Probation

The few days intervening between her dispute with her son and the Spenceleys’ ball were, as may be supposed, not particularly pleasant ones to Mrs. Mallory. Sebastian, after his interview with Adrienne, came home, and looking into the drawing-room found his mother alone. She did not deign to notice him, but he, coming in, said to her,

‘Mother, I want to speak to you.’

‘Well?’

‘I proposed to Miss Blisset this evening.’

‘Indeed!’

‘You do not ask what reception my offer met with.’

‘I imagine, considering your relative positions, there cannot be much need to inquire.’

‘Still, I may as well tell you that she refused me.’

Mrs. Mallory was profoundly astonished, of course; but as, after a moment’s reflection, she did not perceive herself any nearer her real and cherished object, Sebastian’s marriage with Helena, she contented herself with uttering a sneering little laugh, and saying, in an exasperating tone—

‘Really!’

‘So that you will not have the annoyance of knowing her your daughter-in-law. But I think it better to mention that such remarks as you made about her this morning must not be repeated in my presence. I do not choose to hear anything spoken of that young lady which is not quite respectful.’

‘Though she has jilted you,’ said Mrs. Mallory, with an amiable smile.

‘I was not aware of it.’

‘Very likely not; men seldom do know when women make fools of them. The better for them and their conviction as to their superior wisdom.’

‘You may possibly be right,’ he rejoined, with perfect temper; ‘but the point I wish to impress upon you is, that nothing disrespectful is ever to be uttered of Miss Blisset in my presence. The other questions are quite supplementary.’

She made no answer, and Sebastian, politely wishing her good night, retired to his study.

Mrs. Mallory sat alone, very angry, after her phlegmatic, batrachian fashion, at what had happened, and longing very much, for the relief of her own feelings, to punish some one in some way. It was too exasperating that Sebastian should behave in that manner, after all her plans for his good and welfare. Helena Spenceley was at the moment perfection in her eyes.

‘At any rate, he must go to the ball the day after to-morrow,’ she said to herself. ‘It is a good chance. There is no time when a man is so likely to fall in love with a woman as when he has just been “refused” by another woman.’

But here her thoughts wandered off to Adrienne, and she felt as angry with her for her presumption in refusing Sebastian as she would have felt with her success had she accepted him. Indeed, her audacity in attracting him at all was thoroughly odious; she was a little dog in the manger, who would neither accept the man’s love herself nor leave him free to wander aside to where beauty and a hundred thousand pounds waited for him to lift his hand in order to utter a rapturous ‘Yes.’

‘For Helena is in love with him, let her pretend what she likes,’ she muttered angrily. ‘I can see it distinctly. He might have her for the asking.... I wonder if all children are born to break their mothers’ hearts?’

With which speculation agitating her brain she retired to rest.

Her spirit was still ruffled and ill at ease all the next day, and by degrees she concentrated her ill-temper upon a single object—a sort of focus to her anger and vexation—and that object was no other than Hugo von Birkenau. She had always regarded him with little favour: he was poor, dependent, and behaved himself as if he were rich and free. Now, everything that he said or did appeared an offence—a purposely intended, premeditated insult directed at herself, with the purpose of angering her—a very strange frame of mind, dear reader, and one which, from its being so utterly unknown to you and me and eminently reasonable persons like ourselves, would almost seem to require some elucidation or description.

Mrs. Mallory found the day go over, and Hugo continue to be insultingly cheerful and conversational, without her being able to find any actual ground for quarrelling with him. It would come, she was determined; it should come: he was too impertinent to be tolerated without an attempt to repress him.

On the evening on which Myles came to see Sebastian, the latter and Hugo were sitting together in Sebastian’s study. Hugo had heard of Adrienne’s refusal, and though condoling, did not feel so sorry as he considered he ought to have done. By degrees the conversation drifted off to Hugo’s own affairs and prospects. Sebastian told him he thought he ought seriously to think about what he meant to do.

‘I have thought about it, and decided,’ said Hugo. ‘I’m going to write an opera. That has been my ambition ever since I could strum upon a piano.’

‘But, my dear lad, you will never learn all that you must know in order to write an opera by staying in Thanshope. You must go away, Hugo, to your native land, where alone true music flourishes, and you must study. You ought to go to Köln or Leipzig or some other conservatorium. I should recommend Leipzig.’

‘I have always thought of Leipzig,’ answered the boy, ‘and I will go as soon as you like, Sebastian, but it will be very dreary without you.’

