The lady's mile

HECTOR.

The trio in the little breakfast-parlour in Sea-View Cottage, Fortinbras, was perhaps one of the pleasantest parties that ever met at so simply furnished a board. The spirit of the immortal Cliquot, whose vintages have made his widow's name so celebrated, may have smiled contemptuously at such a breakfast-table, on which the strongest beverages were tea and coffee; the mighty chiefs of Philippe's and the Maison Dorée would have held up their hands and shrugged their shoulders with amazement if told that these benighted insulars could really enjoy these coarse viands, and feel no national craving for suicide, or national tendency to spleen, before the barbarous meal was concluded. And yet there are few cabinets particuliers on the Boulevards whose gaudily-papered walls have ever echoed to happier laughter than that of the young Indian hero, as he gave a serio-comic rendering of his adventures, warding off all praise of great and gallant deeds by the playful tone which made peril seem a joke, and desperate valour the most commonplace quality of man.

Mrs. MacClaverhouse would have been pleased to listen all day to the voice of that charmer of six feet two, but her sharp matronly eye perceived presently that the stalwart Plunger looked pale and worn, and was by no means unqualified for the sick-list; so she sent Lady Cecil to the drawing-room to see to the arrangements of the Venetians, and then she led her boy to the sofa, which was not nearly long enough for him, and had to be eked out with chairs. The Captain remonstrated energetically against this Sybarite treatment, but his aunt was inflexible; and as he was very familiar with the strength of her will, he laid himself down at last as meekly as a child.

"And you can read to us, Cecil," said Mrs. MacClaverhouse producing her knitting-needles, and an uncompromising grey-worsted sock, such as Robert Burns may have worn when his plough turned up the immortal daisy. The dowager knitted these worsted instruments of torture for a Dorcas society, which she honoured with her patronage and a very small annual subscription.

"Come, Cecil," she said presently, when her niece came softly into the room after a mysterious visit to the cook. "Hector has been amusing us all the morning, and the least we can do is to amuse him this afternoon. Suppose you read him to sleep."

If the Scottish warrior had been any thing like the image she had made of him in her mind, Cecil Chudleigh would have been very much disposed to rebel against this command. But there are some people born to walk upon roses and to inhale the perfumed breath of incense; and Hector Gordon was one of them. His nurses had idolised him, his father had worshipped him, his uncle and aunt had spoiled him, his brother officers of the Plungers loved him, and dressed after him, and talked after him, and thought after him; and with that feminine admiration, that subtle and delicious flattery which is the most intoxicating of all earthly incense, Hector had been almost surfeited. He was very delightful. The freshness and brightness of an unsullied youth pervaded every tone of his voice, every thought in his mind, every ringing note of his genial laugh—so hearty without loudness, so exuberant without vulgarity. Perhaps his greatest charm lay in the fact that he was young, and did not consider his youth a thing to be ashamed of. And there are so few young men nowadays. Much has been said about the irresistible witchery of a polished Irishman, the delightful vivacity of a well-born Frenchman. But has any one ever sung the graces of a high-bred Scotchman? What words can fairly describe the nameless fascination which has a dash of the Irishman's insidious flattery, a spice of the Frenchman's brilliant vivacity, but which has a tender softness possessed by neither, a patrician grace not to be equalled by any other nationality in the world? In all the history of modern Europe, the two people who, by manner alone, have exercised the most powerful influence upon their contemporaries, have been Mary Queen of Scots, and her great-grandson Charles Stuart. Of all the poets, who has ever so enthralled the hearts of women as George Gordon, Lord Byron, whose maternal lineage was Scotch? Of all lovely and fascinating women whose names will be remembered in the future, is there any fairer or lovelier than Eugenie Marie de Guzman, Countess of Teba, Empress of the French, and scion of the Kirkpatricks of Closeburn?

There are flowers that flourish in the sunshine, and flowers that thrive only in the shade; and as it is in the vegetable, so is it in the animal kingdom. There are men whom a perpetual atmosphere of adulation would have transformed into supercilious fops or selfish profligates. Hector Gordon made no such vile return for the tenderness which had been so freely lavished upon him. High-minded and generous-hearted, brave as a Leonidas or a Clyde, he was no bad example for the young men who formed themselves upon him. It was said that there was less bill-discounting and card-playing amongst the officers of the 11th Plungers than in any other cavalry regiment in the service; for it is your dashing young captain rather than your middle-aged colonel who gives the tone to the youngsters of a mess. They may obey their commanding-officer, but they will copy their brilliant companion.

