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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40408 ***
+
+  A DEVOTEE
+
+  An Episode in the Life of a Butterfly
+
+  BY
+  MARY CHOLMONDELEY
+  AUTHOR OF
+  'DIANA TEMPEST,' 'SIR CHARLES DANVERS,' AND 'THE
+  DANVERS JEWELS'
+
+  _SECOND EDITION_
+
+  EDWARD ARNOLD
+
+  LONDON                 NEW YORK
+  37 BEDFORD STREET      70 FIFTH AVENUE
+
+  1897
+  _All rights reserved_
+
+
+
+
+  To
+  FLORIE,
+  UPON WHOSE KIND STRONG HAND
+  I HAVE SO OFTEN LEANT.
+
+
+
+
+                          'That day is sure,
+    Though not perhaps this week, nor month, nor year,
+    When your great love shall clean forgotten be,
+    And my poor tenderness shall yet endure.'
+
+    WILFRID S. BLUNT.
+
+
+
+
+A DEVOTEE.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+    'Yet to be loved makes not to love again;
+     Not at my years, however it hold in youth.'
+
+     TENNYSON.
+
+
+The cathedral was crammed. The tall slender arches seemed to spring out
+of a vast sea of human heads. The orchestra and chorus had gradually
+merged into one person: one shout of praise, one voice of prayer, one
+wail of terror. The _Elijah_ was in mid-career, sailing like a
+man-of-war upon the rushing waves of music.
+
+And presently there was a hush, and out of the hush a winged voice
+arose, as a lark rises out of a meadow, singing as it rises:
+
+'O rest in the Lord, wait patiently for Him, and He shall give thee thy
+heart's desire.'
+
+The lark dropped into its nest again. The music swept thundering upon
+its way, and a large tear fell unnoticed from a young girl's eyes on to
+the bare slim hand which held her score. The score quivered; the slender
+willowy figure quivered in its setting of palest violet and white
+draperies threaded with silver. Only a Frenchwoman could have dared to
+translate a child's posy of pale blue and white violets, tied with a
+silver string, into a gown; but Sibyl Carruthers' dressmaker was an
+artist in her way, and took an artist's license, and the half-mourning
+which she had designed for the great heiress was in colouring what a
+bereaved butterfly might have worn.
+
+Miss Carruthers was called beautiful. Perhaps she was beautiful for an
+heiress, but she was certainly not, in reality, any prettier than many
+hundreds of dowerless girls who had never been considered more than
+good-looking.
+
+Her delicate features were too irregular, in spite of their obvious high
+breeding; her figure was too slight; her complexion was too faintly
+tinted for regular beauty. But she had something of the evanescent charm
+of a four-petalled dog-rose newly blown--exquisite, ethereal, but as if
+it might fall in a moment. This aspect of fragility was heightened by
+what women noticed about her first, namely, her gossamer gown with its
+silver gleam, and by what men noticed about her first--her gray eyes,
+pathetic, eager, shy by turns, always lovely, but hinting of a sword too
+sharp for its slender sheath, of an ardent spirit whose grasp on this
+world was too slight.
+
+And as the music passed over her young untried soul, she sat motionless,
+her hands clasping the score. She heard nothing of it, but it
+accompanied the sudden tempest of passion which was shaking her, as wind
+accompanies storm.
+
+The voice of the song had stirred an avalanche of emotion.
+
+'And I will give thee thy heart's desire.'
+
+She knew nothing about waiting patiently, but her heart's desire--she
+must have it. She could not live without it. Her whole soul went out in
+an agony of prayer to the God who gives and who withholds to accord
+her this one petition--to _be his wife_. She repeated it over and over
+again. To be near him, to see him day by day--nothing else, nothing
+else! This one thing, without which, poor child! she thought she could
+not live. It seemed to Sibyl that she was falling at God's feet in the
+whirlwind, and refusing to let Him go until He granted her prayer. But
+would He grant it? Her heart sank. Despair rushed in upon her like a
+flood at the bare thought of its refusal, and she caught yet again at
+the only hope left to her--a desperate appeal to the God who gives and
+who withholds.
+
+Presently it was all over, and they were going out.
+
+'We were to wait for the others here,' said Peggy, the girl who had been
+sitting with Sibyl, as they emerged into the sunshine with the crowd.
+'Mother and Mr. Doll were just behind us.'
+
+Lady Pierpoint, Sibyl's aunt, presently joined them with Mr. Doll
+Loftus, an irreproachable-looking, unapproachable-looking fair young
+man, who, it was whispered, was almost too smart to live, but who
+nevertheless bore himself with severe simplicity.
+
+He went up to Sibyl with some diffidence.
+
+'You are tired,' he said anxiously.
+
+Doll's remarks were considered _banal_ in the extreme by some women, but
+others who admired fair hair and pathetic eyes found a thoughtful beauty
+in them.
+
+It would be difficult from her manner to infer which class of sentiments
+this particular remark awoke in Sibyl.
+
+'Music always tires me,' she replied, without looking at him, dropping
+her white eyelids.
+
+'Are we all here?' said Lady Pierpoint. 'Peggy, and Sibyl--my dear, how
+tired you look!--and myself, and you, Mr. Doll; that is only four, and
+"we are seven." Ah! here come Mr. and Mrs. Cathcart. Now we only want
+Mr. Loftus.'
+
+'The Dean caught him in the doorway,' said Doll. 'He is coming now.'
+
+The tall thin figure of an elder man was slowly crossing the angular
+patch of sunshine where the cathedral had not cast its great shadow. The
+nobility of his bearing seemed to appeal to the crowd. They made way for
+him instinctively, as if he were some distinguished personage. He was
+accompanied by a robust clerical figure with broad calves.
+
+'Mr. Loftus makes everyone else look common,' said Peggy plaintively.
+'It is the only unkind thing I know about him. I thought the Dean quite
+dignified-looking while we were at luncheon at the Deanery, but now he
+looks like a pork-butcher. I'm not going to walk within ten yards of Mr.
+Loftus, mummy, or I shall be taken for a parlourmaid having her day out.
+I think, Sibyl, you are the only one who can afford to go with him.'
+
+But Doll thought differently, and it was he and Sibyl who walked the
+short distance to the station together through the flag-decked streets
+in the brilliant September sunshine. People turned to glance at them as
+they passed. They made a striking-looking couple. Mr. Loftus, following
+slowly at a little distance with Lady Pierpoint, looked affectionately
+at the back of his young cousin, who was also his heir, and said to
+her, with a smile:
+
+'I wish it could be. Doll is a good fellow.'
+
+'I wish indeed it could,' said Lady Pierpoint earnestly, with the slight
+slackening of reserve which is often observable in the atmosphere on the
+last afternoon of a visit with a purpose.
+
+Lady Pierpoint had not come to spend a whole week with a Sunday in it
+with Mr. Loftus at Wilderleigh for nothing. And she was aware that
+neither had she and her niece and daughter been invited for that long
+period without a cause. But the week ended with the following morning,
+and she sighed. She had daughters of her own coming on, as well as her
+dear snub-nosed Peggy, who was already out, and it was natural to wish
+that the responsibility of this delicate, emotional creature, with her
+great wealth, might be taken from her and placed in safe hands. She
+thought Doll was safe. Perhaps the wish was father, or rather _aunt_, to
+the thought. But it was no doubt the truest epithet that could be
+applied to the young man. It was a matter of opinion whether he was
+exhaustingly dull in conversation or extraordinarily interesting, but he
+certainly was safe. He belonged to that class of our latter-day youth of
+whom it may be predicted, with some confidence, that they will never
+cause their belongings a moment's uneasiness; who may be trusted never
+to do anything very right or very wrong; who will get on tolerably well
+in any position, and with any woman, provided there are means to support
+it and--_her_; who have enough worldliness to marry money, and enough
+good feeling to make irreproachable husbands afterwards; in short, the
+kind of young men who are invented by Providence on purpose to marry
+heiresses, and who, if they fall below their vocation, dwindle, when
+their youth is over, into the padded impecunious bores of society.
+
+There was a short journey by rail through the hop country. Sibyl watched
+the rows of hops in silence. Cowardice has its sticking-point as well as
+courage, and she was undergoing the miserable preliminary tremors by
+which that point is reached. Mr. Loftus, sitting opposite her, and
+observing her fixity of gaze, glanced at her rather wistfully from time
+to time. He saw something was working in her mind. He looked tired, and
+in the strong afternoon light his grave, lined face seemed more worn
+and world-weary than ever. He had the look of a man who had long
+outlived all personal feeling, and who to-day had been remembering his
+youth.
+
+The Wilderleigh omnibus and Doll's spider-wheeled dogcart were waiting
+at the little roadside station, which was so small that the train very
+nearly overlooked it, and had to be backed. Doll was already holding the
+wheel to protect Sibyl's gown as she got up, and looking towards her,
+and Lady Pierpoint was hurrying Peggy, who had expressed a hankering
+after the dogcart, into the omnibus, when Mr. Loftus observed that he
+thought he would walk up.
+
+Sibyl's face changed.
+
+'May I walk up with you?' she asked instantly.
+
+Mr. Loftus looked disappointed; everybody looked disappointed. Lady
+Pierpoint put her head out, and said:
+
+'My dear child, the drive in the open air will refresh you; you are
+looking tired.'
+
+'May I go in the dogcart if Sibyl doesn't want to?' put in Peggy in an
+audible aside to her mother.
+
+'I think you are tired,' said Mr. Loftus, looking at Sibyl and shaking
+his head. 'And,' he added in a lower voice, 'Doll will be much
+disappointed.'
+
+A faint colour covered her face, which quivered as she turned it towards
+him.
+
+'Let me walk up with you,' she said again, with a tremor in her voice.
+
+He met her appealing eyes with gentle scrutiny.
+
+'It is not far,' he said aloud; 'not more than half a mile through the
+park. I will take care of her, Lady Pierpoint. We shall be at
+Wilderleigh almost as soon as you are.'
+
+'Oh, mummy, may I go in the dogcart _now_?' implored Peggy from the
+depths of the omnibus.
+
+And Mr. Loftus and Sibyl set out together.
+
+They were in the park in a few minutes, and were walking down towards
+Wilderleigh, on the opposite side of the river, an old house of
+weather-beaten gray stone, of twisted chimneys and uneven roofs and
+pointed gables, with quaint carved finials, standing above its terraces
+and its long stone balustrade. The sun was setting in a sky of daffodil
+behind the tall top-heavy elms of the rookery and the tower of the
+village church. Little fleets of clouds lay motionless in high heaven,
+looking towards the west. The land in its long shadows dreamed of
+peace. The old house beyond the river was in shadow already. So was the
+river.
+
+'Sometimes,' said Mr. Loftus to himself, 'a young girl feels more able
+to confide in an old friend than a relation. She has often talked to me
+before. Perhaps she is going to do so again.' And he felt comforted
+about Doll and the dogcart.
+
+Presently as he glanced at her, wondering at her continued silence, he
+saw that she was greatly agitated.
+
+'Something troubles you,' he said gently.
+
+She looked at him half in terror, as if deprecating his anger.
+
+They were walking down a narrow ride in the tall bracken. A trunk of a
+tree lay near the path among the yellowing fern.
+
+He led her to it and sat down by her, looking at her with painful
+anxiety and with a sense of growing fatigue. Emotion of any kind
+exhausted him. If it had not been for Doll, he would have dropped the
+subject, but for his sake he made an effort.
+
+'Tell me,' he said, and he took her thin young hand and held it in his
+thin older hand. It was the last afternoon; both were conscious of it.
+
+She trembled very much, but she did not speak. His heart sank.
+
+'You wish to tell me something about Doll, perhaps,' he said at last.
+'Do not be afraid of paining me by talking of it. You like him, perhaps,
+but not enough, and you are grieved because you see how much he loves
+you. Is that it?'
+
+'I don't like him,' gasped Sibyl. 'I have never thought about it. That
+is only Aunt Marion.'
+
+Mr. Loftus sighed, and his gray cheek blanched a little. He had built
+much on the hope of this marriage. He had a tender regard for Sibyl,
+whose emotional and impulsive nature appealed to him, and filled him
+with apprehension as for a butterfly in a manufactory, which may injure
+itself any moment. And he knew Doll was genuinely in love with her. It
+would be grievous if she were married for her money. And Wilderleigh was
+dying stone by stone and acre by acre for want of that money.
+
+As he looked mournfully at Sibyl, an expression came into her wide eyes
+like that which he had seen in the eyes of some timid wild animal
+brought to bay. He recognised that, like a shy bird near its nest, she
+was defending in impotent despair of broken white wings something which
+was part of her life, which was going from her, which _he_ was taking
+away.
+
+'It is you I love,' she said, and her small hand ceased trembling and
+became cold in his.
+
+For a moment both were stunned alike, and then some of the grayness of
+age and suffering crept suddenly from his face to hers as she felt his
+hand involuntarily slacken its clasp of hers.
+
+'My child,' he said at last, with great difficulty and with greater
+tenderness, 'it is very many years since I gave up all thought of
+marriage. I am old enough to be your----' He might have said
+'grandfather' with truth. He meant to say it, but as he approached the
+word he could not wound her with it.
+
+'I know,' she interrupted hurriedly. 'I don't mind. That is nothing to
+me.'
+
+'And my life,' he said, 'what little there is left of it, hangs by a
+thread.'
+
+'I know,' she said again--'I have thought of that. I have thought of
+nothing but you since I first met you a year ago. But if I might only
+love and serve you and be with you! And I am so rich, too. If I might
+only take away those money troubles which you once spoke of long ago! If
+I might only give you everything I have! The money is the smallest part
+of it--oh, such a little, little part compared to----' And she looked
+imploringly at him.
+
+He was deeply moved.
+
+'My child,' he said again, and the ominous repetition of the word shook
+her fragile edifice of hopes to its brittle foundation, 'you have
+always looked upon me as a friend, have you not?'
+
+She shook her head.
+
+'Well, then,' he added, correcting himself, 'as one who cared for and
+understood you, and whose earnest wish was to see you happy?'
+
+She did not answer.
+
+He had known difficult hours, but none more difficult than this. He felt
+as if he were trying with awkward hands to hold a butterfly without
+injuring it, in order to release it from the pane of glass against which
+it was beating its butterfly heart out.
+
+'To see you happy,' he went on, with authority as well as tenderness in
+his level voice. 'I should never see that; I should have no real'--he
+hesitated--'affection for you at all if I allowed you to make such a
+woeful mistake in your early youth before you know what love and life
+are. They are terrible things, Sibyl; I have known them. This beautiful
+generous feeling which you have for me is not love, and I should be base
+indeed to allow you to wreck your life upon it, your youth upon the rock
+of my age. You offer you know not what; you would sacrifice you know not
+what.' He smiled gravely at her, endeavouring to soothe her growing
+agitation. 'It would be like taking the Koh-i-Noor out of the hand of a
+child. I could not do it.'
+
+Her mind was in too great a tumult wholly to understand him, but one
+thing was clear to her, namely, that he was refusing to marry her. She
+snatched her hands out of his, and, starting wildly to her feet with an
+inarticulate cry, ran a short distance and flung herself down on her
+face among the bracken.
+
+He looked after her, but he did not follow her. He could do no more, and
+a sense of exhaustion and distress was upon him. He had been clumsy. He
+had hurt the poor butterfly, after all.
+
+He sat a long time on the tree-trunk, the low sunshine on his worn,
+patient face, on which the refinement of suffering and of thought had
+set their indelible stamp. And now the thin high features wore a new
+look of present distress over the old outlived troubles, a new look
+which anyone who really loved him would have been heart-stricken to have
+called into it. But when love ceases to wound its object, and bears its
+own cross, it has ceased to be young.
+
+As he sat motionless the sun sank. Far in the amber west the heavens
+had opened in an agony of glory. The knotted arms of the great oaks,
+upraised like those of Moses and his brethren, shone red as flame
+against the darkness of the forest. The first hint of chill after the
+great heat came into the still air.
+
+Mr. Loftus rose and went slowly towards the prostrate figure in its
+delicate gleaming gown.
+
+'Sibyl,' he said gently, but with authority, 'you must get up. I see
+Doll and your cousin coming up the glade to meet us.'
+
+Sibyl started violently and raised herself, turning a white, hopeless
+face towards him. Her entire self-abandonment, which would have brought
+acute humiliation to another woman, brought none to her. Her despair
+was too complete to admit of any other feeling.
+
+'Like a child's,' he thought, as he looked at her sorrowing.
+
+He helped her to smooth her gown, and he set her hat straight, and took
+some pieces of dried bracken out of her crumpled shining hair. She let
+him do it, neither helping nor hindering him. She evidently did not care
+what impression might be made on the minds of the two young people
+leisurely approaching them. She would have lain on the ground if it had
+been a bog instead of dry turf until the ice fit of despair had passed.
+His thoughtfulness for her, and the ashen tint of his face, were nothing
+to her, any more than the moonshine is to the child who has cried for
+the moon and has been denied it.
+
+At Mr. Loftus's bidding they went slowly to meet the others.
+
+'Doll,' said Mr. Loftus, lingering behind as Peggy and Sibyl walked on
+together, 'give me your arm. I feel ill.'
+
+'Won't she have me?' said Doll, biting his lip.
+
+'No, my poor boy, she won't.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+   'But we are tired. At Life's crude hands
+    We ask no gift she understands;
+    But kneel to him she hates to crave
+    The absolution of the grave.'
+
+    MATHILDE BLIND.
+
+
+The laws of attraction remain a mystery. Their results we see. Glimpses
+of their workings can occasionally be caught in their broken fragments.
+But the curve by which the circle may be drawn is nowhere to be found
+among those fragments. The first cause we cannot see. With sacrilegious
+hands we may rend the veil of its temple in the sacred name of truth,
+but we shall find nothing in its holy of holies save the bloodstains of
+generations of sacrifices on its empty altar, and the place where the
+ark has been.
+
+Youth, beauty, wit--all these attract; but they are only the momentary
+disciples of a great master, and their power is from him. In his name
+they perform a few works, and cast out a few small devils.
+
+But now and again a nature appears in our midst in the presence of which
+youth sinks its voice, and beauty pales and hangs its head, and wit
+bends its knee in reverence.
+
+What talisman had Mr. Loftus brought into the world with him that
+disinterested love and devotion should with one exception have followed
+him all the days of his life? But whether it had been given to him at
+his birth, or he had found it alone upon the hillside, or Sorrow, who
+has many treasures in her lap, but will never give them to those who
+turn from her, gave it to him when he kissed her hand--however this may
+have been, he had it.
+
+He had gone through his difficult life little realizing how much he owed
+to the impersonal love and respect which he inspired in men and women,
+as a beautiful woman seldom realizes how life has been coloured for her
+by the colour of her hair and eyes.