‘Oh, bah! Yours is a fickle, artist nature, Hugo, revelling in the delight of the moment. You will think Leipzig heaven a week after you get there, and all the other pupils in the conservatorium seraphs and angels, and you will wonder how you ever lived here.’

‘Not fickle, Sebastian!’ he cried, with the tragic earnest which sometimes made Sebastian think him so like Helena Spenceley. ‘Anything but that! Anything but fickle to you! If I thought I ever could be fickle to you, I’d put an end to myself to-night, and have no qualms of conscience about it. Such a wretch would be better out of the world than in it.’

‘Oh, nonsense! But one thing I do wish you would promise me. I’ve often thought of asking you before, but I was afraid it might seem like trying to entrap your youth and innocence.’

‘What is it? Quick, tell me what it is!’ asked Hugo, his eyes ablaze with eagerness.

‘Well, it is this: that you will never, before you are one-and-twenty, take any very important step, without telling me what you intend to do. I don’t say asking my permission. I trust too much to your honour and purity of heart to keep you from doing anything bad,’ he added, with a smile. ‘I would not harass and fetter you by any such stupid restriction; but, as I trust you, I want you to trust me. Don’t do anything important without telling me that you intend to do it, and giving me a chance to offer you a specimen of my superior wisdom, you know.’

‘What a question! I swear it!’ said Hugo, enthusiastically. ‘As if I could do anything without consulting you!’

‘Not so fast!’ said his friend, laughing. ‘Wait till the time comes. I shall most likely seem then a wearisome old formalist, who——’

‘Never!’

‘But I tell you, it will be so, you obstinate young dog! There are temptations, Hugo, and you, with your temperament, will find them as hard to resist as if they were red-hot fiery hail. I am such a slow, phlegmatic sort of fellow. They don’t affect me in the same way. My temptations always come too late. By the time I begin to think I should like to do something either bad or idiotic, the chance is over, and I am saved. So I have got the reputation of being a very well-conducted sort of person, and not caring for the things other fellows care about.’

‘At any rate, I solemnly give the promise you ask, and should have done so if it had been ten times as binding—and there’s my hand upon it,’ said Hugo, to whom the idea of binding himself to any particular thing, by ‘solemn oaths and execrations,’ was especially fascinating and delightful. It seemed to surround him and his friend with a little romance, and to separate them from the outer crowd. It opened up vague possibilities of self-denial, trial, and probation, and a prospect of endurance through good and evil, thick and thin, which delighted his ardent soul.

‘Then that is settled,’ said Sebastian, contentedly. ‘We can talk about your going away later.’

It was towards the close of this conversation that Sebastian had been called away to Myles Heywood—the day, therefore, before the ball at Castle Hill.

On the following afternoon Sebastian had to go out. His mother asked him at lunch if he intended to go to the dance, and he said yes, he supposed he did—he must now, but he did not care about it, and did not think it was in very good taste to be having balls at such a time. Moreover, he had heard a rumour that Mr. Spenceley’s own affairs caused him some anxiety.

Mrs. Mallory said she supposed it was Mr. Spenceley’s own business; he ought to know best whether he were able to give balls at such a time. He could not put off his daughter’s twenty-first birthday for an indefinite time.

‘No,’ said Sebastian, ‘and that is just what makes the whole affair such a melancholy farce. His daughter is very anxious not to have any ball. She told me so, and nearly cried with vexation about it.’

Mrs. Mallory made no reply, and Sebastian, saying he had a meeting to attend, went out.

Hugo was that afternoon in one of his oft-recurring idle moods, and wandered about, apparently not knowing what to do with himself. He was anticipating the ball eagerly enough, having extracted from Helena the promise of no less than three waltzes—less of a distinction than he imagined, perhaps, since Helena, in granting them, had been thinking chiefly of escaping from the defective dancing and fatuous remarks of the Thanshope young men, amongst whom she enjoyed what she considered a fatal popularity. She had wondered whether to keep any dances for Sebastian. Would he ask her to dance at all?

‘Of course he will!’ she thought, ‘as a matter of duty, and I think I shall fill up my programme, and show it him without any comment when he asks me. Then he will raise his eyebrows in that way I hate, and make a little bow, and smile a little smile, and remark, “I see I am indeed too late;” and stand on one side, perfectly content not to dance, since the nicest girl he ever knew is not there.’

