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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41031 ***
+
+                      THE KIRRIEMUIR EDITION
+                         OF THE WORKS OF
+                          J. M. BARRIE
+
+
+                       WHEN A MAN'S SINGLE
+
+                     A Tale of Literary Life
+
+                         BY J. M. BARRIE
+
+    HODDER AND STOUGHTON
+    LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
+    1913
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+        CHAPTER I ROB ANGUS IS NOT A FREE MAN                        1
+
+       CHAPTER II ROB BECOMES FREE                                  17
+
+      CHAPTER III ROB GOES OUT INTO THE WORLD                       27
+
+       CHAPTER IV 'THE SCORN OF SCORNS'                             43
+
+        CHAPTER V ROB MARCHES TO HIS FATE                           62
+
+       CHAPTER VI THE ONE WOMAN                                     80
+
+      CHAPTER VII THE GRAND PASSION?                                99
+
+     CHAPTER VIII IN FLEET STREET                                  113
+
+      CHAPTER IX MR. NOBLE SIMMS                                   129
+
+       CHAPTER X THE WIGWAM                                        139
+
+      CHAPTER XI ROB IS STRUCK DOWN                                156
+
+     CHAPTER XII THE STUPID SEX                                    169
+
+    CHAPTER XIII THE HOUSE-BOAT 'TAWNY OWL'                        183
+
+     CHAPTER XIV MARY OF THE STONY HEART                           195
+
+      CHAPTER XV COLONEL ABINGER TAKES COMMAND                     210
+
+     CHAPTER XVI THE BARBER OF ROTTEN ROW                          222
+
+    CHAPTER XVII ROB PULLS HIMSELF TOGETHER                        234
+
+   CHAPTER XVIII THE AUDACITY OF ROB ANGUS                         245
+
+     CHAPTER XIX THE VERDICT OF THRUMS                             254
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+ROB ANGUS IS NOT A FREE MAN
+
+
+One still Saturday afternoon some years ago a child pulled herself
+through a small window into a kitchen in the kirk-wynd of Thrums. She
+came from the old graveyard, whose only outlet, when the parish church
+gate is locked, is the windows of the wynd houses that hoop it round.
+Squatting on a three-legged stool she gazed wistfully at a letter on the
+chimney-piece, and then, tripping to the door, looked up and down the
+wynd.
+
+Snecky Hobart, the bellman, hobbled past, and, though Davy was only four
+years old, she knew that as he had put on his blue top-coat he expected
+the evening to be fine. Tammas McQuhatty, the farmer of T'nowhead, met
+him at the corner, and they came to a standstill to say, 'She's hard,
+Sneck,' and 'She is so, T'nowhead,' referring to the weather. Observing
+that they had stopped they moved on again.
+
+Women and children and a few men squeezed through their windows into the
+kirkyard, the women to knit stockings on fallen tombstones, and the men
+to dander pleasantly from grave to grave reading the inscriptions. All
+the men were well up in years, for though, with the Auld Lichts, the
+Sabbath began to come on at six o'clock on Saturday evening, the young
+men were now washing themselves cautiously in tin basins before going
+into the square to talk about women.
+
+The clatter of more than one loom could still have been heard by Davy
+had not her ears been too accustomed to the sound to notice it. In the
+adjoining house Bell Mealmaker was peppering her newly-washed floor with
+sand, while her lodger, Hender Robb, with a rusty razor in his hand,
+looked for his chin in a tiny glass that was peeling on the wall. Jinny
+Tosh had got her husband, Aundra Lunan, who always spoke of her as She,
+ready, so to speak, for church eighteen hours too soon, and Aundra sat
+stiffly at the fire, putting his feet on the ribs every minute, to draw
+them back with a scared look at Her as he remembered that he had on his
+blacks. In a bandbox beneath the bed was his silk hat, which had been
+knocked down to him at Jamie Ramsay's roup, and Jinny had already put
+his red handkerchief, which was also a pictorial history of Scotland,
+into a pocket of his coat-tails, with a corner hanging gracefully out.
+Her puckered lips signified that, however much her man might desire to
+do so, he was not to carry his handkerchief to church in his hat, where
+no one could see it. On working days Aundra held his own, but at six
+o'clock on Saturday nights he passed into Her hands.
+
+Across the wynd, in which a few hens wandered, Pete Todd was supping in
+his shirt-sleeves. His blacks lay ready for him in the coffin-bed, and
+Pete, glancing at them at intervals, supped as slowly as he could. In
+one hand he held a saucer, and in the other a chunk of bread, and they
+were as far apart as Pete's outstretched arms could put them. His chair
+was a yard from the table, on which, by careful balancing, he rested a
+shoeless foot, and his face was twisted to the side. Every time Easie
+Whamond, his wife, passed him she took the saucer from his hand,
+remarking that when a genteel man sat down to tea he did not turn his
+back on the table. Pete took this stolidly, like one who had long given
+up trying to understand the tantrums of women, and who felt that, as a
+lord of creation, he could afford to let it pass.
+
+Davy sat on her three-legged stool keeping guard over her uncle Rob the
+saw-miller's letter, and longing for him to come. She screwed up her
+eyebrows as she had seen him do when he read a letter, and she felt that
+it would be nice if every one would come and look at her taking care of
+it. After a time she climbed up on her stool and stretched her dimpled
+arms toward the mantelpiece. From a string suspended across this, socks
+and stockings hung drying at the fire, and clutching one of them Davy
+drew herself nearer. With a chuckle, quickly suppressed, lest it should
+bring in Kitty Wilkie, who ought to have been watching her instead of
+wandering down the wynd to see who was to have salt-fish for supper, the
+child clutched the letter triumphantly, and, toddling to the door,
+slipped out of the house.
+
+For a moment Davy faltered at the mouth of the wynd. There was no one
+there to whom she could show the letter. A bright thought entered her
+head, and immediately a dimple opened on her face and swallowed all the
+puckers. Rob had gone to the Whunny muir for wood, and she would take
+the letter to him. Then when Rob saw her he would look all around him,
+and if there was no one there to take note he would lift her to his
+shoulder, when they could read the letter together.
+
+Davy ran out of the wynd into the square, thinking she heard Kitty's
+Sabbath voice, which reminded the child of the little squeaking saw that
+Rob used for soft wood. On week-days Kitty's voice was the big saw that
+puled and rasped, and Mag Wilkie shivered at it. Except to her husband
+Mag spoke with her teeth closed, so politely that no one knew what she
+said.
+
+Davy stumbled up the steep brae down which men are blown in winter to
+their work, until she reached the rim of the hollow in which Thrums
+lies. Here the road stops short, as if frightened to cross the common of
+whin that bars the way to the north. On this common there are many
+cart-tracks over bumpy sward and slippery roots, that might be the ribs
+of the earth showing, and Davy, with a dazed look in her eyes, ran down
+one of them, the whins catching her frock to stop her, and then letting
+go, as if, after all, one child more or less in the world was nothing to
+them.
+
+By and by she found herself on another road, along which Rob had trudged
+earlier in the day with a saw on his shoulder, but he had gone east, and
+the child's face was turned westward. It is a muddy road even in summer,
+and those who use it frequently get into the habit of lifting their legs
+high as they walk, like men picking their way through beds of rotting
+leaves. The light had faded from her baby face now, but her mouth was
+firm-set, and her bewildered eyes were fixed straight ahead.
+
+The last person to see Davy was Tammas Haggart, who, with his waistcoat
+buttoned over his jacket, and garters of yarn round his trousers, was
+slowly breaking stones, though the road swallowed them quicker than he
+could feed it. Tammas heard the child approaching, for his hearing had
+become very acute, owing to his practice when at home of listening
+through the floor to what the folks below were saying, and of sometimes
+joining in. He leant on his hammer and watched her trot past.
+
+The strength went gradually from Tammas's old arms, and again resting on
+his hammer he removed his spectacles and wiped them on his waistcoat. He
+took a comprehensive glance around at the fields, as if he now had an
+opportunity of seeing them for the first time during his sixty years'
+pilgrimage in these parts, and his eyes wandered aimlessly from the
+sombre firs and laughing beeches to the white farms that dot the strath.
+In the foreground two lazy colts surveyed him critically across a dyke.
+To the north the frowning Whunny hill had a white scarf round its neck.
+
+Something troubled Tammas. It was the vision of a child in a draggled
+pinafore, and stepping into the middle of the road he looked down it in
+the direction in which Davy had passed.
+
+'Chirsty Angus's lassieky,' he murmured.
+
+Tammas sat down cautiously on the dyke and untied the red handkerchief
+that contained the remnants of his dinner. When he had smacked his lips
+over his flagon of cold kail, and seen the last of his crumbling oatmeal
+and cheese, his uneasiness returned, and he again looked down the road.
+
+'I maun turn the bairn,' was his reflection.
+
+It was now, however, half an hour since Davy had passed Tammas Haggart's
+cairn.
+
+To Haggart, pondering between the strokes of his hammer, came a
+mole-catcher who climbed the dyke and sat down beside him.
+
+'Ay, ay,' said the new-comer; to which Tammas replied abstractedly--
+
+'Jamie.'
+
+'Hae ye seen Davy Dundas?' the stone-breaker asked, after the pause that
+followed this conversation.
+
+The mole-catcher stared heavily at his corduroys.
+
+'I dinna ken him,' he said at last, 'but I hae seen naebody this twa
+'oors.'
+
+'It's no a him, it's a her. Ye canna hae been a' winter here withoot
+kennin' Rob Angus.'
+
+'Ay, the saw-miller. He was i' the wud the day. I saw his cart gae hame.
+Ou, in coorse I ken Rob. He's an amazin' crittur.'
+
+Tammas broke another stone as carefully as if it were a nut.
+
+'I dinna deny,' he said, 'but what Rob's a curiosity. So was his faither
+afore 'im.'
+
+'I've heard auld Rob was a queer body,' said Jamie, adding
+incredulously, 'they say he shaved twice i' the week an' wore a clean
+dickey ilka day.'
+
+'No what ye wad say ilka day, but oftener than was called for. Rob wasna
+naturally ostentatious; na, it was the wife 'at insistit on't. Nanny was
+a terrible tid for cleanness. Ay, an' it's a guid thing in moderation,
+but she juist overdid it; yes, she overdid it. Man, it had sic a hand on
+her 'at even on her deathbed they had to bring a basin to her to wash
+her hands in.'
+
+'Ay, ay? When there was sic a pride in her I wonder she didna lat young
+Rob to the college, an' him sae keen on't.'
+
+'Ou, he was gaen, but ye see auld Rob got gey dottle after Nanny's
+death, an' so young Rob stuck to the saw-mill. It's curious hoo a body
+misses his wife when she's gone. Ay, it's like the clock stoppin'.'
+
+'Weel, Rob's no gettin' to the college hasna made 'im humble.'
+
+'Ye dinna like Rob?'
+
+'Hoo did ye find that oot?' asked Jamie, a little taken aback. 'Man,
+Tammas,' he added admiringly, 'ye're michty quick i' the uptak.'
+
+Tammas handed his snuff-mull to the mole-catcher, and then helped
+himself.
+
+'I daursay, I daursay,' he said thoughtfully.
+
+'I've naething to say agin the saw-miller,' continued Jamie, after
+thinking it out, 'but there's something in's face at's no sociable. He
+looks as if he was takkin ye aff in's inside.'
+
+'Ay, auld Rob was a sarcestic stock too. It rins i' the blood.'
+
+'I prefer a mair common kind o' man, bein' o' the common kind mysel.'
+
+'Ay, there's naething sarcestic about you, Jamie,' admitted the
+stone-breaker.
+
+'I'm an ord'nar man, Tammas.'
+
+'Ye are, Jamie, ye are.'
+
+'Maybe no sae oncommon ord'nar either.'
+
+'Middlin' ord'nar, middlin' ord'nar.'
+
+'I'm thinkin' ye're braw an' sarcestic yersel, Tammas?'
+
+'I'd aye that repootation, Jeames. 'Am no an everyday sarcesticist, but
+juist noos an' nans. There was ae time I was speakin' tae Easie Webster,
+an' I said a terrible sarcestic thing. Ay, I dinna mind what it was, but
+it was michty sarcestic.'
+
+'It's a gift,' said the mole-catcher.
+
+'A gift it is,' said Tammas.
+
+The stone-breaker took his flagon to a spring near at hand and rinsed it
+out. Several times while pulling it up and down the little pool an
+uneasy expression crossed his face as he remembered something about a
+child, but in washing his hands, using sand for soap, Davy slipped his
+memory, and he returned cheerfully to the cairn. Here Jamie was wagging
+his head from side to side like a man who had caught himself thinking.
+
+'I'll warrant, Tammas,' he said, 'ye cudna tell's what set's on to speak
+aboot Rob Angus?'
+
+'Na, it's a thing as has often puzzled me hoo we select wan topic mair
+than anither. I suppose it's like shootin'; ye juist blaze awa at the
+first bird 'at rises.'
+
+'Ye was sayin', had I seen a lass wi' a lad's name. That began it, I'm
+thinkin'.'
+
+'A lass wi' a lad's name? Ay, noo, that's oncommon. But mebbe ye mean
+Davy Dundas?'
+
+'That's the name.'
+
+Tammas paused in the act of buttoning his trouser pocket.
+
+'Did ye say ye'd seen Davy?' he asked.
+
+'Na, it was you as said 'at ye had seen her.'
+
+'Ay, ay, Jamie, ye're richt. Man, I fully meant to turn the bairn, but
+she ran by at sic a steek 'at there was nae stoppin' her. Rob'll mak an
+awfu' ring-ding if onything comes ower Davy.'
+
+'Is't the litlin 'at's aye wi' Rob?'
+
+'Ay, it's Chirsty Angus's bairn, her 'at was Rob's sister. A' her fowk's
+deid but Rob.'
+
+'I've seen them i' the saw-mill thegither. It didna strick me 'at Rob
+cared muckle for the crittury.'
+
+'Ou, Rob's a reserved stock, but he's michty fond o' her when naebody's
+lookin'. It doesna do, ye ken, to lat on afore company at ye've a kind
+o' regaird for yere ain fowk. Na, it's lowerin'. But if it wasna afore
+your time, ye'd seen the cradle i' the saw-mill.'
+
+'I never saw ony cradle, Tammas.'
+
+'Weel, it was unco ingenious o' Rob. The bairn's father an' mither was
+baith gone when Davy was nae age, an' auld Rob passed awa sune efter.
+Rob had it all arranged to ging to the college--ay, he'd been workin'
+far on into the nicht the hale year to save up siller to keep 'imsel at
+Edinbory, but ye see he promised Chirsty to look after Davy an' no send
+her to the parish. He took her to the saw-mill an' brocht her up 'imsel.
+It was a terrible disappointment to Rob, his mind bein' bent on becomin'
+a great leeterary genius, but he's been michty guid to the bairn. Ay,
+she's an extr'or'nar takkin dawty, Davy, an' though I wudna like it
+kent, I've a fell notion o' her mysel. I mind ance gaen in to Rob's,
+an', wud ye believe, there was the bit lassieky sitting in the
+airm-chair wi' ane o' Rob's books open on her knees, an' her pertendin'
+to be readin' oot in't to Rob. The tiddy had watched him readin', ye
+un'erstan', an', man, she was mimickin' 'im to the life. There's nae
+accountin' for thae things, but ondootedly it was attractive.'
+
+'But what aboot a cradle?'
+
+'Ou, as I was sayin', Rob didna like to lat the bairn oot o' his sicht,
+so he made a queer cradle 'imsel, an' put it ower the burn. Ye'll mind
+the burn rins through the saw-mill? Ay, weel, Davie's cradle was put
+across't wi' the paddles sae arranged 'at the watter rocked the cradle.
+Man, the burn was juist like a mither to Davy, for no only did it rock
+her to sleep, but it sang to the bairn the hale time.'
+
+'That was an ingenious contrivance, Tammas; but it was juist like Rob
+Angus's ind'pendence. The crittur aye perseests in doin' a'thing for
+'imsel. I mind ae day seein' Cree Deuchars puttin' in a window into the
+saw-mill hoose, an' Rob's fingers was fair itchin' to do't quick 'imsel;
+ye ken Cree's fell slow? "See haud o' the potty," cries Rob, an' losh,
+he had the window in afore Cree cud hae cut the glass. Ay, ye canna deny
+but what Rob's fearfu' independent.'
+
+'So was his faither. I call to mind auld Rob an' the minister ha'en a
+termendous debate aboot justification by faith, an' says Rob i' the tail
+o' the day, gettin' passionate-like, "I tell ye flat, Mester Byars," he
+says, "if I dinna ging to heaven in my ain wy, I dinna ging ava!"'
+
+'Losh, losh! he wudna hae said that, though, to oor minister; na, he
+wudna hae daured.'
+
+'Ye're a U.P., Jamie?' asked the stone-breaker.
+
+'I was born U.P.,' replied the mole-catcher firmly, 'an' U.P. I'll die.'
+
+'I say naething agin yer releegion,' replied Tammas, a little
+contemptuously, 'but to compare yer minister to oors is a haver. Man,
+when Mester Byars was oor minister, Sanders Dobie, the wricht, had a
+standin' engagement to mend the poopit ilka month.'
+
+'We'll no speak o' releegion, Tammas, or we'll be quarrellin'. Ye micht
+tell's, though, hoo they cam to gie a lassieky sic a man's name as
+Davy.'
+
+'It was an accident at the christenin'. Ye see, Hendry Dundas an'
+Chirsty was both vary young, an' when the bairn was born, they were
+shy-like aboot makkin the affair public; ay, Hendry cud hardly tak
+courage to tell the minister. When he was haddin' up the bit tid in the
+kirk to be baptized he was remarkable egitated. Weel, the minister--it
+was Mester Dishart--somehoo had a notion 'at the litlin was a laddie,
+an' when he reads the name on the paper, "Margaret Dundas," he looks at
+Hendry wi' the bairny in 's airms, an' says he, stern-like, "The child's
+a boy, is he not?"'
+
+'Sal, that was a predeecament for Hendry.'
+
+'Ay, an' Hendry was confused, as a man often is wi' his first; so says
+he, all trem'lin', "Yes, Mr. Dishart." "Then," says the minister, "I
+cannot christen him Margaret, so I will call him David." An' Davit the
+litlin was baptized, sure eneuch.'
+
+'The mither wud be in a michty wy at that?'
+
+'She was so, but as Hendry said, when she challenged him on the subject,
+says Hendry, "I dauredna conterdick the minister."'
+
+Haggart's work being now over for the day, he sat down beside Jamie to
+await some other stone-breakers who generally caught him up on their way
+home. Strange figures began to emerge from the woods, a dumb man with a
+barrowful of roots for firewood, several women in men's coats, one
+smoking a cutty-pipe. A farm-labourer pulled his heavy legs in their
+rustling corduroys alongside a field of swedes, a ragged potato-bogle
+brandished its arms in a sudden puff of wind. Several men and women
+reached Haggart's cairn about the same time, and said, 'It is so,' or
+'Ay, ay,' to him, according as they were loquacious or merely polite.
+
+'We was speakin' aboot matermony,' the mole-catcher remarked, as the
+back-bent little party straggled toward Thrums.
+
+'It's a caution,' murmured the farm-labourer, who had heard the
+observation from the other side of the dyke. 'Ay, ye may say so,' he
+added thoughtfully, addressing himself.
+
+With the mole-catcher's companions, however, the talk passed into
+another rut. Nevertheless Haggart was thinking matrimony over, and by
+and by he saw his way to a joke, for one of the other stone-breakers had
+recently married a very small woman, and in Thrums, where women have to
+work, the far-seeing men prefer their wives big.
+
+'Ye drew a sma' prize yersel, Sam'l,' said Tammas, with the gleam in his
+eye which showed that he was now in sarcastic fettle.
+
+'Ay,' said the mole-catcher, 'Sam'l's Kitty is sma'. I suppose Sam'l
+thocht it wud be prudent-like to begin in a modest wy.'
+
+'If Kitty hadna haen sae sma' hands,' said another stone-breaker, 'I wud
+hae haen a bid for her mysel.'
+
+The women smiled; they had very large hands.
+
+'They say,' said the youngest of them, who had a load of firewood on her
+back, ''at there's places whaur little hands is thocht muckle o'.'
+
+There was an incredulous laugh at this.
+
+'I wudna wonder, though,' said the mole-catcher, who had travelled;
+'there's some michty queer ideas i' the big toons.'
+
+'Ye'd better ging to the big toons, then, Sam'l,' suggested the
+merciless Tammas.
+
+Sam'l woke up.
+
+'Kitty's sma',' he said, with a chuckle, 'but she's an auld tid.'
+
+'What made ye think o' speirin' her, Sam'l?'
+
+'I cudna say for sartin,' answered Sam'l reflectively. 'I had nae
+intention o't till I saw Pete Proctor after her, an' syne, thinks I,
+I'll hae her. Ay, ye micht say as Pete was the instrument o' Providence
+in that case.'
+
+'Man, man,' murmured Jamie, who knew Pete, 'Providence sometimes maks
+use o' strange instruments.'
+
+'Ye was lang in gettin' a man yersel, Jinny,' said Tammas to an elderly
+woman.
+
+'Fower-an'-forty year,' replied Jinny. 'It was like a stockin', lang i'
+the futin', but turned at last.'
+
+'Lasses nooadays,' said the old woman who smoked, 'is partikler by what
+they used to be. I mind when Jeames Gowrie speired me: "Ye wud raither
+hae Davit Curly, I ken," he says. "I dinna deny 't," I says, for the
+thing was well kent, "but ye'll do vara weel, Jeames," says I, an' mairy
+him I did.'
+
+'He was a harmless crittur, Jeames,' said Haggart, 'but queer. Ay, he
+was full o' maggots.'
+
+'Ay,' said Jeames's widow, 'but though it's no for me to say 't, he deid
+a deacon.'
+
+'There's some rale queer wys o' speirin' a wuman,' began the
+mole-catcher.
+
+'Vary true, Jamie,' said a stone-breaker. 'I mind hoo----'
+
+'There was a chappy ower by Blair,' continued Jamie, raising his voice,
+''at micht hae been a single man to this day if it hadna been for the
+toothache.'
+
+'Ay, man?'
+
+'Joey Fargus was the stock's name. He was oncommon troubled wi' the
+toothache till he found a cure.'
+
+'I didna ken o' ony cure for sair teeth?'
+
+'Joey's cure was to pour cauld watter strecht on into his mooth for the
+maiter o' twa 'oors, an' ae day he cam into Blair an' found Jess
+McTaggart (a speerity bit thingy she was--ou, she was so) fair greetin'
+wi' sair teeth. Joey advised the crittur to try his cure, an' when he
+left she was pourin' the watter into her mooth ower the sink. Weel, it
+so happened 'at Joey was in Blair again aboot twa month after, an' he
+gies a cry in at Willie's--that's Jess's father's, as ye'll un'erstan'.
+Ay, then, Jess had haen anither fit o' the toothache, an' she was
+hingin' ower the sink wi' a tanker o' watter in her han', just as she'd
+been when he saw her last. "What!" says Joey, wi' rale consairn, "nae
+better yet?" The stock thocht she had been haddin' gaen at the watter a'
+thae twa month.'
+
+'I call to mind,' the stone-breaker broke in again, 'hoo a body----'
+
+'So,' continued Jamie, 'Joey cudna help but admire the patience o' the
+lassie, an' says he, "Jess," he says, "come oot by to Mortar Pits, an'
+try oor well." That's hoo Joey Fargus speired's wife, an' if ye dinna
+believe's, ye've nae mair to do but ging to Mortar Pits an' see the well
+yersels.'
+
+'I recall,' said the stone-breaker, 'a vary neat case o' speirin'. It
+was Jocky Wilkie, him 'at's brither was grieve to Broken Busses, an'
+the lass was Leeby Lunan. She was aye puttin' Jocky aff when he was on
+the point o' speirin' her, keepin' 'im hingin' on the hook like a trout,
+as ye may say, an' takkin her fling wi' ither lads at the same time.'
+
+'Ay, I've kent them do that.'
+
+'Weel, it fair maddened Jocky, so ae nicht he gings to her father's
+hoose wi' a present o' a grand thimble to her in his pooch, an' afore
+the hale hoosehold he perdooces't an' flings't wi' a bang on the
+dresser:
+
+"Tak it," he says to Leeby, "or leave't." In coorse the thing's bein'
+done sae public-like, Leeby kent she had to mak up her mind there an'
+then. Ay, she took it.'
+
+'But hoo did ye speir Chirsty yersel, Dan'l?' asked Jinny of the
+speaker.
+
+There was a laugh at this, for, as was well known, Dan'l had jilted
+Chirsty.
+
+'I never kent I had speired,' replied the stone-breaker, 'till Chirsty
+told me.'
+
+'Ye'll no say ye wasna fond o' her?'
+
+'Sometimes I was, an' syne at other times I was indifferent-like. The
+mair I thocht o't the mair risky I saw it was, so i' the tail o' the day
+I says to Chirsty, says I, "Na, na, Chirsty, lat's be as I am."'
+
+'They say she took on terrible, Dan'l.'
+
+'Ay, nae doot, but a man has 'imsel to conseeder.'
+
+By this time they had crossed the moor of whins. It was a cold, still
+evening, and as they paused before climbing down into the town they
+heard the tinkle of a bell.
+
+'That's Snecky's bell,' said the mole-catcher; 'what can he be cryin' at
+this time o' nicht?'
+
+'There's something far wrang,' said one of the women. 'Look, a'body's
+rinnin' to the square.'
+
+The troubled look returned to Tammas Haggart's face, and he stopped to
+look back across the fast-darkening moor.
+
+'Did ony o' ye see little Davy Dundas, the saw-miller's bairny?' he
+began.
+
+At that moment a young man swept by. His teeth were clenched, his eyes
+glaring.
+
+'Speak o' the deil,' said the mole-catcher; 'that was Rob Angus.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ROB BECOMES FREE
+
+
+As Haggart hobbled down into the square, in the mole-catcher's rear,
+Hobart's cracked bell tinkled up the back-wynd, and immediately
+afterwards the bellman took his stand by the side of Tam Peter's
+fish-cart. Snecky gave his audience time to gather, for not every day
+was it given to him to cry a lost bairn. The words fell slowly from his
+reluctant lips. Before he flung back his head and ejected his
+proclamation in a series of puffs he was the possessor of exclusive
+news, but his tongue had hardly ceased to roll round the concluding
+sentence when the crowd took up the cry themselves. Wives flinging open
+their windows shouted their fears across the wynds. Davy Dundas had
+wandered from the kirkyard, where Rob had left her in Kitty Wilkie's
+charge till he returned from the woods. What had Kitty been about? It
+was believed that the litlin had taken with her a letter that had come
+for Rob. Was Rob back from the woods yet? Ay, he had scoured the whole
+countryside already for her.
+
+Men gathered on the saw-mill brig, looking perplexedly at the burn that
+swivelled at this point, a sawdust colour, between wooden boards; but
+the women pressed their bairns closely to their wrappers and gazed in
+each other's face.
+
+A log of wood, with which some one had sought to improvise a fire
+between the bricks that narrowed Rob Angus's grate, turned peevishly to
+charcoal without casting much light on the men and women in the saw-mill
+kitchen. Already the burn had been searched near the mill, with Rob's
+white face staring at the searchers from his door.
+
+The room was small and close. A closet-bed with the door off afforded
+seats for several persons; and Davit Lunan, the tinsmith, who could read
+Homer with Rob in the original, sat clumsily on the dresser. The
+pendulum of a wag-at-the-wa' clock swung silently against the wall,
+casting a mouse-like shadow on the hearth. Over the mantelpiece was a
+sampler in many colours, the work of Rob's mother when she was still a
+maid. The bookcase, fitted into a recess that had once held a press, was
+Rob's own handiwork, and contained more books than any other house in
+Thrums. Overhead the thick wooden rafters were crossed with saws and
+staves.
+
+There was a painful silence in the gloomy room. Snecky Hobart tried to
+break the log in the fireplace, using his leg as a poker, but desisted
+when he saw every eye turned on him. A glitter of sparks shot up the
+chimney, and the starling in the window began to whistle. Pete Todd
+looked undecidedly at the minister, and, lifting a sack, flung it over
+the bird's cage, as if anticipating the worst. In Thrums they veil their
+cages if there is a death in the house.
+
+'What do ye mean, Pete Todd?' cried Rob Angus fiercely.
+
+His voice broke, but he seized the sack and cast it on the floor. The
+starling, however, whistled no more.
+
+Looking as if he could strike Pete Todd, Rob stood in the centre of his
+kitchen, a saw-miller for the last time. Though they did not know it,
+his neighbours there were photographing him in their minds, and their
+children were destined to gape in the days to come over descriptions of
+Rob Angus in corduroys.
+
+These pictures showed a broad-shouldered man of twenty-six, whose face
+was already rugged. A short brown beard hid the heavy chin, and the lips
+were locked as if Rob feared to show that he was anxious about the
+child. His clear grey eyes were younger-looking than his forehead, and
+the swollen balls beneath them suggested a student rather than a working
+man. His hands were too tanned and hard ever to be white, and he delved
+a little in his walk, as if he felt uncomfortable without a weight on
+his back. He was the best saw-miller in his county, but his ambition
+would have scared his customers had he not kept it to himself. Many a
+time strangers had stared at him as he strode along the Whunny road, and
+wondered what made this stalwart man whirl the axe that he had been
+using as a staff. Then Rob was thinking of the man he was going to be
+when he could safely leave little Davy behind him, and it was not the
+firs of the Whunny wood that were in his eye, but a roaring city and a
+saw-miller taking it by the throat. There had been a time when he bore
+no love for the bairn who came between him and his career.
+
+Rob was so tall that he could stand erect in but few rooms in Thrums,
+and long afterwards, when very different doors opened to him, he still
+involuntarily ducked, as he crossed a threshold, to save his head. Up to
+the day on which Davy wandered from home he had never lifted his hat to
+a lady; when he did that the influence of Thrums would be broken for
+ever.
+
+'It's oncommon foolish o' Rob,' said Pete Todd, retreating to the side
+of the mole-catcher, 'no to be mair resigned-like.'
+
+'It's his ind'pendence,' answered Jamie; 'ay, the wricht was sayin' the
+noo, says he, "If Davy's deid, Rob'll mak the coffin 'imsel, he's sae
+michty ind'pendent."'
+
+Tammas Haggart stumbled into the saw-miller's kitchen. It would have
+been a womanish kind of thing to fling-to the door behind him.
+
+'Fine growin' day, Rob,' he said deliberately.
+
+'It is so, Tammas,' answered the saw-miller hospitably, for Haggart had
+been his father's bosom friend.
+
+'No much drowth, I'm thinkin',' said Hobart, relieved by the turn the
+conversation had taken.
+
+Tammas pulled from beneath the table an unsteady three-legged
+stool--Davy's stool--and sat down on it slowly. Rob took a step nearer
+as if to ask him to sit somewhere else, and then turned away his head.
+
+'Ay, ay,' said Haggart.
+
+Then, as he saw the others gathering round the minister at the door, he
+moved uneasily on his stool.
+
+'Whaur's Davy?' he said.
+
+'Did ye no ken she was lost?' the saw-miller asked, in a voice that was
+hardly his own.
+
+'Ay, I kent,' said Tammas; 'she's on the Whunny road.'
+
+Rob had been talking to the minister in what both thought English, which
+in Thrums is considered an ostentatious language, but he turned on
+Tammas in broad Scotch. In the years to come, when he could wear gloves
+without concealing his hands in his pockets, excitement brought on
+Scotch as a poultice raises blisters.
+
+'Tammas Haggart,' he cried, pulling the stone-breaker off his stool.
+
+The minister interposed.
+
+'Tell us what you know at once, Tammas,' said Mr. Dishart, who, out of
+the pulpit, had still a heart.
+
+It was a sad tale that Haggart had to tell, if a short one, and several
+of the listeners shook their heads as they heard it.
+
+'I meant to turn the lassieky,' the stone-breaker explained, 'but, ou,
+she was past in a twinklin'.'
+
+On the saw-mill brig the minister quickly organised a search party, the
+brig that Rob had floored anew but the week before, rising daily with
+the sun to do it, because the child's little boot had caught in a worn
+board. From it she had often crooned to watch the dank mill-wheel
+climbing the bouncing burn. Ah, Rob, the rotten old planks would have
+served your turn.
+
+'The Whunny road' were the words passed from mouth to mouth, and the
+driblet of men fell into line.
+
+Impetuous is youth, and the minister was not perhaps greatly to blame
+for starting at once. But Lang Tammas, his chief elder, paused on the
+threshold.
+
+'The Lord giveth,' he said solemnly, taking off his hat and letting the
+night air cut through his white hair, 'and the Lord taketh away: blessed
+be the name of the Lord.'
+
+The saw-miller opened his mouth, but no words came.
+
+The little search party took the cold Whunny road. The day had been
+bright and fine, and still there was a smell of flowers in the air. The
+fickle flowers! They had clustered round Davy and nestled on her neck
+when she drew the half-ashamed saw-miller through the bleating meadows,
+and now they could smile on him when he came alone--all except the
+daisies. The daisies, that cannot play a child false, had craned their
+necks to call Davy back as she tripped over them, and bowed their heavy
+little heads as she toddled on. It was from them that the bairn's track
+was learned after she wandered from the Whunny road.
+
+By and by the hills ceased to echo their wailing response to Hobart's
+bell.
+
+Far in the rear of the more eager searchers, the bellman and the joiner
+had found a seat on a mossy bank, and others, footsore and weary, had
+fallen elsewhere from the ranks. The minister and half a dozen others
+scattered over the fields and on the hillsides, despondent, but not
+daring to lag. Tinkers cowered round their kettles under threatening
+banks, and the squirrels were shadows gliding from tree to tree.
+
+At a distant smithy a fitful light still winked to the wind, but the
+farm lamps were out and all the land was hushed. It was now long past
+midnight in country parts.
+
+Rob Angus was young and strong, but the heaven-sent gift of tears was
+not for him. Blessed the moaning mother by the cradle of her
+eldest-born, and the maid in tears for the lover who went out so brave
+in the morning and was not at evenfall, and the weeping sister who can
+pray for her soldier brother, and the wife on her husband's bosom.
+
+Some of his neighbours had thought it unmanly when Rob, at the rumble of
+a cart, hurried from the saw-mill to snatch the child in his arms, and
+bear her to a bed of shavings. At such a time Davy would lift a saw to
+within an inch of her baby face, and then, letting it fall with a wicked
+chuckle, run to the saw-miller's arms, as sure of her lover as ever
+maiden was of man.
+
+A bashful lover he had been, shy, not of Davy but of what men would say,
+and now the time had come when he looked wistfully back to a fevered
+child tossing in a dark bed, the time when a light burned all night in
+Rob's kitchen, and a trembling, heavy-eyed man sat motionless on a
+high-backed chair. How noiselessly he approached the bonny mite and
+replaced the arm that had wandered from beneath the coverlet! Ah, for
+the old time when a sick imperious child told her uncle to lie down
+beside her, and Rob sat on the bed, looking shamefacedly at the
+minister. Mr. Dishart had turned away his head. Such things are not to
+be told. They are between a man and his God.
+
+Far up the Whunny hill they found Davy's little shoe. Rob took it in his
+hand, a muddy, draggled shoe that had been a pretty thing when he put it
+on her foot that morning. The others gathered austerely around him, and
+strong Rob stood still among the brackens.
+
+'I'm dootin' she's deid,' said Tammas Haggart.
+
+Haggart looked into the face of old Rob's son, and then a strange and
+beautiful thing happened. To the wizened stone-breaker it was no longer
+the sombre Whunny hill that lay before him. Two barefooted herd-laddies
+were on the green fields of adjoining farms. The moon looking over the
+hills found them on their ragged backs, with the cows munching by their
+side. They had grown different boys, nor known why, among the wild roses
+of red and white, and trampling neck-high among the ferns. Haggart saw
+once again the raspberry bushes they had stripped together into flagons
+gleaming in the grass. Rob had provided the bent pin with which Tammas
+lured his first trout to land, and Tammas in return had invited him to
+thraw the neck of a doomed hen. They had wandered hand-in-hand through
+thirsty grass, when scythes whistled in the corn-fields, and larks
+trilled overhead, and braes were golden with broom.
+
+They are two broad-shouldered men now, and Haggart's back is rounding at
+the loom. From his broken window he can see Rob at the saw-mill,
+whistling as the wheel goes round. It is Saturday night, and they are in
+the square, clean and dapper, talking with other gallants about lasses.
+They are courting the same maid, and she sits on a stool by the door,
+knitting a stocking, with a lover on each side. They drop in on her
+mother straining the blaeberry juice through a bag suspended between two
+chairs. They sheepishly admire while Easie singes a hen; for love of her
+they help her father to pit his potatoes; and then, for love of the
+other, each gives her up. It is a Friday night, and from a but and ben
+around which the rabble heave and toss, a dozen couples emerge in
+strangely gay and bright apparel. Rob leads the way with one lass, and
+Tammas follows with another. It must be Rob's wedding-day.
+
+Dim grow Tammas's eyes on the Whunny hill. The years whirl by, and
+already he sees a grumpy gravedigger go out to dig Rob's grave. Alas!
+for the flash into the past that sorrow gives. As he clutches young
+Rob's hand the light dies from Tammas's eyes, his back grows round and
+bent, and the hair is silvered that lay in tousled locks on a lad's
+head.
+
+A nipping wind cut the search party and fled down the hill that was
+changing in colour from black to grey. The searchers might have been
+smugglers laden with whisky bladders, such as haunted the mountain in
+bygone days. Far away at Thrums mothers still wrung their hands for
+Davy, but the men slept.
+
+Heads were bared, and the minister raised his voice in prayer. One of
+the psalms of David trembled in the grey of the morning straight to
+heaven; and then two young men, glancing at Mr. Dishart, raised aloft a
+fallen rowan-tree, to let it fall as it listed. It fell pointing
+straight down the hill, and the search party took that direction; all
+but Rob, who stood motionless, with the shoe in his hand. He did not
+seem to comprehend the minister's beckoning.
+
+Haggart took him by the arm.
+
+'Rob, man, Rob Angus,' he said, 'she was but fower year auld.'
+
+The stone-breaker unbuttoned his trouser pocket, and with an unsteady
+hand drew out his snuff-mull. Rob tried to take it, but his arm
+trembled, and the mull fell among the heather.
+
+'Keep yourselves from idols,' said Lang Tammas sternly.
+
+But the minister was young, and children lisped his name at the white
+manse among the trees at home. He took the shoe from the saw-miller who
+had once been independent, and they went down the hill together.
+
+Davy lay dead at the edge of the burn that gurgles on to the saw-mill,
+one little foot washed by the stream. The Whunny had rocked her to sleep
+for the last time. Half covered with grass, her baby-fist still clutched
+the letter. When Rob saw her, he took his darling dead bairn in his arms
+and faced the others with cracking jaws.
+
+'I dinna ken,' said Tammas Haggart, after a pause, 'but what it's kind
+o' nat'ral.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ROB GOES OUT INTO THE WORLD
+
+
+One evening, nearly a month after Rob Angus became 'single,' Mr. George
+Frederick Licquorish, editor and proprietor of the _Silchester Mirror_,
+was sitting in his office cutting advertisements out of the _Silchester
+Argus_, and pasting each on a separate sheet of paper. These
+advertisements had not been sent to the _Mirror_, and, as he thought
+this a pity, he meant, through his canvasser, to call the attention of
+the advertisers to the omission.
+
+Mr. Licquorish was a stout little man with a benevolent countenance, who
+wrote most of his leaders on the backs of old envelopes. Every few
+minutes he darted into the composing-room, with an alertness that was a
+libel on his genial face; and when he returned it was pleasant to
+observe the kindly, good-natured manner in which he chaffed the
+printer's devil who was trying to light the fire. It was, however, also
+noticeable that what the devil said subsequently to another devil
+was--'But, you know, he wouldn't give me any sticks.'
+
+The _Mirror_ and the _Argus_ are two daily newspapers published in
+Silchester, each of which has the largest circulation in the district,
+and is therefore much the better advertising medium. Silchester is the
+chief town of an English midland county, and the _Mirror's_ business
+notepaper refers to it as the centre of a population of half a million
+souls.
+
+The _Mirror's_ offices are nearly crushed out of sight in a block of
+buildings, left in the middle of a street for town councils to pull down
+gradually. This island of houses, against which a sea of humanity beats
+daily, is cut in two by a narrow passage, off which several doors open.
+One of these leads up a dirty stair to the editorial and composing-rooms
+of the _Daily Mirror_, and down a dirty stair to its printing-rooms. It
+is the door at which you may hammer for an hour without any one's paying
+the least attention.
+
+During the time the boy took to light Mr. Licquorish's fire, a young man
+in a heavy overcoat knocked more than once at the door in the alley, and
+then moved off as if somewhat relieved that there was no response. He
+walked round and round the block of buildings, gazing upwards at the
+windows of the composing-room; and several times he ran against other
+pedestrians on whom he turned fiercely, and would then have begged their
+pardons had he known what to say. Frequently he felt in his pocket to
+see if his money was still there, and once he went behind a door and
+counted it. There was three pounds seventeen shillings altogether, and
+he kept it in a linen bag that had been originally made for carrying
+worms in when he went fishing. When he re-entered the close he always
+drew a deep breath, and if any persons emerged from the _Mirror_ office
+he looked after them. They were mostly telegraph boys, who fluttered out
+and in.
+
+When Mr. Licquorish dictated an article, as he did frequently, the
+apprentice-reporter went into the editor's room to take it down, and
+the reporters always asked him, as a favour, to shut George Frederick's
+door behind him. This apprentice-reporter did the police reports and the
+magazine notices, and he wondered a good deal whether the older
+reporters really did like brandy and soda. The reason why John Milton,
+which was the unfortunate name of this boy, was told to close the
+editorial door behind him was that it was close to the door of the
+reporters' room, and generally stood open. The impression the reporters'
+room made on a chance visitor varied according as Mr. Licquorish's door
+was ajar or shut. When they heard it locked on the inside, the reporters
+and the sub-editor breathed a sigh of relief; when it opened they took
+their legs off the desk.
+
+The editor's room had a carpet, and was chiefly furnished with books
+sent in for review. It was more comfortable, but more gloomy-looking
+than the reporters' room, which had a long desk running along one side
+of it, and a bunk for holding coals and old newspapers on the other
+side. The floor was so littered with papers, many of them still in their
+wrappers, that, on his way between his seat and the door, the reporter
+generally kicked one or more into the bunk. It was in this way, unless
+an apprentice happened to be otherwise disengaged, that the floor was
+swept.
+
+In this room were a reference library and an old coat. The library was
+within reach of the sub-editor's hand, and contained some fifty books,
+which the literary staff could consult, with the conviction that they
+would find the page they wanted missing. The coat had hung unbrushed on
+a nail for many years, and was so thick with dust that John Milton
+could draw pictures on it with his finger. According to legend, it was
+the coat of a distinguished novelist, who had once been a reporter on
+the _Mirror_, and had left Silchester unostentatiously by his window.
+
+It was Penny, the foreman in the composing-room, who set the literary
+staff talking about the new reporter. Penny was a lank, loosely-jointed
+man of forty, who shuffled about the office in slippers, ruled the
+compositors with a loud voice and a blustering manner, and was believed
+to be in Mr. Licquorish's confidence. His politics were respect for the
+House of Lords, because it rose early, enabling him to have it set
+before supper-time.
+
+The foreman slithered so quickly from one room to another that he was at
+the sub-editor's elbow before his own door had time to shut. There was
+some copy in his hand, and he flung it contemptuously upon the desk.
