 CHAPTER 1 HOW A RITCH BANKER MARRIED AN ACTRESS Night streaks of crimson glimmer here and there amid the rich darkness of the kentish woods. Autumn's red finger has been lightly laid upon the foliage, sparingly, as the artist puts the brighter tints into his picture, but the grandeur of an august sunset blazes upon the peaceful landscape and lights all into glory. The encircling woods and wide, long-like meadows, the still ponds of limpid water, the trim hedges and the smooth winding roads, undulating hilltops melting into the purple distance, laboring men's cottages gleaming white from the surrounding foliage, solitary roadside inns with brown-thatched roofs and moss-grown stacks of lopsided chimneys, noble mansions hiding behind ancestral oaks, tiny gothic edifices, Swiss and rustic lodges, tillered gates surmounted by a scutcheon's hewn in stone and festooned with green wreaths of clustering ivy. Village churches and prim schoolhouses every object in the fair English prospect is steeped in a luminous haze as the twilight shadows steal slowly upward from the dim recesses of shady woodland and winding lane and every outline of the landscape darkens against the deepening crimson of the sky. Upon the broad façade of a mighty red brick mansion, built in the favorite style of the early Georgian era, the sinking sun lingers long making gorgeous illumination. The long rows of narrowed windows are all aflame with the red light and an honest homeward tramping villager pauses once or twice in the roadway to glance across the smooth width of a dewy lawn and tranquil lake, half fearful that there must be something more than natural in the glitter of those windows, and that maybe Maester Floyd's house is a fire. The stately red-built mansion belongs to Maester Floyd as he is called in the honest patois of the Kentish rustics, to Archibald Martin Floyd of the great banking house of Floyd, Floyd and Floyd, Lumbard Street, City. The Kentish rustics knew very little of this city banking house, for Archibald Martin, the senior partner, has long retired from any active share in the business, which is carried on entirely by his nephews, Andrew and Alexander Floyd, both steady middle-aged men with families and country houses, both owing their fortune to the rich uncle who had found places in his counting-house for them some thirty years before, when they were tall, raw-boned, sandy-haired, red-complexioned Scottish youths, fresh from some unpronounceable village north of Aberdeen. The young gentlemen signed their names M. Floyd when they first entered their uncle's counting-house, but they very soon followed that wise relative's example and dropped the formidable prefix. When they need to tell these southern bodies that were Scotch, Alec remarked to his brother as he wrote his name for the first time, A. Floyd, all short. The Scottish banking-house had thriven wonderfully in the hospitable English capital. Unprecedented success had waited upon every enterprise undertaken by the old established and respected firm of Floyd, Floyd and Floyd. It had been Floyd, Floyd and Floyd for upward of a century, for as one member of the house dropped off, some greener branch shot out from the old tree, and there had never yet been any need to alter the treble repetition of the well-known name upon the brass plates that adorned the swinging mahogany doors of the banking-house. To this brass plate Archibald Martin Floyd pointed when some thirty years before the August evening of which I write, he took his raw-boned nephews for the first time across the threshold of his house of business. See here, boys, he said, look at the three names upon that brass plate. Your Uncle George is over fifty and a bachelor, that's the first name. Our first cousin, Stephen Floyd of Calcutta, is going to sell out of the business before long, that's the second name. The third is mine, and I'm thirty-seven years of age, remember, boys, and not likely to make a fool of myself by marrying. Your names will be wanted by and by to fill the blanks. See that you keep them bright in the meantime, for let so much as one speck rest upon them, and they'll never be fit for that brass plate. Perhaps the rugged Scottish youths took this lesson to heart, or perhaps honesty was a natural and inborn virtue in the house of Floyd. Be it as it might, neither Alec nor Andrew disgraced their ancestry, and when Stephen Floyd, the East Indian merchant, sold out, and Uncle George grew tired of the business, and took to building, as an elderly bachelor-like hobby, the young men stepped into their relative's shoes, and took the conduct of the business upon their broad northern shoulders. On one point only Archibald Martin Floyd had misled his nephews, and that point regarded himself. Ten years after his address to the young men at the sober age of seven and forty, the banker not only made a fool of himself by marrying, but if indeed such things are foolish, sank still further from the proud elevation of worldly wisdom by falling desperately in love with a beautiful but penniless woman whom he brought home with him after a business tour through the manufacturing districts, and with but little ceremony introduced to his relations and the county families round his Kentish estate as his newly wedded wife. The whole affair was so sudden that these very county families had scarcely recovered from their surprise at reading a certain paragraph in the left-hand column of the Times, announcing the marriage of Archibald Martin Floyd, banker of Lombard Street and Felden Woods, to Eliza, only surviving daughter of Captain Prodder. When the bridegroom's traveling carriage dashed past the gothic lodge at the gates along the avenue and under the great stone portico at the side of the house, and Eliza Floyd entered the banker's mansion, nodding good-naturedly to the bewildered servants marshalled into the hall to receive their new mistress. The banker's wife was a tall young woman of about thirty, with a dark complexion, and great flashing black eyes that lit up a face which might otherwise have been unnoticeable, into the splendor of absolute beauty. Let the reader recall one of those faces who so loveliness lies in the glorious light of a pair of magnificent eyes, and remember how far they surpass all others in their power of fascination. The same amount of beauty frittered away upon a well-shaped nose, rosy pouting lips, symmetrical forehead, and delicate complexion would make an ordinarily lovely woman. But concentrated in one nucleus, in the wondrous luster of the eyes, it makes a divinity, a circe. You may meet the first any day of your life, the second, once in a lifetime. Mr. Floyd introduced his wife to the neighboring gentry at a dinner party which he gave soon after the lady's arrival at Felden Woods, as his country seat was called, and this ceremony very briefly dispatched. He said no more about his choice either to his neighbors or his relations, who would have been very glad to hear how this unlooked-for marriage had come about, and who hinted the same to the happy bridegroom, but without effect. Of course this very reticence on the part of Archibald Floyd himself only set the thousand tongues of rumour more busily to work. Round Beckenham and West Wickham, near which villages Felden Woods was situated, there was scarcely any one debased and degraded station of life from which Mrs. Floyd was not reported to have sprung. She was a factory girl, and the silly old banker had seen her in the streets of Manchester, with a coloured handkerchief on her head, a coral necklace round her throat, and shoeless and stockingless feet, tramping in the mud. He had seen her thus and had fallen incontinently in love with her, and offered to marry her there and then. She was an actress, and he had seen her on the Manchester stage. Nay, lower still, she was some poor performer, decked in dirty white muslin, red cotton velvet and spangles, who acted in a canvas booth, with a pitiful set of wandering vagabonds and a learned pig. Sometimes they said she was an equestrian, and it was at Astley's and nodded the manufacturing districts that the banker had first seen her. Nay, some there were ready to swear that they themselves had beheld her leaping through gilded hoops and dancing the cahooka upon six barebacked steeds in that sawdust strewn arena. There were whispered rumours that went even further than these, rumours which I dare not even set down here, for the busy tongues that dealt so mercilessly with the name and fame of Eliza Floyd were not unbarbed by malice. It may be that some of the ladies had personal reasons for their spite against the bride, and that many a waning beauty in those pleasant Kentish mansions had speculated upon the banker's income, and the advantages attendant upon a union with the owner of Felden Woods. The daring, disreputable creature with not even beauty to recommend her, for the Kentish damsels scrupulously ignored Eliza's wonderful eyes, and were sternly critical with her low forehead, doubtful nose, and rather wide mouth, the artful designing minx who at the mature age of nine and twenty, with her hair growing nearly down to her eyebrows, had contrived to secure to herself the hand and fortune of the richest man in Kent, the man who had been hitherto so impregnable to every assault from bright eyes and rosy lips that the most indefatigable of manoeuvring mothers had given him up in despair, and ceased to make visionary and allnusher-like arrangements of the furniture in Mr. Floyd's great red brick palace. The female portion of the community wondered indignantly at the supine-ness of the two scotch-nephews and the old bachelor-brother George Floyd. Why did not these people show a little spirit, institute a commission of lunacy and shut their crazy relative in a mad-house? He deserved it. The ruined no-bless of the faux-berg Saint-Germain, the faded duchesses and worn-out vedams, could not have abused a wealthy bonapartist with more vigorous rancor than these people employed in their ceaseless babble about the banker's wife. Whatever she did was a new subject for criticism, even at that first dinner-party, though Eliza had no more ventured to interfere with the arrangements of the man-cook and housekeeper than if she had been a visitor at Buckingham Palace, the angry guests found that everything had degenerated since that woman had entered the house. They hated the successful adventurers, hated her for her beautiful eyes and her gorgeous jewels, the extravagant gifts of an adoring husband, hated her for her stately figure and graceful movements which never betrayed the rumored obscurity of her origin, hated her above all for her insolence in not appearing in the least afraid of the lofty members of that new circle in which she found herself. If she had meekly eaten the ample dish of humble pie which these county families were prepared to set before her, if she had licked the dust from their aristocratic shoes, courted their patronage, and submitted to be taken up by them, they might perhaps in time have forgiven her. But she did none of this. If they called upon her well and good, she was frankly and cheerfully glad to see them. They might find her in her gardening gloves, with rumpled hair and a watering-pot in her hands, busy among her conservatories, and she would receive them as serenely as if she had been born in a palace and used to homage from her very babyhood. Let them be as frigidly polite as they pleased, she was always easy, candid, gay and good-natured. She would rattle away about her dear old archy, as she presumed to call her benefactor and husband, or she would show her guests some new picture he had bought, and would dare the impudent, ignorant, pretentious creature to talk about art as if all the high-sounding jargon with which they tried to crush her was as familiar to her as to a royal academician. When etiquette demanded her returning these stately visits, she would drive boldly up to her neighbor's doors in a tiny basket carriage, drawn by one rough pony, for it was an affectation of this designing woman to affect simplicity in her tastes and to abjure all display. She would take all the grandeur she met with as a thing of course and chatter and laugh with her flaunting theatrical animation, much to the admiration of misguided young men who could not see the high-bred charms of her detractors, but who were never tired of talking of