initial commit of ebook 2996HEADmain

1 files changed, 4199 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/2996-0.txt b/2996-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9b91019
--- /dev/null
+++ b/2996-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4199 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid, by
+Thomas Hardy
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid
+
+
+Author: Thomas Hardy
+
+
+
+Release Date: May 2, 2015  [eBook #2996]
+[This file was first posted on October 12, 2000]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANTIC ADVENTURES OF A
+MILKMAID***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1920 Macmillan and Co. _A Changed Man and Other
+Tales_ edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+                  THE ROMANTIC ADVENTURES OF A MILKMAID.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+IT was half-past four o’clock (by the testimony of the land-surveyor, my
+authority for the particulars of this story, a gentleman with the
+faintest curve of humour on his lips); it was half-past four o’clock on a
+May morning in the eighteen forties.  A dense white fog hung over the
+Valley of the Exe, ending against the hills on either side.
+
+But though nothing in the vale could be seen from higher ground, notes of
+differing kinds gave pretty clear indications that bustling life was
+going on there.  This audible presence and visual absence of an active
+scene had a peculiar effect above the fog level.  Nature had laid a white
+hand over the creatures ensconced within the vale, as a hand might be
+laid over a nest of chirping birds.
+
+The noises that ascended through the pallid coverlid were perturbed
+lowings, mingled with human voices in sharps and flats, and the bark of a
+dog.  These, followed by the slamming of a gate, explained as well as
+eyesight could have done, to any inhabitant of the district, that
+Dairyman Tucker’s under-milker was driving the cows from the meads into
+the stalls.  When a rougher accent joined in the vociferations of man and
+beast, it would have been realized that the dairy-farmer himself had come
+out to meet the cows, pail in hand, and white pinafore on; and when,
+moreover, some women’s voices joined in the chorus, that the cows were
+stalled and proceedings about to commence.
+
+A hush followed, the atmosphere being so stagnant that the milk could be
+heard buzzing into the pails, together with occasional words of the
+milkmaids and men.
+
+‘Don’t ye bide about long upon the road, Margery.  You can be back again
+by skimming-time.’
+
+The rough voice of Dairyman Tucker was the vehicle of this remark.  The
+barton-gate slammed again, and in two or three minutes a something became
+visible, rising out of the fog in that quarter.
+
+The shape revealed itself as that of a woman having a young and agile
+gait.  The colours and other details of her dress were then disclosed—a
+bright pink cotton frock (because winter was over); a small woollen shawl
+of shepherd’s plaid (because summer was not come); a white handkerchief
+tied over her head-gear, because it was so foggy, so damp, and so early;
+and a straw bonnet and ribbons peeping from under the handkerchief,
+because it was likely to be a sunny May day.
+
+Her face was of the hereditary type among families down in these parts:
+sweet in expression, perfect in hue, and somewhat irregular in feature.
+Her eyes were of a liquid brown.  On her arm she carried a withy basket,
+in which lay several butter-rolls in a nest of wet cabbage-leaves.  She
+was the ‘Margery’ who had been told not to ‘bide about long upon the
+road.’
+
+She went on her way across the fields, sometimes above the fog, sometimes
+below it, not much perplexed by its presence except when the track was so
+indefinite that it ceased to be a guide to the next stile.  The dampness
+was such that innumerable earthworms lay in couples across the path till,
+startled even by her light tread, they withdrew suddenly into their
+holes.  She kept clear of all trees.  Why was that?  There was no danger
+of lightning on such a morning as this.  But though the roads were dry
+the fog had gathered in the boughs, causing them to set up such a
+dripping as would go clean through the protecting handkerchief like
+bullets, and spoil the ribbons beneath.  The beech and ash were
+particularly shunned, for they dripped more maliciously than any.  It was
+an instance of woman’s keen appreciativeness of nature’s moods and
+peculiarities: a man crossing those fields might hardly have perceived
+that the trees dripped at all.
+
+In less than an hour she had traversed a distance of four miles, and
+arrived at a latticed cottage in a secluded spot.  An elderly woman,
+scarce awake, answered her knocking.  Margery delivered up the butter,
+and said, ‘How is granny this morning?  I can’t stay to go up to her, but
+tell her I have returned what we owed her.’
+
+Her grandmother was no worse than usual: and receiving back the empty
+basket the girl proceeded to carry out some intention which had not been
+included in her orders.  Instead of returning to the light labours of
+skimming-time, she hastened on, her direction being towards a little
+neighbouring town.  Before, however, Margery had proceeded far, she met
+the postman, laden to the neck with letter-bags, of which he had not yet
+deposited one.
+
+‘Are the shops open yet, Samuel?’ she said.
+
+‘O no,’ replied that stooping pedestrian, not waiting to stand upright.
+‘They won’t be open yet this hour, except the saddler and ironmonger and
+little tacker-haired machine-man for the farm folk.  They downs their
+shutters at half-past six, then the baker’s at half-past seven, then the
+draper’s at eight.’
+
+‘O, the draper’s at eight.’  It was plain that Margery had wanted the
+draper’s.
+
+The postman turned up a side-path, and the young girl, as though deciding
+within herself that if she could not go shopping at once she might as
+well get back for the skimming, retraced her steps.
+
+The public road home from this point was easy but devious.  By far the
+nearest way was by getting over a fence, and crossing the private grounds
+of a picturesque old country-house, whose chimneys were just visible
+through the trees.  As the house had been shut up for many months, the
+girl decided to take the straight cut.  She pushed her way through the
+laurel bushes, sheltering her bonnet with the shawl as an additional
+safeguard, scrambled over an inner boundary, went along through more
+shrubberies, and stood ready to emerge upon the open lawn.  Before doing
+so she looked around in the wary manner of a poacher.  It was not the
+first time that she had broken fence in her life; but somehow, and all of
+a sudden, she had felt herself too near womanhood to indulge in such
+practices with freedom.  However, she moved forth, and the house-front
+stared her in the face, at this higher level unobscured by fog.
+
+It was a building of the medium size, and unpretending, the façade being
+of stone; and of the Italian elevation made familiar by Inigo Jones and
+his school.  There was a doorway to the lawn, standing at the head of a
+flight of steps.  The shutters of the house were closed, and the blinds
+of the bedrooms drawn down.  Her perception of the fact that no crusty
+caretaker could see her from the windows led her at once to slacken her
+pace, and stroll through the flower-beds coolly.  A house unblinded is a
+possible spy, and must be treated accordingly; a house with the shutters
+together is an insensate heap of stone and mortar, to be faced with
+indifference.
+
+On the other side of the house the greensward rose to an eminence,
+whereon stood one of those curious summer shelters sometimes erected on
+exposed points of view, called an all-the-year-round.  In the present
+case it consisted of four walls radiating from a centre like the arms of
+a turnstile, with seats in each angle, so that whencesoever the wind
+came, it was always possible to find a screened corner from which to
+observe the landscape.
+
+The milkmaid’s trackless course led her up the hill and past this
+erection.  At ease as to being watched and scolded as an intruder, her
+mind flew to other matters; till, at the moment when she was not a yard
+from the shelter, she heard a foot or feet scraping on the gravel behind
+it.  Some one was in the all-the-year-round, apparently occupying the
+seat on the other side; as was proved when, on turning, she saw an elbow,
+a man’s elbow, projecting over the edge.
+
+Now the young woman did not much like the idea of going down the hill
+under the eyes of this person, which she would have to do if she went on,
+for as an intruder she was liable to be called back and questioned upon
+her business there.  Accordingly she crept softly up and sat in the seat
+behind, intending to remain there until her companion should leave.
+
+This he by no means seemed in a hurry to do.  What could possibly have
+brought him there, what could detain him there, at six o’clock on a
+morning of mist when there was nothing to be seen or enjoyed of the vale
+beneath, puzzled her not a little.  But he remained quite still, and
+Margery grew impatient.  She discerned the track of his feet in the dewy
+grass, forming a line from the house steps, which announced that he was
+an inhabitant and not a chance passer-by.  At last she peeped round.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+A fine-framed dark-mustachioed gentleman, in dressing-gown and slippers,
+was sitting there in the damp without a hat on.  With one hand he was
+tightly grasping his forehead, the other hung over his knee.  The
+attitude bespoke with sufficient clearness a mental condition of anguish.
+He was quite a different being from any of the men to whom her eyes were
+accustomed.  She had never seen mustachios before, for they were not worn
+by civilians in Lower Wessex at this date.  His hands and his face were
+white—to her view deadly white—and he heeded nothing outside his own
+existence.  There he remained as motionless as the bushes around him;
+indeed, he scarcely seemed to breathe.
+
+Having imprudently advanced thus far, Margery’s wish was to get back
+again in the same unseen manner; but in moving her foot for the purpose
+it grated on the gravel.  He started up with an air of bewilderment, and
+slipped something into the pocket of his dressing-gown.  She was almost
+certain that it was a pistol.  The pair stood looking blankly at each
+other.
+
+‘My Gott, who are you?’ he asked sternly, and with not altogether an
+English articulation.  ‘What do you do here?’
+
+Margery had already begun to be frightened at her boldness in invading
+the lawn and pleasure-seat.  The house had a master, and she had not
+known of it.  ‘My name is Margaret Tucker, sir,’ she said meekly.  ‘My
+father is Dairyman Tucker.  We live at Silverthorn Dairy-house.’
+
+‘What were you doing here at this hour of the morning?’
+
+She told him, even to the fact that she had climbed over the fence.
+
+‘And what made you peep round at me?’
+
+‘I saw your elbow, sir; and I wondered what you were doing?’
+
+‘And what was I doing?’
+
+‘Nothing.  You had one hand on your forehead and the other on your knee.
+I do hope you are not ill, sir, or in deep trouble?’  Margery had
+sufficient tact to say nothing about the pistol.
+
+‘What difference would it make to you if I were ill or in trouble?  You
+don’t know me.’
+
+She returned no answer, feeling that she might have taken a liberty in
+expressing sympathy.  But, looking furtively up at him, she discerned to
+her surprise that he seemed affected by her humane wish, simply as it had
+been expressed.  She had scarcely conceived that such a tall dark man
+could know what gentle feelings were.
+
+‘Well, I am much obliged to you for caring how I am,’ said he with a
+faint smile and an affected lightness of manner which, even to her, only
+rendered more apparent the gloom beneath.  ‘I have not slept this past
+night.  I suffer from sleeplessness.  Probably you do not.’
+
+Margery laughed a little, and he glanced with interest at the comely
+picture she presented; her fresh face, brown hair, candid eyes,
+unpractised manner, country dress, pink hands, empty wicker-basket, and
+the handkerchief over her bonnet.
+
+‘Well,’ he said, after his scrutiny, ‘I need hardly have asked such a
+question of one who is Nature’s own image . . . Ah, but my good little
+friend,’ he added, recurring to his bitter tone and sitting wearily down,
+‘you don’t know what great clouds can hang over some people’s lives, and
+what cowards some men are in face of them.  To escape themselves they
+travel, take picturesque houses, and engage in country sports.  But here
+it is so dreary, and the fog was horrible this morning!’
+
+‘Why, this is only the pride of the morning!’ said Margery.  ‘By-and-by
+it will be a beautiful day.’
+
+She was going on her way forthwith; but he detained her—detained her with
+words, talking on every innocent little subject he could think of.  He
+had an object in keeping her there more serious than his words would
+imply.  It was as if he feared to be left alone.
+
+While they still stood, the misty figure of the postman, whom Margery had
+left a quarter of an hour earlier to follow his sinuous course, crossed
+the grounds below them on his way to the house.  Signifying to Margery by
+a wave of his hand that she was to step back out of sight, in the hinder
+angle of the shelter, the gentleman beckoned to the postman to bring the
+bag to where he stood.  The man did so, and again resumed his journey.
+
+The stranger unlocked the bag and threw it on the seat, having taken one
+letter from within.  This he read attentively, and his countenance
+changed.
+
+The change was almost phantasmagorial, as if the sun had burst through
+the fog upon that face: it became clear, bright, almost radiant.  Yet it
+was but a change that may take place in the commonest human being,
+provided his countenance be not too wooden, or his artifice have not
+grown to second nature.  He turned to Margery, who was again edging off,
+and, seizing her hand, appeared as though he were about to embrace her.
+Checking his impulse, he said, ‘My guardian child—my good friend—you have
+saved me!’
+
+‘What from?’ she ventured to ask.
+
+‘That you may never know.’
+
+She thought of the weapon, and guessed that the letter he had just
+received had effected this change in his mood, but made no observation
+till he went on to say, ‘What did you tell me was your name, dear girl?’
+
+She repeated her name.
+
+‘Margaret Tucker.’  He stooped, and pressed her hand.  ‘Sit down for a
+moment—one moment,’ he said, pointing to the end of the seat, and taking
+the extremest further end for himself, not to discompose her.  She sat
+down.
+
+‘It is to ask a question,’ he went on, ‘and there must be confidence
+between us.  You have saved me from an act of madness!  What can I do for
+you?’
+
+‘Nothing, sir.’
+
+‘Nothing?’
+
+‘Father is very well off, and we don’t want anything.’
+
+‘But there must be some service I can render, some kindness, some votive
+offering which I could make, and so imprint on your memory as long as you
+live that I am not an ungrateful man?’
+
+‘Why should you be grateful to me, sir?’
+
+He shook his head.  ‘Some things are best left unspoken.  Now think.
+What would you like to have best in the world?’
+
+Margery made a pretence of reflecting—then fell to reflecting seriously;
+but the negative was ultimately as undisturbed as ever: she could not
+decide on anything she would like best in the world; it was too
+difficult, too sudden.
+
+‘Very well—don’t hurry yourself.  Think it over all day.  I ride this
+afternoon.  You live—where?’
+
+‘Silverthorn Dairy-house.’
+
+‘I will ride that way homeward this evening.  Do you consider by eight
+o’clock what little article, what little treat, you would most like of
+any.’
+
+‘I will, sir,’ said Margery, now warming up to the idea.  ‘Where shall I
+meet you?  Or will you call at the house, sir?’
+
+‘Ah—no.  I should not wish the circumstances known out of which our
+acquaintance rose.  It would be more proper—but no.’
+
+Margery, too, seemed rather anxious that he should not call.  ‘I could
+come out, sir,’ she said.  ‘My father is odd-tempered, and perhaps—’
+
+It was agreed that she should look over a stile at the top of her
+father’s garden, and that he should ride along a bridle-path outside, to
+receive her answer.  ‘Margery,’ said the gentleman in conclusion, ‘now
+that you have discovered me under ghastly conditions, are you going to
+reveal them, and make me an object for the gossip of the curious?’
+
+‘No, no, sir!’ she replied earnestly.  ‘Why should I do that?’
+
+‘You will never tell?’
+
+‘Never, never will I tell what has happened here this morning.’
+
+‘Neither to your father, nor to your friends, nor to any one?’
+
+‘To no one at all,’ she said.
+
+‘It is sufficient,’ he answered.  ‘You mean what you say, my dear maiden.
+Now you want to leave me.  Good-bye!’
+
+She descended the hill, walking with some awkwardness; for she felt the
+stranger’s eyes were upon her till the fog had enveloped her from his
+gaze.  She took no notice now of the dripping from the trees; she was
+lost in thought on other things.  Had she saved this handsome,
+melancholy, sleepless, foreign gentleman who had had a trouble on his
+mind till the letter came?  What had he been going to do?  Margery could
+guess that he had meditated death at his own hand.  Strange as the
+incident had been in itself; to her it had seemed stranger even than it
+was.  Contrasting colours heighten each other by being juxtaposed; it is
+the same with contrasting lives.
+
+Reaching the opposite side of the park there appeared before her for the
+third time that little old man, the foot-post.  As the turnpike-road ran,
+the postman’s beat was twelve miles a day; six miles out from the town,
+and six miles back at night.  But what with zigzags, devious ways,
+offsets to country seats, curves to farms, looped courses, and triangles
+to outlying hamlets, the ground actually covered by him was nearer
+one-and-twenty miles.  Hence it was that Margery, who had come straight,
+was still abreast of him, despite her long pause.
+
+The weighty sense that she was mixed up in a tragical secret with an
+unknown and handsome stranger prevented her joining very readily in chat
+with the postman for some time.  But a keen interest in her adventure
+caused her to respond at once when the bowed man of mails said, ‘You hit
+athwart the grounds of Mount Lodge, Miss Margery, or you wouldn’t ha’ met
+me here.  Well, somebody hey took the old place at last.’
+
+In acknowledging her route Margery brought herself to ask who the new
+gentleman might be.
+
+‘Guide the girl’s heart!  What! don’t she know?  And yet how should
+ye—he’s only just a-come.—Well, nominal, he’s a fishing gentleman, come
+for the summer only.  But, more to the subject, he’s a foreign noble
+that’s lived in England so long as to be without any true country: some
+of his letters call him Baron, some Squire, so that ’a must be born to
+something that can’t be earned by elbow-grease and Christian conduct.  He
+was out this morning a-watching the fog.  “Postman,” ’a said,
+“good-morning: give me the bag.”  O, yes, ’a’s a civil genteel nobleman
+enough.’
+
+‘Took the house for fishing, did he?’
+
+‘That’s what they say, and as it can be for nothing else I suppose it’s
+true.  But, in final, his health’s not good, ’a b’lieve; he’s been living
+too rithe.  The London smoke got into his wyndpipe, till ’a couldn’t eat.
+However, I shouldn’t mind having the run of his kitchen.’
+
+‘And what is his name?’
+
+‘Ah—there you have me!  ’Tis a name no man’s tongue can tell, or even
+woman’s, except by pen-and-ink and good scholarship.  It begins with X,
+and who, without the machinery of a clock in’s inside, can speak that?
+But here ’tis—from his letters.’  The postman with his walking-stick
+wrote upon the ground,
+
+                            ‘BARON VON XANTEN’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+The day, as she had prognosticated, turned out fine; for weather-wisdom
+was imbibed with their milk-sops by the children of the Exe Vale.  The
+impending meeting excited Margery, and she performed her duties in her
+father’s house with mechanical unconsciousness.
+
+Milking, skimming, cheesemaking were done.  Her father was asleep in the
+settle, the milkmen and maids were gone home to their cottages, and the
+clock showed a quarter to eight.  She dressed herself with care, went to
+the top of the garden, and looked over the stile.  The view was eastward,
+and a great moon hung before her in a sky which had not a cloud.  Nothing
+was moving except on the minutest scale, and she remained leaning over,
+the night-hawk sounding his croud from the bough of an isolated tree on
+the open hill side.
+
+Here Margery waited till the appointed time had passed by three-quarters
+of an hour; but no Baron came.  She had been full of an idea, and her
+heart sank with disappointment.  Then at last the pacing of a horse
+became audible on the soft path without, leading up from the water-meads,
+simultaneously with which she beheld the form of the stranger, riding
+home, as he had said.
+
+The moonlight so flooded her face as to make her very conspicuous in the
+garden-gap.  ‘Ah my maiden—what is your name—Margery!’ he said.  ‘How
+came you here?  But of course I remember—we were to meet.  And it was to
+be at eight—_proh pudor_!—I have kept you waiting!’
+
+‘It doesn’t matter, sir.  I’ve thought of something.’
+
+‘Thought of something?’
+
+‘Yes, sir.  You said this morning that I was to think what I would like
+best in the world, and I have made up my mind.’
+
+‘I did say so—to be sure I did,’ he replied, collecting his thoughts.  ‘I
+remember to have had good reason for gratitude to you.’  He placed his
+hand to his brow, and in a minute alighted, and came up to her with the
+bridle in his hand.  ‘I was to give you a treat or present, and you could
+not think of one.  Now you have done so.  Let me hear what it is, and
+I’ll be as good as my word.’
+
+‘To go to the Yeomanry Ball that’s to be given this month.’
+
+‘The Yeomanry Ball—Yeomanry Ball?’ he murmured, as if, of all requests in
+the world, this was what he had least expected.  ‘Where is what you call
+the Yeomanry Ball?’
+
+‘At Exonbury.’
+
+‘Have you ever been to it before?’
+
+‘No, sir.’
+
+‘Or to any ball?’
+
+‘No.’
+
+‘But did I not say a gift—a present?’
+
+‘Or a treat?’
+
+‘Ah, yes, or a treat,’ he echoed, with the air of one who finds himself
+in a slight fix.  ‘But with whom would you propose to go?’
+
+‘I don’t know.  I have not thought of that yet.’
+
+‘You have no friend who could take you, even if I got you an invitation?’
+
+Margery looked at the moon.  ‘No one who can dance,’ she said; adding,
+with hesitation, ‘I was thinking that perhaps—’
+
+‘But, my dear Margery,’ he said, stopping her, as if he half-divined what
+her simple dream of a cavalier had been; ‘it is very odd that you can
+think of nothing else than going to a Yeomanry Ball.  Think again.  You
+are sure there is nothing else?’
+
+‘Quite sure, sir,’ she decisively answered.  At first nobody would have
+noticed in that pretty young face any sign of decision; yet it was
+discoverable.  The mouth, though soft, was firm in line; the eyebrows
+were distinct, and extended near to each other.  ‘I have thought of it
+all day,’ she continued, sadly.  ‘Still, sir, if you are sorry you
+offered me anything, I can let you off.’
+
+‘Sorry?—Certainly not, Margery,’ be said, rather nettled.  ‘I’ll show you
+that whatever hopes I have raised in your breast I am honourable enough
+to gratify.  If it lies in my power,’ he added with sudden firmness, ‘you
+_shall_ go to the Yeomanry Ball.  In what building is it to be held?’
+
+‘In the Assembly Rooms.’
