CHAPTER LXI.
A SAMPLE FROM KENT.

Martin Lovejoy made another bow, of pattern less like a tenterhook. He had come with a will to be roughly received; and lo, there was nothing but smoothness. Full as he was of his errand, and the largest views of everything, he had made up his mind to say something fierce; and here was no opportunity. For he took it for granted, in his simple way, that Sir Roland knew thoroughly well who he was.

“I am come to see you, Sir Roland Lorraine,” he began, with a slightly quivering voice, after declining the offered chair; “not to press myself upon you, but only for the sake of my daughter.”

“Indeed!” the other answered, beginning to suspect; “are you then the father of that young lady——”

“I am the father of Mabel Lovejoy. And sorry I should be to be her father, if—if—I mean, sir, if she was anybody else’s daughter. But being as it is, she is my own dear child; and no man has a better one. And if any one says that she threw herself at the feet of your son, for the sake of his name, Sir Roland, that man is a liar.”

“My good sir, I know it. I never supposed that your daughter did anything of the kind. I have heard that the fault was my son’s altogether.”

“Then why have you never said a word to say so? Why did you leave us like so many dogs, to come when you might whistle? Because we are beneath you in the world, is your son to do a great wrong to my daughter, while you sit up here on the top of your hill, as if you had never heard of us? Is this all the honour that comes of high birth? Then I thank the Almighty that we are not high born.”

The Grower struck his ash-stick with disdain upon the rich Turkey carpet, and turned his broad back on Sir Roland Lorraine; not out of rudeness (as the latter thought), but to hide the moisture that came and spoiled the righteous sparkle of his eyes. The baronet perhaps had never felt so small and self-condemned before. He had not been so blind and narrow-minded, as to forget, through the past two years, that every question has two sides. He had often felt that the Kentish homestead had a grievance against the South Down castle; but with his contemplative ease, and hatred of any disturbance, he had left the case mainly to right itself; persuading himself at last that he must have done all that could be expected, in making that promise to Struan Hales. But now all the fallacy of such ideas was scattered by a father’s honest wrath. And he was not a man who would argue down the rights of another; when he saw them.

“You are right, Mr. Lovejoy,” he said at last; “I have not behaved at all well to you. I will make no excuses, but tell you fairly that I am sorry for my conduct now that you put it so plainly. And whatever I can do shall be done, to make amends to your daughter.”

“Amends means money, from one rank to another. Would you dare to offer me money, sir?”

“Certainly not; it is the very last thing I ever should dream of doing. Not to mention the scarcity of cash just now. In such a case, money is an insult.”

“I should think so—I should think so. What money would ever pay for our Mabel? If you had only seen her once, you could never have been angry with your son. Although I was; although I was—until I heard how ill he is. But bless you, sir, they will do these things—and there is no stopping them. It puts one into a passion with them until one begins to remember. But now, sir, I have heard all sorts of things. Is it true that Master Hilary lies very ill abed, for want of money?”

“You put it very shortly; but it comes to that. He has lost a large sum of the public money, and we cannot very well replace it.”

“Then you should a’ come to me. I’ll cure all that trouble in a jiffy,” said the Grower, tugging heavily at something well inside his waistcoat. “There, that’s a very tidy lump of money; and no call to be ashamed of it, in the way you high folk look at things—because us never made it. Not a farden of it ever saw Covent Garden; all came straight without any trade whatever! He can’t a’ lost all that, anyhow.”

Martin Lovejoy, with broad-tipped fingers, and nails not altogether exempt from chewing, was working away, as he spoke, at a bag such as wheat is sampled in, and tied with whipcord round the neck. Sir Roland Lorraine, without saying a word, looked on, and smiled softly with quiet surprise.

“No patience—I haven’t no patience with counting, since I broke my finger, sir,—seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, no—well, it must be right, and I’ve reckoned amiss; our Mab reckoned every penny—no longer than yesterday morning—twenty thousand pounds it must be, according to the ticket. There is one lot a-missing; oh, here it is, in among my fingers, I do believe! What slippery rubbish this bank stuff is! Will you please now to score them all up, Sir Roland?”

“Mr. Lovejoy, why should I do that? It cannot matter what the quantity is. The meaning is what I am thinking of.”

“Well sir, and the meaning is just this. My daughter Mabel hath had a fortune left her by her godfather, the famous banker Lightgold, over to the town of Tonbridge. No doubt you have heard of him, Sir Roland, and of his death six months agone. Well no, I forget; it is so far away. I be so used to home, that I always speak as if I was at home. And they made me trustee for her—that they did; showing confidence in my nature almost, on the part of the laiyers, sir, do you think? At least I took it in that way.”

