 CHAPTER 18 OF ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE by MARIE ELIZABETH RADIN How full of strange coincidences this life is! It is a small thing, of course, but still it has vexed and worried me more than I can say. This morning, the second after my wretched adventure in Church Street, I heard a most hatefully familiar voice in the hall as I came downstairs from the second floor just before lunch. I stopped on the first floor landing and listened to the voice below. I had not a shadow of a doubt as to the owner of that hateful voice, even before I looked over the balustrade and saw the odious wretch standing in the bright light from the south window, talking to the butler. It was the man who tormented me with his insolent invitation to supper at the Oxford, the man whom his companions called Duvalier. He was there in the morning sunshine, a creature who should only have been visible at night and in the shabbiest places. He was there in our pretty hall, against a background of pale, soft colour, with the beautiful marble face of Nimosani looking over his shoulder, her fingertip on her low, broad brow and her head bent as if in thought. There are several statues in the hall and the corridor, but Nimosani is my favourite among them all. As Mr. Arden had my letters, he asked in his foreign English. Yes, sir, they have been given to him. Three letters. Yes, sir. Two yesterday and one this morning. Yes, sir, they were all given to him. And there is no answer. Was that Mr. Arden's message? Yes, sir, my master told me to tell you there was no answer. And he declines to see me. Yes, sir. Very good. She said very good with a face like a thundercloud. He lingered a little, brushing his hat with his coat cuff in an agitated manner and looking about him angrily, first at one door and then at another, as if he hoped to see Uncle Ambrose appear at one of them. At last he turned on his heel abruptly and went out without another word. I suppose he is one of that great army of begging letter writers who assail both mother and Uncle Ambrose. I sometimes pity them poor creatures when I see the long, long letters, many of them so well written, consigned to the waste-paper basket, and perhaps some of those piteous letters may have a good deal of truth in them. It must seem to the shabby gentile poor that people who live in such a house as this, and to drive out in a fine carriage with splendid horses and have an army of servants, and all that modern civilization can give of pleasure and prettiness, it must seem as if they ought never to say no to the appeal of real want, and yet if the rich people always said yes the fine house and the horses must go, I wonder if it is wicked to keep so much for ourselves and give so little in proportion to what we keep. The half of my goods have I given to the poor, said the Pharisee. Well, it is wrong to be boastful no doubt, but upon my word that Pharisee had some justification for thinking well of himself. I don't think mother and uncle Ambrose give half their substance in charity, kind and generous as they both are. Did that foreign person tell you his name? I asked the butler as I went into the dining room. No, ma'am. And had he been here before to-day? Yes, ma'am. He called yesterday evening to inquire if there was any answer to his letters. He sent two letters by a commissionaire, one in the morning and another in the afternoon. What an important wretch the man must be! My blood runs cold at the thought that he may mean to tell my stepfather about having seen me walking alone in Church Street late at night. He might make up any story and I should have no witness against him, for I do not know the name of my good middle-aged friend in the cab. If he dare to slander me I must tell uncle Ambrose the whole truth and brave it out. He will be shocked, no doubt, at the idea of my prowling about London secretly after dark, but he cannot refuse to forgive me when I tell him of the insurmountable impulse which took me to that fatal house. Cyril and I went to Hurlingham this afternoon with mother and saw a polo match and then strolled about the lawn and looked at the river together while mother sat on the terrace in front of the house talking to her friends. It seems to me sometimes as if all the women in London must be her friends, she is so beset wherever we go. The public life, the constant movement and perpetually changing faces do not suit me half so well as river lawn and its placid insipidity. My books, my piano, an occasional single at tennis with Beatrice Reardon, my boat, my garden. Yes, I love Berkshire and I believe I hate London. The day was lovely, Hurlingham was lovely, Cyril was full of the kindest attentions, and yet I was not happy. Apart from my uncomfortable apprehensions about the man called Duval d'Aix, I felt as if something had gone wrong in my life. An afternoon that would have been perfect bliss a few weeks ago before we went to Paris, for instance, seemed flat, stale and unprofitable. I looked at the river listlessly. I was not interested even in the gowns, some of which were extravagant enough to awaken the dead. Does this remind you of the Adriatic? Cyril asked me as we stood side by side upon the lawn that slopes to the river. Not the least bit in the world. How can you compare this dirty London river with that delicious blue sea? You must be dreaming. I am dreaming, he answered. I am dreaming of the hour when you and I stood side by side with our feet in the long grass that grows close to the sea on Torcello. I felt in just the wrong mood for sentiment. Every word he said jarred upon my nerves. That's a very pretty speech, but I know you wish yourself among those horrid pigeon shooters, I said flippantly, and fond as I am of pigeons I felt that I would willingly sacrifice a few just to get rid of my companion. He looked offended, and then my conscience reproached me and I said something civil, and then we walked up and down the lawn and he talked as I suppose lovers do talk all over the world. It is not worth putting down in this midnight confidant of mine, though sometimes I scribble whole conversations just for the love of scribbling. Do all engaged girls get tired of their fiancés, I wonder? Is there always this feeling of weariness, this sense of the emptiness of life? Are all engagements as monotonous as mine? Cyril and I have been engaged less than four months, and yet I feel as if it were half a lifetime. I feel as if it were absurd in him to be sentimental or to say pretty things after such ages of courtship. Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish I loved him better, if it were only out of gratitude to Uncle Ambrose, who is so pleased at the idea of our union, and who has told me again and again how happy it makes him to know that Cyril's happiness is secured. Could I disappoint him? Could I be inconstant or capricious? Could I write myself down that worthless creature, a jilt after all the father's goodness to me and all the son's affection? No, my fate is sealed. If the vows had been vowed at the altar, I could hardly be more bound than I am. Bound in honor. What bondage can be stronger? Uncle Ambrose is so good to me, but I have reproached him lately with neglecting my education, which seems a hard thing now when I'm getting older and as I venture to think worthier to be his pupil. I remember the pains he used to take with me and the time he used to waste upon my exercises and compositions and resumes before I was in my teens, and now when I want his help he is generally too much occupied to give it, or if he consents to spend an hour in my morning room hearing me read Dante or Virgil, I can see that his mind is no longer in the work. He used to give me such delightful explanations and illustrations over every page, so that to read a page of the Aeneid or the Divine Comedy with him was as good as a lecture upon classic or medieval history. He used to throw himself into the work with all his heart, talking of that old Florentine world as if he had lived in it and been intimate with all the people, flinging himself into vexed questions of politics or social life as if the argument were a thing of today, as if Dante had just left the city, as if Savanarola were still teaching and preaching. And then he used to take such interest in any little composition of mine and would laugh so pleasantly at my ungrammatical construction, my bread and butter misishness. Now when his life ought to be utterly happy, having won the wife of his heart, there is a cloud upon his spirits. He seems to have lost all zest for the books he once loved. Can it be that in his heart of hearts he knows my mother does not really love him, that she gave herself to him in the hope of making his life happy, of giving him some reward for years of quiet devotion on his part? Can it be that he knows as well as I know that her heart is buried in her first husband's grave? This is the only solution I can imagine for that shadow of trouble which hangs over his life, which makes all common pleasures a weariness to him, which makes him tired of everything and turn restlessly from one frivolous amusement to another as if in search of forgetfulness rather than of happiness. I asked him the other day why he had been so eager to set up an establishment in London and to plunge into the gay world. I had two motives, Daisy. He said with his grave explanatory air, just like the Uncle Ambrose of my childhood. The first was you. I thought it only right that in your dawn of womanhood you should taste all the pleasures which are supposed to be delightful to your age and sex. I did not want you to look back in the time to come and say to yourself, my stepfather cheated me out of the privileges of my position in life. He kept me mewed up in a country house when I ought to have been enjoying all the pleasures that society can offer to a rich man's daughter and heiress. Had he been my own father he would have been more considerate. I did not want you to say that, Daisy, perhaps when I was dust. Do you think I could ever have been so unjust or so ungrateful? It would have been only human to have regretted pleasures you have never known, he answered. My secondary motive was purely selfish. I never lived till I made your mother my wife. I wanted to drink deep of the cup of life. I wanted all the pleasures and gladness that life could give me, even its most frivolous pleasures. I wanted to see what the great world was like, to hear my wife admire as a queen among women. I wanted to share the amusements which might interest her, to feel that our wedded life was one joyous holiday. He broke off with a sigh. The word joy sounded pure mockery from those pale lips. Uncle Ambrose, I like you ever so much better as a scholar and a recluse than as a man of fashion. I cried in my impetuous way. Of course, it was just one of those things I ought not to have said and I began to apologize. I know how everybody admires you and how anxious people are to see you, I said. I hear them talking about you at parties, asking if you are really the Ambrose ardent who wrote flesh or spirit and I hear them praising your noble head and your placid expression and quiet contemplative manner. You are distinguished from the herd in whatever society you may appear, but still, but still, I like my uncle Ambrose of the Berkshire Lanes better than the gentleman with whom mother and I tread the mill round of London parties. You are right, Daisy. Fashionable society is not my metier. But I wanted to see what the gay world was like and whether there was anything in the atmosphere of London drawing-rooms that could make a man forget the bundle of doubts, regrets and disappointments which we call self. I find no lethy in