BOOK II

THE BREAKING OF DREAMS

CHAPTER I

RECORDING SOME ASPECTS OF A SMALL PILGRIM'S PROGRESS

It is an ill wind that blows nobody good, says the comfortable proverb. Which would appear to be but another manner of declaring that the law of compensation works permanently in human affairs. All quantities, material and immaterial alike, are, of necessity, stable; therefore the loss or defect of one participant must—indirectly, no doubt, yet very surely—make for the gain of some other. As of old, so now, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.

Julius March would, how gladly, have been among the martyrs! But the lot fell otherwise. And—always admitting the harshness of the limitations he had imposed on himself—the martyrdom of those he held dearest, did, in fact, work to secure him a measure of content that had otherwise been unattainable. The twelve years following the birth of Lady Calmady's child were the most fruitful of his life. He filled a post no other person could have filled; one which, while satisfying his religious sense and priestly ideal of detachment, appeased the cravings of his heart and developed the practical man in him. The contemplative and introspective attitude was balanced by an active and objective one. For he continued to live under his dear lady's roof, seeing her daily and serving her in many matters. He watched her, admiring her clear yet charitable judgment and her prudence in business. He bowed in reverence before her perfect singleness of purpose. He was almost appalled, apprehending, now and then, the secret abysses of her womanhood, the immensity of her self-devotion, the swing of her nature from quick, sensitive shrinking to almost impious pride. Man is the outcome of the eternal common sense; woman that of some moment of divine folly. Meanwhile the ways of true love are many; and Julius March, thus watching his dear lady, discovered, as other elect souls have discovered before him, that the way of chastity and silence, notwithstanding its very constant heartache, is by no means among the least sweet. The entries in his diaries of this period are intermittent, concise, and brief—naturally enough, since the central figure of Julius's mental picture had ceased, happily for him, to be himself.

And not only Katherine's sorrows, but the unselfish action of another woman went to make Julius March's position at Brockhurst tenable. A few days after Ormiston's momentous interview with his sister, news came of Mrs. St. Quentin's death. She had passed hence peacefully in her sleep. Knowledge of the facts of poor, little Dickie Calmady's ill-fortune had been spared her. For it would be more satisfactory—so Mademoiselle de Mirancourt had remarked, not without a shade of irony—that if Lucia St. Quentin must learn the sad fact at all, she should do so where le bon Dieu Himself would be at hand to explain matters, and so, in a degree, set them right.

Early in April Mademoiselle de Mirancourt had gathered together her most precious possessions and closed the pretty apartment in the rue de Rennes. It had been a happy halting-place on the journey of life. It was haunted by well-beloved ghosts. It cost not a little to bid it, the neighbouring church of the St. Germain des Près, where she had so long worshipped, and her little coterie of intimate friends, farewell. Yet she set forth, taking with her Henriette, the hard-featured, old, Breton maid, and Monsieur Pouf, the gray, Persian cat,—he protesting plaintively from within a large Manilla basket,—and thus accompanied, made pilgrimage to Brockhurst. And when Katherine, all the lost joys of her girlhood assailing her at sight of her lifelong friend, had broken down for once, and, laying her beautiful head on the elder woman's shoulder, had sobbed out a question as to when this visit must end, Marie de Mirancourt had answered—

"That, most dear one, is precisely as you shall see fit to decide. It need not end till I myself end, if you so please."

And when Katherine, greatly comforted yet fearing to be over-greedy of comfort, had reasoned with her, reminding her of the difference of climate, the different habits of living in that gay, little Paris home and this great English country house; reminding her, further, of her so often and fondly expressed desire to retire from the world while yet in the complete possession of her powers and prepare for the inevitable close within the calm and sacred precincts of the convent—the other replied almost gaily—

"Ah, my child! I have still a naughty little spirit of experiment in me which defiles the barbarities of your climate. While as to the convent, it has beckoned so long—let it beckon still! It called first when my fiancé died,—God rest his soul,—worn out by the hardships he endured in the war of La Vendée and I put from me forever all thought of marriage. But then my mother, an emigrant here in London, claimed all my care. It called me again when she departed, dear saintly being. But then there were my brother's sons—orphaned by the guillotine—to place. And when I had established them honourably, our beloved Lucia turned to me, with her many enchantments and exquisite tragedy of the heart. And, now, in my old age I come to you—whom I receive from her as a welcome legacy—to remain just so long as I am not a burden to you. Second childhood and first should understand one another. We will play delightful games together, the dear baby and I. So let the convent beckon. For the convent is perhaps, after all, but an impatient grasping at the rest of paradise, before that rest is fairly earned. I have a good hope that, after all, we give ourselves most acceptably to God in thus giving ourselves to His human creatures."

Thus did Marie de Mirancourt, for love's sake, condemn herself to exile, thereby rendering possible—among other things—Julius's continued residence at Brockhurst. For Captain Ormiston had held true to his resolve of scorning the delights of idleness, the smiles of ladies more kind than wise, and all those other pleasant iniquities to which idleness inclines the young and full-blooded, of bidding farewell to London and Windsor, and proceeding to "live laborious days" in some far country. He had offered to remain indefinitely with Katherine if she needed him. But she refused. Let him be faithful to the noble profession of arms and make a name for himself therein.

"Brockhurst has ceased to be a place for a soldier," she said. "Leave it to women and priests!" And then, repenting of the bitterness of her speech, she added:—"Really there is not more work than I can manage, with Julius to help me at times. Iles is a good servant if a little tediously pompous, and Chifney must see to the stables."—Lady Calmady paused, and her face grew hard. But for her husband's dying request, she would have sold every horse in the stud, razed the great square of buildings to the ground and made the site of it a dunghill. "Work is a drug to deaden thought. So it is a kindness to let me have plenty of it, dear old man. And I fear, even when the labour of each day is done, and Dickie is safe asleep,—poor darling,—I shall still have more than enough of time for thought, for asking those questions to which there seems no answer, and for desires, vain as they are persistent, that things were somehow, anyhow, other than they are!"

Therefore it came about that a singular quiet settled down on Brockhurst—a quiet of waiting, of pause, rather than of accomplishment. But Julius March, for reasons aforesaid, and Mademoiselle de Mirancourt, in virtue of her unclouded faith in the teachings of her Church,—which assures its members of the beneficent purpose working behind all the sad seeming of this world,—alike rejoiced in that. A change of occupations and of interests came naturally with the change of the seasons, with the time to sow and reap, to plant saplings, to fell timber, to fence, to cut copsing, to build or rebuild, to receive rents or remit them, to listen to many appeals, to readjust differences, to feed game or to shoot it, to bestow charity of meat and fuel, to haul ice in winter to the ice-house from the lake. But beyond all this there was little going or coming at Brockhurst. The magnates of the countryside called at decent intervals, and at decent intervals Lady Calmady returned their civilities. But having ceased to entertain, she refused to receive entertainment. She shut herself away in somewhat jealous seclusion, defiant of possibly curious glances and pitying tongues. Before long her neighbours, therefore, came to raise their eyebrows a little in speaking of her, and to utter discreet regrets that Lady Calmady, though handsome and charming when you saw her, was so very eccentric, adding—"Of course every one knows there is something very uncomfortable about the little boy!" Then would follow confidences as to the disastrous results of popish influences and Romanising tendencies; and an openly expressed conviction—more especially on the part of ladies blessed with daughters of marriageable age—that it would have been so very much better for many people if the late Sir Richard Calmady had looked nearer home for a bride.

But these comments did not affect Katherine. In point of fact they rarely reached her ears. Alone among her neighbours, Mary Cathcart, of the crisp, black hair and gipsy-like complexion, was still admitted to some intimacy of intercourse. And the girl was far too loyal either to bring in gossip or to carry it out. Brockhurst held the romance of her heart. And, notwithstanding the earnest wooing—as the years went on—of more than one very eligible gentleman, Brockhurst continued to hold it.

Meanwhile the somewhat quaint fixed star around which this whole system of planets, large and small, very really revolved, shone forth upon them all with a cheerful enough light. For Dickie by no means belied the promise of his babyhood. He was a beautiful and healthy little boy, with a charming brilliance of colouring, warm and solid in tone. He had his mother's changeful eyes, though the blue of them was brighter than hers had now come to be. He had her dark eyebrows and eyelashes too, and her finely curved lips. While he bore likeness to his father in the straight, square-tipped nose and the close-fitting cap of bright, brown hair with golden stains in it, growing low in short curling locks on the broad forehead and the nape of the neck—expressing the shape of the head very definitely, and giving it something of antique nobility and grace.

And the little lad's appearance afforded, in these pleasant early days at all events, fair index to his temperament. He was gay-natured, affectionate, intelligent, full of a lively yet courteous curiosity, easily moved to laughter, almost inconveniently fearless and experimental; while his occasional thunderbursts of passion cleared off quickly into sunshine and blue sky again. For as yet the burden of deformity rested upon him very lightly. He associated hardly at all with other children, and had but scant occasion to measure his poor powers of locomotion against their normal ones. Lady Fallowfeild it is true, in obedience to suggestions on the part of her kindly lord and master, offered tentatively to import a carriage load—little Ludovic Quayle was just the same age as Dickie—from the Whitney nurseries to spend the day.

"Good fellow, Calmady. I liked Calmady," Lord Fallowfeild had said to her. His conversation, it may be observed, was nothing if not interjectional. "Pretty woman, Lady Calmady—-terrible thing for her being left as she is. Always shall regret Calmady. Very sorry for her. Always have been sorry for a pretty woman in trouble. Ought to see something of her, my dear. The two estates join, and, as I always have said, it's a duty to support your own class. Can't expect the masses to respect you unless you show them you're prepared to stand by your own class. Just take some of the children over to see Lady Calmady. Pretty children, do her good to see them. Rode uncommonly straight did Calmady. Terribly upsetting thing his funeral. Never shall forget it. Always did like Calmady—good fellow, Calmady. Nasty thing his death."

