Chapter 3

She dreamt her dream of that strange world in fear and trembling, conjuring up scenes of horror—tiger hunts; snakes hidden in the corner of a tent; battle; fever; fire; mutiny. Her morbid imagination pictured all possible and impossible danger for the man she loved. And then she thought of his home-coming—for good, for good—for all the span of their joint lives; and she longed for that return with the sickness of hope deferred.She would go back to the Angler’s Nest sometimes after one of these dreamy days upon the river, and would pace about the house or the garden, planning things for her husband’s return, as if he were due next day. She would wheel his own particular chair to the drawing-room fireplace, and look at it, and arrange the fall of the curtains before the old-fashioned bow-window, and change the position of the lamp, and alter the books on the shelves, and do this and that with an eye to effect, anxious to discover how the room might be made prettiest, cosiest, most lovable and home-like—for him, for him, for him!And now she had to resign herself to a year’s delay, perhaps. Yes, he had said it might be a year. All that bright picture of union and content, which had seemed so vivid and so near, had now grown dim and pale. It had melted into a shadowy distance. To a girl who has but just passed her twentieth birthday a year of waiting and delay seems an eternity.“I won’t think of him,” she said to herself, plunging her sculls fiercely into the rippling water. The tide was running down, and it was strong enough to have carried her little boat out to sea like an autumn leaf swept along the current. “I must try to lull my mind to sleep, as if I were an enchanted Princess, and so bridge over twelve slow months of loneliness. I won’t think of you, Martin, my good, brave, truest of the true! I’ll occupy my poor, foolish little mind. I’ll write a novel, perhaps, like old Miss Carver at Dinan. Anything in the world—just to keep my thoughts from always brooding on one subject.”She rowed on steadily, hugging the shore under the wooded hillside, where the rich autumn colouring and the clear, cool lights were so full of beauty—a beauty which she could feel, with a vague, dim sense which just touched the realm of poetry. Perhaps she felt the same sense of loss which Keats or Alfred de Musset would have felt in the stillness of such a scene—the want of something to people the wood and the river—some race of beings loftier than fishermen and peasants; some of those mystic forms whichthe poet sees amidst the shadows of old woods or in the creeks and sheltered inlets of a secluded river.She thought, with a half-smile, of yesterday’s adventure. What importance that foolish Tabitha gave to so simple an incident; the merest commonplace courtesy, necessitated by circumstances; and only because the person who had been commonly courteous was Richard Hulbert, thirteenth Baron Lostwithiel. Thirteenth Baron! There lay the distinction. These Cornish folks worshipped antique lineage. Tabitha would have thought very little of a mushroom peer’s civility, although he had sent her mistress home in a chariot and four. She was no worshipper of wealth, and she turned up her blunt old nose at Mr. Crowther, of Glenaveril—the great new red-brick mansion which had sprung up like a fungus amidst the woods only yesterday—because he had made his money in trade, albeit his trade had been upon a large scale, and altogether genteel and worthy to be esteemed—a great cloth factory at Stroud, which was said to have clad half the army at one period of modern history.Poor, foolish Tabitha! What would she have thought of the tea-drinking in that lovely old room, mysteriously beautiful in the light of a wood fire—the playful, uncertain light which glorifies everything? What would she have thought of those walls of books—richly bound books, books in sombre brown, big books and little books, from floor to ceiling? A room which made those poor little oak bookcases in the cottage parlour something to blush for. What would Tabitha have thought of his deferential kindness—that tone of deepest consideration with which such men treat all women, even the old and uncomely? She could hardly have helped admiring his good manners, whatever dark things she might have been told about his earlier years.Why should he not have a yacht? It seemed the fittest life for a man without home ties; a man still young, and with no need to labour at a profession. What better life could there be than that free wandering from port to port over a romantic sea?—and to Isola all seas were alike mysterious and romantic.She dawdled away the morning; she sculled against the stream for nearly three hours, and then let her boat drift down the river to the garden above the towpath. It was long past her usual time for luncheon when she moored her boat to the little wooden steps, leaving it for Thomas, the gardener, to pull up into the boat-house. She had made up her mind that if Lostwithiel troubled himself to make any inquiry about her health he would call in the morning.She had guessed rightly. Tabitha was full of his visit, and his wondrous condescension. He had called at eleven o’clock, on his way to the railway station at Fowey. He called in the most perfect of T carts, with a pair of bright bays. Tabitha had opened the door to him. He had asked quite anxiously about Mrs. Disney’s health. He had walked round the garden with Tabitha and admired everything, and had told her that Major Disney had a better gardener than any he had at the Mount, after which he had left her charmed by his amiability. And so this little episode in Isola’s life came to a pleasant end, leaving no record but his lordship’s card, lying like a jewel on the top of less distinguished names in the old Indian bowl.CHAPTER III.“OH MOMENT ONE AND INFINITE!”Isola fancied that her adventure was all over and done with after that ceremonious call of inquiry; but in so narrow a world as that of Trelasco it was scarcely possible to have seen the last of a man who lived within three miles; and she and Lord Lostwithiel met now and then in the course of her solitary rambles. The walk into Fowey, following the old disused railway, was almost her favourite, and one which she had occasion to take oftener than any other, since Tabitha was a stay-at-home person, and expected her young mistress to do all the marketing, so that Isola had usuallysome errand to take her into the narrow street on the hillside above the sea. It was at Fowey that she oftenest met Lostwithiel. His yacht, theVendetta, was in the harbour under repairs, and he went down to look at the work daily, and often dawdled upon the deck till dusk, watching the carpenters, or talking to his captain. They had been half over the world together, master and man, and were almost as familiar as brothers. The crew were half English and half foreign; and it was a curious mixture of languages in which Lostwithiel talked to them. They were most of them old hands on board theVendetta, and would have stood by the owner of the craft if he had wanted to sail her up the Phlegethon.She was a schooner of two hundred and fifty tons, built for speed, and with a rakish rig. She had cost, with her fittings, her extra silk sails for racing, more money than Lostwithiel cared to remember; but he loved her as a man loves his mistress, and if she were costly and exacting, she was no worse than other mistresses, and she was true as steel, which they are not always; and so he felt that he had money’s worth in her. He showed her to Isola one evening from the promontory above the harbour, where she met him in the autumn sundown. Her work at the butcher’s and the grocer’s being done, she had gone up to that airy height by Point Neptune to refresh herself with a long look seaward before she went back to her home in the valley. Lostwithiel took her away from the Point, and made her look down into the harbour.“Isn’t she a beauty?” he asked, pointing below.Her inexperienced eyes roamed about among the boats, colliers, fishing-boats, half a dozen yachts of different tonnage.“Which is yours?” she asked.“Which? Why, there is only one decent boat in the harbour. The schooner.”She saw which boat he meant by the direction in which he flourished his walking-stick, but was not learned in distinctions of rig. TheVendetta, being under repair, did not seem to her especially lovely.“Have you pretty cabins?” she asked childishly.“Oh yes, they’re pretty enough; but that’s not the question. Look at her lines. She skims over the water like a gull. Ladies seem to think only what a boat looks like inside. I believe my boat is rather exceptional, from a lady’s point of view. Will you come on board and have a look at her?”“Thanks, no; I couldn’t possibly. It will be dark before I get home as it is.”“But it wouldn’t take you a quarter of an hour, and we could row you up the river in no time—ever so much faster than you could walk.”Isola looked frightened at the very idea.“Not for the world!” she said. “Tabitha would think I had gone mad. She would begin to fancy that I could never go out without over-staying the daylight, and troubling you to send me home.”“Ah, but it is so long since you were last belated,” he said, in his low caressing voice, with a tone that was new to her and different from all other voices; “ages and ages ago—half a lifetime. There could be no harm in being just a little late this mild evening, and I would row you home—myself, under the new moon. Look at her swinging up in the grey blue there above Polruan. She looks like a fairy boat, anchored in the sky by that star hanging a fathom below her keel. I look at her, and wish—wish—wish!”He looked up, pale in the twilight, with dark deep-set eyes, of which it was never easy to read the expression. Perhaps that inscrutable look made those sunken and by no means brilliant eyes more interesting than some much handsomer eyes—interesting with the deep interest that belongs to the unknowable.“Good night,” said Isola. “I’m afraid that I shall be very late.”“Good night. You would be earlier if you would trust to the boat.”He held out his hand, and she gave him hers, hesitatingly for the first time in their acquaintance. It was after this parting in the wintry sundown that she first began to look troubled at meeting him.The troubled feeling grew upon her somehow. In a life so lonely and uneventful trifles assume undue importance. She tried to avoid him, and on her journeys to Fowey she finished her business in the village street and turned homewards without having climbed the promontory by that rugged walk she loved so well. It needed some self-denial to forego that keen pleasure of standing on the windy height and gazing across the western sea towards Ushant and her native province; but she knew that Lord Lostwithiel spent a good deal of his time lounging on the heights above the harbour, and she did not want to meet him again.Although she lived her quiet life in the shortening days for nearly a month without meeting him, she was not allowed to forget his existence. Wherever she went people talked about him and speculated about him. Every detail of his existence made matter for discussion; his yacht, his political opinions, his talents, his income, his matrimonial prospects, the likelihood or unlikelihood of his settling down permanently at the Mount, and taking the hounds, which were probably to be without a master within a measurable distance of time. There was so little to talk about in Trelasco and those scattered hamlets between Fowey and Lostwithiel.Isola found herself joining in the talk at afternoon tea-parties, those casual droppings in of charitable ladies who had been their rounds among the cottagers and came back to the atmosphere of gentility worn out by long stories of woes and ailments, sore legs and rheumatic joints, and were very glad to discuss a local nobleman over a cup of delicately flavoured Indian tea in the glow of a flower-scented drawing-room.Among other houses Mrs. Disney visited Glenaveril, Mr. Crowther’s great red-brick mansion, with its pepper-boxturrets, and Jacobean windows, after the manner of Burleigh House by Stamford town.Here lived in wealth and state quite the most important family within a mile of Trelasco, the Vansittart Crowthers, erst of Pilbury Mills, near Stroud, now as much county as a family can make itself after its head has passed his fortieth birthday. Nobody quite knew how Mr. Crowther had come to be a Vansittart—unless by the easy process of baptism and the complaisance of an aristocratic sponsor; but the Crowthers had been known in Stroud for nearly two hundred years, and had kept their sacks upright, as Mr. Crowther called it, all that time.Fortune had favoured this last of the Crowthers, and, at forty years of age, he had found himself rich enough to dispose of his business to two younger brothers and a brother-in-law, and to convert himself into a landed proprietor. He bought up all the land that was to be had about Trelasco. Cornish people cling to their land like limpets to a rock; and it was not easy to acquire the ownership of the soil. In the prosperous past, when land was paying nearly four per cent. in other parts of England, Cornishmen were content to hold estates that yielded only two per cent.; but the days of decay had come when Mr. Crowther entered the market, and he was able to buy out more than one gentleman of ancient lineage.When he had secured his land, he sent to Plymouth for an architect, and he so harried that architect and so tampered with his drawings that the result of much labour and outlay was that monstrosity in red brick with stone dressings, known in the neighbourhood as Glenaveril. Mr. Crowther’s elder daughter was deep in Lord Lytton’s newly published poem when the house was being finished, and had imposed that euphonious name upon her father. Glenaveril. The house really was in a glen, or at least in a wooded valley, and Glenaveril seemed to suit it to perfection; and so the romantic name of a romantic poem was cut in massive Gothic letters on the granite pillars ofVansittart Crowther’s gate, beneath a shield which exhibited the coat of arms made and provided by the Herald’s College.Mrs. Vansittart Crowther was at home on Thursday afternoons, when the choicest Indian tea and the thickest cream, coffee as in Paris, and the daintiest cakes and muffins which a professed cook could provide, furnished the zest to conversation; for it could scarcely be said that the conversation gave a zest to those creature comforts. It would be perhaps nearer the mark to say that Mrs. Crowther was supposed to sit in the drawing-room on these occasions while the two Miss Crowthers were at home. The mistress of Glenaveril was not an aspiring woman; and in her heart of hearts she preferred Gloucestershire to Cornwall, and the stuccoed villa on the Cheltenham road, with its acre and a half of tennis-lawn and flower-beds, open to the blazing sun, and powdered with the summer dust, to Glenaveril, with its solemn belt of woodlands, and its too spacious grandeur. She was not vulgar or illiterate. She never misplaced an aspirate. She had learnt to play the piano and to talk French at the politest of young ladies’ schools at Cheltenham. She never dressed outrageously, or behaved rudely. She had neither red hands nor splay feet. She was in all things blameless; and yet Belinda and Alicia, her daughters, were ashamed of her, and did their utmost to keep her, and her tastes, and her opinions in the background. She had no style. She was not “smart.” She seemed incapable of grasping the ideas, or understanding the ways of smart people; or at least her daughters thought so.“Your mother is one of the best women I know,” said the curate to Alicia, being on the most confidential terms with both sisters, “and yet you and Miss Crowther are always trying to edit her.”“Father wants a great deal more editing than mother,” said Belinda, “but there’s no use in talking to him. He is encased in the armour of self-esteem. It made my bloodrun cold to see him taking Lord Lostwithiel over the grounds and stables the other day—praising everything, and pointing out this and that,—and even saying how much things had cost!”“I dare say it was vulgar,” agreed the curate, “but it’s human nature. I’ve seen a duke behave in pretty much the same way. Children are always proud of their new toys, and men are but children of a larger growth, don’t you know. You’ll find there’s a family resemblance in humanity, and that nature is stronger than training.”“Lord Lostwithiel would never behave in that kind of way—boring people about his stables.”“Lord Lostwithiel doesn’t care about stables—he would bore you about his yacht, I dare say.”“No, he never talks of himself or his own affairs. That is just the charm of his manner. He makes us all believe that he is thinking about us; and yet I dare say he forgets us directly he is outside the gate.”“I’m sure he does,” replied Mr. Colfox, the curate. “There isn’t a more selfish man living than Lostwithiel.”The fair Belinda looked at him angrily. There are assertions which young ladies make on purpose to have them controverted.Mrs. Disney hated the great red-brick porch, with its vaulted roof and monstrous iron lantern, and the bell which made such a clamour, as if it meant fire, or at least dinner, when she touched the hanging brass handle. She hated to find herself face to face with a tall footman, who hardly condescended to say whether his mistress were at home or not, but just preceded her languidly along the broad corridor, where the carpet was so thick that it felt like turf, and flung open the drawing-room door with an air, and pronounced her name into empty space, so remote were the half-dozen ladies at the other end of the room, clustered round Belinda’s tea-table, and fed with cake by Alicia, while Mrs. Crowther sat in the window a little way off, with her basket of woolwork at her side, and her fatsomnolent pug lying at her feet. To Isola it was an ordeal to have to walk the length of the drawing-room, navigating her course amidst an archipelago of expensive things—Florentine tables, portfolios of engravings, Louis Seize Jardinières, easels supporting the last expensive etching from Goupil’s—to the window where Mrs. Crowther waited to receive her, rising with her lap full of wools, to shake hands with simple friendliness and without a vestige of style. Belinda shook hands on a level with the tip of her sharpretroussénose, and twirled the silken train of her tea-gown with the serpentine grace of Sarah Bernhardt. She prided herself on those serpentine movements and languid graces which belong to the Græco-Belgravian period; while Alicia held herself like a ramrod, and took her stand upon being nothing if not sporting. Her olive-cloth gown and starched collar, her neat double-soled boots and cloth gaiters, were a standing reproach to Belinda’s silken slovenliness and embroidered slippers, always dropping off her restless feet, and being chased surreptitiously among her lace and pongee frillings. Poor Mrs. Crowther disliked the Guard’s collar, which she felt was writing premature wrinkles upon her younger girl’s throat, but she positively loathed the loose elegance of the Indian silk tea-gown, with its wide Oriental sleeves, exhibiting naked arms to the broad daylight. That sloppy raiment made a discord in the subdued harmony of the visitors’ tailor-made gowns—well worn some of them—brown, and grey, and indigo, and russet; and Mrs. Crowther was tortured by the conviction that her elder daughter looked disreputable. This honest matron was fond of Isola Disney. In her own simple phraseology, she had “taken to her;” and pressed the girl-wife to come every Thursday afternoon.“It must be so lonely for you,” she said gently, “with your husband so far away, and you such a child, too. I wonder your mamma doesn’t come and stay with you for a bit. You must always come on our Thursdays. Now mind you do, my dear.”“I don’t think our Thursdays are remarkably enlivening, mother,” said Alicia, objecting to the faintest suggestion of fussiness, the crying sin of both her parents. And then she turned to Isola, and measured her from head to foot. “It’s rather a pity you don’t hunt,” she said. “We had a splendid morning with the hounds.”“Perhaps I may get a little hunting by-and-by, when my husband comes home.”“Ah, but one can’t begin all at once; and this is a difficult country; breakneck hills, and nasty banks. Have you hunted much?”“Hardly at all. I was out in a boar-hunt once, near Angers, but only as a looker-on. It was a grand sight. The Duke of Beaufort came over to Brittany on purpose to join in it.”“How glorious a boar-hunt must be! I must get my father to take me to Angers next year. Do you know a great many people there?”“No, only two or three professors at the college, and the Marquis de Querangal, the gentleman who has the boar-hounds. His daughter used to visit at Dinan, and she and I were great friends.”“Lord Lostwithiel talked about boar-hunting the other night,” said Alicia. “It must be capital fun.” His name recurred in this way, whatever the conversation might be, with more certainty than Zero on the wheel at roulette.He had been there in the evening, Isola thought. There had been a dinner-party, perhaps, at which he had been present. She had not long to wonder. The name once pronounced, the stream of talk flowed on. Yes, there had been a dinner, and Lord Lostwithiel had been delightful; so brilliant in conversation as compared with everybody else; so witty, so cynical, sofin de siècle.“I didn’t hear him say anything very much out of the common,” said Mrs. Crowther, in her matter-of-fact way.She liked having a nobleman or any other local magnate at her table; but she had too much common sense to behypnotized by his magnificence, and made to taste milk and water as Maronean wine.