But these workings of the feminine mind could not possibly be known to Hugo, who was only aware that he had received an indulgent smile and a pleasant glance from Helena’s dark eyes, as she protested a little against the three waltzes, but yielded in the end. He repaired to the drawing-room, and, with characteristic fitfulness, spent the whole afternoon in playing waltzes, good, bad, and indifferent, of every kind and from every source he could think of. Waltz after waltz flowed from his rapid fingers. Gung’l and Strauss, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert—ancient and modern composers, good and bad ones, were laid under contribution, till his whole being seemed a waltz, and he was in a state of highly strung nervous excitement and anticipation, with which mingled the memories of past waltzes with partners of a bygone day. Hugo felt his whole soul penetrated with music, melody, and happiness as he sat in the shady corner of the drawing-room and saw the sun stream warmly in at the side window. He felt life that afternoon very full and rich and delicious, and crowded with sweet and grand possibilities. He felt at harmony with all the world, and was sure it was a good place to live in.

He had just finished the solemn, passionate strains of a waltz of Beethoven’s, and still his fingers lingered on the keys, and still his ears drank in the glorious notes, when the door opened and Mrs. Mallory came into the room.

Hugo stopped playing. She did not openly request him to do so, but he knew she disliked to hear him, and to his fastidious taste the very presence of an unsympathetic spirit was jarring. Spontaneity ceased; pleasure was gone.

He rose from the instrument, went to the sunny window, and hummed over the air he had been playing.

‘At what time do we go to-night, Mrs. Mallory?’ he presently inquired.

‘Go where?’

‘To the ball.’

‘At eight o’clock, I believe,’ she said, with stony coldness. Mrs. Mallory’s anger was coming to a climax now; it would be strange if Hugo did not say something which should cause the storm to break over his head. Unconsciously, unwittingly, he led straight up to the point.

‘I should like to dance every night,’ he said, rather enthusiastically, for his music still haunted him, and even Mrs. Mallory’s chill influence could not quite bring him down from his heights of abstraction to the commonplaces of every day—yet.

‘Very likely,’ she said. ‘I have noticed that the more frivolous a thing is, the more you delight in it.’

‘Dancing is not necessarily frivolous,’ Hugo assured her with the greatest solemnity. ‘It is, or should be, an art; not a mere kicking about of the legs.’

‘Indeed!’

‘When I grow up,’ continued Hugo, ‘that is to say, when I am majorat, come of age, I mean, and come into my property, I shall devote a great part of my time to dancing, I love it so.’

This was too much, far too much. It was high time that this vain, bombastical, self-conceited pauper was put down.

‘When you come into your property,’ she remarked with polite sarcasm, ‘then you can squander it just as you please. But I would advise you first to make certain that you have any property to come into.’

‘Oh, I don’t suppose I shall be rich. Sebastian knows all about it. He says he will explain all in good time.’

‘Sebastian is as foolish a young man, in some respects, as I know; and as for you, Mr. von Birkenau, I am at a loss to understand how any one professing to be a gentleman can behave as you do.’

‘As how?’ demanded Hugo, his brow suddenly clouding as he perceived that her words bore reference to something unknown to him.

‘Did Sebastian ever tell you, in so many words, that you had any property, any money, estate, possessions of any kind?’

‘N—no.’

‘I thought so. He is very trying, but I have always found him sincere, so far. I should have thought that very fact would have led you to think a little about your own position. That you can quietly accept another man’s bounty, and never ask the reason of it, never inquire into your own affairs, or ask whether you are living in a manner suitable to your future prospects—it is incredible! No one with any sense of honour could conduct himself in such a manner.’

‘I do not know what you mean—Sebastian knows,’ said Hugo, a dread suspicion beginning to creep into his heart. ‘He is my guardian, and I live as he pleases, of course. You know I do.’

‘Your guardian! That is about all he has to guard, I think.’

‘He is my guardian, and the guardian of my property, however small it may be. I dare say, to you, I may seem almost a beggar, but Sebastian——’

‘You make me pity you! I do not think it right that you should live under such a delusion any longer. Let me tell you that you have no property except what my son gives you. You live on his bounty. But for him you would be a beggar.’

‘You are not speaking the truth!’ said Hugo, suddenly standing before her and bending his flashing eyes upon her. ‘You know you are not speaking the truth.’

‘Am I not? You had better ask Sebastian. It was he who told me. I thought you considered him perfect in all respects—not being his mother.’