+
+‘And would you be likely to be recognized there?  Do you know many
+people?’
+
+‘Not many, sir.  None, I may say.  I know nobody who goes to balls.’
+
+‘Ah, well; you must go, since you wish it; and if there is no other way
+of getting over the difficulty of having nobody to take you, I’ll take
+you myself.  Would you like me to do so?  I can dance.’
+
+‘O, yes, sir; I know that, and I thought you might offer to do it.  But
+would you bring me back again?’
+
+‘Of course I’ll bring you back.  But, by-the-bye, can _you_ dance?’
+
+‘Yes.’
+
+‘What?’
+
+‘Reels, and jigs, and country-dances like the New-Rigged-Ship, and
+Follow-my-Lover, and Haste-to-the-Wedding, and the College Hornpipe, and
+the Favourite Quickstep, and Captain White’s dance.’
+
+‘A very good list—a very good! but unluckily I fear they don’t dance any
+of those now.  But if you have the instinct we may soon cure your
+ignorance.  Let me see you dance a moment.’
+
+She stood out into the garden-path, the stile being still between them,
+and seizing a side of her skirt with each hand, performed the movements
+which are even yet far from uncommon in the dances of the villagers of
+merry England.  But her motions, though graceful, were not precisely
+those which appear in the figures of a modern ball-room.
+
+‘Well, my good friend, it is a very pretty sight,’ he said, warming up to
+the proceedings.  ‘But you dance too well—you dance all over your
+person—and that’s too thorough a way for the present day.  I should say
+it was exactly how they danced in the time of your poet Chaucer; but as
+people don’t dance like it now, we must consider.  First I must inquire
+more about this ball, and then I must see you again.’
+
+‘If it is a great trouble to you, sir, I—’
+
+‘O no, no.  I will think it over.  So far so good.’
+
+The Baron mentioned an evening and an hour when he would be passing that
+way again; then mounted his horse and rode away.
+
+On the next occasion, which was just when the sun was changing places
+with the moon as an illuminator of Silverthorn Dairy, she found him at
+the spot before her, and unencumbered by a horse.  The melancholy that
+had so weighed him down at their first interview, and had been
+perceptible at their second, had quite disappeared.  He pressed her right
+hand between both his own across the stile.
+
+‘My good maiden, Gott bless you!’ said he warmly.  ‘I cannot help
+thinking of that morning!  I was too much over-shadowed at first to take
+in the whole force of it.  You do not know all; but your presence was a
+miraculous intervention.  Now to more cheerful matters.   I have a great
+deal to tell—that is, if your wish about the ball be still the same?’
+
+‘O yes, sir—if you don’t object.’
+
+‘Never think of my objecting.  What I have found out is something which
+simplifies matters amazingly.  In addition to your Yeomanry Ball at
+Exonbury, there is also to be one in the next county about the same time.
+This ball is not to be held at the Town Hall of the county-town as usual,
+but at Lord Toneborough’s, who is colonel of the regiment, and who, I
+suppose, wishes to please the yeomen because his brother is going to
+stand for the county.  Now I find I could take you there very well, and
+the great advantage of that ball over the Yeomanry Ball in this county
+is, that there you would be absolutely unknown, and I also.  But do you
+prefer your own neighbourhood?’
+
+‘O no, sir.  It is a ball I long to see—I don’t know what it is like; it
+does not matter where.’
+
+‘Good.  Then I shall be able to make much more of you there, where there
+is no possibility of recognition.  That being settled, the next thing is
+the dancing.  Now reels and such things do not do.  For think of
+this—there is a new dance at Almack’s and everywhere else, over which the
+world has gone crazy.’
+
+‘How dreadful!’
+
+‘Ah—but that is a mere expression—gone mad.  It is really an ancient
+Scythian dance; but, such is the power of fashion, that, having once been
+adopted by Society, this dance has made the tour of the Continent in one
+season.’
+
+‘What is its name, sir?’
+
+‘The polka.  Young people, who always dance, are ecstatic about it, and
+old people, who have not danced for years, have begun to dance again, on
+its account.  All share the excitement.  It arrived in London only some
+few months ago—it is now all over the country.  Now this is your
+opportunity, my good Margery.  To learn this one dance will be enough.
+They will dance scarce anything else at that ball.  While, to crown all,
+it is the easiest dance in the world, and as I know it quite well I can
+practise you in the step.  Suppose we try?’
+
+Margery showed some hesitation before crossing the stile: it was a
+Rubicon in more ways than one.  But the curious reverence which was
+stealing over her for all that this stranger said and did was too much
+for prudence.  She crossed the stile.
+
+Withdrawing with her to a nook where two high hedges met, and where the
+grass was elastic and dry, he lightly rested his arm on her waist, and
+practised with her the new step of fascination.  Instead of music he
+whispered numbers, and she, as may be supposed, showed no slight aptness
+in following his instructions.  Thus they moved round together, the
+moon-shadows from the twigs racing over their forms as they turned.
+
+The interview lasted about half an hour.  Then he somewhat abruptly
+handed her over the stile and stood looking at her from the other side.
+
+‘Well,’ he murmured, ‘what has come to pass is strange!  My whole
+business after this will be to recover my right mind!’
+
+Margery always declared that there seemed to be some power in the
+stranger that was more than human, something magical and compulsory, when
+he seized her and gently trotted her round.  But lingering emotions may
+have led her memory to play pranks with the scene, and her vivid
+imagination at that youthful age must be taken into account in believing
+her.  However, there is no doubt that the stranger, whoever he might be,
+and whatever his powers, taught her the elements of modern dancing at a
+certain interview by moonlight at the top of her father’s garden, as was
+proved by her possession of knowledge on the subject that could have been
+acquired in no other way.
+
+His was of the first rank of commanding figures, she was one of the most
+agile of milkmaids, and to casual view it would have seemed all of a
+piece with Nature’s doings that things should go on thus.  But there was
+another side to the case; and whether the strange gentleman were a wild
+olive tree, or not, it was questionable if the acquaintance would lead to
+happiness.  ‘A fleeting romance and a possible calamity;’ thus it might
+have been summed up by the practical.
+
+Margery was in Paradise; and yet she was not at this date distinctly in
+love with the stranger.  What she felt was something more mysterious,
+more of the nature of veneration.  As he looked at her across the stile
+she spoke timidly, on a subject which had apparently occupied her long.
+
+‘I ought to have a ball-dress, ought I not, sir?’
+
+‘Certainly.  And you shall have a ball-dress.’
+
+‘Really?’
+
+‘No doubt of it.  I won’t do things by halves for my best friend.  I have
+thought of the ball-dress, and of other things also.’
+
+‘And is my dancing good enough?’
+
+‘Quite—quite.’  He paused, lapsed into thought, and looked at her.
+‘Margery,’ he said, ‘do you trust yourself unreservedly to me?’
+
+‘O yes, sir,’ she replied brightly; ‘if I am not too much trouble: if I
+am good enough to be seen in your society.’
+
+The Baron laughed in a peculiar way.  ‘Really, I think you may assume as
+much as that.—However, to business.  The ball is on the twenty-fifth,
+that is next Thursday week; and the only difficulty about the dress is
+the size.  Suppose you lend me this?’  And he touched her on the shoulder
+to signify a tight little jacket she wore.
+
+Margery was all obedience.  She took it off and handed it to him.  The
+Baron rolled and compressed it with all his force till it was about as
+large as an apple-dumpling, and put it into his pocket.
+
+‘The next thing,’ he said, ‘is about getting the consent of your friends
+to your going.  Have you thought of this?’
+
+‘There is only my father.  I can tell him I am invited to a party, and I
+don’t think he’ll mind.  Though I would rather not tell him.’
+
+‘But it strikes me that you must inform him something of what you intend.
+I would strongly advise you to do so.’  He spoke as if rather perplexed
+as to the probable custom of the English peasantry in such matters, and
+added, ‘However, it is for you to decide.  I know nothing of the
+circumstances.  As to getting to the ball, the plan I have arranged is
+this.  The direction to Lord Toneborough’s being the other way from my
+house, you must meet me at Three-Walks-End—in Chillington Wood, two miles
+or more from here.  You know the place?  Good.  By meeting there we shall
+save five or six miles of journey—a consideration, as it is a long way.
+Now, for the last time: are you still firm in your wish for this
+particular treat and no other?  It is not too late to give it up.  Cannot
+you think of something else—something better—some useful household
+articles you require?’
+
+Margery’s countenance, which before had been beaming with expectation,
+lost its brightness: her lips became close, and her voice broken.  ‘You
+have offered to take me, and now—’
+
+‘No, no, no,’ he said, patting her cheek.  ‘We will not think of anything
+else.  You shall go.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+But whether the Baron, in naming such a distant spot for the rendezvous,
+was in hope she might fail him, and so relieve him after all of his
+undertaking, cannot be said; though it might have been strongly suspected
+from his manner that he had no great zest for the responsibility of
+escorting her.
+
+But he little knew the firmness of the young woman he had to deal with.
+She was one of those soft natures whose power of adhesiveness to an
+acquired idea seems to be one of the special attributes of that softness.
+To go to a ball with this mysterious personage of romance was her ardent
+desire and aim; and none the less in that she trembled with fear and
+excitement at her position in so aiming.  She felt the deepest awe,
+tenderness, and humility towards the Baron of the strange name; and yet
+she was prepared to stick to her point.
+
+Thus it was that the afternoon of the eventful day found Margery trudging
+her way up the slopes from the vale to the place of appointment.  She
+walked to the music of innumerable birds, which increased as she drew
+away from the open meads towards the groves.
+
+She had overcome all difficulties.  After thinking out the question of
+telling or not telling her father, she had decided that to tell him was
+to be forbidden to go.  Her contrivance therefore was this: to leave home
+this evening on a visit to her invalid grandmother, who lived not far
+from the Baron’s house; but not to arrive at her grandmother’s till
+breakfast-time next morning.  Who would suspect an intercalated
+experience of twelve hours with the Baron at a ball?  That this piece of
+deception was indefensible she afterwards owned readily enough; but she
+did not stop to think of it then.
+
+It was sunset within Chillington Wood by the time she reached
+Three-Walks-End—the converging point of radiating trackways, now floored
+with a carpet of matted grass, which had never known other scythes than
+the teeth of rabbits and hares.  The twitter overhead had ceased, except
+from a few braver and larger birds, including the cuckoo, who did not
+fear night at this pleasant time of year.  Nobody seemed to be on the
+spot when she first drew near, but no sooner did Margery stand at the
+intersection of the roads than a slight crashing became audible, and her
+patron appeared.  He was so transfigured in dress that she scarcely knew
+him.  Under a light great-coat, which was flung open, instead of his
+ordinary clothes he wore a suit of thin black cloth, an open waistcoat
+with a frill all down his shirt-front, a white tie, shining boots, no
+thicker than a glove, a coat that made him look like a bird, and a hat
+that seemed as if it would open and shut like an accordion.
+
+‘I am dressed for the ball—nothing worse,’ he said, drily smiling.  ‘So
+will you be soon.’
+
+‘Why did you choose this place for our meeting, sir?’ she asked, looking
+around and acquiring confidence.
+
+‘Why did I choose it?  Well, because in riding past one day I observed a
+large hollow tree close by here, and it occurred to me when I was last
+with you that this would be useful for our purpose.  Have you told your
+father?’
+
+‘I have not yet told him, sir.’
+
+‘That’s very bad of you, Margery.  How have you arranged it, then?’
+
+She briefly related her plan, on which he made no comment, but, taking
+her by the hand as if she were a little child, he led her through the
+undergrowth to a spot where the trees were older, and standing at wider
+distances.  Among them was the tree he had spoken of—an elm; huge,
+hollow, distorted, and headless, with a rift in its side.
+
+‘Now go inside,’ he said, ‘before it gets any darker.  You will find
+there everything you want.  At any rate, if you do not you must do
+without it.  I’ll keep watch; and don’t be longer than you can help to
+be.’
+
+‘What am I to do, sir?’ asked the puzzled maiden.
+
+‘Go inside, and you will see.  When you are ready wave your handkerchief
+at that hole.’
+
+She stooped into the opening.  The cavity within the tree formed a lofty
+circular apartment, four or five feet in diameter, to which daylight
+entered at the top, and also through a round hole about six feet from the
+ground, marking the spot at which a limb had been amputated in the tree’s
+prime.  The decayed wood of cinnamon-brown, forming the inner surface of
+the tree, and the warm evening glow, reflected in at the top, suffused
+the cavity with a faint mellow radiance.
+
+But Margery had hardly given herself time to heed these things.  Her eye
+had been caught by objects of quite another quality.  A large white
+oblong paper box lay against the inside of the tree; over it, on a
+splinter, hung a small oval looking-glass.
+
+Margery seized the idea in a moment.  She pressed through the rift into
+the tree, lifted the cover of the box, and, behold, there was disclosed
+within a lovely white apparition in a somewhat flattened state.  It was
+the ball-dress.
+
+This marvel of art was, briefly, a sort of heavenly cobweb.  It was a
+gossamer texture of precious manufacture, artistically festooned in a
+dozen flounces or more.
+
+Margery lifted it, and could hardly refrain from kissing it.  Had any one
+told her before this moment that such a dress could exist, she would have
+said, ‘No; it’s impossible!’  She drew back, went forward, flushed,
+laughed, raised her hands.  To say that the maker of that dress had been
+an individual of talent was simply understatement: he was a genius, and
+she sunned herself in the rays of his creation.
+
+She then remembered that her friend without had told her to make haste,
+and she spasmodically proceeded to array herself.  In removing the dress
+she found satin slippers, gloves, a handkerchief nearly all lace, a fan,
+and even flowers for the hair.  ‘O, how could he think of it!’ she said,
+clasping her hands and almost crying with agitation.  ‘And the glass—how
+good of him!’
+
+Everything was so well prepared, that to clothe herself in these garments
+was a matter of ease.  In a quarter of an hour she was ready, even to
+shoes and gloves.  But what led her more than anything else into
+admiration of the Baron’s foresight was the discovery that there were
+half-a-dozen pairs each of shoes and gloves, of varying sizes, out of
+which she selected a fit.
+
+Margery glanced at herself in the mirror, or at as much as she could see
+of herself: the image presented was superb.  Then she hastily rolled up
+her old dress, put it in the box, and thrust the latter on a ledge as
+high as she could reach.  Standing on tiptoe, she waved the handkerchief
+through the upper aperture, and bent to the rift to go out.
+
+But what a trouble stared her in the face.  The dress was so airy, so
+fantastical, and so extensive, that to get out in her new clothes by the
+rift which had admitted her in her old ones was an impossibility.  She
+heard the Baron’s steps crackling over the dead sticks and leaves.
+
+‘O, sir!’ she began in despair.
+
+‘What—can’t you dress yourself?’ he inquired from the back of the trunk.
+
+‘Yes; but I can’t get out of this dreadful tree!’
+
+He came round to the opening, stooped, and looked in.  ‘It is obvious
+that you cannot,’ he said, taking in her compass at a glance; and adding
+to himself; ‘Charming! who would have thought that clothes could do so
+much!—Wait a minute, my little maid: I have it!’ he said more loudly.
+
+With all his might he kicked at the sides of the rift, and by that means
+broke away several pieces of the rotten touchwood.  But, being thinly
+armed about the feet, he abandoned that process, and went for a fallen
+branch which lay near.  By using the large end as a lever, he tore away
+pieces of the wooden shell which enshrouded Margery and all her
+loveliness, till the aperture was large enough for her to pass without
+tearing her dress.  She breathed her relief: the silly girl had begun to
+fear that she would not get to the ball after all.
+
+He carefully wrapped round her a cloak he had brought with him: it was
+hooded, and of a length which covered her to the heels.
+
+‘The carriage is waiting down the other path,’ he said, and gave her his
+arm.  A short trudge over the soft dry leaves brought them to the place
+indicated.
+
+There stood the brougham, the horses, the coachman, all as still as if
+they were growing on the spot, like the trees.  Margery’s eyes rose with
+some timidity to the coachman’s figure.
+
+‘You need not mind him,’ said the Baron.  ‘He is a foreigner, and heeds
+nothing.’
+
+In the space of a short minute she was handed inside; the Baron buttoned
+up his overcoat, and surprised her by mounting with the coachman.  The
+carriage moved off silently over the long grass of the vista, the shadows
+deepening to black as they proceeded.  Darker and darker grew the night
+as they rolled on; the neighbourhood familiar to Margery was soon left
+behind, and she had not the remotest idea of the direction they were
+taking.  The stars blinked out, the coachman lit his lamps, and they
+bowled on again.
+
+In the course of an hour and a half they arrived at a small town, where
+they pulled up at the chief inn, and changed horses; all being done so
+readily that their advent had plainly been expected.  The journey was
+resumed immediately.  Her companion never descended to speak to her;
+whenever she looked out there he sat upright on his perch, with the mien
+of a person who had a difficult duty to perform, and who meant to perform
+it properly at all costs.  But Margery could not help feeling a certain
+dread at her situation—almost, indeed, a wish that she had not come.
+Once or twice she thought, ‘Suppose he is a wicked man, who is taking me
+off to a foreign country, and will never bring me home again.’
+
+But her characteristic persistence in an original idea sustained her
+against these misgivings except at odd moments.  One incident in
+particular had given her confidence in her escort: she had seen a tear in
+his eye when she expressed her sorrow for his troubles.  He may have
+divined that her thoughts would take an uneasy turn, for when they
+stopped for a moment in ascending a hill he came to the window.  ‘Are you
+tired, Margery?’ he asked kindly.
+
+‘No, sir.’
+
+‘Are you afraid?’
+
+‘N—no, sir.  But it is a long way.’
+
+‘We are almost there,’ he answered.  ‘And now, Margery,’ he said in a
+lower tone, ‘I must tell you a secret.  I have obtained this invitation
+in a peculiar way.  I thought it best for your sake not to come in my own
+name, and this is how I have managed.  A man in this county, for whom I
+have lately done a service, one whom I can trust, and who is personally
+as unknown here as you and I, has (privately) transferred his card of
+invitation to me.  So that we go under his name.  I explain this that you
+may not say anything imprudent by accident.  Keep your ears open and be
+cautious.’  Having said this the Baron retreated again to his place.
+
+‘Then he is a wicked man after all!’ she said to herself; ‘for he is
+going under a false name.’  But she soon had the temerity not to mind it:
+wickedness of that sort was the one ingredient required just now to
+finish him off as a hero in her eyes.
+
+They descended a hill, passed a lodge, then up an avenue; and presently
+there beamed upon them the light from other carriages, drawn up in a
+file, which moved on by degrees; and at last they halted before a large
+arched doorway, round which a group of people stood.
+
+‘We are among the latest arrivals, on account of the distance,’ said the
+Baron, reappearing.  ‘But never mind; there are three hours at least for
+your enjoyment.’
+
+The steps were promptly flung down, and they alighted.  The steam from
+the flanks of their swarthy steeds, as they seemed to her, ascended to
+the parapet of the porch, and from their nostrils the hot breath jetted
+forth like smoke out of volcanoes, attracting the attention of all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+The bewildered Margery was led by the Baron up the steps to the interior
+of the house, whence the sounds of music and dancing were already
+proceeding.  The tones were strange.  At every fourth beat a deep and
+mighty note throbbed through the air, reaching Margery’s soul with all
+the force of a blow.
+
+‘What is that powerful tune, sir—I have never heard anything like it?’
+she said.
+
+‘The Drum Polka,’ answered the Baron.  ‘The strange dance I spoke of and
+that we practised—introduced from my country and other parts of the
+continent.’
+
+Her surprise was not lessened when, at the entrance to the ballroom, she
+heard the names of her conductor and herself announced as ‘Mr. and Miss
+Brown.’
+
+However, nobody seemed to take any notice of the announcement, the room
+beyond being in a perfect turmoil of gaiety, and Margery’s consternation
+at sailing under false colours subsided.  At the same moment she observed
+awaiting them a handsome, dark-haired, rather _petite_ lady in
+cream-coloured satin.  ‘Who is she?’ asked Margery of the Baron.
+
+‘She is the lady of the mansion,’ he whispered.  ‘She is the wife of a
+peer of the realm, the daughter of a marquis, has five Christian names;
+and hardly ever speaks to commoners, except for political purposes.’
+
+‘How divine—what joy to be here!’ murmured Margery, as she contemplated
+the diamonds that flashed from the head of her ladyship, who was just
+inside the ball-room door, in front of a little gilded chair, upon which
+she sat in the intervals between one arrival and another.  She had come
+down from London at great inconvenience to herself; openly to promote
+this entertainment.
+
+As Mr. and Miss Brown expressed absolutely no meaning to Lady Toneborough
+(for there were three Browns already present in this rather mixed
+assembly), and as there was possibly a slight awkwardness in poor
+Margery’s manner, Lady Toneborough touched their hands lightly with the
+tips of her long gloves, said, ‘How d’ye do,’ and turned round for more
+comers.
+
+‘Ah, if she only knew we were a rich Baron and his friend, and not Mr.
+and Miss Brown at all, she wouldn’t receive us like that, would she?’
+whispered Margery confidentially.
+
+‘Indeed, she wouldn’t!’ drily said the Baron.  ‘Now let us drop into the
+dance at once; some of the people here, you see, dance much worse than
+you.’
+
+Almost before she was aware she had obeyed his mysterious influence, by
+giving him one hand, placing the other upon his shoulder, and swinging
+with him round the room to the steps she had learnt on the sward.
+
+At the first gaze the apartment had seemed to her to be floored with
+black ice; the figures of the dancers appearing upon it upside down.  At
+last she realized that it was highly-polished oak, but she was none the
+less afraid to move.
