CHAPTER XX

'"Dearest, bury meUnder that holy oak, or gospel tree,Where, though thou seest not, thou may'st think uponMe, when thou yearly go'st procession;Or, for mine honour, lay me in that tombIn which thy sacred reliques shall have roomFor my embalming, sweetest——"'

'Good heavens, Peggy!'

Some slight rustle of her gown must have betrayed her neighbourhood. The lovers both spring to their feet; and for a moment all three young people stand silently eyeing each other. Prue's hot roses have vanished, but they have not travelled far. It is perhaps a sign that there is still some grace left in him, that they are now transplanted to Freddy's cheeks. Margaret is the first to speak.

'I am here to take you home, Prue,' she says in a low grave voice. 'Are you ready?'

'Come, Peggy dear!' cries the young man, recovering his complexion and hisaplomb, never very far out of reach; 'you need not look so tragic!—you quite frighten us! Do not scold her much,' laying a coaxing hand on Peggy's arm; 'I have scolded her well myself already.'

'You!'

There is such a depth of contempt in this one monosyllable, and it is so elucidated—if indeed it needed elucidation—by the handsome lightning of her eye, that Freddy's colour again changes.

'I was coming home. I should have come home by the next train,' falters Prue, hanging her head; and as this tremulous explanation is received by her sister in a sorrowful silence, she adds with passionate eagerness, 'He was ill, really—very ill. It was not pretence—he was really ill.'

'No doubt,' replies Peggy, in withering quotation from Freddy's own billet; '"the whole head was sick, and the whole heart faint."'

Not vouchsafing him another word or look, she takes her sister's unresisting arm, and leads her away. Without exchanging a syllable, they reach St. Aldate's. Then Peggy hails a hansom, and bids the cabman drive as quickly as he can to the G. W. station. But both her injunctions and his speed are vain. They gallop up only to find the train, reduced by distance to a small puff of smoke, steaming unattainably northwards. There is not a second one for another hour and a half. There is nothing for it but to wait. After all, as Peggy reflects with some bitterness, they are not returning to such a very happy home that they need be in any scrambling hurry to get there.

In mid-October the days are already beginning to close in early, and even before the light goes there comes a sharpness into the air. It is blowing chilly through the draughty station now. Peggy looks apprehensively at Prue. Neither of them have had the forethought to bring any wraps with them. Prue is shivering in a thin summer jacket; her face looks weary, drawn, and cold.

'Had not you better go and rest in the waiting-room?' asks Margaret solicitously, addressing her for the first time, as she takes off her own cloak and wraps it round her.

'Yes, if you wish. I do not mind,' replies Prue apathetically.

When she has been settled in the warmest corner, and her vitality raised a little by a cup of hot tea, Peggy leaves her.There is a painful irksomeness in her company that makes Peggy prefer to it even a silent and solitary march up and down the platform, each footstep beating time to some heavy thought. Her march is not destined to be solitary for long, however. Before she has taken three turns a soft young voice with an intonation of excessive deprecation sounds at her elbow:

'May I take a stroll with you, dear?'

She does not deign him one syllable in answer, but walks along as before, looking straight ahead. He sighs patiently.

'When you come to think it over, dear, I am sure you will acknowledge that you are unjust. I can perfectly see your side of the question. I think that one ought always to try to see both sides; but whether you believe me or not, I can assure you that I never was more horrified in my life than I was this morning, when poor Prue walked in.'

And for once, at all events, Freddy speaks truth.

'Then why,' cries Peggy, blazing around upon him, 'did you write and tell her you were dying? Why did you ask her to come and "lay her little cold white hand upon your burning brow"?'

Freddy winces; and the tone of his charming cheeks rises several degrees.

'I do not quite know, dear, how you justify to yourself the reading of other people's letters,' he says sweetly; 'but if you must quote me, I had rather that you did it correctly.'

'Do you mean to say,' cries she, turning her great honest eyes and her indignant rose face full upon him, 'that you didnotask her to "lay her little cold white hand upon——"'

'Oh, you need not say it all over again,' says Freddy, writhing. 'How dreadful it sounds, hammered out in that brutal voice! What a knack you have, Peggy, of turning everything into prose! I did notaskher to lay her hand upon my forehead; I said I should like it. SoI should; so would you, if your head had been as hot as mine was yesterday.' He pauses; but Peggy has no biting rejoinder to make. 'If I had for a moment supposed,' continues Freddy, 'that poor Prue would have taken itau pied de la lettre, I would have cut off my right hand before I would have written it. It is always so much less painful,' he adds thoughtfully, 'to hurt one's self than to hurt any one else.'

But Margaret does not seem much disarmed by this touching sentiment.

'If you did not want her to come, why did you write her that silly letter?' she asks doggedly.

Again Freddy changes colour.

'As I before observed, Peggy dear,' he answers, with some symptoms of exasperation in his soft voice, 'I do not think it would be a bad plan if you confined yourself to your own correspondence.'

The girl's face flushes as much as his own has done.

'Prue left it for me to read,' she says coldly and proudly. After a pause, drawing a long resolute breath, 'Well, next time that you are dying, you will have to look out for some other hand to cool your burning brow; for Prue's will be beyond your reach.'

'So it was now,' rejoins Freddy, showing symptoms of an inclination to lapse into levity. 'Poor Prue! she would have had to make a long arm from the Red House here.'

'As soon as I get home,' continues Peggy, annoyed by, and yet not deigning to notice, his frivolous interpellation, 'I shall put the house into the hands of a house-agent. There is nothing left us—you have left us nothing but to go!'

'To go! Where?'

She shrugs her shoulders dispiritedly.

'I do not know—somewhere—anywhere—out of this misery.'

Her whole attitude and accent speak so deep a despondency that Freddy's tendency to gaiety disappears. He feels thoroughly uncomfortable; he wishes he had not come. He would like exceedingly to slip away even now; but unfortunately it is impossible.

'My dearest Peg,' he cries, in a very feeling voice, 'you break my heart! You are always so self-sufficing, so apt to rebut sympathy, that one hardly likes to offer it; but if——'

'Sympathy!' she repeats, with a scornful lip that yet trembles; 'sympathyfromyou, who are the cause of all my wretchedness?'

