Читать книгу The Essential Elinor Glyn Collection - Glyn Elinor - Страница 3

"Oh, good God!" he said, "I don't mean that."

The widow fell back into her pillows with a sigh of relief.

"I mean I have deliberately tried to make her unhappy, and I have succeeded--and myself, too."

"That is not so bad then," and she settled a cushion. "Because unhappiness is only a thing for a time. You are crazy for the moon, and you can't get it, and you grieve and curse for a little, and then a new moon arises. What else?"

"Well, I want you to sympathize with me, and tell me what I had better do. Shall I go back to England to-morrow morning, or stay for the dinner-party?"

"You got as far, then, as telling each other you loved each other madly--and are both suffering from broken hearts, after one week's acquaintance."

"Don't be so brutal!" pleaded Hector.

And she noticed that his face looked haggard and changed. So her shrewd, kind eyes beamed upon him.

"Yes, I dare say it hurts; but having broken up your cake, you can't go on eating it. Why, in Heaven's name, did you let affairs get to a climax?"

"Because I am mad," said Hector, and he stretched out his arms. "I cannot tell you how much I love her. Haven't you seen for yourself what a darling she is? Every dear word she speaks shows her beautiful soul, and it all creeps right into my heart. I worship her as I might an angel, but I want her in my arms."

Mrs. McBride knew the English. They were not emotional or _poseurs_ like some other nations, and Hector Bracondale was essentially a man of the world, and rather a whimsical cynic as well. So to see him thus moved must mean great things. She was guilty, too, for helping to create the situation. She must do what she could for him, she felt.

"You should pull yourself together, mon cher Bracondale," she said; "it is not like you to be limp and undecided. You had better stay for the party, and make yourself behave like a gentleman, and how you mean to continue. We have passed the days when 'Oh no, we never mention him' is the order, and 'never meeting,' and that sort of thing. You are bound to meet unless you go into the wilds. And you must face it and try to forget her."

"I can never forget her," he said, in a deep voice; "but, as you say, I must face it and do my best."

"You see," continued the widow, "the girl has only been married a year, and her husband is the most unattractive human being you could find along a sidewalk of miles; but he is her husband, anyway, and she may have children."

Hector clinched his hands in a convulsive movement of anguish and rage.

"And you must realize all these possibilities, and settle a path for yourself and stick to it."

"Oh, I couldn't bear that!" he said. "It would be better I should take her away myself now, to-day."

"You will do no such thing!" said the widow, sternly, and she sat up again. "You forget I am going to marry her father, and I shall look upon her as my daughter and protect her from wolves--do you hear? And what is more, she is too good and true to go with you. She has a backbone if you haven't; and she'll see it her duty to stick to that lump of middle-class meat she is bound to--and she'll do her best, if she suffers to heart-break. It is she, the poor, little white dove, that you and I have wounded between us, that I pity, not you--great, strong man!"

Mrs. McBride's eyes flashed.

"Oh, you are all the same, you Englishmen. Beasts to kill and women to subjugate--the only aims in life!"

"Don't!" said Hector. "I am not the animal you think me. I worship Theodora, and I would devote my life and its best aims to secure her happiness and do her honor; but don't you see you have drawn a picture that would drive any man mad--"

"I said you had to face the worst, and I calculate the worst for you would be to see her with some little Browns along. My! How it makes you wince! Well, face it then and be a man."

He sat for a moment, his head buried in his hands--then--

"I will," he said, "I will do what I can; but oh, when you have the chance you will be good to her, won't you, dear friend?"

"There, there!" said the widow, and she patted his hand. "I had to scold you, because I see you have got the attack very badly and only strong measures are any good; but you know I am sorry for you both, and feel dreadfully, because I helped you to it without enough thought as to consequences."

There was silence for a few minutes, and she continued to stroke his hand.

"Dominic has run down to Dieppe to see those daughters of his," she said, presently, "and won't be back to-night. I meant to be all alone and meditate and go to bed early; but you can dine with me, if you wish, up here, and we will talk everything over. Our plans for the future, I mean, and what will be best to do; I kind of feel like your mother-in-law, you know." Which sentence comforted him.

This woman was his friend, and so kind of heart, if sometimes a little plain-spoken.

* * * * *

And late that night he wrote to Theodora.

"My darling," he began. "I must call you that even though I have no right to. _My_ darling--I want to tell you these my thoughts to-night, before I see you to-morrow as an ordinary guest at your dinner-party. I want you to know how utterly I love you, and how I am going to do my best with the rest of my life to show you how I honor you and revered you as an angel, and something to live for and shape my aims to be worthy of the recollection of that hour of bliss you granted me. Dearest love, does it not give you joy--just a little--to remember those moments of heaven? I do not regret anything, though I am all to blame, for I knew from the beginning I loved you, and just where love would lead us. But it was not until I saw the peep into your soul, when you never reproached me, that I began to understand what a brute I had been--how unworthy of you or your love. Darling, I don't ask you to try and forget me--indeed, I implore you not to do so. I think and believe you are of the nature which only loves once in a lifetime, and I am world-worn and experienced enough to know I have never really loved before. How passionately I do now I cannot put into words. So let us keep our love sacred in our hearts, my darling, and the knowledge of it will comfort and soothe the anguish of separation. Beloved one, I am always thinking of you, and I want to tell you my vision of heaven would be to possess you for my wife. My happiest dream will always be that you are there--at Bracondale--queen of my home and my heart, darling. _My_ darling! But however it may be, whether you decide to chase away every thought of me or not, I want you to know I will go on worshipping you, and doing my utmost to serve you with my life.--For ever and ever your devoted lover."

And then he signed it "Hector," and not "Bracondale."

The widow had promised to give it into Theodora's own hand on the morrow.

He added a postscript:

"I want you to meet my mother and my sister in London. Will you let me arrange it? I think you will like Anne. And oh, more than all I want you to come to Bracondale. Write me your answer that I may have your words to keep always."

* * * * *

Mrs. McBride came round in the morning to the private hotel in the Avenue du Bois, to ask the exact time of the dinner-party, she said. She wanted to see for herself how things were going. And the look in Theodora's eyes grieved her.

"I am afraid it has gone rather deeply with her," she mused. "Now what can I do?"

Theodora was unusually sweet and gentle, and talked brightly of how glad she was for her father's happiness, and of their plans about England; but all the time Jane McBride was conscious that the something which had made her eyes those stars of gracious happiness was changed--instead there was a deep pathos in them, and it made her uncomfortable.

"I wish to goodness I had let well alone, and not tried to give her a happy day," she said to herself.

Just before leaving, she slipped Hector's letter into Theodora's hand. "Lord Bracondale asked me to give you this, my child," she said, and she kissed her. "And if you will write the answer, will you post it to him to the Ritz."

All over Theodora there rushed an emotion when she took the letter. Her hands trembled, and she slipped it into the bodice of her dress. She would not be able to read it yet. She was waiting, all ready dressed, for Josiah to enter any moment, to take their usual walk in the Bois.

Then she wondered what would the widow think of her action, slipping it into her dress--but it was done now, and too late to alter. And their eyes met, and she understood that her future step-mother was wide awake and knew a good many things. But the kind woman put her arm round her and kissed her soft cheek.

"I want you to be my little daughter, Theodora," she said. "And if you have a heartache, dear, why I have had them, too--and I'd like to comfort you. There!"

XV

The dinner-party went off with great clat. Had not all the guests read in the New York _Herald_ that morning of Captain Fitzgerald's good-fortune? He with his usual _savoir-vivre_ had arranged matters to perfection. The company was chosen from among the nicest of his and Mrs. McBride's friends.

The invitations had been couched in this form: "I want you to meet my daughter, Mrs. Josiah Brown, my dear lady," or "dear fellow," as the case might be. "She is having a little dinner at Madrid on Monday night, and so hopes you will let me persuade you to come."

And the French Count, and Mr. Clutterbuck R. Tubbs and his daughter, Theodora had asked herself. Also the Austrian Prince. The party consisted of about twenty people--and the menu and the Tziganes were as perfect as they could be, while the night might have been a night of July--it happened to be that year when Paris was blessed with a gloriously warm May.

Lord Bracondale was late: had not the post come in just as he was starting, and brought him a letter, whose writing, although he had never seen it before, filled him with thrills of joy.

Theodora had found time during the day to read and reread his epistle, and to kiss it more than once with a guilty blush.

And she had written this answer:

"I have received your letter, and it says many things to me--and, Hector, it will comfort me always, this dear letter, and to know you love me.

"I have led a very ordinary life, you see, and the great blast of love has never come my way, or to any one whom I knew. I did not realize, quite, it was a real thing out of books--but now I know it is; and oh, I can believe, if circumstances were different, it could be heaven. But this cannot alter the fact that for me to think of you much would be very wrong now. I do love you--I do not deny it--though I am going to try my utmost to put the thought away from me and to live my life as best I can. I do not regret anything either, dear, because, but for you, I would never have known what life's meaning is at all--I should have stayed asleep always; and you have opened my eyes and taught me to see new beauties in all nature. And oh, we must not grieve, we must thank fate for giving us this one peep into paradise--and we must try and find the angel to steer our barks for us beyond the rocks. Listen--I want you to do something for me to-night. I want you not to look at me much, or tempt me with your dear voice. It will be terribly hard in any case, but if you will be kind you will help me to get through with it, and then, and then--I hardly dare to look ahead--but I leave it all in your hands. I would like to meet your mother and sister--but when, and where? I feel inclined to say, not yet, only I know that is just cowardice, and a shrinking from possible pain in seeing you. So I leave it to you to do what is best, and I trust to your honor and your love not to tempt me beyond bearing-point--and remember, I am trying, trying hard, to do what is right--and trying not to love you.

"And so, good-bye. I must never say this again--or even think it unsaid; but to-night, oh! Yes, Hector, know that I love you! THEODORA."

And all the way to Madrid, as he flew along in his automobile, his heart rejoiced at this one sentence--"Yes, Hector, know that I love you!"

The rest of the world did not seem to matter very much. How fortunate it is that so often Providence lets us live on the pleasure of the moment!

He sat on her left hand--the Austrian Prince was on her right--and studiously all through the repast he tried to follow her wishes and the law he had laid down for himself as the pattern of his future conduct.

He was gravely polite, he never turned the conversation away from the general company, including her neighbors in it all the time, and only when he was certain she was not noticing did he feast his eyes upon her face.

She was looking supremely beautiful. If possible, whiter than usual, and there was a shadow in her eyes as of mystery, which had not been there before--and while their pathos wrung his heart, he could not help perceiving their added beauty. And he had planted this change there--he, and he alone. He admired her perfect taste in dress--she was all in pure white, muslin and laces, and he knew it was of the best, and the creation of the greatest artist.

She looked just what _his_ wife ought to look, infinitely refined and slender and stately and fair.

Morella Winmarleigh would seem as a large dun cow beside her.

Then suddenly they both remembered it was only a week this night since they had met. Only seven days in which fate had altered all their lives.

The Austrian Prince wondered to himself what had happened. He had not been blind to the situation at Armenonville, and here they seemed like polite hostess and guest, nothing more.

"They are English, and they are very well bred, and they are very good actors," he thought. "But, mon Dieu! were I ce beau jeune homme!"

And so it had come to an end--the feast and the Tziganes playing, and Theodora will always be haunted by that last wild Hungarian tune. Music, which moved every fibre of her being at all times, to-night was a torture of pain and longing. And he was so near, so near and yet so far, and it seemed as if the music meant love and separation and passionate regret, and the last air most passionate of all, and before the final notes died away Hector bent over to her, and he whispered:

"I have got your letter, and I love you, and I will obey its every wish. You must trust me unto death. Darling, good-night, but never good-bye!"

And she had not answered, but her breath had come quickly, and she had looked once in his eyes and then away into the night.

And so they shook hands politely and parted. And next day Mr. and Mrs. Josiah Brown crossed over to England.

XVI

It was pouring with rain the evening Lord Bracondale arrived from Paris at the family mansion in St. James's Square. He had only wired at the last moment to his mother, too late to change her plans; she was unfortunately engaged to take Morella Winmarleigh to the opera, and was dining early at that lady's house, so she could only see him for a few moments in her dressing-room before she started.

"My darling, darling boy!" she exclaimed, as he opened the door and peeped in. "Streatfield, bring that chair for his lordship, and--oh, you can go for a few minutes."

Then she folded him in her arms, and almost sobbed with joy to see him again.

"Well, mother," he said, when she had kissed him and murmured over him as much as she wished. "Here I am, and what a sickening climate! And where are you off to?"

"I am going to dine with Morella Winmarleigh," said Lady Bracondale, "early, to go to the opera, and then I shall take her on to the Brantingham's ball. Won't you join us at either place, Hector? I feel it so dreadfully, having to rush off like this, your first evening, darling."

She stood back and looked at him. She must see for herself whether he was well, and if this riotous life she feared he had been leading lately had not too greatly told upon him. Her fond eyes detected an air of weariness: he looked haggard, and not so full of spirits as he usually was. Alas! if he would only stay in England!

"I am rather tired, mother; I may look in at the opera, but I can't face a ball. How is Anne, and what is she doing to-night?" he said.

"Anne has a bad cold. We have had such weather--nothing but rain since Sunday night! She is dining at home and going to bed early. I have just had a telephone message from her; she is longing to see you, too."

"I think I shall go round and dine with her then," said Hector, "and join you later."

They talked on for about ten minutes before he left her to dress, running against Streatfield in the passage. She had known him since his birth, and beamed with joy at his return.

He chaffed her about growing fat, and went on his way to telephone to his sister.

"His lordship looks pale, my lady," said the demure woman, as she fastened Lady Bracondale's bracelet. She, too, disapproved of Paris and bachelorhood, but she did not love Morella Winmarleigh.

"Oh, you think so, Streatfield?" Lady Bracondale exclaimed, in a worried voice. "Now that we have got him back we must take great care of him. His lordship will join me at the opera. Are you sure he likes those aigrettes in my hair?"

"Why, it's one of his lordship's favorite styles, my lady. You need have no fears," said the maid.

And thus comforted, Lady Bracondale descended the great staircase to her carriage.

She was still a beautiful woman, though well past fifty. Her splendid, dark hair had hardly a thread of gray in it, and grew luxuriantly, but she insisted upon wearing it simply parted in the middle and coiled in a mass of plaits behind, while one braid stood up coronet fashion well at the back of her head. She was addicted to rich satins and velvets, and had a general air of Victorian repose and decorum. There was no attempt to retain departed youth; no golden wigs or red and white paint disfigured her person, which had an immense natural dignity and stateliness. It made her shiver to see some of her contemporaries dressed and arranged to represent not more than twenty years of age. But so many modern ways of thought and life jarred upon her!

"Mother is still in the early seventies; she has never advanced a step since she came out," Anne always said, "and I dare say she was behind the times even then."

Meanwhile, Hector was dressing in his luxurious mahogany-panelled room. Everything in the house was solid and prosperous, as befitted a family who had had few reverses and sufficient perspicacity to marry a rich heiress now and then at right moments in their history.

This early Georgian house had been in the then Lady Bracondale's dower, and still retained its fine carvings and Old-World state.

"How shall I see her again?" was all the thought which ran in Lord Bracondale's head.

