 CHAPTER V. OF ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. V. DAISY'S DIARY, SEVEN YEARS LATER. Cyril says he thinks I could write a novel. I have read so many stories, so much poetry, and I am such a fanciful creature. I hope that isn't another way of saying that I am silly and affected. One never quite knows what a university man means. They seem to have a language of their own, made up of cynicism and contempt for other people. Cyril is such a curious young man. He always seems to mean a great deal more than he says. At any rate, he has said ever so many times this summer that I ought to be able to write a novel. How I wish I could. How delightful it must be to invent people and make them alive, to live in their lives and in their adventures, to move all over the world in a beautiful daydream, not dim and confused and blurred and blotted with absurdities like the dreams of slumber but clear and vivid with a light that never was on land or sea. I only wish Cyril were right, but alas he is wrong. I have tried ever so many times. I have begun story after story and have torn up my manuscript after the second or third chapter. My heroine seemed so foolish and so feeble there was no life in her. She was like those dear dolls I loved so that never would sit up not even against the wall but always flopped over on one side or the other as if their lovely waxen heads were too heavy for their awkward sawdust bodies. She was every bit as limp. My hero was better, but I'm rather afraid he was too much like Rochester and Jane Eyre where he wasn't the very image of Guy Livingston. What men those were. Guy was nicer, he would have shown off best at a dinner party or a ball. After Rochester comes nearer one's heart. How I could have loved him after he went blind. Happy Jane to be so heroic and steadfast to go out into the cold bleak world and be nearly starved to death and then to have her own true love after all. That was something like a destiny. No, I'm afraid I shall never write a novel. There is something wanting. Invention I suppose, but I am very fond of writing so I have made up my mind to write my own life. My adventures would hardly fill a chapter, not if I began at my cradle. I never went to a hard and cruel school like Jane Eyre. I never knew what it was to be hungry except after a long walk, and then it was only a pleasant hunger tempered with the knowledge that five o'clock tea and hot buns and brown bread and butter were waiting for me at home. No, I have no vicissitudes to write about, but I can write about those I love, my impressions of people and scenery and books and animals. How big a volume I could feel upon one subject alone if I were to write about mother and all her goodness to me and the happy years I have spent with her for my chief companion. It seems only yesterday that I was a child and she used to play with me at all sorts of games just as if she were another little girl. I fancied she was enjoying herself just as much as I was. She would play at visiting and dinners even, than which I can not imagine anything more rearysome to a grown-up person. To pretend to eat a grand dinner off little wooden dishes with painted food glued on to them curious fused-colored joints and poultry and pink and green tarts and puddings, and to make conversation and pretend to think everything nice, and to ask for a second help of a wooden leg of mutton. Oh dreadfully bored she must have been, but she endured it all like a martyr. We used to play battle-door and shuttlecock on the tennis lawn for hours at a stretch. She could run faster than I till a year or two ago. She says now that those battle-door contests kept her young. Everyone says how young and girlish she looks, more like my elder sister than my mother. Indeed, strangers generally take her to be my sister. How pretty she is. Pretty is too insignificant a word. She is beautiful. I know no one was such a lovely complexion, clear and pale, with a rosy flush that lights up her face suddenly when she is animated. Her large hazel eyes are the loveliest I ever saw. They have so much light in them, and her smile is like summer sunshine. But I must begin the story of my life in those days when I was just old enough to understand all that was going on round about me and to be sorry when those I loved were sorry, and that will bring me only too soon to the saddest part of all my life, the time when my father was taken from us. Let me try and recall him vividly in this book while I am still able to remember him exactly as he was, so that when I am old and memory grows dim I may find his image here as one finds a rose in a book, dry and dead, but with its beauty and color and velvet texture still remaining. What a splendid-looking man he was. Not like Guy Livingston or like Edward Fairfax Rochester. There was nothing dark or rugged or repulsive about my dear father, and indeed, although one's heart always goes out to a rugged repulsive man in the pages of a novel, I don't know whether one would take quite so kindly to Brian de Bois Gilbert or even to Rochester in real life. My father was like David, of a pleasant countenance, ready and fair to see. I can bring his face and figure before me like a vision when I shut my eyes in the sunshine and fancy him walking across the lawn to meet me with the blue of the river behind him as I used to see him so often in the happy days before I went to Harley Street. He was tall and broad-shouldered, upright with an easy walk. He took long steps as he came across the grass, swinging his oak stick, the stick he used in his long tramps to Henley or Redding, or across the fields and woods to some out-of-the-way village. He was almost always out of doors in summer, alone or with mother, optinous with mother, walking, driving, rowing and playing tennis. He was not too old for tennis. Yes, there is the bright Frank face and the smiling blue eyes, honest English eyes. His portrait in the library and the photograph that hangs beside my bed may help to keep his features clearly in my memory, but it seems to me as if I never could have forgotten him even if there had been no picture of him in existence. It is hardly a question of memory. His face lives in my heart and mind. He was fond of me. One of my earliest recollections is of lying at the end of a punt among a heap of soft cushions while my father walked up and down with the long heavy punt pole and moved the great clumsy boat over the bright blue water, sometimes turning into a quiet back water where he would moor his boat and sit and smoke his pipe in the sunshine and talk to me in a slow, dreamy way between the puffs of tobacco or let me talk to him. Oh, how I used to chatter in my little shrill voice and what questions I used to ask him question after question and how puzzled he used to look sometimes at my everlasting why and my everlasting what, why did the sun shine or why did the river make the boat move or what were the flowers made of. Dearest father, how patient he was with me. He used to laugh off my questions. He never explained things or taught me the names of the flowers like Uncle Ambrose. Our life together was a perpetual holiday. He taught me how to fish for days and minnows out of the stem of the boat and I was very happy with him. It all seems like a dream of happiness now as I look back upon it but it is as fresh in my memory as the most vivid dream from which one has only just awakened. Sometimes these happy mornings were Sunday mornings when mother was at church. If Sunday happened to be a very warm day father would begin to yawn at breakfast time and would say he did not feel inclined for church and that he would go on the water with Daisy and then I used to clap my hands and rush off to get my son bonnet and before mother had time to make any objection we were off to the boat house to get the pole and the cushions. When the church bells began to ring from the old red brick tower we were gliding ever so far up the river on the way to our favorite backwater where father used to sit and read his Sunday papers while I worried the little happy dancing fish under the willows. Silvery darting creatures swift as light. How glad I am now that I caught so few of them. Yes, he was very good to me. He used to talk of days when I should be grown up and when he would take me to parties and balls. Your mother and I are saving ourselves up for your first season Daisy, he said. That's why we are living like hermits. Yes, he was good and I loved him dearly, but perhaps I loved Ambrose Arden almost as well, only in another way. I don't think any little girl of seven was ever so honored as to have a man of vast learning to teach her to read and write, unless it was some little princess in the days when a man like Vinalon was not thought too good to be tutored to a dauphin. Uncle Ambrose taught me from the very beginning. It was his whim and fancy to do so. He is a man of such laborious habits that he takes no account of trouble. And in all the years he has labored at my education, I can never remember one impatient word or even one impatient movement on his part. I have lost patience often. I, the learner, he, the teacher, never. I can just remember how I came to call him Uncle Ambrose. I used to call him Mr. Arden, Mr. Arden, at least for it was before I could speak plainly. One day he told me not to call him Mr. It was too formal between him and me. Call me Ambrose, he said, and then mother looked up from her work and said that would never do. A little girl could not address a man of his years and learning by his Christian name. I am not quite so elderly as I seem, he said, laughing, but if you think Ambrose too familiar, let it be an imaginary uncle and let her call me Uncle Ambrose, will that do? Yes, said mother, that will do very well. So from that time forward