Probation

Myles left the house, and, traversing some sideways, found himself presently in a steep, hilly street, which he descended, arriving at last at a sort of square, through the middle of which ran the river Thanse, and on both sides of which were rows of shops. Then, walking on a hundred yards or so, he emerged in another still larger open space, opposite a large and beautiful building, which, in its delicate and multiform Gothic tracery, and noble dimensions, with the springing gilded spire leaping aloft at last, offered a startling contrast to its sordid surroundings—the shabby, low houses, narrow streets, and grimy factories which crowded round, as near as they dared. The river here made a bend, and passed the front of the town-hall. A kind of boulevard had been made, planted with trees, and immediately across the river, fronting the town-hall, was a house standing in a garden, divided by the river from the road. It was a fine old house of red brick, which had no doubt originally been ‘in the country.’ There was a look of stateliness and substance about it—the brick was relieved by handsome stone mullions, copings, and chimney-stacks.

The trees had been stunted by smoke, but they lived yet. Much ivy, strong and tenacious from advanced age, clung about it. The grounds were thoroughly well kept. The parterres were blazing with the passionate, glowing colours of late summer flowers; the windows were glazed with sheets of plate-glass. Here and there a bow had been thrown out. Behind were extensive stables and outhouses. It was, though dingy, and miscellaneous in architecture, a fine, imposing old mansion; it instantly caught the stranger’s eye, and was known from infancy to every inhabitant of Thanshope as well as the old church on the hill behind the town-hall, or as the great co-operative stores on another hill at the other side of the town.

To-night Myles looked more earnestly than usual at this old house. It was called ‘The Oakenrod,’ and was the property of Sebastian Mallory, tenanted during his absence by that stately dame, his mother.

‘There it is!’ said Myles within himself. ‘Cumbering the ground—kept like a palace for a fellow who doesn’t care two straws for it!’

Again he shrugged his shoulders, and turned somewhat abruptly to the left, making for one of the side doors of the town-hall. He went in, and ran up a great many flights of stone steps, past corridors and branching passages, till he could go no higher, for the excellent reason that he was at the top of the building. Pushing open the glass door, which swung to behind him, Myles found himself in the holy of holies—the library. A door to the right led into the reading-room, and thither he directed his steps. It was a large, lofty, handsome room, with many tables and chairs, and plenty of pens, ink, newspapers, and periodicals scattered about. When Myles entered, the room was almost empty. One or two men were reading newspapers, and at one table in a window sat a girl, who had a great book open before her, but whose eyes were at the moment intently fixed upon the old house, the Oakenrod, which lay directly beneath.

Myles, searching about, found a number of the Westminster Review, and took it to his accustomed place, at the table next to that where the girl sat. He noticed no one to right or to left of him—not even her who was almost the only lady visitor who ever entered the reading-room.

She was already a familiar figure to his eyes. For some months past he had seen her nearly every evening, sitting at the same table, even at the same side of that table, with a book—generally some large and weighty volume—open before her, and a small thick note-book, in which she wrote extracts or abstracts of what she read.

Myles knew quite well the tall, slim figure, the two dresses which she alternately wore—one a soft, flowing black one—another, soft and flowing too, of a blue so dark as to be nearly black. He knew that the lines of her dresses flowed gracefully, and were agreeable to the eye. He knew, too, the little black fichu which she usually wore—a sort of apology for a mantle, which she never discarded on the hottest days; the modestly shaped white straw hat, with its carefully preserved black lace scarf, and bunch of daisies at one side, which hat she always ended in taking off after she had sat there ten minutes or so. She had a pale, clear, fair complexion, bright, warm chestnut hair, and a face which, not conventionally beautiful in outline, was full to overflowing of the subtler, more bewitching charm of a beautiful spirit. It—her face—had a youthful softness of outline—not full, but not thin, with a charming rounded chin, melting into the full white throat; a mouth whose lines attracted irresistibly, so good, so spiritual were their curves; an insignificant but well-cut nose; a pair of large, luminous, expressive eyes, which in some favourable lights might appear grey, but which an impartial observer must inevitably have confessed had a shade of green in them.

