“Mr. Edgar,” she said, “you cannot think that I am not moved by such a letter. Oh! I’m not mercenary, I don’t think I am mercenary! but to have all this put at my feet, to feel that it would be for Charles’s good and for Sibby’s good, if I could make up my mind!”

Here she stopped, and cast a glance back at the house again. Edgar had been taking a melancholy walk along the side of the loch, where she had joined him. Her heart was wrung by a private conflict, which she could not put into words, but which he divined. He felt sure of it, from all he had seen and heard since they came, as well as from the impression conveyed to his mind the moment she had named the sailor Willie’s name. I do not know why it should be humbling for a woman to love without return, when it is not humbling for a man; but it is certain that for nothing in the world would Margaret have breathed the cause of her lingering unwillingness to do anything which should separate her from Willie; and that Edgar felt hot and ashamed for her, and turned away his eyes, that she might not see any insight in them. At the same time, however, the question had another side for him, and involved his own fortunes. He tried to dismiss this thought altogether out of his mind, but it was hard to do so. Had she loved Harry Thornleigh, Edgar would have felt himself all the more pledged to impartiality, because this union would seriously endanger his own; but to help to ruin himself by encouraging a mercenary marriage, this would be hard indeed!

“Are you sure that you would get so many advantages?—to Charles and to Sibby?” he cried, with a coldness impossible to conceal.

She looked at him startled, the tears arrested in her blue eyes. She had never doubted upon this point. Could she make up her mind to marry Harry, every external advantage that heart could desire she felt would be secured. This first doubt filled her with dismay.

“Would I no?” she cried faltering. “He is a rich man’s heir, Lady Mary’s nephew—a rich gentleman. Oh! Cousin Edgar, what will you think of me? I have always been poor, and Charles is poor—how can I put that out of my mind?”

“I do not blame you,” said Edgar, feeling ashamed both of himself and her. And then he added, “He is a rich man’s son, but his father is not old; and he would not receive you gladly into his family. Forgive me that I say so—I ought to tell you that I am not a fair judge. I am going to marry Harry’s sister, and they object very much to me.”

“Object to you!—they are ill to please,” cried Margaret, with simple natural indignation. “But if you were in the family, that would make things easier for us,” she added, wistfully, looking up in his face.

“You have made up your mind, then, to run the risk?” said Edgar, feeling his heart sink.

“I did not say that.” She gave another glance at the house again. Willie was standing at the door, in the morning sunshine, and beckoned to her to come back. She turned to him, as a flower turns to the sun. “No, I am far, far from saying that,” said the young woman, with a mixture of sadness and gladness, turning to obey the summons.

Edgar stood still, looking after her with wondering gaze. The good-looking sailor, whose likeness to himself did not make him proud, was a poor creature enough to be as the sun in the heavens to this beautiful, stately young woman, who looked as if she had been born to be a princess. What a strange world it is, and how doubly strange is human nature! Willie had but to hold up a finger, and Margaret would follow him to the end of the earth; though the rest of his friends judged him rightly enough, and though even little Jeanie, though she loved, could scarcely approve her brother, Margaret was ready to give up even her hope of wealth and state, which she loved, for this Sultan’s notice. Strange influence, which no man could calculate upon, which no prudence restrained, nor higher nor lower sentiment could quite subdue!

Edgar followed his beautiful cousin to the house with pitying eyes. He did not want her to marry Harry Thornleigh, but even to marry Harry Thornleigh, though she did not love him, seemed less degrading than to hang upon the smile, the careless whistle to his hand, of a man so inferior to her. I don’t know if, in reality, Willie was inferior to Margaret. She, for one, would have been quite satisfied with him; but great beauty creates an atmosphere about it which dazzles the beholder. It was not fit, Edgar felt, in spite of himself, that a woman so lovely should thus be thrown away.

