A HAUNTED LIFE

BY

JAMES GRANT

AUTHOR OF 'THE ROMANCE OF WAR'

LONDON
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS
BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL
NEW YORK: 9, LAFAYETTE PLACE

1883

JAMES GRANT'S NOVELS,

Price 2s. each, Fancy Boards.

The Romance of War
The Aide-de-Camp
The Scottish Cavalier
Bothwell
Jane Seton: or, the Queen's Advocate
Philip Rollo
The Black Watch
Mary of Lorraine
Oliver Ellis: or, the Fusileers
Lucy Arden: or, Hollywood Hall
Frank Hilton: or, the Queen's Own
The Yellow Frigate
Harry Ogilvie: or, the Black Dragoons
Arthur Blane
Laura Everingham: or, the Highlanders of Glenora
The Captain of the Guard
Letty Hyde's Lovers
Cavaliers of Fortune
Second to None
The Constable of France
The Phantom Regiment
The King's Own Borderers
The White Cockade
First Love and Last Love
Dick Rooney
The Girl he Married
Lady Wedderburn's Wish
Jack Manly
Only an Ensign
Adventures of Rob Roy
Under the Red Dragon
The Queen's Cadet
Shall I Win Her?
Fairer than a Fairy
One of the Six Hundred
Morley Ashton
Did She Love Him?
The Ross-shire Buffs
Six Years Ago
Vere of Ours
The Lord Hermitage
The Royal Regiment
Duke of Albany's Own Highlanders
The Cameronians
The Scots Brigade
Violet Jermyn
Jack Chaloner

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER

I. THE MEET OF THE COACHING CLUB
II. TREVOR CHUTE'S REVERIE
III. HIS VISIT TO CLARE
IV. IDA
V. HOW WILL IT END?
VI. SIR CARNABY COLLINGWOOD
VII. A PROPOSAL
VIII. 'THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH FOR THE STARS'
IX. DOUBTS DISPELLED
X. FOR WHOM THE JEWELS WERE INTENDED
XI. A ROMANCE OF THE DRAWING-ROOM
XII. IN THE KONGENS NYTORV
XIII. BY THE EXPRESS FOR LUBECK
XIV. AN IMBROGLIO
XV. 'LOVE IS STRONG AS DEATH'
XVI. 'JEALOUSY CRUEL AS THE GRAVE'
XVII. A QUARREL
XVIII. THE EMEUTE AT LUBECK
XIX. SIR CARNABY'S GRATITUDE
XX. CARNABY COURT
XXI. CHRISTMAS EVE

A HAUNTED LIFE.

CHAPTER I.

THE MEET OF THE COACHING CLUB.

'Be patient, Trevor Chute; they are sure to be here to-day, old fellow, for Ida told me so.'

'Ida?'

'Yes, Mrs. Beverley; does that surprise you?' asked the other, with a singular smile—one that was rather sardonic.

'No, Jerry, I have long ceased to be surprised at anything. As I have told you, my special mission in town is a visit to her; but—so you and she are good friends still?'

'Yes, though she has been six months a widow, we are on the same strange terms in which you left us last—friends pure and simple.'

'And nothing more?'

'As yet,' replied Jerry Vane, lowering his voice, with something of despondency perceptible in his tone, and to a close observer it might have been apparent that he, though by nature frank, jovial, and good-humoured, had, by force of habit, or by circumstances, a somewhat cynical mode of expression and gravity of manner.

The time was the noon of a bright and lovely day in May, when the newly-opened London season is at its height; and it was the first meet of the Coaching Club in Hyde Park, where the expectant crowd, filling all the seats under the pleasant trees, or in occupation of handsome carriages, snug barouches, dashing phaetons and victorias—in everything save hackney cabs—covered all the wide plateau which stretches from the Marble Arch to the somewhat prosaic powder magazine beside the Serpentine, and waited with the characteristic patience and good-humour of Londoners for the assembling of the coaches, though some were seeking to while away the time with a morning paper or the last periodical.

The speakers, though young men, were old friends, who had known each other since boyhood in the playing-fields of Rugby.

Jervoise, or, as he was familiarly called, Jerry Vane, was a curly-pated, good-looking young fellow of the genuine Saxon type, with expressive, but rather thoughtful eyes of bluish grey, long fair whiskers, and somewhat the bearing of a 'man about town;' while the other, perhaps in aspect the manlier of the two, Trevor Chute, in figure compact and well set-up, was dark-haired, hazel-eyed, and had a smart moustache, imparting much decision of expression to a handsome and regular face, which had been scorched and embrowned by a tropical sun; and where the white flap of the puggaree had failed to protect his neck and ears, they had deepened to a blister hue.

He had but the day before come to town, on leave from his regiment (which had just returned from India), on a special errand, to be detailed in its place.

In front was the great bend of the blue Serpentine rippling and sparkling in the sunshine, with its tiny fleet of toy-ships; beyond it was the leafy background of trees, and the far stretch of emerald lawn, chequered with clumps of rhododendron in full flower, and almost covered with sight-seers, some of whom gave an occasional cheer as a stately drag passed to the meeting-place, especially if its driver was recognized as a personage of note or a public favourite.

'I don't know what you may have seen in India, Trevor,' said Jerry Vane, 'but I am assured that the gayest meetings on the continent of Europe can present nothing like this. I have been in the Prater at Vienna on the brightest mornings of summer, and on gala days at the Bois de Boulogne, and seen there all the élite of Paris wending its way in equipages, on horse or on foot, but no scene in either place equals this of to-day by the Serpentine!'

To this his friend, who had so recently returned from military exile, in the East, warmly assented, adding:

'The day is as hot as my last Christmas was in the Punjaub.'

'Christmas in the Paunjaub, by Jove!' exclaimed Jerry Vane, with a laugh. 'Eating ices and fanning oneself under a punkah, with the thermometer at 90 in the shade, eh?'

Captain Chute laughed in turn at this idea; but as he stood at that time by the inner railings in Hyde Park, waiting anxiously to see the fair occupants of a certain drag, he could foresee, as little as his friend, where they were to spend their coming Christmas, or on its eve to hear, through the stillness thereof, the sweet evensong coming over a waste of snow from an old chapel, amid a group of crystal-shrouded trees, where many soft voices, with hers among them, told again of the angels' message, given more than eighteen hundred years ago to the shepherds of Chaldea, as they watched their fleecy flock by night.

'It seems but yesterday that I last stood here, Jerry,' said Trevor Chute, thoughtfully, almost sadly; 'and how much has come and gone to us both since then!'

'Yes; and here, as of old, Trevor, are the last new beauties who have come out, and the overblown belles of seasons that are past, and, of course, all those great folks whom everybody knows, and others of whom no one knows anything, save that they have swell equipages, and are "like magnificent red and purple orchids, which grow out of nothing, yet do so much credit to their origin."'

'You grow cynical, Jerry.'

'Perhaps; but there was a time when I was not wont to be so. And you, Trevor, are not without good reason for being so too. Why, man alive! when in the Guards, how popular you were with all the mammas of unmarried daughters; a seat in the carriage, a box at the opera, a balcony at the boat-race, whenever you felt disposed. By Jove! there was no man in town I envied more than you in those days.'

'And what has it all come to now, Jerry? I feel quite like a fogey,' exclaimed Trevor Chute.

'Yet this was but four years ago.'

'Only four years, old fellow, and she is not married yet! But here come the party, and on Desmond's drag; he has the "lead," it seems.'

It was now the hour of one; the procession had started, and the eyes of all the onlookers were eagerly engaged in critically examining the various drags, so magnificently horsed and brilliantly appointed, as they passed in succession, with all their silver harness shining in the sun.

About thirty drove from the well-known rendezvous of the Coaching Club along the pretty drive which skirts the Serpentine and ends with the bridge that divides the Park from Kensington Gardens; and though some of the drivers adhered to the Club uniform—blue, with gilt buttons—many appeared in the perfection of morning costume; and as team after team went by, chestnut, white, or grey, with satin-like skins, murmurs of applause, rising at times to a cheer, greeted the proprietors.

The costumes of the ladies who occupied the lofty seats were as perfect as, in many instances, was their beauty; and no other capital in Europe could have presented such a spectacle as Trevor Chute saw then, when the summer sun was at its height in the heavens, gilding the trees with brilliant light, and showing Hyde Park in all its glory.

The leading drag was the one which fascinated him, and all the other twenty-nine went clattering past like same phantasmagoria, or a spectacle one might seem to behold in a dream.

Several ladies were on the drag, including the owner's somewhat passé sister, the Hon. Evelyn Desmond; but Chute saw only two—Clare and Violet Collingwood—or one, rather, the elder, who riveted all his attention.

Both girls were remarkable for their beauty even then, when every second female face seemed fair to look upon; but the contrast was strong in the opposite styles of their loveliness, for Clare was a brilliant brunette, while Violet was even more brilliant as a blonde; and as the drag swept past, Trevor Chute had only time to remark the perfect taste of Clare's costume or habit, that her back hair was a marvel of curious plaiting, and that she was laughingly and hastily thrusting into her silver-mounted Marguerite pouch a note that Desmond had handed to her, almost surreptitiously it seemed; and then, amid the crowd and haze, she passed away from his sight, as completely as she had done four years before, when, by the force of circumstances—a fate over which he had no control—they had been rent asunder, when their engagement was declared null, and they were informed that thenceforward their paths in life must be far apart.

'Clare Collingwood is the same girl as ever, Trevor,' said Jerry Vane, breaking a silence of some minutes. 'You saw with what imperial indifference she was receiving the admiration of all who passed, and the attention of those who were about her.'

'Is she much changed, Jerry, since—since I left England?' Trevor asked.

'Oh, no,' replied the other, cynically; 'she and her sisters—Violet, at least—have gone, and are still going, over the difficult ways of life pleasantly, gracefully, and easily, as all in their "set" usually do. In her fresh widow's weeds Ida Beverley could not be here to-day, of course.'

'I have an express and most melancholy mission to her on the morrow,' said Captain Chute. 'But why is Collingwood père not with his daughters on this occasion?'

'Though girls that any man might be proud of escorting in any capacity, the old beau, with his dyed hair and curled whispers, is never seen with them, nor has been since their mother's death. Though sixty, if he is a day, he prefers to act the rôle of a young fellow on his preferment, and doesn't like to have these young women—one of them a widow, too—calling him "papa." He knows instinctively—nay, he has overheard—that he is called "old Collingwood," and he doesn't like the title a bit,' added Vane, laughing genuinely, for the first time that forenoon, as they made their way towards the nearest gate of the Park, which the glittering drags were all leaving by the Marble Arch, and setting forth, viâ Portman Square, for luncheon at Muswell Hill or elsewhere.

'And has Clare had no offers since my time?' asked Trevor Chute, almost timidly.

'Two; good ones, also.'

'And she refused them?'

'So Ida told me.'

'Ida again; you and Mrs. Beverley seem very good friends.'

'Yes, though she used me shockingly in throwing me over for Beverley.'

'And why did—Clare refuse?'

'Can't say, for the life of me; women are such enigmas; unless a certain Trevor Chute, then broiling in the Punjaub, wherever that may be, had something to do with it.'

'I can pardon much in you, Jerry Vane,' said Chute, gravely; 'for we have been staunch friends ever since I was a species of big brother to you at Rugby; but please not to make a jest of Clare and me. And what of pretty Violet?'

'Oh, Violet is all right,' replied Vane, speaking very fast, and reddening a little at his friend's reproach. 'She has those graceful, taking, and pretty ways with her and about her that will be sure to do well for her in the end; thus, sooner or later, Violet's fortune is certain to be made in a matrimonial point of view.'

'I have heard of this fellow, Harvey Desmond, before,' said Chute, musingly. 'I remember his name when I was in the Household Brigade. He was lately, I think, gazetted a C.B.'

'Of course.'

'For what?'

'In consideration of his great services at Wormwood Scrubs and on Wimbledon Common.'

To see Clare on his drag, even with his sister, the Hon. Evelyn, to play propriety, stung Trevor Chute, and, as if divining his very thoughts, Jerry Vane said, let us hope unintentionally:

'All the clubs have linked their names together for some time past.'

'Well,' replied Trevor, with something like a malediction, as he proceeded in a vicious manner to manipulate a cigar, and bite off the end of it. 'What the deuce does that matter to me?'

His expression of face, however, belied the indifference he affected for the moment, and feeling that he had caused pain by his remark, Jerry Vane said, as they walked arm and arm along Piccadilly, by the side of the Green Park:

'Neither of us have been very successful in our love affairs with the Collingwoods; and with me even more than you, Trevor, it was a case of "love's labours lost." Yet, when I think of all that Ida Collingwood was in the past time to me, I cannot help feeling maudlin over it. We had, time to me, I cannot help feeling maudlin over it. We had, as you know well, been engaged a year when, unluckily, Beverley, of your corps, became a friend of the family. I know not by what magic he swayed her mind, her heart, and all her thoughts, but, from the first day she knew him, I felt that I was thrown over and that she was lost to me for ever! And on that day when she became Beverley's wife——'

In the bitterness of his heart Vane paused, for his voice became tremulous.

'The friend equally of you and of poor Jack Beverley, whom I laid in his grave, far, far away, I felt all the awkwardness of my position when that bitter rivalry arose between him and you about Ida Collingwood,' said Trevor Chute, and the usually lively Jerry, who seemed lost in thoughts which the voice and presence of his friend had summoned from the past, walked slowly forward in moody silence.

He was recalling, as he had too often done, the agony of the time when he first began to learn—first became grimly conscious—that the tender eyes of Ida sought to win glances from other eyes than his, and ask smile for smile from other lips too! And when desperately against hope he had hoped the game would change, and oblivion would follow forgiveness—but the time never came.

Jerry could recall, too, the sickly attempts he had made to arouse her pique and jealousy by flirting with Evelyn Desmond and other girls, but all in vain, as the sequel proved.

She had become so absorbed in Beverley as to be oblivious of every action of the discarded one, and almost careless of what he thought or felt.

But now, though Beverley was dead and had found his grave on a distant and a deadly shore, it was scarcely in human flesh and blood for Vane—even jolly Jerry Vane—to forgive, and still less to regret him as Trevor Chute did, though he affected to do so, on which the soldier shook his hand, saying:

'You are indeed a good-hearted fellow!'

But Vane felt that the praise was perhaps undeserved, and to change the subject, said—

'She has been to a certain extent getting over Beverley's death.'

'Getting over it?'

'Of course.'

'How?'

'By becoming more composed and settled; no grief lasts for ever, you know,' replied Vane, a little tartly; 'but now your return, your special visit to her, and the mementoes you bear, will bring the whole thing to the surface again, and—and—even after six months of widowhood—may——'

'Will make matters more difficult for you?' interrupted Trevor Chute, smiling.

'Precisely. I am a great ass, I know; but I cannot help loving Ida still.'

'You will accompany me to the Collingwoods' to-morrow, Jerry?' urged the soldier, after a pause.

'No, old fellow, decidedly not. Ida's grief would only worry me and make me feel de trop. What the deuce do you think I am made of, Trevor, to attempt to console the woman I love when she is weeping for another?'

'Dine with me at the club this evening, then—sharp eight—and we'll talk it over.'

'Thanks; and then we shall have a long "jaw" together about all that is and all that might have been; so, till then, old man, good-bye.'

CHAPTER II.

TREVOR CHUTE'S REVERIE.

Protracted by various culinary devices, the late dinner had encroached on the night, just as the final cigar in the smoking-room had done on the early hours of morning; and after a long conversation, full of many stirring and tender reminiscences and many mutual confidences, Jerry Vane had driven away to his rooms, and Trevor Chute was left alone to ponder over them all again, and consider the task—if task it really was—that lay before him on the following morn.

And now to tell the reader more precisely the relation in which some of the dramatis personæ stand to each other.

Four years before the time when our story opens, Trevor Chute, then in the Foot Guards, had been engaged to Clare Collingwood. She was in her second season, though not yet in the zenith of her beauty, which was undeniably great, even in London; and his friend, Jervoise Vane, was at the same time the accepted of her second sister Ida, who had just 'come out' under the best auspices; yet the loves of all were fated to end unhappily.

Monetary misfortune overtook the family of Trevor Chute; expected settlements ended in smoke, and he had to begin what he called 'the sliding scale,' by exchanging from the Guards into a Line regiment then serving in India; and then the father of Clare—Sir Carnaby Collingwood—issued the stern fiat which broke off their engagement for ever.

'Of course,' thought he, as he looked dreamily upward to the concentric rings and wreaths of smoke, the produce of his mild havannah, 'we shall meet as mere friends, old acquaintances, and that sort of thing. Doubtless she has forgotten me, and all that I was to her once. Here, amid the gaieties of three successive seasons since those days, she must have found many greater attractions than poor Trevor Chute—this fellow Desmond among them—while the poor devil in the Line was broiling up country, with no solace save the memory—if solace it was—of the days that were no more!'

Sir Carnaby Collingwood was by nature proud, cold, and selfish. He had married for money, as his father had done before him; and though he seemed to have a pleasure in revenging himself, as some one has phrased it, by quenching the love and sunshine in the life of others, because of the lack of both in his own, Trevor Chute felt that he could scarcely with justice be upbraided for breaking off the marriage of a girl having such expectations as Clare with an almost penniless subaltern officer.

Ida's engagement terminated as related in the preceding chapter. With a cruelty that was somewhat deliberate, she fairly jilted Vane and married Jack Beverley, undeniably a handsomer and more showy man, whose settlements were unexceptionable, and came quite up to all that Sir Carnaby could wish.

Yet Beverley did not gain much by the transaction. Ida fell into a chronic state of health so delicate that decline was threatened; the family physicians interposed, and nearly three years passed away without her being able to join her husband in India, where he was then serving with Trevor Chute's regiment, and where he met his death by a terrible accident.

Jerry Vane felt deeply and bitterly the loss of the girl he had loved so well; and he would rather that she had gone to India and passed out of his circle, as he was constantly fated to hear of her, and not unfrequently to meet her; for Jerry's heart did not break, and sooth to say, between balls and dinners, croquet and Badminton parties, cricket matches, whist and chess tournaments, rinking, and so forth, his time was pretty well parcelled out, when in town or anywhere else.

Trevor Chute and Beverley had been warm friends when with the regiment. Loving Clare still, and treasuring all the tender past, he felt that her brother-in-law was a species of link between them, through whom he could always hear of her welfare, while he half hoped that she might wish to hear of his, and yet be led to take an interest in him.