Mrs. Floyd's jolly manners and glorious eyes. I wonder whether poor Eliza Floyd knew all or half the cruel things that were said of her. I shrewdly suspect that she contrived somehow or other to hear them all, and that she rather enjoyed the fun. She had been used to a life of excitement, and Felden Woods might have seemed dull to her but for these ever-fresh scandals. She took a malicious delight in the discomforture of her enemies. How badly they must have wanted you for a husband, Archie, she said, when they hate me so ferociously. Poor, portionless old maids, to think I should snatch their prey from them. I know they think it is a hard thing that they can't have me hung for marrying a rich man. But the banker was so deeply wounded when his adored wife repeated to him the gossip which she had heard from her maid, who was a staunch adherent to a kind, easy mistress, that Eliza ever after withheld these reports from him. They amused her, but they stung him to the quick. Proud and sensitive, like almost all very honest and conscientious men, he could not endure that any creature should dare to be foul the name of the woman he loved so tenderly. What was the obscurity from which he had taken her to him? Is a star less bright because it shines on a gutter as well as upon the purple bosom of the midnight sea? Is a virtuous and generous-hearted woman less worthy because you find her making a scanty living out of the only industry she can exercise and acting Juliet to an audience of factory hands who gave three pence apiece for the privilege of admiring and applauding her? Yes, the murder must out, the malicious were not altogether wrong in their conjectures. Eliza Prouder was an actress, and it was on the dirty boards of a second-rate theatre in Lancashire that the wealthy banker had first beheld her. Archibald Floyd nourished a traditional, passive, but sincere admiration for the British drama. Yes, the British drama, for he had lived in a day when the drama was British and when George Barnwell and Jane Shore were among the favourite works of art of a playgoing public. How sad that we should have degenerated since those classic days and that the graceful story of Mill Wood and her apprentice admirer is now so rarely set before us. Inbued therefore with the solemnity of Shakespeare and the drama, Mr. Floyd, stopping for a night at the second-rate Lancashire town, dropped into the dusty boxes of the theatre to witness the performance of Romeo and Juliet, the heiress of the Capulets being represented by Miss Eliza Percival, alias Prouder. I do not believe that Miss Percival was a good actress, or that she would ever become distinguished in her profession, but she had a deep melodious voice which rolled out the words of her author in a certain rich, though rather monotonous music, pleasant to hear. And upon the stage she was very beautiful to look at, for her face lighted up the little theatre better than all the gas that the manager grudged to his gante audiences. It was not the fashion in those days to make sensation dramas of Shakespeare's plays. There was no hamlet with the celebrated water scene and the Danish Prince taking a header to save poor weak-witted Ophelia. In the little Lancashire theatre it would have been thought a terrible sin against all canons of dramatic art had Othello or his ancient attempted to sit down during any part of the solemn performance. The hope of Denmark was no long-robed Norseman with flowing flaxen hair, but an individual who wore a short, rusty black cotton velvet garment, shaped like a child's frock, and trimmed with bugles, which dropped off and were trodden upon at intervals throughout the performance. The simple actors held that tragedy, to be tragedy, must be utterly unlike anything that ever happened beneath the sun, and Eliza Prader patiently trod the old and beaten track, far too good-natured, light-hearted and easy-going a creature, to attempt any foolish interference with the crookedness of the times which she was not born to set right. What can I say, then, about her performance of the impassioned Italian girl? She wore white satin and spangles, the spangles sewn upon the dirty hem of her dress, in the firm belief common to all provincial actresses, that spangles were an antidote to dirt. She was laughing and talking in the whitewashed little green room, the very minute before she ran on to the stage to wail for her murdered kinsman and her banished lover. They tell us that McCreedy began to be Richelieu at three o'clock in the afternoon, and that it was dangerous to approach or to speak to him between that hour and the close of the performance. So dangerous indeed that surely none but the daring and misguided gentleman who once met the great tragedian in a dark passage and gave him, even tomorrow, Mac, would have had the temerity to attempt it. But Miss Percival did not take her profession very deeply to heart. The Lancashire salaries barely paid for the physical wear and tear of early rehearsals and long performances, how then for that mental exhaustion of the true artist who lives in the character he represents. The easygoing comedians with whom Eliza acted made friendly remarks to each other on their private affairs in the intervals of the most vengeful discourse, speculated upon the amount of money in the house in audible undertones during the pauses of the scene, and when Hamlet wanted Horatio down at the footlights to ask him if he marked that, it was likely enough that the Prince's confident was up the stage telling Polonius of the shameful way in which his landlady stole the tea and sugar. It was not therefore Miss Percival's acting that fascinated the banker. Archibald Floyd knew that she was as bad an actress as ever played the leading tragedy and comedy for five and twenty shillings a week. He had seen Miss O'Neill in that very character, and it moved him to a pitting smile as the factory hands applauded poor Eliza's poison scene. But for all this he fell in love with her. It was a repetition of the old story. It was Arthur Pendennis at the little chatterous theatre bewitched and bewildered by Miss Fatheringay all over again, only that instead of a feeble impressionable boy, it was a sober, steady-going businessman of seven and forty who never felt one thrill of emotion in looking on a woman's face until that night. Until that night. And from that night to him the world only held one being, and life only had one object. He went the next evening and the next, and then contrived to scrape acquaintance with some of the actors at a tavern next to the theatre. They sponged upon him cruelly, these seedy comedians, and allowed him to pay for unlimited glasses of brandy and water, and flattered and cajoled him and plucked out the heart of his mystery, and then went back to Eliza Percival and told her that she had dropped into a good thing, for that an old chap with no end of money had fallen over head and ears in love with her, and that if she played her cards well he would marry her to-morrow. They pointed him out to her through a hole in the green curtain, sitting almost alone in the shabby boxes, waiting for the play to begin, and her black eyes to shine upon him once more. Eliza laughed at her conquest. It was only one among many such, which had all ended alike, leading to nothing better than the purchase of a box on her benefit night, or a bouquet left for her at the stage door. She did not know the power of first love upon a man of seven and forty. Before the week was out, Archibald Floyd had made her a solemn offer of his hand and fortune. He had heard a great deal about her from her fellow performers, and had heard nothing but good. Temptations resisted, diamond bracelets indignantly declined, graceful acts of gentle womanly charity done in secret, independence preserved through all poverty and trial. They told him a hundred stories of her goodness that brought the blood to his face with proud and generous emotion. And she herself told him the simple history of her life, told him that she was the daughter of a merchant captain called Prader, that she was born at Liverpool, that she remembered little of her father who was almost always at sea, nor of a brother three years older than herself, who quarreled with his father, the merchant captain, and ran away and was never heard of again, nor of her mother who died when she, Eliza, was ten years old. The rest was told in a few words. She was taken into the family of an aunt who kept a grocer's shop in Miss Prader's native town. She learned artificial flower making and did not take to the business. She often went to the Liverpool theatres and thought she would like to go upon the stage. Being a daring and energetic young person, she left her aunt's house one day, walked straight to the stage manager of one of the minor theatres, and asked him to let her appear as Lady Macbeth. The man laughed at her but told her that in consideration of her fine figure and black eyes he would give her fifteen shillings a week to walk on, as he technically called the business of the ladies who wander on to the stage, sometimes dressed as villagers, sometimes in court costume of calico trimmed with gold, and stare vaguely at whatever may be taking place in the scene. From walking on Eliza came to play minor parts, indignantly refused by her superiors. From these she plunged ambitiously into the tragic lead, and thus for nine years pursued the even tenor of her way until close upon her nine and twentieth birthday, fate threw the wealthy banker across her pathway, and in the parish church of a small town in the potteries the black-eyed actress exchanged the name of Prader for that of Floyd. She had accepted the rich man partly because moved by a sentiment of gratitude for the generous ardour of his affection, she was inclined to like him better than anyone else she knew, and partly in accordance with the advice of her theatrical friends, who told her with more candor than elegance that she would be a jolly fool to let such a chance escape her. But at the time she gave her hand to Archibald Martin Floyd she had no idea whatever of the magnitude of the fortune he had invited her to share. He told her that he was a banker, and her active mind immediately evoked the image of the only banker's wife she had ever known, a portly lady who wore silk gowns, lived in a square, stuck-out house with green blinds, kept a cook and housemaid, and took three box tickets for Miss Percival's benefit. When therefore the doting husband loaded his handsome bride with diamond bracelets and necklaces, and with silks and brocades that were stiff and unmanageable from their very richness, when he carried her straight from the potteries to the Isle of Wight and lodged her in spacious apartments at the best hotel in Ride, and flung his money here and there as if he carried the lamp of Aladdin in his coat pocket, Eliza remonstrated with her new master, fearing that his love had driven him mad and that this alarming extravagance was the first outburst of insanity. It seemed a repetition of the dear old burly story when Archibald Floyd took his wife into the Long Picture Gallery at Felden Woods. She clasped her hands for frank womanly joy as she looked at the magnificence about her. She compared herself to the humble bride of the Marquis and fell on her knees and did theatrical homage to her lord. Oh, Archie, she said, it is all too good for me. I am afraid I shall die of my grandeur as the poor girl pined away at Burley House. In the full maturity of womanly loveliness, rich in health, freshness, and high spirits, how little could Eliza dream that she would hold even a briefer lease of these costly splendors than the bride of Burley had done before her. Now the reader being acquainted with Eliza's antecedents may perhaps find in them some clue to the insolent ease and well-bred audacity with which Mrs. Floyd treated the second-rate county families who were bent upon putting her to confusion. She was an actress. For nine years she had lived in that ideal world in which Dukes and Marquises are as common as butchers and bakers in work-a-day life, in which indeed a nobleman is generally a poor, mean-spirited individual who gets the worst of it on every hand and is contemptuously entreated by the audience on account of his rank. How should she be abashed on entering the drawing-rooms of these kentish mansions when for nine years she