Читать книгу Lady Connie - Mrs. Humphry Ward - Страница 7

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The party given at St. Hubert's on this evening in the Eights week was given in honour of a famous guest--the Lord Chancellor of the day, one of the strongest members of a strong Government, of whom St. Hubert's, which had nurtured him through his four academic years, was quite inordinately proud. It was very seldom that their great nursling was able or willing to revisit the old nest. But the head of the college, who had been in the same class-list and rowed in the same boat with the politician, was now Vice-Chancellor of the University; and the greater luminary had come to shine upon the lesser, by way of heightening the dignity of both. For the man who has outsoared his fellows likes to remind himself by contrast of his callow days, before the hungry and fighting impulses had driven him down--a young eaglet--upon the sheepfolds of law and politics; while to the majority of mankind, even to-day, hero-worship, when it is not too exacting, is agreeable.

So all Oxford had been bidden. The great hall of St. Hubert's, with its stately portraits and its emblazoned roof, had been adorned with flowers and royally lit up. From the hills round Oxford the "line of festal light" made by its Tudor windows, in which gleamed the escutcheons of three centuries, could have been plainly seen. The High Street was full of carriages, and on the immaculate grass of the great quadrangle, groups of the guests, the men in academic costume, the women in the airiest and gayest of summer dresses, stood to watch the arrivals. The evening was clear and balmy; moonrise and dying day disputed the sky; and against its pale blue still scratched over with pale pink shreds and wisps of cloud, the grey college walls, battlemented and flecked with black, rose warmed and transfigured by that infused and golden summer in which all, Oxford lay bathed. Through open gateways there were visions of green gardens, girdled with lilacs and chestnuts; and above the quadrangle towered the crocketed spire of St. Mary's, ethereally wrought, it seemed, in ebony and silver, the broad May moon behind it. Within the hall, the guests were gathering fast. The dais of the high table was lit by the famous candelabra bequeathed to the college under Queen Anne; a piano stood ready, and a space had been left for the college choir who were to entertain the party. In front of the dais in academic dress stood the Vice-Chancellor, a thin, silver-haired man, with a determined mouth, such as befitted the champion of a hundred orthodoxies; and beside him his widowed sister, a nervous and rather featureless lady who was helping him to receive. The guest of the evening had not yet appeared.

Mr. Sorell, in a master's gown, stood talking with a man, also in a master's gown, but much older than himself, a man with a singular head--both flat and wide--scanty reddish hair, touched with grey, a massive forehead, pale blue eyes, and a long pointed chin. Among the bright colours of so many of the gowns around him--the yellow and red of the doctors of law, the red and black of the divines, the red and white of the musicians--this man's plain black was conspicuous. Every one who knew Oxford knew why this eminent scholar and theologian had never become a doctor of divinity. The University imposes one of her few remaining tests on her D.D's; Mr. Wenlock, Master of Beaumont, had never been willing to satisfy it, so he remained undoctored. When he preached the University sermon he preached in the black gown; while every ambitious cleric who could put a thesis together could flaunt his red and black in the Vice-Chancellor's procession on Sundays in the University church. The face was one of mingled irony and melancholy, and there came from it sometimes the strangest cackling laugh.

"Well, you must show me this phoenix," he was saying in a nasal voice to Sorell, who had been talking eagerly. "Young women of the right sort are rare just now."

"What do you call the right sort, Master?"

"Oh, my judgment doesn't count. I only ask to be entertained."

"Well, talk to her of Rome, and see if you are not pleased."

The Master shrugged his shoulders.

"They can all do it--the clever sort. They know too much about the Forum. They make me wish sometimes that Lanciani had never been born."

Sorell laughed.

"This girl is not a pedant."

"I take your word. And of course I remember her father. No pedantry there. And all the scholarship that could be possibly expected from an earl. Ah, is this she?"