But Katherine's pen was fertile in excuses to avoid the invasion from Whitney. Lady Fallowfeild's small brains and large domestic complacency were too trying to her. And that noble lady, it must be owned, was secretly not a little glad to have her advances thus firmly, though gently, repulsed. For she was alarmed at Lady Calmady's reported acquaintance with foreign lands and with books; added to which her simple mind harboured much grisly though vague terror concerning the Roman Church. Picture all her brood of little Quayles incontinently converted into little monks and nuns with shaven heads! How such sudden conversion could be accomplished Lady Fallowfeild did not presume to explain. It sufficed her that "everybody always said Papists were so dreadfully clever and unscrupulous you never could tell what they might not do next."

Once, when Dickie was about six years old, Colonel St. Quentin brought his young wife and two little girls to stay at Brockhurst. Katherine had a great regard for her cousin, yet the visit was never repeated. On the flat poor Dick could manage fairly well, his strangely shod feet traveling laboriously along in effort after rapidity; his hands hastily outstretched now and again to lay hold of door-jamb or table-edge, since his balance was none of the securest. But in that delightfully varied journey from the nursery, by way of his mother's bed-room, the Chapel-Room next door, the broad stair-head,—with its carven balusters, shiny oak flooring, and fine landscapes by Claude and Hobbema,—the state drawing-room and libraries, to that America of his childish dreams, that country of magnificent distances and large possibility of discovery, the Long Gallery, he was speedily distanced by the three-year-old Betty, let alone her six-year-old sister Honoria, a tall, slim, little maiden, daintily high-bred of face and fleet of foot as a hind. This was bad enough. But the stairways afforded yet more afflicting experiences—the descent of even the widest and shallowest flights presented matter of insuperable difficulty; while the ascent was only to be achieved by recourse to all-fours, against the ignominy of which mode of progression Dickie's soul revolted. And so the little boy concluded that he did not care much about little girls; and confided to his devoted play-fellow Clara—Mrs. Denny's niece and sometime second still-room maid, now promoted, on account of her many engaging qualities, to be Dickie's special attendant—that:—

"They went so quick, they always left him behind, and it was not nice to be left behind, and it was very rude of them to do it; didn't Clara think so?"

And Clara, as in duty and affection bound, not without additional testimony in a certain dimness of her pretty, honest, brown eyes, did indeed very much think so. It followed, therefore, that Dickie saw the St. Quentin family drive away, nurses and luggage complete, quite unmoved. And returned with satisfaction and renewed self-confidence to the exclusive society of all those dear grown-up people—gentle and simple—who were never guilty of leaving him behind; to that of Camp, the old, white bulldog, and young Camp, his son and heir, who, if they so far forgot themselves as to run away, invariably ran back again and apologised, fawning upon him and pushing their broad, ugly, kindly muzzles into his hands; and to that of Monsieur Pouf, the gray Persian cat, who, far from going too quickly, displayed such majestic deliberation of movement and admirable dignity of waving fluffed tail, that it required much patient coaxing on Dickie's part ever to make him leave his cushion by the fire and go at all.

But, with the above-mentioned exception, the little boy's self-content suffered but slight disturbance. He took himself very much for granted. He was very curious of outside things, very much amused. Moreover, he was king of a far from contemptible kingdom; and in the blessed ignorance of childhood—that finds pride and honour in things which a wider and sadder knowledge often proves far from glad or glorious—it appeared to him not unnatural that a king should differ, even to the point of some slightly impeding disabilities, from the rank and file of his obedient and devoted subjects. For Dickie, happily for him, was as yet given over to that wholly pleasant vanity, the aristocratic idea. The rough justice of democracy, and the harsh breaking of all purely personal and individualistic dreams that comes along with it, for him, was not just yet.

And Richard's continued and undismayed acquiescence in his physical misfortune was fostered, indirectly, by the captivating poetry of myth and legend with which his mind was fed. He had an insatiable appetite for stories, and Mademoiselle de Mirancourt was an untiring raconteuse. On Sunday afternoons upon the terrace, when the park lay bathed in drowsy sunshine and sapphire shadows haunted the under edge of the great woods, the pretty old lady—her eyes shining with gentle laughter, for Marie de Mirancourt's faith had reached the very perfect stage in which the soul dares play, even as lovers play, with that it holds most sacred—would tell Dickie—the fairy tales of her Church. Would tell him of blessed St. Francis and of Poverty, his sweet, sad bride; of his sermon to the birds dwelling in the oak groves along Tiber valley; of the mystic stigmata, marking as with nail prints his hands and feet, and of that indomitable love towards all creatures, which found alike in the sun in heaven and the heavy-laden ass, brothers and friends. Or she would tell him of that man of mighty strength and stature, St. Christopher, who, in the stormy darkness,—yielding to its reiterated entreaties,—set forth to bear the little child across the wind-swept ford. How he staggered in midstream, amazed and terrified under the awful weight of that, apparently so light, burden; to learn, on struggling ashore at last, that he had borne upon his shoulder no mortal infant, but the whole world and the eternal maker of it, Christ Himself.

These and many another wonder tale of Christian miracle did she tell to Dickie—he squatting on a rug beside her, resting his curly head against her knees, while the pink-footed pigeons hurried hither and thither, picking up the handfuls of barley he scattered on the flags, and the peacocks sunned themselves with a certain worldly and disdainful grace on the hand-rails of the gray balustrades, and young Camp, after some wild skirmish in search of sport, flung himself down panting, his tongue lolling out of his grinning jaws, by the boy's side.

And Katherine, putting aside her cares as regent of Dickie's kingdom and the sorrow that lay so chill against her heart, would tell him stories too, but of a different order of sentiment and of thought. For Katherine was young yet, and her stories were gallant—since her own spirit was very brave—or merry, because it delighted her to hear the boy laugh. And often, as he grew a little older, she would sit with her arm round him, in the keen, winter twilights before the lamps were lit, on the broad cushioned bench of the oriel window in the Chapel-Room. Outside, the stars grew in number and brightness as the dusk deepened. Within, the firelight played over the white-paneled walls, revealing fitfully the handsome faces of former Calmadys—short-lived, passing hence all unsated with the desperate joys of living—painted by Vandyke and Sir Peter Lely, or by Romney and Sir Joshua. Then she would tell him not only of Aladdin, of Cinderella, and time-honoured Puss-in-Boots, but of Merlin the great enchanter, and of King Arthur and his company of noble knights. And of the loves of Sigurd the Niblung and Brunhilda the wise and terrible queen, and of their lifelong sorrow, and of the fateful treasure of fairy gold which lies buried beneath the rushing waters of the Rhine. Or she would tell him of those cold, clear, far-off times in the northern sojourning places of our race—tell him of the cow Audhumla, alone in the vast plain at the very beginning of things, licking the stones crusted over with hoar frost and salt, till, on the third day, there sprung from them a warrior named Bur, the father of Bör, the father of Odin, who is the father of all the gods. She would tell him of wicked Loki too, the deceiver and cunning plotter against the peace of heaven. And of his three evil children—here Dickie would, for what reason he knew not, always feel his mother hold him more closely, while her voice took a deeper tone—Fenrir the wolf, who, when Thor sought to bind him, bit off the brave god's right hand; and Jörmungand the Midgard serpent, who, tail in mouth, circles the world; and Hela, the pale queen, who reigns in Niflheim over the dim kingdoms of the dead. And of Baldur the bright shining god, joy of Asgard, slain in error by Höder his blind twin-brother; for whom all things on earth—save one—weep, and will weep, till in the last days he comes again. And of All-Father Odin himself, plucking out his right eye and bartering it for a draught of wisdom-giving water from Mirmir's magic well. Again, she would tell him of the End—which it must be owned frightened Dickie a little, so that he would stroke her cheek, and say softly, "But, mummy, you really are sure, aren't you, it won't happen for a good while yet?"—Of Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods; of the Fimbul winter, and cheerless sun and hurrying, blood-red moon, and all the direful signs which must needs go before the last great battle between good and evil.

And through all of these stories, of Christian and heathen origin alike, Richard began dimly, almost unconsciously, to trace, recurrent as a strain of austere music, the idea—very common to ages less soft and fastidious than our own—of payment in self-restraint and labour, or in actual bodily pain, loss, or disablement, for all good gained and knowledge won.

He found the same idea again when, under the teaching of Julius March, he began reading history, and when his little skill in Greek and Latin carried him as far as the easier passages of the classic poets. Dick was a very apt, if somewhat erratic and inaccurate, scholar. His insatiable curiosity drove him forward. He scurried, in childish fashion by all shortcuts available, to get at the heart of the matter—a habit of mind detestable to pedants, since to them the letter is the main object, not the spirit. Happily Julius was ceasing to be a pedant, even in matters ecclesiastical. He loved the little boy, the mingled charm and pathos of whose personality held him as with a spell. With untiring patience he answered, to the best of his ability, Dickie's endless questions, of how and why. And, perhaps, he learned even more than he taught, under this fire of cross-examination. He had never come intimately in contact with a child's mind before; and Dickie's daring speculations and suggestions opened up very surprising vistas at times. The boy was a born adventurer; a gaily audacious sceptic moreover, notwithstanding his large swallow for romance, until his own morsel of reason and sense of dramatic fitness were satisfied.

And so, having once apprehended that idea of payment, he searched for justification of it instinctively in all he saw and read. He found it again in the immortal story of the siege of Troy, and in the long wanderings and manifold trials of that most experimental of philosophers, the great Ulysses. He found it too in more modern and more authentic history—in the lives of Galileo and Columbus, of Sir Walter Raleigh and many another hero and heroine, of whom, because of some unusual excellence of spirit or attainment, their fellow-men, and, as it would seem, the very gods themselves, have grown jealous, not enduring to witness a beauty rivalling or surpassing their own.