+
+His poetic exalted nature, with its tender affections, its deep
+passions, with its refinement and its delicacy of feeling, too sensitive
+to bear contact with this rough world, and yet not content to dwell
+apart from awkward fellow-creatures who wounded when they touched it,
+had leaned twice on the frail reed of personal love, and twice it had
+pierced his hand. After the second time he withdrew his scarred hand in
+silence, and journeyed on with it in his bosom.
+
+In the days of his youth he had been swept into the vortex of a deep
+passion which for the time engulfed his whole being. His early marriage
+and his romantic love, and his young wife's desertion of him, consumed
+like a rolling prairie-fire his early life. But he had emerged with the
+mark of fire upon him, and had taken up life again, and had made a
+career for himself in the world of politics.
+
+And he had reached middle age, he was a grave man with gray in his hair,
+before love came to him the second time. How he fared the second time no
+man knew; but afterwards the love of woman, deep-rooted though it was,
+died down in Mr. Loftus's heart. He went quietly on his way, but the way
+wearied him. He confided in no one, for he was burdened with many
+confidences, and those on whom others lean can seldom find a hand to
+lean on in their greater weakness and their deeper troubles.
+
+But his physical health wavered. At last his heart became affected, and
+after a few warnings he was obliged to give up public life. He ceased to
+be in authority, but he remained an authority, and so lived patiently on
+from year to year on the verge of the grave, aware that at any moment
+the next step might be across its brink.
+
+He had spoken the bare truth to Sibyl when he told her that his life
+hung by a thread. That this is so with all human life is a truism to
+which we all agree, but which none of us believe. But in his case the
+sword of Damocles was visible in the air above him. He never took for
+granted, if he went out for a walk, that he should return; and on this
+particular May afternoon, as he looked out from a friend's house in Park
+Lane across the street to the twinkle of green and the coloured bands of
+hyacinths beyond the railings, he locked his writing-table drawer from
+force of long habit, and burned the letters he had just read as
+carefully as if he were going on a long journey, instead of a short
+stroll across the park to Lady Pierpoint's house in Kensington.
+
+It was a heavy trouble that he had just locked into the writing-table
+drawer--nothing less than the sale of Wilderleigh, which he and Doll,
+after much laying together of the gray head and the brown one, had both
+come to the conclusion could not be staved off any longer. For the
+newly-imposed death-duties and the increasing pressure of taxation on
+land, in the teeth of increasing agricultural depression, had been the
+death-blow of Wilderleigh, as of so many other quiet country homes and
+their owners. The new aristocracy of the ironmaster and the cheesemonger
+and the brewer had come to the birth, and the old must give way before
+the power of their money. Mr. Loftus accepted the inevitable, and
+Wilderleigh was to be sold.
+
+He did not know for certain where Lady Pierpoint was to be found, but he
+would try the little house in Kensington. He had seen her driving alone
+the previous day, and he knew that she had quite recently returned with
+her daughter and niece from Egypt, where they had spent the winter
+months. Something in the glimpse of her passing face yesterday had
+awakened in him a vague suspicion that she was in trouble. She looked
+older and grayer, and why was she alone?
+
+He took up his hat and, entering the Park, struck across the grass in
+the direction of the Albert Memorial, blinking in all its gilt in the
+afternoon sun. The blent green and gray of a May day in London had
+translated the prose of the Park into poetry. Here in the very heart of
+the vast machine, Spring had ventured to alight for a moment,
+undisturbed by the distant roar of dusty struggling life all round her.
+The new leaves on the smoke-black branches of the trees were for a
+moment green as those unfolding in country lanes. Smoke-black among the
+silvery grass men lay strewn in the sunshine, looking like cast-off rags
+flung down, outworn by humanity, whose great pulse was throbbing so near
+at hand. Across the tender beauty of the young year fell the shadow of
+crime and exhaustion, and 'the every-day tragedy of the cheapness of
+man.'
+
+The shadow fell on Mr. Loftus's mind, and he had well-nigh reached Lady
+Pierpoint's door before his thoughts returned to her and to her niece,
+Sibyl Carruthers.
+
+'Pretty, delicate, impulsive creature, so generous, so ignorant, so full
+of the ephemeral enthusiasms of youth which have no staying power. The
+real enthusiasms of life are made of sterner stuff than she, poor child!
+guesses. What will become of her? What man in the future will take her
+ardent, fragile devotion, and hold it without breaking it, and bask in
+the green springtide of her love without desecrating it, like those poor
+outcasts in the Park?'
+
+Lady Pierpoint was at home, and he was presently ushered into the
+drawing-room, where she was sitting in her walking things. The room was
+without flowers, without books, without any of the small landmarks of
+occupation. It had evidently been arranged only for the briefest stay,
+and had as little welcome in it as a narrow mind.
+
+Lady Pierpoint, pouring tea out of a metal teapot into an enormous
+teacup, looked also as if she were on the point of departure.
+
+She greeted him cordially, and sent for another cup. A further glance
+showed him that she looked worn and harassed. Her cheerful motherly
+face was beginning to droop like a mastiff's at the corners of the
+mouth, in the manner in which anxiety cruelly writes itself on plump
+middle-aged faces.
+
+'I am not really visible,' she said, smiling, as she handed him the
+large cup which matched her own. 'I cannot bring forth butter in a
+lordly dish, as you perceive, for everything is locked up. I am here
+only for two days, cook-hunting.'
+
+Mr. Loftus had intended to ask after Sibyl, but he asked after Peggy
+instead.
+
+'She is quite well,' said Lady Pierpoint. 'She is always well, I am
+thankful to say. I have another Peggy coming out this year--Molly--perhaps
+you remember her; but how to bring her to London this season I don't know.
+I have hardly seen anything of her all last winter, poor child! as I was
+in Egypt with Sibyl. I have only just returned to England.'
+
+'And Miss Carruthers?' he said, examining his metal teaspoon; 'will not
+she be in London with you this season, with your own daughters?'
+
+'No,' said Lady Pierpoint, looking narrowly at him; 'Sibyl is ill. I
+have been very anxious about her all the winter. I greatly fear that she
+will sink into a decline. You know, her sister died of consumption a
+year or two ago.'
+
+Mr. Loftus looked blankly at Lady Pierpoint.
+
+'Sibyl!' he said--'ill? Oh, surely there is some mistake? What do the
+doctors say?'
+
+'They all say the same thing,' said Lady Pierpoint, her lips quivering.
+'She had a cough last winter, and she is naturally delicate, but there
+is no actual disease as yet. But if she continues in this morbid state
+of health--if she goes on as she is at present--they say it will end in
+that.'
+
+Mr. Loftus was silent.
+
+Lady Pierpoint looked at his unconscious, saddened, world-weary face,
+and clasped her hands tightly together.
+
+'Mr. Loftus,' she said, 'I am going to put a great strain on our
+friendship, and if I lose it, I must lose it. I have been thinking of
+writing to you, but I could not. I had thought of asking you to come and
+see me while I was alone here, but my courage failed me. But now that
+you have come by what is called chance, I dare not be a coward any
+longer. Sibyl has told me of what passed last summer between you and
+her.'
+
+A faint colour came into Mr. Loftus's pale face. He kept his eyes on the
+floor.
+
+'I think,' he said gently, but with a touch of reserve in his voice
+which did not escape his companion, 'we must both forget that as
+completely as she herself has probably already forgotten it.'
+
+'She has not forgotten it,' said Lady Pierpoint, ignoring, though with a
+pang, his evident wish to dismiss the subject. 'It is that which is
+causing her ill-health. She can think of nothing else. Some of us,' she
+said sadly, 'are so constituted that we can bear trouble and
+disappointment--others can't. This poor child, who has cried for the
+moon, is not mentally and physically strong enough to bear the
+disappointment of being denied it. And the doctors say that her life is
+dependent on her happiness.'
+
+Mr. Loftus rose, and paced up and down the room. She dared not look at
+him.
+
+Presently he stopped, and, with his face turned away, said with emotion:
+
+'But the moon is a dreary place if it is seen as it is, with its extinct
+volcanoes and its ice-fields. Nothing lives there. The fire in it is
+burnt out, and there is snow over the ashes. It is only in the eyes of a
+child that the moon is bright. We elders know that it is dark and
+desolate.'
+
+Lady Pierpoint was awed. She had known Mr. Loftus for twenty years. He
+had been kind to her in the early years of her widowhood, and in the
+later ones had helped on her boys by his influence in high quarters. She
+had often told him of her difficulties, but she had never till now heard
+him speak of himself.
+
+Her great admiration for him, which was of a humbler kind than Sibyl's,
+led her to say: 'It is not only in the child's eyes that the moon is
+bright.'
+
+She might have added with truth that in her own middle-aged eyes it was
+bright, too.
+
+'I greatly honoured you when Sibyl told me about it,' she continued,
+after a long pause. 'It is because I have entire trust in you that I
+have told you the truth about this poor child, who is as dear to me as
+my own, though I hope my own will face life more bravely. Should you,
+after reflection, feel able to do her this--this--great kindness, I hope
+you will come and stay with us at Abergower for Whitsuntide. But--I
+shall not expect you, and I shall not mention to anyone that I have
+asked you.'
+
+She rose and held out her hand. She looked tired.
+
+He held it a moment, and she endeavoured to read the grave, inscrutable
+glance that met hers, but she could not.
+
+'Thank you,' he said, and went away.
+
+'How dare she think of him?' said Lady Pierpoint to herself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+   'L'amour est une source naïve, partie de son lit de cresson, de
+    fleurs, de gravier, qui, rivière, qui, fleuve, change de nature
+    et d'aspect à chaque flot.'--DE BALZAC.
+
+
+In England Spring is a poem. In the Highlands of Scotland she has the
+intensity of a passion. The crags and steeps are possessed by her; they
+stand transfigured like a stern man in the eyes of his bride. And here
+in these solemn depths and lonely heights, as nowhere else, shy Spring
+abandons herself, secure in the fastnesses where her every freak is
+loved. She sets the broom ablaze among the gray rocks, yellow along the
+river's edge, yet hardly yellower than the leaves on the young oak just
+above. The larches hear her voice, and hundred by hundred peep over each
+other's heads upon the hillside, all a-tremble with fairy green. The
+shoots of the dwarf cherry, scattered wide upon the uplands, are pink
+among the grass. The primroses are everywhere, though it is
+Whitsuntide--behind the stones, among the broom, beside the little
+tumbling streams, in every crevice, and on every foothold. The
+mountain-ash holds its white blossoms aloft in its careful spreading
+fingers. Even the silver birch forgets its sadness while spring reigns
+in Scotland.
+
+There are those to whom she speaks of love, but there are many more to
+whom she whispers, 'Be comforted.' When hope leaves us, it is well to
+go out into the woods and listen to what Spring has to say. Though life
+is gray, the primroses are coming up all the same, and the young shafts
+of the bluebell pierce the soft earth in spite of our heartache. A
+hedge-sparrow has built him a house in the nearest tangle of white
+hawthorn. There will be children's voices in it presently. Be comforted.
+Hope is gone, but not lost. You shall meet her again in the faces of the
+children, God's other primroses. She is not lost. She has only taken her
+hand out of yours. Be comforted.
+
+But Sibyl refused to be comforted. Her love for Mr. Loftus, if small
+things may be called by large names, was the first violent emotion of a
+feeble and impulsive mind in a feeble body, both swayed by veering
+influences, both shaken by the changing currents of early womanhood, as
+a silver birch is shaken with its leaves.
+
+A woman with a deeper heart, and with a slight perception of Mr.
+Loftus's character, would have reverently folded her devotion in her
+heart and have gone on her way ennobled by it. But with Sibyl, to admire
+anything was to wish to possess it; to tire of anything was to cast it
+away.
+
+Mr. Loftus was in her eyes without an equal in the world. Therefore--the
+reasoning from her point of view was conclusive--she must marry him. She
+had no knowledge, she had not even a glimpse, of the gulf of feeling,
+far wider than the gulf of years, which separated him from her. She
+imagined no one appreciated him, or entered into the dark places of his
+mind, as she did. She mistook his patient comprehension of her trivial
+aspirations, and his unfailing kindness to all young and crude ideas,
+for the perfect sympathy of two kindred souls, and was wont to speak
+mysteriously to Peggy of how minds that were really related drew each
+other out and enriched each other.
+
+It is always a dangerous experiment to awaken a sleeping soul to the
+pageant of life. Mr. Loftus had endeavoured to do this for Sibyl,
+consciously, gently, with great care, out of the mixed admiration and
+pity with which she inspired him, in the hope that, in later years, when
+her feet would be swept from under her, she might find something to
+cling to, amid the wreck of happiness which his dispassionate gaze
+foresaw that she would one day achieve out of her life.
+
+He had run the risk which all who would fain help others must be content
+to run--the risk that their work will be thrown away. He saw that the
+little rock-pool which reflected his own face was shallow, but he had
+not gauged the measure of its shallowness. His deep enthusiasms, tried
+and tempered before she was born, weary now with his own weariness,
+aroused hers as the Atlantic wave, sweeping up the rocks, just reaches
+and arouses the rock-pool, and sends a flight of ripples over it, which,
+if you look very close, break in mimic waves against the further edge.
+And before the thunder of the wave is silent the pool is glass once
+more.
+
+On natures like these the only influence which can make any impression
+is a personal one. It is overwhelming while it lasts; but it is the
+teacher who is everything--the teaching is nothing. And when he is
+removed, they passively drift under another personal influence, as under
+another wave, and the work of the first, the foundation patiently and
+lovingly built in its pretty yellow sand, is swept away, or remains in
+futile fragments, as a mark of the folly of one who built on sand.
+
+Certain strong, abiding principles Mr. Loftus had sought to instil into
+Sibyl's mind. She had perceived their truth and beauty; but she cared
+nothing for them in reality, and had fallen at the feet of the man who
+had awakened those exquisite feelings in her.
+
+And now either she would not, or could not, get up. She clung to her
+imaginary passion with all the obstinacy which is inherent in weak
+natures. The disappointment had undermined her delicately-poised
+health. As she walked down towards the Spey alone on this particular
+June afternoon, she looked more fragile and ethereal than ever. The
+faint colour had gone from her cheek, and with it half her evanescent
+prettiness had departed. Her slight, willowy figure seemed to have no
+substance beneath the many folds of white material in which her
+despairing dressmaker had draped her. With the suicidal recklessness of
+youth, she made no attempt to turn her mind to other thoughts, but
+pondered instead upon her trouble, with the unreasoning rebellion
+against it with which, in early life, we all meet these friends in
+disguise.
+
+She picked her way down the steep hillside, through the wakened broom
+and sleeping heather, and along the edge of the little oasis of
+oatfield, where so many thousands of round, river-worn stones had been
+gleaned into heaps, and where so many thousands still remained among the
+springing corn. The long labour and the patience and the partial failure
+which that little field meant, reclaimed from the heather, but not
+wholly reclaimed from the stones, had often touched Lady Pierpoint, who
+knew what labour was; but it did not appeal to Sibyl.
+
+She sat down with a sigh on the river-bank, a forlorn white blot against
+the crowded world of green, with Crack, her little Scotch terrier,
+beside her, and looked listlessly across the sliding water, which ran
+deep and brown as Crack's brown eyes, and loitered shallow and yellow as
+a yellow sapphire among its clean gray stones and gleaming rocks. A pair
+of oyster-catchers sped upstream, low over the water, swift as eye
+could follow, with glad cries, like disembodied spirits that have found
+wings at last and feel the first rapture of proving them.
+
+'Happy birds!' said Sibyl to herself. 'They do not know what trouble
+means.'
+
+Crack, who had heard this sentiment, or something very like it, before,
+stretched himself methodically, both front-legs together first, and then
+the hind-legs one by one, and walked slowly down to the edge of the
+water and sniffed sadly, as one who knows that search is vain among the
+stones for a rat which is not there. Crack had a fixed melancholy which
+nothing could dispel. His early life had been passed in the activity of
+a camp, and his spirit seemed to have been permanently embittered by the
+close contemplation of military character. He had been round the world.
+He knew the principal smells of our Eastern empire, but no reminiscences
+of his many travels served to brighten the gloomy tenor of his thoughts.
+He was sad, disillusioned, still apt to hurry and shorten himself
+through doors, and to retreat under sofas to brood over imaginary
+wrongs. All games distressed him. He went indoors at once when the red
+ball was produced which transformed Peter from an elegant poodle into a
+bounding demon. But in spite of his melancholy he was liked. He went out
+but little, but where he went he was welcomed. He was a gentleman and a
+man of the world. No dog ever quarrelled with him. He met bristling
+overtures with a mournful tact which turned growls into waggings of
+tails. He himself was seldom seen to wag his tail, except in his sleep.
+
+He returned from the water's edge and sat down on an outlying fold of
+Sibyl's gown.
+
+In the sunny stillness a wild-duck, with cautious, advanced neck, and a
+little fleet of water-babies, paddled past, bobbing on the amber
+shallows. Crack raised his ears and watched them. His feelings were so
+entirely under control that he could scratch himself while observing an
+object of interest; and he did so now. But he did not move from his seat
+on Sibyl's gown. He was disillusioned about wild-ducks, who did not play
+fair and stick to one element, but would take to their wings when hard
+pressed in the water, like a woman who changes her ground when cornered
+in argument.
+
+Presently the afternoon sun shifted, and all the larches on the steep
+hillside opposite and all the broom along the bank stooped to gaze at a
+flickering fairyland of broom and larches in the wide water. The deep
+valley of the river was drowned in light. Only the bank on which Sibyl
+was sitting under the mountain-ash had fallen suddenly into shadow.
+
+'Like my life,' she thought, and rose to go.
+
+Who was this coming slowly towards her along the little path by the
+water's edge?
+
+She stood still, trembling, her hands pressed against her breast.
+
+It was he. It was Mr. Loftus. He was looking for her. He was coming to
+her. Joy and terror seized her.
+
+He saw her standing motionless in her white gown under the white
+blossom-laden tree. And as he drew near and took her nerveless hands in
+silence, and looked into her face, he saw again in her deep eyes the
+shy, imploring glance which had met him once before--the mute entreaty
+of love to be suffered to live.
+
+'Sibyl,' he said, and in his voice there was reverence as well as
+tenderness--reverence for her untarnished youth, and tenderness for the
+white flower of love which it had put forth, 'will you be my wife?'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+   'J'ai vu sous le soleil tomber bien d'autres choses
+    Que les feuilles des bois et l'écume des eaux,
+    Bien d'autres s'en aller que le parfum des roses
+        Et le chant des oiseaux.'
+
+    ALFRED DE MUSSET.
+
+
+'Mummy,' said Peggy, a few days later, coming into her mother's
+sitting-room and pressing her round, cool cheek against Lady
+Pierpoint's, 'why does Sibyl want to marry Mr. Loftus?'
+
+'Because she thinks she loves him, Peggy, as many other women have done
+before her.'
