Innocent

CHAPTER XXVII.

MRS. FREDERICK.

The evening of the day on which the above incidents occurred was that of a periodical banquet, feared and staved off as long as possible by all the Eastwoods. Since the time of Frederick’s marriage it had been considered necessary that he and his wife should be invited to dinner formally from time to time, in order that it might be visible to the world and “Mrs. Frederick’s family” that full honour was done to her. Nelly and Mrs. Eastwood had made a great effort to adopt Amanda, if not into their hearts, at least into their society, after the terrible event was actually accomplished which made her their daughter and sister. But I need not say that this was a very hopeless attempt, and that as familiar companionship gradually failed between people who resembled each other so little, the periodical dinner gradually gained importance as the only practicable way of keeping up “a proper intercourse.” Mrs. Frederick had come to London with very great ideas. She had hoped for nothing less than an entry into the fashionable world, and all the glory of associating with lords and ladies. The visits she received from the ladies of Mrs. Eastwood’s circle disgusted and disappointed her. What! Marry and come to London for no better purpose than to be visited by ladies from the suburbs, who lived there always—ladies with no better title than Mrs.; some of them, like Mrs. Eastwood herself, paying their visits in flys, or in the plainest of little broughams, no better than a fly. Visions of splendid vehicles, with embroidered hammercloths and celestial flunkeys, had entranced Amanda’s imagination. The Eastwoods were county people at Sterborne—they were a baronet’s family—magnates in the neighbourhood; and the beauty had no means of realizing that a country baronet is no great personage in London, much less a country baronet’s cousin. The disappointment was bitter, and she was not the woman to conceal it. Gradually, however, she fell into a kind of society, or to use her own words, formed a circle, which pleased her well enough. This consisted chiefly of the men who had been her father’s visitors in former days, several of whom had handles to their names. They were not as a general rule much credit to know, but they suited Amanda better than the Mrs. Everards, and other humdrum persons, who had welcomed her first to her new position. When she had yawned through one or two dinner parties, painfully got up for Mrs. Eastwood’s sake, to make the best of a bad business, by the society which frequented The Elms, Amanda had declared her determination to have nothing more to do with “Frederick’s old-fashioned set.” They were not much in sympathy with her, to tell the truth; and dinners at Richmond, with Lord Hunterston and his kind in attendance, were a great deal more to her liking. Amanda held, in fact, the opinion which poor little Innocent had expressed innocently as a reflection of the sentiments of her father. She disliked women. They were all jealous of her beauty, she believed; they were her critics or her rivals—never her friends; spite was their chief characteristic; envy their main sentiment. The men of Amanda’s set were of her opinion—so are a great many clever persons, it must be allowed—at least, in books. Therefore it is not to be supposed that Amanda looked forward with more distinct gratification than that felt by the ladies at The Elms to her periodical dinner. She put on her handsomest dresses and her finest talk to dazzle them, and she made it a subject for her peculiar wit for some time before and after.

“I am going to dine with my old mother-in-law,” she would say to the young men, few in number at this season of the year, who filled her little drawing-room in the afternoon. “Such a set of old guys she has about her, to be sure. Why she should insist upon having me, I can’t imagine, for she hates me, of course. But duty before everything. I shall have to go.”

“Why should you have to go?” said one. “And by Jove, I’ll come to-morrow to hear all about it!” said another. The lively sympathy of this chorus did Mrs. Frederick good.

“Oh, you shall hear the whole account,” she said. “It’s like Noah’s Ark. There is the regular clergyman, and some old fogies of lawyers, and a horrible man called John Vane——”

“Oh, come, Mrs. Eastwood, John Vane’s no end of a good fellow. I know him as well as I know myself,” said one of the interlocutors.

“That may be—but he ain’t a good fellow at The Elms. The Elms! only fancy. Doesn’t it sound like Hampstead Heath? He is related to the mad girl I told you of—and he’s after my prim little puss of a sister-in-law, in a quiet way; for she is engaged, if you please, and oh! does give herself such airs on the strength of it. But the women! You should see the women! In old silks and satins that belonged to their grandmothers, with turbans and I don’t know what—all looking as if they could eat me.”

“That, of course,” said one of Amanda’s court, with a laugh.

“I suppose so,” said Mrs. Frederick, giggling slightly in response; “and to hear them lay down the law! what one should do, and what one should not do. And, then, mamma-in-law herself! But there are some things too dreadful to be talked about. Mothers-in-law are one of these things. Tell me about Hurlingham, or something pleasant. If I go on thinking of what’s before me, I shall die.”

Thus it will be seen the dispositions of Mrs. Frederick were little likely to promote harmony. On the other hand, Mrs. Eastwood and Nelly had their private conference, which was not much more hopeful.

“Try to avoid unpleasant subjects,” said Mrs. Eastwood. “Talk of Brighton, and that sort of thing, Nelly. Or stay, as they have been abroad for their holiday, get her to talk about Switzerland. That must be a safe subject. She will think it is fine to talk about Switzerland, as she was never there before; and keep her off her grievances, if possible. Frederick looks so black when she begins; poor Frederick, how he is changed!”

Nelly made no response on this point, for she was not so deeply convinced as was her mother that Frederick had been a great deal “nicer” before he was married. This is, I am sorry to say, a very common opinion among a man’s female relations. But Nelly had not been so much deluded about the “niceness” of her brother in his previous state as many sisters happily are. She maintained a prudent silence so far as Frederick was concerned.

“If I try to keep her off her grievances, you must try to keep her off Innocent, mamma,” said Nelly; and this was the bargain with which they concluded. I am not sure that Mrs. Eastwood was quite right in her selection of guests to meet Mrs. Frederick. Had she invited Sir Alexis, that imposing person might have kept her in order; but what did Amanda care for Sir Timothy Doul, who had been Governor of Barbadoes, or for Mr. Parchemin, though he was a great lawyer?—any more than she would have done for great poets and such people, in distinction to the really great, the dukes and countesses for whom her soul longed. Sir Timothy and Lady Doul were the only strangers present on this occasion, for, as the reader is aware, Mr. Parchemin was one of Mrs. Eastwood’s councillors. Ernest Molyneux had failed at the last moment, and had been hurriedly replaced by Mr. Vane, who was always ready to do a kind action, and who of late had been a great deal about The Elms. Molyneux objected much to meet Mrs. Frederick. Vane objected to nothing. Perhaps the difference lay in the fact that one of the men had attained all he wanted, and was no longer anxious about Nelly’s favour, but considered it her duty to please him; whereas the other, foreseeing the possibility of a catastrophe, felt himself (though despairingly) on his promotion, and deemed it wise to be on the spot, in order that if anything offered he might have full advantage of the chance. This, I fear, was Mr. Vane’s reason for keeping so much in the foreground. It is impossible to describe the use he was at The Elms. He was never out of temper, and Ernest was very often out of temper. He was satisfied with all the arrangements made by the ladies, and Ernest found fault continually. Nelly, with a guilty sense of treachery in her mind, had felt herself turn to the man who was “a connexion” for rest and sympathy, when she could not turn to her lover. This was a very terrible state of affairs, but no one was quite conscious how far it had gone.