But it must not be supposed that under any circumstance Hector Gordon could have come under the denomination of "a good young man;" for it seems an understood thing that the typical good young man must be nothing but good. Hector was neither evangelical nor Puseyite in his tendencies; but rather of that good, easy-going broad Church, which winks good-naturedly at a parson in "pink," and sees no criminality in a cheerful rubber. He went to church once or twice on a Sunday, as the case might be; and did his best to join earnestly in the service, and to listen with sustained attention to the sermon. If his thoughts wandered now and then to the Highland peaks, amidst whose lonely grandeurs he had once shot a mighty white eagle, or to the deer-stalking adventures or grouse-shooting of the last autumn; if his fancy played him false and brought some bright girlish face before him, with the memory of one especially delicious waltz, and one peculiarly intoxicating flirtation—if such small sins as these sullied his soul now and then when the sermon was duller and longer than it should have been, it must be remembered that he was very young, and that the chastening influence of sorrow had not yet shadowed his life, or lessened his delight in the common pleasures of his age.

Lying on the sofa, in the low-roofed, old-fashioned drawing-room at Fortinbras, and shrouded by a leopard-skin railway-rug, which Mrs. MacClaverhouse had insisted on casting over him, the young Captain looked like an invalid Titan; but a Titan with a nimbus of waving auburn hair about his head, and the brightest blue eyes that ever took a fierce light amid the glare of battle, or softened to feminine tenderness when they looked on a woman's face. Lady Cecil contemplated her aunt's favourite at her leisure as she sat by an open window, with her face quite hidden in the shadow of drooping curtains and closed Venetians. And she had fancied him such a vulgar, clumsy creature—a freckled, red-haired object,—like a tobacconist's Highlander in modern costume, a loutish Caledonian Hercules, with a Gaelic sing-song in his voice, and with no belief in any thing but the grandeur of Princes Street, Edinburgh, and the immortality of Robert Burns. Cecil Chudleigh looked at him slily from beneath the shadow of her long lashes, and smiled at the recollection of her old fancies.

"As if one's idea of a place or person were ever any thing like the reality," she thought. "I ought to have known that Captain Gordon would prove the very opposite of the image I had made him."

She took up some books presently from the table near her, and looked at the titles.

"How can you ask me to read to Captain Gordon, auntie," she demanded, archly, "when you know we have no books or papers that can interest him? We have neither Bell's Life, nor the United-Service Gazette; nor yet 'Post and Scarlet,' or 'Silk and Paddock,' or whatever those barbarous books are called that gentlemen are so fond of. I think there are some odd numbers of Mr. Sponge's Sporting-Tour in a cupboard in Dorset Square, and I dare say we could get them sent down by post; but for to-day——"

"Will you read some of Hugo's verses?" asked Captain Gordon. "I mustn't talk slang to a lady, or I would entreat you not to chaff me while I'm on the sick-list. I have read as much sporting literature as any man, I dare say, in my day; and Post and Paddock is a capital book, I do assure you, Lady Cecil; but I think I know my Tennyson too. I have recited 'Locksley Hall' from the first line to the last, out yonder, when we've been dreadfully hard-up for talk. And you should have seen how scared my Kitmutghar looked! I think he fancied our great Alfred's masterpiece was a volley of bad language; they're so unaccustomed to hear any thing but bad language from Englishmen, poor fellows. If I am really to be treated as an invalid, and dear foolish auntie here insists upon it, I will exercise my prerogative, and demand one of Hugo's odes."

Cecil opened the little volume that she had carried to the top of Fortinbras Keep, and turned the leaves listlessly, with slim white fingers that sparkled faintly with the gems in quaint old-fashioned rings.

She paused, with a volume open at those wonderful verses in which the classic Sybarite bewails the weariness of his felicity; and, pushing the Venetian shutter a little way open, she began to read, with a half-smile upon her face. The summer sunlight flooded her face and figure, and the summer air fluttered one loose tress of her dark-brown hair, as her head drooped over her book.