For in the now crowded hall, filled with the chatter of many voices, a group was making its way from the doorway, on one member of which many curious eyes had been already turned. In front came Mrs. Hooper, spectacled, her small nose in air, the corners of her mouth sharply drawn down. Then Dr. Ewen, grey-haired, tall and stooping; then Alice, pretty, self-conscious, provincial, and spoilt by what seemed an inherited poke; and finally a slim and stately young person in white satin, who carried her head and her long throat with a remarkable freedom and self-confidence. The head was finely shaped, and the eyes brilliant; but in the rest of the face the features were so delicate, the mouth, especially, so small and subtle, as to give a first impression of insignificance. The girl seemed all eyes and neck, and the coils of brown hair wreathed round the head were disproportionately rich and heavy. The Master observing her said to himself--"No beauty!" Then she smiled--at Sorell apparently, who was making his way towards her--and the onlooker hurriedly suspended judgment. He noticed also that no one who looked at her could help looking again; and that the nervous expression natural to a young girl, who realises that she is admired but that policy and manners forbid her to show any pleasure in the fact, was entirely absent.

"She is so used to all her advantages that she forgets them," thought the Master, adding with an inward smile--"but if we forgot them--perhaps that would be another matter! Yes--she is like her mother--but taller."

For on that day ten years earlier, when Ella Risborough had taken Oxford by storm, she and Lord Risborough had found time to look in on the Master for twenty minutes, he and Lord Risborough having been frequent correspondents on matters of scholarship for some years. And Lady Risborough had chattered and smiled her way through the Master's lonely house--he had only just been appointed head of his college and was then unmarried--leaving a deep impression.

"I must make friends with her," he thought, following Ella Risborough's daughter with his eyes. "There are some gaps to fill up."

He meant in the circle of his girl protégées. For the Master had a curious history, well known in Oxford. He had married a cousin of his own, much younger than himself; and after five years they had separated, for reasons undeclared. She was now dead, and in his troubled blue eyes there were buried secrets no one would ever know. But under what appeared to a stranger to be a harsh, pedantic exterior the Master carried a very soft heart and an invincible liking for the society of young women. Oxford about this time was steadily filling with girl students, who were then a new feature in its life. The Master was a kind of queer patron saint among them, and to a chosen three or four, an intimate mentor and lasting friend. His sixty odd years, and the streaks of grey in his red straggling locks, his European reputation as a scholar and thinker, his old sister, and his quiet house, forbade the slightest breath of scandal in connection with these girl-friendships. Yet the girls to whom the Master devoted himself, whose essays he read, whose blunders he corrected, whose schools he watched over, and in whose subsequent love affairs he took the liveliest interest, were rarely or never plain to look upon. He chose them for their wits, but also for their faces. His men friends observed it with amusement. The little notes he wrote them, the birthday presents he sent them--generally some small worn copy of a French or Latin classic--his coveted invitations, or congratulations, were all marked by a note of gallantry, stately and old-fashioned like the furniture of his drawing-room, but quite different from anything he ever bestowed upon the men students of his college.

Of late he had lost two of his chief favourites. One, a delicious creature, with a head of auburn hair and a real talent for writing verse, had left Oxford suddenly to make a marriage so foolish that he really could not forgive her or put up with her intolerable husband; and the other, a muse, with the brow of one and the slenderest hand and foot, whom he and others were hopefully piloting towards a second class at least--possibly a first--in the Honour Classical School, had broken down in health, so that her mother and a fussy doctor had hurried her away to a rest-cure in Switzerland, and thereby slit her academic life and all her chances of fame. Both had been used to come--independently--for the Master was in his own, way far too great a social epicure to mix his pleasures--to tea on Sundays; to sit on one side of a blazing fire, while the Master sat on the other, a Persian cat playing chaperon on the rug between, and the book-lined walls of the Master's most particular sanctum looking down upon them; while in the drawing-room beyond, Miss Wenlock, at the tea-table, sat patiently waiting till her domestic god should declare the seance over, allow her to make tea, and bring in the young and honoured guest. And now both charmers had vanished from the scene and had left no equals behind. The Master, who possessed the same sort of tact in training young women that Lord Melbourne showed in educating the girl-Queen, was left without his most engaging occupation.

Ah!--that good fellow, Sorell, was bringing her up to him.

"Master, Lady Constance would like to be introduced to you."

The Master was immensely flattered. Why should she wish to be introduced to such an old fogey? But there she was, smiling at him.

"You knew my father. I am sure you did!"

His elderly heart was touched, his taste captured at once. Sorell had engineered it all perfectly. His description of the girl had fired the Master; and his sketch of the Master in the girl's ear, as a kind of girlhood's arbiter, had amused and piqued her. "Yes, do introduce me! Will he ever ask me to tea? I should be so alarmed!"