The idea was all confused as yet, coloured by childish fancies, instinctive merely, not realised. Yet it occupied a very actual place in the little boy's mind. He lingered over it silently, caressing it, returning to it again and again in half-frightened delight. It lent a fascination, somewhat morbid perhaps, to all ill-favoured and unsightly creatures—to blind worms and slow-moving toads; to trapped cats and dusty, disabled, winter flies; to a winged sea-gull, property of Bushnell, one of the under-gardeners, that paced, picking up loathsome living in the matter of slugs and snails, about the cabbage beds, all the tragedy of its lost power of flight and of the freedom of the sea in its wild, pale eyes.

It further provoked Dickie to expend all his not inconsiderable gift of draughtsmanship, in the production of long processions of half-human monsters of a grotesque and essentially uncomfortable character. He scribbled these upon all available pieces of paper, including the fly-leaves of Todhunter's Arithmetic, and of his Latin and Greek primers. In an evil hour, for the tidiness of his school-books, he came across the ballad of "Aiken-Drum," with its rather terrible mixture of humour, realism, and the supernatural. From thenceforth for some weeks—though he adroitly avoided giving any direct account of the origin of these grisly imaginative freaks—many margins were adorned, or rather defaced, by fancy portraits of that "foul and stalwart ghaist" the Brownie of Badnock.

So did Dickie dwell, through all his childhood and the early years of youth, in the dear land of dreams, petted, considered, sheltered with perhaps almost cruel kindness, from the keen winds of truth that blow forever across the world. Which winds, while causing all to suffer and bringing death to the weak and fearful, to the lovers of lies and the makers of them, go in the end to strengthen the strong who dare face them, and fortify these in the acceptance of the only knowledge really worth having—namely, the knowledge that romance is no exclusive property of the past, or eternal life of the future, but that both these are here immediately and actually for whoso has eyes to see and courage to possess.

The fairest dreams are true. Yet it is so ordered that to know that we must awake from them. And the awakening is an ugly process enough, too often. When Dickie was about thirteen, the awakening began for him. It came in time-honoured forms—those of horses and of a woman.

CHAPTER II

IN WHICH OUR HERO IMPROVES HIS ACQUAINTANCE WITH MANY THINGS—HIMSELF INCLUDED

It came about in this wise. Roger Ormiston was expected at Brockhurst, after an absence of some years. He had served with distinction in the Sikh war; and had seen fighting on a grand scale in the battles of Sobraon and Chillianwallah. Later, the restless genius of travel had taken hold on him, leading him far eastward into China, and northward across the Himalayan snows. He had dwelt among strange peoples and looked on strange gods. He had hunted strange beasts, moreover, and learnt their polity and their ways. He had seen the bewildering fecundity of nature in the tropic jungle, and her barren and terrible beauty in the out-stretch of the naked desert. And the thought of all this set Dickie's imagination on fire. The return of Roger Ormiston was, to him, as the return of the mighty Ulysses himself.

For a change was coming over the boy. He began to weary of fable and cry out for fact. He had just entered his fourteenth year. He was growing fast; and, but for that dwarfing deformity, would have been unusually tall, graceful and well-proportioned. But along with this increase of stature had come a listlessness and languor which troubled Lady Calmady. The boy was sweet-tempered enough, had his hours, indeed, of overflowing fun and high spirits. Still he was restless and tired easily of each occupation in turn. He developed a disquieting relish for solitude; and took to camping-out on one of the broad window-seats of the Long Gallery, in company with volumes of Captain Cook's and Hakluyt's voyages, old-time histories of sport and natural history; not to mention Robinson Crusoe and the merry but doubtfully decent pages of Geoffrey Gambado. And his mother noted, not without a sinking of the heart, that the window-seat, which in his solitary moods Dickie most frequented, was precisely that one of the eastern bay which commanded—beyond the smooth, green expanse and red walls of the troco-ground—a good view of the grass ride, running parallel with the lime avenue, along which the horses from the racing stables were taken out and back, morning and evening, to the galloping ground. Then fears began to assail Katherine that the boy's childhood, the content and repose of it, were nearly past. Small wonder that her heart should sink!

On the day of her brother's return, Katherine, after rather anxious search, so found Richard. He was standing on the book-strewn window-seat. He had pushed open the tall narrow casement and leaned out. The April afternoon was fitfully bright. A rainbow spanned the landscape, from the Long Water in the valley to the edge of the forest crowning the table-land. Here and there showers of rain fell, showing white against huge masses of purple cloud piled up along the horizon.

And as Katherine drew near, threading her way carefully between the Chinese cabinets, oriental jars, and many quaint treasures furnishing the end of the great room, she saw that, along the grass ride, some twenty race-horses, came streeling homeward in single file—a long line of brown, chestnut, black, and of the raw yellows and scarlets of horse-clothing against the delicate green of springing turf and opening leaves. Beside them, clad in pepper-and-salt mixture, breeches and gaiters complete, Mr. Chifney pricked forward soberly on his handsome gray cob. The boys called to one another now and then, admonished a fretful horse breaking away from the string. One of them whistled shrilly a few bars of that then popular but undistinguished tune, "Pop goes the weazel." And Richard craned far out, steadying himself against the stone mullion on either side with uplifted hands, heedless alike of his mother's presence and of the heavy drops of rain which splattered in at the open casement.

"Dickie, Dickie," Katherine called, in swift anxiety. "Be careful. You will fall."

She came close, putting her arm round him. "You reckless darling," she went on; "don't you see how dangerous the least slip would be?"

The boy straightened himself and looked round at her. His blue eyes were alight. All the fitful brightness, all the wistful charm of the April evening was in his face.

"But it's the only place where I can see them, and they're such beauties," he said. "And I want to see them so much. You know we always miss them somehow, mummy, when we go out."

Katherine was off her guard. Three separate strains of feeling influenced her just then. First, her growing recognition of the change in Richard, of that passing away of childhood which could not but make for difficulty and, in a sense, for pain. Secondly, the natural excitement of her brother's homecoming, disturbing the monotony of her daily life, bringing, along with very actual joy, memories of a past, well-beloved yet gone beyond recall. Lastly, the practical and immediate fear that Dickie had come uncommonly near tumbling incontinently out of the window. And so, being moved, she held the boy tightly and answered rather at random, thereby provoking fate.

"Yes, my dearest, I know we always miss them somehow when we go out. It is best so. But do pray be more careful with these high windows."

"Oh! I'm all right—I'm careful enough." His glance had gone back to where the last of the horses passed out of sight behind the red wall of the gardens. "But why is it best so? Ah! they're gone!" he exclaimed.

Katherine sat down on the window-seat, and Richard, clinging on to the window-ledge, while she still held him, lowered himself into a sitting position beside her.

"Thank you, mummy," he said. And the words cut her. They came so often in each day, and always with the same little touch of civil dignity. The courtesy of Richard's recognition of help given, failed to comfort her for the fact that help was so constantly required. Lady Calmady's sense of rebellion arose and waxed strong whenever she heard those thanks.

"Mother," he went on, "I want to ask you something. You won't mind?"

"Do I ever mind you questioning me?" Yet she felt a certain tightening about her heart.

"Ah, but this is different! I've wanted to for a long while, but I did not know if I ought—and yet I did not quite like to ask Auntie Marie or Julius. And, of course, one doesn't speak to the servants about anything of that sort."

Richard's curly head went up with a fine, little air of pride as he said the last few words. His mother smiled at him. There was no doubt as to her son's breeding.

"Well, what then?" she said.

"I want to know—you're sure you don't mind—why you dislike the horses, and never go to the stables or take me there? If the horses are wrong, why do we keep them? And if they're not wrong, why, mother, don't you see, we may enjoy them, mayn't we?"

He flushed, looking up at her, spoke coaxingly, merrily, a trifle embarrassed by his own temerity, yet keen to prove his point and acquire possession of this so coveted joy.

Katherine hesitated. She was tempted to put aside his question with some playful excuse. And yet, where was the use? The question must inevitably be answered one day; and Katherine, as had been said, was moved just now, dumbness of long habit somewhat melted. Perhaps this was the appointed time. She drew her arm from around the boy and took both his hands in hers.

"My dearest," she said, "our keeping the horses is not wrong. But—one of the horses killed your father."

Richard's lips parted. His eyes searched hers.

"But how?" he asked presently.

"He was trying it at a fence, and it came down with him—and trampled him."

There was a pause. At last the boy asked rather breathlessly: "Was he killed then, mother, at once?"

It had been Katharine's intention to state the facts simply, gravely, and without emotion. But to speak of these things, after so long silence, proved more trying than she had anticipated. The scene in the red drawing-room, the long agony of waiting and of farewell rose up before her after all these years with a vividness and poignancy that refused to be gain-said.

"No," she answered, "he lived four days. He spoke to me of many things he wished to do. And—I have done them all, I think. He spoke to me of you——" Katherine closed her eyes. "The boy might care for the stables. The boy must ride straight." For the moment she could not look at Richard, knowing that which she must see. The irony of those remembered words appeared too great.—"But he suffered," she went on brokenly, "he suffered—ah! my dear——"

"Mummy, darling mummy, don't look like that!" Dickie cried. He wrenched his hands from her grasp and threw his arms impulsively about her neck. "Don't—it hurts me. And—and, after all," he added, reasoningly, consolingly, "it wasn't one of these horses, you know. They've never done anybody any harm. It was an accident. There must always be accidents sometimes, mustn't there? And then, you see, it all happened long, long ago. It must have, for I don't remember anything about it. It must have happened when I was a baby."

"Alas, no," Katherine exclaimed, wrung by the pathos of his innocent egoism; "it happened even before then, my dearest, before you were born."