had walked nightly on to a stage to be the focus for every eye and to entertain her guests the evening through? Was it likely she was to be overawed by the Lenfields who were coach-builders in Park Lane, or the Miss Manderleys whose father had made his money by a patent for starch? She who had received King Duncan at the gates of her castle and had sat on her throne dispensing condescending hospitality to the obsequious thanes at Dunsenane. So do what they would they were unable to subdue this base intruder, while to add to their mortification it every day became more obvious that Mr. and Mrs. Floyd made one of the happiest couples who had ever worn the bonds of matrimony and changed them into garlands of roses. If this were a very romantic story it would be perhaps only proper for Eliza Floyd to pine in her gilded bower and misapply her energies in weeping for some abandoned lover, deserted in an evil hour of ambitious madness. But as my story is a true one, not only true in a general sense but strictly true as to the leading facts which I am about to relate and as I could point out in a certain county far northward of the lovely Kentish Woods, the very house in which the events I shall describe took place, I am bound also to be truthful here and to set down as a fact that the love which Eliza Floyd bore for her husband was as pure and sincere in affection as ever man need hope to win from the generous heart of a good woman. What share gratitude may have had in that love I cannot tell if she lived in a handsome house and was weighted on by attentive and deferential servants, if she ate of delicate dishes and drank costly wines, if she wore rich dresses and splendid jewels and lulled on the downy cushions of a carriage drawn by high-metalled horses and driven by a coachman with powdered hair. If wherever she went all outward semblance of homage was paid to her, if she had but to utter a wish, and swift as the stroke of some enchanters wand that wish was gratified, she knew that she owed all to her husband Archibald Floyd, and it may be that she grew not unnaturally to associate him with every advantage she enjoyed and to love him for the sake of these things. Such a love as this may appear a low and despicable affection when compared to the noble sentiment entertained by the Nancy's of modern romance for the Bill Sykes's of their choice, and no doubt Eliza Floyd ought to have felt a sovereign contempt for the man who watched her every whim, who gratified her every whim, and who loved and honoured her as much si devant provincial actress as she was, as he could have done had she descended the steps of the loftiest throne in Christendom to give him her hand. She was grateful to him, she loved him, she made him perfectly happy, so happy that the strong-hearted scotchman was sometimes almost panic-stricken at the contemplation of his own prosperity, and would fall down on his knees and pray that this blessing might not be taken from him, that if it pleased Providence to afflict him he might be stripped of every shilling of his wealth and left penniless to begin the world anew, but with her. Alas, it was this blessing of all others that he was to lose. For a year Eliza and her husband lived this happy life at Felden Woods. He wished to take her on the Continent or to London for the season, but she could not bear to leave her lovely Kentish home. She was happier than the day was long among her gardens and pineries and graperies, her dogs and horses and her poor. To these last she seemed an angel descended from the skies to comfort them. There were cottages from which the prim daughters of the second-rate county families fled, tracked in hand, discomfited and abashed by the black looks of the half-starved inmates. But upon whose door weighs the shadow of Mrs. Floyd was as the shadow of a priest in a Catholic country, always sacred, yet ever welcome and familiar. She had the trick of making these people like her before she set to work to reform their evil habits. At an early stage of her acquaintance with them she was as blind to the dirt and disorder of their cottages as she would have been to a shabby carpet in the drying-room of a poor duchess. But by and by she would artfully hint at this and that little improvement in the menages of her pensioners until in less than a month without having either lectured or offended she had worked an entire transformation. Mrs. Floyd was frightfully artful in her dealings with these airing peasants. Instead of telling them at once in a candid and Christian-like manner that they were all dirty, degraded, ungrateful and irreligious, she'd diplomatized and finessed with them as if she had been canvassing the county. She made the girls regular in their attendance at church by means of new bonnets. She kept married men out of the public houses by bribes of tobacco to smoke at home, and once, oh horror, by the gift of a bottle of gin. She cured a dirty chimney-piece by the presence of a gaudy china vase to its proprietress and a slovenly hearth by means of a brass fender. She repaired a shrewish temper with a new gown and patched up a family breach of longstanding with a chintz waistcoat. But one brief year after her marriage, while busy landscape gardeners were working at the improvements she had planned, while the steady process of reformation was slowly but surely progressing among the grateful recipients of her bounty, while the eager tongues of her detractors were still waging war upon her fair fame, while Archibald Floyd rejoiced as he held a baby daughter in his arms, without one forewarning symptom to break the force of the blow, the light slowly faded out of those glorious eyes, never to shine again on this side of eternity, and Archibald Martin Floyd was a widower. The moment behind her, when she was so suddenly taken away from all earthly prosperity and happiness, was christened Aurora. The romantic-sounding name had been a fancy of poor Eliza's, and there was no caprice of hers, however trifling, that had not always been sacred with her adoring husband, and that was not doubly sacred now. The actual intensity of the widower's grief was known to no creature in this lower world. His nephews and his nephews' wives paid him pertinacious visits of condolence, nay one of these nieces by marriage, a good motherly creature devoted to her husband, insisted on seeing and comforting the stricken man. Heaven knows whether her tenderness did convey any comfort to that shipwrecked soul. She found him like a man who had suffered from a stroke of paralysis, torpid, almost imbecile. She took the wisest course that could possibly be taken. She said little to him upon the subject of his affliction, but visited him frequently, patiently sitting opposite to him for hours at a time, he and she talking of all manner of easy conventional topics, the state of the country, the weather, a change in the ministry, and such subjects as were so far remote from the grief of his life, that a less careful hand than Mrs. Alexander Floyd's could have scarcely touched upon the broken cords of that ruined instrument, the widower's heart. It was not until six months after Eliza's death that Mrs. Alexander ventured to utter her name, but when she did speak of her it was with no solemn hesitation, but tenderly and familiarly as if she had been accustomed to talk of the dead. She saw at once that she had done right. The time had come for the widower to feel relief in talking of the lost one, and from that hour Mrs. Alexander became a favorite with her uncle. Years after he told her that, even in the sullen torpor of his grief, he had had a dim consciousness that she pitied him, and that she was a good woman. This good woman came that very evening into the big room where the banker sat by his lonely hearth, with a baby in her arms, a pale-faced child with great wondering black eyes, which stared at the rich man in somber astonishment, a solemn-faced ugly baby which was to grow by and by into Aurora Floyd, the heroine of my story. That pale black-eyed baby became henceforth the idol of Archibald Martin Floyd, the one object in all this wide universe for which it seemed worth his while to endure life. In the day of his wife's death he had abandoned all active share in the Lombard Street business, and he had now neither occupation nor delight save in waiting upon the prattlings and humoring the caprices of this infant daughter. His love for her was a weakness almost verging upon a madness. Had his nephews been very designing men they might perhaps have entertained some vague ideas of that commission of lunacy for which the outraged neighbors were so anxious. He grudged the hired nurses their offices of love about the person of his child. He watched them furtively, fearful lest they should be harsh with her. All the ponderous doors in the great house at Felden Woods could not drown the feeblest murmur of that infant voice to those ever anxious loving ears. He watched her grow as a child watches an acorn it hopes to rear to an oak. He repeated her broken syllables till people grew weary of his babble about the child. Of course the end of all this was that in the common acceptance of the term Aurora was spoiled. We do not say a flower is spoiled because it is reared in a hot house where no breath of heaven can visit it too roughly, but then certainly the bright exotic is trimmed and pruned by the gardener's merciless hand, while Aurora shot wither she would and there was none to lop the wandering branches of that luxuriant nature. She said what she pleased, thought, spoke, acted as she pleased, learned what she pleased, and she grew into a bright impetuous being, affectionate and generous-hearted as her mother, but with some touch of native fire blended in her mold that stamped her as original. It is the common habit of ugly babies to grow into handsome women and so it was with Aurora Floyd. At seventeen she was twice as beautiful as her mother had been at nine and twenty, but with much the same irregular features lighted up by a pair of eyes that were like the stars of heaven and by two rows of peerlessly white teeth. You rarely, in looking at her face, could get beyond those eyes and teeth, for they so dazzled and blinded you that they defied you to criticize the doubtful little nose or the width of the smiling mouth. What if those masses of blue-black hair were brushed away from a forehead too low for the common standard of beauty? A phrenologist would have told you that the head was a noble one, and a sculptor would have added that it was set upon the throat of a Cleopatra. This Floyd knew very little of her poor mother's history. There was a picture in crayons hanging in the banker's sanctum sanctorum, which represented Eliza in the full flush of her beauty and prosperity. But the portrait told nothing of the history of the original and Aurora had never heard of the merchant captain, the poor Liverpool lodging, the grim aunt who kept a chandler's shop, the artificial flower making, and the provincial stage. She had never been told that her maternal grandfather's name was prodder and that her mother had played Juliet to an audience of factory hands for the moderate and sometimes uncertain stipend of fore-and-tuppence a night. The county families accepted and made much of the rich banker's heiress, but they were not slow to say that Aurora was her mother's own daughter and had the taint of the play-acting and horse-riding, the spangles and the saw-dust strong in her nature. The truth of the matter is that before Miss Floyd emerged from the nursery she evinced a very decided tendency to become what is called fast. At six years of age she rejected a doll and asked for a rocking horse. At ten she could converse fluently upon the subject of pointers, letters, foxhounds, harriers, and beagles, though she drove her governess to the verge of despair by persistently forgetting under what Roman Emperor Jerusalem was destroyed and who was legged to the Pope at the time of Catherine of Aragon's divorce. At eleven she talked unreservedly of the horses in the Lendfield stables as a pack of screws. At twelve she contributed her half-crown to a derby sweepstakes among her father's servants and triumphantly drew the winning horse, and at thirteen she rode across country with her uncle Andrew, who was a member of the Croydon Hunt. It was not without grief that the banker watched his daughter's progress