It was all settled in a few minutes. Sunday was to see her introduction to the Master's inner circle, which met in summer, not between books and a blazing fire, but in the small college garden hidden amid the walls of Beaumont. Sorell was to bring her. The Master did not even go through the form of inviting either Mrs. Hooper or Miss Hooper. In all such matters he was a chartered libertine and did what he pleased.

Then he watched her in what seemed something of a triumphal progress through the crowded hall. He saw the looks of the girl students from the newly-organised women's colleges--as she passed--a little askance and chill; he watched a Scotch metaphysical professor, with a fiery face set in a mass of flaming hair and beard, which had won him the nickname from his philosophical pupils of "the devil in a mist," forcing an introduction to her; he saw the Vice-Chancellor graciously unbending, and man after man come up among the younger dons to ask Sorell to present them. She received it all with a smiling and nonchalant grace, perfectly at her ease, it seemed, and ready to say the right thing to young and old. "It's the training they get--the young women of her sort--that does it," thought the Master. "They are in society from their babyhood. Our poor, battered aristocracy--the Radicals have kicked away all its natural supports, and left it dans l'air; but it can still teach manners and the art to please. The undergraduates, however, seem shy of her."

For although among the groups of men, who stood huddled together mostly at the back of the room, many eyes were turned upon the newcomer, no one among them approached her. She held her court among the seniors, as no doubt, thought the Master, she had been accustomed to do from the days of her short frocks. He envisaged the apartment in the Palazzo Barberini whereof the fame had often reached Oxford, for the Risboroughs held open house there for the English scholar and professor on his travels. He himself had not been in Rome for fifteen years, and had never made the Risboroughs' acquaintance in Italy. But the kind of society which gathers round the English peer of old family who takes an apartment in Rome or Florence for the winter was quite familiar to him--the travelling English men and women of the same class, diplomats of all nations, high ecclesiastics, a cardinal or two, the heads of the great artistic or archæological schools, Americans, generals, senators, deputies--with just a sprinkling of young men. A girl of this girl's age and rank would have many opportunities, of course, of meeting young men, in the free and fascinating life of the Roman spring, but primarily her business in her mother's salon would have been to help her mother, to make herself agreeable to the older men, and to gather her education--in art, literature, and politics--as a coming woman of the world from their talk. The Master could see her smiling on a monsignore, carrying tea to a cardinal, or listening to the Garibaldian tales of some old veteran of the Risorgimento.

"It is an education--of its own kind," he thought. "Is it worth more or less than other kinds?"

And he looked round paternally on some of the young girl students then just penetrating Oxford; fresh, pleasant faces--little positive beauty--and on many the stamp, already prematurely visible, of the anxieties of life for those who must earn a livelihood. Not much taste in dress, which was often clumsy and unbecoming; hair, either untidy, or treated as an enemy, scraped back, held in, the sole object being to take as little time over it as possible; and, in general, the note upon them all of an educated and thrifty middle-class. His feelings, his sympathies, were all with them. But the old gallant in him was stirred by the tall figure in white satin, winding its graceful way through the room and conquering as it went.

"Ah--now that fellow, Herbert Pryce, has got hold of her, of course! If ever there was a climber!--But what does Miss Hooper say?"

And retreating to a safe corner the Master watched with amusement the flattering eagerness with which Mr. Pryce, who was a fellow of his own college, was laying siege to the newcomer. Pryce was rapidly making a great name for himself as a mathematician. "And is a second-rate fellow, all the same," thought the Master, contemptuously, being like Uncle Ewen a classic of the classics. But the face of little Alice Hooper, which he caught from time to time, watching--with a strained and furtive attention--the conversation between Pryce and her cousin, was really a tragedy; at least a tragi-comedy. Some girls are born to be supplanted!

But who was it Sorell was, introducing to her now?--to the evident annoyance of Mr. Pryce, who must needs vacate the field. A striking figure of a youth! Golden hair, of a wonderful ruddy shade, and a clear pale face; powerfully though clumsily made; and with a shy and sensitive expression.

The Master turned to enquire of a Christ Church don who had come up to speak to him.

"Who is that young man with a halo like the 'Blessed Damosel'?"

"Talking to Lady Constance Bledlow? Oh, don't you know? He is Sorell's protégé, Radowitz, a young musician--and poet!--so they say. Sorell discovered him in Paris, made great friends with him, and then persuaded him to come and take the Oxford musical degree. He is at Marmion, where the dons watch over him. But they say he has been abominably ragged by the rowdy set in college--led by that man Falloden. Do you know him?"