As this is but an episode in my story, I may here follow Margaret’s uncomfortable wooing to its end. Poor Harry, tantalized and driven desperate by a letter, which seemed, to Margaret, the most gently temporising in the world, and which was intended to keep him from despair, and to retain her hold upon him until Willie’s purposes were fully manifested, at last made his appearance at Loch Arroch Head, where she was paying the Campbells a visit, on the day after Edgar left the loch. He came determined to hear his fate decided one way or another, almost ill with the excitement in which he had been kept, wilder than ever in the sudden passion which had seized upon him like an evil spirit. He met her, on his unexpected arrival, walking with Willie, who, having nothing else to do, did not object to amuse his leisure with his beautiful cousin, whose devotion to him, I fear, he knew. Poor Margaret! I know her behaviour was ignoble, but I regret—as I have confessed to the reader—that she did not become the great lady she might have been; and, notwithstanding that Edgar’s position would have been deeply complicated thereby, I wish the field had been left clear for Harry Thornleigh, who would have made her a good enough husband, and to whom she would have made, in the end, a very sweet wife. Forgive me, young romancist, I cannot help this regret. Even at that moment Margaret did not want to lose her young English Squire, and her friends were so far from wanting to lose him that Harry, driven to dire disgust, hated them ever after with a strenuous hatred, which he transferred to their nation generally, not knowing any better. He lingered for a day or more, waiting for the answer which Margaret was unwilling to give, and tortured by Willie, who, seeing the state of affairs, felt his vanity involved, and was more and more loverlike to his cousin. The issue was that Harry rushed away at last half mad, and went abroad, and wasted his substance more than he had ever done up to that moment, damaged his reputation, and encumbered his patrimony, and fell into that state of cynical disbelief in everybody, which, bad as are its effects even upon the cleverest and brightest intelligence, has a worse influence still upon the stupid, to whom there is no possibility of escape from its withering power.

When Harry was fairly off the scene, his rival slackened in his attentions; and after a while Margaret returned to her brother, and they did their best to retrieve their standing at Tottenham’s, and to make the position of the doctor’s family at Harbour Green a pleasant one. But Lady Mary, superior to ordinary prejudices as she was, was not so superior as to be altogether just to Margaret, who, though she deserved blame, got more blame than she deserved. The Thornleighs all believed that she had “laid herself out” to “entrap” Harry—which was not the case; and Lady Mary looked coldly upon the woman who had permitted herself to be loved by a man so far above her sphere. And then Lady Mary disliked the doctor, who never could think even of the most interesting “case” so much as to be indifferent to what people were thinking of himself. So Harbour Green proved unsuccessful, as their other experiments had proved, and the brother and sister drifted off again into the world, where they drift still, from place to place, always needy, anxious, afraid of their gentility, yet with that link of fraternal love between them, and with that toleration of each other and mutual support, which gives a certain beauty, wherever they go, to the family group formed by this handsome brother and sister, and the beautiful child, whom her uncle cherishes almost as dearly as her mother does.

Ah, me! if Margaret had made that “good match,” though it was not all for love, would it not have been better for everybody concerned?

CHAPTER XXII.

Another Winding-up.

Edgar felt that his connection with them was over for ever when he took leave of them on the evening of the funeral. The only one over whom his heart yearned a little was Jeanie, who was the true mourner of the only mother she had ever known, but who, in the midst of her mourning, poor child, felt another pang, perhaps more exquisite, at the thought of seeing him, too, no more. All the confusion of sentiment and feeling, of misplaced loves and indifferences, which make up the world were in this one little family. Jeanie had given her visionary child’s heart to Edgar, who, half aware of, half disowning the gift, thought of her ever with tender sympathy and reverence, as of something sacred. Margaret, less exquisite in her sentiments, yet a loving soul in her way, had given hers to Willie, who was vain of her preference, and laughed at it—who felt himself a finer fellow, and she a smaller creature because she loved him. Dr. Charles, uneasy soul, would have given his head had he dared to marry Jeanie, yet would not, even had she cared for him, have ventured to burden his tottering gentility with a wife so homely.