he was Uncle Ambrose and he is Uncle Ambrose to this day, just as kind and good and devoted as he was when I was a little girl, with bare arms, short petticoats and a son bonnet. He still occupies himself about my education, although he is a much more distinguished person than when we began the task. He has published three books since then, books of the very highest literary character, which have made him a reputation amongst the learned and the refined in England and on the continent. Reviewers have written about him in several languages. His success has been undisputed. His name is quoted with Darwin and Spencer and Max Muller. In a word he is a famous man. And yet he is content to go dredging on at the task of educating a frivolous girl like me. We are reading Zurbiz Istrade Greg together this summer, and with it we are reading Grotz Plato and a selection of the dialogues in Jawet's magnificent translation. The little Greek that I know helps me to appreciate the beauty and the grace of the English rendering. I should like to kiss the hand that wrote that noble book. How suddenly, how awfully that happy life with my father came to an end. I remember that summer morning when he left us soon after breakfast to go to London and complete the purchase of Mr. Florestan's land. We breakfasted in the garden in an open tent on the lawn and we were all so happy. Father talked of nothing but the land and the new garden which was to be laid out immediately. The ground had all been laid out already on paper. The plans were in the library on Father's writing table, drawings of terraces and ballast raids, vases and statues lightly sketched in with that beautiful touch which mixed almost any house charming before it is built. Everybody had seen the plans and had talked about them and argued and advised, and my dear father had talked them all down with his grand ideas of an Italian garden. Uncle Ambrose quoted Lord Bacon's essay on gardens. I remembered the very words a year ago when I began to read Bacon. They came back to me like the memory of a dream. I was only a child, but I used to sit and listen to everything that was said and think and wonder. Father kissed me at the gate before he got into the teacart that was to take him to the station. Thank God for that kiss. He looked back at mother and me as he drove away. He looked round at us with his beautiful smile and called out Gaeli. I shall bring the title Deeds Home for you to look at. He had asked mother to meet him at the station in the evening. She was to drive her ponies and she was to take me with her if she liked. On those long summer days I used to sit up till nine o'clock and I used to sit with mother and father while they dined. My aunt Talbot protested sometimes against what she called over indulgence and said I was being spoiled and should grow up old-fashioned. I don't know about the spoiling but perhaps I have grown up old-fashioned. I could not have been mother's companion in all those happy years if I had not been fond of many things that my cousins don't care for. We went to the station, mother and I, in good time to meet the train that was due at a few minutes before seven. We were there about a quarter of an hour before the train was due, and we walked up and down the long narrow platform in the evening sunlight talking about father and his enthusiasm about the new garden. It was my fancy in the first instance, said mother, but your father is so good to me that I have but to express a wish and he immediately makes it his own. If I were to ask for a rock's egg like the Princess Bedouin Badoul, I believe he would start off to Africa to look for one. I remember laughing at the idea of the egg. A rock's egg would be as big as all our house, mother. Wouldn't it be funny if someone sent us one? There were very few people at the station and we walked up and down and talked as merrily as if we had been in our own garden. Presently an electric bell began to ring and then a porter came out and rang a bell on the platform in front of the little waiting room and then the train slowly came in and mother and I stood looking at the faces in the carriage windows. There was seldom any delay in finding out father among the arrivals. He was always one of the first to open the door and always on the alert to see us. But on this evening we looked for him in vain. Three people got out of the train and the train went on and mother and I were left standing on the platform, disappointed and unhappy. The next train to stop at Lampert was not due until ten minutes to nine, too late for dinner, too late for the sunset on the river, a long, long time for us to wait. I must drive you home, Daisy, said my mother, and then I can come back to meet your father. I tried to persuade her to wait there and let me wait with her. The idea of home and bedtime was distasteful to me. I could see that my mother was vexed and troubled. I clung to her as she moved to leave the station. Let us wait for father, I'm not tired, I'm not hungry. Do let us wait for him and I'll go home together. It was a lovely evening. The sun was still bright, the station master's little garden was full of sweet-scented flowers, roses, clove, carnations and sweet peas. There may be a telegram at home, said my mother. Yes, I have no doubt he has sent me a telegram. That idea seemed to decide her. She put me into the carriage and drove home as fast as the ponies could go. I was a little scared at the pace we traveled along the dusty roads and lanes, but we reached home safely and then came a fresh disappointment. No telegram. I was sent to bed at half-past eight and mother went back to the station. I couldn't sleep but lay listening and waiting in the summer desk in my room next mother's dressing room. I got my good nurse room field to leave my door open and I listened for the return of the carriage. When I heard the wheels I ran out upon the landing in my nightgown and stood at the top of the stairs listening expecting to hear my father's voice directly the door was opened but I only heard my mother speaking to the butler. Your master has not come by the nine o'clock train, Simeon. There is no other train till after midnight. You will have to sit up for him and to arrange a comfortable supper. He may not have found time to dine in London. I ran downstairs in my nightgown barefooted and tried to comfort poor mother for I could tell by her voice that she was unhappy. She took me in her arms and cried over me and we went upstairs together. She scolding me a little for leaving my bedroom but not really angry. I knew that she was hardly thinking about me. I knew that she was miserable about my father. That was only the beginning of trouble. She was up all night walking about her own room or going downstairs and out into the garden and to the gate to listen for his coming. All night at intervals I heard her going up and down and the opening and shutting of the heavy hall door. The butler and one of the maids sat up all night. Mother told Simeon she felt sure his master would come home by road in the middle of the night even rather than leave her in suspense. Such a thing as his breaking an appointment with her had never happened before. It was broad daylight when I cried myself to sleep, so unhappy for mother's sake so frightened without knowing why about my father. Mother left the house early next morning to go to London with Ambrose Arden. She did not come back for three days and then my aunt Emily came with her and mother was so altered that I hardly knew her. She was dressed in black and her pale face had a stony look that made me tremble. She scarcely spoke to me or noticed me, but my aunt took me on her lap and told me that a great sorrow had come upon me. My father was dead. I would not believe it for ever so long. I had heard of people dying, but they were old people who had been ill for a long time, or weak little children, and even they had been ill for a good many days and nights before the end came. But my father was well and strong and happy when he sat in the cart waving us good-bye with his whip. My aunt saw that I did not believe or did not understand her, and she told me slowly how my father had died suddenly in London when he was on his way to a lawyer's office to buy Mr. Floristan's land. He was dead within a few hours after he drove away from our gate. I had no father now. Nothing could ever give him back to me upon this earth. If I were to spend all my life in prayers, never to rise up off my knees while I lived, my prayers would not give him to me for five minutes, would not gain me so much as the sound of his dear voice calling me from the lawn. My aunt took me to London with her that afternoon, and I think what I felt most in the midst of my sorrow was the thought that mother did not mind parting with me. She hardly looked at me. She put away my arms from her neck almost angrily when I clung to her crying and in treating her to let me stay with her. Her eyes looked over my head when she said good-bye to me at the door as if she saw something a long way off, some horrible thing that froze her blood and made her dumb. I can understand what she felt now and how in her grief she was hardly conscious of my existence and that she did not really care whether I went or stayed. I can sympathize with her now. She has told me how she hardly missed me in those days of agony, only awaking sometimes as if out of a dream to wonder that my place was empty. We had been so much together, I running after her everywhere like a lap dog, she never tired of me or impatient with me, and yet in that overwhelming sorrow she almost forgot that she had a daughter. She has owned as much to me, and I have never felt wounded or angry that it should have been so with her since I have been able to understand the nature of