When Cecil came to these closing lines of the Sybarite's complaint, the Scottish Hercules flung off his leopard-skin, and walked across the little room to the open window by which Lady Cecil was seated.

"It's no use, auntie," he said; "I'm not an invalid. If I loll upon that sofa, Lady Cecil will take me for a modern Celsus; and, upon my word, I have felt like that fellow once or twice in my life. I've never been exactly savage with Providence for giving me so many blessings; but I have felt as if I should like to have had a little more of the fun of wishing for things. Look at my position. I'm not used up, and I don't affect to be used up, like some fellows. I don't make a howling about having lost the faculty of pleasure, or the belief in my fellow-men, or any thing of that kind. I'm no disciple of Alfred de Musset, or Owen Meredith; but I really have run through the better part of the pleasures that last most men their lifetime. There's scarcely any thing in the way of adventure that you can propose to me that I haven't done, from tooling a drag along the Lady's Mile when the carriages were thickest, to ascending Mont Blanc or scaling a red-hot brick wall on a fireman's ladder. There's scarcely any route you can suggest to me for a holiday tour that I'm not as familiar with as Murray. And yet I'm only seven-and-twenty. So long as we have plenty to do in India I shall be right enough; but if our fellows should ever come to be planted in country quarters, without any prospect of work, what's to become of me? And then I've promised to sell out in a few years," he added, in a much graver tone.

"Promised to sell out!" screamed Mrs. MacClaverhouse. "That's your father's doing, I know; but you won't leave the army until you marry, I suppose?"

"Oh no, not until I marry."

He took up the volume of poems which Cecil had laid down.

"Let me read to you, ladies," he said; "am I not here to minister to your pleasures and obey your behests? Tell me your favourites, Lady Cecil."

They discussed the book in his hand, and Cecil discovered that Captain Gordon was very familiar with the poet. He read well, and good reading is such a rare accomplishment. His accent was irreproachable; and if there was a charm in his full rich voice when he spoke English, the charm was still greater when he spoke French. He spoke French and German to perfection, for he had been well grounded in both languages, though not very materially advanced in either at Eton or Oxford; and he had spent a considerable part of his youth wandering from city to city with a private tutor, a retired Austrian officer, who was both learned and accomplished, and who adored his pupil.

When two people, both under the age of thirty, discover that they admire the same poet, they have gone half-way towards a pleasant intimacy. After that discussion of Victor Hugo, and the reading aloud that followed, and the desultory talk about Germany and German literature, India and Indian politics, London, and common friends and acquaintances who were to be met there, that succeeded the poetical lecture, Lady Cecil Chudleigh quite forgot all her old fancies about Captain Gordon, and resigned herself to the idea of his visit.

And after this they were the best friends in the world, and Mrs. MacClaverhouse was quite contented to allow Cecil a share in her boy's society. She was a very sensible woman in her way, and liked the society of young people when it was to be had cheaply. Hector and Cecil's animated discussions upon almost all subjects to be found between earth and heaven amused the widow as she basked in the sunshine, seated in her pet chair before a window with her favourite aspect. She astonished the young people very often by the shrewdness of the remarks with which she cut in upon them, smiting their pretty fanciful theories into atoms with the sledge-hammer of common-sense. Altogether she was very well satisfied with the aspect of affairs. If the motherless lad whom she loved so tenderly, and thought of as a lad in spite of his seven-and-twenty years—if Hector Gordon had been a landless younger son, with his fortune to carve out for himself, Mrs. MacClaverhouse would no doubt have loved him dearly, for the sake of his blue eyes and his frank handsome face, his generous nature and gladsome soul; but she would scarcely perhaps have loved him quite so much, or looked for his coming quite so gladly under such circumstances as she did now, when all the blessings or pleasures that wealth can purchase attended his footsteps wherever he went, and created an atmosphere of luxury around and about the dwelling in which he lived. A hungry nephew, always hard-up, and in need of pecuniary assistance, would have been a heavy trial to Mrs. MacClaverhouse.