'I?'

'Yes, you!' turning upon him with gathering passion—a passion that is yet not loud in its utterance; that passes unobserved by the few listeners about the station. 'Have not you eyes to see that you are killing her? You might have set yourself a task that would do your philanthropy more credit than breaking an old friend's heart—than turning a poor little childish head.'

Her voice wavers as she utters the last few words, and she stops abruptly. Perhaps it is by accident that Freddy's eye strays furtively to that spot on the platform where 'Way Out' is legibly inscribed.

'When you talk of "childish,"' he says, in an extremely pained tone, yet one of gentle remonstrance, 'you seem to forget that I am not so very old myself. You talk to me as if I were a hoary-headed old sinner. Do you remember that I shall not be twenty-one till Christmas?' She looks at him with a sort of despair. What he says is perfectly true. It seems ludicrous to arraign this pink and white boy as guilty of the tragedy of her own and Prue's lives. 'I assure you, dear,' he says, in a very caressing tone, drawing a little nearer to her side, 'I often have to tell myself that I am grown up; I am so apt to forget it.'Then, as she is silent, he goes on, 'It would make our relations so much easier, Peggy, if I could get you to believe in me a little—mutual confidence is so much the highest and wholesomest basis for human relations. I think we ought all to try and trust one another; will not you'—edging nearer still, and dropping his voice to a very persuasive whisper—'will not you trust me a little?'

Peggy has heard that whisper many times before; has heard it beguiling her into frequent concessions that her judgment has disapproved. It is therefore with a very unbelieving, even if half-relenting, voice that she asks:

'How much the better shall I be if I do?'

'It makes things so much easier if one feels that one is believed in,' he says touchingly, if a little coaxingly. 'Oh, Peggy dear, will not you believe in me? Will not you trust me a little? Will not you wait—wait till I have taken my degree?Thenyou shall see!'

In his eagerness he has seized her hand, unmindful of the publicity of the place; and she, unmindful of it also, is poring in disconsolate anxiety upon his features to see if they look as if he were for once speaking the truth.

'Seewhat?' she asks drily; but he apparently does not hear the direct question.

'And you will not let the Red House?' he pursues coaxingly. 'That was only a threat, was not it? Of course, I can perfectly understand your irritation; but you will not let it? Dear little house! if you only knew what a sacred spot it is to me! And you yourself, Peggy—why, you are like a limpet on your rock. You would be miserable anywhere else.'

'Thanks to you, I am miserable there too,' replies she bitterly.

She has withdrawn her hand sharply from him; and they now again walk side by side along the platform, begun to be lit up for the evening traffic.

'I think,' says Freddy reproachfully, 'that if you at all gauged the amount of pain that those sort of speeches inflicted, you would be less lavish of them.' As she makes no sort of rejoinder, he continues, with a heavy sigh, 'Where shall you go? Where shall you take her?'

'That can be no concern of yours,' replies she brusquely. 'It will at all events be beyond your pursuit.'

The moment that the word is out of her mouth she sees that it is an unfortunate one; and, by the light of a gas-lamp which they are at that moment passing, she detects on Freddy's face a curious smile, which denotes the perception in him of a certain humorousness in the present employment of that particular noun.

In this case it is certainly not he that is the pursuer. The station is growing fuller; a train must be expected; not Peggy's, unfortunately, which is still not nearly due. A good many undergraduates have appeared on the platform; several recognise Freddy, and look curiously at his companion. Whether it be their scrutiny that annoys her, or the consciousness of the unlucky character of her last phrase that gives added bitterness to her tone, it is with some asperity that she makes her next observation:

'I hope you are not going to stay to see me off! I had very much rather that you did not.'

'Of course I will notforcemy society upon you,' replies Freddy in a melancholy voice, under which, however, Margaret fancies that she detects a lurking alacrity; 'however much it may cost me, I will go at once, if you bid me.'

'Then I do bid you,' she answers curtly.

'And you—you will not do anything rash?' he says, looking extremely wheedling, and sinking his voice to a coaxing whisper. 'You will let things go on just as they are for a—for a little while? You—you will trust me?'

Her only answer is a derisive laugh.

'You—you will not decide in a hurry; you will take time to consider?' he pursues, with an agitation that seems genuine, following her, for she has already begun resolutely to walk away from him towards the waiting-room. 'You will—you will do nothingrash?'

'I do not know what you call rash. I shall write to the agent to-morrow.'

'You will not!' cries he, keeping up with her, and trying to retard her progress. 'You could not be so inhuman. I know that it is a matter of absolute indifference to you what suffering you inflict upon me, but,' with a tremble in his voice, 'you cannot, you must not hurt Prue!'

Again she gives that withering laugh.

'No, certainly not! I should not think of it; I leave that to you! Good-bye!'

So saying she disappears determinedly from his vision within the waiting-room door.

There is nothing left for him but to take the tears out of his smile and the tremor out of his voice, and walk away.

Peggy is as good as her word. On the very next morning she writes, as she had announced that she would, to the local house-agent, putting the dear little Red House into his hands. The deed is done. The letter lies with others in the bag, awaiting the postman; and Peggy goes out of doors to try and dissipate the deep sadness in which her own deed, and much more its causes, have steeped her. Into the garden first, but she does not remain there long. It is too full of pain. Though it is mid-October, the frost has still spared many flowers. There is still lingering mignonette; plenty of Japanese anemones, their pure white faces pearled with the heavy autumn dew; single dahlias also, variously bright. It would have been easier to walk among them with that farewell feeling had the mignonette lain sodden and dead, and the dahlias beenfrost-shrivelled up into black sticks. But no! they still lift their gay cheeks to the kiss of the crisp air.

How much longer we lure our flowers into staying with us than we did twenty years ago! Perhaps by and by we shall wile them into not leaving us at all.

To distract her thoughts from her sad musings Peggy begins to talk to Jacob; but even he adds his unconscious stab to those already planted in her heart. He can talk of nothing but next summer. To escape from him she leaves the garden, and passes out into the road. She walks purposelessly about the lanes, careless of the splendour of their brambles. She meets a detachment of Evanses blackberry-laden, their plain faces smeared with blackberry juice. They stop her to brag of their booty, and tell her that she must come blackberrying with them next year.Next yearindeed!

