^,^ plHl W^ m^^^m w 2 ■ ■ . ■■■;; f^l iriiii' S&l i m i! M-E-^! ■iKKtitn p .^ .1 ! k-'-J^iil;- ■.-^ii-iii ■ :'ll ■ Mm JJ I i 1 \ ! ■ 1 li n 6 i; M 1 ^ BERKELEY LIBRARY UNWERSITY OF CALIFORNIA CD« iluiDor's edition STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS NOVELS BY THE SAME AUTHOR* Lady Audley's Secret. Henry Dunbar. Eleanor's Victory. Aurora Floyd. John Marchmont's Leg^y. The Doctor's Wife. Only a Clod. Sir Jasper's Tenant. Trail of the Serpent. The Lady's Mile. Lady Lisle. Captain of the Vulture. Birds of Prey. Charlotte's Inheritance. Rupert Godwin. Run to Earth. Dead Sea Fruit. Ralph the Bailiff. Fenton's Quest. Lovels of Arden. Robert Ainsleigh. To the Bitter End. Milly Darrell. Strangers and Pilgrims. Lucius Davoren. Taken at the Flood. Lost for Love. A Strange Worid. Hostages to Fortune. Dead Men's Shoes. Joshua Haggard. Weavers and Weft. An Open Verdict. Vixen. The Cloven Foot. The Story of Barbara. Just as I am. Asphodel. Mount Royal. The Golden Calf. Phantom Fortune. Flower and Weed Ishmael. Wyllard's Weird. Under the Red Flag. One Thing Needful. Mohawks. Like and Unlike. The Fatal Three. The Day will come. One Life, One Love. Gerard. The Venetians, All along the River. Thou art the Man. The Christmas Hirelings. Sons of Fire. London Pride. Under Love's Rule. Rough Justice. In High Places. His Darling Sin. The Infidel. The Conflict. A Lost Eden. s TRANGERS AND PILGRIMS BY. M. E. BRADDON Author of **LADY AUDLEVS SECRET," ''VIXEN; ''LONDON PRIDE," ETC. " Egypt, thou knewst too well My heart was to thy rudder tied by the strings, And thou shouldst tow me after ; o'er my spirit Thy full supremacy thou knewst ; and that Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods Command me." ^ Xonbott SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO., Ltd. CONTENTS. PAOS Book the First i Book the Second 156 Book thh Third 2S7 692 OHAPTEB L •• Give me a look, give me a fac^ That makes simplicity a grace ; Eobes loosely flowing, hair as free : Such sweet neglect more taketh me {0 Than all the adulteries of art ; They strike mine eyes, but not my Leait** The scene was an ancient orchard on the slope of a hxU, in the far west of England : an orchard bounded on one side by an old- fashioned garden, where roses and carnations were blooming in their summer glory ; and on the other by a ponderous red-brick wall, heavily buttressed, and with a moat at its outer base — a wall that had been built for the protection of a more important habitation than Hawleigh Vicarage. Time was when the green slope where the rugged apple-trees spread their crooked limbs in the sunshine was a prim pleasance, and when the hill was crowned by the grim towers of Hawleigh Castle. But the civil wars made an end of the gothic towers and machicolated galleries that had weathered many a storm, and nothing was now left save a remnant of the old wall, and one solitary tower, to which some archeologically-minded vicar in time past had joined the modest parsonage of Hawleigh parish. This was a low white building, of the farmhouse type, large and roomy, with bow- windows to some of the lower rooms, and diamond-paned case- ments to others. In this western land of warm rains and flowers the myrtles and roses climbed to the steeply-sloping roof, and every antique casement was set in a frame of foliage and blossom. It was not a mansion which a modern architect would have been 2 Strangers and Pilgrims* proud to have built, by any means, but a dwelling-place with which a painter or a poet would have fallen madly in love at first sight. There were pigeons cooing and boop-boop-booping among the moss-grown corbels of the tower ; a blackbird in a wicker cage hanging outside one of the narrow windows; a skylark in a little green wooden box decorating another. The garden where the roses and carnations flourished had somewhat of a neglected look, not weedy or forlorn, only a little unkempt and over-luxu- riant, like a garden to which the hireling gardener comes once a week, or which is left to the charge of a single outdoor labourer, who has horses and pigs upon his mind, nay perhaps also the daily distraction of indoor duties, in the boot-and- knife-cleaning way. Perhaps, looking at the subject from a purely poetical point of view, no garden should ever be better kept than that garden at Hawleigh. What ribbon-bordering, or artistically variegated mosaic of lobelia, and petunia, and calceolaria, and verbena, could ever equal the wild beauty of roses that grew at their own sweet will against a background of seringa and arbutus — shrubs that must have been planted by some unknown benefactor in the remote past, for no incumbent of late years had ever been known to plant anything ? What prim platter-like circles of well- behaved bedding-out plants, spick and span from the green- house, could charm the sense like the various and yet familiar old-world flowers that filled the long wide borders in Parson Luttrell's flower-garden ? Of this small domain about half an acre consisted of meadow- like grass, not often improved by the roller, and sometimes permitted to flourish in rank luxuriance ankle-deep. The girls — that is to say, Wilmot Luttrell's four daughters — managed to play croquet upon that greensward nevertheless, being at the croquet-playing stage of existence, when a young woman hard driven would play croquet in an empty coal-cellar. Near the house the grass assumed form and dignity, and was bordered by a rugged sweep of loose-gravel, called the carriage drive ; and just opposite the drawing-room windows there stood an ancient stone sun dial, on which the ladies of Hawleigh Castle had marked the slow passage of the empty hours in centuries gone by. Only a hedge of holly divided the garden from a strip of waste land that bordered the dusty high-road ; but a row of fine old elms grew on that intervening strip of grass, and secured the Luttrell damsels from the gaze of the vulgar. Bat for seclusion, for the sweet sense of utter solitude and retirement, the orchard was best — that undulating slope of mossy turf, cropped close by occasional sheep, which skirted the flower-garden, and stretched awa}' to the rear of the low white *V- Str angers and Filgrims. 8 house. The very wall, crowned with gaudy dragon's-mouth, and creeping yellow stone-crop, was in itself a picture; and in tlic shelter of this wall, which turned its stalwart old back to the west, was the nicest spot for an afternoon's idleness over a new book, or the worthless scrap of lace or muslin which constituted the last mania in the way of fancy-work. Thig, at least, was what Elizabeth Luttrell said of the old wall, and as she had been born and reared for the nineteen years of her young life at Hawleigh, she was a tolerable judge of the capabilities of garden and orchard. She sits in the shadow of the waU this June afternoon alone, with an unread book in her lap. Elizabeth Luttrell is the beauty of a family in which, all the daughters are or have been handsome— the peerless flower among four fair sisters, who are renowned through this part of the western world as the pretty I^Iiss Luttrells. About Gertrude the eldest, or Diana the second, or Blanche the youngest, there might be differences of opinion — a question raised as to the length of Gertrude's nose, a doubt as to the width of Diana's mouth, a schism upon the merits of Blanche's figure; but the third daughter of the house of Luttrell was 8imply perfect ; you could no more dispute her beauty than that of the Florentine Yenus. What a picture she made upon this midsummer afternoon, as she sat in the shade of the ruddy old wall, in a holland dress, and with a blue ribbon twisted in her hair, profile of face and figure in full relief against the warm background, every line the perfection of grace and beauty, every hue and every curve a study for a painter ! 0, if among all the splendid fashion-plates in the Boyal Academy — the duchess in black-velvet train and point-lace flounces and scarlet-silk peticoat and diamonds; the marchioness in blue satin and blonde and pearls : the countess in white silk and azaleas; the viscountess in tulle and rose-buds — if in this feast of millinery Elizabeth Luttrell could but shino forth, sitting by the old orchard wall in her washed-out holland gown, what a revelation that fresh young beauty would seem ! It was not a rustic beauty, however — not a loveliness created to be dressed in white muslin and to adorn a cottage — but splendid rather, and worthy to rule the heart of a great man. Nose, a small acquiline ; eyes, that darkly-clear gray which in some lights deepens to violet; complexion, a warm brunette; forehead, low and broad; hair of the darkest brown, with ruddy golden beams lurking in its crisp waves — hair which is in itself almost a sufi&cient justification for any young woman to set up as a beauty, if her stock-in-trade were no more than those dark- brown tresses, those delicately-arched brows and upward curling iashes. In all the varying charms of expression, as well as in regularity of feature, Nature has gifted Elizabeth Luttrell with 3: (Strange^^ and Pilgrims, a lavish hand. She is the crystallisation of centuries of dead* and-gone Luttrells, all more or less beantiful ; for the race i» one that can boast of good looks as a family heritage. She sits alone by the old wall, the western sunlight shining through the red and yellow flowers of the dragon's-mouth above her head; sits alone, with loosely-linked hands lying idle in her /ap, and fixed dreaming eyes. It is nearly an hour since she nas turned a leaf of her book, when a ringing soprano voice <*.alling her name, and a shower of rose leaves thrown across hei face, scare away her day-dreams. She looks up impatiently, angrily even, at Blanche, the hoyden of the family, who stands above her on the steep grassy slope, with a basket of dilapidated roses on her arm. The damsel, incorrigibly idle alike by nature and habit, has been seized with an industrious fit, and has been clipping and trim- ming the roses. " What a lazy creature yon are, Lizzie ! " she exclaims. " 1 thought you were going to put the ribbons on your muslin dress for this evening." " I wish you'd be good enough to concern yourself about your own clothes, Blanche, and leave mine alone. And please don't come screaming at me when I'm — asleep." "You weren't asleep; your eyes were ever so wide open. You were thinking — I can guess what about — and smiling at your own thoughts. I wish I had anything as nice to think about. That's the worst of having a handsome sister. How can I suppose that any one will ever take any notice of poor mieme?" "Upon my honour, Blanche, I believe you are the most pro- voking girl in creation ! " •* You can't believe that, for you don't know all the girls in creation." " One of the most, then ; but that comes of sending a girl to school. You have all the schoolgirl vulgarities." "I'm sure I didn't want to go to Miss Derwent's, Lizzie. It was Gertrude's fault, making such a fuss about me, and setting papa at me. I'd much rather have run wild at home." " I think you'd run vild anywhere, in a convent, even." " I daresay I should ; but that's not the question. I want to know if you're going to wear your clean white muslin, because my own toilet hinges on your decision. It's a serious matter for girls who are allowed only one clean muslin a week." *'I don't know; perhaps I shall wear my blue," replies Elizabeth, with a careless air, pretending to read. " You won't do anything of the kind. It's ever so tumbled^ and I know you like to look nice when Mr. Forde is here. You'r* such a mean girl, Elizabeth LnttrelL Yon pretend not to can> dtrangers ana Ifiignnht, & a straw how you dress, and dawdle here making believe to read that stupid old volume of travels to the Victoria Thingerabob, which the old fogies of the book-club choose for us, instead of some jolly novel ; and when we've put on our veriest rags you'll scamper up the back-stairs just at the last moment, and com^ down a quarter of an hoar after he has come, all over crisp muslin flounces and fresh pink ribbons, just as if you'd a French milliner at your beck and call." "I really can't help it if I know how to put on my things a little better than you and Diana. I'm sure Gertrude is always nicely dressed.'* ** Yes, Gertrude has the brand of Cain — Gertrude is a bom old maid; one can see it in her neck-ribbons and top-knots. Now, how about the white muslin ? " " I wish you wouldn't worry, Blanche ; I shall wear exactly what I please. I will not be pestered by a younger sister. What's the time?" The fourth Miss Luttrell drags a little Geneva silver watch from her belt by a black ribbon — a silver watch presented to her by her father on her fifteenth birthday — to be exchanged for a gold one at some indefinite period of the Vicar's existence, when a gleam of prosperity shall brighten the dull level of his finan- cial career. He has given similar watches to all his daughters on their fifteenth birthdays ; but Lizzie's lies forgotten amongst disabled brooches and odd earrings in a trinket-box on her dressing-table. Elizabeth Luttrell does not care to note the progress of her days on a pale-faced Geneva time-piece, value something under five pounds. " Half-past five by me," says Blanche. " Are you twenty minutes slow, or twenty minutes fast P " '• Well, I believe I'm five-and-twenty minutes slow." *• Then I shall come to dress in half an hour. I wish you'd iust tack those pink bows on my dress, Blanche — you're evidently at a loss for something to do." " Just tack," repeats the younger sister with a wry face ; ** you mean sew them on, I suppose. That's like people asking you to * touch ' the bell, when you're comfortably coiled up in an easy-chair at the other end of the room. It sounds less than asking one to ring it; but one has to disturb oneself all the same. I don't see why you shouldn't sew on your own ribbons ; and I'm dead tired — I've been standing in the broiling sun for the last hour, trimming the roses, and trying to make the garden look a little decent." " 0, very well ; I can get my dress ready myself," says Elizabeth with a grand air, not lifting her eyes from the volume in which she struggles vainly to follow the current of the Vic- toria Nyanza. Has not Malcolm Forde expressed a respectful 6 Strangers and Pilgrims. wish that she were a little less vague in her notions of all that vast world which lies beyond the market-town and rustic suburbs of Hawleigh ? "Don't be offended, Lizzie; you know I always do anything you ask me. Where are the ribbons ? " " In the left-hand top drawer. Be sure you don't tumble my bounces." " I'll take care. I'm so glad you're going to wear your white : ibr now I can wear mine without Gertrude grumbling about my extravagance in beginning a clean muslin at the end of the week ; as if people with any pretence to refinement ever made any dif- ference in their gowns at the end of the week — as if anybody but utter barbarians would go grubby because it was Friday oi Saturday ! Mind you come up-stairs in time to dress, Lizzie." ** I shall be ready, child. The people are not to be here till seven." " The people ! as if you cared one straw about Jane Harrison or Laura Melvin and that preposterous brother of hers ! " " You manage to flirt with the preposterous brother, at any rate," says Lizzie, still looking down at her book. " 0, one must get one's hand in somehow. And as if there were any choice of a subject in this God-forsaken place !" " Blanche, how can you use such horrid expressions ?" " But it is God-forsaken. I heard Captain Fielding call it so the other day." " You are always picking up somebody's phrases. Do go and tack on those ribbons, or I shall have to do it myself." " And that would be a calamity," cries Blanche, laughing, *' when there is anybody else whose services you can utilise !" It was one of the golden rules of Elizabeth Luttrell's life that she should never do anything for herself which she could get any one else to do for her. What was the good of having three unmarried sisters — all plainer than one's self^unless one made some use of them P She herself had grown up like a flower, as beautiful and as useless ; not to toil or spin — only to be admired and cherished as a type of God-given idle loveliness. That her beauty was to be profitable to herself and to the world by-and-by in some large way, she regarded as an inevitable consequence of her existence. She had troubled herself very little about the future; had scarcely chafed against the narrow bounds of her daily life. That certainty of high fortune awaiting her in the coming years supported and sustained her. In the meanwhile she lived her life — a life not altogether devoid of delight, but into which the element of passion had not yet entered. Even in so dull a place as Hawleigh there were plenty of ad- mirers for such a girl as Elizabeth Luttrell. She had drunk freely of the nectar of praise; knew the full measure of her Strangers and Pilgrims. 7 beauty, and felt that she was bound to conquer. All the little victories, the trivial flirtations of the present, were, in her mind, mere child's play ; but they served to give some variety to an existence which would have been intolerably monotonous with- out them. She went on reading, or trying to read, for half an hour after Blanche had skipped up the green slope where the apple-treea spread a fantastic carpet of light and shade in the afternoon sun- shine ; she tried her hardest to chain her thougVits to that book of African travel, but the Victoria Nyanza eluded her Hke a will-o'-the-wisp. Her thoughts went back to a little scene under an avenue of ancient limes in Hawleigh-road — a scene that had been acted only a few hours ago. It was not very much to think of : only an accidental meeting with her father's curate, Malcolm Forde ; only a Httle commonplace talk about the parish and the choir, the early services, and the latest volumes obtain- able at the Hawleigh book-club. Mp. Luttrell had employed four curates since Lizzie's six- teenth birthday ; and the first, second, and third of these young Levites had been Lizzie's devoted slaves. It had become an established rule that the curate — Mr. Luttrell could only afford one, though there were two churches in his duty — should fall madly in love with Elizabeth. But the fourth curate was of a different stuff from the material out of which the three sim- pering young gentlemen fresh from college were created. Mal- colm Forde was five-and-thirty years of age ; a man who had been a soldier, and who had taken up this new service from conviction ; a man who possessed an income amply sufficient for his own simple needs, and in no way looked to the Church as an honourable manner of solving the great enigma of how a gentle- man is to maintain himself in this world. He was a Christian in the purest and widest sense of the word; an earnest thinker, an indetatigable worker ; an enthusiast upon all subjects relating to his beloved Church. To such a man as this all small flirtations and girlish follies must needs appear trivial in the extreme ; but Mr. Forde was not a prig, nor was he prone to parade his piety before the eyes of the world. So he fell into the ways of Hawleigh with con- summate eases played croquet with the mallet of a master; disliked high-jinks and grandiose entertainments at rich people's houses, but was not above an impromptu picnic with his intimate associates, a gipsy-tea in Everton wood, or a friendly musical evening at the parsonage. He had little time to devote to such relaxations, but did not disdain them on occasion. At the outset of their acquaintance the four Luttrell girls vowed they should always be afraid of him, that those dreadful cold grey eyes of his made them feel uncomfortable. 8 Grangers ana Jfiigrwm, " When te looks at me in that grave searching way, I posi- tively feel myself the wickedest creature in the world," cried Diana, who was of a sprightly disposition, and prone to a candid confession of all her weaknesses. " How I should hate to marry such a man ! It would be like being perpetually brought face to face with one's conscience." " I think a woman's husband ought, in a manner, to represent her conscience," said* Gertrude, who was nine-and-twenty, and prided herself upon being serious-minded. "At least I should like to see all my faults and follies retiected in my husband's face, and to grow out of them by his influence." " What a hard time your husband would have of it, Gerty ! " exclaimed the flippant Blanche, assisting at the conversation from outside the open window of the breakfast-room or den, in which the four damsels were as untidy as they pleased ; Eliza- beth's colour-box and drawing-board, Gertrude's work-box, Diana's desk, Blanche's Dorcas bag, all heaped pell-mell upon the battered old sideboard. " If you spent more time among the poor, Diana," said Ger- trude, not deigning to notice this interruption, "you need not be afraid of any man's eyes. When our own hearts are at peace " " Don't, please, Gerty; don't give me any warmed-up versions of your tracts. The state of my own heart has nothing to do with the question. If I were the most spotless being in creation, I should feel just the same about Mr. Forde's eyes. As for district-visiting, you know very well that my health was never good enough for that kind of thing ; and I'm sure if papa had six daughters instead of four, you do enough in the goody-goody line for the whole batch." Miss Luttrell gave a gentle sigh, and continued her needlework in silence. She could not help feeling that she was the one bit of leaven that leavened the whole lump ; that if a general de- struction were threatened the daughters of Hawleigh by reason of their frivolities, her own sterling merits might buy them off — as the ten righteous men who were not to be found in Sodom mi<^ht have rnnsomed that guilty popul-ation. Elizabeth had been busy painting a little bit of still-hfe — an over- ripe peach and a handful of pansies and mulberry-leaves lying loosely scattered at the base of Mr. Luttrell's Venetian claret-flask. She had gone steadily on with her work, laying on little dabs of transparent colour with a quick light touch, and not vouchsafing any expression of interest in the discussion of Mr. Forde's peculiarities. " He's very good-looking," Diana said meditatively. "Don't you think so, Lizzie P You're an authority upon curates." Elizabeth shrugged her shoulders, and answered in her moui indifferent tone : Strangers and JPilgnTM. 9 "Tolerably! He has rather a good forehead." " Rather good ! " exclaimed Gertrude, grinding industriously across an expanse of calico with her cutting-out scissors. " He has the forehead of an apostle." " How do you know that P You never saw an apostle," cried Blanche from the window, with her favourite line of argument. " And as for the pictures we see of them, that's all humbug ! for there were no photographers in Judea." " Come indoors, Blanche, and write a German exercise," said Sortrude. " It's too bad to stand out there all the morning, idling away your time." " And spoiling your complexion into the bargain," added Diana, " What a tawny little wretch you are becoming ! " " I don't care two straws about my complexion, and I'm not going to cramp my hand with that horrid German ! " "Think of the privilege of being able to read Schiller in the original ! " said Gertrude solemnly. " I don't think much of it ; for I never see you read him, though you do pride yourself on your German,* answered the flippant Blanche. And then they went back to Mr. Forde, and discussed his eyes and forehead over again ; not arriving at any very definite expression of opinion at the last, and Elizabeth holding her ideas in reserve. " I don't think this one will be quite like the rest, Liz," said Diana significantly. *' What do you mean by like the rest P " " Why, he won't make a fool of himself about you, as Mr. Horton did, with his flute-playing and stuff; and he won't go on like Mr. Dysart; and he won't write sentimental poetry, and languish about all the afternoon spooning at croquet, like little Mr. Adderley. You needn't count upon making a conquest of him, Lizzie. He has the ideas of a monk," " Abelard was destined to become a monk," replied Elizabeth calmly, "but that did not prevent his fallicg in love with Eloise." " 0, I daresav you think it will end by his being as weak as the rest. But ne told me that he does not approve of a priest marrying — rather rude, wasn't it? when you consider that wo should not be in existence, if papa had entertained the same opinion." " I don't suppose we count for much in his grand ideas of re- ligion,*' answered Elizabeth a little contemptuously. She had held \ier 8n\all flirtations with previous curates as the merest trifling, 6ut the trifling had been pleasant enough in its way. She had liked the incense. And behold, here was a man who withheld all praise ; who had made his own scheme of Ufe — a scheme from vrhich she, Elizabeth LuttrelL was excluded. It was a new thiuff 10 Grangers and Pilgrims. for her to find chat she counted for nothing in the exisxence of any young man who knew her. This conversation took place when Mr. Forde had been at pawleigh about a month. Time slipped past. Malcolm Forde took the parish in hand with a firm grip, Mr. Luttrell being an easy-going gentleman, quite agreeable to let his curate work a» hard as he liked. The two sleepy old churches awoke into new life. Where there had been two services on a Sunday there were now four ; where tiiere had been one service on a great church festival there wer* now five. The dim old aisles bloomed with flowers at Easter and Ascension, at Whitsuntide and Earvest-thanksgiving-feast; and the damsels of Hawleigh ha ge of his was begun; but never for one weak moiaent lid he looked longingly back. He said a few words to Blanche, who blushed, and ppaw^ed, and answered him in little gasps, with upward worshipping gaze, as if he had been indeed an apostle ; talked with Diana tor five minutes or so about the choir — she played the har- monium in St. Mary's, the older of the two churches, which did not boast an organ ; and then strolled across the grass to the sundial, where liizzie was still standing in mute contemplation of the western sky. They shook hands almost silently. He did not intend to apologise for what he had said that morning. If the reproof had stung her, so much the better. He had meant to reprovC And yet it pained him a little to think that he had offended her. How lovely she was as she stood before him, smiling, in the western sunshine I He never remembered having seen any- thing so beautiful, except a face of Guide's — the face of the Virgin-mother — in a Roman picture-gallery. That smile re- lieved his mind a little. She could hardly be offended. " Y in have had a fatiguing day, I suppose, with your sick people P " she said suddenly, after a few words about the beaiity of the evening and the unpunctuality of their friends. *' Do you know, I have been thinking of what you said to me this morning, all day long ; and I begin to feel that I must do some- thing. It seems almost as if I had had what evangelical people describe as * a call.' I should really like to do some- thing. I don't suppose any good will come of it — I know it is not my line — and I am rather sorry you tried to awaken my slumbering conscience. But you must tell me what I am to io. I am your pupil, you know — ^your Madame de Chantal, St. Francis ! " She looked up at him with her thrilling smile — the deep violet eyes just lifted for a moment to his own, with a glance which was swift and sudden as the flight of an arrow. Across his mind there flashed the memory of mediasval legends of witchcraft and crime: records of priestly passion — of women whose noxious presence had brought shame upon holy sister- hds — of infatuation so fatal as to seem the inspiration dl. {Satan — of baneful beauty that had lighted the way to the tor* ture-ch&mher apd the stake. An idle o^emoiy in such a mo* Strangers and Filgrims, 17 ment! iVTiat had lie to do with those da.rk passions — the fungus-^owth of an age that was all darkness? "I think your father is more than competent to advise yon," he answered gravely. " 0, no man is a prophet in his own conntry," she said care- lessly. "I should never think of talking to papa about spiritual things ; we have too many painful interviews upon the subject of pocket-money. If you want to reclaim me, you must help me a little, Mr. Forde. But perhaps I am not worth the trouble?" " You cannot doubt that I should be glad to be of use to yon. But it would be presumption on my part to dictate. Your own good sense will prompt you, and you have an admirable counsellor in your sister Gertrude, my best district-visitor." " I should never submit to be drilled by Gertrude. No ; if you won't help me, T must wait for inspiration. As for district- visiting, I can't tell you how I hate the very notion of it. li there were another Crimean war now, I should like to go out as a nursing-sister, especially if "—she looked at him with another briefly mischievous glance — "if there were nice people to nurse." "I'm afraid, young ladies whose inclinations point to a military theatre are hardly in the right road," he said coldly. He felt that she was trifling with him, and was inclined to be %ngry. He walked away from the sun-dial towards the hall- loor, from which Mr. Luttrell was slowly emerging— an elderly l^entleman, tall and stout, with a still handsome face framed in rilky gray whiskers, and a slightly worn-out air, as of a man vho had mistaken his vocation, and never quite recovered his liscovery of the mistake. " Very good of you to come and play croquet with my thildren, Forde," he said in his good-natured lazy way — he ha4 mlled them children when they were all in the nursery, and he sailed them children still — " especially as I don't think it's par- ticularly in your Hne. 0, here come the Melvins and Misf Harrison ; so I suppose we are to begin tea, in order that you may have an hour's daylight for your game ? '* Elizabeth had walked away from the sundial in an opposite direction, smihng softly to herself. It was something to have made him angry, She had seen the pale dark face flush hotly for a moment; a sudden fire kindled in the deep grey eyes. In the morning he had confessed himself interested in her welfare; in the evening she had contrived to provoke him. That was something gained. " He is not quite a block of stone ! " she thought. She did not trouble herself to come forward and welcome the Melvin party, any more than she had troubled herself to greet 18 Strangers and JPilgrims. Mr. Forde; but came strolling across the grass towards tlie tea-table presently when every one else was seated ; the guesti here and there under the chestnut branches, while Gertrude sat at the table dispensing the tea-cups, with Frederick Melvin in attendance. Mr. Melvin was the eldest son of the chief solicitor of Hawleigh, in partnership with his father, and vaguely sup- posed to be eligible from a matrimonial point of view. He was a young man who had an unlimited capacity for croquet, vingt-- et-un, table-turning, and small flirtations ; spent all his spare hours on the river Tabor, and seemed hardly at home out of a Buit of boating flannels. He was indiff'erently in love with the four Miss Luttrells, with a respectful leaning towards Elizabeth, as the beauty; and he was generally absorbed by the flippant Blanche. His sister Laura sang well, and did nothing else to particularise herself in the minds of her acquaintance. She was fond of music and discoursed learnedly of symphonies anc sonatas, adagios in C flat and capriccios in F double shai-p, ti the terror of the uninitiated. Miss Harrison was a cousiu, whose people were of the gentleman-farmer persuasion, and who came from a sleepy old homestead up the country to stay with the Melvins, and intoxicate her young senses with the dissipa- tions of Hawleigh market-place. The Melvins lived in the market-place, in a big square brick house picked out with white — a house with three rows of windows five in a row, a flight of steps, and a green door with a brass knocker; the very house, one would suppose, upon which all the dolls' houses ever manu- factured have been modelled. She was not a very brilliant damsel, and when she had been asked how she liked Hawleigh after the country, and how she liked the country after Hawleigh, and whether she liked Hawleigh or the country best, conversa- tion with her was apt to languish. Mr. Forde, who was sitting a little in the background, talking to Mr. Luttrell, rose and gave his chair to Elizabeth — the last comer. He brought anotner for himself and sat down again, and went on with his talk ; while Frederick Melvin worshipped at Elizabeth's shrine — ofi'ering tea, and pound-cake, and straw*^ berries, and unutterable devotion. " I wish you'd go and flirt with Blanche," she said coolly. "No, thanks; I don't want any strawberries. Now, please, don't sprinkle a shower of them on my dress ; I shall have to wear it a week. How awkward you are i ** "Who could help being awkward?*^ pleaded the youth, blushing. " Sir Charles Grandison would nave made a fool of himself in your society." " I don't know anything about Sir Charles Grandison, and I d6n*t believe you do, either. That's the way with you young men; you get the name« of people and uiinsrs out of the Strangers and Pilgrimg. 19 Saturday Hevi&w, and pretend to know everything under the ■an. "Wasn't he a fellow in some book — Pamela or Joseph And/rew8 ? something of Smollett's P some sort of rubbish in sixteen volumes ? Nobody reads it now-a-days." *' Then I wouldn't quote it, if I were you. But the Saturday Jteview is the modern substitute for the Eton Latin Grammar. Please, go and flirt with Blanche. You always stand so close to one, making a door-mat of one's dress ! " " 0, very well, I'll go and talk to Blanche. But remember " — this with a threatening air — " when you want to go on the Tabor " " You'll take me, of course. I know that. Eun and play, that's a dear child!" He was her senior by three years, but she gave herself ineifable airs of superiority notwithstanding. Perhaps she was not displeased to exhibit even this trumpery swain before the eyes of Malcolm Forde — who went on talking of parish matters with her father, as if unconscious of her presence. Very little execution was done upon the pound-cake or the syllabub. The atmosphere was too heavily charged with flirtations for any serious consumption of provisions. It is the people who have done with the flowers and sunshine of life who make most havoc among the lobster-salads and raised pies at a picnic — for whom the bouquet of the moselle is a question of supreme importance, who know the difference between a hawk and a heron in the way of claret. So, after a little trifling with the dainty cates Miss Luttrell had hospitably provided, the young people rose for the businesa of the evening. " Wouldn't you rather have a cigar and a glass of claret here, under the chestnut?" said Mr. Luttrell, as Malcolm Forde prepared to join them. *' That would be a breach of covenant," answered the Curate, jaughing. "I was invited for croquet. Besides, I really enjoy the game; it's a sort of substitute for billiards." "A dissipation you have renounced," said the Vicar, in his careless way. "You modem young men are regular Trappists!" Whereby it will be seen that Wilmot Luttrell was of the Broad- Church party — a man who had hunted the Devonian red- deer in his time, who had still a brace of Joe Manton's in his study, was good at fly-fishing, and did not object to clerical billiards or a social rubber. They played for a couple of hours in the balmy summer evening, the Luttrell girls and their four visitors — played till the sunlight faded int^ dusk, apd the dusk deepened into tbf 20 Strangers and Pilgrims. ■oft June night — wliich was hardly night, but rather a tendef mixture of twilight and starshine. Gertrude had taken Mr. Forde for the leader of her side, Miss Hairison and Blanche Luttrell making up their four. The Beauty headed a skinaish- ing party, that incorrigible Frederick for her supporter, Dr Vjuttrell and Laura Welvin bringing up the rear. To hej Malcolm Forde addressed no word throughout the little toumai* inent. It may have been because he had no opportunity ; foi she was laughing and talking more or less all the time, in the wildest spirits, with the young solicitor perpetually at her elbow. And Gertrude had a great deal to say to the Curate; chiefly on the subject of her parish work, and a little of a more vague and metaphysical nature concerning the impressions pro- duced upon her mmd by his last Sunday-evening sermon. H€ listened kindly and respectfully, as in duty bound, but thai frivolous talk and laughter upon the other side worried him not a little. Never had Elizabeth seemed to him so vulgarly pro- vincial; and ho was really interested in her, as indeed it was his duty to be interested in the welfare of his Vicar's daughters. *' It is all the father's fault," he said to himself; " I do not believe he has ever made the faintest attempt to train them." And then he thought what an estimable young person Gertrude must be to have evolved out of her inner conscious- ness, as it were, all that serious and practical piety which made her so valuable to him in his ministrations. As to the future careers of the other three— of Blanche, who talked slang, and seemed to consider this lower wp-^^d designed to be a perpetual theatre for flirtation ; of Dianu,, who was selfish and idle, and set up a pretence of weak health as a means of escaping all the cares and perplexities of existence ; of Elizabeth, who appeared in her own character to embody all the faults and weaknesses be had ever supposed possible to a woman — of the manner in which these three were to tread the troubled paths of life, he could only think with a shudder. Poor lampleas virgins, etraying blindly into the darkness ! Yet, measured by a simply sensuous standard, how sweet was that low rippling sound of girlish laughter; how graceful the white-rebed figure moving lightly in the summer dusk; how exquisite the dark-blue eyes that looked at him in the starlight, when the game waa ended, and the Church Militant, as Blanche said pertly, had been triumphant over the Devil's Own, in the person of the mild-eyed Frederick Melvin ! Mr. Forde's un- erring stroke, mathematically correct as the pendulum, had brought them home, in spite of some rather feeble playing on the part of Gertrude, whose mind was a little too much occupied by last Sunday-evening's sermon. Mr. LnttreU had strolled up and down the garden wiUs, Strang en a, A Pilgrims, 21 ■moting htt cigar, and had loitered a little by the holly hedge talking to some people in the road, while the croquet players amused themselves. He came forward now to propose an ad- journment to the house, and a claret-cup. So they all went crowding into a long low room with a couple of bow windows, a room which was lined with bookshelves on one side, contain- ing Taylor and Hooker, and Barrow and Tillotson, and South and Venn, and other ecclesiastical volumes, freely intermingled with a miscellaneous collection of secular literature; a room which served Mr. Liittrell as a library, but which was neverth*^- less the drawing-room. There was a grand piano by one of the bow windows, a piano which had been presented to Diana by a wealthy aunt and godmother, and the brand-new walnut-wood case whereof was in strong contrast with the time-worn old chairs and tables; the clieffoniers of the early Georgian era; the ponderous old cane-seated sofa, with its chintz -covered pillows and painted frame — a pale, pale green picked out with gold that was fast vanishing away. The attenuated crystal girandoles upon the high wooden mantelshelf were almost as old as the invention of glass; the Chelsea shepherd and shep- herdess had been cracked over and over again, but held together as if by a charmed existence. The Derbyshire-spa vases were relics of a dead-and-gone generation. The mock-venetian mir- ror was of an almost forgotten fashion and a quite extinct manufacture. Blanche vowed that Noah and his wife, when they kept house before the Hood, must have had just such a drawing-room. Yet this antiquated chamber seemed in no wise displeasing to the sight of Mr. Forde as he f:ame in from the starlit garden. He liked it a great deal better than many finer rooms in which he was a rare but welcome visitor, just as he preferred the iil-kept Vicarage lawn and flower- borders to the geometrical parterres of millionaire cloth manufacturers or pompous squires on the outskirts of Hawleigh. Frederick Melvin and his sister pleaded for a little music, upon which the usual family concert began: a showy fantasia by Gertrude, correctly played, with a good firm finger, and not a spark of expression from the first bar to the bang, ban^, hoAig I at the end ; then a canzonet from Blanche, of the " 0, 'tis merry when the cherry and the blossom and the berry, tra-la» la-la, tra-la-la " school in a thin little soprano ; then a sonata — Beethoven's "Adieu" — by Miss Melvin, which Mr. Forde thoiiglit the longest adieu he had ever been obliged to listen to. He lost patience at last, and went over to Elizabeth, whose rip* round mezzo-soprano tones he languished to hear. ** Won't you sing something P" he asked. " What, dv>es not sijiging cQipo within ypur catalogue of for* 22 Strangers and JPilgnms, bidden pleasures — a mere idle waste of time — lotos- eatins, in short?" •' You know that I do not think anything of the kind. Why do you try to make me out what I have never pretended to be — an ascetic, or worse, a Pharisee P Is is only because I am anxious you should be of a little more use to your fellow-creatures P " "And of course singing can be no use, unless I went about among your cottage people leading off hymns." " Does that mean that you won't sing to-night P " he asked in his coldest tone. "Yes." " Then I'll wish you good-night.