such a grief as hers. But at the time I was heartbroken by her coldness. Aunt Emily took me to London and gave me over to the nurses and governesses in her house in Harley Street. It is a very large house, the largest in the street I believe, and it was built for a rich nobleman when Harley Street was new and there was nothing but fields and country villages to the north, no Regent's Park, no squares and terraces, and never-ending streets as there are now. It is a fine old house with paneled walls and decorated ceilings and large rooms at the back, but it seemed, oh, such a dreary house to me after our garden by the river and our bright gay rooms. Father is dead and mother doesn't love me any more. I said to myself, again and again, as I sobbed myself to sleep in the strange bedroom, where the very curtains of the bed were an agony to me because of their strangeness. I had never been parted from my mother before. Wherever she and my father went they had taken me with them. My cousins are all older than I and they had to work very hard under a French and German governess. Fraulein taught them music and painting and Mademoiselle taught them French, attended to their wardrobes with a useful maid under her, superintended their calisthenic exercises and dancing lessons and was responsible for their figures. I cannot help putting that phrase in my book for I heard my aunt use it very often. Her great desire was that her daughters should be accomplished and elegant in all their attitudes and movements. I expect them to be statuesque and repose and graceful in motion, she said, and it gave her almost a nervous attack when she saw Clementina sitting with her toes turned in or her feet and ankles twisted into a knot under her chair. There is no malice in saying that Aunt Emily's idea of education was the very opposite to that of Uncle Ambrose. He taught and trained me to be happy in solitude as he is, to be good company for myself and to find new interests every day in books. Aunt Emily wished her daughters to shine in society, to talk French and German and to play and sing better than any other girls in her circle and above all to make the very most of their personal advantages. She is very candid in the expression of her ideas and makes no secret of her views upon education so there is no harm in my recording them in this journal which nobody is ever to read so I might be as malevolent as I like without injuring anybody. Mother says I am very uncharitable sometimes in my ideas and judgments and that a large hearted charity is a virtue of age rather than of youth. I know that I am quick to see the weak points in the characters of my friends and acquaintances and I dare say I am just as blind to my own defects. It is a lucky thing for Aunt Emily that her five daughters are all good-looking and two of them decidedly handsome. A plain daughter would have been an actual affliction to her. While the ugliness of the family has concentrated itself in her only son, my cousin Horace, a very plain boy, but fortunately he is scientific and promises to be a shining light in the medical profession at least that is what his father and mother say of him. He has made a profound study of sanitation and he can hardly talk to anyone five minutes without mentioning sewer gas. He is always altering the lighting with the drainage or the ventilation in Harley Street and his father complains that his experiments double the rent. Horace was 18 when my father died and while I was at Westgate with my cousins and the two governesses he used to come down on a Saturday and stop till Monday and I must own to my diary which is a kind of lion's mouth into which I can drop any accusations I like that he gave himself great heirs to his sisters and the governesses and was altogether very disagreeable. Those summers at Westgate were the unhappiest period of my life. I look back at them now I am grown up and wonder that I ever lived through them. My cousins were kind to me in a condescending way as was natural from big girls to a little girl and the governesses were very sorry for me and tried to comfort me but there was no comfort for me on the face of the earth without my mother and night after night I dreamt of my dead father and awoke to the agony of knowing that I should never see his beloved face or hear his dear voice again except in my dreams. I think grown up people forget how keenly they grieved and suffered when they were children and that they never quite understand a child's grief. I know that when either of the governesses tried to console me she always made me just a little more miserable than I was before she took me on her lap and talked to me about heaven and my father. I heard by accident as I was not intended to hear it that my mother was very ill, dangerously ill and I was so unhappy about her that after and treating again and again with passionate tears to be taken to her I made up my mind to walk to London and from London to Riverlon. I had looked at the map of England sometimes when my cousins had their atlases out and I knew that to reach Lampford I must go through London. I lay awake all night thinking of how I was to get away when the governesses and the maids were engaged and when I might creep out of the house without being seen. I believe I should really have started on this journey but for the arrival of my uncle Ambrose who came upon me suddenly on the day after I had heard of my mother's illness and who found me sitting crying alone on the sands. His was the first voice that brought me comfort. It was upon his breast that I sobbed out my grief until the burden seemed lightened somehow. He told me that my mother was out of danger now and that she would soon get well or at least well enough for me to go home and be with her again and he said I must try and be a comfort and a consolation to her in the days to come. I told him I was afraid my mother had left off loving me since father's death. She had not seemed to mind my going away while I was heart broken at leaving her and then he tried to make me understand how in a grief like my mother's all things seem blotted out except that one overwhelming loss. He told me that a dark curtain had fallen over my mother's mind and that I should find her changed from the happy woman I had known in the happy days that were gone. But the curtain will be lifted by and by Daisy, he said, and he will see your mother's joyous nature return to her. No grief lasts forever. A year is a long time even for a great sorrow and in a year your mother will begin to forget. He meant this for consolation but my tears broke out afresh at the thought that my father would be forgotten. I shall never forget him, I said. No my darling he will live in your memory and your mother's but your memory of him will be sad and sweet instead of bitter and cruel. He will have taken his natural place in the past and his shadow will not darken the present as it does now. Let me go home soon, I said clinging to him when he was leaving Westgate later in the afternoon. Pray, pray, pray, let it be soon. As soon as ever your mother is well enough to see you, darling, he promised. I had always been fond of him. He had always had the next place in my heart after my mother and father but he seemed nearer to me than ever after that day and he has never lost the place that he took then or the influence that he had over me then in my desolation. I spent three more weary weeks at Westgate after this. Aunt Talbot was with a fashionable party in the Highlands. Uncle Talbot was part of his time in Harley's Tweet and part of his time rushing about England and Scotland by express trains to see his most distinguished patients. I used to hear my cousins talk of the places he went to and the people he went to see, great people, all of them. He had the life and sanity of cabinet ministers and bishops in his special custody and he made them obey his most severe orders in fear and trembling. I used to sit and listen idly in my wretched low-spirited state while my cousins and the governesses chattered about aunt's gowns and uncle's patients and I remembered as children remember things in which they take no interest. At last the happy day came for my going home and here came Uncle Ambrose to fetch me. How good it is of you to come so far, I told him. You must have other things to do besides coming to fetch me. There is no other thing in this world that comes before my duty to my little pupil and her mother, he answered in his low sympathetic voice. We went off to the station in an open fly together. I'm sure my lively cousins must have been very glad to get rid of a crying child that used to mope in corners and sit at meals with a melancholy face, but they couldn't be gladder to part with me than I was to go away. I had tried to take interest in their lessons when the German governess urged me to employ my mind, but their lessons seemed so dull and difficult compared with Uncle Ambrose's way of teaching me. The frow line was always grinding at grammar, while except so far as learning my French verbs I hardly knew what grammar meant, but without vanity it is only fair to Uncle Ambrose to say that at ten years old I knew a great deal more about the history of the world and the people who had lived in it than my cousin Dora who was eighteen. And even in those days I knew something about the great poets of the world of whom Dora and her sisters knew nothing, for Uncle Ambrose had told me all about Dante and his wonderful history of Hell and Heaven, and about Goethe and his Faust, and he had Red Milton's story of Adam and Eve and the fallen angel who tempted them, and Shakespeare's tempest, and as you like it, and Midsummer's Night's Dream allowed to me to familiarize my ear and my mind with poetry while I was still a child, he said. I had to thank