Red Pottage

If you are travelling across Middleshire on the local line between Southminster and Westhope, after you have passed Wilderleigh with its gray gables and park wall, close at hand you will perceive to nestle (at least, Mr. Gresley said it nestled) Warpington Vicarage; and perhaps, if you know where to look, you will catch a glimpse of Hester's narrow bedroom window under the roof. Half a mile farther on Warpington Towers, the gorgeous residence of the Pratts, bursts into view, with flag on turret flying, and two tightly bitted rustic bridges leaping high over the Drone. You cannot see all the lodges of Warpington Towers from the line, which is a source of some regret to Mr. Pratt; but if he happens to be travelling with you he will point out two of them, chaste stucco Gothic erections with church windows, and inform you that the three others are on the northern and eastern sides, vaguely indicating the directions of Scotland and Ireland.

And the Drone, kept in order on your left by the low line of the Slumberleigh hills, will follow you and leave you, leave you and return all the way to Westhope. You are getting out at Westhope, of course, if you are a Middleshire man; for Westhope is on the verge of Middleshire, and the train does not go any farther—at least, it only goes into one of the insignificant counties which jostle each other to hold on to Middleshire, unknown Saharas, where passengers who oversleep themselves wake to find themselves cast away.

Westhope Abbey stands in its long, low meadows and level gardens, close to the little town, straggling red roof above red roof, up its steep cobbled streets.

Down the great central aisle you may walk on mossy stones between the high shafts of broken pillars under the sky. God's stars look down once more where the piety of man had for a time shut them out. Through the slender tracery of what was once the east window, instead of glazed saint and crucifix, you may see the little town clasping its hill.

The purple clematis and the small lizard-like leaf of the ivy have laid tender hands on all that is left of that stately house of prayer. The pigeons wheel round it, and nest in its niches. The soft, contented murmur of bird praise has replaced the noise of bitter human prayer. A thin wind-whipped grass holds the summit of the broken walls against all corners. The fallen stones, quaintly carved with angel and griffin, are going slowly back year by year, helped by the rain and hindered by the frost, slowly back through the sod to the generations of human hands that held and hewed them, and fell to dust below them hundreds of years ago. The spirit returns to the God who gave it, and the stone to the hand that fashioned it.

The adjoining monastery had been turned into a dwelling-house, without altering it externally, and it was here that Lord Newhaven loved to pass the summer months. Into its one long upper passage all the many rooms opened, up white stone steps through arched doors, rooms which had once been monks' dormitories, abbots' cells, where Lady Newhaven and her guests now crimped their hair and slept under down quilts till noon.

It was this long passage, with its interminable row of low latticed windows, that Lord Newhaven was turning into a depository for the old English weapons which he was slowly collecting. He was standing now gazing lovingly at them, drawing one finger slowly along an inlaid arquebus, when a yell from the garden made him turn and look out.

It was not a yell of anguish, and Lord Newhaven remained at the window leaning on his elbows and watching at his ease the little scene which was taking place below him.

On his bicycle on the smooth-shaven lawn was Dick, wheeling slowly in and out among the stone-edged flower-beds, an apricot in each broad palm, while he discoursed in a dispassionate manner to the two excited little boys who were making futile rushes for the apricots. The governess and Rachel were looking on. Rachel had arrived at Westhope the day before from Southminster. "Take your time, my son," said Dick, just eluding by a hair's-breadth a charge through a geranium-bed on the part of the eldest boy. "If you are such jolly little fools as to crack your little skulls on the sun-dial, I shall eat them both myself. Miss Turner says you may have them, so you've only got to take them. I can't keep on offering them all day long. My time"—(Dick ran his bicycle up a terrace, and, as soon as the boys were up, glided down again)—"my time is valuable. You don't want them?" A shrill disclaimer and a fresh onslaught. "Miss Turner, they thank you very much, but they don't care for apricots."

Half a second more and Dick skilfully parted from his bicycle and was charged by his two admirers and severely pummelled as high as they could reach. When they had been led away by Miss Turner, each biting an apricot and casting longing backward looks at their friend, Rachel and Dick wandered to the north side of the abbey and sat down there in the shade.

