CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VII.

‘A LITTLE WHILE SUCH LIPS AS THINE TO KISS.’

It was midwinter when Jasper Treverton died. Spring had come in all her glory—her balmy airs and sultry noontides, stolen from summer; her variety and wealth of wood and meadow blossoms; her snowy orchard bloom, tinted with carnation; her sweetness and freshness of beauty—a season to be welcomed and enjoyed like no other season in the changing year; a little glimpse of Paradise on earth between the destroying gales of March and the fatal thunderstorms of July. Spring had filled all the lanes and glades round Hazlehurst with perfume and colour when John Treverton reappeared in the village, as unexpectedly as if he had dropped from the skies.

Eliza Sampson was destroying the aphids on a favourite rose tree, handling them daintily with the tips of her gloved fingers, as if she loved them, when Mr. Treverton appeared at the little iron gate, carrying his own portmanteau. He, the heir of all the ages, and of what signified much more in Miss Sampson’s estimation, an estate worth fourteen thousand a year.

‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘Mr. Treverton, how could you? We would have sent the boy to the station.’

‘How could I do what?’ he asked, laughing at her horrified look.

‘Carry your own portmanteau. Tom will be so vexed.’

‘Tom need know nothing about it, if it will vex him. The portmanteau is light enough, and I have only brought it from the “George,” where the ’bus dropped me. You see I have taken your brother at his word, Miss Sampson, and have come to quarter myself upon you for a few days.’

‘Tom will be delighted,’ said Eliza.

She was meditating how the dinner she had arranged for Tom and herself could be made to do for the heir of Hazlehurst Manor. It was one of those dinners in which the economical housekeeper delights, a dinner that clears up every scrap in the larder, and leaves not so much as a knuckle-bone for the predatory ‘follower,’ male or female, the cook’s hungry niece, or the housemaid’s young man. A little soup, squeezed, as by hydraulic pressure, out of cleanly picked bones and odd remnants of gristle; a dish of hashed mutton, a very small hash, fenced round with a machicolated parapet of toasted bread; a beefsteak pudding with a kidney in it, boiled in a basin the size of abreakfast-cup. This latter savoury mess was intended to gratify Tom, who was prejudiced against hashed mutton, and always pretended that it disagreed with him. Forentremets sucrésthere were a dish of stewed rhubarb and a mould of boiled rice, wholesome, simple, and inexpensive. It was a little dinner which did honour to Miss Sampson’s head and heart; but she felt that it was not good enough for the future lord of Hazlehurst, a gentleman out of whom her brother hoped to make plenty of money by-and-by.

‘I’ll go and see about your room while you have a chat with Tom in the office,’ she said, tripping lightly away, and leaving John Treverton on the lawn in front of the drawing-room windows, a closely-shorn piece of grass about fifty feet by twenty-five.

‘Pray don’t give yourself any trouble,’ he called after her; ‘I’m used to roughing it.’

Eliza was in the kitchen before he had finished his sentence. She was deep in consultation with the cook, who would have resented theunannounced arrival of any ordinary guest, but who felt that Mr. Treverton was a person for whom people must be expected to put themselves about. He had given liberal vails, too, after his last visit, and that was much in his favour.

‘We must have some fish, Mary,’ said Eliza, ‘and poultry. It’s dreadfully dear at this time of year, and Trimpson does impose so, but we must have it.’

Trimpson was the only fishmonger and poulterer of Hazlehurst, a trader whose stock sometimes consisted of a pound and a half of salmon, and a single fowl, long-necked and skinny, hanging in solitary glory above the slate slab, where the salmon steak lay frizzling in the afternoon sun, which shone full upon Trimpson’s shop.

‘Well, miss, if I was you, I’d have a pair of soles and a duck to follow, with the beefsteak pudding for a bottom dish,’ suggested cook; ‘but, lawks, what’s the good of talking? we must have what we can get. But I saw two ducks in Trimpson’s window this morning when I went up street.’

‘Put on your bonnet, Mary, and run and see what you can do,’ said Eliza. And then, while Mary ran off, without stopping to put on her bonnet, Miss Sampson and the housemaid went upstairs together and took out lavender-scented linen, and decorated the spare room with all those pin-trays, china candlesticks, and pomatum pots, which went into retirement when there was no company.

‘Of course he has come to make her an offer,’ mused Eliza, as she lingered to give a finishing touch to the room, after the housemaid had gone downstairs.

‘He has waited a proper time after the old gentleman’s death,and now he has come down to ask her to marry him, and I dare say they will be married before the summer is over. It will be rather awkward for her to throw off such deep mourning all at once, but that’s her own fault for going into crape, just as if Mr. Treverton had really been her father! I put it down to pride.’