his kindness for all I knew, and for being a better companion to my mother than I could have been if I had had a frow line and a mademoiselle to teach me. When we were sitting in the railway carriage and the sun was shining full upon Uncle Ambrose's face I noticed for the first time that there was a great change in him since the summer. I had been too excited and busy to take notice of it before, but I saw now that he had grown thin and paler and that he looked older and very ill. I put my arms around him and kissed him as I used to do in the dear old days. For Uncle Ambrose, I said, how sorry you must have been. I love you better than ever dear because you are so sorry for us. His head was leaning forward on his breast and he gave one great sob. That was his only answer. How distinctly I remember that journey through the clear September light by great yellow cornfields and the blue bright sea and then hop gardens and orchards full of fruit and then houses and houses and houses and then at last the air grew dull and thick and the sun seemed dead and this was London. Uncle Ambrose was silent and thoughtful all through the journey which seemed so long, oh so long as if it would never come to an end and bring me to mother and home. I have been to the Highlands since then and to the Riviera but those journeys were with mother and they did not seem have so long as the journey from Westgate to London and across London to Paddington and from Paddington to the little station at Lamford where we waited for father that evening, for father who was never, never, never coming home to us again. At the sight of the station and the station master's garden which was all of a blaze with dahlias and hollyhocks now where the sweet peas had been blooming I burst into tears. They were the first I had shed since I left Westgate but the sight of the garden brought back the memory of that evening when I walked up and down with mother and when we were both so gay and happy talking of father and of what he would say and how he would look when we saw his face at the carriage window. I have but to shut my eyes even now after seven years have changed me from a child to almost a woman and I can see the station lying all among the meadows by the riverside and I can see my father's face as I expected to see it smiling at us as the train came in. Dear, well remembered face which I was never to see again upon this earth. There was a carriage at the station to take us home but mother wasn't in the carriage. When he saw my disappointment Uncle Ambrose told me that she was still an invalid and had not gone beyond the garden since her illness. You will have to comfort and cheer her with your loving little ways Daisy, he said, but you will have to be very quiet and gentle. It is not long since she could hardly bear the sound of anyone's voice. You will find her sadly changed. More changed than you are, I asked. Much more. Think how much more trouble she has gone through than I have had to bear. But you look as if you couldn't have been more sorry, I said, for indeed I had never seen such sadness in any face as I had seen in his that day. Mother was lying on a sofa by the drawing-room fire, the evenings were beginning to be chilly and she was an invalid, wrapped in a large white china-crape shawl one of father's gifts which I remembered ever since I could remember anything. There was a middle-aged woman in the room neatly dressed in black with a white cap and apron whom I afterwards knew as one of mother's nurses. She had had two nurses all through her illness, one for the day and the other for night, for there had been one dreadful time when it was thought that she might try to kill herself if she were left alone. Yes, she was changed, more changed than Uncle Ambrose. She was wasted to a shadow and there was no color in her face. Even her lips were white. Her beautiful hair, which father had been so proud of, had all been cut off, and she wore a little lace cap which covered her close-cropped head and was tight under her chin. Her poor hands were almost transparent. She gathered me up in her arms and she kissed and cried over me and I thought even then that it did her good to have her little daughter back again. She told me years afterwards that those tears were the first that had brought any sense of relief with them. She lifted me into a corner of her sofa, weak as she was, and she kept me there till my bedtime. She had my supper laid upon a little table by the sofa and she fed me and cared for me with her own feeble hands in spite of all the nurse could say and from that night I was with her always. You don't know what it is to me to have my little girl again, she said to the nurse. You don't know what it is to feel this frozen heart beginning to melt and to know that there is something left in this world that I can love. She said almost the same words to Uncle Ambrose next day when he came over to River Lawn soon after breakfast to give me my morning lessons and I thought he looked more and more sorry as he stood listening to her with his hand upon the little pile of books which he had brought over from the cottage. He answered Mother with a smile a minute afterwards. Yes, it is a blessed thing to know we can love and be beloved, he said. Mother told me afterwards that there was a reason for his sympathizing with her in her sorrow more than any other friend. He too had lost his nearest and dearest, his good and devoted young wife after a brief illness almost as suddenly as her loss had come upon her. He too was alone in the world but for an only child his son, of whom he was doubtless very fond. But mother added there were times when she fancied that he was fonder of me than of his own son. Our lives went on very quietly after that day and from that day I was my mother's only companion. We have never been parted since my desolate days at Westgate and we have lived almost out of the world. Mother says that next year when I shall be 18 she will have to go into society for my sake and that she will not be able always to go on refusing invitations to garden and tennis parties all along the river banks from Marlowe to Redding. It will be only right for me to see a little more of the world, Mother says, and to mix with girls of my own age. I suppose I shall like it when the time comes but I have no longing for parties or dances or fine clothes and my cousins in Harley Street say I am the oddest girl they ever met with but that it is no wonder I am odd considering the eccentric manner in which I have been educated. I have been so happy, so happy with Mother in all these years, so fond of our pretty house, which grows prettier every year under Mother's care and our gardens, which are looked upon as model gardens by all the neighborhood. People come and ask to see them as a great favor, which is rather hard upon Mother in me who loves seclusion. For seven years Uncle Ambrose has gone steadily on with my education, never missing a day except when some slight illness has made either him or me unfit for work. As punctually as the clock strikes ten he appears at the little garden gate nearest his cottage. If the weather is warm we sit in the summer house or under the great willow which grows and grows and grows as if it were a magic tree. If it is not summery enough for sitting out of doors we work in the morning room upstairs. Yes, we have been happy together, Mother and I, but we have never forgotten Father. We never have come to think less of our great loss. Sadest thoughts have mixed with our happiest hours. We never have forgotten Him. We never can forget Him. Many women as beautiful and as young looking as my mother would have married again within two or three years of a first husband's death, but she has never given a thought to any other man than Him, and she never will. Once I ventured to ask her if Father was her first love, if she had never cared ever so little for any other lover, and she told me that he was the first who had ever spoken to her of love. She was only eighteen when she married, she was only nineteen when I was born. She and my father fell in love with each other at first sight, like a prince and princess in a fairytale. CHAPTER VI I sometimes think Mother hardly makes enough of Uncle Ambrose or of his goodness to me. I know she is grateful to him and proud of my progress, which is all his work. But now and then it seems to me that she keeps him too much at a distance instead of treating him as if he were her brother and really my uncle. She very seldom comes into the morning room while I am at my studies there, and there are many days when he leaves the house at one o'clock without having seen her. Once in a way she asks him to stop to lunch, and when she does I can see his pale, fair face light up suddenly with a flush of pleasure, and he is full of life and talk at luncheon, he who is generally so calm and placid like deep water. And after lunch he lingers and lingers in the garden or in the drawing room till Mother is obliged to ask him to stay to tea, and after tea he goes away slowly and reluctantly, lingering to the very last, and lingering at the gate if it is fine weather, and Mother and I go out with him to say good-bye. He is so fond of us both. It is the little gate in the fence near his cottage at which we say good-bye to Uncle Ambrose, not the gate by which Father went out that summer morning, never to come back to us again. That which was brought back nearly a week afterwards was not my father. That which lies under the grave that Mother and I keep bright with flowers is not my father. We know that he is living still, somewhere. Living or waiting in a placid sleep for the awakening to the new life. We know not how, we know not where, but we believe that he is living still, and that we shall see him again. As