of offence, and was temporarily at a disadvantage. But she recovered from her surprise with astonishing quickness.

“She will be able to tell you of her many conquests,” she said. “It will amuse you to hear of her triumphs.”

“I pay Prudence the compliment of believing her to be neither silly nor vain,” Mrs Morgan returned. “If she made conquests she would not boast of them.”

“I’m unfortunate,” Mrs Henry remarked plaintively. “I am always saying the wrong thing.” She glanced at Prudence with a swift upward lift of her eyelid, and added: “I shall have to borrow a leaf from your book of deportment. You don’t look as good as they would have me believe; but,” and she turned her eyes to where Edward Morgan sat beside his fiancée, and let them rest contemplatively on his solid figure, “I suppose you really are seriously inclined.”

Chapter Twenty Seven.

During the days which followed Prudence strove continually to overcome her prejudices and adapt herself to Mrs Morgan’s ways. She tried, too, to blind herself to what she now realised for an unalterable fact, that her engagement was a mistake. She did not love Edward Morgan. She did not like his mother, nor his home, nor the life they led. Mrs Henry’s humorously sarcastic criticisms of the Morningside establishment did not annoy her. She was often amused by them, and allowed Mrs Henry to see it. Afterwards, removed from Mrs Henry’s influence, her conscience rebuked her for disloyalty.

She liked Mrs Henry on account of her brightness, and spent more time with her than old Mrs Morgan approved of. Mrs Henry kept open house for her bachelor friends, of whom she had a number, and she took a malicious pleasure in getting Prudence to help in the business of entertaining.

“You’ll meet these men at my dance,” she said. “I want you to know them first; it makes it so much more agreeable.”

Prudence thought so too. She failed to understand old Mrs Morgan’s objection. It was absurd to suppose that she must avoid all other male society on account of her engagement.

These brief lapses into an almost Bohemian gaiety under Mrs Henry’s chaperonage, made the Morningside household more noticeably dull. The evenings were particularly dreary. Mrs Morgan insisted upon playing patience after dinner, three-handed to include Prudence, and necessitating the use of three packs of cards which made for confusion in dealing. Prudence was dense in learning the game, and would have preferred to sit out, but was not allowed to; it was imperative that she should share in the amusement. It did not amuse her; and the concentration necessary in following the play made conversation impossible.

“Edward and I play every night,” Mrs Morgan explained. “When he is absent I play a single-handed patience. But that isn’t so interesting. Now when he has to leave home you will be able to play with me. That will cheer us during his absences, and will be nicer for me.”

Prudence began to feel very much as a fish must when caught in a net. The desire to escape was imperative; but the net tightened hourly; there appeared no weak places in it. And Edward Morgan himself was so amazingly kind, and equally amazingly obtuse. He appeared entirely unaware of the vain longing for escape which dominated Prudence’s mind, and made her increasingly restless because of that gradual closing of the net which made retreat day by day more seemingly impossible.

Old Mrs Morgan gave a dinner party for the purpose of introducing Prudence formally as her son’s betrothed wife to his and her immediate friends. Prudence was obliged to stand beside her with Edward and receive these guests as they arrived, and listen to their congratulations and utter little stereotyped phrases in acknowledgment of their good wishes.

There was no way out of the muddle that she could see. She had sealed and ratified her engagement by this visit to her fiancé’s home.

The dinner party produced a curious state of reaction. Apathetic resignation to the inevitable followed upon this amazingly dull ceremony. She must go through with what she had undertaken and make the best of the bargain. The hope of keeping a separate establishment from Mrs Morgan was as forlorn as the hope of escape had been. Neither mother nor son, she knew, would suffer the arrangement. They would wear down her opposition with the firm kindliness with which those in authority overrule the undisciplined complainings of youth. None the less, she felt that the imposition of a mother-in-law was unfair. Had Mr Morgan raised this condition at the time of his proposal she would not have agreed to it.