“It was kind of you, so to take it. They have no confidence in anybody’s nature, whenever they can help it.”

“So I have heard, sir. I have heard that same, and in my small way proved it. But will you be pleased just to count the money?”

“I must be worse than the lawyers if I did. Your daughter Mabel must be the best, and kindest-hearted, and most loving——”

“Of course, of course,” cried the Grower, as if that point wanted no establishing; “but business is business, Sir Roland Lorraine. I am my daughter’s trustee, do you see, and bound to be sure that her money goes right. And it is a good bit of money, mind you; more than I could earn in all my life.”

“Will you tell me exactly what she said? I should like to hear her very words. I beg you to sit down. Are you afraid that I shall run off with the trust-funds?”

“You are like your son. I’ll be dashed if you aren’t. Excuse me, Sir Roland, for making so free—but that was just his way of turning things; a sort of a something in a funny manner, that won the heart of my poor maid. None of our people know how to do it; except of course our Mabel. Mabel can do it, answer for answer, with any that come provoking her. But she hathn’t shown the spirit for it, now ever since—the Lord knows what was the name of the town Master Hilary took. That signifies nothing, neither here nor there; only it showeth how they do take on.”

“Yes, Mr. Lovejoy, I see all that. But what was it your good daughter said?”

“She is always saying something, sir—something or other; except now and then; when her mind perhaps is too much for it. But about this money-bag she said—is that what you ask, Sir Roland? Well, sir, what she said was this. They had told me a deal, you must understand, about investing in good securities, meaning their own blessed pockets, no doubt. But they found me too old a bird for that. ‘Down with the money!’ says I, the same as John Shorne might in the market. They wouldn’t; they wouldn’t. Not a bit of it, till I put another laiyer at them—my own son, sir, if you please, a counsellor on our circuit; and he brought them to book in no time, and he laid down the law to me pretty strong about my being answerable. So as soon as I got it, I said to her, ‘Mabel, how am I to lodge it for you, to fetch proper interest, until you come of age?’ But the young silly burst out crying, and she said—‘What good can it ever be to me? Take it all, father, take every penny, and see if it will do any good to him.’ And no peace could I have, till at last I set off. And there it is, Sir Roland. But I am thinking that, the money in no way belonging to me, I am bound to ask you to make a receipt, or give me your note of hand for it, or something as you think proper, just to disappoint the laiyers.”

“You shall have my receipt,” said Sir Roland Lorraine, with his eyes beginning to glisten. “Meanwhile place all the money in the bag, and tie it up securely.”

The Grower fetched a quiet little sigh, and allowed the corners of his mouth to drop, as he did what he was told to do. It had cost him many a hard fight with Mabel, and many a sulky puff of pipe, to be sent on such an errand. Money is money; and a man who makes it with so much anxiety, chance of season, and cheating from the middlemen, as a fruit-grower has to struggle through,—such a man wants to know the reason why he should let it go all of a heap. However, Martin Lovejoy was one of the “noblest works of God,” an honest man—though an honest woman is even yet more noble, if value goes by rarity—and he knew that the money was his daughter’s own, to do what she pleased with, in a twelvemonth’s time, when she would be a spinster of majority.

“I have written my receipt,” said Sir Roland, breaking in on Master Lovejoy’s sad retrospect at the bag of money. “Read it, and tell me if I have been too cold.”

It is a thing quite unaccountable, haply (and yet there must be some cause for it), that some men who allow no tone of voice, no pressure of hand, to betray emotion, yet cannot take pen without doing it, and letting the fount of heart break open from the sealed reserve of eye. No other explanation can be offered for this note of hand from Sir Roland Lorraine. The Grower put on his specs.; and then he took them off, and wiped them; and then, as the shadow of the hill came over, he found it hard to read anything. The truth was that he had read every word, but had no idea of being overcome. And the note, so hard to read, was as follows:—

CHAPTER LXII.
A FAMILY ARRANGEMENT.

It did not occur to Sir Roland Lorraine (as he shook Martin Lovejoy’s hand, and showed him forth on his way to meet the Reigate coach at Pyecombe) that Mabel’s rich legacy might be supposed to have changed his own views concerning her. Whether her portion was to be twenty thousand pounds or twenty pence, made very little difference to him; but what made all the difference was the greatness of her faith and love.