She throws a friendly word of greeting across the hedge to a cottager digging up his potatoes. He tells her they are very bad, but he hopes she will see them better next year. She looks in at a farm to 'change the weather' with a civil farmer's wife, who shows her her chicken-yard, and volunteers a neighbourly hope that she will be able to give her a setting of game-fowl's eggs next summer. They seem to havese donné le motto tease her with their 'next summer.'

She strays disconsolately home again to the little spoilt house, only six months ago so innocently gay, so serenely content, before Freddy came to lay its small joys in ashes. Can it be because she is thinking of him that she seems to see his wavy-haired head lying back in its old attitude on the bench under the Judas-tree, with another head in close proximity to it? She quickens her steps, but long before she can reach the rustic seat Prue has fled to meet her with a cry of joy.

At this now unfamiliar sign of welcoming poor Peggy'sheart leaps for a moment up. Can it indeed be she that Prue is so glad to see? But is this indeed Prue? this radiant, transfigured creature, laughing, though her eyes are brimming with divinely happy tears?

'Oh, Peggy, where have you been?' cries the young girl, throwing her arms almost hysterically round her sister's neck; 'I thought you were never coming! I have been longing to tell you! Who was right? Who knew him best? Did not I say it would be all right? No! do not keep me! He will tell you!'

And away she speeds into the house, with Mink yapping his congratulations at her heels, and the parrot rapping out a friendly oath in Sarah's voice at her from the hall window as she passes him.

In an agitation hardly inferior to Prue's, Margaret advances to meet the young man, who has risen gracefully from his lounge, and is coming to meet her.

'What does she mean by saying it is all right?' asks Margaret sternly, and breathing quickly.

'It is very kind of dear Prue to put it that way,' replies he quietly. 'I suppose she means that I have asked her to be my wife. I have run over from Oxford on purpose, without leave, and shall probably be sent down for it. There is something a little comic, is not there, Peg,' breaking into an ungovernable smile, 'in the idea of my having a wife? Does it remind you at all of "Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn"? Well, dear!' lapsing into a pensive and quasi reproachful gravity, 'you see, you might have trusted me! Be not afraid; only believe!'

The autumn is throwing down its red and amber tributes before other feet besides Margaret's; before Betty's, before Talbot's. It does not, however, rain the same shower on both. Betty's famed chestnuts supply no leaf for Talbot's tread. For the first time for five years Harborough Castle gets no share in John Talbot's autumn holiday. This is more through his misfortune than his fault, as Betty, though with angry, thwarted tears, is compelled to allow. From the visit to which after leaving the Manor he had betaken himself, he had been recalled to London with peremptory prematureness by a telegram. A crisis in public affairs—an unlooked-for and unpleasant turn in foreign politics has reft his chief—to that great man's unaffected disgust—from his thymy forest and his amethyst moor back to the barren solitudes of Downing Street. It has kept, if not the big, at least the lesser man bound hand and foot there until the opening of the autumn session, which in any case, even if he had not been defrauded of his legitimate playtime, would have summoned him back to harness. So that Talbot sees no red leaves except those which St. James's Park can show him. To a country-hearted man you would think that this would be a great privation; but this year John is glad of it. To him the country must henceforth mean Harborough. If he has no holiday, he need not, he cannot go to Harborough; and in his heart he says that the loss is well bought by the gain. It is true that Betty has, on variouspretexts, run up several times to see him; that he has had to take her to the play; to give his opinion upon her new clothes; to sit on the old low seat beside the old sofa, in the old obscurity of the boudoir, without the old heart. She has even, contrary to his advice, and very much against his wishes, insisted on coming to tea with him in his rooms in Bury Street; and, as a matter of course, has expected him to see her off at Paddington. But on the whole he feels, as he speeds back in a hansom—this last duty punctually done—drawing an unintentional sigh of relief as he does so, that he has got through it pretty well. He has provoked not much anger, and, thank God, no tears. Thank God a hundred times more, too, that he has been miraculously spared any fleers at that other woman, towards whom, perhaps, the completeness of his lady's victory may have rendered her magnanimous. And that other woman! Well, he lets her image tease him as little as he can help it. Whether that is much or little, he himself scarcely knows. Sometimes again he does know, knows that it is infinitely much. But that is only now and then, when some trifling accident has given him a tiny momentary glimpse, such as outsiders often catch, at some keen happinessà deux; some two happy souls together blent,

'As the roseBlendeth in odour with the violet;Solution sweet.'

Then, indeed, he catches his breath with the sharpness of the pain that runs through his lonely heart, saying to himself, before his will can arrest and strangle the lovely, useless thought, 'That might have been Peggy and I.' But this, as I have said, is only now and again. As a matter of fact, his life is too full of genuine continuous hard work, too throbbing with great excitements, too full of the large fever of to-day's hot politics, to have much space for the cherishing of any merely personal ache.Sometimes for a whole day together he keeps his heart's door triumphantly barred against her. For a day—yes; but at night, willy-nilly, she lifts the latch, and cool and tall walks in. In the night she has her revenge. In the day he may think of nations clashing, of party invectives, of discordant Cabinets, and Utopian Reforms; but at night he thinks of Mink, and of the little finches swinging and twittering onhisladder; of the mowing-machine's whir, and the pallid sweet lavender bush.

As the winter nears, and such considerable and growing portion of the world as spend some part at least of the cold season in London, refill their houses, he goes a good deal into society, and when there he seems to enjoy himself. How can each woman to whom he offers his pleasant, easy civilities know that he is saying to his own heart as he looks at her:

'Your skin is not nearly so fine grained as Peggy's; your ear is double the size of hers; your smile comes twice as often, but it is not nearly so worth having when it does come'?

And so he seems to enjoy himself, and to a certain extent really does so. It is quite possible not only to do a great deal of good and thorough work, but to have a very tolerable amount of real, if surface pleasure, with a dull ache going on in the back of your heart all the time. He has as little nourishment on which to feed his remembrance of her as she has hers of him; nay, less, for he has about him no persistent little Harborough voices to ask him whether he would not like Peggy to come and live with him always. Sometimes it strikes him with an irrational surprise that no one should ever mention her name to him; though a moment later reason points out to him that it would be far more strange if they did, since her very existence is absolutely unknown to all those who compose his surroundings. Of no one were Wordsworth's lines ever truer than of her:

'A maid whom there were none to praise,And very few to love.'