"She won't be at a ball, but she might chance to have thought of the opera. It would be a place Mr. Brown would like to exhibit her at. I shall certainly go."

Lady Anningford was tucked up on a sofa in her little sitting-room when her brother arrived at her charming house in Charles Street. Her husband had been sent off to a dinner without her, and she was expecting her brother with impatience. She loved Hector as many sisters do a handsome, popular brother, but rather more than that, and she had fine senses and understood him.

She did not cover him with caresses and endearments when she saw him; she never did.

"Poor Hector has enough of them from mother," she explained, when Monica Ellerwood asked her once why she was so cold. "And men don't care for those sort of things, except from some one else's sister or wife."

"Dear old boy!" was all she said as he came in. "I am glad to see you back."

Then in a moment or two they went down to dinner, talking of various things. And all through it, while the servants were in the room, she prattled about Paris and their friends and the gossip of the day; and she had a shocking cold in her head, too, and might well have been forgiven for being dull.

But when they were at last alone, back in the little sitting-room, she looked at him hard, and her voice, which was rather deep like his, grew full of tenderness as she asked: "What is it, Hector? Tell me about it if I can help you."

He got up and stood with his back to the wood fire, which sparkled in the grate, comforting the eye with its brightness, while the wind and rain moaned outside.

"You can't help me, Anne; no one can," he said. "I have been rather badly burned, but there is nothing to be done. It is my own fault--so one must just bear it."

"Is it the--eh--the Frenchwoman?" his sister asked, gently.

"Good Lord, no!"

"Or the American Monica came back so full of?"

"The American? What American? Surely she did not mean my dear Mrs. McBride?"

"I don't know her name," Anne said, "and I don't want you to say a thing about it, dear, if I can't help you; only it just grieves me to see you looking so sad and distrait, so I felt I must try if there is anything I can do for you. Mother has been on thorns and dying of fuss over this Frenchwoman and the diamond chain--("How the devil did she hear about that?" thought Hector)--until Monica came back with a tale of your devotion to an American."

"One would think I was eighteen years old and in leading-strings still, upon my word," he interrupted, with an irritated laugh. "When will she realize I can take care of myself?"

"Never," said Lady Anningford, "until you have married Morella Winmarleigh; then she would feel you were in good hands."

He laughed again--bitterly this time.

"Morella Winmarleigh! I would not be faithful to her for a week!"

"I wonder if you would be faithful to any woman, Hector? I have often thought you do not know what it means to love--really to love."

"You were perfectly right once. I did not know," he said; "and perhaps I don't now, unless to feel the whole world is a sickening blank without one woman is to love--really to love."

Anne noticed the weariness of his pose and the vibration in his deep voice. She was stirred and interested as she had never been. This dear brother of hers was not wont to care very much. In the past it had always been the women who had sighed and longed and he who had been amused and pleased. She could not remember a single occasion in the last ten years when he had seemed to suffer, although she had seen him apparently devoted to numbers of women.

"And what are you going to do?" she asked, with sympathy, "She is married, of course?"

"Yes."

"Hector, don't you want me to speak about it?"

He took a chair now by his sister's sofa, and he began to turn over the papers rather fast which lay on a table near by.

"Yes, I do," he said, "because, after all, you can do something for me. I want you to be particularly kind to her, will you, Anne, dear?"

"But, of course; only you must tell me who she is and where I shall find her."

"You will find her at Claridge's, and she is only the wife of an impossible Australian millionaire called Brown--Josiah Brown."

"Poor dear Hector, how terrible!" thought Anne. "It is not the American, then?" she said, aloud.

"There never was any American," he exclaimed. "Monica is the most ridiculous gossip, and always sees wrong. If she had not Jack to keep her from talking so much she would not leave one of us with a rag of character."

"I will go to-morrow and call there, Hector," Lady Anningford said. "My cold is sure to be better; and if she is not in, shall I write a note and ask her to lunch? The husband, too, I suppose?"

"I fear so. Anne, you are a brick."

Then he said good-night, and went to the opera.

Left to herself, Lady Anningford thought: "I suppose she is some flashy, pretty creature who has caught Hector's fancy, the poor darling. One never has chanced to find an Australian quite, quite a lady. I almost wish he would marry Morella and have done with it."

Then she lay on her sofa and pondered many things.

She was a year older than her brother, and they had always been the closest friends and comrades.

Lady Anningford was more or less a happy and contented woman now, but there had been moments in her life scorched by passion and infinite pain. Long ago in the beginning when she first came out she had had the misfortune to fall in love with Cyril Lamont, married and bad and attractive. It had given him great pleasure to evade the eye of Lady Bracondale, pure dragon and strict disciplinarian. Anne was a good girl, but she was eighteen years old and had tasted no joy. She was not an easy prey, and her first year had passed in storms of emotion suppressed to the best of her powers.

The situation had been full of shades and contrasts. The outward, a strictly guarded lamb, the life of the world and aristocratic propriety; and the inward, a daily growing mad love for an impossible person, snatched and secret meetings after tea in country-houses, walks in Kensington Gardens, rides along lonely lanes out hunting, and, finally, the brink of complete ruin and catastrophe--but for Hector.

"Where should I be now but for Hector?" her thoughts ran.

Hector was just leaving Eton in those days, and had come up and discovered matters, while she sobbed in his arms, at the beginning of her second season. He had comforted her and never scolded a word, and then he had gone out armed with a heavy hunting-crop, found Cyril Lamont, and had thrashed the man within an inch of his life. It was one of Hector's pleasantest recollections, the thought of his cowering form, his green silk smoking-jacket all torn, and his eyes sightless. Cyril Lamont's talents had not run in the art of self-defence, and he had been very soon powerless in the hands of this young athlete.

The Lamonts went abroad that night, and stayed there for quite six months, during which time Anne mended her broken heart and saw the folly of her ways.

Hector and she had never alluded to the matter all these years, only they were intimate friends and understood each other.

Lady Bracondale adored Hector and was fond of Anne, but had no comprehension of either. Anne was a _frondeuse_, while her mother's mind was fashioned in carved lines and strict boundaries of thought and action.

XVII

Meanwhile, Hector reached the opera, and made his way to the omnibus box where he had his seat.

He felt he could not stand Morella Winmarleigh just yet. The second act of "Faust" was almost over, and with his glass he swept the rows of boxes in vain to find Theodora. He sat a few minutes, but restlessness seized him. He must go to the other side and ascertain if she could be discovered from there. Morella Winmarleigh's box commanded a good view for this purpose, so after all he would face her.

He looked up at her opposite. She sat there with his mother, and she seemed more thoroughly wholesomely unattractive than ever to him.

He hated that shade of turquoise blue she was so fond of, and those unmeaning bits and bows she had stuck about. She was a large young woman with a stolid English fairness.

Her hair had the flaxen ends and sandy roots one so often sees in those women whose locks have been golden as children. It was a thin, dank kind of hair, too, with no glints anywhere. Her eyes were blue and large and meaningless and rather prominent, and her lightish eyelashes seemed to give no shade to them.

Morella's orbs just looked out at you like the bow-windows of a sea-side villa--staring and commonplace. Her features were regular, and her complexion, if somewhat all too red, was fresh withal; so that, possessing an income of many thousands, she passed for a beauty of exceptional merit.

She had a good maid who used her fingers dexterously, and did what she could with a mistress devoid of all sense of form or color.

Miss Winmarleigh went to the opera regularly and sat solidly through it. The music said nothing to her, but it was the right place for her to be, and she could talk to her friends before going on to the numerous balls she attended.

If she loved anything in the world she loved Hector Bracondale, but her feelings gave her no anxieties. He would certainly marry her presently, the affair would be so suitable to all parties; meanwhile, there was plenty of time, and all was in order. The perfect method of her account-books, in which the last sixpence she spent in the day was duly entered, translated itself to her life. Method and order were its watchwords; and if the people who knew her intimately--such as her chaperon, Mrs. Herrick, and her maid, Gibson--thought her mean, she was not aware of their opinion, and went her way in solid rejoicing.

Lady Bracondale was really attached to her. Morella's decorum, her absence of all daring thought in conversation, pleased her so. She had none of that feeling when with Miss Winmarleigh she suffered in the company of her daughter Anne, who said things so often she did not quite understand, yet which she dimly felt might have two meanings, and one of them a meaning she most probably would disapprove of.

She loved Anne, of course, but oh, that she could have been more like herself or Morella Winmarleigh!

Both women saw Hector in the omnibus box, and saw him leave it, and were quite ready with their greetings when he joined them.

Miss Winmarleigh had a slight air of proprietorship about her, which every one knew when Hector was there. And most people thought as she did, that he would certainly marry her in the near future.

He was glad it was not between the acts--there was no excuse for conversation after their greeting, so he searched the house in peace with his glasses.

And although he was hoping to see Theodora, his heart gave a great bound of surprised joy when, on the pit tier, almost next the box he had just left, he discovered her. He supposed it was a box often let to strangers that season, as he could not remember whose the name was as he had passed. He got back into the shadow, that his gaze should not be too remarkable. She had not caught sight of him yet, or so it seemed.

There she sat with her husband and another woman, whom he recognized as one of those kind creatures who go everywhere in society and help strangers when suitably compensated for their trouble.

Where on earth could she have come across Mrs. Devlyn? he wondered. A poisonous woman, who would fill her ears with tales of all the world. Then he guessed, and rightly, the introduction had been effected by Captain Fitzgerald, who would probably have known her in his own day.

Theodora appeared wrapped in the music, and was an enthralling picture of loveliness; her fineness seemed to make all the women's faces who were near look coarse, and her whiteness turned them into gypsies. She wore a gown of black velvet with no relief whatever, only her dazzling skin and her great pearls. He feasted his eyes upon her--eyes hungry with a week's abstinence; for he had felt it more prudent to remain in Paris for some days after she had left.

He looked round the rest of the house, and understood all the other men could, and probably would, gaze too. And then he began to feel hot and jealous! This was different from Paris, where she was more or less a tourist; but here, how long would she be left in peace without siege being laid to her? He knew his world and the men it contained. Yes, at that moment the door at the back of the box opened and Delaval Stirling came in, Josiah Brown making way for him to sit in front. Delaval Stirling--this was too much!

And Theodora turned with her adorable smile and greeted him, so it showed they had met before--greeted him with pleasure. Good God! How much could happen in a week! Why had he stayed in Paris?

If Morella Winmarleigh had glanced round at his face, even her thick perceptions must have grasped the disturbance which was marked there, as he stood back in the shadow and gazed with angry eyes.

The moment she had seen him come into the box Mrs. Devlyn had said, "I want you to notice a man over there, Mrs. Brown, in the box exactly opposite; on the grand tier--do you see?"

"Yes," said Theodora, and she perceived him shaking hands with Miss Winmarleigh before he caught sight of her, so she was forearmed and turned to the stage.

"He is nice-looking, don't you think so?" continued Mrs. Devlyn, without a pause. "He is going to marry that girl in the box; she is one of the richest heiresses of the day--Miss Winmarleigh. I always point out Hector Bracondale to strangers or foreigners; he is quite a show Englishman."

"Bracondale? Lord Bracondale?" interrupted Josiah Brown. "We met him in Paris, did we not, my love?" turning to Theodora. "He dined with us our last evening. Where is he?"

"Oh, you know him, then!" said Mrs. Devlyn, disappointed. "I wanted to be the first to point him out to you. They will make a handsome pair, won't they--he and Miss Winmarleigh?"

"Very," said Theodora, listlessly, with an air of dragging her thoughts from the music with difficulty, while she suddenly felt sick and cold.

"And are they to be married soon?"

"I don't know exactly; but it has been going on for years, and we all look upon it as a settled thing. She is always about with his mother."

"Is that Lord Bracondale's mother--the lady with the coronet of plaits and the huge white aigrette with the diamond drops in it?" Theodora asked. Her voice was schooled, and had no special tones in it. But oh, how she was thrilling with interest and excitement underneath!

"Yes, that is Lady Bracondale. She is quite a type; always dresses in that old-fashioned way, and won't know a soul who is not of her own set. She is a cousin of one of my husband's aunts. I must introduce you to her."

"She looks pretty haughty," announced Josiah Brown. "I should not care to tread on her toes much." And then he remembered he had seen her years ago driving through the little town of Bracondale.

Theodora asked no more questions. She kept her eyes fixed on the stage, but she knew Hector had raised his glasses now and was scanning the box, and had probably seen her.

What ought it to matter to her that he should be going to marry Miss Winmarleigh? He could be nothing to her--only--only--but perhaps it was not true. This woman, Mrs. Devlyn, whom she began to feel she should dislike very much, had said it was looked upon as settled, not that it was a fact. How could a man be going to marry one woman and make desperate love to another at the same time? It was impossible--and yet--she would _not_ look in any case. She would not once raise her eyes that way.

And so in these two boxes green jealousy held sway, and while Hector glared across at Theodora she smiled at Delaval Stirling, and spoke softly of the music and the voices, though her heart was torn with pain.

"Do you see Hector Bracondale is back again, Delaval?" Mrs. Devlyn said. "Do you know why he stayed in Paris so long? I heard--" And she whispered low, so that Theodora only caught the name "Esclarmonde de Chartres" and their modulated mocking laughter.

How they jarred upon her! How she felt she should hate London among all these people whose ways she did not know! She turned a little, and Josiah's vulgar familiar face seemed a relief to her, and her tender eyes melted in kindliness as she looked at him.

"You are very pale to-night, my love," he said. "Would you like to go home?"

But this she would not agree to, and pulled herself together and tried to talk gayly when the curtain went down.

And Hector blamed his own folly for having come up to this box at all. Here he must be glued certainly for a few moments; now that they could talk, politeness could not permit him to fly off at once.

"The house is very full," Miss Winmarleigh said--it was a remark she always made on big nights--"and yet hardly any new faces about."

"Yes," said Hector.

"Does it compare with the Opera-House in Paris, Hector?" Miss Winmarleigh hardly ever went abroad.

"No," said Hector.--Not only had Delaval Stirling retained his seat, but Chris Harford, Mrs. Devlyn's brother, had entered the box now and was assiduously paying his court. "Damned impertinence of the woman, forcing her relations upon them like that," he thought.--"Oh--er--no--that is, I think the Paris Opera-House is a beastly place," he said, absently, "a dull, heavy drab brown and dirty gilding, and all the women look hideous in it."

"Really," said Morella. "I thought everything in Paris was lovely."

"You should go over and see for yourself," he said, "then you could judge. I think most things there are lovely, though."

Miss Winmarleigh raised her glasses now and examined the house. Her eyes lighted at last on Theodora.

"Dear Lady Bracondale," she said, "do look at that woman in black velvet. What splendid pearls! Do you think they are real? Who is it, I wonder, with Florence Devlyn?"

But Hector felt he could not stay and hear their remarks about his darling, so he got up, and, murmuring he must have a talk to his friends in the house, left the box.

He was thankful at least Theodora was sitting on the pit tier--he could walk along the gangway and talk to her from the front.

She saw him coming and was prepared, so no wild roses tinged her cheeks, and her greeting was gravely courteous, that was all.

