X IBRARY OF THE U N IVERSITY Of ILLINOIS S23 M4-<64.«n v.\ NOTICE: Return or renew all Library Materials! The Minimum Fee for each Lost Book is $50.00. The person charging this material is responsible for its return to the library from which it was withdrawn on or before the Latest Date stamped below. Theft mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons for discipli- nary action and may result in dismissal from the University To renew call Telephone Center, 333-8400 OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN UNJVERSI OCT 3 1 m APR 7 20(j5 L161— O-1096 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2009 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://www.archive.org/details/onelifeoneloveno01brad WITH THE PUBLI- ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE Jt-Jtotal BY THE AUTHOR OF "LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET," "YIXEN," "ISHMAEL," "THE DAY WILL COME" ETC. IN THEEE VOLUMES VOL. I. LONDON SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO. LIMITED STATIONERS' HALL COURT 1890 [All rights reserved] LONDON : PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. %A3 v CONTENTS OF VOL. I. CHAPTER PAGE I. Dramatis Persons .. . ... ... ... 1 II. Confidences ... ... ... ... 28 III. Before the Coroner ... ... ... 43 IV. How would she bear it? ... ... 74 V. Daisy's Diary Seven Years after ... ... 92 VI. Daisy's Diary ... ... ... ... 131 VII. She answered, "Stay" ... ... ... 146 VIII. Daisy's Honeymoon Diary ... ... 174 .^ O IX. Daisy's Diary in Milan ... ... ... 216 X. Daisy's Diary in Venice ... ... 233 a certain point, but to which his wife objected when it passed the limits of common sense. u Ungrateful woman ! " "You know, dear, I have more jewellery already than I care to wear." DRAMATIS PERSONS. o "It is not a bracelet. It is not any kind of ornament for the most ungrateful of women. Will that satisfy you?" The little girl never looked up from the indicative mood. The glory of beginning a foreign language overcame her sense of weariness. The tutor never raised his eyelids from the eyes which watched the child puzzling herself over her book; but he was listening intently all the same. "Xot quite, Rob. You have been buying something. I can see it in the sparkle of your eye. You Lave been wasting a heap of money upon some trumpery or other." " I have not spent — or incurred a liability — to the extent of three and sixpence since I left this house ; but I have heard something which may lead to my spending three or four thousand pounds before we are much older." " The land ! " cried Clara, clasping her hands. " YLy meadows, my gardens." " Precisely. Young Florestan has made up his mind to part with some superfluous territory ; 4 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. and as soon as the lawyers are ready to sell I shall be able to buy the extra acres for which my fair land-grabber has been pining." " What rapture ! And we shall be able to extend the river-terrace to twice its present length, and I shall have an Italian garden — a real Italian garden — with marble balustrades, and Pan and Syrinx, and walls of cypress and yew, and a long avenue of junipers " " My dearest dreamer, your cypress walls will take thirty or forty years to arrive at perfection." " They will be something to look forward to in our old age; and we shall have the pleasure of planning everything, and watching the things grow. The garden will be our own creation, an emanation from our very selves. Adam and Eve would have tried harder to be worthy of Eden if it had not been ready-made." Eobert Hatrell had the sanguine temperament, and had a knack of adopting any idea of his wife's with even greater enthusiasm than her own. He was never more pleased than in pleasing her, yet had marked tastes of his own — DRAMATIS PERSONS. D pictures, statues, foreign travel ; a man of no profession or pursuit, and of an energetic temper — energetic even to restlessness. He was an only son, and had been lord of himself and of between three and four thousand a ) T ear at an age when most young men are still dependent upon parental benevolence. He had left Oxford without a degree, but with a reputa- tion for considerable talent of an artistic, social, and generally intangible character; he had travelled and amused himself for half-a-dozen years, enjoying independence, health, and high spirits to the uttermost. He had had his adventures, his disillusions, and his disappoint- ments during that long holiday ; and he had only sobered and settled down on marrying one of the prettiest girls of her season, a girl fresh from a Buckinghamshire valley, where her people had been lords of the soil before the Wars of the Eoses. She had practically no money, but she came of a race which claimed kindred with Hampden. She had the calm and chaste beauty of the Florentine Yenus ; she neither flirted nor 6 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. talked slang ; and she knew no more about racing or cards than if she had been still in the nursery. In a word, she was a girl whom Words- worth or Milton would have accepted as the fairest type of English girlhood; and Kobert Hatrell considered himself very lucky in winning her for his wife. His father had been a civil-engineer — a genius, successful in all he touched. The rewards of his profession had been large and rapid, and had tempted him to overwork, which resulted eventually, after many notes of warn- ing, in an appallingly sudden death. Kobert inherited with the engineer's fortune the engi- neer's ardent temperament, which, on his part, showed itself in superfluous energy — a feverish activity about trifles. There were times when, in spite of fortune, happy home, and idolized wife, he felt that he had made a mistake in his life, that it would have been better for him to have worked hard and had a career like his father's. He read of the two Brunels and the two Stephensons with a pang of regret DRAMATIS PERSONS. 7 But on this bright April morning there was no shadow upon Kobert Hatrell's happiness ; no sense of a purpose and a career missed ; a life in somewise wasted. He talked of the additional land as if it were the beginning and end of existence. " It will just make the place perfect, Clara," he said. " You are always right, love — we were terribly cramped when we made our garden. The river-terrace is well enough, but we have no depth. The grounds are unworthy of the house." He opened a glass door and went out upon the lawn, his wife following him. They stood side by side and looked first at the house, aod then at the garden, this way and that, and then at the river. Eleven years ago, on the eve of their marriage, he and Clara, riding together one morning, on the Berkshire side of the river, between Heading and Henley, had discovered an old-fashioned cottage in a good-sized garden, with a lawn -sloping to the river. There were a couple of 8 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. meadows and an orchard behind the cottoge, divided from it by a road, but the best part of the whole thing was this river frontage of less than a quarter of a mile. The cottage was to be let or sold, as a lop-sided board announced to the world at large ; and the neglected garden gave evidence that it was a long time since the last tenant had departed and left the place to gradual decay. The lovers dismounted, found a door on the latch, and explored the house, which was empty of human life ; albeit some shabby furniture and a sandy cat in the kitchen indicated that a caretaker bad her habitation on the premises. The thick walls, leaded casements, quaint old staircase and corridor fascinated Clara. She was passionately fond of the river and of the country in which she had been born and reared. Her future home was to be in Chester Street, Bel- gravia ; but the exploration of the cottage suggested a delightful alternative. "How sweet it would be to have this for a summer home, Eob ! " she said ; and Eobert, who DRAMATIS PERSOX.E. 9 was at the period of his most abject slavery, instantly decided that the cottage must be hers. The negotiation of the purchase gave him something to do. Alterations and additions and improvements would make a delightful occupation for husband and wife after the honey- moon. The house in Chester Street had been taken on a seven, fourteen, or twenty-one years' lease ; a most common-place business. It was furnished and ready for them. Xothing more to do there. But this cottage would afford endless work. He began to plan at once, even before he knew the owner's name. Of course they must build a drawing-room, and dining- room, and a con pie of bedrooms, boudoir, and dressing-room on the floor above. The present sitting-room would make a pretty hall by knock- ing down a lath and plaster partition, and throwing in the passage. Those thick walls and great chestnut beams were delightful. He saw his way to an artistic-looking house for very little money. "I am nothing if not inventive," he said. 10 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. u Kemember what my father did. Some faint trickle from that deep stream of intellectual force ought to have come down to me." " I'm sure you would be quite as clever as your father, and would plan viaducts and things as he did, if it were required of you," said Clara, admiringly. The cottage was bought, and was the plaything of the first and second year of their married life — their chief amusement, occupation, and excite- ment. The cottage was always with them, and the greatest pleasure of their foreign wanderings was found in bric-a-brac shops, searching out strange and picturesque things for their new home. At the end of those two years the cottage was no longer a cottage, but a spacious and luxurious house, of moderate elevation, with many gables, a tiled roof, and tall chimney stacks. Mr. Hatrell had remembered Kuskin's axiom that no house can be picturesque in which the roof is not a prominent feature. The garden had been made as perfect as its narrow limits would allow; but everybody felt, and many DRAMATIS PERSONS. 11 people said, that the house was too large and too handsome for its surroundings. They had occupied it for nine years, and the daughter who had entered it a year-old baby was old enough to learn her first French verb, although her education had been conducted in a very leisurely manner ; yet only to-day had come the hope of possessing the adjoining land, which had been in the hands of trustees until two or three months ago, when the heir had come of age. The trustees had been unable to sell, and the heir had been unwilling to sell, but a month at Monte Carlo had brought about a change of tactics, and this morning Mr. Hatrell had seen the land agent, and had been told that young Florestan would be glad of an offer for so much of the home farm as might be wanted to perfect Mr. Hatrell's holding. " You will understand that as there is a river frontage, and the land is eminently adapted for building, we shall want a good price for it," said the agent. 12 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. "Let me know your price without an hour's unnecessary delay. I'd rather not make an offer. I can't be buyer and seller too," answered Hatrell ; and then he walked home at five miles an hour, brimming over with delight, triumphant at having such news to carry to his wife. They looked this way and that, and talked, and pointed out boundaries and distances. Those dear old chestnuts in the hedgerow must come down ; the river-terrace must be continued along there; the meadow would have to be levelled into an upper and lower lawn; and there must be stone balustrades and flights of steps. " I'm afraid it will cost a fortune," said Clara. " We can afford to do it, dear, now we have given up the house in Chester Street." They had discovered two or three years before that a London house was a useless expense — an incubus even, since it obliged them to live in town when they would rather be in the country. They both infinitely preferred life in Berkshire to life in Belgravia, so on the expiry of the first term of the lease they gave up the house, DRAMATIS PERSONS. 13 and sold the bulk of the furniture to the incoming tenant. And now they could spend as much of their time as they liked in the house by the river, and could winter in Italy or Switzerland without any scruples of conscience. When they wanted to reside in London there were hotels ready to receive them ; and, on the other hand, they could enjoy many metropolitan pleasures while resident at River Lawn, since the journey to the West End took very little more than an hour. The child had stuck to her book with doomed CO determination while her mother and father were indoors ; but the sight of them standing on the lawn was too much for her. Their animated gestures filled her with curiosity. What were they pointing out to each other? What could they be talking about ? Her tutor laid his long white fingers upon her shoulder, with the slow caressing touch she knew so well. " Where are your thoughts flying, Daisy ? " he said gently. " We shan't manage our two tenses if you don't attend better." 14 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. "I'm rather tired," said the little girl, "and I want to go to mother." " Let it be one tense, then, only one ; but it must be quite perfect. Shut your book, and tell me the French for * I am.' " " ' Je suis,' " replied Daisy, watching those sunlit figures on the lawn — her mother in a gown of cream-white woollen stuff, with an orange- coloured handkerchief knotted loosely round her neck. The tutor — tutor for love, not gain — never looked up. Dreamy at the best of times, he was in an unusually meditative mood this morning. He seemed to be giving a small portion of his brain-power to the child, while all the rest was lost in a labyrinth of thought. The present tense, indicative mood, of the verb " etre " was repeated without a hitch. " Good," said Ambrose Arden ; " we will have the imperfect tense to-morrow. And now you may run in the garden for half an hour, before we read our English history. Perhaps you would like to read out of doors." DRAMATIS PERSONS. lo "Very much, if you please, Uncle Ambrose." She put her arms round his neek, and laid her soft cheek against his silky hair. He had pale auburn hair, which he wore rather long ; his skin was as fair as a woman's. Hair and complexion, and the clear bright blue of the large dreamy eyes, gave something of effeminacy to his appear- ance ; but his features were large and boldly cut, a longish nose inclining to aquiline, a strong chin, and wide, resolute mouth. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but had the stoop of a bookish man, whose life was for the most part sedentary, All his movements were slow and deliberate, and his full, deep voice had slow and deliberate modulations — a legato movement that answered to the gliding movements of his figure. Daisy flew out to the lawn, like an arrow from a bow. She had her mother's hazel eves and her mother's vivacity, slim, straight, and swift as Atalanta, with dark brown hair flying in the wind. Ambrose Arden rose slowly, and saun- tered after her. "May I inquire the cause of all this excite- 16 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. ment ? " he asked, as he approached husband and wife. "Didn't you hear just now, you man of ice?" Kobert Hatrell exclaimed laughingly. " Can it be that mundane things have no interest for you, that you have only ears and mind for the abstract ? " " I heard something about Florestan's land." "Precisely. Had you been more keenly in- terested in the welfare of your friends you might have heard that I have now the chance of buying the additional ground my poor Clara has been pining for ever since we made our garden." "I am very glad/' said Arden, quietly. " You don't look a bit glad," said Clara. "I am one of those cold-blooded people whose faces do not express what they feel. I am heartily glad, all the same — since you and Hatrell are glad." " Oh, it is Clara's business. This place is Clara's creation. She can do what she likes with it," said Hatrell. "I'll have Cruden over this afternoon to plan the new garden." DRA^IATIS PERSOX.E. 17 u But, my dear Kob, is it worth while to begin our plans before we are even sure of the ground ? " remonstrated common sense in the person of his wife. " We are quite sure. It is only a question of a hundred or two, more or less. Florestan wants money, and he can spare the land ; we want the land, and we can spare the money. There is always so much time lost in beginning anything. I'll send for Cruden at once." " Yes, and yon and 3Ir. Cruden will have planned every detail before I can make a single suggestion," said Clara. "I know your im- petuosity of old." " My love, the new garden was your idea, and you shall carry it out in your own way," replied her husband, " but we may as well see Cruden's plan. He is the best man in this part of the country for a job of that kind. "We will do nothing without your approval." Clara gave a little impatient sigh. She knew so well for how little her approval would count when once the landscape gardener and his men VOL. T. c 18 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. were set at work; how little pause or leisure there would be for thought or taste, and how the whole business would be hurried along by her husband's impatient temper till all was fixed and completed — for good or ill. And she knew that the loveliest gardens she had seen had been the slow and gradual growth of care and thought. Mr. Cruden, however, was a prince among nurserymen. He had taste and knowledge, and many acres of nursery ground ; and, if he were but allowed time, all would no doubt be well. Ambrose Arden strolled down to his favourite seat under a weeping willow, which overhung the river and made a tent of tender green above a rustic bench and table. There were cushions scattered on the ground under the tree, and there was a doll sitting with its sawdust back propped up against the trunk. These and various lesson-books indicated that the spot was Daisy's chosen resort. Here in fine weather she carried on her education, under the affectionate DRAMATIS PERSONS. 19 guidance of her father's friend and neighbour, Ambrose Arden. When they bought their cottage at Lamford, Mr. and Mrs. Hatrell found Mr. Arden established in a small, square brick house on the opposite side of the road, one of those ugly, useful houses which people used to build seventy or eighty years ago amidst loveliest scenery, houses which imply that at a certain period of English history the sense of beauty was dead in the English mind. Houses, as square and as unbeautiful, are built by the dozen nowadays on the out- skirts of French provincial towns, and seem the natural outcome of the small bourgeois retired from business. Time and the mild, moist atmo- sphere of the Thames Valley had dealt kindly with this sordid building, and had covered it from basement to roof with roses, passion-flower, woodbine, and trumpet-ash. So clothed, and standing in the midst of an old-fashioned garden, it had assumed a certain humble prettiness, as the commonest labourer's cottage will, when it has time to ripen. It was quite good enough 20 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. for Ambrose Arden, the Oxford scholar, the man who had carried off some of the chief prizes of a university career, but whose name, from a social point of view, had been written in water, Even the men of his year had scarcely heard of him, or at most had heard of him as a poor creature, who neither rowed nor hunted, nor spoke at the Union, nor gave wines ; a creature who only sat in his rooms and read. He came to the square brick house at Lam- ford, a widower with one child, a boy of three years old. He had married a parson's daughter in a village among the Welsh hills, and had lived with her in that quiet, far-off world until their brief married life ended in sudden dark- ness. Her son was just beginning to run alone, when the young mother, who had never given up the pious and charitable ways of the vicar's daughter, took the contagion of a deadly fever by a sick-bed in a remote homestead, hidden among the hills, too far for the elderly vicar to carry words of hope and consolation. Ambrose Arden's wife had taken the duty of visiting DRA^IATIS PERSONS. 21 these people upon herself. The woman's husband had an evil repute, was known to have ill-used his wife, and she was dying of some mysterious, consuming disease, alone and friendless. Amy Arden went daily to visit her, Ambrose walking with her, and while his wife read or talked to the sick woman, he sat on a little rustic bridge that spanned a trout-stream hard by, reading the book he always carried in the pocket of his shooting-coat. Xever had Ambrose Arden been known to leave his house unsupplied with in- tellectual food of some kind. Whether the dying woman's malady was con- tagious, or whether the house itself reeked with drain-poison the doctors never decided. All Ambrose knew was that his young wife fell a victim to her own large-hearted charity. From her childhood she had ministered to her father's flock, and she was stricken with death in the path of duty. Mr. Arden left the rustic cottage in the Ead- norshire village, in which he had lived for three years in comfort and refinement upon a very 22 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. small income, which he had inherited from his mother. He was an only child, the last, as he supposed, of a race that had slowly exhausted itself; a race of gentlefolks who had neither toiled nor spuu, and who had done very little to distinguish themselves in the busy places of this world. They were a Cheshire family, and they had lived on their own land and bad seen their importance and their* means gradually decaying, from generation to generation, with- out being moved to any strong stand-up fight against adverse fortune. Some of them had been soldiers, and some of them had been students, not undistinguished in the records of the University ; but the active temper which can redeem the fortunes of a race bad been unknown in the house of Arden. Ambrose fled from Badnorshire with a great horror of the soil on which he left the grave of his dead wife. He had been very fond of her, not with a passionate or romantic attachment, but with a mild and in some wise fatherly affec- tion, appreciating the sweetness of a most perfect DRAMATIS PERSONS. 23 character. She had never been more to him than a dear and tenderly loved friend ; and his affection at the beginning of their married life had been as placid, temperate, and serious as the love of grey-haired Darby for grey-haired Joan after their golden wedding. It did not seem within the capacities of the student's nature to care passionately for anything outside the world of thought. He went to London and lived in a lodsrinof near the British Museum for about half a year, while his infant son was cared for by a little stay-maker at Koehainpton, who had about half a rood of garden-ground behind her cottage. The boy throve well enough in this humble home, and Ambrose used to walk to Eoehampton every Sunday to look at him. All his weekdays he spent in the Eeading-room of the Museum. One day he discovered that his boy had grown very fond of him. He cried and clung to his father at parting ; and then it first entered into his father's mind that he might make a home for his son, and for his books, which had 24 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. accumulated rapidly since he had lived in London, the temptations of the second-hand bookshops being irresistible to a man for whom the world of books was almost the only world. The valley of the Thames was fairer and mite familiar to the Oxonian than any other part of England. It was also within reach of the great Beading-room ; so it was on the banks of the Thames that Ambrose Arden looked for a home. He found a cottage and a good old garden for thirty pounds a year, and, as his prowliDgs about the lamplit streets within a one-mile radius of the Museum had made him familiar with a great many brokers' shops, he had no difficulty in getting together the few articles of furniture necessary for the establish- ment of a widower with an infant son. A car- penter from Henley put up pitch pine shelves for the student's existing library, and provided space for future purchases, and with his books and his son Ambrose Arden settled down to that dreamy life which he had now been leading for between eleven and twelve years. DRAMATIS PERSONS. . 25 The Hatrells made their neighbour's acquaint- ance casually one summer evening on the river, where the student was sitting in a punt with his boy, the father absorbed in a book, the boy fishing, moored to the willowy bank, and where Eobert Hatrell was sculling his wife slowly towards the sunset, in his capacious skiff, the strong rhythmical stroke bearing witness to the time when he was one of the best oars in the University eight. The casual acquaintance soon ripened into an easy and familiar intercourse, and with the passing years intimacy became friendship. The two men had been at Oxford together, albeit they had no memory of having ever met there. They had some tastes in com- mon, although one was all energy, the other all repose. Mrs. Hatrell was a voracious reader, and looked to Mr. Arden for counsel and help in the choice of books. By the new lights afforded by his wide knowledge of the best authors, she found many a pleasant short cut to a higher level of thought and culture than governess or professors had revealed to her. 26 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. She grew to depend upon him for intellectual guidance ; and it was with delight she accepted his offer to educate her only child after his own plan. "It seems almost absurd to see you wasting your time upon that child," she said, feeling some compunction at the beginning of things. " I have plenty of time to waste, and Daisy's education will serve as amusement and relaxa- tion for me. Now that Cyril is at Winchester I have no young thing to lighten my life except Daisy." "But to see you teaching a child of seven seems rather like setting a Nasmyth hammer to crack a nut." "One of the boasted merits of the Nasmyth hammer is that it can crack a nut. Let me think that I have not lost the lightness and delicacy of a mind which can understand the workings of a child's brain." The mother submitted, and was grateful ; and it gradually became a familiar thing to see Ambrose Arden, the grave student of seven and DRAMATIS PERSOX.E. 27 thirty, whose magnum opus was to make a revo- lution in the history of philosophy, bending over the brown-eyed child, and teaching her history upon his own plan, which was to begin in the valley of the Euphrates, and travel gradually downward through the ages, from the dim fairy- land of the East to the finished civilization of modern Europe. He had a genius for simplifica- tion, and contrived to make the broad outlines of ancient history clear and interesting even to that infant mind. He had travelled over all the same ground with his boy, Cyril, who was now distinguishing himself at Winchester, whence he came nearly every saint's day to see his father. 28 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. CHAPTER II. CONFIDENCES. The moon rose at nine o'clock that evening, and Kobert Hatrell sauntered into the garden after dinner to smoke and meditate upon the projected improvements. With him action was everything, and reverie, however pleasant, rarely lasted long. To-night the meditative mood lasted no longer than a single cigarette. That finished he opened a little gate in the kitchen garden, and strolled across the road. Another little gate admitted him into his neighbour's garden, and he went straight to the open window of the roomy parlour which Ambrose had converted into a study, by the simple process of lining it from floor to ceiling with books. An old knee-hole desk occupied the centre of the floor, and three chairs and an old-fashioned sofa completed the sum of CONFIDENCES. 29 the furniture. It looked a snug and congenial room for a student, shabby as it was, in the light of the shaded lamp by which Ambrose sat reading, unconscious that any one was looking in at hi in. " Shut your dusty tome, old book-worm, and come for a stroll iu the moonlight," said Hatrell. Whereupon the student rose and obeyed him without a word, like a man of weaker will obeying one of stronger will. A cigarette was offered and taken, and then the two men walked along the road in silence, broken only by a common-place remark or two about the weather and the night, until Kobert Hatrell said abruptly — " Are you sure it was the same man ? " " The man you have described to me ? Assuredly it was. What other man should know your story ? " " No, perhaps not. I doubt if there is any one else who would know." "The whole matter is easy enough to under- stand. This man is one of many, all on the 30 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. verge of starvation, refugees of the Commune, who have been dragging out a miserable existence in London since last May — nearly a year. I, who am a Kepublican and a Nihilist in theory, have sympathies with these men who have tried to reduce theory to practice. So I whipped up a few pounds, your fiver among others, and took the money to a public-house in Greek Street where my friends assemble of an evening, and distributed it among them, in accordance with their necessities. While telling these poor wretches the source of the money I happened to mention your name, and the man followed me into the street afterwards and questioned me about you. I naturally refused to answer questions which I considered impertinent, and then he told me his story." " And of course made the worst of it ? " " He told it in a vindictive spirit." "And you think, perhaps, that I ought to have acted differently — that Claude Morel, the chemist's assistant, ought at this moment to be my brother-in-law ? " CONFIDENCES. 31 " 3Iy dear Hatrell, a man's relations with women are just the one part of his life which no other man has the right to question, and in which counsel and opinion are worse than useless." "That's no answer," exclaimed Hatrell, impatiently. " Why don't you say at once that I ought to have married a milliner's apprentice and had that man for my brother-in-law ? " "He would not have been a very agreeable connection, I admit, in practice, although in theory all men are equal. There are plenty of men of as low a grade socially whom I would accept as my friend and equal to-morrow — but not Claude 3Iorel. The fellow bears the brand of Cain upon his forehead. It was men of his stamp who made the Commune what it was. He was one of their speakers, the intellectual element, the force that set other men's brains on fire. I was sorry to see great hulking, honest fellows under his influence. I could read the history of last year's riot and murder in that little room in Soho. A very dangerous man, your Claude Morel." 32 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. " Yet you think he ought to have been my brother-in-law," said Hatrell, slashing at the flowery bank with his stick, harping irritably on the question. "No, no, no! Since you were not so far entangled with the sister as to " "But I was entangled. I loved her, man. Yes, I was over head and ears in love with that milliner's apprentice ; and had more than half a mind to fling prudence to the winds and marry her. She was very young, very confiding, and altogether innocent. Yes, a grisette in Paris, and innocent. God knows how long that would last. She had left her native village less than a year before I met her ; had travelled to Paris to find her brother, who had apprenticed her to a milliner in the Kue Neuve des Petits Champs. We met by purest accident in a street crowd ; she hustled and frightened in the mob. I hap- pened to protect her. I walked home with her, ever so far — beyond the Bastille — and so began an acquaintance which might have ended — God knows how — if that young man had not tried to CONFIDENCES. 33 force the running. I have to thank his violence, not my prudence, for my escape, and for my sweet English wife. I shudder to think of the difference such a marriage as that must have made in my life." "That depends upon the strength of your love," said Arden. " I can imagine a man loving so deeply and truly as never to regret having married beneath him." " No, Arden ; repentance must come. It is the after-taste of passion ; and a gentleman's love for a peasant girl can be only passion at best." "That depends upon the gentleman." "Ah, you are in your provoking mood to-night, I see. Did this fellow tell you what has be- come of his sister — whether she is dead or living?" "No, he went into no particulars, nor did I encourage him by asking questions. He talked of broken promises, broken hearts, a blighted life, pride, and cruelty — talked as you may suppose a Communist, nurtured upon Le Pere Duchesne, would talk of an English gentleman VOL. I. D 34 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. who had, in his idea, compromised and disap- pointed his sister. I cut him as short as I possibly could, only I considered it my duty to let you know that the man is in London, and that he threatens to hunt you out and revenge his sister's wrongs — her supposed wrongs, we will say — in some way or other." " That means lying in wait for me at the corner of a London street to shoot me, or to throw vitriol in my face, I suppose," said Hatrell, with a scornful laugh. " I must take my chance of the bullet or the vitriol." " It may be only an empty threat ; but I own I don't like the man's physiognomy or his history, and I recommend you to be on your guard. It might be wise to try and get him out of the country. I dare say he would emigrate to one of the colonies if emigration were made profitable to him." " Arclen, do you think I am such a poltroon as to buy my life from a foreign bully ? He threatened me in Paris, and I turned him out of my room neck and crop. He wanted to frighten CONFIDENCES. 