CHAPTER XIX.

“It is only some little caprice of hers,” she said persuasively, not guessing that there was any mystery in the matter, and considering the young bride’s conduct as the result of some girlish freak. “I think she was offended because uncle didn’t introduce the boys to her. She will be all right if you leave her alone a few minutes.”

But George was not unnaturally annoyed at his wife’s rudeness, and he followed her into the little drawing-room, where he found her with her nose flattened against the window, staring at Lord Florencecourt’s retreating figure. She had no explanation to give of her conduct, but persisted in begging him not to take her to Willingham. As he remained firm on this point, and continued to press her for her reasons, she grew mutinous, and at last peace was only made between them on the conditions that she would go to Willingham if he would not tease her with any more questions.

And George had to be content with this arrangement, being above all things anxious to learn the meaning of the miraculous change of front on the part of Lady Florencecourt and her husband.

Atdinner at Maple Lodge on the evening of their arrival, George Lauriston and his wife met the gentle Dicky Wood, who had come down the day before, and spent the afternoon riding with the son of Sir Henry’s steward. Nouna was much pleased by this compliance with her wishes, and showed her appreciation of it by flirting very prettily at dinner with the young guardsman. Later in the evening she held in the verandah a little court, and chanted them some half-wild, half-monotonous Indian songs in a tiny thread of sweet voice, with some plaintive low notes that lived in the memory. And George, who was standing with Ella some yards away from the rest of the group, felt thrilled through and through by the weird melodies, and liked to fancy that in these native songs of hers the soul-voice, that, in the tumultuous life of emotions and sensations in which she found her happiness, had small opportunity to be heard, forced up its little note and promised a richer fulness of melody by and by.

It was not by the man’s choice, but the girl’s, that he and Ella found themselves together. At the present time there was only one woman in Lauriston’s world, and in his absorption in his wife the ungrateful fellow was incapable even of feeling his old friendly pleasure in Ella’s society. Her interest in him, on the other hand, as is the way with that splendid institution for the comfort and consolation of man—plain women, had grown tenfold stronger since he had lowered himself to the usual dead level of his foolish sex, by marrying through his eyes. To Ella this downfall was quite tragic; she had thought and hoped so much for him; he had feeling, sense, ambition, was, in fact, not the mere beautifully turned out figure-head of a man who, under various disguises of light or dark complexion, slim or heavy build, was continually saying to her the same commonplaces, betraying to her the same idea-less vacuity, at dinner, ball, and garden-party. Yet here he was, bound for life, and by his own choice, to a beautiful pet animal, with all the fascinating ways of a kitten, who could gambol and scratch, and bask in warmth and shiver in cold, and whom nevertheless he undoubtedly worshipped. Ella, whose mind was of an intellectual cast, and in whom the passions had as yet only developed in an ardent but hazy adoration of dead-and-gone heroes, very naturally underrated the strength of one side of a man’s nature, and was cast down when the creature whose sympathetic comprehension of her highest aspirations had made her raise him to a demi-god proved to be in truth only a very man. She fancied, poor child, that he showed deterioration already; when she reminded him at dinner that she had not yet returned a book of Emerson’s he had lent her, George laughed carelessly, and said he had forgotten all about it.

“Don’t you remember you particularly advised me to read the articles on ‘Goethe’ and ‘Napoleon’?” she asked rather acidly.

“Oh, yes, they’re very good,” said he, with a man’s irritating frivolity, smiling at his wife, who was shutting one eye and holding her glass of claret up to the light, in imitation of an elderly connoisseur, for the amusement of Dicky. Then, perceiving in a pause that he had offended Ella, he hastened to say penitently: “I haven’t done much reading lately; but you have, I suppose; you are always so good.”

“I don’t read because I amgood, but because I like it,” she answered coldly.

And George, reflecting on the oddity of Ella’s trying to improve him as he had tried to improve Nouna, had taken the snub meekly as a bolt of retributive providence.

But when she got an opportunity of speech with him alone in the verandah, in a rather melancholy and remorseful frame of mind, she “had her say” after her sex’s fashion.

“One mustn’t expect you to be the same person that you were three months ago, George,” she began, with a very humble, deprecating manner. “Otherwise I would ask you why we don’t hear of your coming to the front as a writer, as we heard then there was a probability of your doing.”

George laughed with the same maddening indifference to his deterioration, and asked if he might smoke. With a cigarette between his lips, flourishing before her eyes the privilege of a man, he felt more of a man’s commanding position.

“I haven’t come to the front,” said he, “because I haven’t made any steps at all, either forward, backward, or in any direction. I’ve been lazy, Ella, miserably, culpably lazy, and if my great thoughts have not yet stirred the world, it is no doubt only because they have not been committed to paper.”

“Oh, if you are satisfied, of course that is everything. Ambition, I see, is not the great, never pausing, never ceasing motive-power that we poor foolish women are taught to believe; it is a pretty whim, to be taken up alternately with a fit of smoking, or mountain-climbing, as we girls change about between tennis and tatting.”

“Not quite, Ella,” said George, doing her the justice to grow serious when he saw how deeply and unselfishly she was in earnest. “Ambition does not die for lying a short time hidden by other feelings; and surely even if it loses a little of its bitter keenness, it gains by being no longer wholly selfish.”

“A beautiful answer, at least. And no doubt contentment is better than ambition.”

“I don’t know what contentment is, except by seeing it in the faces of cows and pigs. No passion could be stifled by such a tepid feeling as that. I am not contented, I am happy. So will you be some day, and you will let your bright wits rest a little while, and you will understand.”

Understand? No, she felt that was impossible, as she looked down at the big, handsome man sitting on the hammock below her, his eyes bright, not with serene, but with ardent happiness, content to bend all his faculties to the will of a creature whom he must know to be his inferior in every way. She did not wish to understand such a decadence as that.

“Then you will give up all idea of writing?”

“No. I am more anxious to distinguish myself than ever, as things have turned out. A man who suddenly finds himself to be married to a rich wife feels as if he had got off at a false start, and is put at a disadvantage. But so far I own my wife has taken up all my time. You see, she didn’t know she was going to be rich any more than I did, and being hardly more than a child, she wants as much looking after at first as a baby at the edge of a pond.”

“And this is the sort of woman who gets a man’s best love!” thought Ella half bitterly, half disdainfully.

“And of course you choose her friends for her,” suggested Ella, not quite hiding her feeling.

“I can’t quite do that, yet at least,” said George. “Nobody but all of you has got further than acquaintance yet.”

“But of course you are very particular about those acquaintances?”

Decidedly Ella was in her most disagreeable mood to-night.

“I do my best,” said he briefly.

“And of course it’s all nonsense about the smoking-parties, and Captain Pascoe being there nearly every night.”

George felt a shock. Mentioned in that manner, the evening calls of his friends, the admittance among the callers of a man whom he cordially disliked but whom he had no grounds strong enough for insulting, were heavy accusations.

