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The Making of a Prig

by Evelyn Sharp · English · Gutenberg #42153 · 505,360 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Making of a Prig

Author: Evelyn Sharp


        
Release date: February 22, 2013 [eBook #42153]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAKING OF A PRIG ***

Transcriber's Note:

  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal
  signs=.

  The book uses em-dashes as ellipses at the ends of sentences. These
  have been left spaced as in the original text.




_By the Same Author:_

     WYMPS: Fairy Tales. With eight coloured illustrations by Mrs.
     Percy Dearmer.

     AT THE RELTON ARMS: A Novel.

     THE MAKING OF A SCHOOL-GIRL.




     THE
     MAKING OF A PRIG

     BY
     EVELYN SHARP

     JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD
     NEW YORK AND LONDON
     1897




     _Copyright, 1897_,
     BY JOHN LANE.

     _All rights reserved._

     University Press:
     JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.




The Making of a Prig




CHAPTER I


It was supper time at the Rectory, and the Rector had not come in.
There were two conflicting elements at the Rectory, the Rector's
disregard of details and his sister's sense of their importance. There
was only one will, however, and that was his sister's. So the meals
were always punctual, and the Rector was always late; a fact that by
its very recurrence would have long ceased to be important, had not
Miss Esther loved to accentuate it by a certain formula of complaint
that varied as little as the offence itself. This evening, however, he
was later than usual; and Miss Esther did not attempt to conceal her
impatience as she glanced from the old clock in the corner down to the
fire-place, where another familiar grievance awaited her.

"Katharine, how often have I told you not to lie on the rug like a
great boy?" she said querulously, in the tone of one who has not the
courage or the character to be really angry. She added immediately, "I
want you to ring the bell for the soup."

The girl on the floor rolled over lazily, and shut her book with a
bang.

"Daddy hasn't come in yet," she said, sitting up on her heels and
shaking the hair out of her eyes. A latent spirit of revolt was in her
tone, although she spoke half absently, as if her thoughts were still
with her book. Miss Esther tapped her foot on the ground impatiently.

"It is exactly two minutes to eight," she said sharply. "I asked you
to ring the bell, Katharine."

The girl walked across the room in a leisurely manner, and did as she
was told with a great assumption of doing as she wished. Then she sat
on the arm of the nearest chair, and the rebellious look returned to
her face.

"How do you know it is daddy's fault, Aunt Esther? The Stoke road is
awfully bad, and it's blowing hard from the north-west. He may have
been kept, and cold soup's beastly. I think it's a shame."

"I really wish," complained Miss Esther, "that you would try and
control your expressions, Katharine. It all comes of your romping so
much with young Morton. Of course I am a mere cipher in my own house;
but some day your father will be sorry that he did not listen to me in
time. Can you never remember that you are not a boy?"

"I am not likely to forget," muttered Katharine. "I should not be
sticking in this stupid old place if I were. I should be working hard
for daddy, so that he could live with his books and be happy, instead
of grinding his life away for people who only want to get all they can
out of him. What's the use of being a girl? Things are so stupidly
arranged, it seems to me!"

"My dear," said Miss Esther, who had only caught the end of her
speech, "it is difficult to believe that your father is one of God's
chosen ministers."

"But he isn't," objected Katharine. "That's just it. They made him go
into the church because there was a family living; so how on earth
could he have been chosen? Why, you told me so yourself, Aunt Esther!
It's all rubbish about being chosen, isn't it?"

"Don't chatter so much," said Miss Esther, who was counting her
stitches; and Katharine sighed petulantly.

"I can't think," she went on to herself, "how he was ever weak enough
to give in. He must have been absent-minded when they ordained him,
and never discovered it until afterwards! Don't you think so, Dorcas?"

But Dorcas, who had only just brought in the soup, was hardly in a
position to make the necessary reply; and Katharine had to content
herself with laughing softly at her own joke. The meal passed almost
in silence, and they had nearly finished before they heard the sound
of wheels on the wet gravel outside. Miss Esther looked up, and
listened with her chronic air of disapproval.

"Dear me," she sighed, "your father has driven round to the stable
again by mistake. What are you doing, Katharine? I was just going to
say grace."

But Katharine had already dispensed with the ceremony by vanishing
through the door that led into the kitchen; and Miss Esther hurried
over it alone, and managed to be seated in her chair near the
reading-lamp, upright and occupied, by the time her brother came into
the room. There was something pathetic in the way she elaborated her
little methods of reproach for the sake of one on whom the small
things in life made no impression at all. And when the Rector entered,
smiling happily, with Katharine hanging on his arm and whispering
eager questions into his ear, it was easy to see that his mind was
occupied by something far more engrossing than the fact that he was
late for supper. But Miss Esther preserved her look of injury, and the
Rector, who was making futile efforts to produce a paper parcel from
the pocket in his coat tails, suddenly gave up the attempt as he
caught sight of her, and began to smooth his sleek white hair with a
nervous hand.

"Yes, Esther," he said, although she had not spoken a word.

"We have sent away the soup, but there is some cold meat on the side,
I believe. Katharine, do be seated instead of romping round the room
like that! Your father can see to himself," was all that Miss Esther
said.

"Yes, Esther," said the Rector submissively; and he helped himself to
some apple pie, and sat thoughtfully with the knife in his hand until
Katharine came and replaced it with a fork. "It is a windy night," he
continued, as no one seemed inclined to say anything. Miss Esther was
waiting for her opportunity, and Katharine had caught the infection
of her mood, and was again absorbed in her book on the hearthrug.

"Tom Eldridge came up about his dying wife, and Jones's baby is no
better," said Miss Esther, presently.

"Dear, dear! how very unfortunate!" observed the Rector, smiling.

"I said you must have been detained unexpectedly," continued Miss
Esther, with more emphasis. "They seemed very much in want of a little
counsel."

"I'm certain they weren't," said Katharine audibly. "Eldridge wanted
some more port wine, and Mrs. Jones came to see what she could get.
And I don't fancy either of them got it."

"Very unfortunate!" said the Rector again. "I was certainly detained,
Esther, as you cleverly divined,--unavoidably detained."

"People," said Miss Esther, very distinctly, "who have spiritual
brothers and sisters depending upon them, have no right to be
detained."

"I never can think," put in Katharine, "how any one has the courage to
be a clergyman. It simply means having crowds of relations, dull,
sordid, grasping relations, who come and rob you systematically in
the name of the Lord."

"A spiritual man," continued Miss Esther, without heeding the
interruption, "is not--"

"Oh, auntie," implored Katharine, "do let daddy eat his supper in
peace."

"My child," interposed the Rector gently, "I have finished my supper.
Does Eldridge expect me to do anything to-night, Esther? Or Mrs.
Jones?"

"My dear Cyril," said Miss Esther sternly, "if your own instincts do
not prompt you to do anything, I should say they had better go
untended."

The Rector sighed, and played with his knife. He was looking like a
schoolboy in disgrace. Katharine gave a scornful little laugh.

"What _is_ the good of making all that fuss over a trifle? Just as
though the cough of Jones's baby were half as important as the genuine
rat-tail daddy has picked up at Walker's!"

The murder was out, and Miss Esther put down her knitting and prepared
for a characteristic outburst. But the Rector had already unwrapped
his treasure and placed it on the table before him, and her bitterest
reproaches fell unheeded on his ears.

"Genuine sixteenth century," he murmured, as he stroked it reverently
with his long, thin fingers.

"Only yesterday," said the strident voice of his sister, "you were
telling me you had no money for a soup kitchen. It was a poor living,
you said; and now-- How can you set such an example,--you with a
mission in life?"

"I vow I'll never have a mission in life," said Katharine, "if it
means giving up everything that makes one happy. Poor daddy!"

"One of Christ's elect," continued Miss Esther, "to be turned aside
for a bit of tawdry pewter! For what you can see in a tarnished,
old-fashioned thing like that, is more than I can understand."

The Rector looked up for the first time.

"Indeed, Esther," he said in a hurt tone, "it is a fine piece of
sixteenth century silver." Katharine cast a wrathful look at the stern
figure near the reading-lamp, and came over to her father's side. The
rebellious note had gone from her voice altogether as she spoke to
him.

"Let me look, daddy, may I?" she asked. Cyril Austen pulled her on to
his knee, and they bent together over the old spoon. Miss Esther
knitted silently.

"Let me see," said the Rector presently, turning an unruffled
countenance towards his sister, "what were we saying? About some
parishioners, wasn't it?"

"Parishioners? How can you talk of parishioners, when the first
trivial temptation draws you from the right path and--and makes you
late for meals? Isn't it enough to neglect your sacred duty, without
upsetting the household as well? Coming in at this time of--what is it
now, Cyril?"

For a worried look had suddenly crossed the Rector's face. He pulled
out his watch, and consulted it with the nervous haste of a man who is
constantly haunted by having forgotten something.

"Let me see,--how very stupid of me," he said, laughing slightly. "I
fancy there was something else, now; whatever could it have been, I
wonder? It was not the spoon, Esther, that made me late. Kitty, my
child, what did I say to you when I came in, just now?"

"You said, 'I have picked up a genuine rat-tail at Walker's;' and then
you gave your hat to Jim, and hung up the whip on the hat peg!"

"Bad child!" said the Rector, still looking uneasily about him. "I
wonder if Jim would know?"

But here a light was thrown on the matter by the entrance of Dorcas,
who brought the ambiguous message from Jim that the pony was ready to
start again, if the Rector was "going to do anything about the poor
creature down agin the chalk pit."

"Bless my soul!" exclaimed the Rector. "To be sure, that was it.
Esther, brandy and blankets, my dear,--anything you've got! We must
bring him home at once, of course. I knew there was something. Esther,
will you--? Ah, she always understands."

For, to do her credit, Miss Esther never wasted her time in reproaches
when there was really something to be done; and in the bustle that
followed, while the pony carriage was being filled with everything
that could be of use in case of an accident, Katharine found herself
left in the hall, with the intolerable feeling of being neglected, and
burning with curiosity as to the cause of it all.

"Daddy, daddy, what is it? Is any one hurt? Mayn't I come too?" she
pleaded, as the Rector came out to look for his coat.

"Eh, what? Oh, a poor fellow broken his leg in the chalk pit. Doctor's
with him now. What is he like? Kind of tourist, I should fancy;
evidently didn't see his way in the dark. There, run off to bed,
Kitty; you'll hear all about it in the morning."

"But I want to hear _now_," said the child, quivering with impatience.
"What sort of man is he, daddy? Shall I like him, do you think? Oh, do
tell, daddy!"

"My child, I hardly noticed. My hat--ah, thanks! He had a black beard,
I fancy,--quite young though, I should say,--and a sallow face--"

"How unhealthy it sounds; and I hate unhealthy people! I don't think I
want to go now," said Katharine, in an altered tone.

Nevertheless, when the unwilling pony was being urged again into the
storm and the darkness, some one slipped through the little group in
the porch, and sprang into the carriage beside the Rector. And the
Rector, who was incapable of a decided action himself and never
disputed one on the part of others, threw the rug over her knees, and
they drove off together to the scene of the accident. It was a wild,
black night; and the Rector shivered as he bent his head to the
furious gusts of wind, and allowed the pony to struggle on feebly at
its own pace. But Katharine sat upright with her head thrown back,
and would have liked to laugh aloud as the wind caught her long loose
hair and lashed it, wet with rain, across her face.

The chalk pit was situated at the further end of the village; on a
fine day, it might have been reached in a ten minutes' drive, but
to-night it was nearly half an hour before the pony managed to bring
its load to a standstill beside the group of men who had been waiting
there since dusk. Katharine recognised all the village familiars who
came forward at their approach,--the doctor, who had tended her
childish maladies; the schoolmaster, who had taught her to read; the
churchwarden, who still loved to tell her stories that she had long
ago learnt to know by heart. But she had no eyes for any of these
to-night; she looked beyond them all, as she jumped lightly out of the
carriage, at the man who lay on the ground with his eyes closed. A
lantern hung from the branch above, and swung to and fro in the wind,
casting intermittent gleams of light across his face.

He opened his eyes wearily as the Rector came forward, and they rested
at once upon Katharine, who stood bending over him with the rather
heartless curiosity of a very young girl.

"Kitty, move out of the way, my child," the Rector's voice was saying.

"I don't think he looks unhealthy at all," said Katharine dreamily.




CHAPTER II


The sun rose, the following morning, on a scene of devastation. The
storm of the previous night had come at the end of a month's hard
frost, and everything was in a state of partial thaw. Glistening pools
of water lay in the fields on the top of the still frozen ground,
looking like patches of snow in the pale sunshine; and a curious
phenomenon was discernible in the brooks and the ditches, where a
layer of calm water covered the ice that still bound the flowing
stream below. The only trace of last night's gale was a distant
moaning in the tree-tops; while above was a deepening blueness of sky
and a growing warmth in the sunshine. There was winter still on the
ground, and the beginning of spring in the air.

Two women had met under the beech-trees at the edge of the chalk pit.
Early as it was they had already collected large bundles of sticks;
for the beauty of the morning was nothing to them, and the storm, as
far as they were concerned, merely meant the acquisition of firewood.
They had matter for conversation enough, however; and it was this that
was making them loiter so early in the morning near the scene of
yesterday's accident.

"Is it the poor thing what fell down yonder, you be a-talkin' of, Mrs.
Jones? 'Cause I see Jim hisself this blessed morning, I did, and you
can't tell me nothing I doan't know already, you can't, Mrs. Jones,"
said Widow Priest with fine scorn.

There was a jealousy of long standing between the two neighbours. Mrs.
Jones was the sturdy wife of the sexton, and her family was both large
and increasing,--a fact which she attributed entirely to Providence;
though, when three of them succumbed to insufficient food and care,
she put down their loss to the same convenient cause, and extracted as
much consolation as she could out of three visits to the churchyard.
Widow Priest, on the other hand, had buried no one in the little
churchyard on the hill. For her husband had committed suicide, and
they had laid him to an uneasy rest without the sedative of a
religious ceremony; and his widow was thus robbed even of the triumph
of alluding to his funeral. So her widowhood did not bring her its
usual compensations; and she felt bitter towards the wife of the
sexton, who had buried her three and kept five others, and would
probably replace the lost ones in time.

"I bain't so fond o' gossiping nor what you be, Widow Priest,"
returned Mrs. Jones in loud, hearty tones. "I got no time for talking
wi' strangers here an' strangers there, wi' my man an' five little
'uns to do for. An' then there's always the three graves of a Saturday
to tidy up, which you ain't got, poor thing; not but what I'm saying
it be your fault, in course, Widow Priest."

Widow Priest gave a contemptuous sniff as she sat down to tie up her
fagots, and Mrs. Jones remained standing in front of her, with one arm
thrown round her bundle of sticks, and the other placed akimbo, an
effective picture of triumphant woman.

"Touching the poor thing what broke his back yonder," she continued
cheerfully: "I was putting the baby to bed at the time, I was, and I
see the whole thing happen from my top window, I did. He jumped the
fence, all careless like, jest as though he didn't know the pit were
there for sure. An' straightway he tripped up, he did, an' down he
went. God help him, I says! An' I puts the baby down, an' I says to
our Liz, 'Here, my child,' I says, 'stand by your precious brother
while I goes across to the pit,' I says. An' jest as I says that, up
comes the Rector an' the doctor with him, driving friendly like
together they was. So I says to our Liz, 'It's Providence,' I says,
'what sent they two blessed creatures here this day,' I says. An' I
caught up my shawl, I did, an' went hollerin' after them. 'What is it,
Mrs. Jones?' says the Rector, 'is it the baby again?'--'Baby?' I says,
'no, sir; not but what it racks me to hear that child cough, it do.
There be a man yonder,' I says, 'jest broke his neck down agin the
chalk pit.' Lord! it were a sight to see they two men turn that pony
round! An' the rain were that bad, it give me lumbago all down my
back, that did. Not but what I soon got back to baby again, poor
little angel, with a cough that makes my heart ache, to hear it going
jest like the others did afore they died. But ye didn't see him fall
in, now; did ye, Widow Priest?"

The widow shouldered her fagots grimly, and stalked off with dignity.
When she reached the bend of the road, she turned round and shouted a
parting word in a tone of unmitigated contempt.

"It bain't his neck, _nor_ his back, Mrs. Jones. It be both his legs,
an' he be at the Rectory now, in the best bedroom, he be; an' there
he'll likely stop a month or two, Jim says, he do. But Jim didn't give
ye a call perhaps, Mrs. Jones?"

"Bless ye, Widow Priest, I ain't told ye half what I know," cried Mrs.
Jones. "You be a poor thing, you be, if ye can't stand to hear a
body's tale; an' you that's so lonesome too, an' got no one to do for,
like I have. Lord, what a hurry some folk do be in, for sure! Eh, but
that be Miss Katharine yonder, blest if it ain't; an' Widow Priest be
out o' sight, too! I reckon as Miss Katharine knows more nor Jim, an'
I be going--"

But a wail from the cottage opposite awakened the mother's sense of
duty, and she hastened across the road and forgot all about the
accident in an immediate necessity for castigation.

Katharine came over the brow of the hill that sloped down towards the
chalk pit, scaled the wooden fence at the bottom, and skirted the edge
of the little chasm until she came to the line of beech-trees. Here
she paused for a moment, pecked a hole in the soft ground with her
heel, and peered thoughtfully down into the pit. Then she turned
abruptly away again, and struck across the fields to the further side
of the village, where she sped down a grassy lane that was for the
most part under water, and stopped at last before a gap in the hedge
that was hardly large enough to be noticeable. She squeezed adroitly
through it, however, and came in view of an ugly modern house standing
in a neglected looking garden, with an untidy farmyard and some stable
buildings at the back. Here she was careful to keep a clump of
box-trees between herself and the front of the house, until she could
come out with safety into the open and approach the iron fence that
separated the paddock from the lawn. This she vaulted easily, dropping
lightly on the grass beyond, and managed to arrive at last unnoticed,
under a small oriel window at the corner of the house. She picked up a
handful of small stones, and swung them with a sure aim at the little
glass panes, and called, "Coo-ey," as loudly as she dared.

"Lazy toad!" she muttered impatiently. "On a morning like this, too!
And just when I had got a real adventure to tell him, that he knows
absolutely nothing about, not anything at all!"

She did not throw up any more stones, but mounted the iron railings
instead, and sat there with her feet dangling and her eyes fixed on
the oriel window.

"It's the biggest score I've ever had over him," she chuckled to
herself. "I think I shall _explode_ soon, if he doesn't wake up. I'm
getting so awfully hungry, too; it must be eight o'clock."

She called again presently, without changing her position; and this
time there was a sign of life behind the oriel window, and the
curtains were drawn aside. Katharine forgot all her previous caution,
and gave a loud "whoop" of satisfaction. The lattice flew open, and
some one with rumpled hair and flushed cheeks looked out and yawned.

"Don't make such a shindy, Kit; you'll wake the mother," he grumbled.
"Why the dickens have you come so beastly early?"

"Because Aunt Esther was asleep, of course," answered Katharine
promptly. "Hurry up, Ted, and have your bath; it'll make you feel
piles better. And you'll have to get me some food; I could eat my
boots."

"Don't do that," said Ted. "Last night's steak will do just as well."

"How is _she_?" asked Katharine, with a jerk of her head towards the
front of the house.

"Awful. She's getting worse. She docks the pudding course at supper
now. Don't go, Kitty; I'll be down directly."

He was not long, but she was full of impatient reproaches by the time
he joined her at the fence.

"I believe you'd like to give the world a shove to make it go round
quicker," he retorted, swinging himself up beside her.

"Well, you surely don't think it moves very fast now, do you?" she
said. "At all events, Ivingdon doesn't," she added emphatically.

"Well, what did you come for, old chum?" he asked, smiting her
shoulder with rough friendliness. "Not to complain of this slow old
hole, I bet?"

"Get me something to eat, and I'll tell you."

"Oh, hang, Kitty! I can't. Cook will swear, or go to the mother, or
something. Can't you wait till you get home?"

"No, I can't. And I didn't tell you to go to cook, or to _her_; did I,
stupid? Isn't there a pantry window, and isn't the larder next to the
pantry, and aren't the servants having breakfast in the kitchen, out
of the way? Eh?"

"Well, I'm bothered! But I can't get up to that window, anyhow."

"There's a loose brick just below, and you _know_ it, you lazy boy!
What's the use of being exactly six foot, if you can't climb into a
window on the ground floor? _I_ can, and I'm only five foot four. Oh,
you needn't bother, if you're afraid! I can keep my news, for that
matter."

"I don't believe there is any news. Why, I only saw you yesterday
afternoon. And nothing ever happens in Ivingdon. You are only rotting,
aren't you, Kit?"

