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 what he was doing he walked out of the restaurant, crossed the street to the recruiting office and wrote down his name as one of Colonel Roosevelt's Rough Riders.

When the deed had been done he went back to the restaurant and finished his coffee and paid his bill. When he had told his uncle of the step on returning to the ranch, at first Hank Brodie had looked very serious, then he had embraced his nephew and kissed him as tenderly on the cheek as his own mother could have done.

"Son," he said, "I always knew you had good stuff in you, but of course I did not dream it would come to this."

Then Larry sought out his two friends, Pony and Long Tom, and told them. They had both clapped him on the shoulder and told him it was all right. A few minutes later, after consulting Hank Brodie, they had mounted their horses and ridden away. When Larry asked his uncle where they had gone he smiled and said, "Oh, they've gone down to Wyanne to enlist."

So here they were, the three Crooked Creek cow-punchers on their way to Wyanne where they were to join half a dozen other brave fellows and the little party was to make its way to San Antonio and thence to Cuba.

"Who is this here Theodore Roosevelt that is going

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 to be our Lieutenant Colonel?" inquired Long Tom as he gathered up the cards and began shuffling.

"Why, don't you know," returned Pony who was something of a reader, "why, he's a rich New York gent and if all we read about him is true he's a real guy. Why, he scared the entire New York police force out of their boots when he was police commissioner. Then he came out to northwestern Missouri and went into the ranch business. He's a regular cow-puncher, he is, and the bad men of Missouri were as afraid of him as good folks are of the devil. He's a regular guy all right and we can bank on him."

"He's good enough for me, then," replied Long Tom.

"Me, too," said Larry.

Presently as Larry noted that his friends had begun another rubber he arose and said casually, "If you gents will excuse me for a few minutes guess I will go back to the observation car. I want to see the sun sink behind the old Sierras once more and I want to say good-night to the Wyoming hills."

"That's right, son," said Long Tom, "allus stick to your colors and be faithful to the homeland."

"So long, Larry," said Pony affectionately, "we'll meet you in half an hour in the dining car."

To his great joy Larry found the observation car entirely deserted and he sat down where he had a

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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 splendid view of the Sierras away to the southwest. The sun still stood about fifteen minutes above the horizon's rim and the full blaze of its departing glory fell upon the some eight or ten thousand feet below the mountains' crest. This radiant splendor of the sunlight shed such a glory over the that they looked like ancient battlements with little minarets and domes of gold. But soon the light receded up the mountain side and dark shadows took its place over—the hills. Larry could plainly discern the dark blue-green of the forest and he knew his old friends, the pines, the spruces, the cedars, and the hemlocks, were there in all their dark mystic beauty. But once more the advancing shadows forced the sunlight to retreat to the mountains' crest and the full glory of departing day was seen along the top of the range upon the snow and ice fields that still lingered on the caps of the highest peaks. Then the mountain top for twenty miles became a gorgeous rainbow, so bright that the eye could scarce behold it. But the shadows still pursued and almost before the full beauty had been realized the lower side of the rainbow had faded and shadows took its place. Up, up the legions of darkness pursued until a dark red band on the horizon's rim had succeeded the rainbow. But still the shadows pursued and soon the dark red faded into crimson, the crimson into pink, the pink into lighter pink, until finally all color had faded

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 out and an aurora of white light streamed upward into the sky from the point where the sun had disappeared.

Larry had been deeply moved by the wonder of the spectacle and as the last vestige of color faded, a little cry escaped him. "My God, how I love it all," he said under his breath. "These mountains, and the hills, and the canyons and the rivers. There is nothing I know of like it in the whole world."

Then he covered his eyes with his hands and said reverently, "God bless Wyoming and guard these hills and Crooked Creek ranch until I come again."

The ranch was now hidden from sight some forty or fifty miles behind the mountains, but Larry could still see in memory the long gray ranch buildings with the friendly old cottonwoods keeping guard above them. How well he knew every season upon the ranch; the spring time with the hundreds of little white-faced calves playing on the green carpet of the mesa and vying with the homely little colts in their capers; the summer time with its wild strawberries, wild plums and service berries, and with its wild roses. He had never seen such wild roses anywhere else in the whole world. They clambered over fallen logs and boulders and even up the sides of the canyons. And then in the autumn time there was the goldenrod and asters. Where else in the world was such vital vibrant color as during this season when Piñon birds and magpies flocked for their

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 southern flight. Then winter with its endless snow and biting wind, and the stern music of howling coyotes and howling winds had a peculiar beauty all its own. And this beautiful country which for four years he had called home was fading, fading, fading; it was slipping away from him at the rate of fifty miles an hour. When would he see it again?

Now although the last shimmer of light which showed where the sun had sunk a few minutes before had disappeared and night had let down her dusky mantle, yet Larry knew that far away in Piñon Valley the sun was still shining.

And Patches, faithful Patches who would have run until he dropped for his master, knew even better than Larry did that the sun was shining in Piñon Valley, for he was standing at the lower end of the valley in the full blaze of departing day with his head up, his ears thrust forward, his eyes bright, and his nostrils extended. He seemed to be waiting, or looking, or listening for something. It was a picture that would have delighted the eye of a Remington or a Rosa Bonheur. Who shall say that Patches did not receive a message, or that he did not feel the great wave of love and admiration that welled up in his master's heart for him as he turned to leave the observation car and rejoin his friends at dinner? It is not for us humans to say this was not so, for we are continually making new discov-

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 eries in the world of animal psychology which amaze us. Presently the spell was broken and without warning Patches wheeled like a flash and raced up the valley at a wild gallop and a minute later disappeared through the cul-de-sac on his way to the upper mesa.

The upper mesa had been the favorite feeding ground of the wild horses for a long time before man ever came to Wyoming with his countless cattle. The grass was sweeter there than anywhere else on the ranch and Patches knew this fact full well. The water in Crooked Creek up there was clear and cool, and in the summer time when it was hot on the mesa the shade in Aspen Draw was cool and refreshing. So Patches was going back to the wild and once again he would be a free horse ranging in the hills just as his wild kindred had done in years gone by. Once again he would come and go at will with no hand to bridle or saddle him for Larry had given orders that he should not be ridden or driven until he returned. So his life was once more his own just as it had been before he had been broken and he was as free to come and go as the wandering wind.

And who should say when that master would return? He had gone upon stern business. But even Larry's most enthusiastic admirers and ardent well-wishers could not have guessed that he would be back within sixty days without a scratch from bullet or shrapnel.

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text: The New York Times/1918/11/11/Takes Over Wolff Bureau


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 If his eyes were sunken and his cheeks hollow and he had lost twenty pounds during the campaign, what did that matter, he was still strong and vigorous and as ready for the storms of life as a young oak for the blasts of winter. Not only this but he had brought back with him the added distinction of being Lieutenant Larry Winton and a close friend of the impetuous Colonel.

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text: The New York Times/1918/11/11/American Flier Drowned Off England


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 ter to be, and they, I am confident, are ignorant of it?"

When she returned to the dressing-room, the Countess requested she would read to her; and thus employed, except at short intervals, when her ladyship made her pause to rest herself, she continued till dinner was served, at which the Countess was unable to preside; she grew better however in the evening, and again entered into conversation with Madeline.

The discourse turned upon the time she had passed at V; and the Countess now requested to hear a particular account of it. This was a request which Madeline, if she could, would gladly have declined obeying; for, in almost every amusement, almost every scene she had partaken of, or mixed in while there, de Sevignie was so principal an object, that to describe them without mentioning him, she feared would be scarcely possible; to mention him without emotion, she


text: Patches (Hawkes)

title: Patches (Hawkes)


text: The New York Times/1918/11/11/News of Armistice Flashed to City


text: Patches (Hawkes)/The Romance of the Cattle Land


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 knew she could not; and to betray such emotion would be, she was convinced, to confirm in the Countess's mind the suspicions she knew she already entertained of her attachment to de Sevignie; and now to have them confirmed, now, when not a hope remained of their being ever more to each other than friends, she felt would be humiliating and distressing in the extreme.

She attempted however to comply with the request of the Countess, but she faltered in her talk; and, by trying to omit what she wished to conceal, rendered what she would have told almost unintelligible.

The Countess saw and pitied her distress; she pitied, because she guessed the source from whence it proceeded. She was now more convinced than ever, from the dejection of Madeline, her confusion, and a few involuntary expressions that dropped from her, that all hope relative to de Sevignie was over, and,


text: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 1

title: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 1


text: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 2

title: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 2


text: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 3

title: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 3


text: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 4

title: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 4


text: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 5

title: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 5


text: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 6

title: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 6


text: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 7

title: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 7


text: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 8

title: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 8


text: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 9

title: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 9


text: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 10

title: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 10


text: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 11

title: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 11


text: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 12

title: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 12


text: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 13

title: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 13


text: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 14

title: Patches (Hawkes)/Chapter 14


text: The New York Times/1918/11/11/Paris Convinced War is Finished


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text: The New York Times/1918/11/11/Austria Sends Back 250,000 Italians


text: Bells and Pomegranates, Second Series

title: Bells and Pomegranates, Second Series


text: The New York Times/1918/11/11/Peace Conference Now London Topic


text: The New York Times/1918/11/11/Old North Chimes Ring


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 since terminated, she meant not to enquire concerning him, certain as she was that that termination was owing to no impropriety in the conduct of Madeline, or in his either, else she would not thus regret it. Time and kind attention, she trusted, would heal the wound which disappointed affection had given to the bosom of her youthful friend.

By degrees she turned the conversation to one more pleasing to her; and they both parted after supper with more cheerfulness than perhaps either had expected.

The next morning Madeline had the exquisite pleasure of meeting her beloved protectress at breakfast, with a greater appearance of health and spirits than she had witnessed the preceding day.