“I see my own friends as freely as I did when I was a bachelor, certainly,” said he, cold in his turn. “Nouna is too sensible to prevent that. As for Captain Pascoe, he has not been in our house more than three times at the outside.”

Ella dared not say more on this subject, even if she had had more to say. She looked out at the swallows, flying low over the young trees of the plantation on the other side of the road, and asked musingly:

“Do you like being rich?”

“It’s not bad for a change,” answered George philosophically.

“I hate it. I always feel with papa, so glad to shake off the big house and the footmen and the feeling that the great human world is surging round without touching you, and to get back to my tiny room where I can almost water the plants in my window without coming in at the door, and to the farm and my pensioners that I take tracts to. They never read them, but it is quite as much a matter of etiquette to leave them as it is to make calls in town, and they are dreadfully insulted if I forget.”

“But you’ve always been well off?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t make any difference. Money rolls together in such ugly fashions. Look at mamma’s. When her father made his millions, thousands of people were ruined. Well, you know, that’s horrible!”

“They chose to speculate, remember. They must have known no lottery has all prizes.”

“It’s hideous to think of, all the same. On the other hand, if your property descends to you by a long line of greedy land-scrapers, you know it has grown in value because other people’s has decreased, and that your tenants have to pinch themselves to make up your handsome rent-roll. And you haven’t even done the wretched work for it that the speculator has done to get his!”

“It’s lucky all capitalists are not so soft-hearted, or there’d be an end to enterprise, which by the by is brother to your god Ambition.”

“Oh, I’m not making preparations for re-organising the universe, only lifting up a little weak mew of discontent with my corner of it. And your wife’s money: is it the result of a robbery of recent date, like ours, or plunder that has been rolling down for generations, like Lord Florencecourt’s?”

“Well, really, I’ve never put it to her trustees in that way, and, now I think of it, why I really don’t know. But as Nouna’s father was a soldier, and there’s very little loot to be got in our days, I expect it has rolled down.”

“And you don’t really care how it was got together?”

“Yes, I do, now I think of it. But to tell you the truth, the lawyers have managed things so easily for us that all we’ve been called upon to do is to spend the money, a very elementary process.”

“What a strange thing!”

“Why? By the by, so it is, when one comes to think about it. It’s altogether contrary to one’s personal and traditional experience of lawyers.”

“When mamma married,” said Ella, pursuing her own train of thought, “her money was tied up and fenced round with as many precautions as if poor dear old papa had been a brigand. He often laughs about it, and says she couldn’t buy a pair of gloves without a power of attorney. So that it really does seem very astonishing.”

“It does,” assented George, who, never before having had experience of money in any but infinitesimal quantities, had been much readier to take things for granted than was this granddaughter of a Chicago millionaire.

“What would you do, George, if you found out it had been made by supplying bad bayonets to the English army, or anything like that?” she asked, half-laughing, but not without a secret wonder whether this easy-got gold would turn out to have unimpeachable antecedents.

The question gave George a great shock. He jumped up from the hammock across which he had been sitting, with a white face.

“Good heavens, Ella! What makes you say that?” he asked in a low voice, each word sounding as if it were being ground out of him.

“Don’t take it like that,” said she nervously, almost as much moved as he, and impelled by his strong feeling to be more impressed than she had been at first with her own surmise. “I only suggested—it came into my head—I don’t know anything about it.”

“Oh, well, you shouldn’t say things like that, you know, Ella, even in fun. The mere suggestion gives one such an awful shock. It’s like cold water down one’s back,” said he, trying to laugh.

“I didn’t mean it, indeed,” said she, quite unable to take a jesting tone. “As if one would say a thing like that in earnest! I never guessed you would think twice about a foolish speech like that!”

But they both felt uncomfortable; and both were glad when George, noticing that Dicky Wood was standing near anxious to get a word with the jolly nice girl Ella, but much too diffident to come forward at the risk of intruding unwelcomely upon atête-à-tête, drew him into their group by asking if he had been in Norfolk before.

And so both George and Ella were able to shuffle off the burden of a conversation which had grown decidedly difficult to keep up, and the memory of which made a slight constraint between them, on the man’s side especially, for two or three days.

Nouna, to her husband’s great comfort and gladness, was behaving beautifully, and putting new life by her gaiety into the whole household, the younger members of which, in spite of Ella’s intelligence and her sisters’ beauty, were a little wanting in those electric high spirits which, in the routine of a quiet country-house, are as sunshine to the crops. The day after their arrival was Sunday, and the morning church-going had been a fiery ordeal for George, not from religious indifference, but from the misgiving that if Nouna could not keep from smiling in the course of a well-conducted service in a West End church, she would certainly be carried out in convulsions from the Willingham place of worship, where the school children, summer and winter, sniffed through the service in a distressing chorus, while the loud-voiced clerk’s eccentric English rang through the building, drowning the old vicar’s feeble voice; and where the vicar’s wife, a strong-minded lady, whose district-visiting was a sort of assize, had been known to “pull up” her reverend husband publicly from her pew immediately below the pulpit when, as not infrequently happened, he turned over two leaves of his sermon instead of one, and went quietly on as if nothing had happened. “Turned over two leaves? Bless me, so I have!” he would murmur, and rectify his mistake with a tranquil nod.

So George had put his wife through a very severe drill before starting, and had strictly forbidden her so much as to sneeze without his permission. She had a narrow escape at the offertory, when one of the churchwardens, with a lively remembrance of the artifices of his own youth, shovelled a penny into the fingers of each of his offspring with one hand, while he presented the plate menacingly with the other. But glancing up at her husband and perceiving a frown of acute terror on his face, she contrived to choke in silence; and the day was gained.

On the following Monday too, when the dreaded Lady Florencecourt fulfilled her threat of calling and proved equal to her reputation for unamiability, the young wife was, as she triumphantly averred afterwards, “very good.” The county censor proved to be a fair, florid woman of middle height, rather stout, and with features so commonplace that, without the saving shield of her title, they would have been called common. She had arrogant and capricious manners, an oily self-satisfied voice, and an ill word for everybody. Whenever her husband, who accompanied her on this occasion, ventured to make a remark, she turned to look at him with a resigned air, as if she were used to being made a martyr at the stake of his imbecility. She examined Nouna from head to foot through a gold double eyeglass, as if the young wife had been a charity-girl convicted of misconduct, and made no remark to her except to ask her if she was interested in the Zenana Missions, to which Nouna replied rather haughtily that Indian ladies were no more in need of missionaries than English ones: after which thrust and counter-thrust it may be imagined that the conversation languished, and that later in the day George had great difficulty in persuading his wife not to break off their engagement to go to Willingham. She said it would just spoil the end of their visit to the Millards, for one of whom she had begun to feel a real affection. This was the sharp-tongued Ella, whose intelligence she had the wit to recognise, and whose smart sayings amused her.

It was on the evening of a day in the course of which this oddly-assorted pair of friends had been a good deal together that George, on going up stairs to his room after a last cigar with his host, found his wife, not as usual fast asleep like a child, but perched upon the bed in the attitude of a Hindoo idol, with a big book open on her crossed knees, and her eyes fixed upon the nearest candle.

