The Market-Place
by Harold Frederic
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

CHAPTER I

THE battle was over, and the victor remained on the
field--sitting alone with the hurly-burly of his thoughts.

His triumph was so sweeping and comprehensive as to
be somewhat shapeless to the view. He had a sense
of fascinated pain when he tried to define to himself
what its limits would probably be. Vistas of unchecked,
expanding conquest stretched away in every direction.
He held at his mercy everything within sight. Indeed, it
rested entirely with him to say whether there should be any
such thing as mercy at all--and until he chose to utter
the restraining word the rout of the vanquished would go
on with multiplying terrors and ruin. He could crush
and torture and despoil his enemies until he was tired.
The responsibility of having to decide when he would stop
grinding their faces might come to weigh upon him later on,
but he would not give it room in his mind to-night.

A picture of these faces of his victims shaped itself
out of the flames in the grate. They were moulded
in a family likeness, these phantom visages: they were
all Jewish, all malignant, all distorted with fright.
They implored him with eyes in which panic asserted itself
above rage and cunning. Only here and there did he recall
a name with which to label one of these countenances;
very few of them raised a memory of individual rancour.
The faces were those of men he had seen, no doubt,
but their persecution of him had been impersonal;
his great revenge was equally so. As he looked, in truth,
there was only one face--a composite mask of what he
had done battle with, and overthrown, and would trample
implacably under foot. He stared with a conqueror's
cold frown at it, and gave an abrupt laugh which started
harsh echoes in the stillness of the Board Room. Then he
shook off the reverie, and got to his feet. He shivered
a little at the sudden touch of a chill.

A bottle of brandy, surrounded by glasses, stood on the
table where the two least-considered of his lieutenants,
the dummy Directors, had left it. He poured a small quantity
and sipped it. During the whole eventful day it had not
occurred to him before to drink; the taste of the neat
liquor seemed on the instant to calm and refresh his brain.
With more deliberation, he took a cigar from the broad,
floridly-decorated open box beside the bottle, lit it,
and blew a long draught of smoke thoughtfully through
his nostrils. Then he put his hands in his pockets,
looked again into the fire, and sighed a wondering smile.
God in heaven! it was actually true!

This man of forty found himself fluttering with a novel
exhilaration, which yet was not novel. Upon reflection,
he perceived that he felt as if he were a boy again--a
boy excited by pleasure. It surprised as much as it
delighted him to experience this frank and direct joy
of a child. He caught the inkling of an idea that
perhaps his years were an illusion. He had latterly
been thinking of himself as middle-aged; the grey hairs
thickening at his temples had vaguely depressed him.
Now all at once he saw that he was not old at all.
The buoyancy of veritable youth bubbled in his veins.
He began walking up and down the room, regarding new
halcyon visions with a sparkling eye. He was no longer
conscious of the hated foe beneath his feet; they trod
instead elastic upon the clouds.

The sound of someone moving about in the hallway outside,
and of trying a door near by, suddenly caught his attention.
He stood still and listened with alertness for a surprised
instant, then shrugged his shoulders and began moving again.
It must be nearly seven o'clock; although the allotment
work had kept the clerks later than usual that day,
everybody connected with the offices had certainly gone home.
He realized that his nerves had played him a trick in
giving that alarmed momentary start--and smiled almost
tenderly as he remembered how notable and even glorious
a warrant those nerves had for their unsettled state.
They would be all right after a night's real rest.
He would know how to sleep NOW, thank God!

But yes--there was somebody outside--and this time
knocking with assurance at the right door, the entrance
to the outer office. After a second's consideration,
he went into this unlighted outer office, and called
out through the opaque glass an enquiry. The sound
of his voice, as it analyzed itself in his own ears,
seemed unduly peremptory. The answer which came back
brought a flash of wonderment to his eyes. He hurriedly
unlocked and opened the door.

"I saw the lights in what I made out to be the Board Room,"
said the newcomer, as he entered. "I assumed it must be you.
Hope I don't interrupt anything."

"Nothing could have given me greater pleasure, Lord Plowden,"
replied the other, leading the way back to the inner apartment.
"In fact, I couldn't have asked anything better."

The tone of his voice had a certain anxious note in it
not quite in harmony with this declaration. He turned,
under the drop-light overhanging the Board-table, and shook
hands with his guest, as if to atone for this doubtful accent.
"I shake hands with you again," he said, speaking rapidly,
"because this afternoon it was what you may call formal;
it didn't count. And--my God!--you're the man I owe it
all to."

"Oh, you mustn't go as far as that--even in the absence
of witnesses," replied Lord Plowden, lightly. "I'll take
off my coat for a few minutes," he went on, very much
at his ease. "It's hot in here. It's by the merest
chance I happened to be detained in the City--and I saw
your lights, and this afternoon we had no opportunity
whatever for a quiet talk. No--I won't drink anything
before dinner, but I'll light a cigar. I want to say
to you, Thorpe," he concluded, as he seated himself
"that I think what you've done is very wonderful.
The Marquis thinks so too--but I shouldn't like to swear
that he understands much about it."

The implication that the speaker did understand remained
in the air like a tangible object. Thorpe took a chair,
and the two men exchanged a silent, intent look.
Their faces, dusky red on the side of the glow from the fire,
pallid where the electric light fell slantwise upon them
from above, had for a moment a mysterious something
in common. Then the tension of the glance was relaxed--and
on the instant no two men in London looked less alike.

Lord Plowden was familiarly spoken of as a handsome man.
Thorpe had even heard him called the handsomest man in
England--though this seemed in all likelihood an exaggeration.
But handsome he undoubtedly was--tall without suggesting
the thought of height to the observer, erect yet graceful,
powerfully built, while preserving the effect of slenderness.
His face in repose had the outline of the more youthful
guardsman-type--regular, finely-cut, impassive to hardness.
When he talked, or followed with interest the talk
of others, it revealed almost an excess of animation.
Then one noted the flashing subtlety of his glance,
the swift facility of his smile and comprehending brows,
and saw that it was not the guardsman face at all.
His skin was fresh-hued, and there was a shade of warm
brown in his small, well-ordered moustasche, but his hair,
wavy and worn longer than the fashion, seemed black.
There were perceptible veins of grey in it, though he
had only entered his thirty-fifth year. He was dressed
habitually with the utmost possible care.

The contrast between this personage and the older man
confronting him was abrupt. Thorpe was also tall,
but of a burly and slouching figure. His face,
shrouded in a high-growing, dust-coloured beard,
invited no attention. One seemed always to have known
this face--thick-featured, immobile, undistinguished.
Its accessories for the time being were even more than
ordinarily unimpressive. Both hair and beard were
ragged with neglect. His commonplace, dark clothes
looked as if he had slept in them. The hands resting
on his big knees were coarse in shape, and roughened,
and ill-kept.

"I couldn't have asked anything better than your dropping in,
"he repeated now, speaking with a drag, as of caution,
on his words. "Witnesses or no witnesses, I'm anxious
to have you understand that I realize what I owe to you."

"I only wish it were a great deal more than it is,"
replied the other, with a frank smile.

"Oh, it'll mount up to considerable, as it stands,"
said Thorpe.

He could hear that there was a kind of reservation
in his voice; the suspicion that his companion detected
it embarrassed him. He found himself in the position
of fencing with a man to whom all his feelings impelled
him to be perfectly open. He paused, and was awkwardly
conscious of constraint in the silence which ensued.
"You are very kind to put it in that way," said Lord Plowden,
at last. He seemed also to be finding words for his thoughts
with a certain difficulty. He turned his cigar round
in his white fingers meditatively. "I gather that your
success has been complete--as complete as you yourself
could have desired. I congratulate you with all my heart."

"No--don't say my success--say our success," put in Thorpe.

"But, my dear man," the other corrected him, "my interest,
compared with yours, is hardly more than nominal.
I'm a Director, of course, and I'm not displeased
that my few shares should be worth something instead
of nothing, but----"

Thorpe lifted one of his heavy hands. "That isn't my
view of the thing at all. To be frank, I was turning
over in my mind, just awhile ago, before you came in,
some way of arranging all that on a different footing.
If you'll trust it to me, I think you'll find it's
all right."

Something in the form of this remark seemed to restore
to Lord Plowden his accustomed fluency of speech.

"I came here to say precisely that thing," he began--"that
I do trust it to you. We have never had any very definite
talk on the subject--and pray don't think that I want
to go into details now. I'd much rather not, in fact.
But what I do want to say to you is this: I believe
in you. I feel sure that you are going to go far,
as the saying is. Well, I want to tie myself to your star.
Do you see what I mean? You are going to be a power
in finance. You are going to be able to make and unmake
men as you choose. I should be very much obliged indeed
if you would make me."

Thorpe regarded the handsome and titled man of fashion
with what seemed to the other a lethargic gaze. In truth,
his mind was toiling with strenuous activity to master,
in all its bearings, the significance of what had been said.
This habit of the abstracted and lack-lustre eye,
the while he was hard at work thinking, was a fortuitous
asset which he had never up to that time learned that
he possessed. Unconsciously, he dampened the spirits of
his companion.

"Don't imagine I'm trying to force myself upon you,"
Lord Plowden said, growing cool in the face of this slow stare.
"I'm asking nothing at all. I had the impulse to come and
say to you that you are a great man, and that you've done
a great thing--and done it, moreover, in a very great way."

"You know how it was done!" The wondering exclamation
forced itself from Thorpe's unready lips. He bent
forward a little, and took a new visual hold, as it were,
of his companion's countenance.

Lord Plowden smiled. "Did you think I was such
a hopeless duffer, then?" he rejoined.

For answer, Thorpe leant back in his chair, crossed his legs,
and patted his knee contentedly. All at once his face
had lightened; a genial speculation returned to his
grey eyes.

"Well, I was in a curious position about you, you see,"
he began to explain. The relief with which he spoke
was palpable. "I could not for the life of me make up my
mind whether to tell you about it or not. Let's see--this
is Thursday; did I see you Tuesday? At any rate, the scheme
didn't dawn on me myself until toward evening Tuesday.
But yesterday, of course, I could have told you--and again
this afternoon--but, as I say, I couldn't make up my mind.
Once I had it on the tip of my tongue--but somehow I didn't.
And you--you never gave me a hint that you saw what was
going on."

Again Lord Plowden smiled. "I voted with you," he put
in softly.

Thorpe laughed, and relit his cigar. "Well, I couldn't have
asked anything better than this, "he declared once again.
"It beats all the rest put together, to my mind."

"Perhaps I don't quite follow your meaning," commented the
other tentatively.

"Why man," Thorpe explained, hesitating a little in his
choice of words, but speaking with evident fervour;
"I was more anxious about you--and the way you'd take it--
than about anything else. I give you my word I was.
I couldn't tell at all how you'd feel about the thing.
You might think that it was all right, and then again
you might round on me--or no, I don't mean quite that--
but you might say it wasn't good enough for you, and wash
your hands of the whole affair. And I can't tell you what
a relief it is to find that you--that you're satisfied.
Now I can go ahead."

"Ah, yes--ahead," said the younger man, thoughtfully.
"Do you mind telling me--you see I'm quite in the dark
as to details--how much further ahead we are likely
to go? I comprehend the general nature of our advance--
but how far off is the goal you have in sight?"

"God knows!" answered Thorpe, with a rising thrill of
excitement in his voice. "I don't give it any limit.
I don't see why we should stop at all. We've got
them in such a position that--why, good heavens! we
can squeeze them to death, crush them like quartz."
He chuckled grimly at the suggestion of his simile.
"We'll get more ounces to the ton out of our crushings
than they ever heard of on the Rand, too."

"Might I ask," interposed the other, "who may 'they' be?"

Thorpe hesitated, and knitted his brows in the effort
to remember names. "Oh, there are a lot of them,"
he said, vaguely. "I think I told you of the way that
Kaffir crowd pretended to think well of me, and let
me believe they were going to take me up, and then,
because I wouldn't give them everything--the very shirt
off my back--turned and put their knife into me.
I don't know them apart, hardly--they've all got names
like Rhine wines--but I know the gang as a whole, and if I
don't lift the roof clean off their particular synagogue,
then my name is mud."

Lord Plowden smiled. "I've always the greatest difficulty
to remember that you are an Englishman--a Londoner born,"
he declared pleasantly. "You don't talk in the least
like one. On shipboard I made sure you were an American--a
very characteristic one, I thought--of some curious
Western variety, you know. I never was more surprised
in my life than when you told me, the other day, that you
only left England a few years ago."

"Oh, hardly a 'few years'; more like fifteen," Thorpe
corrected him. He studied his companion's face with
slow deliberation.

"I'm going to say something that you mustn't take amiss,"
he remarked, after a little pause. "If you'd known that I
was an Englishman, when we first met, there on the steamer,
I kind o' suspect that you and I'd never have got much beyond
a nodding acquaintance--and even that mostly on my side.
I don't mean that I intended to conceal anything--that is,
not specially--but I've often thought since that it
was a mighty good thing I did. Now isn't that true--that
if you had taken me for one of your own countrymen you'd
have given me the cold shoulder?"

"I dare say there's a good deal in what you say,"
the other admitted, gently enough, but without contrition.
"Things naturally shape themselves that way, rather,
you know. If they didn't, why then the whole position
would become difficult. But you are an American,
to all intents and purposes."

"Oh, no--I never took any step towards getting naturalized,"
Thorpe protested. "I always intended to come back here.
Or no, I won't say that--because most of the time I
was dog-poor--and this isn't the place for a poor man.
But I always said to myself that if ever I pulled it off--if
I ever found my self a rich man--THEN I'd come piking across
the Atlantic as fast as triple-expansion engines would
carry me."

The young man smiled again, with a whimsical gleam
in his eye. "And you ARE a rich man, now," he observed,
after a momentary pause.

"We are both rich men," replied Thorpe, gravely.

He held up a dissuading hand, as the other would have spoken.
"This is how it seems to me the thing figures itself out:
It can't be said that your name on the Board, or the
Marquis's either, was of much use so far as the public
were concerned. To tell the truth, I saw some time ago
that they wouldn't be. Titles on prospectuses are played
out in London. I've rather a notion, indeed, that they're
apt to do more harm than good--just at present, at least.
But all that aside--you are the man who was civil to me
at the start, when you knew nothing whatever about
my scheme, and you are the man who was good to me later on,
when I didn't know where to turn for a friendly word.
Very well; here I am! I've made my coup! And I'd be a sweep,
wouldn't I? to forget to-day what I was so glad to remember
a week ago. But you see, I don't forget! The capital
of the Company is 500,000 pounds, all in pound shares.
We offered the public only a fifth of them. The other
four hundred thousand shares are mine as vendor--and I
have ear-marked in my mind one hundred thousand of them
to be yours."

Lord Plowden's face paled at the significance of these words.
"It is too much--you don't reflect what it is you
are saying," he murmured confusedly. "Not a bit of it,"
the other reassured him. "Everything that I've said goes."

The peer, trembling a little, rose to his feet. "It is a
preposterously big reward for the merest act of courtesy,"
he insisted. "Of course it takes my breath away for joy--and
yet I feel I oughtn't to be consenting to it at all.
And it has its unpleasant side--it buries me under a mountain
of obligation. I don't know what to do or what to say."

"Well, leave the saying and doing to me, then," replied Thorpe,
with a gesture before which the other resumed his seat.
"Just a word more--and then I suppose we'd better be going.
Look at it in this way. Your grandfather was Lord
Chancellor of England, and your father was a General
in the Crimea. My grandfather kept a small second-hand
book-shop, and my father followed him in the business.
In one sense, that puts us ten thousand miles apart.
But in another sense, we'll say that we like each other,
and that there are ways in which we can be of immense
use to each other, and that brings us close together.
You need money--and here it is for you. I need--what
shall I say?--a kind of friendly lead in the matter
of establishing myself on the right footing, among the
right people--and that's what you can do for me.
Mind--I'd prefer to put it all in quite another way;
I'd like to say it was all niceness on your part,
all gratitude on mine. But if you want to consider it on
a business basis--why there you have it also--perfectly plain
and clear."

He got up as he finished, and Lord Plowden rose as well.
The two men shook hands in silence.

When the latter spoke, it was to say: "Do you know
how to open one of those soda-water bottles? I've tried,
but I can never get the trick. I think I should like
to have a drink--after this."

When they had put down their glasses, and the younger man
was getting into his great-coat, Thorpe bestowed the brandy
and cigars within a cabinet at the corner of the room,
and carefully turned a key upon them.

"If you're going West, let me give you a lift,"
said Lord Plowden, hat in hand. "I can set you down
wherever you like. Unfortunately I've to go out to dinner,
and I must race, as it is, to get dressed."

Thorpe shook his head. "No, go along," he bade him.
"I've some odds and ends of things to do on the way."

"Then when shall I see you?"--began the other, and halted
suddenly with a new thought in his glance. "But what
are you doing Saturday?" he asked, in a brisker tone.
"It's a dies non here. Come down with me to-morrow evening,
to my place in Kent. We will shoot on Saturday,
and drive about on Sunday, if you like--and there we can
talk at our leisure. Yes, that is what you must do.
I have a gun for you. Shall we say, then--Charing Cross
at 9:55? Or better still, say 5:15, and we will dine
at home."

The elder man pondered his answer--frowning at the problem
before him with visible anxiety. "I'm afraid I'd better
not come--it's very good of you all the same."

"Nonsense," retorted the other. "My mother will be
very glad indeed to see you. There is no one else
there--unless, perhaps, my sister has some friend down.
We shall make a purely family party."

Thorpe hesitated for only a further second. "All right.
Charing Cross, 5:15," he said then, with the grave brevity
of one who announces a momentous decision.

He stood still, looking into the fire, for a few moments
after his companion had gone. Then, going to a closet
at the end of the room, he brought forth his coat and hat;
something prompted him to hold them up, and scrutinize
them under the bright light of the electric globe. He put
them on, then, with a smile, half-scornful, half-amused,
playing in his beard.

The touch of a button precipitated darkness upon the Board Room.
He made his way out, and downstairs to the street.
It was a rainy, windy October night, sloppy underfoot,
dripping overhead. At the corner before him, a cabman,
motionless under his unshapely covered hat and glistening
rubber cape, sat perched aloft on his seat, apparently asleep.
Thorpe hailed him, with a peremptory tone, and gave the
brusque order, "Strand!" as he clambered into the hansom.

CHAPTER II

"LOUISA, the long and short of it is this," said Thorpe,
half an hour later: "you never did believe in me,
as a sister should do."

He was seated alone with this sister, in a small, low,
rather dismally-appointed room, half-heartedly lighted
by two flickering gasjets. They sat somewhat apart,
confronting a fireplace, where only the laid materials for
a fire disclosed themselves in the cold grate. Above the
mantel hung an enlarged photograph of a scowling old man.
Thorpe's gaze recurred automatically at brief intervals
to this portrait--which somehow produced the effect upon
him of responsibility for the cheerlessness of the room.
There were other pictures on the walls of which he was
dimly conscious--small, faded, old prints about Dido
and AEneas and Agamemnon, which seemed to be coming back
to him out of the mists of his childhood.

Vagrant impressions and associations of this childhood
strayed with quaint inconsequence across the field of his
preoccupied mind. The peculiar odour of the ancient book-shop
on the floor below remained like snuff in his nostrils.
Somewhere underneath, or in the wainscoting at the side,
he could hear the assiduous gnawing of a rat. Was it
the same rat, he wondered with a mental grin, that used
to keep him awake nights, in one of the rooms next to this,
with that same foolish noise, when he was a boy?

"I know you always say that," replied Louisa, impassively.

She was years older than her brother, but, without a trace
of artifice or intention, contrived to look the younger
of the two. Her thick hair, drawn simply from her temples
into a knot behind, was of that palest brown which
assimilates grey. Her face, long, plain, masculine in
contour and spirit, conveyed no message as to years.
Long and spare of figure, she sat upright in her
straight-backed chair, with her large, capable hands
on her knees.

"I believed in you as much as you'd let me," she went on,
indifferently, almost wearily. "But I don't see that it
mattered to you whether I did or didn't. You went your own
way: you did what you wanted to do. What had I to do
with it? I don't suppose I even knew what part of the
world you were in more than once in two or three years.
How should I know whether you were going to succeed,
when I didn't even know what it was you were at? Certainly
you hadn't succeeded here in London--but elsewhere you
might or you might not--how could I tell? And moreover,
I don't feel that I know you very well; you've grown
into something very different from the boy Joel that left
the shop--it must be twenty years ago. I can only know
about you and your affairs what you tell me."

"But my point is," pursued Thorpe, watching her face with
a curiously intent glance, "you never said to yourself:
'I KNOW he's going to succeed. I KNOW he'll be a rich
man before he dies.'"

She shook her head dispassionately. Her manner expressed
fatigued failure to comprehend why he was making so much
of this purposeless point.

"No--I don't remember ever having said that to myself,"
she admitted, listlessly. Then a comment upon his words
occurred to her, and she spoke with more animation:
"You don't seem to understand, Joel, that what was very
important to you, didn't occupy me at all. You were
always talking about getting rich; you kept the idea
before you of sometime, at a stroke, finding yourself
a millionaire. That's been the idea of your life.
But what do I know about all that? My work has been
to keep a roof over my head--to keep the little business
from disappearing altogether. It's been hard enough,
I can tell you, these last few years, with the big
jobbers cutting the hearts out of the small traders.
I had the invalid husband to support for between three
and four years--a dead weight on me every week--and then
the children to look after, to clothe and educate."

At the last word she hesitated suddenly, and looked
at him. "Don't think I'm ungrateful"--she went on,
with a troubled effort at a smile--"but I almost wish
you'd never sent me that four hundred pounds at all.
What it means is that they've had two years at schools
where now I shan't be able to keep them any longer.
They'll be spoiled for my kind of life--and they won't have
a fair chance for any other. I don't know what will become
of them."

The profound apprehension in the mother's voice did not
dull the gleam in Thorpe's eyes. He even began a smile
in the shadows of his unkempt moustache.

"But when I sent that money, for example, two years ago,
and over," he persisted, doggedly--"and I told you there'd
be more where that came from, and that I stood to pull
off the great event--even then, now, you didn't believe
in your innermost heart that I knew what I was talking about,
did you?"

She frowned with impatience as she turned toward him.
"For heaven's sake, Joel," she said, sharply--"you become
a bore with that stupid nonsense. I want to be patient
with you--I do indeed sympathize with you in your
misfortunes--you know that well enough--but you're very
tiresome with that eternal harping on what I believed and
what I didn't believe. Now, are you going to stop to supper
or not?--because if you are I must send the maid out.
And there's another thing--would it be of any help to you
to bring your things here from the hotel? You can have
Alfred's room as well as not--till Christmas, at least."

"Supposing I couldn't get my luggage out of the hotel
till I'd settled my bill," suggested Thorpe tentatively,
in a muffled voice.

The practical woman reflected for an instant.
"I was thinking," she confessed then, "that it might
be cheaper to leave your things there, and buy what
little you want--I don't imagine, from what I've seen,
that your wardrobe is so very valuable--but no, I suppose
the bill ought to be paid. Perhaps it can be managed;
how much will it be?"

Thorpe musingly rose to his feet, and strolled over
to her chair. With his thick hands on his sister's
shoulders he stooped and kissed her on the forehead.

"You believe in me now, anyway, eh, Lou?" he said,
as he straightened himself behind her.

The unaccustomed caress--so different in character from
the perfunctory salute with which he had greeted her
on his arrival from foreign parts, six months before--
brought a flush of pleased surprise to her plain face.
Then a kind of bewilderment crept into the abstracted
gaze she was bending upon the fireless grate.
Something extraordinary, unaccountable, was in the manner
of her brother. She recalled that, in truth, he was
more than half a stranger to her. How could she tell
what wild, uncanny second nature had not grown up in him
under those outlandish tropical skies? He had just told
her that his ruin was absolute--overwhelming--yet there
had been a covert smile in the recesses of his glance.
Even now, she half felt, half heard, a chuckle from him,
there as he stood behind her!

The swift thought that disaster had shaken his brain
loomed up and possessed her. She flung herself out
of the chair, and, wheeling, seized its back and drew
it between them as she faced him. It was with a stare
of frank dismay that she beheld him grinning at her.

"What"--she began, stammering--"What is the matter, Joel?"

He permitted himself the luxury of smiling blankly
at her for a further moment. Then he tossed his head,
and laughed abruptly.

"Sit down, old girl," he adjured her. "Try and hold
yourself together, now--to hear some different kind of news.
I've been playing it rather low down on you, for a fact.
Instead of my being smashed, it's the other way about."

She continued to confront him, with a nervous clasp
upon the chair-back. Her breathing troubled her as she
regarded him, and tried to take in the meaning of his words.

"Do you mean--you've been lying to me about--about
your Company?" she asked, confusedly.

"No--no--not at all," he replied, now all genial heartiness.
"No--what I told you was gospel truth--but I was taking
a rise out of you all the same." He seemed so unaffectedly
pleased by his achievement in kindly duplicity that she
forced an awkward smile to her lips.

"I don't understand in the least," she said, striving to
remember what he had told her. "What you said was
that the public had entirely failed to come in--that
there weren't enough applications for shares to pay
flotation expenses--those were your own words. Of course,
I don't pretend to understand these City matters--but it
IS the case, isn't it, that if people don't subscribe
for the shares of a new company, then the company is a failure?"

"Yes, that may be said to be the case--as a general rule,"
he nodded at her, still beaming.

"Well, then--of course--I don't understand," she owned.

"I don't know as you'll understand it much more when I've
explained it to you," he said, seating himself, and motioning
her to the other chair. "But yes, of course you will.
You're a business woman. You know what figures mean.
And really the whole thing is as simple as A B C. You
remember that I told you----"

"But are you going to stop to supper? I must send Annie
out before the shops close."

"Supper? No--I couldn't eat anything. I'm too worked
up for that. I'll get something at the hotel before I
go to bed, if I feel like it. But say!"--the thought
suddenly struck him--"if you want to come out with me,
I'll blow you off to the swaggerest dinner in London.
What d'ye say?"

She shook her head. "I shall have some bread and cheese
and beer at nine. That's my rule, you know. I don't
like to break it. I'm always queer next day if I do.
But now make haste and tell me--you're really not broken
then? You have really come out well?"

For answer he rose, and drew himself to his full height,
and spread his bulky shoulders backward. His grey-blue
eyes looked down upon her with a triumphant glow.

"Broken?" he echoed her word, with emphasis.
"My dear Louisa, I'm not the sort that gets broken.
I break other people. Oh, God, how I shall break them!"

He began pacing up and down on the narrow rug before
the fender, excitedly telling his story to her.
Sometimes he threw the words over his shoulder;
again he held her absorbed gaze with his. He took his
hands often from his pockets, to illustrate or enforce
by gestures the meaning of his speech--and then she found
it peculiarly difficult to realize that he was her brother.

Much of the narrative, rambling and disconnected,
with which he prefaced this story of the day, was vaguely
familiar to her. He sketched now for her in summary,
and with the sonorous voice of one deeply impressed with the
dramatic values of his declamation, the chronicle of his
wanderings in strange lands--and these he had frequently
told her about before. Soon she perceived, however,
that he was stringing them together on a new thread.
One after another, these experiences of his, as he
related them, turned upon the obstacles and fatal pitfalls
which treachery and malice had put in his path. He seemed,
by his account, to have been a hundred times almost
within touch of the goal. In China, in the Dutch Indies,
in those remoter parts of Australia which were a waterless
waste when he knew them and might have owned them,
and now were yielding fabulous millions to fellows who
had tricked and swindled him--everywhere he had missed
by just a hair's breadth the golden consummation.
In the Western hemisphere the tale repeated itself.
There had been times in the Argentine, in Brazil just before
the Empire fell, in Colorado when the Silver boom was on,
in British Columbia when the first rumours of rich ore
were whispered about--many times when fortune seemed
veritably within his grasp. But someone had always
played him false. There was never a friendship for him
which could withstand the temptation of profitable treason.

But he had hung dauntlessly on. He had seen one concession
slipping through his fingers, only to strain and tighten
them for a clutch at another. It did not surprise
his hearer--nor indeed did it particularly attract
her attention--that there was nowhere in this rapid and
comprehensive narrative any allusion to industry of the
wage-earning sort. Apparently, he had done no work at all,
in the bread-winner's sense of the word. This was so like
Joel that it was taken for granted in his sister's mind.
All his voyages and adventures and painful enterprises
had been informed by the desire of the buccaneer--the
passion to reap where others had sown, or, at the worst,
to get something for nothing.

The discursive story began to narrow and concentrate
itself when at last it reached Mexico. The sister changed
her position in her chair, and crossed her knees when
Tehuantepec was mentioned. It was from that place that Joel
had sent her the amazing remittance over two years ago.
Curiously enough, though, it was at this point in his
narrative that he now became vague as to details.
There were concessions of rubber forests mentioned,
and the barter of these for other concessions with money
to boot, and varying phases of a chronic trouble about
where the true boundary of Guatemala ran--but she failed
clearly to understand much about it all. His other
schemes and mishaps she had followed readily enough.
Somehow when they came to Mexico, however, she saw
everything jumbled and distorted, as through a haze.
Once or twice she interrupted him to ask questions,
but he seemed to attach such slight importance to her
comprehending these details that she forbore. Only one
fact was it necessary to grasp about the Mexican episode,
apparently. When he quitted Tehuantepec, to make his way
straight to London, at the beginning of the year, he left
behind him a rubber plantation which he desired to sell,
and brought with him between six and seven thousand pounds,
with which to pay the expenses of selling it.
How he had obtained either the plantation or the money
did not seem to have made itself understood. No doubt,
as his manner indicated when she ventured her enquiries,
it was quite irrelevant to the narrative.

In Mexico, his experience had been unique, apparently, in that
no villain had appeared on the scene to frustrate his plans.
He at least mentioned no one who had wronged him there.
When he came to London, however, there were villains
and to spare. He moved to the mantel, when he arrived
at this stage of the story, and made clear a space for his
elbow to rest among the little trinkets and photographs
with which it was burdened. He stood still thereafter,
looking down at her; his voice took on a harsher note.

Much of this story, also, she knew by heart. This strange,
bearded, greyish-haired brother of hers had come very often
during the past half-year to the little book-shop, and the
widow's home above it, his misshapen handbag full of papers,
his heart full of rage, hope, grief, ambition, disgust,
confidence--everything but despair. It was true,
it had never been quite real to her. He was right in his
suggestion that she had never wholly believed in him.
She had not been able to take altogether seriously
this clumsy, careworn, shabbily-dressed man who talked
about millions. It was true that he had sent her four
hundred pounds for the education of her son and daughter;
it was equally true that he had brought with him to London
a sum which any of his ancestors, so far as she knew
about them, would have deemed a fortune, and which he
treated as merely so much oil, with which to lubricate
the machinery of his great enterprise. She had heard,
at various times, the embittered details of the disappearance
of this money, little by little. Nearly a quarter of it,
all told, had been appropriated by a sleek old braggart
of a company-promoter, who had cozened Joel into the
belief that London could be best approached through him.
When at last this wretch was kicked downstairs, the effect
had been only to make room for a fresh lot of bloodsuckers.
There were so-called advertising agents, so-called journalists,
so-called "men of influence in the City,"--a swarm
of relentless and voracious harpies, who dragged from
him in blackmail nearly the half of what he had left,
before he summoned the courage and decision to shut them out.

Worse still, in some ways, were the men into whose hands
he stumbled next--a group of City men concerned in the
South African market, who impressed him very favourably
at the outset. He got to know them by accident, and at the
time when he began to comprehend the necessity of securing
influential support for his scheme. Everything that he
heard and could learn about them testified to the strength
of their position in the City. Because they displayed
a certain amiability of manner toward him and his project,
he allowed himself to make sure of their support.
It grew to be a certainty in his mind that they would see
him through. He spent a good deal of money in dinners and
suppers in their honour, after they had let him understand
that this form of propitiation was not unpleasant to them.
They chaffed him about some newspaper paragraphs,
in which he was described as the "Rubber King," with an
affable assumption of amusement, under which he believed
that he detected a genuine respect for his abilities.

Finally, when he had danced attendance upon them for
the better part of two months, he laid before them,
at the coffee-and-cigars stage of a dinner in a private
room of the Savoy, the details of his proposition.
They were to form a Syndicate to take over his property,
and place it upon the market; in consideration of their
finding the ready money for this exploitation, they were to
have for themselves two-fifths of the shares in the Company
ultimately to be floated. They listened to these details,
and to his enthusiastic remarks about the project itself,
with rather perfunctory patience, but committed themselves
that evening to nothing definite. It took him nearly
a week thereafter to get an answer from any of them.
Then he learned that, if they took the matter up at all,
it would be upon the basis of the Syndicate receiving
nine-tenths of the shares.