I grow older and my education goes on and absorbs more of my master's valuable time, I wonder all the more at the sacrifice which he makes and has been making so long for my sake. When I think that he is a man whose books are valued and praised by the greatest thinkers of his age, a man who might win distinction in almost any walk of literature, I am amazed at his willingness to waste so great a part of his life upon my insignificance. It is all the more wonderful perhaps because, although when he came to live at Lamford he was a poor man, he is now a very rich man, a distant relation having died in America some years ago and left him a large fortune. I hardly know when the change in his circumstances arose, he himself made so light of the matter. It was Cyril who told me one day that his father was rich. Did you ever know such a man as my father? he said, to go on living in that ugly old cottage when he might have had a house in Park Lane and a country seat into the bargain if he liked. I asked if Uncle Ambrose was really very rich. Really and really and really I believe? answered Cyril, though he has never condescended to enter into particulars with me, but a Yankee fellow at Oxford told me all about the man who left father his fortune and it was a big-ish pile. That's the Yankee's expression, mind you, not mine. Cyril is at Christchurch, Oxford. He spent his last long vacation in Sweden and Norway. He has promised me that he will spend the next long or at any rate the earlier part of his time at Lamford and that he will take me about in his boat and that I shall help him with his classics. I'm afraid this is only idle compliment to me, but Uncle Ambrose says I really might be of some use to Cyril in reading Horace and Virgil with him and that I know both those poets better than many undergraduates. If I do I have to thank Uncle Ambrose for my knowledge and most of all for teaching me to love Latin poetry instead of to hate Latin grammar. Cyril is sometimes just a little inclined to find fault with his father for living in a small ugly house to which he came in his poverty, but he has a very liberal allowance, can go where he likes for his vacations, and is never denied anything by the most indulgent of fathers, he feels that he has no right to complain. I am so afraid that other fellows will take it into their heads that my father is a miser, he said one day, when they find out that I have no home to which I can invite them, and that my father mopes away his life in a cottage by the Thames, and the worst part of the business is that most fellows in the university know every yard of ground between Henley and Oxford and must know Lamford. I told him that a man could not be said to mope away his life when he has written two books which had been read and praised all over the civilized world. Well, no doubt with some men the books account for something, and they put my father down as an eccentric scholar living his own retired life for his own pleasure. But you see, there are more fools than sensible people in the world, and the fools must think my father is too fond of money to spend it like a gentleman. I dare say they fancy that his wealth came to him too late in life, and that poverty's benurious habits had got burned into his very nature. What does it matter what mistakes people of that kind make about your father? I said. We know that he is a gentleman in every act and thought of his life, and that if he does not spend money upon things that please other people, it is only because he cares for higher things which don't cost money or make a great show. You are right there, Daisy," answered Cyril, and there are some things he cares for which don't make a show and do cost money, his books, for instance. There are two or three thousand pounds sunk in his library, rare books, old books, new books, oriental books, lining the walls of every room in the cottage. Upon my word now I can scarcely take my bath of a morning without splashing a tall copy of the father's, and yet I can't get him to make up his mind to build a house to hold his treasures. Perhaps when the last inch of wall space is filled he will begin to think about the change of quarters. Cyril is not like his father. He takes after his mother's family, I am told. He has not his father's fair skin and blue eyes or his father's pale and silky hair or his father's high and thoughtful brow. His eyes are dark gray, his hair is dark brown, his features are smaller and sharper than his father's. A keen, clever face I have heard people call it, not the face of a thinker and a dreamer like Uncle Ambrose. Some call Cyril handsome and some do not. He has a very kind and bright expression and is always very good to me. He is tall and straight and tremendously active, a first rate oarsman and I am told a good shot. He is very fond of Radnarsher and his mother's people and I think he likes mother and me though we do not see him very often. He laughs at my education and says that father would have made me a blue stalking if nature had not insisted upon making me something else. I wonder what that something else is. Father's grave is in the churchyard at the other end of the village. Such a pretty picturesque sleeping place for the beloved dead. There is one corner of the churchyard which is separated from the river only by a strip of wasteland covered with rushes and by a low stone wall clothed with mosses and lichens, gray and gold and green, a dear old wall with fine small-leaved ivy creeping over it here and there and with fairy-like spleenwort growing out of the interstices of the stone. Just in the angle of the wall nearest the river lies my father's grave under the shadow of a great willow like my tree on the lawn. It was because of that tree my mother chose the spot. Father had always talked of the big weeping willow as Daisy's tree and mother knew that he was fond of it for his little daughter's sake. So he lies under Daisy's tree and his only monument is a low red granite cross with his name and the date of his birth and death. No text, no verse, nothing to say how much he was beloved, only a blank space for mother's name when she is laid beside him. All the rest is garden. Mother thinks the garden tells best of our love for him who lies there because it is a changeful living thing and not dead and immutable like letters carved in marble. Mother and I do all the work of this little garden with our own hands. No one else is allowed to touch it and the flowers change with every change of the seasons from Christmas roses to the pure whiteness of the chrysanthemums in the late autumn and our garden is always lovely and full of freshness and perfume. Fair weather or foul one of us goes there every day. We never miss a day while we are at Lamford. When we are away the garden is left to itself and when we come back we have to make up for an interval of neglect. We had rather there should be neglect and decay for a little while than that hireling hands should cultivate father's garden. That corner by the river is very lonely, the most remote from the church and the vicarage and the path by which people go to church. I have sat there for hours and no one has ever come near me though I have heard the boats going by and people talking as they rode past the little rushy waste outside the wall. Nobody can see me from the river when I am sitting there for father's tree makes a great green tent just as my tree does on the lawn at home. Sometimes I hold the soft drooping greenery apart and peep out at the boats going by in the sunlight while I sit in cool shadow. Many and many an afternoon have I spent here with my books and my scotch deerhound Roderick do, more solitary, more secure from interruption than if I had been at home where any one of the few friends with whom we are intimate might drop in upon me. In the churchyard I have my life all to myself, to read or to think and I prophesy that a great deal of this diary will be scribbled on the grassy bank under the low wall by my father's grave. There is a little hollow nook all among the ivy and bramble and fern which is my own particular seat and I can study there better than anywhere else. One day Beatrice Reardon came and found me out in my nook, came sailing up to me in her bouncing noisy way flourishing her racket. So I found you at last, Dee, she said. She is one of those girls who can never call anything by its right name and she frequently calls me Dee. Simeon told me you were out for the whole afternoon but I thought I should unearth you. Come and make up a set. Now you have found me perhaps you'll be kind enough to lose me again, I answered. I should have thought that even you would understand that when I come to sit by my father's grave I like to be alone and I don't like tennis rackets. I don't often lose my temper but I do think Beatrice Reardon, though no doubt she means well, is a girl who would have exasperated Job. There are times when I feel that a continuance of Beatrice's society would be worse than Boyle's. You're a morbid, disagreeable little Dee, she said, and you'll find out you're mistaken before you're thirty, for by that time your moping solitary cross-grained ways will make you look forty and then you'll be sorry. She marched off with her racket on her shoulders singing, Gather your roses while ye may, in her loud mezzo-soprano voice, the voice of Lamford and two villages beyond, and I'm happy to say she never invaded my peaceful corner again. Here I read the sixth book of the Ineid, and here I read Dante, until I felt as if I were more familiar with the world of shadows than the world of realities. Here I learned those oaths which Uncle Ambrose chose for me, my little Horace, and my favorite bits from the Georgies, and my favorite eclogues. Here I read Milton and Shakespeare. The spot