Nothing could have been more delightful to the dowager than the Captain's manner of opening the campaign on the morning after his arrival. They had breakfasted early this time, for Hector insisted that he was well enough to get up with the birds if necessary, and that so far as any claim to feminine compassion or to sick-leave went, he was the veriest impostor in existence. It was after the little party had dawdled considerably over the breakfast-table, and when Cecil had departed to hold solemn council with the cook, that Hector addressed his relative:

"Now, my dear auntie," he said, "it's essentially necessary that you and I should understand each other. In the first place, I adore Fortinbras. I think it the most delightful place in the universe; and if the possessor of that delicious old castle would only be good enough to conceive an aversion for it, or find himself hopelessly insolvent, or something of that kind, I'd buy it of him to-morrow—Consols have risen an eighth since last Tuesday, and it's a good time for selling out—and restore it. Queen Elizabeth's drawing-room would make an admirable billiard-room, if it only had those necessary trifles—a floor and a ceiling. I'd make my hunting-stables out of the banqueting-hall—imagine a loose box with a wall four feet thick!—and I'd sleep in the topmost chamber of the great Norman tower, with a flag-staff swaying close above my head, and a general sensation of inhabiting a balloon. But all this is beside the question, auntie. What I want to say is that I have fallen desperately in love with Fortinbras, and as I am likely to stay here till you become unutterably weary of my society, I must insist upon your accepting this cheque which I wrote this morning—for you know of old what an expensive fellow I am, and I should feel perfectly miserable if I felt myself sponging on you without the least chance of returning your hospitality."

The Captain crumpled the folded cheque into his aunt's hand. The widow began some vague protest, but her nephew suffocated her scruples by a sonorous kiss; and whatever objection she urged against the receipt of his money were lost in the luxuriance of his beard.

"And now the next question is, how we are to enjoy ourselves?" exclaimed Hector, while his aunt speculated upon the figures inscribed on that crumpled scrap of paper, which her fingers so itched to unfold. "In the first place we must have a carriage; and in an exploration which I made this morning before you were up, Mrs. MacClaverhouse, I discovered that the only vehicle we can have is a shabby old fly, which began life as a britzska, and a shabby old pair of horses, which, in their early days, I suspect, have been employed in the agricultural interest; but as the shabby old carriage is clean and roomy, and as I am told the clumsy old horses are good at going, and as a person in the position of that proverbial Hobson must not be fastidious, I have engaged the vehicle for the season. So now, my dearest auntie, prepare yourself for a chronic state of picnic. I have written to Fortnum and Mason to send us a cargo of picnic provisions—innumerable mahogany-coloured hams and tongues, and Strasburg pies, and potted fowl of all species, and all those wonderful preparations which taste of grease and pepper so much more than of any thing else. And I have found the most delightful nurseryman in the world, who will supply us with hothouse grapes and apricots; and the carriage will be here at twelve, so pray run away and put on your bonnet, auntie, and let Lady Cecil know all about our plans."

"You like Cecil?"

"Excessively. I think she is charming."

Mrs. MacClaverhouse shrugged her shoulders.

"You think every thing charming," she said.

She was familiar with his sanguine temperament, and his faculty for seeing every thing in its sunniest aspect.

"But I think Lady Cecil Chudleigh more charming than most things. I have seen very few women to compare with her, though she is by no means a showy beauty. I was struck by her profile as she sat in the sunlight yesterday. I never saw a more delicate outline, except in the face of the Empress Eugénie—and she has something of Eugenie's pensive gravity in her expression,—not pride, but the sort of thing which common-minded people mistake for pride. I think you have reason to be proud of such a niece. She ought to marry well."

"I hope she will," answered the widow.

If there was any special significance in her tone, Captain Gordon was too careless to be conscious of it. He walked to the open window, humming an Italian air from the last successful opera, and then he strolled out on the lawn, which was screened from the high road by a tall old-fashioned privet hedge and a modern bank of showy evergreens, across which the sea breezes blew fresh and cool. He was very happy, with an innocent, boyish happiness, as he paced to and fro upon the elastic turf, which seemed to spring under his light foot. In all his life he had never known any acute pain, any bitter grief. Of all possibilities in life the last thing which he could have imagined was that he had come to meet his first great sorrow here where he was happy in the planning of such simple pleasures as might have seemed insipid to a modern schoolboy.