Miss Sampson had a knack of finding motives for all the acts of her acquaintance, and those motives were rarely of the best.

John Treverton’s chat with Mr. Sampson did not last more than ten minutes, friendly, and even affectionate, as was the lawyer’s reception.

‘I see you’re busy,’ said Treverton; ‘I’ll go and have a stroll in the village.’

‘No, upon my honour, I was just going to strike work. I’ll come with you if you like.’

‘On no account; I know you haven’t half finished. Dinner at six, as usual, I suppose. I’ll be back in time for a talk before we sit down.’

And before Mr. Sampson could remonstrate, John Treverton was gone. He wanted to see what Hazlehurst Manor was like in the clear spring light, framed in greenery, brightened with all the flowers that bloom in early May, musical with thrush and blackbird, noisy with the return of the swallows. Never had he so longed to look upon anything as he longed to-day to see the home of his ancestors, the home which might be his.

He walked quickly along the village street. Such a quaint little street, with never one house like another; here a building bulging forward, with bow windows below and projecting dormers above; there a house retiring modestly behind a patch of garden; further on an inn set at right angles with the highway, its chief door approached by a flight of stone steps that time had worn crooked. Such a variety of chimneys, such complexities in the way of roofs and gables; but everywhere cleanliness and spring flowers, and a purer air than John Treverton had breathed for a long time. Even this queer little village street, with its dozen shops and its half-dozen public-houses was very fair and pleasant in his town-weary eyes.

When he left the street he entered a noble high-road, bordered on each side by a row of fine old elms, which made the turnpike road an avenue worthy to be the approach to a king’s palace. The Manor-house lay off this road, guarded by tall gates of florid iron tracery, manufactured in the Low Countries two hundred years ago. He stopped at the gates to contemplate the scene, looking at it dreamily, as at something unreal—a picture that was fair but evanescent, and might vanish as he gazed.

Between the gates and the house the ground undulated gently. It was all smooth sward, too small for a park, tooirregular for a lawn. A winding carriage-road, shadowed with fine old trees, skirted the green expanse, and groups of shrubs here and there adorned it, rhododendrons, laurels, bay, deodoras, cypresses, all the variety of ornamental conifers. Two great cedars made islets of shadow in the sunny grass, and a copper beech, a giant of his kind, was just showing its dark brown buds. Beyond stood the Manor-house, tall, and broad, and red, with white stone dressings to door and windows, and a noble cornice, a house of Charles the Second’s reign, a real Sir Christopher Wren house, massive and grand in its stern simplicity.

John Treverton roused himself from his waking dream and rang the bell. A woman came out of the lodge, looked at him, dropped a low curtsey, opened the gate, and admitted him without a word, as if he were master there. In her mind he was master, though the trustees paid her wages. It was an understood thing in the household that Mr. Treverton was going to marry Miss Malcolm and reign at Hazlehurst Manor.

He walked slowly across the smooth, well-kept grass. Everything was changed and improved by the altered season. House and grounds seemed new to him. He remembered the flower-garden on the left of the house, the cheerless garden without a flower, where he had walked in the bleak winter mornings, smoking his solitary cigar; he remembered the walled fruit-garden beyond, to which he had seen that strange guest admitted under cover of darkness.

The thought of that night scene in the winter disturbed him even to-day, despite the apparent frankness of Laura’s explanation.

‘I suppose there is a mystery in every life,’ he said, with a sigh; ‘and, after all, what can it matter to me?’

He had heard nothing of the change in Miss Malcolm’s plans, and supposed the house abandoned to the care of servants. He was surprised to see the drawing-room windows open, flowers on the tables, and a look of domesticity everywhere. He went past the house and into the flower-garden, a garden of the Dutch school, prim and formal, with long, straight walks, box borders, junipers clipped into obelisks, a dense yew hedge, eight feet high, with arches cut in it to give admittance to the adjoining orchard. The beds and borders were a blaze of red and yellow tulips, which shone out against the verdure of the close-shorn bowling-green and the tawny hue of the gravel, and made a feast of vivid colour, like the painted windows of a cathedral. John Treverton, who had not seen such a garden for years, was almost dazzled by its homely beauty.

He walked slowly to the end of the long path, looking about him in dreamy contentment. The sweet, soft air, the sunshine—just at that quiet hour of the afternoon when the light begins tobe golden—the whistling of the blackbirds in the shrubbery, the freshness and beauty of all things, steeped his soul in a new delight. His life of late had been spent in cities, fenced from the beauty of earth by a wilderness of walls, the glory of heaven screened by smoke, the air thick and foul with the breath of men. This placid garden scene was as new to him as if he had come straight from the bottom of a mine.