No attentions which could contribute to render this change a permanent one, were wanting on the part of Madeline; her assi-


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 duities were indeed unremitting, and the Countess received them with every indication of gratitude. A week saw her restored to her usual looks and serenity; and thus happily did the storm which had threatened the peace of her friends and family, appear overblown.

Occupied by attention and anxiety about her friend, Madeline, during her indisposition, had had no time to ruminate over past scenes; but now that her recovery allowed her more leisure, they arose in gloomy retrospection to her view. She saw herself deprived of all those hopes which had hitherto cheered her mind, assured, almost solemnly assured, that her destiny and de Sevignie's could never be united; and sad and solitary in the extreme she anticipated her life would be after such a disappointment, for de Sevignie she considered as her kindred spirit, and could not hope, or rather deemed it utterly impossible, she should again


text: The New York Times/1918/11/11/Polish Republic Announced


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 meet with one so truly congenial to her own.

Another week elapsed without any thing material happening, during which the Countess heard from her daughter; she gave the letter to Madeline to read, and the vivacity with which it was written, and the assurance it contained of her own health and happiness, clearly proved that Madame D'Alembert was entirely ignorant of her mother's late illness and disquietude.

The wonder of Madeline was increased at finding she concealed this disquietude even from her daughter. Surely, she thought, its source must indeed be painful when she thus hides it from those who are most interested about her.

In vain she tried to assign some cause for it in her own mind; the more she thought upon it, the more impossible she found it to conjecture from what or from whom it pro-


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 ceeded, and that she never would know, she was convinced; and now that she saw her friend had (apparently at least) overcome it, her curiosity was somewhat abated.

In about ten days after Madame D'Alembert's letter, she received one herself from Olivia (as did the Countess from Madame Chatteneuf), written in the most lively and affectionate manner, and containing a particular account of their journey over the Alps, their reception from her aunt, who was not quite in so declining a state as they apprehended, and the amusements they partook of at Verona.

She concluded by charging Madeline to write immediately; and said she expected to hear from her all that had happened in and out of the chateau since her departure, and particularly whether she had since seen de Sevignie. "But that you have, I cannot doubt (she added); and, jesting apart, believe me, my dear Madeline, I hope to


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 learn from you that every little uneasiness which lurked in your mind, and his, is removed by the mutual acknowledgment of a passion which, to the penetrating eyes of friendship, it was evident you entertained for each other. Blush not, my dear; the secret which friends discover is guarded by them as sedulously as their own; and, should concealment be necessary, be assured of mine. But I will not harbour an idea that it is; no, I will not believe that de Sevignie will be contented with the mere possession of your heart:—ere this, perhaps, preparations are making; ere this, perhaps, the happy knot is tied; if so, accept my sincerest congratulations; every one who regards you, will congratulate you and themselves on such an event; for the wife of de Sevignie must, if not her own fault (which can never be your case), be completely happy."

Madeline's whole soul felt agitated as she read those lines; since hopeless, she was distressed that her attachment should be


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 known; and she sighed with the heaviest sadness at the contrast which she drew between her present feelings, and what they would have been, had her friend's conjectures relative to de Sevignie and her been just.

She felt shocked at the idea of being asked to show this letter (which she had read in her own chamber) to the Countess; but that lady, perhaps from surmising some of the contents, gave not the smallest intimation of a wish to read it.

But though her fears respecting it were removed by this silence, her dejection continued. The surmises of Olivia hurt and embarrassed her; and she feared, when she declared their fallacy, that she should be regarded as a slighted object; and to pride, youthful pride, perhaps no idea could be more mortifying.

To complete her sadness, the Countess seemed relapsing into melancholy; and,


text: The New York Times/1918/11/11/Travel from Holland to Paris by Auto


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 though they both conversed, conversation in both appeared but as the faint effort of feeling to try and beguile the sadness of each other.

The efforts she made to converse during the day were painful in the extreme; and when the Countess retired in the evening, as was her usual custom, to the ruined monastery in the valley, for the purpose of prayer and meditation, Madeline hastily threw a scarf around her, and went out upon the lawn, as if she had feared a longer continuance in the house would subject her to society, which, in the present agitated state of her mind was irksome to her.


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text: The New York Times/1918/11/11/Paris Crowds Cheer News


text: The New York Times/1918/11/11/Townshend Reaches Paris


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text: Talk:O Canada (Richardson)

title: Talk:O Canada (Richardson)


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text:
Hawaii v. Standard Oil Co.

Section 4 of the Clayton Act does not authorize a State to sue for damages for an injury to its general economy allegedly attributable to a violation of the antitrust laws. Pp. 257-266.

431 F. 2d 1282, affirmed.

MARSHALL, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which BURGER, C.J., and STEWART, WHITE, and BLACKMUN, JJ., joined. DOUGLAS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, post, p. 266. BRENNAN, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which DOUGLAS, J., joined post, p. 270. POWELL and REHNQUIST, JJ., took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.

Maxwell M. Blecher argued the cause for petitioner. With him on the briefs were Bertram Kanbara, Attorney General of Hawaii, Hiromu Suzawa, Acting Attorney General, George Pai, Deputy Attorney General, Joseph L. Alioto, and Peter J. Donnici.

Francis R. Kirkham argued the cause for respondents. With him on the brief were Richard J. MacLaury, Moses Lasky, Malcolm T. Dungan, and William Simon.

Briefs of amici curiae urging reversal were filed by Evelle J. Younger, Attorney General of California, and Anthony C. Joseph, Robert Murphy, Herbert Davis, Michael I. Spiegel, and Carole A. Kornblum, Deputy Attorneys General, for the State of California, and by the Attorneys General and other officials for their respective States and jurisdictions as follows: William T. Baxley, Attorney General of Alabama, Gary K. Nelson, Attorney General of Arizona, Ray Thornton, Attorney General of Arkansas, Duke W. Dunbar, Attorney General of Colorado, Robert K. Killian, Attorney General of Connecticut, W. Laird Stabler, Jr., Attorney General of Delaware, Robert L. Shevin, Attorney General of Florida, W. Anthony Park, Attorney General of Idaho, William J. Scott, Attorney General of Illinois, Richard C. Turner, Attorney General of Iowa, Vern Miller, Attorney General of Kansas, John B. Breckinridge, Attorney General of Kentucky, Jack P.F. Gremillion, Attorney General of Louisiana, James S. Erwin, Attorney General of Maine, Robert H. Quinn, Attorney General of Massachusetts, Frank J. Kelley, Attorney General of Michigan, Warren Spannaus, Attorney General of Minnesota, John C. Danforth, Attorney General of Missouri, Robert L. Woodahl, Attorney General of Montana, Robert List, Attorney General of Nevada, Warren B. Rudman, Attorney General of New Hampshire, George F. Kugler, Jr., Attorney General of New Jersey, David L. Norvell, Attorney General of New Mexico, Louis J. Lefkowitz, Attorney General of New York, Helgi Johanneson, Attorney General of North Dakota, William J. Brown, Attorney General of Ohio, Larry Derryberry, Attorney General of Oklahoma, Richard J. Israel, Attorney General of Rhode Island, Gordon Mydland, Attorney General of South Dakota, David M. Pack, Attorney General of Tennessee, Crawford C. Martin, Attorney General of Texas, Vernon B. Romney, Attorney General of Utah, James M. Jeffords, Attorney General of Vermont, Andrew P. Miller, Attorney General of Virginia, Slade Gorton, Attorney General of Washington, Chauncey H. Browning, Jr., Attorney General of West Virginia, Robert W. Warren, Attorney General, and George F. Sieker, Assistant Attorney General, of Wisconsin, and J. Lee Rankin of the City of New York.

title: Hawaii v. Standard Oil Co.


text:
Page:NBS Circular 553.djvu/57

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 * Orange||А
 * Orange (USA)||F 3205
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title: Page:NBS Circular 553.djvu/57


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 was the great comfort of Kitty’s existence. Always kindly, helpful, sympathetic, no girlish trouble was too slight, no girlish question too difficult for her tender heart—her delicate insight. How different from grim Aunt Eliza, with whom it was Kitty’s fate to live. Aunt Eliza was severe, methodical, energetic. In household matters she spared neither herself nor her niece. Kitty could darn and mend and bake and dust and sweep in a way which might have turned the parents of the bluest Girtonian green with envy. She had read a great deal, too—the really solid works that are such a nuisance to get through, and that leave a mark on one’s mind like the track of a steamroller. That was Aunt Eliza’s doing. Kitty ought to have been grateful—but she wasn’t. She didn’t want to be improved with solid


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 books. She wanted to write books herself. She did write little tales when her aunt was out on business, which was often, and she dreamed of the day when she should write beautiful books, poems, romances. These Aunt Eliza classed roughly as “stuff and nonsense”; and one day, when she found Kitty reading the Girls’ Very Own Friend, she tore that harmless little weekly across and across and flung it into the fire. Then she faced Kitty with flushed face and angry eyes.

“If I ever catch you bringing such rubbish into the house again, I’ll—I’ll stop your music lessons.”

This was a horrible threat. Kitty went twice a week to the Guildhall School of Music. She had no musical talent whatever, but the journey to London and back was her one glimpse of the world’s tide that flowed outside the neat, gloomy, ordered house at Streatham. Therefore Kitty was careful that Aunt Eliza should not again “catch her bringing such rubbish into the house.” But she went on reading the paper all the same, just as she went on writing her little stories. And presently she got one of her little stories typewritten, and sent it to the Girls’ Very Own Friend. It was a silly little story—


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 the heroine was svelte, I am sorry to say, and had red-gold hair and a soft, trainante voice—and the hero was a “frank-looking young Englishman, with a bronzed face and honest blue eyes.” The plot was that with which I firmly believe every career of fiction begins—the girl who throws over her lover because he has jilted her friend. Then she finds out that it was not her lover, but his brother or cousin. We have all written this story in our time, and Kitty wrote it much worse than many, but not nearly so badly as most of us.