^ IVe no doubt the music we've been hearing is very good in its way, but it's hardly my way. Good-night. I'll slip away quietly without disturbing your friends." He was close to the open bow- window, that farthest from the piano, and went out unnoticed, while Miss Melvin and her cousin Miss Harrison were debating whether they should or should not play the overture to Zampa. He went out of the window, and walked slowly across the grass, but had hardly reached the sun-dial, when he heard the voice he knew so well swell out rich and full in the opening tones of a ballad he loved, a plaintive lament called " Ettrick.'* ** 0, murmuring waters, have you no message for me ? " He stopped by the sun-dial and heard the song to the end; heard i^'red Melvin supplicating for another song, and Eliza- beth's impatient refussil — " She was tired to death," with a little nervous laugh. He went away after this, not offended, only wondering that any woman could be so wilful, could take so much pains to render herself unwomanly and unlovable. He thought how keenly another man, whose life was differently planned, might have felt this petty slight — how dangerous to such a man's peace Elizabeth Luttrell might have been; but that was all. He was not angry with her. What would he have thought, if he could have seen Elizabeth Luttrell half an hour later that night, if he could hp-'* seen her fall on her knees by one of the little French beds m the room that she and Blanche occupied together, and bury her face in the counterpane and burst into a passion of tears P "What is the matter, Liz — what is it, darling?" criet Blanche the impulsive. The girl answers nothing, but sobs out her brief passion, and Ihen rises, calm as a statue, to confront her sister. ♦• Jf you ^re going to worry me, ipianche, I nhaU •leep in tb# iStrangers and PugrhM* 23 passage," she exclaims in impatient rebuke of the other's sympa- thetic caress. ** There's nothing the matter. I'm tired, that's all, and that absurd Fred of yours has persecuted me so all the evening." ** He's no Fred of mine, and I think you rather encouraged his persecutions," said Blanche wtth an aggrieved air. " I'm sure I can't make you out, Lizzie. I thought you liked Mr. Ford^^, and yet you quite snubbed him to-night." *' Snubbed him," cried Elizabeth. "As if anybody could •nubSt. Paull" CHAPTER III. " I know thy forms are studied arts, Thy subtle ways be narrow straits ; Thy courtesy but sudden starts, And what thou call'st thy gifts are baits. ** The Curate of Hawleigh, modest in his surroundings as the incorruptible Maximilian Robespierre himself, had lodgings at a carpenter's. His landlord was certainly the chief carpenter of the town, a man of unblemished respectability, who had even infused a flavour of building into his trade ; but the Curate's bedroom windows commanded a view of the carpenter's yard, and he lived in the odour of chips and shavings, and that fresh piney smell which seems to breathe the perfume of a thousand whips far away from the barren main. He had even to submit meekly to the dismal tap, tap, tap of the hammer when a coffin was on hand, which might fairly serve as a substitute for the *• Frere ilfaut mourir /" of the Trappist brotherhood. It must not be supposed, however, that this choice of a lodging was an act of asceticism or wanton self-humiliation « pun the part of Malcolm Forde. The Huwleigh curates lodged, AS a rule, with Humphreys the carpenter : and Hawleigh being Bolf-governed, for the most part, upon strictly conservative principles, it would have been an outrage against the sacred existing order of things if Mr. Forde had pitched his tent else- whiihe-. Mrs. Humphreys was a buxom middle-aged woman of spotless cleanliness, who kept a cow in a neat little paddock behmd the carpenter's yard ; a woman who had a pleasant odour of dairy about her, and who was supposed by long prac- tice to have acquired a special faculty for " doing for curates." ** I know their tastos^" she would say to her gossips, ** and VA Strangers and Titgriv/ii. it's astonishing how little their tastes varies. * 0, give me ft chop, Mrs. Humphreys/ they mostly says, if I werrit then? about their dinner. But, lor, I know better than that. Their poor stomachs would soon turn against chops if they had them every day. So I soon leaves off asking 'em anything about dinner, and contrives to give 'em a nice variety of tasty little dishes — a whiting and a lamb cutlet or two with fried parsley one day ; a red mullet and a split fowl broiled with half-a-dozen mushrooms the next, a spitchcook, tliey call it ; and then the day after I curry what's left of the fowl, so as their bills come moderate ; and I never had a wry word with any curate yet, except Mr. Adderley, who didn't like squab- pie, and I did give him a piece of my mind about that." The rooms were comfortable rooms, though of the plainest: lightsome and airy ; furnished with chairs and tables so sub- stantial that their legs had not been enfeebled by the various fidgetinesses of a whole generation of curates: honest wide- seated leather-bottomed chairs bought at the sack of an ancient manor-house ; stalwart walnut- wood tables and brass-handkd chests of drawers made when George the Second was king, Mrs. Humphreys was wont to boast that her Joe— meaning Mr. Joseph Humphreys — knew what chairs and tables were, and did not choose them for their looks. There were no ornaments of the usual lodging-house type, for Mrs, Humphreys knew that ik is in the nature of curates to bring with them sundry nicknacks, the relics of university extravagances, wherewith to decorate their chambers. Mr. Forde had furnished both sitting-room and bedroom amply with books, nay even the slip of a chamber where ho kept his baths and sponoes and bootstand was encumbered with the shabbier volumes in his collection, piled breast-high in the angles of the walls. He was not a collector of bric-a-brac, and the sole ornaments of his sitting-room were a brass skeleton clock which had travelled many a league with him in his soldiering days ; a carefully painted miniature of an elderly lady, whom, by the likeness to himself, one niij,'ht reasonably suppose to be his mother, on one side of the mantelpiece ; a somewhat faded daguerreotype of a sweet fair young face on the other ; and a breakfast cup and saucer on a little ebony stand under a glass shade. Why this cup and saucer should be so preserved would have been a puzzling question for a stranger. They were of ordinary modern china, and could have possessed no value from an artistic point of view. He had performed his early morning duty at St. Clement's, and spent half an hour with a sick parishioner, before his nine- o'clook breakfast on the day following that little croquet part^ ftt the Vicarage. He was dawdling; a little as be sipped hi^ Strangers and Til^ritns, 25 oocond cup of tea, with one of Southey*s Commonplace Books open at his elbow, turning over the leaves now and then with a somewhat absent air, as if in all that ietsam and flotsam of the poet's studious hours he hardly found a paragraph to enchain nis attention. What manner of man is he, in outward semblance, as he sits there absent and meditative, with the broad summer daylight on his face P It would be a question if one should call him a handsome man. He is distinguished-looking, perhaps, rather than handsome; tall and broad-shouldered, like the men who come from beyond the Tweed; straight as a dart; a man who is not dependent upon dress and surroundings for his dignity, hut has an indefinable air of bein^ superior to the common herd. His features are good, but not particularly regular, hardly coming within the rule and compass of archetypal beauty ; the nose a thought too broad, the forehead too dominant. His skin is dark, and has little colour, save when he is angry or deeply moved, when the stem face glows briefly with a dark crimson. The clear cold gray eyes are wonderful in their variety of expression. The firmly-moulded yet flexible mouth is the best feature in his face, supremely grave in repose, infinitely tender when he smiles. He smiles suddenly now, in the course of his reverie, for it is clear enough that he is thinking, and not reading Southey's agreeable jottings, though his hand mechanically turns the leaves. He smiles a slow thoughtful smile. " What a child she is," he says to himself, " with all a child's perversity I I am foolish ever to be angry with her." He heard a double-knock from the little brass knocker of Mr. Humphreys' private door, "shut his book with an impatient sigh, got up and walked to the window. The Humphreys* mansion was in one of the side streets of Hawleigh, a street known by the rustic title of Field-lane, which led up a gentle hill to the open country ; a vast stretch of common-land, sprinkled sparsley on the outskirts with a few scattered houses and a row or two of cottages. Nor had Mr. Humphreys any opposite neighbours ; the houses on the other side stopped abruptly a few yards below, and there was a triangular green, with a pond and a colony of ducks in front of the Curate's casements. Malcolm Forde looked out of the window, expecting to see his Tisitor waiting meekly on the spotless doorstep ; but the door had l>een opened promptly, and the doorstep was unoccupied. He looked at his watch nastily. *• I've been wasting too much time already," he said to him- ■elf, " and here is some one to detain me ever so long. And 1 want to make a good morning's round out Filburv way." The medical practitioners of Hawleigh prided themselves oa 2ft Stf angers and J^ilgtimB. the cnishing natnre of their duties, yet there were none among them who worked so hard as this healer of souls. Here waa Bome tiresome vestryman, perhaps, come to prose for half an hour or so about some pet grievance, while he was languishing to be up and doing among the miserable hovels at Filbury, where, amidst the fertile smiling landscape, men's souls and bodies were consuming away with a moral dry-rot. The door of his sitting-room opened, but not to admit a prosing vestryman. The smiling handmaiden announced *' Mi^a Luttrell, if you please, sir." And, lo, there stood before him on the threshold of his chamber the wilful woman he had been thinking about just now, gravely regarding him, the very image of decorum. There was some change in her outward aspect, the details whereof his masculine eye could not distinguish. A woman could have told him in a moment by what means the Beauty had contrived to transform herself She was dressed in a lavender- aotton gown, with tight plain sleeves, and a linen collar — no brigbt-hued ribbon encircling the long white throat, no flutter of lace or glimmer of golden locket, none of the pretty frivo- lities with which she was accustomed to set-off her loveliness. She wore an old-fashioned black-silk scarf, a relic of her dead mother's wardrobe, which became her tall slim figure to perfec- tion. She, who was wont to wear the most coquettish and capricious of hats, the daintiest conceit in airy tulle by way of a bonnet, was now crowned with a modest saucer- shaped thing of Dunstable straw, which at this moment hid her eyes altogether from Malcolm Forde. The rich brown hair, which she had been accustomed to display in an elaborate structure of large loose plaits, was neatly braided under this Puritan head gear, and packed into the smallest possible compass at the back of her head. She had a little basket in one hand, a red-covered account-book in the other. "If you please, Mr. Forde, I should like you to give me a round of visits amongst your poor people," she said, offering him this little volume. " I am quite ready to begin my duties to-day." He stood for a moment gazing at her, lost in amazement. The provoking saucer-shaped hat covered her eyes. He could only uuess the expression of her face from her mouth, which was gravity itself '* What, Miss Luttrell, do you mean to help me, after all you Baid last night P '* "Did I really say anything very wicked last night P " she asked naively, lifting her head for a moment so that her eyes shone out at him under the shadow of the saucer-brim. Peer- less eyes they seemed to him in that brief flash, but hardly thd Strar.g&rt and JPilgrtmi* 27 most appropriate eyes for a district- visitor, whose beauty eliouUl be of a subdued order, like the colours of her dress. "Idou't know that you said anything wicked; but you ex- pressed a profound disgust for district-visiting." *• Did I r" It was tne last rebellious murmur of my un re- generate heart. But you have awakened my conscience, imd I mean to turn over a new leaf, to begin a new existence in fact. If the piano were my property instead of Diana's, I think I should make a bonfire on the lawn and bum it. I have serioua thoughts oi burning my colour box — VVinsor and Newton's too. and papa's last birthday present. But you must be kind enough to make me out a list of the people you'd like me to visit. I don't want to be a regular district- visitor, or to interfere with your established sisterhood in any way; so 1 won't take any tickets to distribute. 1 don't want the people to associate me with sacramental alms. 1 want to have a little flock of my own, and to see if I can make them like me tor my own sak*.*, without thinking how much they can get out of me. And if you could coach me a little about what I ought to say to thein, it would be a great comfort to me. Gertrude says that when she feels herself at a loss she says a little prayer, and waits on the doorstep for a few minutes, till something comes to her. But I'm afraid that plan would not answer tor me." Mr. Forde pushed one of the heavy chairs to the writing-table near the window, and asked Miss Luttrell to sit down wliile he wrote what she wanted in the little red book. She seated her- self near one end of the table, and he sat down to write at the other. " I shall be very happy to do what I can to set you going," he said, as he wrote; "but I should be more assured of your sin- cerity if you were less disposed to make a joke of the business." "A joke!" exclaimed Miss Luttrell with an aggrieved air, ** whv, I was never in my hfe so serious. Is this the way in "^hich you mean to treat my awakening, Mr. Forde? " He handed her the little book, with a list of names written on the first leaf " I think you must know something of these people," he said, ** after living here all your life." •* Please don't take anything for granted about me with re- ference to the poor," she answered hastily. " Of course it is abominable in me to admit as much, but I never have cared for them The only ideas about them that I have ever been able to grasp are, that they never open their windows, and that they always want something of one, and take it ill if one can't give them the thing thev want. Gertrude tells quite a different story, and declares that the serious-minded bouIs are always languish- aig for spiritual refreshment, that she can make them quite happy with her prim little sermons and flimsy little tractsb c 28 Strangers and JPilgrimi, Did jon ever read a tract, Mr. Forde P I don't mean a contro- versial pamphlet, or anything of that kind ; hut just one of those little puritanical booklets that drop from Gertrude like leaves from a tree in autumn P " "1 have not given much leisure to that kind of study," re» plied Malcolm, with his grave smile. "I hope you won't think me unappreciative of the honour involved m this visit, Miss Luttrell, if I am obliged to run away. I have a round of calls at Filbury to get through this morning." " You remind me of poor mamma," said Elizabeth, with a tribu- tary sigh to the memory of that departed parent; "she had always a round of calls, and they generally resolved themselves into three — a triangle of calls, in short. But they were genteel visits, you know. Mamma never went in lor the district business." The loose elan^ style of her talk grated upon his ear not a little. He took his hat and gloves from the sideboard — a gentle reminder that he was in haste to be gone. " I won't detain you five minutes more," she said. " How nice the room looks with all those books! I know Mrs. Humphreys* drawing-room very w^ll, though this is my first visit to you. Papa and Gertrude and I came once to drink tea with Mr. Horton. He gave quite a party ; and we had concertante duets for the flute and piano — * Non piu mesta,* and ' Di placer.' and so on," this with a faint blush, remem- bering her own share in that concerted music. " You should have seen the room in his tenancy — Bohemian-glaaa vases, and Hcent caskets, and stereoscopes, and photograph albums ; but very few books. I think I like it best with all those grim- looking brown-backed volumes of yours." She made the tour of the room as she spoke, and paused by the mantelpiece to examine the skeleton clock, the cup and saucer, the two portraits. " What a grand-looking old lady !— your mother, of course, Mr. Forde P And, O, what a sweet face ! " pausing before the photograph. " Your sister, I suppose ? " " No," Mr. Forde answered, somewhat shortly. " And what a pretty cup and saucer, under a glass shade ! It looks Uke a rehc of some kind." " It is a relic." The tone was grave, repellant even, and Elizabeth felt she had touched upon a forbidden subject. " It belonged to his mother, I daresay," she thought; "and AQ keeps it in memory of the dead. I suppose all his people we dead, as he never talks about them." After this she made haste to depart with her little book, knowing very well that she hewi outraged all the convention- /strangers and £ilgnm*. 29 ftlities of Hawleigli, but rather proud of having bearded this lion of Judah in his den. Mr. If orde left the house with her, and walked a little way br her side ; but was graver and more silent than his wont, as if he had hardly recovered from the pain those injudicious questions of hers had given him. He parted from her at the entrance to a row of cottages, in which dwelt two of the matrons whose names he had entered in her book. " Good-bye," he said. " I hope you will be able to do some ^food, and that you will not be tired of the work in a week or two." " That's rather a depressing suggestion," said Elizabeth. " I know you have the worst possible opinion of me ; but I mean to show you how mistaken you have been. And you really ought to feel flattered by my conversion. Papa might have preached at me for a twelvemonth without producing such an effect." " I am sorry to hear that your father has so little influence with you. Miss Luttrell," the Curate answered gravely. He left her with the coldest good-bye. The proud face flushed crimson under the mushroom hat as she turned into the little alley. This morning's interview had not been nearly BO agreeable to her as yesterday's lecture under the Umes at the entrance to the town. She began her missionary work in a very bad humour; but^ brightened by degrees as she went on. She was a woman in whom the desire to please dominated almost every other attribute, and she was bent upon making these people like or even love her. It was not to be a mere spurt, this adoption of a new duty. She meant to show Malcolm Forde that she could be all, or more than all, he thought a woman should be — that she could be as much Gertrude's superior in this particular line as she surpassed her in personal beauty. "Gertrude!" she said to herself contemptuously. "As if poor people could possibly care about Gertrude, with her little fidgety ways, and her Low-Church tracts, and her passion for Boapsuds and hearthstone! She has contrived to train hep people into a subdued kind of civiUty. They look upon her visits as a necessary evil, and put up with them, just as they put up with the water coming through the roof, or a pig- etye close to the parlour window. But I shall make my people look forward to my visits as a bright Uttle spot in their lives.'* This was rather an arrogant idea, perhaps ; but Elizabeth Luttrell succeeded in realising it. She contrived to win an Tinfailing welcome in the twenty cottages which Mr. Forde had tfssigned to her. Nor was her popularity won by bribery and corruption. She had very little to give her people, except 80 Strangers and Pilgrims. an occasional packet of barley-sugar or a paper of biscuits fo» the children, or now and then some cast-off ribbon or other scrap of genteel finery for the mothers. For the sick children, indeed, she would do anything — empty her own slenderly- furnished purse, rob the cross old parsonage cook of her arrow- root, and loaf-sugar, and isinglass, and cornflour, and ground rice, and Epps's cocoa, and new-laid eggs ; but it was not by gifts of any kind that she made herself beloved. It was the brightness and easy grace of her manner rather, that deHghtful air of being perfectly at home in a tiny chamber with a reeking washtub at her elbow, a cradle at her knee, and a line of damp clothes steaming in close proximity to her hat. Nothing disgusted her. She never wondered that people could live in such dirt and muddle. She made her little suggestions of improvement — no blunt plain-spoken recommendation of soap- suds and hearthstone, but insinuating hints of what might be done with a little trouble — in a manner that never offended. And then she was so beautiful to look upon ; the husbands and wives were never tired of admiring her. " Ay, but she be a rale right-down beauty," they said, " and thinks no more of herself than if she was as ugly as sin;" not knowing that the fair Elizabeth was quite conscious of her own loveliness, and hoped to turn it to some good account by-and-by. Kor did Elizabeth forget, in her desire for popularity, that the chief object of her mission among these people was of a spiritual kind: that she was to carry enlightenment and religion into those close pent-up hovels where the damp linen was ever dangling, the washtub for ever reeking; where the larder was so often barren, and the wants of mankind so small and yet sometimes perforce unsatisfied. Although she was not her- self, as Gertrude expressed it, " seriously minded," though her thoughts during her father's sermons, and even during those of Mr. Forde, too often wandered among the bonnets and mantles of the congregation, or shaped themselves into vague visiong of the future, she did notwithstanding contrive to bring about some improvement in the theory and practice of her clients. She persuaded the women to go to church on Sunday evenings, if Sunday-morning worfihip was really an impossible thing, as the poor souls protested ; she induced the husbands to clean themselves a couple of hours earlier than had been their Sabbath custom, and to shamble into the dusky aisle of St. Clement's or St. Mary's while the tinkling five-minutes belJ was still callmg to loiterers and laggards on the wav ; she taught the httle ones their catechism, rewarding proficiency with barley sugar or gingerbread; and she sat by many a washtub reading the Evangelists in her full sweet voice, while ^e industrious nousewife rubbed the sweats of labour from hef Strangers and JPilgrwu, 31 ho8band*s shirt-collars. She would even starch and iron a handful of collars herself, on occasion, if the housewife seemed to set about the business clumsily. " I have to get-up my own fine things sometimes, or I should fo cuffless and collarless," she said. " Papa is not rich, you now, Mrs. Jones." Whereat Mrs. Jones would be struck with amazement by her handiness. " 1 don't lielieve there's a thing in this Varsal world as yo?* can't do, Miss Elizabeth,'* the admiring matron would cry witL uphfted hands ; and even this humble appreciation of her merits pleas'^.d Lizzie Luttrell. Her reading was much liked by listeners who were not com- pelled to sit with folded hands and a brain perplexed by the thought of neglected housework. She had a knack of choosing the most attractive as well as the most profitable portions of Holy Writ, an acute perception of the passages most likely to impress her hearers. *' I do like your Scriptures, Miss Elizabeth," said one woman. " When I was a gal, I used to think the Bible was all Saul and the Philistings — there seemed no end of 'em — and David. I make no doubt David was a dear good man, and after the Lord's own heart; but there did seem too much of him. He wasn't like Him as you read about ; he didn't come home to us like that, miss, and you don't read as he was fond of little children, except that one of his own that he was so wrapt up in. " The Gospel sounds like a pretty story, when you read it, miss," siiid another ; " and when Miss Gertrude read, it did seem 80 sin^-song like. Sometimes I couldn't feel as there was any sense m it, no more than in the Lessons of a hot summer's afternoon, when it seems only a droning, like a hive of bees." So EUzabeth went on and prospered, and grew really interested in her work. It was not half so bad as she had supposed. There was muddle and there was want, but not such utter gloom and misery as she had imagined in these hovels. The spirits of these people were singularly elastic. Ever so little sunshine warmed them into new Hfe ; and, above all, they liked her, and praised her, and spoke well of her to Malcolm Forde. She knew that from his approving manner, not from anything he had dis- tinctly said upon the subject. Rarely had she met with him on her rounds. The list he had given her included only easy subjects — people who would not be likely to repulse her attentions, homes in which she would not hear foul language or see dreadful sights — and having allotted her path-way, he was content that she should follow it with very little assistance from him, and even took pains to tims his own visits, so as to avoid any encounter with her. 82 Strangers and JPilgrims. He did, however, on rare occasions find her among his flock. Not easily did he forget one summer afternoon, when he saw her sitting by an open cottage window with a sick child in her lap. That figure in a pale muslin dress, with tho afternoon sunshine upon it, lived in his memory long. " If I could only believe that she was quite in earnest," he said to himself, "that this new work of hers has some safer charm than its novelty, I should think her the sweetest woman T ever met — except one." Elizabeth had been engaged m these duties for two months, and had done her work faithfully. It was the end of August, the brilliant close of a summer that had been exceptionally fine ; harvest just begun in this western land, and occasional tracts of tawny stubble baking under a cloudless blue sky; hazel-nuts and wortle-berries ripening in the woods ; great sloe- trees shedding their purple fruit in every hedge; a rain of green apples falling on the orchard grass with every warm south wind; the red plums swelling and purpling on the garden wall — a vision of plenty and the perfume of roses and carnations on every side. "If we do^'t have that picnic you talked about very soon, Gerty, we shan't have it at all," remarked the youngest and the pertest of the four sisters at breakfast one morning, when Mr. Luttrell had withdrawn himself to his daily duties, and the damsels were left to enjoy half an hour's idleness and talk over empty coffee-cups and shattered eggshells and other fragments of the feast. " The summer's nearly over, you see, Gerty, and if we don't take care we shall lose all the fine weather. I've no doubt there'll be a deluge after all this sunshine." Blanche al^^ays called her eldest sister " Gerty '' when sh© wanted some indulgence from that important personage. "Well, I'm sure I don't know what to say, Blanche," "S^plioil Miss Luttrell with provoking coolness, as if picnics and C^tlsuch sublunary pleasures were utterly beneath her regard; «trong, too, in her authority as her father's housekeeper, and conscious that her sisters must bow down and pay her homage for whatever they wanted, like Joseph's brethren in quest of corn. " I really think," she went on with a deliberate aip, ** as the summer is nearly gone, we may as well give up any notion of a picnic this year, especially as pa,pa doesn't seem to care much ubjut it.'* "Papa never seems to care about anything that costg money," cried tJie disrespectful youngest. _ " He'd like life well enough if everything in it could be carried on for nothing; if his children could be born and educated, and fed and clothed Strangen and JPilgritM, 38 and doctored and nursed, and introduced to society gratia, so l.liat he could have all the pew-rents and burial-fees and things to put in the bank. It's very mean of you to talk like that, Gertrude, and want to sneak out of the picnic, when it's about the only return we're likely to make for all the croquet parties and dinners and teas and goodness knows what that our friends have given us since Christmas." *' Really, Blanche, you are learning to render yourself eminently disagreea'ule," Miss Luttreil observed severely, " and I fear if papa does not face the necessity of sending you back to school to be finished, your deficiency in manner will be your absolute ruin in after-Hfe." "Never mind Blanche's manner,'* interposed Diana, "but let's talk about the picnic. Of course we must have one. We always have had one for the last five years, since the summer after poor mamma's death, — I know we were all in slight mourning at the first of them, — and our friends expect it. So the only question is, where are we to go this year ? ** This was intended in somewise as an assertion of indepen- dence on the part of the second Miss Luttreil, who did not intend to be altogether overridden by the chariot of an elder sister, even though that elder had bidden a long farewell to the golden summer-tide of her twenty-eighth year. " Elizabeth won't go, of course, now she's turned serious," said Blanche, with a sly glance at Lizzie, who sat leisurely watching the skirmish, with her head' against the clumsy frame of the lattice, and the south wind gently stirring her dark- brown hair, a perfect picture of idle loveliness. " You'll have nothing to do with the picnic, of course, Lizzie, not even if Malcolm Forde goes," pursued the " Pickle " of the family. "Who gave you leave to call him Malcolm?" flashed out Elizabeth. " No one ; but why shouldn't one enjoy oneself in the bosom of one's family. I like to call him Malcolm Forde, it's such a pretty name ; and one onght to get accustomed to th«* Christian name of one's future brother-in-law.'* Two of the Miss Luttrells flushed crimson at this speech .- Gertrude, who turned angrily upon the speaker, as if about to retort ; and Elizabeth, whose swift reply came like a flash of lightning, before her senior could reprove the ofl'ender. " How dare you say that, Blanche P Do you suppose that i would marry Mr. Forde — a Curate — even if he were to ask me?** " I won't suppose anything till he does ask you,'* answered the incorrijxible ; "and then I know pretty well what will happen. Whatever fine notions yon may have had about a rich husband, and a house in Lci:dou, pjid an opera-boi. aad 84 Strangeri and Pilgrim* goodness knowa what, will all count for nothing the day inti Malcolm Forda- makes you an offer. Why, you worship the pround he walks on. Do you think we can't all of us see through your district- visiting ? A pretty freak for you to take up, after admitting that you detested such work ! " *' I suppose it is not quite unnatural that one should try to overcome one's dislikes, and to do some good in the world, replied Elizabeth with dignity. " Have the goodness to bridle your tongue a little, Blanche; and rest assured that I shall never marry a Curate, be he whom he may." "But Mr. Foi'de is not like common Curates. He is independent of the Church. He has private means." " Yes ; three or four hundred a year from a small estate in Aberdeenshire.'* " O, you have been making inquiries, then ? *' " No ; but I heard papa say as much, one day. And now, Blanche, be so kind as to abandon the discussion of my afl'aira. and of Mr. Forde's, and let us talk of the picnic. I say Law- borough Beeches." This " I say " was uttered in a tone of authority, unbefitting a third sister; and Gertrude immediately determined not to brook any such usurpation ; but it somehow generally happened that Elizabeth had her own way. She had a happy knack of suggesting the right thing. " Lawborough Beeches is a jolly place I " said Blanche ap- provingly. " When will you learn to abandon the use of that odious wrtjective ? " cried Gertrude with a shudder. " Lawborough Beeches is low and damp.'* " Well, I'd as soon have it on the moor, and we could have donkey races and no end of fun." " Was there ever a girl with such vulgar ideas ? Donkey races P Imagine Mr. Forde riding a donkey with a piece of white caUco on its back ! And imagine picnicking on the moor, without a vesiige of shade ! A nice blistered state our faces would be in ! and T should have one of my nervout headaches," said Diana, who had a kind of copyright in several interesting ailments of the nervine type. Lawborough Beeches was a little wood of ancient trees, with Bilver-gray trunks and spreading crests; beecnes which had been pollarded in the days when Cromwell rode rough-shod oyer the land, and had stretched out their mighty limbs low and wide in the centuries that had gone by since then. It wa« a little wood lying in a green hollow, through which the Tabor meandered— a silvery stream dear to the soul of the fly-fisher ; here dark and j>lacid as a lake, under the broad shadow of the trees; there Ho wing with swil't current towards the distant weif. Strangers and Pilgrims, 35 Mias Luttrell ackuowletlged somewhat unwillingly, after a good deal of diacussion, that the Beeches was perhaps the beat place for the picnic, if the picnic were really a social necessity. "I must confess that I do not see it in that light,* she said, " and I rather wonder that you should do so, Elizabeth, now that your mind has been awakened to loftier interests. The sum which this picnic will cost would be a great help to our blanket dub next winter." Elizabeth pondered for a few moments. Of course she waa anxious to help those poor people who were so fond of her; but the winter was a long way off. Providence might increase he> means in some nnthought-of manner by that time. And the near delight of a long summer afternoon with Malcolm Forde )inder Lawborou^h Beeches was very sweet to her. She had seen so little of hini of late. The very change in herself, which she had fancied would bring them nearer together, seemed to have only the more divided them. She did not meet him halt Bo often as in her unregenerate days, when she had been always strolling in and out of Hawleigh, to change books at the library ; or to buy a new song, or a yard or two of ribbon ; or to look at the last Paris fashions, which the chief hnendraper had just received — from Plymouth. " We ought to make some return for people's hospitality/' she said. " I consider the picnic nnavoidable." So Blanche produced a sheet of foolscap, and began to make out a formidable hst of comestibles : pigeon-pies, chicken-salads, lobsters, plovers' eggs, galantine of veal, hams, tongues, salmon en maymmaise, and so on, with a wild profusion that seems so easy in pen-and-ink. ** I wish you would not be so officious, Blanche," exclaimed the eldest Miss Luttrell. " Of course, I shall arrange all those details with Susan Sims." Susan Sims was the cook — an important functionary in the Vicar's household— who managed Miss Luttrell. " That means that we are to have whatever Susan likes to f*ve us ! " said Blanche. " Yon do give way to her so, Gertrude, think I'd rather have a bad cook, and one's dinner spoilt occa- sionally, if one could order just what one Hked. However, I suppose, if I mayn't make out a list of the dinner, I may make • hst of the people?" •* Yes, you can, if you'll take vour inkstamd to another table. Tou've made a blot upon the table-cloth already." Upon this, the three elder damsels separated to pursue theii divers occupations: Gertrude to hold solemn converse with Susan Sims ; Diana to practise Mendelssohn's sonatas on the drawing-room piano; Elizabeth to her district- visiting; leaving Blanche wallowing in ink, and swelling with importance, as sht S6 Strangers and TilgrtTM, wrote the names of her father's friends on two separate sheett of foolscap — the people who must be invited upon one, the people who might or might not be invited upon the other. Mr. Luttrell happened to be at homo for luncheon that day — a privilege which he was not permitted to enjoy more than onc€ or twice a week — so the sisters were able to moot the question of the picnic without delay. The Vicar rubbed his bald forehead thoughtfully, with a per- plexed sigh. " I suppose we must do something," he said dolefully. " It's fl long time since we've had a dinner-party ; and if you think people really like their dinner any better on damp grass, Gertrude, »nd with flies dropping into their wine, why, have a picnic by all iii.mns. There's always an immense deal of wine drunk at these td.Tairs, by the way; young men are so officious, and go opening boUles on the least provocation. Be sure yon remind me to write and order some of the Ball-supper Champagne and the ll.K'ecourse Moselle we saw advertised the other day." The matter was settled, therefore, pleasantly enough, and the invitations were written that afternoon, and distributed before nightfall by the parsonage gardener or man-of-all-work, ]\Iv. Forde's invitation among them ; a formal little note in Gertrude's hand, which he twisted about in his fingers for a long time while he meditated upon his answer. Would it do him any good to waste a summer day under Law- borough Beeches? He had been working his hardest for some weeks without relaxation of any kind. He felt that he wanted rest and ease; but hardly this species of recreation, which would involve a great deal of trouble; for be would be required to make himself agreeable to all manner of people — to carry umbrellas and camp-stools; to point out interesting objects in the land- scape ; to quote the county history — and, in fact, to labour assi- duously for the pleasure of other people. Nor had he ever felt himself any the better for these rustic pleasures ; considerably the worse rather, especially when they were shared with Elizabeth Luttrell. Ko; better to waste his day in utter loneliness on the moor, under the shadow of a mighty tor, with a book lying unread at his side. Better to give himself a pause of perfect rest, in which to think out the great problem of his life. For without inordinate self-esteem, Malcolm Forde was a man who deemed that his existence ought to be of some use to the world, that he was destined to fill some place in the scheme of creation. He felt that al-fresco banquetings and junketings were just the idlest, most worthless use that he could make of his rare leisure; and yet, with very human inconsistency, he wrote to MisB Luttrell next morni?