← catalogue

Christina

by L. G. Moberly · English · Gutenberg #38573 · 566,725 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Christina
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Christina

Author: L. G. Moberly


        
Release date: January 14, 2012 [eBook #38573]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38573

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRISTINA ***




Produced by Al Haines










[Illustration: Cover art]






CHRISTINA



BY

L. G. MOBERLY

_Author of "Hope, My Wife," "That Preposterous Will," etc._




WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED

LONDON, MELBOURNE & TORONTO

1912




Dedicated to

WINIFRED V. WALKER,

WITH MUCH LOVE.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

     I. "THE LITTLE PRACTICAL JOKE"
    II. "MUMMY'S BABA--DAT'S ALL"
   III. "ONE OF THE BEST THINGS LEFT"
    IV. "I SUPPOSE IT WAS AN HOUR"
     V. "I KNOW THIS IS WORTH A LOT OF MONEY"
    VI. "BABA LOVES YOU VERY MUCH".
   VII. "A VERY BEAUTIFUL PENDANT, WITH THE INITIALS 'A.V.C.'"
  VIII. "IT IS A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH"
    IX. "A VERY BEAUTIFUL LADY"
     X. "IT IS ONLY HE WHO MATTERS!"
    XI. "YOU CAN TRUST DR. FERGUSSON"
   XII. "YOU ARE JUST 'ZACKLY LIKE THE PRINCE"
  XIII. "YOU HAVE BEEN A FRIEND TO ME TO-DAY"
   XIV. "I AM QUITE SURE YOU NEED NOT BE AFRAID"
    XV. "I DO TRUST, CICELY, YOU KEEP HER IN HER PLACE"
   XVI. "MY MOTHER GAVE IT TO ME"
  XVII. "WHO DO YOU MEAN BY SIR ARTHUR?"
 XVIII. "YOU ARE MY OWN SISTER'S CHILD"
   XIX. "PER INCERTAS, CERTA AMOR"
    XX. "SHE HAS A SWEET, STRONG SOUL"
   XXI. "IF YOU GO ACROSS THE SEA!"
  XXII. "I CAME TO-DAY TO TELL YOU SO"
 XXIII. "THE KING OF MY KINGDOM"




CHRISTINA.




CHAPTER I.

"THE LITTLE PRACTICAL JOKE."

"Don't be a silly ass, Layton.  Do I look the sort of man to play such
a fool's trick?"

"My dear fellow, there's no silly ass about it.  You, a lonely
bachelor, and not badly off--desirous of settling down into quiet,
domestic life, would like to find a young lady of refined and cultured
tastes who would meet you with--a view to matrimony.  I'll take my oath
you are as ready as this gentleman is, to swear you will make an
excellent husband, kind, domesticated, and----"

Further speech was checked by a well-directed cushion, which descended
plump upon the speaker's bronzed and grinning countenance, momentarily
obliterating grin and countenance alike, whilst a shout of laughter
went up from the other occupants of the smoking-room.

"Jack, my boy, Mernside wasn't far wrong when he defined you as a silly
ass," drawled a man who leant against the mantelpiece, smoking a
cigarette, and looking with amused eyes at the squirming figure under
the large cushion; "what unutterable drivel are you reading?  Is the
_Sunday Recorder_ responsible for that silly rot?"

"The _Sunday Recorder_ is responsible for what you are pleased to call
silly rot," answered the young man, who had now flung aside the
cushion, and sat upright, looking at his two elders with laughing eyes,
whilst he clutched a newspaper in one hand, and tried to smooth his
rumpled hair with the other.  "The _Sunday Recorder_ has a matrimonial
column--and--knowing poor old Rupert to be a lonely bachelor, not badly
off, and desirous of settling down into quiet domestic life, etc.,
etc.--see the printed page"--he waved the journal over his head--"I
merely wished to recommend my respected cousin to insert an
advertisement on these lines, in next Sunday's paper."

"Because some wretched bounders choose to advertise for wives in the
Sunday papers, I don't see where I come in," said a quiet and
singularly musical voice--that of the third man in the room--he who a
moment before had flung the large cushion at young Layton.  He was
sitting in an armchair drawn close to the glowing fire, his hands
clasped under his head, his face full of languid amusement, turned
towards the grinning youth upon the sofa.  Without being precisely a
handsome man, Rupert Mernside's was a striking personality, and his
face not one to be overlooked, even in a crowd.  There was strength in
his well-cut mouth and jaw; and the rather deeply-set grey eyes held
humour, and a certain masterfulness, which dominated less powerful
characters than his own.

In those eyes there was a charm which neutralised his somewhat severe
and rugged features, but in Rupert Mernside's voice lay his greatest
attraction; and a lady of his acquaintance had once been heard to say
that with such a voice as his, he could induce anyone to follow him
round the world.

Why he had remained so long a bachelor had long been matter for
speculation, not only to the feminine portion of the community, but
also to his men friends; but thirty-five still found Rupert Mernside
unmarried, and the manoeuvres of match-making mothers, and of daughters
trained to play up to their mothers' tactics, had hitherto failed to
lead him in the desired direction.

"My dear Rupert," his young cousin said solemnly, after a pause, "you
are a bachelor--the fact is painfully self-evident; you have enough
money to--settle down and become domesticated.  There are
hundreds--no--thousands of young women in the world, who would 'meet
you with a view to matrimony.'  It seems a crying shame that you should
waste your sweetness on the desert air--when you might be blooming in a
fair lady's garden."

"You utter young rotter," Mernside ejaculated, laughing as he rose, and
stretched himself, "if you are so keen on matrimonial advertisements,
why not put one in on your own account?"

"Awful sport," Layton ejaculated; "think of the piles of letters you
would get from every kind of marriageable woman--old and young.  And
you might arrange to meet any number of them at different places, and
have no end of a ripping time.  You only have to ask them to meet you
with a view to matrimony; the matrimony needn't come off, unless both
parties are satisfied."

"Silly ass!" Mernside exclaimed again, with a laugh that mitigated the
words, "one of these days you'll find yourself in some unpleasantly
tangled web, my boy, if you play the goat over matrimonial
advertisements.  Better leave well alone and come up to Handwell Manor
with me.  Cicely wants a message taken to the Dysons."

"Cicely's messages are like the poor--always with us," the younger man
answered flippantly; "no, thank you, Rupert; on this genial and
pleasant November afternoon, when you can't see half a mile ahead of
you for the mist, and the country lanes are two feet deep in mud, I
prefer the smoking-room fire.  Besides, I have letters to write."

"I'll go with you, Mernside"; the man who had been lounging against the
mantelpiece straightened himself, and flung away the end of his
cigarette; "Cicely won't be down till tea-time; she is spending the
afternoon in the nursery, looking after the small girl.  Confounded
nuisance for her that the nurse had to go off in a hurry like this, for
my respected sister was not intended by nature for the care of
children."

"Fortunate she has only one," Mernside answered; "what would she have
done with a large family party?"

"Managed by hook or by crook to get a party of nurses and nurserymaids
to mind them," laughed the other man; "she's the dearest little soul
alive, but Cicely never ought to have been a mother, though I shouldn't
say that, excepting to you two who are members of the family, and know
of what stuff Cicely and I are made."

Mernside and Layton joined in the laughter, and the younger man said
lazily:

"Cicely's just Cicely; you can't imagine her less perfect than she is,
and you, Wilfrid, being merely her brother, are not entitled to give an
opinion about her.  Rupert and I, as cousins, see her in a truer
perspective.  Bless her sweet heart!  She makes a perfect chatelaine
for this delectable castle, and the small heiress couldn't have a
sweeter guardian."

"Hear, hear," Mernside murmured, touching Layton's shoulder with a
kindly, almost caressing touch, as he and his cousin, Lord Wilfrid
Staynes, went out of the room, leaving the young man in sole possession.

Left alone, Layton stretched himself again, yawned, lighted a
cigarette, and, strolling to the window, looked at the not very
inviting prospect outside.  Bramwell Castle stood on the slope of a
hill, and on even moderately fine days, the view commanded, not only by
the window of the smoking-room, but by every window on that side of the
house, was one of the wildest, and most beautiful in the county.  But,
on this Sunday afternoon in November, nothing more was visible than the
broad gravel terrace immediately below the house, and a grass lawn that
sloped abruptly from the terrace, and was dotted with trees.
Everything beyond the lawn was swallowed up in a white mist that
drifted over the tree-tops, and clung to the dank grass, blotting out
completely all trace of the park, that swept downwards from the lawn,
and of the great landscape which stretched from the woodlands to the
far-away hills.  Park, woods, and hills were visible to Jack Layton
only in the eyes of his imagination; he could see none of them, and,
with a shiver and a shrug of the shoulders, he turned back into the
warm fire-lit room.

Thanks to his close relationship to Lady Cicely Redesdale, the mistress
of the house, to whom he had always been more of younger brother than
cousin, he had _carte blanche_ to be at the Castle whenever he chose,
and to treat the house as if it were in reality, what he assuredly made
of it--his actual home.  Both to him--and to Cicely's other cousin,
Rupert Mernside--the late John Redesdale, her husband, had extended the
fullest and most warm hospitality; and since his death, it had still
remained a recognised thing that the two cousins should spend their
weekends at Bramwell, whenever Lady Cicely and her little daughter were
there.  The kindly millionaire who had married the lovely but
impecunious Cicely Staynes, one of the numerous daughters of the Earl
of Netherhall, possessed a host of hospitable instincts, and the Castle
had opened its gates wide to Cicely's relations and friends.  Only one
reservation had been made by honest John Redesdale.  No man or woman of
doubtful reputation, or damaged character, was allowed to be the guest
of his wife; and the shadier members of Society never set foot within
any house of which the millionaire was master.  Jack Layton, strolling
idly now across the smoking-room, whose panelled walls and carved
furniture had been Redesdale's pride and joy, glanced up at the
mantelpiece, over which hung a portrait of the dead man.

"Poor old John," the young man reflected, as he kicked a coal back into
its place in the fire; "he was one of the best chaps that ever
lived--even if he hadn't many good looks with which to bless himself."
He looked up again at the plain but kindly features of the man in the
portrait, and a smile crossed his pleasant young face, as his eyes met
the pictured eyes above him.

"It wasn't a love match, of course," his thoughts ran on; "at least, I
don't suppose Cicely loved the dear old fellow.  Well; he was thirty
years her senior, so who could wonder?  But they were jolly happy, for
all that; John worshipped the ground her pretty feet walked upon, and
he was her master, without ever letting her feel his hand through the
glove.  Cicely wants a master--all women do want a master," Jack wagged
his head sagely, when his thoughts reached this point.  Having attained
to the ripe age of twenty-five, he felt he had plumbed the nature of
woman to its lowest depths, "and Cicely was lucky to find a master who
could give her a place like this."  He sauntered away from the
fireplace, and next surveyed the well-stocked bookcases, but although
they contained every variety of literature, nothing he saw appealed to
his fastidious taste of the moment--and, yawning afresh, he once more
picked up the _Sunday Recorder_, which he had flung upon the floor.

That someone who is perennially ready to turn idle hands to account,
was watching over this idle youth on that November afternoon, may, on
the whole, be taken for granted, for as Jack's blue eyes ran down the
columns of the paper, a sudden mischievous light sprang into them, a
low laugh broke from his lips.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed.  "What sport, what ripping sport.  Why on
earth didn't I think of it before?  And--as I start for a four months'
trip with Dundas on Saturday--I shan't have to pay the piper, so to
speak, yet awhile.  In fact, by the time I come back, good old Rupert
may have forgotten the little practical joke."  Whilst he soliloquized,
he was making his way towards the writing-table, where, having seated
himself, he drew towards him a blank sheet of paper--and began to write
a letter, glancing frequently at the _Sunday Recorder_ beside him.  An
expansive grin lightened his features as he wrote, and at intervals he
chuckled softly to himself, murmuring under his breath:

"Poor old Rupert.  If only I could be there when he gets the answers.
But one can't have everything," he went on philosophically, whilst
addressing an envelope to the Editor of the _Sunday Recorder_; "it will
be pure joy to think of the dear soul's dismay, horror, and disgust.
''Tis a mad world, my masters'--and, oh! to see our Rupert's face when
the letters pour in.  For they _will_ pour in."  During this rapid
soliloquy, he was writing a second letter, which gave him less trouble,
and needed less thought, than the first.  Indeed, it ran very briefly:


"DEAR SIR,--I am desired to ask if you will be good enough to forward
all letters in response to the enclosed advertisement to R.M., c/o your
newspaper, to 200, Termyn Street, S.W.--Yours faithfully,

"J. LAYTON."


With a final chuckle, the young man put both letters into an envelope,
and having stamped it, went whistling from the house, and through the
park to the village, to post the missive himself at the little village
post office.

"Quiet and cultivated gentleman of good family and means, is anxious to
meet a young lady of good birth who needs a home, etc., etc., etc.," he
murmured as he walked slowly back to the Castle through the dripping
November mist.  "Oh! what sport--what utterly ripping sport!"




CHAPTER II.

"MUMMY'S BABA--DAT'S ALL."

In the great Free Library of a crowded London district, the gas burnt
dimly; the yellow fog of a November morning crept even into the big
room, and the few readers shivered a little in its cold clamminess.  At
this early hour, for the building had only just opened its doors on a
Monday morning, merely a scattered number of men and women were to be
seen in the place, and those who were there clustered round the
advertisement columns of the newspapers.  Both men and women alike were
a sorry-looking crew, and the sad words "out of work," were stamped
upon them all.  Their clothing bore the marks of much wear and tear;
their faces were worn, and in the eyes of each of them was that
strained expression, that rises from much looking for that which never
comes.  Old and young men were there, searching the long columns of the
papers for work that might suit their pressing needs; old and young
women were there, too--women whose faces gave eloquent testimony to
their hard fight with fortune--whose eyes glanced hungrily along the
printed lines, whose hands tremblingly wrote down this or that address,
which might by some merciful chance give them, if not exactly what they
wanted, at any rate that which would ensure their earning a pittance,
however scanty.  Almost every member of the forlorn group eyed every
other member suspiciously, with furtive glances, that seemed to say:
"If you are lucky enough to get a job out of those columns, then I
shall fail to get one.  We are cutting each other's throats here.  Your
success is my failure."  And as each one finished jotting down the
addresses that were likely to be of use, he or she moved silently away
from the library, speaking no word to the rest--like cowering animals
who, having received a bone, or the promise of a bone, slink away from
their fellows, fearful lest even the small thing they have gained,
should be snatched from them.

The greater number amongst the searchers for work, consisted of those
who, for want of a better title, may be described as belonging to the
middle classes.  They were neither the very poor--in the recognised
acceptation of the words, though heaven knows they were poor
enough--neither could they be classed amongst artisans, or mechanics.
Their appearance would lead an onlooker to suppose that the men were
accustomed to office work of some description, and that the women were
governesses, companions, or perhaps lady housekeepers--all respectable,
all possessing certain ideals of life and propriety, all struggling to
maintain the degree of gentility, which would keep them above the
high-water mark of degradation.  A girl who stood a little apart from
the rest, looked round the dimly-lit room with pitiful eyes, and a
shudder ran through her slight frame, as she watched the faces and
forms of these women who were no longer young, but who were yet still
engaged in this hand-to-hand fight with destitution.  The girl was
young; it was impossible to suppose that more than twenty years had
gone over her head, though the deep shadows under her eyes, and the
lines of anxiety, about her mouth, might have made a casual observer
regard her as an older woman.  Like the rest of her sex who scanned the
advertisement columns, she was dressed in clothes which had plainly
seen better days--much better days.  But, whereas some of the other
women had already begun to drift into untidiness, and into the slovenly
ways which mark the first step along a downward road, this girl was
exquisitely neat from head to foot.  Her hat, in spite of its age, was
well brushed; her threadbare coat and skirt were tidy, and showed no
traces of dirt or grease; her gloves, though they were white at the
tips, had no holes; and there was no sign of neglect or disorder in the
arrangement of the dark hair, that showed in soft, dusky curls below
her hat.

"Poor things!  Oh! poor things!" was her thought, as she looked at the
sad string of humanity filing its slow way to the door.  "Some of them
have been every day for weeks, and they are getting older every day.
And the older one gets, the harder it is to find work.  Some day I
shall be like that, old, and tired, and worn out; and then--work will
be more difficult to get than it is now--and I can't get it--even
now--when I am young."

The thoughts that had begun in sheer pity for those other battlers with
the waves of this troublesome world, ended in a shuddering realisation
of her own position; and not only of her position for the moment, but
of the future that stretched inimitably before her across the years.
She, Christina Moore, was only twenty, and in all human probability
another sixty years of life might be hers, for she dimly remembered
hearing her mother say that both she and her husband belonged to
long-lived families.  That they two had been cut off in the prime of
life by a virulent epidemic of typhoid fever that swept the village
like a plague, did not alter the fact that they came of races famous
for octogenarians; and Christina, the last of two long lines of
ancestors, shivered anew at the thought of the weary, weary years of
struggle that might still lie before her.  It was seldom that she was
assailed by such depressing reflections; her youth had a way, as youth
has, of asserting itself, and rebounding from its own despair; and
there was an abundance of pluck behind those queer, green eyes of hers,
and no lack of resolution in her small square chin.  But the fog
outside, the chilly atmosphere of the big library, whose fires were
barely alight, and the sight of the same unemployed men and women who
for weeks past had, as it were, dogged her footsteps, all combined this
morning, to send Christina's spirits down to zero.  Matters had not
been improved by the calculations over which she had busied herself
before leaving her lodgings an hour earlier.  Whilst eating her dry
bread, and drinking tea without milk, because both milk and butter were
luxuries she no longer dared to give herself, she had written out her
pitiful accounts upon a half-sheet of paper; and the result of the
reckoning had given her a terrible feeling of desperation.  For two
years since her parents' death, she had occupied the post of nursery
governess in the family of a Mrs. Donaldson, to whom her mother had
once shown some trifling kindness.  But three months earlier these
people had left England for Canada, and no longer required her
services--and Christina, untrained to any profession, with a few pounds
in hand, and with nothing but a strong personality, and an innate love
for little children, to offer as her stock in trade, found herself
amongst the hundreds of other unemployed--just a waif in a great city!

Relations, as far as she knew, she had none.  Her father had been an
only child.  Her mother had cut herself off from her own people by
marrying against their consent, and Christina was even unaware of who
they were, or to what part of the country they belonged.  Long ago, she
had grasped the fact that she was alone in the world, and when the
Donaldsons went away, she had no intimate friends in the old
country--two years of life with them in a London suburb having
effectually cut her off from the very few acquaintances she had left
behind, in the Devonshire village, where her parents died.

Alone in the world, with no work, after nearly three months of
fruitless search for it, and with her small stock of money growing
beautifully less each day, it was no wonder that on this morning in
November, Christina Moore's heart sank in despair.

Save for one or two men still busily engaged in extracting addresses
from the papers, she was alone in the library, before she herself began
her daily search along those monotonous columns, whose lines seemed to
her tired eyes to run into one another, and become lost in an infinite
haze.  So many people appeared to require nursery governesses,
companions, and mothers' helps; and yet, as bitter experience taught
her, there were many more applicants for the posts than there were
posts to fill; and it was with a half-hearted sense of intense
discouragement that she noted down some of the addresses.  She even
wrote down some that she had hitherto despised--those who offered only
a home and no salary in return for services; for, as she reflected
despondently, "even to have a roof over one's head, and meals to eat,
is better than to have no lodging, or food--and no money to pay for
either."

Having glanced down the advertisements in the chief dailies, her hand
idly turned the pages of one of the Sunday papers close by, and her
eyes glanced down them, more with the idea of distracting her thoughts,
than with any conception that she might find anything there, that would
be of use to her.  And her lips parted in a smile, as she read, in
large print:

"MATRIMONIAL NEWS."

"How funny," she mused, whilst she read that a gentleman of means
wished to find a lady of fortune who would take pity on his loneliness;
or that a lady no longer young, but still handsome, wished to meet a
gentleman with a moderate income, with a view to marriage.

"How funny--how very funny!" she mused again; then paused suddenly, her
glance riveted to a sentence that caught and held her attention, almost
against her will.

"Quiet and cultivated gentleman of means," so the paragraph ran, "is
anxious to meet a young lady of good birth, who needs a home.  No
fortune is necessary, but marriage may be agreed upon if both parties
are mutually satisfied.  Reply by letter to R.M., Box 40,004, _Sunday
Recorder_ Office, Fleet Street, E.C."

Over the girl's white face there slowly spread a stain of vivid colour;
into her eyes crept an odd light.  She drew the paper more closely into
her hands, reading and re-reading the paragraph, until every word of it
was imprinted upon her mind.

"Young lady--who needs a home--no fortune necessary," she murmured.
"Oh! if only it didn't seem so cold-blooded and horrid, what a way out
it might be!  Only--it seems--so--so mercenary--and not what I always
thought of when I was silly--and dreamt--things," her musings ran on.
"Once--I dreamt about a fairy prince--who would--just come--and--make
me love him--and he and I would--be--all the world--to each other.
But--of course--one couldn't be all the world to a person one had
arranged to meet through a newspaper."

