Chapter Eighteen.

Chapter Eighteen.Two Heads Better Than One.“Fordham, old man, I’m in a devil of a mess,” announced Philip, dolefully, bursting into his friend’s room the following morning while the latter was shaving.“I tell you what it is, Sir Philip Orlebar as is to be,” returned Fordham, who was in an abominably bad humour, pausing with his razor arrested. “You’ll be the death of me long before you arrive at that dignity unless you get out of a certain vile habit of crashing in upon a man during such critical moments as this. Do you think I’ve no nerves?”“Well, I certainly did think so.”“So it seems. But I have. So would you have if you had been expected to sleep beneath two parsons pounding about overhead in nailed boots half the night, and starting again at four o’clock this morning. The noisiest people in their rooms in these ramshackle hotels are invariably parsons and women; I imagine because the first are supposed to be professionally unselfish and the second traditionally so.”“How do you know they were parsons?” said Philip. “Sent up thefemme de chambreto ask them politely to take their boots off. She came back grinning, ‘Ce sont deux pasteurs anglais, M’sieu, qui viennent de passer le Trift-joch.’ Well, the avalanche that failed to engulph them was an avalanche in the wrong place, decidedly. I might just as well not have sent up; for though I’m not a sufficiently impartial witness to assert that they made more row thereafter, I’m fully prepared to swear that they didn’t make any less.”“H’m! But I say, Fordham. I was saying, I’m in the very devil’s own mess.”“That is not infrequently the case, the extent of my acquaintance with you warrants me in asserting. May I ask the nature of it this time?”“I’ve had a devil of a row with old Glover.”“The British merchant? Already? And the day so young! What, may I inquire, led to so decided a difference of opinion? Had you been discussing politics, or a rise in sugar?”“Don’t chaff, Fordham. It’s no laughing matter to me. He says his daughter hasn’t had a wink of sleep all night.”“No more has he, I should say, since he looses his combative instincts thus early. No more have I—thanks to the nailed boots of the gospel—grinders aforesaid. Well, the only thing I can suggest is that he should send down to Sierre and get her a sleeping draught.”“He says she has lain awake all night, and is quite ill, and it’s entirely my doing.”“Ah! I begin to see. Her room is underneath yours, I take it. Well, I always said you had rather a heavy hoof.”“Fordham, do be serious. Don’t you see, man? You were there when they arrived yesterday—and er—er—he swears he’ll bring an action for breach of promise against me? Now do you see?”“And he’s just the sort of animal who would do it too,” rejoined the other coolly, spreading a fresh lather upon his chin.“Well, that’s not all—nor even the worst of it. I’m in a proper sort of hole, I can tell you,” said poor Phil, despairingly dropping into a chair and lighting up a Vevey cheroot.“Wait a minute, Phil,” said Fordham, turning with his razor in mid-air. “There’s a time for all things and, it might be added, a place. Now I’ve a strong suspicion that the partition walls between these rooms are unconscionably thin, and that being so we had better postpone our council of war until we have got outside of our toast and coffee, and then adjourn with pipes to some sequestered spot where undisturbed we can concert plans for the discomfiture of the enemy. But, look here, you must pull yourself together. You are looking a cross between a scarecrow and a galvanised skull. Man alive, you’ll furnish sport to all the women in the house if they see you going about like this.”“What a good chap you are, Fordham,” said poor Philip, gratefully. He was looking wretchedly pulled down and haggard, as the other had said, for he had had very little sleep. No one would have recognised the bright, handsome sunny face of yesterday. He looked a dozen years older. Even Alma, burning with outraged pride, must have pitied him.But the Wyatts were not at table when the two came down, which was perhaps just as well. Old Glover was, but his daughter’s place was vacant. He frowned magnificently at Philip, and nodded in a stiff and patronising way to Fordham as they came in.“Now Phil,” began Fordham, as having strolled up the meadow path behind the hotel, they sat down among a cluster of rocks and began to smoke, “Now Phil, we can talk to our heart’s content. What a chap you are. You were a semi-lunatic for the space of a week about one ‘skirt,’ and no sooner is that put right than another ‘skirt’ sails in unexpectedly and upsets the coach again.”“Upsets it, indeed!” muttered poor Phil.“As I understand the case,” went on Fordham, “and it’s far from an uncommon one, you neglected to throw away your dirty water before you got your clean. Consequently the former has overlapped the latter and damaged it effectually. Do you follow me?”Philip nodded.“Well now, what do you want me to do?”“I want you to advise me.”“H’m! The case stands thus. The appearance upon the scene of Number 1 has sheered Number 2 off in a deadly huff, which, under the circumstances, it was bound to do. Secondly, the British merchant and his offspring threaten to make themselves particularly disagreeable. Those are the two points upon which we must go to work.”“Yes.”“Very well. Now to begin with the first point. Have you squarely explained the whole affair to Miss Wyatt?”“Don’t I wish she’d give me the chance!” was the vehement reply.“You must make the chance—by hook or by crook. That’s all I’ve got to say. It is a matter between her and you exclusively, and one in which you must fight entirely to your own hand. Now as to the other, the—er—Glover side of the difficulty. Quite sure you wouldn’t have the girl at any price?”“Dead certain.”“That’s so, eh?”“Yes, it is.”“Well, I think you’re right. I wouldn’t myself—if I were you, I mean. How did you manage to get in tow with her?”“Oh, it was just after that last cruise of ours, about six months ago,” said Philip, in the disgusted tone of a man who realises that he has made a fool of himself and is called upon to face the consequences of his folly. “I ran down to old Glover’s place with some other fellows to a dance, and—well—Edith and I got rather thick. Drifted into it, I suppose?”“Used to go up the river a good bit, eh? Picnic and spoon on the eyots—and all that sort of thing?”“Yes.”“That river’s the very devil for getting fellows into messes of this kind. The rushes and the whispering-trees and the soft murmur of the water, don’t you know—andthe champagne in the hamper—all this I suppose combines to work it. Now, did you ever propose to her in definite terms?”“N-no. Once it struck me she thought I had. It was one evening at a dance. We were sitting out in a corner of the lawn—and the river and the moonlight on the water—”“Andthe champagne,” murmured Fordham. “No; it was sparkling Burgundy. But don’t chaff, old man. Well, I hadn’t really said anything definite. But, you know, a fellowisapt to make rather a fool of himself on such occasions, isn’t he?”“Oh, very. Now how long was this—this evening when you hadn’t really said anything definite—before we came abroad together?”“About a month or six weeks.”“And of course you have corresponded ever since?”“Up till the time I—er—you know—”“Yes, yes, I quite understand. Well now, have you said—written, rather—anything definite in the course of that correspondence?”“N-no. I don’t think I can have.”“Would you mind allowing me to judge?”“I didn’t keep copies of the letters—Oh, I see. Hers you mean! Hang it, old man, I—er—don’t think that would be quite fair to her.”“Just as you please,” was the perfectly unruffled rejoinder. “By the way, you didn’t perform the pleasing ceremony commonly known as ‘speaking to papa,’ did you?”“Not I,” said Philip, with alacrity.“Yet he came here prepared to give you his blessing—and gave it, too, in the most all-embracing fashion?”“That’sit! That’s just it!” cried Philip, savagely. “It’s a put-up job! Yet what on earth could they want to hook me for? The dear old governor has got years and years to go on yet; and even then he won’t cut up for much, for he’s as poor as Job. Still it looks like a clear case of ‘standing in.’”“I think it does. As for the motive, the British merchant may have had a fancy to be able to talk about ‘My daughter, Lady Orlebar—ah!’ and added to that you’re a personable dog enough, Phil. He ought to be able to supply the funds to counterbalance the title.”“There the motive breaks down,” quickly interrupted the other. “Although he cuts great splashes with his entertainments, and is rolling in money, he has the reputation of being the most close-fisted screw extant.”“Is that so? Ah! now I begin to see a little light. You don’t think he’d come down with a fat settlement?”“Not the ghost of a chance of it.”“Good. I think we may defeat him on that count. But let us again be certain on this head. You are sure you wouldn’t take the girl at any price—not if he offers to settle fifty thousand?”“Not if he offered to settle five hundred thousand. But don’t have any misgivings on that score. He won’t come down with five, you’ll see.”“Good again,” said Fordham. “Now, are there any other daughters?”“Three.”“Sons?”“Three.”“Seven in the family. Right. Now, Phil, your line is this. You must put a prohibitive price upon yourself. Tell him straight that you are not going to wreck all your prospects in life for a girl you don’t really care two straws about, and never will, and bring yourself down to beggary into the bargain. You can defeat him on the question of settlements—if you are only firm enough.”“But isn’t that rather a shady standpoint to take up—eh, Fordham?” said Phil, dubiously. “Not quite one’s form—eh?”Fordham’s dark brows came nearer together, and there was a sneer in the black, piercing eyes which were fixed on the younger man’s face.“My dear Phil,” he replied, “if there is a phase of humanity in this latter-day world which invariably lays itself out to be kicked, hustled, jumped upon, bested all round, it is represented by the man whose ‘form’ rises up to bar him fighting the devil with fire. ‘Poor Satan!’ say such fellows as yourself. ‘It really isn’t fair!’ So, by way of equalising the chances, you surrender at discretion, and the enemy of mankind dances upon youad lib. Here you have got to fight the devil with fire, and you won’t do it, because, forsooth, it is ‘not quite one’s form.’ You are simply the victim of a ‘plant’—a not very cunningly baited trap—and yet you are going to let the devil—who for present purposes may be taken to mean the paternal Glover—bind you hand and foot for all time. Could ever lunacy be more complete—more hopeless?”“Well, what shall I tell him?” said Philip, desperately.“Tell him, in unequivocal terms, to go hang.”For a few moments Philip said nothing. He sat watching the smoke wreaths from his pipe curling up in blue circles upon the clear mountain air, a puzzled and helpless expression clouding his features. Then at last:“I say, Fordham.”“Well?”“I wish—er—I wish, old chap, you’d pull me through this affair. I mean—er—I wish you’d interview old Glover for me. You’re so cool-headed, and I—well, I get in a rage and lose my nut. Why, this morning the old sinner and I were as nearly as possible coming to fisticuffs. We shouted at and damned each other, but what we said I haven’t the faintest recollection.”“I don’t care to undertake anything of the kind, Phil, and so I tell you candidly,” answered Fordham.“Why not, old chap?” was the doleful rejoinder.“Because it is dead in the teeth of every ruling principle of my life to poke my nose into what doesn’t concern me. You may say I have already done so in advising you at all. So I have, and to that extent I plead guilty to having been inconsistent. But two wrongs don’t make a right, which we may take to mean that I don’t see why I should violate my principles still further. Were I to undertake what you want me to, old Glover would begin by asking what the devil business it was of mine, anyhow. And the worst of it is, he would be right—quite right.”“Not of necessity,” rejoined Philip, eagerly. “Surely you have a right to act for a friend; and for all he knows you may be my legal adviser. I believe you must have been a lawyer once, you’re so devilish coldblooded and logical. Now, say you’ll do it.”Fordham’s dark brows met, and he smoked silently for a few minutes. “Coldblooded—logical,” had said this careless youngster, who was merely paltering with the very outskirts of the grim web of circumstances which go to make up the tragedies—and travesties—of the serious side of life. “Coldblooded” was he now pronounced; yet could he remember when his blood ran hot, surging and seething like the boiling and bubbling pitch. Now it lay still within his veins, cool and acrid as vinegar.“And if I don’t bring it off all right, or as you think all right, you’ll turn round and abuse me,” he said at last.“You needn’t be in the least afraid of that,” answered Phil. “I’ll give you a free hand to act as you think right.”“You will?”“Of course.”“Now you’re talking, as they say in the States. Well, Phil, I’ll do what I can for you. But mind, you must leave everything in my hands unreservedly. None of your insane scruples about ‘form,’ or anything of that kind. Do you agree to this?”“I do, unreservedly.”“Well, it’s dead contrary to my principles, as I told you before; but for this once I’ll throw judgment overboard, especially as it is to turn the flank of an infernal scheming, crafty female creature,” added this misogynist, an acrid ring coming into his tone. “And now, Phil, you had better not go back to the hotel. Start off from here and walk somewhere till lunch-time—if you could make it till dinner-time, all the better. By then I shall have knocked what change I can out of the exasperated but knowing British parent.”