And the Girls’ Very Own Friend accepted the story and printed it, and in its columns notified to “George Thompson” that the price, a whole guinea, was lying idle at the office till he should send his address. For, of course, Kitty had taken a man’s name for her pen-name, and almost equally, of course, had called herself “George.” George Sand began it, and it is a fashion which young authors seem quite unable to keep themselves from following.

Kitty longed to tell some one of her success—to ask admiration and advice; but Aunt Eliza was more severe and less approachable than usual that week. She was busy writing


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 letters. She had always a sheaf of dull-looking letters to answer, so Kitty could only tell Mary in the kitchen under vows of secrecy, and Mary in the kitchen only said: “Well, to be sure, Miss, it’s beautiful! I suppose you wrote the story down out of some book?”

Therefore Kitty felt that it was vain to apply to her for intellectual sympathy.

“I will write to Aunt Kate,” said she, “she will understand. Oh, how I wish I could see her! She must be a dear, soft, pussy, cuddly sort of person. Why shouldn’t I go and see her? I will.”

And on this desperate resolve she acted.

Now I find it quite impossible any longer to conceal from the intelligent reader that the reason why Kitty had never seen Aunt Kate was that “Aunt Kate” was merely the screen which sheltered from a vulgar publicity the gifted person who wrote the “Answers to Correspondents” for the Girls’ Very Own Friend.

In fear and trembling, and a disguised hand-writing; with a feigned name and a quickly-beating heart, Kitty, months before, had written to this mysterious and gracious


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 being. In the following week’s number had appeared these memorable lines:

“Sweet Nancy.—So pleased, dear, with your little letter. Write to me quite freely. I love to help my girls.”

So Kitty wrote quite freely, and as honestly as any girl of eighteen ever writes: her hopes and fears, her household troubles, her literary ambitions. And in the columns of the Girls’ Very Own Friend Aunt Kate replied with all the tender grace and delightful warmth that characterised her utterances.

The idea of calling on Aunt Kate occurred to Kitty as she was “putting on her things” to go to the Guildhall. She instantly threw the plain “everyday” hat from her, and pulled her best hat from its tissue-paper nest in the black bandbox. She put on her best blouse—the cream-coloured one with the browny lace on it, and her best brown silk skirt. She recklessly added her best brown shoes and gloves, and the lace pussy-boa. (I don’t know what the milliner’s name for the thing is. It goes round the neck, and hangs its soft and fluffy ends down nearly to one’s knees.) Then she looked at herself in the


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 glass, gave a few last touches to her hair and veil, and nodded to herself.

“You’ll do, my dear,” said Kitty.

Aunt Eliza was providentially absent at Bath nursing a sick friend, and the black-bugled duenna, hastily imported from Tunbridge Wells, could not be expected to know which was Kitty’s best frock, and which the gloves that ought only to have been worn at church.

When Kitty’s music lesson was over, she stood for a moment on the steps of the Guildhall School, looking down towards the river. Then she shrugged her pretty shoulders.

“I don’t care. I’m going to,” she said, and turned resolutely towards Tudor Street. Kitty had been to a high school: therefore she was not obviously shy. She asked her way frankly and easily of carman, or clerk, or errand-boy; and though, at the door of the dingy office in a little court off Fleet Street, her heart beat thickly as she read the blue-enamelled words, Girls’ Very Own Friend, her manner as she walked into the office betrayed no nervousness, and, indeed, struck the grinning idle office boy as that of “a bloomin’ duchess.”

“I want to see” she began;


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 and then suddenly the awkwardness of her position struck her. She did not know Aunt Kate’s surname. Abruptly to ask this grinning lout for “Aunt Kate” seemed absolutely indecorous. “I want to see the editor,” she ended.

She waited in the grimy office while the boy disappeared through an inner door, marked in dingy white letters with the magic words, “Editor—Private.” A low buzz of voices came to her through the door. She looked at the pigeon-holes where heaps of back numbers of the Girls’ Very Own lay in a dusty retirement. She looked at the insurance company’s tasteless almanack that hung all awry on the wall, and still the buzz went on. Then suddenly some one laughed inside, and the laugh did not please Kitty. The next moment the boy returned, grinning more repulsively than ever, and said: “Walk this way.”

She walked that way, past the boy; the door fell to behind her, and she found herself in a cloud of tobacco smoke, compressed into a small room—a very dusty, untidy room—in which stood three young men. Their faces were grave and serious, but Kate could


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 not forget that one of them had laughed, and laughed like that. Her chin went up about a quarter of an inch further.

“I am sorry to have disturbed you,” she said severely. “I wanted to see—to see the lady who signs herself Aunt Kate.”

There was a moment of silence which seemed almost breathless. Two of the young men exchanged a glance, but though Kitty perceived it to be significant, she could not interpret its meaning. Then one of the three turned to gaze out of the window at the blackened glass roof of the printing office below. Kitty felt certain he was concealing a smile; and the second hurriedly arranged a bundle of papers beside him.

The third young man spoke, and Kitty liked the gentle drawl, the peculiar enunciation. The poor girl, in her Streatham seclusion, had never before heard the “Oxford voice.”

“I am very sorry,” he said, “but ‘Aunt Kate’ is not here to-day. Perhaps—is there anything I could do?”

“No, thank you,” said Kitty, wishing herself miles away; the tobacco smoke choked her, the backs of the two other men seemed an outrage. She turned away with a haughty bow, and went down the grimy stairs full


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 of fury. She could have slapped herself. How could she have been such a fool as to come there? There were feet coming down the stair behind her—she quickened her pace. The feet came more quickly. She stopped on the landing and turned with an odd feeling of being at bay. It was the fair-haired young man with the Oxford voice.

“I am so very sorry,” he said gently, “but I did not know. I did not expect to see—I mean, I did not know who you were. And we had all been smoking—I am so sorry,” he said again, rather lamely.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Kitty, more shyly than she had ever spoken in her life. She liked his eyes and his voice as much as she loathed the expressive backs of his two companions.

“If you could come again: perhaps Aunt Kate will be here on Thursday. I know she will be sorry to miss you,” the young man went on.

“I think I won’t call again, thank you,” said Kitty. “I—I’ll write, thank you; it is all right. I oughtn’t to have come. Good-bye.”

There was nothing for it but to stand


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 back and let her pass. The editor went back slowly to his room. His friends had relighted their pipes.

“Appeased the outraged goddess?” asked one of them.

“Good old Aunt Kate!” said the other.

“Shut up, Sellars!” said the editor, frowning.

“Now, which of your correspondents is it?” pondered Sellars, ruffling the bundle of papers in his hand. “Is it ‘Wild Woodbine,’ who wants to know what will make her hands white? Chilcott, did you see her hands? Oh no, of course—bien chaussée, bien gantée. All brown, too. Is it ‘Sylph’?—no; she wants a pattern for a Zouave. What is a Zouave, if you please, Mr Editor?”

“Dry up!” said the editor, but Sellars was busy with the papers.

“Eureka! I know her. She’s ‘Nut-brown Maid’—here’s the letter—wants to know if she may talk to ‘a young gentleman she has not been properly introduced to’—spells it ‘interoduced,’ too”

The editor snatched the papers out of the other’s hands.

“Now clear out,” said he; “I’m busy.”

“Am I dreaming?” said Sellars pensively; “


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 or is this the editor who invited us to collaborate with him in his ‘Answers to Correspondents’?”

“I am the editor who will kick you down the entire five flights if he is driven to it. You won’t drive him, will you?”

The two laughed, but they took up their hats and went; Sellars put his head round the door for a last word.

“What price love at first sight?” said he, and the office ruler dented the door as he disappeared round it. The editor, left alone, sat down in his chair and looked helplessly round him.

“Well!” he said musingly, “well, well, well, well!” Then after a long silence he took up his pen and began the “Answers to Correspondents.”

“Dieu-donnée.—Your hair is a very nice colour. I should not advise Aureoline.

“Shy Fairy.—By all means consult your mother. Heliotrope would suit your complexion, if it is, as you say, of a brilliant fairness.

“Contadina.—No, I should not advise scarlet velvet with the pale blue. Try myrtle green.”

Presently he threw down the pen. “I


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 suppose I shall never see her again,” he said, and he actually sighed.

But he did see her again. For on her way home poor Kitty’s imagination suddenly spread its wings and alighted accurately on the truth; she formed a sufficiently vivid picture of what had happened in the office after she left. She knew that those other young men—“the pigs,” she called them to herself—had speculated as to whether she was “Little One,” who wanted to make her hair curl, and to know whether short waists would be worn; or “Moss Rose,” who was anxious about her complexion, and the proper way to treat a jibbing sweetheart. So that very night she wrote a note to Aunt Kate, but she did not sign it “Sweet Nancy” in the old manner, and she did not disguise her hand. She signed it George Thompson, in inverted commas, and she said that she would call on Thursday.

And on Thursday she called. And was shown into the editor’s room at once.

The editor rose to greet her.

“Aunt Kate is not here,” said he hurriedly; “but if you can spare a few moments I should like to talk to you about business; I did not know the other day that you were


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 the author of that charming story ‘Evelyn’s Error.’”

The room was clear of tobacco smoke—the editor was alone—some red roses lay on the table. Kitty caught herself wondering for whom he had bought them. The chair he offered her was carefully dusted. She took it—and he began to talk about her story; criticising, praising, blaming, and that so skilfully that criticism seemed a subtle flattery, and the very blame conveyed a compliment. Then he asked for more stories. And a new heaven and a new earth seemed to unroll before the girl’s eyes. If she could only write—and succeed—and

“Will you come again?” he said at last. “Aunt Kate”

“Oh,” she said, with eyes shining softly, “it doesn’t matter about Aunt Kate now! I shall be so busy trying to write stories.”