35 me into a marriage with his sister by pretending to believe that I was her seducer. But that was not the worst. When I told him that marriage was impossible he insinuated that there might be other arrangements. A wealthy Englishman in love with a girl of inferior station might make such a settlement as would ensure the comfort and respectability of her future life, without the legal tie. In a word, the man was, and is, a scoundrel. He knew that I was rich, and he wanted to make a market out of me. Don't you know that chantage is a profession in Paris; a profession to which a lazy scoundrel looks as the one royal road to competence ? And he found that I was not a singing bird. Whatever debt I owed to my little Toinette, it was not one that he could force me to pay. And do you suppose that now, fourteen years after, I would reward his bluster with the concession of so much as a sixpence ? If you do think so poorly of me, Arden, you must be a very bad judge of human nature ? " " Perhaps I am wrong, but I have your wife to 36 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. think of as well as you. What if this man were to come here and tell his story " " To my wife ? Let him. She will believe no man's word against mine. Indeed I have talked to her about Antoinette ; or at least I have told her, half in sport and half in earnest, that I was once in love with a grisette : and I am not afraid to tell her the whole truth, that in my salad days, two years before I saw her fair young face, I was very hard hit by that same grisette, and trifled with her longer than I ought, and had even half a mind to marry her, and only pulled myself up sharp when her brute of a brother interfered. I need not tell her that I sent the girl a hundred pounds in my farewell letter, and wished her a good husband in her own rank of life, who would respect her all the more for that dot, and for the knowledge that I could sign myself in all sin- cerity and honour her faithful friend. Ah, Ambrose Arden, you who have given your heart to books can never imagine how this foolish heart of mine ached as I wrote that letter." " I own that I have lived more among books CONFIDENCES. 37 than among human beings ; yet I can conceive the possibility of an overmastering love bearing down all barriers, weighing caste and circum- stance as feathers in the scale against passion. But what I cannot conceive is that such intense feeling can be transient, that such a love can ever give place to another." " Ah, but you see I do not pretend that my fancy for Antoinette was ever a grande passion. My heart ached at throwing her off, but the heartache came as much from my sympathy with her in her disappointment as from my own sense of loss. I was never really in love till I met Clara." "She accepted your hundred pounds, I suppose ? " " I hope so. It never came back to me ; but as I received no acknowledgment from my poor little friend it is likely enough her brother inter- cepted my money and her letter, counselled her to refuse the gift indignantly perhaps, and then put my bank-notes in his pocket. I believe this fellow to be capable of anything sneaking and infamous." 38 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. " And you never heard of Antoinette after that letter?" " Never. I left Paris the next day. The city seemed dull and dark without the light of those southern eyes. It was in autumn, the dead season, and I went off to Petersburg, and thence to Odessa to look at my father's work there, and to feel sorry I was not as good a man as he. The air has turned chilly. Will you come in and play a rubber ? " " With pleasure." They turned and went back to Kiver Lawn. They went in by the hall door into that roomy, low-ceiled hall which had formed the greater part of the basement of the original cottage, and which was a triumph of engineering skill on Mr. Hatrell's part. Ponderous cherry-wood beams supported the ceiling, which was further sustained by two oak pillars carved in a bold and vigorous style of art, which looked as if it had been executed under the Heptarchy. A procession of short-nosed Druids and Saxon kings, with Boadicea in her chariot leading the way, en- CONFIDENCES. 39 circled those stunted pillars in a diagonal line, and many an erudite person had expatiated upon their antique preciousness until silenced by Eobert Hatrell's uproarious laughter. To-night in the shine of the lamps the hall glowed with the vivid hues of Italian stripes and Persian embroidery, and through the open door the large airy drawing-room revealed its more delicate colouring and cool sea-green draperies. Mother and daughter were sitting at a small round table, with the light of a reading-lamp concentrated upon their bright eager faces, as they arranged the pieces of a large puzzle map, the child intensely eager to forestal her mother. "Oh, mother, you've put India next to Russia — one so hot and the other so cold. That can't be right," cried Daisy. The round Chippendale card-table was set ready at a respectful distance from the fire. Two shaded lamps shed their mild radiance upon the cards and the markers. The rubber was a nightly institution, and there were few 40 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. evenings upon which Ambrose Arden did not come in to take his part in the game, he and Mrs. Hatrell playing against the master of the house, who liked no partner at whist so well as dummy. Clara and her partner were in perfect sympathy in their dislike of cards, and therefore they both played an unimpassioned, ineffectual, and often inattentive game, which left Robert Hatrell master of the situation. He played with a fervour and vigour which would have carried a Bill through the House, or silenced an enemy's fort ; and he enjoyed the eager, rapid hour's play with an enjoyment which was exhilarating to his companions ; and then, the hour having ended in his triumph, and the complete humilia- tion of his opponents, he would rise from the table, exultant and beaming, and pace up and down the room, talking as few men can talk, with a rush of eloquence even about small things. When the three players had taken their seats Daisy came to say good night, having stayed up till half-past nine — a prodigious indulgence. CONFIDENCES. 41 She kissed her mother and father, and then went to Mr. Arden, and put her arms round his neck and kissed him almost as fondly as she had kissed the other two. He detained her for a minute or so while Hatrell was dealing for the always favoured dummy. " Shall we have the imperfect tense to-morrow, Daisy ? " " Yes, I nearly know it now. I shall quite know it to-morrow." "And to-morrow will be to-day; and even these kisses of yours will be in the imperfect tense — won't they, pet ? — things that have been. God bless mother's treasure. Good night ! " He said the words almost reverently, with a touch of deeper feeling than is usually given to fatherly good nights. Kobert Hatrell had not even looked up from the cards when his child kissed him. It was a pretty domestic picture in the cheer- ful light of lamps and fire — the three figures at the table, so calm, so reposeful, with such passionless countenances, the child's vivid face 42 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. moving amidst them, looking with rapid glances from one to the other. Family affection, un- clouded peace, unquestioning love, could hardly be more perfectly expressed than they were that night in Robert Hatrell's drawing-room. ( 43 ) CHAPTER III. BEFORE THE CORONER. In the Evening Standard of Wednesday, July 7, 1872, appeared the following : — Mysterious Disappearance. — Much anxiety is being felt by the family and friends of Mr. Robert Hatrell, of River Lawn, Lamford, near Henley, who has been missing since last Monday afternoon. He left the Union Bank, Cockspur Street, at three o'clock on that day, in company with a friend, intending to walk to Lincoln's Inn Fields ; but he was accosted in Cranbourne Street by a middle-aged woman of genteel appearance, whom he accompanied in the direction of Greek Street, after taking leave of his friend. He had in his possession a parcel of Bank of England notes to the amount of some thousands, and it is greatly feared that he has been made away with 44 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. on account of this money. The police have been on the alert since yesterday morning, but up to a late hour last night no discovery had been made. The following notice appeared in the Times on July 8 : — Dreadful Murder in Denmark Street, Bloomsbury. — The mystery of Mr. Hatrell's dis- appearance has been solved, and the worst fears of his family and friends are realized. On the 30th ult., a foreigner, of respectable appearance, representing himself as a journeyman watch- maker, employed at Mr. Walker's, Cornhill, took a second-floor back bedroom at No. 49, Denmark Street, paying a week's rent in advance. He appeared to be a person of orderly and sober habits. He was out of doors all clay, and he went in and out morning and evening without attract- ing any notice from his fellow-lodgers. He waited upon himself, and always locked his door before going out. There was therefore no curi- osity excited by the fact that his room remained closed during the whole of last Tuesday, and BEFORE THE CORONER. 45 although no one had seen the lodger in question, it was supposed that he had gone out at the usual hour in the morning and had let himself in at the usual hour in the evening. The house is in the occupation of three different families — the first floor being occupied by a working tailor, and the front room used as a workshop for three or four men. The foreigner, who gave the name of Saqui, and represented himself as a French Swiss, from the department of the Jura, had been accommodated with a latch key. It was only at six o'clock yesterday morning, when the landlady knocked at the door of the second-floor back, with the intention of asking her lodger to leave his room open in order that she might clean it during his absence, that suspicion was first aroused. His hour for leaving the house was supposed to be about seven, and not being able to obtain any reply at six, the woman concluded that he had been out all night, and proceeded to inquire of the other lodgers when he had been last seen, she herself not having seen him since Monday morning — when he passed her in the 46 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. passage at a quarter-past seven on his way out. No one remembered having seen him or heard any movement in his room since Monday afternoon, when one of the men in the tailor's workshop had seen him pass the open door on his way downstairs. Suspicion being now aroused the door was broken open, and a terrible spectacle met the view of those who entered the room. A man was found lying on the floor, stabbed through the heart. He had been stabbed in the back, and there were three wounds, two out of which were deadly. No weapon has yet been found, but, from the nature of the wounds, it is supposed that they were inflicted by a double-edged knife. The body was surrounded by the bedclothing, which had been stripped off the bed and spread about the murdered man so as to absorb the blood that might otherwise have stained the ceil- ing below. Death must have been instantaneous. The deceased was a man whom few antagonists would have cared to attack single-handed. His pockets had been rifled, but his clothing was not disturbed, and identification followed almost im- BEFORE THE COEOXER. 47 mediately upon the tidings of the murder being conveyed to Scotland Yard. Mr. Hatrell had drawn a considerable sum of money out of the bank, and was on his way to a solicitor's office in Lincoln's Inn Fields, to com- plete the purchase of an estate, at the time he was decoyed to Denmark Street. The police are actively engaged in the pursuit of the murderer, and are said to be already in possession of an important clue. A reward of five hundred pounds has been offered by the family of the deceased. Extracts from the Keport of the Inquest, published in the Times of the following day, July 9 :— Colonel MacDonald stated that he was an in- timate friend of the deceased, and that he had lunched with him at the Army and Navy Club on Monday, the 5th inst. Deceased was in par- ticularly high spirits during luncheon, being much elated at the prospect of passing into im- mediate possession of a small estate adjoining his own grounds on the banks of the Thames. 48 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. The estate was under ten acres, but the situation of the land was exceptional, and the amount to be paid for it was large — close upon four thousand pounds. He, Colonel MacDonald, could not re- member the exact sum. After luncheon he offered to accompany the deceased to the bank, where he was to cash a cheque for the purchase-money, and from the bank — the West End branch of the Union Bank of London, in Cockspur Street — he offered to walk with him to Lincoln's Inn Fields, the de- ceased being somewhat in advance of the hour named for the interview with the vendor's solici- tors. He and the deceased had been at Eton together, and he was, he believed, one of Mr. Hatreii's oldest and most intimate friends. They were in the habit of meeting frequently in London, and he had often visited Mr. Hatrell in his house in Buckinghamshire. Cokonek : Were you with the deceased at the counter of the bank when he cashed his cheque ? Col. MacDonald : I was standing at his elbow at the time. BEFORE THE COEOXEE. 49 Did you observe where he put the notes ? He put them into a Eussia leather note-case, which he placed in his breast-pocket. He was wearing a frock coat. I advised him to button his coat, more in jest than in earnest, as I con- sidered the money perfectly safe where he had placed it. When you left the bank with him, did you observe any suspicious-looking person hanging about upon either side of the street ? Had you any reason to suppose that your friend was watched ? Not the slightest. But I do not mean to state as a fact that there was no one lurking about or watching him. The idea of such a probability never entered into my mind. There was nothing out of the common in two men going in and coming out of a bank. The fact of Mr. Hatrell carrying some thousands could only be known to any one from previous information. Did anything occur on your way to Cranbourne Street to suggest the notion that you were being followed ? VOL. I. E 50 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. Nothing. But if we had been followed the fact would, in all probability, have been unnoticed by either of us. We were engaged in conversa- tion the whole time, and we were passing through a busy part of London. Nothing happened to my knowledge out of the common way until we entered Cranbourne Street, where a middle-aged woman, of respectable appearance, approached my friend and spoke to him in French. He stopped to answer her, and I drew a little way off while they were talking. Did you hear much of their conversation ? Very little. I was standing with my back to them, looking into a print shop. I am not much good at the French language, and they were speaking French all the time. Was it a long conversation ? It seemed longish to me. I was waiting for my friend, and had very little to engage my attention. I don't suppose the conversation really lasted ten minutes. You must have overheard something. You know some French, I suppose ? BEFORE THE CORONER. 51 I overheard enough to know that the woman was talking of some person who was very ill, in a dying state, as I understood, and who wanted to see Hatrell. The woman seemed to be pleading for this dying person. I heard the name Antoinette repeated two or three times in the course of the conversation. Hatrell walked a few paces further with me after this, leaving the Frenchwoman waiting for him. He told me that he felt himself obliged to 2:0 with this woman to see some one — an old acquaintance. The visit would be a matter of less than an hour, as the house was not far off; and in the mean- time he wanted me to go on to the solicitors in Lincoln's Inn Fields, to explain his unavoidable delav, and to assure them that he would be with them half an hour after the appointment, which was for four o'clock. ' I shall take a hansom as soon as I have — seen this person," he said. " It is an urgent case — sickness — destitution." I reminded him of the large sum of money on his person, and asked him if the woman was known to him. He told me that she was — indirectlv. 52 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. She was nearly related to the person he was going to see, who was an old acquaintance. "You don't suppose I'm going to be decoyed and murdered ? " he said, laughing ; and, upon my word, with his magnificent physique and perfect vigour of health and manhood, he seemed about the last man whom any one would try to decoy, in the heart of London and in broad daylight. The idea seemed as preposterous to me as it did to him. He told me I could carry the money to the solicitors myself if I liked, an offer which I laughingly declined ; and so he left me, never to be seen by these eyes again, as a living man. The witness was here deeply affected, and the coroner paused for some moments before con- tinuing the examination. Did you see the direction in which the deceased and his companion went away ? Yes. I turned to watch them. They went into Cranbourne Alley. That was the last you saw of them ? Yes. There was one thins; which I observed on my way towards St. Martin's Lane which, it BEFORE THE CORONER. 53 has since occurred to me, might have some bear- ing upon my poor friend's fate. As I passed a small Italian coffee-house a few doors from the spot at which Hatrell and I parted, I noticed a man standing in the doorway, looking down the street in the direction of Cranbourne Alley, and it seemed to me, on after consideration, that he was standing there for a purpose, on the watch for something or some one in the street. He had a more intent look than a casual idler would have had. I crossed the road almost imme- diately after I observed this man, and I loitered a little on my way to St. Martin's Lane, looking at one or two shops. As I waited at the corner with my face towards Longacre, a hansom passed close by me, and I recognized the man being driven in it as the same man I had seen at the door of the cafe. Should you know the man if you were to see him again ? I'm afraid not. It was the expression of his face that struck me — not the face itself. He had a keen, eager look, like a man in a desperate 54 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. hurry. The cabman was driving very fast, the wheel almost grazed me as the cab shot round the corner. In what direction was the cab going ? Towards St. Giles's Church. That would be in the direction of Denmark Street, would it not ? Yes. It is the way to Denmark Street. I walked over the ground this morning. The witness appeared deeply affected, but gave his evidence in a straightforward and business-like manner. You had known the deceased from boyhood, you say. Did you know anything in the history of his life calculated to throw any light upon his conduct in so readily accompanying this foreign woman to Denmark Street ? Nothing. You had never heard of his having relations with a person called Antoinette ? No. I never heard of any one by that name. But I have heard him speak of a girl in Paris with whom he was in love two or three years before his marriage. BEFORE THE CORONER. Do you suppose that there was au intrigue between him and that girl ? I think not. He spoke of her quite frankly, and on one occasion in the presence of his wife, to whom he was most devoted. I remember that upon that occasion his romantic passion for the Frenchwoman was joked about by husband and wife. I do not for a moment believe in any dishonourable connection in his past life. But you think that Antoinette may have been the name of the girl he admired ? I think it very likely. And that the name was used as a lure to get him to the house in Denmark Street ? I have no doubt that it was so. When did you first hear of his disappearance ? Early the following day, when I received a telegram from his wife, asking for information about him. Mrs. Hatrell knew that her husband was to lunch with me on Monday, and naturally applied to me when first she took alarm. A member of the firm of solicitors in Lincoln's 56 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. Inn Fields gave evidence as to the appointment made by the deceased for the payment of the purchase-money, £3,865, and the execution of the conveyance. This witness described the arrival of Colonel MacDonald with the message from the deceased, and the surprise that was felt at Mr. Hatrell's non-arrival, it being known to the firm that he was a man of punctual and business-like habits, and particularly anxious to pass into possession of the property in question. The Bank clerk who cashed Mr. Hatrell's cheque, deposed to the amounts and numbers of the notes, and stated that the police were already in possession of these numbers, and on the alert to discover any attempt that might be made to dispose of the notes either in England or on the Continent. Mrs. Moore, the landlady of the house in Denmark (Street, described the appearance and characteristics of the foreigner who engaged her second-floor back bedroom on the Thursday preceding the murder. He was a very civil-spoken man. He looked BEFORE THE COEOXEE. 57 quite the gentleman. He spoke English like a foreigner, and I believe he was a Frenchman. His way of talk was quite different from a German gentleman, in the tailoring, who occupies my first floor. I should certainly have put him down as a Frenchman, and he told me he was a French Swiss, from the neighbourhood of Neuchatel, and that he worked for Mr. Walker, of Cornhill. I couldn't have wished for a more respectable lodger. He offered me a week's rent in advance, as he was a stranger, and I did not hesitate about taking him. There was nothing repulsive or disreputable in his appearance — nothing that set you against him ? Nothing. He told me that he should want no attendance, as he was used to waiting upon himself. If he wanted a cup of tea he would take the teapot down to my back kitchen — I don't burn any fire in the front room in summer time — and would boil up my kettle. All he would want would be for me to clean his room once or twice a week. 58 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. Did he bring any luggage ? Only one small portmanteau. The police have taken that away. It was opened in my presence, and there was nothing in it except an old pair of trousers, a brush and comb, and a few foreign books and newspapers. Were you at home on the day of the murder ? Yes, I was indoors all that day. Yet you did not see or hear the deceased come into the house ? I was in my back kitchen most of the day doing my weekly wash. Could you not hear people go in or out of the street-door when you were in the back kitchen ? Yes, I could hear them going along the passage and upstairs, but I wasn't likely to take notice of who went out or came in. The men from the tailor's workshop used to go in and out and up and down at all hours. There are other lodgers in the attics, and an old lady and gentle- man in the parlours. I might have noticed a stranger's step, perhaps, if I had been on the listen, for I knew the footsteps of most of the BEFORE THE CORONER. 59 lodgers ; but I was very busy with my wash, and I didn't take much notice. What was the state of the room when you and Mr. Schmidt broke open the door ? The deceased was lvino- on his face, stabbed through the back. The bed curtain was drawn. A counterpane and blanket had been dragged off the bed and placed round the deceased so as to sop up the blood. Was there anything to indicate that the murderer's clothes or hands were bloody when he left the room — any smears upon the door, or traces of bloody footprints on the floor ? There wasn't a sign of anything of that kind, but there was bloodstained water in the wash- basin, and a towel stained with blood on the washstand. The police examined the room. Should you know your lodger if you were to see him again ? I could swear to him anywhere. John Smallman, journeyman tailor, deposed to having seen the Frenchman 2:0 downstairs some 60 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. time on Monday afternoon. He took notice of the fact, as on Friday and Saturday the man had been out all day, and was supposed to be in constant employment in the watch-making trade. He laughed and told one of his mates that the Frenchman had been keeping St. Monday. He could not say the precise time at which he had seen the man pass the landing, but knew that it was some time after four, and that the church clock hard by had not struck five. He generally went out for his tea when St. Giles's church clock struck five. Did you notice anything peculiar about the appearance of the man as he passed the landing ? No. He walked with a bit of a swagger, and he was whistling softly to himself as he went downstairs. He was whistling that tune French people are so uncommon fond of. The Marseillaise, perhaps, you mean ? No. It was the other tune — Young Dunoy. Partant pour la Syrie f Yes, that was it. Had you or any of your mates struck up an BEFORE THE COEOXEE. 61 intimacy with this Frenchman — had you got into conversation with him upon any occasion ? Not us. He was a very close party, and seemed to think himself a good bit above the rest of the lodgers. He'd only been in the house a few days before the murder. Did none of you see him after that Monday afternoon ? None of us. I don't believe he ever entered the house after he left it that time. A cabman, who had come forward of his own accord, deposed to having driven a man from Cranbourne Street to the corner of Denmark Street about half-past three o'clock on the after- noon of the murder. The man hailed hini from the pavement in front of an Italian coffee-shop. He told him to drive as fast as he could go, and he should have double fare. He did drive fast, getting over the distance in about five minutes, and the man gave him a florin. He got out at the corner of the street nearest the church. Witness stopped to see where he went, and he 62 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. saw him enter a house on the right hand side of the street, which he had since identified as the house where the murder was committed. Witness believed that he would be able to recognize the man in question. He was a dark-complexioned man, between thirty and forty, rather a good- looking man, and he looked like a foreigner — French or Italian, most likely Italian. The medical evidence indicated that two out of the three wounds had pierced the heart and that death must have been almost instantaneous. The deceased was a very powerful man, heart and lungs sound as a bell. Such a man could not have been attacked single-handed, unless taken completely off his guard. There were other witnesses examined, and the inquest was adjourned for a week, the usual order being given for the burial of the deceased in accordance with the desire of his friends. The adjourned inquiry evolved very little additional information. Much of the original BEFOEE THE CORONER. 63 evidence was repeated, but no new facts had been discovered relative to the murderer, except Mr. Walker's repudiation of any knowledge of such a man's existence. Xo man of that name had ever been employed in Mr. Walker's workshops in Cornhill. The police had up to this time totally failed in their efforts to trace either the missing man, or the missing notes. The murder not having been discovered until a day and a half after it had been done, the murderer had had ample time to cross the Channel before the police were on his track. He would probably endeavour to dispose of the notes in Holland or in Germany, and perhaps leave Hamburg or Bremen for America. The London police were in communication with their brotherhood on the Continent, and all suspicious departures from Havre, Marseilles, Antwerp, Hamburg, Bremen, or any of the principal ports would be noted. The large reward which had been offered by the widow of the deceased was calculated to stimulate the energies of Scotland Yard; but the efforts of Scotland Yard resulted only in the following 64 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. up of various false scents, all alike leading to disappointment and disgust. The one scent which, if it could have been followed while it was warm, should have led to the apprehension of the murderer, was a lost scent, because the lapse of time had made it cold before the Scotland Yard pack could be laid on. Ten days after the murder there came com- munications from the Credit Lyonnais at Nice, from the Credit Lyonnais at Cannes, and from Mr. Smith's bank at Monte Carlo, which disposed of the question as to what had become of the money which should have been paid for young Squire Florestan's river-meadows, the bundle of notes which Kobert Hatrell had pocketed so gaily that summer afternoon after his cheery luncheon at the Army and Navy Club. In the morning of July 7 an elderly woman had called at the Credit Lyonnais at Cannes to exchange two notes of £500 each for French money. She was a person of ladylike appearance and manners, spoke French with a Parisian accent, and impressed the cashier as a personage BEFORE THE CORONER. 65 to whom the utmost respect was due. She was very particular in exacting the fullest rate of exchange for her thousand pounds, and seemed to take a miserly delight in the trifling profit made on the transaction. She informed the cashier, en passant, that she had hired a villa in the Quartier de Californie, and that she required the greater part of this money to pay half the season's rent in advance. She added also, en passant, that the people of Cannes were usurious in their insistance upon payment beforehand from a tenant whose integrity and whose means it was impossible to doubt. This was said with an air of quiet dignity which confirmed the cashier in his idea that he was dealing with a u personage." These details were communicated later in con- fidential talk with the detective who followed up the clue ; the main fact telegraphed to Scotland Yard was the fact that such and such notes had been turned into French money. From Monte Carlo came an account of a VOL. I. f 66 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. larger transaction. An elderly lady of aristocratic appearance had called at the English Bank there late on the afternoon of July 7, and had changed three Bank of England notes for £500 each, takiog in exchange French notes, twenty franc pieces, and those large gold pieces of a hundred francs, which make so line a display in a rouleau on a trente et quarante table. Here, as at Cannes, the cashier had been impressed by the lady's distinction of manner and perfect savoir faire. The easy way in which she handled a five hundred pound note indicated long experience of wealth. A gambler evidently, thought the cashier, but a woman rich enough to afford to gamble without any sordid anxiety as to the result ; a person whose presence did honour to the delightful little settlement on the rock. From Nice came a third telegram. Elderly woman exchanged two notes, such and such numbers as advertised, for £500 each, and one, also number as advertised, for £250, on July 9, at 11 o'clock a.m., at the Credit Lyonnais. BEFORE THE CORONER. C7 A letter following the above telegram informed the authorities of Scotland Yard that the elderly woman in question was of distinguished appear- ance, speaking French perfectly, and supposed by the cashier to be a Frenchwoman. She had alleged as her reason for changing the notes that she had bought a plot of land at Beaulieu, with the intention of building a villa there, and she preferred to pay for it in French money. The owner of the land, she added, was an ignorant man, who seemed never to have seen a Bank of England note ; and there was also the advantage upon the exchange. Again, as at Cannes, the distinguished elderly lady showed herself eager for the utmost profit upon the exchange. The money taken from the murdered man was thus accounted for — within a hundred and fifteen pounds. The odd money being in smaller notes might easily be disposed of without leaving any trace in the memory of the people who received it. There could be very little doubt that the elderly lady of Cannes was identical with the lderly lady of Nice and Monte Carlo. Her 68 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. description as given by the three cashiers tallied in every particular, especially in the trifling detail of a rather noticeable mole just above the outer corner of the left eyebrow, and in another detail as to the lady's hands, which were remark- able for their whiteness and delicacy of form — hands which had gone a long way towards suggesting the idea of the lady's patrician birth and refined breeding to the minds of the three cashiers. One of the cleverest detectives in London charged himself with the task of following the trail of this nameless lady, taking up the thread at Nice after a quarter-past eleven upon the 8th July, which was the time of her latest recorded appearance. It needed a good deal of close work in the way of inquiry at nearly every hotel in the city to discover that an elderly Frenchwoman of good appearance spent the night of July 7th at the Hotel des Princes, that she arrived by the late train from Monte Carlo, that her only luggage consisted of a hand-bag, neither large BEFORE THE COROXER. 69 nor heavy, that she went out soon after ten o'clock on the morning of the 8th, lunched in her own room at twelve, and left the hotel at half-past twelve in a cab, which was called for her at the door, carrying her bag with her, after duly paying her bill. Neither porter nor waiter had observed the number of the cab, nor had any one heard her direction to the driver. It was supposed she was going to the railway station, and the hour at which she left suggested that she was going in the Eapide which leaves Ventimille at six minutes past eleven for Paris. As the aforesaid Eapide stops at nearly every station between Nice and Marseilles the lady's range of country — as to choice of where she should alight — would be wide ; but the local idea was that any person so ill-advised as to leave Nice was hardly likely to stop till he or she came to Paris. Between Nice and Paris there was practically nothing — a monotonous progression of orange orchards, sea shore, and wooded hills ; an insignificant watering-place or two — Cannes, St. Eaphael — a shipbuilding settle- 70 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. merit — and a seaport ; but for pleasure, for gaiety, for movement, for the lovers of opera, play- house, and little horses, absolutely nothing. The intelligent detective visited Monte Carlo and saw the cashier at Mr. Smith's Bank. He went into the rooms and talked to the attendants. He met an acquaintance or two, also bent on business ; but he could find out nothing more about the elderly lady. He went to Cannes, and put the Cannes cashier through a kind of Socratic dialogue in the way of close questioning, but could get no more than had been already told. A house-to-house visitation of the hotels resulted in the discovery that an elderly Frenchwoman, travelling alone, had descended at the Hotel de France at half- past seven o'clock in the morning of the 7th, arriving doubtless by the train which leaves Marseilles an hour after midnight She had breakfasted alone in her room, had gone out before eleven, had lunched and paid her bill, and left the hotel in a cab a little before two o'clock in the afternoon. BEFORE THE CORONER. 