Chapter Six.

Chapter Six.The tone in which Harry cried “Claudia!” pierced through even her unconsciousness. She looked at him, startled. He was breathing heavily, altogether unlike himself.“I must speak,” he said. “Haven’t you guessed how I love you?”“You?” she exclaimed in unmistakable amazement. “What can you be thinking of?” and something in her manner brought back his self-control.“There’s nothing so wonderful about it, is there?” he said slowly. “I suppose it began from the first moment I saw you, and it has gone on. Can’t you give me a little hope? I know you’re a lot too good for me—”“Oh, don’t say any more, don’t!”She tried to rise, but he laid his hand on her arm.“I want you to listen—this once. I suppose I’ve taken you by surprise. I didn’t mean to do that. I thought you must have seen all along.”“I never saw!” interrupted Claudia indignantly. “I’m very angry with you.”“If you don’t care for me now,” he went on, unheeding, “don’t you think you might some day? You like the old place—”“The place!” She pushed away his hand, and her eyes were flaming. “Did you suppose I should want to marry a place? Oh, what nonsense this all is! If I could make you understand how much I dislike anything of the sort!”He laughed ruefully.“I think I understand. I was a fool—as usual.”“Don’t say ‘as usual’!” exclaimed the girl, still frowning. “I hate to hear you always running yourself down, and I hate to hear you trying to talk sentiment. We are excellent friends. Do be satisfied with that, and be nice, as you were before.”She waited, but he was silent.“Well, then, if you won’t,” she said, lifting her eyebrows, “I’d better go back to the cousins.”“No,” he said hurriedly, “don’t go. I shan’t torment you.”Claudia glanced doubtfully at him. In spite of her displeasure, the situation struck her as more comical than serious, and though she wished he had not been silly, she did not for a moment realise that she was causing him more than a passing disappointment. Besides, the view which remained to be opened, the improvements which had so entirely filled her imagination, and fired her ambition, were really of far more importance than this ridiculous situation, and if she were to go away before she could carry them out—what a collapse, what a feminine collapse! People would guess, she supposed, because people were so foolish, and so determined to make out that a girl’s head could contain no ideas beyond those idiotic ones which she had just been invited to share; and they would all triumph, and say of course that was always the aim and end of a woman’s efforts. Yet something within her persistently urged her to go, so that she felt cross, and naturally vented the crossness upon Harry.“I do so wish you would not have talked nonsense!” she exclaimed at last. “I did want to stay until I had finished what I have thought out, and it would have been the most wonderful improvement to the place! If I could just arrange it, and show you where to plant a few copper beeches—”Harry’s laughter came readily, and it came now.“You mustn’t think of leaving. If any one has to go, it will be I.”“And if you go,” said Claudia discontentedly, “no one else knows a thing about the trees. Well, I will stay on till Wednesday, if you promise to talk sense, and forget these absurd ideas of yours. They come because you have so little to do. Why on earth don’t you get away, and find some real manly occupation?”He hesitated.“My father’s very infirm. I left the army because he wanted me.”“I should think you might do something.” She had gathered her things together, and was walking towards the house. There may have been an unacknowledged effort to keep the conversation at arm’s length from herself, or it may have been vexation with her companion which raised a keen desire to rebuke him for his shortcomings. Curtain it is that her tone was scornful.“Perhaps,” he answered.“For a man or woman to be without occupation is so uninteresting, to say the least of it,” continued his mentor, “that I would rather break stones on the road.”He was silent, hardly hearing. He was looking at the round softness of her cheek, and wondering whether many men felt as miserable as he. Swiftly before his eyes rose a vision of Claudia wandering about the park at Huntingdon with Captain Fenwick by her side, and he straightened himself with something so like a groan that he glanced hurriedly at the girl, fearing to have annoyed her. But she was looking straight before her, relieved to see Helen Arbuthnot strolling towards them from the grass ride.“At least ten people are crying out for you,” was her greeting to Harry. “Your mother, and your mother’s maid, and the mother of the footman, and a sick bailiff. These are the most importunate, but there are five others dancing round. He must go,” she went on to Claudia, “but if you really have an idle moment to spare, you might bestow it on me. I collect other people’s.”Claudia did not much care for Miss Arbuthnot, whom, with some reason, she suspected of ridiculing her, but at this minute she would have joyfully jumped at any means of escape.“Was that why you came to Thornbury?” she asked bluntly.“Was it? I don’t know; and I never answer questions, because they recall acrostics. Come back to the grass ride.” The grass ride remained unchanged. A broad strip of turf, and on either side tall slender trees springing from a wavy undergrowth of bracken; a ride shady through the hottest summer, yet with the sun filtering down sufficiently to fling broken lights on the close cool grass. Miss Arbuthnot stood still as they reached it, and looked in either direction. “It is an enchanting spot,” she said.“Ye-e-s,” agreed Claudia doubtfully.“But it might be tremendously improved.”“I dare say. I hate improvements, whether in people or places. They destroy sentiment.”Up jumped Claudia on her stilts. “I can’t understand any one not wishing for the best.”“No? That’s your youth. It’s the same sort of rage which sets people scraping ruins, when such charming weeds vanish! Half the attraction of everything consists in its little defects.”Miss Arbuthnot spoke with extreme laziness, quite indifferent to the impression she produced; and the girl, who hated to be reminded of her youth, and felt as if her own efforts were belittled, was provoked.“If the world thought as you do,” she said gravely, “there would be no advancement, no gain.”“And how enjoyable!” sighed Miss Arbuthnot. “Are you going to cut down many more of poor Harry’s favourite trees?”Claudia coloured.“I have only cut what was necessary,” she said with still greater dignity.“From your point of view—yes. But from his?”“Does he object?”“He? Oh no, he knows better.”“I don’t think you understand,” said Claudia impatiently. “I came here to try to make the place more beautiful—”“It does well enough,” murmured Miss Arbuthnot, with a glance at the deep fern beside them.“You don’t suppose I had the trees cut down except where it would be an improvement? And of course Mr Hilton is glad to—have those improvements.” She felt her speech feeble, and it made her angry.“Of course. I am afraid what is good for one is often disagreeable, but, as you say, a supporting sense of virtue remains. Harry is such a capital fellow that he deserves all he can get.”It should be noted that Miss Arbuthnot, accustomed to be regarded, had no idea that Harry had broken loose, and run his stubborn head against a wall, or she would not have chosen such a moment for sinking; his praises. Claudia was too young, or too ignorant of love, to feel kindly towards a man for falling in love with her, and was only annoyed at what she considered a commonplace episode in what she intended to be anything but a commonplace career. As yet she had no conception of the true proportion of things, and dismissing love and such trifles as mere hindrances, her companion’s words irritated her the more against Harry.“Oh, he will get all he deserves, no doubt,” she observed airily. “That kind of character doesn’t want much.” Then she had the grace to blush, and to go on hurriedly, “He will be always quite contented to vegetate at Thornbury, stroll about with his gun, and make an ideal magistrate—or what people consider ideal, which does just as well.”Miss Arbuthnot stopped to whisk away a wasp.“Do you find fault with your picture?”“Well, it doesn’t seem very interesting, that’s all.”“I like discussing other people’s characters,” said Miss Arbuthnot lazily; “I find it much simpler than meditating upon one’s own. So you think Harry commonplace? Why?”“Why? How can it be otherwise? He has no ambition, no aims beyond Thornbury, no work. A man who doesn’t work is a wretched being.”“Has he told you he doesn’t work?”“One can see for one’s self, I suppose?” Claudia said, with a fine scorn; and Helen shot a glance at her as if she had wakened up.“Oh no, you can’t. When you are older you will learn that you can never trust your eyes. Go and ask the bailiff, and the keeper, and the gardeners.”“Thatkind of work!”“Well, we can’t all be landscape gardeners. If we were, I suppose the estate would have to be kept going, or there wouldn’t be much good in beautifying it?”“Agents,” retorted Claudia.“Perhaps. But some people have an old-fashioned prejudice that when a father and mother are old and infirm, there are things which even an agent can’t do. Harryisold-fashioned. I have often told him he ought to be more up-to-date.”There was a silence. Then Claudia remarked in a slightly altered voice—“He has never said anything to make one suppose living here was any sacrifice.”“Or that he felt the loss of his trees. Yet, I assure you, he has more than once ridden miles to avoid the crash of doom.” Another pause.“I had really better go away at once,” Claudia exclaimed impatiently. “Why did they ask me to come? It was his suggestion—not mine. And it is ridiculous. The place is ever so much improved by a little thinning.”“Oh, I dare say. I’m not defending Harry, only when people can never be induced to blow their own trumpets, I feel irresistibly impelled to produce a blast. Let us talk about some one else. Captain Fenwick, for instance. Neither of us need blow for him.”“He’s amusing,” remarked Claudia indifferently.“There’s a tribute!” said Miss Arbuthnot, looking at her between half-closed eyelids.“And he rides a bicycle better than any one I know.”“So that you are less hard on him than on poor idle Harry?”“Hard? I don’t know. He idles too, but—”“More impressively.”“He has been useful in getting me a commission to work at Huntingdon. He says it’s in dreadful order, for Sir Peter has only just succeeded, and of course the worse it is, the better for me.”This time the silence lasted longer. Then Miss Arbuthnot spoke without turning her head—“He goes there too, I suppose?”“Oh yes! He thought,”—she laughed—“that I might feel lost among strangers. One has to get over that sort of thing when one takes up a profession. But he meant it very well, and perhaps if he is there, they will be less shy of me. That’s what generally happens, because people can’t forget their old tradition that a woman mustn’t be professional. With a man it’s taken as a matter of course.”“And a man takes it as a matter of course,” put in Helen. She was tired of her companion’s girlish egotism, and administered her thrust sharply. “But she won’t see,” she reflected.Claudia did see, and coloured.“I dare say I am tiresome,” she said frankly. “At the college they declared that no one rode their hobbies to death as I did. Only,”—she drew a deep breath—“these are wonderful times, aren’t they? And how can one take one’s part in the movement without enthusiasm?”“And pray, where are you moving?” asked Miss Arbuthnot. Then she changed her tone. “Was there ever such a heavenly day? I’m glad you’ve spared the grass ride. There’s nothing like it at Huntingdon, whatever Captain Fenwick may say. When do you go?”“On Wednesday.”“Does he take you?”“I suppose we shall bicycle there together. I shan’t object, because he is a very clever rider, and can show one all sorts of useful dodges.”“Oh, he is very clever!” agreed Miss Arbuthnot. She added quickly, with a touch of scorn—“and insatiable.”Claudia did not catch the oddly chosen word, and certainly would not have understood it.“Well, here he is rather refreshing,” she allowed, “because he has been about the world, and can talk; but, after all, men always strike me as uninteresting. Don’t you think one more often meets with original women?”“At the college, of course.”“Oh, at the college they were delightful.”“If,” Miss Arbuthnot said idly, “you want a definition of advancing years, I should say it was made up of modifications. I’ve had my theories too, though you mightn’t believe it, but I find the hard edges almost gone, and my opinions grown hazy. One still, however, remains—that the inevitable will be down on you. Who is the man in the distance?”“How tiresome!” Claudia exclaimed. “It is Captain Fenwick, and we shall not be able to talk any more. Perhaps he has not seen us, and we can escape.”“Oh, he has seen us. Bring your philosophy to bear, for, after all, you find him more endurable than the others—him or his bicycle, which is it?” As Captain Fenwick came swiftly up, and swung himself off, she added, “That is one point I particularly dislike in the thing. It is always taking you unawares. There is no time to prepare, or to call up one’s blandest expression. However, here is Miss Hamilton who has just been singing its praises—yours, I mean.”“It’s very good,” said Claudia, eyeing it critically, “I wish I hadn’t been in a hurry for mine.”“Yours is well enough. You can have one or two things altered. Look here—” he was beginning, when Miss Arbuthnot broke in.“For pity’s sake, spare me a digression on wheels and pistons, or whatever they may be. You can discuss them at your ease on your way to Huntingdon.”He glanced at Claudia. Miss Arbuthnot glanced too.“So we can,” said the girl cheerfully. “I expect you can put me up to all sorts of things.”“Dear me,” murmured Miss Arbuthnot, “the world has changed indeed since my day!”“Your day?”“It must have been a hundred years ago, for it would have held up many hands in horror at a young man and a young woman arriving by themselves at a country house.”“Yes, it is improving,” said Claudia, with scorn, “it doesn’t think silly things as it did.” The day before this would have been very well, but to-day conscience gave a little tweak at her elbow, recalling her scene with Harry, and she became suddenly silent. Helen noticed the change, and Claudia saw that she noticed. Something made her turn quickly to Fenwick.“I must go,” she said. “If you’re meaning to stay here, I wish you’d let me take your bicycle to the house. I want to look it over.” Miss Arbuthnot stood watching her from under the green boughs. Then she glanced at Fenwick. “She’s not going to fall in love with you,” she remarked.“Aren’t you a little—in advance of the situation?”“Not in advance of your thoughts. What attracts you? But I know.”“You’re bewildering,” he observed rather savagely. “Not content with furnishing me with imaginary fancies, you provide an explanation of them.”She went on as if he had not spoken.“She thinks no more of you than of a dozen others she has met in her small life.”“You’re encouraging.”“Oh,” said Helen sleepily, “do you want encouragement?”He saw his slip, and looked more angry, but suddenly laughed.“She’s naïve enough to be amusing in these days. Enthusiastic, and all that, and believing so intolerably in her career. No woman has a right to a career.”“Beyond that of losing her heart to Arthur Fenwick.””—Until she’s over thirty, at all events. It’s got to be pointed out to her.”“And you are engaged in the object-lesson? One after your own mind, isn’t it?” She spoke in a bitter tone as they strolled along the soft turf. A startled young partridge fluttered across the ride in front of them. Fenwick seemed to have quite recovered his temper, for he laughed lightly.“What makes you so awfully down on me to-day?”“I suppose,” she said, with a slight shrug of her shoulders, “that I was remembering.”“If you remember fairly—”She interrupted him. “What woman does? Don’t let us talk of what is over. Forget, forget, forget—that is the real lesson of life, and one which you, at any rate, learn easily.”He had crown irritable again.“It depends upon what you choose to call forgetting,” he said sharply. “Forgetting is like everything else, each person looks at it from his own standpoint.”“And makes it a horrid nuisance for others. Come, wasn’t that in your mind?” She laughed again.“You credit—discredit—me with thoughts I don’t own to,” he retorted. “Why am I to be held responsible for the past? If we felt we had made a mistake, was it only I who found it out?”“On the contrary, it was I.”“Then why blame me?”“Because I am a woman, I suppose,” she said, and a close listener might have detected that her voice trembled. “But I can assure you, I never really blame you. As you say, it was I, and—I was wise.”“Oh, of course!” he said, with a touch of pique.“Still,” she persisted, “mistakes some times cost more than they are worth, and it is not safe to repeat them.”To this he made no answer.“So that you might, at any rate, leave that child alone.”He shot out indignantly—“You always speak as if I were to blame!”“Forgive me,” she said. “Of course it is unjust.” She suddenly added, “What nonsense we have talked! It is disappointing, when one really meant to be useful. I shall go back to the house and try some other way—perhaps copy out a recipe for beef-tea for Mrs Hilton.”“Since when have you indulged in such high aspirations?” His tone was still moody.“Oh, they awake, even in me, at times,” she returned lightly. “Don’t come with me.”He lifted his hat stiffly, and Helen stood with a smile and watched him out of sight. Then she sat down on a mound of grass, and cried as if her heart would break.