+
+'I think I love him, too, in a way,' said Peggy. 'He is better than
+anybody. When I am with him, I feel--I don't know what I feel, only I
+know it's good, and I want to do something for him, or make him
+something really pretty for his handkerchiefs; but--I don't want to
+marry him.'
+
+'That is as well, my treasure, as he is going to marry Sibyl.'
+
+'I never thought he would marry anybody. I can't believe it. It seems as
+if it could not happen.'
+
+'It will happen,' said Lady Pierpoint, 'if he lives.'
+
+'Sibyl says,' continued Peggy, 'that he enters into her feelings as no
+one else does, and that she understands him, and that hardly anyone else
+does except her, because he is so superior.'
+
+'Indeed!'
+
+'And she says she can speak to him of aspirations and things that she
+can't even mention to Molly and me. She says it isn't our fault--it is
+only because we are different to her.'
+
+'You are certainly very different,' said Lady Pierpoint, compressing her
+lips.
+
+'And to think that she might have married Mr. Doll,' continued Peggy, as
+if Sibyl's actions were indeed inscrutable. 'Mr. Doll will be
+twenty-eight next August. He was twenty-seven when we were at
+Wilderleigh last year. If I had been Sibyl, I would have married him,
+and then I'll tell you, mummy, what I would have done. I would have
+asked Mr. Loftus to let us live with him at Wilderleigh, and I would
+have taken such care of him--oh! such care--and I would have spent whole
+bags of money on the farms and fences and things, and he would have
+been happy, and Mr. Doll would have been happy, too.'
+
+'Peggy,' said Lady Pierpoint, 'shall I tell you a secret? I think that
+is exactly what Mr. Loftus hoped Sibyl would do.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Loftus returned to London a day or two later, and had an interview
+with Doll the day before the announcement of the engagement appeared in
+the _Morning Post_.
+
+Mr. Loftus was attached to his nephew--people always looked upon Doll as
+his nephew, though he was in reality his first cousin--and to him and to
+him alone he told the circumstances which had led to his engagement.
+
+What passed between the elder man and the young one during that
+interview will never be known. But when at last Mr. Loftus left him,
+Doll sat for a long time looking over the geraniums into the park. The
+somewhat dull, unimaginative soul that dwelt behind his handsome
+expressionless face was vaguely stirred.
+
+'It's a mistake,' he said at last, half aloud. 'But Uncle George is on
+the square; he always is.'
+
+And when he was ruthlessly twitted next day by his brother officers on
+being cut out by his uncle, he replied simply enough:
+
+'He is a better man than me, as all you fellows know. She would not have
+looked at one of you any more than she would at me. I suppose she had a
+fancy for marrying a man who could spell, which none of us can.'
+
+'Spelling or none,' said the youngest sub--'which is an indecent
+subject which should never be mentioned between gentlemen--anyhow, I
+mean to borrow a thousand or a fiver off him. Mr. Loftus always tipped
+me at school.'
+
+One of Mr. Loftus's first actions was to stop the preliminary
+proceedings regarding the sale of Wilderleigh, which he had been
+arranging a month ago, on the afternoon when he had called on Lady
+Pierpoint. It was like awakening from a nightmare to realize that
+Wilderleigh would not be sold, after all. He almost wished that he might
+live long enough to set the place in order for Doll.
+
+The engagement was a nine days' wonder, and those nine days were
+purposely spent by Mr. Loftus in London. He was aware that many cruel
+things would be said at his expense, and that the bare fact that a man
+of his years and in his state of health should marry a young heiress,
+and so great an heiress as Sibyl Carruthers, must call forth
+unfavourable comments. People who did not know him said it was perfectly
+shameful, and that it was just the sort of thing which those people who
+posed as being so extra good always did. How shocked Mr. Loftus had
+pretended to be when old Lord Bugbear, after his infamous life, married
+a girl of seventeen! And now he, Mr. Loftus, was doing exactly the same
+himself. Of course he had a very fascinating manner--just the kind of
+manner to impose on a young girl who, like Miss Carruthers, knew nothing
+of the world, and had been nowhere. And everyone knew he was desperately
+poor. Wilderleigh could hardly pay its way. A rumour had long been
+afloat that it would shortly be for sale. If he had not been so hard up
+for money it would have been different; but it was a most disgraceful
+thing, and Lady Pierpoint ought to be ashamed of having exposed the poor
+motherless girl left in her charge to his designs upon her. They
+wondered how much Lady Pierpoint, whose means were narrow, had been
+bought over for. The sums varied according to the sordidness of the
+different speculators, who of course named their own price.
+
+Others who knew Mr. Loftus were puzzled and were silent. To know him at
+all was to believe him to be incapable of an ignoble action; yet this
+marriage had the appearance of being ignoble--not, perhaps, for another
+man, but certainly for him. His intimate friends were distressed, and
+greeted him with grave cordiality and affection, and hoped for an
+explanation. He gave none. And they remembered that never in his public
+or in his private life had he been known to give an explanation of his
+conduct, and came to the conclusion that they must trust him.
+
+Mr. Loftus had recognised early in life that explanations explain
+nothing. If those who had had opportunities of knowing him well
+misjudged him after those opportunities, they were at liberty to do so
+as far as he was concerned. The weight of an enormous acquaintance
+oppressed him, and, though he had never been known to wound anyone by
+withdrawing from an unequal friendship, which he had not been the one to
+begin, and which was an effort to him to continue, still, he took
+advantage of being misunderstood to lay aside many such friendships. It
+was not pride which prompted this line of action on Mr. Loftus's part,
+though many put it down to pride, especially those who had held aloof
+from him at a certain doubtful moment, and in whose regard subsequent
+events had entirely reinstated him, and who complained that he expected
+to be considered infallible. It was, in reality, the natural inclination
+of a world-weary man of the world to lay aside, as far as he could
+courteously do so, the claims of the artificial side of life, its vain
+forms, its empty hospitalities.
+
+He realized that for the purpose of winnowing its friendships the
+various events of life may be relied on to furnish the fitting
+occasions. Those who do not wish to offend others by leaving them need
+make no effort, for they will certainly be presently deserted by those
+who have never grasped the meaning of the character which has been the
+object of their transient admiration. 'If he is unequal he will
+presently pass away.' Mr. Loftus neither hurried the unequal,
+self-constituted friend, nor sought to detain him. But when he departed,
+shaking the dust from off his feet, the door was noiselessly closed
+behind him, and his knock, however loud, was not heard when he returned
+again.
+
+A small batch of uneasy admirers left him on the occasion of his
+engagement. They said openly that they were much disappointed in him,
+and that he had shaken their belief in human nature.
+
+'Will Sibyl also pass away?' Mr. Loftus wondered, as he sat on the
+terrace at Wilderleigh on his return from London. 'Yes, she, too, will
+presently pass away; but I shall not give her time to do so. She will be
+absorbed by her first love for a few years, and I shall only remain a
+few years at longest. By the time it wanes I shall be gone, and my
+departure will pain her but very slightly.'
+
+His face softened as he thought of Sibyl. His nature, which, in its
+far-away youth, had been imaginative and romantic, had remained
+sympathetic. He gauged, as few others could have done had they been the
+object of it, the measure of her romantic attachment to himself. It was
+perhaps safer in his hands than in those of a younger man. For youth
+perpetrates many murders and mutilations in the name of love, as the
+schoolboy's love of a butterfly finds expression in a pin and a cork.
+But it would have cut Sibyl to the heart if she had even guessed that
+his tranquil mind took for granted that her adoration would not last
+until the stars fell from heaven and the earth fell into the sun. For
+'Les esprits faibles ne sont jamais sincères.' That is a hard saying,
+but alas! and alas! that it is only the weak who believe that it is not
+true. The strong know better, but if they are merciful they are silent.
+
+'And so my second wife is also to be an _esprit faible_,' said Mr.
+Loftus to himself, looking at the past through half-closed eyes. 'But in
+the meanwhile I have learnt a lesson in natural history. I shall not
+expect my butterfly to hew wood and draw water. And this time I shall
+not break my heart because pretty wings are made to flutter with.'
+
+And the remembrance slid through his mind of Millais's picture of the
+dying cavalier, and the butterfly perched upon the drawn sword in the
+ardent sunshine. And he thought of the drawn sword of Damocles hanging
+over his own life, and Sibyl's love preening itself for one brief second
+upon it. And at the thought he smiled.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+   'Je suis l'amante, dit-elle.
+    Cueillez la branche de houx.'
+
+    VICTOR HUGO.
+
+   'When all the world like some vast tidal wave withdraws.'--BUCHANAN.
+
+
+Many persons prophesied that the marriage between Mr. Loftus and Sibyl
+would not take place, but it did.
+
+On a burning day late in July they were married in London, for Sibyl's
+country place, where Mr. Loftus had hoped the wedding might have taken
+place, was shut up.
+
+Lady Pierpoint did all in her power to make the wedding a quiet one,
+for his sake. Very few invitations were sent out, and there was no
+reception afterwards. But, nevertheless, though the season was at its
+last gasp, when the day came the unfashionable London church was crammed
+with that 'smart' world, half of which had condemned Mr. Loftus, while
+it showered invitations upon him.
+
+Many hundreds of eyes were fixed upon his stately feeble figure as he
+moved slowly forward to place himself beside the young girl, whose
+emotion was plainly visible, and whose bouquet shook in her hand. The
+contrast between the two, as they stood together, was of that glaring
+description which appeals to the vulgar and conventional mind, on which
+shades of difference are lost.
+
+Mr. Loftus went through the ceremony with equanimity. His grave face
+betrayed nothing except fatigue and the fact that he was suffering from
+a severe headache. Lady Pierpoint and Doll watched him with anxiety,
+while Peggy, standing close behind the bride, wept silently, she knew
+not why.
+
+'Oh, mummy,' she said afterwards when it was all over, and Sibyl,
+anxious, preoccupied, had left Lady Pierpoint and Peggy and Molly, who
+had been mother and sisters to her, without a tear, without a regret,
+without a backward look, absorbed in the one fact that Mr. Loftus was
+ill--'oh, mummy, you say Sibyl loves him so much. Is that why she did
+not mind going away from all of us a bit? I know he had a headache, but
+she never used to mind when you had a headache, and when she was ill, do
+you remember how she always sent for you, even when I told her you were
+resting? And yet she used to be a little fond of us. But since he came
+she does not seem to care for us any more. If one loves anybody, does
+one forget the others?'
+
+'Some women do,' said Lady Pierpoint, taking Peggy's red, tear-stained
+face in her hands and kissing it. She could not bear to own, even to
+Peggy, how wounded her warm maternal heart had been because Sibyl, whose
+delicacy had given her so many anxious hours, had shown no feeling at
+parting with her. Mr. Loftus had shown much more, when he had come to
+speak to her alone for a few minutes in her sitting-room, when the
+carriage was at the door.
+
+'Some women,' said Lady Pierpoint, looking wistfully at her daughter,
+'forget everyone else when they marry, and are very proud of it. They
+think it shows how devoted they are. A little cup is soon full, Peggy,
+and a shallow heart, if it takes in a new love, has no room left for the
+old ones. The new love is like the cuckoo in the nest--it elbows out
+everything else.'
+
+'I will not be like that,' said Peggy, crushing her mother and her
+mother's bonnet in an impulsive embrace. 'I will have a deep, deep
+heart, mummy, and no one shall ever go out that once comes in--and--oh,
+mummy, you shall have the best bedroom in my heart always!'
+
+'I have a very foolish girl for a daughter,' said Lady Pierpoint,
+somewhat comforted, smiling through her tears, 'and one who has no
+respect for my best bonnet.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At Sibyl's wish she and Mr. Loftus went straight to Wilderleigh. They
+reached it after several hours' journey on the evening of their
+wedding-day. And gradually the nervous exhaustion and acute headache
+from which he had been suffering, and which had become almost unbearable
+in the train, relaxed their hold upon him. They were sitting in the
+cool, scented twilight on the terrace. Through the half-darkness came
+the low voice of the river talking to itself. Noise and light and other
+voices, and this dreadful day, were gone at last.
+
+He gave a sigh of relief and smiled deprecatingly at her. They had
+hardly spoken since they were married. She was sitting near him, a
+slender figure in her pale gown, that shimmered in the feeble light. But
+there was light enough for her to see him smile, and she smiled back at
+him with her whole heart in her lovely eyes. No thought of self lurked
+in those clear depths, and Mr. Loftus, looking into them, and
+remembering how, on this her wedding day, her whole mind had been
+absorbed, to the entire oblivion of a bride's divided feelings, in the
+one fact that he was suffering, was touched, but not with elation.
+
+The long listless hand lying palm upwards on his knee made a slight
+movement, and in instant response to it her hand was placed in his. His
+closed over it. Perhaps nothing could have endeared her more to him than
+the mute response that had waited on his mute appeal, and had not
+forestalled it.
+
+His hand clasping hers, he drew her slightly, and, obeying its pressure,
+she leaned towards him.
+
+'My Sibyl!' he said, and she involuntarily drew closer to him, for
+something in his voice and manner, in spite of their exceeding
+gentleness and tenderness, seemed to remove him from her. 'Fate has been
+hard upon you that I should have been ill on your wedding-day.'
+
+'No,' she said, timidly pushing off from shore into the new world upon
+her little raft. 'Fate was kind, because to-day has been the first day
+when I could be with you and take care of you.'
+
+'You take too much care of me.'
+
+'I care for nothing else,' she said, her voice faltering, adoration in
+her eyes.
+
+One white star peered low in the western heaven through the violet dusk.
+
+'Once long ago, before you were born,' said Mr. Loftus, 'I loved
+someone, and she said she loved me, and we were married. But after a
+time she brought trouble upon me, Sibyl.'
+
+The great current had caught the little raft, and was hurrying it out to
+sea.
+
+'I will never bring trouble upon you,' said the young girl, her lips
+trembling as she stooped to kiss his hand. 'When you are tired you shall
+lean on my arm. When your eyes are tired I will read to you. I will take
+care of you, and keep all trouble from you.'
+
+'Till I die,' he said below his breath, more to himself than to her.
+
+'Till you die,' she answered.
+
+And so, but this time very lightly, Mr. Loftus leaned once again, or
+made as if he leaned, on the fragile reed of human love.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+   'He has nae mair sense o' humour than an owl, and a' aye haud
+    that a man withoot humour sudna be allowed intae a poopit.'
+    --IAN MACLAREN.
+
+
+The arrival of Sibyl at Wilderleigh was the occasion of many anxious
+surmises at the little Vicarage on the part of the young Vicar and his
+young and adoring wife.
+
+It had long been a great grief to them that Mr. Loftus only came to
+church once on Sunday. It was vaguely understood that he had yielded
+himself to doubts on religious subjects, which alone could account for
+this 'laxity'--doubts which the young Vicar felt could not have shaken
+himself or Mrs. Gresley, and which he was convinced he could dispel. But
+he could never obtain an opportunity to wage war against these ghostly
+enemies, for though he had preached during Lent a course of sermons
+calculated to pulverize the infidel tendencies of the age, which his
+wife had pronounced to be all-conclusive and to place the whole affair
+in a nutshell--it certainly did that--unfortunately the person for whose
+spiritual needs they were concocted did not hear them.
+
+Mr. Gresley had several times called upon Mr. Loftus with a view to
+giving the conversation a deeper turn, but when he was actually in his
+presence, and Mr. Loftus's steel-gray attentive eye was upon him, the
+younger man found it difficult, not to say impossible, to force
+conversation on subjects which Mr. Loftus had no intention to discuss.
+
+'If he would only meet me in fair argument!' Mr. Gresley said on his
+return from a futile attempt to approach Mr. Loftus on the subject of
+public worship; 'but when I had thoroughly explained my own views on the
+importance of regular attendance at both services on Sunday, he only
+said that those being my opinions, he considered that I was fully
+justified in having daily services as well. If he would only meet me
+fairly and hear reason,' said the young clergyman; 'but he won't. The
+other day when I pressed him on the subject of the devil--I know he is
+lax on the devil--I said: "But, Mr. Loftus, do you not believe in him?"
+If he had only owned what I am sure was the case--namely, that he did
+not believe in him--I could have confuted him in a moment. I was quite
+ready. But he slipped out of it by saying, "Believe in him! I would not
+trust him for a moment." There is no arguing with a man who scoffs or is
+silent.'
+
+'My dear,' said Mrs. Gresley, 'infidels are all like that, and their
+only refuge is to be silent or profane. Don't you remember when that
+professor from Oxford, whom we met at Dr. Pearson's, said something
+about history and the Bible--I forget what, but it was perfectly
+unorthodox--and Dr. Pearson was so interested, and you spoke up at once,
+and he made no reply whatever, and then asked me the name of our
+Virginia creeper, and talked about flowers. I often think of that, and
+how he had to turn the subject.'
+
+'But he was not convinced,' said Mr. Gresley, frowning; 'that is the odd
+part of it. He brought out a book on the Bible with things in it much
+worse than what he said in my presence, and which I positively refuted.
+And it went through six editions, and the Bishop actually read it.'
+
+'You see,' said Mrs. Gresley, with the acumen which pervades the
+atmosphere of so many country vicarages, 'a man like the professor does
+not _want_ to be convinced, or his books would not be read, any more
+than Mr. Loftus wants to be convinced he ought to come to church
+regularly, because then he would have no excuse for staying away. But
+perhaps his wife may be a Christian, James. They say she is quite a
+young girl, and that her aunt has brought her up well.'
+
+And when Sibyl's sweet face and black velvet hat, and a wonderful
+flowing gown of white and lilac, appeared in the carved Wilderleigh
+pew beside Mr. Loftus's familiar profile, the Gresleys hoped many
+things; though Mrs. Gresley expressed herself, after service, as much
+shocked at the bride's style of dress, which she pronounced to be too
+showy. Mrs. Gresley's views on dress were exclusively formed at the two
+garden-parties and the one private ball to which she went in the course
+of the year. The Gresleys thought it wrong to go to public balls,
+and--which was quite another matter--they thought it wrong for other
+clergymen and their wives to go also.
+
+It was fortunate that Mr. Loftus admired his wife's style of dress, as
+he had always admired Sibyl herself, from her graceful, fringeless head
+to her slender, low-heeled shoes. She pleased his fastidious taste as
+perhaps no other woman could have done. She was one of the few
+Englishwomen who can wear French gowns as if they are part of them, and
+not put on for the occasion.
+
+After a becoming interval Mr. and Mrs. Gresley called, and this time
+Mrs. Gresley was somewhat mollified by what she called the very
+'suitable' costume of brown holland in which Sibyl received them. Mr.
+Loftus did not appear, and in the course of conversation the young
+couple were further pleasantly impressed with the perfect orthodoxy and
+sound Church teaching of the bride, whose natural gift of platitude was
+enhanced by the subject under discussion.