"All right; I don't want to tell you, I'm sure. Good-bye," said
Katharine, without moving a step.

He called himself a fool, and told her she was a beastly nuisance, and
that of course there wasn't any news, and he didn't want to hear it if
there was. And he finally strolled round to the pantry window, as she
knew he would, and returned with a medley of provisions in his hands.
They laughed together at the odd selection he had made,--at the cold
pie he was balancing on a slice of bread, and the jam tart that
crowned the jug of milk; and they fought over everything like two
young animals, and drank out of the same jug and spilled half its
contents, and ended in chasing one another round the paddock for no
reason whatever.

"Walk home with me, and I'll tell you the news. Come on, Ted!" she
cried.

"Guess I will, and chance it. If she doesn't like my being late for
breakfast she'll have to do the other thing. Through with you, Kitty,
and don't make the hole any larger! There's always the chance that she
might have it mended, in a spasm of extravagance, and that would be so
bally awkward for us."

She told her news as they went swinging along side by side over the
wet fields, leaping the pools of standing water, and switching the wet
twigs in each other's face. But they grew quieter as the interest of
the tale deepened; and by the time Katharine had reached the episode
of the chalk pit, Ted was walking gloomily along with his hands in his
pockets and his eyes bent on the ground.

"You always have all the luck, Kitty," he said mournfully. "Why wasn't
I there? Think of the use I should have been in helping him into the
carriage; only think of it, Kitty!"

"You wouldn't have been a bit of good," she returned cruelly. "You're
much too clumsy. They wouldn't even let Jim or daddy help. _I_ held
his head, so there!"

"Well, I suppose I could have held his beastly head, too, couldn't I?"
roared Ted.

"It wasn't a beastly head; it was awfully nice,--hair all silky, not
baby's curls like yours," said Katharine scornfully. "And wasn't he
plucky, too! His leg must have hurt frightfully, but he just didn't
say a word or utter a sound. All the way home, whenever the thing
jolted him, he just screwed up his mouth and looked at me, and that
was all. It was the finest thing I've ever seen."

"But you haven't seen much," said Ted.

"No, I haven't. But I've seen you squirm when you had toothache. And
you're not fit to speak to if you have an ordinary headache," laughed
Katharine.

They walked the rest of the way in silence.

"That is where he lies now," said Katharine, with a dramatic gesture
towards the spare-room window. Her cheeks were red with excitement,
and she never noticed the look on Ted's face as he shrugged his
shoulders and made a great pretence of whistling carelessly.

"What sort of a chap is he? Some tourist bounder, I suppose," he
condescended to say.

"He isn't a bounder. He has awfully nice hands,--white, and thin, and
soft. He's rather pale, with a lot of black hair and a curly beard."

"What a played-out chap to make such a fuss about!" said Ted, turning
away contemptuously. "Sounds more like a monkey than anything else.
Good-bye. I wish you joy of him!"

"I suppose I'll see you again some time?" she called after him.

"Oh, yes; I suppose so."

"And it _was_ news, wasn't it, Ted?"

"You seem to think so, anyway."

"Poor Ted!" She laughed, and ran indoors. But he had hardly crossed
the first field before she had caught him up again, breathless and
penitent.

"I didn't mean it, Ted; I didn't, _really_, old boy. It wasn't news,
and he _is_ a monkey, and I'm a horrid pig. Come up after lunch, won't
you, Ted? I promise not to talk about him once, and I want to show you
something. You will come, Ted, won't you?"

She flung her arms round him in her impulsive way, and gave him one of
her rough, playful hugs. But for the first time in his life, Ted
shook her off stiffly, and hastened on.

"What's the matter?" asked Katharine, more perplexed than annoyed.

"Oh, all right; I'll come. Don't be a fool, Kitty!" he jerked over his
shoulder; and she turned away, only half satisfied, and went slowly
into the house. It was characteristic of her that the smallest lack of
response from some one else would change her mood immediately; and
when she entered the dining-room a few minutes later, her vivacity was
all gone, and the first words she caught of the conversation at the
breakfast-table only helped to irritate her still further.

"Oh, bother Mr. Wilton!" she said crossly. "The whole house seems to
have gone mad over Mr. Wilton. I am tired of hearing his name."

The Rector seemed unconscious of her remark, and only pulled her hair
softly as she slipped into the chair beside him. But Miss Esther
stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence, and cast a meaning
glance towards Katharine which her father did not see, though she of
course did.

"My dear," said Mr. Austen, in reply to his sister, "I am sure you are
quite competent to do it. Nancy always said you were a born nurse;
and Nancy knew, bless her! Besides, the poor young man has been sent
to us in his affliction, and there is nothing else to be done, is
there? My child, it will not interest you; we were only saying that
Mr.--Wilton, is it?--would require careful nursing; and your aunt--"

"Really, Katharine, there is no necessity for you to interfere. You
know too much as it is, and this question is not one that concerns you
at all. Perhaps you will keep to the matter in hand until it is
settled, Cyril!"

"My dear, I thought it was settled," said the old man mildly. "The
poor young fellow has to be nursed, and you are the best person to do
it. So there is nothing else, is there, Esther, that need detain me? I
am rather anxious--that is, I would like to finish my paper on the
antiquities of the county, and it is already ten minutes past--"

"It is a most extraordinary thing," interrupted Miss Esther irritably,
"that you never will give your attention to anything that really
matters. You totally misunderstand my meaning, Cyril. How can I, your
sister and a single woman, with due propriety--Katharine, you can go
and feed the chickens."

Katharine did not move, and the Rector got up from his chair.

"My dear," he remonstrated, "I think you over-estimate the difficulty.
It is the duty of the woman to look after the sufferer, is it not? I
really think there is nothing more to be said about it. Meanwhile--"

"I don't know why you are in such a hurry, Cyril; it is the day for
the library to be cleaned, so you cannot use it yet. The whole
business is most inopportune; why should he break his leg in Ivingdon,
when he might have done it quite conveniently in the county town, and
been taken to the infirmary like any one else?"

The Rector wondered vaguely why his room was cleaned more than once a
week; but he sat down again and folded his hands, and said that he was
of the same opinion as before and saw no reason why the unfortunate
young man should not be nursed by Miss Esther.

"No more do I," said Katharine. "What's the difference between nursing
Shepherd Horne through bronchitis and nursing Mr. Wilton with a broken
leg, except that Mr. Wilton is presumably not so unwashed? I never can
see why the poor people should have the monopoly of impropriety, as
well as of the Scriptures. Besides, you can easily reduce him to the
level of a villager by reading the Psalms to him every day. That would
make you feel quite proper, wouldn't it, auntie? And I dare say he
wouldn't mind it much, when he got used to it."

"Your profanity," said her aunt severely, "is becoming perfectly
outrageous. If you were sometimes to say a few words of reproof to
your own daughter, Cyril, instead of dreaming your life away--but
there, I must go and look after poor Mr. Wilton! I wonder whether he
likes his eggs boiled or scrambled?" she added doubtfully. For Miss
Esther was one of those women who reserve the best side of their
nature for the people who have no real claim upon them; and she took
little interest in any one who was neither poor nor afflicted. The
unpractical temperament of the Rector both astonished and chafed her,
and she had nothing but a fretful endurance for her high-spirited
niece, in whom a natural longing for action and an inordinate sense of
humour were fast producing a spirit of revolt and cynicism. But an
invalid, who was thus thrown suddenly into her power, appealed
strongly to the Rector's sister; and her diffidence had entirely
disappeared by the time she had gone through all the objections that
propriety impelled her to raise.

"I feel quite thankful," she said, smiling blandly, "that the poor
fellow has fallen into such good hands."

"So do I," remarked Katharine, as the door closed. "It will be all the
better for your paper on the local antiquities, won't it, daddy? Daddy
_dear_, just think of all the time we shall have to ourselves, now
that she's got Mr. Wilton on her hands! Poor Mr. Wilton! Let's come
and clear Dorcas out of the library and look at what you've done,
shall we? Come along, daddy, _quick_!"

The Rector stroked her long hair, with a doubtful look on his face.

"I am afraid, Kitty, I do not look after you as I should," he said. "I
am a bad old sinner, eh?"

"That's why I love you so. You are a brick!" exclaimed Katharine.

And she dragged him impetuously out of the room.




CHAPTER III


Meanwhile, Paul Wilton lay wearily in the old-fashioned guest-room
over the porch. The pain of his broken limb had kept him awake most of
the night; and now that the suffering was less the discomfort
remained, and he felt no more inclined to sleep than before. With a
kind of mechanical interest he had watched the pale light on his
striped blind grow deep and red, and then again pale and bright, as
the sun came up over the hills. His restlessness increased as the time
wore on; the sensation of being unable to move began to grate on his
nerves, and he wished impatiently that something would break the
stillness of the house, and awaken the people in it who were sleeping
so unreasonably. He raised himself on his elbow as a light step came
along the passage outside, and sank back again with a feeling of
disappointment when it passed his door, and went downstairs into the
garden. In reality it was much earlier than he thought; and it was
still some time longer before the usual early morning sounds
testified to the existence of a maid. He heard the stairs being swept,
and suffered silently as the broom was struck clumsily against his
wall in its downward course. Then the front door, was unbolted with a
good deal of noise, and a few mats were banged together in the open
air, and something was done with the door scraper. A conversation,
held across the lawn with Jim, had the effect of an altercation,
though it was in reality only an inquiry on the subject of milk,
shouted shrilly in broad dialect. Later on, came the welcome crackle
of a fire and the clatter of teacups; and a smell of hot bacon began
to pervade the air.

"At all events, that means breakfast," muttered Paul. "It is not to be
hoped that it will be worth eating, but at least it will bring a human
being into the room. I wonder why ordinary people never have any ideas
for breakfast beyond hot bacon! It is sure to be in thick chunks, too,
and salt, oh, very salt! Don't I know it? It recalls my childhood.
There will be eggs, too,--there always were eggs when we had visitors;
and bad coffee made by unaccustomed hands, also because there is a
visitor. I know that coffee too. On the whole, it is wiser to keep to
tea in strange places of this sort, although one knows beforehand
that it will be thick, and black, and flavourless. I know the tea,
best of all. In quite decent houses, one gets that tea."

Nobody came to him, although there were other voices about the house
now; and he turned from his dissertation on food to a study of the
pictures on the wall. They were of the class that had also been known
to him in his childhood; and he smiled sardonically as he glanced at
the two texts hidden in a maze of illumination, and the German print
of John the Baptist standing in layers of solid water, and the faded
photograph of a baby girl with tangled curls and a saucy mouth.
Something in the shape of that mouth suggested the shadowy events of
last night to his mind, and brought with them the vague recollection
of a girl's face looking curiously down at him, and the pleasurable
sensation of being supported by two firm, soft hands. He rather liked
dwelling on that part of last night's adventures, until a real twinge
of pain in his leg recalled also the less pleasant episodes, and he
shuddered as he remembered the horrors of his transit from the chalk
pit to the Rectory.

"I hate being in pain; it is so vulgar," he muttered distastefully;
and a dread crossed his mind lest his suffering should become more
than he could bear with dignity.

A timid knock came outside the door, and the maid entered to draw up
the blind. She looked clumsy, and Paul sighed. She sidled along the
wall to the door again as soon as she could, and asked shyly when he
would have his breakfast.

"As soon as you like; and--er--Mary, would you kindly give me that
coat? What's the time? And is it a fine day?" asked Paul hurriedly. He
was almost childish in his anxiety to keep her in the room for another
moment. But to be called by the cook's name so far confused her that
she vanished precipitately; and Paul smiled, a little more cynically
than before, and returned to his observations of the pictures. Just
then he heard the end of the conversation between the boy and girl,
under his window, and was amused at his own share in their quarrel.

"Anyhow, if that young woman is going to be about, it may not be so
bad, after all," he reflected.

He was reduced to despondency again, however, by the arrival of the
breakfast, which fully realised his expectations. For one who
professed to have a wide grasp of life, Paul Wilton was singularly
affected by trifles. His spirits were not raised when he found who his
nurse was to be; and, competent as Miss Esther soon proved herself, he
remained convinced that the child with the joyous laugh who made so
much merriment about the house, would have suited him far better. And
again, he was amused at his interest in some one whom he had hardly
seen, and who would probably turn out to be an undeveloped schoolgirl,
some one who would ride roughshod over his susceptibilities, and even
fail to understand his feelings about things. It seemed impossible to
him that he should be able to endure any one who did not understand
his feelings about things. She might be plain, too; women with
fascinating voices were often extremely plain. And if she were neither
mature nor attractive, there could be no object in giving her another
thought; for woman, to Paul Wilton, was merely an interesting
necessity,--like his food; something to fill up the gaps that were not
occupied by work, or art, or any of the real things of life; and
something, therefore, to be taken in as delicate a manner as possible.
He liked to talk to beautiful women in picturesque surroundings,--to
play on their emotions, and to dally with their wit; but the women
had to be beautiful, and their setting had to be appropriate.

"Please do not trouble to wait," he said to Miss Esther in the
afternoon, when he found her preparing to sit with him. "I shall be
quite happy if you will have the goodness to give me the paper and the
cigarette case. Thanks."

When she had gone, having lacked the courage to tell him that tobacco
smoke had never yet polluted the sacred mustiness of the best spare
room, Paul lay back with a sense of relief, and began to review his
situation gloomily.

"How I could have made such an ass of myself, I don't know," he
murmured. "Foisting myself on complete strangers for six or seven
weeks at least! And such strangers, too! Good Lord, how shocked the
dear lady looked when I said I hadn't a relation left who cared a hang
whether I was alive or dead. I must tell her, as an antidote, that my
father was a parson; I have known that to take effect in the most
ungodly circles. Perhaps, if I could swear I should feel better. But I
am not a swearing man; besides, she might leave me to that painfully
dull maid if I did. And that would be a pity," he added reflectively;
"for, at least, she does know how to make a fellow as comfortable as a
fractured leg will let him be."

A sudden shoot of pain made him turn his head wearily on one side. He
had told the doctor, only that morning, that it was nothing, and that
he did not suffer much; and then had been unreasonably disappointed at
the professional verdict that it was a simple fracture, and presented
no complications. He would have liked to be an interesting case, at
least.

"I wonder if I am likely to get a glimpse of that jolly little girl,"
he went on, looking idly at the faded photograph opposite. "It is
probably the one who steadied my head in the dark, last night; the one
who laughs, too. A Philistine place like this could never produce two
of them. However, I shall never find out as long as I am nursed by
that dragon. And after all, why trouble about it? It shows what a
baleful effect idleness can have upon a man, when an unsophisticated
parson's daughter with a jolly laugh can--hullo!"

He heard voices on the landing, and listened eagerly. There was the
sound of a scuffle and a stifled laugh, and some one shook the door by
falling clumsily against it.

"Come in, do!" shouted Paul desperately, and the door opened with a
jerk.

"I say, did we disturb you, or anything? I'm beastly sorry; but Kitty
would rot so, and I couldn't help it, really. And, I say, I'm awfully
sorry you're so hit up."

It was Ted, apologetic and self-conscious. Paul smiled encouragingly;
it was at least some one to talk to, even if it was a boy under
twenty, for whose kind he had as a rule little sympathy. He could see
there was some one else too, on the landing outside; so he smiled a
little more. It pleased him to have his curiosity satisfied, though
perhaps he would not have liked it to be called curiosity.

"You see, Kitty will play so poorly," pursued Ted, plunging his hands
in his pockets to give himself more confidence. "I shouldn't have
dreamt of bothering you like this, if it hadn't been for Kitty."

"I am quite content to believe that it was the fault of Miss Kitty,
whose acquaintance I have not the honour of possessing," said Paul
gravely. "But won't you come in a little further, and explain
matters?"

Ted came in a good deal further, just then, assisted by an unexpected
push between his shoulders.

"It's so poor of Kitty; and it isn't my fault, I swear it isn't!" said
Ted, in an injured tone. "You see, she wants me to say--Oh, hang, Kit,
do let a fellow explain! Well, she says that--that--well, she wants to
come in too, don't you see? She doesn't see why she should have to go
and talk to horrid old men in the village, when they won't let her
come in and talk to you; at least, that's what she says. And she says
it's all rotten humbug-- Well, you know you did! But Miss Esther will
about kill me when she finds it out. Kitty never thinks of that, she's
so poor."

Paul smiled again, partly at himself for being young enough to
appreciate the childishness of the situation.

"Where is Miss Esther?" he asked, like a man, wisely.

"Oh, she's out right enough; but still--"

"Yes," said Paul reflectively, "I recognise that there are still
difficulties in the way. But don't you think, as I am decidedly as
much afflicted as the other horrid old men you mentioned, and as Miss
Esther is out, that--we might all agree to vote it rotten humbug? Just
for a few minutes, you know!"

And Katharine, who had been listening anxiously to every word,
slipped into the room at this point of the negotiations, and closed
the door; nodded cheerfully to Paul as though she had known him all
her life, and dropped sideways on the chair at the end of his bed.

"I knew you wouldn't mind," she said. "Ted declared you would; but
Ted's so awfully dense sometimes, isn't he?"

Paul was willing to admit that, on this occasion, Ted had been
remarkably dense; but he only murmured some commonplace about the
correctness of her judgment, and the honour he felt at her
discrimination.

"Oh, I _knew_!" said Katharine confidently. "I am never wrong about
people. Ted is. He makes fearful hashes about people; I always have to
tell him who is to be trusted, and who isn't."

"I should like to know," observed Paul, "how you manage to know so
much about people whom you have never seen before,--myself, for
instance!"

"But I have seen you before! Oh, I forgot; of course, you didn't know.
I was with daddy last night when he came to fetch you. Don't you
remember? I suppose you were too bad to notice much."

"That must have been it," assented Paul. "I just remember some one
supporting my head, or it may have been my shoulders--"

"It was your head. That was me!" cried Katharine, with animation.
"Wasn't Ted jealous when I told him,--that's all!"

"I wasn't," said Ted. "But it was just like Kitty. Girls always do
have all the luck."

"I am glad," said Paul drily, "that at least one of you was fortunate
enough to view my discomfiture."

Ted laughed, but Katharine became suddenly thoughtful.

"I was very sorry for you, I was really," she said.

"Oh, no, excuse me,--merely interested," said Paul.

Katharine reflected again.

"Perhaps I was; how caddish of me!" she said, and looked at him
doubtfully. Paul raised his eyebrows; to be taken seriously by a
woman, at such an early stage of her acquaintance, was a new
experience to him.

"Oh, please," he exclaimed, laughing, "don't be truthful whatever you
are! It's much more charming to think that you _were_ sorry for me."

Katharine still seemed puzzled. She turned to Ted instinctively, and
he came to her rescue.

"She thought you were awfully plucky and all that; she told me so. I
was rather sick about it, of course; but, after all, it wasn't really
worth minding because you were hit up so completely, you see."

"You are a singularly brutal pair of young people," observed Paul,
glancing from one to the other. "I should like you to have the feel of
my leg for half an hour. I fancy you would find yourselves 'hit up,'
as you are pleased to call it."

"Oh, but we're not a bit brutal," objected Katharine. "Ted never can
help saying what he thinks at the moment,--that's how it is. It's
because he shows all his feelings, don't you see?"

"You mustn't think Kitty is unfeeling because she doesn't say things,"
continued Ted. "She hates spoofing people, and she never says things
she doesn't mean. She doesn't always say them when she does mean them;
it's rather rough on a fellow sometimes, I think," he added feelingly.

The garden gate swung to, and they sprang to their feet
simultaneously.

"Shall we scoot?" asked Ted, who seemed the more apprehensive of the
two.

"I suppose so. Bother!" said Katharine regretfully. Ted was already
gone, but she still lingered. The flying visit to Paul, instead of
satisfying her curiosity about him, had only roused it still more; and
she sauntered half absently towards him, without the least pretence of
being in a hurry to go.

"Good-bye," she said, and put her hand into his. It was the first time
she had shown any signs of shyness, and Paul began to like her better.

"Not good-bye," he said lightly. "You will come in again, won't you?
We shall have a good lot to tell each other."

"Shall we?"

"Well, don't you think so?" He dropped her hand and laughed. It seemed
absurd that this child, who behaved generally like a charming tomboy,
should persist in taking him seriously when he merely wanted to
frivol.

"I'll come if it won't bore you," said Katharine shortly. She was
wondering what there was to laugh at.

"Can you write a tolerable hand?" he asked.

"I write all daddy's things for him."

"Then we'll see if something can't be arranged," he began. He
congratulated himself on his tact in helping to gratify her evident
wish to see him again; but she baffled him once more by suddenly
brightening up, and seizing upon his suggestion before he had half
formed it.

"Could I be your secretary, do you mean? Why, of course I could. What
fun! Aunt Esther? Oh, that's nothing. _I_ will manage Aunt Esther.
Good-bye."