"The fellow who got the Ireland last year?"

The other nodded.

"As clever and as objectionable as they make 'em! Ah, here comes our great man!"

For amid a general stir, the Lord Chancellor had made his entrance, and was distributing greetings, as he passed up the hall, to his academic contemporaries and friends. He was a tall, burly man, with a strong black head and black eyes under bushy brows, combined with an infantile mouth and chin, long and happily caricatured in all the comic papers. But in his D.C.L. gown he made a very fine appearance; assembled Oxford was proud of him as one of the most successful of her sons; and his progress toward the dais was almost royal.

Suddenly, his voice--a famous voix d'or, well known in the courts and in Parliament--was heard above the general buzz. It spoke in astonishment and delight.

"Lady Constance! where on earth have you sprung from? Well, this is a pleasure!"

And Oxford looked on amused while its distinguished guest shook a young lady in white by both hands, asking eagerly a score of questions, which he would hardly allow her to answer. The young lady too was evidently pleased by the meeting; her face had flushed and lit up; and the bystanders for the first time thought her not only graceful and picturesque, but positively handsome.

"Ewen!" said Mrs. Hooper angrily in her husband's ear, "why didn't Connie tell us she knew Lord Glaramara! She let me talk about him to her--and never said a word!--a single word!"

Ewen Hooper shrugged his shoulders.

"I'm sure I don't know, my dear."

Mrs. Hooper turned to her daughter who had been standing silent and neglected beside her, suffering, as her mother well knew, torments of wounded pride and feeling. For although Herbert Pryce had been long since dismissed by Connie, he had not yet returned to the side of the eldest Miss Hooper.

"I don't like such ways," said Mrs. Hooper, with sparkling eyes. "It was ill-bred and underhanded of Connie not to tell us at once--I shall certainly speak to her about it!"

"It makes us look such fools," said Alice, her mouth pursed and set. "I told Mr. Pryce that Connie knew no one to-night, except Mr. Sorell and Mr. Falloden."

The hall grew more crowded; the talk more furious. Lord Glaramara insisted, with the wilfulness of the man who can do as he pleases, that Constance Bledlow--whoever else came and went--should stay beside him.

"You can't think what I owed to her dear people in Rome three years ago!" he said to the Vice-Chancellor. "I adored her mother! And Constance is a charming child. She and I made great friends. Has she come to live in Oxford for a time? Lucky Oxford! What--with the Hoopers? Don't know 'em. I shall introduce her to some of my particular allies."

Which he did in profusion, so that Constance found herself bewildered by a constant stream of new acquaintances--fellows, professors, heads of colleges--of various ages and types, who looked at her with amused and kindly eyes, talked to her for a few pleasant minutes and departed, quite conscious that they had added a pebble to the girl's pile and delighted to do it.

"It is your cousin, not the Lord Chancellor, who is the guest of the evening!" laughed Herbert Pryce, who had made his way back at last to Alice Hooper. "I never saw such a success!"

Alice tossed her head in a petulant silence; and a madrigal by the college choir checked any further remarks from Mr. Pryce. After the madrigal came a general move for refreshments, which were set out in the college library and in the garden. The Lord Chancellor must needs offer his arm to his host's sister, and lead the way. The Warden followed, with the wife of the Dean of Christ Church, and the hall began to thin. Lord Glaramara looked back, smiling and beckoning to Constance, as though to say--"Don't altogether desert me!"

But a voice--a tall figure--interposed--

"Lady Constance, let me take you into the garden? It's much nicer than upstairs."

A slight shiver ran, unseen, through the girl's frame. She wished to say no; she tried to say no. And instead she looked up--haughty, but acquiescent.

"Very well."

And she followed Douglas Falloden through the panelled passage outside the hall leading to the garden. Sorell, who had hurried up to find her, arrived in time to see her disappearing through the lights and shadows of the moonlit lawn.

"We can do this sort of thing pretty well, can't we? It's banal because it happens every year, and because it's all mixed up with salmon mayonnaise, and cider-cup--and it isn't banal, because it's Oxford!"