\ff to accept her kind iuvitatioiu Sttangerf and I^itgrimiu 07 CHAPTER IV. •* you gods ! Why do you make ns lov^e your goodly gifts, And snatch thorn straight away ? We, hero beloVg Eeoall'^not what we give, and therein may Vie honour with yourselves." A PERFECT lull in the summer winds, a sultry silence in the air; Tabor lying stilly under the beeches, dark and polished as a mirror of Damascus steel, not a bulrush on its margent, not a lily trembling on its bosom. There seemed almost a profanity in happy talk and laughter in that silent wood, where the great beeches that were crop-eared by Cromwell spread their gnarled limbs under the hot blue sky. Mr. Luttrell's party, however, do not pause in their mirth to consider the fitness of things. It boots not them to ask whether Lawborough Beeches be not a scene more suited to Miltonic musings than to the consumption of lobster-salad and galantine de veau. They ask each other for salt, and bread, and bitter ale, while the lark pierces the topmost heavens with purest melody. They set champagne corks flying against the giant beechen trunks. They revel in clotted cream and syllabub, and small talk and flirtation, amidst the solemn shadows of that leafy dell ; and then, when they have spent nearly two hours in a business-like absorption of solids and fluids, or in playing trifling with the lightest of the viands, as the case may be, the picnickers abandon the scene of the banquet, and wander away m little clusters of three or four, or in solitary couples, dispersing themselves throughout the wood, nay even beyond, to a broad stretch of rugged heath that borders it on one side, or to the slope of a hill which shelters it on the other. Some tempt the dangers of smooth-faced Tabor in Fred Melvin's trim-built wherry, or in the punt which has conveyed a brace of Oxonians, James and Horace Elgood, the sons of one of the squires whose broad pastures border the town of Hawleigh. Mr. Melvin has been anxious that Elizabeth should trus/- herself upon that silver flood. " You know you're fond of boating,'* he pleads; " and if you naven*t seen much of the Tabor this way, it's worth your while to come. The banks are a picture — no end of flowers — * I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows,' and that kind of thing. One would think Shakespeare had taken his notion from here- tbouts." •• As if the Avon had no thymy banks! " exclaimed Elizabeth sontemptuously. "I don't care about boating this afternoon, thank you, Mr. Melvin. T am going for a walk.** B8 Strangers and Pilgrvm§, She glanced at Malcolm Forde as she spoke, almost plead* uigly, as if she would have said, Give me one idle hour of youf life. They had sat apart at the banquet, Gertrude having con- trived to keep the Curate at her side; they had travelled from llawleigh in different carriages, and had exchanged hardly hall a dozen sentences up to this stage of the entertainment. It seemed to Elizabeth as if they were fated never to be together. Already she began to think the picnic a failure. "I only wanted it for the sake of being with him," she said to herself hopelessly. And here was that empty-headed Fred Melvin worrying her to go in his boat, while Malcolm Forde stood by, leaning against the gray trunk of a pollard willow, listlessly gazing at the river, and said never a word. ** Let Forde punt you down the river as far as the weir," cried one of the Oxonians, coming unconsciously to her relief. " There's an empty punt lying idle yonder, the one that brought the Towers party; and Forde was one of the best punters at Oxford." Mr. Forde had gone up for his degree at a late stage of his existence, after he left the army, and his repute was known to these youngsters. *• There's nothing like a punt in this kind of weather. Miss Luttrell," said the Oxonian, as he rolled up his shirt-sleeves and prepared himself to convey a boatload of young ladies in volu- minous muslin skirts ; " such a nice lazy way of getting along." He stood up high above his freight, plunged his pole deep into the quiet water, and skimmed athwart the river with a slow noiseless motion soothing to see upon a summer afternoon, while Elizabeth was silently blessing him. Mr. Forde did at last awake from his reverie. " Shall I get the punt ?" he asked ; " and will you come P " " I should like it of aU things," she answered gently. She was not going to hazard the loss of this perfect happiness bv any ill-timed coquetry. Yes, it was perfect happiness to be with him. She acknowledged as much as that to nerself, if she did not acknowledge any mor«. *' I suppose I think so much of him simply because he thinks nothing of me," she said to herself musingly, while Mr. Forde had gone a little way down the bank to fetch the punt. He came back presently, with his coat off and his sleeves rolled up like the Oxonian's, skilfully navigating his rude bark with lengthy vigorous arms that had pulled in the university eight. It was the first time that Elizabeth had seen him on the river, and she wondered a little to find him master of thii ■ecular accomplishment. He brought the broad stem of the punt against the bank at her feet. " Wouldn't your sister Blanche like to go with us?" he askect Strangeri and JPilgrimt. J?9 looking ronnd in quest of that young lady. But Blanche had gone off in the wherry with the Melvin set — Miss Pooley, the octor's daughter ; the Miss Cumdens, the rich manufacturer*g daughters; Captain Danvers, and Mr. Pynsent. Shrill laughter sounded from the reedy shores beyond the sharp curve of the river. Even James Elgood's punt was out of sight. They had the river all to themselves. Utter loneliness seemed to have come upon the scene. The sound of that shrill laughter dwindled and died away, and these two stood alone in the sweet summer silence, between sunlight and shadow, on the brink of deep still Tabor. Elizabeth lingered on the bank, doubtful whether it would not be the properer course to wait for some stray reveller to join them before she took her place in the boat. A tete-d-tete excursion with Mr. Forde would entail sundry lectures from Gertrude, a general sense of disapproval perhaps in her small world. But Malcolm Forde stretched out his strong arm and calmly handed her into the punt. It was quite a luxurious kind of boat, as punts go, provided with a red cushion on one of the broad clumsy seats, and a tin vessel for bailing out unnecessary water. She seated herself in the stem, and they drifted away slowly, doftly over the still blue water. It was the first time they had been together, and alone, since the morning when she called upon him at his lodgings. For some time there was silence, sweet silence, only broken by the hum of insect life around them, and the skylark's song in the cle£fr vault above. The navigation of a punt is not a very diflScult business ; but it requires some attention, and Tabor*i windings involved some small amount of care in the navigation. This made a fair excuse for Mr. Forde's silence, and Elizabeth was content — content to watch the dark thonghtiul face, the firmly-cut profile, the deep gray eyes, grave almost to severity ; content to ponder on his life, wondering if it were hard work and careful thought for others that had blanched the ruddier tints from his somewhat sunken cheek, or whether he was by nature pale; wondering if that grave dignity, which roade him different from the common race of curates, wp^e »♦ tamest of fature eminence, if he were verily bom to greatness, and a jishopric awaiting him in the days to come; wondering idly about this thing and that, her fancies plaving rourd him, hke the flickering shadows on his figure as the Doat shot under the trees, and she supremely content to be in his company. Perhaps, since she had more than all a woman's faults and weaknesses, it may have been some gratification to her to con- sider that this boating excursion would occasicn some jealoui fewinees iu the well-ordered mind of her eldest sister. iU Strangers and ^ilgrvnu. ** Gertrude has sucli a way of appropriating people," slie sai) to herself, "and I really believe Mr. Forde considers her a paragon." The navigation grew easier by-and-by, as Tabor became leos weedy. The banks, now high and. broken, now sloping gently, wei*e rich in varying beauty ; but it was not of wild flowers or shivering rushes that Elizabeth thought in that slow summer voyage. The banks slid by like pictures gently shifting as she looked; now a herd of lazy kine, fetlock deep in the odorous atter-math, and then a Httle copse of ancient hawthorn, and then a silvery creek darkly shadowed here and there by drooping willows that had grown aslant the stream. She was faintly conscicas of these things, and felt a vague delight in them ; but her thoughts were all of Malcolm Forde. " Did you ever hear that story of Andrew Marvell's father? " he said at last, breaking that lazy silence which had seemed only a natural element of the warm summer afternoon. There was a straight stretch of water now before him ; so he laid down his pole, and seated himself in the bows with a pair of sculls. " He was a Hull man, you know, and a clergyman, aTid was going across the Huraber to marry a couple in Lincoln- shire. He was seized with a strange presentiment on stepping into the boat, and flung his walking-stick ashore, crying, ' Ho, for heaven ! ' The presage was not a false one, for old Marvell was drowned. The story came into m/ mind just now, when we left the bank, and I couldn't help feeling that it would be a pleasant way of solving the problem of life to shoot mid-stream at random, crying out, * Ho, for heaven ! * like that old puritan parson." " It would be very nice if heaven could be reached so easily," said Elizabeth, who hrid a feeling that for her the pilgrimagi from this world tr* a, better one must needs be difficult. She had never yet fell herself heavenly-minded; of the earth, eaithy rather, with mundane longings for an opera-box and a barouche- and-pair. " But I did not think yon were tired of life, Mr. Forde," she added, after a little pause. "!No! *ilanned between us on the map one sweet summer evening. We jarted at her father's door; she a little graver thtin usual — but that seemed natural on the tljreshold of so great a change. When I went to the manse next morning, they told me that she was not quite well — that her father's old friend, the village doctor, recommended her to keep her room for a day or two, and to see no one. She had had a little too much excitement and fatigue lately. I re- proached myself bitterly for our long walks on the hills and by the rugged sea-shoro we both loved so well. All she wanted was perfect rest. " They kept me off like this for nearly a week ; now confessing reluctantly that she was not quite to well ; now cheenn/j me with the assurance that she was better. Then one morning I heard they had sent to Glasgow for a physician. After tha^ 1 insisted upon seeing her. ** She uid not know me* I stood beside her bed, and the sweet blue eyea looked np at me* but she was nnconscioiifl. Ths Strangers and Pilgrims, 46 physician acknowledged that it w«m a case of typhoid fever. There was very little ground for hope. Yet we did hope — tlindly — to the last. I telegraphed for other doctors. But we eould not save her. She died m my arms at daybreak fji ]jm day that was to have seen us married. " I will not speak of the dead blank that followed her deStfa— of the miserable time in which I could think of nothing but the one fact of my loss. The time came at last when I could think of her more calmly, and then I set myself to consider what I could do, now she was gone, to prove that I had loved her — what tribute I could render to my dead. It was then I thought of entering the Church — of devoting myself, so far as in me lay, to the go^d of others— of leading such a life as she would have blessed. That is the origin of all I have done, of all I hope to do. That is the end of my story. Miss Luttrell. I trust 1 have not tired you very much. I thought we should be better friends, if you knew more about my past." " I am very glad," she answered gently. " I have sometimes fancied there must be something in your life, some sorrovvtul memory : not that there has ever seemed anything gloomy in your character ; but you are so much more in earnest, altogether so unlike papa'o other curates." A faint blush lit up the pale face as she said this, remembering that he differed most widely from these gentlemen in his totsu inability to appreciate herself. Yes, she had fancied there was some bitt(jr memory in his past, but not this. His confidence had straii(^'ely shocked her. It was inexpressibly painful to her to discover that his love — and BO profouna a love — had all been lavished upon another woman years ago; that were she, Elizabeth Luttrell, twit« as lovely, twice as fascinating as she was, she could never be anything to him. He had chosen his type of womanly perfection ; he had given away all the feeling, all the passion that it was in him to give, long before he had seen her face. " Did he suppose that — that I was beginning to think too much of him,*' she said to herself, blushing indignantly, " and tell me this story by way of a warning ? 0, no, no ! his manner was too straightforward for that. He thinks that I am good, thinks that I am able to sympathise with him, to pity him, to be sorry for that dead girl. And I am not. I think I am jealous of her in her grave." The boat glides softly on. They come to a curve in the river, and to Mr. Melvin's party retuniing noisily. " You are not going to take Miss Elizabeth any farther, ar© youP" cries Frederick. " We are going back to tea. How slow yonVe been ! "W^ went as far as the Bells, and had mna chandy-gaff." 4:6 Strangers and Pllyrims, Mr. Forde turned his clumsy bark, and all tte voyage back was noisy with the talk of the Melvin party and the Oxonians* punt-load of vivacious humanity. They were all in holiday spirits, laughing on the faintest provocation, at the smallest imaginable jokes. Elizabeth thought it the most dismal busi- ness All the sunshine was taken out of her afternoon; Tabor seemed a sullen stream flowing between flat weedy banks. But she could not afford to let other people perceive her depression — Mr. Forde above all. She was obliged to affect amusement at those infinitesimal jokes, those stale witticisms, while she was thinking all the time of that thrice-blessed woman whom Malcolm Forde had loved, and who had timely died while his passion was yet in its first bloom and freshness. " I daresay if she had gone on living he would have been tirea of her by this time," she said to herself in a cynical mood, " She would have been his wife of ever so many years' standing, with a herd of small children, perhaps, on her mind, and jnst as commonplace as aU the wives one knows — women whose in- tellects hardly soar above nursemaids and pinafores. How much better Cj be a sacred memory of his life than a prosaic fact in his everyday existence ! " After this, Elizabeth felt as if she could have no more pleasure in Malcolm Forde's society. Her selfish soul revolted against the idea that the memory of his dead was more to him than any favour her friendship could bestow, that she was divided from him by the width of a grave. " I wish his Alice had lived, and he stayed among his native hills with the rest of the Scotch barbarians," she said to herself. *' I don't think I've been quite happy since I've known him. He makes one feel such a contemptible creature, with his grand ideas of what a woman ought to be ; and then, after one has tried one's hardest to be good against one's very nature, he coolly informs one that there never was but one perfect woman in the world, and that she lies among the Scottish hills with big heart buried in her grave." CHAPTER V. ;• Well, you may, you must, set down to am Love that was life, life that was Icve ; it. tenure of breath at your lips' decree, A passion to stand as your thoughts approve A rapture to fall where your foot might be." The gipsy-tea went off brilliantly. The fuel-collecting and firo making nnd kettle-boiling afforded ample sport for those wildef Strangers and PilgriiM. ilt and more youthful spirits whose capacity for flirtation was not yet exhausted. Fred Melvin belonged to that harmless class of young men who, although in the dull round of daily life but moderately gifted, shine forth with unexpected lustre on such an occasion as this, and prove themselves what their friends cail " an acquisition." He fanned life and light into a hopelessly obstinate fire, with his straw hat for an extemporaneous bellows ; he showed a profound knowledge of engineering in his method of placing the kettle on the burning logs, so as not immediately to extinguish the flames he had just coaxed into being. " I don't think there was anything so very wonderful 'va Watt inventing the steam-engine," said Miss Melvin, standing by and admiring her brother's dexterity; "I believe Fred would have been quite as likely to hit upon it, if it hadn't been done before his time." They drank tea in little scattered groups: the elders fore* gathering in small knots to talk scandal or parish business, or to indulge in mild jeremiads upon the frivolity and genera* empty-headedness of the rising generation, their own sons ana daughters and nephews and nieces not excepted ; the juniors to disport themselves after their kind with inexhaustible nothings, vapid utterances which filled the soul of Elizabeth with con- tempt. She carried her teacup away to a lonely little bit of bank where the rushes on the shelving shore grew high enough to screen her from the rest of the company, and sat here alone, absorbed in languid contemplation of the quiet water and all the glories of the sunset reflected on that smooth tide. Fred Melvin, seeing the white dress vanishing beyond the trees, would fain have gone in pursuit, but the Luttrell sisters prevented him. " Elizabeth has one of her headaches, I daresay," said Diana. ** It would be no use going after her." " One of her tempers, you mean, Di," exclaimed Blanche with sisterly candour. " That's always the way with Lizzie if every- thi .g doesn't happen exactly as she wants it to happen. I think sLe would like a world made to order, on purpose for her." " I hope we haven't done anything to oflfend her," cried the anxiouB Frederick, whose adoration of " the beauty," as chief goddess of his soul, had never sufiered diminution, not even when he amused himself by offering his homage at lesser shrines. "Perhaps she didn't like our going off in the boat without her; but it really couldn't have held so much as a lap-dog beyond our load." " As if anything you could do would offend her ! " exclaimed the impetuous Blanche, always ready to rebuke Mr. Melvin's vain passiou. •* Do you thinjc she wanted to poine in our bo^tP S}i^ 48 Strangers and Pilgrims. would^liave given her ears for that tete-WfUte rovr with Mr. Fordo^ <3ily I suppose it didn't answer." " Blanche, how can you be so absurd!" cried Gertrude. ** If you dcn't learn to behave yourself with common decency, we really must leave you at home in the nursery another time," eaid Diana. Mr. Forde was happily beyond the hearing of this little explosion. He was in infinite request among the matrons of the partv. who all regarded him more or less as a modern St. Francis de Sales, and who gave him not a little trouble by their insistence upon communicating small facts relating to their spiritual progress ; little sentimental gushes of feeling which he (iid his best to check, his ideas of his duty being of the broadest and grandest character. He would rather have had the conver- sion of all the hardened or remorseful felons at Portland or Dartmoor on his hands than those gushing matrons and senti- :jiental spinsters, who could not travel the smallest stage of their journey towards the heavenly Jerusalem without being j^ropped and sustained by him. Nor was it pleasant to listen to little laments about the Yicar. " A kind, generous- minded man, Mr. Forde, and very gr;od to the poor, I believe, in his own careless way, — but so unspiritiial ! We hardly knew what light was till you came among us," And so on, and so on. He was glad to slip away from the elder tea- drinkers, and stroll in and out among the giant beech boles, with the gay sound of youthful laughter and happy idle talk filling the atmosphere around him. He lingered to say a few words to Gertrude Luttrell and her party, and then looked round the circle curiously, as if missing some one. " I don't see your sister," he said at last, " Miss Elizabeth." jdiss Luttrell coloured furiously. " Lizzie has strayed off somewhere," she said. " She appears to prefer the company of her own thoughts to our society. Perhaps had she known you would express so much anxiety about her she would have stayed." " I am not particularly anxious," replied Mr. Forde, with his thoughtful smile, a smile which lent sudden life and brightness to the dark grave face. " Only I have it on my conscience that I kept your sister on the river a long while under a blazing sun, and I feared she might be too tired to enjoy herself with the real of you. Can I take her a cup of tea P" " 1 don't think I would if I were you," cried Fred Melvin, who was in a picturesque attitude, half kneeling, half reclining at the feet of Blanche Luttrell, while his cousin, Jane Harrison, for whom there was some dim notion of liis ripening into a husband l)y-and-by, sat looking ot» 'vith an aggrieved air. ** J took hof Strangen and Filgrtmt, 4$ t, eecond cap just now," grumbled Fred, " and veiy nearly got niy nose snapped oflf for my pains." Not an encouraging statement ; but Mr. Forde was not afraid of any attacks upon his nose : was not that feature in a manner sanctified by his profession, and the very high rate at which the curate race is held two hundred and fifty miles from London P He was in nowise deterred by Mr. Melvin's plaint, but went oil at once in quest of Elizabeth'. " I saddened her with that melancholy story," he thought * Perhaps I ought not to have told her. Yet I think she is the kind of woman a man mi^lit dare to choose out of all other women for his friend. I thmk she is of a different stuff from ihe rest of Hawleigh womankind. She has shown herself superior to them all ia her power to win the love of the poor. A.nd we could never be friends until she knew my story, and if new that the word * love * has been blotted from the book of my life." It was a new fancy of Mr. Forde's this desire that there should really be friendship— something more than the every-day superficial acquaintance engendered by church decoration and croquet — between himself and Elizabeth Luttrell. It was not to be in the slightest degree sentimental — the popular platonic idea. The Madame-Recaraier-and-Chateaubriand kind of thing had never entered into his thoughts, nor did he mean that they Bhould see any more of each otlier than they had done hereto- fore ; only that there should be confideuce and trust between thera instead of stranffenesa. He found her presently on ner lonely bank by the Tabo'*, seated in a thoughtful attitude, and castmg little turfs of moss and lady's-slipper idly upon the tide. She had arrayed herseL' with a studied simplicity for this rustic gathering; perhaps fully conscious that she was one of the few women who can atlbrd to dispense with trillings and puffings and ruchings— the whole- framework of beauty, as it were. She wore a plain white muslin gown, high to the throat, round which she had tied a dark-blue ribbon — the true Oxford blue, almost black against the ivory- white of her neck. The long dark ribbon made a rippling line to the perfect waist; {)erfect in its exquisite proportion to the somewhat full and stately figure — the waist of a Juno rather than a sylph. Her head was uncovered, and the low sunlight lit up all the bronze tints in her dark brown hair, shone, too, in the luminous grey eyes, fixed dreamily upon the gleaming water. Mr. Forde stood for a few moments a little way oi:, admiring her— simply aa he would have admired a picture, of course* His footsteps made a faint rustling among the rushes as he came nearer to her. She looked round suddenly, j^d all b«l ^Kje ilughed crimson at sight of him. 60 Strangers and Tilgrims. That blush would have elevated Fred Melvin t^ the seventh heaven ; but Malcolm Forde was no coxcomb, and did not attri- bute the heightened tint to any magical power of his own. She was nervous, perhaps, and he had startled her by his sudden approach; or shem^ght be indeed, as her friends had suggested, a little out of temper, and annoyed at being tracked to her lair. " Don't be angrj with me for disturbing your solitary musings. Miss Elizabeth," ne said, very much detesting the ceremonial Miss ; " but I really don't think you're enjoying your father's picnic quite so much as you ought, for your own satisfaction and that of your friends ' " I hate picnics," she aub^rered peevishly ; " and if papa gives one next year, I'U have nothing to do with it. I'm sure I wish I'd stayed in Hawleigh and gone to see my poor people. I should have been much happier sitting by Mrs. Jones's wash- tub, or reading to Mrs. Brown while she mended her husband's stockings." " If you speak like that, I shall think I spoiled your pleasure by that egotistical talk in the boat." She only shook her head and looked away from him at a dis- tant curve of the river. There was an awkward sensation of semi-strangulation in her throat. For her very life she could not have answered him. Yes, it was a bitter disappointment to discover that he had flung away his heart before he came to Hawleigh ; that he was a kind of widower, and pledged never to narry again. " I am so sorry that I told you that story. Of course it was JO fitting time. I was a brute not to have thought of that ; but we so rarely have time for a confidential talk, and I have been so much interested in your work lately, so much pleased by your hearty manner of taking up a duty which I know did at first seem uncongenial to you, and I was anxious that we should be friends. Pray do not let the gloom of my past life weigh upon your spirits even for an hour. It was a most ill-advised confession. Try to forget that it was ever made." Silence still, and the head turned obstinately towards the river. Was it temper ? or compassion for another's woes more profound than he had dreamed of P " Say, at least, that you forgive me for having depressed you." StiU no answer in words, but a hand stretched cut towards his, a hand chill as death. " Let me take you back to your friends," he said, alarmed by the cold touch of that little hand, which he clasped for a moment with a friendly pressure and then let fall. " I shall not forgivf mrself till I see you happy with the others." Strangem and Pilgrims. 61 She rose slowly and took the arm which he offered her. That choking sensation had been conquered by this time, and she was able to answer him quite calmly; " Pray don't distress yourself about me," she said ; " I am very glad that you told me your story, that you think me worthy of your confidence." lie took her back to the circle under the Beeches. Cups and saucers were being gathered up, the bustle of preparation for departure had begun. Wagonette, omnibus, and dogcart stood ready for the homeward journey, and the usual discussions and disputes as to the mode and manner of return were going on : elderly spinsters languishing to travel on the roof of the omni- bus, and protesting their affection for the perfume of cigars ; fastish young ladies pleading for the same privilege ; and all the male kind thinly disguising the leaven of selfishness that wai in them, and the desire to appropriate the roof to their own accommodation, by an affected solicitude as to the hazard oi cold-catching. «* We ought to have had a dance," grumbled Blanche ; " it would have been the easiest thing in the world to bring a couple of men with a harp and a fiddle, but I suppose it would have been considered unclerical. It would have been so nice. We should have fancied ourselves fairies tripping lightly under the greenwood tree. I declare it seems quite a shame to go hom« 80 early — ^just when the air is pleasantest, and ail the stars are beginning to peep out of their nests in the sky — as if we were a children's tea-party.'* The fiat, however, had gone forth, the vehicles were ready, the fogy-ish element in the party eager to depart before dews began to fall, and toads, bats, owls, spiders, and other r\istic horrors to pervade the scene ; the juvenile population loth to ^0, yet eager for the excitement of the return journey, with all its opportunities for unlimited flirtation. Fred Melvin was the proud proprietor of the dogcart, a con- veyance usually appropriated to the uses of his father — the family carriage, in short — which, if it had only possessed one of those removable Amencan-oven tops popular in the rural dis' tricts would have even done duty for a brougham. Urgec^ thereto by his sister, and with considerable reluctan^^e, the young sohcitor entreated Mr. Forde, who had come on the box of the omnibus, to accept a seat in his chariot — a variety in the mode of return being esteemed a privilege by the picnickers. " Mr. Forde won't want to go back on the omnibus, I dare- say, Fred," argued Laura Melvin. " You might as well offer him a seat in the dogcart." To which suggestion Frederick growled that he wanted no Strangert c^ PilgrifM. parsoms, and tliat he was going to ask one of the Lnttrell girls. " You can ask one of the Miss Luttrells, too, Fred. There'll only be you and me and Mr. Forde, Jenny's going home inside the omnibus. She has a touch of her neuralgia ; and I don't wonder, poor girl, you've l)een flirting so shamefully with Blanche Lut^.rell. 1 wonder how a girl hardly out of pinafores can go on so." So Fred went away to offer the vacant seats ; first to Mr. Ford©, with reluctant politeness. " You don't like too much smoke, I daresay, and those fellows on the 'bus will be smoking like so many factory chimneys every inch of the way. You'd better have 3'our quiet cigar in my trap." " You're very good. I don't like bad tobacco, certainly ; and the odours I enjoyed coming were not by any means the perfumes of Arabia. But are you snre I shall not be in \he wayP" "O, you won't be in the way. I am going to ask Lizzie Lnttrell, and that'll make up the four." Mr. Forde winced at this familiar mention of the damsel in whom he had permitted himself to become interested ; but that kind of familiarity is a natural attribute of brothers in their intercourse with their sisters' friends. "A different race, these provincial brothers, from the rest of mankind," Mr. Forde thought. " I'm going to ask her," repeated Frederick, as he tightened the chestnut mare's kicking-strap, " but I don't suppose she'll oome, unless her temper's undergone some improvement since I took her that cup of tea." Elizabeth Lnttrell drew nigh at this moment, in grave con- verse with a little silver-ljeaded gentleman, the ancient banker of Hawleigh. To Mr. Melvin's surprise, she accepted his offer with extreme fi:raciou8ne8s. ** 1 like a dogcart aljove all things," she said, " especially if I may sit behind. I do so like the excitement of the sensation that one will be jerked off if the horse shies." But Against this Fred protested vehemently. ** You must sit next the driver," he said; •* Laira can sit behind with Mr. Forde. Not that Bess ever shies, but yon must have the post of honour." " Then I'll go home in the omnibus," eaid Lizjdd; "I know riding behind always makes Laura nervoufl." Miss Melvin, pressed hard upon this point, acknowledged thJit the jerky sensation which was pleasant to Elizabeth's bolder ■pirit WW ewinently appalling to herpelf. So EJUzabeth h^^ Strangers and Pilgrims. 53 her own way, and occupied tlie back seat of the (dogcart, with Mr. Forde by her side. The journey back to Hawleigh was a ten-mile drive through west-country lanes, bordered by steep banks and tall tangled hedges that shut out the landscape, except for those privileged travellers on the roof of the omnibus. Only now and then did the dogcart emerge from the shadow of hawthorn and wood- bine, wild rose and wild apple, into the moonlit open country ; but the odour of those leafy laaes was sweet, and beyond them, far away in the soft silver light, spread fair hill-sides and wooded slopes, and brief flashes of the winding river. It only lasted an hour and a quarter, that homeward journey, the dogcart keeping well ahead of the heavier vehicles, and Bess the mare performing the distance in so superior a manner as almost to justify that pride in her which was one of the chief articles of faith in the household code of the Melvins. Elizabeth would have thought better of the animal had she loitered a little on the way. Not often could she enjoy a moonlight tite-a-tete with Mr. Forde — for it mattered little that Fred interjected his trivial little remarks every now and then across Miss Luttrell's shoulder; not often had he unbent to her as ho unbent to-night, talking to her as if she were veiily in some measure a part of his inner life, and not a mere accident in the outer world around him. That confession of his past sorrows seemed really to have brought them a little closer to- gether, and Elizabeth began to think there might indeed be such a thing as friendship between them ; friendship that would brighten the dull round of district- visiting, sweeten all her hfe, and yet leave her free to dream her favourite day-dream of a wealthy marriage in the days to come ; a splendid position won suddenly by her beauty ; a swift and easy translation to a land flowing with silks and laces and all kinds of Parisian mil- linery ; a little heaven here below in the way of opera-boxes and races and flower-shows and morning concerts ; while Mr. Forde remained at liberty to fulfil that scheme of a monkish life which he had in his own quiet maimer avowed to his more fiarailiar friends of the district-visiting class. " And perhaps some day, after I am married, he will really go to the South- Sea Islands, or the centre of Africa, as a mis- sionary," she thought, with a little regretful sigh ; "and years afterwards, when I am middle-aged and his hair i3 growing gray, he will come back to England as Bishop of Tongataboo, or some fearful place, and I shall hear him preach a charity sdrmon at a fashionable London church." It seemed hardly worth her while to be sorry about so remote a contingency; but she could not help feehng a pang at the thought that *hia pai-t of to vision was the moA Ukely to ]»« 54 Strangert and Bilgrimi. realised: thatt whether the hypothetical baronet, with thirty thousand a year, did or did not appear npon the narrow scene of her life, Malcolm Forde would spread his pinions and soar away to a wider field thau this small provincial town. The dogcart arrived at the gate of Hawleigh Vicarage quite half an hour in advance of the other vehicles. It was past ten o'clock, and rare lights burned dimly in the upper casements o. the houses that were scattered here and there along the high- road on this side of the town, the more exclusive and snburb.'in quarter, adorned by the trim gothic lodges of the villas that half aspired to be country seats. The vicarage servants — Ann tl)e sometime nurse and general factotum, Susan the cook, Kebecca the housemaid, and Jakes, the man-of-all-work — were clustered at the gate, waiting to witness the return of the pic- nickers, as more sophisticated domestics might stand at gaze to see all the drags and wagonettes and hansom cabs of the famous Derby pilgrimage file slowly past Clapham-common. *' You'll come in, won't you, Laura?" said Elizabeth, who did not wish her evening to close abruptly with brief farewells at the gate. " Jakes can take care of your horse, Mr. Melvio You'll wait for papa, won't you Mr. Forde, and to say good- night to every one ? " *• If you are sure that you are not tired, and would be glad to get rid of us and go in and rest," said Mr. Forde doubtfully. " I am not in the least tired. I feel more in the humour tc begin a picnic than I did at one o'clock to-day. Why, in London fashionable people are only just beginning to go out to parties ! We seem to cut off the best end of our lives in the country with our stupid humdrum habits. Don't you think the night is best, Mr. Forde ? " " For study, I admit." " 0, for pleasure, for everything ! " cried Elizabeth impatiently. **I feel another creature at night, out of doors, in summer moonlight like this. There is a kind of intoxication : one's soul seems to soar away into clearer air, into dreamland. What would dancing be Uke at eleven o'clock in the morning, or at three on a sultry afternoon? Why, it would seem perfect iunacv I But at night, with open windows, and the moonlight outside, and the scent of the flowers blowing in from the garden, it is simply rapture, because we are not quite the same people, you see, towards midnight. For my own part, on a summer evening I always feel as if I had wings." She said this in a rapid excited tone, as if this particular moonlight had indeed produced an abnormal effect upon her spirits. They had all strolled into the garden, Frederick having reluc- tantly committed the mare to the man-of-all-work. Mr. Forde was walking between the two young ladies, Miss Melvjn feeling Strangefs and Pilgrims. 55 that it was mere foolislmess to hope for any attention from a curate while Elizabeth ran on in that wild and almost dis- reputable way of hers, not in the least like a well-brought-tjp young lady. But then it was a well-known fact that the Luttrell girls had received only a desultory training, not^ the regular old-established boarding-school grinding: but sometimes a morning governess, and sometimes an interregnum of inter- mittent instruction from their father; sometimes masters for music and drawing, sometimes nothing at all. They were all clever girls, of course, said the genteel matrons of Hawleigh, or they could hardly have grown up as well as they had ; but they had not enjoyed the advantages of the orthodox discipline for the youthful mind, and the consequences of this irregular education cropped up occasionally. The girls had read almost »vhat they liked, and had stronger opinions than were becoming in a vicar's daughters. To Laura Melvin's gratified surprise, Mr. Forde did not take any notice of Elizabeth's tirade about moonlight, but turned to her, Laura, and began to question her politely respecting her enjoyment of the day, while Fred, eager to snatch his oppor- tunity, flew to Elizabeth. " Didn't Bess do the ten miles well ? " he asked by way of a lively beginning, quite prepared to have his advances ill received. But Elizabeth was still under the intoxication of the moon- light. She was a person of singularly variable spirits, and the sullen gloom that had come upon her after that interview in the boat had now changed to a reckless vivacity. "The drive was delightful," she said. "I should like ta scamper all over Devonshire and Cornwall in such a dogcart, with just such a horse, stopping at all manner of wild places, and being benighted, and camping on the moors. What a mistake it is to live all one's life shut up between four walls, in the same place, with no more variety from year's end to year's end than a fortnight in seaside lodgings ! O, how I wish Providence had made me a gipsy, or a Bedouin Arab ! " Awfully jolly, I should think, the Bedouins," replied Fred doubtfully. "They tumble, don't theyP I remember seeing some Bedouin tumblers at Vauxhall when I was a youngster, and was up in London with the paternal party. But those were all men and boys. I don't think the women tumbled; and iheir lives must have been uncommonly dull, shut up somewhere in London lodgings, while their husbands and brothers were performing, not being able to speak EngUsh, you know, poor ereatures, or anything." " you stupid Fred 1 " cried Elizabeth, who sometimes deigned to address the young man in this famUiar way. " As if I meant performing Arabs 1 I should like to be the daughter of some W Strangert anct Pitgritno. Arab cTiief in the great desert, with my own darling horse to carry me on the wings of the wind, and only a tent to live in, and locusti and wild honey for my dinner, like John the Baptist. I should like to be one of those nice brown-faced girls who go about the country with a van-load of mats and brooms. There seems something respectable in brooms. They would hardly send me to prison as a rogue and vagabond ; and 0, how nice it must be never to stav very lon^ in the same place ! " *• And to have no fnends and no home, and no books or piano, and to be of no particular use in the world ; only always toiling more or less hopelessly for one's daily bread : and to die some day by the roadside, of hard work and exposure to all kinds of weather," continued Mr. Forde, who had soon exhausted his little stock of civihties to Miss Melvin, and turned to listen to Elizabeth's random talk. " I'm afraid you must be very tired of us all, Miss Luttrell, when your soul yearns for the broom- girl Ufe." " Not so tired as you confess yourself to be of us when you contemplate convertmg the heathen," answered the girl, turning her back upon the hapless Frederick. " It is not because I am tired of you that I think sometimes of a broader field and harder work," he answered gravely, " but for quite a different reason — because I sometimes find my life here too easy, too pleasant ; an enervating life, in short. It is not always wise for a man to trust himself to be happy." " I thought you had done with happiness, after — what yon told me this afternoon," said Elizabeth, almost bitterly. Her speech shocked him a little. Be answered it in his coldest tones. " With one kind of happiness, yes, and that perhaps the only perfect happiness in this world — companionship with a perfect 'voraan." " A very good way of reminding me that I'm an imperfect one," thought Elizabeth, not unconscious of deserving the im« plied rebuke. They walked slowly round the garden in the moonlight, side by side, but somewhat silent after this, leaving Frederick to straggle in their rear with his sister, an ignominious mode of jreatment which he inwardly resented. Nor was he sorry when the omnibus and wagonette drove up to the gate to release him from this humiliating position. He felt himself rehabilitated in his own self-esteem when Blanche, who really came next to Elizabeth in the scale of prettiness, skipped gaily up to him, telling him that she had had the dullest imaginable drive inside the omnibus, and that she had been dreadfully jealous of Idzziei who of course had been having capital fun in the dogcart. ♦• I don't know whether Forde ia i)articularly good fun," Mr. Strangers and Pitjrmi, 57 Melvin replied with a snlky air. " Your sister had him all to herself. There was no getting in a word edjrewaye. I think whea a man as good as gives out from the pulpit that he never means to marry, he ought to givft up flirting into the bargain.