Thus all were astray from the end which might have made each a nobler and certainly a happier creature. Edgar never put these thoughts into words, for he was too chivalrous a man even to allow to himself that a woman had given her heart to him unsought; but the complications of which he was conscious filled him with a vague pang—as the larger complications of the world—that clash of interests, those broken threads, that never meet, those fulnesses and needinesses, which never can be brought to bear upon each other—perplex and pain the spectator. He was glad, as we all are, to escape from them; and when he reached London, where his love was, and where, the first thing he found on his arrival was the announcement of his appointment, his heart rose with a sudden leap, spurning the troubles of the past, in elastic revulsion. He had his little fortune again, not much, at any time, but yet something, which Gussy could hang at her girdle, and his old mother’s watch for her, quaint, but precious possession. He was scarcely anxious as to his reception, though she had written him but one brief note since his absence; for Edgar was himself so absolutely true that it did not come into his heart that he could be doubted. But he could not go to Gussy at once, even on his arrival. Another and a less pleasant task remained for him. He had to meet his sister at the hotel she had gone to, and be present at the clandestine marriage—for it was no better—which was at last to unite legally the lives of Arthur Arden and Clare.

Clare had arrived in town the evening before. He found her waiting for him, in her black dress, her children by her, in black also. She was still as pale as when he left her at Arden, but she received him with more cordiality than she had shown when parting with him. There was something in her eyes which alarmed him—an occasional vagueness, almost wildness.

“We did wrong, Edgar,” she said, when the children were sent away, and they were left together—“we did wrong.”

“In what did we do wrong, Clare?”

“In ever thinking of those—those papers. We should have burnt them, you and I together. What was it to anyone what happened between us? We were the sole Ardens of the family—the only ones to be consulted.”

“Clare! Clare! I am no Arden at all. Would you have had me live on a lie all my life, and build my own comfort upon some one else’s wrong?”

“You were always too high-flown, Edgar,” she said, with the practical quiet of old. “Why did you come to me whenever you heard that trouble was coming? Because you were my brother. Instinct proves it. If you are my brother, then it is you who should be master at Arden, and not—anyone else.”

“It is true I am your brother,” he said, sitting down by her, and looking tenderly into her colourless face.

“Then we were wrong, Edgar—we were wrong—I know we were wrong; and now we must suffer for it,” she said, with a low moan. “My boy will be like you, the heir, and yet not the heir; but for him I will do more than I did for you. I will not stop for lying. What is a lie? A lie does not break you off from your life.”

“Does it not? Clare, if you would think a moment——”

“Oh! I think!” she cried—“I think!—I do nothing but think! Come, now, we must not talk any more; it is time to go.”

They drove together in a street cab to an obscure street in the city, where there was a church which few people ever entered. I doubt if this choice was so wise as they thought, but the incumbent was old, the clerk old, and everything in their favour, so far as secrecy was concerned. Arthur Arden met them there, pale, but eager as any bridegroom could be. Clare had her veil—a heavy veil of black lace—over her face; the very pew-opener shuddered at such a dismal wedding, and naturally all the three officials, clergyman, clerk, and old woman, exerted all their aged faculties to penetrate the mystery. The bridal party went back very silently in another cab to Clare’s hotel, where Arthur Arden saw his children, seizing upon them with hungry love and caresses. He did not suspect, as Edgar did, that the play was not yet played out.

“You have never said that you forgive me, Clare,” he said, after, to his amazement, she had sent her boy and girl away.

“I cannot say what I do not mean,” she said, in a very low and tremulous voice. “I have said nothing all this time; now it is my turn to speak. Oh! don’t look at me so, Edgar!—don’t ask me to be merciful with your beseeching eyes! We were not merciful to you.”

“What does she mean?” said Arthur Arden, looking dully at him; and then he turned to his wife. “Well, Clare, you’ve had occasion to be angry—I don’t deny it. I don’t excuse myself. I ought to have looked deeper into that old affair. But the punishment has been as great on me as on you.”

“Oh, the punishment!” she cried. “What is the punishment in comparison? It is time I should tell you what I am going to do.”

“There, there now!” he said, half frightened, half coaxing. “We are going home. Things will come right, and time will mend everything. No one knows but Edgar, and we can trust Edgar. I will not press you for pardon. I will wait; I will be patient——”

“I am not going home any more. I have no home,” she said.

“Clare, Clare!”