“Fordham, old man, I’m in a devil of a mess,” announced Philip, dolefully, bursting into his friend’s room the following morning while the latter was shaving.

“I tell you what it is, Sir Philip Orlebar as is to be,” returned Fordham, who was in an abominably bad humour, pausing with his razor arrested. “You’ll be the death of me long before you arrive at that dignity unless you get out of a certain vile habit of crashing in upon a man during such critical moments as this. Do you think I’ve no nerves?”

“Well, I certainly did think so.”

“So it seems. But I have. So would you have if you had been expected to sleep beneath two parsons pounding about overhead in nailed boots half the night, and starting again at four o’clock this morning. The noisiest people in their rooms in these ramshackle hotels are invariably parsons and women; I imagine because the first are supposed to be professionally unselfish and the second traditionally so.”

“How do you know they were parsons?” said Philip. “Sent up thefemme de chambreto ask them politely to take their boots off. She came back grinning, ‘Ce sont deux pasteurs anglais, M’sieu, qui viennent de passer le Trift-joch.’ Well, the avalanche that failed to engulph them was an avalanche in the wrong place, decidedly. I might just as well not have sent up; for though I’m not a sufficiently impartial witness to assert that they made more row thereafter, I’m fully prepared to swear that they didn’t make any less.”

“H’m! But I say, Fordham. I was saying, I’m in the very devil’s own mess.”

“That is not infrequently the case, the extent of my acquaintance with you warrants me in asserting. May I ask the nature of it this time?”

“I’ve had a devil of a row with old Glover.”

“The British merchant? Already? And the day so young! What, may I inquire, led to so decided a difference of opinion? Had you been discussing politics, or a rise in sugar?”

“Don’t chaff, Fordham. It’s no laughing matter to me. He says his daughter hasn’t had a wink of sleep all night.”

“No more has he, I should say, since he looses his combative instincts thus early. No more have I—thanks to the nailed boots of the gospel—grinders aforesaid. Well, the only thing I can suggest is that he should send down to Sierre and get her a sleeping draught.”

“He says she has lain awake all night, and is quite ill, and it’s entirely my doing.”

“Ah! I begin to see. Her room is underneath yours, I take it. Well, I always said you had rather a heavy hoof.”

“Fordham, do be serious. Don’t you see, man? You were there when they arrived yesterday—and er—er—he swears he’ll bring an action for breach of promise against me? Now do you see?”

“And he’s just the sort of animal who would do it too,” rejoined the other coolly, spreading a fresh lather upon his chin.

“Well, that’s not all—nor even the worst of it. I’m in a proper sort of hole, I can tell you,” said poor Phil, despairingly dropping into a chair and lighting up a Vevey cheroot.

“Wait a minute, Phil,” said Fordham, turning with his razor in mid-air. “There’s a time for all things and, it might be added, a place. Now I’ve a strong suspicion that the partition walls between these rooms are unconscionably thin, and that being so we had better postpone our council of war until we have got outside of our toast and coffee, and then adjourn with pipes to some sequestered spot where undisturbed we can concert plans for the discomfiture of the enemy. But, look here, you must pull yourself together. You are looking a cross between a scarecrow and a galvanised skull. Man alive, you’ll furnish sport to all the women in the house if they see you going about like this.”

“What a good chap you are, Fordham,” said poor Philip, gratefully. He was looking wretchedly pulled down and haggard, as the other had said, for he had had very little sleep. No one would have recognised the bright, handsome sunny face of yesterday. He looked a dozen years older. Even Alma, burning with outraged pride, must have pitied him.

But the Wyatts were not at table when the two came down, which was perhaps just as well. Old Glover was, but his daughter’s place was vacant. He frowned magnificently at Philip, and nodded in a stiff and patronising way to Fordham as they came in.

“Now Phil,” began Fordham, as having strolled up the meadow path behind the hotel, they sat down among a cluster of rocks and began to smoke, “Now Phil, we can talk to our heart’s content. What a chap you are. You were a semi-lunatic for the space of a week about one ‘skirt,’ and no sooner is that put right than another ‘skirt’ sails in unexpectedly and upsets the coach again.”

“Upsets it, indeed!” muttered poor Phil.

“As I understand the case,” went on Fordham, “and it’s far from an uncommon one, you neglected to throw away your dirty water before you got your clean. Consequently the former has overlapped the latter and damaged it effectually. Do you follow me?”

Philip nodded.

“Well now, what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to advise me.”

“H’m! The case stands thus. The appearance upon the scene of Number 1 has sheered Number 2 off in a deadly huff, which, under the circumstances, it was bound to do. Secondly, the British merchant and his offspring threaten to make themselves particularly disagreeable. Those are the two points upon which we must go to work.”

“Yes.”

“Very well. Now to begin with the first point. Have you squarely explained the whole affair to Miss Wyatt?”

“Don’t I wish she’d give me the chance!” was the vehement reply.

“You must make the chance—by hook or by crook. That’s all I’ve got to say. It is a matter between her and you exclusively, and one in which you must fight entirely to your own hand. Now as to the other, the—er—Glover side of the difficulty. Quite sure you wouldn’t have the girl at any price?”

“Dead certain.”

“That’s so, eh?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Well, I think you’re right. I wouldn’t myself—if I were you, I mean. How did you manage to get in tow with her?”

“Oh, it was just after that last cruise of ours, about six months ago,” said Philip, in the disgusted tone of a man who realises that he has made a fool of himself and is called upon to face the consequences of his folly. “I ran down to old Glover’s place with some other fellows to a dance, and—well—Edith and I got rather thick. Drifted into it, I suppose?”

“Used to go up the river a good bit, eh? Picnic and spoon on the eyots—and all that sort of thing?”

“Yes.”

“That river’s the very devil for getting fellows into messes of this kind. The rushes and the whispering-trees and the soft murmur of the water, don’t you know—andthe champagne in the hamper—all this I suppose combines to work it. Now, did you ever propose to her in definite terms?”

“N-no. Once it struck me she thought I had. It was one evening at a dance. We were sitting out in a corner of the lawn—and the river and the moonlight on the water—”

“Andthe champagne,” murmured Fordham. “No; it was sparkling Burgundy. But don’t chaff, old man. Well, I hadn’t really said anything definite. But, you know, a fellowisapt to make rather a fool of himself on such occasions, isn’t he?”

“Oh, very. Now how long was this—this evening when you hadn’t really said anything definite—before we came abroad together?”

“About a month or six weeks.”

“And of course you have corresponded ever since?”

“Up till the time I—er—you know—”

“Yes, yes, I quite understand. Well now, have you said—written, rather—anything definite in the course of that correspondence?”

“N-no. I don’t think I can have.”

“Would you mind allowing me to judge?”

“I didn’t keep copies of the letters—Oh, I see. Hers you mean! Hang it, old man, I—er—don’t think that would be quite fair to her.”

“Just as you please,” was the perfectly unruffled rejoinder. “By the way, you didn’t perform the pleasing ceremony commonly known as ‘speaking to papa,’ did you?”

“Not I,” said Philip, with alacrity.

“Yet he came here prepared to give you his blessing—and gave it, too, in the most all-embracing fashion?”

“That’sit! That’s just it!” cried Philip, savagely. “It’s a put-up job! Yet what on earth could they want to hook me for? The dear old governor has got years and years to go on yet; and even then he won’t cut up for much, for he’s as poor as Job. Still it looks like a clear case of ‘standing in.’”

“I think it does. As for the motive, the British merchant may have had a fancy to be able to talk about ‘My daughter, Lady Orlebar—ah!’ and added to that you’re a personable dog enough, Phil. He ought to be able to supply the funds to counterbalance the title.”

“There the motive breaks down,” quickly interrupted the other. “Although he cuts great splashes with his entertainments, and is rolling in money, he has the reputation of being the most close-fisted screw extant.”

“Is that so? Ah! now I begin to see a little light. You don’t think he’d come down with a fat settlement?”

“Not the ghost of a chance of it.”

“Good. I think we may defeat him on that count. But let us again be certain on this head. You are sure you wouldn’t take the girl at any price—not if he offers to settle fifty thousand?”

“Not if he offered to settle five hundred thousand. But don’t have any misgivings on that score. He won’t come down with five, you’ll see.”

“Good again,” said Fordham. “Now, are there any other daughters?”

“Three.”

“Sons?”

“Three.”

“Seven in the family. Right. Now, Phil, your line is this. You must put a prohibitive price upon yourself. Tell him straight that you are not going to wreck all your prospects in life for a girl you don’t really care two straws about, and never will, and bring yourself down to beggary into the bargain. You can defeat him on the question of settlements—if you are only firm enough.”

“But isn’t that rather a shady standpoint to take up—eh, Fordham?” said Phil, dubiously. “Not quite one’s form—eh?”

Fordham’s dark brows came nearer together, and there was a sneer in the black, piercing eyes which were fixed on the younger man’s face.

“My dear Phil,” he replied, “if there is a phase of humanity in this latter-day world which invariably lays itself out to be kicked, hustled, jumped upon, bested all round, it is represented by the man whose ‘form’ rises up to bar him fighting the devil with fire. ‘Poor Satan!’ say such fellows as yourself. ‘It really isn’t fair!’ So, by way of equalising the chances, you surrender at discretion, and the enemy of mankind dances upon youad lib. Here you have got to fight the devil with fire, and you won’t do it, because, forsooth, it is ‘not quite one’s form.’ You are simply the victim of a ‘plant’—a not very cunningly baited trap—and yet you are going to let the devil—who for present purposes may be taken to mean the paternal Glover—bind you hand and foot for all time. Could ever lunacy be more complete—more hopeless?”

“Well, what shall I tell him?” said Philip, desperately.

“Tell him, in unequivocal terms, to go hang.”

For a few moments Philip said nothing. He sat watching the smoke wreaths from his pipe curling up in blue circles upon the clear mountain air, a puzzled and helpless expression clouding his features. Then at last:

“I say, Fordham.”

“Well?”

“I wish—er—I wish, old chap, you’d pull me through this affair. I mean—er—I wish you’d interview old Glover for me. You’re so cool-headed, and I—well, I get in a rage and lose my nut. Why, this morning the old sinner and I were as nearly as possible coming to fisticuffs. We shouted at and damned each other, but what we said I haven’t the faintest recollection.”

“I don’t care to undertake anything of the kind, Phil, and so I tell you candidly,” answered Fordham.

“Why not, old chap?” was the doleful rejoinder.

“Because it is dead in the teeth of every ruling principle of my life to poke my nose into what doesn’t concern me. You may say I have already done so in advising you at all. So I have, and to that extent I plead guilty to having been inconsistent. But two wrongs don’t make a right, which we may take to mean that I don’t see why I should violate my principles still further. Were I to undertake what you want me to, old Glover would begin by asking what the devil business it was of mine, anyhow. And the worst of it is, he would be right—quite right.”

“Not of necessity,” rejoined Philip, eagerly. “Surely you have a right to act for a friend; and for all he knows you may be my legal adviser. I believe you must have been a lawyer once, you’re so devilish coldblooded and logical. Now, say you’ll do it.”