One day he meets Freddy at Boodle's, and rushes at him with a warmth of affectionate delight that surprises that easy-going young gentleman. However, as Freddy is himself always delighted to see everybody, he is delighted to see Talbot now; and immediately gives him a perfectly sincere, even if the next moment utterly forgotten, invitation to spend Christmas at the Manor. He has forgotten it, as I have said, next half-hour; he does not in the least perceive the lameness of his friend's stuttered excuses, and he would be thunderstruck were he to conjecture the tempest of revolt, misery, and starved longing that his few careless words, 'Could not you run down to us for Christmas? no party, only ourselves and the Lambtons,' have awoke in that unhappy friend's breast.

Christmas! yes, Christmas is drawing near—Christmas, the great feast that looses every galley-slave from his oar. With how sinking a heart does one galley-slave watch its approach! How much he prefers pulling at his oar, with all the labour and sweat it entails, to the far worse bondage to which his emancipation from it will consign him! There will be no shirking it this time. To all humanity Christmas brings its three or four days of liberation; and these three or four days he must—unless the earth open or the heaven fall between this and then to save him—spend at Harborough. He will have to decorate Betty's church; light the candles on Betty's Christmas-tree; have Betty's children hanging about his neck, and Betty's husband reproaching him for his long absence.

Betty herself accepting his present, thanking him for it, manœuvring to get him alone. Her present! He must be thinking about it. He has not yet bought it. He will have to make time to go and choose it. He yawns. When you are in the habit of giving a person a great manypresents, it is extremely difficult to vary them judiciously. If it were a first gift now, how much simpler it would be! Certainly quite without his consent, the thought darts across him that he has never given Peggy a present. How easy, how delightful, how enthralling it would be to make her some little offering! something slight and comparatively valueless that it would not hurt her pride to accept, but that yet would be worth thanking him for. He feels sure that Peggy has not received many presents in her life. He hears her—his sweetheart—thanking him for that ungiven, never-to-be-given fairing; and at the same moment his eye, falling accidentally upon Betty's last letter lying on the table before him, recalls to his mind that it is not Margaret whom it is now a question of endowing with a Christmas gift. His yawn is exchanged for a sigh. Poor Betty! He undoubtedly does not grudge her her present; but how very much it would simplify matters if she could be induced to choose it for herself. So reflecting he takes his hat, and repairing to the great jewellers', turns over Hunt and Roskell's newest trinkets in dubious half-hearted efforts at selection.

Betty is not altogether of the mind of those present-receivers who hold that the cost of the gift is as nothing; the giver's intention everything. Betty likes both; she likes something rather valuable, but that yet has a sentiment attached to it—something that tells of love, and thought, and love's cunning.

To Talbot, a year, still more two years ago, nothing had seemed easier than this combination. To-day, more than two hours elapse before he can cudgel out of his dull heart and fagged brain something that may, if not too closely scanned, bear the semblance of a fond invention. Christmas is now but a week off; but a week, as eager schoolboys, and pale clerks, and worn seamstresses tell themselves. Perhaps it may be because she knows that they will soonmeet, that Betty's daily letter to Talbot has now for two whole days been intermitted. It is a lapse that has never before occurred, so far as he can recall, in the whole five years of their connection; her billets appearing as regularly as the milkman. Is it possible that she may have conceived some occult offence against him? That he may have unwittingly committed some mysterious sin against love's code? This thought darts across his mind, presenting itself first as a hope, and then as a dread. When it comes as a hope, it suggests that in the case of her having taken umbrage at any of his doings, or non-doings, she may show her resentment by excluding him from her Christmas gaieties; but this idea does not live beyond a moment. It is not much sooner conceived than it is transmogrified into a fear.

If they have quarrelled they will have to make it up again. Perhaps even his laboriously chosen love-gift will not be held a sufficient peacemaker. Perhaps he will have to expend himself in those expletives and asseverations that used once to come so trippingly, nay burningly, from his tongue, but that now have to be driven by main force from his lips, slow and cold and clogged.

A third morning has dawned. Again no letter. It is certainly very strange.

Talbot walks to Downing Street, pondering gravely what can be the cause of this unprecedented silence. Can it be that she is ill? She must be ill indeed not to write to him! A flash of distorted remorse—distorted, since it is for being unable better to return the tenderness of another man's wife—crosses his mind at the thought of her great love for him. No, if she had been ill, too ill to write, Harborough would certainly have sent him word of it, since no one is ever half so anxious to give him tidings of Betty, to further their meetings and impede their partings, as Betty's worthy, blockhead husband. It is most unlikelythat the post, which indeed strangely seldom misbehaves itself, should have erred three times running.

He has reached Downing Street before any solution of the problem has occurred to him. In the course of the day he goes very nigh to forgetting it in the absorption of his work. That work is, on this particular day, specially pressing—specially monopolising. From morning to night he has not a moment that he can call his own. He does not even return home to dress for dinner, but snatches a hasty mouthful of food at the House of Commons, whither he has to accompany his chief, who is to speak on a subject at that moment engaging both House and nation's most passionate attention. The House is thronged to hear the great man. He is for three hours on his legs; and his speech is followed by a hot debate, adorned by the usual accompaniments of senseless obstruction, indecent clamour, and Irish Billingsgate.

It is half-past two in the morning before Talbot finds himself turning the key in his Bury Street door. The whole household has apparently gone to bed; but in his sitting-room the fire has been made up. A touch of the poker upon the coals makes them leap into a blaze, and he sits down in an arm-chair to finish his cigar, and cast an eye over the notes and telegrams that have come for him during his absence. Of the former there are several; of the latter only one. He looks at the addresses of the letters first, to see whether any one of them may be in Lady Betty's handwriting; but such not being the case, he lays them down, and tears open the telegram. He does it without any special excitement. In all our lives telegrams are daily, in his they are half-hourly, occurrences. But not such telegrams as this one. He has been too lazy to light his candles; and now reads it by the firelight that frolics redly over the thin pink paper and the clerkly writing:

'Come at once, and without a moment's delay, on receipt of this.'