** " 0, Fred, how shameful of you to say such a thing ! As if Mr. Forde ever flirted ! " " I should like to know what he's doing now," grumbled Fred. " If that isn't the real thing, it's an uncommonly good imitation." Elizabeth had taken up her favourite position by the sun- dial, and Malcolm Forde was standing by her, talking earn- estly, or at least with an api)earance of earnestness ; and it is one of the misfortunes of youth that two persons of opposite sex cannot converse for ten minutes with any show of interest without raising suspicions of flirtation in the minds of the beholders. " Doesn't it seem absurd," exclaimed the aggrieved Frederick, ** after all Elizabeth has said about never marrying a clergy- man?" " She is not obliged to marry Mr. Forde because she talks to him for five minutes, is she, you stupid creature ?** cried Blanche, disapproving this apf)earance of concern in her admirer — eligible young men were so rare at Hawleigh. And now, after some consumption of claret-cup or sherry- and-soda among the elders in the low candle-lit drawing-room, and a straggling flirtation among the juniors here and there about the garden, there came a general good-night, and Mr. Luttrell's guests dispersed, in carriages or on toot, to that gentleman's supreme contentment. This kind of thing was one of the penalties that went along with a flock of daughters. " Thank heaven, that's over," he said with a faint groan, and in a tone of voice strangely different from the friendly warmth of his last farewell. "And now mind, I am not to be bothered about any more party-giving on this side of Christmas." " I am sure I shouldn't care if there were never to be an- other party on the face of the earth," said Elizabeth drea''*^y. Whereby it might bo supposed that, so far as the prettiest Miss Luttrell was concerned, the day's festivities had been a failure. Blanche questioned ber by-and-by up in their tower chamber — the ancient octagon room, with its deep-set casements and litter of girlish trifles, its bird-cages and bookshelves, and glove- boxes and 8cent-bottles-y-questioned her closely, but at the outset could extort very httle from those firm proud lips. " You know you were glad to have that ride home with him,* said the girl persistently. "You know you quarrelled with him in the boat, and were miserable afterwards. Yon know you are fond of him, Lizzie. What's the good of trying to hide it from ni« P " ffS Strangers and JPilgrims. " Fond of hiin ! " cried Elizabeth passionately. " $*ond of & man who scarcely ever says a civil word to me ! Fond of a man who, if he ever were to care for me — and he never will — would want to make me a district-visitor or a female mission- ary ! You ought to know me better, Blanche." " I know you are fond of him," the girl repeated resolutely. "Why, you've changed your very nature for his sake! As if we didn't all of us know the influence that has made you take np Gertrude's work !*' Elizabeth burst out laughing. "Perhaps I wanted to take the shine out of Gertrude's iupernal virtues," she said. " Perhaps I wanted to show him that I was just as well able to do that kind of a thing as his liawleigh saints, v ^o call it their vocation — that I was able to make the poor people love me, which very few of his saints can manage." " Upon my word, Lizzie, I'm afraid you're very wicked," exclaimed Blanche, staring at her sister with an awed look. Elizabeth was sitting on the edge of the low French bed, her brown hair falling round her Uke a sombre drapery, her eyes fixed with a dreamy look, a half-mischievous, half-triumphant smile upon hf»r lips. " I'm afraid you're right," she said with a sudden burst of candour. " I feel intensely wicked at this moment. Can you guess what I should like to do, Blanche ? " " Not I. You are the most unfathomable girl in creation." *' I should like to bring that man to my feet, to make him as deeply in love with me as — as ever any miserable slavish woman was with a man who did not love her, and then spurn him ; fool him to the top of his bent, Blanche; and when I had become the very apple of his eye — perhaps while he was deliberating in his slow dull soul as to whether he should make an election between me and the conversion of the South- Sea Islanders — astonish him some fine morning by announcing my engagement with somebody a little better worth marrying. He would have his South- Sea Islanders left to console him." She flung the cloud of hair back from her face impatiently, with a bitter little laugh and a downward glance of the dark eyes, as if she did indeed see Malcolm Fcrde at her feet^ and were scorning him. Blanche gazed at her with unmitigated horror. " Goodness gracious, Lizzie ! What can put such dreadful ideas into your head? What has Malcolm Forde done to make you so savage P " " What has he done? 0, nothing, I suppose," half hysteri- cally. " But I should like to punish him for all he has madt me suffer to-day." Stranger* and Pilgrim*, S9 CHAPTER YI. When God smote His hands together, and struck out thy soul as a spark Into the oiganized glory of things, from deeps of the dark, — Say, didst thou shine, didst thou bum, didst thou honour the jwwer ii the form, As the star does at night, or the fire-fly, or even the Kttle ground-worm U " I have sinned," she said, ** For my seed- light shed Has smouldered away from His first decrees, eypreas praiseth the fire-fiy, the ground-leaf praiseth the worm ; I am viler than these." What had Malcolm Forde done? The question was one which that gentleman demanded of himself not unfreqnently during the next few weeks. Was it wise or foolish to have bared this old wound before the pitying, or unpitying, eyes of Elizabeth Luttrell; to have made this appeal for womanly sympathy, he who was by nature so reticent, who had kept his griefs so sternly locked within his own breast until now ? Was it wise or foolish ? Was he right in deeming her nobler than the common herd of women, a soul with whom it might be sweet to hold friendship's calm communion, a woman whom he dared cultivate as his friend ? He was not even yet fully resolved upon this point ; but of possible peril to himself in any such association he had never dreamed. Long ago he had told himself that his heart was buried in Alice Eraser's grave, laid at rest for ever in the hill-side burial ground beneath the mountains that shelter Lanorgie ; long ago he had solemnly devoted all the power of his intellect, all the vigour of his man- hood, to the pursuit of a grander aim than that mere earthly happiness for which the majority of mankind searches. From that burial of all his human hopes there could be no such thing as resurrection. To be false to the memory of his lost bride, to forswear the oath he made to himself when he took his priestly vows, with a wider or a sterner view of th« priestly office than is common to English churchmen — to do this would be to stamp himself for ever in his own esteem the weakest and meanest of mankind. Such a thing was simply impossible. He had therefore no snare to dread in friendly companionship with a bright generous-hearted young creature who was infinitely superior to her surroundings, a faulty soul vaguely struggling towards a purer atmosphere, a woman whom he might help to be good. He felt that here was a noble nature in sore peril of ship* wreck, a creature with the grandest capabilities, vno might foi E 60 Strangers and Pilgrims, lack of culture achieve nothing but evil ; a soul too easily led astray, a heart too impulsive to resist temptation. *• If she were my sister I would make her one of the noblest women of her age," he said to himself, with a firm faith in his own influence upon this feebler feminine spirit. "Her venr faults would seem charming to some men," he told himself sagely. " That variableness which makes her at times the most incomprehensible of women, at other times the sweetest, would lead a fool on to his destruction. There was a day when I deemed her incapable of serious thought or un- selfish work ; yet, once awake to the sense of her obligations^ there has been no limit to her patience and devotion." And he was tfae author of this awakening. He felt a natural pride and delight in the knowledge of this. He was the Pro- n/etheus who had breathed the higher and more spiritual life into the nostrils of this lovely clay. He had snatched her from the narrow influences of her home ; from the easy-going thoughtless father, whose mind hardly soared above the consideration of his cellar or his dinner- table ; from the petty provincial society, with its petty gossip about its own works and ways, the fashion of its garments, and its dinings and tea- drinkings and trivial domestic details, from Mrs. Smith's new parlour-maid to Mrs. Brown's new bonnet. It was something to have lifted her from this slough of despond even to the outermost edge of a better world. Yet she had flashes of the old leaven, intervals of retrogres- sion that afflicted him sorely. During that homeward drive from the picnic she had been all that the most exacting of mankind could desire; sympathetic, confiding, understanding his every thought, and eager to be understood; candid, un- affected, womanly. But when the drive was over she had changed, as quickly as Cinderella at midnight's first fatal stroke. All the glorious vestments of her regenerated soul had dropped away, leaving the old familiar rags — the flippancy, the fastness, the insolence of conscious beauty. That earnest talk by the sundial, which Frederick Melvin had watched from afar with C'dus eyes, had been in reality expostulation. ^ The Curate presumed to lecture his Vicar's daughter, not in an insolent hectoring spirit, not in a tone to which she could fairly object, but with a gentle gravity, regretful that she who had so many gifts should yet fall short of perfection. "How can you talk such nonsense?" she exclaimed im- petuously, with an angry movement of her graceful shoulders. *' You know there is no one perfect, you know there is no one good. Are you not always hammering that at us in your sermons, making believe to consider us the veriest dirt— yes, even IMrs. Polwhele, of the Dene, in her new French bonnet r I don't Strangers and I*tfgrtms, 61 see any use in trying to please you. There nerer was l^t one perfect woman, and she is dead." " I do not think it very kind of you to speak like that,*" said Mr. Forde, " as if you grudged my praise of the dead." " No, it is not that ; but it seems hard that the living should suffer because — because you choose to brood upon the memory of some one who was better than they. I will not shape myself by any model, however perfect. Why," with a little bitter laugh, " if I were to become the faultless being you tell me I might make myself, my j^erfection would only be a plagiarism. I would rather be original, and keep my sins. Besides, what can my shortcomings matter to you P "Thejr matter very much to me. Do you think I am in- terested in my congregation jnst for twenty minutes, while I am preaching to them, and that when I come down the pulpit-stairs all interest ceases till my next sermon ? " " You should reserve your lectures for Gertnide. She enjoys sermonising and being sermonised. I believe she keeps a journal of her spiritual progress. I daresay she would like to show it to you. !No doubt you would iind plenty of my sins duly booked en parenthese.** " Your sister Gertrude is a very admirable person, and I was beginning to hope you would grow like her." "Thanks for the compliment. If I am in any danger of resembling Gertrude, I shall leave off trying to be good the &Tt% thing to-morrow morning." " Good-night, Miss Luttrell " ** I am not Miss Luttrell. My name is Elizabeth." ** Good-night, Elizabeth," he said, very coldly; and before she could speak again he was gone, leaving her planted there by the Bundial, angr^ with herself, and still more angry with him; passionately jealous of that memory which was more to him than the best and brightest of living creatures. *' Alice Eraser ! " she said to herself. " Alice Eraser ! A Scotch clergyman's daughter, a girl who never had a well-made gown in her life, I dare say. It was her portrait I saw over the mantelpiece in his sittin^^-room, no doubt. A poor little namby- pamby face, with pleading eyes always seeming to say, * For- give me for being a little better than everybody else.* And that cup and saucer under the glass shade! Hers, no doubt, used in her last illness. Poor girl ! it was hard to be stricken down like that; and yet how sweet to die with his arms holding her, his agonised face beat over hers, his quivering lipa bent close to hers to catch the last faint breath ! What was there in that poor little meek-souled thing to hold him in life, and after death — to set a seal upon his strong heart, and keep it even is ^cr grx7e ? It is more than I can understand.'" 6'2 JStrangers and Pilgrim*. In the brief intervals of leisure which his daily duties left hiia —very brief at the best — Mr. Forde found his thoughts return with a strange persistency to the image of Elizabeth Luttrell. It was not that he saw her often, for they had not encountered each other since the picnic, the young lady having been absent when he paid his duty-call at the Vicarage. It was perhaps because she was less agreeable than other women ; because sb ^ rebelled and defied him, and argued with hira flippantly, where other damsels bowed down and worshipped; because she had never weakened her optic nerves by a laborious course of tent- ftitch and satin-stitch; because she had refused to lead the choir of Sunday-school children, or to take a class in the Sun- day-school; because she was in every respect, save in her late amendment in the district-visiting way, exactly what a clergy- man's daughter ought not to be, that Malcolm Forde suffered his mind to dwell upon her in the dead watches of the night, and gave her a very disproportionate amount of his consideration at all times and seasons. Of late he had been seriously distnrl^ed about her ; for shortly after the picnic there came a change in the damsel's conduct, a sad falling away in her district- visiting. The women whom she had attached to her bewailed this fact to Mr. Forde. •* I thought as how she'd been ill, poor dear," said one; "but when I went to church last Sunday, there she was, with her head held as high as ever, like a queen, bless her handsome face, and more colour in her cheeks than she used to have. She sent me a gownd last week by the vicarage housemaid, and a regular good one, not a brack in it; but though I was humbly thankful, I'd rather have seen her, as I used when she'd come and sit agen my wash-tub reading the Gospel." He heard this lamentation, in different forms, from several women, and after some inquiry discovered that, except to visit a sick child, Elizabeth had not been among her people since the day of the picnic at Lawborough Beeches. She had sent them iea, and small benefactions of that kind, by the hand of a menial, — benefactions for which they were duly grateful, — but they missed her visits not the less. ** She's such good company," remarked one woman : " not like most of your districk visitors, which make you feel that lown«hearted as if you'd had a undertaker talkin' to you. She'a ^ot such pleasant lively ways, and yet as pitiful as jjitiful if there's sickness. And she do make herself so at home in one's place. *Let me dust your chimbley piece, Mrs. Morris,' she says to me; and dusts it before I can look, and sets the things ^ut so pretty, and brings me that there blue chaney vaise next fey, bless her kind heart ! " Mr. Forde was deeply grieved by this falling oflT. It seemed Strangers and Pilgrims 63 t« if the Promethean spark had been untimely blown out. The 1m antiful clay was once more only clay. He felt unspeak- ably disheartened by the straying of this one lamb, which he had sought to gather into the fold. Once possessed of his facts, he went straightway to the Vicarage to remonstrate. " I do not care how obnoxious I rentier myself to her," ha thought. " I am not here to speak smooth words. If her father neglects his duty, there is so much more reason I should do mine." The year had grown six weeks older since the picnic. In summer time the Luttrell girls — with the exception of Gertrude, who was always busy— lived for the most part a straggling life, scattering themselves about garden and orchard, and doing all things in a desultory manner. In summer the Curate might have felt tolerably sure of finding Elizabeth alone under some favourite tree, reading a novel, or making believe to work. To- day it was dilferent. The October afternoon was fine, but chill. He would have to seek his erring sister in the house, to inquire for the Vicar and the young ladies alter the usual manner of visitors, and to take his chance of getting a few words alone with Elizabeth. He looked right and left of the winding path as he went from the garden-gate to the house, but saw no gHmpse of female aj>f)arel athwart the tall hollyhocks; so he was fain to go on to the hall-door. He was not particularly observant of details ; but it struck him that the gray old house had a smarter aspect than usual. The carriage drive had been lately rolled ; there was even some indication of a thin coating of new gravel. Muslin curtains that were unfamiliar to his eyes shrouded the bow- windows of the drawing-room, and a little yapping black- and-tan terrier — the veriest abbreviation of the dog species — ticw out of a half-open door to gird at him as he rang the bell. '^ihe vicarage parlour-maid — a young woman he had prepared for confirmation twelve months before — came smiling to admit him. Even she had an altered air — more starch in her gown, r smart white apron, cherry-coloured bows in her cap. *' Is Mr. Luttrell at houie ? " " No, sir. Master went to Bulford in the pony-chaise with Miss Luttrell directly after lunch. But the other young ladiet are in the drawing-room, sir, and Mrs. Chevenix." He went into the hall — a square low-ceilinged chamber, em- bellished with antiquated cabinets of cracked oriental china ; an ancient barometer ; a pair of antlers, with a fox's brush lying across them, both trophies of the Vicar's prowess in the field ; a smoky-looking piece of still-life, with the usual cut lemon and dead leveret and monster bunch of impossible grapes ; the still 64 Strangers and Pitgrv/M, smokier portrait of an old gentleman of the pig-tail period ; and eundry other 8p«cimens of art, which, massed into one lot of oddments aC an auction, might iA>BBibly have realised a fi^e* pound note. " Mrs. Chevenix ? " said the Curate interrogatively. " Yes, sir — the young ladies* aunt, sir — master's sister ? ** " O," said Mr. Forde. He faintly remembered having hoard of this lady — the well-to-do aunt and godmother who had given Diana the grand piano; an aunt who was sometimes alluded to confidently by Blanche as an authority upon all matters of taste and fashion ; a person possessed of a universal knowledge, of the lighter sort ; whose judgment as to the best book or the cleverest picture of the season was a judgment beyond dispute ; who knew the ins and outs of life aristocratic and life diplomatic, Jii d would naturaDy be one of the first persons to be informed of an approaching marriage in fashionable circles or an im- pending war. Without ever having seen this lady, Mr. Forde had, from his inner consciousness, as it were, evolved some faint image of her, and the image was eminently distasteful to him. He disliked Mrs. Chevenix, more or less on the Dr. Fell principle. The reason why he could not tell, but he most assuredly did dislike ber. He could understand now that the new muslin curtains and the sprinkling of new gravel were expenses incurred in honour of this super.or person. He kept his hat in his hand, — he would have left it in the hall most likely, had the young ladies been alone, — and thus armed, went in to be presented to Mrs. Chevenix. " O, how do yon do, !Mr. Forde P " cried Diana, bouncing up from the hearthrug, where she had been caressing the infinitesi- mal terrier. " You are quite a stranger. We never see ^ou now, except in church. Let me present you to my aunt, Mrs. Chevenix." He had a sense of something large and brown and rustling fising with a stately air ])etween him and the light, and theu slowly sinking into the luxurious depths of a capacious arm- chair; a chair not indij^enous to the vicarage drawing-room, evidently an additional luxury provided for aunt Chevenix. He had shaken hands with Diana, and bowed to ?*»ut Cheve- nix — who maintained an aristocratic reserve on the subject of hand-shaking, and did not go about the world off". Jng her hand to tlae first comer — in a somewhat absent-minded manner. He had performed th-ese two ceremonies with his eyes wandering in quest of that otner Miss Luttrell for whose special behall he nad come to the Vicarage. She— Elizabeth— sat iu a low chair bj the ire, roading a ^>',rv, novel, tne very picture of contented idleness. She too, like the house, seemed to him altered. Her garments had a more fashionable air. That Puritan simplicity she had assumed at the beginning of her career as a district-visitor was entirely dit*- carded. She wore lockets and trinkets which he had not seen her wear of late, and rich plaits of dark brown hair were piled high on the graceful head, like the pictures in fashion-books. She rose now to greet him with a languid air, an elegant indif- erence of manner which he surmised had been imparted by the ■lately personage in lustrous brown silk. They shook hand^ coldly eoough on both sides, and Elizabeth resumed her seat, with her book open in her lap. Mrs. Chevenix sat with her portly brown-silk back towards the bow window. It was one of Mrs. Chevenix' s principles to sit with her back to the light, whereby a soupfon of pead- powder and hair-dye was rendered less obvious to the observer. A beauty had Mrs. Chevenix been in her time, ay, and aa acknowledged a beauty as Elizabeth Luttrell herself, although it would have cost Malcolm Forde a profound effort of faith to believe that vivid flashing brunette loveliness of Elizabeth's could ever develop into the fleshly charms of the matron. But in certain circles, and in her own estimation, Mrs. Chevenix still took high rank as a fine woman. She had arrived at that arid full-blown stage of existence in which a woman can only be distinguished as fine, in which a carefully preserved figure and a complexion eked out by art are the last melancholy vestiges of departed beauty. She was a large person, with a iafge aquiline-nosed cdunten- ance framed by broad- plaited bands of flaxen hair.' Her cheeks bloomed with' the flond bloom of middle agie, delicately tphed down by_ a judicious a J) j)licatloil of jft^il^qwdfer^^^^^^ eyebrows" were sevei-al shWdes'^^rSer'^Tiai" Mr Mi*, &-!!(?¥ ifttla too regular for nature ; her eyes were blue— cold calculating e^e^, which looked as if thiey tad nev6f belifeiacity ol T4 Strangeri and Pilgrimg. rougli-rider. What a man-mountain the creature is, too! I should hardly have thought any sane bishop would have ordained such a giant. There ought really to be a standard height for the Church as well as for the army, excluding pigmies and giants. I never beheld a man so opposite to one's ideal of a curate." " O, of course," cried Elizabeth impatiently. " Your ideal Burate is a slim simpering thing with white hands — a bandbox- ical being, talking solemn small-talk like a fashionable doctor — a kettledrumish-man, always dropping in at afternoon tea. We have had three of that species, varying only in detail. Thank heaven Malcolm Forde is something better than that." " I cannot perceive that you have any occasion to feel grate- ixil to Providence upon the subject of Mr. Forde's character and attributes, let them be what they may," said Mrs. Chevenix; " and I consider that familiar mention of your father's curate — a paid servant remember, like a governess or a cook— to the last degree indecorous." " But I do thank heaven for him," cried Elizabeth recklessly. " He is my friend and counsellor, — the only man I ever looked up to >* " You appear to forget that you have a father," murmured Mrs. Chevenix, sitting like a statue, with her closed fan laid across her breast, in a stand-at-ease manner. " I don't forget anything of the kind ; but I never looked up to Ihim. It isn't in human nature to reverence one's father. One ia behind the scenes of his life, you see. One knows all his little impatiences, his unspiritual views on the subject of dinner, liis intolerance of crumpled roseleaves in his domestic arrange- ments. Papa is a dear old thing, but he is of the earth, earthy, J^Ir. Forde is of another quality, — spiritual, earnest, self- aacrificing, somewhat arbitrary, perhaps, in the consciousness of hie own strength, but gentle even when he commands ; capable of a heroic life which my poor feeble brain cannot even imagine; his eager spirit even now yearning to cany God's truth to some wretched people buried in creation's primeval gloom ; ready to die a martyr in some nameless Isle of the Pacific, in some unknown desert in Central Africa. He is my modern St. Paul, and I reverence him.'* Elizabeth indulged herself with this small tirade half in earnest, half in a mocking spirit, amusing herself with the discomfiture of aunt Chevenix, who sat staring at her in sfieechless horror. " The girl is stark mad I " gasped the matron, witn a faint flutter of her fan, slowly recovering speech and motion. *' Has tJjis sort of thing been going on long, Diana ? " "Well, not quite so bad as this," replied Diana; "but I ion't think Lizzie has been quite herself since she took ud (ae strangers and Filgrims, 76 trict-visiting. She has left off wearing nice gloves, and essing for dinner, and behaving in a general way like a CLristian." " Has she, indeed? " said aunt Ohevenix ; " then the district- visiting must be put a stop to at once and for ever, or it will leave her stranded high and dry on the barren shore of old- maidism. You may be a very pretty girl, Elizabeth Luttrell — I dare say you know you are tolerably good-looking, so there's no use in my pretending you are not — ^but if once you take up ultra-religious views, visiting the poor, and all that kind of thing, I wash my hands of you. I had hoped to see you make a brilHant marriage ; indeed I have heard you talk somewhat over-confidently of your carriage, your opera-box, your town house and country seat. But from what I hear to-day, I conclude your highest ambition is to marry this preposterous curate— who looks a great deal more like a brigand chief, by the way — and devote your future existence to Sunday-school teaching and tea-meetings." EHzabeth stood tall and straight before her accuser, with clasped hands resting on the back of a prie-dieu chair, exactly as she had stood while she delivered her small rhapsody about Mr. Forde, stately and spiritual-looking as Joan of Are inspired by her "voices." " Perhaps, after all, it might be a woman's loftiest ambition to mate with Malcolm Forde," she said slowlv, with a tender dreamy look in her eyes; and then, before the dragon could remonstrate, she went on with a sudden change of manner, " Don't be alarmed, auntie ; I am not going to hold the world well lost for love. I mean to have my opera-box, if it ever comes begging this way, and to give great dinners, with cabinet ministers and foreign ambassadors for my guests, and to be mistress of a country seat or two, and do wonderful things at elections, and to be stared at at country race-meetings, and to tread in that exalted path in which you would desire to train my ignorant footstep. Mrs. Chevenix gave a half-despairing sigh. " You are a most incomprehensible girl," she said, " and give me more trouble of mind than vour three sisters put together,, But I do hope that you will keep clear of any entanglement with that tall curate, a dangerous man I am convinced; any Hirtation of that kind would inevitably compromise you in the Juture. As to cabinet dinners and country seats, such marriages as you talk of are extremely rare nowadays, and for a Devonsmre parson's daughter to make such a match would be a kind of miracle. But with your advantages you ought certainly to marry well ; and it is better to look too high than too low. A season in London might do wonders." 76 Strangers and Pilgrims. This London seadon was the shining bait whicli Y\r%. Chevenix wao wont to dangle before the eyes of her nieces, and by virtue of which, she obtained their submission to her amiable caprices when the more remote advantage of in- heritance might have failed to influence them. Gertrude and Diana had enjoyed each her season, and had not profited thereby in any substantial manner. They had been " much admired," Mrs. Chevenix declared with an approving air, especially Diana, as the livelier of the two ; but admiration had not taken that definite form for which the soul of the match- maker longeth. "There must be something wanting," Mrs. Chevenix said pensively, in moments of confidence. "I find that something wanting in most of the girls of the present day. Alfred Chevenix proposed to me in my first season. I was a thoughtless thing just emerged from the nursery, and hia was not my only offer. But my nieces made a very different effect. Young men were attentive to them — Sir Harold Haw- buck even seemed struck with Diana — but nothing came of it. There must be a deficiency in something. Gertrude is too serious, Diana a shade too flippant. It is manner, my dear, manner, in which the rising generation is wanting." " A season in town," cried Elizabeth, her dark eyes sparkling, her head lifted with a superb arrogance, and all thought of Malcolm Forde and the life spiritual for the moment banished. " Yes, it is my turn, is it not, auntie P and I think it is time I came out. Who knows how soon I may begin to lose what- ever good looks I now possess? I am of a nervous temper; impressionable, as you suggested just now. I have a knack of sleeping badly when my mind is full of a subject, and excite- ment of any kind spoils my appetite. Even the idea of a new bonnet will keep me awake. I lie tossing from side to side all night trying to determine whether it shall be pink or blue. Living at this rate, I may be a positive fright before I am twenty ; no complexion can stand against such wear and tear." "You have been allowed to grow up with a sadly un- disciplined mind, my poor child," Mrs. Chevenix said sen- tentiously. " If your papa had engaged a competent governess, a person who had lived in superior families, and was experienced in the training of the human mind and the figure — your waist measures two inches more than it ought to at your age — his daughters would have done him much greater credit. But it was only like my brother Wilmot to grudge the «xpenditure cf sixty guineas a year for a proper instructress of his daughters, while frittering away hundreds on his pauper Parishioners." "Now, thftt is one of the tlMisra for which T So reverence ^trangert and Filgrims. 77 papa," ciied Elizabeth with energy. ** Thank heaven, neither our minds nor our bodies have been trained by a proi'essianaJ trainer. Imagine growing like a fruit tree nailed against a wall ; every spontaneous outshoot of one's character cut back, every impulse pruned away as a non-fruit-bearing branch ! I do bless papa with all my free untutored soul for having spared us that. But don't let us quarrel about details, dear auntie. Give me ray season in London, and eee what I will do. I languish for my opera-box and barouche, and the kind of lite one reads of in Mrs. Gore's novels." *• You shall spend next May anJ June with me," said Mrs. Chevenix with another plaintive sigh. ** It will be hard work going over all the same ground again which I went over for Gerty and Di, but the result may be more brilliant." "Couldn't you manage to turn me off at the same time, auntie ?" demanded Blanche pertly. ** I am Sony Gertrude and I were not fortunate enough to receive proposals from dukes or merchant princes," said Diana, whose aristocratic features had flushed angrily at her aunt's implied complaint. " Perhaps we might hove been luckier if we had met more people of that kind. But of course Lizzie will do wonders. She reminds me of Mirabeau's remark about KobespieiTe ; she will do great things, because she believes in herself." Eiizabtith was prompt to respond to this attack ; and so, ^ith Jinall sisterly bickerings, the conversation ended. OHAPTEE VII •* it ne roudrais pas, ei j'^tais Julie, • N'6tre que jolie Avec ma beante. Jnsqu'au bout des doigts je serais tluche^w. Comme ma richesse J'aurais ma fiert4. " Elizabeth, having in a manner pledged herself to a career of worldly-mindedness, to begin in the ensuing spring, deemed herself at Uberty to follow her own incHnations m the interim, and these inclinations pointed to the kind of life which Malcolm Forde wished her to lead. She went back to her district- work on the morning after the Curate's visit ; put on her Puritan hat and sober gray carmelite gown, which seemed to her mind the whole armour of righteousness, and went back t^o her people. She was welcomed back with an affection that at »>!»->■* 78 8tranger$ and PilgrifM surprised and touched her. She had done so little for them— only treating them e-nd thinking of them as creatures of tha same nature as herself — and yet they were so grateful, and so fond of hep. So Elizabeth went back to what Gertrude called her " duties/* and the soul of aunt Ohevenix was heavy within her. Thai lady had cherished high hopes upon the subject of this lovely niece of hers. A perfect beauty in a family is a fortune in irabryo. There was no knowing what transcendent heights upon the vast mountain range of " good society " such a girl as iJlizabeth might scale, dragging her kith and kin upwards with her; provided she were but plastic in the hands of good advisers. To scheme, to plan, to diplomatise, were natural operations of the Chevenix mind. A childless widow, with a comfortable in- come and a somewhat extended circle of acquaintance, could liardly spend all her existence with no more mental pabulum than a fan and a scent-bottle, and the trivial amenities of polite life. Mrs. Chevenix's intellect must have lapsed into stagnation but for the agreeable employment afforded by social diplomacy. She knew everything about everybody ; kept a mental ledger in which she registered all the little weaknesses of her ac- quaintance ; and had even a journal wherein a good deal of genteel scandal was booked in pen and ink. But although by 310 means essentially good-natured, she was not a mischief- maker, and 1*0 unfriendly criticism or lady-like scandal had ever been brought home to her. She was, on the other hand, renowned as a peace-maker : and if she had a fault, it was a species of amiable officiousness, which some of her acquaintance were inclined inwardly to resent. Malign tongues had called Mrs. Chevenix a busybody ; but in the general opinion she was a lady of vivacious and agreeable manners, wno gave snug Uttle dinners, and elegant little suppers after concerts and .iperas ; and was a fine figure for garden parties, or a spare seat 8 1 the dinner- table ; a lady who had done some good service in t he way of match-making, and who exercised considerable in- tiuence over the minds of divers young matrons whom she had assisted in the achievement of their matrimonial successes. It seemed a hard thing that, after having been so useful an ally to various damsels who were only the protegees of the hour, Mrs. Chevenix's diplomatic efforts in relation to her own nieces should result in utter failure. She had never hoped very much from Gertrude, who had that air of being too good for this world, which of all things is the most repellent to sinful man. Still, even for Gertrude Mrs. Ohevenix had done her best, bravely, and with the subUme patience engendered by profound fxperience of this mundane sphere, its mfficulties and disap- Dointments. She had exhibited her seriously-mind^ rW/* at Btrangeti and Pilgrim%. 79 eharity bazaars, at dejeuners given after the inauguration of church organs, at choir festivals, and even — with a noble sacri- fice of personal inclination — at Sunday-school tea-drinkings, orphanage fetes, and other assemblages of what this worldly- minded matron called the goody-goody school. She had angled for popular preachers, for rectors and vicars, the value of whose benefices she had looked up in the Clergy-list; but she had cast her lines in vain. The popular preachers, crying from their pulpits that all is vanity, were yet caught, moth-like, by the flame of worldly beauties, and left Gertrude to console herself with the calm contemplation of her own virtues, and the con- viction that they were somewhat too lofty for the appreciation cf vulgar clay. It had happened thus, that with the advent of Malcolm Forde, the eldest Miss Luttrell fancied she had at last met the elect and privileged individual predestined to sympa- thise with, and understand her; the man upon whose broad forehead she at once recognised the apostolic grace, and who, she fondljr hoped, would hail in her the typical maiden of the church primitive and undefiled, the Dorcas or Ljrdia of modern civilisation. It had been a somewhat bitter disappointment, therefore, to discover that Mr. Forde, although prompt with the bestowal of his confidence and friendship, was very slow to exhibit any token of a warmer regard. Surely he, so difi'erent in every attribute from all former curates, was not going to resemble them in their foolish worship at the shrine of Ehza- beth. So long as this damsel had stuck to her accustomed line of worldliness, Gertrude had scarcely trembled. But when her younger sister all of a sudden subdued her somewhat reckless spirit, and took to district-visiting, Miss Luttrell's heart sank within her. She had no belief in the reality of this conversion. It was a glaring and bold-faced attempt at the Curate's subju- gation, to bend that stifi" neck beneath the yoke which had been worn so patiently by the flute-playing, verse-quoting Levites of the past. And Gertrude did not hesitate to express herself in somewhat bitter phrases to that effect. When Diana came to Eaton-place for the season, the hopes of aunt Chevenix rose higher. The second Miss Luttrell was decidedly handsome, in the aquiline-nosed style, and was a? decidedly styKsh ; wore her country- made gowns with an air which made them pass for the handicraft of a West-end mantua- maker; dressed her own hair with a skill which would have done credit to an experienced lady's maid ; and seemed alto- gether an advantageous young person for whom to labour. Yet Diana's season, though brightened by many a hopeful ray, had been barren of results. Perhaps these girls in their aunt' a house were too obviously "on view." Mrs. Chevenix's renown W a match-maker maj have gone against them ; her past suo- so Strangers and ^tlyruns. cosseg may have induced this present failure. And if Gertrudt erred on the side of piety, Diana possibly went a thought too far in the matter of worldlinese. She was clever and imitative, and caught up the manners of more experienced damsels with a readiness that was perhaps too ready. She had perhaps a trifle too much confidence in herself; too much of the vent, v'uli, vici style; went into battle with "An opera-box and a house in Hyde-park-gardens*' blazoned on her banner; and after suf- fering the fitful fever of high hopes that alternate with blank despair, Diana was fain to go back to Hawleigh Vicarage with- out being able to boast of any definite ofier. But with Elizabeth, Mrs. Chevenix told herself, things would be utterly different. She possessed that rare beauty which always commands attention. She was as perfect in her line as those heaven-born winners of the Derby, Oaks, and Leger, which, hy their performances as two-year-olds, proclaim them- selves at once the conquerors of the coming year. Fairly good- looking girls were abundant enough every season, just as fairly good horses abound at every sale of yearlings throughout the sporting year; but there was as much difference between Klizabeth Luttrell and the common herd of pretty girls — all more or less dependent on the style of their bonnets, or the dressing jf their hair for their good looks — as between the fifty- guinea colt, whose good points excite vague hopes of future merit in the breast of the speculative buyer, and a lordling of a crack Btable, with a pedi^ee half a yard long, knocked down for two or three thousand gumeas to some magnate of the turf, amidst the applause of the auction-yard. '• Elizabeth cannot fail to marry well, unless she behaves like an idiot, and throws herself away upon some pauper curate," eaid M rs. Chevenix : " there is no position to which a girl with her advantages may not aspire — and I shall make it my butiiuess so give her plenty of opportunities — unless she is ob- Btinately bent upon standing in her own light. This district- visiting business must be put a stop to immediately; it ia uothing more than an excuse for flirting vrith that tall curate." Mrs. Chevenix was not slow to warn her brother, the Yicar of this peril which menaced his handsomest daughter; but he who was the easiest- tempered and least-designing of mankind, received her information with a provoking coolness. *• I really can't see how I could object to Lizzie's visitii^ the poor," he said. " It has always been a trouble to me that my daughters, with the exception of Gertrude, have done so little. If ]? orde has brought about a better state of things in this matter, as he has in a good deal besides, I don't see that I can iwmplain of the improvement because it is his doing. And I don't tliink you need alarm yourself with regard to any dangei Strangers and Pilgrims, 81 of )^ve-makiug or matrimony between those two. Forde has Bornewhat advanced notions, and doesn't approve ot a pries+ marrying. He has almost said as much in the pulpit, and i think the Hawleigh girls have left off setting their caps at him." "Men are not always constant in their opinions," said Mrs. Chevenix. " I wouldn't give much for any declaration Mr. Forde may have made in the pulpit. It was very bad taste in him to advance any opinion of that kind, I think, when hia vicar is a married man and the father of a family." *' Forde belongs to the new school," replied JNIr. Luttrell, vdth his good-natured air. " Perhaps he sometimes sails a trifle too near the wind in the matter of asceticism ; but he's the best curate I ever had.