Fordham’s dark brows met, and he smoked silently for a few minutes. “Coldblooded—logical,” had said this careless youngster, who was merely paltering with the very outskirts of the grim web of circumstances which go to make up the tragedies—and travesties—of the serious side of life. “Coldblooded” was he now pronounced; yet could he remember when his blood ran hot, surging and seething like the boiling and bubbling pitch. Now it lay still within his veins, cool and acrid as vinegar.

“And if I don’t bring it off all right, or as you think all right, you’ll turn round and abuse me,” he said at last.

“You needn’t be in the least afraid of that,” answered Phil. “I’ll give you a free hand to act as you think right.”

“You will?”

“Of course.”

“Now you’re talking, as they say in the States. Well, Phil, I’ll do what I can for you. But mind, you must leave everything in my hands unreservedly. None of your insane scruples about ‘form,’ or anything of that kind. Do you agree to this?”

“I do, unreservedly.”

“Well, it’s dead contrary to my principles, as I told you before; but for this once I’ll throw judgment overboard, especially as it is to turn the flank of an infernal scheming, crafty female creature,” added this misogynist, an acrid ring coming into his tone. “And now, Phil, you had better not go back to the hotel. Start off from here and walk somewhere till lunch-time—if you could make it till dinner-time, all the better. By then I shall have knocked what change I can out of the exasperated but knowing British parent.”