“Do you know Lord Lostwithiel?” Belinda asked languidly, as Isola sipped her tea, sitting shyly in the broad glare of a colossal fireplace. “Oh yes, by-the-by, you met him here the week before last.”Mrs. Disney blushed to the roots of those soft tendril-like curls which clustered about her forehead; but she said never a word. She had no occasion to tell them the history of that meeting in the rain, or of those many subsequent meetings which had drifted her into almost the familiarity of an old friendship. They might take credit to themselves for having made her acquainted with their star if they liked. She had seen plenty of smart people at Dinan in those sunny summer months when visitors came from Dinard to look at the old quiet inland city. Lostwithiel’s rank had no disturbing influence upon her mind. It was himself—something in his look and in his voice, in the mere touch of his hand—an indescribable something which of late had moved her in his presence, and made her faintly tremulous at the sound of his name.He was announced while they were talking of him, and he seemed surprised to come suddenly upon that slim unobtrusive figure almost hidden by Belinda’s flowing garment and fuller form. Belinda was decidedly handsome—handsomer than an heiress need be; but she was also just a shade larger than an heiress need be at three and twenty. She was a Rubens’ beauty, expansive, florid, and fair, with reddish auburn hair piled on the top of her head. Sitting between this massive beauty and the still more massive chimney-piece, Mrs. Disney was completely hidden from the new arrival.He discovered her suddenly while he was shaking hands with Belinda, and his quick glance of pleased surprise did not escape that young lady’s steely blue eyes. Not a look or a breath ever does escape observation in a village drawing-room. Even the intellectual people, the people whodevour all Mudie’s most solid books—travels, memoirs, metaphysics, agnostic novels—even these are as keenly interested in their neighbours’ thoughts and feelings as the unlettered rustic in the village street.Lostwithiel took the proffered cup of tea, and planted himself near Mrs. Disney, with his back against the marble caryatid which bore up one-half of the chimney-piece. Alicia began to talk to him about his yacht. How were the repairs going on? and so on, and so on, delighted to air her technical knowledge. He answered her somewhat languidly, as if theVendettawere not first in his thoughts at this particular moment.“What about this ball?” he asked presently. “You are all going to be there, of course?”“Do you mean the hunt ball at Lostwithiel?”“Of course! What other ball could I mean? It is the great festivity of these parts. The one tremendous event of the winter season. It was a grand idea of you new people to revive the old festivity, which had become a tradition. I wore my first dress coat at the Lostwithiel Hunt Ball nearly twenty years ago. I think it was there I first fell in love, with a young lady in pink tulle, who was miserable because she had been mistaken enough to wear pink at a hunt ball. I condoled with her, assured her that in my eyes she was lovely, although her gown clashed—that was her word, I remember—with the pink coats. My coat was not pink, and I believe she favoured me a little on that account. She gave me a good many waltzes in the course of the evening, and I can answer for her never wearing that pink frock again, for I trampled it to shreds. There were traces of her to be found all over the rooms, as if I had been Greenacre and she my victim’s body.”“It will be rather a humdrum ball, I’m afraid,” said Belinda. “All the best people seem to be away.”“Never mind that if the worst people can dance. I am on the committee, so I will answer for the supper and the champagne. You like a dry brand, of course, Miss Crowther?”“I never touch wine of any kind.”“No; then my chief virtue will be thrown away upon you. Are all young ladies blue-ribbonites nowadays, I wonder? Mrs. Disney, pray tell me you are interested in the champagne question.”“I am not going to the ball.”“Not going! Oh, but it is a duty which you owe to the county! Do you think because you are an alien and a foreigner you can flout our local gaieties—fleer at our solemnities? No, it is incumbent upon you to give us your support.”“Yes, my dear, you must go to the ball,” put in Mrs. Crowther, in her motherly tone. “You are much too young and pretty to stay at home, like Cinderella, while we are all enjoying ourselves. Of course you must go. Mr. Crowther has put down his name for five and twenty tickets, and I’m sure there’ll be one to spare for you, although we shall have a large house-party.”“Indeed, you are too kind, but I couldn’t think——” faltered Isola, with a distressed look.She knew that Lostwithiel was watching her from his vantage ground ever so far above her head. A man of six feet two has considerable advantages at a billiard-table, and in a quiet flirtation carried on in public.“If it is a chaperon you are thinking about, I’ll take care of you,” urged good Mrs. Crowther.“No, it isn’t on that account. Mrs. Baynham offered to take me in her party. But I really would much rather not be there. It would seem horrid to me to be dancing in a great, dazzling room, among happy people, while Martin is in Burmah, perhaps in peril of his life on that very night. One can never tell. I often shudder at the thought of what may be happening to him while I am sitting quietly by the fire. And what should I feel at a ball?”“I should hardly have expected you to have such romantic notions about Major Disney,” said Belinda, coolly, “considering the difference in your ages.”“Do you suppose I care the less for him because he is twenty years older than I am?”“Twenty! Is it really as much as that?” ejaculated Mrs. Crowther, unaffectedly shocked.“He is just as dear to me,” pursued Isola, warmly. “I look up to him, and love him with all my heart. There never was a better, truer man. From the time I began to read history I always admired great soldiers. I don’t mean to say that Martin is a hero—only I know he is a thorough soldier—and he seemed to realize all my childish dreams.”She had spoken impetuously, fancying that there was some slight towards her absent husband in Miss Crowther’s speech. Her flash of anger made a break in the conversation, and nothing more was said about her going or not going to the Hunt Ball. They talked of that entertainment in the abstract—discussed the floor—the lighting—the band—and the great people who might be induced to appear, if the proper pressure were put upon them.“There is plenty of time,” said Lostwithiel, “between now and the twenty-second of December—nearly three weeks. Time for you and your sister to get new frocks from London or Paris, Miss Crowther. You mean having new frocks, I suppose?”“One generally does have a new frock for a dance,” replied Belinda, “though the fashions this winter are so completely odious that I would much rather appear in a gown of my great-grandmother’s.”Lostwithiel smiled his slow secret smile high up in the fainter firelight. He was reflecting upon his notion of Miss Crowther’s great-grandmother, in linsey-wolsey, with a lavender print apron, a costume that would be hardly impressive at a Hunt Ball. He did not give the young lady credit for a great-grandmother from the Society point of view. There was the mother yonder—inoffensive respectability—the grandmother would be humbler—and the great-grandmother he imagined at the wash-tub, or cooking the noontide meal for an artisan husband. He had never yetrealized the idea of numerous generations of middle-class life upon the same plane, the same dead level of prosperous commerce.Isola rose to take leave, after having let her tea get cold, and dropped half her cake on the Persian rug. She felt shyer in that house than in any other. She had a feeling that there she was weighed in the balance and found wanting; that unfriendly eyes were scrutinizing her gloves and hat, and appraising her features and complexion. She felt herself insignificant, colourless, insipid beside that brilliant Miss Crowther, with her vivid beauty, and her self-assured airs and graces.Tabitha urged her to be of good heart when she hinted at these feelings.“Why, Lord have mercy upon us, ma’am, however grand they may all look, it’s nothing but wool—only wool; and I heard there used to be a good deal of devil’s dust mixed with it, after this Mr. Crowther came into the business.”The dusk was thickening as she went along the short avenue which led to the gates. Mr. Crowther, having built his house in a wood, had been able to cut himself out a carriage drive, which gave him an avenue of more than two centuries’ growth, and thus imparted an air of spurious antiquity to his demesne. He felt, as he looked at the massive boles of those old Spanish chestnuts, as if he had belonged to the soil since the Commonwealth.Even the lodge was an important building, Tudor on one side, and monastic on the other; with that agreeable hodge-podge of styles which the modern architect loveth. It was a better house than the curate lived in, as he often told Miss Crowther.Isola quickened her pace outside that solemn gateway, and seemed to breathe more freely. She hurried even faster at the sound of a footstep behind her, though there was no need for nervous apprehensions at that early hour in the November evening on the high road between Fowey and Trelasco. Did she know that firm, quick footfall; or was it an instinctiveavoidance of an unknown danger which made her hurry on till her heart began to beat stormily, and her breath came in short gasps?“My dear Mrs. Disney, do you usually walk as if for a wager?” asked a voice behind her. “I can generally get over the ground pretty fast, but it was as much as I could do to overtake you without running.”He was not breathless, however. His tones were firm and tranquil. It was she who could scarcely speak.“I’m afraid I am very late,” she answered nervously.“For what? For afternoon tea by your own fireside? Have you anybody waiting for you at the Angler’s Nest, that you should be in such a hurry to get home?”“No, there is no one waiting, except Tabitha. I expect no one.”“Then why walk yourself into a fever?”“Tabitha gets fidgety if I am out after dusk.”“Then let Tabitha fidget! It will be good for her liver. Those adipose people require small worries to keep them in health. You mustn’t over-pace yourself to oblige Tabitha.”She had slackened her steps, and he was walking by her side, looking down at her from that superb altitude which gave him an unfair advantage. How could she, upon her lower level, escape those searching glances?She knew that her way home was his way home, so far as the bend of the road which led away from the river; and to avoid him for the intervening distance would have been difficult. She must submit to his company on the road, or make a greater effort than it was in her nature to make.“You mean to go to this ball, don’t you?” he asked earnestly.“I think not.”“Oh, but pray do! Why should you shut yourself from all the pleasures of this world, and live like a nun, always? You might surely make just one exception for such a grand event as the Hunt Ball. You have no idea how much we all think of it hereabouts. Remember, it will be the first publicdance we have had at Lostwithiel for ever so many years. You will see family diamonds enough to make you fancy you are at St. James’s. Do you think Major Disney would dislike your having just one evening’s dissipation?”“Oh no, he would not mind! He is only too kind and indulgent. He would have liked me to spend the winter with my sister in Hans Place, where there would have been gaieties of all kinds; but I don’t want to go into society while Martin is away. It would not make me happy.”“But if it made some one else happy—if it made other people happy to see you there?”“Oh, but it would not matter to anybody! I am a stranger in the land. People are only kind to me for my husband’s sake.”“Your modesty becomes you as the dew becomes a rose. I won’t gainsay you—only be sure you will be missed if you don’t go to the ball. And if you do go—well, it will be an opportunity of making nice friends. It will be yourdébutin county society.”“Without my husband? Please don’t say any more about it, Lord Lostwithiel. I had much rather stay at home.”He changed the conversation instantly, asking her what she thought of Glenaveril.“I think the situation most lovely.”“Yes, there we are all agreed. Mr. Crowther had the good taste to find a charming site, and the bad taste to erect an architectural monstrosity, a chimera in red brick. There was a grange once in the heart of that wood, and the Crowthers have the advantage of acorns and chestnuts that sowed themselves while the sleepy old monks were telling their beads. How do you like Miss Crowther?”“I hardly know her well enough to like or dislike her. She is very handsome.”“So was Rubens’ wife, Helena Forman; but what would one do in a world peopled with Helena Formans? There are galleries in Antwerp which no man should enter without smoke-coloured spectacles, if he would avoid being blindedby a blaze of red-haired beauty. I am told that the Miss Crowthers will have, at least, a million of money between them in days to come, and that they are destined to make great matches. Perhaps we shall see some of theirsoupirantsat the ball. Since the decay of the landed interest, thechasse aux dotshas become fiercer than of old.”This seemed to come strangely from him who had already been talked of as a possible candidate for one of the Miss Crowthers. It would be such a particularly suitable match, Mrs. Baynham, the doctor’s wife, had told Isola. What could his lordship look for beyond a fine fortune and a handsome wife?“They would make such a splendid pair,” said Mrs. Baynham, talking of them as if they were carriage-horses.Mrs. Disney and her companion crossed a narrow meadow, from the high road to the river-path which was the nearest way to the Angler’s Nest. The river went rippling by under the gathering grey of the November evening. On their right hand there was the gloom of dark woods: and from the meadow on their left rose a thick white mist, like a sea that threatened to swallow them up in its phantasmal tide. The sound of distant oars, dipping with rhythmical measure, was the only sound except their own voices.Did that three-quarters of a mile seem longer or shorter than usual? Isola hardly knew; but when she saw the lights shining in Tabitha’s kitchen, and the fire-glow in the drawing-room, she was glad with the gladness of one who escapes from some fancied danger of ghosts or goblins.Lostwithiel detained her at the gate.“Good night,” he said; “good night. You will change your mind, won’t you, Mrs. Disney? It is not in one so gentle as you to be inflexible about such a trifle. Say that you will honour our ball.”She drew herself up a little, as if in protest against his pertinacity.“I really cannot understand why you should care whether I go or stay away,” she said coldly.“Oh, but I do care! It is childish, perhaps, on my part, but I do care; I care tremendously; more than I have cared about anything for a long time. It is so small a thing on your part—it means so much for me! Say you will be there.”“Is that you, ma’am?” asked Tabitha’s pleasant voice, while Tabitha’s substantial soles made themselves audible upon the gravel path. “I was beginning to get fidgety about you.”“Good night,” said Isola, shortly, as she passed through the gate.It shut with a sharp little click of the latch, and she vanished among the laurels and arbutus. He heard her voice and Tabitha’s as they walked towards the house in friendly conversation, mistress and maid.There was a great over-blown Dijon rose nodding its heavy head over the fence. Roses linger so late in that soft western air. Lostwithiel plucked the flower, and pulled off its petals one by one as he walked towards the village street.“Will she go—will she stay—go—stay—go—stay?” he muttered, as the petals fluttered to the ground.“Go! Yes, of course she will go,” he said to himself as the last leaf fell. “Does it need ghost from the grave or rose from the garden to tell me that?”CHAPTER IV.“DREAMING, SHE KNEW IT WAS A DREAM.”Isola and Lostwithiel met a good many times after that walk through the autumn mists. She tried her utmost to avoid him. She went for fewer walks than of old; nay, she chiefly confined her perambulations to those domestic errands which Tabitha imposed upon her, and such afternoon visits as she felt it incumbent upon her to pay, in strict return for visits paid to her. Major Disney had begged her to be exact in such small ceremonies, and to keep upon the best possible terms with his friends. “I loveevery soul in the place, for old sake’s sake,” he told her; and for old sake’s sake Isola had to cultivate the people her husband had known all his life.She tried to avoid Lostwithiel, but Fate was against her, and they met. He was unvaryingly courteous. He said no word which could offend the most sensitive of women. Prudery itself could have had no ground for alarm. He did not again allude to the ball, or his wishes upon that point. He talked of those common topics of interest to which every day and every season give rise, even in a Cornish village; and yet in this common talk acquaintance ripened until it became friendship unawares. And then—as all sense of shyness and reserve upon Isola’s part gave way to a vague, reposeful feeling, like drifting down a sunlit river, with never a breath of chilling wind—they began to exchange confidences about their past lives. Unawares Martin Disney’s wife found herself entering into the minutest details about the people she had met on that level road of a monotonous girlhood by which she had come to be what she was. Unawares she betrayed all her feelings and opinions, her likes and dislikes, and even the little weaknesses and eccentricities of her parents—her sister—her wealthy brother-in-law. Never before had she found so good a listener. Her husband had been all affectionate interest in the things that concerned her; yet she had often discovered that his mind was wandering in the midst of some girlish reminiscence; and he had a tiresome trick of forgetting all those particulars about her friends which would have enabled him to distinguish the personages of a story. He had to be told everything afresh at each recurrence of those names that were so familiar to her. Nor had he Lostwithiel’s keen sense of humour, and quick perception of the ridiculous side of life, whereby many a small social sketch fell flat.The glimpses she caught of her new friend’s past existence enthralled her. It was to see new vistas opening into unknown worlds; the world of university life; the world ofsociety, English and continental, with all its varieties of jargon; the world of politics, and literature, and art. It charmed him to see her interest in all those unknown things and people.“You would very soon be tired of it, and would come back to Trelasco—like the hare to her form—or like me,” he said, smiling at her ardent look. “Believe me, it is all dust and ashes. My happiest hours have been on board a yacht, with only half a dozen good books, and ten or a dozen ignoramuses in blue serge for my companions.”She was to go to the Hunt Ball after all; not because he wished it, but because other people had taken her affairs in hand, and decided that she should go. Dr. and Mrs. Baynham had decided for her. Mrs. Vansittart Crowther had decided for her, and had sent her a ticket with her love by that very footman whose appearance when he opened the door always crushed her, and who had given her a frightful shock when she danced into the kitchen to speak to Tabitha, and found him meekly sitting on a Windsor chair, with his knees drawn up nearly to his chin. Lastly, Tabitha had decided; and Tabitha’s opinion went for more than that of anybody else.“You want a little bit of change and gaiety,” said the faithful stewardess. “You have been looking pale and worried ever since you had that bad news from Broomer,” this was Tabitha’s nearest approach to Burmah, “and you’ll be all the better for an evening’s pleasure. It isn’t as if you had to buy a dress, or even a pair of gloves. You’ve only worn your wedding-dress at three parties since you came home from your honeymoon, and it’s as fresh as if you’d been married yesterday. You’ve got everything, and everything of the best. Why shouldn’t you go?”Isola could advance no reason, except her vague fear that her husband might not approve of her appearing at a public ball without him; but at this objection honest Tabitha snapped her fingers.“I’ll answer for Mr. Martin,” she said. “He’ll be pleased for you to enjoy yourself. ‘Don’t let her mope while I’m away, Tabby,’ he said to me the day before he started for foreign parts. He’d like you to be at the ball. You’ll have Mrs. Baynham to take care of you, and what can you want more than that, I should like to know?”Mrs. Baynham, the portly doctor’s wife, was, in Tabitha’s mind, the representative of all the respectabilities. How could a girl just out of her teens—a girl who loved dancing, and had been told she danced exquisitely—turn a deaf ear to such arguments, put forward by the person to whose care her husband had in some wise confided her. If Tabitha approved, Isola thought she could not do wrong in yielding; so the simply-fashioned white satin gown—made in Paris, and with all Parisianchic—was taken out of the pot-pourri perfumed drawer. Gloves and fan, and little white slippers were passed in review. There was nothing wanted. The carefullest housewife need not have hesitated on the score of economy.So the question was finally settled—she was to go to the Hunt Ball. A fly was engaged for her especial service, so that she might not crowd Mrs. Baynham, who was to take two fresh, fat-cheeked nieces, who looked as if they had been fed from infancy upwards upon apple pasties and clotted cream. She was to drive to Lostwithiel in the fly from the Maypole Inn, and she was to join Mrs. Baynham in the cloak-room, and make her entrance under that lady’s wing.This final decision was arrived at about ten days before the event, and for nine of those intervening days Isola’s life went by as if she were always sitting in that imaginary boat drifting down a sunlit river; but on the day of the dance, after just half an hour’s quiet walk with Lostwithiel on the towpath, she went back to the cottage pale as ashes; and sat down at her little davenport in the drawing-room, trembling, breathless, and on the verge of hysteria.She opened the drawers of the davenport one after another, looking for something—helplessly, confusedly, as one whosebrain is half distraught. It was ten minutes before she found what she wanted—a sheaf of telegram forms.