“Listen to what I say. I am ill. There shall be no slander—no story for the world to talk of. I have told everybody that I am going to Italy for my health. It need not even be known that you don’t go with me. I have made all my arrangements. You go your way, and I go mine. It is all settled, and there is nothing more to say.”

She rose up and stood firm before them, very pale, very shadowy, a slight creature, but immovable, invincible. Arthur Arden knew his wife less than her brother did. He tried to overcome her by protestations, by entreaties, by threats, by violence. Nothing made any impression upon her; she had made her decision, and Heaven and earth could not turn her from it. Edgar had to hold what place he could between them—now seconding Arden’s arguments, now subduing his violence; but neither the one nor the other succeeded in their efforts. She consented to wait in London a day or two, and to allow Edgar to arrange her journey for her—a journey upon which she needed and would accept no escort—but that was all. Arden came away a broken man, on Edgar’s arm, almost sobbing in his despair.

“You won’t leave me, Edgar—you’ll speak for me—you’ll persuade her it is folly—worse than folly!” he cried.

It was long before Edgar could leave him, a little quieted by promises of all that could be done. Arden clung to him as to his last hope. Thus it was afternoon when at last he was able to turn his steps towards Berkeley Square.

Gussy knew he was to arrive in town that morning, and, torn by painful doubts as she was, every moment of delay naturally seemed to her a further evidence that Edgar had other thoughts in his mind more important to him than she was. She had said nothing to anyone about expecting him, but within herself had privately calculated that by eleven o’clock at least she might expect him to explain everything and make everything clear. Eleven o’clock came, and Gussy grew distraite, and counted unconsciously the beats of the clock, with a pulsation quicker and quite as loud going on in her heart. Twelve o’clock, and her heart grew sick with the deferred hope, and the explanation seemed to grow dim and recede further and further from her. He had never mentioned Margaret in his letters, which were very short, though frequent; and Gussy knew that her brother, in wild impatience, had gone off two days before to ascertain his fate. But she was a woman, and must wait till her fate came to her, counting the cruel moments, and feeling the time pass slowly, slowly dragging its weary course. One o’clock; then luncheon, which she had to make a pretence to eat, amid the chatter of the girls, who were so merry and so loud that she could not hear the steps without and the knocks at the door.

When they were all ready to go out after, Gussy excused herself. She had a headache, she said, and indeed she was pale enough for any headache. He deserved that she should go out as usual, and wait no longer to receive him; but she would not treat him as he deserved. When they were all gone she could watch at the window, in the shade of the curtains, to see if he was coming, going over a hundred theories to explain his conduct. That he had been mistaken in his feeling all along, and never had really cared for her; that Margaret’s beauty had been too much for him, and had carried him away; that he cared for her a little, enough to fulfil his engagements, and observe a kindly sort of duty towards her, but that he had other friends to see, and business to do, more important than she was. All these fancies surged through her head as she stood, the dark damask half hiding her light little figure at the window.

The days had lengthened, the sounds outside were sounds of spring, the trees in the square garden were coloured faintly with the first tender wash of green. Steps went and came along the pavement, carriages drew up, doors opened and shut, but no Edgar. She was just turning from the window, half blind and wholly sick with the strain, when the sound of a light, firm foot on the stair caught her ears, and Edgar made his appearance at last. There was a glow of pleasure on his face, but care and wrinkles on his forehead. Was the rush with which he came forward to her, and the warmth of his greeting, and the light on his face, fictitious? Gussy felt herself warm and brighten, too, involuntarily, but yet would have liked best to sit down in a corner and cry.

“How glad I am to find you alone!” he said. “What a relief it is to get here at last! I am tired, and dead beat, and sick and sorry, dear. Now I can breathe and rest.”

“You have been long, long of coming,” said Gussy, half wearily, half reproachfully.

“Haven’t I? It seems about a year since I arrived this morning, and not able to get near you till now. Gussy, tell me, first of all, did you see it?—do you know?”

“What?” Her heart was melting—all the pain and all the anger, quite unreasonably as they had risen, floating away.