She managed Aunt Esther very effectually at supper time, by calmly
announcing her intention of becoming Mr. Wilton's secretary. And the
Rector's sister, who was a curious compound of conventional dogma and
worldly ignorance, and knew into the bargain that it was of no use to
withstand her headstrong niece, gave in to her newest whim with a bad
grace.

"Do as you like; I am no longer the head of the house, I suppose," she
observed fretfully.

"Oh, yes, you are, Aunt Esther!" retorted Katharine with provoking
cheerfulness. "_I_ only want to be Mr. Wilton's secretary."

Paul was not so elated as she had expected to find him, when she
walked into his room in Miss Esther's wake on the following day, and
told him that she had gained her point and was ready to become his
secretary. Being such a responsive creature herself, she always
expected every one else to share her emotions.

"Aren't you glad?" she asked him anxiously.

Not being able to explain that what he wanted was not so much a
secretary as a pretty girl to amuse him, he said with his usual smile
that he was delighted, and proceeded to dictate various uninteresting
letters of a business-like character.

"So you live in the Temple," she observed, as she folded up a letter
to his housekeeper. "Isn't it a gloriously romantic place to live in?"

"It is convenient," said Paul briefly. And that was all the
conversation they had that day.

He wanted no letters written the next day, and she read the paper to
him instead. But Miss Esther stayed in the room all the time, with her
knitting, and there was no conversation that day either. On the third
day, however, her aunt was wanted in the parish; and she deputed the
Rector to take her place in the sick room. She might have known that
he would forget all about it, directly she was gone; but Miss Esther
always acted on the assumption that her brother possessed all the
excellent qualities she wished him to have, and it never occurred to
her that he would spend the afternoon in finishing his paper on the
antiquities of the county.

"Aunt Esther has gone to see a poor woman who has lost her baby. I
never can imagine why a woman who has lost her baby should be visited
just because she is poor. Can you?" said Katharine, as she settled
herself on the spare-room window-seat with her writing materials.

"No," said Paul, concealing his satisfaction that Miss Esther was of a
different opinion. "You needn't bother about writing any letters
to-day, thanks," he continued carelessly; "and I don't think I want to
hear the paper, either."

"Don't you? oh!" said Katharine, looking disappointed. "Then there's
nothing I can do for you?"

"Oh, yes. You can talk, if you will," said Paul, smiling. "Come and
sit on the chair at the end of the bed, where you sat the first day
you came in. I can see you, then."

"It is ever so much nicer to see the person you are talking to, isn't
it?" observed Katharine, as she obeyed his suggestion.

"Much nicer," assented Paul, though it had never occurred to him to
suggest that Miss Esther should occupy that particular chair. "Now
then, talk, please!"

Katharine made a sign of dismay.

"I can't," she said. "You begin."

"Who is your favourite poet?" asked Paul solemnly. She disconcerted
him by taking his question seriously, and he had to listen to her
enthusiastic eulogies of several favourite poets, before he had an
opportunity of explaining himself.

She detected him in the act of suppressing a yawn, and she stopped
suddenly, in the middle of a sentence.

"I believe I am boring you dreadfully. Shall I go?" she asked. The
colour had come into her cheeks, and her voice had a note of distress
in it.

"I want you to tell me something, first," was his unexpected reply.
"Do you talk about poetry to young Morton?"

"Ted? Why, no, of course not. What an awful reflection! Ted isn't a
bit poetic, not a little bit; and he would scoff like anything. I have
never talked about the things I really like to anybody before; not
even to daddy, much."

This was a little dangerous, and the tomboy daughter of the parson was
not the kind of personality that was likely to make the danger
fascinating. And Paul's first impulse was to wince at the unstudied
frankness of her remark; but four days of seclusion had been
exceedingly chastening, and the flattery that underlay her words was
not unpleasing to him.

"Then what made you suppose _I_ cared about poetry, eh?" he asked
deliberately.

"Why," said Katharine, staring at him, "you began it, don't you
remember? I thought you wanted me to tell you what I thought."

"Yes, yes; I am aware of that. But don't you think we have talked
enough about poetry for one day?" said Paul, half closing his eyes. He
was already regretting his stupidity in expecting her to understand
him.

"How awfully funny you are! First you say--"

"Yes," said Paul, as patiently as he could, "I know. Don't let us say
any more about it. Supposing you were to talk to me now as you would
talk to young Morton, for instance!"

Katharine shook her head doubtfully.

"I don't think I could. You're not like Ted; you don't like the same
sort of things. You're not like me, either."

Paul smiled grimly.

"We're both the same in reality, Miss Kitty. Only, you are focussing
it from one end, and I from another. I mean, you are too abominably
young and I am too abominably old, for conversation. We shall have to
keep to the favourite poets, after all."

Katharine had come round to the side of the bed, and was regarding him
critically, with a very serious look on her face.

"What is the matter?" she asked abruptly. "I hate people to say they
are old--when they are nice people. It makes me feel horrid; I don't
like it. I never let daddy talk about growing old; it gives me a sort
of cold feel, don't you know? I wish you wouldn't. Besides, I am not
young, either; I am nearly nineteen. I know I look much younger,
because I won't put my hair up; but my skirts are nearly to the
ground. What makes you say I am too young to be talked to?"

"I said you were too young for conversation. It is not quite the same
thing, is it?"

"Isn't it?" said Katharine, and she looked away out of the window for
a full minute. What she saw there she could not have told, but it was
something that had never been there before. When she brought her eyes
round again to his face, the serious look had gone out of them, and
they were twinkling with fun. "I know!" she laughed. "Let's talk
without any conversation."

"She's the same woman, after all," was Paul's reflection.

They did not mention the favourite poets again; but they had no
difficulty for the rest of the afternoon in finding something to talk
about. It was getting late when the garden gate gave its usual
warning, and Katharine got up with a sigh.

"When shall I see you again?" he asked. They had not gone through the
formality of shaking hands, this time.

"When Aunt Esther has _not_ gone to see a poor woman who has lost her
baby," said Katharine, laughing.

"Nonsense! we will keep the letters and the newspaper for that kind of
visit. Won't some one else die, don't you think, so that we can have
another talk?"

"I'll see," said Katharine, which could not strictly be called an
answer to his question. But it fully satisfied Paul.




CHAPTER IV


The weeks crept on; and Paul Wilton, from being merely an object of
interest and pity, gradually became the greatest mystery in the
neighbourhood. Such a reputation was entirely unsought on his part,
although, had he been aware of it, the probability is that it would
not have been wholly unpleasing to him. For it had been his pose
through life to mystify people,--not by deliberately assuming to be
what he was not, but by strenuously avoiding any appearance of what he
was; and his indifference, which was what people first noticed in him,
was entirely feigned for the purpose of concealing that his real
attitude towards life was a critical one. It was not unreasonable that
a man of this calibre, suddenly placed in a quiet country parish,
should end in making some sort of a sensation there. Miss Esther from
the beginning had suffered much, and silently; but a man who had a
father in Crockford and a mother in Debrett, was to be forgiven a
good deal, and she felt compelled to overlook even the ash of his
cigarettes, and his French novels, when she found them both on the
chaste counterpane of the best spare-room bed. But there were others
in Ivingdon who, not having much of a pedigree themselves, were
inclined to undervalue the importance of one; and some of these, the
doctor, for instance, and Peter Bunce the churchwarden, came to the
Rector for enlightenment.

"Eh, but he doan't give hisself away much, do he, now?" said the
churchwarden, jerking his thumb in the direction of the lame man, who
had just swung himself past the window on his crutches. "He be proper
close, I reckon, eh?"

"He is a very intelligent young man," said the Rector vaguely. "He has
quite an appreciation of Oriental china."

It was Sunday afternoon, and the Rector was dispensing whiskey and
cigars to his guests, with a prodigality that might have been
attributed to Miss Esther's absence at the Sunday school. There was an
ease, too, about their manners and their conversation, which was to be
traced to the same cause.

"I suppose he's beastly clever, and all that, isn't he?" asked Ted
morosely. He was sitting on the window ledge, a convenient position
which allowed him to shout occasional answers to the questions that
came from Katharine on the other side of the lawn. Just then, however,
she was joined by Paul; and Ted knew instinctively that he would have
no more questions to answer after that.

"It is difficult to say what he is," observed the doctor. "You can't
get him to talk; at least, not much. Generally, when I've done all the
professional business, he relapses into total silence, and I just have
to go; but sometimes he is inclined to be chatty, and then he makes a
delightful companion. But the odd thing is, that I know no more about
the man himself at the end of a conversation than I did at the
beginning. A barrister, did you say he was? That accounts for the
judicial manner, then; but the question is, what is there behind it
all?"

No one seemed to have an answer ready to the doctor's question; but
Peter Bunce took a long pull at the whiskey, and brushed the cigar ash
from his capacious waistcoat, and attacked the subject with fresh
vigour.

"There ain't no finding out anything about no one, without you take a
bit o' trouble," he remarked wisely. "Mayhap Mr. Austen, yonder,
might know a something more than us folk. Hasn't he got never a
father, now? There's a won'erful lot to be gathered from knowing of a
man's father, there is. Like enough he's one o' they London folk, as
daren't speak aloud for fear of its getting into the newspapers.
London folk is mighty well watched, so I've heard; there's never a
moment's peace or safety in London, some say. Mayhap Mr. Wilton's
father is a London gen'leman, now!"

"His father?" said the Rector, with sudden enthusiasm. "His father was
something short of a genius, sir! He is the best authority we have on
the numismatics of his neighbourhood. Have you never heard of Wilton's
'Copper Tokens'?"

"Guess we have, sir, pretty often," laughed Ted.

The Rector looked pathetic, and handed him another cigar, with an
apprehension that arose from the distant clang of the garden gate.

"They all laugh at me," he said in a cheery tone that evoked no one's
pity. "I'm an old fool; oh, yes, we know all about that. But if you
had read Wilton's 'Copper Tokens,' you wouldn't want to know who this
man's father was. Let me see,--what did I do with my Crockford?"

"I expect you thought it was a hymn-book and carted it up to church
this morning," said Ted, in a tone of forced merriment. He still had
one eye on the lawn, and what he saw there did not raise his spirits.

"Died at the age of fifty-eight, when his son was a lad of eighteen,
he tells me," continued the Rector. "That was the same date that the
fifth edition of the 'Copper Tokens' was issued, some ten or fifteen
years ago now. Bless me, how time flies when we're not growing any
younger!"

For the space of a moment or two, everybody present was occupied with
a mental calculation. The churchwarden was the first to give up the
attempt, and he returned doggedly to the original topic.

"Age ain't got nothing to do with it," he began, heaving a sigh of
relief as he substituted his pipe for the unusual cigar. "'Cause why?
Some folk's old when they're young, and other folk's young when
they're old; that's where it lays, you see."

Nobody did see; but Ted threw in a vicious comment.

"The Lord only knows how old he is, but he's as played out as they
make them," he said.

The churchwarden smiled, without understanding, and Cyril Austen was
too deep in his Crockford to hear what was passing; but the doctor had
been young himself, not so long ago, and he understood.

"Does he talk about leaving?" he asked in a casual manner, directing
his remark to the boy on the window ledge. "There's nothing to keep
him here now, as far as I can see."

"Don't know anything about him," said Ted, with a studied
indifference. "I should have thought, from the way Kitty speaks of
him, that London couldn't do without him for another moment. What they
all see in him, I don't know. I suppose it's because I'm such a rotten
ass, but he seems just like anybody else to me as far as brains are
concerned. And he can't talk for nuts. But Miss Esther says his family
is all square; and that's enough for the women, I suppose."

The doctor nodded sympathetically, and Ted laughed as if he were a
little ashamed of taking himself so seriously.

"He's going to make himself scarce on Wednesday," he continued, rather
more cordially. "He's got a pal of his coming down on business
to-morrow, and they're going off together. Good thing, too, eh? Don't
know anything about the pal--he's not any great shakes, I expect; but
Wilton swears he knows a lot about coins, and of course that will
fetch the Rector. Fact is, this place is getting too clever for me.
There's Kitty, who rots about poetry and things till it makes you
sick. She never used to; and it's no good her trying to spoof you that
she isn't altered, because she is,--and all for the sake of a chap
like Wilton, who hardly ever opens his mouth! It's so poor, isn't it?"

But here the arrival of Miss Esther postponed any further discussion
of the Rectory guest. The doctor suddenly remembered that he had a
patient to visit, and took an abrupt departure; and the churchwarden
refused a curt invitation to tea, and went hastily after him. Ted
lingered a moment or two, without being noticed at all; and Miss
Esther, having successfully routed her brother's guests, went into the
garden to disturb the conversation on the other side of the lawn.

Some two days later, Paul Wilton and his friend from London were
pacing up and down the narrow strip of gravel path that skirted the
house on the south side. In the absence of Katharine, who had induced
him to prolong the period of helplessness, as he would have wished to
prolong any other pleasurable sensation, Paul had no reason to play
the invalid; and, except for an occasional limp, there was nothing in
his walk to indicate lameness. There was the usual inexplicable smile
on his face, however, as he listened to the bantering conversation of
the man at his side, and occasionally interrupted it with one of his
dry, terse remarks. His companion was a little elderly man, with small
features and a fresh complexion, whose geniality was the result of
temperament rather than of principle, and whose conversation was toned
with a personal refrain that made it naïvely amusing.

"That's a pretty child, by the way," he was saying, with the air of a
connoisseur. Katharine had just left them, and they could hear her
laughing with her father indoors. Paul murmured an assent, and went on
smoking. His companion glanced at him sideways, and smiled gently.

"Very pretty," he repeated, "but ridiculously young. And who is the
charming boy who is so gone on her? She doesn't see it a bit, and he
hasn't the pluck to tell her. I'm quite sorry for that boy; I've been
in his shoes many a time, and I know what it feels like. He's got a
lot to teach her, that's certain, eh? Doesn't interest you, I suppose!
If it had been me, now, chained here with a broken leg and nothing to
do, with an idyllic love story going on under my eyes--ah, well! you
are not made that way, and I am too old, I suppose. Besides, in spite
of her charm, she isn't exactly my style."

"No," said Paul; "she is not your style."

"All the same, she's remarkably pretty, and I'm not too old to admire
a pretty woman," chuckled his companion. "'Pon my word, I'm quite
inclined to envy that boy. Just imagine a veritable woman, still
thinking herself a child, with a delightful boy for her only
companion, and no one to stand between them! I'd have given worlds for
such a chance when I was his age."

"But, you see, you are not his age; so it is no use trying to cut him
out. Besides, you ought to know better, Heaton, at your time of life,"
said Paul, in a jesting manner that was a little strained. Heaton took
his remark rather as a compliment than otherwise.

"You won't alter me, my boy; you'll find me the same to the end of the
chapter,--so make up your mind to that. I'm not ashamed of it either,
not I! Seriously, though, I'm quite interested in our little love
story yonder. I should like to help that boy. Silly ass! why doesn't
he make a plunge for it? He isn't likely to have a rival."

"Perhaps that is why he doesn't," observed Paul. "But I don't see why
we should trouble ourselves about it."

"That's where you're so cynical," complained Heaton. "These little
affairs always interest me intensely; they bring back my youth to me,
and remind me of my lost happiness. Oh, life! what you once held for
me! And now it is all gone, buried with my two sweet wives, and I am
left alone with no one to care what becomes of me."

His eyes were moist as he finished speaking, and Paul walked along at
his side without offering any consolation. He would have found it
difficult to explain why he had chosen Laurence Heaton for a friend.
It would be more correct to say, perhaps, that Heaton had chosen him,
and that he had lacked the energy or the power to shake him off. It
was generally true that his sentimental egotism bored Paul
excessively, and yet he found something to like in a nature that was
so unlike his own; and he was so secretive himself that the artless
confidences of Heaton, if a little wearisome, at least relieved him of
the necessity of adding to the conversation. Besides this, he was a
man who never willingly sought the friendship of others, and the
obvious preference that the good-natured idler, who was so many years
his elder, had shown for him when they first met at a public dinner,
had secretly flattered him not a little, and their acquaintance had
grown after that as a matter of course.

"All the same," resumed Heaton in his ordinary manner, "an outsider
never can do much in these cases. Perhaps it would be better to leave
them alone; and yet, if the boy were to come to me for the benefit of
my larger experience--"

"Don't you think," interrupted Paul, "that we have talked about a
couple of children as much as we need? It's all very well for an old
reprobate like yourself to spend your time in reviving your lost
youth, but I haven't so much leisure as you have, and I want to hear
about those shares you mentioned in your letter last week."

Heaton laughed good-humouredly.

"You don't realise, my dear fellow, how anything like that always
interests me. But you wait until your time comes; at present you are
too cynical to understand what I mean."

"Or too romantic," suggested Paul.

"Oh, no!" said Heaton. "Romance is only an equivalent for
inexperience; I think you're a cold-hearted beggar who lets the best
things in life go by, but I shouldn't call you inexperienced. You've
got a finished way with women that always appeals to them; women love
a little humbug, if it's well done. I'm too obvious for them, too
simple-minded, and that always frightens them off."

"Does it?" smiled Paul.

"Now, you ought to marry," continued Heaton briskly. "I believe in
marriage, hanged if I don't! and it's been the making of me.
Everything that is good in me I owe to my married life."

"Did it really take two marriages?" murmured Paul. His companion
smiled at the joke against himself, and they stood for a moment in
silence, looking over the lawn that had just acquired its fresh bloom
of green. Katharine's voice came out to them again through the open
window, this time raised in indignant dispute with her aunt.

"She is a curious mixture of hardness and sentiment," said Paul
involuntarily, "and her surroundings have made her a prig; but she
interests me rather."

"Ah," said Heaton, "I quite agree with you. There _is_ a touch of the
prig about her. But can you wonder? She is the only bit of life and
prettiness about the place, and she never meets her equal. They think
a good lot of her, too. And the parson's daughter generally thinks a
good lot of herself."

"She does it rather charmingly," said Paul, in a dispassionate tone,
"and she is fairly well read, and knows how to express herself. For a
woman, she has quite a sense of criticism."

"That's bad," said Heaton decidedly, "very bad. A woman should have no
sense of criticism. That is what makes her a prig. In fact, as I have
often said to you before, a prig is made in three ways. First of all,
she is made by her own people, if she happens to be clever; and
secondly, by the world, if she happens to be successful; and thirdly,
by her lover, if she isn't in love with him. But of course if she _is_
in love with him he may be the cause of her unmaking."

Some one in a light-coloured print frock jumped out of a side window
and disappeared in the direction of the summer-house. The two men
stood and looked after her without being noticed.

"As you say," remarked Heaton blandly, "she does it rather
charmingly."

Paul roused himself with an effort.

"Half-past three," he said, looking at his watch. "Didn't you promise
to go and look at the Rector's coins some time this afternoon?"

And in another five minutes he had joined Katharine in the
summer-house.




CHAPTER V


The summer house was set far back in the shrubbery, and although
hidden from the house by laurels and box-trees, was open at the front
to a stretch of brightly coloured flower beds and trimly cut grass. It
was a glorious day in May, and spring in its fulness was come. The
white fruit blossoms had given place to crumpled green leaves, and the
early summer flowers were in bud. Paul Wilton lay on a low basket
chair, where he had flung himself down after making his escape from
his garrulous friend; and at his feet, with an open book on her lap,
sat Katharine. Obviously, a great many poor women had lost a great
many babies, since the day she had sat on the chair at the end of his
bed and talked about her favourite poets, for the book on her lap was
only a pretence to which neither of them paid the least attention, and
their conversation was of a purely personal nature, the kind of
conversation that has no subject and no epigrams, and is carried on in
half-finished sentences.

"I am beginning to understand why you don't paint or write or do
things, although you know such a lot about them," observed Katharine,
half closing her eyes and making a picture of the square of sunlit
garden as she saw it framed in the woodwork of the summer-house door.

Paul smiled. It was very pleasant to be told by this child of Nature
that he knew "such a lot about things."

"Tell me why," was all he said, however.

"I think it is because it puts you in a position to criticise every
one else. It makes you so superior, in a sort of way. Oh, bother! I
never can explain things. But don't you see, if you were a painter
yourself, you couldn't say that there was only one painter living, as
you do now. Could you?"

"Perhaps I could," said Paul, and laughed gently at her look of
surprise.

"Of course I know you are only laughing at me," she said in an injured
tone. "You never think I am serious about anything."

"My dear Miss Katharine," he assured her, "on the contrary, I think
you are most terribly serious about everything. I have never had so
much serious conversation since I was nineteen myself. You will have
to grow older, before you learn to be young and frivolous."

"But _you_ are not frivolous," she protested. "You know you are not.
You only say that to tease me."

