CHAPTER VI
Kingston Darnley, as usual, was late for breakfast. He had loitered pleasantly over his toilet, relieving the repellent prose of the process by frequent intervals of poetic rest at the open window. The little old diamond-paned casement of his dressing-room was open, and the crooked oak-panelled apartment was flooded with morning sunlight. Very far below, against the feet of the cliff beneath, the blue and gold of the clear water came lapping in friendship, and its lazy utterance rose faint and thin to the listener through the virginal clarity of the air. The day was not yet old enough for the haze and stress of heat: allwas still clean and fresh from the cool sweetness of the night and the unclouded dawn. To the uttermost horizon spread the level floor of the sea, a glory of scent and colour, gleaming, vital, incredibly buoyant and young for all its uncounted æons of life. Again and again Kingston stayed to dally with the enormous loveliness of life, leaning from the window whence he might have dropped a pebble straight into the purple ripples a hundred feet and more below, where they played leisurely at hide-and-seek among the rocks under the cliff.
It was indeed a morning to be up and alive—a morning to be naked in the naked embrace of the world. As the hours go by, the world, no less than man, puts on its clothes. Clouds and shadows and haze come up to cover the strong free limbs of the earth. It is only in the short space after sunrise in some still morning that the world stands out pure and glorious in its nudity—vivid, stainless, triumphant as the white flawlessness of the young Apollo newly risen out of the dark, formless void. The upspringing day is our emblem of youth fresh from slumber—beautiful, ardent, splendid in the clear glory of his build—before he makes haste to hide himself in the sombre, ugly trappings of convention. Kingston was in no haste to take that leap of many centuries that separates man, as Nature set him forth, from the clothed, shapeless dummy that man has made himself.
From the adjoining room his wife recalled him again and again to the flight of time. She was never to be distracted from her duties by any beauty or ugliness of the outer world. Had the Last Day dawned in fire, Gundred would have duly finished having her hair done before confronting it. There is a time for everything, she says, and all reasonable people know that the time for looking at landscapes is after lunch, whiletaking one’s afternoon drive, before going home to tea and the second post. Then, at the proper moment, ecstasies are allowable, and even suitable. But every minute of the day has its task, and nothing can be plainer than that dressing-time is the time to dress. Kingston, however, whistled idly at his desultory work, and dawdled as if the whole forthcoming week were vacant. He loved the young tenderness of the sunlight, and drew great breaths of life at the open window. Overhead, and far away to the right, stretched along the cliff a mighty, menacing shaft of darkness, the shadow of the huge Castle behind. But this little old wing, on its spur of rock, jutted so boldly out from the main mass of the building that all here was radiance. Gundred, too, enjoyed the sun, but did not allow his ardours to distract her from her duties. She had the white blinds pulled down, and her toilet was cheered merely by a subdued consciousness of the warmth outside. Then, when all was carefully and properly accomplished, she made her way down twisting steps, and along a strip of corridor, to the end of the wing, where the last two rooms on this ground-floor were portioned off as dining-room and sitting-room. The whole arrangement was quaint enough to please her, but neither so inconvenient nor so unusual as to offend her sense of what was becoming. It was better than living, sitting and dining, in the grim, mouldering halls of the Drum Tower, or in the bald, chintz-hung rooms of the modern wings.
The unexpected booming of the gong roused Kingston to a sense of time. With an effort he tore himself from his ecstatic contemplation, and compressed the remainder of his toilet into half a dozen crowded moments. Then, flurried, and filled with the feeling that he ought to be apologetic, he hurried towards the dining-room.
He found his wife seated at the breakfast-table,decapitating a boiled egg with her usual crisp neatness, which always suggested that she was doing the egg a favour in making it an example of exactly how an egg should be eaten. She was a lesson to the world. And he felt that she knew it.
She, for her part, noticed immediately that his tie was under one ear, that it was exceedingly ill-knotted, and that it was the wrong sort of tie for that particular collar.
‘I thought I would begin, darling,’ said Gundred. ‘I did not know when you would appear. Such a lovely morning—yes?’
Here, also, she had shown her appreciation of its loveliness by having all the blinds drawn down. A muffled white radiance was all that she allowed to reach her from outside.
Kingston, meanwhile, had been collecting letters and papers from the sideboard.
‘Letters for you, my dear,’ he said; ‘three.’
