The lady's mile

LORD ASPENDELL'S DAUGHTER.

When the brilliant stream of carriages had poured out of Apsley Gate; when the Serpentine blushed redly in the low western sunlight; when the fashionable world had gone homeward in barouches and landaus, britzskas and phaetons, to dash through the dusky park two hours hence in tiny miniature broughams, with lamps that flash like meteors through the night; when a solemn twilight calm had come down upon the dusky greensward, and the tinkling of a sheep-bell made a rustic sound in the stillness; when a town-bred Gray might have sat beside the placid water meditating an elegy in a West-end park,—a lumbering old chariot was very often to be seen creeping up and down the Lady's Mile. It was a shabby old carriage, with a ponderous drab hammer-cloth which the moths had eaten away in bare patches here and there, a faded old carriage which might have been bright and splendid long ago, when lovely Margaret, Countess of Blessington, was to be seen in the Lady's Mile, and genial Lord Palmerston was called Cupid. But now in the still gloaming this dismal equipage might have been mistaken for some phantom chariot haunting the scene of departed glories. The pale face looking out at the window would have assisted the delusion, so lifeless was its changeless calm—a beautiful, melancholy, patrician face. You might have fancied you beheld the unreal image of a forgotten belle, a ghost of beauty gliding in her shadowy chariot beneath the spreading branches which had looked down upon her triumphs years and years ago.

You might have thought this if you were prone to sentimental musings in the tender twilight; but if you were a sober, practical person, you would most likely have found out who the lady was, and all about her. She was Lady Cecil Chudleigh, orphan daughter of Lord Aspendell; and she was the unpaid companion, the unrecompensed dependant upon the elderly dowager to whom the phantom chariot belonged, and who sat far back in the vehicle, while her beautiful niece looked sadly out upon the rosy bosom of the Serpentine.

In all the world Lady Cecil had no other friend or protector than the dowager, who was the widow of an Anglo-Indian general, and only surviving sister of the dead Countess of Aspendell. The Anglo-Indian warrior had distinguished himself at more places ending with "pore" and "bad" than can be numerated without weariness, had lived a life of reckless and barbaric extravagance in despite of all feminine remonstrance, and had died, leaving his widow very little except his pension and a house-full of Indian shawls, embroidered muslins, sandal-wood boxes, beetle-baskets, and Trichinopoly jewelry.

After the General's death, Mrs. MacClaverhouse—the warrior was of Scottish extraction, and claimed kindred with the hero of Killiecrankie,—after her husband's death the widow had sold the lease of the great house in Portland Place, in whose pillared dining-room the General had been wont to entertain all the notabilities of the three presidencies, and beneath whose sheltering roof he had staggered half tipsy to bed every night for the last ten years of his life. She sold the lease, and the furniture, and the very curious old ports, and constantias, and madeiras; but she kept all the bangles and sandal-wood, the beetles' wings and gorgeous scarfs, and shawls and table-covers, and a very nice little selection from the rare old wines, and a small stock of the plate, and glass, and china, and table-linen, which the magnificent General had chosen, of such splendid quality; and with these she retired to furnished apartments on the quietest side of Dorset Square. She kept the chariot in which she had driven and visited for the last twenty years of her life, and the fat grey horses that had drawn it; but she sent the equipage to a livery-stable in the neighbourhood of her new abode, and she bargained with the proprietor for a sober coachman at five-and-twenty shillings a week; a coachman who wore the stable-yard livery, and was sometimes almost disreputable about the legs and feet.

And then one day she went down to Brighton, where the Earl of Aspendell and his only daughter had been living for the last tea years, is a tiny cottage on the Dyke Road, with a little grass-plat before the windows, and dimity curtains fluttering from the open casements—so poor, so friendless, so dignified in their unpretending seclusion. There was very little trouble connected with pecuniary misfortune which Cecil Chudleigh had not known. The extravagance of a father's youth, repented of too late; the wild follies of a brother's mad career—never repented of at all, but cut suddenly short by a fatal false step on a frozen mountain-side, amidst the desolate grandeur of the Alps; a cheerless home; a mother's slow decay, half physical, half mental; and the weary task of beguiling the monotonous days of a ruined and remorseful spendthrift: sorrows such as these had darkened the young life, and hushed the silvery laugh, and transformed the girl of seventeen into a woman drooping under the burden of a woman's heaviest cares.