+
+'Look here, Mister,' he said, flinging the copy upon the sub-editor's
+desk, 'I don't want that.'
+
+The sub-editor was twisted into as little space as possible, tearing
+telegrams open and flinging the envelopes aside, much as a housewife
+shells peas. His name was Protheroe, and the busier he was the more he
+twisted himself. On Budget nights he was a knot. He did voluntarily so
+much extra work that Mr. Licquorish often thought he gave him too high
+wages; and on slack nights he smiled to himself, which showed that
+something pleased him. It was rather curious that this something should
+have been himself.
+
+'But--but,' cried Protheroe, all in a flutter, 'it's town council
+meeting; it--it must be set, Mr. Penny.'
+
+'Very well, Mister; then that special from Birmingham must be
+slaughtered.'
+
+'No, no, Mr. Penny; why, that's a speech by Bright.'
+
+Penny sneered at the sub-editor, and flung up his arms to imply that he
+washed his hands of the whole thing, as he had done every night for the
+last ten years, when there was pressure on his space. Protheroe had been
+there for half of that time, yet he still trembled before the autocrat
+of the office.
+
+'There's enough copy on the board,' said Penny, 'to fill the paper. Any
+more specials coming in?'
+
+He asked this fiercely, as if of opinion that the sub-editor arranged
+with leading statesmen nightly to flood the composing-room of the
+_Mirror_ with speeches, and Protheroe replied abjectly, as if he had
+been caught doing it--'Lord John Manners is speaking to-night at
+Nottingham.'
+
+The foreman dashed his hand upon the desk.
+
+'Go it, Mister, go it,' he cried; 'anything else? Tell me Gladstone's
+dead next.'
+
+Sometimes about two o'clock in the morning Penny would get sociable, and
+the sub-editor was always glad to respond. On those occasions they
+talked with bated breath of the amount of copy that would come in should
+anything happen to Mr. Gladstone; and the sub-editor, if he was in a
+despondent mood, predicted that it would occur at midnight. Thinking of
+this had made him a Conservative.
+
+'Nothing so bad as that,' he said, dwelling on the subject, to show the
+foreman that they might be worse off; 'but there's a column of local
+coming in, and a concert in the People's Hall, and----'
+
+'And you expect me to set all that?' the foreman broke in. 'Why, the
+half of that local should have been set by seven o'clock, and here I've
+only got the beginning of the town council yet. It's ridiculous.'
+
+Protheroe looked timidly towards the only reporter present, and then
+apologetically towards Penny for having looked at the reporter.
+
+'The stuff must be behind,' growled Tomlinson, nicknamed Umbrage, 'as
+long as we're a man short.'
+
+Umbrage was very short and stout, with a big moon face, and always wore
+his coat unbuttoned. In the streets, if he was walking fast and there
+was a breeze, his coat-tails seemed to be running after him. He squinted
+a little, from a habit he had of looking sideways at public meetings to
+see if the audience was gazing at him. He was 'Juvenal' in the _Mirror_
+on Friday mornings, and headed his column of local gossip which had that
+signature, 'Now step I forth to whip hypocrisy.'
+
+'I wonder,' said the sub-editor, with an insinuating glance at the
+foreman, 'if the new man is expected to-night.'
+
+Mr. Licquorish had told him that this was so an hour before, but the
+cunning bred of fear advised him to give Penny the opportunity of
+divulging the news.
+
+That worthy smiled to himself, as any man has a right to do who has been
+told something in confidence by his employer.
+
+'He's a Yorkshireman, I believe,' continued the crafty Protheroe.
+
+'That's all you know,' said the foreman, first glancing back to see if
+Mr. Licquorish's door was shut. 'Mr. George Frederick has told me all
+about him; he's a Scotsman called Angus, that's never been out of his
+native county.'
+
+'He's one of those compositors taken to literature, is he?' asked
+Umbrage, who by literature meant reporting, pausing in the middle of a
+sentence he was transcribing from his note-book. 'Just as I expected,'
+he added contemptuously.
+
+'No,' said the foreman, thawing in the rays of such ignorance; 'Mr.
+George Frederick says he's never been on a newspaper before.'
+
+'An outsider!' cried Umbrage, in the voice with which outsiders
+themselves would speak of reptiles. 'They are the ruin of the
+profession, they are.'
+
+'He'll make you all sit up, Mister,' said Penny, with a chuckle. 'Mr.
+George Frederick has had his eye on him for a twelvemonth.'
+
+'I don't suppose you know how Mr. George Frederick fell in with him?'
+said the sub-editor, basking in Penny's geniality.
+
+'Mr. George Frederick told me everythink about him--everythink,' said
+the foreman proudly. 'It was a parson that recommended him.'
+
+'A parson!' ejaculated Umbrage, in such a tone that if you had not
+caught the word you might have thought he was saying 'An outsider!'
+again.
+
+'Yes, a parson whose sermon this Angus took down in shorthand, I fancy.'
+
+'What was he doing taking down a sermon?'
+
+'I suppose he was there to hear it.'
+
+'And this is the kind of man who is taking to literature nowadays!'
+Umbrage cried.
+
+'Oh, Mr. George Frederick has heard a great deal about him,' continued
+Penny maliciously, 'and expects him to do wonders. He's a self-made
+man.'
+
+'Oh,' said Umbrage, who could find nothing to object to in that, having
+risen from comparative obscurity himself.
+
+'Mr. George Frederick,' Penny went on, 'offered him a berth here before
+Billy Tagg was engaged, but he couldn't come.'
+
+'I suppose,' said Juvenal, with the sarcasm that made him terrible on
+Fridays, 'the _Times_ offered him something better, or was it the
+_Spectator_ that wanted an editor?'
+
+'No, it was family matters. His mother or his sister, or--let me see, it
+was his sister's child--was dependent on him, and could not be left.
+Something happened to her, though. She's dead, I think, so he's a free
+man now.'
+
+'Yes, it was his sister's child, and she was found dead,' said the
+sub-editor, 'on a mountain-side, curiously enough, with George
+Frederick's letter in her hand offering Angus the appointment.'
+
+Protheroe was foolish to admit that he knew this, for it was news to the
+foreman, but it tries a man severely to have to listen to news that he
+could tell better himself. One immediate result of the sub-editor's
+rashness was that Rob Angus sank several stages in Penny's estimation.
+
+'I dare say he'll turn out a muff,' he said, and flung out of the room,
+with another intimation that the copy must be cut down.
+
+The evening wore on. Protheroe had half a dozen things to do at once,
+and did them.
+
+Telegraph boys were dropping the beginning of Lord John Manners's speech
+through a grating on to the sub-editorial desk long before he had
+reached the end of it at Nottingham.
+
+The sub-editor had to revise this as it arrived in flimsy, and write a
+summary of it at the same time. His summary was set before all the
+speech had reached the office, which may seem strange. But when Penny
+cried aloud for summary, so that he might get that column off his hands,
+Protheroe made guesses at many things, and, risking, 'the right hon.
+gentleman concluded his speech, which was attentively listened to, with
+some further references to current topics,' flung Lord John to the boy,
+who rushed with him to Penny, from whose hand he was snatched by a
+compositor. Fifteen minutes afterwards Lord John concluded his speech at
+Nottingham.
+
+About half-past nine Protheroe seized his hat and rushed home for
+supper. In the passage he nearly knocked himself over by running against
+the young man in the heavy top-coat. Umbrage went out to see if he could
+gather any information about a prize-fight. John Milton came in with a
+notice of a concert, which he stuck conspicuously on the chief
+reporter's file. When the chief reporter came in, he glanced through it
+and made a few alterations, changing 'Mr. Joseph Grimes sang out of
+tune,' for instance, to 'Mr. Grimes, the favourite vocalist, was in
+excellent voice.' The concert was not quite over yet, either; they
+seldom waited for the end of anything on the _Mirror_.
+
+When Umbrage returned, Billy Kirker, the chief reporter, was denouncing
+John Milton for not being able to tell him how to spell 'deceive.'
+
+'What is the use of you?' he asked indignantly, 'if you can't do a
+simple thing like that?'
+
+'Say "cheat,"' suggested Umbrage.
+
+So Kirker wrote 'cheat.' Though he was the chief of the _Mirror's_
+reporting department, he had only Umbrage and John Milton at present
+under him.
+
+As Kirker sat in the reporters' room looking over his diary, with a
+cigarette in his mouth, he was an advertisement for the _Mirror_, and if
+he paid for his velvet coat out of his salary, the paper was in a
+healthy financial condition. He was tall, twenty-two years of age, and
+extremely slight. His manner was languid, though his language was
+sometimes forcible, but those who knew him did not think him mild. This
+evening his fingers looked bare without the diamond ring that sometimes
+adorned them. This ring, it was noticed, generally disappeared about the
+middle of the month, and his scarf-pin followed it by the twenty-first.
+With the beginning of the month they reappeared together. The literary
+staff was paid monthly.
+
+Mr. Licquorish looked in at the door of the reporters' room to ask
+pleasantly if they would not like a fire. Had Protheroe been there he
+would have said 'No'; but Billy Kirker said 'Yes.' Mr. Licquorish had
+thought that Protheroe was there.
+
+This was the first fire in the reporters' room that season, and it
+smoked. Kirker, left alone, flung up the window, and gradually became
+aware that some one with a heavy tread was walking up and down the
+alley. He whistled gently in case it should be a friend of his own, but,
+getting no response, resumed his work. Mr. Licquorish also heard the
+footsteps, but though he was waiting for the new reporter, he did not
+connect him with the man outside.
+
+Rob had stopped at the door a score of times, and then turned away. He
+had arrived at Silchester in the afternoon, and come straight to the
+_Mirror_ office to look at it. Then he had set out in quest of
+lodgings, and, having got them, had returned to the passage. He was not
+naturally a man crushed by a sense of his own unworthiness, but, looking
+up at these windows and at the shadows that passed them every moment, he
+felt far away from his saw-mill. What a romance to him, too, was in the
+glare of the gas and in the _Mirror_ bill that was being reduced to pulp
+on the wall at the mouth of the close! It had begun to rain heavily, but
+he did not feel the want of an umbrella, never having possessed one in
+Thrums.
+
+Fighting down the emotions that had mastered him so often, he turned
+once more to the door, and as he knocked more loudly than formerly, a
+compositor came out, who told him what to do if he was there on
+business.
+
+'Go upstairs,' he said, 'till you come to a door, and then kick.'
+
+Rob did not have to kick, however, for he met Mr. Licquorish coming
+downstairs, and both half stopped.
+
+'Not Mr. Angus, is it?' asked Mr. Licquorish.
+
+'Yes,' said the new reporter, the monosyllable also telling that he was
+a Scotsman, and that he did not feel comfortable.
+
+Mr. Licquorish shook him warmly by the hand, and took him into the
+editor's room. Rob sat in a chair there with his hat in his hand, while
+his new employer spoke kindly to him about the work that would begin on
+the morrow.
+
+'You will find it a little strange at first,' he said; 'but Mr. Kirker,
+the head of our reporting staff, has been instructed to explain the
+routine of the office to you, and I have no doubt we shall work well
+together.'
+
+Rob said he meant to do his best.
+
+'It is our desire, Mr. Angus,' continued Mr. Licquorish, 'to place every
+facility before our staff, and if you have suggestions to make at any
+time on any matter connected with your work, we shall be most happy to
+consider them and to meet you in a cordial spirit.'
+
+While Rob was thanking Mr. Licquorish for his consideration, Kirker in
+the next room was wondering whether the new reporter was to have
+half-a-crown a week less than his predecessor, who had begun with six
+pounds a month.
+
+'It is pleasant to us,' Mr. Licquorish concluded, referring to the
+novelist, 'to know that we have sent out from this office a number of
+men who subsequently took a high place in literature. Perhaps our system
+of encouraging talent by fostering it has had something to do with this,
+for we like to give every one his opportunity to rise. I hope the day
+will come, Mr. Angus, when we shall be able to recall with pride the
+fact that you began your literary career on the _Mirror_.'
+
+Rob said he hoped so too. He had, indeed, very little doubt of it. At
+this period of his career it made him turn white to think that he might
+not yet be famous.
+
+'But I must not keep you here any longer,' said the editor, rising, 'for
+you have had a weary journey, and must be feeling tired. We shall see
+you at ten o'clock to-morrow?'
+
+Once more Rob and his employer shook hands heartily.
+
+'But I might introduce you,' said Mr. Licquorish, 'to the
+reporting-room. Mr. Kirker, our chief, is, I think, here.'
+
+Rob had begun to descend the stairs, but he turned back. He was not
+certain what you did when you were introduced to any one, such
+formalities being unknown in Thrums; but he held himself in reserve to
+do as the other did.
+
+'Ah, Mr. Kirker,' said the editor, pushing open the door of the
+reporting-room with his foot, 'this is Mr. Angus, who has just joined
+our literary staff.'
+
+Nodding genially to both, Mr. Licquorish darted out of the room; but
+before the door had finished its swing, Mr. Kirker was aware that the
+new reporter's nails had a rim of black.
+
+'What do you think of George Frederick?' asked the chief, after he had
+pointed out to Rob the only chair that such a stalwart reporter might
+safely sit on.
+
+'He was very pleasant,' said Rob.
+
+'Yes,' said Billy Kirker thoughtfully, 'there's nothing George Frederick
+wouldn't do for any one if it could be done gratis.'
+
+'And he struck me as an enterprising sort of man.'
+
+'"Enterprise without outlay" is the motto of this office,' said the
+chief.
+
+'But the paper seems to be well conducted,' said Rob, a little
+crestfallen.
+
+'The worst conducted in England,' said Kirker cheerfully.
+
+Rob asked how the _Mirror_ compared with the _Argus_.
+
+'They have six reporters to our three,' said Kirker, 'but we do double
+work and beat them.'
+
+'I suppose there is a great deal of rivalry between the staffs of the
+two papers?' Rob asked, for he had read of such things.
+
+'Oh no,' said Kirker, 'we help each other. For instance, if Daddy Walsh,
+the _Argus_ chief, is drunk, I help him; and if I'm drunk, he helps me.
+I'm going down to the Frying Pan to see him now.'
+
+'The Frying Pan?' echoed Rob.
+
+'It's a literary club,' Kirker explained, 'and very exclusive. If you
+come with me I'll introduce you.'
+
+Rob was somewhat taken aback at what he had heard, but he wanted to be
+on good terms with his fellow-workers.
+
+'Not to-night,' he said. 'I think I'd better be getting home now.'
+
+Kirker lit another cigarette, and saying he would expect Rob at the
+office next morning, strolled off. The new reporter was undecided
+whether to follow him at once, or to wait for Mr. Licquorish's
+reappearance. He was looking round the office curiously, when the door
+opened and Kirker put his head in.
+
+'By the bye, old chap,' he said, 'could you lend me five bob?'
+
+'Yes, yes,' said the new reporter.
+
+He had to undo the string of his money-bag, but the chief was too fine a
+gentleman to smile.
+
+'Thanks, old man,' Kirker said carelessly, and again withdrew.
+
+The door of the editor's room was open as Rob passed.
+
+'Ah, Mr. Angus,' said Mr. Licquorish, 'here are a number of books for
+review; you might do a short notice of some of them.'
+
+He handed Rob the two works that happened to lie uppermost, and the new
+reporter slipped them into his pockets with a certain elation. The night
+was dark and wet, but he lit his pipe and hurried up the muddy streets
+to the single room that was now his home. Probably his were the only
+lodgings in his street that had not the portrait of a young lady on the
+mantelpiece. On his way he passed three noisy young men. They were
+Kirker and two reporters on the _Argus_ trying which could fling his hat
+highest in the rain.
+
+Sitting in his lonely room Rob examined his books with interest. One of
+them was Tennyson's new volume of poems, and a month afterwards the poet
+laureate's publishers made Rob march up the streets of Silchester with
+his chest well forward by advertising 'The _Silchester Mirror_ says,
+"This admirable volume."' After all, the great delight of being on the
+Press is that you can patronise the Tennysons. Doubtless the poet
+laureate got a marked copy of Rob's first review forwarded him, and had
+an anxious moment till he saw that it was favourable. There had been a
+time when even John Milton felt a thrill pass through him as he saw
+Messrs. Besant and Rice boasting that he thought their _Chaplain of the
+Fleet_ a novel of sustained interest, 'which we have read without
+fatigue.'
+
+Rob sat over his empty grate far on into the night, his mind in a
+jumble. As he grew more composed the _Mirror_ and its staff sank out of
+sight, and he was carrying a dead child in his arms along the leafy
+Whunny road. His mouth twitched, and his head drooped. He was preparing
+to go to bed when he sat down again to look at the other book. It was a
+novel by 'M.' in one thin volume, and Rob thought the title, _The Scorn
+of Scorns_, foolish. He meant to write an honest criticism of it, but
+never having reviewed a book before, he rather hoped that this would be
+a poor one, which he could condemn brilliantly. Poor Rob! he came to
+think more of that book by and by.
+
+At last Rob wound up the big watch that neighbours had come to gaze at
+when his father bought it of a pedlar forty years before, and took off
+the old silver chain that he wore round his neck. He went down on his
+knees to say his prayers, and then, remembering that he had said them
+already, rose up and went to bed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+'THE SCORN OF SCORNS'
+
+
+St. Leonard's Lodge is the residence of Mr. William Meredith, an
+ex-mayor of Silchester, and stands in the fashionable suburb of the
+town. There was at one time considerable intercourse between this house
+and Dome Castle, the seat of Colonel Abinger, though they are five miles
+apart and in different counties; and one day, after Rob had been on the
+Press for a few months, two boys set out from the castle to show
+themselves to Nell Meredith. They could have reached the high road by a
+private walk between a beech and an ivy hedge, but they preferred to
+climb down a steep path to the wild-running Dome. The advantage of this
+route was that they risked their necks by taking it.
+
+Nell, who did not expect visitors, was sitting by the fire in her
+boudoir dreaming. It was the room in which she and Mary Abinger had
+often discussed such great questions as Woman, her Aims, her Influence;
+Man, his Instability, his Weakness, his Degeneration; the Poor, how are
+we to Help them; why Lady Lucy Gilding wears Pink when Blue is obviously
+her Colour.
+
+Nell was tucked away in a soft arm-chair, in which her father never saw
+her without wondering that such a little thing should require eighteen
+yards for a dress.
+
+'I'm not so little,' she would say on these occasions, and then Mr.
+Meredith chuckled, for he knew that there were young men who considered
+his Nell tall and terrible. He liked to watch her sweeping through a
+room. To him the boudoir was a sea of reefs. Nell's dignity when she was
+introduced to a young gentleman was another thing her father could never
+look upon without awe, but he also noticed that it soon wore off.
+
+On the mantelpiece lay a comb and several hairpins. There are few more
+mysterious things than hairpins. So far back as we can go into the past
+we see woman putting up her hair. It is said that married men lose their
+awe of hairpins and clean their pipes with them.
+
+A pair of curling-tongs had a chair to themselves near Nell, and she
+wore a short blue dressing-jacket. Probably when she woke from her
+reverie she meant to do something to her brown hair. When old gentlemen
+called at the Lodge they frequently told their host that he had a very
+pretty daughter; when younger gentlemen called they generally called
+again, and if Nell thought they admired her the first time she spared no
+pains to make them admire her still more the next time. This was to make
+them respect their own judgment.
+
+It was little Will Abinger who had set Nell a-dreaming, for from
+wondering if he was home yet for the Christmas holidays her thoughts
+wandered to his sister Mary, and then to his brother Dick. She thought
+longer of Dick in his lonely London chambers than of the others, and by
+and by she was saying to herself petulantly, 'I wish people wouldn't go
+dying and leaving me money.' Mr. Meredith, and still more Mrs.
+Meredith, thought that their only daughter, an heiress, would be thrown
+away on Richard Abinger, barrister-at-law, whose blood was much bluer
+than theirs, but who was, nevertheless, understood to be as hard-up as
+his father.
+
+The door-bell rang, and two callers were ushered into the drawing-room
+without Nell's knowing it. One of them left his companion to talk to
+Mrs. Meredith, and clattered upstairs in search of the daughter of the
+house. He was a bright-faced boy of thirteen, with a passion for
+flinging stones, and, of late, he had worn his head in the air, not
+because he was conceited, but that he might look with admiration upon
+the face of the young gentleman downstairs.
+
+Bouncing into the parlour, he caught sight of the object of his search
+before she could turn her head.
+
+'I say, Nell, I'm back.'
+
+Miss Meredith jumped from her chair.
+
+'Will!' she cried.
+
+When the visitor saw this young lady coming toward him quickly, he knew
+what she was after and tried to get out of her way. But Nell kissed him.
+
+'Now, then,' he said indignantly, pushing her from him.
+
+Will looked round him fearfully, and then closed the door.
+
+'You might have waited till the door was shut, at any rate,' he
+grumbled. 'It would have been a nice thing if any one had seen you!'
+
+'Why, what would it have mattered, you horrid little boy!' said Nell.
+
+'Little boy! I'm bigger than you, at any rate. As for its not
+mattering--but you don't know who is downstairs. The captain----'
+
+'Captain!' cried Nell.
+
+She seized her curling-tongs.
+
+'Yes,' said Will, watching the effect of his words, 'Greybrooke, the
+captain of the school. He is giving me a week just now.'
+
+Will said this as proudly as if his guest was Napoleon Bonaparte, but
+Nell laid down her curling-irons. The intruder interpreted her action
+and resented it.
+
+'You're not his style,' he said; 'he likes bigger women.'
+
+'Oh, does he?' said Nell, screwing up her little Greek nose
+contemptuously.
+
+'He's eighteen,' said Will.
+
+'A mere schoolboy.'
+
+'Why, he shaves.'
+
+'Doesn't the master whip him for that?'
+
+'What? Whip Greybrooke!'
+
+Will laughed hysterically.
+
+'You should just see him at breakfast with old Jerry. Why, I've seen him
+myself, when half a dozen of us were asked to tea by Mrs. Jerry, and
+though we were frightened to open our mouths, what do you think
+Greybrooke did?'
+
+'Something silly, I should say.'
+
+'He asked old Jerry, as cool as you like, to pass the butter! That's the
+sort of fellow Greybrooke is.'
+
+'How is Mary?'
+
+'Oh, she's all right. No, she has a headache. I say, Greybrooke says
+Mary's rather slow.'
+
+'He must be a horror,' said Nell, 'and I don't see why you brought him
+here.'
+
+'I thought you would like to see him,' explained Will. 'He made a
+hundred and three against Rugby, and was only bowled off his pads.'
+
+'Well,' said Nell, yawning, 'I suppose I must go down and meet your
+prodigy.'
+
+Will, misunderstanding, got between her and the door.
+
+'You're not going down like that,' he said anxiously, with a wave of his
+hand that included the dressing-jacket and the untidy hair.
+'Greybrooke's so particular, and I told him you were a jolly girl.'
+
+'What else did you tell him?' asked Nell suspiciously.
+
+'Not much,' said Will, with a guilty look.
+
+'I know you told him something else?'
+
+'I told him you--you were fond of kissing people.'
+
+'Oh, you nasty boy, Will--as if kissing a child like you counted!'
+
+'Never mind,' said Will soothingly, 'Greybrooke's not the fellow to tell
+tales. Besides, I know you girls can't help it. Mary's just the same.'
+
+'You are a goose, Will, and the day will come when you'll give anything
+for a kiss.'
+
+'You've no right to bring such charges against a fellow,' said Will
+indignantly, strutting to the door.
+
+Half-way downstairs he turned and came back.
+
+'I say, Nell,' he said, 'you--you, when you come down, you won't kiss
+Greybrooke?'
+
+Nell drew herself up in a way that would have scared any young man but
+Will.
+
+'He's so awfully particular,' Will continued apologetically.
+
+'Was it to tell me this you came upstairs?'
+
+'No, honour bright, it wasn't. I only came up in case you should want to
+kiss me, and to--to have it over.'
+
+Nell was standing near Will, and before he could jump back she slapped
+his face.
+
+The snow was dancing outside in a light wind when Nell sailed into the
+drawing-room. She could probably still inform you how she was dressed,
+but that evening Will and the captain could not tell Mary. The captain
+thought it was a reddish dress or else blue; but it was all in squares
+like a draught-board, according to Will. Forty minutes had elapsed since
+Will visited her upstairs, and now he smiled at the conceit which made
+her think that the captain would succumb to a pretty frock. Of course
+Nell had no such thought. She always dressed carefully because--well,
+because there is never any saying.
+
+Though Miss Meredith froze Greybrooke with a glance, he was relieved to
+see her. Her mother had discovered that she knew the lady who married
+his brother, and had asked questions about the baby. He did not like it.
+These, he thought, were things you should pretend not to know about. He
+had contrived to keep his nieces and nephews dark from the fellows at
+school, though most of them would have been too just to attach any blame
+to him. Of this baby he was specially ashamed, because they had called
+it after him.
+
+Mrs. Meredith was a small, stout lady, of whose cleverness her husband
+spoke proudly to Nell, but never to herself. When Nell told her how he
+had talked, she exclaimed, 'Nonsense!' and then waited to hear what else
+he had said. She loved him, but probably no woman can live with a man
+for many years without having an indulgent contempt for him, and
+wondering how he is considered a good man of business. Mrs. Meredith,
+who was a terribly active woman, was glad to leave the entertainment of
+her visitors to Nell, and that young lady began severely by asking 'how
+you boys mean to amuse yourselves?'
+
+'Do you keep rabbits?' she said to the captain sweetly.
+
+'I say, Nell!' cried Will warningly.
+
+'I have not kept rabbits,' Greybrooke replied, with simple dignity,
+'since I was a boy.'
+
+'I told you,' said Will, 'that Greybrooke was old--why, he's nearly as
+old as yourself. She's older than she looks, you know, Greybrooke.'
+
+The captain was gazing at Nell with intense admiration. As she raised
+her head indignantly he thought she was looking to him for protection.
+That was a way Nell had.
+
+'Abinger,' said the captain sternly, 'shut up.'
+
+'Don't mind him, Miss Meredith,' he continued; 'he doesn't understand
+girls.'
+
+To think he understands girls is the last affront a youth pays them.
+When he ceases trying to reduce them to fixed principles he has come of
+age. Nell, knowing this, felt sorry for Greybrooke, for she foresaw what
+he would have to go through. Her manner to him underwent such a change
+that he began to have a high opinion of himself. This is often called
+falling in love. Will was satisfied that his friend impressed Nell, and
+he admired Greybrooke's politeness to a chit of a girl, but he became
+restless. His eyes wandered to the piano, and he had a lurking fear
+that Nell would play something. He signed to the captain to get up.
+
+'We'll have to be going now,' he said at last; 'good-bye.'
+
+Greybrooke glared at Will, forgetting that they had arranged beforehand
+to stay as short a time as possible.
+
+'Perhaps you have other calls to make?' said Nell, who had no desire to
+keep them there longer than they cared to stay.
+
+'Oh yes,' said Will.
+
+'No,' said the captain, 'we only came into Silchester with Miss
+Abinger's message for you.'
+
+'Why, Will,' exclaimed Nell, 'you never gave me any message?'
+
+'I forgot what it was,' Will explained cheerily; 'something about a
+ribbon, I think.'
+
+'I did not hear the message given,' the captain said, in answer to
+Nell's look, 'but Miss Abinger had a headache, and I think Will said it
+had to do with that.'
+
+'Oh, wait a bit,' said Will, 'I remember something about it now. Mary
+saw something in a Silchester paper, the _Mirror_, I think, that made
+her cry, and she thinks that if you saw it you would cry too. So she
+wants you to look at it.'
+
+'The idea of Mary's crying!' said Nell indignantly. 'But did she not
+give you a note?'
+
+'She was too much upset,' said Will, signing to the captain not to let
+on that they had refused to wait for the note.
+
+'I wonder what it can be?' murmured Nell.
+
+She hurried from the room to her father's den, and found him there
+surrounded by newspapers.
+
+'Is there anything in the _Mirror_, father?' she asked.
+
+'Nothing,' said Mr. Meredith, who had made the same answer to this
+question many hundreds of times; 'nothing except depression in the boot
+trade.'
+
+'It can't be that,' said Nell.
+
+'Can't be what?'
+
+'Oh, give me the paper,' cried the ex-mayor's daughter impatiently.
+
+She looked hastily up and down it, with an involuntary glance at the
+births, deaths, and marriages, turned it inside out and outside in, and
+then exclaimed 'Oh!' Mr. Meredith, who was too much accustomed to his
+daughter's impulses to think that there was much wrong, listened
+patiently while she ejaculated, 'Horrid!' 'What a shame!' 'Oh, I wish I
+was a man!' and, 'Well, I can't understand it.' When she tossed the
+paper to the floor, her face was red and her body trembled with
+excitement.
+
+'What is it, Nelly?' asked her father.
+
+Whether Miss Abinger cried over the _Mirror_ that day is not to be
+known, but there were indignant tears in Nell's eyes as she ran upstairs
+to her bedroom. Mr. Meredith took up the paper and examined it carefully
+at the place where his daughter had torn it in her anger. What troubled
+her seemed to be something in the book notices, and he concluded that it
+must be a cruel 'slating' of a novel in one volume called _The Scorn of
+Scorns_. Mr. Meredith remembered that Nell had compelled him to read
+that book and to say that he liked it.
+
+'That's all,' he said to himself, much relieved.
+
+He fancied that Nell, being a girl, was distressed to see a book she
+liked called 'the sentimental out-pourings of some silly girl who ought
+to confine her writing to copy-books.' In a woman so much excitement
+over nothing seemed quite a natural thing to Mr. Meredith. The sex had
+ceased to surprise him. Having retired from business, Mr. Meredith now
+did things slowly as a good way of passing the time. He had risen to
+wealth from penury, and counted time by his dining-room chairs, having
+passed through a cane, a horsehair, and a leather period before arriving
+at morocco. Mrs. Meredith counted time by the death of her only son.
+
+It may be presumed that Nell would not have locked herself into her
+bedroom and cried and stamped her feet on an imaginary critic had _The
+Scorn of Scorns_ not interested her more than her father thought. She
+sat down to write a note to Mary. Then she tore it up, and wrote a
+letter to Mary's elder brother, beginning with the envelope. She tore
+this up also, as another idea came into her head. She nodded several
+times to herself over this idea, as a sign that the more she thought of
+it the more she liked it. Then, after very nearly forgetting to touch
+her eyes with something that made them look less red, she returned to
+the drawing-room.
+
+'Will,' she said, 'have you seen the new ponies papa gave me on my
+birthday?'
+
+Will leapt to his feet.
+
+'Come on, Greybrooke,' he cried, making for the door.
+
+The captain hesitated.
+
+'Perhaps,' said Nell, with a glance at him, 'Mr. Greybrooke does not
+have much interest in horses?'
+
+'Doesn't he just!' said Will; 'why----'
+
+'No,' said Greybrooke; 'but I'll wait here for you, Abinger.'
+
+Will was staggered. For a moment the horrible thought passed through his
+mind that these girls had got hold of the captain. Then he remembered.
+
+'Come on,' he said, 'Nell won't mind.'
+
+But Greybrooke had a delicious notion that the young lady wanted to see
+him by himself, and Will had to go to the stables alone.
+
+'I won't be long,' he said to Greybrooke, apologising for leaving him
+alone with a girl. 'Don't bother him too much,' he whispered to Nell at
+the door.
+
+As soon as Will had disappeared Nell turned to Greybrooke.
+
+'Mr. Greybrooke,' she said, speaking rapidly in a voice so low that it
+was a compliment to him in itself, 'there is something I should like you
+to do for me.'
+
+The captain flushed with pleasure.
+
+'There is nothing I wouldn't do for you,' he stammered.
+
+'I want you,' continued Miss Meredith, with a most vindictive look on
+her face, 'to find out for me who wrote a book review in to-day's
+_Mirror_, and to--to--oh, to thrash him.'
+
+'All right,' said the captain, rising and looking for his hat.
+
+'Wait a minute,' said Nell, glancing at him admiringly. 'The book is
+called _The Scorn of Scorns_, and it is written by--by a friend of mine.
+In to-day's _Mirror_ it is called the most horrid names, sickly
+sentimental, not even grammatical, and all that.'
+
+'The cads!' cried Greybrooke.
+
+'But the horribly mean, wicked thing about it,' continued Nell, becoming
+more and more indignant as she told her story, 'is that not two months
+ago there was a review of the book in the same paper, which said it was
+the most pathetic and thoughtful and clever tale that had ever been
+published by an anonymous author!'
+
+'It's the lowest thing I ever heard of,' said Greybrooke, 'but these
+newspaper men are all the same.'
+
+'No, they're not,' said Nell sharply (Richard Abinger, Esq.'s, only
+visible means of sustenance was the press), 'but they are dreadfully
+mean, contemptible creatures on the _Mirror_--just reporters, you know.'
+
+Greybrooke nodded, though he knew nothing about it.
+
+'The first review,' Nell continued, 'appeared on the 3rd of October, and
+I want you to show them both to the editor, and insist upon knowing the
+name of the writer. After that find the wretch out, and----'
+
+'And lick him,' said the captain.
+
+His face frightened Nell.
+
+'You won't hit him very hard?' she asked apprehensively, adding as an
+afterthought, 'perhaps he is stronger than you.'
+
+Greybrooke felt himself in an unfortunate position. He could not boast
+before Nell, but he wished very keenly that Will was there to boast for
+him. Most of us have experienced the sensation.
+
+Nell having undertaken to keep Will employed until the captain's return,
+Greybrooke set off for the _Mirror_ office with a look of determination
+on his face. He went into two shops, the one a news-shop, where he
+bought a copy of the paper. In the other he asked for a thick stick,
+having remembered that the elegant cane he carried was better fitted for
+swinging in the air than for breaking a newspaper man's head. He tried
+the stick on a paling. Greybrooke felt certain that Miss Meredith was
+the novelist. That was why he selected so thick a weapon.
+
+He marched into the advertising office, and demanded to see the editor
+of the _Mirror_.
+
+''Stairs,' said a clerk, with his head in a ledger. He meant upstairs,
+and the squire of dames took his advice. After wandering for some time
+in a labyrinth of dark passages, he opened the door of the day
+composing-room, in which half a dozen silent figures were bending over
+their cases.
+
+'I want the editor,' said Greybrooke, somewhat startled by the sound his
+voice made in the great room.
+
+''Stairs,' said one of the figures, meaning downstairs.
+
+Greybrooke, remembering who had sent him here, did not lose heart. He
+knocked at several doors, and then pushed them open. All the rooms were
+empty. Then he heard a voice saying--
+
+'Who are you? What do you want?'
+
+Mr. Licquorish was the speaker, and he had been peering at the intruder
+for some time through a grating in his door. He would not have spoken at
+all, but he wanted to go into the composing-room, and Greybrooke was in
+the passage that led to it.
+
+'I don't see you,' said the captain; 'I want the editor.'
+
+'I am the editor,' said the voice, 'but I can see no one at present
+except on business.'
+
+'I am here on business,' said Greybrooke. 'I want to thrash one of your
+staff.'
+
+'All the members of my literary staff are engaged at present,' said Mr.
+Licquorish, in a pleasant voice; 'which one do you want?'
+
+'I want the low cad who wrote a review of a book called _The Scorn of
+Scorns_, in to-day's paper.'
+
+'Oh!' said Mr. Licquorish.
+
+'I demand his name,' cried Greybrooke.
+
+The editor made no answer. He had other things to do than to quarrel
+with schoolboys. As he could not get out he began a leaderette. The
+visitor, however, had discovered the editorial door now, and was shaking
+it violently.
+
+'Why don't you answer me?' he cried.
+
+Mr. Licquorish thought for a moment of calling down the speaking-tube
+which communicated with the advertisement office for a clerk to come and
+take this youth away, but after all he was good-natured. He finished a
+sentence, and then opened the door. The captain strode in, but refused a
+chair.
+
+'Are you the author of the book?' the editor asked.
+
+'No,' said Greybrooke, 'but I am her friend, and I am here to
+thrash----'
+
+Mr. Licquorish held up his hand to stop the flow of the captain's
+indignation. He could never understand why the public got so excited
+over these little matters.
+
+'She is a Silchester lady?' he asked.
+
+Greybrooke did not know how to reply to this. He was not sure whether
+Nell wanted the authorship revealed.
+
+'That has nothing to do with the matter,' he said. 'I want the name of
+the writer who has libelled her.'
+
+'On the press,' said Mr. Licquorish, repeating some phrases which he
+kept for such an occasion as the present, 'we have a duty to the public
+to perform. When books are sent us for review we never allow prejudice
+or private considerations to warp our judgment. The _Mirror_ has in
+consequence a reputation for honesty that some papers do not possess.
+Now I distinctly remember that this book, _The Vale of Tears_----'
+
+'_The Scorn of Scorns._'
+
+'I mean _The Scorn of Scorns_, was carefully considered by the expert to
+whom it was given for review. Being honestly of opinion that the
+treatise----'
+
+'It is a novel.'
+
+'That the novel is worthless, we had to say so. Had it been clever, we
+should----'
+
+Mr. Licquorish paused, reading in the other's face that there was
+something wrong. Greybrooke had concluded that the editor had forgotten
+about the first review.
+
+'Can you show me a copy of the _Mirror_,' the captain asked, 'for
+October 3rd?'
+
+Mr. Licquorish turned to the file, and Greybrooke looked over his
+shoulder.
+
+'There it is!' cried the captain indignantly.
+
+They read the original notice together. It said that, if _The Scorn of
+Scorns_ was written by a new writer, his next story would be looked for
+with great interest. It 'could not refrain from quoting the following
+exquisitely tender passage.' It found the earlier pages 'as refreshing
+as a spring morning,' and the closing chapters were a triumph of 'the
+art that conceals art.'
+
+'Well, what have you to say to that?' asked Greybrooke fiercely.
+
+'A mistake,' said the editor blandly. 'Such things do happen
+occasionally.'
+
+'You shall make reparation for it!'
+
+'Hum,' said Mr Licquorish.
+
+'The insult,' cried Greybrooke, 'must have been intentional.'
+
+'No. I fancy the authoress must be to blame for this. Did she send a
+copy of the work to us?'
+
+'I should think it very unlikely,' said Greybrooke, fuming.
+
+'Not at all,' said the editor, 'especially if she is a Silchester lady.'
+
+'What would make her do that?'
+
+'It generally comes about in this way. The publishers send a copy of the
+book to a newspaper, and owing to pressure on the paper's space, no
+notice appears for some time. The author, who looks for it daily, thinks
+that the publishers have neglected their duty, and sends a copy to the
+office himself. The editor, forgetful that he has had a notice of the
+book lying ready for printing for months, gives the second copy to
+another reviewer. By and by the first review appears, but owing to an
+oversight the editor does not take note of it, and after a time, unless
+his attention is called to the matter, the second review appears also.
+Probably that is the explanation in this case.'
+
+'But such carelessness on a respectable paper is incomprehensible,' said
+the captain.
+
+The editor was looking up his books to see if they shed any light on the
+affair, but he answered--
+
+'On the contrary, it is an experience known to most newspapers. Ah, I
+have it!'
+
+Mr. Licquorish read out, '_The Scorn of Scorns_, received September 1st,
+reviewed October 3rd.' Several pages farther on he discovered, '_The
+Scorn of Scorns_, received September 24th, reviewed December 19th.'
+
+'You will find,' he said, 'that this explains it.'
+
+'I don't consider the explanation satisfactory,' replied the captain,
+'and I insist, first, upon an apology in the paper, and second, on
+getting the name of the writer of the second review.'
+
+'I am busy this morning,' said Mr. Licquorish, opening his door, 'and
+what you ask is absurd. If the authoress can give me her word that she
+did not send the book and so bring this upon herself, we shall insert a
+word on the subject but not otherwise. Good-morning.'
+
+'Give me the writer's name,' cried the captain.
+
+'We make a point of never giving names in that way,' said Mr.
+Licquorish.
+
+'You have not heard the last of this,' Greybrooke said from the doorway.
+'I shall make it my duty to ferret out the coward's name, and----'
+
+'Good-morning,' Mr. Licquorish repeated.
+
+The captain went thumping down the stairs, and meeting a printer's devil
+at the bottom, cuffed him soundly because he was part of the _Mirror_.
+
+To his surprise, Miss Meredith's first remark when he returned was--
+
+'Oh, I hope you didn't see him.'
+
+She looked at Greybrooke's face, fearing it might be stained with blood,
+and when he told her the result of his inquiries she seemed pleased
+rather than otherwise. Nell was soft-hearted after all, and she knew how
+that second copy of the novel had reached the _Mirror_ office.
+
+'I shall find the fellow out, though,' said Greybrooke, grasping his
+cudgel firmly.
+
+'Why, you are as vindictive as if you had written the book yourself,'
+said Nell.
+
+Greybrooke murmured, blushing the while, that an insult to her hurt him
+more than one offered to himself. Nell opened the eyes of astonishment.
+
+'You don't think I wrote the book?' she asked; then seeing that it was
+so from his face, added, 'oh no, I'm not clever enough. It was written
+by--by a friend of mine.'
+
+Nell deserves credit for not telling Greybrooke who the friend was, for
+that was a secret. But there was reason to believe that she had already
+divulged it to twelve persons (all in the strictest confidence). When
+the captain returned she was explaining all about it by letter to
+Richard Abinger, Esq. Possibly that was why Greybrooke thought she was
+not nearly so nice to him now as she had been an hour before.
+
+Will was unusually quiet when he and Greybrooke said adieu to the whole
+family of Merediths. He was burning to know where the captain had been,
+and also what Nell called him back to say in such a low tone. What she
+said was--
+
+'Don't say anything about going to the _Mirror_ office, Mr. Greybrooke,
+to Miss Abinger.'
+
+The captain turned round to lift his hat, and at the same time
+expressed involuntarily a wish that Nell could see him punishing loose
+bowling.
+
+Mrs. Meredith beamed to him.
+
+'There is something very nice,' she said to Nell, 'about a polite young
+man.'
+
+'Yes,' murmured her daughter, 'and even if he isn't polite.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ROB MARCHES TO HIS FATE
+
+
+On the morning before Christmas a murder was committed in Silchester,
+and in murders there is 'lineage.' As a consequence, the head reporter
+attends to them himself. In the _Mirror_ office the diary for the day
+was quickly altered. Kirker set off cheerfully for the scene of the
+crime, leaving the banquet in the Henry Institute to Tomlinson, who
+passed on his dinner at Dome Castle to Rob, whose church decorations
+were taken up by John Milton.
+
+Christmas Eve was coming on in snow when Rob and Walsh, of the _Argus_,
+set out for Dome Castle. Rob disliked doing dinners at any time, partly
+because he had not a dress suit. The dinner was an annual one given by
+Will's father to his tenants, and reporters were asked because the
+colonel made a speech. His neighbours, when they did likewise, sent
+reports of their own speeches (which they seemed to like) to the papers;
+and some of them, having called themselves eloquent and justly popular,
+scored the compliments out, yet in such a way that the editor would
+still be able to read them, and print them if he thought fit. Rob did
+not look forward to Colonel Abinger's reception of him, for they had met
+some months before, and called each other names.
+
+It was one day soon after Rob reached Silchester. He had gone a-fishing
+in the Dome and climbed unconsciously into preserved waters. As his
+creel grew heavier his back straightened; not until he returned home did
+the scenery impress him. He had just struck a fine fish, when a
+soldierly-looking man at the top of the steep bank caught sight of him.
+
+'Hi, you sir!' shouted the onlooker. Whir went the line--there is no
+music like it. Rob was knee-deep in water. 'You fellow!' cried the
+other, brandishing his cane, 'are you aware that this water is
+preserved?' Rob had no time for talk. The colonel sought to attract his
+attention by flinging a pebble. 'Don't do that,' cried Rob fiercely.