Chapter Nineteen.Fighting the Devil with Fire.Philip was only too ready to follow his friend’s advice, and accordingly started away there and then—whither he did not care. His only thought was to get through the day somehow.He had no wish to encounter old Glover again. In saying that he had had a considerable row with that worthy he had in no wise overstated matters. His marked abstention from the fair Edith’s society the previous evening had been quite sufficient, and the old man had got up with the fixed determination of having it out with the defaulting swain, and withal giving the latter a very large piece of his mind. This was all very well. But old Glover, not being a gentleman himself, did not in the very least understand how to deal with gentlemen, and his method of handling his grievance was so much that of the triumphant trickster who has bested his neighbour over a bargain that it revolted Philip, unconsciously strengthening a resolve which was forming in his mind to avoid an alliance with connections of this sort at all costs and hazards.Now, as he made his way up the mountain path with the quick elastic step of perfect physical condition, Philip began to feel more sanguine. Fordham would get him out of the mess somehow. From where he was he could make out two figures strolling out from the hotel. He had no glasses with him, but felt sure they were Fordham and old Glover. They were at it already. Fordham was a wonderful fellow, and could do anything if he chose. It would not be surprising if he were to succeed in getting rid of the obnoxious Glovers altogether, and he—Philip—were to find the field clear again when he returned that evening. He felt quite hopeful.Not for long, however. For he remembered there was another horn to the dilemma. He might free himself from the awkward position in which circumstances and his own thoughtlessness had combined to land him; but the new sweet relationship with Alma—ah! that was a thing of the past, and this he recognised with a keen unerring instinct hardly to be looked for in his easy-going nature. This he recognised with a despairing pang, and again his heart was heavy as lead within him.The first person Fordham encountered on returning to the hotel was old Glover himself. The latter was seated on a pile of saw-planks stacked against a chalet, smoking the pipe of solitude and sweet and bitter fancies—probably the latter, if the expression of his countenance was aught to go by. So far from being prepared to resent his intervention, there was an eager look in the old man’s eyes as he perceived Fordham, which was by no means lost upon that astute reader of human nature.“Er—er—Mr Fordham?” he called out, the other having passed him with a commonplace remarkin rethe weather.Fordham turned with just a gleam of well-feigned astonishment in his face.“Ar—Mr Fordham,” went on old Glover now more eagerly, “would you—ar—mind accompanying me for a short stroll? I should—ar—like to have a few words with you.”“Certainly,” was the reply, and an additional touch was thrown into the well-feigned astonishment. “I am quite at your disposal. Doing nothing this morning. We might stroll along the level towards the head of the valley.”The other assented with alacrity, and they started, Fordham keeping the conversation to strict commonplace until they had got clear of the clusters of châlets lining the path on either side. Then the valley opened out into wide, level meadows, and, crossing the log bridge over the swirling, rushing mountain torrent, Fordham led the way into one of these.“Er—ar”—began old Glover, who had with difficulty restrained his eagerness up till now, “have you, may I ask, known young Orlebar for a considerable length of time?”“A goodish while.”“Do you—ar—considar—that you know him well—er—I may say intimately?”“Yes, I do.”“Er—now, Mr Fordham—you will—ar—excuse the question, I’m sure. Have you always found him—ar—straightforward?”“Invariably. Too much so, in fact, for his own interests.”“Ar—r!” The representative of British commerce drew himself up with a sidelong stare at his neighbour. This was a quality quite outside his comprehension. He began to suspect the other was making game of him. The expanse of waistcoat swelled, and the folds of a truly magnificent pomposity deepened around its wearer as he went on. “Ar—I am sorry I cannot agree with you, Mr—ar—Fordham—very sorry indeed. In his dealings with me—with me and mine—young Orlebar has, I regret to say, shown the—ar—very reverse of straightforwardness. Are you aware, sir, that he is engaged to my daughter?”“I can’t say I am.”The old man halted, turned round upon Fordham, and looked him full in the face as though he could hardly believe in his own sense of hearing.“I—ar—beg your pardon, Mr—ar—Fordham. Did I—ar—understand you to say you were not aware of it?”“Certainly, Mr Glover. I intended you to understand precisely that.”Old Glover was nonplussed. He began to feel small and at a decided disadvantage, a most unwonted feeling with him. He stared wonderingly, inquiringly, distrustfully, into the dark, saturnine visage confronting him, but could read nothing there.“It is an odd thing that Phil should not have informed me of the fact,” went on Fordham. “He is usually openness itself—indeed, too much so, as I said just now. Wears his heart on his sleeve, I always tell him. However, I shall have to congratulate him the next time I see him. By the way, I suppose his father is delighted? Philip is an only son, you know.”Nothing could be more innocent than Fordham’s tone, nothing more unsuspecting than the look of half-amused wonder with which he received the intelligence. But his keen perception noted the disconcerted wave which passed over his interlocutor’s face at this allusion to Sir Francis Orlebar.“Fathers have different ways of taking news of that kind,” he continued, innocently. “Now, partly as a student of character, partly by reason of some slight acquaintance with Sir Francis himself, I am curious to know how he took the news of his son’s engagement. How did he?”The question was put with blunt and cruel directness. No slippery commercial instincts could avail here. It must be answered. Poor old Glover felt unprecedentedly small in the hands of his wily opponent. Those piercing dark eyes penetrated his poor coating of pomposity as a lance-head might penetrate the rind of a pumpkin.“I am not aware how Sir Francis took the news,” he answered, stiffly.“He was informed, of course?” pursued Fordham, remorselessly. “Really—ar—Mr Fordham. Your tone is—ar—very strange. I am at a loss to—ar—”“Oh, a thousand pardons. I merely asked the question because I thought I understood you to say that Philip was engaged to your daughter. If I was mistaken—But I quite understand. Of course the affair is no business of mine. At the same time allow me to remind you, Mr Glover, that the topic was broached by yourself, and, moreover, that you requested me to accompany you for a stroll with that object. It is naturally of far greater interest to you than to me, but if it is distasteful to you, we will drop it at once. So let us talk of something more congenial.”His manner was the perfection of ingenuous indifference. Thorough cynic as he was, Fordham was enjoying the embarrassment of this inflated old schemer, who he well knew had not brought him thus far in order to “drop the subject” at any such early stage of the conversation. And the next words proved it.“You were not mistaken, sir. He is engaged to my daughter. And—ar—when you come to look at the matter in its right light, Mr Fordham, you will, I am sure, agree with me that he has acted with very great want of straightforwardness.”“Perhaps. But you know, Mr Glover, Philip is an only son. It does, I confess, appear strange to me that no reference should have been made to his father at the time he asked for your consent to the engagement. He did ask for it, I suppose?”“Hang it, sir!” blared forth the other, goaded to fury by his own helpless flounderings, which only served to entangle him deeper and deeper within the net. “Hang it, sir! You know as well as I do that in these days young people don’t trouble their heads about their fathers in matters of this kind. They take it all into their own hands—arrange it between themselves.”The expression of astonished disapproval upon Fordham’s face as he received this announcement would have delighted the heart of the most confirmed stickler for the old-fashioned proprieties.“Do they? I was not aware of it,” he said, “Pardon my ignorance, but I still can’t help thinking that, whatever may be the general rule, for the only son of a man of Sir Francis Orlebar’s position to be allowed to drift into a tacit engagement without consulting either the young lady’s father or his own, is—pardon me again—somewhat of an odd proceeding.”“What is a beggarly baronet?” cried old Glover, the coarse huckstering blood showing through the veneer of a would-be stately pomposity in his blind rage at finding himself outwitted at every point. “Pooh! I could buy up a dozen of them.”“True. I was not thinking so much, though, about what was due to a ‘beggarly baronet’ as to a gentleman and the son of a gentleman. However,” he resumed, after a pause just perceptible enough to carry that last shaft home, “let us now be frank with each other—talk as men of the world, in fact. I presume you had some object in seeking this interview with me, Mr Glover?”Their stroll had brought them to a large rock which at some period more or less remote had fallen from above and embedded itself in the meadow. In the shade formed by this Fordham proposed that they should sit down. A beetling cliff sheered up behind to a great height, but in front and around the approaches to the place were open.“You are right in your surmise, Mr—ar—Fordham. As an intimate friend of young Orlebar, a man, I believe, considerably older than himself, it occurred to me that you would be—ar—likely to have some influence over him—and—ar—might exert that influence towards inducing him to do what is right.”“You may command any influence I may possess in that direction, Mr Glover,” said Fordham, suavely, though inwardly chuckling over the cool impudence of the proposal and the opacity of the mind which could propound it.“I was sure of it—sure of it,” reiterated the other, much mollified at the prospect of so welcome an alliance. “As I said before, he is not behaving straightforwardly, and you will—ar—agree with me. Well, now, some months ago it was that he came first to my place. I’ve got a little crib down at Henley, you know, Mr Fordham—shall be happy to see you there if you are returning to England—very happy. Well, we had plenty of fun going on—parties and picnics and rowing and all that. I’m a man that likes to see young folks enjoying themselves. I don’t stint them—not I. Let them enjoy themselves when they are young, say I. Don’t you agree with me?”“Undoubtedly,” murmured Fordham.“Well, among other young fellows who came sparking around was this young Orlebar,” went on old Glover, forgetting his stilted pomposity in the thread of his narrative. “I was always glad to see him—ask him if I wasn’t. Soon it seemed to me that he was taking a fancy to my Edie. She’s my eldest, you know, as good a girl as ever was. She’s a pretty girl, too, and looks at home anywhere—in the Park, or wherever she may be. Now doesn’t she?”“I quite agree with you on the subject of Miss Glover’s attractions,” said Fordham, gravely. “She would, as you say, look thoroughly at home in the Park—with a perambulator and a soldier,” he added to himself.“All day and every day he made some excuse or other to run down. He’d take her out on the river by the hour, sit about the garden with her, be sending her flowers and things and all that. If that don’t mean intentions, I’d like to know what does. Well, I didn’t feel called upon to step in. I don’t believe in interfering with young folks’ inclinations. I liked the young fellow—we all did—and it seemed he was old enough to know his own mind. This went on for some time—some months. Then suddenly we heard he’d gone abroad, and from that day on heard no more about him by word or line. My poor Edie felt it dreadfully. She didn’t say anything at first, nor for a long time, and at last I got it all out of her. Now, that isn’t the way a girl should be treated, is it, Mr Fordham? If you had daughters of your own you would not like to see them treated like that, would you?”“Certainly not. But pray go on—I am interested.”He was—but in readingbetween the linesof this very ingenuous and pathetic tale of base and black hearted treachery. To the narrator his sympathetic tone and attitude conveyed the liveliest satisfaction, but that hoary plutocrat little guessed at what a dismally primitive hour it was requisite to rise in order to get the blind side of saturnine Richard Fordham.“I’d taken the girls to the seaside for their summer outing,” continued the narrator—“a thing they generally go wild with delight over. But poor Edie this time said she hated the sea. She wanted to go abroad. Would I take her abroad? At first I wouldn’t, till she grew quite thin and pale. Then I knew why she wanted to go, and she told me. If she could find him out herself—make up a pleasant little surprise, she said—it would all come right. It would all be as before, and they would be as jolly as grigs. I hadn’t the heart to refuse her, and so we came. We found out where young Orlebar was, and dropped down on him with the pleasant little surprise we’d planned. But—it didn’t seem a pleasant surprise at all.”“No, by Jove, it didn’t!” said the listener to himself, putting up his hand to hide a sardonic grin.“You saw that it didn’t. You saw how he behaved. Didn’t seem at all glad to see us, hardly spoke to us. And that girl had been breaking her heart about him—yes, breaking her heart—and he’s never been near her since the moment she arrived. But I see how it is—he’s got another string to his bow. That high and mighty young woman that was sitting near you—Miss—what’s her name?—Miss Wyatt, isn’t it? Well—”“Excuse me if I remind you, Mr Glover, that among ourselves it is not usual to drag ladies’ names into other people’s differences in that free-and-easy sort of fashion,” said Fordham, stiffly, though inwardly convulsed with mirth at the idea of finding himself, of all people, taking up the cudgels on behalf of one of the detested sex.“Eh—what? Why, they told me he was engaged to her.”“Who told you he was?”“Why, let me see—some of the people last night. I don’t quite recollect which of them. But perhaps you can tell me for certain. Is he?”“Not that I am aware of.”“Not—eh?” with a very distrustful look into Fordham’s face, and in no wise convinced; for to this representative of British commerce a man was bound to be lying, provided any adequate motive existed for mendacity, and here such motive undoubtedly did exist. “Well, they told me the pair of them were never apart, out together all day, sitting together all the evening—never apart, except at bedtime.”“Pooh! that means nothing. Here you see, and in places like this, society is a pretty happy-go-lucky assortment, and the harmonious elements gravitate towards each other. And while we are on this subject, Mr Glover, I may as well remind you that Philip is young, a great favourite with women, and consequently a devil of a fellow to flirt. He’s always over head and ears in some flirtation or other—always has been ever since I’ve known him. But he means nothing by it, and it always comes to nothing.”“Upon my word, Mr—ar—Fordham,” replied the other, again bristling up with pomposity, “you seem to treat this matter with strange—ar—levity. Whatever—ar—youmay see fit to call it,Ilook upon this—ar—outrageous trifling with my daughter’s feelings as the act of an unprincipled scoundrel. Yes, sir, an unprincipled scoundrel,” he added, rolling the words, in his delight at having hit upon a good, sounding, double-barrelled epithet. “But what do you want him to do?”“Well, really—ar—Mr Fordham, that is a strange question to come from a man of your—ar—knowledge of the world. What is the usual—ar—outcome of a young man’s winning a girl’s affection?”“I am bound in candour to reply that its nature varies. Further it might be as well to approach this matter with caution and common sense. You are doubtless aware that Sir Francis Orlebar is not a rich man—for a man in his position a decidedly poor one, and Philip has not a shilling in the world beyond what his father allows him? Now if his father should disapprove of this—er—engagement—as not having been consulted it is extremely likely he will—he may cut off that allowance summarily.”“In that case I should be prepared to allow the people—ar—something to go on with.”“What do you mean precisely by ‘something to go on with,’ Mr Glover?”“Well—really now—ar—Mr Fordham. You must excuse my saying so, but you are—ar—I mean this is—”“Taking a great liberty? I quite understand,” was the perfectly unruffled rejoinder. “But then you must remember this, Mr Glover. You broached the subject. You called me into consultation, so to say. You asked me to use my influence with Philip in this matter. I need hardly tell you I have no interest in it one way or the other. We will drop the subject altogether if you like.”“I think you mistake me,” said the other, hurriedly. “I did not—ar—say the words you were good enough to put into my mouth.”“Well, then, you must allow me, Mr Glover, to keep an eye upon my friend’s interests. He is very young, remember, a mere thoughtless boy. Now we, as men of the world, are bound to look at everything from a practical point of view. Let us talk plainly then. How much are you prepared to settle in the event of Philip—er—fulfilling the engagement into which you say he has entered?”“I should be, as I said before, prepared to make them a fairly liberal allowance,” he jerked forth, with the air of a man who has just had a tooth drawn and has found the process less painful than he had expected.But Fordham shook his head.“The ‘allowance’ system is an unsatisfactory one,” he said. “I have known people let into queer quandaries by trusting to it. Allowances may be cut off at the mere caprice of the allower. Now, don’t be offended,” he added, with the shadow of a smile. “We agreed to speak plainly and as men of the world. No—the thing must be asettlement. Now what are you prepared to settle?”“I think I may say this. I will settle four hundred a year upon them now. At my death of course—Why what is the matter? Is that not enough?”The last in an astonished and indignant tone. For an almost derisive shake of the head on the part of the other had cut short his words.“Most certainly not. It is, in fact, ridiculous.”“Many a young couple has begun life on less.”“And many a man has ruined his life by beginning on far more. No. I think my young friend will rate himself at a far higher value than that. Why there are shoals of women with six times that income who would jump at him.”“And are truth and honour to go for nothing?” spluttered old Glover, swelling himself out with virtuous wrath until the expanse of the white waistcoat was so tight that you could hear the seams crack. “Truth and honour and good faith—and a sweet girl’s broken heart?” he repeated, working up a highly effective sniffle.“My dear sir, you can’t run a household, and a milliner, and a dressmaker, and a butcher and baker, and a pocket doctor, and a lawyer—in fact, an unlimited liability, upon truth and honour; nor can you pay the Queen’s taxes with a sweet girl’s mended heart. Now, can you?”“You have a most—ar—peculiar way of putting things, I must say, Mr Fordham. Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do—I’ll make it five hundred. There!”“You might just as well make it five hundred pence, Mr Glover. I can’t advise my friend to throw himself away.”“I consider five hundred a year ample,” said old Glover, magisterially inserting his thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat. “If he wants more let him work for it. Let him go into some business.”“Why should he? He is young, and has the world at his feet. Why should he grind away at some dingy and uncongenial money-grubbing mill just for the fun of supporting your, or any other man’s, daughter. It isn’t good enough, and I tell you so candidly. And remember this: he has everything to lose and nothing to gain by the transaction, and with yourselves it is the other way about.”“And what amount would meet your friend’s views, Mr Fordham?” was the rejoinder, quick spoken, and with cutting irony.“He will have a position and title to keep up by and by,” answered Fordham, tranquilly. “I should say, a capital sum representing three thousand a year—not one farthing less.”Old Glover sprang to his feet with a snort and an activity one would hardly have credited him with. He stared wildly at Fordham, gasped for breath and snorted again. Then he spluttered forth.“I never heard anything so monstrous—such an outrageous piece of impertinence in my life.”“But, my dear sir, surely I’ve put the case plain enough—”“Don’t talk to me any more about it, sir,” interrupted the other furiously, “I won’t hear of such a preposterous suggestion.”“Do I understand that you refuse the condition, then?”“Most emphatically you may understand that very thing. Three thousand a year—ha—ha! He must be mad! But I tell you what it is, sir,” he blared forth, stung by Fordham’s cool and indifferent demeanour. “That young scoundrel—yes—that young scoundrel, I say,” with a stamp of the foot, “shall bemadeto fulfil his engagement—shall be made to, I say.”“Shall he? Excuse my reminding you of the old proverb concerning the horse which may be taken to the water.”“Sha’n’t he! I’ll sue him for breach of promise. I’ll claim such swinging damages as never were asked for in a court of law yet. I’ll ruin him—yes, I’ll ruin him, by God!”“You may obtain a few hundreds at the outside. But you said something just now about your daughter’s heart being broken. Do you propose to heal that fractured organ by exposing the young lady to the jeers of a not over particular crowd in a public court, and making her the laughing stock of every newspaper reader in the kingdom for the sake of a few hundred pounds?”“That’smybusiness, sir—that’smybusiness,” was the savage reply.“Even then you will have to prove any specific promise at all. Under the circumstances this will be a matter of some difficulty, I imagine. Why not think over the terms I have stated?”“Never, sir I never! Such unheard-of impudence?” And he fairly danced at the idea.“Well, then, I’ve no more to say. In my opinion a man is a fool who ties himself to any woman. A lion might as well make himself the slave of a cat. But when he is expected to embrace the exhilarating career of a mill-horse in order that the dear creature may own a conveniently supporting slave—if he does so, I say, he deserves to be hung on sight. I shall certainly advise Phil Orlebar not to marry anybody on a cent less than three thousand a year, and I believe he will take my advice.”“Very well, sir. We shall see—we shall see. And, by the way, Mr—ar—Fordham”—and the trade mind of the successful huckster again rose to the surface—“you are really a most clever advocate, and I must—ar—congratulate you. But ‘nothing for nothing,’ you know. Now how much of this fabulous income was to have found its way into your pocket if obtained? Commission, you understand.”There was such a lurid look in Fordham’s dark face as he quickly rose to his feet, that even old Glover, dancing with rage, quailed and stepped back a pace or two.“I must congratulateyou, Mr Glover, on your good fortune in being anoldman at this moment. However,” and his tone resumed its normal sarcastic ring. “However, there are no witnesses present so we may as well speak our minds to each other. It is abundantly obvious that you have laid yourselves out to hook young Philip Orlebar, and have done it deucedly clumsily too—so clumsily, that luckily for himself the bird has seen the limed twig in time. Anyhow, to rush him as you have done, and bestow the paternal blessing before it was asked for—in public too—is just the way to choke off irrevocably a youngster of his stamp. I don’t know that there’s anything more to be said, except this. Bring your action by all means, but you will find it as hard a matter to prove a specific promise, as you will to persuade any jury that it is not a clear case of trying to entrap the son of a man of position and superior birth.”To convey any idea of old Glover’s state as he listened to this harangue, would be impossible. At first he was speechless, and Fordham began to think he was on the verge of apoplexy. Eventually he found his tongue, and the great cliff in the background fairly echoed to the sound of a volley of strange and gurgling oaths. Then the full torrent of his wrath burst forth. He would sue the delinquent Phil—would ruin him—would sue them both—for conspiracy, libel—what not. There was nothing, in fact, that he would not do—shooting—horse-whipping—every form of violence was enumerated. He should rue the day—every one concerned should rue the day, etc, etc.But Fordham, lighting a fresh pipe, leaned comfortably back against the rock, and waited with perfect unconcern until this human boiler should have blown off all its steam—or burst—it didn’t matter which.

Philip was only too ready to follow his friend’s advice, and accordingly started away there and then—whither he did not care. His only thought was to get through the day somehow.

He had no wish to encounter old Glover again. In saying that he had had a considerable row with that worthy he had in no wise overstated matters. His marked abstention from the fair Edith’s society the previous evening had been quite sufficient, and the old man had got up with the fixed determination of having it out with the defaulting swain, and withal giving the latter a very large piece of his mind. This was all very well. But old Glover, not being a gentleman himself, did not in the very least understand how to deal with gentlemen, and his method of handling his grievance was so much that of the triumphant trickster who has bested his neighbour over a bargain that it revolted Philip, unconsciously strengthening a resolve which was forming in his mind to avoid an alliance with connections of this sort at all costs and hazards.