“Hallo!” said he, “what’s the matter?”

She turned her eyes upon him slowly, with an air of suspicion and curiosity.

“Nothing is the matter,” she said gravely, and turning down a whole half-leaf of the book before her to keep the place, she closed it carefully, and handed it to him with an affectation of solemn indifference. “I have been reading,” she added with decision.

George looked at the title of the ponderous volume, and observed that it wasThe Complete Works of Xenophon. He opened it without a smile at the page she had turned down, and remarking that it was about half-way through the volume, said she had got on very well if she had read so much in one evening.

“I skipped a little—the dry parts,” she observed modestly, but in such a tone that it was impossible for George to tell whether she meant to be taken seriously or not.

“Dry!” he exclaimed, raising his eyebrows, “why, he is the very lightest of light reading. Xenophon was the most frivolous man I ever knew; he was at school with me.”

She crawled to the foot of the bed, and stretching over the rail to the dressing-table, on which George had placed the volume, she recovered it with a violent muscular effort, and turned back the leaves to the title-page.

“This book was published in 1823; so you are much older than you told me you were, I see,” she said simply, while George, unable to contain himself longer, burst out into a long laugh, and made a dive at her, which she evaded like a squirrel, still staring at him with unmoved gravity, so that his mirth died away in wonderment and in a rush of tenderness as he perceived the pathos of this futile plunge into the mazes of learning.

As he recovered his gravity the expression of her mobile face also changed; after a moment’s shy silence their eyes met, and each saw the other through a luminous mist.

“What are you crying for?” she asked tremulously; and in a moment flung herself impulsively into his ready arms. “Why didn’t you marry Ella?” was her next question, shot suddenly into his ear in the midst of an incoherent outburst of the passionate tenderness that glowed ever in his heart for her.

“Marry Ella!” said he, feeling a shock of surprise at the remembrance that he had indeed once offered to make the good little blue-stocking his wife. “Why, what makes you ask such a question as that? Are you jealous?”

“Oh, no. But I see that she would have had you, and therefore you were foolish not to have her.”

“Well, I’m afraid it’s too late now, and I shall have to put up with the consequences of my folly,” said he, pressing her tenderly to him.

“That’s just what I thought,” she agreed quite plaintively. “Miss Glass says a good wife must cook, Ella says a good wife must read, but nobody says a good wife must just sing and laugh and amuse herself as I do. And so when you’re tired of kissing me, you will feel you had better not have married me, but only have amused yourself like Dicky Wood—” She paused significantly.

“Dicky Wood!” echoed he sharply.

“—With Chloris White.”

George moved uneasily; he was angry and disturbed.

“You must not say such things—you must not think them. The name of such a woman as that is not fit to pass your lips.”

“But, George,” she argued, looking straight into his eyes with penetrating shrewdness, “if you had not been you, say, if you had been Rahas or Captain Pascoe, I might—”

He stopped the words upon her lips with a great gravity which awed her and kept her very still, very attentive, while he spoke.

“When God throws an innocent girl into the arms of an honest man, Nouna, as you came into mine, she is a sacred gift, received with such reverent love that she must always hold herself holy and pure, and never even let any thought of evil come into her heart, so that she may be the blessing God intended. I was born into the world to protect you and shield you from harm, my darling; and so my love was ready for you at the moment when your innocence might have put you in danger, just as it will be to the end of your life.”

“Supposing you were to die first?” suggested she, not flippantly, but with an awestruck consideration of possibilities.

“A soldier can always last out till his duty’s done,” said George, with quiet conviction.

After this Nouna remained silent a little while, but that her ideas had not been working in quite the desired direction was evident when she next spoke.

“If, as you say, your love will keep me safe and good whatever I do, I needn’t be so particular,” she argued, “and it won’t do me any harm to go and see this Mrs. Chloris White, and ask her to leave poor Dicky alone, and let him meet some one who will be a blessing tohim. I want him to marry Ella.”

George was thunderstruck.

“Go and see Chloris White! I’d as soon let you go to the Morgue!”

“But I know I could persuade her to give him up; I know just what I would say, just how I would look. I’ve thought it all over; and surely anything’s better than that he should rush back to her as soon as he gets to town, and undo all the good we’ve done him in the country.”

She spoke with a pretty little matronly air of perfectly sincere benevolence.

“My dear child,” said her husband decisively, laying his hand on her head with his gravest air of authority, “you cannot go; it is out of the question. You must not even mention such a wild idea to any one; they would be horribly shocked. But we’ll keep poor Dicky safe among us by much better means than that, I promise you. So now go to sleep, and don’t ever let such an idea come into your head again.”

She let herself be kissed quite brightly and submissively, and rubbed her cheek against his with affection which might have been taken to argue docility. But her own fantastic notion of helping her friend remained in her mind quite unmoved by her husband’s prohibition.

Whenthe time came for them to finish their stay in Norfolk by the dreaded three days at Willingham, neither George nor Nouna made any secret of the fact that they felt the coming visit to be a severe ordeal. Undoubtedly it would be a cruelly abrupt change from the cheerful homeliness of the Lodge, to the penitential atmosphere in which the household of Lady Florencecourt passed their days. So notorious was the character of the graciouschâtelainethat Willingham Hall was commonly known in the neighbourhood as the House of Correction, a title to which the severely simple style of its architecture gave no very flat denial. Willingham Church stood in the grounds belonging to the Hall, so that Nouna had had an opportunity of shuddering at the sombre dreariness of the mansion even before the return call she had made with Lady Millard and Cicely, on which occasion she had sat almost mute on a high-backed chair, looking as insignificant and unhappy as a starved mouse, thinking that Lady Florencecourt’s light eyes looked like the glass marbles with which she played at solitaire, and what a good model her face would be for one of those indiarubber heads that children squeeze up into grotesque grimaces.

She cried at parting with the Millards, like a little girl sent to school for the first time. Sir Henry, with his simple good humour; Lady Millard, with her quiet manners, and the quick black eyes whose flashing keenness and sympathy showed the burning soul of the New World flickering in uneasy brightness among the glowing embers of the Old; Cicely and Charlotte, fair, kind creatures, who filled up the pauses gracefully, the one by merely smiling, the other by a gentle rain of chatter which she had been taught to think a fascinating social accomplishment; and, above all, Ella, of the sallow face, the sharp tongue, and the warm heart, were a group to live pleasantly in the memory, and to make the approaching encounter with the unamiable hosts of Willingham more disagreeable by contrast. It added to poor Nouna’s forlornness in these circumstances that her husband absolutely forbade her taking Sundran with her, as, although he was very anxious for an accidental meeting between Lord Florencecourt and the Indian woman, he felt that he could not force upon his host the presence of a person to whom, if only as the result of a prejudice, he had a strong aversion.