Another smile broke over her face, and when she smiled, Christina's
face was very sweet.

"It may be just some dreadful trap to catch a silly girl," she
reflected sagely, "and if--if I did really think of answering it, I
should have to be very careful what I said--and where I arranged to
meet R.M.  Of course I--shan't really answer it at all--only--if I
did--and if he were nice--and if--it all came right--there wouldn't be
any more of this dreadful struggle!"

She noted the address of this advertisement amongst the others in her
little pocket-book, and then made her way out of the library and
trudged homewards through the yellow murk, buttoning her very
inadequate coat tightly about her and shiveringly speculating whether,
if she really answered R.M.'s advertisement, there might be a chance of
obtaining clothing more fitted to resist the penetrating chill of a
November fog.  Her own small room looked dingier than usual when she
entered it, and it was so full of fog and damp, that she rolled a
blanket round her before lighting a candle and seating herself at the
tiny table, to answer some of the advertisements she had copied.  The
room was bare of all but the most necessary furniture.  A camp bedstead
stood against the wall, whose paper was of that indeterminate drabness
affected by lodging-house keepers; a deal table occupied the centre of
the room, with the common cane-chair on which Christina sat; and a
painted chest of drawers nearly blocked up the one tiny window.  There
was no wash-hand stand; a cracked white basin and a still more cracked
jug stood upon the top of the drawers, a looking-glass of ancient and
battered appearance hung over the mantelpiece, and an open cupboard in
the wall served Christina as sideboard and larder combined.  Beside the
bed was a narrow strip of much-faded carpet, but of comfort and
homeliness the room showed no trace whatever, save in the tiny touches
of home the girl had herself striven to impart to it, by hanging on the
walls one or two sketches of the Devonshire village she loved, and by
putting on the mantelpiece a few treasured photographs.  But her best
endeavours had failed to make the room other than a most dreary and
dispiriting abode, and the view from the window, of the backs of other
houses looming darkly through the fog, was not calculated to lift the
cloud of despair that for the moment had settled heavily upon her.  She
felt listlessly disinclined to state her qualifications as nursery
governess, or mother's help, to the various ladies who hankered after
such commodities.  Involuntarily, but continually, her thoughts
returned to that paragraph from the _Sunday Recorder_, which was not
only engraved upon her mind, but which she had actually copied also
into her book.

"Quiet and cultivated gentleman of means is anxious to meet a young
lady of good birth, who needs a home.  No fortune is necessary."  At
that point in her reading, Christina paused.

"No fortune is necessary," she said aloud, in an oddly deprecating
voice.  "R.M., whoever he may be, only asks for a young lady of good
birth, who needs a home.  Well," she turned her eyes towards the foggy
roofs just visible outside her dirty window-panes, "well, as far as I
know I am of good birth, even though father only taught music; and some
people seem to look down on musicians.  And--I certainly need a home."

Her glance left the gloomy world without, and went ruefully round the
scarcely less gloomy prospect within.  "And if I suited
R.M.--perhaps--perhaps, he would be good to me.  Should I suit him, I
wonder?  I'm not pretty, and certainly not amusing, and I'm dreadfully
shabby, and nearly as poor as it is possible to be.  There is not one
single thing to recommend me."  She pushed back her chair; and, rising
from the table, moved slowly to the mantel-piece, over which hung the
tarnished glass whose powers of reflecting objects satisfactorily had
long since departed.  Into this unpromising mirror, poor little
Christina, holding the candle far above her head, peered long and
earnestly, her small white face looking all the whiter, because of the
background of yellow fog; her eyes seeming more green than was their
wont, because of the dark shadows that underlay them.

She had thrown off her hat, and the soft masses of her hair lay in
curly confusion about her head.  It was a shapely little head, and
particularly well put on, but these were points of which Christina took
no special account, being intent on finding beauties in her face, and
failing to notice that there was anything admirable in the turn of her
neck, in the poise of her firm chin, and in the straightforward glance
of her eyes.

"If R.M. met me casually in the street, he wouldn't look at me
twice--no man would," she exclaimed with a sigh, as she turned away
from the glass, "I am horribly ordinary.  The only thing is--if I could
screw up my courage to answer him--and then to meet him--he might like
to find a girl who didn't want anything but a quiet home; who would be
satisfied to go without gaiety or amusement."  She sighed again, and a
wistful look crept into her eyes.  "I haven't really ever had any fun,
so I shouldn't miss it, and I could just try to make a happy home for
R.M., if that is all he wants.  And--after all," she went on, still
speaking aloud, "there isn't any harm in answering his letter.  It may
all come to nothing; and yet--it might be worth while--and--it almost
seems presidential that I just happened to see that paragraph in the
_Sunday Recorder_."

The letter she sat down to write as the outcome of all these
conflicting meditations, was the most difficult she had ever written in
her young life; and before it was finished, and finally consigned to
its envelope, she had torn up many sheets of paper, and allowed fully
two hours of the morning to pass by.  Twelve o'clock was chiming from
all the clocks in the neighbourhood, when, with her answers to some of
the other advertisements in her hand, she once more pinned on her hat,
and ran downstairs to the post.  The fog had thickened considerably
during the morning, and Christina found the street lamps alight--tiny
points of brightness set high above the prevailing gloom, and producing
very little effect upon the darkness.  Indeed, there was something
almost bewildering about those far-off lights; they seemed to heighten,
rather than diminish, the all-pervading blackness, which deepened every
moment.

The girl walked slowly, feeling her way along the area railings, and
guiding herself as far as possible by the rumble of traffic along the
roadway, though the confusion of sounds made even this guidance a very
uncertain one.  Drivers shouted, horses slipped and stumbled; and the
shrill voices of boys carrying flaring torches, added to the
pandemonium.  Earlier in the morning the fog had merely been of the
familiar yellow variety known to every Londoner.  It was now a black
and total darkness that seemed to engulf the world.  To cross the road
to the pillar-box was a matter of no small difficulty, but Christina,
with a dogged determination not to be outwitted by the elements,
stepped off the kerb and into the seething mass of carts, cabs, and
other vehicles, that jostled and struggled with one another in
apparently inextricable confusion.

On the far side of the street she plunged into a comparatively quiet
square, where the fog had lifted somewhat, and was no longer of such
Cimmerian blackness, but merely a drifting and bewildering white mist.

The pillar-box at the corner loomed faintly through it, and Christina
had just dropped her packet of letters into it, when there struck upon
her ears the soft cry of a little child.  There was such a note of
fear, of lonely misery, in that soft cry, that Christina, a child-lover
to the core of her being, paused, and listened intently.  Everything
about her was very still; the square was a quiet one, though separated
only by a short street from a main thoroughfare; and, excepting for the
distant noise of traffic and shouting, nothing was to be heard, until
again the little whimpering cry became audible on Christina's right.

"What is it?" the girl said gently.  "Don't be frightened, dear.  I'll
take care of you," and as she spoke, she heard a gasp of relief, and a
shaking, childish voice exclaimed:

"Baba's most drefful fightened; please take Baba home."

"But where is Baba?"  Christina was beginning cheerily, when, through
the fog, she caught sight of a tiny figure coming quickly towards her,
and, stooping down, she gathered close into her arms a little child, of
perhaps three years old, a little child who clung to her with a
desperate, terrified clutch, lifting a tear-stained face to hers.

"Take Baba home," the baby voice wailed again, and as the fog rolled
back a little more, Christina saw that the child was no street waif,
but obviously the daintily-clad darling of some great house.  Her
golden head was bare, and the tangle of curls was like a frame about
the lovely little face, whose great blue eyes looked appealingly into
Christina's own.  A red woollen cloak hung over the child's shoulders,
but as the cloak fell back, Christina saw that her frock was chiefly
fashioned of exquisite filmy lace, and that a string of pearls was
fastened round the little white throat.

"Where is Baba's home?" she questioned softly, lifting the child right
into her arms, and kissing the flower-like face, on which the tears
still lay like dewdrops in the heart of a rose.  "Tell me where you
live, sweetheart, and I will take you home."

"Baba doesn't know where she lives," the child shook her yellow curls,
and her big eyes filled again with tears.  "Baba's awful, drefful
fightened.  The door was open--and Baba did just run out to see the
pretty horses--and then--it was all black--and Baba was lost."

"I don't think Baba ought to have come out by herself in a fog,"
Christina said, a gentle reproof in her tones; "and now we must try to
find out where your home is, little girl.  Tell me what your name
is--besides Baba."

"Baba--Mummy's Baba--dat's all," the baby answered, with a conclusive
shutting of her pretty mouth.  "Baba's forgot her other name--she's
only just Mummy's Baba."

"But Baba--what?" Christina said patiently, walking slowly along the
square, the child in her arms.  "Try to remember your other name, my
sweet; then I can take you safe home to mummy and nurse."

"Baba hasn't got no nurse, nurse's gone away.  Mummy minds Baba now,
and Baba can't remember her other name.  She's got a bone in her head,"
quoth the baby, smiling deliciously into Christina's troubled face, and
evidently paraphrasing some former servant's excuses.  "Baba likes
you--pretty lady--come home with Baba!"

"I wish I could," Christina said gravely, feeling rather helpless, as
she looked from the child in her arms to the stately houses in the
square, and back again.  "I wonder where you live, you queer mite; and
how I am going to find out who are your belongings.  They are probably
moving heaven and earth at this moment to find you."

The baby laughed.  She did not follow more than half Christina's words,
but her infantile fancy had been caught by the girl's gentle manner and
motherly ways, and she put two dimpled arms round her rescuer's neck,
and rubbed her face confidently against Christina's white cheeks.

"Baba's not fightened any more," she murmured contentedly; "you just
take Baba home--and we'll find mummy--and then Baba will be all right."

"Yes; it will be all right when we find home and mummy," Christina
answered with a short laugh but her arm tightened round the soft little
body, her lips pressed themselves against the tangled curls, and all
the time she pursued her slow way along the square, hoping that so
small a person could not have travelled very far, and that presently
someone in pursuit of her would put in an appearance.  They had gone
the length of the square, and down the line of houses along one of its
sides, when all at once the baby uttered a shout of triumph.

"There's James--over there," she exclaimed; "now Baba can see her own
house.  James--James!" she cried excitedly, and Christina saw that on
the side of the square at right angles to them, a footman stood on the
doorstep, looking distractedly to right and left of him.  At the sound
of the uplifted baby voice, he left his post at the door, and ran
quickly up to Christina, who had paused to await his arrival.

"That's my dear James," the child cried; and, with the easy fickleness
of her years, she unclasped her arms from Christina's neck, and held
them out to the footman.  "Baba was lost," she said to him confidingly.
"This lady finded Baba, and brought her home."

The footman took the baby into his arms, and turned a scared face to
Christina.

"She've just been missed," he said breathlessly; "must have run out
when the door was open; and we was all in a taking.  Where did you find
her, miss?  I'm sure it's very kind of you to have brought her home."

"She was on the far side of the square, and very frightened in the fog.
I am so glad she is safe."

"Baba quite safe now; Baba going home with James; good-bye, pretty
lady," and waving her hand to Christina, the small girl was carried
away in the arms of the breathless James, who was still too distracted
to reflect that his mistress might wish to thank the young lady who had
brought back the child.

"What a dear wee thing!" Christina reflected, as she wended her way
back to her lodgings.  "I wonder who she is.  Somebody important, if
she lives here.  I wish----" then she sighed and fell to wondering
whether anything would result from all the answers to the
advertisements she had just posted.  "I'm glad I didn't post the one I
wrote to R.M.," she said to herself; "now I can think over it all day
long, and if I haven't changed my mind by then, perhaps I will re-write
it and post it by the last post.  But--I am not sure whether I shall be
brave enough to do it."




CHAPTER III.

"ONE OF THE BEST THINGS LEFT."

The chambers in Jermyn Street occupied by Rupert Mernside, had a
character which seemed to reflect their owner.  Perhaps all rooms in a
more or less degree are reflections of those who live in them: human
beings, whether consciously or unconsciously, stamp their personalities
upon their surroundings, and create their distinctive atmospheres, even
in hired lodgings.  Rupert's rooms, filled as they were with the
furniture he had from time to time picked up, the walls hung with
pictures his fastidious taste had chosen, the bookcases filled with his
own special collection of books, were, to those with eyes to see, a
mirror of their master's nature.  Simplicity was the keynote of the
whole.  There were no expensive hangings, no luxurious rugs or heavily
upholstered chairs and couches; there was nothing of what Mernside
himself would have described as "frippery," nothing effeminate or
over-dainty.  Matting, with here and there a soft-coloured rug, covered
the floor of the sitting-room; the walls, tinted a pale apricot yellow,
were hung with water-colour sketches, each one of which bore the mark
of a master hand; the bookcases were of carved oak, as were the one or
two tables, whilst the chairs, of a severely simple pattern, and even
the few armchairs, spoke rather of solid comfort, than of any undue
luxury.  Upon the breakfast table, pushed near the window, stood a bowl
of chrysanthemums, touched into jewelled beauty by a faint ray of
November sunlight.  Seeing the sunlight on the rich coloured blossoms,
Rupert smiled, as he entered the sitting-room a week after his return
from Bramwell Castle.  It was not his habit to fill his rooms with
flowers: he had a fancy that such a custom savoured of womanishness;
but Cicely, his pretty little cousin, had rifled the greenhouse for him
with her own hands, and Cicely's fashion of giving would have made even
a dandelion a charming and acceptable gift.

Mernside was early that morning, and he had seated himself in front of
the silver coffee-pot and covered dishes, before Courtfield, his
irreproachable servant, brought in the letters.

"Good Lord, man!" his master exclaimed, as the salver was handed to
him, "those letters can't possibly all be for me," and he eyed the huge
pile with the disfavour of one who regards a letter merely as a rather
tiresome piece of business, which must perforce be answered.

"Well, sir, I should gather they were all for you," Courtfield answered
respectfully, whilst his master gathered the packet of envelopes into
his two hands.  "I thought myself at first that there must be some
mistake, seeing that they are only addressed in initials.  But the
number is correct, sir."

"By Jove!" Mernside exclaimed, gazing with stupefied eyes at the
unprecedented batch of correspondence, and observing that every letter
bore the initials only, "R.M.," and had been forwarded to him from a
newspaper office.

Courtfield noiselessly left the room, but his master's coffee remained
in the pot, and his breakfast untasted, whilst he sat and stared with a
petrified stare at the pile of unopened letters, with their
extraordinarily unfamiliar address.  A dusky flush mounted to his
forehead, and he turned over one of the letters distastefully, as
though its very touch were odious to him.

"I am not in the habit of being addressed by initials only," he
muttered, "nor of corresponding through newspapers; the wretched things
are probably not meant for me at all--unless it's some confounded
hoax," he added, after a pause, at the same moment tearing open the top
letter of the pile, one addressed in an untidy, uneducated handwriting.

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed, pushing back his chair, and staring down
at the letter he unfolded, with the disgusted stare of one who sees
something unexpectedly horrible, "is the woman mad? or am I
mad?--or--what does it mean?"

His eyes travelled quickly down the written page, the large, sprawling
writing imprinting itself upon his brain.


"DEAR SIR" (so the epistle ran),--

"Having seen your advertisement in yesterday's _Sunday Recorder_, I beg
to say that I should be pleased to enter into correspondence with
you--with a view to meeting, etc.  Am twenty-one, tall, and said to be
elegant.  Some call me pretty.  Have large blue eyes, fair hair, and a
good complexion.  Am domesticated and sweet-tempered.  Would send
photograph if desired.

"Yours truly, ROSALIE."

"PS.--Should be pleased to cheer your loneliness."


Mernside read this effusion to the end; then one word only, and that a
forcible one, broke from his lips, and with grimly-set mouth, and eyes
grown suddenly steely, he began to open and read one after another of
the other letters, his expression becoming sterner and more grim as he
laid each one down in turn.

"My opinion of women is not enhanced by my morning's correspondence,"
he reflected cynically, during the course of his reading; "could one
have believed there were so many silly women in the world--or so many
plain ones?" and with a short laugh he picked up two photographs, and
looked with scornful scrutiny at the wholly unattractive features of
the ladies of uncertain age, and quite certain lack of beauty.  Before
he had waded half through the packet of letters, his table was strewn
with his correspondence, and the look on his face was one, which, as
his best friends would have known, indicated no amiable frame of mind.

"Domesticated."  "Would make a lonely man intensely happy."  "Only long
for a quiet home such as you suggest."

"Such as I suggest--_I_!"  Mernside looked wildly round him.  "Do I
appear to be in search of a quiet home?" he exclaimed, apostrophising
the pictures on the walls; "do I want a domesticated female?  'Am
considered pretty'--oh, are you, my good young woman?  You can't write
a civilised letter, that's certain.  'I have a slender income of my
own--amply sufficient for my modest wants--but I gather you do not
require a fortune with the lady--only a companion for your loneliness.'

"A fortune with the lady?  I don't require the lady, thank you," Rupert
soliloquised, picking, out sentences from the letters as he read them,
and flung them one by one upon the pile.  "'I have been lonely for so
_long_ myself, that I can _fully_ understand what a lonely man feels.
I am no longer in my first youth, but I have a heart _overflowing_ with
tenderness.  Your happiness would be my first, my only care, etc., etc.'

"Pshaw--what tommy rot!

"'All my friends say I am cheerful.  I have often been called a little
ray of sunshine'"--Rupert lay back in his chair, and shouted with
sudden laughter.  "'I would make your home a heaven of bliss.'"

"Oh!  Good lord!  Good lord!" quoth the unhappy reader, "who in
heaven's name has played this confounded practical joke upon me?  And
what am I to do with these abominable letters and photographs?  I
should like to burn the lot!--but oh! hang it all, the silly women have
taken some rotten hoax for earnest, and"--he paused, as though struck
by a sudden recollection, then bounced out of his chair with a good
round expletive.

"That young ass, Jack Layton!  I'll take my oath he was at the bottom
of this tomfoolery.  Wasn't he reading some matrimonial humbug out
of--wait!--by Jove! it was the _Sunday Recorder_," and without more
ado, Mernside strode across the room and rang the bell.

"Get me a copy of the _Sunday Recorder_ of the day before yesterday, at
once," he said curtly, when Courtfield appeared.  As soon as the man
had vanished, he returned to the table, gathered up the letters he had
read, and thrust them into the bureau near the fireplace; and by the
time Courtfield came back with the paper in his hand, his master was
decorously eating a poached egg, and deliberately opening the
nineteenth or twentieth letter of his morning mail.

There was little deliberation in his movements when, alone once more,
he feverishly turned the pages of the _Sunday Recorder_, until his eyes
fell on the words, "Matrimonial Bureau."  Yes--there it was.  The
wretched thing seemed to leap into sight as though it were alive, and
to his disordered vision the lines appeared to be twice the size of the
ordinary print.


"Quiet and cultivated gentleman of means, who is very lonely, is
anxious to meet a young lady of good birth who needs a home.  No
fortune is necessary, but marriage may be agreed upon, if both parties
are mutually satisfied."


"Oh! may it indeed?" Mernside said scathingly, flinging the paper upon
the floor.  "A young lady of good birth!"  His thoughts went back to
the letters he had just been perusing, most of them ill-written, many
mis-spelt, some genteel, some sentimental--but all bearing the
unmistakable stamp of having been penned by the underbred and the
vulgar.

"A young lady of good birth."  Again he reflected grimly, continuing to
eat his breakfast, and to open letter after letter mechanically,
expending over their contents a force of language which would greatly
have surprised the writers, could they have heard it.  "Not one of
these good women has the most elementary conception what the word
'lady' means.  No lady would be likely to answer such an
advertisement," his thoughts continued contemptuously, as he picked up
the last letter of the pile, and glanced idly at the writing of the
address.  That writing held his attention; it was different from the
others; yes, it was certainly different.  It did not sprawl; it was not
exaggerated or affected; it was merely a round, simple, girlish hand,
with unmistakable character in the well-formed letters and clean
strokes.  And when he had drawn out the contents of the envelope, and
read them slowly, some of the grim lines about his mouth faded away, a
softer look came into his eyes.

"This is different," he said, "very different," and for the second time
he read the terse phrases.


"c/o Mrs. Cole, Newsagent,
  "100, Cartney Street, S.W.

"DEAR SIR,--

"I should not have answered your advertisement, but that I cannot find
work.  I need a home very much.  If I could make things better for
somebody else who is lonely, I should be very pleased.  I am not at all
pretty or clever, but I can cook a little, and I can sew.

"Yours truly, C.M.

"I am twenty."


"Poor little girl," Rupert murmured, "if this is genuine, I am sorry
for C.M.  She is the only one of the lot who writes like a lady, and
the only one who does not suggest a meeting, or actually appoint a
meeting place.  Those are points in her favour.  But, had I ever any
intention of marrying, I should not make my matrimonial arrangements
through the medium of a newspaper!"

Each writer of the letters which had so disturbed Mernside at breakfast
time, received a few hours later a short note, and the wording of all
the notes was identical.


"DEAR MADAM,--

"I regret that both you and I should have been the victims of a hoax.
The advertisement in the _Sunday Recorder_ was inserted without my
knowledge or consent.  Regretting any annoyance this may cause you.

"Yours faithfully, R.M."