An icy feeling crept over him. What was the change, this subtle change in voice and eyes? He suddenly had the agonizing sensation of being a great way off from her, shut out of paradise--a stranger. What had happened? What had he done?

Every one knows the Opera-House, and where he would be standing, and the impossibility of saying anything but the most banal commonplaces, looking up like that.

Then Josiah leaned forward, proud of his acquaintanceship with a peer, and said in a distinct voice:

"Won't you come into the box, Lord Bracondale? There is plenty of room." He had not taken to either Delaval Stirling or Chris Harford, and thought a change of company would not come amiss. They had ignored him, and should pay for it.

Hector made his way joyfully to the back, and, entering, was greeted affably by his host, so the other two men got up to leave to make room for him.

He sat down behind Theodora, and Mrs. Devlyn saw it would be wiser to conciliate Josiah by her interested conversation.

She hoped to make a good thing out of this millionaire and his unknown wife, and it would not do to ruffle him at this stage of the affair.

Theodora hardly turned, thus Hector was obliged to lean quite forward to speak to her.

"I have seen my sister to-night," he said, "and she wants so much to meet you. I said perhaps she would find you to-morrow. Will you be at home in the afternoon any time?"

"I expect so," replied Theodora. She was longing to face him, to ask him if it was true he was going to marry that large, pink-faced young woman opposite, who was now staring down upon them with fixed opera-glasses; but she felt frozen, and her voice was a frozen voice.

Hector became more and more unhappy. He tried several subjects. He told her the last news of her father and Mrs. McBride. She answered them all with the same politeness, until, maddened beyond bearing, he leaned still farther forward and whispered in her ear:

"For God's sake, what is it? What have I done?"

"Nothing," said Theodora. What right had she to ask him any question, when for these seven nights and days since they had parted she had been disciplining herself not to think of him in any way? She must never let him know it could matter to her now.

"Nothing? Then why are you so changed? Ah, how it hurts!" he whispered, passionately. And she turned and looked at him, and he saw that her beautiful eyes were no longer those pure depths of blue sky in which he could read love and faith, but were full of mist, as of a curtain between them.

He put his hand up to touch the little gold case he carried always now in his waistcoat-pocket, which contained her letter. He wanted to assure himself it was there, and she had written it--and it was not all a dream.

Theodora's tender heart was wrung by the passionate distress in his eyes.

"Is that your mother over there you were with?" she asked, more gently. "How beautiful she is!"

"Yes," he said, "my mother and Morella Winmarleigh, whom the world in general and my mother in particular have decided I am going to marry."

She did not speak. She felt suddenly ashamed she could ever have doubted him; it must be the warping atmosphere of Mrs. Devlyn's society for these last days which had planted thoughts, so foreign to her nature, in her. She did not yet know it was jealousy pure and simple, which attacks the sweetest, as well, as the bitterest, soul among us all. But a thrill of gladness ran through her as well as shame.

"And aren't you going to marry her, then?" she said, at last. "She is very handsome."

Hector looked at her, and a wave of joy chased out the pain he had suffered. That was it, then! They had told her this already, and she hated it--she cared for him still.

"Surely you need not ask me," he said, deep reproach in his eyes. "You must be very changed in seven days to even have thought it possible."

The shame deepened in Theodora. She was, indeed, unlike herself to have been moved at all by Mrs. Devlyn's words, but she would never doubt again, and she must tell him that.

"Forgive me," she said, quite low, while she looked away. "I--of course I ought to be pleased at anything which made you happy, but--oh, I hated it!"

"Theodora," he said, "I ask you--do not act with me ever--to what end? We know each other's hearts, and I hope it would pain you were I to marry any other woman, as much as in like circumstances it would pain me."

"Yes, it would pain me," she said, simply. "But, oh, we must not speak thus! Please, please talk of the music, or the--the--oh, anything but ourselves."

And he tried hard for the few moments which remained before the curtain rose again. Tried hard, but it was all dust and ashes; and as he left the box and returned to his own seat next door his heart felt like lead. How would he be able to follow the rules he had laid down for himself during his week of meditations in Paris alone?

"You see, dear Lady Bracondale," Morella Winmarleigh had been saying, "Hector knows that woman with the pearls. He is sitting talking to her now."

"Hector knows every one, Morella. Lend me your glasses, mine do not seem to work to-night. Yes, I suppose by some she would be considered pretty," Lady Bracondale continued, when the lorgnette was fixed to her focus. "What do you think, dear?"

"Pretty!" exclaimed Miss Winmarleigh. "Oh no! Much too white, and, oh--er--foreign-looking. We must find out who she is."

The matter was not difficult. Half the house had been interested in the new-comer, the beautiful new-comer with the wonderful pearls, who must be worth while in some way, or she would not be under the wing of Florence Devlyn.

By the time Hector again entered their box in the last act, Miss Winmarleigh had obtained all the information she wanted from one of the many visitors who came to pay their court to the heiress. And the information reassured her. Only the wife of a colonial millionaire; no one of her world or who could trouble her.

Early next morning, while she sat in her white flannel dressing-gown, her hair screwed in curling-pins, after the Brantinghams' ball, she wrote in her journal the customary summary of her day, and ended with: "H.B. returned--same as usual, running after a new woman, nobody of importance; but I had better watch it, and clinch matters between him and me before Goodwood. Ordered the pink silk after all, from the new little dressmaker, and beat her down three pounds as to price. Begun Marvaloso hair tonic."

Then, as it was broad daylight, after carefully replacing in its drawer this locked chronicle of her maiden thoughts, she retired to bed, to sleep the sleep of those just persons whose digestions are as strong as their absence of imagination.

XVIII

Next day Lady Anningford called, as she had promised, at Claridge's, and found Mrs. Brown at home, although it was only three o'clock in the afternoon.

She had not two minutes to wait in the well-furnished first-floor sitting-room, but during that time she noticed there were one or two things about which showed the present occupant was a woman of taste, and there were such quantities of flowers. Flowers, flowers, everywhere.

Theodora entered already dressed for her afternoon drive. She came forward with that perfect grace which characterized her every movement.

If she felt very timid and nervous it did not show in her sweet face, and Lady Anningford perceived Hector had every excuse for his infatuation.

"I am so fortunate to find you at home, Mrs. Brown," she said. "My brother has told me so much about you, and I was longing to meet you. May we sit down on this sofa and talk a little, or were you just starting for your drive?"

"Of course we may sit down," said Theodora. "My drive does not matter in the least. It was so good of you to come."

And her inward thought was that she would like Hector's sister. Anne's frankness and _sans gne_ were so pleasing.

They exchanged a few agreeable sentences while each measured the other, and then Lady Anningford said:

"You come from Australia, don't you?"

"Australia!" smiled Theodora, while her eyes opened wide. "Oh no! I have never been out of France and Belgium and places like that. My husband lived in Melbourne for some years, though."

"I thought it could not be possible," quoth Anne to herself.

"Then you don't know much of England yet?" she said, aloud.

"It is my first visit; and it seems very dull and rainy. This is the only really fine day we have had since we arrived."

Anne soon dexterously elicited an outline of Theodora's plans and what she was doing. They would only remain in town until Whitsuntide, perhaps returning later for a week or two; and Mrs. Devlyn, to whom her father had sent her an introduction, had been kind enough to tell them what to do and how to see a little of London. She was going to a ball to-night. The first real ball she had ever been to in her life, she said, ingenuously.

And Lady Anningford looked at her and each moment fell more under her charm.

"The ball at Harrowfield House, I expect, to meet the King of Guatemala," she said, knowing Lady Harrowfield was Florence Devlyn's cousin.

"That is it," said Theodora.

"Then you must dance with Hector--my brother," she said.

She launched his name suddenly; she wanted to see what effect it would have on Theodora. "He is sure to be there, and he dances divinely."

She was rewarded for her thrust: just the faintest pink came into the white velvet cheeks, and the blue eyes melted softly. To dance with Hector! Ah! Then the radiance was replaced by a look of sadness, and she said, quietly:

"Oh, I do not think I shall dance at all. My husband is rather an invalid, and we shall only go in for a little while."

No, she must not dance with Hector. Those joys were not for her--she must not even think of it.

"How extraordinarily beautiful she is!" Anne thought, when presently, the visit ended, she found herself rolling along in her electric brougham towards the park. "And I feel I shall love her. I wonder what her Christian name is?"

Theodora had promised they would lunch in Charles Street with her the next day if her husband should be well enough after the ball. And Anne decided to collect as many nice people to meet them as she could in the time.

At the corner of Grosvenor Square she met an old friend, one Colonel Lowerby, commonly called the Crow, and stopped to pick him up and take him on with her.

He was the one person she wanted to talk to at this juncture. She had known him all her life, and was accustomed to prattle to him on all subjects. He was always safe, and gruff, and honest.

"I have just done something so interesting, Crow," she told him, as they went along towards Regent's Park, to which sylvan spot she had directed her chauffeur, to be more free to talk in peace to her companion. Some of her friends were capable of making scandals, even about the dear old Crow, she knew.

"And what have you done?" he asked.

"Of course you have heard the tale from Uncle Evermond, of Hector and the lady at Monte Carlo?"

He nodded.

"Well, there is not a word of truth in it; he is in love, though, with the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life--and I have just been to call upon her. And to-morrow you have got to come to lunch to meet her--and tell me what you think."

"Very well," said the Crow. "I was feeding elsewhere, but I always obey you. Continue your narrative."

"I want you to tell me what to do, and how I can help them."

"My dear child," said the Crow, sententiously, as was his habit, "help them to what? She is married, of course, or Hector would not be in love with her. Do you want to help them to part or to meet? or to go to heaven or to hell? or to spend what Monica Ellerwood calls 'a Saturday to Monday amid rural scenery,' which means both of those things one after the other!"

"Crow, dear, you are disagreeable," said Lady Anningford, "and I have a cold in my head and cannot compete with you in words to-day."

"Then say what you want, and I'll listen."

"Hector met them in Paris, it seems, and must have fallen wildly in love, because I have never seen him as he is now."

"How is he?--and who is 'them'?"

"Why, she and the husband, of course, and Hector is looking sad and distrait--and has really begun to feel at last."

"Serve him right!"

"Crow, you are insupportable! Can you not see I am serious and want your help?"

"Fire away, then, my good child, and explain matters. You are too vague!"

So she told him all she knew--which was little enough; but she was eloquent upon Theodora's beauty.

"She has the face of an angel," she ended her description with.

"Always mistrust 'em," interjected the Crow.

"Such a figure and the nicest manner, and she is in love with Hector, too, of course--because she could not possibly help herself--could she?--if he is being lovely to her."

"I have not your prejudiced eyes for him--though Hector certainly is a decent fellow enough to look at," allowed Colonel Lowerby. "But all this does not get to what you want to do for them."

"I want them to be happy."

"Permanently, or for the moment?"

"Both."

"An impossible combination, with these abominably inconsiderate marriage laws we suffer under in this country, my child."

"Then what ought I to do?"

"You can do nothing but accelerate or hinder matters for a little. If Hector is really in love, and the woman, too, they are bound to dree their weird, one way or the other, themselves. You will be doing the greatest kindness if you can keep them apart, and avoid a scandal if possible."

"My dear Crow, I have never heard of your being so thoroughly unsympathetic before."

"And I have never heard of Hector being really in love before, and with an angel, too--deuced dangerous folk at the best of times!"

"Then there are mother and Morella Winmarleigh to be counted with."

"Neither of them can see beyond their noses. Miss Winmarleigh is sure of him, she thinks--and your mother, too."

"No; mother has her doubts."

"They will both be anti?"

"Extremely anti."

"To get back to facts, then, your plan is to assist your brother to see this 'angel,' and smooth the path to the final catastrophe."

"You worry me, Crow. Why should there be a catastrophe?"

"Is she a young woman?"

"A mere baby. Certainly not more than twenty or so."

"Then it is inevitable, if the husband don't count. You have not described him yet."

"Because I have never seen him," said Lady Anningford. "Hector did say last night, though, that he was an impossible Australian millionaire."

"These people have a strong sense of personal rights--they are even blood-thirsty sometimes, and expect virtue in their women. If he had been just an English snob, the social bauble might have proved an immense eye-duster; but when you say Australian it gives me hope. He'll take her away, or break Hector's head, before things become too embarrassing."

"Crow, you are brutal."

"And a good thing, too. That is what we all want, a little more brutality. The whole of the blessed show here is being ruined with this sickly sentimentality. Flogging done away with; every silly nerve pandered to. By Jove! the next time we have to fight any country we shall have an ansthetic served round with the rations to keep Tommy Atkins's delicate nerves from suffering from the consciousness of the slaughter he inflicts upon the enemy."

"Crow, you are violent."

"Yes, I am. I am sick of the whole thing. I would reintroduce prize-fighting and bear-baiting and gladiatorial shows to brace the nation up a bit. We'll get jammed full of rotten vices like those beastly foreigners soon."

"I did not bring you into Regent's Park to hear a tirade upon the nation's needs, Crow," Anne reminded him, smiling, "but to get your sympathy and advice upon this affair of Hector. You know you are the only person in the world I ever talk to about intimate things."

"Dear Queen Anne," he said, "I will always do what I can for you. But I tell you seriously, when a man like Hector loves a woman really, you might as well try to direct Niagara Falls as to turn him any way but the one he means to go."

"He wants me to be kind to her. Do you advise me just to let the thing drop, then?"

"No; be as kind as you like--only don't assist them to destruction."

"She goes into the country on Saturday for Whitsuntide, as we all do. Hector is going down to Bracondale alone."

"That looks desperate. I shall see Hector, and judge for myself."

"You must be sure to go to the ball at Harrowfield House to-night, then," Anne said. "They are both going. I say both because I know she is, and so, of course, Hector will be there too. I shall go, naturally, and then we can decide what we can do about it after we have seen them together."

And all this time Theodora was thinking how charming Anne was, and how kind, and that she felt a little happier because of her kindness. And, hard as it would be, she would not leave Josiah's side that night or dance with Hector.

And Hector was thinking--

"What is the good of anything in this wide world without her? I _must_ see her. For good or ill, I cannot keep away."

He was deep in the toils of desire and passionate love for a woman belonging to someone else and out of his reach, and for whom he was hungry. Thus the primitive forces of nature were in violent activity, and his soul was having a hard fight.

It was the first time in his life that a woman had really mattered or had been impossible to obtain.

He had always looked upon them as delightful accessories: sport first, and woman, who was only another form of sport, second.

He had not neglected the obligations of his great position, but they came naturally to him as of the day's work. They were not real interests in his life. And when stripped of the veneer of civilization he was but a passionate, primitive creature, like numbers of others of his class and age.

While the elevation of Theodora's pure soul was an actual influence upon him, he had thought it would be possible--difficult, perhaps--but possible to obey her--to keep from troubling her--to regulate his passion into worship at a distance. But since then new influences had begun to work--prominent among them being jealousy.

To see her surrounded by others--who were men and would desire her, too--drove him mad.

Josiah was difficult enough to bear. The thought that he was her husband, and had the rights of this position, always turned him sick with raging disgust; but that was the law, and a law accepted since the beginning of time. These others were not of the law--they were the same as himself--and would all try to win her.

He had no fear of their succeeding, but, to watch them trying, and he himself unable to prevent them, was a thought he could not tolerate.