+
+They also made the discovery that Mr. Loftus was, in his wife's opinion,
+infallible. And Mrs. Gresley looked with some astonishment at a bride
+who actually entertained towards a 'layman' the unique sentiments
+which she did for her apostolic James.
+
+'She is a nice young creature,' said Mrs. Gresley, half an hour later,
+as, with her hands full of orchids, she accompanied her lord back to the
+Vicarage, 'and her views, James, are beautiful--just what I think
+myself. She agreed with everything we said. She must have been very well
+brought up. But I can't understand her infatuation for Mr. Loftus.
+Really, from the way she spoke of him, and how he knew best, one might
+have supposed he was priest as well as squire here. It almost made one
+smile.'
+
+Mr. Loftus and Crack had, in the meanwhile, remained in the gardens, he
+leaning back in a long deck-chair, looking dreamily up into the
+perspective of moving green above him, while Crack, who had only just
+arrived from Scotland, snapped mournfully at the English flies, which
+tasted very much the same as those of Strathspey, so few new things are
+there under the sun.
+
+Sibyl had wished to bring Peter, the poodle, also to Wilderleigh, but
+nothing would induce Mr. Loftus to invite him. He told Sibyl that he
+himself hoped to replace Peter in her affections, and he had certainly
+succeeded.
+
+She returned to him now, and sat down on a low stool at his feet. In
+these early days she was much addicted to footstools and the lowest of
+seats, provided they were properly placed. They were in harmony with her
+sentiments, and facilitated an upward gaze.
+
+'They were so pleasant. I wish you had come in,' she said.
+
+'I find the clergy as fatiguing as Anderson's beetle found cleanliness,'
+said Mr. Loftus, his eyes dwelling on her. 'But that is not their fault.
+It is because I happen to be a beetle.'
+
+'I was a little tired, too,' said Sibyl hastily. 'They stayed rather
+long.'
+
+'And did you like them?'
+
+'Yes; I thought them very nice. And I am glad they are High Church. I
+think it is so much nicer, don't you?'
+
+'Do you mean to tell me, now that we are married and it is too late to
+go back, that you are High Church?'
+
+'Oh, not very high!' said Sibyl anxiously, yet reassured by his look of
+amusement. 'Which are you?'
+
+'I am the same as Mr. Gresley,' said Mr. Loftus slowly, 'with a
+difference.'
+
+'I thought you were different,' said Sibyl, gratified at her own
+powers of observation.
+
+'I know,' continued Mr. Loftus, 'that he thinks I have no principles at
+all, because he believes they are not the same as his; but in reality
+they are very much the same as his, only they are carried further
+afield, and he loses sight of them, while he has a neat little
+ring-fence round his own. I like Mr. Gresley very much. He is an
+exemplary young man. But some people become very narrow by walking in
+the narrow path, and I fear he is one of them. Remember this, my Sibyl,
+that there is no barrier in your own character against which someone,
+sooner or later, will not stumble to his hurt. No boundary in ourselves
+will serve to shut God in, as this good young man thinks, but every
+boundary will at last shut out some fellow-creature from us, and be to
+one, whom perhaps we might have helped, an occasion of stumbling. And
+now let us show Crack the brook. I am afraid he will think but little of
+it after the Spey, but he will be too polite to say so. As he only
+arrived yesterday, it is premature to put it into words, but I have an
+intuition that Crack and I shall become friends. If I had any influence
+over him, I would encourage him to bathe in the brook, for he brought
+into the house with him this morning an odour that convinced me that we
+were on the eve of some great chemical discovery.'
+
+So they wandered down by the brook, across the lengthening shadows. A
+cock pheasant was clearing his throat in the wood near the gardens. The
+low sun had become entangled in the rookery. A pair of sandpipers were
+balancing their slender selves on a tiny beach of sand. A little black
+and white water-ousel darted upstream with rapid, bee-like flight. Crack
+followed, gravely investigating the bank point by point, as if on the
+look-out for some fallacy in it.
+
+And Sibyl registered the conclusion in her own mind that one must be
+'wide,' like Mr. Loftus, not narrow, like Mr. Gresley. After this
+conversation she always spoke of her religious convictions as 'wide.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+   'We form not our affections. It is they
+      That do form us; and form us in despite
+    Of our poor protests.'
+
+    LYTTON.
+
+
+Summer slid into autumn, and autumn into winter. The first few months of
+married life had been difficult to Mr. Loftus, but he had brought his
+whole attention and an infinite patience to bear on them, and gradually
+his reward came to him. Sibyl could learn because she loved. She learned
+slowly, but still she did learn, to read, not her husband's
+thoughts--those were far from her--but his wishes. She discovered, with
+a pang which cost her many secret tears--but still she did
+discover--that he often wished to be alone, and that she must not go
+into his study unless she were asked to do so. She learned gradually
+when to join him when he paced in the rose-garden, and when it vexed and
+wearied him to have her by him. And she learned, too, after the first
+horrible experience, which neither could remember without anguish, when,
+with blue lips, he had begged her not to touch him; that when he had an
+attack of the heart she must not betray her agony of mind, if she was to
+be allowed to remain in the room, and she must not ignorantly try to
+apply the remedies, but must leave it to Mr. Loftus's valet, whose
+imperturbable calm and promptitude had often ministered to his master
+before. Sibyl's terror of death and violent emotion at its approach
+were peculiarly trying to Mr. Loftus, who had long since ceased to
+regard death with horror, and only wished to be allowed to meet it
+quietly, without a scene.
+
+All intimacy was difficult to his solitary nature. It was alien while it
+was courteously welcomed. It was the natural instinct of hers. She had
+to learn to suppress her tenderness--or, at any rate, its expression--a
+hard lesson for an over-demonstrative nature, not long out of its teens.
+But Sibyl learned even that for his sake. And there her knowledge
+stopped. It never reached beyond his wishes to his mind. She was merged
+entirely in her love of her husband, but if he had been unworthy of the
+exalted pedestal on which she had placed him, she would not have
+discovered it.
+
+'It might just as well have been Doll.' Mr. Loftus thought occasionally,
+half amused, when he had the barbarity to try a platitude of the first
+water upon her--one of Doll's best, such as the young man, after diving
+into the recesses of his being, could produce, and found she received it
+with as much interest as the thoughts for which he had dug deep. For
+hero-worship was necessary to Sibyl, but not a hero--only that she
+should consider him one. The sham was to her the same as the real. She
+saw no difference. Like many another woman, she would have adored an
+ass's ears, wondering at the blindness of the rest of mankind. But if
+the truth about those ears had been forced upon her, rubbed into her,
+tattooed upon her, her entire belief in human nature would have fallen
+with the fall of one fellow-creature. The heights and depths of human
+nature had never awed her, nor its great forces moved her to reverence
+or compassion. She was of the stuff out of which the female cynic, as
+well as the female devotee, is made.
+
+Mr. Loftus did not marvel at an adoration which has been the birthright
+of his fortunate sex since the world began, but his perennial wonder at
+the enigma of feminine human nature had a new element added to it--that
+of amusement. She played with his tools, as a robin perches on a spade,
+thinking it is stuck in the earth for that purpose, and for the turning
+up of worms.
+
+The struggles, the despair, the hope and the aspiration, through which
+his youth had climbed, and out of which it had forged its tools, were
+not a part of Sibyl's youth. She liked the tools now that they were
+made, and desired them for her own small uses. She was naturally drawn
+to those of deeper convictions and larger faiths. She liked the luxury
+of being moved by them, stirred by them, lifted beyond herself by a
+power outside of herself. She loved to nibble the edge of their
+hard-earned bread and feel that she, too, was of them, and make believe
+that she had helped to grind the flour; and to make believe with Sibyl
+was the same thing as to believe. Her insolvent nature clung to the rich
+one, ostensibly because it was sympathetic, but really because it was
+rich.
+
+This unconscious audacity was a novel source of entertainment to Mr.
+Loftus, a bubbling wayside spring which he had hardly hoped to meet with
+on the dry highroad of married life. It is greatly to be feared that his
+conscience, usually a tender one, was hardly as watchful as it should
+have been on this subject. It certainly had lapses when Sibyl conversed
+with him seriously, especially when she coupled his feelings with her
+own on the greatest subjects, never doubting that they were identical.
+But after a short time he dared not speak to her of anything really dear
+to him. She had a gift for making sacred things common by touching them,
+and age had not tarnished reverence in Mr. Loftus's soul, though it had
+tarnished many things which youth holds in reverence. He talked to her,
+instead, on subjects which he had not much at heart, and that did quite
+as well.
+
+And she, on her side, would bring to him the inferior religious books,
+and superficial unorthodox works which she believed to be deep because
+they were unorthodox, which were the natural food of her little soul,
+and he received them and her remarks upon them, as he received a flower
+when she gave him one, with courtesy and gratitude.
+
+So absorbed was she in her devotion to her husband, and in the
+interchange of beautiful sentiments, that her other duties, increased by
+her position at Wilderleigh, were not even perceived. Unobservant
+persons are sometimes surprised at the real devotion--and Sibyl's was
+real--of which a shallow and cold-hearted nature shows itself capable.
+But those who look closer perceive at what heavy expense to others that
+one link is held, which is in reality only a new and more subtle form of
+selfishness.
+
+She dropped the other links without even knowing that she had dropped
+them. She had no tender, watchful gratitude for Lady Pierpoint, no
+interest in Peggy's new gowns and lovers, or as to whether Molly had
+enjoyed her first season. If this had been pointed out to her, she would
+have glibly ascribed the result to marriage, which, according to some
+women, is the death-bed of all sympathy and impersonal love. It is like
+ascribing sin to temptation.
+
+The Gresleys were much disappointed in her, and they had reason to be
+so, for Sibyl had changed over after her discovery of Mr. Loftus's
+convictions, or, rather, her interpretation of them, and, instead of
+being rather High Church, had now decided to be 'wide,' which state, it
+soon appeared, was not compatible with being an efficient helper to the
+earnest hard-working young couple at her gate. Mr. Loftus, who now had
+command of money, was far more considerate than his wife.
+
+'She,' Mrs. Gresley complained, 'did not seem to care to do anything
+with her life, for she would neither sing in the choir nor teach in the
+Sunday-school.'
+
+She did consent to give prizes for needlework in the schools, but when
+the day came it was discovered that she had forgotten all about it, and,
+as she had a cold, Mr. Loftus drove into the nearest town and brought a
+mind weighted with political matter to bear upon the requisite number of
+prizes suited to girls of from seven to fourteen years, and hurried back
+just in time to prevent disappointment by distributing them himself.
+
+'Have you written lately to Lady Pierpoint?' he sometimes asked, and
+Sibyl generally had to confess, 'Not lately,' and then she would write
+and then forget again.
+
+'I suppose Lady Pierpoint is less well off now that you are married?' he
+asked one day tentatively. 'No doubt your guardians made her an
+allowance while you lived with her.'
+
+'Yes,' said Sibyl, who was sitting on the hearthrug, trying to make
+Crack do his trick of sitting up. It was his only trick, and he could
+not do that unless he happened to be sitting down when called upon to
+perform it. If he were on all fours at the moment, he could not remember
+how it began. 'Aunt Marion often said it was a very handsome allowance.'
+
+'And have you continued it, or part of it?' asked Mr. Loftus gravely.
+
+Sibyl owned that she had never thought of doing so.
+
+'Everything I have is yours now,' she said, looking up at him.
+
+'And I am spending it,' he said, 'freely. Thousands of yours are being
+put into the estate, in repairs, and new farms and buildings. I am like
+the man in Scripture who pulled down his barns to build greater--at
+least, who intended to do so if he had had time.'
+
+Mr. Loftus stopped. For the first time for many years a faint wish
+crossed his mind that his soul might not be required of him till all
+those expensive improvements were paid for, which would make Doll's
+position as landlord easier than his own had been.
+
+'Even in these bad times,' he went on, 'Wilderleigh will come round. You
+have taken a great weight off my mind, Sibyl.'
+
+'That is what I wish,' she said, turning her face, as he put back a
+little ring of hair behind her ear, so that her lips met his hand.
+
+'But Lady Pierpoint? I am afraid, Sibyl, her husband left her very badly
+off.'
+
+'I will write now,' said Sibyl, springing to her feet.
+
+Crack rose too, and jumped on Mr. Loftus's knees, quietly pushing his
+hands off them with his strong nose, and accommodating his long, thin
+body by a few jerks into the groove which a masculine lap presents. Mr.
+Loftus did not want him, and it tired him to keep his knees together;
+but he knew there was a draught on the floor, and he allowed him to
+remain.
+
+'How much shall I say? A thousand a year or fifteen hundred for her
+life?' asked Sibyl, dipping her pen in the ink. It was all one to her.
+She always gave freely of what cost her nothing--namely, money.
+
+'It must not be too much, or she won't feel able to take it,' said Mr.
+Loftus, considering. 'And if it is an annuity, it does not help the
+children.' And he wondered how far he dared go.
+
+And when, a few days later, Lady Pierpoint received a note from Sibyl,
+very delicately and affectionately expressed, and offering, in such a
+manner as to make refusal almost impossible, a sum of money more than
+sufficient to provide for both her daughters, she guessed immediately
+whose tact had dictated the letter.
+
+'Sibyl would never have thought of it,' she said to herself, as she
+wrote a note of acceptance. 'It never crossed her mind when she left us,
+or even to offer to pay for Peggy's and Molly's bridesmaids' gowns,
+although she chose such expensive ones. And if it had occurred to her
+since, she would not have put it like that.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+   'Le monde est plein de gens qui ne sont pas plus
+    sages.'--LA FONTAINE.
+
+
+With the winter came many invitations, but they were nearly all refused,
+for Mr. Loftus had long since dispensed himself from attending county
+festivities, and Sibyl, though she had recovered her health, was always
+delicate. Lady Pierpoint had had doubts as to whether she ought to
+winter in England, but not only was Sibyl herself determined so to do,
+but when Lady Pierpoint saw her in London before Christmas with a
+vivid colour and an elasticity of bearing which made a marked contrast
+to the drooping, listless demeanour of the previous winter, her doubts
+were at once set at rest.
+
+Presently, however, an invitation came for a masked ball in the
+immediate neighbourhood, which Mr. Loftus decided could not be refused.
+
+'But why should we go?' said Sibyl, 'if we don't care about it. And I
+hate balls, and I hate society. I was saying so to the Gresleys only
+yesterday. I love my own fireside and a book.'
+
+Sibyl had no idea how much these occasional mild flourishes, which found
+great favour at the Vicarage, annoyed Mr. Loftus. She put them forth,
+poor thing! with a view to showing him how much she had in common with
+him.
+
+'It is a mistake to say you hate society,' said Mr. Loftus, 'because
+you are not in a position to hate what you have never seen. Personally,
+I can see nothing peculiarly obnoxious in my fellow-creatures when they
+have their diamonds and white ties on. I do not even discover that they
+are more worldly in ball-gowns than on other occasions.'
+
+'But it is all so empty and vain,' said Sibyl; 'and though I dare say I
+have not seen much, still, the small-talk is so wearying, and I suppose
+that is the same everywhere. I should not mind society if there was any
+real conversation, anything _deep_.'
+
+Sibyl loved the word 'deep.' She used it on the occasions when others
+use the word 'trite,' she meaning the same as they did, but looking at
+the trite from a different angle. From her point of vantage,
+eccentricity was originality, and a wholesale contradiction of
+established facts a new view.
+
+Mr. Loftus was so close on the verge of annoyance that he was obliged to
+be amused instead.
+
+'I have heard many people say they hated society,' he said, smiling, and
+Sibyl smiled back at him, delighted at having won his approbation by the
+nobility and originality of her sentiments.
+
+'I have generally found that they are persons to whom, probably for some
+excellent reason, society has shown the cold shoulder, or those, like
+the Gresleys, who have never seen anything of it, and who call
+garden-parties, and flower-shows, and bazaars, and all those dismal
+local functions, society.'
+
+'She is not going to this masked ball,' said Sibyl. 'I asked her, and
+she said, "Of course not. Her husband being a clergyman made it quite
+impossible." I wonder why she always says things are quite impossible
+for the clergy that most of the other clergy do. She said the same about
+the Hunt Ball.'
+
+'That was because of the pink coats of the men and the new gowns of the
+women, and also partly because they were not asked. It happened to be a
+good ball, consequently it was dangerous. Dowdiness has from a very
+early date of this world's history been regarded as a sacrifice
+acceptable to the Deity, so naturally pretty gowns and electric light
+are considered to be the perquisites of the Evil One.'
+
+'But are we really going to this ball?'
+
+'We are. It would be unneighbourly not to do so. I met Lady Pontesbury
+yesterday in D----, and she begged us to support her, and to bring even
+numbers. People cannot give balls in the country, Sibyl, if none of the
+neighbours will take the trouble to fill their houses. I have seen very
+cruel things of that kind done. Ours is the largest house in the
+neighbourhood, and, as it now has a mistress, we must fill it.'
+
+The idea of society having any claim on her was a new light to Sibyl.
+She had always considered herself superior to its blandishments. But now
+that she discovered that Mr. Loftus actually regarded certain social
+acts as a duty, and this masked ball as one in particular, she
+immediately changed her opinion, and forthwith looked upon it as a duty
+also. It was a duty which, as its fulfilment drew near, became less and
+less unpleasant to anticipate.
+
+She had until now lent a sympathetic ear to the Gresleys when they
+talked of society as a snare, and had echoed Mr. Gresley's remarks on
+the same.
+
+'Balls are not wrong in themselves,' Mr. Gresley would say in his chest
+voice, keeping his hand in before Sibyl and his admiring wife. 'It is
+only the abuse of them that is blameworthy. Use the world as not abusing
+it. A carpet dance among young people I should be the last to blame. We
+cannot keep the bow always at full stretch. But when it comes to ball
+after ball, party after party, and pleasure is made a business, instead
+of a recreation, by which I mean that which restores elasticity to the
+exhausted faculties, recreates us in fact, and renews our energy for
+our work, then indeed----' And Mr. Gresley would express himself at that
+length which is apparently the one great compensation of the teacher who
+has no pupils.
+
+Sibyl enjoyed his conversation very much. She thought Mr. Gresley a very
+sensible person, and his opinions were in harmony with her own.
+
+Mrs. Gresley had also declared, after a brief visit to Kensington in
+July during the 'sales,' that she had neither the means nor the
+inclination to throw herself into the social whirlpool which she and Mr.
+Gresley had dispassionately viewed from two green chairs in the Row, and
+which Mr. Gresley had estimated 'at its true worth.' If she had
+possessed both the means and the inclination, she would perhaps have
+discovered that she was no nearer to that vortex than the many
+thousands who annually make a pilgrimage to London only to be tossed on
+the outermost ripple of the whirlpool, and who revolve for ever on the
+rim of society like Saturn's rings, without approaching the central
+luminary. But that it is difficult to be loved of Society and ensnared
+by her the Gresleys and Sibyl did not know, any more than that certain
+crimes require great qualities in order to commit them.