"I only say it to convince you. It is not my fault if you do not
understand, is it?"

"I do understand, I am certain I do. At least"--she paused suddenly,
and looked at him with one of her long critical looks. "Perhaps you
are right, and I don't understand you a bit. How queer! I don't think
I like the feel of it." She ended with a little gesture of distaste.

"I shouldn't bother about it, if I were you," said Paul calmly. "You
will understand better when you are older--and younger. Meanwhile, it
is very pleasant, don't you think?"

She was leaning forward with her hands folded under her chin, and did
not answer him.

"What made you choose to be a barrister?" she asked suddenly.

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Merely because it presented greater opportunities for idleness than
any other profession, I suppose."

Katharine swung herself round on her low stool, and looked at him
incredulously.

"But don't you ever want to _do_ anything,--you with all your brains
and your talents?" she cried impatiently. "Surely you must have some
ambition?"

"Oh, no," replied Paul, arranging the cushions at the back of his head
and sinking down on them again. "I hope I shall always be comfortable,
that's all; and I have enough money for that, thank the Lord!"

"Supposing you had been poor?"

"Don't suppose it," rejoined Paul; and her puzzled features relaxed
into a smile.

"I can't think why you have a face like that, then," she said
reflectively.

"What's the matter with my face? Does it suggest possibilities? To
think that I might have been a minor poet all these years, without
knowing it!"

Katharine returned to her examination of the flower beds; and Paul lay
back, and blew rings of smoke into the air, and watched her through
them with an amused look on his face. He recalled some casual words of
Heaton's which had annoyed him very much at the time,--"If I'm not in
love with a woman, I don't want to give her another thought;" and he
glanced at her slim waist as she sat there, and tried lazily to
analyse his own feelings towards her.

"What are you thinking about?" she asked, turning round again.

"About you," he said, and brought his feet lightly to the ground and
sat up and stretched himself.

"What about me?" she asked curiously.

"I am wondering if you will miss me very much when I am gone," he
said, and slid slowly along the chair until he sat behind her, where
he could just see her rounded profile as she turned her face away from
him.

"Oh, yes, awfully! I wish, I do wish you were not going!" She was
looking very hard at the flower beds now.

"So do I, Miss Katharine. It has been quite delightful; I shall never
forget your sweet care of me. But you will soon forget all about me.
And besides, there is Ted."

"What has that got to do with it?" she asked swiftly.

"Oh, nothing, surely! It was merely an inconsequent reflection on my
part."

There was a pause for a few moments.

"Talk," he said suddenly, and put his hand gently against her cheek.
It warmed under his touch, and he heard the tremor in her voice as
she spoke.

"I--I can't talk. Oh, please don't!"

"Can't you? Try."

She put her hand up to his, and he caught hold of her fingers, and
dropped a light kiss on them as they lay crumpled up on his palm. Then
he pressed them slightly, and let them go, and walked away to the
house without looking at her again. His countenance was as unmoved as
if he had just been talking archæology to the Rector; but his
reflections seemed absorbing, and he hardly roused himself to move
aside when Ted came lounging out of the house and ran against him in
the porch.

"Hullo!" said Ted. "I'm awfully sorry; I didn't see you, really."

"Oh, no matter!" said Paul, who, never being guilty of a clumsy action
himself, could afford to remain undisturbed. "Miss Katharine's in the
summer house," he added, in answer to Ted's disconsolate look. "We've
been reading Browning. At least, Miss Katharine out of her goodness
has been trying to make a convert of me. I am afraid I was an
unappreciative listener."

Ted glanced inquiringly at him. Somehow, it was not so easy to
disapprove of Paul to his face as it was behind his back.

"How poor!" he said sympathetically. "Kitty does play so cheap,
sometimes, doesn't she? Browning is enough to give you the hump, I
should think. But she never does that to me."

"Probably," said Paul, disengaging a cigarette paper; "she would not
feel the same necessity in your case. You would have greater
facilities for conversation, I mean. Won't you have a cigarette?"

Ted looked towards the shrubbery, but lingered as though the
invitation commended itself to him.

"I think I'll have a pipe, if it's all the same to you. May I try that
'baccy of yours? Thanks, awfully!"

They sat down on opposite sides of the little porch, and puffed away
in silence.

"You haven't been over much, lately," observed Paul presently.

Ted glanced at him again, but was disarmed by his tone of
friendliness.

"No," he said. "At least, I was over once or twice last week, but I
never got a look in with Kitty. I mean," he added hastily, "she was
out, or something."

"Ah!" said Paul indifferently; "that was unfortunate."

"It was a howling nuisance," said Ted, his troubled look returning.
"The truth is," he went on, feeling a desire for a confidant to be
stronger than his distrust of Paul, "there's something I've been
trying to tell Kit for a whole week, and for the life of me I can't
get it out."

"Going to make a fool of himself at the very start," thought Paul.

"You see," continued Ted with an effort, "_she_ has been playing up
so, lately."

"Your mother?" questioned Paul.

Ted nodded.

"And now she's got me a confounded berth in some place in the
city,--candles, or grocery, or something beastly. It's the poorest
thing I ever heard. And I've got to start on Thursday, so I must leave
home to-morrow. And Kitty doesn't know; that's the devil, you see."

"I'm sorry," said Paul gravely.

"Got it through some cousin of my father's," Ted went on in his
aggrieved voice. "No one but a cousin of one's father ever hears of
such rotten jobs. Said it would be the making of me, or some rot. I've
heard that before; the men who never did a stroke of work themselves
always talk that sort of cheapness. Have to be there at half-past
eight in the morning, too, blow it!"

"I'm sorry," said Paul again. He began to feel a vague interest in the
boy as he sat opposite and stretched his long legs out to their full
length, and jerked out his complaints with the brier between his
teeth.

"_She_ thinks it such great shakes, too; just because she won't have
to keep me any longer. She ought never to have had a son like me; I
wasn't meant for such beastly work. Why was I born? Why was I?"

"The parents of the human animal are never selected," said Paul, for
the sake of saying something.

"I know I'm a fool,--_she's_ told me that often enough; so I don't
expect to get anything awfully decent. But why did they educate me as
a gentleman? They should have sent me to a board school, and then I
should have been a bounder myself, and nothing would have mattered.
What's the use of being a gentleman and a fool? That's what I am; and
Kit's the only person in the world who doesn't make me feel it, bless
her!"

Paul threw away his cigarette, and made a sudden resolve. He was
amused, in spite of himself, at the very youthful pessimism in Ted's
remarks; and for a moment he felt almost anxious that the boy should
not spoil his career by a false start. There was something novel, too,
in his playing the part of counsellor, and Paul Wilton was never
averse to a new sensation. So he leaned forward and tapped his
companion on the knee with his long, pointed forefinger.

"You may send me to the devil, if you like," he said with his placid
smile, "but I should like to give you a word of advice first. May I?"

Ted looked more depressed than before, but he did not seem surprised.

"Fire ahead!" he said sadly. "I can stand an awful lot. People have
always given me advice, ever since I was a kid; it's the only thing
they ever have given me."

"I don't suppose it is my business at all," said Paul, making another
cigarette with the elaborate precision he always spent on trifles;
"but I've seen so many nice chaps ruined through a mistake in early
life, and I know one or two things, and I'm older than you, too. Now,
how do you mean to tell that child over there that you are going
away?"

Ted started.

"What do you mean?" he asked. But his lower lip was twitching
nervously, and his colour had deepened.

"Well, this is what I mean. Given an emotional creature like that, who
has never seen any man but you, and a young, impetuous fellow like
yourself, going to say good-bye to her for an indefinite
period,--well, you are both extremely likely to arrive at one
conclusion; and my advice to you is,--Don't."

Ted said nothing, but continued to stare at the tesselated floor. The
elder man rose to his feet, and restored the match box to his pocket.

"I nearly did it myself once," he said; "but I didn't."

Ted looked him thoughtfully up and down.

"I shouldn't think you did," he said, with unconscious sarcasm. Then
he too rose slowly to his feet, and stood on the doorstep for a
moment, with his hands in his pockets. "I think you're a confounded
cynical brute," he said rather breathlessly, "but I believe you're
right, and I won't."

And he walked across the lawn to the shrubbery with the air of a man
on whose decision depends the fate of nations.

Paul frowned slightly, as he always did when he was thinking deeply,
and then threw off his preoccupation with a laugh. Even when he was
alone, he liked to preserve his attitude of nonchalance.

"How have I contrived to fall among such an appallingly serious set of
infants?" he muttered. "Hey-day! here's for London and life!" And he
turned indoors to look for a time-table.

Ted stalked straight into the summer house, with his head in the air
and his mind filled with high-souled resolutions. Any one less
occupied with his own reflections would have seen that Katharine was
sitting with an absent look in her eyes, while the book she held in
her hand was open at the index-page. But Ted only saw in her the woman
he had just sworn within him to respect; and he took the book
reverently out of her hand, and sat down, also just behind her, on the
end of the basket chair. It was the same basket chair.

"Kitty, I say," he began, clearing his throat, "I've come to tell you
something."

Katharine glanced at his solemn face, and looked away again. She
wished he had not sat just there.

"It must have something to do with a funeral, then," she said, with a
flippancy that would have aroused the suspicions of a more observant
person. But Ted was still absorbed in his high-souled resolutions, and
her abstraction failed to make any impression on him.

"No, it hasn't," he rejoined gloomily. "I wish it had! I shouldn't
mind being dead, not I! It would cure this hump, anyhow. Perhaps some
one would be sorry, then; don't know who would, though! _She_'d only
complain of the expense of burying me."

"Poor old man, who has been bullying you now?" asked Katharine, in a
dreamy voice that she strove to make interested. "Has _she_ been doing
anything fresh?"

"Has she, that's all! She's been doing something to some purpose, this
time. Got me a beastly job, in a beastly city place; a pound a week;
soap, or wholesale clothing, or something poor. Says I ought to be
thankful to get anything. Thankful indeed! _She_ never shows a spark
of gratitude for her bally seven hundred a year, I know."

"Oh, Ted! every one is going away. What shall I do?" The words escaped
her involuntarily. But he was still too full of his own troubles to
notice anything except that she seemed distressed; and this, of
course, was only natural.

"I knew you'd be cut up," he said, kicking savagely at the leg of the
chair. "You're the only chap who cares; and you'll forget when I've
been gone a week. Oh, yes, you will! I ought never to have been born.
They're sure to be rank outsiders, too; and I can stand anything
sooner than bounders. It's too beastly caddish for words, and I'd like
to kill him for his rotten advice. What does he know about anything, a
played-out chap like that?"

Ted's conversation was apt to become involved when he was agitated;
but on this occasion Katharine made no attempt to unravel it.

"Poor Ted," she murmured tonelessly, and continued to think about
something else.

"I don't know why you are so cut up about it. I'm such a rotten ass,
and you're so infernally smart! I haven't any right to expect you to
care a hang about me; I won't even ask you to write to me, when I'm
gone," cried Ted, making desperate efforts to keep his high-souled
resolutions. "It's a rotten, caddish world, and I'm the rottenest fool
in it."

He waited for the contradiction that always came from Katharine at
this point of his self-abasement; but when she said nothing, and only
went on staring in the opposite direction, he felt that there was
something unusually wrong, and came hastily round to the front of her
chair and repeated his last remark with emphasis.

"You may say what you like, but I am. All the same, I would sooner
chuck the whole show than make you unhappy. I'll be hanged if I don't
go away to-morrow without a single--" He stopped abruptly; for she was
looking up at him piteously, and his high-souled resolutions suddenly
melted into oblivion. "Kitty, old chum, don't cry! I'm not worth
it,--on my soul I'm not; blowed if I've ever seen you cry before! Good
old Kit, I say, don't. Oh, the devil! Do you really mind so much?"

"Please, Ted, go away; you don't understand; go away; it isn't that at
all! Don't, Ted, don't! Oh, dear, whatever made me cry?" gasped
Katharine. But Ted would take no denial: a woman's tears would have
disarmed him, even if he had not been in love with her; and Katharine,
the tomboyish companion of years, appeared to him in a strangely
lovable light as she sobbed into her hands and made the feeblest
efforts to keep him away. His arms were round her in a moment, and
her head was pulled down on his shoulder, and he poured a medley of
broken sentences into her ear.

"How was I to know you cared, old chum? Of course I have always cared;
but I never thought about it until that played-out London chap turned
up and put it into my head. Dear old Kitty! Why, do you know, I was
half afraid you were going to like him, one time; wasn't I a rotten
ass? But, you see, you're so bally clever, and all that; and I
supposed he was, too, and so I thought,--don't you see? And all the
while, it was me! Buck up, Kit! I won't split that you cried, on my
honour I won't. Oh, I say, I'm the most confoundedly lucky chap-- But,
oh, that infernal office in the city!"

Katharine disengaged herself at last. His kisses seemed to burn into
her cheeks. She pushed back the basket chair into the corner of the
summer-house, and put her fingers over her eyes to shut out the flower
beds and the sunlight.

"Stop, Ted! I don't know what you mean. You must not think those
things of me; they are simply not true. I can't let you kiss me like
that. Has the world gone suddenly mad, this afternoon? I don't
understand what has happened to every one. I don't understand
anything. Will you go, please, Ted? If you won't, I--I must."

She forced out the disjointed sentences in hard, passionless tones.
Ted stood absolutely still where she left him, and watched her stumble
through the doorway and disappear among the laurel bushes and the old
box-trees. Then he rumpled up his thick hair with both his hands, and
laughed aloud.

"I ought never to have been born," he said, and his voice broke.




CHAPTER VI


On a foggy morning in the beginning of the following January, Ted
Morton strolled out of his bedroom shortly before eight o'clock, and
rang the bell for breakfast. He yawned as though he were only half
awake, and swore gently at the weather as he stirred up the fire to
make a blaze.

"What an infernal day!" he muttered, and pulled down the blind and
lighted the gas. The housekeeper brought in his breakfast and his
letters, and wisely withdrew without saying anything. Ted took the lid
off the teapot, and examined the three envelopes in turn. His face
brightened a little as he came to the third, and he buttered some
toast and ate it standing.

"Well, I'm hanged! Not a single bill, and one from Kit, good old Kit!
That'll wait, and that. Well, I can stand hers; it's sure to be funny,
at all events."

He put on one boot, and then stood up again and read her letter, with
a large cup of tea in his right hand. The smile on his face faded
gradually as he read, and he looked almost thoughtful when he folded
it up again and placed it in his breast-pocket. He was staunch in his
belief that Katharine could do no wrong, but her latest idea went far
to shake his conviction.

"You see, it is like this," her letter ran.

     "There is plenty of money, really, but we have to behave as
     though there were none; so the effect is the same, it seems to
     me. I never thought about it before; I only found it out by
     accident, when I overheard Aunt Esther abusing daddy for
     buying some old architectural books. It seems as though he
     really does spend a good lot, without knowing it; but then,
     why shouldn't he? I won't have daddy bullied, so that I should
     have enough bread and butter to eat; it is sordid and
     horrible. They don't say a word about my earning my own
     living, but that is what they are driving me to do; it seems
     ridiculous that I should make other people uncomfortable by
     being here, when there is plenty of money in the world waiting
     to be earned by some one. Don't you think so? But when I said
     I would come up to London and give lessons, Aunt Esther had
     heroics, and said I should kill her. She didn't say how, and
     I'm sure I did not feel particularly murderous; I only wanted
     to laugh, while she lay on the sofa and said I was undutiful
     for trying to save her anxiety! I don't understand parents.
     They hide everything from you, and behave as if they were
     wealthy; then they abuse you for costing so much to keep; and
     then, when you say you will keep yourself, they call you
     undutiful. There is no doubt that if we were to send away one
     of the servants, I should be able to stay at home; but Aunt
     Esther would have a fit at the idea. It seems to me that we
     spend half our income in trying to persuade people of the
     existence of the other half. Anyhow, I am coming up at once to
     look for work. I haven't told daddy yet, and don't know how I
     am going to; he will be so dreadfully cut up at losing me. But
     I am sure he will understand; he is the one person who always
     has understood. And won't it be glorious when I have earned
     enough money to give him everything he wants? About rooms: I
     saw an advertisement of some, a few doors from you. Do you
     know them? I thought it would be rather nice to be near you,"
     etc., etc.

Ted answered her letter the same evening. Writing letters was always a
labour to him, but he toiled over this one more than usual.

     "Of course you know what you are playing at," he wrote, "but I
     believe it is awfully hard to get anything to do. London is
     packed with people trying to find work; and most of them don't
     find it. As to the rooms, it would be beastly jolly to have
     you so close, but I don't advise your coming here; this street
     pals on to Regent Street, you know, and it isn't supposed to
     be pleasant for a girl. I will explain more fully when I see
     you. Let me know if I can do anything for you. I'm a rotten
     ass at expressing myself, as you know; but it will be awfully
     decent to have you to take about. Only I don't like the idea
     of your grinding away alone; it's rotten enough for a man, but
     it's miles worse for a woman. Write again soon. It _is_ a
     life, isn't it?"

It was nearly a fortnight before he heard from her again, and he felt
guiltily conscious of not having encouraged her as much as she
expected. Then came another letter, in her small, firm handwriting;
and he tore it open anxiously.

     "I am coming up by the 4.55 on Wednesday," she wrote. "Will
     you meet me? I thought perhaps you might, as it is a late
     train. Oh, Ted, I feel so old and different somehow; I don't
     believe I _could_ climb into that pantry window now! Daddy
     took it so strangely; he hardly said anything at all. Do you
     think it is possible that he really does not love me as much
     as I love him? And I mind leaving him so much that it quite
     hurts every time he asks me to do anything for him. Why was I
     made to like people more than they like me? Why, I believe
     daddy was rather relieved than otherwise. And I thought he
     would never be able to do without me! Am I very conceited, I
     wonder? But indeed, I do believe he will miss me dreadfully
     when I am gone. Aunt Esther won't speak to me at all; I feel
     in disgrace, without having done anything wrong. Parents are
     inexplicable; they seem to grow tired of us as we grow up,
     just like birds! And they persist in treating us like
     children, while they are forcing us to behave as if we were
     grown up; I can't understand them, or anything. Things seem to
     be going all wrong, everywhere. I have heard of a sort of home
     for working gentlewomen, near Edgware Road; it seems
     respectable, and it is certainly cheap. They have left me to
     arrange everything, just as though I were going to do
     something wicked. And I thought all the while I was doing
     something so splendid and heroic! You will meet me, won't you?
     I feel so forlorn and miserable."

Ted wrote back immediately:--

     "It is a beastly rotten world. Neither of us ought to have
     been born. I will cut the office and meet you. Buck up."

And the following Wednesday saw him on the platform at Euston, trying
to find Katharine in the crowd of passengers who were pouring out of
the 4.55 train. It was not long before he discovered her, looking very
unlike her surroundings, and pointing out her luggage, half
apologetically, to a porter who seemed inclined to patronise her.
There was an exaggerated air of self-possession in her bearing, which
did not conceal her provincial look and rather showed that she felt
less composed than she wished to appear. Ted examined her for a moment
doubtfully, and then made his way towards her. He had not seen her
once since she left him in the summer-house, eight months ago; and he
was amazed at himself for not feeling more disturbed at meeting her
again now. Perhaps her prosaic winter clothing helped to rob the
occasion of romance; for, in his mind, he had vaguely expected to find
her wearing the garden hat and print frock in which he had last seen
her. But when she turned round and saw him, the frank pleasure in her
face was the same as it had always been, and the episode that had been
enacted in the summer-house seemed all at once to be blotted out of
their past.

"You dear old boy, I knew you'd come! I feel so awfully out of it, in
this noise! Do make that porter understand I want to get across to
Gower Street, will you? He seems confused. I don't speak a different
language, do I? Just look at that glorious pair of bays; but, oh, what
a shame to give them bearing-reins! Why, Ted, what a swell you are in
that frock coat; you look just like the vet. at Stoke on Sundays! Oh,
I'm so sorry; I forgot! I want to get to Edgware Road, you see, and I
thought--"

"Oh, we'll cab it, then! Nonsense! it isn't a bit cheaper, only
nastier. Girls never understand these things. Hadn't you better get
in, instead of examining the points of the horse? It won't stand any
quieter than that, if that's your idea."

The porter went off with a handsome gratuity, and Katharine settled
herself in her corner of the cab, and began to examine her companion.

"You've altered a little bit, Ted," she observed. "You're not so
afraid of unimportant people as you used to be. I believe you would go
into the post office at Stoke for your own stamps, now, instead of
sending me because the girl laughed at you. Do you remember? You are
such a swell, too; how you must be getting on at that place!"

"Oh, I don't think so. I don't want to get on there; no decent chap
would," said Ted, and Katharine changed the conversation.