Now, as he made his way up the mountain path with the quick elastic step of perfect physical condition, Philip began to feel more sanguine. Fordham would get him out of the mess somehow. From where he was he could make out two figures strolling out from the hotel. He had no glasses with him, but felt sure they were Fordham and old Glover. They were at it already. Fordham was a wonderful fellow, and could do anything if he chose. It would not be surprising if he were to succeed in getting rid of the obnoxious Glovers altogether, and he—Philip—were to find the field clear again when he returned that evening. He felt quite hopeful.

Not for long, however. For he remembered there was another horn to the dilemma. He might free himself from the awkward position in which circumstances and his own thoughtlessness had combined to land him; but the new sweet relationship with Alma—ah! that was a thing of the past, and this he recognised with a keen unerring instinct hardly to be looked for in his easy-going nature. This he recognised with a despairing pang, and again his heart was heavy as lead within him.

The first person Fordham encountered on returning to the hotel was old Glover himself. The latter was seated on a pile of saw-planks stacked against a chalet, smoking the pipe of solitude and sweet and bitter fancies—probably the latter, if the expression of his countenance was aught to go by. So far from being prepared to resent his intervention, there was an eager look in the old man’s eyes as he perceived Fordham, which was by no means lost upon that astute reader of human nature.

“Er—er—Mr Fordham?” he called out, the other having passed him with a commonplace remarkin rethe weather.

Fordham turned with just a gleam of well-feigned astonishment in his face.

“Ar—Mr Fordham,” went on old Glover now more eagerly, “would you—ar—mind accompanying me for a short stroll? I should—ar—like to have a few words with you.”

“Certainly,” was the reply, and an additional touch was thrown into the well-feigned astonishment. “I am quite at your disposal. Doing nothing this morning. We might stroll along the level towards the head of the valley.”

The other assented with alacrity, and they started, Fordham keeping the conversation to strict commonplace until they had got clear of the clusters of châlets lining the path on either side. Then the valley opened out into wide, level meadows, and, crossing the log bridge over the swirling, rushing mountain torrent, Fordham led the way into one of these.

“Er—ar”—began old Glover, who had with difficulty restrained his eagerness up till now, “have you, may I ask, known young Orlebar for a considerable length of time?”

“A goodish while.”

“Do you—ar—considar—that you know him well—er—I may say intimately?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Er—now, Mr Fordham—you will—ar—excuse the question, I’m sure. Have you always found him—ar—straightforward?”

“Invariably. Too much so, in fact, for his own interests.”

“Ar—r!” The representative of British commerce drew himself up with a sidelong stare at his neighbour. This was a quality quite outside his comprehension. He began to suspect the other was making game of him. The expanse of waistcoat swelled, and the folds of a truly magnificent pomposity deepened around its wearer as he went on. “Ar—I am sorry I cannot agree with you, Mr—ar—Fordham—very sorry indeed. In his dealings with me—with me and mine—young Orlebar has, I regret to say, shown the—ar—very reverse of straightforwardness. Are you aware, sir, that he is engaged to my daughter?”

“I can’t say I am.”

The old man halted, turned round upon Fordham, and looked him full in the face as though he could hardly believe in his own sense of hearing.

“I—ar—beg your pardon, Mr—ar—Fordham. Did I—ar—understand you to say you were not aware of it?”

“Certainly, Mr Glover. I intended you to understand precisely that.”

Old Glover was nonplussed. He began to feel small and at a decided disadvantage, a most unwonted feeling with him. He stared wonderingly, inquiringly, distrustfully, into the dark, saturnine visage confronting him, but could read nothing there.

“It is an odd thing that Phil should not have informed me of the fact,” went on Fordham. “He is usually openness itself—indeed, too much so, as I said just now. Wears his heart on his sleeve, I always tell him. However, I shall have to congratulate him the next time I see him. By the way, I suppose his father is delighted? Philip is an only son, you know.”

Nothing could be more innocent than Fordham’s tone, nothing more unsuspecting than the look of half-amused wonder with which he received the intelligence. But his keen perception noted the disconcerted wave which passed over his interlocutor’s face at this allusion to Sir Francis Orlebar.

“Fathers have different ways of taking news of that kind,” he continued, innocently. “Now, partly as a student of character, partly by reason of some slight acquaintance with Sir Francis himself, I am curious to know how he took the news of his son’s engagement. How did he?”

The question was put with blunt and cruel directness. No slippery commercial instincts could avail here. It must be answered. Poor old Glover felt unprecedentedly small in the hands of his wily opponent. Those piercing dark eyes penetrated his poor coating of pomposity as a lance-head might penetrate the rind of a pumpkin.

“I am not aware how Sir Francis took the news,” he answered, stiffly.

“He was informed, of course?” pursued Fordham, remorselessly. “Really—ar—Mr Fordham. Your tone is—ar—very strange. I am at a loss to—ar—”

“Oh, a thousand pardons. I merely asked the question because I thought I understood you to say that Philip was engaged to your daughter. If I was mistaken—But I quite understand. Of course the affair is no business of mine. At the same time allow me to remind you, Mr Glover, that the topic was broached by yourself, and, moreover, that you requested me to accompany you for a stroll with that object. It is naturally of far greater interest to you than to me, but if it is distasteful to you, we will drop it at once. So let us talk of something more congenial.”

His manner was the perfection of ingenuous indifference. Thorough cynic as he was, Fordham was enjoying the embarrassment of this inflated old schemer, who he well knew had not brought him thus far in order to “drop the subject” at any such early stage of the conversation. And the next words proved it.

“You were not mistaken, sir. He is engaged to my daughter. And—ar—when you come to look at the matter in its right light, Mr Fordham, you will, I am sure, agree with me that he has acted with very great want of straightforwardness.”

“Perhaps. But you know, Mr Glover, Philip is an only son. It does, I confess, appear strange to me that no reference should have been made to his father at the time he asked for your consent to the engagement. He did ask for it, I suppose?”

“Hang it, sir!” blared forth the other, goaded to fury by his own helpless flounderings, which only served to entangle him deeper and deeper within the net. “Hang it, sir! You know as well as I do that in these days young people don’t trouble their heads about their fathers in matters of this kind. They take it all into their own hands—arrange it between themselves.”

The expression of astonished disapproval upon Fordham’s face as he received this announcement would have delighted the heart of the most confirmed stickler for the old-fashioned proprieties.

“Do they? I was not aware of it,” he said, “Pardon my ignorance, but I still can’t help thinking that, whatever may be the general rule, for the only son of a man of Sir Francis Orlebar’s position to be allowed to drift into a tacit engagement without consulting either the young lady’s father or his own, is—pardon me again—somewhat of an odd proceeding.”

“What is a beggarly baronet?” cried old Glover, the coarse huckstering blood showing through the veneer of a would-be stately pomposity in his blind rage at finding himself outwitted at every point. “Pooh! I could buy up a dozen of them.”

“True. I was not thinking so much, though, about what was due to a ‘beggarly baronet’ as to a gentleman and the son of a gentleman. However,” he resumed, after a pause just perceptible enough to carry that last shaft home, “let us now be frank with each other—talk as men of the world, in fact. I presume you had some object in seeking this interview with me, Mr Glover?”

Their stroll had brought them to a large rock which at some period more or less remote had fallen from above and embedded itself in the meadow. In the shade formed by this Fordham proposed that they should sit down. A beetling cliff sheered up behind to a great height, but in front and around the approaches to the place were open.

“You are right in your surmise, Mr—ar—Fordham. As an intimate friend of young Orlebar, a man, I believe, considerably older than himself, it occurred to me that you would be—ar—likely to have some influence over him—and—ar—might exert that influence towards inducing him to do what is right.”

“You may command any influence I may possess in that direction, Mr Glover,” said Fordham, suavely, though inwardly chuckling over the cool impudence of the proposal and the opacity of the mind which could propound it.

“I was sure of it—sure of it,” reiterated the other, much mollified at the prospect of so welcome an alliance. “As I said before, he is not behaving straightforwardly, and you will—ar—agree with me. Well, now, some months ago it was that he came first to my place. I’ve got a little crib down at Henley, you know, Mr Fordham—shall be happy to see you there if you are returning to England—very happy. Well, we had plenty of fun going on—parties and picnics and rowing and all that. I’m a man that likes to see young folks enjoying themselves. I don’t stint them—not I. Let them enjoy themselves when they are young, say I. Don’t you agree with me?”

“Undoubtedly,” murmured Fordham.

“Well, among other young fellows who came sparking around was this young Orlebar,” went on old Glover, forgetting his stilted pomposity in the thread of his narrative. “I was always glad to see him—ask him if I wasn’t. Soon it seemed to me that he was taking a fancy to my Edie. She’s my eldest, you know, as good a girl as ever was. She’s a pretty girl, too, and looks at home anywhere—in the Park, or wherever she may be. Now doesn’t she?”

“I quite agree with you on the subject of Miss Glover’s attractions,” said Fordham, gravely. “She would, as you say, look thoroughly at home in the Park—with a perambulator and a soldier,” he added to himself.

“All day and every day he made some excuse or other to run down. He’d take her out on the river by the hour, sit about the garden with her, be sending her flowers and things and all that. If that don’t mean intentions, I’d like to know what does. Well, I didn’t feel called upon to step in. I don’t believe in interfering with young folks’ inclinations. I liked the young fellow—we all did—and it seemed he was old enough to know his own mind. This went on for some time—some months. Then suddenly we heard he’d gone abroad, and from that day on heard no more about him by word or line. My poor Edie felt it dreadfully. She didn’t say anything at first, nor for a long time, and at last I got it all out of her. Now, that isn’t the way a girl should be treated, is it, Mr Fordham? If you had daughters of your own you would not like to see them treated like that, would you?”

“Certainly not. But pray go on—I am interested.”

He was—but in readingbetween the linesof this very ingenuous and pathetic tale of base and black hearted treachery. To the narrator his sympathetic tone and attitude conveyed the liveliest satisfaction, but that hoary plutocrat little guessed at what a dismally primitive hour it was requisite to rise in order to get the blind side of saturnine Richard Fordham.

“I’d taken the girls to the seaside for their summer outing,” continued the narrator—“a thing they generally go wild with delight over. But poor Edie this time said she hated the sea. She wanted to go abroad. Would I take her abroad? At first I wouldn’t, till she grew quite thin and pale. Then I knew why she wanted to go, and she told me. If she could find him out herself—make up a pleasant little surprise, she said—it would all come right. It would all be as before, and they would be as jolly as grigs. I hadn’t the heart to refuse her, and so we came. We found out where young Orlebar was, and dropped down on him with the pleasant little surprise we’d planned. But—it didn’t seem a pleasant surprise at all.”

“No, by Jove, it didn’t!” said the listener to himself, putting up his hand to hide a sardonic grin.

“You saw that it didn’t. You saw how he behaved. Didn’t seem at all glad to see us, hardly spoke to us. And that girl had been breaking her heart about him—yes, breaking her heart—and he’s never been near her since the moment she arrived. But I see how it is—he’s got another string to his bow. That high and mighty young woman that was sitting near you—Miss—what’s her name?—Miss Wyatt, isn’t it? Well—”

“Excuse me if I remind you, Mr Glover, that among ourselves it is not usual to drag ladies’ names into other people’s differences in that free-and-easy sort of fashion,” said Fordham, stiffly, though inwardly convulsed with mirth at the idea of finding himself, of all people, taking up the cudgels on behalf of one of the detested sex.

“Eh—what? Why, they told me he was engaged to her.”

“Who told you he was?”

“Why, let me see—some of the people last night. I don’t quite recollect which of them. But perhaps you can tell me for certain. Is he?”

“Not that I am aware of.”