The tone in which Harry cried “Claudia!” pierced through even her unconsciousness. She looked at him, startled. He was breathing heavily, altogether unlike himself.

“I must speak,” he said. “Haven’t you guessed how I love you?”

“You?” she exclaimed in unmistakable amazement. “What can you be thinking of?” and something in her manner brought back his self-control.

“There’s nothing so wonderful about it, is there?” he said slowly. “I suppose it began from the first moment I saw you, and it has gone on. Can’t you give me a little hope? I know you’re a lot too good for me—”

“Oh, don’t say any more, don’t!”

She tried to rise, but he laid his hand on her arm.

“I want you to listen—this once. I suppose I’ve taken you by surprise. I didn’t mean to do that. I thought you must have seen all along.”

“I never saw!” interrupted Claudia indignantly. “I’m very angry with you.”

“If you don’t care for me now,” he went on, unheeding, “don’t you think you might some day? You like the old place—”

“The place!” She pushed away his hand, and her eyes were flaming. “Did you suppose I should want to marry a place? Oh, what nonsense this all is! If I could make you understand how much I dislike anything of the sort!”

He laughed ruefully.

“I think I understand. I was a fool—as usual.”

“Don’t say ‘as usual’!” exclaimed the girl, still frowning. “I hate to hear you always running yourself down, and I hate to hear you trying to talk sentiment. We are excellent friends. Do be satisfied with that, and be nice, as you were before.”

She waited, but he was silent.

“Well, then, if you won’t,” she said, lifting her eyebrows, “I’d better go back to the cousins.”

“No,” he said hurriedly, “don’t go. I shan’t torment you.”

Claudia glanced doubtfully at him. In spite of her displeasure, the situation struck her as more comical than serious, and though she wished he had not been silly, she did not for a moment realise that she was causing him more than a passing disappointment. Besides, the view which remained to be opened, the improvements which had so entirely filled her imagination, and fired her ambition, were really of far more importance than this ridiculous situation, and if she were to go away before she could carry them out—what a collapse, what a feminine collapse! People would guess, she supposed, because people were so foolish, and so determined to make out that a girl’s head could contain no ideas beyond those idiotic ones which she had just been invited to share; and they would all triumph, and say of course that was always the aim and end of a woman’s efforts. Yet something within her persistently urged her to go, so that she felt cross, and naturally vented the crossness upon Harry.

“I do so wish you would not have talked nonsense!” she exclaimed at last. “I did want to stay until I had finished what I have thought out, and it would have been the most wonderful improvement to the place! If I could just arrange it, and show you where to plant a few copper beeches—”

Harry’s laughter came readily, and it came now.

“You mustn’t think of leaving. If any one has to go, it will be I.”

“And if you go,” said Claudia discontentedly, “no one else knows a thing about the trees. Well, I will stay on till Wednesday, if you promise to talk sense, and forget these absurd ideas of yours. They come because you have so little to do. Why on earth don’t you get away, and find some real manly occupation?”

He hesitated.

“My father’s very infirm. I left the army because he wanted me.”

“I should think you might do something.” She had gathered her things together, and was walking towards the house. There may have been an unacknowledged effort to keep the conversation at arm’s length from herself, or it may have been vexation with her companion which raised a keen desire to rebuke him for his shortcomings. Curtain it is that her tone was scornful.

“Perhaps,” he answered.

“For a man or woman to be without occupation is so uninteresting, to say the least of it,” continued his mentor, “that I would rather break stones on the road.”

He was silent, hardly hearing. He was looking at the round softness of her cheek, and wondering whether many men felt as miserable as he. Swiftly before his eyes rose a vision of Claudia wandering about the park at Huntingdon with Captain Fenwick by her side, and he straightened himself with something so like a groan that he glanced hurriedly at the girl, fearing to have annoyed her. But she was looking straight before her, relieved to see Helen Arbuthnot strolling towards them from the grass ride.

“At least ten people are crying out for you,” was her greeting to Harry. “Your mother, and your mother’s maid, and the mother of the footman, and a sick bailiff. These are the most importunate, but there are five others dancing round. He must go,” she went on to Claudia, “but if you really have an idle moment to spare, you might bestow it on me. I collect other people’s.”

Claudia did not much care for Miss Arbuthnot, whom, with some reason, she suspected of ridiculing her, but at this minute she would have joyfully jumped at any means of escape.

“Was that why you came to Thornbury?” she asked bluntly.

“Was it? I don’t know; and I never answer questions, because they recall acrostics. Come back to the grass ride.” The grass ride remained unchanged. A broad strip of turf, and on either side tall slender trees springing from a wavy undergrowth of bracken; a ride shady through the hottest summer, yet with the sun filtering down sufficiently to fling broken lights on the close cool grass. Miss Arbuthnot stood still as they reached it, and looked in either direction. “It is an enchanting spot,” she said.

“Ye-e-s,” agreed Claudia doubtfully.

“But it might be tremendously improved.”

“I dare say. I hate improvements, whether in people or places. They destroy sentiment.”

Up jumped Claudia on her stilts. “I can’t understand any one not wishing for the best.”

“No? That’s your youth. It’s the same sort of rage which sets people scraping ruins, when such charming weeds vanish! Half the attraction of everything consists in its little defects.”

Miss Arbuthnot spoke with extreme laziness, quite indifferent to the impression she produced; and the girl, who hated to be reminded of her youth, and felt as if her own efforts were belittled, was provoked.

“If the world thought as you do,” she said gravely, “there would be no advancement, no gain.”