The Grower was a man who judged a man very much by eyesight. He had found out so many rogues, by means of that “keen Kentish look,” for which the Sidneys, and some other old families, were famous. And having well applied this to Sir Roland, he had no longer any doubt of him. And yet, with his shrewd common-sense, he was not sorry to button up his coat with the money once more inside it, in the sample-bag, which had sampled so much love, and trust, and loyalty. Money is not so light to come by as great landlords might suppose; and for a girl to be known to have it is the best of all strings to her bow. So Master Lovejoy grasped his staff; and it would have been a hard job for even the famous Black Robin, the highwayman of the time, to have wrested the trust-fund from him.

Covering the ground at an active pace, and crossing the Woeburn by a tree-bridge (rudely set up where the old one had been) he strode through West Lorraine and Steyning, and over the hills to Pyecombe corner, where he took the Reigate coach; and he slept that night at Reigate.

Meanwhile the Chapmans gathered their forces for perfect conquest of Alice. Father and son had quite agreed that the final stroke of victory might best be made by occupying the commanding fortress Valeria. They knew that this stronghold was only too ready, for the sake of the land below it to surrender at discretion; and the guns thereof being turned on the castle, the whole must lie at their mercy.

Yet there were two points which these besiegers had not the perception to value duly and seize to their own advantage. One was the character of Sir Roland; the other was the English courage and Norman spirit of Alice. “It is all at our mercy now,” they thought; “we have only to hammer away; and the hammer of gold is too heavy for anything.” They did not put it so clearly as that—for people of that sort do not put their views to themselves very clearly; still, if they had looked inside their ideas, they would have found them so.

“Steenie, let me see him first,” said Sir Remnant, meeting his son, by appointment, at the sun-dial in the eastern walk, which for half the year possessed a sinecure office, and a easy berth even through the other half. “Steenie, you will make a muddle; you have been at your flask again.”

“Well, what can I do? That girl is enough to roll anybody over. I wish I had never seen her—oh, I wish I had never seen her! She dis-dis-dis——”

“Dislikes you, Steenie! She can never do that. Of all I have settled with, none have said it. They are only too fond of you, Steenie; just as they were of your father before you. And now you are straight, and going on so well! After all you have done for the women, Steenie, no girl can dislike you.”

“That is the very thing I try to think. And I know that it ought to be so, if only from proper jealousy. But she never seems to care when I talk of girls; and she looks at me so that I scarcely dare speak. And it scarcely makes any difference at all what girls have been in love with me!”

“Have you had the sense to tell her of any of the royal family?”

“Of course I did. I mentioned two or three, with good foundation. But she never inquired who they were, and nothing seems to touch her. I think I must give it up, after all. I never cared for any girl before. And it does seem so hard, after more than a score of them, when one is in downright earnest at last, not to be able to get a chance of the only one I ever lov-lov-loved!”

“Steenie, you are a mere ass,” said Sir Remnant; “you always are, when you get too much—which you ought to keep for dinner-time. I have settled everything for you upstairs, so that it must come right, if only you can hold your tongue and wait. I have them all under my thumb; and nothing but your rotten fuss about the young maid can make us one day later. Her time is fixed. And whether she dislikes——”

“Dis-dis-dis—what I meant to say was—despises.”

“Pish, and tush, fiddlemaree! A young girl to despise a man! I had better marry her myself, I trow, if that is all you are fit for. Now just go away; go down the hill; go and see old Hales; go anywhere for a couple of hours, while I see Lorraine. Only first give me your honour for this, that you will not touch one more drop of drink until you come back for the dinner-time.”

“You are always talking at me about that now. And I have had almost less than nothing. And even that drop I should not have had, if Alice had not upset me so.”

“Well, you may have needed it. I will say no more. We will upset her pretty well, by-and-by, the obstinate, haughty fagot! But, Steenie, you will give me your honour—not another drop, except water. You always keep your honour, Steenie.”

“Yes, sir, I do; and I will give it. But I must not go near either Alice or Hales. She does so upset me that I must have a drop. And I defy anybody to call upon Hales without having two or three good glasses. Oh, I know what I’ll do; and I need not cross that infernal black water to do it. I’ll call upon the boy at the bottom of the hill, and play at pitch guineas with him. They say that he rolls every night in money.”

“Then, Steenie, go and take a lesson from him. All you do with the money is to roll it away—ducks and drakes, and dipping yourself. I would not have stuck to this matter so much, except that I know it for your last chance. Your last chance, Steenie, is to have a wife, with sense and power to steer you. It is worth all the money we are going to pay; even if it never come back again; which I will take deuced good care it does. You know you are my son, my boy.”

“Well, I suppose I can’t be anybody’s else; you carried on very much as I do.”