+
+Away went the fish. Away went Rob after it. Colonel Abinger's face was
+red as he clambered down the bank. 'I shall prosecute you,' he shouted.
+'He's gone to the bottom; fling in a stone!' cried Rob. Just then the
+fish showed its yellow belly and darted off again. Rob let out more
+line. 'No, no,' shouted the colonel, who fished himself, 'you lose him
+if he gets to the other side; strike, man, strike!' The line tightened,
+the rod bent--a glorious sight. 'Force him up stream,' cried the
+colonel, rolling over boulders to assist. 'Now, you have him. Bring him
+in. Where is your landing-net?' 'I haven't one,' cried Rob; 'take him in
+your hands.' The colonel stooped to grasp the fish and missed it.
+'Bungler!' screamed Rob. This was too much. 'Give me your name and
+address,' said Colonel Abinger, rising to his feet; 'you are a poacher.'
+Rob paid no attention. There was a struggle. Rob did not realise that he
+had pushed his assailant over a rock until the fish was landed. Then he
+apologised, offered all his fish in lieu of his name and address,
+retired coolly so long as the furious soldier was in sight, and as soon
+as he turned a corner disappeared rapidly. He could not feel that this
+was the best introduction to the man with whom he was now on his way to
+dine.
+
+The reporter whose long strides made Walsh trot as they hurried to Dome
+Castle, was not quite the Rob of three months before. Now he knew how a
+third-rate newspaper is conducted, and the capacity for wonder had gone
+from him. He was in danger of thinking that the journalist's art is to
+write readably, authoritatively, and always in three paragraphs on a
+subject he knows nothing about. Rob had written many leaders, and
+followed readers through the streets wondering if they liked them. Once
+he had gone with three others to report a bishop's sermon. A curate
+appeared instead, and when the reporters saw him they shut their
+notebooks and marched blandly out of the cathedral. A public speaker had
+tried to bribe Rob with two half-crowns, and it is still told in
+Silchester how the wrathful Scotsman tore his benefactor out of the
+carriage he had just stepped into, and, lifting him on high, looked
+round to consider against which stone wall he should hurl him. He had
+discovered that on the first of the month Mr. Licquorish could not help
+respecting his staff, because on that day he paid them. Socially Rob had
+acquired little. Protheroe had introduced him to a pleasant family, but
+he had sat silent in a corner, and they told the sub-editor not to bring
+him back. Most of the literary staff were youths trying to be Bohemians,
+who liked to feel themselves sinking, and they never scaled the reserve
+which walled Rob round. He had taken a sitting, however, in the Scotch
+church, to the bewilderment of the minister, who said, 'But I thought
+you were a reporter?' as if there must be a mistake somewhere.
+
+Walsh could tell Rob little of Colonel Abinger. He was a brave soldier,
+and for many years had been a widower. His elder son was a barrister in
+London, whom Silchester had almost forgotten, and Walsh fancied there
+was some story about the daughter's being engaged to a baronet. There
+was also a boy, who had the other day brought the captain of his school
+to a Silchester football ground to show the club how to take a
+drop-kick.
+
+'Does the colonel fish?' asked Rob, who would, however, have preferred
+to know if the colonel had a good memory for faces.
+
+'He is a famous angler,' said Walsh; 'indeed, I have been told that his
+bursts of passion are over in five minutes, except when he catches a
+poacher.'
+
+Rob winced, for Walsh did not know of the fishing episode.
+
+'His temper,' continued Walsh, 'is such that his male servants are said
+never to know whether he will give them a shilling or a whirl of his
+cane--until they get it. The gardener takes a look at him from behind a
+tree before venturing to address him. I suppose his poverty is at the
+bottom of it, for the estate is mortgaged heavily, and he has had to cut
+down trees, and even to sell his horses. The tenants seem to like him,
+though, and if they dared they would tell him not to think himself bound
+to give them this annual dinner. There are numberless stories of his
+fierce temper, and as many of his extravagant kindness. According to his
+servants, he once emptied his pocket to a beggar at a railway station,
+and then discovered that he had no money for his own ticket. As for the
+ne'er-do-weels, their importuning makes him rage, but they know he will
+fling them something in the end if they expose their rags sufficiently.'
+
+'So,' said Rob, who did not want to like the colonel, 'he would not
+trouble about them if they kept their misery to themselves. That kind of
+man is more likely to be a philanthropist in your country than in mine.'
+
+'Keep that for a Burns dinner,' suggested Walsh.
+
+Rob heard now how Tomlinson came to be nicknamed Umbrage.
+
+'He was sub-editing one night,' Walsh explained, 'during the time of an
+African war, and things were going so smoothly that he and Penny were
+chatting amicably together about the advantages of having a few Latin
+phrases in a leader, such as _dolce far niente_, or _cela va sans
+dire_----'
+
+'I can believe that,' said Rob, 'of Penny certainly.'
+
+'Well, in the middle of the discussion an important war telegram
+arrived, to the not unnatural disgust of both. As is often the case, the
+message was misspelt, and barely decipherable, and one part of it
+puzzled Tomlinson a good deal. It read: "Zulus have taken Umbrage;
+English forces had to retreat." Tomlinson searched the map in vain for
+Umbrage, which the Zulus had taken; and Penny, being in a hurry, was
+sure it was a fortress. So they risked it, and next morning the chief
+lines in the _Mirror_ contents bill were: "LATEST NEWS OF THE WAR;
+CAPTURE OF UMBRAGE BY THE ZULUS."'
+
+By this time the reporters had passed into the grounds of the castle,
+and, being late, were hurrying up the grand avenue. It was the hour and
+the season when night comes on so sharply, that its shadow may be seen
+trailing the earth as a breeze runs along a field of corn. Heard from a
+height, the roar of the Dome among rocks might have been the rustle of
+the surrounding trees in June; so men and women who grow old together
+sometimes lend each other a voice. Walsh, seeing his opportunity in
+Rob's silence, began to speak of himself. He told how his first
+press-work had been a series of letters he had written when at school,
+and contributed to a local paper under the signatures of 'Paterfamilias'
+and 'An Indignant Ratepayer.' Rob scarcely heard. The bare romantic
+scenery impressed him, and the snow in his face was like a whiff of
+Thrums. He was dreaming, but not of the reception he might get at the
+castle, when the clatter of horses awoke him.
+
+'There is a machine behind us,' he said, though he would have written
+trap.
+
+A brougham lumbered into sight. As its lamps flashed on the pedestrians,
+the coachman jerked his horses to the side, and Rob had a glimpse of the
+carriage's occupant. The brougham stopped.
+
+'I beg your pardon,' said the traveller, opening his window, and
+addressing Rob, 'but in the darkness I mistook you for Colonel Abinger.'
+
+'We are on our way to the castle,' said Walsh, stepping forward.
+
+'Ah, then,' said the stranger, 'perhaps you will give me your company
+for the short distance we have still to go?'
+
+There was a fine courtesy in his manner that made the reporters feel
+their own deficiencies, yet Rob thought the stranger repented his offer
+as soon as it was made. Walsh had his hand on the door, but Rob said--
+
+'We are going to Dome Castle as reporters.'
+
+'Oh!' said the stranger. Then he bowed graciously, and pulled up the
+window. The carriage rumbled on, leaving the reporters looking at each
+other. Rob laughed. For the first time in his life the advantage a
+handsome man has over a plain one had struck him. He had only once seen
+such a face before, and that was in marble in the Silchester Art Museum.
+This man looked thirty years of age, but there was not a line on his
+broad white brow. The face was magnificently classic, from the strong
+Roman nose to the firm chin. The eyes, too beautiful almost for his sex,
+were brown and wistful, of the kind that droop in disappointment oftener
+than they blaze with anger. All the hair on his face was a heavy
+drooping moustache that almost hid his mouth.
+
+Walsh shook his fist at this insult to the Press.
+
+'It is the baronet I spoke of to you,' he said. 'I forget who he is;
+indeed, I rather think he travelled _incognito_ when he was here last. I
+don't understand what he is doing here.'
+
+'Why, I should say this is just the place where he would be if he is to
+marry Miss Abinger.'
+
+'That was an old story,' said Walsh. 'If there ever was an engagement it
+was broken off. Besides, if he had been expected we should have known of
+it at the _Argus_.'
+
+Walsh was right. Sir Clement Dowton was not expected at Dome Castle,
+and, like Rob, he was not even certain that he would be welcome. As he
+drew near his destination his hands fidgeted with the window strap, yet
+there was an unaccountable twinkle in his eye. Had there been any
+onlookers they would have been surprised to see that all at once the
+baronet's sense of humour seemed to overcome his fears, and instead of
+quaking, he laughed heartily. Sir Clement was evidently one of the men
+who carry their joke about with them.
+
+This unexpected guest did Rob one good turn. When the colonel saw Sir
+Clement he hesitated for a moment as if not certain how to greet him.
+Then the baronet, who was effusive, murmured that he had something to
+say to him, and Colonel Abinger's face cleared. He did Sir Clement the
+unusual honour of accompanying him upstairs himself, and so Rob got the
+seat assigned to him at the dinner-table without having to meet his host
+in the face. The butler marched him down a long table with a twist in
+it, and placed him under arrest, as it were, in a chair from which he
+saw only a few of the company. The dinner had already begun, but the
+first thing he realised as he took his seat was that there was a lady on
+each side of him, and a table-napkin in front. He was not sure if he was
+expected to address the ladies, and he was still less certain about the
+table-napkin. Of such things he had read, and he had even tried to be
+prepared for them. Rob looked nervously at the napkin, and then took a
+covert glance along the table. There was not a napkin in sight except
+one which a farmer had tied round his neck. Rob's fingers wanted to
+leave the napkin alone, but by an effort he forced them toward it. All
+this time his face was a blank, but the internal struggle was sharp. He
+took hold of the napkin, however, and spread it on his knees. It fell to
+the floor immediately afterwards, but he disregarded that. It was no
+longer staring at him from the table, and with a heavy sigh of relief he
+began to feel more at ease. There is nothing like burying our bogies.
+
+His position prevented Rob's seeing either the colonel at the head of
+the table or Miss Abinger at the foot of it, and even Walsh was hidden
+from view. But his right-hand neighbour was a local doctor's wife, whom
+the colonel had wanted to honour without honouring too much, and she
+gave him some information. Rob was relieved to hear her address him, and
+she was interested in a tame Scotsman.
+
+'I was once in the far north myself,' she said, 'as far as Orkney. We
+were nearly drowned in crossing that dreadful sea between it and the
+mainland. The Solway Firth, is it?'
+
+Rob thought for a moment of explaining what sea it is, and then he
+thought, why should he?
+
+'Yes, the Solway Firth,' he said.
+
+'It was rather an undertaking,' she pursued, 'but though we were among
+the mountains for days, we never encountered any of those robber
+chieftains one reads about--caterans I think you call them?'
+
+'You were very lucky,' said Rob.
+
+'Were we not? But, you know, we took such precautions. There was quite a
+party of us, including my father, who has travelled a great deal, and
+all the gentlemen wore kilts. My father said it was always prudent to do
+in Rome as the Romans do.'
+
+'I have no doubt,' said Rob, 'that in that way you escaped the caterans.
+They are very open to flattery.'
+
+'So my father said. We also found that we could make ourselves
+understood by saying "whatever," and remembering to call the men "she"
+and the women "he." What a funny custom that is!'
+
+'We can't get out of it,' said Rob.
+
+'There is one thing,' the lady continued, 'that you can tell me. I have
+been told that in winter the wild boars take refuge in the streets of
+Inverness, and that there are sometimes very exciting hunts after them?'
+
+'That is only when they run away with children,' Rob explained. 'Then
+the natives go out in large bodies and shoot them with claymores. It is
+a most exciting scene.'
+
+When the doctor's wife learned that this was Rob's first visit to the
+castle, she told him at once that she was there frequently. It escaped
+his notice that she paused here and awaited the effect. She was not
+given to pausing.
+
+'My husband,' she said, 'attended on Lady Louisa during her last
+illness--quite ten years ago. I was married very young,' she added
+hurriedly.
+
+Rob was very nearly saying he saw that. The words were in his mouth,
+when he hesitated, reflecting that it was not worth while. This is only
+noticeable as showing that he missed his first compliment.
+
+'Lady Louisa?' he repeated instead.
+
+'Oh yes, the colonel married one of Lord Tarlington's daughters. There
+were seven of them, you know, and no sons, and when the youngest was
+born it was said that a friend of his lordship sent him a copy of
+Wordsworth, with the page turned down at the poem "We are Seven "--a
+lady friend, I believe.'
+
+'Is Miss Abinger like the colonel?' asked Rob, who had heard it said
+that she was beautiful, and could not help taking an interest in her in
+consequence.
+
+'You have not seen Miss Abinger?' asked the doctor's wife. 'Ah, you came
+late, and that vulgar-looking farmer hides her altogether. She is a
+lovely girl, but----'
+
+Rob's companion pursed her lips.
+
+'She is so cold and proud,' she added.
+
+'As proud as her father?' Rob asked, aghast.
+
+'Oh, the colonel is humility itself beside her. He freezes at times, but
+she never thaws.'
+
+Rob sighed involuntarily. He was not aware that his acquaintances spoke
+in a similar way of him. His eyes wandered up the table till they rested
+of their own accord on a pretty girl in blue. At that moment she was
+telling Greybrooke that he could call her Nell, because 'Miss' Meredith
+sounded like a reproach.
+
+The reporter looked at Nell with satisfaction, and the doctor's wife
+followed his thoughts so accurately that, before she could check
+herself, she said, 'Do you think so?'
+
+Then Rob started, which confused both of them, and for the remainder of
+the dinner the loquacious lady seemed to take less interest in him, he
+could not understand why. Flung upon his own resources, he remembered
+that he had not spoken to the lady on his other side. Had Rob only known
+it, she felt much more uncomfortable in that great dining-room than he
+did. No one was speaking to her, and she passed the time between the
+courses breaking her bread to pieces and eating it slowly, crumb by
+crumb. Rob thought of something to say to her, but when he tried the
+words over in his own mind they seemed so little worth saying that he
+had to think again. He found himself counting the crumbs, and then it
+struck him that he might ask her if she would like any salt. He did so,
+but she thought he asked for salt, and passed the salt-cellar to him,
+whereupon Rob, as the simplest way to get out of it, helped himself to
+more salt, though he did not need it. The intercourse thus auspiciously
+begun, went no further, and they never met again. It might have been a
+romance.
+
+The colonel had not quite finished his speech, which was to the effect
+that so long as his tenants looked up to him as some one superior to
+themselves they would find him an indulgent landlord, when the tread of
+feet was heard outside, and then the music of the waits. The colonel
+frowned and raised his voice, but his guests caught themselves
+tittering, and read their host's rage in his darkening face. Forgetting
+that the waits were there by his own invitation, he signed to James, the
+butler, to rush out and mow them down. James did not interpret the
+message so, but for the moment it was what his master meant.
+
+While the colonel was hesitating whether to go on, Rob saw Nell nod
+encouragingly to Greybrooke. He left his seat, and before any one knew
+what he was about, had flung open one of the windows. The room filled at
+once with music, and, as if by common consent, the table was deserted.
+Will opened the remaining windows, and the waits, who had been singing
+to shadows on the white blinds, all at once found a crowded audience.
+Rob hardly realised what it meant, for he had never heard the waits
+before.
+
+It was a scene that would have silenced a schoolgirl. The night was so
+clear, that beyond the lawn where the singers were grouped the brittle
+trees showed in every twig. No snow was falling, and so monotonous was
+the break of the river, that the ear would only have noticed it had it
+stopped. The moon stood overhead like a frozen round of snow.
+
+Looking over the heads of those who had gathered at one of the windows,
+Rob saw first Will Abinger and then the form of a girl cross to the
+singers. Some one followed her with a cloak. From the French windows
+steps dropped to the lawn. A lady beside Rob shivered and retired to the
+fireside, but Nell whispered to Greybrooke that she must run after Mary.
+Several others followed her down the steps.
+
+Rob, looking round for Walsh, saw him in conversation with the colonel.
+Probably he was taking down the remainder of the speech. Then a lady's
+voice said, 'Who is that magnificent young man?'
+
+The sentence ended 'with the hob-nailed boots,' and the reference was to
+Rob, but he only caught the first words. He thought the baronet was
+spoken of, and suddenly remembered that he had not appeared at the
+dinner-table. As Sir Clement entered the room at that moment in evening
+dress, making most of those who surrounded him look mean by comparison,
+Rob never learned who the magnificent young man was.
+
+Sir Clement's entrance was something of a sensation, and Rob saw several
+ladies raise their eyebrows. All seemed to know him by name, and some
+personally. The baronet's nervousness had evidently passed away, for he
+bowed and smiled to every one, claiming some burly farmers as old
+acquaintances though he had never seen them before. His host and he
+seemed already on the most cordial terms, but the colonel was one of the
+few persons in the room who was not looking for Miss Abinger. At last
+Sir Clement asked for her.
+
+'I believe,' said some one in answer to the colonel's inquiring glance
+round the room, 'that Miss Abinger is speaking with the waits.'
+
+'Perhaps I shall see her,' said Dowton, stepping out at one of the
+windows.
+
+Colonel Abinger followed him to the window, but no farther, and at that
+moment a tall figure on the snowy lawn crossed his line of vision. It
+was Rob, who, not knowing what to do with himself, had wandered into the
+open. His back was toward the colonel, and something in his walk
+recalled to that choleric officer the angler whom he had encountered on
+the Dome.
+
+'That is the man--I was sure I knew the face,' said Colonel Abinger. He
+spoke in a whisper to himself, but his hands closed with a snap.
+
+Unconscious of all this, Rob strolled on till he found a path that took
+him round the castle. Suddenly he caught sight of a blue dress, and at
+the same moment a girl's voice exclaimed, 'Oh, I am afraid it is lost!'
+
+The speaker bent, as if to look for something in the snow, and Rob
+blundered up to her. 'If you have lost anything,' he said, 'perhaps I
+can find it.'
+
+Rob had matches in his pocket, and he struck one of them. Then, to his
+surprise, he noticed that Nell was not alone. Greybrooke was with her,
+and he was looking foolish.
+
+'Thank you very much,' said Nell sweetly; 'it is a--a bracelet.'
+
+Rob went down on his knees to look for the bracelet, but it surprised
+him a little that Greybrooke did not follow his example. If he had
+looked up, he would have seen that the captain was gazing at Nell in
+amazement.
+
+'I am afraid it is lost,' Nell repeated, 'or perhaps I dropped it in the
+dining-room.'
+
+Greybrooke's wonder was now lost in a grin, for Nell had lost nothing,
+unless perhaps for the moment her sense of what was fit and proper. The
+captain had followed her on to the lawn, and persuaded her to come and
+look down upon the river from the top of the cliff. She had done so, she
+told herself, because he was a boy; but he had wanted her to do it
+because she was a woman. On the very spot where Richard Abinger,
+barrister-at-law, had said something to her that Nell would never
+forget, the captain had presumptuously kissed her hand, and Nell had
+allowed him, because after all it was soon over. It was at that very
+moment that Rob came in sight, and Nell thought she was justified in
+deceiving him. Rob would have remained a long time on the snow if she
+had not had a heart.
+
+'Yes, I believe I did drop it in the dining-room,' said Nell, in such a
+tone of conviction that Rob rose to his feet. His knees were white in
+her service, and Nell felt that she liked this young man.
+
+'I am so sorry to have troubled you, Mr.----Mr.----' began the young
+lady.
+
+'My name is Angus,' said Rob; 'I am a reporter on the _Silchester
+Mirror_.'
+
+Greybrooke started, and Nell drew back in horror, but the next second
+she was smiling. Rob thought it was kindliness that made her do it, but
+it was really a smile of triumph. She felt that she was on the point of
+making a discovery at last. Greybrooke would have blurted out a
+question, but Nell stopped him.
+
+'Get me a wrap of some kind, Mr. Greybrooke,' she said, with such sweet
+imperiousness that the captain went without a word. Half-way he stopped
+to call himself a fool, for he had remembered all at once about Raleigh
+and his cloak, and seen how he might have adapted that incident to his
+advantage by offering to put his own coat round Nell's shoulders.
+
+It was well that Greybrooke did not look back, for he would have seen
+Miss Meredith take Rob's arm--which made Rob start--and lead him in the
+direction in which Miss Abinger was supposed to have gone.
+
+'The literary life must be delightful,' said artful Nell, looking up
+into her companion's face.
+
+Rob appreciated the flattery, but his pride made him say that the
+literary life was not the reporter's.
+
+'I always read the _Mirror_,' continued Nell, on whom the moon was
+having a bad effect to-night, 'and often I wonder who writes the
+articles. There was a book-review in it a few days ago that I--I liked
+very much.'
+
+'Do you remember what the book was?' asked Rob, jumping into the pit.
+
+'Let me see,' said Nell, putting her head to the side, 'it was--yes, it
+was a novel called--called _The Scorn of Scorns_.'
+
+Rob's good angel was very near him at that moment, but not near enough
+to put her palm over his mouth.
+
+'That review was mine,' said Rob, with uncalled-for satisfaction.
+
+'Was it?' cried his companion, pulling away her arm viciously.
+
+The path had taken them to the top of the pile of rocks, from which it
+is a sheer descent of a hundred feet to the Dome. At this point the
+river is joined by a smaller but not less noisy stream, which rushes at
+it at right angles. Two of the castle walls rise up here as if part of
+the cliff, and though the walk goes round them, they seem to the angler
+looking up from the opposite side of the Dome to be part of the rock.
+From the windows that look to the west and north one can see down into
+the black waters, and hear the Ferret, as the smaller stream is called,
+fling itself over jagged boulders into the Dome.
+
+The ravine coming upon him suddenly, took away Rob's breath, and he
+hardly felt Nell snatch away her arm. She stood back, undecided what to
+do for a moment, and they were separated by a few yards. Then Rob heard
+a man's voice, soft and low, but passionate. He knew it to be Sir
+Clement Dowton's, though he lost the words. A girl's voice answered,
+however, a voice so exquisitely modulated, so clear and pure, that Rob
+trembled with delight in it. This is what it said--
+
+'No, Sir Clement Dowton, I bear you no ill-will, but I do not love you.
+Years ago I made an idol and worshipped it, because I knew no better,
+but I am a foolish girl no longer, and I know now that it was a thing
+of clay.'
+
+To Rob's amazement he found himself murmuring these words even before
+they were spoken. He seemed to know them so well, that had the speaker
+missed anything, he could have put her right. It was not sympathy that
+worked this marvel. He had read all this before, or something very like
+it, in _The Scorn of Scorns_.
+
+Nell, too, heard the voice, but did not catch the words. She ran
+forward, and as she reached Rob, a tall girl in white, with a dark hood
+over her head, pushed aside a bush and came into view.
+
+'Mary,' cried Miss Meredith, 'this gentleman here is the person who
+wrote _that_ in the _Mirror_. Let me introduce you to him, Mr. Angus,
+Miss----' and then Nell shrank back in amazement, as she saw who was
+with her friend.
+
+'Sir Clement Dowton!' she exclaimed.
+
+Rob, however, did not hear her, nor see the baronet, for looking up with
+a guilty feeling at his heart, his eyes met Mary Abinger.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE ONE WOMAN
+
+
+Daybreak on the following morning found the gas blazing in Rob's
+lodgings. Rob was seated in an arm-chair, his feet on the cold hearth.
+_The Scorn of Scorns_ lay on the mantelpiece carefully done up in brown
+paper, lest a speck of dust should fall on it, and he had been staring
+at the ribs of the fireplace for the last three hours without seeing
+them. He had not thought of the gas. His bed was unslept on. His damp
+boots had dried on his feet. He did not feel cold. All night he had sat
+there, a man mesmerised. For the only time in his life he had forgotten
+to wind up his watch.
+
+At times his lips moved as if he were speaking to himself, and a smile
+lit up his face. Then a change of mood came, and he beat the fender with
+his feet till the fire-irons rattled. Thinking over these remarks
+brought the rapture to his face:
+
+'How do you do, Mr. Angus?'
+
+'You must not take to heart what Miss Meredith said.'
+
+'Please don't say any more about it. I am quite sure you gave your
+honest opinion about my book.'
+
+'I am so glad you think this like Scotland, because, of course, that is
+the highest compliment a Scotsman can pay.'
+
+'Good-night, Mr. Angus.'
+
+That was all she had said to him, but the more Rob thought over her
+remarks the more he liked them. It was not so much the words themselves
+that thrilled him as the way they were said. Other people had asked,
+'How do you do, Mr. Angus?' without making an impression, but her
+greeting was a revelation of character, for it showed that though she
+knew who he was she wanted to put him at his ease. This is a delightful
+attribute in a woman, and worth thinking about.
+
+Just before Miss Abinger said, 'How do you do, Mr. Angus?' Rob had
+realised what people meant by calling her proud. She was holding her
+head very high as she appeared in the path, and when Nell told her who
+Rob was she flushed. He looked hopelessly at her, bereft of speech, as
+he saw a tear glisten on her eyelid; and as their eyes met she read into
+the agony that he was suffering because he had hurt her. It was then
+that Mary made that memorable observation, 'How do you do, Mr. Angus?'
+
+They turned toward the castle doors, Nell and the baronet in front, and
+Rob blurted out some self-reproaches in sentences that had neither
+beginning nor end. Mary had told him not to take it so terribly to
+heart, but her voice trembled a little, for this had been a night of
+incident to her. Rob knew that it was for his sake she had checked that
+tear, and as he sat in his lodgings through the night he saw that she
+had put aside her own troubles to lessen his. When he thought of that he
+drew a great breath. The next moment his whole body shuddered to think
+what a brute he had been, and then she seemed to touch his elbow again,
+and he half rose from his chair in a transport.
+
+As soon as he reached his lodgings Rob had taken up _The Scorn of
+Scorns_, which he had not yet returned to Mr. Licquorish, and re-read it
+in a daze. There were things in it so beautiful now that they caught in
+his throat and stopped his reading; they took him so far into the
+thoughts of a girl that to go farther seemed like eavesdropping. When he
+read it first _The Scorn of Scorns_ had been written in a tongue Rob did
+not know, but now he had the key in his hands. There is a universal
+language that comes upon young people suddenly, and enables an English
+girl, for instance, to understand what a Chinaman means when he looks
+twice at her. Rob had mastered it so suddenly that he was only its slave
+at present. His horse had run away with him.
+
+Had the critic of _The Scorn of Scorns_ been a bald-headed man with two
+chins, who did not know the authoress, he would have smiled at the
+severity with which she took perfidious man to task, and written an
+indulgent criticism without reading beyond the second chapter. If he had
+been her father he would have laughed a good deal at her heroics, but
+now and again they would have touched him, and he would have locked the
+book away in his desk, seeing no particular cleverness in it, but
+feeling proud of his daughter. It would have brought such thoughts to
+him about his wife as suddenly fill a man with tenderness--thoughts he
+seldom gives expression to, though she would like to hear them.
+
+Rob, however, drank in the book, his brain filled with the writer of it.
+It was about a young girl who had given her heart to a stranger, and
+one day when she was full of the joy of his love he had disappeared. She
+waited, wondering, fearing, and then her heart broke, and her only
+desire was to die. No one could account for the change that came over
+her, for she was proud, and her relatives were not sympathetic. She had
+no mother to go to, and her father could not have understood. She became
+listless, and though she smiled and talked to all, when she went to her
+solitary bed-chamber she turned her face in silence to the wall. Then a
+fever came to her, and after that she had to be taken to the Continent.
+What shook her listlessness was an accident to her father. It was feared
+that he was on his deathbed, and as she nursed him she saw that her life
+had been a selfish one. From that moment she resolved if he got better
+(is it not terrible this, that the best of us try to make terms with
+God?) to devote her life to him, and to lead a nobler existence among
+the poor and suffering ones at home. The sudden death of a relative who
+was not a good man frightened her so much that she became ill again, and
+now she was so fearful of being untruthful that she could not make a
+statement of fact without adding 'I think so,' under her breath. She let
+people take advantage of her lest she should be taking advantage of
+them, and when she passed a cripple on the road she walked very slowly
+so that he should not feel his infirmity.
+
+Years afterwards she saw the man who had pretended to love her and then
+ridden away. He said that he could explain everything to her, and that
+he loved her still; but she drew herself up, and with a look of
+ineffable scorn, told him that she no longer loved him. When they first
+met, she said, she had been little more than a child, and so she had
+made an idol of him. But long since the idol had crumbled to pieces, and
+now she knew that she had worshipped a thing of clay. She wished him
+well, but she no longer loved him. As Lord Caltonbridge listened he knew
+that she spoke the truth, and his eyes drooped before her dignified but
+contemptuous gaze. Then, concludes the author, dwelling upon this little
+triumph with a satisfaction that hardly suggests a heart broken beyond
+mending, he turned upon his heel, at last realising what he was; and,
+feeling smaller and meaner than had been his wont, left the Grange for
+the second and last time.
+
+How much of this might be fiction, Rob was not in a mind to puzzle over.
+It seemed to him that the soul of a pure-minded girl had been laid bare
+to him. To look was almost a desecration, and yet it was there whichever
+way he turned. A great longing rose in his heart to see Mary Abinger
+again and tell her what he thought of himself now. He rose and paced the
+floor, and the words he could not speak last night came to his lips in a
+torrent. Like many men who live much alone, Rob often held imaginary
+conversations with persons far distant, and he denounced himself to this
+girl a score of times as he paced back and forwards. Always she looked
+at him in reply with that wonderful smile which had pleaded with him not
+to be unhappy on her account. Horrible fears laid hold of him that after
+the guests had departed she had gone to her room and wept. That villain
+Sir Clement had doubtless left the castle for the second and last time,
+'feeling smaller and meaner than had been his wont' (Rob clenched his
+fists at the thought of him), but how could he dare to rage at the
+baronet when he had been as great a scoundrel himself? Rob looked about
+him for his hat; a power not to be resisted was drawing him back to Dome
+Castle.
+
+He heard the clatter of crockery in the kitchen as he opened his door,
+and it recalled him to himself. At that moment it flashed upon him that
+he had forgotten to write any notice of Colonel Abinger's speech. He had
+neglected the office and come straight home. At any other time this
+would have startled him, but now it seemed the merest trifle. It passed
+for the moment from his mind, and its place was taken by the remembrance
+that his boots were muddy and his coat soaking. For the first time in
+his life the seriousness of going out with his hair unbrushed came home
+to him. He had hitherto been content to do little more than fling a comb
+at it once a day. Rob returned to his room, and, crossing to the mirror,
+looked anxiously into it to see what he was like. He took off his coat
+and brushed it vigorously.
+
+Having laved his face, he opened his box, and produced from it two
+neckties, which he looked at for a long time before he could make up his
+mind which to wear. Then he changed his boots. When he had brushed his
+hat he remembered with anxiety some one on the _Mirror's_ having asked
+him why he wore it so far back on his head. He tilted it forward, and
+carefully examined the effect in the looking-glass. Then forgetful that
+the sounds from the kitchen betokened the approach of breakfast, he
+hurried out of the house. It was a frosty morning, and already the
+streets were alive, but Rob looked at no one. For women in the abstract
+he now felt an unconscious pity, because they were all so very unlike
+Mary Abinger. He had grown so much in the night that the Rob Angus of
+the day before seemed but an acquaintance of his youth.
+
+He was inside the grounds of Dome Castle again before he realised that
+he had no longer a right to be there. By fits and starts he remembered
+not to soil his boots. He might have been stopped at the lodge, but at
+present it had no tenant. A year before, Colonel Abinger had realised
+that he could not keep both a horse and a lodge-keeper, and that he
+could keep neither if his daughter did not part with her maid. He
+yielded to Miss Abinger's entreaties, and kept the horse.
+
+Rob went on at a swinging pace till he turned an abrupt corner of the
+walk and saw Dome Castle standing up before him. Then he started, and
+turned back hastily. This was not owing to his remembering that he was
+trespassing, but because he had seen a young lady coming down the steps.
+Rob had walked five miles without his breakfast to talk to Miss Abinger,
+but as soon as he saw her he fled. When he came to himself he was so
+fearful of her seeing him, that he hurried behind a tree, where he had
+the appearance of a burglar.
+
+Mary Abinger came quickly up the avenue, unconscious that she was
+watched, and Rob discovered in a moment that after all the prettiest
+thing about her was the way she walked. She carried a little basket in
+her hand, and her dress was a blending of brown and yellow, with a great
+deal of fur about the throat. Rob, however, did not take the dress into
+account until she had passed him, when, no longer able to see her face,
+he gazed with delight after her.
+
+Had Rob been a lady he would probably have come to the conclusion that
+the reason why Miss Abinger wore all that fur instead of a jacket was
+because she knew it became her better. Perhaps it was. Even though a
+young lady has the satisfaction of feeling that her heart is now
+adamant, that is no excuse for her dressing badly. Rob's opinion was
+that it would matter very little what she wore, because some pictures
+look lovely in any frame, but that was a point on which he and Miss
+Abinger always differed. Only after long consideration had she come to
+the conclusion that the hat she was now wearing was undoubtedly the
+shape that suited her best, and even yet she was ready to spend time in
+thinking about other shapes. What would have seemed even more surprising
+to Rob was that she had made up her mind that one side of her face was
+better than the other side.
+
+No mere man, however, could ever have told which was the better side of
+Miss Abinger's face. It was a face to stir the conscience of a good man,
+and make unworthy men keep their distance, for it spoke first of purity,
+which can never be present anywhere without being felt. All men are born
+with a craving to find it, and they never look for it but among women.
+The strength of the craving is the measure of any man's capacity to
+love, and without it love on his side would be impossible.
+
+Mary Abinger was fragile because she was so sensitive. She carried
+everywhere a fear to hurt the feelings of others, that was a bodkin at
+her heart. Men and women in general prefer to give and take. The
+keenness with which she felt necessitated the garment of reserve, which
+those who did not need it for themselves considered pride. Her weakness
+called for something to wrap it up. There were times when it pleased her
+to know that the disguise was effective, but not when it deceived
+persons she admired. The cynicism of _The Scorn of Scorns_ was as much a
+cloak as her coldness, for she had an exquisite love of what is good and
+fine in life that idealised into heroes persons she knew or heard of as
+having a virtue. It would have been cruel to her to say that there are
+no heroes. When she found how little of the heroic there was in Sir
+Clement Dowton she told herself that there are none, and sometimes other
+persons had made her repeat this since. She seldom reasoned about
+things, however, unless her feelings had been wounded, and soon again
+she was dreaming of the heroic. Heroes are people to love, and Mary's
+idea of what love must be would have frightened some persons from loving
+her. With most men affection for a woman is fed on her regard for them.
+Greatness in love is no more common than greatness in leading armies.
+Only the hundredth man does not prefer to dally where woman is easiest
+to win; most finding the maids of honour a satisfactory substitute for
+the princess. So the boy in the street prefers two poor apples to a
+sound one. It may be the secret of England's greatness.
+
+On this Christmas Day Mary Abinger came up the walk rapidly, scorning
+herself for ever having admired Sir Clement Dowton. She did everything
+in the superlative degree, and so rather wondered that a thunderbolt
+was not sent direct from above to kill him--as if there were
+thunderbolts for every one. If we got our deserts most of us would be
+knocked on the head with a broomstick.
+
+When she was out of sight, Rob's courage returned, and he remembered
+that he was there in the hope of speaking to her. He hurried up the walk
+after her, but when he neared her he fell back in alarm. His heart was
+beating violently. He asked himself in a quaver what it was that he had
+arranged to say first.
+
+In her little basket Mary had Christmas presents for a few people,
+inhabitants of a knot of houses not far distant from the castle gates.
+They were her father's tenants, and he rather enjoyed their being unable
+to pay much rent, it made them so dependent. Had Rob seen how she was
+received in some of these cottages, how she sat talking merrily with one
+bed-ridden old woman whom cheerfulness kept alive, and not only gave a
+disabled veteran a packet of tobacco, but filled his pipe for him, so
+that he gallantly said he was reluctant to smoke it (trust an old man
+for gallantry), and even ate pieces of strange cakes to please her
+hostesses, he would often have thought of it afterwards. However, it
+would have been unnecessary prodigality to show him that, for his mind
+was filled with the incomparable manner in which she knocked at doors
+and smiled when she came out. Once she dropped her basket, and he could
+remember nothing so exquisite as her way of picking it up.
+
+Rob lurked behind trees and peered round hedges, watching Miss Abinger
+go from one house to another, but he could not shake himself free of the
+fear that all the world had its eye on him. Hitherto not his honesty
+but its bluntness had told against him (the honesty of a good many
+persons is only stupidity asserting itself), and now he had not the
+courage to be honest. When any wayfarers approached he whistled to the
+fields as if he had lost a dog in them, or walked smartly eastward
+(until he got round a corner) like one who was in a hurry to reach
+Silchester. He looked covertly at the few persons who passed him, to see
+if they were looking at him. A solitary crow fluttered into the air from
+behind a wall, and Rob started. In a night he had become self-conscious.
+
+At last Mary turned homewards, with the sun in her face. Rob was moving
+toward the hamlet when he saw her, and in spite of himself he came to a
+dead stop. He knew that if she passed inside the gates of the castle his
+last chance of speaking to her was gone; but it was not that which made
+him keep his ground. He was shaking as the thin boards used to do when
+they shot past his circular saw. His mind, in short, had run away and
+left him.
+
+On other occasions Mary would not have thought of doing more than bow to
+Rob, but he had Christmas Day in his favour, and she smiled.
+
+'A happy Christmas to you, Mr. Angus,' she said, holding out her hand.
+
+It was then that Rob lifted his hat, and overcame his upbringing. His
+unaccustomed fingers insisted on lifting it in such a cautious way that,
+in a court of law, it could have been argued that he was only planting
+it more firmly on his head. He did not do it well, but he did it. Some
+men would have succumbed altogether on realising so sharply that it is
+not women who are terrible, but a woman. Here is a clear case in which
+the part is greater than the whole.
+
+Rob would have liked to wish Miss Abinger a happy Christmas too, but the
+words would not form, and had she chosen she could have left him looking
+very foolish. But Mary had blushed slightly when she caught sight of Rob
+standing helplessly in the middle of the road, and this meant that she
+understood what he was doing there. A girl can overlook a great deal in
+a man who admires her. She feels happier. It increases her self-respect.
+So Miss Abinger told him that, if the frost held, the snow would soon
+harden, but if a thaw came it would melt; and then Rob tore out of
+himself the words that tended to slip back as they reached his tongue.
+
+'I don't know how I could have done it,' he said feebly, beginning at
+the end of what he had meant to say. There he stuck again.
+
+Mary knew what he spoke of, and her pale face coloured. She shrank from
+talking of _The Scorn of Scorns_.
+
+'Please don't let that trouble you,' she said, with an effort. 'I was
+really only a schoolgirl when I wrote it, and Miss Meredith got it
+printed recently as a birthday surprise for me. I assure you I would
+never have thought of publishing it myself for--for people to read.
+Schoolgirls, you know, Mr. Angus, are full of such silly sentiment.'
+
+A breeze of indignation shook 'No, no!' out of Rob, but Mary did not
+heed.
+
+'I know better now,' she said; 'indeed, not even you, the hardest of my
+critics, sees more clearly than I the--the childishness of the book.'
+
+Miss Abinger's voice faltered a very little, and Rob's sufferings
+allowed him to break out.
+
+'No,' he said, with a look of appeal in his eyes that were as grey as
+hers, 'it was a madness that let me write like that. _The Scorn of
+Scorns_ is the most beautiful, the tenderest----' He stuck once more.
+Miss Abinger could have helped him again, but she did not. Perhaps she
+wanted him to go on. He could not do so, but he repeated what he had
+said already, which may have been the next best thing to do.
+
+'You do surprise me now, Mr. Angus,' said Mary, light-hearted all at
+once, 'for you know you scarcely wrote like that.'
+
+'Ah, but I have read the book since I saw you,' Rob blurted out, 'and
+that has made such a difference.'
+
+A wiser man might have said a more foolish thing. Mary looked up
+smiling. Her curiosity was aroused, and at once she became merciless.
+Hitherto she had only tried to be kind to Rob, but now she wanted to be
+kind to herself.
+
+'You can hardly have re-read my story since last night,' she said,
+shaking her fair head demurely.
+
+'I read it all through the night,' exclaimed Rob, in such a tone that
+Mary started. She had no desire to change the conversation, however; she
+did not start so much as that.
+
+'But you had to write papa's speech?' she said.
+
+'I forgot to do it,' Rob answered awkwardly. His heart sank, for he saw
+that here was another cause he had given Miss Abinger to dislike him.
+Possibly he was wrong. There may be extenuating circumstances that will
+enable the best of daughters to overlook an affront to her father's
+speeches.
+
+'But it was in the _Mirror_. I read it,' said Mary.
+
+'Was it?' said Rob, considerably relieved. How it could have got there
+was less of a mystery to him than to her, for Protheroe had sub-edited
+so many speeches to tenants that in an emergency he could always guess
+at what the landlords said.
+
+'It was rather short,' Mary admitted, 'compared with the report in the
+_Argus_. Papa thought----' She stopped hastily.
+
+'He thought it should have been longer?' asked Rob. Then before he had
+time to think of it, he had told her of his first meeting with the
+colonel.
+
+'I remember papa was angry at the time,' Mary said, 'but you need not
+have been afraid of his recognising you last night. He did recognise
+you.'
+
+'Did he?'
+
+'Yes; but you were his guest.'
+
+Rob could not think of anything more to say, and he saw that Mary was
+about to bid him good-morning. He found himself walking with her in the
+direction of the castle gates.
+
+'This scenery reminds me of Scotland,' he said.
+
+'I love it,' said Mary (man's only excellence over woman is that his awe
+of this word prevents his using it so lightly), 'and I am glad that I
+shall be here until the season begins.'
+
+Rob had no idea what the season was, but he saw that some time Mary
+would be going away, and his face said, what would he do then?
+
+'Then I go to London with the Merediths,' she continued, adding
+thoughtfully, 'I suppose you mean to go to London, Mr. Angus? My brother
+says that all literary men drift there.'
+
+'Yes, oh yes,' said Rob.
+
+'Soon?'
+
+'Immediately,' he replied recklessly.
+
+They reached the gates, and, as Mary held out her hand, the small basket
+was tilted upon her arm, and a card fluttered out.
+
+'It is a Christmas card a little boy in one of those houses gave me,'
+she said, as Rob returned it to her. 'Have you got many Christmas cards
+to-day, Mr. Angus?'
+
+'None,' said Rob.
+
+'Not even from your relatives?' asked Mary, beginning to pity him more
+than was necessary.
+
+'I have no relatives,' he replied; 'they are all dead.'
+
+'I was in Scotland two summers ago,' Mary said, very softly, 'at a place
+called Glen Quharity; papa was there shooting. But I don't suppose you
+know it?'
+
+'Our Glen Quharity!' exclaimed Rob; 'why, you must have passed through
+Thrums?'
+
+'We were several times in Thrums. Have you been there?'
+
+'I was born in it; I was never thirty miles away from it until I came
+here.'
+
+'Oh,' cried Mary, 'then you must be the literary----' She stopped and
+reddened.
+
+'The literary saw-miller,' said Rob, finishing her sentence; 'that was
+what they called me, I know, at Glen Quharity Lodge.'
+
+Mary looked up at him with a new interest, for when she was there Glen
+Quharity had been full of the saw-miller, who could not only talk in
+Greek, but had a reputation for tossing the caber.
+
+'Papa told me some months ago,' she said, in surprise, 'that the
+liter----, that you had joined the Press in England, but he evidently
+did not know of your being in Silchester.'