** " Why doesn't he go over to Eome, and have done with it,'* exclaimed aunt Chevenix angrily ; " I have no patience with Buch a wolf in sheep's clothing. And I have no patience with vou, Wilmot, when I see your handsomest daughter throwing herself away before your eyes." "But I don't see anything of the kind, Maria,'* said the Vicar, gently rolling his fingers round a cigar which he meant to smoke in the orchard as soon as he could escape from his tor- mentor. " As to playing the spy upon my children — watching their flirtations with Jones, or speculating upon their penchant for Kobinson, I think you ought to know by this time that I am the very last of men to do anything of that kind." "Which means in plain English that you are too selfish and too indifferent to trouble yourself about the fate of your daughters. You ought to have had sons, Wilmot; young scapegraces, who would have ruined you with university debts, or gone on the turf and dragged your name through the mire in that way." " I have not been blessed with sons," murmured Mr. Luttrell in his laziest tone. " If I had been favoured in that way, so soon as they arrived at an eligible age, I should have exported them. I should have obtained a government grant of land in Australia or British Columbia, and planted them out. I consider emigra- tion the natural channel for the disposal of surplus sons." " You ought never to have married, Wilmot. You ought to have been one of those dreadful abbots one reads of, who had trout-streams running throiigh their kitchens, and devoted aU the strength of their minds to eating and drinking, and actually wallowed in venison and larded capons." " Those ancient abbots had by no means a bad time of it, my dear," repUed the Yicar, with supreme good humour, " and they had plenty of broken victuals to feed their poor with, which I have not." " I wjiut to know what yon ere going to do about Elii'.iiboth**' 82 Strangefs and Pilgrims* said Mrs. Chevenix, rapping the table with her fan, and return* ing to the charge in a determined manner. " What I am going to do about Elizabeth, my love ? Simply nothing. Would you have me lock her up in the Norman tower, like a princess in a fairy tale, so that she should not behold the face of man till I chose to introduce her to a husband of my own selection P All the legendary lore we possess tends to show the futility of that sort of domestic tryanny. I consider your apprehensions altogether premature and groundless; but if it is Lizzie's destiny to marry Malcolm Forde, I shall not in- terfere. He is a very good fellow, and he has some private means, sufficient at any rale for the maintenance of a wife what more could I wantP" " And you would sacrifice such a girl as Elizabeth to a Scotci curate," said Mrs. Chevenix with the calmness of despair. " I always thought that you were the most short-sighted of mortals; but I did not believe you capable of such egregious folly as this. That girl might be a duchess." " Find me a duke, my dear Maria, and I will not object to him for my son-in-law." Mrs. Chevenix sighed, and shook her head with a despondent air ; and Mr. Luttrell strolled out to the orchard, leaving her to bewail his folly in a confidential converse with Diana, who in a manner represented the worldly wisdom of the family. " I wouldn't make such a fuss about Lizzie, if I were you, auntie," that young lady remarked somewhat coolly. " I never knew a girl about whom her people made too much fuss, setting her up as a beauty, and so on, do anything wonderful in the way of marriage.** Like the eyes of the lynx, in his matchless strength of vision, were the eyes of aunt Chevenix for any sentimental converse between Elizabeth and Mr. Forde. It tortured her to know that they must needs have many opportunities of meeting out- side the range of that keen vision — chance encounters in the <»ttages of tne poor, or in the obscure lanes and alleys that ^nged the chief street of Hawleigh. Vainly had she en- deavoured to cajole her niece into the abandonment of those duties she had newly resumed. All her arguments, her flat- "teries, her ridicule, her little offerings of ribbons and laces and small trinketry, were wasted. After that visit of Malcolm Forde's the girl was constant to her work. ** It is such a happiness to feel that I can be of some use in the world, auntie," she said, unconsciously repeating Mr. Forde's very words ; " and if you had seen how pleased those poor souls were to see me amongst them again, you would nardly wonder at my liking the work." Strangers and Fllgrims. 83 " A tribe of sycophants ! " exclaimed Mrs. Ohevenix con- temptuously. " I should like to know what value they'd attach to y^our visits, or how much civility they'd show you, if there were not tea and sugar, and coals and blankets in the back- ground. Audi I should like to know how long you'd stick to your work if Mr. Forde had left HawleighP " Elizabeth flamed crimson at this accusation, but was not of I temper to be silenced by a hundred Ghevenixes. " Perhaps I might not like the work without his approval," ihe said defiantly ; " but I hope I should go on with it all the same. I am not at all afraid to confess that his influence first set me thinking ; that it was to please him I first tried to be good." " I am not an ultra-religious person, Elizabeth ; but I should call that setting the creature above the Creator," said Mrs., Chevenix severely. To which Lizzie muttered something that Bounded like " Bosh." " What else is there for me to do, I should Hke to know," the girl demanded contemptuously, after an interval of silence, iSirs. Chevenix having retired within herself in a dignified sulkiness. "Ij there any amusement, or any excitement, or any distraction in our life in this place to hinder my devoting myself to these people?" This speech was somewhat reassuring to Mrs. Chevenix : she inferred therefrom that if Elizabeth had had anything more agreeable to do, she would not have become a district- visitor. " You have a fine voice, which you might cultivate to your future profit," she said ; " a girl who sings really well is ifiiely to make a great success in society." "I understand. One gets asked out to entertain other rsople's friends ; and one is not paid like a professional singer, like music well enough, aunt ; but you can't imagine I could spend half my existence in shrieking solfeggi, even if papa would tolerate the noise. I am sure, what with one ano another of us, the piano is jingling and clattering all day, as^ it is. Papa and the servants must execrate the sound of it: Blanche, with her etudes de velocite, and Di with her ever- lasting fugues and sonatas — it's something abominable." " You might have a piano in your tower bedroom, my dear. I wouldn't mind making yon a present of a cottage." " Thanks, auntie. Let it be a real cottage, then, instead of a cottage piano — against I set up that love-in-a-cottage you seem to much afraid of." "Upon my word, Elizabeth, I can never make you out," said Mrs. Chevenix, plaintively. "Sometimes I think you are a thoroughlv sensible girl, and at other times you really appeal capable of any absurdity." 84 Strangers and Pilgrims, " Don't be frightened, auntie. It rather amuses me to se« your awe-stricken look when I say anything particularly wild. But you need have no misgivings about me. I am worldly- minded to the tips of my nails, as the French say ; and I am perfectly aware that I am rather good-looking, and ought to make an advantageous marriage ; only the eligible suitor is a long time appearing. Perhaps I shall meet him next spring in Eaton-place. As to Mr. Forde, he is quite out of the question. I know all about his past life, and know that lie is a confirmed bachelor." "Your confirmed bachelors are a very dangerous race. Elizabeth," said Mrs. Chevenix sententiously, "They con- trive to throw families off their guard by their false pretences, and generally end by marrying a beauty or an heiress. But I trust you have too much common sense to take up with a man who can barely afford to keep you." By such small doses of worldly-wise counsel did Mrs. Chevenix strive to fortify her niece against the peril of Mal- colm Forde's influence. Her sharp eye had discovered some- thing more than common kindliness in the Curate's bearing towards Elizabeth — something more than a mere spirit of contradiction in the girl's liking for him. But there was time enough yet, she told herself; and the tender sprout of passion might, by a little judicious management, be nipped in the bud. She would not even wait for the coming spring, she thought; but would carry off Elizabeth with her when she went back to town a little before Christmas. She had intended to spend that social season in a hospitable Wiltshire manor-house ; but that visit might be deferred. Anything was better than to leave her niece exposed to the perilous influence of Malcolm Forde. Again and again had she made a mental review of the tritons in the matrimonial market; or rather, of those special tiitons who might be brought within the narrow waters of her own drawing-room, or could be encountered at will in that wider sea of society to which she had free ingress. There was Sir Rockingham Pendarvis, the rich Cornish baronet, whom it had been her privilege to meet at the dinner parties of her own particular set, and who might be fairly counted upon for daily tea-drinking and occasional snug little dinners. There was Mr. Maltby, the great distiller, who had lately inherited a business popularly estimated at a hundred thousand a year. There was Mr. Miguel Zamires, the financier, with a lion's share in the public funds of various nations, aquiline-nosed and olive- skinned, speaking a peculiar Spanish-English with a somewhat guttural accent. These three were the mightier argosies that sailed upon society's smooth ocean- but ti^tfit- wxre numerous Strangert and Pi!(/rim^. SS craft of smaller tonnage whereof Mrs. Cbevenuc kept a record, and any one of which would be a prize worth uoardinff. Inscrutable are the decrees of the gods. While this diplo- matic matron was weaving her web for the next London season —even planning her little dinners, reckoning the expenses of the campaign, resolving to do thing?* with a somewhat lavish hand — Fate brought a nobler prize than any she had dared to dream of wiunmg, and landed it, without etfort of her own, at her teet. CHAPTER VIII. •* He never saw, never before to-day, \Yhat was able to take his breath away, A face to lose youth for, to occupy age With the dream of, meet death with — " It was early in November, and Mrs. Chevenix had been at the Vicarage a month — a month of inexorable dulness, faintly relieved by a couple of provincial dinner-parties, at which the Hawleigh pastor assembled round his well-furnished board a choice selection of what were called the best people in the neighbourhood. But the best people seemed somewhat dismal company to Mrs. Chevenix, who cared for no society that lacked the real London flavour — the bouquet of Hyde-park and the Clubs. She was beginning to pine for the racier talk of her own pecuhar set, for the small luxuries of her own establishment, when an event occurred which, in a moment, transformed Hawleigh, and rendered it just the most deliglitfuZ spot upon this lower sphere. She had gone to church vnih her nieces on Sunday morning in by no means a pleasant humour, captiously disposed rather, and inclined to hold forth about their papa's pecularities and their own shortcomings in a strain which Elizabeth openly resented, and the other girls inwardly rebelled against. " If I had been as cross as aunt Chevenix is this morning in my nursery days, 1 should have been told that I had got up on the wrong side of my bed," said Blanche, walking with Diana in the rear of the matron. " I suppose it woul^'t do for us mildly to suggest to auntie that she must have got up on the wrong side of her bed this morning. It might seem out of keeping." *' I wonder vou stop vnih us if onr society is so very un pleasant, aunt,^' said Elizabeth boldly. " You ungrateful girl 1 Yon ought to know that I an etayinff in this roiaxing o^mate, at the hazard of mv own 86 Strcmgets and Pilgrims. health, simply in order to interj^ose my influence between you and destruction." Elizabeth greeted this reproach with a scornful laugh, even at the gate of the churchyard. " You foolish auntie ! you surely don't suppose that your pre- eence here would prevent my doing any thing I wished to do ; that the mere dead-weight of your worldly wisdom would quench ♦he fire of my impulses P " she said. They were within the church-porch before aunt Chevenij t/«)uld reply. She sailed up the central aisle with all her plaia Bails spread, and took the most comfortable seat in the vicarag(? of beauty — a low forehead ; a short straight nose, moulded rather than chiselled ; full lips, shaded by a thick brown mous- tache ; a square jaw, a trifle too heavy for the rest of the face ; a powerful column-like throat, fully exposed by the low-cut collar, and narrow strip of cravat; short-cut hair of reddith brown ; and large bright eyes of the same hue, a reddish hjv.el — eyes that hud never been dimmed by thought or study, but had .something of the sailor's hawk-like far-otf vision, Tt wws i,K»; Wii^i*. and fisrure of a Gr^ek athl-e*«. the winaer ot tii« Strangers and Filgrlma^ 89 ^Ild olive- crown, in the Jays when strength was accounted aeauty. " Do j-on know who that is in the pew by the altar ? " whis- pered Mrs. Chevenix, under cover of the tall green -baize-lined pew, when they knelt down for the litany. " Don't know, I'm sure," replied Elizabeth indifferently ; " T suppose it's a stranger that they've put in the Ashcombe i)ew " " That young man is Lord Paulyn, one of the richest men m London," said Mrs. Chevenix, in an awe-stricken whisper. " O," said Elizabeth settling down to the responses, and not peculiarly impressed by this announcement. Sorely mechanical was Mrs. Chevenix's share in the service after this discovery. Her lips murmured the responses, with nndeviating correctness. She escaped every pitfall which our form of prayer offers for the unwary, and came up to time at every point; but her mind was busy with curious thoughts about Lord PaulyTi, and very little of the Yicar's good old English sermon — a judicious solution of Tillotson, South, and Venn — found its way to her comprehension. She contnved to steer her way down the aiple so as to emerge from the porch with her elbow against the elbow of Lord Paulyn, and then came radiant smiles of recognition, and intense astonishment at this unexpected meeting. " There's nothing very remarkable in it," said the Viscount, while the Luttrell girls were shaking hands with Lady Paulyn and Miss Disney ; " my mother lives down here you know, and I generally come for a week or so in the huntin' season. Going to church is rather out of my line, I admit ; but I sometimes do it here to gratify the mater. Any of your people live down here, Mrs. Chevenix ? " " Yes ; I am staying with my brother, the Vicar.'* " Bless my soul ! old Luttrell your brother, is he ? I had no idea of that. Those girls belong to you, I suppose ? rather nice girls — talking to my mother." ** Those young ladies are my nieces." ** Uncommonly handsome girl, that tall one. We're rather noted tor that sort of thing in the west ; pilchards, clotted cream, and fine women, are our staple. Pray introduce me to vour nieces, Mrs. Chevenix. Do they hunt P * Mrs. Chevenix shook her head despondently. " Elizabeth has all the ambition for that kind of thing," she sa id, " but not the opportunity. My brother has four daughters, arid the Church is not a Golconda." •* That's a pity," said the Viscount, staring at Elizabeth, who was talking to Miss Disney on the opposite side of the pain, along which the congregation was slowly moving, with a good •ioal of nodding and buckoninff 9,nd friendlv sa^it/ituri ; '* that 5>>*il ©0 Strangers and Filgrimg. girl loot? as if she would be straightisli rider. I could give het a gooti mount, if her father would let her hunt." " That would be quite out of the question," said Mrs. Cheve- nix ; " my brother has such strict notions ; " a remark which might have sounded somewhat curious to the easy-going pastor himself; but Mrs. Chevenix had certain cards to play, and knew pretty well how to play them. " Hump, I suppose so ; a parson and all that kind of thing. Which is Elizabeth P The tall one ? " " Yes, Elizabeth is the tallest of the four." " She's an uncommonly handsome girl." " She is generally considered so." ** Egad, so she ought to be. There wasn't a girl to compare with her in this year's betting. Introduce me, please, Mrs. Chevenix." The matron hesitated, as if this demand were hardly agreeable to her. " I think the introduction would come better from Lady Paulyn," she said, " as my nieces appear to be on friendly terms with her." *' 0, very well ; my mother can present me — it comes to the same thing. Don't you know her P " Mrs. Chevenix shook her head with a gentle melancholy. ** My nieces have not taken the trouble to make us acquainted," she said ; ** I was not even aware that Lady Paulyn had a seat in this part of the country." She might have added, that she was not even aware of Lady Paulyn's existence until this morning. She had supposed the Viscount to be in the independent position of an orphan. " O, yes, we've a place down here, and a precious ugly one, but my mother likes it ; doesn't cost much to keep up, though it's big enough for a barrack. I say, mother," crossmg the path way, which was now nearly clear, "this is Mrs. Chevenix, Mr, Luttrell's sister, who is dying to know you." Mrs. Chevenix made a sweeping curtsey, as if she had som«j idea of subsiding into unknown depths below the timeworn tombstones that paved the pathway. The lavender bonnet ^ave a little friendly nod, and the Viscountess extended a paw m a crumpled black kid glove. " And now, mother, you may present me to these young 'adies," said the Viscount. The presentation was made, but hardly with that air of cor- diality which it was Lady Paulyn's habit to employ as a set-oif against the closeness of her financial operations and the inhospi- tality of her gaunt old mansion. Mrs. Chevenix detected a lurking reluctance in the dowager's manner of making her son known to the Luttrell girls. The Vic^ir cume out of the porch while this cercmouy was Strangers and Pilgrims. 91 being performed, with Malcolm Forde by his side. There were more greetings, and Elizabeth had time to shake hands with her father's curate, although Lord Paulyn was in the very utterance of some peculiarly original remark about the general dulness of Hawleigh. Mr. Forde had been very kind to her since her re- turn to the path he had chalked out for her — deferential even in his manner, as if she had become at once the object of his gratitude and respect. But he had no opportunity of saying much to Ehzabeth just now, though she had turned at once to greet him, and had forgotten to respond to Lord Pftulyn's re- mark about Hawleigh ; for Gertrude plunged immediately into the usual parish talk, and held forth upon the blessed fruits of her late labours as manifest in the appearance of a certain Job Smithers in the free seats : " A man who was almost an infidel, dear Mr. Forde, and used to take his children's Sunday-frocks to the pawnbroker's every Thursday or Friday, in order to ob- tain dnnk. But I am thankful to say I persuaded him to take the pledge, and I cherish hopes of his complete reformation." " Eather ^iven to pledges, that fellow, I should think. Miss Luttrell," said the Viscount, in an irreverent spirit. " I can't conceive why young ladies in the country plague themselves with useless attempts at reforming such fellows. I don*t beHeve there's a ha'porth of good done by it. You may keep a man sober for a week, but he'll break out and drink double as much for the next fortnight. You might as well try to stop a man from having scarlet fever when the poison's in his blood. I had a trainer, now, in the north, as clever a fellow as ever breathed. I think if you'd given him a clothes-horse to train, he'd have made it win a cup before he'd done with it. But there was no keeping him away from the bottle. I tried everything; talked to him like a father, supplied him with chateau Lafitte, to try and get him off brandy ; but it was no use, and the stupid beggar had one attack of d. t. after another, till he went off his head alto- gether, and had to be locked up." This improving anecdote Lord Paulyn apparently related for the edification of Elizabeth ; since, although he began by ad- dressing Gertrude, it was on the younger sister his gaze was fixed, as he dwelt plaintively on the hapless doom of his trainer. "Won't you come to the Yicarage for luncheon. Lady Paulyn P " asked Mr. Luttrell, who had the old-fashioned eager country-squireish hospitahty, and who saw that the Viscount hardly seemed inclined t» move from his stand upon a crum- bhng old tombstone which recorded the decease of " Josiah Judd, of this parish ; also of Amelia Judd, wife of the above ; and of Hannah, infant daughter of the above," and so on, through a perplexinct string of departed Judds, all of this parish ; a fiuvt 02 Strangen and PityHmi. dwelt upon with as mucli insistence as if to be "of tHs parisli* were an earthly distinction that ought to prove a passport to eternal felicity. '* You're very kind," said the dowager graciously, " and your luncheons are always excellent ; but I shouldn't like to have the horses out so late on a Sunday, and Parker, my coachman, is a Primitive Methodist, and makes a great point of <)ttending his own chapel once every Sunday. I like to defer to fljy servants' prejudices in these small matters." " O Lady Paulyn, I hope you don't call salvation a small matter ! " ejaculated Gertrude, who would have lectured an archbishop. " Hang Parker's prejudices ! " cried Lord Paulyn ; " and as to those two old screws of yours in the chariot, I don't believe imy thing could hurt them. They ought to have been sent to a knacker's yard five years ago. I always call that wall-eyed gray the Ancient Mariner. He holds me with his glassy eye. We'll come to the Vicarage, by all means, Mr. Luttrell." The dowager gave way at once. She was much too wise to make any attempt at dragooning this only son, for whose en- richment she had pinched and scraped and hoarded until pinch- mg and scraping and hoarding had become the habit of her mind. Too well did she know that Eeginald Paulyn was a young man who would go his own way; that her small economies, her domestic cheese-paring, and flint-skinning were as so many drops of water as compared with the vast ocean of his expenditure. Yet she went on economising with ineffable patience, and thought no day ill-spent in which she had saved a shilling between sunrise and sunset. They all moved away in the direction of the Vicarage, which, nnlike the usual run of vicarages, was somewhat remote from the church. There was a walk of about a quarter of a mile between St. Clement's, which stood just within the West Bar, a gray old archsv^y at the end of the high-street, and the abode of tlw Luttrells. The Vicar offered his arm to the dowager. "You'll come with us, of course, Forde," he said, in his friendly way, looking round at his curate, and the curate did not refuse that offer of hospitality. Sunday luncheon at Hawleigh Vicarage was a famous insti* tution. Mr. Luttrell, as a rule, abjured that mid-day meal, pronouncing it, in the words of some famous epicure, "an insult to a man's breakfast, and an injury to his dinner." Bu* on Sunday the pastor sacrificed I'Jlmself to the convenience of his household, and went without his seven-o'clock dinner, in order that his cook might exhibit her best bonnet in the after- ijK.oii and evening a*, bis two churcli<;«. There was no roasting IStrangers and Pilgrims, 93 01* boiling in the vicarage kitclien on that holy day, only a gentle simmering of curries and fricassees, prepared overnight; nor was there any regular dinner, but by way of substitute therefor, a high tea at eight o'clock, a pleasant easy-going banquet, which hai been much affected by former curates. But woe ba to the household if the two-o'clock luncheon were not a select and savoury repast! and Miss Luttrell and the cook held solemn consultation every Saturday morning in order to secure this result. So the Vicar enjoyed himself every Sunday with his friends round him, and bemoaned himself every Monday on the subject of that untimely meal, declaring that he had thrown his whole internal machinery out of gear for the accommodation of his servants. To-day the luncheon seemed a peculiar success. Lady Paulyn, who was somewhat a stranger to the good things of this life, did ample justice to the viands, devoured curried chicken with the gusto of an Anglo-Indian, called the parlour- maid back to her for a second supply of oyster vol-au-vent, and wound-up with cold sirloin and winter salad, in a manner that was eminentl}^ suggestive of indigestion. Lord Paulyn had the modern appetite, which is of the weakest, trifled with a morsel of curry, drank a good deal of seltzer-and-brandy, and enjoyed himself amazingly after his manner, entertaining Elizabeth, bj whose side he had contrived to be seated, with the history of his Yorkshire stable, and confiding to her his lofty hopes for the coming year. She was not particularly interested in this agreeable dis- course; but she conld see, just as plainly as Mrs. Chevenix saw, that the Viscount was impressed by her beauty, and it was not unpleasant to her to have made such an impression upon that patrician mind, even if it were merely the affair of an hour. Nor was she unconscious of a certain steady watchfulness in the dark deep-set eyes of Malcobn Forde, who sat opposite to her, and was singularly inattentive to the remarks of his next neighbour, Gertrude. *' I don't suppose his perfect woman ever had the opportunity of flirting with a viscount," thought Elizabeth, *' or that she would have done such a thing if she had. I like to horrify him with an occasional glimpse of those depths of iniquity to which / can descend. If he cared for me a Httle, now, and there were any chance of making him jealous, the pleasure would be evef so much keener ; but that is out of the q^uestion.'* So the reformed Elizabeth, the Christian pastor's daughter, who visited the poor, and comforted the afflicted, and supported the heads of sick children on her bosom, and read the gospel to the ignorant, and did in some vague undcterminate manner 94 Strangers and Pilgrimi. trtruggle towards the higher, purer life, vanished altogether, giving place to a young person who improved her opportunity with the Viscount as dexterously as if she had been bred up at the knees of aunt Ohevenix, and had never known any loftier philosophy than that which dropped from those worldly Hps. Malcolm Forde looked on, and shuddered. "And for such a woman I had almost been false to the memory of Alice Fraser 1 " It must not be supposed that Elizabeth's iniquity was of an outrageous nature. She was only listening with an air of pro- found interest to Lord Paulyn's stable-talk, even trying to comprehend the glory of possessing a horse entered for next year's Derby, about which fifteen to two had been freely taken at Manchester during the autumn, and who was likely to advance in the betting after Christmas. She was only smiling radiantly upon a young man she had never seen until that morning — only receiving the homage of admiring eyes with a gracious air of unconsciousness ; like some splendid flower which does not shrink or droop under the full blaze of a meridian Bun, but rather basks and brightens beneath the glory of the Bun-god. But to the eyes of the man who watched her with an interest he would have hardly cared to confess to himself, this conduct seemed very black indeed. He groaned inwardly over the de- fection of this fair young soul, which not a little while ago he had deemed regenerate. " She is not worth the anxiety I feel about her," he said to himself: " Gertrude is a hundred times her superior, really earnest, really good, not a creature of whim and impulse, drifted about by everj wind that blows. And yet I cannot feel the same interest m her." And then he began to wonder if there were indeed something inherently interesting in sin, and if the repentant sinner must needs always have the advantage of the just person. It seemed almost a hard sajing to him, that touching sentence of the gospel of hope, which reserves its highest promises for the wilful, passionate soul that has chosen its own road in life and has only been brought home broken, and soiled, and tarnished at the last. Gertrude was vii-tuous, but not interesting. Vainly did Malcolm Forde endeavour to apply his ear to her discourse. His attention was distracted, in spite of himself, by that animated talk upon the other side of the wide oval table ; his eyes wan- dered now to the handsome, sensual face of the Viscount, now to Elisabeth's lively countenance, which expressed no weariness of that miserable horsey talk. Nor was Mr. Forde the only person present who took note of that animated coversation. From her place at the farther end of the table, Miss Disney'g Strangers and Pilgrvms. 95 oaiin blue eyes wandered ever and anon towards her kinsman and Elizabetli, hardly with any show of interest or concern, but with a coldly curious air, as if she wondered at Lord Paulyn*B vivacity, as an unwonted exhibition on his part. She was very quiet, spoke little, and only replied in the briefest sentences to any remark made by Mr. Luttrell, next to whom she was seated. She ate hardly anything, rarely smiled, and appeared to take very httle more interest in the life about and around her than if ehe had been, indeen, a waxen image, impervious to pain or pleasure. Luncheon came to an end at last, after being drawn out to a point that seemed intolerable to the curate; St. Mary's bells sounded in the distance, from the eastern end of the large straggHng town. There was only a short afternoon service ; the litany and a catechising of the children, which Mr. LuttreU himself rarely attended, deeming that perambulatory examina- tion of small scholars, the hearing of collect, epistle, and gospel, stumbled through with more or less blundering by monotonoua treble voices, a task peculiarly adapted to the curate mind. So, as soon as grace had been said, Mr. Forde rose quietly, shook hands with Gertrude, and slipped away, not unseen by EHza- beth. " There's a good deal of that fellow for a curate," said Lord Paulyn, casting a lazy glance at the retreating figure; " he ought to have been a lifeguardsman." " Mr. Forde has been in the army," Elizabeth answered coldly. " I thought as much, and in a cavalry regiment, of course. He has the * long sword, saddle, bridle * walk. What made him take to the Church P The army's bad enough — stiff examina« tions, bad pay, hard work; but it must be better than the Church. What made him change his profession ? " " Mr. Forde has not taken the trouble to acquaint the world with his motives," said Elizabeth with increasing coldness. Lord Paulyn looked at her curiously. She seemed somewhat sensitive upon the subject of this tall curate. Was there any- thing between them, he wondered ; a flirtation, an engagement even perhaps. He had caught the curate's glance wandering her way several times during the banquet. "Egad, the fellow has good taste," thought Lord Paulyn, " She's the prettiest woman I ever saw, bar none, and is no end too good for a snuffing parson. I'll make that old Chevenix tell me all about it presently." " That old Chevenix" had been trying to make her way with the dowager during the lengthy meal, entertaining her with little scraps of town- talk and small lady-Hke scandal ; not viru- lent vulgar slander, but good-natured genial kind of gossip^ touching lightly upon the failings and errors of one's acquaiat- dncfi, deploring; their little infirmities and mistaken courses witJi 96 Strangers and Mgrims, a friendly compassionate spirit, essentially Christain. Bat 8h« was mortified to discover that her small efforts to amuse were futile. The dowager would not acknowledge acquaintance with one of the people Mrs. Chevenix talked about, or the faintest interest in those public characters, the shining lights of the great world, about whose private life every well-regulated British mind is supposed to be curious. " I don't know her/' said this impracticable old woman ; " I never met him; I'm not acquainted with 'em ;" until the soul of the Chevenix sank within her, for she was ardently desirous of establishing friendly relations with this perverse dowager. " I'm a Devonshire woman, and I only know Devonshire people," said the dowager, ruthlessly cutting short one of the choicest stories that had been current in the last London season. "Then yon must know the Trepethericks!" exclaimed Mrs. Chevenix, in her gushing way; "dear Lady Trepetherick is a sweet woman, and one of my best friends ; and Sir Charles, what a thorough independent-minded Englishman!" "I never heard of 'em," replied the dowager bluntly; and Mrs. Chevenix was hardly sorry when the conclusion of the meal brought her hopeless endeavours to a close. " I can't keep those horses waiting any longer," said this un- g^rateful old woman, as she rose from the table, after having eaten to repletion. " Will you tell them to bring my carriage directly, EeginaldP'* " Nonsense, mother ; the horses are in the stable, and much better off than they'd be at Ashcombe, I dare say," answered the Viscount : " I'm not coming home for an hour. Miss Luttrell is going to show me the garden, and an ancient turret that was part of Hawleigh Castle." " Miss Luttrell is at the other end of the room," said the dowager grimly, perceiving that her son's gaze was rooted to Elizabeth. " Miss Elizabeth Luttrell, then," said that young man ; "you'll show me the garden, won't you P " " There's not much worth your looking at," answered Eliza- beth carelessly. " 0, yes, there is : a man would travel a long way to see as much," cried the Viscount significantly ; and then thinking that his admiration had been somewhat t-oo direct, he went on — " a mediaeval tower, you know, and all that kind of thing. But yon needn't wait for me, mother, if you're really anxious to get home. I'll find my way back to Ashcombe aoinehcw." "^V^lat, walk seven miles between tliis and dinner- time!** ^vclaimed the dowager. " TUere are oi»'''Hfnatance9 uudtjr wjjicji iv man might 4o m Strangers and Filgrimg. 07 mncli," answered the Viscount; "and the Ashcombe diniiora are not banqnets which I hold in extreme reverence." Lady Paulyn sighed despondently. It was a hard thing to have toiled for snoh an ingrate. " I'll wait for you, Beginald," she said with a resigned air " Parker must lose his afternoon's service for once in a way. I daresay he'll give me warning to-morrow morning." So Lord Paulyn went into the garden with Elizabeth, longing sorely for the solaceraent of a cigar, even in that agreeable society. He made the circuit of grounds in which there was very little to see in the month of November; went into the orchard, which he pronounced " rather a jolly little place," and contemplated the landscape to be seen therefrom ; eiamined the moss-grown tower which flanked the low white house, and uttered divers critical remarks which did net show him to be a profound student of archa)ology. "Nice old place for a smoking crib," he said: "what do you use it forP lumber-room, or coal or wine cellar — eh?" "My sister Blanche and I sleep in it,'* replied Elizabetli, laughing : " I wouldn't change my tower- room for any other in the house." " Ah, but you'll change it, you know, one of these days who* vou have a nouse of i^our own ; and such a girl as you must look forward to something better than this old Vicarage." " I am quite satisfied with surroundings that are good enough for the rest of my family," said Elizabeth with her proudest air; " and I have never looked forward to anything of the kind." " 0, but, come now, really, you know," remonstrated the Vis- count, " a girl Hke you can't mean to be buried alive for ever. Y(»u ought to see the world — Ascot, you know, and Goodwood, ajicl the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race, and the pigeon-shoot- ing at Hurlingham. You can't intend to mope in this dreary old place all your life. I don't mean to say anything against your father's house, and I'm sure he ^ave us an uncommonly good luncheon ; but this kind of life is not up to your mark, yon know." Here was a second counsellor suggesting that the life Eliza- beth Luttrell lived was not good enough for her, urging upon her the duty of rising above her surroundings; but in a some- what difierent spirit from that other adviser, whom she had of late pretended to obey. And this foolish impressionable soul was bnt too ready to follow the new guide, too ready to admit that it was a hard thing to be fettered to the narrow life of a country parsonage, to be cut off for ever from that brighter world of Ascot and Goodwood. It waa not that she considered the Viscount at all a superior person. She was <^uite able to j)crc<;ive that this heir of all the ages and all the Paulyns was 9^ strangers and ^Pilgrims. aaade ol very vulgar clay; but she knew that he was a powei in that unraown world whose pleasures she had sometimes longed for with an intense longing, and it was not unpleasant to hear from so great an authority that she was worthy to shine there. She woR not alone with the Viscount in the garden even for half an hour. The proprieties must be observed in Devonshire as well as in Belgravia. Mrs. Chevenix was taking a constitu- tional with Diana close at hand, while Elizabeth and the lord- ling were strolling along the garden walks, and making the circuit of the orchard. The dowager had also hobbled out by this time, with Mr. Luttrell in attendance upon her, not too well pleased at being cut off from the sweets of his afternoon nap. " I might as well be catechising the children as doin^ this," he thought dolefully. But there is an end of all social self- sacrifice, and the lumbering old yellow chariot came grinding over the carriage drive at last, whereupon Lady Paulyn declared that she must go. " I am sure we have had a vastly agreeable visit," she said, ciragging her ancient head graciously, and softening at her de- parture with a grateful recollection of that toothsome vol-au- vent; "you must all come and dine with me one of these days." This was a vague kind of invitation, which the Luttrells had heard before ; a shadowy coin, wherewith the dowager paid off k^niall obhgations. " Yes, mother," cried Lord Faulyn eagerly ; " you'd better apk Mr. Luttrell and the young ladies, and — er — Mrs. Chevenix to dine with you some day next week, while I'm at Ashcombe, you know. It's deuced dull there unless we're lucky enough to get nice people. What day will suit you, eh, Mr. Luttrell ? " "Hilda snail write Miss Luttrell a little note," said the lowager graciously ; " Hilda writes all my little notes." " Notes be hanged 1" exclaimed Lord Paulyn; " why not settle it now ? You are not going to give a party, you know ; you never do. Come, Luttrell, name your day for bringing over the young ladies. There'll be nobody to meet you, unless it's Chapman, the Ashcombe parson, a very good fellow, and an uncommonly straight rider. Will Thursday suit yoti P that's an off-day with me. You might come over to luncheon, and do the family pictures, if you care about that dingy school of art; '—couldn't you ? '* this to Elizabeth. " The ^liss Luttrells have seen our picture-gallery, Eeginald.