With the unconscious arrogance of childhood, Richard had, so far, taken his mother's devotion very much as a matter of course. He had never doubted that he was, and always had been, the inevitable centre of all her interests. So now, her words and her bearing, bringing—in as far as he grasped them—the revelation of aspects of her life quite independent of his all-important, little self, staggered him. For the first time poor Dickie realised that even one's own mother, be she never so devoted, is not her child's exclusive and wholly private property, but has a separate existence, joys and sorrows apart. Instinctively he took his arms from about her neck and backed away into the angle of the window-seat, regarding her with serious and somewhat startled attention. And, doing so, he for the first time realised consciously something more, namely, the greatness of her beauty.

For the years had dealt kindly with Katherine Calmady. Not the great sorrows of life, or its great sacrifices, but fretfulness, ignoble worries, sordid cares, are that which draw lines upon a woman's face and harshen her features. At six and thirty Lady Calmady's skin was smooth and delicate, her colour, still clear and softly bright. Her hair, though somewhat darker than of old, was abundant. Still she wore it rolled up and back from her forehead, showing the perfect oval of her face. Her eyes, too, were darker; and the expression of them had become profound—the eyes of one who has looked on things which may not be told and has chosen her part. Her bosom had become a little fuller; but the long, inward curve of her figure below it to the round and shapely waist, and the poise of her rather small hips, was lithe and free as ever. While there was that enchanting freshness about her which is more than the mere freshness of youth or of physical health—which would seem, indeed, to be the peculiar dowry of those women who, having once known love in all its completeness and its strength, of choice live ever afterwards in perfect chastity of act and thought.

And a perception not only of the grace of her person, as she sat sideways on the window-seat in her close-fitting, gray gown, with its frilled lace collar and ruffles at the wrists, came to Richard now. He perceived something of this more intimate and subtle charm which belonged to her. He was enthralled by the clear sweetness, as of dewy grass newly turned by the scythe, which always clung about her, and by the whispering of her silken garments when she moved. A sudden reverence for her came upon him, as though, behind her gracious and so familiar figure, he apprehended that which belonged to a region superior, almost divine. And then he was seized—it is too often the fate of worshippers—with jealousy of that past of hers of which he had been, until now, ignorant. And yet another emotion shook him, for, in thus realising and differentiating her personality, he had grown vividly, almost painfully, conscious of his own.

He turned away, laying his cheek against the stone window-ledge, while the drops of a passing scud of rain beat in on his hot face.

"Then—then my father never saw me," he exclaimed vehemently. And, after a moment's pause, added, "I am glad of that—very glad."

"Ah! But, my dearest," Lady Calmady cried, bewildered and aghast, "you don't know what you are saying—think."

Richard kept his face to the splashing rain.

"I don't want to say anything wrong; but," he repeated, "I am glad."

He turned to her, his lips quivering a little, and a desolate expression in his eyes, which told Katherine, with only too bitter assurance, that his childhood and the repose of it were indeed over and gone.

She held out her arms to him in silent invitation, and drew the dear curly head on to her bosom.

"You're not displeased with me, mummy?"

"Does this seem as if I was displeased?" she asked.

Then they sat silent once more, Katherine swaying a little as she held him, soothing him almost as in his baby days.

"I won't lean out of the window again," he said presently, with a sigh of comfort. "I promise that."

"There's a darling. But I am afraid we must go. Uncle Roger will be here soon."

The boy raised his head.

"Mother," he said quickly, "will you send Clara, please, to put away these books? And may I have Winter to fetch me? I—I'm tired. If you don't mind? I don't care to walk."

Yet, since happily at thirteen Richard's moods were still as many and changeful as the aspects of that same April day, he enjoyed some royally unclouded hours before he—most unwillingly—retired to bed that night. For on close acquaintance the great Ulysses proved a very satisfactory hero. Roger Ormiston's character had consolidated. It was to some purpose that he had put away the pleasant follies of his youth. He looked out now with a coolness and patience, born of wide experience, upon men and upon affairs. He had ceased to lose either his temper or his head. Acquiescing with undismayed and cheerful common sense in the fact that life, as we know it, is but a sorry business, and that rough things must of necessity be done and suffered every day, he had developed an active—though far from morbidly sentimental—compassion for the individual, man and beast alike. Not that Colonel Ormiston formulated all that, still less held forth upon it. He was content, as is so many another Englishman, to be a dumb and practical philosopher—for which those who have lived with philosophers of the eloquent sort will unquestionably give thanks, knowing, to their sorrow, how often handsome speech is but a cloak to hide incapacity of honest doing.

And so, after dinner, under plea of an imperative need of cigars, Ormiston had borne Dickie off to the Gun-Room; and there, in the intervals of questioning him a little about his tastes and occupations, had told him stories many and great. For he wanted to get hold of the boy and judge of what stuff he was made. Like all sound and healthy-minded men he had an inherent suspicion of the abnormal. He could not but fear that persons unusually constituted in body must be the victims of some corresponding crookedness of spirit. But as the evening drew on he became easy on this point. Whatever Richard's physical infirmity, his nature was wholesome enough. Therefore when, at close upon ten o'clock, Lady Calmady arrived in person to insist that Dickie must go, there and then, straight to bed, she found a pleasant scene awaiting her.

The square room was gay with lamplight and firelight, which brought into strong relief the pictures of famous horses and trophies of old-time weapons—matchlocks, basket-handled swords, and neat silver-hilted rapiers, prettiest of toys with which to pink your man—that decorated its white-paneled walls.

Ormiston stood with his back to the fire, one heel on the fender, his broad shoulders resting against the high chimneypiece, his head bent forward as he looked down, in steady yet kindly scrutiny, at the boy. His face was tanned by the sun and wind of the long sea voyage—people still came home from India by the Cape—till his hair and moustache showed pale against his bronzed skin. And to Richard, listening and watching from the deep armchair drawn up at right angles to the hearth, he appeared as a veritable demigod, master of the secrets of life and death—beheld, moreover, through an atmosphere of fragrant tobacco smoke, curiously intoxicating to unaccustomed nostrils. Dickie had tucked himself into as small a space as possible, to make room for young Camp, who lay outstretched beside him. The bull-dog's great underhung jaw and pendulous, wrinkled cheeks rested on the arm of the chair, as he stared and blinked rather sullenly at the fire—moved and choked a little, slipping off unwillingly to sleep, to wake with a start, to stare and blink once more. The embroidered couvre-pieds, which Dickie had spread across him, gathering the top edge of it up under the front of his Eton jacket, offered luxurious bedding. But Camp was a typical conservative, slow-witted, stubborn against the ingress of a new idea. This tall, somewhat masterful stranger must prove himself a good man and true—according to bull-dog understanding of those terms—before he could hope to gain entrance to that faithful, though narrow heart.

Ormiston meanwhile, finely contemptuous of canine criticism, greeted his sister cheerily.

"You're bound to give us a little law to-night, Kitty," he said, holding out his hand to her. "We won't break rules and indulge in unbridled license as to late hours again, will we, Dick? But, you see, we've both been doing a good deal, one way and another, since we last met, and there were arrears of conversation to make up."—He smiled very charmingly at Lady Calmady, and his fingers closed firmly on her hand.—"We've been getting on famously, notwithstanding our long separation." He looked down at Richard again. "Fast friends, already, and mean to remain so, don't we, old chap?"

Thereupon Lady Calmady's soul received much comfort. Her pride was always on the alert, fiercely sensitive concerning Richard. And the joy of this meeting had, till now, an edge of jealous anxiety to it. If Roger did not take to the boy, then—deeply though she loved him—Roger must go. For the same elements were constant in Katherine Calmady. Not all the discipline of thirteen years had tamed the hot blood in her which made her order out the Clown for execution. But as Ormiston spoke, her face softened, her eyes grew luminous and smiled back at him with an exquisite gladness. The soft gloom of her black velvet dress emphasised the warm, golden whiteness of her bare shoulders and arms. Ormiston seeing her just then, understanding something of the drama of her thought, was moved from his habitual cool indifference of bearing.

"Katherine," he said, "do you know you take one rather by surprise. Upon my word you're more beautiful than ever."

And Richard's clear voice rang out eagerly from the depths of the big chair—

"Yes—yes—isn't she, Uncle Roger—isn't she—delicious?"

The man's smile broadened almost to laughter.

"You young monkey," he said very gently; "so you have discovered that fact already, have you? Well, so much the better. It's a safe basis to start from; don't you think so, Kitty?"

But Lady Calmady drew away her hand. The blood had rushed into her face and neck. Her beauty, now, for so long, had seemed a negligible quantity, a thing that had outlasted its need and use—since he who had so rejoiced in it was dead. What is the value of ever so royal a crown when the throne it represents has fallen to ruin? And yet, being very much a woman, those words of praise came altogether sweetly to Katherine from the lips of her brother and her son. She moved away, embarrassed, not quite mistress of herself, sat down on the arm of Richard's chair, leaned across him and patted the bull-dog—who raised his heavy head with a grunt, and slapped Dickie smartly in the stomach with his tail, by way of welcome.

"You dear foolish creatures," she said, "pray talk of something more profitable. I am growing old, and, in some ways, I am rather thankful for it. All the same, Dickie, darling, you positively must and shall go to bed."

But Colonel Ormiston interrupted her. He spoke with a trace of hesitation, turning to the fireplace and flicking the ash off the end of his cigar.

"By the bye, Katherine, how's Mary Cathcart? Have you seen her lately?"

"Yes, last week."

"Then she's not gone the way of all flesh and married?"

"No," Lady Calmady answered. She bent a little lower, tracing out the lines on the dog's wrinkled forehead with her finger. "Several men have asked her to marry. But there is only one man in the world, I fancy, whom Mary would ever care to marry—poor Camp, did I tickle you?—and he, I believe, has not asked her yet."

