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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Mere Chance, Vol. 3 of 3, by Ada Cambridge
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere 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
+
+
+Title: A Mere Chance, Vol. 3 of 3
+       A Novel
+
+Author: Ada Cambridge
+
+Release Date: November 22, 2011 [EBook #38085]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MERE CHANCE, VOL. 3 OF 3 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Darleen Dove, Shannon Barker, Matthew Wheaton
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive/American
+Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+    A MERE CHANCE.
+
+    A NOVEL.
+
+    BY ADA CAMBRIDGE,
+
+
+    AUTHOR OF "IN TWO YEARS TIME," &c.
+
+    IN THREE VOLUMES.
+
+    VOL. III.
+
+
+    LONDON:
+    RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON,
+    Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen,
+    NEW BURLINGTON STREET.
+    1882.
+    _Right of Translation Reserved._
+
+
+
+
+    CONTENTS OF THE THIRD VOLUME.
+
+
+    CHAPTER
+
+       I.--A Parable
+      II.--"When Yule is Cold."
+     III.--A Discovery
+      IV.--"To Meet Mr. and Mrs. Kingston."
+       V.--A Crisis
+      VI.--Mrs. Reade meets her Match
+     VII.--Good-bye
+    VIII.--Consolation
+      IX.--Reparation
+       X.--Fulfilment
+      XI.--Conclusion
+
+
+
+
+A MERE CHANCE.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+A PARABLE.
+
+
+It was about a month after the foregoing conversation took place, that
+Melbourne society was fluttered by a rumour that the engagement between
+Mr. Kingston and Miss Fetherstonhaugh, which had been unaccountably
+broken off, was "on" again, and that the long-delayed wedding was to
+take place immediately. Rumour for once in the way, was perfectly
+correct.
+
+People went to call at Toorak, and found the aunt serene and radiant,
+and the bride-elect wearing all the honours of her position--not shyly
+as of yore, but with a quiet candour and dignified self-possession that
+was not generally considered becoming under the circumstances.
+
+It was thought that a little humility would be proper in a young person
+who was going to enjoy such altogether undeserved good fortune.
+
+It happened while she was staying at South Yarra. _How_ it happened
+nobody quite knew. Gossip attributed it to Mrs. Reade's manoeuvres; but
+Mrs. Reade, far from encouraging anything of the sort, set herself
+steadily against it, and warned Mr. Kingston of probable consequences
+in the most terse and trenchant manner (she had taken a very different
+view of the situation since her return from Adelonga).
+
+Gossip likewise attributed it to the seductions of the new house, which
+was beginning to shadow forth in Palladio-gingerbread of the most
+ambitious pattern, the magnificence of the establishment that was to be;
+but gossip was equally misinformed in this respect.
+
+Rachel was as ready as ever to admire the house, and the beautiful
+tiles, and carvings, and hangings, and upholstery, that were constantly
+being designed and produced for its adornment; she fully understood how
+much they represented for whoever was to possess and enjoy them. But
+they had not a featherweight of value in her eyes as compared with the
+happiness she had hoped for and lost; they did not suggest the idea of
+compensation or consolation in even a slight degree. The fact was that
+Mr. Kingston was determined to have her.
+
+Of late he had seemed--not to Rachel, but to Mrs. Reade--to have a sort
+of half-sullen doggedness in his determination, indicating that he was
+as much bent upon winning the game as upon winning the stakes--that he
+meant, before all things, not to be beaten in the enterprise upon which
+he had set his heart.
+
+And in this frame of mind he waited upon opportunity; and in the end,
+opportunity, as so often happens in such cases, served him.
+
+One day Beatrice and her husband went out of town to lunch, and Rachel
+had a long, lonely afternoon. It came on to rain, and it was grey and
+chilly. Dull weather always sent her spirits down several degrees below
+the normal temperature, and just now she was morbidly sensitive to its
+influence.
+
+If Beatrice had been at home there would have been a fire in no time,
+summer though it was; in her absence Rachel did not like to take upon
+herself to order one. She lay on a sofa with a shawl over her feet, and
+listened to the rain pattering on the window, and felt cold, and dismal,
+and deserted.
+
+At five o'clock she was pining for her tea, and thinking it had been
+forgotten, rang for it; and the smart young parlour-maid, interrupted in
+an interesting _tete-a-tete_ with the next door coachman, and blessed
+with few opportunities for the indulgence of a naturally restive
+temper, brought it in with a protesting _nonchalance_, a teapotful of
+nasty liquid, made with water that had not boiled, and a couple of
+slices of bread and butter that would have charmed a hungry
+schoolboy--such as would never have been presented to the mistress of
+the house, as Rachel well knew.
+
+This small indignity, so very small as it was, greatly aggravated the
+vague sense of desolation and orphanhood--the feeling that she was a
+person of no consequence to anybody--which possessed her just now. And
+while she was in the lowest depths of despondency, in the deepest indigo
+of blues, Mr. Kingston calling, discovered her solitude and came in,
+tenderly deferential, full of solicitude for her health and comfort,
+stooping from his higher sphere of social importance to pay homage to
+her still in her forlorn insignificance.
+
+For the space of half-an-hour perhaps she felt that it would be good to
+be married to somebody--to anybody--who would love and take care of her,
+and make the servants treat her with proper respect; and a mere chance
+enabled Mr. Kingston to take advantage of that accident.
+
+Looking back afterwards she never could understand how it was that she
+had felt disposed to re-accept him; but the causes were as distinct as
+causes usually are. Badly-made tea, and the want of a fire in dull
+weather are, amongst the multifarious factors of human destiny, greatly
+underrated.
+
+Having said the fatal "yes"--or, rather, having failed at the proper
+moment to say "no," which Mr. Kingston justly took to mean the same
+thing--Rachel was allowed no more opportunities for what her aunt called
+"shilly-shallying."
+
+The day of the marriage was fixed at once, and the preparations for her
+trousseau simultaneously set on foot.
+
+The girl had hardly come to realise the extraordinary thing that she had
+done when she found herself being measured for all sorts of wearing
+apparel, and consulted about the arrangements for her honeymoon tour.
+Then she set herself to do her duty in the state of life to which she
+imagined herself "called," with a kind of hopeless resignation. She
+recognised the fact that this second mistake was not revocable like the
+first; and therefore she understood that it was not to be considered a
+mistake.
+
+All her life and energy now had to be dedicated to the task of making
+it justifiable to her own conscience and in the eyes of all men.
+
+And so she was sweet and gentle to her affianced husband, promising him
+that, though she could not love him first and best, if he was content to
+have her as she was (and he assured her he was quite content), she would
+do all in her power to prove herself a good and true wife to him; and
+she was tractable and obedient in the hands of her aunt, and ready to
+fall in with all the arrangements that were made for her.
+
+But, as the wedding-day drew near, the dread of it showed itself to Mrs.
+Reade, if to no one else, in the dumb eloquence of the sensitive,
+truth-telling face. That little person who had such a talent for
+managing, stood aside at this crisis, and did not intermeddle with the
+strange course of events.
+
+In none of the affairs that she had promoted and directed and brought to
+successful terminations, had she taken such a deep and painful interest
+as she now felt in this, which she had been powerless to control; but,
+for the first time in her life, she was afraid to speak to her young
+cousin of the thoughts that both their minds were full of, lest she
+might be called upon to advise where she found it was impossible to
+decide what was for the best, and only waited helplessly upon Fate, like
+an ordinary incapable woman.
+
+On the night before the wedding--a soft, bright, early autumn
+night--Rachel gave her a distinct intimation if she had wanted it, that
+the marriage however it might turn out eventually, was by no means
+undertaken as marriages should be.
+
+The girl stole away from the drawing-room while the others were
+temporarily absorbed in the preparations that were going on for the
+great ceremonial, and Mrs. Reade, hunting for her anxiously, found her
+standing in the moonlight by the kitchen-garden gate.
+
+"Looking at that house again!" the little woman exclaimed. "Why, you
+must know every stick and stone by heart. I never miss you that I don't
+find you here."
+
+"I am like our poor Jenny and the tank," said Rachel, gazing still at
+the imposing pile before her, sharply black and white against the soft
+light of the sky.
+
+"Who is Jenny, may I ask?"
+
+"A dear cat we used to have. She fell into a deep tank one day when
+father and I were not at home, and for two days she was struggling at
+the edge of the water clinging to a bit of brickwork, and no one came to
+help her. Some men heard her cries, but did not know where she was. As
+soon as we came home, of course I found it all out; and I got a large
+bough of wattle and lowered it down, and so she was saved when she was
+very nearly gone. Oh, poor thing, what a state she was in! I sat up with
+her all night. But she never got over it. She was not exactly mad, but
+she was never in her right mind afterwards."
+
+"Well?" said Mrs. Reade who was greatly mystified. "I can't see the
+drift of your allegory so far."
+
+"No; I was going to tell you. Ever after this happened, we had to keep a
+constant watch upon her to prevent her from throwing herself into the
+tank again. If she heard the sound of the lid being moved, she would
+rush to it in a sort of frenzy. A bricklayer was doing something to it
+one day, and we had to lock her up, she was in such a frantic state. She
+would be gentle and quiet at other times, but as soon as she thought the
+lid was being opened, she got quite mad to go to it. And at last a new
+servant, who did not know of this, left the lid off one day, and poor
+Jenny seized her chance, and jumped in and drowned herself."
+
+"And that is your well, you mean?" said Mrs. Reade, pointing to the
+house. "And you are immolating yourself, like Jenny? Oh, Rachel, what
+are you talking about!"
+
+"I am talking nonsense, I know," said Rachel, with an impressive air of
+artificial composure; "but somehow Jenny happened to come into my head.
+Beatrice, do you know I have been thinking of something."
+
+"Of what? Oh, dear me, I wish to goodness you would think like a
+sensible girl, who knew her own mind sometimes."
+
+"I have been thinking what I ought to do. I ought to just put on my hat
+and jacket and run away. I could go to a friend, a poor widow, who used
+to be very kind to me in the old days, and she would let me stay with
+her until I could get a situation. No, don't scold me--it is ten
+o'clock, isn't it? It is too late for a girl to be out at night alone.
+I _can't_ do it, if I would."
+
+"And would you, indeed if you could?" demanded Mrs. Reade, holding her
+by her wrists and looking imploringly into her face. "Do you really mean
+that you have a mind to do such a thing, Rachel?"
+
+Rachel was silent for a few seconds and then she began to cry bitterly.
+
+"Oh, I don't know--I don't know!" she said, turning her head wildly from
+side to side. "Sometimes I feel one way and sometimes another. I want
+somebody--somebody strong, like Roden--to tell me what it is right to
+do!"
+
+For a moment Mrs. Reade weighed the merits of the proposition, and all
+that lay against it, with as near an approach to impartial judgment as
+true friendship and human fallibility allowed. And the thought of
+Rachel's weakness of purpose and inability to take care of herself, and
+of Mr. Dalrymple's traditional character, turned the scale.
+
+"You cannot go back _now_," she said. "My darling, you have doubly given
+yourself to Mr. Kingston, and you must try to make yourself happy with
+him--much can be done by trying, if you will only make up your mind!"
+
+It was the last chance that Rachel had, and she accepted the fate that
+deprived her of it with characteristic meekness.
+
+"Yes, I will try," she said, wiping her eyes. "It is too late to go back
+now."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+"WHEN YULE IS COLD."
+
+
+Rachel, when she did at last get married, had a very stately wedding, if
+that was any comfort to her. The weather was beautiful, to begin with; a
+lovelier autumn morning even Australia could not have furnished, to be
+an omen of good luck for the future years.
+
+Each of the eight young Melbourne belles who had been invited to assist
+at the interesting ceremony took care to point out the significance of
+sunshine and a cloudless sky when offering their congratulations to the
+bride and to the bridegroom also.
+
+The bridegroom on this occasion by no means filled the humble office
+which tradition and custom assigned to him. There was not a bridesmaid
+of them all who did not feel that she was much more Mr. Kingston's
+bridesmaid than Mrs. Kingston's.
+
+Not only were they better acquainted and on more friendly terms
+generally with him than with her, but he had far more to say to them,
+and practically far more to do with them, in the course of the day and
+in the discharge of his and their official duties.
+
+He was the prince of bridegrooms, indeed. He had made magnificent
+settlements upon his wife (though the credit of that really belonged to
+Mr. Hardy, who, for once in a way, had to be reckoned with in the
+progress of these arrangements); and his wedding presents were on an
+equally noble scale.
+
+The bridesmaids' bracelets were solid evidences of his worth in every
+sense of the term, and inasmuch as each bracelet slightly differed from
+the rest, though all were equally costly, of the excellence of his taste
+and tact. They were valued thereafter by their respective recipients
+rather as parting keepsakes from their bachelor friend than as
+mementoes of his auspicious marriage.
+
+And the diamond necklace that was his special wedding-day gift to his
+bride, and which lay just under the ruffled lace encircling her white
+throat--a dazzling ring of shifting lights and colours--a magnet to the
+eyes of all spectators--was worthy to have been a gift from Solomon to
+the Queen of Sheba.
+
+There was not a servant in the house, nor near it, who did not receive
+some token of the princely fashion in which he improved this great
+occasion, and who did not participate in the general impression that he
+more than rivalled, in popularity and importance, the beautiful young
+lady whom he had won.
+
+Of the company, all were charmed with his gaiety, his affability, and
+his delightful _sang-froid_. He was never for a moment embarrassed. He
+overflowed with airy courtesies, not only to his bride, but to all her
+maids and friends.
+
+He made a brilliant speech, that exactly hit the happy medium between
+tearful pathos and unfeeling jocularity, and that was full of well-bred
+witticisms, provocative of gentle, well-bred laughter. He was, in short,
+all that a bridegroom ought to be, and so very seldom is. He covered
+himself with honour.
+
+Rachel, on the contrary, seemed to have been mesmerised into temporary
+lifelessness. It was expected that she would be shy and fluttered, and
+bathed in blushes; but she was not agitated at all, and she did not
+blush at all. She bore herself generally with a statuesque composure
+that was thought by some to be very dignified, and by others very wooden
+and stupid, and that was a little depressing to witness from either
+point of view. From the beginning of the day she wore this unnatural
+calmness.
+
+Mrs. Reade had been in terror lest she should give way to unbecoming
+excitement at some stage of the ceremonies, and was prepared to combat
+the first symptoms of hysteria with such material and moral remedies as
+were most likely to be efficacious.
+
+She had strictly enjoined Lucilla, who had brought the baby to the
+wedding, not to let that irresistible child appear upon any account,
+and bidden her restrict herself to the most perfunctory caresses until
+the public ordeal was over. But long ere this point was reached the
+little woman was longing to see some signs of the emotional weakness
+that she had deprecated, and there were none.
+
+The bride was as beautiful as a sculptor's ideal, but as cold as the
+marble which dimly embodies it. She had apparently nerved herself for a
+sacrificial rite, or else the greatness of her suffering had numbed her;
+or she was calm with resignation and despair.
+
+"I wish," said Mrs. Reade to herself, in the middle of the marriage
+service, "I wish I had stopped it last night. I have made a mistake."
+
+But as this thought occurred to her, she was standing--a splendid little
+figure in ruby velvet and antique lace--in the midst of scores of other
+splendid figures, a helpless witness to the irrevocable consummation of
+her mistake, which after all was less hers than anybody's.
+
+Rachel had given her "troth" to her husband, and he was putting the ring
+that was the sign and seal of it--the token and pledge of the solemn vow
+and covenant betwixt them made--upon her finger.
+
+When the breakfast was over, that domestic pendant to the religious
+ceremony having "gone off" with great success, Mrs. Kingston, in due
+course, retired to put on her travelling dress.
+
+The bridesmaids proper were dispensed with at this stage, and the two
+married cousins went upstairs with the bride.
+
+It was Beatrice now who was tender and caressing; Lucilla, who did not
+see very far below the surface of anything, and was delighted with the
+pomp and circumstance of this new alliance in the family, and charmed,
+like all happy matrons, to welcome a new comer into the matrimonial
+ranks, overflowed with unwonted gaiety.
+
+"Now we are _all_ married!" she exclaimed, sinking upon a sofa in
+Rachel's room, and looking very fair and young--as if marriage had
+thoroughly agreed with her--in a pale blue French dress of the highest
+fashion. "And we have all married so well, haven't we? And we have all
+got such good husbands. Oh, how nice it will be when Rachel and Laura
+come back and begin housekeeping! John is going to let me have a house
+in town, too, as soon as Isabel and Bruce come home, so that we shall be
+down for part of the year; and then what a cosy little family circle we
+shall make! But Rachel will be at the head of us all. Ah, dear child,
+you will know now how nice it is to be a married woman--to have your own
+husband with you always--such a delightful, attentive husband, too, as I
+know he will be--and your own home--such a beautiful home----"
+
+"You lock up her diamonds, Lucilla," Mrs. Reade interrupted, handing the
+starry necklace to her sister. "And, Rachel, dear, don't stand and tire
+yourself. Sit down, and let me dress you."
+
+Rachel, when her bridal lace and satin had been taken off, sat down to
+be sponged and brushed, and to have her travelling boots laced up.
+
+Beatrice performed her lady's-maid offices in silence, while Lucilla
+handed her what she wanted, and pleasantly chatted on; and when all was
+done, and the bride, in russet homespun, was ready for her departure,
+there were a few words whispered that Mrs. Thornley did not hear.
+
+"My darling, you _said_ you would try."
+
+"Yes, Beatrice, dear; yes, I am trying."
+
+"You are not finding it very hard--too hard--are you?"
+
+"It will be easier in a little while."
+
+"If you make an effort, Rachel--if you make up your mind--if you are
+kind and good to your husband, and try to keep him straight, and to make
+his home happy----"
+
+"Yes, dear; yes. I am going to do all I can. But to-day I can only feel
+that I have lost--_quite_ lost--Roden. I feel now as if he were dead.
+Even the memory of him I must not comfort myself with any more. That is
+what I feel hard. But I am trying to get over it. I have promised Mr.