“And how enjoyable!” sighed Miss Arbuthnot. “Are you going to cut down many more of poor Harry’s favourite trees?”

Claudia coloured.

“I have only cut what was necessary,” she said with still greater dignity.

“From your point of view—yes. But from his?”

“Does he object?”

“He? Oh no, he knows better.”

“I don’t think you understand,” said Claudia impatiently. “I came here to try to make the place more beautiful—”

“It does well enough,” murmured Miss Arbuthnot, with a glance at the deep fern beside them.

“You don’t suppose I had the trees cut down except where it would be an improvement? And of course Mr Hilton is glad to—have those improvements.” She felt her speech feeble, and it made her angry.

“Of course. I am afraid what is good for one is often disagreeable, but, as you say, a supporting sense of virtue remains. Harry is such a capital fellow that he deserves all he can get.”

It should be noted that Miss Arbuthnot, accustomed to be regarded, had no idea that Harry had broken loose, and run his stubborn head against a wall, or she would not have chosen such a moment for sinking; his praises. Claudia was too young, or too ignorant of love, to feel kindly towards a man for falling in love with her, and was only annoyed at what she considered a commonplace episode in what she intended to be anything but a commonplace career. As yet she had no conception of the true proportion of things, and dismissing love and such trifles as mere hindrances, her companion’s words irritated her the more against Harry.

“Oh, he will get all he deserves, no doubt,” she observed airily. “That kind of character doesn’t want much.” Then she had the grace to blush, and to go on hurriedly, “He will be always quite contented to vegetate at Thornbury, stroll about with his gun, and make an ideal magistrate—or what people consider ideal, which does just as well.”

Miss Arbuthnot stopped to whisk away a wasp.

“Do you find fault with your picture?”

“Well, it doesn’t seem very interesting, that’s all.”

“I like discussing other people’s characters,” said Miss Arbuthnot lazily; “I find it much simpler than meditating upon one’s own. So you think Harry commonplace? Why?”

“Why? How can it be otherwise? He has no ambition, no aims beyond Thornbury, no work. A man who doesn’t work is a wretched being.”

“Has he told you he doesn’t work?”

“One can see for one’s self, I suppose?” Claudia said, with a fine scorn; and Helen shot a glance at her as if she had wakened up.

“Oh no, you can’t. When you are older you will learn that you can never trust your eyes. Go and ask the bailiff, and the keeper, and the gardeners.”

“Thatkind of work!”

“Well, we can’t all be landscape gardeners. If we were, I suppose the estate would have to be kept going, or there wouldn’t be much good in beautifying it?”

“Agents,” retorted Claudia.

“Perhaps. But some people have an old-fashioned prejudice that when a father and mother are old and infirm, there are things which even an agent can’t do. Harryisold-fashioned. I have often told him he ought to be more up-to-date.”

There was a silence. Then Claudia remarked in a slightly altered voice—

“He has never said anything to make one suppose living here was any sacrifice.”

“Or that he felt the loss of his trees. Yet, I assure you, he has more than once ridden miles to avoid the crash of doom.” Another pause.

“I had really better go away at once,” Claudia exclaimed impatiently. “Why did they ask me to come? It was his suggestion—not mine. And it is ridiculous. The place is ever so much improved by a little thinning.”

“Oh, I dare say. I’m not defending Harry, only when people can never be induced to blow their own trumpets, I feel irresistibly impelled to produce a blast. Let us talk about some one else. Captain Fenwick, for instance. Neither of us need blow for him.”

“He’s amusing,” remarked Claudia indifferently.

“There’s a tribute!” said Miss Arbuthnot, looking at her between half-closed eyelids.

“And he rides a bicycle better than any one I know.”

“So that you are less hard on him than on poor idle Harry?”

“Hard? I don’t know. He idles too, but—”

“More impressively.”

“He has been useful in getting me a commission to work at Huntingdon. He says it’s in dreadful order, for Sir Peter has only just succeeded, and of course the worse it is, the better for me.”

This time the silence lasted longer. Then Miss Arbuthnot spoke without turning her head—

“He goes there too, I suppose?”

“Oh yes! He thought,”—she laughed—“that I might feel lost among strangers. One has to get over that sort of thing when one takes up a profession. But he meant it very well, and perhaps if he is there, they will be less shy of me. That’s what generally happens, because people can’t forget their old tradition that a woman mustn’t be professional. With a man it’s taken as a matter of course.”

“And a man takes it as a matter of course,” put in Helen. She was tired of her companion’s girlish egotism, and administered her thrust sharply. “But she won’t see,” she reflected.

Claudia did see, and coloured.

“I dare say I am tiresome,” she said frankly. “At the college they declared that no one rode their hobbies to death as I did. Only,”—she drew a deep breath—“these are wonderful times, aren’t they? And how can one take one’s part in the movement without enthusiasm?”

“And pray, where are you moving?” asked Miss Arbuthnot. Then she changed her tone. “Was there ever such a heavenly day? I’m glad you’ve spared the grass ride. There’s nothing like it at Huntingdon, whatever Captain Fenwick may say. When do you go?”

“On Wednesday.”

“Does he take you?”

“I suppose we shall bicycle there together. I shan’t object, because he is a very clever rider, and can show one all sorts of useful dodges.”

“Oh, he is very clever!” agreed Miss Arbuthnot. She added quickly, with a touch of scorn—“and insatiable.”

Claudia did not catch the oddly chosen word, and certainly would not have understood it.

“Well, here he is rather refreshing,” she allowed, “because he has been about the world, and can talk; but, after all, men always strike me as uninteresting. Don’t you think one more often meets with original women?”

“At the college, of course.”

“Oh, at the college they were delightful.”

“If,” Miss Arbuthnot said idly, “you want a definition of advancing years, I should say it was made up of modifications. I’ve had my theories too, though you mightn’t believe it, but I find the hard edges almost gone, and my opinions grown hazy. One still, however, remains—that the inevitable will be down on you. Who is the man in the distance?”

“How tiresome!” Claudia exclaimed. “It is Captain Fenwick, and we shall not be able to talk any more. Perhaps he has not seen us, and we can escape.”

“Oh, he has seen us. Bring your philosophy to bear, for, after all, you find him more endurable than the others—him or his bicycle, which is it?” As Captain Fenwick came swiftly up, and swung himself off, she added, “That is one point I particularly dislike in the thing. It is always taking you unawares. There is no time to prepare, or to call up one’s blandest expression. However, here is Miss Hamilton who has just been singing its praises—yours, I mean.”

“It’s very good,” said Claudia, eyeing it critically, “I wish I hadn’t been in a hurry for mine.”

“Yours is well enough. You can have one or two things altered. Look here—” he was beginning, when Miss Arbuthnot broke in.

“For pity’s sake, spare me a digression on wheels and pistons, or whatever they may be. You can discuss them at your ease on your way to Huntingdon.”

He glanced at Claudia. Miss Arbuthnot glanced too.

“So we can,” said the girl cheerfully. “I expect you can put me up to all sorts of things.”

“Dear me,” murmured Miss Arbuthnot, “the world has changed indeed since my day!”

“Your day?”

“It must have been a hundred years ago, for it would have held up many hands in horror at a young man and a young woman arriving by themselves at a country house.”

“Yes, it is improving,” said Claudia, with scorn, “it doesn’t think silly things as it did.” The day before this would have been very well, but to-day conscience gave a little tweak at her elbow, recalling her scene with Harry, and she became suddenly silent. Helen noticed the change, and Claudia saw that she noticed. Something made her turn quickly to Fenwick.

“I must go,” she said. “If you’re meaning to stay here, I wish you’d let me take your bicycle to the house. I want to look it over.” Miss Arbuthnot stood watching her from under the green boughs. Then she glanced at Fenwick. “She’s not going to fall in love with you,” she remarked.

“Aren’t you a little—in advance of the situation?”

“Not in advance of your thoughts. What attracts you? But I know.”

“You’re bewildering,” he observed rather savagely. “Not content with furnishing me with imaginary fancies, you provide an explanation of them.”

She went on as if he had not spoken.

“She thinks no more of you than of a dozen others she has met in her small life.”

“You’re encouraging.”

“Oh,” said Helen sleepily, “do you want encouragement?”

He saw his slip, and looked more angry, but suddenly laughed.

“She’s naïve enough to be amusing in these days. Enthusiastic, and all that, and believing so intolerably in her career. No woman has a right to a career.”

“Beyond that of losing her heart to Arthur Fenwick.”

”—Until she’s over thirty, at all events. It’s got to be pointed out to her.”

“And you are engaged in the object-lesson? One after your own mind, isn’t it?” She spoke in a bitter tone as they strolled along the soft turf. A startled young partridge fluttered across the ride in front of them. Fenwick seemed to have quite recovered his temper, for he laughed lightly.

“What makes you so awfully down on me to-day?”

“I suppose,” she said, with a slight shrug of her shoulders, “that I was remembering.”

“If you remember fairly—”

She interrupted him. “What woman does? Don’t let us talk of what is over. Forget, forget, forget—that is the real lesson of life, and one which you, at any rate, learn easily.”

He had crown irritable again.

“It depends upon what you choose to call forgetting,” he said sharply. “Forgetting is like everything else, each person looks at it from his own standpoint.”

“And makes it a horrid nuisance for others. Come, wasn’t that in your mind?” She laughed again.

“You credit—discredit—me with thoughts I don’t own to,” he retorted. “Why am I to be held responsible for the past? If we felt we had made a mistake, was it only I who found it out?”

“On the contrary, it was I.”

“Then why blame me?”

“Because I am a woman, I suppose,” she said, and a close listener might have detected that her voice trembled. “But I can assure you, I never really blame you. As you say, it was I, and—I was wise.”

“Oh, of course!” he said, with a touch of pique.

“Still,” she persisted, “mistakes some times cost more than they are worth, and it is not safe to repeat them.”

To this he made no answer.

“So that you might, at any rate, leave that child alone.”

He shot out indignantly—“You always speak as if I were to blame!”

“Forgive me,” she said. “Of course it is unjust.” She suddenly added, “What nonsense we have talked! It is disappointing, when one really meant to be useful. I shall go back to the house and try some other way—perhaps copy out a recipe for beef-tea for Mrs Hilton.”

“Since when have you indulged in such high aspirations?” His tone was still moody.

“Oh, they awake, even in me, at times,” she returned lightly. “Don’t come with me.”

He lifted his hat stiffly, and Helen stood with a smile and watched him out of sight. Then she sat down on a mound of grass, and cried as if her heart would break.