Lord Newhaven could still see them, could still note her amused face under her wide white hat. He was doing his best for Dick, and Dick was certainly having his chance, and making the most of it according to his lights.

"But, all the same, I don't think he has a chance," said Lord Newhaven to himself. "That woman, in spite of her frank manner and her self-possession, is afraid of men; not of being married for her money, but of man himself. And whatever else he may not be, Dick is a man. It's the best chance she will ever get, so it is probable she won't take it."

Lord Newhaven sauntered back down the narrow black oak staircase to his own room on the ground-floor. He sat down at his writing-table and took out of his pocket a letter which he had evidently read before. He now read it slowly once more.

"Your last letter to me had been opened," wrote his brother from India, "or else it had not been properly closed. As you wrote on business, I wish you would be more careful."

"I will," said Lord Newhaven, and he wrote a short letter in his small, upright hand, closed the envelope, addressed and stamped it, and sauntered out through the low-arched door into the garden.

Dick was sitting alone on the high-carved stone edge of the round pool where the monks used to wash, and where gold-fish now lived cloistered lives. A moment of depression seemed to have overtaken that cheerful personage.

"Come as far as the post-office," said Lord Newhaven.

Dick gathered himself together, and rose slowly to his large feet.

"You millionaires are all the same," he said. "Because you have a house crawling with servants till they stick to the ceiling you have to go to the post-office to buy a penny stamp. It's like keeping a dog and barking yourself."

"I don't fancy I bark much," said Lord Newhaven.

"No, and you don't bite often, but when you do you take out the piece. Do you remember that colored chap at Broken Hill?"

"He deserved it," said Lord Newhaven.

"He richly deserved it. But you took him in, poor devil, all the same. You were so uncommonly mild and limp beforehand, and letting pass things you ought not to have let pass, that, like the low beast he was, he thought he could play you any dog's trick, and that you would never turn on him."

"It's a way worms have."

"Oh, hang worms; it does not matter whether they turn or not. But cobras have no business to imitate them till poor rookies think they have no poison in them, and that they can tickle them with a switch. What a great hulking brute that man was! You ricked him when you threw him! I saw him just before I left Adelaide. He's been lame ever since."

"He'd have done for me if he could."

"Of course he would. His blood was up. He meant to break your back. I saw him break a chap's back once, and it did not take so very long either. I heard it snap. But why did you let him go so far to start with before you pulled him up? That's what I've never been able to understand about you. If you behaved different to start with they would behave different to you. They would know they'd have to."

"I have not your art," said Lord Newhaven, tranquilly, "of letting a man know when he's getting out of hand that unless he goes steady there will be a row, and he'll be in it. I'm not made like that."

"It works well," said Dick. "It's a sort of peaceful way of rubbing along and keeping friends. If you let those poor bullies know what to expect they aren't, as a rule, over-anxious to toe the mark. But you never do let them know."

"No," said Lord Newhaven, as he shot his letter into the brass mouth in the cottage wall, just below a window of "bulls'-eyes" and peppermints, "I never do. I don't defend it. But—"

"But what?"

Lord Newhaven's face underwent some subtle change. His eyes fixed themselves on a bottle of heart-shaped peppermints, and then met Dick's suddenly, with the clear, frank glance of a schoolboy.

"But somehow, for the life of me, until things get serious—I can't."

Dick, whose perceptions were rather of a colossal than an acute order, nevertheless perceived that he had received a confidence, and changed the subject.

"Aren't you going to buy some stamps?" he asked, perfectly aware that Lord Newhaven had had his reasons for walking to the post-office.

Lord Newhaven, who was being watched with affectionate interest from behind the counter by the grocer postmaster, went in, hit his head against a pendent ham, and presently emerged with brine in his hair and a shilling's worth of stamps in his hand.

Later in the day, when he and Dick were riding up the little street, with a view to having a look at the moor—for Middleshire actually has a grouse moor, although it is in the Midlands—the grocer in his white apron rushed out and waylaid them.