+
+'But how could he have known anything about me?' asked Rob, surprised in
+turn.
+
+'This is so strange,' Mary answered. 'Why, papa takes credit for having
+got you your appointment on the press.'
+
+'It was a minister, a Mr. Rorrison, who did that for me,' said Rob;
+'indeed, he was so good that I could have joined the Press a year ago by
+his help, had not circumstances compelled me to remain at home.'
+
+'I did not know the clergyman's name,' Mary said, 'but it was papa who
+spoke of you to him first. Don't you remember writing out this
+clergyman's sermon in shorthand, and a messenger's coming to you for
+your report on horseback next day?'
+
+'Certainly I do,' said Rob, 'and he asked me to write it out in longhand
+as quickly as possible. That was how I got to know Mr. Rorrison; and, as
+I understood, he had sent for the report of the sermon, on hearing
+accidentally that I had taken it down, because he had some reason for
+wanting a copy of it.'
+
+'Perhaps that was how it was told to you afterwards,' Mary said, 'but it
+was really papa who wanted the sermon.'
+
+'I should like to know all about it,' Rob said, seeing that she
+hesitated. Colonel Abinger had not seemed to him the kind of man who
+would send a messenger on horseback about the country in quest of
+sermons.
+
+'I am afraid,' Mary explained, 'that it arose out of a wager. This
+clergyman was staying at the Lodge, but papa was the only other person
+there who would go as far as Thrums to hear him preach. I was not there
+that year, so I don't know why papa went, but when he returned he told
+the others that the sermon had been excellent. There is surely an
+English church in Thrums, for I am sure papa would not think a sermon
+excellent that was preached in a chapel?'
+
+'There is,' said Rob; 'but in Thrums it is called the chapel.'
+
+'Well, some badinage arose out of papa's eulogy, and it ended in a bet
+that he could not tell the others what this fine sermon was about. He
+was to get a night to think it over. Papa took the bet a little rashly,
+for when he put it to himself he found that he could not even remember
+the text. As he told me afterwards (here Mary smiled a little), he had a
+general idea of the sermon, but could not quite put it into words, and
+he was fearing that he would lose the wager (and be laughed at, which
+always vexes papa), when he heard of your report. So a messenger was
+sent to Thrums for it--and papa won his bet.'
+
+'But how did Mr. Rorrison hear of my report, then?'
+
+'Oh, I forgot; papa told him afterwards, and was so pleased with his
+victory, that when he heard Mr. Rorrison had influence with some press
+people, he suggested to him that something might be done for you.'
+
+'This is strange,' said Rob, 'and perhaps the strangest thing about it
+is that if Colonel Abinger could identify me with the saw-miller, he
+would be sorry that he had interfered.'
+
+Mary saw the force of this so clearly that she could not contradict him.
+
+'Surely,' she said, 'I heard when I was at the Lodge of your having a
+niece, and that you and the little child lived alone in the saw-mill?'
+
+'Yes,' Rob answered hoarsely, 'but she is dead. She wandered from home,
+and was found dead on a mountain-side.'
+
+'Was it long ago?' asked Mary, very softly.
+
+'Only a few months ago,' Rob said, making his answer as short as
+possible, for the death of Davy moved him still. 'She was only four
+years old.'
+
+Mary's hand went half-way toward his involuntarily. His mouth was
+twitching. He knew how good she was.
+
+'That card,' he began, and hesitated.
+
+'Oh, would you care to have it?' said Mary.
+
+But just then Colonel Abinger walked into them, somewhat amazed to see
+his daughter talking to one of the lower orders. Neither Rob nor Mary
+had any inclination to tell him that this was the Scotsman he had
+befriended.
+
+'This is Mr. Angus, papa,' said Mary, 'who--who was with us last night.'
+
+'Mr. Angus and I have met before, I think,' replied her father,
+recalling the fishing episode. His brow darkened, and Rob was ready for
+anything, but Colonel Abinger was a gentleman.
+
+'I always wanted to see you again, Mr. Angus,' he said, with an effort,
+'to ask you--what flies you were using that day?'
+
+Rob muttered something in answer, which the colonel did not try to
+catch. Mary smiled and bowed, and the next moment she had disappeared
+with her father down the avenue.
+
+What followed cannot be explained. When Rob roused himself from his
+amazement at Mary Abinger's having been in Thrums without his feeling
+her presence, something made him go a few yards inside the castle
+grounds, and, lying lightly on the snow, he saw the Christmas card. He
+lifted it up as if it were a rare piece of china, and held it in his two
+hands as though it were a bird which might escape. He did not know
+whether it had dropped there of its own accord, and doubt and transport
+fought for victory on his face. At last he put the card exultingly into
+his pocket, his chest heaved, and he went toward Silchester whistling.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE GRAND PASSION?
+
+
+One of the disappointments of life is that the persons we think we have
+reason to dislike are seldom altogether villains; they are not made
+sufficiently big for it. When we can go to sleep in an arm-chair this
+ceases to be a trouble, but it vexed Mary Abinger. Her villain of
+fiction, on being haughtily rejected, had at least left the heroine's
+home looking a little cowed. Sir Clement in the same circumstances had
+stayed on.
+
+The colonel had looked forward resentfully for years to meeting this
+gentleman again, and giving him a piece of his stormy mind. When the
+opportunity came, however, Mary's father instead asked his unexpected
+visitor to remain for a week. Colonel Abinger thought he was thus
+magnanimous because his guest had been confidential with him, but it was
+perhaps rather because Sir Clement had explained how much he thought of
+him. To dislike our admirers is to be severe on ourselves, and is
+therefore not common.
+
+The Dome had introduced the colonel to Sir Clement as well as to Rob.
+One day Colonel Abinger had received by letter from a little hostelry in
+the neighbourhood the compliments of Sir Clement Dowton, and a request
+that he might be allowed to fish in the preserved water. All that
+Mary's father knew of Dowton at that time was that he had been lost to
+English society for half a dozen years. Once in many months the papers
+spoke of him as serving under Gordon in China, as being taken captive by
+an African king, as having settled down in a cattle-ranch in the
+vicinity of Manitoba. His lawyers were probably aware of his whereabouts
+oftener than other persons. All that society knew was that he hated
+England because one of its daughters had married a curate. The colonel
+called at the inn, and found Sir Clement such an attentive listener that
+he thought the baronet's talk quite brilliant. A few days afterwards the
+stranger's traps were removed to the castle, and then he met Miss
+Abinger, who was recently home from school. He never spoke to her of his
+grudge against England.
+
+It is only the unselfish men who think much, otherwise Colonel Abinger
+might have pondered a little over his guest. Dowton had spoken of
+himself as an enthusiastic angler, yet he let his flies drift down the
+stream like fallen leaves. He never remembered to go a-fishing until it
+was suggested to him. He had given his host several reasons for his long
+absence from his property, and told him he did not want the world to
+know that he was back in England, as he was not certain whether he would
+remain. The colonel at his request introduced him to the few visitors at
+the castle as Mr. Dowton, and was surprised to discover afterwards that
+they all knew his real name.
+
+'I assure you,' Mary's father said to him, 'that they have not learned
+it from me. It is incomprehensible how a thing like that leaks out.'
+
+'I don't understand it,' said Dowton, who, however, should have
+understood it, as he had taken the visitors aside and told them his real
+name himself. He seemed to do this not of his free will, but because he
+could not help it.
+
+It never struck the colonel that his own society was not what tied Sir
+Clement to Dome Castle; for widowers with grown-up daughters are in a
+foreign land without interpreters. On that morning when the baronet
+vanished, nevertheless, the master of Dome Castle was the only person in
+it who did not think that it would soon lose its mistress, mere girl
+though she was.
+
+Sir Clement's strange disappearance was accounted for at the castle,
+where alone it was properly known, in various ways. Miss Abinger, in the
+opinion of the servants' hall, held her head so high that there he was
+believed to have run away because she had said him no. Miss Abinger
+excused and blamed him alternately to herself, until she found a dull
+satisfaction in looking upon him as the villain he might have been had
+his high forehead spoken true. As for the colonel, he ordered Mary (he
+had no need) never to mention the fellow's name to him, but mentioned it
+frequently himself.
+
+Nothing had happened, so far as was known, to disturb the baronet's
+serenity; neither friends nor lawyers had been aware that he was in
+England, and he had received no letters. Mary remembered his occasional
+fits of despondency, but on the whole he seemed to revel in his visit,
+and had never looked happier than the night before he went. His traps
+were sent by the colonel in a fury to the little inn where he had at
+first taken up his abode, but it was not known at the castle whether he
+ever got them. Some months afterwards a letter from him appeared in the
+_Times_, dated from Suez, and from then until he reappeared at Dome
+Castle, the colonel, except when he spoke to himself, never heard the
+baronet's name mentioned.
+
+Sir Clement must have been very impulsive, for on returning to the
+castle he had intended to treat Miss Abinger with courteous coldness, as
+if she had been responsible for his flight, and he had not seen her
+again for ten minutes before he asked her to marry him. He meant to
+explain his conduct in one way to the colonel, and he explained it in
+quite another way.
+
+When Colonel Abinger took him into the smoking-room on Christmas Eve to
+hear what he had to say for himself, the baronet sank into a chair, with
+a look of contentment on his beautiful face that said he was glad to be
+there again. Then the colonel happened to mention Mary's name in such a
+way that he seemed to know of Sir Clement's proposal to her three years
+earlier. At once the baronet began another story from the one he had
+meant to tell, and though he soon discovered that he had credited his
+host with a knowledge the colonel did not possess, it was too late to
+draw back. So Mary's father heard to his amazement that the baronet had
+run away because he was in love with Miss Abinger. Colonel Abinger had
+read _The Scorn of Scorns_, but it had taught him nothing.
+
+'She was only a schoolgirl when you saw her last,' he said, in
+bewilderment; 'but I hardly see how that should have made you fly the
+house like--yes, like a thief.'
+
+Dowton looked sadly at him.
+
+'I don't know,' he said, speaking as if with reluctance, 'that in any
+circumstances I should be justified in telling you the whole miserable
+story. Can you not guess it? When I came here I was not a free man.'
+
+'You were already married?'
+
+'No, but I was engaged to be married.'
+
+'Did Mary know anything of this?'
+
+'Nothing of that engagement, and but little, I think, of the attachment
+that grew up in my heart for her. I kept that to myself.'
+
+'She was too young,' said the wise colonel, 'to think of such things
+then; and even now I do not see why you should have left us as you did.'
+
+Sir Clement rose to his feet and paced the room in great agitation.
+
+'It is hard,' he said at last, 'to speak of such a thing to another man.
+But let me tell you, Abinger, that when I was with you three years ago
+there were times when I thought I would lose my reason. Do you know what
+it is to have such a passion as that raging in your heart and yet have
+to stifle it? There were whole nights when I walked up and down my room
+till dawn. I trembled every time I saw Miss Abinger alone lest I should
+say that to her which I had no right to say. Her voice alone was
+sufficient to unman me. I felt that my only safety was in flight.'
+
+'I have run away from a woman myself in my time,' the colonel said, with
+a grim chuckle. 'There are occasions when it is the one thing to do,
+but this was surely not one of them, if Mary knew nothing.'
+
+'Sometimes I feared she did know that I cared for her. That is a hard
+thing to conceal, and, besides, I suppose I felt so wretched that I was
+not in a condition to act rationally. When I left the castle that day I
+had not the least intention of not returning.'
+
+'And since then you have been half round the world again? Are you
+married?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'Then I am to understand----'
+
+'That she is dead,' said Sir Clement, in a low voice.
+
+There was a silence between them, which was at last broken by the
+colonel.
+
+'What you have told me,' he said, 'is a great surprise, more especially
+with regard to my daughter. Being but a child at the time, however, she
+could not, I am confident, have thought of you in any other light than
+as her father's friend. It is, of course, on that footing that you
+return now?'
+
+'As her father's friend, certainly, I hope,' said the baronet firmly,
+'but I wish to tell you now that my regard for her has never changed. I
+confess I would have been afraid to come back to you had not my longing
+to see her again given me courage.'
+
+'She has not the least idea of this,' murmured the colonel, 'not the
+least. The fact is that Mary has lived so quietly with me here that she
+is still a child. Miss Meredith, whom I dare say you have met here, has
+been almost her only friend, and I am quite certain that the thought of
+marriage has never crossed their minds. If you, or even if I, were to
+speak of such a thing to Mary, it would only frighten her.'
+
+'I should not think of speaking to her on the subject at present,' the
+baronet interposed, rather hurriedly, 'but I thought it best to explain
+my position to you. You know what I am, that I have been almost a
+vagrant on the face of the earth since I reached manhood, but no one can
+see more clearly than I do myself how unworthy I am of her.'
+
+'I do not need to tell you,' said the colonel, taking the baronet's
+hand, 'that I used to like you, Dowton, and indeed I know no one whom I
+would prefer for a son-in-law. But you must be cautious with Mary.'
+
+'I shall be very cautious,' said the baronet; 'indeed there is no hurry,
+none whatever.'
+
+Colonel Abinger would have brought the conversation to a close here, but
+there was something more for Dowton to say.
+
+'I agree with you,' he said, forgetting, perhaps, that the colonel had
+not spoken on this point, 'that Miss Abinger should be kept ignorant for
+the present of the cause that drove me on that former occasion from the
+castle.'
+
+'It is the wisest course to adopt,' said the colonel, looking as if he
+had thought the matter out step by step.
+
+'The only thing I am doubtful about,' continued Dowton, 'is whether Miss
+Abinger will not think that she is entitled to some explanation. She
+cannot, I fear, have forgotten the circumstances of my departure.'
+
+'Make your mind easy on that score,' said the colonel; 'the best proof
+that Mary gave the matter little thought, even at the time, is that she
+did not speak of it to me. Sweet seventeen has always a short memory.'
+
+'But I have sometimes thought since that Miss Abinger did care for me a
+little, in which case she would have unfortunate cause to resent my
+flight.'
+
+While he spoke the baronet was looking anxiously into the colonel's
+face.
+
+'I can give you my word for it,' said the colonel cheerily, 'that she
+did not give your disappearance two thoughts; and now I much question
+whether she will recognise you.'
+
+Dowton's face clouded, but the other misinterpreted the shadow.
+
+'So put your mind at rest,' said the colonel kindly, 'and trust an old
+stager like myself for being able to read into a woman's heart.'
+
+Shortly afterwards Colonel Abinger left his guest, and for nearly five
+minutes the baronet looked dejected. It is sometimes advantageous to
+hear that a lady with whom you have watched the moon rise has forgotten
+your very name, but it is never complimentary. By and by, however, Sir
+Clement's sense of humour drove the gloom from his chiselled face, and a
+glass bracket over the mantelpiece told him that he was laughing
+heartily.
+
+It was a small breakfast party at the castle next morning, Sir Clement
+and Greybrooke being the only guests, but the baronet was so gay and
+morose by turns that he might have been two persons. In the middle of a
+laugh at some remark of the captain's, he would break off with a sigh,
+and immediately after sadly declining another cup of coffee from Mary,
+he said something humorous to her father. The one mood was natural to
+him and the other forced, but it would have been difficult to decide
+which was which. It is, however, one of the hardest things in life to
+remain miserable for any length of time on a stretch. When Dowton found
+himself alone with Mary his fingers were playing an exhilarating tune on
+the window-sill, but as he looked at her his hands fell to his side, and
+there was pathos in his fine eyes. Drawn toward her, he took a step
+forward, but Miss Abinger said 'No' so decisively that he stopped
+irresolute.
+
+'I shall be leaving the castle in an hour,' Sir Clement said slowly.
+
+'Papa told me,' said Mary, 'that he had prevailed upon you to remain for
+a week.'
+
+'He pressed me to do so, and I consented, but you have changed
+everything since then. Ah, Mary----'
+
+'Miss Abinger,' said Mary.
+
+'Miss Abinger, if you would only listen to what I have to say. I can
+explain everything. I----'
+
+'There is nothing to explain,' said Mary, 'nothing that I have either a
+right or a desire to hear. Please not to return to this subject again. I
+said everything there was to say last night.'
+
+The baronet's face paled, and he bowed his head in deep dejection. His
+voice was trembling a little, and he observed it with gratification as
+he answered--
+
+'Then, I suppose, I must bid you good-bye?'
+
+'Good-bye,' said Mary. 'Does papa know you are going?'
+
+'I promised to him to stay on,' said Sir Clement, 'and I can hardly
+expect him to forgive me if I change my mind.'
+
+This was put almost in the form of a question, and Mary thought she
+understood it.
+
+'Then you mean to remain?' she asked.
+
+'You compel me to go,' he replied dolefully.
+
+'Oh no,' said Mary, 'I have nothing to do with your going or staying.'
+
+'But it--it would hardly do for me to remain after what took place last
+night,' said the baronet, in the tone of one who was open to
+contradiction.
+
+For the first time in the conversation Mary smiled. It was not, however,
+the smile every man would care to see at his own expense.
+
+'If you were to go now,' she said, 'you would not be fulfilling your
+promise to papa, and I know that men do not like to break their word
+to--to other men.'
+
+'Then you think I ought to stay?' asked Sir Clement eagerly.
+
+'It is for you to think,' said Mary.
+
+'Perhaps, then, I ought to remain--for Colonel Abinger's sake,' said the
+baronet.
+
+Mary did not answer.
+
+'Only for a few days,' he continued almost appealingly.
+
+'Very well,' said Mary.
+
+'And you won't think the worse of me for it?' asked Dowton anxiously.
+'Of course, if I were to consult my own wishes I would go now, but as I
+promised Colonel Abinger----'
+
+'You will remain out of consideration for papa. How could I think worse
+of you for that?'
+
+Mary rose to leave the room, and as Sir Clement opened the door for her
+he said--
+
+'We shall say nothing of all this to Colonel Abinger?'
+
+'Oh no, certainly not,' said Mary.
+
+She glanced up in his face, her mouth twisted slightly to one side, as
+it had a habit of doing when she felt disdainful, and the glory of her
+beauty filled him of a sudden. The baronet pushed the door close and
+turned to her passionately, a film over his eyes and his hands
+outstretched.
+
+'Mary,' he cried, 'is there no hope for me?'
+
+'No,' said Mary, opening the door for herself, and passing out.
+
+Sir Clement stood there motionless for a minute. Then he crossed to the
+fireplace, and sank into a luxuriously cushioned chair. The sunlight
+came back to his noble face.
+
+'This is grand, glorious,' he murmured, in an ecstasy of enjoyment.
+
+In the days that followed, the baronet's behaviour was a little
+peculiar. Occasionally at meals he seemed to remember that a rejected
+lover ought not to have a good appetite. If, when he was smoking in the
+grounds, he saw Mary approaching, he covertly dropped his cigar. When he
+knew that she was sitting at a window he would pace up and down the walk
+with his head bent as if life had lost its interest to him. By and by
+his mind wandered, on these occasions, to more cheerful matters, and he
+would start to find that he had been smiling to himself and swishing his
+cane playfully, like a man who walked on air. It might have been said of
+him that he tried to be miserable and found it hard work.
+
+Will, who discovered that the baronet did not know what l.b.w. meant,
+could not, nevertheless, despise a man who had shot lions, but he never
+had quite the same respect for the king of beasts again. As for
+Greybrooke, he rather liked Sir Clement, because he knew that Nell (in
+her own words) 'loathed, hated, and despised' him.
+
+Greybrooke had two severe disappointments that holiday, both of which
+were to be traced to the capricious Nell. It had dawned on him that she
+could not help liking him a little if she saw him take a famous jump
+over the Dome, known to legend as the 'Robber's Leap.' The robber had
+lost his life in trying to leap the stream, but the captain practised in
+the castle grounds until he felt that he could clear it. Then he
+formally invited Miss Meredith to come and see him do it, and she told
+him instead that he was wicked. The captain and Will went back silently
+to the castle, wondering what on earth she would like.
+
+Greybrooke's other disappointment was still more grievous. One evening
+he and Will returned to the castle late for dinner, an offence the
+colonel found it hard to overlook, although they were going back to
+school on the following day. Will reached the dining-room first, and his
+father frowned on him.
+
+'You are a quarter of an hour late, William,' said the colonel sternly.
+'Where have you been?'
+
+Will hesitated.
+
+'Do you remember,' he said at last, 'a man called Angus, who was here
+reporting on Christmas Eve?'
+
+Mary laid down her knife and fork.
+
+'A painfully powerful-looking man,' said Dowton, 'in hob-nailed boots. I
+remember him.'
+
+'Well, we have been calling on him,' said Will.
+
+'Calling on him, calling on that impudent newspaper man!' exclaimed the
+colonel; 'what do you mean?'
+
+'Greybrooke had a row with him some time ago,' said Will; 'I don't know
+what about, because it was private; but the captain has been looking for
+the fellow for a fortnight to lick him--I mean punish him. We came upon
+him two days ago, near the castle gates.'
+
+Here Will paused, as if he would prefer to jump what followed.
+
+'And did your friend "lick" him then?' asked the colonel, at which Will
+shook his head.
+
+'Why not?' asked Sir Clement.
+
+'Well,' said Will reluctantly, 'the fellow wouldn't let him. He--he
+lifted Greybrooke up in his arms, and--and dropped him over the hedge.'
+
+Mary could not help laughing.
+
+'The beggar--I mean the fellow--must have muscles like ivy roots,' Will
+blurted out admiringly.
+
+'I fancy,' said Dowton, 'that I have seen him near the gates several
+times during the last week.'
+
+'Very likely,' said the colonel shortly. 'I caught him poaching in the
+Dome some months ago. There is something bad about that man.'
+
+'Papa!' said Mary.
+
+At this moment Greybrooke entered.
+
+'So, Mr. Greybrooke,' said the colonel, 'I hear you have been in
+Silchester avenging an insult.'
+
+The captain looked at Will, who nodded.
+
+'I went there,' admitted Greybrooke, blushing, 'to horsewhip a reporter
+fellow, but he had run away.'
+
+'Run away?'
+
+'Yes. Did not Will tell you? We called at the _Mirror_ office, and were
+told that Angus had bolted to London two days ago.'
+
+'And the worst of it,' interposed Will, 'is that he ran off without
+paying his landlady's bill.'
+
+'I knew that man was a rascal,' exclaimed the colonel.
+
+Mary flushed.
+
+'I don't believe it,' she said.
+
+'You don't believe it,' repeated her father angrily; 'and why not,
+pray?'
+
+'Because--because I don't,' said Mary.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+IN FLEET STREET
+
+
+Mary was wrong. It was quite true that Rob had run away to London
+without paying his landlady's bill.
+
+The immediate result of his meeting with Miss Abinger had been to make
+him undertake double work, and not do it. Looking in at shop-windows,
+where he saw hats that he thought would just suit Mary (he had a good
+deal to learn yet), it came upon him that he was wasting his time. Then
+he hurried home, contemptuous of all the rest of Silchester, to write an
+article for a London paper, and when he next came to himself, half an
+hour afterwards, he was sitting before a blank sheet of copy paper. He
+began to review a book, and found himself gazing at a Christmas card. He
+tried to think out the action of a government, and thought out a ring on
+Miss Abinger's finger instead. Three nights running he dreamt that he
+was married, and woke up quaking.
+
+Without much misgiving Rob heard it said in Silchester that there was
+some one staying at Dome Castle who was to be its mistress's husband. On
+discovering that they referred to Dowton, and not being versed in the
+wonderful ways of woman, he told himself that this was impossible. A
+cynic would have pointed out that Mary had now had several days in
+which to change her mind. Cynics are persons who make themselves the
+measure of other people.
+
+The philosopher who remarked that the obvious truths are those which are
+most often missed, was probably referring to the time it takes a man to
+discover that he is in love. Women are quicker because they are on the
+outlook. It took Rob two days, and when it came upon him checked his
+breathing. After that he bore it like a man. Another discovery he had to
+make was that, after all, he was nobody in particular. This took him
+longer.
+
+Although the manner of his going to London was unexpected, Rob had
+thought out solidly the inducements to go. Ten minutes or so after he
+knew that he wanted to marry Mary Abinger, he made up his mind to try to
+do it. The only obstacles he saw in his way were, that she was not in
+love with him, and lack of income. Feeling that he was an uncommon type
+of man (if people would only see it), he resolved to remove this second
+difficulty first. The saw-mill and the castle side by side did not rise
+up and frighten him, and for the time he succeeded in not thinking about
+Colonel Abinger. Nothing is hopeless if we want it very much.
+
+Rob calculated that if he remained on the _Mirror_ for another dozen
+years or so, and Mr. Licquorish continued to think that it would not be
+cheaper to do without him, he might reach a salary of £200 per annum. As
+that was not sufficient, he made up his mind to leave Silchester.
+
+There was only one place to go to. Rob thought of London until he felt
+that it was the guardian from whom he would have to ask Mary Abinger;
+he pictured her there during the season, until London, which he had
+never seen, began to assume a homely aspect. It was the place in which
+he was to win or lose his battle. To whom is London much more? It is the
+clergyman's name for his church, the lawyer's for his office, the
+politician's for St. Stephen's, the cabman's for his stand.
+
+There was not a man on the Press in Silchester who did not hunger for
+Fleet Street, but they were all afraid to beard it. They knew it as a
+rabbit-warren; as the closest street in a city where the bootblack has
+his sycophants, and you have to battle for exclusive right to sweep a
+crossing. The fight forward had been grimmer to Rob, however, than to
+his fellows, and he had never been quite beaten. He was alone in the
+world, and poverty was like an old friend. There was only one journalist
+in London whom he knew even by name, and he wrote to him for advice.
+This was Mr. John Rorrison, a son of the minister whose assistance had
+brought Rob to Silchester. Rorrison was understood to be practically
+editing a great London newspaper, which is what is understood of a great
+many journalists until you make inquiries, but he wrote back to Rob
+asking him why he wanted to die before his time. You collectors who want
+an editor's autograph may rely upon having it by return of post if you
+write threatening to come to London with the hope that he will do
+something for you. Rorrison's answer discomfited Rob for five minutes,
+and then, going out, he caught a glimpse of Mary Abinger in the
+Merediths' carriage. He tore up the letter, and saw that London was
+worth risking.
+
+One forenoon Rob set out for the office to tell Mr. Licquorish of his
+determination. He knew that the entire staff would think him demented,
+but he could not see that he was acting rashly. He had worked it all out
+in his mind, and even tranquilly faced possible starvation. Rob was
+congratulating himself on not having given way to impulse when he
+reached the railway station.
+
+His way from his lodgings to the office led past the station, and as he
+had done scores of times before, he went inside. To Rob all the romance
+of Silchester was concentrated there; nothing stirred him so much as a
+panting engine; the shunting of carriages, the bustle of passengers, the
+porters rattling to and fro with luggage, the trains twisting
+serpent-like into the station and stealing out in a glory to be gone,
+sent the blood to his head. On Saturday nights, when he was free, any
+one calling at the station would have been sure to find him on the
+platform from which the train starts for London. His heart had sunk
+every time it went off without him.
+
+Rob woke up from a dream of Fleet Street to see the porters slamming the
+doors of the London train. He saw the guard's hand upraised, and heard
+the carriages rattle as the restive engine took them unawares. Then came
+the warning whistle, and the train moved off. For a second of time Rob
+felt that he had lost London, and he started forward. Some one near him
+shouted, and then he came upon the train all at once, a door opened, and
+he shot in. When he came to himself, Silchester was a cloud climbing to
+the sky behind him, and he was on his way to London.
+
+Rob's first feeling was that the other people in the carriage must know
+what he had done. He was relieved to find that his companions were only
+an old gentleman who spoke fiercely to his newspaper because it was
+reluctant to turn inside out, a little girl who had got in at Silchester
+and consumed thirteen halfpenny buns before she was five miles distant
+from it, and a young woman, evidently a nurse, with a baby in her arms.
+The baby was noisy for a time, but Rob gave it a look that kept it
+silent for the rest of the journey. He told himself that he would get
+out at the first station, but when the train stopped at it he sat on. He
+twisted himself into a corner to count his money covertly, and found
+that it came to four pounds odd. He also took the Christmas card from
+his pocket, but replaced it hastily, feeling that the old gentleman and
+the little girl were looking at him. A feeling of elation grew upon him
+as he saw that whatever might happen afterwards he must be in London
+shortly, and his mind ran on the letters he would write to Mr.
+Licquorish and his landlady. In lieu of his ticket he handed over twelve
+shillings to the guard, under whose eyes he did not feel comfortable,
+and he calculated that he owed his landlady over two pounds. He would
+send it to her and ask her to forward his things to London. Mr.
+Licquorish, however, might threaten him with the law if he did not
+return. But then the _Mirror_ owed Rob several pounds at that moment,
+and if he did not claim it in person it would remain in Mr. Licquorish's
+pockets. There was no saying how far that consideration would affect the
+editor. Rob saw a charge of dishonesty rise up and confront him, and he
+drew back from it. A moment afterwards he looked it in the face, and it
+receded. He took his pipe from his pocket.
+
+'This is not a smoking carriage,' gasped the little girl, so promptly
+that it almost seemed as if she had been waiting her opportunity ever
+since the train started. Rob looked at her. She seemed about eight, but
+her eye was merciless. He thrust his pipe back into its case, feeling
+cowed at last.
+
+The nurse, who had been looking at Rob and blushing when she caught his
+eye, got out with her charge at a side station, and he helped her rather
+awkwardly to alight. 'Don't mention it,' he said, in answer to her
+thanks.
+
+'Not a word; I'm not that kind,' she replied, so eagerly that he started
+back in alarm, to find the little girl looking suspiciously at him.
+
+As Rob stepped out of the train at King's Cross he realised sharply that
+he was alone in the world. He did not know where to go now, and his
+heart sank for a time as he paced the platform irresolutely, feeling
+that it was his last link to Silchester. He turned into the
+booking-office to consult a time-table, and noticed against the wall a
+railway map of London. For a long time he stood looking at it, and as he
+traced the river, the streets familiar to him by name, the districts and
+buildings which were household words to him, he felt that he must live
+in London somehow. He discovered Fleet Street in the map, and studied
+the best way of getting to it from King's Cross. Then grasping his stick
+firmly, he took possession of London as calmly as he could.
+
+Rob never found any difficulty afterwards in picking out the shabby
+eating-house in which he had his first meal in London. Gray's Inn Road
+remained to him always its most romantic street because he went down it
+first. He walked into the roar of London in Holborn, and never forgot
+the alley into which he retreated to discover if he had suddenly become
+deaf. He wondered when the crowd would pass. Years afterwards he turned
+into Fetter Lane, and suddenly there came back to his mind the thoughts
+that had held him as he went down it the day he arrived in London.
+
+A certain awe came upon Rob as he went down Fleet Street on the one side
+and up it on the other. He could not resist looking into the faces of
+the persons who passed him, and wondering if they edited the _Times_.
+The lean man who was in such a hurry that wherever he had to go he would
+soon be there, might be a man of letters whom Rob knew by heart, but
+perhaps he was only a broken journalist with his eye on half a crown.
+The mild-looking man whom Rob smiled at because, when he was half way
+across the street, he lost his head and was chased out of sight by half
+a dozen hansom cabs, was a war correspondent who had been so long in
+Africa that the perils of a London crossing unmanned him. The youth who
+was on his way home with a pork chop in his pocket edited a society
+journal. Rob did not recognise a distinguished poet in a little stout
+man who was looking pensively at a barrowful of walnuts, and he was
+mistaken in thinking that the bearded gentleman who held his head so
+high must be somebody in particular. Rob observed a pale young man
+gazing wistfully at him, and wondered if he was a thief or a sub-editor.
+He was merely an aspirant who had come to London that morning to make
+his fortune, and he took Rob for a leader-writer at the least. The
+offices, however, and even the public buildings, the shops, the
+narrowness of the streets, all disappointed Rob. The houses seemed
+squeezed together for economy of space, like a closed concertina.
+Nothing quite fulfilled his expectations but the big letter holes in the
+district postal offices. He had not been sufficiently long in London to
+feel its greatest charm, which has been expressed in many ways by poet,
+wit, business man, and philosopher, but comes to this, that it is the
+only city in the world in whose streets you can eat penny buns without
+people's turning round to look at you.
+
+In a few days Rob was part of London. His Silchester landlady had
+forwarded him his things, and Mr. Licquorish had washed his hands of
+him. The editor of the _Mirror's_ letter amounted to a lament that a man
+whom he had allowed to do two men's work for half a man's wages should
+have treated him thus. Mr. Licquorish, however, had conceived the idea
+of 'forcing' John Milton, and so saving a reporter, and he did not
+insist on Rob's returning. He expressed a hope that his ex-reporter
+would do well in London, and a fear, amounting to a conviction, that he
+would not. But he sent the three pounds due to him in wages, pointing
+out, justifiably enough, that, strictly speaking, Rob owed him a month's
+salary. Rob had not expected such liberality, and from that time always
+admitted that there must have been a heroic vein in Mr. Licquorish after
+all.
+
+Rob established himself in a little back room in Islington, so small
+that a fairly truthful journalist might have said of it, in an article,
+that you had to climb the table to reach the fireplace, and to lift out
+the easy-chair before you could get out at the door. The room was over a
+grocer's shop, whose window bore the announcement: 'Eggs, new laid, 1s.
+3d.; eggs, fresh, 1s. 2d.; eggs, warranted, 1s.; eggs, 10d.' A shop
+across the way hinted at the reputation of the neighbourhood in the
+polite placard, 'Trust in the Lord: every other person cash.'
+
+The only ornament Rob added to the room was the Christmas card in a
+frame. He placed this on his mantelpiece and looked at it frequently,
+but when he heard his landlady coming he slipped it back into his
+pocket. Yet he would have liked at times to have the courage to leave it
+there. Though he wanted to be a literary man he began his career in
+London with a little sense, for he wrote articles to editors instead of
+calling at the offices, and he had the good fortune to have no
+introductions. The only pressman who ever made anything by insisting on
+seeing the editor, was one--a Scotsman, no doubt--who got him alone and
+threatened to break his head if he did not find an opening for him. The
+editor saw that this was the sort of man who had made up his mind to get
+on, and yielded.
+
+During his first month in London Rob wrote thirty articles, and took
+them to the different offices in order to save the postage. There were
+many other men in the streets at night doing the same thing. He got
+fifteen articles back by return of post, and never saw the others again.
+But here was the stuff Rob was made of. The thirty having been rejected,
+he dined on bread-and-cheese and began the thirty-first. It was accepted
+by the _Minotaur_, a weekly paper. Rob drew a sigh of exultation as he
+got his first proof in London, and remembered that he had written the
+article in two hours. The payment, he understood, would be two pounds at
+least, and at the rate of two articles a day, working six days a week,
+this would mean over six hundred a year. Rob had another look at the
+Christmas card, and thought it smiled. Every man is a fool now and then.
+
+Except to his landlady, who thought that he dined out, Rob had not
+spoken to a soul since he arrived in London. To celebrate his first
+proof he resolved to call on Rorrison. He had not done so earlier
+because he thought that Rorrison would not be glad to see him. Though he
+had kept his disappointments to himself, however, he felt that he must
+remark casually to some one that he was writing for the _Minotaur_.
+
+Rorrison had chambers at the top of one of the Inns of Court, and as he
+had sported his oak, Rob ought not to have knocked. He knew no better,
+however, and Rorrison came grumbling to the door. He was a full-bodied
+man of middle age, with a noticeably heavy chin, and wore a long
+dressing-gown.
+
+'I'm Angus from Silchester,' Rob explained.
+
+Rorrison's countenance fell. His occupation largely consisted in
+avoiding literary young men, who, he knew, were thirsting to take him
+aside and ask him to get them sub-editorships.
+
+'I'm glad to see you,' he said gloomily; 'come in.'
+
+What Rob first noticed in the sitting-room was that it was all in
+shadow, except one corner, whose many colours dazzled the eye. Suspended
+over this part of the room on a gas bracket was a great Japanese
+umbrella without a handle. This formed an awning for a large cane chair
+and a tobacco-table, which also held a lamp, and Rorrison had been
+lolling on the chair looking at a Gladstone bag on the hearthrug until
+he felt that he was busy packing.
+
+'Mind the umbrella,' he said to his visitor.
+
+The next moment a little black hole that had been widening in the
+Japanese paper just above the lamp cracked and broke, and a tongue of
+flame swept up the umbrella. Rob sprang forward in horror, but Rorrison
+only sighed.
+
+'That makes the third this week,' he said, 'but let it blaze. I used to
+think they would set the place on fire, but somehow they don't do it.
+Don't give the thing the satisfaction of seeming to notice it.'
+
+The umbrella had been frizzled in a second, and its particles were
+already trembling through the room like flakes of snow.
+
+'You have just been in time to find me,' Rorrison said; 'I start
+to-morrow afternoon for Egypt in the special correspondent business.'
+
+'I envy you,' said Rob, and then told the manner of his coming to
+London.
+
+'It was a mad thing to do,' said Rorrison, looking at him not without
+approval, 'but the best journalists frequently begin in that way. I
+suppose you have been besieging the newspaper offices since you arrived;
+any result?'
+
+'I had a proof from the _Minotaur_ this evening,' said Rob.
+
+Rorrison blew some rings of smoke into the air and ran his finger
+through them. Then he turned proudly to Rob, and saw that Rob was
+looking proudly at him.
+
+'Ah, what did you say?' asked Rorrison.
+
+'The _Minotaur_ has accepted one of my things,' said Rob.
+
+Rorrison said 'Hum,' and then hesitated.
+
+'It is best that you should know the truth,' he said at last. 'No doubt
+you expect to be paid by the _Minotaur_, but I am afraid there is little
+hope of that--unless you dun them. A friend of mine sent them something
+lately, and Roper (the editor, you know) wrote asking him for more. He
+sent two or three other things, and then called at the office, expecting
+to be paid.'
+
+'Was he not?'
+
+'On the contrary,' said Rorrison, 'Roper asked him for the loan of five
+pounds.'
+
+Rob's face grew so long that even the hardened Rorrison tried to feel
+for him.
+
+'You need not let an experience that every one has to pass through
+dishearten you,' he said. 'There are only about a dozen papers in London
+that are worth writing for, but I can give you a good account of them.
+Not only do they pay handsomely, but the majority are open to
+contributions from any one. Don't you believe what one reads about
+newspaper rings. Every thing sent in is looked at, and if it is suitable
+any editor is glad to have it. Men fail to get a footing on the Press
+because--well, as a rule, because they are stupid.'
+
+'I am glad to hear you say that,' said Rob, 'and yet I had thirty
+articles rejected before the _Minotaur_ accepted that one.'
+
+'Yes, and you will have another thirty rejected if they are of the same
+kind. You beginners seem able to write nothing but your views on
+politics, and your reflections on art, and your theories of life, which
+you sometimes even think original. Editors won't have that because their
+readers don't want it. Every paper has its regular staff of
+leader-writers, and what is wanted from the outside is freshness. An
+editor tosses aside your column and a half about evolution, but is glad
+to have a paragraph saying that you saw Herbert Spencer the day before
+yesterday gazing solemnly for ten minutes in at a milliner's window.
+Fleet Street at this moment is simply running with men who want to air
+their views about things in general.'
+
+'I suppose so,' said Rob dolefully.
+
+'Yes, and each thinks himself as original as he is profound, though they
+have only to meet to discover that they repeat each other. The pity of
+it is, that all of them could get on to some extent if they would send
+in what is wanted. There is copy in every man you meet, and, as a
+journalist on this stair says, when you do meet him you feel inclined to
+tear it out of him and use it yourself.'
+
+'What sort of copy?' asked Rob.
+
+'They should write of the things they have seen. Newspaper readers have
+an insatiable appetite for knowing how that part of the world lives with
+which they are not familiar. They want to know how the Norwegians cook
+their dinners and build their houses, and ask each other in marriage.'
+
+'But I have never been out of Britain.'
+
+'Neither was Shakspeare. There are thousands of articles in Scotland
+yet. You must know a good deal about the Scottish weavers--well, there
+are articles in them. Describe the daily life of a gillie: "The Gillie
+at Home" is a promising title. Were you ever snowed up in your saw-mill?
+Whether you were or not, there is a seasonable subject for January.
+"Yule in a Scottish Village" also sounds well, and there is a safe
+article in a Highland gathering.'
+
+'These must have been done before, though,' said Rob.
+
+'Of course they have,' answered Rorrison; 'but do them in your own way:
+the public has no memory, and besides, new publics are always springing
+up.'
+
+'I am glad I came to see you,' said Rob, brightening considerably; 'I
+never thought of these things.'
+
+'Of course you need not confine yourself to them. Write on politics if
+you will, but don't merely say what you yourself think; rather tell, for
+instance, what is the political situation in the country parts known to
+you. That should be more interesting and valuable than your individual
+views. But I may tell you that, if you have the journalistic faculty,
+you will always be on the look-out for possible articles. The man on the
+stair I have mentioned to you would have had an article out of you
+before he had talked with you as long as I have done. You must have
+heard of Noble Simms?'
+
+'Yes, I know his novel,' said Rob; 'I should like immensely to meet
+him.'
+
+'I must leave you an introduction to him,' said Rorrison; 'he wakens
+most people up, though you would scarcely think it to look at him. You
+see this pipe here? Simms saw me mending it with sealing-wax one day,
+and two days afterwards there was an article about it in the _Scalping
+Knife_. When I went off for my holidays last summer I asked him to look
+in here occasionally and turn a new cheese which had been sent me from
+the country. Of course he forgot to do it, but I denounced him on my
+return for not keeping his solemn promise, so he revenged himself by
+publishing an article entitled "Rorrison's Oil-Painting." In this it was
+explained that just before Rorrison went off for a holiday he got a
+present of an oil-painting. Remembering when he had got to Paris that
+the painting, which was come to him wet from the easel, had been left
+lying on his table, he telegraphed to the writer to have it put away out
+of reach of dust and the cat. The writer promised to do so, but when
+Rorrison returned he found the picture lying just where he left it. He
+rushed off to his friend's room to upbraid him, and did it so
+effectually that the friend says in his article, "I will never do a good
+turn for Rorrison again!"'
+
+'But why,' asked Rob, 'did he turn the cheese into an oil-painting?'
+
+'Ah, there you have the journalistic instinct again. You see a cheese is
+too plebeian a thing to form the subject of an article in the _Scalping
+Knife_, so Simms made a painting of it. He has had my Chinese umbrella
+from several points of view in three different papers. When I play on
+his piano I put scraps of paper on the notes to guide me, and he made
+his three guineas out of that. Once I challenged him to write an article
+on a straw that was sticking to the sill of my window, and it was one of
+the most interesting things he ever did. Then there was the box of old
+clothes and other odds and ends that he promised to store for me when I
+changed my rooms. He sold the lot to a hawker for a pair of flower-pots,
+and wrote an article on the transaction. Subsequently he had another
+article on the flower-pots; and when I appeared to claim my belongings
+he got a third article out of that.'
+
+'I suppose he reads a great deal?' said Rob.
+
+'He seldom opens a book,' answered Rorrison; 'indeed, when he requires
+to consult a work of reference he goes to the Strand and does his
+reading at a bookstall. I don't think he was ever in the British
+Museum.'
+
+Rob laughed.
+
+'At the same time,' he said, 'I don't think Mr. Noble Simms could get
+any copy out of me.'
+
+Just then some one shuffled into the passage, and the door opened.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+MR. NOBLE SIMMS
+
+
+The new-comer was a young man with an impassive face and weary eyes,
+who, as he slouched in, described a parabola in the air with one of his
+feet, which was his way of keeping a burned slipper on. Rorrison
+introduced him to Rob as Mr. Noble Simms, after which Simms took himself
+into a corner of the room, like a man who has paid for his seat in a
+railway compartment and refuses to be drawn into conversation. He would
+have been a handsome man had he had a little more interest in himself.