The night of Mrs Henry’s dance was to witness another reaction. Prudence’s mood varied so continually during the brief visit to Mr Morgan’s home that it might be said to shift like the compass with each fresh breath of criticism that greeted the intelligence of her engagement. She was painfully sensitive on the subject.

She had looked forward to this dance, the success of which in regard to partners was secured in advance, with much pleasure. It was a new experience for her. She dressed that evening with unusual care, and was conscious on surveying the finished result in the glass of looking her best. When she went downstairs old Mrs Morgan’s dim eyes noticed only that she appeared extraordinarily young and immature; there was a suggestion of the ingénue in the fresh girlish prettiness, emphasised by her white dress and the childlike expression in the wide blue eyes.

At sight of her, flushed and happy, and wearing his pearls about her throat, Edward Morgan was moved to an infinitely tender admiration. The thought of the appraising eyes of other men resting upon her, of her being held in familiar closeness by the partners who would claim the privilege of dancing with her, gave him a queer stab of jealousy. He would have preferred that she should dance only with himself.

“You look like a bride,” he said, and bent over her and kissed her lips.

Both speech and manner disconcerted Prudence. Her glance fell, and the flush in her cheeks deepened.

“I’m glad you think I look nice,” she said.

He put her into the motor, and sat beside her, a silent abstracted figure, enveloped in a heavy fur-lined coat. Concern for the thinness of her attire and fear of draughts occupied him during the brief drive. Prudence was relieved when they reached the house and she was free from his fussy guardianship.

He was waiting for her when she emerged from the cloak-room, and he tucked her hand under his arm with an air of conscious proprietorship and led her through an admiring group of men to where the hostess stood with her husband receiving their guests.

“How sweet you look. Prudence!” Mrs Henry said.

“How do? Awfully glad to see you,” murmured Mr Henry, repeating his formula parrotwise to each arrival.

Edward Morgan passed gravely on into the ball-room with his fiancée. He felt nervous and out of his element. Functions of this description always bored him; he possessed no small talk, and dancing seemed to him a foolish pastime. Nevertheless he claimed two dances from Prudence, whose programme filled rapidly; and, having danced the first dance with her, retired to the outskirts, and leaned against the doorpost, watching the moving scene with eyes that looked with jealous insistence for Prudence’s figure among the gay throng of dancers. Mrs Henry, who found time among her distractions to observe him, drew her husband’s attention to the lounging figure, with the whispered injunction:

“For goodness’ sake take him into the card-room! He is making himself ridiculous.”

But Mr Morgan refused to be beguiled into the card-room. He maintained a determined stand near the door; and Prudence, whenever she left the room with her partner in search of rest at the finish of a dance, was conscious of his hungry watchfulness and the look of grave dissatisfaction in his eyes. She wished that he would not watch her; it was embarrassing.

“He doesn’t look much like the hero of the evening,” one unconscious partner remarked to her as he steered her carefully through the press of people. “I wonder which is the lucky lady?—Some one with her eyes wide to the main chance, I imagine. I’ve been amusing myself with trying to pick her out. She is not conspicuous through attentiveness to him, anyhow. Do you know her?”

“Yes,” Prudence admitted, with face aflame.

“Oh, I say! Point her out to me, will you? I am a new-comer, and out of the know.”

“No; I don’t think I will.”

“That’s the reproof courteous,” he returned, slightly nettled. “You consider my remarks in bad taste.”

“I think them indiscreet,” she answered. “You wouldn’t feel very happy for instance if I laid claim to the honour.”

It never occurred to him to treat this speech seriously. He laughed as though it were a huge joke.

“I’m not such a fool as I look,” he said. “It was because I knew it was safe that I spoke so unguardedly to you.”

Later on in the evening he had cause to remember his indiscretion and to regret it. He noticed her with Edward Morgan, and observed with amazement the intimacy of the terms that held between them. It flashed into his mind with disconcerting conviction that what he had believed to be a joke was no jest after all. He had seen Mr Morgan speak to no one else, dance with no other partner. He pushed his inquiries further, and learned to his ever-increasing discomfiture that it was to Mr Morgan’s fiancée he had made his unguarded remarks.