Chapter Seven.Claudia was ungratefully anxious to leave Thornbury. She had been happy there, but the young expect to be happy, and the last days had made her uncomfortable. Harry said no word, and tried hard to be as he had been when hope still lived in his heart, but Claudia was annoyed when she saw him looking grave, or when his mother remarked she did not know what could be the matter with Harry.“Perhaps he has toothache,” said Ruth Baynes, lifting her eyebrows sympathetically. “My brother Walter gets dreadfully low when he has toothache. And it was much worse when he had mumps.”“Mumps! Oh, my dear, I hope poor Harry has not caught anything of that sort! They are in the village, and the gardener’s little girl certainly had a swollen face. Still—Harry has not complained, has he?”“Not to me,” said Claudia, with a laugh.Perhaps in spite of the longing to keep her near him, Harry himself was not sorry when the last day came. The old kindly companionship, even if disdainful on her part, had been sweet, and now that, too, was gone. Claudia scolded him no more, laughed at him no more, and he felt as if she had stepped far away. He blamed himself for the change, but it took the heart out of him. And the gallant effort he made to prevent those who loved him from knowing that he suffered, seemed at times more than he could successfully keep up.Still, when the last moment came, and they all stood at the door to see Claudia and Captain Fenwick ride away together out of his life, Harry went through the worst sensation he had ever experienced. He did his best to hide it, laughed at his mothers misgivings, assuring her that nowadays it was the most common proceeding in the world, and that he meant to take Helen Arbuthnot home in the same fashion; and, instead of retiring to solitude, went straight off to the stable to doctor a lame horse. There were plenty of prosaic and unromantic details to be attended to, of which he shirked not one; the buying pigs, and deciding what should be done with an unprofitable cow, had to be talked over and arranged without impatience. After this he walked off to see the keeper’s old mother, who was very irritable with constant pain, and dearly loved to grumble against all her family to Master Harry. And no one knew how big an ache he carried in his kindly heart.But meanwhile?Well, meanwhile it was summer-time, and under a blue sky veiled here and there with white clouds, through lanes in which honeysuckle still ran riot, Claudia and her companion raced swiftly along, or dawdled up the many hills. He was a little surprised at her vigorous enjoyment of all about them, and, so contagious is happiness, found himself, too, making merry over the veriest trifles. Wonder broke out at last.“You have turned me into a boy again. What magic do you use?”“It is not I,” said Claudia merrily. “It is the air and the sky and the trees and the great simple things which we think nothing about. Why must you be a boy to feel the enchantment of them all?”“Do you advise me, then, to go and live in a hut?”“Oh, I don’t advise. There’s a splendid butterfly.”She named it correctly.“One of the girls at the college collected butterflies. I don’t do it myself because I like them too much. Look! here is a splendid bit of road for a spin. Let us race to that gate, though I shan’t have a chance.”She dashed off, and contrived so cleverly to prevent his passing, that only at the last minute could Fenwick succeed in slipping round her.“Only just!” she cried, waving her hand. “Oh, that was glorious! I wish we had timed ourselves.”They raced again, teased each other, laughed, and behaved like two children on a holiday. As they went down the Huntingdon drive, Claudia gave a sigh of satisfaction.“I’ve enjoyed it so much, every bit of it, haven’t you?”At another time he might have answered with some compliment, but the frank appeal confused him. He was unprepared for such simple delight, in which he could not but feel he had no more special share than twenty other things about them. Claudia had looked upon him as a playfellow—nothing else.Nor could his vanity flatter him that she leaned upon him in this entry into a world of strangers. Quite unabashed, thoroughly direct, and changed and professional to her fingers’ ends, Fenwick, with annoyance for which he could scarcely account, saw amusement growing in his cousin Lady Wilmot’s dancing eyes. When they were left alone, it broke out.“Oh, Arthur, Arthur, now I understand!”“You understand nothing at all,” he said roughly. There was an occasional roughness in his manner, which cynics said was what women liked. Lady Wilmot only smiled.“Do tell her not to be quite so solemn about it all,” she said. “She is so exceedingly determined we shan’t for one moment forget what she is here for, that she is for ever flaunting her calling in one’s face. But she’s quite a nice little thing.”“Yes,” he repeated in the same tone, “quite a nice little things—whatever that may mean.”“Don’t be rude. You might allow for my surprise, when I had made up my mind to a middle-aged being with spectacles and an umbrella, at being confronted with this young little person. I’m very glad—at least I shall be if you can persuade her to unbend, and if Peter doesn’t make love to her.”“As if Peter had ever eyes for any one but yourself!”But if Lady Wilmot was astonished, Fenwick himself had odd sensations. Beginning his acquaintance with the girl with a certain amount of pique at an indifference to which he was unaccustomed, and a determination to drag her out of it, he had taken a great deal more trouble than was usual with him, and yet had failed. He knew women well enough to own that he had failed utterly, and as his vanity could never endure defeat, the consciousness made him more keen to carry out his purpose. Then came this summer afternoon in which he had seen Claudia in a new light, when something of harmony in the girl’s nature with the fresh cool simplicity of a country world, touched him as nothing had touched him for years, and carried him back to his boyish days. For the first time he felt a sharp stab of annoyance when he found that she was up again on her heroic hobby-horse, and that Lady Wilmot’s eyes were brimming over with amusement.“Good heavens!” he said to himself savagely, “I must speak to her, prevent her from making such a fool of herself. When she’s out of this preposterous nonsense she’s charming, but where are her eyes, where’s her sense of the ridiculous?”Nor did he ask himself why Claudia’s folly should disturb him.He stopped her the next morning in a corridor which served for a picture-gallery. She had on a white dress, and, with her hands clasped behind her, was standing looking at the portrait of a young girl.“Who is it by?” she asked. “I don’t know about pictures, but this strikes me as very good.”“Romney, I believe,” he said; and then abruptly, “Look here, you and I are old friends.”“Old friends!” Claudia repeated, opening her eyes.“Older than anybody here, at any rate. And I suppose you’ll own that I’ve knocked about the world more than you? What on earth makes you cram all these people about your business here?”“I think you are rather rude,” she said, flushing. “If you were in my position, you would understand.”“Your position! We’re most of us in some sort of position, but we don’t go talking about it all day long. It’s just as if you were ashamed of it.”“Now I am sure you are rude,” Claudia cried, still redder. “Ashamed, indeed! But I don’t choose to appear as if I were merely a guest. That is not fair upon my employers. I am a professional, a working woman; I am not going to be paid for just driving about and amusing myself like other girls, and unless I make it quite clear, they will insist upon thinking that is what I expect.”“Of course,” he said, still roughly, “I know well enough what you have in your head, but you needn’t be always cramming it down people’s throats. State the fact, if you insist upon it, and then leave it alone.”Claudia felt this to be very disagreeable indeed. She said slowly—“Have you done?”“Naturally you’re offended,” he went on, with a sudden softening of his voice. “But if you think it fairly over, I believe I may get you to own that it can’t have been very pleasant for me to speak?”Her face cleared, and she looked frankly at him.“I suppose it was not,” she allowed. “Did you do it on my account, or because you disliked any one you had to do with being laughed at?” But before he had recovered from this rebuke, she added with a certain sweetness which was noticeable in her at times, “Still, you must not think that I am angry. I suppose I was for a moment, but it was foolish of me, because you were right, quite right, to say out what was in your mind. And I dare say, too, that you are right in what you think. I suppose it seems so much more important to me than to them all—not on my own account, but because we feel we are making a beginning—that I have let myself talk too much about it.”“So that you forgive me?” he said, quite humbly for him.She laughed.“I forgive you. I dare say that by-and-by I shall have reached the height of being even grateful. But now you must let me go, because if I am not to talk I must work all the harder.”“You can always talk to me,” he said eagerly.“Oh no,” she said, escaping, with a shake of her head. “I must break myself of a bad habit.”If Claudia had been mortified by his plain speaking, there was no doubt that she took the lesson to heart. There was no more of that somewhat masterful enthusiasm with which she had up to this time indulged her hearers. She became, instead, extremely reticent, and not an allusion to the college or to professional duties passed her lips. Fenwick was half pleased, half vexed, because this was not the Claudia he knew. He found himself thinking of her with persistence which amazed him. He could not flatter himself that she was angry with him, but would have welcomed her anger as proof that in some way or another he affected her. Why did he not? He raged at the thought of caring that he should, but he could not deny her indifference.The days went by; Claudia still kept her word. She went quietly about the work she had in hand, but would not talk of it—even to Fenwick. This annoyed him, and one evening he threw himself into a chair by her side, and told her so.“Women always go into extremes,” he grumbled, when he had made his complaint.Claudia looked at him and laughed.“I never knew any one so difficult to please,” she said. “I thought I was carrying out my lessons.”“So you are,” he replied impatiently, “but you needn’t practise your lessons upon everybody. I ought to be an exception.”“Why?”“Because I am not a stranger like these other people.”“Oh,” said Claudia, laughing still more unfeelingly; “I never knew any one make quite so much out of a fortnight before! Wasn’t it a fortnight that you had known me?”“I believe I have known you always,” he returned hardily. “Days—weeks—what have they to do with the matter?”“Is that a compliment?”“Uncompromising truth. Don’t you see that it gives me the power of understanding you?”This is an appeal which rarely fails with women, and Fenwick knew how to accentuate it by fixing his dark eyes upon the girl, and flinging an intensity of will into his gaze. She merely lifted her eyebrows.“I dare say. I don’t think any one ever found me mysterious.”He was angrily aware that she spoke truly. There were few complexities in her character to baffle any one, but there was for him a baffling directness and simplicity against which his efforts beat themselves in vain. She met them with an indifference which perpetually incited him to break it down.Lady Wilmot was a little disappointed that Claudia did not carry out the promise of her first hours, for she was a small lady who liked nothing so well as amusement, and had foreseen a rich supply. With the other two or three who were staying there the girl was popular in her own way, which, however, kept her apart except at meals and in the evening. In truth, although she had taken Fenwick’s hint both lightly and good-humouredly, it gave her the sort of shock one gets by running full tilt against a wall. She had been anxious to impress those about her with the gravity of woman’s work, to see that they put it on a level with man’s, to shake off the faintest accusation of frivolity; and, to accomplish this end she was prepared to be pointed at and scorned. With such lofty aspirations nothing could be well more humiliating than to find herself considered a bore. Here lay the point of Fenwick’s moral, it was from this he wanted to save her. “A bore, a bore, a bore!” She scourged herself with the taunt, and vowed there should be no more of it, for to the young, ridicule is intolerable.But the resolution made her feel curiously lonely. The girls at the college, mostly reformers, all enthusiasts, largely impressed with the part they had to play, and occasionally in more open revolt, incited and encouraged each other over their work, which seemed to them of supreme importance. When Claudia came out of this atmosphere it still clung about her, so that she babbled of it gravely, as she had babbled to her companions. Now she was sure she had been a bore, and the thought stung. It made her, also, silent and reserved, although this was so unlike her nature that she only got at it by sheer force of will. Fenwick had certainly offered himself as sympathetic, but she was shrewd enough to reflect, “What he warned me against, he feels himself. He is ready to talk because I am a girl and not bad-looking, but only on that account, not because he really cares.” And then thought flew to Harry Hilton, not with the wish that she had given him a different answer, but with absolute certainty that he would never have considered her a bore.