He conceived the idea, after he had mastered his
original amazement, that they named these preposterous
terms merely because they expected to be beaten down,
and he summoned all his good nature and tact for the task
of haggling with them. He misunderstood their first
show of impatience at this, and persevered in the face
of their tacit rebuffs. Then, one day, a couple of them
treated him with overt rudeness, and he, astonished out of
his caution, replied to them in kind. Suddenly, he could
hardly tell why or how, they were all enemies of his.
They closed their office doors to him; even their clerks
treated him with contemptuous incivility.

This blow to his pride enraged and humiliated him,
curiously enough, as no other misadventure of his life
had done.

Louisa remembered vividly the description he had given to her,
at the time, of this affair. She had hardly understood why
it should disturb him so profoundly: to her mind, these men
had done nothing so monstrous after all. But to him,
their offense swallowed up all the other indignities
suffered during the years of his Ishmaelitish wanderings.
A sombre lust for vengeance upon them took root in his
very soul. He hated nobody else as he hated them.
How often she had heard him swear, in solemn vibrating tones,
that to the day of his death his most sacred ambition
should be their punishment, their abasement in the dust
and mire!

And now, all at once, as she looked up at him, where he leant
against the mantel, these vagabond memories of hers took
point and shape. It was about these very men that he was talking.

"And think of it!" he was saying, impressively. "It's magnificent
enough for me to make this great hit--but I don't count it
as anything at all by comparison with the fact that I make it
at their expense. You remember the fellows I told you about?"
he asked abruptly, deferring to the confused look on her face.

"Yes--you make it out of them," she repeated, in an
uncertain voice. It occurred to her that she must
have been almost asleep. "But did I miss anything?
Have you been telling what it is that you have made?"

"No--that you shall have in good time. You don't seem
to realize it, Louisa. I can hardly realize it myself.
I am actually a very rich man. I can't tell how much
I've got--in fact, it can be almost as much as I like--
half a million pounds, I suppose, at the start, if I want
to make it that much. Yes--it takes the breath away,
doesn't it? But best of all--a thousand times best of
all--practically every dollar of it comes out of those Kaffir
swine--the very men that tried to rob me, and that have been
trying to ruin me ever since. I tell you what I wish,
Louise--I wish to God there could only be time enough,
and I'd take it all in half-sovereigns--two millions
of them, or three millions--and just untwist every coin,
one by one, out from among their heart-strings. Oh--but
it'll be all right as it is. It's enough to make a man
feel religious--to think how those thieves are going
to suffer."

"Well " she said, slowly after reflection, "it all rather
frightens me."

As if the chill in the air of the cheerless room had
suddenly accentuated itself, she arose, took a match-
box from the mantel, and, stooping, lit the fire.

He looked down at the tall, black-clad figure, bent in stiff
awkwardness over the smoking grate, and his eyes softened.
Then he took fresh note of the room--the faded,
threadbare carpet, the sparse old furniture that had
seemed ugly to even his uninformed boyish taste,
the dingy walls and begrimed low ceiling--all pathetic
symbols of the bleak life to which she had been condemned.

"Frightens you?" he queried, with a kind of jovial
tenderness, as she got to her feet; "frightens you,
eh? Why, within a month's time, old lady, you'll be
riding in the Park in your own carriage, with niggers
folding their arms up behind, and you'll be taking
it all as easy and as natural as if you'd been born
in a barouche."

He added, in response to the enquiry of her lifted brows:
"Barouche? That's what we'd call in England a landau."

She stood with a foot upon the fender, her tired,
passive face inclined meditatively, her rusty old black
gown drawn back by one hand from the snapping sparks.
"No," she said, slowly, joyless resignation mingling with
pride in her voice. "I was born here over the shop."

"Well, good God! so was I," he commented, lustily.
"But that's no reason why I shouldn't wind up in Park
Lane--or you either."

She had nothing to say to this, apparently. After a little,
she seated herself again, drawing her chair closer
to the hearth. "It's years since I've lit this
fire before the first of November," she remarked,
with the air of defending the action to herself.

"Oh, we're celebrating," he said, rubbing his hands
over the reluctant blaze. "Everything goes, tonight!"

Her face, as she looked up at him, betrayed the bewilderment
of her mind. "You set out to tell me what it was all about,"
she reminded him. "You see I'm completely in the dark.
I only hear you say that you've made a great fortune.
That's all I know. Or perhaps you've told me as much as you
care to."

"Why, not at all," he reassured her, pulling his own
chair toward him with his foot, and sprawling into it
with a grunt of relief. "If you'll draw me a glass
of that beer of yours, I'll tell you all about it.
It's not a thing for everybody to know, not to be breathed
to a human being, for that matter--but you'll enjoy it,
and it'll be safe enough with you."

As she rose, and moved toward a door, he called merrily
after her: "No more beer when that keg runs dry, you know.
Nothing but champagne!"

CHAPTER III

THORPE took a long, thoughtful pull at the beer his sister
brought him.

"Ah, I didn't know I was so thirsty," he said, when he
put the glass down. "Truth is--I've lost track of
myself altogether since--since the big thing happened.
I seem to be somebody else--a comparative stranger,
so to speak. I've got to get acquainted with myself,
all over again. You can't imagine what an extraordinary
feeling it is--this being hit every few minutes with
the recollection that you're worth half a million.
It's like being struck over the head. It knocks you down.
There are such thousands of things to do--you dance about,
all of a flutter. You don't know where to begin."

"Begin where you left off," suggested Louisa. "You were
going to tell me how--how 'the big thing' happened.
You're always coming to it--and never getting any further."

Nodding comprehension of the rebuke's justification,
he plunged forthwith into the tale.

"You remember my telling you at the time how I got my
Board together. I'm speaking now of the present Company--after
I'd decided to be my own promoter, and have at least some kind
of 'a look-in' for my money. There wasn't much money left,
by the way; it was considerably under three thousand.
But I come to that later. First there was the Board.
Here was where that Lord Plowden that I told you about--the
man that came over on the ship with me--came in.
I went to him. I--God! I was desperate--but I hadn't
much of an idea he'd consent. But he did! He listened
to me, and I told him how I'd been robbed, and how the
Syndicate would have cut my throat if I hadn't pulled
away,--and he said, 'Why, yes, I'll go on your Board.'
Then I told him more about it, and presently he said he'd
get me another man of title--a sky-scraper of a title
too--to be my Chairman. That's the Marquis of Chaldon,
a tremendous diplomatic swell, you know, Ambassador at
Vienna in his time, and Lord Lieutenant and all sorts
of things, but willing to gather in his five hundred a year,
all the same."

"Do you mean that YOU pay HIM five hundred pounds a year?"
asked the sister.

"Yes, I've got a live Markiss who works for me at ten
quid a week, and a few extras. The other Directors get
three hundred. This Lord Plowden is one of them--but I'll
tell you more about him later on. Then there's Watkin,
he's a small accountant Finsbury way; and Davidson,
he's a wine-merchant who used to belong to a big firm
in Dundee, but gets along the best way he can on a very
dicky business here in London, now. And then there's
General Kervick, awfully well-connected old chap, they say,
but I guess he needs all he can get. He's started wearing
his fur-coat already. Well, that's my Board. I couldn't
join it, of course, till after allotment--that's because I'm
the vendor, as they call it--but that hasn't interfered
at all with my running the whole show. The Board doesn't
really count, you know. It only does what I want it to do.
It's just a form that costs me seventeen hundred a year,
that's all."

"Seventeen hundred a year," she repeated, mechanically.

"Well, then we got out the prospectus, d'ye see.
Or first, there were other things to be done. I saw that
a good broker's name counted for a lot on a prospectus.
I picked out one that I'd heard was reasonable--it'd been
a splendid name if I could have got it--but he calmly said
his price was two thousand pounds, all cash down--and I
came away. Finally I got a fellow who hadn't done much
of anything yet, and so wasn't so stiff about his figure.
He agreed to take 500 pounds cash, and 2,000 in shares.
It was God's luck that I hit on him, for he turned out,
at the pinch, to be the one man in a million for me.
But I'll tell you about him later. He's the Broker, mind;
you mustn't forget him. Well, then, he and I got a
Solicitor--he took 200 pounds cash, but he had to have 2,000
shares--and the firm of Auditors--they were 100 pounds
cash and 1,000 shares. Every company has to have these
people pasted on to it, by law. Oh yes, and then you must
have your Bankers. You don't pay them anything, though,
thank God! Well, then, there was the machinery complete,
all ready to start. I took a handsome set of offices,
and furnished them up to the nines--but that I was able
to do pretty well on credit. You see, ready money was
getting short.

"And now came the biggest pull of all. There was
the press to be worked."

He spoke as if there were no other papers in London
but the financial journals.

"I didn't sleep much while that was being fixed up. You've got
no more idea of what the press means, Louisa, than you have
of--of a coil of snakes thawing out hungry in the spring.
Why, if one blackmailer came to me, I swear a hundred did.
They scared the life out of me, the first month or so.
And then there's a swarm of advertising agents, who say
they can keep these blackmailers off, if you'll make it
worth their while. But they all wanted too much money
for me--and for a while I was at my wits' ends. At last
I got a fellow--he's not behaved so badly, all things
considered--who had some sporting blood in his veins,
and he was willing to do the whole thing for 5,000 pounds,
if I could pay 1,500 pounds down, and the rest in shares.
But that was just what I couldn't do, you see, so finally
he took 1,000 pounds down and 5,000 in shares--and as I
say he's done it tolerably well. There was one editor
that I had to square personally--that is to say, 100 pounds
cash--it had to be in sovereigns, for notes could be
traced--and a call of 2,000 shares at par,--he's the boss
pirate that everybody has to square--and of course there
were odd ten-pound notes here and there, but as a rule I
just opened the door and fired the black-mailers out.
The moment a fellow came in, and handed me his card,
and said he had proofs of two kinds of articles in his pocket,
one praising me, one damning me, I told him to go and see
my advertising agent, and if he wouldn't do that, then to go
to hell. That's the way you've got to talk in the City,"
he added, as if in apologetic explanation.

Louisa looked impassively at her brother. "Oh, I've heard
the expression as far west as the Strand," she remarked.

"Well, then came the issue. That was last Saturday.
You saw the prospectus in Saturday morning's papers,
and in the weeklies. The list was to be kept open,
it said, till Wednesday morning--that was yesterday.
That is to say, during all that time, people could apply
for shares."

"Which they didn't do--according to your account,"
the sister suggested, dryly.

Thorpe passed his fingers through his roughened hair,
and eyed her with a momentary quizzical gleam in his eye.
Then he became serious again. The recollection of what he
was now to narrate brought a frown to his brows.

"On Tuesday afternoon," he began, with portentous
deliberation--"Or no, first I must explain something.
You see, in bringing out a company, you can't put up too
stout a bluff. I mean, you've got to behave as if you were
rolling in wealth--as if everything was coming your way,
and fortunes were to be made by fastening to you.
I don't know that it often fools anybody very much,
but it's part of the game, and you must play it.
Well, accordingly, my Broker goes on 'change Saturday
morning, and has his jobber shout out that he'll buy
'Rubber Consols'--that's what our shares are called
on the street--at an eighth premium; that is to say,
he offered to buy for twenty-two-and-six what we were
offering to the public for twenty shillings. Of course,
you see, the object of that was to create the impression
that there was a regular God-almighty rush for our shares.
As I say, I don't know whether that ever fooled anybody--but
at least there was the chance that it might start up
some dealing in the shares--and all those things help.
Besides, you got the sales noticed in the papers,
and that might start up applications from the public.
Well, the Broker bought 1,000 shares this way on Saturday.
On Monday, when it might still be possible to change
the luck, he bought 3,500 more, still at that premium
of an eighth. He bought some Tuesday morning too--say
4,000. Well, now, keep those figures in your head, and keep
an eye on the Broker. He's worth watching--as you'll see."

"What's his name?" asked the sister, with an accession
of alertness in her face. "You call him 'Broker'--and
that doesn't mean anything to me. They're all brokers,
aren't they?"

"Semple--Colin Semple, that's his name. He's a young
Scotchman--father's a Presbyterian minister. He's a little,
insignificant runt of a chap to look at--but I learned
a long time ago not to judge a singed cat by his looks.
However--where was I?"

"You were going to tell about Tuesday afternoon,
weren't you?"

He nodded gravely, and straightened himself, drawing a long
breath in preparation for the dramatic recital before him.
"On Tuesday afternoon," he began again, with impressive
slowness, "I was walking on Throgmorton Street, about four
o'clock. It was raining a little--it had been raining
on and off all day--a miserable, rotten sort of a day,
with greasy mud everywhere, and everybody poking
umbrellas into you. I was out walking because I'd 'a'
cut my throat if I'd tried to stay in the office another
ten minutes. All that day I hadn't eaten anything.
I hadn't slept worth speaking of for three nights.
The whole game was up for me. I was worse than ruined.
I had half a crown in my pocket. I had ten or twelve pounds
in the bank--and they wouldn't let me overdraw a farthing.
I tell you, I was just plumb busted.

"There came along in the gutter a sandwich-man. I'd seen
the cuss before during the day, walking up and down
near my offices. I took notice of him, because he was
the raggedest, dirtiest, most forlorn-looking cripple you
ever saw in your life. Now I read what was on his boards.
It was the bill of a paper that I had refused to be bled by,
and there it was in big letters: 'The Rubber Bubble Burst!'
'Thorpe's Audacity Punished!' Those were the words.
I can see them with my eyes shut. I stood there,
looking at the fellow, and I suppose there was something
in the way I looked, for he stopped too.

Of course, he didn't know me from Adam, but all the same,
I'm damned if he didn't wink his eye at me--as if we two
had a joke between us. And at that I burst out laughing--I
simply roared with laughter, like a boy at a pantomime--and
I took that last half-crown out of my pocket, and I gave
it to the sandwich-man. God! you should have seen his face."

"I don't particularly mind, Joel," said his sister,
"but I never heard you swear so much before."

"Oh, what the--what the deuce!" he protested, impatiently.
"Don't interrupt me now! Well, I went on down the street.
The members of the Stock Exchange were coming out of
'the house,' and making up little groups on the pavement.
They do business inside, you know, until closing
time--this day it happened to be four o'clock--and then
they come out and deal in the street with one another,
with the kerb-stone mob, who are not allowed inside,
standing round to watch the thing. I came along into the
thick of these fellows; they were yelling out all sorts
of things--'East Rands,' 'Oroyas,' 'Lake View Centrals,'
and what not, but these went in one ear and out the other.
If there ever was a man with no stomach for the market it
was me. But then someone roared out:

"'At seven-eighths, sell Rubber Consols! Sell five
hundred Rubber at seven-eighths! Sell five hundred
at three-quarters! At three-quarters you have 'em!
Rubber Consols! Sell a thou. at three-quarters!'

"This thing went into my brain like a live coal. I stopped
and looked up at the fellow--and by God, it was one of the men
I've been talking about--one of those Kaffir scoundrels.
I wish I was better at remembering names--but I knew his face.
There were some of the others around him, and they
laughed at me, and he laughed at me. Oh, they had a heap
of fun out of me--for a minute or two. Pretty good fun,
too! I guess they'll remember it quite a while."

"Go on!" Louisa adjured him. The obvious proximity
of the dramatic climax drew her forward in her chair,
and brought a glow of expectation to her eyes.

"I got myself away from that crowd somehow--l think I
was afraid if I stayed I'd strangle the one who was
shouting on the steps--and I went toward my office.
But when I got to the door, I didn't have the courage
to go in. I'd furnished it better, I suppose, than any
other office in Austin Friars, and I had a kind of feeling
that the sight of those carpets, and oak-tables and desks,
and brass-railings and so on would make me sick.
I owed for 'em all, bear in mind----"

"But--Joel," the sister interposed. "One thing
I don't understand. How many people had applied
for shares? You haven't mentioned that."

A fleeting smile lighted up the saturnine gloom of
his present mood. "It was hardly worth mentioning,"
he answered, with bitter mirth. "Between five
and six thousand shares were subscribed, all told.
I think the withdrawals by telegraph brought it down to
practically five thousand. We offered a hundred thousand,
you know.--But let me go on with my story. I stood there,
in front of our street-door, in a kind of trance.
The words of that Jew--'Sell Rubber Consols at three-
quarters!'--buzzed inside my head as if they would burst
it open. I turned--and I happened to see my Broker--the
Scotchman, Semple, you know--coming along toward me.
Right at that minute, like a flash, something dawned on me.
In less than a second, I saw the whole damned rotten
outfit turned upside down, with me on top. I made a jump,
and ran to meet Semple.

"'How many shares of ours have you bought?' I asked him,
with a grip tight on his arm.

"The little chap was looking mighty sick. He figured up
in his mind. 'I'm afraid it's eight thousand five hundred,
all told,' he said, in a sort of Presbyterian whimper.

"'Well--how would these gentlemen go about it to deliver
their goods--that is, supposing we got a settlement?'

"I asked him this, and kept my eye on his face.
He looked puzzled for a minute. Then he put out his lip.
Then he shot me a glance as sharp as a razor, and we looked
into one another's eyes.

"'They were shouting them out to me at three-quarters,
a minute ago,' I told him.

"He was onto the game like lightning. 'Wait for me
in the office,' he whispered. 'We'll go nap on this!'

"With that he was off like a streak. He stopped
running just before he got to the corner, though,
and began walking slowly, sauntering along, you know,
as if his mind was on nothing but second-hand books.
I watched him out of sight--and then I went back, and up
to the offices. The furniture didn't scare me a bit
this time. Why, I stopped and felt of the brass-railing
just outside the Board Room, and I said to myself--'Pshaw!
We could have you of solid gold, if we wanted to.'"

He paused here, and regarded his sister with what she
felt was intended to be a significant look. She shrank
from the confession that its meaning was Greek to her.
"Well--and what next?" she asked, guardedly.

"Semple came back in twenty minutes or so--and the
next morning he was at it again--and what with him
and his jobber, by George, on the quiet, they picked up
nearly eighteen thousand of our shares. Some they paid
fifteen shillings for, some they got at twelve-and-six
and even ten. That doesn't matter; it's of no more
importance than the coppers you give to crossing-sweepers.
The thing was to get the shares--and by God we've
got them! Twenty-six thousand two hundred shares,
that's what we've got. Now, do you see what that means?"

"Why yes," she answered, with a faint-hearted assumption
of confidence. "Of course, you know the property is so
good that you'll make a profit on the shares you've bought
far below their value. But I don't think I quite see----"

He interrupted her with an outburst of loud laughter.
"Don't think you quite see?" he gurgled at her, with tears
of pleasure in his eye. "Why, you dummy, you haven't got
the faintest glimmer of a notion of what it's all about.
The value of the property's got nothing in the world
to do with it. That's neither here nor there. If there
wasn't any such property in existence, it would be just
the same."

He had compassion upon her blank countenance, at this,
and explained more gently: "Why, don't you see, Lou,
it's this way. This is what has happened. We've got
what's called a corner on the bears. They're caught short,
and we can squeeze them to our hearts' content.
What--you don't understand now? Why, see here! These
fellows who've sold twenty-six thousand of our shares--
they haven't got them to sell, and they can't get them.
That is the point--they can't get them for love nor
money--they must pay me my own price for them, or be
ruined men. The moment they realize the situation,
they will begin offering a premium for Rubber Consols.
The price of a one-pound share will be two pounds,
then four--six--ten--twenty--thirty--whatever I want
to drive it to."

Louisa stared up at him with wide open eyes. It seemed
to her that she understood now. It was very exciting.

"You see," he went on, taking approving note of the new
light of comprehension in her glance, "we did something
that Tuesday afternoon beside buy up these shares.
Semple rushed off to his office, and he and his clerks
got up a lot of dummy applications for shares, made out
in all the different names they could be safe in using,
and they put these into the bank with the application
money--Semple found that--and next day he went and
saw the advertising agent and the solicitor and the
auditors--and got them to pool the shares that I've
promised to give them. A pool? That means they agree
to transfer their shares to me as trustee, and let me
deal with them as I like--of course to their advantage.
In any case, their shares are vendor's shares, and couldn't
be dealt with in this transaction. So you see the thing
is hermetically sealed. Nobody can get a share except
from me, and at my price. But these fellows that have
sold them--they've got to have them, don't you see.
They had their little temporary joke with me on the street
that afternoon--and now they must walk up to the captain's
office and settle. They've got to pay me at least half
a million pounds for that few minutes' fun of theirs.
I may make it a good deal more; I don't know yet."

"Oh, Joel!" she groaned at him, in awed stupefaction.
His rather languid indecision as to whether half a million
was going to be enough, impressed her more powerfully than
had any detail of his narrative.

In a few comprehensive sentences he finished up for
her what there was to tell. "This afternoon my Board
met to allot the shares. They saw the applications,
amounting in all to over ninety thousand shares.
It took their breath away--they had heard that things
were going quite the other way with us. They were
so tickled that they asked no questions The allotment
went through like a greased pig. About 5,000 shares
went to those who had actually applied for them,
and 88,000 were solemnly given to the dummy applicants.
Of course, there wasn't a whisper about these dummies.
Nobody winked so much as an eyelash. But I've found
since that one of the directors--that Lord Plowden I
told you about--was onto the thing all the while.
But he's all right. Everybody's all right. Of course
the dummies' shares still stand in their names--on paper--
but in reality I've got them all in my safe--in my pocket
you might say. They are really mine, you understand.
So now there's nothing for us to do but to apply to the
Stock Exchange for a special settlement date, and meanwhile
lie quiet and watch the Jews stew in their own juice.
Or fry in their own fat, eh? That's better."

"But," she commented slowly, "you say there are no shares
to be bought--and yet as I understand it, there are those five
thousand that were sent out to the people who really applied."

"Bravo, Lou!" he answered her jovially. "You actually
do understand the thing. You've put your finger straight
on the point. It is true that those shares are out
against us--or might be turned against us if they could
be bought up. But in reality, they don't count at all.
In the first place, you see, they're scattered about
among small holders, country clergymen and old maids
on an annuity and so on--all over the country. Even if
these people were all traced, and hunted up, suppose it
was worth the trouble and expense, they wouldn't sell.
The bigger the price they were offered, the more mulish
they would be about holding. That's always the way
with them. But even if they did all sell, their five
thousand would be a mere drop in the bucket. There would
be over twenty thousand others to be accounted for.
That would be quite enough for my purposes. Oh, I figured
all that out very carefully. My own first notion was
to have the dummies apply for the whole hundred thousand,
and even a little over. Then, you see, we might have
allotted everything to the dummies, and sent back the
money and applications of the genuine ones. But that
would have been rather hard to manage with the Board.
The Markiss would have said that the returns ought to be made
pro rata--that is, giving everybody a part of what they
applied for--and that would have mixed everything up.
And then, too, if anybody suspected anything, why the Stock
Exchange Committee would refuse us a special settlement--and,
of course, without that the whole transaction is moonshine.
It was far too risky, and we didn't send back a penny."

"It's all pretty risky, I should think," she declared
as she rose. "I should think you'd lie awake more than
ever now--now that you've built your hopes so high
and it'd be so awful to have them come to nothing."

He smilingly shook his head. "No, it can no more fail
than that gas can fail to burn when you put a light to it.
It's all absolute. My half-million is as right as if
it were lying to my credit in the Bank of England.
Oh, that reminds me," he went on in a slightly
altered tone--" it's damned comical, but I've got to ask
you for a little money. I've only got about seven
pounds at my bank, and just at the minute it would give
me away fearfully to let Semple know I was hard up.
Of course he'd let me have anything I wanted--but,
you can see--I don't like to ask him just at the moment."

She hesitated visibly, and scanned his face with a
wistful gaze. "You're quite sure, Joel?"--she began--
"and you haven't told me--how long will it be before
you come into some of this money?"

"Well,"--he in turn paused over his words--"well, I suppose
that by next week things will be in such shape that my
bank will see I'm good for an overdraft. Oh heavens,
yes! there'll be a hundred ways of touching some ready.
But if you've got twenty or thirty pounds handy just now--I
tell you what I'll do, Lou. I'll give you a three months bill,
paying one hundred pounds for every sovereign you let me
have now. Come, old lady: you don't get such interest
every day, I'll bet."

"I don't want any interest from you, Joel,"
she replied, simply. "If you're sure I can have it back
before Christmas, I think I can manage thirty pounds.
It will do in the morning, I suppose?"

He nodded an amused affirmative. "Why--you don't imagine,
do you," he said, "that all this gold is to rain down,
and none of it hit you? Interest? Why of course you'll get
interest--and capital thrown in. What did you suppose?"

"I don't ask anything for myself," she made answer,
with a note of resolution in her voice. "Of course if you
like to do things for the children, it won't be me who'll
stand in their light. They've been spoiled for my kind
of life as it is."

"I'll do things for everybody," he affirmed roundly.
"Let's see--how old is Alfred?"

"He'll be twenty in May--and Julia is fourteen months
older than he is."

"Gad!" was Thorpe's meditative comment. "How they shoot
up! Why I was thinking she was a little girl." "She never
will be tall, I'm afraid," said the literal mother.
"She favours her father's family. But Alfred is more
of a Thorpe. I'm sorry you missed seeing them last
summer--but of course they didn't stop long with me.
This was no place for them--and they had a good many
invitations to visit schoolfellows and friends in the country.
Alfred reminds me very much of what you were at his age:
he's got the same good opinion of himself, too--and he's
not a bit fonder of hard work."

"There's one mighty big difference between us, though,"
remarked Thorpe. "He won't start with his nose held
down to the grindstone by an old father hard as nails.
He'll start like a gentleman--the nephew of a rich man."

"I'm almost afraid to have such notions put in his head,"
she replied, with visible apprehension. "You mustn't encourage
him to build too high hopes, Joel. It's speculation,
you know--and anything might happen to you. And then--you
may marry, and have sons of your own."

He lifted his brows swiftly--as if the thought were new
to his mind. A slow smile stole into the little wrinkles
about his eyes. He opened his lips as if to speak,
and then closed them again.

"Well," he said at last, abruptly straightening himself,
and casting an eye about for his coat and hat.
"I'll be round in the morning--on my way to the City.
Good-bye till then."

CHAPTER IV

IN Charing Cross station, the next afternoon,
Mr. Thorpe discovered by the big clock overhead that he
had arrived fully ten minutes too soon. This deviation
from his deeply-rooted habit of catching trains at
the last possible moment did not take him by surprise.
He smiled dryly, aud nodded to the illuminated dial,
as if they shared the secret of some quaint novelty.
This getting to the station ahead of time was of a piece
with what had been happening all day--merely one more token
of the general upheaval in the routine of his life.

From early morning he had been acutely conscious of the
feeling that his old manners and usages and methods
of thought--the thousand familiar things that made up
the Thorpe he had been--were becoming strange to him.
They fitted him no longer; they began to fall away
from him. Now, as he stood here on the bustling platform,
it was as if they had all disappeared--been left somewhere
behind him outside the station. With the two large bags
which the porter was looking after--both of a quite
disconcerting freshness of aspect--and the new overcoat
and shining hat, he seemed to himself a new kind of being,
embarked upon a voyage of discovery in the unknown.

Even his face was new. A sudden and irresistible
impulse had led him to the barber-shop in his hotel
at the outset; he could not wait till after breakfast
to have his beard removed. The result, when he beheld
it in the mirror, had not been altogether reassuring.
The over-long, thin, tawny moustasche which survived
the razor assumed an undue prominence; the jaw and chin,
revealed now for the first time in perhaps a dozen years,
seemed of a sickly colour, and, in some inexplicable way,
misshapen. Many times during the day, at his office,
at the restaurant where he lunched, at various outfitters'
shops which he had visited, he had pursued the task of getting
reconciled to this novel visage in the looking-glass.
The little mirrors in the hansom cabs had helped him
most in this endeavour. Each returned to him an image
so different from all the others--some cadaverous,
some bloated, but each with a spontaneous distortion
of its own--that it had become possible for him to strike
an average tolerable to himself, and to believe in it.

His sister had recognized him upon the instant, when he
entered the old book-shop to get the money promised overnight,
but in the City his own clerks had not known him at first.
There was in this an inspiring implication that he had
not so much changed his appearance as revived his youth.
The consciousness that he was in reality still a young
man spread over his mind afresh, and this time he felt
that it was effacing all earlier impressions. Why, when he
thought of it, the delight he had had during the day
in buying new shirts and handkerchiefs and embroidered
braces, in looking over the various stocks of razors,
toilet articles, studs and sleeve-links, and the like,
and telling the gratified tradesmen to give him the best
of everything--this delight had been distinctively boyish.
He doubted, indeed, if any mere youth could have risen
to the heights of tender satisfaction from which he
reflected upon the contents of his portmanteaus.
To apprehend their full value one must have been without them
for such a weary time! He had this wonderful advantage--that
he supplemented the fresh-hearted joy of the youth in
nice things, with the adult man's knowledge of how bald
existence could be without them. It was worth having
lived all those forty obscure and mostly unpleasant years,
for this one privilege now of being able to appreciate
to the uttermost the touch of double-silk underwear.

It was an undoubted pity that there had not been time to go
to a good tailor. The suit he had on was right enough for
ordinary purposes, and his evening-clothes were as good as new,
but the thought of a costume for shooting harassed his mind.
He had brought along with him, for this eventful visit,
an old Mexican outfit of yellowish-grey cloth and leather,
much the worse for rough wear, but saved from the disreputable
by its suggestion of picturesque experiences in a strange
and romantic country. At least it had seemed to him,
in the morning, when he had packed it, to be secure
in this salvation. Uneasy doubts on the subject had
soon risen, however, and they had increased in volume
and poignancy as his conceptions of a wardrobe expanded
in the course of the day's investigations and purchases.
He had reached the point now of hoping that it would
rain bitterly on the morrow.

It was doubly important to keep a close look-out for
Lord Plowden, since he did not know the name of the station
they were to book for, and time was getting short. He dwelt
with some annoyance upon his oversight in this matter,
as his watchful glance ranged from one entrance to another.
He would have liked to buy the tickets himself, and have
everything in readiness on the arrival of his host.
As it was, he could not even tell the porter how his
luggage was to be labelled, and there was now less than
two minutes! He moved forward briskly, with the thought
of intercepting his friend at the front of the station;
then halted, and went back, upon the recollection
that while he was going out one way, Plowden might come
in by the other. The seconds, as they passed now,
became severally painful to his nerves. The ringing
of a bell somewhere beyond the barrier provoked within
him an impulse to tearful profanity.

Then suddenly everything was all right. A smooth-faced,
civilly-spoken young man came up, touched his hat, and asked:
"Will you kindly show me which is your luggage, sir?"

Thorpe, even while wondering what business of his it was,
indicated the glaringly new bags--and then only half
repressed a cry of pleasure at discovering that Lord
Plowden stood beside him.

"It's all right; my man will look out for your things,"
said the latter, as they shook hands. "We will go and get
our places."

The fat policeman at the gate touched his helmet.
A lean, elderly man in a sort of guard's uniform hobbled
obsequiously before them down the platform, opened to them
a first-class compartment with a low bow and a deprecatory
wave of the hand, and then impressively locked the door
upon them. "The engine will be the other way, my Lord,
after you leave Cannon Street," he remarked through
the open window, with earnest deference. "Are there any
of your bags that you want in the compartment with you?"

Plowden had nodded to the first remark. He shook
his head at the second. The elderly man at this,
with still another bow, flapped out a green flag which he
had been holding furled behind his back, and extended
it at arm's length. The train began slowly to move.
Mr. Thorpe reflected to himself that the peerage was by no
means so played-out an institution as some people imagined.

"Ho-ho!" the younger man sighed a yawn, as he tossed
his hat into the rack above his head. "We shall both be
the better for some pure air. London quite does me up.
And you--you've been sticking at it months on end,
haven't you? You look rather fagged--or at all events you
did yesterday. You've smartened yourself so--without
your beard--that I can't say I'd notice it to-day.
But I take it every sensible person is glad to get away
from London."

"Except for an odd Sunday, now and then, I haven't put
my nose outside London since I landed here." Thorpe rose
as he spoke, to deposit his hat also in the rack.
He noted with a kind of chagrin that his companion's was
an ordinary low black bowler. "I can tell you, I SHALL
be glad of the change. I would have bought the tickets,"
he went on, giving words at random to the thought which he
found fixed on the surface of his mind, "if I'd only known
what our station was."

Plowden waved his hand, and the gesture seemed to dismiss
the subject. He took a cigar case from his pocket,
and offered it to Thorpe.

"It was lucky, my not missing the train altogether,"
he said, as they lighted their cigars. "I was up late last
night--turned out late this morning, been late all day,
somehow--couldn't catch up with the clock for the life of me.
Your statement to me last night--you know it rather
upset me."

The other smiled. "Well, I guess I know something about
that feeling myself. Why, I've been buzzing about today
like a hen with her head cut off. But it's fun, though,
aint it, eh? Just to happen to remember every once
in a while, you know, that it's all true! But of course
it means a thousand times more to me than it does to you."