71 There was nothing to show where the woman had gone when she left Nice. Inquiries at the station there had been without result of any kind. "Whether she had set her face towards the Italian frontier — or whether she had gone by Marseilles to Paris, or had stopped at Mar- seilles, or had turned westward and crept by slow trains down to Biarritz or Bordeaux — there was no power could help the intelligent gentle- man from Scotland Yard to discover. She was gone. From her appearance at the Hotel de France at Cannes to her disappearance from the Hotel des Princes at Nice she had been alone. Of whomsoever she might be the accomplice, she had been trusted to carry out her mission uncon- trolled and unwatched. "The bond between her and the murderer must be very tight," mused the detective, " or he would never trust her with the whole of his plunder. It's my belief that she has gone to Paris, and that he was to meet her in Paris ; but how to look for a man of whose antecedents I know nothing, and of whose appearance I know 72 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. only the vague impressions of three or four people who all describe him differently, is a problem beyond my capacity." He thought it worth his while, nevertheless, to spend the best part of a week in Paris, and in professional circles where, if ingenuity and long experience of criminal ways and windings could have helped him to a clue, he might have obtained one ; but no clue was to be found. All the detective's researches among doubtful characters and the places which they are known to haunt ; all his long hours of patient hanging about at railway stations, in cellars where they make music, at bars where they drink mysterious liquors called by eccentric and alarming names, and in this suspected quarter and in that, were but fruitless labour. He could see nothing, and he could hear nothing, of any man answering to the description of the man who had announced himself as a Swiss watchmaker at the Denmark Street lodging-house. The detective pursued his researches at Havre, but he could obtain no trace of any such person BEFORE THE CORONER. 73 lately embarked on one of the numerous American and other steamers which leave that port. Such a man might have sailed unnoted, as there was nothing distinctive in the description of the murderer to mark him out from the common herd of superior mechanics. " It's hard lines for a man to let such a chance slip through his fingers," the detective said to himself, " but I don't believe any man will ever grow rich out of the Denmark Street murder. The job was too neatly done, and the people in it were too clever." 74 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. CHAPTER IV. HOW WOULD SHE BEAK IT? • The public interest in the fate of Robert Hatrell gradually diminished, and finally expired before summer leaves were withered and dead, dying for want of nutriment. The crime in Denmark Street had made a profound sensation, first because the victim was a man of means and position, and above all a man of unblemished character ; next, because it was a shock to society in general to discover that a man of undoubted courage and powerful physique could be assas- sinated in broad daylight, in a decent London street, amidst the going and coming of respect- able working people, and that his murderer could escape unchallenged with his plunder. There were a good many leading articles in the newspapers upon this subject. The HOW WOULD SHE BEAR IT ? 75 Denmark Street mystery was served up to the British Public, which gloats over all such mysteries, with every variety of journalistic sauce ; and the British Public were told, as they had been very often told before, that they were living in a corrupt and degenerate age; that such crimes as the Denmark Street murder were the natural outcome of luxurious habits in the upper middle classes, and of un- speakable corruption among the aristocracy, whereby the great city of Loudon had become a hot-bed of sin, in which the criminal instincts of the masses grew and gathered strength to destroy. The British Public was informed that a wave of crime was passing over England, and that a savage lust of blood and gold was in the air; and the British Public was furthermore called upon to take warning by these monstrous developments of our nineteenth century civiliza- tion, and in a general way to mend its manners. These voices crying in the wilderness of London life the British Public heard with but a languid interest. The one fact that did 76 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. interest society, after the natural curiosity as to the why and the how of Eobert Hatrell's death, was the fact that London was not altogether a place devoid of danger to human life even in broad daylight, that a man might at any un- guarded moment be lured within four walls and stabbed to death. There were those who argued that there must have been some dark page in Mr. Hatrell's history, or he would not so readily have followed an unknown messenger on the strength of a woman's name. There must have been something in the dead man's relations with the woman called Antoinette, which made it a matter of life and death to him to go wherever she summoned him. Otherwise, bearing in mind that he was on his way to an important business appointment, and that he had four thousand pounds in his breast-pocket, it must needs seem strange that he should be so easily turned aside. So argued Society, shaking its head sagely at dinner-tables, where men and women's natural interest in the tragedy of human life sometimes gets the better of that Chesterfieldian refinement HOW WOULD SHE BEAR IT? 77 which would exclude such subjects of conversation from polite assemblies. Summer was gone, and it was late autumn, and the outside world had forgotten Eobert Hatrell — had forgotten him just when his widow was waking from a long, dull dream of agony to the reality of her irreparable loss. The woods along the valley of the Thames were clothed in russet and gold, and Clieveden's glades were strewn with fallen leaves. The mists of autumn rose in the early evening, pale and phantom-like, along the river-meadows, and the tramp of the horses on the towpath and the ripple of the water against the sides of the barge had a ghostly sound in the obscure greyness, through which boat and horses came slowly, as if moving in secret under the veil of night. It was a mild and lovely day at the beginning of October when Clara Hatrell left the house for the first time since her husband's funeral on the eleventh of July. She had insisted on following him to his grave in Lamford Churchyard, and she 78 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. had borne herself with extraordinary fortitude throughout the funeral service, had stood by the grave till the last ceremony had been performed, had seen the wreaths of summer flowers laid on the coffin lid ; and then she had gone quietly back to the house where the happiest years of her married life had been spent. She had gone to her room without a word, save one gentle murmur of thanks to the sister who had been at her side on that trying day. Her sister followed her upstairs, heard her lock the door of her room, and after listening outside for some minutes went down to the drawing-room where the clergyman of the parish, the family lawyer, and Ambrose Arden were assembled. "I don't know what to do about Clara," she said anxiously ; " she has locked herself in her room, and I don't feel that it is right to leave her alone. Yet I don't like to force myself upon her. One cannot tell what to do for the best; it may be better, perhaps, that she should be alone with her grief." " Mrs. Hatrell is a woman of deep religious HOW WOULD SHE BEAR IT? 79 feeling," said the priest. " She will not be alone. She has been borne up wonderfully this clay. The same Power will be with her in the solitude of her room. It might be well to leave her alone for an hour or so, Mrs. Talbot. After a quiet interval of prayer she will better feel the comfort of your sympathy." " Yes, I think you are right. I will leave her to herself for a time, poor dear thing ! " Mrs. Talbot was an elder sister, who had married six years before Clara made her debut in society. She had married a rising physician who had now risen to the fashionable level, and was one of the most popular doctors at the West End of London. Mrs. Talbot had a nursery and a schoolroom to look after, and a widely com- prehensive visiting list, beginning with duchesses, and dwindling down to struggling young women in the musical, literary, and dramatic line. She had an exacting, albeit a kind and generous husband ; and she had so much to do and to think about at home that she had not been able to devote any considerable part of her life to her 80 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. sister's society. She came now in this hour of calamity as an act of duty; but she was not altogether in sympathy with the household at Eiver Lawn, had not altogether grasped the full measure of love which had ruled between husband and wife, and thus could not fathom the depth of the widow's sorrow. She had comforted a good many widows in her time; and her general ex- perience had been that, however they might distress their friends by the intensity of their grief during the first half of the first year of widowhood, they generally surprised their friends by their rapid recovery in the second half. Dr. Talbot was one of the British Public who opined that there was something more than met the eye of the coroner or the coroner's jury in the relations of his deceased brother-in-law with the person called Antoinette. Questioned search- ingly by his wife on the subject of his suspicions, he replied that the case was obvious enough to any one who could read between the lines ; and with this occult phrase Mrs. Talbot was con- strained to content herself. HOW WOULD SHE BEAR IT? 81 There was no family assemblage to which Bobert HatrelTs will had to be read. He had stood almost alone in the world, without any relation nearer than second cousins. The second cousins expected nothing from him, and had made no sign since his death, except in the way of letters of condolence to the widow. " My unfortunate client made his will immedi- ately after his marriage — or I should rather say that he executed his will after his marriage — for the will was drawn up at the same time as the marriage settlement," explained Mr. Melladew, the family solicitor. " He leaves the bulk of his estate in trust for his wife for her life, with succession to his children share and share alike. As there is only one child, she will inherit all at her mother's death. The will gives the trustees power to anticipate some portion of the estate, with Mrs. Hatrell's consent, for the marriage settlement of any son or daughter. By a codicil made in the beginning of last year, Mr. Hatrell leaves his house and the land appertaining to it to his wife, absolutely, with power to purchase VOL. I. G 82 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. conterminous land to the amount of ten thousand pounds out of the corpus of the estate." "He always hankered after Florestan's land, poor fellow," said Mr. Eeardon, the Rector. " Strange that he should have met his death on the very day when he was to complete the purchase of the adjoining meadows. The codicil gives Mrs. Hatrell power to make the addition. That is a fortunate circumstance." " Fortunate," exclaimed the lawyer. " Do you think she will find it in her heart to remain in a place so associated with her husband ? " " I hope she will not leave my parish. There are people who fly from a spot where they have been happy with those who have been taken from them; but there are others who cling to the place where they have loved and been beloved. If I am any judge of character, Mrs. Hatrell belongs to the latter type, and she will remain in the home associated with her husband." " I believe you are right, Mr. Eeardon," said Ambrose Arden, in his calm, leisurely tones, look- ing up from a volume which he had taken as if HOW WOULD SHE BEAR IT ? 83 mechanically from the table near his elbow. " I believe Mrs. Hatrell's gentle and adhesive nature will find comfort in familiar things — after a time. I should be very sorry if it were otherwise. I should be very sorry to lose so kind a neighbour, and, above all, to lose my dear little friend and pupil, Daisy." " Poor little Daisy ! " sighed the Rector. " What a blessed thing that she is too young to know the extent of her loss, or the manner of her father's death ! " " That she must never know," said Arden, firmly. Mr. Eeardon looked doubtful. "Do you suppose this terrible story can be hidden from her always ? " he asked. " I fear not. She may be kept in ignorance of the truth while she is a child under her mother's eye, but when she advances to girlhood and mixes with other girls— when she goes to school " " She will not go to school," interrupted Arden. •'•'Any one would be mad to expose her to the tittle-tattle and folly of a pack of schoolgirls. I wonder you can suggest such a thing, Rector." 84 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. " Well, we will say there shall be no school in her case. Though for an only child that means a lonely, self-contained, and not over-healthy girlhood. But the time will come when she must mix with other people, and go about in the world, at home and abroad. Do you think no officious acquaintance will ever be indiscreet enough to talk to her, in pure sympathy, about her father's death — taking it for granted that she knows all that can be known about it ? " "That is a long way to look ahead," said Arden. " I hope she will grow up a light-hearted, happy girl, her mind so well furnished, her memory so full of interesting things, that should the evil you apprehend ever come to pass she may be strong enough to bear the shock. In the mean time I trust that all her friends in this place, from the highest to the lowest, will do their best to keep her in ignorance of everything except the one fact that she has lost a good and affectionate father." While this conversation was going on in the drawing-room, Mrs. Talbot was strolling about the HOW WOULD SHE BEAR IT ? 8d garden to get rid of time, in accordance with Mr. Reardon's suggestion that it would be well to leave the mourner to herself for an hour or so. The lawn and river, the flowers and shrubs were in the perfection of their summer beauty, clumps of roses, hedges of roses, standard roses, dwarf roses, blush roses, climbing roses, made the glory of the long, narrow lawn, and between the lawn and the river there was a terrace with great green tubs containing orange trees ranged at regular intervals. There was a flight of steps leading to the river at each end of the terrace, and at the western end, with its back to the setting sun, there was a summer-house of classic form, in Portland stone, a summer-house which in Italy would have been marble. At the eastern end of the terrace, and on a lower level, there was a capacious boat-house, containing a couple of out- riggers, a punt, and a skiff, and the level roof of this boat-house had been a favourite lounging place of Robert Hatrell and his friends— -a place on which to talk and smoke in the summer twi- light, as the pleasure-boats went down to Henley. 86 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. Mrs. Talbot had seen her husband and the dead man sitting there in close confidential talk on a summer evening after dinner, while she and her sister strolled up and down the terrace, or stopped to feed the white stately swans and their soft grey cygnets. She almost fancied she could hear the mellow sound of Kobert Hatrell's laughter as she walked there now, What a joyous, frank, expansive nature ! What a happy life ! wanting nothing that this world can give of comfort and delight ; endowed with strength, intellect, good looks, fortune, perfect health, and a wife who adored him. And he had been stabbed to death in a shabby London lodging by an unknown hand. It was only a fortnight ago that Emily Talbot and her husband had been dining at Eiver Lawn. They had gone down for a single night in the very flush of midsummer, just to smell the roses, just for a few hours' respite from London gaieties and London smoke, as Clara had expressed it in her letter of invitation. There had been only the Kector and Mr. Arden to meet them, the two HOW WOULD SHE BEAR IT ? 87 men now in the drawing-room with the lawyer. They had been a most sociable party, full of talk, Hatrell expatiating upon his plans for the arrangement of the land which was so soon to be his, and in higher spirits than usual. There had not been a cloud on the horizon ; and Mrs. Talbot, who loved Harley Street and all her London pleasures, had for once in her life gone back to town reluctantly. " It is curious that Robert and Clara can live like hermits in the height of the season," she told her husband. " But really this morning, when we were leaving, I almost envied them their quiet domestic life in that lovely place." And now the bond that held two lives was broken, and joy was gone like a dream when one awaketh. Mrs. Talbot was pacing slowly along the terrace, depressed by these thoughts, when a shriek rang out upon the summer air; such a cry of agony as her ears had never heard until that hour. The sound came from the open window of her 88 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. sister's bedroom, the large bow window, which was one of Robert Hatrell's numerous improve- ments. She rushed into the house and ran up- stairs, but quick as she was Ambrose Arden and the Eector were there before her, and the former was in the act of breaking open the door as she reached the landing. He had implored Mrs. Hatrell to open the door, and there had been no answer, so he put his shoulder against the panelling and wrenched the door off its hinges. Clara Hatrell was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, with a heap of her husband's letters — her lover's letters, for they had all been written before marriage — scattered about her. She sat with her hands clasped upon her knees, her eyes fixed, and staring into vacancy. Her dishevelled hair fell about her shoulders in a wild confusion, as if her hands had been clutch- ing and tearing at it. Emily Talbot knelt down by her and spoke to her, trying to soothe her, gathering up the tangled hair with gentle hands, pressing tenderest kisses upon her burning fore- HOW WOULD SHE BEAR IT ? 89 head ; but she took no notice, her eyes remained fixed in that sightless gaze, her fingers were still locked together in the same convulsive grasp. " She does not know me," cried Mrs. Talbot, horrified at that awful look, which made her sister's face like the face of a stranger ; " oh, God, she has gone mad ! " * * * * « For more than six weeks after the funeral Clara Hatrell lived in the darkness of a dis- traught brain. More than once during that period she hovered on the brink of the grave, and there were dismal hours in which her doctor and her nurses lost all hope. Life and reason were alike in peril, and there was many a night when Ambrose Arden sat in his study, trying to read, but never able to leave off listening for the footfall that might bring him fatal tidings. During this season of fear he rarely went to his bedroom till the sun had risen above the long- level meadows towards Henley Bridge, and often the sunrise found him walking in the lane between his cottage and River Lawn. It was 90 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. the dreariest time of his life since the short, sharp agony of his young wife's fatal iilness. He had nothing to distract his mind from the one subject which absorbed him. His little pupil had been carried off by her aunt, and was at Westgate-on-Sea with a bevy of cousins, all older than herself. His son's vacation was being spent with the old grandfather, in Kadnorshire. He had planned the visit at the beginning of Mrs. Hatrell's illness. The lad's company would have been irksome to him in this time of fear. He preferred to be alone while he faced the dread possibility of a fatal issue. No one could have helped him to bear his agony, the agony of fear for the life of the woman whom he had loved in patient subjugation — in such perfect mastery of himself as never to have awakened suspicion in those among whom he lived his everyday life — ever since he first looked upon her fair young face. No one had ever guessed his secret ; not the husband, whose fiery temper would have been quick to kindle into flame, had there been but HOW WOULD SHE BEAR IT? 91 the lightest cause for jealousy ; not the wife, whose purity would have been quick to take alarm at a word or a look ; not the friends, who lived in intimate relations with the family. Xo one had suspected him. Yes, one perhaps had divined his secret. One pair of clear, candid eyes had read his heart. Once, in a moment of expansion, his pupil and playfellow clasped her arms round bis neck and murmured in his ear, "I love you, because you love mother." 92 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. CHAPTER V. DAISY'S DIAEY SEVEN YEARS AFTER. Cyril says he thinks I could write a novel. I have read so many stories, so much poetry, and I am such a fanciful creature. I hope that isn't another way of saying that I am silly and affected. One never quite knows what a University man means. They seem to have a language of their own, made up of cynicism and contempt for other people. Cyril is such a curious young man ; he always seems to mean a great deal more than he says. At any rate, he has said ever so many times this summer that I ought to be able to write a novel. How I wish I could ! How delightful it must be to invent people and make them alive ; to live in their lives and in their adventures ; to move all over the world in a beautiful day dream ; not dim and confused, and blurred and blotted daisy's diary seyex years after. 93 with absurdities, like the dreams of slumber, but clear and vivid with the light that never was on land or sea ! I only wish Cyril were right; but alas! he is wrong. I have tried ever so many times. I have begun story after story, and have torn up my manuscript after the second or third chapter. My heroine seemed so foolish and so feeble, there was no life in her. She was like those dear dolls I loved so, that never would sit up, not even against the wall, but always flopped over on one side or the other, as if their lovely waxen heads were too heavy for their awkward, sawdust bodies. She was every bit as limp. My hero was better, but I'm rather afraid he was too much like Eochester in "Jane Eyre," where he wasn't the very image of Guy Livingston. What men those were ! Guy was nicer — he would have shown off best at a dinner party or a ball. Mr. Rochester comes nearer one's heart. How I could have loved him after he went blind ! Happy Jane — to be so heroic and steadfast, to go out into the cold bleak world and be nearly starved to death, and 94 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. then to have her own true love after all. That was something like a destiny ! No, I'm afraid I shall never write a novel. There is something wanting. Invention, I sup- pose. But I am very fond of writing, so I have made up my mind to write my own life. My adventures would hardly fill a chapter — not if I began at my cradle. I never went to a hard and cruel school like Jane Eyre. I never knew what it was to be hungry, except after a long walk; and then it was only a pleasant hunger, tempered with the knowledge that five-o'clock tea and hot buns and brown bread and butter were waiting for me at home. No, I have no vicissitudes to write about, but I can write about those I love, my impressions of people and scenery, and books and animals. How big a volume I could fill upon one subject alone if I were to write about mother and all her goodness to me, and the happy years I have spent with her for my chief companion ! It seems only yesterday that I was a child and she used to play with me at all sorts of games, just as if she were daisy's diary seven years after. 95 another little girl. I fancied she was enjoying herself just as much as I was. She would play at visiting, and dinners even, than which I cannot imagine anything more wearisome to a grown-up person. To pretend to eat a grand dinner off little wooden dishes, with painted food glued on to them, curious puce-coloured joints and poultry, and pink and green tarts and puddings ; and to make conversation and pretend to think every- thing nice ; and to ask for a second help of a wooden leg of mutton. How dreadfully bored she must have been ! but she endured it all like a martyr. We used to play battledore and shuttlecock on the tennis lawn for hours at a stretch. She could run faster than I till a year or two ago. She says now that those battledore contests kept her young. Every one says how young and girlish she looks, more like my elder sister than my mother. Indeed, strangers generally take her to be my sister. How pretty she is ! pretty is too insignificant a word. She is beautiful. I know no one with 96 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. such a lovely complexion — clear and pale, with a rosy flush that lights up her face suddenly when she is animated. Her large hazel eyes are the loveliest I ever saw. They have so much light in them ; and her smile is like summer sunshine. But I must begin the story of my life in those days when I was just old enough to understand all that was going on round about me, and to be sorry when those I loved were sorry ; and that will bring me only too soon to the saddest part of all my life — the time when my father was taken from us. Let me try and recall him vividly in this book while I am still able to remember him exactly as he was, so that when I am old and memory grows dim I may find his image here, as one finds a rose in a book, dry and dead, but with its beauty and colour and velvet texture still remaining. What a splendid looking man he was ! not like Guy Livingston, or like Edward Fairfax Roches- ter. There was nothing dark or rugged, or repul- sive about my dear father, and, indeed, although one's heart always goes out to a rugged, repulsive daisy's diary seven years after. 97 man in the pages of a novel, I don't know whether one would take quite so kindly to Brian de Bois Gilbert, or even to Rochester, in real life. My father was like David, of a pleasant counten- ance, ruddy and fair to see. I can bring his face and figure before me like a vision, when I shut my eyes in the sunshine and fancy him walking across the lawn to meet me, with the bine of the river behind him, as I used to see him so often in the happy days before I went to Harley Street. He was tall and broad-shouldered, upright, with an easy walk* He took long steps as he came across the grass, swinging his oak stick, the stick he used in his long tramps to Henley or Beading, or across the fields and woods to some out-of-the-way village. He was almost always out of doors in summer — alone, or with mother, oftenest with mother — walking, driving, rowing, playing tennis. He was not too old for tennis. Yes, there is the bright frank face, and the smiling blue eyes — honest English eyes. His portrait, in the library, and the photograph that hangs beside VOL. I. H 98 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. my bed may help to keep his features clearly in my memory, but it seems to me as if I never could have forgotten him even if there had been no picture of him in existence. It is hardly a question of memory. His face lives in my heart and mind. He was fond of me. One of my earliest recol- lections is of lying at the end of a punt among a heap of soft cushions, while my father walked up and down with the long heavy punt pole, and moved the great clumsy boat over the bright blue water, sometimes turning into a quiet backwater, where he would moor his boat, and sit and smoke his pipe in the sunshine, and talk to me in a slow, dreamy way between the puffs of tobacco, or let me talk to him. Oh, how I used to chatter in my little shrill voice ! and what questions I used to ask him, question after question ! and how puzzled he used to look sometimes at my ever- lasting " why," and my everlasting " what ! " Why did the sun shine, or why did the river make the boat move, or what were the flowers made of ? Dearest father, how patient he was daisy's diary seven years after. 99 with me. He used to laugh off my questions. He never explained things, or taught me the names of the flowers, like Uncle Ambrose. Our life together was a perpetual holiday. He taught me how to fish for dace and minnows out of the stern of the boat, and I was very happy with him. It all seems like a dream of happiness now as I look back upon it, but it is as fresh in my memory as the most vivid dream from which one has only jnst awakened. Sometimes these happy mornings were Sunday mornings, when mother was at church. If Sun- day happened to be a very warm diy, father would begin to yawn at breakfast time, and would say he did not feel inclined for church, and that he would go on the water with Daisy ; and then I used to clap my hands and rush off to get my sun-bonnet, and before mother had time to make any objection we were off to the boathouse to get the pole and the cushions. When the church bells began to ring from the old red brick tower we were gliding ever so far up the river, on the way to our favourite backwater, where father used 100 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. to sit and read his Sunday papers, while I worried the little happy, dancing fish under the willows. Silvery darting creatures, swift as light ! How glad I am now that I caught so few of them ! Yes, he was very good to me. He used to talk of days when I should be grown up, and when he would take me to parties and balls. " Your mother and I are saving ourselves up for your first season, Daisy," he said ; " that's why we are living like hermits." Yes, he was good, and I loved him dearly ; but perhaps I loved Ambrose Arden almost as well, only in another way. I don't think any little girl of seven was ever so honoured as to have a man of vast learning to teach her to read and write ; unless it was some little princess in the days when a man like Fenelon was not thought too good to be tutor to a Dauphin. Uncle Ambrose taught me from the very beginning. It was his whim and fancy to do so. He is a man of such laborious habits that he takes no account of trouble ; and in all the years he has laboured at my education I can daisy's diary seven yeaes after. 101 never remember one impatient word, or even ons impatient movement on his part. I have lost patience often, I, the learner ; he, the teacher, never. I can just remember how I came to call him Uncle Ambrose. I used to call him Mr. Arden — Misser Arden, at least, for it was before I could speak plainly. One day he told me not to call him Mr., it was too formal between him and me. "Call me Ambrose," he said; and then mother looked up from her work and said that would never do. A little girl could not address a man of his years and learning by his Christian name. " I am not quite so elderly as I seem," he said, laughing; "but if you think Ambrose too familiar, let me be an imaginary uncle, and let her call me Uncle Ambrose. Will that do ? " " Yes," said mother, " that will do very well." So from that time forward he was Uncle Ambrose, and he is Uncle Ambrose to this day, just as kind, and good, and devoted as he was when I was a little girl, ^Yith bare arms, short petticoats, and a sun-bonnet. He still occupies himself about 102 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. my education, although he is a much more dis- tinguished person than when he began the task. He has published three books since then, books of the very highest literary character, which have made him a reputation amongst the learned and the refined in England and on the Continent. Re viewers have written about him in several languages ; his success has been undisputed ; his name is quoted with Darwin, and Spencer, and Max Muller. In a word he is a famous man. And yet he is content to go drudging on at the task of educating a frivolous girl like me. We are reading Duruy's "Histoire des Grecs" to- gether this summer, and with it we are reading Grote's " Plato " and a selection of the Dialogues, in Jowett's magnificent translation. The little Greek that I know helps me to appreciate the beauty and grace of the English rendering. I should like to kiss the hand that wrote that noble book. ***** How suddenly, how awfully that happy life with my father came to an end! I remember daisy's diary seven years after. 10:3 that summer morning when he left us soon after breakfast to go to London and complete the purchase of Mr. Elorestan's land. We break- fasted in the garden, in an open tent on the lawn, and we were all so happy. Father talked of nothing but the land and the new garden which was to be laid out immediately. The ground had all been laid out already on paper. The plans were in the library on father's writing- table — drawings of terraces and balustrades, vases and statues lightly sketched in with that beautiful touch which makes almost any house charming before it is built. Everybody had seen the plans, and had talked about them, and argued and advised; and my dear father had talked them all down with his grand ideas of an Italian garden. Uncle Ambrose quoted Lord Bacon's Essay on Gardens. I remembered the very words a year ago when I began to read Bacon. They came back to me like the memory of a dream. I was only a child, but I used to sit and listen to everything that was said, and think and wonder. 104 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. Father kissed me at the gate before he got into the T-cart that was to take him to the station. Thank God for that kiss ! He looked back at mother and me as he drove away. He looked round at us with his beautiful smile, and called out gaily, "I shall bring the title-deeds home for you to look at." He had asked mother to meet him at the station in the evening. She was to drive her ponies, and she was to take me with her if she liked. On those long summer days I used to sit up till nine o'clock, and I used to sit with mother and father while they dined. My aunt Talbot protested sometimes against what she called over- indulgence, and said I was being spoilt, and should grow up old-fashioned. I don't know about the spoiling, but perhaps I have grown up old- fashioned. I could not have been mother's companion in all those happy years if I had not been fond of many things that my cousins don't care for. We went to the station, mother and I, in good time to meet the train that was due at a few daisy's diary seven years after. 