It was only when the Earl of Aspendell and his folly were buried together in a corner of the little hill-side churchyard where Captain Tattersall the loyal, and Phœbe Hessel the daring, sleep so quietly; it was only when Cecil was quite desolate, and sat with the Times newspaper in her lap, staring hopelessly at the advertisements, and wondering whether she was clever enough to be a governess,—it was then only that Marion MacClaverhouse thought fit to trouble herself about the fate of her dead sister's only surviving child. Her brother-in-law's death happened "fortunately," as she said herself, in the Brighton season; and as she had no invitation for the current month, Mrs. MacClaverhouse decided on paying a brief visit to Brighton. The widow was of a prudent turn of mind, and contrived to save money out of her limited income;—for a rainy day, she said. She had been saving odd pounds and shillings and sixpences for this anticipated wet weather ever since her marriage, and as yet Jupiter Pluvius had been pitiful, and had restrained his fury.

She went to the little Dyke-Road cottage to see Cecil Chudleigh—to inspect her, it may be said, so sharply did she scrutinise, so closely did she interrogate the girl. But Lady Cecil's mind was too candid to shrink from questioning; and she thought her aunt most nobly generous when that lady proposed to adopt her henceforward as companion, reader, amanuensis, and prop and comfort to her declining years. Lady Cecil certainly did not happen to know that the widow had been for some time on the look-out for a suitable person as companion and drudge, and had only failed to suit herself because, in her own words, "the impertinent creatures wanted such preposterous salaries, and asked if I allowed port at luncheon, as their physicians had ordered it. Their physicians, indeed! a dispensary-surgeon, or the parish apothecary, I should think!" cried the widow, impatiently; for she was an energetic and plain-speaking person, who was always proclaiming her want of "common patience" with the failings and follies of her fellow-creatures.

Lady Cecil went home with the dowager, and ministered very patiently to her wants and pleasures, and read the newspapers to her, and beat down the tradespeople, and disputed about stray entries of mutton-chops and half-pounds of tea that had or had not been supplied, and counted the glass, and was responsible for the spoons, and trembled when the widow's own parlour-maid chipped a morsel out of one of the General's tumblers; for was it not her duty to see that neither glass nor china was broken, and that the silver entrèe-dishes, salvers, butter-boats, and tea-trays were rubbed with the hand only, and not scratched and smudged with a greasy, gritty leather? Cecil's own pretty pink palms helped to clean the dowager's plate sometimes when there was a festival in Dorset Square.

Mrs. MacClaverhouse was very fond of society, and entertained innumerable elderly warriors and judges of the Sudder, with their wives and daughters, in her stuffy little dining-room. The splendid silver and glass were set forth, the rare old wines were brought out very often in the London season, and Lady Cecil bowed under the burden of a new kind of care, and went to sleep oppressed by the terror of a tablespoon missing from the plate-basket, or a butter-boat that had not been put away.

Sometimes she felt a sick yearning for the old monotonous days with her father; for when they were saddest there had been a tender quiet in their sadness. In the new life there might be no sorrow, but then there was such continual worry. The burdens laid upon her were very small ones, but then there were so many of them; and every day it seemed as if the last straw would be added to the heap, and she must sink down in the dust and die.

The dowager was not unkind to her niece; for she was too much a woman of the world not to know when she had a good servant, and to rejoice in the fact that she possessed that treasure at the cheapest possible rate. She was not unkind, but she was pitiless. She called Cecil "my dear," and bought her pretty dresses—pretty dresses that were to be had cheap after stock-taking at the West-end haberdashers', dainty gauzes with the bloom off them, and muslins with soiled edges she gave her good food, and persuaded her to take half-glasses of tawny port, which the girl, in her secret soul, thought more nasty than physic; but if Lady Cecil had been dying, Mrs. MacClaverhouse would have come to her death-bed to demand the inventory of the china, and to ask if it were six or eight shell-and-thread pattern salt-spoons that had been intrusted to the parlour-maid for the last dinner-party.