The train had come to a stop inside the gloomy, domed cavern
of Cannon Street. Many men in silk hats crowded to and fro
on the platform, and a number of them shook the handle of
the locked door. There was an effect of curses in the sound
of their remarks which came through the closed window.
Mr. Thorpe could not quite restrain the impulse to grin at them.

"Ah, that's where you mistake," said Plowden,
contemplating the mouthful of smoke he slowly blew forth.
"My dear man, you can't imagine anybody to whom it would
mean more than it does to me--I hope none of those fellows
have a key. They're an awful bore on this train.
I almost never go by it, for that reason. Ah, thank God
we're off!--But as I was saying, this thing makes a greater
difference to me than you can think of. I couldn't sleep
last night--I give you my word--the thing upset me so.
I take it you--you have never had much money before;
that is, you know from experience what poverty is?"

Thorpe nodded with eloquent gravity.

"Well--but you"--the other began, and then paused.
"What I mean is," he resumed, "you were never, at any rate,
responsible to anybody but yourself. If you had only a
sovereign a day, or a sovereign a week, for that matter,
you could accommodate yourself to the requirements
of the situation. I don't mean that you would enjoy
it any more than I should--but at least it was open
to you to do it, without attracting much attention.
But with me placed in my ridiculous position--poverty
has been the most unbearable torture one can imagine.
You see, there is no way in which I can earn a penny.
I had to leave the Army when I was twenty-three--the
other fellows all had plenty of money to spend, and it
was impossible for me to drag along with a title and an
empty pocket. I daresay that I ought to have stuck to it,
because it isn't nearly so bad now, but twelve years ago
it was too cruel for any youngster who had any pride
about him--and, of course, my father having made rather
a name in the Army, that made it so much harder for me.
And after that, what was there? Of course, the bar and medicine
and engineering and those things were out of the question,
in those days at least. The Church?--that was more so still.
I had a try at politics--but you need money there as much
as anywhere else--money or big family connections.
I voted in practically every division for four years,
and I made the rottenest speeches you ever heard of at
Primrose League meetings in small places, and after all
that the best thing the whips could offer me was a billet
in India at four hundred a year, and even that you took
in depreciated rupees. When I tried to talk about
something at home, they practically laughed in my face.
I had no leverage upon them whatever. They didn't care
in the least whether I came up and voted or stopped at home.
Their majority was ten to one just the same--yes, twenty
to one. So that door was shut in my face. I've never
been inside the House since--except once to show it to an
American lady last summer--but when I do go again I rather
fancy"--he stopped for an instant, and nodded his handsome
head significantly--"I rather fancy I shall turn up on the
other side."

"I'm a Liberal myself, in English politics," interposed Thorpe.

Plowden seemed not to perceive the connection. They had left
London Bridge behind, and he put his feet up on the cushions,
and leant back comfortably. "Of course there was the City,"
he went on, speaking diagonally across to his companion,
between leisurely intervals of absorption in his cigar.
"There have been some directors' fees, no doubt,
and once or twice I've come very near to what promised
to be a big thing--but I never quite pulled it off.
Really, without capital what can one do?--I'm curious to
know--did you bring much ready money with you to England?"

"Between six and seven thousand pounds."

"And if it's a fair question--how much of it have you
got left?"

Thorpe had some momentary doubts as to whether this
was a fair question, but he smothered them under the
smile with which he felt impelled to answer the twinkle
in Plowden's eyes. "Oh, less than a hundred," he said,
and laughed aloud.

Plowden also laughed. "By George, that's fine!"
he cried. "It's splendid. There's drama in it.
I felt it was like that, you know. Something told me it
was your last cartridge that rang the bell. It was that
that made me come to you as I did--and tell you that you
were a great man, and that I wanted to enlist under you.
Ah, that kind of courage is so rare! When a man has it,
he can stand the world on its head." "But I was plumb scared,
all the while, myself," Thorpe protested, genially.
"Courage? I could feel it running out of my boots."

"Ah, yes, but that's the great thing," insisted the other.
"You didn't look as if you were frightened. From all
one could see, your nerve was sublime. And nothing else
matters--it was sublime."

"Curious--that thing happened to me once before,"
commented Thorpe, with ruminating slowness. "It was
out on the plains, years ago, and I was in pretty
hard luck, and was making my way alone from Tucson north,
and some cowboys held me up, and were going to make
kindling wood of me, they being under the impression
that I was a horse-thief they were looking after.
There was five or six minutes there when my life wasn't
worth a last year's bird's-nest--and I tell you, sir, I was
the scaredest man that ever drew the breath of life.
And then something happened to be said that put
the matter right--they saw I was the wrong man--and
then--why then they couldn't be polite enough to me.
They half emptied their flasks down my throat, and they
rode with me all the way to the next town, and there they
wanted to buy everything liquid in the place for me.
But what I was speaking of--do you know, those fellows
got a tremendous notion of my nerve. It wasn't so much
that they told me so, but they told others about it.
They really thought I was game to the core--when in reality,
as I tell you, I was in the deadliest funk you ever
heard of"

"That's just it," said Plowden, "the part of you which was
engaged in making mental notes of the occasion thought you
were frightened; we will say that it was itself frightened.
But the other part of you, the part that was transacting
business, so to speak--that wasn't in the least alarmed.
I fancy all born commanders are built like that.
Did you ever see General Grant?"

Thorpe shook his head.

"What reminded me of him--there is an account in his
Memoirs of how he felt when he first was given a command,
at the beginning of the Civil War. He was looking about
for the enemy, who was known to be in the vicinity,
and the nearer he got to where this enemy probably was,
the more he got timid and unnerved, he says, until it seemed
as if cowardice were getting complete mastery of him.
And then suddenly it occurred to him that very likely
the enemy was just as afraid of him as he was of the enemy,
and that moment his bravery all returned to him.
He went in and gave the other man a terrible thrashing.
It doesn't apply to your case, particularly--but I fancy
that all really brave men have those inner convictions
of weakness, even while they are behaving like lions.
Those must have been extraordinarily interesting
experiences of yours--on the plains. I wish I could
have seen something of that part of America when I
was there last year. Unfortunately, it didn't come
my way."

"I thought I remembered your saying you'd been West."

Plowden smiled. "I'm afraid I did think it was West
at the time. But since my return I've been warned
that I mustn't call Chicago West. That was as far as
I went. I had some business there, or thought I had.
When my father died, that was in 1884, we found
among his papers a lot of bonds of some corporation
purporting to be chartered by the State of Illinois.
Our solicitors wrote several letters, but they could find
out nothing about them, and there the matter rested.
Finally, last year, when I decided to make the trip,
I recollected these old bonds, and took them with me.
I thought they might at least pay my expenses. But it
wasn't the least good. Nobody knew anything about them.
It seems they related to something that was burned up in the
Great Fire--either that, or had disappeared before that time.
That fire seems to have operated like the Deluge--it
cancelled everything that had happened previously.
My unhappy father had a genius for that kind of investment.
I shall have great pleasure in showing you tomorrow,
a very picturesque and comprehensive collection of
Confederate Bonds. Their face value is, as I remember it,
eighty thousand dollars--that is, sixteen thousand pounds.
I would entertain with joy an offer of sixteen shillings
for the lot. My dear father bought them--I should not
be surprised to learn that he bought them at a premium.
If they ever touched a premium for a day, that is
certainly the day that he would have hit upon to buy.
Oh, it was too rare! Too inspired! He left nearly
a hundred thousand pounds' worth of paper--that is,
on its face--upon which the solicitors realized, I think
it was thirteen hundred pounds. It's hard to imagine
how he got them--but there were actually bonds among
them issued by Kossuth's Hungarian Republic in 1848.
Well--now you can see the kind of inheritance I came into,
and I have a brother and sister more or less to look after,
too."

Thorpe had been listening to these details with an almost
exaggerated expression of sympathy upon his face.
The voice in which he spoke now betrayed, however, a certain
note of incredulity.

"Yes, I see that well enough," he remarked. "But what I
don't perhaps quite understand--well, this is it.
You have this place of yours in the country, and preserve
game and so on--but of course I see what you mean.
It's what you've been saying. What another man would think
a comfortable living, is poverty to a man in your position."

"Oh, the place," said Plowden. "It isn't mine at all.
I could never have kept it up. It belongs to my mother.
It was her father's place; it has been in their family
for hundreds of years. Her father, I daresay you know,
was the last Earl of Hever. The title died with him.
He left three daughters, who inherited his estates,
and my mother, being the eldest, got the Kentish properties.
Of course Hadlow House will come to me eventually,
but it is hers during her lifetime. I may speak of it
as my place, but that is merely a facon de parler; it isn't
necessary to explain to everybody that it's my mother's.
It's my home, and that's enough. It's a dear old place.
I can't tell you how glad I am that you're going to see
it."

"I'm very glad, too," said the other, with unaffected sincerity.

"All the ambitions I have in the world," the nobleman
went on, sitting upright now, and speaking with a
confidential seriousness, "centre round Hadlow.
That is the part of me that I'm keen about. The Plowdens
are things of yesterday. My grandfather, the Chancellor,
began in a very small way, and was never anything more
than a clever lawyer, with a loud voice and a hard heart,
and a talent for money-making and politics. He got
a peerage and he left a fortune. My father, for all
he was a soldier, had a mild voice and a soft heart.
He gave a certain military distinction to the peerage,
but he played hell-and-tommy with the fortune. And then
I come: I can't be either a Chancellor or a General,
and I haven't a penny to bless myself with. You can't think
of a more idiotic box for a man to be in. But now--thanks
to you--there comes this prospect of an immense change.
If I have money at my back--at once everything is different
with me. People will remember then promptly enough that I
am a Hadlow, as well as a Plowden. I will make the party
whips remember it, too. It won't be a Secretary's billet
in India at four hundred a year that they'll offer me,
but a Governorship at six thousand--that is, if I wish
to leave England at all. And we'll see which set of
whips are to have the honour of offering me anything.
But all that is in the air. It's enough, for the moment,
to realize that things have really come my way. And about
that--about the success of the affair--I suppose there can
be no question whatever?"

"Not the slightest," Thorpe assured him. "Rubber Consols
can go up to any figure we choose to name."

Lord Plowden proffered the cigar case again, and once more
helped himself after he had given his companion a light.
Then he threw himself back against the cushions,
with a long sigh of content. "I'm not going to say
another word about myself," he announced, pleasantly.
"I've had more than my legitimate innings. You mustn't
think that I forget for a moment the reverse of the medal.
You're doing wonderful things for me. I only wish it
were clearer to me what the wonderful things are that I
can do for you."

"Oh, that'll be all right," said the other, rather vaguely.

"Perhaps it's a little early for you to have mapped out in your
mind just what you want to do," Plowden reflected aloud.
"Of course it has come suddenly upon you--just as it has
upon me. There are things in plenty that we've dreamed
of doing, while the power to do them was a long way off.
It doesn't at all follow that these are the things we shall
proceed to do, when the power is actually in our hands.
But have you any plans at all? Do you fancy going
into Parliament, for example?"

"Yes," answered Thorpe, meditatively. "I think I should
like to go into Parliament. But that would be some
way ahead. I guess I've got my plans worked out a trifle
more than you think. They may not be very definite,
as regards details, but their main direction I know
well enough. I'm going to be an English country gentleman."

Lord Plowden visibly winced a little at this announcement.
He seemed annoyed at the consciousness that he had done so,
turning abruptly first to stare out of the window,
then shifting his position on the seat, and at last stealing
an uneasy glance toward his companion. Apparently his
tongue was at a loss for an appropriate comment.

Thorpe had lost none of these unwilling tokens of embarrassment.
Plowden saw that at once, but it relieved even more than
it surprised him to see also that Thorpe appeared not
to mind. The older man, indeed, smiled in good-natured
if somewhat ironical comprehension of the dumb-show.

"Oh, that'll be all right, too," he said, with the evident
intention of reassurance. "I can do it right enough,
so far as the big things are concerned. It'll be in the
little things that I'll want some steering."

"I've already told you--you may command me to the utmost
of my power," the other declared. Upon reflection,
he was disposed to be ashamed of himself. His nerves
and facial muscles had been guilty of an unpardonable
lapse into snobbishness--and toward a man, too, who had
been capable of behaviour more distinguished in its
courtesy and generosity than any he had encountered
in all the "upper circles" put together. He recalled all
at once, moreover, that Thorpe's "h's" were perfect--aud,
for some occult reason, this completed his confusion.

"My dear fellow"--he began again, confronting with verbal
awkwardness the other's quizzical smile--"don't think I
doubt anything about you. I know well enough that you
can do anything--be anything--you like."

Thorpe laughed softly.

"I don't think you know, though, that I'm a public-
school man," he said.

Plowden lifted his brows in unfeigned surprise.
"No--I didn't know that," he admitted, frankly.

"Yes, I'm a Paul's Pigeon," Thorpe went on, "as they
called them in my day. That's gone out now, I'm told,
since they've moved to the big buildings in Hammersmith.
I did very well at school, too; came out in the first fourteen.
But my father wouldn't carry the thing any further.
He insisted on my going into the shop when I left St. Paul's
and learning the book-business. He had precisely the same
kind of dynastic idea, you know, that you fellows have.
His father and his grand-father had been booksellers,
and he was going to hand on the tradition to me,
and my son after me. That was his idea. And he thought
that Paul's would help this--but that Oxford would
kill it.

"Of course, he was right there--but he was wrong in supposing
there was a bookseller in me. I liked the books well enough,
mind you--but damn the people that came to buy them,
I couldn't stand it. You stood two hours watching to see
that men didn't put volumes in their pockets, and at
the end of that time you'd made a profit of ninepence.
While you were doing up the parcel, some fellow walked off
with a book worth eighteen-pence. It was too slow for me.
I didn't hit it off with the old man, either. We didn't
precisely quarrel, but I went off on my own hook.
I hung about London for some years, trying this thing
and that. Once I started a book-shop of my own--but I
did no good here. Finally I turned it up altogether,
and went to Australia. That was in 1882. I've been
in almost every quarter of the globe since; I've known
what it was to be shipwrecked in a monsoon, and I've
lain down in a desert not expecting to get up again,
with my belt tightened to its last hole for hunger--but
I can't remember that I ever wished myself back in my
father's book-shop."

Plowden's fine eyes sparkled his appreciation of the
other's mood. He was silent for a moment, then lifted
his head as if something had occurred to him.
"You were speaking of the plan that you should succeed
to your father's business--and your son after you--you're
not married, are you?"

Thorpe slowly shook his head.

"Our station is the next," said the younger man.
"It's a drive of something under two miles. You'd better
light another cigar." He added, as if upon a casual
afterthought: "We can both of us think of marrying now."

CHAPTER V

FOR the next two hours, Thorpe's thoughts were almost
wholly occupied with various phases of the large subject of
domestic service. He seemed suddenly to have been transported
to some region populated exclusively by clean-shaven men
in brown livery. One of these was holding a spirited
horse outside the station, and when Lord Plowden had taken
the reins, and Thorpe had gathered the rugs about his
knees and feet, this menial silently associated himself
with the young man who had accompanied them from town,
on the back seat of the trap. With these people so close
behind him, Thorpe felt that any intimate conversation
was out of the question. Indeed, talk of any sort
was not invited; the big horse burst forth with high,
sprawling strides upon a career through the twilight,
once the main road was reached, which it taxed all Plowden's
energies to regulate. He kept up a continual murmuring
monologue to the animal--"So--so--quiet, my pet,--so--
so--easy, my beauty---so--so"--and his wrists and gloved
hands were visibly under a tremendous tension of strain,
as they held their own against the rigid arched neck
and mouth of steel. Thorpe kept a grip on the side of
the trap, and had only a modified pleasure in the drive.
The road along which they sped seemed, in the gathering dusk,
uncomfortably narrow, and he speculated a good deal
as to how frightened the two mutes behind him must be.
But silence was such a law of their life that, though he
strained his ears, he could not so much as hear them
sigh or gasp.

It seemed but a very few minutes before they turned off,
with but the most fleeting diminution of pace, upon a
private road, which speedily developed into an avenue
of trees, quite dark and apparently narrower than ever.
Down this they raced precipitately, and then, coming out
all at once upon an open space, swung smartly round the
crescent of a gravel road, and halted before what seemed
to be the door of a greenhouse. Thorpe, as he stood up
in the trap, got an uncertain, general idea of a low,
pale-coloured mansion in the background, with lights showing
behind curtains in several widely separated windows;
what he had taken to be a conservatory revealed itself now
to be a glass gallery, built along the front of the central
portion of this house.

A profusion of hospitable lights--tall wax-candles
in brackets among the vines against the trellised wall--
gave to this outlying entrance what the stranger felt
to be a delightful effect. Its smooth tiled floor,
comfortably bestrewn with rugs, was on a level with the
path outside. There were low easy-chairs here, and a little
wicker table bearing books and a lady's work-basket.
Further on, giant chrysanthemum blooms were massed beneath
the clusters of pale plumbago-flowers on the trellis.
Directly in front, across the dozen feet of this
glazed vestibule, the broad doorway of the house proper
stood open--with warm lights glowing richly upon dark
woods in the luxurious obscurity within.

What Thorpe noted most of all, however, was the servants
who seemed to swarm everywhere. The two who had alighted
from the trap had contrived somehow mysteriously to multiply
themselves in the darkness. All at once there were a
number of young men--at the horse's head, at the back and
sides of the trap, at the first doorway, and the second,
and beyond--each presenting such a smooth-faced, pallid,
brown-clad replica of all the others that Thorpe knew
he should never be able to tell them apart.

Lord Plowden paused for a moment under the candle-light to
look at his watch. "We did it in a bit over eight minutes,"
he remarked, with obvious satisfaction. "With four
people and heavy roads that's not so bad--not so bad.
But come inside."

They moved forward through the wide doorway into an
apartment the like of which Thorpe had not seen before.
It was a large, square room, with a big staircase at
the end, which separated and went off to right and left,
half-way up its visible course. Its floor was of
inlaid woods, old and uneven from long use, and carpeted
here and there by the skins of tigers and leopards.
There were many other suggestions of the chase about
the room: riding boots, whips, spurs, and some stands
of archaic weapons caught the eye at various points;
the heads of foxes and deer peeped out on the blackened
panels of the walls, from among clusters of hooks crowded
with coats, hats, and mackintoshes. At the right,
where a fire glowed and blazed under a huge open
chimney-place, there were low chairs and divans drawn up
to mark off a space for orderly domestic occupation.
The irregularity of every thing outside--the great table
in the centre of the hall strewn with an incongruous litter
of caps, books, flasks, newspapers, gloves, tobacco-pouches;
the shoes, slippers, and leggings scattered under the
benches at the sides--all this self-renewing disorder of a
careless household struck Thorpe with a profound surprise.
It was like nothing so much as a Mexican ranch--and
to find it in the ancestral home of an English nobleman,
filled to overflowing with servants, amazed him.

The glances that he cast about him, however, were
impassive enough. His mind was charged with the ceaseless
responsibility of being astonished at nothing.
A man took his hat, and helped him off with his coat.
Another moved toward the staircase with his two bags.

"If you will follow Pangbourn," said his host,
indicating this second domestic, "he will look after you.
You would like to go up and change now, wouldn't you?
There's a fire in your room."

Thus dismissed, he went up the stairs in the wake
of his portmanteaus, taking the turning to the left,
and then proceeding by a long, low passage, round more than
one corner, to what he conceived to be a wing of the house.
The servant ushered him into a room--and, in despite
of himself, he sighed with pleasure at the sight of it.
The prettiest and most charming of rooms it seemed
to him to be--spacious and quaintly rambling in shape,
with a delicately-figured chintz repeating the dainty
effects of the walls upon the curtains and carpet and
bed-hangings and chair-covers, and with a bright fire
in the grate throwing its warm, cozy glow over everything.
He looked at the pictures on the walls, at the photographs
and little ornaments on the writing desk, and the high
posts and silken coverlet of the big bed, and, secure in
the averted face of the servant, smiled richly to himself.

This servant, kneeling, had unstrapped and opened
the new bags. Thorpe looked to see him quit the room,
this task accomplished, and was conscious of something
like dismay at the discovery that he intended to unpack
them as well. Pangbourn began gravely to unwrap one
paper parcel after another and to assort their contents
in little heaps on the sofa beside him. He did it deftly,
imperturbably, as if all the gentlemen he had ever seen
carried their belongings in packages done up by tradesmen.

Thorpe's impulse to bid him desist framed itself in words
on the tip of his tongue--but he did not utter these words.
After circling idly, hands in pockets, about the man
and the bags for a little time, he invented something
which it seemed better for him to say.

"I don't know what you'll be able to make of those things,"
he remarked, casually. "My man has been buying them
today--and I don't know what he mayn't have forgotten.
My whole outfit of that sort of thing went astray or was
stolen at some station or other--the first part of the
week--I think it must have been Leeds."

"Yes, sir," said Pangbourn, without emotion.
"They're very careless, sir."

He went on impassively, shaking out the black garments
and spreading them on the bed, laying out a shirt and tie
beside them, and arranging the razors, strop, and brushes
on the dressing-table. He seemed to foresee everything--for
there was not an instant's hesitation in the clock-like
assiduity of his movements, as he bestowed handkerchiefs,
in one drawer, socks in another, hung pyjamas before the fire,
and set the patent-leather pumps against the fender.
Even the old Mexican shooting-suit seemed in no way to
disconcert him. He drew forth its constituent elements
as with a practised hand; when he had hung them up,
sombrero and all, in the wardrobe against the wall,
they had the trick of making that venerable oaken receptacle
look as if it had been fashioned expressly for them.

Thorpe's earlier uneasiness quite lost itself in his
admiration for Pangbourn's resourceful dexterity.
The delighted thought that now he would be needing a man
like this for himself crossed his mind. Conceivably he might
even get this identical Pangbourn--treasure though he were.
Money could command everything on this broad globe--and why
not Pangbourn? He tentatively felt of the coins in his pocket,
as it became apparent that the man's task was nearing
completion--and then frowned at himself for forgetting
that these things were always reserved for the end of a visit.

"Will you dress now, sir?" asked Pangbourn. His soft,
distinct enunciation conveyed the suggestion of centuries
of training.

"Eh?" said Thorpe, finding himself for the moment behind
the other's thought.

"Shall you require me any further, sir?" the man reframed
the question, deferentially.

"Oh! Oh--no," replied Thorpe. "No--I'll get along all right."

Left to himself, he began hurriedly the task of shaving
and dressing. The candles on either side of the thick,
bevelled swinging mirror presented a somewhat embarrassing
contrast to the electric light he was used to--but upon second
thought he preferred this restrained aristocratic glimmer.

He had completed his toilet, and was standing at the
bay-window, with his shoulder holding back the edge
of the curtain, looking out upon the darkened lawn and
wondering whether he ought to go downstairs or wait for
someone to summon him, when he heard a knock at his door.
Before he could answer, the door opened, and he made
out in the candle-and firelight that it was Lord Plowden
who had come in. He stepped forward to meet his host who,
clad now in evening-clothes, was smoking a cigarette.

"Have they looked after you all right?" said Plowden,
nonchalantly. "Have a cigarette before we go down? Light
it by the candle. They never will keep matches in a bedroom."

He seated himself in an easy-chair before the fire,
as he spoke, and stretched out his shining slippers
toward the grate. "I thought I'd tell you before we went
down"--he went on, as Thorpe, with an elbow on the mantel,
looked down at his handsome head--"my sister has a couple
of ladies visiting her. One of them I think you know.
Do you remember on shipboard a Miss Madden--an American,
you know--very tall and fine, with bright red hair--rather
remarkable hair it was?"

"I remember the lady," said Thorpe, upon reflection,
"but we didn't meet." He could not wholly divest his tone
of the hint that in those days it by no means followed
that because he saw ladies it was open to him to know them.

Lord Plowden smiled a little. "Oh, you'll like her.
She's great fun--if she's in the mood. My mother and sister--I
had them call on her in London last spring--and they took
a great fancy to her. She's got no end of money, you know--at
least a million and a half--dollars, unfortunately.
Her parents were Irish--her father made his pile in the
waggon business, I believe--but she's as American as if
they'd crossed over in--what was it, the 'Sunflower'?--no,
the 'Mayflower.' Marvelous country for assimilation,
that America is! You remember what I told you--it's put
such a mark on you that I should never have dreamt you were English."

Thorpe observed his companion, through a blue haze of smoke,
in silence. This insistence upon the un-English nature
of the effect he produced was not altogether grateful
to his ears.

"The other one," continued Plowden, "is Lady Cressage.
You'll be interested in her--because a few years ago she
was supposed to be the most beautiful woman in London.
She married a shocking bounder--he would have been
Duke of Glastonbury, though, if he had lived--but he
was drowned, and she was left poor as a church mouse.
Oh! by the way!" he started up, with a gleam of aroused
interest on his face--"it didn't in the least occur
to me. Why, she's a daughter of our General Kervick.
How did he get on the Board, by the way? Where did you pick
him up?"

Thorpe bent his brows in puzzled lines. "Why, you introduced
me to him yourself, didn't you?" he asked, slowly.

Plowden seemed unaffectedly surprised at the suggestion,
as he turned it over in his mind. "By George! I think
you're right," he said. "I'd quite forgotten it.
Of course I did. Let me see--oh yes, I reconstruct it
readily enough now. Poor old chappie--he needs all he
can get. He was bothering her about money--that was it,
I remember now--but what an idiot I was to forget it.
But what I was saying--there's no one else but my mother
and sister, and my brother Balder. He's a youngster--twenty
or thereabouts--and he purports to be reading for his exams
for the Army. If they opened his head, though, I doubt
if they'd find anything but cricket and football,
unless it might be a bit of golf. Well--that's the party.
I thought you might like to have a notion of them in advance.
If you've finished your cigarette"--he threw his own
into the grate, and rose as he spoke--"we may as well be
moving along. By the way," he concluded, as they walked
toward the door, "I've an idea that we won't say anything,
just at the moment, about our great coup. I should like
to keep it as a little surprise--for my mother and sister,
you know."

Some two hours later, Thorpe found the leisure and the
restored equanimity needful for a dispassionate survey
of his surroundings. He had become temporarily detached
from the group over by the fireplace in the big drawing-room
and was for the first time that evening very much at
his ease. It was all much simpler, upon experiment,
than he had feared. He stood now in a corner of the
ornate apartment, whither he had wandered in examining
the pictures on the walls, and contemplated with serenity
the five people whom he had left behind him. He was
conscious of the conviction that when he rejoined them,
it would be on a new footing of assured equality.
He knew now the exact measure of everything.

The Hon. Balder Plowden--a tall, heavily-built youth,
with enormous shoulders and thick, hard hands, and pale
straw-coloured hair and brows and eyelashes--had amiably
sauntered beside him, and was elucidating for his benefit now,
in slow, halting undertones, some unfathomable mystery
connected with the varying attitude of two distinct breeds
of terriers toward rats. Across the room, just within
reach of the flickering ruddy firelight from the hearth,
the American guest, Miss Madden, was seated at the piano,
playing some low and rather doleful music. Thorpe bent
his head, and assumed an air of attention, but in truth he
listened to neither the Honourable Balder nor the piano.
His thoughts were concentrated jealously upon his own
position in this novel setting. He said to himself that it
was all right. Old Lady Plowden had seemed to like him
from the start. The genial, if somewhat abstracted,
motherliness of her welcome had been, indeed, his sheet
anchor throughout the evening. She had not once failed
to nod her head and smile and twinkle her little kind eyes
through their spectacles at him, whenever by word or look he
had addressed her. Nor did his original half-suspicion,
that this was her manner to people in general, justify itself
upon observation. She was civil, even excessively civil,
to the other two guests, but these ladies did not get
the same eager and intent smile that he could command.
He reasoned it out that Plowden must have said something
pleasant to his mother about him--perhaps even to the point
of explaining that he was to be the architect of their
fortunes--but he did not like to ascribe all her hospitable
warmth to that. It was dear to him to believe that she
liked him on his own merits--and he did believe it,
as his softened glance rested upon her where she sat
almost facing him in her padded, wicker chair--small,
white-haired, rosy-cheeked, her intelligent face radiating
a kind of alert placidity which somehow made him feel
at home.

He had not been as much at home with the others.
The Honourable Balder, of course, didn't count; nobody paid
attention to him, and least of all a busy Rubber King.
He gave not much more heed to the American--the tall
young woman with the red hair and the million and a half
of dollars. She was plainly a visitor like himself,
not at all identified with the inner life of the household.
He fancied, moreover, that she in no way desired to be
thus identified. She seemed to carry herself with a
deliberate aloofness underlying her surface amiability.
Then he had spoken his few words with her, once or twice,
he had got this effect of stony reserve close beneath
her smile and smooth words. True, this might mean only
that she felt herself out of her element, just as he
did--but to him, really it did not matter what she felt.
A year ago--why, yes, even a fortnight ago--the golden
rumour of millions would have shone round her auburn hair
in his eyes like a halo. But all that was changed.
Calculated in a solidified currency, her reported fortune
shrank to a mere three hundred thousand pounds. It was
a respectable sum for a woman to have, no doubt, but it
did nothing to quicken the cool indifference with which he
considered her.

The two other young women were different. They were seated
together on a sofa, so placed as regarded his point of view,
that he saw only in part the shadowed profiles of the faces
they turned toward the piano. Although it was not visible
to him, the posture of their shoulders told him that they
were listening to the music each holding the other's hand.
This tacit embrace was typical in his mind of the way
they hung together, these two young women. It had been
forced upon his perceptions all the evening, that this
fair-haired, beautiful, rather stately Lady Cressage,
and the small, swarthy, round-shouldered daughter
of the house, peering through her pince-nez from under
unduly thick black brows, formed a party of their own.
Their politeness toward him had been as identical in all
its little shades of distance and reservation as if they
had been governed from a single brain-centre. It would
be unfair to them to assume from their manner that they
disliked him, or were even unfavourably impressed by him.
The finesse of that manner was far too delicate a thing
to call into use such rough characterizations. It was
rather their action as a unit which piqued his interest.
He thought he could see that they united upon a common
demeanour toward the American girl, although of course they
knew her much better than they knew him. It was not even
clear to him that there were not traces of this combination
in their tone toward Plowden and the Honourable Balder.
The bond between them had twisted in it strands of social
exclusiveness, and strands of sex sympathy.

He did not analyze all this with much closeness in his thoughts,
but the impressions of it were distinct enough to him.
He rather enjoyed these impressions than otherwise.
Women had not often interested him consecutively
to any large degree, either in detail or as a whole.
He had formulated, among other loose general notions
of them, however, the idea that their failure to stand
by one another was one of their gravest weaknesses.
This proposition rose suddenly now in his mind, and claimed
his attention. It became apparent to him, all at once,
that his opinions about women would be henceforth
invested with a new importance. He had scarcely before
in his life worn evening dress in a domestic circle
which included ladies--certainly never in the presence
of such certificated and hall-marked ladies as these.
His future, however, was to be filled with experiences
of this nature. Already, after this briefest of ventures
into the new life, he found fresh conceptions of the great
subject springing up in his thoughts. In this matter
of women sticking together, for example--here before his
eyes was one of the prettiest instances of it imaginable.
As he looked again at the two figures on the sofa,
so markedly unlike in outward aspect, yet knit to each
other in such a sisterly bond, he found the spectacle
really touching.

Lady Cressage had inclined her classic profile even more
toward the piano. Thorpe was not stirred at all by
the music, but the spirit of it as it was reflected upon
this beautiful facial outline--sensitive, high-spirited,
somewhat sad withal--appealed to something in him.
He moved forward cautiously, noiselessly, a dozen
restricted paces, and halted again at the corner of a table.
It was a relief that the Honourable Balder, though he
followed along, respected now his obvious wish for silence.
But neither Balder nor anyone else could guess that
the music said less than nothing to his ears--that
it was the face that had beckoned him to advance.

Covertly, with momentary assurances that no one observed him,
he studied this face and mused upon it. The white candle-light
on the shining wall beyond threw everything into a soft,
uniform shadow, this side of the thread of dark tracery
which outlined forehead and nose and lips and chin.
It seemed to him that the eyes were closed, as in reverie;
he could not be sure.

So she would have been a Duchess if her husband had
lived! He said to himself that he had never seen before,
or imagined, a face which belonged so indubitably
beneath a tiara of strawberry leaves in diamonds.
The pride and grace and composure, yes, and melancholy,
of the great lady--they were all there in their supreme
expression. And yet--why, she was no great lady at all.
She was the daughter of his old General Kervick--the
necessitous and haughtily-humble old military gentleman,
with the grey moustache and the premature fur coat,
who did what he was told on the Board without a question,
for a pitiful three hundred a year. Yes--she was his daughter,
and she also was poor. Plowden had said so.