“And when my time is over, Steenie—if you haven’t drunk yourself to death before me—you will say that you had a good kind father, who would go to the devil to save you.”

“Really, sir, you were down upon me for having had a sentimental drop. But, I think, I may return the compliment.”

“Go down the hill, Steenie—go down the hill. It seems to be all that you are fit for. And do try to put your neckcloth tidy before you come back to dinner.”

Sir Remnant Chapman returned to the house, with a heavy sigh from his withered breast. He had not the goodness in him which is needed to understand the value of a noble maiden, or even of any good girl, taken as against man’s selfishness. But in his little way, he thought of the bonds of matrimony as a check upon his son’s poor rambling life; and he knew that a lady was wanted in his house; and his great ambition was to see, at last, a legitimate grandson. “If he comes of the breed of Lorraine,” he exclaimed, “I will settle £100,000, the very day he is born, on him.”

With this in his head, he came back to try his measures with Sir Roland. He knew that he must not work at all as he had done with Lady Valeria; but put it all strictly as a matter of business, with no obligation on either side; but as if there were “landed security” for the purchase-money of Alice. And he managed all this so well, that Sir Roland, proud and high-minded as he was, saw nothing improper in an arrangement by which Alice would become an incumbent on the Lorraine estates, for the purpose of vindicating the honour of Lorraine, and saving, perhaps, the male heir thereof. Accordingly the matter was referred to the lawyers; who put it in hand, with the understanding that the trustees of the marriage-settlement, receiving an indemnity from Sir Remnant, would waive all defects, and accept as good a mortgage as could be made by deed of even date, to secure the £50,000.

Sir Roland had long been unwilling to give his favourite Alice to such a man as Captain Chapman seemed to be. Although, through his own retiring and rather unsociable habits, he was not aware of the loose unprincipled doings of the fellow, he could not but perceive the want of solid stuff about him, of any power for good, or even respectable powers of evil. But he first tried to think, and then began to believe, that his daughter would cure these defects, and take a new pride and delight in doing so. He knew what a spirited girl she was; and he thought it a likely thing enough, that she would do better with a weak, fond husband, than with one of superior mind, who might fail to be polite to her. And he could not help seeing that Steenie was now entirely devoted to her. Perpetual snubbings or silent contempt made little difference to Steenie. He knew that he must win in the end; and then his turn might come perhaps; and in half an hour after his worst set-down, he was up again, on the arm of Cognac.

Alice Lorraine, with that gift of waiting for destiny, which the best women have, allowed the whole thing to go on, as if she perceived there was no hope for it. She made no touching appeals to her father, nor frantic prayers to her grandmother; she let the time slip on and on, and the people said what they liked to her. She would give her life for her brother’s life, and the honour of the family; but firmly was she resolved never to be the wife of Stephen Chapman.

The more she saw of this man, the more deeply and utterly she despised him. She could not explain to her father, or even herself, why she so loathed him. She did not know that it was the native shrinking of the good from evil, of the lofty from the low, the brave from the coward, the clean from the unclean. All this she was too young to think of, too maidenly to imagine. But she felt perhaps, an unformed thought, an unpronounced suggestion, that death was a fitter husband for a pure girl, than a rake-hell.

Meanwhile Hilary, upon whom she waited with unwearying love and care, was beginning to rally from his sad disorder and threatening decline. The doctors, who had shaken their heads about him, now began to smile, and say that under skilful treatment, youth and good constitution did wonders; that “really they had seldom met with clearer premonitory indications of phthisis pulmonalis, complicated by cardiac and hypochondriac atony, and aggravated by symptomatic congestion of the cerebellum. But proper remedial agents had been instrumental in counteracting all organic cachexy, and now all the principles of sound hygiene imperatively demanded quietude.” In plain English, he was better and must not be worried. Therefore he was not even told of the arrangement about his sister. Alice used to come and sit by his bed, or sofa, or easy-chair, as he grew a little stronger, and talk light nonsense to him, as if her heart was above all cloud and care. If he alluded to any trouble, she turned it at once to ridicule; and when he spoke of his indistinct remembrance of the Woeburn, she made him laugh till his heart grew fat, by her mimicry of Nanny Stilgoe, whom she could do to the very life. “How gay you are, Lallie; I never saw such a girl!” he exclaimed, with the gratitude which arises from liberated levity. “You do her with the stick so well! Do her again with the stick, dear Lallie.” His mind was a little childish now, from long lassitude of indoor life, which is enough to weaken and depress the finest mind that ever came from heaven, and hankers for sight of its birth-place. In a word, Alice Lorraine was bestowing whatever of mirth or fun she had left (in the face of the coming conflict), all the liveliness of her life, and revolt of bright youth against misery, to make her poor brother laugh a little and begin to look like himself again.