But when, having laboured through the mass of "Rosalies," "Violets,"
"Lilians," and "Hildas," he finally reached the little note signed
"C.M.," Mernside paused.

"I--don't think I can let this little girl know she has been the victim
of a hoax," he mused, a pitiful tenderness creeping about his heart as
he thought of the girl who was without work or home; "the others are
fairly tough-skinned, I am ready to swear.  This one"--he looked again
at the round, characteristic handwriting, the simple phrases--"this
one--did not make up her mind to write such a letter, excepting under
stress of circumstances, I am sure of that.  This one--is different.
And if that incorrigible young ass, Jack Layton, hadn't started on a
yachting cruise last week, I--should jolly well like to give him a
thrashing."

Feeling the need, as he himself expressed it, of a balloon full of
fresh air after his distasteful occupation of the morning, Rupert went
out at about eleven o'clock, taking with him the pile of letters he had
to post.

"Can't leave them for Courtfield's inquisitive eyes," he muttered.
"Good chap as he is, Courtfield would think I had gone raving mad, if
he saw all these things addressed to Christian names and initials.
I'll get rid of the horrors, and then see if Margaret can take the
taste of them away from me."

The letters posted, he made his way briskly along Piccadilly, and
across the Park, to a quiet road in Bayswater, where he stopped before
a small detached house, standing a little back from the pavement, in
its own garden.  His ring at the bell brought to the door a middle-aged
servant, whose plain but kindly face expanded into a smile when she saw
him.  He was evidently a frequent and welcome visitor, for to his
cheery "Well, Elizabeth, how are things this morning?" she answered
with another smile--

"We've had a bad two days, sir, but Mrs. Stanforth is better now.  She
is downstairs, sir," and, opening a door on the right of the tiny hall,
she ushered Rupert into a long narrow room, whose windows at either end
gave it an unusual look of brightness and sunshine.  A piano took up a
large share of one wall, and over the piano hung some fine photographs
of Old Masters, chiefly of the Italian school.  The fireplace was
flanked by bookshelves, and drawn close to one of these was a couch, on
which lay a woman of such rare and startling beauty, that Mernside,
familiar as her face was to him, caught his breath as he entered, and
for a moment stood still, looking silently down at her.

Her cheeks were very white, but it was the whiteness of a pure white
rose, and gave one no sense of ill-health, although there was about her
a certain air of fragility.  Her hair, soft and dark, waved back from
her forehead in dusky masses, that made just the right background for
her exquisitely chiselled features, and for the eyes, that seemed to
concentrate in themselves all the loveliness of her face.  They were
wonderful eyes--dark, deep, unfathomable--with a mystery in their
depths that enhanced their strange fascination.  Those dark eyes with
their sweeping lashes, and the crimson line of her beautiful mouth,
were the only points of colour in her face, and as she turned her head
to greet the visitor, the gleam of light that shot into those eyes,
might well have turned a stronger head than Rupert's.  Meeting her
glance, his pulses quickened, and his own eyes grew bright; but his
voice was very quiet, very self-contained, as he said--

"I am three days too soon--I know it, you need not tell me.  But--I had
to come to-day."

She put one of her hands into his, but she did not move from her
prostrate position on the couch, and her visitor seated himself on a
low chair by her side, whilst she gently withdrew the hand he still
held, and said softly--

"Why especially to-day?  You must not break through the stipulation,
Rupert.  If there is a particular reason now--I--will forgive
you--but--we must keep to our bargain."

Gentle as was the voice, gentle as was the look in her eyes, a look of
almost maternal tenderness, there was evidence that behind the
tenderness, lay a most unusual strength of character.  The woman with
the beautiful face, although she lay prone upon a sofa, and was
obviously an invalid, showed in her personality no trace of weakness.
Her eyes met the eyes of her visitor squarely and straightly, there was
almost a hint of severity in the set of her lips.

"Why did you come to-day?" she repeated, when he stirred uneasily in
his chair, and kicked away a footstool in front of him, with a touch of
irritability.

"When I begin to put it into words, it sounds a babyish reason; but
that jackanapes, Layton, has been playing an idiotic practical joke
upon me, and I--was fool enough to mind it.  I wanted soothing down;
and--I wanted your advice about a girl."

"About--a girl--you!"  A note of excitement was apparent in her
accents; she looked at him narrowly.  "Has it--come--at last, Rupert?"
she questioned, and her quiet voice shook just a little.

"No--no--my God--_no_!" he exclaimed, "nothing of that sort is ever
likely to come into my life--again"--he uttered the last words under
his breath, and his eyes rested hungrily on her beautiful face--"there
is no question of--my caring for any girl--only--young Jack Layton has
made me responsible for what may make a perfectly innocent girl
unhappy."  And forthwith he plunged into a full description of the
sheaf of letters received that morning, winding up with a mention of
the terse little letter signed "C.M."  His listener's eyes twinkled
mischievously as he told the first part of his story in wrathful
accents, and over some of his quotations from the letters that had
reached him she laughed--a frank, delicious laugh that seemed oddly out
of keeping with the tragic mystery of her eyes.  But as he described
that last letter, with its simple wording, her face grew grave again,
and when his voice ceased, she uttered the precise words that had
fallen from his own lips three hours earlier.

"Poor little girl--oh! poor little girl!"

"I am sorry for her," Mernside said impetuously, "and it doesn't seem
fair that she should perhaps suffer for that idiotic young fool's love
of practical jokes.  Goodness knows what hopes she may have built upon
this letter, and upon me.  Of course, I can't give her a home, and I
don't want to meet her--with a view to--anything.  There is no place in
my life for women, even as friends.  There is no place in my life for
more than--one woman," he ended vehemently.

"Hush!" she said softly.  "Remember--you promised; and--if you break
your promise, I can't ever let you come here again."

"I know--I know!" he cried, with an impetuosity very foreign to his
usual self-control; "but, Margaret, is it to be like this always?  Will
a time never come when you--when I----"

She put out her hand and laid it over one of his, with a firm touch
that had a curiously quieting effect upon him.

"You and I are great friends, as we have been for--longer than we care
to think.  But--there could not ever be an idea between us of anything
else, not even the thought of such a thing.  It is out of the question.
It always has been out of the question.  You know that as well as I do,
and you must not come here at all, unless you can keep to our agreement
in spirit as well as in letter."

"Is our friendship nothing to you?" he asked sullenly.

"It is--so much to me--that I will not risk spoiling it for ever," she
said firmly; "but if you talk as you are talking now, I shall tell
Elizabeth I cannot see you."

"And you are putting up this fence between us, when--I might be some
comfort to you," he exclaimed, almost roughly, getting up as he spoke
to lean against the mantelpiece, and glower threateningly down at her,
"when every reasonable being would tell you that he----"

"Ah! hush!" she cried, and the sudden sharp anguish in her tones gave
him pause; "don't let us go into it all over again.  Whilst I feel--as
I do feel--I must go on in the way I have marked out for myself, one
can only follow the right as one sees it.  Besides which----"

"Besides which--his little finger is more to you than----"

"Ah! don't--_don't_!" she interrupted him again, her eyes darkening and
deepening with agony.  "Rupert, I can't bear it; there are some things
I am not strong enough to bear."

"I was a brute," he said, his rough tone changing all at once into
caressing tenderness; "I let myself go--I was an utter brute.  Forgive
me, dear--and--try to forget."

He sat down beside her again, and his face, which had shown the same
strong emotion that had rang in his words, resumed its quiet look of
strength.  A great relief swept over the woman's beautiful features,
but she was shivering from head to foot, and in her eyes there still
lay a haunting anguish.  With an effort--how great an effort only she
herself knew--she regained her self-control, and her voice, though
still shaken, was very gentle again.

"Tell me now about the poor little girl, and the matrimonial letter.
Can we put our heads together to devise any way of helping her?"

"I might conceivably get her some work," Rupert answered, "but people
are a little chary of engaging employees recommended by bachelors like
myself.  Cicely might help her, but, first of all, I must find out if
she is genuine.  I couldn't impose a stranger, even on Cicely,
good-natured, easy-going little soul that she is.  And to find out
anything about this girl will entail--meeting her!"

Margaret Stanforth smiled.

"Poor Rupert!"

"I am not by way of making rendezvous with young women," he said with
sarcasm; "it is not a pastime in which I have ever indulged.  At the
same time, I don't want to let a fellow creature go empty away, if I
could really help her."

"How would it be if you suggested her coming here?  I could see her
too, and--two heads being better than one--we might be able to do
something really helpful.  If the letter is sincere, it is obvious the
girl is not a mere husband hunter; she is at her wits' end, and--I
can't bear to think of any girl stranded in this great hungry London.
I myself"--she pulled herself up short, leaving her sentence
unfinished, then went on more quietly: "Write to C.M. and appoint a
meeting here.  Say this is the house of a lady of your acquaintance,
ask her to come and see me--and incidentally to see you."

"It is like you to make such a suggestion about a total stranger,"
Rupert exclaimed, "but--she may turn out an entire fraud--an arrant
adventuress--and I could not be responsible for bringing such a person
here."

"Such a person!  My dear Rupert, even if she were all the terrible
things you describe, I don't think she could hurt me.  I have seen--so
much of the seamy side of life."  For a moment Rupert looked at her
silently.  Long as he had known her, Margaret Stanforth was still
largely an enigma to him, and it often seemed to him that the
mysterious depths of her eyes veiled mysteries of her life which he had
never fathomed.

"For my own sake, for this girl's sake, I should like to jump at your
offer," he said, after that long, searching look into her face,
"but----"

"There is no 'but,'" she put in gaily, a sudden smile momentarily
chasing away the sadness of her face.  "Write a civil, non-committal
letter to C.M., and ask her, as I say, to come here.  Surely, between
us, we can do something for this poor little waif and stray.  Why not
fix to-morrow afternoon, at five o'clock?  If the poor girl's need is
urgent, we ought not to delay."

"And--you forgive me for all I ought not to have said this morning,"
Rupert said when, ten minutes later, he rose to depart.  "I--have not
hurt you?"

"No, you have not hurt me; but in future, you will remember--our
bargain?  And there are some things--I can't bear."

Rupert Mernside walked slowly away from the house, his brain and heart
full of the woman he had just left, who, after his departure, lay back
amongst the silken cushions on her sofa, with a look of profound
exhaustion.

"There now, my dearie, you didn't ought to let him come and tire you
this way; you get worn out with him coming worrying."  The faithful
Elizabeth had entered the room with a salver in her hand, and stood
looking into her mistress's white face, with distress written all over
her plain kindly features.  Margaret opened her eyes, and smiled up
into the loving ones fixed upon her.

"No, he doesn't worry me; he is--a comfort, he helps me.  Don't scold,
nursie dear; his friendship is one of the best things I have in
life--one of the best things I have left out of all the wreckage; but
to-day--he brought back some of the old memories, and--I--am so silly
still.  They hurt; sometimes it all feels--unbearable."

The ring of almost uncontrollable pain in her voice, brought a spasm of
answering pain into the other's face, and she laid a work-roughened
hand tenderly upon the dusky head against the cushions.  "There, my
dearie, there--there," she murmured, speaking as if her beautiful,
stately mistress were a little child; "there's nothing so hard in this
world but what it can be borne, if we look at it in the right way.  The
strength comes along with the sorrow, and 'tis all for the best."

"Is it?"  Into the dark eyes there flashed for a second a look of
bitterness, and then Margaret drew the other woman's hand down to her
lips, and kissed it.  "I wish I had your simple straightforward faith,
dear old nurse of mine," she said wearily; "you are so sure things will
come right, and that what hurts us is for our good.  And I--I can't
say, 'Thy will be done'; at least, I can't say it as if I meant it.
But what did you bring in on that salver?" she asked, after a moment of
silence, and with an effort at brightness.

"There, my pretty; I nearly forgot it after all.  It came when I was
speaking to the butcher on the doorstep, and Mr. Mernside was here, so
I waited to bring it in till he was gone."

She had a purpose in lengthening her story, and chatting on garrulously
whilst Margaret opened the orange envelope, for the faithful creature
had seen the sudden dilation of her mistress's dark eyes, the whitening
of her lips; had seen, too, how her hands shook as they unfolded the
telegram.

"I don't understand it," Mrs. Stanforth whispered shakily, when her
eyes had scanned the few words before her.  "I don't know what it
means--Elizabeth--but--I must go--I must go--at once."

The servant drew the flimsy paper from her trembling hands and read the
message, shaking her head in bewilderment, as the sense of it
penetrated to her brain.

"I'm sure I don't know what it means no more than you do, dearie," she
said.


"Graystone.

"Come at once; prepare for surprise.

"MARION."




CHAPTER IV.

"I SUPPOSE IT WAS AN HOUR."

"Poor dear James is the worthiest soul, but he has no more brains than
a pin--the small kind of pin that you get in change for a farthing!"

"James always seemed to me a good footman."

"Rupert!  He is an admirable footman.  I haven't a word to say against
him in that capacity.  He does his duties with the beautiful regularity
of an automatic machine.  But move James from his own dear little
beaten track, and he is lost, hopelessly, irrevocably lost!"

"What beaten track has he left? and why is he rousing your ladyship's
wrath?"

Lady Cicely Redesdale, lying back in the cosiest chair of her cosy
boudoir, swung her pretty foot to and fro, and glanced up at her tall
cousin with one of her gay little laughs.  Rupert Mernside, the son of
her mother's sister, had always been to her more of elder brother than
cousin, and from their earliest youth there had existed between them a
frank _camaraderie_ which had never degenerated into flirtation, or
drifted into any sentimental relationship.  Cicely was in the habit of
saying that Rupert was the person of all others from whom she would not
only ask, but take, advice; because his judgment was so sound and he
possessed a really well-balanced mind.  This opinion of him had been
endorsed by her late husband, who had only qualified it with one
limitation.

"Rupert's got as sound and balanced a mind as any man could wish for,
but once let the right woman get hold of him, and she will twist him
round her little finger."

Those words of her husband recurred to Cicely now, as she lifted her
eyes from their contemplation of her own dainty shoes and looked up
into Rupert's rugged face.

"I should rather like to see a woman twist you round her little
finger," she said irrelevantly.

"A woman--me?  What on earth have a woman and I got to do with James's
delinquencies?"

"There is method in my madness, but the lane that led from James to
your little finger, and the not impossible she, is so long that I can't
take you back along its windings.  It all comes of the power of
association.  I shall have Baba taught everything by association.  I am
planning a scheme of education that----"

"Where does James come in to the plan for Baba's education?" Rupert
contrived to ask, his grey eyes shining, a whimsical smile playing
round his mouth.

"Oh! my dear boy, I had completely forgotten James, though talking of
Baba would soon have reminded me of him--poor silly thing!  Baba ran
away two days ago in that appalling fog--and----"

"_Baba ran away?_"

"Well, the door was open; I suppose the outside world looked rather
fascinating and mysterious, and she has no nurse just now, you know; so
there was no one with her; and, of course, Jane, the nursery maid, was
fetching something from the kitchen--and--well, the long and the short
of it was that Baba ran out into the street, and was promptly swallowed
up by the fog."

"My dear Cicely!"

"Providentially, as I now consider it, I was out.  I had an early
appointment with Mathilde."

"Your dressmaker?"

"My dressmaker.  Wasn't it kind of luck, or whatever it is, to let it
all happen when I wasn't there.  Rupert, if I had been at home, and
they told me Baba was lost, I should have gone straight off my head."

"That would have been an eminently useful and practical thing to do,"
was the dry retort.

"You have never been a mother; you don't know what a mother feels like
about her only child," Cicely said with an attempt at dignity that sat
quaintly upon her small person and drew an amused laugh from her
cousin.  "I believe it would kill me if anything really happened to
Baba," she went on, more gravely; "you think I'm just a silly,
frivolous thing, but--Baba is all the world to me."

"I know, dear; I know quite well," Rupert answered kindly; "and nobody
could think you silly.  But go on and tell me what happened two days
ago.  We haven't got to James's shortcomings _yet_."

"Baba ran out into the square, and nobody missed her at first.  Then,
when that goose of a Jane came back from her wanderings in the kitchen,
she found the nurseries empty, and Baba nowhere to be found.  There was
a tremendous hue and cry; the servants seem to have been on the verge
of distraction, and ran off in all directions like frightened hens,
leaving James on guard at the door.  And, after a few minutes, when the
fog lifted, James caught sight of Baba in a strange girl's arms,
evidently quite at home with her, and very happy.  You know Baba's
ducky way of making friends with everybody.  James flew out, seized
Baba, seems to have thanked her rescuer, and bustled back to the house
with the child, without ever dreaming of asking the stranger her name."

"What sort of a person was she?"

"Oh!  I don't know.  When I asked James he could only say: 'Well, my
lady, she seemed a nice respectable young person'; but heaven knows
what James means by a young person.  He further volunteered that she
was rather shabbily dressed; and I can't bear to think that she went
away with no thanks from me, and with no reward."

Rupert smiled down into his cousin's pretty, eager face.

"Perhaps the thought of reward never entered her head?  There are still
some disinterested people left in the world.  And Baba is a very
fetching little being to rescue from the dangers of a fog."

"She looked so fetching that morning, too.  I came in just after she
was brought back, and there she was, the little monkey, in her red
cloak which she had found in the hall, where, needless to say, it ought
not to have been; with no hat, and all her curls in a delicious tangle,
her face so soft and pink, and her eyes shining.  She looked a
delectable baby, but, Rupert, she had on the most valuable lace frock,
and pearls round her neck.  Only think what might have happened if some
horrible person had found her.  My pretty baby," and Cicely's face grew
suddenly white and grave, whilst she shivered at the picture conjured
up by her own mind.

"I asked James why he hadn't told the 'young person' to give him her
name and address, and he could only say feebly that 'it never crossed
his mind.'  Poor James, I don't believe he's got a mind."

"You could advertise for the young lady.  If you really want to find
her, an advertisement in some leading paper should unearth her for you.
Perhaps, too, if she was shabbily dressed, a reward might be a god-send
to her."

"Oh, Rupert! perhaps she's fearfully poor.  Do, do advertise for me.  I
can't bear to think that a girl may be in difficulties when I have more
money than I know what to do with.  Will you advertise for me?"

"Yes; of course."

"I don't know what I should do without you," she continued, looking at
him gravely, but with no hint of coquettishness in her glance.  "I do
miss John so dreadfully; I do want a man to help me and advise me."

"You can have me whenever you want me," her cousin answered with equal
gravity, knowing that her words, which in another woman's mouth might
have implied a desire to change their friendly relations for something
more lover-like, on Cicely's lips held merely their surface meaning--no
more.

"I always hope that some day you will marry again," Rupert went on with
brotherly frankness; "you have been alone three years now.  Your great
property is a big handful for a woman to manage, and John would wish
for your happiness above everything else in the world."

"John never thought of anything but my happiness," was the gentle
answer.  "I don't think any girl ever had a better, dearer husband.
People thought, perhaps you thought so, too, that I just married him
for his money.  It wasn't true.  At first--quite at first--when father
showed me what a huge difference it would make to them all if I married
a millionaire, I _did_ think more of John's fortune than of himself.
But, it was only quite at first.  After that, I knew I would rather
live in a cottage with him than in a palace with anybody else.
I--don't think--I shall marry again--unless I find I am too weak and
silly to manage Baba's fortune by myself."

Rupert looked silently down at her bent, bright head, a new reverence
stirring within him for the little cousin.  Hitherto, he had regarded
her with the kindly affection of an elder brother for a small sister
whom he considers scarcely more than a child; but this grave Cicely was
showing him depths of whose existence he had never been even dimly
aware.

"But that's enough of being solemn," Cicely exclaimed, shattering his
new conception of her with characteristic suddenness; "talking of
marriage, the thing I hanker for most in the whole world is to see you
married, Rupert.  You don't look a bit like a soured old bachelor, and
yet--here you are, more than thirty-five, and not one single woman's
name has ever been mentioned in connection with yours."

"For which mercy let us be humbly and devoutly thankful," her cousin
answered, laughing, though how sincere was his thankfulness only his
own heart knew, and into that heart there flashed as he spoke the
vision of a white face and dark eyes, deep with unfathomable mystery;
"if I don't want to marry, why hustle me into the holy estate?  I
believe the Prayer Book strongly urges us not to undertake it lightly
or unadvisedly."

"Now, you are flippant.  As if you would be marrying lightly or
unadvisedly, if you wait until you are within five years of forty,
before choosing a wife.  When I think of the hundreds of really
charming girls I've introduced you to, with----"

"With a view to matrimony," Rupert ended the sentence, punctuating his
words with a laugh.  "Let me recommend you to study the matrimonial
columns of some of the papers.  You will possibly find an eligible
husband there for some of your charming girls."

"_Rupert!_ don't be so incorrigibly low and horrid.  As if any girl
with a rag of decency or self-respect would answer one of those
advertisements.  Why, men who advertise for wives can only be seedy
adventurers, the sort of person one reads of in books and never meets
in real life."

"Seedy sort of adventurers," Rupert repeated slowly, turning, as if by
chance, to survey his own reflection in the mirror over the
mantelpiece; "there are adventurers and adventurers.  Perhaps some of
those who advertise do it--for a joke."