Myles and this young lady had sat at neighbouring tables in the public reading-room almost every evening throughout the spring and summer months of that year. Whenever Myles came into the room he had found the young lady there; he could not, of course, tell whether she came when he was not there.

Conversation in the reading-room was against the rules; but ‘conversation’ is an abstract noun of considerable indefiniteness, and one to which different minds may attach different meanings. A few words exchanged, of greeting or courtesy, could scarcely have come under the head of ‘conversation,’ or if it did, the rules were infringed every day. A little remark, as one passed the paper to the other—fifty little things might have been said (and were said by some frequenters of the room) without in the least disturbing the peace of the studious.

But between Myles and his neighbour those words had never been spoken. They had never exchanged a syllable—Myles because of a certain British-workmanlike shyness, and a general sense that she belonged, despite the simplicity of her appearance, manner, and attire, to the class of ‘fine ladies’ whom he disliked and distrusted—the class which was typified for him in the person of Mrs. Mallory of the Oakenrod—and of whom he had the idea that they were silly, pretty, useless, expensive things, good for nothing but to spend a man’s money, and make him miserable with their tricks and antics—and break his heart if he were fool enough to give it into their keeping—incapable of taking any part in the serious things of life. That was his opinion of ‘ladies.’ For the women of his own class he had a hearty respect and admiration: they could earn wages; they could work; they did not meddle with things out of their sphere; they had a distinct use and purpose; he never uttered an ill word to or of any one of them.

He had never spoken to his neighbour, because he was shy, and did not know how to begin a conversation; but he would have scorned to own it: he would have said, ‘Speak to her? Why should I speak to her? I’ve nothing that I want to say to her.’

Which would have been untrue; for there was such intelligence, such sympathy in her face, that he many a time caught himself, on reading any striking passage, wondering what she would think of it if she had read it.

She had never spoken to him—because—why—because—well, what did it matter? possibly because she was a little more sensible than most girls, and felt no wish to speak unless she had something to say.

They met without sign of recognition. He would take his place—she hers; she always had some book under her arm, for which she had stopped to ask the librarian on her way in, and they would often pass a couple of hours thus almost without a word or a look. She read earnestly and hard—not as if she read for pleasure, but for work—with a purpose. Privately, Myles was mighty puzzled to know what she could be reading, or rather, with what object she read what she did. Once he had been quite excited (silently) to see her poring over a musical score; reading it as if it were a book. One of the specialities of the Thanshope Free Library was its musical department, which was richly stocked both in scores and in treatises on music and musicians.

During the summer the room was generally nearly empty. The people were otherwise employed, so that often not more than half a dozen readers were to be found in all the large, airy room—sometimes Myles and the studious, unknown ‘reading girl’ were all alone there.

Myles opened his Review, and his eye fell upon an article on the governing classes which instantly caught his attention. In the hope of finding some follies and weaknesses of the governing classes sharply castigated, he settled himself with pleased expectation to his book.

Half an hour passed. One by one the other occupants of the room walked away. The workman and the young lady were left alone together. She looked every now and then out of the window. Her note-taking did not seem to flow so smoothly as usual. Spread open on the table before her, she had a fine edition of the ‘Fugues’ of Domenico Scarlatti, which she studied a little now and then, but oftener looked out through the window. Now, from that window she had a tolerably wide prospect; and immediately beneath her eyes was the handsome old red-brick house, with its flower-beds, and its lawns, smooth, and green, and well-watered—a rural fastness in the midst of the dusty town.

There was silence that was almost solemn in the big room, which was growing dusk: it was so high and airy, and so isolated; raised far above the town and its troubles; the din hushed; the rolling vehicles and the passing throng dwarfed; books on every side, and silence like a garment over all.

As chimes broke that silence, and eight o’clock struck, the girl, with a sigh, turned resolutely away from the outside prospect, and applied herself again to her score.

Myles, half roused by the chiming, half pleased with a particularly hard hit at the governing classes, which especially took his fancy, raised his head at this moment, and his eyes, without any thought of his neighbour. It is a gesture which every one makes sometimes in reading. Smiling with satisfaction at what struck him as a masterly argument, Myles let his eyes fall upon her.

