"Engaged Cuthbertson. Greatly surprised. Deeply thankful.—ELIZA."
This rather mysterious message was followed, later in the day, by a letter four pages in length, and marked on the outside, for some reason best known to Eliza, "Immediate." The letter explained more fully the cause of Eliza's thankfulness, and who it was that was greatly surprised.
"If you had told me," wrote Eliza, "six weeks ago that I should now be engaged to Mr. Cuthbertson, I should hardly have believed it. I really had not a notion that he cared for me until he actually said the words. Is it not too strange to think that perhaps, after all, Maud may be one of the last of us to get married?"
Here followed the usual descriptive catalogue, so characteristic of the Jamiesons' letters. "Mr. Cuthbertson looks like a widower, though he is not one." Strangely enough, I could never think of any other words, when I came to know Mr. Cuthbertson, that described him so well as these, and I can only account for it by saying that the man's deep melancholy and the crape band that he habitually wore round his hat must have given one the feeling that at some time Mr. Cuthbertson had suffered a heavy bereavement. "I have only known him," Eliza's letter went on, "for six weeks, but even that time has shown me his worth. He has a very straight nose and a black beard, and his forehead is distinctly intellectual. I met him first at Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs', where, as you know, I had gone to stay to catalogue their library, and to do a little typewriting for her. You know, of course, that she has become a member of the S.R.S., and their library is amine of information.
"At first I was afraid to say, or even to allow myself to think, he showed me any preference, but Maud thought from the first that he was struck, and I asked her not to appear at all until everything was settled, for you know how attractive she is. But I really don't think that even then I thought that there was anything serious in it." (For an intelligent woman Eliza's letter strikes one as being strangely lacking in concentration.) "I have just been to the meeting of the Browning Society—our first appearance in public together—and I read my paper on "The Real Strafford," but I could hardly keep my voice steady all the time. I wear his own signet-ring for the present, but we are going up to London next week, when he will buy me a hoop of pearls. I am sure that you will be glad to hear that he is comfortably off. When the right man comes preconceived objections to matrimony vanish,but it must be the right man."
Palestrina said that she was "thrilled" to hear of Eliza's engagement, because an engagement was always thrilling, and she instantly went to tell the news to Mr. Ellicomb. She told me afterwards that when she had said that one of the Jamiesons was engaged Mr. Ellicomb became suddenly very pale in his complexion, and exclaimed, in a most anxious tone of voice, "Which?"
The cold weather has set in very suddenly, and already there is a sprinkling of snow on some of the distant hills. The robins still sing cheerily, but the gulls on the shore, flying over the yellow seaweed, call to each other plaintively in the gray of the early twilight. The heavy-winged herons stand in an attitude of serious thought for hours on the cold rocks; then, as if suddenly making up their minds to something, they stretch out their red legs behind them, and flop with large wings over the waters of the loch. The red Virginian creeper has begun to drop its leaves regretfully, after a night or two of white frost, and the dahlias hang their heads, heavy with the moisture which their cups contain. The sun wakes late in the mornings now, but shines strong and warm when it does get up. Cottage lights and fires burn cheerily o' nights, and within the cottages the old folks and the young ones draw round the fires and speak eerily of wraiths and whaurlochs, and some will tell of death-lights which they have seen on the lonely shore road. The herring fishers who sail away in the early twilight wear good stout jerseys now, and red woollen "crauvats" which the "wumman at hame" has knitted. TheLordhas sailed away to Dunoon to lay up for the winter, and the shepherds have gone away down South "to winter the hogs." The shepherds' wives sit alone in the little hillside cottages away up on the face of the brae, and "mak dae" with their slender money till their men come home again.
The old women in the village have begun their winter spinning, and the tap, tap, tap of the treadle on the floor gives a pleasant sound as one passes outside on the dark road. Old men tell tales of snow in the passes in winter-time, and of death on the bleak hillsides, and some wife, shuddering, will say, "Ay, I mind I saw his corp-licht the very evening he was lost." And then they tell tales of fantasy and signs and premonitions of death.
The Finlaysons are going to wind up their very successful autumn in the Highlands by giving what they insist upon calling a gillies' dance, though probably the revels will mostly be indulged in by their large retinue of English servants. Good-natured old Finlayson has more than once said that he hopes we shall all come to the gillies' dance, and that it will give ourselves and our guests a chance of seeing some Highland customs. A good many of us come to Scotland most years, and have seen gillies and pipers before, but our good-natured neighbours certainly out-distance any one I know in their Highland sympathies.