"Just like a man if they do," his cousin answered vehemently; "and then
some poor girl takes the wretched creature seriously, and thinks he
means his stupid joke.  I should despise a girl who answered such an
advertisement, but I should much more despise the man who inserted it."

"Don't scorn them too much.  Everybody has different ideals, and it
takes all sorts to make a world.  Your sort don't advertise for
husbands and wives, but our section of society is not so faultless that
we can afford to throw stones even at people who marry through a
matrimonial bureau."

"It's so low.  The sort of thing a shop girl might do."

"Not lower than displaying your daughters in the best market, as the
Society mother does," Rupert answered sternly; "not lower than running
a man to earth, as shoals of women do, and do it without an ounce of
shame."

"But, answering an advertisement like that is almost asking a man to
marry you."

"Perhaps, and when poor old Donkin lost his wife a year ago, a lot of
women wrote and proposed to him.  Yes, _actually wrote and offered to
marry him_!  He told me so himself, and those were women of your class,
well born and well educated.  Well, we have the consolation of knowing
that he refused the lot."

"Horrid beasts! no wonder you men lose your respect for women, if you
think we are all capable of doing that sort of thing."

"We don't think so," Rupert's contemptuous tones grew gentle again; "we
know the difference between the womanly woman and the others.  Thank
God, there are plenty of the right sort left," and Rupert stooped
suddenly and took his cousin's two small hands into his.

"You aren't going?" she exclaimed.  "I wanted you to see Baba, and
there are thousands of things I meant to say to you."

"So sorry, but the thousands of things must be postponed.  I have an
appointment at five, and I must keep it."

"You will advertise for the 'young person'?"

"Yes; I won't forget the 'young person'--and--by the way, Cicely," a
slight trace of embarrassment showed on his face, "didn't you tell me
you wanted to find a sort of nursery governess for Baba?"

"Certainly, I do; but, my dear boy, what do you know about nursery
governesses?"

"I don't know anything about them," was the reply, but Cicely's quick
eyes still noted embarrassment in both voice and manner, "but I heard
the other day of a girl who--who might be wanting a post."

"A girl who might be wanting a post," Cicely exclaimed mockingly; "the
person I engage for Baba, would have to be somebody much less vague
than that, and she must have unimpeachable references."

"Unimpeachable references," Mernside reflected as he left his cousin's
house; and, side by side with Cicely's words, other words tossed to and
fro in his brain, words written in a clear, girlish hand that had an
odd character of its own.

"I cannot find work, and I need a home very much."

"Probably she is quite impossible," his reflections ran on.  "Cicely
had a good deal of right on her side when she talked about shop girls
and matrimonial advertisements.  I daresay I shall find C.M. belongs to
that class of girl, and if so, what am I going to do about her?  Ah!
well; Margaret will help."

It was this thought that buoyed him up during his walk across the park
from the Redesdale's mansion in Eaton Square, to the small white house
in Bayswater; but as he pushed open the familiar gate and walked up the
garden path, a shock of surprise awaited him.  The blinds of the room
to the right of the front door were pulled down, and his repeated
ringing of the bell brought no response from within.  The bell clanged
in the kitchen regions, its echoes dying away forlornly, but no
footstep sounded in the hall, no hand lifted the latch of the door, and
as he stepped back and looked up at the house, Rupert saw that no smoke
was coming from the chimneys.  A sick fear smote at his heart.  What
had happened?  What could have happened?  The day before, he had been
here, sitting with Margaret in that very room over whose windows the
blinds were now so closely drawn.  She had seemed tired, it was true,
but not more tired than he had often seen her, and he had no reason to
suppose that she was more ill than usual.  She was always fragile; he
was accustomed to find her one week on the sofa, another week
sufficiently strong to be moving about the room, and even going out of
doors.  But that her house should be barred and bolted against him was
inexplicable.  He felt as though the ground had been cut away from
under his feet, as if the very foundations of his life had been shaken.
Why! to-day was the day she had herself fixed for his interview in her
house with the girl of the advertisement.  Margaret had arranged the
hour; it was by her suggestion that he had written to C.M., proposing a
meeting at 100, Barford Road, and now he found the house locked up and
apparently empty, with no word of explanation or apology.  Could
Margaret have been suddenly taken ill?  If so, why had she not let him
know?  Yet, if she was ill, she would be in the house, and Elizabeth
with her.  Somebody would have answered his ringing, which had grown
more and more imperative as each ring remained unanswered.  Could she
have gone away?  Gone away without letting him have the slightest hint
of her intended going?  Was that more conceivable than his theory of
sudden illness?  Again, sick dismay knocked at the door of his heart,
and with it came a wave of hot anger against Margaret.  Surely his
years of faithful devotion, of willing service, had entitled him to
more consideration than this at her hands.  He had made few demands
upon her, but this sudden and unexplained disappearance was a strain
which even the merest friendship should not be called upon to bear.

Once again he pealed the bell, and even knocked vigorously at the
knocker, but neither sound produced the slightest effect, and he was
perforce turning away, when the gate clicked and he saw a breathless
personage of the charwoman class hurrying up the path.

"I'm sure I beg your parding, sir," she panted; "just like my luck to
a' popped out for a minute twice in the afternoon, and each time
somebody called."

"Are you in charge of this house?" Rupert asked, his own agitation
making him speak more sternly than the occasion quite warranted.

"Yes, sir; and I'm truly sorry, sir," the woman whimpered, wiping her
much-heated face with a grimy apron; "come here yesterday, I did, all
of a sudden, Mrs. Stanforth and Miss Herring, her maid, going away
unexpected, and me havin' a extra lot of washin' and all.  But I says
to Jem, my son, 'Jem,' I says----"

"Yes, yes," Rupert interrupted impatiently, "but where is Mrs.
Stanforth?  Did she leave any message?  Any note?  Did she tell you to
say anything to people who called?"

"Lor', no, sir.  Went off in a hurry and didn't leave no messages nor
nothin'.  And I'm sure I'm sorry I wasn't 'ere when you come, but I'd
popped out for a minute, and let out the kitchen fire, too, and I just
'ad to see to my bit o' washin', and there, I run back a half an 'our
ago, and there was a young lady in a rare takin' then, and so----"

"A young lady," Rupert again broke into her stream of words.

"Pore young thing, she did seem upset over it, too.  Said she was
expected, and she was to be 'ere at five, and all.  There!  I was sorry
for 'er.  Seemed to strike 'er all of an 'eap when she see the shut up
'ouse.  She says quite 'urt like: 'Well, I s'pose it was an 'oax.'
Them was 'er very words."

"I suppose you explained to her that the lady had gone away
unexpectedly?" Rupert exclaimed with growing irritation; "you didn't
let the young lady think she had been brought here for a _joke_?"

"Well, o' course, sir, I didn't know nothin' about it," was the
offended retort; "if you ask me, I should say there was somethin' queer
in tellin' somebody to come to an 'ouse at five o'clock, and then for
the 'ouse to be shut up.  Which I should say it was a pore joke meself.
She says: 'Ain't Mr. Mernside 'ere?' and I says, 'I don't know nothin'
about nobody o' that name,' and she looks as took aback as if I'd 'it
'er, and so----"

Rupert uttered a smothered oath, then mastered himself, and asked more
quietly:

"And how long has the young lady been gone?"

"Best part of a quarter of a hour.  Quiet young lady she was, too;
dressed very plain; you might say shabby; and went orf lookin' fit to
cry with disappointment.  And I just popped out agin to git me bit o'
relish for tea, and _you_ come; lor', it do seem strange."

The good lady was left to address her rambling remarks to the shrubs in
the garden, for Rupert, unable to bear more of her discursiveness,
turned and fled, shutting the garden gate with a sharp clang behind
him, and feeling that his world had all at once gone wrong, very wrong
indeed.




CHAPTER V.

"I KNOW THIS IS WORTH A LOT OF MONEY."

"I suppose I was stupid to think it could be anything but a hoax.  But
the letter seemed so kind, not as if it were written by a horrid person
who would want to play a practical joke."

Christina, having climbed the stairs to her room with weary, dragging
footsteps, sat down on her one chair, feeling tired, depressed, and
indignant.  The dire necessity of saving her every penny, drove her to
walk from Bayswater to her far-off lodgings in the S.W. district, and
as a fine rain had begun to fall long before she was half-way across
the park, she was not only worn out and miserable, but very wet as
well.  In their best days her serge coat and skirt had not been thick;
much wear and tear had reduced them to a threadbare condition quite
incapable of resistance to weather.  The drizzling rain had penetrated
her inadequate coat and thin blouse; her skirt hung limply about her
legs; she felt, what she actually was, wet to the skin, and too tired
even to exert herself to make some tea over her spirit-lamp.

"I expect it is true what Mrs. Jones says," she reflected; "she says
men are all brutes, and you can't trust one of them.  I used to think
she only said it because Mr. Jones drank himself to death, and drank
away her earnings first, and beat her.  But, now, I don't know."  With
cold fingers she drew the hatpins from her sodden hat, threw off the
wet coat that clung so chillily to her shivering form, and took from
her pocket a letter addressed in a bold, masculine hand.


"C.M., c/o Mrs. Cole, Newsagent,
  "10, Cartney Street, S.W."


"It looks like the handwriting of a gentleman," the poor little girl's
reflections ran on; "I shouldn't have thought a man who wrote like that
could be a brute, and his letter isn't a brute's letter either," she
added pathetically, drawing the letter from its envelope and reading
the words, which were already engraved upon her mind.


"DEAR MADAM,

"I think perhaps I may be able to be of some use to you if you could
make it convenient to call at 100, Barford Road, Bayswater, at five
o'clock to-morrow (Wednesday).  We might have a little talk.  My friend
to whom the house belongs, will be very glad to see you.

"Yours faithfully,
  "R. MERNSIDE."


"And then I find the house shut up," Christina said shakily, and aloud,
"and an old charwoman tells me she never heard of Mr. Mernside; and I
suppose it was just all a mean practical joke."  Two tears, tears of
sheer fatigue and of bitter disappointment, welled up in the girl's
eyes, and dropped slowly down her cheeks.  She was so tired--so tired
and cold and miserable--and she had built more hopes than she quite
knew upon the answer to her timid little letter.  The entire absence of
any allusion to matrimonial prospects in Mr. Mernside's note had
quieted her fears, and many hopes had mingled with the nervous doubts
that had filled her soul as she set out that afternoon on her strange
expedition.  Some faint idea that this unknown Mr. Mernside might be
instrumental in helping her to find work, sustained her through the
long walk to Barford Road; she had been so sure, so very sure, that the
writer of the terse, kindly letter, was a gentleman, and a good man to
boot, that the sight of the shut-up house came to her with the force of
an actual blow, whilst the caretaker's unfeigned ignorance of anybody
of the name of Mernside, made Christina's theory of a hoax seem more
than probable.

"And not one answer to all the letters I wrote about situations," she
exclaimed wearily, pulling herself up from her chair, and taking the
spirit-lamp from its place in the cupboard.  "I wonder whether there
are lots of other girls as poor as I am, and without any relations or
friends.  In another week, I shan't have enough money to pay my rent;
and Mrs. Jones won't let it run; she's said so over and over again."
Another shiver ran through her, and this time dread apprehension of the
future was more responsible for the shiver than even the damp
chilliness of her condition.  "I don't know what I shall do when the
money is all gone.  Oh!  I don't know what I shall do," and a little
sob broke from her, as she took from the cupboard the materials for her
tea.  It was a meagre enough meal that her cold shaking fingers spread
on the old deal table, and she was repeatedly forced to brush away the
tears from her face, so fast did they run down it now that exhaustion
and misery were at last finding an outlet.  Her lunch had consisted of
a glass of milk and a bun, bought at a neighbouring shop; since
lunch-time she had walked some miles, had incidentally become wet
through during the process, and her walk had been crowned by a cruel
disappointment.  It was not wonderful that the girl, plucky little soul
though she was, should feel now as if the end were reached, and she
could hope no more.

To add to her misery, everything seemed to go awry.  The matches were
only found after a prolonged hunt for them; for many minutes the lamp
refused to light; and when, at last, a flame shot up, Christina thought
that the water in the kettle boiled more slowly than water had ever
boiled before.  Dry bread had never tasted more unappetising; and
milkless tea (though it was certainly warm, and in that respect carried
a certain amount of comfort with it), tasted bitter and nauseating.

The girl longed, with an almost childish longing, for something more to
eat and drink.  Visions rose before her of the Donaldsons' cosy
nursery, of a plate piled high with hot buttered toast, of a big
home-made seed cake, that could be eaten as quickly as the nursery
folks liked, without any dread of future want, and she pushed away her
plate, and laid her head down upon the table, sobbing as though her
heart would break.  Hot buttered toast and seed cake are unromantic
sounding things enough, no doubt, but when one is very hungry, and very
heartsick, and only twenty into the bargain, the thoughts of past
plenty make present poverty seem well nigh intolerable.

Good stuff must have gone to the making of little Christina, and
whoever those ancestors on her mother's side had been, they had passed
on to her a goodly heritage of courage and endurance.  Her storm of
sobs was of very brief duration.  Giving herself a little shake both
actually and metaphorically, she raised her head from the table,
resolutely dried her eyes, choked back her sobs and forced herself to
finish eating the dry morsels of bread, and drinking the nauseous
draught of tea.  Either the food itself, or the effort she had made to
eat it, sent a tingling of new strength along her limbs, and she broke
into a faint laugh over her own despair.

"You perfect goose," she said firmly, rising to wash up her tea things;
"crying won't make anything better.  Mr. Donaldson used to say, 'Don't
look for your bridges before you come to them,' and so I won't look at
the bridge.  Mrs. Jones will put up for me about the rent, until I am
really going to step right on to it.  And before I give up every bit of
hope, I ought--perhaps I ought to try and pawn the pendant, only I
can't bear doing it.  I can't bear it."

Mrs. Jones was not at all the pleasant and kindly landlady of fiction,
who succours and helps her tenants, and plays the part of mother to
them.  The only part Mrs. Jones understood playing was that of the
cruel stepmother of fairy legend, and Christina did not err in thinking
that to allow rent to remain unpaid, was no part of her landlady's
methods.  Mrs. Jones's own life had been a hard one.  Grinding work in
her early girlhood, a brutal husband, and much grinding poverty during
her married life, and in her widowhood an unending struggle to make two
ends meet; these made up the sum of the landlady's existence, and she
treated the world as she found herself treated by the world.  She
expected nothing from others, and she gave them nothing.  She asked for
no help from her fellow beings, and she most assuredly bestowed none.

She was lighting the gas jet in the hall, a hard-featured, tight-lipped
woman, when, half an hour later, Christina went out again, a small
brown paper parcel in her hand; and Mrs. Jones's thin lips tightened
more than ever as her sharp eyes fell upon the parcel.

"Goin' out to pop somethin'," was her grim thought, and the thought was
displeasing to her.  Not that she particularly pitied her lodger.  Pity
was a virtue not cultivated by Mrs. Jones.  But she instinctively
dreaded the moment when her lodgers began to slip out stealthily with
parcels under their arms, or in their hands.  The significance of those
parcels was well known to her, and she was fully aware that lodgers who
once began to pawn their goods passed by easy stages to backwardness in
paying their rent, and then followed eviction and new tenants.  No;
Mrs. Jones mistrusted brown paper parcels, just as much as she
mistrusted the look, half-shy, half-frightened, which Christina cast at
her in passing, and the flood of colour that dyed the girl's face, when
she met the landlady's glance.

Some of her smarter clothes Christina had long ago sold to an old
clothes' shop round the corner, but this was the first time she had
visited a real pawnbroker, and her heart beat like a sledge-hammer, as
she stood outside the window of a jeweller's shop, over which the three
balls were displayed.  She had shrunk from going into the establishment
of Mr. Moss, the recognised pawnbroker of that squalid neighbourhood,
and had gone further afield, thinking that from a jeweller, even though
he engaged in pawnbroking as well, she would meet with more
consideration, and perhaps receive a larger sum of money.  But, looking
through the glass doors at the two men who lounged behind the counter,
her spirits sank to zero, and she allowed ten minutes to slip by
before, taking her courage into her hands, she finally entered the shop.

Coming in out of the damp of the November evening, the pleasant warmth
was grateful to her, but the brilliant gaslight dazzled her eyes, and
sheer nervousness made her stumble hopelessly over the sentence she had
been committing to memory, ever since she had left her lodgings.

"I called to ask whether this pendant was of any value," she had
intended to say.  But instead of that, she found herself stammering
breathlessly, "I--I came--would you please tell me--if you can give me
something on this," and she thrust her parcel into the hand indolently
stretched out for it, by one of the young men behind the counter.

His eyes looked her up and down with an insolent stare that sent the
blood flying over her face, and his smile gave her an impotent longing
to strike his fat, sleek countenance.

"How much do you want for it, my dear, that's the question?" the man
said jauntily, his eyes never leaving the girl's flushed face; "we are
always pleased to accommodate a pretty young lady like you, eh, Tom?"
with an odious leer he nudged the elbow of his companion, who emitted a
hoarse guffaw, and winked facetiously, as Christina turned a distressed
glance in his direction.  Unfortunately for her, the master of the shop
was absent, and she was at the mercy of two of those underbred,
mean-spirited curs, who regard any defenceless woman as lawful prey,
and take the same delight in baiting her, as their ignoble ancestors
took in baiting an equally defenceless dumb animal.

"You tell us what you want, miss," the man called Tom struck in,
leaning across the counter, and tapping the girl's hand; "anything you
ask in reason we shall be pleased to oblige you with.  Now, what's this
thing, and this thing, and this very pretty thing?" he ended
facetiously, whilst his fellow shopman unfastened Christina's parcel,
and opened the cardboard box it contained.

"It is a pendant," Christina faltered, afraid to show the indignation
she felt, lest the men should refuse to give her what she needed; "it
has been a long time in my family--and--I know it is very valuable."

"Oh! you know it is very valuable, do you?" queried the first man,
mocking her trembling accents; "now, it is for us to tell you its
value; not for you to tell us, you know.  Hum! old-fashioned thing," he
ejaculated, holding up to the light the piece of jewellery he had drawn
from its box; "this sort of antique article may have suited our
grandmothers, but it doesn't go down nowadays!"

"That is not at all the case," Christina answered boldly; "everybody
likes antique things now; and that pendant is worth a great deal, as
you know."

Anger was beginning to conquer her nervous tremors, and the odious
smile with which her remark was received by both young men, made her
draw herself up proudly.

"Hoity, toity!" said the man called Tom; "as we know, indeed.  If Mr.
Franks, my excellent friend and colleague," he made an exaggerated bow
to his companion, "considers the bauble old-fashioned and worthless, it
certainly is worthless and old-fashioned."

"It is certainly nothing of the kind," Christina cried, anger driving
away the last semblance of nervousness.  "I should be much obliged if
you would tell me at once how much you can advance me upon it.  If you
are unable to give me anything, I can take it elsewhere."  As she
spoke, she looked straight into the smiling, insolent faces before her,
her own grown rigid and proud; and in spite of her shabby clothing and
obvious poverty, she suddenly assumed a look of imperial dignity, which
had an instantaneous effect upon her tormentors.

"Come, come, miss; don't talk like that," the man called Franks said
sheepishly; "we were just having a bit of fun over it, that's all.  And
I'm sure we'll give you the best we can for the pendant."

Christina's threat of taking the jewel elsewhere, had brought the
shopmen sharply to their senses, for it had needed no more than a
cursory glance, to show them both that the jewel the girl had brought
them was of no small value, and they were uncomfortably aware that the
vials of their master's wrath would be emptied upon their heads, if
they allowed such an article to be disposed of in another establishment.

"It is a very pretty piece of work," the first man said, taking the
pendant in his hand, and looking over it with a fine assumption of
carelessness; "family initials, I suppose, in this twisted monogram?"

"I suppose so.  I cannot give you any history of the pendant; I don't
know its history myself.  It came to me from my mother."  Christina
gave this piece of gratuitous information, feeling uneasily that it
might be supposed she had stolen the beautiful piece of jewellery; and,
with the thought, all the old associations that were interwoven with it
swept into her mind, and almost choked further utterance.

"A.V.C.," the young man said slowly, deciphering the monogram, which,
in exquisitely-chased gold, surmounted the pendant itself.  This latter
consisted of an emerald, remarkably vivid in colour, and set in the
same finely-chased gold as that which formed the monogram.  "A.V.C.
would have been some ancestor of yours, no doubt?" he asked jocularly,
and with another wink at his companion.

"I don't know," Christina repeated; "as I tell you, I know nothing of
the jewel's history.  I believe it to be a genuine emerald, and I am
sure it is very valuable."

Both men simultaneously shrugged their shoulders and laughed, odious,
deprecating laughs.

"My dear young lady," said Franks, who seemed to occupy a position
superior to the other, "someone has been, as we say, 'getting at' you,
if they told you this was a _genuine_ emerald.  Why! if it was an
emerald, a _real_ emerald, mind you, it would be worth"--and he raised
his eyes to the ceiling, and lifted up his hands, as if to demonstrate
the magnitude of a sum he could not mention in spoken language.