“Not—eh?” with a very distrustful look into Fordham’s face, and in no wise convinced; for to this representative of British commerce a man was bound to be lying, provided any adequate motive existed for mendacity, and here such motive undoubtedly did exist. “Well, they told me the pair of them were never apart, out together all day, sitting together all the evening—never apart, except at bedtime.”

“Pooh! that means nothing. Here you see, and in places like this, society is a pretty happy-go-lucky assortment, and the harmonious elements gravitate towards each other. And while we are on this subject, Mr Glover, I may as well remind you that Philip is young, a great favourite with women, and consequently a devil of a fellow to flirt. He’s always over head and ears in some flirtation or other—always has been ever since I’ve known him. But he means nothing by it, and it always comes to nothing.”

“Upon my word, Mr—ar—Fordham,” replied the other, again bristling up with pomposity, “you seem to treat this matter with strange—ar—levity. Whatever—ar—youmay see fit to call it,Ilook upon this—ar—outrageous trifling with my daughter’s feelings as the act of an unprincipled scoundrel. Yes, sir, an unprincipled scoundrel,” he added, rolling the words, in his delight at having hit upon a good, sounding, double-barrelled epithet. “But what do you want him to do?”

“Well, really—ar—Mr Fordham, that is a strange question to come from a man of your—ar—knowledge of the world. What is the usual—ar—outcome of a young man’s winning a girl’s affection?”

“I am bound in candour to reply that its nature varies. Further it might be as well to approach this matter with caution and common sense. You are doubtless aware that Sir Francis Orlebar is not a rich man—for a man in his position a decidedly poor one, and Philip has not a shilling in the world beyond what his father allows him? Now if his father should disapprove of this—er—engagement—as not having been consulted it is extremely likely he will—he may cut off that allowance summarily.”

“In that case I should be prepared to allow the people—ar—something to go on with.”

“What do you mean precisely by ‘something to go on with,’ Mr Glover?”

“Well—really now—ar—Mr Fordham. You must excuse my saying so, but you are—ar—I mean this is—”

“Taking a great liberty? I quite understand,” was the perfectly unruffled rejoinder. “But then you must remember this, Mr Glover. You broached the subject. You called me into consultation, so to say. You asked me to use my influence with Philip in this matter. I need hardly tell you I have no interest in it one way or the other. We will drop the subject altogether if you like.”

“I think you mistake me,” said the other, hurriedly. “I did not—ar—say the words you were good enough to put into my mouth.”

“Well, then, you must allow me, Mr Glover, to keep an eye upon my friend’s interests. He is very young, remember, a mere thoughtless boy. Now we, as men of the world, are bound to look at everything from a practical point of view. Let us talk plainly then. How much are you prepared to settle in the event of Philip—er—fulfilling the engagement into which you say he has entered?”

“I should be, as I said before, prepared to make them a fairly liberal allowance,” he jerked forth, with the air of a man who has just had a tooth drawn and has found the process less painful than he had expected.

But Fordham shook his head.

“The ‘allowance’ system is an unsatisfactory one,” he said. “I have known people let into queer quandaries by trusting to it. Allowances may be cut off at the mere caprice of the allower. Now, don’t be offended,” he added, with the shadow of a smile. “We agreed to speak plainly and as men of the world. No—the thing must be asettlement. Now what are you prepared to settle?”

“I think I may say this. I will settle four hundred a year upon them now. At my death of course—Why what is the matter? Is that not enough?”

The last in an astonished and indignant tone. For an almost derisive shake of the head on the part of the other had cut short his words.

“Most certainly not. It is, in fact, ridiculous.”

“Many a young couple has begun life on less.”

“And many a man has ruined his life by beginning on far more. No. I think my young friend will rate himself at a far higher value than that. Why there are shoals of women with six times that income who would jump at him.”

“And are truth and honour to go for nothing?” spluttered old Glover, swelling himself out with virtuous wrath until the expanse of the white waistcoat was so tight that you could hear the seams crack. “Truth and honour and good faith—and a sweet girl’s broken heart?” he repeated, working up a highly effective sniffle.

“My dear sir, you can’t run a household, and a milliner, and a dressmaker, and a butcher and baker, and a pocket doctor, and a lawyer—in fact, an unlimited liability, upon truth and honour; nor can you pay the Queen’s taxes with a sweet girl’s mended heart. Now, can you?”

“You have a most—ar—peculiar way of putting things, I must say, Mr Fordham. Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do—I’ll make it five hundred. There!”

“You might just as well make it five hundred pence, Mr Glover. I can’t advise my friend to throw himself away.”

“I consider five hundred a year ample,” said old Glover, magisterially inserting his thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat. “If he wants more let him work for it. Let him go into some business.”

“Why should he? He is young, and has the world at his feet. Why should he grind away at some dingy and uncongenial money-grubbing mill just for the fun of supporting your, or any other man’s, daughter. It isn’t good enough, and I tell you so candidly. And remember this: he has everything to lose and nothing to gain by the transaction, and with yourselves it is the other way about.”

“And what amount would meet your friend’s views, Mr Fordham?” was the rejoinder, quick spoken, and with cutting irony.

“He will have a position and title to keep up by and by,” answered Fordham, tranquilly. “I should say, a capital sum representing three thousand a year—not one farthing less.”

Old Glover sprang to his feet with a snort and an activity one would hardly have credited him with. He stared wildly at Fordham, gasped for breath and snorted again. Then he spluttered forth.

“I never heard anything so monstrous—such an outrageous piece of impertinence in my life.”

“But, my dear sir, surely I’ve put the case plain enough—”

“Don’t talk to me any more about it, sir,” interrupted the other furiously, “I won’t hear of such a preposterous suggestion.”

“Do I understand that you refuse the condition, then?”

“Most emphatically you may understand that very thing. Three thousand a year—ha—ha! He must be mad! But I tell you what it is, sir,” he blared forth, stung by Fordham’s cool and indifferent demeanour. “That young scoundrel—yes—that young scoundrel, I say,” with a stamp of the foot, “shall bemadeto fulfil his engagement—shall be made to, I say.”

“Shall he? Excuse my reminding you of the old proverb concerning the horse which may be taken to the water.”

“Sha’n’t he! I’ll sue him for breach of promise. I’ll claim such swinging damages as never were asked for in a court of law yet. I’ll ruin him—yes, I’ll ruin him, by God!”

“You may obtain a few hundreds at the outside. But you said something just now about your daughter’s heart being broken. Do you propose to heal that fractured organ by exposing the young lady to the jeers of a not over particular crowd in a public court, and making her the laughing stock of every newspaper reader in the kingdom for the sake of a few hundred pounds?”

“That’smybusiness, sir—that’smybusiness,” was the savage reply.

“Even then you will have to prove any specific promise at all. Under the circumstances this will be a matter of some difficulty, I imagine. Why not think over the terms I have stated?”

“Never, sir I never! Such unheard-of impudence?” And he fairly danced at the idea.

“Well, then, I’ve no more to say. In my opinion a man is a fool who ties himself to any woman. A lion might as well make himself the slave of a cat. But when he is expected to embrace the exhilarating career of a mill-horse in order that the dear creature may own a conveniently supporting slave—if he does so, I say, he deserves to be hung on sight. I shall certainly advise Phil Orlebar not to marry anybody on a cent less than three thousand a year, and I believe he will take my advice.”

“Very well, sir. We shall see—we shall see. And, by the way, Mr—ar—Fordham”—and the trade mind of the successful huckster again rose to the surface—“you are really a most clever advocate, and I must—ar—congratulate you. But ‘nothing for nothing,’ you know. Now how much of this fabulous income was to have found its way into your pocket if obtained? Commission, you understand.”

There was such a lurid look in Fordham’s dark face as he quickly rose to his feet, that even old Glover, dancing with rage, quailed and stepped back a pace or two.

“I must congratulateyou, Mr Glover, on your good fortune in being anoldman at this moment. However,” and his tone resumed its normal sarcastic ring. “However, there are no witnesses present so we may as well speak our minds to each other. It is abundantly obvious that you have laid yourselves out to hook young Philip Orlebar, and have done it deucedly clumsily too—so clumsily, that luckily for himself the bird has seen the limed twig in time. Anyhow, to rush him as you have done, and bestow the paternal blessing before it was asked for—in public too—is just the way to choke off irrevocably a youngster of his stamp. I don’t know that there’s anything more to be said, except this. Bring your action by all means, but you will find it as hard a matter to prove a specific promise, as you will to persuade any jury that it is not a clear case of trying to entrap the son of a man of position and superior birth.”

To convey any idea of old Glover’s state as he listened to this harangue, would be impossible. At first he was speechless, and Fordham began to think he was on the verge of apoplexy. Eventually he found his tongue, and the great cliff in the background fairly echoed to the sound of a volley of strange and gurgling oaths. Then the full torrent of his wrath burst forth. He would sue the delinquent Phil—would ruin him—would sue them both—for conspiracy, libel—what not. There was nothing, in fact, that he would not do—shooting—horse-whipping—every form of violence was enumerated. He should rue the day—every one concerned should rue the day, etc, etc.

But Fordham, lighting a fresh pipe, leaned comfortably back against the rock, and waited with perfect unconcern until this human boiler should have blown off all its steam—or burst—it didn’t matter which.