When the contents of a missive that we receive, or of a speech addressed to us, diverge very widely from anything that we have been at all expecting, it is some time before the meaning of the words, however simple, succeeds in reaching our brain. Such is Talbot's case. He reads the telegram three times before he fully grasps its signification; and it is quite two minutes before it occurs to him to look at its date. 'Sent out at 11.10A.M.Received at 11.35.' It has been lying waiting for him for fourteen hours and more. He reads it a fourth time. 'Come at once, and without a moment's delay, on receipt of this.' What does it—what can it mean? To obey it now, in the sense in which it meant to be obeyed, is as impossible as to 'call back yesterday out of the treasures of God.' It is true that he can set off, without a moment's delay, on the receipt of it. But as that receipt has been delayed fourteen hours longer than its sender calculated upon, his obedience will be a virtual disobedience. Why has she sent for him? In any case she would have seen him in five days. What can she have to say to him of such surpassing urgency as cannot brook that short delay? His eye rests doubtfully on the vague yet pressing words. In the mouth and from the hand of any one save Betty, they would certainly imply some grave crisis—some imminent or already fallen catastrophe. In Betty's theymaymean nothing. More than once before, during the past five years, has she telegraphed for him with the same indefinite peremptoriness; and when—always at great personal inconvenience, once gravely offending his chief, and seriously imperillinghis future prospects—he has made shift to obey her summonses, he has discovered that it had been prompted merely by some foolish whim. Once the broken-haired terrier, which he had given her, had had a fit; once Mr. Harborough had spoken sharply to her before the servants; once she had felt so low that she could not get through the day without seeing him. These recollections combine together to form his resolution.

He lays down the paper. He will not go. Accident has made him disobedient; intention shall make him further so. Had she known at what an hour her message would reach him, even she could not have expected compliance with it.

So thinking, his cigar being by this time finished, he rises, and lighting his bedroom candle, turns to go to bed. Only, just as he is leaving the room, some impulse prompts him to read the telegram yet a fifth time. The words have certainly not changed since he last glanced at them; and yet they seem to him to have a more compelling look. Why can't he force them to be more explicit? He pauses; telegram in one hand and candle in the other. What can she want with him? It is just within the bounds of possibility that she may really need his presence; how or why, he is unable to hazard the faintest conjecture. But it is just within the limits of the possible that she may. Various suggestions of what shape that possible may take flit across his puzzled brain. Can it be that her husband has at length made the discovery of what for five years has been the open secret of all his acquaintance? In that case, as he, Talbot, has long known—known at first with leaping pulses, latterly with the cold sweat of an unspeakable dread, she would not have waited for him to come to her—she would have fled to him. It cannot, then, be that. Various other conjectures suggest themselves, but are dismissed as impracticable; but though they are dismissed,the fact remains that the woman to whom he once swore—once, nay, millions of times swore a love eternal, unalterable, exclusive—has sent him an imperative summons to her side; and he is preparing entirely to neglect it.

He sets down the candlestick, and takes up an 'A B C' lying on the table, as if officiously close at hand. He will just look to see if there is a train that would take him to her. If there is not, that will settle the matter. He turns to the name of the small station at which travellers to Harborough get out. Of course not. Nothing stops at that little wayside place before eleven o'clock. By that time he will be installed in Downing Street for the day, with his chief's correspondence before him.

He heaves a sigh of relief; and once more turns bedward. But before he has reached the door another thought has arrested him. Though there is no train which could take him to the little station close to her gate, yet there may easily be one which would carry him to Oxford, only five miles away from her.

Again he picks up the 'A B C,' and runs his finger and his eye down the page from the Paddington that heads it. Paddington 5.30; arrives at Oxford 7.40. Yes, there is one. It is, for the last ten miles of its course, a slow crawler; but, if up to its time, reaches Oxford at 7.40. A good hansom would convey him to Harborough in half an hour. He would have twenty minutes in which to learn her will; a second half-hour's drive would take him back to Oxford, to catch the nine o'clock up-train, which would land him in London in time for his day's work. It is possible, then—quite possible. The question is, shall he embrace that bare possibility? Shall he pick out the one chance for, out of the ninety-nine against, there being any real meaning in her message, to build upon it this fool's errand. At all events, he has plenty of time in which tothink it over. It is only three o'clock. There are two good hours before he need set off.

He sits down again in his arm-chair, replenishes the fire, and lights another cigar. A year ago he would have gone without hesitation. Two years ago he would have stood on his head with joy at having the chance of going; butthisyear—— Well, it is true that it is no longer the voice of the passionately loved woman calling to him—a voice before whose sound obstacles vanish, space shrivels, time contracts; but it may be the voice of a fellow-creature in distress.A fellow-creature in distress!He laughs to himself at the flat pomposity of the phrase. What kind of distress the fellow-creature's can be—a fellow-creature so lapped in cotton-wool, so apparently beyond the reach of most of life's ennuis—he is absolutely at a loss to conjecture! He spends two hours, and smokes three cigars in conjecturing; and at the end, being as wise as he was at the beginning, knocks up his servant, puts on his fur coat, arms himself with as many wraps as he can muster, jumps into a hansom, and through the murkiness—black as midnight—of a hideous December morning, has himself driven to the Paddington Departure Platform; where, for three minutes, he stamps about, telling himself that no such fool as he walks, has ever walked, or, as far as he knows, will ever walk upon God's earth; and is then whirled away.