"It _is_ a real emerald, and it is worth a great deal," Christina said
firmly, "but if you do not care to advance me what it is worth, I will
take it away," and she put out her hand for the pendant, from which the
gleams of light flashed brilliantly.

"Now look here," said Mr. Franks persuasively, "you believe me, missy;
this is no more an emerald than I am, but it is a nice little bit of
paste, and the gold is well worked.  I'm taking a good bit upon myself
in making the suggestion, and goodness knows what the boss will say to
me when he comes home.  But I'll take it off your hands for five
pounds.  There!" he ended triumphantly, as though convinced that the
generosity must be a delicious surprise for his hearer.

"Five--pounds!"--Christina's voice rang with indignation--"five pounds
for what you know as well as I do is worth twenty times that amount."

Franks laughed contemptuously, and began putting the ornament back into
its box with elaborate care.

"You have an exaggerated idea of the thing's value," he said.  "I
couldn't undertake to offer you more than five pounds for it, and if
you take my advice," he added darkly, with a swift glance at his
colleague, and back at the girl, "you'll accept the offer, and let us
have the thing altogether.  You see," he coughed significantly,
"awkward questions might be asked about a thing like this, with
initials.  If I did my business properly, I ought to ask you where you
got it."

The colour ebbed out of Christina's face; the possibility that had
confronted her a few minutes ago, had all at once taken definite form.
This man was hinting--nay, more than hinting--that the pendant had come
into her hands by unlawful means, and she had nothing but her word to
prove her own statement.

"I have told you--that it belonged to my mother," she said tremblingly;
"it is an old family ornament, and--I cannot part with it altogether."

"Look here, miss"--the man's voice became rough and harsh--"it's no use
your coming old family ornaments over me.  People with old family
ornaments don't come to places like this pawning them.  What price your
'old family,' eh?"  He ended his coarse speech with a coarser laugh, at
the sound of which Christina shrank and shivered.

"I will take back my pendant, please," she said, trying to regain her
courageous tone.  "I do not wish to sell it outright, and if you will
not advance me anything on it, there is nothing more to be said."

"Not so fast, not so fast," the man called Tom exclaimed, pushing back
the hand she once more extended towards the box.  "What Mr. Franks says
is very true--how do we know where you got this pendant?  The more you
go on making difficulties over letting it go, the more doubtful the
whole affair looks.  Now if you're really so badly in want of cash," he
went on brutally, "you take what we offer--five pounds down.  If you
don't, we may feel ourselves obliged to send for the police--and----"

Quite unable, in her innocence, to understand that the two cowards were
bullying her to the top of their bent;--already worn-out by the events
of the day, and by many days of fatigue and under-feeding, a panic
terror seized upon her.  Before the astonished men were aware of her
intention, she had reached over the counter, snatched the box from
Franks's hand, and fled out of the shop and down the street, her heart
beating to suffocation, her eyes wide with terror.

Never once looking back, she threaded her way along the pavement,
oblivious of the expostulations of passers-by, against whom she
brushed; almost unconscious of their very existence, in her frantic
desire speedily to put as great a distance as possible between herself
and the objectionable jewellers.

Heedless of the traffic, she dashed headlong over the crossings, and
plunging into a network of by-streets, ran on still at full speed,
possessed by the horrible fear that those men with the dreadful smiles,
might already have put the police upon her track.

"I can't prove the pendant is mine," she panted breathlessly.  "I have
no proof that I didn't steal it.  What can I say if they take me up as
a thief?"  The bare thought made her redouble her pace, although she
was already on the verge of exhaustion, and her breath was coming in
great gasps.  Beads of perspiration stood on her forehead, and when at
last she reached her own room, she was powerless to do more than sink
upon a chair, shaking in every limb.

For many minutes she could only lean back, with closed eyes and ashen
face, drawing long painful breaths, each one of which was a sob; but as
a sense of safety grew upon her, she roused herself to light her lamp,
and to draw off her damp clothing, preparatory to going to bed.  Even
with the slender supply of blankets Mrs. Jones allowed her lodgers, it
would be warmer than sitting up without a fire; and she dared not allow
herself the luxury of a fire, especially now that her last hope of
raising money had been snatched from her.

"For I shall never dare take the pendant to show to anybody again," she
thought, with a shudder.  "The next person I went to might send for the
police then and there.  And perhaps it was horrible of me to think of
pawning mother's pendant at all--only--I don't believe she would have
minded, if she had known how dreadfully, dreadfully poor her little
girl was going to be--and how hard it is for a girl even to get bread
enough to keep from starvation.  And I know this is worth--oh! a lot of
money," she exclaimed pathetically, once more taking the ornament from
its box, and holding it before her in the light of the lamp.  As the
green gleam of the stones flashed out before her eyes, the dreary room
in which she sat, her squalid surroundings, even her own misery faded
from her mind; she was back in the past--back in her mother's bedroom
in the dear Devonshire home--her mother's dying voice sounding in her
ears.  Through the open window had drifted the song of the sea,
mingling with the hum of bees amongst the roses that climbed to the
very sill, and made the room fragrant with their sweetness.  And a bird
had sung--ah! how it had sung, on that last night of her mother's life,
when Christina felt that her life too was going down into the dark for
ever.

"My little girl"--how faint the gentle voice had been!--"I--can't
stay--now father has gone; he--and I--could not ever be apart.  He is
my world---all my world."  The dim resentment which Christina, the
child, had sometimes experienced, because those two beings she loved
best had seemed so remote from her, so perfectly able to live their
lives without her, had smitten the girl Christina afresh as she
listened to her mother's words.  Her father and mother had been so
wrapped up in one another, always so wholly sufficient for each other's
needs, that their child had played a very secondary part in their
lives.  And the child had dimly resented it.

Through all the sorrow that filled her heart as she stood beside her
mother's deathbed, that smouldering resentment would not be wholly
stilled.  Her mother could barely spare a thought for the girl she was
leaving to face the world alone, because her husband filled her whole
soul; she could remember only that he had gone before her into the
silent land, and that she must hasten to join him again.

"You are so young," the dying voice had murmured on, whilst the fast
dimming eyes looked, not at her little daughter, but at the blue sky
outside the window, "somebody will want you some
day--as--Ronald--wanted me--as--he wants me still."

Christina did not answer, only her eyes followed her mother's glance
out to the deep blue sky framed by the nodding roses round the window;
and she wondered dully whether anybody would really care for her some
day, or whether there was something inherently unlovable in her, seeing
that her own father and mother had seemed to find her so little worthy
of love.

The bitter thought passed.  She bent over her mother, and gently
stroked back the damp hair from her forehead.

"I shall--be able--to take care of myself," she said bravely, "and----"

"Be good, my little girl," the murmuring voice broke in, "be good--and
come to us some day--Ronald and I will be there--together.  I want--to
tell you--the pendant--the emerald pendant"--a look of excitement
flashed into her eyes; she made a great effort to raise herself in the
bed, but such effort was far beyond her feeble strength--"I can't
tell--you--now," she gasped; "later--after--sleep--the
pendant--take--the--emerald; tell Arthur"--and at that word her
strength suddenly failed, her eyes closed, she slipped down among her
pillows, in an unconsciousness from which she never again awoke.

All through the fragrant summer night following that sunshiny
afternoon, Christina had watched beside her, hoping against hope that
some faint knowledge of outward things would return to her, that the
strange unfinished sentence might be ended.

"I want to tell you," her mother had said.  What was it she wished to
tell her daughter?  What was the meaning of those strange words that
seemed so incoherent and without sense?

"The pendant--take--the--emerald--tell Arthur----"

But no glimmer of consciousness crossed the still white face; the eyes
that had last looked at the sunny sky of June, and the nodding roses,
opened no more upon this world's sunshine and flowers, the faltering
voice was silenced for ever; and in the grey dawn of morning
Christina's mother had passed to the land where she and the man she
loved would part no more.

The vision faded.  Christina was back again in the present--the dull
light of the oil lamp shining on the jewel she held--in the clammy cold
of a November evening, that was as far removed from the sunny sweetness
of June, as her sordid room was removed from the rose-scented fragrance
of her old home.

"I wonder what she wanted to tell me," the girl mused again; as she had
mused countless times before; "what could she have meant when she said
those words:

"The pendant--take--the--emerald--tell Arthur----"

"I wonder who Arthur could have been."




CHAPTER VI.

"BABA LOVES YOU VERY MUCH."

"Will the lady who on Monday morning brought Baba home out of the fog,
kindly call at 100, Eaton Square, any time between eleven and one
o'clock?"

The words seemed to start from the printed page before Christina's
eyes, and she read them over and over again with growing wonder.  It
was Friday morning, two days after her two disastrous visits--one to
the shut-up house in Bayswater, the other to the insolent
jewellers--and with difficulty she had managed to crawl round to the
Free Library, feeling that she dared leave no stone unturned in a fresh
search for work.  The day before she had perforce spent in bed, for her
day of fatigue, emotion, and exposure to the weather, had been followed
by a night of fever and aching limbs; and on the Thursday morning she
could scarcely lift her head from the pillow.  But on Friday, realising
affrightedly that each day brought her nearer to absolute destitution,
she made a herculean effort, got up and dressed, and, feeling more dead
than alive, dragged herself to the library, to study the monotonous
advertisement columns of the newspapers.  And having wearily glanced
down the familiarly-worded lines, in which nursery governesses and
companions were asked for, at wages that would not satisfy the average
kitchen-maid, she turned to the front page of the _Morning Post_, and
found herself confronted with the advertisement that now held her
astonished eyes:

"Will the lady who on Monday morning brought Baba home out of the fog,
kindly call at 100, Eaton Square, any time between eleven and one
o'clock."

Unless there were two Babas in the world, and two ladies who had taken
them home out of the fog, she herself was clearly the person indicated
by the advertisement; and as the square in which the bewitching baby
had been taken from her by an excited footman, was certainly Eaton
Square, she had little doubt but that the advertiser wished to thank,
and perhaps to reward, her.  A hot flush came into her white cheeks as
the word "reward" entered her mind; all her instincts revolted against
the notion of being rewarded for doing what had been a most obvious
duty.  But with the instinct of revolt came also a little rush of hope.
To the tired girl the advertisement seemed like a friendly hand
outstretched towards her; and though pride whispered to her to pay no
heed to it, and to ignore it altogether, the sense that kindliness
towards a total stranger had prompted the advertisement, fought hard
with pride.  After all, if she went to 100, Eaton Square, she need
accept nothing at the hands of the inmates: that they should wish to
thank her for the safe return of their little one was only natural, and
it would be churlish of her to refuse to be thanked.

In her excitement, she omitted to take down any addresses of employers;
for the first time since she had begun to haunt the Free Library, she
went out of its doors without a list of names to which letters must be
written, setting forth her own qualifications for tending children, or
amusing the elderly.  She had actually forgotten to draw from her
pocket the sheet of notepaper she never failed to bring with her on her
morning quest, so full was her mind of the coming visit to Eaton
Square.  Her weary limbs still refused to hurry, and she walked slowly
back to her lodgings, "to make herself tidy," as she put it, before
venturing into what was to her an actually new world.  Her heart was
beating very fast as she rang the bell of the great Eaton Square
mansion, and, thanks partly to nervousness, partly to fatigue, her legs
were trembling so much, that she was obliged to clutch at the wall for
support, to prevent herself from falling.  A footman flung open the
door--a tall, rather supercilious footman, whose face was not the
good-natured, foolish face of the James who had lifted the red-cloaked
baby from her arms.  This man looked the visitor up and down with a
comprehensive stare, which held in it both enquiry and contempt, and
had the effect of banishing Christina's small remnant of courage.

"Could I--see--the lady of the house?" she asked.

"What might you want with her?" the servant demanded with a sniff.

"There was an advertisement in to-day's _Morning Post_," the girl
answered, her voice shaking with nervous weariness; "it said, 'call
between eleven and one'--and I came to----"

"Come after the place, have you?"--the footman's tone changed to one of
huge condescension.  "Oh! well, step in, and I'll see if her ladyship
can see you."

"The place!--her ladyship!" Christina looked at the man with bewildered
eyes, and said faintly--"I don't know anything about a place.  I have
not come for that.  Only the advertisement said, 'call between eleven
and one o'clock.'"

"Step inside," came the short order, whilst Henry, the first footman,
inwardly remarked that he wished her ladyship wouldn't go putting in
advertisements, and not mentioning them to the establishment.  "Take a
seat there, and I'll ascertain whether her ladyship is disengaged."

Had Christina been in her normal health, the man's grandiloquent manner
and language would have amused her.  With her nerves at high tension,
her limbs trembling, and her whole frame exhausted and weary, she felt
only a great inclination either to flee out of the front door, or to
sit down and cry.  The hall, softly-carpeted and warm, fragrant with
the flowers massed in great pots at the foot of the staircase, and
quiet with the stillness of a well-ordered house, oppressed her.  The
solemn voice of a grandfather clock in the corner, had only the effect
of making the prevailing silence more noticeable, and Christina
experienced a wild longing to scream, or to burst into uncontrollable
laughter, just to break the stillness which weighed upon her like a
nightmare.

"Will you come this way, please?"

She started violently as the footman's voice sounded close to her.  His
footstep on the thick pile of the stair carpet had been quite
inaudible, and she was surprised to see him once more beside her.  At
his bidding she rose mechanically, and followed him up the wide
staircase, whose soft carpet was a bewildering novelty to the girl
accustomed to the simplest surroundings, across a landing, fragrant,
like the hall, with growing roses and exotic plants, into a small
boudoir, in which she found herself alone.  In all her twenty years of
life she had never before been in a room like this room, and, standing
in the centre of it, just where her guide had left her, she looked
round her timidly, and drew a long breath of admiration and amazement.

The murkiness of the November day that darkened the world outside, did
not appear to enter into this lovely apartment, which gave Christina a
sense of summer and sunshine.

"It is just like a pink rose," she said to herself, her eyes wandering
from the walls, delicately tinted a soft rose colour, to the sofa and
chairs upholstered in a deeper shade of the same colour, and the
carpet, whose darker tint of rose harmonised with the paler hues.
Every table seemed to the girl to overflow with books and magazines;
bowls of flowers, vases of flowers, pots of flowers, stood on every
available shelf, and in every possible corner.  The windows were draped
with rose-coloured silk curtains, that made even the grey sky beyond
them look less grey, and the pictures on the walls drew a gasp of
delight from Christina's lips.  They were mainly landscapes, and in
almost every case they represented wide spaces, open tracts of country,
that gave one a sense of life and freshness.  Here was an expanse of
sea, blue and smiling as the sky that stooped to meet it; there, long
green rollers swept up a sandy beach, whilst clouds lit up by a rift of
sunshine, lay on the horizon.  On this side was a moorland, purple with
heather, bathed in the glory of the setting sun; on that side, a plain,
far-reaching as the sea itself, soft and green and misty, bounded by
mountains, whose snow-crowned summits stood out in serried stateliness
against the faint blue sky.  In a looking-glass hanging on the wall,
Christina caught sight of her own reflection, and a shamed
consciousness of her white face and shabby clothes, gave her a sense of
the incongruousness between her own appearance, and the loveliness
around her.  But this uneasy sense of discrepancy had barely entered
her mind, when the door opened, and there entered a tiny personage,
whose daintiness made Christina all at once feel huge, awkward, and
ungainly.

"It was sweet of you to come," the little lady exclaimed, holding out
to the girl a white hand flashing with diamonds, "you are the kind lady
who brought my Baba home?  Henry was very incoherent; he always is, in
a grand, long-winded way of his own.  But I gathered from his
meandering remarks, that you had come in answer to my advertisement."

"Yes," Christina answered; "I saw it--the advertisement--in the
_Morning Post_ to-day.  I thought it was so kind of you to advertise,
that I came.  But, of course, when I brought the darling baby home, I
only did what everybody else would have done," she added, rather
breathlessly.

"A lady--and very proud," the thought ran through her listener's brain;
but aloud the little lady only said:

"I can't put into words how grateful I am to you, all the same.  You
see, my little girlie is my ewe lamb--my only child--and she is very
precious.  If anything had happened to her, I--oh! but we mustn't talk
about dreadful things that might happen, when I hope they never will.
Baba was a naughty monkey to run out alone.  But she is rather a sweet
monkey, isn't she?"

"She is one of the dearest babies I ever saw," Christina answered
simply, sitting down in the chair her hostess pushed forward for her,
and feeling some of her awkwardness slipping from her, in presence of
this kindly, dainty little lady.  With girlish enthusiasm her eyes
drank in the loveliness of the other's fair face, its delicate
colouring, its crown of bright hair; the perfection of the tiny form,
the gracefulness of the dead black gown, that fell in exactly the right
folds, and was hung as no dress of poor little Christina's had ever
been persuaded to hang.

"Baba--we call her Baba, because her own name, Veronica, is so big for
such a baby--has managed to get rather out of hand since her nurse
left.  We do try not to spoil her, but we don't always succeed very
well.  I think you must be very fond of children--aren't you?  You made
a great impression on Baba."

"I love little children," Christina answered, with the simplicity and
sincerity which characterised her; "since I have had to earn my own
living, I have been a nursery governess."

"It is very absurd, but I don't even know your name, and I daresay you
are equally ignorant of mine?" the little lady in the armchair
exclaimed, with a gay laugh.  "Rupert did not put any name in the
advertisement; he said it was wiser not--but I am Lady Cicely
Redesdale, and Baba, as I say, is my only child, and--very precious."
Lady Cicely's blue eyes looked thoughtfully at Christina, her last
words were spoken absently.

"I did not even know into which house the small girl was carried on
Monday," Christina replied, laughing also; "the footman ran along the
pavement when he saw us, and until I read your advertisement to-day, I
had no idea which number in the square was the one he had come from.
My name is Moore--Christina Moore--and I live in Maremont Street."

"In Maremont Street?  But--isn't that rather a--wretched neighbourhood
for you?  Do your people live there?"

"I have no people," the girl answered, an unconscious wistfulness in
her eyes that appealed to Lady Cicely's kind heart.  "I lost my father
and mother three years ago, and since then I have been living with some
friends, and taking care of their children.  But now they have gone to
Canada and I am alone in the world."  It was said without any _arriere
pensee_; no thought of exploiting her loneliness crossed Christina's
mind.  The sympathetic glance of the blue eyes watching her, led her on
to frankness of speech, and to speak to an educated lady again was a
delight, to which for the past few months she had been an entire
stranger.

"And you--are obliged to work for yourself?" Lady Cicely put the
question with hesitating kindliness.

"Oh, yes"--a faint smile crossed Christina's face--"and just now it is
rather hard to get.  Nobody seems to want the sort of work that I can
do.  You see, I have had very little education--not enough to teach big
children--and I have no certificates or diplomas, or anything.  I don't
think my father ever dreamt that I should have to earn my own living,
or he would have had me trained to do it."

"But you have taken care of little children?" again Lady Cicely's eyes
searched the girl's face earnestly--"and you are very fond of them?"

"I love them," Christina said, for the third time, "and I am never
tired of being with them, and taking care of them.  But there are such
lots of other girls like me, with very few qualifications, and so,
though I answer ever so many advertisements, I can't get a place."

"Do you mind waiting here just a moment?" Lady Cicely asked abruptly.
"I--I should like you to see Baba before you go; perhaps we might
find--we might think----" and with this vague sentence, the small lady
went out of the room, leaving Christina puzzled and wondering.

Lady Cicely meanwhile hurried downstairs to the library, where a man
sat looking over a mass of legal papers.

"Rupert," she exclaimed impetuously, "it is the girl who brought Baba
back, and my brain is teeming with plans for helping her."

"Is she a young person?"

"No, no--a lady.  Very shabby, very tired-looking, very poor, I should
guess; but unmistakably a lady.  And--I'm so sorry for her, Rupert; she
is just a slip of a girl, who looks as if she wanted mothering."

"Now, Cicely, do you wish to embark on the mother's role?  As one of
your trustees, let me warn you I shan't allow any quixotism."

"Leave those tiresome old papers for five minutes, and come and see
this girl.  I don't want to be quixotic, and I am ready to abide by
your judgment, but come and look at Miss Moore."

"The tiresome old papers are fairly important deeds connected with your
estate, and the future inheritance of your daughter, Miss Veronica Joan
Redesdale," her cousin answered with a laugh; "but I suppose your
ladyship's whims must take precedence of your property.  Where is Miss
Moore?"

"In my boudoir, and very shy.  I am sure she was afraid at first that I
meant to offer her money, there was a sort of proud shrinking in her
eyes--and she has very pretty eyes, too.  Of course, my idea _had_ been
to offer her money, because I imagined she would be of the shop-girl
type, but I should as soon think of offering you money, as of
suggesting giving it to Miss Moore."

"Come along, then; let us get the inspection over.  But, if you can't
give her money, what do you propose to do with her?"

"I--thought"--Lady Cicely paused, glanced into her cousin's grave face,
and glanced away again--"I fancied, perhaps, I might help her to get
work.  She is horribly poor, and she looks half-fed, and so tired.
I--well--I--really and truly, Rupert, I wondered whether she could come
here as nurse to Baba."