"Ah! there," Ormiston exclaimed quickly, "you are mistaken."

"Am I?" Katherine said. "I have great faith in Mary. I suppose she was too wise to accept even him, being not wholly convinced of his love."

Lady Calmady raised her eyes. Ormiston looked very keenly at her. And Richard, watching them, felt his breath come rather short with excitement, for he understood that his mother was speaking in riddles. He observed, moreover, that Colonel Ormiston's face had grown pale for all its sunburn.

"And so," Katherine went on, "I think the man in question had better be quite sure of his own heart before he offers it to Mary Cathcart again."

Ormiston flung his half-smoked cigar into the fire. He came and stood in front of Richard.

"Look here, old chap," he said, "what do you say to our driving over to Newlands to-morrow? You can set me right if I've forgotten any of the turns in the road, you know. And you and Miss Cathcart are great chums, aren't you?"

"Mother, may I go?" the boy asked.

Lady Calmady kissed his forehead.

"Yes, my dearest," she said. "I will trust you and Uncle Roger to take care of each other for once. You may go."

The immediate consequence of all which was, that Richard went to bed that night with a brain rather dangerously active and eyes rather dangerously bright. So that when sleep at last visited him, it came burdened with dreams, in which the many impressions and emotions of the day took altogether too lively a part, causing him to turn restlessly to and fro, and throw his arms out wide over the cool linen sheets and pillow.

For there was new element in Dickie's dreams to-night:—namely, a recurrent distress of helplessness and incapacity of movement, and therefore of escape, in the presence of some on-coming multitudinous terror. He was haunted, moreover, by a certain stanza of the ballad of Chevy Chase. It had given him a peculiar feeling, sickening yet fascinating, ever since he could remember first to have read it, a feeling which caused him to dread reading it beforehand, yet made him turn back to it again and again. And to-night, sometimes Richard was himself, sometimes his personality seemed merged in that of Witherington, the crippled fighting-man, of whose maiming and deadly courage that stanza tells. And the battle was long and fierce, as from out a background of steeple-shaped, honey-combed rocks and sparse trees with large golden leaves—like those on the panels of the great, lacquered cabinets in the Long Gallery—innumerable hordes of fanatic Chinamen poured down on him, a hideous bedizenment of vermilion war-devils painted on their blue tunics and banners and shields. And he, Richard,—or was it he, Witherington?—alone facing them all,—they countless in number, always changing yet always the same. From under their hard, upturned hats, a peacock feather erect in each, the cruel, oblique-eyed, impassive faces stared at him. They pressed him back and back against the base of a seven-storied pagoda, the wind bells of which jangled far above him from the angles of its tiers of fluted roofs. And the sky was black and polished. Yet it was broad, glaring daylight, every object fearfully distinct. And he was fixed there, unable to get away because—yes, of course, he was Witherington, so there was no need of further explanation of that inability of escape.

And still, at the same time, he could see Chifney on the handsome gray cob, trotting soberly along the green ride, beside the long string of race-horses coming home from exercise. The young leaves were fragile and green now, not sparse and metallic, and the April rain splashed in his face. He tried to call out to Tom Chifney, but the words died in his throat. If they would only put him on one of those horses! He knew he could ride, and so be safe and free. He called again. That time his voice came. They must hear. Were they not his own servants, after all, and his own horses—or would be soon, when he was grown up? But neither the trainer, nor the boys so much as turned their heads; and the living ribbon of brown and chestnut swept on and away out of sight. No one would heed him, no one would hearken to his cry.

Once his mother and some man, whom he knew yet did not know, passed by him hand in hand. She wore a white dress, and smiled with a look of ineffable content. Her companion was tall, gracious in bearing and movement, but unsubstantial, a luminous shadow merely. Richard could not see his face. Yet he knew the man was of near kin to him. And to them he tried to speak. But it was useless. For now he was not Richard any more. He was not even Witherington, the crippled fighting-man of the Chevy Chase ballad. He was—he was the winged sea-gull, with wild, pale eyes, hiding—abject yet fierce—among the vegetable beds in the Brockhurst kitchen-gardens, and picking up loathsome provender of snails and slugs. Roger Ormiston, calm, able, kindly, yet just a trifle insolent, cigar in mouth, sauntered up and looked at the bird, and it crawled away among the cabbages ignominiously, covered with the shame of its incompleteness and its fallen estate.

And then from out the honey-combed rocks, under the black, polished sky, the blue tunicked Chinamen swept down on Richard again with the maddening horror of infinite number. They crushed in upon him, nearer and nearer, pressing him back against the wall of that evil pagoda. The air was hot and musky with their breath and thick with the muffled roar of their countless footsteps. And they came right in on him, trampling him down, suffocating, choking him with the heat of them and the dead weight.

Shouting aloud—as it seemed to him—in angry terror, the boy woke. He sat up trembling, wet with perspiration, bewildered by the struggle and the wild phantasmagoria of his dream. He pulled open the neck of his nightshirt, leaned his head against the cool brass rail of the back of the bedstead, while he listened with growing relief to the rumble of the wind in the chimney, and the swish of the rain against the casements, and watched the narrow line of light under the door of his mother's room.

Yes, he was Richard Calmady, after all, here in his own sheltered world, among those who had loved and served him all his life. Nothing hurtful could reach him here, nothing of which he need be afraid. There was no real meaning in that ugly dream.

And then Dickie paused a moment, still sitting up in the warm darkness, pressing his hands down on the mattress on either side to keep himself from slipping. For involuntarily he recalled the feeling which had prompted his declaration that he was glad his father had never seen him; recalled his unwillingness to walk, lest he should meet Ormiston unexpectedly; recalled the instinct which, even during that glorious time in the Gun-Room, had impelled him to keep the embroidered couvre-pieds carefully over his legs and feet. And, recalling these things, poor Dickie arrived at conclusions regarding himself which he had happily avoided arriving at before. For they were harsh conclusions, causing him to cower down in the bed, and bury his face in the pillows to stifle the sound of the tearing sobs which would come.

Alas! was there not only too real a meaning in that same ugly dream and that shifting of personality? He understood, while his body quivered with the anguish of it, that he had more in common with, and was nearer, far nearer, to the maimed fighting-man of the old ballad, even to the poor seagull robbed of its power of flight, than to all those dear people whose business in life it seemed to pet and amuse him, and to minister to his every want—to the handsome soldier uncle, whose home-coming had so excited him, to Julius March, his indulgent tutor, to Mademoiselle de Mirancourt, his delightful companion, to Clara, his obedient playfellow, to brown-eyed Mary Cathcart, and even to his lovely mother herself!

Thus did the bitter winds of truth, which blow forever across the world, first touch Richard Calmady, cutting his poor boyish pride as with a whip. But he was very young. And the young, mercifully, know no such word as the inevitable; so that the wind of truth is ever tempered for them—the first smart of it over—by the sunshine of ignorant and unlimited hope.

CHAPTER III

CONCERNING THAT WHICH, THANK GOD, HAPPENS ALMOST EVERY DAY

The merry spring sky was clear, save in the south where a vast perspective of dappled cloud lay against it, leaving winding rivers of blue here and there, as does ribbed sand for the incoming tide. As the white gate of the inner park—the gray unpainted palings ranging far away to right and left—swung to behind them, and Henry the groom, after a smart run, clambered up into his place again beside Camp on the back seat of the double dog-cart, Richard's spirits rose. Straight ahead stretched out the long vista of that peculiar glory of Brockhurst, its avenue of Scotch firs. The trunks of them, rough-barked and purple below, red, smooth and glistering above, shot up some thirty odd feet—straight as the pillars of an ancient temple—before the branches, sweeping outward and downward, met, making a whispering, living canopy overhead, through which the sunshine fell in tremulous shafts, upon the shining coats and gleaming harness of the horses, upon Ormiston's clear-cut, bronzed face and upright figure, and upon the even, straw-coloured gravel of the road. The said road is raised by about three feet above the level of the land on either side. On the left, the self-sown firs grow in close ranks. The ground below them is bare but for tussocks of coarse grass and ruddy beds of fallen fir needles. On the right, the fir wood is broken by coppices of silver-stemmed birches, and spaces of heather—that shows a purple-brown against the gray of the reindeer moss out of which it springs. Tits swung and frolicked among the tree-tops, and a jay flew off noisily with a flash of azure wing-coverts and volley of harsh discordant cries.

The rapid movement, the moist, pungent odour of the woodland, the rhythmical trot of the horses, the rattle of the splinter-bar chains as the traces slackened going downhill, above all the presence of the man beside him, were pleasantly stimulating to Richard Calmady. The boy was still a prey to much innocent enthusiasm. It appeared to him, watching Ormiston's handling of the reins and whip, there was nothing this man could not do, and do skilfully, yet all with the same easy unconcern. Indeed, the present position was so agreeable to him that Dickie's spirits would have risen to an unusual height, but for a certain chastening of the flesh in the shape of the occasional pressure of a broad strap against his middle, which brought him unwelcome remembrance of recent discoveries it was his earnest desire to ignore, still better to forget.

For just at starting there had been a rather bad moment. Winter, having settled him on the seat of the dog-cart, was preparing to tuck him in with many rugs, when Ormiston said—

"Look here, dear old chap, I've been thinking about this, and upon my word you don't seem to me very safe. You see this is a different matter to your donkey-chair, or the pony-carriage. There's no protection at the side, and if the horses shied or anything—well, you'd be in the road. And I can't afford to spill you the first time we go out together, or there'd be a speedy end of all our fun."