Claudia was ungratefully anxious to leave Thornbury. She had been happy there, but the young expect to be happy, and the last days had made her uncomfortable. Harry said no word, and tried hard to be as he had been when hope still lived in his heart, but Claudia was annoyed when she saw him looking grave, or when his mother remarked she did not know what could be the matter with Harry.

“Perhaps he has toothache,” said Ruth Baynes, lifting her eyebrows sympathetically. “My brother Walter gets dreadfully low when he has toothache. And it was much worse when he had mumps.”

“Mumps! Oh, my dear, I hope poor Harry has not caught anything of that sort! They are in the village, and the gardener’s little girl certainly had a swollen face. Still—Harry has not complained, has he?”

“Not to me,” said Claudia, with a laugh.

Perhaps in spite of the longing to keep her near him, Harry himself was not sorry when the last day came. The old kindly companionship, even if disdainful on her part, had been sweet, and now that, too, was gone. Claudia scolded him no more, laughed at him no more, and he felt as if she had stepped far away. He blamed himself for the change, but it took the heart out of him. And the gallant effort he made to prevent those who loved him from knowing that he suffered, seemed at times more than he could successfully keep up.

Still, when the last moment came, and they all stood at the door to see Claudia and Captain Fenwick ride away together out of his life, Harry went through the worst sensation he had ever experienced. He did his best to hide it, laughed at his mothers misgivings, assuring her that nowadays it was the most common proceeding in the world, and that he meant to take Helen Arbuthnot home in the same fashion; and, instead of retiring to solitude, went straight off to the stable to doctor a lame horse. There were plenty of prosaic and unromantic details to be attended to, of which he shirked not one; the buying pigs, and deciding what should be done with an unprofitable cow, had to be talked over and arranged without impatience. After this he walked off to see the keeper’s old mother, who was very irritable with constant pain, and dearly loved to grumble against all her family to Master Harry. And no one knew how big an ache he carried in his kindly heart.

But meanwhile?

Well, meanwhile it was summer-time, and under a blue sky veiled here and there with white clouds, through lanes in which honeysuckle still ran riot, Claudia and her companion raced swiftly along, or dawdled up the many hills. He was a little surprised at her vigorous enjoyment of all about them, and, so contagious is happiness, found himself, too, making merry over the veriest trifles. Wonder broke out at last.

“You have turned me into a boy again. What magic do you use?”

“It is not I,” said Claudia merrily. “It is the air and the sky and the trees and the great simple things which we think nothing about. Why must you be a boy to feel the enchantment of them all?”

“Do you advise me, then, to go and live in a hut?”

“Oh, I don’t advise. There’s a splendid butterfly.”

She named it correctly.

“One of the girls at the college collected butterflies. I don’t do it myself because I like them too much. Look! here is a splendid bit of road for a spin. Let us race to that gate, though I shan’t have a chance.”

She dashed off, and contrived so cleverly to prevent his passing, that only at the last minute could Fenwick succeed in slipping round her.

“Only just!” she cried, waving her hand. “Oh, that was glorious! I wish we had timed ourselves.”

They raced again, teased each other, laughed, and behaved like two children on a holiday. As they went down the Huntingdon drive, Claudia gave a sigh of satisfaction.

“I’ve enjoyed it so much, every bit of it, haven’t you?”

At another time he might have answered with some compliment, but the frank appeal confused him. He was unprepared for such simple delight, in which he could not but feel he had no more special share than twenty other things about them. Claudia had looked upon him as a playfellow—nothing else.

Nor could his vanity flatter him that she leaned upon him in this entry into a world of strangers. Quite unabashed, thoroughly direct, and changed and professional to her fingers’ ends, Fenwick, with annoyance for which he could scarcely account, saw amusement growing in his cousin Lady Wilmot’s dancing eyes. When they were left alone, it broke out.

“Oh, Arthur, Arthur, now I understand!”

“You understand nothing at all,” he said roughly. There was an occasional roughness in his manner, which cynics said was what women liked. Lady Wilmot only smiled.

“Do tell her not to be quite so solemn about it all,” she said. “She is so exceedingly determined we shan’t for one moment forget what she is here for, that she is for ever flaunting her calling in one’s face. But she’s quite a nice little thing.”

“Yes,” he repeated in the same tone, “quite a nice little things—whatever that may mean.”

“Don’t be rude. You might allow for my surprise, when I had made up my mind to a middle-aged being with spectacles and an umbrella, at being confronted with this young little person. I’m very glad—at least I shall be if you can persuade her to unbend, and if Peter doesn’t make love to her.”

“As if Peter had ever eyes for any one but yourself!”

But if Lady Wilmot was astonished, Fenwick himself had odd sensations. Beginning his acquaintance with the girl with a certain amount of pique at an indifference to which he was unaccustomed, and a determination to drag her out of it, he had taken a great deal more trouble than was usual with him, and yet had failed. He knew women well enough to own that he had failed utterly, and as his vanity could never endure defeat, the consciousness made him more keen to carry out his purpose. Then came this summer afternoon in which he had seen Claudia in a new light, when something of harmony in the girl’s nature with the fresh cool simplicity of a country world, touched him as nothing had touched him for years, and carried him back to his boyish days. For the first time he felt a sharp stab of annoyance when he found that she was up again on her heroic hobby-horse, and that Lady Wilmot’s eyes were brimming over with amusement.

“Good heavens!” he said to himself savagely, “I must speak to her, prevent her from making such a fool of herself. When she’s out of this preposterous nonsense she’s charming, but where are her eyes, where’s her sense of the ridiculous?”

Nor did he ask himself why Claudia’s folly should disturb him.

He stopped her the next morning in a corridor which served for a picture-gallery. She had on a white dress, and, with her hands clasped behind her, was standing looking at the portrait of a young girl.

“Who is it by?” she asked. “I don’t know about pictures, but this strikes me as very good.”

“Romney, I believe,” he said; and then abruptly, “Look here, you and I are old friends.”

“Old friends!” Claudia repeated, opening her eyes.

“Older than anybody here, at any rate. And I suppose you’ll own that I’ve knocked about the world more than you? What on earth makes you cram all these people about your business here?”

“I think you are rather rude,” she said, flushing. “If you were in my position, you would understand.”

“Your position! We’re most of us in some sort of position, but we don’t go talking about it all day long. It’s just as if you were ashamed of it.”

“Now I am sure you are rude,” Claudia cried, still redder. “Ashamed, indeed! But I don’t choose to appear as if I were merely a guest. That is not fair upon my employers. I am a professional, a working woman; I am not going to be paid for just driving about and amusing myself like other girls, and unless I make it quite clear, they will insist upon thinking that is what I expect.”

“Of course,” he said, still roughly, “I know well enough what you have in your head, but you needn’t be always cramming it down people’s throats. State the fact, if you insist upon it, and then leave it alone.”

Claudia felt this to be very disagreeable indeed. She said slowly—

“Have you done?”

“Naturally you’re offended,” he went on, with a sudden softening of his voice. “But if you think it fairly over, I believe I may get you to own that it can’t have been very pleasant for me to speak?”

Her face cleared, and she looked frankly at him.

“I suppose it was not,” she allowed. “Did you do it on my account, or because you disliked any one you had to do with being laughed at?” But before he had recovered from this rebuke, she added with a certain sweetness which was noticeable in her at times, “Still, you must not think that I am angry. I suppose I was for a moment, but it was foolish of me, because you were right, quite right, to say out what was in your mind. And I dare say, too, that you are right in what you think. I suppose it seems so much more important to me than to them all—not on my own account, but because we feel we are making a beginning—that I have let myself talk too much about it.”

“So that you forgive me?” he said, quite humbly for him.

She laughed.

“I forgive you. I dare say that by-and-by I shall have reached the height of being even grateful. But now you must let me go, because if I am not to talk I must work all the harder.”

“You can always talk to me,” he said eagerly.

“Oh no,” she said, escaping, with a shake of her head. “I must break myself of a bad habit.”

If Claudia had been mortified by his plain speaking, there was no doubt that she took the lesson to heart. There was no more of that somewhat masterful enthusiasm with which she had up to this time indulged her hearers. She became, instead, extremely reticent, and not an allusion to the college or to professional duties passed her lips. Fenwick was half pleased, half vexed, because this was not the Claudia he knew. He found himself thinking of her with persistence which amazed him. He could not flatter himself that she was angry with him, but would have welcomed her anger as proof that in some way or another he affected her. Why did he not? He raged at the thought of caring that he should, but he could not deny her indifference.

The days went by; Claudia still kept her word. She went quietly about the work she had in hand, but would not talk of it—even to Fenwick. This annoyed him, and one evening he threw himself into a chair by her side, and told her so.

“Women always go into extremes,” he grumbled, when he had made his complaint.

Claudia looked at him and laughed.

“I never knew any one so difficult to please,” she said. “I thought I was carrying out my lessons.”

“So you are,” he replied impatiently, “but you needn’t practise your lessons upon everybody. I ought to be an exception.”

“Why?”

“Because I am not a stranger like these other people.”

“Oh,” said Claudia, laughing still more unfeelingly; “I never knew any one make quite so much out of a fortnight before! Wasn’t it a fortnight that you had known me?”

“I believe I have known you always,” he returned hardily. “Days—weeks—what have they to do with the matter?”

“Is that a compliment?”

“Uncompromising truth. Don’t you see that it gives me the power of understanding you?”

This is an appeal which rarely fails with women, and Fenwick knew how to accentuate it by fixing his dark eyes upon the girl, and flinging an intensity of will into his gaze. She merely lifted her eyebrows.

“I dare say. I don’t think any one ever found me mysterious.”

He was angrily aware that she spoke truly. There were few complexities in her character to baffle any one, but there was for him a baffling directness and simplicity against which his efforts beat themselves in vain. She met them with an indifference which perpetually incited him to break it down.