+
+‘I am afraid of falling down,’ she said.
+
+‘Lean on me; you will soon get used to it,’ he replied.  ‘You have no
+nails in your shoes now, dear.’
+
+His words, like all his words to her, were quite true.  She found it
+amazingly easy in a brief space of time.  The floor, far from hindering
+her, was a positive assistance to one of her natural agility and
+litheness.  Moreover, her marvellous dress of twelve flounces inspired
+her as nothing else could have done.  Externally a new creature, she was
+prompted to new deeds.  To feel as well-dressed as the other women around
+her is to set any woman at her ease, whencesoever she may have come: to
+feel much better dressed is to add radiance to that ease.
+
+Her prophet’s statement on the popularity of the polka at this juncture
+was amply borne out.  It was among the first seasons of its general
+adoption in country houses; the enthusiasm it excited to-night was beyond
+description, and scarcely credible to the youth of the present day.  A
+new motive power had been introduced into the world of poesy—the polka,
+as a counterpoise to the new motive power that had been introduced into
+the world of prose—steam.
+
+Twenty finished musicians sat in the music gallery at the end, with
+romantic mop-heads of raven hair, under which their faces and eyes shone
+like fire under coals.
+
+The nature and object of the ball had led to its being very inclusive.
+Every rank was there, from the peer to the smallest yeoman, and Margery
+got on exceedingly well, particularly when the recuperative powers of
+supper had banished the fatigue of her long drive.
+
+Sometimes she heard people saying, ‘Who are they?—brother and
+sister—father and daughter?  And never dancing except with each other—how
+odd?’  But of this she took no notice.
+
+When not dancing the watchful Baron took her through the drawing-rooms
+and picture-galleries adjoining, which to-night were thrown open like the
+rest of the house; and there, ensconcing her in some curtained nook, he
+drew her attention to scrap-books, prints, and albums, and left her to
+amuse herself with turning them over till the dance in which she was
+practised should again be called.  Margery would much have preferred to
+roam about during these intervals; but the words of the Baron were law,
+and as he commanded so she acted.  In such alternations the evening
+winged away; till at last came the gloomy words, ‘Margery, our time is
+up.’
+
+‘One more—only one!’ she coaxed, for the longer they stayed the more
+freely and gaily moved the dance.  This entreaty he granted; but on her
+asking for yet another, he was inexorable.  ‘No,’ he said.  ‘We have a
+long way to go.’
+
+Then she bade adieu to the wondrous scene, looking over her shoulder as
+they withdrew from the hall; and in a few minutes she was cloaked and in
+the carriage.  The Baron mounted to his seat on the box, where she saw
+him light a cigar; they plunged under the trees, and she leant back, and
+gave herself up to contemplate the images that filled her brain.  The
+natural result followed: she fell asleep.
+
+She did not awake till they stopped to change horses; when she saw
+against the stars the Baron sitting as erect as ever.  ‘He watches like
+the Angel Gabriel, when all the world is asleep!’ she thought.
+
+With the resumption of motion she slept again, and knew no more till he
+touched her hand and said, ‘Our journey is done—we are in Chillington
+Wood.’
+
+It was almost daylight.  Margery scarcely knew herself to be awake till
+she was out of the carriage and standing beside the Baron, who, having
+told the coachman to drive on to a certain point indicated, turned to
+her.
+
+‘Now,’ he said, smiling, ‘run across to the hollow tree; you know where
+it is.  I’ll wait as before, while you perform the reverse operation to
+that you did last night.’  She took no heed of the path now, nor regarded
+whether her pretty slippers became scratched by the brambles or no.  A
+walk of a few steps brought her to the particular tree which she had left
+about nine hours earlier.  It was still gloomy at this spot, the morning
+not being clear.
+
+She entered the trunk, dislodged the box containing her old clothing,
+pulled off the satin shoes, and gloves, dress, and in ten minutes emerged
+in the cotton and shawl of shepherd’s plaid.
+
+Baron was not far off.  ‘Now you look the milkmaid again,’ he said,
+coming towards her.  ‘Where is the finery?’
+
+‘Packed in the box, sir, as I found it.’  She spoke with more humility
+now.  The difference between them was greater than it had been at the
+ball.
+
+‘Good,’ he said.  ‘I must just dispose of it; and then away we go.’
+
+He went back to the tree, Margery following at a little distance.
+Bringing forth the box, he pulled out the dress as carelessly as if it
+had been rags.  But this was not all.  He gathered a few dry sticks,
+crushed the lovely garment into a loose billowy heap, threw the gloves,
+fan, and shoes on the top, then struck a light and ruthlessly set fire to
+the whole.
+
+Margery was agonized.  She ran forward; she implored and entreated.
+‘Please, sir—do spare it—do!  My lovely dress—my-dear, dear slippers—my
+fan—it is cruel!  Don’t burn them, please!’
+
+‘Nonsense.  We shall have no further use for them if we live a hundred
+years.’
+
+‘But spare a bit of it—one little piece, sir—a scrap of the lace—one bow
+of the ribbon—the lovely fan—just something!’
+
+But he was as immoveable as Rhadamanthus.  ‘No,’ he said, with a stern
+gaze of his aristocratic eye.  ‘It is of no use for you to speak like
+that.  The things are my property.  I undertook to gratify you in what
+you might desire because you had saved my life.  To go to a ball, you
+said.  You might much more wisely have said anything else, but no; you
+said, to go to a ball.  Very well—I have taken you to a ball.  I have
+brought you back.  The clothes were only the means, and I dispose of them
+my own way.  Have I not a right to?’
+
+‘Yes, sir,’ she said meekly.
+
+He gave the fire a stir, and lace and ribbons, and the twelve flounces,
+and the embroidery, and all the rest crackled and disappeared.  He then
+put in her hands the butter basket she had brought to take on to her
+grandmother’s, and accompanied her to the edge of the wood, where it
+merged in the undulating open country in which her granddame dwelt.
+
+‘Now, Margery,’ he said, ‘here we part.  I have performed my contract—at
+some awkwardness, if I was recognized.  But never mind that.  How do you
+feel—sleepy?’
+
+‘Not at all, sir,’ she said.
+
+‘That long nap refreshed you, eh?  Now you must make me a promise.  That
+if I require your presence at any time, you will come to me . . . I am a
+man of more than one mood,’ he went on with sudden solemnity; ‘and I may
+have desperate need of you again, to deliver me from that darkness as of
+Death which sometimes encompasses me.  Promise it, Margery—promise it;
+that, no matter what stands in the way, you will come to me if I require
+you.’
+
+‘I would have if you had not burnt my pretty clothes!’ she pouted.
+
+‘Ah—ungrateful!’
+
+‘Indeed, then, I will promise, sir,’ she said from her heart.  ‘Wherever
+I am, if I have bodily strength I will come to you.’
+
+He pressed her hand.  ‘It is a solemn promise,’ he replied.  ‘Now I must
+go, for you know your way.’
+
+‘I shall hardly believe that it has not been all a dream!’ she said, with
+a childish instinct to cry at his withdrawal.  ‘There will be nothing
+left of last night—nothing of my dress, nothing of my pleasure, nothing
+of the place!’
+
+‘You shall remember it in this way,’ said he.  ‘We’ll cut our initials on
+this tree as a memorial, so that whenever you walk this path you will see
+them.’
+
+Then with a knife he inscribed on the smooth bark of a beech tree the
+letters M.T., and underneath a large X.
+
+‘What, have you no Christian name, sir?’ she said.
+
+‘Yes, but I don’t use it.  Now, good-bye, my little friend.—What will you
+do with yourself to-day, when you are gone from me?’ he lingered to ask.
+
+‘Oh—I shall go to my granny’s,’ she replied with some gloom; ‘and have
+breakfast, and dinner, and tea with her, I suppose; and in the evening I
+shall go home to Silverthorn Dairy, and perhaps Jim will come to meet me,
+and all will be the same as usual.’
+
+‘Who is Jim?’
+
+‘O, he’s nobody—only the young man I’ve got to marry some day.’
+
+‘What!—you engaged to be married?—Why didn’t you tell me this before?’
+
+‘I—I don’t know, sir.’
+
+‘What is the young man’s name?’
+
+‘James Hayward.’
+
+‘What is he?’
+
+‘A master lime-burner.’
+
+‘Engaged to a master lime-burner, and not a word of this to me!  Margery,
+Margery! when shall a straightforward one of your sex be found!  Subtle
+even in your simplicity!  What mischief have you caused me to do, through
+not telling me this?  I wouldn’t have so endangered anybody’s happiness
+for a thousand pounds.  Wicked girl that you were; why didn’t you tell
+me?’
+
+‘I thought I’d better not!’ said Margery, beginning to be frightened.
+
+‘But don’t you see and understand that if you are already the property of
+a young man, and he were to find out this night’s excursion, he may be
+angry with you and part from you for ever?  With him already in the field
+I had no right to take you at all; he undoubtedly ought to have taken
+you; which really might have been arranged, if you had not deceived me by
+saying you had nobody.’
+
+Margery’s face wore that aspect of woe which comes from the repentant
+consciousness of having been guilty of an enormity.  ‘But he wasn’t good
+enough to take me, sir!’ she said, almost crying; ‘and he isn’t
+absolutely my master until I have married him, is he?’
+
+‘That’s a subject I cannot go into.  However, we must alter our tactics.
+Instead of advising you, as I did at first, to tell of this experience to
+your friends, I must now impress on you that it will be best to keep a
+silent tongue on the matter—perhaps for ever and ever.  It may come right
+some day, and you may be able to say “All’s well that ends well.”  Now,
+good morning, my friend.  Think of Jim, and forget me.’
+
+‘Ah, perhaps I can’t do that,’ she said, with a tear in her eye, and a
+full throat.
+
+‘Well—do your best.  I can say no more.’
+
+He turned and retreated into the wood, and Margery, sighing, went on her
+way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+Between six and seven o’clock in the evening of the same day a young man
+descended the hills into the valley of the Exe, at a point about midway
+between Silverthorn and the residence of Margery’s grandmother, four
+miles to the east.
+
+He was a thoroughbred son of the country, as far removed from what is
+known as the provincial, as the latter is from the out-and-out gentleman
+of culture.  His trousers and waistcoat were of fustian, almost white,
+but he wore a jacket of old-fashioned blue West-of-England cloth, so well
+preserved that evidently the article was relegated to a box whenever its
+owner engaged in such active occupations as he usually pursued.  His
+complexion was fair, almost florid, and he had scarcely any beard.
+
+A novel attraction about this young man, which a glancing stranger would
+know nothing of, was a rare and curious freshness of atmosphere that
+appertained to him, to his clothes, to all his belongings, even to the
+room in which he had been sitting.  It might almost have been said that
+by adding him and his implements to an over-crowded apartment you made it
+healthful.  This resulted from his trade.  He was a lime-burner; he
+handled lime daily; and in return the lime rendered him an incarnation of
+salubrity.  His hair was dry, fair, and frizzled, the latter possibly by
+the operation of the same caustic agent.  He carried as a walking-stick a
+green sapling, whose growth had been contorted to a corkscrew pattern by
+a twining honeysuckle.
+
+As he descended to the level ground of the water-meadows he cast his
+glance westward, with a frequency that revealed him to be in search of
+some object in the distance.  It was rather difficult to do this, the low
+sunlight dazzling his eyes by glancing from the river away there, and
+from the ‘carriers’ (as they were called) in his path—narrow artificial
+brooks for conducting the water over the grass.  His course was something
+of a zigzag from the necessity of finding points in these carriers
+convenient for jumping.  Thus peering and leaping and winding, he drew
+near the Exe, the central river of the miles-long mead.
+
+A moving spot became visible to him in the direction of his scrutiny,
+mixed up with the rays of the same river.  The spot got nearer, and
+revealed itself to be a slight thing of pink cotton and shepherd’s plaid,
+which pursued a path on the brink of the stream.  The young man so shaped
+his trackless course as to impinge on the path a little ahead of this
+coloured form, and when he drew near her he smiled and reddened.  The
+girl smiled back to him; but her smile had not the life in it that the
+young man’s had shown.
+
+‘My dear Margery—here I am!’ he said gladly in an undertone, as with a
+last leap he crossed the last intervening carrier, and stood at her side.
+
+‘You’ve come all the way from the kiln, on purpose to meet me, and you
+shouldn’t have done it,’ she reproachfully returned.
+
+‘We finished there at four, so it was no trouble; and if it had been—why,
+I should ha’ come.’
+
+A small sigh was the response.
+
+‘What, you are not even so glad to see me as you would be to see your dog
+or cat?’ he continued.  ‘Come, Mis’ess Margery, this is rather hard.
+But, by George, how tired you dew look!  Why, if you’d been up all night
+your eyes couldn’t be more like tea-saucers.  You’ve walked tew far,
+that’s what it is.  The weather is getting warm now, and the air of these
+low-lying meads is not strengthening in summer.  I wish you lived up on
+higher ground with me, beside the kiln.  You’d get as strong as a hoss!
+Well, there; all that will come in time.’
+
+Instead of saying yes, the fair maid repressed another sigh.
+
+‘What, won’t it, then?’ he said.
+
+‘I suppose so,’ she answered.  ‘If it is to be, it is.’
+
+‘Well said—very well said, my dear.’
+
+‘And if it isn’t to be it isn’t.’
+
+‘What?  Who’s been putting that into your head?  Your grumpy granny, I
+suppose.  However, how is she?  Margery, I have been thinking to-day—in
+fact, I was thinking it yesterday and all the week—that really we might
+settle our little business this summer.’
+
+‘This summer?’ she repeated, with some dismay.  ‘But the partnership?
+Remember it was not to be till after that was completed.’
+
+‘There I have you!’ said he, taking the liberty to pat her shoulder, and
+the further liberty of advancing his hand behind it to the other.  ‘The
+partnership is settled.  ’Tis “Vine and Hayward, lime-burners,” now, and
+“Richard Vine” no longer.  Yes, Cousin Richard has settled it so, for a
+time at least, and ’tis to be painted on the carts this week—blue
+letters—yaller ground.  I’ll boss one of ’em, and drive en round to your
+door as soon as the paint is dry, to show ’ee how it looks?’
+
+‘Oh, I am sure you needn’t take that trouble, Jim; I can see it quite
+well enough in my mind,’ replied the young girl—not without a flitting
+accent of superiority.
+
+‘Hullo,’ said Jim, taking her by the shoulders, and looking at her hard.
+‘What dew that bit of incivility mean?  Now, Margery, let’s sit down
+here, and have this cleared.’  He rapped with his stick upon the rail of
+a little bridge they were crossing, and seated himself firmly, leaving a
+place for her.
+
+‘But I want to get home-along,’ dear Jim, she coaxed.
+
+‘Fidgets.  Sit down, there’s a dear.  I want a straightforward answer, if
+you please.  In what month, and on what day of the month, will you marry
+me?’
+
+‘O, Jim,’ she said, sitting gingerly on the edge, ‘that’s too
+plain-spoken for you yet.  Before I look at it in that business light I
+should have to—to—’
+
+‘But your father has settled it long ago, and you said it should be as
+soon as I became a partner.  So, dear, you must not mind a plain man
+wanting a plain answer.  Come, name your time.’
+
+She did not reply at once.  What thoughts were passing through her brain
+during the interval?  Not images raised by his words, but whirling
+figures of men and women in red and white and blue, reflected from a
+glassy floor, in movements timed by the thrilling beats of the Drum
+Polka.  At last she said slowly, ‘Jim, you don’t know the world, and what
+a woman’s wants can be.’
+
+‘But I can make you comfortable.  I am in lodgings as yet, but I can have
+a house for the asking; and as to furniture, you shall choose of the best
+for yourself—the very best.’
+
+‘The best!  Far are you from knowing what that is!’ said the little
+woman.  ‘There be ornaments such as you never dream of; work-tables that
+would set you in amaze; silver candlesticks, tea and coffee pots that
+would dazzle your eyes; tea-cups, and saucers, gilded all over with
+guinea-gold; heavy velvet curtains, gold clocks, pictures, and
+looking-glasses beyond your very dreams.  So don’t say I shall have the
+best.’
+
+‘H’m!’ said Jim gloomily; and fell into reflection.  ‘Where did you get
+those high notions from, Margery?’ he presently inquired.  ‘I’ll swear
+you hadn’t got ’em a week ago.’  She did not answer, and he added, ‘_Yew_
+don’t expect to have such things, I hope; deserve them as you may?’
+
+‘I was not exactly speaking of what I wanted,’ she said severely.  ‘I
+said, things a woman _could_ want.  And since you wish to know what I
+_can_ want to quite satisfy me, I assure you I can want those!’
+
+‘You are a pink-and-white conundrum, Margery,’ he said; ‘and I give you
+up for to-night.  Anybody would think the devil had showed you all the
+kingdoms of the world since I saw you last!’
+
+She reddened.  ‘Perhaps he has!’ she murmured; then arose, he following
+her; and they soon reached Margery’s home, approaching it from the lower
+or meadow side—the opposite to that of the garden top, where she had met
+the Baron.
+
+‘You’ll come in, won’t you, Jim?’ she said, with more ceremony than
+heartiness.
+
+‘No—I think not to-night,’ he answered.  ‘I’ll consider what you’ve
+said.’
+
+‘You are very good, Jim,’ she returned lightly.  ‘Good-bye.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+Jim thoughtfully retraced his steps.  He was a village character, and he
+had a villager’s simplicity: that is, the simplicity which comes from the
+lack of a complicated experience.  But simple by nature he certainly was
+not.  Among the rank and file of rustics he was quite a Talleyrand, or
+rather had been one, till he lost a good deal of his self-command by
+falling in love.
+
+Now, however, that the charming object of his distraction was out of
+sight he could deliberate, and measure, and weigh things with some
+approach to keenness.  The substance of his queries was, What change had
+come over Margery—whence these new notions?
+
+Ponder as he would he could evolve no answer save one, which, eminently
+unsatisfactory as it was, he felt it would be unreasonable not to accept:
+that she was simply skittish and ambitious by nature, and would not be
+hunted into matrimony till he had provided a well-adorned home.
+
+Jim retrod the miles to the kiln, and looked to the fires.  The kiln
+stood in a peculiar, interesting, even impressive spot.  It was at the
+end of a short ravine in a limestone formation, and all around was an
+open hilly down.  The nearest house was that of Jim’s cousin and partner,
+which stood on the outskirts of the down beside the turnpike-road.  From
+this house a little lane wound between the steep escarpments of the
+ravine till it reached the kiln, which faced down the miniature valley,
+commanding it as a fort might command a defile.
+
+The idea of a fort in this association owed little to imagination.  For
+on the nibbled green steep above the kiln stood a bye-gone, worn-out
+specimen of such an erection, huge, impressive, and difficult to scale
+even now in its decay.  It was a British castle or entrenchment, with
+triple rings of defence, rising roll behind roll, their outlines cutting
+sharply against the sky, and Jim’s kiln nearly undermining their base.
+When the lime-kiln flared up in the night, which it often did, its fires
+lit up the front of these ramparts to a great majesty.  They were old
+friends of his, and while keeping up the heat through the long darkness,
+as it was sometimes his duty to do, he would imagine the dancing lights
+and shades about the stupendous earthwork to be the forms of those giants
+who (he supposed) had heaped it up.  Often he clambered upon it, and
+walked about the summit, thinking out the problems connected with his
+business, his partner, his future, his Margery.
+
+It was what he did this evening, continuing the meditation on the young
+girl’s manner that he had begun upon the road, and still, as then,
+finding no clue to the change.
+
+While thus engaged he observed a man coming up the ravine to the kiln.
+Business messages were almost invariably left at the house below, and Jim
+watched the man with the interest excited by a belief that he had come on
+a personal matter.  On nearer approach Jim recognized him as the gardener
+at Mount Lodge some miles away.  If this meant business, the Baron (of
+whose arrival Jim had vaguely heard) was a new and unexpected customer.
+
+It meant nothing else, apparently.  The man’s errand was simply to inform
+Jim that the Baron required a load of lime for the garden.
+
+‘You might have saved yourself trouble by leaving word at Mr. Vine’s,’
+said Jim.
+
+‘I was to see you personally,’ said the gardener, ‘and to say that the
+Baron would like to inquire of you about the different qualities of lime
+proper for such purposes.’
+
+‘Couldn’t you tell him yourself?’ said Jim.
+
+‘He said I was to tell you that,’ replied the gardener; ‘and it wasn’t
+for me to interfere.’
+
+No motive other than the ostensible one could possibly be conjectured by
+Jim Hayward at this time; and the next morning he started with great
+pleasure, in his best business suit of clothes.  By eleven o’clock he and
+his horse and cart had arrived on the Baron’s premises, and the lime was
+deposited where directed; an exceptional spot, just within view of the
+windows of the south front.
+
+Baron von Xanten, pale and melancholy, was sauntering in the sun on the
+slope between the house and the all-the-year-round.  He looked across to
+where Jim and the gardener were standing, and the identity of Hayward
+being established by what he brought, the Baron came down, and the
+gardener withdrew.
+
+The Baron’s first inquiries were, as Jim had been led to suppose they
+would be, on the exterminating effects of lime upon slugs and snails in
+its different conditions of slaked and unslaked, ground and in the lump.
+He appeared to be much interested by Jim’s explanations, and eyed the
+young man closely whenever he had an opportunity.
+
+‘And I hope trade is prosperous with you this year,’ said the Baron.
+
+‘Very, my noble lord,’ replied Jim, who, in his uncertainty on the proper
+method of address, wisely concluded that it was better to err by giving
+too much honour than by giving too little.  ‘In short, trade is looking
+so well that I’ve become a partner in the firm.’