"The streets seem very full," she said, as they came to a block in the
traffic.

"Up to the brim," said Ted laconically. "I always wonder the horses
don't tread on one another's toes, don't you?"

She laughed in her old joyous manner, and he leaned back contentedly
and looked at her.

"At all events, you haven't altered much," he observed.

"I've grown an inch, and my dresses are quite long now. Besides, I
have put up my hair. Didn't you notice?"

"I thought there was something. Turn your head round. About time you
did, wasn't it? But why don't you make it stick out more? Other girls
do, don't they?"

Katharine had not seen any other girls, and said so; whereupon Ted
supposed it was all right, if she thought it was, and added
conciliatingly, that at all events her new coat was "all there." They
chattered in the same trivial manner all the rest of the way; it was
like the old days, when they had never thought of making up a quarrel
formally, but had just resumed matters where they had been broken off.

"Do you feel bad?" he asked, in his sympathetic way, when they stood
at last on the well-worn doorstep of number ten, Queen's Crescent,
Marylebone.

"Oh, I don't know! I've got to go through with it now, haven't I? It's
just like you and me not to have touched on anything really important
all the way; isn't it? And I've got such a heap of things to tell
you," said Katharine, in a nervous tone; and she gave a little shiver
as an east wind came rushing up the street and blew dirty pieces of
paper against the dingy iron railings, whence they fluttered down into
the area.

"Never mind; I'll look you up some evening soon. Let me know if you
want bucking up or anything. Good-bye, old chum."

And she found herself inside a dimly lighted, distempered hall, face
to face with a kindly looking maid, who was greeting her with the air
of conventional welcome she had been told to assume towards strangers.
It was supposed to support the advertisement that this was a home.

"Miss Jennings? No, miss; she won't be in, not before supper. And the
lady what's in your cubicle ain't cleared out yet, miss, so I can't
take your box up, neither. Will you come and have your tea, miss? This
way, if you please."

Katharine followed her mechanically. The heroic notions that had
sustained her for weeks were vanishing before this pleasant-faced maid
and the dreary, distempered hall. For the first time in her life a
feeling of shyness suddenly overwhelmed her, as the servant held open
a door, and a hum of voices and clatter of plates came out into the
passage. For the moment, she hardly knew where to look or what to do.
The room into which she had been ushered was a bare-looking one,
though clean enough, and better lighted than the hall outside. Long
tables were placed across it, and around these, on wooden chairs, sat
some twenty or thirty girls of various ages, some of whom were talking
and others reading, as they occupied themselves with their tea. They
all looked up when Katharine came into the room, but the spectacle did
not present enough novelty to interest them long, and they soon looked
away again and went on with their several occupations. "_She_ won't be
here long,--not the sort," Katharine overheard one of them saying to
another, and the casual remark brought the colour to her cheeks, and
made her assume desperately some show of courage.

"May I take this chair?" she asked, moving towards a vacant place as
she spoke.

"It isn't anybody's; none of them are unless the plate is turned
upside down," volunteered the girl in the next chair. She was reading
"Pitman's Phonetic Journal," and eating bread and treacle.

"You have to get your own tea from the urn over there, and collect
your food from all the other tables," she added in the same brusque
manner, as Katharine sat down and looked helplessly about her.
However, by following out the instructions thus thrown at her, she
managed, with a little difficulty, to procure what she wanted from the
food that was scattered incidentally about the room, and then returned
to her seat by the girl who was eating bread and treacle.

"Isn't it rather late for tea?" she asked of her neighbour, who at
least seemed friendly in a raw sort of way.

"It always goes on till seven; most of them don't get back from the
office before this, you see."

"What office?" asked Katharine, who did not see.

"Any office," returned the girl, staring round at her. "Post office
generally, or a place in the city, or something like that. Some of
them are shorthand clerks, like me,--it's shorter hours and better
paid as a rule; but it's getting overcrowded, like everything else."

"Do you like it?" asked Katharine. The girl stared again. The
possibility of liking one's work had never occurred to her before.

"Of course not; but we have to grin and bear it, like the food here
and everything else. I'm sorry for you if you mean to stop here long;
you don't look as though you could stand it. I've seen your sort
before, and they never stop long."

"Oh, I mean to stop," said Katharine decidedly. But her heroic mood
had been completely dissipated by the leaden atmosphere of the place,
and she could not repress a sigh.

"Butter bad?" asked her neighbour cheerfully. "Try the treacle; it's
safer. You can't go far wrong with treacle. The jam's always
suspicious; you find plum stones in the strawberries, and so on."

Katharine was obliged to laugh, and the shorthand clerk, who had not
meant to make a joke, seemed hurt.

"I beg your pardon," said Katharine, "but your cynical view of the
food is so awfully funny."

"Wait till you've been here three years, like I have," said the
shorthand clerk, and she returned to her newspaper.

Katharine tried to stay the sinking at her heart, and made a critical
review of the room. What impressed her most was the twang of the
girls' voices. Not that they were noisy,--for they seemed a quiet set
on the whole; either daily routine or respectability had succeeded in
subduing their spirits; but for all that they did not look unhappy,
and Katharine supposed, as her neighbour had remarked, that it was
possible to get used to it after a time.

"And the room is certainly clean," she reflected, as she made an
effort to see the brighter side of things; "and the girls don't stare,
or ask questions, or do anything unpleasant. I _couldn't_ tell them
anything about myself if they did. And I do wish, though I know it's
awfully snobbish, that some of them were ladies."

Her neighbour broke in upon her thoughts, and Katharine came to
herself with a start.

"Whose cuby are you going to have?" she was asking.

"I--I don't know. The servant said it was not empty yet. I should
rather like to unpack."

"I don't suppose you will get a permanent one yet awhile," said the
shorthand clerk, in the cheerful way with which she imparted all her
unpleasant revelations; "they always move you about for a week or two
first. I expect you are coming into our room for the present; Miss
King is going up to Scotland by the night mail. Jenny will tell you
when she comes in. Supper is at nine," she added, pushing back her
chair and folding up her paper, "and there are two reception rooms
upstairs, if you want to sit somewhere till your cubicle is empty."

Katharine thanked her, and felt more forlorn than ever when the
shorthand clerk had gone. But the servant came to her rescue a few
minutes later, and offered to take her to her room which was now
empty.

"Is it Miss King's?" asked Katharine, and felt a little happier when
she learned that it was. She would have one acquaintance in the same
room at all events. But her heart sank again, when she found herself
alone with her two boxes in a curtained corner of a dingy room, the
corner that was the farthest from the window and the smallest of the
four compartments. There was hardly room to move; and when she tried
to unpack her boxes, she found that most of the drawers in the tiny
chest were already occupied, and that there were no pegs for her
dresses.

"Could anything be more dreary?" she said aloud. "And the curtains are
just horribly dirty, and I don't feel as though I _could_ get into
that bed. And what a tiny jug and basin!"

"Hullo, is that you?" said the voice of the shorthand clerk, who had
come into her part of the room unobserved. "I guessed you'd feel
pretty bad when you saw what it was like. They all do. But you might
as well turn up the gas, and make it as cheerful as possible. That's
better. Well, it's not much like the prospectus, is it?"

Katharine remembered the plausible statements of the prospectus, and
broke into a laugh. There was a grim humour in her situation that
appealed to her, though it seemed to be lost on her companion.

"Well, I'm glad you can laugh, though I never found it funny myself,"
she called out. "But don't stay moping here; come into the
drawing-room until the bell rings for supper, won't you?"

Katharine followed her advice, and allowed herself to be taken into
another bare looking room, over the dining-room. This was furnished
with a horsehair sofa and three basket chairs, which were all
occupied, several cane chairs, and two square tables, at which some
girls sat writing. One of them looked up as the door opened, and asked
the shorthand clerk to come and help her with her arithmetic.

"You know I'm no good, Polly. Where's Miss Browne?" asked the
shorthand clerk, pushing a chair towards Katharine, and taking one
herself.

"She's out; I think you might try," said the girl who had spoken to
her, in a peevish tone. "I have got to finish this paper to-night; and
I'm fagged now."

"Can I help?" asked Katharine. The other two looked at her, and seemed
surprised.

"This is some one new," explained her first friend. "Let me introduce
you: Miss Polly Newland, Miss-- Why, I don't even know your name, do
I?"

"Austen," said Katharine. "Won't you tell me yours?"

The girl said her name was Hyam,--Phyllis Hyam; and they returned to
the subject of the arithmetic.

"Let's look at it, Polly," said Phyllis Hyam, and Miss Newland passed
the paper across the table. The two girls bent over it, and Phyllis
shook her head.

"I never understood stocks,--too badly taught!" she said, and tilted
her chair and began to whistle.

"Shall I try?" said Katharine, taking out a pencil. She worked out the
sum to the satisfaction of Polly Newland, who then unbent a little,
and explained that she was going up for the Civil Service examination
in March.

"I say, you're clever, aren't you? Do you teach?" asked Phyllis Hyam,
bringing the front legs of her chair down again with a bang.

"That is what I want to do; but I never have," replied Katharine. The
other two looked at her pityingly.

"Any friends in London?" they asked.

"Only relations; and they won't help me."

"Of course not. Relations never do. Hope you'll get some work," said
the shorthand clerk dubiously. Katharine changed the conversation, to
hide her own growing apprehension.

"Where are the newspapers?" she asked, looking round.

"In the prospectus; never saw them anywhere else!" said Phyllis, with
a short laugh.

"Did you expect to find any?" asked Polly Newland. "They all do," she
added gravely. "It's like the baths, and the boots, and everything
else."

"Surely, the bath-room is not a fallacy?" exclaimed Katharine in
dismay.

"Oh, there is one down in the basement; but all the water has to be
boiled for it, so only three people can have a bath every evening. You
have to put your name down in a book; and your turn comes in about a
fortnight."

"And the boots?" said Katharine, suppressing a sigh.

"You have to clean your own, that's all. They are supposed to provide
the blacking and the brushes; but, my eye, what brushes! Of course you
get used to it after a bit. When you get to your worst, you will
probably wear them dirty."

"When does one get to one's worst?" asked Katharine.

"That depends," said Polly Newland, sucking the end of her pencil, and
staring across in a curious manner at Katharine. "I should say you
would get to it pretty soon, if you stop long enough."

"Of course I shall stop!" cried Katharine, a little impatiently. "Why
do you both say that?"

The two girls glanced at one another.

"You're not the sort," said Phyllis shortly; and Polly returned to her
arithmetic.

Katharine relapsed into a dream. All her aspirations, all her hopes of
making her father a rich man, had only landed her in number ten,
Queen's Crescent, Marylebone! She looked round at the silent occupants
of the room,--some of them too tired to do anything but lounge about,
some of them reading novelettes, some of them mending stockings. She
wondered if her existence would simply become like theirs,--a daily
routine, with just enough money to support life, and not enough to buy
its pleasures; enough energy to get through its toil, and not enough
to enjoy its leisure. Ivingdon, with its recent troubles, its more
distant happiness, seemed separated from this rude moment of
disillusionment by a long stretch of years. A passionate instinct of
rebellion against the circumstances that were answerable for her
present situation made her unhappiness seem still more pitiable to
her; and a tragic picture of herself, martyred and forgotten, ten
years hence, brought sympathetic tears to her own eyes.

A piano began a cheerful accompaniment in the next room, and some one
sang a ballad in a fresh, untrained soprano. The piano was out of
tune, and the song was of the cheapest and most popular nature; but it
made an interruption in the sound of the traffic outside on the
cobble-stones, and Katharine glanced round the room characteristically,
in search of an answering smile. But the other girls were as
unaffected by the music as they had been by the dreariness that
preceded it; and nobody looked up from what she was doing. Only one of
them made a comment; it was Phyllis Hyam. "How that girl does thump!"
she said.

But on Katharine the effect had been instantaneous. She was not
cultured in music: with her it was an emotion, not an art; and the
little jingling tune had already turned her thoughts into a happier
channel. Her spirits rose insensibly, and the spell that the dingy
surroundings had cast over her was broken. Why should she believe what
these two girls told her? Surely, her conviction that she would make
something of her life was not going to wear itself out in a miserable
struggle to keep alive! She was worth something more than that: she
was intellectual beyond her years; every one had told her so, until
she had come to believe it was true; and her future was in her own
hands. She would be a teacher of a new school; she would make a name
for herself by her lectures; and then, some day, when she had acquired
a fortune, and all the world was talking of her talent, and her
goodness, and her beauty,--she was going to be very beautiful, too, in
her dream,--these girls would remember that they had doubted her
powers of endurance. She was even rehearsing what she would say to
them in the hour of her triumph, when a touch on her shoulder brought
her back abruptly to her present surroundings, and she looked up to
see a little white-haired lady at her side, in a lace cap and a black
silk apron.

"Miss Austen? Come down with me, and let us have a little chat
together. I was sorry not to be back in time to receive you, my dear."

It was a sudden awakening; but she was able to smile as she followed
her guide downstairs.

"She has the captivating manner of an impostor," she reflected. "She
is just like Widow Priest! But it accounts for the prospectus."




CHAPTER VII


The next day, she began a vigorous search for work. She did everything
that is generally done by women who come up from the country and
expect to find employment waiting for them; she answered
advertisements, she visited agents, she walked over the length and
breadth of London, she neglected no opportunity that seemed to offer
possibilities. But she soon found that she had much to learn. She
discovered that she was not the only girl in London, who thought there
was a future before her because she was more intellectually minded
than the rest of her family; and she found that every agent's office
was full of women, with more experience than herself, who had also
passed the Higher Local Examination with honours, and did not think
very much of it. And she had to learn that an apologetic manner is not
the best one to assume towards strangers, and that omnibus conductors
do not mean to be patronising when they say "missy," and that a
policeman is always open to the flattery of being addressed as
"Constable." But what she did not learn was the extravagance of being
economical; and it was some time yet before she discovered that
walking until she was over-tired, and fasting until she could not eat,
were the two most expensive things she could have done.

But she found no work. Either there was none to be had, or she was too
young; or, as they sometimes implied, too attractive. When this last
objection was made to her by the elderly principal of a girl's school,
Katharine stared in complete bewilderment for a moment or two, and
then broke into an incredulous laugh.

"But, surely, my looking young and--and inexperienced would not affect
my powers of teaching," she remonstrated.

"It would prevent my taking you," replied the principal coldly. "I
must have some one about me whom I can trust, and leave safely with
the children. Besides, what do I know of your capabilities? You say
you have never even tried to teach?"

"But I know I can teach,--I am certain of it; I only want a chance.
Why must I wait until I am old and unsympathetic, and can no longer
feel in touch with the children, before any one will trust me with a
class? It is not reasonable."

The elderly principal remained unmoved.

"The teaching market is overcrowded by such as you," she said. "I
should advise your trying something else."

"I have not been trained to anything else," said Katharine. "That is
where it is so hard. I might have got a secretaryship, if I had known
shorthand. I never knew I should have to earn my own living, or I
should be better qualified to do it. But I know I can teach, if I get
the chance."

"Are you compelled to earn your living?" asked the principal, a little
less indifferently. "Pardon me, but I have heard your tale so often
before from girls who might, with a little forbearance, have remained
at home."

"I am compelled," answered Katharine. "At least--"

A feeling of loyalty to her father, her lovable, faulty old father,
who was so unconscious of her present difficulties, kept her silent
and brought a troubled look into her face. The elderly principal was
not unkindly, when circumstances did not force her to be academic; and
Katharine, when she looked troubled, was very attractive indeed.

"My dear," she said, with a severity that she assumed in order to
justify her weakness in her own mind, "what are your friends thinking
of? Go home; it is the right place for a child like you."

Katharine hurried away to conceal her desire to laugh. She did not go
home, however; she went to a cheap milliner's in the Edgware Road, and
ordered them to make her a severely simple bonnet. And when it came
home the next evening, and she put it on, she hardly knew whether to
laugh or to cry at the reflection of herself in the glass. "Whatever
would daddy say?" she thought, and put it hastily back into the box;
and if the other occupants of her room had happened to come in just
then, they would certainly have modified their opinion of her pride
and her coldness. But, after all, she was no better off than before;
for the contrast of youth and age that her new bonnet made in her
appearance was rather conspicuous than otherwise, and she found that
her old countrified hat suited her purpose far better.

She saw very little of Ted at this time. He asked her to come out with
him, once or twice, but she always refused. She was afraid that he
would ask questions, and she shrank from telling any one, even Ted,
of her failure to get on. On the few occasions that she went down to
speak to him in the hall, she told him that she was getting along
quite well, and would be sure to hear of some work very soon, and that
she would prefer not to come out with him because it unsettled her.
And Ted, in his humble-minded way, thought she had made new friends in
the house and did not care to be bothered with him; and Katharine, who
read him like a book, knew that he thought so, and made fresh efforts
to get on so that she could spend all her leisure time with him. She
wrote home in the same spirit, and said that she was sure of making
her way soon, and that, meanwhile, she had everything she wanted, and
nobody was to be anxious about her. And her father, with the quaint
unworldliness of his nature, wrote back that he was glad to hear she
was happy, and that he had no doubt the ten pounds he had given her
would last until she earned some more, and that he had just picked up
a perfect bargain in an old book shop for thirty shillings.

"Dear daddy," smiled Katharine, without a trace of bitterness. "Could
any one be more economical for other people, and more extravagant for
himself? I wonder if that is what makes me love him so? But, oh, what
would I give for that thirty shillings!"

She counted her little store for the twentieth time, and sat thinking.
Doubtless she had spent her money injudiciously at first; but the fact
remained that, if she went on at her present rate of expenditure, she
would have to return home in a fortnight. If she went without her
midday meal, and economised in every possible way, she might manage to
remain another month.

"That is what I must do," she said. "That will bring me to the middle
of March, and I shall have been in London just nine weeks. And, after
all, the food is so nasty that I sha'n't mind much. Besides, it is
really very romantic to starve a little."

It grew less romantic as another fortnight went by. The food had never
seemed less nasty than it did now; and she had to take long walks at
dinner time to escape the appetising smell of the hot dishes. She had
never realised before what a very healthy appetite she possessed; and
she remembered with some regret how she had been too dainty, at first,
to touch the food at all, and had lived for days almost entirely on
bread and butter. But now she would have eaten any of it with a
relish,--even a certain dish which was said to be stewed rabbit, but
which she had derisively termed "a cat in a pie dish."

One day, she read an alluring advertisement of a new agency. She had
lost her faith in agencies, and she had no more money for fees; but at
least it was an object for a walk, and anything was better than
waiting indoors for something to happen. To be idle in a place like
Queen's Crescent was not an enviable position. And by this time she
knew her London pretty well, and it fascinated her, and spoke to her
of life, and work, and the future; and a walk through any part of it
was always exhilarating. As she turned into the park at the Marble
Arch, a carriage and pair rumbled out with two well-dressed women in
it. Katharine stopped and looked after it, with an amused smile on her
face.

"My aunt and cousin," she murmured aloud. "What would they say, if
they knew? And once they came to stay with us, and they worried daddy
no end, and said I wanted finishing, and ought to go to Paris! It
seems to me that life is always a comedy, but sometimes it drops into
a roaring farce!"

And pleased with the appositeness of her own remark, she continued her
walk in better spirits than her worldly condition would seem to
justify. The agency turned out to be on the top floor of some flats
near Parliament Street; and the porter looked curiously at her as he
took her up in the lift.

"Agency, miss? So they says, I'm told. Don't believe in agencies much
myself, I don't; queerish kind of impostory places, I calls 'em. Don't
you let yourself be took in, missy!"

Katharine remembered the condition of her purse, and felt that it was
not likely. Her destination was marked by a large amount of
information on the wall, headed by the inscription, "Parker's
Universal Scholastic and Commercial Agency." She had not much time to
study it, however, for an office boy hastened to answer her knock, as
though he had been longing for the opportunity to do so for some time,
and said that Mr. Parker was at liberty, if she would kindly step in.
She fancied that he also stared critically at her, and she began to
fear that something was wrong with her personal appearance. This
naturally did not add to her self-possession; and when she found
herself in a small inner room that smelt of stale tobacco and whiskey,
she began to wish she had not come at all. A fair-haired man, with a
moustache and an eyeglass, was sitting with his feet on the
mantel-shelf when she entered the room; but he jumped up with a great
deal of fuss, and offered her a chair, and asked her what he could do
for her. Katharine faltered out her usual inquiry for teaching work;
and the fact that Mr. Parker was adjusting his eyeglass and taking her
in from head to foot all the time, completed her discomfiture.

"Teaching? To be sure," he said with a supercilious smile, and went at
once to the door and told the boy to bring the books.