+Kingston--Graham--all those solemn promises, and I _must_ keep them--I
+will. It is only at first that I don't know how to bear it; but it will
+be easier by-and-bye. We must not talk about it, Beatrice; it is wrong
+to talk about it now. And, oh! I do so dread that I shall break down."
+
+She did break down at last. When she descended the staircase into the
+hall she found all the company awaiting her, the front door open, and
+the carriage that was to take her away being packed with her travelling
+bags and wraps.
+
+She shook hands with all the guests, and smiled a gentle response to
+their congratulatory farewells; she shook hands with John and his
+fellow-servants; she kissed her uncle and thanked him for all his
+kindness to her; she embraced Lucilla and Beatrice with silent fervour,
+and then her stately aunt, to whom she repeated her grateful
+acknowledgements for the home and care that had been given her.
+
+"I am afraid I have not made much return to you for your goodness to me,
+dear Aunt Elizabeth," she said, with pathetic earnestness, but with no
+agitation of voice or manner.
+
+To her intense surprise the majestic woman suddenly burst into tears.
+
+"Oh, my child!" she said, tenderly, "I hope I have been as good an aunt
+to you as you have been a good niece to me. I hope you will be very,
+very happy, my darling. If you are not, I shall never forgive myself."
+
+Mr. Kingston, of course, was standing by, and a frown fell like a cloud
+over his face. Mrs. Reade was also standing by, and she looked at him
+steadily for a few seconds with clear, bright eyes.
+
+"Come, Rachel," he said, and he only looked at his wife; "we shall lose
+our train if we don't make haste."
+
+Rachel withdrew herself from her aunt's arms, and Mr. Kingston took her
+by the hand and led her away, followed from the house to her carriage by
+all her train. She was a good deal shaken by the little incident that
+had so unexpectedly occurred.
+
+There was no mystery to her in what Mrs. Hardy had said, but the thing
+she had done was very strange and very touching. It invested the Toorak
+House and all its belongings with a new charm that the orphan girl had
+never felt before with all the kindness that she had enjoyed there.
+
+At no time in the fourteen or fifteen months that she had lived in it
+had it seemed so much her "home" as at this moment, when her aunt cried
+like a mother at parting from her--so desirable a place to stay in now
+that she had to go.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Kingston, when the carriage was fairly out of the Hardy
+grounds, and he had waved a gracious adieu with the tips of his fingers
+to the woman at the lodge, who stood in her Sunday best and white satin
+cap-ribbons, smiling and curtseying, to see them pass; "well, that is a
+good thing over, isn't it? Of all the senseless institutions of this
+world, a wedding _a la mode_ is about the most preposterous. You look
+knocked up already, when you ought to be fresh for your travels."
+
+He spoke with a little nervous irritation, and Rachel did not answer
+him. Her heart was beating very fast, beating in her ears and in her
+throat, as well as in the place where its active operations were usually
+carried on.
+
+All her powers were concentrated upon a desperate effort to postpone
+that breaking-down which she had dreaded, and which she felt was
+inevitable, until she could shut herself within four walls again. But
+she could not postpone it.
+
+Her husband took her hand and asked her what was the matter with
+her--whether she felt ill, or whether she was regretting after all that
+she had married him; whether she was going to make him happy, as
+she had promised, or to curse his life with its bitterest
+disappointment--speaking half in love, half in anger, with a sudden
+outburst of protesting entreaty provoked by her irresponsive silence.
+And she began to cry--almost to scream--in the most violent and alarming
+manner.
+
+"My dear love! my sweet child!" cried the bridegroom, aghast. "I did not
+mean to vex you, Rachel. I did not mean to blame you, my pet. Rachel,
+Rachel, hush! do hush! Don't let that confounded coachman go back and
+say--Rachel, do you hear?"--giving her a little shake--"there are people
+passing. For Heaven's sake don't make a scene in the street, whatever
+you do!"
+
+Rachel was almost beside herself with excitement, but she was awake to
+the indecency of betraying her emotion to the servants and the
+passers-by. Moreover, something in her husband's voice steadied her.
+
+By a strong effort she checked the headlong impulse to rave and scream
+that for a few seconds was almost overpowering, and held herself in with
+shut teeth and tight-locked hands, wildly sobbing under her breath, and
+by-and-bye, when the first rush of passion had spent itself, she became
+quiet and tractable, fortunately, before they reached the
+railway-station.
+
+Mr. Kingston was terribly shocked and outraged by this behaviour. He
+would have given anything to be able to scold her--in a gentle and
+judicious manner, of course--but he was afraid to attempt such a thing,
+or even to speak of the probable causes that had led to such deplorable
+impropriety.
+
+He rummaged for his spirit-flask, and made her drink a few drops of
+brandy, which nearly choked her; he found some eau-de-Cologne and bathed
+her face; he got her to put on a thicker veil, which happened to be
+amongst the luxuries that her aunt and cousins had stuffed into her
+travelling-bag; and he kissed her and petted her, and when she attempted
+to explain and excuse herself, bade her "Hush! till another time," and
+would not listen to her.
+
+His immediate anxiety was to restore her personal appearance and her
+powers of self-command. The more important matters could wait. And he
+succeeded in his efforts; she did not break down any more.
+
+Their journey that day was not very far. An hour or two in the train,
+and then half a dozen miles in a comfortable covered buggy, and they
+reached the country house which had been placed at their disposal--the
+best substitute to be had for that charming residence on the shores of
+the bay at Sydney--where they were to spend two or three weeks in their
+own society before starting by the next mail to Europe.
+
+As they were driving through the silent bush, in the dusk of that autumn
+day, and the bridegroom, wrapped in his fur-collared overcoat, was
+musing not very happily upon the success that had crowned his
+long-cherished hopes and plans, his young wife slipped her hand under
+his arm, and laid her cheek upon his coat-sleeve.
+
+"Graham," she whispered softly.
+
+He turned round quickly, and took her in his arms. It was the first time
+she had spoken his name and offered him a caress voluntarily, and he was
+greatly touched and cheered.
+
+"Will you forgive me?" she said, not shrinking away from his embrace,
+but creeping into it as she had never done before. "And, oh, will you
+love me, in spite of it all?"
+
+"Love you!" he echoed, tenderly. "My sweet, I have always loved you more
+than anybody in the world, and I always shall. It will not be on _my_
+side that love will be wanting."
+
+She said no more, but she lay still, with her head in its soft little
+sealskin cap on his breast, as if she liked to feel his arms about her.
+
+It was so new to him, and so immeasurably delightful. He had never
+expected to feel happier (even on his wedding day) than he felt now,
+with his best beloved, who had been so impracticable, his own at last,
+giving herself up to him in this way.
+
+Poor, parasitic little heart, full of spreading tendrils! It was
+essential to its very existence that it should have _something_ to cling
+to--which was a view of the case, that happily did not chance to strike
+him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+A DISCOVERY.
+
+
+There was a great ball at Toorak on the night of the wedding, and like
+all the nuptial ceremonies, it went off with great _eclat_.
+
+Mrs. Hardy recovered her serenity very quickly after the bride's
+departure, and appeared in the evening, clothed in smiles and sapphire
+velvet, looking the proud woman that it was generally conceded she had a
+right to be. Lucilla, at home for the first time since her sister
+Laura's wedding, and since her accession to the dignities of maternity,
+and carrying herself very prettily as a personage of consequence amongst
+the unmarried friends of her girlhood, looked extremely well and very
+happy, and reflected great honour upon her family in a variety of ways.
+Beatrice also was unusually brilliant, not only in her personal
+appearance, but in her mode of discharging the duties of the occasion--a
+little too much so, indeed, if anything.
+
+Some elderly ladies, and a very few young men, were subsequently heard
+to express an opinion that she carried that sharp and satirical manner
+of hers to an excess that was unbecoming in a person of her sex and
+years, even if she had married money and become a leader of fashion.
+
+A little after midnight, these two young women, the one for the sake of
+her baby, and the other on account of her husband, excused themselves
+from further attendance on Mrs. Hardy, and drove back to South Yarra,
+where the Thornleys were staying, carrying their willing lords along
+with them.
+
+When they reached home, where of course they found bright fires ready
+for them, the men retired to the smoking-room, Mrs. Reade having laid
+upon her brother-in-law the responsibility of keeping his host from
+getting "any worse than he was already;" and the ladies went upstairs to
+Lucilla's apartment.
+
+Lucilla having only arrived in town the day before, she and her sister
+had had no opportunity for what they called a good talk; and now the
+baby being found asleep and in his nurse's charge for the night, they
+sat down to begin it, having previously got rid of ball-room finery and
+made themselves comfortable in their dressing-gowns.
+
+"Does Ned often get--a--like this?" Mrs. Thornley began, with a
+compassionate inflection in her soft voice. She knew of course that one
+couldn't expect everything, but still she was sorry that her sister's
+excellent marriage should have this particular drawback, than which she
+could hardly imagine one more unpleasant and embarrassing, and that a
+nice fellow like Ned, with a noble pedigree and the sweetest temper in
+the world, should take his social pleasures as a shearer would celebrate
+pay-day.
+
+Mrs. Reade was thinking, at the same moment, that John was ageing very
+fast and getting immensely stout, and that his manner of addressing his
+wife, and his bearing towards her generally, was more peremptory and
+dictatorial than _she_ would feel inclined to put up with if she were in
+Lucilla's place.
+
+"Oh, no," said the little woman, sharply; "it is only on these festive
+occasions, when I am not able to look after him properly. And at the
+worst he is not very bad. He never gets obstinate and quarrelsome, as
+some men do--only vaguely argumentative and subsequently sleepy. I
+should think no husband, with so pronounced a tendency that way could be
+easier to manage--if one knows how to manage."
+
+"You were always a splendid manager, Beatrice."
+
+"Well, I just hold him well in hand--that's all. I know he can't help
+it, to a certain extent, so I don't keep always worrying at him about
+it. It is only now and then that I give him a real good talking to--to
+prevent his thinking I might grow indifferent, as much as anything."
+
+"He is such a dear, good fellow," said Lucilla, "but for that."
+
+"He is a dear, good fellow, in spite of that," replied Beatrice, who
+allowed no one but herself to disparage her husband. "He is better worth
+having, with all his faults--and that is about the only one he has--than
+most of your brilliant society men. I only hope Mr. Kingston will be as
+little trouble to Rachel as Ned has been to me--and half as good and
+kind to her."
+
+"Yes, dear. I didn't mean to say that he wasn't the best of
+husbands--far from it. Indeed, we may both be thankful for our good luck
+in that respect--all of us, I should say. I should think no four girls
+in one family are more happily situated than we are."
+
+"I hope so," sighed Mrs. Reade. "I hope we are all as happy as--as we
+are well off otherwise."
+
+"Dear little Rachel!" said Mrs. Thornley, musingly. "I don't think there
+is any doubt about her being happy. It is quite extraordinary to see how
+fond of her Mr. Kingston is--_really_ fond of her, I mean. Did you think
+he would ever marry such a young girl, Beatrice? and be so terribly
+anxious to do it, too? I didn't. I suppose it was her beauty captivated
+him."
+
+"No," said Beatrice; "it was the fact that she didn't want to captivate
+him. That has been her charm all along--he has felt that his honour was
+concerned in making her, and it has been a difficult task."
+
+"Oh, but I know he thinks a great deal about beauty, and she is really
+the prettiest girl in Melbourne, I do think, though she does belong to
+us. She did not look so pretty to-day though, as I expected she would.
+That dead-white in the morning that brides have to wear does spoil even
+the best complexion. I thought hers could stand anything, but it can't
+stand that. When she wears it in the evening, now--not dead-white, but
+transparent white--she is a perfect picture. At that ball of ours last
+year everybody was talking of her. She was in Indian muslin. John said
+she was like a wood anemone."
+
+Mrs. Reade was gazing thoughtfully into the fire. The mention of the
+ball at Adelonga stirred many troubled thoughts. The real importance of
+that event, in its effect upon Rachel, had never been known to Mrs.
+Thornley, who was led to suppose that the suspension of Mr. Kingston's
+engagement in October was solely due to certain laxities on his part,
+which the girl would not condone.
+
+Mrs. Hardy's terror lest "people" should get to know that a member of
+her family had had any dealings of a compromising nature with such a
+person as she considered Mr. Dalrymple to be had been the cause of this
+extreme reticence.
+
+A general impression prevailed amongst the guests who had attended the
+ball, that the handsome ex-hussar had admired the belle of the evening
+to an extent that had roused the wrath of her _fiance_ against him; but
+no one, strange to say, had been able to discover more than that.
+
+Mr. Dalrymple himself never had confidantes in these matters; and Mr.
+Kingston, when he was enlightened at Christmas, was as little desirous
+as Mrs. Hardy that the facts of the case should be published. Beatrice
+and Rachel, who alone discussed them freely, did so with the strictest
+secresy.
+
+Mrs. Reade had no confidential intercourse with her mother, as of yore,
+on the subject of her cousin's welfare. They had jointly resolved, just
+before the younger lady set out for her summer visit to Adelonga, that
+it would be safer to exclude Lucilla (as a married woman who told her
+husband everything) from any participation in the knowledge of the
+mischief that Mr. Dalrymple had done, and of Rachel's unfortunate
+infatuation for him--which did not seem so very serious at that time;
+and since then his name had scarcely been mentioned between them.
+
+Now, however, the anxious little woman, with a load of care that she
+was by no means used to weighing on her heart, was impelled to take
+advantage of the opportunity offered by Lucilla's reference to that
+momentous ball to put a question that had suddenly become to herself,
+tormentingly importunate.
+
+"Has anything been heard of that Mr. Dalrymple lately?"
+
+"Oh, yes," said Lucilla; "he is gradually getting better."
+
+"Getting better!" echoed Beatrice, sharply. "Why, what is the matter
+with him? Is he ill?"
+
+"Didn't you hear? He had a dreadful accident. He was breaking-in a young
+horse that was very wild, and it bucked him off, or did something, and
+he fell on his head. It is a wonder he didn't break his neck. No one
+saw it happen, for he was away on the plains by himself, and it was only
+when he did not come home at night that Mr. Gordon went to look for him.
+They were a long time finding him, and he had been there for hours, and
+he was quite insensible. There were some wild dogs sniffing at him, as
+if he were really dead. Indeed, Mr. Gordon said, if they hadn't found
+him when they did, the dingoes would probably have made an end of him.
+Was it not dreadful?"
+
+Mrs. Reade was staring at the fire, not displaying that interest in the
+narrative that its tragic details demanded, apparently.
+
+"When did it happen?" she asked quietly, without lifting her eyes.
+
+"Oh, some time ago--in December. We did not hear of it until January.
+But he is only now able to get out of bed and crawl about, poor fellow.
+He was dreadfully hurt. His brain was affected, and the summer weather
+in that hot place was so much against him. And, of course, he couldn't
+have what he wanted up there, and was too bad to be moved. Mrs. Digby
+went there to nurse him--the Hales took the children for her. It was
+enough to kill her, so delicate as she is; but she would go. She
+idolises him almost. Mr. Digby went with her, and stayed till the worst
+was over. And Mr. Gordon was most devoted--he went all the way to
+Melbourne to consult the doctors there about him, travelling night and
+day."
+
+"Were there no doctors nearer than Melbourne?"
+
+"Yes, of course; they had two. But he wanted the best opinions. He is
+Mr. Dalrymple's partner, you know, and they were old friends before they
+came out here."
+
+"And did Mr. Dalrymple seem to be any better after he got the Melbourne
+prescriptions?"
+
+"No; it was not a case where doctors could do much. He seemed to rally a
+little while Mr. Gordon was away, but he had a bad relapse afterwards.
+The weather became frightfully hot, and the fever of course got worse.
+He was delirious for a whole fortnight, and then he was so low that he
+just seemed sinking. However, he must be an amazingly strong man
+naturally. He managed to struggle through it, and now he is getting
+about, and all danger is over, though Mrs. Digby says he is like a
+walking skeleton. I expect she will have brought him home with her by
+the time we go back; he will soon get well when she has him in her own
+house. I shall go over and see him," added Lucilla, compassionately;
+"and I shall ask him to come to Adelonga, as soon as he is strong
+enough, and let _me_ nurse him for a few weeks."
+
+Mrs. Reade had before her mind's eye that photograph which her sister
+had shown her in Mrs. Digby's house. She saw every lineament of the
+powerful, impressive face distinctly--even in a photograph it was not a
+face that once looked at, could be forgotten; and she pictured to
+herself the changes that months of wasting illness would have made in
+it.
+
+A warm rush of indignant pity, mingled with something near akin to
+admiration, filled her heart, which was wont to indulge itself in
+womanly weaknesses--an impulse to champion and befriend this man of so
+kingly a presence, whose sins, whatever they were, were balanced with so
+many misfortunes. And yet for a moment she could not help regretting
+that his fall from his horse had not broken his neck.
+
+Ned, guiltily creeping into his dressing-room about half an hour later,
+never had the fumes of superfluous champagne dispersed from his brain
+so quickly. He saw his wife sitting by her own fireside, with her feet
+on the fender and her face in her hands, crying--actually crying--like
+any common woman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+"TO MEET MR. AND MRS. KINGSTON."
+
+
+Rachel was away for nearly a year and a half, seeing all the kingdoms of
+the earth and the glory of them in the most luxurious modern fashion. It
+was such a tour as a romantic and imaginative woman born to a humdrum
+life would feel to be the one thing to "do" and die; and according to
+her account, she enjoyed it extremely. She came home very much improved
+by it in the opinion of her aunt and other good judges.
+
+"Certainly," they said, "travel is the very best education: there is
+nothing like it for enlarging the mind, and for giving polish and repose
+to the manners."
+
+Mrs. Kingston, indeed, when she took her place in the society of which
+her husband had long been so distinguished an ornament, was a very
+interesting study, as exemplifying this soundest of popular theories.
+She was greatly altered in all sorts of ways. She had quite lost that
+bashful rusticity which had been Mrs. Hardy's despair, and in her
+unpretentious fashion, was really very dignified.