Why had Plowden, by the way, been so keen about relieving
her from her father's importunities? He must have had
it very much at heart, to have invented the roundabout
plan of getting the old gentleman a directorship.
But no--there was nothing in that. Why, Plowden had even
forgotten that it was he who suggested Kervick's name.
It would have been his sister, of course, who was
evidently such chums with Lady Cressage, who gave him
the hint to help the General to something if he could.
And when you came to think of it, these aristocrats and
military men and so on, had no other notion of making money
save by directorships. Clearly, that was the way of it.
Plowden had remembered Kervick's name, when the chance
arose to give the old boy a leg up, and then had clean
forgotten the circumstance. The episode rather increased
his liking for Plowden.

He glanced briefly, under the impulse of his thought,
to where the peer sat, or rather sprawled, in a big low chair
before the fire. He was so nearly recumbent in it, indeed,
that there was nothing to be seen of him but an elbow,
and two very trim legs extended to the brass fender.
Thorpe's gaze reverted automatically to the face of
General Kervick's daughter. He wondered if she knew
about the Company, and about him, and about his ability
to solidify to any extent her father's financial position.
Even more, upon reflection, he wondered whether she was
very fond of her father; would she be extremely grateful
to one who should render him securely comfortable for
life? Miss Madden rose from the piano before Thorpe noted
that the music had ceased. There came from the others
a soft but fervent chorus of exclamations, the sincerity
and enthusiasm of which made him a little ashamed.
He had evidently been deaf to something that deeply
moved the rest. Even Balder made remarks which seemed
to be regarded as apposite.

"What IS it?" asked Lady Cressage, with obvious feeling.
"I don't know when anything has touched me so much."

"Old Danish songs that I picked up on the quai
in Paris for a franc or two," replied Miss Madden.
"I arranged and harmonized them--and, oddly enough,
the result is rather Keltic, don't you think?"

"We are all of us Kelts in our welcome to music--and
musicians--like this," affirmed Lord Plowden, who had
scrambled to his feet.

With sudden resolution, Thorpe moved forward and joined
the conversation.

CHAPTER VI

THORPE'S life-long habit of early rising brought him downstairs
next morning before anybody else in the house, apparently,
was astir. At all events, he saw no one in either the hall
or the glass vestibule, as he wandered about. Both doors
were wide open, however, to the mild, damp morning air.
He found on one of the racks a cap that was less uncomfortable
than the others, and sauntered forth to look about him.

His nerves were by no means in so serene a state as his reason
told him they ought to be. The disquieting impression of bad
dreams hung about him. The waking hour--always an evil
time for him in these latter days of anxiety--had been this
morning a peculiarly depressing affair. It had seemed
to him, in the first minutes of reviving consciousness,
that he was a hopelessly ruined and discredited man;
the illusion of disaster had been, indeed, so complete
and vivid that, even now, more than an hour later,
he had not shaken off its effects.

He applied his mental energies, as he strolled along
the gravel paths, to the task of reassuring himself.
There were still elements of chance in the game,
of course, but it was easy enough, here in the daylight,
to demonstrate that they had been cut down to a minimum--that
it was nonsense to borrow trouble about them. He reviewed
the situation in painstaking detail, and at every point
it was all right, or as nearly all right as any human
business could be. He scolded himself sharply for this
foolish susceptibility to the intimidation of nightmares.
"Look at Plowden!" he bade his dolorous spirit.
"See how easy he takes things."

It was undeniable that Lord Plowden took things very
easily indeed. He had talked with eloquence and feeling
about the miseries and humiliations of a peerage inadequately
endowed with money, but no traces of his sufferings were
visible to Thorpe's observant eye. The nobleman himself looked
the very image of contented prosperity--handsome, buoyant,
light-hearted, and, withal, the best-groomed man in London.
And this ancestral home of his--or of his mother's, since he
seemed to insist upon the distinction--where were its signs
of a stinted income? The place was overrun with servants.
There was a horse which covered a distance of something
like two miles in eight minutes. Inside and out,
Hadlow House suggested nothing but assured plenty.
Yet its master told the most unvarying tales of poverty,
and no doubt they were in one sense true. What he wished
to fix his mind upon, and to draw strength for himself from,
was the gay courage with which these Plowdens behaved
as if they were rich.

The grounds at the front of the house, hemmed in by
high hedges and trees from what seemed to be a public
road beyond, were fairly spacious, but the sleek decorum
of their arrangement, while it pleased him, was scarcely
interesting. He liked better to study the house itself,
which in the daylight revealed itself as his ideal
of what a historic English country-house of the minor
class should be.

There had been a period in his youth when architecture
had attracted him greatly as offering a congenial and
lucrative career. Not much remained to him now of the
classifications and phraseology which he had gone to the trouble
of memorizing, in that far-off time, but he still looked
at buildings with a kind of professional consciousness.
Hadlow House said intelligible things to him, and he
was pleased with himself for understanding them.
It was not new in any part, apparently, but there was
nothing pretentious in its antiquity. It had never
been a castle, or a fortified residence. No violent
alteration in habits or needs distinguished its present
occupants from its original builders. It had been
planned and reared as a home for gentle people, at some
not-too-remote date when it was already possible for gentle
people to have homes, without fighting to defend them.
One could fancy that its calm and infinitely comfortable
history had never been ruffled from that day to this.
He recalled having heard it mentioned the previous evening
that the house stood upon the site of an old monastery.
No doubt that accounted for its being built in a hollow,
with the ground-floor on the absolute level of the
earth outside. The monks had always chosen these low-lying
sheltered spots for their cloisters. Why should they
have done so? he wondered--and then came to a sudden
mental stop, absorbed in a somewhat surprised contemplation
of a new version of himself. He was becoming literary,
historical, bookish! His mind had begun to throw open again,
to abstract thoughts and musings, its long-closed doors.
He had read and dreamed so much as a lad, in the old
book-shop! For many years that boyhood of eager concern
in the printed page had seemed to him to belong to
somebody else. Now, all at once, it came back to him as his
own possession; he felt that he could take up books again
where he had dropped them, perhaps even with the old rapt,
intent zest.

Visions rose before him of the magnificent library he
would gather for himself. And it should be in no wise
for show--the gross ostentation of the unlettered
parvenu--but a genuine library, which should minister
to his own individual culture. The thought took instant
hold upon his interest. By that road, his progress to the
goal of gentility would be smooth and simple. He seemed
not to have reasoned it out to himself in detail before,
but now, at all events, he saw his way clearly enough.
Why should he be tormented with doubts and misgivings
about himself, as if he had come out of the gutter?

Why indeed? He had passed through--and with credit,
too--one of the great public schools of England.
He had been there on a footing of perfect equality,
so far as he saw, with the sons of aristocratic families
or of great City potentates. And as to birth, he had
behind him three generations at least of scholarly men,
men who knew the contents, as well as the commercial value,
of the books they handled.

His grandfather had been a man of note in his calling.
The tradition of Lord Althorp's confidence in him, and of
how he requited it by securing Caxton's "Golden Legend"
for the library of that distinguished collector, under the
very nose of his hot rival, the Duke of Marlborough,
was tenderly cherished as an heirloom in the old shop.
And Thorpe's father, too, though no such single achievement
crowned his memory, had been the adviser and, as one might say,
the friend of many notable writers and patrons of literature.
The son of such forbears needed only money to be recognized
by everybody as a gentleman.

On his mother's side, now that he thought of it,
there was something perhaps better still than a heritage
of librarians' craft and tastes. His mother's maiden
name was Stormont, and he remembered well enough the
solemnity with which she had always alluded to the fact,
in the course of domestic discussions. Who the Stormonts
were he could not recall that he had ever learned,
but his mother had been very clear indeed about their
superiority to the usual ruck of people. He would
ask his sister whether she knew anything about them.
In the meantime there was no denying that Stormont was
a fine-sounding name. He reflected that it was his own
middle name--and, on the instant, fancy engraved for him
a card-plate on which appeared the legend--"Mr. Stormont Thorpe."

It was an inspiration! "Joel" he had not used for so many
years that now, after six months' familiarity with it
on his sister's lips, he could not get accustomed to it.
The colourless and non-committal style of "J. S. Thorpe,"
under which he had lived so long, had been well enough
for the term of his exile--the weary time of obscure toil
and suspense. But now, in this sunburst of smiling fortune,
when he had achieved the right to a name of distinction--here
it was ready to his hand. A fleeting question as to
whether he should carry the "J" along as an initial put
itself to his mind. He decided vigorously against it.
He had always had a prejudice against men who, in the
transatlantic phrase, parted either their hair or their
names in the middle.

He had made his unheeding way past the house to the
beginning of the avenue of trees, which he remembered
from the previous evening's drive. To his right, an open
space of roadway led off in the direction of the stables.
As he hesitated, in momentary doubt which course to take,
the sound of hoofs in the avenue caught his ear,
and he stood still. In a moment there came into view,
round a curve in the leafy distance, two horses with riders,
advancing at a brisk canter. Soon he perceived that the
riders were ladies; they drew rein as they approached him,
and then it was to be seen that they were the pair he had
judged to be such close friends last night--Lady Cressage
and the daughter of the house.

They smiled and nodded down at him, as he lifted his
cap and bowed. Their cheeks were glowing and their
eyes sparkling with the exhilaration of their ride.
Even the Hon. Winifred looked comely and distinguished
in his eyes, under the charm of this heightened vivacity.
She seemed to carry herself better in the saddle than she
did out of it; the sweep of her habit below the stirrup
lent dignity to her figure.

But her companion, whose big chestnut mount was pacing slowly
toward the stepping-block--how should he bring within the
compass of thought the impressions he had had of her as she
passed? There seemed to have been no memory in his mind
to prepare him for the beauty of the picture she had made.
Slender, erect, exquisitely-tailored, she had gone by like
some queen in a pageant, gracious yet unapproachable.
He stared after her, mutely bewildered at the effect she
produced upon him--until he saw that a groom had run from
the stable-yard, and was helping the divinity to dismount.
The angry thought that he might have done this himself
rose within him--but there followed swiftly enough
the answering conviction that he lacked the courage.
He did not even advance to proffer his services to the other
young lady, while there was still time. The truth was,
he admitted ruefully to himself, they unnerved him.

He had talked freely enough to them, or rather to the company
of which they made part, the previous evening. There had
been an hour or more, indeed, before the party broke up,
in which he had borne the lion's share of the talk--and
they had appeared as frankly entertained as the others.
In fact, when he recalled the circle of faces to which he
had addressed his monologue of reminiscences--curious
experiences and adventures in Java and the Argentine,
in Brazil and the Antilles and Mexico and the far West--it
was in the face of Lady Cressage that he seemed to discern
the most genuine interest.

Why should she frighten him, then, by daylight? The
whimsical theory that the wine at dinner had given him
a spurious courage occurred to him. He shrugged his
shoulders at it, and, with his hands in his pockets,
turned toward the stables.

The stable-yard is, from some points of view,
the prettiest thing about Hadlow. There is a big,
uneven, grass-grown space, in the centre of which,
from a slight mound, springs an aged oak of tremendous
girth and height. All around this enclosure are buildings
of the same pale yellowish brick as the mansion itself,
but quaintly differing one from another in design and size.
Stables, carriage-houses, kennels, a laundry, a brewery,
and half a dozen structures the intention of which is
now somewhat uncertain--some flat-topped, some gabled,
others with turrets, or massive grouped chimneys, or overhanging
timbered upper stories--form round this unkempt, shadowed
green a sort of village, with a communal individuality of its own.

A glance shows its feudal relation to, and dependence
upon, the great house behind which it nestles;
some of the back-kitchens and offices of this
great house, indeed, straggle out till they meet and
merge themselves into this quadrangle. None the less,
it presents to the enquiring gaze a specific character,
of as old a growth, one might think, as the oak itself.
Here servants have lived, it may be, since man first learned
the trick of setting his foot on his brother's neck.
Plainly enough, the monks' servants lived and worked here;
half the buildings on the side nearest the house belong to
their time, and one of them still bears a partially-defaced
coat of arms that must have belonged to an Abbot.
And when lay lord succeeded cleric, only the garb and
vocabulary of servitude were altered in this square.
Its population crossed themselves less, and worked much harder,
but they remained in a world of their own, adjacent aud
subject to the world of their masters, yet separated
from it by oh! such countless and unthinkable distances.

Thorpe sauntered along the side of the stables.
He counted three men and a boy who visibly belonged
to this department. The dog-cart of the previous evening
had been run out upon the brick-pavement which drained
the stables, and glistened with expensive smartness now
beneath the sponge of one of the hostlers. Under cover,
he discerned two other carriages, and there seemed to be
at least half a dozen horses. The men who, in the half
gloom of the loose-boxes, were busy grooming these
animals made a curious whistling noise as they worked.
Everybody in the yard touched a forelock to him as he passed.

From this quaint, old-world enclosure he wandered at
his leisure, through an open gate in the wall at the back,
into the gardens behind the house. There was not much
in the way of flowers to look at, but he moved about quite
unconscious of any deprivation. A cluster of greenhouses,
massed against the southern side of the mansion,
attracted his listless fancy, and he walked toward what
appeared to be an entrance to them. The door was locked,
but he found another further on which opened to his hand.
The air was very hot and moist inside, and the place was
so filled with broad-leaved, umbrageous tropical plants
that he had to stoop to make his way through to the end.
The next house had a more tolerable atmosphere, and contained
some blossoms to which he gave momentary attention.
In the third house, through the glass-door, he could
see a man--evidently a gardener--lifting some pots to a
shelf overhead.

The thought occurred to him that by entering into
conversation with this man, he might indirectly obtain
a hint as to the usual breakfast-hour at Hadlow. It was
now nearly ten o'clock, and he was getting very hungry.
Would they not ring a bell, or sound a gong, or something?
he wondered. Perhaps there had been some such summons,
and he had not heard it. It might be the intelligent
thing for him to return to the house, at all events,
and sit in the hall where the servants could see him,
in case the meal was in progress.

Looking idly through the glass at the gardener, meanwhile,
it suddenly dawned upon him that the face and figure
were familiar. He stared more intently at the man,
casting about in his memory for a clue to his identity.
It came to him that the person he had in mind was a
fellow named Gafferson, who had kept an impoverished
and down-at-the-heels sort of hotel and general store on
the road from Belize to Boon Town, in British Honduras.
Yes, it undoubtedly was Gafferson. What on earth
was he doing here? Thorpe gave but brief consideration
to this problem. It was of more immediate importance
to recall the circumstances of his contact with the man.
He had made Gafferson's poor shanty of an hotel his
headquarters for the better part of a month--the base
of supplies from which he made numerous prospecting
tours into the mountains of the interior. Had he paid
his bill on leaving? Yes, there was no doubt about that.
He could even recall a certain pity for the unbusiness-like
scale of charges, and the lack of perception of opportunity,
which characterized the bill in question. He remembered
now his impression that Gafferson would never do any good.
It would be interesting to know what kind of an impression he,
in turn, had produced on his thriftless host. At any rate,
there was no good reason why he should not find out.
He opened the door and went in.

The gardener barely looked up from his occupation,
and drew aside to let the newcomer pass with no sign
of a gesture toward his cap. Thorpe halted, and tried
to look at the pots on the staging as if he knew about
such things.

"What are you doing?" he asked, in the tentative tone
of one who is in no need of information, but desires
to be affable.

"Drying off the first lot of gloxinias," answered the other.
"Some people put 'em on their sides, but I like 'em upright,
close to the glass. It stands to reason, if you think
about it."

"Why, certainly," said Thorpe, with conviction.
In his mind he contrasted the independence of Gafferson's
manner with the practised servility of the stable-yard--
and thought that he liked it--and then was not so sure.
He perceived that there was no recognition of him.
The gardener, as further desultory conversation about his
work progressed, looked his interlocutor full in the face,
but with a placid, sheep-like gaze which seemed to be entirely
insensible to variations in the human species.

"How did you ever get back here to England?" Thorpe was
emboldened to ask at last. In comment upon the other's
stare of puzzled enquiry, he went on: "You're Gafferson,
aren't you? I thought so. When I last saw you, you were
running a sort of half-way house, t'other side of Belize.
That was in '90."

Gafferson--a thick-set, squat man of middle age, with a
straggling reddish beard--turned upon him a tranquil but
uninformed eye. "I suppose you would have been stopping
at Government House," he remarked. "That was in Sir
Roger Goldsworthy's time. They used to come out often
to see my flowers. And so you remembered my name.
I suppose it was because of the Gaffersoniana hybrids.
There was a good bit in the papers about them last spring."
Thorpe nodded an assent which it seemed better not to put
into words. "Well, it beats all," he mused aloud.
"Why, man, there's gold in those mountains! You had an inside
track on prospecting, placed as you were. And there's
cocoa--and some day they'll coin money in rubber, too.
All that country's waiting for is better communications.
And you were on the spot, and knew all the lay of the
land--and yet here you are back in England, getting so much
a month for messing about in the mud."

He saw swiftly that his reflections had carried him beyond
his earlier limit, and with rapidity decided upon frankness.
"No, I wasn't in the Governor's outfit at all. I was
looking for gold then--with occasionally an eye on rubber.
I stopped at your place. Don't you remember me? My
name's Thorpe. I had a beard then. Why, man, you and one
of your niggers were with me three or four days once,
up on the ridge beyond the Burnt Hills--why, you remember,
the nigger was from San Domingo, and he was forever
bragging about the San Domingo peppers, and saying those
on the mainland hadn't enough strength to make a baby
wrinkle his nose, and you found a pepper coming through
the swamp, and you tipped me the wink, and you handed
that pepper to the nigger, and it damned near killed him.
Hell! You must remember that!"

"That would have been the Chavica pertusum," said Gafferson,
thoughtfully. He seemed to rouse himself to an interest in
the story itself with some difficulty. "Yes--I remember it,"
he admitted, finally. "I shouldn't have known you though.
I'm the worst in the world about remembering people.
It seems to be growing on me. I notice that when I go
up to London to the shows, I don't remember the men
that I had the longest talks with the time before.
Once you get wrapped up in your flowers, you've got
no room in your head for anything else--that's the way of it."

Thorpe considered him with a ruminating eye. "So this
is the sort of thing you really like, eh? You'd rather be
doing this, eh? than making your pile in logwood and mahogany
out there, or floating a gold mine?" Gafferson answered
quite simply: "I wasn't the kind to ever make a pile.
I got led into going out there when I was a youngster,
and there didn't seem to be any good in trying to get back,
but I wasn't making more than a bare living when you
were there, and after that I didn't even do that much.
It took me a good many years to find out what my
real fancy was. I hated my hotel and my store,
but I was crazy about my garden. Finally an American
gentleman came along one day, and he put up at my place,
and he saw that I was as near ruined as they make 'em,
and he says to me, 'You're no good to run a hotel,
nor yet a store, and this aint your country for a cent.
What you're born for is to grow flowers. You can't
afford to do it here, because nobody'll pay you for it,
but you gather up your seeds and roots and so on, and come
along with me to Atlanta, Georgia, and I'll put fat on
your bones.'

"That's what he said to me, and I took him at his word,
and I was with him two years, and then I thought I'd like to
come to England, and since then I've worked my way up here,
till now I take a Royal Horticultural medal regular,
and there's a clematis with salmon-coloured bars that'll
be in the market next spring that's named after my master.
And what could I ask more 'n that?"

"Quite right," said Thorpe. "What time do they have
breakfast here?"

The gardener's round, phlegmatic, florid countenance had
taken on a mild glow of animation during his narrative.
It relapsed into lethargy at the advent of this new topic.

"It seems to me they eat at all hours," he said.
"But if you want to see his Lordship," he went on,
considering, "about noon would be your best time."

"See his Lordship!" repeated Thorpe, with an impatient grin.
"Why I'm a guest here in the house. All I want is
something to eat."

"A guest," Gafferson repeated in turn, slowly. There was
nothing unpleasant in the intonation, and Thorpe's sharp
glance failed to detect any trace of offensive intention
in his companion's fatuous visage. Yet it seemed to
pass between the two men that Gafferson was surprised,
and that there were abundant grounds for his surprise.

"Why, yes," said Thorpe, with as much nonchalance as he
could summon, "your master is one of my directors.
I've taken a fancy to him, and I'm going to make a rich
man of him. He was keen about my seeing his place here,
and kept urging me to come, and so finally I've got away
over Sunday to oblige him. By the way--I shall buy an
estate in the country as soon as the right thing offers,
and I shall want to set up no end of gardens and greenhouses
and all that. I see that I couldn't come to a better
man than you for advice. I daresay I'll put the whole
arrangement of it in your hands. You'd like that,
wouldn't you?"

"Whatever his Lordship agrees to," the gardener
replied, sententiously. He turned to the staging,
and took up one of the pots.

Thorpe swung on his heel, and moved briskly toward the
further door, which he could see opened upon the lawn.
He was conscious of annoyance with this moon-faced,
dawdling Gafferson, who had been afforded such a splendid
chance of profiting by an old acquaintanceship--it might even
be called, as things went in Honduras, a friendship--and
who had so clumsily failed to rise to the situation.
The bitter thought of going back and giving him a half-crown
rose in Thorpe's inventive mind, and he paused for
an instant, his hand on the door-knob, to think it over.
The gratuity would certainly put Gafferson in his place,
but then the spirit in which it was offered would be wholly
lost on his dull brain. And moreover, was it so certain
that he would take it? He had not said "sir" once, and he
had talked about medals with the pride of a scientist.
The rules were overwhelmingly against a gardener rejecting
a tip, of course, but if there was no more than one chance
in twenty of it, Thorpe decided that he could not afford
the risk.

He quitted the greenhouse with resolution, and directed his
steps toward the front of the mansion. As he entered the hall,
a remarkably tuneful and resonant chime filled his ears
with novel music. He looked and saw that a white-capped,
neatly-clad domestic, standing with her back to him beside
the newel-post of the stairs, was beating out the tune
with two padded sticks upon some strips of metal ranged on
a stand of Indian workmanship. The sound was delightful,
but even more so was the implication that it betokened breakfast.

With inspiration, he drew forth the half-crown which he
had been fingering in his pocket, and gave it to the girl
as she turned. "That's the kind of concert I like,"
he declared, bestowing the patronage of a jovial smile upon
her pleased and comely face. "Show me the way to this
breakfast that you've been serenading about."

Out in the greenhouse, meanwhile, Gafferson continued
to regard blankly the shrivelled, fatty leaves of
the plant he had taken up. "Thorpe," he said aloud,
as if addressing the tabid gloxinia--"Thorpe--yes--I
remember his initials--J. S. Thorpe. Now, who's the
man that told me about him? and what was it he told me?"

CHAPTER VII

THE experiences of the breakfast room were very agreeable indeed.
Thorpe found himself the only man present, and, after the
first few minutes of embarrassment at this discovery,
it filled him with surprised delight to note how perfectly
he was at his ease. He could never have imagined
himself seated with four ladies at a table--three
of them, moreover, ladies of title--and doing it all so well.

For one thing, the ladies themselves had a morning manner,
so to speak, which differed widely from the impressions
he had had of their deportment the previous evening.
They seemed now to be as simple and fresh and natural
as the unadorned frocks they wore. They listened with an
air of good-fellowship to him when he spoke; they smiled
at the right places; they acted as if they liked him,
and were glad of his company.

The satisfied conviction that he was talking well,
and behaving well, accompanied him in his progress
through the meal. His confession at the outset of his
great hunger, and of the sinister apprehensions which
had assailed him in his loitering walk about the place,
proved a most fortuitous beginning; after that,
they were ready to regard everything he said as amusing.

"Oh, when we're by ourselves," the kindly little old
hostess explained to him, "my daughter and I breakfast
always at nine. That was our hour yesterday morning,
for example. But when my son is here, then it's farewell
to regularity. We put breakfast back till ten, then,
as a kind of compromise between our own early habits
and his lack of any sort of habits. Why we do it I
couldn't say--because he never comes down in any event.
He sleeps so well at Hadlow--and you know in town he sleeps
very ill indeed--and so we don't dream of complaining.
We're only too glad--for his sake."

"And Balder," commented the sister, "he's as bad the other way.
He gets up at some unearthly hour, and has his tea and a
sandwich from the still-room, and goes off with his rod
or his gun or the dogs, and we never see him till luncheon."

"I've been on the point of asking so many times,"
Miss Madden interposed--"is Balder a family name,
or is it after the Viking in Matthew Arnold's poem?"

"It was his father's choice," Lady Plowden made answer.
"I think the Viking explanation is the right one--it
certainly isn't in either family. I can't say that it
attracted me much--at first, you know."

"Oh, but it fits him so splendidly," said Lady Cressage.
"He looks the part, as they say. I always thought it
was the best of all the soldier names--and you have only
to look at him to see that he was predestined for a soldier
from his cradle."

"I wish the Sandhurst people would have a good long
look at him, then," put in the mother with earnestness
underlying the jest of her tone. "The poor boy will
never pass those exams in the world. It IS ridiculous,
as his father always said. If there ever was a man who
was made for a soldier, it's Balder. He's a gentleman,
and he's connected by tradition with the Army, and he's
mad about everything military--and surely he's as clever
as anybody else at everything except that wretched matter
of books, and even there it's only a defect of memory--and
yet that suffices to prevent his serving his Queen.
And all over England there are young gentlemen like that--the
very pick of the hunting-fields, strong and brave as lions,
fit to lead men anywhere, the very men England wants
to have fighting her battles--and they can't get places
in the Army because--what was it Balder came to grief
over last time?--because they can't remember whether
it's Ispahan or Teheran that's the capital of Persia.

"They are the fine old sort that would go and capture both
places at the point of the bayonet--and find out their
names afterward--but it seems that's not what the Army
wants nowadays. What is desired now is superior clerks,
and secretaries and professors of languages--and much
good they will do us when the time of trouble comes!"

"Then you think the purchase-system was better?"
asked the American lady. "It always seemed to me
that that must have worked so curiously."

"Prefer it?" said Lady Plowden. "A thousand times
yes! My husband made one of the best speeches in the
debate on it--one do I say?--first and last he must
have made a dozen of them. If anything could have kept
the House of Lords firm, in the face of the wretched
Radical outcry, it would have been those speeches.
He pointed out all the evils that would follow the change.
You might have called it prophetic--the way he foresaw
what would happen to Balder--or not Balder in particular,
of course, but that whole class of young gentlemen.

"As he said, you have only to ask yourself what kind
of people the lower classes naturally look up to and
obey and follow. Will they be ordered about by a man
simply because he knows Greek and Latin and Hebrew? Do
they respect the village schoolmaster, for example,
on account of his learning? Not in the very slightest! On
the contrary, they regard him with the greatest contempt.
The man they will serve is the man whose birth gives him
the right to command them, or else the man with money
in his pockets to make it worth their while. These two
are the only leaders they understand. And if that's true
here in England, in times of peace, among our own people,
how much truer must it be of our soldiers, away from England,
in a time of war?"

"But, mamma," the Hon. Winifred intervened, "don't you
see how badly that might work nowadays? now that the good
families have so little money, and all the fortunes are
in the hands of stockjobbing people--and so on? It would
be THEIR sons who would buy all the commissions--and
I'm sure Balder wouldn't get on at all with that lot."

Lady Plowden answered with decision and great promptness.
"You see so little of the world, Winnie dear,
that you don't get very clear ideas of its movements.
The people who make fortunes in England are every whit
as important to its welfare as those who inherit names,
and individually I'm sure they are often much more deserving.
Every generation sniffs at its nouveaux riches, but by
the next they have become merged in the aristocracy.
It isn't a new thing in England at all. It has always been
that way. Two-thirds of the peerage have their start
from a wealthy merchant, or some other person who made
a fortune. They are really the back-bone of England.
You should keep that always in mind."

"Of course--I see what you mean"--Winnie replied,
her dark cheek flushing faintly under the tacit reproof.
She had passed her twenty-fifth birthday, but her voice had
in it the docile self-repression of a school-girl. She spoke
with diffident slowness, her gaze fastened upon her plate.
"Of course--my grandfather was a lawyer--and your point
is that merchants--and others who make fortunes--would
be the same."

"Precisely," said Lady Plowden. "And do tell us,
Mr. Thorpe"--she turned toward where he sat at her right
and beamed at him over her spectacles, with the air of
having been wearied with a conversation in which he bore no
part--"is it really true that social discontent is becoming
more marked in America, even, than it is with us in England?"

"I'm not an American, you know," he reminded her.
"I only know one or two sections of the country--and
those only as a stranger. You should ask Miss Madden."

"Me?" said Celia. "Oh, I haven't come up for my
examinations yet. I'm like Balder--I'm preparing."

"What I should like Mr. Thorpe to tell us,"
suggested Lady Cressage, mildly, "is about the flowers
in the tropics--in Java, for example, or some
of the West Indies. One hears such marvelous tales about them."

"Speaking of flowers," Thorpe suddenly decided to mention the fact;
"I met out in one of the greenhouses here this morning,
an old acquaintance of mine, the gardener, Gafferson.
The last time I saw him, he was running the worst hotel
in the world in the worst country in the world--
out in British Honduras."

"But he's a wonderful gardener," said Lady Cressage.
"He's a magician; he can do what he likes with plants.
It's rather a hobby of mine--or used to be--and I never saw
his equal."

Thorpe told them about Gafferson, in that forlorn
environment on the Belize road, and his success in
making them laugh drew him on to other pictures of the
droll side of life among the misfits of adventure.
The ladies visibly dallied over their tea-cups to listen
to him; the charm of having them all to himself,
and of holding them in interested entertainment by his
discourse--these ladies of supremely refined associations
and position--seemed to provide an inspiration of its own.
He could hear that his voice was automatically modulating
itself to their critical ears. His language was producing
itself with as much delicacy of selection as if it came
out of a book--and yet preserving the savour of quaint,
outlandish idiom which his listeners clearly liked.
Upon the instant when Lady Plowden's gathering of skirts,
and glance across the table, warned him that they were
to rise, he said deliberately to himself that this had
been the most enjoyable episode of his whole life.

There were cigar boxes on the fine old oak mantel,
out in the hall, and Winnie indicated them to him with
the obvious suggestion that he was expected to smoke.
He looked her over as he lit his cigar--where she
stood spreading her hands above the blaze of the logs,
and concluded that she was much nicer upon acquaintance
than he had thought. Her slight figure might not
be beautiful, but beyond doubt its lines were ladylike.
The same extenuating word applied itself in his mind
to her thin and swarthy, though distinguished, features.
They bore the stamp of caste, and so did the way she looked
at one through her eye-glasses, from under those over-heavy
black eyebrows, holding her head a little to one side.
Though it was easy enough to guess that she had a spirit
of her own, her gentle, almost anxious, deference to her
mother had shown that she had it under admirable control.

He had read about her in a peerage at his sister's
book-shop the previous day. Unfortunately it did not
give her age, but that was not so important, after all.
She was styled Honourable. She was the daughter of one
Viscount and the sister of another. Her grandfather
had been an Earl, and the book had shown her to possess
a bewildering number of relationships among titled folks.
All this was very interesting to him--and somewhat suggestive.
Vague, shapeless hints at projects rose in his brain as he
looked at her.

"I'm afraid you think my brother has odd notions
of entertaining his guests," she remarked to him,
over her shoulder. The other ladies had not joined them.

"Oh, I'm all right," he protested cordially. "I should
hate to have him put himself out in the slightest."
Upon consideration he added: "I suppose he has given up
the idea of shooting to-day."

"I think not, "she answered." The keeper was about this morning,
that is--and he doesn't often come unless they are to go
out with the guns. I suppose you are very fond of shooting."

"Well--I've done some--in my time," Thorpe replied, cautiously.
It did not seem necessary to explain that he had yet to fire
his first gun on English soil. "It's a good many years,"
he went on, "since I had the time and opportunity to do much
at it. I think the last shooting I did was alligators.
You hit 'em in the eye, you know. But what kind of
a hand I shall make of it with a shot-gun, I haven't
the least idea. Is the shooting round I here pretty good?"

"I don't think it's anything remarkable. Plowden says
my brother Balder kills all the birds off every season.
Balder's by way of being a crack-shot, you know.
There are some pheasants, though. We saw them flying
when we were out this morning."

Thorpe wondered if it would be possible to consult her
upon the question of apparel. Clearly, he ought to make
some difference in his garb, yet the mental vision
of him-self in those old Mexican clothes revealed itself
now as ridiculously impossible. He must have been out
of his mind to have conceived anything so preposterous
as rigging himself out, among these polished people,
like a cow-puncher down on his luck.

"I wonder when your brother will expect to start,"
he began, uneasily. "Perhaps I ought to go and get ready."