Constance sat in the shadow of a plane-tree with Falloden at her feet

Constance was sitting under the light shadow of a plane-tree, not yet fully out; Falloden was stretched on the grass at her feet. Before her ran a vast lawn which had taken generations to make; and all round it, masses of flowering trees, chestnuts, lilacs, laburnums, now advancing, now receding, made inlets or promontories of the grass, turned into silver by the moonlight. At the furthest edge, through the pushing pyramids of chestnut blossom and the dim drooping gold of the laburnums, could be seen the bastions and battlements of the old city wall, once a fighting reality, now tamed into the mere ornament and appendage of this quiet garden. Over the trees and over the walls rose the spires and towers of a wondrous city; while on the grass, or through the winding paths disappearing into bosky distances, flickered white dresses, and the slender forms of young men and maidens. A murmur of voices rose and fell on the warm night air; the sound of singing--the thin sweetness of boyish notes--came from the hall, whose decorated windows, brightly lit, shone out over the garden.

"It's Oxford--and it's Brahms," said Constance. "I seem to have known it all before in music: the trees--the lawn--the figures--appearing and disappearing--the distant singing--"

She spoke in a low, dreamy tone, her chin propped on her hand. Nothing could have been, apparently, quieter or more self-governed than her attitude. But her inner mind was full of tumult; resentful memory; uneasy joy; and a tremulous fear, both of herself and of the man at her feet. And the man knew it, or guessed it. He dragged himself a little nearer to her on the grass.

"Why didn't you tell me when you were coming?"

The tone was light and laughing.

"I owe you no account of my actions," said the girl quickly.

"We agreed to be friends."

"No! We are not friends." She spoke with suppressed violence, and breaking a twig from the tree overshadowing her, she threw it from her, as though the action were a relief.

He sat up, looking up into her face, his hands clasped round his knees.

"That means you haven't forgiven me?"

"It means that I judge and despise you," she said passionately; "and that it was not an attraction to me to find you here--quite the reverse!"

"Yet here you are--sitting with me in this garden--and you are looking delicious! That dress becomes you so--you are so graceful--so exquisitely graceful. And you never found a more perfect setting than this place--these lawns and trees--and the old college walls. Oxford was waiting for you, and you for Oxford. Are you laughing at me?"

"Naturally!"

"I could rave on by the hour if you would listen to me."

"We have both something better to do--thank goodness! May I ask if you are doing any work?"

He laughed.

"Ten hours a day. This is my first evening out since March. I came to meet you."

Constance bowed ironically. Then for the first time, since their conversation began, it might have been seen that she had annoyed him.

"Friends are not allowed to doubt each other's statements!" he said with animation. "You see I still persist that you allowed me that name, when--you refused me a better. As to my work, ask any of my friends. Talk to Meyrick. He is a dear boy, and will tell you anything you like. He and I 'dig' together in Beaumont Street. My schools are now only three weeks off. I work four hours in the morning. Then I play till six--and get in another six hours between then and 1 a.m."

"Wonderful!" said Constance coolly. "Your ways at Cannes were different. It's a mercy there's no Monte Carlo within reach."

"I play when I play, and work when I work!" he said with emphasis. "The only thing to hate and shun always--is moderation."

"And yet you call yourself a classic! Well, you seem to be sure of your First. At least Uncle Ewen says so."

"Ewen Hooper? He is a splendid fellow--a real Hellenist. He and I get on capitally. About your aunt--I am not so sure."

"Nobody obliges you to know her," was the tranquil reply.

"Ah!--but if she has the keeping of you! Are you coming to tea with me and my people? I have got a man in college to lend me his rooms. My mother and sister will be up for two nights. Very inconsiderate of them--with my schools coming on--but they would do it. Thursday?--before the Eights? Won't my mother be chaperon enough?"

"Certainly. But it only puts off the evil day."

"When I must grovel to Mrs. Hooper?--if I am to see anything of you? Splendid! You are trying to discipline me again--as you did at Cannes!"

In the semidarkness she could see the amusement in his eyes. Her own feeling, in its mingled weakness and antagonism, was that of the feebler wrestler just holding his ground, and fearing every moment to be worsted by some unexpected trick of the game. She gave no signs of it, however.

"I tried, and I succeeded!" she said, as she rose. "You found out that rudeness to my friends didn't answer! Shall we go and get some lemonade? Wasn't that why you brought me here? I think I see the tent."

They walked on together. She seemed to see--exultantly--that she had both angered and excited him.