For three years Lady Cecil had lived on the dullest side of Dorset Square, and counted the glasses and spoons, and battled with the Marylebone tradesmen, and ridden in the phantom chariot. In all those three years there had been only one break in the drudgery of her life, only one glimpse of sunshine; but then it was such a dazzling burst of light, such a revelation of paradise. Ah, let my pen fall lightly on the paper as I write the story of that tender dream.

It was the habit of Mrs. MacClaverhouse to spend as much of her time in visiting as was thoroughly agreeable to her acquaintance. She liked visiting because it was pleasant and cheap; but she was too wise a woman to wear out her welcome, and no one had ever uttered the obnoxious word 'sponge' in conjunction with her name. She was lively and agreeable—rather vulgar perhaps, but then genteel people are permitted to be vulgar—clever, well dressed, of high family, and acknowledged position, and she gave cosy little dinners in the season; so there were many houses in which she and her niece were favourite guests in the cheery winter days when an old country-house is such a paradise. Poor Cecil found herself sometimes looking anxiously after other people's spoons and forks in these pleasant holiday times, or taking a mental photograph of a cold sirloin or a raised pie as it was removed from the breakfast-table; for one of her home duties was to register the appearances of joints and poultry before they descended into the territory of the landlady, who might or might not be honest. Mrs. MacClaverhouse made a point of never quite believing in people's honesty.

"Don't tell me that I have known them for years and never known them rob me!" exclaimed the widow. "They may have robbed me without my knowing it, or they may not have robbed me because I never gave them the opportunity; and they may begin to rob me to-morrow if they get the chance. Look at the Bishop of Northlandshire's butler, who had lived with him thirteen years, and ran away with five hundred pounds' worth of plate in the fourteenth. Look at Sir Harry Hinchliffe's valet, who was such a faithful creature that his master left him an annuity of two hundred a year; which he would have enjoyed very much, no doubt, if he hadn't stripped the house while his benefactor's corpse was lying in it, and had not been transported for life in consequence. Don't talk to me about honesty, Cecil. If Mrs. Krewson is an honest woman, why do her eyes sparkle so when I order a large joint, and why are two quarts of Bisque barely enough for six?"

In the autumn Mrs. MacClaverhouse generally retired to some marine retreat unfrequented by cockneys or fashionables, where lodgings were to be had on reasonable terms, and where she could recruit herself and her niece for the winter campaign.

"I really don't see why you shouldn't marry well, Cecil,—though Heaven knows what will become of the General's diamond-cut glass when you leave me,—and I sometimes wonder how it is you haven't made a good match before now," said the widow. "I think it's that cold manner of yours that keeps the men off; and then you don't talk slang, as some of the women do nowadays. You're not dashing, you know, my love; but you are very handsome, and elegant, and accomplished; and if any one of those flippant minxes can sing Rossini's music or write an inventory of china as well as you, I'll eat her—pearl-powder and all," added Mrs. Mac, with a wry face.

It was very true that as yet no pretender of any importance had appeared for Lady Cecil Chudleigh's hand. It might be that lovers were kept off by the cold reserve of her manners, the shrinking dislike to take any prominent part in society which is apt to affect those whom poverty has always kept more or less at a disadvantage, or it might be in consequence of that panic in the matrimonial market of which we have heard so much in these latter days.