“To Major Disney, Cornwall Fusiliers, Rangoon.—Let me go to you at once. I am miserable. My heart will break if you leave me here.”This was the gist of a message which she wrote half a dozen times, in different words, upon half a dozen forms. Then she tore up all but the last, threw that into a drawer, and began to pace the room feverishly, with her hands clasped before her face.What fever-fraught vision was it that those hands tried to shut out from her burning eyes? So little had happened—so little—only half an hour’s quiet walk along the towpath, where the leafless willows had a grim, uncanny look, like those trees whose old grey branches seemed the arms of the Erlking’s daughters, beckoning the child as he nestled in his father’s arms, riding through the night. So little—so little—and yet it meant the lifting of a veil—the passage from happy innocence to the full consciousness of an unholy love. It meant what one kiss on trembling lips meant for Paolo and Francesca. It meant the plunge into a gulf of dark despair—unless she had strength to draw back, seeing the abyss at her feet, warned of her danger.What had he said? Only a few agitated words—only a revelation. He loved her, loved her with all the passion of his passionate soul; loved her as he had never loved before. They all tell the same story, these destroyers of innocence; and, for that one burning moment, they all mean what they say. Every seducer has his hour of sublime truthfulness; of generous feeling; of ardent heroic aspirations; the hour in which he would perish for the woman he loves; cut off his right hand; burn out his eyes; leap off a monument; do anything except surrender her, except forego his privilege to destroy her.It was not too late. The warning had come in time—just in time to save her. She knew now to what ocean that drifting boat was carrying her—through the sunny atmosphere, between the flowery shores of dreamland. It was taking her to the arctic ocean of shame and ruin—the great sea strewn with the corpses of women who had sinned, and suffered, and repented, and died—unforgiven of mankind—to wait the tribunal of God.“Oh, lor!” cried Tabitha, bursting into the room. “I thought you were never coming home. You ought to go and lay down for two or three hours after your tea, or we shall have you fainting away before the night’s over. You’ve not been eating enough for a healthy canary bird for the last week.”“I’m not very well, Tabbie. I don’t think I’ll go to the ball.”“Not go! and when the fly’s ordered—and will have to be paid for whether or no; for Masters told me he could have let it twelve deep. Not go! and disappoint Mrs. Baynham, who has set her heart on taking you; and Mrs. Crowther, who gave you the ticket! Why, it would never do! You’ll feel well enough when you’re there. You won’t know whether you’re standing on your head or your heels. It’s past five o’clock, and your tea has been ready in the study since a quarter to.”“How do you send telegrams to India, Tabitha?”“Lor, ma’am, how should I know? From the post-office, I suppose, pretty much like other telegrams. But they cost no end of money, I’ll be bound. You’re not wanting to send a telegram to the major, are you, ma’am, to ask his leave about the ball?”“No; I was only wondering,” Isola answered feebly.She shut and locked the davenport, leaving her message in the drawer. She meant to send it—if not to-day, to-morrow; if not before the ball, after the ball. She felt that her only hope of peace and safety and a clear conscience was at her husband’s side. She must go out to him yonder in the unknown land. She must get to him somehow, with or without his leave—with or without his help. She wouldbrave anything, hazard anything to be with that faithful friend and defender—her first love—her brave, self-denying, God-fearing lover. She felt as if there were no other safety or shelter for her in all the world.“God will not help me unless I help myself,” she muttered distractedly, as she sat in her low chair by the fire, with her head flung back upon the cushions and the untouched meal at her side. Tabitha had left off providing dinner for her, at her particular request. She had neither heart to sit down alone to a formal dinner nor appetite to eat it; so Tabitha had exercised all her skill as a cook, which was great, in preparing a dainty little supper at nine o’clock; and it had irked her that her mistress did such scant justice to the tempting meal.Isola fell asleep by the fire, comforted by the warmth, worn out by nights that had been made sleepless by vague agitation—by the living over again of accidental meetings, and friendly conversations—not by fear or remorse—for it was only this day that the danger of that growing friendship had been revealed to her. It was only to-day that she knew what such friendships mean. She slept a feverish sleep, from sheer exhaustion, and dreamt fever-dreams.Those willows on the bank had recalled Goethe’s “Erl König”—the ballad she had learnt by rote in her earliest German studies—and the willows and the ballad were interwoven with her dreams. It was Martin Disney who was riding his charger along a dark road, and she was sitting in front of his saddle, clinging to him, hiding her face upon his breast, and the willows were beckoning—she knew those gaunt arms were beckoning to her, although her eyes were hidden—andhewas following. He was thundering behind them, on a black horse. Yes, and then the dream changed—the dreamer’s wandering thoughts directed by another reminiscence of those girlish studies in German poetry. She was Lenore, and she was in the arms of her dead lover. She felt that bony arm—Death’s arm—clutching her round the waist. Her streaming hair mingled with the streamingmane of that unearthly horse. She was with Lostwithiel—in his arms—and they were both dead and both happy—happy in being together. What did they want more than that?“Vollbracht, vollbracht ist unser Lauf!Das Hochzeitbette, thut sich auf!Die Todten reiten schnelle!Wir sind, wir sind, zur Stelle.”She woke with the chill of the charnel-house freezing her blood. The fire had gone out. Tim had curled himself at her feet in the folds of her gown. The Persian was staring discontentedly at the ashes in the grate, and Tabitha’s sturdy footsteps might be heard in the room above, bustling to and fro, and anon poking the fire, and putting on coals, making all snug and ready for her mistress’s toilet.Isola rang, and Susan, the parlour-maid, brought in the lamp.“I came twice before, ma’am; but you were fast asleep, so I took the lamp back to the pantry.”Isola looked at the clock. Ten minutes to nine, and she was to meet Mrs. Baynham in the cloak-room at half-past ten. Ten o’clock was the hour on the card, and the fat-faced nieces were feverishly afraid that all the eligible partners would be snapped up by those wise virgins who appeared earliest on the scene.“You won’t keep us waiting in the cloak-room, will you, dear Mrs. Disney?” they pleaded coaxingly.Was she to put on her finery and go! There would be time yet to send a note to Mrs. Baynham, excusing herself on the score of illness. The doctor’s party would not start before half-past nine. What was she to do? Oh, she wanted to see him once more—just once more—in the brightly-lighted rooms, amidst a crowd—in a place where he would have no chance of repeating those wicked, wicked words—of forgetting all that was due to his own honour and to hers. In the crowded ball-room there would besafety—safety even from evil thoughts. Who could think of anything amidst the sound of dance music, the dazzle of lamps and flashing of jewels?She wanted to go to the ball, to wear her satin gown, to steep herself in light and music; and thus to escape from the dim horrors of that awful dream.Tabitha seemed like a good angel, when she came in at this juncture with a fresh cup of tea and a plate of dainty little chicken sandwiches.“Come now, ma’am, I shan’t let you go to the ball if you don’t take these. What, not a bit of fire—and you asleep here in the cold? What was that addle-pated Susan thinking about, I wonder? I’ll take the tray upstairs. There’s a lovely fire in your room, and everything ready for you to dress. I want to be able to tell Mr. Martin that his young wife was the belle of the ball.”Isola allowed herself to be led upstairs to the bright, cheerful bedroom, with its pretty chintz-pattern paper, and photographs, and artistic muslin curtains, and glowing fire, and toilet-table, with its glitter of crystal and silver in the pleasant candlelight. She suffered herself to be fed and dressed by Tabitha’s skilful hands, almost as if she had been a child; and she came out of her dismal dream into the glad waking world, a radiant figure, with violet eyes and alabaster complexion, flushed by the loveliest hectic. The simply-made, close-fitting bodice, with folded crape veiling the delicate bust, and the pure pearly tint of the satin, set off her fragile beauty, while the long train and massive folds of the rich fabric gave statuesque grace to her tall, slim figure; but the crowning glory of her toilette was the garland of white chrysanthemums, for which Tabitha had ransacked all the neighbouring green-houses; a garland of fluffy, feathery petals, which reached in a diagonal line from her shoulder to the hem of her gown. It was her only ornament, for by some strange caprice she refused to wear the modest pearl necklace and diamond cross which had been her husband’s wedding gift.“Not to-night, Tabbie,” she said; and Tabitha saw in this refusal only the coquetry of a lovely woman, who wanted to show the great ladies and squire’s wives how poor and common diamonds are by the side of youth and beauty.“Well, you don’t want any jewels, certainly,” said Tabitha. “You look as if you were going to be married—all but the veil. Those chrysanthemums are ever so much prettier than orange blossoms. There’s the fly. Let me put on your cloak. It’s a beautiful night, and almost as mild as May. Everybody will be at the ball. There’s nothing to keep folks away. Well, I do wish the major was here to go with you. Wouldn’t he be proud?”The stars were shining when Isola went along the gravel path to the gate where Masters’ fly was waiting, with blazing lamps, which seemed to put those luminous worlds yonder to shame. There was no carriage-drive to the hall door of the Angler’s Nest. The house retained all its ancient simplicity, and ignored the necessities of carriage people. Tabitha wrapped her mistress’s fur-lined cloak close round her, before she stepped into the fly, which was provided with those elaborate steps that seem peculiar to the hired brougham.“Good night, Tabitha, and thank you for all the pains you’ve taken in dressing me—and for the lovely wreath. I shall come home early. I shan’t wait for Mrs. Baynham’s party.”“Don’t you hurry,” said Tabitha, heartily. “The Hunt Ball only comes once a year, and you’d better make the most of it. I shan’t mind sitting up; and perhaps I shan’t be half so dull as you think for.”The flyman shut the door, which nobody but himself could shut—another peculiarity of hired broughams. The fly vanished in the darkness, and Tabitha ran back to the house, where she found Susan waiting at the hall door in her jacket and hat, as near a reproduction of Mrs. Disney’s jacket and hat as local circumstances—or the difference between Bond Street and Lostwithiel—would allow.“Have you locked and bolted the back doors?” askedTabitha; “but, lor, I’ll go and look myself; I won’t trust to your giddy young brains. Mr. Tinkerly will be here with the cart directly. I’ve only got to put on my bonnet and dolman, after I’ve taken a look round, and put away Mrs. Disney’s jewel-box.”Tabitha was no light-minded housekeeper, but she had her hours of frivolity, and she loved pleasure with the innocent freshness of a most transparent soul. Tinkerly, the butcher, had offered to drive the two ladies—Tabitha and Susan—into Lostwithiel in his tax cart, and, furthermore, to place them where they would see something of the ball, or at least of the company arriving and departing, and beyond all this to give them a snack of supper, “Just something to bite at and a glass of beer,” he told Tabitha deprecatingly, lest he should raise hopes beyond his power of realization.He meant to do the thing as handsomely as circumstances would permit, certainly to the extent of cold boiled beef and pickles, with Guinness or Bass. He was a family man, of irreproachable respectability, and his meat was supposed to be unmatchable for thirty miles round. He grew it himself, upon those picturesque pastures which sloped skyward, dipping towards the blue of the river, rising towards the blue of the sky.No precaution of lock, bolt, or bar did Tabitha neglect before she put on her best bonnet, and dignified black cloth dolman, heavy with imitation Astrachan. She and Susan were standing at the gate when Tinkerly drove up with his skittish mare and spring cart, a cart so springy that it threatened to heel over altogether when Tabitha clambered into the place of honour. Mr. Tinkerly’s foreman was sitting behind to take care of Susan, and the foreman was unmarried, and of a greasy black-haired comeliness, and there was none happier than Susan under those wintry stars—not even the great ladies in their family diamonds.“What are diamonds,” said Susan, philosophically, with the foreman’s arm sustaining her at a sharp turn in the road, “if you don’t care for each other?”CHAPTER V.“AND THE CHILD-CHEEK BLUSHING SCARLET FOR THE VERY SHAME OF BLISS.”People who were familiar with the Talbot Hotel, Lostwithiel, in its everyday aspect would hardly have recognized the old-fashioned hostelry to-night, under the transforming hand of the Hunt Club, with Lord Lostwithiel and Vansittart Crowther on the committee. The entrance hall, usually remarkable only for various cases of stuffed birds, and a monster salmon—caught in the Lerrin river in some remote period of history—was now a bower of crimson cloth and white azaleas. In the ball-room and ante-room, tea-room and supper-room, were more flowers, and more crimson cloth, while on every side brushes and vizards against the crimson and white panelling testified to the occasion. The dancing-room was very full when Mrs. Baynham’s party made their entrance, the matron in her historical black velvet—which had formed part of her trousseau thirteen years before, when she left the family residence in the chief street of Truro, and all those privileges which appertained to her as the only daughter of a provincial banker, to grace Dr. Baynham’s lowlier dwelling. The black velvet gown had been “let out” from time to time, as youth expanded into maturity: and there had been a new bodice and a real Maltese lace flounce within the last three years, which constituted a second incarnation; and Mrs. Baynham walked into the Talbot ball-room with the serene demeanour that goes with a contented mind. She was satisfied with herself, and she was proud of her party, the two fresh, rosy-cheeked girls in sky-blue tulle, Isola, looking like a Mary lily in her white satin raiment, and the village surgeon, who always looked his best in his dress clothes, newly-shaven, and, as it were, pulled together in honour of the occasion.The room was full, and very full; but Lostwithiel was not there. Isola had an instinctive consciousness that he wasmissing in that brilliant crowd. People came buzzing round her, and she was made room for upon a raised bench opposite the gallery where a military band was playing a polka in which the brasses predominated to an ear-splitting extent.The Glenaveril party made their entrance ten minutes later. The Crowther girls were not afraid of wanting partners. Most young men are glad to dance with half a million of money. There is always an off chance of a good thing, just as there is a chance of breaking the bank at Monte Carlo. Belinda looked superb in a cloud of tulle, like a goddess. Alicia looked too well on horseback to look well off. Her spare straight figure and sharp elbows were not at their best in evening dress. She wore black, and an infinity of bugles, and flashed and glittered more than any one else in the room, though she wore never a jewel.“Worth, my dear,” said Mrs. Baynham to a blue niece, in a mysterious whisper; “I know his style.”There was a buzz of conversation on that raised divan where the matrons were sitting with those newly arrived maidens who were like ships waiting to slide out of their cradles and float away to sea. Isola and the sky-blue nieces had not long to wait; especially Isola. Men were entreating the stewards to introduce them to that lovely fragile-looking creature in white satin—the best men in the neighbourhood, or those wandering stars from distant counties, or the London galaxy, “men with handles to their names,” as Mr. Baynham told Mrs. Crowther, resplendent in salmon brocade, and Venetian point.“My presentation gown,” she informed the doctor’s wife; “the Court mantle is ruby velvet, lined with salmon satin. The weight of it almost pulled me backwards when I curtsied to the royalties—such a lot of them, and I’m afraid I curtsied rather too low to one of the Princesses, for I caught her taking me off when she returned my curtsy.”Isola danced through the lancers as one in a dream. When the heart of a man is oppressed with care, “Ta-rarra, ta-rarra, ta-rà, ta-rà!” What foolishness it all seemed.And her husband in Burmah, hemmed round by murderous dacoits!She went back to her seat among the matrons, after almost curtly refusing either refreshment or a promenade through the rooms. Mrs. Crowther was saying solemnly, “I do believe Lord Lostwithiel is not coming after all, and yet he worked so hard on the committee, my husband said, and took such pains about the flowers, and what not.”The tall, slim figure cut its way through the crowd two or three minutes later, and Lostwithiel was standing in front of Isola, and the two matrons.He wore a pink coat, as became a member of the Lostwithiel Hunt, and the vivid colour accentuated the pallor of his long thin face. He talked to all the ladies on the divan; to the sky-blue nieces even, hoping that their cards were full.“If not, I must bring you some men I know,” he said. “You mustn’t miss a dance.”They blushed and trembled with delight, never before having been thus familiarly addressed by a peer of the realm. He asked Isola for her programme, with well-simulated indifference, yet with that air of profound respect with which he talked to all women.“I hope you can spare me some waltzes,” he said.“She is only just come,” said Mrs. Baynham.“And yet her card is almost full. People have been very officious. Here is a poor little waltz—number seven. May I have that, and number eleven, and number——”“Please don’t put down your name for anything later than number eleven. I shall be gone long before those late dances.”“Oh, surely, you don’t mean to desert us early. Remember this is the one festive occasion of our lives as a sporting community. All our other meetings are given up to carking care, financial difficulties, and squabbling. I shall put down my name in these tempting blanks, and if you disappoint me—well—it will only be like my previous experiences as a fox-hunter.”He gave her back her programme, with all the blanks filled in, and at the bottom a word written, and triply underscored,ἉΝΑΓΚΗ.They had talked of Victor Hugo’s romantic story—that romance which the great man so despised in after years that he was almost offended if any one presumed to praise it in his hearing, although in the half-century that has gone since Victor Hugo was a young man this story of Notre Dame has been unsurpassed as an example of the romantic novel. Lostwithiel had praised the book, and had talked of the monk Frollo, and his fatal love—and that word Fatality, graven upon the wall of his cell, and burnt into his soul.Isola knew what those Greek letters meant. She dropped the little white and gold programme as if it had been an adder. He went away to a duty dance with a great lady of the district—a lady whose diamonds made a light about her wherever she moved; and then he waltzed with Belinda Crowther, to the admiration of the young lady’s mother, and of two or three other matrons on the divan by the door. Were they not a splendid couple, she so brilliantly fair, he dark and pale, bronzed slightly with exposure to the sun in warmer climates than this—not positively handsome, but with such an interesting countenance. So, and so, and so prosed the matrons, until various middle-aged cavaliers came to invite them to the tea-room, where there was the usual drawback in the shape of a frightful draught from open windows, which the dancers, coming in flushed and heated, voted delicious.“This will be a good night’s work for me,” said Dr. Baynham, cheerfully, although he considered it his duty to warn his patients of their danger.Conscience thus satisfied, he could look on complacently as they eat ices, and selected cool corners of the refreshment-room to flirt in.“Next to a juvenile party, I don’t know anything better—from a professional point of view—than a public ball,” hesaid. “Your canvas corridors, decorated with flowers and bunting, are a fortune to a family practitioner.”