With all this mutual regard, Chute's dearest friend of the two was not the dead man, but Jerry Vane; yet there had been a great community of sentiment between them. This was born of the affection they fostered for the two sisters, and sooth to say, Beverley, while in India, loved his absent wife with a passion that bordered on something beyond either enthusiasm or romance. It became eventually spiritualised and refined, this love for the distant and the ailing, beyond what he could describe or altogether conceive, though times there were when in moments of confidence, over their cheroots and brandy pawnee, he would gravely observe to Trevor Chute that so strong, and yet so tender, was the tie between him and Ida, that, though so many thousand miles apart, they were en rapport with each other, and thus that each thought, or talked, and dreamt of the absent at the same moment.

Be all this as it may, a time was to come when Trevor was to recall these strange confidences and apparently wild assertions with something more than terror and anxiety, though now he only thought of the death-bed of his friend in India, the details of all that befell him, and the messages and mementoes which Jack Beverley had charged him to deliver to Ida on his return to England.

They had been stationed together, on detachment, at the cantonment of Landour, which is situated on one of the outer ridges of the Himalaya range, immediately above the Valley of the Deyrah Dhoon, where they shared the same bungalow.

The dulness of the remote station at which the two friends found themselves became varied by the sudden advent of a tiger in an adjacent jungle: a regular man-eater, a brute of unexampled strength and ferocity, which had carried off more than one unfortunate native from the pettah or village adjoining the cantonment; thus, as a point of honour, it behoved Trevor Chute and Beverley, as European officers and English sportsmen, to undertake its destruction. Indeed, it was to them, and to their skill, prowess, and hardihood, the poor natives looked entirely for security and revenge.

'I have sworn to kill that tiger, and send its skin as a trophy to Ida,' said Beverley, when the subject was first mooted at tiffin one day. 'She shall have it for the carriage in the Park, and to show to her friends!'

About two in the morning, the comrades, accompanied by four native servants, took their guns, and set forth on this perilous errand, and leaving the secluded cantonment, proceeded some three or four miles in the direction of the jungle in which the tiger was generally seen.

As he sat in reverie now, how well Trevor Chute could remember every petty detail of that eventful day; for an eventful one it proved, in more ways than one.

The aspect of Jack Beverley, his dark and handsome face, set off by his white linen puggaree, his lips clearly cut, firm and proud, his eyes keen as those of a falcon, filled with the fire of youth and courage, and his splendid figure, with every muscle developed by the alternate use of the saddle, the oar, and the bat, his chest broad, and his head nobly set on his shoulders, and looking what he was, the model of an Englishman.

'Now, Chute, old fellow, you will let me have the first shot, for Ida's sake, when this brute breaks cover,' said he, laughing, as he handed him a case worked by her hands, adding, 'Have a cheroot—they are only chinsurrahs, but I'll send a big box to your crib; they will be too dry for me ere I get through them all, and we may find them serviceable this evening.'

Poor Beverley could little foresee the evening that was before him!

Though late in the season, the day and the scenery were beautiful. Leaving behind a noble thicket, where the fragrant and golden bells of the baubul trees mingled with the branches of other enormous shrubs, from the stems and branches of which the baboon ropes and other verdant trailers hung in fantastic festoons, the friends began to step short, look anxiously around them while advancing, a few paces apart, with their rifles at half-cock; for now they were close upon that spot called the jungle, and the morning sun shone brightly.

After six hours' examination of the jungle the friends saw nothing, and the increasing heat of the morning made them descend thankfully into a rugged nullah that intersected the thicket, to procure some of the cool water that trickled and filtered under the broad leaves and gnarled roots far down below.

Just as Chute was stooping to drink, Beverley said, in a low but excited voice:

'Look out, Trevor; by Jingo, there's the tiger!'

Chute did so, and his heart gave a kind of leap within him when, sure enough, he saw the dreaded tiger, one of vast strength and bulk, passing quietly along the bottom of the nullah, but with something stealthy in its action, with tail and head depressed.

In silence Beverley put his rifle to his shoulder, just as the dreadful animal began to climb the bank towards him, and at that moment a ray of sunlight glittering on the barrel caused the tiger to pause and look up, when about twenty yards off.

It saw him: the fierce round face seemed to become convulsed with rage; the little ears fell back close; the carbuncular eyes filled with a dreadful glare; from its red mouth a kind of steam was emitted, while its teeth and whiskers seemed to bristle as it drew crouchingly back on its haunches prior to making a tremendous spring.

Ready to take it in flank, Chute here cocked his rifle, when Beverley, not without some misgivings, sighted it near the shoulder, and fired both barrels in quick succession.

Then a triumphant shout escaped him, for on the smoke clearing away he saw the tiger lying motionless on its side, with its back towards him.

'You should have reserved the fire of one barrel,' said Chute, 'for the animal may not be dead, and it may charge us yet.'

'I have knocked the brute fairly over,' replied Beverley; 'don't fire, Chute, please, as, for Ida's sake, I wish to have all the glory of the day.'

And without even reloading his rifle the heedless fellow rushed towards the fallen animal, which was certainly lying quietly enough among the jungle-grass that clothed the rough sides of the water-course.

The tiger suddenly rose with a frightful roar, that made the jungle re-echo; and springing upon Beverley with teeth and claws, they rolled together to the bottom of the nullah!

Two of the native attendants fled, and two clambered up a tree. Left thus alone, with a heart full of horror, anxiety, and trepidation, Trevor Chute went plunging down the hollow into which his friend had vanished, and from whence some indescribable, but yet terrible sounds, seemed to ascend.

He could see nothing of Beverley; but suddenly the crashing of branches, and the swaying of the tall feathery grass, announced the whereabouts of the tiger, which became visible a few yards off, apparently furious with rage and pain, and tearing everything within its reach to pieces.

On Trevor firing, his ball had the effect of making it spring into the air with a tremendous bound; but the contents of his second barrel took the savage right in the heart, after which it rolled dead to the bottom of the nullah.

On being assured that the tiger was surely killed, the cowardly natives came slowly to the aid of Chute, who found his friend Beverley in a shocking condition, with his face fearfully lacerated, and his breast so torn and mutilated by the dreadful claws, that the very action of the heart was visible.

He was breathing heavily, but quite speechless and insensible.

Though many minutiæ of that day's dreadful occurrence came vividly back to Chute's memory, he could scarcely remember how he got his friend conveyed back to the cantonment of Landour, and laid on a native charpoy in their great and comfortless-looking bungalow, where the doctor, after a brief examination, could afford not the slightest hope of his recovery.

'It's only an affair of time now,' said he; 'muscles, nerves, and vessels are all so torn and injured that no human system could survive the shock.'

So, with kind-hearted Trevor Chute, the subsequent time was passed in a species of nightmare, amid which some catastrophe seemed to have happened, but the truth of which his mind failed to grasp or realize; and mourning for his friend as he would for a brother, they got through the hot and dreary hours of the Indian night, he scarcely knew how.

About gunfire, and just when dawn was empurpling the snowy summits of the vast hills that overshadow the Deyrah Dhoon, the doctor came and said to him, with professional coolness:

'Poor Jack Beverley is going fast; I wish you would do your best to amuse him.'

'Amuse him?' repeated Chute, indignantly.

'Yes; but no doubt you will find it difficult to do so, when you know the poor fellow is dying.'

In the grey dawn his appearance was dreadful, yet he was quite cool and collected, though weaker than a little child—he who but yesterday had been in all the strength and glory of manhood when in its prime!

'The regiment is under orders for home,' said he, speaking painfully, feebly, and at long intervals. 'Dear old friend, you will see her—Ida—and give my darling all the mementoes of me that you deem proper to take: my V.C. and all that sort of thing; among others, this gipsy ring; it was her first gift to me; and see, the tiger's cruel teeth have broken it quite in two! I have had a little sleep, and I dreamt of her (God bless her for ever!)—dreamt of her plainly and distinctly as I see you now, old fellow, for I know that we are en rapport—and we shall soon meet, moreover.'

'En rapport again!' thought Chute; 'what can he—what does he mean?'

'Promise me that you will do what I ask of you, and break to my darling, as gently as possible, the mode in which I died.'

Trevor Chute promised all that his friend required of him, especially that he should see Ida personally.

This was insisted on, and after that the victim sank rapidly.

As he lay dying, he seemed in fancy, as his feeble mutterings indicated, to float through the air as his thoughts and aspirations fled homeward—homeward by Aden, the Red Sea, and Cairo—homeward by Malta and the white cliffs to the home of the Collingwoods; and he saw Ida standing on the threshold to welcome him; and then, when her fancied kiss fell on his lips, the soul of the poor fellow passed away.

The name of Ida was the last sound he uttered.

All was silent then, till as Trevor Chute closed his eyes he heard the merry drums beating the reveille through the echoing cantonments.

CHAPTER III.

HIS VISIT TO CLARE.

Though not yet thirty years of age, Trevor Chute was no longer a young man with a wild and unguessed idea of existence before him. Thought and experience of life had tamed him down, and made him in many respects more a man of the world than when last he stood upon the threshold of Sir Carnaby Collingwood's stately mansion in Piccadilly, and left it, as he thought, for ever behind him.

Yet even now a thrill came over him as he rang the visitors' bell.

It would have been wiser, perhaps, and, circumstanced as he was with the family, the most proper mode, to have simply written to Sir Carnaby or to Ada Beverley instead of calling; but he had promised his friend, when dying at Landour, to see her personally; and it is not improbable that in the kindness of his heart Jack Beverley, even in that awful hour, was not without a hope that the visit might eventually lead to something conducive to the future happiness of his friend, to whom the chance of such a hope had certainly never occurred.

Trevor Chute had urged Jerry Vane to accompany him, hoping, by the aid of his presence and companionship, to escape some of the awkwardness pertaining to his visit; but the latter, though on terms of passable intimacy with the family still, and more especially since the widowhood of Ida, considering the peculiar mission of Chute to her, begged to be excused on this occasion.

And now, while a clamorous longing to see Clare once again—to hear her voice, to feel the touch of her hand, though all for the last time in life—rose in his heart, and while conning over the terms in which he was to address her, and how, in their now altered relations, he was to comport himself with her from whom he had been so cruelly separated by no fault of either, he actually hoped that, if not from home, she might at least be engaged with visitors.

Full of such conflicting thoughts, he rang the bell a second time. The lofty door of the huge house was slowly unfolded by a tall powdered lackey of six feet and some odd inches, the inevitable 'Jeames,' of the plush and cauliflower head, who glanced suspiciously at a glazed sword-case and small travelling-bag which Chute had taken from his cab.

'Is Sir Carnaby at home?'

'No, sir—gone to his club,' was the reply, languidly given.

'Mrs. Beverley, then?'

'She does not see anyone—to-day, at least.'

'Miss Collingwood?'

She was at home, and on receiving the card of Chute, the valet, who knew that his name was not on the visitors' list, again looked suspiciously at the bag and sword-case, and while marvelling 'what line the "Captain" was in—barometers, French jewellery, or fancy soaps,' passed the card to a 'gentleman' in plain clothes, and after some delay and formality our friend was ushered upstairs.

Again he found himself in that familiar drawing-room—but alone.

It seemed as if not a day had elapsed since he had last stood there, and that all the intervening time was a dream, and that he and Clare were as they might have been.

From the windows the view was all unchanged; he could see the trees of the Green Park, and the arch surmounted by the hideous statue of the 'Iron Duke,' and even the drowsy hum of the streets was the same as of old.

Chute had seen vast and airy halls in the City of Palaces by the Hooghly; but, of late, much of his time had been spent under canvas, or in shabby straw-roofed bungalows; and now the double drawing-room of this splendid London house, though familiar enough to him, as we have said, appealed to his sense of costliness, with its rich furniture, its lofty mirrors, lace curtains, gilded cornices, statues, and jardinières, loading the atmosphere with the perfume of heliotrope and tea-roses, and brought home to him, by its details, the gulf that wealth on one hand, and unmerited misfortune on the other, had opened between him and Clare Collingwood.

A rustle of silk was heard, and suddenly she stood before him.

She was very, very pale, and while striving to conceal her emotion under the cool exterior enforced by good breeding, it was evident that the hand in which she held his card was trembling.

But she presented the other frankly to Trevor Chute, and hastily begging him to be seated, bade him welcome to England, and skilfully threw herself into a sofa with her back to the light.

'We saw in the papers that your regiment was coming home, and then that it had landed at Portsmouth,' she remarked, after a brief pause, and Chute's heart beat all the more lightly that she seemed still to have some interest in his movements. 'Poor Ida,' she resumed, 'is confined to her room; Violet is at home,—you remember Violet? but I am so sorry that papa is out.'

'My visit was to him, or rather to Mrs. Beverley,' said Chute, with the slightest tinge of bitterness in his tone; 'and believe me that I should not have intruded at all on Sir Carnaby Collingwood but for the dying wish of my poor friend your brother-in-law.'

'Intruded! Oh, how can you speak thus, Captain Chute—and to me?' she asked in almost breathless voice, while her respiration became quicker, and a little flush crossed her pale face for a second.

Then Chute began to feel more than ever the miserable awkwardness of the situation, and of the task which had been set him; for when a man and woman have ever been more to each other than mere friends, they can never meet in the world simply as acquaintances again.

For a minute he looked earnestly at Clare, and thought that never before, even in the buried past that seemed so distant now—yet only four years ago—had she seemed more lovely than now.

The blood of a long line of fair and highly bred ancestresses had given to her features that, though perfectly regular and beautifully cut, were full of expression and vivacity, though times there were when a certain fixity or statue-like repose that pervaded them seemed to enhance their beauty.

Her eyes and hair were wonderfully dark when contrasted with the pale purity of her complexion, and the colour and form of her lips, though full and pouting, were expressive of softness, of sweetness, and even of passionate tenderness, but without giving the slightest suggestion of aught that was sensuous; for if the heart of Clare Collingwood was passionate and affectionate, its outlet was rather in her eyes than in the form of her mouth.

And now, while gazing upon her and striving hard to utter the merest commonplaces with an unfaltering tongue, Trevor Chute could but ponder how often he had kissed those lips, those thick dark tresses, and her charming hands, on which his eyes had to turn as on a picture now.

His eyes, however, were speaking eyes; they were full of tenderness and truth, and showed, though proper pride and the delicacy of their mutual position forbade the subject, how his tongue longed to take up the dear old story he had told her in the past years, ere cold worldliness parted them so roughly, and, as it seemed, for ever.

On the other hand, Clare Collingwood—perfectly high-bred, past girlhood, a woman of the world, and fully accustomed to society, if she received him now without any too apparent emotion, by the delicate flush that flitted across her beautiful face, and the almost imperceptible constraint in her graceful yet—shall we say it?—startled manner, imparted the flattering conviction to her visitor that he was far from indifferent to her still, and her eyes filled alternately with keen interest, with alarm, affection, and sorrow, as she heard, for the first time, all the details of Beverley's death in that distant hill cantonment, a place of which she had not the slightest conception.

'Will Mrs. Beverley see me?' he concluded.

'Though much of an invalid now, poor Ida undoubtedly will; but you must not tell her all that you have told to me,' said Clare, in her earnestness almost unconsciously laying her hand on his arm, which thrilled beneath her touch. 'Dearest mamma is, of course you know, no more. We lost her since—since you left England.'

'Yes, I heard of the sorrowful event when we were up country on the march to Benares, and it seemed to—to bring my heart back to its starting-place.'

'Since then I have been quite a matron to Violet, and even to Ida, though married; thus I feel myself, when in society, equal to half a dozen of chaperones.'

A little laugh followed this remark, and to Chute's ear it had, he thought, a hollow sound, and Vane's report of 'what the clubs said' concerning Desmond and the 'linked names,' and the recollection of the note placed so hastily in the Marguerite pouch which she wore at that very time, rankled in Chute's mind, and began to steel him somewhat against her, in spite of himself, but only for a time, for the charm of her presence was fast bewildering him.

Her heart, like his own, perhaps, was full to bursting—beating with love and yearning, yet stifled under the exterior that good breeding and the conventionality of 'society' inculcated.

'I hope you find the climate of England pleasant after—after India,' she remarked, when there was a pause in the conversation.

'Oh, yes—of course—Miss Collingwood—my native air.'

'Our climate is so very variable.'

Captain Chute agreed with her cordially that it was so.

Though subjects not to be approached by either, each was doubtful how the heart of the other stood in the matters of love and affection.

Trevor Chute had, all things considered, though their engagement had been brought to a calamitous end, good reason, he thought, to be jealous of Harvey Desmond; while Clare had equal reason to doubt whether, in the years that were gone, and in his wanderings in that land of the sun from whence he had just returned so bronzed and scorched, he might have loved, and become, even now, engaged to another.

She was only certain of one fact: that he was yet unmarried.

These very ideas and mutual suspicions made their conversation disjointed; hollow, and unprofitable; but now, luckily, an awkward pause was interrupted by the entrance of a fair and handsome, dashing yet delicate-looking girl, attired for a ride in the Row, with her whip and gloves in one hand, her gathered skirt in the other.

Though neither bashful nor shy, her bright blue eyes glanced inquiringly at their military-looking visitor, to whom she merely bowed, and was, perhaps, about to withdraw, when Clare said:

'Don't you remember who this is, Captain Chute?'

Turning more fully towards the young girl, whose beauty and charming grace in her riding-habit were undeniable, he said:

'I think I do; you are——'

'Violet; you can't have forgotten Violet, Trevor? Oh, how well I remember you, though you are as brown as a berry now!' exclaimed Violet Collingwood, as she threw aside her gloves and whip, and took each of his hands in hers. 'I was thirteen when you saw me last; I am seventeen, quite a woman, now.'

Kindly he pressed the fairy fingers of Violet, whose merry blue eyes gazed with loving kindness into his, for the girl had suddenly struck a chord of great tenderness in his heart by so frankly calling him 'Trevor,' while another, who was wont to do so once, was now styling him ceremoniously 'Captain Chute.'

Clare seemed sensible of the situation in which her somewhat girlish sister placed them; for a moment her face looked haughty and aristocratic, but the next its normal sweet expression of character, all that is womanly, beautiful, and tender, stole into it, and she fairly laughed when Violet twitched off her hat and veil, and, seating herself beside Trevor Chute, declared that the Row should not be honoured with her presence that day.