Lady Florencecourt sent a lumbering old family travelling carriage, with powdered footmen and bewigged coachmen, to bring Mr. and Mrs. Lauriston to the Hall. Nouna rather liked this old-world state, which, as her education had embraced the experiences of Paul Clifford and Martin Blakeborough of “The King’s Mail,” stimulated her imagination. She crammed her little fingers tightly into her husband’s hand as they entered the long straight drive, with a deep grass border on each side flanked by tall trees, which led up to Willingham Hall.

“Keep up your spirits, George,” she quavered, as the carriage drew up at the imposing front door. “There aren’t any spikes to get over if we have to run away.”

And she entered the hall with the air of a prisoner who hopes he’ll get off because he’s such a little one. They were shown up to their room at once, and when they came down to the drawing-rooms, which were a succession of vast wildernesses, with all the defects of apartments too large for the human atoms who lived in them, they found, to Nouna’s great relief, that not only was the great Mr. Birch there already, but he had brought with him a real live daughter, a girl about twenty, who seemed just as much relieved by the sight of a young face as Nouna herself was. Lord Florencecourt was there, looking as if he had been kept in against his will from the society of his boys; and Lady Florencecourt, who made it a boast that she never interrupted her charitable work for anybody, worked away at certain hideous convict-like garments, which she was knitting in very coarse scrubby gray wool for the unlucky poor, while she held forth on the ingratitude of the “masses,” the vicious extravagance of the “classes,” and the shortcomings of everybody all round; while Mr. Birch, who was a bald-headed man with a great expanse of knobby forehead, which was in itself a tower of strength to his party, agreed with everything—perhaps a habit he had contracted at Westminster.

The two younger ladies drew instinctively nearer and nearer each other, until they were close enough to grow confidential, and to enter upon a strictly defensive alliance. By the time Lord Florencecourt suggested an excursion through the grounds to see the ruins of an old Norman church which had been built at the same period as the one still standing, and within a stone’s throw of it, adversity had made Nouna and Miss Birch inseparable as love-birds. Before the evening was over, little Mrs. Lauriston had reason to congratulate herself on having found such an ally. For her acid hostess treated her with only the barest possible show of civility, and Lord Florencecourt, while making a determined effort to be more courteous, betrayed in his eyes such a rooted and cold dislike that Nouna, with her strong sensitiveness to every shade of feeling in the people with whom she came in contact, shrank into herself and was completely miserable, casting forlorn glances across the table at her husband, who felt scarcely happier than she, but in whom was growing stronger every moment the determination to learn the reason of an invitation which had evidently sprung from no spontaneous wish either of host or hostess. Two other guests had joined the party before dinner, an elderly couple named Admiral and Mrs. Bohun, very old friends of Lord Florencecourt’s. Neither added much to the liveliness of the circle, but whether from native dulness or through Lady Florencecourt’s peculiar gift of causing the people about her to show always at their worst in her society, did not appear. At all events, when the ladies left the room at dessert, Nouna was so much overcome by the dire prospect before her that she slipped round to her husband, and hissed into his ear, in a doleful and not altogether inaudible whisper:

“Don’t be long, or you won’t find me alive!”

She had not under-estimated the relaxation of the drawing-room. Throughout the length of the suite of cold-looking apartments wax-lights flickered weakly in numbers wholly inadequate to the size of the rooms. The piano had been opened, and Lady Florencecourt invited the younger ladies to play; as Miss Birch hesitated, with not unnatural diffidence before such an audience, Nouna rushed recklessly into the breach, regardless of the fact that she was a totally incompetent performer.

“I knew she’d go back to her knitting, and that’s in the furthest room,” she volunteered in explanation, as the elder ladies sailed away.

But the astounding badness of her performance soon brought Lady Florencecourt back, not indeed so much to criticise as to find out whether the curious sounds the instrument was giving forth were not the result of an excursion of her Blenheim spaniel along the keys.

“Is that Indian music, Mrs. Lauriston? Something that is usually played to an accompaniment of tom-toms?” asked Lady Florencecourt, holding up her glasses, not, however, before she had ascertained that she was listening to a mangled version of “Auld Robin Gray.”

“Yes, it’s an ‘Invocation to a Witch,’ ” answered Nouna imperturbably. “It ends like this, all the tom-toms together,” and she put her arms down upon the piano with a crash.

Her face was perfectly grave, but she began to feel the promptings of a wicked imp within her, urging her to rebel against this most unwarrantable discipline to which she was being subjected. Mrs. Bohun had followed her hostess, and as Nouna rose abruptly from the piano, the old lady said gently:

“You mustn’t be offended by my saying so, but it seems impossible to realise that you are a married woman. You must have been married while you were still in short frocks!”

Nouna, who wore an elaborate dinner-dress of emerald-green velvet, with loose folds of Nile green silk falling straight from her neck to her feet, was for a moment rather crestfallen to find how little dignity a train could give.

“Ye-es,” she said reluctantly. “But I wear long ones now. And I’m sixteen.”

Mrs. Bohun smiled. “That is very young for the responsibilities of a wife.”

“I haven’t any responsibilities,” answered Nouna quickly. “My mother gives me an allowance—or at least the lawyers do; at any rate, I have one.”

“But isn’t that a responsibility?” asked the old lady, much amused.

“Oh, no. I just spend it, and then mamma has the responsibility of sending me some more.”

Neither Mrs. Bohun nor Miss Birch could keep her countenance at thisnaïvedisclosure, but its effect upon Lady Florencecourt was to make her grow grimmer than ever.

“I’m sure it’s a very nice thing to have such a good mamma,” said Mrs. Bohun indulgently. “Don’t you think so, Clarissa?”

“Undoubtedly.”

The tone in which Lady Florencecourt gave this short answer, caused Nouna to look up at her.

“Do you know my mother?” she asked abruptly.

“I have not that honour,” answered Lady Florencecourt, many degrees below zero.

Quite unmoved this time by her hostess’s frigidity, Nouna mused a few moments with her eyes fixed on the lady’s face. Then she said slowly:

“I believe Lord Florencecourt knows mamma though——”

She stopped short, bewildered by the sudden change these few words brought about in the placid, self-satisfied countenance. Then, as there was a moment’s awkward pause, she went on hurriedly—“At least, I know mamma has an old portrait—one of those old-fashioned dark things with glass over them, that is like him. I knew when I met him first at the barracks that I had seen his face somewhere, and when I thought, I remembered the picture.”

Now Nouna had begun to speak in all innocence, but when she noticed that her words had some magical power of discomposing the woman who had been discourteous to her, she mischievously slackened her tone, and watched the effect with much interest. Lady Florencecourt’s square heavy face was not capable of any very vivid or varied expression when her usual stolid self-complacency had been frightened out of it. But the lower features quivered slightly, and a vixenish look, which boded ill for her husband’s peace during their nexttête-à-tête, brought a spark of angry brightness into her light eyes. Her next speech, and the tone in which it was uttered, gave the same impression.