She dreamt her dream of that strange world in fear and trembling, conjuring up scenes of horror—tiger hunts; snakes hidden in the corner of a tent; battle; fever; fire; mutiny. Her morbid imagination pictured all possible and impossible danger for the man she loved. And then she thought of his home-coming—for good, for good—for all the span of their joint lives; and she longed for that return with the sickness of hope deferred.She would go back to the Angler’s Nest sometimes after one of these dreamy days upon the river, and would pace about the house or the garden, planning things for her husband’s return, as if he were due next day. She would wheel his own particular chair to the drawing-room fireplace, and look at it, and arrange the fall of the curtains before the old-fashioned bow-window, and change the position of the lamp, and alter the books on the shelves, and do this and that with an eye to effect, anxious to discover how the room might be made prettiest, cosiest, most lovable and home-like—for him, for him, for him!And now she had to resign herself to a year’s delay, perhaps. Yes, he had said it might be a year. All that bright picture of union and content, which had seemed so vivid and so near, had now grown dim and pale. It had melted into a shadowy distance. To a girl who has but just passed her twentieth birthday a year of waiting and delay seems an eternity.“I won’t think of him,” she said to herself, plunging her sculls fiercely into the rippling water. The tide was running down, and it was strong enough to have carried her little boat out to sea like an autumn leaf swept along the current. “I must try to lull my mind to sleep, as if I were an enchanted Princess, and so bridge over twelve slow months of loneliness. I won’t think of you, Martin, my good, brave, truest of the true! I’ll occupy my poor, foolish little mind. I’ll write a novel, perhaps, like old Miss Carver at Dinan. Anything in the world—just to keep my thoughts from always brooding on one subject.”She rowed on steadily, hugging the shore under the wooded hillside, where the rich autumn colouring and the clear, cool lights were so full of beauty—a beauty which she could feel, with a vague, dim sense which just touched the realm of poetry. Perhaps she felt the same sense of loss which Keats or Alfred de Musset would have felt in the stillness of such a scene—the want of something to people the wood and the river—some race of beings loftier than fishermen and peasants; some of those mystic forms whichthe poet sees amidst the shadows of old woods or in the creeks and sheltered inlets of a secluded river.She thought, with a half-smile, of yesterday’s adventure. What importance that foolish Tabitha gave to so simple an incident; the merest commonplace courtesy, necessitated by circumstances; and only because the person who had been commonly courteous was Richard Hulbert, thirteenth Baron Lostwithiel. Thirteenth Baron! There lay the distinction. These Cornish folks worshipped antique lineage. Tabitha would have thought very little of a mushroom peer’s civility, although he had sent her mistress home in a chariot and four. She was no worshipper of wealth, and she turned up her blunt old nose at Mr. Crowther, of Glenaveril—the great new red-brick mansion which had sprung up like a fungus amidst the woods only yesterday—because he had made his money in trade, albeit his trade had been upon a large scale, and altogether genteel and worthy to be esteemed—a great cloth factory at Stroud, which was said to have clad half the army at one period of modern history.Poor, foolish Tabitha! What would she have thought of the tea-drinking in that lovely old room, mysteriously beautiful in the light of a wood fire—the playful, uncertain light which glorifies everything? What would she have thought of those walls of books—richly bound books, books in sombre brown, big books and little books, from floor to ceiling? A room which made those poor little oak bookcases in the cottage parlour something to blush for. What would Tabitha have thought of his deferential kindness—that tone of deepest consideration with which such men treat all women, even the old and uncomely? She could hardly have helped admiring his good manners, whatever dark things she might have been told about his earlier years.Why should he not have a yacht? It seemed the fittest life for a man without home ties; a man still young, and with no need to labour at a profession. What better life could there be than that free wandering from port to port over a romantic sea?—and to Isola all seas were alike mysterious and romantic.She dawdled away the morning; she sculled against the stream for nearly three hours, and then let her boat drift down the river to the garden above the towpath. It was long past her usual time for luncheon when she moored her boat to the little wooden steps, leaving it for Thomas, the gardener, to pull up into the boat-house. She had made up her mind that if Lostwithiel troubled himself to make any inquiry about her health he would call in the morning.She had guessed rightly. Tabitha was full of his visit, and his wondrous condescension. He had called at eleven o’clock, on his way to the railway station at Fowey. He called in the most perfect of T carts, with a pair of bright bays. Tabitha had opened the door to him. He had asked quite anxiously about Mrs. Disney’s health. He had walked round the garden with Tabitha and admired everything, and had told her that Major Disney had a better gardener than any he had at the Mount, after which he had left her charmed by his amiability. And so this little episode in Isola’s life came to a pleasant end, leaving no record but his lordship’s card, lying like a jewel on the top of less distinguished names in the old Indian bowl.CHAPTER III.“OH MOMENT ONE AND INFINITE!”Isola fancied that her adventure was all over and done with after that ceremonious call of inquiry; but in so narrow a world as that of Trelasco it was scarcely possible to have seen the last of a man who lived within three miles; and she and Lord Lostwithiel met now and then in the course of her solitary rambles. The walk into Fowey, following the old disused railway, was almost her favourite, and one which she had occasion to take oftener than any other, since Tabitha was a stay-at-home person, and expected her young mistress to do all the marketing, so that Isola had usuallysome errand to take her into the narrow street on the hillside above the sea. It was at Fowey that she oftenest met Lostwithiel. His yacht, theVendetta, was in the harbour under repairs, and he went down to look at the work daily, and often dawdled upon the deck till dusk, watching the carpenters, or talking to his captain. They had been half over the world together, master and man, and were almost as familiar as brothers. The crew were half English and half foreign; and it was a curious mixture of languages in which Lostwithiel talked to them. They were most of them old hands on board theVendetta, and would have stood by the owner of the craft if he had wanted to sail her up the Phlegethon.She was a schooner of two hundred and fifty tons, built for speed, and with a rakish rig. She had cost, with her fittings, her extra silk sails for racing, more money than Lostwithiel cared to remember; but he loved her as a man loves his mistress, and if she were costly and exacting, she was no worse than other mistresses, and she was true as steel, which they are not always; and so he felt that he had money’s worth in her. He showed her to Isola one evening from the promontory above the harbour, where she met him in the autumn sundown. Her work at the butcher’s and the grocer’s being done, she had gone up to that airy height by Point Neptune to refresh herself with a long look seaward before she went back to her home in the valley. Lostwithiel took her away from the Point, and made her look down into the harbour.“Isn’t she a beauty?” he asked, pointing below.Her inexperienced eyes roamed about among the boats, colliers, fishing-boats, half a dozen yachts of different tonnage.“Which is yours?” she asked.“Which? Why, there is only one decent boat in the harbour. The schooner.”She saw which boat he meant by the direction in which he flourished his walking-stick, but was not learned in distinctions of rig. TheVendetta, being under repair, did not seem to her especially lovely.“Have you pretty cabins?” she asked childishly.“Oh yes, they’re pretty enough; but that’s not the question. Look at her lines. She skims over the water like a gull. Ladies seem to think only what a boat looks like inside. I believe my boat is rather exceptional, from a lady’s point of view. Will you come on board and have a look at her?”“Thanks, no; I couldn’t possibly. It will be dark before I get home as it is.”“But it wouldn’t take you a quarter of an hour, and we could row you up the river in no time—ever so much faster than you could walk.”Isola looked frightened at the very idea.“Not for the world!” she said. “Tabitha would think I had gone mad. She would begin to fancy that I could never go out without over-staying the daylight, and troubling you to send me home.”“Ah, but it is so long since you were last belated,” he said, in his low caressing voice, with a tone that was new to her and different from all other voices; “ages and ages ago—half a lifetime. There could be no harm in being just a little late this mild evening, and I would row you home—myself, under the new moon. Look at her swinging up in the grey blue there above Polruan. She looks like a fairy boat, anchored in the sky by that star hanging a fathom below her keel. I look at her, and wish—wish—wish!”He looked up, pale in the twilight, with dark deep-set eyes, of which it was never easy to read the expression. Perhaps that inscrutable look made those sunken and by no means brilliant eyes more interesting than some much handsomer eyes—interesting with the deep interest that belongs to the unknowable.“Good night,” said Isola. “I’m afraid that I shall be very late.”“Good night. You would be earlier if you would trust to the boat.”He held out his hand, and she gave him hers, hesitatingly for the first time in their acquaintance. It was after this parting in the wintry sundown that she first began to look troubled at meeting him.The troubled feeling grew upon her somehow. In a life so lonely and uneventful trifles assume undue importance. She tried to avoid him, and on her journeys to Fowey she finished her business in the village street and turned homewards without having climbed the promontory by that rugged walk she loved so well. It needed some self-denial to forego that keen pleasure of standing on the windy height and gazing across the western sea towards Ushant and her native province; but she knew that Lord Lostwithiel spent a good deal of his time lounging on the heights above the harbour, and she did not want to meet him again.Although she lived her quiet life in the shortening days for nearly a month without meeting him, she was not allowed to forget his existence. Wherever she went people talked about him and speculated about him. Every detail of his existence made matter for discussion; his yacht, his political opinions, his talents, his income, his matrimonial prospects, the likelihood or unlikelihood of his settling down permanently at the Mount, and taking the hounds, which were probably to be without a master within a measurable distance of time. There was so little to talk about in Trelasco and those scattered hamlets between Fowey and Lostwithiel.Isola found herself joining in the talk at afternoon tea-parties, those casual droppings in of charitable ladies who had been their rounds among the cottagers and came back to the atmosphere of gentility worn out by long stories of woes and ailments, sore legs and rheumatic joints, and were very glad to discuss a local nobleman over a cup of delicately flavoured Indian tea in the glow of a flower-scented drawing-room.Among other houses Mrs. Disney visited Glenaveril, Mr. Crowther’s great red-brick mansion, with its pepper-boxturrets, and Jacobean windows, after the manner of Burleigh House by Stamford town.Here lived in wealth and state quite the most important family within a mile of Trelasco, the Vansittart Crowthers, erst of Pilbury Mills, near Stroud, now as much county as a family can make itself after its head has passed his fortieth birthday. Nobody quite knew how Mr. Crowther had come to be a Vansittart—unless by the easy process of baptism and the complaisance of an aristocratic sponsor; but the Crowthers had been known in Stroud for nearly two hundred years, and had kept their sacks upright, as Mr. Crowther called it, all that time.Fortune had favoured this last of the Crowthers, and, at forty years of age, he had found himself rich enough to dispose of his business to two younger brothers and a brother-in-law, and to convert himself into a landed proprietor. He bought up all the land that was to be had about Trelasco. Cornish people cling to their land like limpets to a rock; and it was not easy to acquire the ownership of the soil. In the prosperous past, when land was paying nearly four per cent. in other parts of England, Cornishmen were content to hold estates that yielded only two per cent.; but the days of decay had come when Mr. Crowther entered the market, and he was able to buy out more than one gentleman of ancient lineage.When he had secured his land, he sent to Plymouth for an architect, and he so harried that architect and so tampered with his drawings that the result of much labour and outlay was that monstrosity in red brick with stone dressings, known in the neighbourhood as Glenaveril. Mr. Crowther’s elder daughter was deep in Lord Lytton’s newly published poem when the house was being finished, and had imposed that euphonious name upon her father. Glenaveril. The house really was in a glen, or at least in a wooded valley, and Glenaveril seemed to suit it to perfection; and so the romantic name of a romantic poem was cut in massive Gothic letters on the granite pillars ofVansittart Crowther’s gate, beneath a shield which exhibited the coat of arms made and provided by the Herald’s College.Mrs. Vansittart Crowther was at home on Thursday afternoons, when the choicest Indian tea and the thickest cream, coffee as in Paris, and the daintiest cakes and muffins which a professed cook could provide, furnished the zest to conversation; for it could scarcely be said that the conversation gave a zest to those creature comforts. It would be perhaps nearer the mark to say that Mrs. Crowther was supposed to sit in the drawing-room on these occasions while the two Miss Crowthers were at home. The mistress of Glenaveril was not an aspiring woman; and in her heart of hearts she preferred Gloucestershire to Cornwall, and the stuccoed villa on the Cheltenham road, with its acre and a half of tennis-lawn and flower-beds, open to the blazing sun, and powdered with the summer dust, to Glenaveril, with its solemn belt of woodlands, and its too spacious grandeur. She was not vulgar or illiterate. She never misplaced an aspirate. She had learnt to play the piano and to talk French at the politest of young ladies’ schools at Cheltenham. She never dressed outrageously, or behaved rudely. She had neither red hands nor splay feet. She was in all things blameless; and yet Belinda and Alicia, her daughters, were ashamed of her, and did their utmost to keep her, and her tastes, and her opinions in the background. She had no style. She was not “smart.” She seemed incapable of grasping the ideas, or understanding the ways of smart people; or at least her daughters thought so.“Your mother is one of the best women I know,” said the curate to Alicia, being on the most confidential terms with both sisters, “and yet you and Miss Crowther are always trying to edit her.”“Father wants a great deal more editing than mother,” said Belinda, “but there’s no use in talking to him. He is encased in the armour of self-esteem. It made my bloodrun cold to see him taking Lord Lostwithiel over the grounds and stables the other day—praising everything, and pointing out this and that,—and even saying how much things had cost!”“I dare say it was vulgar,” agreed the curate, “but it’s human nature. I’ve seen a duke behave in pretty much the same way. Children are always proud of their new toys, and men are but children of a larger growth, don’t you know. You’ll find there’s a family resemblance in humanity, and that nature is stronger than training.”“Lord Lostwithiel would never behave in that kind of way—boring people about his stables.”“Lord Lostwithiel doesn’t care about stables—he would bore you about his yacht, I dare say.”“No, he never talks of himself or his own affairs. That is just the charm of his manner. He makes us all believe that he is thinking about us; and yet I dare say he forgets us directly he is outside the gate.”“I’m sure he does,” replied Mr. Colfox, the curate. “There isn’t a more selfish man living than Lostwithiel.”The fair Belinda looked at him angrily. There are assertions which young ladies make on purpose to have them controverted.Mrs. Disney hated the great red-brick porch, with its vaulted roof and monstrous iron lantern, and the bell which made such a clamour, as if it meant fire, or at least dinner, when she touched the hanging brass handle. She hated to find herself face to face with a tall footman, who hardly condescended to say whether his mistress were at home or not, but just preceded her languidly along the broad corridor, where the carpet was so thick that it felt like turf, and flung open the drawing-room door with an air, and pronounced her name into empty space, so remote were the half-dozen ladies at the other end of the room, clustered round Belinda’s tea-table, and fed with cake by Alicia, while Mrs. Crowther sat in the window a little way off, with her basket of woolwork at her side, and her fatsomnolent pug lying at her feet. To Isola it was an ordeal to have to walk the length of the drawing-room, navigating her course amidst an archipelago of expensive things—Florentine tables, portfolios of engravings, Louis Seize Jardinières, easels supporting the last expensive etching from Goupil’s—to the window where Mrs. Crowther waited to receive her, rising with her lap full of wools, to shake hands with simple friendliness and without a vestige of style. Belinda shook hands on a level with the tip of her sharpretroussénose, and twirled the silken train of her tea-gown with the serpentine grace of Sarah Bernhardt. She prided herself on those serpentine movements and languid graces which belong to the Græco-Belgravian period; while Alicia held herself like a ramrod, and took her stand upon being nothing if not sporting. Her olive-cloth gown and starched collar, her neat double-soled boots and cloth gaiters, were a standing reproach to Belinda’s silken slovenliness and embroidered slippers, always dropping off her restless feet, and being chased surreptitiously among her lace and pongee frillings. Poor Mrs. Crowther disliked the Guard’s collar, which she felt was writing premature wrinkles upon her younger girl’s throat, but she positively loathed the loose elegance of the Indian silk tea-gown, with its wide Oriental sleeves, exhibiting naked arms to the broad daylight. That sloppy raiment made a discord in the subdued harmony of the visitors’ tailor-made gowns—well worn some of them—brown, and grey, and indigo, and russet; and Mrs. Crowther was tortured by the conviction that her elder daughter looked disreputable. This honest matron was fond of Isola Disney. In her own simple phraseology, she had “taken to her;” and pressed the girl-wife to come every Thursday afternoon.“It must be so lonely for you,” she said gently, “with your husband so far away, and you such a child, too. I wonder your mamma doesn’t come and stay with you for a bit. You must always come on our Thursdays. Now mind you do, my dear.”“I don’t think our Thursdays are remarkably enlivening, mother,” said Alicia, objecting to the faintest suggestion of fussiness, the crying sin of both her parents. And then she turned to Isola, and measured her from head to foot. “It’s rather a pity you don’t hunt,” she said. “We had a splendid morning with the hounds.”“Perhaps I may get a little hunting by-and-by, when my husband comes home.”“Ah, but one can’t begin all at once; and this is a difficult country; breakneck hills, and nasty banks. Have you hunted much?”“Hardly at all. I was out in a boar-hunt once, near Angers, but only as a looker-on. It was a grand sight. The Duke of Beaufort came over to Brittany on purpose to join in it.”“How glorious a boar-hunt must be! I must get my father to take me to Angers next year. Do you know a great many people there?”“No, only two or three professors at the college, and the Marquis de Querangal, the gentleman who has the boar-hounds. His daughter used to visit at Dinan, and she and I were great friends.”“Lord Lostwithiel talked about boar-hunting the other night,” said Alicia. “It must be capital fun.” His name recurred in this way, whatever the conversation might be, with more certainty than Zero on the wheel at roulette.He had been there in the evening, Isola thought. There had been a dinner-party, perhaps, at which he had been present. She had not long to wonder. The name once pronounced, the stream of talk flowed on. Yes, there had been a dinner, and Lord Lostwithiel had been delightful; so brilliant in conversation as compared with everybody else; so witty, so cynical, sofin de siècle.“I didn’t hear him say anything very much out of the common,” said Mrs. Crowther, in her matter-of-fact way.She liked having a nobleman or any other local magnate at her table; but she had too much common sense to behypnotized by his magnificence, and made to taste milk and water as Maronean wine.“Do you know Lord Lostwithiel?” Belinda asked languidly, as Isola sipped her tea, sitting shyly in the broad glare of a colossal fireplace. “Oh yes, by-the-by, you met him here the week before last.”Mrs. Disney blushed to the roots of those soft tendril-like curls which clustered about her forehead; but she said never a word. She had no occasion to tell them the history of that meeting in the rain, or of those many subsequent meetings which had drifted her into almost the familiarity of an old friendship. They might take credit to themselves for having made her acquainted with their star if they liked. She had seen plenty of smart people at Dinan in those sunny summer months when visitors came from Dinard to look at the old quiet inland city. Lostwithiel’s rank had no disturbing influence upon her mind. It was himself—something in his look and in his voice, in the mere touch of his hand—an indescribable something which of late had moved her in his presence, and made her faintly tremulous at the sound of his name.He was announced while they were talking of him, and he seemed surprised to come suddenly upon that slim unobtrusive figure almost hidden by Belinda’s flowing garment and fuller form. Belinda was decidedly handsome—handsomer than an heiress need be; but she was also just a shade larger than an heiress need be at three and twenty. She was a Rubens’ beauty, expansive, florid, and fair, with reddish auburn hair piled on the top of her head. Sitting between this massive beauty and the still more massive chimney-piece, Mrs. Disney was completely hidden from the new arrival.He discovered her suddenly while he was shaking hands with Belinda, and his quick glance of pleased surprise did not escape that young lady’s steely blue eyes. Not a look or a breath ever does escape observation in a village drawing-room. Even the intellectual people, the people whodevour all Mudie’s most solid books—travels, memoirs, metaphysics, agnostic novels—even these are as keenly interested in their neighbours’ thoughts and feelings as the unlettered rustic in the village street.Lostwithiel took the proffered cup of tea, and planted himself near Mrs. Disney, with his back against the marble caryatid which bore up one-half of the chimney-piece. Alicia began to talk to him about his yacht. How were the repairs going on? and so on, and so on, delighted to air her technical knowledge. He answered her somewhat languidly, as if theVendettawere not first in his thoughts at this particular moment.“What about this ball?” he asked presently. “You are all going to be there, of course?”“Do you mean the hunt ball at Lostwithiel?”“Of course! What other ball could I mean? It is the great festivity of these parts. The one tremendous event of the winter season. It was a grand idea of you new people to revive the old festivity, which had become a tradition. I wore my first dress coat at the Lostwithiel Hunt Ball nearly twenty years ago. I think it was there I first fell in love, with a young lady in pink tulle, who was miserable because she had been mistaken enough to wear pink at a hunt ball. I condoled with her, assured her that in my eyes she was lovely, although her gown clashed—that was her word, I remember—with the pink coats. My coat was not pink, and I believe she favoured me a little on that account. She gave me a good many waltzes in the course of the evening, and I can answer for her never wearing that pink frock again, for I trampled it to shreds. There were traces of her to be found all over the rooms, as if I had been Greenacre and she my victim’s body.”“It will be rather a humdrum ball, I’m afraid,” said Belinda. “All the best people seem to be away.”“Never mind that if the worst people can dance. I am on the committee, so I will answer for the supper and the champagne. You like a dry brand, of course, Miss Crowther?”“I never touch wine of any kind.”“No; then my chief virtue will be thrown away upon you. Are all young ladies blue-ribbonites nowadays, I wonder? Mrs. Disney, pray tell me you are interested in the champagne question.”“I am not going to the ball.”“Not going! Oh, but it is a duty which you owe to the county! Do you think because you are an alien and a foreigner you can flout our local gaieties—fleer at our solemnities? No, it is incumbent upon you to give us your support.”“Yes, my dear, you must go to the ball,” put in Mrs. Crowther, in her motherly tone. “You are much too young and pretty to stay at home, like Cinderella, while we are all enjoying ourselves. Of course you must go. Mr. Crowther has put down his name for five and twenty tickets, and I’m sure there’ll be one to spare for you, although we shall have a large house-party.”“Indeed, you are too kind, but I couldn’t think——” faltered Isola, with a distressed look.She knew that Lostwithiel was watching her from his vantage ground ever so far above her head. A man of six feet two has considerable advantages at a billiard-table, and in a quiet flirtation carried on in public.“If it is a chaperon you are thinking about, I’ll take care of you,” urged good Mrs. Crowther.“No, it isn’t on that account. Mrs. Baynham offered to take me in her party. But I really would much rather not be there. It would seem horrid to me to be dancing in a great, dazzling room, among happy people, while Martin is in Burmah, perhaps in peril of his life on that very night. One can never tell. I often shudder at the thought of what may be happening to him while I am sitting quietly by the fire. And what should I feel at a ball?”“I should hardly have expected you to have such romantic notions about Major Disney,” said Belinda, coolly, “considering the difference in your ages.”“Do you suppose I care the less for him because he is twenty years older than I am?”“Twenty! Is it really as much as that?” ejaculated Mrs. Crowther, unaffectedly shocked.“He is just as dear to me,” pursued Isola, warmly. “I look up to him, and love him with all my heart. There never was a better, truer man. From the time I began to read history I always admired great soldiers. I don’t mean to say that Martin is a hero—only I know he is a thorough soldier—and he seemed to realize all my childish dreams.”She had spoken impetuously, fancying that there was some slight towards her absent husband in Miss Crowther’s speech. Her flash of anger made a break in the conversation, and nothing more was said about her going or not going to the Hunt Ball. They talked of that entertainment in the abstract—discussed the floor—the lighting—the band—and the great people who might be induced to appear, if the proper pressure were put upon them.“There is plenty of time,” said Lostwithiel, “between now and the twenty-second of December—nearly three weeks. Time for you and your sister to get new frocks from London or Paris, Miss Crowther. You mean having new frocks, I suppose?”“One generally does have a new frock for a dance,” replied Belinda, “though the fashions this winter are so completely odious that I would much rather appear in a gown of my great-grandmother’s.”Lostwithiel smiled his slow secret smile high up in the fainter firelight. He was reflecting upon his notion of Miss Crowther’s great-grandmother, in linsey-wolsey, with a lavender print apron, a costume that would be hardly impressive at a Hunt Ball. He did not give the young lady credit for a great-grandmother from the Society point of view. There was the mother yonder—inoffensive respectability—the grandmother would be humbler—and the great-grandmother he imagined at the wash-tub, or cooking the noontide meal for an artisan husband. He had never yetrealized the idea of numerous generations of middle-class life upon the same plane, the same dead level of prosperous commerce.Isola rose to take leave, after having let her tea get cold, and dropped half her cake on the Persian rug. She felt shyer in that house than in any other. She had a feeling that there she was weighed in the balance and found wanting; that unfriendly eyes were scrutinizing her gloves and hat, and appraising her features and complexion. She felt herself insignificant, colourless, insipid beside that brilliant Miss Crowther, with her vivid beauty, and her self-assured airs and graces.Tabitha urged her to be of good heart when she hinted at these feelings.“Why, Lord have mercy upon us, ma’am, however grand they may all look, it’s nothing but wool—only wool; and I heard there used to be a good deal of devil’s dust mixed with it, after this Mr. Crowther came into the business.”The dusk was thickening as she went along the short avenue which led to the gates. Mr. Crowther, having built his house in a wood, had been able to cut himself out a carriage drive, which gave him an avenue of more than two centuries’ growth, and thus imparted an air of spurious antiquity to his demesne. He felt, as he looked at the massive boles of those old Spanish chestnuts, as if he had belonged to the soil since the Commonwealth.Even the lodge was an important building, Tudor on one side, and monastic on the other; with that agreeable hodge-podge of styles which the modern architect loveth. It was a better house than the curate lived in, as he often told Miss Crowther.Isola quickened her pace outside that solemn gateway, and seemed to breathe more freely. She hurried even faster at the sound of a footstep behind her, though there was no need for nervous apprehensions at that early hour in the November evening on the high road between Fowey and Trelasco. Did she know that firm, quick footfall; or was it an instinctiveavoidance of an unknown danger which made her hurry on till her heart began to beat stormily, and her breath came in short gasps?“My dear Mrs. Disney, do you usually walk as if for a wager?” asked a voice behind her. “I can generally get over the ground pretty fast, but it was as much as I could do to overtake you without running.”He was not breathless, however. His tones were firm and tranquil. It was she who could scarcely speak.“I’m afraid I am very late,” she answered nervously.“For what? For afternoon tea by your own fireside? Have you anybody waiting for you at the Angler’s Nest, that you should be in such a hurry to get home?”“No, there is no one waiting, except Tabitha. I expect no one.”“Then why walk yourself into a fever?”“Tabitha gets fidgety if I am out after dusk.”“Then let Tabitha fidget! It will be good for her liver. Those adipose people require small worries to keep them in health. You mustn’t over-pace yourself to oblige Tabitha.”She had slackened her steps, and he was walking by her side, looking down at her from that superb altitude which gave him an unfair advantage. How could she, upon her lower level, escape those searching glances?She knew that her way home was his way home, so far as the bend of the road which led away from the river; and to avoid him for the intervening distance would have been difficult. She must submit to his company on the road, or make a greater effort than it was in her nature to make.“You mean to go to this ball, don’t you?” he asked earnestly.“I think not.”