Richard tried to emulate his uncle's cool indifference, and take the broad strap as a matter of course. But he was glad the tongue of the buckle slipped so directly into place; and that Henry's attention was engaged with the near horse, which fretted at standing; and that Leonard, the footman, was busy making Camp jump up at the back; and that his mother, who had been watching him from the lowest of the wide steps, turned away and went up to the flight to join Julius March standing under the gray arcade. As the horses sprang forward, clattering the little pebbles of the drive against the body of the carriage, and swung away round the angle of the house, Katherine came swiftly down the steps again smiling, kissing her hand to him. Still, the strap hurt—not poor Dickie's somewhat ill-balanced body, to which in truth it lent an agreeable sense of security, but his, just then, all too sensitive mind. So that, notwithstanding a fine assumption of gaiety, as he kissed his hand in return, he found the dear vision of his mother somewhat blurred by foolish tears which he had resolutely to wink away.

But now that disquieting incident was left nearly ten minutes behind. The last park gate and its cluster of mellow-tinted thatched cottages was past. Not only out-of-doors and all the natural exhilaration of it, but the spectacle of the world beyond the precincts of the park—into which world he, in point of fact, so rarely penetrated—wooed him to interest and enjoyment. To Dickie, whose life through his mother's jealous tenderness and his own physical infirmity had been so singularly circumscribed, there was an element, slightly pathetic, of discovery and adventure in this ordinary afternoon drive.

He did not want to talk. He was too busy simply seeing, everything food for those young eyes and brain so greedy of incident and of beauty. He sat upright and stared at the passing show.—At the deep lane, its banks starred with primroses growing in the hollows of the gnarled roots of oaks and ash trees. At Sandyfield rectory, deep-roofed, bow-windowed, the red walls and tiles of it half smothered in ivy and coton-easter. At the low, squat-towered, Georgian church, standing in its acre of close-packed graveyard, which is shadowed by yew trees and by the clump of three enormous Scotch firs in the rectory garden adjoining. At the Church Farm, just beyond—a square white house, the slated roofs of it running up steeply to a central block of chimneys, it having, in consequence, somewhat the effect of a monster extinguisher. At the rows of pale, wheat stacks, raised on granite straddles; at the prosperous barns, yards, and stables, built of wood on brick foundations, that surround it, presenting a mass of rich, solid colour and of noisy, crowded, animal life. At the fields, plough and pasture, marked out by long lines of hedgerow trees, broken by coppices—these dashed with tenderest green—stretching up and back to the dark purple-blue range of the moorland. At scattered cottages, over the gates of whose gardens gay with daffodils and polyanthus, groups of little girls and babies, in flopping sunbonnets and scanty lilac pinafores, stared back at the passing carriage, and then bobbed the accustomed curtsy. In the said groups were no boys, save of infant years. The boys were away shepherding, or to plough, or bird-minding. For as yet education was free indeed—in the sense that you were free to take it, or leave it, as suited your pocket and your fancy.

Richard stared too at the pleasant, furze-dotted commons, spinning away to right and left as the horses trotted sharply onward—commons whereon meditative donkeys endured rather than enjoyed existence, after the manner of their kind; and prodigiously large families of yellow-gray goslings streeled after the flocks of white geese, across spaces of fresh sprung grass around shallow ponds, in which the blue and dapple of the sky was reflected. He stared at Sandyfield village too—a straight street of detached houses, very diverse in colour and in shape, standing back, for the most part, amid small orchards and gardens that slope gently up from the brook, which last, backed, here by a row of fine elms, there by one of Lombardy poplars, borders the road. Three or four shops, modest in size as they are ambitious in the variety of objects offered for sale in them, advance their windows boldly. So does the yellow-washed inn, the Calmady arms displayed upon its swinging sign-board. A miller's tented waggon, all powdery with flour, and its team of six horses, brave with brass harness and bells, a timber-carriage, and a couple of spring-carts, were drawn up on the half-moon of gravel before the porch; while, from out the open door, came a sound of voices and odour of many pipes and much stale beer.

And Richard had uninterrupted leisure to bestow on all this seeing, for his companion, Colonel Ormiston, was preoccupied and silent. Once or twice he looked down at the boy as though suddenly remembering his presence and inquired if he was "all right." But it was not until they had crossed the long, white-railed bridge, at the end of Sandyfield street—which spans not only the little brown river overhung by black-stemmed alders, but a bit of marsh, reminiscent of the ancient ford, lush with water grasses, beds of king-cups, and broad-leaved docks—not until then did Colonel Ormiston make sustained effort at conversation. Beyond the bridge the road forks.

"Left to Newlands, isn't it?" he asked sharply.

Then, as the carriage swept round the turn, he woke up from his long reverie; waking Richard up also, from his long dream of mere seeing, to human drama but dimly apprehended close there at his side.

"Oh, well, well!" the man exclaimed, throwing back his head in sharp impatience, as a horse will against the restraint of the bearing-rein. He raised his eyebrows, while his lips set in a smile the reverse of gay. Then he looked down at Richard again, an unwonted softness in his expression.

"Been happy?" he said. "Enjoyed your drive? That's right. You understand the art of being really good company, Dick."

"What's that?"

"Allowing other people to be just as bad company as they like."

"I—I don't see how you could be bad company," Dickie said, flushing at the audacity of his little compliment.

"Don't you, dear old chap? Well, that's very nice of you. All the same, I find, at times, I can be precious bad company to myself."

"Oh! but I don't see how," the boy argued, his enthusiasm protesting against all possibility of default in the object of it. Richard wanted to keep his hands down,—unconsciousness, if only assumed, told for personal dignity—but in the agitation of protest, spite of himself, he laid hold of the top edge of that same chastening strap. "It must be so awfully jolly to be like you—able to do everything and go everywhere. There must be such a lot to think about."

The softness was still upon Ormiston's face. "Such a lot?" he said. "A jolly lot too much, believe me, very often, Dick."

He looked away up the copse-bordered road, over the ears of the trotting horses.

"You've read the story of Blue Beard and that unpleasant locked-up room of his, where the poor little wives hung all of a row? Well, I'm sorry to say, Dick, most men when they come to my age have a room of that sort. It's an inhospitable place. One doesn't invite one's friends to dine and smoke there. At least no gentleman does. I've met one or two persons who set the door open and rather gloried in inviting inspection—but they were blackguards and cads. They don't count. Still each of us is obliged to go in there sometimes himself. I tell you it's anything but lively. I've been in there just now."

The dappled cloud creeping upward from the southern horizon veiled the sun, the light of which grew pale and thin. The scent of the larch wood, on the right, hung in the air. Richard's eyes were wide with inquiry. His mind suffered growing-pains, as young minds of any intellectual and poetic worth needs must. The possibility of moral experience, incalculable in extent as that golden-gray outspread of creeping, increasing vapour overhead, presented itself to him. The vastness of life touched him to fear. He struggled to find a limit, clothing his effort in childish realism of statement.

"But in that locked-up room, Uncle Roger, you can't have dead women—dead wives."

Ormiston laughed quietly.

"You hit out pretty straight from the shoulder, master Dick," he said. "Happily I can reassure you on one point. All manner of things are hung up in there—some ugly—almost all ugly, now, to my eyes, though some of them had charming ways with them once upon a time. But, I give you my word, neither ugly nor charming, dead nor alive, are there any wives."

The boy considered a moment, then said stoutly, "I wouldn't go in there again. I'd lock the door and throw away the key."

"Wait till your time comes! You'll find that is precisely what you can't do."

"Then I'd fetch them out, once and for all, and bury them."

The carriage had turned in at the lodge gate. Soon a long, low, white house and range of domed conservatories came into view.

"Heroic remedies!" Ormiston remarked, amused at the boy's vehemence. "But no doubt they do succeed now and then. To tell you the truth, Dick, I have been thinking of something of the kind myself. Only I'm afraid I shall need somebody to help me in carrying out so extensive a funeral."

"Anybody would be glad enough to help you," Richard declared, with a strong emphasis on the pronoun.

"Ah! but the bother is anybody can't help one. Only one person in all this great rough and tumble of a world can really help one. And often one finds out who that person is a little bit too late. However, here we are. Perhaps we shall know more about it all in the next half hour, if these good people are at home."

In point of fact the good people in question were not at home. Ormiston, holding reins and whip in one hand, felt for his card-case.

"So we've had our journey for nothing you see, Dick," he said.

And to Richard the words sounded regretful. Moreover, the drama of this expedition seemed to him shorn of its climax. He knew there should be something more, and pushed for it.

"You haven't asked for Mary," he said. "And I thought we came on purpose to see Mary. She won't like us to go away like this. Do ask."

Colonel Ormiston's expression altered, hardened. And Richard, in his present hypersensitive state, remembered the cool scrutiny bestowed on the winged sea-gull of his dream last night. This man had seemed so near him just now, while they talked. Suddenly he became remote again, all understanding of him shut away by that slight insolence of bearing. Still he did as Richard prayed him. Miss Cathcart was at home. She had just come in from riding.

"Tell her Sir Richard Calmady is here, and would like, if he may, to see her."

Without waiting for a reply, Ormiston unbuckled that same chastening strap silently, quickly. He got down and, coming round to the farther side of the carriage, lifted Richard out; while Camp, who had jumped off the back seat, stood yawning, whining a little, shaking his heavy head and wagging his tail in welcome on the door-step. With the bull-dog close at his heels, Ormiston carried the boy into the house.

The inner doors were open, and, up the long, narrow, pleasantly fresh-tinted drawing-room, Mary Cathcart came to meet them. The folds of her habit were gathered up in one hand. In the other she carried a bunch of long-stalked, yellow and scarlet tulips. Her strong, supple figure stood out against the young green of the lawns and shrubberies, seen through the French windows behind her. She walked carefully, with a certain deliberation, thanks to her narrow habit and top-boots. The young lady carried her thirty-one years bravely. Her irregular features and large mouth had always been open to criticism. But her teeth, when her lips parted, were white and even, and her brown eyes frankly honest as ever.