+
+There was no hurry and flutter about her now as there used to be; none
+of that indiscriminate enthusiasm, which in her aunt's eyes branded her
+as a poor relation who "had never been used to anything nice." She
+expressed her appreciation of things smilingly and sweetly, with more or
+less of her natural bright frankness, but with a well-bred moderation
+and serenity that might have become a duchess. To please her husband she
+wore rich raiment, "composed" by the most distinguished Parisian
+artists, and it symbolised the change that all her individuality seemed
+to have undergone.
+
+She was no longer a girl, an _ingenue_, a bread-and-butter miss, a
+pretty little nobody; she was an experienced and cultured woman, a
+leader of society, fully equipped for that high position, with a just
+appreciation of her own importance, and relatively to that of other
+people's.
+
+Indeed, there seemed to certain persons--Miss Brownlow amongst
+others--indications in her reticent and reposeful manner of a tendency
+to be exclusive, and to think a great deal too much of herself.
+
+Mrs. Hardy, who was immensely interested in the unforeseen development,
+was beyond measure gratified by it--more especially as the young wife
+was evidently on the best of terms with her husband, though she had the
+good taste to refrain from drawing public attention to the fact.
+
+Many apprehensions were set at rest by the sight of her entering a room
+on his arm, carefully and beautifully dressed, as if she had enjoyed
+dressing herself, and twinkling with diamonds everywhere, responding to
+respectful greetings with quiet grace, moving in her comparatively
+higher sphere as if she felt thoroughly at home in it. It seemed to the
+anxious matron that an end had been reached which justified all the
+means that had been taken to compass it.
+
+Mrs. Reade was not so satisfied. She looked at the change in Rachel from
+another point of view. She did not like to see a girl who had been
+exceptionally girlish, turned into a sober woman with such unnatural
+rapidity.
+
+Her sister Laura had come home, and was now settled at Kew, giving
+entertainments in a severely-appointed high-art house; she had had quite
+as much of the education of travel as Rachel--perhaps more, inasmuch as
+her young husband was a dabbler in _bric-a-bric_, and had a taste for
+old churches, and palaces, and pictures; whereas Mr. Kingston's interest
+in foreign cities, however famous, had chiefly concerned itself with the
+quality of the society and the cuisine of the hotels.
+
+But Laura, though stored with information and experience, and lately the
+happy mother of twin daughters, was much the same as she had been in her
+maiden days--cheerful, enterprising, a rider of harmless hobbies, a
+great believer in herself, and in the force and variety of her
+fascinations.
+
+She had improved and developed, of course, but the experiences of
+travel had not changed her as Rachel was changed.
+
+The acute little woman who practically had never solved the meaning of
+love and marriage, and quite understood her disqualifications in this
+respect, yet had glimmerings of the state of things that existed in
+Rachel's heart. She knew--though she had come to the knowledge by slow
+degrees--that the girl was not weak all through, but only weak as the
+water-lily is,
+
+     "Whose root is fix'd in stable earth, whose head
+     Floats on the tossing waves."
+
+And that just as she had been tenacious of certain principles in her
+earlier life, when living with her father in an atmosphere which she had
+only her own instinct to teach her was tainted with dishonour, so she
+would hold fast to some other things, if they had taken root, with a
+secret, blind integrity in spite of her emotional fluctuations in the
+winds and waves of circumstance.
+
+She had adapted herself to the conditions of her marriage with the
+pliant submissiveness of her disposition; but there was a part of her
+that refused to be reconciled to all the degradation that was involved,
+and it was a tough and vital part of her.
+
+Since this was violently repressed, comprehending as it did all those
+aspiring ideals which had had so much poetry and promise, and which
+represented for her, in their loss as in their possession, the meaning
+of human happiness and the diviner aspect of human life, there was
+naturally a great vacuum somewhere--a great emptiness for which no
+compensating interests were available. Hence that serene
+inexpressiveness of mien and manner which had so mature and
+distinguished an air.
+
+Mrs. Reade's own marriage was very much of the same pattern in one
+respect--it was but an outward and visible sign of marriage that had no
+inward and spiritual grace; but then she did not know what it was that
+she missed, and Rachel did. And the difference between the two cases was
+perfectly obvious to that intelligent woman.
+
+On the return of Mr. and Mrs. Kingston to Melbourne, a number of
+fashionable parties were of course given in their honour. At the chief
+of these, a great ball in the Town-hall, the dramatic action of this
+story, temporarily suspended by our heroine's absence from the country
+which held all its elements in solution, so to speak, was suddenly set
+going again.
+
+It was towards the end of October, just when the gay season of the races
+was about to set in, and when the spring was in its glory. It strangely
+happened to be also the anniversary of the night of her clandestine
+betrothal to Roden Dalrymple, which was the memorable last time--two
+whole years ago--that she had seen or heard of him.
+
+Nowadays she never mentioned Roden Dalrymple's name. She had never
+mentioned it to her husband since he and she came to a certain
+understanding on their wedding-day, and her husband had scrupulously
+avoided mentioning it to her; which reticence on his part was odd and
+uncomfortable rather than considerate and delicate, inasmuch as she was
+intensely anxious to pursue the line of conduct that she had laid down
+for herself in her relations with him--to have no secrets and to tell
+the truth--and to bring their companionship into such harmony and
+sympathy as the nature of things made possible.
+
+And since her return she had never even suggested the existence of her
+lost lover to any of those who might have given her information about
+him--not even to Beatrice. She "would not recognise that she felt" any
+interest in his existence.
+
+Nevertheless, she lived in a perpetual, absorbing, all-pervading
+consciousness that he and she were "in the world together," and that the
+key to the whole system of the universe lay somehow in that fact.
+
+And the years and months, and days and hours were all dates in the first
+place, and periods of time in the second; and every date was a register
+of ineffaceable memories of him, which she _could_ not destroy or
+ignore.
+
+So on this great anniversary, as the hour approached which witnessed
+their last interview in the solitude of the half-built house (the
+boudoir was in the hands of the decorators now, and the sacred spot of
+floor was covered over with inlaid woodwork), she tried to put the
+thought of it out of her mind--tried to shut her eyes to the inevitable
+agonising and tantalising perception of what _might_ have been--and yet
+was acutely responsive to every tick of the clock on her mantelpiece,
+checking off the reminiscent moments one by one. She followed the events
+of that long-ago happy night perforce as an unquiet spirit "raised"
+against its will.
+
+"Now we were sitting together," she remembered, as the little clock
+struck nine silvery notes. "We were looking at the moonlight on the bay.
+Ah, me, how lovely that moonlight was!"
+
+"Rachel," called her husband from his dressing-room within, whither he
+had just arrived from a dinner at the club, "aren't you dressed yet? I
+met that young woman of yours on the stairs; she seems to have more time
+on her hands than she knows what to do with. Why don't you make her wait
+on you better? She ought to be getting you ready by this time."
+
+Rachel jumped up hastily and rang for her maid, whose ministrations,
+essential to the dignity of her present position, she certainly did not
+appreciate.
+
+"I shall not be long dressing," she replied; "and it is early yet."
+
+And then she went into his room to ask him if he had had a pleasant
+party at dinner, and whether he had enjoyed it, anxious to show him
+some special tenderness on this special night--anxious to find some
+shelter in his affection from the reminiscences that beset her.
+
+He was a little irritable, for his gout was troubling him, and he did
+not respond to her advances. He patted the hand that she laid on his arm
+in a perfunctory manner, and sent her back to begin her preparations for
+the ball. He did not wish her to dress herself quickly; he wanted her to
+make the most of her beauty and her supplementary resources on such a
+great occasion.
+
+He was very fond of his wife still, and proud of her, and good to her in
+his own rather tyrannical way; but his marriage with her, after a year
+and a half of it, had become to himself--as under the circumstances was
+inevitable--a very unromantic and commonplace affair.
+
+They had lived together in tolerable peace and comfort; they had never
+quarrelled, simply because it was Rachel's habit to efface herself at
+the first symptoms of rising temper; but neither had they been
+companions, in any proper sense of the term.
+
+As yet he had no active sense of injury and injustice, in that the
+possession of his treasure gave him such meagre compensation for all
+that he had paid for it, but he did feel, in a general way, that
+matrimony was--as he confessed he had been well warned that it would
+be--very tame and dull, and uninteresting, and that it would be too
+unreasonable altogether to expect a man to devote himself exclusively to
+its demands. Even little Rachel herself, he was quite sure, would not
+wish him to be bored to death.
+
+And so he fell back insensibly into many of his old self-indulgent
+habits, and the pleasures of his bachelor life grew more than ever
+pleasant. This was particularly the case after his return to Melbourne,
+where his face became as familiar to club men as in the ante-nuptial
+days. Some excuse for this independence was supposed to lie in the fact
+that he and his wife had not yet settled down to housekeeping.
+
+The Toorak mansion was being furnished and decorated with the treasures
+of art and upholstery that they had brought out with them; and until
+everything was completed, and the entire establishment was in proper
+order for their reception, and for the giving of that magnificent
+house-warming to which the world of Melbourne fashion was looking
+forward, they were inhabiting a suite of rooms in an hotel, and domestic
+life, consequently, was to a certain extent disorganised.
+
+On this night of which we are speaking, Rachel thought it was very kind
+and attentive of him to come home to her a full hour before he needed to
+have done. It never occurred to her, any more than to him, that he
+neglected her.
+
+The servants of the hotel, who were on the watch for a sight of her as
+she went to her carriage, thought her not only one of the most lovely,
+but one of the most fortunate of women; and so did the majority of the
+gay company at the Town Hall, when she made her appearance amongst them.
+
+She had come back from Europe and all her sea-voyaging, in excellent
+physical health, and the last year or two of her life, in spite of
+sorrowful vicissitudes, had ripened and developed her beauty in a very
+marked degree.
+
+She was dressed in white, but with great richness, of course--her
+husband had seen to that; covered with precious lace, that was as
+attractive to the eyes of the Melbourne ladies as the delicacy of her
+pure complexion was to those of the men. And she wore her necklace of
+diamond stars, and diamonds on her arms, and on her bosom, and in her
+hair; and she was altogether very magnificent, and made a great
+sensation.
+
+Amongst her many admirers she noticed, when she had been in the room a
+little while, a short, stout man, of about forty or fifty years of age,
+apparently, who was a stranger to her, regarding her with much
+attention.
+
+He had rather an air of distinction about him in spite of his low
+stature, and a noticeable absence of beauty; and she had a dim--very
+dim--impression that she had seen him, or someone like him, before.
+
+He wore a fair moustache but no beard or whiskers, and his florid face
+was marked down one side with the puckered white scar of an old wound.
+
+His eyes were quick and bright, and the keen observation that he brought
+to bear upon her through an eyeglass that he put into one of them
+whenever she came near, obviously with the intention of studying her to
+the best advantage, was a little disconcerting even to an acknowledged
+beauty.
+
+She was waltzing with Mr. Buxton--it was her second waltz, and he danced
+very well--when suddenly, high in the air over her head, the great clock
+chimed eleven, and all the associations of that sacred hour gathered
+like ghosts around her, Roden Dalrymple holding the lighted match to his
+watch, while she sheltered the little flame from the wind--her head
+touching his cheek and his huge moustache as they looked down together
+to see the time--the mystic light and stillness of the peaceful night,
+through which the sound of the city bells came up to them, to warn them
+that their happiness was a thing too good to last.
+
+"Eleven p.m.," he had called it; and "you must go home, little one," he
+had said. Could it have been at _that_ moment that he meant to send her
+away so far, and never to take her back to his arms and his heart again?
+
+"Aw--what's the matter? Are you dizzy?" asked her partner, feeling a
+break and a jar in the rhythm of the measure that had been flowing so
+very harmoniously.
+
+"A little," she whispered. "I should like to sit down for a few
+minutes--we'll go on again, if you like, presently."
+
+He led her to a retired bench, and while she rested stood beside her,
+silently watching the people who continued to revolve before them. She
+had hardly sat down, and was beginning mechanically to fan herself, when
+the stranger with the eyeglass came up, with a lady, who was also
+unknown to her, on his arm.
+
+"Here's a seat," said the little stout man; and his partner, an elderly
+and amiable matron, sat down, bestowing the deprecatory smile of
+old-fashioned courtesy upon the two already in possession.
+
+He took the end of the bench himself, and chatted away to her--she was
+his aunt, apparently--leaning a little forward, with an elbow on his
+knee; and Rachel, dreamily occupied as she was, was quite conscious that
+his keen eyes dwelt persistently, not upon his neighbour's face, but
+upon her own.
+
+"Why don't you go and get a partner, James?" said the elderly matron.
+"You don't want to dance attendance upon me, my dear--I shall do very
+well here until Lucy wants me. Go and find some pretty young lady, and
+enjoy yourself like the rest of them."
+
+"I don't believe in pretty young ladies," replied the little man, rather
+bluntly. "Except Lucy--and she is engaged for the whole night, as far as
+I can make out."
+
+Here ensued some comments upon Lucy, who appeared to be the lady's
+daughter, generally favourable to that young person. And the little man
+then began to inveigh against the abstract girl of the period with
+trenchant vigour--obviously to the great embarrassment of his companion,
+who tried her best, but vainly, to divert him to other topics.
+
+"In fact, there are no girls nowadays," he remarked coolly; "they are
+all calculating, selfish, heartless, worldly women--always excepting
+Lucy, of course--as soon as they cease to be children. They have only
+one object in life, and that is to marry a man--no, not a man
+necessarily, a forked stick will do--who has plenty of money."
+
+"My dear, that is a popular sentiment, I know, and supposed to be full
+of wit and wisdom, but it always seems to me that it is just a little
+vulgar," replied his companion, frowning surreptitiously, and giving
+uneasy sidelong glances at Rachel. "There are girls and girls, of
+course, just as there are men and men; we see bad and good in every
+class. How beautifully this place lights up, to be sure!"
+
+"They like a fellow to dance with them and dangle after them, and make
+love to them, and break his heart for them--nothing pleases them
+better--when they have no serious business on hand," the little man
+proceeded, with unabashed composure, and still gazing steadily at
+Rachel; "but when it comes to marriage--"
+
+"My dear James, I am _not_ recommending marriage to you--only a harmless
+waltz."
+
+"Then they are for sale to the highest bidder, whoever he may happen to
+be. The poor, impecunious lover--be he ever so much a lover, and the
+best fellow that walks the earth into the bargain--must take himself
+off--and cut his throat for all she cares."
+
+At this sudden change from the plural to the singular, and at something
+personal and impertinent that she recognised in the tone and look of the
+speaker, a deep blush flooded Rachel's face, and she rose from her seat
+with dignity, but trembling in all her limbs.
+
+"Aw--who the dickens is that fellow?" Mr. Buxton whispered, with a
+scowl--supposing, however, that he could only be a disappointed aspirant
+for Rachel's hand. "He's an impudent brute, whoever he is, and I have a
+good mind to tell him so. What's his name, eh?"
+
+"I don't know," said Rachel. But as she spoke, and was about to move
+away, the stranger rose and stood with an air of courteous deference to
+let her pass him--an air that somehow indicated the breeding and
+manners of a gentleman; and all at once it flashed across her where and
+when she had seen him before. He was the man who had called at Toorak
+and been closeted with her aunt at the time when Roden Dalrymple had
+promised to come for her, nearly two years ago. She had gone out into
+the garden, thinking he might possibly have been Roden, to intercept him
+as he was going away. She had had only a distant glimpse of him--of his
+short, square figure, and the lower part of his face--but she recognised
+now that this was the same man. She had not gone many steps into the
+room, feeling strangely overwhelmed by her discovery, when a pair of
+exhausted waltzers went trailing by, and one of them said to the other,
+"Didn't somebody say Jim Gordon was here to-night? Where is the old
+fellow hiding himself? I should like to see him again."
+
+The little man with the eyeglass was--of course he was--Roden
+Dalrymple's friend and partner.
+
+She drew her hand from her cousin's arm, turned round, and walked
+deliberately back to the seat she had just quitted.
+
+"No," she said to her pursuing cavalier, "do not come. Go and dance with
+somebody, and fetch me presently."
+
+"My dear Rachel, you must allow me--aw, I couldn't really--"
+
+"I want to speak to Mr. Gordon," she said, pausing in front of that
+gentleman. "Mr. Gordon, I want to ask you something. Will you kindly
+take me out to the lobbies--somewhere where it is quiet--if this lady
+will excuse you for a few minutes?"
+
+Mr. Buxton was utterly bewildered, as well he might be. He stared,
+stiffened himself, and then went off to find Laura, and to tell her of
+the extraordinary proceedings of her cousin "with some insolent beggar
+whose name she said she didn't know, though she addressed him by it
+almost in the same breath," and to intimate (merely by way of soothing
+his own injured dignity) that there seemed to him something "rather
+fishy" going on.
+
+And Mr. Gordon, after losing his presence of mind for about half a
+minute, and then only partially recovering it, silently offered his arm
+to the lady who had made that strange appeal to him. He had never seen
+her until to-night; he had hoped he never should see her, or have
+anything to do with her. She had been, in his imagination of her, the
+embodiment of all that was detestable in woman. But now something in the
+candid young face, unnaturally set and pale, and in the suppressed
+passion and purpose of her manner, gave him compunctious misgivings, and
+a vague but alarming impression that there had been some blundering
+somewhere.
+
+"You are Mr. Gordon, are you not?" she began hurriedly, as soon as they
+were out of the crowd and glare of the ball-room. "Yes, I thought so;
+but I did not recognise you at first. I should have waited for an
+introduction, but I was afraid you might go away. I think you know who I
+am. What you were saying just now--had it not some reference to me?"
+
+The little man began to stammer incoherently. He was completely
+overbalanced by the shock of this unexpected attack. Rachel, on the
+contrary, usually so fluttered by an emergency, had a sort of fierce,
+collected calm about her.
+
+"I am sure it had," she said. "And I want to know what you meant?"
+
+"I--a--perhaps you are aware that I am Mr. Dalrymple's friend, Mrs.
+Kingston. I am therefore, perhaps, something of a partisan--forgive me,
+if I forgot myself for the moment--"
+
+"Ah," she broke out sharply, "there has been some great mistake! Tell
+me--quickly--before anyone is here to interrupt us--did you come to see
+my aunt that Christmas--the Christmas before last?"
+
+"Certainly I came to see her and you," he replied.