Mrs. Frederick made her appearance in a dress of pink silk, with a train almost a yard long. Her beautiful shoulders were bare, and her arms. Her hair was dressed in the most elaborate way which an excited hairdresser could devise; a soft little curling fringe of it half covered her low but white forehead, and great golden billows rose above, increasing at once her height and the size of her head. All the glow of colour, all the roundness of outline, all the flush of physical beauty which had maddened Frederick, remained undimmed and undiminished; but Frederick stalked in behind her like a black shadow, gloomy, disappointed, dismal, more like Charles I. than ever. Wherever he went, all the ladies were sorry for Frederick. Poor fellow, he had made a mistake in his marriage, and how he felt it! He writhed when his Amanda began to talk fine, and to display her knowledge of great people. He looked at her morosely whenever she opened her lips, and followed her into the room with a gloom upon his countenance which here he did not think it necessary to conceal. His mother at least had forgiven all the faults that Frederick had ever committed against her, in consideration of his present sufferings. The fact that he was discontented with the toy for which he had paid so dear (and for which, alas! Mrs. Eastwood, too, was paying dear), seemed to cover all his previous sins. Had he put a better face upon it, and endured cheerfully the doom which he had brought upon himself, his mother, and womankind in general, would have thought less well of him; they would have concluded that he was happy, and would have despised him; but they were sorry for him now, and elevated him to the rank of a martyr, in consideration of his gloom and disgust. Nelly was almost the only rebel against this universal tenderness.

“He married to please himself,” said Nelly; “he ought to make the best of it now, and not the worst. It is mean of him to pose in this gloomy way. I should like to shake him,” cried the impetuous girl.

“Nelly, don’t be so hard-hearted,” her mother would say, with piteous looks.

Thus Frederick was generally successful in his gloom—at least among the feminine half of society. He came in behind Amanda’s train, which he looked at with disgust, as it curled about his foot. Nevertheless he was pleased to see that his gorgeous wife made an impression on the old fogies who sat by his mother’s side—Sir Timothy and Lady Doul.

“I am pretty well, thank you,” said Amanda, “as well as it is possible to be in London at this time of the year; when all one’s friends are gone, and when the place is full of outlandish country-looking people, or strange fishes from abroad, it is such a bore to stay in London. You don’t feel it out here in the suburbs—you have your little society of your own, which pays no attention to the season. I am sure I wish I was as well off.”

“Dear me!” said old Lady Doul, with the admiration and wonder of ignorance. “I think London is always so exciting. I could not bear too much of it. Sir Timothy and I were just saying what a racket it was. To be sure we are living in Half-Moon Street, in the centre of everything,” the old lady added with simple pride. Her cap had been made in Barbadoes, and so had her gown; she had not been “in town” for more than twenty years.

Amanda gave her a stare in passing. She was never civil to women.

“I should think you would find the desert lively if you think Half-Moon Street exciting,” she said. “Give me a nice country house choke full of people, with luncheons at the cover-side, and dances in the evening, and all sorts of fun going on. But when one marries a poor clerk in a public office, one has to put up with many things,” she went on, turning to old Sir Timothy, who, startled and embarrassed, did not know what to reply.

“Oh, ah, oh, of course,” said the old man; “very good—very good. Everybody suffers from a penurious government. I assure you, my dear young lady, the fine young fellows one meets out in the world—attachés, and such like—wasting their time, as I always tell them, upon twopence-halfpenny a year. Why, I had a secretary once, a young man of excellent family——”

“But I hope you did not allow him to marry,” said Amanda. “It is always upon the wives that the hardship falls. If you saw the little hole of a place we have to live in—and back to London in October—only fancy! I wonder what we are supposed to be made of. The men are much better off with their clubs, and that sort of thing. They know at least all that is going on; they hear the gossip, and see every stray creature there is to see; but as for us, poor ladies——”

“Tell me how far you went in Switzerland, Amanda,” said Nelly. “You must have enjoyed that. We have only been once among the mountains; but what a pleasure it was!—did you go to——? But I remember Frederick wrote you had changed your minds——”

Nelly spoke with the artificiality of a made-up digression, and Sir Timothy thought her but a poor little shadowy thing by the side of her beautiful sister-in-law.

“Oh, I never go into raptures I don’t feel,” said Amanda. “I don’t care twopence for Switzerland; I hate mountains; I would rather go to Margate any day—that is, if nothing better were to be had,” she added, remembering that Margate was hardly consistent with the splendour of her pretensions—“Don’t ask me about places as if I was a guide book. I like people, and talk, and to see new faces, and the play, and all that’s going on.”

“Very pleasant,” said Sir Timothy, “and very good taste, and I quite agree with you. I have promised Lady Doul and myself the pleasure of the play to-morrow.”

“The play—to-morrow!” cried Amanda, putting out her hand with an air of horror—“The play! At this time of the year? You must be out of your senses——”

Here Brownlow made his appearance at the door, and the party went in to dinner.

“You did not tell us that Mrs. Frederick was a beauty,” said Sir Timothy in Mrs. Eastwood’s ear, “and so completely one of the beau monde. You said Mrs. Frederick surely? Not a title? Ah, now you set my mind at rest. I was rather afraid to hazard a name. Allow me to congratulate you on such a charming daughter-in-law.”

“Yes—she is very handsome,” said poor Mrs. Eastwood.

“Handsome! a divinity, my dear madam, quite a divinity!” cried the old man. For half the dinner through Mrs. Eastwood was silent, wondering whether her old acquaintance had become imbecile in the climate of Barbadoes; or if he was venturing to joke at Mrs. Frederick’s expense. It was difficult to solve this question, for old Sir Timothy set up a lively flirtation with the beauty, who was placed at her mother-in-law’s other hand. All through the course of dinner, during which banquet Mrs. Eastwood lost much of her accustomed good-humoured ease, the old man went on. Was he drawing out Amanda’s folly? or was he dazzled by her beauty with the usual incomprehensible weakness of men? Mr. Vane, who sat between Mrs. Eastwood and Amanda, added this to his many attractions, that he was not dazzled by her; and he, too, was somewhat silent, finding little to say in the crossfire which the others kept up. As for Frederick, he sat gloomy and grand at the foot of the table between Lady Doul and his sister, and was not conversational. Lady Doul had a pleasant little chattering tongue, and told him she remembered him as a baby, and congratulated him on his beautiful wife.

“Mrs. Frederick seems to have been a great deal in society,” the old lady said, with a keen glance at him, which belied the simplicity of her question. And Frederick, with the consciousness of Nelly’s eye upon him, did not know how to respond.

“Oh, ah,” he said, giving a tacit assent, and wondering all the time what she was really thinking, and why that muff, Molyneux, was not there. If it was a mere quarrel between Nelly and her lover, or even if Molyneux had declared off, Frederick would not have disturbed himself much on the subject; but he could not but recollect that Molyneux had been absent the last time he and his wife had dined at The Elms. If he were to behave badly to Nelly it would be bad, no doubt; but to give himself airs with Frederick was a still more dreadful offence. “Confound his impudence,” he muttered between his teeth.