in these doubtful accomplishments, but she was so beautiful, so frank and fearless, so generous, affectionate and true, that he could not bring himself to tell her that she was not all he could desire her to be. If he could have governed or directed that impetuous nature, he would have had her the most refined and elegant, the most perfect and accomplished of her sex. But he could not do this, and he was famed to thank God for her as she was and to indulge her every whim. Alexander Floyd's eldest daughter Lucy, first cousin once removed to Aurora, was that young lady's friend and confidant, and came now and then from her father's villa at Fulham to spend a month at Felden Woods. But Lucy Floyd had half a dozen brothers and sisters, and was brought up in a very different manner from the heiress. She was a fair-faced, blue-eyed, rosy-lipped, golden-haired little girl who thought Felden Woods a paradise upon earth, and Aurora more fortunate than the Princess Royal of England or Tatiana Queen of the Fairies. She was direfully afraid of her cousin's ponies and Newfoundland dogs, and had a firm conviction that sudden death held his throne within a certain radius of a horse's heels, but she loved and admired Aurora after the manner common to these weaker natures, and accepted Miss Floyd's superb patronage and protection as a thing of course. The day came when some dark but undefined cloud hovered about the narrow home circle at Felden Woods. There was a coolness between the banker and his beloved child. The young lady spent half her time on horseback, scouring the shady lanes round Beckenham, attended only by her groom, a dashing young fellow, chosen by Mr. Floyd on account of his good looks for Aurora's a special service. She dined in her own room after these long lonely rides, leaving her father to eat his solitary meal in the vast dining room, which seemed to be fully occupied when she sat in it, and desolately empty without her. The household at Felden Woods long remembered one particular June evening on which the storm burst forth between the father and daughter. Aurora had been absent from two o'clock in the afternoon until sunset, and the banker paced the long stone terrace with his watch in his hand, the figures on the dial plate barely distinguishable in the twilight, waiting for his daughter's coming home. He had sent his dinner away untouched, his newspapers lay uncut upon the table, and the household spies, we call servants, told each other how his hands had shaken so violently that he had spilled half a decanter of wine over the polished mahogany in attempting to fill his glass. The housekeeper and her satellites crept into the hall and looked through the half-glass doors at the anxious watcher on the terrace. The men in the stables talked of the row as they called this terrible breach between father and child, and when at last horses hooves were heard in the long avenue, and Miss Floyd reigned in her thoroughbred chestnut at the foot of the terrace steps, there was a lurking audience hidden here and there in the evening shadow, eager to hear and see. But there was very little to gratify these prying eyes and ears. Aurora sprang lightly to the ground before the groom could dismount to assist her, and the chestnut with heaving and foam-flexed sides was led off to the stable. Mr. Floyd watched the groom and the two horses as they disappeared through the great gates leading to the stable-yard, and then said very quietly, �You don�t use that animal well, Aurora. A six-hours ride is neither good for her nor for you. Your groom should have known better than to allow it.� He led the way into his study, telling his daughter to follow him, and they were closeted together for upward of an hour. Only the next morning Miss Floyd�s governess departed from Felden Woods, and between breakfast and luncheon the banker paid a visit to the stables and examined his daughter�s favourite chestnut mare, a beautiful filly, all bone and muscle, that had been trained for eraser. The animal had strained a sinew and walked lame. Mr. Floyd sent for his daughter�s groom and paid and dismissed him on the spot. The young fellow made no remonstrance but went quietly to his quarters, took off his livery, packed a carpet-bag, and walked away from the house without bidding good-bye to his fellow servants, who resented the affront and pronounced him a surly brute whose absence was no loss to the household. Three days after this, upon the 14th of June, 1856, Mr. Floyd and his daughter left Felden Woods for Paris, where Aurora was placed at a very expensive and exclusive Protestant finishing school kept by the Des Moises Les Spars in a stately mansion entre Cour et Jardin in the Roussin Dominique, there to complete her very imperfect education. For a year and two months Miss Floyd has been away at this Parisian finishing school. It is late in the August of 1857, and again the banker walks upon the long stone terrace in front of the narrow windows of his red brick mansion, this time waiting for Aurora's arrival from Paris. The servants have expressed considerable wonder at his not crossing the channel to Fetch's daughter, and they think the dignity of the house somewhat lowered by Miss Floyd's travelling unattended. A poor dear young thing that knows no more of this wicked world than a blessed baby, said the housekeeper, all alone among a pack of moustached Frenchmen. Archibald Martin Floyd had grown an old man in one day, that terrible and unexpected day of his wife's death. But even the grief of that bereavement had scarcely seemed to affect him so strongly as the loss of his Aurora during the fourteen months of her absence from Felden Woods. Perhaps it was that at sixty-five years of age he was less able to bear even a lesser grief, but those who watched him closely declared that he seemed as much dejected by his daughter's absence as he could well have been by her death. Even now that he paces up and down the broad terrace with the landscape stretching wide before him and melting vaguely away under that veil of crimson glory shed upon all things by the sinking sun, even now that he hourly, nay almost momentarily expects to clasp his only child in his arms, Archibald Floyd seems rather nervously anxious than joyfully expectant. He looks again and again at his watch and pauses in his walk to listen to Beckonham Church clock striking eight. His ears are preternaturally alert to every sound and give him instant warning of carriage wheels far off upon the wide high road. All the agitation and anxiety he has felt for the last week has been less than the concentrated fever of this moment. Will it pass on that carriage or stop at the lodge gates? Surely his heart could never beat so loud save by some wondrous magnetism of fatherly love and hope. The carriage stops. He hears the clanking of the gates. The crimson tinted landscape grows dim and blurred before his eyes and he knows no more till a pair of impetuous arms are twined about his neck and Aurora's face is hidden on his shoulder. It was a paltry-hired carriage which Miss Floyd arrived in and it drove away as soon as she had alighted and the small amount of luggage she brought had been handed to the eager servants. The banker led his child into the study where they had held that long conference fourteen months before. A lamp burned upon the library table and it was to this light that Archibald Floyd led his daughter. A year had changed the girl to a woman, a woman with great hollow black eyes and pale haggard cheeks. The course of study at the Parisian finishing school had evidently been too hard for the spoiled heiress. Aurora, Aurora, the old man cried piteously, how ill you look, how altered, how—she laid her hand lightly yet imperiously upon his lips. Don't speak of me, she said, I shall recover, but you, you father, you too are changed. She was as tall as her father and resting her hands upon his shoulders, she looked at him long and earnestly. As she looked the tears welled slowly up to her eyes which had been dry before and poured silently down her haggard cheeks. My father, my devoted father, she said in a broken voice, if my heart was made of adamant I think it might break when I see the change in this beloved face. The old man checked her with a nervous gesture, a gesture almost of terror. Not one word, not one word, Aurora, he said hurriedly, at least only one. That person, he is dead? He is. CHAPTER III What became of the Diamond Bracelet Aurora's aunts, uncles, and cousins were not slow to exclaim upon the change for the worse which a twelve-month in Paris had made in their young kin's woman. I fear that the demoiselle L'Espare suffered considerably in reputation among the circle-round Felden Woods for Miss Floyd's impaired good looks. She was out of spirits, too, had no appetite, slept badly, was nervous and hysterical, no longer took any interest in her dogs and horses, and was altogether an altered creature. Mrs. Alexander Floyd declared it was perfectly clear that these cruel French woman had worked poor Aurora to a shadow. The girl was not used to study, she said. She had been accustomed to exercise and open air, and no doubt pined sadly in the close atmosphere of a school room. But Aurora's was one of those impressionable natures which quickly recover from any depressing influence. Early in September Lucy Floyd came to Felden Woods and found her handsome cousin almost entirely recovered from the drudgery of the Parisian pension, but still very loath to talk much of that seminary. She answered Lucy's eager questions very curtly, said that she hated the demoiselle L'Espare and the roussin Dominique and that the very memory of Paris was disagreeable to her. Like most young ladies with black eyes and blue-black hair, Miss Floyd was a good hater, so Lucy forbore to ask for more information upon what was so evidently an unpleasant subject to her cousin. Poor Lucy had been mercilessly well educated. She spoke half a dozen languages, knew all about the natural sciences, had read Gibbon, Niebuhr and Arnold from the title page to the printer's name and looked upon the heiress as a big brilliant dunce. So she quietly set down Aurora's dislike to Paris to that young lady's distaste for tuition and thought little more about it. Any other reasons for Miss Floyd's almost shuddering horror of her Parisian associations lay far beyond Lucy's simple power of penetration. The fifteenth of September was Aurora's birthday, and Archibald Floyd determined upon this, the nineteenth anniversary of his daughter's first appearance on this mortal scene, to give an entertainment where at his country-neighbours and town acquaintances might alike behold and admire the beautiful heiress. Mrs. Alexander came to Felden Woods to superintend the preparations for this birthday ball. She drove Aurora and Lucy into town to order the supper and the band and to choose dresses and wreaths for the young ladies. The banker's heiress was sadly out of place in a milliner's showroom, but she had that rapid judgment as to colour and that perfect taste in form which bespeak the soul of an artist. And while poor, mild Lucy was giving endless trouble and tumbling innumerable boxes of flowers before she could find any headdress in harmony with her rosy cheeks and golden hair, Aurora, after one brief glance at the bright-part hairs of painted cambrick, pounced upon a crown-shaped garland of vivid scarlet berries with drooping and tangled leaves of dark shining green that looked as if they had been just plucked from a running streamlet. She watched Lucy's perplexities with a half-compassionate, half-contemptuous smile. Look at that poor child, Aunt Lizzie, she said. I know that she would like to put pink and yellow against her golden hair. Why, you silly Lucy, don't you know that yours is the beauty which really does not want adornment? A few pearls, or forget-me-not blossoms, or a crown of white lilies and a cloud of white areofane would make you look like a silphied, but I dare say you would like to wear amber satin and cabbage roses. From the milleners they drove to Mr. Gunters in Barclay Square, at which world-renowned establishment Mrs. Alexander commanded those preparations of turkeys preserved in jelly, hams cunningly embalmed in rich wines and broths, and other specimens of that sublime art of confectionery which hovers midway between sleight of hand and cookery, and in which the Barclay