Presently he stopped, as if struck with a new thought, looked straight before him, and muttered between clenched teeth:—

‘I shall be a fool if I let it slip from my hand.’

‘It’ meant Hazlehurst Manor, and the lands and fortune thereto belonging.

He was standing within a few yards of the yew-tree hedge, and just at this moment the green arch opposite him became the frame of a living picture, and that a lovely one.

Laura Malcolm stood there, bareheaded, dressed in black, with a basket of flowers upon her arm—Laura, whom he had no idea of meeting in this place.

The western sky was behind her, and she stood, a tall, slim figure in straight, black drapery, against a golden background, like a saint in an early Italian picture, an edge of light upon her chestnut hair making almost an aureole, her face in shadow.

For a few moments she paused, evidently startled at the apparition of a stranger, then recognised the intruder, and came forward and offered him her hand frankly, as if he had been quite a commonplace acquaintance.

‘Pray forgive me for coming in unannounced,’ he said; ‘I had no idea I should find you here. Yet it is natural that you should come sometimes to look at the old gardens.’

‘I am living here,’ answered Laura. ‘Didn’t you know?’

‘No, indeed. No one informed me of the change in your plans.’

‘I am so fond of the dear old house and garden, and the place is so full of associations for me, that I was easily induced to stay when Mr. Clare told me that it would be better for the house. I am a kind of housekeeper in charge of everything.’

‘I hope you will stay here all your life,’ said Treverton quickly, and then he coloured crimson, as if he had said something awful.

The same crimson flush mounted almost as quickly to Laura’s pale cheeks and brow. Both stood looking at the ground, embarrassed as a schoolboy and girl, while the blackbirds whistled triumphantly in the shrubbery, and a thrush in the orchard went into ecstasies of melody.

Laura was the first to recover.

‘Have you been staying long at Hazlehurst?’ she asked, quietly.

‘I only came an hour ago. My first visit was to the Manor, though I expected to find it an empty house.’

Another picture now appeared in the green frame—a young lady with a neat little figure, a retroussé nose, and an agreeably vivacious countenance.

‘Come here, Celia,’ cried Laura, ‘and let me introduce Mr. Treverton. You have heard your father talk about him. Mr. Treverton, Miss Clare.’

Miss Clare bowed and smiled, and murmured something indefinite. ‘Poor Edward!’ she was thinking all the while. ‘This Mr. Treverton is awfully good-looking.’

‘Awfully’ was Miss Clare’s chief laudatory adjective; her superlative form of praise was ‘quite too awfully,’ and when enthusiasm carried her beyond herself she called things ‘nice.’ ‘Quite too awfully nice,’ was her maximum of rapture.

As she rarely left Hazlehurst Vicarage, and knew in all about twenty people, it is something to her credit that she had made herself mistress of the current metropolitan slang.

‘I suppose you are staying at the Sampsons?’ she said. ‘Mr. Sampson is always talking of you. “My friend Treverton,” he calls you, but I suppose you won’t mind that. It’s rather trying.’

‘I think I can survive even that,’ answered John, who felt grateful to this young person for having come to his rescue at a moment when he felt himself curiously embarrassed. ‘Mr. Sampson has been very kind to me.’

‘If you can only manage to endure him he is an awfully good-natured little fellow,’ said Miss Clare with her undergraduate air. She modelled her manners and opinions upon those of her brother, and was in most things a feminine copy of the Oxonian. ‘But how do you contrive to get on with his sister? She is quite too dreadful.’

‘I confess that she is a lady whose society does not afford me unqualified delight,’ said John, ‘but I believe she means kindly.’

‘Can a person with white eyelashes mean kindly?’ inquired Celia, with a philosophical air. ‘Has not Providence created them like that as a warning, just as venomous snakes have flat heads?’

‘That is treating the matter rather too seriously,’ said John. ‘I don’t admire white eyelashes, but I am not so prejudiced as to consider them an indication of character.’

‘Ah,’ replied Celia, with a significant air, ‘you will know better by-and-by.’

She was only twenty, but she talked to John Treverton with as assured a tone as if she had been ages older than he in wisdom and experience of life.

‘How pretty the gardens are at this season!’ said Treverton, looking round admiringly, and addressing his remark to Laura.

‘Ah, you have only seen them in winter,’ she answered; ‘perhaps you would like to walk round the orchard and shrubberies?’

‘I should, very much.’