As for the other members of the party, Innocent was very passive, and Mr. Parchemin, with his spectacles pushed back upon his forehead, ate his dinner with serious devotion, and troubled himself about nothing which might be going on.

After dinner, the ladies, being so few in number, made a little group in the drawing-room round Mrs. Eastwood’s chair. It was then that Innocent attracted Amanda’s attention.

“What a great girl she is growing—almost grown up,” she said. “What do you intend to do with her?”

Innocent was leaning against the back of Mrs. Eastwood’s chair. Her attention was directed quite otherwise, or rather, she was attending to nothing, gazing across the room vacantly with her eyes fixed on the door. Whether this was mere chance, or whether it was the lingering remains of the old adoration for Frederick, Nelly, who was watching her very closely, could not tell. The girl was not attending—but she woke up and stirred slightly at this allusion to herself.

“What am I going to do with her?” asked Mrs. Eastwood in dismay.

“Yes—I mean, do you intend to send her out as a governess, or anything of that sort?” said Amanda, plucking a flower to pieces which she had taken from the dinner table. It was bad enough to abstract the flower from a bouquet which Nelly had arranged very carefully; but, having abstracted it, to pull it to pieces, throwing the petals on the floor, was almost more than human patience, personified in Nelly Eastwood, could bear.

“Now she has grown up,” continued the beauty, “I suppose you mean her to be of some use. You can’t keep her always in idleness to the injury of your own children——”

“We must not talk about the questions you don’t fully understand,” cried Mrs. Eastwood, with flushed cheeks. “Innocent, my love, go and fetch a cushion for Lady Doul. And perhaps Mrs. Frederick will give us a little music, Nelly, if you have anything new to tempt her.”

“Oh, I never play till the gentlemen come in,” said Amanda; “but I don’t see why you should take me up so sharp about Innocent. Now you’ve given her her education she ought to be made to do something. I’ll look out for a companion’s place, if you like, among my friends. Why shouldn’t I understand? it’s easy enough; and I am sure all your children have a right to interfere. Why should a girl that is only your half-niece take the bread out of their mouths? Ask any one if I am not right. Every penny you spend on her will be so much less for your own.”

“We need not trouble Lady Doul with our family concerns,” said Mrs. Eastwood, with a tremendous effort to keep her temper; and she addressed a question to the old lady, upon which Amanda again broke in.

“Oh, I assure you Frederick and I often talk it over; he thinks as I do. If she couldn’t be a governess she might be a companion. It would be quite easy; I, myself——”

“Come and look at something I have got here,” cried Nelly, at the table, sending meaning looks at her mother.

“Leave me alone, Nelly, I think it’s my duty to speak. As the wife of the eldest son I have a right to interfere; the Eastwoods are not so rich that the little they have should be spent on strangers.”

“My dear Mrs. Frederick,” said Mrs. Eastwood, with a forced smile, while old Lady Doul hurried to the other end of the room to speak to Nelly; “I have been used to manage my own affairs without reference either to my sons or my son’s wife.”

“And so much the worse for you,” cried Amanda, with flushed cheeks. “What can you know about business?—women never do—you ought to take sensible advice; you ought to consider your own children, and not a lot of hangers-on; you ought not just to take your own way, without ever thinking of us, starving our children for a pack of poor relations. Oh, I know what I am saying, and I ain’t to be put down by looks. I’m one of the family; and a poor enough thing for me, too, with my looks and my expectations; but to see a great beggar girl eating all up with her useless ways—what ought to come to us and our children. I cannot put up with it. I will say what I’ve got to say.”

“What is the matter, Amanda?” said Frederick, behind her. He had heard the raised tone of his wife’s voice, and had rushed in, in dismay. He found his mother risen from her chair, indignant, and burning with suppressed anger, and his wife standing before her, aiding her words by gestures, her white arm raised, her cheeks deeply flushed, her breath coming quick, and her eyes flashing red fire. He put his hand on her arm. “Come and sit down here on the sofa; the other men are just coming in. For heaven’s sake, Amanda, compose yourself! Do you want to be ill again? do you want to make a scene?”

“I don’t care twopence for making a scene. I want to have it out now it’s been started,” cried Amanda. “I say that great girl oughtn’t to be kept up in idleness and luxury. She ought to be sent out into the world to make her living. Ain’t we the natural heirs, and haven’t we a right to speak? Oh, what do I care for the men coming in? let ’em come in. It’s only right and justice; since you haven’t the heart to speak up, I must. Innocent, indeed! a nice sort of Innocent, to eat up what ought to be for us. There isn’t so much of it; and a pack of younger brothers already, and that sort. Oh, I have no patience; let me have it out.”

“For God’s sake, Amanda——”

She made an ineffectual attempt to go on, but breath failed her, and she allowed herself to be drawn to the sofa, and laid herself back upon the pillows panting, her white shoulders and forehead stained with patches of vivid pink. “It’s all very well to say ‘don’t excite yourself,’” she said. “How can I help it, when people are so self-willed and stupid!”

The unhappy Frederick sat down by her and endeavoured to soothe her. Surely a little recompense for his many offences was doled out to him that evening; he talked to her in a low tone, expostulating, entreating. “Think of your health,” was the burden of his argument. He fanned her, he held her hand, he wiped her hot forehead with her laced handkerchief. Poor Frederick! He had pleased himself, and he was paying the penalty. Nelly and Lady Doul had rushed with a common impulse towards the door to meet the other gentlemen, and stood there involuntarily pointing out old pictures to their admiration, and plunging into depths of conversation which bewildered the new-comers. Mrs. Eastwood, too angry to think for the moment of keeping up appearances, had pushed back her chair as far as it would go, and after sitting down in it a minute, had risen again to look for Innocent, who stood with one hand upon the table, gazing with wide-open eyes at Frederick and his wife. No sort of offence was upon Innocent’s dreamy face. Awakened attention, a slight startled wonder, but nothing painful was in her expression, and perhaps that wonder was more roused by the sight of Amanda’s excitement and exhaustion than by anything she had said. Mrs. Eastwood hastened to her, took the girl into her arms, and held her close. “My poor child, my dear child. You must not mind her, Innocent,” she said.

“Is she ill?” asked Innocent, wondering.

“I am sure I wish she was!” cried Mrs. Eastwood, “she deserves to be, venturing to dictate to me, the little vulgar intruder, a girl not fit to be in the same room with Nelly and you!”

“Little!” said Innocent, with an amused smile. “She is not little. She is the biggest of all. Are you very angry? Did she scold you?”

“I am very angry; but don’t you mind, my dear. Never think again of what she said, Innocent. She is a passionate, selfish fool; don’t pay any attention to what she said.”

“No,” said docile Innocent; “but I should like to be of use—it would be pleasant to be of use,” she added, after a pause. “Let me do something. What is a companion? How strange that she should be so red and so breathless? Is it all about me?”