“Very possibly,” she said in a voice which implied an offensive doubt. “Of course, my husband, when he was a subaltern in India, gave his portrait right and left to all sorts of persons, as young men will do.”

“In India! He has been in India! Oh, then that accounts for it. He must have met my mother there. I’ll ask him.”

And as the voices of the gentlemen were heard in the hall, Nouna prepared for a spring at the door. Lady Florencecourt laid a heavy hand peremptorily on her arm.

“No,” she said in a suddenly subdued voice, retaining her hold on the fragile wrist, and looking down into the little creature’s eyes with some entreaty and even fear in her own. “Don’t tease Lord Florencecourt about it now. I—I want to talk to you.”

She drew Nouna with her towards an ottoman, and invited Mrs. Bohun to join them.

“I quite agree with you, Harriet; it is a wonderful thing in these days to have a mamma to appeal to,” she continued, in a kind of grudgingly gracious tone. “Mrs. Lauriston is quite the only person I know who is not suffering from this horrible depression in everything. I don’t know whether you have heard”—and she lowered her voice to a confidential murmur—“that my husband wants to get rid of Willingham. All the tenants are asking for twenty-five per cent. reduction on their rent, and as you see, Lord Florencecourt has given up the shooting this year. Even I have had to make some sacrifices, and to dispose of part of my jewellery.”

Nouna was touched. Such a misfortune as this appealed to her imagination, and this most unexpected, uncalled-for candour disarmed her antagonism.

“Your jewellery! Oh, how dreadful!” she cried with deep sympathy. “I think I could bear anything but that.”

She glanced down at one of the diamond bracelets her mother had sent her on her wedding-day, and hugged the little arm that bore it close to her breast. Mrs. Bohun sympathised less sensationally.

“Dear me!” she said gently. “Not your pearls, I hope, Clarissa?”

“Yes, my necklace; the double row with the dragon clasp.”

“Dragon clasp!” repeated Nouna quickly.

“Yes, it had a very uncommon clasp: a dragon in diamonds, with ruby eyes.”

Nouna stared at her with open mouth, in a manner which would have excited remark in anybody but this eccentric little person; but she offered no further observation, although she remained seated near the elderly ladies, considering Lady Florencecourt’s face with deep interest, until the boys came in for a dull half-hour in the drawing-room. To them the lively little lady was an unexpected blessing. By the time the butler marched in with a huge Bible and Prayer-book, Nouna was sitting on a sofa, with Regie leaning over her shoulder and Bertie’s arms round her neck, to the great scandal of Lady Florencecourt, who regarded her sons rather as a handsome present she had made to their father than with any more vulgarly maternal feeling, and who would have been shocked at such a breach of filial respect as a spontaneous hug.

Nouna, who found nothing very exhilarating in the assembled company after the departure of the boys, seized the very first opportunity to retire, and was up stairs before anybody else. When her husband followed a little later, he found the door of the room wide open, the candles flickering and guttering in the draught, but no Nouna. Her jewel-case was open on the dressing-table, and the contents were scattered about in reckless disorder, a bracelet lying on the floor, a diamond earring glistening on the top of a high-heeled boot, a couple of rings embedded in a hairbrush. George looked into the dressing-room, and then went back into the corridor, where he heard a long way off the rattling of the Fiji shells on his wife’s dress. He drew back into the room, and received her in his arms as she rushed through the door like a whirlwind. She gave a little cry when he caught her.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

“Where have I been? Oh, nowhere; only speaking to Lady Florencecourt’s maid.”

“What about?”

“Nothing. I wish you had let me bring Sundran; I can’t do my own hair.”

“Why, it isn’t much longer than a boy’s. I might as well say I couldn’t do mine. I’ll be your maid to-night.”

She made no objection, but quietly tilted up her chin as an intimation that he might unfasten her frock for her, with such an unusual air of reflective absorption that he stopped in the midst of his careful but clumsy ministrations to ask her what she was thinking about.

“Nothing,” said she, as her glance fell on her scattered trinkets.

“What have you been doing with your jewellery?” And he picked up some of the ill-used treasures and piled them up in the velvet tray. “Why, where’s the pearl necklace that you keep on the top?”

He saw a slight but rapid change in her face which convinced him that he was, as the children say at hide and seek, “warm.”

“Have you lost it? Is that the trouble?” he asked kindly.

“There’s no trouble. I left it at home,” she answered with so much vivacity and mendacious promptitude that George saw it would be of no use to ask more questions.

On the following morning, however, his curiosity was appeased in an unexpected and startling manner. As soon as he appeared at the breakfast-table, he was conscious of a decided change for the worse in the already chilly and depressing atmosphere. If Lady Florencecourt had been cool, her husband constrained, the day before, the lady was an icicle, her lord a statue this morning. Lord Florencecourt avoided him, would not meet his eyes, and absolutely—so it seemed to George—slunk out of the way of Nouna altogether; while his wife maintained all through breakfast such a frigid attitude to both the young couple, that George was boiling with indignation before the meal was ended, and contrived to meet his hostess alone within a few minutes of the break-up of the party. He had some difficulty in keeping the anger he felt from bursting through the formal speeches in which he told her of an unexpected summons which would force him and his wife to curtail their visit and return to town that very morning.

“As soon as you please, Mr. Lauriston,” said Lady Florencecourt, icily. “And as I may not have another opportunity of seeing your wife alone, perhaps you will be kind enough to return this to her”—she handed George a small parcel, through a torn corner of which peeped the pearls he supposed Nouna to have lost—“and to inform her that though, like other ladies, I am forced to submit to be robbed by my husband to deck out another woman, I am not reduced to receiving back my own jewels from her hands when she has done with them.”

George looked at her very steadily, and gave no sign of the tempest within him except the trembling of his hands.

“I will give this packet, not to my wife, but to your husband, madam,” said he in a very low voice. At that moment Lord Florencecourt’s footsteps were heard outside the door, and George added: “I shall not have to wait for an opportunity.”

Upon the first sound of her husband’s tread, the lady had visibly quailed, in spite of her Amazonian reputation: as he entered the room, and with a searching glance seemed to take in at once the chief features of the situation, she made an attempt to walk majestically to the door.

“Stop,” said he, raising his hand a very little way; “I want to speak to you. Mr. Lauriston,” he went on, turning formally to the young man, who noticed that his nervousness of the morning had given place to a look of steady determination, “if my wife has had the folly and bad taste to insult you, I apologise for her, and beg that you will take no steps consequent upon her impertinence until you have first had an interview with me.”

“I shall be glad to have that interview as soon as possible, Lord Florencecourt, as I must leave your house this morning.”

“In five minutes, if you like. In the meantime, if you wish to ask questions about that infernal gewgaw,” and he looked savagely at the necklace, which George had torn from its covering, “I will tell you at once I did not give it to your wife, as Lady Florencecourt persists in imagining, but I sold it to a dealer without the least idea what was to become of it. Are you satisfied?”

“As to your share in the matter, my lord, perfectly.”

“As for my wife, she shall apologise to you herself.”