+
+‘Indeed; I am glad to hear it.  So now you are settled in life.’
+
+‘Well, my lord; I am hardly settled, even now.  For I’ve got to finish
+it—I mean, to get married.’
+
+‘That’s an easy matter, compared with the partnership.’
+
+‘Now a man might think so, my baron,’ said Jim, getting more
+confidential.  ‘But the real truth is, ’tis the hardest part of all for
+me.’
+
+‘Your suit prospers, I hope?’
+
+‘It don’t,’ said Jim.  ‘It don’t at all just at present.  In short, I
+can’t for the life o’ me think what’s come over the young woman lately.’
+And he fell into deep reflection.
+
+Though Jim did not observe it, the Baron’s brow became shadowed with
+self-reproach as he heard those simple words, and his eyes had a look of
+pity.  ‘Indeed—since when?’ he asked.
+
+‘Since yesterday, my noble lord.’  Jim spoke meditatively.  He was
+resolving upon a bold stroke.  Why not make a confidant of this kind
+gentleman, instead of the parson, as he had intended?  The thought was no
+sooner conceived than acted on.  ‘My lord,’ he resumed, ‘I have heard
+that you are a nobleman of great scope and talent, who has seen more
+strange countries and characters than I have ever heard of, and know the
+insides of men well.  Therefore I would fain put a question to your noble
+lordship, if I may so trouble you, and having nobody else in the world
+who could inform me so trewly.’
+
+‘Any advice I can give is at your service, Hayward.  What do you wish to
+know?’
+
+‘It is this, my baron.  What can I do to bring down a young woman’s
+ambition that’s got to such a towering height there’s no reaching it or
+compassing it: how get her to be pleased with me and my station as she
+used to be when I first knew her?’
+
+‘Truly, that’s a hard question, my man.  What does she aspire to?’
+
+‘She’s got a craze for fine furniture.’
+
+‘How long has she had it?’
+
+‘Only just now.’
+
+The Baron seemed still more to experience regret.
+
+‘What furniture does she specially covet?’ he asked.
+
+‘Silver candlesticks, work-tables, looking-glasses, gold tea-things,
+silver tea-pots, gold clocks, curtains, pictures, and I don’t know what
+all—things I shall never get if I live to be a hundred—not so much that I
+couldn’t raise the money to buy ’em, as that to put it to other uses, or
+save it for a rainy day.’
+
+‘You think the possession of those articles would make her happy?’
+
+‘I really think they might, my lord.’
+
+‘Good.  Open your pocket-book and write as I tell you.’
+
+Jim in some astonishment did as commanded, and elevating his pocket-book
+against the garden-wall, thoroughly moistened his pencil, and wrote at
+the Baron’s dictation:
+
+‘Pair of silver candlesticks: inlaid work-table and work-box: one large
+mirror: two small ditto: one gilt china tea and coffee service: one
+silver tea-pot, coffee-pot, sugar-basin, jug, and dozen spoons: French
+clock: pair of curtains: six large pictures.’
+
+‘Now,’ said the Baron, ‘tear out that leaf and give it to me.  Keep a
+close tongue about this; go home, and don’t be surprised at anything that
+may come to your door.’
+
+‘But, my noble lord, you don’t mean that your lordship is going to give—’
+
+‘Never mind what I am going to do.  Only keep your own counsel.  I
+perceive that, though a plain countryman, you are by no means deficient
+in tact and understanding.  If sending these things to you gives me
+pleasure, why should you object?  The fact is, Hayward, I occasionally
+take an interest in people, and like to do a little for them.  I take an
+interest in you.  Now go home, and a week hence invite Marg—the young
+woman and her father, to tea with you.  The rest is in your own hands.’
+
+A question often put to Jim in after times was why it had not occurred to
+him at once that the Baron’s liberal conduct must have been dictated by
+something more personal than sudden spontaneous generosity to him, a
+stranger.  To which Jim always answered that, admitting the existence of
+such generosity, there had appeared nothing remarkable in the Baron
+selecting himself as its object.  The Baron had told him that he took an
+interest in him; and self-esteem, even with the most modest, is usually
+sufficient to over-ride any little difficulty that might occur to an
+outsider in accounting for a preference.  He moreover considered that
+foreign noblemen, rich and eccentric, might have habits of acting which
+were quite at variance with those of their English compeers.
+
+So he drove off homeward with a lighter heart than he had known for
+several days.  To have a foreign gentleman take a fancy to him—what a
+triumph to a plain sort of fellow, who had scarcely expected the Baron to
+look in his face.  It would be a fine story to tell Margery when the
+Baron gave him liberty to speak out.
+
+Jim lodged at the house of his cousin and partner, Richard Vine, a
+widower of fifty odd years.  Having failed in the development of a
+household of direct descendants this tradesman had been glad to let his
+chambers to his much younger relative, when the latter entered on the
+business of lime manufacture; and their intimacy had led to a
+partnership.  Jim lived upstairs; his partner lived down, and the
+furniture of all the rooms was so plain and old fashioned as to excite
+the special dislike of Miss Margery Tucker, and even to prejudice her
+against Jim for tolerating it.  Not only were the chairs and tables
+queer, but, with due regard to the principle that a man’s surroundings
+should bear the impress of that man’s life and occupation, the chief
+ornaments of the dwelling were a curious collection of calcinations, that
+had been discovered from time to time in the lime-kiln—misshapen ingots
+of strange substance, some of them like Pompeian remains.
+
+The head of the firm was a quiet-living, narrow-minded, though friendly,
+man of fifty; and he took a serious interest in Jim’s love-suit,
+frequently inquiring how it progressed, and assuring Jim that if he chose
+to marry he might have all the upper floor at a low rent, he, Mr. Vine,
+contenting himself entirely with the ground level.  It had been so
+convenient for discussing business matters to have Jim in the same house,
+that he did not wish any change to be made in consequence of a change in
+Jim’s domestic estate.  Margery knew of this wish, and of Jim’s
+concurrent feeling; and did not like the idea at all.
+
+About four days after the young man’s interview with the Baron, there
+drew up in front of Jim’s house at noon a waggon laden with cases and
+packages, large and small.  They were all addressed to ‘Mr. Hayward,’ and
+they had come from the largest furnishing ware-houses in that part of
+England.
+
+Three-quarters of an hour were occupied in getting the cases to Jim’s
+rooms.  The wary Jim did not show the amazement he felt at his patron’s
+munificence; and presently the senior partner came into the passage, and
+wondered what was lumbering upstairs.
+
+‘Oh—it’s only some things of mine,’ said Jim coolly.
+
+‘Bearing upon the coming event—eh?’ said his partner.
+
+‘Exactly,’ replied Jim.
+
+Mr. Vine, with some astonishment at the number of cases, shortly after
+went away to the kiln; whereupon Jim shut himself into his rooms, and
+there he might have been heard ripping up and opening boxes with a
+cautious hand, afterwards appearing outside the door with them empty, and
+carrying them off to the outhouse.
+
+A triumphant look lit up his face when, a little later in the afternoon,
+he sent into the vale to the dairy, and invited Margery and her father to
+his house to supper.
+
+She was not unsociable that day, and, her father expressing a hard and
+fast acceptance of the invitation, she perforce agreed to go with him.
+Meanwhile at home, Jim made himself as mysteriously busy as before in
+those rooms of his, and when his partner returned he too was asked to
+join in the supper.
+
+At dusk Hayward went to the door, where he stood till he heard the voices
+of his guests from the direction of the low grounds, now covered with
+their frequent fleece of fog.  The voices grew more distinct, and then on
+the white surface of the fog there appeared two trunkless heads, from
+which bodies and a horse and cart gradually extended as the approaching
+pair rose towards the house.
+
+When they had entered Jim pressed Margery’s hand and conducted her up to
+his rooms, her father waiting below to say a few words to the senior
+lime-burner.
+
+‘Bless me,’ said Jim to her, on entering the sitting-room; ‘I quite
+forgot to get a light beforehand; but I’ll have one in a jiffy.’
+
+Margery stood in the middle of the dark room, while Jim struck a match;
+and then the young girl’s eyes were conscious of a burst of light, and
+the rise into being of a pair of handsome silver candlesticks containing
+two candles that Jim was in the act of lighting.
+
+‘Why—where—you have candlesticks like that?’ said Margery.  Her eyes flew
+round the room as the growing candle-flames showed other articles.
+‘Pictures too—and lovely china—why I knew nothing of this, I declare.’
+
+‘Yes—a few things that came to me by accident,’ said Jim in quiet tones.
+
+‘And a great gold clock under a glass, and a cupid swinging for a
+pendulum; and O what a lovely work-table—woods of every colour—and a
+work-box to match.  May I look inside that work-box, Jim?—whose is it?’
+
+‘O yes; look at it, of course.  It is a poor enough thing, but ’tis mine;
+and it will belong to the woman I marry, whoever she may be, as well as
+all the other things here.’
+
+‘And the curtains and the looking-glasses: why I declare I can see myself
+in a hundred places.’
+
+‘That tea-set,’ said Jim, placidly pointing to a gorgeous china service
+and a large silver tea-pot on the side table, ‘I don’t use at present,
+being a bachelor-man; but, says I to myself, “whoever I marry will want
+some such things for giving her parties; or I can sell em”—but I haven’t
+took steps for’t yet—’
+
+‘Sell ’em—no, I should think not,’ said Margery with earnest reproach.
+‘Why, I hope you wouldn’t be so foolish!  Why, this is exactly the kind
+of thing I was thinking of when I told you of the things women could
+want—of course not meaning myself particularly.  I had no idea that you
+had such valuable—’
+
+Margery was unable to speak coherently, so much was she amazed at the
+wealth of Jim’s possessions.
+
+At this moment her father and the lime-burner came upstairs; and to
+appear womanly and proper to Mr. Vine, Margery repressed the remainder of
+her surprise.
+
+As for the two elderly worthies, it was not till they entered the room
+and sat down that their slower eyes discerned anything brilliant in the
+appointments.  Then one of them stole a glance at some article, and the
+other at another; but each being unwilling to express his wonder in the
+presence of his neighbours, they received the objects before them with
+quite an accustomed air; the lime-burner inwardly trying to conjecture
+what all this meant, and the dairyman musing that if Jim’s business
+allowed him to accumulate at this rate, the sooner Margery became his
+wife the better.  Margery retreated to the work-table, work-box, and
+tea-service, which she examined with hushed exclamations.
+
+An entertainment thus surprisingly begun could not fail to progress well.
+Whenever Margery’s crusty old father felt the need of a civil sentence,
+the flash of Jim’s fancy articles inspired him to one; while the
+lime-burner, having reasoned away his first ominous thought that all this
+had come out of the firm, also felt proud and blithe.
+
+Jim accompanied his dairy friends part of the way home before they
+mounted.  Her father, finding that Jim wanted to speak to her privately,
+and that she exhibited some elusiveness, turned to Margery and said;
+‘Come, come, my lady; no more of this nonsense.  You just step behind
+with that young man, and I and the cart will wait for you.’
+
+Margery, a little scared at her father’s peremptoriness, obeyed.  It was
+plain that Jim had won the old man by that night’s stroke, if he had not
+won her.
+
+‘I know what you are going to say, Jim,’ she began, less ardently now,
+for she was no longer under the novel influence of the shining silver and
+glass.  ‘Well, as you desire it, and as my father desires it, and as I
+suppose it will be the best course for me, I will fix the day—not this
+evening, but as soon as I can think it over.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+Notwithstanding a press of business, Jim went and did his duty in
+thanking the Baron.  The latter saw him in his fishing-tackle room, an
+apartment littered with every appliance that a votary of the rod could
+require.
+
+‘And when is the wedding-day to be, Hayward?’ the Baron asked, after Jim
+had told him that matters were settled.
+
+‘It is not quite certain yet, my noble lord,’ said Jim cheerfully.  ‘But
+I hope ’twill not be long after the time when God A’mighty christens the
+little apples.’
+
+‘And when is that?’
+
+‘St. Swithin’s—the middle of July.  ’Tis to be some time in that month,
+she tells me.’
+
+When Jim was gone the Baron seemed meditative.  He went out, ascended the
+mount, and entered the weather-screen, where he looked at the seats, as
+though re-enacting in his fancy the scene of that memorable morning of
+fog.  He turned his eyes to the angle of the shelter, round which Margery
+had suddenly appeared like a vision, and it was plain that he would not
+have minded her appearing there then.  The juncture had indeed been such
+an impressive and critical one that she must have seemed rather a
+heavenly messenger than a passing milkmaid, more especially to a man like
+the Baron, who, despite the mystery of his origin and life, revealed
+himself to be a melancholy, emotional character—the Jacques of this
+forest and stream.
+
+Behind the mount the ground rose yet higher, ascending to a plantation
+which sheltered the house.  The Baron strolled up here, and bent his gaze
+over the distance.  The valley of the Exe lay before him, with its
+shining river, the brooks that fed it, and the trickling springs that fed
+the brooks.  The situation of Margery’s house was visible, though not the
+house itself; and the Baron gazed that way for an infinitely long time,
+till, remembering himself, he moved on.
+
+Instead of returning to the house he went along the ridge till he arrived
+at the verge of Chillington Wood, and in the same desultory manner roamed
+under the trees, not pausing till he had come to Three-Walks-End, and the
+hollow elm hard by.  He peeped in at the rift.  In the soft dry layer of
+touch-wood that floored the hollow Margery’s tracks were still visible,
+as she had made them there when dressing for the ball.
+
+‘Little Margery!’ murmured the Baron.
+
+In a moment he thought better of this mood, and turned to go home.  But
+behold, a form stood behind him—that of the girl whose name had been on
+his lips.
+
+She was in utter confusion.  ‘I—I—did not know you were here, sir!’ she
+began.  ‘I was out for a little walk.’  She could get no further; her
+eyes filled with tears.  That spice of wilfulness, even hardness, which
+characterized her in Jim’s company, magically disappeared in the presence
+of the Baron.
+
+‘Never mind, never mind,’ said he, masking under a severe manner whatever
+he felt.  ‘The meeting is awkward, and ought not to have occurred,
+especially if as I suppose, you are shortly to be married to James
+Hayward.  But it cannot be helped now.  You had no idea I was here, of
+course.  Neither had I of seeing you.  Remember you cannot be too
+careful,’ continued the Baron, in the same grave tone; ‘and I strongly
+request you as a friend to do your utmost to avoid meetings like this.
+When you saw me before I turned, why did you not go away?’
+
+‘I did not see you, sir.  I did not think of seeing you.  I was walking
+this way, and I only looked in to see the tree.’
+
+‘That shows you have been thinking of things you should not think of,’
+returned the Baron.  ‘Good morning.’
+
+Margery could answer nothing.  A browbeaten glance, almost of misery, was
+all she gave him.  He took a slow step away from her; then turned
+suddenly back and, stooping, impulsively kissed her cheek, taking her as
+much by surprise as ever a woman was taken in her life.
+
+Immediately after he went off with a flushed face and rapid strides,
+which he did not check till he was within his own boundaries.
+
+The haymaking season now set in vigorously, and the weir-hatches were all
+drawn in the meads to drain off the water.  The streams ran themselves
+dry, and there was no longer any difficulty in walking about among them.
+The Baron could very well witness from the elevations about his house the
+activity which followed these preliminaries.  The white shirt-sleeves of
+the mowers glistened in the sun, the scythes flashed, voices echoed,
+snatches of song floated about, and there were glimpses of red
+waggon-wheels, purple gowns, and many-coloured handkerchiefs.
+
+The Baron had been told that the haymaking was to be followed by the
+wedding, and had he gone down the vale to the dairy he would have had
+evidence to that effect.  Dairyman Tucker’s house was in a whirlpool of
+bustle, and among other difficulties was that of turning the cheese-room
+into a genteel apartment for the time being, and hiding the awkwardness
+of having to pass through the milk-house to get to the parlour door.
+These household contrivances appeared to interest Margery much more than
+the great question of dressing for the ceremony and the ceremony itself.
+In all relating to that she showed an indescribable backwardness, which
+later on was well remembered.
+
+‘If it were only somebody else, and I was one of the bridesmaids, I
+really think I should like it better!’ she murmured one afternoon.
+
+‘Away with thee—that’s only your shyness!’ said one of the milkmaids.
+
+It is said that about this time the Baron seemed to feel the effects of
+solitude strongly.  Solitude revives the simple instincts of primitive
+man, and lonely country nooks afford rich soil for wayward emotions.
+Moreover, idleness waters those unconsidered impulses which a short
+season of turmoil would stamp out.  It is difficult to speak with any
+exactness of the bearing of such conditions on the mind of the Baron—a
+man of whom so little was ever truly known—but there is no doubt that his
+mind ran much on Margery as an individual, without reference to her rank
+or quality, or to the question whether she would marry Jim Hayward that
+summer.  She was the single lovely human thing within his present
+horizon, for he lived in absolute seclusion; and her image unduly
+affected him.
+
+But, leaving conjecture, let me state what happened.
+
+One Saturday evening, two or three weeks after his accidental meeting
+with her in the wood, he wrote the note following:—
+
+    DEAR MARGERY,—
+
+    You must not suppose that, because I spoke somewhat severely to you
+    at our chance encounter by the hollow tree, I have any feeling
+    against you.  Far from it.  Now, as ever, I have the most grateful
+    sense of your considerate kindness to me on a momentous occasion
+    which shall be nameless.
+
+    You solemnly promised to come and see me whenever I should send for
+    you.  Can you call for five minutes as soon as possible, and disperse
+    those plaguy glooms from which I am so unfortunate as to suffer?  If
+    you refuse I will not answer for the consequences.
+
+    I shall be in the summer shelter of the mount to-morrow morning at
+    half-past ten.  If you come I shall be grateful.  I have also
+    something for you.
+
+                                                                    Yours,
+                                                                        X.
+
+In keeping with the tenor of this epistle the desponding, self-oppressed
+Baron ascended the mount on Sunday morning and sat down.  There was
+nothing here to signify exactly the hour, but before the church bells had
+begun he heard somebody approaching at the back.  The light footstep
+moved timidly, first to one recess, and then to another; then to the
+third, where he sat in the shade.  Poor Margery stood before him.
+
+She looked worn and weary, and her little shoes and the skirts of her
+dress were covered with dust.  The weather was sultry, the sun being
+already high and powerful, and rain had not fallen for weeks.  The Baron,
+who walked little, had thought nothing of the effects of this heat and
+drought in inducing fatigue.  A distance which had been but a reasonable
+exercise on a foggy morning was a drag for Margery now.  She was out of
+breath; and anxiety, even unhappiness was written on her everywhere.
+
+He rose to his feet, and took her hand.  He was vexed with himself at
+sight of her.  ‘My dear little girl!’ he said.  ‘You are tired—you should
+not have come.’
+
+‘You sent for me, sir; and I was afraid you were ill; and my promise to
+you was sacred.’
+
+He bent over her, looking upon her downcast face, and still holding her
+hand; then he dropped it, and took a pace or two backwards.
+
+‘It was a whim, nothing more,’ he said, sadly.  ‘I wanted to see my
+little friend, to express good wishes—and to present her with this.’  He
+held forward a small morocco case, and showed her how to open it,
+disclosing a pretty locket, set with pearls.  ‘It is intended as a
+wedding present,’ he continued.  ‘To be returned to me again if you do
+not marry Jim this summer—it is to be this summer, I think?’
+
+‘It was, sir,’ she said with agitation.  ‘But it is so no longer.  And,
+therefore, I cannot take this.’
+
+‘What do you say?’
+
+‘It was to have been to-day; but now it cannot be.’
+
+‘The wedding to-day—Sunday?’ he cried.
+
+‘We fixed Sunday not to hinder much time at this busy season of the
+year,’ replied she.
+
+‘And have you, then, put it off—surely not?’
+
+‘You sent for me, and I have come,’ she answered humbly, like an obedient
+familiar in the employ of some great enchanter.  Indeed, the Baron’s
+power over this innocent girl was curiously like enchantment, or mesmeric
+influence.  It was so masterful that the sexual element was almost
+eliminated.  It was that of Prospero over the gentle Ariel.  And yet it
+was probably only that of the cosmopolite over the recluse, of the
+experienced man over the simple maid.
+
+‘You have come—on your wedding-day!—O Margery, this is a mistake.  Of
+course, you should not have obeyed me, since, though I thought your
+wedding would be soon, I did not know it was to-day.’
+
+‘I promised you, sir; and I would rather keep my promise to you than be
+married to Jim.’
+
+‘That must not be—the feeling is wrong!’ he murmured, looking at the
+distant hills.  ‘There seems to be a fate in all this; I get out of the
+frying-pan into the fire.  What a recompense to you for your goodness!
+The fact is, I was out of health and out of spirits, so I—but no more of
+that.  Now instantly to repair this tremendous blunder that we have
+made—that’s the question.’
+
+After a pause, he went on hurriedly, ‘Walk down the hill; get into the
+road.  By that time I shall be there with a phaeton.  We may get back in
+time.  What time is it now?  If not, no doubt the wedding can be
+to-morrow; so all will come right again.  Don’t cry, my dear girl.  Keep
+the locket, of course—you’ll marry Jim.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+He hastened down towards the stables, and she went on as directed.  It
+seemed as if he must have put in the horse himself, so quickly did he
+reappear with the phaeton on the open road.  Margery silently took her
+seat, and the Baron seemed cut to the quick with self-reproach as he
+noticed the listless indifference with which she acted.  There was no
+doubt that in her heart she had preferred obeying the apparently
+important mandate that morning to becoming Jim’s wife; but there was no
+less doubt that had the Baron left her alone she would quietly have gone
+to the altar.