Chapter Twenty.On The Summit.A narrow apex of solid rock, surrounded by a little cairn of stones and four human figures. And around—what a panorama! Everywhere rolling billowy summits, snowy and hump-like, or rearing up sharp and defined in craggy pinnacles—everywhere they rise—north, south, east, or west, the eye wanders confused over a vast sea of them. Below, a mighty array of snowfields, great ice rivers flowing silently down between their rock-bound walls—divided, separated from each other by stupendous ramparts of cliff and snow. Further down still—far, far beneath the region of ice and snow—a confused labyrinth of tortuous valleys, green, and sprinkled here and there with clusters of brown specks, haply representing a town or village, the faintly glittering star above which resolves itself under the lens of the telescope into the metal-sheathed cupola of a church tower. The very immensity of the panorama is overwhelming in its bewildering vastness. The eye, the senses, are burdened with it—can hardly take it in. The whole world seems to lie spread out around and beneath, for this apex of rock soaring up in mid-air seems in very truth to tower above the rest of the world. It is the summit of the Rothhorn.The two guides—good representatives of their class—with their thoughtful bronzed faces and horny hands, their quasi-uniform attire of grey frieze, and black-cock feather adorned hat—are busily engaged in examining the contents of a bottle, which they have extracted from its snug hiding-place in the heart of the cairn aforesaid—not in the hope of finding it to contain liquid refreshment, let us hasten to explain—nor are the contents precisely of a solid nature. They are calculated to appeal to the mind rather than the body, for they happen to consist, for the most part, of an assortment of visiting cards, bearing the names of such climbers as have hitherto gained this altitude, together with those of their guides, and any other remarks their owners may have seen fit to pencil thereon by way of record.“Well, Phil? Think my prescription was good enough, eh?” says Fordham, cheerfully. “Worth while undergoing something to get such a view as this?”But there is no cheerfulness about Philip Orlebar to-day, nor does he seem to take any interest in the view. Sprawling on his back, on the hard rock, with his hands behind his head, he is staring up at the sky—a phase of observation equally well undertaken at the bottom of a valley, thinks his companion. He merely growls in reply, and relapses into his abstraction.It is the second day after the somewhat stormily concluding interview between Fordham and old Glover, but poor Philip’s prospects had in no wise been improved thereby—indeed, he could not but realise that they were hopelessly ruined. The only result achieved was that of, so to say, drawing the teeth of the aggrieved but scheming parent. That crafty plutocrat had been left, in a manner of speaking, on his back. He had been met with a crisp, healthy decisiveness, which had left nothing to be inferred, whereas had Philip himself constituted the other party to the interview, we fear that a tendency to temporise might have wedged him into the morass firmer and deeper than ever. So far Fordham had rendered him yeoman’s service.But while released from one horn of the dilemma there was another upon which he remained firmly impaled, and whence it was beyond the power of any friend to extricate him, and that was a woman’s outraged pride. Alma Wyatt’s self-contained nature was a fearfully proud one, and it had been wounded to the quick. She, to allow herself to be deceived, fooled, made a plaything of, a mere pastime to add zest to a summer holiday—while all the time this man who had been whispering undying love to her was plighted to some one else! Her face fairly blanched with fierce wrath at the thought. And the insult, the publicity of the insult which he had put upon her—for his attentions were, of course, thoroughly understood by those around! No, she would never forgive him; never as long as he lived—or even on his deathbed!Even then the natural fairness of her mind moved her to do him what justice she could. Her own heart told her that in his love for herself there was, at any rate, no make-believe. That, at any rate, was genuine. So much the worse. It argued weakness in her eyes, an unpardonable fault in a man. And, again—that he had dared to offer her a mere place in his affections—to suppose that she wouldsharethem with anybody, let alone the overdressed, underbred creature to whom he was already plighted, and who had come there and claimed him—publicly claimed him—under her eyes! It was an outrage which she could not bring herself so much as to think of condoning.The only consolation was that she had all this time steadfastly refused to give him a definite answer—to allow him to give anybody to understand in definite terms that she was engaged to him. But what then? Had she not more than justified by implication such a conclusion on the part of those around her! Even now she was conscious of the exchanged glance, the hastily-stifled smile which her appearance evoked amid this or that group she happened to be passing, but this she could afford to treat with unconcern. Still the sting penetrated—penetrated and rankled. Her bitterness towards the chief offender hardened to white heat.Nothing had been said between them. She took care to allow him no opportunity for that. No explanations were needed. The situation would admit of none—absolutely none. She made no external difference in her manner towards him—did not even change her place beside him at table. She was too proud to give him or the lookers-on to suppose that she was sorely wounded. But there was a steeliness in her tone when she addressed him or answered any remark of his, which conveyed as severe a punishment as even she could have wished. He was miserable.Then he wrote to her—a piteous and heartbroken letter—explaining, protesting, and, above all, entreating. To ensure her receipt of this he slipped it himself beneath her door at a time when it could not escape her observation. As a result she did afford him an opportunity of speaking with her alone—an interview of just sufficient duration to allow her deliberately to tear his letter into small fragments before his face, carefully letting him see that it was unopened. Not a word did she speak. She could not trust herself. Her great eyes blazing forth such scorn from her pale face seemed to sear and burn into his. Then she turned and left him.After that he was desperate. Poor Phil, soft-hearted and sensitive, felt that he had wrecked his whole life. He wished he could get up a corresponding indignation. But he could not, not even the fraction of a semblance of it. His heart seemed turned to water—his brain was ablaze. He would relieve his feelings by undertaking some desperate feat—thank Heaven, it was always easy to break one’s neck. And on this object intent he bounded upstairs three steps at a time in quest of his ice-axe.But Providence, or his own forgetfulness, stood him in good stead that time, for the implement he sought was not in his room. He must have left it in Fordham’s. Thither he repaired.“What’s the row, Phil?” said the latter, looking up quickly, taking in at the same time the obvious fact that things were not merely wrong with his unlucky friend, but very much more so than ever.“Got my axe here? I’m just going for a—er—walk.”“Well, you can put it off then, for I’ve just been scheming out a promising climb. Got two first-rate Zermatt guides, who turned up last night and want to go back there. Everything is ready. What do you say to doing the Rothhorn? We can start for the Mountet cabin soon after lunch; sleep there, get to the top any time by midday, and go down the other side to Zermatt. What do you say?”“I’m your man, Fordham. Just the very thing I should like. And, I say—while we are about it—we might stay at Zermatt a few days and do the Matterhorn and two or three others, eh?”Fordham looked at him curiously.“Just the very thing I was going to suggest,” he said, “only I doubted whether you’d cotton. A smart shaking up and a change will do you all the good in the world, just now, Phil. We’ll start half an hour after lunch—there goes the second bell!—and go up to the hut quietly.”This they had done, and now after an excruciatingly early start from that convenient tarrying-place, and about six hours of really difficult climbing, of scrambling from rock to rock, worming round “corners” overhanging dizzy heights—work that called into full play every muscle and braced every nerve—here they were on the summit with the world at their feet.During the actual process of ascent Philip’s spirits seemed to return. The hard, and, in places, really hazardous, nature of the undertaking demanded all his attention, and whether clinging spreadeagled against the face of the cliff with no real hold to speak of, or balancing with one foot upon a rock projection about the size of a walnut, the other dangling over nothing, what time the next man above should secure a footing, or skirting gingerly the treacherous line of a curling snow cornice, where the thrust of the handle of an ice-axe left a hole through which lay viewed the awful depth of space which it overhung—all this constituted such a strain upon his faculties as to leave room for no other thought. Though strong and active, and in good training all round, Philip, be it remembered, was a novice at this sort of thing, consequently he found enough to do in ensuring his own safety, and, relatively, that of his companions. At one point of their progress a cloud had come over the mountain, rendering the rocks rimy and slippery, throwing out the ridge of ice crowning a sharparêtespectral and drear against the misty murk, magnifying the cliffs to gigantic proportions in their uncertain and ill-defined outlines. Gazing down upon the snow-flecked rocks far, far beneath, losing themselves in the swirling vortex of vapour, Philip felt rather small as he remembered his reckless intentions of the day before. Life, strange to say, seemed still worth having; at any rate such a way of ending it as a sudden dash through space on to those hideous black and white rocks struck him as grim and horrible in the extreme.But the excitement and physical exertion over, and the summit attained, his depression returned. More over he was tired, for he had hardly slept the night before, was, in fact, just dropping off, when roused by his indefatigable friend at 2 a.m. to make a pretence at devouring the breakfast which the guides were preparing over the weather-beaten stove. Now the magnificence and extent of the view was nothing to him. It seemed to lie outside his gaze. In spirit he was back again at the hotel at Zinal. Was Alma beginning to miss him—to think more kindly of him, now that they would not see each other for some days? Would those execrable Glovers have left by the time he returned? And would all come right again? If only it might!But if his younger friend’s thoughts were far-away down in the valley they had come up out of, Fordham’s were not. That saturnine individual was, for him, in high spirits. He had got out an excellent map—in the production of such Switzerland stands in the foremost place—and with the guides was busy verifying the topographical details of the stupendous panorama lying beneath and around. The cloud which had overshadowed them during their ascent had long since vanished, and now the sky was blue and clear, and the air like an elixir of life. The only clouds were those from three pipes, for the two guides and Fordham were smoking like chimneys.But they had been an hour on the summit, and the air, though exhilarating, was uncommonly chill. It became time to start downwards. The guides were beginning to repack the haversacks.“Have a pull at this, Phil,” said Fordham, handing him a flask. “And—I tell you what it is, man. You don’t know when you’re well off.”“Oh, I don’t?”“Rather not. Look at this,” with a comprehensive sweep of the hand. “Think what a splendid climb we had to get up here. Think what a splendid one we are going to have to get down, better, in fact, because less of sheer fag, and then think how many poor devils there are who would give their heads to be here to-day, instead of slaving their hearts out all their lives to support some snarling, ungrateful female, and a mob of more or less dirty and wholly detestable brats.”“Candidly, my dear chap,” returned Philip, “you are becoming somewhat of the nature of a bore. I seem to have heard something very like that before—not once, nor yet twice. The salutary instructions of the immortal Mr Barlow, of ‘Sandford and Merton’ fame, shine forth as very masterpieces of sparkling pungency when contrasted with your latter-day harangues. I want to know what the devil all this has to do with me.”“You shall! The gist of the parable is this. You are thinking all this time that Paradise lies at present in the Zinal valley in general, and very particularly in the Hôtel Durand; whereas in actual fact, so far as any semblance of that institution may be said to exist, it lies around and before you. For you are free at present, Phil, free as the air up here which is making us shiver, your freedom is as boundless as this rolling view of half a continent upon which we look down. You have the world at your feet as literally as we have it before us now.”“Go on, Mr Barlow. Pray proceed.”“I will. At present you are thinking what a Paradise every moment of life would be if coupled with the charmer down yonder. You are drawing all manner of glowing mental pictures of the bliss of a home illumined by her divine presence. All fustian, my dear fellow, all fustian! These superstitions are encouraged by the women from obvious motives. But they have no foundation in actual fact. Now whatIam thinking of is this. I am thinking of you in two or three years’ time, caged up with your charmer in some shabby-genteel suburban semi-detached—for she hasn’t a shilling of her own, I believe—I am thinking of you, I say, the proud possessor of two or three unruly brats—who may or may not be kept clean—thus caged up, with a domineering, bad-tempered woman, who has parted with her illusions, in proportion as she has contributed towards populating this interesting orb. I am thinking of you toiling the day through, week in week out, at some sordid and uncongenial drudgery for a mere pittance. You can never be well off, my dear Phil, for to do you justice, you lack the essential qualities of rascality and sycophancy which are requisite to the manufacture of the ‘successful man.’ And while your scanty leisure is taken up policing a series of ever-changing and refractory domestics, or carrying on epistolary war with your landlord,in rehis inevitable refusal to observe the most obvious provisions of his agreement, your much-needed slumbers will be invaded by the piercing and colicky yells of the last overfed cherub, and your night devoted to hospital duties in regard to that same. And then when you look back to—this day, for instance—I am not far out in asserting that you will catch yourself wondering whether such an unparalleled ass is even worth the sixpenny-worth of laudanum which should send him in search of the decisive change which may possibly be for the better, but can hardly be for the worse. There—that’s the other side of the orange, and now you can’t say it hasn’t been shown you.”“That all, Fordham?”“Nearly. But think it over, think it over, my dear chap. The gift of freedom is a grand and a glorious one. Don’t throw it away for the traditional mess of pottage—a comestible which may or may not be an excellent thing, but cannot in my humble judgment maintain its savour if subsisted on for the term of one’s natural life to the exclusion of all other articles of diet.”“I appreciate the point of that highly finished hyperbole—at its true valuation,” returned Philip, ironically. “And, look here, Fordham, I feel it necessary to amend my former comment. A man who will undertake to deliver such an unconscionably prosy preachment, on the very apex of a high Alp, is no longer merely becoming a bore, but has become one—in factisa bore, and that of the first magnitude.”

A narrow apex of solid rock, surrounded by a little cairn of stones and four human figures. And around—what a panorama! Everywhere rolling billowy summits, snowy and hump-like, or rearing up sharp and defined in craggy pinnacles—everywhere they rise—north, south, east, or west, the eye wanders confused over a vast sea of them. Below, a mighty array of snowfields, great ice rivers flowing silently down between their rock-bound walls—divided, separated from each other by stupendous ramparts of cliff and snow. Further down still—far, far beneath the region of ice and snow—a confused labyrinth of tortuous valleys, green, and sprinkled here and there with clusters of brown specks, haply representing a town or village, the faintly glittering star above which resolves itself under the lens of the telescope into the metal-sheathed cupola of a church tower. The very immensity of the panorama is overwhelming in its bewildering vastness. The eye, the senses, are burdened with it—can hardly take it in. The whole world seems to lie spread out around and beneath, for this apex of rock soaring up in mid-air seems in very truth to tower above the rest of the world. It is the summit of the Rothhorn.

The two guides—good representatives of their class—with their thoughtful bronzed faces and horny hands, their quasi-uniform attire of grey frieze, and black-cock feather adorned hat—are busily engaged in examining the contents of a bottle, which they have extracted from its snug hiding-place in the heart of the cairn aforesaid—not in the hope of finding it to contain liquid refreshment, let us hasten to explain—nor are the contents precisely of a solid nature. They are calculated to appeal to the mind rather than the body, for they happen to consist, for the most part, of an assortment of visiting cards, bearing the names of such climbers as have hitherto gained this altitude, together with those of their guides, and any other remarks their owners may have seen fit to pencil thereon by way of record.