“The fact is” said the editor slowly, racking his brains for a reason that should bring her to the office again—“the fact is—I am Aunt Kate.”

Kitty sprang to her feet. Her face flamed scarlet. She stood silent a moment. Then: “You?” she cried. “Oh, it’s not fair—it’s mean—it’s shameful! Oh—how could you!


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 And girls write to you—and they think it’s a woman—and they tell you about their troubles. It’s horrible! It’s underhand—it’s abominable! I hate you for it. Every one ought to know. I shall write to the papers.”

“Please, please,” said the editor hurriedly and humbly—“it’s not my fault. It is a lady who does it generally, but she had to go away—and I couldn’t get any one else to do it. And I didn’t see—till after you’d been the other day—that it wasn’t fair. And I was going to ask if you would do it—the correspondence, I mean—just for this week. I wish you would!”

“Could I?” she said doubtfully.

“Of course you could! And if you’d bring the copy on Monday—about two columns, you know—we could go through it together and”

“Well, I’ll try,” said Kitty abruptly, reaching out for the sheaf of letters which he was gathering together.

And now who was happier than Kitty, seated behind her locked bedroom door advising “Dieu-donnée” and “Shy Fairy” and “Contadina” out of the unfathomable depths of her girlish inexperience. Her advice looked wonderfully practical, though,


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 in print, she thought, as with a thrill of pride and joy she corrected the first proofs. And she wrote stories, too, and they, too, were printed. It was indeed a bright and beautiful world. Aunt Eliza stayed away for five glorious weeks. Kitty, with an enthralling sense of reckless wickedness, gave up her useless music lessons, and in going three times a week to the office experienced a glowing consciousness of the joy and dignity of honest toil.

The editor, by the way, during these five weeks fell in love with Kitty, exactly as he had known he would do when first he saw her grey eyes. Kitty had never been so happy in all her life. The child honestly believed hers to be the happiness that comes from congenial work. And her editor was so clever and so kind! No one ever smoked in the office now, and there were always roses. And Kitty took them home with her, so that now there was no need to wonder for whom he had bought them.

Then came the inevitable hour. He met her one day with a clouded face and a letter in his hand.

“It’s all over,” he said; “the real original old Aunt Kate is coming back. She’s the


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 dearest old thing, so kind and jolly—but—but—but—whatever shall we do?”

“I can still write stories, I suppose,” said Kitty, but she realised with a gasp that congenial toil would not be quite, quite the same without congenial companionship.

“Yes,” said he, picking up the bunch of red roses, “but—here are your flowers—don’t you know yet that I can’t possibly do without you? In a few months I’m to have the editorship of a new weekly, a much better berth than this. If only you would”

“Write the correspondence?” said Kitty, brightening; “of course I will. I don’t know what I should do without”

“I wish,” he interrupted, “that I could think it was me you couldn’t do without.” Her pretty eyes met his over the red roses, and he caught her hands with the flowers in them. “Is it? Oh, say you can’t do without me either. Say it, say it!”

“I—I—don’t want to do without you,” said Kitty at last. He was holding her hands fast, and she was trying, not very earnestly, perhaps, to pull them away. The pair made a pretty picture.


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“Oh, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!” he said softly, and then the door opened, and suddenly, without the least warning, a middle-aged lady became a spectator of the little tableau. The newcomer wore a mantle with beads on it, a black bonnet wherein nodded a violet flower—and beads and flower and bonnet were absolutely familiar to each of the astonished ones now standing consciously with the breadth of the office between them. For in that middle-aged lady the editor recognised Aunt Kate, the pleasant, sensible, companionable woman who for years had written those sympathetic “Answers to Correspondents” in the Girls’ Very Own Friend. And at the same moment Kitty recognised, beyond all possibility of doubt, Aunt Eliza—her own grim, harsh, uncongenial Aunt Eliza.

Kitty cowered—in her frightened soul she cowered. But her little figure drew itself up, and the point of her chin rose a quarter of an inch.

“Aunt Eliza,” she said firmly, “I know you will”

“Your Aunt Eliza, Kitty?” cried the editor.

“‘Kitty’?” said the aunt.


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And now the situation hung all too nicely balanced on the extreme edge of the absolutely impossible. Would this middle-aged lady—an aunt beyond doubt—an aunt who so long had played a double rôle, assume, now that one rôle must be chosen, the part of Aunt Eliza the Terrible or of Aunt Kate the Kind? The aunt was dumb. Kitty was dumb. But the editor had his wits about him, and Kate, though shaken, was not absolutely paralysed.

“It’s almost too good to be true,” he said, “that my Aunt Kate is really your Aunt Eliza. Aunt Kate, Kitty and I have just decided that we can’t do without each other. I am so glad that you are the first to wish us joy.”

At his words all the “Kate” in the aunt rose triumphant, trampling down the “Eliza.”

“My dear boy,” she said—and she said it in a voice which Kitty had never heard before—the sound of that voice drew Kitty like a magnet. She did the only possible thing—she put her arms timidly round her aunt’s neck and whispered: “Oh, don’t be Aunt Eliza any more, be Aunt Kate!”

It was Aunt Kate’s arms undoubtedly that


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 went round the girl. Certainly not Aunt Eliza’s.

“I will take a walk down Fleet Street,” said the editor discreetly.

Then there were explanations in the office.

“But why,” said Kitty, when all the questions had been asked and answered, “why were you Aunt Eliza to me, and Aunt Kate to him?”

“My dear, one must spoil somebody, and I was determined not to spoil you; I wanted to save you. All my life was ruined because I was a spoiled child—and because I tried to write. I had such dreams, such ambitions—just like yours, you silly child! But then I was never clever—perhaps you may be—and it all ended in my losing my lover. He married a nice, quiet, domestic girl, and I never made name or fame at all—I never got anything taken but fashion articles—and ‘Answers to Correspondents.’ Now, that’s the whole tale. Don’t mention it again.”

“But you did love me, even when”

“Of course I did,” said Aunt Kate in the testy tones of Aunt Eliza; “or why should I have bothered at all about whether you were going to be happy or not? Now, Kitty, you’re not to expect me to gush. I’ve


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 forgotten how to be sentimental except on paper.”

“I don’t want to be sentimental,” said Kitty, a little injured, “neither does”

Here the editor came in.

“You don’t want to be sentimental either,” Kitty went on; “do you—Mr Editor?”

The editor looked a little doubtful.

“I want to be happy, at any rate,” said he, “and I mean to be.”

“And he can’t be happy unless you smile on him. Smile on him, Auntie!” cried a new, radiant Kitty, to whom aunts no longer presented any terrors. “Say ‘Bless you, my children!’ Auntie—do!”

“Get along with your nonsense!” said Aunt Eliza. Or was it Aunt Kate?


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 were poor, not with the desperate poverty that has to look on both sides of a penny, but with the decent bearable poverty that must look at a shilling with attention, and with respect at half-a-crown. There was money for the necessities of life, the mother said, but no money to waste. This was what she always tried to say when Maisie came in with rainbow representations of the glories of local “sales” piteous pictures of beautiful things going almost for nothing—things not absolutely needed, but which would “come in useful.” Maisie’s dress was never allowed those touches of cheap finery which would have made it characteristic of her. Her clothes were good, and she had to patch and mend and contrive so much that sometimes it seemed to her as though all her life was going by in the effort to achieve, by a


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 distasteful process, a result which she abhorred. For her artistic sense was too weak to show her how the bright, soft freshness of her tints gained by contrast with the dull greys and browns and drabs that were her mother’s choice—good wearing colours, from which the pink and white of her face rose triumphantly, like a beautiful flower out of a rough calyx.

The house was like Maisie, in that it never seemed to have anything new—none of those bright, picturesque cushions and screens and Japaneseries which she adored through the plate-glass windows of the big local draper. The curtains were of old damask, faded but rich; the furniture was mahogany, old and solid; the carpets were Turkey and Aubusson—patched and darned this last, but still beautiful. Maisie knew all about old oak—she had read her Home Hints and her Gentlewoman’s Guide—but she had no idea that mahogany could be fashionable. None of the photographs of the drawing-rooms of celebrities in her favourite papers were anything like the little sitting-room where her mother sat knitting by the hearth, surrounded by the relics of a house that had been handsome in the ’sixties, when it was her girlhood’s


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 home. Maisie hated it all: the chairs covered in Berlin-wool needlework, the dark, polished surfaces of the tables and bureaux, the tinkling lustres of Bohemian glass, the shining brass trivet on which the toast kept itself warm, the crude colours of the tea-service, the smell of eau-de-Cologne mingling with the faint scent of beeswax and cedar-wood. She would have liked to change the old water-colours in their rubbed gilt frames for dark-mounted autotypes. How should she know that those hideous pigs were Morlands, and that the cow picture was a David Cox. She would have liked Japanese blue transfers instead of the gold-and-white china—old Bristol, by the way, but Maisie knew nothing of Bristol. The regular, sober orderliness of the house chafed and fretted her; the recurrent duties, all dull; the few guests who came to tea. Decent poverty cannot give dinner parties or dances. She visited her school friends, and when she came home again it seemed to her sometimes as though the atmosphere of the place would choke her.

“I want to go out and earn my own living,” she said to her cousin Edward one Sunday afternoon when her mother was resting and he and she were roasting chestnuts on the


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 bars of the dining-room fire. “I’m simply useless here.”

Edward was a second cousin. To him the little house was the ideal home, just as Maisie was—well, not, perhaps, the ideal girl, but the only girl in the world, which comes to much the same thing. But he never told her so: he dared not risk losing the cousin’s place and missing for ever the lover’s.