* sjaid the dowager. " ^Vr»ll, never mind, they can see it again. I know those old portraits — a collection of ancient mugs — are not much worth looking at; but in the courtr^*, yon know, one must do some- thing; t'i a good wiiy of getting through a winter's nftemoon. Strangers and JPilgrimb. 99 And I can teach you b^zique, if yon don't know it "—this to the damsels generally, but with a special glance at Elizabeth. ** We'll say Thursday then, at two o clock ; and mind, we shall expect you aU, shan't we, mother P " He hoisted her into the chariot before she could gainsay him, and in a manner extinguished her and any objection she might have been disposed to offer. " What a charming young man ! " exclaimed Mrs. Chevenix, as the chariot rumbled away, after very cordial adieux from the Viscount, and a somewhat cold leave-taking from Hilda Disney. ** So frank, so easy, so unassuming, so utterly unconscious of his position ; one would never discover from his manner that he was one of the richest noblemen in England, and that the Paulyns are as old a family as the Percys." " I don't see any special merit in that," said Mr. LuttreU, laughing ; " a man can hardly go about the world labelled with the amount of his income, or wear his genealogical tree em- broidered upon the back of his coat. And you're mistaken when you call the Paulyns a good old family. They were in trade as late as the reign of Charles the Second, and owe their title to the King's necessities. The young fellow is well enough, however, and seems good-natured and friendly; but I cannot say that the manners of the present day impress me by their elegance or their polish, if I am to take Lord Paulyn as a fair sample of your modern fine gentleman." " The fine gentleman is as extinct as the megatherium, Wilmot; he went out with high collars and black-satin stocks. The qualities we appreciate nowadays are ease and savoir-fairfc. If poor George the Fourth could come to life again, with his grand manner, what an absurd creature we should all think the first gentleman of Europe ! " " I am sorry for our modem taste, then, my dear," answered the Vicar ; " but as Lord Paulyn seems inclmed to be civil, I suppose we must make the best of him. I wish he'd spend mor« of his time down here, and keep up the old house as it ought to be kept, for the good of the neighbourhood." " O you blind old mole ! " thought Mrs. Chevenix, as Mr. Lnttrell retired to his den ; a httle bit of a room at the end of the house, with a latticed window looking down upon the sloping orchard; a window that faced the western sun, and warmed the room pleasantly upon a winter afternoon. There was a tiny fireplace in a comer ; a capacious arm-chair ; a writing-table, at which the Vicar hammeim out his weekly sermon when ho treated his congregation to a new one; a battered old book-case, containing a few books of reference, and Mr. Luttrell's college classics, with the cribs that had assisted him therewith. Here hfi WHS WQT)t to slumber peacefully on a Sabbfith afternoon TTHtsl 100 Strangers and Filgrimt. Blancho bronglit him a cup of strong tea, and told him it wai time to think about evening service. Mrs. Chevenix ensconced herself in her favourite chair by tho drawing-room fire, with a hAnner-screen carefully adjusted for the protection of her complexion, and sat for a long time slowly fanning herself, and meditating on the events of the day. That Lord Paulyn was impressed by her niece's beauty — ^in modern phrastfology, hard hit — the astute widow had no doubt ; but on ihe other nand he might be a young man who was in the haMt »f being hard hit by every pretty girl he met, and the impres- sion might result in nothing. Yet that invitation to Ashcombe, about which he had shown such eagerness, indicated something serious. It might be a question of time, perhaps. If the youn % man stayed long enougn in the neighbourhood, there was no eaying what brilliant result might come of the admiration which he had exhibited to-day with such a delightful candour. •* How very odd that you should never have seen Lord Paulyn before, Blanche ! " said Mrs. Chevenix to her youngest niece, who was sitting on the hearth-rug making believe to read a volume of Sunday literature. " It's not particularly odd, auntie, for he very seldom comes here ; and when he does come — about once in two years perhaps — it's only for the hunting. I never saw him in church before to-day, that I can remember." " But it is still more strange that I should never have heard you speak of his mother " *' 0, she's a stingy old thing, and we don't any of us care for her. We only see ner about twice a year, and there's no reason we should talk about her. She's a most uninteresting old party." " My dearest Blanche, ease of manner is one thing, and vul- garity is another ; I wish you would bear in mind that distinc- tion. Party, except in its legal or collective sense, is a word t abhor ; and a girl of your age would do well to adopt a mora respectful tone in speaking of your superiors in the social scale." "I really can't be respectful about fid Lady Panlyn, aunt. \Ye had a housemaid from Ashcombe; and, O, the stories she told me about that dreadful house ! They'd make your hair stand on end. I wonder what they'll give us for dinner next Thursday. Barleybroth perhaps, and boiled leg of mutton." "Blanche, I beg that you will desist from such flippant jhatter. Lady Paulyn may be eccentric, but she is a lady wiiose notice it is an honour to receive. Do you know how long Lord Paulyn usually stays at Ashcombe ? " *♦ He doesn't usually stay there, aunt. He has been inert once in t»^o yeara, as fur as I know; and has stayed ior a lort- I^'^range fs and Pilgrims. 101 nigttt or llkre© feeks. I've heard ]^Po|)]e say that he cares for nothing but hoi ses, and that he spends his life in going from one race-meeting to another." " A thorough Englishman's taste," said Mrs. Cherenix approv- ingly. If she had been told that he was an amateur house- breaker, or had a passion for garrotting, she -would have hardly blamed his weakness. ** But I have no doubt he will \:^vt up that sort of tiling when he marries." CHAPTER IX. ** The burden of sweet speeches. Nay, kneel down, Cover thy head, and weep ; for verily These market-men that buy thy white and brown In the last days shall take no thought for thee. In the last days like earth thy face shall be, Yea, like sea-marsh made thick with brine and mire, Sad with sick leavings of the sterile sea This is the end of every man's desire." The Yicar had fully expected to receive one of Miss Disney's little notes postponing the dinner at Ashcombe, so foreign was it to the manners and customs of the dowager to extend so much hospitality to her neighbours; but instead of the little note of postponement there came a little note " to remind ; " and, as Mr. Luttrell observed, with an air of resignation, there was nothing for it but to go. Then came a grand consultation as to who should go. It was not to be supposed that Mr. Luttrell could enter society, even in the most friendly way, with five women in his wake. Ger- trude at once announced her indifference to the entertainment. It was Thursday, and on that night there was an extra service and a sermon at St. Clement's. She would not lose Mr. Forde's sermon for the world. " And I should think you would hardly miss that, Lizzie," she aaid, " since you have become so stanch a Forde-ite." But on this Mrs. Chevenix protested vehemently that Eliza- beth must go to Ashcombe. She had been especially mentioned by the Viscount. He was to teach her b^zique. " I know all about bezique already, and I hate it," Elizabeth n Towered coolly ; " but I should like to see a dinner at Ashcombe, I want to see whether it will be all make-believe, like the Bar- mecide's feast, or whether there will really be some kind of food upon the table. My impression is, that the dinner will consis^k of a leg of mutton and an epergne." It was decided therefore, after a Httle skirmi^hinjj between 102 Strangers and Pilgrims, the sisters, that Elizabeth and Diana should accompany Mr* Luttrell and Mrs. Chevenix to Ashcombe, and that Gertrude and Blanche should stay at home. The vicarage wagonette, which had a movable cover that transformed it into a species of genteel baker's cart, would hold four very comfortably. The Vicar could afford to absent himself for once in a way from the Thurs- day-evening service, which was an innovation of Mr. Forde's. The appointed day was not altogether nnpropitious, but was hardly inviting : a dull dry winter day, with a gray sunless sky and a north-east wind, which whistled shrilly among the leaf- less elms and beeches of the wide avenue in Ashcombe Park ae the vicarage wagonette drove up to the house. Ashcombe Park was a great tract of low-lying land, stretchea at the feet of a rugged hill that rose abruptly from the very edge of the wide lawn on one side of the house, and over- shadowed it with its gaunt outline like a couchant giant. The mansion itself was a triumph of that school of architecture in which the research of ugliness seems to have been the directing principle of the designer's mind. It was a huge red-and-yellow brick edifice of the Yanbrugh school, with a ponderous centre and more ponderous wings ; long ranges of narrow windows nnreheved by a single ornament ; broad flights of shallow stone steps on each side of the tall central door ; a garden-door at the end of each wing ; an inner quadrangle, embelhshed with a hideous equestrian statue of some distinguished Paulyn who had perished at Malplaquet : a house which, in better occupation and with lighter surroundings, might not have been without a certain old-fashioned dignity and charm of its own peculiar order, but which in the possession of Lady Paulyn wore an aspect of depressing gloom. There were some darksome specimens of the conifer tribe in huge square wooden tubs upon the broad gravelled walk before the principal front ; but there was no pretence of a flower-garden on any side of the mansion. Lady Paulyn abjured floriculture as a foolish waste of money. The geo- metrical flower-beds in the Dutch garden, that had onco adorned the south wing, had been replaced by a flat expanse of hirf, on which her ladyship's sheep ranged at their pleasure ; the wide lawn before the grand saloon — a panelled chamber of fifty feet long, with musical instruments and emblems painted in medallions on the panels — was also a pasture for those useful animals, which sometimes gazed through the narr<^w panes of windows, with calm wondering eyes, while Lady Paulyn and Hilda sat at work within. Lord Paulyn was pacing the walk by the conifers as the wagonette drove ap, and flew to assist the vicarage raan-of-aU- work in his attendance upon the Udies. Strangefi and ^ilgrifM. 103 "l*m so glad yoaVe all come," he exclaimed, as he handed ont Elizabeth, apparently nnconscious of the absence of her two sisters. "Very good of your father to bring you to such a dismal hole. I sometimes wonder my mother and Hilda don't go to sleep for a hundred years like the girl in the fairy tale, from sheer inability to get rid of their time in any other way. But they sit and stitch, stitch, stitch, like a new version of the Song of the Shirt, and write letters to distant friends, the Lord knows what about. Here, Treby, take care of the ladies* wraps, will you," he said to a feeble old man in a threadbare suit of black, who was my lady's butler and house- steward, and was popularly supposed to clean the knives and fill the coal- Bcuttles in a cavernous range of cellars with which the mansion was undermined. The Viscount led the way to the drawing-room, or saloon — that spacious apartment with the flesh-coloured panelling which had been originally designed for a music-room. It was a stately chamber, with six long windows, and two fireplaces with high narrow mantelpieces, upon each of which appeared a scanty row of tiny iTankin teacups. Scantiness was indeed the distinguishing feature of the Ashcombe furniture from garret to ceUar, but was perhaps more strikingly obvious in this spacious apartment wian in any other room in the house. A taded and much-worn Turkey carpet covered the centre of the floor — a mere island in an ocean of bees-waxed oak ; a few spindle-legged chairs and tables were dotted about here and there; two hard-seated couches of the classic mould — their frames rosewood inlaid with brass, their cushions covered with a striped satin damask, somewhat frayed at the edges, and ex- hibiting traces of careful repair — stood at a respectful distance from each fireplace; and one easy-chair, of a more modern manufacture, but by no means a choice or costly specimen of the upholsterer's art, was drawn close up to the one he&rfch upon which there burned a somewhat meagre pile of small wood, the very waste and refuse of the timber-yard. Lady Paulyn was seated in this chair, with a little three-cornered shawl of her own knitting drawn tightly round her skinny shoulders, as if she would thereby have eked out the sparing supply of fuel. Miss Disney sat at one of the little tables remote from the fire, copying a column of figures into an ac- count-book. Both ladies rose to receive their guests, but not with a rapturous greeting. " It's very good of you to come all this way to see a quiet oKl woman like me," said the dowager, as if she had hardly ex- pected them, in spite of Hilda's note "to remind." " Why the deuce don't you have a fire in both fireplaces in such weather as this, mother?" the Viscount demanded* 104 Strangers and Pilgrims* shivering, as lie placed himself on the centre of the heartnrug, and thus obscured the only fire there was. " I never have had two fires in this room, iveginald, and I never will have two fires," replied the dowager, resolutely. " When I can't sit here with one fire, I shall leave off sitting here altogether. I don't hold with your modern luxurious habits." "But it must have been an ancient habit to warm this room a little better than you do, or it would hardly have been built with two firej)laces," said Lord Paulyn. "That, I imagine, was rather a question of architectural uniformity," replied the dowager. "There's the luncheon-gong," said her son. "Perhaps we ■hall find it a little warmer in the dining-room." There was a good deal of ceremony at Ashcombe, con- sidering the scantiness of the household; and Lady Paulyn took no refreshment that was not heralded by beat of gong. Her little bit of roast mutton, or her fried sole and skinny chicken, cost no more on account of that majestic prelude, and it kept up the right tone, as my lady sometimes observed to Hilda. The luncheon to-da}/-, though quite a festive banquet in comparison with the silver biacuit-barrel and mouldering Stilton cheese which formed the staple of the daily meal, was not too bountiful a repast. There was a gaunt piece of ribs of beef, l)ony and angular, as of an ox that had known hard times, at one end of the long table; a melancholy-looking roast fowl, with huge and scaly legs, whose ad\^anced age ought to have held him sacred from the assassin, and who seemed to feel his isolated position on a very large dish, with a distant border of sliced tongue, lemon, and parsley. There were two dishes of potatoes, fried and boiled ; there was a little glass dish of mar- malade, that was made quite a feature of on one side of the board ; and a similar dish containing six anchovies reposing in a grove of parsley, which enlivened the other side. There was an artistic preparation of beetroot and endive on a centre dish, and two ponderous diamond- cut celery glasses, scantily supplied with celery; these, with a pickle-stand or two, and a good deal of splendour in the way of cruets, gave the table an air of being quite liberally furnished. The meal was tolerably cheerful despite a certain toughness and wooden flavour in the viands. Mr. Luttrell pleaded his sworn enmity to luncheons as an excuse for not eating any- thing; and conversed agreeably with the dowager, who had brightened a little by this time, and seemed determined to make the best of things. Lord Paulyn sat between Mrs. Chevenix and Elizabeth, and had a good deal to say for him^olf in one way or another. He was enclianted to hear that hL,.:**- beth was to have a season in town next year. Strangers and PilgnrM, 105 ** You ratlst come to me for tbe Oxford and Cambridge, mind. Mrs. Ohevenix," he said. " I always charter a crib — I beg your pju-don— -take a house on the river for that event. I thought j'fi^s Elizabeth would never consent to be buried alive down Lite all her days. She isn't like my mother and Hilda. It suits them very well. There's something ol the fossil in their composition, and a century or so more or less in a pit doesn't make any difference to them. I'm so glad I shall see you in town next year." This to Elizabeth, and with an extreme heartiness. He could hardly behave like this to every pretty girl he met, Mrs. Chevenix thought; it must mean something serious; and in the dim future she beheld herself allied to the peerage, through her niece, Lady Pauiyn. The Viscount seemed very glad when luncheon was over, and he could carry off the two young ladies to see the family portraits. " You won't care much about that kind of thing, I daresay," he said to Mrs. Chevenix, not caring to be troubled with that matron's society ; " you'd rather stop and talk to my mother." " There is nothing would give me more pleasure than a chat with dear Lady Pauiyn," simpered aunt Chevenix, inwardly shuddering as she remembered her vain attempt to interest that inexorable dowager ; " but my brother Wilmot seems to have a great deal to say to her, and if I have a passion for one thing above another, it is for family portraits, especially where the family is ancient and distinguished like yours." " 0, very well, you can come, of course. I'll show you the old fogies ; my grandfathers and greatgrandfathers, and all their brotherhood and sisterhood." "Miss Disney will accompany us, of course," said Mrs, Chevenix, smiling graciously at Hilda, who sat opposite to her, very fair to look upon in her waxwork serenity. " 0, Hilda knows the pictures by heart. She'd rather sit by the fire and spin ; or go on with those everlasting accounts she is always scribbUng for my mother." •* I will come if you like, Mrs. Chevenix," replied Hilda, ignoring her cousin's remark. The party of exploration, therefore, consisted of three damsels, Mrs. Chevenix and Lord Pauiyn ; a party large enough to admit of being divided — a result which aunt Chevenix had laboured to achieve. Lord Pauiyn straggled off at once with Elizabeth through the long suite of upper cL.ambers, with deep oaken seats in all the windows — Hampton Court on a small scale — ■ leaving Hilda to play cicerone for Mrs. Chevenix and Diana, whom her aunt contrived to keep at her side. This left the eoast clear for the other two, whose careless laughter rang gaily through the old empty rooms. Merciless was the criticism 106 Strangers and Pilgrims. ^liich those departed Paulyns suffered at the haads of theif graceless descendant and Elizabeth Luttrell. The scowling military uncles, the blustering naval uncles, the smirking grand- mothers and aunts, with powdered ringlets meandering over bare shoulders, or flowing locks and loose bodice of the Lely period. Lord Paulyn entertained his companions with scraps of family history, their mesalUances, extravagances, and other mis- deeds which did not tend to the glorification of that noble race. But Reginald Paulyn did not devote all his attention to his duties as cicerone. He had a great deal to say to Elizabeth about himself and his own affairs ; and a great many questions to ask about herself, her likings, dislikings, and so on. " I'm sure you're fond of horses," he said ; " a girl with your superior intellect must be fond of horses." " I did not know that taste was a mark of superior intellect ; I may have a dormant passion for horseflesh, certainly, but you see it has never been developed. I can't go into raptures about Toby, that big horse you saw in the wagonette. I used to be very fond of Cupid, a pony that Blanche and I rode when we were children ; but unfortunately Cupid grew too small for me, or at least I grew too big for Cupid, and papa gave him away. That is all my experience of horses." " Bless my soul !" exclaimed the Viscount, with a distressed air. " It seems a burning shame that a girl like you should get BO little out of Ufe. Why, you ought to have a couple of hunters, and follow the hounds twice a week every season ; it would be an introduction to a new existence. And you ought to have a pair of thorough-bred ponies, and a nice little trap to drive them in." Elizabeth laughed gaily at this suggestion. " A clergyman's daughter with her own hunters and pony- carriage would be rather an incongruous person," she said. " But you're not going to be a clergyman's daughter all your life. When you come to London you'll see things in a very dif- ferent Hght." " London," repeated Elizabeth, with a little sigh. " Yes ; I think I should like that kind of life ; only the poor old home will seem ever so much more dismal afterwards. I sometimes fancy I could bear it better if there were not quite so many- Sundays. The week-days would go drifting by, and one would hardly know how long the dreary time was, any more than one counts the hours when one is asleep. But Sunday pulls yon ap sharply with the reflection — * Another empty week gone ; another empty week coming!* A day of rest, too, after a week of nothingness. What a mockery I " " Sunday is a bore, certainly," said the Viscount. " People are s(i dam prejudiced. If it wasn't for Tattersall's, and th« Sir anger » and Pilgrwts, 107 Star- and- Garter — a rather jolly dinner- |>luce near town, yon know — Sunday would be unbearable. But I wouldn't hurry nay self about coming back to Hawleigh after youVe had a season in town, if I were you. Sufficient for the day, you know, as that fellow Shakespeare says. In the first place, it's a long way ahead ; and in the second, you may never come back at all. Who knows P" They were sitting on one of the deep old window- seats, waiting for the two young ladies and Mrs. Chevenix, that diplomatic person having contrived to ask Hilda so many questions about the pictures, and to be so fascinated ever and anon by glimpses of that flat waste of verdure called the park, as to detain her party for some time by the way, thus affording Elizabeth and the Viscount ample leisure for their tete-a-t^fce. They were sit- ting side by side in one of the windows ; Elizabeth with her head resting against the ponderous shutter, the golden-brown hair melting into the rich brown of the polished oak, the heavy eyelids drooping lazily over the dark-blue eyes, the whole face in a half listless repose. Very different would have seemed the same face if Malcolm Forde had been her companion — radiant with a light and life whose glory Eeginald Paulyn was destined never to behold. "You can't tell what's in the future, you see,'* said the Viscount, looking curiously at the tranquil face opposite him. " Suppose I were to tell your fortune — eh. Miss Luttrell ? " " I should have to cross your palm with a piece of gold, per- haps, and I'm sure I haven't any." ** Never mind the gold. Shall I tell you your fortune P " "I have no great faith in your prophetic power." " You wouldn't say that if you saw my betting-book. I have not been out in my calculations three times since the Craven meeting." " But that is quite another matter ; you have some soKd ground- work for your calculations there ; and here you have none. ' " Haven't I P Yes, I have ; only you'd be offended if I were to tell you what it is. I must have your hand, please — no, the left," as she offered him the right with a somewhat reluctant air. * Yes, in this pretty little pink palm I can read a great deal. First and foremost, that it will be yonr own fault if ever you go back to Hawleigh parsonage as Miss Luttrell ; secondly, that you can have as many hunters as you like at your disposal next winter ; thirdly, that it will be your own fault if you have not your pony-carriage and outriders for the park in the following spring. That's my prophecy. Of course it will depend in a considerable measure upon yourself whether I prove a true prophet." Elizabeth's heart beat a little faster as Lord Paulyn reloaded 108 Strangen and Pilgrimi, her hand, with just ine faintest detention of those slim fingeri XL his strong grasp. Was not this the very realisation of her Drightest, fondest dream of earthly glory ? Eank and wealth, •jashion and pleasure and splendour, seemed, as it were, flung JO to her lap, like a heap of gathered roses, without trouble of effort of her own to compass their winning ; prizes in life's lot- tery that she had only thought of in a far-off way, as blessings which might come to her sooner or later, if fortune were kind— but prizes that she had thought of very much and very often — to be cast thus at her feet ! For, although the Viscount had not in plain words offered her his hand and fortune, there was a significance in his tone, an earnestness in his looks, that made his speech almost a preHminary offer — a sounding of the ground, before taking a bolder step." She gave a little silvery laugh, which seemed a sufficient reply to Lord Paulyn's vaticination. Even in that moment, with a vision of horses and carriages, country seats and opera-boxes, shining before her ; dazzled with the thought of how grand a thing it would be actually to wiu the position she had talked of winning only in her wildest, most indolent moods ; to prove to Gertrude and Diana, and all the little world which might have doubted or disparaged her, that she was indeed a superior creature, marked out by destiny for a splendid career — even amid such thoughts as these, there came the image of Malcolm Forde, a disturbing presence. "Couid I bear my life without him?" she thought; "could I ever put him quite out of my mind ? " All her worldly longings, her ignorant yearning for the splen- dours of this world, seemed hardly strong enough to weigh against that fooUsh passion for a man who had never professed any warmer regard for her than for the most commonplace young woman in his congregation. " If he loved me, and asked me to be his wife, should I be foolish enough to marry him, I wonder?" she thought, while Lord Paulyn's admiring gaze was stiU rooted to her thoughtful face; "would 1 give up every pleasure I have ever dreamed about for his sake ?" The Viscount was happily unconscious of the turn which his companion's thoughts nad taken. He fancied that it was his own suggestive remarks which had made her thoughtful. *' I fancy I hit her rather hard there,'* he said to himself " I don't suppose it will ever come to anything, and I have made my book so as to hedge the matrimonial question altogether ; hut if ever I do marry, that's the girl I'll have for my wife. Not a sixpence to bless herself with, of course — and there are no end of young women in the market who'd bring ine a hatful cf uaoney — ^but a man can't harve everything, and ^ jjirl who'd bee:* Stranger9 and Filgrims, 109 brought up in a Devonshire parsonage wouldn't be likely to hava liny extravagant notions calculated to ruin a fellow." }3y which sagacious reflection it will be seen that the Yiscou}^» was not without the Paulyn virtue of economy. Hilda's calm presence appeared anon upon the threshold of the open door, leading tbe way for the others ; and this being the last of the state rooms, the Viscount's opportunities came to an end. He was hardly sorry for this, perhaps, having said already rather more than he wanted to say. _ " But that girl is handsome enough to make any fellow lose his head," he said to himself, by way of excuse for nis own imprudence. Miss Disney surveyed the two with a thoughtful countenance. "I hope you have been entertained with the pictures, Miss Elizabeth," she said, with the faintest possible sneer ; " I had no idea that Eeginald was so accomplished a critic as to keep you amused all this time." " We haven't been looking at the pictures or talking of the pictures half the time," replied Elizabeth coolly. " You don't imagine one could interest oneself for an hour with those dingy old portraits. We have been talking of ourselves — always a most delightful subject." Miss Disney smiled a wintry smile. " Then if we have done with the pictures, we may as well go back to my aunt,'* she said. " 0, hang it all," exclaimed Lord Paulyn, looking at his watch, a bulky hunter that had been over more five -barred gates and bullfinches than fall to the lot ol many timepieces, " tnere's an hour and a half before dinner ; we can't shiver in that Siberian drawing-room all that time. Put on your wraps, and come for a walk m the park, and I'll take you round to the stables and show you my hunters." Anything seemed preferable, even to aunt Chevenix, to that dreary drawing-room with its handful of fuel ; so the ladies clad themselves in shawls and winter jackets, and sallied out with Lord Paulyn to inspect his domain. There was very little to see in the park — a vast expanse of flat greenaward dotted about by some fine old timber ; here and there a young plantation of sycamore and poplar — the dowager afiected only the cheapest kind of timber — looking pinched and poor in its leaflessness, protected by a rugged post-and-rail fence, with Lady Paulyn's initials branded upon every rail, lest mid- night marauders should plunder her fences in their lawless quest for firewood. It was all very sombre and dreary in the early November twilight, and the black moorland above them took a threatening aspect, as of a sullen giant meditating some ven- geance against the house of Ashcombe, which had lain a vassal at hie fo*;b ko Ions;. 110 Strangers and PilgrirM. ** I would rather have the humblest cottage perched up yonder wx. the summit of that hill," cried EHzabeth, pointing to the dark edge of the moor, behind which the faint yellow light was fading, " than this grand house down here; there's something stifling in the atmosphere." " You'd find it uncommonly cold up yonder in the winter," replied the Yiscount in his practical way; "and Ashcombe wouldn't be half a bad place if it was properly kept up, with about six times the establishment my mother keeps. But she has her whims, poor old lady, and I'm bound to give way to them as long as she's mistress here." " How good of you ! " said Hilda ; " how very good of you, to allow my aunt to deprive herself of luxuries and pleasures in order that you may be the richest man in the county !" " You needn't indulge your natural propensity for sneering, at my expense. Miss Disney," "replied Lord Paulyn rather savagely. " It amuses my mother to save money, and I let her do it. Just as I should let her keep a roomful of tame cats it she had a fancy that way. I don't think your position in the family is one that gives you a right to criticise my conduct." The fair transparent face flushed faintly for a moment, but Miss Disney vouchsafed no answer ; and Diana LuttreU plunged valorously into the gap with an eager demand to see the hunters before it grew quite dark. " Very proper indeed," thought Mrs. Chevenix ; " that kind of young woman requires a good deal of putting down. I never like thewe dependent cousins about a young man — especially if they happen to be good-looking." She glanced at Miss Disney, a slim graceful figure of about middle height, dressed in a shabby black sUk gown, but with a certain elegance that was independent of dress. A fair delicate face, in whose thoughtful calm the Chevenix eye could discover very little. She had only a general impression that these quiet young women are of all others the most dangerous. They went to the stables to see 1 ,ord Paulyn's horses ; and Mrs. Chevenix had to endure rather an uncomfortable quarter Df an hour going in and out of loose boxes, where satin- coated steeds with fiery eyes jerked and champed and snorted at her with malignant intentions, or seemed so to champ and snort ; but she bore it all with a lamb-like meekness : while EHzabeth patted the velvety noses of these creatures with her ungloved hand, and stood fearlessly beside them in a manner that went far to confirm the Viscount's behef in her vast superiority to the common order of women. Not that Hilda Disney showed any fear of the horses. She was as much at home with them as if fcbey had been so many lap-dogs, and they seemed to know and love her, a fact which Mrs. Chevenix marked with a jealous eye Strangets and JPilgrims. IH •* Love me, love my dog," she thought ; " some people begin hj loving the dog." It was dark when they left the great roomy quadrangle where the long row of loose boxes had the air of so many cells for solitary confinement, and Miss Disney conducted them to one of the numerous spare bedrooms to readjust their toilets for the evening, a bedroom which was spare in every sense of the word; »?parely furnished with an ancient four-poster and half a dozen grim hif^h-backed chairs, a darksome mahogany dressing-table, a tall narrow looking-glass which was a most impartial reflector of the human countenance, making every one alike hideous; sparely lighted with a single candle m a massive silver candlestick, engraved with the Paulyn arms. Here Hilda left them to their own devices. There was no offer of afternoon tea, and Diana yawned dismally as she cast herself upon one of the high-backed chairs. " How I wish it was over ! " she exclaimed ; " I don't think I ever had such a long day. It*s all very well for Lizzie, she has Lord Paulyn to flirt with, and I suppose it's rather nice to flirt with a Viscount. But Miss Disney is really the most un-get- on-able-with girl that it was ever my misfortune to encounter." " Miss Disney is a very clever young woman, my dear, for all that," replied Mrs. Chevenix mysteriously ; " rely upon it, she has her own views about her position here." " You mean that she would like to marry her cousin, I sup- pose," said Elizabeth. " I mean that to do that is the sole aim and object of her life," replied Mrs. Chevenix with conviction, " but a design in which she will not succeed." "You're so suspicious, auntie," said EHzabeth carelessly. •' Aren't we to have any more candles ? O, dear me, what a dreadful old place this is ! — something like those goblin castles one reads of m German legends, where there are a number of huge ancient rooms and only one old steward, and where a traveller begs a night's shelter, and is half frightened to deatK before morning." The dinner, which Elizabeth had looked forward to seeing as a kind of natural curiosity, was of a somewhat shadowy and Barmecide order, like the pale wraith of some decent dinner that had died and been buried a long while ago. There was Julienne, that refuge of the destitute in soups, a thin and vapid decoc- tion, with a faint flavour of pot-herbs and old bones ; there wafs filleted sole a la maitre d'hotel, with a good deal more sauce— Si compound of the bill-sticker-and-paste-brush order — than sole. There was curry, that rock of refuge for the distressed cook — ^a curry which mi^ht have been veal or rabbit, or the remains of tihe aaicieiit fowl that had graced the board at luncheon ; and 112 Strangers and JPilgrimt. there were patties also, of a somewhat flavonrless order, pattias that were curiously lacking in individuality. The joint is a more serious thing, and the cook, feeling that her art was here unavailing, came to the front boldly with a very small leg of Dartmoor mutton, which gave place anon to a brace of pheasants, the victims of Lord Paulyn's gun. The sweets were various preparations of a gelatinous and farinaceous order, stately in 3hape and^ appearance, and faintly flavoured with Marsala, or fcssential oil of almonds. The dessert consisted of biscuits, and almonds and raisins, a dish of wintry ajiples, and another of half-ripened oranges, and some fossil preparations of crystallised fruit, which looked like heir-looms that had been handed down from generation to generation of the Paulyns. This banquet — served with a solemn air, and a strict observance of the pro- prieties, by the ancient man-of- all- work and a puritanical-look- ing parlour-maid, who evidently had the ancient under her thumb, and who gibed at him and scolded him ever and anon in the retirement of the sideboard — was a somewhat dreary meal ; but Lord Paulyn had Elizabeth on his left hand, and found plenty to talk about with that damsel while the barren courses dragged their slow length along. Mr. Luttrell, to whom a good dinner was the very mainstay of existence, sought in vain to satisfy his appetite with the insignificant morsels of provision that were handed to him by the ancient serving- man ; nor was he able to console himself for the poverty of the menu by a desperate recourse to the bottle; for the vintages which the ancient doled ont to him were of so thin and sour a clmracter, that he was inclined to think the still hock was more nearly re- lated to the dowager's own peculiar brand of cider than that lady would have cared to acknowledge. He ate his dinner, however, or made bleieve to eat, with a cheerful countenance, heroically concealing the anguish that gnawed him within, and did his best to make himself agreeable to Lady Paulyn, who was a strong-minded old woman, read every line of the Times news- paper daily, and was up in all the ins and outs of the money market, being much given to the shifting of her investments, and to cautious little speculations and dabblings on her own account. The Yicar, who never had sixpence to invest, found it rather uphill work to discuss foreign loans, Indian irrigation companies, and American railways with this astute financier, and was glad when the conversation drifted into a political channel, when the dowager proclaimed herself an advanced liberal, with revolutionary notions about the income-tax. He was hardly sorry when they all left the table together, after a small ration of veiy indifferent coffee had been sei-ved out by the ancient, " in the nice friendly continental fashion," as the dowager remarked with a sprightly air, and he found % quiet Strangers and J^ilgrwis. 