There are not so many passengers by the 5.30 train as to hinder its being punctual. It is almost faithful to its minute. So far—it can't be said to be very far—fortune favours the one of its occupants with whom we have any concern. He rolls out, cross and furry, still repeating to himself with an even greater intensity of inward emphasis than he had employed at Paddington, that unflattering opinion of his own wisdom with which he had embarked on his present venture. If it had appeared a fool's errand when looked forward to dispassionately from the warmth and ease of his own fireside, what does it appear now? Now that, having picked out the most promising-looking of the few sleepy hansoms awaiting unlikely passengers, and bidden the mufflered purple-nosed driver take him as fast as his horse can lay legs to the ground to Harborough Castle, he finds himself spinning through the Oxford suburbs out into the flat country beyond—ugly as original ugliness, further augmented by a December dawning and a black and iron frost, can make it. At each mile that carries him nearer and nearer his goal, his own unreason looms ever immenser and yet immenser before him. By such a gigantic folly as this even Betty herself may be satisfied. At every echoing step the horse takes on the frozen ground it seems to him less and less likely that Betty has had any real reason for sending for him, any reason that may at all account for or palliate his appearanceat this unheard-of hour. Even Betty herself has asked no such insanity of him as this. She had reckoned upon her telegram reaching him at mid-day, and upon his arriving in obedience to it sometime in the afternoon, an hour at which any one may arrive at a friend's house without provoking special comment. But now? At the spanking pace at which, in accordance with his own directions, he is getting over the ground, he will reach the Castle by eight o'clock, just as the housemaids are beginning to open the shutters and clean the grates. When the door is unbarred to him by an astonished footman struggling into his coat, whom shall he ask for? What shall he say? Lady Betty? Impossible! At eight o'clock in the morning! Mr. Harborough? Neither is he, any more than his wife, an early riser; and if, in answer to his, Talbot's, astounding summons, he should drag himself from his couch, and come in sleepydéshabilléto meet him, what has he, Talbot, to say to him? What does he want with him? How can he explain his own appearance? Had he better ask for no one, then?—say nothing, but just slip in, trusting to the thoroughness of the Harborough servants' acquaintance with his appearance to save him from any inconvenient questions? Shall he wait in some cold sitting-room in process of dusting, with its chairs standing on their heads, and the early besom making play on its carpet until his half-hour is up, and he can return whence he came, having at least done what he was bidden to do? He laughs derisively at himself. And meanwhilehowcold he is! He has been up all night, in itself a chilly thing; a hansom is by no means a warm vehicle, at least to one to whom any nipping air is preferable to having the glass let chokily down within a half-inch of his nose. The dawn is being blown in by a small wind—small, but full of knife-blades—and the griding frost that holds all earth and water in the rigidity of death's ugly sleep, has pierced into his very bones. In his life hehas seldom taken a colder drive, and yet he dreads its being over. What shall he say to Harborough? The chance of his seeing him is indeed remote; but remote chances do sometimes become facts. If this becomes fact, what is he to say to him? Even through Harborough's hippopotamus-hide there must be some arrow that will penetrate. If anything can open the stupid eyes, so miraculously sealed through five years, surely this insane apparition of his will do it.

They have reached the park gates. The lodge-keeper at least is up and dressed, and runs out with alacrity. She need not have been in such a hurry. He would have been much more obliged to her if she had crawled, and bungled, and delayed him a little. Now he is rolling through the park, by the dead white grass and the pinched brown bracken; under the black arms of the famous chestnuts, beneath which he and Betty have so often strayed; through half a dozen more gates; through a last gate, on leaving which behind them, turf more carefully trimmed, flower-beds now hard and empty, clumps of laurustinus and rhododendron tell of his neighbourhood to the house, which a turn in the approach now gives to his view. His eye flies anxiously, though with little hope, to the front. Does it look at all awake? Are there any blinds up? It would be ludicrous to hope that Betty's could be; Betty who is never seen a moment before eleven o'clock, and very often not for many moments after. He looks mechanically, though quite hopelessly, up at her windows—the three immediately above the portico—and so looking, starts, and gives utterance to an involuntary ejaculation. In the case of all three, shutters are open and blinds up. What can have happened? What can so flagrant a departure from the habits of a lifetime imply? He has reached the door by now, and, jumping out, rings the bell. He will probably have long to wait before it is answered, the servants,expecting no such summons, being probably dispersed to other quarters of the house. But, as in the case of the lodge-keeper, he is mistaken.

With scarce any delay the great folding-doors roll back; nor is there in the faces of the couple of footmen who appear any of that blank astonishment which he had been schooling himself to meet. There is no surprise that he can detect upon their civil features, any more than there would have been had he and his portmanteau walked in at five o'clock in the afternoon.

'Of—of course no one is up yet?' he says, with an air that he, as he feels, in vain tries to make easy and disengaged.

'Oh yes, sir; her ladyship is up! Her ladyship has been up all night.'

Up all night!Then some one must be ill! Is it Harborough? Harborough ill? Will he die? In one thought-flash these questions, with all that for him and his future life an answer in the affirmative would imply, dart through his mind—dart with such a sickening dread that he can scarcely frame his next and most obvious question.

'Is any one ill, then?'

For the first time the servant looks a little surprised. If it is not on account of the illness in the house why has Mr. Talbot presented himself at this extraordinary hour?

'Yes, sir; Master Harborough has been very ill for two days. Sir Andrew Clark and Dr. Ridge Jones came down yesterday to see him, and he was hardly expected to live through the night.'

Master Harborough! Not expected to live through the night! At this news, so entirely unlooked for—since, amongst all the possibilities whose faces he has been scanning, that of something having happened to the children has never once presented itself—Talbot stands stock-still, rooted to the spot, in sad amazement. Poor little Master Harborough!In a moment he is seeing him again as he had last seen him—seen the little sturdy figure that, in its rosy vigour, seemed to be shaking its small fist in defiance at age, or decay, or death. Yes; he sees him again—sees, too, his mother, laughing at his naughtiness, bragging of his strength, smothering him with her kisses. Poor, poor Betty! A great rush of compassionate tenderness floods his heart towards the woman against whom he had just been harshly shutting that heart's doors; discrediting her truth; grudging the service she has asked of him; crediting her even in his thoughts with the indecency of summoning him to her husband's death-bed. Oh, poor Betty! On his heart's knees he begs her pardon.