+
+He drove along furiously, in a cloud of dust.  There was much to
+contemplate in that peaceful Sunday morning—the windless trees and
+fields, the shaking sunlight, the pause in human stir.  Yet neither of
+them heeded, and thus they drew near to the dairy.  His first expressed
+intention had been to go indoors with her, but this he abandoned as
+impolitic in the highest degree.
+
+‘You may be soon enough,’ he said, springing down, and helping her to
+follow.  ‘Tell the truth: say you were sent for to receive a wedding
+present—that it was a mistake on my part—a mistake on yours; and I think
+they’ll forgive . . . And, Margery, my last request to you is this: that
+if I send for you again, you do not come.  Promise solemnly, my dear
+girl, that any such request shall be unheeded.’
+
+Her lips moved, but the promise was not articulated.  ‘O, sir, I cannot
+promise it!’ she said at last.
+
+‘But you must; your salvation may depend on it!’ he insisted almost
+sternly.  ‘You don’t know what I am.’
+
+‘Then, sir, I promise,’ she replied.  ‘Now leave me to myself, please,
+and I’ll go indoors and manage matters.’
+
+He turned the horse and drove away, but only for a little distance.  Out
+of sight he pulled rein suddenly.  ‘Only to go back and propose it to
+her, and she’d come!’ he murmured.
+
+He stood up in the phaeton, and by this means he could see over the
+hedge.  Margery still sat listlessly in the same place; there was not a
+lovelier flower in the field.  ‘No,’ he said; ‘no, no—never!’  He
+reseated himself, and the wheels sped lightly back over the soft dust to
+Mount Lodge.
+
+Meanwhile Margery had not moved.  If the Baron could dissimulate on the
+side of severity she could dissimulate on the side of calm.  He did not
+know what had been veiled by the quiet promise to manage matters indoors.
+Rising at length she first turned away from the house; and, by-and-by,
+having apparently forgotten till then that she carried it in her hand,
+she opened the case, and looked at the locket.  This seemed to give her
+courage.  She turned, set her face towards the dairy in good earnest, and
+though her heart faltered when the gates came in sight, she kept on and
+drew near the door.
+
+On the threshold she stood listening.  The house was silent.  Decorations
+were visible in the passage, and also the carefully swept and sanded path
+to the gate, which she was to have trodden as a bride; but the sparrows
+hopped over it as if it were abandoned; and all appeared to have been
+checked at its climacteric, like a clock stopped on the strike.  Till
+this moment of confronting the suspended animation of the scene she had
+not realized the full shock of the convulsion which her disappearance
+must have caused.  It is quite certain—apart from her own repeated
+assurances to that effect in later years—that in hastening off that
+morning to her sudden engagement, Margery had not counted the cost of
+such an enterprise; while a dim notion that she might get back again in
+time for the ceremony, if the message meant nothing serious, should also
+be mentioned in her favour.  But, upon the whole, she had obeyed the call
+with an unreasoning obedience worthy of a disciple in primitive times.  A
+conviction that the Baron’s life might depend upon her presence—for she
+had by this time divined the tragical event she had interrupted on the
+foggy morning—took from her all will to judge and consider calmly.  The
+simple affairs of her and hers seemed nothing beside the possibility of
+harm to him.
+
+A well-known step moved on the sanded floor within, and she went forward.
+That she saw her father’s face before her, just within the door, can
+hardly be said: it was rather Reproach and Rage in a human mask.
+
+‘What! ye have dared to come back alive, hussy, to look upon the dupery
+you have practised on honest people!  You’ve mortified us all; I don’t
+want to see ’ee; I don’t want to hear ’ee; I don’t want to know
+anything!’  He walked up and down the room, unable to command himself.
+‘Nothing but being dead could have excused ’ee for not meeting and
+marrying that man this morning; and yet you have the brazen impudence to
+stand there as well as ever!  What be you here for?’
+
+‘I’ve come back to marry Jim, if he wants me to,’ she said faintly.  ‘And
+if not—perhaps so much the better.  I was sent for this morning early.  I
+thought—.’  She halted.  To say that she had thought a man’s death might
+happen by his own hand if she did not go to him, would never do.  ‘I was
+obliged to go,’ she said.  ‘I had given my word.’
+
+‘Why didn’t you tell us then, so that the wedding could be put off,
+without making fools o’ us?’
+
+‘Because I was afraid you wouldn’t let me go, and I had made up my mind
+to go.’
+
+‘To go where?’
+
+She was silent; till she said, ‘I will tell Jim all, and why it was; and
+if he’s any friend of mine he’ll excuse me.’
+
+‘Not Jim—he’s no such fool.  Jim had put all ready for you, Jim had
+called at your house, a-dressed up in his new wedding clothes, and
+a-smiling like the sun; Jim had told the parson, had got the ringers in
+tow, and the clerk awaiting; and then—you was _gone_!  Then Jim turned as
+pale as rendlewood, and busted out, “If she don’t marry me to-day,” ’a
+said, “she don’t marry me at all!  No; let her look elsewhere for a
+husband.  For tew years I’ve put up with her haughty tricks and her
+takings,” ’a said.  “I’ve droudged and I’ve traipsed, I’ve bought and
+I’ve sold, all wi’ an eye to her; I’ve suffered horseflesh,” he says—yes,
+them was his noble words—“but I’ll suffer it no longer.  She shall go!”
+“Jim,” says I, “you be a man.  If she’s alive, I commend ’ee; if she’s
+dead, pity my old age.”  “She isn’t dead,” says he; “for I’ve just heard
+she was seen walking off across the fields this morning, looking all of a
+scornful triumph.”  He turned round and went, and the rest o’ the
+neighbours went; and here be I left to the reproach o’t.’
+
+‘He was too hasty,’ murmured Margery.  ‘For now he’s said this I can’t
+marry him to-morrow, as I might ha’ done; and perhaps so much the
+better.’
+
+‘You can be so calm about it, can ye?  Be my arrangements nothing, then,
+that you should break ’em up, and say off hand what wasn’t done to-day
+might ha’ been done to-morrow, and such flick-flack?  Out o’ my sight!  I
+won’t hear any more.  I won’t speak to ’ee any more.’
+
+‘I’ll go away, and then you’ll be sorry!’
+
+‘Very well, go.  Sorry—not I.’
+
+He turned and stamped his way into the cheese-room.  Margery went
+upstairs.  She too was excited now, and instead of fortifying herself in
+her bedroom till her father’s rage had blown over, as she had often done
+on lesser occasions, she packed up a bundle of articles, crept down
+again, and went out of the house.  She had a place of refuge in these
+cases of necessity, and her father knew it, and was less alarmed at
+seeing her depart than he might otherwise have been.  This place was
+Rook’s Gate, the house of her grandmother, who always took Margery’s part
+when that young woman was particularly in the wrong.
+
+The devious way she pursued, to avoid the vicinity of Mount Lodge, was
+tedious, and she was already weary.  But the cottage was a restful place
+to arrive at, for she was her own mistress there—her grandmother never
+coming down stairs—and Edy, the woman who lived with and attended her,
+being a cipher except in muscle and voice.  The approach was by a
+straight open road, bordered by thin lank trees, all sloping away from
+the south-west wind-quarter, and the scene bore a strange resemblance to
+certain bits of Dutch landscape which have been imprinted on the world’s
+eye by Hobbema and his school.
+
+Having explained to her granny that the wedding was put off; and that she
+had come to stay, one of Margery’s first acts was carefully to pack up
+the locket and case, her wedding present from the Baron.  The conditions
+of the gift were unfulfilled, and she wished it to go back instantly.
+Perhaps, in the intricacies of her bosom, there lurked a greater
+satisfaction with the reason for returning the present than she would
+have felt just then with a reason for keeping it.
+
+To send the article was difficult.  In the evening she wrapped herself
+up, searched and found a gauze veil that had been used by her grandmother
+in past years for hiving swarms of bees, buried her face in it, and
+sallied forth with a palpitating heart till she drew near the tabernacle
+of her demi-god the Baron.  She ventured only to the back-door, where she
+handed in the parcel addressed to him, and quickly came away.
+
+Now it seems that during the day the Baron had been unable to learn the
+result of his attempt to return Margery in time for the event he had
+interrupted.  Wishing, for obvious reasons, to avoid direct inquiry by
+messenger, and being too unwell to go far himself, he could learn no
+particulars.  He was sitting in thought after a lonely dinner when the
+parcel intimating failure as brought in.  The footman, whose curiosity
+had been excited by the mode of its arrival, peeped through the keyhole
+after closing the door, to learn what the packet meant.  Directly the
+Baron had opened it he thrust out his feet vehemently from his chair, and
+began cursing his ruinous conduct in bringing about such a disaster, for
+the return of the locket denoted not only no wedding that day, but none
+to-morrow, or at any time.
+
+‘I have done that innocent woman a great wrong!’ he murmured.  ‘Deprived
+her of, perhaps, her only opportunity of becoming mistress of a happy
+home!’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+A considerable period of inaction followed among all concerned.
+
+Nothing tended to dissipate the obscurity which veiled the life of the
+Baron.  The position he occupied in the minds of the country-folk around
+was one which combined the mysteriousness of a legendary character with
+the unobtrusive deeds of a modern gentleman.  To this day whoever takes
+the trouble to go down to Silverthorn in Lower Wessex and make inquiries
+will find existing there almost a superstitious feeling for the moody
+melancholy stranger who resided in the Lodge some forty years ago.
+
+Whence he came, whither he was going, were alike unknown.  It was said
+that his mother had been an English lady of noble family who had married
+a foreigner not unheard of in circles where men pile up ‘the cankered
+heaps of strange-achieved gold’—that he had been born and educated in
+England, taken abroad, and so on.  But the facts of a life in such cases
+are of little account beside the aspect of a life; and hence, though
+doubtless the years of his existence contained their share of trite and
+homely circumstance, the curtain which masked all this was never lifted
+to gratify such a theatre of spectators as those at Silverthorn.  Therein
+lay his charm.  His life was a vignette, of which the central strokes
+only were drawn with any distinctness, the environment shading away to a
+blank.
+
+He might have been said to resemble that solitary bird the heron.  The
+still, lonely stream was his frequent haunt: on its banks he would stand
+for hours with his rod, looking into the water, beholding the tawny
+inhabitants with the eye of a philosopher, and seeming to say, ‘Bite or
+don’t bite—it’s all the same to me.’  He was often mistaken for a ghost
+by children; and for a pollard willow by men, when, on their way home in
+the dusk, they saw him motionless by some rushy bank, unobservant of the
+decline of day.
+
+Why did he come to fish near Silverthorn?  That was never explained.  As
+far as was known he had no relatives near; the fishing there was not
+exceptionally good; the society thereabout was decidedly meagre.  That he
+had committed some folly or hasty act, that he had been wrongfully
+accused of some crime, thus rendering his seclusion from the world
+desirable for a while, squared very well with his frequent melancholy.
+But such as he was there he lived, well supplied with fishing-tackle, and
+tenant of a furnished house, just suited to the requirements of such an
+eccentric being as he.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Margery’s father, having privately ascertained that she was living with
+her grandmother, and getting into no harm, refrained from communicating
+with her, in the hope of seeing her contrite at his door.  It had, of
+course, become known about Silverthorn that at the last moment Margery
+refused to wed Hayward, by absenting herself from the house.  Jim was
+pitied, yet not pitied much, for it was said that he ought not to have
+been so eager for a woman who had shown no anxiety for him.
+
+And where was Jim himself?  It must not be supposed that that tactician
+had all this while withdrawn from mortal eye to tear his hair in silent
+indignation and despair.  He had, in truth, merely retired up the
+lonesome defile between the downs to his smouldering kiln, and the
+ancient ramparts above it; and there, after his first hours of natural
+discomposure, he quietly waited for overtures from the possibly repentant
+Margery.  But no overtures arrived, and then he meditated anew on the
+absorbing problem of her skittishness, and how to set about another
+campaign for her conquest, notwithstanding his late disastrous failure.
+Why had he failed?  To what was her strange conduct owing?  That was the
+thing which puzzled him.
+
+He had made no advance in solving the riddle when, one morning, a
+stranger appeared on the down above him, looking as if he had lost his
+way.  The man had a good deal of black hair below his felt hat, and
+carried under his arm a case containing a musical instrument.  Descending
+to where Jim stood, he asked if there were not a short cut across that
+way to Tivworthy, where a fête was to be held.
+
+‘Well, yes, there is,’ said Jim.  ‘But ’tis an enormous distance for
+’ee.’
+
+‘Oh, yes,’ replied the musician.  ‘I wish to intercept the carrier on the
+highway.’
+
+The nearest way was precisely in the direction of Rook’s Gate, where
+Margery, as Jim knew, was staying.  Having some time to spare, Jim was
+strongly impelled to make a kind act to the lost musician a pretext for
+taking observations in that neighbourhood, and telling his acquaintance
+that he was going the same way, he started without further ado.
+
+They skirted the long length of meads, and in due time arrived at the
+back of Rook’s Gate, where the path joined the high road.  A hedge
+divided the public way from the cottage garden.  Jim drew up at this
+point and said, ‘Your road is straight on: I turn back here.’
+
+But the musician was standing fixed, as if in great perplexity.
+Thrusting his hand into his forest of black hair, he murmured, ‘Surely it
+is the same—surely!’
+
+Jim, following the direction of his neighbour’s eyes, found them to be
+fixed on a figure till that moment hidden from himself—Margery Tucker—who
+was crossing the garden to an opposite gate with a little cheese in her
+arms, her head thrown back, and her face quite exposed.
+
+‘What of her?’ said Jim.
+
+‘Two months ago I formed one of the band at the Yeomanry Ball given by
+Lord Toneborough in the next county.  I saw that young lady dancing the
+polka there in robes of gauze and lace.  Now I see her carry a cheese!’
+
+‘Never!’ said Jim incredulously.
+
+‘But I do not mistake.  I say it is so!’
+
+Jim ridiculed the idea; the bandsman protested, and was about to lose his
+temper, when Jim gave in with the good-nature of a person who can afford
+to despise opinions; and the musician went his way.
+
+As he dwindled out of sight Jim began to think more carefully over what
+he had said.  The young man’s thoughts grew quite to an excitement, for
+there came into his mind the Baron’s extraordinary kindness in regard to
+furniture, hitherto accounted for by the assumption that the nobleman had
+taken a fancy to him.  Could it be, among all the amazing things of life,
+that the Baron was at the bottom of this mischief; and that he had amused
+himself by taking Margery to a ball?
+
+Doubts and suspicions which distract some lovers to imbecility only
+served to bring out Jim’s great qualities.  Where he trusted he was the
+most trusting fellow in the world; where he doubted he could be guilty of
+the slyest strategy.  Once suspicious, he became one of those subtle,
+watchful characters who, without integrity, make good thieves; with a
+little, good jobbers; with a little more, good diplomatists.  Jim was
+honest, and he considered what to do.
+
+Retracing his steps, he peeped again.  She had gone in; but she would
+soon reappear, for it could be seen that she was carrying little new
+cheeses one by one to a spring-cart and horse tethered outside the
+gate—her grandmother, though not a regular dairywoman, still managing a
+few cows by means of a man and maid.  With the lightness of a cat Jim
+crept round to the gate, took a piece of chalk from his pocket, and wrote
+upon the boarding ‘The Baron.’  Then he retreated to the other side of
+the garden where he had just watched Margery.
+
+In due time she emerged with another little cheese, came on to the
+garden-door, and glanced upon the chalked words which confronted her.
+She started; the cheese rolled from her arms to the ground, and broke
+into pieces like a pudding.
+
+She looked fearfully round, her face burning like sunset, and, seeing
+nobody, stooped to pick up the flaccid lumps.  Jim, with a pale face,
+departed as invisibly as he had come.  He had proved the bandsman’s tale
+to be true.  On his way back he formed a resolution.  It was to beard the
+lion in his den—to call on the Baron.
+
+Meanwhile Margery had recovered her equanimity, and gathered up the
+broken cheese.  But she could by no means account for the handwriting.
+Jim was just the sort of fellow to play her such a trick at ordinary
+times, but she imagined him to be far too incensed against her to do it
+now; and she suddenly wondered if it were any sort of signal from the
+Baron himself.
+
+Of him she had lately heard nothing.  If ever monotony pervaded a life it
+pervaded hers at Rook’s Gate; and she had begun to despair of any happy
+change.  But it is precisely when the social atmosphere seems stagnant
+that great events are brewing.  Margery’s quiet was broken first, as we
+have seen, by a slight start, only sufficient to make her drop a cheese;
+and then by a more serious matter.
+
+She was inside the same garden one day when she heard two watermen
+talking without.  The conversation was to the effect that the strange
+gentleman who had taken Mount Lodge for the season was seriously ill.
+
+‘How ill?’ cried Margery through the hedge, which screened her from
+recognition.
+
+‘Bad abed,’ said one of the watermen.
+
+‘Inflammation of the lungs,’ said the other.
+
+‘Got wet, fishing,’ the first chimed in.
+
+Margery could gather no more.  An ideal admiration rather than any
+positive passion existed in her breast for the Baron: she had of late
+seen too little of him to allow any incipient views of him as a lover to
+grow to formidable dimensions.  It was an extremely romantic feeling,
+delicate as an aroma, capable of quickening to an active principle, or
+dying to ‘a painless sympathy,’ as the case might be.
+
+This news of his illness, coupled with the mysterious chalking on the
+gate, troubled her, and revived his image much.  She took to walking up
+and down the garden-paths, looking into the hearts of flowers, and not
+thinking what they were.  His last request had been that she was not to
+go to him if be should send for her; and now she asked herself, was the
+name on the gate a hint to enable her to go without infringing the letter
+of her promise?  Thus unexpectedly had Jim’s manœuvre operated.
+
+Ten days passed.  All she could hear of the Baron were the same words,
+‘Bad abed,’ till one afternoon, after a gallop of the physician to the
+Lodge, the tidings spread like lightning that the Baron was dying.
+
+Margery distressed herself with the question whether she might be
+permitted to visit him and say her prayers at his bedside; but she feared
+to venture; and thus eight-and-forty hours slipped away, and the Baron
+still lived.  Despite her shyness and awe of him she had almost made up
+her mind to call when, just at dusk on that October evening, somebody
+came to the door and asked for her.
+
+She could see the messenger’s head against the low new moon.  He was a
+man-servant.  He said he had been all the way to her father’s, and had
+been sent thence to her here.  He simply brought a note, and, delivering
+it into her hands, went away.
+
+    DEAR MARGERY TUCKER (ran the note)—They say I am not likely to live,
+    so I want to see you.  Be here at eight o’clock this evening.  Come
+    quite alone to the side-door, and tap four times softly.  My trusty
+    man will admit you.  The occasion is an important one.  Prepare
+    yourself for a solemn ceremony, which I wish to have performed while
+    it lies in my power.
+
+                                                               VON XANTEN.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+Margery’s face flushed up, and her neck and arms glowed in sympathy.  The
+quickness of youthful imagination, and the assumptiveness of woman’s
+reason, sent her straight as an arrow this thought: ‘He wants to marry
+me!’
+
+She had heard of similar strange proceedings, in which the orange-flower
+and the sad cypress were intertwined.  People sometimes wished on their
+death-beds, from motives of esteem, to form a legal tie which they had
+not cared to establish as a domestic one during their active life.
+
+For a few minutes Margery could hardly be called excited; she was
+excitement itself.  Between surprise and modesty she blushed and trembled
+by turns.  She became grave, sat down in the solitary room, and looked
+into the fire.  At seven o’clock she rose resolved, and went quite
+tranquilly upstairs, where she speedily began to dress.
+
+In making this hasty toilet nine-tenths of her care were given to her
+hands.  The summer had left them slightly brown, and she held them up and
+looked at them with some misgiving, the fourth finger of her left hand
+more especially.  Hot washings and cold washings, certain products from
+bee and flower known only to country girls, everything she could think
+of, were used upon those little sunburnt hands, till she persuaded
+herself that they were really as white as could be wished by a husband
+with a hundred titles.  Her dressing completed, she left word with Edy
+that she was going for a long walk, and set out in the direction of Mount
+Lodge.
+
+She no longer tripped like a girl, but walked like a woman.  While
+crossing the park she murmured ‘Baroness von Xanten’ in a pronunciation
+of her own.  The sound of that title caused her such agitation that she
+was obliged to pause, with her hand upon her heart.
+
+The house was so closely neighboured by shrubberies on three of its sides
+that it was not till she had gone nearly round it that she found the
+little door.  The resolution she had been an hour in forming failed her
+when she stood at the portal.  While pausing for courage to tap, a
+carriage drove up to the front entrance a little way off, and peeping
+round the corner she saw alight a clergyman, and a gentleman in whom
+Margery fancied that she recognized a well-known solicitor from the
+neighbouring town.  She had no longer any doubt of the nature of the
+ceremony proposed.  ‘It is sudden but I must obey him!’ she murmured: and
+tapped four times.
+
+The door was opened so quickly that the servant must have been standing
+immediately inside.  She thought him the man who had driven them to the
+ball—the silent man who could be trusted.  Without a word he conducted
+her up the back staircase, and through a door at the top, into a wide
+corridor.  She was asked to wait in a little dressing-room, where there
+was a fire, and an old metal-framed looking-glass over the mantel-piece,
+in which she caught sight of herself.  A red spot burnt in each of her
+cheeks; the rest of her face was pale; and her eyes were like diamonds of
+the first water.
+
+Before she had been seated many minutes the man came back noiselessly,
+and she followed him to a door covered by a red and black curtain, which
+he lifted, and ushered her into a large chamber.  A screened light stood
+on a table before her, and on her left the hangings of a tall dark
+four-post bedstead obstructed her view of the centre of the room.