Mayfair or Belgravia, Daisy. Self goes about with me from square to street and from street to square. He rose with the troubled sigh and began to pace the room. You to talk of disappointments, I cried reproachfully. What a bad compliment to mother. Daisy, you know as well as I do that to me your mother is simply the most adorable of women, and yet I am disappointed and yet I am disheartened, for I thought this butterfly life of ours would please her and I don't believe it does. You should have left her in the home she loves, I answered. She was as happy there as she ever could be anywhere after the sorrow that clouded her life forever. You cannot expect such a cloud as that to pass away altogether. You cannot expect her ever to be just the same as other women in whose lives there has been no tragedy. You ought never to have brought her to live in London. Don't you know that to her and to me this great gay London with all its wealth and brightness and headlong hunt after pleasure means only the city in which my father was murdered? We can never forget that one fact. To us London must always be the most hateful place in the world. I was carried away by my feelings and said a good deal more than I meant to say. Does she feel that? He asked, stopping in his spacing up and down and looking at me fixedly. I think she must, I answered. I know I do. We will go away in a week or two, he said hurriedly. I will take you all to the lakes. It is just the season to enjoy those shadowy hills and cool waters. We don't want the lakes. We want home and our own gardens and our own river. I said angry at his caring for new places. That is the only change mother and I care about. He sighed and was silent and after a little more pacing to and fro he resumed his seat at my side and took up Dante at the line where we had strayed away into conversation. This talk occurred the day before my pilgrimage to Denmark Street. That odious man has forced himself into my stepfather's presence after ever so many repulses and I am utterly mystified by his audacity and by my stepfather's reticence. Cyril and I were at the opera last night with mother. Mother had promised to show herself if it were for only half an hour at a reception at the foreign office where she is likely to meet all the people she knows and does not care a straw about. So we dropped her in Whitehall, looking superb in pale gray brocade, lighted up with sapphires and diamonds and with her beautiful throat rising out of a rough of ostrich feathers and then the carriage to cuss home with instructions to go back for mother in half an hour. Uncle Ambrose had been complaining of headache all day and was not well enough to go to either opera or a party. The door was opened and I was just going in when a man seemed to spring out of the darkness, pushed himself in front of Cyril who was following me and almost leapt into the house at my side. There were two men in the hall but footmen are stupid solemn creatures trained to move slowly and to hold their chins in the air and neither of those two powdered dolts had the sense to stop him. He walked straight to Uncle Ambrose's study at the back of the hall, opened the door and went in. I waited breathlessly, expecting to see him flung out into the hall again in the next moment, but he shut the door behind him and the door remained shut. Uncle Ambrose was evidently giving him an interview. Cyril was furious. Do you know that fellow? He asked the footman. He had been here before, sir, arsed in for answers to his letters, three or four, or I should say as much as five or six times within the week. One of the men stated solemnly as if he had been in a witness box. Do you know his name or who and what he is? I do not, sir, least ways only that he's a foreigner. Cyril walked over to the door of the study, opened it and went in. I waited with my heart beating violently, expecting to be called in and questioned about my adventure in Church Street. Cyril came back to the hall in a minute or two. My father seems to know the fellow and wishes to hear his grievance, whatever it is, he told me with a vexed air. I don't like the look of the man and I told my father how he had pushed past me and rushed into the house. However, my father chooses to hear his story and I can say nothing. Come up to the divan, Daisy. I don't want to be out of the way while that bellow is on the premises. The divan is a little room on the half flight, fitted up in Moresque style, and only divided from the landing by a partition, partly stained glass and partly carved sandalwood from Persia. It is a capital nook for gossip or flirtation, and when we have a party, the divan is always in great request. It is lighted by an oriental lamp, which is in perfect harmony with the decoration, but which gives a very indifferent light. Cyril ordered strawberries and lemonade to be sent up to this retreat, and we sat there for half an hour, pretending to talk about the opera, but both of us obviously preoccupied and uncomfortable, and both of us listening for the opening of the study door below. I know we talked in hushed voices, and never withdrew our attention from what was going on downstairs. We could see the hall door through the open door of the divan at the end of the vista beyond the shallow flight of stairs. I hate mysteries, Cyril said at last in the midst of a languid debate about the merits and demerits of the new tenor. I got up, and Cyril and I went to the landing and stood there looking over the balustrade into the hall until the door opened and his father's voice called to the footman, see that man out, whereupon the man opened the great hall door and the midnight visitor went out just a minute or so before the carriage stopped and my mother alighted. She came into the hall in her long white cloak with its downy ostrich trimming, such a lovely gracious figure, the gems in her rich brown hair flashing in the lamp light. Uncle Ambrose came out of his den to receive her. Were you amused, dearest? He asked. Was it a pleasant party? It was a brilliant one at any rate, she answered. I met all the people we know and a few stars and foreign orders that I don't know. How white you look, Ambrose! You ought not to be up so late. What was the use of staying away from the opera and the reception only to tire yourself at home? I have not been tiring myself except with a dull book by a clever man. What pains some clever men take to be dull, by the way? I have been resting as much as I can rest, dear. I am past that golden age when sleep comes at will. But you had a late visitor. Who was the man who went out of the house just before I arrived? An old acquaintance, that is to say, a bookbinder who worked for me years ago who has the common complaint of old acquaintances, impecuniousness. And you helped him, of course? I heard his story and have promised to consider it. But if he is an immediate want? My dearest, I have no opinion of the man's character and I am doubtful whether I ought to believe his story. He forced an entrance into this house in an unwarrantable manner and it would have served him right that I sent for a policeman and given him in charge. However, he pleads sore distress as an excuse for his audacity and I let him tell me his story. I shall do nothing for him unless I get some confirmation of his statement from a respectable quarter. Cyril and I were leaning over the balustrades straining our ears to listen. A bookbinder, that impertinent wretch, is a bookbinder. And what a tissue of falsehoods his story of distress must be when I saw him reeling out of a restaurant with his boon companions less than a week ago. I suppose the wretch has said nothing about his meeting with me. He may not have associated the name of Patrell with his old employer, Mr. Arden, and yet a man of that kind hanging about the house as he has done would be likely to find out all about us. He passed close to me as he pushed his way into the hall, but it is just possible he did not recognize me in my very different style of dress. There was nothing in my stepfather's manner to indicate agitation or irritation of any kind. I never heard his melodious voice calmer or his accents more measured than when he explained the midnight visit to my mother in the hall. The mountain has brought forth a mouse, said Cyril gaily. Mother came upstairs in the next minute, so I wished Cyril good night and went up to her dressing room with her to hear all about the party while her maid took off her jewels and finery. July 15th. We are at home once more in the dear old rooms and in the lovely old garden, and I feel almost as if my 16th birthday was still a grand event in the future, feel almost as young as I felt in the old childish days before mother's marriage and our Italian travels and our London gayities and all the experiences that have made me a woman of the world. I feel almost as I felt at 16, almost but not quite as happy as I felt then. There is no use in keeping a diary unless one is sternly truthful and stern truth compels me to acknowledge to this book that I am not so happy as I was before mother's marriage and my own engagement to Cyril. In those old days I was as free as air, free to think and to dream and to shape the many colored visions of my future life out of those idle dreams. Now my future is all mapped out for me and my life as a master who will dictate all things. He is good, he is devoted, he is all that a fiance should be, but still he is my master. There can be no doubt of that. My duty as his plighted wife involves confidence and obedience. I am bound to confide in him, I am bound to obey him. Oh, I wish, I wish I loved him better. I wish I could feel as mother did when she was 19 years of age and engaged to my father. She has talked to me often of her thoughts and feelings at that time, how it seemed to her as if all this life of ours and all this world we live in began and ended in Robert Hatrell. I have never felt like that. Never, never, never. What a perverse wretch I must be. How persistently all my thoughts and fancies drift into the wrong channel. Only this morning walking alone on the terrace where I made tea for Mr. Florestan, the fancy flashed into my mind that on that particular afternoon I was happier than I had ever been in my life. What an idle notion, as idle and capricious as any of the fancies of my childhood, when I used to give myself up to daydreams and lie upon the freshly cut grass in haymaking time and think of all the people I loved most in history and dream that I was walking in the woods beyond Lamford with Charles I and Henrietta Maria and that I was destined somehow to come between the king and his enemies, yes, to save him from the scaffold, to help him in his escape like Flora MacDonald with the young pretender. Charles Edward was not romantic enough for me. Alas, I knew that he grew fat and took to drinking in his old age. History is so brutal. Charles I was my hero. I forgot all his shiftiness and double dealing, his selfish sense of his own importance, his cowardly abandonment of Strappard. I forgot everything except that his head was very beautiful as Van Dyke painted it, and that Bradshaw and his crew cut it off. Foolish, foolish, Alice in Wonderland fancies. Every girl of 11 or 12 has her Wonderland, and if she has been crammed with history, it is not of birds and beasts that she dreams, but of Joan of Arc and her martyrdom at Rouen, or of Henry I, Bourbon King, murdered in the quaint old streets of Medieval Paris, or of Mary of Scotland, or Mary Antoinette and the young Dauphin, who suffered the most cruel reverse of fortune that ever Prince endured, and who died mysteriously, done to death in the wicked old prison. My earliest dreams were of heroes and