“It is because she is a fool,” said Mrs. Eastwood, though, indeed, she herself was flushed and excited too.

“But what is a companion?” asked Innocent.

“You are my companion and Nelly’s,” said Mrs. Eastwood; “my dear, don’t think of it any more.”

“And she is Frederick’s,” said Innocent, contemplating with a strange abstract spectatorship the group on the sofa. There was no enmity, only a wondering contemplation in her eyes. “Can he never be without her? Will she stay with him for ever and ever?”

“As long as she lives,” said Mrs. Eastwood, with a profound sigh.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

A NEW COMPLICATION.

“A great many, my dear,” said old Sir Timothy, with a chuckle. And so the old pair jogged on to their lodgings, half sorry, half shocked, half indignant. The party they left behind was more seriously excited. The first thing Mrs. Eastwood did was to hurry off Innocent to bed, accompanying her to her room with a fear for the effect of Amanda’s ravings upon her feelings, which was really uncalled for; for Innocent’s feelings were too little on the surface to be moved by any such assault. It had given rise to vague thoughts in her mind, but no wound—thoughts which, when her aunt, with many caresses, had left her, she expressed to old Alice, with more freedom than probably she would have ventured upon with any one else. Innocent’s habitation was now in the old schoolroom, to which she had taken so great a fancy. And here Alice waited upon her with a care which amazed the other servants, for Innocent had nothing to give in return, not even thanks or caresses, and was considered “proud” and “stuck-up” in her dreamy habitual silence.

“She said I might be a companion,” said Innocent. “And Sir Alexis said something too—a companion! I am Nelly’s companion and my aunt’s, she says—Frederick’s wife meant something different. Alice, you are old; you know a great many things——”

“I know you’re but an innocent, my poor bonnie bairn,” said the old woman with a sigh.

“Of course I am Innocent; but that is only my name. Companion is not a name; it is a thing. She is Frederick’s companion. My aunt says he will never be rid of her—never—so long as she lives. What a pity that she cannot be made to stop living! She scolds—like—like—she grows red like the women we once saw quarrelling in the street.”

“When you stoppit to tell them it was ugly,” said Alice; “and why should they scold each other?”

“Yes,” said Innocent, “to scold children is natural, I suppose, at least, everybody does it, even you, Alice; but Frederick’s wife—and he cannot send her away. I wish she might die, and then Frederick would be free.”

“Bairn, bairn, hold your tongue!” cried Alice. “Are you no aware that it’s a sin, a great sin, to wish anybody dead? Never let me hear you say such a thing again.”

“But I do think it,” said Innocent; “she makes herself ill; she suffers; she makes everybody else unhappy. She scolds, it does not matter whom. Why should people go on living when they do so much harm?”

“But you would not do her harm?” said Alice, curiously gazing at her; “and why should Mr. Frederick be free? He has taken his own way, and he must put up with it. He has made his bed, and he must lie on it. What is he, that he should be delivered from what he has brought on himself?”

“I am fond of Frederick,” said Innocent dreamily. “If he is good or not I do not know, but I am fond of him. Alice, do you know I have found out something? When papa said women were hateful, he meant women like Frederick’s wife.”

“My bonnie lamb,” said Alice, “think as little as you can either of Mr. Frederick or Mr. Frederick’s wife. Such kind of thoughts are little good. Say your prayers, and mind that you must wish harm to no person. It’s against a’ Scripture; though, eh! human nature’s weak, and if it was me I doubt if I could keep my hands off her,” she added to herself.

When Mrs. Eastwood left the room with Innocent, Mr. Vane asked permission to stay. “May I wait till you come back?” he asked, “I have something to say.” Perhaps it was injudicious on all sides, for, indeed, Nelly, who was thus left alone with him in a state of high and indignant resentment, was, perhaps, too much disposed to confide in the sympathetic companion who was always ready to feel with her, always willing to be interested. They were standing together over the little fire, which on this mild October evening smouldered unnecessarily in the grate. But when there is any trouble in a house the fire becomes at once the centre; everybody goes to it mechanically. Nelly stood there, clasping her hands together by way of restraining herself; her cheeks were flushed, her eyes abashed. She was not only wounded and angry, but ashamed to the bottom of her heart. She had been doing all she could to conceal and cover over the “scene” which, like all Englishwomen, she dreaded to have known. But she had not been successful, and now her mind was so full of it, so running over with indignation and excitement, that she knew she ought not to have trusted herself with any companion; and yet absolute self-denial was so hard. She could not be so wise as to go away and bury the tumult of feeling which was eager to be expressed.

“Oh, Mr. Vane, what must you think of us?” she burst forth at last.

“What must I think of you? I am afraid some things I dare not tell you,” he said. “But what can any one think—that you have had to submit to a very ordinary form of domestic misfortune, and that, by dint of doing your very best to bear it, you have to suffer much that is disagreeable? That is all that the most curious could think. Every one who is worthy to be called your friend, Miss Eastwood, should be only too glad to stand by you in such a trial.”

I don’t know what John Vane meant, or if he fully realized what he was saying; but as for Nelly she turned crimson, and gave him a quick, furtive look of inquiry. Had he looked as if he meant anything she would have been offended; but he was sufficiently innocent or clever to dismiss all meaning from his face.

“Oh, as for that,” said Nelly, “it would be foolish to speak as if we wanted any one to stand by us. Mamma and I are able to support each other—mamma, and I, and Innocent. We are quite a strong body; we want no one else,” said Nelly. She looked up at him, smiling, to prove her assertion, but somehow just at that moment a chance tear, which had gathered on her eyelashes without her knowledge, seized the opportunity to fall. “Why what is this? I wonder,” she said, with a little laugh, wiping it from her hand with her handkerchief; “it seems I must have been crying without knowing it. How silly! It is horrid that because one happens to be a woman one should always make a fool of one’s self and cry.”

“I wish we were all fools of your description,” said Vane.

“What, to cry? Oh no. It comes natural to a girl, but it is dreadful in a man. And there is not much to cry about either,” said Nelly. “It is not Mrs. Frederick that makes me unhappy, Mr. Vane; it is that poor mamma must feel what I once said to you, that we are all trying to get as much out of her as ever we can. Why should she have given up her own comforts to let Frederick marry? If papa had been alive, no one would have expected him to do it; but because mamma is a woman, Frederick and everybody think she should give in continually. Do you think it is just or right? Why should she give up all she has been used to, to give us things we have no need of? First her carriage, and now her old servants; and she talks even of letting the dear old house. Mr. Vane, perhaps I ought not to talk like this to you—but do you think it is right? Should not a man try when he marries to make something for himself?”

“If I were ever so happy,” said Vane, “that is what I should do. I should like my wife to feel that I was working for her. My wife! That sort of thing is not for me.”

“Why shouldn’t it be for you?” said Nelly in a softened tone; but she felt the ground was dangerous, and perhaps she felt that there was a certain inference in all that was being said—a something which implicated others as well as her brother; therefore she hasted to place Frederick in the foreground as the sole subject of discourse.