Square professor is without arrival. In poor Thomas Babington Macaulay's New Zealander shall come to ponder over the ruins of St. Paul's. Perhaps he will visit the remains of this humbler temple in Barclay Square and wonder at the ice-pales and jelly molds and refrigerators and stew pans, the hot plates long cold and unheated, and all the mysterious paraphernalia of the dead art. From the west end Mrs. Alexander drove to Charing Cross. She had a commission to execute at Dent's, the purchase of a watch for one of her boys who was just off to Eaton. Aurora threw herself wearily back in the carriage while her aunt and Lucy stopped at the watchmakers. It was to be observed that although Miss Floyd had recovered much of her old brilliancy and gaiety of temper, a certain gloomy shade would sometimes steal over her countenance when she was left to herself for a few minutes. A darkly reflective expression quite foreign to her face. This shadow fell upon her beauty now as she looked out of the open window, moodily watching the passers-by. Mrs. Alexander was a long time making her purchase, and Aurora had sat nearly a quarter of an hour blankly staring at the shifting figures in the crowd when a man hurrying by was attracted by her face at the carriage window and started as if at some great surprise. He passed on, however, and walked rapidly toward the horse-guards, but before he turned to the corner came to a dead stop, stood still for two or three minutes scratching the back of his head reflectively with his big bare hand, and then walked slowly back toward Mr. Dent's Emporium. He was a broad-shouldered, bull-necked, sandy-whiskered fellow, wearing a cutaway coat and a gaudy necker-chiff, and smoking a huge cigar, the rank fumes of which struggled with a very powerful odor of rum and water, recently imbibed. This gentleman standing in society was betrayed by the smooth head of a bull terrier whose round eyes peeped out of the pocket of his cutaway coat and by a blenum spaniel carried under his arm. He was the very last person among all the souls between Cockspur Street and the Statue of King Charles, who seemed likely to have anything to say to Miss Aurora Floyd. Nevertheless he walked deliberately up to the carriage and planting his elbows upon the door, nodded to her with friendly familiarity. Well, he said, without inconveniencing himself by the removal of the rank cigar, how do? After which brief salutation he relapsed into silence and rolled his great brown eyes slowly here and there, in contemplative examination of Miss Floyd and the vehicle in which she sat, even carrying his powers of observation so far as to take particular notice of a plethoric Morocco bag lying on the back seat and to inquire casually whether there was anything wallible in the old party's ridicule. But Aurora did not allow him long for this leisurely employment. For looking at him with her eyes flashing forked lightnings of womanly fury and her face crimson with indignation, she asked him in a sharp spasmodic tone whether he had anything to say to her. He had a great deal to say to her, but as he put his head in at the carriage window and made his communication, whatever it might be, in a rum and watery whisper, it reached no ears but those of Aurora herself. When he had done whispering he took a greasy leather-covered account book and a short stump of lead pencil considerably the worse for chewing from his waistcoat pocket and wrote two or three lines upon a leaf which he tore out and handed to Aurora. This is the address, he said, you won't forget to send. He shook her head and looked away from him, looked away with an irrepressible gesture of disgust and loathing. You wouldn't like to buy a spannel dog, said the man, holding the sleek curly black-and-tan animal up to the carriage window, or a French poodle what'll balance a bit of bread on his nose while you count ten, hey? You should have him a bargain, say fifteen pound the two. No. At this moment Mrs. Alexander emerged from the watchmakers just in time to catch a glimpse of the man's broad shoulders as he moved sulkily away from the carriage. Has that person been begging of you, Aurora, she asked, as they drove off? No, I once bought a dog of him and he recognized me. And wanted you to buy one today? Yes. Miss Floyd sat gloomily silent during the whole of the homeward drive, looking out of the carriage window and not daining to take any notice whatever of her aunt and cousin. I do not know whether it was in submission to that palpable superiority of force and vitality in Aurora's nature, which seemed to set her above her fellows, or simply in that inherent spirit of todyism common to the best of us. But Mrs. Alexander and her fair-haired daughter always paid mute reverence to the banker's heiress, and were silent when it pleased her, or conversed at her royal will. I verily believe that it was Aurora's eyes rather than Archibald Martin Floyd's thousands that overawed all her kinsfolk, and that if she had been a street sweeper dressed in rags and begging for half-pence people would have feared her and made way for her and baited their breath when she was angry. The trees in the long avenue of Felden Woods were hung with sparkling-colored lamps to light the guests who came to Aurora's birthday festival. The long range of windows on the ground floor was ablaze with light, the crash of the band burst every now and then above the perpetual roll of carriage-wheels and the shouted repetition of visitors' names, and peeled across the silent woods. Through the long vista of half a dozen rooms opening one into another, the waters of a fountain, sparkling with a hundred hues in the light, glittered amid the dark floral wealth of a conservatory filled with exotics. Great clusters of tropical plants were grouped in the spacious hall, festoons of flowers hung about the vapory curtains in the arched doorways, light and splendor were everywhere around, and amid all and more splendid than all, in the dark grandeur of her beauty Aurora Floyd, crowned with scarlet and robed in white, stood by her father's side. Among the guests who arrive latest at Mr. Floyd's ball are two officers from Windsor who have driven across the country in a male phaton. The elder of these two and the driver of the vehicle has been very discontented and disagreeable throughout the journey. If I'd had the remotest idea of the distance, Maldon, he said, I'd have seen you and your Kentish banker very considerably inconvenienced before I would have consented to victimize my horse for the sake of this snobbish party. But it won't be a snobbish party, answered the young man impetuously. Archibald Floyd is the best fellow in Christendom, and as for his daughter? Oh, of course, a divinity with fifty thousand pounds for her fortune, all of which will no doubt be very tightly settled upon herself if she is ever allowed to marry a penniless scapegrace like Francis Lewis Maldon of Her Majesty's Eleventh Hussars. However I don't want to stand in your way, my boy. Go in and win, and my blessing be upon your virtuous endeavors. I can imagine the young scotch woman, red hair, of course you'll call it auburn, large feet, and freckles. Aurora Floyd, red hair and freckles, the young officer laughed aloud at the stupendous joke. You'll see her in a quarter of an hour, Bulstrode, he said. Talbot Bulstrode, captain of Her Majesty's Eleventh Hussars, had consented to drive his brother officer from Windsor to Beckenham, and to array himself in his uniform, in order to adorn therewith the festival at Felden Woods, chiefly because having at two and thirty years of age run through all the wealth of life's excitements and amusements, and finding himself a penniless spendthrift in this species of coin, though well enough off for mere sordid riches, he was too tired of himself and the world to care much whither his friends and comrades led him. He was the eldest son of a wealthy Cornish baronet, whose ancestor had received his title straight from the hands of Scottish King James, when baronet sees first came into fashion, the same fortunate ancestor being near akin to a certain noble, erratic, unfortunate and injured gentleman called Walter Raleigh, and by no means too well used by the same Scottish James. Now of all the pride which ever swelled the breasts of mankind, the pride of Cornishmen is perhaps the strongest, and the Bulstrode family was one of the proudest in Cornwall. Talbot was no alien son of this haughty house, from his very babyhood he had been the proudest of mankind. This pride had been the saving power that had presided over his prosperous career. Other men might have made a downhill road of that smooth pathway which wealth and grandeur made so pleasant, but not Talbot Bulstrode. The vices and follies of the common herd were perhaps retrievable, but vice or folly in a Bulstrode would have left a blot upon a hitherto unblemished discussion never to be erased by time or tears. That pride of birth, which was utterly unalied to pride of wealth or station, had a certain noble and chivalrous side, and Talbot Bulstrode was beloved by many a parvenu whom meaner men would have insulted. In the ordinary affairs of life he was as humble as a woman or a child. It was only when honour was in question that the sleeping dragon of pride which had guarded the golden apples of his youth, purity, probity and truth awoke and bad defiance to the enemy. At two and thirty he was still a bachelor, not because he had never loved, but because he had never met with a woman whose stainless purity of soul fitted her in his eyes to become the mother of a noble race and to rear sons who should do honour to the name of Bulstrode. He looked for more than ordinary everyday virtue in the woman of his choice. He demanded those grand and queenly qualities which are rarest in woman kind. Fearless truth, a sense of honour keen as his own, loyalty of purpose, unselfishness, a soul untainted by the petty baseness of daily life, all these he sought in the being he loved, and at the first warning thrill of emotion caused by a pair of beautiful eyes he grew critical and captious about their owner, and began to look for infinitesimal stains upon the shining robe of her virginity. He would have married a beggar's daughter if she had reached his almost impossible standard. He would have rejected the descendant of a race of kings if she had fallen one decimal part of an inch below it. Women feared Talbot Bulstrode, maneuvering mothers shrank a bash from the cold light of those watchful gray eyes. Daughters to marry blushed and trembled and felt their pretty affectations, their ballroom properties, drop away from them under the quiet gaze of the young officer, till from fearing him the lovely flutterers grew to shun and dislike him, and to leave Bulstrode Castle and the Bulstrode fortune unangled for in the great matrimonial fisheries. So at two and thirty Talbot walked serenely safe amid the meshes and pitfalls of Belgravia, secure in the popular belief that Captain Bulstrode of the Eleventh Hussars was not a marrying man. This belief was perhaps strengthened by the fact that the Cornishman was by no means the elegant Ignoramus, whose sole accomplishment consists in parting his hair, waxing his moustaches, and smoking a mirsham that has been colored by his valet and who has become the accepted type of the military man in time of peace. Talbot Bulstrode was fond of scientific pursuits. He neither smoke, drank nor gambled. He had only been to the Darby once in his life and on that one occasion had walked quietly away from the stand while the great race was being run and the white faces were turned toward the fatal corner and men were sick with terror and anxiety and frenzied with the madness of suspense. He never hunted though he rode like Colonel Ashton Smith. He was a perfect swordsman and one of Mr. Angelo's pet pupils, a favourite lounger in the gallery of that simple-hearted, honourable-minded gentleman. But he had never handled a billiard cue in his life, nor had he touched a card since the days of his boyhood when he took a hand at long wist with his father and mother and the parson of the parish in the south drawing room at Bulstrode Castle. He had a peculiar aversion to all games of chance and skill, contending that it was beneath a gentleman to employ even for amusement the implements of the sharper's pitiful trade. His rooms were as neatly