‘Leave them there, darling, will you? I never look at my letters till after breakfast. It is so nice to make a habit of everything—yes?’
Her husband, returning to the table, helped himself and sat down. For a time the meal went forward in silence. Then he looked across at his wife with intense approval. In the softened light Gundred looked wonderfully pretty. The table was bare—a piece of oak too beautiful to hide—and beyond its dark surface, where silver, glass, and white china gleamed and glittered, Gundred’s head and shoulders rose in soft relief against a very old painted panel on the further wall, a dim, dingy portrait of King Henry the Seventh. Before her on the table stood a bowl of pink and salmon-coloured sweet-peas. In the dim, primeval room, in the quiet mellowed glow, she struck a note of exquisite modernity. The curled gold of her hair,the small clear features, the inconspicuously perfect gown harmonized, in the very audacity of their contrast, with the ripened antiquity that surrounded her. She touched another octave. From head to foot there was nothing about her to find fault with. And, against such a background, her charm was seen more whole and successful than in a garish setting of modern furniture and other, showier women.
‘By Jove!’ said Kingston, ‘you do look extraordinary cool and beautiful, Gundred. How do you manage it? I don’t believe you could ever grow old!’
Gundred was pleased. Such comments had been growing too rare. But she was one of those women who repel what they most desire, whether from motives of mortification or allurement, it would at first sight be hard to decide.
‘Nonsense, Kingston dear!’ she said; ‘one gets older every day. You must really not try to make me vain.’
‘Never,’ replied her husband, ‘have I seen anyone who gave me the same perfect feeling of satisfaction that you do. You always look as if you had just come out of the smartest bandbox that was ever made. One can’t realize that it’s all taken to pieces again every night.’
‘Don’t, dear,’ said Gundred. ‘You are always so exaggerated. I am so glad I look nice, but it is only a matter of taking pains. Anybody can be neat—yes?’
‘I couldn’t. If it weren’t for Andrews, I should always have odd socks and boots, I am sure I should. I believe I am capable of wearing an up-and-down collar in the evening if it was put out for me. What would you do if I did, Gundred—divorce me on the spot?’
‘Darling, don’t talk so lightly about such a dreadfulsubject. God has joined us together, and of course I should not think of divorcing you if you came down to dinner in an up-and-down collar. It would be very wrong of me. But, oh, Kingston dear, I do hope you never will. It is so easy to be tidy. Your tie is all crooked this morning, dear.’
Her husband whistled instead of answering, as he helped himself to cold ham. A man may let a woman mend his morals or his mind, but he would rather suffer any reasonable torture than have it suspected that she meddles with his clothes.
When Kingston returned to the table Gundred was ready with a renewed supply of tea. ‘Nice and fresh and hot,’ she advertised. ‘Let me give you another cup.’ She poured out for each, adding cream in fair quantity to her own, and lavishly to her husband’s. This was a habitual little silent proof of her love for him, and had no reference to the fact that he particularly disliked cream in his tea. As for herself, she expected Kingston always to remember and respect her avoidance of sugar. But then his tastes were wrong, while hers were right. For he was Kingston, a man: and she was Gundred, a good wife.
‘You’ve put cream in,’ protested Kingston, wrying his mouth at the taste.
‘Have I, dear? I’m so sorry. Take my cup instead. I have not touched it.’
She gave her cup a rapid final stir to make the cream disappear amid the tea, then handed it to him, and watched complacently while he drank it without any further complaint. She imagined that he was deceived, and felt herself happily embarked on that career of small benevolent falsehoods which make so necessary a part of the good wife’s success. She foresaw innumerable ways of cheating him for his own good, of making him eat veal in disguise, of teachinghim to like rabbit by serving it up as chicken cream. As a matter of fact he fully realized what she had done, but knew that it was useless to make a protest. He had learnt by now in a fortnight that all opposition to Gundred’s ideas was unprofitable. She had a firm notion that cream was good for him. Therefore cream he was evidently doomed to have, for the sake of domestic peace—and in quantities, too, as generous as the love that poured them out. Gundred had the bland pertinacity of the martyr, combined with the imperturbable self-complacence of the Pharisee. Before her gentle, inexorable determinations all hostile resolves were as the stone which an incessant drip of water permeates and dissolves.
Kingston swallowed his polluted tea as quickly as possible; then, breakfast being over, began to think of the day’s news. He offered his wife a paper.