“Perhaps I am too angry with Frederick,” she said; “it is because I feel as if mamma might think we were all alike—all thinking of what she has, not of her; all grasping and wanting something. Rather than she should think that of me I would die.”

“She could not think that of you. It would be impossible,” said Vane.

“I don’t know,” said Nelly, the tears gathering once more on her down-dropped eyelashes. “Oh, how true it is what mamma says—that nature wrongs women more than law does! Sometimes we are compelled to look different from what we are that people may not see or find out—other things. Sometimes we have to put on false looks to make other people seem true. You men, you don’t know half nor a quarter what poor girls have to do!”

This curious and enigmatical outburst filled Vane with feelings which I will not attempt to describe. He thought he understood it, and his whole heart melted over the girl, whose case already, perhaps, he had thought over too much. He put his hand for a moment on hers, not holding it, but giving just one touch of a sympathy which went beyond words. As he did so another tear, slowly brimming over, fell on his hand. Instantly, before he knew, the water stood in his own eyes; Nelly startled, dashed the tear off with her handkerchief, and crying hastily, “Oh, I beg your pardon! I beg your pardon!” covered her hot eyes and flushed face with her hand.

It was at this moment that Molyneux came in. I do not wonder for my part that he was a little startled by the position of the two, and the attitude of affairs generally; Nelly crying, and Vane beside her with an agitated look about the eyes, which tells much that men would prefer to conceal. “Hullo, what is wrong?” he said, striding up to her side. Nelly recovered her composure instantaneously; and Vane, drawing back, felt that the charm of the moment was over, and all its magic flown.

“What is the matter?” cried Molyneux, more angry than affectionate; “crying? What are you crying for? Has Winks been taken bad, or have you lost your canary bird, or what? I think you might have kept your tears till I came.”

“They are not pleasant things to keep,” said Nelly, “and indeed I was not crying. Mrs. Frederick put us all out of temper——”

“Oh, Mrs. Frederick! Dick told me there had been a shindy,” said the young man. “I’m sorry I was not here to see the fun. Vane, you are luckier than I am—you are always on the spot.”

A retort was on John Vane’s lips; but he considered all the circumstances, and held his peace, offering no explanations. Nelly’s betrothed looked from one to the other with, I do not deny, a certain justification for his suspicions. “Well,” he said, “now that I am here you don’t seem communicative. What was it all about?”

“Oh, the subject does not matter,” cried Nelly. “It was an attack upon mamma. Don’t let us speak of it; it makes me wicked, it makes my heart sick. Poor mamma, who has always been so good to us—is this how we are to repay her at the end?”

“I can’t say, of course, if you don’t choose to tell me,” said Molyneux; “but Mrs. Eastwood is not any worse off than other people of her age, so far as I can see. We can’t all be romantic little gooses, Nelly, like you.”

“Don’t!” said Nelly, with sharp pain and shame. Why was it that her lover’s familiar tone went so near to disgust her at such a moment? She drew away, not venturing to look up, ashamed, because the other was present, she would have said. And this was true; but not entirely in the simple sense of the words.

“I must speak to your mother about Innocent,” Vane said, apologetically, feeling too that he was in the way, and they stood all there about the fire in the most awkward of positions until Mrs. Eastwood, with her clouded brow, came back. She gave Ernest a little nod of recognition—no more. It was well that he had not been there, and yet it was ill that he took no pains to stand by Nelly in any emergency. She seated herself in her usual chair, taking little notice of any one. Her pulses were still tingling, and her heart beating. She was a proud woman, though she made but small external pretensions; and she had been insulted in her own house.

“I want you to let Innocent go to my sister,” said Vane, approaching her softly, “for a week or two perhaps. Don’t you think she should make acquaintance with her father’s relations? She is grown up; she has developed so much under your kind care. Could you not trust her, even for a few weeks, out of your own hands?”

“Oh, Mr. Vane!” cried Mrs. Eastwood hastily, with tears coming to her eyes; “this is because of what you have just been hearing—because of what my daughter-in-law was so wicked and so cruel as to say.”

“What is the matter?” said Molyneux to Nelly. “What did she say? and what has he to do with it? and what does your mother mean by looking so excited? It all seems a pretty muddle for a man to fall into.”

“What she said was about Innocent,” said Nelly, restraining herself with an effort; “that we ought not to keep her here—that she should be sent out as a governess—I don’t know how much more hard-hearted nonsense. I can’t tell how she dared to speak so to mamma.”

“That woman would dare anything,” said Molyneux. “About Innocent? Well, I don’t know that she was very wrong; that girl will turn into a dreadful burden one day or other if she is not made to marry somebody. I can’t think what your mother meant, when she had such a chance, by letting Longueville slip through her fingers. So that’s why he’s here, I suppose? I hate that man, John Vane; always poking himself where he is not wanted.”

“I suppose mamma must have wanted him or she would not have asked him,” said Nelly. “We could not have an empty place at table.”

“Oh, that’s why you are cross, is it?” said Ernest, with a vain laugh; “but, Nelly, you must not really expect that I can always be doing duty at those family parties. A family party is the thing I most hate in the world.”

“Fortunately for mamma, Mr. Vane is not of your opinion,” said Nelly. It was the first time she had attempted anything like self-assertion. She had never stood at bay before.

CHAPTER XXIX.

INNOCENT’S OUTSET IN THE WORLD.

And Nelly looked at him. She did not say anything, but her lips moved as if she would have echoed her mother’s words. Nelly’s face had grown somehow longer, with a wistful expression which, by moments, was almost like Innocent’s. Especially when she looked at John Vane was this the case; a perpetual comparison seemed to be going on in her mind, almost a complaint against him that he was different from the other who was so much more important to her. Why should Vane always be of use and service when that other neglected his duties? Why should he be, as Ernest said, always on the spot when the other was away? Nelly was half angry with the man who was so ready to stand by her; and then there came over her heart the softest compunction and self-reproach, mingled—in that inextricable complication which belongs to all human feeling—with bitterness and mortification. Was it possible that she grudged the kindness of the one because it threw into further relief the indifference of the other? This, as the reader will easily see, was a very unsafe, as well as a very uncomfortable, state of mind for an engaged young woman. Perhaps on the whole, the kindest thing John Vane could have done would have been to take himself out of the way, and leave Ernest to show himself in the best light possible, a thing which his constant presence put out of the question.

To return, however, to the conversation with which this chapter begins. It took place on the morning after Mrs. Frederick’s outburst, and was the end of the adjourned discussion which Vane had begun on the previous evening. He had found some trouble in soothing Mrs. Eastwood, and persuading her that his proposal had nothing to do with what Amanda had said, but had been in his mind for some time previously. When he succeeded in this, everything was easy enough. It was certainly well that Innocent should be made acquainted with her family, her father’s relations. “If anything were to happen to me,” Mrs. Eastwood allowed with some pathos, “it would be an excellent thing that she should have other friends to fall back upon. Frederick could not, I fear, give her a home, as I might have hoped, and as for Nelly, I don’t know how Nelly may be situated,” the mother said, looking at her daughter. She did not know what was in Nelly’s mind; but that Ernest should be ready to give succour and shelter to a penniless dependent was a thing which, at this stage of affairs, with her present knowledge of Ernest, Mrs. Eastwood could not hope.