+
+'I thought you told me you were going out to-night,' said Rorrison.
+
+'I meant to go,' Simms answered, 'but when I rang for my boots the
+housekeeper thought I asked for water, and brought it, so, rather than
+explain matters to her, I drank the water and remained indoors.'
+
+'I read your book lately, Mr. Simms,' Rob said, after he had helped
+himself to tobacco from Simms's pouch, 'Try my tobacco,' being the Press
+form of salutation.
+
+'You did not buy the second volume, did you?' asked Simms, with a show
+of interest, and Rob had to admit that he got the novel from a library.
+
+'Excuse my asking you,' Simms continued, in his painfully low voice; 'I
+had a special reason. You see I happen to know that, besides what went
+to the libraries, there were in all six copies of my book sold. My
+admirer bought two, and I myself bought three and two-thirds, so that
+only one volume remains to be accounted for. I like to think that the
+purchaser was a lady.'
+
+'But how did it come about,' inquired Rob, while Rorrison smoked on
+imperturbably, 'that the volumes were on sale singly?'
+
+'That was to tempt a public,' said Simms gravely, 'who would not take
+kindly to the three volumes together. It is a long story, though.'
+
+Here he paused, as if anxious to escape out of the conversation.
+
+'No blarney, Simms,' expostulated Rorrison. 'I forgot to tell you,
+Angus, that this man always means (when he happens to have a meaning)
+the reverse of what he says.'
+
+'Don't mind Rorrison,' said Simms to Rob. 'It was in this way. My great
+work of fiction did fairly well at the libraries, owing to a mistake
+Mudie made about the name. He ordered a number of copies under the
+impression that the book was by the popular novelist, Simmons, and when
+the mistake was found out he was too honourable to draw back. The
+surplus copies, however, would not sell at all. My publisher offered
+them as Saturday evening presents to his young men, but they always left
+them on their desks; so next he tried the second-hand book-shops, in the
+hope that people from the country would buy the three volumes because
+they looked so cheap at two shillings. However, even the label
+"Published at 31s. 6d.: offered for 2s.," was barren of results. I used
+to stand in an alley near one of these book-shops, and watch the people
+handling my novel.'
+
+'But no one made an offer for it?'
+
+'Not at two shillings, but when it came down to one-and-sixpence an
+elderly man with spectacles very nearly bought it. He was undecided
+between it and a Trigonometry, but in the end he went off with the
+Trigonometry. Then a young lady in grey and pink seemed interested in
+it. I watched her reading the bit about Lord John entering the
+drawing-room suddenly and finding Henry on his knees, and once I
+distinctly saw her smile.'
+
+'She might have bought the novel if only to see how it ended.'
+
+'Ah, I have always been of opinion that she would have done so, had she
+not most unfortunately, in her eagerness to learn what Henry said when
+he and Eleanor went into the conservatory, knocked a row of books over
+with her elbow. That frightened her, and she took to flight.'
+
+'Most unfortunate,' said Rob solemnly, though he was already beginning
+to understand Simms--as Simms was on the surface.
+
+'I had a still greater disappointment,' continued the author, 'a few
+days afterwards. By this time the book was marked "Very Amusing, 1s.,
+worth 1s. 6d."; and when I saw a pale-looking young man, who had been
+examining it, enter the shop, I thought the novel was as good as sold.
+My excitement was intense when a shopman came out for the three volumes
+and carried them inside, but I was puzzled on seeing the young gentleman
+depart, apparently without having made a purchase. Consider my feelings
+when the shopman replaced the three volumes on his shelf with the new
+label, "924 pp., 8d.; worth 1s."'
+
+'Surely it found a purchaser now?'
+
+'Alas, no. The only man who seemed to be attracted by it at eightpence
+turned out to be the author of _John Mordaunt's Christmas Box_
+("Thrilling! Published at 6s.: offered at 1s. 3d."), who was hanging
+about in the interests of his own work.'
+
+'Did it come down to "Sixpence, worth ninepence"?'
+
+'No; when I returned to the spot next day I found volumes One and Three
+in the "2d. any vol." box, and I carried them away myself. What became
+of volume Two I have never been able to discover. I rummaged the box for
+it in vain.'
+
+'As a matter of fact, Angus,' remarked Rorrison, 'the novel is now in
+its third edition.'
+
+'I always understood that it had done well,' said Rob.
+
+'The fourth time I asked for it at Mudie's,' said Simms, the latter half
+of whose sentences were sometimes scarcely audible, 'I inquired how it
+was doing, and was told that it had been already asked for three times.
+Curiously enough there is a general impression that it has been a great
+success, and for that I have to thank one man.'
+
+'The admirer of whom you spoke?'
+
+'Yes, my admirer, as I love to call him. I first heard of him as a
+business gentleman living at Shepherd's Bush, who spoke with rapture of
+my novel to any chance acquaintances he made on the tops of buses. Then
+my aunt told me that a young lady knew a stout man living at Shepherd's
+Bush who could talk of nothing but my book; and on inquiry at my
+publisher's I learnt that a gentleman answering to this description had
+bought two copies. I heard of my admirer from different quarters for the
+next month, until a great longing rose in me to see him, to clasp his
+hand, to ask what part of the book he liked best, at the least to walk
+up and down past his windows, feeling that two men who appreciated each
+other were only separated by a pane of glass.'
+
+'Did you ever discover who he was?'
+
+'I did. He lives at 42 Lavender Crescent, Shepherd's Bush, and his name
+is Henry Gilding.'
+
+'Well?' said Rob, seeing Simms pause as if this was all.
+
+'I am afraid, Mr. Angus,' the author murmured in reply, 'that you did
+not read the powerful and harrowing tale very carefully, or you would
+remember that my hero's name was also Henry Gilding.'
+
+'Well, but what of that?'
+
+'There is everything in that. It is what made the Shepherd's Bush
+gentleman my admirer for life. He considers it the strangest and most
+diverting thing in his experience, and every night, I believe, after
+dinner, his eldest daughter has to read out to him the passages in which
+the Henry Gildings are thickest. He chuckles over the extraordinary
+coincidence still. He could take that joke with him to the seaside for a
+month, and it would keep him in humour all the time.'
+
+'Have done, Simms, have done,' said Rorrison; 'Angus is one of us, or
+wants to be, at all events. The _Minotaur_ is printing one of his
+things, and I have been giving him some sage advice.'
+
+'Any man,' said Simms, 'will do well on the Press if he is stupid
+enough; even Rorrison has done well.'
+
+'I have just been telling him,' responded Rorrison, 'that the stupid men
+fail.'
+
+'I don't consider you a failure, Rorrison,' said Simms, in mild
+surprise. 'What stock-in-trade a literary hand requires, Mr. Angus, is a
+fire to dry his writing at, jam or honey with which to gum old stamps on
+to envelopes, and an antimacassar.'
+
+'An antimacassar?' Rob repeated.
+
+'Yes; you pluck the thread with which to sew your copy together out of
+the antimacassar. When my antimacassars are at the wash I have to take a
+holiday.'
+
+'Well, well, Simms,' said Rorrison, 'I like you best when you are
+taciturn.'
+
+'So do I,' said Simms.
+
+'You might give Angus some advice about the likeliest papers for which
+to write. London is new to him.'
+
+'The fact is, Mr. Angus,' said Simms, more seriously, 'that advice in
+such a matter is merely talk thrown away. If you have the journalistic
+instinct, which includes a determination not to be beaten, as well as an
+aptitude for selecting the proper subjects, you will by and by find an
+editor who believes in you. Many men of genuine literary ability have
+failed on the Press because they did not have that instinct, and they
+have attacked journalism in their books in consequence.'
+
+'I am not sure that I know what the journalistic instinct precisely is,'
+Rob said, 'and still less whether I possess it.'
+
+'Ah, just let me put you through your paces,' replied Simms. 'Suppose
+yourself up for an exam. in journalism, and that I am your examiner.
+Question One: "The house was soon on fire; much sympathy is expressed
+with the sufferers." Can you translate that into newspaper English?'
+
+'Let me see,' answered Rob, entering into the spirit of the examination.
+'How would this do: "In a moment the edifice was enveloped in shooting
+tongues of flame: the appalling catastrophe has plunged the whole street
+into the gloom of night"?'
+
+'Good. Question Two: A man hangs himself; what is the technical heading
+for this?'
+
+'Either "Shocking Occurrence" or "Rash Act."'
+
+'Question Three: "_Pabulum_," "_Cela va sans dire_," "_Par excellence_,"
+"_Ne plus ultra_." What are these? Are there any more of them?'
+
+'They are scholarship,' replied Rob, 'and there are two more, namely,
+"_tour de force_" and "_terra firma_."'
+
+'Question Four: A. (a soldier) dies at 6 P.M. with his back to the foe.
+B. (a philanthropist) dies at 1 A.M.: which of these, speaking
+technically, would you call a creditable death?'
+
+'The soldier's, because time was given to set it.'
+
+'Quite right. Question Five: Have you ever known a newspaper which did
+not have the largest circulation in its district, and was not the most
+influential advertising medium?'
+
+'Never.'
+
+'Question Six: Mr. Gladstone rises to speak in the House of Commons at 2
+A.M. What would be the sub-editor's probable remark on receiving the
+opening words of the speech, and how would he break the news to the
+editor? How would the editor be likely to take it?'
+
+'I prefer,' said Rob, 'not to answer that question.'
+
+'Well, Mr. Angus,' said Simms, tiring of the examination, 'you have
+passed with honours.'
+
+The conversation turned to Rorrison's coming work in Egypt, and by and
+by Simms rose to go.
+
+'Your stick, I suppose, Mr. Angus?' he said, taking Rob's thick staff
+from a corner.
+
+'Yes,' answered Rob, 'it has only a heavy knob, you see, for a handle,
+and a doctor once told me that if I continued to press so heavily on it
+I might suffer from some disease in the palm of the hand.'
+
+'I never heard of that,' said Simms, looking up for the first time since
+he entered the room. Then he added, 'You should get a stick like
+Rorrison's. It has a screw handle which he keeps loose, so that the
+slightest touch knocks it off. It is called the compliment-stick,
+because if Rorrison is in the company of ladies, he contrives to get
+them to hold it. This is in the hope that they will knock the handle
+off, when Rorrison bows and remarks exultingly that the stick is like
+its owner--when it came near them it lost its head. He has said that to
+fifteen ladies now, and has a great reputation for gallantry in
+consequence. Good-night.'
+
+'Well, he did not get any copy out of me,' said Rob.
+
+'Simms is a curious fellow,' Rorrison answered. 'Though you might not
+expect it, he has written some of the most pathetic things I ever read,
+but he wears his heart out of sight. Despite what he says, too, he is
+very jealous for the Press's good name. He seemed to take to you, so I
+should not wonder though he were to look you up here some night.'
+
+'Here? How do you mean?'
+
+'Why, this. I shall probably be away from London for some months, and as
+I must keep on my rooms, I don't see why you should not occupy them. The
+furniture is mine, and you would be rent free, except that the
+housekeeper expects a few shillings a week for looking after things.
+What do you think?'
+
+Rob could have only one thought as he compared these comfortable
+chambers to his own bare room, and as Rorrison, who seemed to have taken
+a warm liking to him, pressed the point, arguing that as the rent must
+be paid at any rate the chambers were better occupied, he at last
+consented, on the understanding that they could come to some arrangement
+on Rorrison's return.
+
+'It will please my father, too,' Rorrison added, 'to know that you are
+here. I always remember that had it not been for him you might never
+have gone on to the Press.'
+
+They sat so late talking this matter over that Rob eventually stayed all
+night, Rorrison having in his bedroom a couch which many journalists had
+slept on.
+
+Next morning the paper whose nickname is the _Scalping Knife_ was served
+up with breakfast, and the first thing Rob saw in it was a leaderette
+about a disease generated in the palm of the hand by walking-sticks with
+heavy knobs for handles.
+
+'I told you,' said Rorrison, 'that Simms would make his half-guinea out
+of you.'
+
+When Rorrison went down to Simms's chambers later in the day, however,
+to say that he was leaving Rob tenant of his rooms, he was laughing at
+something else.
+
+'All during breakfast,' he said to Simms, 'I noticed that Angus was
+preoccupied, and anxious to say something that he did not like to say.
+At last he blurted it out with a white face, and what do you think it
+was?'
+
+Simms shook his head.
+
+'Well,' said Rorrison, 'it was this. He has been accustomed to go down
+on his knees every night to say his prayers--as we used to do at school,
+but when he saw that I did not do it he did not like to do it either. I
+believe it troubled him all night, for he looked haggard when he rose.'
+
+'He told you this?'
+
+'Yes; he said he felt ashamed of himself,' said Rorrison, smiling. 'You
+must remember he is country-bred.'
+
+'You were a good fellow, Rorrison,' said Simms gravely, 'to put him into
+your rooms, but I don't see what you are laughing at.'
+
+'Why,' said Rorrison, taken aback, I thought you would see it in the
+same light.'
+
+'Not I,' said Simms; 'but let me tell you this, I shall do what I can
+for him. I like your Angus.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE WIGWAM
+
+
+Rob had a tussle for it, but he managed to live down his first winter in
+London, and May-day saw him sufficiently prosperous and brazen to be
+able to go into restaurants and shout out 'Waiter.' After that nothing
+frightened him but barmaids.
+
+For a time his chief struggle had been with his appetite, which tortured
+him when he went out in the afternoons. He wanted to dine out of a paper
+bag, but his legs were reluctant to carry him past a grill-room. At last
+a compromise was agreed upon. If he got a proof over night, he dined in
+state next day; if it was only his manuscript that was returned to him,
+he thought of dining later in the week. For a long time his appetite had
+the worse of it. It was then that he became so great an authority on
+penny buns. His striking appearance always brought the saleswomen to him
+promptly, and sometimes he blushed, and often he glared, as he gave his
+order. When they smiled he changed his shop.
+
+There was one terrible month when he wrote from morning to night and did
+not make sixpence. He lived by selling his books, half a dozen at a
+time. Even on the last day of that black month he did not despair. When
+he wound up his watch at nights before going hungry to bed, he never
+remembered that it could be pawned. The very idea of entering a
+pawnshop never struck him. Many a time when his rejected articles came
+back he shook his fist in imagination at all the editors in London, and
+saw himself twisting their necks one by one. To think of a different
+death for each of them exercised his imagination and calmed his passion,
+and he wondered whether the murder of an editor was an indictable
+offence. When he did not have ten shillings, 'I will get on' cried Rob
+to himself. 'I'm not going to be starved out of a big town like this.
+I'll make my mark yet. Yes,' he roared, while the housekeeper at the
+other side of the door quaked to hear him, 'I will get on; I'm not going
+to be beaten.' He was waving his arms fiercely, when the housekeeper
+knocked. 'Come in,' said Rob, subsiding meekly into his chair. Before
+company he seemed to be without passion, but they should have seen him
+when he was alone. One night he dreamt that he saw all the editors in
+London being conveyed (in a row) to the hospital on stretchers. A
+gratified smile lit up his face as he slept, and his arm, going out
+suddenly to tip one of the stretchers over, hit against a chair. Rob
+jumped out of bed and kicked the chair round the room. By and by, when
+his articles were occasionally used, he told his proofs that the editors
+were capital fellows.
+
+The only acquaintances he made were with journalists who came to his
+chambers to see Rorrison, who was now in India. They seemed just as
+pleased to see Rob, and a few of them, who spoke largely of their
+connection with literature, borrowed five shillings from him. To his
+disappointment Noble Simms did not call, though he sometimes sent up
+notes to Rob suggesting likely articles, and the proper papers to which
+to send them. 'I would gladly say "Use my name,"' Simms wrote, 'but it
+is the glory of anonymous journalism that names are nothing and good
+stuff everything. I assure you that on the Press it is the men who have
+it in them that succeed, and the best of them become the editors.' He
+advised Rob to go to the annual supper given by a philanthropic body to
+discharged criminals and write an account of the proceedings; and told
+him that when anything remarkable happened in London he should at once
+do an article (in the British Museum) on the times the same thing had
+happened before. 'Don't neglect eclipses,' he said, 'nor heavy scoring
+at cricket matches any more than what look like signs of the times, and
+always try to be first in the field.' He recommended Rob to gather
+statistics of all kinds, from the number of grandchildren the crowned
+heads of Europe had to the jockeys who had ridden the Derby winner more
+than once, and suggested the collecting of anecdotes about celebrities,
+which everybody would want to read if his celebrities chanced to die, as
+they must do some day; and he assured him that there was a public who
+liked to be told every year what the poets had said about May. Rob was
+advised never to let a historic house disappear from London without
+compiling an article about its associations, and to be ready to run
+after the fire brigade. He was told that an article on flagstone artists
+could be made interesting. 'But always be sure of your facts,' Simms
+said. 'Write your articles over again and again, avoid fine writing as
+much as dishonest writing, and never spoil a leaderette by drawing it
+out into a leader. By and by you may be able to choose the kind of
+subject that interests yourself, but at present put your best work into
+what experienced editors believe interests the general public.'
+
+Rob found these suggestions valuable, and often thought, as he passed
+Simms's door, of going in to thank him, but he had an uncomfortable
+feeling that Simms did not want him. Of course Rob was wrong. Simms had
+feared at first to saddle himself with a man who might prove incapable,
+and besides, he generally liked those persons best whom he saw least
+frequently.
+
+For the great part of the spring Simms was out of town; but one day
+after his return he met Rob on the stair, and took him into his
+chambers. The sitting-room had been originally furnished with newspaper
+articles; Simms, in his younger days, when he wanted a new chair or an
+etching having written an article to pay for it, and then pasted the
+article on the back. He had paid a series on wild birds for his piano,
+and at one time leaderettes had even been found in the inside of his
+hats. Odd books and magazines lay about his table, but they would not in
+all have filled a library shelf; and there were no newspapers visible.
+The blank wall opposite the fireplace showed in dust that a large
+picture had recently hung there. It was an oil-painting which a month
+earlier had given way in the cord and fallen behind the piano, where
+Simms was letting it lie.
+
+'I wonder,' said Rob, who had heard from many quarters of Simms's
+reputation, 'that you are content to put your best work into
+newspapers.'
+
+'Ah,' answered Simms, 'I was ambitious once, but, as I told you, the
+grand book was a failure. Nowadays I gratify myself with the reflection
+that I am not stupid enough ever to be a great man.'
+
+'I wish you would begin something really big,' said Rob earnestly.
+
+'I feel safer,' replied Simms, 'finishing something really little.'
+
+He turned the talk to Rob's affairs as if his own wearied him, and,
+after hesitating, offered to 'place' a political article by Rob with the
+editor of the _Morning Wire_.
+
+'I don't say he'll use it, though,' he added.
+
+This was so much the work Rob hungered for that he could have run
+upstairs and begun it at once.
+
+'Why, you surely don't work on Saturday nights?' said his host, who was
+putting on an overcoat.
+
+'Yes,' said Rob, 'there is nothing else to do. I know no one well enough
+to go to him. Of course I do nothing on the Sab--I mean on Sundays.'
+
+'No? Then how do you pass your Sundays?'
+
+'I go to church, and take a long walk, or read.'
+
+'And you never break this principle--when a capital idea for an article
+strikes you on Sunday evening, for instance?'
+
+'Well,' said Rob, 'when that happens I wait until twelve o'clock
+strikes, and then begin.'
+
+Perceiving nothing curious in this, Rob did not look up to see Simms's
+mouth twitching.
+
+'On those occasions,' asked Simms, 'when you are waiting for twelve
+o'clock, does the evening not seem to pass very slowly?'
+
+Then Rob blushed.
+
+'At all events, come with me to-night,' said Simms, 'to my club. I am
+going now to the Wigwam, and we may meet men there worth your knowing.'
+
+The Wigwam is one of the best known literary clubs in London, and as
+they rattled to it in a hansom, the driver of which was the broken son
+of a peer, Rob remarked that its fame had even travelled to his
+saw-mill.
+
+'It has such a name,' said Simms in reply, 'that I feel sorry for any
+one who is taken to it for the first time. The best way to admire the
+Wigwam is not to go to it.'
+
+'I always thought it was considered the pleasantest club in London,' Rob
+said.
+
+'So it is,' said Simms, who was a member of half a dozen; 'most of the
+others are only meant for sitting in on padded chairs and calling out
+"sh-sh" when any other body speaks.'
+
+At the Wigwam there is a special dinner every Saturday evening, but it
+was over before Simms and Rob arrived, and the members were crowding
+into the room where great poets have sat beating time with
+churchwardens, while great artists or coming Cabinet ministers sang
+songs that were not of the drawing-room. A popular novelist, on whom Rob
+gazed with a veneration that did not spread to his companion's face, was
+in the chair when they entered, and the room was full of literary men,
+actors, and artists, of whom, though many were noted, many were also
+needy. Here was an actor who had separated from his wife because her
+notices were better than his; and another gentleman of the same
+profession took Rob aside to say that he was the greatest tragedian on
+earth if he could only get a chance. Rob did not know what to reply
+when the eminent cartoonist sitting next him, whom he had looked up to
+for half a dozen years, told him, by way of opening a conversation, that
+he had just pawned his watch. They seemed so pleased with poverty that
+they made as much of a little of it as they could, and the wisest
+conclusion Rob came to that night was not to take them too seriously. It
+was, however, a novel world to find oneself in all of a sudden, one in
+which everybody was a wit at his own expense. Even Simms, who always
+upheld the Press when any outsider ran it down, sang with applause some
+verses whose point lay in their being directed against himself. They
+began--
+
+    When clever pressmen write this way,
+    'As Mr. J. A. Froude would say,'
+    Is it because they think he would,
+    And have they read a line of Froude?
+    Or is it only that they fear
+    The comment they have made is queer,
+    And that they either must erase it,
+    Or say it's Mr. Froude who says it?
+
+Every one abandoned himself to the humour of the evening, and as song
+followed song, or was wedged between entertainments of other kinds, the
+room filled with smoke until it resembled London in a fog.
+
+By and by a sallow-faced man mounted a table to show the company how to
+perform a remarkable trick with three hats. He got his hats from the
+company, and having looked at them thoughtfully for some minutes, said
+that he had forgotten the way.
+
+'That,' said Simms, mentioning a well-known journalist, 'is K----. He
+can never work unless his pockets are empty, and he would not be
+looking so doleful at present if he was not pretty well off. He goes
+from room to room in the house he lodges in, according to the state of
+his finances, and when you call on him you have to ask at the door which
+floor he is on to-day. One week you find him in the drawing-room, the
+next in the garret.'
+
+A stouter and brighter man followed the hat entertainment with a song,
+which he said was considered by some of his friends a recitation.
+
+'There was a time,' said Simms, who was held a terrible person by those
+who took him literally, 'when that was the saddest man I knew. He was so
+sad that the doctors feared he would die of it. It all came of his
+writing for _Punch_.'
+
+'How did they treat him?' Rob asked.
+
+'Oh, they quite gave him up, and he was wasting away visibly, when a
+second-rate provincial journal appointed him its London correspondent,
+and saved his life.'
+
+'Then he was sad,' asked Rob, 'because he was out of work?'
+
+'On the contrary,' said Simms gravely, 'he was always one of the
+successful men, but he could not laugh.'
+
+'And he laughed when he became a London correspondent?'
+
+'Yes; that restored his sense of humour. But listen to this song; he is
+a countryman of yours who sings it.'
+
+A man, who looked as if he had been cut out of a granite block, and who
+at the end of each verse thrust his pipe back into his mouth, sang in a
+broad accent, that made Rob want to go nearer him, some verses about an
+old university--
+
+    'Take off the stranger's hat!'--The shout
+      We raised in fifty-nine
+    Assails my ears, with careless flout,
+      And now the hat is mine.
+    It seems a day since I was here,
+      A student slim and hearty,
+    And see, the boys around me cheer,
+      'The ancient-looking party!'
+
+    Rough horseplay did not pass for wit
+      When Rae and Mill were there;
+    I see a lad from Oxford sit
+      In Blackie's famous chair.
+    And Rae, of all our men the one
+      We most admired in quad
+    (I had this years ago), has gone
+      Completely to the bad.
+
+    In our debates the moral Mill
+      Had infinite address,
+    Alas! since then he's robbed a till,
+      And now he's on the press.
+    And Tommy Robb, the ploughman's son,
+      Whom all his fellows slighted,
+    From Rae and Mill the prize has won,
+      For Tommy's to be knighted.
+
+    A lanky loon is in the seat
+      Filled once by manse-bred Sheen,
+    Who did not care to mix with Peate,
+      A bleacher who had been.
+    But watch the whirligig of time,
+      Brave Peate became a preacher,
+    His name is known in every clime,
+      And Sheen is now the bleacher.
+
+    McMillan, who the medals carried,
+      Is now a judge, 'tis said,
+    And curly-headed Smith is married,
+      And Williamson is dead.
+    Old Phil and I who shared our books
+      Now very seldom meet,
+    And when we do, with frowning looks
+      We pass by in the street.
+
+    The college rings with student slang
+      As in the days of yore,
+    The self-same notice boards still hang
+      Upon the class-room door:
+    An essay (I expected that)
+      On Burns this week, or Locke,
+    'A theory of creation' at
+      Precisely seven o'clock.
+
+    There's none here now who knows my name,
+      My place is far away,
+    And yet the college is the same,
+      Not older by a day.
+    But curious looks are cast at me,
+      Ah! herein lies the change,
+    All else is as it used to be,
+      And I alone am strange!
+
+'Now, you could never guess,' Simms said to Rob, 'what profession our
+singer belongs to.'
+
+'He looks more like a writer than an artist,' said Rob, who had felt the
+song more than the singer did.
+
+'Well, he is more an artist than a writer, though, strictly speaking, he
+is neither. To that man is the honour of having created a profession. He
+furnishes rooms for interviews.'
+
+'I don't quite understand,' said Rob.
+
+'It is in this way,' Simms explained. 'Interviews in this country are
+of recent growth, but it has been already discovered that what the
+public want to read is not so much a celebrity's views on any topic as a
+description of his library, his dressing-gown, or his gifts from the
+king of Kashabahoo. Many of the eminent ones, however, are very
+uninteresting in private life, and have no curiosities to show their
+interviewer worth writing about, so your countryman has started a
+profession of providing curiosities suitable for celebrities at from
+five pounds upwards, each article, of course, having a guaranteed story
+attached to it. The editor, you observe, intimates his wish to include
+the distinguished person in his galaxy of "Men of the Moment," and then
+the notability drops a line to our friend saying that he wants a few of
+his rooms arranged for an interview. Your countryman sends the goods,
+arranges them effectively, and puts the celebrity up to the
+reminiscences he is to tell about each.'
+
+'I suppose,' said Rob, with a light in his eye, 'that the interviewer is
+as much taken in by this as--well, say, as I have been by you?'
+
+'To the same extent,' admitted Simms solemnly. 'Of course he is not
+aware that before the interview appears the interesting relics have all
+been packed up and taken back to our Scottish friend's show-rooms.'
+
+The distinguished novelist in the chair told Rob (without having been
+introduced to him) that his books were beggaring his publishers.
+
+'What I make my living off,' he said, 'is the penny dreadful, complete
+in one number. I manufacture two a week without hindrance to other
+employment, and could make it three if I did not have a weak wrist.'
+
+It was thus that every one talked to Rob, who, because he took a joke
+without changing countenance, was considered obtuse. He congratulated
+one man on his article on chaffinches in the _Evening Firebrand_, and
+the writer said he had discovered, since the paper appeared, that the
+birds he described were really linnets. Another man was introduced to
+Rob as the writer of _In Memoriam_.
+
+'No,' said the gentleman himself, on seeing Rob start, 'my name is not
+Tennyson. It is, indeed, Murphy. Tennyson and the other fellows, who are
+ambitious of literary fame, pay me so much a page for poems to which
+they put their names.'
+
+At this point the applause became so deafening that Simms and Rob, who
+had been on their way to another room, turned back. An aged man, with a
+magnificent head, was on his feet to describe his first meeting with
+Carlyle.
+
+'Who is it?' asked Rob, and Simms mentioned the name of a celebrity only
+a little less renowned than Carlyle himself. To Rob it had been one of
+the glories of London that in the streets he sometimes came suddenly
+upon world-renowned men, but he now looked upon this eminent scientist
+for the first time. The celebrity was there as a visitor, for the Wigwam
+cannot boast quite such famous members as he.
+
+The septuagenarian began his story well. He described the approach to
+Craigenputtock on a warm summer afternoon, and the emotions that laid
+hold of him as, from a distance, he observed the sage seated astride a
+low dyke, flinging stones into the duck-pond. The pedestrian announced
+his name and the pleasure with which he at last stood face to face with
+the greatest writer of the day; and then the genial author of _Sartor
+Resartus_, annoyed at being disturbed, jumped off the dyke and chased
+his visitor round and round the duck-pond. The celebrity had got thus
+far in his reminiscence when he suddenly stammered, bit his lip as if
+enraged at something, and then trembled so much that he had to be led
+back to his seat.
+
+'He must be ill,' whispered Rob to Simms.
+
+'It isn't that,' answered Simms; 'I fancy he must have caught sight of
+Wingfield.'
+
+Rob's companion pointed to a melancholy-looking man in a seedy coat, who
+was sitting alone glaring at the celebrity.
+
+'Who is he?' asked Rob.
+
+'He is the great man's literary executor,' Simms replied: 'come along
+with me and hearken to his sad tale; he is never loth to tell it.'
+
+They crossed over to Wingfield, who received them dejectedly.
+
+'This is not a matter I care to speak of, Mr. Angus,' said the sorrowful
+man, who spoke of it, however, as frequently as he could find a
+listener. 'It is now seven years since that gentleman'--pointing angrily
+at the celebrity, who glared in reply--'appointed me his literary
+executor. At the time I thought it a splendid appointment, and by the
+end of two years I had all his remains carefully edited and his
+biography ready for the Press. He was an invalid at that time, supposed
+to be breaking up fast; yet look at him now.'
+
+'He is quite vigorous in appearance now,' said Rob.
+
+'Oh, I've given up hope,' continued the sad man dolefully.
+
+'Still,' remarked Simms, 'I don't know that you could expect him to die
+just for your sake. I only venture that as an opinion, of course.'
+
+'I don't ask that of him,' responded Wingfield. 'I'm not blaming him in
+any way; all I say is that he has spoilt my life. Here have I been
+waiting, waiting for five years, and I seem farther from publication
+than ever.'
+
+'It is hard on you,' said Simms.
+
+'But why did he break down in his story,' asked Rob, 'when he saw you?'
+
+'Oh, the man has some sense of decency left, I suppose, and knows that
+he has ruined my career.'
+
+'Is the Carlylean reminiscence taken from the biography?' inquired
+Simms.
+
+'That is the sore point,' answered Wingfield sullenly. 'He used to shun
+society, but now he goes to clubs, banquets, and "At Homes," and tells
+the choice things in the memoir at every one of them. The book will
+scarcely be worth printing now.'
+
+'I dare say he feels sorry for you,' said Simms, 'and sees that he has
+placed you in a false position.'
+
+'He does in a way,' replied the literary executor, 'and yet I irritate
+him. When he was ill last December I called to ask for him every day,
+but he mistook my motives; and now he is frightened to be left alone
+with me.'
+
+'It is a sad business,' said Simms, 'but we all have our trials.'
+
+'I would try to bear up better,' said the sad man, 'if I got more
+sympathy.'
+
+It was very late when Simms and Rob left the Wigwam, yet they were
+amongst the first to go.
+
+'When does the club close?' Rob asked, as they got into the fresh air.
+
+'No one knows,' answered Simms wearily, 'but I believe the last man to
+go takes in the morning's milk.'
+
+In the weeks that followed Rob worked hard at political articles for the
+_Wire_, and at last began to feel that he was making some headway. He
+had not the fatal facility for scribbling that distinguishes some
+journalists, but he had felt life before he took to writing. His style
+was forcible if not superfine, and he had the faculty that makes a
+journalist, of only seeing things from one point of view. The successful
+political writer is blind in one eye.
+
+Though one in three of Rob's articles was now used, the editor of the
+_Wire_ did not write to say that he liked them, and Rob never heard any
+one mention them. Even Simms would not read them, but then Simms never
+read any paper. He got his news from the placards, and bought the
+_Scalping Knife_, not to read his own articles, but to measure them and
+calculate how much he would get for them. Then he dropped them into the
+gutter.
+
+Some weeks had passed without Rob's seeing Simms, when one day he got a
+letter that made him walk round and round his table like a circus horse.
+It was from the editor of the _Wire_, asking him to be in readiness to
+come to the office any evening he might be wanted to write. This looked
+like a step toward an appointment on the staff if he gave satisfaction
+(a proviso which he took complacently), and Rob's chest expanded, till
+the room seemed quite small. He pictured Thrums again. He jumped to Mary
+Abinger, and then he distinctly saw himself in the editorial chair of
+the _Times_. He was lying back in it, smoking a cigar, and giving a
+Cabinet minister five minutes.
+
+Nearly six months had passed since Rob saw Miss Abinger--a long time for
+a young man to remain in love with the same person. Of late Rob had been
+less given to dreaming than may be expected of a man who classifies the
+other sex into one particular lady and others, but Mary was coming to
+London in the early summer, and when he thought of summer he meant Mary.
+Rob was oftener in Piccadilly in May than he had been during the
+previous four months, and he was always looking for somebody. It was the
+third of June, a day to be remembered in his life, that he heard from
+the editor of the _Wire_. At five o'clock he looked upon that as what
+made it a day of days, but he had changed his mind by a quarter past.
+
+Rob had a silk hat now, and he thrust it on his head, meaning to run
+downstairs to tell Simms of his good fortune. He was in the happy frame
+of mind that makes a man walk round improbabilities, and for the first
+time since he came to London he felt confident of the future, without
+becoming despondent immediately afterwards. The future, like the summer,
+was an allegory for Miss Abinger. For the moment Rob's heart filled with
+compassion for Simms. The one thing our minds will not do is leave our
+neighbours alone, and Rob had some time before reached the conclusion
+that Simms's nature had been twisted by a disappointment in love. There
+was nothing else that could account for his fits of silence, his
+indifference to the future. He was known to have given the coat off his
+back to some miserable creature in the street, and to have been annoyed
+when he discovered that a friend saw him do it. Though Simms's walls
+were covered with engravings, Rob remembered all at once that there was
+not a female figure in one of them.
+
+To sympathise with others in a love affair is delightful to every one
+who feels that he is all right himself. Rob went down to Simms's rooms
+with a joyous step and a light heart. The outer door stood ajar, and as
+he pushed it open he heard a voice that turned his face white. From
+where he stood paralysed he saw through the dark passage into the
+sitting-room. Mary Abinger was standing before the fireplace, and as
+Rob's arm fell from the door, Simms bent forward and kissed her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+ROB IS STRUCK DOWN
+
+
+Rob turned from Simms's door and went quietly downstairs, looking to the
+beadle, who gave him a good-evening at the mouth of the inn, like a man
+going quietly to his work. He could not keep his thoughts. They fell
+about him in sparks, raised by a wheel whirling so fast that it seemed
+motionless.
+
+Sleep-walkers seldom come to damage until they awake; and Rob sped on,
+taking crossings without a halt; deaf to the shouts of cabmen, blind to
+their gesticulations. When you have done Oxford Circus you can do
+anything; but he was not even brought to himself there, though it is all
+savage lands in twenty square yards. For a time he saw nothing but that
+scene in Simms's chambers, which had been photographed on his brain. The
+light of his life had suddenly been turned out, leaving him only the
+last thing he saw to think about.
+
+By and by he was walking more slowly, laughing at himself. Since he met
+Mary Abinger she had lived so much in his mind that he had not dared to
+think of losing her. He had only given himself fits of despondency for
+the pleasure of dispelling them. Now all at once he saw without
+prejudice the Rob Angus who had made up his mind to carry off this
+prize, and he cut such a poor figure that he smiled grimly at it. He
+realised as a humorous conception that this uncouth young man who was
+himself must have fancied that he was, on the whole, less unworthy of
+Miss Abinger than were most of the young men she was likely to meet.
+With the exaggerated humility that comes occasionally to men in his
+condition, without, however, feeling sufficiently at home to remain
+long, he felt that there was everything in Simms a girl could find
+lovable, and nothing in himself. He was so terribly open that any one
+could understand him, while Simms was such an enigma as a girl would
+love to read. His own clumsiness contrasted as disastrously with Simms's
+grace of manner as his blunt talk compared with Simms's wit. Not being
+able to see himself with the eyes of others, Rob noted only one thing in
+his favour, his fight forward; which they, knowing, for instance, that
+he was better to look at than most men, would have considered his chief
+drawback. Rob in his calmer moments had perhaps as high an opinion of
+his capacity as the circumstances warranted, but he never knew that a
+good many ladies felt his presence when he passed them.
+
+Most men are hero and villain several times in a day, but Rob went
+through the whole gamut of sensations in half an hour, hating himself
+the one moment for what seemed another's fault the next, fancying now
+that he was blessing the union of Mary with the man she cared for, and,
+again, that he had Simms by the throat. He fled from the fleeting form
+of woman, and ran after it.
+
+Simms had deceived him, had never even mentioned Silchester, had laughed
+at the awakening that was coming to him. All these months they had been
+waiting for Mary Abinger together, and Simms had not said that when she
+came it would be to him. Then Rob saw what a foolish race these thoughts
+ran in his brain, remembering that he had only seen Simms twice for more
+than a moment, and that he himself had never talked of Silchester. He
+scorned his own want of generosity, and recalled his solicitude for
+Simms's welfare an hour before.
+
+Rob saw his whole future life lying before him. The broken-looking man
+with the sad face aged before his time, who walked alone up Fleet
+Street, was Rob Angus, who had come to London to be happy. Simms would
+ask him sometimes to his house to see her, but it was better that he
+should not go. She would understand why, if her husband did not. Her
+husband! Rob could not gulp down the lump in his throat. He rushed on
+again, with nothing before him but that picture of Simms kissing her.
+
+Simms was not worthy of her. Why had he always seemed an unhappy,
+disappointed man if the one thing in the world worth striving for was
+his? Rob stopped abruptly in the street with the sudden thought, Was it
+possible that she did not care for Simms? Could that scene have had any
+other meaning? He had once heard Simms himself say that you never knew
+what a woman meant by anything until she told you, and probably not even
+then. But he saw again the love in her eyes as she looked up into
+Simms's face. All through his life he would carry that look with him.
+
+They took no distinct shape, but wild ways of ending his misery coursed
+through his brain, and he looked on calmly at his own funeral. A
+terrible stolidity seized him, and he conceived himself a monster from
+whom the capacity to sympathise had gone. Children saw his face and fled
+from him.
+
+He had left England far behind, and dwelt now among wild tribes who had
+not before looked upon a white face. Their sick came to him for
+miracles, and he either cured them or told them to begone. He was not
+sure whether he was a fiend or a missionary.
+
+Then something remarkable happened, which showed that Rob had not
+mistaken his profession. He saw himself in the editorial chair that he
+had so often coveted, and Mary Abinger, too, was in the room. Always
+previously when she had come between him and the paper he had been
+forced to lay down his pen, but now he wrote on and on, and she seemed
+to help him. He was describing the scene that he had witnessed in
+Simms's chambers, describing it so vividly that he heard the great
+public discussing his article as if it were an Academy picture. His
+passion had subsided, and the best words formed slowly in his brain. He
+was hesitating about the most fitting title, when some one struck
+against him, and as he drew his arm over his eyes he knew with horror
+that he had been turning Mary Abinger into copy.
+
+For the last time that night Rob dreamt again, and now it was such a
+fine picture he drew that he looked upon it with sad complacency. Many
+years had passed. He was now rich and famous. He passed through the
+wynds of Thrums, and the Auld Lichts turned out to gaze at him. He saw
+himself signing cheques for all kinds of charitable objects, and
+appearing in the subscription lists, with a grand disregard for glory
+that is not common to philanthropists, as X. Y. Z. or 'A Wellwisher.'
+His walls were lined with books written by himself, and Mary Abinger
+(who had not changed in the least with the years) read them proudly,
+knowing that they were all written for her. (Simms somehow had not
+fulfilled his promise.) The papers were full of his speech in the House
+of Commons the night before, and he had declined a seat in the Cabinet
+from conscientious motives. His imagination might soon have landed him
+master in the Mansion House, had it not deserted him when he had most
+need of it. He fell from his balloon like a stone. Before him he saw the
+blank years that had to be traversed without any Mary Abinger, and
+despair filled his soul. All the horrible meaning of the scene he had
+fled from came to him like a rush of blood to the head, and he stood
+with it, glaring at it, in the middle of a roaring street. Three hansoms
+shaved him by an inch, and the fourth knocked him senseless.
+
+An hour later Simms was lolling in his chambers smoking, his chair
+tilted back until another inch would have sent him over it. His gas had
+been blazing all day because he had no blotting-paper, and the blinds
+were nicely pulled down because Mary Abinger and Nell were there to do
+it. They were sitting on each side of him, and Nell had on a round cap,
+about which Simms subsequently wrote an article. Mary's hat was larger
+and turned up at one side; the fashion which arose through a carriage
+wheel's happening to pass over the hat of a leader of fashion and make
+it perfectly lovely. Beyond the hats one does not care to venture, but
+out of fairness to Mary and Nell it should be said that there were no
+shiny little beads on their dresses.
+
+They had put on their hats to go, and then they had sat down again to
+tell their host a great many things that they had told him already. Even
+Mary, who was perfect in a general sort of way, took a considerable time
+to tell a story, and expected it to have more point when it ended than
+was sometimes the case. Simms, with his eyes half closed, let the
+laughter ripple over his head, and drowsily heard the details of their
+journey from Silchester afresh. Mary had come up with the Merediths on
+the previous day, and they were now staying at the Langham Hotel. They
+would only be in town for a few weeks; 'just to oblige the season,' Nell
+said, for she had inveigled her father into taking a house-boat on the
+Thames, and was certain it would prove delightful. Mary was to accompany
+them there too, having first done her duty to society, and Colonel
+Abinger was setting off shortly for the Continent. In the middle of her
+prattle, Nell distinctly saw Simms's head nod, as if it was loose in its
+socket. She made a mournful grimace.
+
+Simms sat up.
+
+'Your voices did it,' he explained, unabashed. 'They are as soothing to
+the jaded journalist as the streams that murmur through the fields in
+June.'
+
+'Cigars are making you stupid, Dick,' said Mary; 'I do wonder why men
+smoke.'
+
+'I have often asked myself that question,' thoughtfully answered Simms,
+whom it is time to call by his real name of Dick Abinger. 'I know some
+men who smoke because they might get sick otherwise when in the company
+of smokers. Others smoke because they began to do so at school, and are
+now afraid to leave off. A great many men smoke for philanthropic
+motives, smoking enabling them to work harder, and so being for their
+family's good. At picnics men smoke because it is the only way to keep
+the midges off the ladies. Smoking keeps you cool in summer and warm in
+winter, and is an excellent disinfectant. There are even said to be men
+who admit that they smoke because they like it, but for my own part I
+fancy I smoke because I forget not to do so.'
+
+'Silly reasons,' said Nell. If there was one possible improvement she
+could conceive in Dick it was that he might make his jests a little
+easier.
+
+'It is revealing no secret,' murmured Abinger in reply, 'to say that
+drowning men clutch at straws.'
+
+Mary rose to go once more, and sat down again, for she had remembered
+something else.
+
+'Do you know, Dick,' she said, 'that your two names are a great
+nuisance. On our way to London yesterday there was an acquaintance of
+Mr. Meredith's in the carriage, and he told us he knew Noble Simms
+well.'