Though naturally playful, frank, and almost hoydenish—if such an expression could be applied to a girl of Violet's appearance, and one so highly bred, too—she gazed with something of wonder, curiosity, and undeniable interest on the handsome face, the tender eyes, and well-knit figure of this once lover of her elder sister, whose story, with all the romance of a young girl's nature, she so genuinely pitied, whom she remembered so well as being her particular friend when she was permitted to come home for the holidays, who had petted and toyed with her so often, as with a little sister, and of whom she had only heard a little from time to time as being absent with Beverley in a distant, and to her unknown, land; and now, girl-like, she began to blunder, to the confusion and annoyance of her more stately sister.

'Trevor Chute here after all!' she exclaimed, with a merry burst of laughter. 'Why! it seems all like a story in one of Mudie's novels!'

'What does?' asked Clare, with a little asperity of tone.

'Can you ask?' persisted Violet.

'His visit is a very melancholy one; and if Captain Chute will excuse me, I shall go and prepare poor Ida for it,' said Clare, rising.

'What does it all mean?' asked Violet, again capturing the willing hands of their visitor, as Clare hastily, and not without some confusion, swept away through the outer drawing-room. 'Why doesn't she call you Trevor, as I do? Captain Chute sounds so formal! I am sure I have often heard her talk to Ida of you as "Trevor" when they thought I was asleep, yet was very much awake indeed. So you are Clare's first love, are you?'

'I am glad to find that I am not quite forgotten,' replied Chute, smiling in earnest now; 'you were quite a child when I—I——'

'Left this for India.'

'Yes.'

'Why did you go?'

'To join my regiment.'

'Leaving Clare behind you? I must have a long, long talk with you about this, and you shall be my escort in the Park the next time I ride with Evelyn Desmond, for her brother is perpetually dangling after Clare, eyeing her with his stupid china-blue eyes, and doing his dreary best to be pleasing, like a great booby as he is.'

CHAPTER IV.

IDA.

Preceded by Clare, and accompanied by Violet, Trevor Chute entered the apartment of Ida Beverley, a species of little drawing-room, appropriated to her own use, and where, when not driving in the Park, she spent most of the day, apart from everyone.

Ere they entered, Clare again touched his arm lightly, and whispered,

'Be careful in all you say.'

'Be assured that I shall.'

'Thanks, for poor Ida looks as though she would never smile again.'

Though warned by these words to expect some marked change in the beautiful coquette who had been the sun of Beverley's life, and who had taken nearly all the life out of the less luckless Jerry Vane, the visitor was greatly shocked by the appearance of Ida, who rose from her easy-chair to receive him with the saddest of smiles on one of the sweetest of faces—Ida, who had the richest and brightest auburn hair in London, and the 'most divine complexion in the same big village by the Thames,' as Beverley used to boast many a time and oft, when he and Trevor were far, far away from home and her.

Her beauty had become strangely ethereal; her complexion purer, even, and more waxen than ever; her eyes seemed larger, but clearer, more lustrous, and filled at times with a far-seeing expression, and they were long-lashed and heavily lidded.

Her hands seemed very thin and white, yet so pink in the palms.

To Trevor Chute she had the appearance of one in consumption; but strange to say, poor Jerry Vane, who still loved her so well, saw nothing of all this, even when meeting her at intervals.

She received Trevor Chute with outstretched hands, and with an empressement which, perhaps, her elder sister envied; she invited him to sit close by her side, and to tell her all he knew, all he could remember, and every detail of Beverley's last hours; but to do this, after the warning he had received from Clare, required all the tact, ingenuity, and delicacy that Chute was master of.

She had become composed and calm during the past months; but now the proffered relics brought so vividly and painfully before her the individuality of the dead, the handsome young husband she had lost, that a heavy outburst of anguish was the result, as all expected.

There were rings, each of which had its own story; a miniature of herself, with a lock of her auburn hair behind it; there were his medals and his Victoria cross, gained by an act of bravery among the hills, his sword and sash: all were kissed with quivering lips, commented on, and wept over again and again, not noisily or obstreperously, but with a quiet, gentle, subdued, and ladylike grief that proved very touching, especially in one so young and so beautiful in her deep crape dress; and Trevor Chute, as he observed all this, began to think that even yet his friend Vane's chances of regaining the widow's heart were of the slightest kind.

'I knew, Trevor Chute,' said she, after a pause, 'that I should never, never see him again!'

'How?' he asked.

'Because in the dawn of that morning when—when he died, I dreamt of him, and he showed me the ring you have brought—the gipsy ring I gave him, broken in two, as it now is.'

'The tiger's teeth did that.'

'It is true,' said Clare. 'She was sleeping with me, and started up in tears and agitation to tell me of her dream and of the ring.'

Trevor Chute's mind went back to that time when the pale face of the dead man looked so sad in the half-darkened bungalow, while the drums beat merrily in the square without; the last words of Beverley came back to him, and could it be, as he had often said, that he and Ida were indeed en rapport, and had a spiritual and unseen link between them?

It began to seem so now.

Then, fearing that his visit was somewhat protracted, he rose, yet lingeringly, to go.

'Dear Captain Chute—Trevor we all called you once,' said Ida, taking his hand in both of hers, while Clare drew a little way back, 'you will call again and see us?'

'It is better that I should not,' replied Chute, in a voice that became agitated in spite of himself; 'you know all the circumstances, Ida, under which we parted,' he added, in a lower voice.

'You will surely come again and see me?' she urged.

'If the family were out of town,' Chute was beginning.

'Trevor,' said the widow, passionately, 'love me as if—as if I were your sister; for you were more than a friend—yes, a very brother—to my poor Beverley, and I must be as your sister.'

Clare's eyes met those of Chute for an instant, and then were dropped on the carpet; but she did not blush, as another might have done, at all this speech implied or suggested, for her face grew very pale, and then, feeling the dire necessity of saying something, she muttered, falteringly:

'You will surely call and see papa, after—after——'

'What, Miss Collingwood?'

'Your long absence from this country.'

'It has seemed somewhat of an eternity to me.'

She trembled as he added, in a gentle, yet cold manner:

'Excuse me, but it were better to pay my first visit to him at his club.'

Chute, who had been all tenderness to Ida, could not help this manner to Clare, for Violet's remarks about Desmond seemed to corroborate those of Vane.

Unstable of purpose, he held Clare's hand, and she permitted him to do so, with a slow, regretful clasp. Why should he not do so, and why should she withdraw her slender fingers?

As he descended the staircase, he heard the name of the Honourable Harvey Desmond announced with his card, and the rivals passed each other in the marble vestibule, the former with the easy air of a daily, at least a frequent, visitor; the other with that of one whose mission was over.

'On what terms are he and Clare if the clubs link their names together?' thought Trevor, bitterly and sadly, as he came forth.

Did she, after all, love himself still?

He was almost inclined to flatter himself that she did so.

Worldly or monetary matters were unchanged between them, as at that cruel time when he lost her; so perhaps he had only returned to London to stand idly by and see her become the wife of Desmond!

After all that had passed between them, after all that seemed gone for ever, after the bitterness and mortification he had endured, the years of hopeless separation in a distant land, he could scarcely realize, while walking along the sunny and crowded pavement of Piccadilly, the assured fact that he had again seen and spoken with Clare Collingwood; and that the whole interview had not been one of those day-dreams in which, when in Beverley's society, he had been so often wont to indulge when quartered far up country in the burning East.

Then he recalled the cold terms of that letter in which her father—a hard and heartless, frivolous and luxurious man of the world, with much of aristocratic snobbery in his composition—had bluntly informed him that the engagement between him and Clare was ended for ever, and why; and he resolved that neither at the baronet's club nor anywhere else would he waste a calling card upon him; and in this pleasant mood of mind he hailed a hansom and drove to the rooms of his friend Jerry Vane.

CHAPTER V.

HOW WILL IT END?

If Jerry Vane was not very contented in mind, his rooms, the windows of which overlooked a fashionable square, bore evidence that he was surrounded by every luxury, that he was behind the young fellows of his set in nothing; while the velvet and silk cases for cigars or vestas that littered the table and mantelpiece, even the slippers and smoking-cap he wore, all the work of feminine fingers, seemed to hint of the many fair ones who were ready to console him.

Possessed of means ample enough to indulge in every whim and fancy, the mantelpiece and the tables about him were littered by the 'hundred and one' objects with which a young man like Jerry is apt to surround himself.

There were pipes of all kinds, whips, spurs, fencing-foils, revolvers, Derringer pistols, Bohemian glass, and gold-mounted bottles full of essences, statuettes pell-mell with soiled kid gloves, soda-water bottles, pink notes, faded bouquets, and French novels in their yellow covers.

The hangings and furniture were elegant and luxurious, on the walls were some crayons of very fair girls in rather décolleté dress, while on a marble console lay a gun-case, hunting-flasks, and many other things that were quite out of place in a drawing-room, and a Skye terrier and an enormous St. Bernard mastiff were gambolling together on a couple of great tiger-skins, the spoil of Trevor Chute's gun in some far Indian jungle.

The day was far advanced, yet Jerry had not long breakfasted, and lay, not fully dressed, in a luxurious dressing-robe, tasselled and braided, on the softest of sofas, enjoying the inevitable cigar, when Chute was ushered in, and he sprang up to receive him.

It may easily be supposed that Vane was most impatient to hear all the details of his friend's remarkable visit to the Collingwoods—remarkable, at least, under all circumstances—but he could not fail to listen with emotions of a somewhat mingled cast to the account of Ida's undoubted grief for his supplanter—an account which he certainly, with that love of self-torment peculiar to some men, wrung from Trevor Chute by dint of much industrious cross-questioning.

Could he blame her for it?

'This sadness, of which all are cognizant,' said Chute, 'is not unaccountable, you know, Jerry.'

'I suppose so.'

'It is natural grief for Jack Beverley.'

'Pleasant fact to thrust on me!' said Vane, grimly.

'Pardon me, old fellow, I did not thrust it on you. But take heart; a girl with such capacity for love and tenderness is worth the winning.'

'I won her, man alive!' said Jerry, savagely.

'Well, such a fortune is worth winning again.'

'This is barrack slang, Trevor.'

'Not at all,' said Chute, laughing at his friend's petulance. 'Be assured that she must love something; and your turn will deservedly come in due time.'

'If a cat or a monkey don't take my place.'

'Cynical again.'

'I can't help being so, Trevor, as well as being a simpleton.'

'Nay, don't say so, Jerry,' said the soldier, kindly; 'I think this unchanging love you have for a girl who used you so does honour to your heart, especially in this age of ours, when we are much more addicted to pence than to poetry; and, as some one says, the sauce piquante of life is its glorious uncertainty.'

'And Clare—what were your thoughts and conclusions about her?

'My thoughts you know; my conclusions—I have none,' replied Chute, who, since he had again seen and talked with Clare Collingwood, had felt his heart too full of her to confide, even to his friend, as yet, what hope or fear he had.

'And you saw Violet, too?' asked Vane, to fill up a pause.

'Oh, yes,' replied Chute, with animation; 'Violet, whilom the pretty little girl—the child with a wealth of golden hair flowing below her waist, and no end of mischief and fun in her bright blue eyes; she seems the same now as then. She actually spoke of Desmond being an admirer of Clare.'

'Surely that was bad form in the girl, to you especially.'

'She did so through pure inadvertence, Jerry; but I must own that, when coupled with your remarks, the circumstance stung me more than a week ago I could have anticipated. But I suppose such trials as those of ours,' he continued, helping himself to a bumper of sherry without waiting to be asked, 'are part and parcel of the ills that manhood has to encounter—"Manhood, with all its chances and changes, its wild revels and its dark regrets—its sparkling champagne-cup and its bitter aconite lying at the dregs."'

'Times there are when I blush at my own want of proper pride of heart in continuing to mourn after a girl who has quietly let me drop into the place of a mere friend.'

'Nay, depend upon it, Jerry, you must be much more than any mere friend can be to Ida Beverley; and now, as far as her grief goes, my visit to-day will prove, I think, the turning point.'

'And so Violet actually blundered out with some remark about Desmond.'

'Yes, and that which galled me more was to see him come lounging into the house to visit Clare just as I took my departure, so there must be some truth in what the clubs say.'

Jerry Vane did not reply, and his silence seemed to give a marked assent to the surmise, as he had been in London, for some time past, and must, as Chute thought bitterly, know all the on dits of the fashionable world, and he sat also silent, watching the ice in the sherry cobbler melt slowly away.

Though Trevor Chute had, with emotions of doubt, regret, and envy, seen Desmond lounging into the house of the Collingwoods on the eventful day of his visit thereto, it did not follow, he thought on reflection, that he visited there daily.

Nor was it so.

It was the height of a crowded and brilliant London season, and the Brigade had to undergo what that branch of the service deem 'hard work.'

There were guards of honour for Royal drawing-rooms; escort duty; heavy morning drills at Wormwood Scrubs; the daily ride in the Lady's Mile; polo at Lillie Bridge; perhaps a match with the Coldstreams at Lord's; a Bacchanalian water party and a nine o'clock dinner at Richmond with some of the pets of the Opera; midnight receptions and later waltzes; at homes, and so forth: thus the time of Desmond was pretty well filled up; and yet at many of these places he had ample opportunities for meeting Clare, and being somewhat of a privileged dangler, without committing himself so far as a special visit might imply.

All was over between Clare Collingwood and Trevor Chute; yet the interest of the latter in her and her future was irrepressible.

Two days passed, and he remained in great doubt what to do: whether to accept Ida's piteous and pressing invitation to call on her, heedless, of course, though not forgetting it, of Violet's proposal that he should escort her in the Park when Clare rode with Desmond.

And now he began to think that to remain in London, where there would be daily chances of seeing Clare, would be but to trifle with his own happiness and that peace of mind which he had been gradually attaining in India, and that he and Jerry Vane should betake themselves to Paris or Brussels, and kill thought as best they could; to this conclusion they came as they sat far into the hours of a sultry summer night over cigars and iced drinks, and resolved that the morrow should see them leave 'the silver streak' behind them.

And at that very time, when they were forming their plans, what was Clare about?

Could Trevor have seen her then, and known her secret thoughts, perhaps he might have been less decided in his views of foreign travel.

Returning wearily and long before the usual time from a brilliant rout, greatly to the surprise of Violet, and not a little to the vexation of that young lady, Clare was seated alone in her own room, lost in thought and unwilling to consult poor sad Ida, who was now fast asleep.

It was long past midnight; the throng of foot passengers was gone, but the rattle of carriages was incessant as if the time were mid-day.

She had unclasped her ornaments as if they oppressed her, and forgetful of her maid, who yawned fitfully and impatiently in an adjoining room, she sat with her rounded chin placed in the palm of a white hand, with her dark eyes fixed on vacancy.

The soft air of the summer night—or morning, rather—came gently through the lace curtains of an open window, bringing with it the delicious perfume of flowers from the jardinière in the balcony; and perhaps the fragrance of these blossoms, and the half-hushed hum of the streets without, 'stole through the portals of the senses,' and lured her into waking dreams of the past and of the future.

At the ball she had quitted so early, her father, who had been making himself appear somewhat absurd by his senile attentions to Desmond's rather passée sister, Evelyn, had actually spoken to her of Trevor Chute, and in unwonted friendly terms; and the flood of thought this episode had called up within her, conflicting with the half-decided addresses of Desmond, partly drew her home, to think and ponder over her future, if a future she had that was worth considering now.

So far as monetary matters were concerned, the same barriers existed still between her and poor Trevor Chute as when Sir Carnaby broke off the engagement as cruelly as he would have 'scratched' a horse; and then the settlements which the great, languid guardsman could make were known to be unexceptional.

These did not weigh much with gentle, yet proud, and unambitious Clare; but she knew that they had vast weight with her worldly-minded father, so why torment herself by thinking of Trevor Chute at all?

But thoughts came thick and fast in spite of reason and cool reflection, and the girl sank into a reverie that was far from being a pleasant one.

But what if Trevor Chute had learned to love another!

She bit her lovely nether lip, which was like a scarlet camellia bud, for an instant; her dark eyes flashed, then drooped, and she smiled softly, confidently, and perhaps triumphantly, as she said, half audibly:

'Ah, no—he loves me still; poor Trevor! I saw it in his eyes—I heard it in the cadence of his voice, and I never was mistaken! He loves me still—but to what purpose, to what end?'

Tears started to her eyes; but she crushed her emotion, and, with a quick, impatient little hand, rang for her waiting-maid.

CHAPTER VI.

SIR CARNABY COLLINGWOOD.

Still intent upon his Continental scheme, and somewhat impatiently waiting the arrival of Jerry Vane, Trevor Chute was idling over a late breakfast, so full of thoughts—sweet, regretful, and angry thoughts—of Clare Collingwood that he seemed like one in a dream.

It was nearly noon. The sun of May was bathing in light the leafy foliage of the Green Park, and throwing its shadows darkly and strongly on the green below; while the far extent of the lofty street seemed all aglow and quivering in the sunshine.

How fair and fresh the world looked, and yet, since his last interview with Clare, everything seemed indistinct and unusual to his senses.

'Bah!' thought he; 'to-night Jerry and I shall be in France, and then——'

What then, he scarcely knew.

The current of his ideas changed, for times there were, and this became one of them, when he longed morbidly to go through all the luxury of grief and sentiment in taking that which he had never before taken, save by letter—a last farewell of her; to beg of her to let no hour of sorrow for him mar her peace, no regret for his loss of fortune, a loss that was no fault of his own; to think of him with no pain, but with a soft memory of their past love, or to forget him, though he never could, or should, forget her, but would ever treasure in his heart how dear she had been to him, etc., etc.; and in this mood he was indulging, when his valet laid before him a note, the envelope of which caused him to feel a kind of electric shock.

It bore the Collingwood crest.

With hands tremulous as those of an agitated girl, he tore it open, and found that it was from Sir Carnaby Collingwood—a brief invitation to dine with him at his club at eight to-morrow evening (if disengaged), 'that they might have a little talk over old times.'

'Old times,' he repeated; 'what does that phrase mean?'

He had read over the note for the fourth or fifth time when Jerry Vane arrived.

He, too, had a similar invitation, but in that there was nothing remarkable, as he had never ceased to be on terms of intimacy with Sir Carnaby.

'What can old Collingwood mean by this invitation to smoke the calumet of peace?' exclaimed Trevor Chute.

'Time will show.'

'After the cutting tenor of the letter he sent me—that cold and formal letter of dismissal—I—I——'

'Forget it, like the good fellow you are; and remember only that he is the father of Clare Collingwood.'