105 minutes before seven. We were there about a quarter of an hour before the train was due ; and we walked up and down the long narrow platform in the evening sunlight, talking about father and his enthusiasm about the new garden. " It was my fancy, in the first instance," said mother ; " but your father is so good to me that I have but to express a wish, and he immediately makes it his own. If I were to ask for a roc's egg, like the Princess Badroulbadour, I believe he would start off to Africa to look for one." I remember laughing at the idea of the egg. " A roc's egg would be as big as all our house, mother. Wouldn't it be funny if some one sent us one ? " There were very few people at the station, and we walked up and down and talked as merrily as if we had been in our own garden. Presently an electric bell began to ring, and then a porter came out and rang a bell on the platform in front of the little waiting-room, and then the train came slowly in, and mother and I stood looking at the faces in the carriage windows. There was 106 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. seldom any delay in finding out father among the arrivals. He was always one of the first to open the door, and always on the alert to see us. But on this evening we looked for him in vain. Three people got out of the train, and the train went on, and mother and I were left standing on the platform, disappointed and unhappy. The next train to stop at Lamford was not due until ten minutes to nine — too late for dinner, too late for the sunset on the river — a long, long time for us to wait. "I must drive you home, Daisy," said my mother, " and then I can come back to meet your father." I tried to persuade her to wait there and let me wait with her — the idea of home and bed- time was distasteful to me. I could, see that my mother was vexed and troubled. I clung to her as she moved to leave the station. " Let us wait for father ; I'm not tired ; I'm not hungry. Do let us wait for him, and all go home together." It was a lovely evening; the sun was still daisy's diary seyex years after. 107 bright, the station-master's little garden was full of sweet-scented flowers — roses, clove carnations, and sweet peas. " There may be a telegram at home," said my mother. " Yes, I have no doubt he has sent me a telegram." That idea seemed to decide her. She put me into the carriage, and drove home as fast as the ponies could go. I was a little scared at the pace we travelled along the dusty roads and lanes; but we reached home safely, and then came a fresh disappointment. No telegram. I was sent to bed at half-past eight, and mother went back to the station. I couldn't sleep, but lay listening and waiting in the summer dusk in my room next mother's dress- ing-room. I got my good nurse Broomfield to leave my door open, and I listened for the return of the carriage. When I heard the wheels I ran out upon the landing in my nightgown, and stood at the top of the stairs listening, expecting to hear my father's voice directly the door was opened, 108 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. but I only heard my mother speaking to the butler. "Your master has not come by the nine o'clock train, Simeon. There is no other train till after midnight. You will have to sit up for him, and to arrange a comfortable supper. He may not have found time to dine in London." I ran downstairs in my nightgown, bare-footed, and tried to comfort poor mother, for I could tell by her voice that she was unhappy. She took me in her arms and cried over me, and we went upstairs together, she scolding me a little for leaving my bedroom, but not really angry. I knew that she was hardly thinking about me. I knew that she was miserable about my father. That was only the beginning of trouble. She was up all night, walking about her own room or going downstairs and out into the garden, and to the gate, to listen for his coming. All night at intervals I heard her going up and down, and the opening and shutting of the heavy hall door. The butler and one of the maids sat up all night. Mother told Simeon she felt sure his master daisy's diaey seven years after. 109 would come home, by road, in the middle of the night even, rather than leave her in suspense. Such a thing as his breaking an appointment with her had never happened before. It was broad daylight when I cried myself to sleep — so unhappy for mother's sake, so frightened, without knowing why, about my father. Mother left the house early next morning to go to London with Ambrose Arden. She did not come back for three clays, and then my Aunt Emily came with her, and mother was so altered that I hardly knew her. She was dressed in black, and her pale face had a stony look that made me tremble. She scarcely spoke to me or noticed me, but my aunt took me on her lap and told me that a great sorrow had come upon me. My father was dead. I would not believe it for ever so long. I had heard of people dying, but they were old people who had been ill for a long time, or weak little children, and even they had been ill 110 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. for a good many clays and nights before the end came. But my father was well and strong and happy when he sat in the cart waving us good- bye with his whip. My aunt saw that I did not believe or did not understand her ; and she told me slowly how my father had died suddenly in London when he was on his way to a lawyer's office to buy Mr. Florestan's land. He was dead within a few hours after he drove away from our gate. I had no father now. Nothing could ever give him back to me upon this earth. If I were to spend all my life in prayers, never to rise up off my knees while I lived, my prayers would not give him to me for five minutes, would not gain me so much as the sound of his dear voice calling me from the lawn. My aunt took me to London with her that afternoon, and I think what I felt most in the midst of my sorrow was the thought that mother did not mind parting with me. She hardly looked at me; she put away my arms from her neck almost angrily when I clung to her crying, and entreating her to let me stay with her. daisy's diary seven years after. Ill Her eyes looked over ray head when she said good-bye to me at j the door, as if she saw- something a long way off, some horrible thing that froze her blood and made her dumb. I can understand what she felt now, and how in her grief she was hardly conscious of my existence, and that she did not really care whether I went or stayed. I can sympathize with her now. She has told me how she hardly missed me in those days of agony — only awaking sometimes as if out of a dream to wonder that my place was empty. We had been so much together, I running after her everywhere like a lap-dog, she never tired of me, or impatient with me; and yet in that overwhelming sorrow she almost forgot that she had a daughter. She has owned as much to me ; and I have never felt wounded or angry that it should have been so with her, since I have been able to understand the nature of such a grief as hers. But at the time I was heartbroken by her coldness. Aunt Emily took me to London, and gave me over to the nurses and governesses in her house 112 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. in Harley Street. It is a very large house, the largest in the street, I believe, and it was built for a rich nobleman when Harley Street was new, and there was nothing but fields and country villages to the north — no Eegent's Park, no squares and terraces, and never-ending streets as there are now. It is a fine old house, with panelled walls and decorated ceilings, and large rooms at the back ; but it seemed, oh ! such a dreary house to me after our garden by the river, and our bright, gay rooms. " Father is dead, and mother doesn't love me any more," I said to myself again and again, as I sobbed myself to sleep in the strange bedroom, where the very curtains of the bed were an agony to me because of their strangeness. I had never been parted from my mother before. Wherever she and my father went they had taken me with them. My cousins are all older than I, and they had to work very hard under a French and a German governess. Fraulein taught them music and painting ; and Mademoiselle taught them French, attended to their wardrobes, with a useful maid under her, superintended their calisthenic exercises and dancing lessons, and was " responsible for their figures." I cannot help putting that phrase in my book, for I heard my aunt use it very often. Her great desire was that her daughters should be accom- plished and elegant in all their attitudes and movements. " I expect them to be statuesque in repose, and graceful in motion," she said ; and it gave her almost a nervous attack when she saw Clementina sitting with her toes turned in, or her feet and ankles twisted into a knot under her chair. There is no malice in saying that Aunt Emily's idea of education was the very opposite to that of Uncle Ambrose. He taught and trained me to be happy in solitude, as he is, to be good company for myself, and to find new interests every day in books. Aunt Emily wished her daughters to shine in society, to talk French and German, and to play and sing VOL. i. I 114 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. better than any other girls in her circle, and above all to make the very most of their personal advantages. She is very candid in the expression of her ideas, and makes no secret of her views upon education, so there is no harm in my recording them in this journal, which nobody is ever to read, so I might be as male- volent as I like without injuring anybody. Mother says that I am very uncharitable sometimes in my ideas and judgments, and that a large-hearted charity is a virtue of age rather than of youth. I know that I am quick to see the weak points in the characters of my friends and acquaintances, and I dare say I am just as blind to my own defects. It is a lucky thing for Aunt Emily that her five daughters are all good looking, and two of them decidedly handsome. A plain daughter would have been an actual affliction to her. All the ugliness of the family has concentrated itself in her only son, my cousin Horace, a very plain boy. But fortunately he is scientific, and promises to be a shining light in the medical daisy's diary seven years after. 115 profession; at least that is what Ids father and mother say of him. He has made a profound study of sanitation, and he can hardly talk to any one five minutes without mentioning sewer gas. He is always altering the lighting or the drainage or the ventilation in Harley Street, and his father complains that his experiments double the rent. Horace was eighteen when my father died, and while I was at YVestgate with my cousins and the two governesses he used to come down on a Saturday and stop till Monday, and I must own to my diary, which is a kind of lion's mouth into which I can drop any accusatious I like, that he gave himself great airs to his sisters and the governesses, and was altogether very disagreeable. Those summer weeks at YVestgate were the unhappiest period of my life. I look back at them now I am grown up and wonder that I ever lived through them, liy cousins were kind to me in a condescending way, as was natural from big girls to a little girl, and the governesses were very sorry for me, and tried to comfort me ; 116 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. but there was no comfort for me on the face of the earth without my mother ; and night after night I dreamt of my dead father, and woke to the agony of knowing that I should never see his beloved face or hear his dear voice again, except in dreams. I think grown-up people forget how keenly they grieved and suffered when they were children, and that they never quite understand a child's grief. I know that when either of the governesses tried to console me she always made me just a little more miser- able than I was before she took me on her lap and talked to me about Heaven and my father. I heard by accident, as I was not intended to hear it, that my mother was very ill, dangerously ill; and I was so unhappy about her that after entreating again and again with passionate tears to be taken to her, I made up my mind to walk to London and from London to River Lawn. I had looked at the map of England sometimes when my cousins had their atlases out, and I knew that to reach Lamford I must go through London. I lay awake all night thinking of how daisy's diary seven years after. 117 I was to get away when the governesses and the maids were engaged, and when I might creep out of the house without being seen. I believe I should have really started on this journey, but for the arrival of my Uncle Ambrose, who came upon me suddenly on the day after I had heard of my mother's illness, and who found me sitting crying alone on the sands. His was the first voice that brought me com- fort ; it was upon his breast that I sobbed out my grief, until the burden seemed lightened somehow. He told me that my mother was out of danger now, and that she would soon get well, or at least well enough for me to go home and be with her again, and he said I must try and be a comfort and a consolation to her in the days to come. I told him I was afraid my mother had left off loving me since father's death. She had not seemed to mind my going away, while I was heart-broken at leaving her. And then he tried to make me understand how in a great grief like my mother's all things seem blotted out, 118 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. except that one overwhelming loss. He told Hie that a dark curtain had fallen over my mother's mind ; and that I should find her changed from the happy woman I had known in the happy clays that were gone. "But the curtain will be lifted hy-and-by, Daisy," he said, " and you will see your mother's joyous nature return to her. No grief lasts for ever. A year is a long time even for a great sorrow ; and in a year your mother will begin to forget." He meant this for consolation, but my tears broke out afresh at the thought that my father would be forgotten. " I shall never forget him," I said. "No, my darling, he will live in your memory and your mother's, but your memory of him will be sad and sweet, instead of bitter and cruel. He will have taken his natural place in the past, and his shadow will not darken the present as it does now." "Let me go home soon," I said, clinging to him, when he was leaving Westgate later in daisy's diary seven years after. 119 the afternoon. " Pray, pray, pray let it be soon." " As soon as ever your mother is well enough to see you, darling," he promised. I had always been fond of him. He had always had the next place in my heart after my father and mother, but he seemed nearer to me than ever after that day, and he has never lost the place that he took then, or the influence that he had over me then in my desolation. I spent three more weary weeks at "YVestgate after this. Aunt Talbot was with a fashionable party in the Highlands, Uncle Talbot was part of his time in Harley Street and part of his time rushing about England and Scotland by express trains to see his most distinguished patients. I used to hear my cousins talk of the places he went to and the people he went to see — great people, all of them. He had the life and sanity of Cabinet Ministers and Bishops in his special custody, and he made them obey his most severe orders in fear and trembling. I used to sit and listen idly in my wretched, 120 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. low-spirited state while my cousins and the governesses chattered about aunt's gowDs and uncle's patients, and I remembered as children remember things in which they take no interest. At last the happy day came for my going home, and here came Uncle Ambrose to fetch me. " How good it is of you to come so far ! " I told him. " You must have other things to do besides coming to fetch me." " There is no other thing in this world that comes before my duty to my little pupil and her mother," he answered, in his low sympathetic voice. We went off to the station in an open fly together. I'm sure my lively cousins must have been very glad to get rid of a crying child that used to mope in corners and sit at meals with a melancholy face ; but they couldn't be gladder to part with me than I was to go away. I had tried to take interest in their lessons when the German governess urged me to employ my mind, but their lessons seemed so dull and difficult compared with Uncle Ambrose's way of teaching daisy's diary seven years after. 121 me. The Fraulein was always grinding at gram- mar — while, except so far as learning my French verbs, I hardly knew what grammar meant ; but, without vanity, it is only fair to Uncle Ambrose to say that at ten years old I knew a great deal more about the history of the world and the people who had lived in it than my Cousin Dora, who was eighteen. And even in those days I knew something about the great poets of the world, of whom Dora and her sisters knew nothing; for Uncle Ambrose had told me all about Dante, and his wonderful history of hell and heaven ; and about Goethe, and his Faust ; and he had read Milton's story of Adam and Eve and the fallen Angel who tempted them, and Shakespeare's " Tempest," and " As You Like it,*' and "Midsummer Night's Dream" aloud to me, to familiarize my ear and my mind with poetry, while I was still a child, he said. I had to thank his kindness for all 1 knew ? and for being a better companion to my mother than I could have been if I had had a Fraulein and a Mademoiselle to teach me. 122 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. When we were sitting in the railway carriage, and the sun was shining full upon Uncle Ambrose's face, I noticed for the first time that there was a great change in him since the summer. I had been too excited and busy to take notice of it before ; but I saw now that he had grown thin and paler, and that he looked older and very ill. I put my arms round him, and kissed him as I used to do in the dear old days. " Poor Uncle Ambrose," I said, " how sorry you must have been ! I love you better than ever, dear, because you are so sorry for us." His head was leaning forward on his breast, and he gave one great sob. That was his only answer. How distinctly I remember that journey, through the clear September light, by great yellow corn-fields, and the blue bright sea, and then hop-gardens, and orchards full of fruit, and then houses, and houses, and houses, and then at last the air grew dull and thick, and the sun seemed dea r l, and this was London ! Uncle Ambrose was silent and thoughtful all through the journey, which seemed so long— oh, daisy's diary seven YEARS AFTER. 1'2o so long, as if it would never come to an end and bring me to mother and home ! I have been to the Highlands since then, and to the Biviera, but those journeys were with mother, and they did not seem half so long as the journey from West- gate to London, and across London to Paddington, and from Paddington to the little station at Lam- ford, where we waited for father that evening — for father who was never, never, never coming home to us again. At the sight of the station, and the station- master's garden — which was all of a blaze with dahlias and hollyhocks now, where the sweet peas had been blooming — I burst into tears. They were the first I had shed since I left YYestgate ; but the sight of the garden brought back the memory of that evening when I walked up and down with mother, and when we were both so gay and happy, talking of father, and of what he would say and how he would look when we saw his face at the carriage window. I have but to shut my eyes,, even now, after seven years have changed me from a child to 124 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. almost a woman, and I can see the station lying all among the meadows by the river side, and I can see my father's face as I expected to see it, smiling at us as the train came in — dear, well- remembered face which I was never to see again upon this, earth. There was a carriage at the station to take us home, but mother wasn't in the carriage. When he saw my disappointment, Uncle Ambrose told me that she was still an invalid, and had not gone beyond the garden since her illness. " You will have to comfort and cheer her with your loving little ways, Daisy," he said ; " but you will have to be very quiet and very gentle. It is not long since she could hardly bear the sound of any one's voice. You will find her sadly changed." " More changed than you are ? " I asked. " Much more. Think how much more trouble she has gone through than I have had to bear." "But you look as if you couldn't have been more sorry," I said, for indeed I had never seen daisy's diary seven years after. 125 such sadness in any face as I had seen in his that day. ***** Mother was lying on a sofa by the drawing- room fire — the eveninjs were beginning: to be chilly, and she was an invalid — wrapped in a large white China crape shawl, one of father's gifts, which I remembered ever since I could remember anything. There was a middle-aged woman in the room, neatly dressed in black, with a white cap and apron, whom I afterwards knew as one of mother's nurses. She had had two nurses all through her illness, one for the day and the other for the night ; for there had been one dreadful time when it was thought that she mi^ht try to kill herself if she were left alone. Yes, she was changed, more changed than Uncle Ambrose. She was wasted to a shadow, and there was no colour in her face. Even her lips were white. Her beautiful hair, which father had been so proud of, had all been cut off, and she wore a little lace cap, which covered her close- 126 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. cropped head, and was tied under her chin. Her poor hands were almost transparent. She gathered me up in her arms, and she kissed and cried over me, and I thought even then that it did her good to have her little daughter back again. She told me years afterwards that those tears were the first that had brought any sense of relief with them. She lifted me into a corner of her sofa, weak as she was, and she kept me there till my bedtime. She had my supper laid upon a little table by the sofa, and she fed me and cared for me with her own feeble hands, in spite of all the nurse could say, and from that night I was with her always. "You don't know what it is to me to have my little girl again," she said to the nurse; " you don't know what it is to feel this frozen heart beginning to melt, and to know that there is something left in this world that I can love." She said almost the same words to Uncle Ambrose next day when he came over to River Lawn soon after breakfast, to give me my morning daisy's diary sevex years after. 127 lessons, and I thought he looked more and more sorry as he stood listening to her, with his hand upon the little pile of books which he had brought over from the cottage. He answered mother with a smile a minute afterwards. " Yes, it is a blessed thing to know we can love and be beloved," he said. AEother told me afterwards that there was a reason for his sympathizing with her in her sorrow more than any other friend. He, too, had lost his nearest and dearest, his good and devoted young wife, after a brief illness, almost as suddenly as her loss had come upon her. He, too, was alone in the world, but for an only child, his son, of whom he was doubtless very fond. But, mother added, there were times when she fancied that he was fonder of me than of his own son. ***** Our lives went on very quietly after that day, and from that day I was mother's only companion. We have never been parted since my desolate days at Westgate, and we have lived almost out 128 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. of the world. Mother says that next year when I shall be eighteen she will have to go into society for my sake, and that she will not be able always to go on refusing invitations to garden and tennis parties all along the river banks from Mario w to Beading. It will be only right for me to see a little more of the world, mother says, and to mix with girls of my own age. I suppose I shall like it when the time comes, but I have no longing for parties, or dances, or fine clothes, and my cousins in Harley Street say I am the oddest girl they ever met with, but that it is no wonder I am odd considering the eccentric manner in which I have been educated. I have been so happy, so happy with mother in all these years, so fond of our pretty house, which grows prettier every year under mother's care, and our gardens, which are looked upon as model gardens by all the neighbourhood. People come and ask to see them, as a great favour; which is rather hard upon mother and me who love seclusion. For seven years Uncle Ambrose has gone steadily on with my education, never missing a day, except when some slight illness has made either him or me unfit for work. As punctually as the clock strikes ten he appears at the little garden gate nearest his cottage. If the weather is warm we sit in the summer-house, or under the great willow, which grows and grows and. grows, as if it were a magic tree. If it is not summery enough for sitting out-of-doors, we work in the morning-room upstairs. Yes, we Lave been happy together, mother and I, but we have never forgotten father ; we never have come to think less of our great loss. Sad- dest thoughts have mixed with our happiest hours. We never have forgotten him ; we never can forget him. Many women as beau- tiful and as young-looking as my mother would have married again within two or three years of a first husband's death ; but she has never given a thought to any other man than him, and she never will. Once I ventured to ask her if father was her first love ; if she had never cared ever so little for any other lover ; and she VOL. I. K 130 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. told me that he was the first who had ever spoken to her of love. She was only eighteen when she married ; she was only nineteen when I was born. She and my father fell in love with each other at first sight — like a Prince and Princess in a fairy tale. ( 131 ) CHAPTER VI. daisy's diaey. I sometimes think mother hardly makes enough of Uncle Ambrose or of his goodness to me. I know she is grateful to him, and proud of my progress, which is all his work. But now and then it seems to me that she keeps him too much at a distance, instead of treating him as if he were her brother and really my uncle. She very seldom comes into the morning-room while I am at my studies there, and there are many days when he leaves the house at one o'clock without having seen her. Once in a way she asks him to stop to lunch, and when she does I can see his pale, fair face light up suddenly with a flush of pleasure, and he is full of life and talk at luncheon, he who is generally so calm and placid, like deep water; 132 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. and after lunch he lingers and lingers in the garden or in the drawing-room, till mother is obliged to ask him to stay to tea; and after tea he goes away slowly and reluctantly, linger- ing to the very last, lingering at the gate if it is fine weather, and mother and I go out with him to say good-bye. He is so fond of us both ! It is the little gate in the fence near his cottage at which we say good-bye to Uncle Ambrose — not the gate by which father went out that summer morning, never to come back to us again. That which was brought back nearly a week afterwards was not my father. That which lies under the grave that mother and I keep bright with flowers is not my father. We know that he is living still — somewhere. Living, or wait- ing in a placid sleep for the awakening to the new life. We know not how, we know not where; but we believe that he is living still, and that we shall see him again. As I grow older, and my education goes on, and absorbs more of my master's valuable time, daisy's diary. 133 I wonder all the more at the sacrifice which he makes and has been making so long for my sake. When I think that he is a man whose books are Yalued and praised by the greatest thinkers of his age, a man who might win dis- tinction in almost any walk of literature, I am amazed at his willingness to waste so great a part of his life upon my insignificance. It is all the more wonderful, perhaps, because, although when he came to live at Lamford he was a poor man, he is now a very rich man, a distant relation having died in America some years ago and left him a large fortune. I hardly know when the change in his cir- cumstances arose, he himself made so light of the matter. It was Cyril who told me one day that his father was rich. " Did you ever know such a man as my father," he said, "to go on living in that ugly old cottage when he might have a house in Park Lane and a country-seat into the bargain, if he liked ! " I asked if Uncle Ambrose was really very rich. 134 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. " Keally, and really, and really, I believe," answered Cyril, "though he has never con- descended to enter into particulars with me ; but a Yankee fellow at Oxford told me all about the man who left father his fortune, and it was a biggish pile — that's the Yankee's expression, mind you, not mine." Cyril is at Christchurch, Oxford. He spent his last long vacation in Sweden and Norway. He has promised me that he will spend the next long, or at any rate the earlier part of his time at Lamford, and that he will take me about in his boat, and that I shall help him with his classics. I'm afraid this is only idle compliment to me ; but Uncle Ambrose says I really might be of some use to Cyril in reading Horace and Virgil with him, and that I know both those poets better than many undergraduates. If I do I have to thank Uncle Ambrose for my knowledge, and most of all for teaching me to love Latin poetry instead of to hate Latin grammar. DAISY S DIARY. 100 Cyril is sometimes just a little inclined to find fault with his father for living in the small ugly house to which he came in his poverty ; but as he has a very liberal allowance, can go where he likes for his vacations, and is never denied anything by the most indulgent of fathers, he feels that he has no right to complain. " I'm so afraid that other fellows will take it into their heads that my father is a miser," he said one day, "when they find that I have no home to which I can invite them, and that my father mopes away his life in a cottage by the Thames. And the worst part of the business is that most fellows in the University know every yard of ground between Henley and Oxford, aod must know Lamford." I told him that a man could not be said to mope away his life when he had written two books which had been read and praised all over the civilized world. "Well, no doubt with some men the books count for something, and they put my father 136 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. down as an eccentric scholar, living his own retired life, for his own pleasure ; but you see there are more fools than sensible people in the world, and the fools must think my father is too fond of money to spend it like a gentle- man. I dare say they fancy that his wealth came to him too late in life, and that poverty's penurious habits had got burned into his very nature." " What does it matter what mistakes people of that kind may make about your father," I said. " We know that he is a gentleman in every act and thought of his life ; and that if he does not spend money upon things that please other people, it is only because he cares for higher things, which don't cost money or make a great show." " You are right there, Daisy," answered Cyril, "and there are some things he cares for which don't make a show, and do cost money — his books, for id stance. There are two or three thousand pounds sunk in his library — rare books, old books, new books, Oriental books, DAISYS DIAKY. 137 lining the walls of every room in the cottage. Upon my word, now, 1 can scarcely take my bath of a morning without splashing a tall copy of the Fathers; and yet I can't get him to make up his mind to build a house to hold his treasures. Perhaps when the last inch of wall- space is filled he will begin to think about a change of quarters." Cyril is not like his father. He takes after his mother's family, I am told. He has not his father's fair skin and blue eyes, or his father's pale and silky hair, or his father's high and thoughtful brow. His eyes are dark gray, his hair is dark brown, his features are smaller and sharper than his father's — a keen, clever face, I have heard people call it ; not the face of a thinker and dreamer like Uncle Ambrose. Some call Cyril handsome, and some do not. He has a very kind and bright expression, and is always very good to me. He is tall and straight and tremendously active, a first-rate oarsman, and, I am told, a good shot. He is very fond of Eadnorshire and his mother's 138 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. people, and I think he likes mother and me, though we do not see him very often. He laughs at my education, and says that father would have made me a blue-stocking if Nature had not insisted upon making me something else. I wonder what that something else is ? Father's grave is in the churchyard at the other end of the village — such a pretty, pictur- esque sleeping-place for the beloved dead! There is one corner of the churchyard which is separated from the river only by a strip of waste land covered with rushes, and by a low stone wall, clothed with mosses and lichens, gray, and gold, and green — a dear old wall, with fine small-leaved ivy creeping over it here and there, and with fairy-like spleenwort growing out of the interstices of the stone. Just in the angle of the wall nearest the river lies my father's grave, under the shadow of a great willow, like my tree on the lawn. It was because of that tree my mother chose the spot. daisy's diaey. 130 Father had always talked of the big weepiug- willow as Daisy's tree, and mother knew that he was fond of it for his little daughter's sake. So he lies under Daisy's tree, and his only monument is a low red granite cross, with his name and the date of his birth and death. No text, no verse; nothing to say how much he was beloved ; only a blank space for mother's name when she is laid beside him. All the rest is garden. Mother thinks the garden tells best of our love for him who lies there, because it is a changeful living thing, and not dead an 4 immutable, like letters carved in marble. Mother and I do all the work of this little garden with our own hands. .No one else is allowed to touch it, and the flowers change with every change of the seasons — from Christmas roses to the pure whiteness of the chrysanthemums in the late autumn ; and our garden is always lovely, and full of freshness and perfume. Fair weather or foul, one of us goes there every day. We never miss a day while we are at Lamford. When we are away the garden is left to itself; and when 140 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. we come back we have to make up for an interval of neglect. We had rather there should be neglect and decay for a little while than that hireling hands should cultivate father's garden. That corner by the river is very lonely, the most remote from the church and the vicarage, and the path by which people go to church. I have sat there for hours and no one has ever come near me ; though I have heard the boats going by, and people talking as they rowed past the little rushy waste outside the wall. Nobody can see me from the river when I am sitting there, for father's tree makes a great green tent, just as my tree does on the lawn at home. Sometimes I hold the soft, drooping greenery apart and peep out at the boats going by in the sunlight, while I sit in cool shadow. Many and many an afternoon have I spent here with my books and my Scotch deerhound, Koderick Dhu, more solitary, more secure from interruption than if I had been at home, where any one of the few friends with whom we are intimate might drop in upon me. In the church- daisy's diary. 