+
+'Yes,' said Nell, 'and that this Noble Simms was an old gentleman who
+had been married for thirty years. We said we knew Mr. Noble Simms and
+that he was a barrister, and he laughed at us. So you see some one is
+trading on your name.'
+
+'Much good may it do him,' said Abinger generously.
+
+'But it is horrid,' said Nell, 'that we should have to listen to people
+praising Noble Simms's writings, and not be allowed to say that he is
+Dick Abinger in disguise.'
+
+'It must be very hard on you, Nell, to have to keep a secret,' admitted
+Dick, 'but you see I must lead two lives or be undone. In the Temple you
+will see the name of Richard Abinger, barrister-at-law, but in
+Frobisher's Inn he is J. Noble Simms.'
+
+'I don't see the good of it,' said Nell.
+
+'My ambition, you must remember,' explained Dick, 'is to be Lord
+Chancellor or Lord Chief Justice, I forget which, but while I wait for
+that post I must live, and I live by writings (which are all dead the
+morning after they appear). Now such is the suspicion with which
+literature is regarded by the legal mind, that were it known I wrote for
+the Press my chance of the Lord Chancellorship would cease to be a moral
+certainty. The editor of the _Scalping Knife_ has not the least notion
+that Noble Simms is the rising barrister who has been known to make as
+much by the law as a guinea in a single month. Indeed, only my most
+intimate friends, some of whom practise the same deception themselves,
+are aware that the singular gifts of Simms and Abinger are united in the
+same person.'
+
+'The housekeeper here must know?' asked Mary.
+
+'No, it would hopelessly puzzle her,' said Dick; 'she would think there
+was something uncanny about it, and so she is happy in the belief that
+the letters which occasionally come addressed to Abinger are forwarded
+by me to that gentleman's abode in the Temple.'
+
+'It is such an ugly name, Noble Simms,' said Nell; 'I wonder why you
+selected it.'
+
+'It is ugly, is it not?' said Dick. 'It struck me at the time as the
+most ridiculous name I was likely to think of, and so I chose it. Such
+a remarkable name sticks to the public mind, and that is fame.'
+
+As he spoke he rose to get the two girls the cab that would take them
+back to the hotel.
+
+'There is some one knocking at the door,' said Mary.
+
+'Come in,' murmured Abinger.
+
+The housekeeper opened the door, but half shut it again when she saw
+that Dick was not alone. Then she thought of a compromise between
+telling her business and retiring.
+
+'If you please, Mr. Simms,' she said apologetically, 'would you speak to
+me a moment in the passage?'
+
+Abinger disappeared with her, and when he returned the indifferent look
+had gone from his face.
+
+'Wait for me a few minutes,' he said; 'a man upstairs, one of the best
+fellows breathing, has met with an accident, and I question if he has a
+friend in London. I am going up to see him.'
+
+'Poor fellow!' said Mary to Nell, after Dick had gone; 'fancy his lying
+here for weeks without any one going near him but Dick.'
+
+'But how much worse it would be without Dick!' said Nell.
+
+'I wonder if he is a barrister,' said Mary.
+
+'I think he will be a journalist rather,' Nell said thoughtfully, 'a
+tall, dark, melancholy-looking man, and I should not wonder though he
+had a broken heart.'
+
+'I'm afraid it is more serious than that,' said Mary.
+
+Nell set off on a trip round the room, remarking with a profound sigh
+that it must be awful to live alone and have no one to speak to for
+whole hours at a time. 'I should go mad,' she said, in such a tone of
+conviction that Mary did not think of questioning it.
+
+Then Nell, who had opened a drawer rather guiltily, exclaimed, 'Oh,
+Mary!'
+
+A woman can put more meaning into a note of exclamation than a man can
+pack in a sentence. It costs Mr. Jones, for instance, a long message
+simply to telegraph to his wife that he is bringing a friend home to
+dinner, but in a sixpenny reply Mrs. Jones can warn him that he had
+better do no such thing, that he ought to be ashamed of himself for
+thinking of it, that he must make some excuse to his friend, and that he
+will hear more of this when he gets home. Nell's 'Oh, Mary!' signified
+that chaos was come.
+
+Mary hastened round the table, and found her friend with a letter in her
+hand.
+
+'Well,' said Mary, 'that is one of your letters to Dick, is it not?'
+
+'Yes,' answered Nell tragically; 'but fancy his keeping my letters lying
+about carelessly in a drawer--and--and, yes, using them as scribbling
+paper!'
+
+Scrawled across the envelopes in a barely decipherable handwriting were
+such notes as these: 'Schoolboys smoking master's cane-chair, work up';
+'Return of the swallows (poetic or humorous?)'; 'My First Murder
+(magazine?)'; 'Better do something pathetic for a change.'
+
+There were tears in Nell's eyes.
+
+'This comes of prying,' said Mary.
+
+'Oh, I wasn't prying,' said Nell; 'I only opened it by accident. That is
+the worst of it. I can't say anything about them to him, because he
+might think I had opened his drawer to--to see what was in it--which is
+the last thing in the world I would think of doing. Oh, Mary,' she added
+woefully, 'what do you think?'
+
+'I think you are a goose,' said Mary promptly.
+
+'Ah, you are so indifferent,' Nell said, surrendering her position all
+at once. 'Now when I see a drawer I am quite unhappy until I know what
+is in it, especially if it is locked. When we lived opposite the Burtons
+I was miserable because they always kept the blind of one of their
+windows down. If I had been a boy I would have climbed up to see why
+they did it. Ah! that is Dick; I know his step.'
+
+She was hastening to the door, when she remembered the letters, and
+subsided primly into a chair.
+
+'Well?' asked Mary, as her brother re-entered with something in his
+hand.
+
+'The poor fellow has had a nasty accident,' said Dick; 'run over in the
+street, it seems. He ought to have been taken to the infirmary, but they
+got a letter with his address on it in his pocket, and brought him
+here.'
+
+'Has a doctor seen him?'
+
+'Yes, but I hardly make out from the housekeeper what he said. He was
+gone before I went up. There are some signs, however, of what he did.
+The poor fellow seems to have been struck on the head.'
+
+Mary shuddered, understanding that some operation had been found
+necessary.
+
+'Did he speak to you?' asked Nell.
+
+'He was asleep,' said Dick, 'but talking more than he does when he is
+awake.'
+
+'He must have been delirious,' said Mary.
+
+'One thing I can't make out,' Dick said, more to himself than to his
+companions. 'He mumbled my name to himself half a dozen times while I
+was upstairs.'
+
+'But is there anything remarkable in that,' asked Mary, 'if he has so
+few friends in London?'
+
+'What I don't understand,' explained Dick, 'is that the word I caught
+was Abinger. Now, I am quite certain that he only knew me as Noble
+Simms.'
+
+'Some one must have told him your real name,' said Mary. 'Is he asleep
+now?'
+
+'That reminds me of another thing,' said Dick, looking at the torn card
+in his hand. 'Just as I was coming away he staggered off the couch where
+he is lying to his desk, opened it, and took out this card. He glared at
+it, and tore it in two before I got him back to the couch.'
+
+There were tears in Nell's eyes now, for she felt that she understood it
+all.
+
+'It is horrible to think of him alone up there,' she cried. 'Let us go
+up to him, Mary.'
+
+Mary hesitated.
+
+'I don't think it would be the thing,' she said, taking the card from
+Nell's hand. She started slightly as she looked at it, and then became
+white.
+
+'What is his name, Dick?' she faltered, in a voice that made Nell look
+at her.
+
+'Angus,' said Dick. 'He has been on the Press here for some months.'
+
+The name suggested nothing at the moment to Nell, but Mary let the card
+fall. It was a shabby little Christmas card.
+
+'I think we should go up and see if we can do anything,' Dick's sister
+said.
+
+'But would it be the thing?' Nell asked.
+
+'Of course it would,' said Mary, a little surprised at Nell.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE STUPID SEX
+
+
+Give a man his chance, and he has sufficient hardihood for anything.
+Within a week of the accident Rob was in Dick Abinger's most luxurious
+chair, coolly taking a cup and saucer from Nell, while Mary arranged a
+cushion for his poor head. He even made several light-hearted jests, at
+which his nurses laughed heartily--because he was an invalid.
+
+Rob's improvement dated from the moment he opened his eyes and heard the
+soft rustle of a lady's skirts in the next room. He lay quietly
+listening, and realised by and by that he had known she was Mary Abinger
+all along.
+
+'Who is that?' he said abruptly to Dick, who was swinging his legs on
+the dressing-table. Dick came to him as awkwardly as if he had been
+asked to hold a baby, and saw no way of getting out of it. Sick-rooms
+chilled him.
+
+'Are you feeling better now, old fellow?' he asked.
+
+'Who is it?' Rob repeated, sitting up in bed.
+
+'That is my sister,' Dick said.
+
+Rob's head fell back. He could not take it in all at once. Dick thought
+he had fallen asleep, and tried to slip gently from the room,
+discovering for the first time as he did so that his shoes creaked.
+
+'Don't go,' said Rob, sitting up again. 'What is your sister's name?'
+
+'Abinger, of course, Mary Abinger,' answered Dick, under the conviction
+that the invalid was still off his head. He made for the door again, but
+Rob's arm went out suddenly and seized him.
+
+'You are a liar, you know,' Rob said feebly; 'she's not your sister.'
+
+'No, of course not,' said Dick, humouring him.
+
+'I want to see her,' Rob said authoritatively.
+
+'Certainly,' answered Dick, escaping into the other room to tell Mary
+that the patient was raving again.
+
+'I heard him,' said Mary.
+
+'Well, what's to be done?' asked her brother. 'He's madder than ever.'
+
+'Oh no, I think he's getting on nicely now,' Mary said, moving toward
+the bedroom.
+
+'Don't,' exclaimed Dick, getting in front of her; 'why, I tell you his
+mind is wandering. He says you're not my sister.'
+
+'Of course he can't understand so long as he thinks your name is Simms.'
+
+'But he knows my name is Abinger. Didn't I tell you I heard him groaning
+it over to himself?'
+
+'Oh, Dick,' said Mary, 'I wish you would go away and write a stupid
+article.'
+
+Dick, however, stood at the door, ready to come to his sister's
+assistance if Rob got violent.
+
+'He says you are his sister,' said the patient to Mary.
+
+'So I am,' said Mary softly. 'My brother writes under the name of Noble
+Simms, but his real name is Abinger. Now you must lie still and think
+about that; you are not to talk any more.'
+
+'I won't talk any more,' said Rob slowly. 'You are not going away,
+though?'
+
+'Just for a little while,' Mary answered. 'The doctor will be here
+presently.'
+
+'Well, you have quieted him,' Dick admitted.
+
+They were leaving the room, when they heard Rob calling.
+
+'There he goes again,' said Dick, groaning.
+
+'What is it?' Mary asked, returning to the bedroom.
+
+'Why did he say you were not his sister?' Rob said, very suspiciously.
+
+'Oh, his mind was wandering,' Mary answered cruelly.
+
+She was retiring again, but stopped undecidedly. Then she looked from
+the door to see if her brother was within hearing. Dick was at the other
+end of the sitting-room, and she came back noiselessly to Rob's bedside.
+
+'Do you remember,' she asked, in a low voice, 'how the accident
+happened? You know you were struck by a cab.'
+
+'Yes,' answered Rob at once, 'I saw him kissing you. I don't remember
+anything after that.'
+
+Mary, looking like a culprit, glanced hurriedly at the door. Then she
+softly pushed the invalid's unruly hair off his brow, and glided from
+the room smiling.
+
+'Well?' asked Dick.
+
+'He was telling me how the accident happened,' Mary said.
+
+'And how was it?'
+
+'Oh, just as you said. He got bewildered at a crossing and was knocked
+over.'
+
+'But he wasn't the man to lose his reason at a crossing,' said Dick.
+'There must have been something to agitate him.'
+
+'He said nothing about that,' replied Mary, without blushing.
+
+'Did he tell you how he knew my name was Abinger?' Dick asked, as they
+went downstairs.
+
+'No,' his sister said, 'I forgot to ask him.'
+
+'There was that Christmas card, too,' Dick said suddenly. 'Nell says
+Angus must be in love, poor fellow.'
+
+'Nell is always thinking people are in love,' Mary answered severely.
+
+'By the way,' said Dick, 'what became of the card? He might want to
+treasure it, you know.'
+
+'I--I rather think I put it somewhere,' Mary said.
+
+'I wonder,' Dick remarked curiously, 'what sort of girl Angus would take
+to?'
+
+'I wonder,' said Mary.
+
+They were back in Dick's chambers by this time, and he continued with
+some complacency--for all men think they are on safe ground when
+discussing an affair of the heart:--
+
+'We could build the young lady up from the card, which, presumably, was
+her Christmas offering to him. It was not expensive, so she is a careful
+young person; and the somewhat florid design represents a blue bird
+sitting on a pink twig, so that we may hazard the assertion that her
+artistic taste is not as yet fully developed. She is a fresh country
+maid, or the somewhat rich colouring would not have taken her fancy,
+and she is short, a trifle stout, or a big man like Angus would not have
+fallen in love with her. Reserved men like gushing girls, so she gushes
+and says "Oh my!" and her nicest dress (here Dick shivered) is of a
+shiny satin with a dash of rich velvet here and there. Do you follow
+me?'
+
+'Yes,' said Mary; 'it is wonderful. I suppose, now, you are never wrong
+when you "build up" so much on so little?'
+
+'Sometimes we go a little astray,' admitted Dick. 'I remember going into
+a hotel with Rorrison once, and on a table we saw a sailor-hat lying,
+something like the one Nell wears--or is it you?'
+
+'The idea of your not knowing!' said his sister indignantly.
+
+'Well, we discussed the probable owner. I concluded, after narrowly
+examining the hat, that she was tall, dark, and handsome, rather than
+pretty. Rorrison, on the other hand, maintained that she was a pretty,
+baby-faced girl, with winning ways.'
+
+'And did you discover if either of you was right?'
+
+'Yes,' said Dick slowly. 'In the middle of the discussion a little boy
+in a velvet suit toddled into the room, and said to us, "Gim'me my
+hat."'
+
+In the weeks that followed, Rob had many delicious experiences. He was
+present at several tea-parties in Abinger's chambers, the guests being
+strictly limited to three; and when he could not pretend to be ill any
+longer, he gave a tea-party himself in honour of his two nurses--his one
+and a half nurses, Dick called them. At this Mary poured out the tea,
+and Rob's eyes showed so plainly (though not to Dick) that he had never
+seen anything like it, that Nell became thoughtful, and made a number of
+remarks on the subject to her mother as soon as she returned home.
+
+'It would never do,' Nell said, looking wise.
+
+'Whatever would the colonel say!' exclaimed Mrs. Meredith. 'After all,
+though,' she added--for she had been to see Rob twice, and liked him
+because of something he had said to her about his mother--'he is just
+the same as Richard.'
+
+'Oh no, no,' said Nell, 'Dick is an Oxford man, you must remember, and
+Mr. Angus, as the colonel would say, rose from obscurity.'
+
+'Well, if he did,' persisted Mrs. Meredith, 'he does not seem to be
+going back to it, and universities seem to me to be places for making
+young men stupid.'
+
+'It would never, never do,' said Nell, with doleful decision.
+
+'What does Mary say about him?' asked her mother.
+
+'She never says anything,' said Nell.
+
+'Does she talk much to him?'
+
+'No; very little.'
+
+'That is a good sign,' said Mrs. Meredith.
+
+'I don't know,' said Nell.
+
+'Have you noticed anything else?'
+
+'Nothing except--well, Mary is longer in dressing now than I am, and she
+used not to be.'
+
+'I wonder,' Mrs. Meredith remarked, 'if Mary saw him at Silchester after
+that time at the castle?'
+
+'She never told me she did,' Nell answered, 'but sometimes I
+think--however, there is no good in thinking.'
+
+'It isn't a thing you often do, Nell. By the way, he saw the first Sir
+Clement at Dome Castle, did he not?'
+
+'Yes,' Nell said, 'he saw the impostor, and I don't suppose he knows
+there is another Sir Clement. The Abingers don't like to speak of that.
+However, they may meet on Friday, for Dick has got Mr. Angus a card for
+the Symphonia, and Sir Clement is to be there.'
+
+'What does Richard say about it?' asked Mrs. Meredith, going back
+apparently upon their conversation.
+
+'We never speak about it, Dick and I,' said Nell.
+
+'What do you speak about, then?'
+
+'Oh, nothing,' said Nell.
+
+Mrs. Meredith sighed.
+
+'And you such an heiress, Nell,' she said; 'you could do so much better.
+He will never have anything but what he makes by writing; and if all
+stories be true, half of that goes to the colonel. I'm sure your father
+never will consent.'
+
+'Oh yes, he will,' Nell said.
+
+'If he had really tried to get on at the Bar,' Mrs. Meredith pursued,
+'it would not have been so bad, but he is evidently to be a newspaper
+man all his life.'
+
+'I wish you would say journalist, mamma,' Nell said, pouting, 'or
+literary man. The profession of letters is a noble one.'
+
+'Perhaps it is,' Mrs. Meredith assented, with another sigh, 'and I dare
+say he told you so, but I can't think it is very respectable.'
+
+Rob did not altogether enjoy the Symphonia, which is a polite club
+attended by the literary fry of both sexes; the ladies who write because
+they cannot help it, the poets who excuse their verses because they were
+young when they did them, the clergymen who publish their sermons by
+request of their congregations, the tourists who have been to Spain and
+cannot keep it to themselves. The club meets once a fortnight, for the
+purpose of not listening to music and recitations; and the members, of
+whom the ladies outnumber the men, sit in groups round little lions who
+roar mildly. The Symphonia is very fashionable and select, and having
+heard the little lions a-roaring, you get a cup of coffee and go home
+again.
+
+Dick explained that he was a member of the Symphonia because he rather
+liked to put on the lion's skin himself now and again, and he took Mrs.
+Meredith and the two girls to it to show them of what literature in its
+higher branches is capable. The elegant dresses of the literary ladies,
+and the suave manner of the literary gentlemen, impressed Nell's mother
+favourably, and the Symphonia, which she had taken for an out-at-elbows
+club, raised letters in her estimation.
+
+Rob, however, who never felt quite comfortable in evening dress, had a
+bad time of it, for Dick carried him off at once, and got him into a
+group round the authoress of _My Baby Boy_, to whom Rob was introduced
+as a passionate admirer of her delightful works. The lion made room for
+him, and he sat sadly beside her, wishing he was not so big.
+
+Both of the rooms of the Symphonia club were crowded, but a number of
+gentlemen managed to wander from group to group over the skirts of
+ladies' gowns. Rob watched them wistfully from his cage, and observed
+one come to rest at the back of Mary Abinger's chair. He was a
+medium-sized man, and for five minutes Rob thought he was Sir Clement
+Dowton. Then he realised that he had been deceived by a remarkable
+resemblance.
+
+The stranger said a great deal to Mary, and she seemed to like him.
+After a long time the authoress's voice broke in on Rob's cogitations,
+and when he saw that she was still talking without looking tired, a
+certain awe filled him. Then Mary rose from her chair, taking the arm of
+the gentleman who was Sir Clement's double, and they went into the other
+room, where the coffee was served.
+
+Rob was tempted to sit there stupidly miserable, for the easiest thing
+to do comes to us first. Then he thought it was better to be a man, and,
+drawing up his chest, boldly asked the lion to have a cup of coffee. In
+another moment he was steering her through the crowd, her hand resting
+on his arm, and, to his amazement, he found he rather liked it.
+
+In the coffee-room Rob could not distinguish the young lady who moved
+like a swan, but he was elated with his social triumph, and cast about
+for any journalist of his acquaintance who, he thought, might like to
+meet the authoress of _My Baby Boy_. It struck Rob that he had no right
+to keep her all to himself. Quite close to him his eye lighted on
+Marriott, the author of _Mary Hooney: a Romance of the Irish Question_,
+but Marriott saw what he was after, and dived into the crowd. A very
+young gentleman, with large empty eyes, begged Rob's pardon for treading
+on his toes, and Rob, who had not felt it, saw that this was his man.
+He introduced him to the authoress as another admirer, and the
+round-faced youth seemed such a likely subject for her next work that
+Rob moved off comfortably.
+
+A shock awaited him when he met Dick, who had been passing the time by
+taking male guests aside and asking them in an impressive voice what
+they thought of his great book, _Lives of Eminent Washer-women_, which
+they had no doubt read.
+
+'Who is the man so like Dowton?' he repeated, in answer to Rob's
+question. 'Why, it is Dowton.'
+
+Then Dick looked vexed. He remembered that Rob had been at Dome Castle
+on the previous Christmas Eve.
+
+'Look here, Angus,' he said bluntly, 'this is a matter I hate to talk
+about. The fact is, however, that this is the real Sir Clement. The
+fellow you met was an impostor, who came from no one knows where.
+Unfortunately, he has returned to the same place.'
+
+Dick bit his lip while Rob digested this.
+
+'But if you know the real Dowton,' Rob asked, 'how were you deceived?'
+
+'Well, it was my father who was deceived rather than myself, but we did
+not know the real baronet then. The other fellow, if you must know,
+traded on his likeness to Dowton, who is in the country now for the
+first time for many years. Whoever the impostor is, he is a humorist in
+his way, for when he left the castle in January he asked my father to
+call on him when he came to town. The fellow must have known that Dowton
+was coming home about that time; at all events, my father, who was in
+London shortly afterwards, looked up his friend the baronet, as he
+thought, at his club, and found that he had never set eyes on him
+before. It would make a delicious article if it had not happened in
+one's own family.'
+
+'The real Sir Clement seems great friends with Miss Abinger,' Rob could
+not help saying.
+
+'Yes,' said Dick, 'we struck up an intimacy with him over the affair,
+and stranger things have happened than that he and Mary----'
+
+He stopped.
+
+'My father, I believe, would like it,' he added carelessly, but Rob had
+turned away. Dick went after him.
+
+'I have told you this,' he said, 'because, as you knew the other man, it
+had to be done, but we don't like it spoken of.'
+
+'I shall not speak of it,' said miserable Rob.
+
+He would have liked to be tearing through London again, but as that was
+not possible he sought a solitary seat by the door. Before he reached it
+his mood changed. What was Sir Clement Dowton, after all, that he should
+be frightened at him? He was merely a baronet. An impostor who could
+never have passed for a journalist had succeeded in passing for Dowton.
+Journalism was the noblest of all professions, and Rob was there
+representing it. The seat of honour at the Symphonia was next to Mary
+Abinger, and the baronet had held it too long already. Instead of
+sulking, Rob approached the throne like one who had a right to be there.
+Sir Clement had risen for a moment to put down Mary's cup, and when he
+returned Rob was in his chair, with no immediate intention of getting
+out of it. The baronet frowned, which made Rob say quite a number of
+bright things to Miss Abinger. When two men are in love with the same
+young lady one of them must be worsted. Rob saw that it was better to be
+the other one.
+
+The frightfully Bohemian people at the Symphonia remained there even
+later than eleven o'clock, but the rooms thinned before then, and Dick's
+party were ready to go by half-past ten. Rob was now very sharp. It did
+not escape his notice that the gentlemen were bringing the ladies'
+cloaks, and he calmly made up his mind to help Mary Abinger on with
+hers. To his annoyance, Sir Clement was too quick for him. The baronet
+was in the midst of them, with the three ladies' cloaks, just as Rob
+wondered where he would have to go to find them. Nell's cloak Sir
+Clement handed to Dick, but he kept Mary's on his arm while he assisted
+Mrs. Meredith into hers. It was a critical moment. All would be over in
+five seconds.
+
+'Allow me,' said Rob.
+
+With apparent coolness he took Mary's cloak from the baronet's arm. He
+had not been used to saying 'allow me,' and his face was white, but he
+was determined to go on with this thing.
+
+'Take my arm,' he said to Mary, as they joined the crowd that swayed
+toward the door. After he said it he saw that he had spoken with an air
+of proprietorship, but he was not sorry. Mary did it.
+
+It took them some time to reach their cab, and on the way Mary asked Rob
+a question.
+
+'I gave you something once,' she said, 'but I suppose you lost it long
+ago.'
+
+Rob reddened, for he had been sadly puzzled to know what had become of
+his Christmas card.
+
+'I have it still,' he answered at last.
+
+'Oh,' said Mary coldly; and at once Rob felt a chill pass through him.
+It was true, after all, that Miss Abinger could be an icicle on
+occasion.
+
+Rob, having told a lie, deserved no mercy, and got none. The pity of it
+is that Mary might have thawed a little had she known that it was only a
+lie. She thought that Rob was not aware of his loss. A man taking
+fickleness as the comparative degree of an untruth is perhaps only what
+may be looked for, but one does not expect it from a woman. Probably the
+lights had blinded Mary.
+
+Rob had still an opportunity of righting himself, but he did not take
+it.
+
+'Then you did mean the card for me,' he said, in foolish exultation;
+'when I found it on the walk I was not certain that you had not merely
+dropped it by accident.'
+
+Alas! for the fatuity of man. Mary looked up in icy surprise.
+
+'What card?' she said. 'I don't know what you are talking about.'
+
+'Don't you remember?' asked Rob, very much requiring to be sharpened
+again.
+
+He looked so woebegone, that Mary nearly had pity on him. She knew,
+however, that if it was not for her sex, men would never learn anything.
+
+'No,' she replied, and turned to talk to Sir Clement.
+
+Rob walked home from the Langham that night with Dick, and, when he was
+not thinking of the two Sir Clements, he was telling himself that he had
+climbed his hill valiantly, only to topple over when he neared the top.
+Before he went to bed he had an article to finish for the _Wire_, and,
+while he wrote, he pondered over the ways of women; which, when you come
+to think of it, is a droll thing to do.
+
+Mr. Meredith had noticed Rob's dejection at the hotel, and remarked to
+Nell's mother that he thought Mary was very stiff to Angus. Mrs.
+Meredith looked sadly at her husband in reply.
+
+'You think so,' she said, mournfully shaking her head at him, 'and so
+does Richard Abinger. Mr. Angus is as blind as the rest of you.'
+
+'I don't understand,' said Mr. Meredith, with much curiosity.
+
+'Nor do they,' replied his wife contemptuously; 'there are no men so
+stupid, I think, as the clever ones.'
+
+She could have preached a sermon that night, with the stupid sex for her
+text.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE HOUSE-BOAT 'TAWNY OWL'
+
+
+'Mr. Angus, what is an egotist?'
+
+'Don't you know, Miss Meredith?'
+
+'Well, I know in a general sort of way, but not precisely.'
+
+'An egotist is a person who--but why do you want to know?'
+
+'Because just now Mr. Abinger asked me what I was thinking of, and when
+I said of nothing he called me an egotist.'
+
+'Ah! that kind of egotist is one whose thoughts are too deep for
+utterance.'
+
+It was twilight. Rob stood on the deck of the house-boat _Tawny Owl_,
+looking down at Nell, who sat in the stern, her mother beside her, amid
+a blaze of Chinese lanterns. Dick lay near them, prone, as he had fallen
+from a hammock whose one flaw was that it gave way when any one got into
+it. Mr. Meredith, looking out from one of the saloon windows across the
+black water that was now streaked with glistening silver, wondered
+whether he was enjoying himself, and Mary, in a little blue nautical
+jacket with a cap to match, lay back in a camp-chair on deck with a
+silent banjo in her hands. Rob was brazening it out in flannels, and had
+been at such pains to select colours to suit him that the effect was
+atrocious. He had spent several afternoons at Molesey during the three
+weeks the _Tawny Owl_ had lain there, but this time he was to remain
+overnight at the Island Hotel.
+
+The _Tawny Owl_ was part of the hoop of house-boats that almost girded
+Tagg's Island, and lights sailed through the trees, telling of launches
+moving to their moorings near the ferry. Now and again there was the
+echo of music from a distant house-boat. For a moment the water was
+loquacious as dingeys or punts shot past. Canadian canoes, the ghosts
+that haunt the Thames by night, lifted their heads out of the river,
+gaped, and were gone. An osier-wand dipped into the water under a weight
+of swallows, all going to bed together. The boy on the next house-boat
+kissed his hand to a broom on board the _Tawny Owl_, taking it for Mrs.
+Meredith's servant, and then retired to his kitchen smiling. From the
+boat-house across the river came the monotonous tap of a hammer. A
+reed-warbler rushed through his song. There was a soft splashing along
+the bank.
+
+'There was once a literary character,' Dick murmured, 'who said that to
+think of nothing was an impossibility, but he lived before the days of
+house-boats. I came here a week ago to do some high thinking, and I
+believe I have only managed four thoughts--first, that the cow on the
+island is an irate cow; second, that in summer the sun shines brightly;
+third, that the trouble of lighting a cigar is almost as great as the
+pleasure of smoking it; and fourth, that swans--the fourth thought
+referred to swans, but it has slipped my memory.'
+
+He yawned like a man glad to get to the end of his sentence, or sorry
+that he had begun it.
+
+'But I thought,' said Mrs. Meredith, 'that the reason you walk round and
+round the island by yourself so frequently is because you can think out
+articles on it?'
+
+'Yes,' Dick answered, 'the island looks like a capital place to think
+on, and I always start off on my round meaning to think hard. After that
+all is a blank till I am back at the _Tawny Owl_, when I remember that I
+have forgotten to think.'
+
+'Will ought to enjoy this,' remarked Nell.
+
+'That is my brother, Mr. Angus,' Mary said to Rob; 'he is to spend part
+of his holidays here.'
+
+'I remember him,' Rob answered, smiling. Mary blushed, however,
+remembering that the last time Will and Greybrooke met Rob there had
+been a little scene.
+
+'He will enjoy the fishing,' said Dick. 'I have only fished myself three
+or four times, and I am confident I hooked a minnow yesterday.'
+
+'I saw a little boy,' Nell said, 'fishing from the island to-day, and
+his mother had strapped him to a tree in case he might fall in.'
+
+'When I saw your young brother at Silchester,' Rob said to Mary, 'he had
+a schoolmate with him.'
+
+'Ah, yes,' Dick said; 'that was the man who wanted to horsewhip you, you
+know.'
+
+'I thought he and Miss Meredith were great friends,' Rob retorted. He
+sometimes wondered how much Dick cared for Nell.
+
+'It was only the young gentleman's good-nature,' Abinger explained,
+while Nell drew herself up indignantly; 'he found that he had to give up
+either Nell or a cricket match, and so Nell was reluctantly dropped.'
+
+'That was not how you spoke,' Nell said to Dick in a low voice, 'when I
+told you all about him, poor boy, in your chambers.'
+
+'You promised to be a sister to him, I think,' remarked Abinger. 'Ah,
+Nell, it is not a safe plan that. How many brothers have you now?'
+
+Dick held up his hand for Mary's banjo, and, settling himself
+comfortably in a corner, twanged and sang, while the lanterns caught
+myriads of flies, and the bats came and went.
+
+    When Coelebs was a bolder blade,
+      And ladies fair were coy,
+    His search was for a wife, he said,
+      The time I was a boy.
+    But Coelebs now has slothful grown
+      (I learn this from her mother),
+    Instead of making her his own,
+      He asks to be her brother.
+
+    Last night I saw her smooth his brow,
+      He bent his head and kissed her;
+    They understand each other now,
+      She's going to be his sister.
+    Some say he really does propose,
+      And means to gain or lose all,
+    And that the new arrangement goes,
+      To soften her refusal.
+
+    He talks so wild of broken hearts,
+      Of futures that she'll mar,
+    He says on Tuesday he departs
+      For Cork or Zanzibar.
+    His death he places at her door,
+      Yet says he won't resent it;
+    Ah, well, he talked that way before,
+      And very seldom meant it.
+
+    Engagements now are curious things,
+      'A kind of understandin','
+    Although they do not run to rings,
+      They're good to keep your hand in.
+    No rivals now, Tom, Dick, and Hal,
+      They all love one another,
+    For she's a sister to them all,
+      And every one's her brother.
+
+    In former days when men proposed,
+      And ladies said them No,
+    The laws that courtesy imposed
+      Made lovers pack and go.
+    But now that they may brothers be,
+      So changed the way of men is,
+    That, having kissed, the swain and she
+      Resume their game at tennis.
+
+    Ah, Nelly Meredith, you may
+      Be wiser than your mother,
+    But she knew what to do when they
+      Proposed to be her brother.
+    Of these relations best have none,
+      They'll only you encumber;
+    Of wives a man may have but one,
+      Of sisters any number.
+
+Dick disappeared into the kitchen with Mrs. Meredith to show her how
+they make a salad at the Wigwam, and Nell and her father went a-fishing
+from a bedroom window. The night was so silent now that Rob and Mary
+seemed to have it to themselves. A canoe in a blaze of coloured light
+drifted past without a sound. The grass on the bank parted, and
+water-rats peeped out. All at once Mary had nothing to say, and Rob
+shook on his stool. The moon was out looking at them.
+
+'Oh,' Mary cried, as something dipped suddenly in the water near them.
+
+'It was only a dabchick,' Rob guessed, looking over the rail.
+
+'What is a dabchick?' asked Mary.
+
+Rob did not tell her. She had not the least desire to know.
+
+In the river, on the opposite side from where the _Tawny Owl_ lay, a
+stream drowns itself. They had not known of its existence before, but it
+was roaring like a lasher to them now. Mary shuddered slightly, turning
+her face to the island, and Rob took a great breath as he looked at her.
+His hand held her brown sunshade that was ribbed with velvet, the
+sunshade with the preposterous handle that Mary held upside down. Other
+ladies carried their sunshades so, and Rob resented it. Her back was
+toward him, and he sat still, gazing at the loose blue jacket that only
+reached her waist. It was such a slender waist that Rob trembled for it.
+
+The trees that hung over the house-boat were black, but the moon made a
+fairyland of the sward beyond. Mary could only see the island between
+heavy branches, but she looked straight before her until tears dimmed
+her eyes. Who would dare to seek the thoughts of a girl at such a
+moment? Rob moved nearer her. Her blue cap was tilted back, her chin
+rested on the rail. All that was good in him was astir when she turned
+and read his face.
+
+'I think I shall go down now,' Mary said, becoming less pale as she
+spoke. Rob's eyes followed her as she moved toward the ladder.
+
+'Not yet,' he called after her, and could say no more. It was always so
+when they were alone; and he made himself suffer for it afterwards.
+
+Mary stood irresolutely at the top of the ladder. She would not turn
+back, but she did not descend. Mr. Meredith was fishing lazily from the
+lower deck, and there was a murmur of voices in the saloon. On the road
+running parallel to the river traps and men were shadows creeping along
+to Hampton. Lights were going out there. Mary looked up the stretch of
+water and sighed.
+
+'Was there ever so beautiful a night?' she said.
+
+'Yes,' said Rob, at her elbow, 'once at Dome Castle, the night I saw you
+first.'
+
+'I don't remember,' said Mary hastily, but without going down the
+ladder.
+
+'I might never have met you,' Rob continued grimly, 'if some man in
+Silchester had not murdered his wife.'
+
+Mary started and looked up at him. Until she ceased to look he could not
+go on.
+
+'The murder,' he explained, 'was of more importance than Colonel
+Abinger's dinner, and so I was sent to the castle. It is rather curious
+to trace these things back a step. The woman enraged her husband into
+striking her, because she had not prepared his supper. Instead of doing
+that she had been gossiping with a neighbour, who would not have had
+time for gossip had she not been laid up with a sprained ankle. It came
+out in the evidence that this woman had hurt herself by slipping on a
+marble, so that I might never have seen you had not two boys, whom
+neither of us ever heard of, challenged each other to a game at
+marbles.'
+
+'It was stranger that we should meet again in London,' Mary said.
+
+'No,' Rob answered, 'the way we met was strange, but I was expecting
+you.'
+
+Mary pondered how she should take this, and then pretended not to hear
+it.
+
+'Was it not rather _The Scorn of Scorns_ that made us know each other?'
+she asked.
+
+'I knew you after I read it a second time,' he said; 'I have got that
+copy of it still.'
+
+'You said you had the card.'
+
+'I have never been able to understand,' Rob answered, 'how I lost that
+card. But,' he added sharply, 'how do you know that I lost it?'
+
+Mary glanced up again.
+
+'I hate being asked questions, Mr. Angus,' she said sweetly.
+
+'Do you remember,' Rob went on, 'saying in that book that men were not
+to be trusted until they reached their second childhood?'
+
+'I don't know,' Mary replied, laughing, 'that they are to be trusted
+even then.'
+
+'I should think,' said Rob, rather anxiously, 'that a woman might as
+well marry a man in his first childhood as in his second. Surely the
+golden mean----' Rob paused. He was just twenty-seven.
+
+'We should strike the golden mean, you think?' asked Mary demurely. 'But
+you see it is of such short duration.'
+
+After that there was such a long pause that Mary could easily have gone
+down the ladder had she wanted to do so.
+
+'I am glad that you and Dick are such friends,' she said at last.
+
+'Why?' asked Rob quickly.
+
+'Oh, well,' said Mary.
+
+'He has been the best friend I have ever made,' Rob continued warmly,
+'though he says our only point in common is a hatred of rice pudding.'
+
+'He told me,' said Mary, 'that you write on politics in the _Wire_.'
+
+'I do a little now, but I have never met any one yet who admitted that
+he had read my articles. Even your brother won't go so far as that.'
+
+'I have read several of them,' said Mary.
+
+'Have you?' Rob exclaimed, like a big boy.
+
+'Yes,' Mary answered severely; 'but I don't agree with them. I am a
+Conservative, you know.'
+
+She pursed up her mouth complacently as she spoke, and Rob fell back a
+step to prevent his going a step closer. He could hear Mr. Meredith's
+line tearing the water. The boy on the next house-boat was baling the
+dingey, and whistling a doleful ditty between each canful.
+
+'There will never be such a night again,' Rob said, in a melancholy
+voice. Then he waited for Mary to ask why, when he would have told her,
+but she did not ask.
+
+'At least, not to me,' he continued, after a pause, 'for I am not likely
+to be here again. But there may be many such nights to you.'
+
+Mary was unbuttoning her gloves and then buttoning them again. There is
+something uncanny about a woman who has a chance to speak and does not
+take it.
+
+'I am glad to hear,' said Rob, 'that my being away will make no
+difference to you.'
+
+A light was running along the road to Hampton Court, and Mary watched
+it.
+
+'Are you glad?' asked Rob desperately.
+
+'You said I was,' answered Mary, without turning her head. Dick was
+thrumming the banjo below. Her hand touched a camp-chair, and Rob put
+his over it. He would have liked to stand like that and talk about
+things in general now.
+
+'Mary,' said Rob.
+
+The boy ceased to whistle. All nature in that quarter was paralysed,
+except the tumble of water across the river. Mary withdrew her hand, but
+said nothing. Rob held his breath. He had not even the excuse of having
+spoken impulsively, for he had been meditating saying it for weeks.
+
+By and by the world began to move again. The boy whistled. A swallow
+tried another twig. A moor-hen splashed in the river. They had thought
+it over, and meant to let it pass.
+
+'Are you angry with me?' Rob asked.
+
+Mary nodded her head, but did not speak. Suddenly Rob started.
+
+'You are crying,' he said.
+
+'No, I'm not,' said Mary, looking up now.
+
+There was a strange light in her face that made Rob shake. He was so
+near her that his hands touched her jacket. At that moment there was a
+sound of feet on the plank that communicated between the _Tawny Owl_ and
+the island, and Dick called out--
+
+'You people up there, are you coming once round the island before you
+have something to eat?'
+
+Rob muttered a reply that Dick fortunately did not catch, but Mary
+answered 'Yes,' and they descended the ladder.
+
+'You had better put a shawl over your shoulders,' said Rob, in rather a
+lordly tone.
+
+'No,' Mary answered, thrusting away the shawl he produced from the
+saloon; 'a wrap on a night like this would be absurd.'
+
+Something caught in her throat at that moment, and she coughed. Rob
+looked at her anxiously.
+
+'You had better,' he said, putting the shawl over her shoulders.
+
+'No,' said Mary, flinging it off.
+
+'Yes,' said Rob, putting it on again.
+
+Mary stamped her foot.
+
+'How dare you, Mr. Angus?' she exclaimed.
+
+Rob's chest heaved.
+
+'You must do as you are told,' he said.
+
+Mary looked at him while he looked at her, but she did not take off the
+shawl again, and that was the great moment of Rob's life.
+
+The others had gone on before. Although it was a white night the plank
+was dark in shadow, and as she stepped off it she slipped back. Rob's
+arm went round her for a moment. They walked round the island together
+behind the others, but neither uttered a word. Rob was afraid even to
+look at her, so he did not see that Mary looked once or twice at him.
+
+Long after he was supposed to be in the hotel Rob was still walking
+round the island, with no one to see him but the cow. All the Chinese
+lanterns were out now, but red window-blinds shone warm in several
+house-boats, and a terrier barked at his footsteps. The grass was
+silver-tipped, as in an enchanted island, and the impatient fairies
+might only have been waiting till he was gone. He was wondering if she
+was offended. While he paced the island she might be vowing never to
+look at him again, but perhaps she was only thinking that he was very
+much improved.
+
+At last Rob wandered to the hotel, and reaching his bedroom sat down on
+a chair to think it out again by candle-light. He rose and opened the
+window. There was a notice over the mantelpiece announcing that smoking
+was not allowed in the bedrooms, and having read it thoughtfully he
+filled his pipe. A piece of crumpled paper lay beneath the
+dressing-table, and he lifted it up to make a spill of it. It was part
+of an envelope, and it floated out of Rob's hand as he read the address
+in Mary Abinger's handwriting, 'Sir Clement Dowton, Island Hotel.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+MARY OF THE STONY HEART
+
+
+A punt and a rowing-boat were racing lazily toward Sunbury on a day so
+bright that you might have passed women with their hair in long curls
+and forgiven them.
+
+'I say, Dick,' said one of the scullers, 'are they engaged?'
+
+Will was the speaker, and in asking the question he caught a crab. Mary,
+with her yellow sleeves turned up at the wrist, a great straw hat on her
+head, ran gaily after her pole, and the punt jerked past. If there are
+any plain girls let them take to punting and be beautiful.
+
+Dick, who was paddling rather than pulling stroke, turned round on his
+young brother sharply.
+
+'Whom do you mean?' he asked, speaking low, so that the other occupants
+of the boat should not hear him, 'Mary and Dowton?'
+
+'No,' said Will, 'Mary and Angus. I wonder what they see in her.'
+
+They were bound for a picnicking resort up the river; Mrs. Meredith,
+Mary, and Sir Clement in the punt, and the others in the boat. If Rob
+was engaged he took it gloomily. He sat in the stern with Mr. Meredith,
+while Nell hid herself away beneath a many-coloured umbrella in the
+prow; and when he steered the boat into a gondola, he only said
+vacantly to its occupants, 'It is nothing at all,' as if they had run
+into him. Nell's father said something about not liking the appearance
+of the sky, and Rob looked at him earnestly for such a length of time
+before replying that Mr. Meredith was taken aback. At times the punt
+came alongside, and Mary addressed every one in the boat except Rob. The
+only person in the punt whom Rob never looked at was Mary. Dick watched
+them uneasily, and noticed that once, when Mary nearly followed her pole
+into the water, Rob, who seemed to be looking in the opposite direction,
+was the first to see what had happened. Then Dick pulled so savagely
+that he turned the boat round.
+
+That morning at breakfast in his chambers Rob had no thought of spending
+the day on the river. He had to be at the _Wire_ office at ten o'clock
+in the evening, and during the day he meant to finish one of the many
+articles which he still wrote for other journals that would seldom take
+them. The knowledge that Sir Clement Dowton had been to Molesey
+disquieted him, chiefly because Mary Abinger had said nothing about it.