113 little dark comer in the drawing-room — dimly illumined with two pair of sallow-complexioned candles, which gave a sickly light, as if just recovered from the jaundice — where he sank into a peaceful and soothing slumber, while Lady Paulyn played fox- and-geese with Mrs. Ohevenix, who was enraptured hy thia small token of favour from the dowager. Lord Paulyn insisted upon playing bezique in a remote corner with EHzabeth, leaving Diana and Hilda to languish in solitude on one of the Grecian couches, Diana making feeble little attempts at conversation, which Miss Disney would neither encourage nor assist. Bezique, which neither of the players cared about playing, afforded a delightful opportunity for flirtation, in a shadowy corner, where the four languishing candles made darknesj visible ; and it was an opportunity which Lord Paulyn contrived to make the most of. Yet he was careful, withal, not to com- mit himself to anything serious. There was always plenty of time for that kind of thing, and he had some years ago made up his mind never to marry, unless marriage should oSer itself to him backed by very substantial advantages in the way of worldly wealth. But this girl, this country parson's daughter, had attracted and fascinated him as no other woman had ever done. He had, indeed, from his boyhood cherished an antipa- thy to feminine society, preferring to take his ease in a public billiard-room or a stable-yard, rather than to sacrifice to the graces of life in a drawing-room or boudoir. He was not in the least degree like that typical Frenchman of modern French novels who spends his forenoon in arraying himself hke the Hlies of the field, and then sallies forth, combed and curled and perfumed, to languish in the boudoir of the young Marquise de la Rochevielle till dinner-time, and after dinner elaborately ai the Caf^ Riche, repairs to the side-scenes of some easy-going theatre, to worship at the shrine of Mademoiselle Battemain the dancer; thus employing his life from morn till midnight in the cultivation of the tender passion. Not often did Reginald Paulyn meet with a woman whose society he considered worth having; but there was in Eliza- beth's manner something that charmed him almost as much as lier beauty. She was so perfectly at her ease with him ; showed at times an insolent depreciation of him, which was refreshing by its novelty ; received his adulation with such an air of divine right, that he felt a delightful sense of security in her society. She was not trying to captivate him, like almost all the other young women of his acquaintance. Her mind was not filled to the brim with the one fact that he was the best match of the ■eason. • if ion. Do you think your father would let you ride," he asked, I were to piit a couple of horses at your disposal^ and a 114 !!Stranger6 and Pilgrims, steady-going old groom IVe got down here, who'd talce no end of care of you ? '* " I am quite sure papa would not; and even if he would, I have no time for riding." " No time I Why, what can you find to occupy you down here?" " T have JLy poor people to visit." *• What ! " exclaimed the Viscount, with a Ic-olc of mingled disgust and mortification. " You don't mean to say that you go m for that kind of thing? I thought your eldest sister did it all." " I don't see why my sister should have a copyright in good works." " No ; but, really, I thought it was quite out of your line." " Thanks for the compliment. But, you see, I am not quite Eo bad as I seem. I have taken to visiting some of papa's poorer parishioners lately, and I liave found the work much pleasanter than I fancied it would be." " Oh, you have taken to it lately," said Lord Paulyn, with a moody look. " I suppose it was that tall Curate who put it into your head ? " " Yes ; it was Mr. Forde who first awakened me to a sense of my duty," replied Elizabeth fearlessly. " How long has he been here, that fellow ?" •'What fellow?" « The Curate." " Mr. Forde has been with us nearly two years.** After this the conversation languished a little, while Lord Paulyn meditated upon the possibilities with regard to Miss Luttrell and her father's Curate. She had flashed out at him so indignantly just now, as if his disrespectful mention of this man were an ofience to herself. He determined to push the ques- tion a little closer. " I daresay he's a very decent fellow," he said ; " but I could never make much way with men of that kind. They seem a distinct breed somehow, like the zebra. However, I've no doubt he's a well-meaning fellcw. I thought he seemed rather sweet upon your eldest sister.** Elizabeth gave a hittle scornful laugh. " Mr. Forde is not sweet upon any one,** she answered ; " he is a priest for ever, after the order of Melchisedec ; or after a more severe order, for I believe that matrimony was not forbidden to that ancient priesthood. Mr. Forde sets his face against it.'* " An artful dodge upon his part, perhaps,** said the Viscounty doubtfully. " I daresay he is lying in wait for a wife worth having.'* His keen eyes surveyed Elizabeth's face with a searching guzt^ Strangers and j^ilgrims. 115 but could not read the mystery of that splendid countenance. He would have gone on talking about the Curate, but she checked him with an authoritative air. '* I wouldn't trouble myself to discuss Mr. Forde's inclina- tions, if I were you," she said ; " you have confessed your inability to sympathise with that kind of person. He is a noble- minded man, who has marked out a particular line of life for himself. There is nothing in common between you and him." " Candid," said the Viscount, with a careless laugh, " but not complimentary. No, I don't suppose my line of Ufe is what you'd call noble-minded ; but I mean to win a Derby before I die; audi mean to win something else too" — this with the bright, red-brown eyes full upon her face — " if I make up my mind to go in for it." The wagonette was announced at this juncture, and Mr. Luttrell awoke from refreshing slumbers to gather his woman- kind around him,, -Aid depart from the halls of Ashcombe, rejoic- ing in his soul at this release. " Thank goodness that's over ! '* he exclaimed, as he settled himself in a corner of the wagonette, half- smothered by his sister's ample draperies and cashmere shawl; " and if ever Lady Paulyn catches me trusting myself to her hospitaHty again, she may give me as miserable a dinner as she gave me to-day." ^ " Upon my word, Wilmot, I believe you are the most short- sighted of created beings," exclaimed Mrs. Chevenix, with a pro- found sigh. •• It would have required an uncommonly long sight to see any- thing fit to eat at that dinner," answered Mr. Luttrell. " Supper is a meal to which I have a radical objection ; but if there's any- thing edible in the house when we get home to-night, I shall be strongly tempted to submit my digestion to that ordeal." " I'm sure I could eat half a barrel of oysters," exclaimed Diana, with a weary air. " I never went through such a day in my hfe. It's aU very fine for aunt Chevenix and Lizzie to be puffed up with the idea of having made a conquest, but anybody can see that Lord Paulyn is a professed flirt, and that his inten- tions are as meaningless as they can be." *' These are questions," said aunt Chevenix, with dignitr, "which time alone can solve. I think we have had an extremely pleasant day, and that Ladjr Paulyn is a woman of wonderful force of character. Eccentric, I admit, and somewhat close in her domestic arrangements — I'm afraid my cap was on one side all the evening, from the inadequacy of light on the toilet- table when I dressed for dinner — but a very remarkable woman." " That's a safe thing to say of anybody, aunt," replied Eliza- beth. " Mrs. Brownrigg, who starved her apprentices to death was a remarkable woman." 116 Strangert and JPilgrvtM. CHAPTER X. •• Who knows what's fit for us t Had faJtib Proposed bliss here should sublimate My being — had I sign'd the bond — Still one must lead some life beyond, Have a bliss to die with, dim-descried." Whether Lord Paulyn*s attentions were indeed meaningless, or whether serious intentions tending towards matrimony Inrked behind them, was a question whose solution Time, the revealer of Jill secrets, did not hasten to afford. The Viscount spent about three weeks in Devonshire, during which period he con- trived to see a good deal of the Vicarage people — calhng at least twice a week, upon one pretence or another, and dragging out each visit to its extremest length. He was not an intellectual person, and had contrived to exist since the conclusion of his university career without opening a book, except only such volumes as could assist him in the supervision of his stables, or aid his calculations as a speculator on the turf. His conversa- tion was therefore in no manner enlivenst/ or adorned by tho wit and wisdom of others ; but he had a little stock of anec- dotes and reminiscences of his career in the fashionable world, and of the " fellows " he had encountered there, wherewith to entertain his hearers. He had also a yacht, the Pixy, whose performances were a source of interest to him, and which afforded an occasional variety to his stable-talk. In fact, he made himself so agreeable in a general way, during his visits to the Vicarage, that Mrs. Chevenix pronounced him the most entertaining and original young man it had ever been her good fortune to encounter. Elizabeth was not always at home when he called, but he contrived to spin-out his visit until her return ; an endeavour in which he was much assisted by Mrs. Chevenix, who took care to acquaint him with her disapproval of this parish work, and bur fear that dear Elizabeth was undermining her health by these pious labours. " li she were an ordinary girl, I should regard the thin;^ iu quite another light," said aunt Chevenix ; ** but Elizabeth is mot an ordinary girl." An opinion in which the Viscount con- curred with enthusiasm. " It's all that Curate's doing," he said. " Why don't yon use your influence against that fellow, Mrs. Chevenix P " ** 0, you're jealous of the Curate, are you? " thought the matron; " then perhaps we can bring you on a little faster by that means/' Strang en and Pllgrimi. 117 She gave a plaintive sigh, and shook her head donbtfully. " I regret to say that my influence goes for nothing when Mr. Forde is in question," she said. " He has contrived to impress Elizabeth with the idea that he is a kind of saint." " You don't think she cares for him ? " asked the Viscount eagerly. " Not in the vulgar worldly sense of the words, dear Lord Paulyn," said Mrs. Chevenix; " but she has a sensitive imprcB- sionable nature, and he has contrived to exercise an influence which sometimes alarms me. She is a girl who would hardly astonish me if she were to go over to Eome, and immure her- self for life in a convent." " That would be a pity," said the Viscount ; " and it would be a greater pity if she were to marry some stick of a curate." But he did not commit himself to any stronger expression than this ; and he left Devonshire without making Elizabeth Luttrell an offer: — a fact which gave rise to a few sisterly sarcasms on the part of Gertrude and Diana. Blanche was more good-natured, and was really desirous of having a noble- man for her brother-in-law. But before he departed from his native place Lord Paulyn dined two or three times at the Vicarage, having hung about late in the afternoon in such a manner as to invite Mr. Luttrell's hospitality. " I don't much wonder that he shirks his mother's dinners," remarked that short-sighted incumbent; nor did he see any special cause for self-gratulation when the Viscount spent his evenings in hanging over the piano while Elizabeth sang, or in teaching her the profound theories of ecarte. If the Vicar was slow to perceive anything peculiar in this gentleman's conduct, there were plenty of more acute observers in Hawleigh who kept a record of his movements, and told each other over afternoon teacups that Lord Paulyn must be smitten by one of the Vicarage girls. Before the young man had left the neighbourhood, this rumour had reached the ears of Malcolm Forde. He heard this scrap of gossip with a somewhat bitter smile, remembering the Sunday luncheon at the Vicarage, and to \Vhom the Viscount's attention had been exclusively given. " I am hardly sorry for it," he said to himslef " God knows that I have fought against my own folly in loving her so dearly — loving her with no higher hope or thought than a passionate delight in her beauty, a blind worship of herself, a sinful indulgence for her veiy faults, which have seemed in her so many additional charms; knowing her all the while to be the last of women to help me on in the path that I have chosen for myself, the very woman to hold me backward, to keep me down by the dead wei^^ht of her worldliness. I shall have roation to 118 Strang&rs and Pilgrimi* be grateful to Lord Paulyn if he comes between us, and mates a sudden end of my madness." Yet, with a curious inconsistency, when the Curate met Elizabeth in one of the cottages, he saluted her with so gloomy a brow and so cold an air that the girl went home miserable, wondering how she had offended him. That he could be i'ealous was an idea that never entered into her mind, for sho lad never hoped that he loved her. She went home that after- noon thinking him the coldest and hardest of mankind — a man ;ehose gloomy soul no act of submission could conciliate; wont tiome and avenged herself for that outrage by a desperaU) lirtation with the Yiscount, who happened to eat his farewell jiinner at the Vicarage that evening. Lord Paulyn departed and made no sign : yet it is certain that he left Hawleigh as deeply in love with Elizabeth LuttrelJ as it was in his nature to love any woman upon this earth. But he was a gentleman of a somewhat cold and calculating temper, and was supported and sustained in all the events of life by an implicit belief in his own merits, and the value of his position and surroundings. He was not a man to throw himself awa]^ lightly. Elizabeth was a charming girl, and, in his opinion, the handsomest woman he had ever seen, and the very fittest to lend a grace and giory to his life in the eyes of his fellow-men — a wife he mignt bo proud to see pointed out as his property on racecources, or on the box-seat of his drag, as his favourite team drew themselves together for the start, on a field-day at Hyde-park Corner. But, on the other hand, there was no denying that such a match would be a very paltry alliance for him to make, bringing him neither advantageous connections nor addition to his fortune ; and_ if on sober reflec- tion, at a distance from the object of his passion, he found that he could live without Elizabeth Luttrell, why he might have reason to congratulate himself upon his judicious withdrawal that too delightful society. " Mind, I shall expect to see you in town early in the season," he said to Elizabeth, when making his adieux. A speech which ne felt committed him to nothing. "You mustn't forget your promise to show us the university boat-race," said Mrs. Chevenix with her vivacious air. She felt not a little disappointed that nothing more decisive bad come of the young man's admiration ; that he should be able thus to tear himself away unfettered and uncompromised. She had fondly hoped that he would linger on at Ashcombe till in some impassioned moment he should cast his fortunes at the feet of his enchantress. It was somewhat bitter therefore to see him depart in this cool manner, with only vague anticipa- Uons of possible meetiniis during the London season. Mrs, Strangers and JPilgrims. 119 Chevenix was well aware of a fact wtich the Visconnt pre- tended to ignore, namely, that her set was not his set, and that it was only by means of happy accidents or diplomatic struggle* that she and her niece could hope to meet him in society. " But he will call, no doubt," she said to herself, having taken «^ecial care to furnish him with her address. EHzabeth gave a great sigh of relief as the Vicarage door closed for the last time upon her admirer. She had been grati- fied by his admiration, she had listened to him with an air of interest, had brightened and sparkled as she talked to him ; but it was dull work at the best. There was no real sympathy, and it was an unspeakable relief to know that he was gone. " Thank heaven that's over ! " she exclaimed ; " and now I can live my own life again.** ^ After the Viscount's departure Mrs. Chevenix began to find life at Hawleigh a burden too heavy for her to bear. The cere- monial call which she and her two nieces had made at Ashcombe about a week after the dinner there, had resulted in no new invitation, nor in any farther visit from Lady Paulyn. Intimacy with the inexorable dowager, which aunt Chevenix had done her utmost to achieve, was evidently an impossibility. So about a week before Christmas Mrs. Chevenix and her confidential maid left the Vicarage, to the heartfelt satisfaction of Mr. Luttrell's household, and not a Uttle to the relief of that hospitable gentle- man himself. December was nearly over. A long dreary month it had seemed to Elizabeth ; and since that Sunday luncheon at which Lord Paulyn had assisted, Malcolm Forde had paid no visit to the Vicarage. Elizabeth had seen him two or three times in the course of her district-visiting, and on each occasion he had seemed to her colder and sterner of manner than on the last. Gertrude was the only member of the family who made any remark upon this falling away of Mr. Forde's. The Vicar knew that he worked harder than any other labourer who had ever come into that vineyard, and was not surprised that he should lack leisure for morning calls ; nor had he ever been a frequent visitor at the Vicarage. But Gertrude remarked with an injured air that of late he had ceased from calling altogether. " I've no doubt he heard that Lord Paulyn was always here," she observed ; " and of course that kind of society would not be likely to suit him.** " i can't see that papa's curates have any right to select our society for us,*' exclaimed Blanche, firing up at this. "Lord Paulyn was no particular favourite of mine, for he used to take about as much notice of me as if I were a chair or a table ; and Mr. Forde is always nice ; bnt still I can't see that he has any right to object to our visitors.** 120 Stranf/ers and Tilgrims, " No one spoke of such a right, Blanche," answered her eldest Bister ; " but Mr. Forde is free to select his own society, and it is only natural that he should avoid a person of Lord Paulyn's calibre." Elizabeth felt this defection keenly. It was not as if she had neglected her duties, or fallen away from the right path in any palpable manner. She had gone on with her work unflinchingly, even when, depressed by his coldness, her spirits had flagged and the work had grown wearisome. She had been constant in her attendance at the early services on dismal winter mornings, when the outer world looked bleak and uninviting. She had struggled to be good, according to her lights, perceiving no sin- fulness in that flirtation with Lord Paulyn, which had helped to till her empty life. She missed the excitement of these flirtations when Lord Paulyn was gone. It was all very well to declare that he had bored her, and to express herself relieved by his departure ; but she missed that agreeable ministration to her vanity. It had been pleasant to know, when she made her simple toilet for the home dinner, that every fresh knot of ribbon m her hair made her lovelier in the eyes of a man whose admiration the world counted worth winning — pleasant to discover that fascinations which had no power to touch the cold heart of Malcolm Forde possessed an overwhelming influence for the master of Ash- combe. Yet the end of her flirtation with the Viscount was hardly less humiliating to her than the coldness of the Curate. He loved and he rode away. She began to think that she had no real power over the hearts of men; that she could only qtartle and bewitch them by her beauty ; hold them for but the briefest space in her thrall. If the Viscount's admiration had gone a step farther, and he had made her an ofier, what would have been her reply ? That was a question which she had asked herself many times of late, and for which she could find no satisfactory answer. The pros- pect was almost too dazzling for her to contemplate with a steady gaze. Had not a brilliant marriage been the dream of her girlhood ? a vision first evoked by some prophetic utterances of aunt Chevenix, when Elizabeth was only a tall slip of a girl 'u a pinafore practising major and minor scales on a battered old piano in the school-room. She had dreamed of horses and carriages, and opera-boxes and country-seats, from the hour when she first learned the value of her growing loveliness at the feet of that worldly teacher. All that wars basest in her nature, her ignorant yearning for splendour and pleasure, her belief ia her divine right to be prosperous and happy, had been fostered, half unconsciously perhaps, by aunt Chevenix. Mrs. Luttrell vas the weakest and simplest of women, and had always referred Strangers and JPilgrims* 121 to her sisfcer'in-law as the very oracle of social existence, and had fondly believed in that lady as a leader of London fashion to her dying day. There had been no home influence in the Vicarage household to counteract the Ohevenix influence, and although Elizabeth took a pride in defying her aunt upon occasions, she was not the less her faithful disciple. Could she have refused such an ofier from Lord Panlyn ? Could she of her own free will have put aside at once and' for ever — since two such chances would hardly come in her obscure life — all the delights and triumphs of this world, all the pleasures she had dreamed of? It hardly seemed possible that she could have been so heroic as to say no. It was very certain, on the Dther hand, that she did not care for Eeginald Paulyn, that hia handsome face had no charm for her, that the Hngering clasp of his strong hand sent no thrill to her heart, that his society after the first half-hour became a bore to her. It was quite as certain that there was another man whose coldest look quickened the beating of her heart, whose lightest touch had a magical influ- ence ; for whose sake poverty would seem no hardship, obscurity no affliction ; by whose side she could have felt herself strong enough to make life's pilgrimage over ever so thorny a road. " I could hardly have been so demented as to refuse him,'* she thought, remembering that this one man for whom she could have so cheerfully sacrificed all her visions of earthly glory had no desire to profit by her self-abnegation. Christmas was close at hand, and the Luttrell girls were busy from morning till evening with the decoration of the two churches ; but Elizabeth performed her share of this labour with a somewhat listless air, and did a good deal more looking-on than Gertrude or Diana approved. She was beginning to be very tired of her work, tired even of her poor people, despite their afiection for her. It seemed altogether such a dreary business, uncheered by Mr. Forde's counsel or approbation ; not that he would have withheld his counsel, had she taken the trouble to ask for it ; but she could not bring herself to do that. She remembcrcfl that October day in the Vicarage garden when they had walked k)gether over the fallen leaves, while autumn winds moaned dis- mally, and autumn clouds obscured the sun — that day when they had seemed so near to each other, and when the dull gray world had been lighted with that light that never was on sea or shore — the light of a great joy. What would she not have done for his Bake, if he had only taken the trouble to order her. If he ha-l been a Redemptorist father, and had presented her with a cat- o'-nine-tails wherewith to go and scourge herself, she would have taken the whip from him with a smile, and departed cheerfully to do his bidding. Bat he asked no more from her than from a i.y oi'ner member of that httle band of ladies who helued biua 122 SirangerG and Filgrims. in the care of his poor, and he distinguished her from that littl« band only by his peculiar coldness. She flung iiown her garland of ivy and holly with an impatient air, in the midst of a little cluster of ladies working busily in the vestry of St. Clement's, the decorations whereof were but half completed. " I shall do no more," she said ; " my fingers ache and smart horribly. I am tired of the whole business ; tired of parish work altogether." Miss Melvin looked up at her friend wonderingly, with her meek blue e^es. " Why, Lizzie, Fm surprised to hear you say that," she ex- claimed. " Mr. Forde says you are the best of all his district- visitors, because you are sympathetic, and the poor people understand you." " I feel very much honoured by his praise," said Elizabeth, with a scornful Httle laugh; "but as he has never taken the trouole to give me the slightest encouragement of late, I begin to find the work a little disheartening." " Elizabeth has an insatiable appetite for praise," remarked Gertrude ; " and I daresay she has been not a little spoiled by Lord Paulyn's absurd flatteries." "You have been rather fortunate in escaping that kind of contamination, Gerty," replied Elizabeth, whose temper was by no means at its best on this particular Christmas-eve ; " but I assure you it is rather nice to have a viscount for one's slave." " Even when his bondage sits so lightly that he is able to shake it off at any moment," said Gertrude. To which Eliza- beth would have no doubt replied, but for the sound of a firm tread upon the stone threshold, and the sudden opening of the door, which had been left ajar by the busy workers. It was Mr. Forde on his round of inspection. Elizabeth won- dered whether he had overheard that shallow unladyHke talk about Lord Paulyn. She picked up her unfinished garland, and set to work again hurriedly, glad of any excuse for hiding her face from his cold gaze. He did not stop long in the vestry, only long enough for a general good-morning, and a few questions about the decora- tions ; nor did he address one word to Elizabeth Luttrell. Her face was still bent over her work, and the wounded fingers were moving busily, when she heard the door shut behind him, and his departing footstep on the pavement of the church. He had come to the vestry-door just in time to hear Elizabeth's flippant speech about Lord Paulyn ; a speech which to his mind seemed to reveal the utter shallowness and worthlessness of the woman he had suffered himself to love. ** And yet she has been able to cheat me ioio a beUef in th<» Strangers and Pilgrifns* 123 latent nobility of her nature ; she has been able to bewilder my reason as sbe has bewitched my heart," he said to himself, as he walked slowly down the (juiet aisle, and out into the bleak churchyard ; " as she has distracted me from better thoughts and higher hopes, and has been an evil influence in my life from the first fatal hour in which I let her creep into my heart." Even the Vicar's friendly invitation for Christmas-day waa rejected by Mr. Forde. He would have been very happy to join that agreeable circle, he wrote, but it was a pleasure which he felt it safer to deny himself. The services on that day were numerous ; there were sick people he had promised to see in the course of the day, and he should hardly have time for anything else, and so on. He spent his day between the two churches and those sick- rooms, and his night in solitary reading and meditation ; trying to lift his soul to that higher level whither it had been wont to soar before an earthly passion clogged its wings. That he would, so far as it was possible to him in his position as Mr. Luttrell's curate, renounce and abjure the society o<-' Mr. Luttrell's daughter, was a resolution that he had arrived at very promptly on hearing the town-talk about Lord Paulyn's frequent visits at the Vicarage. " I will not trust myself near her," he said to himself. " She has deceived me in the past, and would deceive me again in the future. I have no power to resist her witchery, except by sepa- rating myself from her for ever.'* He was just strong enough to do this ; he had just sufficient force of will to avoid the siren. Knowing the houses in which she was most Hkely to be found, her customary hours, the way she took in her walks, knowing almost every detail of her daily life, and how easy it would be for him to meet her, not once did he swerve from the rigid line which he had marked out for his conduct: he saw the familiar figure in the distance sometimes, and never quickened his step to overtake it. He heard that she was expected in a cottage where he was visiting, and hurried his departure straightway rather than run the hazard of meeting her. But it is hardly by these means that a man learns to for- get the woman he loves. It is a kind of schooling that is apt to end another way. Perhaps no man ever yet forgot by trying to forget : but he is on the highway to forgetfulness when he tries to remember. A poison had entered into Malcolm Forde's life. That sacred calling which demands the service of a heart uncormpted by- earthly passion began to weigh upon him like a bondage. It, was not that he was in any manner weary of his office, but rather that he began to feel himself unfitted for it. A deadly sense of monotony crept into his mind. He began to doubt hi» J 124 Strangers and Pilgrims. powers of usefulness ; to fancy that his career at Hawleigh wfiS like the round of a horse in a mill, grinding on for ever, and tending towards no higher result than that common daily bread. The natural result of these languors — these painful doubts of his own worthiness — was to turn his thoughts in that direction whither they had turned not nnfrequently in the days when he had been better contented with his lot. He began to think more seriously than ever upon the missionary life which comes nearer to the apostolic form of service than the smooth pastures of the church at home. He collected all the information he could ob- tain ui)on this subject; wrote to men who had the work at heart, and \Rho knew where a worker of his stamp was most wanted. " I have a vigorons constitution," he wrote to one of his cor- respondents, " and have hardly ever known a day's illness. ^ I am therefore not afraid of climate ; and if I do finally determine to go, I should wish to go where such labour as I can give would be of real value ; where a weaker man might be unfifc to face the difficulties and dangers which I feel myself qualified to cope with and overcome. Do not think that I am boasting of my strength ; I only wish to remind you that my former pro- fession has in some measure inured me to peril and hardship, and that I should be glad to be able to employ some of that military spirit still inherent in my composition in the nobler service to which it is now my privilege to belong. I want to feel myself a soldier and servant of Christ's church militant here on earth, in every sense of the word ; and I do not m my present mood find the work of a rural parish adequate for the satisfaction of this desire." CHAPTER XI. " 'Tis the pest Of love, that fairest joys give most unrest; That things of delicate and tenderest worth Are swallow' d all, and made a seared dearth, By one consuming flame : it doth immeraa And suffocate true blessings in a curse. Half happy, by comparison of bhss, Is miserable." TiULT Christmas at Hawleigh was not a peculiarly festive season* Mr. Luttrell being happily rid of his sister was indisposed for farther society, preferring to bask in the genial glow of his )»earth untrammelled by the duties of hospitality. So the Lut- trel girls sat round the fire on Christmas evening in a dismal circle, while their father, silent and motionless as tlie sculptured Strangers and Pilgrims* 125 figure of some household god, slumbered peacefully in his easy* chair behind the banner screen that had shaded the fair feature* of aunt Chevenix. " I really do wish that boy-baby had lived," exclaimed Blanche after a long silence, alluding to an infant scion of the house o( Luttrell which had perished untimely. " Of course, I know he'd have been a nuisance to us all — brothers always are — but still lie'd have been something. He must have imparted a little variety to the tenor of our miserable lives. Papa would havo been obliged to send him to Oxford or Cambridge, where he would have got into debt for shirt-studs and meerschaum pij)ej and things, no doubt ; but he would have brought home nics young men, perhaps, in the long vacation, and that would be some amusement. He might have touted for papa in a gentle- manly way, and brought home young men to be coached." " Blanche," exclaimed Gertrude, " you positively grow more revoltingly vulgar in your ideas every day." " Let the poor child talk," cried Diana, with a stifled yawn, *' I wonder sne has spirit enough left to l)e vulgar. Any inverte- brate creature can be ladylike, but vulgarity requires a certain amount of animal spirits; and I am sure such a miserable Christmas as this is a damper for any one's vivacity." EKzabeth said nothing. She sat on a low seat opposite the fire, motionless as her slumbering father, but with her great dark eyes wide open, gazing dreamily at the smouldering yule log which dropped its white ashes .slowly and silently into a deep chasm of dull red coal. She had sit thus for the last half- hour thinking her own thoughts, and taking no part in her Bisters' desultory snatches of talk. " * She sat like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief,* " exclaimed Diana presently, exasperated by this silence. *' Upon my word, Lizzie, you are not the best of company for a winter's nigbt by the fire." " I do not pretend to be good company," replied Elizabeth toolly. " How difierent it would be if Lord Paulyn were here ! " said Diana, whose temper had been somewhat soured by the dreari- jioss of that long evening ; ** then you would be afl am ilea and bewitchment." *• I should do my best to entertain a visitor, of coarse. I do not consider myself bound to entertain vou." '* Poor Lizzie," murmured Diana, with an insolent air of com- passion. *• We ougbt not to be hard upon you. It is rather a *.vial for any girl to have a coronet dangled before her eyes iu tliMt tantalising manner, and nothing to come of her conquest Stun- all!" "Do you mean to say that I ever angled for Lord Paulyn,** 126 Stf-angers and Pilgrims, cried Elizabeth, with a sudden flash of scornful anger, ** or that I could not have him if I chose P " " I mean to say," replied Diana, in a provolcingly deliberate manner, " that you and aunt Chevenix tried your very hardest to catch him, and did not succeed. Perhaps vou look forward 10 seeing him in London, and subjugating him there ; but \ fency that if a woman cannot bring an admirer to her feet ia iie first flush of her conquest, she is hardly likely to bring him jhere later. He has time for reflection and distraction, you see ; jnd a man who has sufficient prudence tc keep himself uncon> mitted as cleverly as Lord Paulyn did, would be the very man to cure himself of a foolish infatuation. I don't mean to say anything offensive, but of course a marriage with one of us would be a very disadvantageous alHance for a man in his position." " You are extremely wise, my dear Di, and have acquired your wisdom in the bitter school of experience. But I doubt if you are quite infalHble ; and to show you that I am ready to back my opinion, as Lord Paulyn says, I will bet your poor dear mamma's pearl necklace, my only valuable possession, that if he and I live so long, I will be Lady Paulyn before next Christ- mas-day." A foolish wager to make, perhaps, when her heart was given utterly to another man; but these little sisterly skirmishes always brought out the worst points in EKzabeth's character. She had been thinking too, as she watched the softly-dropping ashes, of all the grandeurs and pleasures with which she might have surrounded herself at such a season as this, were she tho wife of Viscount Paulyn ; thinking of that dismal old house at Ashcombe, and the transformation that she might effect there; the spacious rooms glowing with warm light, filled with pleasant people, new furniture, splendid draperies, life and colour through- out that mansion, where now reigned a death-hke gloom and grayness, as if the dust of many generations had settled and become fixed there, covering all things with one sombre hue. These visions were strangely sweet to her shallow soul: and mingled with the thoughts of those possible triumphs there waa always the thought of Malcolm Forde, and the impression that tQch a marriage would make upon him. " He would see that at least some one can care for me," sh» itfLid to herself; " that if I am not good enough for him, I may be good enough for his superior in rank and fortune." And then came a vision of that tall figure and grave face" among the witnesses of her wedding. He would take his sub- ordinate part in the service, no Juubt ; ** by the Vicar of Haw- leigh, father of the bride, asi^i.sted by the Eevercnd Malcolm For«ie." Strangers and Pilgrims, ' 127 " He would not care," she thought ; ** he would not even b« angry with me. But he would preach me a sermon about my increaaipd means of usefulness ; he would expect me to become R sister of mercy on a wider scale." After that joyless Christmas-time life seemed to Elizabeth Luttrell to become almost intolerable by reason of its dreariness. She gave up her spasmodic attempts at active usefulness alto- gether. She had emptied her purse for her poor ; wearied her- self in going to and fro between the Vicarage and their hovels; steeped herself to the lips in their difficulties and sorrows, and to some of them at least had contrived to render herself very dear ; and having done this, she all at once abandoned them, stayed at home and brooded upon her vexations, sat for long hours at her piano, playing wild, passionate music, which seemed like a stormy voice answering her stormy heart. " Let him come to me and remonstrate with me again," she said to herself, looking up with haggard eyes at the drawing- room door, as if she expected to see that tall figure api)ear at her invocaition. " Let nim come to reprove me, and I will tell him that I am tired of working without any earthly reward ; that I have neither faith nor patience to labour for a recom- pense that I am only to win, perhaps half a century hence, in heaven. And who knows if I should «ee his face there, or hear his voice praising me ? " But the days went by, and Mr. Forde took no heed of this second defection. One thing only gave colour to Elizabeth's life in this hope- less time, and that was the daily service in the big empty church of St. Clement's, at which she saw the cold grave face that had usurped so fatal a power over her soul. Once in every day she must needs see him ; once in every day she must needs hear his voice; and it was to see and hear him that she rose early on those cheerless winter^ mornings, and shared the devotions of a few feeble old women in poke bonnets, and a sprinkling of maiden ladies with frost-pmched noses, showing rosy-tipped beneath their veils. It was not a pure worship which was wafted heavenward with Elizabeth a orisons ; rather, no worship at all, but an impious adoration of the creature instead of the Creator ; in every word in the familiar prayers, every sentence in the morning lessons, she heard the voice of the man she loved, and nothing more. Sis voice with its slow solemn depths of music; his face with its earnest eyes for ever overlooking her. These were the sole elements of that daily service. She went to church to see and to hear Malcolm Forde, and knew in her heart of hearts that it was for this alone she went; and in some remorseful moments wondered that Hoaven's swift vengeance did not descend upon so impious a creatum. 128 Strangers and Pilgrtmt, " How ootild I bear my life if I were married to anothep mail, and it were a deadly sin to think of him ? " she asked herself, vvonderingly ; and then argued with herself that in an utterly new life, a life filled to overflowing with the pleasures that had never yet been within her reach, pleasures that would have all the freshness and delight of novelty, she must surely find it an easy matter to shut Malcolm Forde's image out of her ';eart. " In what is he different from all other men that I should go on lamenting him for ever ? " she thought. " If I lived in the world, I should meet his superiors every day of my life. But Jiving out of the world — seeing only such people as Frederick Melvin and his fellow-creatures — it is hardly wonderful that I think him a demi-god." And then, in the next moment, with a passionate scorn of her own arguments, she would exclaim: — " Bat he is above all other men ! There is no one like him in that great world I am so ignorant of. There is no one else whose coldest word could seem sweeter than the praise of other men. There is no one else whose very shadow across my path eould be more to me than the love of all the world besides." In this blank pause of her life, when all the machinery of her existence, which hacT* for a long time been gradually growing abominable to her by reason of its monotony, seemed all at once to become too hateful for endurance; like a long dusty road, \vhich for a certain distance the pilgrim treads with a kind of hopefulness, until, grown footsore and weary long ere the end of his journey, that lorg white road under the broiling sun, those changeless hedges, that pitiless burning sky, become an affliction ^ardl}r to be borne ; — in this sudden failure of happiness and nope, it was not unnatural that Elizabeth's eyes should turn with some kind of longing to the dazzling prospect perpetually exhibited to them by aunt Ohevenix. " Remember, my dearest Lizzie," wrote that lady, wh ose congest epistles were always addressed to Elizabeth — " remember that you have a great future before you, and pray do not suffef yourself to be depressed by any remarks which en/vy or malic9 may dictate to those who feel themselves your inferiors in accom- plishments and personal appearcmce. Your fate is in your own nando, my dearest girl, and it is you alone who can hinder, by u foolish preference, of which I cannot think with common patience, the very high advancement which I feel assured Fortune holds in reserve for you. But I venture to believe that your absurd ad» miration of Mr. F is a thing of the past. Think, my love, of the delight you would feel in being mistress of a brilliant esia' hlishment—iu finding yourself the centre of an a/ristocratic and fashionable circle, invited to state balls and royal garden-partiet 1 -and thon "jontrast this picture with the vision of some obscure Strangsrs and Filgrimi. 