'True.'

'You'll go, of course?' said Jerry, after a pause; but Chute was silent.

His pride suggested that under all the circumstances, especially if what 'the clubs said' were true, he should decline the invitation.

But why?

He had already been at the Collingwoods', but on a special mission, certainly.

Then Sir Carnaby was proud, and it was impossible to forget that the first formal advance had come from him. More than all, as Jerry Vane had said, he was the father of Clare, of her who had never ceased to be the idol of all his thoughts.

'By Jove, I'll go—and you, Jerry,' he exclaimed. 'Of course.'

Each dashed off an acceptance, and they were despatched to Pall Mall in the care of Trevor's valet.

After a time, as if repenting of his sudden facility, Trevor Chute muttered:

'He used barely to bow to me in the Row or in the streets after he gave me my congé. What the deuce can his object be? Is he—is he relenting?'

The pulsation of Chute's heart quickened at the idea, and the colour deepened in his bronzed cheek.

'How anomalous and singular is the position in which we both stand with this selfish old fellow and his daughters,' said he to Jerry as they ascended the stately marble staircase of the baronet's club next evening, and gave their cards to a giant in livery, with the small head and enormous calves and feet peculiar to the fraternity of the shoulder-knot.

As they were ushered into a lofty and magnificent room, the great windows of which opened to Pall Mall, Sir Carnaby took their cards mechanically from the silver salver, but seemed chiefly intent on bowing out a tall and fashionable-looking man, whose leading characteristics were languor of gait and bearing, with insipid blue eyes, and a bushy, sandy-coloured moustache.

'And you won't dine with us, Desmond?' he was saying.

'Impossible, thanks very much,' drawled the other. 'Then I have your full permission, Sir Carnaby?'

'With all my warmest wishes, my dear fellow,' responded the baronet cordially; and, hat in hand, the visitor bowed himself out, with a brief kind of stare at Trevor Chute, whose face, he thought, he somehow remembered, and a dry shake of the hand with Jerry Vane, whom he knew.

He was gone, 'with full permission,' to do what?

Chute's heart foreboded at that moment all the two words meant, and the next he found himself cordially greeted by the man whose son-in-law he had once so nearly been.

'Ha, Captain Chute, welcome back from India,' he exclaimed. 'By Jove, how brown you look—brown as a berry, Violet said—after potting tigers, and all that sort of thing; too much for Beverley, though. Poor Jack—good fellow, Beverley, but rash, I fear. Very glad to thank you in person for all your kindness to him and to poor Ida. Most kind of you both, I am sure, to come on so hurried an invitation.'

Of Beverley and Ida, with reference to the death of the first, and the grief of the second, he spoke in the same jaunty and smiling way that he did of the beauty of the weather, the brilliance of the London season, the topics before the House last night, or anything else, and laughingly he led the way to dinner, the courses of which were perfect, and included all manner of far-fetched luxuries, even to pigeons stewed in champagne, and other culinary absurdities.

Sir Carnaby did not seem one day older than when Trevor Chute had seen him last, and yet he had attained to those years when most men age rapidly.

He had been a singularly handsome man in that time which he was exceedingly loath to convince himself had departed—his youth.

His firm, though thin—very thin—figure was still erect, well-stayed, and padded, perhaps; his eyes were keen and bright, their smile as insincere, artificial, and hollow as it had been forty years Before. His cheek was not pale, for there was a suspicious dash of red about it, while his well-shaved hair and ragged moustache were dyed beyond a doubt, like his curled whiskers.

His mouth was perhaps weak and rather sensual; he had thin white diaphanous hands, with carefully trimmed nails and sparkling diamond rings. In general accuracy of costume he might have passed for a tailor's model, while to Chute's eye his feet were as small, his boots as glazed, as ever; yet he had undergone the tortures of the gout, drunk colchicum with toast and water till he shuddered at the thoughts thereof, and talked surreptitiously of high and dry localities as being most suitable for his health.

He had, as we have said, keen—others averred rather wicked—grey eyes, a long and thin aristocratic nose, on which, when ladies were not present, he sometimes perched a gold eyeglass. He was certainly wrinkled about the face; but his smooth white forehead showed no line of thought or care, as he had never known either, yet death had more than once darkened his threshold, and hung above it a scutcheon powdered with tears. He had still the appearance of what he was—a well-shaved, well-dressed, and well 'got-up' old beau and man about town, and still flattered himself that he was not without interest in a pretty girl's eye.

He had the reputation of being a courtly and well-bred man; and yet, in his present hilarity, or from some inexplicable cause, he had the bad taste to refer in his jaunty way to his past relations with Trevor Chute, and to mingle them with some praises of his recent visitor.

'Good style of fellow, Desmond!—devilish good style, you know; has a nice place in Hants, and no end of coal-pits near the Ribble,' he continued, after the decanters had been replenished more than once. 'Wishes to stand well with Clare—your old flame, Chute; got over all that sort of thing long ago, of course, for, as a lady writer says, "nothing on earth is so pleasant as being a little in love, and nothing on earth so destructive as being too much so." Desmond has my best wishes—but, Chute, the decanters stand with you.'

Chute exchanged one brief and lightning-like glance with Jerry Vane; he felt irrepressible disgust, and for this stinging tone to him would have hated the heartless old man but that he was the father of (as he now deemed her) his lost Clare Collingwood. But Jerry was made to wince too.

'Your visit the other day, Chute, seems quite to have upset poor Ida,' said he, after an awkward pause.

'So sorry to hear you say so, Sir Carnaby,' replied Chute, drily.

'I don't like girls to betray emotion on every frivolous occasion; it is bad form, you know.'

Frivolous occasion! thought Chute, receiving the last relics and mementoes of her husband from the comrade in whose arms he died, and who commanded the funeral party that fired over him.

'She has begun to mope more horribly than ever during the last few days; but if I take her down to the country, she becomes more dull than ever, or goes in for parochial work—bad style of things, I think—blankets and coals—Dorcas meetings—and helps the rector's wife in matters of soup and psalm-singing.'

Indeed, if the truth were known, Sir Carnaby Collingwood was not ill pleased by Beverley's death, all things considered. Ida's jointure was most ample—even splendid—and she had no little heir to attend to. To be the father of these grown-up girls was bad enough, he thought; but to have been a 'grandfather' would prove the culmination of horror to the would-be youthful beau of sixty.

His own lover and romance, if he ever had any—which may be doubted—were put by and forgotten years ago, and he never dreamed that others might indulge in such dreams apart from the prose of life. From his school-days he had been petted, pampered, and caressed by wealth and fortune, so much so that he was actually ignorant of human wants, ailments, or sufferings. Hence his utter callousness and indifference in such a matter as Trevor Chute's love for Clare, or her love for Chute. Though his dead wife, a fair and gentle creature, who was the antitype of Ida, and had been quite as lovely, loved him well, he had married her without an atom of affection, to suit the views of his family and her own.

Hence it was that, as we have shown, he could talk in the manner he did to his two guests—men whose past relations with his own household were of a nature so delicate, and to be approached with difficulty; yet, had anyone accused Sir Carnaby of want of tact or taste, or more than all of ill-breeding, he would have been filled with astonishment. But the ill-breeding shown by Sir Carnaby simply resulted from a total want of feeling, good taste, and perception.

Thus it was that he could coolly expatiate to Chute on the good qualities of Desmond, adding, 'You'll be glad to hear of my girl's welfare and expectations; he'll be a peer, you know, some of these days; and to poor Jerry Vane upon Ida's grief for the loss of her husband, his rival.

Then, while smoothing his dyed moustache with a dainty girl-like handkerchief, all perfume and point, with a Collingwood crest in the corner thereof, he would continue in this fashion:

'Poverty is a nuisance. I have admired dowerless girls in my day—do so still—but never go farther than mere admiration; so no girl of mine shall ever marry any man who cannot keep her in the style to which she has been accustomed. It was, perhaps, a foolish match Ida made with Beverley, though he had that snug place in the Midlands—or rather, the reversion of it when his father died; but now she is a widow—ha! ha! bless my soul, that I should be the father of a widow!—and with her natural attractions, enhanced by a handsome dowry, may yet be a peeress—who knows?'

Jerry Vane, with silent rage swelling in his heart, glanced at Chute, as much as to say:

'How intolerable—how detestable—all this is!'

'She is a widow,' continued Sir Carnaby, eyeing fondly the ruby wine in his glass, as he held it between him and the lustre, with one eye closed for a moment, 'but with all her attractions, may perhaps remain so if she continues this horrible folly of unfathomable grief, and all that sort of thing.'

'It does honour to her heart!' sighed poor Jerry.

'She is becoming an enthusiast and a visionary. The girl's grief bores me, and times there are when I wish that you, friend Vane, may come to the rescue, after all.'

A little smile flitted across the face of Vane as he merely bowed to this remark, which he cared not to follow, as he was doubtful whether it was the baronet or his wine that was talking now; but he glanced at Trevor Chute, and both rose to depart, thinking they had now quite enough of Sir Carnaby's 'hospitality.'

But the latter, seized by a sudden access of friendship or familiarity, on finding that he could no longer prevail on them to remain, proposed, as the night was fine, and their ways lay together, to walk so far and enjoy a cigar.

It was impossible to decline this: the 'weeds' were lit; Sir Carnaby took an arm of each—perhaps his steps were a little unsteady—and as they turned away towards Piccadilly, he began anew to sing the praises of Desmond, with the pertinacity with which wine will sometimes make a man recur again and again to the same subject.

'Good style of fellow, and all that sort of thing, don't you know, Chute? Has a fortune—comfortable thing that—very!—but it has prevented—it has prevented——'

'What, Sir Carnaby?' asked Trevor, wearily.

'The development of his genius.'

Trevor Chute laughed aloud at this, and said:

'Ah! there is nothing like a hand-to-hand free fight with the world for that.'

'You are a soldier, Chute, but the world is no longer a bivalve, which one may, like ancient Pistol, open by the sword. Desmond graduated at Oxford.'

'As stroke oar, Sir Carnaby, I presume.'

'He would have taken the highest honours, Chute, and all that sort of thing, don't you know, only—only——'

'He could not?'

'Not at all,' replied Sir Carnaby, somewhat tartly. 'He preferred that they should be taken, Chute, by those who set their hearts on such things; yet for Clare's sake, I wish——'

Whatever it was he wished, Trevor Chute never learned, for now he lost all patience, and affecting suddenly to remember another engagement, bade farewell, curtly and hurriedly, to Sir Carnaby, who said:

'Must have you down at Carnaby Court when the event—perhaps the double event—comes off; good style of old place—the baronial, the mediæval, the picturesque, and all that sort of thing—bored by artists and tourists, don't you know, but, of course, you remember it—ta-ta!'

And arresting skilfully an undeniable hiccup, the senile baronet trotted, or rather 'toddled,' away in the moonlight. Remember it!

Well and sadly did Trevor Chute remember it; for there, on a soft autumn night, when the music and the hum of the dancers' voices came through the ball-room oriels, when the moonlight steeped masses of the ancient pile in silver sheen or sunk them in shadow—

'When buttresses and buttresses alternately
Seem framed of ebon or ivory,'

as he and Clare stole forth for one delicious moment from the conservatory, had he first told her how deeply and tenderly he loved her; and now again memories of the waltz they had just concluded, of the delicate perfume of her floating dress, of the scarlet flower in her dark hair, of the drooping, downcast eyes, and her lovely lips, near which his own were hovering, come vividly back to haunt him, as they had done many a time and oft when he had seen the same moon that lit up prosaic Piccadilly shining in its Orient splendour on the marble domes and towers of Delhi, on the waters of the Jumna or the Indus, and on the snow-clad peaks that look down, from afar, on the vast plains of Assam!

Now that their old tormentor was gone, both Chute and Jerry Vane laughed, but with much of scornful bitterness in their merriment.

'Hope you enjoyed your dinner, Jerry!'

'Hereditary rank is very noble, according to Burke and Debrett,' replied Vane, cynically. 'He is a baronet, true; but I would rather win a title than succeed to one; and to meet a few more men like Sir Carnaby would make a down-right Republican of me.'

'How such an empty fool ever had a daughter like Clare Collingwood is a riddle to me. He is so cool, so listless, so heartless——'

'Yet so thoroughbred, as it is deemed!'

'And so worldly—she, all heart!'

'Perhaps; but what does all this about Desmond mean, eh, friend Trevor?'

'A little time will show now,' said the other, bitterly.

CHAPTER VII.

A PROPOSAL.

It was the noon of the following day when Major Desmond ordered his mail phaeton, and drove to the mansion of the Collingwoods to avail himself of the 'permission' granted to him so fully by Sir Carnaby on the evening before.

The hour was somewhat early for a usual call; but as an ami de la maison, and considering the errand on which he was come, Desmond thought he might venture to take the liberty, and he felt a kind of pleasure in the belief that he would surprise his intended, for he came with the full resolution of sacrificing himself at last, and making a proposal to Clare, and feeling apparently as cool in the matter as if he were going to buy a horse at Tattersall's.

Miss Collingwood was at home and disengaged; Miss Violet and Mrs. Beverley were out driving; so all seemed to favour the object he had in view, and he was ushered into the drawing-room. His name was announced; but Clare, who was seated at a writing-table, with a somewhat abstracted air, did not hear it, as she was intently perusing a tiny note she had just written. She seemed agitated, too, for her eyes bore unmistakable traces of tears.

Agitation was so unusual with her, and indeed with anyone Desmond met in society, that he paused with some surprise, standing irresolutely near her, hat in hand; and as he watched the contour of her head with a gleam of sunshine in her braided hair, the curve of her shoulders, the pure beauty of her profile, the grace of the tender white neck encircled by its frill of tulle, and the quick movement of the lovely little hand, as she rapidly closed and addressed the note, he thought what a creditable-looking wife she would be to show the world—aye, even the world of London.

There seemed something of a sad expression on her usually serene face; but he knew not then that her heart was beating with a new joy—yea, that 'it throbbed like a bird's heart when it is wild with the first breath of spring.'

Suddenly his figure caught her eye.

'Major Desmond, pray pardon me; I did not hear you announced.'

'I fear, Miss Collingwood'—he could not at that moment trust himself to say 'Clare'—'that I intrude upon your privacy,' and the nearest approach to anger and surprise that the usually imperturbable and impassive Desmond could permit himself to manifest appeared in his face when he saw her, with a rapidity, and even with something of alarm, which she could not or cared not to conceal, thrust the recently addressed envelope into the Marguerite pouch—the same in which Trevor Chute had seen her place a note from Desmond on the coaching day; but that referred only to a bet of gloves and the coming Derby.

All this seemed terribly unwonted, and the deduction instantly drawn by the tall guardsman was that a note thus concealed was not intended for one of her own sex.

'You do not intrude,' said Clare, timidly, yet composedly. 'I am, as you see, quite alone—my sisters have gone to the Park.'

Desmond was too well bred to make any direct allusion either to Clare's emotion or the matter of the note, to which that emotion gave an importance it otherwise could not merit; but he was nevertheless anxious for some light on the episode.

'You dined with papa yesterday?' said Clare, after a pause.

'I had to deny myself that pleasure, being otherwise engaged; but he had an old friend with him,' replied Desmond, tugging his moustache as he accentuated the word; 'and I have come here with his express permission,' he added; but instead of seating himself, he drew very near, and bent over her, with tenderness in his tone and manner.

'Express permission?' repeated Clare, lifting her clear, bright eyes composedly to his.

'Yes—to take you out for a ride; we may join Sir Carnaby and my sister, who——'

He paused, for this was not what he came to say; but he felt an awkwardness in the situation, and the perfect coolness or apparent unconsciousness of Clare put him out, all the more so that now a smile stole over her face.

Vanity and admiration of her beauty had made him dangle so much about Clare, that he felt the time was come when 'something must be done.'

He had come to do that 'something'—to propose, in short; and now, with all his insouciance, he had a doubt that, if it did not give him pain, certainly piqued his pride; and he actually hoped that visitors might interrupt the tête-à-tête.

But he hoped in vain; the hour was too early for callers.

Clare's smile brightened; but there was an undeniable curl on her lovely lip.

He had just enough of lazy tenderness in his manner, with something in his tone and eye which seemed to indicate what he had in view, and yet seemed unmistakably to say: 'I can't act the lover, so why the deuce do I come here to talk nonsense?'

'My mail phaeton is at the door; shall I send for my horse and ring for yours?' he asked.

'Excuse me—I have a headache this morning.'

'So sorry; but, perhaps, you may be better amused at home.'

'How, Major?' asked Clare.

'With books, music, or—or correspondence.'

At the last word she did colour, he saw, a very little.

'Ladies have a thousand ways of passing time that men don't possess,' he added, lapsing into his habitual bearing, which in his style of man some one describes as 'gentle and resigned weariness.'

It actually seemed too much trouble to make love when the matter became serious.

There was a pause, after which, for a change of subject, Clare asked about the horse he was to run in the Derby.

'Oh! Crusader is in capital form,' said he with animation, as this was a subject to be approached with ease. 'Though neither a large nor a powerful horse, he is "blood" all over, and there is no better animal in the stud book!'

'I know that he stands high in the betting.'

'How?'

'From the racing column in the Times.'

'Ah, you take an interest in my horse, then!'

'Of course,' replied Clare, smiling, thinking of her bets in gloves; 'a very deep interest.'

Encouraged by this trivial remark, he thought to himself, 'Hang it—here goes!' and while there occurred vaguely to his lazy mind recollections of all he had read of proposals, and seen of them on the stage, he took her hand in his, and said abruptly:

'Miss Collingwood—Clare—dearest Clare—will you be my wife? Will you marry me—love me—and all that, don't you know?'

Clare withdrew her hand, and slightly elevated her proud eyebrows, which were dark and straight rather than arched, while something of a dangerous and then of a droll sparkle came into her dreamy and beautiful eyes, for neither the tone nor the mode of the proposal proved pleasing to her, in her then mood of mind especially.

'Excuse me, Major Desmond,' said she, scarcely knowing how to frame her reply, 'you have done me an honour, which—which I must, however, decline.'

'Just now, perhaps; but—but in time, dearest Clare?'

'Your sister may call me that; but to you I am Miss Collingwood.'

'Shall I ever get beyond that?' he urged, in a soft tone.

'I do not know,' murmured Clare, doubtfully; for she knew what her father wished and expected of her; 'but as yet let us be friends as we have been, and not talk of marriage, I implore you.'