They invited us to dine with them before the dance should begin, and six of us went, feeling very like the Jamiesons, and resolved that when we got home we should never put a limit to their numbers when we send them an invitation again.
We talk of returning home at the end of next week, and Mrs. Fielden and our other two guests are leaving on Monday, I believe.
Mrs. Fielden looks much prettier in the Highlands, I think, than anywhere else. Young Finlayson is in love with her, and I believe has offered her his heart and the ironmongery business with it; but I think of all her lovers Anthony Crawshay is the one she likes best. He is the only one for whom her moods never alter, and to whom she is always gracious and charming and sweet. Perhaps it is in a quiet, less radiant way than that in which she treats others, but it is with an unvarying loving-kindness which I have not seen her bestow elsewhere. And Anthony Crawshay is a good fellow—one of the best.
Old Mr. Finlayson actually donned a kilt for the gillies' dance; young Finlayson also wore the national dress, and Thomas tells me that they have sported the Macdonald tartan, and wants to know why. Old Finlayson met us at the door of his baronial hall in a clannish, feudal sort of way, and seizing his glengarry bonnet from his head he flung it down upon the oak settle in the hall, and exclaimed in hearty accents, "Welcome to the Glen." The Misses Finlayson wore sashes of royal Stuart tartan put plaid-wise across their shoulders. Mrs. Finlayson was dressed in a very regal manner which I cannot attempt to describe, and her platform voice was in use throughout the entire evening.
Ellicomb said the dance was barbaric, but Thomas enjoyed the evening immensely, and so did Crawshay, who said in his hearty way, "The Finlaysons did us uncommonly well," and shouted out, "Not at all bad people, not at all bad."
After dinner old Finlayson showed us all the pictures in the hall by the light of a long wax taper which he held above his head, and he pointed out the beauties of the house in a proprietary way, even to Evan himself, to whom the place belongs. Evan Sinclair, in a shabby green doublet, accepted all Mr. Finlayson's wildest statements about his own house with a queer, humorous grin on his face, and submitted to being patronized by the Miss Finlaysons, whose commercial instincts, no doubt, caused them to despise a young man who was obliged to let his place.
One of the Highland axioms which the Finlaysons have accepted is that "a man's a man for a' that," and they shook hands with every one in an effusive way, and condescended to a queer sort of familiarity with the boatmen and keepers about the place. The daughters of the house, with flying tartan ribbons, swung the young gillies about in the intricate figures of the hoolichan, and talked to them with a heartiness which one would hardly have thought possible of the Clarkham young ladies. The Finlaysons had a large number of English guests staying in the house for the dance. These all made the same joke when the pipes began to play. "Is the pig being killed?" they asked, and looked very pleased with their own ready wit.
Red-headed Evan Sinclair carried his old green doublet and battered silver ornaments very well, and his neat dancing was in pleasant contrast to the curious bounds and leaps of the Finlaysons. Old Mr. Finlayson spent his evening strutting about in a kindly, important fashion, and in making Athole Brose after a recipe supplied by Tyne Drum, who superintended the brewing of it himself.
I hope I am not fanciful when I say that the pipes when I hear them have to me something irresistibly sad about them, and that they conjure up many fantasies in my head which I am half ashamed to put down on paper. They seem to me to gather up in their bitter sobbings all the sorrows of a people who have suffered much and have said very little about it. There is the cry in them of children dying in the lonely glens in winter-time, when the wind howls round the clachan and the snow fills the passes. One almost sees the little procession of black-coated men bearing away a tiny burden from the cottage door into the whiteness beyond, with its one heaped-up patch of brown earth on either side of the little grave. They wail, too, of the Killing Time, when the Covenanters were crushed but never broken under persecution; and one seems to see the defiant gray-haired old men, with their splendid obstinacy, unmoved by threats—not defiant, but simply unbreakable. Thinking of the Covenanters as they pass slowly before one to the sighing of the pipes, one wonders if it is possible to punish by death the man who is content to die.
The tuneful reeds sob out, too, the story of the Prince for whom so many brave men bled, and they tell again of the days of song, and of noble legends and deeds of daring when the nation spent its passionate love on its King. "Come back! come back!" The desolate cry of the times. Almost one hears it sounding across the hills, and it seems to me that all that it is so hard to speak, so hard even to look, may perhaps be told in music. And I think loyalty and love speak very beautifully in the old Jacobite airs.