"Ah, here comes his man," remarked the sister.
A round-faced, smooth-mannered youngster--whom Thorpe
discovered to be wearing cord-breeches and leather
leggings as he descended the stairs--advanced toward him
and prefaced his message by the invariable salutation.
"His Lordship will be down, sir, in ten minutes--and he
hopes you'll be ready, sir," the valet said.

"Send Pangbourn to this gentleman's room," Miss Winnie
bade him, and with a gesture of comprehensive submission
he went away.

The calm readiness with which she had provided a solution
for his difficulties impressed Thorpe greatly.
It would never have occurred to him that Pangbourn
was the answer to the problem of his clothes, yet how
obvious it had been to her. These old families did
something more than fill their houses with servants;
they mastered the art of making these servants an integral
part of the machinery of existence. Fancy having a man
to do all your thinking about clothes for you, and then
dress you, into the bargain. Oh, it was all splendid.

"It seems that we're going shooting," Thorpe found
himself explaining, a few moments later in his bedroom,
to the attentive Pangbourn. He decided to throw himself
with frankness upon the domestic's resourceful good-feeling.
"I haven't brought anything for shooting at all. Somehow I
got the idea we were going to do rough riding instead--and
so I fetched along some old Mexican riding-clothes that make
me feel more at home in the saddle than anything else would.
You know how fond a man gets of old, loose things like that.
But about this shooting--I want you to fix me out.
What do I need? Just some breeches and leggings, eh? You
can manage them for me, can't you?"

Pangbourn could and did--and it was upon his advice that the
Mexican jacket was utilized to complete the out-fit. Its
shape was beyond doubt uncommon, but it had big pockets,
and it looked like business. Thorpe, as he glanced up
and down his image in the tall mirror of the wardrobe,
felt that he must kill a large number of birds to justify
the effect of pitiless proficiency which this jacket lent
to his appearance.

"We will find a cap below, sir," Pangbourn announced,
with serenity, and Thorpe, who had been tentatively
fingering the big, flaring sombrero, thrust it back upon
its peg as if it had proved too hot to handle.

Downstairs in the hall there was more waiting to be done,
and there was nobody now to bear him company. He lit
another cigar, tried on various caps till he found a leathern
one to suit him, and then dawdled about the room and the
adjoining conservatory for what seemed to him more than half
an hour. This phase of the aristocratic routine, he felt,
did not commend itself so warmly to him as did some others.
Everybody else, however, seemed to regard it as so wholly
a matter of course that Plowden should do as he liked,
that he forbore formulating a complaint even to himself.

At last, this nobleman's valet descended the stairs
once more. "His Lordship will be down very shortly
now, sir," he declared--"and will you be good enough
to come into the gun-room, sir, and see the keeper?"

Thorpe followed him through a doorway under the staircase--the
existence of which he had not suspected--into a
bare-looking apartment fitted like a pantry with shelves.
After the semi-gloom of the hall, it was almost
glaringly lighted. The windows and another door opened,
he saw, upon a court connected with the stable-yard.
By this entrance, no doubt, had come the keeper,
a small, brown-faced, brown-clothed man of mature years,
with the strap of a pouch over his shoulder, who stood
looking at the contents of the shelves. He mechanically
saluted Thorpe in turn, and then resumed his occupation.
There were numerous gun cases on the lower shelf,
and many boxes and bags above.

"Did his Lordship say what gun?" the keeper demanded
of the valet. He had a bright-eyed, intent glance,
and his tone conveyed a sense of some broad, impersonal,
out-of-doors disdain for liveried house-men.

The valet, standing behind Thorpe, shrugged his shoulders
and eloquently shook his head.

"Do you like an 'ammerless, sir?" the keeper turned
to Thorpe.

To his intense humiliation, Thorpe could not make out
the meaning of the query. "Oh, anything'll do for me,"
he said, awkwardly smiling. "It's years since I've shot--I
daresay one gun'll be quite the same as another to me."

He felt the knowing bright eyes of the keeper taking
all his measurements as a sportsman. "You'd do best
with 'B,' sir, I fancy," the functionary decided at last,
and his way of saying it gave Thorpe the notion that "B"
must be the weapon that was reserved for school-boys.
He watched the operation of putting the gun together,
and then took it, and laid it over his arm, and followed
the valet out into the hall again, in dignified silence.
To the keeper's remark--"Mr. Balder has its mate with
him today, sir," he gave only a restrained nod.

There were even now whole minutes to wait before Lord
Plowden appeared. He came down the stairs then with
the brisk, rather impatient air of a busy man whose plans
are embarrassed by the unpunctuality of others. He was
fully attired, hob-nailed shoes, leggings, leather coat
and cap, gloves, scarf round his throat and all--and he
behaved as if there was not a minute to lose. He had barely
time to shake perfunctorily the hand Thorpe offered him,
and utter an absent-minded "How are you this morning?"

To the valet, who hurried forward to open the outer door,
bearing his master's gun and a camp-stool, he said reproachfully,
"We are very late today, Barnes." They went out,
and began striding down the avenue of trees at such a pace
that the keeper and his following of small boys and dogs,
who joined them near the road, were forced into a trot
to keep up with it.

Thorpe had fancied, somehow, that a day's shooting would
afford exceptional opportunities for quiet and intimate
talk with his host, but he perceived very soon that this
was not to be the case. They walked together for half
a mile, it is true, along a rural bye-road first and then
across some fields, but the party was close at their heels,
and Plowden walked so fast that conversation of any sort,
save an occasional remark about the birds and the
covers between him and the keeper, was impracticable.
The Hon. Balder suddenly turned up in the landscape,
leaning against a gate set in a hedgerow, and their course
was deflected toward him, but even when they came up to him,
the expedition seemed to gain nothing of a social character.
The few curt words that were exchanged, as they halted
here to distribute cartridges and hold brief consultation,
bore exclusively upon the subject in hand.

The keeper assumed now an authority which Thorpe,
breathing heavily over the unwonted exercise and hoping
for nothing so much as that they would henceforth take
things easy, thought intolerable. He was amazed that the
two brothers should take without cavil the arbitrary orders
of this elderly peasant. He bade Lord Plowden proceed
to a certain point in one direction, and that nobleman,
followed by his valet with the gun and the stool,
set meekly off without a word. Balder, with equal docility,
vaulted the gate, and moved away down the lane at the
bidding of the keeper. Neither of them had intervened
to mitigate the destiny of their guest, or displayed
any interest as to what was going to become of him.

Thorpe said to himself that he did not like this--and
though afterward, when he had also climbed the gate and taken
up his station under a clump of trees at the autocrat's behest,
he strove to soothe his ruffled feelings by the argument
that it was probably the absolutely correct deportment
for a shooting party, his mind remained unconvinced.
Moreover, in parting from him, the keeper had dropped
a blunt injunction about firing up or down the lane,
the tone even more than the matter of which nettled him.

To cap all, when he presently ventured to stroll about a
little from the spot on which he had been planted, he caught
a glimpse against the skyline of the distant Lord Plowden,
comfortably seated on the stool which his valet had
been carrying. It seemed to Thorpe at that moment that he
had never wanted to sit down so much before in his life--and
he turned on his heel in the wet grass with a grunt of displeasure.

This mood vanished utterly a few moments later.
The remote sounds had begun to come to him, of boys
shouting and dogs barking, in the recesses of the strip
of woodland which the lane skirted, and at these he hastened
back to his post. It did not seem to him a good place,
and when he heard the reports of guns to right and left
of him, and nothing came his way, he liked it less
than ever; it had become a matter of offended pride
with him, however, to relieve the keeper of no atom
of the responsibility he had taken upon himself.
If Lord Plowden's guest had no sport, the blame for it
should rest upon Lord Plowden's over-arrogant keeper.
Then a noise of a different character assailed his ears,
punctuated as it were by distant boyish cries of "mark!"
These cries, and the buzzing sound as of clockwork gone
wrong which they accompanied and heralded, became all at
once a most urgent affair of his own. He strained his eyes
upon the horizon of the thicket--and, as if by instinct,
the gun sprang up to adjust its sight to this eager gaze,
and followed automatically the thundering course of the
big bird, and then, taking thought to itself, leaped ahead
of it and fired. Thorpe's first pheasant reeled in the air,
described a somersault, and fell like a plummet.

He stirred not a step, but reloaded the barrel with a hand
shaking for joy. From where he stood he could see the
dead bird; there could never have been a cleaner "kill."
In the warming glow of his satisfaction in himself,
there kindled a new liking of a different sort for Plowden
and Balder. He owed to them, at this belated hour
of his life, a novel delight of indescribable charm.
There came to him, from the woods, the shrill bucolic
voice of the keeper, admonishing a wayward dog. He was
conscious of even a certain tenderness for this keeper--and
again the cry of "mark!" rose, strenuously addressed to him.

Half an hour later the wood had been cleared, and Thorpe
saw the rest of the party assembling by the gate. He did
not hurry to join them, but when Lord Plowden appeared he
sauntered slowly over, gun over arm, with as indifferent
an air as he could simulate. It pleased him tremendously
that no one had thought it worth while to approach the
rendezvous by way of the spot he had covered. His eye
took instant stock of the game carried by two of the boys;
their combined prizes were eight birds and a rabbit,
and his heart leaped within him at the count.

"Well, Thorpe?" asked Plowden, pleasantly. The smell
of gunpowder and the sight of stained feathers had co-
operated to brighten and cheer his mood. "I heard you
blazing away in great form. Did you get anything?"

Thorpe strove hard to give his voice a careless note.
"Let some of the boys run over," he said slowly.
"There are nine birds within sight, and there are two or
three in the bushes--but they may have got away."

"Gad!" said Balder.

"Magnificent!" was his brother's comment--and Thorpe
permitted himself the luxury of a long-drawn, beaming
sigh of triumph.

The roseate colouring of this triumph seemed really
to tint everything that remained of Thorpe's visit.
He set down to it without hesitation the visible
augmentation of deference to him among the servants.
The temptation was very great to believe that it had
affected the ladies of the house as well. He could not
say that they were more gracious to him, but certainly
they appeared to take him more for granted. In a hundred
little ways, he seemed to perceive that he was no longer
held mentally at arm's length as a stranger to their caste.
Of course, his own restored self-confidence could account
for much of this, but he clung to the whimsical conceit
that much was also due to the fact that he was the man
of the pheasants.

Sunday was bleak and stormy, and no one stirred out of
the house. He was alone again with the ladies at breakfast,
and during the long day he was much in their company.
It was like no other day he had ever imagined to himself.

On the morrow, in the morning train by which he
returned alone to town, his mind roved luxuriously
among the fragrant memories of that day. He had been
so perfectly at home--and in such a home! There were
some things which came uppermost again and again--but
of them all he dwelt most fixedly upon the recollection
of moving about in the greenhouses and conservatories,
with that tall, stately, fair Lady Cressage for his guide,
and watching her instead of the flowers that she pointed out.
Of what she had told him, not a syllable stuck in his mind,
but the music of the voice lingered in his ears.

"And she is old Kervick's daughter!" he said to himself
more than once.

CHAPTER VIII

IT may be that every other passenger in that morning train
to London nursed either a silent rage, or declaimed aloud
to fellow-sufferers in indignation, at the time consumed
in making what, by the map, should be so brief a journey.
In Thorpe's own compartment, men spoke with savage irony
of cyclists alleged to be passing them on the road,
and exchanged dark prophecies as to the novelties in
imbecility and helplessness which the line would be preparing
for the Christmas holidays. The old joke about people
who had gone travelling years before, and were believed
to be still lost somewhere in the recesses of Kent,
revived itself amid gloomy approbation. The still older
discussion as to whether the South Eastern or the Brighton
was really the worst followed naturally in its wake,
and occupied its accustomed half-hour--complicated, however,
upon this occasion, by the chance presence of a loquacious
stranger who said he lived on the Chatham-and-Dover,
and who rejected boisterously the idea that any other
railway could be half so bad.

The intrusion of this outsider aroused instant resentment,
and the champions of the South Eastern and the Brighton,
having piled up additional defenses in the shape of
personal recollections of delay and mismanagement quite
beyond belief, made a combined attack upon the newcomer.
He was evidently incapable, their remarks implied,
of knowing a bad railway when he saw one. To suggest
that the characterless and inoffensive Chatham-and-Dover,
so commonplace in its tame virtues, was to be mentioned
in the same breath with the daringly inventive and
resourceful malefactors whose rendezvous was London Bridge,
showed either a weak mind or a corrupt heart. Did this man
really live on the Dover line at all? Angry countenances
plainly reflected the doubt.

But to Thorpe the journey seemed short enough--almost
too short. The conversation interested him not at all;
if he had ever known the Southern lines apart, they were
all one to him now. He looked out of the window,
and could have sworn that he thought of nothing but the
visit from which he was returning.

When he alighted at Cannon Street, however, it was
to discover that his mind was full of a large, new,
carefully-prepared project. It came to him, ready-made and
practically complete, as he stood on the platform,
superintending the porter's efforts to find his bags.
He turned it over and over in his thoughts, in the hansom,
more to familiarize himself with its details than to add
to them. He left the cab to wait for him at the mouth
of a little alley which delves its way into Old Broad
Street through towering walls of commercial buildings,
old and new.

Colin Semple was happily in his office--a congeries of small,
huddled rooms, dry and dirty with age, which had a doorway
of its own in a corner of the court--and Thorpe pushed on to his
room at the end like one who is assured of both his way and his welcome.

The broker was standing beside a desk, dictating a letter
to a clerk who sat at it, and with only a nod to Thorpe
he proceeded to finish this task. He looked more than
once at his visitor as he did so, in a preoccupied,
impersonal way. To the other's notion, he seemed the
personification of business--without an ounce of distracting
superfluous flesh upon his wiry, tough little frame,
without a trace of unnecessary politeness, or humour,
or sensibility of any sort. He was the machine perfected
and fined down to absolute essentials. He could understand
a joke if it was useful to him to do so. He could drink,
and even smoke cigarettes, with a natural air, if these
exercises seemed properly to belong to the task he had
in hand. Thorpe did not conceive him doing anything
for the mere human reason that he liked to do it.
There was more than a touch of what the rustic calls "ginger"
in his hair and closely-cropped, pointed beard, and he had
the complementary florid skin. His eyes--notably direct,
confident eyes--were of a grey which had in it more brown
than blue. He wore a black frock-coat, buttoned close,
and his linen produced the effect of a conspicuous whiteness.

He turned as the clerk left the room, and let his serious,
thin lips relax for an instant as a deferred greeting.
"Well?" he asked, impassively.

"Have you got a quarter-of-an-hour?" asked Thorpe in turn.
"I want a talk with you."

For answer, Semple left the room. Returning after a minute
or two, he remarked, "Go ahead till we're stopped,"
and seated himself on the corner of the desk with the light
inconsequence of a bird on a twig. Thorpe unbuttoned
his overcoat, laid aside his hat, and seated himself.

"I've worked out the whole scheme," he began, as if introducing
the product of many sleepless nights' cogitations.
"I'm going to leave England almost immediately--go
on the Continent and loaf about--I've never seen the Continent."

Semple regarded him in silence. "Well?" he observed
at last.

"You see the idea, don't you?" Thorpe demanded.

The broker twitched his shoulders slightly. "Go on,"
he said.

"But the idea is everything," protested the other.
"We've been thinking of beginning the campaign straight
away--but the true game now is to lie low--silent as the grave.
I go away now, d'ye see? Nothing particular is said about it,
of course, but in a month or two somebody notices that
I'm not about, and he happens to mention it to somebody
else--and so there gets to be the impression that things
haven't gone well with me, d'ye see? On the same plan,
I let all the clerks at my office go. The Secretary'll
come round every once in a while to get letters, of course,
and perhaps he'll keep a boy in the front office for show,
but practically the place'll be shut up. That'll help
out the general impression that I've gone to pieces.
Now d'ye see?"

"It's the Special Settlement you're thinking of,"
commented Semple.

"Of course. The fellows that we're going to squeeze would
move heaven and hell to prevent our getting that Settlement,
if they got wind of what was going on. The only weak point
in our game is just there. Absolutely everything hangs
on the Settlement being granted. Naturally, then, our play
is to concentrate everything on getting it granted.
We don't want to raise the remotest shadow of a suspicion
of what we're up to, till after we're safe past that rock.
So we go on in the way to attract the least possible attention.
You or your jobber makes the ordinary application for a
Special Settlement, with your six signatures and so on;
and I go abroad quietly, and the office is as good as
shut up, and nobody makes a peep about Rubber Consols--
and the thing works itself. You do see it, don't you?"

"I see well enough the things that are to be seen,"
replied Semple, with a certain brevity of manner.
"There was a sermon of my father's that I remember, and it
had for its text, 'We look not at the things which are seen,
but at the things which are not seen.'"

Thorpe, pondering this for a moment, nodded his head.
"Semple," he said, bringing his chair forward to the desk,
"that's what I've come for. I want to spread my cards on
the table for you. I know the sum you've laid out already,
in working this thing. We'll say that that is to be paid
back to you, as a separate transaction, and we'll put that
to one side. Now then, leaving that out of consideration,
what do you think you ought to have out of the winnings,
when we pull the thing off? Mind, I'm not thinking of your
2,000 vendor's shares----"

"No--I'm not thinking much of them, either," interposed Semple,
with a kind of dry significance.

"Oh, they'll be all right," Thorpe affirmed. He laughed
unconsciously as he did so. "No, what I want to get
at is your idea of what should come to you, as a bonus,
when I scoop the board."

"Twenty thousand pounds," said Semple, readily.

Thorpe's slow glance brightened a trifle. "I had
thought thirty would be a fairer figure," he remarked,
with an effort at simplicity.

The broker put out his under-lip. "You will find people
rather disposed to distrust a man who promises more than
he's asked," he remarked coldly.

"Yes--I know what you mean," Thorpe hurried to say,
flushing awkwardly, even though the remark was so undeserved;
"but it's in my nature. I'm full of the notion of
doing things for people that have done things for me.
That's the way I'm built. Why"--he halted to consider
the advisability of disclosing what he had promised to do
for Lord Plowden, and decided against it--"why, without you,
what would the whole thing have been worth to me? Take
one thing alone--the money for the applications--I could
have no more got at it than I could at the Crown Jewels
in the Tower. I've wondered since, more than once--if
you don't mind the question--how did you happen to have
so much ready money lying about."

"There are some Glasgow and Aberdeen folk who trust me to
invest for them," the broker explained. "If they get five
per cent. for the four months, they'll be very pleased.
And so I shall be very pleased to take thirty thousand
instead of twenty--if it presents itself to your mind
in that way. You will give me a letter to that effect,
of course."

"Of course," assented Thorpe. "Write it now, if you like."
He pushed his chair forward, closer to the desk, and dipped
a pen in the ink. "What I want to do is this," he said,
looking up. "I'll make the promise for thirty-two thousand,
and I'll get you to let me have two thousand in cash
now--a personal advance. I shall need it, if I'm to hang
about on the Continent for four months. I judge you think
it'll be four months before things materialize, eh?"

"The Special Settlement, in the natural order of events,
would come shortly after the Christmas holidays.
That is nearly three months. Then the work of taking
fort-nightly profits will begin--and it is for you to say
how long you allow that to go on."

"But about the two thousand pounds now," Thorpe reminded him.

"I think I will do that in this way," said Semple,
kicking his small legs nonchalantly. "I will buy two thousand
fully-paid shares of you, for cash down, NOT vendor's shares,
you observe--and then I will take your acknowledgment
that you hold them for me in trust up to a given date.
In that way, I would not at all weaken your market,
and I would have a stake in the game." "Your stake's
pretty big, already," commented Thorpe, tentatively.

"It's just a fancy of mine," said the other, with his
first smile. "I like to hold shares that are making
sensational advances. It is very exciting."

"All right," said Thorpe, in accents of resignation.
He wrote out two letters, accepting the wording which Semple
suggested from his perch on the desk, and then the latter,
hopping down, took the chair in turn and wrote a cheque.

"Do you want it open?" he asked over his shoulder.
"Are you going to get it cashed at once?"

"No--cross it," said the other. "I want it to go
through my bankers. It'll warm their hearts toward me.
I shan't be going till the end of the week, in any event.
I suppose you know the Continent by heart."

"On the contrary, very little indeed. I've had business
in Frankfort once, and in Rotterdam once, and in Paris twice.
That is all."

"But don't you ever do anything for pleasure?"
Thorpe asked him, as he folded the cheque in his pocket-book.

"Oh yes--many things," responded the broker, lightly.
"It's a pleasure, for example, to buy Rubber Consols
at par."

"Oh, if you call it buying," said Thorpe, and then
softened his words with an apologetic laugh. "I didn't
tell you, did I? I've been spending Saturday and Sunday
with Plowden--you know, the Lord Plowden on my Board."

"I know of him very well," observed the Scotchman.

"Has he a place that he asks people down to, then? That
isn't the usual form with guinea-pigs."

"Ah, but, he isn't the guinea-pig variety at all,"
Thorpe asserted, warmly. "He's really a splendid
fellow--with his little oddities, like the rest of us,
of course, but a decent chap all through. Place? I should
think he HAD got a place! It's one of the swellest old
country-houses you ever saw--older than hell, you know--and
it's kept up as if they had fifty thousand a year.
Do you happen to know what his real income is supposed
to be?"

Semple shook his head. He had taken his hat, and was
smoothing it deftly with the palm of his hand.

"I asked," Thorpe went on, "because he had so much to say
about his poverty. To hear him talk, you'd think the
bailiffs were sitting on his doorstep. That doesn't prevent
his having fast horses, and servants all over the place,
and about the best shooting I've seen in the South
of England. As luck would have it, I was in wonderful form.
God! how I knocked the pheasants!" A clerk showed his head
at the door, with a meaning gesture. "I must go now,"
said Semple, briskly, and led the way out to another room.
He halted here, and dismissed his caller with the
brief injunction, "Don't go away without seeing me."

It was the noon-hour, and the least-considered grades
of the City's slaves were in the streets on the quest
for cheap luncheons. Thorpe noted the manner in which some
of them studied the large bill of fare placarded beside
a restaurant door; the spectacle prompted him luxuriously
to rattle the gold coins remaining in his pocket.
He had been as anxious about pence as the hungriest
of those poor devils, only a week before. And now! He
thrust up the door in the roof of the cab, and bade
the driver stop at his bank. Thence, after some brief
but very agreeable business, and a hurried inspection
of the "Court" section of a London Directory, he drove
to a telegraph station and despatched two messages.
They were identical in terms. One sought General Kervick
at his residence--he was in lodgings somewhere in the Hanover
Square country--and the other looked for him at his club.
Both begged him to lunch at the Savoy at two o'clock.

There was time and to spare, now. Thorpe dismissed the cab
at his hotel--an unpretentious house in Craven Street,
and sent his luggage to his rooms. There were no letters
for him on the board in the hallway, and he sauntered up
to the Strand. As by force of habit, he turned presently
into a side-street, and stopped opposite the ancient
book-shop of his family.

In the bright yet mellow light of the sunny autumn noontide,
the blacks and roans and smoked drabs of the low old
brick front looked more dingy to his eye than ever.
It spoke of antiquity, no doubt, but it was a dismal and
graceless antiquity of narrow purposes and niggling thrift.
It was so little like the antiquity, for example,
of Hadlow House, that the two might have computed their
age by the chronological systems of different planets.
Although his sister's married name was Dabney, and she
had been sole proprietor for nearly a dozen years,
the sign over the doorway bore still its century-old legend,
"Thorpe, Bookseller."

He crossed the street, and paused for a moment to run
an eye over the books and placards exposed on either
side of the entrance. A small boy guarded these wares,
and Thorpe considered him briefly, with curious recollections
of how much of his own boyhood had been spent on that
very spot. The lad under observation had a loutish
and sullen face; its expression could not have been more
devoid of intellectual suggestions if he had been posted
in a Wiltshire field to frighten crows with a rattle,
instead of being set here in the highway of the world's
brain-movement, an agent of students and philosophers.
Thorpe wondered if in his time he could have looked such
a vacant and sour young fool. No--no. That could not be.
Boys were different in his day--and especially boys
in book-shops. They read something and knew something
of what they handled. They had some sort of aspirations,
fitful and vague as these might be, to become in their
time bookmen also. And in those days there still
were bookmen--widely-informed, observant, devoted old
bookmen--who loved their trade, and adorned it.

Thorpe reflected that, as he grew older, he was the better
able to apprehend the admirable qualities of that departed
race of literature's servants. Indeed, it seemed that he
had never adequately realized before how proud a man might
well be of descending from a line of such men. The thought
struck him that very likely at this identical doorway,
two generations back, a poor, out-at-the-elbows, young
law-student named Plowden had stood and turned over pages
of books he could not dream of buying. Perhaps, even, he had
ventured inside, and deferentially picked acquaintance
with the Thorpe of the period, and got bookish advice
and friendly counsel for nothing. It was of no real
significance that the law-student grew to be Lord Chancellor,
and the bookseller remained a book-seller; in the realm
of actual values, the Thorpes were as good as the Plowdens.

A customer came out of the shop, and Thorpe went in,
squeezing his way along the narrow passage between the
tall rows of books, to the small open space at the end.
His sister stood here, momentarily occupied at a high desk.
She did not look up.

"Well--I visited his Lordship all right." He announced
his presence thus genially.

"I hope you're the better for it," she remarked,
turning to him, after a pause, her emotionless, plain face.

"Oh, immensely," he affirmed, with robust jocularity.
"You should have seen the way they took to me.
It was 'Mr. Thorpe' here and 'Mr. Thorpe' there, all over
the place. Ladies of title, mind you--all to myself
at breakfast two days running. And such ladies--finer
than silk. Oh, it's clear as daylight--I was intended
for a fashionable career."

She smiled in a faint, passive way. "Well--they say
'better late than never,' you know." "And after all,
IS it so very late?" he said, adopting her phrase as an
expression of his thought. "I'm just turned forty, and I
feel like a boy. I was looking at that 'Peerage' there,
the other day--and do you know, I'm sixteen years younger
than the first Lord Plowden was when they made him a peer?
Why he didn't even get into the House of Commons until
he was seven-and-forty."

"You seem to have the Plowden family on the brain,"
she commented.

"I might have worse things. You've no idea, Lou, how nice
it all is. The mother, Lady Plowden--why she made me
feel as if I was at the very least a nephew of hers.
And so simple and natural! She smiled at me, and listened
to me, and said friendly things to me--why, just as anybody
might have done. You'll just love her, when you know her."

Louisa laughed in his face. "Don't be a fool, Joel,"
she adjured him, with a flash of scornful mirth.
He mingled a certain frowning impatience with the buoyancy
of his smile. "Why, of course, you'll know her,"
he protested. "What nonsense you're thinking of! Do
you suppose I'm going to allow you to mess about here
with second-hand almanacs, and a sign in your window
of 'threepence in the shilling discount for cash,'
while I'm a millionaire? It's too foolish, Lou. You annoy
me by supposing such a thing!"

"There's no good talking about it at all," she observed,
after a little pause. "It hasn't come off yet,
for one thing. And as I said the other night, if you want
to do things for the children, that's another matter.
They're of an age when they can learn whatever anybody
chooses to teach them."

"Where are they now?" he asked. Upon the instant another
plan began to unfold itself in the background of his mind.

"They're both at Cheltenham, though they're at
different places, of course. I was recommended to send
Julia there--one of our old customers is a Governor,
or whatever it's called--and he got special terms for her.
She was rather old, you know, to go to school, but he arranged
it very nicely for her--and there is such a good boys'
college there, it seemed the wisest thing to send Alfred too.
Julia is to finish at Christmas-time--and what I'm
going to do with her afterward is more than I know."

"Is she pretty?" the uncle of Julia enquired.

"She's very nice," the mother answered, with vague extenuation
in her tone. "I don't know about her looks--she varies
so much. Sometimes I think she's pretty--and then again
I can't think it. She's got good features, and she holds
herself well, and she's very much the lady--rather too much,
I think, sometimes--but it all depends upon what you
call pretty. She's not tall, you know. She takes after
her father's family. The Dabneys are all little people."

Thorpe seemed not to care about the Dabneys. "And what's
Alfred like?" he asked.

"He wants to be an artist!" There was a perceptible note
of apprehension in the mother's confession.

"Well--why shouldn't he--if he's got a bent that way?"
demanded Thorpe, with reproof in his tone. "Did you want
him to be a shop-keeper?"

"I should like to see him a doctor," she replied with dignity.
"It was always my idea for him."

"Well, it's no good--even as an idea," he told her.
"Doctors are like parsons--they can't keep up with the times.
The age is outgrowing them. Only the fakirs in either
profession get anything out of it, nowadays. It's all mystery
and sleight-of-hand and the confidence trick--medicine
is--and if you haven't got just the right twist of the wrist,
you're not in it. But an artist stands on his merits.
There is his work--done by his own hands. It speaks
for itself. There's no deception--it's easy enough to tell
whether it's good or bad. If the pictures are good,
people buy them. If they're bad, people don't buy them.
Of course, it won't matter to Alfred, financially speaking,
whether his pictures sell well or not. But probably he'd
give it up, if he didn't make a hit of it.

"I don't know that there's any crying need that he should
do anything. My own idea for him, perhaps, would be the Army,
but I wouldn't dream of forcing it on him against his will.
I had a bitter enough dose of that, myself, with father.
I'd try to guide a youngster, yes, and perhaps argue
with him, if I thought he was making a jack of
himself--but I wouldn't dictate. If Alfred thinks he
wants to be an artist, in God's name let him go ahead.
It can be made a gentlemanly trade--and the main thing
is that he should be a gentleman."

Louisa had listened to this discourse with apathetic
patience. "If you don't mind, I don't know that I do,"
she said when it was finished. "Perhaps he wouldn't
have made a good doctor; he's got a very quick temper.
He reminds me of father--oh, ever so much more than you do.
He contradicts everything everybody says. He quite knows
it all."

"But he's a good fellow, isn't he?" urged Thorpe. "I mean,
he's got his likable points? I'm going to be able to get
along with him?"

"I didn't get along with him very well," the mother
admitted, reluctantly, "but I daresay with a man it would
be different. You see, his father was ill all those
four years, and Alfred hated the shop as bad as you did,
and perhaps in my worry I blamed him more than was fair.
I want to be fair to him, you know."

"But is he a gentleman? That puts it in a word,"
Thorpe insisted.

"Oh, mercy yes," Louisa made ready answer. "My only fear
is--whether you won't find him too much of a gentleman."

Thorpe knitted his brows. "I only hope we're talking
about the same thing," he said, in a doubtful tone.
Before she could speak, he lifted his hand.
"Never mind--I can see for myself in ten minutes more
than you could tell me in a lifetime. I've got a plan.
I'm going on the Continent in a few days' time, to stay
for three or four months. I've got nothing special
to do--just to travel about and see things and kill
time--I shall probably go to Italy and Switzerland
and Paris and the Rhine and all sorts of places--and it
occurred to me that I'd take the two youngsters with me.
I could get acquainted with them, that way, and they'd
be company for me. I've been lonesome so long, it would
feel good to have some of my own flesh and blood about
me--and I suppose they'd be tickled to death to go."

"Their schooling and board are paid for up to Christmas,"
Mrs. Dabney objected, blankly.

"Bah!" Thorpe prolonged the emphatic exclamation into
something good-natured, and ended it with an abrupt laugh.
"What on earth difference does that make? I could go
and buy their damned colleges, and let the kids wear them
for breastpins if I wanted to. You said the girl was
going to quit at Christmas in any case. Won't she learn
more in four months travelling about on the Continent,
than she would trotting around in her own tracks there
at Cheltenham?

"And it's even more important for the boy. He's of an age
when he ought to see something of the world, and I ought
to see something of him. Whatever he's going to do,
it's time that he began getting his special start for it."
He added, upon a luminous afterthought: " Perhaps his seeing
the old Italian picture galleries and so on will cure him
of wanting to be an artist."

The mother's air displayed resigned acquiescence rather
than conviction. "Well--if you really think it's best,"
she began, "I don't know that I ought to object.
Goodness knows, I don't want to stand in their way.
Ever since you sent that four hundred pounds,
it hasn't seemed as if they were my children at all.
They've scarcely listened to me. And now you come,
and propose to take them out of my hands altogether--and
all I can say is--I hope you feel entirely justified.
And so, shall I write them to come home? When do you think
of starting? Julia ought to have some travelling clothes."

"I can wait till you get her ready--only you must hurry
up about it."

Remembering something, he took out his cheque-book,
and spread it on the desk. "I will give you back
that thirty," he said, as he wrote, "and here's a hundred
to get the youngsters ready. You won't waste any time,
will you? and if you want more tell me."

A customer had entered the shop, and Thorpe made it
the occasion for leaving.

His sister, looking after her brother with the cheque in
her hand, was conscious of a thought which seemed to spell
itself out in visible letters before her mental vision.
"Even now I don't believe in him," the impalpable legend ran.