+
+"Did he send you?"
+
+"Of course he did."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Why!" he echoed angrily. "Do you mean to say you don't know why?"
+
+"I know _nothing_," said Rachel. She stood before him shining in her
+satin and diamonds, without a trace of colour in her face; and the
+anguish of her beseeching eyes told him plainly that she spoke the
+truth.
+
+"Oh, dear me, this is terrible!" he exclaimed, in a flurry of dismay and
+consternation. "Do you mean to say that you didn't know that he was
+ill?--that you didn't tell Mrs. Hardy to write that letter?--that it was
+all done without your knowing anything about it? Good Heavens! would
+anybody believe there were such malignant fiends in existence--and such
+fools!" he added bitterly.
+
+Then he told her the whole story--how her lover had got hurt, and had
+lain insensible for many days, between life and death--how his first
+anxiety upon recovering consciousness was about his appointment with
+her--how he had deputed his friend to go to Melbourne and explain his
+inability to keep it; and how he (Mr. Gordon) had seen Mrs. Hardy and
+afterwards Mr. Kingston, and been led by them to an apparently
+unavoidable conclusion.
+
+"She said you were not willing to see me, but that she would give you my
+messages and explanations," said the little man, thinking it would be
+best for his friend (and not much caring what it would be for other
+people) to have it all out at once, while he was as about it; "and that
+she would send me a note to the club, where I was staying, in the
+evening, or instruct you to do so. She had already told me that you were
+re-engaged to--a--your present husband. At night I got the letter, in
+which she repeated this assertion, stating that you had empowered her to
+do so."
+
+"And you went and told him that?"
+
+"I did not go and tell him that--for I did not want to kill him--until I
+had taken every possible precaution to get it corroborated."
+
+"Yes?" ejaculated Rachel, breathlessly.
+
+"I obtained an introduction to Mr. Kingston at the club, and I asked him
+on his honour to tell me if what Mrs. Hardy had said was true."
+
+"You told him why you wanted to know?"
+
+"I did."
+
+She stood still for a few seconds to collect her strength; whole years
+of effort and agony were concentrated in that little interval.
+
+"Shall you be going back to Queensland soon?" she asked quietly.
+
+"I am going back to-morrow," he said--though he had not previously
+thought of doing so.
+
+"Tell him when you see him--tell him from me--that I never knew
+_anything_--never, never, from the day I saw him last until to-night."
+
+"It will break his heart to hear it, Mrs. Kingston."
+
+"No--he will be glad to know that I was not utterly base. And I--I want
+him to know it."
+
+"And shall I--_can_ I--tell him that you were really not engaged when
+they said you were--when he thought you were waiting for him?"
+
+She flushed deeply and drew herself up with a little stately gesture.
+
+"He will not wish you to go into those particulars, Mr. Gordon. If you
+will give him my message simply, that is all I want you to do. He will
+understand it. Will you take me back to the ball-room now? I should like
+to find my cousin, Mrs. Reade."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+A CRISIS.
+
+
+As nature makes us, so to a great extent, the most of us remain, when
+education has done its very best, or its very worst, to modify the great
+mother's handiwork. Her patterns, of which no one ever saw the original
+designs, and that have been unknown centuries a-weaving, cannot be
+sensibly altered in the infinitesimal fragment that one human lifetime
+represents, though every thread of circumstance, in its right or wrong
+adjustment, must have its value in the ultimate product, whatever that
+unimaginable thing may be.
+
+Still, in the individual man or woman, here and there, the type that he
+or she belongs to is temporarily obscured by accidental causes; the
+lines of character, laid down by many forefathers, are twisted or
+straightened by violent wrenchings of irresponsible fate--as in less
+important branches of nature's business her processes are interrupted by
+lightning and earthquakes, and other rebellious forces.
+
+Rachel, from the hour when she discovered how it was that she and Roden
+Dalrymple had been defrauded of their "rights," was apparently quite
+changed (though--as she is still a very young woman--we are not
+prepared to suppose that she will never be her old weak and timid and
+clinging self again). She was turned, from a soft and shrinking girl,
+into a hard and fearless, if not a defiant, woman.
+
+The immense strength of her love--always an incalculable "unknown
+quantity" in the elements of human character and the factors of human
+destiny--had already given force and point, and meaning and dignity, to
+her whole personality and her relations with life; but now the magnitude
+of her wrongs and misfortunes, and still more of _his_, seemed to dwarf
+and crush every feeble trait and sentiment in her.
+
+She went back to the ball-room, very white and silent, on Mr. Gordon's
+arm; and the first person of her own party whom she met there was Mr.
+Reade, under whose protection she placed herself, dismissing her late
+escort with a quiet "good-night."
+
+She asked to be taken to Beatrice; and Ned, who never knew from whom he
+had received her, piloted her through the crowd until he found his small
+wife, whose bright eyes no sooner rested on Rachel's face than they
+recognised a new calamity.
+
+"Has she heard anything, I wonder?" she asked herself in dismay. "Are
+you ill?" she inquired aloud.
+
+"I want to go home," said Rachel.
+
+The little woman did not waste time asking useless questions. She took
+her cousin to the cloak-room, sent Ned for a cab, and in a few minutes
+the three were driving to the Kingstons' hotel.
+
+When they reached Rachel's drawing-room, and Ned had been sent
+downstairs to see if her maid was on the premises, Mrs. Reade put her
+arms round her tenderly, and begged to know what was the matter with
+her.
+
+But Rachel, singularly unresponsive to the rare caress, would not
+tell--would not talk at all. She would not betray the mother's crime to
+the daughter, and she would not mention the name of her beloved, even to
+her dearest friend, in these married days.
+
+"I am not well," she said, gently but with an odd harshness in her face
+and voice. "I could not dance--I could not stay in that place. I shall
+be better here. Go back, Beatrice, and make excuses for me. Say I was
+not well."
+
+"I shall do no such thing," said Beatrice bluntly. "I shall not leave
+you until Graham comes home."
+
+Rachel begged and protested with a sharp peremptoriness that was very
+unusual to her. Beatrice, full of anxiety and consternation, was
+obdurate.
+
+In the midst of their discussion, they heard Mr. Kingston coming
+upstairs, bustling along in great haste. He flung open the door, with an
+air of angry irritation.
+
+"Oh, here you are!" he exclaimed loudly. "What on earth are you doing?
+Everybody is inquiring for you, Rachel. Aren't you well? Why didn't you
+tell me, and let me bring you home, if you wanted to come? You have set
+all the room talking and gossiping, slinking off before midnight in this
+way--as if you were a mere nobody, who would not be missed--and not
+letting me know. What's the matter, eh?"
+
+Rachel, without changing her position by a hair's breadth, lifted her
+eyes steadily and looked at him, but she did not speak.
+
+Mrs. Reade saw the look, and she needed no words to tell her that some
+crisis in the conjugal relations of this pair had come, which no
+outsider had any business to see or meddle with; and she guessed
+correctly what it was.
+
+"I will go back, and make what explanations are necessary," said she;
+"and I will come round in the morning, Rachel."
+
+And she went out quickly, and closed the door behind her. On the stairs
+she met Rachel's maid going up, and told her her mistress would ring
+when she wanted her; and in the lobby of the hotel she replied to her
+husband's anxious inquiries by declaring irrelevantly that she wished
+Mr. Kingston, and his house and his money, were all at the bottom of the
+sea.
+
+That gentleman, meanwhile, after following her out upon the landing, and
+looking over the stairs to see that her natural protector was in
+attendance, returned to his wife with a vague presentiment of
+unpleasantness in some shape or other.
+
+He, too, had been struck with the peculiar expression of Rachel's face,
+and a guilty conscience intimated at once that she had "found out
+something," though it did not suggest any catastrophe in particular.
+There were so many things that, by unlucky accident, she might find out.
+
+"However, I am not going to be called to account by her," he said to
+himself, in that spirit of swagger which she had herself nursed and
+nourished by her excess of wifely meekness. "_I_ am not Ned Reade, to
+submit to be dictated to and sat upon by my own wife--so she needn't
+begin it."
+
+And he walked into the drawing-room in a lordly manner.
+
+The reception that he met with staggered him considerably.
+
+"Graham," said Rachel, in a very quiet voice, "did you send word to Mr.
+Roden Dalrymple that I was engaged to you that Christmas--you know when
+I mean--two years ago, when I was ill? Did you tell that lie to Mr.
+Gordon deliberately, when you knew how things were with us?"
+
+He was silent--intensely silent--for a few minutes, amazed, ashamed,
+embarrassed, and savage. He did not know how to answer her. Then he gave
+a little short surly laugh.
+
+"What about it? Who has been talking to you of those things? What is Mr.
+Dalrymple to you _now_, I should like to know?"
+
+"Did you?" she persisted.
+
+"And what if I did?" he retorted roughly, but still making a ghastly
+attempt at badinage. "All's fair in love and war, you know, my dear; and
+it was that aunt of yours who told the lie, as you elegantly term it--if
+it was a lie--not I; I merely did not contradict her."
+
+She looked at him steadily, with that implacable hardness in her once
+soft eyes.
+
+"I will never forgive you," she said; "I will never, never forgive you."
+
+"I am sure I am very sorry to hear it; but I suppose I can manage to get
+on without your forgiveness," he began. And then he gave up trying to
+make a joke of it, and turned upon her savagely. "Have you been seeing
+that fellow, Rachel? Tell me this instant; I insist upon knowing."
+
+"I have seen his friend," she said, quietly.
+
+"And did he send his friend to make those explanations to you--to
+_you_?"
+
+"No; he did not send him. It was by accident that I met Mr. Gordon
+to-night!"
+
+"And what business had you to talk to Mr. Gordon--to talk to
+anybody--about your old love affairs? Do you forget that you are a
+married woman--that you are my wife? It was bad enough when you were
+single to be mixing yourself up with a disreputable scoundrel like
+that----"
+
+"He is not a disreputable scoundrel," she interposed sternly. "He is
+the most upright gentleman--he is the most noble man--in the wide world.
+I might have known," she added, drawing herself up proudly, "that he
+would never have forsaken me! I might have been sure that he would never
+break his word; that whoever was to blame for what happened to me that
+time, _he_ was not! But I let myself be twisted round anybody's fingers
+rather than trust in him. It serves me right, it serves me right! I was
+not worthy of him."
+
+"Well--upon my word!"
+
+"You need not look at me so, Graham. I have never deceived _you_. I told
+you before I married you exactly how it was with me. I have never had
+any secrets from you, and I never will have any. You _know_ as well as I
+do that I loved him--ah! I did not love him enough, that is what has
+ruined us!--and so I shall while I live, if I live to be a hundred."
+
+"You mean to say you can sit there and tell me that to my face?"
+
+"I can only tell the truth," she replied, with the same hard
+deliberation. "I could no more help loving him, especially now I
+understand how things have been with us--no one will know it, but it
+will be in my heart--than I could help breathing. When I leave off
+breathing, then I shall forget him perhaps, not before."
+
+Mr. Kingston was beside himself with passion--as, indeed, so was she.
+
+"Forewarned is forearmed," he said, with a sort of sardonic snarl; "I
+shall know now what steps to take to protect my honour."
+
+"You know perfectly well that your honour--what _you_ call your
+honour--is safe," she replied proudly. "If I am not to be trusted, _he_
+is. Do not insult us any more. We have had enough cruelty; we shall have
+quite enough to bear--he and I."
+
+And so they went on with these bitter and defiant recriminations--Mr.
+Kingston, of course, insisting upon giving due prominence to his own
+wrongs, which were very real ones in their way, and both of them making
+reckless proposals with respect to their domestic arrangements--until
+suddenly, without any apparent warning, Rachel went off into wild
+hysterics, and the doctor had to be sent for.
+
+Perhaps it was the best thing that could have happened under all the
+circumstances. She was very ill for several hours; and in the morning,
+when passion was spent, and she was lying in her bed still and quiet,
+with her head swathed in wet bandages, her husband knelt down beside her
+and asked her to forgive him.
+
+"It was for love of you that I did it," he said; "and _I_ am punished,
+too. We can't undo it now, Rachel, if we would, and there's no good in
+making a public talk and scandal. Let bygones be bygones, won't you,
+dear?"
+
+She lifted her heavy eyes to his face. They were cold and hard no
+longer, but unutterably dull and sad.
+
+"Yes," she said wearily; "we have both been wrong; we have injured one
+another. We must try to make the best of it; it is the only thing we can
+do now."
+
+He kissed her and stroked her face, and adjusted the wet bandages.
+
+"There, there," he said soothingly, "we both forgot ourselves a little.
+We said a great deal more than we meant, I daresay. People do when they
+are out of temper."
+
+And he bade her go to sleep, told her he would take her for a drive in
+the afternoon if she felt well enough, and went forth with the sense
+that he was treating her magnanimously to receive and reply to inquiries
+after her health in person.
+
+By noon, "all Melbourne," according to Mrs. Hardy's calculation, was
+aware that Mr. and Mrs. Kingston had had a quarrel (though there was
+every variety of conjecture as to the cause of it, and a division of
+opinion as to which was the most to blame); but it was not Mr.
+Kingston's fault if all Melbourne was not satisfied by nightfall that
+the quarrel had been made up.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+MRS. READE MEETS HER MATCH.
+
+
+"Will Mr. Roden Dalrymple do Mrs. Edward Reade the great favour to call
+upon her to-morrow (Thursday) morning, if convenient to him, between ten
+and twelve o'clock? She is particularly anxious to see him upon a matter
+of private business."
+
+This note was despatched from South Yarra to Menzies on a certain night
+in the early part of December, a few weeks after the Town Hall ball.
+Mr. Dalrymple had just come to Melbourne, and Mrs. Reade, through the
+gossip of afternoon visitors, had heard of it.
+
+She had heard of a great deal more besides--from Laura's husband
+chiefly; and the critical nature of the situation, and her anxious
+solicitude for Rachel's welfare in the midst of the perils and
+temptations to which, while a meeting with her old lover was possible,
+she would be exposed, made it seem absolutely necessary that the person
+who was most capable of doing so effectually should interfere once more.
+
+The course she adopted in undertaking this delicate and difficult
+enterprise was worthy alike of her courage and her good sense. She had
+never met Mr. Dalrymple, and she had no definite knowledge of his
+character, only an impression that he was "wild"--a man of the world,
+with a touch of the libertine and the vagabond about him--and that he
+was also undoubtedly a gentleman, with some of the finer qualities that
+are the heritage of good blood.
+
+Yet she determined that she would abjure all schemes and artifices, and
+see him herself before there was time for anything to happen, and appeal
+to his honour and generosity on behalf of the woman he loved--upon whose
+peace it seemed evident to her he had some selfish if not distinctly
+evil designs.
+
+"He has come to town in consequence of Mr. Gordon's representations, of
+course, for no other purpose than to see her," the little woman said to
+herself the moment she heard of his arrival; "and if he does see her,
+nothing but trouble can possibly come of it."
+
+So she determined to prevent trouble if possible, and this seemed to her
+the proper way.
+
+She prepared herself for the interview on the Thursday morning, without
+any sense of having undertaken a difficult task.
+
+When he arrived she was discussing dinner with her cook, and she walked
+from the larder to the drawing-room with a very grave and thoughtful
+face, but feeling perfectly serene and self-possessed.
+
+He was standing in the middle of the room, facing the door, with his hat
+in his hand when she entered. He looked immensely tall, and stiff, and
+stately. There was an air of impracticable independence in his attitude,
+and in the distant dignity of his salutation that disconcerted her a
+little. He was wonderfully like his photograph she thought, and yet he
+was a much more imposing personage than she had bargained for.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Dalrymple--it was so kind of you to come," she said, in her
+quick, easy way. "I must apologise for summoning you in such a very
+informal manner, but--a--won't you sit down?"
+
+She dropped into one of her soft, low chairs; and her visitor seated
+himself at a little distance from her, not hesitatingly, but with just
+so much deliberation as indicated a protest against the prolongation of
+the interview.
+
+"I understood from your note that you wished to see me upon some
+business," he suggested gravely.
+
+"I did," she replied, feeling unaccountably flustered. "Perhaps you will
+think it rather impertinent of me--perhaps it is a liberty for me to
+take--but the fact is I have so deep an interest in my cousin's
+welfare--she is so very dear to me--I must plead that as my excuse----"
+
+"You are speaking of Mrs. Kingston?" he interposed in the same cool and
+distant manner, "I hope she is quite well? I have not had the pleasure
+of seeing her since her marriage."
+
+"She is quite well, thank you. I trust she will keep so, but I am afraid
+she is not very strong. Mr. Dalrymple, I ought perhaps to tell you that
+I--that Rachel told me--that I am aware of the relationship that has
+existed between you."
+
+"We will not speak of that, if you please, Mrs. Reade."
+
+"But I sent for you on purpose to speak of it."
+
+"Then I must ask you to excuse me," he said, rising haughtily. "I cannot
+discuss those matters with strangers--still less with a member of Miss
+Fetherstonhaugh's family."
+
+"But, Mr. Dalrymple, _I_ am not to blame for anything that has
+happened--for any mistakes that have been made--I assure you I am not. I
+never knew of your accident--I never knew that Mr. Gordon came down--I
+never knew anything more than Rachel did, until it was too late. And I
+was her intimate friend all that time, and she made me her _confidante_.
+I served her interests as far as a friend who loved her could, to the
+best of my power."
+
+"If that is so, I am very grateful to you," he said gently, "though I am
+afraid you failed to see what her interests were. May I ask if you are
+acting under her instructions now? Did she authorise you to make this
+appointment for the purpose of speaking of these things?"
+
+"Of course she did not."
+
+"Then we will not speak of them. There would be very grave impropriety
+in doing so. You must see, Mrs. Reade, that nothing you can say will in
+the least degree affect the case for anyone. I think we all know the
+truth of the story now. It is too late to take any action one way or the
+other. For Mrs. Kingston's sake, the fewer reminiscences we allow the
+better. Our business is to reconcile ourselves to circumstances, since
+they are irrevocable, and to let the past alone. If it was your
+intention to explain to me that you were guiltless of active
+participation in the crime which parted us, believe me, I appreciate the
+kind motive, and I thank you from my heart. But it is much better not to
+say any more about it."