"Very sorry about the letter, my lord," he repeated volubly, touching his forelock. "Hope her la'ship told you as I could not get it out again, or I'm sure I would have done to oblige your lordship, and her la'ship calling on purpose. But the post-office is that mean and distrustful as it don't leave me the key, and once hanything is in, in it is."

"Ah!" said Lord Newhaven, slowly. "Well, Jones, it's not your fault. I ought not to have changed my mind. I suppose her ladyship gave you my message that I wanted it back?"

"Yes, my lord, and her la'ship come herself, not ten minutes after you was gone. But I've no more power over that there receptacle than a hunlaid hegg, and that's the long and short of it. I've allus said, and I say it again, 'Them as have charge of the post-office should have the key.'"

"When I am made postmaster-general you shall have it," said Lord Newhaven, smiling. "It is the first reform that I shall bring about." And he nodded to the smiling, apologetic man and trotted on, Dick beside him, who was apparently absorbed in the action of his roan cob.

But Dick's mind had sustained a severe shock. That Lady Newhaven, "that jolly little woman," the fond mother of those two "jolly little chaps," should have been guilty of an underhand trick, was astonishing to him.

Poor Dick had started life with a religious reverence for woman; had carried out his brittle possession to bush-life in Australia, from thence through two A.D.C.-ships, and, after many vicissitudes, had brought it safely back with a large consignment of his own Burgundy to his native land. It was still sufficiently intact—save for a chip or two—to make a pretty wedding-present to his future wife. But it had had a knock since he mounted the roan cob. For, unfortunately, the kind of man who has what are called "illusions" about women is too often the man whose discrimination lies in other directions, in fields where little high-heeled shoes are not admitted.

Rachel had the doubtful advantage of knowing that, in spite of Dick's shrewdness respecting shades of difference in muscatels, she and Lady Newhaven were nevertheless ranged on the same pedestal in Dick's mind as flawless twins of equal moral beauty. But after this particular day she observed that Lady Newhaven had somehow slipped off the pedestal, and that she, Rachel, had the honor of occupying it alone.

Rachel had left London precipitately after she had been the unwilling confidante of Lady Newhaven's secret, and had taken refuge with that friend of all perplexed souls, the Bishop of Southminster. She felt unable to meet Hugh again without an interval of breathing-time. She knew that if she saw much more of him he would confide in her, and she shrank from receiving a confidence the ugliest fact of which she already knew. Perhaps she involuntarily shrank also from fear lest he should lower himself in her eyes by only telling her half the truth. Sad confessions were often poured into Rachel's ears which she had known for years. She never alluded to that knowledge, never corrected the half-lie which accompanies so many whispered self—accusations. Confidences and confessions are too often a means of evasion of justice—a laying of the case for the plaintiff before a judge without allowing the defendant to be present or to call a witness. Rachel, by dint of long experience, which did slowly for her the work of imagination, had ceased to wonder at the faithfully chronicled harsh words and deeds of generous souls. She knew or guessed at the unchronicled treachery or deceit which had brought about that seemingly harsh word or deed.

She had not the exalted ideas about her fellow-creatures which Hester had, but she possessed the rare gift of reticence. She exemplified the text—"Whether it be to friend or foe, talk not of other men's lives." And in Rachel's quiet soul a vast love and pity dwelt for these same fellow-creatures. She had lived and worked for years among those whose bodies were half starved, half clothed, degraded. When she found money at her command she had spent sums (as her lawyer told her) out of all proportion on that poor human body, stumbling between vice and starvation. But now, during the last year, when her great wealth had thrown her violently into society, she had met, until her strong heart flinched before it, the other side of life—the starved soul in the delicately nurtured, richly clad body, the atrophied spiritual life in hideous contrast with the physical ease and luxury which were choking it. The second experience was harder to bear than the first. And just as in the old days she had shared her bread and cheese with those hungrier than herself, and had taken but little thought for those who had bread and to spare, so now she felt but transient interest in those among her new associates who were successfully struggling against the blackmail of luxury, the leprosy of worldliness, the selfishness that at last coffins the soul it clothes. Her heart yearned instead towards the spiritually starving, the tempted, the fallen in that great little world, whose names are written in the book, not of life, but of Burke—the little world which is called "Society."