is full of lovely images and haunting fancies. We have very few friends, though mother is obliged to be civil to a good many acquaintances scattered about the Happy River between Henley Bridge and Cavishamweir. She visits very little, only in the quietest way at the houses of her oldest friends, the people she knew best in my father's time. The only families of whom we see much are the rectors and the doctors, for mother's charities bring her in contact with both, and as there are girls in both families I have been invited very often to play tennis or to join in water picnics or any other homely festivities. I have never gone to parties at either house since I was a child, and the girls laugh at me for my solitary bringing up. But mother and I have been too happy in our own quiet way for me to think that I lose much in staying away from the birthday dances and hobbled ahoy parties out of doors and in. Not a hundred miles from Lamford, there is a big red house by the river called Temple Mead, which once belonged to a noble family and which is now occupied by Mr. Copeland who coaches young men for the army. Some of the young men are the sons of noble families and many of them are rich and I'm afraid I must say that most of them behave badly. The rector says animal spirits, I say bad manners. The rector says that as I have never had a brother I don't understand young men's ways and certainly judging by Cyril's account of the goings-on at Christ Church young men must be extraordinary creatures with the oddest ideas of pleasure. Cyril says that if Mr. Reardon had not three daughters to marry he would not be quite so charitable in his opinion of Mr. Copeland's young men. But I don't think our dear old rector is a contriving sort of person and I don't think one ought to be too hard upon Mrs. Reardon for giving so many tennis parties and Cinderella dances and blind man's buff parties and water picnics for three daughters to marry must mean hard work for any mother. Mrs. Tyso the doctor's wife has two sons and only one daughter so there is not nearly so much excuse for her and I must say she does make rather too much of those unmanually hobbled ahoyes from Temple Mead nor can I conceal from my dear diary that Laura Tyso's conversation would be more entertaining if it were not all about Mr. Copeland's young men. I am afraid my diary is going to develop all the worst propensities in my nature. Above all the propensity for thinking too much of myself and looking down upon other people. A diary is such a safe confidant and it is such a comfort to know one can say just what one likes without any fear of having one silly babble babbled about and made sillier by one's dearest friend. So dear diary I mean to scribble just what I like in your nice smooth white pages and when my foolishness has all run off in pen and ink I have only to turn the key in your neat little brass lever lock and my secrets are as safe as if they were shut up in the heart of the biggest pyramid. Seven. She answered, stay. Seven years. Robert Hatrell had been lying in his grave seven years and a day and Ambrose Arden was slowly pacing the river Terrace which the dead man planned in the pride of his heart while his murderer was lying and wait for him somewhere in the big city yonder far away to the east where the bright blue sky changed to a dull and heavy gray. Ambrose Arden and Clara Hatrell were walking side by side upon the broad gravel terrace between the two rows of cypresses. She with a slow and listless step. He suited his pace to hers but by no means listless intent rather watching every change in the pensive face every shade upon the fair forehead. Seven years and a day had he been lying in his grave seven years and seven days had gone by since he was found stark and cold in a two pair back bedroom in a shabby lodging house near St. Giles Church a wonder and a mystery to all England. For seven years his widow had mourned him missing him and regretting him every day of her life albeit calmly content in her quiet lot with the daughter she adored rooting over the tragedy of his death rooting over the cruel destiny which had sundered so perfect a union. Her sorrow was in no wise diminished by the years that had come and gone her memory of the beloved dead was no less vivid than it was before the first flowers had bloomed upon his grave. He was still in her mind the one loved and lovable of men her first and her only lover. Time had brought calmness and resignation but time had not weakened love. Ambrose Arden walking by her side in the sultry stillness of the July afternoon knew her heart almost as well as she knew it herself. Seven years had made little alteration externally in Robert Hattrell's widow or in Robert Hattrell's friend. At six and thirty Clara Hattrell was still a beautiful woman so much the lovelier perhaps in her calm maturity for the seclusion and repose of her widowhood. The cares and excitements of the woman of society had not written premature wrinkles on the broad white brow. The disappointments and vexations of the fashionable world had not drawn down the corners of the mobile mouth or pinched the perfect oval of the cheek. Ambrose Arden was exactly the man he had been seven years before fair complexion dreamy-eyed with the scholars bent shoulders and with the scholars measured accents. A remarkable looking man always and a fine looking man in spite of those stooping shoulders and the slow meditative walk. A man to attract the admiration and the love of women as being different from his fellow men and with something of that power which women call magnetic in his thoughtful eyes. So blue, so clear, with the color and transparent of childhood yet with such an unfathomable depth of thought. Seven years and in all that length of months and weeks and days he had been this woman's slave and she knew it not. Day and night waking or sleeping near or far he had adored her and she knew it not. Seven years since her husband's death and how many years before. Only since the hour he first looked upon her when it had been to him as if the heart within him a strong and passionate heart whose forces he had never known till that moment leaped suddenly into life and linked his fate with hers forever. He had married a fair young wife and he had been a good and tender husband. He had truly and tenderly mourned the early dead. But till he met Clara Hatrell he knew not what passion meant. He knew not and could never hope to know what it was that made this woman different from all other women upon earth, the one supreme mistress of his life, whom to serve was destiny, whom to love was a necessity of his being. And so for seven years and more before her husband's death and for seven years after he had been her idolater and slave. She nothing knowing excepting his quiet attentions as calmly as she took a basket of hothouse flowers from her gardener, asking no questions of her own heart or of his, thinking of him only as the nameable eccentric who lived at her gates because it was his fancy so to live, who gave one third of his life to the tuition of her child because it was his whim so to waste himself. Her kindnesses to him had been of the slightest, for in her widowed loneliness it had behoved her to keep even so old a friend somewhat aloof lest the little world of Lamford should begin to have ideas and speculations about her and her daughter's teacher. She had kept her life completely apart from the life of pupil and master and had on rarest occasions offered hospitality to the man to whom she owed so much. To his son she had been more frankly kind, treating him almost as a son of the house and letting him feel that he was always welcome. Even to Cyril's college friends her house had been open and he had in no way stretched his privileges, though there were occasions upon which he was glad to take a boating friend to River Lawn rather than to his own cottage home with its shabby furniture and atmosphere of over much learning. Thus had he worshipped her faithfully and silently for fourteen years just the length of Jacob's servitude for Rachel and she was still a far off called as marble unresponsive unconscious of his love. It was a hard thing to have been so patient and to have waited so long and to be no nearer the goal to feel the golden years of manhood slipping away like those faded lilies yonder drifting with the current flowers which some careless hand had plucked and flung away. It was hard. It was more difficult to be patient now when he felt the glory and strength of life beginning to wane. Was he to be an old man before he dared ask for his girdon? He who had done so much to win his beloved, who had sacrificed for her sake all that other men care for. Today his heart was throbbing with the new vehemence and there was a fire in his thoughts that must needs burst into a blaze before long. Everything in life has its limits, even the patience of a man who loves as Ambrose Arden loved. Daisy grows prettier and more womanly every day, he said after a contemplative silence of some minutes. You must not waste her life as you have wasted your own since your bereavement. I conclude that you intend to go into society next season if only for her sake. I have been thinking about it, Clara answered quietly, and I suppose it must be so. Poor child, she has seen very little of the world, but we have been so happy together, so completely united, that I do not think my Daisy will ever regret her solitary girlhood. However, everything must come to an end with a faint sigh. So I have asked my sister Emily to look out for a furnished house at the west end in Wilton Crescent or somewhere about there, and if she can find one that Daisy and I like I shall take it next January. You must come and see us in our new home, she added, smiling at him with her calm