martyrs, my chosen favorites in the world of the dim romantic past. Then came more egotistical daydreams, visions of the life that I was to lead and the wonderful things I was to do when I grew up. When I grew up, oh, phrase of marvellous meaning! Wealth, wisdom, power, unlimited were to come to me as a matter of course when I had grown up. I was to be very beautiful, lovelier than anyone else. There would be no good in a common place every day beauty. I must be beautiful exceedingly, an advantage which would not be without its drawbacks as I should have on an average to reject a suit or a day. Beauty has its duties as well as its rights, the duty of crushing presumptuous pretenders to its favor. Vainest, eyedless visions. I am blushing, dear diary, at the mere recollection of my absurdity, but I am happy to say this kind of daydream only lasted as long as the novelty of being in my teens and the first keen delight of wearing a gold watch which mother gave me on my thirteenth birthday. Later visions were a philanthropic revolutions. I was to be the guardian angel of a great district in the poorest part of London. I saw myself walking in streets and alleys where the police hardly dared to enter. I saw myself visiting the hospitals, carrying good tidings to the dying. My heart swelled at the thought of the good I would do when I grew up, if mother would only let me do just as I liked and spend my money how I liked. Some foolish chattering maid servant had told me that I should be rich, that I should have my own independent fortune when I grew up. There were other castles in the air that indicate a substratum of inordinate vanity under all my girlish shyness. I could not take up an art without dreaming that I was going to excel in it. If I got on fairly well with my practice of Mozart's sonatas, I fancied that I was going to work on until I became a second Schumann oressipal. If I just managed to paint a little water-colored sketch of the river or the village, the gable end of a cottage and a bit of garden, a backwater under the willows, I saw before my eager footsteps a long bright road leading to a dazzling temple where fame sat ready with garlands and trumpets and gold medals, ready to pronounce me second only to me lair for figure and landscape. Idle, idle dreams. They have all fled long ago, fled into the limbo of childish things, gone to the great rubbish heap where some of my dearest dolls are rotting. I hope and believe that I am cured of silly vanities, and that I am a fairly sensible young woman quite aware of the difference of my dream nose, a perfect Grecian and my real nose, a very tolerable re-troussée, quite aware that a complexion powdered with freckles every summer can hardly be called alabaster. My dream self had a distinctly alabaster complexion. In a word, I am aware of all my shortcomings, mental and physical, and am reconciled to them. All I ask in life is to live always with or very near mother, to be happy, and the cause of happiness in others. Is that too much to ask, I wonder, in a world so full of suffering? I fear it is. If one had newly alighted upon this earth in some tropical valley or by some Italian lake, one would suppose that a world made only for bliss. Who would suspect earthquakes or disastrous tempests, floods, disease and famine, poisonous serpents and savage tigers upon so fair a planet? Who would ever guess new to the scene that the majority of mankind are full of trouble as the sparks fly upward? No. There was never a more idle thought than that of mine which dwelt so obstinately upon the one-half hour I spent with Mr. Florestan, te, te, te, upon the terrace. I don't believe it was more than twenty minutes. I know I made myself excessively disagreeable in order that he should not stay too long. I was seized with an attack of brutishness, I'm afraid, for after all it could not have been very bad manners to give a visitor a cup of tea in my mother's absence. Fountainhead is empty now. I hear the plashing of the fountain when I walk in the shrubbery that joins his shrubbery. The trees were planted the autumn after my father's death when mother was just well enough to be wheeled about in her bath-chair to watch the planting. I can see her face now as it looked then, pale as marble and without a smile. The trees have grown ever so big, chestnuts red and white, acacias, mountain ash and copper beach, conifers of every kind, tremulous birches, silvery white in sunshine or moonlight. It is a delightful shrubbery arranged in careless-seeming curves, and with labyrinthine paths and here and there a rustic bench, and in one deep-wooded nook a rustic summer-house. At a season like this, when the glare on the terrace is almost too much to be endured, even by a sun-worshipper like me, I bring my books and my work to this summer-house. I am writing in it now. And the dogs find me, and we make ourselves at home here, aloof from all the world. There is no sound but the plash of Mr. Florestan's fountain and the song of the thrushes which revel in this shrubbery. The nightingales are gone already. How soon the glory of summer dwindles away? It must be horribly warm in Paris at this season, and I read in the papers that the city is given over to summer tourists. Yet I suppose Mr. Florestan prefers Paris to Berkshire. In all probability he has gone off with the rest of the great world and is taking the waters of Vichy or Roya or away in that wonderful mountain region in the Pyrenees where healing and beauty go hand in hand. Wherever he may be I am glad we are here. Uncle Ambrose pleaded hard for the English Lakes. He had all but taken a house at Grasmere. But Mother and I both wanted to come home, and we are at home, and we ought to be happy. I wish Uncle Ambrose were happier. It grieves me to see that the desire of his heart has not brought him happiness. Mother is so attentive to him, so full of tenderness and forethought, but I know, I know it is not love that she gives him and his heart hungers for love. I pity them both. Yes, it is just that, the one thing wanting. It is the little rift within the lute. Oh diary of mine, it is an evil thing to marry without love. The more I think of Mother and her second husband, and the more I think of Cyril and myself, the more I feel that it is an evil thing. It is an unmitigated evil to marry a man to whom one cannot give one's whole heart. I pray God every morning and every night that I may grow fonder of Cyril, that I may learn to adore him between now and our wedding day. An engaged girl once told me that she did not care a straw for her fiancé when she accepted him. She only thought that it would be nice to be married and have a house of her own, and she had visions of her true so, and her mother had promised to give her half her diamonds when she married, all sorts of selfish considerations. But by the time she had been engaged three months she felt that she could beg her bread barefoot through the world with a man who was to be her husband. That was her way of putting it. Cyril is clever, generous-minded, good-looking. He is a fine tennis player. He skulls splendidly. A girl ought to find it easy to adore him. What can I want in a lover if I am not satisfied with him? Do I expect to marry a demigod? End of CHAPTER XIII. CHAPTER XIX of One Life, One Love by Mary Elizabeth Bratton. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. 19. DAISY'S DIARY. When I was a child and even last summer I used to think a July day could not be too long provided, of course, that July behaved as July and one could bask in the sunshine on the lawn or on the river and gul oneself in the shade of willows and mysterious backwaters where the sedges are full of bloom and the lilies lie in a tangle of loveliness lifting their milk-white cups to the warm blue sky. This year I find I am growing old and that we can have too much even of July, a monotony of loveliness that preys upon one's spirits, a perpetual sunshine that irritates one's nerves. I have only lately discovered what it is to have nerves, and since I made that discovery I seem to have nothing but nerves. Mother asked me yesterday what had become of my sweet temper. She hardly recognized her daughter of a year ago and the fretful young person of today. Was I ever sweet-tempered? I asked myself, wonderingly. I know I am very unameable now. I was snappish to my dear old broomfield this very morning. I snatched my white frock out of her hand while she stood shilly-shallying and prosing about it in her dear old rambling way, debating whether it was or was not fresh enough for me to wear. What does it matter? I cried impatiently. There is nobody to see my frock. Nobody, Miss Daisy, when Mr. Cyril is marching up and down by the boat-house at this very moment waiting for you? Cyril is nobody. A fiance doesn't count, said I. Don't he, Miss? It was different in my time. A young woman always took pains with herself when she had someone to walk out with. And you used to walk out with all sorts of people, I believe, dear old flirt? Said I, for one of my earliest memories is of broomfield's long stories about soldiers and shop-boys who paraded the London parks with her in her previous services. I always had admirers, Miss Daisy, but I knew how to keep them at arm's length, she answered with dignity. A young person in service in London must have a well-behaved young man to walk out with, or she would never get a breath of fresh air. Oh, you cruel broomfield, to think of the shoe-leather your victims must have worn out, you meaning nothing all the time. Lure, Miss, they're used to it and it only serves them right, said broomfield. They're all as artful as they're high, and they've always denied to a young woman's post-office savings-bank-book. I encouraged the dear old thing to prattle in this fashion while she fastened my white cambrick frock, and I forgot poor Cyril, who had been loafing about for the last hour waiting for me. I am afraid I'm getting tired of the Thames. I am afraid I am developing an inconsistent capricious character. How odd it is that one may go on adoring a place for years and then weary of it suddenly in one week of blazing July sunshine. I hope it is only a temporary weariness caused by the hot weather. Fountainhead shows its usual dismal aspect of clothes, shutters, and blinds drawn down. Mr. Florestan came in a meteor-like manner at the beginning of last week, took tea with Mother on Tuesday afternoon while I was miles and miles up the river with Cyril, yawning myself to death over a silly novel while he threw his fly for trout and seemed to do nothing but untangle his line in the willows. When I went down to dinner that evening, Mother informed me that Mr. Florestan had done me the honor to inquire about my health, as if I were ever ill, and, furthermore, that he was to leave Fountainhead early next morning on his way to Scotland, where he was to spend the whole of August and September. I felt inclined to hate Scotland. How will Paris get on without him? I'm afraid there'll be a revolution or at least any mount, I remarked flippantly. I have noticed in myself lately that when I feel as if my heart were made of lead I am always inclined to be flippant. Why should my heart be heavy? Why, oh, why? Cyril is so frank, so clever in his own bright, boyish way, so altogether what a young man ought to be, and yet I am not satisfied. There is a terrible sense of failure and a life gone wrong always gnawing at my heart. Mother began to talk to me yesterday about my true soul, but I begged her not to mention the odious thing for ages. My drawers and our moires and hanging closets are stuffed with clothes of all kinds, and how can I want more? True that I never seemed to have the right kind of gown to