The dowager had been quite sincere when she spoke of her niece's beauty. There were few handsomer faces to be seen in the Lady's Mile than that which looked wistfully out of the phantom chariot. It was a pale face—pale with no muddled sickly whiteness, or bilious yellow, but that beautiful pallor which is so rare a charm,—a pensive patrician face, with a slender aquiline nose, and dark hazel eyes. People liked to see Lady Cecil in their rooms, even when she wore her plainest white muslin, and kept herself most persistently in a shadowy corner, so unmistakable were her rank and breeding. Young men who complained that she had so little to say for herself, and lamented the absence of a mysterious quality called "go" in her manners, confessed that her profile was more beautiful than the finest cameo in the Louvre, and her style unexceptionable.

"If polygamy were admissible, I'd marry Lady Cecil to-morrow," remarked a gentleman of the genus Swell. "She is the woman of women to sit at the head of a fellow's table and do him credit in society; but if I were going home half-seas-over after a four-in-hand club-dinner at Richmond, I'd as soon have Lady Macbeth sitting up for me as Lord Aspendell's daughter. Not that she'd be coarse or low, like the Scotchwomen, you know—not a bit of it. She'd receive me with a stately curtsey, and freeze me to death with her classic profile. Egad! when you come to think of it, you know, old fellow, there must be a hitch somewhere in the matrimonial law. Society doesn't confine a man to one horse; society doesn't compel him to ride his park-hack across country, or harness his racing stud to his drag; and yet society limits an unhappy beast to one wife; and if he marries a nice little indulgent creature who won't look black at him when he goes home late or smokes in the dining-room, the odds are that she'll freeze his marrow by dropping her h's and talking of her par—who was something in the soap-boiling way—at an archbishop's state-dinner."

In the second autumn of Lady Cecil's dependence the dowager carried her niece and her parlour-maid to a pretty little village on the Hampshire coast—a sleepy little village, where the fruit was blown off the trees in farmers' orchards by the fresh breath of ocean breezes—a village nestling under the shadow of brown, sun-burnt hills, a long, straggling street of rustic cottages, with here and there a quaint old gabled dwelling-place of a better class, shut in by moss-grown walls, and nestling in such gardens as are to be seen on that south-western coast. Very few cockney visitors ever invaded the drowsy hamlet of Fortinbras, where the watering-place habitué would have looked in vain for the cliffs or the jetty, the brazen band and the buff slippers, the Ethiopian serenaders and the wheel of fortune—so dear to his cockney soul. At Fortinbras there were only two bathing-machines, and the sole attraction which the place possessed for sightseers was a grand old Norman castle, whose mighty keep towered high above the farmyards and orchards, and within whose walls red-shirted cricketers met on sunny summer afternoons, and whither village Sunday-school children came now and then to feast on buns and tea.

The coast of Fortinbras was low and flat and weedy, and sometimes a faint odour of stale seaweed floated up from the shining sands on the evening air. Your cockney would have fled aghast from the place as "un'ealthy;" but for Lady Cecil the rustic village and the weedy coast had an odour of Longfellow and Tennyson that was delicious to her soul, and she felt as if she would have been unutterably happy if she could have bidden an eternal farewell to Dorset Square and Mrs. MacClaverhouse's plate-chest and china-closet, to take up her abode under the shelter of the Norman castle and the grassy hills for the rest of her life.

She wandered alone on the wet sands while her aunt took an after-dinner nap on the first evening of their arrival. She lingered by the cool grey sea, and watched the changing glories of the low western sky in a kind of rapture.

"And there are people who like Dorset Square better than this," she thought. "Oh, dear, dear lonely place, how I love you!"

Was it only a sensuous delight in the beautiful sky, the cool breezy atmosphere, the rustic calm? or was it because the happiest days of her life were to be spent on this weedy shore? If a coming sorrow casts its ominous shadow on the foredoomed creature who is to suffer it, should no prophetic sunshine herald the coming of a joy? Lady Cecil was happier that August evening than she ever remembered having been in her life, and there was a faint bloom on her cheeks, like the pinky heart of a wild rose, when she went home to the pretty cottage, half grange, half villa, which Mrs. MacClaverhouse had hired for the season—"for a mere song, my dear; and a duck, for which that extortionate Jiffles would have the audacity to charge me four shillings, I get here for half-a-crown," wrote the dowager to a friend and confidante.