He had no settled plan. He did not deliberately say to himself: "I will possess her at all costs. I will be her lover, and take her by force from the bonds of this world." His whole mind was in a ferment and chaos. There was no time to think of the position in cold blood. His passion hurried him on from hour to hour.

This day after the opera, when the hideous impossibility of the situation had come upon him with full force, he felt as Lancelot--

"His mood was often like a fiend, and rose and drove him into wastes and solitudes for agony, Who was yet a living soul."

There are all sorts of loves in life, but when it is the real great passion, nor fear of hell nor hope of heaven can stem the tide--for long!

He had gone out in his automobile, and was racing ahead considerably above the speed limit. He felt he must do something. Had it been winter and hunting-time, he would have taken any fences--any risks. He returned and got to Ranelagh, and played a game of polo as hard as he could, and then he felt a little calmer. The idea came to him as it had done to Anne. Lady Harrowfield was Florence Devlyn's cousin; she would probably have squeezed an invitation for her protges for the royal ball to-night. He would go--he must see Theodora. He must hold her in his arms, if only in the mazes of the waltz.

And the thought of that sent the blood whirling madly once more in his veins.

Everything he had looked upon so lightly up to now had taken a new significance in reference to Theodora. Florence Devlyn, for instance, was no fit companion for her--Florence Devlyn, whom he met at every decent house and had never before disapproved of, except as a bore and a sycophant.

XIX

Harrowfield House, as every one knows, is one of the finest in London; and with the worst manners, and an inordinate insolence, Lady Harrowfield ruled her section of society with a rod of iron. Indeed, all sections coveted the invitations of this disagreeable lady.

Her path was strewn with lovers, and protected by a proud and complacent husband, who had realized early he never would be master of the situation, and had preferred peace to open scandal.

She was a woman of sixty now, and, report said, still had her lapses. But every incident was carried off with a high-handed, brazen daring, and an assumption of right and might and prerogative which paralyzed criticism.

So it was that with the record of a _demimondaine_--and not one kind action to her credit--Lady Harrowfield still held her place among the spotless, and ruled as a queen.

There was not above two years' difference between her age and Lady Bracondale's; indeed, the latter had been one of her bridesmaids; but no one to look at them at a distance could have credited it for a minute.

Lady Harrowfield had golden hair and pink cheeks, and her _embonpoint_ retained in the most fashionable outline. And if towards two in the morning, or when she lost at bridge, her face did remind on-lookers of a hideous colored mask of death and old age--one can't have everything in life; and Lady Harrowfield had already obtained more than the lion's share.

This night in June she stood at the top of her splendid staircase, blazing with jewels, receiving her guests, among whom more than one august personage, English and foreign, was expected to arrive; and an unusually sour frown disfigured the thick paint of her face.

It all seemed like fairy-land to Theodora as, accompanied by Josiah, and preceded by Mrs. Devlyn, she early mounted the marble steps with the rest of the throng.

She noticed the insolent stare of her hostess as she shook hands and then passed on in the crowd.

She felt a little shy and nervous and excited withal. Every one around seemed to have so many friends, and to be so gay and joyous, and only she and Josiah stood alone. For Mrs. Devlyn felt she had done enough for one night in bringing them there.

It was an immense crowd. At a smaller ball Theodora's exquisite beauty must have commanded instant attention, but this was a special occasion, and the world was too occupied with a desire to gape at the foreign king to trouble about any new-comers. Certainly for the first hour or so.

Josiah was feeling humiliated. Not a creature spoke to them, and they were hustled along like sheep into the ballroom.

A certain number of men stared--stared with deep interest, and made plans for introductions as soon as the crowd should subside a little.

Theodora was perfectly dressed, and her jewels caused envy in numbers of breasts.

She was too little occupied with herself to feel any of Josiah's humiliation. This society was hers by right of birth, and did not disconcert her; only no one could help being lonely when quite neglected, while others danced.

Presently, a thin, ill-tempered-looking old man made his way with difficulty up to their corner; he had been speaking to Mrs. Devlyn across the room.

"I must introduce myself," he said, graciously, to Theodora. "I am your uncle, Patrick Fitzgerald, and I am so delighted to meet you and make your acquaintance."

Theodora bowed without _empressement_. She had no feeling for these relations who had been so indifferent to her while she was poor and who had treated darling papa so badly.

"I only got back to town last night, or I and my wife would have called at Claridge's before this," he continued. And then he said something affable to Josiah, who looked strangely out of place among this brilliant throng.

For whatever may compose the elements of the highest London society, the atoms all acquire a certain air after a little, and if within this _fine fleur_ of the aristocracy there lurked some Jews and Philistines and infidels of the middle classes, they were not quite new to the game, and had all received their gloss. So poor Josiah stood out rather by himself, and Sir Patrick Fitzgerald felt a good deal ashamed of him.

Theodora's fine senses had perceived all this long ago--the contrast her husband presented to the rest of the world--and it had made her stand closer to him and treat him with more deference than usual; her generous heart always responded to any one or anything in an unhappy position.

And through all his thick skin Josiah felt something of her tenderness, and glowed with pride in her.

Sir Patrick Fitzgerald continued to talk, and even paid his niece some bluff compliments. Her manner was so perfect, he decided! Gad! he could be proud of his new-found relation. And though the husband was nothing but a grocer still, and looked it every inch, by Jove, he was rich enough to gild his vulgarity and be tolerated among the highest.

Thus the uncle was gushing and lavish in his invitations and offers of friendship. They must come to Beechleigh for Whitsuntide. He would hear of no refusal. Going home! Oh, what nonsense! Home was a place one could go to at any time. And he would so like to show them Beechleigh at its best, where her father had lived all his young life.

Josiah was caught by his affable suggestions. Why should they not go? Only that morning he had received a letter from his agent at Bessington Hall to say the place, unfortunately, would not be completely ready for them. Why, then, should they not accept this pleasant invitation?

Theodora hesitated--but he cut her short.

"I am sure it is very good of you, Sir Patrick, and my wife and I will be delighted to come," he said.

By this time the excitement of the royal entrance and quadrille had somewhat subsided, and several people felt themselves drawn to be presented to the beautiful young woman in white with the really fine jewels, and before she knew where she was, Theodora found herself waltzing with a wonderfully groomed, ugly young marquis.

She had meant not to dance--not to leave her husband's side; but fate and Josiah had ordered otherwise.

"Not dance! What nonsense, my love! Go at once with his lordship," he had said, when Sir Patrick had presented Lord Wensleydown. And wincing at the sentence, Theodora had allowed herself to be whirled away.

Her partner was not more than nine-and-twenty; but he had all the blas airs of a man of forty. He began to say _entreprenant_ things to Theodora after three turns round the room.

She was far too unsophisticated to understand their ultimate meaning, but they made her uncomfortable.

He gazed at her loveliness with that insulting look of sensual admiration which some men think the highest compliment they can pay to a woman. And just in the middle of all this, Hector Bracondale arrived upon the scene. He had been searching for her everywhere; in that crowd one could miss any one with ease. He stood and watched her before she caught sight of him--watched her pure whiteness in the clutches of this beast of prey. Saw his burning looks; noted his attitude; imagined his whisperings--and murderous feelings leaped to his brain.

How dared Wensleydown! How dared any one! Ah, God! and he was powerless to prevent it. She was the wife of Josiah Brown over there, smiling and complacent to see _his_ belonging dancing with a marquis!

"Hector, dearest, what is the matter?" exclaimed Lady Anningford, coming up at that moment to her brother's side. She was with Colonel Lowerby, and they had made a tour of the rooms on purpose to see Theodora. "You appear ready to murder some one. What has happened?"

Hector looked straight at her. She was a very tall woman, almost his height, and she saw pain and rage and passion were swimming in his eyes, while his deep voice vibrated as he answered:

"Yes, I want to murder some one--and possibly will before the evening is over."

"Hector! Crow, leave me with him, like the dear you always are," she whispered to Colonel Lowerby, "and come and find me again in a few minutes."

"Hector, what is it?" she asked, anxiously, when they stood alone.

"Look!" said Lord Bracondale. "Look at Wensleydown leaning over Theodora." He was so moved that he uttered the name without being aware of it. "Did you ever see such a damned cad as he is? Good God, I cannot bear it!"

"He--he is only dancing with her," said Anne, soothingly. What had come to her brother, her whimsical, cynical brother, who troubled not at all, as a rule, over anything in the world?

"Only dancing with her! I tell you I will not bear it. Where is the Crow? Why did you send him off? I can't stay with you; I must go and speak to her, and take her away from this."

"Hector, for Heaven's sake do not be so mad," said Lady Anningford, now really alarmed. "You can't go up and seize a woman from her partner in the middle of a waltz. You must be completely crazy! Dear boy, let us stay here by the door until the music finishes, and then I will speak to her before they can leave the room to sit out."

She put her hand on his arm to detain him, and started to feel how it trembled.

What passion was this? Surely the Crow was right, after all, and it could only lead to some inevitable catastrophe. Anne's heart sank; the lights and the splendor seemed all a gilded mockery.

At that moment Morella Winmarleigh advanced with Evermond Le Mesurier--their uncle Evermond--who, having other views for his own amusement, left her instantly at Anne's side and disappeared among the crowd.

"How impossible to find any one in this crush!" Miss Winmarleigh said. There was a cackly tone in her voice, especially when raised above the din of the music, which was peculiarly irritating to sensitive ears.

Hector felt he hated her.

Anne still kept her hand on his arm, and flight was hopeless.

Just then a Royalty passed with their hostess, and claimed Lady Anningford's attention, so Hector was left sole guardian of Morella Winmarleigh.

She cackled on about nothing, while his every sense was strained watching Theodora, to see that she did not leave the room without his knowledge.

She was whirling still in the maze of the waltz, and each time she passed fresh waves of rage surged in Hector's breast, as he perceived the way in which Lord Wensleydown held her.

"Why, there is the woman who was at the opera last night," exclaimed Morella, at last. "How in the world did an outsider like that get here, I wonder? She is quite pretty, close--don't you think so, Hector? Oh, I forgot, you know her, of course; you talked to her last night, I remember."

Hector did not answer; he was afraid to let himself speak.

Morella Winmarleigh was looking her best. A tonged, laced, flounced best; and she was perfectly conscious of it, and pleased with herself and her attractions.

She meant to keep Lord Bracondale with her for the rest of the evening if possible, even if she had to descend to tricks scarcely flattering to her own vanity.

"Do let us go for a walk," she said. "I have not yet seen the flower decorations in the yellow salon, and I hear they are particularly fine."

Hector by this time was beside himself at seeing Theodora converging with her partner towards the large doors at the other end of the ballroom.

"No," he said. "I am very sorry, but I am engaged for the next dance, and must go and hunt up my partner. Where can I take you?"

Hector engaged for a dance? An unknown thing, and of course untrue. What could this mean? Who would he dance with? That colonial creature? This must be looked into and stopped at once.

Miss Winmarleigh's thin under-lip contracted, and a deeper red suffused her blooming cheeks.

"I really don't know," she said. "I am quite lost, and I am afraid you can't leave me until I find some one to take care of me." And she giggled girlishly.

That such a large cow of a woman should want protection of any sort seemed quite ridiculous to Hector--maddeningly ridiculous at the present moment. Theodora had disappeared, having seen him standing there with Morella Winmarleigh, who she had been told he was going to marry.

He was literally white with suppressed rage. The Royalty had commandeered Anne, and among the dozens of people he knew there was not one in sight with whom he could plant Morella Winmarleigh; so he gave her his arm, and hurried along the way Theodora had disappeared.

"Are you going to Beechleigh for Whitsuntide?" Morella asked. "I am, and I think we shall have a delightful party."

Hector was not paying the least attention. Theodora was completely out of sight now, and might be lost altogether, for all they were likely to overtake her among this crowd and the numberless exits and entrances.

"Beechleigh!" he mumbled, absently. "Who lives there? I don't even know. I am going home."

"Why, Hector, of course you know! The Fitzgeralds--Sir Patrick and Lady Ada. Every one does."

Then it came to him. These were Theodora's uncle and aunt. Was it possible she could be going there, too? He recollected she had told him in Paris her father had written to this brother of his about her coming to London. She might be going. It was a chance, and he must ascertain at once.

Sir Patrick Fitzgerald he knew at the Turf, and now that he thought of it he knew Lady Ada by sight quite well, and he was aware he would be a welcome guest at any house. If Theodora was going, he expected the thing could be managed. Meanwhile, he must find her, and get rid of Morella Winmarleigh. He hurried her on through the blue salon and the yellow salon and out into the gallery beyond. Theodora had completely disappeared.

Miss Winmarleigh kept up a constant chatter of commonplaces, to which, when he replied at all, he gave random answers.

And every moment she became more annoyed and uneasy.

She had known Hector since she was a child. Their places adjoined in the country, and she saw him constantly when there. Her stolid vanity had never permitted the suggestion to come to her that he had always been completely indifferent to her. She intended to marry him. His mother shared her wishes. They were continually thrown together, and the thought of her as a probable ending to his life when all pleasures should be over had often entered his head.

Before he met Theodora, if he had ever analyzed his views about Morella, they probably would have been that she was a safe bore with a great many worldly advantages. A woman who you could be sure would not take a lover a few years after you had married her, and whom he would probably marry if she were still free when the time came.

His flittings from one pretty matron to another had not caused her grave anxieties. He could not marry them, and he never talked with girls or possible rivals. So she had always felt safe and certain that fate would ultimately make him her husband.

But this was different--he had never been like this before. And uneasiness grabbed at her well-regulated heart.

"Ah, there is my mother!" he exclaimed, at last, with such evident relief that Morella began to feel spiteful.

They made their way to where Lady Bracondale was standing. She beamed upon them like a pleased pussy-cat. It looked so suitable to see them thus together!

"Dearest," she said to Morella, "is not this a lovely ball? And I can see you are enjoying yourself."

Miss Winmarleigh replied suitably, and her stolid face betrayed none of her emotion.

"Mother," said Hector, "I wish you would introduce me to Lady Ada Fitzgerald when you get the chance. I see her over there."

This was so obvious that Morella, who never saw between the lines, preened with pleasure. After all, he wished to spend Whitsuntide with her, and this anxiety to find Lady Bracondale had been all on that account. Lady Bracondale, who was acquainted with Miss Winmarleigh's plans, made the same interruption, and joy warmed her being.

She was only too pleased to do whatever he wished. And the affair was soon accomplished.

Hector made himself especially attractive, and Lady Ada Fitzgerald decided he was charming.

The way paved for possible contingencies, he escaped from this crowd of women, and once more began his search for Theodora. She would certainly return to Josiah some time. To go straight to him would be the best plan.

Josiah was standing absolutely alone by one of the windows in the ballroom, and looked pitiably uncomfortable and ill at ease in his knee-breeches and silk stockings.

He had experienced such pleasure when he had tried them on, and had enjoyed walking through the hall at Claridge's to his carriage, knowing the people there would be aware it meant he was going to meet the most august Royalty.

But now he felt uncomfortable, and kept standing first on one leg, then on the other. Theodora had not returned to him yet: the next dance had not begun.

This great world contained discomfort as well as pleasure, he decided.