+
+He was still standing with his hat in his hand, and that peculiar
+distant look in his sad and haughty face. Mrs. Reade sat before him in
+her low chair silent, with her eyes cast down.
+
+Not one of the numerous gentlemen in whose affairs she had condescended
+to take an interest had ever treated her like this, and she felt
+inexpressibly humiliated. Yet she had no sense of resentment, strange to
+say, against the individual who dominated her, and the position
+generally, in such an unexampled manner.
+
+"Did I understand you to say that Mrs. Kingston was not strong?" he
+inquired after a short pause.
+
+"I think she is very well," Mrs. Reade meekly responded. "Her
+constitution is quite sound; but her nervous system is delicate. She
+cannot stand worry, or shocks, or any great excitement or fatigue--any
+of those things upset her."
+
+"I should imagine so. But it is always possible to keep her free of
+those things, is it not?"
+
+Mrs. Reade replied, not so much to the letter as to the spirit of the
+question.
+
+"Her husband takes good care of her," she said. "He is very thoughtful
+for her comfort. She does not run any risk of harm that he can spare
+her. If we are all as careful of her welfare as he is, Mr. Dalrymple--if
+we are as scrupulous to protect her peace now she is at peace----"
+
+She broke off, and lifted her eyes wistfully.
+
+Mr. Dalrymple looked down upon her with stately and impenetrable
+composure.
+
+"I am deeply thankful to know that her marriage has so far been
+satisfactory," he said. "I suppose the house in Toorak is nearly
+finished, is it not?"
+
+"It is quite finished. They went into it three weeks ago."
+
+"It promised to be a very good house, though rather of the _nouveaux
+riches_ order of architecture," he proceeded coolly; "and unfortunately
+it is impossible to manufacture trees, without which the best house
+looks bald and naked. But it stands well. It must be a very healthy
+situation; and that, after all, is the principal consideration."
+
+"I hope she will be happy in it," said Mrs. Reade. Her soul rebelled
+against this mode of treating the question, and yet her efforts to
+divert the discussion into the channels that she had designed for it
+were absurdly feeble and futile.
+
+"I hope so, indeed," he replied gravely. "I suppose you see a great deal
+of her, do you not?"
+
+"Yes. I seldom miss a day without seeing her. Either I go to Toorak, or
+she comes here, or we meet somewhere about town. _I_ do whatever is in
+my power to help to make her happy."
+
+"It must be a happiness to you, too, to have her friendship and
+confidence in such a marked degree."
+
+"It is," said Mrs. Reade.
+
+"I--if you will excuse me--I will say good morning. Allow me to thank
+you very much for permitting me to call, and for your kind interest in
+my misfortunes--and in Mrs. Kingston's welfare. But the greatest service
+you can do her, Mrs. Reade, is to be silent yourself, and to discourage
+gossip in others, about anything that occurred either before or since
+her marriage in connection with me. I hope I do not seem discourteous in
+saying this--if so, pray forgive me. I speak to you frankly, because you
+are her friend. I am afraid she has not had many friends--there is the
+more reason that we who desire her welfare and happiness, should take
+every precaution against imperilling it by allowing any hint of these
+private matters to reach the ears of vulgar scandalmongers. A great
+crime has been done, for which if there is anything in the theory of
+retribution, some one will have to answer some day; but in the meantime
+our part is to take care that _she_ is spared as much difficulty and
+suffering as possible."
+
+"Yes, Mr. Dalrymple. That is what I think--that is what I was going to
+say."
+
+"I am sure you think so. I am sure you see that that is all we can do
+for her now. Good morning. I am much obliged to you for your kindness.
+It looks rather as if we were going to have a storm, does it not? The
+air is close and sultry, and the glass is falling very fast."
+
+He turned from looking out of the window and made a stately bow; she
+laid her hand upon the bell mechanically--she had no arts wherewith to
+keep him; and in another minute he had passed out of the house, and the
+door was shut upon him. The interview which was to have had such great
+results was over.
+
+We have heard it said of a pioneer colonist, lessee of a Crown-land
+principality, that, after bearing the reverses of fortune which, with
+the advent of free selectors, overwhelmed him, the loss of land and
+stock and the accumulated treasure of toilsome and prosperous years,
+with the fortitude and equanimity of a gentleman, he was broken down at
+last by the unspeakable humiliation of the circumstance that he had
+"lived to hear himself called a boss-cocky."
+
+Mrs. Reade had not only been defied and defeated, and made to feel small
+and ridiculous in her own drawing-room, where never man or woman--man,
+especially--had never dared dispute her supremacy; but she had lived to
+hear herself called, or at any rate to find herself considered, a
+_gossip_--a common tattler and busybody, who intrigued in other people's
+private affairs from the vulgar feminine love of meddling--and the blow
+was equally bitter.
+
+She stood in the bow window of her drawing-room, and watched the tall
+figure leisurely striding through the garden as if South Yarra and the
+adjacent suburbs were but a small part of his possessions; taking in
+all the details of his strong majestic figure, his thin, dark, proud
+face, with its immense moustache, the perfection of his quiet dress, and
+the repose and dignity of his bearing generally, and of every distinct
+movement that he made--even when trying to open a gate with a mysterious
+fastening, at which most people fumbled and bungled awkwardly.
+
+But she was _not_ consumed with a passion of angry resentment against
+him for the indignities and humiliations that he had heaped upon her.
+No, she was filled with a vague but intense respect and admiration for
+him, a feeling that she had never before entertained for any individual
+of his sex.
+
+She did not say it to herself in so many words, but the thought of her
+heart undoubtedly was that here was the man, who as a husband, would
+just have suited her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+GOOD-BYE.
+
+
+On that same day, at a little after four o'clock in the afternoon, Mrs.
+Kingston might have been seen--she _was_ seen, in fact--going into the
+Town Hall by herself, having left her carriage in the street below. She
+mounted the stone steps lightly, with the train of her dress held up in
+her hand, looking exquisitely fresh and dainty in the dusty sultriness
+that everywhere prevailed; and she glided through the vestibule as if
+time were precious, paid her sixpence, and entered the hall, where she
+took a solitary seat under the shadow of the gallery at the lower end.
+
+The organist was interpreting Mozart to some hundreds of receptive
+citizens, making the great organ sing like a choir of angels in the
+"Gloria" of the Twelfth Mass, "_et in terra pax, pax, pax hominibus;
+bonae, bonae voluntatis_." All the spacious place was flooded with the
+impassioned harmonies of that inspired theme.
+
+Rachel was not what is popularly called musical, but in the dulness of
+her empty life her soul slacked its thirst in this way, as a soul of a
+lower order, which had been denied its natural nourishment, might have
+found comfort in the emotional stimulus of champagne or brandy.
+
+She could not play well herself, but she was like a fine instrument to
+be played upon; not one sweet phrase of melody passed from her listening
+ear to her sensitive heart without wakening an echo that had the very
+divine afflatus in it in response. And in this resonance of enthusiasms
+and aspirations, dumb and suffocated in the bondage of her artificial
+life--in the sense of breathing spiritual air, and freedom, though with
+a passion of enjoyment that filled her with far more pain than
+peace--she found the one true luxury of her much-envied lot.
+
+Long ago--oh, so long ago!--the music of a violin had led her into
+enchantment, as the Pied Piper of Hamelin led away the children. To-day
+the music of the Town Hall organ, speaking now in Mozart's dramatic
+choruses, and again in Baptiste's Andante in G, was a similar but a
+sadder incantation.
+
+She sat solitary in her far-away chair, with her feet on the rung of the
+one in front of her, her hands, gloved to perfection, folded in her lap,
+her delicate, neat dress daintily adjusted, much as she might have sat
+in the pew at church, a model of matronly grace and propriety.
+
+But who could tell, from the expression of her quiet _pose_ and her
+dreamy eyes, what ineffable raptures and fancies, what infinite longings
+and yearnings--nameless, even to her own consciousness, but all
+reminiscent of the blessed past--soared out of captivity on the wings of
+those alluring harmonies!
+
+Who could see that in her heart she was crying--crying bitterly--for
+the poetry and the beauty that were lost out of her life!
+
+There was an interval of silence, during which she sat quite still,
+looking at the great organ-pipes, and seeing nothing; and then there
+grew out of the hush the delicious rhythm of the "Faust" waltz, beating
+like a soft pulse through the summer air.
+
+What spell is there in the "Faust" waltz, or in any waltz, for one whose
+heart is capable of receiving and responding to the inspired message of
+Mozart?
+
+How can we tell? But this we know, that those whose hearts are warm and
+young--who understand how to love and how to dance, and have done the
+two things at the self-same moment--have seldom any more power than they
+have honest inclination to resist the subtle wiles of this simple
+measure.
+
+There is a vox humana stop out in whatever organ plays it, magnetic to
+the human passions that memory and imagination keep. Rachel did not ask
+why it was, but she felt, as soon as the air began to unwind itself from
+a confusion of sweet sounds, and she heard the slow time throbbing
+softly in her ears, that she did not know how to bear it.
+
+It filled her soul with a great wave of suffocating emotion--it ran like
+an electric current over all her sensitive nerves--it contracted her
+white throat with a choking pain that was like incipient hysteria--it
+set abnormal pulses bounding in her brain. She did not think of
+Adelonga, and the hour when she and her true love had their first and
+last waltz together.
+
+No definite picture of the past arose at the magician's bidding, or if
+it did, she shut her eyes to it. But she could not help the forlorn
+rapture of longing for that nameless something that was the most
+precious of her woman's rights, which fate and fraud had taken from her,
+when the notes of this dreamy waltz measure, so charged with passionate
+and poetic associations, pulsed from the heart of the organ into her
+warm young blood.
+
+"Oh, my love! my love!"--that was the burden of the music which was not
+set to words.
+
+And she turned her face a little, and saw Roden Dalrymple standing in
+the doorway. He had come in quietly, and was waiting, with his hat in
+his hand, apparently for a pause in the performance, which he did not
+wish to interrupt, but really until he could find where some one whom he
+was looking for was sitting.
+
+It was the first time she had seen him since that October night when
+they had parted in the moonlight under the walls of the house that was
+now her home; but she had been, unknown to herself, expecting him, and
+there was no shock in her surprise.
+
+She knew that he was looking for her, when she saw his eyes travelling
+over the rows of occupied chairs in the upper division of the hall, and
+she longed to call out to him,
+
+"Roden, Roden, here I am!"
+
+But not a dozen seconds passed before he saw her far away from him in
+her shadowy corner; and when he saw her, with that solemn eagerness in
+her face, he knew--but he said to himself he had already known--that,
+though she had forsaken him, she had never done him wrong.
+
+Of course before the day was over it was reported in various circles,
+more or less select, that pretty Mrs. Kingston, who had married an old
+fogey for his money, was in the habit of coming to the organ recitals
+alone and unbeknown to her husband, in order to enjoy clandestine
+flirtations with younger and more fascinating men.
+
+It was also darkly whispered that the favoured individual was a person
+who made it his constant practice to run away with married women, and to
+murder their lawful spouses in sham duels afterwards if they ventured
+to make any objections.
+
+But of all the human beings collected in the Town Hall that afternoon,
+perhaps no two were less capable of violating the spirit of the moral
+and social law whereof the letter is so sacred to the ubiquitous and
+lynx-eyed Mrs. Grundy, who persists in suspecting everyone of a desire
+to evade or infringe it, simply for the sake of doing so, whenever he or
+she is presented with an opportunity.
+
+That they loved one another as much as it was possible for sympathetic
+hearts to love, and that they seized one brief half-hour out of a
+lifetime of separation in which to say farewell, might have been
+reprehensible from the conventional point of view; but then the
+conventional point of view does not embrace the universe, by a very long
+way.
+
+He came down the hall, and round to her chair, and she drew her dress
+close that he might sit down beside her. She was too innately pure to
+make any mere outward and artificial demonstrations of modesty in such a
+moment as this; and she trusted him too well to be afraid of him.
+
+She put out her hand, and he took it in a long, close clasp; and they
+looked at one another the while with loving, despairing eyes, which
+said, "Oh, Rachel, why _did_ you?" and "Oh, Roden, forgive me!" and
+bridged the only gulf that could be bridged between them, without any
+help of words.
+
+And then, though the organ began to fill the air with the sonorous
+crash and thunder of Bach's great pedal fugue in D, they heard nothing
+but the beating of their hearts, and the memories that called to them
+from their brief past, vibrating through the void and silence of a world
+in which they were alone together.
+
+When the music ceased for an interval, Mr. Dalrymple rested his arm on
+the back of the chair which had served Rachel for a footstool, and
+looking into her face, said under his breath,
+
+"Gordon gave me your message--I came down to thank you--and I thought we
+should get on better if we could see each other just once. Dear, we must
+try and comfort ourselves with knowing that neither of us played the
+other false."
+
+"_I_ did--_I_ did," she whispered hurriedly. "I ought to have trusted
+you, Roden."
+
+"Yes--that was a mistake. But you did not know any better, poor child.
+And they were too many for you, those people. Gordon ought to have
+insisted on seeing you, himself, or getting some message to you, and not
+have left you in their hands. But he did his best, he says. He was too
+anxious to get back to me to have much patience over it, and he didn't
+bargain for being told lies of that magnitude in cold blood.
+However,--however----"
+
+He broke off and looked at her with a passion of love and grief in his
+eyes that he dared not trust to speech. And she looked back at him, with
+her simple soul laid bare--longing to make him know, if they were never
+to be together like this again, how absolutely in her heart she had been
+true to him. _She_ would not tell him a lie, at any rate.
+
+"Oh," he said in a sort of groaning whisper, drawing a long hard breath,
+"oh, my little one, isn't it hard lines!"
+
+"Don't," she gasped, feeling that clutch on her throat tighten with a
+sudden spasm; "oh, Roden, don't!"
+
+And he straightened himself quickly, and sat back in his chair. And the
+organ began to play again--a stately march of Schubert's, which acted
+like a tonic on her disordered nerves, and as a sedative to the
+hysterical excitement that for a moment had threatened to overmaster
+her.
+
+The echoes of that march rang in her ears, when Roden was gone back to
+Queensland and this chapter of her life was finished, for many a long
+day.
+
+And then at last the thunders of the National Anthem brought the
+performance to a close, and the audience trooped out, casting curious
+glances as they went at the distinguished-looking couple standing
+conspicuously apart--the tall stranger with the peculiar moustache, who
+had soldier and gentleman written on him from head to foot, and the
+graceful young lady with the lovely complexion and the irreproachable
+French dress, whom nobody "who was anybody" failed to recognise.
+
+The two were left together amongst all the empty chairs, in a silence
+that was hardly broken by the organist's movements at the far end of
+the hall, closing the stops and keys of his enormous instrument.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Dalrymple, looking down upon his companion, who lifted
+to his sombre eyes a pale but solemn face, "well--so this is all, I
+suppose!"
+
+Her lips twitched a little; she could not answer him.
+
+"You are not sorry that I came, are you, Rachel? It will not make it
+harder for you, will it?"
+
+"Oh, _no_, Roden! But it is _you_ on whom it is so hard--you will be so
+lonely without me! I can't bear to think what I have brought on you--and
+you had so many troubles already!"
+
+"Not you, dear--not you. And I can bear all my part of it, if only
+things go well with you."
+
+"Why did you break that trace?" she exclaimed, with a touch of bitter
+passion. "But for that--but for two minutes lost--you would never have
+seen me, and then I should never have spoiled your life like this."
+
+"But, dear, we are not going to regret _that_, I hope. We have got
+something 'saved from chance and change,' if not much, that to me at any
+rate--yes and to you too, I know--is worth even this heavy price that we
+are paying for it now. It need not spoil our lives, Rachel, to
+know--what we know. It is an agonising thing to see how blessed it
+_might_ have been for us, and to be obliged to give it all up; but I
+shall never think of those two hours, when we belonged entirely to each
+other--only two hours, Rachel, out of our whole lives!--without being
+thankful for the chance which gave them to us. Yes, and I think we shall
+be the better for them--I don't say happier, because I really don't know
+what that word means--but I think life will somehow have a finer quality
+henceforth, whatever happens, on account of those two hours. Dear, I am
+forcing myself to give in to the hard fate that has done us out of our
+inheritance; but there is one thing that I don't think I _could_ get
+reconciled to--and that is to thinking that you would ever live to wish
+that we had never known each other."
+
+"I could not wish it," she whispered; "I could only try to persuade
+myself that I did."
+
+"Do not try. You are under no obligation of duty to do that. Try to be
+happy with your husband--try not to fret over what is irrevocable, and
+not to hanker after what is hopeless. But don't try to turn me out of
+the only place in your life where I have a corner of my own. Let me keep
+the little of you that I have got--it is little enough! Do you remember
+what you said to me that night?--you said you had no rights in my past.
+_He_ has no rights in our past. Keep it sacred, Rachel, for my sake.
+That will not hurt anybody. You are not afraid that such remembrances,
+if you shut them away in your heart, will militate against your efforts
+to do what is right by him? And you are not afraid that _I_ will ever
+tempt or trouble you?"
+
+"Oh, Roden, I am not afraid of you--you well know that!"
+
+"Treat me as if I were dead," he said gently. "If I had been killed that
+time when I was thrown--if I were in my grave now--I know how you would
+think of me. You would not wish you had never seen me then. That is how
+I _want_ you to think of me, Rachel."
+
+"I know," she said, drawing a deep breath. "But to me--even if you _had_
+killed yourself--to me you could never be dead."
+
+By this time they had sauntered slowly out of the deserted hall and
+through the empty vestibules, and were standing in the doorway, looking
+out upon the street below them.
+
+The storm that had threatened in the morning was gathering up. Heavy
+clouds weighed upon the sultry air, and gusts of wind were beginning to
+blow the dust about ominously. Pedestrians were hurrying to gain shelter
+before the rain came on, but, as they passed, they took note of the
+lingering pair, who were apparently heedless of the warnings of the
+elements, with more or less curious eyes. Neither of them, it is
+needless to say, minded in the least who saw them. They had no desire to
+take even this last good-bye clandestinely.