Again, as Evan's piper marches up and down in the moonlight playing a lament, the romance of life seems lost in the hardness of it, its stress and its loss. "Hame, hame, hame!" the pipes sob forth, crying for the homes that are sold to strangers, and for the hills and the glens which pass away from the old hands. It is "Good-bye, good-bye," an eternity of farewells. And still, wherever life is most difficult, wherever comforts are fewest and work is most hard, in the distant parts of the world are the Scottish exiles. But I know that all the world over the sons of the heather and the mist, in however distant or alien lands they may be, feel always, as they steer their way through life, that there is a pole-star by which they set their compass; and that some day, perhaps, they or their children may steer the boat to a haven on some rocky shore, where the whaup calls shrilly on the moors above the loch, and the heather grows strong and tough on the hillside, and the peat reek rises almost like the incense of an evening prayer, against a gray, soft sky in the land of the North.
I suppose that even in a diary I have no business to mix this up with an account of the Finlaysons' dance.
Palestrina came up to me after conscientiously dancing reels with Thomas, looking very pink and pretty, and thoughtful of me, as usual.
"Don't stay longer than you feel inclined," she said. "I told them to come for you in the dog-cart, and to wait about for you between twelve and one."
"I will take a turn down on the shore," I said, "and have a cigar, and then I will come back and see how you are getting on."
Palestrina gave me my crutch, and I went down towards the loch, which looked like a sheet of silver in the moonlight, and I found Anthony and Mrs. Fielden sitting on a garden bench beneath some wind-torn beeches by the shore. To-night there was not a breath of air stirring, and Mrs. Fielden had only thrown a light wrap round her.
"Have you come to tell me that I am to go in and dance reels with old Mr. Finlayson?" she said. "It is really so much pleasanter out here. Do sit down and talk to Sir Anthony and me."
She would never have allowed one to know that one was in the way, even if one had interrupted a proposal of marriage.
Anthony made room for me on the bench, and said heartily, "I am awfully glad to see you able to sit up like this, Hugo. Why, man, you're getting as strong as a horse!"
"Oh. I'm all right again," I said. "I'll begin to grow a new leg soon. And the first thing I mean to do when that happens is to dance reels like the Finlaysons."
"I believe I ought to be going in to supper now with Mr. Finlayson," said Mrs. Fielden. "Does any one know what time it is? He said he would 'conduct me to the dining-hall' at twelve o'clock."
"It is a quarter past now," said Anthony, looking at his watch in the moonlight. "Don't go in, Mrs. Fielden. Wait out here, and talk to Hugo and me."
But old Finlayson in his kilt had tracked us to our seat underneath the beech-trees, and he took instant possession of our fair neighbour, and told us to follow presently. He thought all the supper-tables were full just now.
"We shan't eat everything before you come," said hospitable old Finlayson, walking away with his beautiful partner on his arm.
Mrs. Fielden was dressed in white satin, with some pretty soft stuff about her, and she wore some white heather in her hair.
"What a good sort she is!" said Anthony in a loud voice, almost before Mrs. Fielden was out of hearing.
It wasn't, perhaps, the most poetical way in which he could have put it, but one didn't want or expect Anthony to express himself poetically.
"Utterly spoilt!" I replied, because at that moment I happened to be feeling supremely miserable, and I did not want Anthony to know it.
"Not a bit," he replied; "and you know that as well as I do, old chap."
"Allow me, Anthony," I said, "to be as savage as I like; it is one of the privileges of a cripple."
"Oh, blow cripples!" said Anthony. "You will be shooting next autumn, man."
"And what will you be doing?" I said. After all, we have been pals all our lives, and I think Anthony might tell me about it if there is anything to tell.
"Oh, I'll be shooting too, I suppose," said Anthony.
We smoked for some time in silence.
And then Anthony began, and said that he had enjoyed himself amazingly up here in the North, and he went on to say a good word for every one. Old Finlayson had been a brick about his shooting and deer-stalking, and it was beastly hard luck that I hadn't been able to come too. The minister wasn't a bad fellow, even when he was jocose; and Evan Sinclair was one of the best; and so on.
"What shall you be doing when you go back, Anthony?" I said, harking back to my old question, and hoping for more information than I actually asked for. "Are you going straight home?"
"I'll be at the first shoot at Stanby. Shall you be there?"