‘Letters first, thank you, dear,’ said Gundred, seating herself concisely on a small, stiff-backed settle. She always preferred hard and rigid furniture to the cushions and softnesses that nowadays prevail. She felt them more virtuous, more decent, more suitable. She turned towards her husband. ‘Take the arm-chair, dear,’ she said.
There was but one in the room that had any pretensions to comfort. Kingston, finding that Gundred was determined to remain where she was, settled himself in it with his papers.
‘Kingston, dear,’ pleaded his wife suddenly, ‘you won’t leave the papers all anyhow on the floor, will you? It’s so untidy—yes?’
For answer he softly whistled a snatch, then, growing absorbed in the news, began abstractedly to drum a small rhythm on the oaken floor. Gundred bore it for a moment. Then a combined instinct of martyrdom and love rebellious stirred her to action. Sherose and picked up a small cushion that happened to be on the settle, a bony little unyielding square, prickly and stiff with embroideries that tradition attributed to Queen Elizabeth.
‘A cushion, darling,’ said Gundred in level tones, standing behind his chair. ‘Move your back—sit up a little, and let me arrange it for you.’
Her utterance, her action, were characteristic of her nature. The utterance decorous, cold, impassive, the action springing from an unresting love. Neither from her words nor from their inflection could Kingston have guessed the warmth of the affection that beamed out of her eyes as she stood looking down at the back of his neck with an ardour which she would have been utterly ashamed to show to his face. Only by such attentions as these, valuable as symptoms of her concealed devotion, could Kingston ever make a guess at her feelings.
‘Thank you, dearest,’ he replied gratefully, shifting himself so as to admit the insertion of Queen Elizabeth’s uncomfortable comfort. It harassed him, its adamantine corners cut into his ribs and the small of his back, but as an emblem of his wife’s tenderness he endured and welcomed it. What she zealously concealed from him in word she was perpetually anxious to reveal vicariously by such actions as these. ‘Thanks awfully,’ he repeated, then twisted round, so as to get a glimpse of Gundred’s face. Instantly the light faded out of her eyes, and all she allowed him to see was a decent wifely expression of solicitude. He never divined that any other had been there.
But suddenly she permitted herself a word of self-betrayal.
‘I always want you to be comfortable, dear,’ she said. The words were cool and coolly spoken, but under them lay the warmth of Gundred’s secret nature.
Kingston, fired by such an advance, rose and swung round. He caught his wife’s two hands—those charming hands that were never hot or cold.
‘I owe you something for that,’ he said, and kissed her twice.
Very gently Gundred drew herself away. Her heart was afire with gratification, but she felt that every consideration of decency, economy, and pride compelled her to conceal it. To be made cheap was the last horror that her mind could imagine; and all outward displays seemed to level her with kitchen-maids and factory-girls.
‘Don’t be so boisterous, darling,’ she remonstrated, while her heart longed to thank him for what he had done, and beg him to do it again. In the daytime, however, the invisible audience before whom she lived forbade these manifestations; only under the cover of darkness could she feel them permissible. ‘It is too early in the day,’ said Gundred, patting into place a curl that had never been out of it.
Not for the first time Kingston sighed and found himself baffled by his wife’s perpetual assumption of virginity. Beyond the reach of all allowed caresses, her soul remained untouched, immaculate. The bloodless chastity of temperament that invested this last of Queen Isabel’s offspring was for ever a barrier between man and wife. And neither Kingston nor Gundred had any doubt as to whether the barrier were natural or artificial. Both believed it an essential part of Gundred’s nature. If Gundred herself ever doubted, she stifled the doubt as ill-bred, repulsive, almost irreligious.
‘Ice-house!’ cried Kingston. ‘One may kiss your lips, but the real you is far away beyond the reach of kisses.’