"I am never rude," he declared. "I am only honest! Only nobody, in this mealy-mouthed world, allows you to be honest; to say and do exactly what represents you. But I shall not be rude to anybody under your wing. Promise me to come to tea, and I will appear to call on your aunt and behave like any sucking dove."

Constance considered it.

"Lady Laura must write to Aunt Ellen."

"Of course. Any other commands?"

"Not at present."

"Then let me offer some humble counsels in return. I beg you not to make friends with that red-haired poseur I saw you talking to in the hall."

"Mr. Radowitz!--the musician? I thought him delightful! He is coming to play to me to-morrow."

"Ah, I thought so!" said Falloden wrathfully. "He is an impossible person. He wears a frilled shirt, scents himself, and recites his own poems when he hasn't been asked. And he curries favour--abominably--with the dons. He is a smug--of the first water. There is a movement going on in college to suppress him. I warn you I may not be able to keep out of it."

"He is an artist!" cried Constance. "You have only to look at him, to talk to him, to see it. And artists are always persecuted by stupid people. But you are not stupid!"

"Yes, I am, where poseurs are concerned," said Falloden coldly. "I prefer to be. Never mind. We won't excite ourselves. He is not worth it. Perhaps he'll improve--in time. But there is another man I warn you against--Mr. Herbert Pryce."

"A great friend of my cousins'," said Constance mockingly.

"I know. He is always flirting with the eldest girl. It is a shame; for he will never marry her. He wants money and position, and he is so clever he will get them. He is not a gentleman, and he rarely tells the truth. But he is sure to make up to you. I thought I had better tell you beforehand."

"My best thanks! You breathe charity!"

"No--only prudence. And after my schools I throw my books to the dogs, and I shall have a fortnight more of term with nothing to do except--are you going to ride?" he asked her abruptly. "You said at Cannes that you meant to ride when you came to Oxford."

"My aunt doesn't approve."

"As if that would stop you! I can tell you where you can get a horse--a mare that would just suit you. I know all the stables in Oxford. Wait till we meet on Thursday. Would you care to ride in Lathom Woods? (He named a famous estate near Oxford.) I have a permit, and could get you one. They are relations of mine."

Constance excused herself, but scarcely with decision. Her plans, she said, must depend upon her cousins. Falloden smiled and dropped the subject for the moment. Then, as they moved on together through the sinuous ways of the garden, flooded with the scent of hawthorns and lilacs, towards the open tent crowded with folk at the farther end, there leapt in both the same intoxicating sense of youth and strength, the same foreboding of passion, half restlessness, and half enchantment. …

"I looked for you everywhere," said Sorell, as he made his way to Constance through the crowd of departing guests in the college gateway. "Where did you hide yourself? The Lord Chancellor was sad not to say good-bye to you."

Constance summoned an answering tone of regret.

"How good of him! I was only exploring the garden--with Mr. Falloden."

At the name, there was a quick and stiffening change in Sorell's face.

"You knew him before? Yes--he told me. A queer fellow--very able. They say he'll get his First. Well--we shall meet at the Eights and then we'll make plans. Goodnight."

He smiled on her, and went his way, ruminating uncomfortably as he walked back to his college along the empty midnight streets. Falloden? It was to be hoped there was nothing in that! How Ella Risborough would have detested the type! But there was much that was not her mother in the daughter. He vowed to himself that he would do his small best to watch over Ella Risborough's child.

There was little or no conversation in the four-wheeler that bore the Hooper party home. Mrs. Hooper and Alice were stiffly silent, while the Reader chaffed Constance a little about her successes of the evening. But he, too, was sleepy and tired, and the talk dropped. As they lighted their bedroom candles in the hall, Mrs. Hooper said to her niece, in her thin, high tone, mincing and coldly polite:

"I think it would have been better, Constance, if you had told us you knew Lord Glaramara. I don't wish to find fault, but such--such concealments--are really very awkward!"

Constance opened her eyes. She could have defended herself easily. She had no idea that her aunt was unaware of the old friendship between her parents and Lord Glaramara, who was no more interesting to her personally than many others of their Roman habitués, of whom the world was full. But she was too preoccupied to spend any but the shortest words on such a silly thing.

"I'm sorry, Aunt Ellen. I really didn't understand."

And she went up to bed, thinking only of Falloden; while Alice followed her, her small face pinched and weary, her girlish mind full of pain.