“Oh, but pray do! Why should you shut yourself from all the pleasures of this world, and live like a nun, always? You might surely make just one exception for such a grand event as the Hunt Ball. You have no idea how much we all think of it hereabouts. Remember, it will be the first publicdance we have had at Lostwithiel for ever so many years. You will see family diamonds enough to make you fancy you are at St. James’s. Do you think Major Disney would dislike your having just one evening’s dissipation?”“Oh no, he would not mind! He is only too kind and indulgent. He would have liked me to spend the winter with my sister in Hans Place, where there would have been gaieties of all kinds; but I don’t want to go into society while Martin is away. It would not make me happy.”“But if it made some one else happy—if it made other people happy to see you there?”“Oh, but it would not matter to anybody! I am a stranger in the land. People are only kind to me for my husband’s sake.”“Your modesty becomes you as the dew becomes a rose. I won’t gainsay you—only be sure you will be missed if you don’t go to the ball. And if you do go—well, it will be an opportunity of making nice friends. It will be yourdébutin county society.”“Without my husband? Please don’t say any more about it, Lord Lostwithiel. I had much rather stay at home.”He changed the conversation instantly, asking her what she thought of Glenaveril.“I think the situation most lovely.”“Yes, there we are all agreed. Mr. Crowther had the good taste to find a charming site, and the bad taste to erect an architectural monstrosity, a chimera in red brick. There was a grange once in the heart of that wood, and the Crowthers have the advantage of acorns and chestnuts that sowed themselves while the sleepy old monks were telling their beads. How do you like Miss Crowther?”“I hardly know her well enough to like or dislike her. She is very handsome.”“So was Rubens’ wife, Helena Forman; but what would one do in a world peopled with Helena Formans? There are galleries in Antwerp which no man should enter without smoke-coloured spectacles, if he would avoid being blindedby a blaze of red-haired beauty. I am told that the Miss Crowthers will have, at least, a million of money between them in days to come, and that they are destined to make great matches. Perhaps we shall see some of theirsoupirantsat the ball. Since the decay of the landed interest, thechasse aux dotshas become fiercer than of old.”This seemed to come strangely from him who had already been talked of as a possible candidate for one of the Miss Crowthers. It would be such a particularly suitable match, Mrs. Baynham, the doctor’s wife, had told Isola. What could his lordship look for beyond a fine fortune and a handsome wife?“They would make such a splendid pair,” said Mrs. Baynham, talking of them as if they were carriage-horses.Mrs. Disney and her companion crossed a narrow meadow, from the high road to the river-path which was the nearest way to the Angler’s Nest. The river went rippling by under the gathering grey of the November evening. On their right hand there was the gloom of dark woods: and from the meadow on their left rose a thick white mist, like a sea that threatened to swallow them up in its phantasmal tide. The sound of distant oars, dipping with rhythmical measure, was the only sound except their own voices.Did that three-quarters of a mile seem longer or shorter than usual? Isola hardly knew; but when she saw the lights shining in Tabitha’s kitchen, and the fire-glow in the drawing-room, she was glad with the gladness of one who escapes from some fancied danger of ghosts or goblins.Lostwithiel detained her at the gate.“Good night,” he said; “good night. You will change your mind, won’t you, Mrs. Disney? It is not in one so gentle as you to be inflexible about such a trifle. Say that you will honour our ball.”She drew herself up a little, as if in protest against his pertinacity.“I really cannot understand why you should care whether I go or stay away,” she said coldly.“Oh, but I do care! It is childish, perhaps, on my part, but I do care; I care tremendously; more than I have cared about anything for a long time. It is so small a thing on your part—it means so much for me! Say you will be there.”“Is that you, ma’am?” asked Tabitha’s pleasant voice, while Tabitha’s substantial soles made themselves audible upon the gravel path. “I was beginning to get fidgety about you.”“Good night,” said Isola, shortly, as she passed through the gate.It shut with a sharp little click of the latch, and she vanished among the laurels and arbutus. He heard her voice and Tabitha’s as they walked towards the house in friendly conversation, mistress and maid.There was a great over-blown Dijon rose nodding its heavy head over the fence. Roses linger so late in that soft western air. Lostwithiel plucked the flower, and pulled off its petals one by one as he walked towards the village street.“Will she go—will she stay—go—stay—go—stay?” he muttered, as the petals fluttered to the ground.“Go! Yes, of course she will go,” he said to himself as the last leaf fell. “Does it need ghost from the grave or rose from the garden to tell me that?”CHAPTER IV.“DREAMING, SHE KNEW IT WAS A DREAM.”Isola and Lostwithiel met a good many times after that walk through the autumn mists. She tried her utmost to avoid him. She went for fewer walks than of old; nay, she chiefly confined her perambulations to those domestic errands which Tabitha imposed upon her, and such afternoon visits as she felt it incumbent upon her to pay, in strict return for visits paid to her. Major Disney had begged her to be exact in such small ceremonies, and to keep upon the best possible terms with his friends. “I loveevery soul in the place, for old sake’s sake,” he told her; and for old sake’s sake Isola had to cultivate the people her husband had known all his life.She tried to avoid Lostwithiel, but Fate was against her, and they met. He was unvaryingly courteous. He said no word which could offend the most sensitive of women. Prudery itself could have had no ground for alarm. He did not again allude to the ball, or his wishes upon that point. He talked of those common topics of interest to which every day and every season give rise, even in a Cornish village; and yet in this common talk acquaintance ripened until it became friendship unawares. And then—as all sense of shyness and reserve upon Isola’s part gave way to a vague, reposeful feeling, like drifting down a sunlit river, with never a breath of chilling wind—they began to exchange confidences about their past lives. Unawares Martin Disney’s wife found herself entering into the minutest details about the people she had met on that level road of a monotonous girlhood by which she had come to be what she was. Unawares she betrayed all her feelings and opinions, her likes and dislikes, and even the little weaknesses and eccentricities of her parents—her sister—her wealthy brother-in-law. Never before had she found so good a listener. Her husband had been all affectionate interest in the things that concerned her; yet she had often discovered that his mind was wandering in the midst of some girlish reminiscence; and he had a tiresome trick of forgetting all those particulars about her friends which would have enabled him to distinguish the personages of a story. He had to be told everything afresh at each recurrence of those names that were so familiar to her. Nor had he Lostwithiel’s keen sense of humour, and quick perception of the ridiculous side of life, whereby many a small social sketch fell flat.The glimpses she caught of her new friend’s past existence enthralled her. It was to see new vistas opening into unknown worlds; the world of university life; the world ofsociety, English and continental, with all its varieties of jargon; the world of politics, and literature, and art. It charmed him to see her interest in all those unknown things and people.“You would very soon be tired of it, and would come back to Trelasco—like the hare to her form—or like me,” he said, smiling at her ardent look. “Believe me, it is all dust and ashes. My happiest hours have been on board a yacht, with only half a dozen good books, and ten or a dozen ignoramuses in blue serge for my companions.”She was to go to the Hunt Ball after all; not because he wished it, but because other people had taken her affairs in hand, and decided that she should go. Dr. and Mrs. Baynham had decided for her. Mrs. Vansittart Crowther had decided for her, and had sent her a ticket with her love by that very footman whose appearance when he opened the door always crushed her, and who had given her a frightful shock when she danced into the kitchen to speak to Tabitha, and found him meekly sitting on a Windsor chair, with his knees drawn up nearly to his chin. Lastly, Tabitha had decided; and Tabitha’s opinion went for more than that of anybody else.“You want a little bit of change and gaiety,” said the faithful stewardess. “You have been looking pale and worried ever since you had that bad news from Broomer,” this was Tabitha’s nearest approach to Burmah, “and you’ll be all the better for an evening’s pleasure. It isn’t as if you had to buy a dress, or even a pair of gloves. You’ve only worn your wedding-dress at three parties since you came home from your honeymoon, and it’s as fresh as if you’d been married yesterday. You’ve got everything, and everything of the best. Why shouldn’t you go?”Isola could advance no reason, except her vague fear that her husband might not approve of her appearing at a public ball without him; but at this objection honest Tabitha snapped her fingers.“I’ll answer for Mr. Martin,” she said. “He’ll be pleased for you to enjoy yourself. ‘Don’t let her mope while I’m away, Tabby,’ he said to me the day before he started for foreign parts. He’d like you to be at the ball. You’ll have Mrs. Baynham to take care of you, and what can you want more than that, I should like to know?”Mrs. Baynham, the portly doctor’s wife, was, in Tabitha’s mind, the representative of all the respectabilities. How could a girl just out of her teens—a girl who loved dancing, and had been told she danced exquisitely—turn a deaf ear to such arguments, put forward by the person to whose care her husband had in some wise confided her. If Tabitha approved, Isola thought she could not do wrong in yielding; so the simply-fashioned white satin gown—made in Paris, and with all Parisianchic—was taken out of the pot-pourri perfumed drawer. Gloves and fan, and little white slippers were passed in review. There was nothing wanted. The carefullest housewife need not have hesitated on the score of economy.So the question was finally settled—she was to go to the Hunt Ball. A fly was engaged for her especial service, so that she might not crowd Mrs. Baynham, who was to take two fresh, fat-cheeked nieces, who looked as if they had been fed from infancy upwards upon apple pasties and clotted cream. She was to drive to Lostwithiel in the fly from the Maypole Inn, and she was to join Mrs. Baynham in the cloak-room, and make her entrance under that lady’s wing.This final decision was arrived at about ten days before the event, and for nine of those intervening days Isola’s life went by as if she were always sitting in that imaginary boat drifting down a sunlit river; but on the day of the dance, after just half an hour’s quiet walk with Lostwithiel on the towpath, she went back to the cottage pale as ashes; and sat down at her little davenport in the drawing-room, trembling, breathless, and on the verge of hysteria.She opened the drawers of the davenport one after another, looking for something—helplessly, confusedly, as one whosebrain is half distraught. It was ten minutes before she found what she wanted—a sheaf of telegram forms.“To Major Disney, Cornwall Fusiliers, Rangoon.—Let me go to you at once. I am miserable. My heart will break if you leave me here.”This was the gist of a message which she wrote half a dozen times, in different words, upon half a dozen forms. Then she tore up all but the last, threw that into a drawer, and began to pace the room feverishly, with her hands clasped before her face.What fever-fraught vision was it that those hands tried to shut out from her burning eyes? So little had happened—so little—only half an hour’s quiet walk along the towpath, where the leafless willows had a grim, uncanny look, like those trees whose old grey branches seemed the arms of the Erlking’s daughters, beckoning the child as he nestled in his father’s arms, riding through the night. So little—so little—and yet it meant the lifting of a veil—the passage from happy innocence to the full consciousness of an unholy love. It meant what one kiss on trembling lips meant for Paolo and Francesca. It meant the plunge into a gulf of dark despair—unless she had strength to draw back, seeing the abyss at her feet, warned of her danger.What had he said? Only a few agitated words—only a revelation. He loved her, loved her with all the passion of his passionate soul; loved her as he had never loved before. They all tell the same story, these destroyers of innocence; and, for that one burning moment, they all mean what they say. Every seducer has his hour of sublime truthfulness; of generous feeling; of ardent heroic aspirations; the hour in which he would perish for the woman he loves; cut off his right hand; burn out his eyes; leap off a monument; do anything except surrender her, except forego his privilege to destroy her.It was not too late. The warning had come in time—just in time to save her. She knew now to what ocean that drifting boat was carrying her—through the sunny atmosphere, between the flowery shores of dreamland. It was taking her to the arctic ocean of shame and ruin—the great sea strewn with the corpses of women who had sinned, and suffered, and repented, and died—unforgiven of mankind—to wait the tribunal of God.“Oh, lor!” cried Tabitha, bursting into the room. “I thought you were never coming home. You ought to go and lay down for two or three hours after your tea, or we shall have you fainting away before the night’s over. You’ve not been eating enough for a healthy canary bird for the last week.”“I’m not very well, Tabbie. I don’t think I’ll go to the ball.”“Not go! and when the fly’s ordered—and will have to be paid for whether or no; for Masters told me he could have let it twelve deep. Not go! and disappoint Mrs. Baynham, who has set her heart on taking you; and Mrs. Crowther, who gave you the ticket! Why, it would never do! You’ll feel well enough when you’re there. You won’t know whether you’re standing on your head or your heels. It’s past five o’clock, and your tea has been ready in the study since a quarter to.”“How do you send telegrams to India, Tabitha?”“Lor, ma’am, how should I know? From the post-office, I suppose, pretty much like other telegrams. But they cost no end of money, I’ll be bound. You’re not wanting to send a telegram to the major, are you, ma’am, to ask his leave about the ball?”“No; I was only wondering,” Isola answered feebly.She shut and locked the davenport, leaving her message in the drawer. She meant to send it—if not to-day, to-morrow; if not before the ball, after the ball. She felt that her only hope of peace and safety and a clear conscience was at her husband’s side. She must go out to him yonder in the unknown land. She must get to him somehow, with or without his leave—with or without his help. She wouldbrave anything, hazard anything to be with that faithful friend and defender—her first love—her brave, self-denying, God-fearing lover. She felt as if there were no other safety or shelter for her in all the world.“God will not help me unless I help myself,” she muttered distractedly, as she sat in her low chair by the fire, with her head flung back upon the cushions and the untouched meal at her side. Tabitha had left off providing dinner for her, at her particular request. She had neither heart to sit down alone to a formal dinner nor appetite to eat it; so Tabitha had exercised all her skill as a cook, which was great, in preparing a dainty little supper at nine o’clock; and it had irked her that her mistress did such scant justice to the tempting meal.Isola fell asleep by the fire, comforted by the warmth, worn out by nights that had been made sleepless by vague agitation—by the living over again of accidental meetings, and friendly conversations—not by fear or remorse—for it was only this day that the danger of that growing friendship had been revealed to her. It was only to-day that she knew what such friendships mean. She slept a feverish sleep, from sheer exhaustion, and dreamt fever-dreams.Those willows on the bank had recalled Goethe’s “Erl König”—the ballad she had learnt by rote in her earliest German studies—and the willows and the ballad were interwoven with her dreams. It was Martin Disney who was riding his charger along a dark road, and she was sitting in front of his saddle, clinging to him, hiding her face upon his breast, and the willows were beckoning—she knew those gaunt arms were beckoning to her, although her eyes were hidden—andhewas following. He was thundering behind them, on a black horse. Yes, and then the dream changed—the dreamer’s wandering thoughts directed by another reminiscence of those girlish studies in German poetry. She was Lenore, and she was in the arms of her dead lover. She felt that bony arm—Death’s arm—clutching her round the waist. Her streaming hair mingled with the streamingmane of that unearthly horse. She was with Lostwithiel—in his arms—and they were both dead and both happy—happy in being together. What did they want more than that?“Vollbracht, vollbracht ist unser Lauf!Das Hochzeitbette, thut sich auf!Die Todten reiten schnelle!Wir sind, wir sind, zur Stelle.”She woke with the chill of the charnel-house freezing her blood. The fire had gone out. Tim had curled himself at her feet in the folds of her gown. The Persian was staring discontentedly at the ashes in the grate, and Tabitha’s sturdy footsteps might be heard in the room above, bustling to and fro, and anon poking the fire, and putting on coals, making all snug and ready for her mistress’s toilet.Isola rang, and Susan, the parlour-maid, brought in the lamp.“I came twice before, ma’am; but you were fast asleep, so I took the lamp back to the pantry.”Isola looked at the clock. Ten minutes to nine, and she was to meet Mrs. Baynham in the cloak-room at half-past ten. Ten o’clock was the hour on the card, and the fat-faced nieces were feverishly afraid that all the eligible partners would be snapped up by those wise virgins who appeared earliest on the scene.“You won’t keep us waiting in the cloak-room, will you, dear Mrs. Disney?” they pleaded coaxingly.Was she to put on her finery and go! There would be time yet to send a note to Mrs. Baynham, excusing herself on the score of illness. The doctor’s party would not start before half-past nine. What was she to do? Oh, she wanted to see him once more—just once more—in the brightly-lighted rooms, amidst a crowd—in a place where he would have no chance of repeating those wicked, wicked words—of forgetting all that was due to his own honour and to hers. In the crowded ball-room there would besafety—safety even from evil thoughts. Who could think of anything amidst the sound of dance music, the dazzle of lamps and flashing of jewels?She wanted to go to the ball, to wear her satin gown, to steep herself in light and music; and thus to escape from the dim horrors of that awful dream.Tabitha seemed like a good angel, when she came in at this juncture with a fresh cup of tea and a plate of dainty little chicken sandwiches.“Come now, ma’am, I shan’t let you go to the ball if you don’t take these. What, not a bit of fire—and you asleep here in the cold? What was that addle-pated Susan thinking about, I wonder? I’ll take the tray upstairs. There’s a lovely fire in your room, and everything ready for you to dress. I want to be able to tell Mr. Martin that his young wife was the belle of the ball.”Isola allowed herself to be led upstairs to the bright, cheerful bedroom, with its pretty chintz-pattern paper, and photographs, and artistic muslin curtains, and glowing fire, and toilet-table, with its glitter of crystal and silver in the pleasant candlelight. She suffered herself to be fed and dressed by Tabitha’s skilful hands, almost as if she had been a child; and she came out of her dismal dream into the glad waking world, a radiant figure, with violet eyes and alabaster complexion, flushed by the loveliest hectic. The simply-made, close-fitting bodice, with folded crape veiling the delicate bust, and the pure pearly tint of the satin, set off her fragile beauty, while the long train and massive folds of the rich fabric gave statuesque grace to her tall, slim figure; but the crowning glory of her toilette was the garland of white chrysanthemums, for which Tabitha had ransacked all the neighbouring green-houses; a garland of fluffy, feathery petals, which reached in a diagonal line from her shoulder to the hem of her gown. It was her only ornament, for by some strange caprice she refused to wear the modest pearl necklace and diamond cross which had been her husband’s wedding gift.“Not to-night, Tabbie,” she said; and Tabitha saw in this refusal only the coquetry of a lovely woman, who wanted to show the great ladies and squire’s wives how poor and common diamonds are by the side of youth and beauty.“Well, you don’t want any jewels, certainly,” said Tabitha. “You look as if you were going to be married—all but the veil. Those chrysanthemums are ever so much prettier than orange blossoms. There’s the fly. Let me put on your cloak. It’s a beautiful night, and almost as mild as May. Everybody will be at the ball. There’s nothing to keep folks away. Well, I do wish the major was here to go with you. Wouldn’t he be proud?”The stars were shining when Isola went along the gravel path to the gate where Masters’ fly was waiting, with blazing lamps, which seemed to put those luminous worlds yonder to shame. There was no carriage-drive to the hall door of the Angler’s Nest. The house retained all its ancient simplicity, and ignored the necessities of carriage people. Tabitha wrapped her mistress’s fur-lined cloak close round her, before she stepped into the fly, which was provided with those elaborate steps that seem peculiar to the hired brougham.“Good night, Tabitha, and thank you for all the pains you’ve taken in dressing me—and for the lovely wreath. I shall come home early. I shan’t wait for Mrs. Baynham’s party.”“Don’t you hurry,” said Tabitha, heartily. “The Hunt Ball only comes once a year, and you’d better make the most of it. I shan’t mind sitting up; and perhaps I shan’t be half so dull as you think for.”The flyman shut the door, which nobody but himself could shut—another peculiarity of hired broughams. The fly vanished in the darkness, and Tabitha ran back to the house, where she found Susan waiting at the hall door in her jacket and hat, as near a reproduction of Mrs. Disney’s jacket and hat as local circumstances—or the difference between Bond Street and Lostwithiel—would allow.“Have you locked and bolted the back doors?” askedTabitha; “but, lor, I’ll go and look myself; I won’t trust to your giddy young brains. Mr. Tinkerly will be here with the cart directly. I’ve only got to put on my bonnet and dolman, after I’ve taken a look round, and put away Mrs. Disney’s jewel-box.”Tabitha was no light-minded housekeeper, but she had her hours of frivolity, and she loved pleasure with the innocent freshness of a most transparent soul. Tinkerly, the butcher, had offered to drive the two ladies—Tabitha and Susan—into Lostwithiel in his tax cart, and, furthermore, to place them where they would see something of the ball, or at least of the company arriving and departing, and beyond all this to give them a snack of supper, “Just something to bite at and a glass of beer,” he told Tabitha deprecatingly, lest he should raise hopes beyond his power of realization.He meant to do the thing as handsomely as circumstances would permit, certainly to the extent of cold boiled beef and pickles, with Guinness or Bass. He was a family man, of irreproachable respectability, and his meat was supposed to be unmatchable for thirty miles round. He grew it himself, upon those picturesque pastures which sloped skyward, dipping towards the blue of the river, rising towards the blue of the sky.No precaution of lock, bolt, or bar did Tabitha neglect before she put on her best bonnet, and dignified black cloth dolman, heavy with imitation Astrachan. She and Susan were standing at the gate when Tinkerly drove up with his skittish mare and spring cart, a cart so springy that it threatened to heel over altogether when Tabitha clambered into the place of honour. Mr. Tinkerly’s foreman was sitting behind to take care of Susan, and the foreman was unmarried, and of a greasy black-haired comeliness, and there was none happier than Susan under those wintry stars—not even the great ladies in their family diamonds.“What are diamonds,” said Susan, philosophically, with the foreman’s arm sustaining her at a sharp turn in the road, “if you don’t care for each other?”CHAPTER V.“AND THE CHILD-CHEEK BLUSHING SCARLET FOR THE VERY SHAME OF BLISS.”People who were familiar with the Talbot Hotel, Lostwithiel, in its everyday aspect would hardly have recognized the old-fashioned hostelry to-night, under the transforming hand of the Hunt Club, with Lord Lostwithiel and Vansittart Crowther on the committee. The entrance hall, usually remarkable only for various cases of stuffed birds, and a monster salmon—caught in the Lerrin river in some remote period of history—was now a bower of crimson cloth and white azaleas. In the ball-room and ante-room, tea-room and supper-room, were more flowers, and more crimson cloth, while on every side brushes and vizards against the crimson and white panelling testified to the occasion. The dancing-room was very full when Mrs. Baynham’s party made their entrance, the matron in her historical black velvet—which had formed part of her trousseau thirteen years before, when she left the family residence in the chief street of Truro, and all those privileges which appertained to her as the only daughter of a provincial banker, to grace Dr. Baynham’s lowlier dwelling. The black velvet gown had been “let out” from time to time, as youth expanded into maturity: and there had been a new bodice and a real Maltese lace flounce within the last three years, which constituted a second incarnation; and Mrs. Baynham walked into the Talbot ball-room with the serene demeanour that goes with a contented mind. She was satisfied with herself, and she was proud of her party, the two fresh, rosy-cheeked girls in sky-blue tulle, Isola, looking like a Mary lily in her white satin raiment, and the village surgeon, who always looked his best in his dress clothes, newly-shaven, and, as it were, pulled together in honour of the occasion.The room was full, and very full; but Lostwithiel was not there. Isola had an instinctive consciousness that he wasmissing in that brilliant crowd. People came buzzing round her, and she was made room for upon a raised bench opposite the gallery where a military band was playing a polka in which the brasses predominated to an ear-splitting extent.The Glenaveril party made their entrance ten minutes later. The Crowther girls were not afraid of wanting partners. Most young men are glad to dance with half a million of money. There is always an off chance of a good thing, just as there is a chance of breaking the bank at Monte Carlo. Belinda looked superb in a cloud of tulle, like a goddess. Alicia looked too well on horseback to look well off. Her spare straight figure and sharp elbows were not at their best in evening dress. She wore black, and an infinity of bugles, and flashed and glittered more than any one else in the room, though she wore never a jewel.“Worth, my dear,” said Mrs. Baynham to a blue niece, in a mysterious whisper; “I know his style.”There was a buzz of conversation on that raised divan where the matrons were sitting with those newly arrived maidens who were like ships waiting to slide out of their cradles and float away to sea. Isola and the sky-blue nieces had not long to wait; especially Isola. Men were entreating the stewards to introduce them to that lovely fragile-looking creature in white satin—the best men in the neighbourhood, or those wandering stars from distant counties, or the London galaxy, “men with handles to their names,” as Mr. Baynham told Mrs. Crowther, resplendent in salmon brocade, and Venetian point.“My presentation gown,” she informed the doctor’s wife; “the Court mantle is ruby velvet, lined with salmon satin. The weight of it almost pulled me backwards when I curtsied to the royalties—such a lot of them, and I’m afraid I curtsied rather too low to one of the Princesses, for I caught her taking me off when she returned my curtsy.”Isola danced through the lancers as one in a dream. When the heart of a man is oppressed with care, “Ta-rarra, ta-rarra, ta-rà, ta-rà!” What foolishness it all seemed.And her husband in Burmah, hemmed round by murderous dacoits!She went back to her seat among the matrons, after almost curtly refusing either refreshment or a promenade through the rooms. Mrs. Crowther was saying solemnly, “I do believe Lord Lostwithiel is not coming after all, and yet he worked so hard on the committee, my husband said, and took such pains about the flowers, and what not.”The tall, slim figure cut its way through the crowd two or three minutes later, and Lostwithiel was standing in front of Isola, and the two matrons.He wore a pink coat, as became a member of the Lostwithiel Hunt, and the vivid colour accentuated the pallor of his long thin face. He talked to all the ladies on the divan; to the sky-blue nieces even, hoping that their cards were full.“If not, I must bring you some men I know,” he said. “You mustn’t miss a dance.”They blushed and trembled with delight, never before having been thus familiarly addressed by a peer of the realm. He asked Isola for her programme, with well-simulated indifference, yet with that air of profound respect with which he talked to all women.“I hope you can spare me some waltzes,” he said.“She is only just come,” said Mrs. Baynham.“And yet her card is almost full. People have been very officious. Here is a poor little waltz—number seven. May I have that, and number eleven, and number——”“Please don’t put down your name for anything later than number eleven. I shall be gone long before those late dances.”“Oh, surely, you don’t mean to desert us early. Remember this is the one festive occasion of our lives as a sporting community. All our other meetings are given up to carking care, financial difficulties, and squabbling. I shall put down my name in these tempting blanks, and if you disappoint me—well—it will only be like my previous experiences as a fox-hunter.”He gave her back her programme, with all the blanks filled in, and at the bottom a word written, and triply underscored,ἉΝΑΓΚΗ.They had talked of Victor Hugo’s romantic story—that romance which the great man so despised in after years that he was almost offended if any one presumed to praise it in his hearing, although in the half-century that has gone since Victor Hugo was a young man this story of Notre Dame has been unsurpassed as an example of the romantic novel. Lostwithiel had praised the book, and had talked of the monk Frollo, and his fatal love—and that word Fatality, graven upon the wall of his cell, and burnt into his soul.Isola knew what those Greek letters meant. She dropped the little white and gold programme as if it had been an adder. He went away to a duty dance with a great lady of the district—a lady whose diamonds made a light about her wherever she moved; and then he waltzed with Belinda Crowther, to the admiration of the young lady’s mother, and of two or three other matrons on the divan by the door. Were they not a splendid couple, she so brilliantly fair, he dark and pale, bronzed slightly with exposure to the sun in warmer climates than this—not positively handsome, but with such an interesting countenance. So, and so, and so prosed the matrons, until various middle-aged cavaliers came to invite them to the tea-room, where there was the usual drawback in the shape of a frightful draught from open windows, which the dancers, coming in flushed and heated, voted delicious.“This will be a good night’s work for me,” said Dr. Baynham, cheerfully, although he considered it his duty to warn his patients of their danger.Conscience thus satisfied, he could look on complacently as they eat ices, and selected cool corners of the refreshment-room to flirt in.“Next to a juvenile party, I don’t know anything better—from a professional point of view—than a public ball,” hesaid. “Your canvas corridors, decorated with flowers and bunting, are a fortune to a family practitioner.”