wear upon any given occasion, but I believe that is a peculiarity of all wardrobes, and I dare say if I had the most magnificent true soul I should find before my honeymoon was over that I must refuse really tempting invitations for want of appropriate raiment. All this is idle beating about the bush of my discontent. I am engaged to be married and I shrink with actual aversion from the mere thought of the future life I have pledged myself to lead. I like my lover with a very cordial liking, and I am happy and at ease in his company, so long as he does not remind me that he is my lover and that he expects very soon to be my husband. When he does remind me of that odious fact I almost hate him, just as I hate the July weather and the river and the gardens and myself most of all. Oh, it is such a dreadful thing to know oneself beloved by a good and true heart like serals and not be able to give one's whole heart in return. If it were not for this stupid old diary I believe I should go out of my mind. It eases my heart a little to scribble about my thoughts and feelings. I could not talk even to my dear mother as I can talk to this book. I wonder Mr. Floristan did not stay one day longer at Fountainhead just to see us all again and to tell us the latest news of Paris. Poor mother has anxieties of her own and it would be cruel to plague her with mine even if I could bring myself to confess all my troubled thoughts to her which I am sure I could not. She is anxious about Uncle Ambrose and I don't wonder. He is in very bad health and I fear that his mental health is in question and that seems more hopeless and more full of alarm for the future than any bodily ailment. He came back to River Lawn reluctantly and I have seen him change for the worst day by day since we came here. He spends all his studious hours in the old cottage sitting in the library where he has all his choices books and where he did so much good work in past years. But even in his studious hours he is restless and comes back to this house every now and then in a capricious purposeless way just to say a few words to mother or to wander about the garden for a few minutes and to stand looking dreamily at the river as if he had had some motive for leaving his books and coming across the road and had forgotten it on the way. He will not admit that he is ill nor will he consent to consult a physician though mother has urged him to see any one of the great men in whom everybody believes. He declares that he has never in his life consulted a doctor on his own account and that he is too old to begin. I remember a sleek white haired gentleman with gold rimmed spectacles who felt my pulse and looked at my tongue every day for a fortnight when I had the measles, he said, and who dosed me with nauseous medicine three times a day and with nightly powders. He gave me a poor opinion of the faculty which I have never been able to outlive. It is all very well for him to make light of his ailments and to refuse all advice, but I know he is ill and very ill. He has a nervous irritability at times which makes him all together unlike the Uncle Ambrose of old and something happened the other day which makes me fear that his nerves are in a worse condition than even mother suspects anxious though she is about him. I was dawdling in the hall after playing tennis all the morning with Cyril who really is quite the finest player I know. I was examining my racket before I put it in the stand and was almost hidden by one of the oak pillars which stood between me and the library door. The garden door opened while I was standing there and Uncle Ambrose came into the hall looking white and weary as he so often looks now. He opened the door of my father's old study expecting to find my mother there. Clara, he said as he opened the door. She was not there and the room was empty. He stood upon the threshold motionless for some moments. The time seemed longer to me as I watched him standing there rigid as a stone figure staring into the empty room. Then he gave a groan of agony, staggered back into the hall and sank into a chair and sat there languid almost to fainting wiping the perspiration from his forehead. I could see his hand tremble as he drew his handkerchief out of his coat pocket. I came from behind the pillar and ran to him. He gave a cry at sight of me just as if I had been a ghost. I offered to get him some brandy but he said there was no occasion. There was nothing the matter with him except a passing faintness which had come over him as he opened the library door. Don't tell your mother, he said. It would only alarm her causelessly. But she ought to know, I told him, indeed, indeed, indeed, Uncle Ambrose, you must consult some clever physician. You must not go on any longer like this. Well, child, I will consult a physician if my submission upon that point will make you and your mother any happier, although I can tell you beforehand that no doctor in London, not the whole College of Physicians, can do any good for me. The evil I suffer from is purely nervous and no doctor has yet fathomed the mystery of the nerves any more than any theologian has fathomed the mystery of the worlds that lie behind this life or in front of it. I took his hand in mine and found it as cold as ice and the perspiration kept starting out afresh upon his forehead. His whole being seemed convulsed and shattered. I had heard of catalepsy and I could but think that he was in a cataleptic state during those minutes in which he stood on the threshold of the library. If you will promise to go up to London tomorrow with mother to see a doctor, I will not tell her anything about this attack today, I said. But if you refuse, I must tell her. Haven't I said that I will do anything to please you and your mother, Daisy? He kept his word and mother and he went off to Cavendish Square and my cousins from Hardy Street came down for a long day at tennis. I can only say that it was a long day. The interval between lunch and tea was a pacific ocean of time. I thought the blessed break of afternoon tea would never come, but the tea kettle appeared at last and mother and her husband came home soon after. She knew I was almost as anxious as herself and she told me all the doctor had said. It did not seem to amount too much, but no doubt it was comforting. All the wisdom of Cavendish Square might be summed up under three heads. A judicious diet as per half-page of note paper filled with a great man's writing, less intellectual work, and bromide of potassium. The diet was the most important point according to the physician and I suppose he was right and that an injudicious helping of Ellsbury Duck may have been the cause of that strange seizure at the door of my father's old den. Cyril took his father's illness rather lightly. I told him of the attack, though I said not one word about it to mother. My father is paying the penalty of having no fixed purpose or pursuit in life. He is suffering from too much money and too much metaphysics. He has a brain capable of better work than he has ever done and he is beginning to suffer from wasted energies. But he has written books that have made their mark in the most intellectual circles, said I. Yes, and therefore books that the British public don't care two pence about, books that interrogate everything and solve nothing, books that leave us not one hair's breadth farther advanced towards the comprehension of the three great mysteries of matter, life and mind, and Aristotle and Plato left us 350 years before the birth of Christ. Some of the reviews said that your father's book Martin Uera in Philosophy, said I. My dear Daisy, philosophy is like the sea. The waves rise and fall and change their forms every hour, but the shore is always at exactly the same distance from mid-ocean. I felt that it seemed hard upon Uncle Ambrose that the sun should make so light of the labours of the father's lifetime. Oh, I am wicked, desperately wicked, steeped to the lips in falsehood and dishonour. He is too honourable a man to have insisted upon speaking had I been firm. But the crisis of my life came upon me suddenly and I behaved as impulsively and unwisely and abominably as the most uneducated schoolgirl could have behaved. I encouraged the avowal which I ought to have prevented. I longed so to hear all he had to say. I wanted so much to know the secret of his heart, though that heart could never be mine. Gilbert Florestan had not gone to Scotland after all. When I awoke yesterday morning I thought of him far away in Argosher. I pictured the barren, heathery hills, purple and palest green under the baking july sky as Flora and Dora, who go everywhere, have often described them to me, and I thought how much nicer those wild hails above the kiles of Butte must be than our pretty little toy-shop river with its willowy aughts which look as if one could hold them in the hollow of one's hand. I felt such a longing for Scotland yesterday morning almost as if I were homesick for a country I had never seen. I began to think I must have a Scottish ancestor hidden in some corner of the family tree. All our fancies and vagaries are put down to heredity nowadays, and certainly yesterday morning I felt Scotchblood seething and bubbling in my veins. But he was not in Scotland. Mother had misunderstood him about the date of his journey or else he had changed his mind. At any rate he had only gone to London to see about guns and fishing tackle for the autumn, and there he was yesterday morning at eleven o'clock coming suddenly between me and the light as I sat reading alone in the summer house in the shrubbery. Cyril had left us by an early train for a two-days visit to a manor house near Guildford in religious observance of one of those college friendships which young men esteem so highly. His friend had telegraphed to him urgently, come, and he went, having carefully ascertained first that I did not mind. How I wish I had minded more. I felt a sense of relief when I saw him drive away from the gate, and yet I was dull without him. I missed his cheerful society which generally makes thought impossible, and I sat thinking deeply in the stillness of the shrubbery where there were no birds singing any more it seemed. I had books, work, a little sketch block, and color box, ample means for employment or amusement, and yet I sat idly thinking, idly dreaming, and picturing a life that was not the life I had pledged myself to lead. In the midst of these vain and foolish dreams he whose image had mixed itself with all of them stood suddenly before me. I looked up and saw him standing there, mute and serious. My guilty conscience sent the blood up to my face in a great wave of crimson. I could not speak, nor I think could he just at first. I thought you were in Scotland, I said at last, and I really thought as if I had achieved a brilliant remark. He explained, and the sound of our voices having made us both just a little more at our ease, he sat down in the only empty chair and took up my books one by one and looked at their titles. How learned you are, he said. Cousin Spinoza, read, I did not think that little girls troubled their curly heads about philosophy. I am not a little girl, I answered huffed at this impertinence, and philosophy is my Uncle Ambrose's favorite subject. He taught me all I know and I like to read the subjects that interest him. Have you read much this morning, he asked, looking me straight in the face with a cruelly deliberate scrutiny. Again the hot blood rushed up to cheeks and brow and I felt that he must know by my wretched blushes that I had not read a word, that I had just given over my heart and my mind to foolish thoughts of him, profitless thoughts of what might have been if