+Having given himself fifty reasons for her reticence, he pushed them
+from him, and vowed wearily that he would go to the house-boat no more.
+Then Dick walked in to suggest that they might run down for an hour or
+two to Molesey, and Rob agreed at once. He shaped out in the train a
+subtle question about Sir Clement that he intended asking Mary, but on
+reaching the plank he saw her feeding the swans, with the baronet by her
+side. Rob felt like a conjurer whose trick has not worked properly.
+Giving himself just half a minute to reflect that it was all over, he
+affected the coldly courteous, and smiled in a way that was meant to be
+heart-rending. Mary did not mind that, but it annoyed her to see the
+band of his necktie slipping over his collar.
+
+It was the day of the Sunbury Regatta, but the party from the _Tawny
+Owl_ twisted past the racers, leaving Dick, who wanted a newspaper,
+behind. When he rejoined them beyond the village, the boat was towing
+the punt.
+
+'Why,' said Dick, in some astonishment to Rob, who was rowing now, 'I
+did not know you could scull like that.'
+
+'I have been practising a little,' answered Rob.
+
+'When he came down here the first time,' Mrs. Meredith explained to Sir
+Clement, 'he did not know how to hold an oar. I am afraid he is one of
+those men who like to be best at everything.'
+
+'He certainly knows how to scull now,' admitted the baronet, beginning
+to think that Rob was perhaps a dangerous man. Sir Clement was a manly
+gentleman, but his politics were that people should not climb out of the
+station they were born into.
+
+'No,' Dick said, in answer to a question from Mr. Meredith, 'I could
+only get a local paper. The woman seemed surprised at my thinking she
+would take in the _Scalping Knife_ or the _Wire_, and said, "We've got a
+paper of our own."'
+
+'Read out the news to us, Richard,' suggested Mrs. Meredith. Dick
+hesitated.
+
+'Here, Will,' he said to his brother, 'you got that squeaky voice of
+yours specially to proclaim the news from a boat to a punt ten yards
+distant. Angus is longing to pull us up the river unaided.'
+
+Will turned the paper round and round.
+
+'Here is a funny thing,' he bawled out, 'about a stick. "A curious
+story, says a London correspondent, is going the round of the clubs
+to-day about the walking-stick of a well-known member of Parliament,
+whose name I am not at liberty to mention. The story has not, so far as
+I am aware, yet appeared in print, and it conveys a lesson to all
+persons who carry walking-sticks with knobs for handles, which generate
+a peculiar disease in the palm of the hand. The member of Parliament
+referred to, with whom I am on intimate terms----"'
+
+Rob looked at Dick, and they both groaned.
+
+'My stick again,' murmured Rob.
+
+'Read something else,' cried Dick, shivering.
+
+'Eh, what is wrong?' asked Mr. Meredith.
+
+'You must know,' said Dick, 'that the first time I met Angus he told me
+imprudently some foolish story about a stick that bred a disease in the
+owner's hand, owing to his pressing so heavily on the ball it had by way
+of a handle. I touched the story up a little, and made half a guinea out
+of it. Since then that note has been turning up in a new dress in the
+most unlikely places. First the London correspondents swooped down on
+it, and telegraphed it all over the country as something that had
+happened to well-known Cabinet Ministers. It appeared in the Paris
+_Figaro_ as a true story about Sir Gladstone, and soon afterwards it was
+across the Channel as a reminiscence of Thiers. Having done another tour
+of the provinces, it was taken to America by a lecturer, who exhibited
+the stick. Next it travelled the Continent, until it was sent home again
+by Paterfamilias Abroad, writing to the _Times_, who said that the man
+who owned the stick was a well-known Alpine guide. Since then we have
+heard of it fitfully as doing well in Melbourne and Arkansas. It figured
+in the last volume, or rather two volumes, of autobiography published,
+and now, you see, it is going the round of the clubs again, preparatory
+to starting on another tour. I wish you had kept your stick to yourself,
+Angus.'
+
+'That story will never die,' Rob said, in a tone of conviction. 'It will
+go round and round the world till the crack of doom. Our children's
+children will tell it to each other.'
+
+'Yes,' said Dick, 'and say it happened to a friend of theirs.'
+
+A field falls into the river above Sunbury, in which there is a clump of
+trees of which many boating parties know. Under the shadow of these Mrs.
+Meredith cast a table-cloth and pegged it down with salt-cellars.
+
+'As we are rather in a hurry,' she said to the gentlemen, 'I should
+prefer you not to help us.'
+
+Rob wandered to the river-side with Will, who would have liked to know
+whether he could jump a gate without putting his hands on it; and the
+other men leant against the trees, wondering a little, perhaps, why
+ladies enjoy in the summer-time making chairs and tables of the ground.
+
+Rob was recovering from his scare, and made friends with Mary's young
+brother. By particular request he not only leapt the gate, but lifted it
+off its hinges, and this feat of strength so impressed Will that he
+would have brought the whole party down to see it done. Will was as fond
+of Mary as a proper respect for himself would allow, but he thought she
+would be a lucky girl if she got a fellow who could play with a heavy
+gate like that.
+
+Being a sharp boy, Will noticed a cloud settle on Rob's face, and
+looking toward the clump of trees, he observed that Mary and the baronet
+were no longer there. In the next field two figures were disappearing,
+the taller, a man in a tennis jacket, carrying a pail. Sir Clement had
+been sent for water, and Mary had gone with him to show him the spring.
+Rob stared after them; and if Will could have got hold of Mary he would
+have shaken her for spoiling everything.
+
+Mrs. Meredith was meditating sending some one to the spring to show them
+the way back, when Sir Clement and Mary again came into sight. They did
+not seem to be saying much, yet were so engrossed that they zigzagged
+toward the rest of the party like persons seeking their destination in a
+mist. Just as they reached the trees Mary looked up so softly at her
+companion that Rob turned away in an agony.
+
+'It is a long way to the spring,' were Mary's first words, as if she
+expected to be taken to task for their lengthened absence.
+
+'So it seems,' said Dick.
+
+The baronet crossed with the pail to Mrs. Meredith, and stopped half-way
+like one waking from a dream. Mrs. Meredith held out her hand for the
+pail, and the baronet stammered with vexation. Simultaneously the whole
+party saw what was wrong, but Will only was so merciless as to put the
+discovery into words.
+
+'Why,' cried the boy, pausing to whistle in the middle of his sentence,
+'you have forgotten the water!'
+
+It was true. The pail was empty. Sir Clement turned it upside down, and
+made a seat of it.
+
+'I am so sorry,' he said to Mrs. Meredith, trying to speak lightly. 'I
+assure you I thought I had filled the pail at the spring. It is entirely
+my fault, for I told Miss Abinger I had done so.'
+
+Mary's face was turned from the others, so that they could not see how
+she took the incident. It gave them so much to think of that Will was
+the only one of the whole party who saw its ridiculous aspect.
+
+'Put it down to sunstroke, Miss Meredith,' the baronet said to Nell; 'I
+shall never allow myself to be placed in a position of trust again.'
+
+'Does that mean,' asked Dick, 'that you object to being sent back again
+to the spring?'
+
+'Ah, I forgot,' said Sir Clement. 'You may depend on me this time.'
+
+He seized the pail once more, glad to get away by himself to some place
+where he could denounce his stupidity unheard, but Mrs. Meredith would
+not let him go. As for Mary, she was looking so haughty now that no one
+would have dared to mention the pail again.
+
+During the meal Dick felt compelled to talk so much that he was
+unusually dull company for the remainder of the week. The others were
+only genial now and again. Sir Clement sought in vain to gather from
+Mary's eyes that she had forgiven him for making the rest of the party
+couple him and her in their thoughts. Mrs. Meredith would have liked to
+take her daughter aside and discuss the situation, and Nell was looking
+covertly at Rob, who, she thought, bore it bravely. Rob had lately
+learned carving from a handbook, and was dissecting a fowl, murmuring to
+himself, 'Cut from _a_ to _b_ along the line _f g_, taking care to sever
+the wing at the point _k_.' Like all the others, he thought that Mary
+had promised to be the baronet's wife, and Nell's heart palpitated for
+him when she saw how gently he passed Sir Clement the mustard. Such a
+load lay on Rob that he felt suffocated. Nell noticed indignantly that
+Mary was not even 'nice' to him. For the first time in her life, or at
+least for several weeks, Miss Meredith was wroth with Miss Abinger. Mary
+might have been on the rack, but she went on proudly eating bread and
+chicken. Relieved of his fears, Dick raged internally at Mary for
+treating Angus cruelly, and Nell, who had always dreaded lest things
+should not go as they had gone, sat sorrowfully because she had not been
+disappointed. They all knew how much they cared for Rob now, all except
+Mary of the stony heart.
+
+Sir Clement began to tell some travellers' tales, omitting many things
+that were creditable to his bravery, and Rob found himself listening
+with a show of interest, wondering a little at his own audacity in
+competing with such a candidate. By and by some members of the little
+party drifted away from the others, and an accident left Mary and Rob
+together. Mary was aimlessly plucking the berries from a twig in her
+hand, and all the sign she gave that she knew of Rob's presence was in
+not raising her head. If love is ever unselfish his was at that moment.
+He took a step forward, and then Mary, starting back, looked round
+hurriedly in the direction of Sir Clement. What Rob thought was her
+meaning flashed through him, and he stood still in pain.
+
+'I am sorry you think so meanly of me,' he said, and passed on. He did
+not see Mary's arms rise involuntarily, as if they would call him back.
+But even then she did not realise what Rob's thoughts were. A few yards
+away Rob, moving blindly, struck against Dick.
+
+'Ah, I see Mary there,' her brother said, 'I want to speak to her. Why,
+how white you are, man!'
+
+'Abinger,' Rob answered hoarsely, 'tell me. I must know. Is she engaged
+to Dowton?'
+
+Dick hesitated. He felt sore for Rob. 'Yes, she is,' he replied. 'You
+remember I spoke of this to you before.' Then Dick moved on to have it
+out with Mary. She was standing with the twig in her hand, just as Rob
+had left her.
+
+'Mary,' said her brother bluntly, 'this is too bad. I would have
+expected it from any one sooner than from you.'
+
+'What are you talking about?' asked Mary frigidly.
+
+'I am talking about Angus, my friend. Yes, you may smile, but it is not
+play to him.'
+
+'What have I done to your friend?' said Mary, looking Dick in the face.
+
+'You have crushed the life for the time being out of as fine a fellow
+as I ever knew. You might at least have amused yourself with some one a
+little more experienced in the ways of women.'
+
+'How dare you, Dick!' exclaimed Mary, stamping her foot. All at once
+Dick saw that though she spoke bravely her lips were trembling. A sudden
+fear seized him.
+
+'I presume that you are engaged to Dowton?' he said quickly.
+
+'It is presumption certainly,' replied Mary.
+
+'Why, what else could any one think after that ridiculous affair of the
+water?'
+
+'I shall never forgive him for that,' Mary said, flushing.
+
+'But he----'
+
+'No. Yes, he did, but we are not engaged.'
+
+'You mean to say that you refused him?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+Dick thought it over, tapping the while on a tree-trunk like a
+woodpecker.
+
+'Why?' he asked at last.
+
+Mary shrugged her shoulders, but said nothing.
+
+'You seemed exceedingly friendly,' said Dick, 'when you returned here
+together.'
+
+'I suppose,' Mary said bitterly, 'that the proper thing in the
+circumstances would have been to wound his feelings unnecessarily as
+much as possible?'
+
+'Forgive me, dear,' Dick said kindly; 'of course I misunderstood--but
+this will be a blow to our father.'
+
+Mary looked troubled.
+
+'I could not marry him, you know, Dick,' she faltered.
+
+'Certainly not,' Dick said, 'if you don't care sufficiently for him;
+and yet he seems a man that a girl might care for.'
+
+'Oh, he is,' Mary exclaimed. 'He was so manly and kind that I wanted to
+be nice to him.'
+
+'You have evidently made up your mind, sister mine,' Dick said, 'to die
+a spinster.'
+
+'Yes,' said Mary, with a white face.
+
+Suddenly Dick took both her hands, and looked her in the face.
+
+'Do you care for any other person, Mary?' he asked sharply.
+
+Mary shook her head, but she did not return her brother's gaze. Her
+hands were trembling. She tried to pull them from him, but he held her
+firmly until she looked at him. Then she drew up her head proudly. Her
+hands ceased to shake. She had become marble again.
+
+Dick was not deceived. He dropped her hands, and leant despondently
+against a tree.
+
+'Angus----' he began.
+
+'You must not,' Mary cried; and he stopped abruptly.
+
+'It is worse than I could have feared,' Dick said.
+
+'No, it is not,' said Mary quickly. 'It is nothing. I don't know what
+you mean.'
+
+'It was my fault bringing you together. I should have been more----'
+
+'No, it was not. I met him before. Whom are you speaking about?'
+
+'Think of our father, Mary.'
+
+'Oh, I have!'
+
+'He is not like you. How could he dare----'
+
+'Dick, don't.'
+
+Will bounced towards them with a hop, step, and jump, and Mrs. Meredith
+was signalling that she wanted both.
+
+'Never speak of this again,' Mary said in a low voice to Dick as they
+walked toward the others.
+
+'I hope I shall never feel forced to do so,' Dick replied.
+
+'You will not,' Mary said, in her haste. 'But, Dick,' she added
+anxiously, 'surely the others did not think what you thought? It would
+be so unpleasant for Sir Clement.'
+
+'Well, I can't say,' Dick answered.
+
+'At all events, he did not?'
+
+'Who is he?'
+
+'Oh, Dick, I mean Mr. Angus?'
+
+Dick bit his lip, and would have replied angrily; but perhaps he loved
+this sister of his more than any other person in the world.
+
+'Angus, I suppose, noticed nothing,' he answered, in order to save Mary
+pain, 'except that you and Dowton seemed very good friends.'
+
+Dick knew that this was untrue. He did not remember then that the
+good-natured lies live for ever like the others.
+
+Evening came on before they returned to the river, and Sunbury, now
+blazing with fireworks, was shooting flaming arrows at the sky. The
+sweep of water at the village was one broad bridge of boats, lighted by
+torches and Chinese lanterns of every hue. Stars broke overhead, and
+fell in showers. It was only possible to creep ahead by pulling in the
+oars and holding on to the stream of craft of all kinds that moved
+along by inches. Rob, who was punting Dick and Mary, had to lay down his
+pole and adopt the same tactics, but boat and punt were driven apart,
+and soon tangled hopelessly in different knots.
+
+'It is nearly eight o'clock,' Dick said, after he had given up looking
+for the rest of the party. 'You must not lose your train, Angus.'
+
+'I thought you were to stay overnight, Mr. Angus,' Mary said.
+
+Possibly she meant that had she known he had to return to London, she
+would have begun to treat him better earlier in the day, but Rob thought
+she only wanted to be polite for the last time.
+
+'I have to be at the _Wire_,' he replied, 'before ten.'
+
+Mary, who had not much patience with business, and fancied that it could
+always be deferred until next day if one wanted to defer it very much,
+said, 'Oh!' and then asked, 'Is there not a train that would suit from
+Sunbury?'
+
+Rob, blinder now than ever, thought that she wanted to get rid of him.
+
+'If I could catch the 8.15 here,' he said, 'I would reach Waterloo
+before half-past nine.'
+
+'What do you think?' asked Dick. 'There is no time to lose.'
+
+Rob waited for Mary to speak, but she said nothing.
+
+'I had better try it,' he said.
+
+With difficulty the punt was brought near a landing-stage, and Rob
+jumped out.
+
+'Good-bye,' he said to Mary.
+
+'Good-night,' she replied. Her mouth was quivering, but how could he
+know?
+
+'Wait a moment,' Dick exclaimed. 'We might see him off, Mary?' Mary
+hesitated.
+
+'The others might wonder what had become of us,' she said.
+
+'Oh, we need not attempt to look for them in this maze,' her brother
+answered. 'We shall only meet them again at the _Tawny Owl_.'
+
+The punt was left in charge of a boatman, and the three set off silently
+for the station, Mary walking between the two men. They might have been
+soldiers guarding a deserter.
+
+What were Mary's feelings? She did not fully realise as yet that Rob
+thought she was engaged to Dowton. She fancied that he was sulky because
+a circumstance of which he knew nothing made her wish to treat Sir
+Clement with more than usual consideration; and now she thought that
+Rob, having brought it on himself, deserved to remain miserable until he
+saw that it was entirely his own fault. But she only wanted to be cruel
+to him now to forgive him for it afterwards.
+
+Rob had ceased to ask himself if it was possible that she had not
+promised to be Dowton's wife. His anger had passed away. Her tender
+heart, he thought, made her wish to be good to him--for the last time.
+
+As for Dick, he read the thoughts of both, and inwardly called himself a
+villain for not reading them out aloud. Yet by his merely remaining
+silent these two lovers would probably never meet again, and was not
+that what would be best for Mary?
+
+Rob leant out of the carriage window to say good-bye, and Dick, ill at
+ease, turned his back on the train. It had been a hard day for Mary,
+and, as Rob pressed her hand warmly, a film came over her eyes. Rob saw
+it, and still he thought that she was only sorry for him. There are far
+better and nobler things than loving a woman and getting her, but Rob
+wanted Mary to know, by the last look he gave her, that so long as it
+meant her happiness his misery was only an unusual form of joy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+COLONEL ABINGER TAKES COMMAND
+
+
+One misty morning, about three weeks after the picnic, Dick found
+himself a prisoner in the quadrangle of Frobisher's Inn. He had risen to
+catch an early train, but the gates were locked, and the porter in
+charge had vanished from his box. Dick chafed, and tore round the Inn in
+search of him. It was barely six o'clock; which is three hours after
+midnight in London. The windows of the Inn had darkened one by one,
+until for hours the black building had slept heavily with only one eye
+open. Dick recognised the window, and saw Rob's shadow cast on its white
+blind. He was standing there, looking up a little uneasily, when the
+porter tramped into sight.
+
+'Is Mr. Angus often as late as this?' Mary's brother paused to ask at
+the gate.
+
+'Why, sir,' the porter answered, 'I am on duty until eight o'clock, and
+as likely as not he will still be sitting there when I go. His shadow up
+there has become a sort of companion to me in the long nights, but I
+sometimes wonder what has come over the gentleman of late.'
+
+'He is busy, I suppose; that is all,' Dick said sharply.
+
+The porter shook his head doubtfully, like one who knew the ways of
+literary hands. He probably wrote himself.
+
+'Mr. Angus only came in from his office at three o'clock,' he said, 'and
+you would think he would have had enough of writing by that time. You
+can see his arm going on the blind though yet, and it won't be out of
+his common if he has another long walk before he goes to bed.'
+
+'Does he walk so late as this?' asked Dick, to whom six in the morning
+was an hour of the night.
+
+'I never knew such a gentleman for walking,' replied the porter, 'and
+when I open the gate to him he is off at six miles an hour. I can hear
+the echo of his feet two or three streets off. He doesn't look as if he
+did it for pleasure either.'
+
+'What else would he do it for?'
+
+'I can't say. He looks as if he wanted to run away from himself.'
+
+Dick passed out, with a forced laugh. He knew that since saying good-bye
+to Mary at Sunbury Station, Rob had hardly dared to stop working and
+face the future. The only rest Rob got was when he was striding along
+the great thoroughfares, where every one's life seemed to have a purpose
+except his own. But it was only when he asked himself for what end he
+worked that he stopped working. There were moments when he could not
+believe that it was all over. He saw himself dead, and the world going
+on as usual. When he read what he had written the night before, he
+wondered how people could be interested in such matters. The editor of
+the _Wire_ began to think of this stolid Scotsman every time there was a
+hitch in the office, but Rob scarcely noticed that he was making
+progress. It could only mean ten or twenty pounds more a month; and what
+was that to a man who had only himself to think of, and had gathered a
+library on twenty shillings a week? He bought some good cigars, however.
+
+Dick, who was longing for his father's return from the Continent, so
+that the responsibility for this miserable business might be transferred
+to the colonel's shoulders, frequently went into Rob's rooms to comfort
+him, but did not know how to do it. They sat silently on opposite sides
+of the very hearthrug which Mary had once made a remark about--Rob had
+looked interestedly at the rug after she went away--and each thought
+that, but for the other's sake, he would rather be alone.
+
+What Dick felt most keenly was Rob's increased regard for him. Rob never
+spoke of the _Tawny Owl_ without an effort, but he showed that he
+appreciated Dick's unspoken sympathy. If affairs could have righted
+themselves in that way, Mary's brother would have preferred to be turned
+with contumely out of Rob's rooms, where, as it was, and despite his
+friendship for Rob, he seemed now to be only present on false pretences.
+Dick was formally engaged to Nell now, but he tried at times to have no
+patience with Rob. Perhaps he thought a little sadly in his own rooms
+that to be engaged is not all the world.
+
+Dick had hoped that the misunderstanding which parted Rob and Mary at
+Sunbury would keep them apart without further intervention from him.
+That was not to be. The next time he went to Molesey he was asked why he
+had not brought Mr. Angus with him, and though it was not Mary who asked
+the question, she stopped short on her way out of the saloon to hear his
+answer.
+
+'He did not seem to want to come,' Dick replied reluctantly.
+
+'I know why Mr. Angus would not come with you,' Nell said to Dick when
+they were alone; 'he thinks Mary is engaged to Sir Clement.'
+
+'Nonsense,' said Dick.
+
+'I am sure of it,' said Nell; 'you know we all thought so that day we
+were up the river.'
+
+'Then let him think so if he chooses,' Dick said harshly. 'It is no
+affair of his.'
+
+'Oh, it is!' Nell exclaimed. 'But I suppose it would never do, Dick?'
+
+'What you are thinking of is quite out of the question,' replied Dick,
+feeling that it was a cruel fate which compelled him to act a father's
+part to Mary; 'and besides, Mary does not care for him like that. She
+told me so herself.'
+
+'Oh, but she does,' Nell replied, in a tone of conviction.
+
+'Did she tell you so?'
+
+'No, she said she didn't,' answered Nell, as if that made no difference.
+
+'Well,' said Dick wearily, 'it is much better that Angus should not come
+here again.'
+
+Nevertheless, when Dick returned to London he carried in his pocket an
+invitation to Rob to spend the following Saturday at the _Tawny Owl_. It
+was a very nice note in Mary Abinger's handwriting, and Dick would have
+liked to drop it over the Hungerfield Bridge. He gave it to Rob,
+however, and stood on the defensive.
+
+The note began, 'Dear Mr. Angus, Mrs. Meredith would be very pleased if
+you could----'
+
+The blood came to Rob's face as he saw the handwriting, but it went as
+quickly.
+
+'They ask me down next Saturday,' Rob said bluntly to Dick, 'but you
+know why I can't go.'
+
+'You had better come,' miserable Dick said, defying himself.
+
+'She is to marry Dowton, is she not?' Rob asked, but with no life in his
+voice.
+
+Dick turned away his head, to leave the rest to fate.
+
+'So, of course I must not go,' Rob continued bravely.
+
+Dick did not dare to look him in the face, but Rob put his hand on the
+shoulder of Mary's brother.
+
+'I was a madman,' he said, 'to think that she could ever have cared for
+me, but this will not interfere with our friendship, Abinger?'
+
+'Surely not,' said Dick, taking Rob's hand.
+
+It was one of those awful moments in men's lives when they allow, face
+to face, that they like each other.
+
+Rob concluded that Mrs. Meredith, knowing nothing of his attachment for
+Mary, saw no reason why he should not return to the house-boat, and that
+circumstances had compelled Mary to write the invitation. His blundering
+honesty would not let him concoct a polite excuse for declining it, and
+Mrs. Meredith took his answer amiss, while Nell dared not say what she
+thought for fear of Dick. Mary read his note over once, and then went
+for a solitary walk round the island. Rob saw her from the tow-path
+where he had been prowling about for hours in hopes of catching a last
+glimpse of her. Her face was shaded beneath her big straw hat, and no
+baby-yacht, such as the Thames sports, ever glided down the river more
+prettily than she tripped along the island path. Once her white frock
+caught in a dilapidated seat, and she had to stoop to loosen it. Rob's
+heart stopped beating for a moment just then. The way Mary extricated
+herself was another revelation. He remembered having thought it
+delightful that she seldom knew what day of the month it was, and having
+looked on in an ecstasy while she searched for the pocket of her dress.
+The day before Mrs. Meredith had not been able to find her pocket, and
+Rob had thought it foolish of ladies not to wear their pockets where
+they could be more easily got at.
+
+Rob did not know it, but Mary saw him. She had but to beckon, and in
+three minutes he would have been across the ferry. She gave no sign,
+however, but sat dreamily on the ramshackle seat that patient anglers
+have used until the Thames fishes must think seat and angler part of the
+same vegetable. Though Mary would not for worlds have let him know that
+she saw him, she did not mind his standing afar off and looking at her.
+Once after that Rob started involuntarily for Molesey, but realising
+what he was about by the time he reached Surbiton, he got out of the
+train there and returned to London.
+
+An uneasy feeling possessed Dick that Mary knew of the misunderstanding
+which kept Rob away, and possibly even of her brother's share in
+fostering it. If so, she was too proud to end it. He found that if he
+mentioned Rob to her she did not answer a word. Nell's verbal
+experiments in the same direction met with a similar fate, and every one
+was glad when the colonel reappeared to take command.
+
+Colonel Abinger was only in London for a few days, being on his way to
+Glen Quharity, the tenant of which was already telegraphing him glorious
+figures about the grouse. Mary was going too, and the Merediths were
+shortly to return to Silchester.
+
+'There is a Thrums man on this stair,' Dick said to his father one
+afternoon in Frobisher's Inn, 'a particular friend of mine, though I
+have treated him villainously.'
+
+'Ah,' said the colonel, who had just come up from the house-boat, 'then
+you might have him in, and make your difference up. Perhaps he could
+give me some information about the shooting.'
+
+'Possibly,' Dick said; 'but we have no difference to make up, because he
+thinks me as honest as himself. You have met him, I believe.'
+
+'What did you say his name was?'
+
+'His name is Angus.'
+
+'I can't recall any Angus.'
+
+'Ah, you never knew him so well as Mary and I do.'
+
+'Mary?' asked the colonel, looking up quickly.
+
+'Yes,' said Dick. 'Do you remember a man from a Silchester paper who was
+at the castle last Christmas?'
+
+'What!' cried the colonel, 'an underbred, poaching fellow who----'
+
+'Not at all,' said Dick, 'an excellent gentleman, who is to make his
+mark here, and, as I have said, my very particular friend.'
+
+'That fellow turned up again,' groaned the colonel.
+
+'I have something more to tell you of him,' continued Dick
+remorselessly. 'I have reason to believe, as we say on the Press when
+hard up for copy, that he is in love with Mary.'
+
+The colonel sprang from his seat. 'Be calm,' said Dick.
+
+'I am calm,' cried the colonel, not saying another word, so fearful was
+he of what Dick might tell him next.
+
+'That would not, perhaps, so much matter,' Dick said, coming to rest at
+the back of a chair, 'if it were not that Mary seems to have an equal
+regard for him.'
+
+Colonel Abinger's hands clutched the edge of the table, and it was not a
+look of love he cast at Dick.
+
+'If this be true,' he exclaimed, his voice breaking in agitation, 'I
+shall never forgive you, Richard, never. But I don't believe it.'
+
+Dick felt sorry for his father.
+
+'It is a fact that has to be faced,' he said, more gently.
+
+'Why, why, why, the man is a pauper!'
+
+'Not a bit of it,' said Dick. 'He may be on the regular staff of the
+_Wire_ any day now.'
+
+'You dare to look me in the face, and tell me you have encouraged this,
+this----' cried the colonel, choking in a rush of words.
+
+'Quite the contrary,' Dick said; 'I have done more than I had any right
+to do to put an end to it.'
+
+'Then it is ended?'
+
+'I can't say.'
+
+'It shall be ended,' shouted the colonel, making the table groan under
+his fist.
+
+'In a manner,' Dick said, 'you are responsible for the whole affair. Do
+you remember when you were at Glen Quharity two or three years ago
+asking a parson called Rorrison, father of Rorrison the war
+correspondent, to use his son's Press influence on behalf of a Thrums
+man? Well, Angus is that man. Is it not strange how this has come
+about?'
+
+'It is enough to make me hate myself,' replied the irate colonel, though
+it had not quite such an effect as that.
+
+When his father had subsided a little, Dick told him of what had been
+happening in England during the last month or two. There had been a
+change of Government, but the chief event was the audacity of a plebeian
+in casting his eyes on a patrician's daughter. What are politics when
+the pipes in the bath-room burst?
+
+'So you see,' Dick said in conclusion, 'I have acted the part of the
+unrelenting parent fairly well, and I don't like it.'
+
+'Had I been in your place,' replied the colonel, 'I would have acted it
+a good deal better.'
+
+'You would have told Angus that you considered him, upon the whole, the
+meanest thing that crawls, and that if he came within a radius of five
+miles of your daughter you would have the law of him? Yes; but that sort
+of trespassing is not actionable nowadays; and besides, I don't know
+what Mary might have said.'
+
+'Trespassing!' echoed the colonel; 'I could have had the law of him for
+trespassing nearly a year ago.'
+
+'You mean that time you caught him fishing in the Dome? I only heard of
+that at second-hand, but I have at least no doubt that he fished to some
+effect.'
+
+'He can fish,' admitted the colonel; 'I should like to know what flies
+he used.'
+
+Dick laughed.
+
+'Angus,' he said, 'is a man with a natural aptitude for things. He does
+not, I suspect, even make love like a beginner.'
+
+'You are on his side, Richard.'
+
+'It has not seemed like it so far, but, I confess, I have certainly had
+enough of shuffling.'
+
+'There will be no more shuffling,' said the colonel fiercely. 'I shall
+see this man and tell him what I think of him. As for Mary----'
+
+He paused.
+
+'Yes,' said Dick, 'Mary is the difficulty. At present I cannot even tell
+you what she is thinking of it all. Mary is the one person I could never
+look in the face when I meditated an underhand action--I remember how
+that sense of honour of hers used to annoy me when I was a boy--and so I
+have not studied her countenance much of late.'
+
+'She shall marry Dowton,' said the colonel decisively.
+
+'It is probably a pity, but I don't think she will,' replied Dick. 'Of
+course you can prevent her marrying Angus by simply refusing your
+consent.'
+
+'Yes, and I shall refuse it.'
+
+'Though it should break her heart she will never complain,' said Dick,
+'but it does seem a little hard on Mary that we should mar her life
+rather than endure a disappointment ourselves.'
+
+'You don't look at it in the proper light,' said the colonel, who, like
+most persons, made the proper light himself; 'in saving her from this
+man we do her the greatest kindness in our power.'
+
+'Um,' said Dick, 'of course. That was how I put it to myself, but just
+consider Angus calmly, and see what case we have against him.'
+
+'He is not a gentleman,' said the colonel.
+
+'He ought not to be, according to the proper light, but he is.'
+
+'Pshaw!' the colonel exclaimed pettishly. 'He may have worked himself up
+into some sort of position, like other discontented men of his class,
+but he never had a father.'
+
+'He says he had a very good one. Weigh him, if you like, against Dowton,
+who is a good fellow in his way, but never, so far as I know, did an
+honest day's work in his life. Dowton's whole existence has been devoted
+to pleasure-seeking, while Angus has been climbing up ever since he was
+born, and with a heavy load on his back, too, most of the time. If he
+goes on as he is doing, he will have both a good income and a good
+position shortly.'
+
+'Dowton's position is made,' said the colonel.
+
+'Exactly,' said Dick, 'and Angus is making his for himself. Whatever
+other distinction we draw between them is a selfish one, and I question
+if it does us much credit.'
+
+'I have no doubt,' said the colonel, 'that Mary's pride will make her
+see this matter as I do.'
+
+'It will at least make her sacrifice herself for our pride, if you
+insist on that.'
+
+Mary's father loved her as he had loved her mother, though he liked to
+have his own way with both of them. His voice broke a little as he
+answered Dick.
+
+'You have a poor opinion of your father, my boy,' he said. 'I think I
+would endure a good deal if Mary were to be the happier for it.'
+
+Dick felt a little ashamed of himself.
+
+'Whatever I may say,' he answered, 'I have at least acted much as you
+would have done yourself. Forgive me, father.'
+
+The colonel looked up with a wan smile.
+
+'Let us talk of your affairs rather, Richard,' he said. 'I have at least
+nothing to say against Miss Meredith.'
+
+Dick moved uncomfortably in his chair, and then stood up, thinking he
+heard a knock at the door.
+
+'Are you there, Abinger?' some one called out. 'I have something very
+extraordinary to tell you.'
+
+Dick looked at his father, and hesitated. 'It is Angus,' he said.
+
+'Let him in,' said the colonel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE BARBER OF ROTTEN ROW
+
+
+Rob started when he saw Mary's father.
+
+'We have met before, Mr. Angus,' said the colonel courteously.
+
+'Yes,' answered Rob, without a tremor; 'at Dome Castle, was it not?'
+
+This was the Angus who had once been unable to salute anybody without
+wondering what on earth he ought to say next. This was the colonel whose
+hand had gaped five minutes before for Rob's throat. The frown on the
+face of Mary's father was only a protest against her lover's improved
+appearance. Rob was no longer the hobbledehoy of last Christmas. He was
+rather particular about the cut of his coat. He had forgotten that he
+was not a colonel's social equal. In short, when he entered a room now
+he knew what to do with his hat. Their host saw the two men measuring
+each other. Dick never smiled, but sometimes his mouth twitched, as now.
+
+'You had something special to tell me, had you not?' he asked Rob.
+
+'Well,' Rob replied, with hesitation, 'I have something for you in my
+rooms.'
+
+'Suppose my father,' began Dick, meaning to invite the colonel upstairs,
+but pausing as he saw Rob's brows contract. The colonel saw too, and
+resented it. No man likes to be left on the outskirts of a secret.
+
+'Run up yourself, Abinger,' Rob said, seating himself near Mary's
+father; 'and, stop, here are my keys. I locked it in.'
+
+'Why,' asked Dick, while his father also looked up, 'have you some
+savage animal up there?'
+
+'No,' Rob said, 'it is very tame.'
+
+Dick climbed the stair, after casting a quizzical look behind him, which
+meant that he wondered how long the colonel and Rob would last in a
+small room together. He unlocked the door of Rob's chambers more quickly
+than he opened it, for he had no notion of what might be caged up
+inside, and as soon as he had entered he stopped, amazed. All men of
+course are amazed once in their lives--when they can get a girl to look
+at them. This was Dick's second time.
+
+It was the hour of the evening when another ten minutes can be stolen
+from the day by a readjustment of one's window curtains. Rob's blind,
+however, had given way in the cords, and instead of being pulled up was
+twisted into two triangles. Just sufficient light straggled through the
+window to let Dick see the man who was standing on the hearthrug looking
+sullenly at his boots. There was a smell of oil in the room.
+
+Dowton!' Dick exclaimed; 'what masquerade is this?'
+
+The other put up his elbow as if to ward off a blow, and then Dick
+opened the eyes of anger.
+
+'Oh,' he said, 'it is you, is it?'
+
+They stood looking at each other in silence.
+
+'Just stand there, my fine fellow,' Dick said, 'until I light the gas. I
+must have a better look at you.'
+
+The stranger turned longing eyes on the door as the light struck him.
+
+'Not a single step in that direction,' said Dick, 'unless you want to go
+over the banisters.'
+
+Abinger came closer to the man who was Sir Clement Dowton's double, and
+looked him over. He wore a white linen jacket, and an apron to match,
+and it would have been less easy to mistake him for a baronet aping the
+barber than it had been for the barber to ape the baronet.
+
+'Your name?' asked Dick.
+
+'Josephs,' the other mumbled.
+
+'You are a barber, I presume?'
+
+'I follow the profession of hair-dressing,' replied Josephs, with his
+first show of spirit.
+
+Had Dick not possessed an inscrutable face, Josephs would have known
+that his inquisitor was suffering from a sense of the ludicrous. Dick
+had just remembered that his father was downstairs.
+
+'Well, Josephs, I shall have to hand you over to the police.'
+
+'I think not,' said Josephs, in his gentlemanly voice.
+
+'Why not?' asked Dick.
+
+'Because then it would all come out.'
+
+'What would all come out?'
+
+'The way your father was deceived. The society papers would make a great
+deal of it, and he would not like that.'
+
+Dick groaned, though the other did not hear him.
+
+'You read the society journals, Josephs?'
+
+'Rather!' said Josephs.
+
+'Perhaps you write for them?'
+
+Josephs did not say.
+
+'Well, how were you brought here?' Dick asked.
+
+'Your friend,' said Josephs sulkily, 'came into our place of business in
+Southampton Row half an hour ago, and saw me. He insisted on bringing me
+here at once in a cab. I wanted to put on a black coat, but he would not
+hear of it.'
+
+'Ah, then, I suppose you gave Mr. Angus the full confession of your
+roguery as you came along?'
+
+'He would not let me speak,' said Josephs. 'He said it was no affair of
+his.'
+
+'No? Then you will be so good as to favour me with the pretty story.'
+
+Dick lit a cigar and seated himself. The sham baronet looked undecidedly
+at a chair.
+
+'Certainly not,' said Dick; 'you can stand.'
+
+Josephs told his tale demurely, occasionally with a gleam of humour, and
+sometimes with a sigh. His ambition to be a gentleman, but with no
+desire to know the way, had come to him one day in his youth when
+another gentleman flung a sixpence at him. In a moment Josephs saw what
+it was to belong to the upper circles. He hurried to a street corner to
+get his boots blacked, tossed the menial the sixpence, telling him to
+keep the change, and returned home in an ecstasy, penniless, but with an
+object in life. That object was to do it again.
+
+At the age of eighteen Josephs slaved merrily during the week, but had
+never any money by Monday morning. He was a gentleman every Saturday
+evening. Then he lived; for the remainder of the week he was a barber.
+One of his delights at this period was to have his hair cut at
+Truefitt's and complain that it was badly done. Having reproved his
+attendant in a gentlemanly way, he tipped him handsomely and retired in
+a glory. It was about this time that he joined a Conservative
+association.
+
+Soon afterwards Josephs was to be seen in Rotten Row, in elegant
+apparel, hanging over the railing. He bowed and raised his hat to the
+ladies who took his fancy, and, though they did not respond, glowed with
+the sensation of being practically a man of fashion. Then he returned to
+the shop.
+
+The years glided by, and Josephs discovered that he was perfectly
+content to remain a hairdresser if he could be a gentleman now and
+again. Having supped once in a fashionable restaurant, he was satisfied
+for a fortnight or so with a sausage and onions at home. Then the
+craving came back. He saved up for two months on one occasion, and then
+took Saturday to Monday at Cookham, where he passed as Henry K. Talbot
+Devereux. He was known to the waiters and boatmen there as the gentleman
+who had quite a pleasure in tossing them half-crowns, and for a month
+afterwards he had sausage without onions. So far this holiday had been
+the memory of his life. He studied the manners and language of the
+gentlemen who came to the shop in which he was employed, and began to
+dream of a big thing annually. He had learnt long ago that he was
+remarkably good-looking.
+
+For a whole year Josephs abstained from being a gentleman except in the
+smallest way, for he was burning to have a handle to his name, and
+feared that it could not be done at less than twenty pounds. His week's
+holiday came, and found Josephs not ready for it. He had only twelve
+pounds. With a self-denial that was magnificent he crushed his
+aspirations, took only two days of delight at Brighton, and continued to
+save up for the title. Next summer saw him at the Anglers' Retreat, near
+Dome Castle. 'Sir Clement Dowton' was the name on his Gladstone bag. A
+dozen times a day he looked at it till it frightened him, and then he
+tore the label off. Having done so, he put on a fresh one.
+
+Josephs had selected his baronetcy with due care. Years previously he
+had been told that he looked like the twin-brother of Sir Clement
+Dowton, and on inquiry he had learned that the baronet was not in
+England. As for the Anglers' Retreat, he went there because he had heard
+that it was frequented by persons in the rank of life to which it was
+his intention to belong for the next week. He had never heard of Colonel
+Abinger until they met. The rest is known. Josephs dwelt on his
+residence at Dome Castle with his eyes shut, like a street-arab
+lingering lovingly over the grating of a bakery.
+
+'Well, you are a very admirable rogue,' Dick said, when Josephs had
+brought his story to an end, 'and, though I shall never be proud again,
+your fluency excuses our blindness. Where did you pick it up?' The
+barber glowed with gratification.
+
+'It came naturally to me,' he answered. 'I was intended for a gentleman.
+I dare say, now, I am about the only case on record of a man who took to
+pickles and French sauces the first time he tried them. Mushrooms were
+not an acquired taste with me, nor black coffee, nor caviare, nor
+liqueurs, and I enjoy celery with my cheese. What I liked best of all
+was the little round glasses you dip your fingers into when the dinner
+is finished. I dream of them still.'
+
+'You are burst up for the present, Josephs, I presume?'
+
+'Yes, but I shall be able to do something in a small way next Christmas.
+I should like to put it off till summer, but I can't.'
+
+'There must be no more donning the name of Dowton,' said Dick, trying to
+be stern.
+
+'I suppose I shall have to give that up,' the barber said with a sigh.
+'I had to bolt, you see, last time, before I meant to go.'
+
+'Ah, you have not told me yet the why and wherefore of those sudden
+disappearances. Excuse my saying so, Josephs, but they were scarcely
+gentlemanly.'
+
+'I know it,' said Josephs sadly, 'but however carefully one plans a
+thing, it may take a wrong turning. The first time I was at the castle I
+meant to leave in a carriage and pair, waving my handkerchief, but it
+could not be done at the money.'
+
+'The colonel would have sent you to Silchester in his own trap.'
+
+'Ah, I wanted a brougham. You see I had been a little extravagant at the
+inn, and I could not summon up courage to leave the castle without
+tipping the servants all round.'
+
+'So you waited till you were penniless, and then stole away?'
+
+'Not quite penniless,' said Josephs; 'I had three pounds left, but----'
+
+He hesitated.
+
+'You see,' he blurted out, blushing at last, 'my old mother is dependent
+on me, and I kept the three pounds for her.'
+
+Dick took his cigar from his mouth.
+
+'I am sorry to hear this, Josephs,' he said, 'because I meant to box
+your ears presently, and I don't know that I can do it now. How about
+the sudden termination to the visit you honoured the colonel with last
+Christmas?'
+
+'I had to go,' said Josephs, 'because I read that Sir Clement Dowton had
+returned to England. Besides, I was due at the shop.'
+
+'But you had an elegant time while your money held out?'
+
+Josephs wiped a smile from his face.
+
+'It was grand,' he said. 'I shall never know such days again.'
+
+'I hope not, Josephs. Was there no streak of cloud in those halcyon
+days?'
+
+The barber sighed heavily.
+
+'Ay, there was,' he said, 'hair oil.'
+
+'Explain yourself, my gentle hairdresser.'
+
+'Gentlemen,' said Josephs, 'don't use hair oil. I can't live without it.
+That is my only stumbling-block to being a gentleman.'
+
+He put his fingers through his hair, and again Dick sniffed the odour of
+oil.
+
+'I had several bottles of it with me,' Josephs continued, 'but I dared
+not use it.'
+
+'This is interesting,' said Dick. 'I should like to know now, from you
+who have tried both professions, whether you prefer the gentleman to the
+barber.'
+
+'I do and I don't,' answered Josephs. 'Hair-dressing suits me best as a
+business, but gentility for pleasure. A fortnight of the gentleman sets
+me up for the year. I should not like to be a gentleman all the year
+round.'
+
+'The hair oil is an insurmountable obstacle.'