CHAPTER LXIII.
BETTER THAN THE DOCTORS.

She did want to go; and go she did, backed up by kind opinions; and her father being busy with his pears and hops (which were poor and late this wet season), the fine young sailor, now adrift on shore—while his ship was refitting at Chatham—made sail, with his sister in convoy, for the old roadstead of the South Downs. Gregory (who had refused to go, for reasons best known to himself, but sensible and sound ones) wishing them good luck, returned to his chambers in the Middle Temple.

Now there is no time to set forth how these two themselves set forth; the sailor with all the high spirit of the sea, when it overruns the land; the spinster inclined to be meditative, tranquil, and deep of eye and heart; yet compelled to come out of herself and smile, and then let herself come into her smile. It is a way all kind-hearted girls have, when they know that they ought to be grave, and truly intend to be so, yet cannot put a chain on the popgun pellets of young age, health, and innocence.

Enough that they had arrived quite safely at the old house in the Coombe, with the sailor of course in a flurry of ambition to navigate his father’s horse whenever he looked between his ears. The inborn resemblance between ships and horses has been perceived, and must have been perceived, long before Homer, or even Job, began to consider the subject; and it still holds good, and deserves to be treated by the most eloquent man of the age, retiring into silence.

Mr. Hales had claimed the right of introducing his favourite Mabel to his brother-in-law, Sir Roland. For amity now reigned again between the Coombe and the Rectory; the little quarrel of the year before had long since been adjusted, and the parson was as ready to contribute his valuable opinion upon any subject, as he was when we began with him. One might almost say even more so; for the longer a good man lives with a wife and three daughters to receive the law from him, and a parish to accept his divinity, the less hesitation he has in admitting the extent of his own capacities. Nevertheless he took very good care to keep out of Lady Valeria’s way.

“Bless my heart! you look better than ever,” said the Rector to blushing Mabel, as her pretty figure descended into his strong arms, at the great house door. “Give me a kiss. That’s a hearty lass. I shall always insist upon it. What! Trembling lips! That will never do. A little more Danish courage, if you please. You know I am the Danish champion. And here is the Royal Dane of course; or a Dane in the Royal Navy, which does quite as well, or better. Charlie, my boy, I want no introduction. You are a fisherman—that is enough; or too much, if your sister’s words are true. You can catch trout, when I can’t.”

“No, sir, never, I never should dare. But Mabel always makes me a wonder.”

“Well, perhaps we shall try some day, the Church against the Navy; and Mabel to bring us the luncheon. Well said, well said! I have made her smile; and that is worth a deal of trying. She remembers the goose, and the stuffing, and how she took in the clerk from Sussex. I don’t believe she made a bit of it.”

“I did, I did! How can you say such things? I can make better stuffing than that to-morrow. I was not at all at my best, then.”

“You are at your best now,” he replied, having purposely moved her mettle: “come in with that colour and those sparkling eyes, and you will conquer every one.”

“I want to conquer no one,” she answered, with female privilege of last word; “I only came to see poor Hilary.”

The Rector, with the fine gallantry and deference of old-fashioned days, led the beautiful and good girl, and presented her to Sir Roland. She was anxious to put her hair a little back, before being looked at; but the impetuous parson wisely would not let her trim herself. She could not look better than she did; so coy, and soft, and bashful, resolved to be by no means timid, but afraid that she could not contrive to be brave.

Sir Roland Lorraine came forward gently, and took her hand, and kissed her. He felt in his heart that he had been hard upon this very pretty maiden, imputing petty ambition to her; which one glance of her true dear eyes disproved to his mind for ever. She was come to see Hilary; nothing more. Her whole heart was on Hilary. She had much admiration of Sir Roland, as her clear eyes told him. But she had more than admiration for some one on another floor.

“You want to go upstairs, my dear,” Sir Roland said, with the usual bathos of all critical moments; “you would like to take off your things, and so on, before you see poor Hilary.”

“Of course she must touch herself up,” cried the Rector; “what do you know about young women? Roland, where is Mrs. Pipkins?”

“I told her to be not so very far off; but she is boiling down bullace plums, or something, of the highest national importance. We could not tell when this dear child would come, or we might have received her better.”

“Oh, I am so glad! You cannot receive me, you could not receive me, better. And now that you have called me your dear child, I shall always love you. I did not think that you would do it. And I came for nothing of the kind. I only came for Hilary.”