She dreamt her dream of that strange world in fear and trembling, conjuring up scenes of horror—tiger hunts; snakes hidden in the corner of a tent; battle; fever; fire; mutiny. Her morbid imagination pictured all possible and impossible danger for the man she loved. And then she thought of his home-coming—for good, for good—for all the span of their joint lives; and she longed for that return with the sickness of hope deferred.

She would go back to the Angler’s Nest sometimes after one of these dreamy days upon the river, and would pace about the house or the garden, planning things for her husband’s return, as if he were due next day. She would wheel his own particular chair to the drawing-room fireplace, and look at it, and arrange the fall of the curtains before the old-fashioned bow-window, and change the position of the lamp, and alter the books on the shelves, and do this and that with an eye to effect, anxious to discover how the room might be made prettiest, cosiest, most lovable and home-like—for him, for him, for him!

And now she had to resign herself to a year’s delay, perhaps. Yes, he had said it might be a year. All that bright picture of union and content, which had seemed so vivid and so near, had now grown dim and pale. It had melted into a shadowy distance. To a girl who has but just passed her twentieth birthday a year of waiting and delay seems an eternity.

“I won’t think of him,” she said to herself, plunging her sculls fiercely into the rippling water. The tide was running down, and it was strong enough to have carried her little boat out to sea like an autumn leaf swept along the current. “I must try to lull my mind to sleep, as if I were an enchanted Princess, and so bridge over twelve slow months of loneliness. I won’t think of you, Martin, my good, brave, truest of the true! I’ll occupy my poor, foolish little mind. I’ll write a novel, perhaps, like old Miss Carver at Dinan. Anything in the world—just to keep my thoughts from always brooding on one subject.”

She rowed on steadily, hugging the shore under the wooded hillside, where the rich autumn colouring and the clear, cool lights were so full of beauty—a beauty which she could feel, with a vague, dim sense which just touched the realm of poetry. Perhaps she felt the same sense of loss which Keats or Alfred de Musset would have felt in the stillness of such a scene—the want of something to people the wood and the river—some race of beings loftier than fishermen and peasants; some of those mystic forms whichthe poet sees amidst the shadows of old woods or in the creeks and sheltered inlets of a secluded river.

She thought, with a half-smile, of yesterday’s adventure. What importance that foolish Tabitha gave to so simple an incident; the merest commonplace courtesy, necessitated by circumstances; and only because the person who had been commonly courteous was Richard Hulbert, thirteenth Baron Lostwithiel. Thirteenth Baron! There lay the distinction. These Cornish folks worshipped antique lineage. Tabitha would have thought very little of a mushroom peer’s civility, although he had sent her mistress home in a chariot and four. She was no worshipper of wealth, and she turned up her blunt old nose at Mr. Crowther, of Glenaveril—the great new red-brick mansion which had sprung up like a fungus amidst the woods only yesterday—because he had made his money in trade, albeit his trade had been upon a large scale, and altogether genteel and worthy to be esteemed—a great cloth factory at Stroud, which was said to have clad half the army at one period of modern history.

Poor, foolish Tabitha! What would she have thought of the tea-drinking in that lovely old room, mysteriously beautiful in the light of a wood fire—the playful, uncertain light which glorifies everything? What would she have thought of those walls of books—richly bound books, books in sombre brown, big books and little books, from floor to ceiling? A room which made those poor little oak bookcases in the cottage parlour something to blush for. What would Tabitha have thought of his deferential kindness—that tone of deepest consideration with which such men treat all women, even the old and uncomely? She could hardly have helped admiring his good manners, whatever dark things she might have been told about his earlier years.

Why should he not have a yacht? It seemed the fittest life for a man without home ties; a man still young, and with no need to labour at a profession. What better life could there be than that free wandering from port to port over a romantic sea?—and to Isola all seas were alike mysterious and romantic.

She dawdled away the morning; she sculled against the stream for nearly three hours, and then let her boat drift down the river to the garden above the towpath. It was long past her usual time for luncheon when she moored her boat to the little wooden steps, leaving it for Thomas, the gardener, to pull up into the boat-house. She had made up her mind that if Lostwithiel troubled himself to make any inquiry about her health he would call in the morning.

She had guessed rightly. Tabitha was full of his visit, and his wondrous condescension. He had called at eleven o’clock, on his way to the railway station at Fowey. He called in the most perfect of T carts, with a pair of bright bays. Tabitha had opened the door to him. He had asked quite anxiously about Mrs. Disney’s health. He had walked round the garden with Tabitha and admired everything, and had told her that Major Disney had a better gardener than any he had at the Mount, after which he had left her charmed by his amiability. And so this little episode in Isola’s life came to a pleasant end, leaving no record but his lordship’s card, lying like a jewel on the top of less distinguished names in the old Indian bowl.

CHAPTER III.

“OH MOMENT ONE AND INFINITE!”

Isola fancied that her adventure was all over and done with after that ceremonious call of inquiry; but in so narrow a world as that of Trelasco it was scarcely possible to have seen the last of a man who lived within three miles; and she and Lord Lostwithiel met now and then in the course of her solitary rambles. The walk into Fowey, following the old disused railway, was almost her favourite, and one which she had occasion to take oftener than any other, since Tabitha was a stay-at-home person, and expected her young mistress to do all the marketing, so that Isola had usuallysome errand to take her into the narrow street on the hillside above the sea. It was at Fowey that she oftenest met Lostwithiel. His yacht, theVendetta, was in the harbour under repairs, and he went down to look at the work daily, and often dawdled upon the deck till dusk, watching the carpenters, or talking to his captain. They had been half over the world together, master and man, and were almost as familiar as brothers. The crew were half English and half foreign; and it was a curious mixture of languages in which Lostwithiel talked to them. They were most of them old hands on board theVendetta, and would have stood by the owner of the craft if he had wanted to sail her up the Phlegethon.

She was a schooner of two hundred and fifty tons, built for speed, and with a rakish rig. She had cost, with her fittings, her extra silk sails for racing, more money than Lostwithiel cared to remember; but he loved her as a man loves his mistress, and if she were costly and exacting, she was no worse than other mistresses, and she was true as steel, which they are not always; and so he felt that he had money’s worth in her. He showed her to Isola one evening from the promontory above the harbour, where she met him in the autumn sundown. Her work at the butcher’s and the grocer’s being done, she had gone up to that airy height by Point Neptune to refresh herself with a long look seaward before she went back to her home in the valley. Lostwithiel took her away from the Point, and made her look down into the harbour.

“Isn’t she a beauty?” he asked, pointing below.

Her inexperienced eyes roamed about among the boats, colliers, fishing-boats, half a dozen yachts of different tonnage.

“Which is yours?” she asked.

“Which? Why, there is only one decent boat in the harbour. The schooner.”

She saw which boat he meant by the direction in which he flourished his walking-stick, but was not learned in distinctions of rig. TheVendetta, being under repair, did not seem to her especially lovely.

“Have you pretty cabins?” she asked childishly.

“Oh yes, they’re pretty enough; but that’s not the question. Look at her lines. She skims over the water like a gull. Ladies seem to think only what a boat looks like inside. I believe my boat is rather exceptional, from a lady’s point of view. Will you come on board and have a look at her?”

“Thanks, no; I couldn’t possibly. It will be dark before I get home as it is.”

“But it wouldn’t take you a quarter of an hour, and we could row you up the river in no time—ever so much faster than you could walk.”

Isola looked frightened at the very idea.

“Not for the world!” she said. “Tabitha would think I had gone mad. She would begin to fancy that I could never go out without over-staying the daylight, and troubling you to send me home.”

“Ah, but it is so long since you were last belated,” he said, in his low caressing voice, with a tone that was new to her and different from all other voices; “ages and ages ago—half a lifetime. There could be no harm in being just a little late this mild evening, and I would row you home—myself, under the new moon. Look at her swinging up in the grey blue there above Polruan. She looks like a fairy boat, anchored in the sky by that star hanging a fathom below her keel. I look at her, and wish—wish—wish!”

He looked up, pale in the twilight, with dark deep-set eyes, of which it was never easy to read the expression. Perhaps that inscrutable look made those sunken and by no means brilliant eyes more interesting than some much handsomer eyes—interesting with the deep interest that belongs to the unknowable.

“Good night,” said Isola. “I’m afraid that I shall be very late.”

“Good night. You would be earlier if you would trust to the boat.”

He held out his hand, and she gave him hers, hesitatingly for the first time in their acquaintance. It was after this parting in the wintry sundown that she first began to look troubled at meeting him.

The troubled feeling grew upon her somehow. In a life so lonely and uneventful trifles assume undue importance. She tried to avoid him, and on her journeys to Fowey she finished her business in the village street and turned homewards without having climbed the promontory by that rugged walk she loved so well. It needed some self-denial to forego that keen pleasure of standing on the windy height and gazing across the western sea towards Ushant and her native province; but she knew that Lord Lostwithiel spent a good deal of his time lounging on the heights above the harbour, and she did not want to meet him again.

Although she lived her quiet life in the shortening days for nearly a month without meeting him, she was not allowed to forget his existence. Wherever she went people talked about him and speculated about him. Every detail of his existence made matter for discussion; his yacht, his political opinions, his talents, his income, his matrimonial prospects, the likelihood or unlikelihood of his settling down permanently at the Mount, and taking the hounds, which were probably to be without a master within a measurable distance of time. There was so little to talk about in Trelasco and those scattered hamlets between Fowey and Lostwithiel.

Isola found herself joining in the talk at afternoon tea-parties, those casual droppings in of charitable ladies who had been their rounds among the cottagers and came back to the atmosphere of gentility worn out by long stories of woes and ailments, sore legs and rheumatic joints, and were very glad to discuss a local nobleman over a cup of delicately flavoured Indian tea in the glow of a flower-scented drawing-room.

Among other houses Mrs. Disney visited Glenaveril, Mr. Crowther’s great red-brick mansion, with its pepper-boxturrets, and Jacobean windows, after the manner of Burleigh House by Stamford town.

Here lived in wealth and state quite the most important family within a mile of Trelasco, the Vansittart Crowthers, erst of Pilbury Mills, near Stroud, now as much county as a family can make itself after its head has passed his fortieth birthday. Nobody quite knew how Mr. Crowther had come to be a Vansittart—unless by the easy process of baptism and the complaisance of an aristocratic sponsor; but the Crowthers had been known in Stroud for nearly two hundred years, and had kept their sacks upright, as Mr. Crowther called it, all that time.

Fortune had favoured this last of the Crowthers, and, at forty years of age, he had found himself rich enough to dispose of his business to two younger brothers and a brother-in-law, and to convert himself into a landed proprietor. He bought up all the land that was to be had about Trelasco. Cornish people cling to their land like limpets to a rock; and it was not easy to acquire the ownership of the soil. In the prosperous past, when land was paying nearly four per cent. in other parts of England, Cornishmen were content to hold estates that yielded only two per cent.; but the days of decay had come when Mr. Crowther entered the market, and he was able to buy out more than one gentleman of ancient lineage.

When he had secured his land, he sent to Plymouth for an architect, and he so harried that architect and so tampered with his drawings that the result of much labour and outlay was that monstrosity in red brick with stone dressings, known in the neighbourhood as Glenaveril. Mr. Crowther’s elder daughter was deep in Lord Lytton’s newly published poem when the house was being finished, and had imposed that euphonious name upon her father. Glenaveril. The house really was in a glen, or at least in a wooded valley, and Glenaveril seemed to suit it to perfection; and so the romantic name of a romantic poem was cut in massive Gothic letters on the granite pillars ofVansittart Crowther’s gate, beneath a shield which exhibited the coat of arms made and provided by the Herald’s College.

Mrs. Vansittart Crowther was at home on Thursday afternoons, when the choicest Indian tea and the thickest cream, coffee as in Paris, and the daintiest cakes and muffins which a professed cook could provide, furnished the zest to conversation; for it could scarcely be said that the conversation gave a zest to those creature comforts. It would be perhaps nearer the mark to say that Mrs. Crowther was supposed to sit in the drawing-room on these occasions while the two Miss Crowthers were at home. The mistress of Glenaveril was not an aspiring woman; and in her heart of hearts she preferred Gloucestershire to Cornwall, and the stuccoed villa on the Cheltenham road, with its acre and a half of tennis-lawn and flower-beds, open to the blazing sun, and powdered with the summer dust, to Glenaveril, with its solemn belt of woodlands, and its too spacious grandeur. She was not vulgar or illiterate. She never misplaced an aspirate. She had learnt to play the piano and to talk French at the politest of young ladies’ schools at Cheltenham. She never dressed outrageously, or behaved rudely. She had neither red hands nor splay feet. She was in all things blameless; and yet Belinda and Alicia, her daughters, were ashamed of her, and did their utmost to keep her, and her tastes, and her opinions in the background. She had no style. She was not “smart.” She seemed incapable of grasping the ideas, or understanding the ways of smart people; or at least her daughters thought so.

“Your mother is one of the best women I know,” said the curate to Alicia, being on the most confidential terms with both sisters, “and yet you and Miss Crowther are always trying to edit her.”

“Father wants a great deal more editing than mother,” said Belinda, “but there’s no use in talking to him. He is encased in the armour of self-esteem. It made my bloodrun cold to see him taking Lord Lostwithiel over the grounds and stables the other day—praising everything, and pointing out this and that,—and even saying how much things had cost!”

“I dare say it was vulgar,” agreed the curate, “but it’s human nature. I’ve seen a duke behave in pretty much the same way. Children are always proud of their new toys, and men are but children of a larger growth, don’t you know. You’ll find there’s a family resemblance in humanity, and that nature is stronger than training.”

“Lord Lostwithiel would never behave in that kind of way—boring people about his stables.”

“Lord Lostwithiel doesn’t care about stables—he would bore you about his yacht, I dare say.”

“No, he never talks of himself or his own affairs. That is just the charm of his manner. He makes us all believe that he is thinking about us; and yet I dare say he forgets us directly he is outside the gate.”

“I’m sure he does,” replied Mr. Colfox, the curate. “There isn’t a more selfish man living than Lostwithiel.”

The fair Belinda looked at him angrily. There are assertions which young ladies make on purpose to have them controverted.