I had not engaged myself to Cyril that day at Torchello, and if he, Gilbert Florestan, had happened to care just a little for me. Could any daydreams be wilder or more unbecoming a girl with the slightest notion of self-respect? I felt that I had degraded myself by my own folly and that I was hardly worthy to live. Have you read much this morning, he asked again, provokingly persistent. Not very much. If you were like me you would not have read half a dozen consecutive lines. I have not been able to read properly for many weeks. An image comes dancing along the printed lines and dazzles me, like that spectrum of the sun we see upon the page of a book after we have looked at the sun himself. I have been no good for intellectual work forever so long, Miss Hatrell. It was a relief when he called me Miss Hatrell, for I had been trembling lest he should call me Daisy. It was a relief to find him properly ceremonious, but I did not know how brief the respite was to be and how soon he was going to shatter the citadel of my self-respect. He looked at all the books again, rearranged them methodically on the table, took up my sketch block, and looked critically at the half-finished sketch of a group of sycamores by the bend in the opposite shore. I don't suppose he recognized them, though he must have known the originals from his boyhood. I took my little bit of embroidery out of my basket. It was one of my numerous beginnings in a new style of work which don't often go beyond the preliminary stage. I threaded my needle carefully with silk of the wrong color and began a bit of a scroll. Every stitch had to come out when I took up my work again this morning. I seemed to have been colorblind yesterday. Miss Hatrell, he said at last, when is this marriage to be? I concluded that he must mean my marriage, though he put his question rather vaguely. I don't know, there is no date fixed yet, not for ages perhaps. Ages in a young lady's vocabulary generally mean weeks. There is no date fixed. But the marriage is fixed, I suppose. There is no doubt as to that. No, I answered resolutely. There is no doubt. There never has been any doubt. There is no room for doubt. You have never felt the slightest inclination to withdraw your promise. Such things have been done, you know, and in all honor. Better to discover now than later that your heart is not wholly given to your fiancé. Better for you, happier for him. It is not an honorable act to marry a man you do not love only because you have promised rashly. I have promised and I mean to keep my word. I answered still resolute. And now the crimson flush, the fiery heat of that fierce shame had cooled and I could feel from the faint sickness of my sinking heart that I must have turned deadly pale. I have many reasons for being true to my promise which you cannot know, motives of gratitude, motives of affection. I am not romantically in love with my fiancé. I don't think there are many romantic marriages in our day. Girls have grown more sensible. They no longer take their ideas of life from Byron and more. I knew that I was rattling on in a most ridiculous way, but I felt constrained to talk. It was my only means of hiding my confusion, a kind of cuttlefish vivacity by which I hope to obscure my thoughts in a cloud of words. Mr. Florestan lent his arms upon the table where my books and work were scattered and watched my face earnestly while I spoke, as if he was reading the thoughts behind all my foolish babble. You are not romantically in love with your future. He repeated slowly, but you have promised to be his wife and you mean to keep your promise. You are perfectly contented with your lot. I think that is the gist of what you have just said to me, Miss Hatrell. That is what you mean. Yes, I answered stiffly. That is what I mean. Then I can only ask you to pardon my impertinent questioning and wish you good-bye, he said, rising slowly and taking his hat which he had put upon the bench beside him. I shall go to Scotland tonight. He held out his hand and I gave him mine without a word. I wonder which was the colder. I thought of Mrs. Browning's simile of a little stone in a running stream. Ah, if my hand could have lain in the hollow of his comfortably as his possession with what wild happiness this heart would have beaten, we parted so with a most admirable gravity. Sir Charles Grandison and Miss Byron could not have behaved any better in a similar situation. And then, all at once, as I heard his footstep grinding the gravel, Satan got hold of me and I ran after him. I did more than run, I flew. He was walking very fast and I only caught him within a few paces of the gate which opens out of the shrubbery into the lane close to his own grounds. Mr. Floristan, I gasped too breathless to say more. He turned and faced me, still with that Grandisonian gravity. I hope you are not angry with me, I said inanely. Angry? What right have I to be angry? returned he. I have entered perhaps over boldly to ask a question. You have answered it frankly and there's an end. Whatever hope led me to you this morning is a hope that has vanished. Nothing less than the knowledge that you are unhappy in your engagement to Mr. Arden would justify me in telling you what I might tell if honor would allow. Oh, Daisy, Daisy, he cried, clasping my hands and changing in one instant from Sir Charles Grandison to the most animated and impassioned of men. Why do you tempt me to say what were better unsaid if you have really made up your mind? Don't trifle with me, don't fool me. Oh, I think I understand you. I know what women are, even the best of them. You are going to marry Cyril Arden but you would like just for sport to know how hard hit I am. Very hard hit, Daisy. The arrow has gone home to its mark and it is a poisoned dart that will leave its venom in the wound for many and many a year. Is it not a pleasure, my sweet one, to know that in making one man happy you will make another man miserable? No, it is not a pleasure and I am utterly wretched, I said, and as the tears were rolling down my cheeks he could not help believing me. He took me in his arms and held me to his heart and kissed my forehead and my hair, kissed me, Cyril's promised wife, and I let him out of sheer misery. I was too completely broken down with woe to make a good fight for honour. Dear love, break this foolish engagement. Scatter your precipitated vows to the winds. It will be better for everybody, for Arden whom you don't care about, for me who adore you, and even for your sweet, sweet self, whose heart beats throb for throb with mine, like the rival engines which will be racing to Scotland through the summer night, one of them carrying me away from you. I had recovered my senses by this time and wrenched myself from his arms. How cruel of you to take such advantage of my helplessness, I said, trying to smooth down the fluffy curls upon my poor ill-used forehead. Sir Charles wouldn't have done such a thing. Sir Charles, he echoed doubtless thinking me mad. I am very sorry that I was so foolish as to follow you, I said. There was really no reason for my doing such an absurd thing. Only I wished to part friends. That means you are obdurate to both your victims. You will marry Arden, not carrying a straw for him, and you will break my heart, carrying perhaps just a little more than a straw for me. You are very impertinent for making such a suggestion, I said, with all the hotir I could summon to my voice and countenance, and it is very difficult for a girl of my disposition to summon any. The fairy who ought to have supplied me with feminine dignity and proper self-respect must certainly have taken offense at my christening, for I feel myself lamentably deficient in those qualities, and I really think the want of them is worse than a spindle through one's hand. Worse than a spindle. Worse than an after-dinner nap of a century. What if I were to sleep for a hundred years and Gilbert Floristan were to wake me in that new world which is the old? Ah, why have we no fairies now? Why has life no sweet surprises? Why has everything in my life gone wrong? He did not notice my reproach. Is there no hope, Daisy? He asked, pronouncing my name as if he had never been accustomed to address me by any other. I have told you that I mean to be true to my promise, I said. I am ashamed of myself for having given you the idea that I could possibly waver. Goodbye once more, and a pleasant journey to Argyle, sir. I did not offer to shake hands with him again. It would have seemed absurd after his terrible conduct three minutes before. I turned and ran back to the arbor as fast as ever I could go, and I opened the driest and most pessimistic of the books upon my table, and read and read and read for an hour and a half till mother came to look for me and to tell me that the luncheon gong had sounded ever so long ago. I shut my book with a bang and went meekly back to the house with the dear mother, and I had not the least bit of notion what I had been reading except like Hamlet's book that it was words, words, words. I hated myself as I had never hated myself before, though I have been ever keenly alive to my own hatefulness, to my hideous propensity for doing or saying the wrong thing on every possible occasion. Today self-scorn was sharp as an acute bodily pain, as a raging toothache for instance, or a gnawing rheumatism. Why had I so betrayed myself? Why had I gone out of my way to let him see that I love him and that my fidelity to Cyril is only maintained by a struggle? That while I was dismissing him and his love as a hopeless case, I was ready to throw myself into his arms and say, let us go to Scotland together, let us be married by the blacksmith at Gretna Green, if there is any such person as the blacksmith, or any such place as Gretna Green left for true lovers in this unromantic age. I felt that he could never more have a good or proper opinion of me. I felt that if he had had a sister turn out like me he would have considered her a disgrace to the family. I was more completely miserable than I had ever been since those weary days at Westgate-on-Sea when the misery of my father's death was a new thing and when I was parted from my mother. A kind of helplessness and a dull aching sense of degradation had taken hold of me, and the worst of all was that for the first time in my life I dared not confide in my mother. We sat opposite each other at the luncheon table, neither of us caring to eat. She, low-spirited about my step-father who was buried in his book-room over at the cottage, I, dumb and despairing. When the silence was at last broken it was that dear mother of mine who broke it in just the way which of all others jarred upon my irritated nerves. Daisy, she said, it is absolutely necessary to arrive at some definite idea about your marriage. Cyril has been pleading with me very earnestly, poor fellow. He is tired of his solitary existence in chambers, tired of bachelor amusements. He is devotedly attached to you and he wants to begin his domestic life. And then she went on in her sweet tender way which brought the tears into my eyes to remind me that though very young I am no younger than she was when she cast in her lot with my father, and to tell me again, as she has so often told me, how completely happy her wedded life was. The more she said about that perfect union, the more miserable I felt, until at last the tears rolled down my cheeks and my handkerchief became a mere wet rag and I felt that if I was like any bride at all it was the morning bride in somebody's play of whom all I know is that her existence gave occasion for a much quoted line about music and an overpraised descriptive passage about a temple. Do you think you could make