‘Sebastian told you that I lived on him—that he——’

‘That your mother committed you to his charge, and he took it into his head to adopt you. That, except what he gives you, you have nothing. He told me that, and I think it best that you should know it, for I consider your behaviour and conversation very unfit for your position. That is all that I have to say, or want to hear, upon the subject.’

Mrs. Mallory’s moral equilibrium was almost restored; she felt distinctly more cheerful and better satisfied with everything. For Hugo there remained only a hideous chaos, a general bouleversement of his fixed, contented conceptions of life and his sphere in it.

He walked out of the room, and stood in the hall a moment. What should he do—whither go? This was no place for him. He had no right here. He was the object of a rich man’s pitying charity—a beggar. Mrs. Mallory had said it, and said it after a fashion which left no doubt possible. Instead of playing a grand piano in a luxurious drawing-room, instead of going to balls and dancing with beautiful young women of large fortune, and driving about, and riding fine horses—all belonging to another man—instead of this, he ought to be—what? Well, if Sebastian had left him at the institution where he was being brought up, the authorities would at least have found him a trade and apprenticed him to it: he might have been at this moment a shopman or an usher, or a clerk, or somebody’s secretary and amanuensis. At least, he would not have been anybody’s dependent, loaded with so many obligations that their weight crushed and overpowered him.

By this time he had almost unconsciously ascended the stairs, and found himself in his own room. What must he do? It was impossible to let such a state of things continue any longer. What remained? To go, of course! The idea flashed like an inspiration upon him. He would fly—now, at once, Sebastian was out; Mrs. Mallory would certainly not try to prevent his departure. What should he take? what leave? He made an excited rush to his wardrobe, his drawers, and began to turn them out. Then another idea struck him. That would not do. They were all Sebastian’s things. Not one of them but had been bought with Sebastian’s money. He could not take any of them. It would be stealing. He looked down with a shudder at the very clothes he wore. No—he must take nothing; but he must go—he must get away from here, and go and earn some money, and pay Sebastian back.

But he never could do that. How could he repay the kindness, the advice, the friendship—the care that had watched over him, the generosity which had condoned a thousand impertinences and wayward wearisome fancies? No money, no service, could ever repay these things. But at least he must get away—must remove himself. That very generosity which he had so often proved might, for anything he knew, have wearied of him long ago, though it would never say so.

He rose with the vague intention of getting out of the house with as few impediments as possible, and, once out of it, never to re-enter it. And then memory and conscience again asserted themselves. What was it that he had promised Sebastian only last night? Not to do anything of any importance without first telling him of his intention. He could not even go, for he would not begin his new career by breaking his word to the man to whom he owed everything. He must wait.

‘Oh, Sebastian!’ groaned the poor boy, flinging himself face downwards upon a couch at the foot of his bed, ‘it was cruel, cruel of you! You should not have treated me thus!’

Men of Hugo’s temperament weep sometimes with almost womanly facility, and Hugo, in his new-born anguish and despair, wept now; and when the weeping was over, he did not rise, but remained with his face buried in the cushions, repeating to himself every item of Sebastian’s generosity, and his own blind, besotted self-confidence and ignorant assumption (such it appeared to him). A thousand things rose up in his memory, and he asked himself how he could have failed to comprehend their meaning, to have some suspicion of his real position. He resolved, with more and more impassioned eagerness, to go; to wait till he had redeemed his promise, and then to say farewell, and bid Sebastian forget him. How his heart ached at the thought! But no alternative was open to him. He was a gentleman. No gentleman could knowingly continue to live as he had been doing.

The time went on; whether long or short he could not tell. He did not keep count of the minutes or hours. His whole consciousness seemed to resolve itself into a desire to be gone, which had grown overpowering and intense, when a quick tap at the door was heard, then it was opened, and Sebastian’s voice said,

‘I say, Hugo, do you mean to go to this entertainment or not? Because if—why, what is the matter with you?’

‘I never knew, Sebastian! Upon my soul and honour I never knew till Mrs. Mallory told me to-day!’ exclaimed Hugo, starting up and confronting his horrified friend, with pale face, scintillating eyes, which bore traces of recent weeping, hair wildly tossed up and down his head, and generally demoralised aspect.

‘Didn’t know what, my dear fellow? What is all this excitement about?’