and friendly smile. I should seem like a fish out of water among smart people. You might feel bored by their frivolity, but the smart people would be very glad to know you. They must all have heard of your books. Heard of them, yes, read them, no. I fancy there are not many smart people who care for the makers of books. Only the intellectual few, the stars of the smart world, who have found time to cultivate their minds as well as to shine in society. Cyril will come to us often, I hope, she said cordially. I shall have to give parties and I must have a day for callers. It will all be very dreadful. This time her sigh was deep and long. Why dreadful, he asked. You who are still young, still beautiful, and rich enough to indulge your caprices are not a woman to shrink from society. Am I not? Oh, Mr. Arden, how can you be so short-sighted? Do you think it would be no ordeal to me to face strangers? Do you forget that I am the widow of a man who was cruelly and mysteriously murdered and whose murder set all England talking and wondering? I shrink with horror from the thought of going into society, knowing that people will whisper about me and point me out to each other in every room I enter. But that isn't the worst. Daisy will hear. Daisy will be told the dreadful history we have kept hidden from her. Here people are kind and considerate and they have respected her feelings, but in London it will be different. True, she cannot be so fenced round and protected in society as she has been among your few intimate friends here, answered Arden thoughtfully, but seven years are a long time. Dynasties are forgotten within a lesser period. Look at France, for instance, and see how little traces left of a fallen empire and a suicidal war. To pass. To last. To cast. That tragedy which made so deep a mark in your life is forgotten by the world at large. I do not think you need fear any annoyance either for yourself or Daisy. But there is one way by which you could put a barrier between the present and the past, if you would but take that way. His pale face flushed as he drew nearer to her, his eyes lighted with a sudden fire as he laid his long white hand upon her shoulder, stopping her almost imperiously, looking down at her with the resoluteness that gave to his face something of the eagle look which belongs to conquering natures. What way! she faltered, perplexed by that sudden change in a familiar face. Take my name instead of yours. Let Robert Hattrell's widow vanish in Ambrose Arden's wife. Clara, I cannot be eloquent where all I value on earth is at stake. I love you. I have loved you ever since—no, I do not say how long. Only remember that I have never offended you by one whisper of my consuming love. I have waited, waited, waited, until it seems to me that my life is like the children of Israel's pilgrimage through the desert—so long, so weary, so far from the promised land. Let me not be like their leader. Let me not die with the haven of my hope seen dimly in unattainable distance. I have been patient, have I not? I have never offended you, Clara. Offended me? No. You have been a kind and devoted friend, she answered quickly, but I never thought you wanted to be more than a friend. Nothing was further from my thoughts. Nothing. She went on in an embarrassed manner, and then with a sudden transition to warmest feeling, she exclaimed. You know how I loved him. You know how dear his image is to me. It would be treason to care for anyone else. It would be cowardice to take another name. I am the widow of Robert Hatrell, of him whom some devil murdered. Mary again. Call myself by another name. Why, to be true to the past, I ought to give up all my future life to one continuous endeavour to bring his murderer to justice. My dearest, in plays and in novels, murderers are brought to the scaffold by devoted women like you, after any interval the novelist or dramatist may find convenient, but in real life there is only one kind of machinery that works, and that is the much abused police. When the police stimulated by the offer of a large reward cannot find a criminal within seven years from the date of the crime, you may be sure the criminal is safe. The odds are that the murderer who is not caught within a week has saved his neck. In the case of my lamented friend the assassin was a man of peculiar audacity, prompt, resolute, unflinching, and there is strong reason to believe that the murder in Denmark Street was not his first crime. Not his first? cried Clara Hatrell with a sudden vehemence which startled her lover. Then it will not be his last crime, and he will be caught sooner or later like the man in Vienna the other day. The man in Vienna was a professional murderer who had been trapped like a wild beast after a series of crimes. When trapped, condemned and assured that his case was hopeless, he made a full confession of his guilty deeds, gloating over the revolting details, proud of having struck horror to the hearts of his fellow men. He will be caught some day, said Clara Hatrell, just as that Austrian was caught, red-handed and he will confess his catalogue of crimes. This caller was silent for a few moments and then answered quietly. Such cases as those are rare, but as you say the murderer may confess some day. Clara, it is time you do a veil over that dark and cruel past. It is time you took pity on the man who loves you. Oh, my beloved, I have no words to tell my love. I have given you years of my life when other men give words. I have waited seven years and now I feel that I have spoken too soon. There was a marble bench near the spot where they were standing, an antique seat which had been brought from Rome to adore Mrs. Hatrell's garden. Ambrose Arden staggered a few paces forward and flung himself upon this bench and there, with his face hidden in his hands, sobbed out his fashion, with sobs which shook his powerful frame and swelled the veins upon his class tans. That agony of grief touched Clara Hatrell was sudden pity. He had been so good and true and it was love, devoted love for her which had changed him to the dull monotony of a life that was a puzzle to the people who knew his talent and his means. It was for her he had sacrificed himself, for her sake he had educated her child as never child was educated before. And he had been her husband's trusted friend and advisor, her husband's better sense. What more faithful friend, what wiser counselor and guide would she choose for herself in the labyrinth of life? What should she say to him? Was she to bid him wait and hope or to tell him plainly that she could never be his wife? She had vowed no vow to remain single all her life, for it had seemed to her in her fond regret that a second marriage for her was of all things upon this earth the least possible. There had been no spoken promise to her child, but Daisy had taken it for granted that her mother would be constant to the dead until death reunited the broken bond until she should lie down by his side, his true wife in the grave. Pity and gratitude moved her profoundly at sight of Ambrose Arden's agony. He fought against his weakness as a strong man fights his foe until those convulsive sobs came at longer intervals and the powerful shoulders ceased to heave. At last, with a final struggle, he dashed the tears from his eyes, rose from the bench, and stood before her, calm and still, but disfigured by the vermilion stain upon his eyelids in the deadly powder of cheek and lip. Forgive me for having made a fool of myself, Mrs. Hattrell. He said huskily, I ought to have known better. I ought not to have trusted myself to speak. How you must despise me! She held out her hand to him with a gentle seriousness. Despise you! she repeated gently. Can you think me so base as not to be grateful for your patient friendship and for your love? But you should not have spoken to me of love. You should remember that my heart is buried in my husband's grave, yet believe at least that I am not ungrateful. Let us be friends as we have been in the quiet years that have come and gone since his untimely death. No, no, Clara, that passive bliss, that paradise of the dead, is over. Friendship is too thin a mask for passion. I could not go on acting my part, after today. It must be all or nothing. She hung her head and the slow tears rolled down her cheeks. She did not love him, but she felt herself bound to him by a friendship that ought to be life long and her heart brimmed over with womanly compassion. It must be all or nothing, Clara. He repeated, still holding the hand that she had given him an assurance of friendship. I must leave you at once and forever, or stay with the hope of winning you. Stay, she answered gently. He dined at River Lawn that evening for the first time since Robert Hattrell's death, a cozy little party of three, his pupil pleased to have his company and full of affectionate attentions to him all through the repast complaining of his want of appetite, his indifference to certain dishes which Cyril liked and which were really worthy of his notice. They dined in one of the old cottage rooms, a room with a low ceiling, an old-fashioned dado and chimney piece and a bow window, the best parlor of the original building. The dining room had been very little used during Clara's widowhood. They took their coffee in the veranda in front of the drawing room enjoying the beauty of the night and the newly risen moon. Shall I play you a little Mozart? asked Daisy, and without waiting for an answer she leapt them and seated herself at the grand piano from whence she could see them dimly as they sat in the shadow of the Climatis and Magnolia which overhung the veranda. She was not a brilliant pianist, having given only her leisure hours to music, but she played with delicacy and expression and as she had