“It was with no such lugubrious idea that I made my proposal,” said John Vane, laughing. “But Innocent is nearly eighteen, and there could not be an easier plunge into life for her than a few weeks at the High Lodge. My sister has made half a convent, half a school, of the old house. I wish you would come too, and see what she is doing. But if not, I will take my little cousin down and leave her with Lætitia. It will teach Innocent the use of some new faculties. You have taught her only how to be carried about and cared for and tended——”

“I have not spoiled her, I hope,” said Mrs. Eastwood, who was not, however, displeased with the compliment. When a woman comes to that stage of life in which all that she does and says is no longer admirable, because she says and does it—when she begins to feel the force of hot and hostile criticism and to be shaken even in the natural confidence with which she has been accustomed to regard her own motives, then praise becomes very sweet to her; it restores her to the moral standing-ground which she seemed to have lost. Mrs. Eastwood had just accepted with a natural pleasure John Vane’s testimony to her goodness, when Frederick came in suddenly, with a harassed look upon his face. Frederick had been in the country shooting, as he said—for some time—without his wife; and had come back looking pale, as he used to look after his absences in the old days.

“Something is wrong?” said his mother, divining what his looks meant as Vane discreetly withdrew.

“Oh, nothing particular—nothing out of the ordinary,” he said; “I wonder though, that, knowing all the circumstances as you do, you should not make an effort, mother, to prevent Amanda from exciting herself. Of course, she is ill to-day. I told you before I married what was the state of affairs; she may deserve it if you please, but I don’t deserve it, and the worst always falls on me. I do think you and Nelly between you might, at least manage to keep the peace.”

“Frederick! you seem quite unaware of how it all happened,” cried his mother, suddenly roused to a movement of self-defence.

“I know how it all turned out,” said Frederick, “and I do think my mother, if she had any regard for me, would try to avoid such scenes. She has been ill all night; and now she’s taken it into her head to go down to Sterborne, to the old place—the last thing in the world I could wish for. If you only knew,” said Frederick in a tone of the deepest injury, “how I hate her father; how I have struggled to keep them apart! And now here is my wife—your daughter-in-law—going down to our own county among all the Eastwoods, to Batty’s house! By Jove, it will break my heart.”

Words of unkind meaning were on Nelly’s very lips. “You should not have married Batty’s daughter, if you hate him,” was what she was disposed to say. “Frederick would not have spared me had I done anything of the kind,” she added to herself. She was guilty in intention of this unkind utterance; but in act she was innocent; she bit her lips, and kept it in. Mrs. Eastwood was a great deal more sympathetic.

“But if you were to speak to her, Frederick—if you were to say you did not like it?” she suggested anxiously.

“Speak! say! much she would care,” cried Frederick. “It just shows how little you know Amanda. That confounded heart disease of hers—if she has a heart disease—makes her believe that she is free to insult everybody. She must not be crossed herself; but there is nothing she likes so much as to cross others. No, I shall have to give in. I shall have to take her there, though I hate the whole concern. I do not think there ever was a more miserable wretch than I am on the face of the earth,” cried Frederick, flinging himself wearily into a chair.

“My poor boy!” said his mother, going to him, and passing her soft kind hand over his forehead, raising the waves of his hair, which were not in their usual good order. Frederick was not generally very tolerant of his mother’s caresses, but of late he had been soothed by them. Amanda cared very little for his amour propre, and made no particular effort to magnify his importance, and a man likes to feel himself important, if only to his mother. On the other hand, his mother was half-pleased even in the midst of her pity for him that he should, as it were, throw aside his wife, and recognize himself as a victim. It is not a fine quality, this, in women; but I am afraid a great many good women are conscious of possessing it. When a man has connected himself with his inferior, with some one we disapprove of, we like him to find out his mistake. We feel that it is better for him to know that he has done badly, very badly, for himself; and though in higher minds a certain contempt for the being who thus gives up the cause of his once-beloved, mingles with the softer feeling, yet we are all more or less mollified towards the son or brother who has made a foolish marriage, when he delivers over his wife, metaphorically, to our tender mercies, and abandons her standard. I don’t know whether the same sentiment exists on the other side, but I avow its existence on my own side. Mrs. Eastwood was pleased that her boy gave his Amanda up. She was far more tenderly sorry for him than had he been still in love. In words, she tried “to make the best of her,” and recognized fully that now the deed was done it was to be desired that Frederick should be “happy” with the woman who was his wife; but she thought more highly of him because he was not happy. She was more pleased, more tender, much more softened towards her son than if his household had been a pleasant one. Nelly did not share these sentiments. She was impatient with Frederick, and disposed to despise him for giving up Amanda’s cause. She put herself in Amanda’s place, small as was her sympathy for that young woman, and involuntarily conjured up before her a picture of the Molyneuxes, who would feel towards Ernest’s wife much as the Eastwoods felt to Frederick’s. Would Ernest abandon her, Nelly, to their strictures? would he allow them to suppose that he too had made a mistake? This thought made Nelly’s cheeks burn, and her eyes glow, and disposed her on the spot to assault Frederick, and lift up Amanda’s falling standard.

“It is curious,” said Mrs. Eastwood, after a pause, “that we should be so much entangled with Sterborne, where all the Eastwoods live, without having anything to do with the Eastwoods. Perhaps Innocent might travel with you, Frederick, if you are obliged to go. She has been invited to the High Lodge, to make acquaintance with her father’s family.”

“Who lives at the High Lodge?”

“Mr. Vane’s sister, the only one of the Vanes who has taken much notice of Innocent.”

“What does John Vane want with Innocent?” said Frederick, his tone changing. He got up from his chair, and slightly pushed away his mother, who was still leaning over him. “Does he want to marry her too?”

“Does Mr. Vane want to marry some one else—too?” said Nelly instinctively, with an impulse for which next moment she was sorry.

“You should know best,” said Frederick; and then he turned to his mother with that air of superior knowledge and virtue which he knew so well how to assume. “I told you when that man first came to the house that his character was very doubtful. He has always been a queer fellow. Had I thought that you would receive him almost into the family, and make so much of him, I should never have allowed him to come here at all.”

“But, Frederick!—I have never seen anything in him that was not nice,” said Mrs. Eastwood, alarmed.

“Oh, I daresay, mother. A man does not come into a lady’s drawing-room to show off his shady qualities; but I warned you to start with. There are many queer stories about him current among men. Ask Molyneux—I don’t think there is any love lost between him and John Vane.”

“Is that the case, Nelly?” asked Mrs. Eastwood.