She too was looking up—not at him, but past him. Her eyes were turned towards the door, and quick as thought there passed a subtle, inexplicable flash of dislike, tempered with alarm, across her face. She made a movement as if to rise—as if to escape; then sat down again, with a flush, more of annoyance than confusion, mantling in her cheeks. Then, bending to her book, she seemed to make some effort to keep her eyes firmly fixed upon it.

This little bit of by-play roused Myles’s attention. He turned his head towards the door, which was behind him, and he saw how it was opened, and a man came into the room. A gentleman? he speculated, as he first saw the figure, in the obscure background. The visitor gradually approached, and Myles, staring unceremoniously at him, experienced a feeling of surprise, disgust, and sudden enlightenment as to the cause of the young lady’s disturbance.

The new-comer was a young man with a somewhat high colour, dark hair and eyes, a full beardless face, and a coarse, animal mouth. He was well, even foppishly dressed, and bore the outward stamp of a person to whom money is not a subject of painful study or consideration. But, as Myles knew, he was not sterling coin. His manner, even of entering that room, was less than second-rate; confidence became a swagger; independence was metamorphosed into self-consciousness. The expression of his face was bold and vulgar. Perhaps no greater or more telling contrast could have been found, than that between the workman in his work-a-day dress, and the would-be dandy in his gloved, perfumed, over-dressed vulgarity.

This person came forward; his eyes fell upon Myles; he removed them. A workman—a person not demanding his attention, one of the “fellahs” who came to the reading-room.

Nevertheless, he seated himself at Myles’s table and drew a Daily News towards him, without speaking and without removing his hat. Myles glanced at the young lady without letting her see that he did so; her eyes were fastened upon the page before her, but he had studied her expressions, and knew that she was not reading.

‘Now, I should like to know,’ speculated Myles inwardly, ‘what you may want here, Mr. Frederick Spenceley?’

He had recognised the man—the son of a rich manufacturer of Thanshope, who had earned his fortune as a Radical, and was living in state now as a Conservative and a supporter of the aristocracy, Church, State, and landed gentry interest. His son, as Myles was well aware, had assuredly not visited the reading-room for purposes of mental instruction.

Myles apparently applied himself again to his book, but the argument had lost its charm for him. He had not known until now how lively was the interest he had taken in his graceful young neighbour. Placing his book so as to shield his face, but yet so that he could observe what was going on, he said to himself,

‘I’m glad I didn’t go away ten minutes ago.’

After bestowing a very short and scant need of attention upon the Daily News, Mr. Spenceley cast his eyes around him. Myles watched him, and saw the leisurely impudence of the stare with which he favoured the young lady, and his ears began to tingle. He—my poor Myles—was of a fiery temperament, could not endure to see even a ‘fine lady’ insulted without cause, and was dangerously ready to take up the cudgels for the unprotected or ill-used.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mr. Frederick Spenceley, leaning towards the girl. ‘Do you want that paper?’

He stretched his hand towards a newspaper which lay upon the table at which she sat, but he was looking at her with a stare, perhaps intended for one of gallant admiration, but which, from the unfortunate ‘nature of the beast,’ succeeded only in being impertinent.

Without looking at him, she raised her elbow from the paper on which it had rested, and continued, or seemed to continue, her reading.

‘You don’t want it?’ he said, with what may have been meant for a winning smile.

‘No,’ came like a little icicle from her lips.

Myles with difficulty sat still; but, making an effort, continued quiet, though watching the game with a deeper interest than before.

The twilight had grown almost into darkness by this time. The attendant, perhaps not knowing that any one was in the room, had not yet lighted the gas.

Mr. Spenceley took the paper, but, without even pretending to look at it, said in a tone of under-bred badinage,

‘Isn’t it rather dark to be reading, Miss—a——’

She raised her eyes this time, and caught those of the speaker fixed full upon her. Her own were instantly averted, with an expression of cold contempt and disgust, and she made no reply.

‘I assure you it’s very bad for the eyes to read by this half-light—very trying. Hadn’t I better tell the fellah to light the gas? I am sure you will spoil your eyes, and that would be a pity,’ with a winning simper, which made Myles’s fist clench with an intense desire to do him some horrible violence. ‘Don’t you really think I had better?’ he pursued, evidently bent upon making her speak. At last he succeeded.