“Oh, we quite understand that we are nobodies,” answered Sir Roland, smiling; “you shall go to him directly. But you must not be frightened by his appearance. He has been a good deal knocked about, and fallen into sad trouble; but we all hope that now he is getting better, and the sight of you will be better than a hundred doctors to him. But you must not stay very long, of course, and you must keep him very quiet. But I need not tell you—I see that you have a natural gift of nursing.”

“All who have the gift of cookery have the gift of nursing,” exclaimed Mr. Hales, “because ‘omne majus continet in se minus.’ Ah, Roland, you think nothing of my learning. If only you knew how I am pervaded with Latin, and with logic!”

These elderly gentlemen chattered thus because they were gentlemen. They saw that poor Mabel longed to have their attention withdrawn from her; and without showing what they saw, they nicely thus withdrew it. Then Alice, having heard of Miss Lovejoy’s arrival, came down and was good to her, and their hearts were speedily drawn together by their common anxiety. Alice thought Mabel the prettiest girl she had ever seen anywhere; and Mabel thought Alice the loveliest lady that could exist out of a picture.

What passed between Mabel and Hilary may better be imagined duly, than put into clumsy words.

CHAPTER LXIV.
IMPENDING DARKNESS.

But now before this style of things set in, in bitter earnest, nobody on the South Down hills could tell what to make of the weather. For twenty years the shepherds had not seen things look so strange like. There was no telling their marks, or places, or the manners of the sheep. A sulky grey mist crawled along the ground even when the sky was clear. In the morning, every blade and point, and every spike of attraction, and serrated edge (without any intention of ever sawing anything), and drooping sheath of something which had vainly tried to ripen, and umbellate awning of the stalks that had discharged their seed, were, one and all alike, incrusted with a little filmy down. Sometimes it looked like the cotton-grass that grows in boggy places; and sometimes like the “American blight,” so common now on apple-trees; and sometimes more like gossamer, or the track of flying spiders. The shepherds had never seen this before; neither had the sheep—those woolly sages of the weather. The sheep turned up their soft black eyes with wonder towards the heavens,—the heavens where every sheep may hope to walk, in the form of a fleecy cloud, when men have had his legs of mutton.

It is needless to say that this long warning (without which no great frost arrives) was wholly neglected by every man. The sheep, the cattle, and the pigs foresaw it, and the birds took wing to fly from it; the fish of the rivers went into the mud, and the fish of the sea to deep water. The slug, and the cockroach, the rat and the wholesome toad, came home to their snuggeries; and every wire-worm and young grub bored deeper down than he meant to do. Only the human race straggled about, without any perception of anything.

In this condition of the gloomy air, and just when frost was hovering in the grey clouds before striking, Alice Lorraine came into her father’s book-room, on the Christmas-eve. There was no sign of any merry Christmas in the shadowed house, nor any young delighted hands to work at decoration. Mabel was gone, after a longer visit than had ever been intended; and Alice (who had sojourned in London, under lofty auspices) had not been long enough at home to be sure again that it was her home. Upon her return she had enjoyed the escort of a mighty warrior, no less a hero than Colonel Clumps, the nephew of her hostess. The Colonel had been sadly hacked about, in a skirmish soon after Vittoria, when pressing too hotly on the French rear-guard. He had lost not only his right arm, but a portion of his one sound leg; and instead of saying his prayers every morning, he sat for an hour on the edge of his bed and devoted all his theological knowledge to the execration of the clumsy bullet, which could not even select his weak point for attack. This choler of his made much against the recovery of what was left of him: and the doctors thought that country air might mitigate his state of mind, and at the same time brace his body, which sadly wanted bracing. Therefore it had been arranged that he should go for a month to Coombe Lorraine, posting all the way, of course, and having the fair Alice to wait on him—which is the usual meaning of escort.

At the date of this journey, the Colonel’s two daughters were still away at a boarding-school; but they were to come and spend the Christmas with his aunt in London, and then follow their father into Sussex, and perhaps appear as bridesmaids. Meanwhile their father was making himself a leading power at Coombe Lorraine. He naturally entered into strict alliance with his aunt’s friend, Lady Valeria, and sternly impressed upon everybody the necessity of the impending marriage. “What earthly objection can there be?” he argued with Mrs. Pipkins, now Alice’s only partisan, except old Mr. Binns, the butler; “even if Captain Chapman is rather lazy, and a little too fond of his wine-glass; both points are in her favour, ma’am. She will manage him like a top, of course. And as for looking up to him, that’s all nonsense. If she did, he would have to look down upon her; and that’s what the women can’t bear, of course. How would you like it now, Mrs. Pipkins? Tut, tut, tut, now don’t tell me! I am a little too old to be taken in. I only wish that one of my good daughters had £50,000 thrown at her, with £20,000 a-year to follow.”