Nelly felt to her dismay that a hot and angry blush—a blush not altogether of embarrassment, of something that felt like passion—covered her face. “I should be sorry to quote Ernest on any such subject,” she said, faltering yet eager. “He told me that there were stories current among men about Sir Alexis, that he was not a man to be brought into your house, into my company——”

(“What impertinence! one of my oldest friends!”) said Mrs. Eastwood, in a parenthesis.

“And then,” continued Nelly, “he turned round upon me, and laughed at my knowing such things, when I told you, mamma. He made me out to be a gossip, to be fond of disagreeable reports; he made me feel as if I had made it up; that is how men show their friendship for each other. Probably both Frederick and he would do the same about Mr. Vane.”

“Molyneux would be flattered by your opinion of him,” said Frederick, laughing; and had it not been for the lucky arrival of Dick and Jenny, I do not know how far the quarrel might have gone. Mrs. Eastwood, however, would not have “the boys” made parties to any discussion of this kind, and Frederick departed after a time to his office, where he was so very hard worked, poor fellow, and where he appeared between twelve and one o’clock, having settled his domestic affairs first, as became a Briton of the most “domesticated” race in the world.

During the interval which has passed without record in these pages, Dick, the much suffering and much labouring, had encountered a great event, and had got through it, I do not say triumphantly, but at least successfully. The examination—the great exam., which had exercised his mind and temper for years—had come and passed; and Dick had pulled through. There he was, still walking about with books in his pocket, still in the trammels of “a coach,” and still subject to other terrible and ghastly episodes of exam., which had (I think) to be repeated for two or three years before the full-blown competition wallah was sent to India. I do not remember to have encountered in society many young men of this tremendously educated class, and therefore I cannot tell if Dick may be considered as a fair specimen; but this I can say, that considering the amount of information which must have been crammed into his head, it was astonishing how lightly he wore it. He was profoundly careful not to shock and humiliate the uninstructed mass of his fellow-creatures by letting it appear when there was no occasion for such vanities; and, in short, Dick examined and passed, was as much like Dick unexamined and dubious as could be supposed. Jenny had undergone a greater change. He had left Eton and had matriculated at Balliol, and felt himself a greater man than it is given to mortal in any other stage of existence to feel himself. He had done even more than this; he had gained a scholarship, and was thus actually paying part of his own expenses, a fact which his mother could not sufficiently admire and wonder at, and which still had all the freshness of a family joke in the house. It was astonishing how the brows of the two women cleared, how the atmosphere lightened when these two boys (oh, boys, I beg your pardon—men) came in. No complication had yet arisen in their young lives. Jenny had hung his mother’s photograph over the mantelpiece in his college sitting-room, and boasted that she had as much sense as all the dons put together, though she knew no Greek. I wonder whether in the progress of the human intellect this kind of boy will long survive; but the very sight of Jenny’s face (though he was not handsome), and Dick’s big figure, with a book in its coat pocket, was good for sore hearts as well as eyes.

“We were talking about Mr. Vane,” said Mrs. Eastwood, with a little furtive artfulness such as women use. She would not enter into any discussion of him with her boys, nor direct their attention to the stories “current among men.” She reverenced their youth more perhaps than, had she been anything but an ignorant woman, she would have thought it necessary to reverence it. Probably they both knew a great deal more than she did in that kind—or so at least all men inform women for their comfort; but still I think it was good for Dick and Jenny that their mother ignored all these “stories current,” &c. “We were talking,” she said, “about Mr. Vane. Frederick does not seem quite to like him——”

“I should think not. He isn’t the sort of fellow for Frederick to like,” said Dick. “He is not your superior sort of prig. He is jolly to everybody. I like him—gives himself no airs, and is never above saying he’s wrong when he’s wrong. Why just the other day—I told you, Jen—about the build of that yacht——”

“I like him,” said Jenny, “but I’m not a fair judge. He came down to Eton last fourth of June, and didn’t he just give me a tip! so I can’t speak; I’m bribed; but if I knew anything he wanted——”

“So that is your opinion,” said the mother, well pleased. “They say though,” she added mournfully, “that those men in the clubs——”

“I don’t belong to any club,” said Dick. “It’s very hard. What does it matter, if I am going to India? I shall come back from India, I hope. I suppose you all wish to see me again? Well, then, why shouldn’t I be proposed for Trevor’s club? It doesn’t bind a fellow to anything, and it’s a handy place to have people call upon you, and to send your letters. Trevor offered to put me up a year ago. His father is on the committee, and I know two or three other fellows there.”

“My dear boy, Frederick thought it a waste of money—as you are going away,” said Mrs. Eastwood, with an incipient tear in her eye. This glimmer of moisture was always produced by any reference to the fact that Dick was going away.

“Then thanks to him,” said Dick, in high dudgeon, “I can’t tell any one what is said in the clubs.”

“What is the question?” said Jenny, always practical; “is John Vane on his trial for something?” And here the boy, without knowing it, glanced at Nelly; and Nelly turned abruptly away, and went out through the conservatory into the garden, with a very great tumult and many painful thoughts in her breast.

“Innocent is going to pay his sister a visit,” said Mrs. Eastwood, “at a house near Sterborne. He thinks it is time she knew her father’s relations, and I have consented, for I thought so too. But Frederick says——”

“Is she going now, or at Christmas?” said Jenny. “If now, I give my consent, for I’m going off to-morrow. I like Innocent to be at home when I am at home. You may laugh, if you please, but I like it; why shouldn’t I?” said the boy hotly. “And I like Nelly to be at home. What is the good of girls if they don’t make the old place look nice? But she may go now, if you please, what has that to do with John Vane?”

Upon this Dick laughed long and low, “John ain’t in love with Innocent,” he said chuckling. “I say, mother, what a set of jolly spoons!—if you know what that means. I’ll take her down to the country, if you like, and see John Vane’s sister. Perhaps she might take a fancy to me.”

“Silly boy, she is as old as I am,” said his mother, with a smile. And thus the discussions of the morning fell into cheerful home banter, and the jests of the boys. This consoled the mother, the light of whose firmament was at present supplied by these two boys; but it did not comfort Nelly, who was wading up to her neck in personal dismay and trouble; and it would have called forth nothing but angry contempt from Frederick, who felt his own griefs big enough to eclipse both earth and heaven.

CHAPTER XXX.

THE HIGH LODGE.