"What an old-fashioned fellow I am!" he thought, as he stopped with his hand in his pocket, searching for his cigar-case. "If any of my chums in the Eleventh knew that I was looking forward to a day's ramble in a rumbling old fly with a couple of women, I think they'd cut me dead ever afterwards; and yet they're not such a bad lot of fellows, after all; only there's not one of them has pluck enough to own he can enjoy himself."

Captain Gordon had smoked out his cigar by the time the fly drove up to the garden gate. He threw the ash away, and shook the fumes of his cabana out of his hair and beard, and then went to meet the dowager and Lady Cecil; the dowager stately in black silk robes, which she possessed in all stages of splendour and shabbiness, and which she wore always, because it was "suitable for a person of my age, my dear, and by far the most economical thing one can wear," as she informed her confidantes. The Indian shawl—the shawl which the Captain had brought to Fortinbras in one of his port-manteaus—hung across Mrs. MacClaverhouse's arm, in compliment to the donor; and behind the widow came Cecil, in a pale muslin dress and scarf, and looking very lovely under the shelter of a broad Leghorn hat.

They drove away in the bright summer sunshine, through country-lanes, where the breath of the sea came to them laden with the perfume of flowers; where rustic children ran out of cottage-doors to curtsey to them as they drove by, or even to set up a feeble cheer, as if the fly had been a triumphal chariot. The drive was a success; as, indeed, almost all things were on which Hector Gordon set his desire. Mrs. MacClaverhouse was radiant, for her inspection of the cheque had proved eminently satisfactory; Hector was delightful, throwing his whole heart and soul into the task of amusing his companions—gay with the consciousness of pleasing, and with the insouciance of a man who has never known trouble; and if Lady Cecil was the most silent of the little party, it was only because she felt most deeply the delicious repose of the rustic scenery, the exquisite sweetness of the untainted atmosphere.

They had many such drives after this, exploring the country for twenty miles round Fortinbras. They held impromptu picnics on breezy heights above the level of the sea; picnics in which the rector of Fortinbras and his two pretty daughters were sometimes invited to join, and which ended with tea-drinking at Sea-View Villa, and croquet on the lawn; and then they had lonely drives to distant villages, where there were old Norman churches to be explored, under convoy of quavery old sextons, who always had to be fetched from their dinner or their tea; dusky old churches which Mrs. MacClaverhouse declined to enter, and in whose solemn gloom Hector and Cecil dawdled together, discussing the dates of doors and windows, tombs and font, stalls and reading-desk, while the old sexton hovered respectfully in attendance, and while the dowager dozed delightfully in her carriage, lulled by the booming of excited bees. Sometimes Mrs. MacClaverhouse was too lazy to go out at all, and on those occasions the shabby fly and the shabby horses enjoyed a holiday, while Hector and Cecil strolled on the sands before the villa, or dawdled on the lawn.

They were very happy together. All Lady Cecil's proud reserve melted under the influence of the Scotchman's genial nature.

It was simply impossible not to like him; it was very difficult to resist his fascination, the indescribable witchery that lurked in his manner when he wished to please. Lord Aspendell's daughter found herself forgetting how slight a link bound her to this pleasant companion, and admitting him to a cousinly intimacy before she had time to think of what she was doing; and then it was such an easy brotherly and sisterly friendship, that to draw back from it would have seemed prudish and ungracious; so Cecil walked and talked with the young Captain, and read and played to him in the evenings, and enjoyed to the full that delightful association which can only arise between two well-bred and highly educated people. If either of them had been ignorant or shallow, selfish or vain, such close companionship must have become intolerable at the end of a week. Every body knows how weary Madame du Doffand and President Heinault grew of themselves and existence in less than twelve hours, when they met in a friend's deserted apartment, in order to escape from their visitors for the enjoyment of each other's society; but then Madame and the President were middle-aged lovers, and the freshness of youth was wanting to transform the place of their rendezvous into a paradise.

It was when Hector Gordon had been staying nearly a month at Fortinbras that the sharp-spoken and worldly dowager suddenly awakened Lady Cecil from that mental languour which had stolen upon her since his coming. He seemed to have brought so much sunshine with him, and she had abandoned herself so entirely to the delight of its warmth and radiance, lulled by the belief that it was the change from Dorset Square to Fortinbras that had filled her heart and mind with such unwonted gladness.