+
+And when Rachel, to whom it had not occurred to wonder why her carriage
+was not in attendance, saw it thundering along the street towards her,
+it was with as much relief as surprise that she recognised her husband
+in it, looking out of the window for her.
+
+"We have said nothing," said Mr. Dalrymple, who perceived the approach
+of his old rival and enemy; "and we had so much to say."
+
+"Perhaps it is better not to say much," said Rachel.
+
+"Perhaps so. But one thing you must not mind my asking you--and I know
+you will tell me truly--are you getting along pretty well? Do you think
+you will be able to make anything of a happy life out of it? That is my
+great anxiety."
+
+"Do not be anxious about me," she replied. "I shall get along. I know
+that you forgive me--that will help me more than anything."
+
+"Don't talk about forgiveness, child--it implies a wider separation
+than I think has ever been between us. There can be no forgiveness in
+the case of people who never knowingly do one another wrong."
+
+The carriage, with its high stepping, showy horses, began to slacken
+speed, and they descended the long flight of steps quietly, side by
+side.
+
+"Is he good to you?" inquired Roden, quickly.
+
+"Very," she replied; "very, indeed."
+
+And then they reached the pavement, and the person referred to got out
+of the carriage and came to meet them.
+
+It must be recorded, to Mr. Kingston's credit, that he behaved like a
+gentleman on this occasion. He was a little acid and supercilious, and
+not as composed as he assumed to be; but otherwise he conducted himself
+with propriety. "I took the carriage for half an hour," said he loudly.
+"I hope I haven't kept you waiting, my dear. Ah, Mr. Dalrymple, how do
+you do? I did not know you were in town. I hope you are quite well.
+Making a long stay?"
+
+"A day or two only," said Roden, who stiffened in spite of himself, but
+spoke with studied courtesy. "I shall be starting back to Queensland
+to-night. I am glad to have had the opportunity of meeting Mrs.
+Kingston, and to see her looking well."
+
+"Oh, yes, she is very well, I hope. Travelling did her good--it does
+everybody good. I felt quite set up by it myself. Dear me, was that a
+drop of rain? I think you had better be getting home, Rachel. There is
+a heavy storm coming directly. Good day, Mr. Dalrymple, good day. We
+can't set you down anywhere, I suppose?"
+
+Mr. Dalrymple declined a seat in the carriage with thanks, and he held
+out his hand to Rachel.
+
+"Good-bye," he said quietly.
+
+"Good-bye," she replied, with an ash-white face. They looked at one
+another for a second; and then, lifting his hat gravely, Mr. Dalrymple
+turned and walked away down the street, and Mr. Kingston gave his arm to
+his wife, and led her to her carriage. Poor Rachel! she did not ask
+herself what would happen next--she did not wonder nor care whether she
+was to be scolded or not. For a few bitter, lonely moments, she had no
+recognisable future.
+
+Then she turned to her husband, who was fanning the fuel of his wrath in
+silence, laid her hand on his arm, and said softly, "Graham?"
+
+"Well--what?" he inquired, roughly.
+
+"Do not be angry. I am never going to see him again."
+
+"It's to be hoped not," he snarled, "if you have any regard for your
+reputation. Standing up there with him, in that public way, for all
+Melbourne to see!"
+
+"You would not have wished me to meet Mr. Dalrymple in any way that was
+_not_ public," she said, drawing herself up. "And I should be very sorry
+to do anything that all Melbourne might not see."
+
+The rain began to sweep down heavily, and he turned to put up the window
+nearest him with an energy that threatened destruction to the glass.
+
+And he said no more about Mr. Dalrymple.
+
+Disturbed as he was, he was greatly relieved that the meeting he had
+always dreaded was over, and had taken place so quietly; and poor as was
+his estimation of the abstract woman, he had the most implicit faith in
+his wife's sincerity.
+
+When she told him that she had bidden her old lover a final farewell, he
+believed her; and, though the sight and thought of the man made him
+ferocious, he was quite aware that difficulties were adjusting
+themselves more satisfactorily than he could have expected.
+
+He did not feel that he had any excuse for upbraiding Rachel now, and he
+did not do it. But he had to put great restraint upon himself not to do
+it.
+
+He got out of the carriage at his club, shutting the door with a bang
+behind him, and while his wife drove home by herself in a state of
+semi-consciousness, he went in to quarrel with some of his old friends
+who chanced to require his opinion upon the political situation.
+Politics, he promptly gave them to understand, were beneath his notice,
+likewise the people who concerned themselves therein. He wouldn't touch
+one of them with a pair of tongs. It wasn't for gentlemen and clubmen to
+mix themselves up with a lot of rogues and vagabonds. Let them alone and
+be hanged to them. That was what respectable people did in America. If
+Americans didn't care what riff-raff represented them, why should they?
+
+As for the colony, if it liked to be dragged in the dirt--if it
+preferred, of its own free will, to go to the devil--let it, for all to
+him.
+
+And so he worked off his savage temper harmlessly, and appeared in his
+own drawing-room at seven o'clock, irreproachably spruce, and with a
+flower in his button-hole, looking jaunty and amiable, as if nothing had
+happened.
+
+Rachel, when he arrived, was sitting alone in the midst of her wealth
+and splendour, waiting for him.
+
+She rose as he entered and went to meet him, looking lovely in her
+favourite black velvet, with red geraniums in her hair; and she laid
+her hand on his sleeve, and lifted a sad but peaceful face. "Kiss me,
+Graham," she said gently.
+
+He put his arms round her at once.
+
+"Dear little woman!" he responded. "I understand. I am not angry with
+you. It's all right. We won't say any more about it."
+
+And he led her to the dining-room and placed her "at the head of the
+table," which was her social throne; and he plied her with dainty viands
+and rare wines with a fussy solicitude that was highly edifying to the
+servants who waited upon them, by way of showing her that he forgave
+her.
+
+He was much impressed by his own large magnanimity; and what was more
+to the purpose, so in her unselfish heart, was she. They spent the
+evening together, _tete-a-tete_ by the fireside (for it was cold when
+the storm was over), in the most domestic manner, planning new schemes
+for the garden and for the arrangement of a pet cabinet of blue china;
+and when Rachel went to bed, lighting her way about the great corridors
+and staircases with a candle that her husband had lit for her, she felt
+that he was helping her to make a fair start upon the weary road which
+stretched, plain and straight--but, oh, so flat and bare!--before her.
+
+And she was very grateful to him.
+
+Mr. Dalrymple, meanwhile left town by an evening train, and travelled
+night and day until he reached his home in the Queensland wilderness,
+where, being human--and very much so, too--he unloosed his heart from
+the restraints that he had put upon it, and railed at ease over the
+injustices of fate in the very strongest language.
+
+"Why should I have done it?" he demanded of his ancient friend and
+comrade as they lounged in restful attitudes under the grass-thatched
+verandah of their humble little house, smoking the pipe of peace in the
+cool of the summer day. "Why should I have given her up to him? What
+right has he to keep her, while I am lonely for the rest of my days? He
+has not the shadow of a right. She doesn't belong to him, and she never
+will. There is no binding force in any other contract that is entered
+into by fraud and false pretences; why should there be in this which she
+has been dragged into, and which deprives her as well as me, of all the
+flower and sweetness of her life? It is a monstrous sacrifice--and as
+immoral as it is monstrous.
+
+"It isn't as if we had no end of years, no end of lives to throw away.
+Suppose, ages hence, if we should survive, with our human nature, and I,
+for one, don't want to survive without it--and we look back upon this
+precious bit of certain happiness that we _might_ have had, and see that
+we voluntarily gave up the whole of it merely because of a wretched
+little paper law--a miserable little conventional prejudice--what shall
+we think of ourselves then? We shall say that we did not deserve a gift
+that we did not know how to value."
+
+"Rave away," said Mr. Gordon. "It will do you good. All the same, you
+know, as well as I do, that it would be impossible for you to do less or
+more than you have done."
+
+Of course it was impossible. Few people are better than they profess to
+be, but he was one of those few. And if he had had the happiness of
+twenty lives to lose, he would have lost it all twice over rather than
+have kept it at any cost of peace or honour to the woman he loved. He
+allowed himself the right to love her still, which, as he justly
+remarked, couldn't hurt anybody.
+
+He thought of her as he rode about his lonely plains, looking after
+black boys and cattle, and dreamt of her as he lay out in the starlight
+nights, with a saddle for his pillow, and the red light of the camp-fire
+flickering through the darkness upon his face; and always with a sense
+that, spiritually and morally, she belonged, before all the world to
+him.
+
+But he never at heart regretted either that he had seen her that day at
+the Town-hall, or that he had elected to see her no more. He had done
+the only thing that it had been in him to do.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+CONSOLATION.
+
+
+If it is true, as it is said, and as the observation of most of us seems
+to testify, that the ideal marriage is hardly ever realised, and then
+only when the rare and brief experience has been bought at untold cost
+of precious years, it is, perhaps, equally true that the majority of
+marriages wrongly and recklessly entered into, provided the contracting
+parties are honestly disposed, turn out surprisingly and undeservedly
+well.
+
+Time, which solaces our disappointments and sanctifies our bereavements,
+remedies also in a great measure even these criminal mistakes.
+
+As Rachel truly said, there are "whole worlds of things" besides
+love--_i.e._, "the love of man and woman when they love their best"--to
+knit husbands and wives together; and, independently of the ties that
+children create, and which, to the mother at least, are supremely and
+eternally sacred, the innumerable soft webs of habit and association
+that are woven in days and years of intimate companionship grow, like
+ivy over a fissure in a wall, so strong as eventually not only to hide
+the vacant place, but in some degree to supply artificially that element
+of stability and permanence to the structure which in its essential
+substance it lacked.
+
+And so it was with Rachel. After a little time, when she had "settled
+down," changed and aged, and sobered as she was, she really was not
+unhappy.
+
+She was always vastly conscious of her loss, but she was of too
+wholesome a disposition to be embittered by it; and her simple sense of
+duty and her characteristic unselfishness prompted her from the first to
+wear a cheerful face for her husband, and never by word or deed to
+reproach him, which course of conduct had the natural result of
+comforting herself quite as much as it gratified him.
+
+He was not a bad man, and in his easy fashion, he loved her; and
+appreciating her gentle and dutiful behaviour, he put himself out of the
+way to be kind to her, though, with all his attentions, he never was
+what one would call a domestic husband.
+
+Her demands upon him were not exorbitant. Indeed, she was true to her
+creed in not demanding anything; but for such evidences of his affection
+as he voluntarily bestowed upon her she showed herself always grateful
+in a meek, pleased way that was very charming to a man vain of his own
+importance, and she did not profess to be more so than, in her soft
+heart, she really was.
+
+She had no vocation for independence, nor for making herself--still less
+for making others--miserable; and if she had married Bluebeard instead
+of a well-intentioned gentleman, she must have twined herself about him
+with her tender, deferential, delicately-caressing ways--which came as
+naturally to her as breathing--and have found support and rest in doing
+it.
+
+When all signs of storm had cleared away, the apparently ill-matched
+husband and wife settled down to a life together that, if not
+rapturously delightful, was quite as placid and kindly and peaceful as
+the married life of most of us.
+
+They did not see a great deal of each other, to be sure; but the hours
+that they spent together, being generally hours when Mr. Kingston was
+tired or unwell, and wanted to be nursed and cheered, and to have the
+papers read to him, had a homely sweetness and solace for Rachel not far
+removed from happiness.
+
+And then I am afraid it must be confessed that the house, and the wealth
+and luxury belonging to it, _did_ comfort her a little.
+
+She was excessively unpretentious in her habits, and pure and simple in
+her tastes, but she had an intense appreciation of all those delicate
+personal refinements which womanly women love, and only those who have
+money, and plenty of it, can enjoy--of which years of sordid poverty had
+taught her the grace and value; and it was not possible to her, with her
+healthy sense of life, to refuse, even if she had wished, to absorb the
+fragrance and brightness of her social and material surroundings.
+
+She revelled in her beautiful garden and in her spacious and artistic
+rooms; she loved her piano and her books and pictures, and her
+innumerable pretty things; she enjoyed her drives and her rides, and her
+visiting and her parties, and her operas and concerts, and her shopping
+expeditions--upon which no limitations were placed by her husband, who
+liked her to spend his money--with Laura and Beatrice.
+
+And, more than all, she delighted in the power which her position gave
+her of doing all kinds of helpful, unpretentious service to the poor and
+miserable, whom she seemed, by a sort of divining-rod, to discover in
+the most unexpected places.
+
+Her husband would not allow her to make her large subscriptions to the
+public charities anonymously, nor would he consent to her taking
+invalids of the lower orders for drives, except upon unfrequented roads
+and in a generally surreptitious manner; and he strongly objected to her
+visiting poor people's cottages, and running risks of catching dirt and
+fever.
+
+But she might make frocks for ragged children, and babyclothes for
+unprovided mothers, and scrap-books for the Alfred Hospital; she might
+load her carriage with wine and chicken broth every time she went out;
+she might spend a little fortune, as she did, in helping on benevolent
+enterprises of all sorts; and he only laughed at her for being a
+soft-hearted little goose, and triumphed over her when--as happened in
+five cases out of ten--she was proved to have been more or less
+flagrantly imposed upon and taken in.
+
+Like most people who have badly known the want of money, she was
+decidedly extravagant in spending it now that she had plenty; and,
+unlike most husbands and wives in such circumstances, she and Mr.
+Kingston had no pleasanter episodes in their domestic life than those
+which had reference to her financial embarrassments.
+
+It was charming to him (since his banking account was much too solid to
+be easily affected by her operations) to see her come, with her timid
+and anxious face, to confess that she had spent all her money, and to
+ask him, with the sweetest wifely meekness, if he could spare her a
+little more; and to her he never showed to better advantage than when he
+declared, so obviously without meaning it, that she would ruin him, and
+then gave her twice as much as she had asked for.
+
+She always flushed and glowed with pleasure at this delicate and
+generous, and gentlemanly way of doing things, and would put her arms
+round his neck and kiss him; and, naturally, he would thereafter set
+forth to his club, feeling proud of himself and pleased with things in
+general, his young wife and he being so thoroughly in their right places
+in their relation to one another.
+
+And then there came to Rachel that which to every true woman is the
+greatest and dearest and best--save one--of all life's many good things,
+and which to her must inevitably have made even the most loveless
+marriage lovely:--
+
+"On the 17th inst., at Toorak, the wife of Graham Kingston, Esq., of a
+son."
+
+This little notice appeared in "The Argus," of the 18th, and caused a
+flutter and sensation in all well-regulated Melbourne households.
+
+"Dear me, how nice! and a son, too. How pleased Mr. Kingston will be! An
+heir to all that fine property at last! Dear me, how nice! We must call
+and make inquiries."
+
+And when kind inquiries resulted in the satisfactory information that
+both mother and infant were progressing favourably, society
+congratulated Mr. Kingston with effusive and impressive cordiality,
+which that gentleman, deprecating a fuss with airs of smiling
+indifference, felt to be by no means more than the occasion demanded.
+
+Of course, the interesting event made a pleasant commotion in the great
+Toorak house and in the Hardy family.
+
+Mrs. Hardy assumed the functions of mother-in-law to Mr. Kingston, and
+introduced him to his son and heir with a genuine maternal pride, that
+could not have been more touching or more complimentary to either of the
+delighted parents, had the featureless little atom been a lineal fifth
+grandchild.
+
+The stately matron, as is the habit of stately matrons under such
+circumstances, put off her conventional armour and rustled softly about
+the hushed rooms, clothed in all the homely womanliness of her own
+baby-nursing youth; and Rachel, watching her from her tranquil nest of
+pillows, forgave her--as she had long ago forgiven her husband--and
+wondered that she had never understood before what a truly sweet and
+loveable woman dear Aunt Elizabeth was.
+
+And Laura came up to see the baby, bringing a wonderful high-art
+coverlid for the cradle, and all sorts of wise advice (based upon her
+exceptional experience as the mother of twins).
+
+And Beatrice came--poor Beatrice, who had no babies!--and held the tiny
+creature for a long time in her arms, looking with silent wistfulness at
+its crumpled little face.
+
+And by-and-bye, when Rachel was promoted to gorgeous dressing-gowns and
+a sofa in her boudoir, Lucilla came to stay with her, full of importance
+and responsibility (as the mother of the largest family of them all), to
+instruct her in the newest and most improved principles upon which an
+infant of quality should be reared.
+
+As if Rachel wanted showing how to manage a baby! Some ladies, as the
+nurse sagely remarked, never had any sense, but if Mrs. Kingston had
+been a poor man's wife, which she hoped she would excuse her taking the
+liberty of speaking of such a thing, she couldn't have took to the child
+more naturally.
+
+It speedily became apparent to others besides that experienced woman
+that maternity was Rachel's vocation, and, when she found it, it seemed
+that she had found a consolation, if not an actual compensation, at last
+for the great want and sorrow of her woman's life.
+
+Mrs. Hardy, watching the young mother's passion of tender solicitude for
+the baby that she could hardly bear to have five minutes out of her
+sight, told herself that, after all, the end _had_ justified the means;
+and even Mrs. Reade, who was most interested in this latest experiment
+of a benevolent Fate, came practically to the same conclusion.
+
+One day she was alone with her cousin. Rachel had been entertaining a
+small and select circle at afternoon tea in her own pretty room, and the
+baby had been present, and she had been pointing out to its father what
+lovely eyes it had, and what small ears, and what perfectly-shaped
+hands, and how charming it was altogether--much to Mr. Kingston's
+amusement, and obviously to his immense satisfaction also; and now he
+had kissed her affectionately and gone out, and the baby was taking a
+siesta, and she was resting on her sofa by the fireside, gazing at the
+bright logs meditatively, with a half smile on her face.
+
+"Tell me," said Beatrice, suddenly, crossing the hearth and kneeling
+down beside her; "tell me, are you happy now, Rachel?"
+
+Rachel lifted her soft eyes, shining with a sort of vague rapture.
+
+"Oh, yes," she said, quickly; "indeed I am." And then in a moment her
+face was overshadowed, and she looked in the fire again with eyes that
+shone with tears. "I am _too_ happy," she said, under her breath, "while
+he is alone and sad."