'Deuced odd!' thought the Major, who, perhaps, felt relieved in his mind.

Clare knew well the calm, half-passionless, and insouciant world of the Major and his 'set,' her own 'set' too; she was not surprised; she had ere now expected some such declaration or proposal as this from Desmond; but certainly, with all his inanity, and perhaps stupidity, she expected it to be made in other terms, and with more ardour and earnestness; and at the moment he spoke her memory flashed back to the same moonlight night of which Trevor Chute had thought and remembered so vividly when he parted from her father but a few hours before.

While Desmond was considering what to say next, it chanced that Clare drew her handkerchief from the Marguerite pouch, and with it the note, which fell at the feet of her visitor. Ere she was aware, he had picked it up, and saw that it was addressed to Trevor Chute.

With a greater sense of irritation, pique, and even jealousy than he thought himself capable of feeling—certainly than ever he felt before—he presented it to her, saying blandly:

'You have dropped a note, Miss Collingwood—addressed to some one at the "Rag," I think.'

'Oh, thanks,' she replied in a voice with the slightest tinge of alarm and annoyance.

'Have you many correspondents there?' he ventured to ask, with the slightest approach to a sneer, as he placed his glass in his eye.

'Only one,' replied Clare, now thoroughly irritated. 'Captain Chute—Trevor Chute—perhaps you have heard of him.'

'Yes; does Sir Carnaby know of this correspondence?'

'No,' she replied, a little defiantly.

The Major began to feel himself, as he would have phrased it, 'nowhere,' and to wish that he had not called that morning. There ensued a break in the conversation which was embarrassing to both, till Clare, who was the first to recover her equanimity, said with a smile, as she deemed some explanation due, if not to him, at least to herself:

'It is to Trevor—to Captain Chute—concerning poor Ida—not on any affair of mine, be assured; but,' she added, colouring a little, 'you will not mention this circumstance to—to papa?'

'You have my word, Miss Collingwood; and now good-morning.'

He left her with coldness of manner, but only a little; for whatever he thought, he deemed it bad style to discover the least emotion. But he felt that even in a small way, in virtue of his promised secrecy, he and Clare had a secret understanding. Why had she been so afraid that he should know of her correspondence with this fellow Chute, who he understood had been a discarded admirer of hers in her first season; and why keep her father in ignorance of it, when Chute was the old man's guest but yesterday?

It was, he thought, altogether one of those things 'no fellow can understand,' and drove off in his mail phaeton to visit Crusader in his loose box.

Clare remained full of thought after he had gone, and the note had been despatched to Trevor Chute; she felt none of the excitement a proposal might cause in another. She was, in fact, more annoyed than fluttered or flattered by it. Yet Clare felt a need for loving some one and being beloved in turn. It is a necessity in every female, perhaps every true human heart.

Clare had certainly many admirers, but she was always disposed to criticise them, and the woman who criticises a man rarely ends by loving him; so since that old time, to which we have already referred, she had gone through the world of gaiety heart-free; and though mingling much in society, she had somehow made a little world of her own—a species of independent existence, and even preferred the retirement of their country home, with a few pleasant visitors, of course, and weaving out schemes of benevolence to the tenantry, to the whirl of life in London, with its balls, drums, crushes, and at-homes, attending sometimes three in the same evening, as it was called, though the early morning was glittering on the silver harness as the carriage drove her home.

Though the proposal of Desmond had excited not the least emotion in the heart of Clare Collingwood, it caused some unpleasant and unwelcome thoughts to arise, and at such a time as this more than ever did she miss her mother, whose affection and counsel were never wanting. She had a dread of her father, and of his cold and cutting, yet withal courtly, way of addressing her, when in any way, however lightly, she displeased him, and now she feared intuitively that she would do so, or had done so, in a serious manner.

She knew how much he was under the influence of the Desmonds, and felt assured that something unpleasant would come out of that morning's episode; and apart from having such a husband as the Major, even with his great wealth and prospective title, too, Clare felt that she could not tolerate the close relationship of his sister, a passé belle, horsey in nature and style, who had been engaged in intrigues and flirtations that were unnumbered, and more than once had made a narrow escape from being a source of downright scandal, for the Honourable Evelyn Desmond was fast—undeniably very fast indeed for an unmarried lady, and the queen of a fast set, too—yet it never reached the ears of Clare, though the rumour went current that she had dined at Richmond and elsewhere with Sir Carnaby Collingwood and some of the fastest men in the Brigade, and without any other chaperon than her brother. But then the baronet was more than old enough to be her father, with whom a late conversation now recurred to Clare's memory. While talking of Desmond, she had remarked:

'I am surprised, papa, that, with all her opportunities, his sister does not get married.'

'Why?' he asked, curtly.

'She has now been out for seven or eight seasons—even more, I think—and is getting quite passé!

'Yet she is much admired; besides, Clare, it is not her place to make proposals.'

'Of course not.'

'Nor is it every proposal she would accept, any more than yourself,' said the baronet, with a loftiness of manner.

'She seems to dazzle without touching men's hearts.'

'Indeed!'

'Papa, how sententious you have become! But really I don't think Evelyn will ever be married at all.'

'Time will show, Clare—time will show,' chuckled Sir Carnaby, showing all his brilliantly white Parisian teeth.

'It will not be her fault if she is not, papa,' said Violet, who had a special dislike to the lady in question. 'I wonder how long she has studied the language of the flowers in the conservatory with old Colonel Rakes' son?'

'Why?'

'And never got him to propose, I mean, papa. Her eyes are handsome, yet they smiled exclusively, for the time, on young Rakes.'

'Violet!'

'One good flirtation, she told me, always led to another.'

'Surely that is not her style,' said Sir Carnaby, with some asperity; 'and I have to request, Miss Violet, that you will not speak in this rough manner of any lady in the position of Miss Desmond.'

This and many similar conversations of the kind now recurred to Clare, and led her to dread her father's questions, and perhaps his lectures, on the subject, and she began to feel sadness and doubt.

From these thoughts she was roused by the entrance of a servant, who said:

'Miss Collingwood, a jeweller's man is here with the jewels from Bond Street for your inspection.'

'The jewels! what jewels? I ordered none,' said Clare.

'He 'ave Sir Carnaby's card, miss,' replied the man, pulling his long whiskers, in imitation of Desmond and others.

The man entered with a mincing step, and bowed very low, announcing the name of the firm he represented, and unlocking a handsome walnut and brass-bound box, took out the morocco cases, and unclasping them, displayed, to the surprise of Clare, three magnificent suites of diamond ornaments, all set in gold and blue enamel, reposing on the whitest of velvet. In each suite were a tiara, pendant ear-rings, and a necklace, each and all worth several thousand pounds.

'Oh, such lovely jewels!' exclaimed Violet, who came in at the moment, and with a burst of girlish delight; 'these diamonds are fit for a prince or a maharajah! Clare! Clare! are they meant for you?'

'They are submitted for inspection and choice.'

'What can this mean? There is some mistake,' replied Clare, colouring with extreme annoyance. If they came by her father's order, they came as a bribe; if from Desmond, they could not be left for a moment! 'Did Sir Carnaby give his address?' she asked.

'No, miss; he simply ordered the three sets to be sent on approval, and I brought them here. This is Sir Carnaby's card.'

'They are all too large—much too large for me,' said Clare, hastily. 'Take them away, please, and I shall ask Sir Carnaby about them when he returns.'

The man bowed, returned the jewels to their cases, and was ushered out.

'Oh, papa, how kind of you!' exclaimed Violet, apostrophizing the absent. 'Are you sure, Clare, that these three lovely suites were not for us?'

'I am sure of—nothing, Violet: I don't know what to think,' replied Clare, wearily, and with an unmistakable air of annoyance. 'The Collingwood jewels are enough for us all, Violet.'

CHAPTER VIII.

'THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH FOR THE STAR.'

Ignorant of the little scene that had passed in the Collingwoods' drawing-room, Trevor Chute felt only something very nearly amounting to transports of rage when he thought of all that had occurred overnight at Sir Carnaby's club. The callous remarks of the frivolous old man stung him to the heart. So Clare as well as her father had blotted him out of their selfish world, and Desmond was the man who took his place!

Love, doubt, indignation, and jealousy tormented him by turns, or all together at once: love for Clare—the dear old love that had never died within him, and that, seeing her again and hearing her voice, had roused in all its former strength and tenderness; doubt whether she were worthy of it, and whether he had a place yet in her heart; indignation at the underbred indifference of her father to whatever he might think or feel, and jealousy of the influence of Desmond with them both.

Nor were the visions of hope and revenge absent. He pondered that if she loved him—if she still loved him—why leave it unknown? why should he trifle with himself and her? Why tamper with fate? Why not marry her in spite of her father and Desmond, too? In mere revenge he might make Clare his own, after all!

Then second, and perhaps better, thoughts came anon; for Trevor Chute, though to his friends apparently but an ordinary good fellow in most respects, a mere captain of the line, and so forth, was in spirit as genuine a soldier and a knight as chivalrous as any that ever rode at Hastings with the bastard Conqueror, or at Bannockburn; and thus, on reflection, his heart recoiled from making any advances to his old love—to the girl that had been torn from him, unless he obtained that which he considered hopeless—the permission of her father.

In India, why was it, when so many perished of jungle-fever and other pests, that he escaped with scarcely the illness of a day?—when among Nagas, Bhotanese, and Thibetians, matchlock balls and poisoned arrows whistled past him, and keen-edged swords crossed his, no missile or weapon had found a passage to his heart?

Amid these stirring scenes and episodes he had striven to forget everything—more than all, those days of his Guards' life in England; and now—now a lovely face—'only the face of a woman—only a woman's face, nothing more,' as the song has it, and a woman's voice, with all its subtle music, had summoned again all the half-buried memories of the past!

From day-dreams, tormenting thoughts, and weary speculative fancies, which were in some respects alien to his natural temperament, Chute was roused by his valet, Tom Travers, presenting him with a note on the inevitable silver salver.

If, as we have related, he was startled before by seeing an envelope with the Collingwood crest thereon still more was he startled now on receiving another addressed in the well-remembered handwriting of Clare! How long, long it seemed since last he had looked upon it!

While his heart and hands trembled with surprise, he opened Clare's note, which stated briefly that she had heard from Mr. Vane of their intention of going abroad, and begged that he would not forget his promise of once more visiting Ida, by whose request she now wrote.

'The pallor of her complexion and the lowness of her spirits alarm me greatly,' continued Clare. 'I can but hope that when the season is over, and we go to Carnaby Court, the quietness there and the pleasant shady groves in autumn may restore her to health; only papa always likes to have the house full of lively friends from town, as you know of old.'

'Did her hand tremble when she referred to the past?' thought Chute, viciously. 'Was Desmond hanging over her chair when she penned this? Why does she and not Ida write to me? Is this angling or coquetry? But Clare needs not to angle with me, and she never was a coquette.'

The truth was that poor Clare had written, but with the greatest reluctance, by desire of Ida, who, for secret and kind reasons of her own, wished her sister to address him; and the sight of her handwriting did not fail to produce much of the effect which the gentle Ida intended; for Chute, while resolving to pay a visit, meant it to be a farewell one; and if he saw Clare, to suppress all emotion, to seem 'as cool as a cucumber.'

And yet, but for his promise given, and in accordance with Jack Beverley's dying request, he would, on visiting London, no more have gone near the Collingwood family than have faced a volcano in full flame; perhaps he would not have come to London at all till the season was over; and now he was preparing to pay a second visit, but as he meant, a farewell one, to Ida, after dining—actually dining, per express invitation—with the father, who, in a spirit of selfish policy, had broken his engagement with Clare.

It was an absurdly anomalous situation, and altogether strange.

With all Trevor Chute's regard for Jerry Vane, many of his deepest sympathies were with his brave comrade, Beverley, whose last moments he had soothed, and to whose last faint mutterings he had listened when life ebbed in that hot and distant bungalow—mutterings of his past years and absent love—of the beechen woods of his English home.

Chute had a brotherly love for Ida, and had she not asked him to love her as a sister?

He could remember a dainty, delicate little girl, with a rose-leaf complexion, a face of smiles and dimples, all gay with white lace and blue ribbon, and the floating masses of her auburn hair bound by a simple fillet of gold.

And the memory of these past times, with all their dear and deep associations, came strongly back to Trevor's heart when, within a short time of the receipt of Clare's note, he sat with Ida's thin white hand in his, gazing into the depths of her tender brown eyes, on her pale and delicate cheek, and confessing to himself how lovely she was, and how charming as a friend.

She was every way more calm and composed than when he visited her before, and she seemed much inclined to talk of their first intercourse and relations in the years that were gone; and more than once she stirred the depths of Trevor's honest heart by a few words, dropped as if casually, yet so delicately, from which he was led to infer that he had frequently formed the topic of conversation between her and Clare, and that he was not without an interest in the breast of the latter still.

After a pause he sighed, but with some little bitterness, as he thought of the formidable rival who had Sir Carnaby's 'warmest wishes,' and said:

'Am I, then, to suppose that you have pleaded for me with Clare?'

'Yes, dear Trevor,' she replied, as her slender fingers tightened upon his.

'There was a time when I did not require even you, Ida, to do so for me,' he replied, mistaking, perhaps, her meaning, for he was oversensitive. 'That is all past and gone now; but in the same kind spirit may I not plead with you for one who was very dear to you once—poor Jerry Vane?'

She coloured deeply, and then grew very pale again, and while the long lashes of her soft eyes dropped, she said:

'Do not speak of this again, Trevor—my heart is in Beverley's grave.'

'Yet,' he urged gently, 'a time may come——'

'It will never come.'

'Poor Jerry—as he loved you once, he loves you still. I hope, dear Ida, you pardon me for speaking of this to you.'

'I do from my heart, Trevor; but tell me, in the time that you have seen me—I mean since your return—have you not been struck by a certain strangeness of action about me?'

'I confess that I have.'

'I am conscious of it repeatedly,' she continued with a strange and sad smile.

'In the midst of an animated conversation, I have all at once perceived your thoughts to wander, an expression of alarm to creep over your face, a kind of shudder through your frame, and your hand to tremble.'

'It is so.'

'And this sudden emotion, Ida?

'Comes when I think of Beverley—or, rather, this emotion, which I can neither avert nor control, makes me think of him even when my thoughts have been elsewhere.'

'This is very strange,' said Trevor Chute, as some of what he deemed Beverley's 'wild speeches' came back to memory again.

'Strange indeed, Trevor; but morbid thoughts come over me, with the thrill you have remarked, even in the sunshine and when with others, but more especially when I am alone; and there seems to be—oh, Trevor Chute, I know not how to phrase it, lest you think me absurd or eccentric,' she continued, while a wild, sad earnestness stole into her eyes, 'that there hovers near me, and unknown to all, a spirit—a something that is unseen and intangible.'

'This is but overheated fancy,' said Chute tenderly, and with commiseration; 'you should be alone as seldom as possible, and change of air and scene will cure you of all this gloom. On my return—if I should return to London—I shall hope to hear that you are, as you used to be, the bright and happy Ida of my own brighter and happier days.'

And rising now, he lingered with Ida's hand in his, intent on departure, as his last orders to his valet had been to pack at once for France or Germany; and Tom Travers, a faithful fellow, whose discharge he had bought from the Guards, and who had been with him in India and everywhere else, was fully engaged on that duty by this time.

'But, dear Ida,' he said, 'dismiss as soon as you can these gloomy ideas from your mind, and cease to imagine that anything so unnatural, so repugnant to the fixed laws of nature, as aught hovering near you unseen, forcing you to think of Beverley, could exist.'

'I do not require to be forced to think of Beverley,' said she, with tender sadness.

'Pardon me, I did not mean that,' said he.

'I know; but that which seems to haunt me at times may exist; the world is full of mystery, and so is all nature. We know not how even a seed takes root, or a blade of grass springs from the earth.'

'Ida, this is the cant of the spiritualists!' urged Trevor Chute; 'do not adopt it. What would Sir Carnaby think of such a theme?'

She slightly shrugged her shoulders, and with a little laugh said:

'Papa's views of life are very different from mine, and his ideas of the superiority of mind over matter must be vague, if, indeed, he has any views on the subject at all. Do you go to the Continent alone?'

'No, Jerry Vane proposes to accompany me.'

'Also leaving London in the height of the season!'

'His reasons are nearly the same as mine,' replied Chute. 'Have you any message to him?'

'None,' said she, colouring and looking down.

'None,' repeated Chute, in a half-reproachful tone.

'Save my kindest wishes. You know, Trevor, that I used Jerry very ill; I am well aware of that, but it is too late now to—to——' She paused in confusion, and then said, 'Poor Jerry, I pity him with unspeakable pity.'

'I would that he heard you,' said Chute, caressing her pretty hand.

'Why?'

'Does not Dryden tell us that pity melts the mind to love?'

'Do not repeat the admission I have made,' said Ida, as a shade of annoyance crossed her pallid face, adding firmly, 'Let him have no false hopes; my heart has a great tenderness, but no such love as he wishes, for him.'

'And now farewell, Ida, for a long time.'

'A pleasant journey to you,' said she, and tears started to her eyes, as he bowed himself out of her boudoir.

'Thanks—to-night may see me in Paris.'

CHAPTER IX.

DOUBTS DISPELLED.

'In Paris to-night?' said a voice that thrilled him, and he found himself face to face with Clare, who unexpectedly, and somewhat to her own confusion, appeared at the drawing-room door.

'I knew not that you were at home,' replied Chute, with some coldness of manner, as the memories of last night occurred to him, and he too became confused as he added, 'I meant to have left a farewell card for Sir Carnaby.'

Mechanically they entered the drawing-room. For reasons of her own, Ida did not follow them, and feeling full of the awkwardness of the situation, Trevor Chute lingered, hat in hand, and Clare, amid the tremor and tumult of her thoughts, forgot to offer him a seat.

She was provoked now that she had yielded to Ida's urgency, and written personally to Chute.

Yet wherefore, or why? She had loved him in the past time, and loved him still, as she whispered in her heart; and felt sure that he loved her; and yet—and yet she thought now that letter should have been written by Ida, not her, if written at all.

'I hope you enjoyed your evening with papa at the club,' she said; with polite frigidity of manner.

'Far from it,' said he abruptly, as he felt piqued thereby.

'Indeed!'

'I can scarcely tell you why.'

'Do, if possible,' said she, with genuine surprise.