“But perhaps, sir, your young ladies is not quite so particular, and romantic like, as our poor dear Miss Alice.”

“I should hope not. I’d romantic them. Bread and water is the thing for young hussies, who don’t know on which side their bread is buttered. But I don’t believe a bit of it. It’s all sham and girlish make-believe. In her heart she is as ready as he is.”

Almost everybody said the same thing; and all the credit the poor girl got for her scorn of a golden niddering, was to be looked upon as a coy piece of affectation and thanklessness. All this she was well aware of. Evil opinion is a thing to which we are alive at once; though good opinion is well content to impress itself on the coffin. Alice (who otherwise rather liked his stolid and upright nature) thought that Colonel Clumps had no business to form opinion upon her affairs; or at any rate, none to express it. But the Colonel always did form opinions, and felt himself bound to express them.

“I live in this house,” he said, when Alice hinted at some such phantasy; “and the affairs of this house are my concern. If I am not to think about the very things around me, I had better have been cut in two, than made into three pieces.” He waved the stalk of his arm, and stamped the stump of the foot of his better leg, with such a noise and gaze of wrath, that the maiden felt he must be in the right. And so perhaps he may have been. At any rate, he got his way as a veteran colonel ought to do.

With everybody he had his way. Being unable to fight any more, he had come to look so ferocious, and his battered and shattered body so fiercely backed up the charge of his aspect, that none without vast reserve of courage could help being scattered before him. Even Sir Roland Lorraine (so calm, and of an infinitely higher mind), by reason perhaps of that, gave way, and let the maimed veteran storm his home. But Alice rebelled against all this.

“Now, father,” she said on that Christmas-eve, when the house was chilled with the coming cold, and the unshedden snow hung over it, and every sheep, and cow, and crow, and shivering bird, down to the Jenny-wren, was hieing in search of shelter; “father, I have not many words to say to you; but such as they are, may I say them?”

Sir Roland Lorraine, being struck by her quite unwonted voice and manner, rose from his chair of meditation, left his thoughts about things which can never be thought out by mankind, and came to meet what a man should think of foremost—his child, his woman child.

“Lallie, my dear,” he said very gently, and kindly looking at her sad wild eyes, whose difference from their natural softness touched him with some terror—“Lallie, now what has made you look like this?”

“Papa, I did not mean to look at all out of my usual look. I beg your pardon, if indeed I do. I know that all such things are very small in your way of regarding things. But still, papa—but still, papa, you might let me say something.”

“Have I ever refused you, Alice, the right to say almost everything?”

“No; that you have never done, of course. But what I want to say now is something more than I generally want to say. Of course, it cannot matter to you, papa; but to me it makes all the difference.”

“My dear, you are growing sarcastic. All that matters to you matters a great deal more to me, of course. You know what you have always been to me.”

“I do, papa. And that is why I find it so very hard to believe that you can be now so hard with me. I do not see what I can have done to make you so different to me. Girls like me are fond of saying very impudent things sometimes; and they seem to be taken lightly. But they are not forgiven as they are meant. Have I done anything at all to vex you in that way, papa?”

“How can you be so foolish, Lallie? You talk as if I were a girl myself. You never do a thing to vex me.”

“Then why do you do a thing to kill me? It must come to that; and you know it must. I am not very good, nor in any way grand, and I don’t want to say what might seem harsh. But, papa, I think I may say this—you will never see me Stephen Chapman’s wife.”

“Well, Lallie, it is mainly your own doing. I did not wish to urge it, until it seemed to become inevitable. You encouraged him so in the summer, that we cannot now draw back honourably.”

“Father, I encouraged him?”

“Yes. Your grandmother tells me so. I was very busy at that time; and you were away continually. And whenever I wanted you, I always heard ‘Miss Alice is with Captain Chapman.’”

“How utterly untrue! But, O papa now, you got jealous! Do say that you got jealous; and then I will forgive you everything?”

“My dear, there is nothing to be jealous of. I thought that you were taking nicely to the plan laid out for you.”

“The plan that will lay me out, papa. But will you tell me one thing?”

“Yes, my dear child, a hundred things; if you will only ask them quietly.”