“There is no need for any apology,” said George, without condescending to look in the direction of the lady. “I am quite satisfied with your explanation.”

He left the husband and wife together, and finding Nouna, who was in a state of tearful anger against the dragon, he helped her to pack her trunk, and then filled and fastened his own portmanteau. These tasks were scarcely finished when Lady Florencecourt, pale, trembling, meek as a startled lamb, her eyes red with violent crying, her whole manner so utterly subdued and abject as to make one doubt her identity, knocked at the door, and finding them engaged in packing, begged them most earnestly to forget her impatience of the morning and to stay, as they had intended, until the Monday. Poor Nouna was so much affected by the evident distress of this haughty personage, that she burst into tears and put her arms round her, assuring her that she had not noticed any impatience at all, and that she would be glad to stay. But George, whose masculine nature was not so easily melted, persisted quietly but firmly that they were obliged to return to London at once. Whereupon Lady Florencecourt extracted a promise from Nouna that she would come to dinner as soon as they should all return to town.

“Oh yes,” said Nouna readily, “I want to see the dear boys again; I always like boys, but I never liked any so well as Regie and Bertie.”

At these words Lady Florencecourt fell a-trembling again most unaccountably, and she soon withdrew to order the carriage to take her guests to the station.

It was a most uncomfortable leave-taking. In spite of her importunities, Nouna could not see the boys again; Lady Florencecourt was as much too humbly cordial as she had before been too loftily cold; and Lord Florencecourt, who accompanied them to the station, hid a painful nervousness under his usual shield of impenetrable reserve. At the station, however, a little incident occurred which laid bare his defences in an untoward manner.

In an honourable determination not to lead Lord Florencecourt into any meeting with the Indian woman which could bear the appearance of a trap, George had ordered Sundran to return to town at once, and to get everything ready for her mistress’s return on Monday. But Sundran had lost the train, and had to put off her journey; so that she was in the station on Saturday morning, waiting to go by the very train in which her master and mistress so hastily decided to travel. She was waiting on the platform, a limp bundle of white clothes, too proud to take shelter in the waiting-room from curious glances, but flashing looks of grand contempt around her with her black eyes, when she caught sight of her young mistress in the doorway, and hastened up to her with a low cry of loving welcome. The train was coming up, and as it was market day, there was a bustling and mildly-excited crowd on the platform, jostling one another with baskets, and chivying to madness the solitary porter. In the confusion Lord Florencecourt was for a few moments separated from his departing guests, whom he rejoined just as Nouna had mounted into an empty compartment, and was handing her sunshade to Sundran, who was standing on the doorstep. George stood on the platform, much excited; as soon as he caught sight of Lord Florencecourt, for whom the crowd made way with respectful recognition, he told Sundran sharply that he had got a seat for her, and she must come to it at once. She stepped down, and he put his hand on her arm, and made her turn her back to Lord Florencecourt, and run. In doing so she dropped Nouna’s sunshade. Before George could prevent her she had stopped, wheeled round to pick it up, and seen the Colonel face to face.

With a hoarse and guttural cry she drew herself upright, pointing at him with a lean, dark finger.

“Captain Weston!” she hissed out fiercely, while her black eyes flashed, and her fingers clenched as if she would have flown at his throat.

Lord Florencecourt saw her; over his rugged features a dull flush spread, dying again quickly; he raised his hat mechanically, not looking at Nouna; and without any change in the fixed expression of dead reserve he had worn all the morning, turned and made his way through the yielding crowd out of the station. George bundled Sundran into a carriage, and went back to his wife just in time to jump in as the train started.

A quick, shy glance at her face told him she had heard the Indian woman’s words.

George Lauristonwas not a dull-witted man; but the shock of astonishment he suffered when Sundran recognised Lord Florencecourt as “Captain Weston,” for a few moments paralysed his thoughts and prevented his realising all the complications to which the discovery gave rise. His first thought was for its effect upon his wife.

He scarcely dared to look at her. But after the train had started she came to him and forced her face up into his.

“Did you hear what Sundran said?” she asked in a loud whisper.

George nodded.

“Do you think it’s true?”

“I don’t know, dear.”

“What shall you do to Lord Florencecourt if it is true?”

“Do? Nothing.”

“Won’t you? I shall.”

“What?”

“Kill him for having been cruel to my mother.”

She was shaking from head to foot with passion, her eyes lurid as those of a tigress, her white teeth gleaming between thirstily parted lips, as if they would tear the flesh from the bones of the man whose imputed offence in being her father was not yet even proved. George was silent, beset by a crowd of conjectures no less mysterious than unpleasant. She suddenly leaped upon him, seizing his shoulders with small hands that griped tight as claws.

“Well!” she said impatiently. “Well! You say nothing! I will have you say something. This Colonel of yours, who beat my mother, and left her and let her think he was dead—is he your respected dear friend now, or do you hate him with your whole soul, as I do?”

“I can’t hate an old friend on the spur of the moment, especially when I don’t know what he’s done,” said George in a tone which had the effect of a few drops of water on a fire.

“Don’t know what he’s done! Haven’t I told you all Sundran has said about the way he used to treat my mother, my beautiful darling mother; how he was harsh, and wicked, and jealous, and ran away from her when I was a little baby? Why did he call himself Captain Weston, when his real name was Lord Florencecourt, if he meant to be a good true husband to her? Was that like the noble English gentlemen you talk about, and poor mamma talks about?”

“His name was not always Lord Florencecourt,” said George rather meekly.

He knew that the Colonel’s name had never been Captain Weston; and that there were circumstances in this affair of which Lord Florencecourt was by no means proud had been amply shown by the mixture of constraint, dislike, and fear which had marked his behaviour to Nouna since his first meeting with her at the barracks. “And perhaps Sundran was mistaken,” he suggested in the same tone.

But Nouna laughed this idea to scorn, and he himself had nothing to offer in support of it. The Indian woman’s recognition was the first sign he had had of a clue to all the mysterious circumstances surrounding his marriage; and if it raised new doubts and suggested new entanglements, at any rate it pointed out one person near at hand who could, if he would, unravel them. George determined to see Lord Florencecourt again without delay, and to ask him simply and straightforwardly whether he was Nouna’s father, and if so, why he had thought it necessary to conceal the fact from him. The young husband thought he could now understand the strange reserve of Madame di Valdestillas, who, as the circumstances seemed to suggest, having been deceived in early youth by Lord Florencecourt, then masquerading as Captain Weston, was naturally anxious to conceal the evidence of her past indiscretion, and had therefore caused her child to be educated away from her, and had probably concealed Nouna’s very existence from her husband. In that case, Nouna’s mushroom sprung up fortune could not have been a testamentary provision of her father, as he was still alive. Where then did the money come from? George remembered with a shock Lord Florencecourt’s late complaints of an unexpected and heavy drain on resources which he knew to be by no means limitless, and the remarkable incident of the pearl necklace flamed up unpleasantly in his mind. This, together with the grudgingly given invitation to Willingham, and the socially important visit extracted by the Colonel from his sister to Nouna, seemed to point to a considerable influence being still exerted over Lord Florencecourt by Madame di Valdestillas, in spite of his unconcealed prejudice against dark-skinned women. Whether by tickling his remorse or his fear of publicity, the lady played very skilfully to be able to levy such substantial blackmail upon her former lover.