She longed to comfort them, to raise them up, to wipe from their hands and garments the muddy gold stains of the gutter into which they had fallen, to smooth away the lines of mean care from their faces. But it had been far simpler in her previous life to share her hard-earned bread with those who needed it than it was now to share her equally hard-earned thoughts and slow gleanings of spiritual knowledge, to share the things which belonged to her peace.

Rachel had not yet wholly recovered from the overwhelming passion of love which, admitted without fear a few years ago, had devastated the little city of her heart, as by fire and sword, involving its hospitable dwellings, its temples, and its palaces in one common ruin. Out of that desolation she was unconsciously rebuilding her city, but it was still rather gaunt and bare, the trees had not had time to grow in the streets, and there was an ugly fortification round it of defaced, fire-seared stones, which had once stood aloft in minaret and tower, and which now served only as a defence against all corners.

If Dick had been in trouble, or rather if she had known the troubles he had been through, and which had made his crooked mouth shut so firmly, Rachel might possibly have been able to give him something more valuable than the paper money of her friendship. But Dick was obviously independent. He could do without her, while Hugh had a claim upon her. Rachel's thoughts turned to Hugh again and ever again. Did he see his conduct as she saw it? A haunting fear was upon her that he did not. And she longed with an intensity that outbalanced for the time every other feeling that he should confess his sin fully, entirely—see it in all its ugliness, and gather himself together into a deep repentance before he went down into silence, or before he made a fresh start in life. She would have given her right hand to achieve that.

And in a lesser degree she was drawn towards Lady Newhaven. Lady Newhaven was conscious of the tender compassion which Rachel felt for her, and used it to the uttermost; but unfortunately she mistook it for admiration of her character, mixed with sympathetic sorrow for her broken heart. If she had seen herself as Rachel saw her, she would have conceived, not for herself, but for Rachel, some of the aversion which was gradually distilling, bitter drop by drop, into her mind for her husband. She would not have killed him. She would have thought herself incapable of an action so criminal, so monstrous. But if part of the ruin in the garden were visibly trembling to its fall, she would not have warned him if he had been sitting beneath it, nor would her conscience have ever reproached her afterwards.

"I wish Miss Gresley would come and stay here instead of taking you away from me," she said, plaintively, to Rachel one morning, when she made the disagreeable discovery that Rachel and Hester were friends. "I don't care much about her myself, she is so profane and so dreadfully irreligious. But Edward likes to talk to her. He prefers artificial people. I wonder he did not marry her. That old cat, Lady Susan Gresley, was always throwing her at his head. I wish she was not always persuading you to leave me for hours together. I get so frightened when I am left alone with Edward. I live in perpetual dread that he will say something before the children or the servants. He is quite cruel enough."

"He will never say anything."

"You are always so decided, Rachel. You don't see possibilities, and you don't know him as I do. He is capable of anything. I will write a note now, and you can take it to Miss Gresley, if you must go there to-day."

"I wish to go very much."

"And you will stay another week whether she comes or not?"

There was a momentary pause before Rachel said, cheerfully, "I will stay another week, with pleasure. But I am afraid Lord Newhaven will turn restive at taking me in to dinner."

"Oh! he likes you. He always prefers people who are not of his own family."

Rachel laughed. "You flatter me."

"I never flatter any one. He does like you, and, besides, there are people coming next week for the grouse-shooting. I suppose that heavy young Vernon is going to lumber over with you. It's not my fault if he is always running after you. Edward insisted on having him. I don't want him to dance attendance on me."

"He and I are going to bicycle to Warpington together. The Gresleys are cousins of his. If it turns very hot we will wait till after sunset to return, if we may."

"Just as you like," said Lady Newhaven with asperity. "But I advise you to be careful, my dear Rachel. It never seems to occur to you what on-lookers see at a glance, namely, that Mr. Vernon is in love with your fortune."

"According to public opinion that is a very praiseworthy attachment," said Rachel, who had had about enough. "I often hear it commended."

Lady Newhaven stared. That her conversation could have the effect of a mustard leaf did not strike her. She saw that Rachel was becoming restive, and, of course, the reason was obvious. She was thinking of marrying Dick.