“Well, Phil? Think my prescription was good enough, eh?” says Fordham, cheerfully. “Worth while undergoing something to get such a view as this?”

But there is no cheerfulness about Philip Orlebar to-day, nor does he seem to take any interest in the view. Sprawling on his back, on the hard rock, with his hands behind his head, he is staring up at the sky—a phase of observation equally well undertaken at the bottom of a valley, thinks his companion. He merely growls in reply, and relapses into his abstraction.

It is the second day after the somewhat stormily concluding interview between Fordham and old Glover, but poor Philip’s prospects had in no wise been improved thereby—indeed, he could not but realise that they were hopelessly ruined. The only result achieved was that of, so to say, drawing the teeth of the aggrieved but scheming parent. That crafty plutocrat had been left, in a manner of speaking, on his back. He had been met with a crisp, healthy decisiveness, which had left nothing to be inferred, whereas had Philip himself constituted the other party to the interview, we fear that a tendency to temporise might have wedged him into the morass firmer and deeper than ever. So far Fordham had rendered him yeoman’s service.

But while released from one horn of the dilemma there was another upon which he remained firmly impaled, and whence it was beyond the power of any friend to extricate him, and that was a woman’s outraged pride. Alma Wyatt’s self-contained nature was a fearfully proud one, and it had been wounded to the quick. She, to allow herself to be deceived, fooled, made a plaything of, a mere pastime to add zest to a summer holiday—while all the time this man who had been whispering undying love to her was plighted to some one else! Her face fairly blanched with fierce wrath at the thought. And the insult, the publicity of the insult which he had put upon her—for his attentions were, of course, thoroughly understood by those around! No, she would never forgive him; never as long as he lived—or even on his deathbed!

Even then the natural fairness of her mind moved her to do him what justice she could. Her own heart told her that in his love for herself there was, at any rate, no make-believe. That, at any rate, was genuine. So much the worse. It argued weakness in her eyes, an unpardonable fault in a man. And, again—that he had dared to offer her a mere place in his affections—to suppose that she wouldsharethem with anybody, let alone the overdressed, underbred creature to whom he was already plighted, and who had come there and claimed him—publicly claimed him—under her eyes! It was an outrage which she could not bring herself so much as to think of condoning.

The only consolation was that she had all this time steadfastly refused to give him a definite answer—to allow him to give anybody to understand in definite terms that she was engaged to him. But what then? Had she not more than justified by implication such a conclusion on the part of those around her! Even now she was conscious of the exchanged glance, the hastily-stifled smile which her appearance evoked amid this or that group she happened to be passing, but this she could afford to treat with unconcern. Still the sting penetrated—penetrated and rankled. Her bitterness towards the chief offender hardened to white heat.

Nothing had been said between them. She took care to allow him no opportunity for that. No explanations were needed. The situation would admit of none—absolutely none. She made no external difference in her manner towards him—did not even change her place beside him at table. She was too proud to give him or the lookers-on to suppose that she was sorely wounded. But there was a steeliness in her tone when she addressed him or answered any remark of his, which conveyed as severe a punishment as even she could have wished. He was miserable.

Then he wrote to her—a piteous and heartbroken letter—explaining, protesting, and, above all, entreating. To ensure her receipt of this he slipped it himself beneath her door at a time when it could not escape her observation. As a result she did afford him an opportunity of speaking with her alone—an interview of just sufficient duration to allow her deliberately to tear his letter into small fragments before his face, carefully letting him see that it was unopened. Not a word did she speak. She could not trust herself. Her great eyes blazing forth such scorn from her pale face seemed to sear and burn into his. Then she turned and left him.

After that he was desperate. Poor Phil, soft-hearted and sensitive, felt that he had wrecked his whole life. He wished he could get up a corresponding indignation. But he could not, not even the fraction of a semblance of it. His heart seemed turned to water—his brain was ablaze. He would relieve his feelings by undertaking some desperate feat—thank Heaven, it was always easy to break one’s neck. And on this object intent he bounded upstairs three steps at a time in quest of his ice-axe.

But Providence, or his own forgetfulness, stood him in good stead that time, for the implement he sought was not in his room. He must have left it in Fordham’s. Thither he repaired.

“What’s the row, Phil?” said the latter, looking up quickly, taking in at the same time the obvious fact that things were not merely wrong with his unlucky friend, but very much more so than ever.

“Got my axe here? I’m just going for a—er—walk.”

“Well, you can put it off then, for I’ve just been scheming out a promising climb. Got two first-rate Zermatt guides, who turned up last night and want to go back there. Everything is ready. What do you say to doing the Rothhorn? We can start for the Mountet cabin soon after lunch; sleep there, get to the top any time by midday, and go down the other side to Zermatt. What do you say?”

“I’m your man, Fordham. Just the very thing I should like. And, I say—while we are about it—we might stay at Zermatt a few days and do the Matterhorn and two or three others, eh?”

Fordham looked at him curiously.

“Just the very thing I was going to suggest,” he said, “only I doubted whether you’d cotton. A smart shaking up and a change will do you all the good in the world, just now, Phil. We’ll start half an hour after lunch—there goes the second bell!—and go up to the hut quietly.”

This they had done, and now after an excruciatingly early start from that convenient tarrying-place, and about six hours of really difficult climbing, of scrambling from rock to rock, worming round “corners” overhanging dizzy heights—work that called into full play every muscle and braced every nerve—here they were on the summit with the world at their feet.

During the actual process of ascent Philip’s spirits seemed to return. The hard, and, in places, really hazardous, nature of the undertaking demanded all his attention, and whether clinging spreadeagled against the face of the cliff with no real hold to speak of, or balancing with one foot upon a rock projection about the size of a walnut, the other dangling over nothing, what time the next man above should secure a footing, or skirting gingerly the treacherous line of a curling snow cornice, where the thrust of the handle of an ice-axe left a hole through which lay viewed the awful depth of space which it overhung—all this constituted such a strain upon his faculties as to leave room for no other thought. Though strong and active, and in good training all round, Philip, be it remembered, was a novice at this sort of thing, consequently he found enough to do in ensuring his own safety, and, relatively, that of his companions. At one point of their progress a cloud had come over the mountain, rendering the rocks rimy and slippery, throwing out the ridge of ice crowning a sharparêtespectral and drear against the misty murk, magnifying the cliffs to gigantic proportions in their uncertain and ill-defined outlines. Gazing down upon the snow-flecked rocks far, far beneath, losing themselves in the swirling vortex of vapour, Philip felt rather small as he remembered his reckless intentions of the day before. Life, strange to say, seemed still worth having; at any rate such a way of ending it as a sudden dash through space on to those hideous black and white rocks struck him as grim and horrible in the extreme.

But the excitement and physical exertion over, and the summit attained, his depression returned. More over he was tired, for he had hardly slept the night before, was, in fact, just dropping off, when roused by his indefatigable friend at 2 a.m. to make a pretence at devouring the breakfast which the guides were preparing over the weather-beaten stove. Now the magnificence and extent of the view was nothing to him. It seemed to lie outside his gaze. In spirit he was back again at the hotel at Zinal. Was Alma beginning to miss him—to think more kindly of him, now that they would not see each other for some days? Would those execrable Glovers have left by the time he returned? And would all come right again? If only it might!

But if his younger friend’s thoughts were far-away down in the valley they had come up out of, Fordham’s were not. That saturnine individual was, for him, in high spirits. He had got out an excellent map—in the production of such Switzerland stands in the foremost place—and with the guides was busy verifying the topographical details of the stupendous panorama lying beneath and around. The cloud which had overshadowed them during their ascent had long since vanished, and now the sky was blue and clear, and the air like an elixir of life. The only clouds were those from three pipes, for the two guides and Fordham were smoking like chimneys.

But they had been an hour on the summit, and the air, though exhilarating, was uncommonly chill. It became time to start downwards. The guides were beginning to repack the haversacks.

“Have a pull at this, Phil,” said Fordham, handing him a flask. “And—I tell you what it is, man. You don’t know when you’re well off.”

“Oh, I don’t?”

“Rather not. Look at this,” with a comprehensive sweep of the hand. “Think what a splendid climb we had to get up here. Think what a splendid one we are going to have to get down, better, in fact, because less of sheer fag, and then think how many poor devils there are who would give their heads to be here to-day, instead of slaving their hearts out all their lives to support some snarling, ungrateful female, and a mob of more or less dirty and wholly detestable brats.”

“Candidly, my dear chap,” returned Philip, “you are becoming somewhat of the nature of a bore. I seem to have heard something very like that before—not once, nor yet twice. The salutary instructions of the immortal Mr Barlow, of ‘Sandford and Merton’ fame, shine forth as very masterpieces of sparkling pungency when contrasted with your latter-day harangues. I want to know what the devil all this has to do with me.”

“You shall! The gist of the parable is this. You are thinking all this time that Paradise lies at present in the Zinal valley in general, and very particularly in the Hôtel Durand; whereas in actual fact, so far as any semblance of that institution may be said to exist, it lies around and before you. For you are free at present, Phil, free as the air up here which is making us shiver, your freedom is as boundless as this rolling view of half a continent upon which we look down. You have the world at your feet as literally as we have it before us now.”

“Go on, Mr Barlow. Pray proceed.”

“I will. At present you are thinking what a Paradise every moment of life would be if coupled with the charmer down yonder. You are drawing all manner of glowing mental pictures of the bliss of a home illumined by her divine presence. All fustian, my dear fellow, all fustian! These superstitions are encouraged by the women from obvious motives. But they have no foundation in actual fact. Now whatIam thinking of is this. I am thinking of you in two or three years’ time, caged up with your charmer in some shabby-genteel suburban semi-detached—for she hasn’t a shilling of her own, I believe—I am thinking of you, I say, the proud possessor of two or three unruly brats—who may or may not be kept clean—thus caged up, with a domineering, bad-tempered woman, who has parted with her illusions, in proportion as she has contributed towards populating this interesting orb. I am thinking of you toiling the day through, week in week out, at some sordid and uncongenial drudgery for a mere pittance. You can never be well off, my dear Phil, for to do you justice, you lack the essential qualities of rascality and sycophancy which are requisite to the manufacture of the ‘successful man.’ And while your scanty leisure is taken up policing a series of ever-changing and refractory domestics, or carrying on epistolary war with your landlord,in rehis inevitable refusal to observe the most obvious provisions of his agreement, your much-needed slumbers will be invaded by the piercing and colicky yells of the last overfed cherub, and your night devoted to hospital duties in regard to that same. And then when you look back to—this day, for instance—I am not far out in asserting that you will catch yourself wondering whether such an unparalleled ass is even worth the sixpenny-worth of laudanum which should send him in search of the decisive change which may possibly be for the better, but can hardly be for the worse. There—that’s the other side of the orange, and now you can’t say it hasn’t been shown you.”

“That all, Fordham?”

“Nearly. But think it over, think it over, my dear chap. The gift of freedom is a grand and a glorious one. Don’t throw it away for the traditional mess of pottage—a comestible which may or may not be an excellent thing, but cannot in my humble judgment maintain its savour if subsisted on for the term of one’s natural life to the exclusion of all other articles of diet.”

“I appreciate the point of that highly finished hyperbole—at its true valuation,” returned Philip, ironically. “And, look here, Fordham, I feel it necessary to amend my former comment. A man who will undertake to deliver such an unconscionably prosy preachment, on the very apex of a high Alp, is no longer merely becoming a bore, but has become one—in factisa bore, and that of the first magnitude.”

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