‘And after that we will go indoors and have some tea,’ said Celia. ‘You are fond of tea, of course, Mr. Treverton?’

‘I confess that weakness.’

‘I am glad to hear it. I hate a man who is not fond of tea. There is that brother of mine appreciates nothing but strong coffee without milk. I’m afraid he’ll come to a bad end.’

‘I am glad you think tea-drinking a virtue,’ said John, laughing.

And then they all three went under the yew-tree arch, into the loveliest of orchards—an orchard of seven or eight acres—an orchard that had been growing a century and a half; pears, plums, cherries, apples; here and there a walnut tree towering above the rest; here and there a gray old medlar; a pool in a corner overshadowed by two rugged old quinces; grass so soft, and deep, and mossy; primroses, daffodils; pale purple crocuses; the whole bounded by a sloping bank on which the ferns were just unfolding their snaky, gray coils, and revealing young leaves of tenderest green, under a straggling hedge of hawthorn, honeysuckle, and eglantine.

Here among the old gnarled trunks, and on the hillocky grass, Mr. Treverton and the two young ladies walked for about half-an-hour, enjoying the beauty and freshness of the place, in this sweetest period of the balmy spring day. Celia talked much, and John Treverton talked a little, but Miss Malcolm was for the most part silent. And yet John did not think her dull or stupid. It was enough for him to look at that delicate, yet firmly-modelled profile, the thoughtful brow, grave lips, and calm, dark eyes, to know that neither intellect nor goodness was wanting in her whom his kinsman had designed for his wife.

‘Poor old man,’ he thought, ‘he meant to secure my happiness without jeopardising hers. If he could have known—if he could have known!’

They returned to the garden by a different arch; they visited the hot-houses, where the rose-hued azaleas and camellias made pyramids of vivid colour; they glanced at the kitchen garden with its asparagus-beds and narrow box-edged borders, its all-pervading odour of sweet herbs and wallflowers.

‘I am positively expiring for want of a cup of tea,’ cried Celia. ‘Didn’t you hear the church clock strike five, Laura?’

John remembered the six o’clock dinner at The Laurels.

‘I really think I must deny myself that cup of tea,’ he said. ‘The Sampsons dine at six.’

‘What of that?’ exclaimed Celia, who never would let a man out of her clutches till stern necessity snatched him from her. ‘It is not above ten minutes’ walk from here to The Laurels.’

‘What an excellent walker you must be, Miss Clare. Well, I’ll hazard everything for that cup of tea.’

They went into a pretty room, opening out of the garden, a room with two long windows wreathed round with passionflower and starry white clematis—the clematis montana, which flowers in spring. It was not large enough for a library, so it was called the book-room, and was lined from floor to ceiling with books—a great many of which had been collected by Laura. It was quite a lady’s collection. There were all the modern poets, from Scott and Byron downwards, a good many French and German books—Macaulay, De Quincey, Lamartine, Victor Hugo—a good deal of history and belles-lettres, but no politics, no science, no travels. The room was the essence of snugness—flowers on mantelpiece and tables, basket-work easy chairs, cushions adorned with crewel-work, delightful little tables (after Chippendale), and on one of the tables a scarlet Japanese tea-tray, with the quaintest of old silver teapots, and cups and saucers in willow-pattern Nankin ware. Laura poured out the tea, while Celia began to devour hot buttered cake, the very look of which suggested dyspepsia; but to some weak minds earth has no more overpowering temptation on a warm spring afternoon than hot buttered cake and strong tea with plenty of cream in it.

John Treverton sat in one of the low basket arm-chairs—such chairs as they make in Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire—and drank tea as if it were the elixir of life. He had a strange feeling as he sat in that chair by the open window, looking across the beds of tulips, above which the bees were humming noisily—a feeling as if his life were only just beginning; as if he were a child in his cradle, dimly conscious of the dawning of existence; no burdens on mind or conscience; no tie or encumbrance; no engagement of honour or faith; a dead blank behind him; and before him life, happiness, the glory and freshness of earth, love, home, all things which fate reserves for the man born to good luck.

This dream or fancy of his was so pleasant that he let it stay with him while he drank three cups of tea, and while Celia rattled on about Hazlehurst and its inhabitants, giving him what she called a social map of the country, which might be useful for his guidance during the week he proposed to spend there. He only roused himself when the church clock chimed the three-quarters, and then he pulled himself out of the basket chair with a jerk, put down his cup and saucer, and wished Laura good-bye.

‘I shall have to do the distance in ten minutes, Miss Clare,’ he said, as he shook hands with that vivacious young lady.