Hector walked straight over to him and was excessively polite and agreeable, and Josiah's equanimity was somewhat restored.

What could have happened to Theodora? Where had that beast Wensleydown taken her? Not to supper--surely not to supper?--were Lord Bracondale's thoughts.

And then with the first notes of the next dance she reappeared. It seemed to him she was looking superbly lovely: a faint pink suffused her cheeks, and her eyes were shining with the excitement of the scene.

A mad rush of passion surged over Hector; his turn had come, he thought.

Lord Wensleydown seemed loath to release her, and showed signs of staying to talk awhile. So Hector interposed at once.

"May I not have this dance? I have been looking for you everywhere," he said.

Theodora told him she was tired, and she stood close to her husband; tired--and also she was quite sure Josiah would be bored left all alone, so she wished to stay with him.

But Mrs. Devlyn made a reappearance just then, and as they spoke they saw Josiah give her his arm and lead her away.

Thus Theodora was left standing alone with Lord Bracondale.

Fate seemed always to nullify her good intentions.

It was an exquisite waltz, and the music mounted to both their brains.

For one moment the room appeared to reel in front of her, and then she found herself whirling in his arms. Oh, what bliss it was, after this long week of separation! What folly and maddening bliss!

Her senses were tingling; her lithe, exquisite, willowy body thrilled and quivered in his embrace. And they both realized what a waltz could be, as a medium for joy.

"We will only have two turns until the crowd gets impossible again," he whispered, "and then I will take you to supper."

Lady Anningford had been rejoined by the Crow, and now stood watching them. She and her companion were silent for a moment, and then:

"By Jove!" Colonel Lowerby said. "She is certainly worth going to hell for, to look at even--and they don't appear as if they would take long on the road."

XX

"Oh, Crow, dear, what are we to do, then?" said Lady Anningford. "Surely, surely you don't anticipate any sudden catastrophe? In these days people never run away--"

"No," said the Crow. "They stay at home until the footman, or the man's last mistress, or the woman's dearest friend, send anonymous letters to the husband."

"But--"

"Well, I tell you, Queen Anne, to me this appears serious. I know Hector pretty well, and I have never seen him as far gone as this before. The woman--she is a mere child--looks as unsophisticated as a baby, and probably is. She won't have the least idea of managing the affair. She will tumble headlong into it."

"Well, what is to be done, then?" exclaimed Anne, piteously.

"You had better talk to him quietly. He is very fond of you. Though nothing, I am afraid, will be of the least use," said the Crow.

"But if she is going into the country they won't meet," reasoned Anne. "You saw the dreadful-looking husband just now. Will he be the colonial who will object, do you think, or the English snob who won't?"

But the Crow refused to give any more opinions except in general.

It all came, he said, from the ridiculous marriage laws in this over-civilized country. Why should not people eminently suited to each other be allowed to be happy?

"It is too bad, Crow," said Anne. "You take it for granted that Hector has the most dishonorable intentions towards Mrs. Brown. He may worship her quite in the abstract."

"Fiddle-dee-dee, my child!" said Colonel Lowerby. "Look at him! You don't understand the fundamental principles of human nature if you say that. When a man is madly in love with a woman, nature says, 'This is your mate,' not a saint of alabaster on a church altar. There are numbers of animals about who find a 'mate' in every woman they come across. But Hector is not that sort. Look at his face--look at him now they are passing us, and tell me if you see any abstract about it?"

Anne was forced to admit she did not; and it was with intense uneasiness she saw her brother and his partner stop, and disappear through one of the doors towards the supper-room.

When her mother perceived the situation--or Morella--disagreeable moments would begin at once for everybody!

Meanwhile, the culprits were extremely happy.

With the finest and noblest intention in the world, Theodora was too young, and too healthy, not to have become exhilarated with the dance and the scene. Something whispered, Why should she not enjoy herself to-night? What harm could there be in dancing? Every one danced--and Josiah, himself, had left her alone.

Hector had not said a word that she must rebuke him for; they had just waltzed and thrilled, and been--happy!

And now she was going to eat some supper with him, and forget there were any to-morrows.

They found a secluded corner, and spent half an hour in perfect peace. Hector was an artist in pleasing women--and to-night, though he never once transgressed in words, she could feel through it all that he loved her--loved her madly. His voice was so tender and deep, and his thought for her slightest wish and comfort so evident; he was masterful, too, and settled what she was to do--where to sit, and now and then he made her look at him.

He was just so wildly happy he could not stop to count the cost; and while he worshipped her more deeply than when they had sat on the soft greensward at Versailles, even the whole sight of her pure soul now could not stop him--now he knew she loved him, and that there were possible others on the scene. She had trusted him--had appealed to his superior strength; he did not forget that fact quite--but here at a ball was not the place to analyze what it would mean. They were just two guests dancing and supping like the rest, and were supremely content.

He found out where she was going for Whitsuntide, but said nothing of his own intentions.

The blindness and madness of love was upon him and held him in complete bondage. The first shock, which her look of the wounded fawn had given him, was over. They had suffered, and made good resolutions, and parted, and now they had met again. And he could not, and would not, think where they might drift to.

To be near her, to look into her eyes, to be conscious of her personality was what he asked at the moment, what he must have. The rest of time was a blank, and meaningless. It is not every man who loves in this way--fortunately for the rest of the world! Many go through life with now and then a different woman merely as an episode, as far as anything but a physical emotion is concerned. Sport, or their own ambitions, fill up their real interests, and no woman could break their hearts.

But Hector was not of these. And this woman had it in her power to make his heaven or hell.

They had both passed through moments of exalted sentiment, even a little dramatic in their tragedy and renunciation, but circumstance is stronger always than any highly strung emotion of good or evil. At the end of their good-bye at Madrid their story should have closed, as the stories in books so often do, with the hero and heroine worked up to some wonderful pitch of self-sacrifice and drama. They so seldom tell of the flatness of the afterwards. The impossibility of retaining a balance on this high pinnacle of moral valor, where circumstance, which is a commonplace and often material thing, decrees that the lights shall not be turned out with the ring-down of the curtain.

Unless death finishes what is apparently the last act, there is always the to-morrow to be reckoned with--out of the story-book. So while exalted--he by his sudden worship of that pure sweetness of soul in Theodora which he had discovered, she by her innocence and desire to do right--they had been able to tune their minds to an idea of a tender good-bye, full of sentiment and vows of abstract devotion, and adherence to duty.

And if he had gone to the ends of the earth that night the exaltation, as a memory, might have continued, and time might have healed their hurts--time and the starvation of absence and separation. But fate had decreed they should meet again, and soon; and all the forces which precipitate matters should be employed for their undoing.

For all else in life Hector was no weakling. He had always been a strong man, physically and morally.

His views were the views of the world. It seemed no great sin to him to love another man's wife. All his friends did the same at one period or another.

It was only when Theodora had awakened him that he had begun even to think of controlling himself.

It was to please her, not because he was really convinced of the right and necessity of their course of action, that he had said good-bye and agreed to worship her in the abstract.

He had been highly moved and elevated by her that night in Paris. And when he wrote the letter his honest intention had been to follow its words.

He did not recognize the fact that without the zeal of blind faith as to the right, human nature must always yield to inclination.

So they sat there and ate their supper, and forgot to-morrow, and were radiantly happy.

As they had gone down the stairs Monica Ellerwood had joined Lady Bracondale in the gallery above.

"Oh! Look, Aunt Milly!" she had said. "Hector is with the American I told you about in Paris. Do you see, going down to supper. Oh, isn't she pretty! and what jewels--look!"

And Lady Bracondale had moved forward in a manner quite foreign to her usual dignity to catch sight of them.

"It is the same woman he talked to at the opera last night," she said. "She is not an American, but a Mrs. Brown, an Australian millionaire's wife, we were told. She is certainly pretty. Oh--eh--you said Hector was devoted to her in Paris?"

"Why, of course! You can ask Jack."

"I do not think we need worry, though, dear, because I am happy to say Hector shows great signs of wishing to be with Morella."

And with this pleasing thought she had turned the conversation.

"I think we must go back now," said Theodora, after she had finished the last monster strawberry on her plate. "Josiah may be waiting for me."

Oh, she had been so happy! There was that sense vibrating through everything that he loved her, and they were together--but now it must end.

So they made their way up the stairs and back to the ballroom.

Mrs. Devlyn had abandoned Josiah, and he stood once more alone and supremely uncomfortable. A pang of remorse seized Theodora; she wished she had not stayed so long; she would not leave him again for a moment.

He had supped, it appeared, been hurried over it because Mrs. Devlyn wished to return, and was now feeling cross and tired. He was quite ready to leave when Theodora suggested it, and they said good-night to Hector and descended to find their carriage. But in that crowd it was not such an easy matter.

There was a long wait in the hall, where they were joined by the assiduous Marquis and Delaval Stirling. And Hector, from a place on the stairs, had all his feelings of jealous rage aroused again in watching them while he was detained where he was by his hostess.

Meanwhile, Sir Patrick Fitzgerald had gone about telling every one of the beauty of his new-found niece, and had brought his wife to be introduced to her just after Theodora had left.

Since his scapegrace brother was going to make such an advantageous marriage, and this niece had proved a lovely woman, and rich withal, he quite admitted the ties of blood were thicker than water.

Lady Ada was not of like opinion; she had enough relations of her own, and resented his having asked the Browns to Beechleigh for Whitsuntide.

"My party was all made up but for one extra man," she said, "whom I think I have found; and we did not need these people."

XXI

Lord Bracondale arrived at his sister's house in Charles Street about a quarter of an hour before her luncheon guests were due.

Anne rushed down to see him, meeting her husband on the stairs.

"Oh, don't come in yet, Billy, like a darling," she said, "I want to talk to Hector alone."

And the meek and fond Lord Anningford had obediently retired to his smoking-room.

"Well, Hector," she said, when she had greeted him, "and so you are going to the Fitzgeralds' for Whitsuntide, and not to Bracondale, mother tells me this morning. She is in the seventh heaven, taking it for a sign, as you had to manoeuvre so to be asked, that things are coming to a climax between you and Morella."

"Morella? Is she going?" said Hector, absently. He had quite forgotten that fact, so perfectly indifferent was he to her movements, and so completely had his own aims engrossed him.

"Why--dear boy!" Anne gasped. The whole scene, highly colored by repetition, had been recounted to her. How Morella had told him of her plans, and how he had at once got introduced to Lady Ada, and played his cards so skilfully that the end of the evening produced the invitation.

"Oh yes, of course, I remember she is going," he said, impatiently. "Anne, you haven't asked that beast Wensleydown to-day, have you?"

"No, dear. What made you think so?"

"I saw you talking to him in the park this morning, and I feared you might have. I shall certainly quarrel with him one of these days."

"You will have an opportunity, then, at Beechleigh, as he will be there. He is always with the Fitzgeralds," Anne said, and she tried to laugh. "But don't make a scandal, Hector."

She saw his eyes blaze.

"He is going there, is he?" he said, and then he stared out of the window.

Anne knew nothing of the relationship between Theodora and Sir Patrick. She never for a moment imagined the humble Browns would be invited to this exceptionally smart party. And yet she was uneasy. Why was Hector going? What plan was in his head? Not Morella, evidently. But she had never believed that would be his attraction.

And Hector was too preoccupied to enlighten her.

"Is mother coming to lunch?" he asked.

"Yes, by her own request. I had not meant to ask her--Oh, well, you know, she is never very pleased at your having new friends, and I thought she might fix Mrs. Brown with that stony stare she has sometimes, and we would be happier without her; but she was determined to come."

"It is just as well," he said, "because she will have to get accustomed to it. I shall ask my friends the Browns down to Bracondale on every occasion, and as she is hostess there the stony stare won't answer."

"Manage her as best you may," said Anne. "But you know how she can be now and then--perfectly annihilating to unfortunate strangers."

Hector's finely chiselled lips shut like a vise.

"We shall see," he said. "And who else have you got? None of the Harrowfield-Devlyn crew, I hope--"

"Hector, how strange you are! I thought you and Lady Harrowfield were the greatest friends, so of course I asked her. No one in London can make a woman's success as she can."

"Or mar it so completely if she takes a dislike! Have you ever heard of her doing a kindness to any one? I haven't!" he said, irritably.

Then he walked to the window and back quickly.

"I tell you I am sick of it all, Anne. Last night, whoever I spoke to had something vile to impute or insinuate about every one they mentioned; and Lady Harrowfield, with a record of her own worse than the lowest, rode a high horse of virtue, and was more spiteful than all the rest put together. I loathe them, the whole crew. What do they know of anything good or pure or fine? Painted Jezebels, the lot of them!"

"Hector!" almost screamed Lady Anningford. "What has come over you, my dear boy?"

"I will tell you," he said; and his voice, which had been full of passion, now melted into a tone of deep tenderness. "I love a woman whose pure goodness has taught me there are other possibilities in life beyond the aims of these vile harpies of our world--a woman whose very presence makes one long to be better and nobler, whose dear soul has not room for anything but kind and loving thoughts of sweetness and light. Oh, Anne, if I might have her for my own, and live away down at Bracondale far from all this, I think--I think I, too, could learn what heaven would mean on earth."

"Dear Hector!" said Anne, who was greatly moved. "Oh, I am so sorry for you! But what is to be done? She is married to somebody else, and you will only injure her and yourself if you see too much of her."

"I know," he said. "I realize it sometimes--this morning, for instance--and then--and then--"

He did not add that the thought of Lord Wensleydown and the rest swarming round Theodora drove him mad, deprived him of his power of reasoning, and filled him with a wild desire to protect her, to be near her, to keep her always for himself, always in his sight.

"Anne," he said, at last, "promise me you will go out of your way to be kind to her. Don't let these other odious women put pin-points into her, because she is so innocent, and all unused to this society. She is just my queen and my darling. Will you remember that?"

And as Anne looked she saw there were two great tears in his eyes--his deep-gray eyes which always wore a smile of whimsical mockery--and she felt a lump in her throat.

This dear, dear brother! And she could do nothing to comfort him--one way or another.

"Hector, I will promise--always," she said, and her voice trembled. "I am sure she is sweet and good; and she is so lovely and fascinating--and oh, I wish--I wish--too!"

Then he bent down and kissed her, just as his mother and Lady Harrowfield came into the room.

Anne felt glad she had not informed them they were to meet the Browns, as was her first intention. She seemed suddenly to see with Hector's eyes, and to realize how narrow and spiteful Lady Harrowfield could be.

Most of the guests arrived one after the other, and were talking about the intimate things they all knew, when "Mr. and Mrs. Brown" were announced, and the whole party turned to look at them, while Lady Harrowfield tittered, and whispered almost audibly to her neighbor:

"These are the creatures Florence insisted upon my giving an invitation to last night. I did it for her sake, of course, so wretchedly poor she is, dear Florence, and she hopes to make a good thing out of them. Look at the man!" she added. "Has one ever sees such a person, except in a pork-butcher's shop!"

"I have never been in one," said Hector, agreeably, a dangerous flash in his eyes; "but I hear things are too wonderfully managed at Harrowfield House--though I had no idea you did the shopping yourself, dear Lady Harrowfield."