Chapter Twenty Eight.

That night Prudence asked Edward Morgan for her release. The dance to which she had looked forward so gladly, and which she had not enjoyed, had galvanised her into a fixed determination to secure her freedom while yet there was time. The thought of marriage with a man so much older than herself, with whom she had nothing in common, whose every wish opposed itself in gentle opposition to her own, had become a nightmare to her. Young eyes had looked into her eyes that night with a wondering question in them that had hurt her. The hunger for young companionship gripped her. Her memory echoed the careless inconsequent chatter, the joyous laughter of irresponsible youth. One laugh in particular, an amused incredulous laugh, rang in her ears like a reproach.

Why had she committed this folly? She must draw back before it was too late.

With manifest nervousness Prudence made her faltering appeal for release from her engagement during the homeward drive. Mr Morgan was amazed. He keenly resented her lack of consideration for himself in wishing to withdraw her promise after the publicity given to their engagement. She shrank back from the cold anger in his eyes and the hardness of his voice when he answered her.

“You are overwrought,” he said. “You don’t know what you are saying. What have I done, that you should wish to break off your engagement? I have striven to please you, to make you happy. Do you realise that in less than two months we are to be married? You would make me ridiculous. People will laugh. It will be scandalous.”

His voice gathered anger as he considered the amusement that would arise at his expense when it became known that the young bride he had chosen had jilted him—jilted the wealthy Edward Morgan almost on the eve of the wedding.

“It is absurd!” he added. “You don’t realise what you ask.”

“Oh, please!” she cried, and turned a white frightened face towards him. “Don’t be angry with me. I’m so sorry. I ought never to have become engaged to you. I don’t love you.”

He sounded a note of impatience.

“You raised that point at the time when I proposed,” he said. “I thought we had settled that. Love will come with marriage. I have enough for both.”

“Don’t you see that that only makes it worse?” she said in a voice that shook with nervousness. “I can never love you. I know that now. I’ve tried. Oh! please be generous and forgive me. I am so sorry for causing you pain. I’m so sorry.”

She broke down, and sat huddled in a corner of the motor, and sobbed.

Mr Morgan sank back in his corner and stared out at the darkened street. Never in his life had he felt so annoyed and upset. At the back of his mind lurked the uncomfortable conviction that he had been a fool, that his world would call him a fool, an old fool for falling in love with a pretty face.

He wished he had never seen Prudence, wished that he had never asked her to become his wife. Since he had asked her and she had accepted him, he had no intention of acceding now to her absurd request for release. She was placing him in a most invidious position. She seemed to have no appreciation of what was right and due to him. It would be necessary to make her see that he had to be considered in this as well as herself. He thought of his mother, of the annoyance this would cause her. He determined to ask her to intercede with the girl in his behalf. It was impossible that she should retract from her promise at the eleventh hour.

He sat in a heavy silence, his imagination busy with the awkwardness of this disastrous crisis in his hitherto pleasant life, until the motor turned in at his own gates and stopped in front of the house. He got out, and, leaving Prudence to follow, walked up to the door which he opened with his latchkey. He waited for her in the warm, dimly-lit hall, and closed the door after her and bolted it. He lit a bedroom candle for her with some attempt to atone for his late discourtesy, and asked:

“Would you like anything before you go upstairs?”

“No, thank you.”

She took the candlestick from him with a shaking hand and turned towards the stairs.

“Good-night,” he said.

The emotion in his voice moved her to yet deeper distress. It was the first time she had parted from him without the good-night kiss. She looked back at him where he stood, muffled in his greatcoat, a big ungainly figure, which nevertheless seemed shrunken, possibly on account of the loss of that air of successful assurance which hitherto had characterised the man.

“Good-night,” she answered softly. “I am so sorry that I have hurt you.”

Then, carrying her candle, she went swiftly up the stairs.

Neither Prudence nor Edward Morgan secured any sleep that night. While Mr Morgan tossed restlessly on his bed, fretting and worrying over this blow which she had dealt him, Prudence lay very still and wide-eyed in the darkness, wondering dismally what the new day would bring forth, and how she would face old Mrs Morgan’s anger, and the pained displeasure in Edward’s eyes.