up your mind to be married in the autumn, Daisy? Mother asked at last. I believe she took my tears to be only the expression of a general soft-heartedness. There are some girls whose eyes brim over at a tender word and not as indicative of sorrow for she asked the question quite cheerfully. Which autumn inquired I? This coming autumn naturally? Why, mother, that would be directly. No, dearest, we are still in July. Suppose we were to fix upon October for the wedding. That would give us three months for your trousseau. All other things are ready. You're charming rooms in Grobner's Square and at least half this house. Your stepfather and I will be over-housed even then, especially as Ambrose does not love this place and would like to travel during some part of every year. Yes, there is room enough for us all, I said, and as for the trousseau I don't care a straw about it. You have dressed me so well all my life that I never hunger for new clothes. It is only the badly dressed girls who are eager for wedding-finery. Leave the trousseau to me, then, Daisy, said mother, and I will take care that it is worthy of the dearest girl in the world. I may tell Cyril that he shall begin his new life before the end of October, may I not? Tell him just what you like, mother, I answered with a heart as heavy as lead. You must be the best judge of what is right. I left her a few minutes afterwards to go back to the garden. I felt a restlessness which made it impossible for me to stay in the house, a perpetual fever and worry which seemed a part of the heavy burden that weighed on my spirits. And, oh, I had been so happy, so happy in that very garden only a year ago. I want to do what is right. If I made a mistake about my own feelings at Torcello it is not right that another should suffer from my thoughtlessness and folly. I gave my promise far too lightly. It never occurred to me how solemn a thing it is to pledge one's love for a lifetime. I was rather pleased to be engaged to have Cyril for my own property, and whenever doubtings or questionings arose in my mind I told myself that as time went on and we grew older I should grow more and more attached to him, being really very fond of him in a sisterly kind of way to begin with. Only when we were leaving Paris did I discover how dreadfully I had misread my own heart, for then only did I know what love, such love as mother felt for her sweetheart, really means. It was just in one moment in that parting at the station that the dreadful truth flashed upon me. Oh, the heartache of parting, the look in his eyes which seemed to plead for pity to urge me to be brave and cast off the pretense of love and own boldly to the reality. He was not openly dishonorable, he waited for me to break my bonds. He could not know how strongly I was bound in gratitude and family love as well as an honor to Cyril. Nobody except mother and I can ever know how much I owe to Uncle Ambrose. No, there is no possibility of revoking my promise, and Cyril is all that is good and true, and I dare say my life will be very happy with him. I have but to forget those two short weeks in Paris and that one tête-à-tête cup of tea and this morning in the arbor and his face when he left me. Not much surely to forget, seeing how much women do forget nowadays, seeing how quickly mothers forget their lost children and sons and daughters their parents and the most sorrowful widows the husbands they once adored. Forgetfulness must be easier than it seems to one mother pangs of memory I still acute. I went back to the house, too restless to stay long anywhere, and on my way to the hall door I was startled by a most hateful apparition in the person of that odious Frenchman who attacked me in Church Street and who seems to have interwoven himself into our lives by his persistent appeals to my stepfather's charity. I know how kind Uncle Ambrose is, and yet I should have given him credit for more firmness of man to allow himself to be hunted down by a needy imposter of this kind. The man was coming from the gate towards the hall door when we met face to face and he looked considerably abashed at encountering me. Ah, you may well feel ashamed of yourself, I said indignantly. Yes, I am the lady you had the audacity to wail in the street when you were tipsy. You are Miss Hatrell. He faltered, looking an absolute craven. Yes, I am Miss Hatrell. What do you want at my mother's house? I want to see my employer, your stepfather. He said those two words, my employer, in a most detestable manner, implying contempt for the man for whom he had worked and by whom he had no doubt been liberally paid. Mr. Arden is over the way at his cottage, I said. You can go to him there if you like. You will not be admitted into my mother's house. He looked at me from head to foot with a very insolent expression, but as his eyes met mine his countenance changed suddenly and there was more of fear than of insolence in his look. His olive complexion changed to a grayish pallor and he turned on his heel abruptly, muttering something which I did not hear. He walked quickly back to the gate and went out and the shrug of his shoulders as he swung the gate open might mean anything in the world. My study window overlooks the lane and I saw him nearly an hour afterwards leave the cottage. He looked both angry and crestfallen and I fancy Uncle Ambrose had not proved so amenable as the applicant had expected. I wonder whether he had mentioned our meeting in Church Street this time. I think not. The part he played in that encounter would scarcely recommend him to my stepfather's generosity. 20 Scattered to the Winds I have seen that man again. He was lounging on the grassy bank above the lock this evening in the sunset as Cyril and I came through in our wary. There the creature sprawled looking hideously metropolitan in his black cutaway coat and black veiled hat against the background of flowering grasses and the ragged old hedgerow tangled with woodbine and starred with blackberry blossom. I pointed him out to Cyril. That is the bookbinder man who haunts your father, I said, and then I told him how this detestable person had been at River Lawn inquiring for Uncle Ambrose. Did my father see him? asked Cyril. Evidently, for he was nearly an hour at the cottage, I saw him leave. My father may have kept him waiting for the best part of that time, answered Cyril. You know how absent-minded he is when he is among his books. Yes, indeed, said I, and I hope that odious man was sitting on the little oak bench in the lobby nursing his hat all the time. The last entry is two days old, and now I have to record the strangest event in my life since I have come to womanhood, an event so startling that I am almost too agitated to write about it, although it happened yesterday. But the record must be written, for this book is to be all my life a faithful history of the romance and reality of my existence, of heart, facts, and idle dreams, of every act of folly and every gleam of sense. In a word, this book is to be a photograph of me, a photograph in pen and ink by an unskilled photographer. I awoke yesterday morning with that curious feeling with which I have so often awakened of late, a feeling of vague wonder. As I float gradually from sleep to waking I ask myself, what is it? I know there is something amiss in my life, but what, but what? And then I remember that I am engaged to be married, and that October is very near. And then I think how good it would be for everybody if I were to fall ill and die and leave Cyril free to marry somebody who would really love him and be honestly glad to be his wife. There are such girls, no doubt. I believe I could name seven between Henley and Reading. That was the feeling with which I awoke yesterday. A lovely day, and the church clocks striking six with a clear and silvery sound that means a west wind, and my room failed with the sweetness of the white climatus which grows over all this end of the house. I was out in the garden by seven and breakfasted with mother, Uncle Ambrose and Cyril at eight. There is a tennis tournament on at the rectory, and Cyril and Beatrice Reardon were to play the final yesterday between eleven and one. I was expected to look on, but my early walk in the garden had given me a headache or something else had, so I told Cyril I could not stand the noise and glare of the tennis court at the rectory, where all the Reardon family and hangers on would be bawling and laughing and making themselves generally detestable to anyone with a headache. So I said I would go for a gentle walk while he was finishing the match and be home in time to congratulate him at luncheon. For you are sure to win, said I. I don't know about that. Beatrice is a very fine player. She ought to be, said I, for she thinks of nothing else. To hear her talk one would suppose the honour of England was to be maintained by tennis. Well it is a fine manly game ensues the girls of this generation, he replied, and we walked together as far as the rectory gate. Don't tire yourself, darling, he said, looking at me ever so kindly with his honest eyes as we parted, and then I went for a long and lonely ramble in the Berkshire lanes. Those Berkshire lanes have been my one sovereign cure for the headache ever since my head was old enough to ache. A quiet walk between those flowering hedge-rows, those primrose and violet banks, those avenues of lords and ladies, and dog-roses and wood-binds has always soothed my aching head. If the sweet air and the scent of the flowers could only cure my aching heart as well, I thought yesterday. But heartache is not cured so easily. I went for a long, long ramble without thought of Cyril's warning, rather wishing to tire myself into a state of drowsy forgetfulness before I crept home. The church clocks struck one as I came across the meadows inside of the village. The aftermath was deep and full of flowers, and the narrow footpath between the tall grass and the hedgerow was the quietest haven in which to think of one's troubles. I felt sorry I was so near home when I came to the little gate that opened out of the meadow into a deep lane leading directly to our own road. River Lawn was in front between me and the Thames, and Uncle Ambrose's cottage was on my left hand as I turned my face to the river. I was lingering at the gate in a dreamy mood when I heard footsteps in the lane. I thought they might belong to one of those everlasting Reardon's, and as I wasn't equal to meeting a Reardon, I drew back behind a bushy blackthorn that grew beside the gate and watched the passer by. There was more than one. Two men went slowly by in earnest, and as I thought in angry conversation, though the tones of the one who was talking when they passed the gate was suppressed almost to a whisper. These two were Uncle Ambrose and the French bookbinder. Scarcely had they passed the gate when another man followed stealthily evidently listening to their conversation. The third man was Cyril. Cyril, my betrothed husband. Cyril, the pattern of honesty and honour creeping at his father's heels and acting the degrading part of listener. I could hardly believe my eyes. I was shocked, horrified, disgusted, and yet after thinking the whole thing over during a most painful reverie I was obliged to confess to myself that if the opportunity had occurred to me I might have done the same thing. The persistent intrusions of the Frenchman are not to be endured without protest of some kind, and I think Cyril was justified in listening to any conversation in which that man bore a part in order to protect his good, easy and most unwordly wise father from being imposed upon. Yes, after serious reflection I found excuses for my poor Cyril, although the sight of