+
+Mr. Loftus might have been able to relieve their ignorance, but, as
+Sibyl told the Gresleys, he did not care much for conversation.
+
+A habit of silence was certainly growing upon him since his marriage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+   'Et chacun croit fort aisément,
+    Ce qu'il craint.'
+
+    LA FONTAINE.
+
+
+The night of the masked ball had arrived. A large party had assembled at
+Wilderleigh, including Lady Pierpoint and her daughters, and Doll. It
+was Doll's first visit to Wilderleigh since Mr. Loftus's marriage, and
+as he looked down the dinner-table at Sibyl he wondered at his own folly
+in coming. He thought he had 'got over it,' but to-night he found that
+he had made a sufficiently grave mistake in supposing so. Unimaginative
+persons never know when they have got over anything, because they have
+no fore-knowledge in absence of the stab which a certain presence can
+inflict. So Doll walked stolidly in--where Mr. Loftus in a remote but
+not forgotten passage of his own life had feared to tread--and then
+writhed and bit his lip at the hurt he had inflicted upon himself.
+
+In the days when he had hoped to marry Sibyl, he had often pictured her
+to himself--his imagination could reach as far as tangible objects, such
+as furniture and food and raiment--sitting at the head of his table,
+talking to his guests, wearing the Wilderleigh diamonds, and looking as
+she looked now; for to-night Sibyl was beautiful. And it had all come
+about, except one thing--that she was married to Mr. Loftus instead of
+to him. He turned to look fixedly at Mr. Loftus talking to Lady
+Pierpoint, and saw as in some new and arid light his thin stooping
+figure in the carved high-backed chair, the refined profile with the
+high thin nose and scant brushed-back gray hair, and the bloodless
+Vandyke hand holding his wine-glass. Mr. Loftus had a very beautiful
+hand. Doll had not seen Mr. Loftus and Sibyl together except at the
+altar-rails. And as he looked rage took him. It was a monstrous
+marriage. The blood rushed to his face, and beat in his temples. And a
+sudden bitter hatred surged up within him against Mr. Loftus as man
+against man. He looked at him again in his gray hair and his feebleness,
+and loathed him.
+
+And Mr. Loftus's indifferent kindly glance met his, and he smiled
+quietly at him. And the cold fit came after the hot one, and poor Doll
+cursed himself, and told himself for the first time of many times--of
+how many times!--that the greatest evil that could befall him in life
+would be to become estranged from 'Uncle George.'
+
+'What are you thinking of?' said Peggy's voice at his elbow. Peggy was
+often at Doll's elbow at other times besides dinner, a fact which did
+not escape Lady Pierpoint's maternal eye, but for which she did not
+reprimand Peggy, any more than for her slightly upturned nose and little
+upper lip, which turned up in sympathy too. But Peggy vaguely felt that
+on this occasion her dear 'mummy' was rather in the way, especially when
+the whole party assembled in the hall in their masks and dominoes, and
+Peggy could not sufficiently admire Doll's flame-coloured garment with a
+black devil outlined on the back and a hood with pointed ears. She had
+no eyes for Captain Charrington, the tallest man in the Guards,
+magnificent in crimson silk from head to foot, with crimson mask as
+well, or for another of Doll's companions in arms in a chessboard domino
+of black and white with an appalling white mask.
+
+'Look, Peggy,' said Lady Pierpoint, 'at Mrs. Devereux. I think I have
+never seen any domino as pretty as her white one with little silver bees
+all over it.'
+
+Mrs. Devereux protested, in a muffled manner, through the lace edge of
+her mask that Miss Pierpoint's and Mrs. Loftus's duplicate primrose ones
+edged with gold quite put her bees into the shade.
+
+'Into a hive you mean,' said her husband, a dull young man in dove
+colour. 'But how are we to know Mrs. Loftus and Miss Pierpoint apart?'
+
+'You won't know us,' said Sibyl; 'that is just the point.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+'There is one thing I ought to have asked you before,' said Sibyl
+solemnly in her married-woman voice, as the brougham in which she and
+Mr. Loftus had driven together drew up in the _queue_. 'Would you like
+me to dance or not?'
+
+'Are you fond of dancing?'
+
+'Very--at least, I mean I don't mind.'
+
+'Then, dance by all means.'
+
+'You are quite sure it is what you wish. I thought perhaps as a married
+woman----'
+
+'Married goose,' said Mr. Loftus, laughing, perfectly aware that she
+would have liked him to be jealous.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+'I'm going to dance,' whispered Sibyl to Peggy, as they followed Mr.
+Loftus and Lady Pierpoint, the only unmasked ones of the party, towards
+the ballroom. 'He says he wishes me to. He is always so unselfish.'
+
+But Peggy's open eyes and mouth and whole attention were turned to the
+ballroom which they were entering.
+
+Lord and Lady Pontesbury were standing near the entrance solemnly
+shaking hands with the masked hooded figures who came silently towards
+them. No introductions were possible. Lord Pontesbury almost embraced
+Mr. Loftus, so relieved was he to see a human face. Lady Pontesbury
+beamed on Lady Pierpoint.
+
+'Your girls here?' she whispered. No one seemed able to speak above a
+whisper.
+
+'Yes,' said Lady Pierpoint below her breath, looking helplessly round
+at the twenty muffled figures in her wake. And Captain Charrington came
+forward at once, and said he was the eldest, and produced Doll as his
+youngest sister, while Peggy and Molly wondered how anyone could be so
+funny and live.
+
+The long ballroom, with its cedar-panelled walls outlined in gilding,
+was brilliantly lighted. The floor of pale polished oak shone like the
+pale walls. Banks of orchids rose in the bay-windows. In the brilliant
+light a vast crowd of spectral figures stalked about in silence, clad in
+every variety and incongruous mixture of colour.
+
+'Like devils out on a holiday,' said a voice from the depths of a fool's
+cap and bells.
+
+Mr. Loftus was at once surrounded by masked figures who shook hands
+with him warmly. A Bishop was the centre of another group, ruefully
+responding to he knew not whom, half the young men in the room telling
+him that they had met him last at the Palace when they were ordained.
+
+One mischievous couple were making the circuit of the room, conversing
+with the chaperons one after the other, who smiled helplessly at them
+and answered but little, for middle-aged ladies with daughters out have
+other things to think of besides repartee. Captain Charrington sustained
+his character of a wit by walking about growling at intervals in a
+mysterious and interesting manner.
+
+The band took its courage in both hands, and broke the silence. A tremor
+passed through the crowd. There was a momentary pause, a momentary
+uncertainty as to the sex of the hooded figures, and then forty, fifty,
+seventy couples of demons were solemnly polkaing.
+
+Mr. Loftus smiled. Sibyl, standing by him, laughed till he gently urged
+her to take it more quietly. Lord and Lady Pontesbury turned for a
+moment from the fresh arrivals, and their mournful faces relaxed. The
+Bishop, who seldom saw anything more enlivening than a confirmation or a
+diocesan gathering, shed tears. The trombone collapsed, the wind
+instruments wavered, and left the violins for a moment to make desperate
+music by themselves. Then the band pulled itself together, and the music
+and the flying feet rushed headlong on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Doll, who had hardly spoken to Sibyl that day, came up to claim his
+dance.
+
+'I can't dance any more,' she said plaintively. 'My domino weighs me
+down. Let us sit out.'
+
+'Shall we go into the gallery,' said Doll, 'and watch the unmasking from
+there? It is a quarter to twelve now, and every one unmasks at twelve.'
+
+He did not know whether to be glad or sorry that she would not dance
+with him. 'Better not,' he said to himself. But he had thought of the
+possibility of that dance many times before he reached the ballroom, and
+had decided that it was his duty to ask her.
+
+They left the ballroom, and, passing numerous ghostly figures sitting in
+nooks and on the wide staircase, they made their way to the arched
+gallery which overhung the ballroom. Every white arch had been lit by
+a pendent pink-shaded lamp, and the arches and Sibyl's primrose domino
+all took the same rosy hue. In nearly every arch a couple were already
+sitting, watching the crowd below. Doll secured one of the few vacant
+places, and Sibyl drew her chair forward and leaned her slender bare
+arms on the white stone balustrade. The couple in the adjoining archway
+were chattering volubly, but Doll and Sibyl did not talk. She did not
+notice the omission, for her eyes were following the quaint pageant with
+the delight of a child. Doll racked his brains for something to say, and
+found nothing.
+
+Why had she married Uncle George? Why had she married Uncle George? So,
+as he could not ask her that, and tell her that he cared for her a
+hundred times more than her husband did, he said nothing.
+
+The _pas de quatre_ was in full swing. The men, annoyed by their long
+dominoes, and having one hand disengaged, raised their voluminous skirts
+and danced with long black legs, regardless of propriety. Captain
+Charrington's endless crimson domino had come open in front and
+displayed his high action to great advantage. A very elegant pink
+domino, which had been introduced by the eldest son of the house as an
+heiress to all the men whom he did not recognise, and which had danced
+only with masculine dominoes, was now seen to emulate its partner, and
+to have black trousers rolled up above its white-stockinged ankles, and
+rather large white satin shoes.
+
+'Look!' said the girl in the next archway; 'that pink domino must be
+Mr. Lumley. He often acts as a woman.'
+
+'Hang him for an impostor! I've danced with him as such,' said the man,
+with ill-concealed vexation. 'He knew me, and called me by name. I took
+him for----' He did not finish his sentence. 'By Jove! that black domino
+with a death's-head and cross-bones is a good idea,' he went on. 'Is it
+half-mourning, do you suppose?'
+
+'How foolish you are! That is Lord Lutwyche. I have just been dancing
+with him.'
+
+'Lord Lutwyche is not here. He sprained his ankle at hockey yesterday.'
+
+The female domino appeared to be a prey to uneasy reflections.
+
+'The primrose domino is the prettiest in the room,' she said presently.
+'And how well she dances! I wonder who she is.'
+
+'I happen to know that is Mrs. Loftus.'
+
+Sibyl, with her back to the arch, could hear every word on the other
+side of it. Doll was not near enough. This was indeed delightful! How
+lucky that she and Peggy had come dressed alike!
+
+'Which is Mr. Loftus?' said the woman's voice eagerly. 'I have heard so
+much about him.'
+
+'That tall, thin, fine-looking old chap with his hands behind his back,
+standing by the Bishop. The Union Jack domino is speaking to him.'
+
+'So that is he. I have always wished to see him. He looks tired to
+death.'
+
+'He always looks like that. Quite a character, though, isn't he?'
+
+'He has an interesting face. But it was a disgraceful thing, his
+marrying a pretty young girl, and an heiress, at his age.'
+
+Sibyl made a sudden movement, and the other couple glanced round. They
+saw her, but her primrose domino had taken the pink of her surroundings,
+and they suspected nothing.
+
+'I'm not so sure. His nephew stands up for him, though his uncle cut him
+out, and his nephew ought to know. I fancy there was more in that
+marriage than outsiders suspect. I've heard it said more than once that
+she fell head-over-ears in love with him, and he married her out of
+pity.'
+
+The last words fell distinctly on Sibyl's ears, and at that second the
+music ceased with a crash, and a gong boomed out, engulfing all other
+sounds. It was twelve o'clock. A bell somewhere just above them was
+counting out twelve slow strokes, just too late--just ten seconds too
+late.
+
+She leaned back sick and shivering.
+
+She did not realize that the crash and the tolling bell were part of the
+evening's programme. They seemed to her the natural result of the words
+she had just heard. If she had been crossed in love at Lisbon before the
+earthquake, she would have regarded that upheaval as the immediate
+consequence of her lacerated feelings.
+
+'Look, look!' said the woman; 'they are unmasking.'
+
+A confused sound of laughter and surprise and recognition, and a
+widespread hum of conversation, came up to them.
+
+Everyone was streaming out of the gallery, and in the ballroom there
+was a vast turmoil, as of hiving bees, and a throng at every door.
+
+'Shall I take you to the cloak-room to leave your mask and domino?' said
+Doll, turning to her at last, from watching without seeing it what was
+passing below. He took off his velvet mask as he spoke. The sullen
+wretchedness of his face fitted ill with the pointed rakish ears which
+still surmounted it.
+
+She did not answer. He saw that the outstretched hand still on the
+balustrade was tightly clenched.
+
+'Mrs. Loftus,' he said. 'Sibyl! what is it? Are you ill?'
+
+She tore off her mask, and, as if she were suffocating, plucked with
+trembling hands at the gold ribbon that fastened her hood and domino.
+
+He was alarmed, and clumsily helped her to loosen them. Her small face,
+released from the mask, looked shrunk and pinched like a squirrel's in
+its thrown-back hood. The pink glow upon it from the lamp was in
+horrible contrast with its agonized expression.
+
+'What is it? what is it?' said Doll, in distress nearly as great as her
+own, taking her little clenched hand, and holding it, still clenched, in
+his large grasp. 'Are you ill?'
+
+She shook her head impatiently.
+
+'Would you like--shall I--fetch Mr. Loftus?'
+
+She winced as if she had been struck.
+
+'No,' she gasped; 'I will not see him--I will not see him!'
+
+A change came over Doll's face. Involuntarily, his hand tightened its
+clasp on hers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+'These entertainments,' said the Bishop to Mr. Loftus, as they paused
+for a moment in the gallery, and looked down into the ballroom, which
+was now rapidly refilling with gaily-dressed women and pink and black
+coats, 'are, I believe, typical of English country life. They
+are--ahem!--the gallery seems conducive to conversation; it is, in fact,
+a--er--whispering-gallery.' Here he turned, smiling, to Mr. Loftus.
+'Perhaps Mr. Doll has hardly reached the stage at which he will call
+upon me to officiate--just so; we will go down by the other
+staircase--but I trust, though I might be in the way at present, that my
+services may be required a little later on.'
+
+'I should like to see Doll married,' said Mr. Loftus, who had been not a
+little surprised at the eager manner in which the young man was bending
+towards the figure with her back towards them, whose fallen-back hood
+intercepted her features. He recognised the domino.
+
+'I had no idea Peggy had made such an impression,' he said to himself.
+
+As he re-entered the ballroom, he met Lady Pierpoint, also returning to
+it with her two plump little girls in tow, whom she had been tidying in
+the cloak-room. Captain Charrington and some of the other men from
+Wilderleigh were waiting near the doorway, claiming first dances as
+their party came in. The orchestra, who had been refreshing themselves,
+were remounting to their places.
+
+'Then, where is Sibyl?' said Mr. Loftus, looking at Peggy.
+
+'She went to the gallery a long time ago,' replied Peggy promptly, 'with
+Mr. Doll, to see the people unmask at twelve o'clock.'
+
+Mr. Loftus smiled. 'It was a horrible sight as seen from below,' he
+said; 'half the men's faces were black, and the hair of every one of
+them stood up at the back.'
+
+The band struck up a swaying, languorous valse such as tears the hearts
+out of young persons in their teens.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+'I must go home,' Sibyl kept repeating feverishly. 'Doll, you must get
+the carriage. I must go home.'
+
+Doll was engaged to Peggy for this valse, but he had forgotten it. Sibyl
+was engaged to Captain Charrington, but she had forgotten it.
+
+He was terrified, as only reticent persons can be, lest her loss of
+self-control should be observed. He helped her to her feet, and took
+her to the cloak-room, she clinging convulsively to him. Her entire
+disregard of appearances filled him with apprehension. The cloak-room
+was empty, even of attendants, for it had been thronged till within the
+last ten minutes, and now the wave had surged back to the ballroom, and
+the maids, their duties finished, had slipped away to see the spectacle.
+
+Sibyl cast herself down on a chair, shivering. Her little Grecian crown
+of diamonds fell crooked.
+
+'Let me fetch Lady Pierpoint,' said Doll urgently.
+
+'No, no,' she said imploringly; 'I want to go home. Oh, Doll, get the
+carriage, and take me home. Is it so much to ask?'
+
+He looked at her in doubt. She was not fit to return to the ballroom.
+Evidently she would make no attempt to conceal her despair, whatever its
+cause might be, from the first chance comer.
+
+'I will take you,' he said; and he rushed out to the stables, found the
+Wilderleigh coachman, and himself helped to put the horses into the
+brougham.
+
+'It was ordered for one o'clock especially for Mr. Loftus,' said the
+coachman, hesitating, 'and the landau, and the fly, and the homnibus for
+half-past three.'
+
+'You will be back in time for Mr. Loftus,' said Doll. 'Mrs. Loftus is
+ill, and must go home immediately.'
+
+He had the brougham at the door in ten minutes, and returned to the
+cloak-room to find a maid standing by Sibyl with a glass of water. Sibyl
+was still shivering, holding on to the chair with both hands, her eyes
+half closed, her face ghastly.
+
+'I am afraid the lady is ill,' said the servant.
+
+It was very evident that she was ill.
+
+'The carriage is here,' said Doll. 'Can you manage to walk to it?'
+
+She rose unsteadily, and the maid wrapped her in her white cloak. It
+annoyed Doll that the maid evidently looked upon them as an interesting
+young married couple.
+
+He gave Sibyl his arm, and she staggered against him. He hesitated, and
+then compressed his lips, put his arm round her, and, half carrying,
+half leading her, helped her to the carriage.
+
+It was a white night with snow upon the ground. The band was playing
+one of Chevalier's songs. Out into the solemn night came the urgent
+appeal of ''Enery 'Awkins' to his Eliza not to die an old maid,
+accompanied by the dull, threshing sound of many feet.
+
+As the carriage began to move, Sibyl seemed to revive, and a moan broke
+from her.
+
+'Oh, Doll,' she said suddenly, turning towards him and catching his hand
+and wringing it. 'It isn't true, is it? It is only a horrible lie.'
+
+'What isn't true?' he said fiercely, almost hating her for the pain she
+was causing him, not his hand.
+
+'It isn't true what that man said in the next arch, that--that Mr.
+Loftus married me out of pity?' And she swayed herself to and fro.
+
+She had asked the only person to whom Mr. Loftus had confided his real
+reasons for his marriage.
+
+It had been on the tip of Doll's tongue all the evening to say: 'Why did
+you marry him? _I_ would have married you for love.' But he mastered
+himself.
+
+'It isn't true, is it?' gasped Sibyl.
+
+Doll set his teeth.
+
+'No,' he said. 'It's a lie. He married you for love. He--_told me so_!'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+   'Pour connaître il faut savoir ignorer.'--AMIEL.
+
+
+'Doll,' said Mr. Loftus, the morning after the ball, when all the guests
+had departed, except the Pierpoints, 'I do not expect absolute
+perfection in my fellow-creatures, but it appeared to me that you fell
+rather below your usual near approach to it last night. What do _you_
+think?'
+
+Doll answered nothing.