It was obvious to Prudence when she descended on the following morning, heavy-eyed and with nerves strung to high tension, that Mr Morgan had already confided in his mother the fact that she wished to end her engagement. The old lady was upset and deeply affronted. Her agitation betrayed itself in the trembling of her hands as she poured out the coffee from the big silver urn. Nothing was said on the subject uppermost in their thoughts until the finish of the meal, but a sense of something impending hung in the air, making ordinary conversation impossible. When he had finished his breakfast Mr Morgan rose and went out, closing the door behind him. Mrs Morgan followed his exit with her short-sighted gaze; then she sat back in her chair and gave her attention to Prudence.

She did not speak immediately; she was busy collecting her ideas, trying to subdue her bitter resentment against this girl who deliberately planned to wreck her son’s happiness. A betrayal of anger would, she realised, only make the estrangement more complete.

“I want to talk to you,” she said presently, breaking the silence which was becoming increasingly awkward.

Prudence looked up, and sat crumbling the bread beside her plate nervously, and waited.

“Edward has told me what happened last night,” Mrs Morgan added with fresh signs of agitation in her voice. “He is very distressed and worried. This means more to him than you realise. It is not as if he were a young man, and could face a disappointment and get over it. You cannot seriously intend to break off your engagement—now—when everything is arranged? It would be monstrous.”

She paused, and looked with pathetic eagerness to Prudence for her answer. The girl choked. She felt the tears rising to her eyes and hastily winked them away. What could she say? What was there to say in face of her determination not to marry a man with whom marriage seemed to her now intolerable? It amazed her to think that ever she could have contemplated such a step.

“I don’t know how to answer you,” she faltered. “It’s so hateful to keep hurting people. I know I’ve hurt Edward. I know you are thinking badly of me—you must be. And I can’t alter it. I can’t please you. I ought never to have accepted Edward. I don’t love him. How can I marry some one I don’t love?”

The tears fell now unchecked; she made no attempt to staunch them. But old Mrs Morgan took no heed of this display of emotion; no amount of tears could atone for such heartless conduct. She set herself to the task of overruling the girl’s decision.

“I agree with you that you ought not to have engaged yourself to my son,” she said; “but, since you are engaged to him and every one knows of the engagement, it would be most dishonourable for you to end it now. Your father will say the same. You cannot do it, Prudence.”

“But I must,” Prudence insisted.

“No.” The old lady became more emphatic. “It is unthinkable. You can’t do it. I don’t consider, myself, that you will make Edward a suitable wife; but he still wishes it; your family wish it. You cannot draw back.”

Prudence pushed back her chair and stood up.

“I’ll go home,” she said. “I’ll go to-day—now. I don’t think that Edward has a right to expect me to many him against my will. I’ll go home.” She gripped the back of her chair hard, and met Mrs Morgan’s unfriendly eyes with no sign of yielding in her look. “I know you are angry with me,” she added. “They’ll be angry at home. I can’t help that. I deserve it. But to do as you wish wouldn’t help matters. It would be another mistake. I couldn’t make him happy.”

“You will never make any one happy,” Mrs Morgan said, “because you are utterly selfish.”

Chapter Twenty Nine.

Prudence was not allowed to return home that day as she wished to do. Old Mrs Morgan insisted upon writing first to Mr Graynor to prepare him for his daughter’s unexpected return, and to explain the reason for her travelling before the original date and alone. In the circumstances it was impossible that Mr Morgan should accompany her.

Prudence dreaded the sending of this letter. She feared as the result of its dispatch that some member of her family would arrive to take her home like a child who is in disgrace. She retired to her room and spent the greater part of the day in tears till her face was disfigured and her eyelids swollen with weeping, so that Mrs Henry, when she called during the afternoon, could not fail to detect these signs of distress. Old Mrs Morgan was too upset to receive any one; and Prudence entertained the mystified visitor alone, and in response to repeated probings, explained the situation to her in jerky incomplete sentences which conveyed nothing very clearly, save the fact that she wished to end her engagement and that the Morgans would not agree to this on account of what people would say.