Gundred knew that this was not true, longed to deny it, yet was glad that her husband thought it.She was taking a shamefaced, almost fierce delight in the dialogue. For once her correct coldness had proved a challenge. Too often she had grieved that the low temperature of her behaviour was passing unregretted, unnoticed, and was even beginning to lower the temperature of her lover. Cold she still wished to be, for pride and decorum, yet without paying any of the penalties. The personal intimacy that one aspect of marriage enforces only the more impelled her soul, for the sake of its stiff self-respect, to take refuge in all possible mental reservations and seclusions, by way of indemnifying itself and justifying itself for the other candours into which Nature had driven her, not unwilling, indeed, but always feeling that she ought to be unwilling. Gundred’s temperament was civilized very far below the surface, and the rough facts of life never ceased to strike her as monstrous and barbaric. And most barbarous of all was her own surprised acquiescence. She could only recapture her vanishing dignity by emphasizing at every possible moment the immaculate maidenhood of her mind. This was at once her revenge on Nature, and on herself for loving what Nature sent. But her husband could not understand these subtleties; no clue was given him to the labyrinth of Gundred’s hidden emotions; he took her at her face-value, and imagined her as deeply, incurably frigid as was the manner that she thought proper to assume.
He stood before her, still holding her hands, gazing hotly into the depths of her cool eyes. But now they gave him no answering light. Shallow, clear, and cold, they met his own without a tremor. No soul looked out of them.
‘The real you,’ he repeated at last, after a long pause—‘the real you. Where is it, I wonder? Or is there any such thing? I thought once I could thaw you, but one can’t thaw an icicle unless one can get near it.’
The passion of his speech pleased her no less than the success of her own decorous hypocrisy. Now evidently she was winning the demonstrations for which she secretly hungered, and without any sacrifice of her pudicity.
She drew her hands away.
‘Let me go, dear,’ she said, with mild decision. ‘You make me feel hot and rumpled. If you want to kiss me—well, I suppose I am your wife—yes?’
The tacit invitation, the unexpressed desire, were too successfully concealed by the decorous dullness of her tone. He read into it annoyance and disgust. Abruptly the flame of his mood was extinguished. He dropped her hands, so suddenly that they, not expecting any such desertion, hung limp and disappointed for a moment in the air.
‘Sorry to have bothered you,’ he said. ‘I suppose I am too rough.’
Without another word he subsided again into his chair, and fell to reading the paper. Gundred retired to her settle, feeling how glad she ought to feel thus triumphantly to have vindicated her sense of decency. But her satisfaction was hollow; her soul had received a shock when her hands had been so suddenly dropped—a nasty jarring shock such as one receives in a dream, stepping into vacancy where one had expected solid ground. Her hands fell slowly to her sides, cheated, frustrated; then set languidly about opening her letters, as if diverted from their proper use. It was a minute or two before she could concentrate her attention. In her turn she experienced something of that snubbed, humiliated sensation which she had so often inflicted on her husband. Then good training conquered personal disappointment, and she began to read. In an instant her attention was chained.
‘Kingston,’ she cried, looking up, ‘here is a letterfrom Isabel Darrell, of all people in the world. She wants to pay us a visit. Why, I declare,’ she added, ‘Isabel writes from London. I must say she loses no time.’
‘Isabel Darrell?’ questioned Kingston. ‘Who is she, and what does she want with us—especially now, when we are supposed to be on our honeymoon?’
‘My cousin,’ Gundred reminded him. ‘Her mother was my father’s sister, Isabel Mortimer. Don’t you remember, I told you about her? Poor Aunt Isabel! She married a dreadful man who came over from Australia or New Zealand, and took her back there, and led her a most terrible life, I am afraid. Aunt Isabel died three years ago, and now her husband seems to have died, too, and the daughter has come to England to see her own people. We shall have to have her here, Kingston. I must write at once. I’ll let her have a line by this morning’s post. But I do wish Aunt Agnes ever wrote letters: we ought to have heard of Isabel’s arrival at least a week ago. We must certainly send for her at once.’
Gundred wanted her husband to protest against this sacrifice of their privacy, perhaps to forbid it. If he had done so, she would have resisted his objections, and eventually have made a wifely virtue of yielding to them. But the best of people are not without their small ungenerosities, and Kingston Darnley was in a mood to punish his wife for her obstinate chilliness. If their privacy were to give no real intimacy, it might just as well cease.
‘Capital!’ said Kingston. ‘We want someone to liven us up a bit. Write to your cousin and tell her to come here at once. She’ll be someone for you to talk to.’
‘Won’t she—yes?’ assented Gundred, wounded indeed, but quite successful in concealing the fact.‘Poor thing! I will send her a wire. She can be here by dinner-time. How odd of her, though, to think one likes being interrupted on one’s honeymoon! Do you suppose they do that kind of thing in the colonies?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I dare say she heard we had been here for more than a fortnight, and thought we must have had about enough of it.’