"Why, Dickie dear, it is simply glorious to have you and Camp paying visits on your own account."—Her speech broke into a little cry, while her fingers closed so tightly on the tulips that the brittle stalks snapped, and the gay-coloured bells of them hung limply, some falling on to the carpet about her feet. "Roger—Colonel Ormiston—I didn't know you were home—were here!" Her voice was uncontrollably glad.

Still carrying the boy, Ormiston stood before her, observing her keenly. But he was no longer remote. His insolence, which, after all, may have been chiefly self-protective, had vanished.

"I'm very sorry—I mean for those poor tulips. I came to pay my respects to Mr. and Mrs. Cathcart, and not finding them was preparing to drive humbly home again. But——" Certainly she carried her years well. She looked absurdly young. The brown and rose-red of her complexion was clear as that of the little maiden who had fought with, and overcome, and kissed the rough Welsh pony refusing the grip by the roadside long ago. The hint of a moustache emphasised the upturned corners of her mouth—but that was rather captivating. Her eyes danced, under eyelids which fluttered for the moment. She was not beautiful, not a woman to make men run mad. Yet the comeliness of her body, and the spirit to which that body served as index, was so unmistakably healthful, so sincere, that surely no sane man, once gathering her into his arms, need ask a better blessing.—"But," Ormiston went on, still watching her, "nothing would satisfy Dick but he must see you. With many injunctions regarding his safety, Katherine made him over to me for the afternoon. I'm on duty, you see. Where he goes, I'm bound to go also—even to the destruction of your poor tulips."

Miss Cathcart made no direct answer.

"Sit here, Dickie," she said, pointing to a sofa.

"But you don't really mind our coming in, do you?" he asked, rather anxiously.

The young lady placed herself beside him, drew his hand on to her knee, patted it gently.

"Mind? No; on the whole, I don't think I do mind very much. In fact, I think I should probably have minded very much more if you had gone away without asking for me."

"There, I told you so, Uncle Roger," the boy said triumphantly. Camp had jumped up on to the sofa too. He put his arm comfortably around the dog's neck. It was as well to acquire support on both sides, for the surface of the glazed chintz was slippery, inconveniently unsustaining to his equilibrium. "It's an awfully long time since I've seen Mary," he continued, "more than three weeks."

"Yes, an awfully long time," Ormiston echoed, "more than six years."

"Dear Dickie," she said; "how pretty of you! Do you always keep count of my visits?"

"Of course I do. They were about the best things that ever happened, till Uncle Roger came home."

Forgetting herself, Mary Cathcart raised her eyes to Ormiston's in appeal. The boy's little declaration stirred all the latent motherhood in her. His fortunes at once passed so very far beyond, and fell so far short of, the ordinary lot. She wondered whether, and could not but trust that, this old friend and newcomer was not too self-centred, too hardened by ability and success to appreciate the intimate pathos of the position. Ormiston read and answered her thought.

"Oh! we are going to do something to change all that," he said confidently. "We are going to enlarge our borders a bit; aren't we, Dick? Only, I think, we should manage matters much better if Miss Cathcart would help us, don't you?"

Richard remembering the locked-up room of evil contents and that proposal of inclusive funeral rites, gave this utterance a wholly individual application. His face grew bright with intelligence. But, greatly restraining himself, he refrained from speech. All that had been revealed to him in confidence, and so his honour was engaged to silence.

Ormiston pulled forward a chair and sat down by him, leaning forward, his hands clasped about one knee, while he gazed at the tulips scattered on the floor.

"So tell Miss Cathcart we all want her to come over to Brockhurst just as often as she can," he continued, "and help us to make the wheels go round a little faster. Tell her we've grown very old, and discreet, and respectable, and that we are absolutely incapable of doing or saying anything foolish or naughty, which she would object to—and——"

But Richard could restrain himself no longer. "Why don't you tell her yourself, Uncle Roger?"

"Because, my dear old chap, a burnt child fears the fire. I tried to tell Miss Cathcart something once, long ago. She mayn't remember——"

"She does remember," Mary said quietly, looking down at Richard's hand and patting it as it lay on her lap.

"But she stopped me dead," Ormiston went on. "It was quite right of her. She gave the most admirable reasons for stopping me. Would you care to hear them?"

"Oh! don't, pray don't," Mary murmured. "It is not generous."

"Pardon me, your reasons were absolutely just—true in substance and in fact. You said I was a selfish, good-for-nothing spendthrift, and so——"

"I was odious," she broke in. "I was a self-righteous little Pharisee—forgive me——"

"Why—there's nothing to forgive. You spoke the truth."

"I don't believe it," Richard cried, in vehement protest.

"Dickie, you're a darling," Mary Cathcart said.

Colonel Ormiston left off nursing his knee, and leaned a little further forward.

"Well then, will you come over to Brockhurst very often, and help us to make the wheels go round, and cheer us all up, and do us no end of good, though—I am a selfish, good-for-nothing spendthrift? You see I run through the list of my titles again to make sure this transaction is fair and square and above-board."

A silence followed, which appeared to Richard protracted to the point of agitation. He became almost distressingly conscious of the man's still, bronzed, resolute face on the one hand, of the woman's mobile, vivid, yet equally resolute face on the other, divining far more to be at stake than he had clear knowledge of. Tired and excited, his impatience touched on anger.

"Say yes, Mary," he cried impulsively, "say yes. I don't see how anybody can want to refuse Uncle Roger anything."

Miss Cathcart's eyes grew moist. She turned and kissed the boy.

"I don't think—perhaps—Dickie, that I quite see either," she answered very gently.

"Mary, you know what you've just said?" Ormiston's tone was stern. "You understand this little comedy? It means business. This time you've got to go the whole hog or none."

She looked straight at him, and drew her breath in a long half-laughing sigh.

"Oh, dear me! what a plague of a hurry you are in!" she said. "Well—then—then—I suppose I must—it is hardly a graceful expression, but it is of your choosing, not of mine—I suppose I must go the whole hog."

Roger Ormiston rose, treading the fallen tulips under foot. And Richard, watching him, beheld that which called to his remembrance, not the hopeless and impotent battle under the black polished sky of his last night's dream, but the gallant stories he had heard, earlier last night, of the battles of Sobraon and Chillianwallah, of the swift dangers of sport, and large daring of travel. Here he beheld—so it seemed to his boyish thought—the aspect of a born conqueror, of the man who can serve and wait long for the good he desires, and who winning it, lays hold of it with fearless might. And this, while causing Richard an exquisite delight of admiration, caused him also a longing to share those splendid powers so passionate that it amounted to actual pain.

Mary Cathcart's hand slid from under his hand. She too rose to her feet.

"Then you have actually cared for me all along, all these years," Ormiston declared in fierce joy.

"Of course—who else could I care for? And—and—you've loved me, Roger, all the while?"

And Ormiston answered "Yes,"—speaking the truth, though with a difference. There had been interludes that had contributed somewhat freely to the peopling of that same locked-up room. But it is possible for a man to love many times, yet always love one woman best.

All this, however, Dickie did not know. He only knew they dazzled him—the man triumphantly strong, the woman so bravely glad. He could not watch them any longer. He went hot all over, and his heart beat. He felt strangely desolate too. They were far away from him in thought, in fact, though so close by. Dickie shut his eyes, put his arms round the bull-dog, pressed his face hard against the faithful beast's shoulder; while Camp, stretching his short neck to the uttermost, nuzzled against him and essayed to lick his cheek.

Thus did Richard Calmady gain yet further knowledge of things as they are.

CHAPTER IV

WHICH SMELLS VERY VILELY OF THE STABLE

April softened into May, and the hawthorns were in blossom before Richard passed any other very note-worthy milestone on the road of personal development. Then, greatly tempted, he committed a venial sin; received prompt and coarse chastisement; and, by means of the said chastisement, as is the merciful way of the Eternal Justice, found unhoped of emancipation.

It happened thus. As the spring days grew warm Mademoiselle de Mirancourt failed somewhat. The darkness and penetrating chill of the English winter tried her, and this year her recuperative powers seemed sadly deficient. A fuller tide of life had pulsed through Brockhurst since Colonel Ormiston's arrival. The old stillness was departing, the old order changing. With that change Mademoiselle de Mirancourt had no quarrel, since, to her serene faith, all that came must, of necessity, come through a divine ordering and in conformity to a divine plan. Yet this more of activity and of movement strained her. The weekly drive over to Westchurch, to hear mass at the humble Catholic chapel tucked away in a side street, sorely taxed her strength. She returned fortified, her soul ravished by that heavenly love, which, in pure and innocent natures, bears such gracious kinship to earthly love. Yet in body she was outworn and weary. On such occasions she would rally Julius March, not without a touch of malice, saying:—

"Ah! très cher ami, had you only followed the ever blessed footsteps of those dear Oxford friends of yours and entered the fold of the true Church, what fatigue might you not now spare me—let alone the incalculable advantages to your own poor, charming, fatally darkened soul!"

While Julius—who, though no less devout than of yore, was happily less fastidiously sensitive—would reply:—

"But, dearest lady, had I followed the footsteps of my Oxford friends, remember I should not be at Brockhurst at all."

"Clearly, then, everything is well ordered," she would say, folding her fragile hands upon her embroidery frame, "since it is altogether impossible we could do without you. Yet I regret for your soul. It is so capable of receiving illumination. You English—even the most finished among you—remain really deplorably stubborn, and nevertheless it is my fate perpetually to set my affections upon one or other of you."

It followed that Katherine devoted much of her time to Mademoiselle de Mirancourt, walked slowly beside her up and down the sunny, garden paths sheltered by the high, red walls whereon the clematis and jasmine began to show for flower; or took her for quiet, little drives within the precincts of the park. They spoke much of Lucia St. Quentin, of Katherine's girlhood, and of those pleasant days in Paris long ago. And this brought soothing and comfort, not only to the old lady, but to the young lady also—and of soothing and comfort the latter stood in need just now.