141 yard I have my life all to myself, to read or to think, and I prophesy that a great deal of this diary will be scribbled on the grassy bank under the low wall by my father's grave. There is a little hollow nook all among the ivy and bramble and fern, which is my own particular seat, and I can study there better than anywhere else. One day Beatrice Eeardon came and found me out in my nook, came sailing up to me in her bouncing, noisy way, flourishing her racket. " So I've found you at last, D," she said. She is one of those girls who can never call anything by its right name, and she frequently calls me D. " Simeon told me you were out for the whole afternoon, but I thought I should unearth you. Come and make up a set." " Now you have found me, perhaps you'll be kind enough to lose me again," I answered. " I should have thought that even you would under- stand that when I come to sit by my father's grave I like to be alone, and I don't like tennis rackets." I don't often lose my temper, but I do think 142 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. Beatrice Keardon — though no doubt she means well — is a girl who would have exasperated Job. There are times when I feel that a continuance of Beatrice's society would be worse than boils. "You're a morbid, disagreeable little D," she said, "and you'll find out your mistake before you're thirty; for by that time your moping, solitary, cross-grained ways will make you look forty, and then you'll be sorry." She marched off with her racket on her shoulder, singing " Gather your roses while ye may," in her loud mezzo-soprano voice, the voice of Lamford and two villages beyond, and I am happy to say she never invaded my peaceful corner again. Here I read the sixth book of the Eneid, and here I read Dante, until I felt as if I were more familiar with the world of shadows than the world of realities. Here I learnt those odes which Uncle Ambrose chose for me in my little Horace, and my favourite bits from the Georgics, and my favourite Eclogues. Here I read Milton and Shakespeare. The spot is full of lovely images and haunting fancies. daisy's diaey. 143 We have very few friends, though mother is obliged to be civil to a good many acquaintances scattered about the happy river, between Henley Bridge and Caversham Weir. She visits very little — only in the quietest way at the houses of her oldest friends, the people she knew best in my father's time. The only families of whom we see much are the Hector's and the Doctor's, for mother's charities bring her in contact with both, and as there are girls in both families I have been invited very often to play tennis or to join in water picnics, or any other homely festivities. I have never gone to parties at either house since I was a child, and the girls laugh at me for my solitary bringing-up : but mother and I have been too happy in our own quiet way for me to think that I lose much in staying away from the Keardon's birthday dances and hobbledehoy parties out of doors and in. Not a hundred miles from Lamford there is a big red house by the river, called Templemead, which once belonged to a noble family, and which is now occupied by Mr. Copeland, who coaches 144 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. young men for the Army. Some of the young men are the sons of noble families, and many of them are rich, and I'm afraid I must say that most of them behave badly. The Rector says animals spirits, I say bad manners. The Rector says that as I have never had a brother I don't understand young men's ways; and certainly, judging by" Cyril's account of the goings on at Christchurch, young men must be extraordinary creatures, with the oddest ideas of pleasure. Cyril says that if Mr. Reardon had not three daughters to marry he would not be quite so charitable in his opinion of Mr. Copeland's young men ; but I don't think our dear old Rector is a contriving sort of person ; and I don't think one ought to be too hard upon Mrs. Reardon for giving so many tennis parties, and Cinderella dances, and blind-man's-buff parties, and water picnics; for three daughters to marry must mean hard work for any mother. Mrs. Tysoe, the doctor's wife, has two sons and only one daughter ; so there is not nearly so much excuse for her; and I must say she does daisy's diary. 14?5 make rather too much of those unmannerly hobbledehoys from Templemead; nor can I con- ceal from my dear Diary that Laura Tysoe's con- versation would be more entertaining if it were not all about Mr. Copeland's young men. I am afraid my Diary is going to develop all the worst propensities in my nature — above all, the propensity for thinking too much of myself and looking down upon other people. A Diary is such a safe confidante ; and it is such a comfort to know one can say just what one likes without any fear of having one's silly babble babbled about and made sillier by one's dearest friend. So, dear Diary, I mean to scribble just what I like in your nice, smooth, white pages : and when my foolishness has all run off in pen and ink, I have only to turn the key in your neat little brass lever lock, and my secrets are as safe as if they were shut up in the heart of the biggest pyramid. VOL. I. 146 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. CHAPTEK VII. SHE ANSWERED, " STAY." Seven years ! Kobert Hatrell had been lying in bis grave seven years and a day, and Am- brose Arden was slowly pacing the river-terrace which the dead man planned in the pride of his heart while his murderer was lying in wait for him somewhere in the big city yonder, far away to the east, where the bright blue sky changed to a dull and heavy grey. Ambrose Arden and Clara Hatrell were walking side by side upon the broad, gravel terrace between two rows of cypresses; she with a slow and listless step; he suiting his pace to hers, but by no means list- less, intent rather, watching every change in the pensive face, every shade upon the fair forehead. Seven years and a day had he been lying in his grave — seven years and seven days had gone SHE ANSWERED, "STAY." 147 by since he was found stark and cold, in a " two pair back " bedroom in a shabby lodging- house near St. Giles's Church, a wonder and a mystery to all England. For seven years his widow had mourned him, missing him and regretting him every day of her life — albeit calmly content in her quiet lot with the daugh- ter she adored — brooding over the tragedy of his death, brooding over the cruel destiny which had sundered so perfect a union. Her sorrow was in no wise diminished by the years that had come and gone — her memory of the beloved dead was no less vivid than it was before the first flowers had bloomed upon hi> grave. He was still in her mind the one loved and lovable of men — her first and her only lover. Time had brought calmness and resignation ; but Time had not weakened love. Ambrose Arclen, walking by her side in the sultry stillness of the July afternoon, knew her heart almost as well as she knew it herself. Seven years had made little alteration exter- nally in Robert Hatrell's widow, or in Robert 148 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. Hatred's friend. At six and thirty Clara Hatrell was still a beautiful woman, so much the lovelier, perhaps in her calm maturity for the seclusion and repose of her widowhood. The cares and excitements of the woman of society had not written premature wrinkles on the broad white brow. The disappointments and vexations of the fashionable world had not drawn down the corners of the mobile mouth or pinched the perfect oval of the cheek. Ambrose Arden was exactly the man he had been seven years before — fair complexioned, dreamy-eyed, with the scholar's bent shoulders and with the scholar's measured accents. A remarkable-looking man always, and a fine- looking man in spite of those stooping shoulders and the slow meditative walk ; a man to attract the admiration and the love of women, as being different from his fellow men, and with some- thing of that power which women call magnetic in his thoughtful eyes — so blue, so clear, with the colour and transparence of childhood, yet with such an unfathomable depth of thought. SHE ANSWEKED, "STAY." 149 Seven years, and in all that length of months and weeks and days he had been this woman's slave; and she knew it not. Day and night waking or sleeping, near or far, he had adored her; and she knew it not. Seven years since her husband's death, and how many years before ? Only since the hour he first looked upon her, when it had been to him as if the heart within him, a strong and passionate heart — whose forces he had never known till that moment — leaped suddenly into life and linked his fate wkh hers for ever. He had married a fair young wife, and he had been a good and tender husband. He had truly and tenderly mourned the early dead. But till he met Clara Hatrell he knew not what passion meant. He knew not, and could never hope to know, what it was that made this woman different from all other women upon earth, the one supreme mistress of his life, whom to serve w r as destiny, whom to love was a necessity of his being. And so for seven years and more before her 150 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. husband's death, and for seven years after, he had been her idolator and slave ; she nothing knowing — accepting his quiet attentions as calmly as she took a basket of hothouse flowers from her gardener, asking no questions of her own heart or of his, thinking of him only as an amiable eccentric, who lived at her gates because » it was his fancy so to live, who gave one-third of his life to the tuition of her child, because it was his whim so to waste himself. Her kindnesses to him had been of the slightest, for in her widowed loneliness it had behoved her to keep even so old a friend some- what aloof, lest the little world of Lamford should begin to have ideas and speculations about her and her daughter's teacher. She had kept her life completely apart from the life of pupil and master, and had on rarest occasions offered hospitality to the man to whom she owed so much. To his son she had been more frankly kind, treating him almost as a son of the house, and letting him feel that he was always welcome. Even to Cyril's college friends her house had SHE ANSWERED, " STAY." 151 been open, and he had in no wise stretched his privileges; though there were occasions upon which he was glad to take a boating friend to Eiver Lawn rather than to his own cottage home, with its shabby furniture, and atmosphere of over-much learning. Thus had he worshipped her, faithfully and silently, for fourteen years, just the length of Jacob's servitude for Eachel ; and she was still afar off, cold as marble, unresponsive, uncon- scious of his love. It was a hard thins: to have been so patient, and to have waited so long, and to be no nearer the goal — to feel the golden years of manhood slipping away like those faded lilies yonder drifting with the current, flowers which some careless hand had plucked and flung away. It was hard. It was more difficult to be patient now when he felt the glory and strength of life beginning to wane. AY as he to be an old man before he dared ask for his guerdon — he who had done so much to win his beloved; who had sacrificed for her sake all that other men care for? 152 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. To-day his heart was throbbing with a new vehemence, and there was a fire in his thoughts that must needs burst into a blaze before long. Everything in life has its limits; even the patience of a man who loves as Ambrose Arden loved. "Daisy grows prettier, and more womanly every day," he said, after a contemplative silence of some minutes. " You must not waste her life as you have wasted your own — since your bereavement. I conclude that you intend to go into society next season, if only for her sake." "I have been thinking about it," Clara answered quietly, "and I suppose it must be so. Poor child, she has seen very little of the world, but we have been so happy together, so com- pletely united that I do not think my Daisy will ever regret her solitary girlhood. However, everything must come to an end," with a faint sigh, " so I have asked my sister Emily to look out for a furnished house at the West End, in Wilton Crescent, or somewhere about there, and if she can find one that Daisy and I like, I shall SHE ANSWERED, " STAY." 153 take it next January. Yon must come and see us in our new home," she added, smiling at him with her calm and friendly smile. " I should seem like a fish out of water among smart people." " You might feel bored by their frivolity, but the smart people would be very glad to know you. They must all have heard of your books." " Heard of them, yes : read them, no. I fancy there are not many smart people who care for the makers of books — only the intellectual few, the stars of the smart world, who have found time to cultivate their minds as well as to shine in society." "Cyril will come to us often, I hope," she said cordially. " I shall have to give parties, and I must have a day for callers. It will be all very dreadful." This time her sigh was deep and long. " Why dreadful ? " he asked. " You who are still young, still beautiful, and rich enough to indulge your caprices, are not a woman to shrink from society." 154 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. " Am I not ? Oh ! Mr. Arden, how can you be so short-sighted? Do you think it will be no ordeal to me to face strangers ? Do you forget that I am the widow of a man who was cruelly and mysteriously murdered, and whose murder set all England talking and wondering? I shrink with horror from the thought of going into society, knowing that people will whisper about me, and point me out to each other in every room I enter. But that isn't the worst! Daisy will hear. Daisy will be told the dreadful history we have kept hidden from her. Here people are kind and considerate, and they have respected her feelings — but in London it will be different." "True, she cannot be so fenced round and protected in society as she has been among your few intimate friends here," answered Arden, thoughtfully, " but seven years are a long time. Dynasties are forgotten within a lesser period. Look at France, for instance, and see how little trace is left of a fallen empire, and a suicidal war. Tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse. That SHE ANSWERED, "STAY." 155 tragedy which made so deep a mark in your life is forgotten by the world at large. I do not think you need fear any annoyance either for yourself or Daisy. But there is one way by which you could put a barrier between the present and the past, if you would but take that way." His pale face flushed as he drew nearer to her, his eyes lighted with a sudden fire as he laid his long white hand upon her shoulder, stopping her almost imperiously, looking down at her with a resoluteness that gave to his face something of the eagle look which belongs to conquering natures. " "What way ? " she faltered, perplexed by that sudden change in a familiar face. " Take my name instead of yours. Let Robert Hatrell's widow vanish in Ambrose Arden's wife. Clara, I cannot be eloquent where all I value on earth is at stake. I love you — I have loved you ever since — no, I dare not say how long. Only remember that I have never offended you by one whisper of my consuming love. I have waited, waited, waited, until it seems to 156 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. me that my life is like the children of Israel's pilgrimage through the desert — so long, so weary, so far from the Promised Land. Let me not be like their leader. Let me not die with the haven of my hope seen dimly in unattainable distance. I have been patient, have I not? I have never offended you, Clara." " Offended me? no! You have been a kind and devoted friend," she answered quickly, "but I never thought you wanted to be more than a friend. Nothing was further from my thoughts — nothing," she went on, in an embarrassed manner; and then, with a sudden transition to warmest feeling, she exclaimed, " You know how I loved him. You know how dear his image is to me. It would be treason to care for any one else. It would be cowardice to take another name. I am the widow of Robert Hatrell, of him whom some devil murdered. Marry again ! Call myself by another name ! Why, to be true to the past I ought to give up all my future life to one continuous endeavour to bring his murderer to justice." SHE ANSWERED, "STAY." 157 " ITy dearest, in plays and in novels murderers are brought to the scaffold by devoted women like you, after any interval the novelist or drama- tist may find convenient, but in real life there is only one kind of machinery that works, and that is the much abused police. 'When the police, stimulated by the offer of a large reward, cannot find a criminal within seven years from the date of the crime, you may be sure the criminal is safe. The odds are that the murderer who is not caught within a week has saved his neck. In the case of my lamented friend the assassin was a man of peculiar audacity — prompt, resolute, unflinching, and there is strong reason to believe that the murder in Denmark Street was not his first crime." " Not his first ? " cried Clara Hatrell, with a sudden vehemence which startled her lover. " Then it will not be his last crime ; and he will be caught sooner or later, like the man in Vienna the other day." The man in Vienna was a professional murderer who had been trapped like a wild beast after a 158 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. series of crimes. When trapped, condemned, and assured that his case was hopeless, he made a full confession of his guilty deeds, gloating over the revolting details, proud of having struck horror to the hearts of his fellow-men. "He will be caught some day," said Clara Hatrell, "just as that Austrian was caught, red- handed, and he will confess his catalogue of crimes." The scholar was silent for a few moments, and then answered quietly. " Such cases as those are rare ; but, as you say, the murderer may confess some day. Clara, it is time you drew a veil over that dark and cruel past ; it is time you took pity on the man who loves you. Oh, my beloved, I have no words to tell my love. I have given you years of my life where other men give words. I have waited seven years; and now I feel that I have spoken too soon." There was a marble bench near the spot where they were standing — an antique seat which had been brought from Kome to adorn Mrs. Hatrell's SHE ANSWERED, "STAY." 159 garden. Ambrose Arden staggered a few paces forward and flung himself upon this bench, and there, with his face hidden in his hands, sobbed out his passion, with sobs which shook his power- ful frame, and swelled the veins upon his clasped hands. That agony of grief touched Clara Hatrell with sudden pity. He had been so good and true ; and it was love, devoted love for her which had chained him to the dull monotony of a life that was a puzzle to the people who knew his talent and his means. It was for her he had sacrificed himself, for her sake he had educated her child as never child was educated before. And he had been her husband's trusted friend and adviser; her husband's better sense. What more faithful friend, what wiser counsellor and guide could she choose for herself in the laby- rinth of life ? What should she say to him ? Was she to bid him wait and hope, or to tell him plainly that she could never be his wife? She had vowed no vow to remain single all her life ; for it had 160 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. seemed to her in her fond regret that a second marriage for her was of all things upon this earth the least possible. There had been no spoken promise to her child ; but Daisy had taken it for granted that her mother would be constant to the dead, until death reunited the broken bond, until she should lie down by his side, his true wife in the grave. Pity and gratitude moved her profoundly at sight of Ambrose Arden's agony. He fought against his weakness, as a strong man fights his foe, until those convulsive sobs came at longer intervals, and the powerful shoulders ceased to heave. At last, with a final struggle, he dashed the tears from his eyes, rose from the bench, and stood before her, calm and still, but disfigured by the vermillion stain upon his eyelids and the deathly pallor of cheek and lip. " Forgive me for having made a fool of my- self, Mrs. Hatrell," he said huskily; "I ought to have known better. I ought not to have trusted myself to speak. How you must despise me!" SHE ANSWERED, "STAY." 161 She held out her hand to him, with a gentle seriousness. "Despise you?" she repeated gently. "Can you think me so base as not to be grateful for your patient friendship, and for your love ? But you should not have spoken to me of love. You should remember that my heart is buried in my husband's grave — yet believe, at least, that I am not ungrateful. Let us be friends as we have been in the quiet years that have come and gone since his untimely death." " No, no, Clara — that passive bliss — that para- dise of the dead — is over. Friendship is too thin a mask for passion. I could not go on acting my part — after to-day. It must be all or nothing." She hung her head, and the slow tears rolled down her cheeks. She did not love him, but she felt herself bound to him by a friendship that ought to be lifelong, and her heart brimmed over with womanly compassion. "It must be all or nothing, Clara," he re- peated, still holding the hand that she had given him in assurance of friendship. "I must leave VOL. i. m 162 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. you at once and for ever, or stay with the hope of winning you." " Stay," she answered gently. ***** He dined at Kiver Lawn that evening for the first time since Kobert HatrelPs death, a cosy little party of three, his pupil pleased to have his company, and full of affectionate attentions to him all through the repast, complaining of his want of appetite, his indifference to certain dishes which Cyril liked, and which were really worthy of his notice. They dined in one of the old cottage rooms, a room with a low ceiling, an old- fashioned dado and chimneypiece, and a bow window, the best parlour of the original building. The dining-room had been very little used during Clara's widowhood. They took their coffee in the verandah, in front of the drawing-room, enjoying the beauty of the night and the newly risen moon. "Shall I play you a little Mozart?" asked Daisy ; and without waiting for an answer she left them and seated herself at the grand piano, from SHE AXSWEBED, "STAY." 163 whence she could see them dimly, as they sat in the shadow of the clematis and magnolia which overhung the verandah. She was not a brilliant pianiste, having given only her leisure hours to music ; but she played with delicacy and expression, and as she had been content to devote herself for the most part to one composer, she had learnt to interpret his compositions with feeling and understanding. " Mozart is enough for one lifetime," she said, when her cousins ridiculed her limited repertoire, being taught by a master who discovered a new Sclavonic composer every quarter. " I " never hope to play as well as he ought to be played if I go on working all the days of my life." The clever fingers flew over the keys in the light and airy Fisher variations. The round white wrist moved with easy grace in the passages for crossed hands, the player looking straight before her all the time at those two motionless figures between the lamplight and the moon. How earnestly he bent over her mother as he talked ! how still her mother sat, with slightly 164 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. drooping head! and how odd that on this one day in seven years her mother should ask him to dinner, and allow him to spend the evening in a long tete-a-tete ! She had kept him at such a distance hitherto that any departure from the old habit seemed strange. ***** It was Daisy's custom to spend half an hour or so in her mother's room before going to bed. These two, who lived together always, had so much to say to each other that the day seemed insufficient for confidential talk, and if the girl happened to be deprived of her nightly tete-a-tete she would complain that she saw nothing of her mother, and was altogether hardly used. On this particular evening, after Mr. Arden had wished them good night and strolled across to his cottage on the other side of the lane, the mother and daughter walked up and down the terrace two or three times in the moonlight before going indoors for good; and then the doors were shut andl locked, and the lamps were put out, the River Lawn sank into darkness, SHE ANSWERED, "STAY." 165 except for five lighted windows on the first floor. Three of these windows, which opened on a wide balcony, belonged to Mrs. Hatrell's bedroom and boudoir, the other two were Daisy's, and the lamplight shone through artistic terra-cotta muslin curtains which the girl had draped with her own hands. The boudoir was one of the prettiest rooms in the house. It had been planned and furnished by Eobert Hatrell as an offering to the wife he admired, and both Clara and her daughter loved it all the more for the sake of the love that had presided over its crea- tion. Here, in the subdued light of a shaded lamp, Clara sank somewhat wearily into a deep armchair, and sat silent, while Daisy moved about the room, looking at the water-colour studies on the wall — a Surrey lane by Birkett Foster, a girlish head by Dobson, a street corner in Venice by Clara Montalba — or, lightly touch- ing the books, the Dresden china boxes, and Indian bronzes on the tables, in idle restlessness. " You look tired to-night, mother dear," she said presently, watchful of her mother's troubled face. 166 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. " Yes, dear, I am very tired." "And yet you have not been beyond the gardens to-day. It must be the heat that tired you. I was so glad you asked Uncle Ambrose to dinner, for once in a way. You are not very hospitable to him, you know. He does not get much attention from you in return for all his goodness to me." "You know I am grateful to him, Daisy; but you and I living alone together can hardly be expected to entertain gentlemen." " Why, mother, you surely don't suppose that people would talk if he were to dine here every day. What a strange idea! Uncle Ambrose. A confirmed old bachelor." " People are more ready to talk than you would ever suppose, Daisy. Mr. Arden is not an old man." "Not in years, but he is old in thoughts and habits. He is not like other men." "No, he is not like other men. He has deeper feelings than most men. Come here, darling, and be quiet if you can. You make me SHE ANSWERED, "STAY." 167 nervous while you are moving about and touch- ing things." "I will be a very mouse for tranquillity, mother dear," cried the girl, sinking into a half- sitting, half-kneeling position at her mother's feet. The mother caressed the dark brown hair, tenderly touched the broad forehead, above hazel eyes that were like her own — eyes that looked woncleringly at her, seeing an unwonted trouble in her face. "Daisy, would it distress you if — if — in time to come I were to marry again ? " "Distress me? Xo, mother. It would be only natural that you should marry again — you who are so handsome and so young-looking — if you could meet any one good enough for you. No, I am not such a selfish, ungrateful daughter as to be distressed at any change which would make your life happy. I should be jealous — no doubt, horribly jealous, after having had you all to myself — and I should hate the man. I hate him already in anticipation, without know- 168 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. ing what he is like or where he is coming from, or when he will come. But don't be frightened, dearest, for your sake I should do my best to behave admirably, and I would try and school myself to tolerate the " She screwed up her lips as if some abusive epithet were on the point of utterance, and ended in a loud, clear voice with the monosyllable " Man ! " " But what if it were some one you like already — some one you love, Daisy ? " " Some one I love — a man ! Why, that could be only one man in the world — Uncle Ambrose," exclaimed Daisy, gazing at her mother with widely opened eyes, surprised and half in- credulous. " It is Mr. Arden who urges me to marry him. No thought of a second marriage would ever have entered my head but for him." " Uncle Ambrose ! What an absurd idea ! " said Daisy, slowly. " Uncle Ambrose!" — lingering over the name. "Uncle Ambrose in love, like a young man ! It seems almost ridiculous." " Girls of seventeen think that hearts are cold SHE ANSWERED, "STAY." 169 and numbed with age at forty," said Clara Hatrell; "but it is not always so. There are attachments that outlast youth." "Yes, mother dear, I can quite understand that, and if it had been the colonel of a cavalry regiment — a fine, handsome man who had dis- tinguished himself in India, with an iron-grey moustache — or a politician, a man of the world — I shouldn't have been a bit surprised to hear that he was madly in love with you. But Uncle Ambrose ! A man who only lives to read books that other people don't read, and brood over questions that other people don't under- stand ! I could never imagine such a man as that in love. He has talked to me of his wife, and of his grief when he lost her; but I could hear in his placid way of talking that he had never been in love with her — not as Kochester was in love with Jane, or Eavenswood with Lucy," concluded Daisy, whose examples and pictures of life were all taken from her favourite novels. u Well, Daisy, I was of your opinion yesterday, and I, too, thought Mr. Arden incapable of a 170 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. romantic attachment ; but now lie has shown me his heart — such an unselfish, devoted heart — a heart which beats only for you and Cyril and me. He is not happy, Daisy dear. His lonely life is killing him, though people think he is a recluse by choice. He longs for a fuller life — for a home. He asked me to marry him, after waiting seven years to prove his fidelity to me, and his respect for the friend he lost in my dear husband. If 1 refuse we shall see him no more — you will lose your kind master." " And if you say * yes ' he will live with us always," exclaimed Daisy. " I have often thought you unkind for turning him out of the house when he evidently longed to stay. I have even thought you ungrateful; but it would be very grateful of you to marry him." " You talk as if you would like me to marry him, Daisy. Would you really ? " "Yes, I really would, for his sake, because I think he deserves a good deal more attention than you have ever shown him. Only there is one thing " SHE ANSWERED, " STAY." 171 "What is that, pet?" " I could never call him father. I could never speak the word I spoke at the gate that fatal morning when my own dear father bade us good-bye. He would be Uncle Ambrose to the end." There was a silence, during which the mother sat with downcast eyelids and thoughtful brow ; perplexed, uncertain, wavering between two opinions ; and then Daisy began again with a startling suddenness. " You would be Cyril's mother, and I should be his sister. It would be very nice to have such a clever brother." Another silence; another sudden burst of speech from Daisy. " There is one question I have not asked you," she said impressively. u Do you love him ? "I answered that question in advance,, Daisy, a year ago, when we were talking together on this spot, just as we are talking to-night. I told you then that your father was my first love, and that he would be my last. That is as true now 172 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. as it was a year ago ; it will be true to the end of my life." " Poor Uncle Ambrose ! " sighed Daisy. " I have always pitied a man who marries a widow. You know what Guy Darrell says in ' What Will He Do With It?' ' Nothing so insipid as a heart warmed up.' And yet that very Guy Darrell marries a widow, after all. Poor Uncle Ambrose! But you don't dislike him, do you, mother ? " "Dislike him? No. He is the one man I would choose for a friend and counsellor. I respect and admire him for his fine character — so free from unworthy ambitions, so single- minded — and for his intellect. There is no one I would sooner have as my friend and companion — no one whom I would rather obey." "In those things where women do obey their husbands," said Daisy, making a wry face. "I am not over fond of that word ' obedience ; ' and I hope, if ever I marry, my husband will not have the bad taste to pronounce it in my hearing. Dear, dearest one," with a sudden change to SHE ANSWERED, "STAY." 173 earnestness, "there are tears streaming down your cheeks. Are you unhappy, mother ? " "No, love, only troubled and undecided. I want to act for the best." "Then I really think you ought to marry Uncle Ambrose. He is so devoted to us both, and he knows so much ; and it will be very nice to have him and Cyril by our fireside on a winter evening." Mother and daughter kissed with tears, and Daisy sobbed out her emotions on her mother's breast ; and the end of this confidential talk was Clara Hatrell's promise to marry the man who adored her. 174 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. CHAPTEK VIII. i DAISY'S HONEYMOON DIARY. How strange life is'! The change that has come in my life came so suddenly that I fancied I should never be accustomed to the new state of things ; yet after a little more than a month I feel as if Uncle Ambrose had lived with us for years, and as if I had always been one of a united family of four instead of the other half of my mother's soul. In my thoughts of her I have always called her what Horace called Virgil — Animse dimidium mem. Have I lost her now that she is Ambrose Arden's wife ; or rather, how much of her love and her sweet companionship have I lost ? Naturally there is a loss. I cannot be to her quite what I was before she gave herself to a daisy's honeymoon diary. 