“Our Consulship,” he said, opening up his newspaper with one hand, and spreading it out, to be held by the other hand, on the other side of her. The two heads bent close together to look at this blessed announcement. “Not much for you, my darling—for me everything,” said Edgar, with a voice in which bells of joy seemed to be ringing, dancing, jostling against each other for very gladness. “I was half afraid you would see it before I brought the news.”

“I had no heart to look at the paper this morning,” she said.

“No heart! Something has happened? Your father—Harry—what is it?” cried Edgar, in alarm.

“Oh! nothing,” cried Gussy, crying. “I was unhappy, that was all. I did not know what you would say to me. I thought you did not care for me. I had doubts, dreadful doubts! Don’t ask me any more.”

“Doubts—of me!” cried Edgar, with a surprised, frank laugh.

Never in her life had Gussy felt so much ashamed of herself. She did not venture to say another word about those doubts which, with such laughing, pleasant indifference, he had dismissed as impossible. She sat in a dream while he told her everything, hearing it all like a tale that she had read in a book. He brought out the old watch and gave it to her, and she kissed it and put it within her dress, and cried when he described to her the last words of his old mother. Loch Arroch and all its homely circumstances became as a scene of the Scriptures to Gussy; she seemed to see a glory of ideal hills and waters, and the moonlight filling the sky and earth, and the loveliness of the night which made it look “but a step” between earth and heaven. Her heart grew so full over those details that Edgar, unsuspicious, never discovered the compunction which mingled in that sympathetic grief. He told her about his journey; then paused, and looked her in the eyes.

“Last year it was you who travelled with me. You were the little sister?” he said. “Ah! yes, I know it was you. You came and kissed me in my sleep——”

“Indeed I did not, sir!” cried Gussy, in high indignation. “I would not have done such a thing for all the world.”

Edgar laughed, and held her so fast that she could not turn from him.

“You did in spirit,” he said; “and I had it in a dream. Ever since I have had a kind of hope in my life; I dreamt that you put the veil aside, and I saw you. When I woke I could not believe it, though I knew it; but the other sister, the real one, would not tell me your name.”

“Poor sister Susan!” cried Gussy, the tears disappearing, the sunshine bursting out over all her face; “she will not like me to go back into the world.”

“Nor to go out to Italy as a Consul,” said Edgar, gay as a boy in his new happiness, “to talk to all the ships’ captains, and find out about the harbour dues.”

“Foolish! there are no ship captains, nor ships either, nor dues of any kind—”

“Nothing but the bay and the hills, and the sunsets and the moonrises; the Riviera, which means Paradise—”

“And to be together—”

“Which has the same meaning,” he said. And then they stopped in this admirable fooling, and laughed the foolish laughter of mere happiness, which is not such a bad thing, when one can have it, once in a way.

“What a useless, idle, Sybarite life you have sketched out for us!” Gussy said at last. “I hope it is not a mere sunshiny sinecure. I hope there is something to do.”

“I am very good at doing nothing,” Edgar replied—too glad, at last, to return to homely reality and matter of fact; and until the others came home, these two talked as much nonsense as it is given to the best of us to talk; and got such good of it as no words can describe.

When Lady Augusta returned, she pretended to frown upon Edgar, and smiled; and then gave him her hand, and then inclined her cheek towards him. They had the paper out again, and she shook her head; then kissed Gussy, and told them that Spezzia was the most lovely place in all the world. Edgar stayed to dinner, as at last a recognised belonging of the household, and met Lord Granton, who was somewhat frightened of him, and respectful, having heard his praises celebrated by Mary as something more than flesh and blood; and for that evening “the Grantons” that were to be, were nobodies—not even redeemed from insignificance by the fact that their marriage was approaching, while the other marriage was still in the clouds.

“How nice it would be if they could be on the same day!” little Mary whispered, rather, I fear, with the thought of recovering something of her natural consequence as bride than for any other reason.

“As if the august ceremonial used at an Earl’s wedding would do for a Consul’s!” cried saucy Gussy, tossing her curls as of old. And notwithstanding Edgar’s memories, and the dark shadow of Clare’s troubles that stood by his side, and the fear that now and then overwhelmed them all about Harry’s movements—in spite of all this, I do not think a merrier evening was ever spent in Berkeley Square. Gussy had been in a cloud, in a veil, for all these years; she had not thought it right to laugh much, as the Associate of a Sisterhood—which is to say that Gussy was not happy enough to want to laugh, and founded that grey, or brown, or black restriction for herself, with the ingenuity of an unscrupulous young woman. But now sweet laughter had become again as natural to her as breath.