been content to devote herself for the most part to one composer, she had learned to interpret his compositions with feeling and understanding. Mozart is enough for one lifetime. She said when her cousins ridiculed her limited repertoire being taught by a master who discovered a new Slavonic composer every quarter, I never hoped to play as well as he ought to be played if I go on working all the days of my life. The clever fingers flew over the keys in the light and airy Fisher variations. The round white wrist moved with easy grace in the passages for crossed hands, the player looking straight before her all the time at those two motionless figures between the lamp light and the moon. How earnestly he bent over her mother as he talked, how still her mother sat with slightly drooping head, and how odd that on this one day in seven years her mother should ask him to dinner and allow him to spend the evening in a long tete-a-tete. She had kept him at such a distance hitherto that any departure from the old habit seemed strange. It was Daisy's custom to spend half an hour or so in her mother's room before going to bed. These two who lived together always had so much to say to each other that the day seemed insufficient for confidential talk, and if the girl happened to be deprived of her nightly tete-a-tete, she would complain that she saw nothing of her mother and was altogether hardly used. On this particular evening, after Mr. Arden had wished them good night and strolled across to his cottage on the other side of the lane, the mother and daughter walked up and down the terrace two or three times in the moonlight before going in doors for good, and then the doors were shut and locked and the lamps were put out. The river lawn sank into darkness except for five lighted windows on the first floor. Three of these windows which opened on a wide balcony belonged to Mrs. Hattrell's bedroom and boudoir. The other two were Daisy's, and the lamp light shone through artistic terracotta muslin curtains which the girl had draped with her own hands. The boudoir was one of the prettiest rooms in the house. It had been planned and furnished by Robert Hattrell as an offering to the wife he admired, and both Clara and her daughter loved it all the more for the sake of the love that had presided over its creation. Here, in the subdued light of a shaded lamp, Clara sank somewhat wearyly into a deep armchair and sat silent, while Daisy moved about the room looking at the watercolor studies on the wall, a Surrey Lane by Birkitt Foster, a girlish head by Dobson, a street corner in Venice by Clara Montalba, or lightly touching the books addressed in china boxes and Indian bronzes on the tables in idle restlessness. You look tired tonight, mother dear, she said presently, watchful of her mother's troubled face. Yes, dear, I am very tired. And yet you have not been beyond the gardens today. It must be the heat that tired you. I was so glad you asked Uncle Ambrose to dinner for once in a way. You are not very hospitable to him, you know. He does not get much attention from you in return for all his goodness to me. You know I am grateful to him, Daisy, but you and I living alone together can hardly be expected to entertain gentlemen. Why, mother, you surely don't suppose that people would talk if he were to die in here every day? What a strange idea. Uncle Ambrose, a confirmed old bachelor. People are more ready to talk than you would ever suppose, Daisy. Mr. Arden is not an old man. Not in years, but he is old in thoughts and habits. He is not like other men. No, he is not like other men. He has deeper feelings than most men. Come here, darling, and be quiet if you can. You make me nervous while you are moving about and touching things. I will be a very mouse for tranquility, Mother dear, cried the girl, sinking into a half-sitting, half-kneeling position at her mother's feet. The mother caressed the dark brown hair, tenderly touched the broad forehead, above hazel eyes that were like her own, eyes that looked wonderingly at her, seeing an unwanted trouble in her face. Daisy, would it distress you if, if, in time to come, I were to marry again? Distress me? No, Mother. It would be only natural that you should marry again. You are so handsome and so young-looking, if you could meet anyone good enough for you. No, I am not such a selfish, ungrateful daughter as to be distressed at any change which would make your life happy. I should be jealous, no doubt horribly jealous, after having had you all to myself, and I should hate the man. I hate him already in anticipation without knowing what he is like or where he is coming from or when he will come. But don't be frightened, dearest, for your sake I should do my best to behave admirably, and I would try and school myself to tolerate the... She screwed up her lips as if some abusive epithet were on the point of utterance and ended in a loud, clear voice with a monosyllable... Man. But what if it were someone you like already, someone you love, Daisy? Someone I love, a man. Why, that could be only one man in the world. Uncle Ambrose, exclaimed Daisy, gazing at her mother with widely opened eyes, surprised and half-incredulous. It is Mr. Arden who urges me to marry him. No thought of a second marriage would ever have entered my head but for him. Uncle Ambrose, what an absurd idea, said Daisy slowly. Uncle Ambrose, lingering over the name. Uncle Ambrose, in love, like a young man. It seems almost ridiculous. Girls of seventeen think that hearts are cold and numbed with age at forty, said Clara Hattrell, but it is not always so. There are attachments that outlast youth. Yes, mother dear, I can quite understand that, and if it had been the colonel of a cavalry regiment, a fine, handsome man who had distinguished himself in India with an iron-grey mustache or a politician, a man of the world, I shouldn't have been a bit surprised to hear that he was madly in love with you. But Uncle Ambrose, a man who only lives to read books that other people don't read and brood over questions that other people don't understand. I could never imagine such a man as that in love. He has talked to me of his wife and of his grief when he lost her, but I could hear in his placid way of talking that he had never been in love with her, not as Rochester was in love with Jane or Ravenswood with Lucy, concluded Daisy whose examples and pictures of life were all taken from her favourite novels. Well, Daisy, I was of your opinion yesterday and I too thought Mr. Arden incapable of a romantic attachment, but now he has shown me his heart, such an unselfish, devoted heart, a heart which beats only for you and Cyril and me. He is not happy, Daisy dear. His lonely life is killing him though people think he is a recluse by choice. He longs for a fuller life, for a home. He asked me to marry him after waiting seven years to prove his fidelity to me and his respect for the friend he lost in my dear husband. If I refuse we shall see him no more. You will lose your kind master. And if you say yes he will live with us always, exclaimed Daisy. I have often thought you unkind for turning him out of the house when he evidently longed to stay. I have even thought you ungrateful, but it would be very grateful of you to marry him. You talk as if he would like me to marry him, Daisy. Would you really? Yes, I really would, for his sake, because I think he deserves a good deal more attention than you have ever shown him. Only there is one thing. What is that, Pet? I could never call him father. I could never speak the word I spoke at the gate that fatal morning when my own dear father badass could buy. He would be Uncle Ambrose to the end. There was a silence during which the mother sat with downcast eyelids and thoughtful brow, perplexed, uncertain, wavering between two opinions, and then Daisy began again with a startling suddenness. You would be Saro's mother and I should be his sister. It would be very nice to have such a clever brother. Another silence. Another sudden burst of speech from Daisy. There is one question I have not asked you, she said impressively. Do you love him? I answered that question in advance, Daisy, a year ago when we were talking together on this spot just as we are talking tonight. I told you then that your father was my first love and that he would be my last. That is true now as it was a year ago. It will be true to the end of my life. Poor Uncle Ambrose, sighed Daisy. I have always pitied a man who marries a widow. You know what Guy Daryl says in, what will he do with it? Nothing so insipid as a heart warmed up. And yet that very Guy Daryl marries a widow after all. Poor Uncle Ambrose, but you don't dislike him, do you, mother? Dislike him? No. He is the one man I would choose for a friend and counselor. I respect and admire him for his fine character, so free from unworthy ambitions, so single-minded, and for his intellect. There is no one I would sooner have as my friend and companion, no one whom I would rather obey. In those things where women do obey their husbands, said Daisy, making a rye face, I am not over font of that word obedience, and I hope if ever I marry, my husband will not have the bad taste to pronounce it in my hearing. Dear, dearest one, with a sudden change to earnestness, there are tears streaming down your cheeks. Are you unhappy, mother? No love, only troubled and undecided. I want to act for the best. Then I really think you ought to marry Uncle Ambrose. He is so devoted to us both, and he knows so much. And it will be very nice to have him and Cyril by our fireside on a winter evening. Mother and daughter kissed with tears, and Daisy sobbed out her emotions on her mother's breast, and at the end of this confidential talk was Clara Hattrell's promise to marry the man who adored her.