Lady Wilmot was a little disappointed that Claudia did not carry out the promise of her first hours, for she was a small lady who liked nothing so well as amusement, and had foreseen a rich supply. With the other two or three who were staying there the girl was popular in her own way, which, however, kept her apart except at meals and in the evening. In truth, although she had taken Fenwick’s hint both lightly and good-humouredly, it gave her the sort of shock one gets by running full tilt against a wall. She had been anxious to impress those about her with the gravity of woman’s work, to see that they put it on a level with man’s, to shake off the faintest accusation of frivolity; and, to accomplish this end she was prepared to be pointed at and scorned. With such lofty aspirations nothing could be well more humiliating than to find herself considered a bore. Here lay the point of Fenwick’s moral, it was from this he wanted to save her. “A bore, a bore, a bore!” She scourged herself with the taunt, and vowed there should be no more of it, for to the young, ridicule is intolerable.

But the resolution made her feel curiously lonely. The girls at the college, mostly reformers, all enthusiasts, largely impressed with the part they had to play, and occasionally in more open revolt, incited and encouraged each other over their work, which seemed to them of supreme importance. When Claudia came out of this atmosphere it still clung about her, so that she babbled of it gravely, as she had babbled to her companions. Now she was sure she had been a bore, and the thought stung. It made her, also, silent and reserved, although this was so unlike her nature that she only got at it by sheer force of will. Fenwick had certainly offered himself as sympathetic, but she was shrewd enough to reflect, “What he warned me against, he feels himself. He is ready to talk because I am a girl and not bad-looking, but only on that account, not because he really cares.” And then thought flew to Harry Hilton, not with the wish that she had given him a different answer, but with absolute certainty that he would never have considered her a bore.

Chapter Eight.Huntingdon Hall was a comfortable house, with rooms which Lady Wilmot had already transformed. The grounds, however, were not to compare with those of Thornbury, for they had passed through a long season of neglect, and the trees were tall and lank, requiring both thinning and autumn planting. Claudia’s labours would not bear fruit for years. She said this to Sir Peter one day when she had sent to ask him to come and decide for himself whether a certain important change should be carried out. She liked Sir Peter. He was a big clumsy man, rather shy, with twinkling eyes which, when he smiled, screwed themselves into innumerable wrinkles, and a slight hesitation—not amounting to a stammer—in his speech. He invariably gave his decisions clearly.“We are very much obliged to you, Miss Hamilton,” he said finally; “but my wife told me to tell you that you must take an off-day now and then, and she wants you to go to Barton Towers to-day.” As Claudia hesitated he went on, “I warn you she will accept no denial, and really it is a place which you ought to see.”A week ago she would have taken refuge behind her occupation, and afterwards she wished she had done so, at whatever cost; but her new dread of making it and herself ridiculous stopped the words which rose to her lips, and she was just agreeing when Lady Wilmot with her two pugs rustled round the corner.“Ah! here you are, Peter,” she called out. “I wish you wouldn’t let that boy, Charlie Carter, have your gun. Do go and take it away from him before he kills anybody.” He went obediently, and she turned smilingly to Claudia. “Miss Hamilton, has Peter told you? I am not going to have any more unsociable excuses.”“I should like to come, please,” said Claudia at once.“I knew I should get you!” Lady Wilmot exclaimed triumphantly. “Come with me to the hothouses, and let the men go to their dinner. Do you mind going to Barton on your bicycle? I’d give anything to ride mine, but Peter says I can’t because of old Lady Bodmin. It’s such a nuisance having to sit up in the victoria with her.” And then Lady Wilmot, who was noted for making imprudent speeches, made a very imprudent one indeed. “I’m so glad you will come. We see nothing of you, and I am tired of trying to console Arthur Fenwick.”“Captain Fenwick? I don’t understand,” said Claudia coldly.Lady Wilmot laughed. “Don’t you?” she said gaily. “Well, I can’t help being amused, because generally it’s the other way, and now any one can see that he’s devoted, and you treat the poor fellow quite cruelly.”“Oh, you are very much mistaken!” cried the girl, frowning. “You ought not—I beg your pardon, but really people ought not to imagine such foolish things. Captain Fenwick is absolutely nothing to me, nor I to him.”“Now you are certainly blind. And do you mean to say you haven’t thought of him—seriously, I mean?”“I? Never!” returned Claudia proudly. “Nor he of me.”“Oh, there you are wrong,” said Lady Wilmot, with amusement. She was going on, when Claudia interrupted her with a ring of indignation in her tone which took the other woman by surprise.“Please don’t say any more; I hate it! I should hate it if it were true, and it isn’t. I can’t tell you how much I dislike such things being said!”She stopped. Lady Wilmot looked at her with interest. All emotion is impressive, and Claudia was very much moved in quite an unexpected way. She stood facing her hostess, her girlish features stirred and changed by an expression which had never before touched them.“I beg your pardon,” said Lady Wilmot quickly. “I spoke carelessly, as one does sometimes—much too often, if I’m to believe Peter. Don’t think of it again. It was only nonsense.”“Yes,” said Claudia, drawing a deep breath, “it was nonsense. Of course I shan’t think of it again.”Lady Wilmot hurried after her husband, and caught him in the library.“Peter, Peter,” she said in an injured tone, “I thought new women didn’t mind what was said to them, and I thought Miss Hamilton was a new woman, and I said the least little bit in the world to her about Arthur, and found myself in quite the wrong box. She fired up, and told me to hold my tongue, or as good as told me. Imagine a girl who is so exceedingly independent, and bent upon taking care of herself, minding a little chaff! I supposed she would mind nothing.”“Did Arthur ask you to say anything?”“Don’t be annoying. It was a small voyage of discovery on my own account, because I really think he likes her—seriously, I mean, and I wanted to find out.” She went on impressively, “I don’t think she cares herself one little bit.”“Then there’s an end of it.”“How tiresome you are, Peter!” she said petulantly. “I’ll never believe she can stand up against him if he takes the trouble to make love to her. Anyway, I think it very hard she should fly out at me when my intentions were so good.”“Well, I hope your good intentions won’t do any harm.”“How can they? She’d never thought of him. You’re rather priggish this morning, Peter, but I may as well tell you that I mean some of them to go on their bicycles—Arthur, and Charlie Carter at all events. I shall give her the chance. If she likes it better, she can drive.”The same question was in Claudia’s mind. She felt hunted, disdainful, indignant, all at once. First Harry and then Captain Fenwick thrust down her unwilling throat. It was persecution! She, who would have none of them, who was thinking of much more important business, who had meant to live her own life, and, so far as in her lay, to be mistress of her fate, bitterly resented an interruption which seemed to place her at once on a level with all the other pleasure-loving idle girls of the day, whose heads were full of offers and settlements. She! Claudia raised her chin, and looked like an angry nymph. If Fenwick had passed that way he would have met with scant civility. She thought Lady Wilmot impertinent, she wished she had not come to the place, and then suddenly, to her added annoyance, found her eyes brimming with hot tears, which put the final touch to her humiliation. She dashed them away with scornful fierceness. “So,”—she rated herself—“so it has come to this, that if a stupid thing happens, you cry about it! Oh, do pluck up a little spirit and resolve not to think twice about such folly! Most likely it is all her invention, or else he has just been amusing himself in the way men do, and pretending—pretending!—to her that he cares. You should expect to meet such men, Claudia. And what ought you to do? Certainly not trouble yourself about them. Turn yourself into a stone wall. I suppose you have sense enough left to go on just as usual? But I wish, I do wish she hadn’t said it! It makes everything disagreeable and stupid. It shan’t, though! What’s the use of having a will of one’s own if one can’t use it? If he wants to speak, let him, and there’s an end of it; and if he has the better sense to hold his tongue, I shall know she was wrong. And if, as I suppose, we are to go on our bicycles to this tiresome place to-day, I’m not going to blush prettily and draw back; I shall do exactly as I should have done if she hadn’t come out and spoilt my morning. The most annoying part of it all is that I have quite forgotten what I meant to do with those hollies. I know that I had some capital notion, and it has gone. Oh,howtiresome men are!”Claudia sat wrathfully down, pulled out her pocket-book, rested her chin on her hands, and forced her mind to stern consideration of her plans. In some degree this brought back her calm, so that when she appeared at luncheon, and ways and means for reaching Barton Towers were discussed, she did not allow a shadow of hesitation to appear in her manner. Lady Bodmin clung to the victoria, and Lady Wilmot made a little face of dismay. Claudia said calmly that of course she could bicycle, and inwardly hoped that Captain Fenwick would not be of the party. But this was far from his intention.“I thought you hated calls?” said Lady Wilmot mischievously.“One has to suffer sometimes.”Lady Wilmot laid down her fork.“You might stay at home.”“I should never hear the last of it.”“Well, then,” she said, looking meditatively at Claudia, “you three are provided for.”“Three?” said Fenwick quickly.“Yes, Charlie—Charlie Carter. You always try to forget him.”“He ought to be forgotten. He’s not in the least wanted. Good heavens! a boy who plays practical jokes!”“That is why I want you to look after him,” said Lady Wilmot in a firm voice. “Besides, he must go. Lady Bodmin agrees with me.”Fenwick flung an aggrieved glance at Claudia, but she was gazing out of the window. In her heart she was saying joyfully—“He may play practical jokes as much as he likes, and I shall take care he is not forgotten. If worse comes to worst I’ll fetch him myself.”But this sense of relief was so derogatory to the standard of the professional young woman which she had set up, that she was torn by different feelings, extremely pleased when Charlie Carter arrived, dripping, from a practical investigation of the Black Pond, yet so ashamed of clinging to such a fossilised an institution as a chaperon, that she took herself to task for not agreeing to Captain Fenwick’s strongly expressed desire to start and leave the boy to follow. When she refused he hinted at a chancre in herself.“When we came here, you didn’t mind trusting yourself to me.”“Mind!” she exclaimed indignantly. “Do you suppose I mind, when if you weren’t going I should go by myself?”He bit his lip, but pressed his point.“Then come along,” he said, “and leave that wretched boy to follow. He has to get food and dry clothes, and will be an hour at least.”“There’s no hurry,” said Claudia coolly. “If you want to overtake the others—go. We’ll come after.”“You are cruel,” he said in a low voice. To this she made no reply, determined to ignore such speeches, but she could not help perceiving that her insistence annoyed him very much, or that he had scarcely recovered himself when they set off. The day was full of the rich strong beauty of late summer, freshened by recent rain which had washed the dusty hedges green again; the clouds were no longer grey and uniform, but broken into great precipitous masses, dazzlingly white in part, and here and there fading softly into blue. Their way at first ran along a road high on a hill, and commanding exquisite views of the country round. But Claudia, in spite of self-scolding, could not call back the fresh and delightful enjoyment of that other day when they had come to Huntingdon. She was on the watch, at times on the defensive, despising herself that it should be so, but heartily wishing that the ride was over. Nor could she utilise Charlie Carter as much as she would have liked, for he was one of a large family, with a profound contempt for all girls except his own sisters, and a yet more profound admiration for Captain Fenwick. He was therefore gruff, and disregardful of Claudia, sidling out of her way, and ready to please his hero by acting as scout and rushing along side lanes in search of short cuts. At such times Claudia made desperate attempts to push on, but there is a limit to this means of escape even on a bicycle, and when hills came, she was obliged to walk up them. Perhaps Fenwick noted the disturbance, and perhaps he preferred it to her former indifference, for now and then a smile crossed his face which it would have enraged her to see. He asked her suddenly whether she liked Huntingdon better than Thornbury. This was safe ground, and she breathed freely.“I have a bigger opening there,” she said. “Thornbury was already beautiful, and Huntingdon has to be made so. It’s very interesting.”“You have said so little about it lately that I had fears.”“Women go into extremes, you know,” returned Claudia, dimpling, and quoting his own words.“Yes, but you are not like other women. You have independence and originality.” As Claudia struggled breathlessly against the hill, he added in a vexed tone, “Why on earth must you be in such a hurry?”“You were in a hurry yourself just now.” But she was obliged to get off, and all she could do was to walk with the bicycle between them.“That was to start, not to arrive. Did you really suppose I cared to find myself at Barton Towers?”“I don’t know. I know I do. I expect to pick up a great many hints, after what Sir Peter said about the place.”“All in good time,” he said crossly. “What I want to say, if you will only give me the chance to speak— Good gracious! what is it now?”“Isn’t there something wrong with the wheel?”“Nothing at all. What do you suppose I’m going to say, that you won’t listen?”Claudia called all her dignity to her aid, and turned an offended face upon him.“Pray go on. I am quite ready to listen.”“Well, it’s only this. I think it hard that you should shut me out of your hopes and ambitions so determinedly as you have been doing lately. I had flattered myself that you, above all women, were fair enough not to visit on an unfortunate man’s head his awkward carrying out of a good intention.”“Oh,” she cried rashly, “did you suppose—”And then she yet more rashly stopped, for it was a hundred times worse to let him guess at the real reason for her coldness.“If not?” he said, perceiving his advantage, and pushing it.Claudia took refuge in petulancy.“Why on earth must one explain why one does this, or doesn’t do that? What do you complain of? That I haven’t talked over my ideas with you? Very well, I will talk now. I suppose you have happened to notice a big group of firs, the only fine thing about the place?” And she flourished the note-book Miss Arbuthnot found so obnoxious. “There! As no one can see them unless they go to look, I suggest making a clean sweep of those worthless trees in front, then—”He put up his hand.“Spare me; I don’t want detail.”“Very well,” said Claudia triumphantly. “Then you mustn’t complain.”“You have run off the track. All that has nothing to do with my complaint. I am anxious, very anxious, to be told what—if you were really not offended at my plain speaking—has altered you towards me.” His voice changed, there crept into it a thrill which made Claudia miserably conscious of what might be at hand. She frowned and stared straight before her. “You don’t know,” he was saying, “how I have looked forward to a chance like this, when I might have you to myself, and now I can hardly get a glance. And yet you are not offended? Then why are you so different from what you were ten days ago?”“How can one always be exactly the same?” she asked coldly. “Besides, you are exaggerating; I don’t feel any change.”“Oh yes, you do. Something has brought it about. Some confounded tongues have been tattling.”“Tattling!” repeated Claudia, frowning harder.“Yes, old cats like Lady Bodmin, who can’t see a man and woman talking—”“I know! Isn’t it idiotic?” said the girl frankly, turning a relieved face upon him.If she had not looked, perhaps he would not have spoken. In spite of his manoeuvring for a quiet and uninterrupted time with Claudia, he had no intention of saying anything serious—at least so soon. But, like many another man, he lost his balance when he least expected it, and, curiously enough, as with Harry Hilton, it was her name which broke from his lips.“Claudia!”To her unutterable relief, Charlie Carter shot out of a lane, not ten feet ahead of them.“I say, that ways no good,” he shouted. “I’ve been ever so far. You’ve got to go down this hill, and you’d better look out, for there’s a nasty sharp turn at the bottom.” Claudia neither heard him nor would she have heeded. Anything at such a moment would have seemed better to her than being forced to listen to the words she felt were imminent. She got quickly on her bicycle, and called out joyfully—“Oh, I am so tired of pushing! Who will race me down the hill?”“Stop!” cried Fenwick peremptorily.But nothing would have stopped her then. Escape, escape from what she most dreaded to hear lay before her. She was confident in her own powers, and, with a gay wave of the hand, down the steep rough road she went flying at a speed which she found dangerously intoxicating. Charlie Carter, giving an answering whoop of wild delight, rushed after, and Fenwick, inwardly anathematising the folly of his companions, spun past the boy, and closely followed Claudia’s track, shouting to her to be careful, and each moment expecting to see her overturned by some of the many stones or ruts. In spite, however, of her excitement, she guided herself cleverly, and only called laughingly back without checking her pace. All might have gone well had it not been for the sharp turn at the foot of the hill. What made this perilous, and what neither Fenwick nor Claudia knew, was that another lane emerged at the same point. The old high-road which the three had taken was but little used for carriages, or such a danger would never have been tolerated. Fenwick realised it before the others, owing to his catching sight over the hedge of the top of a carter’s hat. But the cart was jogging down its own hill into the road, and though he pressed his bell, and shouted at the top of his voice, the man did not hear, nor, indeed, so close was Claudia, did it seem possible to avert a collision. By a really prodigious effort, Fenwick shot in between them, pushing her bicycle so violently that it fell on one side, although clear of the cart. He himself was not so fortunate, for the near horse knocked him over, and before the startled driver could pull up, one of the heavy wheels had gone over him.