So, in his anxiety lest she should know how much he cared, he scolded her a good deal. But he took her to picture galleries and to matinées, and softened her life in a hundred ways that she never noticed. He was only “Poor old Edward,” and he knew it.

“How can you?” he said. “Why, what on earth would Aunt do without you? Here, have this one—it’s a beauty.”

“I ought to have been taught a trade, like other poor girls,” she went on, waving away the roasted chestnut. “Lots of the girls I was at school with are earning as much as a pound a week now—typewriting or painting birthday cards, and some of them are in the Post Office—and I do nothing but drudge away at home. It’s too bad.”

Edward would have given a decent sum at that moment to be inspired with exactly the


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 right thing to say. As it was he looked at her helplessly.

“I don’t understand, I’m afraid,” said he.

“You never do,” she answered crossly. There was a silence in which she felt the growth of a need to justify herself—to herself as well as to him. “Why, don’t you see,” she urged, “it’s my plain duty to go out and earn something. Why, we’re as poor as ever we can be—I haven’t any pocket-money hardly—I can’t even buy presents for people. I have to make presents out of odds and ends of old things, instead of buying them, like other girls.”

“I think you make awfully pretty things,” he said; “much prettier than any one can buy.”

“You’re thinking of that handkerchief-case I gave Aunt Emma at Christmas. Why, you silly, it was only a bit of one of mother’s old dresses. I do wish you’d talk to mother about it. I might go out as companion or something.”

The word came before the thought, but the thought was brought by the word and the thought stayed.

That very evening Maisie began to lay siege to her mother’s desired consent.


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She put her arguments very neatly, so neatly that it was hard for the mother to oppose them without being betrayed into an attitude that would seem grossly selfish.

She sat looking into the fire, thinking of all the little, unceasing sacrifices that had been her life ever since Maisie had been hers—even the giving up of that treasured silk, her wedding dress, last Christmas, because Maisie wanted something pretty to make Christmas presents out of. She remembered it all; and now this new great sacrifice was called for. She had given up to Maisie everything but her taste in dress, and now it seemed that she was desired to give up even Maisie herself. But the other sacrifices had been for Maisie’s good or for her pleasure. Would this one be for either?

She saw her little girl alone among strangers, snubbed, looked down upon, a sort of upper servant with none of a servant’s privileges; she nerved herself to what was always to her an almost unbearable effort. Her heart was beating and her hands trembling as she said: “My dear, it’s quite impossible; I couldn’t possibly allow it.”

“I must say I don’t see why,” said Maisie, with tears in her voice.


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Her mother dropped the mass of fleecy white wool and the clinking knitting needles and grasped the arms of her chair intensely. Her eyes behind the spectacles clouded with tears. It seemed to her that her child should surely understand the agony it was to her mother to refuse her anything.

“I could earn money for you—it’s not myself I’m thinking about,” the girl went on; the half-lie came out quite without her conscious volition. “I wish you didn’t always think I do everything for selfish reasons.”

“I don’t, my dear,” said the mother feebly.

“I’m sure it’s my duty,” Maisie went on, with more tears than ever in her voice. “I’m eighteen, and I ought to be earning something, instead of being a burden to you.”

The mother looked hopelessly into the fire. She had always tried to explain things to Maisie; how was it that Maisie never understood?

“I’m sure,” said Maisie, echoing her mother’s thought, “I always try to tell you how I think about things, and you never seem to understand. Of course, I won’t go if you wish it, but I do think”

She left the room in tears, and the mother


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 remained to torment herself with the eternal questions, What had she done wrong? Why was Maisie not contented? What could she do to please her? Would nothing please her but the things that were not for her good—smart clothes, change, novelty? How could she bear her life if Maisie was not pleased?

She went down to supper shivering with misery and apprehension. What a meal it would be with Maisie cold and aloof, polite and indifferent! But Maisie was cheerful, gay almost, and her mother felt a passion of gratitude to her daughter for not being sulky or unapproachable. Maisie, however, was only stepping back to jump the better.

The same scene, with intenser variations, was played about twice a week till the girl got her way, as she always did in the end, except in the matter of cheap finery. Taste in dress was as vital to the mother as her religion. Then, through the influence of an old governess of her mother’s, Maisie got her wish. She was to go as companion to an old lady, the mother of Lady Yalding, and she was to live at Yalding Towers. Here was splendour—here would be life, incident, opportunity! For her reading had sometimes strayed from Home Hints to the


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 Family Herald, and she knew exactly what are the chances of romance to a humble companion in the family of a lady of title.

And now Maisie’s mother gave way to her, finally and completely, even on the question of dress. The old wardrobe was ransacked to find materials to fit her out with clothes for her new venture. It was a beautiful time for Maisie. New things, and old things made to look as good as new, or better. It was like having a trousseau. The mother lavished on her child every inch of the old lace, every one of the treasured trinkets—even the little old locket that had been the dead husband’s first love-gift.

And Maisie, in the flutter of her excitement and anticipation, was loving and tender and charming, and the mother had her reward.

Edward opposed a stolid and stony disapproval to all the new enthusiasm. He said little because he feared to say too much.

“Poor little Maisie!” he said. “You’ll soon find out that you didn’t know when you were well off.”

“Edward, I hate you,” said Maisie, and she thought she did.

But when all the beautiful new clothes were packed and her cab was at the door,


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 some sense of what she was leaving did come to the girl, and she flung her arms round her mother in an embrace such as she had never given in her life.

“I don’t want to go,” she cried. “Mummy darling, I’ve been a little beast about it. I won’t go if you say you’d rather not. Shall I send the cab away? I will if you say so, my own dear old Mummy!”

Maisie’s mother was not a very wise woman, but she was not fool enough to trust this new softness.

“No, no, dearest,” she said; “go and try your own way. God bless you, my darling! You’ll miss the train if you stay. God bless you, my darling!”

And Maisie went away crying hard through the new veil with the black velvet spots on it; as for the mother—but she was elderly, and plain, and foolishly fond, and her emotions can have but little interest for the readers of romances.

And now Maisie, for the first time, knew the meaning of home. And before she had been at Yalding a week she had learned to analyse home and to give names to its constituents: love, interest, sympathy, liberty—these were some.


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At Yalding Towers Maisie was nothing to any one. No one knew or cared one single little bit of a straw whether she was unhappy or no. Her time was filled, and overfilled, by the attentions exacted by an old, eccentric, and very disagreeable lady. When she put on, for the first evening, the least pretty of the pretty dresses she had brought with her, the old lady looked at her with a disapproval almost rising to repulsion, and said: “I expect you to wear black; and a linen collar and cuffs.”

So another black dress had to be ordered from home, and all the pretty, dainty things lay creasing themselves with disuse in the ample drawers and cupboards of her vast, dreary bedroom.

Her employer was exacting and irritable. When on the third day Maisie broke into tears under the constant flood of nagging, the old lady told her to go away and not to come back till she could control her temper.

“I’ll come back when you send for me, and not before, you hateful old thing!” said Maisie to herself.

And she sat down in her fireless bedroom and wrote a long letter to her mother, saying how happy she felt, and how kind every one


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 was, and what a lovely and altogether desirable place was Yalding Towers. Who shall say whether pride or love, or both, dictated that letter?

When her employer did send for her, it was to tell her, very sharply, that one more such exhibition of sullenness would cost her her situation. So she had to learn to school herself. And she did it. But the learning was hard, very hard, and in the learning she grew thinner, and some of the pretty pink in her cheeks faded away.

Lady Yalding, when she swept in, in beautiful dream-dresses, always spoke to the companion quite kindly and nicely and pleasantly, but there were none of those invitations to come into the drawing-room after dinner which the Family Herald had led her to expect. Lady Yalding was always charming to every one, and Maisie tortured herself with the thought that it was only because she had no opportunity to explain herself that Lady Yalding failed to see how very much out of the common she was. She read Ruskin industriously, and once she left her own book of Browning selections that Edward had given her in the conservatory. She imagined Lady Yalding returning it to


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 her with, “So, are you fond of poetry?” or, “It’s delightful to find that you are a lover of Browning!” But the book was brought back to her by a footman, and the old lady lectured her for leaving her rubbish littering about.

But towards Christmas a change came. Maisie had hoped—more intensely than she had ever in her life hoped for anything—for a few days’ grace, for a sight of her mother, and the mahogany, and the damask curtains, and—yes—of Edward. But the old lady, who really was exceptionally horrid, wondered how she could ask for a holiday when she had only been in her situation six weeks.

Then the old lady went off at half an hour’s notice to spend Christmas with her other daughter—Maisie would have suspected a “row” if Lady Yalding had been a shade less charming—and the girl was left. Thus it happened that Lord Yalding’s brother lounged into Lady Yalding’s room one day, and said: “Who’s the piteous black mouse you’ve tamed?”

“I beg your pardon, Jim?” said Lady Yalding.

“The crushed apple-blossom in a black


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 frock—one meets her about the corridors. Gloomy sight. Chestnut hair. Princess-in-exile sort of look.”

“Oh, that! It’s mother’s companion.”

“Poor little devil!” said the Honourable James. “What does she do now the cat’s away? I beg your pardon—my mind was running on mice.”

“Do? I don’t know,” said Lady Yalding a little guiltily. “She’s a good, quiet little thing—literary tastes, reads Browning, and all that sort of rot. She’s all right.”

“Why don’t you give her a show? She’d take the shine out of some of the girls here if you had her dressed.”

“My dear Jim,” Lady Yalding said, “she’s all right as she is. What’s the good of turning the child’s head and giving her notions out of her proper station?”

“If I were that child I’d like to have a little bit of a fling just for once. The poor little rat looks starved, as though it hadn’t laughed for a year. Then it’s Christmas—peace and goodwill, and all that, don’t you know. If I were you I’d ask her down a bit”

Lady Yalding thought—a thing she rarely did.