+Everything here seemed of such a magnificent type to her eyes that she
+felt confused, diminished to half her height, half her strength, half her
+prettiness.  The man who had conducted her retired at once, and some one
+came softly round the angle of the bed-curtains.  He held out his hand
+kindly—rather patronisingly: it was the solicitor whom she knew by sight.
+This gentleman led her forward, as if she had been a lamb rather than a
+woman, till the occupant of the bed was revealed.
+
+The Baron’s eyes were closed, and her entry had been so noiseless that he
+did not open them.  The pallor of his face nearly matched the white
+bed-linen, and his dark hair and heavy black moustache were like dashes
+of ink on a clean page.  Near him sat the parson and another gentleman,
+whom she afterwards learnt to be a London physician; and on the parson
+whispering a few words the Baron opened his eyes.  As soon as he saw her
+he smiled faintly, and held out his hand.
+
+Margery would have wept for him, if she had not been too overawed and
+palpitating to do anything.  She quite forgot what she had come for,
+shook hands with him mechanically, and could hardly return an answer to
+his weak ‘Dear Margery, you see how I am—how are you?’
+
+In preparing for marriage she had not calculated on such a scene as this.
+Her affection for the Baron had too much of the vague in it to afford her
+trustfulness now.  She wished she had not come.  On a sign from the Baron
+the lawyer brought her a chair, and the oppressive silence was broken by
+the Baron’s words.
+
+‘I am pulled down to death’s door, Margery,’ he said; ‘and I suppose I
+soon shall pass through . . . My peace has been much disturbed in this
+illness, for just before it attacked me I received—that present you
+returned, from which, and in other ways, I learnt that you had lost your
+chance of marriage . . . Now it was I who did the harm, and you can
+imagine how the news has affected me.  It has worried me all the illness
+through, and I cannot dismiss my error from my mind . . . I want to right
+the wrong I have done you before I die.  Margery, you have always obeyed
+me, and, strange as the request may be, will you obey me now?’
+
+She whispered ‘Yes.’
+
+‘Well, then,’ said the Baron, ‘these three gentlemen are here for a
+special purpose: one helps the body—he’s called a physician; another
+helps the soul—he’s a parson; the other helps the understanding—he’s a
+lawyer.  They are here partly on my account, and partly on yours.’
+
+The speaker then made a sign to the lawyer, who went out of the door.  He
+came back almost instantly, but not alone.  Behind him, dressed up in his
+best clothes, with a flower in his buttonhole and a bridegroom’s air,
+walked—Jim.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+Margery could hardly repress a scream.  As for flushing and blushing, she
+had turned hot and turned pale so many times already during the evening,
+that there was really now nothing of that sort left for her to do; and
+she remained in complexion much as before.  O, the mockery of it!  That
+secret dream—that sweet word ‘Baroness!’—which had sustained her all the
+way along.  Instead of a Baron there stood Jim, white-waistcoated,
+demure, every hair in place, and, if she mistook not, even a deedy spark
+in his eye.
+
+Jim’s surprising presence on the scene may be briefly accounted for.  His
+resolve to seek an explanation with the Baron at all risks had proved
+unexpectedly easy: the interview had at once been granted, and then,
+seeing the crisis at which matters stood, the Baron had generously
+revealed to Jim the whole of his indebtedness to and knowledge of
+Margery.  The truth of the Baron’s statement, the innocent nature as yet
+of the acquaintanceship, his sorrow for the rupture he had produced, was
+so evident that, far from having any further doubts of his patron, Jim
+frankly asked his advice on the next step to be pursued.  At this stage
+the Baron fell ill, and, desiring much to see the two young people united
+before his death, he had sent anew Hayward, and proposed the plan which
+they were to now about to attempt—a marriage at the bedside of the sick
+man by special licence.  The influence at Lambeth of some friends of the
+Baron’s, and the charitable bequests of his late mother to several
+deserving Church funds, were generally supposed to be among the reasons
+why the application for the licence was not refused.
+
+This, however, is of small consequence.  The Baron probably knew, in
+proposing this method of celebrating the marriage, that his enormous
+power over her would outweigh any sentimental obstacles which she might
+set up—inward objections that, without his presence and firmness, might
+prove too much for her acquiescence.  Doubtless he foresaw, too, the
+advantage of getting her into the house before making the individuality
+of her husband clear to her mind.
+
+Now, the Baron’s conjectures were right as to the event, but wrong as to
+the motives.  Margery was a perfect little dissembler on some occasions,
+and one of them was when she wished to hide any sudden mortification that
+might bring her into ridicule.  She had no sooner recovered from her
+first fit of discomfiture than pride bade her suffer anything rather than
+reveal her absurd disappointment.  Hence the scene progressed as follows:
+
+‘Come here, Hayward,’ said the invalid.  Hayward came near.  The Baron,
+holding her hand in one of his own, and her lover’s in the other,
+continued, ‘Will you, in spite of your recent vexation with her, marry
+her now if she does not refuse?’
+
+‘I will, sir,’ said Jim promptly.
+
+‘And Margery, what do you say?  It is merely a setting of things right.
+You have already promised this young man to be his wife, and should, of
+course, perform your promise.  You don’t dislike Jim?’
+
+‘O, no, sir,’ she said, in a low, dry voice.
+
+‘I like him better than I can tell you,’ said the Baron.  ‘He is an
+honourable man, and will make you a good husband.  You must remember that
+marriage is a life contract, in which general compatibility of temper and
+worldly position is of more importance than fleeting passion, which never
+long survives.  Now, will you, at my earnest request, and before I go to
+the South of Europe to die, agree to make this good man happy?  I have
+expressed your views on the subject, haven’t I, Hayward?’
+
+‘To a T, sir,’ said Jim emphatically; with a motion of raising his hat to
+his influential ally, till he remembered he had no hat on.  ‘And, though
+I could hardly expect Margery to gie in for my asking, I feels she ought
+to gie in for yours.’
+
+‘And you accept him, my little friend?’
+
+‘Yes, sir,’ she murmured, ‘if he’ll agree to a thing or two.’
+
+‘Doubtless he will—what are they?’
+
+‘That I shall not be made to live with him till I am in the mind for it;
+and that my having him shall be kept unknown for the present.’
+
+‘Well, what do you think of it, Hayward?’
+
+‘Anything that you or she may wish I’ll do, my noble lord,’ said Jim.
+
+‘Well, her request is not unreasonable, seeing that the proceedings are,
+on my account, a little hurried.  So we’ll proceed.  You rather expected
+this, from my allusion to a ceremony in my note, did you not, Margery?’
+
+‘Yes, sir,’ said she, with an effort.
+
+‘Good; I thought so; you looked so little surprised.’
+
+We now leave the scene in the bedroom for a spot not many yards off.
+
+When the carriage seen by Margery at the door was driving up to Mount
+Lodge it arrested the attention, not only of the young girl, but of a man
+who had for some time been moving slowly about the opposite lawn, engaged
+in some operation while he smoked a short pipe.  A short observation of
+his doings would have shown that he was sheltering some delicate plants
+from an expected frost, and that he was the gardener.  When the light at
+the door fell upon the entering forms of parson and lawyer—the former a
+stranger, the latter known to him—the gardener walked thoughtfully round
+the house.  Reaching the small side-entrance he was further surprised to
+see it noiselessly open to a young woman, in whose momentarily illumined
+features he discerned those of Margery Tucker.
+
+Altogether there was something curious in this.  The man returned to the
+lawn front, and perfunctorily went on putting shelters over certain
+plants, though his thoughts were plainly otherwise engaged.  On the grass
+his footsteps were noiseless, and the night moreover being still, he
+could presently hear a murmuring from the bedroom window over his head.
+
+The gardener took from a tree a ladder that he had used in nailing that
+day, set it under the window, and ascended half-way, hoodwinking his
+conscience by seizing a nail or two with his hand and testing their
+twig-supporting powers.  He soon heard enough to satisfy him.  The words
+of a church-service in the strange parson’s voice were audible in
+snatches through the blind: they were words he knew to be part of the
+solemnization of matrimony, such as ‘wedded wife,’ ‘richer for poorer,’
+and so on; the less familiar parts being a more or less confused sound.
+
+Satisfied that a wedding was in progress there, the gardener did not for
+a moment dream that one of the contracting parties could be other than
+the sick Baron.  He descended the ladder and again walked round the
+house, waiting only till he saw Margery emerge from the same little door;
+when, fearing that he might be discovered, he withdrew in the direction
+of his own cottage.
+
+This building stood at the lower corner of the garden, and as soon as the
+gardener entered he was accosted by a handsome woman in a widow’s cap,
+who called him father, and said that supper had been ready for a long
+time.  They sat down, but during the meal the gardener was so abstracted
+and silent that his daughter put her head winningly to one side and said,
+‘What is it, father dear?’
+
+‘Ah—what is it!’ cried the gardener.  ‘Something that makes very little
+difference to me, but may be of great account to you, if you play your
+cards well.  _There’s been a wedding at the Lodge to-night_!’  He related
+to her, with a caution to secrecy, all that he had heard and seen.
+
+‘We are folk that have got to get their living,’ he said, ‘and such ones
+mustn’t tell tales about their betters,—Lord forgive the mockery of the
+word!—but there’s something to be made of it.  She’s a nice maid; so,
+Harriet, do you take the first chance you get for honouring her, before
+others know what has happened.  Since this is done so privately it will
+be kept private for some time—till after his death, no question;—when I
+expect she’ll take this house for herself; and blaze out as a widow-lady
+ten thousand pound strong.  You being a widow, she may make you her
+company-keeper; and so you’ll have a home by a little contriving.’
+
+While this conversation progressed at the gardener’s Margery was on her
+way out of the Baron’s house.  She was, indeed, married.  But, as we
+know, she was not married to the Baron.  The ceremony over she seemed but
+little discomposed, and expressed a wish to return alone as she had come.
+To this, of course, no objection could be offered under the terms of the
+agreement, and wishing Jim a frigid good-bye, and the Baron a very quiet
+farewell, she went out by the door which had admitted her.  Once safe and
+alone in the darkness of the park she burst into tears, which dropped
+upon the grass as she passed along.  In the Baron’s room she had seemed
+scared and helpless; now her reason and emotions returned.  The further
+she got away from the glamour of that room, and the influence of its
+occupant, the more she became of opinion that she had acted foolishly.
+She had disobediently left her father’s house, to obey him here.  She had
+pleased everybody but herself.
+
+However, thinking was now too late.  How she got into her grandmother’s
+house she hardly knew; but without a supper, and without confronting
+either her relative or Edy, she went to bed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+On going out into the garden next morning, with a strange sense of being
+another person than herself, she beheld Jim leaning mutely over the gate.
+
+He nodded.  ‘Good morning, Margery,’ he said civilly.
+
+‘Good morning,’ said Margery in the same tone.
+
+‘I beg your pardon,’ he continued.  ‘But which way was you going this
+morning?’
+
+‘I am not going anywhere just now, thank you.  But I shall go to my
+father’s by-and-by with Edy.’  She went on with a sigh, ‘I have done what
+he has all along wished, that is, married you; and there’s no longer
+reason for enmity atween him and me.’
+
+‘Trew—trew.  Well, as I am going the same way, I can give you a lift in
+the trap, for the distance is long.’
+
+‘No thank you—I am used to walking,’ she said.
+
+They remained in silence, the gate between them, till Jim’s convictions
+would apparently allow him to hold his peace no longer.  ‘This is a bad
+job!’ he murmured.
+
+‘It is,’ she said, as one whose thoughts have only too readily been
+identified.  ‘How I came to agree to it is more than I can tell!’  And
+tears began rolling down her cheeks.
+
+‘The blame is more mine than yours, I suppose,’ he returned.  ‘I ought to
+have said No, and not backed up the gentleman in carrying out this
+scheme.  ’Twas his own notion entirely, as perhaps you know.  I should
+never have thought of such a plan; but he said you’d be willing, and that
+it would be all right; and I was too ready to believe him.’
+
+‘The thing is, how to remedy it,’ said she bitterly.  ‘I believe, of
+course, in your promise to keep this private, and not to trouble me by
+calling.’
+
+‘Certainly,’ said Jim.  ‘I don’t want to trouble you.  As for that, why,
+my dear Mrs. Hayward—’
+
+‘Don’t Mrs. Hayward me!’ said Margery sharply.  ‘I won’t be Mrs.
+Hayward!’
+
+Jim paused.  ‘Well, you are she by law, and that was all I meant,’ he
+said mildly.
+
+‘I said I would acknowledge no such thing, and I won’t.  A thing can’t be
+legal when it’s against the wishes of the persons the laws are made to
+protect.  So I beg you not to call me that anymore.’
+
+‘Very well, Miss Tucker,’ said Jim deferentially.  ‘We can live on
+exactly as before.  We can’t marry anybody else, that’s true; but beyond
+that there’s no difference, and no harm done.  Your father ought to be
+told, I suppose, even if nobody else is?  It will partly reconcile him to
+you, and make your life smoother.’
+
+Instead of directly replying, Margery exclaimed in a low voice:
+
+‘O, it is a mistake—I didn’t see it all, owing to not having time to
+reflect!  I agreed, thinking that at least I should get reconciled to
+father by the step.  But perhaps he would as soon have me not married at
+all as married and parted.  I must ha’ been enchanted—bewitched—when I
+gave my consent to this!  I only did it to please that dear good dying
+nobleman—though why he should have wished it so much I can’t tell!’
+
+‘Nor I neither,’ said Jim.  ‘Yes, we’ve been fooled into it, Margery,’ he
+said, with extraordinary gravity.  ‘He’s had his way wi’ us, and now
+we’ve got to suffer for it.  Being a gentleman of patronage, and having
+bought several loads of lime o’ me, and having given me all that splendid
+furniture, I could hardly refuse—’
+
+‘What, did he give you that?’
+
+‘Ay sure—to help me win ye.’
+
+Margery covered her face with her hands; whereupon Jim stood up from the
+gate and looked critically at her.  ‘’Tis a footy plot between you two
+men to—snare me!’ she exclaimed.  ‘Why should you have done it—why should
+he have done it—when I’ve not deserved to be treated so.  He bought the
+furniture—did he!  O, I’ve been taken in—I’ve been wronged!’  The grief
+and vexation of finding that long ago, when fondly believing the Baron to
+have lover-like feelings himself for her, he was still conspiring to
+favour Jim’s suit, was more than she could endure.
+
+Jim with distant courtesy waited, nibbling a straw, till her paroxysm was
+over.  ‘One word, Miss Tuck—Mrs.—Margery,’ he then recommenced gravely.
+‘You’ll find me man enough to respect your wish, and to leave you to
+yourself—for ever and ever, if that’s all.  But I’ve just one word of
+advice to render ’ee.  That is, that before you go to Silverthorn Dairy
+yourself you let me drive ahead and call on your father.  He’s friends
+with me, and he’s not friends with you.  I can break the news, a little
+at a time, and I think I can gain his good will for you now, even though
+the wedding be no natural wedding at all.  At any count, I can hear what
+he’s got to say about ’ee, and come back here and tell ’ee.’
+
+She nodded a cool assent to this, and he left her strolling about the
+garden in the sunlight while he went on to reconnoitre as agreed.  It
+must not be supposed that Jim’s dutiful echoes of Margery’s regret at her
+precipitate marriage were all gospel; and there is no doubt that his
+private intention, after telling the dairy-farmer what had happened, was
+to ask his temporary assent to her caprice, till, in the course of time,
+she should be reasoned out of her whims and induced to settle down with
+Jim in a natural manner.  He had, it is true, been somewhat nettled by
+her firm objection to him, and her keen sorrow for what she had done to
+please another; but he hoped for the best.
+
+But, alas for the astute Jim’s calculations!  He drove on to the dairy,
+whose white walls now gleamed in the morning sun; made fast the horse to
+a ring in the wall, and entered the barton.  Before knocking, he
+perceived the dairyman walking across from a gate in the other direction,
+as if he had just come in.  Jim went over to him.  Since the unfortunate
+incident on the morning of the intended wedding they had merely been on
+nodding terms, from a sense of awkwardness in their relations.
+
+‘What—is that thee?’ said Dairyman Tucker, in a voice which unmistakably
+startled Jim by its abrupt fierceness.  ‘A pretty fellow thou be’st!’
+
+It was a bad beginning for the young man’s life as a son-in-law, and
+augured ill for the delicate consultation he desired.
+
+‘What’s the matter?’ said Jim.
+
+‘Matter!  I wish some folks would burn their lime without burning other
+folks’ property along wi’ it.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself.  You
+call yourself a man, Jim Hayward, and an honest lime-burner, and a
+respectable, market-keeping Christen, and yet at six o’clock this
+morning, instead o’ being where you ought to ha’ been—at your work, there
+was neither vell or mark o’ thee to be seen!’
+
+‘Faith, I don’t know what you are raving at,’ said Jim.
+
+‘Why—the sparks from thy couch-heap blew over upon my hay-rick, and the
+rick’s burnt to ashes; and all to come out o’ my well-squeezed pocket.
+I’ll tell thee what it is, young man.  There’s no business in thee.  I’ve
+known Silverthorn folk, quick and dead, for the last couple-o’-score
+year, and I’ve never knew one so three-cunning for harm as thee, my
+gentleman lime-burner; and I reckon it one o’ the luckiest days o’ my
+life when I ’scaped having thee in my family.  That maid of mine was
+right; I was wrong.  She seed thee to be a drawlacheting rogue, and ’twas
+her wisdom to go off that morning and get rid o’ thee.  I commend her
+for’t, and I’m going to fetch her home to-morrow.’
+
+‘You needn’t take the trouble.  She’s coming home-along to-night of her
+own accord.  I have seen her this morning, and she told me so.’
+
+‘So much the better.  I’ll welcome her warm.  Nation!  I’d sooner see her
+married to the parish fool than thee.  Not you—you don’t care for my hay.
+Tarrying about where you shouldn’t be, in bed, no doubt; that’s what you
+was a-doing.  Now, don’t you darken my doors again, and the sooner you be
+off my bit o’ ground the better I shall be pleased.’
+
+Jim looked, as he felt, stultified.  If the rick had been really
+destroyed, a little blame certainly attached to him, but he could not
+understand how it had happened.  However, blame or none, it was clear he
+could not, with any self-respect, declare himself to be this peppery old
+gaffer’s son-in-law in the face of such an attack as this.
+
+For months—almost years—the one transaction that had seemed necessary to
+compose these two families satisfactorily was Jim’s union with Margery.
+No sooner had it been completed than it appeared on all sides as the
+gravest mishap for both.  Stating coldly that he would discover how much
+of the accident was to be attributed to his negligence, and pay the
+damage, he went out of the barton, and returned the way he had come.
+
+Margery had been keeping a look-out for him, particularly wishing him not
+to enter the house, lest others should see the seriousness of their
+interview; and as soon as she heard wheels she went to the gate, which
+was out of view.
+
+‘Surely father has been speaking roughly to you!’ she said, on seeing his
+face.
+
+‘Not the least doubt that he have,’ said Jim.
+
+‘But is he still angry with me?’
+
+‘Not in the least.  He’s waiting to welcome ’ee.’
+
+‘Ah! because I’ve married you.’
+
+‘Because he thinks you have not married me!  He’s jawed me up hill and
+down.  He hates me; and for your sake I have not explained a word.’
+
+Margery looked towards home with a sad, severe gaze.  ‘Mr. Hayward,’ she
+said, ‘we have made a great mistake, and we are in a strange position.’
+
+‘True, but I’ll tell you what, mistress—I won’t stand—’  He stopped
+suddenly.  ‘Well, well; I’ve promised!’ he quietly added.
+
+‘We must suffer for our mistake,’ she went on.  ‘The way to suffer least
+is to keep our own counsel on what happened last evening, and not to
+meet.  I must now return to my father.’
+
+He inclined his head in indifferent assent, and she went indoors, leaving
+him there.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+Margery returned home, as she had decided, and resumed her old life at
+Silverthorn.  And seeing her father’s animosity towards Jim, she told him
+not a word of the marriage.
+
+Her inner life, however, was not what it once had been.  She had suffered
+a mental and emotional displacement—a shock, which had set a shade of
+astonishment on her face as a permanent thing.
+
+Her indignation with the Baron for collusion with Jim, at first bitter,
+lessened with the lapse of a few weeks, and at length vanished in the
+interest of some tidings she received one day.
+
+The Baron was not dead, but he was no longer at the Lodge.  To the
+surprise of the physicians, a sufficient improvement had taken place in
+his condition to permit of his removal before the cold weather came.  His
+desire for removal had been such, indeed, that it was advisable to carry
+it out at almost any risk.  The plan adopted had been to have him borne
+on men’s shoulders in a sort of palanquin to the shore near Idmouth, a
+distance of several miles, where a yacht lay awaiting him.  By this means
+the noise and jolting of a carriage, along irregular bye-roads, were
+avoided.  The singular procession over the fields took place at night,
+and was witnessed by but few people, one being a labouring man, who
+described the scene to Margery.  When the seaside was reached a long,
+narrow gangway was laid from the deck of the yacht to the shore, which
+was so steep as to allow the yacht to lie quite near.  The men, with
+their burden, ascended by the light of lanterns, the sick man was laid in
+the cabin, and, as soon as his bearers had returned to the shore, the
+gangway was removed, a rope was heard skirring over wood in the darkness,
+the yacht quivered, spread her woven wings to the air, and moved away.
+Soon she was but a small, shapeless phantom upon the wide breast of the
+sea.