‘I’m afraid I ought to have said ten minutes for a bicycle,’replied Celia; ‘but the Sampsons won’t mind waiting dinner for you, and I don’t suppose the delay will hurt their dinner.’

‘It will be nearer for you through the orchard,’ said Laura.

So John Treverton went through the orchard, at the end of which there was a gate that opened into a lane leading to the high-road. It was the same lane that skirted the walled fruit-garden, with the little door that John had seen mysteriously opened that winter night. The sight of the little wooden door made him curiously thoughtful.

‘I’ll never believe that there was anything approaching guilt in that mystery,’ he said to himself. ‘No, I have looked into those lovely eyes of hers, and I believe her incapable of an unworthy thought. Some poor relation, I dare say—a scamp whom she would have been ashamed of before the servants, so she received him secretly; doubtless to help him with money.’

‘What an extraordinary girl you are, Laura!’ said Celia, draining the teapot. ‘Why did you never tell me that John Treverton was so perfectly lovely?’

‘My dear Celia, how am I to know what constitutes your idea of perfect loveliness in a young man? I have heard you praise so many, all distinctly different. I told you that Mr. Treverton was gentlemanlike and good-looking.’

‘Good-looking!’ cried Celia. ‘He is absolutely perfect. To see him sitting in that chair drinking tea and looking dreamily out of the garden with those exquisite eyes of his! Oh, he is quite too awfully nice. Do you know the colour of his eyes?’

‘I have not the slightest idea.’

‘They are a greeny-gray—a colour that changes every minute, a tint between blue and brown; I never saw it before. And his complexion—just that olive paleness which is so positively delightful. His nose is slightly irregular in line, not straight enough to be Grecian, and not curved enough to be aquiline—but his mouth is awfully nice—so firm and resolute-looking, yet lapsing now and then into dreamy thought. Did you see him lapse into dreamy thought, Laura?’

Miss Malcolm blushed indignantly; vexed, no doubt, at such foolishness.

‘Really, Celia, you are too ridiculous. I can’t think how you can indulge in such absurd raptures about a strange man.’

‘Why not about a strange man?’ asked Celia, with her philosophical air. ‘Why should the perfections of a strange man be a forbidden subject? One may rave about a landscape; one may be as enthusiastic as one likes about the stars or the moon, the sea, or a sunset, or even the last popular novel? Why must not one admire a man? I am not going to put a padlock upon my lips to flatter such an absurd prejudice. As for you, Laura, it isall very well to sit there stitching at that faded blackberry leaf—you are putting too much brown in it, I am sure—and looking the image of all that is demure. To my mind you are more to be envied than any girl I ever heard of, except the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.’

‘Why should I be envied?’

‘Because you are to have a splendid fortune and John Treverton for your husband.’

‘Celia, I shall be so grateful to you if you will be quite silent on that subject, supposing that you can be silent about anything.’

‘I can’t,’ said Celia frankly.

‘It is by no means certain that I shall marry Mr. Treverton.’

‘Would you be so utterly idiotic as to refuse him?’

‘I would not accept him unless I could believe that he really liked me—better than any other woman he had ever seen.’

‘And of course he will; of course he does,’ cried Celia. ‘You know, as a matter of personal inclination, I would much rather you should marry poor Edward, who adores the ground you walk upon, and, of course, adores you much more than the ground. But there is a limpness about Ted’s character which makes me fear that he will never get on in the world. He is a clever young man, and he thinks that he has nothing to do but go on being clever, and write verses for the magazines—which even I, as his sister, must confess are the weakest dilution of Swinburne—and that Fame will come and take him by the hand, and lead him up the steps of her temple, while Fortune will meet him in the portico with a big bag of gold. No, Laura, dearly as I love Ted, I should be sorry to see you sacrifice a splendid fortune, and refuse such a man as John Treverton.’

‘There will be time enough to debate the question when Mr. Treverton asks me to marry him,’ said Laura gravely.

‘Oh, that will come upon you all in a moment,’ retorted Celia, ‘when you won’t have me to help you. You had better make up your mind beforehand.’

‘I should despise Mr. Treverton if he were to make me an offer before he knew a great deal more of me than he does now. But I forbid you to talk any more of this, Celia. And now we had better go and walk in the orchard for half-an-hour, or you will never be able to digest all the cake you have eaten.’

‘What a pity digestion should be so difficult, when eating is so easy,’ said Celia.

And then she went dancing along the garden paths with the airy lightness of a nymph who had never known the meaning of indigestion.