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“Well,” she said, “it is pretty slow for her, I suppose. I’ll send her home to her people.”

“On Christmas Eve? Fog and frost, and the trains all anyhow? Fanny, Fanny!”

“Oh, very well. We’ll have her down, and go the whole hog. Only don’t make a fool of the child, Jim; she’s a good little thing.”

And that was how the dream-dressed Lady Yalding came to sweep into the old lady’s sitting-room—it was as full of mahogany, by the way, as Maisie’s home in Lewisham—and spoke so kindly of Maisie’s loneliness, that the girl could have fallen down and worshipped at her Paris shoes.

When Maisie, in the figured lavender satin that had been her mother’s, swept across the great hall on the arm of the Honourable James, she felt that this indeed was life. Here was the great world with its infinite possibilities.

“How did you get on?” his sister-in-law asked him later.

“Oh, it’s quite a decent sort of little mouse,” he said. “Wants to make sure you see how cultivated it is, quotes poetry—what?—and talks about art. It’s a little


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 touching and all that to see how busy it is putting all its poor little stock in the tiny shop-window.”

Maisie, alone in her room, was walking up and down, trailing the lavender satin, recalling with kindled eyes and red-rose cheeks every word, every look of her cavalier. How kindly he had spoken, yet how deferentially; how he had looked, how he had smiled! At dinner she supposed it was his business to talk to her. But afterwards, when she was sitting, a little forlornly and apart from the noisy chatter of the bright-plumaged house-party, how he had come straight over to her directly the gentlemen came into the drawing-room! And she felt that she had not been wanting to herself on so great an occasion.

“I know I talked well. I’m certain he saw directly that I wasn’t a silly idiot.”

She lay long awake, and, as the men trooped up the stairs, she tried to fancy that she could already distinguish his footsteps.

The letter she wrote to her mother next day was, compared to those other lying letters, as a lit chandelier to a stable-lantern. And the mother knew the difference.

“Poor darling!” she thought. “She must


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 have been very miserable all this time. But she’s happy now, God bless her!”

By the week’s end, every thought, every dream, every hope of Maisie’s life was centred in the Honourable James; her tenderness, her ambition turned towards him as flowers to the sun.

And her happiness lighted a thousand little candles all around her. No one could see the candles, of course, but every one saw the radiant illumination of her beauty. And the other men of the house-party saw it too. Even Lord Yalding distinguished her by asking whether she had read some horrid book about earthworms.

“You’re making a fool of that girl, Jim,” said Lady Yalding. “I really think it’s too bad.”

“My good Fanny, don’t be an adorable idiot! I’m only trying to give the poor little duffer a good time. There’s nothing else to do. The other girls really are—now, you know they are, Fanny—between ourselves”

“They’re all duty people, of course,” she said. “Well, only do be careful.”

He was careful. He subdued his impulses to tenderness and gentle raillery. He talked


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 seriously to little Miss Mouse, and presently he found that she was seriously talking to him—telling him, for instance, how she wrote poetry, and how she longed to show it to some one and ask whether it really was so bad as she sometimes feared.

What could he do but beg her to show it to him? But there he pulled himself up short.

“There’s skating to-morrow. We’re going to drive over to Dansent. Would you like to come?”

Her grey eyes looked up quickly, and the long lashes drooped over them. She had read of that trick in a book, and for the life of him he could not help knowing it. Her answer to his question came from a book, too, though it also came from her heart.

“Ah,” she said, “you know!”

Then the Honourable James was honestly frightened. Next day he had a telegram, and departed abruptly. And as abruptly the old lady returned.

And now Maisie had a secret joy to feed on—a manna to sustain her in the wilderness of her tiresome life. She thought of him. He loved her; she was certain of it.


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 Miss Mouse could imagine no reason but love for the kindness he had shown her. He had gone away without a word, but that was for some good reason. Probably he had gone to confess to his mother how he had given his whole heart to a penniless orphan—well, she was half an orphan, anyway. But the days slipped by and he did not come back. All that bright time at Christmas had faded like a picture from a magic-lantern when the slide is covered. Lady Yalding was quite nice and kind, but she left Maisie to the work Maisie was paid for.

Maisie’s mother perceived, through Maisie’s studied accounts of her happiness, more than a glimpse of the reality.

Then, at last, when the days grew unbearable, Maisie wrote to him, a prim little letter with agitated heart-beats between the lines, where he, being no fool, did not fail to find them. Yet he had to answer the letter. He did it briefly.

“,” he wrote, “I have received your letter and the little poem, which is very nice. Poems about Spring are the pleasantest kind, I think.—With kind regards, I am yours sincerely.”


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 It was not, as you may see, worth the heartache with which Maisie watched for it.

It was when she wrote again, and sent more verses, that he decided he must not mince matters.

“,” was his second letter, “it is good of you to write again. Now I do hope you won’t be offended with me for what I am going to say. I am so much older than you, you know, and I know you are alone at Yalding, with no one to advise you, so it must be my duty to do it, though, for my own sake, I should, of course, like to advise you quite differently. It was a great pleasure to me to hear from you, but I must not allow myself that pleasure again, even if you were willing to give it to me. It would not be fair to you to let you write any more to a man who is not related to you. Try to forgive me for being unselfish and acting in your interests and not my own.”}}

And again, with kind regards, he was hers sincerely.

“Poor, pretty little duffer!” he said, as he closed the envelope. “But it’s not real. Don’t I know the sort of thing? She’s simply bored to death down there. And it’s all my fault, anyhow. By Jove! I’ll


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 never try to do any one a good turn again as long as I live. Fanny was perfectly right.”

The letter came by the second post, when Maisie was engaged in drearily reading her employer to sleep after lunch.

It lay on her lap, but she kept her eyes from it and read on intelligibly if not with expression.

The old lady dozed.

Maisie opened her letter. And before she could even have had time to put up a hand to save herself, her Spanish castle was tumbling about her ears. A curious giddy feeling seemed to catch at the back of her neck, the room gave a sickening half-turn. She caught at her self-control.

“Not here. I mustn’t faint here. Not with his letter in my hand.”

She got out of the room somehow, and somehow she got into hat and jacket and boots, put her quarter’s salary in her purse, and walked out of the front door and straight down the great drive that she had come up four months ago with such bright hopes. She went to the station, and she took a train, and she never stopped nor stayed till she was at home again. She pushed past the frightened maid, and, pale and shabby, with


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 black-ringed eyes and dusty black gown, she burst into her mother’s room. The scent of eau-de-Cologne and bees’-wax and buttered toast met her, and it was as the perfume of Paradise. Edward was there—but she was in no mood to bother about Edward. She threw herself on her knees and buried her face in the knitting on her mother’s lap, and felt thin arms go round her.

“It’s nothing. I’m tired of it all. I’ve come home,” was all she said. But presently she reached out a hand to Edward, and he took it and held it, as it were, absently, and the three sat by the fire and spoke little and were content.

To her dying day Maisie will never forget the sense of peace, of enfolding care, and love unchanging and unchangeable that came to her as she woke next morning to find her mother standing by her bed with a cup of tea in her hands.

“Oh, Mummy darling,” she cried, throwing her arms round her mother and nearly upsetting the tea, “I haven’t had a single drop of in-bed tea all the time I’ve been away!”

That was all she found words to tell her mother. Later there was Edward, and she


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 told him most things, but, I imagine, not all. But the mother was content without spoken confidences. She knew that Maisie had suffered, and that now she had her little girl again, to wrap warm in her love as before. This was happiness enough.

This story, I know, is instructive enough for a Sunday School prize. It ought to be tagged at the end with a Moral. I can’t help it: it is true. Of course, it is not what usually happens. Many companions, no doubt, marry Honourable James’s, or even Dukes, and are never at all glad to get home to their mothers and their Edwards. But Maisie was different. She feels now a sort of grateful tenderness for Yalding Towers, because, but for the dream she dreamed there she might never have really awakened—never have known fully and without mistake what it was in life that she truly cared for. And such knowledge is half the secret of happiness. That, by the way, is really the moral of this story.


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 “; married by the 30th of June, introduce my wife to the tenants on Christmas Eve, or no fortune. That was my uncle’s last and worst joke; he was reputed a funny man in his time. The alternatives are pretty ghastly either way.”

“Doesn’t that rather depend?” Sylvia queried, with a swift blue glance from under veiling lashes.

Michael answered her with a look, the male counterpart of her own, from dark Devon eyes, the upper lid arched in a perfect semicircle over pure grey. “Yes; but my wife must have a hundred a year of her own in Consols, to protect me from fortune-hunters—lone, lorn lamb that I am!”

Sylvia emphasised the sigh with which she admitted her indigence. Her pretty eyebrows owned plaintively that she, a struggling artist, had no claim against the nation.


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“Mary has just a hundred a year,” she said, her voice low-toned as she looked across the room to where, demure in braided locks and grey camlet, her companion sat knitting.

“I daresay,” Michael answered indifferently, following her eyes’ flight and her tone’s low pitch; “but she’s young. I shall advertise for an elderly housekeeper. And qui vivra verra.”

The words, lightly cast on the thin soil of a foolish word-play with a pretty woman, bore fruit.

A week later Michael Wood stood aghast before a tray heaped with letters, answers to his advertisement:

“Housekeeper wanted. Must be middle-aged. The older the better. Salary, £500 a year.”

Not much, he had thought, £500 a year—if, by paying it, he might win a wife who would entitle him to an annual £15,000, whose declining years he might kindly cheer, and whose death would set him free to marry a wife whom he could love. His fancy drifted pleasantly towards Sylvia.