kept as those of a woman. Cases of mathematical instruments took the place of cigar boxes. Proof impressions of Raphael adorned the walls ordinarily covered with French prints and water-coloured sporting sketches from Ackerman's Emporium. He was familiar with every turn of expression in Descartes and Cônes-de-Lac, but would have been sorely puzzled to translate the Argotic locutions of Monsieur de Coq-père. Those who spoke of him summed him up by saying that he wasn't a bit like an officer, but there was a certain regiment of foot which he had commanded when the heights of Inckerman were won, whose ranks told another story of Captain Bolstrode. He had made an exchange into the eleventh hussars on his return from Crimea, whence, among other distinctions, he had brought a stiff leg which for a time disqualified him from dancing. It was from pure benevolence, therefore, or from that indifference to all things which is easily mistaken for unselfishness, that Talbot Bolstrode had consented to accept an invitation to the ball at Felden Woods. The banker's guests were not of that charmed circle familiar to the captain of hussars, so Talbot, after a brief introduction to his host, fell back among the crowd assembled in one of the doorways and quietly watched the dancers, not unobserved himself, however, for he was just one of those people who will not pass in a crowd. Tal and broad-chested, with a pale, whiskerless face, aquiline nose, clear, cold, gray eyes, thick moustache and black hair, worn as closely cropped as if he had lately emerged from cold bath fields or mill-bank prison, he formed a striking contrast to the yellow-whiskered young ensign who had accompanied him. Even that stiff leg which in others might have seemed a blemish added to the distinction of his appearance, and coupled with the glittering orders on the breast of his uniform, told of deeds of prowess lately done. He took very little delight in the gay assembly revolving before him to one of Charles Dalbert's waltzes. He had heard the same music before executed by the same band. The faces, though unfamiliar to him, were not new. Dark beauties in pink, fair beauties in blue, tall, dashing beauties in silks and laces and jewels and splendor, modestly downcast beauties in white crepe and rose buds. They had all been spread for him those familiar nets of gauze and aereophane, and he had escaped them all, and the name of Bulstrode might drop out of the history of Cornish gentry to find no records save upon gravestones, but it would never be tarnished by an unworthy race or dragged through the mire of a divorce court by a guilty woman. While he lounged against the pillar of a doorway, leaning on his cane and resting his lame leg and wondering lazily whether there was anything upon earth that repaid a man for the trouble of living, Ensign Maldon approached him with a woman's gloved hand lying lightly on his arm and a divinity walking by his side. A divinity, imperiously beautiful in white and scarlet, painfully dazzling to look upon, intoxicatingly brilliant to behold. Captain Bulstrode had served in India and had once tasted a horrible spirit called Bang, which made the men who drank it half mad, and he could not help fancying that the beauty of this woman was like the strength of that alcoholic preparation, barbarous, intoxicating, dangerous, and maddening. His brother officer presented him to this wonderful creature, and he found that her earthly name was Aurora Floyd and that she was the heiress of Felden Woods. Talbot Bulstrode recovered himself in a moment. This imperious creature, this Cleopatra in Crinolin, had a low forehead, a nose that deviated from the line of beauty and a wide mouth. What was she but another trap set in white and muslin and baited with artificial flowers like the rest? She was to have fifty thousand pounds for her portion, so she didn't want a rich husband, but she was a nobody, so of course she wanted position and had no doubt read up the Raleigh Bulstrode's in the sublime pages of Burke. The clear gray eyes grew cold as ever therefore as Talbot bowed to the heiress. Mr. Maldon found his partner a chair close to the pillar against which Captain Bulstrode had taken his stand, and Mrs. Alexander Floyd swooping down upon the ensign at this very moment with the dire intent of carrying him off to dance with the lady who executed more of her steps upon the toes of her partner than on the floor of the ballroom, Aurora and Talbot were left to themselves. Captain Bulstrode glanced downward at the banker's daughter. His gaze lingered upon the graceful head with its coronal of shining scarlet berries and circling smooth masses of blue-black hair. He expected to see the modest drooping of the eyelids peculiar to young ladies with long lashes, but he was disappointed, for Aurora Floyd was looking straight before her, neither at him nor at the lights nor the flowers nor the dancers, but far away into vacancy. She was so young, prosperous, admired, and beloved that it was difficult to account for the dim shadow of trouble that clouded her glorious eyes. While he was wondering what he should say to her, she lifted her eyes to his face and asked him the strangest question he had ever heard from girlish lips. Do you know if Thunderbolt won the lage, she asked? He was too much confounded to answer for a moment, and she continued rather impatiently. They must have heard by six o'clock this evening in London, but I have asked half a dozen people here to-night, and no one seems to know anything about it. Talbot's close-cropped hair seemed to lift from his head as he listened to this terrible address. Good heavens, what a horrible woman! The Hussar's vivid imagination pictured the air of all the Raleigh-Bull Strode's receiving his infantine impressions from such a mother. She would teach him to read out of the racing calendar. She would invent a royal alphabet of the turf and tell him that D stands for Darby, Old England's great race, and E stands for Epsom, a crack meeting place, et cetera. He told Miss Floyd that he had never been to Doncaster in his life, that he had never read a sporting paper, and that he knew no more of Thunderbolt than of King Keops. She looked at him rather contemptuously. Keops wasn't much, she said, but he won the Liverpool Autumn Cup in Blink Bonnie's year. Talbot-Bull Strode shuddered afresh, but a feeling of pity mingled with his horror. If I had a sister, he thought, I would get her to talk to this miserable girl and bring her to a sense of her iniquity. Aurora said no more to the captain of Hussar's, but relapsed into the old faraway gaze into vacancy, and sat twisting a bracelet round and round upon her finely modelled wrist. It was a diamond bracelet worth a couple of hundred pounds, which had been given her that day by her father. He would have invested all his fortune in Monsieur's hunt and Roscoe's cunning handiwork if Aurora had sighed for gems and gigas. Miss Floyd's glance fell upon the glittering ornament, and she looked at it long and earnestly, rather as if she were calculating the value of the stones than admiring the taste of the workmanship. While Talbot was watching her, full of wondering pity and horror, a young man hurried up to the spot where she was seated and reminded her of an engagement for the quadrille that was forming. She looked at her tablets of ivory, gold, and turquoise, and with a certain disdainful weariness rose and took his arm. Talbot followed her receding form. Taller than most among the throng, her queenly head was not soon lost sight of. A Cleopatra with a snub-nose two sizes too small for her face, and a taste for horse-flesh, said Talbot bullstrode, ruminating upon the departed divinity. She ought to carry a betting-book instead of those ivory tablets. How distraught she was all the time she sat here! I dare say she has made a book for the lage and was calculating how much she stands to lose. What will this poor old banker do with her? Put her into a mad-house, or get her elected a member of the Jockey Club? With her black eyes and fifty thousand pounds she might lead the sporting world. There has been a female pope. Why should there not be a female Napoleon of the Turf? Later, when the rustling leaves of the trees in beckoning woods were shivering in that cold gray hour which precedes the advent of the dawn, Talbot bullstrode drove his friend away from the banker's lighted mansion. He talked of Aurora Floyd during the whole of that long cross-country drive. He was merciless to her follies. He ridiculed, he abused, he sneered at and condemned her questionable taste. He bade Francis Lewis Maldon marry her at his peril and wished him the joy of such a wife. He declared that if he had such a sister he would shoot her, unless she reformed and burnt her betting-book. He worked himself up into a savage humour about the young lady's delinquencies and talked of her as if she had done him an unpardonable injury by entertaining a taste for the Turf. Till at last the poor meek young ensign plucked up a spirit and told his superior officer that Aurora Floyd was a very jolly girl and a good girl and a perfect lady, and that if she did want to know who won the léger it was no business of Captain Bullstrode's and that he, Bullstrode, needn't make such a howling about it. While the two men are getting to high words about her, Aurora is seated in her dressing room listening to Lucy Floyd's babble about the ball. There was never such a delightful party that young lady said, and did Aurora see so and so and so and so and so and so? And above all did she observe Captain Bullstrode who had served all through the Crimean War and who walked lame and was the son of Sir John Walter Raleigh Bullstrode of Bullstrode Castle near Camelford? Aurora shook her head with a weary gesture. No, she hadn't noticed any of these people. Poor Lucy's childish talk was stopped in a moment. You are tired, Aurora, dear, she said, how cruel I am to worry you. Aurora threw her arms about her cousin's neck and hid her face upon Lucy's white shoulder. I am tired, she said, very, very tired. She spoke with such an utteringly despairing weariness in her tone that her gentle cousin was alarmed by her words. You are not unhappy, dear Aurora, she asked anxiously. No, no, only tired. There, go Lucy, good night, good night. She gently pushed her cousin from the room, rejected the services of her maid and dismissed her also. Then, tired as she was, she removed the candle from the dressing table to a desk on the other side of the room and seating herself at this desk unlocked it and took from one of its inmost recesses the soiled pencil scrawl which had been given her a week before by the man who tried to sell her a dog in Coxbur Street. The diamond bracelet, Archibald Floyd's birthday gift to his daughter, lay in its nest of satin and velvet upon Aurora's dressing table. She took the Morocco case in her hand, looked for a few moments at the jewel, and then shut the lid of the little casket with a sharp metallic snap. The tears were in my father's eyes when he clasped the bracelet on my arm, she said, as she receded herself at the desk. If he could see me now. She wrapped the case in a sheet of fullscap, secured the parcel in several places with red wax and a plain seal, and directed it thus. J.C. care of Mr. Joseph Green, Belin, Doncaster. Early the next morning Miss Floyd drove her aunt and cousin into Croydon and, leaving them at a Berlin wool shop, went alone to the post office where she registered and posted this valuable parcel. CHAPTER IV. AFTER THE BALL Two days after Aurora's birth night festival, Talbot Balstrode's Phaeton dashed once more into the avenue at Felden Woods. Again the captain made a sacrifice on the Shrine of Friendship and drove Frances Maldon from Windsor to Beckinham in order that the young coronet might make those anxious inquiries about the health of the ladies of Mr. Floyd's household which, by a pleasant social fiction, are supposed to be necessary after an evening of intermittent waltzes and quadrills. The junior officer was very grateful for this kindness, for Talbot, though the best of fellows, was not much given to putting himself out of the way for the pleasure of other people. It would have been far pleasanter to the captain to dawdle away the day in his own rooms, lulling over those erudite works which his brother officers described by the generic title of heavy