A low whistle was Rupert's response, then he said slowly--

"You didn't suggest this to her, did you?  You are so kind, so
impulsive, but, remember this girl is a perfect stranger.  She may
be--anything.  As you yourself told me two days ago, you must have
unimpeachable references with anyone who takes charge of Baba."

"Of course I said nothing to her.  Now, Rupert, I know I am impulsive,
but I am not entirely devoid of all common sense.  Come and give me
your opinion, and I promise--yes, I absolutely _promise_--to be guided
by you."

Rupert's grey eyes smiled down with brotherly affection into his little
cousin's face, and he followed her obediently from the room, and
upstairs, wondering vaguely why it was, that, much as he cared for and
admired Cicely, she had never inspired him with any deeper affection.
Like an elder brother to her from her earliest childhood, the brotherly
relation had continued between them after Cicely's marriage, and it had
been by her dead husband's most earnest wish, and specified
instructions, that Mernside was one of her trustees and Baba's
guardians, and Mr. Redesdale had bidden his wife consult Rupert about
everything connected with the estate and its baby heiress.

On the landing at the head of the stairs a small figure with flying
golden curls, and filmy white frock, flung herself upon her mother,
shrieking delightedly.

"Baba's runned away from Jane.  Now Baba come with mummy."

"Oh, Baba, you are not a good baby," Cicely exclaimed, with an attempt
at severity, which only produced a chuckle from the small girl; "it is
time mummy found a very stern nurse.  Nevertheless her appearance is
opportune," she said, _sotto voce_, to Rupert.  "I told Miss Moore I
would fetch Baba, and I don't want her to feel she is being inspected.
Run on into mummy's boudoir, sweetheart," she added aloud to the child,
"there's somebody there for Baba to see."

It was a pretty sight which greeted the two elders when, a moment
later, they entered the rose-coloured room; and Rupert paused for an
instant in the doorway, to look and smile.  Baba, after one short
glance at the stranger, who had risen from her chair, made a rush
across the room towards her, clasped her round the knees, and cried
fervently--

"Dat's Baba's lady, what found her in the ugly fog.  Kiss Baba," and,
at the moment of their entrance, Rupert and Cicely saw the girl stoop
and lift the baby in her arms, with a tenderness that marked a true
child lover, and an absence of self-consciousness induced by her
ignorance that two pairs of eyes were fixed upon her.

"Baba loves you very much," the child babbled on, her soft fingers
touching Christina's white face, "and thank you for bringing Baba home.
Pretty lady," she added suddenly, "Baba like when the pinky colour goes
all up and down your cheeks."  For, at that moment, the girl had become
aware of the presence, not only of Lady Cicely, but of a tall stranger
with grave grey eyes, and a rosy flush swept over the whiteness of her
face.

"Baba has not forgotten you," the former said, with her gay little
laugh.  "Rupert, this is Miss Moore, who so kindly brought naughty Baba
home out of the fog.  My cousin is Baba's guardian, Miss Moore, and he
is as grateful to you as I am."

Christina, in her embarrassment, did not observe Lady Cicely's omission
of the tall stranger's surname; Cicely herself was unconscious that she
had not said it, and Rupert was only intent on setting the girl at her
ease.

"Baba seems to be bestowing her own thanks in her own violent way," he
said, as the child's dimpled arms were flung again round Christina's
neck, and her soft face pressed against the girl's flushed one; "but we
all owe you a debt of gratitude for having found, and brought her back.
London streets are not the safest place for little babies of that age,
with pearl necklaces round their necks."

"That was what I thought," Christina exclaimed impulsively; "at
least--I mean," she stammered, "I couldn't help being glad that I was
the first person to find her, and that it was not one of the dreadful
people who do prowl about in fogs, who saw her first."

"We are most thankful for that, too," Rupert answered; and then, being
a man of the world, he skilfully led the conversation to more general
subjects, until Christina was soon talking quietly and naturally, with
no more tremors or self-consciousness.

When, a few minutes later, she rose to go, Lady Cicely held her hands
in a clasp that was very comforting to the weary girl, and said gently--

"I am not going to worry you with more thank-yous; but I want you to
come and see me again in a day or two.  I think, perhaps, I may be able
to hear of some work that would suit you."

As Christina wended her way homewards, she felt, tired though she was,
as if her feet trod on air.  Hope was once more fully alive within her.
Lady Cicely's lovely face and charming manner had bewitched the girl,
and she was sure--quite, quite sure--that if the sweet little blue-eyed
lady said she would do something for her, that something would
infallibly be done.  And--the tall cousin, with the grave grey eyes,
and the mouth that seemed to Christina to be set in lines of pain?
Those grey eyes and that firmly-set mouth, haunted her during the whole
course of her walk, and through her mind there flashed unbidden the
thought--

"I--wish I could comfort him.  I am sure he is unhappy."

Her way led her past the newspaper shop kept by Mr. Coles, and the
little man himself was standing at his door surveying the world.

"There is a letter in here for you, miss," he said good-naturedly; "it
came yesterday morning, and the wife and I made sure you'd be in for
it."

Christina started.  The events of the day had obliterated from her mind
all recollection of the matrimonial advertisement, and the letters that
were to be addressed to Mr. Coles's shop.  The memory of Wednesday's
disappointment came back to her, and as Mr. Coles put into her hand a
letter addressed "C.M." in the same bold, strong hand that had
addressed the other letter, her momentary inclination was to return it
to its writer unopened.

"Perhaps there is some explanation," was her next and saner reflection;
and, walking along the street, she opened, and read the letter, feeling
a certain compunction as she did so.  The address was still that of the
newspaper office, and the letter ran--


"DEAR MADAM,--

"I deeply regret that you found the house, at which I had asked you to
call, shut up.  I reached it a few minutes after you had left, and to
my own great surprise found--as you had done--no one there but a
caretaker.  My friend must have been called away suddenly, for on
Tuesday, when I saw her, she most kindly arranged that her house should
be at my disposal.  Please forgive what must have seemed to you most
strange.  Would it suit you to arrange any meeting-place that would
accord with your wishes?  With renewed apologies.

"Yours faithfully,
  "R. MERNSIDE."




CHAPTER VII.

"A VERY BEAUTIFUL PENDANT, WITH THE INITIALS 'A.V.C.'"

With all her undoubted strength of character, Christina was only human,
and the courteous apology she had received from the man signing himself
"Rupert Mernside," sorely tempted her.  Curiosity to see the writer,
and a lurking feeling that he might really be able to find work for
her, were mingled with a girlish longing for adventure, and for some of
the youthful joys she had missed; and all these sensations made her
more than half inclined to assign a meeting-place to this Mr. Mernside.
She had known few men, either in her quiet Devonshire home, or when she
was in the Donaldsons' service, and any pleasant social intercourse
with the other sex had never come in her way at all.  There rose before
her a vision of meeting this man of the bold, characteristic
handwriting--of perhaps being taken by him to tea in one of those
tea-rooms about which she had heard--tea-rooms where the waitresses
were ladies, dressed in soft lilac gowns, with dainty muslin aprons,
and where delicious music was played to the fortunate tea-drinkers.  To
have tea in such a place, with a man whose business it was for the
moment to look exclusively after her and her well-being, would be such
a treat as she had never enjoyed in all her life.  Her parents had not
encouraged any social gaiety; thinking over it now, it seemed to
Christina that for some inexplicable reason they had avoided society,
and actually warded off those of their neighbours who were inclined to
be friendly.  And with a sudden revolt against her own loneliness and
dullness, the girl felt as though at any cost she must seek friendship,
amusement, distraction.

"Of course, I haven't any clothes in which to go to a really smart
tea-room," she thought, when, in the shelter of her own small room, she
read her letter for the second time; "but there maybe somewhere not too
smart, where he could take me; and he leaves me to decide where to meet
him--and--oh!  I do want some fun; I do dreadfully want it!"

The man who would be the central figure of the entertainment, entered
little into her calculations.  She was far more interested in her
vision of tea-rooms, and the smart folk she might be fortunate enough
to see there, than in the man whose "open sesame" was to admit her to
the sacred precincts.  And only when some chance train of thought
reminded her of her recent interview with Lady Cicely, did she reflect
that the person who would sit beside her, and attend to her wants at
the tiny table in the enthralling tea-room, would be a stranger to her,
perhaps even an objectionable stranger.

With the remembrance of her visit to Eaton Square, came also the
recollection of the tall man with the grave grey eyes, the man
introduced to her by Lady Cicely, as "my cousin," and a hot flush of
shame rushed to her face, as she wondered what he would think of her,
if he knew she was planning to meet a person she had never seen, and of
whom she had only heard through a matrimonial advertisement.

He would certainly despise her; and it was not nice to contemplate the
kindly glance of those eyes turned to scorn and contempt.

Although she knew it was absurd to suppose that Lady Cicely's cousin
could ever be aware of, or interested in, the doings of so
insignificant a person as herself, she shrank oddly from doing anything
of which he would disapprove.

"To arrange to meet a strange man isn't really a very womanly thing to
do," she said, when she sat down to write her letter to the unknown Mr.
Mernside.  "I shouldn't ever have answered the advertisement at all, if
I had not been so dreadfully poor, and I shouldn't like to look Lady
Cicely's cousin in the face again if I met this man."

The letter was not so difficult a one to write as the first had been,
and its recipient both smiled and sighed, as he read the terse little
sentences in the round, girlish handwriting.


"DEAR SIR,--

"Thank you for your kind letter, but I hope I now have a chance of
getting some work, so that I need not trouble you any more.

"Yours faithfully,
  "C. MOORE."


"Well! that's a relief," Rupert ejaculated, throwing the note into the
fire; "what I could have done with the girl if she had agreed to meet
me, heaven only knows.  Margaret would have helped me--but Margaret----"

His meditations ended abruptly; he drew from his breast pocket a letter
that had reached him a post or two before Christina's arrived, and for
the fiftieth time read it from end to end.  The sense of it had long
since imprinted itself upon his brain, but it gave him a painful
pleasure to let his eyes rest upon the well-formed letters of the
handwriting, though a resentful indignation towards the writer stirred
within him.  She had not treated him well, and yet--she was the one
woman in the world to him--this woman of the dark eyes and rare white
beauty, who signed her letter with the one word, "Margaret."  No
address stood at the head of the letter, it was undated; and the
postmark was that of the West Central district.


"Forgive me for having left London so abruptly, and without telling you
of my intention," she wrote.  "I was summoned away by telegram, and in
my hurry and anxiety, I forgot to let you know.  I cannot tell you my
address just now, but Elizabeth is with me, and I am safe and well.  I
have often warned you, have I not, my dear, faithful friend, that much
in my life must always seem to you strange and mysterious.  I can give
you no explanation now.  But trust me still.  MARGARET.

"Letters sent to me, c/o Mrs. Milton, 180, Gower Street, will be
forwarded."


Mernside wrote four letters, each one of which in turn he tore up and
flung into the fire as soon as it was written, finally writing a fifth,
which appeared to satisfy him, for, having addressed and stamped it, he
put it into his pocket when he went out.

"Drive sharply to 180, Gower Street," were his directions to the driver
as he swung himself into a passing hansom, and leant forward on the
closed doors, watching the traffic with listless glances, which only
saw a woman's dark eyes, set in a white face.

"No, sir, I couldn't tell you Mrs. Stanforth's address," was the
uncompromising reply to his question, and Mrs. Milton's inflexible
countenance, and flat, rigid form were as uncompromising as her speech;
"she bid me say to anyone enquiring, that she was gone in the country
for a time, and I can only answer the same to you, as I answers to the
rest.  Letters and people--they come on here from Barford Road, and I
says the same to all of 'em."

Rupert's creed as a gentleman forbade his pressing for the address of a
woman who wished to keep herself hidden, but with all the hatred of his
sex for mysteries, he moved impatiently away, speculating grimly on the
eccentricities of women.  Why, when she had a house of her own, did
Margaret have her visitors and letters sent to Gower Street for
information, or re-addressing respectively?  What object was being
served by all this mysterious behaviour?  And why was she sometimes so
apparently frank with him, at other times so strangely secret?

True, that her very uncertainty was part of her charm; but, without
swerving in his unshakable loyalty to her, he felt himself occasionally
wishing that Margaret had some of the transparent candour of his little
cousin, Cicely Redesdale.  Cicely was incapable of dark secrets, or
hidden, mysterious actions; she and Baba were children together, and
one was scarcely more innocent and crystal pure than the other--which
reflections brought him by easy stages to his cousin's estates, and his
own trusteeship; and the memory of a paper needing Cicely's signature,
made him retrace his steps to his own chambers, and thence to Eaton
Square, where he found Cicely and her small daughter enjoying the
delights of tea together, in the bright nursery at the top of the house.

"Jane has got a sick mother," Cicely explained dolefully; "Jane was
imperatively needed at home, at an hour's notice--and behold me, head
nurse and nursery-maid rolled into one, and Baba in the seventh heaven
of bliss.  If you want any tea, Rupert, you must have it here--hot
buttered toast and all.  Dawson won't approve, but I am tired of trying
to live up to him."  Dawson was the butler, a magnificent personage who
had only condescended to anything more insignificant than a ducal
mansion, in consideration of Mr. Redesdale's generosity in the matter
of wages; and Dawson regarded any departure from the orthodox, with
disapproving eyes.

"You will never succeed in reaching Dawson's criterion of correctness,"
Rupert laughed; "meanwhile, nursery tea is much jollier than the
drawing-room meal.  We can eat double as much, and we can spread our
own jam."

"But you know, Rupert, I can't spend my whole life in the nursery,"
Cicely began, when the appetites of the baby and the big man had been
partially satisfied.  "Baba has chosen a new nurse for herself, but--I
can't let her decide anything so important; I am afraid you will call
me quixotic if I say I am half inclined to--

"Is it the young person--James's young person?" her cousin broke in.
"I knew that girl with the green eyes and shabby clothes was making
indelible marks on your kind heart.  But--you know nothing about her,
dear, and, as you told me, you must have unimpeachable references."

"Rupert, to remind a woman of the things she has said in a remote past,
is like driving a pig towards the north, when you want him to go there.
When you have a wife, you will understand the inwardness of my remark."

"I shall never have a wife," was the quick retort, "and am I to infer
from your remark that you are intending to engage a nurse who cannot
produce the necessary references?"

"I don't know what she can produce yet, but I have written to ask your
green-eyed friend of the shabby hat, to come and see me, and--then I
thought we could talk things over."

"Then 'things' are a foregone conclusion," said Rupert, with a laugh.
"I know you, Cicely.  The girl seemed to have a way with children; she
looked and spoke like a lady, and----"

"And Baba loved her"; Cicely lowered her voice, but the child, absorbed
in putting a consignment of dolls to bed, gave no heed to her elders;
"and ever since the girl came here, Baba has gone on saying: 'Baba
would like that pretty lady to live with her; can't the pretty lady
come?'  And sometimes children and dogs have wonderful instincts about
people, don't they?  Baba's instinct may be just the right one."

"It may.  Let us hope it will.  There was something very
straightforward about that girl's eyes, and her voice was particularly
pleasant.  It reminded me of somebody, but who the somebody is I can't
for the life of me remember."

"By the way, didn't you tell me the other day you knew of a nursery
governess who wanted work?  Can she come and see me as well?  Perhaps
you have found out more about her by now?"

"She has just succeeded in hearing of work," Rupert answered, and
Cicely noticed that, as before, he spoke with a trace of embarrassment.
"I have found out nothing more about her, but I hear she is, or hopes
to be, 'suited,' as the servants say."

"I am very strongly inclined to try the girl who brought Baba in from
the fog.  Something about her appealed to me, and she must be able to
produce some kind of reference.  She can't just have 'growed,' like
Topsy, into her present position.  Oh!  Dawson, who and what is it?"
she broke off to say, as the butler's stately form and impassive face
appeared in the doorway.

"Sir Arthur Congreve wishes to see your ladyship very particularly,"
was the reply.

"I will be down in one moment," she answered; and, when the door had
closed noiselessly after the butler, she turned to Rupert, and made a
small grimace.

"Now, what has brought that tiresome old person here to-day," she
demanded of the world in general; "you don't know him, do you?  He is a
cousin of John's; and the most intolerable bore ever created to worry
his long-suffering relations."

"I know him by name, naturally; but I never had the pleasure----"

"Come and have it now."  Cicely sprang to her feet, and rang the bell.
"I must get a housemaid to take care of Baba; and you come and be
introduced to my pet bugbear.  He and his wife hardly ever come to
town.  They look upon it as modern Babylon, sunk in iniquity.  He is
hugely rich, and their jewels are amazing, but very few people ever see
them.  He lives in a very remote corner of the country, somewhere on
the Welsh border, about ten miles from every reasonable sort of place,
and my private opinion is that he is more mad than sane."

"Why?"

"Oh! a woman's reason.  I think him so, because I think him so.  No;
but without joking, all sorts of queer things have happened in that
family--dark mysteries, and I fancy even crimes; but John never told me
details.  Sir Arthur is a most unspeakably conventional person, but I
believe some of his relations were quite the reverse.  Come and help me
entertain him," she added, when a housemaid had entered the nursery;
"he will probably disapprove of you, and tell me later on that your
presence in the house is damaging to my reputation," she added as they
went down the stairs together.

The elderly gentleman who stood on the drawing-room hearthrug,
surveying the room with an air of disapproval, was, Rupert thought, one
of the handsomest men he had ever seen.  White-haired, with a heavy
white moustache, his complexion was clear and healthy as a girl's, and
his refined, well-cut features were almost cameo-like in their perfect
chiselling His eyes were dark, and very bright, and they fixed
themselves at once upon Rupert with a glance of suspicion.

"My dear Cicely," he said, shaking her stiffly by the hand, "urgent
business, tiresome family business, brought me to this city of dreadful
night for a few hours, and I thought I must call and enquire after your
health, and the health of Veronica."

"Thank you, Cousin Arthur; do sit down; I am very flourishing, and Baba
is in rude health.  We don't call her Veronica yet, you know; she is
really only quite a baby still."

"I strongly deprecate the calling of children by fancy names," Sir
Arthur answered pompously.  "Veronica is a name in our family; a name
about which, alas! cling many sad associations.  But still, I am
convinced that if her poor father had lived, your poor daughter----"

"I haven't introduced you to my cousin," Cicely cut in unceremoniously,
feeling that any comments upon her husband's possible conduct would be
unendurable from Sir Arthur's lips.  "I believe you have never met him.
Mr. Mernside, Sir Arthur Congreve."

Sir Arthur bowed stiffly.  Rupert's greeting was pleasant and friendly;
the older man's rigid attitude merely amused him.

"No; I have certainly never met Mr. Mernside," Sir Arthur said coldly;
"as you know, my dear Cicely, I never come to this terrible Babylon,
unless absolutely driven to do so by irresistible circumstances.  And
in your husband's lifetime, I do not ever remember to have seen your
cousin," he added, with a severe glance at Mernside.

"If you had been much in town in John's lifetime you would often have
met Rupert," Cicely answered quickly.  "Rupert was one of John's
greatest friends, and is Baba's trustee and guardian.  But you," she
tried to speak more lightly, "you and Cousin Ellen bury yourselves so
completely in your country fastness, that you know nothing of the
troublesome world in which we live."

"Troublesome world, indeed," answered Sir Arthur, wagging his head and
looking at her solemnly.  The saving grace of humour had been omitted
from his composition, and he took himself, and the whole world, with a
seriousness that could not be shaken; "in this dreadful city, you
frolic like children on the edge of a volcano, but one day the eruption
will come, and----"

"And then we shall all be little bits of lava, shan't we?" Cicely
asked, her blue eyes wide and innocent, her lips parted in an engaging
smile.

"You are sadly flippant, Cicely.  I had hoped that walking through the
vale of misery, your flippancy would have fallen from you.  But I fear
you are determined to turn this vale of tears, this troublesome world,
as you so justly call it, into a mere playground."

"A very delightful vale--sometimes," Rupert said, in his slow, charming
voice; "the troublesome world can be beautiful, as well as troublesome,
you will allow, especially if you live in the country."

"Beautiful?" Sir Arthur glared at the speaker.  "But all to be burnt
some day--all to be burnt.  When I am asked to admire the mountains
near my home--the woods, the river--I say the same thing always; I say,
'It is all being prepared for the burning.'"

"Perhaps we may enjoy its beauties during the time of preparation,"
Rupert said smiling; "until--the conflagration, the beauty is ours."

"I did not call to-day to engage in flippant small talk," Sir Arthur
answered sternly.  "Like Babylon of old, London is rushing on its doom,
and I have no doubt that the fashionable throng which numbers you
amongst its members, has long ago resigned every serious thought and
effort.  Conversation is as loose as manners and morals, and----"

"My manners and morals are not conspicuously loose, Cousin Arthur,"
Cicely said demurely; "but I don't belong to the smart set, and I don't
even want to belong to it, and I expect that is what you meant by the
fashionable throng.  We live very quietly, Baba and I."

"Quietly?  In all this luxury, this pomp?" Sir Arthur glanced round the
exquisite room with a shudder.  "One of my designs in coming here
to-day, was to ask whether you would ever care to come and pay us a
visit at Burnbrooke, but we could offer you no such luxury as this.
If, however, you would care to come, we have peace there."