175 husband who worships her, who seems jealous of every thought and every moment she gives to any one but himself. We can no longer live like Hermia and Helena, before Puck set them by the ears. We are no longer more like sisters than mother and daughter, as people used to say we were in the old days which begin to look so far away. No, it must be owned there is a loss, and a loss that I shall feel all my life ; but it is not so great a loss as to make me unhappy ; for I know my mother loves me as truly and fondly as ever, and that she would not part with me for anything in the world. I know that Uncle Ambrose thoroughly deserves her love, and that he is doing his utmost to win it. I know that to me he is a good and true friend, and that I am never tired of his society. I know that the atmosphere of love in which I have lived all my life has lost none of its warmth and brightness. I know I am a girl in a thousand for good fortune, and that I ought to be very grateful to Providence for all my blessings. As I have failed in all my attempts to write a 176 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. novel, I mean to make this journal the book of my life, and to put all of my thoughts and all my fancies into it. I shall describe things as vividly as ever I can ; so that when I am an old woman I can look back upon the history of my life, and find my youth still fresh and bright in these pages. Let me record the great event which has made so marked a change in my mother's life — her second marriage. It is a very curious sensation for a girl to stand by and see her mother married. It seemed to me almost as if time had gone back- wards, and mother were a girl again standing on the threshold of life. Uncle Ambrose was a most devoted lover, and would hardly let my mother out of his sight during their very short courtship. When mother accepted him I knew that a short engagement was very far from her thoughts. Gratitude pre- vailed with her, and rather than lose so valued a friend she consented to take him as a husband ; but when she gave that consent last July she daisy's honeymoon diary. 177 certainly had no idea of marrying him early in September. However, those serious and placid people are much more persistent than impetuous characters, like my beloved father, for instance ; and Uncle Ambrose contrived to talk my dear mother into an almost immediate marriage. Of course there was not the least reason why they should delay their wedding ; for as both are rich there could be no question of ways and means ; and as neither of them is young, it might seem a pity to lose time. Xor is mother the kind of person to waste six months upon the preparation of a trousseau. She is always charmingly dressed, though it is only within the last year or two that she has consented to wear anything but black; and her wardrobe is full of beautiful things — so it would be idle vanity to wait for a heap of new clothes to be made, and during that delay to lose the beauty of the autumn for her honeymoon tour. It was decided at the very first discussion of the honeymoon that I was to travel with them after the first week, which they were to spend VOL. I. n 178 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. very quietly together at Folkestone, just to get used to the idea of being all in all to each other. A great many places were proposed and discussed, and finally it was settled that we should spend the autumn in Switzerland, and go on to Italy in the beginning of the winter. Where do you think we are going to spend the winter, dear Diary? In what particular city among all the cities of the world is our home to be? It is like a dream. I turn giddy at the very thought of it. We are to winter in Venice. We are to live within a stone's throw of the Doge's Palace and the Lion's Mouth. I am to see the Bridge of Sighs so often, going backwards and forwards in my gondola, that I shall get to think no more of it than I do of Lamford Lock. Yes, it is enough to turn any girl giddy. I want to preserve all the details of that won- derful day — my mother's wedding-day. It was a perfect morning — as lovely a day as there has been all through the summer, which ought to have been over, but which was just then in its daisy's honeymoon diary. 179 prime, for that first week of September was hotter and brighter than July. The dear old church, and the graveyard where father lies, and the village, and the river were basking in a faint haze of heat, which hung over all things, like a bridal veil. ^Mother and I drove to church together, she very pale, and with a distressed look about her beautiful mouth, which made me feel sorry I had not begged and prayed her not to marry again ; for I felt that her heart was with her first love, lying in his grave under the willow, and not with the man who was so soon to be called her husband. She looked lovely, in spite of her marble whiteness — lovely, but not like a bride. Her soft fawn-coloured silk gown harmonized with her rich brown hair, and became her admirably. So did the little fawn-coloured bonnet with a bunch of corn flowers. She was dressed for the journey to Folkestone, where they were to arrive in time for dinner. There were no wedding guests, except Aunt Emily and her husband, my cousins, the Eeardon girls, the Rector and his 180 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. wife, and good old Mr. Mellidew, my father's lawyer. I carried mother's sunshade, and I was to hold her gloves while she was being married. Everything had been kept so quiet, thanks to the Hector, that very few people in the neigh- bourhood knew that mother and Mr. Arden were going to be married, and only about half a dozen knew that this was their wedding day. So the church was almost empty. There were no school children to strew flowers. There was nothing in their pathway as they left the church but the sunshine, and the shadows of the old yew branches that lay darkly across the path. I think I like that utter simplicity better than what people call a picturesque wedding. There was just one thing out of the common in the whole ceremony. We have a fine old organ at Lamford, an organ built in the reign of George the Second, but we have a very poor organist. Great therefore was my amazement to hear a Gloria of Mozart's played by a master-hand, as we walked up the nave; and when mother and her new husband came out of the vestry, arm in daisy's honeymoon diary. 181 arm, the same master-Land attacked the opening chords of Mendelssohn's " Wedding March " with a power which must have startled and thrilled everybody in the church, as it startled and thrilled me. " Whoever that was, it wasn't Mr. Parkins," I said to Cyril, as he handed me into the second carriage — Mr. and Mrs. Arden — oh, how strange it seems to write it ! — having gone away in the first. "It was not Mr. Parkins. It was Mr. Daventry, the organist of New, an old friend of my father's." " What brought him to Lamford ? " " Friendship. My father asked him to give us a touch of his quality upon this particular day. He knows your mother is fanatica per la musica, and he wanted to please her." " I call that a very delicate attention," said 1, delighted. "Do you, child?" exclaimed Cyril, in a scorn- ful way. "Perhaps you don't know that if it would please your mother for him to cut his heart 182 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. out, he would pay her that delicate attention just as willingly as this." " You are not jealous, are you, Cyril ? " We had the carriage to ourselves by an accident. Beatrice was to have gone with us, but had arrived at the church in a state of bewilderment, and had got into the landau with Aunt Emily, Mrs. Eeardon, and my Cousin Flora, who grumbled all the rest of the day at having her frock crushed by overcrowding. "Jealous!" exclaimed Cyril; "no, I am not jealous, and I admire my new mother" — how ready he was with that sacred name — " almost as much as my father does. But I can't help pity- ing any man as deep in love as my father. It is a spectacle of human weakness which, being human, one must pity and deplore, lest the same thing should happen to one's self." " I hope they will both be happy," said I. " I adore my mother, and I love Uncle Ambrose ; but I would rather have gone on caring for him in the old quiet way, and have kept my mother all to myself." daisy's honeymoon diary. 183 " Egotistical puss," said Cyril. " Do you know, Daisy, that you have the egotistical nose — not a bad nose, in its way, but speaking volumes for the character of the nosee. A pert nose — straight and delicate in line, but with just that upward tilt which means vanity and self-consciousness." " I suppose now you are a kind of brother you are going to be rude to me," said I. "Decidedly. I mean to take every fraternal privilege," answered he. And then, without a word of warning, he kissed me. I was desperately angry. " That is a fraternal privilege which you will please to forego in the future," I said. " I adopted your father for my uncle when you were a small schoolboy, but I never adopted you. And in our enlightened age no one supposes that you are any more my brother because your father has married my mother than you were yesterday when they were only engaged." "But just now you said I was your brother. What an inconsistent girl you are." 184 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. " I said a kind of brother." " Not the real thing. Very well, Daisy, I hope you may never want to put ine upon the fraternal level. I assure you that I don't desire it." This was so rude on his part that I lost my temper altogether. " You are a smug," I said. I trembled when I had uttered that awful word, expecting that he would want to annihilate me, but he only laughed, which was worse. " I am getting behind the scenes," he said ; " and my first discovery is a vixen in the family." We were at home by this time, and went into luncheon. It was not a very gay feast, though Uncle Ambrose looked intensely happy. I had been surprised by his appearance as he stood beside my mother at the altar. He had been gradually changing for the better in his looks and bearing ever since he was engaged, but on his wedding day the trans- formation seemed to have completed itself. He who used to stoop now carried himself with an daisy's honeymoon diary. 185 erect and noble air. His clear blue eyes seemed to have more colour in them ; and, oh ! there was such a look of happiness in every line of his face. Then, as for his clothes, he who used to wear a coat that was almost disgracefully shabby was now dressed to perfection, in a style that was neither too young nor too old. I really felt proud of Uncle Ambrose as I watched him leave the church with my mother on his arm, and later, when we were all clustered at the gate to see them start for their honeymoon. And then, as he bade me good-bye, I could but think of that other parting, seven years ago — the parting which meant for ever. The carriage drove away, with one of my shoes flying after it, thrown by Cyril, who has a great reputation for throwing the hammer, and who threw my poor little bronze slipper so as to lodge it between the carriage and the lamp, like a decoration. I had to hop back to the hall, which seemed so ridiculous that, while I was ready to cry at parting with my mother, the 186 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. absurdity of the thing made me laugh instead, and then, three minutes afterwards, the laughter and tears got mixed and I was sobbing hysteri- cally on Cyril's shoulder. Aunt Emily took me away from him, and scolded me for being so foolish as to make such a fuss about such a brief parting. " You will see your mother again in a week, you silly child," she said. " One would think she was going to Australia. Why, my girls and I are sometimes parted for six or eight weeks at a time." "But they are used to it," I answered; as indeed they are, poor things, and have been from their infancy. " It's different with mother and me. We have never lived apart." I ran upstairs as soon as I could slip away from the family party, and had a comfortable cry in my own room, while Flora and Dora played tennis with Cyril and Beatrice. They were all very noisy, so I suppose they were enjoying themselves. Even though I was so miserable I couldn't help noticing the difference daisy's honeymoon diary. 187 between Beatrice's country noise and Flo and Do's London noise. Hy cousins are what people call stylish girls, and have a dashing, off-hand way of talking and doing everything. Beatrice, on the other hand, has a kind of lumbering vivacity, which I hope it is not ill-natured to compare with a brewer's horse in high spirits. Aunt Emily and the cousins were installed at River Lawn for a week, and at the end of that week aunt was to take me to Folkestone to join mother and her new husband, and from Folkestone we were to start for Switzerland. Oh, how I counted the hours in that week, and how it seemed to me as if those seven days and nights would never come to an end ! How I sickened of tennis and boating, and of all the things which amused my cousins ! How I sickened even of Cyril, who used to come across from the cottage at all hours, and who devoted himself to Flora and Dora, and was very kind in asking me to join in their boating excursions up or down the river! They used to start soon after breakfast with a well-filled picnic 188 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. basket, and land at any spot they fancied, and eat their lunch in some picturesque corner, and they came home to afternoon tea sunburnt to a degree that horrified Aunt Emily. "Are you aware that your complexions will never recover from such treatment as this ? " she asked them solemnly. Cyril was to start for his travels on the day I set out upon mine. He was going to the Norwegian Fjords to fish for salmon. I cannot understand the rage some people have for chilly, half-civilized countries, when there are all the glories and grandeur of the South waiting to be looked at. Imagine anybody preferring Norway to Venice! Cyril does. Venice is so triste, he said. And then he promised me that if I were a very good little girl, and sent him a nice long gossiping letter every week, he would join us at Venice for a week or so, just to see if I were dying of too much Paul Veronese. "You will be dosed with that fellow and his school," he said ; " made to look up at ceilings till your eyes and your neck ache. If people daisy's honeymoon diary. 189 would only let one alone in foreign cities, travel- ling would not be half such a trial as it is ; but there is always the intelligent companion, bent upon improving one's mind." Cyril had grown blase, from having been allowed to go wherever he chose. He has seen all that is best worth seeing iu Europe, and a sunny corner of Africa into the bargain. He has travelled all through Greece, and thinks no more of Marathon than I do of Maidenhead. I sometimes think it has been a disadvantage for him to have so much money, and that he would be ever so much nicer if Uncle Ambrose had never come into his fortune. He is kind and generous, and high-spirited ; but he values himself just a little too much; and he seems to think the world is hardly good enough for him to live in. Mother was at the station to meet me, when the train went slowly over the housetops into Folkestone. How young and handsome she looked in her dark-brown tailor gown and neat brown hat ! and what a moment of bliss it was 190 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. for me when she clasped my hands and gave me one discreet little kiss ! "Are you happy, mother, and are you still fond of me ? " I asked, in a breath. "Yes, to both foolish questions. See, Daisy, have you not a word for " She stopped embarrassed, looking at her husband, who came up at this moment, after having sent off his servant to help my maid with the luggage. "Yes, I have plenty of words for Uncle Ambrose," I said, giving him both my hands. " Gracious ! what a grand person you have grown, and ever so many years younger ! I think you must have concocted one of those wonderful philters that I have read about in Horace." " Yes, Daisy, I have drunk of a philter ; but not one of those nasty mixtures which wicked witches brew. My philter has been happiness." " I really half suspect you are a second Doctor Faustus, and that you have made a bargain with the fiend," said I. " If I had, Daisy, I don't think my conscious- daisy's honeymoon diary. 191 ness of the compact would prevent my being happy," he answered, smiling at me. We went straight from the station to the boat, only a few yards, and then we sailed across a summery sea, and then came a long, hot journey — for though we had left cool weather in Eu gland, there was a sultry atmosphere on the other side of the Channel. We were in Paris in time for an eight-o'clock dinner, and I sat between mother and Uncle Ambrose in one of the prettiest private sitting- rooms in the Continental Hotel, with open windows facing the big lamplit square, and the fountains and statues, and the Champs Elysees, in a glittering haze of summer mist mixed with lamplight, and over all the great purple sky flashing with stars so brilliant and so large that they seemed hanging just above our heads. They both seemed glad to have me with them. They both seemed fond of me. After dinner Uncle Ambrose took me for a walk, and showed me Paris by lamplight, while mother sat and rested, and read the last new book which he had 192 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. bought for her at the station. There never was a happier girl than I was that balmy September night, hanging on to Uncle Ambrose's arm and devouring Paris with my eyes. We walked as far as Notre Dame, and stood in the quiet, open space, looking up at the great dusky towers, so grand, so old, so rich in saintly and historic images. He told me all about the building of that mighty cathedral, and how it had slowly risen from its foundations, and grown and ripened into beauty, like a great oak in the heart of the forest, almost as gradually, almost as quietly. And then we looked at the river, and then we walked slowly back to the hotel. I felt so happy when I went in ; but one look at my mother's face, as she sat staring straight before her in the lamplight, dashed all my happi- ness. " Clara ! " cried Uncle Ambrose. " What is the matter ? " She pointed to the novel she had been reading, which lay open on the table. daisy's honeymoon diary. 193 " How could you choose such a book as that for me ? " she asked reproachfully. "I chose the book because it has made a great success in Paris. See, ninety-ninth thousand ! Isn't that a guarantee that the story is worth reading ? " " It is a revolting story — the story of a murder — in a low lodging-house in the cite — a murder that was never avenged." " Don't you like murder stories ? " I asked. " I enjoy a murder if it is a really good one — a mysterious murder, which keeps the reader won- dering all through the book ? " " Never talk in that strain, Daisy, unless you want to disgust me," answered mother, more sternly than I ever remembered her to have spoken to me in her life. "Do you think a crime which desolates a home and wrecks a life — or many lives — is a thing to be talked of in that spirit ? " " Oh, but poets and dramatists would be poor creatures unless they were able to describe great criminals. Look at Macbeth, for instance. Some vol. i. o 194 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. critics call Macbeth the finest of all Shakespeare's plays, and I really think it is my first favourite among them all." " Stop, Daisy," said Uncle Ambrose, with his hand upon my shoulder. "Don't you see that your mother is tired and nervous? It is past eleven, and we are to do a great deal of sight- seeing to-morrow. You had better bid us good night." I kissed the poor pale face, which had changed so sadly since dinner time, and went off to my room, where my maid was waiting for me. I had shared mother's maid until now, but now I have the undivided service of my good nurse Broomfield, a buxom person of eight and thirty, who has been gradually educating her- self into a lady's maid, and who has nothing to do except look after my wardrobe, and brush my hair, and walk out with me sometimes, when I cannot have mother's company. My head was a little troubled as I laid it on my strange pillow, troubled about my mother's trouble, which seemed more than the occasion daisy's honeymoon diary. 195 accounted for. If I had known then what I know now I should have understood that look of horror in her eyes as she lifted them to her husband's face while she pointed to the open book. Oh, what a blessing it was not to know ! and how I wish Providence had suffered me to remain in happy ignorance, as my mother wished ! But there are always officious people in the world to take things out of the hands of Providence ; or, at least, it seems so. "We had been nearly a month in Switzer- land moving quietly from place to place and thoroughly enjoying the beauty of everything, all the more because of Uncle Ambrose, who was like a walking encyclopaedia, telling me all I wanted to know about everything and every- body, talking most delightfully about Voltaire, Rousseau, Gibbon, and all the Lake Leman poets and philosophers, and quoting whole pages of Tyndall on the Alps and Glaciers. My mother had no more nervous fits alter 196 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. that night in Paris. She seemed thoroughly happy, and pleased with my enjoyment of everything. Sometimes a shade of melancholy would creep over her at the thought of years ago when she had been in these places with my father, and there were days when she had a listless air, as if she were weary of life, in spite of the love that watched her footsteps and wrapped, her round like an atmosphere. I wonder if all husbands are like Uncle Ambrose. There is an intensity in his devotion to my mother which shows itself in every act of his daily life ; and yet his affection is never in- trusive, it never touches the ridiculous. I think very few people at the hotels where we stopped guessed that they were a honeymoon couple. Mother is silent and reserved amongst strangers, and Uncle Ambrose has always the thoughtful air of a student. At the National, at Geneva, there were some Oxford men who were very much impressed when they found out who he was. I heard them talking about his books one evening in the reading-room when I was daisy's honeymoon diary. 197 looking through the Tauchnitz novels. I felt quite proud to think that the man they were praising was the man who had stooped from his high estate to educate me. I wonder whether it was for mother's sake — whether he worshipped her from the very beginning, even in my dear father's lifetime, with the same worship that he has for her now — a hopeless, distant love in those days, without expectation or thought of reward. I can but think that it may have been so, that no lesser feeling would have induced so learned a man to devote himself to the training of an ignorant little girl. It was at Lucerne that the secret of my father's death was revealed to me. It happened only the day before yesterday, and yet I feel as if it was ages ago. I was so occupied with the novelty and delight of this beautiful country until then, that I had not found time to open my diary after I left England ; but now I come to the book for relief from my pent-up agony. 198 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. I have not had one happy moment since that revelation; and yet I have been obliged to appear as happy as ever, for fear my mother should find out what I am brooding upon, and be reminded of the one great sorrow of her life. Oh, what a sorrow it must have been! What an awful haunting memory ! It is wonderful to me that she could ever smile again, or take any pleasure in life, or think of anything except that one dreadful fact. I know now how my father died — why he was snatched away from us without an hour's warning. I know that he was cruelly murdered by an unknown hand ; and that his murderer is walking about the earth at this day, undis- covered and unpunished ; unless God's vengeance has fallen upon the wretch in some mysterious way that we know not. We were at the Schweitzerhoff, at Lucerne. The weather was lovely, and we had spent the day on the lake, and in the evening after dinner we all went out to the portico in front of the hotel. There were some Tyrol ese musicians daisy's honeymoon diary. 199 playing under the trees by the lake, and I thought of that curious story of Tolstoi's — of the poor wandering musician and the cruel people at the Schweitzerhoff, who listened and applauded, but never gave him a sou. And then the poor creature went strolling about the town, where the teller of the story followed him, to take him back to the Schweitzerhoff and treat him to champagne, much to the indignation of the company in the coffee-room. I reminded Uncle Ambrose of Tolstoi's story, which we had read together. \Ye were sitting in the deep shadow of the portico, looking out at the moonlit quay, and listening to the Tyrolese musicians, one of them playing upon the Streich-zither while the others sang. Presently Uncle Ambrose and my mother went for a turn on the quay, leaving me sitting in my dark corner at the back of the colonnade. They asked me to go with them, but I had walked and run about a good deal in the after- noon, at Altdorf and Fluellen, and I told mother I was tired, and would rather stay where I was. 200 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. I was sitting in a dark corner, enjoying the music, and unobserved by anybody. There were two rows of people in front of me. "Do you know who she is?" asked a man sitting very near me, as my mother moved slowly away on her husband's arm. " Her name is Arden — a very attractive woman, is she not ? " returned his companion. " Decidedly handsome ! But don't you know who she is ? " " I only know that the man she is walking with is her husband, and that their name is Arden. I saw it in the visitors' book this morning." " Didn't you notice another name bracketed with it? I did." "What name?" "Miss Hatrell, the lady's daughter. She is travelling with her mother and her stepfather. Mr. and Mrs. Arden have only been married a month. I saw the marriage in the Times!' " But what about Miss Hatrell ? " " Do you mean to say the name has no association in your mind ? " daisy's honeymoon diaey. 201 "Xot the slightest. I never knew any Hatrells, so far as I can remember." " Perhaps not, but I don't think you can have forgotten the mysterious murder in Denmark Street, St. Giles's, which everybody talked about six or seven years ago. The man murdered was a country gentleman who had gone up to London to cash a big cheque in order to pay for an estate he was buying. He cashed the cheque in Pall Mall, but he never reached Lincoln's Inn Fields with the money. He was intercepted on his way and lured to a lodging- house in Denmark Street, where he was found next day stabbed and plundered by an unknown hand. It was one of those murders which baffle all the endeavours of the police, and bring discredit upon the force." " Yes, I have a faint recollection of the affair — the Denmark Street mystery, I think they called it. I had utterly forgotten the man's name. Do you say that this Miss Hatrell is a relation of the murdered man ? " " Only his daughter. lErs. Arden was his 202 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. widow until a month ago, when she married the man who is walking with her over there in the moonlight. I have some friends at Henley who talk about her. She has a place on the banks of the Thames, where she has lived in retire- ment since her husband's murder." " Was it never known who murdered him ? " "Never. The motive was plunder, of course. The murderer got clean off with his booty, in the form of Bank of England notes, which were cashed in the South of France before the bankers in that part of the world had heard of the crime. The murderer got a start of eighteen hours or so before the crime was discovered — just margin enough to allow of his turning the notes into hard cash." " Were there any arrests made, or was any- body suspected?" "Oh, as far as that goes, there is no doubt that the man who committed the murder was a foreigner who took a room in the Denmark Street lodging-house for the express purpose of murder. He lured his victim there by the use daisy's honeymoon diary. 203 ot a woman's name — the name of some French- woman of whom Hatrell had once been fond. He did the deed unaided, in the broad light of day, and then he locked the door of his room, and went downstairs and out of the house, as coolly as if he had gone home to fetch some implement of his trade and were only going back to his workshop. This, I believe, is the last that was ever seen of him." "Xo doubt he is knockiug about Europe somewhere," answered the other man. " Who knows ? He may be here to-night. The SchweitzerhofT would be a capital resort for a man who was wanted by the police. The very publicity of the hotel would be his safeguard." I sat there cold and trembling while they talked, oh ! with such callous indifference ; as if it mattered nothing that an adored husband and father should be lured away to some horrid den and cruelly murdered. And then the dear face came back to me in all its brightness — the happy smile — the candid gray eyes. The loved voice sounded again in my ears, just as if my 204 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. father had that instant called to me from the garden. Oh, how could my mother get over such a blow as that ? The wonder was not that she had grieved dreadfully, but that she had ever ceased to grieve. And nothing had been done. His death was unavenged; his murderer was walking about the world unpunished. Yes, as that man said, he might be in Lucerne to-night. I did not cry out, or faint, or do anything to create a disturbance. For a minute or so there was a rushing in my ears, and the pillars of the portico seemed to rock ; and then my head grew cool and clear again. But I felt that I could not go on sitting quietly there ; and I started up and asked one of the men who had talked about my father to make way for me, and I broke through the double range of sitters some- how, and ran down the steps and away towards the cathedral, and then up the hill at the back of the hotel. I wanted to get away from the crowd, from my mother and Uncle Ambrose, from every one and everything, just to be alone with my thoughts of my dear dead father. daisy's honeymoon diary. 205 The narrow path up which I went to the top of the hill was quite deserted at this time. I stood on the hill-top alone, looking down at the lighted city, so picturesque in its stillness, the quaint old roofs and gables, and market squares and narrow streets, which it had been such a delight to explore with Uncle Ambrose only yesterday, but which I looked at now with dull, unseeing eyes. Pilatus lifted his snow-crowned head above the further shore of the lake, and over all there was the clear light of the moon, clear yet soft, leaving great gaps of densest shadow, black depths where the lamps twinkled here and there, singly or in clusters of warm red light, which seemed a relief after the coldness of the moon and stars. I had noticed all these things the niirht before, when I stood in the same spot with Uncle Ambrose. I noticed them mechanically to-night, while my heart beat loud and fast, with a passion- ate longing to do something, weak, inexperienced girl as I was, that should slowly, laboriously, surely lead to the punishment of my father's murderer. 206 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. "How is it," I asked myself, "that one murderer escapes, and that another, who seems to leave but the slightest indications to lead to discovery, is arrested within a week of his crime ? What is it that makes the chances of criminals so uneven, and how is it that the police, who in some cases seem to exercise a superhuman intelli- gence, seem in other cases helpless and blunder- ing almost to the verge of idiocy ? " I had heard this question discussed within the last few weeks in relation to a mysterious murder in Liverpool, and I had taken an intense interest in the subject — a morbid interest, Uncle Ambrose told me, when I talked to him about it. He reproved me for occupying my mind with a ghastly story. I reminded him that the story of this murder was no more ghastly than the story of Agamemnon's murder, or of the string of murders in "Macbeth," and that one might as well be interested in real horrors as in fiction. Little did I think then that there would come a day when I should have a stronger reason for brooding upon this ghastly subject. DAISY'S HONEYMOON" DIARY. 207 I stayed on the hill a long time, forgetting everything except the horror that had been made known to me that night — forgetting most of all that my absence would alarm my mother. I was startled at last by the cathedral clock, which began to strike the hour. I counted the strokes, and found that it was eleven o'clock. I had been away from the hotel more than an hour. I hurried back, and on the way met Uncle Ambrose, who scolded me for going out alone at such a late hour. "Your mother has been anxious and agitated about you, Daisy," he said. " How came so wise a person to do such a foolish thing ? " " I don't know — I forgot," I said. " Where have you been all this time ? " "On the hill up there, looking down at the town." "My dear Daisy, how could you forget that your mother would be alarmed at your dis- appearance?" " I forgot everything." And then I told him what I had heard an hour 208 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. ago in the portico. I asked him why the cruel truth had been kept from me during all those years? I looked at his face in the moonlight, and saw more trouble there than I had ever seen in my life before. " It would have been cruel to tell you the truth, Daisy. The greatest curse of life is the existence of idle chatterers, who must always be babbling about other people's business. If wishes could bear fruit, it would be bad for those men you overheard to-night." I had never heard such anger in his voice as I heard then. " God only knows the pains your mother and I have taken to keep this sorrow from you," he said. " We have pledged all who knew you and were about you to silence. We have hedged you round with precautions. And yet, in one unlucky minute, the prurient gossip of a wonder-monger frustrates all our care." " I am glad I know," I answered. " Do you think I wanted to live in a fool's paradise ? — to believe that my father died peacefully in the daisy's honeymoon diary. 