‘Be good enough to mind your own business, without addressing me,’ said she, in a voice which, thought Myles, was sufficient to have rebuffed the veriest cur that ever called itself by the name of man.

With that she quietly, by slightly altering the position of her chair, turned her back upon Mr. Spenceley, while her profile, with frowning brow and indignantly compressed lips, was plainly visible to Myles.

Mr. Spenceley laughed, not so musically as a lady-killer should be able to laugh, and remarked:

‘I feel it my business to prevent a young lady from spoiling her eyes, and——’

Steadying his voice with some difficulty into something like indifference, Myles turned to him and said,

‘Don’t you know that talking is forbidden here?’

The look which he received in answer made him smile, despite his inner indignation. Mr. Spenceley contemplated him with a stare, which was unfortunately not so regal as it might have been; then, raising a single eyeglass, he stuck it into one eye, and surveyed the audacious speaker anew, as if his wonder at what had occurred could never be sufficiently satisfied.

‘Will yah mind yah own business, and leave gentlemen to mind they-aws?’ he at last drawled out, with magnificent disdain.

‘When I see the gentleman I shall be quite ready to leave him to mind his own business,’ was the placid retort. ‘In the meantime, as the young lady wishes to read, and I wish to read, and you disturb us with your chatter, perhaps you will kindly hold your tongue.’

Here Mr. Spenceley resolved upon a master-stroke. Turning his broadcloth-clad back upon Myles, he tilted his chair back so as to see the young lady better, and inquired,

‘Do you know the fellah, Miss—a——?’

Before she could reply (supposing that she had any intention of replying) Myles had leaned a little forward, and tapped Mr. Spenceley on the shoulder. With a great start, quite disproportionate to the circumstances, the latter brought his chair to its normal position again. Myles saw the start, and stifled a smile.

‘Excuse me, my good sir, I don’t remember ever to have seen you here before, so perhaps you won’t mind showing me your ticket—I mean your member’s ticket—otherwise——’

‘Will yah hold yah tongue?’ retorted the other, in a tone of scornful exasperation.

‘No,’ replied Myles. ‘If you’ve any right to be here, show me your ticket, and hold your tongue, according to rules; if you haven’t that right, walk out at once.’

‘I can tell yah, yah don’t seem to know who ya’h speaking to,’ observed Mr. Spenceley, apparently lost in astonishment. ‘Are yah one of the authorities here?’

‘Oh yes! I know you,’ said Myles, who saw that the young lady was now watching the dispute with undisguised interest. ‘And I’m that much of an authority that I can prevent you from disturbing and annoying people. Once for all, will you show me your card of admission?’

‘No, I won’t.’

‘Then you’ll excuse my going to the librarian and telling him you are here without right—unless you prefer to save that trouble to me, and ten shillings to yourself, by walking yourself off now, this moment,’ said Myles, who began to find a delicious piquancy in the sensation of dealing thus summarily with a person of the consideration of Frederick Spenceley. It was an ignoble feeling, and we all have ignoble feelings sometimes, or what is the meaning of the constant injunctions to bear and forbear which we receive from different sources?

‘Haw! Wha—at?’

‘The fine for using this room without belonging to it is ten shillings. There’s another fine for talking and disturbing people, too,’ said Myles, who had never lost his look of perfect ease and calmness, and who did not for a moment remove his eyes from the other’s face.

Mr. Spenceley did not appear to like the mention of fines. His face fell; his hand involuntarily sought his pocket.

‘Tender in that direction, poor fellow!’ thought Myles to himself.

‘Confounded radical place, this!’ observed Mr. Spenceley. ‘Not fit for gentlemen to live in.’

‘Not when they have only been gentlemen since the last general election,’ said Myles, politely. ‘I quite agree with you.’

‘Well, I shall go and see what the librarian says to all this,’ said Mr. Spenceley, by way of covering his retreat; and then, after a prolonged stare at the girl in the window, he retired, not so jauntily as he had entered.

Myles picked up his book again. The girl watched her tormentor, until the noiseless door had swung to behind him, and she had seen his shadow pass towards the stairs. Myles feigned to read, but he could not help seeing how she trembled as she sat there.