CHAPTER XXIII.

H.B.M.’s Consul.—Conclusion.

Clare carried out her intentions, unmoved by all the entreaties addressed to her. She heard everything that was said with perfect calm; either her capabilities of emotion were altogether exhausted, or her passionate sense of wrong was too deep to show at the surface, and she was calm as a marble statue; but she was equally inflexible. Edgar turned, in spite of himself, into Arthur Arden’s advocate; pleaded with her, setting forth every reason he could think of, partly against his own judgment—and failed. Her husband, against whom she did not absolutely close her door, threw himself at her feet, and entreated, for the children’s sake, for the sake of all that was most important to them both—the credit of their house, the good name of their boy. These were arguments which with Clare, in her natural mind, would have been unanswerable; but that had happened to Clare which warps the mind from its natural modes of thought. The idea of disgrace had got into her very soul, like a canker. She was unable to examine her reasons—unable to resist, even in herself, this overwhelming influence; it overcame her principles, and even her prejudices, which are more difficult to overcome. The fear of scandal, which those who knew Clare would have supposed sufficient to make her endure anything, failed totally here. She knew that her behaviour would make the world talk, and she even felt that, with this clue to some profound disagreement between her husband and herself, the whole story might be more easily revealed, and her boy’s heirship made impossible; but even with this argument she could not subdue herself, nor suffer herself to be subdued. The sense of outrage had taken possession of her; she could not forget it—could not realize the possibility of ever forgetting it. It was not that she had been brought within the reach of possible disgrace. She was disgraced; the very formality of the new marriage, though she consented to it without question, as a necessity, was a new outrage. In short, Clare, though she acted with a determination and steadiness which seemed to add force to her character, and showed her natural powers as nothing else had ever done, was not, for the first time in her life, a free agent. She had been taken possession of by a passionate sense of injury, which seized upon her as an evil spirit might seize upon its victim. In the very fierceness of her individual resentment, she ceased to be an individual, and became an abstraction, a woman wronged, capable of feeling, knowing, thinking of nothing but her wrong. This made all arguments powerless, all pleas foolish. She could not admit any alternative into her mind; her powers of reasoning failed her altogether on this subject; on all others she was sane and sensible, but on this had all the onesidedness, the narrowness of madness—or of the twin-sister of madness—irrepressible and irrepressed passion.

Without knowing anything of the real facts of the story, the Thornleighs were admitted to see her, on Clare’s own suggestion; for her warped mind was cunning to see where an advantage could be drawn from partial publicity. They found her on her sofa, looking, in the paleness which had now become habitual to her, like a creature vanishing out of the living world.

“Why did you not let us know you were ill? You must have been suffering long, and never complained!” cried Lady Augusta, moved almost to tears.

“Not very long,” said Clare.

She had permitted her husband to be present at this interview, to keep up appearances to the last; and Arthur felt as if every word was a dart aimed at him, though I do not think she meant it so.

“Not long! My dear child, you are quite thin and wasted; this cannot have come on all at once. But Italy will do you all the good in the world,” Lady Augusta added, trying to be cheerful. “They, you know, are going to Italy too.”

“But not near where I shall be,” said Clare.

“You must go further south? I am very sorry. Gussy and you would have been company for each other. You are not strong enough for company? My poor child! But once out of these cold spring winds, you will do well,” said kind Lady Augusta.

But though she thus took the matter on the surface, she felt that there was more below. Her looks grew more and more perplexed as they discussed Edgar’s appointment, and the humble beginning which the young couple would make in the world.

“It is very imprudent—very imprudent,” Lady Augusta said, shaking her head. “I have said all I can, Mrs. Arden, and so has Mr. Thornleigh. I don’t know how they are to get on. It is the most imprudent thing I ever heard of.”