Cecil found her aunt in very high spirits.

"You've heard me talk a good deal of my husband's nephew, Hector Gordon, the only son of Andrew Gordon, the great contractor. Yes, I know that a person who contracts seems something horribly vulgar, and that's what Margaret MacClaverhouse's grand friends said when she married him. But Andrew Gordon was as polished a gentleman as ever sat in parliament—and he did sit there, my dear, and he does to this day; and Scotchmen, whose pride has a good deal that's noble in it, don't think it a more degrading thing to make money honestly by straightforward commerce than to get rich by time-bargains and rigging the market. I know there are people to this day who are inclined to look down upon Hector, and when he joined the Eleventh there was one man—a freckled, flaxen-haired creature with weak eyes, whose father was a money-lending attorney—who tried to get up a laugh against our boy by asking some questions about Andrew's business transactions. I don't know what Hector said or did, Cecil; but I know the young man never tried to sneer at him again, and sold out shortly afterwards because his sight was too weak for India. You've heard me talk about the boy till you are almost tired of his name, I dare say, my dear."

Cecil smiled. She was thinking how many of Mrs. MacClaverhouse's pet subjects she had grown weary of within the two years of her slavery, and that this womanly talk of the favourite nephew was the least obnoxious of them.

"It is only natural that you should be fond of him," she said.

"You'd have some reason to say so, Cecil, if you'd known him when he was four years old," answered her aunt. "At four I think he was the loveliest child that ever was created. Such blue eyes! not your wishy-washy, milk-and-water colour that some parents call blue, but as deep and dark as that purple convolvulus in the vase yonder." And then the widow went on to relate to Cecil the very familiar legend of how poor Margaret went off into a consumption soon after the infant's birth, and how she, being alone in England at the time, took up her abode in Andrew Gordon's house, to superintend the rearing of the child,—"which saved my expenses elsewhere, and was doing a favour to the poor helpless widower," said Mrs. MacClaverhouse parenthetically; "and then, you know, my dear, the General, being particularly fond of children, like most people who have none of their own, took a tremendous fancy to his poor sister's child; so nothing would do but that the boy must be continually in Portland Place whenever his uncle was in England, and I'm sure I wonder that darling child's constitution was not completely ruined by the mangoes and chutnee and raging hot curries the General allowed him to eat. And when Hector was at Oxford, and my husband had settled down after the last Affghan war, it was just the same. I think the young man spent as much of his time in Portland Place as at the University; and it was the General who put a military career into his head, much to his father's annoyance; for Andrew would have liked him to go into the house and preach about poor-laws, and national surveys, and main-drainage and such-like. However, whatever Hector wished was sure to be done sooner or later; for I do believe there never was a young man so completely spoiled by every body belonging to him; and the end of it was that his father bought him a commission in the 11th Plungers, as you know."

Yes, the story was a very old one for Cecil. She had listened with unfailing patience to her aunt's prosy discourses about Hector Gordon; and as the dowager was generally in a good temper when she talked of him, her niece had no unpleasant association with his name. But familiar as his graces and merits had become to her, through the praises of his aunt, Cecil felt no special interest in the young Captain. She knew that he had been a good son and a brave soldier, but then there are so many good sons and brave soldiers in the world. She knew that he had distinguished himself in India by doing something desperate in connection with a fort; but then young men in India are always doing desperate things in connection with forts. If ever any image of Hector Gordon presented itself to Lady Cecil's imagination, it took the shape of a clumsy Scotchman, with high cheekbones and sandy hair. Mrs. MacClaverhouse called his hair auburn; but then that word auburn has such a wide signification.

Cecil listened to the old, old story of Hector's childhood to-night as patiently as she had been wont to listen any time within the last two years; but even calm queenly Lady Cecil Chudleigh was a little startled when the dowager exclaimed:

"And now, my dear, I am going to surprise you. Hector Gordon will be here to breakfast with us to-morrow morning——"

"Auntie!"