"It is very kind of you, and of Cousin Ellen to have thought of it,"
Cicely faltered with a recollection of a depressing fortnight spent in
Sir Arthur's home, during her husband's lifetime; "perhaps in the
spring or summer you would let us come and see you."

"We have been away so frequently during the last three years that we
have seen few people.  My poor wife being a martyr to rheumatism, has
had to visit foreign watering places; we have, as you know, been little
at home, and we have invited few guests to Burnbrooke.  If you will
come, we shall be happy to see you; or if at any time you would care to
send Veronica with her nurse, to breathe some other air than the
pernicious air of this dark town, pray send them."

Cicely made a courteous and smiling rejoinder, but Rupert thought he
could read, in the mutinous setting of her pretty lips, that she had
small intention of allowing her little daughter to breathe the
salubrious air of Burnbrooke.

"You are in town on business only, not for pleasure?" the little lady
asked, taking a certain malicious delight in seeing Sir Arthur's start
of horror.

"Pleasure?  I here for pleasure?  Heaven forbid.  I have come on
troublesome business.  I am anxious about the news of my unfortunate
brother-in-law and his wife, my poor, foolish sister.  Ah! well you
never knew her, did you?"

"No, never."  Cicely shook her head, wildly trying to unearth from the
depths of her mind, any fragments of knowledge she might ever have
possessed about Sir Arthur's brother-in-law; but finding herself
entirely at sea, gave up the attempt.

"Poor, misguided soul," the visitor went on, with a solemn shake of the
head; "she would never listen to reason; never believe what I told her.
My sisters--Ah! well, well, I must not trouble you with our family
skeletons.  I have come up to try and find out if I can where my
brother-in-law is, and to avert worse scandals than already exist."

Cicely, still completely at sea as to the drift of his conversation,
murmured something non-committal and sympathetic, and he continued
speaking with unabated energy.

"I also have some business to do with Scotland Yard," he said
importantly; "my wife has lost a piece of jewellery which she greatly
values, and which I also value exceedingly.  The loss is a very strange
one; and, after serious deliberation, I have decided to put the case
into the hands of the Scotland Yard officials."

"Have you had a burglary?"

"No, nothing of that kind at all.  We can only account for the loss in
one way.  We were travelling home last week, after a visit, and at
Liverpool station my wife's maid put her mistress's dressing bag into
the carriage, she herself standing beside the door.  One person was in
the compartment, a quiet-looking young lady, so the maid describes her.
We reached home.  My wife discovered the loss of the jewel she so much
values.  It had been put into the bag at the last minute before we left
our friends' house, as she had been showing it to a visitor.  The bag,
it is true, was unlocked, but the maid vows she did not leave the
carriage door, and that the young person in the carriage seemed to be a
lady.  The fact remains that the pendant has vanished."

"A pendant, was it?" Cicely asked with interest.

"A very beautiful pendant, one that, to my mind, is unique.  It is made
of a single and very remarkable emerald, set in beautifully chased
gold, and above the emerald there are three initials twisted together
in gold; the initials A.V.C."




CHAPTER VIII.

"IT IS A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH."

"And the Prince had the dearest face in all the world.  It was not
exactly handsome, but it was very strong, and when you looked at it,
you knew that he was good.  And his eyes were grey and very kind,
and----"

"And did he wear white armour, all shining, and a silver crown on his
head?"

Baba's voice, clear and imperious, interrupted Christina's dreamy
tones, and her dimpled fingers seized and shook the girl's hand, in
order to attract her attention, which, as the baby was vaguely aware,
had wandered from the fairy tale in process of being told.  "Did the
Prince have white armour?"

"Yes, I expect so," Christina answered, with momentary hesitation,
flushing as a vision flashed into her mind of a tall figure in well-cut
dark blue serge, that bore no resemblance whatever to silver armour;
"he--he put on armour when he had to go and fight dragons, but when he
was in the Castle with the lovely Princess, he wore a velvet tunic,
dark blue velvet, and a silver crown upon his head."

"And the Princess was just 'zactly like you," Baba said lovingly,
pressing her golden head more closely against Christina's breast, and
looking into the girl's face with adoring eyes, "just 'zactly like my
pretty lady."

Christina laughed softly, running her hands through the child's curls,
and bending down to kiss the uplifted face.

"You are a little monkey, Baba," she said, "and a flatterer.  You
mustn't call Christina a pretty lady.  She isn't a bit pretty, and
she's only just your nurse."

"Baba will call Christina just 'zactly what she likes," the child
answered sturdily, enunciating her words with the clearness often found
in an only child who is constantly with grown-up people.  "Christina's
a very pretty lady, and Baba loves her."

"Baba's a goose, and we must put on our things and go out in the
sunshine and see what we can find in these nice lanes."  She put the
child off her lap, and, going into an adjacent room, brought out the
red cloak in which she had first seen her, and wrapped it round Baba's
graceful little form, drawing the hood over the golden curls.

Barely a fortnight had gone by since Christina had first entered Lady
Cicely's service, after an interview which had ended precisely as
Rupert had laughingly declared it would end, in the engagement of
Christina as Baba's nurse.  The references the girl had produced from
her late employer, Mrs. Donaldson, from an old clergyman who had known
her in Devonshire, and from her father's solicitor, had seemed to
Cicely to justify her in taking this step, even though the Donaldsons
were in Canada, the old clergyman dead, and the solicitor gone to South
Africa.

"She looks genuine; I am sure she _is_ genuine," the little lady said
afterwards to Rupert; "and she was so overwhelmed with delight and
gratitude at the idea of coming to us."

"No doubt she was," Rupert responded drily; "well! no great harm can
come of giving her a month's trial.  I am glad you had the saving grace
to suggest that.  And during the month you will be able to see what she
is made of."

But the month had not fallen out quite as Rupert had naturally supposed
that it would.  Lady Cicely, driven nearly distracted by a scare of
scarlet fever in the near neighbourhood, and unable to use Bramwell
Castle, which was in the builder's hands, had sent Christina and Baba
off, almost at a moment's notice, to Graystone.  In this remote  hamlet
on a remote Sussex border, Mrs. Nairne, an old servant of the Staynes
family, owned a small farmhouse, and also received lodgers; and here,
for the past ten days, Christina and her little charge had been
rejoicing in the country sights and sounds, which even in early
December had a fascination all their own.

To Baba, the farmyard was an unfailing source of delight; and to
Christina, the great spaces of moorland, the deep lanes, the woods
whose soft brown hues gave colour to the hillsides, were a welcome
change from London streets, and the squalor of London lodgings.  To the
girl who for so long had been tossing on a sea of struggle and
privation, her quiet life at Graystone was like a haven of rest; and
her one passionate prayer was, that at the end of her month of
probation, she might still find favour in Lady Cicely's eyes, and keep
the situation which seemed to her a more delightful one than she had
ever dared to hope for in her wildest dreams.  With the help of a
little pony cart, she and the child could make quite lengthy excursions
about the country side, and Christina often found herself wondering why
it was the fashion to talk as if there were no beauties to be found in
the country in winter time.  She revelled in the great sweeps of
moorland that rolled away to far hills on the horizon, hills scarcely
less blue than the soft blue of the winter sky.  And, if the moorlands
were no longer clad in their robe of purple heather, or pale pink ling,
the duns and browns of heath and bracken, the dark green of fir-trees,
and the brightly tinted leaves of the bilberry plants offered no lack
of colour.  On the oaks in the lanes bright brown leaves still hung;
and the trees that were leafless--delicate birches, sturdy ashes,
smooth-stemmed beeches, made so dainty a lacework of bare boughs
against their background of sky, that the leaflessness was in itself
beautiful.  The sunlight poured a flood of radiance on the upland road,
as Christina and Baba jogged peacefully along it, in the wake of the
small black pony, who meandered on at his own pace, just as the fancy
took him.  Larks sang in the sunlight; in the copse under the hill the
thrushes were already beginning to learn their songs of spring; and
Christina, drinking in all the loveliness about her, laughed aloud for
sheer gladness of heart.

They had driven for some distance along the main road, when they came
to a spot where four roads met, and towards one of them Baba pointed a
fat forefinger.

"Let's go along there," she said; "it's such a ducky wee road, and
there's a pond."

Christina was lain to confess that the road indicated had special
attractions of its own.  It wound down from the upland, between hedges
which in summer must be a tangled loveliness of briar roses,
honeysuckle, and clematis; and, skirting a common where a pond
reflected the sunshine on its small ruffled waves, turned down again
between woods that climbed steeply up the hill-side on either hand.
The lane narrowed as it wound onwards, and Christina was beginning to
wonder whether it would end in a mere grassy track, when she saw a
clearing in the woods on the right-hand side, and became aware of
chimney-pots showing above a very high wall.

"What an extraordinarily lonely place," the girl reflected, looking
with a little shudder at the height of the wall, and at the dense woods
which hemmed it in on every side.  Excepting where the space for the
actual house itself had been cleared, and where the lane meandered past
it, it was entirely shut in by woods--beech, oak, and birch on the
lower levels, pines climbing upward to the summit, closing the building
in from all observation.  Thanks to the steep hills and the overhanging
woods, only a very small proportion of sunshine could filter into the
lane, and Christina shivered again, feeling that there was something
sinister about this secluded spot, and the house that was barely
visible behind its encircling walls.

"Baba thinks p'raps the Princess lives behind there," said the baby,
looking with round blue eyes at the frowning walls; "it's a awful,
dreadful place; and p'raps the Dragon's got the Princess safe in there;
and she's waiting for the Prince to come and get her out."

"The Prince will come in his shining armour," Christina answered
brightly; "and then the Princess will come away, and be happy ever
after."

At the moment they were driving past a green door in the wall; and as
she spoke these words, the door was hurriedly opened, and a tall woman
stepped out into the lane.  She was closely wrapped in a dark cloak,
and some magnificent black lace draped her hair.  But it was the sight
of her face that made Christina draw in her breath sharply, for she
thought she had never seen anything more beautiful than its white
loveliness, anything more sad than the glance of the great dark eyes.
She panted a little, as though she had been running; there was a
strange mingling of fear and anguish in her expression, and she held up
her hand with so pleading a gesture, that Christina pulled up, and
leaning from the cart, said gently:

"Is there anything I can do for you?"

The dark eyes met hers, a startled look, one would almost have said a
look of recognition swept over the white face, then she exclaimed
breathlessly:

"Why--I thought--you were--I beg your pardon--it was foolish of me--of
course, I have never seen you before."

"No, never," Christina answered emphatically, knowing that the lovely
face of this woman, once seen, could never have faded from her memory;
"but, I am afraid you are in trouble; can I help you?

"A doctor," the other panted.  "I must have a doctor; and yet--I am
afraid--I am afraid," she wrung her hands together, and her lips
quivered pitifully.

"We are driving back to Graystone.  Can I send a doctor if there is one
in the place?  Or, can I send over to the nearest town?" Christina
asked, struck afresh by the anguish in the other's eyes, and realising
that only some vital necessity could so have moved her.

"I must have a doctor," the words were reiterated, and the woman put
her hands upon the cart, and leant heavily against it.  "I can't
let--him--die--and yet--no one must know if the doctor comes here," she
exclaimed, suddenly pulling herself upright, and speaking fast and
earnestly; "not a living soul must ever know; and the doctor himself?
If you find a doctor for me, promise to make him swear that he will
never divulge where he has been, or what he sees in this house."

Christina looked the bewilderment she felt, and a faint wonder flashed
across her mind whether this woman could be sane.  Her speech savoured
of melodrama, her hurried, breathless sentences, the nervous glances
she cast over her shoulder, and the strangeness of the words she spoke,
all tended to make the girl doubt the speaker's sanity.  But the dark
eyes, unfathomable and sad as they were, looked straight into hers
without a trace of madness; and though she was plainly afraid of
something or somebody, it was not the unreasoning fear of insanity.

"Is there someone ill in that house?" the girl questioned practically;
"is it of great importance to have a doctor?"

"It is a matter of life and death," was the broken answer; "when I
heard wheels in the lane I came out, hoping it might be someone who
would help me.  I--cannot leave him myself; I have no one to send--it
is all that my servant and I can do to manage----" she pulled herself
up abruptly, adding after a moment, "for pity's sake help me if you
can."

"I will do the best I can," Christina answered, bewildered surprise
still her dominant sensation.  "I am a stranger in Graystone.  We are
only staying in a farmhouse there, but by hook or by crook I will get a
doctor for you."

"I think you will carry through whatever you undertake," the other
answered, a smile flitting across the wan misery of her face, as her
eyes rested on the girl's square chin, and firmly cut lips; "you look
as if you would not easily be beaten."

Christina smiled back at her and shook her head.

"I was very nearly beaten a little while ago," she said, gathering up
the reins and preparing to turn the pony's head up the steep ascent
again; "when one is poor, and hungry, all the fight seems to go out of
one.  But I don't like being beaten, and I shall find a doctor for you."

She nodded her head cheerily, and was touching the pony lightly with
the whip, when the stranger clutched the side of the cart again, and
laid a hand on the girl's shoulder.

"Remember, no one must be told that the doctor is coming here; and he
himself must be sworn--_sworn_ to secrecy.  Promise me you will not
tell a soul you have seen me, not a living soul."  She was labouring
under strong excitement, and it alarmed Christina to notice how the
whiteness of her face had extended to her very lips, and what black
shadows of suffering and fear lay under her eyes.

"Promise," she repeated, her grasp tightening on Christina's shoulder.

"I--promise," Christina answered slowly.  "I will not tell anyone that
I have seen you, or what you have said to me; and I will--do as you
wish about the doctor."

Having received the girl's assurance, the woman drew back from the
cart, and stood watching it retrace its way up the hill, her hands
wrung together in anguish, her dark eyes wide with pain.

Baba had been a silent spectator of the strange little scene,
understanding very little of what passed between her two elders, but
watching the face of the beautiful stranger with an intent scrutiny,
curious in one so young.

"That was a beautiful Princess," she said, after the cart had driven a
short distance.  "Baba hopes the Prince will come soon, and take her
right away."

"Perhaps he will," Christina answered absently, relieved that the child
had woven the strange lady into a fairy tale, thus obviating the
possibility that close attention would be paid to remarks Baba might
make about their encounter with her; and speculating vainly over all
that she had just heard and seen, and over the striking personality of
the woman who had commissioned her to do so strange an errand.

Resourceful as nature and necessity had made her, Christina was
nevertheless a little puzzled to think how she could make enquiries
about a doctor, without betraying what she had been especially conjured
to keep secret; but during the drive home her plans were matured, and,
having reached the farm, and put Baba into her cot for her afternoon
nap, she went to the kitchen in search of Mrs. Nairne.

That worthy dame was engaged in making scones for tea, and turned a
flushed but kindly face to Christina, who had already won her heart.

"Well, missy, you and the precious baby's had a nice drive; and I'm
sure you're wise and right to take her out early, in the sunshine, and
let her rest a bit before her tea--a prettier baby never was."

"She is a darling," Christina answered, "and if she hadn't the
sweetest, most wholesome nature in the world, she would be spoilt,
everybody adores her so!"

"There! and who can wonder, miss.  The little dear!  I was baking some
scones for her tea and yours, miss, and----"

"That is very good of you, Mrs. Nairne.  I was going to ask whether you
would be so kind as to look in upon Baba presently; she is asleep in
her cot, and quite safe there.  But, if you would look at her now and
then I should be so grateful.  I haven't had the cart, sent round to
the stables, for I must go up to the post office."

"And I'll do it with pleasure, miss.  You go out with a light heart; no
harm shall come to that little dear, that I'll promise you."

The post office, which occupied one side of the tiny general shop, was
at the end of the straggling row of houses Graystone called its village
street; and Mr. Canning, the postmaster, besides watching over His
Majesty's mails, served customers with bacon and butter, sweets or
string, sugar or tea, as occasion required.  He was weighing out very
brown and moist looking Demarara sugar when Christina entered the shop,
and he looked at her over his spectacles, with all the absorbing
interest felt by a villager for the stranger in their midst.

"A shillingsworth of penny stamps, please," Christina said, when with
much deliberation he had tied up the parcel of brown sugar and handed
it to his customer, "and a packet of halfpenny cards."  Then, when the
customer had departed, she asked a few questions about the
neighbourhood, adding, with well-feigned carelessness:

"I suppose in such a small place as this you have no resident doctor?"

"Well, no, miss," the man answered; "we have no one nearer than Dr.
Stokes--Dr. Martin Stokes.  He lives on the other side of the hill at
Manborough.  I hope the little lady is not ailing?" Mr. Canning asked
sympathetically, for Baba's gracious little personality had endeared
itself to the postmaster, and to the rest of the villagers.

"No; oh, no!" Christina answered quickly; "she is very well, and we
like this lovely place so much.  It is a good thing, though, to know
where the doctor lives, isn't it?" she added, brightly and evasively.

"Ah! there you are right, miss.  Getting the doctor in time saves
fetching the undertaker, as I've said more than once," and Mr. Canning
bowed Christina out of his shop, with all the empressement of a
courtier.

"Manborough--the other side of the hill."  It was, as the girl knew, at
least three miles off, and Sandro, the fat pony who stood lazily
flicking his tail before the shop door, was not to be hurried under any
circumstances.

"A matter of life and death!"  Those words, and the anguished tones in
which they had been uttered, recurred to her, as she stood looking
thoughtfully up the village street, and before her eyes rose the white,
agonised face of the woman who uttered them.

"I think you will carry through whatever you undertake."  Other words
spoken in that same voice, came back to the girl's thoughts, and she
looked with a puzzled frown at Jem, the farm boy, who stood at the
pony's head.

"Taking the short cut over the moor, I believe I can walk there as
quickly as Master Sandro would joggle along the main road," she
reflected, saying aloud after that second of reflection:

"You can take the cart back, Jem; and please ask Mrs. Nairne if she
will be so very kind as to give Miss Baba her tea; and say I have been
detained."

The boy nodded and drove off, whilst Christina walked away in the
opposite direction, following the main road to Manborough, until she
reached a point some way beyond the village, where a steep path--the
short-cut she had recollected--struck across the open moorland.  She
had just reached this point, and was about to turn into the by-path,
when the hoot of a motor sounded behind her, and turning, she saw a
large car coming slowly up the road.  It contained only two occupants;
and with a leap of the heart at her own audacity, Christina suddenly
resolved to stop them, and ask for their help.

"A matter of life and death!" the words still rang in her ears, and
with the resourcefulness in emergency which belonged to her character,
she held up her hand to the two men in the car, and signalled to them
to stop.  The great car instantly slowed down, and Christina, flushing
rosily at her own audacity, stepped forward to speak to one of the two
men who bent towards her.  Both were gentlemen, she saw at once, and
one of them she recognised, and her heart almost stopped beating, when
her eyes met the grey eyes of Lady Cicely's cousin.

He looked at her with grave courtesy, but evidently with no idea that
he had ever seen her before; and, indeed, on the one and only occasion
when they had met in Lady Cicely's boudoir, he had paid very scant
attention to the girl, beyond observing that she was white and thin,
and very shabbily dressed.  The girl who stood now beside his car was
neatly and becomingly gowned in garments of soft dark green, which had
the effect of making her eyes look very deep and green; she was
flushing rosily and becomingly, and the wind blew her dark hair into
fascinating little curls about her forehead.

"Oh! please forgive me for stopping you," she exclaimed breathlessly,
"but--are you going to Manborough?"

"Yes," Rupert answered, "we are going through Manborough.  Is there
anything we can do for you?"

Christina noticed again, as she had noticed on the occasion of their
first meeting, the peculiarly musical quality of his voice; its tones
sent little thrills running along her pulses, and a dreamy conviction
crept over her, that, if only he would go on speaking, she could
willingly stand here for ever, listening to his deep, vibrating voice.
His question roused her to the absurdity of her thoughts, and, flushing
more vividly, she answered:

"I hardly dare ask you what flashed into my mind to ask, when I stopped
you.  But I am very anxious to get quickly over to Manborough to the
doctor; it is an urgent case, and I----"

"Of course we will drive you over," Rupert broke in quickly, opening
the door, and holding out his hand to help her into the back part of
the car.  "I am very glad we happened to be passing."

"It was dreadfully audacious of me to stop you," Christina answered,
smiling in response to his smile, "but I do so want to get to the
doctor as fast as I can, and when I saw the car, I thought of nothing
but what I wanted to do."

Rupert glanced back at her, an amused twinkle in his grey eyes.

"You don't let obstacles hinder your attaining your goal?" he
questioned.

"I--don't think I do," was the reply; "and especially when it is a
matter of real importance--one of life and death."  By this time they
were whirling along the road at a pace which rendered conversation
difficult, and Christina sat back in her comfortable seat, looking
first at the man who had spoken to her, and was now steering the
machine, then at his companion who sat beside him.  Now that Rupert was
no longer smiling pleasantly at her, she observed how grave and worn
was his face, what new deep lines seemed to have carved themselves
about his mouth, what a shadow of pain, or of some gnawing anxiety lay
in his eyes.

"He is in trouble," the girl thought, her heart contracting with pity,
as her eyes rested on the strong, rugged face.  "I wish I could help
him; he looks as if he had lost something he cared for with all his
soul, and it is breaking his heart!"