'Pardon the admission, Miss Collingwood, but all night long Sir Carnaby sang the praises of a certain Major Desmond.'

Clare coloured deeply; her eyes darkened, and sparkled, yet softly, under the sweep of their long black lashes.

'It was horrible taste in papa—to you especially! How could he act so strangely?'

'So cruelly, Clare,' said Trevor Chute, with a burst of honest emotion, born of the sudden line this conversation had taken.

'Fear not for Desmond,' said she, in a bitter, yet low tone, as she shook her graceful head.

'He was to—to propose for your hand.'

'He did so this morning,' was the calm reply.

'And you, Miss Collingwood, you——'

'Refused him.'

'Oh, Clare!' exclaimed Trevor, and all the old love beamed in his eyes as he uttered her name.

'Neither doubt nor misunderstand me,' said Clare, very calmly, and in a voice that was earnest, sweet, and low. 'Papa and others too' ('What others?' thought Chute) 'have tried hard to make me forget what you and I were to each other once, but he and they have failed.'

'Thank God!' exclaimed Chute, so full of emotion that he clutched the back of a chair for support.

'In the seeming emptiness of my heart,' said Clare, speaking in a low tone and with downcast eyes, while the throbbing of her bosom was apparent beneath her dress, 'I made for myself a life within a life, known to myself alone.'

'And that life, darling?'

'Was full of you.'

He made a step towards her; but she drew back, and said, questioningly:

'And you, Trevor, in the days of this long separation?'

'Have never, never forgotten you, Clare!'

'Yet you must have seen many!'

'Many—yes, and lovely women, too; but never have I felt a touch of even the slightest passing pang or preference for any one out of the many.'

Clare gazed at him softly and sweetly. She did not, she could not, tell him that in the intervals of a brilliant garden party she had rejected for the third time the passionate supplications and proposals of one who could have made her a marchioness; and those who knew of this thought her cold and proud, but they were wrong, for Clare was 'one of those women who, beneath the courtly negligence of a chill manner, are capable of infinite tenderness, infinite nobility, and infinite self-reproach,' and her heart was loving, tender, sweet, and warm as a summer rose to those who knew her, and whom she loved.

The mist was dispelling fast now.

Again they were discovering, or recalling, all that was sympathetic in each other, and learning to understand each other by word, and hint, or glance, when soul seemed to speak to soul, and more than all, when hand met hand, did Clare feel that which she had never felt since their separation, how magnetic was the influence between them, and how no other hand had made the blood course through her veins as his had done.

The situation was becoming perilous, and Sir Carnaby might at any moment come upon them, like the ogre of a fairy tale, or the irate father of a melodrama.

'I must go, Clare,' said he, but yet he lingered.

Again he was calling her by her name—her Christian name—as of old, in the dear past time, and how sweetly it sounded in her ear!

'Trevor,' said she, pressing a hand on her heart as if to soothe its throbbing, while she leant on a table with the other, 'stay yet a moment.'

Clare was with him again; he was conscious of nothing more; and the old love that had never passed out of his heart, or hers either, stronger now than it had ever been, made him linger in her presence, and made eye dwell on eye, tenderly, sadly, and passionately, till emotion got the better of all prudence, pride, and policy, and snatching the hand that was pressed upon her bosom, he besought her, in what terms, or with what words, he scarcely knew in the whirl of his thoughts, to be his wife at all risks and hazards.

But Clare drew her hand away, and mournfully shook her head, and then, with an effort, spoke calmly—

'You know, Trevor, how I loved poor mamma, and how she loved me?'

'I do, my own Clare.'

'Well, on her death-bed she made me give her two solemn promises.'

'And these were?'

'First, to be, so far as I could, a mother to Ida and Violet, and—and——'

'The second? Oh, Clare, keep me not in suspense!'

'Never to marry without the fullest consent of papa; and as he acted before, so will he act again, out of mere petulance and pride, perhaps, as he will never acknowledge himself in error. Oh, Trevor!' she added, pathetically, 'I would that we had never met, and almost wish that after being so cruelly parted we had never met more.'

Trevor Chute was silent for a time, but a sense of irritation against her father gave him courage to hope.

'Clare, Sir Carnaby is a somewhat gay man,' said he, 'and he has hinted to Jerry Vane, to Colonel Rakes, and others, the chance——'

'Of what?' asked Clare, as her lips became pale.

'Pardon me—his marrying again.'

'With whom?'

'I heard no name.'

'Marrying again!' she exclaimed, with anger, as certain undefined suspicions occurred to her or came to memory. 'If Sir Carnaby does aught so absurd, I shall consider myself absolved from my promise to await his permission, and—and——'

'What, dearest Clare?'

'Become that which I should have been three long years ago,' she replied, with tenderness and vehemence.

'My wife, darling?'

'Your wife, Trevor.'

'Oh, Clare, God bless you for these words!'

And as his arms went round her, all the man's brave heart went out to her, and tears started to his eyes as he kissed her with a passionate warmth in which he had never indulged in the past days of their early and unclouded love.

Soft Clare in his arms again! Clare's tender lips touching his! Oh, which was a dream and which was the truth? The three years of excitement, sorrow, and disappointment in burning India; the marches under the fierce glaring sun; long days of drought and thirst, when facing death among the fierce hill tribes; nights, chill and bitter, among the Himalayan snows; the hard existence in barrack, tent, and bungalow, all so different from what his Guards life had been in London—the present or the past!

But to what would the present lead?

They knew too well that, so far as Sir Carnaby was concerned, his consent would never be given.

'Heavens, Clare!' exclaimed Trevor, in this bitter conviction, 'to what a death in life does your father doom you!'

'Say us, Trevor,' said she, in a choking voice.

'Bless you, dear girl, for saying so; but you it seems, and all for my sake!'

At last he had to retire—literally to tear himself away.

So there was acted and there was ended, for the time, their bitter but sorrowful romance, in that most prosaic of all places a fashionable drawing-room, with all its mirrors, lounges, porcelains, and objets d'art, which seem so necessary to that apartment which Button Cook calls essentially 'the British drawing-room,' and mentally over and over again did Trevor Chute react and recall every detail of that delicious, yet painful interview, which had come so unexpectedly about, while the swift tidal train bore him from Charing Cross; and her last words seemed to linger yet in his ear—her face before his eye, like the vision of a waking dream—as on the deck of the steam-packet he sat, apart from all, full of his own thoughts, and saw the lights of Harwich and Landguard Fort mingling with moonshine on the water, while the clang of the Bell Buoy came on the wind, and the Shipwash floating beacon was soon left astern, and Trevor Chute, careless of whither he went, changed his mind and resolved to go to Germany.

Happy thoughts banished sleep from his eyes, and on deck he stayed nearly the whole night through, till the muddy waters of the Maese were rippling against the bow of the Dutch steamer.

Clare loved him still, as she had ever, ever done! New happiness grew with hope in his heart.

Yet the prospect was a hard one. He could only know that, though not his wife, Clare Collingwood should never be the wife of another, and tenderly he looked on a ring of sapphires and opals from her hand, on which he had slipped their old engagement ring of diamonds.

He was alone, we have said, for his friend Vane did not accompany him.

He had a card for Lady Rakes' 'at home;' Clare was going, and Ida too; so the former asked Trevor to get him to defer his journey and be present, adding:

'It is for Ida's sake; you know all I mean, and all I hope she wishes.'

'I do, Clare, and so will Jerry.'

'But do not speak of her.'

Hence Vane remained behind in London.

CHAPTER X.

FOR WHOM THE JEWELS WERE INTENDED.

Clare was seated in a shady corner of the library, looking alternately at the German map in Murray's Guide and the diamond ring which she had first received from Trevor Chute on the eventful moonlight night at Carnaby Court.

How strange that it should be on her finger again after all!

'And to think,' she muttered, 'that papa should so unkindly and, with bad taste have stung his tender and loving heart by speaking to him of me and that big butterfly soldier, Desmond! No wonder it is that Trevor seemed cold, constrained, and strange. Oh, my love, what must you have thought of me!'

And the girl, as she uttered this aloud, pressed the ring to her lips, while her eyes filled with tears. Then she sank into one of her reveries, from which, after a time, she was roused by the entrance of her father. He was attired for a ride in the Row, had his whip in his hand, and was buttoning his faultlessly fitting gloves on his thin white aristocratic hands with the care that he usually exhibited; but Clare could perceive that his face wore an undoubtedly cloudy expression.

'Papa, for whom were those lovely jewels that came here for inspection yesterday?' she asked.

'Not for you, Miss Collingwood.'

'Yet they were sent here.'

'A mistake of the shop-people.'

Clare looked up with surprise in her sweet face, for his manner, though studiously polite in tone, was curt and strange.

'Perhaps they were for Ida?' said Clare, gently.

'No.'—'Violet, then?'

'No.'—'For whom, then, papa?'

'The sister of him you rejected yesterday.'

'Evelyn Desmond!'

'Yes, Miss Collingwood; and thereby hangs a tale,' replied Sir Carnaby, giving a final touch to his stock in a mirror opposite. 'Did any silly fancy for this man who has just returned to India—this Captain Chute—influence you in this matter?'

Clare coloured painfully, but said 'No.'

'Glad to hear it, Clare, as I thought all that stuff was forgotten long ago,' he continued, with the nearest approach to a frown that was ever seen on his usually impassible visage.

'You asked him to dine at your club, papa,' said Clare, evasively.

'Yes, out of mere politeness, to thank him, as Beverley's friend, for visiting Ida, though I fear the visit may make her grief a greater bore than ever. But why did you decline an alliance that would be so advantageous as that with Desmond?'

'Simply because I cannot love him, and I don't wish to leave you, dearest papa; now that you are getting old.'

'Old!' He was frowning in earnest now.

'Pardon me, papa, I love no man sufficiently to make me leave your roof for his.'

'What stuff and nonsense is this, Clare Collingwood!'

'It is neither, but truth, papa.'

'Though you have the bad taste to inform me that I am getting old, permit me to remind you that in many things you, Clare, are a mere child, though a woman in years.'

'A child, perhaps, compared with such women as Desmond's sister Evelyn,' replied Clare, with some annoyance.

'And as a woman in years, I, foreseeing the time when I could not have you always to reign over my table at Carnaby Court or in Piccadilly, have deemed it necessary to provide myself with a—a——'

'Papa!'

'Well, a substitute,' he added, giving a finishing adjust to his gloves, and then looking Clare steadily in the face.

'In the person of Evelyn Desmond!' she exclaimed, in a breathless voice, and becoming very pale.

'Precisely, my dear Miss Collingwood. She has promised to fill up in my heart all the fearful void left there by the loss of your good mother. I meant to have told you this long ago, but—but it was an awkward subject to approach.'

'So I should think!'

'With one who comports herself like you; and—ah—in fact, now that we are about it, I may mention that the marriage has been postponed only in consequence of Beverley's death, Ida's mourning, illness, and all that sort of thing.'

'So my sacrifice in declining poor Trevor Chute, after all his faith, love, and cruel treatment, was uncalled for,' thought Clare, as she stood like a marble statue, with scorn growing on her lovely lip, while endeavouring to realize the startling tidings now given to her.

'Is this to be the end of Evelyn's endless manoeuvring and countless flirtations?' she exclaimed after a pause.

'Miss Collingwood, I spoke of Miss Desmond,' said he.

'So did I,' replied Clare, with growing anger.

'Don't be so impulsive—rude, I should say—it is bad form, bad style, very.'

'Poor mamma!' sighed Clare; 'she was a good and true gentlewoman.'

'That I grant you, but a trifle cold and stately.'

'When she died I thought it is only when angels leave us that we see the light of heaven on their wings.'

'Now don't be melodramatic; it is absurd, and to be emotional is bad taste. As one cuckoo does not make a spring any more than one swallow a summer, so no more should one affair of the human heart make up the end of a human existence.'

'Are you really in earnest about this, papa?'

'Of course, though I am not much in earnest about anything usually; it is not worth one's while.'

'At a certain age, perhaps,' thought Clare; 'but you were earnest enough once, in dismissing poor Trevor Chute.'

'You will break this matter to your sisters,' said he, preparing to leave her.

'My sisters!' said Clare, bitterly and sadly. 'Oh, papa! think of Violet's prospects with—with' (she feared to add such a chaperon)—'and of Ida, so sad, so delicate in health.'

'Nonsense, Miss Collingwood, Ida will soon marry again; such absurd grief never lasts; and I am sure that Vane loves her still.'

'Then he is not supposed to have got over "that stuff," as you think Trevor Chute and I have done.'

'Miss Collingwood, I do not like my words repeated; so with your permission we shall cease the subject, and I shall bid you good-morning.'

Whenever he was offended with any of his own family the tone he adopted was one of elaborate politeness; and twiddling his eyeglass, with a kind of Dundreary skip, this model father, this 'awful dad' of Clare, departed to the abode of his inamorata.

Clare remained for some time standing where he had left her as if turned to stone. The proud and sensitive girl's cheek burned with mingled shame and anger as she thought of the ridicule, the perhaps coarse gibes of the clubs, and general irony of society, which such an alliance was apt to excite; and with all the usual command of every emotion peculiar to her set and style, as this conviction came upon her, tears hot and swift rushed into her sweet dark eyes.

Could Sir Carnaby have been so insane as to contemplate a double alliance with that fast family? she asked of herself.

'It would have made us all more than ever ridiculous!' she muttered aloud; and then she thought with more pleasure of her re-engagement with Trevor Chute, the promise given, and which she would certainly redeem; yet she fairly wept for the price of its redemption, as she shrank with a species of horror from seeing that 'Parky party,' as she knew the men about town called the fair Evelyn, occupying the place of her dead mother at home and abroad, and presented at Court and elsewhere in the Collingwood jewels.

Vanity, perhaps, as much as anything else, was the cause of this new idea in the mind of the shallow Sir Carnaby. Though he felt perfectly conscious that his own day was past, he would not acknowledge it. He knew well, too, that though many enjoyed his dinners and wines, his crushes in Piccadilly, and his cover-shooting at Carnaby Court, and that many tolerated him for the sake of his rank, position, and charming daughters, they deemed him 'no end of an old bore,' and this conviction galled and cut him to the quick.

Hence, if Evelyn Desmond became his wife, the fact would be a kind of protest against Time itself!

'How society will laugh! it is intolerable!' exclaimed Ida, thoroughly rousing herself when she heard the startling tidings. 'You, Clare, were ever his favourite—the one who, as he said always, reminded him most of poor mamma 'when she last folded her pale, thin hands so meekly, and after kissing us all, gave up her soul to God; yet he could tell you, in this jaunty way, that another was to take her place, and that other was such a woman as Evelyn Desmond!'

Already the rumour of 'the coming event' must, they thought, be known in town, else wherefore the hint thrown out so vaguely by Trevor Chute? Already! The mortification of the girls was unspeakable.

Had the unwelcome announcement been made to her but a day sooner, at least before her chance interview with Trevor—that interview so full of deep and tender interest to them both—she might have been tempted to make a promise more distinct than she had given, for Clare's gentle heart was full of indignation now.

Trevor Chute could not now make, as in the past time, such settlements as her father's ambition required and deemed necessary; yet his means were ample, and she had lands, riches, and position enough for both; so why should she not be his wife?

Such are the idiosyncrasies of human nature, that her father, who once liked Trevor Chute, now disliked, and more than disliked him, because he felt quite sensible that he had done the frank but unfortunate soldier who had loved his daughter a wrong.

To stay in town with this engagement on the tapis, and this marriage in prospect, was more, however, than Clare cared to endure, or Ida either. When it was pressed upon the baronet that the three sisters should go to Carnaby Court or elsewhere, he affected much surprise, as they had barely reached the middle of the season, and the engagement list contained many affairs towards which Clare, and certainly Violet, had looked forward with interest.

Though he made a show of some opposition to all this, Sir Carnaby was not unwilling to be left in town alone at this time, where he had to be in frequent attendance upon his intended, where there were settlements to arrange, a trousseau to prepare, and jewels to select, so the plan of Clare and Ida was at once adopted.

CHAPTER XI.

A ROMANCE OF THE DRAWING-ROOM.

'It is bitter,' says a powerful writer, 'to know those whom we love dead; but it is more bitter to be as dead to those who, once having loved us, have sunk our memory deep beneath an oblivion that is not the oblivion of the grave.'

Jerry Vane had experienced much of this bitterness in the past time; but new hopes were already dawning within him.

He had received Clare's message from Trevor Chute, who, for the life of him, in the fulness of his own joy, could not, nathless his promise to her, help telling Vane what she had said of Ida's probable wishes; thus, with a heart light as a bird's, on the evening of the 'at-home,' he betook himself to a part of Belgravia where at that season the great houses, rising floor above floor, have usually every window ablaze with light, and awnings of brilliant hues extending from the pillared portico to the kerb, with soft bright carpets stretched beneath for the tread of pretty feet in the daintiest of boots, while the carriages, with rich liveries and flashing harness, line the way, waiting to set down or take up.

Countless carriages were there; those which had deposited their freights were drawn up on the opposite side of the square, wheel to wheel, like a park of artillery; others were setting down past the lighted portico, which was crowded by servants in livery. The bustle was great, nor were smart hansoms and even rickety 'growlers' wanting in the throng of more dashing vehicles, bringing bachelors, like Jerry, from their clubs.

Full of one thought—Ida—he was betimes at Colonel Rakes' house—earlier, indeed, than was his wont—and piloted his way up the great staircase and through the great drawing-rooms, which were hung with stately family portraits of the Rakes of other times, and were already crowded with people of the best style, for the 'at-home' was usually a 'crusher' in this house; a sea of velvets and silks, diamonds, and sapphires; and every other man wore a ribbon, star, or order of some kind.

Of his hostess Lady Rakes, a fade old woman of fashion, with her company smile and insipid remarks for all in succession, and her husband the Colonel, who, till Sir Carnaby came, was ever about Evelyn Desmond, with whom he fancied himself to have an incipient flirtation, we shall say no particular more, as they have no part in our story.

The Collingwoods had not yet arrived. Vane could see nothing of them amid the throng while looking everywhere for Ida. Any very definite idea he had none; but love was the impulse that led him to seek her society so sedulously again—to see her, and hear her voice. How often had he said and thought, even while his whole heart yearned for her, 'I shall never torment myself by looking on her face again!' and now he was searching for her with a heart that was hungry and eager.