"He will arrive with the London papers, at a quarter before twelve o'clock. We must have fried soles, and mutton cutlets, and Worcester sauce, and potted game, and all those coarse high-seasoned things that men like; and you can put a little fruit on the table to make it look pretty; which, of course, will do for dessert afterwards; and you will have to give out the tea and coffee service, and half-a-dozen large forks. I only hope and pray the servants here are honest. If it wasn't for that tiresome lion prancing upon every atom of silver, one might persuade servants and people that it was all electro——"

"But, auntie," said Cecil, heedless of the housekeeping details, "I thought Captain Gordon was in India."

"And so did I, my dear: but it seems he has come home on sick leave—not ill, he tells me, but only knocked up by climate and hard work; and he went to Dorset Square yesterday morning unannounced, on purpose to surprise me—the consequence of which was that he found me out of the way, as people generally do when they plan those romantic surprises; and he has brought me an Indian shawl, because I am so fond of Indian shawls, he says. That's always the way with people. If they see you suffering from a plethora of any kind of property, they take it into their heads that you have a passion for that especial class of property, and rush to buy you more of it. I've no common patience with such folly."

Perhaps Mrs. MacClaverhouse said this because it was her habit to be sharp and unsparing, and she found herself too much inclined to melt into weak motherly tenderness when she spoke of her nephew. Now the hero of all the old nursery and schoolboy stories was so near at hand, Cecil Chudleigh began to think of him a little more seriously than ever she had done before. He was weak and ill, no doubt, his aunt said, in spite of his assurances to the contrary; and in that case he must be kept in the sleepy Hampshire village, and nursed till he was strong again.

"And you must help to nurse him, Cecil," said the widow; "and if by any chance he should happen to fall in love with you, be sure you remember that he's a better match than one out of fifty of the young men you meet in London—and Heaven knows they are scarce enough nowadays. If you weren't my sister's own child I wouldn't throw you in his way, for Hector might marry any woman in England; but at the worst it would sound well for his wife's name to have a handle to it."

Lady Cecil's face was dyed with a hot, indignant blush.

"I am not the sort of person to be fascinated by Captain Gordon's money, Aunt MacClaverhouse," she said.

"Perhaps not," answered the old lady, coolly; "but you may fall in love with him."

Cecil was too angry to answer. That the dowager should talk coolly of Hector Gordon, the contractor's son, as a great catch for the descendant of Aspendells and Chudleighs who had helped to vanquish his countrymen at Flodden, stung the Earl's daughter to the very heart. She had so little but her grand old lineage left her, that it was scarcely strange she should be proud of it. There came a time, not many weeks after this August evening, when she looked back thought what a delicious thing it must have been to have her name coupled with his, and to be ignorant that there was any wrong in the association.

But to-night she was wounded and indignant, and though she went out into the kitchen-premises by-and-by to give orders about the cutlets, and the soles, and the potted meats for the Plunger Captain's breakfast, her heart was not in the duty, and she sent none of those little messages to the butcher which a woman would have done who loved the coming cutlet-consumer. She thought how unpleasant it would be to have a clumsy Scottish invalid lying on the sofa in the cosy little drawing-room, where she had hoped to read Tennyson and Owen Meredith all by herself in the warm, drowsy afternoons. And the time came, and so soon, when no sofa that Gillow could devise would have seemed soft enough for so dear a visitor; when every glimmer of sunshine or breath of summer air in that cosy drawing-room was watched and calculated as closely as if a valuable life had depended upon the adjustment of the Venetians, or the opening and shutting of the French windows.

Lady Cecil went out upon the seashore after an early cup of tea on the morning that was to witness Hector Gordon's arrival. She had arranged a pile of dewy plums nestling in their dark green leaves, and a basket of hothouse grapes, with her own hands, for she had the magical touch whereby some women can impart beauty to common things. She had surveyed the breakfast-table, and had given orders as to the moment at which the tea and coffee were to be made, and the fish put into the frying-pan; and she left a message for her aunt to the effect that she was gone for a long walk, and would not be home to breakfast. It would be so much better, she fancied, to leave the widow and her nephew tête-à-tête on this first morning of the soldier's arrival. She had done her duty conscientiously, and having done it, she went out to breathe the sweet morning air, and shake off the unpleasant idea of the coming Scotchman.