CHAPTER IX

GENERAL KERVICK was by habit a punctual man, and Thorpe
found him hovering, carefully gloved and fur-coated, in
the neighbourhood of the luncheon-room when he arrived.
It indeed still lacked a few minutes of the appointed
hour when they thus met and went in together. They were
fortunate enough to find a small table out on the balcony,
sufficiently removed from any other to give privacy to
their conversation.

By tacit agreement, the General ordered the luncheon,
speaking French to the waiter throughout. Divested of his
imposing great-coat, he was seen to be a gentleman of meagre
flesh as well as of small stature. He had the Roman nose,
narrow forehead, bushing brows, and sharply-cut mouth and chin
of a soldier grown old in the contemplation of portraits
of the Duke of Wellington. His face and neck were of a
dull reddish tint, which seemed at first sight uniformly
distributed: one saw afterward that it approached pallor
at the veined temples, and ripened into purple in minute
patches on the cheeks and the tip of the pointed nose.
Against this flushed skin, the closely-cropped hair
and small, neatly-waxed moustache were very white indeed.
It was a thin, lined, care-worn face, withal, which in repose,
and particularly in profile, produced an effect of dignified
and philosophical melancholy. The General's over-prominent
light blue eyes upon occasion marred this effect, however,
by glances of a bold, harsh character, which seemed
to disclose unpleasant depths below the correct surface.
His manner with the waiters was abrupt and sharp,
but undoubtedly they served him very well--much better,
in truth, than Thorpe had ever seen them serve anybody before.

Thorpe observed his guest a good deal during the repast,
and formed numerous conclusions about him. He ate with
palpable relish of every dish, and he emptied his glass
as promptly as his host could fill it. There was hardly
a word of explanation as to the purpose of their meeting,
until the coffee was brought, and they pushed back
their chairs, crossed their legs, and lighted cigars.

"I was lucky to catch you with my wire, at such short notice,"
Thorpe said then. "I sent two, you know--to your chambers
and your club. Which of them found you?"

"Chambers," said the General. "I rarely dress till
luncheon time. I read in bed. There's really nothing
else to do. Idleness is the curse of my life."

"I've been wondering if you'd like a little occupation--
of a well-paid sort," said Thorpe slowly. He realized
that it was high time to invent some pretext for his
hurried summons of the General.

"My dear sir," responded the other, "I should like anything
that had money in it. And I should very much like occupation,
too--if it were, of course, something that was--was suitable to me."

"Yes," said Thorpe, meditatively. "I've something in my
mind--not at all definite yet--in fact, I don't think I
can even outline it to you yet. But I'm sure it will suit
you--that is, if I decide to go on with it--and there ought
to be seven or eight hundred a year for you in it--for life, mind you."

The General's gaze, fastened strenuously upon Thorpe,
shook a little. "That will suit me very well," he declared,
with feeling. "Whatever I can do for it"--he let the
sentence end itself with a significant gesture.

"I thought so, "commented the other, trifling with the
spoon in his cup. "But I want you to be open with me.
I'm interested in you, and I want to be of use to you.
All that I've said, I can do for you. But first,
I'm curious to know everything that you can tell me about
your circumstances. I'm right in assuming, I suppose,
that you're--that you're not any too well-fixed."

The General helped himself to another little glass of brandy.
His mood seemed to absorb the spirit of the liqueur.
"Fixed!" he repeated with a peevish snap in his tone.
"I'm not 'fixed' at all, as you call it. Good God, sir! They
no more care what becomes of me than they do about their
old gloves. I gave them name and breeding and position--and
everything--and they round on me like--like cuckoos."
His pale, bulging eyes lifted their passionless veil
for an instant as he spoke, and flashed with the predatory
fierceness of a hawk.

Intuition helped Thorpe to guess whom "they" might mean.
The temper visibly rising in the old man's mind was what he
had hoped for. He proceeded with an informed caution.
"Don't be annoyed if I touch upon family matters," he said.
"It's a part of what I must know, in order to help you.
I believe you're a widower, aren't you, General?"

The other, after a quick upward glance, shook his
head resentfully. "Mrs. Kervick lives in Italy with HER
son-in-law--and her daughter. He is a man of property--
and also, apparently, a man of remarkable credulity
and patience." He paused, to scan his companion's face.
"They divide him between them," he said then, from clenched
teeth--"and I--mind you--I made the match! He was
a young fellow that I found--and I brought him home
and introduced him--and I haven't so much as an Italian
postage-stamp to show for it. But what interest can
you possibly take in all this?" The unamiable glance
of his eyes was on the instant surcharged with suspicion.

"How many daughters have you?" Thorpe ventured the enquiry
with inward doubts as to its sagacity.

"Three," answered the General, briefly. It was evident
that he was also busy thinking.

"I ask because I met one of them in the country over Sunday,"
Thorpe decided to explain.

The old soldier's eyes asked many questions in the moment
of silence. "Which one--Edith?--that is, Lady Cressage?"
he enquired. "Of course--it would have been her."

Thorpe nodded. "She made a tremendous impression upon me,"
he observed, watching the father with intentness as he let
the slow words fall.

"Well she might, "the other replied, simply. "She's supposed
to be the most beautiful woman in England."

"Well--I guess she is," Thorpe assented, while the two
men eyed each other.

"Is the third sister unmarried?" it occurred to him to ask.
The tone of the question revealed its perfunctory character.

"Oh--Beatrice--she's of no importance," the father replied.
"She goes in for writing, and all that--she's not a beauty,
you know--she lives with an old lady in Scotland.
The oldest daughter--Blanche--she has some good looks of
her own, but she's a cat. And so you met Edith! May I ask
where it was?"

"At Hadlow House--Lord Plowden's place, you know."

The General's surprise at the announcement was undoubted.
"At Plowden's!" he repeated, and added, as if half to himself,
"I thought that was all over with, long ago."

"I wish you'd tell me about it," said Thorpe, daringly.
"I've made it plain to you, haven't I? I'm going
to look out for you. And I want you to post me up,
here, on some of the things that I don't understand.
You remember that it was Plowden who introduced you to me,
don't you? It was through him that you got on the Board.
Well, certain things that I've seen lead me to suppose
that he did that in order to please your daughter.
Did you understand it that way?"

"It's quite likely, in one sense," returned the General.
He spoke with much deliberation now, weighing all his words.
"He may have thought it would please her; he may not have
known how little my poor affairs concerned her."

"Well, then," pursued Thorpe, argumentatively, "he had
an object in pleasing her. Let me ask the question--
did he want to marry her?"

"Most men want to marry her," was the father's non-
committal response. His moustache lifted itself in the
semblance of a smile, but the blue eyes above remained
coldly vigilant.

"Well--I guess that's so too," Thorpe remarked.
He made a fleeting mental note that there was something
about the General which impelled him to think and talk
more like an American than ever. "But was HE specially
affected that way?"

"I think," said Kervick, judicially, "I think it was
understood that if he had been free to marry a penniless wife,
he would have wished to marry her."

"Do you know," Thorpe began again, with a kind of diffident
hesitation--"do you happen to have formed an idea--supposing
that had been the case--would she have accepted him?"
"Ah, there you have me," replied the other. "Who can tell
what women will accept, and what they will refuse? My daughter
refused Lord Lingfield--and he is an Under-Secretary,
and will be Earl Chobham, and a Cabinet Minister,
and a rich man. After that, what are you to say?"

"You speak of her as penniless," Thorpe remarked,
with a casual air.

"Six hundred a year," the father answered.
"We could have rubbed along after a fashion on it,
if she had had any notions at all of taking my advice.
I'm a man of the world, and I could have managed her
affairs for her to her advantage, but she insisted upon
going off by herself. She showed not the slightest
consideration for me--but then I am accustomed to that."

Thorpe smiled reflectively, and the old gentleman read
in this an encouragement to expand his grievances.

"In my position," he continued, helping himself to still
another tiny glass, "I naturally say very little.
It is not my form to make complaints and advertise
my misfortunes. I daresay it's a fault. I know it kept
me back in India--while ever so many whipper-snappers
were promoted over my head--because I was of the proud
and silent sort. It was a mistake, but it was my nature.
I might have put by a comfortable provision for my old age,
in those days, if I had been willing to push my claims,
and worry the Staff into giving me what was my due.
But that I declined to do--and when I was retired, there was
nothing for me but the ration of bread and salt which they
serve out to the old soldier who has been too modest.
I served my Queen, sir, for forty years--and I should
be ashamed to tell you the allowance she makes me in my
old age. But I do not complain. My mouth is closed.
I am an English gentleman and one of Her Majesty's soldiers.
That's enough said, eh? Do you follow me? And about my
family affairs, I'm not likely to talk to the first comer,
eh? But to you I say it frankly--they've behaved badly,
damned badly, sir.

"Mrs. Kervick lives in Italy, at the cost of HER
son-in-law. He has large estates in one of the healthiest
and most beautiful parts; he has a palace, and more money
than he knows what to do with--but it seems that he's
not my son-in-law. I could do with Italy very well--but
that doesn't enter into anyone's calculations. No! let
the worn-out old soldier sell boot-laces on the kerb!
That's the spirit of woman-kind. And my daughter
Edith--does she care what becomes of me? Listen to me--I
secured for her the very greatest marriage in England.
She would have been Duchess of Glastonbury today
if her husband had not played the fool and drowned himself."

"What's that you say?" put in Thorpe, swiftly.

"It was as good as suicide," insisted the General,
with doggedness. His face had become a deeper red.
"They didn't hit it off together, and he left in a huff,
and went yachting with his father, who was his own sailing-
master--and, as might be expected, they were both drowned.
The title would have gone to her son--but no, of course,
she had no son--and so it passed to a stranger--an
outsider that had been an usher in a school, or something
of that sort. You can fancy what a blow this was to me.
Instead of being the grandfather of a Duke, I have a childless
widow thrust back upon my hands! Fine luck, eh? And then,
to cap all, she takes her six hundred a year and goes off
by herself, and gives me the cold shoulder completely.
What is it Shakespeare says? 'How sharper than a serpent's
teeth'----"

Thorpe brought his fist down upon the table with an
emphasis which abruptly broke the quotation in half.
He had been frowning moodily at his guest for some minutes,
relighting his cigar more than once meanwhile. He had
made a mental calculation of what the old man had had
to drink, and had reassured himself as to his condition.
His garrulity might have an alcoholic basis, but his
wits were clear enough. It was time to take a new line
with him.

"I don't want to hear you abuse your daughter," he admonished
him now, with a purpose glowing steadily in his firm glance.
"Damn it all, why shouldn't she go off by herself, and take
care of her own money her own way? It's little enough,
God knows, for such a lady as she is. Why should you
expect her to support you out of it? No--sit still!
Listen to me!"--he stretched out his hand, and laid it
with restraining heaviness upon the General's arm--"you
don't want to have any row with me. You can't afford it.
Just think that over to yourself--you--can't--afford--it."

Major-General Kervick's prominent blue eyes had bulged
forth in rage till their appearance had disconcerted the
other's gaze. They remained still too much in the foreground,
as it were, and the angry scarlets and violets of the cheeks
beneath them carried an unabated threat of apoplexy--but
their owner, after a moment's silence, made a sign
with his stiff white brows that the crisis was over.
"You must remember that--that I have a father's feelings,"
he gasped then, huskily.

Thorpe nodded, with a nonchalance which was not wholly affected.
He had learned what he wanted to know about this veteran.
If he had the fierce meannesses of a famished old dog,
he had also a dog's awe of a stick. It was almost too
easy to terrorize him.

"Oh, I make allowances for all that," Thorpe began, vaguely.
"But it's important that you should understand me.
I'm this sort of a man: whatever I set out to do, and put
my strength into it, that I do! I kill every pheasant I
fire at; Plowden will tell you that! It's a way I have.
To those that help me, and are loyal to me, I'm the best
friend in the world. To those that get in my way,
or try to trip me up, I'm the devil--just plain devil.
Now then--you're getting three hundred a year from
my Company, that is to say from me, simply to oblige my
friend Plowden. You don't do anything to earn this money;
you're of no earthly use on the Board. If I chose,
I could put you off at the end of the year as easily as I
can blow out this match. But I propose not only to keep
you on, but to make you independent. Why do I do that?
You should ask yourself that question. It can't be on
account of anything you can do for the Company. What else
then? Why, first and foremost, because you are the father
of your daughter."

"Let me tell you the kind of man I am," said the General,
inflating his chest, and speaking with solemnity.

"Oh, I know the kind of man you are," Thorpe interrupted
him, coolly. "I want to talk now."

"It was merely," Kervick ventured, in an injured tone,
"that I can be as loyal as any man alive to a true friend."

"Well, I'll be the true friend, then," said Thorpe,
with impatient finality. "And now this is what I want to say.
I'm going to be a very rich man. You're not to say so
to anybody, mind you, until the thing speaks for itself.
We're keeping dark for a few months, d'ye see?--lying low.
Then, as I say, I shall be a very rich man. Well now,
I wouldn't give a damn to be rich, unless I did with my
money the things that I wanted to do, and got the things
with it that I wanted to get. Whatever takes my fancy,
that's what I'll do."

He paused for a moment, mentally to scrutinize a brand-
new project which seemed, by some surreptitious agency,
to have already taken his fancy. It was a curious project;
there were attractive things about it, and objections to it
suggested themselves as well.

"I may decide," he began speaking again, still revolving
this hypothetical scheme in his thoughts--"I may want
to--well, here's what occurs to me as an off-chance.
I take an interest in your daughter, d'ye see? and it
seems a low-down sort of thing to me that she should be
so poor. Well, then--I might say to you, here's two
thousand a year, say, made over to you in your name, on the
understanding that you turn over half of it, say, to her.
She could take it from you, of course, as her father.
You could say you made it out of the Company. Of course
it might happen, later on, that I might like to have
a gentle hint dropped to her, d'ye see, as to where it
really came from. Mind, I don't say this is what is going
to be done. It merely occurred to me."

After waiting for a moment for some comment, he added
a second thought: "You'd have to set about making friends
with her, you know. In any case, you'd better begin
at that at once."

The General remained buried in reflection. He lighted
a cigarette, and poured out for himself still another
petit verre. His pursed lips and knitted brows were
eloquent of intense mental activity.

"Well, do you see any objections to it?" demanded Thorpe,
at last.

"I do not quite see the reasons for it,"
answered the other, slowly. "What would you gain by it?"

"How do you mean--gain?" put in the other, with peremptory
intolerance of tone.

General Kervick spread his hands in a quick little gesture.
These hands were withered, but remarkably well-kept. "I
suppose one doesn't do something for nothing," he said.
"I see what I would gain, and what she would gain,
but I confess I don't see what advantage you would get out
of it."

"No-o, I daresay you don't," assented Thorpe,
with sneering serenity. "But what does that matter? You
admit that you see what you would gain. That's enough,
isn't it?"

The older man's veined temples twitched for an instant.
He straightened himself in his chair, and looked hard at
his companion. There was a glistening of moisture about
his staring eyes.

"It surely isn't necessary--among gentlemen"--he began,
cautiously picking his phrases--"to have quite so much
that's unpleasant, is it?"

"No--you're right--I didn't mean to be so rough,"
Thorpe declared, with spontaneous contrition.
Upon the instant, however, he perceived the danger
that advantage might be taken of his softness. "I'm a
plain-spoken man," he went on, with a hardening voice,
"and people must take me as they find me. All I said was,
in substance, that I intended to be of service to you--and
that that ought to interest you."

The General seemed to have digested his pique.
"And what I was trying to say," he commented deferentially,
"was that I thought I saw ways of being of service to you.
But that did not seem to interest you at all."

"How--service?" Thorpe, upon consideration, consented to ask.

"I know my daughter so much better than you do,"
explained the other; "I know Plowden so much better; I am
so much more familiar with the whole situation than you can
possibly be--I wonder that you won't listen to my opinion.
I don't suggest that you should be guided by it, but I
think you should hear it."

"I think so, too," Thorpe declared, readily enough.
"What IS your opinion?"

General Kervick sipped daintily at his glass, and then gave
an embarrassed little laugh. "But I can't form what you
might call an opinion," he protested, apologetically,
"till I understand a bit more clearly what it is you
propose to yourself. You mustn't be annoyed if I return
to that--'still harping on my daughter,' you know.
If I MUST ask the question--is it your wish to marry her?"

Thorpe looked blankly at his companion, as if he were thinking
of something else. When he spoke, it was with no trace
of consciousness that the question had been unduly intimate.

"I can't in the least be sure that I shall ever marry,"
he replied, thoughtfully. "I may, and I may not.
But--starting with that proviso--I suppose I haven't
seen any other woman that I'd rather think about marrying
than--than the lady we're speaking of. However, you see
it's all in the air, so far as my plans go."

"In the air be it," the soldier acquiesced, plausibly.
"Let us consider it as if it were in the air--a
possible contingency. This is what I would say--My--
'the lady we are speaking of' is by way of being
a difficult lady--'uncertain, coy, and hard to please'
as Scott says, you know--and it must be a very skilfully-
dressed fly indeed which brings her to the surface.
She's been hooked once, mind, and she has a horror of it.
Her husband was the most frightful brute and ruffian,
you know. I was strongly opposed to the marriage, but her
mother carried it through. But--yes--about her--I think
she is afraid to marry again. If she does ever consent,
it will be because poverty has broken her nerve.
If she is kept on six hundred a year, she may be starved,
so to speak, into taking a husband. If she had sixteen
hundred--either she would never marry at all, or she would
be free to marry some handsome young pauper who caught
her fancy. That would be particularly like her. You would
be simply endowing some needy fellow, beside losing her
for yourself. D'ye follow me? If you'll leave it to me,
I can find a much better way than that--better for all
of us."

"Hm!" said Thorpe, and pondered the paternal statement.
"I see what you mean," he remarked at last. "Yes--I see."

The General preserved silence for what seemed a long time,
deferring to the reverie of his host. When finally he
offered a diversion, in the form of a remark about the hour,
Thorpe shook himself, and then ponderously rose to his feet.
He took his hat and coat from the waiter, and made his way
out without a word.

At the street door, confronting the waning foliage of the
Embankment garden, Kervick was emboldened to recall to him
the fact of his presence. "Which way are you going?"
he asked.

"I don't know," Thorpe answered absently. "I think--I
think I'll take a walk on the Embankment--by myself."

The General could not repress all symptoms of uneasiness.
"But when am I to see you again?" he enquired, with an
effect of solicitude that defied control.

"See me?" Thorpe spoke as if the suggestion took him
by surprise.

"There are things to be settled, are there not?"
the other faltered, in distressed doubt as to the judicious
tone to take. "You spoke, you know, of--of some employment
that--that would suit me."

Thorpe shook himself again, and seemed by an effort
to recall his wandering attention. "Oh yes," he said,
with lethargic vagueness--"I haven't thought it out yet.
I'll let you know--within the week, probably."

With the briefest of nods, he turned and crossed the road.
Walking heavily, with rounded shoulders and hands
plunged deep in his overcoat pockets, he went through
the gateway, and chose a path at random. To the idlers
on the garden benches who took note of him as he passed,
he gave the impression of one struggling with nausea.
To his own blurred consciousness, he could not say
which stirred most vehemently within him, his loathing
for the creature he had fed and bought, or his bitter
self-disgust.

The General, standing with exaggerated exactness upon the doorstep,
had followed with his bulging eyes the receding figure.
He stood still regarding the gateway, mentally summarizing
the events of the day, after the other had vanished.
At last, nestling his chin comfortably into the fur of
his collar, he smiled with self-satisfaction. "After all,"
he said to himself, "there are always ways of making a cad
feel that he is a cad, in the presence of a gentleman."

CHAPTER X

ON a Sunday afternoon, early in February, Thorpe journeyed
with his niece and nephew from Bern to Montreux.

The young people, with maps and a guide-book open,
sat close together at the left side of the compartment.
The girl from time to time rubbed the steam from the window
with a napkin out of the lunch-basket. They both stared
a good deal through this window, with frequent exclamations
of petulance.

"Isn't it too provoking!" cried the girl, turning to her
uncle at last. "This is where we are now--according
to Baedeker: 'As the train proceeds we enjoy a view
of the Simmen-Thal and Freiburg mountains to the left,
the Moleson being conspicuous.' And look at it! For
all one can see, we might as well be at Redhill."

"It is pretty hard luck," Thorpe assented, passively glancing
past her at the pale, neutral-tinted wall of mist which obscured
the view. "But hang it all--it must clear up some time.
Just you have patience, and you'll see some Alps yet."

"Where we're going," the young man interposed, "the head-porter
told me it was always cloudier than anywhere else."

"I don't think that can be so," Thorpe reasoned, languidly,
from his corner. "It's a great winter resort, I'm told,
and it rather stands to reason, doesn't it? that people
wouldn't flock there if it was so bad as all that."

"The kind of people we've seen travelling in Switzerland,"
said the girl--"they would do anything."

Thorpe smiled, with tolerant good humour. "Well, you can
comfort yourself with the notion that you'll be coming again.
The mountains'll stay here, all right," he assured her.
The young people smiled back at him, and with this he
rearranged his feet in a new posture on the opposite seat,
lighted another cigar, and pillowed his head once more
against the hard, red-plush cushion. Personally, he did
not in the least resent the failure of the scenery.

For something more than three months, this purposeless
pleasure-tour had been dragging him about from point
to point, sleeping in strange beds, eating extraordinarily
strange food, transacting the affairs of a sight-seer among
people who spoke strange languages, until he was surfeited
with the unusual. It had all been extremely interesting,
of course, and deeply improving--but he was getting
tired of talking to nobody but waiters, and still more
so of having nothing to do which he could not as well
leave undone if he chose. After a few days more of
Switzerland--for they had already gazed with blank faces
at this universal curtain of mist from such different points
of view as Lucerne, Interlaken, and Thun--it was clear
to him that they would, as he phrased it, to himself,
make a break for home. Unless, indeed, something happened
at Montreux. Ah, would anything happen at Montreux?
For four days his mind had been automatically reverting
to that question; it lurked continually in the background
of his thoughts, now, as he smoked and idly ruminated,
on his way southward through the fog.

All the rest of the prolonged trip had been without
any specific motive, so far as he was concerned.
The youngsters had planned all its routes and halts and
details of time and connections, and he had gone along,
with cheerful placidity, to look at the things they bade
him observe, and to pay the bills. Perhaps in all things
their tastes had not been his tastes. He would have liked
more of Paris, he fancied, and less of the small Dutch
and North German towns which they seemed to fancy so much.
Still, the beer was good--and really their happiness,
as a spectacle, had given him more satisfaction than
a thousand miles of boulevards could have done.

He liked this niece and nephew of his more than he could
ever have imagined himself liking any young people.
They had been shy with him at the outset--and for the first
week his experiment had been darkened by the belief that,
between themselves, they did not deem him quite good enough.
He had been wise enough, then, to have it out with the
girl--she was the one to whom he felt it easiest to talk
frankly--and had discovered, to his immense relief,
that they conceived him to be regarding them as encumbrances.
At breakfast next morning, with tactful geniality, he set
everything right, and thereafter they were all extremely
happy together.

So far as he could judge, they were very superior
young people, both intellectually and spiritually.
The girl spoke French, and her brother German,
with what seemed to him remarkable proficiency.
Their young minds were the repositories of an astounding
amount of information: they knew who Charles the Bold was;
they pointed out to their uncle the distinction between
Gothic and Romanesque arches; they explained what was the
matter with the Anabaptists; they told him that the story
of the Bishop and the rats at Bingen was a baseless myth,
and that probably there had never been any such man
as William Tell. Nor did they get all this out of the
guide-books which they pored over with such zest.
It was impossible not to see that they were familiar with
large numbers of the subjects that these books discussed,
and that the itinerary which they marked out had reference
to desires and interests that they had cultivated for themselves.

Julia, upon even first sight, made a much pleasanter
impression than her mother's hesitating description
had prepared him for. As he came to know her well,
he ceased to remember that there was a question in any mind
as to her being a pretty girl. There was less colour
in her face than he could have wished. Her smooth,
pallid skin, almost waxen in texture, had a suggestion
of delicate health which sometimes troubled him a little,
but which appealed to the tenderness in his nature all
the time. The face was unduly thin, perhaps, but this,
and the wistful glance of the large grey eyes in repose,
made up an effect that Thorpe found touched him a good deal.
Even when she was in visibly high spirits, the look in these
eyes seemed to him to be laying claim to his protection.
She could be merry upon occasion, in a gentle and tranquil way,
and as her self-confidence expanded under the shelter
of their growing intimacy, she disclosed to her uncle
plenty of initiative and individuality--but what he felt
in her most was a peculiarly sweet and girlish trustfulness,
which made him like himself more than he had ever
done before. He could feel that he was at his very
best--a hitherto unsuspected best--when Julia was about.
He wanted to buy for her everything in the windows upon
which she bestowed the most casual approving glance.
It was a delight merely to look at her, and to meditate upon
the felicity of being able to do things for so charming
a girl.

Alfred made a less direct demand upon his uncle's admiration,
but he was a very good fellow all round. He was big and fair
and muscular, and nothing about him but his spectacles
seemed in Thorpe's mind to be related to his choice of art
as a profession. That so robust and hearty a young fellow
should wish to put paint on a canvas with small brushes,
was to the uncle an unaccountable thing. It was almost as
if he had wanted to knit, or do embroidery. Of the idleness
and impatience of discipline which his mother had seemed
to allege against him, Thorpe failed to detect any signs.
The young man was never very late in the morning, and,
beside his tireless devotion to the task of hunting up old
pictures in out-of-the-way places, did most of the steward's
work of the party with intelligence and precision.
He studied the time-tables, audited the hotel-bills, looked
after the luggage, got up the street-maps of towns and
the like, to such good purpose that they never lost a train,
or a bag, or themselves. Truly, an excellent young man.
Thorpe noted with especial satisfaction his fine,
kindly big-brother attitude toward his sister Julia--and
it was impossible for him to avoid the conviction that
Louisa was a simpleton not to appreciate such children.
They did not often allude to their mother; when they did,
it was in language the terms of which seemed more
affectionate than the tone--and Thorpe said often to
himself that he did not blame them. It was not so much
that they had outgrown their mother's point of view.
They had never occupied it.

The journey, so far as Thorpe comprehended its character,
had been shaped with about equal regard for Julia's interest
in the romance of history, and Alfred's more technical
and practical interest in art. Each had sufficient
sympathy with the tastes of the other, however, to prevent
any tendency to separation. They took their uncle one
day to see where William the Silent was assassinated,
and the next to observe how Rembrandt's theory of guild
portrait-painting differed from Van der Helst's, with a
common enthusiasm. He scrutinized with patient loyalty
everything that they indicated to him, and not infrequently
they appeared to like very much the comments he offered.
These were chiefly of a sprightly nature, and when Julia
laughed over them he felt that she was very near to him indeed.

Thus they saw Paris together--where Thorpe did relinquish
some of the multiplied glories of the Louvre to sit
in front of a cafe by the Opera House and see the funny
people go past--and thence, by Bruges and Antwerp,
to Holland, where nobody could have imagined there were
as many pictures as Thorpe saw with his own weary eyes.
There were wonderful old buildings at Lubeck for Julia's
eyes to glisten over, and pictures at Berlin, Dresden,
and Dusseldorf for Alfred.

The assumption existed that the excursion into the
Thuringenwald to see the memorials of Luther was especially
for the uncle's benefit, and he tried solicitously
to say or look nothing which might invalidate it.
There were other places in Germany, from Mainz to Munich,
which he remembered best by their different beers.
They spent Christmas at Vienna, where Julia had heard
that its observance was peculiarly insisted upon, and then
they saw the Tyrol in its heaviest vesture of winter snows,
and beautiful old Basle, where Alfred was crazier
about Holbein than he had been at Munich over Brouwer.
Thorpe looked very carefully at the paintings of both men,
and felt strengthened in his hopes that when Alfred got
a little older he would see that this picture business
was not the thing for a young gentleman with prospects
to go into.

It was at Basle that Thorpe received a letter from London
which directly altered the plans of the party. He had
had several other letters from London which had produced
no such effect. Through Semple, he had followed in outline
the unobtrusive campaign to secure a Special Settlement,
and had learned that the Stock Exchange Committee,
apparently without opposition, had granted one for the
first week in February.

Even this news, tremendously important as it was, did not
prompt Thorpe to interfere with the children's projects.
There was no longer any point in remaining away from London;
there were, indeed, numerous reasons for a prompt return.
But he was loth to deprive the youngsters of that descent
into smiling, sunlit Italy upon which they had so fondly
dwelt in fancy, and after all Semple could do all that was
needful to be done for another month.

So they went to Basle, and here it was that another kind
of letter came. It was in a strange hand, at once cramped
and fluttering, which puzzled the recipient a good deal;
it was a long time before even the signature unravelled itself.
Then he forced himself to decipher it, sentence by sentence,
with a fierce avidity. It was from General Kervick.

The next morning Thorpe astonished his young companions
by suggesting an alteration in their route. In a roundabout
and tentative fashion--in which more suspicious observers
must have detected something shamefaced--he mentioned
that he had always heard a great deal about Montreux as a
winter-resort. The fact that he called it Montroox raised
in Julia's mind a fleeting wonder from whom it could be that
he had heard so much about it, but it occurred to neither
her nor her brother to question his entire good faith.
Their uncle had displayed, hitherto, a most comforting
freedom from discrimination among European towns;
he had, indeed, assured them many times that they were
all one to him. That he should suddenly turn up now with
a favourite winter-resort of his own selection surprised
them considerably, but, upon reflection, it also pleased them.
He had humoured all their wishes with such unfailing and
bountiful kindness, that it was a delight to learn that
there was something he wanted to do. They could not finish
their breakfast till the guide-book had been brought to the table.

"Oh! How splendid!" Julia had cried then. "The Castle
of Chillon is there!"

"Why of course!" said Thorpe, complacently.

They laughed gayly at him for pretending that he had known this,
and he as good-humouredly accepted their banter. He drew
a serious long breath of relief, however, when their backs
were turned. It had gone off much better than he had feared.

Now, on this Sunday afternoon, as the train made its sure-footed
way across the mountains, the thought that he was actually
to alight at Montreux at once fascinated and depressed him.
He was annoyed with himself for suffering it to get such
a hold upon his mind. What was there in it, anyway? There
was a big hotel there, and he and his youngsters were to stop
at it, and if he accidentally encountered a certain lady
who was also stopping there--and of course the meeting
would bear upon its face the stamp of pure chance--what of it?

And if he did meet her, thus fortuitously--what would
happen then? No doubt a lady of her social position met
abroad great numbers of people that she had met at home.
It would not in any way surprise her--this chance encounter
of which he thought so much. Were there sufficient grounds
for imagining that it would even interest her? He forced
his mind up to this question, as it were, many times,
and invariably it shied and evaded the leap.

There had been times, at Hadlow House, when Lady Cressage
had seemed supremely indifferent to the fact of his existence,
and there had been other times when it had appeared
manifest that he pleased her--or better, perhaps, that she
was willing to take note of how much she pleased him.
It must have been apparent to her--this fact that she
produced such an impression upon him. He reasoned this
out satisfactorily to himself. These beautiful women,
trained from childhood for the conquest of a rich husband,
must have cultivated an extraordinary delicacy of consciousness,
in such matters. They must have developed for themselves
what might be called a sixth sense--a power of feeling
in the air what the men about were thinking of them.
More than once he had caught a glimmer of what he felt to be
the operation of this sense, in the company of Lady Cressage.
He could not say that it had been discernible in her glance,
or her voice, or her manner, precisely, but he was sure
that he had seen it, somehow.

But even assuming all this--admitting that in October,
on a wet Sunday, in the tedium of a small country-house party,
she had shown some momentary satisfaction in the idea that
he was profoundly impressed by her--did it at all follow
that in February, amid the distractions of a fashionable
winter-resort, and probably surrounded by hosts of friends,
she would pay any attention to him whatever? The abject
fear that she might not even remember him--might not
know him from Adam when he stood before her--skulked
about in the labyrinths of his mind, but he drove it back
whenever it showed itself. That would be too ignominious.

The young people at the other side of the compartment,
forever wiping the window with the napkin, and straining their
eyes to see the invisible, diverted his unsettled attention.
A new perception of how much he liked them and enjoyed
having them with him, took hold of his thoughts.
It had not occurred to him before, with any definiteness,
that he would be insupportably lonely when the time came
to part with them.

Now, when he dwelt upon it, it made him feel sad and old.

He said to himself at once, with decision, that there
need be no parting at all. He would take a house
without delay, and they should live with him.
He could not doubt that this would be agreeable to them;
it would solve every problem for him.