+
+'Yes,' said the barber; 'besides, to be a gentleman is rather hard
+work.'
+
+'I dare say it is,' said Dick, 'when you take a short cut to it. Well, I
+presume this interview is at an end. You may go.'
+
+He jerked his foot in the direction of the door, but Josephs hesitated.
+
+'Colonel Abinger well?' asked the barber.
+
+'The door, Josephs,' replied Dick.
+
+'And Miss Abinger?'
+
+Dick gave the barber a look that hurried him out of the room and down
+the stairs. Abinger's mouth twitched every time he took the cigar out of
+it, until he started to his feet.
+
+'I have forgotten that Angus and my father are together,' he murmured.
+'I wonder,' he asked himself, as he returned to his own chambers, 'how
+the colonel will take this? Must he be told? I think so.'
+
+Colonel Abinger was told, as soon as Rob had left, and it added so much
+fuel to his passion that it put the fire out.
+
+'If the story gets abroad,' he said, with a shudder, 'I shall never hold
+up my head again.'
+
+'It is a safe secret,' Dick answered; 'the fellow would not dare to
+speak of it anywhere. He knows what that would mean for himself.'
+
+'Angus knows of it. Was it like the chivalrous soul you make him to
+flout this matter before us?'
+
+'You are hard up for an argument against Angus, father. I made him
+promise to let me know if he ever came on the track of the impostor, and
+you saw how anxious he was to keep the discovery from you. He asked me
+at the door when he was going out not to mention it to either you or
+Mary.'
+
+'Confound him,' cried the colonel testily; 'but he is right about Mary;
+we need not speak of it to her. She never liked the fellow.'
+
+'That was fortunate,' said Dick, 'but you did, father. You thought that
+Josephs was a gentleman, and you say that Angus is not. Perhaps you have
+made a mistake in both cases.'
+
+'I say nothing against Angus,' replied the colonel, 'except that I don't
+want him to marry my daughter.'
+
+'Oh, you and he got on well together, then?'
+
+'He can talk. The man has improved.'
+
+'You did not talk about Mary?' asked Dick.
+
+'We never mentioned her; how could I, when he supposes her engaged to
+Dowton? I shall talk about him to her, though.'
+
+Two days afterwards Dick asked his father if he had talked to Mary about
+Angus yet.
+
+'No, Richard,' the old man admitted feebly, 'I have not. The fact is
+that she is looking so proud and stately just now, that I feel nervous
+about broaching the subject.'
+
+'That is exactly how I feel,' said Dick, 'but Nell told me to-day that,
+despite her hauteur before us, Mary is wearing her heart away.'
+
+The colonel's fingers beat restlessly on the mantelpiece.
+
+'I'm afraid she does care for Angus,' he said.
+
+'As much as he cares for her, I believe,' replied Dick. 'Just think,' he
+added bitterly, 'that these two people love each other for the best that
+is in them, one of the rarest things in life, and are nevertheless to be
+kept apart. Look here.'
+
+Dick drew aside his blind, and pointed to a light cast on the opposite
+wall from a higher window.
+
+'That is Angus's light,' he said. 'On such a night as this, when he is
+not wanted at the _Wire_, you will see that light blazing into the
+morning. Watch that moving shadow; it is the reflection of his arm as he
+sits there writing, writing, writing with nothing to write for, and only
+despair to face him when he stops. Is it not too bad?'
+
+'They will forget each other in time,' said the colonel. 'Let Dowton
+have another chance. He is to be at the Lodge.'
+
+'But if they don't forget each other; if Dowton fails again, and Mary
+continues to eat her heart in silence, what then?'
+
+'We shall see.'
+
+'Look here, father. I cannot play this pitiful part before Angus for
+ever. Let us make a bargain. Dowton gets a second chance; if he does not
+succeed, it is Angus's turn. Do you promise me so much?'
+
+'I cannot say,' replied the colonel thoughtfully. 'It may come to that.'
+
+Rob was as late in retiring to rest that night as Dick had predicted,
+but he wrote less than usual. He had something to think of as he paced
+his room, for, unlike her father and brother, he knew that when Mary
+was a romantic schoolgirl she had dressed the sham baronet, as a child
+may dress her doll, in the virtues of a hero. He shuddered to think of
+her humiliation should she ever hear the true story of Josephs--as she
+never did. Yet many a lady of high degree has given her heart to a
+baronet who was better fitted to be a barber.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+ROB PULLS HIMSELF TOGETHER
+
+
+In a London fog the street-lamps are up and about, running maliciously
+at pedestrians. He is in love or writing a book who is struck by one
+without remonstrating. One night that autumn a fog crept through London
+a month before it was due, and Rob met a lamp-post the following
+afternoon on his way home from the _Wire_ office. He passed on without a
+word, though he was not writing a book. Something had happened that day,
+and, but for Mary Abinger, Rob would have been wishing that his mother
+could see him now.
+
+The editor of the _Wire_ had called him into a private room, in which
+many a young gentleman, who only wanted a chance to put the world to
+rights, has quaked, hat in hand, before now. It is the dusty sanctum
+from which Mr. Rowbotham wearily distributes glory or consternation,
+sometimes with niggardly hand, and occasionally like an African explorer
+scattering largess among the natives. Mr. Rowbotham might be even a
+greater editor than he is if he was sure that it is quite the proper
+thing for so distinguished a man as himself to believe in anything, and
+some people think that his politics are to explain away to-day the
+position he took up yesterday. He seldom writes himself, and, while
+directing the line to be adopted by his staff, he smokes a cigar which
+he likes to probe with their pens. He is pale and thin, and has roving
+eyes, got from always being on the alert against aspirants.
+
+All the chairs in the editorial room, except Mr. Rowbotham's own, had
+been converted, like the mantelpiece, into temporary bookcases. Rob
+tumbled the books off one (your _Inquiry into the State of Ireland_ was
+among them, gentle reader) much as a coal-heaver topples his load into a
+cellar, or like a housewife emptying her apron.
+
+'You suit me very well, Angus,' the editor said. 'You have no lurking
+desire to write a book, have you?'
+
+'No,' Rob answered; 'since I joined the Press that ambition seems to
+have gone from me.'
+
+'Quite so,' said Mr. Rowbotham, his tone implying that Rob now left the
+court without a stain upon his character. The editor's cigar went out,
+and he made a spill of a page from _Sonnets of the Woods_, which had
+just come in for review.
+
+'As you know,' the editor continued, 'I have been looking about me for a
+leader-writer for the last year. You have a way of keeping your head
+that I like, and your style is not so villainously bad. Are you prepared
+to join us?'
+
+'I should think so,' said Rob.
+
+'Very well. You will start with £800 a year. Ricketts, as you may have
+heard, has half as much again as that, but he has been with us some
+time.'
+
+'All right,' said Rob calmly, though his chest was swelling. He used to
+receive an order for a sack of shavings in the same tone.
+
+'You expected this, I dare say?' asked the editor.
+
+'Scarcely,' said Rob. 'I thought you would offer the appointment to
+Marriott; he is a much cleverer man than I am.'
+
+'Yes,' assented Mr. Rowbotham, more readily than Rob thought necessary.
+'I have had Marriott in my eye for some time, but I rather think
+Marriott is a genius, and so he would not do for us.'
+
+'You never had that suspicion of me?' asked Rob, a little blankly.
+
+'Never,' said the editor frankly. 'I saw from the first that you were a
+man to be trusted. Moderate Radicalism is our policy, and not even
+Ricketts can advocate moderation so vehemently as you do. You fight for
+it with a flail. By the way, you are Scotch, I think?'
+
+'Yes,' said Rob.
+
+'I only asked,' the editor explained, 'because of the shall and the will
+difficulty. Have you got over that yet?'
+
+'No,' Rob said sadly, 'and never will.'
+
+'I shall warn the proof-readers to be on the alert,' Mr. Rowbotham said,
+laughing, though Rob did not see what at. 'Dine with me at the Garrick
+on Wednesday week, will you?'
+
+Rob nodded, and was retiring, when the editor called after him--
+
+'You are not a married man, Angus?'
+
+'No,' said Rob, with a sickly smile.
+
+'Ah, you should marry,' recommended Mr. Rowbotham, who is a bachelor.
+'You would be worth another two hundred a year to us then. I wish I
+could find the time to do it myself.'
+
+Rob left the office a made man, but looking as if it all had happened
+some time ago. There were men shivering in Fleet Street as he passed
+down it who had come to London on the same day as himself, every one
+with a tragic story to tell now, and some already seeking the double
+death that is called drowning care. Shadows of university graduates
+passed him in the fog who would have been glad to carry his bag. That
+night a sandwich-board man, who had once had a thousand a year, crept
+into the Thames. Yet Rob bored his way home, feeling that it was all in
+vain.
+
+He stopped at Abinger's door to tell him what had happened, but the
+chambers were locked. More like a man who had lost £800 a year than one
+who had just been offered it, he mounted to his own rooms, hardly
+noticing that the door was now ajar. The blackness of night was in the
+sitting-room, and a smell of burning leather.
+
+'Another pair of slippers gone,' said a voice from the fireplace. It was
+Dick, and if he had not jumped out of one of the slippers he would have
+been on fire himself. Long experience had told him the exact moment to
+jump.
+
+'I tried your door,' Rob said. 'I have news for you.'
+
+'Well,' said Dick, 'I forced my way in here because I have something to
+tell you, and resolved not to miss you. Who speaks first? My news is
+bad--at least for me.'
+
+'Mine is good,' said Rob; 'we had better finish up with it.'
+
+'Ah,' Dick replied, 'but when you hear mine you may not care to tell me
+yours.'
+
+Dick spoke first, however, and ever afterwards was glad that he had done
+so.
+
+'Look here, Angus,' he said bluntly, 'I don't know that Mary is engaged
+to Dowton.'
+
+Rob stood up and sat down again.
+
+'Nothing is to be gained by talking in that way,' he said shortly. 'She
+was engaged to him six weeks ago.'
+
+'No,' said Dick, 'she was not, though for all I know she may be now.'
+
+Then Dick told his tale under the fire of Rob's eyes. When it was ended
+Rob rose from his chair, and stared silently for several minutes at a
+vase on the mantelpiece. Dick continued talking, but Rob did not hear a
+word.
+
+'I can't sit here, Abinger,' he said; 'there is not room to think. I
+shall be back presently.'
+
+He was gone into the fog the next moment. 'At it again,' muttered the
+porter, as Rob swung past and was lost ten paces off. He was back in an
+hour, walking more slowly.
+
+'When the colonel writes to you,' he said, as he walked into his room,
+'does he make any mention of Dowton?'
+
+'He never writes,' Dick answered; 'he only telegraphs me now and again,
+when a messenger from the Lodge happens to be in Thrums.'
+
+'Miss Abinger writes?'
+
+'Yes. I know from her that Dowton is still there, but that is all.'
+
+'He would not have remained so long,' said Rob, 'unless--unless----'
+
+'I don't know,' Dick answered. 'You see it would all depend on Mary.
+She had a soft heart for Dowton the day she refused him, but I am not
+sure how she would take his reappearance on the scene again. If she
+resented it, I don't think the boldest baronet that breathes would
+venture to propose to Mary in her shell.'
+
+'The colonel might press her?'
+
+'Hardly, I think, to marry a man she does not care for. No, you do him
+an injustice. What my father would like to have is the power to compel
+her to care for Dowton. No doubt he would exercise that if it was his.'
+
+'Miss Abinger says nothing--sends no messages--I mean, does she ever
+mention me when she writes?'
+
+'Never a word,' said Dick. 'Don't look pale, man; it is a good sign.
+Women go by contraries, they say. Besides, Mary is not like Mahomet. If
+the mountain won't go to her, she will never come to the mountain.'
+
+Rob started, and looked at his hat.
+
+'You can't walk to Glen Quharity Lodge to-night,' said Dick, following
+Rob's eyes.
+
+'Do you mean that I should go at all?'
+
+'Why, well, you see, it is this awkward want of an income that spoils
+everything. Now, if you could persuade Rowbotham to give you a thousand
+a year, that might have its influence on my father.'
+
+'I told you,' exclaimed Rob; 'no, of course I did not. I joined the
+staff of the _Wire_ to-day at £800.'
+
+'Your hand, young man,' said Dick, very nearly becoming excited. 'Then
+that is all right. On the Press every one with a good income can add
+two hundred a year to it. It is only those who need the two hundred
+that cannot get it.'
+
+'You think I should go north?' said Rob, with the whistle of the train
+already in his ears.
+
+'Ah, it is not my affair,' answered Dick; 'I have done my duty. I
+promised to give Dowton a fair chance, and he has had it. I don't know
+what use he has made of it, remember. You have overlooked my share in
+this business, and I retire now.'
+
+'You are against me still, Abinger.'
+
+'No, Angus, on my word I am not. You are as good a man as Dowton, and if
+Mary thinks you better----'
+
+Dick shrugged his shoulders to signify that he had freed them of a load
+of prejudice.
+
+'But does she?' said Rob.
+
+'You will have to ask herself,' replied Dick.
+
+'Yes; but when?'
+
+'She will probably be up in town next season.'
+
+'Next season,' exclaimed Rob; 'as well say next century.'
+
+'Well, if that is too long to wait, suppose you come to Dome Castle with
+me at Christmas?'
+
+Rob pushed the invitation from him contemptuously.
+
+'There is no reason,' he said, looking at Dick defiantly, 'why I should
+not go north to-night.'
+
+'It would be a little hurried, would it not?' Dick said to his pipe.
+
+'No,' Rob answered, with a happy inspiration. 'I meant to go to Thrums
+just now, for a few days at any rate. Rowbotham does not need me until
+Friday.'
+
+Rob looked up and saw Dick's mouth twitching. He tried to stare Mary's
+brother out of countenance, but could not do it.
+
+Night probably came on that Tuesday as usual, for Nature is as much as
+man a slave to habit, but it was not required to darken London. If all
+the clocks and watches had broken their mainsprings no one could have
+told whether it was at noon or midnight that Rob left for Scotland. It
+would have been equally impossible to say from his face whether he was
+off to a marriage or a funeral. He did not know himself.
+
+'This human nature is a curious thing,' thought Dick, as he returned to
+his rooms. 'Here are two of us in misery, the one because he fears he is
+not going to be married, and the other because he knows he is.'
+
+He stretched himself out on two chairs.
+
+'Neither of us, of course, is really miserable. Angus is not, for he is
+in love; and I am not, for----' He paused, and looked at his pipe.
+
+'No, I am not miserable; how could a man be miserable who has two chairs
+to lie upon, and a tobacco jar at his elbow? I fancy, though, that I am
+just saved from misery by lack of sentiment.
+
+'Curious to remember that I was once sentimental with the best of them.
+This is the Richard who sat up all night writing poems to Nell's
+eyebrows. Ah, poor Nell!
+
+'I wonder, is it my fault that my passion burned itself out in one
+little crackle? With most men, if the books tell true, the first fire
+only goes out after the second is kindled, but I seem to have no more
+sticks to light.
+
+'I am going to be married, though I would much rather remain single. My
+wife will be the only girl I ever loved, and I like her still more than
+any other girl I know. Though I shuddered just now when I thought of
+matrimony, there can be little doubt that we shall get on very well
+together.
+
+'I should have preferred her to prove as fickle as myself, but how true
+she has remained to me! Not to me, for it is not the real Dick Abinger
+she cares for, and so I don't know that Nell's love is of the kind to
+make a man conceited. Is marriage a rash experiment when the woman loves
+the man for qualities he does not possess, and has not discovered in
+years of constant intercourse the little that is really lovable in him?
+Whatever I say to Nell is taken to mean the exact reverse of what I do
+mean; she reads my writings upside down, as one might say; she cries if
+I speak to her of anything more serious than flowers and waltzes, but
+she thinks me divine when I treat her like an infant.
+
+'Is it weakness or strength that has kept me what the world would call
+true to Nell? Is a man necessarily a villain because love dies out of
+his heart, or has his reason some right to think the affair over and
+show him where he stands?
+
+'Yes, Nell after all gets the worse of the bargain. She will have for a
+husband a man who is evidently incapable of a lasting affection for
+anybody. That, I suppose, means that I find myself the only really
+interesting person I know. Yet, I think, Richard, you would at times
+rather be somebody else--anybody almost would do.
+
+'It is a little humiliating to remember that I have been lying to Angus
+for the last month or two--I, who always thought I had such a noble
+admiration for the truth. I did it very easily too, so I suppose there
+can be no doubt that I really am a very poor sort of creature. I wonder
+if it was for Mary's sake I lied, or merely because it would have been
+too troublesome to speak the truth? Except by fits and starts I have
+ceased apparently to be interested in anything. The only thing nowadays
+that rouses my indignation is the attempt on any one's part to draw me
+into an argument on any subject under the sun. Here is this Irish
+question; I can pump up an article in three paragraphs on it, but I
+don't really seem to care whether it is ever settled or not. Should we
+have a republic? I don't mind; it is all the same to me: but don't give
+me the casting vote. Is Gladstone a god? is Gladstone the devil? They
+say he is one or other, and I am content to let them fight it out. How
+long is it since I gave a thought to religion? What am I? There are men
+who come into this room and announce that they are agnostics, as if that
+were a new profession. Am I an agnostic? I think not; and if I was I
+would keep it to myself. My soul does not trouble me at all, except for
+five minutes or so now and again. On the whole I seem to be indifferent
+as to whether I have one, or what is to become of it.'
+
+Dick rose and paced the room, until his face gave the lie to everything
+he had told himself. His lips quivered and his whole body shook. He
+stood in an agony against the mantelpiece with his head in his hands,
+and emotions had possession of him compared with which the emotions of
+any other person described in this book were but children's fancies. By
+and by he became calm, and began to undress. Suddenly he remembered
+something. He rummaged for his keys in the pocket of the coat he had
+cast off, and, opening his desk, wrote on a slip of paper that he took
+from it, '_Scalping Knife_, Man Frightened to Get Married (humorous)!'
+
+'My God!' he groaned, 'I would write an article, I think, on my mother's
+coffin.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE AUDACITY OF ROB ANGUS
+
+
+Colonel Abinger had allowed the other sportsmen to wander away from him,
+and now lay on his back on Ben Shee, occasionally raking the glen of
+Quharity through a field-glass. It was a purple world he saw under a sky
+of grey and blue; with a white thread that was the dusty road twisting
+round a heavy sweep of mountain-side, and a broken thread of silver that
+was the Quharity straggling back and forward in the valley like a stream
+reluctant to be gone. To the naked eye they were bare black peaks that
+overlooked the glen from every side but the south. It was not the
+mountains, however, but the road that interested the colonel. By and by
+he was sitting up frowning, for this is what he saw.
+
+From the clump of trees to the north that keeps Glen Quharity Lodge warm
+in winter, a man and a lady emerged on horseback. They had not advanced
+a hundred yards, when the male rider turned back as if for something he
+had forgotten. The lady rode forward alone.
+
+A pedestrian came into sight about the same time, a mile to the south of
+the colonel. The field-glass lost him a dozen times, but he was
+approaching rapidly, and he and the rider must soon meet.
+
+The nearest habitation to Colonel Abinger was the schoolhouse, which
+was some four hundred yards distant. It stands on the other side of the
+white road, and is approached by a straight path down which heavy carts
+can jolt in the summer months. Every time the old dominie goes up and
+down this path, his boots take part of it along with him. There is a
+stone in his house, close to the door, which is chipped and scarred
+owing to his habit of kicking it to get the mud off his boots before he
+goes inside. The dominie was at present sitting listlessly on the dyke
+that accompanies this path to the high road.
+
+The colonel was taking no interest in the pedestrian as yet, but he
+sighed as he watched the lady ride slowly forward. Where the road had
+broken through a bump in the valley her lithe form in green stood out as
+sharply as a silhouette against the high ragged bank of white earth. The
+colonel had recognised his daughter, and his face was troubled.
+
+During all the time they had been at the Lodge he had never mentioned
+Rob Angus's name to Mary, chiefly because she had not given him a chance
+to lose his temper. She had been more demonstrative in her love for her
+father than of old, and had anticipated his wants in a way that
+gratified him at the moment but disturbed him afterwards. In his
+presence she seemed quite gaily happy, but he had noticed that she liked
+to slip away on to the hillside by herself, and sit there alone for
+hours at a time. Sir Clement Dowton was still at the Lodge, but the
+colonel was despondent. He knew very well that, without his consent,
+Mary would never give her hand to any man, but he was equally aware that
+there his power ended. Where she got her notions he did not know, but
+since she became his housekeeper she had impressed the colonel
+curiously. He was always finding himself taking for granted her purity
+to be something so fine that it behoved him to be careful. Mary affected
+other people in the same way. They came to know that she was a very rare
+person, and so in her company they became almost fine persons
+themselves. Thus the natural goodness of mankind asserted itself. Of
+late the colonel had felt Mary's presence more than ever; he believed in
+her so much (often to his annoyance) that she was a religion to him.
+
+While Colonel Abinger sat in the heather, perturbed in mind, and trying
+to persuade himself that it was Mary's fault, the pedestrian drew near
+rapidly. Evidently he and the rider would meet near the schoolhouse, and
+before the male rider, who had again emerged from the clump of trees,
+could make up on his companion.
+
+The dominie, who did not have such a slice of the outer world as this
+every day, came to the end of his path to have a look at the persons who
+were nearing him from opposite directions. He saw that the pedestrian
+wore an elegant silk hat and black coat, such as were not to be got in
+these parts. Only the delve with which he walked suggested a man from
+Thrums.
+
+The pedestrian made a remark about the weather as he hurried past the
+dominie. He was now so near the colonel that his face could be
+distinctly seen through the field-glass. The colonel winced, and turned
+white and red. Then the field-glass jumped quickly to the horsewoman.
+The pedestrian started as he came suddenly in sight of her, and at the
+same moment her face lit up with joy. The colonel saw it and felt a
+pain at his heart. The glass shook in his hand, thus bringing the
+dominie accidentally into view.
+
+The dominie was now worth watching. No sooner had the pedestrian passed
+him than the old man crouched so as not to seem noticeable, and ran
+after him. When he was within ten yards of his quarry he came to rest,
+and the field-glass told that he was gaping. Then the dominie turned
+round and hurried back to the schoolhouse, muttering as he ran:
+
+'It's Rob Angus come home in a lum hat, and that's one o' the leddies
+frae the Lodge. I maun awa to Thrums wi' this. Rob Angus, Robbie Angus,
+michty, what a toon there'll be aboot this!'
+
+Rob walked up to Mary Abinger, feeling that to bid her good afternoon
+was like saying 'Thank you' in a church when the organ stops. He felt
+himself a saw-miller again.
+
+The finest thing in the world is that a woman can pass through anything,
+and remain pure. Mary had never been put to the test, but she could have
+stood it. Her soul spoke in her face, and as Rob looked at her the sound
+of his own voice seemed a profanation. Yet Mary was not all soul. She
+understood, for instance, why Rob stammered so much as he took her hand,
+and she was glad that she had on her green habit instead of the black
+one.
+
+Sir Clement Dowton rode forward smartly to make up on Miss Abinger, and
+saw her a hundred yards before him from the top of a bump which the road
+climbs. She was leaning forward in her saddle talking to a man whom he
+recognised at once. The baronet's first thought was to ride on, but he
+drew rein.
+
+'I have had my chance and failed,' he said to himself grimly. 'Why
+should not he have his?'
+
+With a last look at the woman he loved, Sir Clement turned his horse,
+and so rode out of Mary Abinger's life. She had not even seen him.
+
+'Papa has been out shooting,' she said to Rob, who was trying to begin,
+'and I am on my way to meet him. Sir Clement Dowton is with me.'
+
+She turned her head to look for the baronet, and Rob, who had been
+aimlessly putting his fingers through her horse's mane, started at the
+mention of Sir Clement's name.
+
+'Miss Abinger,' he said, 'I have come here to ask you one question. I
+have no right to put it, but Sir Clement, he----'
+
+'If you want to see him,' said Mary, 'you have just come in time. I
+believe he is starting for a tour of the world in a week or so.'
+
+Rob drew a heavy breath, and from that moment he liked Dowton. But he
+had himself to think of at present. He remembered that he had another
+question to ask Miss Abinger.
+
+'It is a very long time since I saw you,' he said.
+
+'Yes,' said Mary, sitting straight in her saddle, 'you never came to the
+house-boat those last weeks. I suppose you were too busy.'
+
+'That was not what kept me away,' Rob said. 'You know it was not.'
+
+Mary looked behind her again.
+
+'There was nothing else,' she said; 'I cannot understand what is
+detaining Sir Clement.'
+
+'I thought----' Rob began.
+
+'You should not,' said Mary, looking at the schoolhouse.
+
+'But your brother----' Rob was saying, when he paused, not wanting to
+incriminate Dick.
+
+'Yes, I know,' said Mary, whose intellect was very clear to-day. She
+knew why Rob stopped short, and there was a soft look in her eyes as
+they were turned upon him.
+
+'Your brother advised me to come north,' Rob said, but Mary did not
+answer.
+
+'I would not have done so,' he continued, 'if I had known that you knew
+why I stayed away from the house-boat.'
+
+'I think I must ride on,' Mary said.
+
+'No,' said Rob, in a voice that put it out of the question. So Mary must
+have thought, for she remained there. 'You thought it better,' he went
+on huskily, 'that, whatever the cause, I should not see you again.'
+
+Mary was bending her riding-whip into a bow.
+
+'Did you not?' cried Rob, a little fiercely.
+
+Mary shook her head.
+
+'Then why did you do it?' he said.
+
+'I didn't do anything,' said Mary.
+
+'In all London,' said Rob, speaking at a venture, 'there has not been
+one person for the last two months so miserable as myself.'
+
+Mary's eyes wandered from Rob's face far over the heather. There might
+be tears in her eyes at any moment. The colonel was looking.
+
+'That stream,' said Rob, with a mighty effort, pointing to the distant
+Whunny, 'twists round the hill on which we are now standing, and runs
+through Thrums. It turns the wheel of a saw-mill there, and in that
+saw-mill I was born and worked with my father for the greater part of my
+life.'
+
+'I have seen it,' said Mary, with her head turned away. 'I have been in
+it.'
+
+'It was on the other side of the hill that my sister's child was found
+dead. Had she lived I might never have seen you.'
+
+'One of the gamekeepers,' said Mary, 'showed me the place where you
+found her with her foot in the water.'
+
+'I have driven a cart through this glen a hundred times,' continued Rob
+doggedly. 'You see that wooden shed at the schoolhouse; it was my father
+and I who put it up. It seems but yesterday since I carted the boards
+from Thrums.'
+
+'The dear boards,' murmured Mary.
+
+'Many a day my mother has walked from the saw-mill into this glen with
+my dinner in a basket.'
+
+'Good mother,' said Mary,
+
+'Now,' said Rob, 'now, when I come back here and see you, I remember
+what I am. I have lived for you from the moment I saw you, but however
+hard I might toil for you, there must always be a difference between
+us.'
+
+He was standing on the high bank, and their faces were very close. Mary
+shuddered.
+
+'I only frighten you,' cried Rob.
+
+Mary raised her head, and, though her face was wet, she smiled. Her hand
+went out to him, but she noticed it and drew it back. Rob saw it too,
+but did not seek to take it. They were looking at each other bravely.
+His eyes proposed to her, while he could not say a word, and hers
+accepted him. On the hills men were shooting birds.
+
+Rob knew that Mary loved him. An awe fell upon him. 'What am I?' he
+cried, and Mary put her hand in his. 'Don't, dear,' she said, as his
+face sank on it; and he raised his head and could not speak.
+
+The colonel sighed, and his cheeks were red. His head sank upon his
+hands. He was young again, and walking down an endless lane of green
+with a maiden by his side, and her hand was in his. They sat down by the
+side of a running stream. Her fair head lay on his shoulder, and she was
+his wife. The colonel's lips moved as if he were saying to himself words
+of love, and his arms went out to her who had been dead this many a
+year, and a tear, perhaps the last he ever shed, ran down his cheek.
+
+'I should not,' Mary said at last, 'have let you talk to me like this.'
+
+Rob looked up with sudden misgiving.
+
+'Why not?' he cried.
+
+'Papa,' she said, 'will never consent, and I--I knew that; I have known
+it all along.'
+
+'I am not going to give you up now,' Rob said passionately, and he
+looked as if he would run away with her at that moment.
+
+'I had no right to listen to you,' said Mary. 'I did not mean to do so,
+but I--I'--her voice sank into a whisper--'I wanted to know----'
+
+'To know that I loved you! Ah, you have known all along.'
+
+'Yes,' said Mary, 'but I wanted--I wanted to hear you say so yourself.'
+
+Rob's arms went over her like a hoop.
+
+'Rob, dear,' she whispered, 'you must go away, and never see me any
+more.'
+
+'I won't,' cried Rob; 'you are to be my wife. He shall not part us.'
+
+'It can never be,' said Mary.
+
+'I shall see him--I shall compel him to consent.'
+
+Mary shook her head.
+
+'You don't want to marry me,' Rob said fiercely, drawing back from her.
+'You do not care for me. What made you say you did?'
+
+'I shall have to go back now,' Mary said, and the softness of her voice
+contrasted strangely with the passion in his.
+
+'I shall go with you,' Rob answered, 'and see your father.'
+
+'No, no,' said Mary; 'we must say good-bye here, now.'
+
+Rob turned on her with all the dourness of the Anguses in him.
+
+'Good-bye,' he said, and left her. Mary put her hand to her heart, but
+he was already turning back.
+
+'Oh,' she cried, 'do you not see that it is so much harder to me than to
+you?'
+
+'Mary, my beloved,' Rob cried. She swayed in her saddle, and if he had
+not been there to catch her she would have fallen to the ground.
+
+Rob heard a footstep at his side, and, looking up, saw Colonel Abinger.
+The old man's face was white, but there was a soft look in his eye, and
+he stooped to take Mary to his breast.
+
+'No,' Rob said, with his teeth close, 'you can't have her. She's mine.'
+
+'Yes,' the colonel said sadly; 'she's yours.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE VERDICT OF THRUMS
+
+
+On a mild Saturday evening in the following May, Sandersy Riach,
+telegraph boy, emerged from the Thrums post-office, and, holding his
+head high, strutted off towards the Tenements. He had on his uniform,
+and several other boys flung gutters at it, to show that they were as
+good as he was.
+
+'Wha's deid, Sandersy?' housewives flung open their windows to ask.
+
+'It's no a death,' Sandersy replied. 'Na, na, far frae that. I daurna
+tell ye what it is, because it's agin' the regalations, but it'll cause
+a michty wy doin' in Thrums this nicht.'
+
+'Juist whisper what it's aboot, Sandersy, my laddie.'
+
+'It canna be done, Easie; na, na. But them 'at wants to hear the noos,
+follow me to Tammas Haggart's.'
+
+Off Sandersy went, with some women and a dozen children at his heels,
+but he did not find Tammas in.
+
+'I winna hae't lyin' aboot here,' Chirsty, the wife of Tammas, said,
+eyeing the telegram as something that might go off at any moment; 'ye'll
+better tak it on to 'imsel. He's takkin a dander through the buryin'
+ground wi' Snecky Hobart.'
+
+Sandersy marched through the east town end at the head of his
+following, and climbed the steep, straight brae that leads to the
+cemetery. There he came upon the stone-breaker and the bellman strolling
+from grave to grave. Silva McQuhatty and Sam'l Todd were also in the
+burying-ground for pleasure, and they hobbled toward Tammas when they
+saw the telegram in his hand.
+
+'"Thomas Haggart,"' the stone-breaker murmured, reading out his own name
+on the envelope, '"Tenements, Thrums."' Then he stared thoughtfully at
+his neighbours to see whether that could be looked upon as news. It was
+his first telegram.
+
+'Ay, ay, deary me,' said Silva mournfully.
+
+'She's no very expliceet, do ye think?' asked Sam'l Todd.
+
+Snecky Hobart, however, as an official himself, had a general notion of
+how affairs of state are conducted.
+
+'Rip her open, Tammas,' he suggested. 'That's but the shell, I'm
+thinkin'.'
+
+'Does she open?' asked Tammas, with a grin.
+
+He opened the telegram gingerly, and sat down on a prostrate tombstone
+to consider it. Snecky's fingers tingled to get at it.
+
+'It begins in the same wy,' the stone-breaker said deliberately;
+'"Thomas Haggart, Tenements, Thrums."'
+
+'Ay, ay, deary me,' repeated Silva.
+
+'That means it's to you,' Snecky said to Tammas.
+
+'Next,' continued Tammas, 'comes, "Elizabeth Haggart, 101, Lower Fish
+Street, Whitechapel, London."'
+
+'She's a' names thegether,' muttered Sam'l Todd, in a tone of
+remonstrance.
+
+'She's a' richt,' said Snecky, nodding to Tammas to proceed. 'Elizabeth
+Haggart--that's wha the telegram comes frae.'
+
+'Ay, ay,' said the stone-breaker doubtfully, 'but I ken no Elizabeth
+Haggart.'
+
+'Hoots,' said Snecky; 'it's your ain dochter Lisbeth.'
+
+'Keep us a',' said Tammas, 'so it is. I didna un'erstan' at first; ye
+see we aye called her Leeby. Ay, an' that's whaur she bides in London
+too.'
+
+'Lads, lads,' said Silva, 'an' is Leeby gone? Ay, ay, we all fade as a
+leaf; so we do.'
+
+'What!' cried Tammas, his hand beginning to shake.
+
+'Havers,' said Snecky, 'ye hinna come to the telegram proper yet,
+Tammas. What mair does it say?'
+
+The stone-breaker conned over the words, and by and by his face wrinkled
+with excitement. He puffed his cheeks, and then let the air rush through
+his mouth like an escape of gas.
+
+'It's Rob Angus,' he blurted out.
+
+'Man, man,' said Silva, 'an' him lookit sae strong an' snod when he was
+here i' the back-end o' last year.'
+
+'He's no deid,' cried Tammas, 'he's mairit. Listen, lads, "The thing is
+true Rob Angus has married the colonel's daughter at a castle Rob Angus
+has married the colonel."'
+
+'Losh me!' said Sam'l, 'I never believed he would manage't.'
+
+'Ay, but she reads queer,' said Tammas. 'First she says Rob's mairit the
+dochter, an' neist 'at he's mairit the colonel.'
+
+'Twa o' them!' cried Silva, who was now in a state to believe anything.
+
+Snecky seized the telegram, and thought it over.
+
+'I see what Leeby's done,' he said admiringly. 'Ye're restreected to
+twenty words in a telegram, an' Leeby found she had said a' she had to
+say in fourteen words, so she's repeated hersel to get her full
+shilling's worth.'
+
+'Ye've hit it, Snecky,' said Tammas. 'It's juist what Leeby would do.
+She was aye a michty thrifty, shrewd crittur.'
+
+'A shilling's an awfu' siller to fling awa, though,' said Sam'l.
+
+'It's weel spent in this case,' retorted Tammas, sticking up for his
+own; 'there hasna been sic a startler in Thrums since the English kirk
+steeple fell.'
+
+'Ye can see Angus's saw-mill frae here,' exclaimed Silva, implying that
+this made the affair more wonderful than ever.
+
+'So ye can,' said Snecky, gazing at it as if it were some curiosity that
+had been introduced into Thrums in the night-time.
+
+'To think,' muttered Tammas, ''at the saw-miller doon there should be
+mairit in a castle. It's beyond all. Oh, it's beyond, it's beyond.'
+
+'Sal, though,' said Sam'l suspiciously, 'I wud like a sicht o' the
+castle. I mind o' readin' in a booky 'at every Englishman's hoose is his
+castle, so I'm thinkin' castle's but a name in the sooth for an ord'nar
+hoose.'
+
+'Weel a wat, ye never can trust thae foreigners,' said Silva; 'it's weel
+beknown 'at English is an awful pretentious langitch too. They slither
+ower their words in a hurried wy 'at I canna say I like; no, I canna
+say I like it.'
+
+'Will Leeby hae seen the castle?' asked Sam'l.
+
+'Na,' said Tammas; 'it's a lang wy frae London; she'll juist hae heard
+o' the mairitch.'
+
+'It'll hae made a commotion in London, I dinna doot,' said Snecky, 'but,
+lads, it proves as the colonel man stuck to Rob.'
+
+'Ay, I hardly expected it.'
+
+'Ay, ay, Snecky, ye 're richt. Rob'll hae manage't him. Weel, I will say
+this for Rob Angus, he was a crittur 'at was terrible fond o' gettin'
+his ain wy.'
+
+'The leddy had smoothed the thing ower wi' her faither,' said Tammas,
+who was notorious for his knowledge of women; 'ay, an' there was a
+brither, ye mind? Ane o' the servants up at the Lodge said to Kitty
+Wobster 'at they were to be mairit the same day, so I've nae doot they
+were.'
+
+'Ay,' said Sam'l, pricking up his ears, 'an' wha was the brither
+gettin'?'
+
+'Weel, it was juist gossip, ye understan'. But I heard tell 'at the
+leddy had a tremendous tocher, an' 'at she was called Meredith.'
+
+'Meredith!' exclaimed Silva McQuhatty, 'what queer names some o' thae
+English fowk has; ay, I prefer the ord'nar names mysel.'
+
+'I wonder,' said Snecky, looking curiously at the others, 'what Rob has
+in the wy o' wages?'
+
+'That's been discuss't in every hoose in Thrums,' said Sam'l, 'but
+there's no doubt it's high, for it's a salary; ay, it's no wages.'
+
+'I dinna ken what Rob has,' Silva said, 'but some o' thae writers makes
+awfu' sums. There's the yeditor o' the _Tilliedrum Weekly Herald_ noo.
+I canna tell his income, but I have it frae Dite Deuchars, wha kens, 'at
+he pays twa-an'-twenty pound o' rent for's hoose.'
+
+'Ay, but Rob's no a yeditor,' said Sam'l.
+
+'Ye're far below the mark wi' Rob's salary,' said Tammas. 'My ain
+opeenion is 'at he has a great hoose in London by this time, wi' twa or
+three servants, an' a lad in knickerbuckers to stan' ahent his chair and
+reach ower him to cut the roast beef.'
+
+'It may be so,' said Snecky, who had heard of such things, 'but if it is
+it'll irritate Rob michty no to get cuttin' the roast 'imsel. Thae
+Anguses aye likit to do a'thing for themsels.'
+
+'There's the poseetion to think o',' said Tammas.
+
+'Thrums'll be a busy toon this nicht,' said Sam'l, 'when it hears the
+noos. Ay, I maun awa an' tell the wife.'
+
+Having said this, Sam'l sat down on the tombstone.
+
+'It'll send mair laddies on to the papers oot o' Thrums,' said Tammas.
+'There's three awa to the printin' trade since Rob was here, an' Susie
+Byars is to send little Joey to the business as sune as he's auld
+eneuch.'
+
+'Joey'll do weel in the noospaper line,' said Silva; 'he writes a better
+han' than Rob Angus already.'
+
+'Weel, weel, that's the main thing, lads.'
+
+Sam'l moved off slowly to take the news into the east town end.
+
+'It's to Rob's creedit,' said Tammas to the two men remaining, ''at he
+wasna at all prood when he came back. Ay, he called on me very frank
+like, as ye'll mind, an' I wasna in, so Chirsty dusts a chair for 'im,
+and comes to look for me. Lads, I was fair ashamed to see 'at in her
+fluster she'd gien him a common chair, when there was hair-bottomed anes
+in the other room. Ye may be sure I sent her for a better chair, an' got
+him to change, though he was sort o' mad like at havin' to shift. That
+was his ind'pendence again.'
+
+'I was aye callin' him Rob,' said Snecky, 'forgettin' what a grand man
+he was noo, an', of coorse, I corrected mysel, and said Mr. Angus. Weel,
+when I'd dune that mebbe a dozen times he was fair stampin's feet wi'
+rage, as ye micht say. Ay, there was a want o' patience aboot Rob
+Angus.'
+
+'He slippit a gold sovereign into my hand,' said Silva, 'but, losh, he
+wudna lat me thank 'im. "Hold yer tongue," he says, or words to that
+effec', when I insistit on't.'
+
+At the foot of the burying-ground road Sam'l Todd could be seen laying
+it off about Rob to a little crowd of men and women. Snecky looked at
+them till he could look no longer.
+
+'I maun awa wi' the noos to the wast toon end,' he said, and by and by
+he went, climbing the dyke for a short cut.
+
+'Weel, weel, Rob Angus is mairit,' said Silva to Tammas.
+
+'So he is, Silva,' said the stone-breaker.
+
+'It's an experiment,' said Silva.
+
+'Ye may say so, but Rob was aye venturesome.'
+
+'Ye saw the leddy, Tammas?'
+
+'Ay, man, I did mair than that. She spoke to me, an' speired a lot aboot
+the wy Rob took on when little Davy was fund deid. He was fond o' his
+fowk, Rob, michty fond.'
+
+'What was your opeenion o' her then, Tammas?'
+
+'Weel, Silva, to tell the truth I was oncommon favourably impreesed. She
+shook hands wi' me, man, an' she had sic a saft voice an' sic a bonny
+face I was a kind o' carried awa; yes, I was so.'
+
+'Ay, ye say that, Tammas. Weel, I think I'll be movin'. They'll be keen
+to hear aboot this in the square.'
+
+'I said to her,' continued Tammas, peering through his half-closed eyes
+at Silva, ''at Rob was a lucky crittur to get sic a bonny wife.'
+
+'Ye did!' cried Silva. 'An' hoo did she tak that?'
+
+'Ou,' said Tammas complacently, 'she took it weel.'
+
+'I wonder,' said Silva, now a dozen yards away, ''at Rob never sent ony
+o' the papers he writes to Thrums juist to lat's see them.'
+
+'He sent a heap,' said Tammas, 'to the minister, meanin' them to be
+passed roond, but Mr. Dishart didna juist think they were quite the
+thing, ye un'erstan', so he keeps them lockit up in a press.'
+
+'They say in the toon,' said Silva, ''at Rob would never hae got on sae
+weel if Mr. Dishart hadna helpit him. Do you think there's onything in
+that?'
+
+Tammas was sunk in reverie, and Silva at last departed. He was out of
+sight by the time the stone-breaker came to.
+
+'I spoke to the minister aboot it,' Tammas answered, under the
+impression that Silva was still there, 'an' speired at him if he had
+sent a line aboot Rob to the London yeditors, but he wudna say.'
+
+Tammas moved his head round, and saw that he was alone.
+
+'No,' he continued thoughtfully, addressing the tombstones, 'he would
+neither say 'at he did nor 'at he didna. He juist waved his han' like,
+to lat's see 'at he was at the bottom o't, but didna want it to be
+spoken o'. Ay, ay.'
+
+Tammas hobbled thoughtfully down one of the steep burying-ground walks,
+until he came to a piece of sward with no tombstone at its head.
+
+'Ay,' he said, 'there's mony an Angus lies buried there, an' Rob's the
+only are left noo. I hae helpit to hap the earth ower five, ay, sax o'
+them. It's no to be expeckit, no, i' the course o' natur' it's no to be
+expeckit, 'at I should last oot the seventh: no, but there's nae sayin'.
+Ay, Rob, ye wasna sae fu' o' speerits as I'll waurant ye are the noo,
+that day ye buried Davy. Losh, losh, it's a queer warld.'
+
+'It's a pretty spot to be buried in,' he muttered, after a time; and
+then his eyes wandered to another part of the burying-ground.
+
+'Ay,' he said, with a chuckle, 'but I've a snod bit cornery up there for
+mysel. Ou ay.'
+
+
+THE END
+
+     Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the
+     Edinburgh University Press
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of When a Man's Single, by J. M. Barrie
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41031 ***