"I have been tolerably comfortable with my aunt so far," she thought, "in spite of the spoons and forks; but now I shall only interfere with her enjoyment of this dreadful Scotchman's society. Oh, papa, papa, how I miss you, and the dreary little house on the Dyke Road, where we lived so peacefully together, with all the winds of heaven howling round us, and rattling our windows in the dead of the night!"

She went under the ponderous archway beneath which a portcullis still hung, and into the grassy enclosure which had once been the muster-ground of the castle. At this early hour there were neither Sunday-school children nor exploring visitors among the old grey ruins. The fresh sea-breezes fluttered the little plume in Lady Cecil's hat, and blew all thoughts of vexation out of her mind. She mounted the winding stair of the keep—a dangerous, treacherous stair, which had been worn by the tread of mailed feet in the days that were gone, and the buff boots of excursionists from the Isle of Wight in this present age. She went to the very top of the great Norman tower, high up above all grievances about Hector Gordon and his breakfast, and emerged upon the battlements, a fragile, fluttering little figure, amid that massive mediæval stonework, whose grey ruin was grander than the most elaborate glories of modern architecture.

She had heard the whistle of the engine as she entered the castle, and she imagined that at this moment Hector Gordon must be installed at the breakfast-table; "devouring chops," she thought, with a contemptuous little grimace. It is so natural for a girl of nineteen to think meanly of a man who is below her in social status. To Philip Foley, painting in his Highbury lodging, and dressed in a threadbare shooting-jacket, Lady Cecil Chudleigh would have been unspeakably gracious; but for a scion of the Caledonian plutocracy she had nothing but good-natured contempt.

"He is an invalid, poor fellow," she thought; "I am sure it is very wicked of me to think his visit a bore."

She settled matters with her conscience by determining to be very attentive to the physical comforts of her aunt's favourite.

"I dare say he would like some salmon for dinner," she thought; "I'll call at the fishmonger's as I go home."

And then she took a volume of Victor Hugo's poetry from her pocket, and began to read.

The noble verse carried her aloft on its mighty pinions, high up into some mystic region a million miles above the battlements of the Norman tower. She had an idea that she could not leave her aunt and Captain Gordon too long undisturbed on this particular morning, and she abandoned herself altogether to the delight of her book. It was so seldom that she was able to entirely forget that there were such things as silver forks and dishonest servants in the world.

Even to-day she was not allowed to be long unconscious of the outer world, for when she had been reading about twenty minutes she heard a voice close beside her exclaim:

"I am so glad you like Victor Hugo. Pray forgive me for being so impertinent as to look over your shoulder; but I have been searching for you every where, and I am to take you home to breakfast, please; if you are Lady Cecil Chudleigh, and I am almost sure you are."

She started to her feet, and looked at the speaker. He was the handsomest man she had ever seen—tall, and grand, and fair, the very type of a classic hero, she fancied, as he stood before her on the battlements, with the winds lifting the short auburn curls from his bare forehead. He was no more like the traditional Scotchman than the Duke d'Aumâle is like one of Gilray's Frenchmen. There was no more odour of the parvenu about him than about a Bayard or a Napier. In all her life she had never seen any one like him. It was not because he was handsome that she was struck by his appearance; for she had generally hated handsome men as the most obnoxious of their species. It was because he was—himself.

For once in her life; Lord Aspendell's daughter, whose calm reserve was so near akin to hauteur, was fairly startled.

"And are you really Captain Gordon?" she asked, amazed.

"I am indeed; and that question tells me that I was right, and you are Lady Cecil, and we are—at least we ought to be—cousins, since dear Aunt MacClaverhouse stands in the same relation to both of us."