129 Parsonage, its Sunday-school, its old women in black bon;ieta — that speciP3 of black bonnet which I imagine must be a natural product of the soil in agricultural districts, so inevitable is its appearance, and I can hardly believe there are people still living who would voluntarily make a thing of that shape. Look upon this picture, my dearest girl, and then on that, — as Pope, or some other old-fashioned writer, has observed, — and let reason be your guide. Easter, I am pleased to see, falls early this year, by which means we shall have done with Lent before the fine weatfier begins. I shall expect you as soon after Easter Sunday as your papa can manage to bring you." To this visit she looked forward as a release from that life which had of late become worse than bondage ; but even in this looking forward there was an element of despair. She might have balls and garden-parties, and pleasures without number-, she might wear fine dresses, and sun her beauty in the light of admiring eyes; but she would see Malcolm Forde no more. Would it not be happier for her to be thus divided than to see him day by day, and every day become more assured of his in- difference ? Yes, she told herself. And in that whirlpool of London fife was it likely she would be for ever haunted by his image ? " It is this Mariana-in-the-moated-grange kind of life that is killing me," she said to herself, as she sat by her turret window, preferring her fireless bedroom to the society of her sisters, watching the winter rain fall slowly in the drenched garden, and the dripping sun-dial by which she had stood so often talking to Malcolm Forde in the summer that was gone. It was arranged that Mr. Luttrell and his third daughter should go to London on the 30th of March, the Vicar treating himself to a week's holiday in town, after the fatigue of the Easter services ; a burden which was chiefly borne by the broad shoulders of Malcolm Forde. Towards the end of February, therefore, Elizabeth was able to occupy herself with the pleasing task of preparing for the visit; a business which involved a good deal of dressmaking, and a greater outlay than the Yicar approved. He grumbled and endured, however, as he had grumbled and endured when Gertrude and Diana spread their young pinions for their brief flight into those fashionable skies. " It seems a nonsensical waste of money,** he said, with a doleful sigh, as he wrote a final clearing- up cheque for the Hawleigh dressmaker, " and I don't suppose that your visit will result in anything more than your sisters' visits. But Maria would lead me a hfe if I refused to let you go." " I beg your pardon, papa," exclaimed Gertrude. ** Praj ^^ not make any comparison between Elizabeth and ue. The belongs to (juite fi, difierQat order of beiu^^ii; >u4 is euro to ji^ivkc 130 Strangers and Pilgrims. a brilliant match. It is not to be supposed that the world can overlook her merits." " I don't know about that," said the Yicar, with a rueful glance at the figures on his cheque ; " but this seems a large amount to pay for dressmaking. I think girls in your position — ^the daughters of a professional man — ought to make your own gowns." "The bill isn't all for dressmaking, papa; Miss March has found the material," said Elizabeth, waiving the question of what a girl in her position ought or ought not to do. " The trimmings are rather expensive, perhaps; but dresses are so much trimmed nowadays." " Yes, that's what I hear on every side, when I complain of my bills," replied the Vicar. "Butcher's meat is so much dearer nowadays, says the cook; fodder has risen since last month, says the groom; Russia is consuming our coals, and prices are mounting daily, says the coal-merchant. But un- happily my income is not so elastic — that is a fixed quantity ; and I fear the time is at hand when to make that square with our necessities will be something like attempting to square the circle." The Luttrell girls were accustomed to mild wailings of this kind when the paternal cheque-book had to be produced, and cheques were signed as reluctantly as if they had been death- warrants waiting for the sign-manual of a tender-hearted king; 80 they were not deeply impressed by this threat of future des- titution. They gave their minds very cheerfully to the prepa- ration of their summer clothing ; envied Elizabeth those extra garments provided for her approaching visit; quarrelled and made friends again after the manner of sisters whose affection is tempered by certain individual failings. Frivolous as the distraction might be, this choosing of colours and materials, and trying-ou of new apparel, served to brighten the bleak days of a blusterous March with a feeble light. Elizabeth thought just a little less of her hopeless wasted love, while Miss March's head apprentice was coming to the Vicarage every day with patterns of gimps and fringes and laces and ruchings, for the selection whereof all the sisters had to be con- vened like a synod. Even Gertrude and Diana were not alto- gether ill-natured, and ^ave themselves up to these deliberations with a friendly air ; while Blanche flung herself into the subject with youthful ardour, and wound up her approval of every article by the dec.laration that she would have one like it when she wont to aunt Chevenix for her London season. " Or perhaps you'll be married, and have a town-house, Lizzie, and I shall come to you ; which would be much nicer than being under ^'latie'fl thumb. An4 of course you'd enjoy Strangers and Pilgrims. 131 bringing ont a younger sister. Yiscountess Paulyn, on hei marriage, by Lncretia Viscountess Paulyn ; Miss Blanche Lntt- rell, by her sister, Yiscountess Paulyn. Wouldn't that look well in the local papers P " CHAPTER XII. ** A man can have but one life and one death, One heaven, one hell. Let me fulfil my fate. Grant me my heaven now ! Let me know you mine^ Prove you mine, write my name upon your brow, Hold you and have you, and then die away. If God please, with completion in my soul ! " Mb,. Foude's letters brought a more definite response than he had looked for. One of the chief members of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel wrote, strongly urging him to lend himself to that vast work. It was just such men as he who were wanted, and the need for such was great. A new mission to a land of more than Cimmerian darkness was on foot ; the harvest was ready ; had long been waiting for the sickle, but fitting labourers were few. The letter was long and eloquent, and went home to Malcolm Forde's heart. From the first, from that first hour in which the slumbering depths of his spirit had been stirred with a sudden rush of religious enthusiasm — like that strange ruffling of Siloam's still waters beneath the breath of God's angel — from that initial hour in which, beside the clay-cold corpse of her who should have been his wife, he dedicated his life to the service of his God, he had meant to do something — to make a name which should mark him out from the unnoted ranks of the Church — to ac- complish a work which should be in itself the noblest monument that he could raise to the memory of his lost bride. Not in a quiet country parish could he find the fulness of his desires. It was something to have made a ripple upon this stagnant pool ; something to have stirred the foul scum of indifierence that had defiled these tideless waters. But having done this successfully, having awakened new Hfe and vigour in this slumberous fijcb^ he began to think in all earnestness that it was time for him to be moving forward. The hfe here was in no manner unpleasing to him ; it was sweet rather, sweet in its utter peacefulness, and the fruition of all his present desires. He knew himself beloved and honoured; knew himself to have acquired unwittinglv the first place, and not the second, in the hearts and minds of this congregation. But all this was not enough to the man wV* had m^e St. Paul his typical chwchiuitn — to the mau who 182 Strang&rs and Filgrimt. boasted of himself as a soldier and servant of Christ. Very Bweet was this pleasant resting-place ; ver^ dear the afFectiou that greeted him on every side ; tlie blushing cheeks and reve- rent eyes of school-children lifted to him as he went along the quiet street; the warm praises of men and women; the genial welcome that greeted him in every household ; the hushed expec- tancy and upward look of rapt attention that marked his entrance to the pulpit. But precious though these things might be to him, they were not the accomplishment of his mission. It was as a pilgrim he had entered the Church ; a teacher whose influence for good could not be used in too wide a field* Not in this smooth garden-ground could he find room for his labour ; his soul yearned for the pathless forest, to stand witb the pioneer's axe on his shoulder alone in the primeval wilder- ness, with a new world to conquer, a new race of men to gather into the fold of Christ. This having been in his thoughts from the very first — a desire that had mingled with his dreams, sleeping and waking, from the beginning — it would have been curiously inconsistent had he shrunk from its realisation now. And yet he sat for a long time with that letter in his hand, deliberating, with a painful perplexity, on the course which he should take. Nor did that lengthy reverie make an end of his deliberation. He who had been won't to decide all things swiftly (his Ufe-path being so narrow a thread, leading straight to one given point, his scheme of existence hardly allowing room for irresolution) was now utterly at fault, tossed upon a sea of doubt, perplexed beyond measure. Alas, almost unawares, that mathematicallv adjusted scheme »f his existence had fallen out of gear : the wheels were clogged that had gone so smoothly, the machine no longer worked with that even swiftness which had made his life so easy. He waa no longer able to concentrate all his thoughts and desires upon one point, but was dragged to this side and to that by contend- ing influences. In a word, he had given himself a new idol. That idea of foreign senuce, of toiling for his Master in^ an un- trodden world, of being able to say, " This work is mine, and mine only !" which a little while ago had been to him so ex- hilarating a notion, had now lost its charm. ** Never to see her any more," he said to himself; " not even to know her fate 1 Could I endure that ? O, I know but too well that she is not worthy of my love, that she is not worthy to divide my heart with the service of my God, not worthy that for her sake I should befalse to the vow that I made beside Alice Fraser's death-bed ; and yet I cannot tear mj heart away from her. Sometimes I say to myself that this is not love at all, oidy a base earthly passion, a slavish worship of htr beuuiy. Strangers and Pilgrims 133 Sometimes I half believe that I never truly loved before, that my alfection for Alice was only a subHmated friendship, that the true passion is this, and this only." He thought of David, and that fatal hour in which the King of Israel, the chosen of the Lord, walked alone up on the house- top, and beheld the woman whose beauty was to be his ruin ; thought and wondered at that strange solemn story with its pathetic ending. Was he stronger or wiser than David, when for the magic of a lovely face he was ready to give his soul into bondage? For three days and three nights he abandoned himself to the demon of uncertainty; for three days and three nights he >vi'estled with the devil, and Satan came to him in but too fair a guise, wearing the shape of the woman he loved. In the end he conquered, or believed that he had conquered. There was no immediate necessity for a decisive reply to that letter, but he determined to accept the mission that had been offered him; and he began to make his arrangements with that view. Having once made up his mind as to his future, it was of course his duty to communicate that fact to the Yicar without loss of time. So upon the first evening that he found himself at liberty, he walked out to the Vicarage to make this announce- ment. It was an evening in the middle of March, — gray and cold, but calm withal, for the blusterous winds had spent their fury in the morning, and there was only a distant mysterious sound of fitful gusts sweeping across the moorland ever and anon, hke the sighing of a discontented Titan. There was a dim line of primrose light still lingering behind the western edge of the hills when Malcolm Forde passed under the Bar, and out into the open country that lay beyond that ancient archway. He looked at the dim gray landscape with a sudden touch of sadness. How often had his eyes looked upon tiiear familiar things without seeing them! The time might sook come when to remember this place, in its quiet English beauty, would be positive pain, just as it had been pain to him some- times in tnis place to recall the mountains and the lochs ol his native land. " If I could but have lived here all the days of my life with Elizabeth for my fellow- worker and companion ! " he thought. *' I can conceive no existence happier than that, if I could be satisfied with small thinors. But for a man who has set all his uopes on something higher, surely that would be a living ieath. I should be stilled in the languid sweetness of such va. atmosphere." He thought of himself with a wife and children, his heart &nd mind tilled with care for that dear household, all his desires, xJJ his hopes, all his fears converging to that one centre — only 134 Strangers and JBilgrvmt. the romnant of his intellectual power left for the service of hii God. "A man cannot serve two masters," he said to himself. " Sweet fancy, sweet dream of wife and home, I renounce you ! There are men enough in this world with the capacity for happiness. The men who are most needed are the men who can do without it." The Curate stood for some moments before the Vicarage gate with a thoughtful air, but instead of opening it, walked slowly on along the waste border-land of unkempt turf that edged the high-road. Just at the last moment that new habit of indecision took hold of him again. He had hardly made up his mind what to say. He would find Mr. Luttrell with his daughteri round him most likely. Elizabeth's clear eyes would peruse his face while he pronounced his sentence of banishment. He was not quite prepared for this interview, and strolled on meditatively, in the cold gray twilight, wondering at his own unlikeness to himself. "Will she be sorry P" he wondered, "just a little grieved to see me depart out of her life for ever? I remember when I spoke of my missionary schemes, that day I told her the story of my life, there was a shocked look in her face, as if the idea were dreadful to her. And then she began to talk of mission- aries, with the air of a schoolgirl, as a low sort of people. She is such an unanswerable enigma. At times deludmg one into a belief in her soul's nobility — at other times showing herself frivolous, shallow, empty in brain and heart. Yet I think— after her own light fashion — she will be sorry for my going." Then arose before him the image of Lord Paulyn, and the memory of that Sunday luncheon at the Vicarage ; the two faces turned towards each other — the man*s face ardent, en- raptured — the girl's glowing with a conscious pride in its loveliness; two faces that were of the earth, earthy — a brief scene which seemed like the prelude of a drama wherein he, Malcolm Forde, could have no part. He bethought himself of that mere fragment of conversa- tion he had overheard unawares on the threshold of the vestry, a gush of girlish confidence, in which Elizabeth had boldly apoken of the Viscount as her " slave." He remembered that common talk in which the Hawleigh gossips had coupled Lord Paulyn's name with Elizabeth Luttrell's, and he thought, with a pang, that this was perhaps the future which awaited lier. He thought of such a prospect with more than common pain, a pain in which selfish regret or jealousy had no part. He had heard enough of Lord Paulyn's career to know that the woman who married him would prepare for herself a doubtful future \ in all likelihood a dark and stonay ope. Strangers and Filgrims, 133 ** If 1 can get a minute's talk alone with her before I leave this place, I will warn her," he said to himself; " though, Heaven knows, if her heart is set on this business, she is little likely to accept my warning." He wasted half an hour idling thus by the way side, anc' in all that time had been thinking wholly of Elizabeth, insteac of pondering on what he should say to her father. But about that there need be no difficulty. He had never yet found him- self at a loss for words : and though Mr. Luttrell.would doubtless be reluctant to lose so energetic a coadjutor, his affliction woultood there confronting them, calm as a statue, a curious con- trast to the distressed Gertrude, who was wringing her hands feebly, and gazing at the Curate with a half-distracted air. The single lamp stood on a distant table ; but even in the doubtful light Mr. Forde fancied that Elizabeth's face had grown suddenly pale. "You are going out as a missionary," she repeated, as if she had by some subtle power of sympathy shared all his thoughts from the hour in which he briefly touched upon his views in his one confidential talk with her. " You are good at guessing," he said. " Yes, I am going.'* '* " cried Gertrude, " it is like your apostolic nature to coil* I^trangefi and Pilorim^, 137 template snch self, sacrifice. But, 0, dear Mr. Forde, consider your health, — and the natives." " I don't think St. Paul ever gave much consideration to hia health, or the question of possible danger from the natives." answered Mr. Forde, with his grave smile ; " and if you insist upon comparing me with saints and apostles, you would at least expect me to be as regardless of any peril to myself aj» the numerous gentlemen who have spent the best part of then u\es in this work." *' Those lives may not have been so precious as yours, Mr. Forde." ^ . " Or they may have been much more precious. There are very few to regret me, should the chances of war be adverse." Again he stole a glance at Elizabeth. She stood firm as a rock, and was now not even looking his way. Her eyes were bent upon the decaying fire, with that customary prophetic look. She might have been trying to read his fate there. " However," he continued, "the die is cast. I have arrived at the conviction that I am more wanted yonder, to dig and delve that rugged soil, than to idle among the delights of this flower- garden. And I came here this evening to announce my deter- mination to Mr. Luttrell. Do you know if I shall find him in his study P " " Papa has gone into the town, to the reading-room," said Blanche. " Then I can take my chance of finding him there," said the Curate, preparing to depart. "O, Mr. Forde, how unkind to be so anxious to run away, when this is perhaps almost your last visit. You must stop to tea, and you can tell us about your plans ; how soon," with a little choking noise, " you really mean to leave us." " I will stop with much pleasure, if you like,"' he answered, putting down his hat, whijh Gertrude took up with a reverent air, as if it had been a mitre, and removed to a convenient abiding place. ^ " As to my plans, they are somewhat vague as yet. I have little to tell beyond the one fact that I am going. Only I thought it due to Mr. Luttrell to give him the earhest information of that fact, insignificant as it may be." "It is not insignificant," exclaimed Gertrude. "Hawleigh never had such a gain or such a loss as you will have been to it. Will it be"— with another little choking interval, like a strangled semicolon — " very long before we lose you ? " " I do not know what you would call long. About a month, perhaps." " Only a month — only four more blessed Sundays ! 0, Mr. ITorde, that is sudden I " *' Do not suppose that I am not sorry to go," said Mr. Forde, 138 Strangers and Tilgrimt, "I am very fond of Hawleigh. Bat tliat other work is a patl of an old design. I have only been trying my strength here.** " Only fluttering yonr wings like a yonng eagle before soaring to the topmost mountain peaks," exclaimed Gertrude with a little gush of poetry, raising her tearful eyes to the ceiling, in the midst of which burst the maid brought in the tea-tray, and Miss Luttrell seated herself to perform her duties in connection therewith, not without a consolatory pride in the silver tea- eervice. She was the kind of woman to whom even in the hour of despair these things are not utterly dust and ashes. Elizabeth had seated herself in an arm-chair by the fire, on which her gaze was still gravely bent. She made no farther attempt to join in the conversation, but sat silent while Gertrude persecuted the Curate with questions about his future career, not consenting to be put off with vague or careless answers, but evincing an insatiable thirst for exact information upon every point. Scarcely did Elizabeth lift her eyes from that mute contem- plation of the fire when Mr. Forde carried her a cup of tea. She took it from him with a murmured acknowledgment, but did not look up at him, or give him any excuse for lingering near her. He was obligM to go back to his chair by the round table at the other end of the room, and sit in the full glare of the lamp, submitting himself meekly to Gertrude's cross-questioning. He bore this infliction perhaps with a greater patience than he might otherwise have shown, for the sake of that quiet figure by the hearth. Against his better judgment, even although the plan of his life was fixed irrevocably, and Elizabeth Luttrell' s image excluded from it, there was yet a pensive sweetness in her presence — her silent presence — the sense of being near her. " What does it matter if the pleasure is a foolish one? " he thought : " it must needs be so brief." He stayed about an hour, sipping orange pekoe, and talking somewhat reluctantly of his hopes and views, for he was a man who deemed that in these things silence is golden. He tried to turn the thread of talk another way, but Gertrude would not be put off. " 0, let us talk of you and your future, dear Mr. Forde," she exclaimed, with her accustomed air of pious rapture. " It will be such a comfort when you are gone to be able to think of yon, and follow your footsteps on the map." The clock struck the half-hour after nine, and Mr. Luttrell had not yet appeared, so the Curate rose to depart, and went across to the hearthrug to bid Elizabeth good-night. " Yon had better say good-bye at the same time," said Diana. " Your visits are so few and far between that I daresay Lizzia tnll have gone away before we eee you agaiu." ** Cfone away I " Strangers and Pilgrimt. 139 * Yes ; she is going to town in a fortnight to stay with aunt Chevenix." " Indeed." This in a disappointed tone, yet it could matter so little to him whither she went, when he was about to discon- nect himself altogether from Hawleigh. Only he disapproved of aunt Chevenix in the abstract, and it was disagreeable to him to hear that the woman he had admired, and at times even believed in, was about to be subject to her influence. " I believe you are half a Puritan at heart, Mr. Forde," said Diana, " and that you look upon all fashionable pleasures as crimi- nal. I could read it in your face one day when auntie was holding forth upon her delectable land in the regions of Eaton-place." " I have no passion for that kind of thing, I admit," answered the Curate. " But I trust that your sister Elizabeth will pass safely through that and every other ordeal. If good wishes could insure her safety, mine are earnest enough to count for something." He shook hands with Elizabeth as he said this. The hand she gave him was very cold, and he fancied even that it trembled a little as his strong fingers closed on it. Then followed Gertrude's effusive farewells. He would come to see them oftener, would he not, now that his hours among them were numbered P Diana and Blanche were also effusive, but in a milder degree, having already been speculating upon the possible attributes of a new curate. In so dull a life as theirs even the agony of such a part- ing was not unpleasing distraction, like that abscess in the cheek from which an Austrian archduchess derived amusement in her declining years. "While these farewells were being somewhat lengthily drawn out, Elizabeth sHpped quietly from the room. Mr. Forde heard the flutter of her dress, and looked round for a moment, to dis- cover that her place was vacant. How empty did the room seem to him without her ! He dragged himself away from the reluctant Gertrude at last, and felt not a little relieved when he found himself in the open air, under a windy sky ; the moon shining fitfully, with swift clouds scudding across her silvern face, the night winds sighing among the laurels on the leafy bank that shadowed the almost empty flower-border, where a fringe of daffodils showed pale in the moonlight. Mr. Forde walked slowly towards the gate, over the lawn on which he had condescended to foolish games of croquet in the summers that were gone, thinking of Elizabeth, and her curious apathetic silence, and the almost deathhke cold- ness of the hand that had touched his. " She is the strangest girl," he said to himself, "and there are moments when I am half tempted to think " He did not finish the thought even to himself, for looking up waddfmiy he beheld a figure standing beforA him on the edge of 140 Strangers and Ptlgrimi. the lawn, a woman's figure, with a shawl of fleecy whiteness, folded Arab-wise, and shrouding it almost from head to feet. Yet even ttns muffled he knew the figure by its bearing ; a loftier air than is common to modem young-lady-hood — some- thing nearer akin to the untutored grace of an Indian princess. "Elizabeth!" " Yes, Mr. Forde. I have come out here to ask you if it is true, — if you do really intend to fling away your life like that ? " " There is no question of my flinging away my life," he an- swered quietly, yet strangely moved by her presence, by the smothered passion in her tone. " I shall be as much in the hands of God yonder as I am here." " Of course," she answered in her reckless way, " G-od is with US everywhere, watching and judging us. But He suffers human sacrifices, even in our day. It may be in the scheme of Provi- dence that you should be eaten, or scalped, or tomahawked, or \iurnt alive by savages." " Be sure that if it is, the thing wiU happen." " 0, that is your horrible Oalvmistic doctrine ; almost as bad as a Turk's. But if you do not leave England you cannot fall into the hands of those dreadful savages." " And perhaps remain at home to be killed in a railway acci- dent, or die of smallpox. I hardly think the savages would be worse ; and if I felt I had done any good among them, there would be a kind of glory in my death, which might take the sting out of its physical pain." " * The path of glory leads but to the grave,* " said Elizabeth gloomily. "Don't go, Mr. Eorde. There are heathens enough to convert in England." " But I feel that my vocation calls me yonder." ** It is a mere fancy. You were a soldier the other day, and cannot forget the old longing for foreign service." " Believe me, no ; I have considered this business with more iehberation than is usual to me, and I am quite convinced that my duty lies in that direction." "A delusion! You would be greater and more useful in England. Your countryman, Edward Irving, had once that fancy, I remember; he had his ideal picture of a missionary's iife, and seriously thought of trying to realise it." " Better for himself, perhaps, if he had achieved that earlj ^im, than to be a world's wonder for a few brief years, and die the dupe of a disordered brain." " Don't go, Mr. Forde I " clasping her hands, and looking up at him so piteously with her lovely eyes, so different from the seraphic gaze of poor Gertrude's faded orbs. " I wish to Heaven I were eloquent, and knew how to plead and argue as some people do." strangers and JPilgrimn, 141 •* You are only too eloquent; your words go to my heart. God's sake, say no more ! " " Yes, yes, I will say much more ; if I can touch you, if my words can penetrate your obstinate heart, you shall not go. I am pleading for Hawleigh, and all the people who love you, who have drawn their very faith and hope from you, as if your soul were a fountain of righteousness. I nave a presentiment that ti you go to those savage islands it will be to perish ; to lose your life for a vain dream. Stay here, and teach us to be good. W« were half of us pagans till you came to us." They had walked on towards the gate while they were talking. They now stood close beside it; Elizabeth with one bare hand clasping the topmost bar, as if she meant to hinder the Curate's exit till she had extorted the recantation of his vow. There was a Uttle pause after her last speech. Malcolm Forde stood looking downward, thinking of what she had said: thinking of it with a passionate delight which was new an (J strange to his soul ; a rapture which had been no element in hijj love of Alice Fraser. Suddenly he took the hand that hung loosely by Elizabeth's side. '* If I were weak enough, mad enough, to prefer my own hap- piness to the call of duty, I should stay here," he said; "you ought to know that." " I know nothing except that you have been hard and cruel to me always, in spite of all my feeble endeavours to please vou,** answered the girl with the faint touch of the pettistnessi «ommon to undisciplined beauty. " Your endeavours to pjlease me ! " he repeated. " Could 1 think you valued my opinion? If I had imagined that; if I could have supposed, for one presumptuous moment, that you loved me " " If you could have supposed !" she cried impatiently. " You must have known that I loved you, that I have hated myself for loving you, that I hated you for not loving me." No swift answer came from his lips, but she was clasped ii. his arms, held close against his heart, his passionate heart, which had never beaten thus until this moment. "My darling, my darling I" he said at last, in the lowest fondest tones that ever stole from a lover's Hps. " I never knew what passionate love meant till I knew you." ** Not when you loved AHce Fraser?" she asked doubtfully. " Not even for my sweet AUce. I loved her because she was as good as she was beautiful, because to love her seemed the nearest way to heaven. I love you even when you seemed to lead me away from heaven." " Because I am so wicked," she said with a shade of bitterness. **No, darling; only because you are not utterly perfect; 142 Siranger9 and Pilgrimt, because to love you is to be too fond of this sweet world, to be less eager for heaven. my dearest, what a slave yon can make of me ! But beware of this passionate love which you have kindled in a heart that tried so hard to shut yon out. It is jealous and exacting, tyrannic, perilous — perilous for you and for me. It is of the earth, earthy. I love you too much for the Rake of your beauty, too much for the magic of those lovely eyes that seem sweeter to me than summer starlight." ** And if something were to happen to me that would spoil my good looks for ever, you would leave off loving me, I suppose ? " she said. " No, dearest, you would still be Elizabeth. There is a name- less, indefinable charm which would be left even if your beauty had perished." " Then you do not love me for the sake of my beauty P" she asked persistently, as if she were bent on plucking out the heart of his mystery. " Not now, perhaps ; but I fear it was that which won me. I never meant to love you, remember, Elizabeth. No battle was ever harder fought than mine against my own heart and you, nor ever a battle lost more ignominiously," he added, with a faint sigh. " Thank Fiaven it is lost!" she said; "not for my sake— I will not claiii so unwilling a victim — but for yoiir own. You will not go to the Antipodes to be eaten by savages ? " " Not if you offer me the supremest earthly happiness at home. I will try to do some good in my generation, and yet be happy. I will forget that I ever had any higher aspiration than to tread the beaten tracks. I will try to be useful in my small way — at home." This half-regretfuUy, even with her bright head resting on hia shoulder, her lovely eyes looking up at him with an almost worshipping fondness. " And you will help me to lead a good life, will you not, Elizabeth P " he asked earnestly. * I will be your slave," she said, with a strange blending of corn and pride— scorn of herself, intensest pride in him. " I i^ill be your dog, to fetch and carry; the veriest drudge in your parish work, if you like. I can fancy our life : in the dreariest parsonage that was ever bmlt, a wild waste of mai*sh and fen round about us, a bleak straggling street of hovels for our town, not a decent habitation within ten miles of us, only the poor with their perpetual wants, and ailments, and afflictions. I can fancy all this, and yet my life will be spent in paradise — with you." Sweet fooling in which lovers delignt! Doubly sweet to MalcJm Forde, to whom it was so new. «< M ' dearest and best," he said, smiling at her enthusiasm* strangers and Pitgritns. 143 • I will forgive you the marshes and fens ; that is to say, we will not go out of our way to find them. But we will go wher- ever we are most wanted." " To a nice manufacturing town, for instance, where there will be a perpetual odour of soap-boiling and size-making, and soot blowing in at all our windows." " Perhaps to such a town, darling; but I would find you a nest beyond the odours of soap-boiling." " Or if you have set your heart on a mission to the Dog-nb Indians, or the Maoris, or the Japanese, I will go with you. Why should I have less courage than that noble creature, Lady Balcer ? Indeed, on reflection, I think I should rather like such an adventurous existence. If one could go about in a yacht, now, and convert the heathen, it would be really nice." " I will not risk a life so precious to me. No, dearest, we will be content with a narrower sphere. Alter all, perhaps a clergy- man who has a wife may be of more use than a bachelor in an Englijsh parish ; she can be such a valuable ally if she chooses, almost a second self." " I will choose to be anything that you order me to be," she answered confidently. '* But, 0, my darling, are you really in earnest P" he asked in his gravest tone, scrutinising the upturned face with a serious searching gaze. " For pity's sake, Elizabeth, do not fool me ! You have told me that you are fitful and inconstant. If— if— this love, which fills my soul with such a fond delight, which changes the whole scheme of my existence in a moment, — if, on your part, it is only a brief fancy, born perhaps of the very idle- ness and emptiness of your fife, let us forget every word that we have said. You can trust me, darling ; I shall not think less of you for being self-deluded. Consioer in time whether it is possible for jom to change; whether the kind of life which you speak of so ughtly would not really seem dismal and unendur- able to you when you found yourself pledged to go on living it U the end of your days ; whether there is not in your heart some hankering for worldly pleasures and worldly triumphs: a longing which might grow into a regret when you had lost all hope of them for ever. To marry me is to accept a life that must be lived chiefly for others. My wife must be a lay sister of charity. " Have I not told you that I will be your slave ? " she an- Iwered ; and then withdrawing herself suadenly from his arms, * 0, 1 begin to understand," she said, with a deeply wounded air; "it 18 I who have been ofi'erin^ myself to you, not you to me, and yoi are trying to find a pohte mode of rejection. Why are you not more candid ? Why not humiliate me at once by Baying, * Eeally, Miss Luttrell, your readiness to sacrifice Yoxa* •elf is most obliging, only I do not happen to want you P' ** ^44) Strangers and JPitgrimt. " Elizabetli, you know that I love you witli all my heart and mind." " Do you P No, I cannot believe it ; I have wished it too much ; no one ever obtained anything so ardently wished for. It is not in nature that I should be so happy." " If there is any ha,ppiness in being assured of my love, drink the draught freely. It is, and has been yours almost since the beginning of our acquaintance." " There is more than happiness, there is intoxication ! " she answered in her fervent unmeasured fashion. "Not because you are handsome," she went on, with an arch smile ; " for in that respect I am superior to you. It was not your face that won me. I love you because you seem to me so much above all o^er men ; because you have dominion over me, in fact. I did not think it could be so sweet to have a master." " Say, rather, a guide and counsellor, dearest. There shall be no question <»f dominion between us. I want your life to be as happy as miiif? will be in the possession of your love." " But I insist upon your being my master ! " she answered impetuously. " I am not a creature to be guided or counselled ; see how little inflcence papa has ever exercised over me with his mild bewailings and lamentings, or Gertrude with her everlast- ing sermonising. Believe me, I must be commanded by a being stronger than myself. Even my love for you is slavish. See how little value I could have set upon my dignity as a woman when I came out here to-night to make my supplication to you. But I did not mean to betray myself. I only meant to plead for the people of Hawleigh. You will not think me too contempti- ble, will you, Malcolm P " The name was half whispered. It was the first time she had ever pronounced it. "Contemptible!" A lingering kiss upon the broad white brow made the rest of his answer. How long this kind of talk might have lasted is an open ques- tion, but at this moment Elizabeth's quick ear caught the sound of a footstep on the high-road. " It is papa, perhaps," she said nervously. " O, please go." " If you wish it, darling. But I may tell him everything to- morrow, may I not ? " " To-morrow ! That is so very sudden." " There can be no reason for delay, dearest. Of course our marriage is an event in the future. I am not going to hasten that unduly. Though, as far as worldly matters go, I am in a position to marry to-morrow. But there should be no delay in letting your father know of our engagement." "1 8up]K)se not. Our engagement! How strange that founds I Do you really mean it, or will you write me a littU Strangers and Pilgri/ms, 145 note to-morrow morning recalling your ill-advised expressions of to-night P" " Such a note is more likely to come from you than from me. But one word, darling. What about this visit to Mrs. OhevenixP It can be put off, can it not, now P " '* I hardly think so ; auntie has made all preparations for me." ** They cannot involve much." " She would be so disappointed, and papa so angry; and there are my expectations, you know. One cannot fly in the face of fortune." " My wife must be independent of expectations, dear. Ana London gaieties are not the best preparation for life in a par- sonage among the fens." " Do you think not ? I shall find out how hollow and empty Buch pleasures are, and learn to despise them." " That is according to circumstances. But as a matter of per- sonal feeling, I would rather you did not go." " I only wish it were possible to slip out of the engagement ; but I don't think it is ; aunt Chevenix is so easily ofiended." " Offend her then, dear, for once in the way." Elizabeth shook her head hopelessly. After the money that had been spent upon her dresses it would seem something worse tiian folly not to wear them. They might have served for her trousseau perhaps, but she doubted if so much flouncing and trimming on the garments of a country clergyman's wife would have satisfied Malcolm Forde's sense of the fitness of things. There was a white tulle ball dress dotted about with tea-roses, a masterpiece of Miss March's which she thought of with a tender regretfulness. 0, the dresses ought really to be worn; and what a pity to offend aunt Chevenix for nothing ! " Yery well," said Mr. Forde. " I see my tyranny is not to begin yet awhile. If you must go, dear, you must. But it seems rather hard that our betrothal should be inaugurated by a separation." " It will only be for a few weeks. And I am not going till th( tnd of the month." The footstep had approached and had passed the Yicaragt gate. It was not the step of Mr. Luttrell, but of some bulky farmer walking briskly towards his homestead. " G-ood-night, dearest I" said Malcolm Forde, suddenly awakened to the recollection that it was a cold March night, and that Elizabeth was be^nning to shiver. " How inconsiderate of me to keep you standing in the open air so long. Shall I tak