For it is harsh discipline even to a noble woman, whose life is still strong in her, to stand by and see another woman but a few years her junior entering on those joys which she has lost,—marriage, probably motherhood as well. Roger Ormiston's and Mary Cathcart's love-making was restrained and dignified. But the very calm of their attitude implied a security of happiness passing all need of advertisement. And Katherine was very far from grudging them this. She was not envious, still less jealous. She did not want to take anything of theirs; but she wanted, she sorely wanted, her own again. A word, a look, a certain quickness of quiet laughter, would pierce her with recollection. Once for her too, below the commonplaces of daily detail, flowed that same magic river of delight. But the springs of it had gone dry. Therefore it was a relief to be alone with Mademoiselle de Mirancourt—virgin and saint—and to speak with her of the days before she had sounded the lovely depths of that same magic flood—days when she had known of its existence only by the mirage, born of the dazzle of its waters, which plays over the innocent vacant spaces of a young girl's mind.

It was a relief even, though of sterner quality, to go into the red drawing-room on the ground floor and pace there, her hands clasped behind her, her proud head bowed, by the half hour together. If personal joy is dead past resurrection, there is bitter satisfaction in realising to the full personal pain. The room was duly swept, dusted, casements set open to welcome breeze and sunshine, fires lighted in the grate. But no one ever sat there. It knew no cheerfulness of social intercourse. The crimson curtains and covers had become faded. They were not renewed. The furniture, save for the absence of the narrow bed, stood in precisely the same order as on the night when Sir Richard Calmady died. It was pushed back against the walls. And in the wide empty way between the two doors, Katherine paced, saturating all her being with thoughts of that which was, and must remain, wholly and inalienably her own—namely, her immense distress.

And in this she took the more comfort, because something else, until now appearing wholly her own, was slipping a little away from her. Dickie's health had improved notably in the last few weeks. His listlessness had vanished, while his cheeks showed a wholesome warmth of colour. But his cry was ever. "Mother, Uncle Roger's going to such a place. He says he'll take me. I can go, can't I?" Or, "Mother, Mary's going to do such a thing. She says she'll show me how. She may, mayn't she?" And Katherine's answer was always "Yes." She grudged the boy none of his new-found pleasures, rejoiced indeed to see him interested and gay. Yet to watch the new broom, which sweeps so clean, is rarely exhilarating to those that have swept diligently with the old one. The nest had held her precious fledgling so safely till now; and this fluttering of wings, eager for flight, troubled her somewhat. Not only was Dickie's readiness to be away from her a trifle hard to bear; but she knew that disappointment, of a certainty, lay in wait for him, and that each effort towards wider action would but reveal to him how circumscribed his powers actually were.

Meanwhile, however, Richard enjoyed himself recklessly, almost feverishly, in the attempt to disprove the teaching of that ugly dream, and keep truth at bay. There had been further drives, and the excitement of witnessing a forest fire—only too frequent in the Brockhurst country when the sap is up, and the easterly wind and May sun have scorched all moisture from the surface of the moorland. He and Mary had bumped over fir roots and scuttled down bridle-paths in the pony-carriage, to avoid the rush of flame and smoke; had skirmished round at a hand gallop, in search of recruits to reinforce Ormiston, and Iles, and a small army of beaters, battling against the blazing line that threatened destruction to the fir avenue. Now and again, with a mighty roar, which sent Dickie's heart into his mouth, great tongues of flame, clear as topaz and ruby in the steady sunshine, would leap upwards, converting a whole tall fir into a tree of fire, while the beaters running back, grimed with smoke and sweat, took a moment's breathing-space in the open.

There had been more peaceful pastimes as well—several days' fishing, enchanting beyond the power of language to describe. The clear trout-stream meandering through the rich water-meadows; the herds of cattle standing knee-deep in the grass, lazily chewing the cud and switching their tails at the cloud of flies; the birds and wild creatures haunting the streamside; the long dreamy hours of gentle sport, had opened up to Dickie a whole new world of romance. His donkey-chair had been left at the yellow-washed mill beneath the grove of silvery-leaved, ever-rustling, balsam poplars. And thence, while Ormiston and Mary sauntered slowly on ahead, the men—Winter in mufti, oblivious of plate-cleaning and cellarage, and the onerous duties of his high estate, Stamp, the water-bailiff, and Moorcock, one of the under-keepers—had carried him across the great green levels. Winter was an old and tried friend, and it was somewhat diverting to behold him in this novel aspect, affable and chatty with inferiors, displaying, moreover, unexpected knowledge in the mysteries of the angler's craft. The other two men—sharp-featured, their faces ruddy as summer apples, merry-eyed, clad in velveteen coats, that bulged about the pockets, and wrinkled leather gaiters reaching halfway up the thigh—charmed Richard, when his first shyness was passed. They were eager to please him. Their talk was racy. Their laughter ready and sincere. Did not Stamp point out to him a water-ouzel, with impudently jerking tail, dipping and wading in the shallows of the stream? Did not Moorcock find him a water-rail's nest, hidden in a tuft of reeds and grass, with ten, yellowish, speckled eggs in it? And did not both men pluck him handfuls of cowslips, of tawny-pink avens, and of mottled, snake-headed fritillaries, and stow them away in the fishing-baskets above the load of silver-and-red spotted trout?

Mary had protested Dickie could throw a fly, if he had a light enough rod. And not only did he throw a fly, but at the fourth or fifth cast a fish rose, and he played it—with skirling reel and much advice and most complimentary excitement on the part of the whole good company—and brought it skilfully within range of Stamp's landing-net. Never surely was trout spawned that begot such bliss in the heart of an angler! As, with panting sides and open gills, this three-quarter-pound treasure of treasures flopped about on the sunny stream bank all the hereditary instinct of sport spoke up clearly in Dickie. The boy—such is youthful masculine human nature—believed he understood at last why the world was made! At dressing-time he had his sacred fish carried on a plate up to his room to show Clara; and, but for strong remonstrance on the part of that devoted handmaiden, would have kept it by his bedside all night, so as to assure himself at intervals, by sense of touch—let alone that of smell—of the adorable fact of its veritable existence.

But all this, inspiring though it was, served but as prelude to a more profoundly coveted acquaintance—that with the racing-stable. For it was after this last that Dickie still supremely longed—the more so, it is to be feared, because it was, if not explicitly, yet implicitly forbidden. A spirit of defiance had entered into him. Being granted the inch, he was disposed to take the ell. And this, not in conscious opposition to his mother's will; but in protest, not uncourageous, against the limitations imposed on him by physical misfortune. The boy's blood was up, and consequently, with greater pluck than discretion, he struggled against the intimate, inalienable enemy that so marred his fate. And it was this not ignoble effort which culminated in disobedience.

For driving back one afternoon, later than usual,—Ormiston had met them, and Mary and he had taken a by-path home through the woods,—the pony-carriage, turned along the high level road beside the lake, going eastward, just as the string of race-horses, coming home from exercise, passed along it coming west. Richard was driving, Chaplin, the second coachman, sitting in the dickey at the back of the low carriage. He checked the pony, and his eyes took in the whole scene—the blue-brown expanse of the lake dotted with water-fowl, on the one hand, the immense blue-brown landscape on the other, ranging away to the faint line of the chalk downs in the south; the downward slope of the park, to the great square of red stable buildings in the hollow; the horses coming slowly towards him in single file. Cawing rooks streamed back from the fallow-fields across the valley. Thrushes and blackbirds carolled. A wren, in the bramble brake close by, broke into sharp sweet song. The recurrent ring of an axe came from somewhere away in the fir plantations, and the strident rasping of a saw from the wood-yard in the beech grove near the house.

Richard stared at that oncoming procession. Half-way between him and the foremost of the horses the tan ride branched off, and wound down the hillside to the stables. The boy set his teeth. He arrived at a desperate decision,—touched up the pony, drove on.

Chaplin leaned forward, addressing him, over the back of the seat.

"Better wait here, hadn't we, Sir Richard? They'll turn off in a minute."

Richard did not look round. He tried to answer coldly, but his voice shook.

"I know. That's why I am going on."

There was a silence save for the cawing of the rooks, ring of the axe, and grinding of wheels on the gravel. Chaplin, responsible, correct, over five-and-thirty, and fully intending to succeed old Mr. Wenham, the head coachman, on the latter's impending retirement from active service, went very red in the face.

"Excuse me, but I have my orders, Sir Richard," he said.

Dickie still looked straight ahead.

"Very well," he answered, "then perhaps you'd better get out and walk on home."

"You know I'm bound not to leave you, sir," the man said.

Dickie laughed a little in uncontrollable excitement. He was close to them now. The leading horse was just moving off the main road, its shadow lying long across the turf. How was it possible to give way with the prize within reach?—"You can go or stay Chaplin, as you please. I mean to speak to Chifney. I—I mean to see the stables."

"It's as much as my place is worth, sir."

"Oh! bother your place!" the boy cried impetuously.—Dear heart alive, how fine they were as they filed by! That chestnut filly, clean made as a deer, her ears laid back as she reached at the bit; and the brown, just behind her—"I mean, I mean you needn't be afraid, Chaplin—I'll speak to her ladyship. I'll arrange all that. Go to the pony's head."

At the end of the long string of horses came the trainer—a square-built, short-necked man, sanguine complexioned and clean shaven. Of hair, indeed, Mr. Chifney could only boast a rim of carroty-gray stubble under the rim of the back of his hard hat. His right eye had suffered damage, and the pupil of it was white and viscous. His lips were straight and purplish in colour. He raised his hat and would have followed on down the slope, but Dickie called to him.