Mrs. MacClaverhouse had a very acute perception of all matters in which her own interests were in any way implicated, and she had woven a little scheme in relation to her nephew and niece. The dishonest steward, who made friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, has many disciples in our modern day; and the dowager had certain views with regard to Captain Gordon's settlement in life—views which involved her enjoyment of a permanent home with the nephew she loved. It was for the furtherance of this little scheme that she sat at home so often while Hector and Cecil walked side by side upon the shore, or loitered in the garden; and this object was in her mind when she let them sing duets to her in the dusky drawing-room, and sank so often into gentle slumbers while they sang, or paused to talk in voices that were hushed in harmony with the still twilight.

"I suppose you will scarcely turn up your nose now, Lady Cecil, if I venture to tell you that my nephew will be a first-rate match," exclaimed the dowager one morning, when she found herself alone with her niece.

Cecil blushed crimson.

"I—I—don't understand you, auntie," she stammered.

"Oh, of course not, Cecil. I hate a sly girl; and I begin to think you are sly. Do you mean to tell me you don't understand the drift of Hector's attentions to you?"

"But, dear auntie, he is not attentive; at least, not more attentive than a man must be to any woman he meets. Pray do not take any absurd idea into your head. We are almost relations, you know; and we get on very well together—much better than I ever thought we should; but as for any thing more than a cousinly kind of friendship——"

"A cousinly kind of fiddlestick!" cried the energetic dowager. "Do you think I can believe that all that strolling on the beach, and all that dawdling on the lawn, and all that mumbling by the piano which I hear in my sleep, means nothing but cousinly friendship?"

"On my honour, auntie, Captain Gordon has never said a word to me which the most indifferent acquaintance might not have said."

"Then what in Heaven's name does the man mumble about?" demanded Mrs. MacClaverhouse sharply.

"Oh, we have so much to talk of—our favourite books, and pictures, and music, places we have both seen, old acquaintances, places that he only has seen, and people whom he only has known; and then sometimes we get a little metaphysical—or even mystical. You know how superstitious the Scotch are, and I really think Captain Gordon is almost inclined to believe in the spiritualists."

"That will do. Then Hector Gordon has not made you an offer?"

"No, indeed," Cecil answered, blushing more deeply than before; "nor have I any reason to suppose he has the faintest idea of doing so. Pray do not mention the subject again, dear aunt. I have such a horror of any thing at all like husband-hunting."

"As you please, my young lady. It's all very well to ride the high horse; but I think some day, when you find yourself unpleasantly close to your thirtieth birthday, and discover some ugly lines under those beautiful hazel eyes of yours—some day when I am dead and gone, and your delicate ivory-white complexion has grown as yellow as an old knife-handle—when you look forward to a dreary life of dependence upon others, or lonely struggles with a hard, pitiless world—I think then, Lady Cecil, you'll be inclined to regret that you were so contemptuously indifferent to Hector Gordon's merits. There, go and put on your bonnet, child; you may marry whom you please, or remain unmarried as long as you please, for all I care about it. And yet I had built quite a castle in the air about you, and I fancied how nice it would be for you and Hector to settle in Hyde Park Gardens, or thereabouts, and for me to live with you. I should like to end my days with my boy; and those second floors in Hyde Park Gardens are very delightful—especially if you are lucky enough to get a corner house."

Mrs. MacClaverhouse's voice seemed to strike like some sharp instrument into Cecil Chudleigh's heart as she concluded this tirade. The girl had listened in proud silence, and retired silently when her aunt came to a pause. An excursion had been planned for the day; the fly was waiting before the gate, and Cecil heard Hector's step pacing to and fro on the gravel-walk below her open window, and smelt the perfume of his cigar as she put on her hat. But all the girlish joyousness with which she had been wont to attire herself for such rustic expeditions had fled from her breast, leaving a heavy dull sense of pain in its stead.