She looked up at him, rage in her heart. Hector had long been a hopeless passion of hers--so good-looking, so whimsical, and, above all, so indifferent! She had never been able to dominate and ride rough-shod ever him. When she was rude and spiteful he answered her back, and then neglected her for the rest of the evening.

But why should he defend these people, whom, probably, he did not even know?

She would watch and see.

Then they went in to luncheon, without waiting for two or three stray young men who were always late.

And Theodora found herself sitting between the Crow and a sleek-looking politician; while poor Josiah, extremely ill at ease, sat at the left hand of his hostess.

Anne had purposely not put Hector near Theodora; with her mother there she thought it was wiser not to run any risks.

Lady Bracondale was sufficiently soothed by her happy dream of the cause of Hector's visit to Beechleigh to be coldly polite to Theodora, whom Anne had presented to her before luncheon. She sat at the turn of the long, oval table just one off, and was consequently able to observe her very carefully.

"She is extremely pretty and looks well bred--quite too extraordinary," she said to herself, in a running commentary. "Grandfather a convict, no doubt. She reminds me of poor Minnie Borringdon, who ran off with that charming scapegrace brother of Patrick Fitzgerald. I wonder what became of them?"

Lady Bracondale deplored the ways of many of the set she was obliged to move in--Delicia Harrowfield, for instance. But what was one to do? One must know one's old friends, especially those to whom one had been a bridesmaid!

The Crow, who had begun by being determined to find Theodora as cunning as other angels he was acquainted with, before the second course had fallen completely under her spell.

No one to look into her tender eyes could form an adverse opinion about her; and her gentle voice, which only said kind things, was pleasing to the ear.

"'Pon my soul, Hector is not such a fool as I thought," Colonel Lowerby said to himself. "This seems a bit of pure gold--poor little white lady! What will be the end of her?"

And opposite, Hector, with great caution, devoured her with his eyes.

Theodora herself was quite happy, though her delicate intuition told her Lady Harrowfield was antagonistic to her, and Hector's mother exceedingly stiff, while most of the other women eyed her clothes and talked over her head. But they all seemed of very little consequence to her, somehow.

She was like the sun, who continues to shine and give warmth and light no matter how much ugly imps may look up and make faces at him.

Theodora was never ill at ease. It would grieve her sensitive heart to the core if those she loved made the faintest shade of difference in their treatment of her--but strangers! They counted not at all, she had too little vanity.

Both her neighbors, the young politician and the Crow, were completely fascinated by her. She had not the slightest accent in speaking English, but now and then her phrasing had a quaint turn which was original and attractive.

Anne was not enjoying her luncheon-party. The impression of sorrow and calamity which the conversation with her brother had left upon her deepened rather than wore off.

Josiah's commonplace and sometimes impossible remarks perhaps helped it.

She seemed to realize how it must all jar on Hector. To know his loved one belonged to this worthy grocer--to understand the hopelessness of the position!

Anne was proud of her family and her old name. It was grief, too, to think that after Hector the title would go to Evermond Le Mesurier, the unmarried and dissolute uncle, if he survived his nephew, and then would die out altogether. There would be no more Baron Bracondales of Bracondale, unless Hector chose to marry and have sons. Oh, life was a topsy-turvy affair at the best of times, she sighed to herself.

Just before the ladies left the table, Josiah had announced their intended visit to Beechleigh, and his wife's relationship to Sir Patrick Fitzgerald and the old Earl Borringdon.

It came as a thunderclap to Lady Anningford. This accounted for Hector's eagerness to obtain the invitation--accounted for Theodora's exceeding look of breeding--accounted for many things.

She only trusted her mother had not heard the news also. So much better to leave her in her fool's paradise about Morella.

If Lady Harrowfield knew, she said nothing about it. She absolutely ignored Theodora, as though she had never shaken hands with her in her own house the night before. Theodora wondered at her manners--she did not yet know Mayfair.

The conversation turned upon some of the wonderful charities they were all interested in, and Theodora thought how good and kind of them to help the poor and crippled. And she said some gentle, sympathetic things to a lady who was near her. And Anne thought to herself how sweet and beautiful her nature must be, and it made her sadder and sadder.

Presently they all began to discuss the ball at Harrowfield House. It had been too lovely, they said, and Lady Harrowfield joined in with one of her sharp thrusts.

"Of course it could not be just as one would have wished. I was obliged to ask all sorts of people I had never even heard of," she said. "The usual grabbing for invitations, you know, to see the Royalties. Really, the quaint creatures who came up the stairs! I almost laughed in their faces once or twice."

"But don't you like to feel what pleasure you gave them, the poor things?" Theodora said, quite simply, without the least sarcasm. "You see, I know you gave them pleasure, because my husband and I were some of them--and we enjoyed it, oh, so much!"

And she smiled one of her adorable smiles which melted the heart of every one else in the room. But of Lady Harrowfield she made an enemy for life. The venomous woman reddened violently--under her paint--while she looked this upstart through and through. But Theodora was quite unconscious of her anger. To her Lady Harrowfield seemed a poor, soured old woman very much painted and ridiculous, and she felt sorry for unlovely old age and ill-temper.

Meanwhile, Lady Bracondale was being favorably impressed. She was a most presentable young person, this wife of the Australian millionaire, she decided.

Anne took the greatest pains to be charming to Theodora. They were sitting together on a sofa when the men came into the room.

Hector could keep away no longer. He joined them in their corner, while his face beamed with joy to see the two people he loved best in the world apparently getting on so well together.

"What have you been talking about?" he asked.

"Nothing very learned," said Anne. "Only the children. I was telling Mrs. Brown how Fordy's pony ran away in the park this morning, and how plucky he had been about it."

"They are rather nice infants," said Hector. "I should like you to see them," and he looked at Theodora. "Mayn't we have them down, Anne?"

Lady Anningford adored her offspring, and was only too pleased to show them; but she said:

"Oh, wait a moment, Hector, until some of these people have gone. Lady Harrowfield hates children, and Fordy made some terrible remarks about her wig last time."

"I wish he would do it again," said Hector. "She took the skin off every one the whole way through lunch."

"But Colonel Lowerby told me she was one of the cleverest women in London!" exclaimed Theodora; "and surely it is not very clever just to be bitter and spiteful!"

"Yes, she is clever," said Anne, with a peculiar smile, "and we are all rather under her thumb."

"It is perfectly ridiculous how you pander to her!" Hector said, impatiently. "I should never allow my wife to have anything but a distant acquaintance with her if I were married," and he glanced at Theodora.

Lady Anningford's duties as hostess took her away from them then, and he sat down on the sofa in her place.

"Oh, how I hate all this!" he said. "How different it is to Paris! It grates and jars and brings out the worst in one. These odious women and their little, narrow ways! You will never stay much in London--will you, Theodora?"

"I have always to do what Josiah wishes, you know; he rather likes it, and means us to come back after Whitsuntide, I think."

Hector seemed to have lost the power of looking ahead. Whitsuntide, and to be with her in the country for that time, appeared to him the boundary of his outlook.

What would happen after Whitsuntide? Who could say?

He longed to tell her how his thoughts were forever going back to the day at Versailles, and the peace and beauty of those woods--how all seemed here as though something were dragging him down to the commonplace, away out of their exalted dream, to a dull earth. But he dared not--he must keep to subjects less moving. So there was silence for some moments.

Theodora, since coming to London, had begun to understand it was possible for beautiful Englishmen to be husbands now and then, and that the term is not necessarily synonymous with "bore" and "duty"--as she had always thought it from her meagre experience.

She could not help picturing what a position of exquisite happiness some nice girl might have--some day--as Hector's wife. And she looked out of the window, and her eyes were sad. While the vision which floated to him at the same moment was of her at his side at Bracondale, and the delicious joy of possessing for their own some gay and merry babies like Fordy and his little brother and sister. And each saw a wistful longing in the other's eyes, and they talked quickly of banal things.

XXII

The Crow stayed on after all the other guests had left. He knew his hostess wished to talk to him.

It had begun to pour with rain, and the dripping streets held out no inducement to them to go out.

They pulled up their two comfortable arm-chairs to the sparkling wood fire, and then Colonel Lowerby said:

"You look sad, Queen Anne. Tell me about it."

"Yes, I am sad," said Anne. "The position is so hopeless. Hector loves her--loves her really--and I do not wonder at it; and she seems just everything that one could wish for him. A thousand times above Morella in intellect and understanding. All the things Hector and I like she sees at once. No need of explaining to her, as one has to to mother and Morella always."

"Yes," said the Crow. He did not argue with her as usual.

"It seems so fearful to think of her forever bound to that dreadful old grocer, whom she treats with so much deference and gentleness. The whole thing has made me sad. Hector is perfectly miserable; and, do you know, they are going to Beechleigh for Whitsuntide. Sir Patrick Fitzgerald is her uncle--and, of course, Hector is going, too, and--"

She did not finish her sentence. Her voice died away in a pathetic note as she gazed into the fire.

The Crow fidgeted; he had been devoted to Anne since she was a child of ten, and he hated to see her troubled.

"Look here," he said. "I investigated her thoroughly at luncheon, and I don't often make a mistake, do I?"

"No," said Anne. "Well--?"

"Well, she appeared to me to have some particular quality of sweetness--you were right about her looking like an angel--and I think she has got an angel's nature more or less; and when people are really like that there is some one up above looks after them, and I don't think we need worry much--you and I."

"Dear old Crow!" said Anne; "you do comfort me. But all the same, angel or not, Hector is so attractive--and he is a man, you know, not one of these anmic, artistic, sthetic things we see about so often now; and thrown together like that--how on earth will they be able to help themselves?"

The Crow was silent.

"You see," she continued, "beyond Morella, who is too absolutely unalluring and respectable to come to harm anywhere, and Miss Linwood, who only cares for bridge, there will hardly be another woman in the house who has not got a lover, and the atmosphere of those things is catching--don't you think so?"

"It is nature," said Colonel Lowerby. "A woman in possession of her health and faculties requires a mate, and when her husband is attending to sport or some other man's wife, she is bound to find one somewhere. I don't blame the poor things."

"Oh, nor I!" said Anne. "I don't ever blame any one. And just one, because you love him, seems all right, perhaps. It is six different ones in a year, and a seventh to pay the bills, that I find vulgar."

"Dans les premires passions, les femmes aiment l'amant; et dans les autres, elles aiment l'amour," quoted the Crow. "It was ever the same, you see. It is the seventh to pay the bills that seems vulgar and modern."

"Billy and I stayed there for the pheasant shoot last November, and I assure you we felt quite out of it, having no little adventures at night like the rest. Lady Ada is the picture of washed-out respectability herself, and so--to give her some reflected color, I suppose--she asks always the most go-ahead, advanced section of her acquaintances."

"Well, I shall be there this time," said the Crow; "she invited me last week."

This piece of news comforted Lady Anningford greatly. She felt here would be some one to help matters if he could.

"Morella will be perfectly furious when she gets there and finds she was not the reason of Hector's empressement for the invitation. And in her stolid way she can be just as spiteful as Lady Harrowfield."

"Yes, I know."

Then they were both silent for a while--Anne's thoughts busy with the mournful idea of the end of the House of Bracondale should Hector never marry, and the Crow's of her in sympathy, his eyes watching her face.

At last she spoke.

"I believe it would be best for Hector to go right away for a year or so," she sighed. "But, however it may be, I fear, alas! it can only end in tears."

XXIII

Beechleigh was really a fine place, built by Vanbrugh in his best days.

Three tiers of fifteen tall windows looked to the north in a front and two short wings, while colonnades led down to splendid wrought-iron gates, and blocks of buildings constructed in the same stately style. Fifteen more windows faced the south; and the centre one of the first floor led, with sweeping steps, to a terrace, while seven casements adorned each of the eastern and western sides.

On the southern side the view, for that rather flat country, was superb.

It gave, from a considerable elevation--through a wide opening of giant oaks and elms--a peep of the lake a mile below, and on in a long avenue of turf to a vista of smiling country.

On the splendid terrace peacocks spread their tails, and vases of carved stone broke at intervals the gray old balustrade.

Inside the house was equally nobly planned: all the rooms of great height and perfect proportion, and filled with pictures and tapestries and bronzes and antiques of immense value.

It had come to these spendthrift Irish Fitzgeralds through their grandmother, the last of an old ducal race. And two generations of Hibernian influence had curtailed the fine fortune which went with it, until Sir Patrick often felt it no easy matter to make both ends meet in the luxurious and gilded fashion which was necessary to himself and his friends.

If he and Lady Ada pinched and scraped when alone, keeping few servants on board wages, the parties, at all events, were done with all their wonted regal splendor.

"I shall stay with you, Patrick, as long as you can afford this cook," Lady Harrowfield said once to him; "but when you begin to economize, don't trouble to ask me. I hate poor people, when it shows."

A promising son, on the true Fitzgerald lines, was at Oxford now, and gave many anxious crows'-feet full opportunity of developing round his mother's faded eyes.

A plain daughter, Barbara, was pushed into corners and left much to herself. And a brilliant, flashing, up-to-date niece of Lady Ada's took always the first place.

Mildred was so clever, and her lovers were so well chosen, and so thoroughly of the right set or of great wealth; while a puny husband was helped to something in South Africa, when the man in possession was a Jew--or as agent for tea and jam in the colonies--when he happened to be only a colossally successful Englishman. And once, during a prominent politician's reign, poor Willie Verner enjoyed a few months in his own land as secretary to a newly started Radical club.

This Whitsuntide party was perhaps the smartest of the year.

By Saturday evening over thirty people would be gathered together under the Beechleigh roof.

Josiah, though exceedingly proud and pleased at the invitation, felt nervous at the thought of the visit. Not so Mr. Toplington, who, although he knew he should probably have to blush for his master, and might get a very secondary place in the "room," still felt he would hold his own when he could let it be known what magnificent wages he received from Mr. Brown.

"A long sight more than I'd get out of any lord," he thought. "And money is money. And all classes feels it."

Theodora, on the contrary, was neither proud nor pleased. She looked forward to the visit with excitement and dread.

Hector would be there, among all these people whom she did not know. And her awakened heart had begun to tell her that she loved him wildly, and to see him could only be alternate mad joy and remorse and anguish.

It was still drizzling on the Saturday afternoon when they arrived. So tea awaited them in the great saloon which made the centre of the north side of the house. Several of the rest of the guests had come down in the same train, but they did not know them, nor did any of them trouble themselves much to speak to them on the short drive from the station. A few words, that was all, addressed to Theodora. Josiah was ignored.

Sir Patrick had always been an excellent host. His genial Irish smile, when in action, concealed the ill-tempered lines of his thin old face. He greeted his guests cordially, and made them welcome to his home.

Lady Ada had the inherited bad manners of her family, the De Baronsvilles, who had come over with the Conqueror, and when one has a _cachet_ like that there is no need to trouble one's self further. Thus, while Mildred flashed brilliant witticisms about, plain Barbara saw after the guests' tea and sugar, and if they took cream or lemon, and tiresome things like that. And as every one knew every one else, and the same party met continuously all over England, things were very gay and friendly.

Only Theodora and Josiah were completely out of it all, and several of the guests, who resented the intrusion of these strangers into their charmed circle, would take care on every opportunity to make them feel it.