209 arms of a friend, when he was brutally murdered ? You don't know how I loved him, or you would know better than that." I was angry in my turn — and now tears came, the first which I had shed since I heard the storv of my father's deatli — tears of mingled anger and grief. I seized Uncle Ambrose by the arm. I was almost beside myself. " You were his friend," I said, " his closest friend, almost like a brother ! Did you do nothing to avenge his death ? Xothing, no- thing?" " I did all that mortal man could do, Daisy. I stimulated the police to action by every means in my power. I did not rest till all that could be done had been done. It was in concert with me that your mother offered a reward large enough to set all Scotland Yard on the alert. If the murderer escaped, be assured it was not because his pursuers were careless or indifferent. Had he been a prince of the blood royal the endeavour to solve the mystery of his death could not have been more intense than it was." VOL. i. P 210 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. " What idiots the detective police must be ! " I exclaimed. " No, they are not idiots, Daisy, though it is the fashion to call them so whenever a notorious criminal evades pursuit. There are some un- commonly clever men among them, and there are some uncommonly clever captures and discoveries made by them. But now and then they have to deal with a criminal who is both clever and lucky, and that was the case with the wretch who murdered your father." " Tell me all about his death — every detail," I "What good will it do for you to know, Daisy?" he asked in his pleading voice; just as he used to talk to me years ago when I was a child, and inclined to be naughty. " For God's sake, my dear girl, try to forget all you heard to-night. Think of your father only as you have thought of him hitherto ; as one who was taken from you in the flower of his years, and who sleeps quietly in his grave, honoured, loved, and lamented. The manner of his death makes little daisy's honeymoon diary. 211 difference. It was swift and sudden, a merciful death — without deathbed horrors, or prolonged pain. It must have been an almost instantaneous death." " You know all about it, and I want to know, too," I answered. "If you won't tell me 1 shall find out the truth for myself. I know the date of my father's death, and I have only to get the newspapers for the following days, and I shall learn all that can be learnt about his murderer, and the circumstances of his death." " You are obstinate and foolish, Daisy," he said. "It would be far wiser to blot the horror of the past out of your mind for ever. Your father's sleep is just as sweet as if he had perished by the slow and painful decay which darkens the end of life when men live to what is called a good old age. A good old age ! as if age and decay could ever be good ! I wonder at your want of phi- losophy. I thought I had trained my pupil better, and that whenever you should come to know the worst your own calm reason would show 212 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. you that death by assassination is no more dread- ful than any other form of death." "It is more dreadful — infinitely more dreadful — for it robbed me of my beloved father. He would be with us now — he might be with us for long years to come — but for the wretch who killed him. It is easy for you to preach resig- nation, for you have been the gainer by his death." I was too angry to think of the cruelty of my words, or of my base ingratitude towards the truest friend I have in the world, after my mother. I could think of nothing but my lather's hard fate, and my own most bitter loss. " That will do, Daisy," said Uncle Ambrose, in a voice that sounded like a stranger's. " So long as you and I live you can never say anything more cruel than that." " Or more ungrateful," I cried, throwing my- self into his arms. " I am a wretch, a thankless wretch." He soothed and comforted me, assuring me of his forgiveness. He could make every allowance daisy's honeymoon diary. 213 for a heart so tried as mine. Yes, it was a hard thing to have lost so dear a father, so good a man. " For God's sake don't think that I failed in regard for your father," he said. " Although our ideas of life were so different — he all action and vivacity, I dreamy and self-contained — he was the best friend I ever had, the man I liked best in the world. Yes, I have gained by his un- timely death, gained a pearl beyond price, the one dream and desire of my life. I can never palter with facts there, Daisy. You and I must understand each other and believe in each other, if I am to stand in a parent's place for my dear pupil and friend. There shall be no sophistica- tion on my part. I have told you why your mother and I have laboured to keep the manner of your father's death hidden from you ; but now you have discovered so much I will not stand in the way of your knowiDg all, since it is your wish " " It is my wish — my most ardent wish." " Very well. When we go back to England I 214 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. will give you the report of the inquest, which will tell you every detail. I will give you a collection of leading articles, which will show you how easy it is to speculate and conjecture and theorize about a crime, and how very difficult it may be to find the criminal. I have all these papers for you to read, and you shall be allowed to read them, but under protest. I know that it is not well for you to brood upon that sad event." " I shall brood less, perhaps, when I know more," I told him. And then he implored me to say nothing to my mother about this dreadful past, which had tried her so terribly. " God knows what would happen if her sorrow were to be brought too vividly back to her by any display of emotion upon your part," he said. " She must never be allowed to talk about that dreadful time. Her life and her reason were both in danger. Child as you were you must have seen what a wreck she was when you went home from Westgate. You must have known how slow she was to recover health and spirits." daisy's honeymoon diary. 215 I promised him that come what might I would never afflict my mother by any allusion to my father's death ; and then once more I pleaded for pardon for my foolish and thankless speech. u 3Iy child, how can I be angry with you ? " he said, in his grave and gentle voice, the voice I have loved from my babyhood almost. " What can be more natural than that you should love your father, and regret him, passionately and fondly? Only tell me, dear, honestly, are you sorry that your mother has made my life happy ? Are you sorry that she has allowed me to stand in the place of the father you have lost ? " I told him no, a thousand times no. Next to my father and mother he was the person I loved best upon this earth, and I was very glad to have him bound to me for all my life as my guardian and friend. " There shall be no one ever nearer or dearer to me," I told him. " But you must be Uncle Ambrose to the end. I cannot call you father." !16 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. CHAPTER IX. DAISY'S DIAEY IN MILAN. Lucerne was very gray and dim when we bade it good-bye yesterday morning, the last day of November ; but when we had climbed nearer the snow peaks the sun shone out over the beautiful white world above us and the dark lake below, and the rest of the journey to the mouth of the great tunnel was like a journey in fairyland. What could be more exquisite than to go winding upward and upward into the great heart of the mountain, and to look down on village roofs, and winding streamlets, and bridges, and rocky gorges, and vineyards, and gardens, and church towers, ever so far below the wonderful iron road that was taking us towards the skies ? I felt so sorry when that part of our journey was over; and though I longed to find out what Italy was like, I DAISY'S DIARY IX MILAN. 217 felt very sad as I sat at the snug round table in the little station, the last Swiss station, and sipped a farewell cup of coffee with mother and Uncle Ambrose. It was a disappointment after leaving sunshine and blue skies above the Sw T iss snow^-peaks to find Italy gray and rainy, with just that incessant drizzling rain which one has known from one's childhood as the mark of a hopeless wet day, and which has been politely called a Scotch mist. Of all the things I had thought to meet with in Italy a Scotch mist was the last ; but there it was, and nothing would have reconciled me to the grayness and the rain except the red cotton umbrellas, w T bich were delightful, and which made me feel I was in Italy. Next to the red umbrella, as an Italian insti- tution, came the herceau, the verdant colonnade made by vines trained over cane or wire, leafy arcades which I saw in every garden, and in front of the humblest houses — sometimes on the tops of the houses, sometimes forming a loggia on the upper story. The vine leaves were turning 218 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. yellow and red with the touch of autumn, but they were still green enough for beauty. The bell-tower in every village church was another sign that we were in Italy ; and then by-and-by we came upon the great dark blue lake lying in the bosom of mist-wreathed hills, and mother and I agreed that but for the bell-towers, the berceaux, and the red umbrellas of the peasantry, we might have fancied we were in the Trossachs. And so, as Mr. Pepys says, to Milan, where we steamed into a great metropolitan-looking ter- minus, and saw Cyril waiting for us on the platform in the glare of the electric light. He had grown tired of the North, and had written to his father to propose joining us on our journey to Venice, and with this intention he had made his way to Milan, amusing himself here and there as he came, exploring odd nooks and out- of-the-way spots. He was looking in high health and very happy, I thought, as he stood smiling at us in the electric light. "Well, wee modest flower," he said, addressing daisy's DIARY IX MIL AX. 219 me in his usual grand manner, after he had shaken hands with mother and Uncle Ambrose. "Welcome to the ancient kingdom of Lom- bardy. I wonder if you are as enraptured with Italy as you were before your foot had ever touched the soil. I'm afraid upon such an even- ing as this you'll find Milan uncommonly like Glasgow." He took us to a fine roomy landau which he had engaged for us, and we left the man and the maids to look after the luggage, and drove off to the Hotel de la Yille, in a narrowish busy-looking street that might have been Fleet Street or the Strand for anything distinctive that I could see in it under that gray rainy atmosphere. Yes, there was one superiority over Fleet Street in spite of the rain and the mud, and that was the electric light, which filled all the city of Milan with its silvery radiance, so that the night was like unto the day. The head waiter at the hotel told us that there had been three weeks' rain, and I found after- wards that this fertile plain of Lombardy, which 220 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. I am told is very lovely in spring, owes its chief beauty to the damp and cloudy winter climate. At any rate I was in Italy, and the very idea was full of delight. I kept telling myself that this was Italy, and trying to cheat myself into brief forgetfulness of the dreadful story on which my mind had been fixed ever since that night at Lucerne. It was to be only brief forgetfulness, for I had resolved to confide all my troubles to Cyril, to whom I could talk freely. Oh ! what a painful effort it had cost me to keep my feelings hidden from the dear mother, with whom till now I had shared every thought and every fancy ! In spite of my endeavour to seem happy and untroubled, she discovered that there was something wrong, and I had to pretend that young-lady-like ailment, neuralgia, from which I am thankful to say I have never suffered. I was conscience-stricken at the thought of my own falsehood when I saw mother's anxiety. She almost insisted upon calling in a doctor, so I had to reassure her by a prompt recovery. I told DAISY'S DIARY IN MILAN. 221 her the pain was quite gone, but that the climate had rather a depressing effect upon my spirits. This accounted for my talking very little, instead of talking almost incessantly ; and this accounted for my sitting in my corner of the carriage, thinking, thinking, thinking, all through that long railroad journey. I have always liked Cyril, but I never felt so glad to see him as I felt that night at 3Iilan. I wanted so much to talk to a man who knew the world, and a man to whom I could express myself freely, without any fear of inflicting an unpremeditated wound, as I had done in the case of Uncle Ambrose. So after dinner I asked Cyril if he would take me for a walk, and show me the outside of the cathedral; to which request he assented very good-naturedly, only bargaining for a cigarette in the hall before we started. We had dined in our sitting-room on the first floor, and we all went down into the gay-looking vesti- bule after dinner, and took our coffee at a little table, in a corner where we could look on at the people coming in and going out. 222 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. Was mother happier than I ? Had she for- gotten the dead? Those were two questions which I could not refrain from asking myself as I sat by her side that evening, our first evening in Italy. She looked so young and so beautiful that night, in her calm, reposeful attitude, as she sat slowly fanning herself and idly watching the shifting groups in the spacious vestibule. Her brown brocade gown, with its sable collar and bordering, made her look like an old picture. The aristocratic-looking head, with its crown of dark auburn hair, rose out of the deep soft fur like a lily out of a cluster of leaves. Her hazel eyes seemed to have sunlight in their clear darkness. She looked utterly calm and happy; and assuredly if a husband's devotion could make a wife happy her happiness was well founded. Such gentle deference, such chivalrous affection must be very rare in the history of men and women, if I may judge by the stories of domestic misery that I have heard, and by the few married couples I have known. There is the dear old Rector, for instance, a daisy's DIARY IX MILAN. 223 delightful being for all the world outside the Rectory, but a pestilence to his wife. There is Dr. Tysoe, always grumbling about his dinner, and wanting to have the cook discharged instantly if ajoint is not roasted to a turn. Then there is Dr. Talbot, a man in whom Society delights, but who is always irritable or out of spirits at home ; whose sudden appearance in the drawing-room casts a cloud over his family, and seems palpably to chill the atmosphere. No, in my brief experience I never saw the perfect and ideal husband whom we occasionally meet in a novel, till I saw my mother's husband, Uncle Ambrose. He is not a bit like Rochester, though he has Rochester's commanding intellect. He is more like a spiritualized John Halifax; and I who have known him all my life know that his placid temper is no honeymoon garb to be put off by- and-by. I who have known him all my life know that he is the most delightful companion, the most unselfish and sympathetic friend — a man always abreast with every intellectual movement 224 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. of the age, a man rich in resources, keenly- interested in art and science, as well as in dry- learning. There never was a son less like his father than Cyril. He is as much unlike in temperament as he is in person. Uncle Ambrose is all thought, Cyril is all action. He is like my own dear father in his energy and movement, as full of life and activity as if there were quicksilver in his veins. He is eager for knowledge ; but he loves best the knowledge that comes to him from the lips of men ; the knowledge that can be gained amidst the life and movement of the big, busy world. Cyril is not the least like anybody's ideal. He would never serve as a model for the hero of a novel. Yet in spite of the absence of the poetic element, Cyril is very nice, and one cannot help liking him. He sings delightfully. He is always gay and bright; although he affects to have exhausted every pleasure. He is the most inquisitive person I ever met with — always wanting to know everything about everybody. DAISY'S DIARY IN MILAN. 225 He is generally considered good-looking, indeed some people insist upon calling him handsome. He has gray eyes in which the light sparkles and dances when he is amused at anything. He has curly brown hair — hair which curls obstinately, however closely it is cropped, very pretty hair, hair which suggests the poetical temperament, a suggestion which Cyril certainly does not realize. He has a sharp, inquisitive nose; he calls mine tip-tilted, and I am sure his has the same upward inclination — but it is a very nice nose all the same, and it has no affinity to the snub or the pug. He is tall and slim, with moderately broad shoulders, and quick, active movements, and he always dresses well. I believe he considers him- self an authority upon dress, and he is certainly very severe upon other people. I took his arm, and we went out into the drizzling rain. There were a great many shops open, late as it was, and they looked lovely ; but my mind was too full of serious things for me to be easily distracted. "Take me first to look at the cathedral," I VOL. I. Q 226 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. said ; " and then take me into some solitary place where we can talk quietly." " Gracious, madam, what an alarming request ! " he cried. " I think we had better get the sacristan and his keys and go down into the crypt where St. Charles Borromeo lies in his silver shrine. I cannot conceive any other place solemn enough to match the solemnity of your tone." " Don't laugh at me, Cyril ; I am very serious." He looked down at me, with a startled, in- quisitive air. " What is it, Daisy ? " he said very sharply, almost angrily ; " a love affair ? " " No, no, no. There is nothing further from my thoughts to-night than love." " I am glad to hear it. When a young lady is an heiress, and something of a feather-head into the bargain, one is easily alarmed." " You have no right to call me a feather-head, when your father, one of the cleverest men in Europe, has educated me," I said indignantly. "My dearest child, book-learning is not wis- dom," he answered; "and a grain of worldly daisy's DIARY IX MILAN. 227 knowledge is sometimes more useful than a pound of book-knowledge. I know that you are far in advance of the average girl in your acquaintance with European literature. I know that you have read more than some college dons, and that you are an excellent linguist, and altogether deeply, darkly, beautifully blue. But all the same, you have not learnt the alphabet of the world in which you live. All that kind of knowledge has yet to come." " It is a hateful kind of knowledge," I said angrily. "My child, you can't get on without it," he answered, with his superior air. We were in the great open place in front of the cathedral, by this time, and I stood breath- less with wonder, looking up at that matchless building. I have been told since that the exterior, which looked so lovely in the bright white light, against a background of dull gray, is over rich in decoration, that those innumerable statues of saints and martyrs, angels and arch- angels, priests and prophets, are a waste of 228 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. power ; but to my uneducated eye there was not a touch of the chisel that seemed superfluous ; not a niche or pinnacle that did not seem a necessary part of the vast scheme of splendour. I told Cyril what I thought, as we walked slowly up and down, surveying the mighty church from different points of view ; and then we crossed the square, and he took me through the lofty bright-looking arcade, and then into a quieter part of the city, beyond the great opera- house and Leonardo's statue. Here the houses were large and palatial, and there were no more shops, and very few people walking about. "Now, Daisy, for this confidence of yours, which is not about love," he said kindly. " I want you to tell me all you know and all you think about my father's murder," I said. " What ! they have told you, then ? " " Nobody has told me. I overheard two men talking about my mother and her first husband." "And their talk revealed the secret that had been kept from you so carefully. Hard lines ! " DAISY'S DIARY IN MILAN. 220 " I am glad I know. It was hateful to be kept in the dark — loving my father as I did." " Dear child, what good can it do you to know?" " Only this good — that I can look forward to the day when his murderer will be discovered and punished." "I'm afraid that day will never come, Daisy. A pursuit that failed seven years ago is not likely to succeed hereafter. Your mother offered first five hundred and then a thousand pounds reward for the conviction of the murderer, and some of the sharpest brains in London were engaged in the attempt to find him. They failed ignominiously ; and I take it there is only one chance of his being brought to book." " And that is " " His being arrested for some new crime. The cool deliberation with which the deed was done, the quiet way in which the man got off and disposed of his plunder, argues the professional murderer. He may commit more murders in the course of his professional career, and sooner 230 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. or later his work may be clumsily done, or his luck may change — and then, perhaps, when the rope is round his neck, he may confess himself the murderer of your father." "Tell me all you know about the man — and the crime." " My dearest child, I know very little," he said. " Seven years ago I was at Winchester, a careless young scoundrel, thinking more of cricket and football, and of my chances of a scholarship, than of my friends ; although I think you must know that I loved your mother and your father next in this world to my own father, and the dear old grandad in Eadnorshire. Seven years ago my father was a poor man, and I was ever so much more ambitious, and ever so much more willing to work, than I have been since he came into his fortune. I'm afraid I was a selfish young beggar in those days ; but I felt the shock of your father's death very deeply, in spite of my egotism. I was mentally stunned by the blow when I took up the London paper and saw that my father's friend had been murdered, and daisy's DIARY IX MIL AX. 231 thought of the desolation in that happy home, the misery of that once happy wife. River Lawn was my ideal home, Daisy. I had never been able to picture to myself a fairer domestic life than that of your father and mother, with my sweet brown-eyed Daisy flitting about in the foreground, like a ray of sunshine incarnate. If you had changed into anything it would have been into a sun-ray. I felt the full force of the catastrophe, Daisy, and I devoured the account of the inquest, but the details have grown dim in my memory. I only know that your father was lured into a shabby lodging, upon some shallow pretence, and there murdered, and robbed of nearly four thousand pounds." And then he argued with me as my stepfather had argued. He tried to make me think that the history of my father's death was a history which I ought to forget. He used almost the same words that Uncle Ambrose had used at Lucerne when my heart was bursting with grief and indignation. Nothing that either could say had any power to alter my feelings. 232 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. Cyril and I walked for a long time in those narrow streets of tall stone houses, with great sculptured doorways, and here and there the glimpse of a garden seen dimly through a vaulted arch. I shall never think of the city of Milan as long as I live without thinking of my father's ghastly death, or without recalling the dreary sense of helplessness that came upon me last night as I walked by Cyril's side and heard his sophistical arguments in favour of oblivion. To-morrow we go to Verona — city of many memories; and after a day or two devoted to mediaeval architecture, we go on to Venice, the dream -city. Uncle Ambrose has given me half a dozen books about the city of the Doges to read at my leisure, and he is always ready with his own storehouse of information, which seems to me to hold more than all the books that were ever written. He has a memory equal to Lord Macaulay's, I verily believe. ( 233 CHAPTER X. DAISY'S DIAEY IN VENICE. Charles Dickens's unfailing artistic instinct was never truer than when he described this city as a dream. It is a dream — a dream in marble and precious stones and gold — a dream lying on the bosom of the blue, bright sea — a dream of shadowy streets, where every glimpse of garden seen above a decaying wall which once was splendid, has a look of fairyland. Oh ! those little bits of greenery, an orange tree, an aloe or two, how they tell where all the chief beauty of the place is in marble ! Uncle Ambrose laughed at me once because I screamed with delight at the vision of a boughy orange tree nodding over an ansle of wall in one of those narrow canals, where the sun hardly enters. The green leaves and 234 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. waving branches seemed strangely beautiful amidst that wonder- world of stone. We stayed for a week at Danieli's, and now we are in an apartment of our own, on the first floor of a palace which is next door but one to Desde- mona's house — the house in which she was born and reared, I suppose, and from which she fled with her tawny warrior. She was about my age, I believe, but much simpler and more confiding than I am. I don't think I should ever fall in love with a famous soldier for telling long stories about his fights and his travels, unless he were of a fairly presentable complexion. Poor little Desdemona! I gaze up at her window's every day from my gondola, and wonder which was her nursery window, and which her schoolroom, and whether her mother was a more agreeable person than her father. I wonder, by the way, what kind of father Shakespeare had. Judging by old Capulet, Brabantio, and one or two other specimens, I should conclude that the woolstapler, glover, or butcher of Stratford-on-Avon was not the most indulgent or amiable of parents. The Shake- spearean idea of paternal government is not alluring. We have been nearly four months in Venice, and have seen the city under many and widely different aspects. We have had days and weeks of almost summer brightness ; we have had intervals of wind and rain and wintry gloom. We have visited every nook and corner of the city, have seen every picture and every shrine., have read and reread, and in some instances understood, our Euskin. We have explored the neighbouring islands ; we have dawdled away sunny days on the Lido ; we know the Armenian Convent by heart ; and Cyril has reproached me with having established what he calls a system of flirtage with the dearest old monk in the world. How full this region is of memories of Byron, and how prodigious an influence a poet can exercise over the minds of men when he has been lying half a century in his grave ! We think and talk of Byron at every turn. In the Doge's Palace, on the Bridge of Sighs; on the Lido, 236 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. where he used to take his morning ride; on the staircase, where Marino Faliero's noble head rolled down the blood-stained marble, to testify for all time to the ingratitude of nations; in the convent where he spent such happy, innocent hours learning the Armenian language — everywhere one finds the traces of his footsteps or the shadows which his genius clothed with beauty. Mother is growing tired of Venice — no, that is impossible. Nobody could ever weary of a place so full of loveliness — a place whose every phase is poetry incarnate in marble. She is not tired of Venice ; but she begins to weary for home — the familiar house and gardens she loves so well, where every room and every pathway and tree and shrub are interwoven with the history of her happy married life — the clays before calamity came upon us. I think I can understand her feelings almost as well as if she and I were, indeed, what we have sometimes been taken to be. I think I can read my mother's heart as well as if she were my sister. DAISY'S DIARY IN VENICE. 237 I believe she is happy with Uncle Ambrose. I believe that his society is as delightful to her as it is to me, that his chivalrous devotion gratifies her as it would any woman upon earth. I believe that she is grateful to him and fond of him, and that she has never repented, and is never likely to repent, her second marriage. But all the same do I know that her heart goes back to the old love. I found her a few days ago sitting with my father's photograph on the table before her. She was sitting looking at it, with clasped hands, and tears streaming down her cheeks. She was so absorbed in sad thoughts that she did not hear me enter the room or leave it. She was talking of Eiver Lawn in the evening ■ and I fancied that her mind had been dwelling on the old happy days, and that even in the midst of this beautiful city she felt sad and lonely. She has seemed all at once to grow languid and listless, and to feel no more interest in scenes and buildings whose interest seems inexhaustible to me. I only hope she is not ill. 238 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. I have questioned her, but she assures me there is nothing the matter. She never was in better health, but she is haunted by visions of the old home where so much of her life has been spent. "I dreamt of your father's grave last night, Daisy," she said ; " I dream of it so often, so often!" I could not tell her that I too had had my dreams, not of the grave, but of my father himself — horrible dreams sometimes, filled with vague shapes and unknown faces. I had seen my father struggling with his murderer; I had seen the cruel blow struck ; but I had never been able to remember the murderer's face when I awoke, though it seemed sometimes in my dream to be a face well known to me. I can see that Uncle Ambrose is perplexed and uneasy about my mother, and he too seems to have become indifferent to Titian and Paul Veronese. This being so, I am thrown upon Cyril for society in my rambles and explorations, and he and I go roaming about these delicious waters in DAISYS DIARY IX VENICE. 230 our gondola — our own gondola, built on purpose for us, and to be sent to England after our return. How surprised Beatrice Reardon and all the rest of them will be to see us in this mysterious- looking boat, with its swan-like prow and black curtains — a boat which seems to have been de- signed on purpose for mystery and romance. ILy good old Berkshire nurse and maid goes everywhere with me, as a kind of duenna, and exists in a perpetual state of wonder. I doubt if she is altogether awakened to the loveliness of Venice ; and indeed she told me the other day that she could not think much of a city which had not one broad street in it. Milau, she ad- mitted, was a fine town, but Yerona she considered " a hole," and she considers Venice decidedly inferior to Henley. "I like the Rialto Bridge, Miss Daisy," she said, " because there's a bit of life there, with the shops and the people, and I like the shops in St. Mark's square, though I should like them better if the shopkeepers didn't stand at their doors and tout for customers, which is an annoy- 240 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. ance when one wants to look at things in peace and hasn't no thought of buying anything. But even that isn't up to the Pallerroyal in Paris." It will be seen, therefore, that Broomfield's tastes are essentially modern. Poor soul, she is so patient and so good-tempered in going about with me to churches and odd out-of-the-way corners that haven't the faintest interest for her. She stands smiling blandly at the pictures and statues, while Cyril and I are deep in our Hare or our Buskin, peering into every detail. Cyril is capital. He has an ardent love of art, and, indeed, he seems to like everything that I like. We have long confidential talks about our- selves and other people, about the past and the future — how strange that one so rarely talks of the present — as we sit in our gondola, lazily gliding over the sunlit water, scarcely conscious of the movement of the boat. Sometimes we talk French, sometimes Italian, in which I am anxious to attain facility. It is one thing to be able to read Dante, I find, and another thing to DAISY'S DIARY IN VENICE. 241 express one's own thoughts easily. The language we talk makes very little difference to Broom- field, who sits poring over her Daily Telegraph, or knitting one of those everlasting woollen com- forters which she provides for her numerous nephews and nieces. Cyril and I are as much by ourselves as if Broomfield were one of those sculptured seraphim which the Israelites used to have in their houses to symbolise the deity they worshipped. Cyril's Oxford days are over. He has taken his degree, and has I believe done very well — though he has not swept the board, he tells me, like Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Goldwin Smith, as he intended to do when he was at Winchester. And now he has to think of what he shall do with his life. "I think I shall go to the Bar,'' he said, "because a man ought to have a profession of some kind, and I rather like the idea of the Bar — followed in due course by the Bench. And the Bar has advantages for a man who does not want to be a slave in the golden years of youth. vol. i. R 242 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. The Bar is a profession in which a man can take it easy." I am afraid Cyril has a slight inclination to idleness — or rather, perhaps, that he has a dis- taste for any systematic and monotonous work. He is far too active and energetic to waste his days in laziness, but he likes to occupy himself according to the caprice of the hour ; and then no doubt he is influenced by the knowledge that his father is a rich man and he an only child. We were talking the other day about Uncle Ambrose's fortune, and his almost eccentric in- difference to wealth, which would have been such a delightful surprise to most men in his position. "I found out a most extraordinary fact con- nected with my father's inheritance," said Cyril, "a fact which reveals an indifference that is really abnormal. An American I met at Oxford got into conversation with me about my connec- tion with America, through my father's kinsman. He told me that old Matthew Arden, of Chicago, died early in April, '72, and that as his property was all of a most simple and obvious character daisy's DIARY IN VENICE. 