"I dare say Aunt MacClaverhouse is right," she thought sadly; "and I shall feel a dreary desolate creature when I come to be thirty, and stand all alone in the world. But it is so horrible to hear her talk of good matches, just as if every girl must always be on the alert to entrap a rich husband; when I know too that Captain Gordon does not care for me——"

She paused, and a vivid blush stole over her thoughtful face—not the crimson glow of indignation, but the warm brightness which reflects the roseate hue of a happy thought. Did he not care for her? That phrase about "caring for her" is the modest euphemism in which a woman disguises the bold word "love." Was he really so indifferent? Her protest to Mrs. MacClaverhouse had contained no syllable of untruth or prevarication. In all their intercourse, throughout all that cousinly intimacy which had been so sweet a friendship, Hector Gordon had not uttered a word which the vainest or most conscious coquette could construe into a confession of any thing warmer than friendship.

"Ah! yet—and yet—and yet!" as Owen Meredith says, there had been something—yes, surely something! no spoken word, no license of glance, no daring pressure of a yielding hand—something fifty times less palpable, and yet a hundred times sweeter than any of these—a lowering of the voice—a tender tremulous tone now and then, a dreamy softness in the dark-blue eyes—a silence more eloquent than words—a sudden break in a sentence, that had a deeper meaning than a hundred sentences.

"Poor auntie!" thought Lady Cecil, "it was silly of me to be so angry with her; for, after all, I think he does care for me—a little."

Did she think of the contractor's wealth, or remember how high above poverty and dependence she would be lifted by a marriage with Hector Gordon? Did any vision of the corner house in Hyde-Park Gardens, the noble windows overlooking the woods and waters of Kensington, the elegant equipage and thoroughbred horses, arise before her side by side with the image of the young soldier? No. Through that most terrible of ordeals the furnace of genteel poverty—Lady Cecil had passed unscathed. When the remembrance of Hector Gordon's position flashed upon her presently, all her pride rose in arms against her weakness.

"I would die rather than he should know that I care for him," she thought. "He might think me one of those calculating mercenary girls one reads of."

Thus it was that, when Lady Cecil took her seat in the carriage that day, there was an air of restraint, a cold reserve in her manner, that Hector Gordon had never seen before.

He also was changed. He had thrown away his cigar while Cecil was lingering in her own room, and had gone into the little breakfast-parlour, where his aunt sat with an unread newspaper in her hand, brooding over her niece's folly. She looked up as Hector entered, and began to talk to him. The conversation was a very brief one, and the Captain had little share in it; but when he went back to the garden his face was grave and downcast; and when he handed Cecil into the carriage, she was struck by the gloomy preoccupation of his manner. Of all the excursions they had enjoyed together, that excursion was the least agreeable. The September wind was bleak and chilly, penetrating the warmest folds of Mrs. MacClaverhouse's Indian shawl, and tweaking the end of her aristocratic nose. The brown moorlands and bare stubble-fields had a barren look against the cold grey sky; and the Captain, generally as much aux petits soins with regard to the two ladies as if he had been the adoring son of the one and the accepted lover of the other, sat in a gloomy reverie, and seemed to arouse himself by an effort whenever he uttered some commonplace remark upon the weather or the scenery. There was very little conversation during dinner; and Captain Gordon made so poor a pretence of eating that the dowager became positively alarmed, and declared that her boy was ill.

"It is no use talking, Hector," she exclaimed, though her nephew had only made a half-articulate murmur to the effect that there was nothing the matter with him. "You eat no fish, and you only helped yourself to a wing of that chicken; and you sent your plate away with that almost untouched—a very extravagant mode of sending your plate away, I should say, if you were a poor man. You've not been yourself all day, Hector; so I shall insist on your being nursed this evening. You won't take any fruit, I know; for fruit is bilious.—Never mind the dessert to-day, Mowatt," the widow said, addressing her parlour-maid; "and be sure the fruit is kept in a cool dry place till to-morrow," she added sotto voce, as she cast a sharply-scrutinising glance upon the dishes of grapes and apricots. The widow insisted that her nephew was ill and tired; and as the Captain seemed oppressed by a kind of languor which made him quite unequal to offer any opposition to such an energetic person as his aunt, he gave way, and suffered himself to be installed in a reclining attitude on the most comfortable sofa, with an Indian shawl spread over him like the counterpane of a state bed.

"And now Cecil shall play us both to sleep," said Mrs. MacClaverhouse, sinking into her own chair.