He heard carriage after carriage come up and deposit its occupants, name after name announced, and saw group after group stream up the staircase and glide through the doors. Would she come after all? He was beginning to fear not, when suddenly the name of 'Collingwood' caught his ear, and the well-saved old dandy, with an unusually bright smile on his thin aristocratic face, appeared with Clare leaning on one arm and Ida on the other. With all their beauty, we have said that he felt his daughters a bore; thus, so soon as he could, he made all haste to leave them in the care of others, while he mixed with the glittering throng.

So dense was the latter that a considerable time elapsed ere Vane could make his way to where the sisters stood, with more than one admirer near them.

There, too, was Desmond, with his cross of the Bath, and a delicate waxen flower in his lapel. Clara's refusal had certainly piqued, but not pained, the tall, languid guardsman with the tawny hair; yet he did not think his chances of ultimate success, if he cared sufficiently to attain it, were over yet; but his love was of that easy nature—more like a listless flirtation than love—that he was in no haste to press his suit again; for if this affair, and 'a very absurd affair, by Jove!' he deemed it, between Sir Carnaby and his fast sister actually came off, he would find himself often enough in the charming society of Clare; but what a joke it would be to think that Evelyn might be his mother-in-law.

All things considered, the Honourable Major was not much in want of consolation, and if he had required it, there were plenty of lovely belles there and elsewhere 'who would gladly be bride,' not 'to young Lochinvar,' but to the future Lord Bayswater.

And what of Clare, so calm in aspect and aristocratically serene?

Her thoughts were not with the gay yet empty throng that buzzed and glittered around her, but with her soldier-lover, browned and tanned by the fierce sun-glare of India, from whom she had been so long wantonly separated, and was now separated again, yet with the sweet memory of his last passionate kisses on her lip, that looked so proud to others, and who was not now, thank God! as before—facing the toils and terrors of an obscure mountain war in India, but simply self-banished to Germany till time should show what might be before them both. Where was he then? what doing, and with whom?

Thinking, doubtless, of her! so thought and pondered Clare, when she could thrust aside the coming marriage of Sir Carnaby, with all its contingent ridicule; but it was in vain that she repelled it, for the fact took full and bitter possession of her, and could not be displaced; and her lip curled scornfully as she saw her father, with his bald head shining in the light like a billiard ball, his dyed moustache, and false teeth, his undoubtedly handsome and aristocratic figure, though thin and shrunken, clad in evening costume of the most perfect fashion, simpering and bending over Evelyn, of whom we shall have more to say anon.

None that looked on Clare, and saw the greatness of her beauty, the general sweetness of her smile, her tranquil air, and somewhat languid grace, could have dreamed that irritating or bitter thoughts were flitting through her mind.

'Oh,' thought she, as she fanned herself, 'how vapid it all is, exchanging the same hackneyed commonplaces with dozens in succession.'

Yet society compelled her to appear like other people, and she found herself listening to Desmond, who lisped away in his usual fashion of things in general: the debates in the House last night, the envious screen of the ladies' gallery, la crosse at Hurlingham, polo, tent-pegging, and lemon-slicing at Lillie Bridge, the coaching club and the teams, Colonel Rakes' greys, Bayswater's roans, the Scottish Duke of Chatelherault's snow-whites, the matching of wheelers and leaders; of this party and that rout; who were and were not at the Chiswick Garden Fete.

One circumstance pleased her. Nothing in the well-bred and impassive manner of Desmond, though he hung over her and tugged his long fair moustache, could have led anyone to suppose that he had actually made her a proposal the other morning, and as to his sister's intended 'fiasco,' for such they both deemed it, the subject was not even hinted at; and now, as he moved on to speak to some one else, a gloved hand was laid on her arm, and Clare found herself beside Evelyn Desmond.

She was perhaps about thirty, yet she had more experience of the world than Clare could ever have won in a lifetime. In girlhood she had been handsome; but her beauty—if real beauty she ever possessed—was already gone; bloom at least had departed. She was fair, blue-eyed, and not unlike her brother, with a proportionately tall figure, and a face rather aristocratic in contour, but with a keener, sharper, more haughty and defiant expression.

One of the three suites of diamonds that Clare had seen was sparkling on her brow and bosom. She was attired in violet velvet, with priceless point lace, cut in the extreme mode: her neck and shoulders were bare, and her dress cut so absurdly low behind as to show rather too much of a certainly fair and snow-white back.

Clare's chief objection to her, apart from the disparity of years, was that the Honourable Evelyn had the unpleasant reputation of having done more than one very fast thing in her life, though no one could precisely say what they were; and though she was the daughter of a peer and a sister of a major in the Guards, all men had a cool, insouciant, and even flippant or half 'chaffing' mode of addressing her, that they would never have dared to adopt to a girl like Clare Collingwood.

'Your papa has told you about—you know what, Clare?' said Miss Desmond, looking not in the slightest degree abashed, though lowering her tone, certainly.

'Yes,' said Clare, curtly and wearily.

'We must be better friends than ever, Clare.'

Miss Collingwood fanned herself in silence, so Evelyn spoke again:

'I suppose you know when the—the event takes place?'

'No.'

'How monosyllabic you are,' said the other, while her lip quivered, and her eye lightened. 'Has Sir Carnaby not told you?'

'I never asked him,' was the half-contemptuous response.

'Why?'

'I was not aware that matters were in such a state of progression. A time is named, then, for—for this affaire de fantasie?'

'A month from to-day. Pray call it an affaire du cœur.'

'A month!' repeated Clare, dreamily.

'He would have it, he was so impatient,' said Evelyn Desmond, with something of a smile; but whether it was a triumphant or malignant one, Clare cared not to analyze. She only feared that the 'impatience' had been elsewhere, as Evelyn had been on the point of marrying with more than one man already, but there was always a flaw somewhere, and the affairs ended. Perhaps, as some hinted, they were too easily begun.

As she could neither express pleasure or congratulation, Clare fanned herself in silence, until Evelyn said:

'And so you have refused Harvey?'

'Yes.'

'How exceedingly funny.'

'Why?'

'Because on that same morning I finally accepted Sir Carnaby. By the way,' she added, with a glance that was not a pleasant one, 'I heard that your old admirer, Trevor Chute, once of the Guards, was in town again.'

'Indeed.'

'Yes; perhaps that accounts for poor Harvey's disappointment.'

'Think so if you choose,' replied Clare, haughtily, as she turned away to conceal how her soft cheek coloured with the excess of her annoyance.

By this time Vane, after being entangled by innumerable trains, had made his way to the side of Ida.

Jerry Vane was popular in society, and could have had many a girl for the asking. Clare and Ida, too, had often wished—for he was still the dearest of their friends—that he should marry; but they had never suggested it to him, for under the circumstances it would have seemed bad taste, and though he had but one thought—Ida, and Ida only—Jerry Vane went everywhere, and was deemed the gayest of the gay; and now, when their eyes met, there was a kind, sad smile in hers—a smile of the olden time—that took a load off his heart, and still lighter did it grow when, rising, she took his arm—as a widow she could do so now, and said:

'Take me to a cool place; the heat here is stifling, especially in this dark dress; there is a cool seat just within the conservatory door. Thanks, that will do.'

Many a picture—many a soft Gainsborough or softer Greuze—may suggest a face as delicate and beautiful as that which was turned up to his; but no picture ever painted by human hand had such a power of expression as that possessed by the face of Ida Beverley, as she sat there, slightly flushed by the heat of the crowded room, and feeling with pleasure the breeze from the great square without blowing on her cheek, and laden with perfumes of fresh flowers as it passed through the long conservatory.

The broken ring, the gipsy ring of the dream, rent in two by the cruel tiger's fangs, was now on the marriage finger beside the wedding hoop, as Jerry could see when she drew off her glove, but he was glad to observe that her mourning was becoming lessened by trimmings of grey silk; yet the dark costume, by its contrast to the pallor and purity of her complexion, made Ida seem lovelier than ever, and his heart ached to think that those trappings of woe were worn for a rival.

Why did he seek her presence? he was asking himself again. Did some lingering hope inspire him? Without it Jerry felt that it would be madness to place himself within the sphere of her beauty, with their mutual past; yet he could not deny himself the joy of the present, in watching the tenderness of her soft grey-blue eye, the glory of her auburn hair, and the grace of all her actions.

She had been the wife of Beverley, true; but the wife of only a few months, and left behind in loneliness while yet a bride.

Worried by her sadness, and sick of her repining, selfish old Sir Carnaby had become, unknown to her, somewhat an adherent of her first lover. He was not disinclined to let his widowed daughter become the wife of this unappropriated man, whose good looks and style were as undeniable as his position and expectations. Thus he whispered to Evelyn Desmond that he was not ill-pleased to see them draw apart within the conservatory door.

Jerry's friends would have called him 'a muff,' to sigh as he did, and make himself 'a blighted being' for Ida, whose whole heart and soul seemed devoted to another, and who sorrowed as some women only sorrow over their dead, going through the world with one visionary yet formed fancy that floated drearily and vaguely in her memory. Yet, in spite of himself, Jerry Vane hovered near the sad one like a love-bird by the nest of its young.

It was impossible that the love of this faithful, honest, and good-hearted fellow should fail to impress Ida. She was conscious that his fate was a cruel one, and of her own making; and she felt a great pity for him; for although she had been fickle once, her nature was generous and compassionate.

A dead flirtation can seldom be revived, but an old love is often rekindled; yet Ida bore him none as yet; it was only pity, as we have said—compunction for what she had done—a tenderness, nothing more, save, perhaps, a sense of honour for him, that gave Jerry Vane an indefinable and, it may be, dangerous attraction to her; and now, as he spoke to her, bending over her as he used to do of old, her dark blue eyes changed and shadowed with the changing thoughts that passed quickly through her mind.

'We are good friends as ever,' said she, smiling upward in reply to some remark of his.

'Ida, some one has written that after love, mere friendship becomes more cruel than hate, and says it is the worst cruelty "when we seek love—as a stone proffered to us when we ask for bread in famine."'

Jerry felt that in this remark he had made somewhat of a 'header;' but fanning herself, she said calmly:

'I believe in you, Mr. Vane; is not that the highest trust one creature can give another?'

'May I not implore you to call me Jerry, as—as of old?' he asked, in a tremulous voice.

'When alone—yes.'

'Mr. Vane sounds so odiously formal after—after——' his lip quivered.

'Well—Jerry it shall be.'

'Thanks, dear, dear Ida; I begin to hope again.'

Poor Jerry did begin indeed to have fresh hope; and are we not told that its promises are sweeter than roses in the bud, and more flattering to expectation?

'Combine love with friendship, Ida,' he urged, softly, with the tip of his moustache almost touching her ear, 'and its tranquillity will be great and happy.'

She could not, without growing interest and tenderness, see the mournful love-me look that his eyes wore; yet she said, over her bouquet of stephanotis, Beverley's favourite flower and perfume:

'Do not talk thus, I implore you, Jerry Vane.'

A gesture of impatience escaped Vane, yet he said, in a voice of tenderness:

'Oh, Ida, I do know it—too well and bitterly; for as I loved you in the past time, so do I love you still!'

'Pardon me, Jerry; you are indeed a kind and faithful——'

'Fool!' he interrupted her, bitterly. 'That is the word, Ida.'

'Nay, nay, don't say so,' she urged, with tremulous lips and moistened eyes.

'The first love of a woman's heart is a holy thing, Ida—and yours was mine.'

'Let us be friends,' said she, in a painful tone.

'I can never, never be your—mere friend, Ida!'

Like that of Clare and Trevor Chute, but a few days before, it was another romance of the drawing-room, the strange intercourse and perilous friendship between these two.

She looked wistfully at Vane.

'We know not what God may have in store for us yet,' said she, colouring while she spoke, but only with the desire to soothe and not ignore the passion he was avowing. 'It may be—may be that we have only in our hearts been waiting for each other after all.'

Ere Vane could make a response to this speech, which she felt conscious was a rash one, she shivered and grew deadly pale.

'Does the night air chill you, Ida?' he asked.

'I know not—surely no,' said she, in a strange voice: 'it is close, rather; and yet——'

'What, dear Ida?'

'I felt a strange shudder come over me as I spoke.'

'It is nervousness, and will soon pass away.'

For a moment she sat with her eyes dropped and her heart palpitating. Whence came that strange, cold, and irrepressible tremor, like the shock of an electric battery, yet so chilly? What could it be? Could she have an affection of the heart?

She started from her seat with manifest uneasiness, and taking his arm, said, 'Let us return to the rooms.'

And now there occurred an episode which, however trivial then, Jerry Vane recalled with singular and very mingled emotions at a future time. As they came out of the conservatory, Colonel Rakes said, laughingly:

'Who is your friend, Vane, that is so strangely dressed—at least, not in evening costume?'

'Friend! What friend?—where, Colonel?'

'In the conservatory with you and Mrs. Beverley. Ah, Mrs. Beverley, too bad of you to appropriate our friend Vane when you know all the women are in love with him.'

'Colonel—I?'

'You, my dear girl—for I am old enough to call you so. But about your friend——'

'There was no one but ourselves in the conservatory,' said Vane.

'Oh pardon me, Vane, you three were close together.'

'Impossible!'

'As you rose to retire, I saw him slide, as it were, behind the shelves of flowers.'

'We saw no one,' urged Ida.

'Can it be a thief or an intruder? Let us see,' said the Colonel; and he and Vane searched all over the place, which was brilliantly lighted with gas, but without success.

'You must be mistaken, Colonel,' said Jerry, 'as the only other door of the conservatory is locked, and on the inside.'

'Though a little short-sighted, I was not mistaken, Vane.'

'And this man——?'

'Stood close behind Mrs. Beverley's chair, within less than arm's-length of you both.'

'What was he like?' asked Vane, with genuine irritation and astonishment.

'That I can scarcely describe.'

'His face?'

'Was singularly pale, with dark eyes and a dark, heavy moustache.'

'And he actually hung over Ida—Mrs. Beverley, I mean—unseen by me.'

'Yes; closer than good breeding warranted. You must have been very much absorbed not to have seen him,' said the Colonel, with a wicked smile in his old eyes.

'I was indeed absorbed, Colonel.'

'Don't wonder at it; there are not many Ida Beverleys even in the world of London. But, egad, the butler must be told to have an eye upon the plate-chest—the racing-cups and silver spoons!'

Who was this strange-looking man whom the Colonel could not describe, yet had so distinctly seen close by Ida's chair, listening, doubtless, to all their remarkable conversation? It was, to say the least of it, a most ungentlemanly proceeding; and Jerry, amid the clatter of tongues around him, strove to remember all they had said, and whether he had let fall anything that shed a light upon their past relations and his present hopes; with the pleasant conviction that the eavesdropper must have heard much that was intended for Ida's ear alone!

'By Jove!' thought Jerry, 'if I had caught the fellow, there would have been an unseemly scene among the Colonel's majolica flower-pots, his orchids, and azaleas.'

The interview in the conservatory, and the strange emotion that came over her, had somewhat wearied Ida; and like Clare, who had overheard some unmistakable remarks on the 'coming event'—remarks certainly not meant for her sensitive ear—she was anxious to be home.

'A game old fellah,' she heard Lord Brixton say—a peer whose only known ancestor was one of the cottonocracy—to another, whose adjusted eye-glass was focussed on Sir Carnaby; 'game indeed! but will live to repent his matrimonial folly. She'll lead him a dance, believe me, don't you know.'

Even the servants in the hall and at the portico had heard some rumour, for there fell upon Clare's ear, as they swept out to the carriage, something like this:—

'Oh, yes! I knows 'em—the Honourable Miss Desmond, with her big mastiff, whip, and wissel, and only Sir Carnaby on dooty. I've seen 'em by the Serpentine many times.'

So, then, their names were linked together, even by the men in livery!

And as they drove home in the carriage, leaving Sir Carnaby with his fair one, by the lighted windows of the far extent of streets and squares, Ida lay back in a corner, muffled in her gossamer-like Shetland shawl, soft as Dacca muslin, the 'woven wind,' very silent and sad.

She was thinking very much of what Jerry had said, and the hopes she had, perhaps unwisely, awakened; but more of the strange cold thrill that came over her, for she had too often experienced that unwelcome emotion or sensation of late.

In another direction Jerry was 'tooling' home in a hansom, with a heart full of happiness. He had struck the vein; he had an interest, even though but a renewed interest, in the eyes and heart of his old love. Had she not admitted that they knew not what Fate had in store for them yet, and that their hearts might only have been waiting for each other after all!

Moreover, Sir Carnaby had given, and he had accepted, a formal invitation for the shooting and then for the Christmas festivities at Carnaby Court; and he drove on, sunk in happy waking dreams of all that the future might have in store for him yet.

CHAPTER XII.

IN THE KONGENS NYTORV.

'Married, at St. George's Church, Hanover Square, on Saturday, Sir Carnaby Collingwood, Bart., of Carnaby Court, to the Hon. Evelyn Desmond, only daughter of the Right Hon. Lord Bayswater..... The bride wore a dress composed of rich ivory-white Duchesse satin, the skirt,' &c., &c.

Such was the announcement which suddenly met the eye of startled Trevor Chute, as it was running leisurely and carelessly over the columns of a Times, nearly a fortnight old, as he lingered over his coffee one morning, when seated under the awning in front of the Hotel d'Angleterre, in the Kongens Nytorv of Copenhagen.

'Whew!' whistled Chute, as he read and re-read the paragraph, with all its details of the bride's elaborate costume, the uniform of the bridesmaids, the presents, and so forth, down to the shower of satin slippers, and the departure of the happy couple by the Great Western Railway.

This event was all the more startling to Chute, as he had been wandering from place to place, through Germany and the North of Europe, and thus few letters and no papers from England had reached him for some time past; and now it was the end of the first week of September, when the brown partridges would be learning to their cost that the tall waving wheat, amid which their little broods had thriven, was shorn on the uplands, and the sharp-bladed plough was turning up the barley-stubbles.

It may well be supposed that the contents of this paragraph among the fashionable intelligence gave our wanderer occasion for much thought; and from the bustle around him—for he had been taking his coffee at a little marble table placed literally on the pavement of the square, which, if not one of the handsomest places in Europe, is certainly the finest in the Danish capital, with its statue of Christian V., with its green plateau and flower-borders—he retired to the solitude of his own room; but even as he did so there were others, he found, who were near him, and took a gossiping interest in the paragraph.