He did not speak to her. Something—he knew not what—held him back. But he suddenly felt a light touch upon his arm, and, looking up, saw the young lady standing beside him.

‘Do you think he is really gone?’ she asked, scarcely above her breath.

‘Oh yes! That sort of cur slinks off when you stoop for a stone, with his tail between his legs. It’s only when he has his kennel well behind him that he turns upon you and snaps,’ replied Myles, with homely if expressive metaphor.

She drew a long breath, raised her head again, and said, with a mixture of dignity and gentleness which appealed intensely to his strongest feelings of admiration,

‘I cannot tell you how much I am obliged to you!’

‘Don’t mention it, miss,’ said he; and it was odd that, while Mr. Spenceley’s ‘miss’ made every right-minded person pant to knock him down and pound him well, Myles’s ‘miss’ was not in the faintest degree offensive.

‘You spoke as if you knew who he is. Do you?’ she added.

‘Oh yes! He’s well enough known; he’s the only son of that Spenceley who has the big factories down at Lower Place—“Bargaining Jack” they call him.’

‘Oh! I know who you mean. Poor man! How I pity him for having such a son!’

‘Had you ever seen him before?’ asked Myles, confirmed in his impression that she was not a native of Thanshope, and finding conversation easier than he had expected.

‘I have seen him several times lately. I seem always to be meeting him. Once I thought he had followed me, and then I thought how absurd to imagine such a thing; but he must have done it all the same.’

Myles had had inexplicable sensations while she spoke. He had known her so long without a voice, that now, when he heard it, she seemed to become a stranger again; and yet not a stranger. She had a sweet, low voice, clear and penetrating, and she spoke with an accent that had something not quite English in it.

It would have been difficult—to Myles in his ignorance, impossible—to say in what the foreign element lay; but it was assuredly there. When she spoke she looked at him with fleeting glances which had nothing insincere in them, and her face lighted up and became lovely—and more than that, distinguished, spiritual; the slender figure was balanced with such a graceful poise; the delicate hands were free from all nervous restlessness. Her chestnut hair was abundant, and its dressing so simple and beautiful as alone to make her remarkable. Myles realised that she was most distinctly a ‘lady,’ but he could not make himself feel her to be either trivial or stupid. There had been nothing trivial in her behaviour. Her treatment of him flattered his discrimination when he remembered her late treatment of Mr. Spenceley. At that time of his life he had very wrong ideas on the subject of gentlemen, having mistaken notions as to their power and character; but the best part of his nature was soothed and pleased when so perfect a piece of refinement as this young lady treated him entirely as a gentleman.

‘And I thank you again, very much,’ she added, smiling, and holding out her hand.

Myles forgot to be confused as he accepted the hand so frankly extended, and felt encouraged to do what he had thought would be right from the moment she had spoken to him.

‘I am very glad to have been of service. May I ask how far you are going?’

‘To Blake Street, if you know it.’

‘I know it well. It is too far for you to go alone, if you will excuse my saying so. It is quite possible that fellow may be hanging about yet. I’ll go with you, if you will allow me?’

‘Oh! you are very kind,’ said she, with visible relief. ‘I cannot refuse, though I am sorry to take you away.’

‘Not at all. I can’t fasten to it again,’ said Myles, sincerely.

‘Then, if you would be so good, I should be very grateful,’ said she; and she looked so relieved and so pleased, that Myles felt himself rewarded an hundredfold for the act which had occurred to him as one of simple civility—nay, of almost obvious necessity.

They left the town-hall when she had returned her book to the librarian, and passed out into the street turning to the right.

‘This is the shortest way, miss,’ said Myles, distracted as to what he should call her, feeling ‘miss’ disagreeable, he hardly knew why, but, despite the wealth of the English language, having no other alternative than a bold ‘you.’

She relieved his mind as if she had understood his thoughts.

‘My name is Adrienne Blisset,’ said she. ‘I should like to know yours, if you will tell it me?’

‘Myles Heywood.’

‘I like it—it is so English, so Lancashire.’

‘It’s not like yours, then,’ said he. ‘It sounds foreign.’