These conjectures ran in George’s head and absorbed him so completely, that Nouna, who was sitting in the opposite corner and gazing out of window with a pretty imitation of deep abstraction, found, on turning suddenly to direct his attention to a stack of red-tiled roofs and towering chimneys nestling, in Christmas-card prettiness, among trees in a hollow near the line, something deeply fascinating in the fact that he was, for the first time since their marriage, completely oblivious of her presence. She paused with her mouth open for speech, considering him in wonderment, noting the lines of the frown on his forehead, and the dull, steady outlook of clouded eyes that for once did not see her. Then she stooped forward, and, with her hands on his knees, stretched up to peer closely into his face. He started, and his eyes turned upon her with a look in which she saw, or fancied she saw, so much sternness, that her hands slipped off his knees, and she fell, a meek and frightened human bundle, on to the floor of the carriage. George snatched her up and crushed her tiny limbs against him with a sudden thrill of passionate tenderness in which she discerned at once some new and unknown element. She sunned herself in his caresses for a few moments and then looked inquiringly into his eyes.

“You have begun a new wooing,” she whispered, peeping up with languid eyes. “You are very sweet to me, but you seem to be asking me something I don’t understand.”

“I don’t know, my darling, whether I could make you understand.”

“Kiss me again to prepare me, and then try.”

He obeyed the first direction and then set about carrying out the second.

“What would you do, my darling, if you had to give up your pretty house, your rooms full of flowers, your dainty marble bath, your French frocks and your crowds of visitors?”

Her reply was prompt and crushing, spoken with passionate conviction. “I should die.” Then she turned upon him in alarmed eagerness: “What has happened that I should give them up? They are my own, they are natural to me; it is not right that the granddaughter of a Maharajah should be without these things!”

“But supposing you found out that you were enjoying them at the expense of others who had a better right to them still, who were born to them, and had to go without them for your pleasure. Oh, Nouna, you have a generous little heart, you would not bear that!”

She shook her head incredulously.

“You forget,” said she, “it was through my mother that my fortune came to me. Mamma would never do anything that was not right and just. What she says is mine, that I may enjoy without fear of wrong.”

She was secure now behind the rampart of her religion, and he perceived that he could only convert her through the mother she adored. So he let the subject drop, inwardly deciding that his next move, after seeing Lord Florencecourt, must be to find out where Madame di Valdestillas and her husband were staying, and come to an understanding with that lady as to the duties owed by a woman to her daughter’s husband as well as to her own.

Determined not to trouble his wife again with premature hints of such a desolating kind that she had already burst open her dressing-bag to shed tears over the portable evidence of her accession to fortune—her diamonds—he spoke of indifferent things, and asked, for want of something better, if she knew what had become of Dicky Wood since he left Maple Lodge a few days before they did. Nouna’s face seemed suddenly to contract, and she darted at her husband a curiously cautious glance, shifting immediately back to the contents of her bag.

“I’m afraid—” she began. “They say he has got back into the power of—of that woman, you know,” she ended with a nod, seeing a cloud form upon her husband’s face which forbade her to let the name of such a person pass her lips.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said he, being indeed more grieved at his wife’s knowledge of and interest in the affair than at the foolish boy’s falling again into the hot water out of which he had been once so thoughtfully fished.

“Yes,” she assented, and with unusual and remarkable reticence she pursued the subject no further.

George’s masculine wits failed to see more in this circumstance than respect for his prejudice against her interesting herself in such themes. She had calmed down very suddenly, he thought, from her outburst of violent indignation against the Colonel. No one could have imagined, to see her now trifling first with a scent-bottle and then with a fan, that only half an hour had passed since she learnt, in a startling manner, a secret concerning her parentage momentous enough to set the most volatile creature thinking. And then it occurred to him that this secret, so new to him, might not be altogether new to her. Candour is not an Oriental virtue, and experience had already shown him that Nouna was by nature secretive, and much more likely to keep her own counsel even in hours of amorous confidence than he or any other babbling foolish Samson of a male lover. He recalled certain confidential looks and tones he had observed between her and the lawyer, Mr. Smith, on her wedding-day; he recollected various injunctions from Madame di Valdestillas that Nouna should in all things pertaining to the marriage put herself without question into the old solicitor’s hands. The result of these musings was that George, determined by yet another flash of remembrance, marked down for his second step in this matter a visit to the church where he was married, and an inspection of the register.

The first step he proposed for himself was to question Sundran. It would depend, he knew, upon her own dull and dogged views of what was her mistress’s interest whether she would condescend to open her lips to him either for truth or falsehood. But he thought he might be able to prove to her by the evidence of his unquestionable devotion that he could have no aim but her mistress’s happiness, and if this could once be made clear to the woman, Lord Florencecourt’s careful avoidance of her was enough to show that she could make important revelations.

But George was met on the very threshold of his investigations by an undreamt-of difficulty. When the train arrived at Liverpool Street he put Nouna at once into a cab, and went back to the train to fetch Sundran, who had not yet found her way to her mistress. But she had disappeared. In vain he examined every compartment in turn, and scanned the crowd on the platform. Inquiries of the porter at last elicited that a dark-skinned woman in white had sprung out of a compartment before the train stopped, and driven off at once in a cab. George returned to his wife, saying simply that Sundran had gone off before them, but as the inspector at the gate of the station took the number of their cab, George called to the driver to stop, and asked the official if he had noticed a black woman pass out, adding that she was his wife’s maid, knew very little English, and he was afraid she might have made a mistake with the address.

“I saw her, sir. I think the number of the cab was fifty-seven,” said the man, referring to his list.

George thanked him, and the cab drove off. Nouna looked at her husband in astonishment.

“She won’t make a mistake, George. Sundran is not so silly.”

“I don’t think she is. But I want to find out where she’s gone.”

“Then you think she’s run away! Why should she? Where would she go?” asked Nouna breathlessly.

“Well, well, we don’t know yet whether she’s gone at all.”

But when they got home and found that Sundran had not arrived, George decided that he would wait one hour, filling up the time with a visit to the parish church; and then, if she still failed to appear, he would call at 36, Mary Street, where he suspected her to be, on his way to Liverpool Street station. He intended to return to Willingham that night, and get through the interview with the Colonel. A packet of letters was handed to him, in which he found one for his wife. Seeing that the handwriting was masculine and unknown to him, George turned it over jealously.

“Who is this from, Nouna?” he asked, holding it over her head, high above her reach.

A red flood ran at once under the delicate brown skin.

“How can I tell if you hold it all that way off?” she asked, making a futile spring to reach it.

She was much excited, but by what emotion he could not tell.