reading, or according to the popular belief of those harebrained young men, employed in squaring the circle in the solitude of his chamber. Talbot Balstrode was altogether an inscrutable personage to his comrades of the eleventh hussars, his black-letter folios, his polished mahogany cases of mathematical instruments, his proof-before-letters engravings, were the properties of a young oxonian rather than an officer who had fought and bled at Inckermann. The young men who breakfasted with him in his rooms trembled as they read the titles of the big books on the shelves and stared helplessly at the grim saints and angular angels in the pre-Raphaelite prints upon the walls. They dared not even propose to smoke in those sacred chambers, and were ashamed of the wet impressions of the rims of the Moselle bottles which they left upon the mahogany cases. It seemed natural to people to be afraid of Talbot Balstrode, just as little boys are frightened of a beetle, a policeman, and a schoolmaster, even before they have been told the attributes of these terrible beings. The colonel of the eleventh hussars, a portly gentleman who rode fifteen stone and wrote his name high in the peerage, was frightened of Talbot. That cold gray eye struck a silent awe in the hearts of men and women with its straight penetrating gaze that always seemed to be telling them they were found out. The colonel was afraid to tell his best stories when Talbot was at the mess table, for he had a dim consciousness that the captain was aware of the discrepancies in those brilliant anecdotes, though that officer had never implied a doubt by either look or gesture. The Irish agitant forgot to brag about his conquests among the fair sex, the younger men dropped their voices when they talked to each other of the side scenes at Her Majesty's Theatre, and the corks flew faster and the laughter grew louder when Talbot left the room. The captain knew that he was more respected than beloved, and like all proud men who repel the warm feelings of others in utter despite of themselves, he was grieved and wounded because his comrades did not become attached to him. Will anybody out of all the millions on this wide earth ever love me, he thought? No one ever has as yet, not even my father and mother. They have been proud of me, but they have never loved me. How many a young profligate has brought his parents' grey hairs with sorrow to the grave, and has been beloved with the last heartbeat of those he destroyed, as I have never been in my life. Perhaps my mother would have loved me better if I had given her more trouble, if I had scattered the name of Bull Strode all over London upon postabits and dishonored acceptances, if I had been drummed out of my regiment and had walked down to Cornwall without shoes or stockings to fall at her feet and sob out my sins and sorrows in her lap and ask her to mortgage her jointure for the payment of my debts. But I have never asked anything of her dear soul except her love and that she has been unable to give me. I suppose it is because I do not know how to ask. How often have I sat by her side at Bull Strode talking of all sorts of indifferent subjects, yet with a vague yearning at my heart to throw myself upon her breast and implore of her to love and bless her son, but held aloof by some icy barrier which I have been powerless all my life to break down? What woman has ever loved me? Not one. They have tried to marry me because I shall be Sir Talbot Bull Strode of Bull Strode Castle, but how soon they have left off angling for the prize and shrunk away from me chilled and disheartened. I shudder when I remember that I shall be three and thirty next March, and that I have never been beloved. I shall sell out now the fighting is over, for I am of no use among the fellows here, and if any good little thing would fall in love with me I would marry her and take her down to Bull Strode to my mother and father and turn country gentleman. Talbot Bull Strode made this declaration in all sincerity. He wished that some good and pure creature would fall in love with him in order that he might marry her. He wanted some spontaneous exhibition of innocent feeling which might justify him in saying, I am beloved. He felt little capacity for loving on his own side, but he thought that he would be grateful to any good woman who would regard him with disinterested affection and that he would devote his life to making her happy. It would be something to feel that if I were smashed in a railway accident or dropped out of a balloon, some one creature in this world would think it a lonelier place for the lack of me. I wonder whether my children would love me. I daresay not. I should freeze their young affections with the Latin grammar, and they would tremble as they passed the door of my study and hushed their voices into a frightened whisper when papa was within hearing. Talbot Bull Strode's ideal of woman was some gentle and feminine creature crowned with an oriole of pale auburn hair, some timid soul with downcast eyes, fringed with golden-tinted lashes, some shrinking being as pale and prim as the medieval saints in his pre-Raphaelite engravings, spotless as her own white robes, excelling in all womanly graces and accomplishments, but only exhibiting them in the narrow circle of a home. Perhaps Talbot thought that he had met with his ideal when he entered the long drawing-room at Feldenwoods with Cornet Maldon on the seventeenth of September, 1857. Lucy Floyd was standing by an open piano with her white dress and pale golden hair bathed in a flood of autumn sunlight. That sunlit figure came back to Talbot's memory long afterward after a stormy interval in which it had been blotted away and forgotten, and the long drawing-room stretched itself out like a picture before his eyes. Yes, this was his ideal, this graceful girl with the shimmering light forever playing upon her hair and the modest droop in her white eyelids, but undemonstrative as usual Captain Balstrode seated himself near the piano after the brief ceremony of greeting and contemplated Lucy with grave eyes that betrayed no special admiration. He had not taken much notice of Lucy Floyd on the night of the ball. Indeed, Lucy was scarcely a candlelight beauty. Her hair wanted the sunshine gleaming through it to light up the golden halo about her face, and the delicate pink of her cheeks waxed pale in the glare of the great chandeliers. While Captain Balstrode was watching Lucy with that grave contemplative gaze, trying to find out whether she was in any way different from other girls he had known, and whether the purity of her delicate beauty was more than skin deep, the window opposite to him was darkened and Aurora Floyd stood between him and the sunshine. The banker's daughter paused on the threshold of the open window, holding the collar of an immense mastiff in both her hands and looking irresolutely into the room. Miss Floyd hated morning collars, and she was debating within herself whether she had been seen or whether it might be possible to steal away unperceived. But the dog set up a big bark and settled the question. Quiet, Bow Wow! she said. Quiet, quiet boy! Yes, the dog was called Bow Wow! He was twelve years old, and Aurora had so christened him in her seventh year when he was a blundering, big-headed puppy that sprawled upon the table during the little girl's lessons, upset ink-bottles over her copybooks, and ate whole chapters of Pinnock's abridged histories. The gentleman rose at the sound of her voice, and Miss Floyd came into the room and sat down at a little distance from the captain and her cousin, twirling a straw hat in her hand and staring at her dog, who seated himself resolutely by her chair, knocking double knocks of good temper upon the carpet with his big tail. Though she said very little and seated herself in a careless attitude that bespoke complete indifference to her visitors, Aurora's beauty extinguished poor Lucy as the rising sun extinguishes the stars. The thick plates of her black hair made a great diadem upon her low forehead, and crowned her as an Eastern Empress, an Empress with a doubtful nose it is true, but an Empress who reigned by right divine of her eyes and hair. For do not these wonderful black eyes, which perhaps shine upon us only once in a lifetime, in themselves constitute a royalty? Talbot Bulstrode turned away from his ideal to look at this dark-haired goddess with a coarse straw hat in her hand and a big mastiff's head lying on her lap. Again he perceived that abstraction in her manner which had puzzled him upon the night of the ball. She listened to her visitors politely, and she answered them when they spoke to her, but it seemed to Talbot as if she constrained herself to attend to them by an effort. She wishes me away, I daresay, he thought, and no doubt considers me a slow party because I don't talk to her of horses and dogs. The captain resumed his conversation with Lucy. He found that she talked exactly as he had heard other young ladies talk, that she knew all they knew and had been to the places they had visited. The ground they went over was very old indeed, but Lucy traversed it with charming propriety. She is a good little thing, Talbot thought, and would make an admirable wife for a country gentleman. I wish she would fall in love with me. Lucy told him of some excursion in Switzerland where she had been during the preceding autumn with her father and mother. And your cousin, he asked, was she with you? No, Aurora was at school in Paris with the demoiselles Lespares. Lespares, Lespares, he repeated, a Protestant pension in the Faux-Bourg Saint-Germain. Why, a cousin of mine is being educated there, a Miss Trevillian. She has been there for three or four years. Do you remember Constance Trevillian at the demoiselles Lespares Miss Floyd asked Talbot addressing himself to Aurora? Constance Trevillian, yes, I remember her, answered the banker's daughter. She said nothing more and for a few moments there was rather an awkward pause. Miss Trevillian is my cousin, said the captain. Indeed. I hope that you were very good friends. Oh, yes. She bent over her dog, caressing his big head and not even looking up as she spoke of Miss Trevillian. It seemed as if the subject was utterly indifferent to her and she disdained even to affect an interest in it. Talbot Balstrode bit his lip with offended pride. I suppose this purse-proud heiress looks down upon the Trevillians of Tredethlan, he thought, because they can boast of nothing better than a few hundred acres of barren moorland, some exhausted tin mines, and a pedigree that dates from the days of King Arthur. Archibald Floyd came into the drawing-room while the officers were seated there and bade them welcome to Felden Woods. A long drive, gentlemen, said he, your horses will want a rest. Of course you will dine with us. We shall have a full moon to-night and you'll have it as light as day for your drive back. Talbot looked at Francis Lewis Maldon, who was sitting staring at Aurora with vacant open-mouthed admiration. The young officer knew that the heiress and her fifty thousand pounds were not for him, but it was scarcely the less pleasant to look at her and wish that, like Captain Bulstrode, he had been the eldest son of a rich baronet. The invitation was accepted by Mr. Maldon as cordially as it had been given, and with less than his usual stiffness of manner on the part of Talbot. The luncheon bell rang while they were talking, and the little party adjourned to the dining-room, where they found Mrs. Alexander Floyd sitting at the bottom of the table. Talbot sat next to Lucy with Mr. Maldon opposite to them, while Aurora took her place beside her father. The old man was attentive to his guests, but the shallowest observer could have scarcely failed to notice his watchfulness of Aurora. It was ever present in his care-worn face that tender, anxious glance which turned to her at every pause in the conversation and could scarcely withdraw itself from her for the common courtesies of life. If she spoke, he listened, listened as if every careless, half-destainful word concealed a deeper meaning which it was his task to discern and unravel. If she was silent he watched her still more closely, seeking perhaps to penetrate that gloomy veil which sometimes spread itself over her handsome face. Talbot Bulstrode was not so absorbed by his conversation with Lucy