+
+'You see,' went on Mr. Loftus, 'after twelve o'clock, when everyone
+unmasked, was the time when I should naturally have introduced Sibyl to
+many of our friends and neighbours, as this was her first public
+appearance since her marriage, and I could not do so on our arrival. The
+fact that she had left the house without me, and--without my
+knowledge--was unfortunate.'
+
+It had been more than unfortunate in reality. Mr. Loftus, whose marriage
+had made a great sensation in his own county, had been begged on all
+sides, as soon as the masks were off, to introduce his wife, and, though
+he had not shown any surprise at her non-appearance and Doll's, he had
+at last been obliged to retire to the men's cloak-room and wait there
+till his carriage came, so as to obscure the fact that she had departed
+without him. He had been annoyed at what he took to be Doll's
+heedlessness of appearances.
+
+'She felt ill, and wished to go home,' said Doll, reddening, and not
+perceiving that he was offering an explanation which did not cover the
+ground. He would have been perfectly satisfied with it himself.
+
+'I greatly fear that she _is_ ill,' said Mr. Loftus; 'but she was quite
+well when she went to the ball last night. She is very delicate and
+excitable. Is it possible that anything occurred to upset her?'
+
+Mr. Loftus fixed his keen steel-gray eyes on Doll. He had seen, as he
+saw everything, Doll's momentary jealousy of him the evening before.
+
+For the life of him Doll could not think what to say. It seemed
+impossible to tell Mr. Loftus the truth, and he had but little of that
+inventive talent which envious persons with a small vocabulary call
+lying. That little had been used up the night before. Yet, perhaps, if
+he had been aware that Mr. Loftus had seen him with Sibyl in the gallery
+in an attitude which allowed of but few interpretations, his slow mind
+might have grasped the nettly fact that he must explain.
+
+Mr. Loftus waited.
+
+'My boy,' he said at last, 'I am not only Sibyl's husband'--he saw Doll
+wince--'but I am also, I verily believe, her best friend.'
+
+There was no answer.
+
+A slight, almost imperceptible, change came over Mr. Loftus's face. He
+paused a moment, and then went on quietly:
+
+'Sibyl is most generous about money--too generous. I am almost afraid of
+taking an unfair advantage of it, though she presses me to do so. But I
+am pushing on the repairs everywhere; and I am rebuilding Greenfields
+and Springlands from the ground. They will get to work again directly
+the frost is over. I have the plans here, if you would like to look at
+them.'
+
+He drew a roll out of the writing-table drawer, and spread it on the
+table. Doll perceived with intense relief that the subject was dropped,
+and he knew Mr. Loftus well enough to be certain that it would never
+under any circumstances be reopened. But as he looked at the plans, and
+Mr. Loftus pointed out the new well and the various advantages of the
+designs, it dawned upon Doll's consciousness that he was losing
+something which he had always regarded as a secure possession, and which
+nothing could replace--Mr. Loftus's confidence.
+
+He had seen it withdrawn in this gentle fashion from other people, who
+did not find out for years afterwards that it was irrevocably gone. And
+he became aware that he could not bear to lose it.
+
+'Here,' said Mr. Loftus, putting on his silver-rimmed pince-nez, 'is, or
+ought to be, the new private road leading out on to the H---- highroad.
+I decided to make it, Doll, not only for the convenience of the farm,
+but also because I cannot let that row of cottages with any certainty
+until there is an easier means of access to them. My father always
+intended to make a road there. I only hope,' he said at last, letting
+the map fly back into a roll, 'that I shall live to pay for all I am
+doing, but I can't pay for unfinished contracts. If I don't, Doll, you
+will have to raise a mortgage on the property to pay for the actual
+improvements on it. Sibyl has left all her fortune to me, I believe;
+but as I am certain to go first, Wilderleigh will not be the gainer.'
+
+And it passed through Mr. Loftus's mind for the first time that perhaps,
+after all, Sibyl might still marry Doll some day. How he had once wished
+for that marriage he remembered with a sigh.
+
+'It may be. Youth turns to youth,' said Mr. Loftus to himself, as he
+went up to his wife's room after Doll had left.
+
+Sibyl was ill. A chill, or a shock, or excitement--who shall say
+which?--had just touched the delicate balance of her health and overset
+it. It toppled over suddenly without warning, without any of the
+preliminary struggles by which a strong constitution or a strong will
+staves off the advance of illness. She gave way entirely and at once,
+and the night after the night of the ball it would have been difficult
+to recognise, in the sunk, colourless face and motionless figure, the
+brilliant, lovely young girl in her little diamond crown.
+
+Sibyl's illness did not prove dangerous, but it was long. Lady
+Pierpoint, who had nursed her before, sent her daughters home, and took
+her place again by the bedside, with the infinite patience which she had
+learned in helping her husband down the valley towards the death which
+at last became the one goal of all their longing, and which had receded
+before them with every toiling step towards it, till they had both wept
+together because he could not, could not die. Perhaps it was because her
+husband had gone through the slow mill of consumption that Lady
+Pierpoint's heart had so much tenderness for Sibyl, for whom only a
+year ago she had dreaded the same fate.
+
+Mr. Loftus had the nervous horror of, and repugnance to, every form of
+illness which as often accompanies a refined and sympathetic nature as
+it does an obtuse and selfish one. And his lonely existence had not
+brought him into contact with that inevitable side of domestic life. He
+was extraordinarily ignorant about it, and his natural impulse was to
+avoid it.
+
+But he stood by his wife's bedside, adjusted his pince-nez, and accepted
+the situation. For many days Sibyl would take nothing unless given it by
+himself, would rouse herself for no voice but his. Lady Pierpoint
+marvelled to see him come into Sibyl's room at night in his long gray
+dressing-gown, to administer the food or medicine which the nurse put
+into his hand. His patience and his kindness did not flag, but it
+seemed to Lady Pierpoint as if at this eleventh hour they should not
+have been demanded of him; and it wounded her--why, it would be hard to
+say--to watch him do for Sibyl with painstaking care the little things
+which in her own youth her young husband had done for her, the little
+things which in wedded life are the great things.
+
+Mr. Loftus sometimes made a mistake, and once he forgot that he was
+married, and was found pacing in the rose-garden oblivious of everything
+except a political crisis--but only once. He was faithful in that which
+is least.
+
+Lady Pierpoint felt with a twinge of conscience that when she had
+endeavoured to bring about this marriage she had been selfishly
+engrossed in Sibyl's welfare. She had not thought enough of his.
+
+And gradually Sibyl recovered, and went about the house again, wan and
+feeble, and Lady Pierpoint left Wilderleigh.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+   'Dark is the world to thee? Thyself art the reason why.'
+
+    TENNYSON.
+
+
+Convalescence is often accompanied by a depression of spirits rarely
+experienced during the illness itself. A weak nature seeks for a cause
+for this depression in its surroundings, and when it finds one, as it
+invariably does, it hugs it. These causes, thanks to the assiduity of
+one whom we are given to understand has seen better days, are seldom far
+to seek; and it requires a very strong will to hold fast the conviction
+that these paroxysms of depression arise from physical weakness, and
+not from some secret woe. Sibyl had not a very strong will. After the
+first novelty of convalescence was past, and she had been installed in
+her sitting-room in a cascade of lace and ribbons, which her dressmaker
+called a _saut du lit_, and after Mr. Loftus had gravitated back towards
+the library on the ground-floor and his article for the _Millennium_,
+Sibyl began to experience that vague weariness and distaste of life
+which all know who know ill health.
+
+It is at this stage that the unprincipled invalid becomes 'the terror of
+the household and its shame.' It is at this stage that lengths of felt
+are laid down in passages by tender and injudicious parents, because no
+sound can be borne by sensitive ears, that the children are 'hushed,'
+the blinds are drawn down, and doctors who encourage exercise and light
+are speedily discovered to have misunderstood the delicate constitution
+with which they have to deal.
+
+If Sibyl had not had a cause for depression, she would most certainly
+have manufactured one. But unfortunately she had a real one. The
+incident of the masked ball rankled. Doll had lied. He had done his poor
+best, but he had not lied well. His eyes had not quite looked her in the
+face when he told her that Mr. Loftus had married her for love. His
+voice had not that emphatic ring which the crude mind ever recognises as
+the ring of truth, and which in consequence the progressive one applies
+itself to acquire.
+
+Her mind, dulled by illness and narcotics, had half forgotten that she
+had been momentarily distressed. But now the remembrance came back like
+a nightmare. The grain of sand, blown by chance into her eye, pricked,
+and she sedulously rubbed it into an inflammation.
+
+She remembered now that there had been an earlier incident in his
+courtship which had not been satisfactorily explained, _when he proposed
+to her the second time_. Sibyl always regarded his offer under the
+mountain-ash as _the second time_. She had a vague feeling that he had
+proposed before. She had said as much to one or two friends in
+confidence. But now that she came to think of it, she remembered that it
+was she who had proposed _the first time_, and had been refused. This
+minor detail of an uncomfortable incident had until now almost slipped
+out of her memory, which, like that of many women whose buoyancy
+depends on the conviction of the admiration of others, seldom harboured
+anything likely to prove a worm in that bud.
+
+But now she applied to the whole subject that mental friction which
+morbid minds believe to be reflection, until it became, so to speak,
+inflamed.
+
+Why had he sworn before the altar and the Bishop to love her, if he did
+not love her? She became tearful, listless, apathetic. She sat for hours
+looking into the fire, unemployed, uninterested. The evil spirit which
+ever lurks in sofas and couches whispered in her ear, when it pressed
+the cushions, that she was indeed miserable, that her husband avoided
+her, that she was an unloved martyr, that no one felt for her or
+sympathized with her. It did not tell her that she had been married for
+her money, simply because no sane person could look at Mr. Loftus and
+believe that. But she changed in manner towards him. She was cold,
+formal. She turned away her head when he came into the room, and then
+when he had left it wept in secret because she had been married out of
+pity.
+
+And yet in her heart of hearts, if she had such a thing, had she not
+partly guessed that fact long ago, and wilfully shut her eyes to it? The
+chance words she had overheard were only the confirmation of a latent
+misgiving. Does any woman ever really remain in ignorance if she is not
+loved, or if she has been married for other reasons than love? What
+constant props and supports she had given to Mr. Loftus's love for her!
+It had never been allowed to stand alone. Why had she from the first
+always bolstered it up by continually saying to herself and others,
+until she almost believed it: 'My husband is so devoted to me. My love
+is such a little thing beside his. What have I done to deserve such a
+great devotion?' How often she had said all these things that
+tepidly-loved women say!
+
+Seeming to observe nothing, Mr. Loftus saw all, and pondered over the
+reason of her altered appearance, and her visibly changed feeling
+towards himself since the night of the masked ball. If it were that her
+health was threatened as it had been before her marriage, why should her
+affection towards himself have undergone this change? Could it be
+anything to do with Doll? And in these days Sibyl was more frequently in
+his thoughts than in the early days of his marriage with her. The
+thought of her came between him and the political article which the
+editor of the _Millennium_ had asked for.
+
+'Time will show,' he would say to himself, with a sigh, taking up his
+pen again.
+
+One afternoon soon afterwards he came into her sitting-room, and found
+her in tears.
+
+'Has Crack said anything unkind?' he asked gently, while Crack beat his
+tail in the depths of the fur rug in courteous recognition of his own
+name.
+
+'No,' she said, turning her head away.
+
+'Have I, then?' sitting down by her.
+
+'No.'
+
+'Then, my child, what is it?'
+
+'Nothing,' she said faintly.
+
+There was a pause.
+
+'Is it the same nothing that troubled you the night of the ball?'
+
+He saw her start and shrink away from him.
+
+'Oh! did Doll tell you?' she gasped, turning crimson.
+
+'My dear, he told me nothing,' said Mr. Loftus gently, moving slightly
+away from her, and looking at her with grave attention. He greatly
+feared that unhappiness was before her in some form or other. He waited
+in the hope that she would speak to him of her own accord. But she only
+began to cry again. She was still weak. Was it possible that she was
+afraid of him? What could be troubling her that she, who did not know
+what reticence meant, could fear to tell him, which yet Doll knew? Doll
+was in love with her. Had he lost his head on the night of the ball?
+Had she discovered that she and Doll were young?
+
+'Crack,' said Mr. Loftus, 'I have a very neglectful wife. I come to ask
+for something for my headache, and she pays no attention to me at all.'
+
+In earlier days Sibyl would have been on the alert in a moment if Mr.
+Loftus's sacred head confessed an ache. Now she moved slowly to the
+writing-table and produced certain innocuous remedies which he had
+brought to her and asked her to apply for him after that terrible time
+when he had had an attack of the heart and had repulsed her.
+
+Presently the headache was better, and Mr. Loftus went back to the
+library and lit his pipe, which was remarkable, because he was as a rule
+unable to smoke after a headache.
+
+He sat motionless a long time, his eyes fixed.
+
+'I hope,' he said at last, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, 'that I
+shall not live to become Sibyl's natural enemy, for I think I am about
+the only real friend she has in the world.'
+
+And the small seed that would have quickened in another man's heart into
+a deep-rooted jealousy remained upon the surface of his mind as a
+misgiving, which took the form of anxiety for her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+   'Oui, sans doute, tout meurt; ce monde est un grand rêve,
+    Et le peu de bonheur qui nous vient en chemin,
+    Nous n'avons pas plus tôt ce roseau dans la main,
+      Que le vent nous l'enlève.'
+
+    ALFRED DE MUSSET.
+
+
+Sibyl continued pale and listless, and presently Mr. Loftus found fault
+with her gowns. They were not new enough. The colours of her tea-gowns
+did not suit her. He suggested that she should go to London to Lady
+Pierpoint's house for a few days to see her dressmaker, and added, as an
+afterthought, that he should like her to consult the specialist to whom
+she had gone on former occasions, and whose name he had reason to
+remember.
+
+Sibyl received the suggestion of this visit in silence. She did not
+oppose herself to it, but left the room to shed a torrent of angry tears
+in private. The truth, which seldom visited her feeble judgment, did not
+tell her that Mr. Loftus was anxious about her health. Hysteria took up
+the tale instead, and officiously informed her that he was tired of her.
+He wanted to get rid of her. Men were always like that after they had
+been married a little time. What was a woman's love and devotion to them
+when the first novelty had worn off? She would go. She would certainly
+go; and when she was gone she would write to him, telling him that she
+saw only too plainly that his love for her was dead, and that she had
+decided never to return, and at the same time making over to him her
+entire fortune, reserving only for herself a pittance, on which she
+would live in seclusion in a cottage in some remote locality.
+
+She was somewhat consoled as she thought over the dignified, the
+harrowing letter which she would compose in London. Parts of it, as she
+repeated them to herself, moved her to tears. A new sullenness was added
+to the previous listlessness of her demeanour. She parted from Mr.
+Loftus with studied indifference.
+
+Mr. Loftus missed her, not altogether unpleasantly, when she left him.
+It was the first time that she had been a day away from him since their
+marriage. Life was certainly very tranquil without her. He wrote her a
+charming little letter every day of the three days she was away.
+
+Doll was with him on business. Now that Sibyl was absent, something of
+the old affection and confidence returned between them, which shrank
+away in her presence; but not quite all. At times, as they were talking,
+the younger man longed to break down the slight, almost imperceptible
+barrier that his stupid untimely silence had raised. But he could not do
+it. He could not take the plunge. Mr. Loftus, however, who would not
+have done such a thing for worlds, unwittingly gave him a push.
+
+'The spring coppice wants thinning,' he said to Doll the third morning.
+'We will go up and mark the trees this afternoon.'
+
+'I am going away to-day,' said Doll sullenly.
+
+'Stay another day,' said Mr. Loftus. 'Mrs. Gresley tells me that the
+sight of her happy home, and Mr. Gresley, and the church-tower as viewed
+from the spare bedroom of the Vicarage, have proved a turning-point in
+the lives of many wild young men. Stay another day, Doll, and I will
+emulate Mrs. Gresley. It will do you good.'
+
+'Uncle George,' stammered the young man with sudden anger, 'will you
+never, never understand? Have you forgotten that it is not a year ago
+since I told you--in this very room--and you said you would help me. I
+can't meet Sibyl; and--and she is coming back to-day. I tried in the
+winter, and--it was a failure.'
+
+Mr. Loftus had momentarily forgotten Sibyl, as he had done once before
+when she was ill.
+
+'I beg your pardon, Doll,' he said, his pale face reddening. 'I ought to
+have remembered.'
+
+There was a constrained silence.
+
+'It need not come between us,' said Mr. Loftus at last. 'You must not
+let it do that.'
+
+'I can't help it,' said Doll. 'It does. It must.'
+
+'Sibyl's happiness,' said Mr. Loftus sadly, 'seems to be a costly
+article. A great deal has been spent upon it, apparently without making
+it secure. If we have any real regard for her, we must manage to save
+that between us, Doll, whatever else goes by the board.'
+
+'What do you take me for?' said Doll fiercely.
+
+'A good man,' said Mr. Loftus, 'and the person I care for most in the
+world.'
+
+Sibyl's letter to Mr. Loftus was never written. At least it was written,
+as, indeed, were several, and read over and retouched at night in her
+own room; but even the best of the assortment remained unposted. Sibyl
+brought back her wan face and limp figure to Wilderleigh a few hours
+after Doll had left it, and heard with bitterness that he had been
+staying there. She had pictured to herself Mr. Loftus alone, missing her
+at every moment of the day, realizing the withdrawal of the sunshine of
+her presence. This was a 'high jump,' on the bar of which, it must be
+owned, even her practised imagination caught its toe. And now she found
+that Doll had been with him all the time--Doll, whom he cared for more
+than for his wife. He had not missed her, after all. Probably he and
+Doll had been discussing her. She had been jealous of Doll ever since
+she had seen Mr. Loftus take his arm during her first visit to
+Wilderleigh before she was married.
+
+Her jealousy revived now. For the remainder of the day Sibyl met Mr.
+Loftus with averted eyes and monosyllabic answers, rehearsing in her
+mind parting scenes with him which were to prove more poignantly
+distressing to him than the best of the letters, and in which he was to
+appeal in vain (imagination caught its toe once more) against her
+irrevocable determination to leave for ever one who had married her for
+other motives than love.
+
+She could see herself in evening dress, pale as the jasmine flower in
+her breast, mournful but unflinching, withdrawing her hand, and saying,
+in reply to the moving representation which he would of course make of
+his loneliness:
+
+'You have Doll!'
+
+She decided that she would not say more than that. No reproach should
+pass her lips.
+
+'You have Doll!'
+
+What words for a young wife to be forced to use to her husband! Her
+hands clenched in an agony of self-pity. What a cruel situation was
+hers!
+
+So Sibyl walked in her waking dream, and her husband watched her.
+
+'Is it the body that is ill, or is it the mind?' he asked himself.
+
+Later in the day the doctor's letter to himself--Mr. Loftus had written
+to him asking for a frank statement of Sibyl's condition--confirmed his
+worst fears for her.