"I'm afraid not," I said. "I haven't learned to do cross-stitch yet, and I'm sure all the women would think me a great bore, sitting about in their morning-rooms all day. Except Mrs. Fielden, of course! Mrs. Fielden would probably persuade me into thinking that the only thing that made her house-party successful, or saved herself from boredom, was the presence of a lame man in the house."
"I don't think you are quite just about Mrs. Fielden, Hugo," said Anthony, moving rather resentfully on the garden bench.
"That doesn't matter much," I replied. "One voice will not be missed from the general chorus of praise that follows Mrs. Fielden wherever she goes."
"No; but still——" began Anthony; and then he stopped, and we smoked on for some time without speaking. "You see," he began at last, "she is the best friend I ever had." He did not lower his voice, because I suppose Anthony finds it impossible to do so, but went on steadily: "You see, I once cared for a little cousin of hers, and she died when she was eighteen. I don't think anybody ever knew about it, except Mrs. Fielden. But she knows how much cut up I was, and I suppose that is why she is so nice to me always."
"I'm awfully sorry!" I said.
"I never meant to speak about it," said Anthony in a brisk, cheerful voice. "Oh, don't you bother about it, Hugo! I mean I'm awfully keen about hunting, and I have an excellent time, only I don't suppose I shall ever care for any one else."
"Thanks for telling me, Tony."
"I wouldn't have said anything about it," said Anthony, "if it hadn't been for what you said about Mrs. Fielden. Y'see, she has been so awfully good to me, and I don't think you quite understand all she is really."
"Why, man," I cried, "I love her with every bit of my heart! And I worship her—how does one say one worships a woman?—as if she were the sun!"
And I think that was the very first moment that I told myself that I loved Mrs. Fielden.
The minister and Evan Sinclair came to say good-bye; the minister has accepted our approaching departure with his usual philosophy. "You would soon tire of this place in the winter-time," he said. "And even looking at it from the other point of view, I believe that summer visitors should not prolong their stay above a few months. I admit that we have enjoyed your sojourn amongst us; but were you and your sister to become residenters in the place, our intercourse would have to be reconstructed from the foundation." The minister crossed his legs, and, without being pressed to continue the subject, he went on: "There is a certain conventionality, not to say forbearance, admitted and allowed between friends with whom one's acquaintance is to be short; but there is a basis stronger than that upon which any lengthy friendship must be made."
"And that basis?" I asked.
"That basis, I take it," said the minister, "should be a straightforward disregard for one another. I do not believe in politeness between near neighbours; it cannot last."
"I had hoped," said Palestrina, pouting a little, "that you would all miss us, Mr. Macorquodale."
"We shall miss you," said the minister quickly, but with judgment. "We shall see the merits as well as the demerits of the case. For instance, one of your friends cost me a sovereign for a favourite charity of hers."
Evan Sinclair said very kindly, blinking his fair eyelashes in a shy way, "Well, I know I shall miss you. The place will seem very dull with only Alexander and me left in it."
"Ishall have my wife," said the minister brutally.
"Yes," said Sinclair; "and her mother! You have kept that pretty dark from us, Taurbarrels."
"It is only a visit," said Mr. Macorquodale shortly. And he went on in a truculent tone, "And I need not have her unless I want to."
"I hear she is strict," murmured Evan. "I hope you will be allowed to look out of the window on the Sabbath, my man."
"I am master in my own house," said Mr. Macorquodale magnificently.
"Believe me," said Evan, "that's a courtesy title, supported by no valid claim, and still less precedent. A man never has been master of his own house when there is a mistress in it. I remember when my brother got married he had just your very ideas, and he gave his wife the keys of the linen-press and the store-cupboard, 'But the rest of the bunch,' he said, 'I keep to myself.' And he put them all in his pocket. It was not six months after that," said Evan, "that I went to stay with them, and I heard him ask my sister-in-law if she would mind his having two pocket-handkerchiefs on Sundays."
Palestrina and I were alone, for Ellicomb had left us a few days before, and we hear from the Jamiesons that he is a daily visitor at their house. Thomas and Anthony were out shooting, and Mrs. Fielden had gone for a walk over the hills.
"I have a thousand things to do," said Palestrina, when Evan and the minister had departed.
"I also have a thousand things to do," I replied.
"Don't tire yourself," said Palestrina. "What are you going to do?"
"I am going to re-write my diary," I said.
"But, my dear," said Palestrina, "that would be the work of months."