Thus every one discussed and gave their opinion as to Innocent’s outset in life—except Innocent herself. She acquiesced—it was all she ever did. A slight paling of her very faint colour, a certain look of fright in her eyes were the only indications that it affected her at all. Somehow this change in her life associated itself in her ideas with Amanda’s proposal to render her of use—a proposal which she had received with more favour than any one else in the house; it had offended them all on her account, but it had not offended Innocent. She listened to all the descriptions which were given her of Miss Vane, her unknown relation, and of the pretty country which she was about to visit, and of the novelty and change which her aunt thought would do her so much good, with passive incomprehension. Novelty alarmed, it did not excite her; she wanted no change—but yet she was quite contented to be sent where they pleased; to do whatever they thought proper. She looked upon her visit as a very devout and enthusiastic believer looks—or is supposed to look—upon death; as an unknown and terrible event of which she could form no idea, but which would be soon over, and which it was absolutely the will of those who were as gods to Innocent that she should undergo “for her good.” Thus she allowed herself to be prepared for it with a mixture of fright and docility; everybody talked of it except herself, the heroine. Innocent’s visit was in every mouth except Innocent’s. She did not even form to herself any picture of what it would be like, as Nelly kept doing perpetually. She had no faculty for making pictures. Indeed, the peculiarity of Innocent’s organization began to centre chiefly in this point—that she had no imagination. It did not seem a moral want in her as it does in some people, so much as a wistful vacancy, a blank caused by some accident. No sort of cynic scorn of the imagination of others, such, as the unimaginative often show, was in her passive soul; but she followed the gaze of the eyes which could thus see into the unseen with a wistful look which was full of pathos.

“How do you know when things are going to happen?” she said to Nelly, who had just been indulging in a long account of Miss Vane’s probable appearance and manners to cheer them over their work, as they sat with Alice in Mrs. Eastwood’s room, helping to make some new “things” for Innocent’s outfit.

“I don’t know in the least—I only imagine,” said Nelly, laughing.

“Imagine!” repeated Innocent. She did not understand it. She was all a dream, poor child, and Nelly was all real; but the dream-girl possessed no imagination at all, while the other was running over with ready youthful fancy. No matter-of-fact creature, no dull clodhopper, could be more absolutely and rigidly bound within the lines of what she knew, than Innocent. She knew the old wandering life in Italy, and she knew The Elms. But all the rest of the world was a blank to her. She had formed no idea either of what she was about to meet with, or how she was to conduct herself under other circumstances. With such an absence of the faculty which guides us through it, the future and every change can be nothing but a terror to the ignorant soul.

“Look here, Innocent,” said Jenny, who had always taken a special charge of her, on the evening before she left home. He had taken her into the garden for the purpose of examining her, and satisfying himself that she was what he called a free agent. “Are you sure you like going? That’s what I want to know.”

“Like going?” said Innocent, opening her eyes. “Oh, no.”

“Why are you going, then? Is it because you are obliged?” asked Jenny, knitting portentous brows.

“Obliged!” Innocent repeated once more, with a little wonder. “I am going because my aunt thinks so—neither because I am obliged, nor because I like. It is not me, it is her.”

“But it ought not to be like that,” cried Jenny. “Speak to my mother, she is very reasonable. She never forces a fellow into anything; tell her that you would rather not. That’s how I always did.”

“But you are a boy,” said Innocent, with a mixture of respect and gentle contempt, which I fear she had learned from Nelly.

“What difference does that make? have a little courage, and tell me. The thing you want to learn,” said Jenny, with much gravity, “is that everybody here wishes you to be happy, wishes you to do what pleases you. Don’t misunderstand my mother. You take up an idea of your own—you don’t look at the real state of the case, and try to make out what she means. Don’t you understand me, Innocent?”

“No,” said Innocent, looking at him with veiled and wondering eyes.

Poor Jenny! he thrust his hands deeper into his pockets, and muttered something to himself, which was not adapted for publication; and then he looked at her in his turn with that anxious but impotent gaze with which so often one mortal attempts to fathom another—to fathom the unfathomable—whether there be nothing or much in those veiled and inscrutable depths of personal identity. She smiled at him softly, and the dreamy light of this smile went over all her face, touching it into visionary life and beauty. Jenny was baffled in his inquiry, in his investigation, in his counsel; he could not make anything of Innocent. With a mixture of kindness and impatience he hurried her back into the house.

“It is growing cold, and you have no shawl,” said Jenny. Would poor Innocent never be sensible to any higher solicitude than this?

Next day she went away under the care of John Vane. She did not cry or show any emotion; but her eyes were full of fright, and the excitement of terror. She had not even the same unreasoning instinctive confidence to support her which she had felt in Frederick on her former journey. John Vane was very kind to her, and very good, she knew; but he was not Frederick. She sat still as a mouse in her corner of the carriage, and said “Yes” and “No” when he asked her a question, and saw the world whirl round her once again, and the long stretches of country, and strange faces look in. To Innocent it seemed a kind of treadmill, turning round and round. She was not conscious of making any progress; but only of unknown faces that looked at her, of long green lines of fields and hedgerows flying past. When they had got half way through their journey, they discovered that Frederick was in the same train, with his wife, whom he was taking to her father’s house. He came to the carriage, when the train stopped, and leaned his arms upon the window and talked to Innocent, who brightened at the sight of him, and instinctively put out her hand to cling to the most real thing she knew, the first human creature whom she had personally identified and discovered, as it were, out of the unknown. John Vane could not be supposed to understand this altogether inexplainable feeling, which poor Innocent could no more have put into words than she could have written a poem. He thought very differently of it. He thought like a man that the other man, smiling and talking lightly to the poor girl, had meanly accepted the worthless flower of this child’s love to laugh at, or tread under foot. He was unjust, for perhaps the most really good feeling in Frederick’s mind (when she did not cross or irritate him) was his tenderness for his little cousin; but the other cousin, who felt himself her protector, realized this as little as he understood the nature of Innocent’s sentiments. He made the poor child change her seat to the other end of the carriage, and when Frederick came back, entertained him with remarks upon the weather, to which Frederick responded in the same tone. There was, as people say, no love lost between them.

“Oh, is it Innocent?” said Amanda, when they reached Sterborne. “So your mother has taken my advice, Fred. I suppose she is going to be trained for a governess at Miss Vane’s school? Quite right, quite right! You may come and see me, Innocent, if you like; it will be a little change for you. After all the petting you have had at The Elms, you may not quite like it at first; but it’s for your good. Fred, is there a carriage for me? Is papa there? Come and take me out, then; don’t leave me here like a piece of luggage. Come and see me soon, Innocent. You will always be some one to talk to—Good-bye.”

“Innocent,” said John Vane, when he had placed her in the light open carriage which had been sent for them from the High Lodge, “I do not wish you to go and see that woman; neither does your aunt, I think. So unless you wish it very much——”

“I don’t wish it at all,” said Innocent, more distinctly than usual; and with a promptitude which surprised her companion.

“Then you don’t like her?” he said.

“She took Frederick away from us,” said Innocent; “he would have lived at home always but for her. She makes my aunt, and every one, unhappy. Him, too—sometimes he looks as if he were miserable. People who make everybody miserable,” the girl continued, very gravely, “ought not to be allowed to live.”

“My dear child,” he said, half laughing, “that is a terrible doctrine. In that way none of us would be safe.”

“You don’t make any one miserable,” said Innocent. “Few that I have ever seen do. But she does. And Frederick——”

“I don’t wish to say anything to you against your cousin,” said Vane, very gravely; “but Innocent, you must not think too highly of Frederick Eastwood. He is not so perfect as you suppose. Remember that it is entirely his own fault that he has such a wife; you must not make a hero of Frederick. The less you see of him, also, the better for your own sake——”