+
+'Mrs. Loftus's health is endangered, not by her recent illness, of which
+no trace appears, but by some anxiety. She does not deny that she is
+suffering from great depression. Unless that anxiety, whatever it may
+be, can be removed, her morbid condition, if prolonged, will give rise
+to grave apprehension as to her future.'
+
+Mr. Loftus had heard something very like this before--about nine months
+ago. He had removed a mountain in order to remove with it the first
+cause of her unhappiness, and now unhappiness had reappeared. No one had
+guessed--no one had been allowed to guess--what an effort his marriage
+had been to him. And it had availed nothing. He dropped the letter into
+the fire, and, as he did so, exhaustion and an intense weariness of
+life laid hold upon him. He knew well the touch of those stern hands,
+but this evening, as he sat alone in the library, it seemed to him as if
+he had never endured their full pressure until now.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+   'O World, O Life, O Time.
+    O these last steps on which I climb.'
+
+    SHELLEY.
+
+
+For those who do not sleep, life has two sides--the side of night as
+well as day--and the heaviest hour of the day or night is the hour
+before the dawn, when the night-lamp totters and dies, and the ashen
+light of another day falls like despair on the familiar articles of
+furniture, the chairs, the table, the wardrobe, which have been up all
+night like ourselves, taking the imprint of our exhaustion through the
+interminable hours, and which look older and more haggard than ever in
+the changed light which brings nor change nor rest.
+
+Those who sleep at night, for whom each day is not divided by a gulf of
+pain, who look upon the darkness as a time of rest, and the morning as a
+time of waking, know one side of life, perhaps, as the passers-by in the
+street know one side of the hospital as they skirt it--the outside wall.
+
+Mr. Loftus slept ill, and the night after Sibyl's return he woke early.
+The gray light was just showing above the white blinds as he had seen it
+so many, many times. Would the morning ever come, he wondered, when he
+should no longer open his eyes upon the dawn, when 'these last steps'
+should be climbed, and effort would cease, and weariness might lie down
+and cease also?
+
+The premonitory tremor, the shudder of coming illness, laid its hand
+upon him, and with it came that physical recoil of the flesh from
+solitude before which the strongest will goes down.
+
+Involuntarily he got up and went to Sibyl's room. He opened the door
+noiselessly and looked in.
+
+The room felt deserted. He went up to the bed; it was empty. A great
+fear fell upon him. Had she left him? Poor, poor child! had she left
+him, as that other wife had left him in the half-forgotten past, buried
+beneath so many years? Can any man whose wife has forsaken him ever
+quite forget that he has once been deserted, that the road which leads
+away from him has known a woman's footsteps, and another may walk in it?
+He stood still and listened. The spirit had over-mastered the flesh.
+All suffering had vanished.
+
+From the next room, Sibyl's sitting-room, which opened out of her
+bedroom, a faint sound came. He noiselessly crossed, and looked through
+the half-open door, and thanked God.
+
+Sibyl was lying on her face on the polished floor in her night-gown,
+moaning and sobbing, a white blot upon the dark boards.
+
+He had seen her lie like that once before, among the bracken in the
+park, in the entire abandonment of young despair. The vague suspicion of
+many weeks dropped its disguise, and stood revealed, an awful figure
+between them, between the old man in his gray hair and the young, young
+wife.
+
+He withdrew stealthily, regained his own room, and sat down in the
+armchair.
+
+That passion of tears could flow from one source only. He knew Sibyl
+well enough to know that she had no tears, no strong emotion, for
+anything except that which affected her own personal happiness. Her
+slight nature could not reach to impersonal love, any more than it could
+reach to righteous anger. All this apparent failure of health and
+listlessness had a mental cause, as he had always feared, as he now knew
+for certain. She was unhappy.
+
+'She has ceased to love me,' said Mr. Loftus to himself, 'and she is in
+despair. Doll loves her, and she has found it out. Those tears are for
+Doll.'
+
+There was a long pause of thought.
+
+He started at the remembrance that she was probably still lying on the
+floor in her thin night-gown.
+
+He got up, and tapped distinctly at the door of her bedroom. At first
+there was no reply, but after the second time there was a slight hurried
+movement and a faint 'Come in.' He went in. She had crept back into bed,
+as he had hoped she would at the sound of his tap.
+
+'May I have your salts?' he said, taking them from the dressing-table.
+'I have waked with a headache.'
+
+'Can I do anything for it?' she asked, but without moving, her miserable
+eyes following his thin, gaunt figure in its gray dressing-gown.
+
+'Nothing, my dear, except forgive me for disturbing you.'
+
+'I was not asleep,' said Sibyl, yielding to the impulse, irresistible to
+some women, to approach the subject which they are trying to conceal.
+
+He took the salts, and went back to his own room, closing the door
+carefully. But he did not use them. He sighed heavily as he sat down
+again in the old armchair in which he had so often watched the light
+grow behind the Welsh hills.
+
+There was another pause of thought, and he remembered again Doll's
+confession of the day before.
+
+'Poor children!' he said--'poor children!'
+
+And he remembered his own youth and its devastating passions, and the
+woman whom he had loved in middle life, and how nearly once--how
+nearly---- And he and she had been stronger than Doll and Sibyl.
+
+'God forgive me!' he said; 'I meant well.'
+
+There was another pause.
+
+'I knew her love could not last,' his mind went on. 'It was too
+extravagant, and it had no foundation. But I thought it would last my
+time, and it has not. I have outlived it; I am in the way.'
+
+Mr. Loftus had never willingly been in the way of anyone before. His
+tact had so far saved him. But a kind intention had betrayed him at
+last.
+
+'I am in the way,' he repeated, 'and I am fond of them both, and I think
+they are both fond of me. But they will come to hate me.'
+
+The light was strong and white now, and a butterfly on the window-sill,
+that had mistaken spring for summer, waked, and began to beat its wings
+against the pane.
+
+He rose wearily, and opened the old-fashioned window wide upon its
+hinges. The butterfly flew away into the spring morning.
+
+'My other butterfly,' he said--'my pretty butterfly, who mistook the
+spring for summer, breaking your heart against the prison windows of my
+worn-out life--I will release you, too!'
+
+He took up the little silver flask that always stood on his
+dressing-table at night and lived in his pocket by day, and which
+contained the only remedy which a great doctor could find for his
+attacks of the heart, by means of which he had been till now kept in
+life.
+
+'I have a right to do it,' he said. 'I can only help them by going away.
+And if I am in the wrong, upon my head be it.'
+
+He checked himself in the act of emptying the contents of the flask
+into the dead fire.
+
+'A right?' he said. 'What right have I to shirk the consequences of my
+own actions? what right to be a coward? No; I will not go away until I
+receive permission to do so. I will stay while it is required of me.'
+
+He sighed heavily, and replaced the flask upon the dressing-table.
+
+'Patience,' he said. 'I thought I had seen the last of you. I am tired
+of you. But, nevertheless, I must put up with you a little longer.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+   'As the water is dried upon sands, so a life flieth
+    back to the dust.'--SIR ALFRED LYALL.
+
+
+How Sibyl spent the morning that followed she never knew. She dared not
+go out of doors. The world of spring, with the new breath of life in it,
+mocked her. The song of the birds hurt her. She felt as if she should
+scream outright if she saw the may-blossom against the sky. She wandered
+aimlessly about the house, and at last crept back to her own room and
+lay down on her bed, and turned her face to the wall.
+
+The day went on. Her maid brought her soup, and drew down the blinds,
+and was pettishly dismissed.
+
+The afternoon came. They were mowing the grass on the terrace on the
+south front. The faint scent of newly-cut grass came in through the open
+window, and seemed, through the senses, to reach some acute nerve of the
+brain. She moaned, and buried her face in the pillows. Presently the
+mowing ceased, and everything became very silent. A bluebottle fly,
+pressed for time, rushed in, made the circuit of the room, and rushed
+out again.
+
+Far away in the other wing, on the ground-floor, she heard the library
+door open. She knew Mr. Loftus's slow, even step. It crossed the hall;
+it entered the orangery; it came out through the orangery door, down the
+stone steps to the terrace below her window. She could hear his step on
+the gravel outside in the crisp air. Crack gave a short bark in
+recognition of the spring, and satisfaction that the long morning of
+arranging papers and the afternoon of letter-writing were at last over.
+
+The steps dwindled and died away into the sunny silence. It seemed to
+Sibyl's overwrought mind that he was walking slowly out of her life, and
+that unless she made haste to follow him she would lose him altogether.
+With a sudden revulsion of feeling, she sprang to her feet, and put on
+her hat and shoes. Then she braved the spring, and went swiftly out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A great tranquillity had fallen upon Mr. Loftus. He had made up his
+mind. After a turn along the terrace, he and Crack went into the little
+wood near the gardens, and sat down under the pink horse-chestnut-tree,
+just blushing into flower. It would have been difficult to put the
+arrangement into words, but there was a tacit understanding between the
+husband and wife that when Mr. Loftus sat under that particular tree he
+did not mind being interrupted. Sibyl generally fluttered out to him
+after he had been there a few minutes, though the wood was out of sight
+of the windows. And he waited for her to come to him now.
+
+Spring had returned at last. But you might have walked through the wood
+and not known she was there: have seen only the naked trees, and the
+gray twigs of the alder, bleached white where the rabbits had bitten
+them in the frost. But if you had stopped to listen and look as Mr.
+Loftus did, you would have seen and heard her; seen her in the blue
+haze, and the mystery of change that lurked among the gray twigs, and in
+the rare primroses among the brown leaves; heard her in the persistent
+double-tongue of the chiff-chaff, and, not near at hand, but two trees
+away, in the ripple of the goldfinch, with a little question at the end
+of it. Is it a hint of immortality, that haunting desire and expectation
+of happiness which comes with the primroses, that longing for some
+future year when the spring shall bring with it no heartache, the autumn
+no contrition; of another year, somewhere in the future, when the ills
+of life will be done away? Mr. Loftus looked straight in front of him,
+and his face took an expression as of one whose eyes are on a goal where
+even patience itself, so visible in every line of his quiet face, will
+at last with other burdens be laid aside.
+
+She saw him before he saw her, as she came towards him. Her heart went
+out to him wistfully and passionately by turns. She longed to turn to
+him as a young wife turns to a young husband, and cry her heart out on
+his breast, and be petted, and caressed, and comforted. But she dared
+not. Whatever besides she was ignorant of, she had learnt certain things
+about her husband, and one of them was that she must never show her
+devotion unasked. And she was seldom asked. Her life was a constant
+repression of its greatest, its only real affection.
+
+As she came towards him he roused himself and smiled at her. She sat
+down by him in silence. He had a single primrose in the buttonhole of
+his coat, and he took it out and drew it very gently through the
+Russian embroidery on her bodice.
+
+'When I was young, Sibyl,' he said, 'I was convinced, and the conviction
+has never wholly left me, that flowers are God's thoughts which He sows
+broadcast in the hearts of all alike. But we will have none of them, and
+they drop unheeded to the ground. But the faithful earth receives
+them--thoughts despised and rejected of us--and nurses them in her
+bosom, and they come forth transfigured. And that is why, when we see
+them again, we love them so much, and feel akin to them.'
+
+Her locked hands trembled on her knee.
+
+'It must have been a beautiful thought that could turn into a lily,' he
+went on, noting, but ignoring, her emotion. 'I wonder, if it had fallen
+into a poet's heart, what it would have grown into. Nothing more
+beautiful, I think. And I know the primroses are first love. I have felt
+sure of that always. I wonder, my Sibyl, when there is so much in your
+heart for me, that there are any left to come out in the woods; but
+there are a few, you see, among the brown leaves.'
+
+'They will soon be over,' said Sibyl, turning her head away.
+
+'Yes,' said Mr. Loftus, with a gentleness which was new to Sibyl, and he
+was always gentle. 'They will die presently, as first love dies. But
+nevertheless it is a beautiful gift while it lasts, and we must not
+grieve because, like the primroses, it cannot last in flower _for ever_.
+I have lived through so many feelings, Sibyl, I have seen so many die
+which seemed immortal, that I have long since ceased to count on the
+permanence of any.'
+
+He leant towards her, and for the first time he took her slender hands
+and kissed them. It was as if he were readjusting his position towards
+her, reassuring her of his trust and confidence and sympathy, supporting
+her in some great trouble. She leaned her forehead against his shoulder,
+and a sense of comfort came across her desolation, as if she were
+leaning her faint soul against his soul. He put his arm round her, and
+drew her closer to him.
+
+'My darling!' he said, and there was an emotion in his voice which she
+had never heard in it before. Her hat had slipped off, and he passed his
+hand very tenderly over her hair.
+
+Sibyl's over-strained nerves relaxed. Some of the craving of her heart
+and its long yearning was stilled by the touch of his hand. Ah! he
+loved her, after all--certainly he loved her. Doll was right, after all.
+How foolish she had been to cry all night! Certainly he loved her.
+
+She could not speak. She could not weep. She could only lean against
+him. She had never known him like this before. It was this that she had
+always wanted, all her life, long before she had ever met him.
+
+'You have been so good to me,' he went on, 'from the first day of our
+married life when I was ill. Do you remember? And I know that your dear
+love and kindness will not fail me while I live. I thank and bless you
+for all you have given me, your whole spring of primroses; and now that
+spring is passing, as it must, Sibyl, as it must, not by your fault,
+take comfort, and when other feelings come into your heart, as they
+have come in, do not reproach yourself, do not cut me to the heart by
+grieving, but remember that I understand, and that my love and honour
+and gratitude can never change towards you, and that I too was young
+once: as young as--Doll, and there is no need for you and him to be so
+miserable. It will only be--like a--long engagement.'
+
+As the drift of his words gradually became clear to her, Sibyl
+insensibly shrank back as from an abyss before her feet. But in another
+moment she took in their whole meaning. She pushed him from her with
+sudden violence, and stood before him, her hands clenched, her eyes
+blazing, her slender figure shaking with passion.
+
+'How dare you!' she stammered. 'How dare you insult me?'
+
+He put out his hand feebly, and she struck it down.
+
+'What is Doll to me?' she went on, 'to me, _your wife_! Oh, will you
+never, never understand that I love you, that I worship you, that I care
+for nothing in the whole world but you, and that I cried all night
+because you married me out of pity?' Sibyl wrung her hands. 'Oh! how
+dared you do it, how dared you swear to love me before God, if you did
+not, if you could not? I am too miserable. I cannot bear it--I cannot
+bear it!'
+
+He sat like one stunned. His hand went to his heart.
+
+In a moment her arms were round him, and his head was on her shoulder.
+
+'Forgive,' he repeated over and over again, between the long-drawn
+gasps which shook him from head to foot.
+
+And then the battle for life began.
+
+She found his little flask in his pocket, and managed to make him
+swallow the contents.
+
+He struggled, but she upheld him. Her strength was as the strength of
+ten.
+
+At last, all in a moment, the struggle ceased, and a light came into his
+fixed eyes of awe and thankfulness, and--was it joy?
+
+He did not move. He did not speak. His whole being seemed absorbed in
+that of some vast enfolding presence.
+
+She called him wildly by name.
+
+He trembled, and his troubled eyes, with all the light blown out of
+them, wandered back to seek hers. Death looked at her through them. He
+saw her as across a gulf. He recognised her. He remembered. He had
+hoped that when he came to die it might be quietly, without a scene, but
+it was not to be. He made a last effort.
+
+'Not for pity--for----' he gasped, his ebbing breath winnowing the air.
+But Death cut short the lie faltering on his lips, and his head fell
+suddenly forward on her breast. She held him closely to her, murmuring
+incoherent words of love and tenderness, such as she had never dared to
+speak while he had ears to hear.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How long she had knelt beside him, holding him in her arms, the
+frightened servants, who at last found them after sunset, never knew.
+And when they came to lay him in his coffin, they saw on one of the thin
+folded hands a faint blue mark, as from a blow.
+
+
+
+
+POSTSCRIPT.
+
+
+Sibyl was an inconsolable widow. Her grief reached a depth which placed
+her beyond the succour of human sympathy, and Lady Pierpoint, who had
+lost her young husband in her youth, was felt to take a superficial view
+of Sibyl's bereavement.
+
+She shut herself up at Wilderleigh for a year and refused comfort, and
+then suddenly married Doll, the only man except Mr. Gresley whom she had
+allowed to see her during her widowhood.
+
+In rather less than a month after her marriage with him she made the
+interesting discovery that he was the only man in the world who really
+understood her. His gift of platitude, harmonizing as it did with hers,
+was an inexhaustible source of admiration to her. She was wont to say in
+confidence to her woman friends, that, devotedly as she had loved her
+first husband, she had found her ideal in her second one; and that it
+was to Doll she owed the real development of her character, a subject in
+which she took great interest.
+
+For some years, while her daughter remained an only child, she was
+passionately devoted to her. But when her son was born she ceased to
+take much interest in the little girl, who was by this, time rather
+spoilt, and consequently tiresome. Doll, who proved exemplary in
+domestic life, took to her when Sibyl forgot her, and became deeply
+attached to her. Later in life Sibyl became inconsolably jealous of her
+daughter.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.
+
+
+
+
+NOVELS FROM
+_MR. EDWARD ARNOLD'S LIST_.
+
+
+
+
+  By the Author of 'The Red Badge of Courage.'
+  GEORGE'S MOTHER.
+  BY STEPHEN CRANE.
+
+Cloth, 2s.
+
+
+_Saturday Review._
+
+'From first to last it goes with immense vigour and sympathy. But the
+story must be read for its power to be understood; quotation fails, for
+the simple reason that it is a bare story and nothing beyond. Apart from
+its distinctive qualities, English readers will welcome this book as an
+indication of the growth of a real and independent critical method
+across the Atlantic, side by side and directing really original work.'
+
+
+_Athenæum._
+
+'A striking scene of the relations, in a rough world, between a boy and
+his mother.'
+
+
+_Speaker._
+
+'Stephen Crane proved conclusively in "The Red Badge of Courage" his
+possession of an extraordinary power of vivid and accurate vision
+expressed with startling poignancy of phrase; and in his later
+production, "George's Mother," we find the same rugged directness and
+almost savage intensity, the same contempt for conventional graces of
+style, and the love for violent colouring, which marked his previous
+work.'
+
+
+_Daily Chronicle._
+
+'The gradual progress of deterioration in George Kelcey is very briefly
+but very cleverly and convincingly set out.'
+
+
+_St. James's Gazette._
+
+'It is a _tour de force_ of description and analysis, this terrible
+scene of George's debauch--not in the least laboured, or Zolaistic, or
+photographic, but amazingly actual, and lightened with a grim sense of
+humour.'
+
+By the Author of 'Into the Highways and Hedges.'
+
+
+
+
+  WORTH WHILE.