+
+"Don't you think he will like you to be as happy as possible?"
+
+"I know he will. But it lies on my heart that he is desolate while I
+have so many consolations. Beatrice, I was reading some verses of Emily
+Bronte's the other day, and they seemed to express exactly how it is
+with me. Do you remember them?"
+
+     "Sweet love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee,
+       While the world's tide is bearing me along;
+     Other desires and other hopes beset me,
+       Hopes that obscure, but cannot do thee wrong."
+
+"Oh my love!" she broke out suddenly, "I do not forget thee! And," she
+added, more quietly, "I don't think my being happy can wrong him,
+Beatrice."
+
+"No, dear child, far from it," said Mrs. Reade.
+
+The little woman was not shocked, nor was she dissatisfied with the
+state of things that this naive revelation disclosed to her. She was
+deeply thankful to know that Rachel, after all, was happy; but she was
+not sorry to know also that she was to this extent faithful to her true
+love, who had dealt so well by her.
+
+It was at this very hour that the papers containing the announcement of
+the baby's birth arrived at the Queensland bungalow, and that Roden
+Dalrymple learned what a change had taken place, not only in the life
+and welfare of his beloved, but in his own lonely and empty lot.
+
+"The wife of Graham Kingston, of a son." He knew as well as
+anybody--better even than Rachel herself--what that little notice meant.
+It meant that the gulf already parting them had all at once widened to
+an immeasurable extent.
+
+He knew how it would be with that tender and clinging heart--it would be
+able to solace itself now, even for the loss of him.
+
+Yet he loved her well enough to be glad and thankful for the comfort
+that had come to her, though the coming of it left him doubly bereaved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+REPARATION.
+
+
+But, after all, Fate willed that this marriage should be but the chief
+episode in the story, and not the story itself, of Rachel's life.
+
+One day, when she was flitting about her great drawing-room, with a
+basket of flowers on her arm, singing soft airs from "Don Giovanni"
+under her breath as she busied herself with the arrangement of little
+groups of leaves and flowers in sundry precious receptacles here and
+there, a footman entered with a telegram.
+
+"That is from your master," said Rachel, lifting it from the salver and
+tearing off the envelope.
+
+"Wait a moment, James, until I see if there are any orders for you to
+take out."
+
+She put down her flowers on the piano, read the brief message
+tranquilly, and then lifted her face with a smile.
+
+"Ask Wilkinson to have the carriage ready at three o'clock," she said;
+"not the brougham, if it keeps as fine as it is now, the open carriage.
+And tell cook I want to speak to her in half an hour.
+
+"Your master is coming home to-day instead of Friday."
+
+James said "Yes'm" and retired, and his mistress continued her
+occupation of arranging the flowers with more haste and eagerness than
+before.
+
+Mr. Kingston had gone from home a few days previously to meet some
+distinguished foreign visitors at a friend's house in the country, a
+thing he did not often do, and she had stayed behind because little
+Alfred seemed to have symptoms of a bad cold coming on--which, however,
+had been happily checked at that stage.
+
+She had not expected her lord's return just yet, but she concluded that
+he had not found the party amusing, or had been bored in some way, and
+so had excused himself from prolonging his visit; and she was glad of
+the accident, whatever it was, that was bringing him back so soon.
+
+In the afternoon she went upstairs to get ready to go to the station to
+meet him. It was winter, and she clothed herself in rich furs--sealskin
+and sable, with the sealskin cap of old days on her shining
+head--against which the soft roundness of her cheek and throat, and the
+blush-rose delicacy of her complexion was particularly distinct and
+striking, and also the evident fact that, far from pining away, she had
+developed in health and strength quite as much as in beauty during the
+five or six years of her married life.
+
+When she was dressed she went to the nursery, where her little boy ran
+to meet her, begging her to take him with her wherever she was going.
+
+She caught him up in her arms and looked irresolutely at the imposing
+nurse, who was responding to his appeal in an official and determined
+manner, telling him that he must not cry to go in the carriage to-day;
+he must go for a nice walk with his nursey, because his dear papa did
+not like to be bothered with little boys when he was driving with his
+dear mamma (which was very true).
+
+"Never mind, Alfy," said Rachel, hugging him to her maternal bosom, and
+covering his fair little face--which was very like her own--with
+kisses; "You shall go with mother next time, my sweet. Don't cry, dear
+little man! Suppose mother brings him home a pretty new toy? What shall
+mother bring Alfy home, nurse, eh?"
+
+"I don't want toys, I want to go with you, mother," wailed Alfy.
+
+"Oh, well, I think he might," said Rachel, weakly. "It is a fine
+afternoon, and he would enjoy it so! And his father hasn't seen him for
+four days. Dress him quickly, nurse, and I'll take him. You needn't come
+to-day, I can look after him quite well by myself for once."
+
+Alfy was accordingly dressed, his nurse performing that operation
+silently, with a mien of severe disapproval, and his mother kneeling on
+the floor and helping her.
+
+When he was ready--looking, Rachel thought, more nearly like an angel
+than ever child looked before--he was carried downstairs in her own
+caressing arms, resting his curly head on her sable collar, and clasping
+his mites of hands round her white throat; and she placed him in the
+carriage beside her, and tucked up his little legs in the soft bearskin,
+and they set forth together to Spencer Street in a state of beatific
+satisfaction and enjoyment, slightly qualified by Rachel's well-founded
+apprehension that her husband would scold her for spoiling the child and
+making a nursemaid of herself.
+
+When Mr. Kingston arrived at the station, closely muffled in overcoat
+and comforters, it was evident to Rachel's experienced eye--or ear
+rather, for as she knew he would object to her waiting unattended on the
+platform, she stayed in the carriage and sent the footman to meet him at
+the train and to take his baggage, and so heard him before she saw
+him--that he was in anything but a good temper.
+
+He rated an unfortunate porter who drove a barrow in his way in
+unnecessarily violent terms, and then he demanded angrily of his servant
+why the dickens they hadn't brought the brougham for him on such a
+bitter day.
+
+"Oh, Graham," said Rachel, stretching out her hand, "how do you do,
+dear? I am so sorry!--but I thought you would like the open carriage
+best. It was beautifully mild when we started--it has been quite a warm
+day. And here is Alfy come to meet you. He is quite well, again, you
+see, and such a good little boy, aren't you, Alfy? He is taking care of
+his mother to-day, and sitting so quietly."
+
+"Why did you bring him out in the cold?" responded the father
+snappishly. "And where's the nurse? At home? Upon my word, Rachel, we
+might as well be spared the expense of servants altogether, for all the
+use you make of them. No, I won't kiss him--I might give him a sore
+throat."
+
+"Have you a sore throat, dear?" inquired Rachel meekly, tucking the
+child into her own corner of the carriage, and whispering to him to sit
+very still.
+
+"I should rather say so--not so much a sore throat, perhaps, as a
+general bad cold--the most confounded bad cold I ever had in my life.
+I'm regularly seedy and done up," grumbled Mr. Kingston, climbing into
+his seat beside her.
+
+"Oh, dear, I'm so sorry!"
+
+"That is why I have come home to-day," he added. "It's the most wretched
+thing to be in other people's houses when you don't feel well."
+
+"Indeed it is," assented Rachel sympathetically; "and I am very glad you
+came back. How did you catch it, do you think?"
+
+"I think I must have got it before I started. But that idiot Lambert
+sent an open trap to meet me--you know what a pouring wet day it turned
+out? --and I had to sit and be soaked for an hour and a half. Umbrellas
+were no good in that rain, and there was a sharp wind, too, and before
+we reached the house--great, cold barrack of a place, with stingy little
+coal fires--fancy _coal_ fires!--shows what an idiot the fellow is, and
+she's worse--before we got there I was thoroughly wet through, and
+chilled to the bone. I never was so cold in my life. I took a hot bath
+before I dressed for dinner, and I got Lambert to send me up some
+brandy, but it was no use--it seemed to have regularly struck into me. I
+_couldn't_ get warm--not till about the middle of the night, and then I
+felt as if I'd got a fever. I believe I have too."
+
+"Oh, Graham, I hope not."
+
+"It has settled on my chest," he went on. "I haven't been able to sleep
+for coughing--you know I have never had a cough in my life--and I can't
+draw a breath without feeling as if I was dragging something up by the
+roots. Can't you hear how I breathe? You never heard me breathe like
+that before did you?"
+
+Rachel turned her blooming face, now grave and anxious, to listen to his
+respiration, which certainly was strangely quick and laboured, and
+noisy, and she was struck by a great change in _his_ since she had seen
+it four days ago. It had become all at once wrinkled, and hollow, and
+haggard--the face of an old man.
+
+"Oh, my dear," she exclaimed, in an accent of genuine distress, "you
+_have_ got a bad cold, indeed! Hadn't you better call on the doctor at
+once--it won't be much out of our way--and see what he says about it? It
+may be nothing, but I think it seems like bronchitis, and it is best to
+be on the safe side."
+
+"I think I will," said Mr. Kingston, covering his mouth with his wraps
+again. "It seems worse than it was when I started--the cold day, I
+suppose. Hang it, I wish you had brought the brougham--it is colder than
+ever!"
+
+And he shivered under an accumulation of great-coats and furs that one
+would have thought sufficient for the temperature of polar regions.
+
+The carriage was stopped in Collins Street, and remained in the
+doctors' quarter until little Alfy fell asleep, and was temporarily put
+to bed under the long, soft skirt of his mother's jacket. Then, as the
+dusk was falling, Mr. Kingston came back to his place, and tremulously
+commanded the coachman to drive home as fast as he possibly could.
+
+"He says it is inflammation of the lungs, Rachel," he whispered
+excitedly, "and that I must go to bed at once. Only a touch he called
+it, but he didn't look as if he thought it a touch. He is coming up
+to-night to do something. He says I ought to have come home the first
+day, and not have let it run on. Inflammation of the lungs--that is a
+dreadful thing, isn't it? I have never had it, but I have heard of
+it--it's a most dangerous complaint!"
+
+"Oh, no, dear, not dangerous, except when people are careless," said
+Rachel soothingly, taking his hand under the fur rug and clasping it
+between her own. "And now you are home, with me to nurse you, you will
+soon get all right. Many people have it slightly--it is quite a common
+thing with a bad cold--but when they are well nursed and taken care of,
+they soon get all right again."
+
+"Good little woman! you will take care of me, I know."
+
+"Indeed I will," she responded, slipping up one hand under his arm, and
+resting her cheek on his coat-sleeve. "I wish you had come back to me
+before. But, once I get you fairly into my hands, I'll soon nurse you
+round."
+
+However, though she did all that a woman and a wife, and one born to be
+the genius of a sick room, could do, she did not nurse him round. By the
+time he reached home, where the household was thrown into a panic of
+consternation, he was very ill indeed--his fright about himself helping
+very much to develop the bad symptoms rapidly; and the doctor, who next
+day summoned other doctors in consultation upon the case, pronounced
+him--not in words, but by unmistakable signs--to be in a serious and
+critical condition. The attack had been severe from the first; it had
+been allowed to run on for several days; and the constitution of the
+patient, enervated and shattered by years of unwholesome indulgence,
+was as little fitted to stand an illness as any constitution could be.
+The pain in breathing grew worse and worse, and the fever hotter and
+drier; and then stupor came on, and delirium, and exhaustion, and by and
+bye a filmy cloud over the sunken eyes, and a dusky pallor over the old,
+old, wrinkled face; and, in spite of all the doctors, and all the
+nurses, and all that money could do--in spite of the agonised devotion
+of his young wife, who never left him for more than five minutes at a
+time, taking snatches of sleep only when he slept, sitting by the
+bedside, and resting her tired head on the same pillow that she smoothed
+for his--it was over in less than a week. And a little paragraph
+appeared in "The Argus" one morning, to shock that small world of which
+he had so long been a distinguished ornament, with the incomprehensible
+intelligence that he was "gone," and would never be seen at a club mess
+or in a festive drawing-room again.
+
+On the night of his death, when fever and pain and restlessness were
+sinking away with the sinking pulse, and when Rachel, watching beside
+him, thought he was past knowing anyone--even her--he looked at her with
+a gleam of loving recognition. "Good little woman!" he muttered in a
+struggling whisper. "Dear, good little woman!"
+
+She stooped over him at once with a yearning passion of pity and vague
+remorse, and kissed him, and laid her white arms about him, raining
+tears on his dying face and his cold limp hands.
+
+"Oh, Graham, Graham, I have not been good enough to you!" she cried.
+"And you have been so good--so kind--to me!"
+
+He continued to look at her with dull wistful, pathetic eyes.
+
+"Have I?" he gasped, feebly. "Have I?"
+
+And then the gleam died out of his face in the shrouding darkness that
+was creeping over him. He was quiet for several minutes, and Rachel laid
+her cheek on the pillow beside him, and listened to the faint rattle
+which now and then told that the "step or two dubious of twilight"
+between sleep and death was not yet crossed, motioning the other
+watchers away from the bedside, that he and she might be alone together.
+
+And suddenly he roused himself, and said--panting the words out slowly
+and huskily, but evidently with a perfect consciousness of their
+meaning--"Rachel--you can--have him--now."
+
+Her arm was under his pillow, and she drew it back to her gently until
+his head lay next her breast.
+
+"Hush--hush--hush!" she said, with choking sobs. But he went on
+steadily, as if he had not heard her.
+
+"Only tell him--not to--not to--lead little Alfy--into bad ways."
+
+After a pause, he said,
+
+"Do you hear!--tell him--"
+
+"He will not--he could not!" she broke out eagerly. "He is a good, good
+man, though people think he is not! He will take care of little Alfy, my
+darling--do not be afraid--he will never lead him into bad ways--never
+never!"
+
+Ought she to have said it? Had she given him--she, who, at this moment,
+would have laid down her life to save his, if that had been
+possible--the comfort she had meant to give, or a most cruel, cruel
+stab, in his last conscious hour? She looked at him with agonised,
+imploring face, which mutely prayed him to try and understand her; and
+there came slowly into his sunken eyes a vague intelligence and a dim,
+dim smile. He _did_ understand her--better, perhaps, than he had ever
+understood her before.
+
+"Good little woman!" he murmured, "Good little girl--to tell the truth."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+FULFILMENT.
+
+
+Rachel, who could not have dissembled if she had tried, appeared to be
+overwhelmed by Mr. Kingston's sudden death.
+
+She wept herself ill, sitting now in his library chair, now in his
+office, now in his dressing-room, with mementoes of his domestic
+occupations and the homely companionship of nearly half-a-dozen wedded
+years around her; missing him from his accustomed place with a sense of
+having lost one of the best and kindest husbands that ever ungrateful
+woman had.
+
+She allowed no one to touch his clothes and trinkets, or his books and
+pipes, or anything that he had used and cared for, but herself; and she
+cried over them, and kissed them, and laid them away in sacred drawers,
+to be treasured relics and heirlooms for her little Alfy, who was to be
+taught to reverence the memory of the tenderest of fathers, and to hand
+down to unborn generations the name and fame of the most accomplished
+and estimable of men.
+
+She wandered about her great, silent house, in and out of the spacious
+rooms, making loving inventories of all the rich appointments, which
+had never had so much grace and beauty as now.
+
+"He built this lovely place for _me_," she would say to herself, or
+perhaps say aloud to Beatrice, who was her chief companion at this time,
+"He had this carved dado made because _I_ didn't like tiles; he gave me
+this Florentine cabinet on my twentieth birthday; he chose these
+hangings himself because he said they suited my complexion." Every bit
+of the house and its furniture was newly sanctified by some of these
+reminiscences.
+
+She gathered together all his letters reverently--some had been waiting
+for his return from Mr. Lambert's, and were still unopened; and though
+many of them were addressed in the kind of handwriting that was
+especially calculated to arouse curiosity, she would not pry into his
+correspondence, nor allow anyone else to do so.
+
+She would not read what he had evidently never intended her to read; she
+burnt them all without taking one of them out of its envelope, and then
+drove to the cemetery with a wreath of flowers for his grave.
+
+"He was the best of husbands," she said, when to her own people she
+talked of him.
+
+And Mrs. Hardy, who was truly afflicted by the family bereavement, was
+comforted to be able to repeat this tender formula to all the gossip of
+her own circle.
+
+"He was the best of husbands. So fond of her to the last! Even when he
+was delirious you could see plainly his distress when she went out of
+the room, and his relief when she came back again. And she was so
+devoted! Such a thoroughly suitable marriage in every way--as if they
+had been made for each other! She is broken-hearted for the loss of him.
+And how _he_ valued _her_ he has plainly proved."
+
+And here the gossips would smile decorously, and shake their heads, and
+say, "Yes, indeed." For they all understood what this allusion meant. It
+meant that Mr. Kingston had left the half of his great property
+absolutely at his young wife's disposal, and that she was the sole and
+unrestricted trustee of the rest, which was settled upon his son; which
+certainly _did_ prove that he had valued her in the most conclusive
+manner.
+
+But in a little while--a scandalously little while--indications that
+this young widow of twenty-five was not inconsolable for the loss of her
+elderly husband, became apparent to all but the most superficial
+observers.
+
+It was not that she wore such very slight mourning--soft black silks and
+cashmeres that were the merest apology for weeds--for everybody knew
+that Mr. Kingston had had a horror of crape, and had been repeatedly
+heard to declare that no wife of his should wear it if he could help it.
+
+Mrs. Hardy had explained that it was in deference to his wishes that she
+had defied custom in this respect; and, though there was a strong
+impression that she ought to have insisted on paying proper respect to
+his memory, in spite of him--and even that his protests against
+conventional suttee were never intended to include this particular case
+(as was very probable), but only indicated his personal distaste for
+harsh and unbecoming materials in ladies' apparel--the fact that it was
+growing the fashion to be lax and independent in these matters, saved
+her the verdict of the majority.
+
+And it was not that she drove about, within two months of his death,
+with her veil turned back over her bonnet--in the case of a veil so
+transparent, it didn't make much difference whether it were up or
+down--leaving her youthful, lovely, rose-leaf face exposed to public
+view as heretofore.