‘Adrienne? Yes; that is French for Adriana; but I pronounce it in the German way—Adrien-ne. Don’t you see?’

‘I never heard such a name—for an English young lady,’ said Myles, simply.

‘I am not altogether an Englishwoman. I am half German. I was never in England till eighteen months ago.’

‘Never in England!’ echoed Myles, incredulously. ‘Then you speak English amazingly well.’

Adrienne laughed, and Myles asked,

‘How do you like England, now that you are in it?’

‘I do not know England. I only know Thanshope, and I—cannot say—that I do like it much—if you will excuse me.’

‘Oh, we don’t expect every one to like our town,’ said Myles, magnanimously. ‘It is a rough sort of a place, I fancy. And I should not think you would like it either. You are not like most of the ladies here.’

‘No?’

‘There isn’t another lady in the place who would come to the reading-room as you do.’

‘Indeed. Why?’

‘They are too fine, I suppose,’ said he, contemptuously.

‘Too fine?’

‘Ay. We have a lot of fine ladies here. There’s Mrs. Spenceley, mother of that fellow who was annoying you this evening; but she’s not so fine, certainly, poor thing! But there’s her daughter!’ Myles shrugged his shoulders and turned his eyes to heaven.

‘Is she very fine?’

‘Whenever I see her she is as fine as fine can be; but perhaps she has some excuse for it, for she is very handsome, and she has a kind face too; one would wonder how she could be that fellow’s sister. Then there’s Mrs. Shuttleworth, that has the grand yellow carriage, but she is better than some of them; and she looks ill, poor thing! so perhaps her finery only gives her very little comfort.’

‘It seems to me that you have an excuse for them all,’ said Miss Blisset.

‘Perhaps I have—for all but one—the proudest and the finest of the whole lot. I’d rather have any of them than her—and that’s Mrs. Mallory of the Oakenrod.’

‘Mrs. Mal——’ began Adrienne quickly, and then stopped abruptly. ‘Do you know her?’ she added.

‘I know this much of her, that I work in their factory, and she comes looking round now and then, behaving as if she thought that I, and the factories, and the town, and the world in general were made for her pleasure and service. Oh, she’s a proud, insolent woman, Mrs. Mallory; all the Mallorys are proud and insolent. It would do them good to be humbled, and I hope they will be.’

‘Oh! how can you be so bitter against them?’ said she, as if shocked.

‘No, I’m not bitter; but I don’t like to see people like that giving themselves airs, looking as if the world’s prosperity depended upon their continuing to favour it by living in it, when any one knows that if they had their bread to earn they couldn’t do it. I like justice.’

‘Justice, and a little generosity with it,’ said she, gently, smiling in what appeared to Myles a very attractive manner.

‘We are here in Blake Street,’ said he; ‘which way do we turn?’

‘To the right, please. My uncle’s house is at the very end of the street.’

‘The end—it must be lonely,’ observed Myles.

‘Yes, it is, rather. He lives at Stonegate.’

‘Stonegate!’ echoed Myles. ‘I’ve often wondered who lived there, and never knew. Why, it is part of the Mallorys’ property,’ he said suddenly.

‘Yes; I believe it is,’ she replied composedly. ‘My uncle has lived there for ten years now.’

There was a little pause, and then Myles said,

‘You will excuse me, but I don’t really think it is fit for you to walk all that long way of an evening, especially now that it gets dark so soon, and after what has happened to-night.’

‘I suppose I shall have to give it up. Luckily I am nearly at the end of my task. So I shall try to finish it.’

‘Your reading?’ he said inquiringly.

‘Yes. References for my uncle’s book. He is writing a book about Art and the Development of Civilisation: he is too infirm to go to the library himself, and I like going there. I have been reading up music for him all summer.’

‘Oh, that’s it!’ said Myles, in a tone which betrayed ingenuously enough that he had thought often and deeply upon the subject.

‘Yes, that is it. I must really try to go a few times more, because those books may not be removed from the library; and then I shall not need to go any more.’

‘But you have not been here long, you said?’ said Myles.

‘No. Only eighteen months, since my father died abroad, and my uncle asked me to come and live here with him, else I should have had no home.’