‘Well, it will be very nice. Would you like to see her letter?’
‘I don’t mind,’ answered Kingston indifferently. In the circumstances wild horses would not have forced him to confess how much he resented the invasion. Not even to himself would he confess it. But already he had conceived a keen dislike for his cousin, Isabel Darrell.
‘Quite an odd letter,’ commented Gundred; ‘not at all like anyone else’s. My poor aunt was always strange and eccentric—evidently Isabel takes after her mother.’
‘Let me see,’ said Kingston, in the hope of finding something to feed his feeling for Isabel Darrell.
Gundred handed him the letter. It was written in a large, flamboyant hand, on large flamboyant paper; twirls and flourishes abounded, and the signature was written with a sprawling arrogance that might have done credit to a second-rate actress.
‘Dear my Cousin,’ it began,‘I have come to England at last, to enter the bosom of my family. My father, to the relief of everybody, has entered Abraham’s. Don’t think me flippant, but one cannot always mourn, not even for the worst of parents. Meanwhile, here am I in London, buying frocks so as not to disgrace my family. When can I come to you? As soon as you like. A wire will fetch me. I understand that your honeymoon is nearly over, so Idon’t suppose a casual third will be much of a nuisance by now. And, anyhow, I have nowhere else to go. I am dying to see Brakelond, too, and the ducal great-uncle. Aunt Agnes and I have had quite enough of each other in a week, but she has been doing her duty nobly by the returned prodigal. Really, she is too weird for words. I believe she thinks New Zealand is the capital of Australia, or else the other way round.‘Your affectionate and only cousin,‘Isabel Darrell, of the Mortimers.’
‘Dear my Cousin,’ it began,
‘I have come to England at last, to enter the bosom of my family. My father, to the relief of everybody, has entered Abraham’s. Don’t think me flippant, but one cannot always mourn, not even for the worst of parents. Meanwhile, here am I in London, buying frocks so as not to disgrace my family. When can I come to you? As soon as you like. A wire will fetch me. I understand that your honeymoon is nearly over, so Idon’t suppose a casual third will be much of a nuisance by now. And, anyhow, I have nowhere else to go. I am dying to see Brakelond, too, and the ducal great-uncle. Aunt Agnes and I have had quite enough of each other in a week, but she has been doing her duty nobly by the returned prodigal. Really, she is too weird for words. I believe she thinks New Zealand is the capital of Australia, or else the other way round.
‘Your affectionate and only cousin,‘Isabel Darrell, of the Mortimers.’
Kingston found himself amply justified in his dislike. Underbred, loud, vulgar, evidently Isabel Darrell was a very undesirable specimen of the colonial. Her clashing presence would teach him anew to appreciate the quiet perfection of Gundred. He returned the letter with a laugh.
‘So very odd—yes?’ said Gundred; ‘just like her poor dear mother. Aunt Isabel was just the same—so flaunting, and independent, and unconventional. Isabel must be the oddest girl.’
‘She sounds a shocking bounder,’ said Kingston.
‘She is my cousin, dear,’ said Gundred, very gently, after a slight pause. The emphasis was slight but unmistakable. Another pause followed.
‘And when are we to expect that sacrosanct person, your cousin?’ inquired Kingston, who knew nothing of that calm loyalty which people of Gundred’s sort display towards even the most despised and detested of their relations when they come up for discussion in the presence of anyone unconnected with ‘the family.’
‘Isabel? Ring, dear, for Murchison, and I will send a wire. She will have time to catch the midday train, and we shall have her here in good time to dress for dinner. But of course she won’t be able to see poor Uncle Henry.’
Kingston rang, feeling himself powerless to avert the coming of this discordant, pestilent alien, and Murchison was duly entrusted with the telegram. As soon as it had gone both Kingston and Gundred began to feel injured, and by common consent forbore to say another word about Isabel Darrell. Gundred felt herself aggrieved that her husband should so readily and with such apparent gladness have consented to the invasion of a stranger; Kingston felt himself aggrieved that Gundred should so gladly and with such apparent readiness have suggested the importation of a third person. Each thought the other bored with the honeymoon; neither was, but the one from offended pride, and the other from conscientious delicacy considered it a duty to make the pretence; and, each concealing his feeling strictly from the other, husband and wife drew deliberately apart to make room for the figure of Isabel Darrell between them.