Huntingdon Hall was a comfortable house, with rooms which Lady Wilmot had already transformed. The grounds, however, were not to compare with those of Thornbury, for they had passed through a long season of neglect, and the trees were tall and lank, requiring both thinning and autumn planting. Claudia’s labours would not bear fruit for years. She said this to Sir Peter one day when she had sent to ask him to come and decide for himself whether a certain important change should be carried out. She liked Sir Peter. He was a big clumsy man, rather shy, with twinkling eyes which, when he smiled, screwed themselves into innumerable wrinkles, and a slight hesitation—not amounting to a stammer—in his speech. He invariably gave his decisions clearly.

“We are very much obliged to you, Miss Hamilton,” he said finally; “but my wife told me to tell you that you must take an off-day now and then, and she wants you to go to Barton Towers to-day.” As Claudia hesitated he went on, “I warn you she will accept no denial, and really it is a place which you ought to see.”

A week ago she would have taken refuge behind her occupation, and afterwards she wished she had done so, at whatever cost; but her new dread of making it and herself ridiculous stopped the words which rose to her lips, and she was just agreeing when Lady Wilmot with her two pugs rustled round the corner.

“Ah! here you are, Peter,” she called out. “I wish you wouldn’t let that boy, Charlie Carter, have your gun. Do go and take it away from him before he kills anybody.” He went obediently, and she turned smilingly to Claudia. “Miss Hamilton, has Peter told you? I am not going to have any more unsociable excuses.”

“I should like to come, please,” said Claudia at once.

“I knew I should get you!” Lady Wilmot exclaimed triumphantly. “Come with me to the hothouses, and let the men go to their dinner. Do you mind going to Barton on your bicycle? I’d give anything to ride mine, but Peter says I can’t because of old Lady Bodmin. It’s such a nuisance having to sit up in the victoria with her.” And then Lady Wilmot, who was noted for making imprudent speeches, made a very imprudent one indeed. “I’m so glad you will come. We see nothing of you, and I am tired of trying to console Arthur Fenwick.”

“Captain Fenwick? I don’t understand,” said Claudia coldly.

Lady Wilmot laughed. “Don’t you?” she said gaily. “Well, I can’t help being amused, because generally it’s the other way, and now any one can see that he’s devoted, and you treat the poor fellow quite cruelly.”

“Oh, you are very much mistaken!” cried the girl, frowning. “You ought not—I beg your pardon, but really people ought not to imagine such foolish things. Captain Fenwick is absolutely nothing to me, nor I to him.”

“Now you are certainly blind. And do you mean to say you haven’t thought of him—seriously, I mean?”

“I? Never!” returned Claudia proudly. “Nor he of me.”

“Oh, there you are wrong,” said Lady Wilmot, with amusement. She was going on, when Claudia interrupted her with a ring of indignation in her tone which took the other woman by surprise.

“Please don’t say any more; I hate it! I should hate it if it were true, and it isn’t. I can’t tell you how much I dislike such things being said!”

She stopped. Lady Wilmot looked at her with interest. All emotion is impressive, and Claudia was very much moved in quite an unexpected way. She stood facing her hostess, her girlish features stirred and changed by an expression which had never before touched them.

“I beg your pardon,” said Lady Wilmot quickly. “I spoke carelessly, as one does sometimes—much too often, if I’m to believe Peter. Don’t think of it again. It was only nonsense.”

“Yes,” said Claudia, drawing a deep breath, “it was nonsense. Of course I shan’t think of it again.”

Lady Wilmot hurried after her husband, and caught him in the library.

“Peter, Peter,” she said in an injured tone, “I thought new women didn’t mind what was said to them, and I thought Miss Hamilton was a new woman, and I said the least little bit in the world to her about Arthur, and found myself in quite the wrong box. She fired up, and told me to hold my tongue, or as good as told me. Imagine a girl who is so exceedingly independent, and bent upon taking care of herself, minding a little chaff! I supposed she would mind nothing.”

“Did Arthur ask you to say anything?”

“Don’t be annoying. It was a small voyage of discovery on my own account, because I really think he likes her—seriously, I mean, and I wanted to find out.” She went on impressively, “I don’t think she cares herself one little bit.”

“Then there’s an end of it.”

“How tiresome you are, Peter!” she said petulantly. “I’ll never believe she can stand up against him if he takes the trouble to make love to her. Anyway, I think it very hard she should fly out at me when my intentions were so good.”

“Well, I hope your good intentions won’t do any harm.”

“How can they? She’d never thought of him. You’re rather priggish this morning, Peter, but I may as well tell you that I mean some of them to go on their bicycles—Arthur, and Charlie Carter at all events. I shall give her the chance. If she likes it better, she can drive.”