She spoke with a quietness amounting to sadness, and Myles felt sure that there was sadness in her life, though she spoke so cheerfully.

‘Were you sorry or glad to come to England?’ he ventured to ask.

‘Oh, sorry. Every association I had with it was unpleasant; whereas I had had many pleasures at different times abroad; and it is so cold, and dull, and triste here.’

‘For any one that has no friends——’ he began.

‘Like me,’ she said.

‘It must be rather dull. Here is your place, I think.’

‘Yes,’ said Adrienne, pausing with her hand on the latch of the gate. ‘I would ask you to come in, only it would disturb my uncle so much. But I shall see you again, and another evening I hope you will come in—will you?’

‘You are very kind,’ said Myles, secretly feeling immensely flattered at the invitation. ‘If it wouldn’t be intruding——’

‘Not at all. I should like to know what you think about one or two things. I know you think, by the books I have seen you reading, and I have a burning curiosity to know what you think.’

Myles suggested that his subjects—work, wages, politics—might not be very interesting to a young lady.

‘It depends so much upon the kind of young lady, I think,’ said she, smiling. ‘Well, good night; I am obliged for your kindness.’

With a gracious inclination of her head she was gone—had passed swiftly up the walk, opened the door, and entered the house.

Myles stood for some time on the spot where she had left him, staring at the house. He looked at it well. ‘Stonegate. Blake Street.’ The whole of Blake Street was part of the Mallorys’ property—Sebastian Mallory’s property, to gain which he had toiled not, neither had he spun; but it had come to him, and was his to do as he would with.

Blake Street was a long street, composed, for about half its length, of smallish houses, in which lived quiet, steady, proper people. Several of the door-plates bore the indications of dressmakers; there were two dentists, a veterinary surgeon, and an undertaker. The rest were quiet, dull, dingy-looking private residences.

Beyond a certain point all this changed. Blake Street became a mere confusion of pasteboard terraces, half-finished houses, single strips of houses, and general disorder and chaos—a brick and plaster abomination of desolation. And then came a lonely stretch of street, quite without houses, with an unfinished footpath on either side, skirting a waste of what really had been heath, and was now little else. Some tufts of heather might be found growing there in their season, and the air that blew over it was sharp and keen.

Across this common one might see the lights of the town; dim outlines of factories and churches, and masses of buildings—the tortuous lines of light creeping up steep streets and lanes, and the indistinct outlines of the long range of the Blackrigg moors. On the left side of the road stood one solitary house, in a moderately sized garden—the Stonegate where Adrienne lived with her uncle. It was an old house of dark grey stone; square, solidly built, and of moderately large proportions. It was contemporary with the Oakenrod, and had been built by some far-back, dead and gone Mallory (they were lords of the manor of Thanshope) as a dower-house. In the garden the trees were shrivelled up, the flower-beds were adorned with nothing but a few evergreen bushes, and the grass was not kept as was the grass in the Oakenrod garden.

Behind the house was the lonely-looking waste of heath or common which was out of Sebastian Mallory’s jurisdiction; and in front a low wall, with a wicket-gate in it, bounded the garden. From the wicket to the door was a flagged walk, raised a little above the grass border on either side of it. On each side the door two windows; on the second story five windows. The shutters of the lower windows were closed—the whole face of the house presented a blank, staring void, till at last Myles, looking intently upwards, saw a light appear in one of the upper windows, and a shadow pass the blind. That must be Adrienne’s room. Then he glanced at the surroundings of the house.

‘A lonely place enough!’ he decided within himself. ‘I’m glad I came home with her. If that blackguard had been at the trouble to follow her! I hope he doesn’t know where she lives: it hardly looks as if he did, or he wouldn’t have chosen the public library to molest her in. I don’t believe that if she called out, in this street, any one would hear her; and if they did, they’re a poor lot—tailors, and women, and ‘pothecaries: they wouldn’t know a woman’s screaming from a cat’s miauling.’

‘It is a nasty place!’ he muttered again to himself, lingering unaccountably, reluctant to go. ‘It looks as if there were a blight, or a curse, or something upon it.’

At last he tore himself away, and took his homeward way.