Mrs Henry’s primary emotion, when this point became clear, revealed itself in a vindictive gratification in her mother-in-law’s discomfiture. Apart from that she kept an open mind on the subject. She liked Prudence. She would have preferred that Edward should not upset her own arrangements by taking to himself a wife, but, since he was inclined that way, she thoroughly approved his choice, and had become reconciled to the thought of his marriage. She scarcely knew whether to feel relieved or disappointed at this unexpected turn of affairs. But she was frankly amused. The picture of old Mrs Morgan, amazed and angry, fussing in irreconcilable distress over what people would say, filled her with indescribable satisfaction.

“They can’t make you marry against your will,” she said reassuringly.

Prudence was not so sanguine. Persistent opposition of the kind enforced in her family bore one with the irresistible force of a flood in the most unlikely directions. To brave this opposition from a distance was a very different affair from facing it daily and being crushed beneath its influence. She had had experience enough of this sort in the past.

“It wouldn’t be so intolerable,” she said, “if Edward and I could five alone. I want a home of my own. I should hate to have my household ordered according to Mrs Morgan’s ideas of what a home should be. Imagine not being mistress in one’s own house!”

“I can’t imagine anything of the kind,” Mrs Henry said, and became animated with a new and brilliant inspiration. “Make your consent to marrying him conditional on his keeping a separate establishment,” she suggested. “Turn the old woman out—or make him take another house. That’s how I should act in your place.”

The audacity of this proposal robbed it largely of its effect. Prudence rejected it without consideration.

“They would never agree to that,” she said.

“Then Edward has no right to hold you to your engagement. You didn’t undertake to marry his mother.”

Mrs Henry felt particularly pleased with her Solomon-like solution of the difficulty. She urged Prudence to give it her attention.

“You have the whole situation in your hands, if you like to be firm,” she said.

It was a shabby card. Prudence felt, to hold in reserve for the winning of the game. Nevertheless, if it was a shabby card, it was a very strong one: it threw the responsibility of decision on Mr Morgan’s shoulders.

“Don’t let them bully you, you poor child!” Mrs Henry added, and passed a friendly arm around Prudence’s waist. “Be firm, and show some spirit, and you’ll win through.” She took Prudence out motoring, to change the current of her thoughts, as she expressed it. “It won’t help matters if you are ill on our hands,” she said.

William arrived at Morningside as a result of Mrs Morgan’s letter, a pompously irate and blustering William, whose anger roused Prudence to a show of defiance, but otherwise left her unmoved.

“This is a nice thing to have happened,” he observed, his cold eyes resting with unsympathetic criticism on her white face, with the eyes ringed from sleeplessness and recent distress. “You have disgraced the family. No Graynor, whatever his faults, has acted dishonourably before. Your conduct is scandalous. Here have I been obliged to leave my business and start off at a moment’s notice on your account. You show no consideration for any one.”

“You might have spared yourself the journey, so far as my pleasure is concerned,” Prudence retorted.

He insisted upon her returning with him by the first available train, an arrangement which suited Prudence, whose one desire was to get away from Morningside under any condition. Edward Morgan’s sense of injury, which he made very manifest, and his mother’s silent anger, were difficult to face.

She had not seen Edward alone since the night of the dance; but he sought an interview with her before she left the house to which he had brought her in the proud belief that she would one day live there with him as his wife. He came to her in the drawing-room where she waited dressed ready for departure, with an air of perplexed and hurt inquiry in his look. He refused to believe in the unalterable quality of her decision. The whole thing was utterly incomprehensible to him.

“Don’t move,” he said gravely, as Prudence started up nervously at his entrance with a hurried demand to know whether the motor and William were ready. “I couldn’t let you leave without a further effort to arrive at some sort of an understanding. The motor will not be round for a few minutes. There is plenty of time. Won’t you sit down?”