Once more John Treverton drove round his late kinsman’s estate, and this second time, in the sweet spring weather, the farms, and homesteads, the meadows where the buttercups werebeginning to show golden among the grass, the broad sweeps of arable land where the young corn was growing tall—seemed to him a hundredfold more fair than they had seemed in the winter. He felt a keener longing to be the master of all these things. It seemed to him as if no life could be so sweet as the life he might lead at Hazlehurst Manor, with Laura Malcolm for his wife.

The life he might lead——if——

What was that ‘if’ which barred the way to perfect bliss?

There was more than one obstacle, he told himself gloomily, as he paced the elm avenue on the London road, one evening at sunset, after he had been at Hazlehurst more than a week, during which week he had seen Laura very often.

There was, among many questions, the doubt as to Laura’s liking for him. She might consider herself constrained to accept him, were he to offer himself, in deference to the wish of her adopted father; but could he ever feel sure that she really cared for him, that he was the one man upon earth whom she would choose for her husband?

A flattering whisper which crept into the ear of his mind, like a caressing breath of summer wind gently fanning his cheek, told him that he was already something nearer and dearer to this sweet girl than the ruck of mankind; that her lovely hazel eyes took a new light and colour at his coming, that their beauty was shadowed with sadness in the moment of parting from him; that there were tender, broken tones of voice, fleeting blushes, half smiles, sudden droopings of darkly-fringed eyelids, and many other more subtle signs, that told of something more than common friendship. Believing this, what had he to do but snatch the prize?

Alas! between him and the light and glory of life stood a dark, forbidding figure, a veiled face, an arm sternly extended to stop the way.

‘It is not to be thought of,’ he said to himself. ‘I honour her too much—yes, I love her too well. The estate must go, and she and I must go on our several ways in the wilderness of life—to meet by chance, perhaps, half-a-century hence, when we have grown old, and hardly remember each other.’

It was to be his last evening at Hazlehurst, and he was going to the Manor-house to bid Laura and her friend good-bye. A very simple act of politeness, assuredly, yet he hung back from the performance of it, and walked slowly up and down under the elm trees, smoking a meditative cigar, and chewing the cud of fancies which were mostly bitter.

At last, just when the topmost edge of the sinking sun dropped below the dark line of distant woods, John Treverton made up his mind there was no more time to be lost, if he meant to call at the Manor-house that evening. He quickened his pace,anxious to find Laura in the garden, where she spent most of her life in this balmy spring weather. He felt himself more at ease with her in the garden than when he was brought face to face with her within four walls. Out of doors there was always something to distract attention, to give a sudden turn to the conversation if it became embarrassing to either of them. Here, too, it was easier to escape Celia’s searching eye, which was so often upon them indoors, where she had very little to occupy her attention.

He went in at the lodge gate, as usual unquestioned. All the old servants agreed in regarding him as the future owner of the estate. They wondered that he asserted himself so little, and went in and out as if he were nobody. The way to the old Dutch garden was by this time very familiar to him. He had been there at almost every hour of the day, from golden noon to gray evening.

As he went round by the house he heard voices, a man’s voice among them, and the sound of that masculine voice was not welcome to his ear. Celia’s shrill little laugh rang out merrily, the sky-terrier yapped in sympathy. They were evidently enjoying themselves very much in the Dutch garden, and John Treverton felt as if their enjoyment were an affront to him.

He turned the angle of the house, and saw the group seated on a little lawn in front of the book-room windows; Laura and Celia in rustic chairs, a young man on the grass at their feet, the dog dancing round him. John Treverton guessed at once that the young man was the Edward, or Ted, about whom he had heard Celia Clare so often discourse; the Edward Clare who, according to Miss Sampson, was in love with Laura Malcolm.

Laura half rose to shake hands with her guest. Her face at least was grave.Shehad not been laughing at the nonsense which provoked Celia’s mirth. John Treverton was glad of that.

‘Mr. Clare, Mr. Treverton.’

Edward Clare looked up and nodded—a rather supercilious nod, John thought, but he did not expect much friendliness from the vicar’s son. He gave the young man a grave bow, and remained standing by Laura’s chair.

‘I hope you will forgive my late visit, Miss Malcolm,’ he said. ‘I have come to wish you “good-bye.”’

She glanced up at him with a startled look, and he fancied—yes, he dared to fancy—that she was sorry.

‘You have not stopped long at Hazlehurst,’ she said, after a palpable pause.

‘As if any one would who was not absolutely obliged,’ cried Celia. ‘I can’t imagine how Mr. Treverton has existed through an entire week.’

‘I assure you that I have not found my existence a burden,’said John, addressing himself to Celia. ‘I shall leave Hazlehurst with deep regret.’

He could not for worlds, in his present mood, have said as much to Laura.