Michael was a lazy man, who bristled with business instincts. He telephoned to the nearest “typewriters’ association” for a


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 secretary, and to this young woman he committed the charge of answering the letters which his advertisement had drawn forth. The answer was to be the same to all:

“Call at 17 Hare Court, Temple, between 11 and 1.”

And the dates fixed for such calling were arranged to allow about fifty interviews daily for the next week or two, for Michael was a bold man as well as a lazy one. The next morning, faultlessly dressed, with carnations in his buttonhole, he composed himself in his pleasant oak-furnished room to await his first batch of callers.

They came. And Michael, strong in his unswerving determination not to forfeit his chance of inheriting the £15,000 a year left him under his mad uncle’s mad will, saw them all, one after the other.

But he did not like any of them. They were old; that he did not mind—it was, indeed, of the essence of the contract. But they were frowsy, too, with reticules of scarred brownish leather, and mangy fur trimmings, worn fringes, and beaded mantles, whence time and poverty had clawed handfuls of the bright beads. Each of them was,


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 as a wife, even as a wife in name, impossible. The task of rejection was softened to his hand by the fact that not one of them could boast the necessary hundred a year in Consols.

The interviews over, Michael, his spirit crushed by the spectacle of so many women anxious to find a refuge at an age when their children and grandchildren should, in their own homes, have been rising up to call them blessed, went to lounge a restorative hour in Sylvia’s bright little studio, and laugh with her over his dilemma. He would have liked to sigh with her, too, but the pathos of the homeless old women escaped her. She saw only the humour of the situation.

“There’s no harm done, if it amuses you,” she said, “but you’ll never marry an old woman.”

“Fifteen thousand pounds a year,” said Michael softly.

Next day more poor old ladies, all eager, anxious, ineligible.

It was on the third day that the old lady in dove-colour came in, sweet as a pressed flower in an old love-letter, dainty as a pigeon in spring. Her white hair, the white lace of her collar, the black lace of her mantle, her beautiful little hands in their perfect,


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 dove-coloured gloves, all appealed irresistibly to Michael’s æsthetic sense.

“What an ideal housekeeper!” he said to himself, as he placed a chair for her. And then an odd thrill of discomfort and shame shot through him. This delicate, dainty old lady—he was to insult her by a form of marriage, and then to live near her, waiting for her death? No; it was impossible—the whole thing was impossible. He found himself in the middle of a sentence.

“And so I fear I am already suited.”

The old lady raised eyebrows as delicate as Sylvia’s own.

“Hardly, I think,” she said, “since your servant admitted me to an interview with you. May I ask you one or two questions before you finally decide against me?”

The voice was low and soft—the voice men loved in the early sixties, before the shrill shriek became the voice of fashionable ladies.

“Certainly,” Michael said. He could hardly say less, and in the tumult of embarrassment that had swept over him, he could not for his life have said more.

The old lady went on. “I am competent to manage a house. I can read aloud fairly well. I am a good nurse in case of sickness;


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 and I am accustomed to entertain. But I gather from the amount of the salary offered that some other duties would be required of me?”

“That’s clever of her, too,” Michael thought; “none of the others saw that.”

He bowed.

“Would you enlighten me,” she went on, “as to the nature of the services you would require?”

“Ah—yes—of course,” he said glibly, and then stopped short.

“From your hesitation,” said the old lady, with unimpaired self-possession, “I gather that the matter involves an explanation of some delicacy, or else—pardon the egotism—that my appearance is personally unpleasing to you.”

“No—oh, no,” Michael said very eagerly; “on the contrary, if I may say so, it is just because you are so—so—exactly my ideal of an old lady, that I feel I can’t go on with the business; and that’s put stupidly, so that it sounds like an insult. Please forgive me.”

She looked him straight in the eyes through her gold-rimmed spectacles.

“You see, I am old enough to be your


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 grandmother,” she said. “Why not tell me the truth?”

And, to his horror and astonishment, he told it.

“And that’s what I meant to do,” he ended. “It was a mad idea, and I see now that if I do it at all I must marry some one who is not—who is not like you. You have made me ashamed of myself.”

A spot of pink colour glowed in her faded cheek. The old lady put up her gloved hand and touched her cheek, as if it burned. She got up and walked to the window, and stood there, looking out.

“If you are going to do it,” she said in a voice that was hardly audible, “I have been used to live among beautiful surroundings—I should like to end my days among them. I do not come of a long-lived family. You would not have long to wait for your freedom and your second wife.”

Never in all his days had Michael known so sharp an agony of embarrassment.

“When must you be married,” the old lady went on calmly, “to ensure your fortunes and estates?”

“In about a month.”

“Well, Mr Wood, I make you a formal


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 offer of marriage, and for reference I can give you my banker and my solicitor”

Her voice was calm; it was his voice that trembled as he answered: “You are too good. I can’t see that it would be fair to you. May I think about it till to-morrow?”

The contrast between the old lady’s dainty correctness of attire and speech, and the extraordinary unconventionality of her proposal, made Michael’s brain reel. She turned from the window, again looked him fairly in the eyes, and said: “You will not find me unconventional in other matters. This is purely an affair of business, and I approach it in a business spirit. You would be giving a home to one who wants it, and I should be helping you to what you need still more. I have never been married. I never wished to marry; and when I am dead Don’t look so horror-stricken. I should not die any sooner because you—you had married me. My name is Thrale—Frances Thrale. That is my card that you have been pulling to pieces while you have been talking to me. Shall I come and see you again at this time to-morrow? It is not a subject on which I should wish either to write or to receive letters.”


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He could only acquiesce. At the door the old lady turned.

“If you think I look so old as to make your marriage too absurd,” she said—and now, for the first time, her voice trembled—“I could dye my hair.”

“Oh no,” Michael said, “your hair is beautiful. Good-bye, and thank you.”

As the old lady went down the dusty Temple stairs she stamped a small foot angrily on the worn oak.

“Fool!” she said, “how could you? Hateful, shameless, unwomanly! And it’s all for nothing, too. He’ll never do it. It’s too mad!”

Michael went straight to Sylvia, and told his tale.

“And I felt I couldn’t,” he said; “she is the daintiest, sweetest little old lady. I couldn’t marry her and see her every day and live in the hope of her death.”

“I don’t see why not,” Sylvia said, a little coldly. “She wouldn’t die any sooner because you married her, and, anyway, she can’t have long to live.”

The words were almost those of the little old lady herself. Yet—or perhaps for that very reason—they jarred on Michael’s mood.


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 He alleged business, and cut short his call.

Next day Miss Thrale called again. Mr Wood was sorry to have given her so much trouble. He had decided that the idea was too wild, and must be abandoned.

“Is it because I am too old?” said the old lady wistfully; “would you marry me if I were young?”

“Upon my word, I believe I would,” Michael surprised himself by saying. That it was not the answer Miss Thrale expected was evident from her smile of sudden amusement.

“May I say,” she said, “in return for what, in its way, is a compliment, that I like you very much. I would take care of you, and I shall perhaps not live more than a year or two.”

The tremor of her voice touched him. The £15,000 a year pulled at his will. In that instant he saw the broad glades of waving bracken, the big trees of the park, the sober face of the great house he might inherit, looking out over the smooth green lawns. He looked again at the little lady. After all, he was more than thirty. The world would laugh—well, they laughed best


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 who laughed last. And, after a few years, there would be Sylvia—pretty, charming, enchanting Sylvia. He put the thought of her roughly away. Not because he was ashamed of it, but because it hurt him. The thought that Sylvia should wait for a dead woman’s shoes had seemed natural; what hurt him was that she herself should see nothing unnatural in such waiting.

The silence had grown to the limit that spells discomfort; the ticking of the tall clock, the rustle of the plane tree’s leaves outside the window, the discords of Fleet Street harmonised by distance, all deepened the silence and italicised it. She spoke.

“Well?” she said.

The plane tree’s leaves murmured eloquently of the great oaks in the park. The old lady’s eyes looked at him appealingly through the pale-smoked glasses. How she would like that old place! And his debts—he could pay them all.

“I will,” he said suddenly; “if you will, I will; and I pray you may never regret it.”

“I don’t think you will regret it,” she said gently; “it is a truly kind act to me.”

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 income—the requisite hundred a year in Consols. And on a certain day in June Michael Wood woke from a feverish dream, in which obstinacy and the longing for money had fought with many better things and worsted them, to find himself married to a white-haired woman of sixty.

The awakening took place in his rooms in the Temple. He had yielded to the little old lady’s entreaties, and consented, most willingly, to forego the “wedding journey,” in this case so sad a mockery.

The set was a large one—five rooms; it seemed that they might live here, and neither irk the other.

And she was in the room he had caused to be prepared for her—dainty and neat as herself—and he, left alone in the room where he had first seen her, crossed his arms on the table, and thought. His wedding-day! And it might have been Sylvia, the rustle of whose dress he could hear in the next room. He groaned. Then he laid his head on his arms and cried—like a child that has lost its favourite toy: for he saw, suddenly, that respect for his old wife must keep him from ever seeing Sylvia now; and life looked grey as the Thames in February twilight.


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A timid hand on his shoulder startled him to the raising of his tear-stained face. The little old lady stood beside him.

“Ah, don’t!” she said softly—“don’t! Believe me, it will be all right. Your old wife won’t live more than a year—I know it. Take courage.”

“Don’t!” he said in his turn; “it’s a wicked thing I’ve done. Forgive me! If only we could have been friends. I can’t bear to think I shall make you unhappy.”

“My dear boy,” she said, “we are friends. I am your housekeeper. In a year at latest you will see the last of my white hairs. Be brave.”

He could not understand the pang her words gave him.