"I am only going to correct all the mistakes I have made in it," I replied; and I took my book and a pen, and went and sat in the little room on the ground-floor which they call my den.
We once had an old aunt, Palestrina and I, who kept a diary all her life, and when any of the relatives whom she mentioned in its pages came to die, she used to go through all the back numbers of her journal and insert affectionate epithets in front of the names of the deceased. For instance (my aunt's existence was not marked by any thrilling events), the entry would perhaps be as follows: "Maria was late for breakfast this morning. In the afternoon she had her singing-lesson, and afterwards we did some shopping, when Maria tried on her new gown." But the amended entry after Maria's death would be, "Our darling Maria was (a little) late for breakfast this morning; in the afternoon she had her singing-lesson"—and here would probably be a footnote praising Maria's voice—"afterwards we did some shopping, and"—Maria struck out—"my sweet girl tried on her new gown." Any one's death, or even a successful marriage of one of the family, would cause her to revise and correct her diary in this way, and she used to fan the wet ink with a piece of blotting-paper to make it dry black, and thus prevent posterity from knowing that the words written over the lines were an afterthought induced by subsequent events.
It was manifestly an unfair way of keeping a diary. But I can claim her example and hereditary taint as an excuse for my own dishonesty this afternoon. I read through my diary with a sense of utter shame, and wherever I found, for instance, that I had said that Mrs. Fielden was frivolous, or even that she raised her eyebrows in an affected way, I corrected the misstatement by the light of the magnificent discovery I had made that Mrs. Fielden was faultless, and that I loved her. Oh, the beauty of this woman and her blessed kindness! the cunning with which she conceals her unselfishness, and her ridiculous attempts at pretending she is frivolous or worldly.
Alas! there were so many misstatements to correct, and so many dear adjectives to fill in, that I was not halfway through my task before Mrs. Fielden herself tapped at the window and looked in.
I believe I must have grinned foolishly, but what I wanted to do was to stretch out my arms to the beautiful vision, framed in the hectic Virginian creeper round the window, and call out to her to come to me.
Mrs. Fielden came in for a minute, and said with the adorable lift of the eyebrows: "I have been educating a pair of young boots by walking through all the bogs on the hillside. Listen, they are quite full of water." She raised herself on her toes with a squelching sound of the leather, and gave one of her joyous soft laughs.
"You must change directly," I said, with an idiotic sense of proprietorship.
"When I have done so I think I shall come and have tea with you," said Mrs. Fielden. And of course then I knew that she had come home early on purpose to have tea with me, and that probably she had given up something else which she wanted to do, in order that she might sit by me when I was alone—because of course I have found Mrs. Fielden out now, and exposed her hypocrisy.
Fortunately she took nearly a quarter of an hour to change her wet boots, and this gave me time to ask myself why I was behaving like a raving idiot, because I had found out that Mrs. Fielden was absolutely perfect, and that I loved her.
It was quite the worst quarter of an hour that I have ever spent, because in it I had time to remember that I was a crippled man with one leg, and that Mrs. Fielden was a beautiful young woman whom of course every one loved, and that she owned an old historical place called Stanby, and probably—I realized this also—that she would continue to come over and sit with a dull man and bewilder him with her beauty and her kindness only so long as he did not allow her to know the supremely impertinent fact that he had fallen in love with her.
I must plead ill-health, and a certain weakness of nerve which no doubt always follows a surgical operation, for the fact that I turned round and put my face in the pillows for a moment and groaned.
Mrs. Fielden came in in my favourite pale-blue gown which she sometimes wears when she changes her frock at tea-time. She came and took a seat beside me, and as she never hurriedly plunges into a conversation we sat silent for a time. The afternoon was darkening now, and the light of a blazing fire leaped and played upon her pale-blue dress, and turned her brown hair to a sort of red-gold.
Mrs. Fielden thinks she is the only person in the world who can make up a fire. And she is perfectly right. She arranged the logs with a long brass poker, shifting them here and there, while her dear face glowed in the light of the fire. She is not a luxurious woman, in spite of being surrounded always by luxury. For instance, she stands and walks in a very erect way, and I have never seen her stuff a lot of sofa cushions at her back in a chair, nor lounge on a sofa. Her glorious, buoyant health seems to exempt her from need of support or ease, and her figure is too pretty for lounging.
When she had finished arranging the logs she put down the poker and looked at me with that dear kindliness of hers, and said in her pretty voice, "What have you been doing with yourself this afternoon?"