The day drifted by in colourless talk, and the fine splendour of the morning grew clouded with a leaden haze. Kingston and Gundred sat out the hours in the small close garden that was shut in by the Castle. Their own little oaken wing jutted away ahead of them, but the line of the cliff, before it ran out in that unexpected spur, was enclosed by three old towers of the building, and here, in the square levelled space, looking straight over the boundless sea, with a battlemented wall of windows behind, and the Drum Tower glooming high over it in the background, had been made the only patch of garden that existed to give light and life to the grey mountain of masonry. The little flowery patch, gay with sweet-peas and roses, seemed as discordant with the Castle as a bow of ribbon on the brow of a precipice. It was frivolous, impertinent, saucy in its defiance of the stern greyness that it adorned. The only fit colours to relieve the sombre majesty of Brakelond were thoseof blood and fire, not those of grass and flowers. But the contradiction was so flagrant as to be fascinating, and the lovers took daily joy in this little impudent oasis.
However, their unuttered thoughts of the new-comer dominated every remark they made, and it was a relief when evening drew near, and each minute brought nearer and nearer the abrupt termination of their solitude. Isabel had telegraphed her joy at being permitted to come, and her intention to do so immediately. Orders were given to prepare for her, and she was expected to arrive in time to dress for dinner. When, therefore, the carriage returned empty from the station, six miles away, after having kept dinner waiting for half an hour, both Kingston and Gundred felt their grievances redoubled. Kingston saw how right he had been to detest the very notion of this disorderly stranger, and Gundred realized more than ever how slack and neglectful of her husband it had been not to forbid the importation of such a disconcerting element into their ordered tranquillity. Meanwhile a telegram arrived, explaining that Isabel had lost her train, had taken a ‘special,’ and hoped to arrive in an hour or so. Again the carriage was sent, and, after another tedious interval of expectation the lovers were told that its lights could be seen returning up the hill. To ease the arrival of a shy, desolate colonial Gundred decided to receive her in the great hall itself. Accordingly, at the news, Kingston and Gundred passed on through the dim, gaunt passages of outwork and bastion until they found themselves at last in the heart of the big Drum Tower. The hall was a vast flagged expanse, walled in by high, dusty glooms, into whose recesses no light of any feeble lamp or lantern could penetrate. Grime and weary antiquity seemed to permeate it, and the air was close and heavy with a scent of mouldered greatness.Kingston, as he went, began insensibly to play a game with himself. He picked out the names of four moods, to be repeated to himself, one for each flag on which he trod; and his fate, his whole attitude to Isabel was to be foretold by the paving-stone on which his foot should rest at the instant of the new-comer’s alighting. His fancy was taken from the game which children play with their cherry-stones, and the moods he chose were ‘Love, Hate, Fear, Contempt.’ In turn he repeated them as he stepped from flag to flag, careful always never to set his foot on any boundary line. ‘Love, Hate, Fear, Contempt,’ he murmured inwardly from stone to stone, while Gundred walked briskly at his side, her clear mind a hundred years removed from any such silly infantile fantasies. Now they were drawing near the huge, gaping doorway. There were not so many of the great squares left to tread, and the jingling approach of the carriage could be more and more clearly heard. Kingston’s heart began to beat with the artificial excitement of his game. ‘Love, Hate, Fear, Contempt....’ The carriage had driven up.... ‘Love, Hate, Fear, Contempt....’ He lingered, hoping that the stranger would alight appropriately on the word ‘Contempt.’ In vain. There was some delay. Perforce he must advance to the three or four remaining flag-stones. Quickly, to get it over without danger, he hurried with a long stride on to the stone that meant ‘Love,’ eager to leap to the next. But the unconscious Isabel was quicker. As his foot was set on ‘Love,’ Isabel jumped untidily from the carriage. Kingston laughed internally. ‘So much for fate,’ he thought; then, calmed again, he advanced with Gundred to meet the stranger. In the flickering light, among the draughts that swirled in the high cavern of darkness, his first impression was of a limp, floppy hat, bulged, overtrodden boots, anda deplorable draggled tippet. Greetings were hurriedly exchanged, and Kingston felt justified of all his hostile forebodings. Awkward, shapeless, inopportune, tawdry,—‘Contempt’ or ‘Hate’ should certainly have been his footing with regard to Isabel Darrell.