His fancy sketched out the natural and legitimate
extensions of this project. There would be, first of all,
a house in town--a furnished house of a modest sort,
having no pretension save to provide a cheerful temporary
shelter for three people who liked one another.
Here the new household would take shape, and get its
right note of character. Apparently Louisa would not be
urged to form part of this household. He said to himself
with frankness that he didn't want her, and there had been
nothing to indicate that her children would pine for her.
She showed good sense when she said that her place was
in the shop, and in her ancestral home over the shop.
No doubt there would be a certain awkwardness,
visible to others if not to themselves, about her living
in one part of London and her children in another.
But here also her good sense would come on;--and, besides,
this furnished house in town would be a mere brief
overture to the real thing--the noble country mansion
he was going to have, with gardens and horses and hounds
and artificial lakes and deer parks and everything.
Quite within the year he would be able to realize this
consummation of his dreams.

How these nice young people would revel in such a place--and
how they would worship him for having given it to them for
a home! His heart warmed within him as he thought of this.
He smiled affectionately at the picture Julia made,
polishing the glass with vehement circular movements
of her slight arm, and then grimacing in comic vexation
at the deadly absence of landscape outside. Was there
ever a sweeter or more lovable girl in this world? Would
there have to be some older woman to manage the house,
at the beginning? he wondered. He should like it immensely
if that could be avoided. Julia looked fragile and
inexperienced--but she would be twenty-one next month.
Surely that was a mature enough age for the slight
responsibility of presiding over servants who should be
the best that money could buy. Many girls were married,
and given households of their own to manage, when they
were even younger.

This reflection raised an obstacle against the smooth-
flowing current of his thoughts. Supposing that Julia
got the notion of marrying--how miserable that would
make everything. Very likely she would never do any
such thing; he had observed in her no shadow of a sign
that a thought of matrimony had ever crossed her brain.
Yet that was a subject upon which, of course, she could
not be asked to give pledges, even to herself.

Thorpe tried to take a liberal view of this matter.
He argued to himself that there would be no objection at
all to incorporating Julia's husband into the household,
assuming that she went to the length of taking one,
and that he was a good fellow. On this latter point,
it was only the barest justice to Julia's tastes and judgment
to take it for granted that he would be a good fellow.
Yet the uncle felt uneasily that this would alter things
for the worse. The family party, with that hypothetical
young man in it, could never be quite so innocently
and completely happy as--for instance--the family party
in this compartment had been during these wonderful
three months.

Mechanically he rubbed the window beside him, and turned
to look out with a certain fixedness--as if he might
chance to catch a glimpse of the bridegroom with whom
Julia would have it in her power to disturb the serenity
of their prospective home. A steep white cliff,
receding sullenly against the dim grey skyline; a farmhouse
grotesquely low for its size, crouching under big
shelving galleries heaped with snow; an opening in front,
to the right, where vaguely there seemed to be a valley
into which they would descend--he saw these things.
They remained in his mind afterward as a part of something
else that he saw, with his mental vision, at the same
moment--a strikingly real and vivid presentment of
Lady Cressage, attired as he had seen her in the saddle,
her light hair blown about a little under her hat,
a spot of colour in the exquisite cheek, the cold,
impersonal dignity of a queen in the beautiful profile.

The picture was so actual for the instant that he uttered
an involuntary exclamation--and then looked hastily round
to see whether his companions had heard it. Seemingly they
had not; he lolled again upon the comfortless cushion,
and strove to conjure up once more the apparition.
Nothing satisfactory came of the effort. Upon consideration,
he grew uncertain as to whether he had seen anything at all.
At the most it was a kind of half-dream which had visited him.
He yawned at the thought, and lighted a fresh cigar.
All at once, his mind had become too indolent to do any
more thinking. A shapeless impression that there would be
a good many things to think over later on flitted into his
brain and out again.

"Well, how are the mountains using you, now?" he called
out to his niece.

"Oh, I could shake them!" she declared. "Listen to this:
'A view of singular beauty, embracing the greater part
of the Lake of Geneva, and the surrounding mountains,
is suddenly disclosed.' That's where we are now--or
were a minute ago. You can see that there is some sort
of valley in front of us--but that is all. If I could
only see one mountain with snow on it----"

"Why, it's all mountains and all snow, when you come
to that," Thorpe insisted, with jocose perversity.
"You're on mountains yourself, all the time."

"You know what I mean," she retorted. "I want to see
something like the coloured pictures in the hotels."

"Oh, probably it will be bright sunlight tomorrow,"
he said, for perhaps the twentieth time that day.

"There--that looks like water!" said Alfred.
"See? just beyond the village. Yes, it is water.
There's your Lake of Geneva, at all events."

"But it isn't the right colour," protested Julia,
peering through the glass. "It's precisely like everything
else: it's of no colour at all. And they always paint it
such a lovely blue! Really, uncle, the Swiss Government
ought to return you your money."

"You wait till you see it tomorrow--or next day,"
said the uncle, vaguely. He closed his eyes, and welcomed
a drowsy mood. As he went off to sleep, the jolting racket
of the train mellowed itself into a murmur of "tomorrow
or next day, tomorrow or next day," in his ears.

CHAPTER XI

FROM their windows, high up and at the front of the
big hotel, Julia looked down upon the Lake of Geneva.
She was in such haste to behold it that she had not so
much as unbuttoned her gloves; she held her muff still
in her hand. After one brief glance, she groaned aloud
with vexation.

Beyond the roadway, and the deserted miniature pier of Territet,
both dishevelled under melting and mud-stained snow,
there lay a patch of water--motionless, inconspicuous,
of a faded drab colour--which at some small distance
out vaguely ceased to look like water and, yet a little
further out, became part and parcel of the dull grey mist.
Save for the forlorn masts of a couple of fishing boats,
beached under the shelter of the pier, there was no proof
in sight that this was a lake at all. It was as uninspiring
to the eye as a pool of drippings from umbrellas in a porch.

While her uncle and brother occupied themselves with
the luggage being brought up by the porters, she opened
a window and stepped out upon the tiny balcony.
A flaring sign on the inner framework of this balcony
besought her in Swiss-French, in the interests of order,
not to feed the birds. The injunction seemed meaningless
to her until she perceived, over by the water, several gulls
lazily wheeling about. They were almost as grey as the
fog they circled in. Suddenly they seemed to perceive
her in turn, and, swerving sharply, came floating
toward the hotel, with harsh, almost menacing cries.
She hurried in, and shut the window with decision.
It seemed to her that the smile with which, as she turned,
she was able to meet her uncle's look, was a product
of true heroism.

Apparently this smile did not altogether delude him.
"Oh, now, you mustn't get down on your luck,"
he adjured her. "We're going to be awfully cozy here.
Have you seen your room? It's just there, in a little alley
to the right of the door. They say it has an even finer
view than these windows. Oh, you needn't laugh--this is
the best view in the world, I'm told by those who know.
And as a winter-resort, why----"

"I say, look here!" The interruption came from Alfred,
who, having gone out on one of the balconies, put in
his head now to summon them. "Come here! Here's some fun."

He pointed out to Thorpe the meaning of the inscription
on the sign, and then pulled him forward to observe its
practical defiance. A score of big gulls were flapping
and dodging in excited confusion close before them,
filling their ears with a painful clamour. Every now
and again, one of the birds, recovering its senses
in the hurly-burly, would make a curving swoop downward
past the rows of windows below, and triumphantly catch
in its beak something that had been thrown into the air.

Thorpe, leaning over his railing, saw that a lady on
a balcony one floor below, and some yards to the left,
was feeding the birds. She laughed aloud as she did so,
and said something over her shoulder to a companion who was
not visible.

"Well, that's pretty cool," he remarked to his niece,
who had come to stand beside him. "She's got the same
sign down there that we've got. I can see it from here.
Or perhaps she can't read French."

"Or perhaps she isn't frightened of the hotel people,"
suggested the girl. She added, after a little, "I think
I'll feed them myself in the morning. I certainly shall
if the sun comes out--as a sort of Thanksgiving festival,
you know."

Her uncle seemed not to hear her. He had been struck by
the exceptional grace of the gestures with which the pieces
of bread were flung forth. The hands and wrists of this
lady were very white and shapely. The movements which she
made with them, all unaware of observation as she was,
and viewed as he viewed them from above, were singularly
beautiful in their unconstraint. It was in its way
like watching some remarkable fine dancing, he thought.
He could not see much of her face, from his perch,
but she was tall and fashionably clad. There was a loose
covering of black lace thrown over her head, but once,
as she turned, he could see that her hair was red.
Even in this fleeting glimpse, the unusual tint attracted
his attention: there was a brilliancy as of fire in it.
Somehow it seemed to make a claim upon his memory.
He continued to stare down at the stranger with an indefinable
sense that he knew something about her.

Suddenly another figure appeared upon the balcony--and
in a flash he comprehended everything. These idiotic,
fighting gluttons of gulls had actually pointed out to him
the object of his search. It was Lady Cressage who stood
in the doorway, there just below him--and her companion,
the red-haired lady who laughed hotel-rules to scorn,
was the American heiress who had crossed the ocean
in his ship, and whom he had met later on at Hadlow.
What was her name--Martin? No--Madden. He confronted the swift
impression that there was something odd about these two
women being together. At Hadlow he had imagined that they
did not like each other. Then he reflected as swiftly
that women probably had their own rules about such matters.
He seemed to have heard, or read, perhaps, that females
liked and disliked each other with the most capricious
alternations and on the least tangible of grounds.
At all events, here they were together now. That was
quite enough.

The two ladies had gone in, and closed their window.
The sophisticated birds, with a few ungrateful croaks
of remonstrance, had drifted away again to the water.
His niece had disappeared from his elbow. Still Thorpe
remained with his arms folded on the railing, his eyes fixed
on the vacant balcony, below to the left.

When at last he went inside, the young people were waiting
for him with the project of a stroll before dinner.
The light was failing, but there was plenty of time.
They had ascertained the direction in which Chillon lay;
a servant had assured them that it was only a few minutes'
walk, and Alfred was almost certain that he had seen it from
the window.

Thorpe assented with a certain listlessness, which they
had never noted in his manner before, but when Julia begged
him not to stir if he were in the slightest degree tired,
he replied honestly enough that he would do anything
rather than be left alone. Then, of course, they said,
there should be no walk, but to this he would not listen.
The party trooped downstairs, accordingly, and out into
the street. The walking was vile, but, as Julia had long
ago said, if they were to be deterred by slush they would
never get anywhere or see anything.

It proved to be too late and too dark to either enter
the castle or get much of an idea of its exterior.
Returning, they paused again to look into the lighted window
of the nice little book-shop. The numerous photographs
of what they were entitled to behold from the windows
of their hotel seemed more convincing than photographs
usually were. As the young people inspected them,
they became reassured. It was not credible that such a noble
vista would forever deny itself to such earnest pilgrims.
When their uncle introduced this time his ancient formula
about the certainty of brilliant sunshine in the morning,
they somehow felt like believing him.

"Yes--I really think it must change," Julia declared,
with her fascinated glance upon the photographs.

Alfred looked at his watch. "We'd better get along
to the hotel, hadn't we?" he suggested.

"By the way"--Thorpe began, with a certain uneasiness
of manner--"speaking of dinner, wouldn't you like to dine
at the big table d'hote, instead of up in our sitting-room?"

"If you're tired of our dining alone--by all means,"
answered Julia, readily. There was obvious surprise,
however, in both her look and tone.

"Tired nothing!" he assured her. "I like it better
than anything else in the world. But what I mean is--I
was thinking, seeing that this is such a great winter-
resort, and all the swagger people of Europe come here--
that probably you youngsters would enjoy seeing the crowd."

Julia's glance, full of affectionate appreciation,
showed how wholly she divined his spirit of self-sacrifice.
"We wouldn't care in the least for it," she declared.
"We enjoy being a little party by ourselves every whit
as much as you do--and we both hate the people you get
at table d'hotes--and besides, for that matter, if there
are any real swells here, you may be sure they dine in their
own rooms."

"Why, of course!" Thorpe exclaimed swiftly, in palpable
self-rebuke. "I don't know what I could have been thinking of.
Of course they would dine in their rooms."

Next morning, Thorpe rose earlier than ever--with the
impression of a peculiarly restless and uncomfortable night
behind him. It was not until he had shaved and dressed
that he noted the altered character of the air outside.
Although it was not fully daylight yet, he could see
the outlines of the trees and vinerows on the big,
snow-clad hill, which monopolized the prospect from his window,
all sharp and clear cut, as if he were looking at them
through an opera-glass. He went at once to the sitting-room,
and thrust the curtains aside from one of the windows.

A miracle had been wrought in the night. The sky
overhead was serenely cloudless; the lake beneath,
stirring softly under some faint passing breeze,
revealed its full breadth with crystalline distinctness.
Between sky and water there stretched across the picture
a broad, looming, dimly-defined band of shadow, marked here
and there at the top by little slanting patches of an
intensely glowing white. He looked at this darkling middle
distance for a moment or two without comprehension.
Then he turned and hurriedly moved to the door of Julia's
room and beat upon it.

"Get up!" he called through the panels. "Here's your
sunrise--here's your Alpine view. Go to your window
and see it!"

A clear voice, not unmirthful, replied: "I've been watching
it for half an hour, thanks. Isn't it glorious?"

He was more fortunate at the opposite door, for Alfred
was still asleep. The young man, upon hearing the news,
however, made a toilet of unexampled brevity, and came
breathlessly forth. Thorpe followed him to the balcony,
where he stood collarless and uncombed, with the fresh
morning breeze blowing his hair awry, his lips parted,
his eyes staring with what the uncle felt to be a painful
fixedness before him.

Thorpe had seen many mountains in many lands. They did
not interest him very much. He thought, however, that he
could see now why people who had no mountains of their
own should get excited about Switzerland. He understood
a number of these sentimental things now, for that matter,
which had been Greek to him three months before.
Unreceptive as his philistinism may have seemed to these
delightful youngsters, it was apparent enough to him that
they had taught him a great deal. If he could not hope
to share their ever-bubbling raptures and enthusiasms,
at least he had come to comprehend them after a fashion,
and even to discern sometimes what it was that stirred them.

He watched his nephew now--having first assured himself
by a comprehensive downward glance that no other
windows of the hotel-front were open. The young man
seemed tremendously moved, far too much so to talk.
Thorpe ventured once some remarks about the Mexican mountains,
which were ever so much bigger, as he remembered them,
but Alfred paid no heed. He continued to gaze across
the lake, watching in rapt silence one facet after another
catch the light, and stand out from the murky gloom,
radiantly white, till at last the whole horizon was a mass
of shining minarets and domes, and the sun fell full
on his face. Then, with a long-drawn sigh, he turned,
re-entered the room, and threw himself into a chair.

"It's too good!" he declared, with a half-groan. "I
didn't know it would be like that."

"Why nothing's too good for us, man," his uncle told him.

"THAT is," said the boy, simply, and Thorpe, after staring
for a moment, smiled and rang the bell for breakfast.

When Julia made her appearance, a few minutes later,
the table was already laid, and the waiter was coming
in with the coffee.

"I thought we'd hurry up breakfast," her uncle explained,
after she had kissed him and thanked him for the sunrise
he had so successfully predicted--"because I knew you'd
both be crazy to get out."

He had not over-estimated their eagerness, which was so great,
indeed, that they failed to note the excessive tranquility
of his own demeanour. He ate with such unusual deliberation,
on this exciting morning, that they found themselves at
the end of their repast when, apparently, he had but made a beginning.

"Now you mustn't wait for me at all," he announced
to them then. "I'm a little tired this morning--and I
think I'd just like to lie around and smoke, and perhaps
read one of your novels. But you two must get your
things on and lose no time in getting out. This is the
very best time of day, you know--for Alpine scenery.
I'd hate to have you miss any of it."

Under his kindly if somewhat strenuous insistence, they went
to their rooms to prepare for an immediate excursion.
He was so anxious to have them see all there was to be
seen that, when Julia returned, properly cloaked and befurred,
and stood waiting at the window, he scolded a little.

"What on earth is that boy doing?" he exclaimed, with a
latent snarl in his tone which was novel to her ear.
"He'll keep you here till noon!"

"He's shaving, I think. He won't be long," she replied,
with great gentleness. After a moment's pause, she turned
from the window and came gayly forward.

"Oh, I forgot: I was going to feed the birds.
There are several of them out there now." As she spoke,
she busily broke up some of the rolls on the table.
Her face was bright with the pleasure of the thought.

"If you don't much mind, Julia," her uncle began,
with almost pleading intonations, "I rather think I wouldn't
feed those birds. The rule is there before our eyes,
you know--and it's always been my idea that if you're
at a hotel it's the correct thing to abide by its rules.
It's just an idea of mine--and I daresay, if you think
about it, you'll feel the same way."

The girl freed the last remaining bread-crumb from her gloves.
"Why, of course, uncle," she said, with promptitude.

Although there was no hint of protest in her tone
or manner, he felt impelled to soften still further
this solitary demonstration of his authority.
"You see I've been all round the world, my little girl,"
he explained, haltingly, "and when a man's done that,
and knocked about everywhere, he's apt to get finicking
and notional about trifles every once in a while."

"You're less so than anybody I ever knew," she generously interposed.

"Oh, no I'm not. You don't know me well enough yet;
that's what's the matter. And you see, Julia--another thing
just because you saw that lady throwing out bread,
that aint a very good reason why you should do it.
You don't know what kind of a person she may be.
Girls have got to be so frightfully careful about all that
sort of thing."

Julia offered a constrained little laugh in comment.
"Oh, you don't know how careful I can be," she said.

"But you're not annoyed?" he entreated her--and for answer
she came behind him, and rested an arm on his shoulder,
and patted it. He stroked her hand with his own.
"That's something like the nicest niece in the world!"
he exclaimed, with fervour.

When at last she and her brother had gone, he made short
work of his breakfast, and drank his coffee at a gulp.
A restless activity suddenly informed his movements.
He lit a cigar, and began pacing up and down the room,
biting his lips in preoccupation as he went. After a little,
he opened a window, and ventured cautiously as far
out on the balcony as was necessary to obtain a view
of the street below. Eventually, he identified his nephew
and niece among the pedestrians beneath him, and he kept
them in sight till, after more than one tiresome halt at
a shop window, they disappeared round a bend in the road.
Then he turned and came back into the room with the buoyant
air of a man whose affairs are prospering.

He smiled genially to himself as he gathered from the table
in one capacious hand all the pieces of bread his beloved
niece had broken up, and advanced again to the open window.
Waiting here till one of the dingy gulls moving aimlessly
about was headed toward him, he tossed out a fragment.
The bird dashed at it with a scream, and on the instant
the whole squawking flock were on wing. He suffered
the hubbub to proceed unappeased for a little while he
kept a watchful though furtive eye on that balcony
to the left, below. Unhappily he could not get out far
enough to see whether the inner curtains of its window
were drawn. He threw another bit of bread, and then
looked at his watch. It was a few minutes past nine.
Surely people travelling to see scenery would be up by
this hour.

The strategy of issuing just enough bread to keep the
feathered concourse in motion commended itself to his mind.
As a precautionary measure, he took all the rolls remaining on
the table, and put them in the drawer of a desk by the window.
It even occurred to him to ring for more bread, but upon
consideration that seemed too daring. The waiter would
be sufficiently surprised at the party's appetites as it was.

Half an hour later, his plan of campaign suddenly yielded
a victory. Lady Cressage appeared on her balcony,
clad in some charming sort of morning gown, and bareheaded.
She had nothing in her hands, and seemed indifferent
to the birds, but when Thorpe flung forth a handful
of fragments into the centre of their whirling flock,
she looked up at him. It was the anxious instant, and he
ventured upon what he hoped was a decorous compromise
between a bow and a look of recognition.

She was in no haste to answer either. He could see
rather than hear that she said something to her invisible
companion within, the while she glanced serenely
in the general direction of his balcony. It seemed
to him that the answer to her remark, whatever it was,
must have exerted a direct influence upon his destiny,
for Lady Cressage all at once focussed her vague regard
upon him, and nodded with a reasonably gracious smile.

"It's wonderful luck to find you here," he called
down to her. Having played their part, he wished now
that the birds were at Jericho. Their obstreperous
racket made conversation very difficult. Apparently she
made him an answer, but he could catch nothing of it.

"I'm here with my niece and nephew," he shouted down.
"I don't hear what you say. May I come down and pay
my respects--later on? What is your number, and when may
I come?"

These questions, as he flashed them in review through his mind,
seemed to be all right from the most exacting social
point of view. Doubtless it was equally all right that,
before replying, she should consult her companion,
as she did at some length. Then she replied--and he had
no difficulty now in hearing her above the birds--that it
would be very nice of him to come, say, in an hour's time.
She told him the number--and then almost abruptly went in.

Thorpe, during this hour that ensued, smoked with
volcanic energy. He tried to interest himself in one
after another of half a dozen Tauchnitz novels his niece
carried about, with a preposterous absence of success.
He strove to arrange in some kind of sequence the things
that he should say, when this momentous interview
should begin, but he could think of nothing which did
not sound silly. It would be all right, he argued to
himself in the face of this present mental barrenness;
he always talked well enough on the spur of the moment,
when the time came--and still was not reassured.

He wondered if both ladies would be there to receive him,
and decided that they would probably regard that as indispensable
to the proprieties. In that case, their conversation would
necessarily be of the most casual and general character.
He would tell them a good deal about his niece, he foresaw.
A man travelling about with a niece--and such a delightfully
lady-like and engaging little niece--would take on some
added interest and dignity, he perceived, in the eyes
of ladies travelling alone. He essayed to estimate just
how much they would probably like Julia. Of course he would
say nothing about her mother and the book-shop; a vague
allusion to a widowed sister would be ample on that head.
But there could be confident references to Cheltenham;
he knew from what Julia had said that it suggested the
most satisfactory social guarantees, if taken strictly
by itself. And then so much would depend upon Julia
herself! If she succeeded in striking up a friendship
with them--ah, then everything would be all right.
Perhaps they would take a fancy to Alfred too! He was
a boy, of course, but conceivably the fact that he wanted
to paint, and knew about pictures, would appeal to them.
He seemed to have heard somewhere that artists were
the very devil among women.

At last the weary time of waiting had worn itself out,
somehow, and, after a final polishing before his glass,
he went down, and found his right corridor, and knocked
at the door. A pleasant voice bade him enter, and,
hat and gloves in hand, he went in.

As he had imagined, both ladies were present.
He had not been prepared, however, for the fact that it
was the American who played the part of hostess.
It was she who received him, and invited him to sit down,
and generally made him free of the apartment. When he
shook hands with Lady Cressage, there was somehow an effect
of the incidental in the ceremony, as if she were also a guest.

Nothing could have been simpler or more pleasing
than the little visit turned out to be. Miss Madden
had suddenly grown tired of the snowless and dripping
English winter, and had as promptly decided to come
to Switzerland, where the drifts ought to be high enough,
and the frosts searching enough, in all conscience.
They had selected Territet, because it was familiar to her,
and because it was on the way to Martigny and Brieg,
and she had had a notion of crossing either the Simplon
or the St. Bernard in winter. As she found now,
the St. Bernard was quite impracticable, but admittedly
a post road was kept open over the Simplon. It was said
now that she would not be allowed to proceed by this,
but it often happened that she did the things that she
was not allowed to do. The hotel-people at both Brieg
and Berisal had written refusing to let their horses attempt
the Simplon journey, and they were of course quite within
their rights, but there were other horses in Switzerland.
One surely could buy horses--and so on.

Thorpe also had his turn at autobiography. He told
rather whimsically of his three months' experiences at
the tail of the juvenile whirligigs, and his auditors
listened to them with mild smiles. He ventured upon
numerous glowing parentheses about Julia, and they at
least did not say that they did not want to know her.
They heard with politeness, too, what he could contrive
to drag in about his artist-nephew, and said it must be
very pleasant for him to have such nice company. At least
Miss Madden said this: her companion, as he thought it
over afterward, seemed hardly to have said anything at all.
She answered the few remarks which he found it possible
to direct to her, but the responses took no hold upon
his memory. He fancied that she was bored, or unhappy,
or both.

Finally, in the midst of commonplaces which, to his apprehension,
were verging upon flatness, a bold inspiration disclosed
itself--as splendid as the Dent du Midi revealing
its glaciers above the mounting sunrise--in his brain.

"We should all be charmed if you would come up and dine
with us tonight," he said, under the abrupt impulsion
of this idea. "It's been such an age since we wanderers
have had the privilege of company at our table!"

The felicity of these phrases from his lips attracted
his admiring attention, even while he waited in suspense
for an answer to them.

The ladies exchanged a look. "Yes," said Miss Madden,
after the slightest of pauses, "we shall be very happy."

Shortly thereafter Thorpe took his leave, and went
downstairs and out. He wandered about till luncheon
time, observing the mountains across the lake from
various standpoints, and, as it were, with new eyes.
He was interested in them in a curious new fashion;
they seemed to say things to him. His lip curled
once at the conceit that he was one of the Alps himself.

CHAPTER XII

IT did not happen until three days later that Thorpe's
opportunity to speak alone with Lady Cressage came.

In this brief period, the two parties seemed to have
become fused in a remarkable intimacy. This was
clearly due to the presence of the young people,
and Thorpe congratulated himself many times each day
upon the striking prescience he had shown in bringing them.

Both the ladies unaffectedly liked Julia; so much so
that they seemed unwilling to make any plans which did
not include her. Then it was only a matter of course
that where she went her brother should go--and a further
logical step quite naturally brought in their willing uncle.
If he had planned everything, and now was ordering everything,
it could not have gone more to his liking.

Certain side speculations lent a savour to the satisfaction
with which he viewed this state of affairs. He found many
little signs to confirm the suspicion that the two ladies
had been the readier to make much of Julia because they
were not overkeen about each other's society. The bright,
sweet-natured girl had come as a welcome diversion
to a couple who in seclusion did battle with tendencies
to yawn. He was not quite convinced, for that matter,
that the American lady always went to that trouble.
She seemed to his observation a wilful sort of person,
who would not be restrained by small ordinary considerations
from doing the things she wanted to do. Her relations
with her companion afforded him food for much thought.
Without any overt demonstrations, she produced the
effect of ordering Lady Cressage about. This, so far
as it went, tended to prejudice him against her.
On the other hand, however, she was so good to Julia,
in a peculiarly frank and buoyant way which fascinated
the girl, that he could not but like her. And she was
very good to Alfred too.

There was, indeed, he perceived, a great deal of
individuality about the friendship which had sprung up
between Miss Madden and his nephew. She was years his
senior--he settled it with himself that the American
could not be less than seven-and-twenty,--yet Alfred
stole covert glances of admiration at her, and seemed
to think of nothing but opportunities for being in her
company as if--as if--Thorpe hardly liked to complete
the comparison in his own thoughts. Alfred, of course,
said it was all on account of her wonderful hair; he rather
went out of his way to dilate upon the enthusiasm her
"colour scheme"--whatever that might mean--excited in him
as an artist. The uncle had moments of profound skepticism
about this--moments when he uneasily wondered whether it
was not going to be his duty to speak to the young man.
For the most part, however, he extracted reassurance
from Miss Madden's demeanour toward the lad. She knew,
it seemed, a vast deal about pictures; at least she was able
to talk a vast deal about them, and she did it in such
a calmly dogmatic fashion, laying down the law always,
that she put Alfred in the position of listening as a pupil
might listen to a master. The humility with which his
nephew accepted this position annoyed Thorpe upon occasion,
but he reasoned that it was a fault on the right side.
Very likely it would help to keep the fact of the lady's
seniority more clearly before the youngster's mind,
and that would be so much gained.

And these apprehensions, after all, were scarcely to be
counted in the balance against the sense of achieved
happiness with which these halcyon days kept Thorpe filled.
The initiatory dinner had gone off perfectly. He could
have wished, indeed, that Julia had a smarter frock,
and more rings, when he saw the imposing costumes and jewelled
throats and hands of his guests--but she was a young girl,
by comparison, he reflected, and there could be no doubt
that they found her charming. As for Alfred, he was notably
fine-looking in his evening-clothes--infinitely more like
the son of a nobleman, the gratified uncle kept saying
to himself, than that big dullard, the Honourable Balder.
It filled him with a new pleasure to remember that Alfred
had visiting cards presenting his name as D'Aubigny,
which everybody of education knew was what the degenerate
Dabney really stood for. The lad and his sister had
united upon this excellent change long ago at Cheltenham,
and oddly enough they had confessed it to their uncle,
at the beginning of the trip, with a show of trepidation,
as if they feared his anger. With radiant gayety he had
relieved their minds by showing them his card, with "Mr.
Stormont Thorpe" alone upon it. At the dinner table,
in the proudest moment of his life, he had made himself
prouder still by thinking how distinguished an appearance
his and Alfred's cards would make together in the apartment
below next day.

But next day, the relations between the two parties had
already become too informal for cards. Julia went down
to see them; they came up to see Julia. Then they all went
for a long walk, with luncheon at Vevey, and before evening
Alfred was talking confidently of painting Miss Madden.
Next day they went by train to St. Maurice, and,
returning after dark, dined without ceremony together.
This third day--the weather still remaining bright--they had
ascended by the funicular road to Glion, and walked on among
the swarming luegers, up to Caux. Here, after luncheon,
they had wandered about for a time, regarding the panorama
of lake and mountains. Now, as the homeward descent began,
chance led the two young people and Miss Madden on ahead.

Thorpe found himself walking beside Lady Cressage.
He had upon his arm her outer wrap, which she said she
would put on presently. To look at the view he must glance
past her face: the profile, under the graceful fur cap,
was so enriched by glowing colour that it was, to his thought,
as if she were blushing.

"How little I thought, a few months ago," he said,
"that we should be mountaineering together!"

"Oh, no one knows a day ahead," she responded, vaguely.
"I had probably less notion of coming to Switzerland
then than you had."

"Then you don't come regularly?"

"I have never seen either Germany or Switzerland before.
I have scarcely been out of England before."

"Why now"--he paused, to think briefly upon his words--"I
took it for granted you were showing Miss Madden around."

"It 's quite the other way about," she answered, with a
cold little laugh. "It is she who is showing me around.
It is her tour. I am the chaperone." Thorpe dwelt upon
the word in his mind. He understood what it meant only
in a way, but he was luminously clear as to the bitterness
of the tone in which it had been uttered.

"No--it didn't seem as if it were altogether--what I
might call--YOUR tour," he ventured. They had seen much
of each other these past few days, but it was still hard
for him to make sure whether their freedom of intercourse
had been enlarged.

The slight shrug of the shoulders with which, in silence,
she commented upon his remark, embarrassed him. For a
moment he said nothing. He went on then with a renewed
consciousness of risk.

"You mustn't be annoyed with me," he urged. "I've been
travelling with that dear little niece of mine and her brother,
so long, that I've got into a habit of watching to notice
if the faces I see round me are happy. And when they're not,
then I have a kind of fatherly notion of interfering,
and seeing what's wrong."

She smiled faintly at this, but when he added, upon
doubtful inspiration--"By the way, speaking of fathers,
I didn't know at Hadlow that you were the daughter
of one of my Directors"--this smile froze upon the instant.

"The Dent du Midi is more impressive from the hotel,
don't you think?" she remarked, "than it is from here."

Upon consideration, he resolved to go forward.
"I have taken a great interest in General Kervick,"
he said, almost defiantly. "I am seeing to it that he has
a comfortable income--an income suitable to a gentleman
of his position--for the rest of his life."

"He will be very glad of it," she remarked.

"But I hoped that you would be glad of it too,"
he told her, bluntly. A curious sense of reliance upon
his superiority in years had come to him. If he could
make his air elderly and paternal enough, it seemed
likely that she would defer to it. "I'm talking to you
as I would to my niece, you know," he added, plausibly.

She turned her head to make a fleeting survey of his face,
as if the point of view took her by surprise.
"I don't understand," she said. "You are providing
an income for my father, because you wish to speak
to me like an uncle. Is that it?"

He laughed, somewhat disconsolately. "No--that isn't it,"
he said, and laughed again. "I couldn't tell, you know,
that you wouldn't want to talk about your father."
"Why, there's no reason in the world for not talking of him,"
she made haste to declare. "And if he's got something
good in the City, I'm sure I'm as glad as anyone. He is
the sort that ought always to have a good deal of money.
I mean, it will bring out his more amiable qualities.
He does not shine much in adversity--any more than I do."

Thorpe felt keenly that there were fine things to be said
here--but he had confidence in nothing that came to
his tongue. "I've been a poor man all my life--till now,"
was his eventual remark.

"Please don't tell me that you have been very happy
in your poverty," she adjured him, with the dim flicker
of a returning smile. "Very likely there are people
who are so constituted, but they are not my kind.
I don't want to hear them tell about it. To me poverty
is the horror--the unmentionable horror!"

"There never was a day that I didn't feel THAT!"
Thorpe put fervour into his voice. "I was never
reconciled to it for a minute. I never ceased swearing
to myself that I'd pull myself out of it. And that's
what makes me sort of soft-hearted now toward those--
toward those who haven't pulled themselves out of it."