+
+It was not that she was heartless or unfeeling, or that she infringed
+the laws of good breeding and good taste in any distinctly and visible
+manner.
+
+No one could quite say what it was, and yet everyone felt that the fact
+was sufficiently indicated that she was recovering from the shock of her
+sudden and terrible bereavement with unexpected, if not unbecoming,
+rapidity.
+
+"You mark my words," somebody would say to somebody else, when Mrs.
+Kingston's carriage went flashing by, and she turned to bow to them,
+perhaps with her serene, sweet, grave smile; "you mark my words--that
+woman will be married again by this time next year. I don't know what
+makes me think so, but I am sure of it. There is a look in her face as
+if she were going to make herself happy."
+
+The person addressed, being a man, would probably reply that the odd
+thing would be if she _did_ not make herself happy (and generally he
+suggested that by remaining a widow she would be most likely to secure
+that object), with youth and beauty, leisure and liberty, and ten
+thousand a year to do what she liked with; and that he sincerely hoped
+she would be.
+
+Being a woman, she was more likely than not to look after Rachel and her
+carriage with solemn severity, and wonder how it was that that poor,
+dear, foolish man never could see that the girl cared nothing at all
+about him, and had only married him for his money.
+
+Mrs. Hardy was becoming aware of this state of public opinion with
+respect to her niece's conduct--which had been so extremely proper
+hitherto--and was herself conscious of the subtle change that had taken
+place, and was uneasily wondering what it indicated, when one day Rachel
+came to see her.
+
+It was eleven o'clock on a warm summer morning, just before Christmas;
+and the young widow walked over through the gardens and the back gate,
+wearing a light, black cambric dress and a shady straw hat,
+looking--Mrs. Hardy thought, glancing up at her from her writing-table
+in a cool corner of the now transformed drawing-room--unusually well and
+strikingly young and girlish.
+
+"Well, my dear, how are you? And where's Alfy? Have you not brought him
+with you?"
+
+Rachel put her arm over her aunt's shoulder, and kissed her
+affectionately.
+
+"I haven't brought him to-day, because I wanted to have a little quiet
+talk," she said. "Are you very busy, auntie?"
+
+Mrs. Hardy _was_ busy--she always was, from breakfast until lunch time;
+but she was impressed by a certain gentle gravity in Rachel's voice and
+manner, and understood that there was something of importance to be
+attended to. So she gathered up her papers, told her visitor to take off
+her hat and sit down, and inquired anxiously what was the matter.
+
+"There is nothing the matter," said Rachel, with a little hesitation.
+"But, auntie dear, I am going to--do something, and I would not do it
+without telling you first."
+
+She sat upon the edge of a chair, and leaned her arms on a corner of the
+writing-table; and she looked into the elder woman's face with wistful,
+longing, pleading eyes.
+
+Mrs. Hardy had faint, instinctive premonitions.
+
+"Well, my dear," she replied a little brusquely, "I shall be glad to
+advise you to the best of my power. But you are your own mistress now,
+you know." Then after a little pause, she said anxiously, "What is it
+you are going to do?"
+
+"Auntie," faltered Rachel, "auntie--you know all about Mr. Dalrymple?"
+
+"_Rachel_--my _dear_--you _don't_ mean to say--! And your poor husband
+not six months in his grave!"
+
+"Not yet," said Rachel, suddenly becoming composed and collected.
+"Though I do not believe that I _ought_ to put it off. But presently,
+auntie--as soon as you would think it right--I want to marry Mr.
+Dalrymple. And in the meantime he is waiting for me to send him a
+message--he has asked me to write--we want to have the comfort of some
+sort of recognised engagement, if it is ever so quiet----"
+
+"Oh, Rachel, don't ask me to have anything to do with such a thing! Only
+think what poor Graham would say if he could know! And he left little
+Alfy in your hands--and he left all that money to you--little thinking
+what you would do with it!"
+
+"He knew--he knew," said Rachel. "_He_ has already sanctioned it. Dear,
+good husband! He left me the money without any conditions if I married
+again, and he _knew_ I should do this. It was understood between us when
+he died. Aunt Elizabeth, I think he wished to make reparation to Roden
+and me. Don't you wish it, too? Only think, it is six years--six whole
+years--that poor Roden has been lonely in Queensland, without any
+brightness or comfort in his life; and, though he has loved me just the
+same, he has never attempted to do--what you would not have wished him
+to do--all that time. It is six years this very week, Aunt Elizabeth,
+since he sent Mr. Gordon down to you."
+
+"And if he had come himself," said Mrs. Hardy, passionately, beginning
+to break down and cry, "I should not have let him see you--I would not
+have allowed you to have him. Oh, child, child! when you have grown-up
+daughters to look after and manage for, you will understand that I tried
+to do my best for you--you will think less hardly of me then."
+
+Rachel jumped up from her chair, and kneeling down flung her warm young
+arms about the sobbing woman.
+
+"My own auntie," she exclaimed fondly, "if I could think hardly of you I
+should be ashamed to live. I _know_ you tried to do your best for me--of
+course I know it! It is always a mistake to deceive people, but _I_
+deceived _you_, too, not telling you all I had done. I know you were
+right to keep me away from him knowing only what you knew. If he _had_
+been wicked, as you thought, and I had had it all my own way, what would
+have become of me? But now--now that you know he is good----"
+
+"Ah, my dear, I don't know it! Remember that dreadful duel! And how can
+you tell that he doesn't want you now for your money? He has none of his
+own, and you have a great fortune that he could squander as he liked.
+Everyone will say that it was for the sake of your money."
+
+"It would sooner have been that the money would have kept him from me,"
+said Rachel softly. "Once I was afraid of _that_. But afterwards I was
+ashamed that I could have any fears. We understand each other better.
+Aunt Elizabeth, Beatrice knows that he is good--Beatrice believes in
+him--and my dear Graham gave me leave to make him happy. Won't you
+consent to it, too?"
+
+"Well, if poor Graham gave you leave it is not for me to interfere, I
+suppose. But you _won't_ let anyone know you are engaged so soon?"
+
+"It need only be known to ourselves, auntie."
+
+"And you'll promise me you won't get married again _under_ the year, at
+the very earliest?"
+
+"Yes, dear Aunt Elizabeth, I will promise you that. If I can go and stay
+at Adelonga for a little, and take Alfy----"
+
+"Is he down at the Digbys?"
+
+"Yes, auntie."
+
+"Perhaps that will be the best plan," said Mrs. Hardy, sighing. "It is
+a quiet place, and out of the way, if only Lucilla doesn't gossip about
+it."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+CONCLUSION.
+
+
+Mrs. Thornley was a little scandalised like her mother, at first, not by
+Rachel's desire to marry again--for that she should do so, as a rich
+young widow of twenty-five, "left" by a husband just forty years her
+senior, was generally anticipated as a matter of course--but by the too
+early announcement of those wishes and intentions which conventional
+decorum forbade a woman to dream of until "the year" was up.
+
+Very speedily, however, she forgot to be shocked by anything of this
+kind, and devoted herself ardently to the furtherance of her cousin's
+happiness.
+
+She had had Mr. Dalrymple at Adelonga after his accident, and had nursed
+him for about a month of his convalescence; and since that time both she
+and John had had a strong feeling of friendship for him, not much less
+than that which they had always had for their favourite, Mrs. Digby.
+
+They had condoned all the errors of his earlier years (even the great
+duel, which Mr. Gordon had assured them was the worst episode in a
+reckless but not dishonourable career, and was in itself unstained by
+any mean or vicious motives), and they had proved the sincerity of their
+respect and regard for him by allowing their son Bruce to "chum" with
+him in Queensland.
+
+And now, being put in possession of all the facts relating to his and
+Rachel's love affairs, Lucilla entered eagerly into the arrangements
+which Rachel herself, without a blush of shame, suggested for bringing
+the long-parted lovers together again.
+
+"Oh, _yes_, my darling," she wrote hurriedly, by return of post, "pray
+_do_ come and spend all the summer with us. Mamma says that as it is so
+_very_, _very_ soon we must be careful to keep it _quite_ quiet, but
+John wishes me particularly to tell you that, in _his_ opinion, you are
+_quite right_.
+
+"We both like Mr. Dalrymple _very much_, and we think he has behaved _so
+very well_. And John says he is not at all a spendthrift _now_, whatever
+he may have been _once_, and he thinks _really_ that he will take care
+of your money and not squander it away (only he says you must let him
+arrange things for you on your marriage--which _must_ take place at
+Adelonga--so as to be _quite_ on the safe side); for they have had both
+floods and droughts _very_ badly at their place in Queensland, and yet
+they have made it pay, which John says he _never_ expected. Bruce
+thinks so much of the property and the way it has been managed, that I
+am sure he will want to go in with Mr. Gordon if Mr. Dalrymple will let
+us buy him out (perhaps he _won't_ now the meat-freezing is going to do
+such great things.) But these are details to talk of presently. We must
+get you here first.
+
+"If you can come on Tuesday, _do_. John will meet you at the train. I
+have written to Mr. Dalrymple to come the _next_ day, for you must not
+be excited and upset until you have had time for a _good rest_ after
+your journey. I am having the blue south room got ready for you--the one
+you _used_ to like--and the large dressing-room next to it for dear
+little Alfy. _I_ don't think you ought to send away your maid. Won't it
+_look_ odd after being used to one for so long? I have _plenty_ of room
+for her as well as for the nurse, &c., &c."
+
+On the Tuesday, Rachel, with Alfy and his nurse, arrived, having
+dismissed some of her servants and put the rest on board wages, having
+packed up her most precious china and art treasures, and swathed her
+splendid upholstery in sheets of brown holland, prepared to spend any
+length of time at Adelonga that circumstances would admit of.
+
+It was a beautiful day in January, rather too hot for travelling in
+comfort, but pleasant and breezy about the Adelonga-hills and the bosky
+garden that sheltered the old house. It was the same old house still,
+Rachel was thankful to see. Mr. Thornley had been building with brick
+and stone in town, and so had been content to leave to his country seat,
+the picturesque charm of its wooden walls and its medley of low roofs
+and gables; and now it stood embowered in cool vine leaves and
+sweet-scented creepers, with great trees of pink oleander, which loved
+the sultry midsummer, nestling up against it, and making broad splashes
+of sunny colour amid the sombre richness of evergreen shrubs--a sort of
+earthly paradise in Rachel's eyes. Lucilla was standing on the verandah,
+surrounded by all her family (except her grown-up step daughter,
+Isabel, who had been sent on a visit to an aunt in Sydney to be "out of
+the way") waiting to greet her welcome guest; and Rachel, jumping down
+from the buggy, and flinging herself into those faithful arms, felt that
+she had been a wandering prodigal in strange countries for half a dozen
+years, and was on the threshold of home again.
+
+"But, oh," she said to herself, when having seen little Alfy tucked up
+in his cot, and having, maidless, with her own hands, laid away her
+clothes in drawers and wardrobes, she began to dress for dinner, "_what_
+could have made Lucilla imagine that waiting for him for twenty-four
+hours would _rest_ me?"
+
+The long hours passed, however, as the longest hours do, and the evening
+of Wednesday drew on with a flaming crimson sunset; and Rachel listened
+for the sound of buggy wheels on distant bush tracks, and was deafened
+by the noise of her own loud-beating heart.
+
+"They are coming," whispered Lucilla, creeping with the stealth of a
+conspirator into her cool, dim drawing-room, where the young widow
+stood, bright-eyed and pale, in her black gown, steadying herself with a
+hand on the piano.
+
+"Shall I send him in to you by himself, dear, or would he think that was
+bad taste--a too open and vulgar way of recognising the state of
+affairs?"
+
+"Oh, no, he would think not it vulgar," replied Rachel, smiling slightly
+through her air of solemn and rapt abstraction. "You must send him by
+himself, Lucilla, please--this once."
+
+The buggy came into the garden and passed the window. Lucilla, outside
+on the verandah, welcomed her guest with effusive inquiries after Mrs.
+Digby's health and welfare, and that of all the little Digbys'
+respectively; Mr. Thornley gave loud directions to the servants about
+the portmanteau that was to be carried to the green gable room. And then
+the buggy went to the stable-yard; there was a few minutes' silence; and
+the door of the drawing-room opened quietly, and Roden Dalrymple came
+in.
+
+He had changed a little in the four years since she had seen him last;
+his ruddy moustache was a little more grizzled, and the lines in his
+sun-tanned forehead were stronger and deeper.
+
+She was changed, too; there was a matronly grace and maturity in the
+roundness of her shapely figure and in the reposeful softness of her
+face, that had been wanting in the beauty, fresh and delicate as he
+remembered it, of her earlier girlish years.
+
+But the only change they recognised in one another was their deeper
+capacity for understanding the worth and the meaning of such an
+experience as this, when, with his back against the closed door, and her
+hands about his neck, he held her in both arms clasped close to his
+breast, and they drank together in one moment of speechless passion the
+solace and the sweetness of all the kisses that they _should_ have had.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the evening Lucilla sat down to the piano, to play some of
+Beethoven's sonatas to her husband. It was a lovely moonshiny summer
+night, and some of the windows stood open, letting in the fragrance of
+jessamine and tobacco, and a quantity of tiny moths and gnats.
+
+Mr. Thornley, having taken his coffee and his cigarette upon the
+verandah, lying all along on a bamboo easy chair, stayed there to listen
+and doze in obscurity, with his handkerchief thrown over his bald head
+to keep off the mosquitoes.
+
+For a few minutes Mr. Dalrymple stood behind his hostess; but, finding
+that she played from memory, and therefore did not want leaves turned
+over for her, he left the piano, and crossing the room, stooped down to
+Rachel as she sat in a low chair dreamily fanning herself.
+
+"Rachel," he whispered, "is the lapageria in blossom now?"
+
+"I don't know, Roden--I don't think so," she replied.
+
+"Shall we go and see?"
+
+She rose at once, and they went together into the curtained alcove and
+through the noiseless swing door.
+
+"Where is our seat?" he said, taking her hand as soon as they were
+alone, and leading her down the dim alleys, over-arched with fern trees,
+and filled with broken shadows of the gigantic fronds. "I hope it is in
+the same place."
+
+It was in the same place, but the place was stiller and darker than it
+used to be--built all round and about with gnarled masses of cork,
+feathered in every crevice with maiden hair, and roofed with drooping
+leaves.
+
+There was just moonlight enough to enable them to find it, and when they
+found it they sat down side by side, and Rachel laid her head on one of
+her lover's broad shoulders and her hand on the other; and they remained
+there for several minutes without moving or speaking, listening to the
+far-off sound of the piano, more perfectly at rest than either of them
+had ever imagined it possible to be in this world.
+
+Mr. Dalrymple spoke first, drawing a long breath.
+
+"_Must_ we be separated any more, Rachel? Can't we be married now--this
+week--to-morrow--and go away from everybody quietly? It seems like
+tempting Providence to lose sight of one another again--to lose one hour
+more than we can help of what we have been kept out of all this time."
+
+"It does--it does," assented Rachel. "But I promised Aunt Elizabeth that
+I would be a widow for a year."
+
+"You were a widow for me--how many years?"
+
+"I know, Roden, I know. I do not do it willingly. But other
+people--other things--have to be considered."
+
+"Six months more! Child, no one has any right to demand such an enormous
+sacrifice of us. Who knows how long we may live to be together as we
+want to be together? Can we afford to throw away six months on the top
+of six years for the sake of mere sham propriety, knowing the worth of
+every hour as we do?"
+
+"Roden," said Rachel gently, after a pause, "it shall be just as you
+like. If you think we ought not to wait, we will not. I can explain to
+Aunt Elizabeth."
+
+And then he recognised his responsibilities.
+
+"No," he said, "I think perhaps we had better wait--though there _is_ no
+sense or justice in it. We'll pay Mrs. Grundy the heaviest price that
+she has swindled honest people of for many a day, and then we'll take it
+out with interest. But you will do something for me in the meantime?"
+
+"There is nothing I could do for you that I should not want to do for
+myself, Roden."
+
+"You won't go quite away, will you? You'll stay here till I have to
+leave, and then you'll come and stay a long while with Lily? You'll let
+me have sight of you, and keep watch over you, until the waiting time is
+up?" There was no answer required for this question. What they could do
+for one another they would, as both well knew. He held her tightly in
+his arms, covering half her face with his great moustache. "And when the
+time is up we will not wait one hour--not one," he said, with sudden,
+strong passion. "That very day, Rachel, I shall take you away to
+Queensland, where nobody can reach us and nothing can interfere with us.
+When at last I _do_ get you, I will have you--for a little while at all
+events--absolutely and wholly to myself."
+
+And Rachel prayed that she might be permitted to live until that "little
+while" should come.
+
+It seemed, in this moment of anticipation, something that it would be
+presumptuous for a mortal woman to hope for, much less to expect.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And should Love, when all is said and done, be the ruler and lord of
+all--supreme arbiter of the destinies of purblind creatures, not one in
+ten, perhaps not one in fifty, of whom have the faculty to see him and
+know him as he is?
+
+Should the passion of wayward girls defy the wisdom and wishes of
+parents and guardians, who have learned in long years of costly
+experience something of the potentialities of this many-sided life?
+
+Should all risks of poverty and social ignominy, with their long train
+of trials and temptations, involving the welfare of innocent relatives
+and unborn children, be dared in an irrevocable moment of enthusiasm for
+one's faith in the eternal fidelity of any man or woman?
+
+Like many other questions that trouble us in this world, wherein nothing
+seems quite right and nothing altogether wrong, we are constrained to
+leave it for the history of future ages, that we shall never see, to
+answer.
+
+Knowing only what we know, we must not say "yes"--we cannot say "no." We
+have not sufficient light for any such generalities.
+
+But when one finds this unique treasure of human life, to whom it is,
+with respect to his tangible earthly possessions, what the pearl of
+great price was to the merchantman of Scripture, there seems no better
+thing for him to do than to sell all that he has to buy it, so long as
+he sells only what is absolutely his own, and none of the rights and
+privileges that belong to other people.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+London: Printed by A. Schulze, 13, Poland Street. (S. & H.)
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's A Mere Chance, Vol. 3 of 3, by Ada Cambridge
+
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