"There ain't no books, and you knows it," retorted the boy, who seemed
disposed to be rebellious; and Mr. Parker vanished precipitately into
the other room. When he returned, his smile was unaltered; and he sat
down again, and twirled his drooping moustache.

"I have just looked through the books," he said, "and don't see
anything good enough for you. Would you care to take anything else?"

"I don't quite know what else I could do," said Katharine doubtfully.
She wanted to get away, and did not exactly know how to make a
dignified exit.

"Book-keeping, for instance, or literary work? Have you ever tried
being a secretary? Ah, I am sure you have! You are not the sort of
young lady to lead the life of a humdrum governess, eh?"

"I was my father's secretary," said Katharine. Mr. Parker was leaning
across the table and playing with the pens in the ink-stand, so that
his hand almost touched her elbow.

"Of course you were. So I was right about you, wasn't I? Don't you
think that was very clever of me, now?"

He leaned a little nearer to her, and Katharine drew back
instinctively and took her elbow off the table. He found the straight
look of her eyes a little disconcerting, and left off playing with the
penholders.

"Speaking seriously," he said, donning an official air with alacrity,
"would you care to take a post as secretary?"

He had dropped his eyeglass and his supercilious manner, and Katharine
took courage.

"I should, immensely. But they are so hard to get."

"Of course they are not easy to pick up, but in an agency like ours we
often hear of something good. Let me see, would you like to go out to
South Africa? Hardly, I should think."

Katharine said she would not like to go out to South Africa;
whereupon Mr. Parker offered New Zealand as an alternative.

"Your connection seems to lie principally in other quarters of the
globe," Katharine felt obliged to remark; and in an unguarded moment
she began to laugh at the absurdity of his suggestions. Mr. Parker at
once ceased to look official, and laughed with her, and began playing
with the pens in the inkstand again.

"Ah, now we understand each other better," he said, resuming his
familiar tone. "What you want is a snug little berth with some
literary boss, who won't give you too much to do, eh? A nice salary,
and some one charming to play with; isn't that it?"

The sheer vulgarity of the man exposed the real nature of the
situation to her. Her first impulse was to rush out of his sight, at
any cost; but she restrained herself with an effort, and drew a sharp
breath to gain time to collect her resources.

"I am afraid, Mr. Parker, that we don't understand each other at all,"
she said very slowly, trying to conceal the tremble in her voice; "and
as I don't feel inclined to emigrate, I think I had better--"

"Now, now, what a hurry you are in, to be sure!" interrupted Mr.
Parker, getting up and lounging round to her side of the table. "You
haven't even heard what I was going to say. I've been looking out for
a secretary myself, for some time, 'pon my oath I have; but never,
until this blessed moment, have I set eyes upon a young lady who
suited me so well as you. Now, what do you say to that, eh?"

Katharine had risen, too, and was turning imperceptibly towards the
door. She glanced contemptuously round the room, that was so entirely
devoid of the ordinary apparatus of business, and she walked swiftly
to the door and opened it, before he had time to prevent her.

"You are most kind," she said sarcastically, emboldened by the
presence of the office boy, "but I feel that the work would be very
much too hard for me. A large business like yours must need so much
looking after! Good morning."

Outside, while she was waiting for the lift, her composure completely
deserted her, and she found she was trembling all over, and had to
lean against the balusters for support.

"I knowed you wasn't the sort to go a-mixing of yourself up with that
kidney," observed the porter, who detected the tears in her eyes.

"Why didn't you tell me he was such a horrid man?" asked Katharine.
She was thoroughly unnerved, and even the porter's sympathy was better
than none at all.

"It wasn't my business to hinterfere," said the porter, who was merely
curious and not sympathetic at all; and Katharine dried her eyes
hastily, and tried to laugh.

"Of course it is nobody's business," she said drearily, and gave him
twopence for helping her to realise the fact. "And I shouldn't have
cried at all, if I had had any lunch," she added vehemently to
herself.

Some one was waiting to enter the lift as she stepped out of it. She
looked up by chance and caught his eye, and they uttered each other's
name in the same breath.

For a moment they stood silent, as they loosed hands again. Katharine
had blushed, hopelessly and irretrievably; but he was standing a
little away from her, with just the necessary amount of interest in
his look, and the necessary amount of pleasure in his smile. Paul was
a man who prided himself on never straining a situation; and directly
he saw her agitation at meeting him, he assumed the conventional
attitude, entirely for purposes of convenience.

"This is very delightful. Are you staying in town?"

"Yes. At least--"

"Your father well, I hope? And Miss Esther? I am charmed to hear it.
Supposing we move out of the draught; yes, cold, isn't it? Thanks, I
won't go up now--" this to the porter, who was still waiting by the
lift. "Which way are you going? Good! I have a call to pay in
Gloucester Place, and we might go in the same cab."

It was pleasant to be ordered about, after taking care of herself for
seven weeks, and Katharine yielded at once to the masterful tone,
which had always compelled her compliance from the moment she had
first heard it.

"Now, please, I want to hear all about it," he began briskly, as they
drove westwards. His manner was no longer conventional, and his
familiar voice carried her back over the weary months of last year to
the spring when she had still been a child. Somehow she did not feel,
as with Ted, that she could not tell him about her failures: it seemed
as though this man must know all there was to know about her, whether
it was pleasant for him to hear it or not; though, as she told him
about her coming to town and her subsequent career there, she made
her tale so entertaining that Paul was something more than idly
amused, when she finally brought it to an end.

"Do you think I ought not to have done it?" she asked him, anxiously,
as he did not speak. He looked at her before he answered.

"I cannot imagine how they let you do it!"

"Oh, don't! That is what that horrid old lady principal said. What
could possibly happen to me, I should like to know?"

He looked at her again, with his provoking serenity.

"Oh, nothing, of course! At least, not to you."

"Why not to me, particularly?" she asked half petulantly. She did not
know whether to be pleased or annoyed that he should credit her with
the same infallible quality as every one else.

"Because things of that nature do not, I believe, happen to girls of
your nature. But of course I may be wrong; I am quite ignorant in
these matters."

She smiled at his show of humility; it was so characteristic of him to
affect indifference about his own opinions. But she had learnt
something already that day, and she remembered Mr. Parker, and thought
that Paul very possibly was wrong on this occasion.

"Every one tells me that. I can't see how I am different," she said
thoughtfully.

"I shouldn't worry about it, if I were you. You could not be expected
to see. But it is just that little difference that has probably
carried you through."

Katharine remembered Mr. Parker again, and laughed outright.

"I don't think so," she said. "I think it is more likely to have been
my sense of humour."

"You used to laugh like that when I first knew you," he said
involuntarily. She knew that he had spoken without reflection, and she
laughed again with pleasure. It was always a triumph to surprise him
into spontaneity.

"How jolly it was in those days! Do you remember our tea in the
orchard, how we watched Aunt Esther out of the front door, and then
brought the things out through the back door?"

"Yes; and how you spilt the milk, and cook wouldn't let you have any
more, and our second cups were spoilt?"

"Rather! And how you shocked Dorcas--"

"Ah," sighed Paul; "we can never do those delightful things again. We
know one another too well, now."

They allowed themselves to become almost depressed, for the space of
a moment, because they knew one another so well. "All the same,"
observed Katharine, "there is still one joy left to us. We can
quarrel."

He became conventional again as he rang the bell for her at number
ten, Queen's Crescent, Marylebone. He raised his hat, and gently
pressed her hand, and supposed he should see her again soon. And
Katharine, who was occupied in hoping that he did not notice the
squalor of the area, and would not come inside the dull, distempered
hall, only said that she supposed so too; and then blamed herself
hotly, as he drove away, for not responding more warmly.

"He will think I don't want to see him again," she thought wearily, as
she dragged herself up the uncarpeted stairs, and went into her dark
and dingy cubicle. It had never seemed so dark or so dingy before; and
she added miserably to herself, "I had better not see him again,
perhaps. It makes it all so much worse afterwards."

She would have been surprised had she known what Paul really was
thinking about her.

"She is more of a study than ever," he said to the cab horse. "Still
so much of the innocent pose about her, with just that indication of
added knowledge that is so fascinating to a man. She'll do, now she
has got away from her depressing relations; and the touch of weirdness
in her expression is an improvement. Wonder if Heaton would call her a
schoolgirl now? It was quite finished, the careless way she said
good-bye, as though it were of no consequence to her at all. Yes; she
is a study."

About a week later, when Katharine came down to breakfast, Phyllis
Hyam threw her a letter, in her unceremonious fashion.

"Look here!" she said. "I've kept you a chair next to mine, and I've
managed to procure you a clean plate, too; so don't go away to the
other table, as you did yesterday. Polly's gone; and I won't talk
unless you want to. Come on!"

Katharine sat down absently on the hard wooden chair, and began to
read her letter. She never wanted to talk at breakfast time, a fact
which Phyllis good-naturedly recognised without respecting. To-day she
was more silent than usual.

"No, I can't eat any of that stuff," she said to the proffered bacon.
"Get me some tea, will you? I'll make myself some toast."

Phyllis trotted off to the fire instead, and made it herself; and
Katharine returned to her letter without noticing her further. Judging
from the tense look on her face, it was of more than ordinary
interest.

"Dear Miss Katharine," it ran,

     A school in which I have a little influence is in want of a
     junior mistress. I have no idea as to the kind of work you
     want, but if it is of this nature, and you would like to
     consider it further, come up and see me about it in my
     chambers. I shall be in at tea-time, any afternoon this week.
     The best way for you to get here is to come to the Temple
     Station. Do not think any more about it, if you have already
     heard of something else.

          Yours sincerely,

               PAUL WILTON.

"Of course," said Katharine aloud, "I shall go this very afternoon."
Then she paused, and looked smilingly into Phyllis Hyam's hot face.
"No; I mean to-morrow."

"What?" said Phyllis, looking perplexed. "I thought you wanted it now,
and I made it on purpose."

"You dear thing! of course I want it now. You are an angel of
goodness, and I am a cross old bear," exclaimed Katharine, with a
burst of unusual cordiality; and Phyllis was consumed with curiosity
as to the writer of that letter.

It was not difficult to find Paul Wilton's chambers among the quaint
old buildings of Essex Court; and Katharine, as she toiled up the
massive oak staircase, stopping on every landing to read the names
over the doors, felt that she had reached a delightful oasis of
learning in the middle of commercial London.

"How splendid to be a man, and to have brains enough to live in a
place like this," she thought enthusiastically; and then, with the
cynicism that always dogged the steps of her enthusiasm, she added,
"It probably only wants money enough, though."

Paul Wilton opened his own door to her. He looked really glad to see
her, and Katharine flushed with pleasure when he kept hold of her hand
and drew her into his room.

"This is most good of you," he said; and on the impulse of the moment
Katharine let herself be surprised into an indiscretion.

"I was so glad to have your letter; I wanted to see you again
dreadfully," she said, without reflection. She meant what she said,
but she saw from his manner that she ought not to have said it. Any
sentiment that was crudely expressed was always distasteful to him;
and he at once dropped her hand, and pulled forward an arm-chair with
a great show of courtesy.

"Is that comfortable, or do you prefer a high one? I thought you might
come, one day; but I hardly expected you so soon. It is rather wet,
too, isn't it?"

Something impelled her to meet his irritating self-assurance with
ridicule.

"Very wet," she replied demurely. "In fact, now I come to think of it,
there are a great many reasons why I should not have come. But the one
that brought me here, in spite of them all, was a matter of business,
if you remember."

If he minded being laughed at, he certainly did not show it, for his
tone was much more natural when he answered her.

"Oh, yes, about the school! It is not far from you,--near Paddington,
in fact. It is rather a swagger place, I believe; Mrs. Downing is the
widow of an old friend of mine, who was killed out in Africa, and she
started this concern after his death. She knows nothing about
education, but a great deal about etiquette, and as this is also the
position of the mothers of most of her pupils, she has no difficulty
in convincing them of her capabilities. She is quite flourishing now,
I believe. Can you teach arithmetic?"

They discussed the vacant appointment solemnly, with the result that
Katharine agreed to accept it if Mrs. Downing approved of her. The
salary was not large, but she had learnt by now not to be too
particular, and it offered her an opening, at all events.

"I am sure she will like you all right. I told her about your people,
and so on, and a clergyman is always a guarantee in such cases. And
now for tea."

They talked about the historic associations of the Temple while the
housekeeper was bringing in tea; and they talked very little about
anything after she had left. Paul was in one of his unaccountable
silent moods, and they were never conducive to conversation. He roused
himself a little to show her some of his treasures,--an old bit of
tapestry, some Japanese prints, a Bartolozzi; but the afternoon was
not a success, and his depression soon communicated itself to
Katharine.

"I must be going," she said at last, after an awkward pause that he
showed no signs of breaking. They stood for a moment in the middle of
the room.

"It was good of you to come like this," he said, with the slightly
worried look he always wore in his morose moods. "I was afraid,
perhaps, that I ought not to have asked you."

Her questioning look invited him to continue.

"Not being sure what day you would come, I was unable to provide a
chaperon, don't you see? But, of course, if you don't mind, that
doesn't matter."

"Of course I don't mind," she said, with a reassuring smile. "Why
should I? I know you so well, don't I?"

He continued his explanation, as though he had decided to make it
beforehand, and did not mean to be deterred by her unwillingness to
hear it.

"Under the circumstances," he said gravely, "you will see that it
would be wiser for you not to come here again."

Katharine did not see, and she showed it in her face.

"If I were married," he continued, in a lighter tone, "it would be
different; but there are many reasons which have made it impossible
for me to marry, and there are still more now, which will prevent my
ever doing so. And since I am a bachelor, it is obviously better for
you to keep away."

In spite of his assumed carelessness, Katharine felt instinctively
that it was to hear this that he had asked her to come and see him
to-day. And, like many another woman who has to face as embarrassing a
disclosure from a man, her great desire at the moment was to conceal
that she had ever entertained the idea of his marrying her at all.

"But does it matter, so long as I don't mind?" she asked, pulling on
her gloves for the sake of the occupation. He bent down to button them
for her, and their eyes met. "Let me come again," she said
impulsively. "You know I think propriety is all rubbish. Besides, I
want to come. We can go on being friends, can't we? _I_ don't care
what other people think!"

"I only care for your sake, not for my own. No, child, it is safer
not; you are not the sort. Don't think any more about it. I am old
enough to be your father, and have seen more of the world than you. I
would not allow you, if you did wish it."

"It is all rubbish," repeated Katharine. "Why am I not the sort? I
don't understand; I am tired of being told that. If that is all, I--I
wish I were!"

Paul half wished it too, as she stood there in the firelight, with
the glow all over her face and hair; but he laughed away the thought.

"You are an absurd child; you don't know what you are saying. It is
lucky there is no one else to hear you. There, go away, and make it up
with young Morton! Oh, no, I know nothing whatever about it, I swear I
don't; but he won't do you any harm, and he isn't old, and worn out,
and--"

"Don't, please don't!" said Katharine, imploringly. "Ted is only like
my brother; I love him, but it is altogether different. Mayn't I
really see you any more?"

She was threatening to become unpleasantly serious, and Paul switched
on the electric light and fetched his coat hastily.

"Why, surely, lots of times, I expect. What a desperately solemn
person you are! I believe you work too hard, don't you? Now, I am not
going to let you walk to the station alone, so come along."

And Katharine realised, with a hot blush, that she had made a second
blunder.




CHAPTER VIII


The lady principal of the school near Paddington had too high an
opinion of her distinguished and influential friend, Mr. Wilton, to
refuse a teacher who was so warmly recommended by him, more especially
as her junior mistress had left her most inconveniently in the middle
of term; so Katharine found herself installed there, about three weeks
before the Easter holidays, with a class of thirty children in her
sole charge. The teaching was only elementary, but there was plenty to
be done; and she soon found that, although she was ostensibly only
wanted in the mornings, she had to spend most of her afternoons also
in correcting exercises. But the work interested her, and she had no
difficulty in managing the children,--a fact which surprised her as
much as it did Mrs. Downing, who had expected very little from her
youthful looking teacher, in spite of her recommendation by Mr.
Wilton. Mrs. Downing was a well-dressed little woman, with charming
manners and an unbounded belief in herself. By resolutely playing on
the weaknesses of others, she concealed her own shallowness of mind;
and she made up for her lack of brains by contriving to have clever
people always about her. She had chatted herself into a fashionable
and paying connection in that part of Bayswater which calls itself
Hyde Park; and if she employed tact and dissimulation in order to
entrap the mothers of the neighbourhood, she was, to do her justice,
genuine in her love of their children. Katharine would have found it
difficult to like such a woman, had not a two months' sojourn with
working gentlewomen taught her to tolerate weaknesses which would
formerly have excited her contempt; and she endured her smiles and her
blandishments with a stoicism that arose from a knowledge of their
harmlessness. But Mrs. Downing remained in ignorance of the fact that
her youngest teacher, with the serious face and the childish manner,
was able to see right through her; and the impenetrability which saved
her from feeling a snub, also spared her the knowledge that Katharine
was laughing at her.

One morning, about a week after she had begun her work as junior
teacher, Katharine was interrupted in the middle of her first lesson
by the precipitate entrance of the lady principal.

"My dear Miss Austen," she began effusively, and then paused suddenly;
for there was something about Katharine, in spite of her youthful
look, which warned intruders that she was not to be interrupted so
lightly as the other teachers. On this occasion she finished
explaining to the children that saying Mary Howard was "_in_ the
second piano" did not accurately express the fact that Mary Howard was
practising in the second music-room; and then turned to see who had
come in.

"My dear Miss Austen," began Mrs. Downing again, "so good of you to
look after their English; they are apt to be so careless! I am always
telling them of it myself, am I not, dear children? Ah, Carry, what an
exquisite rose; such colouring; beautiful, beautiful! For me? Thanks,
my sweet child; that is so dear of you! My dear Miss Austen, you are
so obliging always, and my literature lecturer has suddenly
disappointed me, and the first class will have nothing to do in the
next hour. So tiresome of Mr. Fletcher! His wife is ill, and he is
such a good husband,--quite a model! So I have set them an essay; I
cannot _bear_ to have the ordinary work interrupted; and would you be
so good as to leave the door open between the two rooms, and give them
a little, just a little supervision? That is so dear of you; it has
taken a load off my mind. Dear children, listen with all your might to
everything Miss Austen has to say, and you will soon be so clever and
so wise--I beg your pardon, Miss Austen?"

"Isn't it rather a pity for them to miss their lecture altogether?"
said Katharine, in the first breathing space. "I mean, I could give
them one if you liked, on something else. My class is being drilled in
the next hour, and I have nothing particular to do."

"But I should be charmed, delighted; nothing could be more opportune!
My dear Miss Austen, I have found a treasure in you. Children, you
must make the most of your teacher while she is with you, for I shall
have to take her away from you, quite soon! Miss Austen, I shall come
and listen to your lecture myself. I will go and prepare the girls--"

"I think, perhaps, something quite different would be best," said
Katharine, detaining her with difficulty. "Would you like it to be on
Gothic architecture?"

Mrs. Downing did not know the difference between a pinnacle and a
buttress, but she hastened to say she would like Gothic architecture
better than anything else in the world, and had, in fact, been on the
point of suggesting it herself; after which, she went to interrupt the
first class also, and Katharine devoted her energies to collecting the
wandering attention of her own pupils.

At the end of her lecture the lady principal hastened up to her.

"How extremely interesting, to be sure! I had no idea those vaults,
and pillars, and things, were so beautiful before. Where did you find
out all that? I should like to learn it up myself in the holidays, and
give a course of lessons on it to the first class next term."

Katharine tried not to smile.

"I have been learning it all my life, from my father. I don't think I
know any textbooks; it would be difficult to read it up in a hurry, I
should think." But the lady principal never allowed herself to be
thwarted, when she had a fresh idea. Besides, Gothic architecture was
quite new, and would be sure to take in the neighbourhood.

"Then you must give a course yourself to the whole school, my dear
Miss Austen," she exclaimed. "I insist upon it; and we will begin the
first Wednesday of next term."

Anything that promised an addition to her salary was sure to be
agreeable to Katharine, and she was only too pleased to agree. But,
meanwhile, her finances were in a deplorable condition. She found
herself with nothing but the change out of half a sovereign, about ten
days before the end of the term; and although she could easily have
asked Miss Jennings to give her credit until she received her salary,
she had all a woman's hyper-sensitiveness of conscience, and all her
disregard of the importance of food as well; and she resolutely set to
work to starve herself during those ten days. Fortunately, she was
constitutionally strong, and she never reached the stage of privation
when food becomes distasteful; but there was little consolation for
her in the fact that she remained healthily hungry all the time, and
had to run past the pastry-cooks' shops to escape their seductive
display. Long walks at supper time did not compensate for a meal that
was satisfying, if it was not very tempting; and the irony of it all
was forced upon her with a somewhat grim significance by something
that occurred, when she came up to bed one evening, tired out and
dispirited. She noticed that the girls stopped talking directly she
entered the room; but this would not have aroused her suspicions, if
Phyllis Hyam had not made a point of conversing vigorously with her
through the curtains, and being more brusque than usual when the
others tried to interrupt her.