“Nothing is imprudent,” said Clare, with a hard, dry intonation, which took all pleasant meaning out of the words, “when you can trust fully for life or death; and my brother Edgar is one whom everybody can trust.”

“At all events, we are both of us old enough to know our own minds,” said Gussy, hastily, trying to laugh off this impression. “If we choose to starve together, who should prevent us?”

Arthur Arden took them to their carriage, but Lady Augusta remarked that he did not go upstairs again. “There is something in all this more than meets the eye,” she said, oracularly.

Many people suspected this, after Lady Augusta, when Clare was gone, and when it came out that Mr. Arden was not with her, but passing most of his time in London, knocking about from club to club, through all the dreary winter. He made an effort to spend his time as virtuously as possible that first year; but the second year he was more restless and less virtuous, having fallen into despair. Then everybody talked of the breach between them, and a great deal crept out that they had thought buried in silence. Even the real facts of the case were guessed at, though never fully established, and the empty house became the subject of many a tale. People remarked that there were many strange stories about the Ardens; that they had behaved very strangely to the last proprietor before Arthur; that nobody had ever heard the rights of that story, and that Edgar had been badly used.

Whilst all this went on, Clare lived gloomy and retired by herself, in a little village on the Neapolitan coast. She saw nobody, avoiding the wandering English, and everybody who could have known her in better times; and I don’t know how long her reason could have stood the wear and tear, but for the illness and death of the poor little heir, whose hapless position had given the worst pang to her shame and horror. Little Arthur died, his mother scarcely believing it, refusing to think such a thing possible. Her husband had heard incidentally of the child’s illness, and had hurried to the neighbourhood, scarcely hoping to be admitted. But Clare neither welcomed him nor refused him admission, but permitted his presence, and ignored it. When the child was gone, however, it was Arthur’s vehement grief which first roused her out of her stupor.

“It is you who have done it!” she cried, turning upon him with eyes full of tearless passion. But she did not send him out of her house. She felt ill, worn out in body and mind, and left everything in his hands. And by-and-by, when she came to herself, Clare allowed herself to be taken home, and fled from her duties no longer.

This was the end of their story. They were more united in the later portion of their lives than in the beginning, but they have no heir to come after them. The history of the Ardens will end with them, for the heir-at-law is distant in blood, and has a different name.

As for the other personages mentioned in this story, Mr. Tottenham still governs his shop as if it were an empire, and still comes to a periodical crisis in the shape of an Entertainment, which threatens to fail up to the last moment, and then is turned into a great success. The last thing I have heard of Tottenham’s was, that it had set up a little daily newspaper of its own, written and printed on the establishment, which Mr. Tottenham thought very likely to bring forward some latent talent which otherwise might have been lost in dissertations on the prices of cotton, or the risings and fallings of silks. After Gussy’s departure, I hear the daily services fell off in the chapel; flowers were no longer placed fresh and fragrant on the temporary altar, there was no one to play the harmonium, and the attendance gradually decreased. It fell from a daily to a weekly service, and then came to an end altogether, for it was found that the young ladies and the gentlemen preferred to go out on Sunday, and to choose their own preachers after their differing tastes. How many of them strayed off to chapel instead of church, it would have broken Gussy’s heart to hear. I do not think, however, that this disturbed Mr. Tottenham much, who was too viewy not to be very tolerant, and who liked himself to hear what every new opinion had to say for itself. Lady Mary was very successful with her lectures, and I hope improved the feminine mind very much at Harbour Green. She thought she improved her own mind, which was of course a satisfaction; and did her best to transmit to little Molly very high ideas of intellectual training; but Molly was a dunce, as providentially happens often in the families of very clever people; and distinguished herself by a curious untractableness, which did not hinder her from being her mother’s pride, and the sweetest of all the cousins—or so at least Lady Mary thought.