The piano was as far away from the sofa as it could be in so small a room; but Cecil heard a faint sigh as she seated herself in the dusk and laid her hands softly on the keys. How many evenings they two had sat side by side in the same dusk, talking in hushed voices! how often she had felt his warm breath admidst her hair as he bent over her while she sang! But to-day he seemed changed all at once, as he might have changed on the discovery that the woman in whose companionship he had been so unrestrainedly happy was only a scheming coquette after all, and had been spreading an airy net in which to entrap his heart and his fortune. The thought that some chance word of the dowager's might have inspired him with such an idea of her was absolute torture to Cecil Chudleigh.

She felt half inclined to refuse to play or sing for the Captain's gratification; and yet to do so might be to make a kind of scene which would seem only a part of her scheme. So after sitting silently for some minutes she touched the keys softly, and began a little reverie of Kalkbrenner's; the simplest of melodies, with a flowing movement like the monotonous plashing of waves rising and falling under the keel of a boat; and then she wandered into a very sweet arrangement of that exquisite air of Beethoven's, "Those evening bells," a melody which Moore has made more exquisite by words whose mournful beauty has never been surpassed by any lyric in our language.

"Sing the song, Lady Cecil," said Hector, in a low pleading voice. "Let me hear you sing once more."

There was something in his entreating tone—something that seemed like humility, and which reassured Cecil as to his opinion of her. It was not in such a tone that a man would address a woman he had newly learned to despise. If Hector Gordon had been the suppliant of a queen his accent could have been no more reverential than it was.

"I am in a very melancholy mood to-night, Lady Cecil," he said, while she paused with her hands straying listlessly over the keys; "and I have a fancy for pensive music. Please let me have the song."

"Do you really wish it?"

"Really—and truly."

What common words they were! and yet how thrilling an accent they took to-night upon his lips!

Cecil sang the tender melancholy words in a voice that conveyed all their tenderness—she sang that ballad which in the quiet twilight has so sad a cadence, mournful as the dirge of perished hopes and buried loves. If her low tremulous voice did not break into tears before the end of the song, it was only because, in her nervous terror of any thing like a scene, she exerted all the force of her will to sustain her tones to the close.

She paused when the song was finished, expecting some acknowledgment from Captain Gordon; but the silence of the darkening room was only broken by the slumberous breathing of Mrs. MacClaverhouse. It was a little ungracious of him to utter no word of thanks, Cecil thought; and then she began to wonder about the cause of his melancholy of this evening, and the subject of that moody reverie which had occupied him all day.

While she was wondering about this, the servant came into the room, bearing a tea-tray and a monster moderator lamp, that towered like an obelisk in the centre of the little table on which the dowager was wont to make tea. That lady was startled from her slumbers by the faint jingling of the teacups, and looked about her as sharply as if she had never been asleep at all.

"How quiet you have both been!" she exclaimed, rather impatiently. "I don't enjoy my nap half so much without the drowsy hum of your voices. What droning thing was that you were singing just now, Cecil?"

There was no answer. Cecil still bent abstractedly over the piano, touching the notes softly now and then, but making no sound. Hector Gordon lay with his face hidden by his folded arms. The fussy dowager darted across the room and swooped down upon her nephew.

"Hector," she cried, "what in goodness' name has been the matter with you all day? Why, bless my soul, what's this?—the pillow's wet. You've been crying!"

Captain Gordon got up from the sofa and laughed pleasantly at his aunt's scared face.

"It seems very absurd for a man to be nervous or hysterical," he said; "but I have not been myself to-day, and Lady Cecil's song quite upset me."

"What, that droning thing?" exclaimed Mrs. MacClaverhouse. "It sounded to me like Young's Night-Thoughts set to music."

"I think I'll wish you good-night, auntie," said the soldier.

Cecil wondered whether it was the glare of the moderator lamp that made him look so pale as he bent over his aunt.

"I think you'd better," answered the dowager; "and if you're not yourself to-night, I only hope you will be yourself to-morrow. I haven't common patience with such nonsense."

"Good-night, Lady Cecil." He paused by the piano to say this, but he did not offer Cecil his hand as he had been wont to do at parting, and he left the room without another word.