And now began, for these two, a strange life. In those Temple rooms—ideal nest for young lovers—Mrs Wood, the white-haired, kept house with firm and capable little hands. Comfort, which Michael’s lazy nature loved but could not achieve, reigned peacefully. The old lady kept much to her own rooms, but whenever he needed talk she was there. And she could talk. She had read much, reflected much. In her mind his own ideas found mating germs, and bore fruit of


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 beautiful dreams, great thoughts. His verses—neglected this long time, since Sylvia did not care for poetry—flourished once more.

And music—Sylvia’s taste in music had been Sullivan; the old wife touched the piano with magic fingers, and Bach, Beethoven, Wagner came to transfigure the Temple rooms. Michael had never been so contented—never so wretched; for, as the quiet weeks went by, the leaves fell from the plane tree, and the time drew near when he must show his wife to the tenants—his white-haired wife. In these months a very real friendship had grown up between them. Michael had never met a woman, old or young, whose tastes chimed so tunefully with his own. Ah! what a pity he had not met a young woman with these tastes—this soul. And now, liking, friendship, affection—all the finer, nobler side of love—he could indeed feel for his old wife; but love—lovers’ love, that would set the seal on all the rest—this he might never know, except for some other woman, who would succeed to his wife’s title.

Badly as Michael had behaved, I think it is permissible to be sorry for him. His wife, in fact, was very sorry.

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 the other side of him thrilled with pleasure. He sat by her an hour, his eyes drinking in her fresh beauty, while his soul shrivelled more and more. Ah! why could she not talk, as his wife could, instead of merely chattering?

His wife looked sad that evening. He asked the reason.

“I saw you in the park to-day,” she said. “Are you going to see her? Don’t compromise her: it’s not worth while.”

He kissed her hand in its black mitten, and in a flash of pain saw the black funeral, when she should be carried from his house, and he be left free to marry Sylvia.

And now the days had dropped past; so even was their flow that it seemed rapid, and in another week it would be Christmas.

“And I must show you to the tenants,” said he.

“My poor boy,” she said—it was just as she had risen to bid him good night—“be brave. Perhaps it won’t be so bad as you think. Good night.”

He sat still after she had left him, gazing into the fire, and thinking thoughts in which now the estate and the fortune played but little part. At last he shrugged his shoulders.


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“Well,” he said, “I have no lover, no wife; but I have a companion, a friend—one in a million.” And again the black funeral trailed its slow length before his eyes, and he shuddered.

I have not sought to deceive the reader. He knows as well as I do that at this moment the door opened, and a young and beautiful woman stood on the threshold. Her eyes were shining; round her neck were gleaming pearls. She was playing for a high stake, and being a true woman she had disdained no honest artifice that might help her. She wore shining white silk, severely plain, and her brown hair was dressed high on her head. A woman one shade less intuitive would have let the dusky masses fall over a lace-covered tea-gown.

“Michael,” she said, “I am your wife. Are you going to forgive me?”

He raised himself slowly from his chair, and his eyes dwelt on detail after detail of the beauty before him.

“My wife!” he said. “You are a stranger!”

“I did disguise myself well. My sister told me about your advertisement; she lives with Sylvia Maddox. We each have


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 *Laurie, A. P., ' The Pigments and Mediums of the Old Masters.' Pp. xvi, 192. London, 19 14.
 * Moreau-Vauthier, Ch., 'La Peinture.' Pp. xii, 322. Paris, 1912.
 * Ostwald, W., ' Letters to a Painter.' Translated from the German by H. W. Morse. Pp. viii, 162. Boston, U.S.A., 1906.
 * Parry, Ernest J., and Coste, John H., 'The Chemistry of Pigments.' Pp. viii, 280. London, 1902.
 * Russell, W. J., and Abney, W. de W., 'Action of Light on Water-Colours ' (Blue-Book). Pp. 78. Appendix of 14 diagrams. London, 1888.
 * Solomon, Solomon J., 'The Practice of Oil-Painting.' Pp. xvi, 278. London, 1910.
 * Vasari, Giorgio, 'On Technique.' Translated by Louisa S. Maclehose ; edited and annotated by Professor G. Baldwin Brown. Pp. xxiv, 328. London, 1907.


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 a hundred pounds a year. At first I did it for fun; but when I had seen how—how nice you were—my mother is very poor. There are no excuses. But are you going to forgive me?” Any other woman, to whom forgiveness meant all that it meant to her, might have kneeled at his feet. Frances stood erect by the door. “Anyway,” she said, biting her lip, “I have saved you from Sylvia. For the sake of that, forgive me.”

That stung him, as she had known it would.

“Forgive you?” he said. “Never. You’ve spoiled my life.” But he took a step towards her as he spoke.

She took an equal step back.

“Take courage,” she said. “Who knows but I may die before next June, after all. Good night.”

“I hate you,” he said, and took another step forward. But the door closed in his face.

Next morning the old lady, white haired and mittened, appeared behind the breakfast tea. Michael almost thought he had dreamed, till her eyes, now without their glasses, met his timidly.


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 in the cultivation of the different parts of the country. In England, the valuation according to which the different counties and parishes were assessed to the land tax by the 4th of William and Mary, was very unequal even at its first establishment. This tax, therefore, so far offends against the first of the four maxims above mentioned. It is perfectly agreeable to the other three. It is perfectly certain. The time of payment for the tax, being the same as that for the rent, is as convenient as it can be to the contributor. Though the landlord is in all cases the real contributor, the tax is commonly advanced by the tenant, to whom the landlord is obliged to allow it in the payment of the rent. This tax is levied by a much smaller number of officers than any other which affords nearly the same revenue. As the tax upon each district does not rise with the rise of the rent, the sovereign does not share in the profits of the landlord's improvements. Those improvements sometimes contribute, indeed, to the discharge of the other landlords of the district. But the aggravation of the tax, which this may sometimes occasion upon a particular estate, is always so very small, that it never can discourage those improvements, nor keep down the produce of the land below what it would otherwise rise to. As it has no tendency to diminish the quantity, it can have none to raise the price of that produce. It does not obstruct the industry of the people. It subjects the landlord to no other inconvenience besides the unavoidable one of paying the tax.

The advantage, however, which the landlord has derived from the invariable constancy of the valuation by which all the lands of Great Britain are rated to the land tax, has been principally owing to some circumstances altogether extraneous to the nature of the tax.


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“Let us end this play-acting, at least,” he said. Ten minutes of fuming ended in tepid tea poured by a beautiful brown-haired girl.

He watched her in silence.

“It’s horrible,” he broke out. “You’re a strange woman, and there you sit, pouring tea out as if Who are you? I don’t know you.”

“Don’t you?” she said quietly. And then he remembered all the old talks with the old wife.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I don’t want to be a brute.”

“It’s no use my saying I’m sorry,” she said.

“Are you?” He leaned forward to put the question.

“We must make the best of it,” she said. “Perhaps Look here, don’t let’s speak of it till after Christmas; let’s just go on as we did before.”

So the days wore on. But the situation when Michael lived in torment in the company of his old wife was simplicity itself compared to his new life with a wife—young, beautiful, and a stranger, yet in all essentials his dearest friend. This discomfort grew daily—hourly branching out into ever fresh embarrassments—


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 new and harassing, vexatious, half understood, wholly resented.

The wife had her burden to bear also. The laundress had only known the old wife as “Mrs Wood.”

“She thought I was your mother,” the wife said when Michael propounded the difficulty. But the laundress’s attitude to the new Mrs Wood had a sting that was almost punishment enough to the wife, had Michael only known, for all that she had done amiss.

The hour of departure for the Christmas festivities at Wood Grange came as a relief from the persistent pinpricks of unexplained emotion which tormented him. His wife was young and beautiful, yet he was only conscious of repulsion. He hated her for her trickery. But most he hated her because she had cheated him of the old wife—the friend, the confidante, who had grown to be so much, and so much the best part, in his life. For now there was no confidence between the two—no talk, no reading, no music to brighten the Temple rooms. They lived in an almost complete silence.

Every window of the Grange shone out with yellow light across the snow. For once


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 Christmas had been kind and seasonable—a white sheet covered the world. Holly gleamed against old oak. Priceless silver, saved from the smelting-pot in Cromwell’s hard days, shone above white napery on the long tables. The tenants’ dinner was over, and now was the moment when, according to the will, Michael Wood’s wife must be presented to the tenants then assembled.

The slender figure in white woollen cloth and white fur, with Christmas roses at its breast, stood on the daïs at the end of the great hall, and the tenants cheered themselves hoarse at the mere sight of her beautiful face, her kind eyes.

“It went off very well,” Michael said when, the last guest gone, the last shutter closed, the last servant departed, the two stood alone in the long drawing-room.

“Yes; think if you had had to present to them the old white-haired wife”

“I loved the old wife,” he said obstinately; but his voice was not quite steady.

“I wish,” she said, playing with the Christmas roses she wore, “I wish you would try to forgive me. It was horribly wrong; but I began it as a joke. You see, I had only just come over from the convent


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 where I was brought up. I thought it would be such fun: I was always good at theatricals. I will never do anything silly again. And to-morrow I’ll go away, and you need never see me again. And you have got the money and the old place, haven’t you? And I got them for you—and—do forgive me. It began as a silly schoolgirl’s joke indeed.”

“But—a convent! You have read and thought”

“It was my father. He made me read and think; and when he died all the money went, and my mother is poor. Oh, Michael, don’t be so flinty! Say you forgive me before I go! It all began in a joke!”

“Began. Yes. But why did you go on?”

“Because I—I didn’t like Sylvia—and I liked you—rather—but I won’t be a nuisance. I’ll go back to mother. Say you forgive me. I’ll go by the first train in the morning.”

“The first train,” said Michael absently, “is the 9.17; but to-morrow is Christmas Day—I daresay they’ll run the same as on Sunday.”

She took her white cloak from the settle by the fire.

“Good night,” she said sadly; “you are very hard. Won’t you even shake hands?”