Hector did not get there until half an hour later, in his automobile, which was the mode of arrival with more than two-thirds of the company.

And until the dressing-gong sounded, a continuous teuf-teuf-teuf might have been heard as, one after another, the cars whizzed up to the door.

Of course, in a troop of over thirty people, naturally some had kind hearts and good manners, but the prevailing tone of this coterie of _crme de la crme_ was one of pure selfishness and blunt and material brutality.

If you were rich and suited them, you were given a nickname probably, and were allowed to play cards with them, and lose your money for their benefit. If you were non-congenial you did not exist--that was all. You might be sitting in a chair, but they only saw it and an empty space--you did not even cumber their ground.

To do them justice, they preferred people of their own exalted station; outsiders seldom made their way into this holy of holies, however rich they were--unless, of course, they happened to be Mildred's lovers. That situation for a man held special prerogatives, and was greatly coveted by pretenders to this circle of grace.

Intellectual intelligence was not important. Some of the women of this select company had been described by an agricultural duke who had stayed there as having just enough sense to come in out of the rain.

Sir Patrick Fitzgerald occasionally departed from the strict limits of this set in the big parties--especially lately, when money was becoming scarcer, several financial friends who could put him on to good things had been included, the result being that Lady Harrowfield had not always shed the light of her countenance upon the festivities.

Lord Harrowfield drew most of his income from a great, populous manufacturing city in the north, so neither he nor his countess had need to smile at mere wealth.

And Lady Harrowfield had said, frankly, "Let me know if it is a utility party, Patrick, or for just ourselves, because if you are going to have these creatures I sha'n't come."

This time, however, she had not been so exigent. It happened to suit some other arrangements of hers to spend Whitsuntide at Beechleigh, so she consented to chaperon Morella Winmarleigh without asking for a list of the guests.

Hector had never conformed to any special set; he went here, there, and everywhere, and was welcomed by all. But somehow, until this occasion, Beechleigh had never seen him within its gates, although Lady Harrowfield had praised him, and Mildred had sighed for him in vain.

He saw the situation at a glance when he came into the saloon: Josiah and Theodora sitting together, neglected by every one but Barbara. They could not have been more than half an hour in the house, he knew, for he had found out when the trains got in.

Barbara was a good sort; he remembered now he had met her before somewhere. She had evidently taken to the new cousin; but Mildred had not.

Hitherto Mildred had been the undisputed and acknowledged beauty of every party, and she resented Theodora's presence because she was clever enough not to have any illusions upon the matter of their mutual looks. She saw Theodora was beautiful and young and charming, and had every advantage of perfect Paris clothes. Uncle Patrick had been a fool to ask her, and she must take measures to suppress her at once.

Sir Patrick, on the other hand, was very pleased with himself for having given the invitation. He had made inquiries, and found that Josiah was a man of great and solid wealth, with interests in several things which could be of particular use to himself, and he meant to obtain what he could out of him.

As for Theodora, no living man could do anything but admire her, and Sir Patrick was not an Irishman for nothing.

Hector behaved with tact; he did not at once fly to his darling, but presently she found him beside her. And the now habitual thrill ran over her when he came near.

He saw the sudden, convulsive clasp of her little hands together; he knew how he moved her, and it gave him joy.

The next batch of arrivals contained Lord Wensleydown, who showed no hesitation as to his desired destination in the saloon. He made a bee-line for Theodora, and took a low seat at her feet.

Hector, with more caution, was rather to one side. Rage surged up in him, although his common-sense told him as yet there was nothing he could openly object to in Wensleydown's behavior.

The little picture of these five people--Barbara engaging Josiah, and the two men vying with each other to please Theodora--was gall and wormwood to Mildred. Freddy Wensleydown had always been one of her most valued friends, and for Hector she had often felt she could experience a passion.

Lord Wensleydown had an immense _cachet_. He was exceedingly ugly and exceedingly smart, and was known to have quite specially attractive methods of his own in the art of pleasing beautiful ladies. He was always unfaithful, too, and they had to make particular efforts to retain him for even a week.

Hector knew him intimately, of course; they had been in the same house at Eton, and were comrades of many years' standing, and until Theodora's entrance upon the scene, Hector had always thought of him as a coarse, jolly beast of extremely good company and quaintness. But now! He had no words adequate in his vocabulary to express his opinion about him!

To Theodora he appeared an ugly little man, who reminded her of the statue of a satyr she knew in the Louvre. That was all!

At this juncture Lady Harrowfield, accompanied by Morella Winmarleigh, her lord, and one of her _mes damnes_, a certain Captain Forester, appeared upon the scene.

Their entrance was the important one of the afternoon, and Lady Ada and Sir Patrick could not do enough to greet and make them welcome.

The saloon was so large and the screens so well arranged, that for the first few seconds neither of the ladies perceived the fact of Theodora's presence. But when it burst upon them, both experienced unpleasant sensations.

Lady Harrowfield's temper was bad in any case on account of the weather, and here, on her arrival, that she should find the impertinent upstart who had made her look foolish at the Anningford luncheon, was an extra straw.

Morella felt furious. It began to dawn upon her this might be Hector's reason in coming, not herself at all; and one of those slow, internal rages which she seldom indulged in began to creep in her veins.

Thus it was that poor Theodora, all unconscious of any evil, was already surrounded by three bitter enemies--Mildred, Lady Harrowfield, and Morella Winmarleigh. It did not look as though her Whitsuntide could be going to contain much joy.

It was a good deal after six o'clock by now. Bridge-tables had already appeared, and most of the company had commenced to play. Barbara saw the look in Mildred's eye as she came across, and, ignoring Theodora quite, tried to carry off Lord Wensleydown.

"You must come, Freddy," she said. "Lady Harrowfield wants to begin her rubber."

Barbara, knowing what this move meant, and blushing for her cousin's rudeness, nervously introduced Theodora to her.

"How d' do," said Mildred, staring over her head. "Don't detain Lord Wensleydown, please, because Lady Harrowfield hates to be kept waiting."

Theodora rose and smiled, while she said to Barbara: "I am rather tired. Mayn't I go to my room for a little rest before dinner?"

"Take him, Lady Mildred, do," said Hector; "we don't want him," and he laughed gayly. His beautiful, tender angel might be a match for these people after all. At any rate, he would be at her side to protect her from their claws.

Lord Wensleydown frowned. Mildred was being a damned nuisance, he said to himself, and he insisted upon accompanying Theodora to the bottom of the great staircase, which rose to magnificent galleries in the hall adjoining the saloon.

Sir Patrick had advanced and engaged Josiah in conversation.

He knew his guests' ways and how they would boycott him, and, with a serious question like those Australian shares on the _tapis_, he was not going to have Josiah insulted and ruffled just yet.

"Don't stay up-stairs all the time," Hector had managed to whisper, while Mildred and Lord Wensleydown stood arguing; "they are sure not to dine till nine; there are two hours before you need dress, and we can certainly find some nice sitting-room to talk in."

But Theodora, with immense self-denial, had answered: "No, I want to write a long letter to papa and my sisters. I won't come down again until dinner."

And he was forced to be content with the memory of her soft smile and the evident regret in her eyes.

XXIV

Theodora was greatly interested in Beechleigh. To her the home of her fathers was full of sentiment, and the thought that her grandfather had ruled there pleased her. How she would love and cherish it were it her home now! Every one of these fine things must have some memory.

Then the pictures of as far back as she could remember came to her, and she saw again their poor lodgings in the cheap foreign towns and their often scanty fare. And with a fresh burst of love and pride in him, she remembered her father's invariable cheerfulness--cheerfulness and gayety--in such poverty! And after he had been used to--this! For all the descriptions of Captain Fitzgerald had given her no idea of the reality.

Now she knew what love meant, and could realize her mother's story. Oh, she would have acted just in the same way, too.

Dominic had been forgiven by his brother after his first wife's death, and had come back to enjoy a short spell of peace and prosperity. And who could wonder that Lady Minnie Borringdon, in her first season, and full of romance, should fall headlong in love with his wonderfully handsome face, and be only too ready to run off with him from an angry and unreasonable parent! She was a spoiled and only child who had never been crossed. Then came that fatal Derby, and the final extinction of all sympathy with the scapegrace. The Fitzgeralds had done enough for him already, and Lord Borringdon had no intention of doing anything at all, so the married lovers crept away in high disgrace, and spent a few months of bliss in a southern town, where the sun shone and the food was cheap, and there poor, pretty Minnie died, leaving Theodora a few hours old.

And now at Beechleigh Theodora looked out of her window on the north side--the southern rooms were kept for greater than she--and from there she could see a vast stretch of park, with the deer cropping the fine turf, and the lions frowning while they supported the ducal coronet over the great gates at the end of the court-yard and colonnade.

It was truly a splendid inheritance, and she glowed with pride to think she was of this house.

So she wrote a long letter to her dear ones--her sisters at Dieppe, and papa, still in Paris, and even one to Mrs. McBride. And then she read until her maid came to dress her for dinner.

Her room was a large one, and numberless modern touches of comfort brought up-to-date the early Georgian furniture and the shabby silk hangings. A room stamped with that something which the most luxurious apartments of the wealthiest millionaire can never acquire.

Josiah looked in upon her as she finished dressing. He was, he said, most pleased with everything, and if they were a little unused to such company, still nothing could be more cordial than Sir Patrick's treatment of him.

Meanwhile, on their way up to dress, Mildred had gone in to Morella's room, and the two had agreed that Mrs. Brown should be suppressed.

It was with extra displeasure Miss Winmarleigh had learned of Theodora's relationship to Sir Patrick, and that after all she could not be called a common colonial.

There was no question about the Fitzgerald and Borringdon families, unfortunately, while Morella's grandfather had been merely a coal merchant.

"I don't think she is so wonderfully pretty, do you, Mildred?" she said.

But Mildred was a clever woman, and could see with her eyes.

"Yes, I do," she answered. "Don't be such a fool as to delude yourself about that, Morella. She is perfectly lovely, and she has the most deevie Paris clothes, and Lord Bracondale is wildly in love with her."

"And apparently Freddy Wensleydown, too," snapped Morella, who was now boiling with rage.

"Well, she is not likely to enjoy herself here," said Mildred, with her vicious laugh, which showed all her splendid, sharp teeth, as she went off to dress, her head full of plans for the interloper's suppression.

First she must have a few words with Barbara. There must be none of her partisanship. Poor, timid Barbara would not dare to disobey her, she knew. That settled, she did not fear that she would be able to make Theodora suffer considerably during the five days she would be at Beechleigh.

Sir Patrick was busy with some new arrivals who had come while they were dressing, so not a soul spoke to Theodora or Josiah when they got down to the great, white drawing-room, from which immensely high mahogany doors opened into an anteroom hung with priceless tapestry and containing cabinets of rare china. From thence another set of splendid carved doors gave access to the dining-room.

Neither Lord Wensleydown or Hector was in the room at first, so there was no man even to talk to them. Lady Ada had not introduced them to any one. And there they stood: Josiah ill at ease and uncomfortable, and Theodora quite apparently unconscious of neglect, while she looked at a picture.

All the younger women were thinking to themselves: "Who are these people? We don't want any strangers here--poaching on our preserves. And what perfect clothes! and what pearls! Why on earth did Ada ask them?"

And soon the party was complete, and Theodora found herself going in to dinner with her cousin Pat, who arrived upon the scene at the very last minute, having come from Oxford by a late train.

Mildred had taken care that neither Lord Wensleydown or Hector should be anywhere near Theodora. She had secured Lord Bracondale for herself, and did her best all through the repast to fascinate him.

And while he answered gallantly and paid her the grossest compliments, she knew he was laughing in his sleeve all the time, and it made her venom rise higher and higher.

Patrick Fitzgerald, the younger, was a dissipated, vicious youth, with his mother's faded coloring and none of the Fitzgerald charm. How infinitely her father surpassed any of the family she had seen yet, Theodora thought.

She did not enjoy her dinner. The youth's conversation was not interesting. But it was not until the ladies left the dining-room that her real penance began.

It seemed as if all the women crowded to one end of the drawing-room round Lady Harrowfield, and talked and whispered to one another, not one making way for Theodora or showing any knowledge of her presence. Barbara had gone off up to her room. She was too frightened of Mildred to disobey her, and she felt she would rather not be there to see their hateful ways to the dear, little, gentle cousin whom she thought she could love so much.

Theodora subsided on a sofa, wondering to herself if these were the manners of the great world in general. She hoped not; but although no human creature could be quite happy under the circumstances, she was not greatly distressed until she distinctly caught the name of "Mr. Brown" from the woman Josiah had taken in amid a burst of laughter, and saw Mildred, with a glance at her, ostentatiously suppress the speaker, who then continued her narration in almost a whisper, amid mocking titters of mirth.

Then anger burned in Theodora's gentle soul. They were talking about Josiah, of course, and turning him into ridicule.

She wondered, what would be the best to do. She was too far away to attempt to join in the conversation, or to be even able to swear she had heard aright, although there was no doubt in her own mind about it.

So she sat perfectly still on her great sofa, her hands folded in her lap, while two bright spots of wild rose flushed her cheeks.

She did not even pick up a book. There she sat like an alabaster statue, and most of the women were conscious of the exquisitely beautiful picture she made.

They could not stand in this packed group all the time, the whole dozen or more of them, and they gradually broke up into twos and threes about the large room.

They were delightfully friendly with one another, and all seemed in the best of spirits and tempers.

Most of them had no ulterior motive in their behavior to Theodora; it was merely the feeling that they were not the hostess and responsible. It was none of their business if Ada neglected her guests, and they all knew plenty of people and did not care to enlarge their acquaintance gratuitously.

So when they came in from the dining-room more than one of the men understood the picture they saw, of the beautiful, little, strange lady seated alone, while the other women chatted together in groups.

Hector was feeling irritated and excited, and longing to get near Theodora. He guessed Lord Wensleydown would have the same desire, and had no intention of being interfered with. He felt he could not bear to spend an evening watching the little brute daring to lean over her. He should kill him, or commit some violence, he knew.

Thus prudence, which at another time would have held him--would have made him remember what was best for her among this crowd of hostile women--flew to the winds. He must go to her--must show her he loved and would protect her, and, above all, that he would permit no other man to usurp his place.

And Theodora, who had been suffering silently a miserable feeling of loneliness and neglect, felt her heart bound with joy at the sight of his loved, familiar face, and she welcomed him more warmly than she had ever done before.

"Have these demons of women been odious to you, darling?" he whispered, hardly conscious of the term of endearment he had used. "Do not mind them; it is only jealousy because you are so beautiful and young."

"They have not been anything at all," she said, softly; "they have just left me alone and kept to themselves, and--and laughed at Josiah, and that has made me very angry, because--what has he done to them?"

"I loathe them all!" said Hector. "They are hardly fit to be in the same room with you, dear queen--and if you really belonged to me I would take you away from them now--to-night."

His voice was a caress, and that sentence, "belonged to me," always made her heart beat with its pictured possibilities. Oh, how she loved him! Could anything else in the world really matter while he could sit there and she could feel his presence and hear his tender words?