that creeping figure with head bent forward to listen gave me a dreadful shock. The greater shock was to come a few hours after, a shock which agitates my heart and nerves at this moment, not knowing how I ought to take it, whether I ought to be glad or sorry. Glad I cannot be, recalling my poor Cyril's white, agonised face as he talked to me by the river at five o'clock yesterday afternoon. Sorry, I cannot be, when I remember how cruelly the tie with which I had bound myself weighed upon my spirits. It was late when I went into the house but no one had gone to lunch. Mother was sitting alone in the morning-room. Her work-basket was on one side of her chair, her book-table on the other, but she was neither reading nor working and I thought she looked worried and anxious. Uncle Ambrose among his books as usual, I suppose, said I, feeling myself a dreadful hypocrite, though after all there had been time enough for him to get back to the library since he passed me in the lane. No doubt, answered Mother, he went across to the cottage soon after breakfast. Mother, said I, if I were you I would take him away from Berkshire. Let us all go to Salzburg or the Dolomites or Oveung or somewhere at least until October. This place doesn't suit Uncle Ambrose, he is not happy and you are not happy. Our lives are beginning to be a failure. There is something wrong somewhere. Yes, answered my mother gravely, there is something wrong. Your step father is out of health. There is some depressing influence at work. I have done all I can but I cannot make him happy. Poor Mother! There was such a settled sadness in her tone that the tears rushed to my eyes and it was all I could do not to sob aloud. I understood her secret thoughts so well. She had done all she could. She had sacrificed her freedom, her fidelity to her first love, the idolized husband of her youth out of gratitude to this faithful friend. She had put every selfish thought and feeling aside in order to reward his devotion and the sacrifice had been useless. He was not happy. In one vivid glance I saw my own future fashioned after the semblance of my mother's life today. I saw myself, the wife of a man whom I could not love, and I saw him unhappy in the discovery which no loyal effort of mine could keep from him. Poor Mother! Poor Daughter! It was nearly three o'clock when Mother and I went into the dining room and by that time I had contrived to cheer her with talk about the books we had been reading lately and about a possible run to the continent in the early part of September. We talked of Auvers and of Côtre, both of which districts were still untrodden ground for us, and untrodden ground has always the attraction of an earthly paradise. There was no sign of Cyril. He must have lunged at the rectory, said my mother. Rather bad manners on his part. He ought to have come to lay his laurels at your feet. His laurels? Ah, yes, the result of the final. The prize is a copy of the Idols of the King bound in Vellum, and if Cyril wins I am to have the book. Beatrice will be savage at losing it, though I don't believe she ever read twenty consecutive lines of poetry unless it was John Gilpin. After our feeble attempt at luncheon Mother went off on one of her charitable expeditions. I knew that would last for a good two hours, so I resigned myself to take tea alone, unless Cyril should reappear. I was really anxious to see him as I wanted to hear what he had overheard in the lane, and I fancied he would not keep his discovery from me, although he would expect to be reproved for his unworthy behavior in playing the spy upon his father. Of course there could be nothing to the discredit of Uncle Ambrose in his discovery, only the revelation of that dear good man's weakness where anything in the way of a book is concerned. Such a devoted lover of books would allow himself to be imposed upon even by the man whose trade was to bind them. Indeed it is extraordinary the importance which these book lovers attach to the outer covering of a book. I have seen volumes in Uncle Ambrose's library with landscapes painted on the edges of the paper under the gilding, a decoration which has cost two or three pounds per volume. Yet the book is put in a shelf where nobody sees the painted edges from year's end to year's end. I ordered my tea upon the terrace, exactly where I had my tea table that afternoon when Mr. Florestan and I took tea, ta ta ta. Somehow, haphazard I think, I had taken Napier's Wanderings on the Spy from a shelf in the library and the book seemed to carry me nearer to Scotland and to him. No doubt he is enjoying himself immensely in that sportsman's paradise, thought I, and I turned over the leaves to see if Napier said anything about Grouse. It was a delicious afternoon with a hot sun and a blue sky, a sky flecked with faint feathery cloudlets. It was the kind of afternoon which used to mean unqualified bliss, and even in spite of my troubles I could not help feeling a kind of sensuous content as I lulled back in my pet wicker chair and watched the ripple of the river and the gentle movement of the willows where the opposite bank curved inwards towards the broad reach over which the church tower cast its solemn shadow. The second quarter after four chimed from the dear old tower, the tea table stood ready, the little copper kettle hissed gaily, but there was still no sign of Virgil. I began to feel just a little uneasy about him, for it was unlike his usual way to be anywhere within reach and not come to hunt me out every hour or so, either for a ramble or a ride, a single, or a row on our beloved river. It was nearly five when I saw a young man coming across the lawn to the terrace where I was sitting, a young man in tennis flannels, such as those I had seen Cyril wear when he started for the tournament that morning, a man of Cyril's height and bulk, but not the least like Cyril in figure or walk as I saw him in the distance, for this man stooped as Cyril never did and this man's step had none of the elastic force of Cyril's rapid movements. Yet this man, with the bent shoulders and heavy walk, was Cyril and no one else. Cyril transformed by some heavy trouble. He came slowly to the empty chair at my side and seated himself in silence and looked at me with eyes whose expression I can never forget. All frivolous words died on my lips. I could only watch him in mute expectancy. Daisy, he began in a voice that was even stranger than his altered looks. I think you know that I have loved you honestly, truly, and dearly. I am sure you have, dear. I answered with a sinking heart, knowing that I myself dared not have said as much of my own truth and honesty. I have not gone into hysterics about my passion or written verses or done any other of the wild things that I might have done had we met as strangers at Venice the other day and fallen in love with each other at first sight. I have taken everything for granted, too much for granted, perhaps. I grew up loving you from the time I was allowed at school and you a kind of household fairy in a white frock with bright hair and dove-like eyes. I went on loving you and claimed you as my own almost as if I had a right to you, as if the trouble of wooing and winning were not for me since my own true love had been born and reared and educated expressly to make me happy. That is how I felt about you, Margaret, and perhaps I have seemed to tame more in consequence. No, no, no, I exclaimed eagerly. You have been all that is good and true. It is I who am weak and changeable and frivolous. It is I who am to blame. My two ready tears stopped me. I thought that he had discovered my guilty secret, that he had found out somehow that I had left off caring for him and had begun to care for Gilbert Floristan. I was going to throw myself on my knees at his feet when he stopped my uncertain movement with a hand laid heavily upon my arm. I doubt if he had heard one word of my self-accusation. That is all over and done with Daisy, he said, our wooing at Venice and elsewhere, and all the happy days and hours we have had together, and all our plans for the future, and the rooms that have been made beautiful for us to live in, and the life we were to lead. All those things must be as a dream that we have dreamed, and you must teach yourself to forget me, and to forget that you were ever my promised wife. Yes, he had found out all the truth, I told myself. My head duped forward upon my clasped hands, and I had what the weirding girls call a good cry. They have a good cry about the most contemptible things, if their dressmaker disappoints them, or if bad weather prevents an intended tennis match, but this good cry of mine seemed rung out of a breaking heart. I felt so sorry for Cyril, so ashamed of myself. I did not for one moment doubt that he had discovered my inconstancy, and that he was setting me free to marry Mr. Floristan, if Mr. Floristan cared to have the reversion of such a worthless weathercock. My darling, don't cry so bitterly, he pleaded more tenderly than I ever remembered him to have done in all our foolish little love scenes. You are breaking my heart, and I have need to be strong and stern to face a cruel future. You think that I am fickle, I said at last, and not worthy of your trust. You, fickle, you, unworthy, he cried. Why, my dearest, I know that you are the truest and purest of creatures. It is no doubt of you that influences me. There is an insuperable bar to our marriage, an obstacle which you and I have nothing to do. Is it my mother who is trying to part us? I asked wonderingly, or I thought mother might have read my secret. I had never been able to pretend much in my talks with her. No, Daisy, your mother has nothing to do with this matter. She knows nothing of my determination yet, and I am going to ask you a favour. What is that? I want you to let your mother suppose that it is you who have broken the engagement. You can say that you did not know your own mind when you accepted me, that you were too precipitant. This sort of thing girls say pretty often, I believe. I don't think as society is constituted nowadays, there will be very much astonishment at the alteration of our plans. I hope, before a year is over, that my darling will have found a worthy or lover, and as I shall be far away, no doubt people will soon forget me. You will be far away, I echoed. Where? In Australia. I shall try to begin a new life on the other side of the world. Read sheep on the darling downs, or turn wine grower, heaven knows what. But anyhow, my future shall be as far remote from my past as distance can make it. A new light flashed upon me, and I began to think that the question of money was at the bottom of poor Cyril's trouble, and that in honour I was bound to refuse this offered release. However, I might wish to cancel the past, I could not be so mean as to break my engagement because my lover had grown suddenly poor. I begin to suspect your motive, I said seriously. Uncle Ambrose has lost his fortune. Its coming was like a fairy tale, and it has vanished like gold in fairyland. Oh, Cyril, surely you know that I never cared about your father's wealth, or thought whether you were rich or poor. Mother and I have plenty of money for all of us. My dearest, I know your generous heart. No, it is not a money trouble that has darkened my days, but there is a trouble, and it is one which I must keep locked up in my own breast till I die. It is something about yourself, I speculated, pitting him too much to leave the mystery unquestioned. Some mortal disease, perhaps? You have consulted a physician who has told you that you may die suddenly, and you fear to make me unhappy. No, Daisy, medical men and I have had few dealings since I was vaccinated. Don't