"Well, my dear," she said, lying down on a low couch near the latticed window, and opening a novel, "you need not be vexed with me for trying to save you from a mercenary marriage. I only speak because I am fond of you. But one marriage is as good as another. I was married for love myself; I had not a farthing. And yet you see my marriage has turned out a tragedy—a bitter, bitter tragedy."

Tableau.—A beautiful, sad-faced young married woman in white, reclining among pale-green cushions near a bowl of pink carnations, endeavoring to rouse the higher feelings of an inexperienced though not youthful spinster in a short bicycling skirt. Decidedly, the picture was not flattering to Rachel.

Hester did not fail a second time to warn the Gresleys of the arrival of guests. She mentioned it in time to allow of the making of cakes, and Mr. Gresley graciously signified his intention of returning early from his parochial rounds on the afternoon when Dick and Rachel were expected, while Mrs. Gresley announced that the occasion was a propitious one for inviting the Pratts to tea.

"Miss West will like to meet them," she remarked to Hester, whose jaw dropped at the name of Pratt. "And it is very likely if they take a fancy to her they will ask her to stay at the Towers while she is in the neighborhood. If the captain is at home I will ask him to come too. The Pratts are always so pleasant and hospitable."

Hester was momentarily disconcerted at the magnitude of the social effort which Rachel's coming seemed to entail. But for once she had the presence of mind not to show her dismay, and she helped Mrs. Gresley to change the crewel-work antimacassars, with their washed-out kittens swinging and playing leap-frog, for the best tussore-silk ones.

The afternoon was still young when all the preparations had been completed, and Mrs. Gresley went up-stairs to change her gown, while Hester took charge of the children, as Fräulein had many days previously arranged to make music with Dr. and Miss Brown on this particular afternoon. And very good music it was which proceeded out of the open windows of the doctor's red brick house opposite Abel's cottage. Hester could just hear it from the bottom of the garden near the church-yard wall, and there she took the children, and under the sycamore, with a bench round it, the dolls had a tea-party. Hester had provided herself with a lump of sugar and a biscuit, and out of these many dishes were made, and were arranged on a clean pocket-handkerchief spread on the grass. Regie carried out his directions as butler with solemn exactitude; and though Mary, who had inherited the paternal sense of humor, thought fit to tweak the handkerchief and upset everything, she found the witticism so coldly received by "Auntie Hester," although she explained that father always did it, that she at once suited herself to her company, and helped to repair the disaster.

It was very hot. The dolls, from the featureless midshipman to the colossal professional beauty sitting in her own costly perambulator (a present from Mrs. Pratt), felt the heat, and showed it by their moist countenances. The only person who was cool was a small, nude, china infant in its zinc bath, the property of Stella, whose determination to reach central facts, and to penetrate to the root of the matter, at present took the form of tearing or licking off all that could be torn or licked from objects of interest. Hester, who had presented her with the floating baby in the bath, sometimes wondered, as she watched Stella conscientiously work through a well-dressed doll down to its stitched sawdust compartments, what Mr. Gresley would make of his daughter when she turned her attention to theology.

They were all sitting in a tight circle round the handkerchief, Regie watching Hester cutting a new supply of plates out of smooth leaves with her little gilt scissors, while Mary and Stella tried alternately to suck an inaccessible grain of sugar out of the bottom of an acorn cup.

Rachel and Dick had come up on their silent wheels, and were looking at them over the wall before Hester was aware of their presence.

"May we join the tea-party?" asked Rachel, and Hester started violently.

"I am afraid the gate is locked," she said. "But perhaps you can climb it."

"We can't leave the bicycles outside, though," said Dick, and he took a good look at the heavy padlocked gate. Then he slowly lifted it off its hinges, wheeled in the bicycles, and replaced the gate in position.

Rachel looked at him.

"Do you always do what you want to do?" she said, involuntarily.

"It saves trouble," he said, "especially as no one can be such a first-class fool as to think a padlock will keep a gate shut. He would expect it to be opened."