‘Mrs. Mallory told me, just a little while ago, the truth about myself,’ said Hugo, speaking rapidly and vehemently in German, as he nearly always did when agitated, and he began to stride excitedly about the room. ‘It was not right ... no, no! it was very cruel! you should not have done it. I have no right to reproach you, but you should not have laid such a burden upon me—a burden which is greater than I can bear ... aber, Gott im Himmel! what do I mean by reproaching you, when I owe you the very bread I eat, the very clothes I wear! Sebastian! Sebastian! It was not right!’ he reiterated passionately, coming to a stop, and standing before the other, upon whose mind the truth began to dawn.

His mother had played the traitor—had betrayed the trust which he had been weak enough to repose in her before he had understood her so well as he did now, and the result must be, in any case, a very painful explanation, and perhaps failure to convince Hugo; perhaps the alienation of a love which he prized more highly at this present moment than he ever had done before. For the moment, the first moment, his heart sank very low: he suddenly seemed to see everything that he most prized deserting him. Adrienne was lost to him, and his heart was yet smarting under that conviction. Yesterday he had seen Myles Heywood depart, expressing his gratitude, but, as he felt, unconquered, untouched at heart. Now, here was Hugo bitterly reproaching him for not having done what was right towards him. One stroke coming upon the other almost unmanned him momentarily, for the men with warm hearts and cool heads are necessarily more susceptible both to failure and success than the men with cool heads and cold hearts to boot.

Then he suddenly gathered himself together. Hugo was not gone; he was only drifting away from him. He would make a very strong struggle to still hold him fast to him; if he succeeded, he might take it as a good omen for the future—if not, the future must look after itself. He came into the room and closed the door.

‘You startle me, Hugo. This is something I did not expect. Suppose you tell me all about it, and we can discuss it. Shall we?’

‘There is nothing to be discussed. If it had not been for my promise to you yesterday, I should not be here now. As it is, I waited; but only to say that I am going at once—to clear myself—to tell you that I never knew....’

‘Why, Hugo, how could you know? If you had known, you would not have been what you are to me, the frank, open-hearted comrade, whose friendship and companionship have made me so happy.’

‘If I had known,’ said Hugo, ‘I should not have behaved myself like a mountebank, such as I must have seemed to you many a time, with my impertinences and fancies. Mrs. Mallory is quite right—for me to be thinking of balls and amusements and enjoyments is folly—madness. What an ape! what a confounded, conceited, self-important ape I must have seemed all these years! Acting as if I had great prospects before me, while all the time I am a beggar. It is hideous!’

He was getting excited again. His eyes began to flash and his foot to beat the floor restlessly. Sebastian noticed that he had not once looked at him during all this scene, but away from him: anywhere rather than meet his eyes.

‘Let me go,’ he added, in a choked voice. ‘Let me go, and forget me. That is all you and I can do, and it must be done at once.’

‘You will never leave me, any more than I can, or shall try to forget you.’

‘Why? Because I am under such obligations to you, that you can force me to obey you from very shame?’ asked Hugo, bitterly.

‘Not at all, Hugo, but because you love me, and I love you (if it were not so, after all these years, it would be strange), and you could never find it in your heart to wound me as such a proceeding would wound me.’

At last Hugo’s eyes turned to him; at last he stood still and looked at him, and Sebastian returned the look from his inmost heart. This soul-to-soul, searching gaze was a prolonged one, and Hugo at last, turning away, sat down on the sofa again, put his hand before his face, and said in a broken voice,

‘You could always do what you liked with me, and you can now. What do you want?’

‘I only want you to listen to me and believe me,’ said Sebastian. ‘If you will only believe me, all will be well.’

A movement of the head showed that Hugo was listening.

‘You have called me cruel—you have said that what I have done was not right. I cannot hear such accusations unmoved. Why have I been cruel?’

‘In putting me into a false position—making me believe myself to be what I am not.’

‘Somewhat insincere it may have been, but I do not see how I could well have acted otherwise. When your mother died you were equally badly off, so far as worldly circumstances go, as you are now. You did not know it. It was her weakness that she could not bear you, whom she adored, to know it. She had a horror of your learning that the institution at which you were being educated was a ch—I mean——’

‘A charity-school—yes.’

‘That’s right, old fellow! Put it as spitefully as you can. If you like, it was a charity-school—and a poor coarse inadequate place too, not the place for you. When I think of you there, it is horrible; I simply took the place of the authorities of that school towards you. They had nothing to bind them to you; no single tie existed. I had everything. I had been your mother’s intimate friend; she gave me, in her goodness, that which no service of mine could repay. I reverenced her in her lifetime, and I reverence her memory now. She knew what I wished; I discussed it with her fully and freely, and she gave her unqualified consent. She trusted you to me—gave you to me. Have you any right to impute wrong motives to her memory? You remember her perfectly well. You know what she was. You must know that she never acted but as she thought, from right and pure motives.’