The same question was in Claudia’s mind. She felt hunted, disdainful, indignant, all at once. First Harry and then Captain Fenwick thrust down her unwilling throat. It was persecution! She, who would have none of them, who was thinking of much more important business, who had meant to live her own life, and, so far as in her lay, to be mistress of her fate, bitterly resented an interruption which seemed to place her at once on a level with all the other pleasure-loving idle girls of the day, whose heads were full of offers and settlements. She! Claudia raised her chin, and looked like an angry nymph. If Fenwick had passed that way he would have met with scant civility. She thought Lady Wilmot impertinent, she wished she had not come to the place, and then suddenly, to her added annoyance, found her eyes brimming with hot tears, which put the final touch to her humiliation. She dashed them away with scornful fierceness. “So,”—she rated herself—“so it has come to this, that if a stupid thing happens, you cry about it! Oh, do pluck up a little spirit and resolve not to think twice about such folly! Most likely it is all her invention, or else he has just been amusing himself in the way men do, and pretending—pretending!—to her that he cares. You should expect to meet such men, Claudia. And what ought you to do? Certainly not trouble yourself about them. Turn yourself into a stone wall. I suppose you have sense enough left to go on just as usual? But I wish, I do wish she hadn’t said it! It makes everything disagreeable and stupid. It shan’t, though! What’s the use of having a will of one’s own if one can’t use it? If he wants to speak, let him, and there’s an end of it; and if he has the better sense to hold his tongue, I shall know she was wrong. And if, as I suppose, we are to go on our bicycles to this tiresome place to-day, I’m not going to blush prettily and draw back; I shall do exactly as I should have done if she hadn’t come out and spoilt my morning. The most annoying part of it all is that I have quite forgotten what I meant to do with those hollies. I know that I had some capital notion, and it has gone. Oh,howtiresome men are!”

Claudia sat wrathfully down, pulled out her pocket-book, rested her chin on her hands, and forced her mind to stern consideration of her plans. In some degree this brought back her calm, so that when she appeared at luncheon, and ways and means for reaching Barton Towers were discussed, she did not allow a shadow of hesitation to appear in her manner. Lady Bodmin clung to the victoria, and Lady Wilmot made a little face of dismay. Claudia said calmly that of course she could bicycle, and inwardly hoped that Captain Fenwick would not be of the party. But this was far from his intention.

“I thought you hated calls?” said Lady Wilmot mischievously.

“One has to suffer sometimes.”

Lady Wilmot laid down her fork.

“You might stay at home.”

“I should never hear the last of it.”

“Well, then,” she said, looking meditatively at Claudia, “you three are provided for.”

“Three?” said Fenwick quickly.

“Yes, Charlie—Charlie Carter. You always try to forget him.”

“He ought to be forgotten. He’s not in the least wanted. Good heavens! a boy who plays practical jokes!”

“That is why I want you to look after him,” said Lady Wilmot in a firm voice. “Besides, he must go. Lady Bodmin agrees with me.”

Fenwick flung an aggrieved glance at Claudia, but she was gazing out of the window. In her heart she was saying joyfully—

“He may play practical jokes as much as he likes, and I shall take care he is not forgotten. If worse comes to worst I’ll fetch him myself.”

But this sense of relief was so derogatory to the standard of the professional young woman which she had set up, that she was torn by different feelings, extremely pleased when Charlie Carter arrived, dripping, from a practical investigation of the Black Pond, yet so ashamed of clinging to such a fossilised an institution as a chaperon, that she took herself to task for not agreeing to Captain Fenwick’s strongly expressed desire to start and leave the boy to follow. When she refused he hinted at a chancre in herself.

“When we came here, you didn’t mind trusting yourself to me.”

“Mind!” she exclaimed indignantly. “Do you suppose I mind, when if you weren’t going I should go by myself?”

He bit his lip, but pressed his point.

“Then come along,” he said, “and leave that wretched boy to follow. He has to get food and dry clothes, and will be an hour at least.”

“There’s no hurry,” said Claudia coolly. “If you want to overtake the others—go. We’ll come after.”

“You are cruel,” he said in a low voice. To this she made no reply, determined to ignore such speeches, but she could not help perceiving that her insistence annoyed him very much, or that he had scarcely recovered himself when they set off. The day was full of the rich strong beauty of late summer, freshened by recent rain which had washed the dusty hedges green again; the clouds were no longer grey and uniform, but broken into great precipitous masses, dazzlingly white in part, and here and there fading softly into blue. Their way at first ran along a road high on a hill, and commanding exquisite views of the country round. But Claudia, in spite of self-scolding, could not call back the fresh and delightful enjoyment of that other day when they had come to Huntingdon. She was on the watch, at times on the defensive, despising herself that it should be so, but heartily wishing that the ride was over. Nor could she utilise Charlie Carter as much as she would have liked, for he was one of a large family, with a profound contempt for all girls except his own sisters, and a yet more profound admiration for Captain Fenwick. He was therefore gruff, and disregardful of Claudia, sidling out of her way, and ready to please his hero by acting as scout and rushing along side lanes in search of short cuts. At such times Claudia made desperate attempts to push on, but there is a limit to this means of escape even on a bicycle, and when hills came, she was obliged to walk up them. Perhaps Fenwick noted the disturbance, and perhaps he preferred it to her former indifference, for now and then a smile crossed his face which it would have enraged her to see. He asked her suddenly whether she liked Huntingdon better than Thornbury. This was safe ground, and she breathed freely.

“I have a bigger opening there,” she said. “Thornbury was already beautiful, and Huntingdon has to be made so. It’s very interesting.”

“You have said so little about it lately that I had fears.”

“Women go into extremes, you know,” returned Claudia, dimpling, and quoting his own words.

“Yes, but you are not like other women. You have independence and originality.” As Claudia struggled breathlessly against the hill, he added in a vexed tone, “Why on earth must you be in such a hurry?”

“You were in a hurry yourself just now.” But she was obliged to get off, and all she could do was to walk with the bicycle between them.

“That was to start, not to arrive. Did you really suppose I cared to find myself at Barton Towers?”

“I don’t know. I know I do. I expect to pick up a great many hints, after what Sir Peter said about the place.”

“All in good time,” he said crossly. “What I want to say, if you will only give me the chance to speak— Good gracious! what is it now?”

“Isn’t there something wrong with the wheel?”

“Nothing at all. What do you suppose I’m going to say, that you won’t listen?”

Claudia called all her dignity to her aid, and turned an offended face upon him.

“Pray go on. I am quite ready to listen.”

“Well, it’s only this. I think it hard that you should shut me out of your hopes and ambitions so determinedly as you have been doing lately. I had flattered myself that you, above all women, were fair enough not to visit on an unfortunate man’s head his awkward carrying out of a good intention.”

“Oh,” she cried rashly, “did you suppose—”

And then she yet more rashly stopped, for it was a hundred times worse to let him guess at the real reason for her coldness.

“If not?” he said, perceiving his advantage, and pushing it.

Claudia took refuge in petulancy.

“Why on earth must one explain why one does this, or doesn’t do that? What do you complain of? That I haven’t talked over my ideas with you? Very well, I will talk now. I suppose you have happened to notice a big group of firs, the only fine thing about the place?” And she flourished the note-book Miss Arbuthnot found so obnoxious. “There! As no one can see them unless they go to look, I suggest making a clean sweep of those worthless trees in front, then—”

He put up his hand.

“Spare me; I don’t want detail.”

“Very well,” said Claudia triumphantly. “Then you mustn’t complain.”

“You have run off the track. All that has nothing to do with my complaint. I am anxious, very anxious, to be told what—if you were really not offended at my plain speaking—has altered you towards me.” His voice changed, there crept into it a thrill which made Claudia miserably conscious of what might be at hand. She frowned and stared straight before her. “You don’t know,” he was saying, “how I have looked forward to a chance like this, when I might have you to myself, and now I can hardly get a glance. And yet you are not offended? Then why are you so different from what you were ten days ago?”

“How can one always be exactly the same?” she asked coldly. “Besides, you are exaggerating; I don’t feel any change.”

“Oh yes, you do. Something has brought it about. Some confounded tongues have been tattling.”

“Tattling!” repeated Claudia, frowning harder.

“Yes, old cats like Lady Bodmin, who can’t see a man and woman talking—”

“I know! Isn’t it idiotic?” said the girl frankly, turning a relieved face upon him.

If she had not looked, perhaps he would not have spoken. In spite of his manoeuvring for a quiet and uninterrupted time with Claudia, he had no intention of saying anything serious—at least so soon. But, like many another man, he lost his balance when he least expected it, and, curiously enough, as with Harry Hilton, it was her name which broke from his lips.

“Claudia!”

To her unutterable relief, Charlie Carter shot out of a lane, not ten feet ahead of them.

“I say, that ways no good,” he shouted. “I’ve been ever so far. You’ve got to go down this hill, and you’d better look out, for there’s a nasty sharp turn at the bottom.” Claudia neither heard him nor would she have heeded. Anything at such a moment would have seemed better to her than being forced to listen to the words she felt were imminent. She got quickly on her bicycle, and called out joyfully—

“Oh, I am so tired of pushing! Who will race me down the hill?”

“Stop!” cried Fenwick peremptorily.

But nothing would have stopped her then. Escape, escape from what she most dreaded to hear lay before her. She was confident in her own powers, and, with a gay wave of the hand, down the steep rough road she went flying at a speed which she found dangerously intoxicating. Charlie Carter, giving an answering whoop of wild delight, rushed after, and Fenwick, inwardly anathematising the folly of his companions, spun past the boy, and closely followed Claudia’s track, shouting to her to be careful, and each moment expecting to see her overturned by some of the many stones or ruts. In spite, however, of her excitement, she guided herself cleverly, and only called laughingly back without checking her pace. All might have gone well had it not been for the sharp turn at the foot of the hill. What made this perilous, and what neither Fenwick nor Claudia knew, was that another lane emerged at the same point. The old high-road which the three had taken was but little used for carriages, or such a danger would never have been tolerated. Fenwick realised it before the others, owing to his catching sight over the hedge of the top of a carter’s hat. But the cart was jogging down its own hill into the road, and though he pressed his bell, and shouted at the top of his voice, the man did not hear, nor, indeed, so close was Claudia, did it seem possible to avert a collision. By a really prodigious effort, Fenwick shot in between them, pushing her bicycle so violently that it fell on one side, although clear of the cart. He himself was not so fortunate, for the near horse knocked him over, and before the startled driver could pull up, one of the heavy wheels had gone over him.

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