"The minister and Evan Sinclair came up to say good-bye," I said.
"And since then?"
I took my diary, which still lay on my knee, and hid it under the sofa cushions.
"Since then," I said, "I have been correcting—that is, writing my diary."
"Oh, the diary!" exclaimed Mrs. Fielden delightedly. "I had forgotten about that!"
"No, you hadn't," I said to myself. "It is only part of your wilful, uncomprehendable, untranslatable charm that makes you pretend sometimes that you have no memory. As a matter of fact, you knew from the first that it would be a relief to an egotistical grumbler to get rid of his spleen sometimes on blue ruled essay paper, and so you set him a task to do, and you have often wondered since how he is getting on with it.
"I think I must see the diary," said Mrs. Fielden.
"That you certainly shall not," I said; and I pushed the book still farther under the sofa cushions—just as if it was necessary to fight with Mrs. Fielden for anything, or any use either!
"I thought you promised," said Mrs. Fielden.
"If I did I have changed my mind," I said firmly.
"You know you mean all the time to let me see it," said Mrs. Fielden.
"I know I do not mean to let you see it for even a minute of time," I replied.
One of Mrs. Fielden's special odd little silences fell between us. "No," I said to myself. "I willnotsay I am sorry. I willnotsay I have been a brute, I willnotfeel a desire to comfort her, even if her eyes have the wistful look in them."
Mrs. Fielden sat still and looked into the fire.
What unexpected thing will she do next, I wonder? Will she suddenly burst out laughing, or will she turn and take every bit of manhood out of me by smiling? Or shall I find, when I turn and look at her face, simply that she has gone to sleep?
Good heavens! What if she should be crying?
In an agony of compunction I turned and looked at her; and Mrs. Fielden not only smiled, but held out her hand for the book.... I rummaged underneath the sofa cushions, and passed it over to her. She bent forward till the firelight from the blazing logs fell full on the open page, and she read every one of those corrected lines. She saw where I had once put "affected" I had now put "beautiful," and for "frivolous" I put a "lovely gaiety," and she read till she came to the last correction of all. I had run a line through the words "Mrs. Fielden came to sit with me," and had written over it, "My darling came to see me——"
Then Mrs. Fielden closed the book, and left her chair where she had been sitting. She crossed the hearthrug quite slowly till she reached my sofa. And then she kneeled down and took both my hands in her dear strong ones, and looked at me with misty blue eyes, like wet forget-me-nots. "But, Hugo dear," she said, "why did you not tell me long ago?"
THE END.
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME
BY Miss MACNAUGHTAN.THE FORTUNE OF CHRISTINA M'NAB.
THE DUENNA OF A GENIUS. M. E. Francis.OWD BOB. Alfred Ollivant.EIGHT DAYS. R. E. Forrest.LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET. Miss Braddon.THE OCTOPUS. Frank Norris.THE PIT. Frank Norris.MONSIEUR BEAUCAIRE, Etc. Booth Tarkington.WOODSIDE FARM. Mrs. W. K. Clifford.WHITE FANG. Jack London.THE PRINCESS PASSES. C. N. & A. M. Williamson.THE MAN FROM AMERICA. Mrs. H. de la Pasture.SIR JOHN CONSTANTINE. "Q"INCOMPARABLE BELLAIRS. A. and E. Castle.IF YOUTH BUT KNEW! A. and E. Castle.MATTHEW AUSTIN. W. E. Norris.HIS GRACE. W. E. Norris.THE AMERICAN PRISONER. Eden Phillpotts.THE HOSTS OF THE LORD. Mrs. F. A. Steel.THE LADY OF THE BARGE. W. W. Jacobs.THE GOD IN THE CAR. Anthony Hope.QUISANTE. Anthony Hope.THE INTRUSIONS OF PEGGY. Anthony Hope.THE KING'S MIRROR. Anthony Hope.THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE. Sir G. Parker.AN ADVENTURER OF THE NORTH. Sir G. Parker.THE BATTLE OF THE STRONG. Sir G. Parker.MARRIAGE OF WILLIAM ASHE. Mrs. Humphry WardHISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE. Mrs. Humphry Ward.ROBERT ELSMERE. Mrs. Humphry Ward.CLEMENTINA. A. E. W. Mason.THE RECIPE FOR DIAMONDS. C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne.THE WAGES OF SIN. Lucas Malet.
Etc., Etc.
NELSON'S LIBRARY.