His agitation is so great and so overcoming that, for the moment, he can ask no more questions, but only follows the butler, who by this time has appeared on the scene, in silent compliance with his request to him to come upstairs—a request accompanied by the remark that he will let her ladyship know that he is here. Having led him to Betty's boudoir, the servant leaves him to look round, with what heart he may, on all the objects of that most familiar scene. How familiar they are—all her toys and gewgaws! Many he himself has given her; some they had chosen together; over others they had quarrelled; over others, again, they had made up—but how well he knows them, one and all! He looks round on them with a triple sorrow—the sorrow of his past love and present pity for her joining hands, in melancholy triad, with his deep and abiding self-contempt. He looks round on the countless fans—fans everywhere—open, half-open; on the great Japanese umbrella, stuck up, in compliance with one of the most senseless fashions ever introduced, in the middle of the room, with Liberty silk handkerchiefs meaninglessly draped about its stem; on the jumping frogs and mechanical mice; on the banjo she has often thrummed to him; on the mandoline she has tried towheedle him into learning to play, that he may sing her Creole love-songs to it.

He turns away from them all with a sick impatient sigh. How hideously out of tune they and all the fooleries they recall seem with this soul-and-body-biting December dawning—with 'Master Harborough not expected to live through the night!'

He has never seen Betty in the grasp of a great grief. He is as much at a loss to picture how she will bear it as he would be to fancy a butterfly drawing a load of coals. How will she take it? How will she look? What shall he say? How shall he comfort her? That she has had any other motive in sending for him than the child's impulse to show the cut finger or the barked shin to a friend never occurs to him. His poor Betty! No selfish regret enters his mind at having been summoned through the midwinter night helplessly to see a little child die. He can think of nothing but how best to console her. He is very far from being ready with any consolations that even to himself appear at all consoling, when the door opens, and she enters.

At the sound of the turning handle he has gone to meet her, with both hands out as if to draw her and her misery to that breast whose doors are thrown wider to her than they have been for many months; but no answering hands come to meet them. Some gesture of hers tells him that she does not wish him to approach her.

'How late you are!' she says.

If he were not looking at her, and did not see with his own eyes that the words proceeded out of her mouth, he would never have recognised her voice. By that voice, and by her whole appearance, he is so shocked, that for a moment he cannot answer. Even upon the face of a girl in the first flush of youth, and whose only ornamentings come from the Hand of God, two long nights' vigils, extravagant weeping, the careless dishevelment of heart-rendinganguish, write themselves in terrible characters. What, then, must they do to a woman like Betty, whose whole beauty is a carefully built-up fabric, on which no sun must look, and no zephyr blow too inquisitively?

For the first time in his life Talbot fully realises what a built-up fabric it is. Through his mind flashes the doubt, whether, if without expecting to meet her, he had come across her in the street, he should have recognised her. She looks fifty years old. Her hair is in damp disorder; at the top all rough and disturbed, where it has evidently been desperately buried in a little counterpane. She is not now crying; but her unnumbered past tears have partially washed the rouge off her cheeks. A dreadful impression of the ludicrous, inextricably entangled with his unspeakable compassion—an impression for which he tells himself that he ought to be flayed alive—conveys itself to Talbot from her whole appearance. But though he ought to be flayed alive for receiving it, still it is there. And meanwhile she has spoken to him a second time. He must say something to her; not stand staring with stupid cruelty at her in her ruin and abasement.

'I expected you all yesterday,' she says in that same strange, dreadful voice.

He gives a sort of gasp. Can that indeed be the voice whose pretty treble has so often run with rippling laughter into his ears? the voice that sang him comic songs to that very banjo—now lying in its irony beside him—almost the last time that he heard its tones? His head is in a grisly whirl between that Betty and this. Which is the true one? Is this only a hideous nightmare? It seems at least to have the suffocating force of one; a force through which it is only by the strongest self-compulsion that he can break to answer her.

'I came as soon as I got your telegram.'

Her eyes, washed away to scarcely more than half theirsize, are resting upon him; and yet it seems by her next speech as if she had either not heard or not heeded his answer.

'You might have come quicker,' she says.

'But indeed I could not,' cries he, genuine distress lending him at last fluent speech. 'I was at the House till two in the morning; I never received it until I got home to Bury Street; I came by the very next train. Oh, Betty, how could you doubt that I should?'

As he speaks an arrow of self-reproach shoots through his heart at the thought of how near a chance the poor soul's cry for help had run of being altogether disregarded.

'I wanted to speak to you,' she says, a spark of fever brightening the chill wretchedness of her look. 'I have something to say to you; that was why I sent for you.'

'Of course, of course!' he answers soothingly. 'I was delighted to come.'

'I can't stay more than a minute,' she says restlessly. 'I must go back to him; I have never left him for eight and forty hours. He is asleep now—only under opiates—but an opiate sleep is better than none, is it not?' consulting his face with a piteous appeal.

'Much—much better,' replies Talbot earnestly.

'You have heard—they have told you—how ill he is?'

A sort of hard break makes itself heard in her voice; but she masters it impatiently.

'Yes, they have told me.'

'What have they told you?' asks she sharply. 'I daresay that they have told you a great deal more than the truth. If they have told you that there is no hope, they have told you wrong. They had no right to say so; there is hope!'

'They never told me that there was not,' replies he, still more soothingly than before; for it seems to him that no finger can be laid too gently on that terrible mother-ache.

'It all came so suddenly,' says she, putting her hand up with a bewildered air to her damp forehead and disordered hair. 'And yet now it seemscenturiessince he was running about.Howhe ran and jumped, did not he? There never was such an active child. And now it seemscenturiesthat he has been lying in his little bed.'

For a moment she breaks down entirely, but fights her way on again.

'It was only a cold at first—quite a slight cold! He was not the least ill with it, and I thought nothing of it; and then on Tuesday there came an acrobatic company to Darnton'—the little neighbouring market-town—'and he was so excited about them, and begged so hard to be allowed to go and see them, that I took him; and he was so delighted with them—he clapped and applauded more than anybody in the house; and all the evening afterwards he was trying to do the things he had seen them do—you know how clever he always is in imitating people—and telling nurse about them. Nurse and I agreed that we had never seen him in such spirits. But he did not sleep well; he was always dreaming about them, and jumping up; and next morning he was in a high fever, and I sent for the doctor, and he has been getting worse ever since; andnow——'

Again she breaks down, but again recovering herself, goes on rapidly:

'But it is not the same as if it were a grown-up person, is it? Children have such wonderful recovering power, have not they?—down one day and up the next. They pull through things that would kill you or me, do not they? Hewillpull through, won't he? You think that hewillpull through?'