“Well, now,” and he held it near to her face, guarding it with both hands from the expected clutch.

There was enough subdued interest in her manner to make him determined to know the contents of the letter, but not wishing to give himself the airs of a Bluebeard, he drew her on to his knee and gave it to her, at the same time opening one of his own. As he read his he saw that she slipped hers without opening it into some hiding-place among the folds of her dress; at first he made no remark upon this, but went on with his own letters until he had come to the end of the pile by throwing a couple of circulars into the fireplace. At this point she tried to get away; she wanted to take her hat off, she said.

“Well, that’s soon done,” said George laughing, tossing off her little grey cap and passing his fingers through her curls. “And now who is your letter from?”

“Oh, it’s only from an old schoolfellow.”

“A schoolfellow! A male schoolfellow! I must see it then; I’m jealous.”

“There’s nothing to be jealous about,” said Nouna lightly, but beginning to tremble as she saw that, in spite of the playfulness of his tone, he did not mean to let her go till his curiosity was satisfied. “I haven’t even opened it yet.”

“Open it now then, and tell me the news.”

He spoke quite gently, and leaned back in the arm-chair they were sitting on, leaving her perched upon his knees in what she might have imagined was liberty, if there had not been, to her sharp eyes, a leonine look of possession and passive power in the strong white hands that lay quietly on the arms of the chair on each side of her. These Eastern women have a subtle sense, transmitted to them from bow-stringing times, of what is best to do in a case of jealousy. George saw the quick glance round under lowered eyelids, and while fearing some impish indiscretion, yet with a little smart of rage admired her self-possession as she crossed her knees carelessly and drew forth her letter from her breast, after affecting to feel in her pocket, as if forgetful where she had put it. As she inserted a small forefinger under the flap of the envelope, George held himself on the alert to seize the little hands if they should make any attempt to destroy the missive. But the first glance at the note apparently relieved her, and she flourished it before him to show that he had made a fuss about nothing.

“It is only a note from Captain Pascoe to tell me his address, because he is so anxious to come again to our little suppers,” said she, making a ball of the note, tossing it dexterously, catching it in her hand, and posting it between her husband’s lips, opened for a little lecture.

“Has he written to you before?” asked George frowning.

“No; if he had I should have known the handwriting,” answered she carelessly, but in the meantime by a clever little movement causing the injured note to roll from its lodging-place under George’s chin on to the floor. “And now please may I go and change my shoes?”

“Certainly.”

George let her go, and, all his senses being still awake to observation, remarked that in searching for a dropped glove she made a long sweep, and picked up the note from under his chair. His hand closed over hers, which she immediately opened with a red flush. He unrolled the crumpled ball of paper and read:

“Grand Hotel, Scarborough.“Dear Mrs. Lauriston,“Thames Lawn, Richmond. I hope you and your husband won’t forget me when you resume your charming evenings. There’s nothing like them in town or out of it. I am constrained to beg to be remembered, for I know you have all the world at your feet, and I am but a humble unit. Always, as you know, very much at your service if I can ever be of use to you in any way,“With kind regards, yours very truly,“Arthur Pascoe.”

“Grand Hotel, Scarborough.

“Dear Mrs. Lauriston,

“Thames Lawn, Richmond. I hope you and your husband won’t forget me when you resume your charming evenings. There’s nothing like them in town or out of it. I am constrained to beg to be remembered, for I know you have all the world at your feet, and I am but a humble unit. Always, as you know, very much at your service if I can ever be of use to you in any way,

“With kind regards, yours very truly,

“Arthur Pascoe.”

“This is an answer, I see,” said George when he had read to the end. “So you have been writing to Captain Pascoe.”

“Only for his address, that we might invite him,” said Nouna, looking frightened.

“But how could you write without knowing it?”

“He was going to change it, I knew. He is at Scarborough now.”

George said no more, and tossed the letter into the wastepaper basket. Nouna, whose eagerness to change her shoes had disappeared, stood considering her husband, whose reticence she could not understand. She had braced herself up to meet a long interrogatory, and the simple silence made her think that something worse was in store for her.

“Haven’t you anything more to say to me?” she asked at last, with her head on one side in a helpless, birdwitted manner.

“Yes, dear, I have a great deal more to say to you,” burst out poor George, gliding from his chair down on to his knees before her, clasping his arms round her waist, and looking up into the beautiful mask of the spirit it was so hard to reach, so impossible to impress. “Why won’t you be quite open and frank with me, when it’s all I ask of you? When I tell you it hurts me so much for you to keep back a trifle from me that a whole evening’s pretty caresses from you can’t take out the sting of it? Can’t you see, dearest, that nobody in the world loves you so much as I, or would do as much for you? Why do you encourage these fellows to think you can ever want services from them, when you know that the man in whose bosom you lie every night lives only in your life, and for your happiness? What do you want of me that I won’t do? Why won’t you open your little heart wide to me, as you do your arms? Don’t you love me, Nouna? Don’t you love me?”

His encircling arms trembled with the passion that surged in him, and the slender little form he held was swayed by the convulsive movement of his body. These appeals of her husband to something within her of which she had but a dim consciousness, bewildered and distressed a creature accustomed to live fully and happily in the day’s emotions, beautifully unconscious of higher duties, higher claims. She was, however, moved to a soft sensation of pity for this big, kind, splendid companion whose passionate affection was, after all, the kingly crown of all her joys; and she put little tender arms round his neck in the belief that these mad frenzies after something intangible were signs of a disorder peculiar to man, of which that dangerous symptom jealousy was the chief feature.

“Of course I love you, George, my dear old beautiful darling elephant,” she said, with the soothing accent of an affection which was indeed perfectly genuine.

And she kissed the waves of his hair with such a winning abandonment of herself to the pleasure his touch afforded her, and dropped down into his breast with such a seductive air of meek submission to his will in every act and thought, that George was carried away from his doubts, away from his questionings, as he had been a hundred times before, and so she strengthened her empire over him in the interview which had at the outset appeared to threaten it.

It was not until he had left her, and was on his way to the church, that a momentary gloom fell on the glow into which the magic of her charm had cast him. She had been very sweet, but she had given no word of explanation of that strange request to Captain Pascoe, a man of a character so well known, that it was gall to George to think he had in his possession so much as a line of his wife’s handwriting. With an effort he put the matter aside in his mind, not without the unpleasant reflection that, after all his efforts at art-education, the primitive and impracticable methods of the harem were those best calculated to keep the husband of the little dark-skinned enchantress in security.

A walk of a few minutes had brought him to the outside of the church where he was married, but he found the building a true type of Heaven in the difficulty of getting in. At last he ferreted out the person authorised to unlock the doors, and admit him to a sight of the register. It was with trembling fingers that he turned over the pages to find the signature he wanted. When at last he found the place, he bit his lip through in a first impulse of hot indignation. He had been tricked again by the whole gang, as he said to himself bitterly, within five minutes of his standing with his bride before the altar.

The signature of his wife was “Nouna Kilmorna.”

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