“I am not making any noise, papa; it is only that my collar touched my throat. But what I want to know is this. If anything should happen to me, as they say; if I should drop out of everybody’s way, could the money be got that you are all so steadfastly set upon getting? Could the honour of the family be set up, and poor Hilary get restored, and well, and the Lorraines go on for ever? Why don’t you answer me, papa? My question is a very simple one. What I have a right to ask is this—am I, for some inscrutable reason (which I have had nothing to do with), the stumbling-block—the fatal obstacle to the honour and the life of the family?”

“Alice, I never knew you talk like this, and I never saw you look so. Why, your cheeks are perfectly burning! Come here, and let me feel them.”

“Thank you, papa; they will do very well. But will you just answer my question? Am I the fatal—am I the deathblow to the honour and life of our lineage?”

Sir Roland Lorraine was by no means pleased with this curt mode of putting things. He greatly preferred, at his time of life, the rounding off and softening of affairs that are too dramatic. He loved his beautiful daughter more than anything else on the face of the earth; he knew how noble her nature was, and he often thought that she took a more lofty view of the world than human nature in the end would justify. But still he must not give way to that.

“Alice,” he said, “I can scarcely see why you should so disturb yourself. There are many things always to be thought of—more than one has time for.”

“To be sure, papa; I know all that; and I hate to see you worried. But I think that you might try to tell me whether I am right or not.”

“My darling, you are never wrong. Only things appear to you in a stronger light than they do to me. Of course, because you are younger and get into a hurry about many things that ought to be more dwelt upon. It is true that your life is interposed, through the command of your grandmother and the subtlety of the lawyers, between poor Hilary and the money that might have been raised to save him.”

“That is true, papa; now, is it? I believe every word that you say; but I never believe one word of my grandmother’s.”

“You shocking child! Yes, it is true enough. But, after all, it comes to nothing. Of the law I know nothing, I am thankful to say; but from Sir Glanvil Malahide I understand, through some questions which your grandmother laid before him, that the money can only be got—either through this family arrangement, or else by waiting till you, as a spinster attain the age of twenty-one—which would be nearly two years too late.”

“But, papa, if I were to die?”

“Lallie, why are you so vexatious? If you were to die, the whole of the race might end—so far as I care.”

“My father, you say that, to make me love you more than I do already, which is a hopeless attempt on your part. Now you need not think that I am jealous. It is the last thing I could dream of. But ever since Mabel Lovejoy appeared, I have not been what I used to be; either with you, or with Hilary. In the case of poor Hilary, I must of course expect it, and put up with it. But I cannot see, for a moment, why I ought to be cut out with you, papa.”

“What foolish jealousy, Alice! Shall I tell you why I like and admire Mabel so much? But as for comparing her with you——”

“But, papa, why do you like and admire her so deeply?”

“You jealous child, I did not say ‘deeply.’ But I like her, because she is so gentle, so glad to do what she is told, so full of self-sacrifice and self-devotion.”

“While I am harsh, and disobedient, self-seeking, and devoted to self. No doubt she would marry according to order. Though I dreamed that I heard of a certain maltster, who had the paternal sanction. ‘Veni, vidi, vici,’ appears to be her motto. Even grandmamma is vanquished by her, or by her legacy. She says that she curtseys much better than I do. She is welcome to that distinction. I am not at all sure that the prime end and object of woman’s life is to curtsey. But I see exactly how I am placed. I will never trouble you any more, papa.”

With these words, Alice Lorraine arose, and kissed her father’s forehead gently, and turned away, not to worry him with the long sigh of expiring hope. She had still three weeks to make up her mind, or rather to wait with her mind made up. And three weeks still is a long spell of time for the young to anticipate misery.

“You are quite unlike yourself, my child,” Sir Roland said with perfect truth; “you surprise me very much to-day. I am sure that you do not mean a quarter of what you are saying.”

“You are right, papa. I do not mean even a tenth part of my spitefulness. I will try to be more like Mabel Lovejoy, who really is so good and nice. It is quite a mistake to suppose that I could ever be jealous of her. She is a dear kind-hearted girl, and the very wife for Hilary. But I think that she differs a little from me.”

“It is no matter of opinion, Alice. Mabel differs from you, as widely as you differ from your Cousin Cecil. I begin to incline to an old opinion (which I came across the other day), that much more variety is to be found in the weaker than in the stronger sex. Regard it thus——”

“Excuse me, father. I have no courage for regarding anything. You can look at things in fifty lights; and I in one shadow only. Good-bye, darling. Perhaps I shall never speak to you again as I have to-night. But I hope you will remember that I meant it for the best.”