+
+It was said that the yacht was bound for Algiers.
+
+When the inimical autumn and winter weather came on, Margery wondered if
+he were still alive.  The house being shut up, and the servants gone, she
+had no means of knowing, till, on a particular Saturday, her father drove
+her to Exonbury market.  Here, in attending to his business, he left her
+to herself for awhile.  Walking in a quiet street in the professional
+quarter of the town, she saw coming towards her the solicitor who had
+been present at the wedding, and who had acted for the Baron in various
+small local matters during his brief residence at the Lodge.
+
+She reddened to peony hues, averted her eyes, and would have passed him.
+But he crossed over and barred the pavement, and when she met his glance
+he was looking with friendly severity at her.  The street was quiet, and
+he said in a low voice, ‘How’s the husband?’
+
+‘I don’t know, sir,’ said she.
+
+‘What—and are your stipulations about secrecy and separate living still
+in force?’
+
+‘They will always be,’ she replied decisively.  ‘Mr. Hayward and I agreed
+on the point, and we have not the slightest wish to change the
+arrangement.’
+
+‘H’m.  Then ’tis Miss Tucker to the world; Mrs. Hayward to me and one or
+two others only?’
+
+Margery nodded.  Then she nerved herself by an effort, and, though
+blushing painfully, asked, ‘May I put one question, sir?  Is the Baron
+dead?’
+
+‘He is dead to you and to all of us.  Why should you ask?’
+
+‘Because, if he’s alive, I am sorry I married James Hayward.  If he is
+dead I do not much mind my marriage.’
+
+‘I repeat, he is dead to you,’ said the lawyer emphatically.  ‘I’ll tell
+you all I know.  My professional services for him ended with his
+departure from this country; but I think I should have heard from him if
+he had been alive still.  I have not heard at all: and this, taken in
+connection with the nature of his illness, leaves no doubt in my mind
+that he is dead.’
+
+Margery sighed, and thanking the lawyer she left him with a tear for the
+Baron in her eye.  After this incident she became more restful; and the
+time drew on for her periodical visit to her grandmother.
+
+A few days subsequent to her arrival her aged relative asked her to go
+with a message to the gardener at Mount Lodge (who still lived on there,
+keeping the grounds in order for the landlord).  Margery hated that
+direction now, but she went.  The Lodge, which she saw over the trees,
+was to her like a skull from which the warm and living flesh had
+vanished.  It was twilight by the time she reached the cottage at the
+bottom of the Lodge garden, and, the room being illuminated within, she
+saw through the window a woman she had never seen before.  She was dark,
+and rather handsome, and when Margery knocked she opened the door.  It
+was the gardener’s widowed daughter, who had been advised to make friends
+with Margery.
+
+She now found her opportunity.  Margery’s errand was soon completed, the
+young widow, to her surprise, treating her with preternatural respect,
+and afterwards offering to accompany her home.  Margery was not sorry to
+have a companion in the gloom, and they walked on together.  The widow,
+Mrs. Peach, was demonstrative and confidential; and told Margery all
+about herself.  She had come quite recently to live with her
+father—during the Baron’s illness, in fact—and her husband had been
+captain of a ketch.
+
+‘I saw you one morning, ma’am,’ she said.  ‘But you didn’t see me.  It
+was when you were crossing the hill in sight of the Lodge.  You looked at
+it, and sighed.  ’Tis the lot of widows to sigh, ma’am, is it not?’
+
+‘Widows—yes, I suppose; but what do you mean?’
+
+Mrs. Peach lowered her voice.  ‘I can’t say more, ma’am, with proper
+respect.  But there seems to be no question of the poor Baron’s death;
+and though these foreign princes can take (as my poor husband used to
+tell me) what they call left-handed wives, and leave them behind when
+they go abroad, widowhood is widowhood, left-handed or right.  And
+really, to be the left-handed wife of a foreign baron is nobler than to
+be married all round to a common man.  You’ll excuse my freedom, ma’am;
+but being a widow myself, I have pitied you from my heart; so young as
+you are, and having to keep it a secret, and (excusing me) having no
+money out of his vast riches because ’tis swallowed up by Baroness Number
+One.’
+
+Now Margery did not understand a word more of this than the bare fact
+that Mrs. Peach suspected her to be the Baron’s undowered widow, and such
+was the milkmaid’s nature that she did not deny the widow’s impeachment.
+The latter continued—
+
+‘But ah, ma’am, all your troubles are straight backward in your
+memory—while I have troubles before as well as grief behind.’
+
+‘What may they be, Mrs. Peach?’ inquired Margery with an air of the
+Baroness.
+
+The other dropped her voice to revelation tones: ‘I have been forgetful
+enough of my first man to lose my heart to a second!’
+
+‘You shouldn’t do that—it is wrong.  You should control your feelings.’
+
+‘But how am I to control my feelings?’
+
+‘By going to your dead husband’s grave, and things of that sort.’
+
+‘Do you go to your dead husband’s grave?’
+
+‘How can I go to Algiers?’
+
+‘Ah—too true!  Well, I’ve tried everything to cure myself—read the words
+against it, gone to the Table the first Sunday of every month, and all
+sorts.  But, avast, my shipmate!—as my poor man used to say—there ’tis
+just the same.  In short, I’ve made up my mind to encourage the new one.
+’Tis flattering that I, a new-comer, should have been found out by a
+young man so soon.’
+
+‘Who is he?’ said Margery listlessly.
+
+‘A master lime-burner.’
+
+‘A master lime-burner?’
+
+‘That’s his profession.  He’s a partner-in-co., doing very well indeed.’
+
+‘But what’s his name?’
+
+‘I don’t like to tell you his name, for, though ’tis night, that covers
+all shame-facedness, my face is as hot as a ’Talian iron, I declare!  Do
+you just feel it.’
+
+Margery put her hand on Mrs. Peach’s face, and, sure enough, hot it was.
+‘Does he come courting?’ she asked quickly.
+
+‘Well only in the way of business.  He never comes unless lime is wanted
+in the neighbourhood.  He’s in the Yeomanry, too, and will look very fine
+when he comes out in regimentals for drill in May.’
+
+‘Oh—in the Yeomanry,’ Margery said, with a slight relief.  ‘Then it
+can’t—is he a young man?’
+
+‘Yes, junior partner-in-co.’
+
+The description had an odd resemblance to Jim, of whom Margery had not
+heard a word for months.  He had promised silence and absence, and had
+fulfilled his promise literally, with a gratuitous addition that was
+rather amazing, if indeed it were Jim whom the widow loved.  One point in
+the description puzzled Margery: Jim was not in the Yeomanry, unless, by
+a surprising development of enterprise, he had entered it recently.
+
+At parting Margery said, with an interest quite tender, ‘I should like to
+see you again, Mrs. Peach, and hear of your attachment.  When can you
+call?’
+
+‘Oh—any time, dear Baroness, I’m sure—if you think I am good enough.’
+
+‘Indeed, I do, Mrs. Peach.  Come as soon as you’ve seen the lime-burner
+again.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+Seeing that Jim lived several miles from the widow, Margery was rather
+surprised, and even felt a slight sinking of the heart, when her new
+acquaintance appeared at her door so soon as the evening of the following
+Monday.  She asked Margery to walk out with her, which the young woman
+readily did.
+
+‘I am come at once,’ said the widow breathlessly, as soon as they were in
+the lane, ‘for it is so exciting that I can’t keep it.  I must tell it to
+somebody, if only a bird, or a cat, or a garden snail.’
+
+‘What is it?’ asked her companion.
+
+‘I’ve pulled grass from my husband’s grave to cure it—wove the blades
+into true lover’s knots; took off my shoes upon the sod; but, avast, my
+shipmate,—’
+
+‘Upon the sod—why?’
+
+‘To feel the damp earth he’s in, and make the sense of it enter my soul.
+But no.  It has swelled to a head; he is going to meet me at the Yeomanry
+Review.’
+
+‘The master lime-burner?’
+
+The widow nodded.
+
+‘When is it to be?’
+
+‘To-morrow.  He looks so lovely in his accoutrements!  He’s such a
+splendid soldier; that was the last straw that kindled my soul to say
+yes.  He’s home from Exonbury for a night between the drills,’ continued
+Mrs. Peach.  ‘He goes back to-morrow morning for the Review, and when
+it’s over he’s going to meet me.  But, guide my heart, there he is!’
+
+Her exclamation had rise in the sudden appearance of a brilliant red
+uniform through the trees, and the tramp of a horse carrying the wearer
+thereof.  In another half-minute the military gentleman would have turned
+the corner, and faced them.
+
+‘He’d better not see me; he’ll think I know too much,’ said Margery
+precipitately.  ‘I’ll go up here.’
+
+The widow, whose thoughts had been of the same cast, seemed much relieved
+to see Margery disappear in the plantation, in the midst of a spring
+chorus of birds.  Once among the trees, Margery turned her head, and,
+before she could see the rider’s person she recognized the horse as Tony,
+the lightest of three that Jim and his partner owned, for the purpose of
+carting out lime to their customers.
+
+Jim, then, had joined the Yeomanry since his estrangement from Margery.
+A man who had worn the young Queen Victoria’s uniform for seven days only
+could not be expected to look as if it were part of his person, in the
+manner of long-trained soldiers; but he was a well-formed young fellow,
+and of an age when few positions came amiss to one who has the capacity
+to adapt himself to circumstances.
+
+Meeting the blushing Mrs. Peach (to whom Margery in her mind sternly
+denied the right to blush at all), Jim alighted and moved on with her,
+probably at Mrs. Peach’s own suggestion; so that what they said, how long
+they remained together, and how they parted, Margery knew not.  She might
+have known some of these things by waiting; but the presence of Jim had
+bred in her heart a sudden disgust for the widow, and a general sense of
+discomfiture.  She went away in an opposite direction, turning her head
+and saying to the unconscious Jim, ‘There’s a fine rod in pickle for you,
+my gentleman, if you carry out that pretty scheme!’
+
+Jim’s military _coup_ had decidedly astonished her.   What he might do
+next she could not conjecture.  The idea of his doing anything
+sufficiently brilliant to arrest her attention would have seemed
+ludicrous, had not Jim, by entering the Yeomanry, revealed a capacity for
+dazzling exploits which made it unsafe to predict any limitation to his
+powers.
+
+Margery was now excited.  The daring of the wretched Jim in bursting into
+scarlet amazed her as much as his doubtful acquaintanceship with the
+demonstrative Mrs. Peach.  To go to that Review, to watch the pair, to
+eclipse Mrs. Peach in brilliancy, to meet and pass them in withering
+contempt—if she only could do it!  But, alas! she was a forsaken woman.
+
+‘If the Baron were alive, or in England,’ she said to herself (for
+sometimes she thought he might possibly be alive), ‘and he were to take
+me to this Review, wouldn’t I show that forward Mrs. Peach what a lady is
+like, and keep among the select company, and not mix with the common
+people at all!’
+
+It might at first sight be thought that the best course for Margery at
+this juncture would have been to go to Jim, and nip the intrigue in the
+bud without further scruple.  But her own declaration in after days was
+that whoever could say that was far from realizing her situation.  It was
+hard to break such ice as divided their two lives now, and to attempt it
+at that moment was a too humiliating proclamation of defeat.  The only
+plan she could think of—perhaps not a wise one in the circumstances—was
+to go to the Review herself; and be the gayest there.
+
+A method of doing this with some propriety soon occurred to her.  She
+dared not ask her father, who scorned to waste time in sight-seeing, and
+whose animosity towards Jim knew no abatement; but she might call on her
+old acquaintance, Mr. Vine, Jim’s partner, who would probably be going
+with the rest of the holiday-folk, and ask if she might accompany him in
+his spring-trap.  She had no sooner perceived the feasibility of this,
+through her being at her grandmother’s, than she decided to meet with the
+old man early the next morning.
+
+In the meantime Jim and Mrs. Peach had walked slowly along the road
+together, Jim leading the horse, and Mrs. Peach informing him that her
+father, the gardener, was at Jim’s village further on, and that she had
+come to meet him.  Jim, for reasons of his own, was going to sleep at his
+partner’s that night, and thus their route was the same.  The shades of
+eve closed in upon them as they walked, and by the time they reached the
+lime-kiln, which it was necessary to pass to get to the village, it was
+quite dark.  Jim stopped at the kiln, to see if matters had progressed
+rightly in his seven days’ absence, and Mrs. Peach, who stuck to him like
+a teazle, stopped also, saying she would wait for her father there.
+
+She held the horse while he ascended to the top of the kiln.  Then
+rejoining her, and not quite knowing what to do, he stood beside her
+looking at the flames, which to-night burnt up brightly, shining a long
+way into the dark air, even up to the ramparts of the earthwork above
+them, and overhead into the bosoms of the clouds.
+
+It was during this proceeding that a carriage, drawn by a pair of dark
+horses, came along the turnpike road.  The light of the kiln caused the
+horses to swerve a little, and the occupant of the carriage looked out.
+He saw the bluish, lightning-like flames from the limestone, rising from
+the top of the furnace, and hard by the figures of Jim Hayward, the
+widow, and the horse, standing out with spectral distinctness against the
+mass of night behind.  The scene wore the aspect of some unholy
+assignation in Pandaemonium, and it was all the more impressive from the
+fact that both Jim and the woman were quite unconscious of the striking
+spectacle they presented.  The gentleman in the carriage watched them
+till he was borne out of sight.
+
+Having seen to the kiln, Jim and the widow walked on again, and soon Mrs.
+Peach’s father met them, and relieved Jim of the lady.  When they had
+parted, Jim, with an expiration not unlike a breath of relief; went on to
+Mr. Vine’s, and, having put the horse into the stable, entered the house.
+His partner was seated at the table, solacing himself after the labours
+of the day by luxurious alternations between a long clay pipe and a mug
+of perry.
+
+‘Well,’ said Jim eagerly, ‘what’s the news—how do she take it?’
+
+‘Sit down—sit down,’ said Vine.  ‘’Tis working well; not but that I
+deserve something o’ thee for the trouble I’ve had in watching her.  The
+soldiering was a fine move; but the woman is a better!—who invented it?’
+
+‘I myself,’ said Jim modestly.
+
+‘Well; jealousy is making her rise like a thunderstorm, and in a day or
+two you’ll have her for the asking, my sonny.  What’s the next step?’
+
+‘The widow is getting rather a weight upon a feller, worse luck,’ said
+Jim.  ‘But I must keep it up until to-morrow, at any rate.  I have
+promised to see her at the Review, and now the great thing is that
+Margery should see we a-smiling together—I in my full-dress uniform and
+clinking arms o’ war.  ’Twill be a good strong sting, and will end the
+business, I hope.  Couldn’t you manage to put the hoss in and drive her
+there?  She’d go if you were to ask her.’
+
+‘With all my heart,’ said Mr. Vine, moistening the end of a new pipe in
+his perry.  ‘I can call at her grammer’s for her—’twill be all in my
+way.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+Margery duly followed up her intention by arraying herself the next
+morning in her loveliest guise, and keeping watch for Mr. Vine’s
+appearance upon the high road, feeling certain that his would form one in
+the procession of carts and carriages which set in towards Exonbury that
+day.  Jim had gone by at a very early hour, and she did not see him pass.
+Her anticipation was verified by the advent of Mr. Vine about eleven
+o’clock, dressed to his highest effort; but Margery was surprised to find
+that, instead of her having to stop him, he pulled in towards the gate of
+his own accord.  The invitation planned between Jim and the old man on
+the previous night was now promptly given, and, as may be supposed, as
+promptly accepted.  Such a strange coincidence she had never before
+known.  She was quite ready, and they drove onward at once.
+
+The Review was held on some high ground a little way out of the city, and
+her conductor suggested that they should put up the horse at the inn, and
+walk to the field—a plan which pleased her well, for it was more easy to
+take preliminary observations on foot without being seen herself than
+when sitting elevated in a vehicle.
+
+They were just in time to secure a good place near the front, and in a
+few minutes after their arrival the reviewing officer came on the ground.
+Margery’s eye had rapidly run over the troop in which Jim was enrolled,
+and she discerned him in one of the ranks, looking remarkably new and
+bright, both as to uniform and countenance.  Indeed, if she had not
+worked herself into such a desperate state of mind she would have felt
+proud of him then and there.  His shapely upright figure was quite
+noteworthy in the row of rotund yeomen on his right and left; while his
+charger Tony expressed by his bearing, even more than Jim, that he knew
+nothing about lime-carts whatever, and everything about trumpets and
+glory.  How Jim could have scrubbed Tony to such shining blackness she
+could not tell, for the horse in his natural state was ingrained with
+lime-dust, that burnt the colour out of his coat as it did out of Jim’s
+hair.  Now he pranced martially, and was a war-horse every inch of him.
+
+Having discovered Jim her next search was for Mrs. Peach, and, by dint of
+some oblique glancing Margery indignantly discovered the widow in the
+most forward place of all, her head and bright face conspicuously
+advanced; and, what was more shocking, she had abandoned her mourning for
+a violet drawn-bonnet and a gay spencer, together with a parasol
+luxuriously fringed in a way Margery had never before seen.  ‘Where did
+she get the money?’ said Margery, under her breath.  ‘And to forget that
+poor sailor so soon!’
+
+These general reflections were precipitately postponed by her discovering
+that Jim and the widow were perfectly alive to each other’s whereabouts,
+and in the interchange of telegraphic signs of affection, which on the
+latter’s part took the form of a playful fluttering of her handkerchief
+or waving of her parasol.  Richard Vine had placed Margery in front of
+him, to protect her from the crowd, as he said, he himself surveying the
+scene over her bonnet.  Margery would have been even more surprised than
+she was if she had known that Jim was not only aware of Mrs. Peach’s
+presence, but also of her own, the treacherous Mr. Vine having drawn out
+his flame-coloured handkerchief and waved it to Jim over the young
+woman’s head as soon as they had taken up their position.
+
+‘My partner makes a tidy soldier, eh—Miss Tucker?’ said the senior
+lime-burner.  ‘It is my belief as a Christian that he’s got a party here
+that he’s making signs to—that handsome figure o’ fun straight over-right
+him.’
+
+‘Perhaps so,’ she said.
+
+‘And it’s growing warm between ’em if I don’t mistake,’ continued the
+merciless Vine.
+
+Margery was silent, biting her lip; and the troops being now set in
+motion, all signalling ceased for the present between soldier Hayward and
+his pretended sweetheart.
+
+‘Have you a piece of paper that I could make a memorandum on, Mr. Vine?’
+asked Margery.
+
+Vine took out his pocket-book and tore a leaf from it, which he handed
+her with a pencil.
+
+‘Don’t move from here—I’ll return in a minute,’ she continued, with the
+innocence of a woman who means mischief.  And, withdrawing herself to the
+back, where the grass was clear, she pencilled down the words
+
+                             ‘JIM’S MARRIED.’
+
+Armed with this document she crept into the throng behind the
+unsuspecting Mrs. Peach, slipped the paper into her pocket on the top of
+her handkerchief; and withdrew unobserved, rejoining Mr. Vine with a
+bearing of _nonchalance_.
+
+By-and-by the troops were in different order, Jim taking a left-hand
+position almost close to Mrs. Peach.  He bent down and said a few words
+to her.  From her manner of nodding assent it was surely some arrangement
+about a meeting by-and-by when Jim’s drill was over, and Margery was more
+certain of the fact when, the Review having ended, and the people having
+strolled off to another part of the field where sports were to take
+place, Mrs. Peach tripped away in the direction of the city.
+
+‘I’ll just say a word to my partner afore he goes off the ground, if
+you’ll spare me a minute,’ said the old lime-burner.  ‘Please stay here
+till I’m back again.’  He edged along the front till he reached Jim.
+
+‘How is she?’ said the latter.
+
+‘In a trimming sweat,’ said Mr. Vine.  ‘And my counsel to ’ee is to carry
+this larry no further.  ’Twill do no good.  She’s as ready to make
+friends with ’ee as any wife can be; and more showing off can only do
+harm.’
+
+‘But I must finish off with a spurt,’ said Jim.  ‘And this is how I am
+going to do it.  I have arranged with Mrs. Peach that, as soon as we
+soldiers have entered the town and been dismissed, I’ll meet her there.
+It is really to say good-bye, but she don’t know that; and I wanted it to
+look like a lopement to Margery’s eyes.  When I’m clear of Mrs. Peach
+I’ll come back here and make it up with Margery on the spot.  But don’t
+say I’m coming, or she may be inclined to throw off again.  Just hint to
+her that I may be meaning to be off to London with the widow.’
+
+The old man still insisted that this was going too far.
+
+‘No, no, it isn’t,’ said Jim.  ‘I know how to manage her.  ’Twill just
+mellow her heart nicely by the time I come back.  I must bring her down
+real tender, or ’twill all fail.’
+
+His senior reluctantly gave in and returned to Margery.  A short time
+afterwards the Yeomanry hand struck up, and Jim with the regiment
+followed towards Exonbury.
+
+‘Yes, yes; they are going to meet,’ said Margery to herself, perceiving
+that Mrs. Peach had so timed her departure as to be in the town at Jim’s
+dismounting.
+
+‘Now we will go and see the games,’ said Mr. Vine; ‘they are really worth
+seeing.  There’s greasy poles, and jumping in sacks, and other trials of
+the intellect, that nobody ought to miss who wants to be abreast of his
+generation.’
+
+Margery felt so indignant at the apparent assignation, which seemed about
+to take place despite her anonymous writing, that she helplessly assented
+to go anywhere, dropping behind Vine, that he might not see her mood.
+
+Jim followed out his programme with literal exactness.  No sooner was the
+troop dismissed in the city than he sent Tony to stable and joined Mrs.