+  BY F. F. MONTRÉSOR,
+  Author of 'Into the Highways and Hedges,' 'The One Who Looked on.'
+
+Crown 8vo., cloth, 2s. 6d.
+
+
+_Academy._
+
+'The quiet excellence of Miss Montrésor's little book may likely enough
+cause it to lie unnoticed among its thrilling companions. There is, none
+the less, more of art and literature in two short sketches than one is
+likely to meet with again in a hurry. If inferior work, gaudily
+bedraped, gets all the encores, in the shape of many editions, I cannot
+think she will greatly care. Such work as hers only comes, as the
+proverb has it, by prayer and fasting. And she will receive ungrudging
+praise from those who revere sterling merit, and respect labour at once
+unobtrusive, competent, sincere.'
+
+
+_Guardian._
+
+'"Worth While" is a real idyll of a life's sacrifice, most sweetly and
+touchingly told.'
+
+
+_Glasgow Herald._
+
+'Both the stories in this volume are of very superior quality. The
+characters are distinctly original, and the workmanship is admirable.'
+
+
+_Manchester Mercury._
+
+'Although the two stories contained in the present volume are
+comparatively short, they serve to display the author's peculiar gifts
+in a striking manner.'
+
+
+_Liverpool Courier._
+
+'Two most pathetic and beautiful stories make up this little volume. The
+writer is to be congratulated on the delicate beauty of her stories.'
+
+
+
+
+  By the Author of 'The Apotheosis of Mr. Tyrawley.'
+  A MASK AND A MARTYR.
+  BY E. LIVINGSTON PRESCOTT.
+
+One vol., crown 8vo., cloth, 6s.
+
+
+_Westminster Gazette._
+
+'This is an undeniably clever book. A picture of self-sacrifice so
+complete and so enduring is a rare picture in fiction, and has rarely
+been more ably or more finely drawn. This singular and pathetic story is
+told all through with remarkable restraint, and shows a strength and
+skill of execution which place its author high among the novel-writers
+of the day.'
+
+
+_Daily Telegraph._
+
+'There is no doubt that this is a striking book. The story it has to
+tell is thoroughly original and unconventional, while the manner of
+telling shows much restrained power.'
+
+
+_Spectator._
+
+'Mr. Prescott has evidently a future before him.'
+
+
+_Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+'Mr. Prescott has given us a clever and an interesting book. We have
+seldom read of such superhuman courage, such transcendent love, as Mr.
+Prescott has shown us in his masterly picture of Captain Cosmo
+Harradyne, of the Fighting Hussars. A story which we confidently, nay,
+earnestly, recommend to our readers; they will thank us for doing so.'
+
+
+_National Observer._
+
+'A book which has much cleverness of treatment, an excellent style, a
+great deal of interest, a high ideal, and a real pathos. Perhaps it is
+not necessary to add that a novel of which so much can be said is one
+greatly above the common run of fiction. The book should be, and we have
+no doubt will be, read with real interest by many people.'
+
+
+
+
+  'One of the best stories of the season.'--_Daily Chronicle._
+  HADJIRA,
+  _A TURKISH LOVE STORY_.
+  BY ADALET.
+
+One volume, crown 8vo., cloth, 6s.
+
+
+_Speaker._
+
+'Certainly one of the most interesting and valuable works of fiction
+issued from the press for a long time past. Even if we were to regard
+the book as an ordinary novel, we could commend it heartily; but its
+great value lies in the fact that it reveals to us a hidden world, and
+does so with manifest fidelity. But the reader must learn for himself
+the lesson which this remarkable and fascinating book teaches.'
+
+
+_Daily Chronicle._
+
+'A Turkish love story written in excellent English by a young Ottoman
+lady, would be a book worth reading, if only as a curiosity; but when,
+as in this instance, it is of uncommon merit and originality, it is
+particularly welcome. It is deeply interesting, fascinatingly so. It is
+as a picture of family life in Turkey that this book is so interesting,
+possibly because the picture it provides is unexpectedly agreeable. As a
+study of Turkish life in our times, when Western civilization is
+beginning to penetrate into the seclusion of the harem, this book is a
+valuable contribution to contemporary literature. It is a well-merited
+compliment to its author to say of "Hadjira" that it is one of the best
+stories of the season.'
+
+
+_Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+'An interesting and readable book.'
+
+
+_St. James's Gazette._
+
+'The book is excellently written. As a clearly truthful account of
+modern Turkish life, from the woman's point of view, it is as valuable
+as it is interesting. We shall hope to have more from the same pen.'
+
+
+_Guardian._
+
+'A curiously interesting bit of work.'
+
+
+
+
+  A RELUCTANT EVANGELIST.
+  BY ALICE SPINNER,
+  Author of 'Lucilla,' 'A Study in Colour,' etc.
+
+Crown 8vo., 1 vol., 6s.
+
+
+_Saturday Review._
+
+'"A Reluctant Evangelist" is as good as its predecessor "Lucilla," which
+we were glad to be able to praise last year. The West Indies, with their
+"colour problem," their weird romance and undercurrent of horror, will
+last a long time as background for new stories.'
+
+
+_Glasgow Herald._
+
+'It is into the wonderland of the West Indies that Miss Spinner takes
+us: into a region of hot sunshine, of blue sky, of sparkling sea. All
+the stories are excellent, and will repay perusal.'
+
+
+_Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+'Good, too, is Miss Spinner's budget of short stories. "Buckra Tommie"
+is an exquisitely pathetic story. The writer is evidently at home in the
+South Seas, and with the out-of-the-way humanity she meets there.'
+
+
+_Irish Times._
+
+'A charming little series of stories. They are very daintily written,
+and although the incidents upon which they turn are not always very
+striking, they are at all events novel, and they have been conceived
+with much dramatic power.'
+
+
+_Cape Times._
+
+'These short stories are all distinctly good.'
+
+
+_Englishman._
+
+'We can strongly recommend these stories. They are varied and
+interesting, and have a distinct literary merit.'
+
+
+
+
+  INTERLUDES.
+  BY MAUD OXENDEN.
+
+One volume, crown 8vo., 6s.
+
+
+_Scotsman._
+
+'The writer is to be congratulated on the strength with which she
+portrays men and women, and describes the passions of love or of grief
+that sometimes fill the mind. There are other personages in these pages,
+whose experiences of love and joy and grief are under other
+circumstances than those indicated; but if the writer had depicted none
+other than the three personages that appear in the tragic scene in
+London she would have scored a distinct success. An admirably-written
+book.'
+
+
+_Sheffield Telegraph._
+
+'We have not read anything so tenderly touched with pathos, and at the
+same time so delicately told, for a very long time. Indeed, "Interludes"
+is about as good a piece of literary work of its class as we could wish
+to read, and is worth a high place in the works which appeal to the
+emotional in our nature.'
+
+
+_Bradford Observer._
+
+'The stories evince a considerable and disciplined faculty of invention
+which, though it produces situations of intense interest, never becomes
+riotous or extravagant. We will close our too brief note with an
+expression of the pleasure we have felt in reading these chaste and
+beautiful fancies.'
+
+
+_Guardian._
+
+'There is much that is both clever and original in Miss Oxenden's
+"Interludes." There is often very genuine pathos, and nearly all the
+volume is interesting.'
+
+
+
+
+  TWENTY-SECOND THOUSAND.
+  STEPHEN REMARX.
+  _THE STORY OF A VENTURE IN ETHICS._
+  BY THE HON. AND REV. JAMES ADDERLEY.
+
+Small 8vo., elegantly bound, 3s. 6d.; paper, 1s.
+
+
+_Daily Telegraph._
+
+'Written with a vigour, warmth, and sincerity which cannot fail to
+captivate the reader's attention and command his respect.'
+
+
+_Saturday Review._
+
+'Let us express our thankfulness at encountering, for once in a way, an
+author who can amuse us.'
+
+
+_Star._
+
+'The book is charmingly written.'
+
+
+_Guardian._
+
+'Not only do we agree with Mr. Adderley in his general objects, and in
+many of his fundamental principles, but we believe that the path of
+reform lies very much in the direction to which he has pointed.'
+
+
+_Daily Chronicle._
+
+'The story is one of a novel kind, and many people will find it
+interesting and very suggestive.'
+
+
+_Rock._
+
+'A little but very notable volume.'
+
+
+_Record._
+
+'A little book, but one of which much will be heard.'
+
+
+
+
+  DAVE'S SWEETHEART.
+  BY MARY GAUNT.
+
+One vol., 8vo., cloth, 3s. 6d.
+
+
+_Spectator._
+
+'It is interesting to watch the literature which is coming over to us
+from Australia, a portion of which is full of promise, but we may safely
+say that of all the novels that have been laid before readers in this
+country, "Dave's Sweetheart," in a literary point of view and as a
+finished production, takes a higher place than any that has yet
+appeared. From the opening scene to the closing page we have no
+hesitation in predicting that not a word will be skipped even by the
+most _blasé_ of novel readers.'
+
+
+_Daily Telegraph._
+
+'In every respect one of the most powerful and impressive novels of the
+year.'
+
+
+_Tablet._
+
+'Essentially a strong book. The writer has a wonderfully clean way of
+describing the elemental facts of life, and lets her plummet-line go
+down deep into the depths of human tears. The book is of interest down
+to the last line.'
+
+
+_Weekly Sun._
+
+'The narrative is throughout animated, and rises occasionally to heights
+of great dramatic power, whilst the picture of life in the diggings is
+delineated in a way that compels admiration.'
+
+
+_Morning Post._
+
+'The action is rapid and well-developed, the incidents exciting, as
+becomes the nature of the subject, and the human interest unusually
+deep.'
+
+
+_Times._
+
+'A vigorous and dramatic story of the early gold-digging days in
+Victoria. "Dave's Sweetheart" is a good story.'
+
+
+_Guardian._
+
+'Many books of Australian life have come before us lately, and to none
+of them are we inclined to give more honest praise than to "Dave's
+Sweetheart."'
+
+
+_Speaker._
+
+'Alike from a dramatic and a literary point of view, "Dave's Sweetheart"
+is admirably told, with restraint and with distinction.'
+
+
+
+
+  TOMMY ATKINS.
+  A Tale of the Ranks.
+  BY ROBERT BLATCHFORD,
+  Author of 'A Son of the Forge,' 'Merrie England,' etc.
+
+Second Edition. Crown 8vo., cloth, 6s.
+
+
+_Bradford Observer._
+
+'A splendid narrative of the barrack life of the rank and file.'
+
+
+_Eastern Morning News._
+
+'There is not a dull page in the book.'
+
+
+_Glasgow Herald._
+
+'Most vigorous and picturesque sketches of barrack life.'
+
+
+_Scotsman._
+
+'Entertaining throughout, and reveals high literary ability.'
+
+
+_Dundee Advertiser._
+
+'A really vivacious book; the incidents are so well selected that the
+reader never wearies from start to finish.'
+
+
+_Liverpool Post._
+
+'The book is both clever and amusing.'
+
+
+_Broad Arrow._
+
+'For this well-conceived, well-written, and well-informed little story
+we have little but commendation to offer.'
+
+
+
+
+  THE BAYONET THAT CAME HOME.
+  BY N. WYNN WILLIAMS,
+  Author of 'Tales of Modern Greece.'
+
+Crown 8vo., 3s. 6d.
+
+
+_Dundee Advertiser._
+
+'Well worth perusing.'
+
+
+_National Observer._
+
+'Mr. Williams's story of modern Greece throws a curious light on her
+corrupt politics, on petty oppression, and on the conscription, with its
+attendant hardships to the peasant population.'
+
+
+_Glasgow Herald._
+
+'A powerfully-written and vivid little story.'
+
+
+
+
+  By the Author of 'Aunt Anne.'
+  LOVE-LETTERS OF A WORLDLY WOMAN.
+  BY MRS. W. K. CLIFFORD,
+  Author of 'Aunt Anne,' 'Mrs. Keith's Crime,' etc.
+
+Cloth, 2s. 6d.
+
+
+_Queen._
+
+'One of the cleverest books that ever a woman wrote.'
+
+
+_Morning Post._
+
+'It is that _rara avis_--a volume characterized by knowledge of human
+nature and brightened by refined wit.'
+
+
+_World._
+
+'A book that will gladden the hearts of those who love literature for
+its own sake.'
+
+
+_Review of Reviews._
+
+'Many writers have pictured to us a woman, but none more successfully
+than Mrs. Clifford, whose Madge Brooke stands forth distinct and almost
+flesh and blood--a human document.'
+
+
+
+
+  ON THE THRESHOLD.
+  BY ISABELLA O. FORD,
+  Author of 'Miss Blake, of Monkshalton.'
+
+Cloth, 3s. 6d.
+
+
+_Guardian._
+
+'It is a relief to turn from many of the novels that come before us to
+Miss Ford's true, penetrating, and sympathetic description of the lives
+of some of the women of our day.'
+
+
+_Bradford Observer._
+
+'Those who have followed and admired Miss Ford's active social and
+political work will be interested in this latest work of hers, and will
+understand its special characteristics. It only remains to be added that
+the literary workmanship of the book is excellent.'
+
+
+_Hearth and Home._
+
+'A decidedly clever book.'
+
+
+
+
+  MISTHER O'RYAN.
+  An Incident in the History of a Nation.
+  BY EDWARD MCNULTY.
+
+Small 8vo., elegantly bound, 3s. 6d.
+
+
+_National Observer._
+
+'"Ould Paddy" and the "poor dark cratur" are as pathetic figures as any
+we have met with in recent romance, and would alone stamp their creator
+as a writer of real force and originality.'
+
+
+_Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+'An extremely well-written satire of the possibilities of blarney and
+brag.'
+
+
+_Bookman._
+
+'An Irish story of far more than ordinary ability.'
+
+
+_Church Times._
+
+'A sad story, but full of racy Irish wit.'
+
+
+_Yorkshire Post._
+
+'It is a book to circulate everywhere, a book which, by its pathos and
+its power, its simplicity and its vivid truth, will impress the mind as
+the logic and the reasoning of the statesman too rarely do.'
+
+
+
+
+  ORMISDAL.
+  BY THE EARL OF DUNMORE, F.R.G.S.,
+  Author of 'The Pamirs.'
+
+One vol., cloth, 6s.
+
+
+_Glasgow Herald._
+
+'In this breezy and entertaining novel Lord Dunmore has given us a very
+readable and racy story of the life that centres in a Highland shooting,
+about the end of August.'
+
+
+_St. James's Gazette._
+
+'The impression left on the mind after laying down "Ormisdal" is that
+Lord Dunmore is a remarkably lucky man to lead such a pleasant life
+among such charming people and in such charming places, and that
+everybody will be delighted to hear from him again, when he has more of
+the same sort to tell us, whether he wraps it up in a book of personal
+anecdote or a novel.'
+
+
+
+
+  THAT FIDDLER FELLOW.
+  _A TALE OF ST. ANDREWS._
+  BY HORACE G. HUTCHINSON,
+  Author of 'My Wife's Politics,' 'Golf,' 'Creatures of Circumstance,'
+  etc.
+
+Popular edition, crown 8vo., cloth, 2s. 6d.
+
+
+_Spectator._
+
+'A singularly ingenious and interesting tale.'
+
+
+_The World._
+
+'What Mr. Hutchinson writes is always pleasant to read.'
+
+
+_The Guardian._
+
+'A strange history of hypnotism and crime, which will delight any lover
+of the grim and terrible.'
+
+
+_National Observer._
+
+'An excellent story.'
+
+
+
+
+  THE BONDWOMAN.
+  _A STORY OF THE NORTHMEN IN LAKELAND._
+  BY W. G. COLLINGWOOD,
+  Author of 'Thorstein of the Mere,' 'The Life and Work of John Ruskin,'
+  etc.
+
+Cloth, 16mo., 3s. 6d.
+
+
+_Leeds Mercury._
+
+'As for the thrilling details of the plot, and the other sterling charms
+of the little work, we must refer our readers to its pages, especially
+those of them who may be touring, or contemplating a tour, in
+Westmorland and Cumberland.'
+
+
+_Manchester Guardian._
+
+'Mr. Collingwood has attempted the almost impossible task of
+constructing the social life of a remote period, of evolving from dry
+and doubtful specimens the pulse and colour of a bygone age, and his
+success has been remarkable.'
+
+
+_Glasgow Herald._
+
+'His story is a stirring and vigorous one, which can hardly fail to take
+hold of the imagination and leave a vivid impression on it.'
+
+
+
+
+TWO FAMOUS FRENCH NOVELS.
+
+
+
+
+  THE TUTOR'S SECRET.
+  (_LE SECRET DU PRÉCEPTEUR._)
+  Translated from the French of VICTOR CHERBULIEZ.
+
+One volume, crown 8vo., cloth, 6s.
+
+
+_Daily Chronicle._
+
+'M. Cherbuliez is to be congratulated on having found a translator who
+has done justice to him, and to do justice to M. Cherbuliez is no mean
+achievement, for he is one of the most artistic and delightful of modern
+French novelists. He is also one of the few whose works may be safely
+left lying about where the young person is prone to penetrate. In "The
+Tutor's Secret" all his finest qualities are to be found.'
+
+
+_Manchester Guardian._
+
+'An admirable translation of a delightful novel. Those who have not read
+it in French must hasten to read it in English.'
+
+
+_Westminster Gazette_.
+
+'If Victor Cherbuliez did not already possess a great reputation his
+latest production would have been quite sufficient to secure him renown
+as a novelist. From the first line to the last we recognise a master
+hand at work, and there is not a page that even the veriest skimmer will
+care to pass over.'
+
+
+
+
+  THE MYSTERY OF THE RUE SOLY.
+  From the French of H. DE BALZAC, by LADY KNUTSFORD.
+  One volume, 8vo., cloth, 3s. 6d.
+
+
+_Spectator._
+
+'To place a first-rate foreign novel in reach of those whose education
+does not enable them to enjoy it in the original is to confer a real
+boon upon them; and everyone who is not a French scholar has much cause
+to be grateful to Lady Knutsford for the capital translation of Balzac's
+renowned Ferragus.'
+
+
+_Scotsman._
+
+'Lady Knutsford's translation is excellent.'
+
+
+_Speaker._
+
+'Admirably translated.'
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note
+
+
+Inconsistencies have been retained in spelling, hyphenation,
+punctuation, and grammar, except where indicated in the list
+below:
+
+  - Single quote added after "death." on Page 139
+  - "his" added after "on" on Page 157
+  - "s" changed to "is" on Page 214
+  - Single quote added before "Mr." on Page 214
+  - Period changed to comma after "SPINNER" on Page 216
+  - Single quote changed to double after "Ormisdal" on page 222
+  - Period changed to comma after "HUTCHINSON" on Page 223
+  - Period changed to comma after "COLLINGWOOD" on Page 223
+  - Single quote added after "over." on Page 224
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Devotee, by Mary Cholmondeley
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40408 ***