And so they talked awhile, and then they looked up and surveyed the scene. Josiah had been joined by Sir Patrick, and they were earnestly conversing by the fireplace. One or two pairs sat about on the sofas; but the general company showed signs of flocking off to the bridge-tables, which were laid out in another drawing-room beyond. And the couples joined them gradually, until only Lord Wensleydown and Morella Winmarleigh remained near and watched them with mocking eyes.

Hector had never before realized that Morella could have so much expression in her face.

How could he ever have thought under any conceivable circumstances, even at the end of his life, it would be possible to marry her! How thankful he felt he had never paid her any attention, or from his behavior given color to his mother's hopes.

He remembered a fairy story he had read in his youth, where a magic power was given to the hero of discovering what beast each human being was growing into by grasping their hands. And he wondered, if the gift had been his, what he should now find was the destiny of those two in front of him!

Wensleydown, no doubt, would be a great, sensual goat and Morella a vicious mule. And the idea made him laugh as he turned to Theodora again, to feast his eyes on her pure loveliness.

The Crow, who had arrived late and been among the last to enter the drawing-room before dinner, had not yet had an opportunity of speaking to Mrs. Brown, as he had been dragged off among the first of the bridge-players.

Presently Mildred looked through the door from the room beyond and called: "Freddy and Morella, come and play; we must have two more to make up the numbers. Uncle Patrick will bring Lord Bracondale presently."

Josiah and Theodora did not count at all, it seemed!

"What intolerable insolence!" said Hector, through his teeth. "I shall not play bridge or stir from here."

And Lord Wensleydown called back: "Do give one a moment to digest one's dinner, dear Lady Mildred. Miss Winmarleigh does not want to come yet, either. We are very--interested--and happy here."

Morella tittered and played with her fan. The dull, slow rage was simmering within her. Even her vanity could not misinterpret the meaning of Hector's devotion to Mrs. Brown. He was deeply in love, of course, and she, Morella, was robbed of her hopes of being Lady Bracondale. Her usually phlegmatic nature was roused in all its narrow strength. She was like some silent, vengeful beast waiting a chance to spring.

And so the evening wore away. Sir Patrick drew Josiah into the bridge-room, and made him join one of the tables where they were waiting for a fourth--Josiah, who was a very bad player, and did not really care for cards! But luck favored him, and the woman opposite restrained the irritable things she had ready to say to him when she first perceived how he played his hand.

And all the while Hector sat by Theodora, and learned more and more of her fair, clear mind. All the thoughts she had upon every subject he found were just and quaint and in some way illuminating. It was her natural sweetness of nature which made the great charm--that quality which Mrs. McBride had remarked upon, and which every one felt sooner or later.

Nothing of the ascetic saint or goody _poseuse_. She did not walk about with a book of poems under her arm, and wear floppy clothes and talk about her own and other people's souls. She was just human and true and attractive.

Theodora had perhaps no religion at all from the orthodox point of view; but had she been a Mohommedan or a Confucian or a Buddhist, she would still have been Theodora, full of gentleness and goodness and grace.

The entire absence of vanity and self-consciousness in her prevented her from feeling hurt or ruffled even with these ill-mannered women. She thought them rude and unpleasant, but they could not really hurt her except by humiliating Josiah. Her generosity instantly fired at that.

Both she and Hector perceived that Morella and Lord Wensleydown sat there watching them for no other reason but to disconcert and tease them, and it roused a spirit of resistance in both. While this was going on they would not move.

And Hector employed the whole of his self-control to keep himself from making actual love to her, and they talked of many things, and she understood and was grateful.

Presently, apparently, Morella could stand it no longer, for she rose rather abruptly and said to Lord Wensleydown:

"Come, let us play bridge."

They went on into the other room, and Theodora and Lord Bracondale were left quite alone.

"I should like to find Josiah," said Theodora. "Shall we not go, too?"

And they also followed upon the others' heels. Lady Ada happened to be out at her table, and some tardy sense of her duties as a hostess came to her, for she crossed over to where Theodora stood by the door and made some ordinary remark about hoping it would be fine on the morrow so they could enjoy the gardens.

And while she talked and looked into the blue eyes something attracted and softened her. She was very gentle and pretty, after all, the new niece, she decided, and Mildred had been quite wrong in saying she was an upstart and must be snubbed.

Lady Ada had a nervous way of blinking her light lashes in a fashion which suggested she might suffer from headache.

To Theodora she seemed a sad woman, full of cares, and she felt a kindly pity for her and no resentment for her rudeness.

Mildred looked up, and a frown of annoyance darkened her face.

The "creature" should certainly not make a conquest of her hostess if she could help it!

It was the first time Theodora had ever been into a company of people like this, and her eyes wandered over the scene when Lady Ada had to go back to her place.

"Tell me what you are thinking of?" said Hector, in her ear.

"I was thinking," she answered, "it is so interesting to watch people's faces. It seems to me so queer a way to spend one's time, the whole of one's intelligence set upon a game of cards and a few pieces of money for hours and hours together."

"They don't look attractive, do they?" he laughed.

"No, they look haggard, and worried, and old," she said. "Even the young ones look old and watchful, and so intent and solemn."

Lady Harrowfield had been losing heavily, and a deep mauve shade glowed through all her paint. She was a bad loser, and made all at her table feel some of her chagrin and wrath. In fact, candidates for the light of her smile found it advisable to let her win when things became too unpleasant.

There was a dreary silence over the room, broken by the scoring and remarks upon the games, and those who were out wandered into the saloon beyond, where iced drinks of all sorts were awaiting the weary.

"Every one must enjoy themselves how they can, of course," said Theodora. "It is absurd to try and make any one else happy in one's own way, but oh, I hope I shall not have to pass the time like that, ever! I don't think I could bear it."

The voices became raised at the table where Josiah sat. He had made some gross mistake in the game and his partner was being fretful over it. Her complaints amounted to real rudeness when the counting began. She had lost twenty pounds on this rubber, all through his last foolish play, she let it be known.

Josiah was angry with himself and deeply humiliated. He apologized as well as he could, but to no purpose with the wrathful dame.

And Theodora slipped behind his chair, and laid her hand upon his shoulder in what was almost a caress, and said, in a sweet and playful voice:

"You are a naughty, stupid fellow, Josiah, and of course you must pay the losses of both sides to make up for being such a wicked thing," and she patted his shoulders and smiled her gentle smile at the angry lady, as though they were children playing for counters or sweets, and the twenty pounds was a nothing to her husband, as indeed it was not. Josiah would cheerfully have paid a hundred to finish the unpleasant scene.

He was intensely grateful to her--grateful for her thought for him and for her public caress.

And the lady was so surprised at the turn affairs had taken that she said no more, and, allowing him to pay without too great protest, meekly suggested another rubber. But Josiah was not to be caught again. He rose, and, saying good-night, followed his wife and Lord Bracondale into the saloon.

XXV

After the rain and gloom of the week, Sunday dawned gloriously fine. There was to be a polo match on Monday in the park, which contained an excellent ground--Patrick and his Oxford friends against a scratch team. The neighborhood would watch them with interest. But the Sunday was for rest and peace, so all the morning the company played croquet, or lay about in hammocks, and more than half of them again began bridge in the great Egyptian tent which served as an out-door lounge on the lawn. It was reached from the western side down wide steps from the terrace, and beautiful rose gardens stretched away beyond.

Theodora had spent a sleepless night. There was no more illusion left to her on the subject of her feelings. She knew that each day, each hour, she was growing more deeply to love Hector Bracondale. He absorbed her thoughts, he dominated her imagination. He seemed to mean the only thing in life. The situation was impossible, and must end in some way. How could she face the long months with Josiah down at their new home, with the feverish hopes and fears of meetings! It was too cruel, too terrible; and she could not lead such a life. She had thought in Paris it would be possible, and even afford a certain amount of quiet happiness, if they could be strong enough to remain just friends. But now she knew this was not in human nature. Sooner or later fate would land them in some situation of temptation too strong for either to resist--and then--and then--She refused to face that picture. Only she writhed as she lay there and buried her face in the fine pillows. She did not permit herself any day-dreams of what might have been. Romauld himself, as he took his vows, never fought harder to regain his soul from the keeping of Claremonde than did Theodora to suppress her love for Hector Bracondale. Towards morning, worn out with fatigue, she fell asleep, and in her dreams, released from the control of her will, she spent moments of passionate bliss in his arms, only to wake and find she must face again the terrible reality. And cruellest thought of all was the thought of Josiah.

She had so much common-sense she realized the position exactly about him. She had not married him under any false impression. There had been no question of love--she had frankly been bought, and had as frankly detested him. But his illness and suffering had appealed to her tender heart--and afterwards his generosity. He was not unselfish, but, according to his lights, he heaped her with kindness. He could not help being common and ridiculous. And he had paid with solid gold for her, gold to make papa comfortable and happy, and she must fulfil her part of the bargain and remain a faithful wife at all costs.

This visit must be the last time she should meet her love. She must tell him, implore him--he who was free and master of his life; he must go away, must promise not to follow her, must help her to do what was right and just. She had no sentimental feeling of personal wickedness now. How could it be wicked to love--to love truly and tenderly? She had not sought love; he had come upon her. It would be wicked to give way to her feelings, to take Hector for a lover; but she had no sense of being a wicked woman as things were, any more than if she had badly burned her hand and was suffering deeply from the wound; she would have considered herself wicked for having had the mischance thus to injure herself. She was intensely unhappy, and she was going to try and do what was right. That was all. And God and those kind angels who steered the barks beyond the rocks would perhaps help her.

Hector for his part, had retired to rest boiling with passion and rage, the subtle, odious insinuations of Mildred ringing in his ears. The remembrance of the menace on Morella's dull face as she had watched Theodora depart, and, above all, Wensleydown's behavior as they all said good-night: nothing for him actually to take hold of, and yet enough to convulse him with jealous fury.

Oh, if she were only his own! No man should dare to look at her like that. But Josiah had stood by and not even noticed it.

Passionate jealousy is not a good foster-parent for prudence.

The Sunday came, and with it a wild, mad longing to be near her again--never to leave her, to prevent any one else from so much as saying a word. Others besides Wensleydown had begun to experience the attraction of her beauty and charm. If considerations of wisdom should keep him from her side, he would have the anguish of seeing these others take his place, and that he could not suffer.

And as passion in a man rages higher than in the average woman, especially passion when accelerated by the knowledge of another's desire to rob it of its own, so Hector's conclusions were not so clear as Theodora's.

He dared not look ahead. All he was conscious of was the absolute determination to protect her from Wensleydown--to keep her for himself.

And fate was gathering all the threads together for an inevitable catastrophe, or so it seemed to the Crow when the long, exquisite June Sunday evening was drawing to a close and he looked back on the day.

He would have to report to Anne that the two had spent it practically together; that Morella had a sullen red look on her face which boded ill for the part she would play, when she should be asked to play some part; that Mildred had done her best to render Theodora uncomfortable and unhappy, and thus had thrown her more into Hector's protection. The other women had been indifferent or mocking or amused, and Lady Harrowfield had let it be seen she would have no mercy. Her comments had been vitriolic.

Hector and Theodora had not gone out of sight, or been any different to the others; only he had never left her, and there could be no mistaking the devotion in his face.

For the whole day Sir Patrick had more or less taken charge of Josiah. He was finding him more difficult to manipulate over money matters than he had anticipated. Josiah's vulgar, round face and snub nose gave no index to his shrewdness; with his mutton-chop whiskers and bald head, Josiah was the personification of the smug grocer.

As she went to dress for dinner it seemed to Theodora that her heart was breaking. She was only flesh and blood after all, and she, too, had felt her pulses throbbing wildly as they had walked along by the lake, when all the color and lights of the evening helped to excite her imagination and exalt her spirit. They had been almost alone, for the other pair who composed the _partie carre_ of this walk were several yards ahead of them.

Each minute she had been on the verge of imploring him to say good-bye--to leave her--to let their lives part, to try to forget, and the words froze on her lips in the passionate, unspoken cry which seemed to rise from her heart that she loved him. Oh, she loved him! And so she had not spoken.

There had been long silences, and each was growing almost to know the other's thoughts--so near had they become in spirit.

When she got to her room her knees were trembling. She fell into a chair and buried her face in her hands. She shivered as if from cold.

Josiah was almost angry with her for being so late for dinner. Theodora hardly realized with whom she went in; she was dazed and numb. She got through it somehow, and this night determined to go straight to her room rather than be treated as she had been the night before. But one of the women whom the intercourse of the day had drawn into conversation with her showed signs of friendliness as they went through the anteroom, and drew her towards a sofa to talk. She was fascinated by Theodora's beauty and grace, and wanted to know, too, just where her clothes came from, as she did not recognize absolutely the models of any of the well-known _couturires_, and they were certainly the loveliest garments worn by any one in the party.

One person draws another, and soon Theodora had three or four around her--all purring and talking frocks. And as she answered their questions with gentle frankness, she wondered what everything meant. Did any of them feel--did any of them love passionately as she did?--or were they all dolls more or less bored and getting through life? And would she, too, grow like them in time, and be able to play bridge with interest until the small hours?

Later some of the party danced in the ballroom, which was beyond the saloon the other way, and now a definite idea came to Hector as he held Theodora in his arms in the waltz. They could not possibly bear this life. Why should he not take her away--away from the smug grocer, and then they could live their life in a dream of bliss in Italy, perhaps, and later at Bracondale. He had a great position, and people soon forget nowadays.

His pulses were bounding with these wild thoughts, born of their nearness and the long hours of strain. To-morrow he would tell her of them, but to-night--they would dance.

And Theodora felt her very soul melt within her. She was worn out with conflicting emotions. She could not fight with inclination any longer. Whatever he should say she would have to listen to--and agree with. She felt almost faint. And so at the end of the first dance she managed to whisper:

"Hector, I am tired. I shall go to bed." And in truth when he looked at her she was deadly white.

She stopped by her husband.

"Josiah," she said, "will you make my excuses to Lady Ada and Uncle Patrick? I do not feel well; I am going to my room."

Hector's distress was intense. He could not carry her up in his arms as he would have wished, he could not soothe and pet and caress her, or do anything in the world but stand by and see Josiah fussing and accompanying her to the stairs and on to her room. She hardly said the word good-night to him, and her very lips were white. Wensleydown's face, as he stood with Mildred, drove him mad with its mocking leer, and if he had heard their conversation there might have been bloodshed.

Josiah returned to the saloon, and made his way to the bridge-room to Sir Patrick and his hostess; but Hector still leaned against the door.

"He'll probably go out on the terrace and walk in the night by himself," thought the Crow, who had watched the scene, "and these dear people will say he has gone to meet her, and it is a ruse her being ill. They could not let such a chance slip, if they are both absent together."

So he walked over to Hector and engaged him in conversation.

Hector would have thought of this aspect himself at another time, but to-night he was dazed with passion and pain.

"Come and smoke a cigar on the terrace, Crow," he said. "One wants a little quiet and peace sometimes."

And then the Crow looked at him with his head on one side in that wise way which had earned for him his sobriquet.

"Hector, old boy, you know these damned people here and their ways. Just keep yourself in evidence, my son," he said, as he walked away.

And Hector thanked him in his heart, and went across and asked Morella to dance.

Up in her room Theodora lay prostrate. She could reason no more--she could only sob in the dark.