‘I know; that alters it. But all the same it is very hard.’

‘I feel it so,’ said Sebastian. ‘Year by year I have been more glad that I had you as my firm and faithful friend, who would never desert me, whatever any one else did. I firmly believed that it was so, and you—you have so little regard for me, that you would leave me—quit me here at an hour’s notice, and why? Because you cannot, or will not, rise above a few miserable, material interests; because you let a few paltry, sordid coins (that is what it comes to) raise themselves between you and me, and make them into a wall which neither of us can pass. Yet you told me the other night that you could not be fickle—to me. Which am I to believe—your words or your actions?’

‘You may believe both now, when I tell you that I will do what you please. Shall I stay? I will do whatever you like—just whatever you like,’ said Hugo, in a dull, toneless kind of voice.

‘You call that doing what I please—remaining though you hate it. I thought—last night I was sure that it would have caused you pain to leave me.’

‘It will—would, I mean, cause me agony; but what am I to think, when you have told Mrs. Mallory, who hates me, my whole story, and kept it from me, whom you say you love?’

‘There I was wrong, Hugo—utterly wrong, I own it Had I known—but I must not say that. If I had it to do now, I should keep silence. But if you will not allow me one mistake, take your own way. Leave me alone. My mother opposes my wishes bitterly. The girl I love won’t have a word to say to me. I have no one left but Hugo von Birkenau—and he begs to decline my acquaintance. So be it!’

He turned to leave the room. His hand was on the door-handle, when Hugo overtook him.

‘Stop!’ said he, almost in a whisper. ‘You know me better than I know myself. I cannot leave you thus. If I thought I was of any good to you——’

‘I suppose I should go through all this, to keep a thing I didn’t care for. That is so like me!’ observed Sebastian.

‘Yes,’ said Hugo, with a half-laugh, half-choke, or sob; ‘I never thought of that.’

‘Of course not. You wish to repay me, as you call it, Hugo. The only way in which you can do it is to let me watch your future, as I have always hoped to do, till you are famous, and I am known as your greatest friend, eh?’

Hugo smiled faintly.

‘Your mother despises me,’ he began.

Sebastian shrugged his shoulders.

‘My dear boy, you must have seen that my mother is by no means graciously disposed towards any one or anything that I may have the misfortune to be fond of. As I like you better almost than any one, she naturally dislikes you proportionately. It is not a pleasant thing to have to say, but it is true. Surely, if you and I understand each other, it does not matter what outsiders think of us.’

‘No,’ said Hugo, and once more there was heartiness and confidence in his tone. ‘Forgive me my folly. It is over now.’

‘I thank you for making such a sacrifice to me.... When I came into the room it was to see what you were doing, as you didn’t appear at dinner. And, behold, nearly an hour has passed. The carriage will be here in ten minutes.’

‘I don’t think I shall go.’

‘Pray do, though, or I shall have to think that this reconciliation is only a sham one after all. Besides, Helena’s beaux yeux will not turn very amiably towards me, if I come without you.’

‘It depends upon yourself how Helena’s beaux yeux regard you,’ said Hugo; ‘but I will go. It would be insulting to her if I did not. I’ll get ready now.’

‘I must do the same,’ said Sebastian, leaving the room.

Hugo proceeded to dress himself. He found himself looking back upon the afternoon, when he had sat playing waltzes, as if it had been separated by years from the evening, and his present self was a stranger to himself of yesterday.

It was quite true. These few short hours had transformed him from a boy to a man. The process, which in some cases is one of such prolonged, lingering growth, had been with him effected at a leap, a single bound. The change proved itself most in the fact that he accepted the cross laid upon him; he felt himself possessed of that goodly, manly virtue, the ability to wait; two days ago he would have tried to rush away from pain and difficulty—now he could shake hands with them. As he dressed, he planned his course as it should be, subject to circumstances; not with the furious, fitful temper of an hour ago, but with calm, manly reasonableness and judgment.

When the carriage came round they stood in the hall, and Mrs. Mallory looked curiously at his pale, altered, composed countenance; but she saw in an instant, by the look that passed between him and Sebastian, that all was perfectly clear between them. The sweet accord of two noble natures was a thing beyond her power to grasp; but she saw that she had not succeeded in separating them, and recognised that she had done her cause no service by her interference.