"But father said no one could come in there now," explained Regie, who had watched, open-mouthed, the upheaval of the gate. "Father said it could not be opened any more. He told mother."

"Did he, my son?" said Dick, and he kissed every one, beginning with Hester and finishing with the dolls. Then they all sat down to the tea-party, and partook largely of the delicacies, and after tea Dick solemnly asked the children if they had seen the flying half-penny he had brought back with him from Australia. The children crowded round him, and the half-penny was produced and handed round. Each child touched it, and found it real. Auntie Hester and Auntie Rachel examined it. Boulou was requested to smell it. And then it was laid on the grass, and the pocket-handkerchief which had done duty as a table-cloth was spread over it.

The migrations of the half-penny were so extraordinary that even Rachel and Hester professed amazement. Once it was found in Rachel's hand, into which another large hand had gently shut it. But it was never discovered twice in the same place, though all the children rushed religiously to look for it where it was last discovered.

Another time, after a long search, the doll in the bath was discovered to be sitting upon it, and once it actually flew down Regie's back; and amid the wild excitement of the children its cold descent was described by Regie in piercing minuteness until the moment when it rolled out over his stocking at his knee.

"Make it fly down my back too, Uncle Dick," shrieked Mary. "Regie, give it to me."

But Regie danced in a circle round Dick, holding aloft the wonderful half-penny.

"Make it fly down my throat," he cried, too excited to know what he was doing, and he put the half-penny in his mouth.

"Put it out this instant," said Dick, without moving.

A moment's pause followed, in which the blood ebbed away from the hearts of the two women.

"I can't," said Regie; "I've swallowed it." And he began to whimper, and then suddenly rolled on the grass screaming.

Dick pounced upon him like a panther, and held him by the feet head downward, shaking him violently. The child's face was terrible to see.

Hester hid her face in her hands. Rachel rose and stood close to Dick.

"I think the shaking is rather too much for him," she said, watching the poor little purple face intently. "I'm bound to go on," said Dick, fiercely. "Is it moving, Regie?"

"It's going down," screamed Regie, suddenly.

"That it's not," said Dick, and he shook the child again, and the half-penny flew out upon the grass. "Thank God," said Dick, and he laid the gasping child on Hester's lap and turned away.

A few minutes later Regie was laughing and talking, and feeling himself a hero. Presently he slipped off Hester's knee and ran to Dick, who was lying on the grass a few paces off, his face hidden in his hands.

"Make the half-penny fly again, Uncle Dick," cried all the children, pulling at him.

Dick raised an ashen face for a moment and said, hoarsely, "Take them away."

Hester gathered up the children and took them back to the house through the kitchen garden.

"Don't say we have arrived," whispered Rachel to her. "I will come on with him presently." And she sat down near the prostrate vine-grower. The president of the South Australian Vine-Growers' Association looked very large when he was down.

Presently he sat up. His face was drawn and haggard, but he met Rachel's dog-like glance of silent sympathy with a difficult, crooked smile.

"He is such a jolly little chap," he said, winking his hawk eyes.

"It was not your fault."

"That would not have made it any better for the parents," said Dick. "I had time to think of that while I was shaking that little money-box. Besides, it was my fault, in a way. I'll never play with other people's children again. They are too brittle. I've had shaves up the Fly River and in the South Sea Islands, but never anything as bad as this, in this blooming little Vicarage garden with a church looking over the wall."

Hester was skimming back towards them.

"Don't mention it to James and his wife," she said to Dick. "He has to speak at a temperance meeting to-night. I will tell them when the meeting is over."

"That's just as well," said Dick, "for I know if James jawed much at me I should act on the text that it is more blessed to give than to receive."

"In what way?"

"Either way," said Dick. "Tongue or fist. It does not matter which, so long as you give more than you get. And the text is quite right. It is blessed, for I've tried it over and over again, and found it true every time. But I don't want to try it on James if he's anything like what he was as a curate."

"He is not much altered," said Hester.

"He is the kind of man that would not alter much," said Dick. "I expect God Almighty likes him as he is."