+Peach, who stood on the edge of the pavement expecting him.  But this
+acquaintance was to end: he meant to part from her for ever and in the
+quickest time, though civilly; for it was important to be with Margery as
+soon as possible.  He had nearly completed the manœuvre to his
+satisfaction when, in drawing her handkerchief from her pocket to wipe
+the tears from her eyes, Mrs. Peach’s hand grasped the paper, which she
+read at once.
+
+‘What! is that true?’ she said, holding it out to Jim.
+
+Jim started and admitted that it was, beginning an elaborate explanation
+and apologies.  But Mrs. Peach was thoroughly roused, and then overcome.
+‘He’s married, he’s married!’ she said, and swooned, or feigned to swoon,
+so that Jim was obliged to support her.
+
+‘He’s married, he’s married!’ said a boy hard by who watched the scene
+with interest.
+
+‘He’s married, he’s married!’ said a hilarious group of other boys near,
+with smiles several inches broad, and shining teeth; and so the
+exclamation echoed down the street.
+
+Jim cursed his ill-luck; the loss of time that this dilemma entailed grew
+serious; for Mrs. Peach was now in such a hysterical state that he could
+not leave her with any good grace or feeling.  It was necessary to take
+her to a refreshment room, lavish restoratives upon her, and altogether
+to waste nearly half an hour.  When she had kept him as long as she
+chose, she forgave him; and thus at last he got away, his heart swelling
+with tenderness towards Margery.  He at once hurried up the street to
+effect the reconciliation with her.
+
+‘How shall I do it?’ he said to himself.  ‘Why, I’ll step round to her
+side, fish for her hand, draw it through my arm as if I wasn’t aware of
+it.  Then she’ll look in my face, I shall look in hers, and we shall
+march off the field triumphant, and the thing will be done without
+takings or tears.’
+
+He entered the field and went straight as an arrow to the place appointed
+for the meeting.  It was at the back of a refreshment tent outside the
+mass of spectators, and divided from their view by the tent itself.  He
+turned the corner of the canvas, and there beheld Vine at the indicated
+spot.  But Margery was not with him.
+
+Vine’s hat was thrust back into his poll.  His face was pale, and his
+manner bewildered.  ‘Hullo? what’s the matter?’ said Jim.  ‘Where’s my
+Margery?’
+
+‘You’ve carried this footy game too far, my man!’ exclaimed Vine, with
+the air of a friend who has ‘always told you so.’  ‘You ought to have
+dropped it several days ago, when she would have come to ’ee like a
+cooing dove.  Now this is the end o’t!’
+
+‘Hey! what, my Margery?  Has anything happened, for God’s sake?’
+
+‘She’s gone.’
+
+‘Where to?’
+
+‘That’s more than earthly man can tell!  I never see such a thing!  ’Twas
+a stroke o’ the black art—as if she were sperrited away.  When we got to
+the games I said—mind, you told me to!—I said, “Jim Hayward thinks o’
+going off to London with that widow woman”—mind you told me to!  She
+showed no wonderment, though a’ seemed very low.  Then she said to me, “I
+don’t like standing here in this slummocky crowd.  I shall feel more at
+home among the gentlepeople.”  And then she went to where the carriages
+were drawn up, and near her there was a grand coach, a-blazing with lions
+and unicorns, and hauled by two coal-black horses.  I hardly thought much
+of it then, and by degrees lost sight of her behind it.  Presently the
+other carriages moved off, and I thought still to see her standing there.
+But no, she had vanished; and then I saw the grand coach rolling away,
+and glimpsed Margery in it, beside a fine dark gentleman with black
+mustachios, and a very pale prince-like face.  As soon as the horses got
+into the hard road they rattled on like hell-and-skimmer, and went out of
+sight in the dust, and—that’s all.  If you’d come back a little sooner
+you’d ha’ caught her.’
+
+Jim had turned whiter than his pipeclay.  ‘O, this is too bad—too bad!’
+he cried in anguish, striking his brow.  ‘That paper and that fainting
+woman kept me so long.  Who could have done it?  But ’tis my fault.  I’ve
+stung her too much.  I shouldn’t have carried it so far.’
+
+‘You shouldn’t—just what I said,’ replied his senior.
+
+‘She thinks I’ve gone off with that cust widow; and to spite me she’s
+gone off with the man!  Do you know who that stranger wi’ the lions and
+unicorns is?  Why, ’tis that foreigner who calls himself a Baron, and
+took Mount Lodge for six months last year to make mischief—a villain!  O,
+my Margery—that it should come to this!  She’s lost, she’s ruined!—Which
+way did they go?’
+
+Jim turned to follow in the direction indicated, when, behold, there
+stood at his back her father, Dairyman Tucker.
+
+‘Now look here, young man,’ said Dairyman Tucker.  ‘I’ve just heard all
+that wailing—and straightway will ask ’ee to stop it sharp.  ’Tis like
+your brazen impudence to teave and wail when you be another woman’s
+husband; yes, faith, I see’d her a-fainting in yer arms when you wanted
+to get away from her, and honest folk a-standing round who knew you’d
+married her, and said so.  I heard it, though you didn’t see me.  “He’s
+married!” says they.  Some sly register-office business, no doubt; but
+sly doings will out.  As for Margery—who’s to be called higher titles in
+these parts hencefor’ard—I’m her father, and I say it’s all right what
+she’s done.  Don’t I know private news, hey?  Haven’t I just learnt that
+secret weddings of high people can happen at expected deathbeds by
+special licence, as well as low people at registrars’ offices?  And can’t
+husbands come back and claim their own when they choose?  Begone, young
+man, and leave noblemen’s wives alone; and I thank God I shall be rid of
+a numskull!’
+
+Swift words of explanation rose to Jim’s lips, but they paused there and
+died.  At that last moment he could not, as Margery’s husband, announce
+Margery’s shame and his own, and transform her father’s triumph to
+wretchedness at a blow.
+
+‘I—I—must leave here,’ he stammered.  Going from the place in an opposite
+course to that of the fugitives, he doubled when out of sight, and in an
+incredibly short space had entered the town.  Here he made inquiries for
+the emblazoned carriage, and gained from one or two persons a general
+idea of its route.  They thought it had taken the highway to London.
+Saddling poor Tony before he had half eaten his corn, Jim galloped along
+the same road.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+Now Jim was quite mistaken in supposing that by leaving the field in a
+roundabout manner he had deceived Dairyman Tucker as to his object.  That
+astute old man immediately divined that Jim was meaning to track the
+fugitives, in ignorance (as the dairyman supposed) of their lawful
+relation.  He was soon assured of the fact, for, creeping to a remote
+angle of the field, he saw Jim hastening into the town.  Vowing vengeance
+on the young lime-burner for his mischievous interference between a
+nobleman and his secretly-wedded wife, the dairy-farmer determined to
+balk him.
+
+Tucker had ridden on to the Review ground, so that there was no necessity
+for him, as there had been for poor Jim, to re-enter the town before
+starting.  The dairyman hastily untied his mare from the row of other
+horses, mounted, and descended to a bridle-path which would take him
+obliquely into the London road a mile or so ahead.  The old man’s route
+being along one side of an equilateral triangle, while Jim’s was along
+two sides of the same, the former was at the point of intersection long
+before Hayward.
+
+Arrived here, the dairyman pulled up and looked around.  It was a spot at
+which the highway forked; the left arm, the more important, led on
+through Sherton Abbas and Melchester to London; the right to Idmouth and
+the coast.  Nothing was visible on the white track to London; but on the
+other there appeared the back of a carriage, which rapidly ascended a
+distant hill and vanished under the trees.  It was the Baron’s who,
+according to the sworn information of the gardener at Mount Lodge, had
+made Margery his wife.
+
+The carriage having vanished, the dairyman gazed in the opposite
+direction, towards Exonbury.  Here he beheld Jim in his regimentals,
+laboriously approaching on Tony’s back.
+
+Soon he reached the forking roads, and saw the dairyman by the wayside.
+But Jim did not halt.  Then the dairyman practised the greatest duplicity
+of his life.
+
+‘Right along the London road, if you want to catch ’em!’ he said.
+
+‘Thank ’ee, dairyman, thank ’ee!’ cried Jim, his pale face lighting up
+with gratitude, for he believed that Tucker had learnt his mistake from
+Vine, and had come to his assistance.  Without drawing rein he diminished
+along the road not taken by the flying pair.  The dairyman rubbed his
+hands with delight, and returned to the city as the cathedral clock
+struck five.
+
+Jim pursued his way through the dust, up hill and down hill; but never
+saw ahead of him the vehicle of his search.  That vehicle was passing
+along a diverging way at a distance of many miles from where he rode.
+Still he sped onwards, till Tony showed signs of breaking down; and then
+Jim gathered from inquiries he made that he had come the wrong way.  It
+burst upon his mind that the dairyman, still ignorant of the truth, had
+misinformed him.  Heavier in his heart than words can describe he turned
+Tony’s drooping head, and resolved to drag his way home.
+
+But the horse was now so jaded that it was impossible to proceed far.
+Having gone about half a mile back he came again to a small roadside
+hamlet and inn, where he put up Tony for a rest and feed.  As for
+himself, there was no quiet in him.  He tried to sit and eat in the inn
+kitchen; but he could not stay there.  He went out, and paced up and down
+the road.
+
+Standing in sight of the white way by which he had come he beheld
+advancing towards him the horses and carriage he sought, now black and
+daemonic against the slanting fires of the western sun.
+
+The why and wherefore of this sudden appearance he did not pause to
+consider.  His resolve to intercept the carriage was instantaneous.  He
+ran forward, and doggedly waiting barred the way to the advancing
+equipage.
+
+The Baron’s coachman shouted, but Jim stood firm as a rock, and on the
+former attempting to push past him Jim drew his sword, resolving to cut
+the horses down rather than be displaced.  The animals were thrown nearly
+back upon their haunches, and at this juncture a gentleman looked out of
+the window.  It was the Baron himself.
+
+‘Who’s there?’ he inquired.
+
+‘James Hayward!’ replied the young man fiercely, ‘and he demands his
+wife.’
+
+The Baron leapt out, and told the coachman to drive back out of sight and
+wait for him.
+
+‘I was hastening to find you,’ he said to Jim.  ‘Your wife is where she
+ought to be, and where you ought to be also—by your own fireside.
+Where’s the other woman?’
+
+Jim, without replying, looked incredulously into the carriage as it
+turned.  Margery was certainly not there.  ‘The other woman is nothing to
+me,’ he said bitterly.  ‘I used her to warm up Margery: I have now done
+with her.  The question I ask, my lord, is, what business had you with
+Margery to-day?’
+
+‘My business was to help her to regain the husband she had seemingly
+lost.  I saw her; she told me you had eloped by the London road with
+another.  I, who have—mostly—had her happiness at heart, told her I would
+help her to follow you if she wished.  She gladly agreed; we drove after,
+but could hear no tidings of you in front of us.  Then I took her—to your
+house—and there she awaits you.  I promised to send you to her if human
+effort could do it, and was tracking you for that purpose.’
+
+‘Then you’ve been a-pursuing after me?’
+
+‘You and the widow.’
+
+‘And I’ve been pursuing after you and Margery!  My noble lord, your
+actions seem to show that I ought to believe you in this; and when you
+say you’ve her happiness at heart, I don’t forget that you’ve formerly
+proved it to be so.  Well, Heaven forbid that I should think wrongfully
+of you if you don’t deserve it!  A mystery to me you have always been, my
+noble lord, and in this business more than in any.’
+
+‘I am glad to hear you say no worse.  In one hour you’ll have proof of my
+conduct—good and bad.  Can I do anything more?  Say the word, and I’ll
+try.’
+
+Jim reflected.  ‘Baron,’ he said, ‘I am a plain man, and wish only to
+lead a quiet life with my wife, as a man should.  You have great power
+over her—power to any extent, for good or otherwise.  If you command her
+anything on earth, righteous or questionable, that she’ll do.  So that,
+since you ask me if you can do more for me, I’ll answer this, you can
+promise never to see her again.  I mean no harm, my lord; but your
+presence can do no good; you will trouble us.  If I return to her, will
+you for ever stay away?’
+
+‘Hayward,’ said the Baron, ‘I swear to you that I will disturb you and
+your wife by my presence no more.  And he took Jim’s hand, and pressed it
+within his own upon the hilt of Jim’s sword.
+
+In relating this incident to the present narrator Jim used to declare
+that, to his fancy, the ruddy light of the setting sun burned with more
+than earthly fire on the Baron’s face as the words were spoken; and that
+the ruby flash of his eye in the same light was what he never witnessed
+before nor since in the eye of mortal man.  After this there was nothing
+more to do or say in that place.  Jim accompanied his
+never-to-be-forgotten acquaintance to the carriage, closed the door after
+him, waved his hat to him, and from that hour he and the Baron met not
+again on earth.
+
+A few words will suffice to explain the fortunes of Margery while the
+foregoing events were in action elsewhere.  On leaving her companion Vine
+she had gone distractedly among the carriages, the rather to escape his
+observation than of any set purpose.  Standing here she thought she heard
+her name pronounced, and turning, saw her foreign friend, whom she had
+supposed to be, if not dead, a thousand miles off.  He beckoned, and she
+went close.  ‘You are ill—you are wretched,’ he said, looking keenly in
+her face.  ‘Where’s your husband?’
+
+She told him her sad suspicion that Jim had run away from her.  The Baron
+reflected, and inquired a few other particulars of her late life.  Then
+he said: ‘You and I must find him.  Come with me.’  At this word of
+command from the Baron she had entered the carriage as docilely as a
+child, and there she sat beside him till he chose to speak, which was not
+till they were some way out of the town, at the forking ways, and the
+Baron had discovered that Jim was certainly not, as they had supposed,
+making off from Margery along that particular branch of the fork that led
+to London.
+
+‘To pursue him in this way is useless, I perceive,’ he said.  ‘And the
+proper course now is that I should take you to his house.  That done I
+will return, and bring him to you if mortal persuasion can do it.’
+
+‘I didn’t want to go to his house without him, sir,’ said she,
+tremblingly.
+
+‘Didn’t want to!’ he answered.  ‘Let me remind you, Margery Hayward, that
+your place is in your husband’s house.  Till you are there you have no
+right to criticize his conduct, however wild it may be.  Why have you not
+been there before?’
+
+‘I don’t know, sir,’ she murmured, her tears falling silently upon her
+hand.
+
+‘Don’t you think you ought to be there?’
+
+She did not answer.
+
+‘Of course you ought.’
+
+Still she did not speak.
+
+The Baron sank into silence, and allowed his eye to rest on her.  What
+thoughts were all at once engaging his mind after those moments of
+reproof?  Margery had given herself into his hands without a
+remonstrance, her husband had apparently deserted her.  She was
+absolutely in his power, and they were on the high road.
+
+That his first impulse in inviting her to accompany him had been the
+legitimate one denoted by his words cannot reasonably be doubted.  That
+his second was otherwise soon became revealed, though not at first to
+her, for she was too bewildered to notice where they were going.  Instead
+of turning and taking the road to Jim’s, the Baron, as if influenced
+suddenly by her reluctance to return thither if Jim was playing truant,
+signalled to the coachman to take the branch road to the right, as her
+father had discerned.
+
+They soon approached the coast near Idmouth.  The carriage stopped.
+Margery awoke from her reverie.
+
+‘Where are we?’ she said, looking out of the window, with a start.
+Before her was an inlet of the sea, and in the middle of the inlet rode a
+yacht, its masts repeating as if from memory the rocking they had
+practised in their native forest.
+
+‘At a little sea-side nook, where my yacht lies at anchor,’ he said
+tentatively.  ‘Now, Margery, in five minutes we can be aboard, and in
+half an hour we can be sailing away all the world over.  Will you come?’
+
+‘I cannot decide,’ she said, in low tones.
+
+‘Why not?’
+
+‘Because—’
+
+Then on a sudden, Margery seemed to see all contingencies: she became
+white as a fleece, and a bewildered look came into her eyes.  With
+clasped hands she leant on the Baron.
+
+Baron von Xanten observed her distracted look, averted his face, and
+coming to a decision opened the carriage door, quickly mounted outside,
+and in a second or two the carriage left the shore behind, and ascended
+the road by which it had come.
+
+In about an hour they reached Jim Hayward’s home.  The Baron alighted,
+and spoke to her through the window.  ‘Margery, can you forgive a lover’s
+bad impulse, which I swear was unpremeditated?’ he asked.  ‘If you can,
+shake my hand.’
+
+She did not do it, but eventually allowed him to help her out of the
+carriage.  He seemed to feel the awkwardness keenly; and seeing it, she
+said, ‘Of course I forgive you, sir, for I felt for a moment as you did.
+Will you send my husband to me?’
+
+‘I will, if any man can,’ said he.  ‘Such penance is milder than I
+deserve!  God bless you and give you happiness!  I shall never see you
+again!’  He turned, entered the carriage, and was gone; and having found
+out Jim’s course, came up with him upon the road as described.
+
+In due time the latter reached his lodging at his partner’s.  The woman
+who took care of the house in Vine’s absence at once told Jim that a lady
+who had come in a carriage was waiting for him in his sitting-room.  Jim
+proceeded thither with agitation, and beheld, shrinkingly ensconced in
+the large slippery chair, and surrounded by the brilliant articles that
+had so long awaited her, his long-estranged wife.
+
+Margery’s eyes were round and fear-stricken.  She essayed to speak, but
+Jim, strangely enough, found the readier tongue then.  ‘Why did I do it,
+you would ask,’ he said.  ‘I cannot tell.  Do you forgive my deception?
+O Margery—you are my Margery still!  But how could you trust yourself in
+the Baron’s hands this afternoon, without knowing him better?’
+
+‘He said I was to come, and I went,’ she said, as well as she could for
+tearfulness.
+
+‘You obeyed him blindly.’
+
+‘I did.  But perhaps I was not justified in doing it.’
+
+‘I don’t know,’ said Jim musingly.  ‘I think he’s a good man.’  Margery
+did not explain.  And then a sunnier mood succeeded her tremblings and
+tears, till old Mr. Vine came into the house below, and Jim went down to
+declare that all was well, and sent off his partner to break the news to
+Margery’s father, who as yet remained unenlightened.
+
+The dairyman bore the intelligence of his daughter’s untitled state as
+best he could, and punished her by not coming near her for several weeks,
+though at last he grumbled his forgiveness, and made up matters with Jim.
+The handsome Mrs. Peach vanished to Plymouth, and found another sailor,
+not without a reasonable complaint against Jim and Margery both that she
+had been unfairly used.
+
+As for the mysterious gentleman who had exercised such an influence over
+their lives, he kept his word, and was a stranger to Lower Wessex
+thenceforward.  Baron or no Baron, Englishman or foreigner, he had shown
+a genuine interest in Jim, and real sorrow for a certain reckless phase
+of his acquaintance with Margery.  That he had a more tender feeling
+toward the young girl than he wished her or any one else to perceive
+there could be no doubt.  That he was strongly tempted at times to adopt
+other than conventional courses with regard to her is also clear,
+particularly at that critical hour when she rolled along the high road
+with him in the carriage, after turning from the fancied pursuit of Jim.
+But at other times he schooled impassioned sentiments into fair conduct,
+which even erred on the side of harshness.  In after years there was a
+report that another attempt on his life with a pistol, during one of
+those fits of moodiness to which he seemed constitutionally liable, had
+been effectual; but nobody in Silverthorn was in a position to ascertain
+the truth.
+
+There he is still regarded as one who had something about him magical and
+unearthly.  In his mystery let him remain; for a man, no less than a
+landscape, who awakens an interest under uncertain lights and touches of
+unfathomable shade, may cut but a poor figure in a garish noontide shine.
+
+When she heard of his mournful death Margery sat in her nursing-chair,
+gravely thinking for nearly ten minutes, to the total neglect of her
+infant in the cradle.  Jim, from the other side of the fire-place, said:
+‘You are sorry enough for him, Margery.  I am sure of that.’
+
+‘Yes, yes,’ she murmured, ‘I am sorry.’  After a moment she added: ‘Now
+that he’s dead I’ll make a confession, Jim, that I have never made to a
+soul.  If he had pressed me—which he did not—to go with him when I was in
+the carriage that night beside his yacht, I would have gone.  And I was
+disappointed that he did not press me.’
+
+‘Suppose he were to suddenly appear now, and say in a voice of command,
+“Margery, come with me!”’
+
+‘I believe I should have no power to disobey,’ she returned, with a
+mischievous look.  ‘He was like a magician to me.  I think he was one.
+He could move me as a loadstone moves a speck of steel . . . Yet no,’ she
+added, hearing the infant cry, ‘he would not move me now.  It would be so
+unfair to baby.’
+
+‘Well,’ said Jim, with no great concern (for ‘_la jalousie
+rétrospective_,’ as George Sand calls it, had nearly died out of him),
+‘however he might move ’ee, my love, he’ll never come.  He swore it to
+me: and he was a man of his word.’
+
+_Midsummer_, 1883.
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANTIC ADVENTURES OF A
+MILKMAID***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 2996-0.txt or 2996-0.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/9/9/9/9/2996
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
+States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive
+specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
+eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
+for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
+performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given
+away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks
+not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the
+trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
+Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country outside the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
+on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
+  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
+  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
+  United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you
+  are located before using this ebook.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
+other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
+Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+provided that
+
+* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
+  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+  Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
+  works.
+
+* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+  receipt of the work.
+
+* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The
+Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org 
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary 
+Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the
+mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its
+volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous
+locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt
+Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to
+date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
+official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+
+    Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+    Chief Executive and Director
+    gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+