ask any more questions, dear. I dare not tell you more than I told you at first. All is over between us, and my life must be spent thousands of miles away. I could not trust myself within reach of an express train that would bring me back to you. He bent over me as I sat motionless with wonder, looking at the bright water and the lights and shadows on the opposite shore. He pressed his lips upon my forehead in a fair well kiss. Goodbye, my Margaret, my Pearl, mine no more, he said, and then turned away and walked slowly across the lawn by the way he had come. I heard the gate in the fence open and shut, and I knew that he had gone across the road to his father's cottage. I sat, looking at the water in a mute, dull wonder, while quarter after quarter chimed from the old gray tower, and the shadows deepened, and the golden lights grew dim upon beach and oak, and the willows in the foreground changed from green to gray. The footmen carried away the tea-table in their horrid mechanical way, which makes one think that they would clear a table and arrange a room in just the same leisurely fashion if one were lying dead upon the carpet. The evening darkened, and still I sat there wondering and amusing. I was free, free to love whom I pleased, free to marry anyone who cared to ask for my hand. I had the liberty for which my soul had longed ever since I left Paris, and yet I could not feel glad. I could not be glad while he was so sorry. Poor Cyril. My first play-fellow, my boyish sweetheart, the first admirer who ever told me my face was worth looking at. How well I remembered those first compliments, and how flushed and flattered I felt when the young oxonian told me he liked the gown I wore, or that my eyes looked dark under the shadow of my sailor hat. How foolish and vain I must have been when I was fifteen and wore my first long gown! No, I could not be glad. I felt such an imposter. Surely I ought to have confessed the truth in that last moment. I ought to have told him plainly and candidly that my heart had gone from him months ago and that the fancied treasure which he was renouncing was the poorest thing in the world, a jilt's unstable affection. There might have been some consolation for him in knowing the worthlessness of the thing he surrendered. And yet, and yet, it might have been cruel to undeceive him. It was better for him perhaps to believe that he had received measure for measure that I had loved him to the last. If ever I marry it will be years hence, I dare say, I told myself, and he will be in Australia, happily married himself before that time. This was a comforting thought, but even this could not prevent me feeling very unhappy about Cyril and his mysterious trouble. What was it? Had he gambled? Had he kept race-horses? Had he forged? One hears and reads of things quite as extraordinary as forging on the part of a seemingly honourable young man. And the trouble was obviously a very serious one. It might be some casual forgery executed on the spur of the moment after a wine at Christchurch when the poor dear fellow hardly knew what he was doing. I could fancy the whole scene. Some wicked collegian, several years older than Cyril, putting a pen into his hand and making him sign a bond or an IOU or a bill or something with somebody else's name, the deans perhaps to redeem his losses at cards. He has often told me how wild they are at Christchurch and how they throw one another into the fountain and smash furniture and play poker and do all manner of dreadful things. The more I thought of Cyril's unhappiness, the more I felt inclined to believe that it must date from his college days. It was a sort that had been hanging over his head for a long time and their hair had broken today. There was another idea which struck me afterwards as I walked back to the house. What if Cyril, in a weak, good-natured way, had got himself engaged to another girl, a girl he detested, and felt that honour obliged him to marry her because she was of inferior rank and because he detested her. This would account for his resolution to go to the other side of the world and begin a new life. He would marry this person and take her straight off to the antipodes where no one belonging to his own world would ever see him in his disgrace. Poor Cyril. My heart bled for him as I thought what his life would be like married to a vulgar woman who would misplace the aspirate and talk of him as Mr. Harden. It would be too dreadful and I felt as if I would have rather sacrificed my own happiness than that he should be so utterly lost. Mother came out of the drawing-room window to meet me as I drew near the house. She had just returned from her visiting having tasted half a dozen cups of tea and a half dozen tiny sitting-rooms and had heard no end of sad stories. Yet she looked happier than usual for she had been giving happiness to others. I had been keeping my heart locked against that dear mother for months, but now I was determined to tell her as much of the truth as I was free to tell. I put my arms around her neck and laid my bewildered head upon her shoulder. Mother dear, you have no need to trouble about that horrid true-so. I said half laughing and half crying. The changes come over the spirit of our dream, mine and Cyril's. We have agreed that we don't quite suit each other or at least that we answer better as brother and sister than we ever could as husband and wife, and so, in the friendliest way, we have agreed to part. He is going to Australia to look about him, and I am going to stay with you. I believe I was slightly hysterical after this, and I felt very much ashamed of myself as I heard myself making a ridiculous noise without the power to stop. Poor mother kissed and comforted me and scolded me a little till I quieted down, and then she sat by my side on our favorite sofa to discuss the situation. This is very sudden, Daisy, she said, and I saw that she looked grave and troubled. It seems sudden, I answered, but it has been in the air for some time, ever since we left Paris. Ever since you left Paris, repeated mother as if she saw a light. You must have seen that I was reluctant to name any time for my marriage and that I didn't take the faintest interest in my true-so. Yes, I saw that, and I thought it only meant that my Daisy was less frivolous than most girls. It meant that I was a hypocrite and an imposter, that I allowed myself to be engaged to Cyril out of sheer frivolity, mere idle vanity which made me pleased to have an admirer. For months past I have been chafing against my bonds and I cannot be too grateful to Cyril for having set me free. Did you ask him to release you? inquired mother, looking at me searchingly with her soft, serious eyes. I could not tell her a deliberate falsehood, but I could prevaricate which I dare say is just as bad. There was no necessity for me to ask him, I said. He understood my feelings, we understood each other perfectly. Don't ask any more questions, mother darling, I pleaded, at least not about poor Cyril. He will be leaving us very soon, I fear. Indeed, indeed, there is no need for you to grieve. I urge, guessing her sweet, anxious face, it is better as it is. Is it Daisy? She exclaimed sadly. I cannot quite think that. The change seems light to you, but it is a sad breaking up of home and family ties. The nest has been made ready for the birds and now they are depart and scatter far and wide. This will be a blow for your stepfather. He was so proud of your engagement to Cyril, so happy in the thought of your future union. The disappointment will be bitter for him. And he is out of health and hardly in a condition to bear a great sorrow. I am very sorry on his account, I faltered, but though I am not to be his daughter-in-law, I shall always be his loving and obedient friend and pupil. I can never forget all that he has been to me from my childhood until now. I am glad of that, Daisy, answered the dear mother her eyes filling with tears. I should be very sorry if either you or I could be unthoughtful of the best friend widow and daughter ever had in the world, the most unselfish, the most forbearing. You know that my marriage with Ambrose Arden was not a love match. No woman can love a second husband as I loved your father. It was a marriage of friendship, of grateful affection, of unqualified and admiring regard. I wanted to make the remaining years of my friend's life as happy as a woman's tenderness could make them. My only disappointment in this second marriage, my only regret since my wedding day, has been the fear that in spite of all my care your stepfather has not been happy. There is a little rift within the loot, Daisy, and God knows how it came there. It is none of my making. Dearest mother, no wife on earth could do more to make a husband's life full of sunshine than you have done, I told her. If there is some touch of shadow mingled with the light you must not take it to heart. Uncle Ambrose is a scholar and a recluse, a man of peculiar character and temperament, and you must not be surprised if he has intervals of melancholy brooding. A man who reads the modern metaphysicians can only be happy when he has no time for thought. Uncle Ambrose thinks too much, mother. That is the only evil. She kissed me fondly at this, and I felt somehow that our mutual confidences had drawn us nearer to each other than we had been since her marriage. Yes, Daisy, no doubt that is the evil. Ambrose has lived the scholar's life too long to be able to enjoy commonplace pleasures like other men. He is too old to begin a new life. He is like Eugene Arum. Eugene Arum? What am I thinking of, Daisy, to compare my husband to a murderer? Ah, but you meant it as a compliment, I told her laughing. Eugene Arum was such a delightful murderer. The crime that darkens his past only deepens the interest in his character, and by the time the mystery stands revealed, the reader is devoted to the criminal. That is only the glamour of the novelist, Daisy. Depend upon it, the real Arum was a smooth-faced, canting hypocrite with murder lurking in his downcast eyes. I cannot believe that any man capable of such a crime could ever win a noble-minded woman like Madeline. She would have shrunk from him instinctively. We read Bulwur's romance together not long ago, and every detail of the story is still vivid in both our minds. My mother looked at the clock on the chimney-piece. A quarter to eight, Daisy, and we must dress for dinner, and after dinner I must tell your stepfather what has happened. He has no idea of it, I suppose. I think not. Poor Ambrose, I am sorry for him. No, love, I don't blame you or Cyril, she added hastily as she saw my look of self-reproach. It is not your fault, either of you, if you do not love each other well enough to take lifelong vows. It is better to have found out the truth in time, but the disappointment will not be last bitter to Cyril's father. It pleased him to believe that his affection for me would be in a manner continued in the coming years by his son's union with my daughter. I shall always be fond of Cyril, I said, as a brother. That has been my only mistake. I fancied sisterly affection meant more than it really did. Before you left Paris, said my mother looking at me searchingly until I felt myself turning scorchingly red under that earnest examination. Run away and dress, Daisy. I hear Ambrose going upstairs to his dressing-room. We shall all be late for dinner. I ran to my room three steps at a time. I felt happier than I had been at any time since we left Venice in spite of all that had been done to make me happy. I was sorry for Cyril, honestly and sincerely sorry, but a burden was lifted off my heart and I could not wonder that it beat less heavily.