and Mrs. Alexander as to overlook this peculiarity in the father's manner toward his only child. He saw, too, that when Aurora addressed the banker, it was no longer with that listless indifference, half weariness, half-destain, which seemed natural to her on other occasions. The eager watchfulness of Archibald Floyd was in some measure reflected in his daughter. By fits and starts it is true, for she generally sank back into that moody abstraction which Captain Bulstrode had observed on the night of the ball. But still it was there, the same feeling as her father's, though less constant and intense, a watchful, anxious, half-sorrowful affection which could scarcely exist except under abnormal circumstances. Talbot Bulstrode was vexed to find himself wondering about this and growing every moment less and less attentive to Lucy's simple talk. What does it mean, he thought, has she fallen in love with some man whom her father has forbidden her to marry and is the old man trying to atone for his severity? That scarcely likely a woman with a head and throat like hers could scarcely fail to be ambitious, ambitious and revengeful rather than over susceptible of any tender passion. Did she lose half her fortune upon that race she talked to me about? I'll ask her presently. Perhaps they have taken away her betting-book or lame'd her favourite horse or shot some pet dog to cure him of distemper. She's a spoiled child, of course, this eras, and I dare say her father would try to get a copy of the moon made for her if she cried for that planet. After luncheon the banker took his guests into the gardens that stretched far away upon two sides of the house. The gardens which poor Eliza Floyd had helped to plan nineteen years before. Talbot Bulstrode walked rather stiffly from his Crimean wound, but Mrs. Alexander and her daughter suited their pace to his, while Aurora walked before them with her father and Mr. Maldon and with the mastiff close at her side. Your cousin is rather proud, is she not, Talbot asked Lucy after they had been talking of Aurora? Aurora, proud, oh no indeed, perhaps if she has any fault at all, for she is the dearest girl that ever lived, it is that she has not sufficient pride, I mean with regard to servants and that sort of people. She would have soon talked to one of those gardeners as to you or me, and you would see no difference in her manner except perhaps that it would be a little more cordial to them than to us. The poor people round Felden idolize her. Aurora takes after her mother, said Mrs. Alexander, she is the living image of poor Eliza Floyd. Was Mrs. Floyd a countrywoman of her husband, Talbot asked? He was wondering how Aurora came to have those great brilliant black eyes and so much of the south in her beauty. No, my uncle's wife belonged to a Lancashire family. A Lancashire family, if Talbot Raleigh Bulstrode could have known that the family name was Proder, that one member of the haughty house had employed his youth in the pleasing occupations of a cabin boy, making thick coffee and toasting greasy herrings for the machutinal meal of a surly captain and receiving more corporal correction from the sturdy toe of his master's boot than sterling copper coin of the realm. If he could have known that the great aunt of this disdainful creature walking before him in all the majesty of her beauty had once kept a chandler's shop in an obscure street in Liverpool and for ought anyone but the banker knew kept it still. But this was a knowledge which had wisely been kept even from Aurora herself, who knew little except that despite having been born with that allegorical silver spoon in her mouth, she was poorer than other girls, in as much as she was motherless. Mrs. Alexander, Lucy and the captain overtook the others upon a rustic bridge where Talbot stopped to rest. Aurora was leaning over the rough wooden balustrade, looking lazily at the water. Did your favourite win the race, Miss Floyd, he asked as he watched the effect of her profile against the sunlight. Not a very beautiful profile, certainly, but for the long black eyelashes and the radiance under them which their darkest shadows could never hide. Which favourite, she said? The horse you spoke to me about the other night, Thunderbolt, did he win? No, I am very sorry to hear it. Aurora looked up at him reddening angrily. Why so, she asked? Because I thought you were interested in his success. As Talbot said this he observed for the first time that Archibald Floyd was near enough to hear their conversation, and furthermore that he was regarding his daughter with even more than his usual watchfulness. Do not talk to me of racing, it annoys Papa, Aurora said to the captain, dropping her voice. Talbot bowed. I was right then, he thought, the turf is the skeleton. I daresay Miss Floyd has been doing her best to drag her father's name into the gazette, and yet he evidently loves her to distraction. While I... There was something so very ferrecaical in the speech that Captain Bolstero would not even finish it mentally. He was thinking, this girl who perhaps has been the cause of nights of sleepless anxiety and days of devouring care is tenderly beloved by her father. While I, who am a model to all the elder sons of England, have never been loved in my life. At half-past six the great bell at Felden Woods rang a clamorous peel that went shivering above the trees, to tell the countryside that the family were going to dress for dinner, and another peel at seven to tell the villagers round Beckinham and West Wickham that Maester Floyd and his household were going to dine. But not altogether an empty or discordant peel, for it told the hungry poor of broken victuals and rich and delicate meats to be had almost for asking in the servants' offices. Shreds of freakando and patches of dainty preparations, quarters of chickens and carcasses of pheasants, which would have gone to fatten the pigs for Christmas but for Archibald Floyd's strict commands that all should be given to those who chose to come for it. Mr. Floyd and his visitors did not leave the gardens till after the ladies had retired to dress. The dinner party was very animated, for Alexander Floyd drove down from the city to join his wife and daughter, bringing with him the noisy boy who was just going to eaten and who was passionately attached to his cousin Aurora. And whether it was owing to the influence of this young gentleman or to that fitfulness which seemed a part of her nature, Talbot Bulstrode could not discover. But certain it was that the dark cloud melted away from Miss Floyd's face, and she abandoned herself to the joyousness of the hour with a radiant grace that reminded her father of the night when Eliza Percival played Lady Teasel for the last time and took her farewell of the stage in the Little Lancashire Theatre. It needed but this change in his daughter to make Archibald Floyd thoroughly happy. Aurora's smile seemed to shed a revivifying influence upon the whole circle. The ice melted away for the sun had broken out and the winter was gone at last. Talbot Bulstrode bewildered his brain by trying to discover why it was that this woman was such a peerless and fascinating creature. Why it was that argue as he would against the fact, he was nevertheless allowing himself to be bewitched by this black-eyed siren, freely drinking of that cup of bong which she presented to him and rapidly becoming intoxicated. I could almost fall in love with my fair-haired ideal, he thought, but I cannot help admiring this extraordinary girl. She is like Mrs. Nisbet in her zenith of fame and beauty. She is like Cleopatra sailing down the Sidnus. She is like Nell Gwynne selling oranges. She is like Lola Montez giving battle to the Bavarian students. She is like Charlotte Corday with the knife in her hand, standing behind the friend of the people in his bath. She is like everything that is beautiful and strange and wicked and unwomanly and bewitching, and she is just the sort of creature that many a fool would fall in love with. He put the length of the room between himself and the Enchantress and took his seat by the grand piano at which Lucy Floyd was playing slow, harmonious symphonies of Beethoven. The drawing room at Felden Woods was so long that, seated by this piano, Captain Bollstrode seemed to look back at the merry group about the heiress as he might have looked at a scene on the stage from the back of the boxes. He almost wished for an opera-glass as he watched Aurora's graceful gestures and the play of her sparkling eyes. And then, turning to the piano, he listened to the drowsy music and contemplated Lucy's face, marvelously fair in the light of that full moon of which Archibald Floyd had spoken, the glory of which, streaming in from an open window, put out the dim wax candles on the piano. All that Aurora's beauty most lacked was richly possessed by Lucy. Delicacy of outline, perfection of feature, purity of tint, all were there, but while one face dazzled you by it shining splendor, the other impressed you only with a feeble sense of its charms, slow to come and quick to pass away. There are so many Lucy's, but so few Aurora's, and while you never could be critical with the one you were merciless in your scrutiny of the other, Talbot Bustrode was attracted to Lucy by a vague notion that she was just the good and timid creature who was destined to make him happy. But he looked at her as calmly as if she had been a statue, and was as fully aware of her defects as a sculptor who criticizes the work of a rival. But she was exactly the sort of woman to make a good wife. She had been educated to that end by a careful mother. Purity and goodness had watched over her and hemmed her in from the cradle. She had never seen unseemly sights or heard unseemly sounds. She was as ignorant as a baby of all the vices and horrors of this big world. She was ladylike, accomplished, well-informed, and if there were a great many others of precisely the same type of graceful womanhood it was certainly the highest type and the holiest and the best. Later in the evening when Captain Bustrode's Phaeton was brought round to the flight of steps in front of the great doors, the little party assembled on the terrace to see the two officers depart, and the banker told his guests how he hoped this visit to Felden would be the beginning of a lasting acquaintance. I'm going to take Aurora and my niece to Brighton for a month or so he said as he shook hands with the captain, but on our return you must let us see you as often as possible. Talbot bowed and stammered his thanks for the banker's cordiality. Aurora and her cousin, Percy Floyd, the young Aetonian, had gone down the steps and were admiring Captain Bustrode's thoroughbred bays, and the captain was not a little distracted by the picture the group made in the moonlight. He never forgot that picture. Aurora, with her cornet of plates dead black against the purple air and her silk dress shimmering in the uncertain light, the delicate head of the bay horse visible above her shoulder, and her ringed white hands caressing the animal's slender ears, while the purblind old mastiff, vaguely jealous, wind complainingly at her side. How marvelous is the sympathy which exists between some people and the brute creation. I think that horses and dogs understood every word that Aurora said to them that they worshipped her from the dim depths of their inarticulate souls and would have willingly gone to death to do her service. Talbot observed all this with an uneasy sense of bewilderment. I wonder whether these creatures are wiser than we, he thought. Do they recognize some higher attributes in this girl than we can perceive and worship their sublime presence? If this terrible woman with her unfeminine tastes and mysterious propensities were mean or cowardly or false or impure, I do not think that mastiff would love her as he does. I do not think my thoroughbreds would let her hands meddle with their bridles. The dog would snarl and the horses would bite as such animals used to do in those remote old days when they recognized witchcraft and evil spirits and were convulsed by the presence of the uncanny. I daresay this Miss Floyd is a good, generous-hearted creature, the sort of person fast men would call a glorious girl, but as well read in the racing calendar and roughs guide as other ladies in Miss Young's novels. I'm really sorry for her.