From the strong face, with its lines of pain, her eyes turned to his
companion--a slight, alert man, military in build--and with fair,
good-humoured features devoid of any marked personality.

His blue eyes had brightened when Christina stopped the car, and whilst
she talked to Rupert, he watched her expressive face with growing
admiration.  They had only proceeded a short distance on their journey,
when he turned round to the girl, and said kindly:

"We are going a great pace, and you are not dressed for motoring; you
must be cold.  Will you wrap yourself in this?" and, drawing from
behind him a heavy fur coat, which he had brought as an extra wrap, if
necessary, he handed it to Christina, who gratefully rolled herself in
its warm folds.

"By Jove! she looks more fetching than ever, with her face looking out
of all that fur," the blue-eyed young man reflected, when he again
glanced over his shoulder at her, "those green eyes of hers are like no
others I ever saw," and Christina, little as she was in the habit of
considering such things, could not help noticing how often during their
three-miles' drive, the young man turned to look at her, or to shout a
remark.  The grey-eyed man looked round only once, to say shortly but
kindly:

"Quite comfortable?"  But even those two words in the vibrating voice,
had, as before, an oddly thrilling effect on Christina's pulses.

That rapid drive across the moorland, in the low sunlight of the
December afternoon, seemed to her for long afterwards, like part of
some extraordinary dream--a dream in which she, and the grey-eyed man,
and the beautiful white-faced woman, were all playing parts; a dream
which had no real relation at all to the commonplace details of
everyday life.

"Here is Manborough," Rupert called out, when, over the brow of a steep
hill, they came in sight of clustering red-roofed houses amongst pine
woods; "now where does the doctor live?  What is his name?"

"Doctor Martin Stokes is his name; I don't know what his house is
called, but Manborough is only a small place," Christina answered.  "If
you will very kindly put me down in the main street, I shall easily
find the right house."

"Oh, no, we will drive you up in state," was the laughing rejoinder;
and the car once more slowed down, whilst Rupert put a question to a
passing rustic, who jerked his thumb to the right.

"Doctor's house be up among they pines," he said; "Doctor calls 'un
Pinewood Lodge."

"Unromantic and ordinary person, that doctor," said Rupert, with a
short laugh; "this country and those woods might inspire a man to
invent a name with some sort of poetry in it.  Ah! here is the lodge in
question--and as ordinary as its name," he concluded, stopping the car
before a closed brown gate, through which a well-kept drive led to a
red-brick house, that might have been transplanted bodily to these
heights, from a London suburb.

"I don't know how to say thank you properly," Christina said a little
tremulously, when she stood by the brown gate, helped out of the car by
the blue-eyed young man, who had skilfully forestalled Rupert in this
act of gallantry; "it is very, very good of you to have helped me, and
will you please forgive me for being so bold and stopping you as I did?"

Rupert laughed and held out his hand.

"Don't think twice about it," he said heartily.  "I am very glad you
did stop the car, and very glad we were able to save so much time for
you.  I hope the doctor will pull your patient well through the
illness."  His hand closed over Christina's small one, the blue-eyed
man likewise shook her by the hand, and before the door bell of the
doctor's house had been answered, the car had whirled out of sight.

"Poor little girl, she was very prettily grateful," Rupert said to his
companion.  "I wonder whose illness she is agonising over.  Plucky
thing to do, stopping us as she did."

"She is a young woman of resource," the other answered.  "I like that
sort of 'git up and git' way of tackling a difficulty.  Now, in her
place, I should have just begun to think what might have happened if I
_had_ stopped somebody's car, by the time the car was two miles further
down the road."

"My dear Wilfred, you hit your own character to a nicety," Rupert
answered with a laugh; "but it's only your confounded laziness of mind
that prevents your being as much on the spot as that little green-eyed
girl."

"Very fetching eyes, too," Wilfred mused aloud, "and a smile that she
ought to find useful.  Can't we come back this way to-morrow, old man?
We might find she wanted some errand done in the opposite direction,
and I'll keep a sharp look-out for her all along the road!"

"As it happens, I have every intention of coming back this way," Rupert
answered drily, "though not in order to enable you to rescue distressed
damsels.  You were not intended for a knight-errant, my good Wilfred;
leave well alone.  But I am bound to come back through Graystone.  I
promised Cicely that on my way home from Lewes, I would look in on Baba
and her new nurse.  They are lodging at old Mrs. Nairne's farm, and
it's somewhere near Graystone village.  Cicely wants to know whether
the new nurse is all she should be; we will look in upon them on our
way back."




CHAPTER IX.

"A VERY BEAUTIFUL LADY."

The doctor's consulting-room was as uninteresting as the rest of the
house, inside and out; and whilst Christina looked at the orthodox red
walls, the few conventional engravings, the closely-curtained windows,
and the severely correct chairs and tables, a feeling of depression
stole over her.  Almost unconsciously she had hoped that the doctor of
whom she had come in search, would prove to be an individual of no
ordinary description; she had an odd fancy that the situation with
which he would have to deal, would be one that was out of the common,
and the bare thought of sending a commonplace, country doctor to help
the beautiful lady with the anguished face, was intolerable to her.
More than once, whilst she sat and waited in the dreary room, whose
outlook into the depths of the pine woods was as depressing as
everything else about it, she half-rose, with a determination to go
elsewhere and seek another doctor.  Remembering, however, the urgency
of her message, and the uncertainty of finding another medical man
within any reasonable distance, she was deterred from acting upon this
impulse, though her heart sank with apprehension when the door at last
opened.  But the man who entered was in no sense the kind of man she
had dreaded to see; there was nothing ordinary or commonplace, either
in his own personality or in his greeting of her, and Christina could
only feel devoutly thankful that she had not been misled by the mere
externals of house and furniture.

"Now will you tell me what I can do for you?"  The voice was cheery and
kind; it gave her a sense of helpfulness, and the man's personality,
like his voice, brought into the room an atmosphere of power and
strength.

He was a short man, with very bright brown eyes, a clean-shaven face,
and a mouth in which humour and determination struggled for the
mastery.  But beyond and above everything else, it was a reliable face:
Christina knew, with a subtle and sure instinct, that whatever this man
undertook, would be carried through, if heaven and earth had to be
moved to bring about the carrying.

"Doctor Stokes?" she said enquiringly.

"No, I am not Doctor Stokes," he answered.  "Doctor Stokes is away; he
was summoned away suddenly.  My name is Fergusson, and I am doing
Doctor Stokes's work."

"I am very glad," Christina exclaimed naively, with a fervour of which
she was not aware, until she saw the twinkle of amusement in the brown
eyes watching her.

"Oh!--I--beg your pardon," she stammered.  "I ought not----"

"It is not my pardon you must beg," the doctor answered, laughing a
spontaneous, and very boyish laugh, "and I will promise not to tell
Doctor Stokes what you said," he added, his eyes still twinkling as he
saw the girl's confusion.

"But indeed--please--oh! do understand," she faltered; "I don't know
Doctor Stokes.  I am a stranger here, and I never saw him in my life,
but----"

"Then why were you so glad to find I was not he?" asked Fergusson, his
amused look turning to one of puzzled enquiry.

"It sounds so silly," Christina said with seeming irrelevance, "but--I
didn't think the person who lived in--this kind of room--was the sort
of doctor I wanted to find."

Fergusson threw back his head and laughed.

"Do you judge all humanity by the rooms in which it lives?" he asked.

"Nobody but a commonplace person could live contentedly in a room like
this," Christina answered vehemently, "or call his house Pinewood
Lodge, or have a house just like this house."

"I rather agree with you, but Doctor Stokes is a total stranger to me
too; we may be libelling him entirely; and--meanwhile, what can I do
for you?

"I have come to ask you to go somewhere, on a matter of life and
death," she answered, "but----"

"Life and death?"--the doctor's smiling face grew grave--"then we must
not delay.  Where am I wanted?"  He touched a bell by the fireplace.
"I will order the car at once.  Tell me all details as briefly as
possible."

His humorous accent had dropped; he spoke in terse, business-like
tones, his brown eyes looked searchingly at her.

"Bring the car round immediately," he said to a man who answered his
bell.  "Now, tell me everything quickly," he went on, turning back to
Christina.

"Before you go, I have to ask you to promise not to tell any living
soul where you have been; and you must swear to tell nobody what you
see and hear when you get to the house."

Fergusson stared at her blankly.

"Swear secrecy about where I go, and what I find there?" he said.

"Yes--swear it," she answered, quailing a little before the sudden
sternness of his eyes.

"But why?--in heaven's name, why?" he questioned, his voice growing
imperious.  "What reason can you have for making such extraordinary
conditions?"

"Oh!--I have nothing to do with the conditions," Christina cried, "and
please--_please_ don't look doubtful, and as if you didn't mean to do
what I ask.  I have only come here as a messenger.  There was nobody
else to send, and the poor, beautiful lady seemed nearly distracted
with grief."

"What poor, beautiful lady?  You are talking in riddles.  Try to tell
me quietly where I have to go, and what is the name of the lady who
needs me."

"I--don't know," Christina faltered, conscious of how strangely her
words must fall upon his ears, when she saw the bewilderment deepen on
his face.

"I was passing a house," she said quickly, before he could speak, "and
a lady came running out--a very beautiful lady.  She asked me to fetch
a doctor.  She said it was a matter of life and death, and she made me
promise to ask the doctor to swear secrecy--absolute secrecy.  That is
all I know--really all I know.  But I am sure she is urgently in need
of help."

"What an extraordinary story!" the doctor said in a low voice, "and you
don't know who is ill? or what is the matter?"

"Not in the least.  I conclude the patient is a man, because the lady
spoke of 'him' and 'he,' but I know nothing more than I have told you.
You will go to her?  You will make the promise she asks?  I can't bear
to think of her sad, beautiful face, and her wonderful eyes."

"I will go--yes, certainly I will go," Fergusson exclaimed, after a
moment's pause; "if it is really a matter of life and death, I have no
choice but to go."

"And--you will promise?"

He looked into her face with a curiously grave and questioning glance.

"You know of no reason why I should refuse to take such an
unprecedented oath?" he asked.

"I know nothing!" she answered emphatically.  "I know of no reason,
either for or against your doing it.  Only--when I think of her
beautiful face, and of her eyes that seemed to hold all the sorrow in
the world, I feel as if you could only do what she asked you."

"And if I refuse to swear?"

"Then I shall refuse to tell you where the lady lives," she answered
with spirit, "and I shall go and find another doctor.  But--oh! please
do what she asks."

A smile broke over Fergusson's grave face.

"I don't half like the business," he said; "I am not fond of swearing
in the dark, so to speak, and what guarantee have I that I am not going
to mix myself up in some discreditable affair?"

"The lady I saw could not do anything discreditable," Christina
exclaimed warmly; "it is unthinkable."

Fergusson's smile deepened.

"She has a warm advocate in you; you are not a friend of hers?"

"I never saw her before," Christina answered.  "I am staying near
Graystone.  I am nurse to Lady Cicely Redesdale's little girl, and it
was only by chance that we were passing the beautiful lady's house
to-day."

"There comes the car," Fergusson said, as the crunching of wheels on
gravel became audible; "now I will drive you as far as our ways go
together, and you shall tell me where I am to go.  I will not take my
man, lest there should be any risk of my destination being discovered.
And--I will take the required oath.  Mind--I do it much against my
will, but, if it is a matter of life and death, I--can't refuse it.
Come--your beautiful lady's secrets will be absolutely safe with me."

As well as she was able, Christina gave a minute description of the
lonely house in the valley, where she had received the strange message,
and Fergusson, having deposited her safely within a very few hundred
yards of Mrs. Nairne's farm, raced on across the moor and down the
steep lane, which the little cart had traversed so short a time before.

"Never knew there _was_ any house down here," he mused, as he drove
further and further along the lane; "uncanny sort of place."  The short
December day was drawing to a close.  No ray of the sunshine that still
shone on the moorland above, penetrated into this valley, whose steep,
thickly-wooded sides threw deep shadows across it.  "What on earth
possessed anybody to build a house in this gloomy hole, when all the
uplands were there to be built upon?"  So Fergusson's musings ran on,
whilst the shadows thickened round him, the gloom of the place
beginning to oppress him like a nightmare.  The roughness and steepness
of the road obliged him to proceed slowly and with great caution, and
the fast-fading light made his progress a difficult one.  It was a
relief to him, therefore, when, through the semi-darkness, he became
aware of a high stone wall on his right, and descried, above the wall,
the dim outline of a chimney, from which smoke issued.

"This, presumably, is the place," he muttered, stopping the car before
a door in the wall; "and now, how does one get into such a very
prison-like abode?"

He had by this time alighted, and was standing in the lane, looking
first at the closed green door, then at the frowning wall, and finally
up the steep way by which he had come--a way which, in the fast-falling
darkness, was beginning to resemble a long black tunnel.

Now that the sound of his car's machinery had ceased, the silence
around him was very eerie, and Fergusson found that some words of the
burial service were beating backwards and forwards in his brain--

"The grave and gate of death ... The grave and gate of death."

He made a great effort to shake off his uncanny sensations, but they
were only heightened by the gloom about him, and by the death-like
silence which brooded over the valley.  The lane, as he could faintly
see, ended only a few yards beyond the gate at which he stood, and
merged itself into a grassy track amongst the densest woodland; and the
house, with its surrounding wall, was so enclosed by woods, that they
seemed to be on the point of swallowing it up altogether.

"What a place for a crime--for any number of crimes," Fergusson
reflected, with a shudder, as he peered about the green door, trying to
discover any means of making his presence known to the inmates of the
house beyond the wall.  But neither bell nor knocker was visible, and
the doctor, after banging vainly on the wood of the door, moved away,
and walked slowly round the wall, seeking for another entrance.  A
narrow, grass-grown path, evidently rarely used, ran close under the
wall, but Fergusson made the whole circuit of the place without finding
any other means of entrance, excepting an old iron gate, rusty with
age, choked up with weeds and rank grass.  It was obvious that the gate
had not been opened for years, and that it was certainly not reckoned
by the inhabitants of the house as one of the entrances.  Fergusson
peered through the bars, but the light was so dim, and the grass and
undergrowth so thick and high, that beyond getting an impression of a
neglected garden, he saw nothing.  He fancied, however, that he could
catch a distant murmur of voices, and he called out loudly:

"Is there any means of getting in here?  I am the doctor."  Total
silence answered him, a silence only broken by the sharp clang of a
closing door inside the house.  When the echoes of the sharply clanging
door died away, silence settled down more deeply than ever upon the
place; and Fergusson, as he completed his circuit of the walls, and
found himself once more at the green door, felt strongly tempted to
climb into his car again and drive away.

But the remembrance of the girl who had so lately stood in his
consulting-room, looking at him with wistful eyes, speaking in so
appealing a voice, determined him to make one more attempt to gain
access to the inaccessible house, and, lifting up his hands, he
battered on the green door with heavy thuds that reverberated loudly in
the silence.

"They must be all deaf or dead, if that fails to bring them out," he
exclaimed grimly, pausing for a moment to take breath; then, when no
one responded to his efforts, he was beginning again to hammer at the
door, when the sound of a footstep fell on his ears, and a woman's
voice from within the gate cried--

"Who is there?"

"The doctor--Dr. Fergusson," he answered impatiently; and upon that, he
heard the grinding of a key in the lock, bolts were shot back, and the
door was opened.  A woman stood in the aperture, a woman whom Fergusson
took to be a servant, and she stood aside, a little, as though inviting
him to enter.

"I was asked to come here," he said.  "Is there someone ill?  Am I
wanted?"

"Yes, sir," the woman answered quietly.  "Will you come in?  I am sorry
there was any delay in answering the door, but--I--couldn't get away."

Her voice was low and shaken, and Fergusson now observed that she was
trembling violently.

"Come--in--quickly, sir," she jerked out.  "I am afraid what may
happen--come quickly!"  Whilst she spoke, she was locking and bolting
the green door again; then, without uttering another syllable, she led
the way up a flagged path, across a bare and deserted garden, to a
white stone house, through whose open front door a stream of light fell
across an unkempt, overgrown lawn.

"This way, sir," the woman said, when, having entered the door, she
turned across a wide hall; "this way--quickly!"  As she uttered the
last word, a little cry broke the stillness of the house--a woman's
cry, sharp with fear, and the doctor's guide, her face suddenly grown
livid and pinched, broke into a run.  They were passing along a
corridor, which intersected the hall at one end, and even in his hurry
Fergusson noticed the thickness of the carpet beneath his feet, and the
heavy curtains that shrouded the windows on his right; noticed, too,
that after that one short sharp cry, a silence had fallen over the
house again--a silence as sinister and uncanny as that in the valley
outside.

His guide paused before a door on their left, and as she turned her
plain but kindly face towards him, he saw how strained and ashen it had
grown, and what a great fear looked out of her eyes.

"It is so quiet," she whispered in low, horror-stricken accents, "so
quiet--I--am--afraid!"

Pushing her aside, Fergusson opened the door, ashamed of feeling how
hard his own heart was knocking against his ribs, ashamed of that
momentary shrinking from what he might find inside the room; but his
involuntary shrinking did not bring with it even a second of
hesitation.  He opened the door widely, and stepped straight into the
apartment.  Excepting for a night-light burning on a chest of drawers,
the room was in darkness, and he could make out nothing of his
surroundings.  Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he
uttered a short exclamation of horror, and moved hurriedly forwards,
calling to the woman behind him to bring a light, and to bring it
quickly.




CHAPTER X.

"IT IS ONLY HE WHO MATTERS!"

Christina's thoughts that evening often travelled to the silent valley,
and to the beautiful woman with the anguished face, who had made so
profound an impression upon her.  Having tucked Baba safely into her
cot, and heard the soft breathing which indicated that the blue-eyed
baby was sleeping, Christina returned to the sitting-room, and drawing
an armchair close to the fire, took up a novel in which she was deeply
interested.  But to-night her thoughts refused to follow the chequered
fortunes of her heroine, and she no longer felt herself the least
thrilled over the approaching climax of the story.  The strange piece
of real life into which she had been unwittingly plunged, interested
her far more than any heroes or heroines of fiction, and she soon found
herself with her book on her lap, and her own eyes fixed on the glowing
coals, whilst her mind recapitulated all the events of the past few
hours.

"It is just like something entrancingly exciting in a melodrama," she
reflected: "that lonely house, and the beautiful lady with the white
face, and that silent valley."  Remembering the silence in the valley,
she shuddered a little, and wondered whether the lady of the
unfathomable eyes ever minded the loneliness and silence; whether
sometimes she was afraid--down there in the stillness of those
sheltering woodlands.

"I don't suppose I shall ever know any more about her," the girl's
thoughts ran on, "but I should like to see her again.  I never saw
anybody like her in my life before, and she looked so sad; I wish I
could have helped her more."  From this point her reflections passed on
to subsequent events of the day: to her own audacious stopping of the
big motor; to the grey-eyed man whose failure to recognise her had
given her just a tiny pang of regret; to the blue-eyed man, who had
looked at her with an admiration to which she was quite unaccustomed.
The memory of it brought a little flush to her face, even now that she
sat alone in the firelight, and brought with it, too, a stab of
resentment.

"I don't think I quite like anybody to look at me like that," she
thought; "and, after all, even if I am only a nurse, earning my own
living--I--am still a woman."  She drew up her head with a proud
gesture characteristic of her, and then her reflections slipped away
from the two men who had driven her to the doctor's house, and wandered
on to the doctor himself.

"I like _that_ man," she murmured emphatically, lifting her foot to
push a protruding coal between the bars; "he wouldn't ever look at any
woman as if he didn't respect her, and a woman might put her whole
trust in him; so she might in--that other!"  Rupert's face rose again
before her mental vision, and she wondered as she had wondered many
times that afternoon and evening, what was the pain that had carved
such deep lines in his face, and brought so haunting a look of misery
into his eyes.

"His eyes seem as if he was looking all the time for something he has
lost," she thought, repeating her former musings; "perhaps, if he is
Lady Cicely's cousin, I may see him again some day.  I wonder what his
name is--besides Rupert?  I only heard him called Rupert."  She leant
back in her chair, her book still upon her knee, her eyes seeing many
pictures in the coals--pictures in which a man with a rugged face, and
kind grey eyes, seemed to be continually walking beside a tall lady
with a beautiful white face, and eyes of unfathomable sadness and
mystery, until the pictures merged themselves into dreams, and
Christina slept peacefully.  A loud knocking at the door startled her
into wakefulness, and jumping to her feet, she confronted Mrs. Nairne,
who looked at her with injured amusement.

"Been asleep by the fire, missy, I suppose.  I couldn't make you hear
nohow, knock as I might.  There's a gentleman in a motor-car at the
door, wanting to speak to you all in a hurry."

"A gentleman--in a motor--wanting _me_?" Christina asked, feeling that
she must still be in the world of dreams.

"Well, he said he wanted to speak to the young lady who was staying
here, with the little girl," Mrs. Nairne answered, and Christina, a
faint hope stirring at her heart that Lady Cicely's cousin might have
come to ask her about Baba, went quickly to the farmhouse door, to be
greeted by Dr. Fergusson, who awaited her with obvious impatience.

"I came t

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/38573