‘Then you must be one of two things,’ said Celia.

‘What things?’

‘You must be either a poet, or intensely in love. There is my brother here. He never seems tired of roaming about Hazlehurst. But then he is a poet, and writes verses about March violets, and the first leafbuds on the willows, and the reappearance of the May-fly, or the return of the swallow. And he smokes no end, and he reads novels to an extent that is absolutely demoralizing. It’s dreadful to see a man dependent upon Mudie for getting through his life,’ exclaimed Celia, making a face that expressed extreme contempt.

‘I am not a poet, Miss Clare,’ said John Treverton, quietly; ‘yet I confess to having been very happy at Hazlehurst.’

He stole a glance at Laura to see if the shot told. She was looking down, her sweet, grave face pure and pale as ivory in the clear evening light.

‘It’s very civil of you towards the parish to say as much,’ said Edward with a veiled sneer, ‘and it is kind of you to shrink from wounding our feelings as aborigines, but I am sure you must have been ineffably bored. There is positively nothing to do at Hazlehurst.’

‘I suppose that’s why the place suits you, Ted?’ observed Miss Clare innocently.

The conversation had an uncomfortable tone which was quite out of harmony with the soft evening sky, and shadowy garden, where the flowers were losing their colour as the light declined. John Treverton looked curiously at the man he knew to be his rival.

He saw a man of about six-and-twenty, of the middle height, slim almost to fragility, yet with a compactness of form which indicated activity and possibly strength. Gray eyes inclining to blue, long lashes, delicately-pencilled eyebrows, a fair complexion, low, narrow brow, and regular features, a pale brown moustache, more silky than abundant, made up a face that was very handsome in the estimation of some people, but which assuredly erred on the side of effeminacy. It was a face that would have suited the velvet and brocade of one of the French Henry’s minions, or the lovelocks and jewel-broidered doublet of one of James Stuart’s silken favourites.

It would have been difficult to imagine the owner of that face doing any good or great work in the world, or leaving any mark upon his time, save some petty episode of vanity, profligacy, and selfishness in the memoirs of a modern St. Simon.

‘Anything new in the evening papers?’ asked Mr. Clare, with a stifled yawn.

The languid inquiry followed upon a silence that had lasted rather too long to be pleasant.

‘Sampson had not got hisGlobewhen I left him,’ answered John Treverton; ‘but in the present stagnation of everything at home and abroad I confess to feeling very little interest in the evening papers.’

‘I should like to have heard if that unlucky dancer is dead,’ said Celia.

John Treverton, who had been standing beside Laura’s chair like a man lost in a waking dream, turned suddenly at this remark.

‘What dancer?’ he asked.

‘La Chicot. Of course you have seen her dance. You happy Londoners see everything under the sun that is worth seeing. She is something wonderful, is she not? And now I suppose I shall never see her.’

‘She’s a very handsome woman, and a very fine dancer, in her particular style,’ answered Treverton. ‘But what did you mean just now when you talked about her death? She is as much alive as you and I are; at least I know that her name was on all the walls and she was dancing nightly when I left London.’

‘That was a week ago,’ said Celia. ‘Surely you saw the account of the accident in this morning’sTimes? There was nearly a column about it.’

‘I did not look at theTimes. Mr. Sampson and I started early this morning for a long round. What was this accident?’

‘Oh, quite too dreadful!’ exclaimed Celia. ‘It made my blood run cold to read the description. It seems that the poor thing had to go up into the flies, or the skies, or something, hooked on to somemoveable irons—a kind of telescopic arrangement, you know.’

‘Yes, yes, I know,’ said Treverton.

‘Well, of course that would be awfully jolly as long as it was safely done, for she must look lovely floating upwards, with the limelight shining on her; but it seems the man who had the management of the iron machine got tipsy, and did not know what he was doing, so the irons were not properly braced together, and just as she was near the top the thing gave way and she came down headlong.’

‘And was killed?’ asked John Treverton breathlessly.

‘No, she was not killed on the spot, but her leg was broken—a compound fracture, I think they call it, and she was hurt about the head, and the paper said she was altogether in a very precarious state. Now I have noticed that when a newspapersays that a person is in a precarious state, the next thing one hears of that person is that he or she is dead; so that I shouldn’t at all wonder if La Chicot’s death were in the evening papers.’

‘What a loss to society!’ sneered Edward Clare. ‘I think you are the most ridiculous girl in the world, Celia, to interest yourself in people who are as far off your groove as if they were the inhabitants of the moon.’