'I am sure that he will,' replies Talbot earnestly.

It is, of course, an answer absolutely senseless, and in the air; but what other can he give, with those miserable eyes fastened in such desperate asking upon his?

'Oh, if you knew what it has been,' she says, her arms falling with a gesture of measureless tired woe to her sides as she speaks, 'to have been kneeling by him all these two days, hearing him moan, and seeing him try to get his breath!—he does not understand what it means; he has never been ill before. He thinks that I can help him. O God! he thinks I can help him, and that I don't! He turns to me for everything. You know that he always did when he was well, did not he? He is always asking me when the pain will go away? Asking me whether he has been naughty, and I am angry with him? Angry with him! Iangrywith him! O God! O God!'

Her excitement and her grief have been gaining upon her at each fresh clause of her speech, and at the end she flings herself down on the ground and buries her face in the cushion of a low chair, while dry, hard sobs shake her from head to foot.

What is he to say to her? Nothing. He will not insult such a sorrow by the futility of his wretched words. He can only stoop over her, and lay his hand no harshlier than her mother would have done, no harshlier than she herself would have laid hers upon her little dying boy, on her heaving shoulder. But she shakes off his light touch, and raising her distorted face, again tries to address him. But the rending sobs that still convulse her make her utterance difficult; and her words, when they come, scarcely intelligible.

'Do not touch me! leave me—leave me—alone! I—I have not yet said what—what I had to say to you. That—that was not what I had to say to you! I—I—must say what I—sent for you—to say.'

She pauses, gasping. It seems as if the task she had set herself was beyond her present strength.

'Do not tell me,' he says most gently; 'if it is anything that hurts you, do not tell me now; wait and tell me by and by.'

He has withdrawn at her bidding his hand from her shoulder, but has knelt down in his deep pity beside her, and tried to take in his her cold and clammy fingers. But she draws them sharply away.

'Did not I tell you to leave me alone!' she cries in a thin voice. 'Let me—let me say what I have to say to you, and have done with it. I will say it now! Imustsay it now! What business have you,' turning with a pitiful fierceness upon him, 'to try and hinder me?'

'I do not—I do not!' speaking in the tenderest tone. 'Tell it me of course, whatever it is, if it will give you the least relief.'

'I sent for you to tell you that it is all over—all over between us,' she says, having now mastered her sobs, and speaking with great rapidity and distinctness; 'that is what I sent for you to tell you. I wanted you to come at once, that I might tell you. Why did not you come at once? I have been a very wicked woman——'

'No, dear, no! indeed you have not!' he interrupts with an accent of excessive pain and protest.

But she goes on without heeding him:

'Or if I have not, it has been no thanks to me; it has been thanks to you, who have saved me from myself! But whatever there has been between us, it is over now. That is what I sent for you to tell you.Over! do you understand?Gone! done with!Do you understand? Why do not you say something? Do you hear? Do you understand?'

'I hear,' he answers in a mazed voice; 'but I—I do not understand! I do not understand why, if you want to tell me this, you should tell it menowof all times.'

'It isnowof all times that I want to tell you—that I must tell you!' cries she wildly. 'Cannot you see that itis on account ofhim? Oh, cannot you think what it has been kneeling beside him with his little hot hand in mine! You do not know how fiery hot his hand is! Last night his pulse was so quick that the doctor could scarcely count the beats—it was up to 120; and while I was kneeling beside him the thought came to me that perhaps this had happened to him on—on—account of—us! that it was a judgment on me!'

She pauses for a minute, and he tries to put in some soothing suggestion, but she goes on without heeding him.

'You may call it superstition if you please, but it came to me—oh, it seems years ago now!—it must have been the night before last!—and as the night went on, it kept getting worse and worse, as he got worse and worse; and in the morning I could not bear it any longer, and I sent for you! I thought that you would have been here in a couple of hours.'

'So I would! So I would! Heaven knows so I would, if it had been possible!'

'And all yesterday he went on growing worse—I did not think that he could have been worse than he was in the night, and live—but he was. All day and all last night again he was struggling for breath!—think of having to sit by and see a little child struggling for his breath!'

She stops, convulsed anew by that terrible dry sobbing, that is so much more full of anguish than any tears.

'Poor little chap! poor Betty!'

'I have been listening all night for you! I could not have believed that you would have been so long in coming; it is such a little way off! I knew—I had a feeling that he would never get better until you had come—until I had told you that it was all over between us; but I have told you now, have not I? I have done all that I could! Onecannot recall the past; no one can, not even God! He cannot expect that of me; but I have done what I could—all that is left me to do, have not I?'

There is such a growing wildness in both her eye and voice that he does not know in what terms to answer her; and can only still kneel beside her, in silent, pitying distress.

'I see that you think I am out of my wits!' she says, looking distrustfully at him; 'that I must be out of my wits to talk of sending you away—you who have been everything to me. Cannot you see that it is because I love you that I am sending you away? if I did not love you it would be nothing—no sacrifice!—it would be no use! But perhaps if I give up everything—everything I have in the world except him' (stretching out her hands, with a despairing gesture of pushing from herself every earthly good)—'perhaps then—then—God will spare him to me! perhaps He will not take him from me! It may be no good! He may take him all the same; but there is just the chance! say that you think itisa chance!'

But he cannot say so. There are very few words that he would not try to compel his lips to utter; but he dares not buoy her up with the hope that she can buy back her child by a frantic compact with the Most High. Her eyes drop despairingly from his face, not gaining the assent they have so agonisedly asked for; and she struggles dizzily to her feet.

'That is all—I had—to—tell you!' she says fiercely. 'I have nothing more to say!—nothing that need—need detain you here any longer. I must go back to him; he may be asking for me!—asking for me, and I not there! But you understand—you are sure that you understand? I have often sent you away before in joke, but I am not joking now' (poor soul! that, at least, is a needless assertion); 'I am in real earnest this time! I am not sendingyou away to-day only to send for you back again to-morrow; it is real earnest this time; it is for ever!—do you understand?For ever! say it after me, that I may be sure that you are making no mistake—for ever.'

And he, looking down into the agony of her sunk eyes, not permitted even to touch in farewell her clammy hand, echoes under his breath, 'For ever!'

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