Mrs. Disney hated the great red-brick porch, with its vaulted roof and monstrous iron lantern, and the bell which made such a clamour, as if it meant fire, or at least dinner, when she touched the hanging brass handle. She hated to find herself face to face with a tall footman, who hardly condescended to say whether his mistress were at home or not, but just preceded her languidly along the broad corridor, where the carpet was so thick that it felt like turf, and flung open the drawing-room door with an air, and pronounced her name into empty space, so remote were the half-dozen ladies at the other end of the room, clustered round Belinda’s tea-table, and fed with cake by Alicia, while Mrs. Crowther sat in the window a little way off, with her basket of woolwork at her side, and her fatsomnolent pug lying at her feet. To Isola it was an ordeal to have to walk the length of the drawing-room, navigating her course amidst an archipelago of expensive things—Florentine tables, portfolios of engravings, Louis Seize Jardinières, easels supporting the last expensive etching from Goupil’s—to the window where Mrs. Crowther waited to receive her, rising with her lap full of wools, to shake hands with simple friendliness and without a vestige of style. Belinda shook hands on a level with the tip of her sharpretroussénose, and twirled the silken train of her tea-gown with the serpentine grace of Sarah Bernhardt. She prided herself on those serpentine movements and languid graces which belong to the Græco-Belgravian period; while Alicia held herself like a ramrod, and took her stand upon being nothing if not sporting. Her olive-cloth gown and starched collar, her neat double-soled boots and cloth gaiters, were a standing reproach to Belinda’s silken slovenliness and embroidered slippers, always dropping off her restless feet, and being chased surreptitiously among her lace and pongee frillings. Poor Mrs. Crowther disliked the Guard’s collar, which she felt was writing premature wrinkles upon her younger girl’s throat, but she positively loathed the loose elegance of the Indian silk tea-gown, with its wide Oriental sleeves, exhibiting naked arms to the broad daylight. That sloppy raiment made a discord in the subdued harmony of the visitors’ tailor-made gowns—well worn some of them—brown, and grey, and indigo, and russet; and Mrs. Crowther was tortured by the conviction that her elder daughter looked disreputable. This honest matron was fond of Isola Disney. In her own simple phraseology, she had “taken to her;” and pressed the girl-wife to come every Thursday afternoon.

“It must be so lonely for you,” she said gently, “with your husband so far away, and you such a child, too. I wonder your mamma doesn’t come and stay with you for a bit. You must always come on our Thursdays. Now mind you do, my dear.”

“I don’t think our Thursdays are remarkably enlivening, mother,” said Alicia, objecting to the faintest suggestion of fussiness, the crying sin of both her parents. And then she turned to Isola, and measured her from head to foot. “It’s rather a pity you don’t hunt,” she said. “We had a splendid morning with the hounds.”

“Perhaps I may get a little hunting by-and-by, when my husband comes home.”

“Ah, but one can’t begin all at once; and this is a difficult country; breakneck hills, and nasty banks. Have you hunted much?”

“Hardly at all. I was out in a boar-hunt once, near Angers, but only as a looker-on. It was a grand sight. The Duke of Beaufort came over to Brittany on purpose to join in it.”

“How glorious a boar-hunt must be! I must get my father to take me to Angers next year. Do you know a great many people there?”

“No, only two or three professors at the college, and the Marquis de Querangal, the gentleman who has the boar-hounds. His daughter used to visit at Dinan, and she and I were great friends.”

“Lord Lostwithiel talked about boar-hunting the other night,” said Alicia. “It must be capital fun.” His name recurred in this way, whatever the conversation might be, with more certainty than Zero on the wheel at roulette.

He had been there in the evening, Isola thought. There had been a dinner-party, perhaps, at which he had been present. She had not long to wonder. The name once pronounced, the stream of talk flowed on. Yes, there had been a dinner, and Lord Lostwithiel had been delightful; so brilliant in conversation as compared with everybody else; so witty, so cynical, sofin de siècle.

“I didn’t hear him say anything very much out of the common,” said Mrs. Crowther, in her matter-of-fact way.

She liked having a nobleman or any other local magnate at her table; but she had too much common sense to behypnotized by his magnificence, and made to taste milk and water as Maronean wine.

“Do you know Lord Lostwithiel?” Belinda asked languidly, as Isola sipped her tea, sitting shyly in the broad glare of a colossal fireplace. “Oh yes, by-the-by, you met him here the week before last.”

Mrs. Disney blushed to the roots of those soft tendril-like curls which clustered about her forehead; but she said never a word. She had no occasion to tell them the history of that meeting in the rain, or of those many subsequent meetings which had drifted her into almost the familiarity of an old friendship. They might take credit to themselves for having made her acquainted with their star if they liked. She had seen plenty of smart people at Dinan in those sunny summer months when visitors came from Dinard to look at the old quiet inland city. Lostwithiel’s rank had no disturbing influence upon her mind. It was himself—something in his look and in his voice, in the mere touch of his hand—an indescribable something which of late had moved her in his presence, and made her faintly tremulous at the sound of his name.

He was announced while they were talking of him, and he seemed surprised to come suddenly upon that slim unobtrusive figure almost hidden by Belinda’s flowing garment and fuller form. Belinda was decidedly handsome—handsomer than an heiress need be; but she was also just a shade larger than an heiress need be at three and twenty. She was a Rubens’ beauty, expansive, florid, and fair, with reddish auburn hair piled on the top of her head. Sitting between this massive beauty and the still more massive chimney-piece, Mrs. Disney was completely hidden from the new arrival.

He discovered her suddenly while he was shaking hands with Belinda, and his quick glance of pleased surprise did not escape that young lady’s steely blue eyes. Not a look or a breath ever does escape observation in a village drawing-room. Even the intellectual people, the people whodevour all Mudie’s most solid books—travels, memoirs, metaphysics, agnostic novels—even these are as keenly interested in their neighbours’ thoughts and feelings as the unlettered rustic in the village street.

Lostwithiel took the proffered cup of tea, and planted himself near Mrs. Disney, with his back against the marble caryatid which bore up one-half of the chimney-piece. Alicia began to talk to him about his yacht. How were the repairs going on? and so on, and so on, delighted to air her technical knowledge. He answered her somewhat languidly, as if theVendettawere not first in his thoughts at this particular moment.

“What about this ball?” he asked presently. “You are all going to be there, of course?”

“Do you mean the hunt ball at Lostwithiel?”

“Of course! What other ball could I mean? It is the great festivity of these parts. The one tremendous event of the winter season. It was a grand idea of you new people to revive the old festivity, which had become a tradition. I wore my first dress coat at the Lostwithiel Hunt Ball nearly twenty years ago. I think it was there I first fell in love, with a young lady in pink tulle, who was miserable because she had been mistaken enough to wear pink at a hunt ball. I condoled with her, assured her that in my eyes she was lovely, although her gown clashed—that was her word, I remember—with the pink coats. My coat was not pink, and I believe she favoured me a little on that account. She gave me a good many waltzes in the course of the evening, and I can answer for her never wearing that pink frock again, for I trampled it to shreds. There were traces of her to be found all over the rooms, as if I had been Greenacre and she my victim’s body.”

“It will be rather a humdrum ball, I’m afraid,” said Belinda. “All the best people seem to be away.”

“Never mind that if the worst people can dance. I am on the committee, so I will answer for the supper and the champagne. You like a dry brand, of course, Miss Crowther?”

“I never touch wine of any kind.”

“No; then my chief virtue will be thrown away upon you. Are all young ladies blue-ribbonites nowadays, I wonder? Mrs. Disney, pray tell me you are interested in the champagne question.”

“I am not going to the ball.”

“Not going! Oh, but it is a duty which you owe to the county! Do you think because you are an alien and a foreigner you can flout our local gaieties—fleer at our solemnities? No, it is incumbent upon you to give us your support.”

“Yes, my dear, you must go to the ball,” put in Mrs. Crowther, in her motherly tone. “You are much too young and pretty to stay at home, like Cinderella, while we are all enjoying ourselves. Of course you must go. Mr. Crowther has put down his name for five and twenty tickets, and I’m sure there’ll be one to spare for you, although we shall have a large house-party.”

“Indeed, you are too kind, but I couldn’t think——” faltered Isola, with a distressed look.

She knew that Lostwithiel was watching her from his vantage ground ever so far above her head. A man of six feet two has considerable advantages at a billiard-table, and in a quiet flirtation carried on in public.

“If it is a chaperon you are thinking about, I’ll take care of you,” urged good Mrs. Crowther.

“No, it isn’t on that account. Mrs. Baynham offered to take me in her party. But I really would much rather not be there. It would seem horrid to me to be dancing in a great, dazzling room, among happy people, while Martin is in Burmah, perhaps in peril of his life on that very night. One can never tell. I often shudder at the thought of what may be happening to him while I am sitting quietly by the fire. And what should I feel at a ball?”

“I should hardly have expected you to have such romantic notions about Major Disney,” said Belinda, coolly, “considering the difference in your ages.”

“Do you suppose I care the less for him because he is twenty years older than I am?”

“Twenty! Is it really as much as that?” ejaculated Mrs. Crowther, unaffectedly shocked.

“He is just as dear to me,” pursued Isola, warmly. “I look up to him, and love him with all my heart. There never was a better, truer man. From the time I began to read history I always admired great soldiers. I don’t mean to say that Martin is a hero—only I know he is a thorough soldier—and he seemed to realize all my childish dreams.”

She had spoken impetuously, fancying that there was some slight towards her absent husband in Miss Crowther’s speech. Her flash of anger made a break in the conversation, and nothing more was said about her going or not going to the Hunt Ball. They talked of that entertainment in the abstract—discussed the floor—the lighting—the band—and the great people who might be induced to appear, if the proper pressure were put upon them.

“There is plenty of time,” said Lostwithiel, “between now and the twenty-second of December—nearly three weeks. Time for you and your sister to get new frocks from London or Paris, Miss Crowther. You mean having new frocks, I suppose?”

“One generally does have a new frock for a dance,” replied Belinda, “though the fashions this winter are so completely odious that I would much rather appear in a gown of my great-grandmother’s.”

Lostwithiel smiled his slow secret smile high up in the fainter firelight. He was reflecting upon his notion of Miss Crowther’s great-grandmother, in linsey-wolsey, with a lavender print apron, a costume that would be hardly impressive at a Hunt Ball. He did not give the young lady credit for a great-grandmother from the Society point of view. There was the mother yonder—inoffensive respectability—the grandmother would be humbler—and the great-grandmother he imagined at the wash-tub, or cooking the noontide meal for an artisan husband. He had never yetrealized the idea of numerous generations of middle-class life upon the same plane, the same dead level of prosperous commerce.

Isola rose to take leave, after having let her tea get cold, and dropped half her cake on the Persian rug. She felt shyer in that house than in any other. She had a feeling that there she was weighed in the balance and found wanting; that unfriendly eyes were scrutinizing her gloves and hat, and appraising her features and complexion. She felt herself insignificant, colourless, insipid beside that brilliant Miss Crowther, with her vivid beauty, and her self-assured airs and graces.

Tabitha urged her to be of good heart when she hinted at these feelings.

“Why, Lord have mercy upon us, ma’am, however grand they may all look, it’s nothing but wool—only wool; and I heard there used to be a good deal of devil’s dust mixed with it, after this Mr. Crowther came into the business.”

The dusk was thickening as she went along the short avenue which led to the gates. Mr. Crowther, having built his house in a wood, had been able to cut himself out a carriage drive, which gave him an avenue of more than two centuries’ growth, and thus imparted an air of spurious antiquity to his demesne. He felt, as he looked at the massive boles of those old Spanish chestnuts, as if he had belonged to the soil since the Commonwealth.

Even the lodge was an important building, Tudor on one side, and monastic on the other; with that agreeable hodge-podge of styles which the modern architect loveth. It was a better house than the curate lived in, as he often told Miss Crowther.

Isola quickened her pace outside that solemn gateway, and seemed to breathe more freely. She hurried even faster at the sound of a footstep behind her, though there was no need for nervous apprehensions at that early hour in the November evening on the high road between Fowey and Trelasco. Did she know that firm, quick footfall; or was it an instinctiveavoidance of an unknown danger which made her hurry on till her heart began to beat stormily, and her breath came in short gasps?

“My dear Mrs. Disney, do you usually walk as if for a wager?” asked a voice behind her. “I can generally get over the ground pretty fast, but it was as much as I could do to overtake you without running.”

He was not breathless, however. His tones were firm and tranquil. It was she who could scarcely speak.

“I’m afraid I am very late,” she answered nervously.

“For what? For afternoon tea by your own fireside? Have you anybody waiting for you at the Angler’s Nest, that you should be in such a hurry to get home?”

“No, there is no one waiting, except Tabitha. I expect no one.”

“Then why walk yourself into a fever?”

“Tabitha gets fidgety if I am out after dusk.”

“Then let Tabitha fidget! It will be good for her liver. Those adipose people require small worries to keep them in health. You mustn’t over-pace yourself to oblige Tabitha.”

She had slackened her steps, and he was walking by her side, looking down at her from that superb altitude which gave him an unfair advantage. How could she, upon her lower level, escape those searching glances?

She knew that her way home was his way home, so far as the bend of the road which led away from the river; and to avoid him for the intervening distance would have been difficult. She must submit to his company on the road, or make a greater effort than it was in her nature to make.

“You mean to go to this ball, don’t you?” he asked earnestly.

“I think not.”

“Oh, but pray do! Why should you shut yourself from all the pleasures of this world, and live like a nun, always? You might surely make just one exception for such a grand event as the Hunt Ball. You have no idea how much we all think of it hereabouts. Remember, it will be the first publicdance we have had at Lostwithiel for ever so many years. You will see family diamonds enough to make you fancy you are at St. James’s. Do you think Major Disney would dislike your having just one evening’s dissipation?”

“Oh no, he would not mind! He is only too kind and indulgent. He would have liked me to spend the winter with my sister in Hans Place, where there would have been gaieties of all kinds; but I don’t want to go into society while Martin is away. It would not make me happy.”

“But if it made some one else happy—if it made other people happy to see you there?”

“Oh, but it would not matter to anybody! I am a stranger in the land. People are only kind to me for my husband’s sake.”

“Your modesty becomes you as the dew becomes a rose. I won’t gainsay you—only be sure you will be missed if you don’t go to the ball. And if you do go—well, it will be an opportunity of making nice friends. It will be yourdébutin county society.”

“Without my husband? Please don’t say any more about it, Lord Lostwithiel. I had much rather stay at home.”

He changed the conversation instantly, asking her what she thought of Glenaveril.

“I think the situation most lovely.”

“Yes, there we are all agreed. Mr. Crowther had the good taste to find a charming site, and the bad taste to erect an architectural monstrosity, a chimera in red brick. There was a grange once in the heart of that wood, and the Crowthers have the advantage of acorns and chestnuts that sowed themselves while the sleepy old monks were telling their beads. How do you like Miss Crowther?”

“I hardly know her well enough to like or dislike her. She is very handsome.”

“So was Rubens’ wife, Helena Forman; but what would one do in a world peopled with Helena Formans? There are galleries in Antwerp which no man should enter without smoke-coloured spectacles, if he would avoid being blindedby a blaze of red-haired beauty. I am told that the Miss Crowthers will have, at least, a million of money between them in days to come, and that they are destined to make great matches. Perhaps we shall see some of theirsoupirantsat the ball. Since the decay of the landed interest, thechasse aux dotshas become fiercer than of old.”

This seemed to come strangely from him who had already been talked of as a possible candidate for one of the Miss Crowthers. It would be such a particularly suitable match, Mrs. Baynham, the doctor’s wife, had told Isola. What could his lordship look for beyond a fine fortune and a handsome wife?

“They would make such a splendid pair,” said Mrs. Baynham, talking of them as if they were carriage-horses.

Mrs. Disney and her companion crossed a narrow meadow, from the high road to the river-path which was the nearest way to the Angler’s Nest. The river went rippling by under the gathering grey of the November evening. On their right hand there was the gloom of dark woods: and from the meadow on their left rose a thick white mist, like a sea that threatened to swallow them up in its phantasmal tide. The sound of distant oars, dipping with rhythmical measure, was the only sound except their own voices.

Did that three-quarters of a mile seem longer or shorter than usual? Isola hardly knew; but when she saw the lights shining in Tabitha’s kitchen, and the fire-glow in the drawing-room, she was glad with the gladness of one who escapes from some fancied danger of ghosts or goblins.

Lostwithiel detained her at the gate.

“Good night,” he said; “good night. You will change your mind, won’t you, Mrs. Disney? It is not in one so gentle as you to be inflexible about such a trifle. Say that you will honour our ball.”

She drew herself up a little, as if in protest against his pertinacity.

“I really cannot understand why you should care whether I go or stay away,” she said coldly.

“Oh, but I do care! It is childish, perhaps, on my part, but I do care; I care tremendously; more than I have cared about anything for a long time. It is so small a thing on your part—it means so much for me! Say you will be there.”

“Is that you, ma’am?” asked Tabitha’s pleasant voice, while Tabitha’s substantial soles made themselves audible upon the gravel path. “I was beginning to get fidgety about you.”

“Good night,” said Isola, shortly, as she passed through the gate.

It shut with a sharp little click of the latch, and she vanished among the laurels and arbutus. He heard her voice and Tabitha’s as they walked towards the house in friendly conversation, mistress and maid.

There was a great over-blown Dijon rose nodding its heavy head over the fence. Roses linger so late in that soft western air. Lostwithiel plucked the flower, and pulled off its petals one by one as he walked towards the village street.

“Will she go—will she stay—go—stay—go—stay?” he muttered, as the petals fluttered to the ground.

“Go! Yes, of course she will go,” he said to himself as the last leaf fell. “Does it need ghost from the grave or rose from the garden to tell me that?”

CHAPTER IV.

“DREAMING, SHE KNEW IT WAS A DREAM.”

Isola and Lostwithiel met a good many times after that walk through the autumn mists. She tried her utmost to avoid him. She went for fewer walks than of old; nay, she chiefly confined her perambulations to those domestic errands which Tabitha imposed upon her, and such afternoon visits as she felt it incumbent upon her to pay, in strict return for visits paid to her. Major Disney had begged her to be exact in such small ceremonies, and to keep upon the best possible terms with his friends. “I loveevery soul in the place, for old sake’s sake,” he told her; and for old sake’s sake Isola had to cultivate the people her husband had known all his life.

She tried to avoid Lostwithiel, but Fate was against her, and they met. He was unvaryingly courteous. He said no word which could offend the most sensitive of women. Prudery itself could have had no ground for alarm. He did not again allude to the ball, or his wishes upon that point. He talked of those common topics of interest to which every day and every season give rise, even in a Cornish village; and yet in this common talk acquaintance ripened until it became friendship unawares. And then—as all sense of shyness and reserve upon Isola’s part gave way to a vague, reposeful feeling, like drifting down a sunlit river, with never a breath of chilling wind—they began to exchange confidences about their past lives. Unawares Martin Disney’s wife found herself entering into the minutest details about the people she had met on that level road of a monotonous girlhood by which she had come to be what she was. Unawares she betrayed all her feelings and opinions, her likes and dislikes, and even the little weaknesses and eccentricities of her parents—her sister—her wealthy brother-in-law. Never before had she found so good a listener. Her husband had been all affectionate interest in the things that concerned her; yet she had often discovered that his mind was wandering in the midst of some girlish reminiscence; and he had a tiresome trick of forgetting all those particulars about her friends which would have enabled him to distinguish the personages of a story. He had to be told everything afresh at each recurrence of those names that were so familiar to her. Nor had he Lostwithiel’s keen sense of humour, and quick perception of the ridiculous side of life, whereby many a small social sketch fell flat.

The glimpses she caught of her new friend’s past existence enthralled her. It was to see new vistas opening into unknown worlds; the world of university life; the world ofsociety, English and continental, with all its varieties of jargon; the world of politics, and literature, and art. It charmed him to see her interest in all those unknown things and people.

“You would very soon be tired of it, and would come back to Trelasco—like the hare to her form—or like me,” he said, smiling at her ardent look. “Believe me, it is all dust and ashes. My happiest hours have been on board a yacht, with only half a dozen good books, and ten or a dozen ignoramuses in blue serge for my companions.”

She was to go to the Hunt Ball after all; not because he wished it, but because other people had taken her affairs in hand, and decided that she should go. Dr. and Mrs. Baynham had decided for her. Mrs. Vansittart Crowther had decided for her, and had sent her a ticket with her love by that very footman whose appearance when he opened the door always crushed her, and who had given her a frightful shock when she danced into the kitchen to speak to Tabitha, and found him meekly sitting on a Windsor chair, with his knees drawn up nearly to his chin. Lastly, Tabitha had decided; and Tabitha’s opinion went for more than that of anybody else.