"Good old Phyllis," reflected Katharine. "They have evidently been
abusing me. I wonder what I have done!"

Phyllis enlightened her somewhat unwillingly, the next morning, when
the others had gone down to breakfast.

"Don't bother about them; _I_ wouldn't. Mean cats! It's jealousy, of
course. Fact is, Polly saw you in a hansom with a man, some time back;
she came home full of it. Said you were no better than the rest of us,
after all. I said you never pretended to be; it was our own look out,
if we chose to think so. Besides, it was most likely your brother, I
said. Polly said it wasn't; you looked so happy, and he was smiling at
you."

"Conclusive evidence," murmured Katharine, with her mouth full of
hair-pins. "Did she describe the gentleman in question? It might be
useful for future identification."

"Oh, yes, she did! Said he was rather like a corpse with a black
beard; had a flavour of dead loves about him, I think she said; but I
don't quite know what she was driving at. And I'm sure I don't care."

"I do. It is most entertaining. Was that all they said?"

Phyllis hesitated, said she was not going to tell any more, and
finally told every detail.

"I said they were mean, despicable liars, especially Polly,
considering how much you have done for her! And I said that if ever I
had the chance--"

"But what did _they_ say?" interrupted Katharine.

"Oh, bother! what does it matter? They are a pack of mean sneaks. They
said you were never in to lunch now, or supper either; and Polly was
sure she had seen you walking with some one, only yesterday evening,
and that you went into a restaurant with him; and she declares you see
him every day, and that you are going all wrong. I said I should like
to kill her. And they all said you must have gone wrong, because you
are never in to supper now. I said I should like to kill them all for
telling such a false lie, whether it was true or not! It isn't their
business whether you choose to come in to supper or not, is it? And
then you came in, and-- Why, whatever is the joke now? Mercy me; I
thought you would be furious!"

For, of course, it was not to be supposed that she should know why
Katharine was rolling on her bed in a paroxysm of laughter.

But the holidays came at last, and she congratulated herself proudly
on not having given in once. She left school on the last day of the
term with a light heart; everything had made her laugh that morning,
from the children's jubilation at the coming holiday, to Mrs.
Downing's characteristic farewell. "Don't overwork in the holidays, my
dear Miss Austen," she had said, shaking Katharine warmly by both
hands. "You look quite worn out; I am afraid you take things a little
too seriously, do you not? When you have had _my_ experience in school
work, you will think nothing of a class like yours! Perhaps you do not
eat enough? Take my advice, and try maltine; it is an excellent tonic
for the appetite!" And Katharine walked out into the sunshine and the
warm air, with a feeling of joy at the thought of the cheque she was
to receive on the morrow. There was only one more day of privation for
her; and she called herself greedy for thinking about it, and laughed
at her own greediness, all in the same breath. She might easily have
humbled her pride and gone home to lunch like a rational being, now
that she saw her way to paying for it; but such a weakness as that
never entered her head for a moment, and she walked gaily on instead,
weaving a rosy dream of the feast she would have if her pocket were
full of money. But it was nearly empty, and she only found twopence
there when she put her hand in to feel; and she jingled the coppers
together, and laughed again, and hurried on a little faster. At Hyde
Park Corner a beggar pursued her with his studied tale of distress: he
had no home, he whined, and he had eaten nothing for days. "Just my
case," said Katharine cheerfully, and a spirit of recklessness
impelled her to drop the two pennies into his grimy palm, and then
hasten on as before.

"Well met," said a voice behind her. "But what a hurry you are in, to
be sure! Where are you off to, now?"

She looked round and saw Paul Wilton, smiling unaffectedly at her in a
way that recalled the old days at Ivingdon. Perhaps, the fine day had
influenced him too; certainly, he had not been starving for a
fortnight, nor would he have seen the humour of it, probably, if he
had. But these reflections did not occur to Katharine; it was enough
for her that he looked more pleased than usual, and that his manner
had lost its constraint.

"I am not going anywhere. The spring has got into my head, that's all;
and I felt obliged to walk. Besides, it is the first day of my first
holidays!" and she laughed out joyously.

"Yes? You look very jolly over it, any way. Have you lunched yet?"

"Yes,--I mean, no. I don't want any lunch to-day," she said hastily.
"Don't let us talk about lunch; it spoils it so."

"But, my dear child, I really must talk about it. I have had nothing
to eat since supper last night, and I am going to have some lunch now.
You've got to come along, too, so don't make any more objections. I'm
not a healthy young woman like you, and I can't eat my three courses
at breakfast, and then fast until it is time to spoil my digestion by
afternoon tea. Where shall we go? Suppose you stop chuckling for a
moment and make a suggestion."

"But I don't know any places, and I don't really want anything to
eat," protested Katharine. She would not have been so independent, if
she had been a little less hungry. "There's a confectioner's along
here, that always looks rather nice," she added, remembering one she
had often passed lately with a lingering look, at its attractive
contents.

"Nonsense! that's only a shop. Have you ever been in here?"

Katharine confessed that she had never lunched at a restaurant before;
and the savoury smell that greeted them as they entered reminded her
how very hungry she was, and drove away her last impulse to object.

"Never? Why, what has Ted been up to? Now, you have got to say what
you like; this is your merrymaking, you know, because it is the first
day of the holidays."

"Oh, but I can't; you must do all that, _please_. You don't know how
beautiful it is to be taken care of again."

"Is it?" They smiled at each other across the little table, and the
old understanding sprang up between them.

"You're looking very charming," he said, when he had given the waiter
his preliminary instructions. "You may abuse the food at your place as
much as you like, but it certainly seems to agree with you."

"I don't think," said Katharine carelessly, "that it has anything to
do with the food."

"Of course not; my mistake. No doubt it is natural charm triumphing
over difficulties. Try some of this, to begin with; bootlaces or
sardines?"

Katharine looked perplexed.

"What a delightful child you are," he laughed. "It's to give you an
appetite for the rest. I advise the bootlaces. Nonsense! you must do
as you are told, for a change. I am not one of your pupils. Besides,
it is the first day of the holidays."

And Katharine, who had no desire for a larger appetite than she
already possessed, ate the _hors d'oeuvre_ with a relish, and longed
for more, and wondered if she should ever attain to the extreme
culture of her companion, who was playing delicately with the sardine
on his plate.

"Don't you ever feel hungry?" she asked him. "It seems to add to your
isolation that you have none of the ordinary frailties of the flesh. I
really believe it would quite destroy my illusion of you, if I ever
caught you enjoying a penny bun!"

"You may preserve the illusion, if you like, and remember that I am
not a woman. It is only women who-- Well, what is it now, child?"

"Do explain this," she begged him, with a comical expression of
dismay. "Why is it red?"

"I should say because, fundamentally, it is red mullet. It would never
occur to me to inquire more deeply into it; but the rest is probably
accounted for by the carte, if you understand French. Don't you think
you had better approach it, fasting and with faith?"

"Go on about your appetite, please; it is so awfully entertaining,"
resumed Katharine. "I believe, if you found yourself really hungry one
day, force of habit would still make you eat your lunch as though you
didn't want it a bit. Now, wouldn't it?"

"My dear Miss Katharine, you have yet to learn that hunger does not
give you a desire for more food, but merely imparts an element of
pleasure to it. Go on with your fish, or else the entrée will catch
you up."

"I am glad," said Katharine, in the interval between the courses,
"that I'm not a superior person like you. It must be so lonely, isn't
it?"

"What wine will you drink? White or red?" asked Paul severely.

"Living with you," continued Katharine, leaning back and looking
mischievously at what was visible of him over the wine list, "must be
exactly like living with Providence."

"Number five," said Paul to the waiter, laying down the wine list.
Then he looked at her, and shook his head reprovingly.

"You see you don't live with me, do you?" he said drily.

"No," retorted Katharine hastily. "I live with sixty-three working
gentlewomen, and that is a very different matter."

"Very," he assented, looking so searchingly at her that she found
herself beginning to blush. The arrival of the wine made a diversion.

"Oh," said Katharine, "I am quite sure I can't drink any champagne."

"If you had not been so occupied in firing off epigrams, you might
have had some choice in the matter. As it is, you have got to do as
you are told."

He filled her glass, and she felt that it was very pleasant to do as
she was told by him; and her eyes glistened as they met his over the
brimming glasses.

"I am so happy to-day," she felt obliged to tell him.

"That's right. Because it is the first day of the holidays?"

"Because you are so nice to me, I think," she replied softly; and then
was afraid lest she had said too much. But he nodded, and seemed to
understand; and she dropped her eyes suddenly and began crumbling her
bread.

"What makes you so nice to me, I wonder," she continued in the same
tone. This time he became matter-of-fact.

"The natural order of the universe, I suppose. Man was created to look
after woman, and woman to look after man; don't you think so?"

She understood him well enough, by now, to know when to take her tone
from him.

"At all events, it saves Providence a lot of trouble," she said; and
they laughed together.

Their lunch was a success; and Paul smiled at her woe-begone face when
the black coffee had been brought, and she was beginning slowly to
remember that there was still such a place as number ten, Queen's
Crescent, and that it actually existed in the same metropolis as the
one that contained this superb restaurant.

"It is nearly over, and it has been so beautiful," she sighed.

"Nonsense! it has only just begun. It isn't time to be dull yet; I'll
tell you when it is," said Paul briskly; and he called for a daily
paper.

"What do you mean?" gasped Katharine, opening her eyes wide in
anticipation of new joys to come.

"We're going to a matinee, of course. Let's see,--have you any
choice?"

"A theatre? Oh!" cried Katharine. Then she reddened a little. "You
won't laugh if I tell you something?"

"Tell away, you most childish of children!"

"I've never been to a theatre before, either."

They looked at the paper together, and laughed one another's
suggestions to scorn, and then found they had only just time to get to
the theatre before it began. And she sat through the three acts with
her hand lying in his; and to her it was a perfect ending to the most
perfect day in her life. He took her home afterwards, and left her at
the corner of the street.

"I won't come to the door; better not, perhaps," he said, and his
words sent a sudden feeling of chill through her. They seemed to have
fallen back into the conventional attitude again, the most appropriate
one, probably, for Edgware Road, but none the less depressing on that
account.

"You are not going to be sad, now?" he added, half guessing her
thoughts. She looked up in his face and made an effort to be bright.

"It has been beautiful all the time," she said. "I never knew anything
could be so beautiful before."

"Ah," he said, smiling back; "it is the first day of your first
holidays, you see. We will do it again some day." But she knew as he
spoke that they never could do it again.

She saw him occasionally during the Easter holidays. He sent for her
once about a pupil he had managed to procure her, and once about some
drawing-room lectures he tried to arrange for her, and which fell
through. But on both these occasions he was in his silent mood, and
she came away infected by his dulness. Then she met him one day in the
neighbourhood of Queen's Crescent, and they had a few minutes
conversation in the noise and bustle of the street, that left her far
happier than she had been after a tête-à-tête in his chambers.

She went home for a few days at the end of her holidays, but her visit
was not altogether a success. It was a shock to her to find that home
was no longer the same now that she had once left it; and she did not
quite realise that the change was in herself as much as in those she
had left behind her. Her father had grown accustomed to living without
her, and it hurt her pride to find that she was no longer
indispensable to him. Her old occupations seemed gone, and there was
no time to substitute new ones; she told herself bitterly that she had
no place in her own home, and that she had burnt her ships when she
went out to make herself a new place in the world. Ivingdon seemed
narrower in its sympathies and duller than ever; she wondered how
people could go on living with so few ideas in their minds, and so few
topics of conversation; even the Rector irritated her by his want of
interest in her experiences and by his utter absorption in his own
concerns. Miss Esther added to her feeling of strangeness by treating
her with elaborate consideration; she would have given anything to be
scolded instead, for being profane, or for lying on the hearthrug. But
they persisted in regarding her as a child no longer; and she felt
graver and more responsible at home, than she had done all the time
she was working for her living in London.

On the whole, she was glad when school began again; and she grew much
happier when she found herself once more engrossed in the term's work,
which had now increased very materially, owing to her own efforts as
well as to those of Paul. Of him, she only had occasional glimpses
during the next few weeks; but they were enough to keep their
friendship warm, and she soon found herself scribbling little notes to
him, when she had anything to tell,--generally about some small
success of hers which she felt obliged to confide to some one, and
liked best of all to confide to him. Sometimes he did not answer them;
and she sighed, and took the hint to write no more for a time. And
sometimes he wrote back one of his ceremonious replies, which she had
learnt to welcome as the most characteristic thing he could have sent
her; for, in his letters, Paul never lost his formality. It was a very
satisfactory friendship on both sides, with enough familiarity to give
it warmth, and not enough to make it disquieting. But it received an
unexpected check towards the middle of June, through an incident that
was slight enough in itself, though sufficient to set both of them
thinking. And to stop and think in the course of a friendship,
especially when it is between a man and a woman, is generally the
forerunner of a misunderstanding.

It was the first hot weather that year. May had been disappointingly
cold and wet, after the promise of the month before, but June came in
with a burst of sunshine that lasted long enough to justify the papers
in talking about the drought. On one of the first fine days, Paul was
lazily smoking in his arm-chair after a late breakfast, when a knock
at his outer door roused him unpleasantly from a reverie that had
threatened to become a nap; and he rose slowly to his feet with
something like a muttered imprecation. Then he remembered that he had
left the door open for the sake of the draught, and he shouted a brief
"Come in," and sank back again into his chair. A light step crossed
the threshold, and paused close behind him.

"Who's there?" asked Paul, without moving.

"Well, you _are_ cross. And on a morning like this, too!"

Paul got up again, with rather more than his usual show of energy, and
turned and stared at his visitor.

"Really, Katharine," he said, with a slowly dawning smile of
amusement.

"Oh, I know all that," exclaimed Katharine, with an impatient gesture.
"But the sun was shining, and I had to come, and you'll have to put up
with it."

Paul looked as though he should have no difficulty in putting up with
it; and he went outside, and sported his oak.

"Won't you sit down, and tell me why you have come?" he suggested,
when he came back again. Katharine dropped into a chair, and laughed.

"How can you ask? Why, it is my half-term holiday; and the sun's
shining. Look!"

"I believe it is, yes," he said, glancing towards the gently flapping
blind. "Has that got anything to do with it?"

"Of course it has. I believe, I do believe you never would have known
it was a fine day at all, if I had not come to see you!"

"I can hardly believe that you did come to see me for the purpose of
telling me it was a fine day," said Paul.

Katharine leaned over the back of her chair, and nodded at him.

"Guess why I did come," she said. He shook his head lazily. She
imparted the rest of her news in little instalments, to give it more
emphasis. "It's my half-term holiday," she said again, and paused to
watch the effect of her words.

"I think I heard you say that before," he observed.

"And I'm going into the country for the whole day."

"Yes?" said Paul, who did not seem impressed.

"And I want you to come too. There! don't you think it was worth a
visit?" Her laugh rang out, and filled the little room. Paul was
stroking his beard reflectively, but he did not seem vexed.

"Really, Katharine," he said once more.

"Oh, now, don't be musty," she pleaded, resting her chin on her hands.
"I just want to do something jolly to-day; and I've never asked you
anything before, have I? Do, _please_, Mr. Wilton. I won't bother you
again for ever so long; I promise you I won't."

"Are you aware," said Paul, frowning, "that it is not customary to
come and visit a man in his chambers in this uninvited manner?"

"You know quite well," retorted Katharine, "that nothing ever matters,
if I do it."

"Of course I know that you are beyond the taint of scandal, or the--"

She started up impatiently, and came over to the side of his
arm-chair.

"Don't begin to be sarcastic. I never can think of the word I want,
when you get sarcastic. I am not beyond anything, and I am certainly
not above asking you a favour. Now, if you were to stop being superior
for a few minutes--"

"And if you were to stop standing on one leg, and swinging the other
about in that juvenile manner, a catastrophe might be--"

She seized a cushion and tried to smother him with it; but he was too
quick for her, and the cushion went spinning to the other end of the
room, and she found herself pulled on to his knee.

"You dreadful child! It is too hot, and I am too old for romping in
this fashion," he observed lazily.

"Are you coming?" she asked abruptly. She was playing with his watch
chain, and he did not quite know what to make of her face.

"Do you want me to?" he asked gently.

"Of course I do," she said, in a swift little whisper; and her fingers
strayed up to his scarf pin, and touched his beard.

"I am being dreadfully improper," she said.

"You are being very nice," he replied, and weakly kissed her fingers.
She did not move, and he gave her a little shake.

"What a solemn child you are," he complained. "It is impossible to
play with you, because you always take one so seriously."

"I know," said Katharine, rousing herself and looking penitent. "I am
so sorry! I am made that way, I think. It used to annoy Ted. I think
it is because I never had any fun at home, or any one to play with,
except Ted. And then I began to earn my living, and so I never had
time to be frivolous at all. I suppose I am too old to begin, now."

"Much too old," smiled Paul.

A knock came at the outer door. Paul put her away from him almost
roughly, and glanced with a disturbed look round the room.

"You had better stay here," he said shortly, "and keep quiet till I
come back."

"Who is it?" asked Katharine, in some bewilderment.

"I don't know. You don't understand," was all he said; and he went out
and spoke for a few minutes to a man on the landing.

"It was about a brief," he said on his return. He still frowned a
little, and she felt, regretfully, that his genial mood had fled.

"Was that all? Wouldn't he come in?" she asked.

Paul looked at her incredulously.

"It wasn't likely that I should ask him," he said, turning his back to
her, and rummaging among the papers on his desk. The colour came into
her face, and she was conscious of having said something tactless,
without exactly knowing what.

"Shall I go away again?" she asked slowly. The joy seemed suddenly to
have been taken out of her half-term holiday.

"You see, it is not for myself that I mind," he tried to explain
quietly; "but if you were to be seen in here alone, it would do for
your reputation at once, don't you see?"

Katharine looked as though she did not see.

"But, surely, there is no harm in my coming here?" she protested.

"Of course not; no harm at all. It isn't that," said Paul hastily.

"Then," said Katharine, "if there is no harm in it, why should I not
come? It is all rubbish, isn't it? I won't come any more if it bothers
you; but that is another matter."

"My dear child, do be reasonable! It is not a question of my feelings
at all. I like you to come, but I don't want other people to know that
you do, because of what they might say. It is for your sake entirely
that I wish you to be careful. That is why I don't come to see you at
your place. Do you see now?"

Katharine shook her head.

"It is either wrong, or it isn't wrong," she said obstinately. "I
never dreamed that there could be any harm in my coming to see you, or
I should not have come. And it was so pleasant, and you have always
been so nice to me. Why did you not tell me before? I don't see how it
can be wrong, and yet it can't be right, if I have got to pretend to
other people that I don't come. I hate hiding things; I don't like the
feel of it. I wish I could understand what you mean."

"It is quite easy to understand," said Paul, beginning to realise that
his case, as stated baldly by Katharine, was a very lame one. "It is
not wrong, as far as you and I are concerned; but it is a hell of a
world, and people will talk."

It was strong language for him to use; and she felt again that it was
her stupidity that was annoying him. She sighed, and her voice
trembled a little.

"I don't see what it has to do with other people at all. It is quite
enough for me, if you like me to come; and as for my reputation, it
seems to exist solely for the sake of the other people, so they may
as well say what they like about it. _I_ don't care. It is horrible of
you to suggest such a lot of horrible ideas. According to you, I ought
to be feeling ashamed of myself; but-- I don't."

"Of course you don't," said Paul, smiling in spite of himself; and he
put his hand out and drew her towards him. She was only a child, he
told himself, and he was old enough to be her father.

"My dear little puritan," he added softly, "you were never made to
live in the world as it is. If all women were like you, good heavens!
there wouldn't be any sin left."

"And I believe you would be sorry for it, wouldn't you?" said
Katharine suddenly. But when, instead of contradicting her, he tried
to make her explain her meaning, she only shook her head resolutely.

"I don't think I could; I hardly know myself. It was only something
that came into my head at the moment. It was something horrid; don't
let us talk about it any more. Are you coming out with me, or not? Ah,
I know you are not coming, now!"

She was swift to notice the least change in his expression, and it had
grown very dark in the last ten minutes. He held her out at arms'
length, by her two elbows, and smiled rather uncomfortably.

"I think I won't to-day, dear. Another time, eh? This brief must be
looked to at once; and I have some other work, too. Go and enjoy your
holiday, without me for a discordant element."