Mr. and Mrs. Gresley, meanwhile, were receiving Mrs. Pratt and the two Misses Pratt in the drawing-room. Selina and Ada Pratt were fine, handsome young women, with long upper lips, who wore their smart sailor hats tilted backwards to show their bushy fringes, and whose muff-chains, with swinging pendent hearts, silk blouses and sequin belts and brown boots represented to Mrs. Gresley the highest pinnacle of the world of fashion.

Selina was the most popular, being liable to shrieks of laughter at the smallest witticisms, and always ready for that species of amusement termed "bally-ragging" or "hay-making." But Ada was the most admired. She belonged to that type which in hotel society and country towns is always termed "queenly." She "kept the men at a distance." She "never allowed them to take liberties," etc., etc. She held her chin up and her elbows out, and was considered by the section of Middleshire society in which she shone to be very distinguished. Mrs. Pratt was often told that her daughter looked like a duchess; and this facsimile of the aristocracy, or rather of the most distressing traits of its latest recruits, had a manner of lolling with crossed legs in the parental carriage and pair which was greatly admired. "Looks as if she was born to it all," Mr. Pratt would say to his wife.

Mrs. Gresley was just beginning to fear her other guests were not coming when two tall figures were seen walking across the lawn, with Hester between them.

Mr. Gresley sallied forth to meet them, and blasts of surprised welcome were borne into the drawing-room by the summer air.

"But it was locked. I locked it myself." Inaudible reply.

"Padlocked. Only opens to the word Moon. Key on my own watch-chain."

Inaudible reply.

"Hinges! ha! ha! ha! Very good, Dick. Likely story that. I see you're the same as ever. Travellers' tales. But we are not so easily taken in, are we, Hester?"

Mrs. Gresley certainly had the gift of prophecy as far as the Pratts were concerned. Mrs. Pratt duly took the expected "fancy" to Rachel, and pressed her to stay at "The Towers" while she was in the neighborhood, and make further acquaintance with her "young ladies."

"Ada is very pernickety," she said, smiling towards that individual conversing with Dick. "She won't make friends with everybody, and she gives it me" (with maternal pride) "when I ask people to stay whom she does not take to. She says there's a very poor lot round here, and most of the young ladies so ill-bred and empty she does not care to make friends with them. I don't know where she gets all her knowledge from. I'm sure it's not from her mother. Ada, now you come and talk a little to Miss West."

Ada rose with the air of one who confers a favor, and Rachel made room for her on the sofa, while Mrs. Pratt squeezed herself behind the tea-table with Mrs. Gresley.

The conversation turned on bicycling.

"I bike now and then in the country," said Ada, "but I have not done much lately. We have only just come down from town, and, of course, I never bike in London."

Rachel had just said that she did.

"Perhaps you are nervous about the traffic," said Rachel.

"Oh! I'm not the least afraid of the traffic, but it's such bad form to bike in London."

"That, of course, depends on how it's done," said Rachel; "but I am sure in your ease you need not be afraid."

Ada glared at Rachel, and did not answer.

When the Pratts had taken leave she said to her mother:

"Well, you can have Rachel West if you want to, but if you do I shall go away. She is only Birmingham, and yet she's just as stuck up as she can be."

The Pratts were "Liverpool."

"Well, my dear," said Mrs. Pratt with natural pride, "it's well known no one is good enough for you. But I took to Miss West, and an orphan and all, with all that money, poor thing!"

"She has no style," said Selina, "but she has a nice face; and she's coming to stay with Sibbie Loftus next week, when she leaves Vi Newhaven. She may be Birmingham, Ada, but she's just as thick with county people as we are."

"I did not rightly make out," said Mrs. Pratt, reflectively, "whether that tall gentleman, Mr. Vernon, was after Miss West or Hessie Gresley."

"Oh, ma! You always think some one's after somebody else," said Ada, impatiently, whose high breeding obliged her to be rather peremptory with her simple parent. "Mr. Vernon is a pauper, and so is Hessie. And, besides, Hessie is not the kind of girl anybody would want to marry."

"Well, I'm not so sure of that," said Selina. "But if she had had any chances I know she would have told me, because I told her all about Captain Cobbett and Mr. Baxter."