“You want a little bit of change and gaiety,” said the faithful stewardess. “You have been looking pale and worried ever since you had that bad news from Broomer,” this was Tabitha’s nearest approach to Burmah, “and you’ll be all the better for an evening’s pleasure. It isn’t as if you had to buy a dress, or even a pair of gloves. You’ve only worn your wedding-dress at three parties since you came home from your honeymoon, and it’s as fresh as if you’d been married yesterday. You’ve got everything, and everything of the best. Why shouldn’t you go?”

Isola could advance no reason, except her vague fear that her husband might not approve of her appearing at a public ball without him; but at this objection honest Tabitha snapped her fingers.

“I’ll answer for Mr. Martin,” she said. “He’ll be pleased for you to enjoy yourself. ‘Don’t let her mope while I’m away, Tabby,’ he said to me the day before he started for foreign parts. He’d like you to be at the ball. You’ll have Mrs. Baynham to take care of you, and what can you want more than that, I should like to know?”

Mrs. Baynham, the portly doctor’s wife, was, in Tabitha’s mind, the representative of all the respectabilities. How could a girl just out of her teens—a girl who loved dancing, and had been told she danced exquisitely—turn a deaf ear to such arguments, put forward by the person to whose care her husband had in some wise confided her. If Tabitha approved, Isola thought she could not do wrong in yielding; so the simply-fashioned white satin gown—made in Paris, and with all Parisianchic—was taken out of the pot-pourri perfumed drawer. Gloves and fan, and little white slippers were passed in review. There was nothing wanted. The carefullest housewife need not have hesitated on the score of economy.

So the question was finally settled—she was to go to the Hunt Ball. A fly was engaged for her especial service, so that she might not crowd Mrs. Baynham, who was to take two fresh, fat-cheeked nieces, who looked as if they had been fed from infancy upwards upon apple pasties and clotted cream. She was to drive to Lostwithiel in the fly from the Maypole Inn, and she was to join Mrs. Baynham in the cloak-room, and make her entrance under that lady’s wing.

This final decision was arrived at about ten days before the event, and for nine of those intervening days Isola’s life went by as if she were always sitting in that imaginary boat drifting down a sunlit river; but on the day of the dance, after just half an hour’s quiet walk with Lostwithiel on the towpath, she went back to the cottage pale as ashes; and sat down at her little davenport in the drawing-room, trembling, breathless, and on the verge of hysteria.

She opened the drawers of the davenport one after another, looking for something—helplessly, confusedly, as one whosebrain is half distraught. It was ten minutes before she found what she wanted—a sheaf of telegram forms.

“To Major Disney, Cornwall Fusiliers, Rangoon.—Let me go to you at once. I am miserable. My heart will break if you leave me here.”

This was the gist of a message which she wrote half a dozen times, in different words, upon half a dozen forms. Then she tore up all but the last, threw that into a drawer, and began to pace the room feverishly, with her hands clasped before her face.

What fever-fraught vision was it that those hands tried to shut out from her burning eyes? So little had happened—so little—only half an hour’s quiet walk along the towpath, where the leafless willows had a grim, uncanny look, like those trees whose old grey branches seemed the arms of the Erlking’s daughters, beckoning the child as he nestled in his father’s arms, riding through the night. So little—so little—and yet it meant the lifting of a veil—the passage from happy innocence to the full consciousness of an unholy love. It meant what one kiss on trembling lips meant for Paolo and Francesca. It meant the plunge into a gulf of dark despair—unless she had strength to draw back, seeing the abyss at her feet, warned of her danger.

What had he said? Only a few agitated words—only a revelation. He loved her, loved her with all the passion of his passionate soul; loved her as he had never loved before. They all tell the same story, these destroyers of innocence; and, for that one burning moment, they all mean what they say. Every seducer has his hour of sublime truthfulness; of generous feeling; of ardent heroic aspirations; the hour in which he would perish for the woman he loves; cut off his right hand; burn out his eyes; leap off a monument; do anything except surrender her, except forego his privilege to destroy her.

It was not too late. The warning had come in time—just in time to save her. She knew now to what ocean that drifting boat was carrying her—through the sunny atmosphere, between the flowery shores of dreamland. It was taking her to the arctic ocean of shame and ruin—the great sea strewn with the corpses of women who had sinned, and suffered, and repented, and died—unforgiven of mankind—to wait the tribunal of God.

“Oh, lor!” cried Tabitha, bursting into the room. “I thought you were never coming home. You ought to go and lay down for two or three hours after your tea, or we shall have you fainting away before the night’s over. You’ve not been eating enough for a healthy canary bird for the last week.”

“I’m not very well, Tabbie. I don’t think I’ll go to the ball.”

“Not go! and when the fly’s ordered—and will have to be paid for whether or no; for Masters told me he could have let it twelve deep. Not go! and disappoint Mrs. Baynham, who has set her heart on taking you; and Mrs. Crowther, who gave you the ticket! Why, it would never do! You’ll feel well enough when you’re there. You won’t know whether you’re standing on your head or your heels. It’s past five o’clock, and your tea has been ready in the study since a quarter to.”

“How do you send telegrams to India, Tabitha?”

“Lor, ma’am, how should I know? From the post-office, I suppose, pretty much like other telegrams. But they cost no end of money, I’ll be bound. You’re not wanting to send a telegram to the major, are you, ma’am, to ask his leave about the ball?”

“No; I was only wondering,” Isola answered feebly.

She shut and locked the davenport, leaving her message in the drawer. She meant to send it—if not to-day, to-morrow; if not before the ball, after the ball. She felt that her only hope of peace and safety and a clear conscience was at her husband’s side. She must go out to him yonder in the unknown land. She must get to him somehow, with or without his leave—with or without his help. She wouldbrave anything, hazard anything to be with that faithful friend and defender—her first love—her brave, self-denying, God-fearing lover. She felt as if there were no other safety or shelter for her in all the world.

“God will not help me unless I help myself,” she muttered distractedly, as she sat in her low chair by the fire, with her head flung back upon the cushions and the untouched meal at her side. Tabitha had left off providing dinner for her, at her particular request. She had neither heart to sit down alone to a formal dinner nor appetite to eat it; so Tabitha had exercised all her skill as a cook, which was great, in preparing a dainty little supper at nine o’clock; and it had irked her that her mistress did such scant justice to the tempting meal.

Isola fell asleep by the fire, comforted by the warmth, worn out by nights that had been made sleepless by vague agitation—by the living over again of accidental meetings, and friendly conversations—not by fear or remorse—for it was only this day that the danger of that growing friendship had been revealed to her. It was only to-day that she knew what such friendships mean. She slept a feverish sleep, from sheer exhaustion, and dreamt fever-dreams.

Those willows on the bank had recalled Goethe’s “Erl König”—the ballad she had learnt by rote in her earliest German studies—and the willows and the ballad were interwoven with her dreams. It was Martin Disney who was riding his charger along a dark road, and she was sitting in front of his saddle, clinging to him, hiding her face upon his breast, and the willows were beckoning—she knew those gaunt arms were beckoning to her, although her eyes were hidden—andhewas following. He was thundering behind them, on a black horse. Yes, and then the dream changed—the dreamer’s wandering thoughts directed by another reminiscence of those girlish studies in German poetry. She was Lenore, and she was in the arms of her dead lover. She felt that bony arm—Death’s arm—clutching her round the waist. Her streaming hair mingled with the streamingmane of that unearthly horse. She was with Lostwithiel—in his arms—and they were both dead and both happy—happy in being together. What did they want more than that?

“Vollbracht, vollbracht ist unser Lauf!Das Hochzeitbette, thut sich auf!Die Todten reiten schnelle!Wir sind, wir sind, zur Stelle.”

She woke with the chill of the charnel-house freezing her blood. The fire had gone out. Tim had curled himself at her feet in the folds of her gown. The Persian was staring discontentedly at the ashes in the grate, and Tabitha’s sturdy footsteps might be heard in the room above, bustling to and fro, and anon poking the fire, and putting on coals, making all snug and ready for her mistress’s toilet.

Isola rang, and Susan, the parlour-maid, brought in the lamp.

“I came twice before, ma’am; but you were fast asleep, so I took the lamp back to the pantry.”

Isola looked at the clock. Ten minutes to nine, and she was to meet Mrs. Baynham in the cloak-room at half-past ten. Ten o’clock was the hour on the card, and the fat-faced nieces were feverishly afraid that all the eligible partners would be snapped up by those wise virgins who appeared earliest on the scene.

“You won’t keep us waiting in the cloak-room, will you, dear Mrs. Disney?” they pleaded coaxingly.

Was she to put on her finery and go! There would be time yet to send a note to Mrs. Baynham, excusing herself on the score of illness. The doctor’s party would not start before half-past nine. What was she to do? Oh, she wanted to see him once more—just once more—in the brightly-lighted rooms, amidst a crowd—in a place where he would have no chance of repeating those wicked, wicked words—of forgetting all that was due to his own honour and to hers. In the crowded ball-room there would besafety—safety even from evil thoughts. Who could think of anything amidst the sound of dance music, the dazzle of lamps and flashing of jewels?

She wanted to go to the ball, to wear her satin gown, to steep herself in light and music; and thus to escape from the dim horrors of that awful dream.

Tabitha seemed like a good angel, when she came in at this juncture with a fresh cup of tea and a plate of dainty little chicken sandwiches.

“Come now, ma’am, I shan’t let you go to the ball if you don’t take these. What, not a bit of fire—and you asleep here in the cold? What was that addle-pated Susan thinking about, I wonder? I’ll take the tray upstairs. There’s a lovely fire in your room, and everything ready for you to dress. I want to be able to tell Mr. Martin that his young wife was the belle of the ball.”

Isola allowed herself to be led upstairs to the bright, cheerful bedroom, with its pretty chintz-pattern paper, and photographs, and artistic muslin curtains, and glowing fire, and toilet-table, with its glitter of crystal and silver in the pleasant candlelight. She suffered herself to be fed and dressed by Tabitha’s skilful hands, almost as if she had been a child; and she came out of her dismal dream into the glad waking world, a radiant figure, with violet eyes and alabaster complexion, flushed by the loveliest hectic. The simply-made, close-fitting bodice, with folded crape veiling the delicate bust, and the pure pearly tint of the satin, set off her fragile beauty, while the long train and massive folds of the rich fabric gave statuesque grace to her tall, slim figure; but the crowning glory of her toilette was the garland of white chrysanthemums, for which Tabitha had ransacked all the neighbouring green-houses; a garland of fluffy, feathery petals, which reached in a diagonal line from her shoulder to the hem of her gown. It was her only ornament, for by some strange caprice she refused to wear the modest pearl necklace and diamond cross which had been her husband’s wedding gift.

“Not to-night, Tabbie,” she said; and Tabitha saw in this refusal only the coquetry of a lovely woman, who wanted to show the great ladies and squire’s wives how poor and common diamonds are by the side of youth and beauty.

“Well, you don’t want any jewels, certainly,” said Tabitha. “You look as if you were going to be married—all but the veil. Those chrysanthemums are ever so much prettier than orange blossoms. There’s the fly. Let me put on your cloak. It’s a beautiful night, and almost as mild as May. Everybody will be at the ball. There’s nothing to keep folks away. Well, I do wish the major was here to go with you. Wouldn’t he be proud?”

The stars were shining when Isola went along the gravel path to the gate where Masters’ fly was waiting, with blazing lamps, which seemed to put those luminous worlds yonder to shame. There was no carriage-drive to the hall door of the Angler’s Nest. The house retained all its ancient simplicity, and ignored the necessities of carriage people. Tabitha wrapped her mistress’s fur-lined cloak close round her, before she stepped into the fly, which was provided with those elaborate steps that seem peculiar to the hired brougham.

“Good night, Tabitha, and thank you for all the pains you’ve taken in dressing me—and for the lovely wreath. I shall come home early. I shan’t wait for Mrs. Baynham’s party.”

“Don’t you hurry,” said Tabitha, heartily. “The Hunt Ball only comes once a year, and you’d better make the most of it. I shan’t mind sitting up; and perhaps I shan’t be half so dull as you think for.”

The flyman shut the door, which nobody but himself could shut—another peculiarity of hired broughams. The fly vanished in the darkness, and Tabitha ran back to the house, where she found Susan waiting at the hall door in her jacket and hat, as near a reproduction of Mrs. Disney’s jacket and hat as local circumstances—or the difference between Bond Street and Lostwithiel—would allow.

“Have you locked and bolted the back doors?” askedTabitha; “but, lor, I’ll go and look myself; I won’t trust to your giddy young brains. Mr. Tinkerly will be here with the cart directly. I’ve only got to put on my bonnet and dolman, after I’ve taken a look round, and put away Mrs. Disney’s jewel-box.”

Tabitha was no light-minded housekeeper, but she had her hours of frivolity, and she loved pleasure with the innocent freshness of a most transparent soul. Tinkerly, the butcher, had offered to drive the two ladies—Tabitha and Susan—into Lostwithiel in his tax cart, and, furthermore, to place them where they would see something of the ball, or at least of the company arriving and departing, and beyond all this to give them a snack of supper, “Just something to bite at and a glass of beer,” he told Tabitha deprecatingly, lest he should raise hopes beyond his power of realization.

He meant to do the thing as handsomely as circumstances would permit, certainly to the extent of cold boiled beef and pickles, with Guinness or Bass. He was a family man, of irreproachable respectability, and his meat was supposed to be unmatchable for thirty miles round. He grew it himself, upon those picturesque pastures which sloped skyward, dipping towards the blue of the river, rising towards the blue of the sky.

No precaution of lock, bolt, or bar did Tabitha neglect before she put on her best bonnet, and dignified black cloth dolman, heavy with imitation Astrachan. She and Susan were standing at the gate when Tinkerly drove up with his skittish mare and spring cart, a cart so springy that it threatened to heel over altogether when Tabitha clambered into the place of honour. Mr. Tinkerly’s foreman was sitting behind to take care of Susan, and the foreman was unmarried, and of a greasy black-haired comeliness, and there was none happier than Susan under those wintry stars—not even the great ladies in their family diamonds.

“What are diamonds,” said Susan, philosophically, with the foreman’s arm sustaining her at a sharp turn in the road, “if you don’t care for each other?”

CHAPTER V.

“AND THE CHILD-CHEEK BLUSHING SCARLET FOR THE VERY SHAME OF BLISS.”

People who were familiar with the Talbot Hotel, Lostwithiel, in its everyday aspect would hardly have recognized the old-fashioned hostelry to-night, under the transforming hand of the Hunt Club, with Lord Lostwithiel and Vansittart Crowther on the committee. The entrance hall, usually remarkable only for various cases of stuffed birds, and a monster salmon—caught in the Lerrin river in some remote period of history—was now a bower of crimson cloth and white azaleas. In the ball-room and ante-room, tea-room and supper-room, were more flowers, and more crimson cloth, while on every side brushes and vizards against the crimson and white panelling testified to the occasion. The dancing-room was very full when Mrs. Baynham’s party made their entrance, the matron in her historical black velvet—which had formed part of her trousseau thirteen years before, when she left the family residence in the chief street of Truro, and all those privileges which appertained to her as the only daughter of a provincial banker, to grace Dr. Baynham’s lowlier dwelling. The black velvet gown had been “let out” from time to time, as youth expanded into maturity: and there had been a new bodice and a real Maltese lace flounce within the last three years, which constituted a second incarnation; and Mrs. Baynham walked into the Talbot ball-room with the serene demeanour that goes with a contented mind. She was satisfied with herself, and she was proud of her party, the two fresh, rosy-cheeked girls in sky-blue tulle, Isola, looking like a Mary lily in her white satin raiment, and the village surgeon, who always looked his best in his dress clothes, newly-shaven, and, as it were, pulled together in honour of the occasion.

The room was full, and very full; but Lostwithiel was not there. Isola had an instinctive consciousness that he wasmissing in that brilliant crowd. People came buzzing round her, and she was made room for upon a raised bench opposite the gallery where a military band was playing a polka in which the brasses predominated to an ear-splitting extent.

The Glenaveril party made their entrance ten minutes later. The Crowther girls were not afraid of wanting partners. Most young men are glad to dance with half a million of money. There is always an off chance of a good thing, just as there is a chance of breaking the bank at Monte Carlo. Belinda looked superb in a cloud of tulle, like a goddess. Alicia looked too well on horseback to look well off. Her spare straight figure and sharp elbows were not at their best in evening dress. She wore black, and an infinity of bugles, and flashed and glittered more than any one else in the room, though she wore never a jewel.

“Worth, my dear,” said Mrs. Baynham to a blue niece, in a mysterious whisper; “I know his style.”

There was a buzz of conversation on that raised divan where the matrons were sitting with those newly arrived maidens who were like ships waiting to slide out of their cradles and float away to sea. Isola and the sky-blue nieces had not long to wait; especially Isola. Men were entreating the stewards to introduce them to that lovely fragile-looking creature in white satin—the best men in the neighbourhood, or those wandering stars from distant counties, or the London galaxy, “men with handles to their names,” as Mr. Baynham told Mrs. Crowther, resplendent in salmon brocade, and Venetian point.

“My presentation gown,” she informed the doctor’s wife; “the Court mantle is ruby velvet, lined with salmon satin. The weight of it almost pulled me backwards when I curtsied to the royalties—such a lot of them, and I’m afraid I curtsied rather too low to one of the Princesses, for I caught her taking me off when she returned my curtsy.”

Isola danced through the lancers as one in a dream. When the heart of a man is oppressed with care, “Ta-rarra, ta-rarra, ta-rà, ta-rà!” What foolishness it all seemed.And her husband in Burmah, hemmed round by murderous dacoits!

She went back to her seat among the matrons, after almost curtly refusing either refreshment or a promenade through the rooms. Mrs. Crowther was saying solemnly, “I do believe Lord Lostwithiel is not coming after all, and yet he worked so hard on the committee, my husband said, and took such pains about the flowers, and what not.”

The tall, slim figure cut its way through the crowd two or three minutes later, and Lostwithiel was standing in front of Isola, and the two matrons.

He wore a pink coat, as became a member of the Lostwithiel Hunt, and the vivid colour accentuated the pallor of his long thin face. He talked to all the ladies on the divan; to the sky-blue nieces even, hoping that their cards were full.

“If not, I must bring you some men I know,” he said. “You mustn’t miss a dance.”

They blushed and trembled with delight, never before having been thus familiarly addressed by a peer of the realm. He asked Isola for her programme, with well-simulated indifference, yet with that air of profound respect with which he talked to all women.

“I hope you can spare me some waltzes,” he said.

“She is only just come,” said Mrs. Baynham.

“And yet her card is almost full. People have been very officious. Here is a poor little waltz—number seven. May I have that, and number eleven, and number——”

“Please don’t put down your name for anything later than number eleven. I shall be gone long before those late dances.”

“Oh, surely, you don’t mean to desert us early. Remember this is the one festive occasion of our lives as a sporting community. All our other meetings are given up to carking care, financial difficulties, and squabbling. I shall put down my name in these tempting blanks, and if you disappoint me—well—it will only be like my previous experiences as a fox-hunter.”

He gave her back her programme, with all the blanks filled in, and at the bottom a word written, and triply underscored,

ἉΝΑΓΚΗ.

They had talked of Victor Hugo’s romantic story—that romance which the great man so despised in after years that he was almost offended if any one presumed to praise it in his hearing, although in the half-century that has gone since Victor Hugo was a young man this story of Notre Dame has been unsurpassed as an example of the romantic novel. Lostwithiel had praised the book, and had talked of the monk Frollo, and his fatal love—and that word Fatality, graven upon the wall of his cell, and burnt into his soul.

Isola knew what those Greek letters meant. She dropped the little white and gold programme as if it had been an adder. He went away to a duty dance with a great lady of the district—a lady whose diamonds made a light about her wherever she moved; and then he waltzed with Belinda Crowther, to the admiration of the young lady’s mother, and of two or three other matrons on the divan by the door. Were they not a splendid couple, she so brilliantly fair, he dark and pale, bronzed slightly with exposure to the sun in warmer climates than this—not positively handsome, but with such an interesting countenance. So, and so, and so prosed the matrons, until various middle-aged cavaliers came to invite them to the tea-room, where there was the usual drawback in the shape of a frightful draught from open windows, which the dancers, coming in flushed and heated, voted delicious.

“This will be a good night’s work for me,” said Dr. Baynham, cheerfully, although he considered it his duty to warn his patients of their danger.

Conscience thus satisfied, he could look on complacently as they eat ices, and selected cool corners of the refreshment-room to flirt in.

“Next to a juvenile party, I don’t know anything better—from a professional point of view—than a public ball,” hesaid. “Your canvas corridors, decorated with flowers and bunting, are a fortune to a family practitioner.”

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