Katharine flushed up hotly, and loosed herself from his grasp. "I
don't mind your not coming," she said, looking steadily on the ground,
"but I don't think you need bother to invent excuses for _me_."

Paul shrugged his shoulders with an indifference that maddened her.
"All right; I won't, then. Go and find some one else for a companion,
and don't be a young silly. Can't Ted get off for to-day?"

"You have never said so many horrid things to me before," cried
Katharine passionately.

"You have never been so difficult to please before," observed Paul
coolly. "Besides, I was under the impression that I was making rather
a good suggestion."

"You always drag up Ted when you are being particularly unkind! If I
had wanted to go out with Ted, I shouldn't have come to you first."

Paul began to fear a scene; and he had more than a man's horror of
scenes. But he could not help seeing the tears in her eyes as she
walked away to the door, and he caught her up just as she was opening
it.

"Aren't you going to say good-bye? It may be some time before I see
you again." He determined, as he spoke, that it should certainly be a
very long time before he saw her again. But she disarmed him by
turning round swiftly without a trace of her anger left.

"Oh, why must it be some time? You don't mean it, do you? Say you
don't mean it, Mr. Wilton," she implored.

"No, no; I was only joking," he said reassuringly. "Quite soon, of
course." And he dropped a kiss on the little pink ear that was nearest
to him. But when he saw the look on her face, and the quick way in
which her breath was coming and going, he blamed himself for his
indiscretion, and pushed her playfully outside the door.

When Phyllis Hyam came home from the office, that evening, she found
Katharine on the floor of her cubicle, mending stockings; while the
rest of her wardrobe occupied all the available space to be seen.
Katharine never did things by halves, and she very rarely had the
impulse to mend her clothes.

"Hullo! do you mean to say you are back already?" cried Phyllis,
tripping clumsily over the dresses on the floor.

"That hardly demands an answer, does it?" said Katharine, without
looking up. She threaded her needle, and added more graciously, "I
didn't go, after all."

"Oh," said Phyllis wonderingly. "I'm sorry."

"You needn't bother, thanks. I didn't want to go. I stayed at home
instead, and mended my clothes; they seemed to want it, rather. I
shall be quite respectable, now."

"Oh!" said Phyllis again. "I should have left it for a wet day, I
think."

"Perhaps your work allows you to select your holidays according to the
weather. Mine doesn't," said Katharine sarcastically.

Phyllis cleared the chair, and sat down upon it.

"You've been crying," she said, with the bluntness that estranged all
her friends in time. Katharine never minded it; it rather appealed to
her love of truth than otherwise.

"Oh, yes! I was disappointed, that's all. There was nothing really to
cry about. I don't know why I did. Don't sit there and stare,
Phyllis; I know I have made a sight of myself."

"No, you haven't. Poor old dear!" said Phyllis, with ill-timed
affection. "I should like to tell him what I think of him, I know!"
she added emphatically.

"What are you muttering about?" asked Katharine.

"Oh, nothing," said Phyllis. "Have you had any tea?"

"I don't want any tea, thank you. I wish you wouldn't bother. Go down
and have your own."

"Guess I shall bring it up here instead, and then we can talk," said
Phyllis. In about ten minutes she returned, very much out of breath,
with a large tray.

Katharine looked up and frowned. "I said I didn't want any," she said
crossly. However, she added that she believed there was some
shortbread on the book-case, which Phyllis at once annexed; and her
temper began slowly to improve.

"Phyllis," she asked abruptly, after a long pause, "what do you think
of men?"

"That they are luxuries," returned Phyllis, without hesitation. "If
you've nothing to do all day but to play about, you can afford to
have a man or two around you; but if you're busy, you can't do with
them, anyhow."

"Why not?" demanded Katharine. "Don't you think they help one along,
rather?"

"Not a bit of it! First, they draw you on, because you seem to hold
off; and then, when you begin to warm up, they come down with a
quencher, and you feel you've been a sight too bold. And all that kind
of thing is distracting; and it affects your work after a time."

"But surely," said Katharine, "a girl can have a man for a friend
without going through all that!"

"Don't believe in it; never did; it doesn't work."

"I think it does, sometimes," observed Katharine. "Of course it
depends on the girl."

"Entirely," said Phyllis cheerfully. "The man would always spoil it,
if he could--without being found out."

Katharine leaned back on the pillow, with her arms behind her head,
and her eyes fixed on the ceiling.

"That's just it," she said thoughtfully; "men are so much more
conventional than women. I am glad I am not a man, after all. There
is no need for a woman to be conventional, is there? She isn't afraid
of being suspected, all the time. I'm certain conventionality was made
for man, and not man for conventionality, and that woman never had a
hand in it at all."

"I don't know about that, though it sounds very fine," said Phyllis.
"But of course men have to be more conventional than we are. It helps
them to make some show of respectability, I guess."

"It is very horrible, if one analyses it," murmured Katharine.
"According to that, the man who is openly bad is preferable to the man
who is conventionally good. Of course Paul is not bad at all; but, oh!
I do wish I didn't see through people, when they try to pretend
things,--it always annoys them."

"Eh?" said Phyllis, looking up. "Your tea is getting cold."

"Never mind about the tea! Tell me, Phyllis, do you think any woman
can attract any man, if she likes?"

"Of course she can, if she is not in love with him."

Katharine winced, and brought her eyes down to look at her unconscious
friend, who was still munching shortbread with an expression of
complete contentment on her face.

"I mean if she _is_ in love with him, very much in love with him."

"Can't say; never was, myself. But I don't believe you can do
anything, if you've got it badly; you have to let yourself go, and
hope for the best."

"I don't believe you know any more about it than I do, Phyllis. I'll
tell you what it is that is attractive to a man in a woman: it is her
imperfections. He likes her to be jealous, and vain, and full of small
deceptions. He hates her to be tolerant, and large-minded, and
truthful; above all, he hates her to be truthful. I don't know why it
is so, but it is."

"It is because she isn't too mighty big to worship him, then; nor cute
enough to see through him," said Phyllis.

"If you can see through a man, you should never fall in love with
him," added Katharine.

"Oh, I don't know!" said Phyllis. "You can always pretend not to see;
they never know."

"A nice man does," said Katharine, smiling for the first time. The tea
had made her feel more charitable; and she took up her pen, and wrote
to her mother's connections, the Keeleys, who did not know she was in
town, to ask them when she could call and see them.

She felt the need of knowing some one, now that she had made up her
mind not to know Paul any more. For he had taught her the desire for
companionship, and she shrank from being left entirely friendless.




CHAPTER IX


At first she was surprised to find that it was so easy to get on
without him. She persuaded herself that her indifference arose from
her annoyance at his having imposed the conventional view of things
upon her; but, in reality, it was due to her conviction that he would
be the first to give in, and would soon write and ask her to go and
see him. And she longed for an opportunity to write and refuse him.
But when a fortnight passed by and no letter came from him, her
righteous scorn deserted her and she became merely angry. The flatness
of being completely ignored was unendurable; and she longed more than
ever for a chance of showing him that her dignity was equal to his,
although she was beginning to fear that he was not going to give her
the necessary occasion. Then came days when she felt reckless, and
determined to cease thinking about him at any cost; and she threw
herself into any distraction that offered itself, and tried to think
that she was quite getting over her desire to see him. It was in one
of these moods that she went to call on the Keeleys, who had written
to tell her that they were always at home on Thursdays. The fact of
putting on her best clothes was in itself some satisfaction; it was a
step towards restoring her self-respect, at all events, and she felt
happier than she had been for some time past as she walked down Park
Lane and found her way to their house in Curzon Street.

The Honourable Mrs. Keeley was the widow of a peer's son who had been
a cabinet minister and had signalised his political career by
supporting every bill for the emancipation of women, and his domestic
one by impressing upon his wife that her true sphere was the home. The
natural reaction followed after his death, when Mrs. Keeley broke
loose from the restraint his presence had put upon her, and practised
the precepts he had loved to expound in public. She became the most
active of political women; she spoke upon platforms; she harried the
rate-payers until they elected her favourite county councillor; she
canvassed in the slums for the candidate who would vote for woman's
suffrage. She had a passion for everything that was modern,
irrespective of its value; and she spent the time that was not
occupied by her public duties in trying to force her principles upon
her only daughter. But Marion Keeley refused to be modern, except in
her amusements; she accepted the bicycle and the cigarette with
equanimity, but she had no desires to reform anything or anybody; she
merely wanted to enjoy herself as much as possible, and she looked
forward to making a wealthy marriage in the future. Her greatest
ambition was to avoid being bored, and her greatest trial was the
energy of her mother. She never pretended to be advanced; and she felt
that she had been wasted on the wrong mother when she saw most of the
girls of her acquaintance burning to do things in defiance of their
old-fashioned parents. She chose her own friends from the idle world
of Mayfair; and so it was that two distinct sets of people met in the
Keeleys' drawing-room on Thursday afternoons and disapproved of each
other.

Katharine received a warm reception from her hostess. The fact that
she belonged to the class of working gentlewomen, about whom Mrs.
Keeley had many theories but little knowledge, was a sufficient
evidence of her right to be encouraged; and she found herself seated
on an uncomfortable stool, and introduced to an East-end clergyman
and a lady inspector of factories within five minutes of her entry
into the room. She glanced rather longingly towards the back
drawing-room, where her cousin Marion was looking very pretty and was
flirting very charmingly with three smart-looking boys; but it was
evident that her aunt had labelled her as one of her own set, and she
resigned herself to her fate, and agreed with the East-end clergyman
that the want of rain was becoming serious.

"My niece lectures, you know; strikingly clever, and _so_ young," said
Mrs. Keeley in a breathless aside to the lady inspector, as she came
back from the opposite side of the room, where she had just coupled a
socialist and a guardian of the poor.

"Indeed!" said the lady inspector; and Katharine began to lose her
diffidence when she found that she smiled quite like an ordinary
person. "Do you lecture on hygiene? Because Mr. Hodgson-Pemberton is
getting up some popular lectures in his parish, and we are trying to
find a lecturer for hygiene?"

Mr. Hodgson-Pemberton became animated for a moment; but when Katharine
said, apologetically, that her subjects were merely literary, he took
no further interest in her and resumed his conversation with the lady
inspector of factories. Katharine was left alone again, and relapsed
into one of her dreams, until Marion recognised her and came and
fetched her into the back drawing-room.

"Isn't it refreshing?" she said to the boys, who had now increased in
number: "Kitty doesn't know anything about politics, and she doesn't
want to be with the fogies at all, do you, Kitty? And, for all that,
she is dreadfully clever, and gives lectures on all sorts of things to
all sorts of people. Oh, dear, I do wish I were clever!"

"Oh, please don't be clever, Miss Keeley! you won't know me any longer
if you are," said her favourite boy, imploringly.

"You are far too charming to be clever," added another boy, who had
been her favourite last week, and was trying to regain his position by
elaborate compliments.

"That's rubbish," said Marion crushingly; "and not very polite to my
cousin, either."

The dethroned favourite did his best to repair his blunder by assuring
Katharine that he would never have supposed her to be clever, if he
had not been told so. And when she laughed uncontrollably at his
remark, he chose to be offended, and withdrew altogether.

"You shouldn't laugh at him. He can't help it," said Marion, and she
introduced a third admirer to Katharine to get rid of him. He had very
little to say, and when she had confessed that she did not bicycle,
and never went in the park because she was too busy, he stared a
little without speaking at all, and then contrived to join again in
the conversation that was buzzing around Marion. Most of the other
people had left now, and Katharine was trying to summon up courage to
do the same, when her aunt came up to her again, and presented her to
a weary-looking girl in a big hat.

"You ought to know each other," she said, effusively, "because you are
both workers. Miss Martin does gesso work, and has a studio of her
own; and my niece gives lectures, you know."

They looked at one another rather hopelessly, and Katharine resisted
another impulse to laugh.

"The knowledge of our mutual occupations doesn't seem to help the
conversation much, does it?" she said; and the weary-looking girl
tried to smile.

"That's right," said Mrs. Keeley, resting for a moment in a chair near
them. "I knew you two would have plenty to say to each other. That's
the best of you working-women; there is such a bond of sympathy
between you."

"Is there?" said Katharine, remembering the sixty-three working-women
at Queen's Crescent, and her feelings towards them. But Mrs. Keeley
had ideas about women who worked, and meant to air them.

"It is so splendid to think that women can really do men's work, in
spite of everything that is said to the contrary," she continued.

The weary-looking girl made no attempt to contradict her, but
Katharine was less docile.

"I don't think they can," she objected. "They might, perhaps, if they
had a fair chance; but they haven't."

"But they are getting it every day," cried Mrs. Keeley, waxing
enthusiastic. "Think of the progress that has been made, even in my
time; and in another ten years there will be nothing that women will
not be able to do in common with men! Isn't it a glorious reflection?"

"I don't think it will be so," persisted Katharine. "It has nothing to
do with education, or any of those things. A woman is handicapped,
just because she is a woman, and has to go on living like a woman.
There is always home work to be done, or some one to be nursed, or
clothes to be mended. A man has nothing to do but his work; but a
woman is expected to do a woman's work as well as a man's. It is too
much for any one to do well. I am a working-woman myself, and I don't
find it so pleasant as it is painted."

"I'm _so_ glad you think so," murmured Marion, who had come up
unobserved, with her favourite in close attendance. "I was afraid you
would be on mamma's side, and I believe you are on mine, after all."

At this point the weary-looking girl got up to leave, as though she
could not bear it another minute, and Katharine tried to do the same;
but she was not to be let off so easily.

"Tell me," said her aunt earnestly, "do you not think that women are
happier if they have work to do for their living?"

"I suppose it is possible, but I haven't met any who are," answered
Katharine. "I think it is because they feel they have sacrificed all
the pleasures of life. Men don't like women who work, do they?"

The eyes of Marion met those of her favourite admirer; and Marion
blushed. But Mrs. Keeley returned to the charge.

"Indeed, there are many in my own acquaintance who have the greatest
admiration for working-women."

"Oh, yes," laughed Katharine, "they have lots of admiration for us;
but they don't fall in love with us, that's all. I think it is because
it is the elusive quality in woman that fascinates men; and directly
they begin to understand her, they cease to be fascinated by her. And
woman is growing less mysterious every day, now; she is chiefly
occupied in explaining herself, and that is why men don't find her
such good fun. At least, I think so."

"You know us remarkably well, Miss Austen, you do, really," drawled
the favourite boy.

"Oh, no," said Katharine, really getting up this time, "I don't
pretend to. But I do know the working gentlewoman very well indeed,
and I don't think she is a bit like the popular idea of her."

She was much pleased with herself as she walked home; and even the
bustle of Edgware Road and the squalor of Queen's Crescent failed to
remove the pleasant impression that her excursion into the fashionable
world had left with her. It comforted her wounded feelings to
discover that she could hold her own in a room full of people,
although the only man whose opinion she valued held her of no more
account than a child.

"Hullo! you seem pleased with yourself," said Polly Newland, as she
entered the house. The cockney twang of her voice struck un-musically
on Katharine's ear, and she murmured some sort of ungracious reply and
turned to rummage in the box for letters. There was one for her, and
the sight of the precise, upright handwriting drove every thought of
Polly, and the Keeleys, and her pleasant afternoon out of her head.
Even then something kept her from reading it at once, and she took it
upstairs into her cubicle, and laid it on the table while she changed
her clothes and elaborately folded up her best ones and put them away.
Then she sat down on the bed and tore it open with trembling fingers,
and tried to cheat herself into the belief that she was perfectly
indifferent as to its contents.

"Dear child," it ran:--

     What has become of you? Come round and have tea with me
     to-morrow afternoon. I have some new books to show you.

         Yours ever,

              PAUL WILTON.

Here at last was the opportunity she had wanted. He should know now
that she was not a child, to be laughed at because she was cross, to
be ignored when she was hurt, and to be coaxed back into good humour
again by a bribe. She would be able to show him now that she was not
the sort of woman he seemed to consider her, and she told herself
several times that she was overjoyed at being given the chance of
telling him so. But when it came to the point, she found that the
cold, dignified letter she had been composing for weeks was not so
easy to write; and she spent the rest of the evening in thinking of
new ones. First of all, it was to be very short, and very stiff; but
that was not obvious enough to gratify her injured feelings, and she
set to work on another one that was mainly sarcastic. But sarcasm
seemed a sorry weapon to use when she had reached such a crisis in her
life as this; and she thought of another one in bed, after the light
was out, in which she determined that he should know she was unhappy
as well. And this one was so pathetic that it even roused her own
pity, and she felt that it would be positively inhuman to send such a
letter as that to any one, however badly he had behaved.

In the end, she did not write to him at all. It was more effective,
she thought, to remain silent. So she went to school the next morning
as usual, and gave her lessons as usual; though she looked in the
glass at intervals to see if she were pale and had a sad expression,
which certainly ought to have been the case. But even her head did not
ache, which it did sometimes; and Nature obstinately refused to come
to her assistance. She reached home again about four o'clock, and the
aspect of the doorsteps and the area completed her discomfiture. If
they had only been a little less squalid, a little more free from the
domination of cats, she might have retained her dignified attitude to
the end. But there was something about them to-day that recalled the
cosy little room in the Temple by vivid contrast; and she flung her
pile of exercise books recklessly upon the hall table, and hastened
out of the house again, without allowing herself time to think.

"I was afraid you were not coming," he said, and he greeted her with
both hands. She never remembered seeing him so unreserved in his
welcome before; and she marvelled at herself for having attempted to
keep away from him any longer.

"It was because of the cats," she said, laughing to hide her emotion.
But she could not hide anything from him; he knew something of what
she was thinking, and he bent down and deliberately kissed her.

"Why did you do that?" she asked, trying to free her hands to cover
her burning face.

"Because you didn't stop me, I suppose," he replied, lightly.

"But I didn't know you were going to."

"Because I knew you wouldn't mind, then."

She did not speak, and her eyes were lowered.

"Did you mind, Katharine?"

"No," she whispered.

"Now, tell me why I am indebted to the cats," he said, as he rang the
bell for tea; and for the rest of the afternoon they talked, as
Katharine laughingly said, "without any conversation."

There was no explanation on either side, no attempt at facing the
situation; and she felt when she left him that she had thrown away her
last chance of controlling their friendship. There had been a tacit
struggle between their two wills, and his had triumphed. She could
never put him out of her life now, unless he broke with her of his
own accord; and she realised bitterly, even while she was glad, that
he did not care enough for her to do that.

She saw him constantly all through the hot months of July and August.
She gave up her original intention of going home for the summer
holidays, on the pretext of reading for her next term's lectures at
the British Museum; but she did very little work in reality, and she
spent whole days in the reading-room, regardless of the people around
her, sometimes even of the book before her, and dreamed long hours
away, making visions in which only two people played any prominent
part,--and those two people were Paul and herself. Her whole life
seemed to be a kind of dream just then, with a vivid incident here and
there when she met him or went to see him, and the rest a vague
nebula, in which something outside herself made her do what was
expected of her. Sometimes she felt impelled to work furiously hard
for a day or two, or to take long walks by herself, as though nothing
else would tire her restless energy; and then she would relapse into
her lethargic mood again, and do nothing but watch vigilantly for the
post, or haunt the streets where she had sometimes met him. And all
the while she thought she was happy, with a kind of weird, passionate
happiness she had never known before; and it seemed to compensate for
the hours of suspense and anxiety she went through when he took no
notice of her. For his conduct was as inexplicable as ever; and for
one day that he was demonstrative and even affectionate, she had to
endure many of indifference that almost amounted to cruelty.

"We are horribly alike; it hurts me sometimes when I suddenly find
myself in you," she said to him one day, when he was in an expansive
mood.

"I am much honoured by the discovery, but I fail to see where the
likeness lies," was his reply.

"It is not very definite," she said, thoughtfully. "I think it must be
because I feel your changes of mood so quickly. We laugh together at
something, and everything seems so fearfully nice; and then, suddenly,
I feel that something has sprung up between us, and I look up and I
see that you feel it too, and all at once there is nothing to talk
about. Haven't you ever noticed it?"

"I think you are an absurdly sensitive little girl," he said, smiling.

"Of course," she continued, without heeding his remark, "on the
surface, no two people could be more unlike than we are. You are so
awfully afraid of showing what you feel, for instance; but I always
tell you everything, don't I?"

"My dear child, what nonsense! I am of the most artless and confiding
nature; while you, on the contrary, never give yourself away at all.
Why, you never tell me anything I really want to know! Whatever put
such an idea into that curious head of yours?"

"Oh, don't!" she cried. "You make me feel quite hysterical! You have
no right to upset all my views on my own character, as well as on
yours. I _know_ I am stupidly demonstrative. I have often blu

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