"Your niece says you are soft-hearted beyond example,"
remarked Lady Cressage.

"Who could help being, to such a sweet little girl as she is?"
demanded the uncle, fondly.

"She is very nice," said the other. "If one may say
such a thing, I fancy these three months with her have
had an appreciable effect upon you. I'm sure I note
a difference."

"That's just what I've been saying to myself!" he told her.
He was visibly delighted with this corroboration.
"I've been alone practically all my life. I had no
friends to speak of--I had no fit company--I hadn't
anything but the determination to climb out of the hole.
Well, I've done that--and I've got among the kind of people
that I naturally like. But then there came the question
of whether they would like me. I tell you frankly,
that was what was worrying the heart out of me when I
first met you. I like to be confessing it to you now--but
you frightened me within an inch of my life. Well now,
you see, I'm not scared of you at all. And of course
it's because Julia's been putting me through a course
of sprouts."

The figure was lost upon Lady Cressage, but the spirit
of the remarks seemed not unpleasant to her. "I'm sure
you're full of kindness," she said. "You must forget that I
snapped at you--about papa." "All I remember about that is,"
he began, his eye lighting up with the thought that this time
the opportunity should not pass unimproved, "that you said
he didn't shine much in adversity---any more than you did.
Now on that last point I disagree with you, straight.
There wouldn't be any place in which you wouldn't shine."

"Is that the way one talks to one's niece?" she asked him,
almost listlessly. "Such flattery must surely be bad
for the young." Her words were sprightly enough, but her
face had clouded over. She had no heart for the banter.

"Ah"--he half-groaned. "I only wish I knew what was
the right way to talk to you. The real thing is that I
see you're unhappy--and that gets on my nerve--and I
should like to ask you if there wasn't something I could
do--and ask it in such a way that you'd have to admit
there was--and I don't know enough to do it."

He had a wan smile for thanks. "But of course there
is nothing," she replied, gently.

"Oh, there must be!" he insisted. He had no longer any
clear notions as to where his tongue might not lead him.
"There must be! You said I might talk to you as I would
to Julia

"Did I?"

"Well, I'm going to, anyway," he went on stoutly,
ignoring the note of definite dissent in her interruption.
"You ARE unhappy! You spoke about being a chaperone.
Well now, to speak plainly, if it isn't entirely pleasant
for you with Miss Madden--why wouldn't you be a chaperone
for Julia? I must be going to London very soon--but
she can stay here, or go to Egypt, or wherever she
likes--and of course you would do everything, and have
everything--whatever you liked, too."

"The conversation is getting upon rather impossible grounds,
I'm afraid," she said, and then bit her lips together.
Halting, she frowned a little in the effort of considering
her further words, but there was nothing severe in the
glance which she lifted to him as she began to speak.
"Let us walk on. I must tell you that you misconceive
the situation entirely. Nobody could possibly be kinder
or more considerate than Miss Madden. Of course she
is American--or rather Irish-American, and I'm English,
and our notions and ways are not always alike. But that has
nothing to do with it. And it is not so much that she
has many thousands a year, and I only a few hundreds.
That in itself would signify nothing--and if I must take
help from somebody I would rather take it from Celia Madden
than anybody else I know--but this is the point, Mr. Thorpe.
I do not eat the bread of dependence gracefully. I pull wry
faces over it, and I don't try very much to disguise them.
That is my fault. Yes--oh yes, I know it is a fault--but
I am as I am. And if Miss Madden doesn't mind--why"--she
concluded with a mirthless, uncertain laugh--"why on earth
should you?"

"Ah, why should I?" he echoed, reflectively. "I should
like desperately to tell you why. Sometime I will tell you."

They walked on in silence for a brief space. Then she
put out her hand for her wrap, and as she paused,
he spread it over her shoulders.

"I am amazed to think what we have been saying to each other,"
she said, buttoning the fur as they moved on again.
"I am vexed with myself."

"And more still with me," he suggested.

"No-o--but I ought to be. You've made me talk the most
shocking rubbish."

"There we disagree again, you know. Everything you've
said's been perfect. What you're thinking of now is
that I'm not an old enough friend to have been allowed
to hear it. But if I'm not as old a friend as some,
I wish I could make you feel that I'm as solid a friend
as any--as solid and as staunch and as true. I wish I
could hear you say you believed that."

"But you talk of 'friends,'" she said, in a tone not at
all responsive--"what is meant by 'friends'? We've chanced
to meet twice--and once we barely exchanged civilities,
and this time we've been hotel acquaintances--hardly more,
is it?--and you and your young people have been very
polite to me--and I in a silly moment have talked to you
more about my affairs than I should--I suppose it was
because you mentioned my father. But 'friends' is rather
a big word for that, isn't it?"

Thorpe pouted for a dubious moment. "I can think
of a bigger word still," he said, daringly. "It's been
on the tip of my tongue more than once."

She quickened her pace. The air had grown perceptibly colder.
The distant mountains, visible ever and again through
the bare branches, were of a dark and cheerless blue,
and sharply defined against the sky. It was not yet
the sunset hour, and there were no mists, but the
light of day seemed to be going out of the heavens.
He hurried on beside her in depressed silence.

Their companions were hidden from view in a convolution
of the winding road, but they were so near that their
voices could be heard as they talked. Frequently the
sound of laughter came backward from them.

"They're jolly enough down there," he commented at last, moodily.

"That's a good reason for our joining them, isn't it?"
Her tone was at once casual and pointed.

"But I don't want to join them!" he protested. "Why don't
you stay with me--and talk?" "But you bully me so,"
she offered in explanation.

The phrase caught his attention. Could it be that it
expressed her real feeling? She had said, he recalled,
that he had made her talk. Her complaint was like
an admission that he could overpower her will.
If that were true--then he had resources of masterfulness
still in reserve sufficient to win any victory.

"No--not bully you," he said slowly, as if objecting to the word
rather than the idea. "That wouldn't be possible to me.
But you don't know me well enough to understand me.
I am the kind of man who gets the things he wants.
Let me tell you something: When I was at Hadlow, I had
never shot a pheasant in my life. I used to do tolerably
well with a rifle, but I hardly knew anything about a
shot-gun, and I don't suppose I'd ever killed more than
two or three birds on the wing--and that was ages ago.
But I took the notion that I would shoot better than anybody
else there. I made up my mind to it--and I simply did it,
that's all. I don't know if you remember--but I killed
a good deal more than both the others put together.
I give you that as an example. I wanted you to think
that I was a crack shot--and so I made myself be a
crack shot."

"That is very interesting," she murmured. They did
not seem to be walking quite so fast.

"Don't think I want to brag about myself," he went on.
"I don't fancy myself--in that way. I'm not specially
proud of doing things--it's the things themselves
that I care for. If some men had made a great fortune,
they would be conceited about it. Well, I'm not.
What I'm keen about is the way to use that fortune so
that I will get the most out of it--the most happiness,
I mean. The thing to do is to make up your mind carefully
what it is that you want, and to put all your power and
resolution into getting it--and the rest is easy enough.
I don't think there's anything beyond a strong man's reach,
if he only believes enough in himself."

"But aren't you confusing two things?" she queried.
The subject apparently interested her. "To win one's
objects by sheer personal force is one thing. To merely
secure them because one's purse is longer than other
people's--that's quite another matter."

He smiled grimly at her. "Well, I'll combine the two,"
he said.

"Then I suppose you will be altogether irresistible,"
she said, lightly. "There will be no pheasants left for
other people at all."

"I don't mind being chaffed," he told her, with gravity.
"So long as you're good-natured, you can make game
of me all you like. But I'm in earnest, all the same.
I'm not going to play the fool with my money and my power.
I have great projects. Sometime I'll tell you about them.
They will all be put through--every one of them. And you
wouldn't object to talking them over with me--would you?"

"My opinion on 'projects' is of no earthly value--to
myself or anyone else."

"But still you'd give me your advice if I asked it?"
he persisted. "Especially if it was a project in which you
were concerned?"

After a moment's constrained silence she said to him,
"You must have no projects, Mr. Thorpe, in which I
am concerned. This talk is all very wide of the mark.
You are not entitled to speak as if I were mixed up with
your affairs. There is nothing whatever to warrant it."

"But how can you help being in my projects if I put you there,
and keep you there?" he asked her, with gleeful boldness.
"And just ask yourself whether you do really want
to help it. Why should you? You've seen enough of me
to know that I can be a good friend. And I'm the kind
of friend who amounts to something--who can and will
do things for those he likes. What obligation are you
under to turn away that kind of a friend, when he offers
himself to you? Put that question plainly to yourself."

"But you are not in a position to nominate the questions
that I am to put to myself," she said. The effort to
import decision into her tone and manner was apparent.
"That is what I desire you to understand. We must not talk
any more about me. I am not the topic of conversation."

"But first let me finish what I wanted to say," he insisted.
"My talk won't break any bones. You'd be wrong not
to listen to it--because it's meant to help you--to
be of use to you. This is the thing, Lady Cressage:
You're in a particularly hard and unpleasant position.
Like my friend Plowden"--he watched her face narrowly
but in vain, in the dull light, for any change at mention
of the name--"like my friend Plowden you have a position
and title to keep up, and next to nothing to keep it
up on. But he can go down into the City and make
money--or try to. He can accept Directorships and tips
about the market and so on, from men who are disposed
to be good to him, and who see how he can be of use to
them--and in that way he can do something for himself.
But there is the difference: you can't do these things,
or you think you can't, which is the same thing.
You're all fenced in; you're surrounded by notice-boards,
telling you that you mustn't walk this way or look that way;
that you mustn't say this thing or do the other.
Now your friend down ahead there--Miss Madden--she doesn't
take much stock in notice-boards. In fact, she feeds
the gulls, simply because she's forbidden to do it.
But you--you don't feed any gulls, and yet you're annoyed
with yourself that you don't. Isn't that the case? Haven't
I read you right?"

She seemed to have submitted to his choice of a topic.
There was no touch of expostulation in the voice with
which she answered him. "I see what you think you mean,"
she said.

"Think!" he responded, with self-confident emphasis.
"I'm not 'thinking.' I'm reading an open book. As I say,
you're not contented--you're not happy; you don't try
to pretend that you are. But all the same, though you
hate it, you accept it. You think that you really must
obey your notice-boards. Now what I tell you you ought
to do is to take a different view. Why should you put up
all this barbed wire between yourself and your friends? It
doesn't do anybody else any good--and it does you harm.
Why, for example, should Plowden be free to take things
from me, and you not?"

She glanced at him, with a cold half-smile in her eye.
"Unfortunately I was not asked to join your Board."

He pressed his lips tightly together, and regarded her
meditatively as he turned these words over in his mind.
"What I'm doing for Plowden," he said with slow vagueness
meanwhile, "it isn't so much because he's on the Board.
He's of no special use to me there. But he was nice to me
at a time when that meant everything in the world to me--and
I don't forget things of that sort. Besides, I like
him--and it pleases me to let him in for a share of my
good fortune. See? It's my way of enjoying myself.
Well now, I like you too, and why shouldn't I be allowed
to let you in also for a share of that good fortune?
You think there's a difference, but I tell you it's
imaginary--pure moonshine. Why, the very people whose
opinion you're afraid of--what did they do themselves
when the South African craze was on? I'm told that the
scum of the earth had only to own some Chartered shares,
and pretend to be 'in the know' about them--and they
could dine with as many duchesses as they liked.
I knew one or two of the men who were in that deal--I
wouldn't have them in my house--but it seems there
wasn't any other house they couldn't go to in London."

"Oh yes, there were many houses," she interposed.
"It wasn't a nice exhibition that society made of itself--
one admits that,--but it was only one set that quite lost
their heads. There are all kinds of sets, you know.
And--I don't think I see your application, in any event.
The craze, as you call it, was all on a business basis.
People ran after those who could tell them which shares were
going up, and they gambled in those shares. That was all,
wasn't it?"

Still looking intently at her, he dismissed her query
with a little shake of the head. "'On a business basis,'"
he repeated, as if talking to himself. "They like to have
things 'on a business basis.'"

He halted, with a hand held out over her arm, and she
paused as well, in a reluctant, tentative way. "I don't
understand you," she remarked, blankly.

"Let me put it in this way," he began, knitting his brows,
and marshalling the thoughts and phrases with which
his mind had been busy. "This is the question.
You were saying that you weren't asked to join my Board.
You explained in that way how I could do things for Plowden,
and couldn't do them for you. Oh, I know it was a joke--but
it had its meaning--at least to me. Now I want to ask
you--if I decide to form another Company, a very small
and particular Company--if I should decide to form it,
I say--could I come to you and ask you to join THAT Board?
Of course I could ask--but what I mean is--well, I guess
you know what I mean."

The metaphor had seemed to him a most ingenious and
satisfactory vehicle for his purpose, and it had broken
down under him amid evidences of confusion which he could
not account for. All at once his sense of physical
ascendancy had melted away--disappeared. He looked at Lady
Cressage for an instant, and knew there was something
shuffling and nerveless in the way his glance then shifted
to the dim mountain chain beyond. His heart fluttered
surprisingly inside his breast, during the silence which ensued.

"Surely you must have said everything now that you
wished to say," she observed at last. She had been
studying intently the trodden snow at her feet, and did
not even now look up. The constraint of her manner,
and a certain pleading hesitation in her words,
began at once to restore his self-command. "Do not
talk of it any further, I beg of you," she went on.
"We--we have been lagging behind unconscionably.
If you wish to please me, let us hurry forward now.
And please!--no more talk at all!"

"But just a word--you're not angry?"

She shook her head very slightly.

"And you do know that I'm your friend--your solid,
twenty-four-carat friend?"

After a moment's pause, she made answer, almost in a
whisper--"Yes--be my friend--if it amuses you,"--and
led the way with precipitate steps down the winding road.

CHAPTER XIII

TWO days later, Thorpe and his young people took an early
morning train for Geneva--homeward bound.

It was entirely easy to accept their uncle's declaration
that urgent business summoned him to London, yet Julia
and Alfred, when they chanced to exchange glances after
the announcement, read in each other's eyes the formless
impression that there were other things beside business.
Their uncle, they realized, must be concerned in large
and probably venturesome enterprises; but it did not fit
with their conception of his character that commercial
anxieties should possess the power to upset him.
And upset he undeniably was.

They traced his disturbance, in a general way, to the
morning following the excursion up to Glion and Caux.
He told them then that he had slept very badly, and that
they must "count him out" of their plans for the day.
He continued to be counted out of what remained of
their stay at Territet. He professed not to be ill,
but he was restless and preoccupied. He ate little,
but smoked continuously, and drank spirits a good deal,
which they had not seen him do before. Nothing would induce
him to go out either day.

Strangely enough, this disturbance of their uncle's
equanimity synchronized with an apparent change in the
attitude of their new friends on the floor below.
This change was, indeed, more apparent than definable.
The ladies were, to the nicest scrutiny, as kindly
and affable as ever, but the sense of comradeship
had somehow vanished. Insensibly, the two parties
had ceased to have impulses and tastes in common.
There were no more trips together--no more fortuitous
luncheons or formal dinners as a group.

The young people looked up at the front of the big hotel
on this morning of departure, after they had clambered
over the drifts into the snow-bedecked train, and opened
the window of their compartment. They made sure that
they could identify the windows of Miss Madden's suite,
and that the curtains were drawn aside--but there was no
other token of occupancy discernible. They had said good-bye
to the two ladies the previous evening, of course--it
lingered in their minds as a rather perfunctory ceremony--but
this had not prevented their hoping for another farewell
glimpse of their friends. No one came to wave a hand
from the balcony, however, and the youngsters looked
somewhat dubiously at each other as the train moved.
Then intuitively they glanced toward their uncle--and
perceived that he had his hat pulled over his eyes,
and was staring with a kind of moody scowl at the lake opposite.

"Fortunately, it is a clear day," said Julia. "We shall
see Mont Blanc."

Her voice seemed to have a hollow and unnatural sound
in her own ears. Neither her uncle nor her brother
answered her.

At breakfast, meanwhile, in the apartment toward which
the young people had turned their farewell gaze in vain,
Miss Madden sipped her coffee thoughtfully while she read
a letter spread upon the table beside her.

"It's as they said," she observed. "You are not allowed
to drive in the mountains with your own horses and carriage.
That seems rather quaint for a model Republic--doesn't it?"

"I daresay they're quite right," Lady Cressage
replied, listlessly. "It's in the interest of safety.
People who do not know the mountains would simply go and
get killed in avalanches and hurricanes--and all that.
I suppose that is what the Government wishes to prevent."

"And you're on the side of the Government," said the other,
with a twinkle in her brown eyes. "Truly now--you hated
the whole idea of driving over the Simplon."

Lady Cressage lifted her brows in whimsical assent
as she nodded.

"But do you like this Russian plan any better?"
demanded Celia. "I wish for once you would be absolutely
candid and open with me--and let me know to the uttermost
just what you think." "'For once'?" queried the other.
Her tone was placid enough, but she allowed the significance
of the quotation to be marked.

"Oh, I never wholly know what you're thinking,"
Miss Madden declared. She put on a smile to alleviate the
force of her remarks. "It is not you alone--Edith. Don't
think that! But it is ingrained in your country-women.
You can't help it. It's in your blood to keep things back.
I've met numbers of English ladies who, I'm ready
to believe, would be incapable of telling an untruth.
But I've never met one of whom I could be sure that she
would tell me the whole truth. Don't you see this case
in point," she pursued, with a little laugh, "I could
not drag it out of you that you disliked the Simplon idea,
so long as there was a chance of our going. Immediately we
find that we can't go, you admit that you hated it."

"But you wanted to go," objected Lady Cressage, quietly.
"That was the important thing. What I wanted or did
not want had nothing to do with the matter."

Celia's face clouded momentarily. "Those are not the
kind of things I like to hear you say," she exclaimed,
with a certain vigour. "They put everything in quite
a false light. I am every whit as anxious that you should
be pleased as that I should. You know that well enough.
I've said it a thousand times--and have I ever done
anything to disprove it? But I never can find out what
you do want--what really will please you! You never
will propose anything; you never will be entirely frank
about the things I propose. It's only by watching
you out of the corner of my eye that I can ever guess
whether anything is altogether to your liking or not."

The discussion seemed to be following lines familiar
to them both. "That is only another way of saying
what you discovered long ago," said Lady Cressage,
passively--"that I am deficient in the enthusiasms.
But originally you were of the opinion that you had
enthusiasms enough for two, and that my lack of them would
redress the balance, so to speak. I thought it was a very
logical opinion then, and, from my own point of view,
I think so now. But if it does not work in practice,
at least the responsibility of defending it is not mine."

"Delightful!" cried Celia, smiling gayly as she put
down her cup again. "You are the only woman I've ever
known who was worth arguing with. The mere operation
makes me feel as if I were going through Oxford--or
passing the final Jesuit examinations. Heaven knows,
I would get up arguments with you every day, for the pure
enjoyment of the thing--if I weren't eternally afraid
of saying something that would hurt your feelings,
and then you wouldn't tell me, but would nurse the wound
in silence in the dark, and I should know that something
was wrong, and have to watch you for weeks to make
out what it was--and it would all be too unhappy.
But it comes back, you see, to what I said before.
You don't tell me things!"

Edith smiled in turn, affectionately enough, but with a
wistful reserve. "It is a constitutional defect--even national,
according to you. How shall I hope to change, at this
late day? But what is it you want me to tell you?--I forget."

"The Russian thing. To go to Vienna, where we get
our passports, and then to Cracow, and through to Kief,
which they say is awfully well worth while--and next
Moscow--and so on to St. Petersburg, in time to see
the ice break up. It is only in winter that you see
the characteristic Russia: that one has always heard.
With the furs and the sledges, and the three horses
galloping over the snow--it seems to me it must be the
best thing in Europe--if you can call Russia Europe.
That's the way it presents itself to me--but then I was
brought up in a half-Arctic climate, and I love that sort
of thing--in its proper season. It is different with you.
In England you don't know what a real winter is.
And so I have to make quite sure that you think you would
like the Russian experiment."

The other laughed gently. "But if I don't know what a
real winter is, how can I tell whether I will like it
or not? All I do know is that I am perfectly willing to go
and find out. Oh yes--truly--I should like very much to go."

Miss Madden sighed briefly. "All right," she said,
but with a notable absence of conviction in her tone.

A space of silence ensued, as she opened and glanced through
another note, the envelope of which had borne no postmark.
She pouted her lips over the contents of this missive,
and raised her eyebrows in token of surprise, but as she
laid it down she looked with a frank smile at her companion.

"It's from our young friend," she explained, genially--
"the painter-boy--Mr. D'Aubigny. It is to remind me
of a promise he says I made--that when I came to London
he should paint my portrait. I don't think I promised
anything of the kind--but I suppose that is a detail.
It's all my unfortunate hair. They must have gone
by this time--they were to go very early, weren't they?"

Lady Cressage glanced at the clock. "It was 8:40,
I think--fully half an hour ago," she answered,
with a painstaking effect of indifference.

"Curious conglomeration"--mused the other. "The boy and
girl are so civilized, and their uncle is so rudimentary.
I'm afraid they are spoiling him just as the missionaries
spoil the noble savage. They ought to go away and leave
him alone. As a barbarian he was rather effective--but
they will whitewash him and gild him and make a tame
monstrosity of him. But I suppose it's inevitable.
Having made his fortune, it is the rule that he must set
up as a gentleman. We do it more simply in America.
One generation makes the fortune, and leaves it to
the next generation to put on the frills. My father,
for example, never altered in the slightest degree the
habits he formed when he was a poor workman. To the day
of his death, blessed old man, he remained what he had
always been--simple, pious, modest, hard-working, kindly,
and thrifty--a model peasant. Nothing ever tempted him a
hair's-breadth out of the path he had been bred to walk in.
But such nobility of mind and temper with it all! He never
dreamed of suggesting that I should walk in the same path.
From my earliest childhood I cannot remember his ever
putting a limitation upon me that wasn't entirely sensible
and generous. I must have been an extremely trying daughter,
but he never said so; he never looked or acted as if he
thought so.--But I never stop when I begin talking of
my father."

"It's always very sweet to me to hear you talk of him,"
Lady Cressage put in. "One knows so few people who feel
that way about their fathers!"

Celia nodded gravely, as if in benevolent comment upon
something that had been left unsaid. The sight of the
young artist's note recalled her earlier subject.
"Of course there is a certain difference," she went on,
carelessly,--"this Mr. Thorpe is not at all a peasant,
as the phrase goes. He strikes one, sometimes, as having
been educated."

"Oh, he was at a public school, Lord Plowden tells me,"
said the other, with interest. "And his people were
booksellers--somewhere in London--so that he got a good
smattering of literature and all that. He certainly has
more right to set up as a gentleman than nine out of ten
of the nouveaux riches one sees flaunting about nowadays.
And he can talk very well indeed--in a direct, practical sort
of way. I don't quite follow you about his niece and
nephew spoiling him. Of course one can see that they
have had a great effect upon him. He sees it himself--and
he's very proud of it. He told me so, quite frankly.
But why shouldn't it be a nice effect?"

"Oh, I don't know," Celia replied, idly. "It seemed to me
that he was the kind of piratical buccaneer who oughtn't
to be shaved and polished and taught drawing-room tricks--I
feel that merely in the interest of the fitness of things.
Have you looked into his eyes--I mean when they've got
that lack-lustre expression? You can see a hundred
thousand dead men in them."

"I know the look you mean," said Lady Cressage,
in a low voice.

"Not that I assume he is going to kill anybody,"
pursued Miss Madden, with ostensible indifference, but fixing
a glance of aroused attention upon her companion's face,
"or that he has any criminal intentions whatever. He behaves
very civilly indeed, and apparently his niece and nephew
idolize him. He seems to be the soul of kindness to them.
It may be that I'm altogether wrong about him--only I
know I had the instinct of alarm when I caught that sort
of dull glaze in his eye. I met an African explorer
a year ago, or so, about whose expeditions dark stories
were told, and he had precisely that kind of eye.
Perhaps it was this that put it into my head--but I have
a feeling that this Thorpe is an exceptional sort of man,
who would have the capacity in him for terrible things,
if the necessity arose for them."

"I see what you mean," the other repeated. She toyed
with the bread-crumbs about her plate, and reflectively
watched their manipulation into squares and triangles
as she went on. "But may that not be merely the visible
sign of an exceptionally strong and masterful character?
And isn't it, after all, the result of circumstances
whether such a character makes, as you put it, a hundred
thousand dead men, or enriches a hundred thousand lives
instead? We agree, let us say, that this Mr. Thorpe
impresses us both as a powerful sort of personality.
The question arises, How will he use his power? On that point,
we look for evidence. You see a dull glaze in his eye,
and you draw hostile conclusions from it. I reply that it
may mean no more than that he is sleepy. But, on the
other hand, I bring proofs that are actively in his favour.
He is, as you say, idolized by the only two members of his
family that we have seen--persons, moreover, who have been
brought up in ways different to his own, and who would
not start, therefore, with prejudices in his favour.
Beyond that, I know of two cases in which he has behaved,
or rather undertaken to behave, with really lavish
generosity--and in neither case was there any claim upon
him of a substantial nature. He seems to me, in fact,
quite too much disposed to share his fortune with Tom,
Dick, and Harry--anybody who excites his sympathy or gets
into his affections." Having said this much, Lady Cressage
swept the crumbs aside and looked up. "So now," she added,
with a flushed smile, "since you love arguments so much,
how do you answer that?"

Celia smiled back. "Oh, I don't answer it at all," she said,
and her voice carried a kind of quizzical implication.
"Your proofs overwhelm me. I know nothing of him--and you
know so much!"

Lady Cressage regarded her companion with a novel
earnestness and directness of gaze. "I had a long,
long talk with him--the afternoon we came down from Glion."

Miss Madden rose, and going to the mantel lighted a cigarette.
She did not return to the table, but after a brief pause
came and took an easy-chair beside her friend, who turned
to face her. "My dear Edith," she said, with gravity,
"I think you want to tell me about that talk--and so I
beg you to do so. But if I'm mistaken--why then I beg
you to do nothing of the kind."

The other threw out her hands with a gesture of
wearied impatience, and then clasped them upon her knee.
"I seem not to know what I want! What is the good
of talking about it? What is the good of anything?"

"Now--now!" Celia's assumption of a monitor's tone
had reference, apparently, to something understood
between the two, for Lady Cressage deferred to it,
and even summoned the ghost of a smile.

"There is really nothing to tell, "she faltered, hesitatingly--"
that is, nothing happened. I don't know how to say it--the
talk left my mind in a whirl. I couldn't tell you why.
It was no particular thing that was said--it seemed to be
more the things that I thought of while something else was
being talked about--but the whole experience made a most
tremendous impression upon me. I've tried to straighten
it out in my own mind, but I can make nothing of it.
That is what disturbs me, Celia. No man has ever confused me
in this silly fashion before. Nothing could be more idiotic.
I'm supposed to hold my own in conversation with people
of--well, with people of a certain intellectual rank,--but
this man, who is of hardly any intellectual rank at all,
and who rambled on without any special aim that one
could see--he reduced my brain to a sort of porridge.
I said the most extraordinary things to him--babbling
rubbish which a school-girl would be ashamed of.
How is that to be accounted for? I try to reason it out,
but I can't. Can you?"

"Nerves," said Miss Madden, judicially.

"Oh, that is meaningless," the other declared.
"Anybody can say 'nerves.' Of course, all human thought
and action is 'nerves.'"

"But yours is a special case of nerves," Celia pursued,
with gentle imperturbability. "I think I can make my meaning
clear to you--though the parallel isn't precisely an elegant one.
The finest thoroughbred dog in the world, if it is beaten
viciously and cowed in its youth, will always have a latent
taint of nervousness, apprehension, timidity--call it
what you like. Well, it seems to me there's something
like that in your case, Edith. They hurt you too cruelly,
poor girl. I won't say it broke your nerve--but it made
a flaw in it. Just as a soldier's old wound aches when
there's a storm in the air--so your old hurt distracts
and upsets you under certain psychological conditions.
It's a rather clumsy explanation, but I think it does explain."

"Perhaps--I don't know," Edith replied, in a tone
of melancholy reverie. "It makes a very poor creature
out of me, whatever it is."

"I rather lose patience, Edith," her companion
admonished her, gravely. "Nobody has a right
to be so deficient in courage as you allow yourself to be."

"But I'm not a coward," the other protested.
"I could be as brave as anybody--as brave as you are--if
a chance were given me. But of what use is bravery
against a wall twenty feet high? I can't get over it.
I only wound and cripple myself by trying to tear it down,
or break through it.--Oh yes, I know what you say! You say
there is no wall--that it is all an illusion of mine.
But unfortunately I'm unable to take that view.
I've battered myself against it too long--too sorely, Celia!"

Celia shrugged her shoulders in comment. "Oh, we women
all have our walls--our limitations--if it comes to that,"
she said, with a kind of compassionate impatience in her tone.
"We are all ridiculous together--from the point of view
of human liberty. The free woman is a fraud--a myth.
She is as empty an abstraction as the 'Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity' that the French put on their public buildings.
I used to have the most wonderful visions of what independence
would mean. I thought that when I was absolutely my
own master, with my money and my courage and my free mind,
I would do things to astonish all mankind. But really
the most I achieve is the occasional mild surprise of a
German waiter. Even that palls on one after a time.
And if you were independent, Edith--if you had any amount
of money--what difference do you think it would make to you?
What could you do that you don't do, or couldn't do, now?"

"Ah, now"--said the other, looking up with a thin
smile--"now is an interval--an oasis."

Miss Madden's large, handsome, clear-hued face,
habitually serene in its expression, lost something in
composure as she regarded her companion. "I don't know
why you should say that," she observed, gently enough,
but with an effect of reproof in her tone. "I have
never put limits to the connection, in my own mind--and
it hadn't occurred to me that you were doing so in yours."

"But I'm not," interposed Lady Cressage.

"Then I understand you less than ever. Why do you
talk about an 'interval'? What was the other word?--
'oasis'--as if this were a brief halt for refreshments and
a breathing-spell, and that presently you must wander forth
into the desert again. That suggestion is none of mine.
We agreed that we would live together--'pool our issues,'
as they say in America. I wanted a companion; so did you.
I have never for an instant regretted the arrangement.
Some of my own shortcomings in the matter I have regretted.
You were the most beautiful young woman I had ever seen,
and you were talented, and you seemed to like me--and I
promised myself that I would add cheerfulness and a gay spirit
to your other gifts--and in that I have failed wofully.
You're not happy. I see that only too clearly."

"I know--I'm a weariness and a bore to you," broke in
the other, despondingly.

"That is precisely what you're not," Celia went on.
"We mustn't use words of that sort. They don't describe
anything in our life at all. But I should be better
pleased with myself if I could really put my finger
on what it is that is worrying you. Even if we decided
to break up our establishment, I have told you that you
should not go back to what you regard as poverty.
Upon that score, I had hoped that your mind was easy.
As I say, I think you attach more importance to money
than those who have tested its powers would agree to--but
that's neither here nor there. You did not get on well on
600 pounds a year--and that is enough. You shall never
have less than twice that amount, whether we keep together
or not--and if it ought to be three times the amount,
that doesn't matter.

"You don't seem to realize, Edith"--she spoke with
increased animation--"that you are my caprice. You are
the possession that I am proudest of and fondest of.
There is nothing else that appeals to me a hundredth
part as much as you do. Since I became independent,
the one real satisfaction I have had is in being able
to do things for you--to have you with me, and make
you share in the best that the world can offer.
And if with it all you remain unhappy, why then you see
I don't know what to do."

"Oh, I know--I behave very badly!" Lady Cressage had risen,
and with visible agitation began now to pace the room.
"I deserve to be thrown into the lake--I know it
well enough! But Celia--truly--I'm as incapable
of understanding it as you are. It must be that I am
possessed by devils--like the people in the New Testament.
Perhaps someone will come along who can cast them out.
I don't seem able to do it myself. I can't rule myself
at all. It needs a strength I haven't got!"

"Ah!" said Celia, thoughtfully. The excited sentences
which Edith threw over her shoulder as she walked appeared,
upon examination, to contain a suggestion.

"My dear child, "she asked abruptly, after a moment's silence,
"do you want to marry?"

Lady Cressage paused at the mantel, and exchanged
a long steadfast glance with her friend. Then she
came slowly forward. "Ah, that is what I don't know,"
she answered. Apparently the reply was candid.

Miss Madden pursed her lips, and frowned a little
in thought. Then, at some passing reflection,
she smiled in a puzzled fashion. At last she also rose,
and went to the mantel for another cigarette. "Now I
am going to talk plainly," she said, with decision.
"Since the subject is mentioned, less harm will be done
by speaking out than by keeping still. There is a debate
in your mind on the matter, isn't there?"