The marriage of “the Grantons” took place in April, with the greatest éclat. It was at Easter, when everybody was in the country; and was one of the prettiest of weddings, as well as the most magnificent, which Thornleigh ever saw. Mary’s presents filled a large room to overflowing. She got everything possible and impossible that ever bride was blessed with; and the young couple went off with a maid, and a valet and a courier, and introductions to every personage in Europe. Their movements were chronicled in the newspapers; their letters went and came in ambassadorial despatch boxes. Short of royalty, there could have been nothing more splendid, more “perfectly satisfactory,” as Lady Augusta said. The only drawback was that Harry would not come to his sister’s wedding; but to make up for that everybody else came—all the great Hauteville connections, and Lady Augusta’s illustrious family, and all the Thornleighs, to the third and fourth generations. Not only Thornleigh itself, but every house within a radius of ten miles was crowded with fine people and their servants; and the bells were rung in half a dozen parish churches in honour of the wedding. It was described fully in the Morning Post, with details of all the dresses, and of the bride’s ornaments and coiffure.

“We shall have none of these fine things, I suppose,” Gussy said, when it was all over, turning to Edgar with a mock sigh.

“No, my dear; and I don’t see how you could expect them,” said Lady Augusta. “Instead of spending our money vainly on making a great show for you, we had much better save it, to buy some useful necessary things for your housekeeping. Mary is in quite a different case.”

“Buy us pots and pans, mamma,” said Gussy, laughing; “though perhaps earthen pipkins would do just as well in Italy. We shall not be such a credit to you, but we shall be much cheaper. There is always something in that.”

“Ah! Gussy, it is easy to speak now; but wait till you are buried in the cares of life,” said her mother, going away to superintend the arrangements for the ball in the evening. So grand a wedding was certainly very expensive; she never liked to tell anyone how much that great ceremonial cost.

A little later, the little church dressed itself in a few modest spring flowers, and the school-children, with baskets full of primroses—the last primroses of the season—made a carpet under Gussy’s feet as she, in her turn, went along the familiar path between the village gravestones, a bride. There were not more than a dozen people at the breakfast, and Lady Augusta’s little brougham took them to the station afterwards, where they set out quite humbly and cheerily by an ordinary train.

“Quite good enough for a Consul,” Gussy said, always the first to laugh at her own humbleness. She wore a grey gown to go away in, which did not cost a tenth part so much as Lady Granton’s, and the Post took no notice of them. They wandered about their own country for a week or two, like the Babes in the Wood, Gussy said, expected in no great country house, retiring into no stately seclusion, but into the far more complete retirement of common life and common ways. Gussy, as she was proud to tell, had learned to do many things in her apprenticeship to the sisters of the Charity-house as associate of the order; and I think the pleasure to her of this going forth unattended, unsuspected, in the freedom of a young wife—the first smack of absolute freedom which women ever taste—had something far more exquisite in it to Gussy than any delight her sister could have in her more splendid honeymoon. Lord and Lady Granton were limited, and kept in curb by their own very greatness; they were watched over by their servants, and kept by public opinion in the right way; but Edgar and Gassy went where they would, as free as the winds, and thought of nobody’s opinion. The Consul in this had an unspeakable advantage over the Earl.

They got to their home at last on a May evening, when Italy is indeed Paradise; they had driven all day long from the Genoa side along the lovely Riviera di Levante, tracing the gracious curves from village to village along that enchanting way. The sun was setting when they came in sight of Spezzia, and before they reached the house which had been taken for them, the Angelus was sounding from the church, and the soft dilating stars of Italian skies had come out to hear the homely litany sung shrilly in side-chapels, and out of doors, among the old nooks of the town, of the angelic song, “Hail, Mary, full of grace!” The women were singing in an old three-cornered piazzetta, close under the loggia of the Consul’s house, which looked upon the sea. On the sea itself the magical sky was shining with all those listening stars. In Italy the stars take more interest in human life than they do in this colder sphere. Those that were proper to that space of heaven, crowded together, Edgar thought to himself, to see his bride. On the horizon the sea and sky blended in one infinite softness and blueness; the lights began to twinkle in the harbour and in its ships; the far-off villages among the woods lent other starry tapers to make the whole landscape kind and human. Heaven and earth were softly illuminated, not for them—for the dear common uses and ends of existence; yet unconsciously with a softer and fuller lustre, because of the eyes that looked upon them so newly, as if earth and heaven, and the kindly light, and all the tender bonds of humanity, had been created fresh that very day.

THE END.


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