243 my father must have passed into possession of it within a month or two after his death. Now, I distinctly remember that the first I heard of the change in our circumstances was on All Saints' Day, when I went home from Winchester for twenty-four hours' holiday. My father told me then that a great-uncle, with whom he had kept up an occasional correspondence, had lately died in America, an old bachelor, and a man of con- siderable wealth, accumulated in trade, and that he had appointed my father residuary legatee. I was a great deal more excited by the change from poverty to wealth than he was. I never saw a man so unmoved by the idea of large means, or so indifferent to the things that money can buy. That indifference has never been less- ened ; but I believe now that he has a wife and daughter to think about he will take more pleasure out of his wealth and spend money royally. I hear of a house in Grosvenor Square, which has been bought, and is being renovated in the Adamesque style we are all so fond of." "A house in town would be rather nice," I 244 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. said, " but I hope Uncle Ambrose does not mean to take us too much away from Lamford. That is the home I love." " In spite of its sorrowful associations ? " "Yes. I don't want to forget my father. I think to try and forget the loss of one we love is only a selfish way of pleasing ourselves at the cost of our dead. We owe a duty to our beloved dead — the duty of long remembrance." I had heard a good deal about the house in Grosvenor Square, and had seen sketches of the rooms and their decoration. There were to be occasional departures from the Adamesque character, notably in the hall and staircase, and the room on the half flight. These were to be Moorish, with a good deal of perforated sandal- wood and Oriental drapery. I heard my mother discussing the colouring and decoration with Uncle Ambrose, and I was often called into council ; but I was just now too completely steeped in the loveliness of Venice to take a very warm interest in any London house. What I sighed for was one of those fifteenth-century palaces which I saw daisy's DIARY IX VENICE. 245 given over to business purposes, manufactories for carved furniture or Venetian glass, store- houses, show-rooms, workshops — palaces in which painters like Titian had lived and worked, palaces where the walls still show the armorial bearings of historic, families. Oh ! to think that the roof which once sheltered a Doge should ever be vulgarised by trade. Cyril laughs at my horror of trade, and re- minds me that Venice, in the davs of her greatest splendour, was a city of traders, and that now she is dependent on reviving commerce for her resurrection from poverty and decay. Yesterday Cyril and I had a grand excursion all to ourselves, or with only my duenna Broom- field to make a third ; dear old Broornfield, who always looks the other way when we are talking confidentially. I dare say she wonders what we can find to talk about — first in one language and then in another. Cyril's Italian is of the poorest quality, by the way, and very limited in quantity, but he pretends that he likes to hear me talk, 246 'one life, one love. and he pretends to understand me. Our chief confidences, however, are in French, a language in which he is quite at home. Indeed, here it is I who am at fault, for to tease me he often persists in talking Parisian, which is quite a different tongue to the French in which Eacine and Boileau wrote. "We started early, on a morning that was more like June than February. We had our own gondola, and our two men, looking deliciously picturesque in their black livery and yellow silk scarves. They are both dear creatures, and have become a part of our family. Paolo is a bachelor, and he is to accompany the gondola to Lamford, and live and die in our service; but Giovanni has a wife and two babies, so we do not import him. It will be an agonising moment when I have to bid him good-bye. I save my dessert every night after dinner, and give it to him next morning for his hambini, and his face becomes one broad grin of delight when I hand him my little offering. One could not venture upon such childishness with a Thames daisy's DIARY IN VENICE. 247 waterman, whose only idea of kindness from his superiors begins and ends with beer. We had a most delightful picnic-basket, enough for the whole party, and we were to go to Torcello, and to be free till sunset. Oh, how like a fairy tale it was to go gliding over that blue lagoon, passing Murano and its chimneys, and Burano and its lace factory, and gliding on and on by willow-shaded banks till we came to all that is left of the mother city of Venice ! We landed in a narrow creek, among sedges and alders, and long rank grass, and I could have almost thought I was in a backwater at home ; but within a few paces of our landing-place stood the octagonal church of Santa Fosca, and the museum which calls itself a Municipal Palace, and just behind them the cathedral, very plain of aspect outside, but grand and beautiful within. After a very conscientious visitation of the two churches, and a rather superficial examina- tion of the marble relics in the museum, we went in quest of a picturesque spot for our 248 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. picnic; and having found a bower of alders on the edge of the meadows, where the cattle were feeding quietly in the sweet, flowery grass, on ground that was once the city of Torcello, we lunched as it were tete-a-tete with the Adriatic; for in front of us we could see nothing but the bright blue waters and the painted sails of some fishing-boats, shiniug crimson, and purple, and orange in the noonday light. We lingered long over the delicious meal, in air that was far more exhilarating than the champagne which Cyril persuaded me to taste, and which he himself drank with much gusto. I told him that I thought it a horrid thing to see a young man drinking champagne, and pre- tending to be a severe judge of the particular vintage. I considered such a taste odiously suggestive of some overfed alderman, feasting in the city. " You will be taking turtle next," I said. "Why, you silly puss, we often have turtle at our lunches in Tom Quod," said he. "Do you suppose we wait for grey hairs and red DAISY'S DIARY IX VENICE. 249 noses before we learn to appreciate the good things of this life. An undergrad. is as good a judge of turtle and champagne as any alder- man who ever passed to the luxuries of lEansion House through a long apprenticeship to boiled beef and beer." We sent Broomfield off to find our gondoliers, while we two wandered along the edge of that verdant shore, with our feet almost in the sea. " Now we have lost sight of the churches, we might almost fancy ourselves on a desert island," said I. "I only wish the fancy were true," said he. " I should revel in a spell of summer idleness on a desert is] and ; if we had only enough to eat." " That last condition takes the poetry out of the whole thing," answered I. " Oh, but you would not have us left to starve until we began to look at each other and wonder which bit was the nicest." " Or the least nasty. Xo, that idea is too awful ; it is one of the dreadful mysteries of human degradation that we can never under- 250 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. stand till we are brought face to face with Death. Oh, it is so dreadful to think that the mere blind clinging to life can change men into wild beasts. And yet the thing happens. You have filled me with horror by the mere suggestion." "Daisy, you have too vivid an imagination. You look at me as if you saw the potentiality of cannibalism depicted in my countenance. You and I will visit no island more savage than Prospero's, and there it seems there was always enough to eat." "Prospero was an enchanter, sir." " And Miranda was an enchantress — for Ferdi- nand, at least. Over him she flung earth's most potent spell. Will you be my Miranda, Daisy ? " We were standing on that quiet shore, the waves curling, azure and emerald and silvery bright, up to our very feet. We were as much alone as Ferdinand and Miranda can ever have been on their enchanted isle, and — he had the supreme impertinence to put his arm round my waist. I believe that kind of thing has happened to DAISY'S DIARY IX VENICE. 251 Beatrice Beardon almost as often as the tooth- ache ; and my cousin Flora has told me that it is sometimes done at dances, in a conservatory where there are palms and tree-ferns, after supper ; but such a thing had never occurred to me, and it took my breath away. " Be my ITiranda, Daisy," he went on, in such a charming voice that I forgot to be angry with him, or at any rate forgot to express my indig- nation. "Let me be your Ferdinand, and all the world will be my enchanted island. It is the fairy who makes the spell." " I don't quite follow your meaning," I said, stupefied by amazement at his audacity. " Oh, Daisy, what a horrid thing to say ! ; ' he exclaimed, evidently hurt. " I thought you were romantic and full of poetry, and you answer me as if you were made of wood." He took away his arm from my waist in a huff. I believe if he had left it there any longer he would have given me an angry pinch. His whole countenance changed. " I can't quite understand you, Cyril," I said 252 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. very meekly. " I thought you and I were to be brother and sister." " You know you thought nothing of the kind, Miss. You refused to accept my father as a father, or to call him by that name. You told me very distinctly on the wedding-day that I was not to have the privileges of a brother, and I replied that I had no desire to stand upon that footing. And now that the happiest months of my life have been spent with you ; now that I am over head and ears in love, you pretend not to understand, you make believe to be stupid and apathetic. It is very cruel — more cruel than words can say — if you have been fooling me all this time." I don't know exactly what I said after this. I think I must have apologized for my stupidity, for he certainly forgave me, and put his arm round my waist again, and kissed me, not in the boisterous sort of way that he kissed me in the carriage after mother's wedding, but gently, and even timidly, so that I could not find it in my heart to be angry. DAISY'S DIARY IX VENICE. 253 " Are these my Miranda's lips ? " he asked ; and I think I said that it misfht be so if he pleased. And then we went slowly, slowly, slowly back to the creek where we had left the gondola ; and I believe we were en^a^ed. Broomfield looked at us in a most extraordinary way when we took our seats opposite her, as if she really guessed what had happened, which was hardly possible. Our dear good men had eaten an enormous luncheon, and they sang their delightful songs all the way back to Venice. The sun soon began to steep everything in gold — islands, water, distant mountains, and the wonderful city towards which we were going, and the painted sails of the fishing-boats, and the clouds floating in the azure sky — azure that changed into opal — gold that changed to crimson, as the bell-tower of St. George the Greater rose out of the level tide, and the lamps on the Piazza began to gleam like a string of diamonds. Cyril is a very impetuous person, and before 254 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. we sat down to dinner lie had told Uncle Ambrose and mother that he and I were engaged, and that he would not forfeit that privilege to be the Doge — if the Ducal power of Venice were to be revived to-morrow. Late in the evening mother came into my room and sat with me for nearly an hour by the wood fire. She told me that nothing would please her better than that Cyril and I should love each other well enough to take upon ourselves the most solemn tie this earth knows. Her seriousness made me very serious, and almost frightened me. "I am pleased that you should be engaged even earlier than I was, Daisy," she said, " and that you should not be hardened and spoilt by the experience of the world, where girls learn to be selfish, and vain, and self-seeking. I am pleased that you should be engaged to your first lover, in the very freshness and dawn of your life. It is too early to think about marrying, but a year or two hence " "Oh, not for ever so many years," I cried. " Pray don't talk about getting rid of me. I daisy's DIARY IN VENICE. 255 want to stay with you, mother. You are all in all to me. You are not tired of me, are you ? " " Tired ! No, my darling. It will be a sad day for me when my bright bird leaves the home-nest ; but I married very young, Daisy, and my wedded life was all gladness. An engagement should not last too long, even when the lovers are as young as you and Cyril. Two years will be quite long enough. In two years you will be nearly twenty." " That sounds dreadfully ancient," said I ; for indeed it seems that one has done with youth when one is out of one's teens. Mother gave me her small pearl necklace on my thirteenth birth- day, and I was so proud of myself, and thought myself quite a personage because I was in my teeDS ; and now here she was talking coolly about my soon being twenty, and old enough to be turned out of doors. " Two years will be no time," I told her. " I would rather be engaged for ten, so that I may stay at Kiver Lawn with you." " Who knows, dearest, if you need ever leave Kiver Lawn," she answered sweetly. " I have 256 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. always thought the French much wiser than we in their domestic arrangements, because they are not afraid to keep their children under the family roof when they are married; and thus the bond of parentage grows stronger instead of weaker, and the little children of the third generation grow up at the feet of the old people. I have heard Englishmen say that this plan can never succeed with us ; and, if so, one cannot help thinking that there must be some want of affection in the English heart. Now, in your case, Daisy, there is every reason that your married life should be spent in your mother's home, since you are to marry my stepson." "Dear, dearest mother," I exclaimed, giving her a hug which would have done credit to a young she-bear, " how sweet and how wise you are ! I am very glad I accepted Cyril. I see now that he is just the very best husband I could have chosen." " My darling, how lightly you talk," said mother, almost reproachfully. " Your stepfather and I are naturally pleased that you and Cyril DAISY'S DIARY IX VENICE. 257 should have chosen each other ; but that is not enough, not nearly enough. Nothing is enough unless you love hiin truly and devotedly, with your whole heart and mind, as 1 loved your father." " I suppose I like hirn as well as I could like anybody," I answered, rather frightened at her grave looks and earnest words. "Liking is not enough." " Well, perhaps I love him. I know I have been very happy with him ever since we came here — so happy as to forget — every idea of s >rrow or trouble in the world," I said, checking myself confusedly ; for the thing that I had forgotten more than I ever thought I could forget was the dark story of my lather's death. " I have beeu quite abandoned to happiness, but I don't know how much Venice may have had to do with that, and whether I shall care quite as much for Cyril when we get back to Lamford." " My love, be serious," urged mother, looking painfully grave. " Seriously then I believe I love him as well as I shall ever love anybody." vol. i. s 258 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. "Daisy, yon talk like a coquette, and not like an earnest woman." " Dearest, don't be shocked with me. It all seemed like a dream or a fairy tale to-day, when Cyril and I stood on the beach in the sunshine, with the waves making music at our feet. If you had heard how lightly he asked me to be his wife — indeed he never once mentioned the word — you would not wonder that I am inclined to speak half in jest about this solemn business. Let us take the situation lightly, mother, and if after a year or two we should happen to grow tired of each other, why we can apologize, and drop back into the position of brother and sister." " No, Daisy, that will not do — there must be no engagement — there must be no semblance of a bond between you — unless you and he are both sure of your hearts. No hay burlas con el amor. Good night, dear. Pray to God for guidance. Kem ember marriage means for ever. As a bond or as a stigma it marks a woman's life to the end." I felt miserable after she had left me ; but 1 DAISY'S DIARY IX VENICE. 259 did what she told me to do. I knelt down and prayed to be guided and led in the right way — led to choose the fate that should be best for my own happiness, and for my mother's. The thought that I need never leave home if Cyril were my husband, made him seem to me the most perfect husband I could have. Scarcely had I risen from my knees, when I heard the distant dip of oars, and the music of a guitar and a couple of mandolines, accompany- ing the song Cyril and I are so fond of. The sounds came nearer, slowly growing out of the still night — the melodious plish-plash of the oars, the silvery tinkling of the mandolines, the deeper tones of the guitar, and a fine baritone voice which I fancied I knew. " Will they pass, will they stay ? " I asked myself, throwing open my window, and hiding myself behind the velvet curtain, where I could see without fear of being seen. The moon was near the full, and all the palaces upon the opposite bank were bathed in silvery light, and along the broad open canal 260 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. a gondola came gliding, lit with coloured lan- terns, which danced and trembled in the soft breeze. It came nearer and nearer, till it stopped under my window, and then the mandolines and guitar played a familiar symphony, and the voice 1 knew very well began Schubert's " Gute Nacht." He — it was Cyril of course — sang the serenade beautifully. Music is one of his greatest talents, inherited from his mother ; for I doubt if Uncle Ambrose could distinguish "God Save the Queen" from " Robin Adair." He sang that lovely melody to perfection, or it seemed perfection on the moonlit canal, with those fantastic Chinese lanterns trembling in the soft, sweet wind. I feel assured it was on just such a night as this that Desdemona eloped with her Moor. When he had sung the last notes and the mandolines had tinkled into silence, he stood looking up at my window, as if he were waiting for some token of approval. What Desdemona would have done under the daisy's DIARY IN VENICE. 2G1 same circumstances floated upon me in an instant. I crept to the mantelpiece and chose a lily from the vase of flowers, and, still hidden by the curtain, flung it out of the window. He caught it very cleverly ; and then, after a pause, the oars dipped, and the mandolines began to play the serenade from "Don Pasquale,"' and the gondola moved slowly, slowly down the canal, he singing as it went. I wonder if the other inhabitants of Venice considered him a nuisance. There was a man at the table d'hote at Danieli's who called Venice " a smelly place " — that was all he had to say about the most enchanting city in the world. Such a man as that would be sure to object to a serenade. Cyril and I were solemnly engaged this morn- ing. We were plighted and pledged to each other for life, and when we marry we are to have our own suite of rooms in Grosvenor Square, the whole of the third floor, which is to be decorated and furnished according to my taste. This means that Cyril and I are to choose 262 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. everything ; for, of course, I should not be such a selfish wretch as to choose without deferring to him. At River Lawn we are to have the east wing, and mother will build more rooms if ever we fancy we want them. And the gondola is to be ours — the gondola in which Cyril sang last night. I feel as if the gondola were a personal friend. ( 263 ) CHAPTER XI. A WOMAN WHO MIGHT HAVE BEEN HAPPY. Gilbert Flobestan, who came of age a few months before Robert Hatrell's death, was still a bachelor. He saw his twenty-eighth birthday approaching, and he saw himself no nearer matrimony than when he was twenty-one. His life in the interval had been eventful, and he felt older than his years. He had entered the diplomatic service under the best possible auspices, with family interest and collegiate honours in his favour. He had travelled much, and had spent the brightest years of his youth in vagrant diplomacy, passing from one legation to another. He had loved, and he had suffered; and now, at twenty-eight, having, as he believed, got be = yond the passions and illusions of youth, he was established in Paris as an idler by profes- 264 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. sion, well looked upon in the best society of the dazzling capital, and not unacquainted with the worst. He was not rich, as wealth is counted nowadays, when hardly any man under a millionaire presumes to consider himself comfortably off. He had bread and cheese ; that is to say, landed property which brought him, nominally, two thousand live hundred a year, actually, about seventeen hundred. He was not ambitious. He had lost father and mother before he was fifteen years of age, and he had none but distant relations. The stimulus to effort which paternal pride and maternal love might have afforded was in his case wanting. He had no sister to interest herself in his endeavours and to exult in his triumphs. He had no brother to rouse the spirit of emulation in his sluggish temperament. He told himself that he stood alone in the world, and that it mattered very little what became of him — that he might go his own way, whether to blessedness or to perdition, without hurting any- body but himself. A WOMAN WHO MIGHT HAVE BEEN HAPPY. 205 This sense of isolation had tended towards cynicism. He saw the world in which he lived in its worst aspect, and cultivated a low opinion of his fellow-men. His estimate of woman had been of the lowest, since one never-to-be-forgotten April night in Florence, when, standing in a moonlit garden, he heard a woman's careless speech from an open window just above his head — speech which told hiui uith ruthless unreserve that the woman he had worshipped as more than half a saint was an audacious and remorseless sinner. Xever till that ni^ht had Gilbert Florestan deliberately listened to a conversation that was not meant for his ear ; and on that night he stood beneath the window-sill for less than five minutes. He only waited long enough to be sure that he had not deceived himself — that the speech he had heard was not a delusion engendered of his own fevered brain. There, hidden amidst the foliage of magnolia and orange, he stood and listened to the two who leant upon the cushioned sill above him, looking dreamily out into the 266 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. night. No, there was no illusion. Those words were real — silvery sweet, though to him they sounded like the hissing of Medusa's snakes. They told him that the woman he was pursuing with all-confiding love was the mistress of another man — that if she were to yield to his prayers and marry him — a question which she was now de- bating with, her lover — the marriage would be a simple matter of convenience, and the lover would not be the less beloved, or the less favoured. "For thee, carissimo, it would be always the same," said the silver voice ; and the music of the waltz in the adjoining ball-room seemed to take up the strain. "Always the same — always the same." Florestan waited to hear no more. He left the garden of that semi-royal villa, walked straight home to his lodgings in the Via Cavour, packed up the lady's letters — those cherished letters, every one of which — from the tiniest note acknowledging a bouquet, to the longest and most romantic amplification of the old theme, "he loves me, he loves me not" — he had A WOMAN WHO MIGHT HAVE BEEN HAPPY. 267 treasured in a locked drawer, together with every flower he had begged from the clusters she wore ou her breast, every stray glove he had hoarded, and the dainty Cinderella slipper for which he had paid more than its weight in gold to her maid. He did not write her a letter. He would not stoop so low as to give any ex- pression to his anger or his scorn. He had been deceived, that was all. The woman he loved had only existed in his imagination. The beautiful face and form which he had ignorantly worshipped belonged to quite a different kind of woman. Perhaps there was no such woman — out of a book — as the woman he had imagined, the woman of transparent soul and noble mind, the only woman he cared to win. " I know you ; good-bye." Those five words were all the explanation or farewell which he deigned to send her. He wrote them in his bold strong hand upon a sheet of Bath post, and wrapped it round the packet of letters. Then he packed them in another sheet, and sealed them with the seal which had 268 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. been set upon so many an ardent outpouring of his passionate heart. Yes, he had loved her, with all the fire and freshness of three and twenty — with all the romantic fervour of a mind fed upon classic Greek, and steeped in Italian poetry. He had come to Florence a romantic youth, he left Florence a blase man of the world ; and yet now, five years after, in this bustling cosmo- politan and distinctly modern Paris, the very thought of those old palaces in which he had danced with her, those old gardens where they had sat in twilight and star-shine, moonlight and shadow, thrilled him with the bitter-sweet memory of a delusion that had been dearer than all the realities of his youth. He had not been at Fountainhead, his birth- place by the river, except for a week or a fort- night at a time, since he came of age and sold the meadows adjoining River Lawn to Robert Hatrell. But although he had been living abroad since he left the University, he had A WOMAN WHO MIGHT HAVE BEEN HAPPY. never consented to let strangers inhabit the house in which, his father and mother had lived and died, albeit agents had been desirous to find him an " eligible tenant." The house remained shut up, in the care of his mother's faithful housekeeper, and her nephew, a handy young man who helped in the gardens, where expenses had been cut down to the lowest level compatible with the preservation of the beauty of grounds which had been the chief delight of young Sirs. Florestan's life. A woman takes to a garden naturally, as a duckling takes to water, and cherishes it, and watches it, and thinks about it as if it were a living thing. The worship of flowers and shrubs is inherent in the female mind, and a woman who did not care fur her garden would be a monster. The house was old, as old as the Tudors, and it was just one of those places which the modern millionaire would have ruthlessly razed to the ground, or so altered, restored, enlarged, and beautified, as to obliterate its every charm of age and picturesqueness. Florestan was content 270 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. to leave it alone in all its subdued colouring, quaintness, and inconveniences of construction, telling of a civilization long past, and of a life less pretentious and more domestic. The gardens had all the grave beauty of an honourable old age. Very little money had been spent upon them ; but there had been taste and care from the beginning of things, when they who planned them had Lord Bacon's Essay on Gardens in their minds as a new thing, and had known Francis Bacon in the flesh, and talked with him of the trees and flowers he loved. Vagrant diplomacy had carried Gilbert Flores- tan very far from the old home in which his ancestors had dwelt from generation to genera- tion ; but he kept the image of his birthplace in a corner of his heart, and he would almost as soon have sold his heart's best blood as the house in which his people had lived and died. Paris suited his cynical temper at eight and twenty ; a city through which the whole civilized world passed and repassed ; the vestibule of Europe, the playground of America ; a city in A WOMAN WHO MIGHT HAVE BEEN HAPPY. 2 i 1 which a man who only wanted to be a spectator of the life-drama could have ample opportunity to study the varieties of mankind, nationalities, professions, wealth, and penury, beauty, and burning. 3Ir. Florestan had a fourth floor in the Champs Elysees, an apartment which he spoke of jocosely as his sky-parlour. Nominally the fourth, it was practically the fifth floor, and the balcony com- manded a bird's-eye view of the city, a vast panorama of white walls and gray and red roofs, through which wound the serpentine coils of the dark blue river. Although the rooms were so near the roof they were spacious and lofty, and were furnished with some taste, Florestan's own belongings — books, pictures, photographs, bronzes, and curios — giving an air of comfort and individuality to the con- ventional Louis Seize suite of tapestried easy- chairs and sofas, ebony tables and cabinets. The rooms comprised an ante-room, where three large palms and a Turkish divan suggested Oriental luxury, and which served as a waiting-room for 272 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. tradesmen and troublesome visitors of all kinds ; a library, where Florestan dined on the very rare occasions when he dined, at home ; a small smoking-room adjoining; and a spacious bed- room, with dressing and bath-room attached. Here Gilbert Florestan lived his own life, received the few intimate friends he cared about, and shut out all the great family of bores. In the polite world of Paris he was known as a well- born Englishman whose commanding presence and handsome face were distinctly ornamental in any salon, and he was welcomed accordingly with Parisian effusion, which he knew meant very little. In the demi-monde he was known as a young man who had outlived his illusions; and in that half world he was a more important figure than in the salons of the great. It must be owned that he had a preference for Bohemian society, with all its accidents and varieties, its brilliant reputations of to-day, its sudden dis- appearances of to-morrow, its frank revelations, its absence of all reserve. He painted cleverly, in a sketchy style, after A WOMAN WHO MIGHT HAVE BEEN HAPPY. 273 the manner of the Impressionists, and he was very fond of Art. Music and the Drama had also an inexhaustible charm for him, and he loved those out-of-the-way nooks and corners of the Art world where dwell the men and women whose talents have won but scanty appreciation from the great public, and who have never been spoiled or Philistinised by large monetary re- wards. " Directly an artist gets rich, there is a divine fire goes out of him," said Florestan. " All the spontaneity and the daring which made hitn great is paralysed by the greed of gain. He no longer obeys the first impulse of his genius, the real inspiration, but he sits down to consider what will pay best ; the thing, good or bad, true or false, which will bring him in the most solid cash. He strives no longer to realize his ideal. He studies the market, and paints, or writes, or composes for that. And so dies the divinity out of his art. His genius shudders, and flies the trader's studio; for once bitten with the desire to make money, the artist sinks to the level of VOL. I. T 274 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. the trader. He is no better than the middleman with his shop on the boulevard and his talent for reclame" There is plenty of unrewarded talent in the great city of Paris; and amongst painters and composers who had never reached the monotonous table-land of financial ease, amongst journalists, poets, and vaudevillists, Gilbert Florestan found a little world which was Bohemian without being vicious, but which occasionally opened its doors to certain stars of the demi-monde who would hardly have been received in the great houses of the Faubourg St. Germain, or the Faubourg St. Honore. It was at a musical evening on a third floor in the Kue des Saints Peres that Florestan met two women, in whom he felt keenly interested at first sight. They were mother and daughter. The mother was distinguished looking, and had once been handsome ; the daughter was eminently beautiful. He was told that they were Spaniards, natives of Madrid. The elder lady described herself as the widow of a General Officer, Felix A WOMAN WHO MIGHT HAVE BEEN HAPPY. 2/D Quijada, who died when her only child, Dolores, was an infant. She had migrated to Paris soon after her husband's death, and had lived there ever since. Mother and daughter were both dressed in black, with an elegant simplicity which did not forbid the use of a great deal of valuable lace; and Florestan noted that the elder lady wore diamond solitaire earrings, and the younger a collet necklace, which would not have misbeseemed the throat of a duchess. Nowhere, however, could diamonds have shown to greater advantage than on the ivory whiteness of Mademoiselle Dolores di Quijada's swan-like neck. Nowhere had Florestan seen a lovelier complexion or finer eyes : but that which attracted him most in the Spanish girl's face was her resemblance to the woman he had loved, the woman who had deceived him, and well-nigh broken his heart. He was interested in her at first sight, and he begged to be introduced to her and her mother. They received him with cordiality, perhaps because he was the handsomest and most 276 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. aristocratic-looking man in an assembly where art was represented by long hair and well-worn dress-coats on the part of the men, and by eccentric toilets and picturesque heads on the part of the women. Madame Duturque, the giver of the party, was the wife of a musical man who had written a successful opera twenty years before, succeeded by several unsuccessful ones, and who now made a somewhat scanty living by giving pianoforte lessons and publishing occa- sional compositions, which he fondly believed to be as good as Chopin's best work, but which were rarely played by anybody except his own pupils. Clever people, musical or otherwise, liked good- natured little Madame Duturque's parties, and as she did not inquire too closely into the ante- cedents of any well-mannered and pretty woman who sought her acquaintance, people were met in her salon who were not without histories, and whose past and present existence was in some- wise mysterious. The Spanish beauty and her mother were A WOMAN WHO MIGHT HAVE BEEN HAPPY. 277 accidental acquaintances, met at Boulogne-sur- lier the previous summer. "Are they not charming?" the little woman asked Florestan, while her husband, a grim- looking man, with a long, gaunt figure, after the manner of Don Quixote, a long, pale face and lono- o-rev hair, was crashing out one of his *o o noisiest mazourkas, in which the tempo rubato prevailed to an agonizing extent. " They are of a very old Castilian family. A Quijada was secretary or something to Charles the Fifth, and I know that they are rich, though they live in a very simple style on a second floor in the Eue Saint Guillaume." " The young lady's diamonds look like wealth, most assuredly," replied Florestan; "but how comes it that so lovely a woman, and not without a dot, should be unmarried at five or six and twenty. She looks quite as old as that." "Oh, she has had offers and offers. She is tired of admiration and pursuit. Her mother has talked to me of the grand opportunities she has thrown away. She is capricious— a spoiled 278 ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE. child. She does what she likes, and her mother is too fond of her to oppose her in anything. They adore each other. It is a most touching spectacle to see them in their modest interior."