‘Homo sum,’ said Celia, proud of a smattering of Latin, the crumbs that had fallen from her brother’s table, ‘and all the varieties of mankind are interesting to me. I should like to have been a dancer myself, if I had not been a clergyman’s daughter. It must be an awfully jolly life.’

‘Delightful,’ exclaimed Edward, ‘especially when it ends abruptly through the carelessness of a drunken scene-shifter.’

‘I must say good-night and good-bye,’ said John Treverton to Laura. ‘I have my portmanteau to pack ready for an early start to-morrow morning. Indeed, I am inclined to go by the mail to-night. It would save me half-a-day.’

‘The mail leaves at a quarter past ten. You’ll have to look sharp if you travel by that,’ said Edward.

‘I’ll try it, at any rate.’

‘Good-night, Mr. Treverton,’ said Laura, giving him her hand.

The lively Celia was not going to let him depart with so cold a farewell. He was a man, and, as such, eminently interesting to her.

‘We’ll all walk to the gate with you,’ she said; ‘it will be better for us than sitting yawning here, watching the bats skimming across the flower-beds.’

They all went, and it happened somehow, to John Treverton’s tremulous delight, that Laura and he were side by side, a little behind the other two.

‘I am sorry you are obliged to leave so soon,’ said Laura, anxious to say something vaguely civil.

‘I should go away more happy than I can tell you if I thought my going could make you sorry.’

‘Oh, I did not mean in such a particular sense,’ she said, with a little laugh. ‘I am sorry for your own sake that you have to leave the country, just when it is so lovely, and to go back to smoky London.’

‘If you knew how I hate that world of smoke and all foul things, you would pity me with the uttermost compassion your kind heart can feel,’ he answered, very much in earnest. ‘I am going from all I love to all I detest; and I know not how long it may be before I can return; but if I should be able to come quickly will you promise me a kindly welcome, Laura? Will you promise to be as glad of my return as I am sorry to go to-night.’

‘I cannot make any such bargain,’ she said gently, ‘for Icannot measure your sadness to-night. You are altogether a mysterious person; I have not even begun to understand you. But I hope you may come back soon, when our roses are in bloom and our nightingales are singing, and if their welcome is not enough for you I will promise to add mine.’

There was a tender playfulness in her tone which was unspeakably sweet to him. They were quite alone, in a part of the carriage-drive where the trees grew thickest, the shadow of chestnut leaves folding them round, the low breath of the evening wind whispering in their ears. It was an hour for tender avowals, for unworldly thoughts.

John Treverton took Laura’s hand, and held it unreproved.

‘Tell me that you do not hate the memory of my cousin Jasper because of that absurd will,’ he said.

‘Could I hate the memory of one who was so good to me, the only father I ever knew?’

‘Say then that you do not hate me because of my cousin’s will.’

‘It would be very unchristianlike to hate you for an act of which you are innocent.’

‘No doubt, but I can imagine a woman hating a man under such circumstances. You take away your hand. Yes, I feel convinced that you detest me.’

‘I took away my hand because I thought you had forgotten to let it go,’ said Laura, determined not to be too serious. ‘Will it really make you more satisfied with yourself if I tell you that I heartily forgive my adopted father for his will?’

‘Infinitely.’

‘And that, in spite of our ridiculous position towards each other, I do not quite—hate you.’

‘Laura, you are making me the happiest of men.’

‘But I am saying very little.’

‘If you knew how much it is to me! A world of hope, a world of delight, an incentive to high thoughts and worthy deeds, a regeneration of body and soul.’

‘You are talking wildly.’

‘I am wild with gladness. Laura, my love, my darling.’

‘Stop,’ she said suddenly, turning to him with earnest eyes, very pale in the dim light, now completely serious. ‘Is it me or your cousin’s estate you love? If it is the fortune you think of, let there be no stage-play of love-making between us. I am willing to obey your cousin—as I would have obeyed him living, honouring him and submitting to him as a father—but let us be true and loyal to each other. Let us face life honestly and earnestly, and accept it for what it is worth. Let us be faithful friends and companions, but not sham lovers.’

‘Laura, I love you for yourself, and yourself only. As I live, that is the truth. Come to me to-morrow penniless, and tell methat Jasper Treverton’s will was a forgery. Come to me and say: “I am a pauper like yourself, John, but I am yours,” and see how fond and glad a welcome I will give you. My dearest, I love you truly, passionately. It is your lovely face, your tender voice, yourself I want.’

He put his arm round her, and drew her, not unwilling, to his breast, and kissed her with the first lover’s kiss that had ever crimsoned her cheek.

‘I like to believe you,’ she said softly, resting contentedly in his arms.

This was their parting.

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