There were several English people in the hotel, of course, for one must travel a long way to find solitude in these our days of universal locomotion. Among others there was young Charley Rakes, at whose house we have lately seen the Collingwoods—a fast youth of Belgravian breed, whom Chute did not like; and he had rather a way of keeping at full arm's-length those whom he viewed thus.

'So, so,' he heard him say to a friend; 'the old fellow is married at last, and to the Desmond. What the little birds said proves right, after all.'

'Poor Clare!' thought Chute, as a burst of laughter followed the reading of the paragraph, with great accentuation, aloud.

'Fancy Evelyn Desmond airing flannel bags for the gouty feet of old Collingwood, fomenting his bald pate—(he is bald, isn't he?)—putting his lovely teeth into a tumbler at night, unlacing his stays, and all that sort of thing, don't you know!'

From this rough jesting with names in which he had an interest so vital now, Trevor Chute, we say, gladly sought the privacy of his own room, where, stretched upon a sofa, he gave himself tip to the luxury of lonely thinking, while watching the pale blue wreaths evoked from his meerschaum bowl floating upward into the lofty ceiling overhead, while the drowsy hum of the city came through the green jalousies of the windows, which opened to the Kongens Nytorv, and faced the Theatre Royal.

Would this alliance mar for ever the chances of the Major, or redouble them, as he would be quite en famille at Carnaby Court and the town mansion in Piccadilly?

He recalled the parting words of Clare, and thrust the speculation aside as unworthy the consideration of a second. He could awaken in the morning now with other thoughts than the dull ache of the bitter olden time; for though their prospects were vague and undefined, he had her renewed promise, and now more than ever did he recall it, with the delicious threat that accompanied the renewal.

'Clare, Clare!' he muttered aloud; and with all the passionate longing of a lad of twenty, the man's heart went out to her, the absent one.

She was his in spirit only; but oh, for Surrey's magic mirror, to bring her before him once again, that he might revel on the calm poses of her statuesque figure, her soft, yet aristocratic face, and the curve of her lips, that were exquisite as those of a Greuze—even as Surrey revelled on the beauties of Geraldine when conjured up by Cornelius Agrippa!

Again he was sunk in thoughts of her, as when far away amid the awful and undisturbed solitude of the Himalayan forests, where the pines that rose to the height of two hundred feet were tipped with sunshine, while all was night below; and where the torrents, with their ceaseless roar, that wearied the ear, when, swollen by the winter rains, they tore past the lonely cantonment of Landour, where the last home of Beverley and many more lie, rolling on and on to the plains and tea-gardens of Assam.

But his prospects were brighter now, and thus he had thought of her happily when idling from place to place, in the glittering Kursaal at Hamburg, the many gaieties of Berlin, and of more domestic Copenhagen; when among the lonely woods of Norway, and the countless isles of the Christiana Fiord, which the Norse packet had traversed when its waters were moonlit and luminous, when the dark violet-tinted waves of eve rolled on the green shores of the Jungfrau land, when he had seen the gorgeous sun setting redly beyond the bronze-like forests of Sweden, and flushing alike the sky above and the waters of the Sound below—her face was ever before him, and he had remembered its expressions and the tone of her voice in every hour he spent, especially when alone, by land and sea, in city, wood, or wilderness.

'I have Clare's promise and assurance that she loves me still,' he would think; 'but how long am I to drag on this absurd life, this separate existence? Surely we are not so hopeless now as in that time when I was broiling up country.'

With reference to her promise, he pondered, would she write to him? Scarcely. Should he write to her, and remind her of it—not that for a moment he ever believed it to be forgotten; but of, this policy he was doubtful, and so resolved to wait a little, as he would be certain to hear from Jerry Vane or some other friend.

But while waiting, Clare might be cast into the attractive influence of some one else, and he knew that she was surrounded by all the charms and allurements of rank and of wealth. Then he deemed himself a wretch to think of such things. Anon he became terrified lest she should be ill, as he knew how much this marriage would mortify, fret, and worry her.

From his reverie he was roused by the appearance of his valet, Tom Travers, standing close by at 'attention,' by pure force of old habit. He had neither heard him knock nor enter; neither had he heard his tread on the polished floor, which as usual in these countries, was uncarpeted.

'Letter for you, sir,' said he, presenting one on a salver.

'Thanks, Tom.'

He tore it open; it was from Jerry Vane, and dated from 'Carnaby Court.' This made Trevor's heart leap.

'Jerry must have been making his innings,' thought he, 'to be there. He has surely been seized with a most unusual cacoethes scribendi. I have not heard from the fellow for months, and now he sends me nearly sixteen pages. What can they all be about? Perhaps the marriage, but more likely that alluring ignis fatuus, Ida.'

And once more filling his pipe, he composed himself to peruse the letter of his old chum, Jerry, who ran on thus:—

'I suppose you have long since heard how Sir Carnaby Collingwood made a fool of himself at St. George's. He has now gone on his wedding tour, and I am thankful he is out of the way. It is ungracious to write these lines of one's host, and still more so of one I would fain be more nearly connected with; but it is the old story of Doctor Fell, and you know I never liked Sir Carnaby. How difficult it is to analyse sympathy. By Jove, Trevor, it is a thing that no fellow can understand, for it takes possession of us whether we will or no; hence it is that we are unconsciously attracted or repelled by some of those we meet at first sight. And why? No one can tell. Hence, a magnetic influence draws us sometimes even to those we should shun, or compels us to shun sometimes those whom, from policy, we should attract, and in whom we should confide.' ('Has Jerry had a sunstroke?' thought Trevor; 'what is all this about?') 'And thus it was that a magnetic influence led me to love Ida at first sight, and at the same time to dislike Sir Carnaby, and I fear the feeling will never pass away, so far as he is concerned.

'I know not where this may find you; but any place is better than London at this season. You know what it is in August and September, with its pavement fit only for a salamander or a fireman. After Ascot, the Collingwoods—the three ladies, at least—left London in the height of the season, and went to Carnaby Court. I was with them—Ida and Clare, I mean—on Rakes' drag on the Royal Heath on the Cup day. Don't you envy me, old fellow? I am sure you do. We spoke much of you among ourselves, anyhow, and Clare looked her brightest and her best when we did so. By not starting early, we were delayed waiting for the young engaged couple; we lost the first two races, but that was nothing.

'It was with quiet anger the girls saw the half-concealed billing and cooing of the old baronet and the fiancée, and with what excellent grace he lost some heavy bets to her brother, the Guardsman, and others to the lady herself, which she entered in a dainty little book with a jewelled pencil, and laughing girlishly as she buried her pretty nose in a hot-house bouquet of the colours affected by Sir Carnaby.

'Desmond's animal was nowhere; but, perhaps, you won't be sorry for that. Some say he has lost a pot of money, and may have to leave the Brigade; anyway, it did not prevent him from returning with some dolls in his hat-band. For some reason—gout, it was whispered—the baronet did not go to the Derby, so the fair Evelyn agreed with him that it was only fit for boys, and declined to go either. Why should a gentleman go, to have his clothes covered by dust or flour, his hat, perhaps, banished by a cocoa-nut; and why a lady, to see and hear all the horrid things that were said or done? Yet, in times past, she had gone and faced all these things and more, so it suited her to play propriety on that Derby Day; but when Ascot came, she was there making bets, even 'ponies,' in full swing.

'I came here at first to have a shot or two at the birds for a week, by express invitation, as I told you, and then I may, perhaps, join you on the Continent after all. Ida matronises the household, and a lovely matron she makes, with her sweet, sad grace. Sir John and Lady Oriel are here, old Colonel Rakes and his wife, and that titled parvenu, Lord Brixton, with some others, to await the return of the "young couple" from Germany, whither they have gone to hide their blushes; and the tenantry are getting up an enormous triumphal archway at the avenue gate; the public-house at the village is getting a new signboard; the ringers are practising chimes in the old Saxon spire; the schoolmaster is composing an epithalamium, and the Carnaby volunteer artillery are to fire a salute on the lawn. But I wonder how I can write so frivolously, for something occurred on the third day after I came that has caused me much discomfort and perplexity.

'There is an arbour in the garden, one of many, but before this I mean there stands a marble Psyche.'

(How well Trevor Chute could remember that arbour—a kiosk—with all its iron lattice-work and gilded knobs, and the masses of roses and clematis, Virginia creeper and ivy, all matted and woven in profusion over it. Many a time had he sat there with Clare, and often in a silence that was not without its eloquence. 'Well; and what of the arbour?' thought he, turning again to the letter of Jerry.)

'When passing among the shrubberies, I saw Ida seated in that arbour, with a book in her lap, and, to all appearance, lost in thought. A flood of amber light, shed by the evening sun, poured aslant through an opening in the greenery upon her white neck and lustrous auburn hair, which shone like gold, as her hat was off and lay beside her. A great joy filled my heart as I thought of the hopes given me during the meeting at Rakes' house, and after watching her beauty for a minute or so in silence I was about to join her, when she looked upward, and then there appeared, what I had not before perceived, so absorbed had I been in her, a man, unknown to me, looking down upon her—a man with whom she seemed to be in close conversation.

'Some huge branches of roses concealed his figure from me, but his face was distinct enough, in closer proximity to hers than good breeding generally warrants. It was pale, very, with dark eyes and a black moustache—in detail, by Jove, Chute, the same fellow whom Colonel Rakes found eavesdropping in the conservatory!

'Startled, alarmed, and scarcely knowing what to think, I still resolved to join her. I could scarcely deem myself an intruder, considering the terms we had been on, and are on now, and approached the arbour, but in doing so had to make a circuit among the shrubberies. Half a minute had not elapsed when I reached the arbour; no one passed me on the walk, not a footfall was heard on the gravel, at least by me; but when I joined her she was alone, with her head stooped forward, her face buried in her hands, and when she looked up its pallor startled me; yet her grey-blue, changeful, and lustrous eyes looked, and with a smile, into mine.

'"Have I disturbed you?" I asked, scarcely knowing what to say.

'"Disturbed me? Oh, no; I was done reading."

'"But some one was with you."

'"When?"

'"Just now."

'"Impossible!"

'"I thought that some one was here," I said, in great perplexity.

'"Oh no—but sit down and let us talk," said she, frankly.

'I thought of the face I had just seen so near her own. I was rendered dumb, as I felt my tenure of favour was too slight to risk offending her by further remark on a subject so singular; but I was pained, grieved, and bewildered to a degree beyond what words can express. I looked at her earnestly, and seeing her so pale, said:

'"Are you not well, Ida?"

'"Only in so far that one of those mysterious shudders which I feel at times came over me a minute ago."

'I am aware that she has complained of this emotion or sensation before, and that the best medical skill in town has failed to make anything of it.

'"The odour of those flowers has perhaps affected you," said I, somewhat pettishly thrusting aside a bouquet tied by a white ribbon which lay near her.

'"Oh no," she replied, "their perfume has always been a favourite of mine."

'They were stephanotis, and I have often heard it was a favourite flower with Beverley.

'"From whom did you receive the bouquet?" I asked, but something indefinable in my tone attracted her.

'"Vane—Jerry!" she exclaimed. "It was brought me by the gardener," she added, and her calm face and serene eye all spoke of one to whom doubt or further question would have been intolerable, and the fear of anything unknown. Did she know what I had seen, or suspect what was passing in my mind? It would seem not; and still more was I perplexed and startled on perceiving, as we rose to join Clare, Violet, and others who were proceeding laughingly to the croquet lawn, a gentleman's glove lying on the seat which she had just quitted.

'"Some one has dropped this," said I, taking it up.

'"I never observed it," she replied, quietly; "is it not your own?"

'"No," said I, curtly, as I tossed it into the arbour, with the fear, the crushing conviction, that some fellow had been there after all How he had effected his exit from the arbour unseen by me was a mystery; but how I enjoyed our croquet that afternoon you may imagine.

'In the course of our game I casually discovered that the lost glove belonged to Sir John Oriel, but you know that his personal appearance scarcely answers to that of the man I have described to you.

'I am loath to admit myself to be jealous; but there is a mystery in all this I cannot fathom. My visit here terminates at the end of a week, when I shall return to town more miserable in mind than I ever did before. I am to be at Carnaby Court for the Christmas festivities, but have a vague fear of what may happen in the meantime. This fellow——' (Jerry had drawn his pen through words, evidently as if checking some ebullition, and then continued).

'It was, perhaps, with the naturally kind and womanly desire to soothe the sorrow she had caused, and the wound she had inflicted, that when next day we met by chance in the same arbour—in fact, I followed her to it—she was more than usually affable and sweet with me, and I ventured in the plainest terms to speak of the subject that was nearest my heart.

'"Confident in my own unchanging love for you, Ida," said I, "honour for your feelings, tenderness and kindness have made me silent for long; but I think the better time has come when I might openly speak to you of love again, dear Ida."

'"Do not urge that subject on me now," she replied, with undisguised agitation. "You are a dear good and kind fellow—dear and good as—as—as when I first knew you; but I—I——" She paused and trembled.

'"What?" I whispered.

'"My heart is in the grave!"

'"This is absurd; it is morbid—it is irreligious!" I exclaimed.

'"Do not say so, Jerry Vane."

'I thought to myself, bitterly (excuse me, Chute), could not this confounded fellow Beverley die without bothering her with all his gloomy messages and mementoes?

'"If you do not marry me, I shall die an old bachelor. Let not the one love of my life be utterly hopeless—you, my first and last!"

'"Poor Jerry, what can I say?" she exclaimed, interlacing her white, slender fingers.

'"That you will love me."

'"In time, perhaps—I will try—but cease to urge me now."

'"Bless you for those words, Ida."

'"I am glad to make you happy, Jerry," said she, with a bright smile in her beautiful eyes.

'"You do indeed cause my heart to swell with happiness—but—but why do you shudder?" I exclaimed.

'"Did I shudder?" she asked, growing very pale, and withdrawing her hand from mine. "Oh, let us cease this subject, Jerry, and—and excuse me leaving you."

'She glided away from my sight down the garden walk, quitting me with an abruptness unusual to her, which I observed on more than one occasion, and the cause of which I was unable to discover, or reconcile even with the rules of common politeness; but now she returned with a sad yet smiling and somewhat confused expression of face, and showed me the book she had been perusing on the preceding day. It was the Baron von Reichenbach's work on magnetism and vital force, and pointing to a passage wherein he details the effect produced on a girl of highly sensitive organization when influenced by a magnet, she said:

'"I feel when I start and leave you exactly what this girl describes her sensation to be, drawn from you by an irresistible attraction which I am compelled to follow unconditionally and involuntarily, and which, while the power lasts, I am obliged to obey, even against my own will. So do pardon me, Jerry; I am powerless, and not to blame."

'She spoke with quiet sweetness—with an infinite gentleness and sadness, but I saw the man's glove yet lying in the arbour—the tangible glove—and thought: "Good heavens! is all this acting—insanity, or what?"

'Anyway, I was filled with keen anxiety and deep sorrow to find that she whom I loved so tenderly was under influences so strange and accountable—so far beyond one's grasp.

'Could the figure of the man I had seen so near her, with his odious face so close—so very close—to hers, have been an illusion—a hallucination—a thing born of my own heated fancy, and the shifting lights and shadows of the arbour and its foliage?

'If so, it seemed very odd indeed that an appearance exactly similar should have been seen in his conservatory by such a sentimental and matter-of-fact old fellow as Colonel Rakes!'

Here ended Jerry's long and rambling letter, many items in which gave Trevor Chute food for long thought and reverie.

As for Ida's nervous illness, for such he deemed it beyond a doubt to be—an illness born of her grief for Beverley, and annoyance at her father's marriage—he believed the bracing country air would cure all that; and as for her magnetic fancies, he thought that the less she read of such far-fetched philosophy as that of the Baron the better.

The two stories of the man who had been seen were odd, certainly, and to some minds the bouquet, though alleged to be given by the gardener, and the glove might have seemed suspicious; but Ida, though she had jilted Jerry in time that was past, was not by nature a coquette; and knowing this, Trevor Chute, as a man of the world, dismissed the whole affair as some fancy or coincidence, and then his ideas went direct to Clare and Carnaby Court, and he envied Jerry.

The strange medley of foreign sounds in the vast space of the Kongens Nytorv were forgotten and unheard, for Chute's mind was revelling amid other scenes and places now. He was even thinking over the Derby to which Vane had alluded, and he recalled the days when he had been a species of pet in 'the Brigade,' when he looked forward to the Derby as the great event of the year, and his own delight when he first drove the regimental drag, the selection of the horses, the ordering of the luncheon, the colour of the veils, and the road along which all the world of London seemed pouring, the golden laburnums at Balham in all their glory, the hawthorn hedges at Ewell, the beeches and chestnuts that shaded the dusty way, the myriads on the course, the wonderful bird's-eye view from the grand-stand, the excitement of the races, the stakes and the bets, from thousands to pretty boxes of delicate gloves for Clare and others; all of which he should never enjoy as he had enjoyed them once. And now impatience made him peripatetic, so he rang for his valet, Travers.

'Pack up, Tom,' said he; 'we leave Copenhagen to-morrow.'

'All right, sir—for where?'

'Lubeck. Have a droski ready at ten; I shall take the morning train.'

Travers saluted and withdrew, without thinking or caring whether Lubeck was in Hanover, Hindostan, or the island of Laputa.

It was the merest whim or chance in the world that led to the selection of Lubeck as a place to be visited; but Trevor Chute could little foresee whom he was to meet there, or all that meeting led to.

CHAPTER XIII.

BY THE EXPRESS FOR LUBECK.

Though Trevor Chute's old habits of decision and activity remained, a new kind of life had come upon him of late; thus he who had found the greatest pleasure in his military duties and attending to the wants of his men, in the saddle hunting, enjoying the day-dawn gallop, or with his rifle and hog-spear, watching under the fierce sun-glare for the red-eyed tiger or the bristly boar, as they came to drink in some secluded nullah, had now changed into one of the veriest day-dreamers that ever let the slow hours steal past him uselessly in succession.

So that time were got through, he cared little how. Would Vane join him? He rather fancied that he would not.

Nor did he wish it, though Jerry was the friend he valued most in the world, for the urgent reason that through him alone could he hear aught of her to whom he could not write, and who would not write to him.

Thus Chute lived in a little world of his own, lighted up by the remembered face of Clare and the hopes she had bade him cherish.

He marvelled much how Jerry's love affair was progressing, and whether Ida would yet forget his other friend, Jack Beverley.

He thought not, by all he knew of her, yet wished that she should do so, for Jerry's sake.

There was much of humility in the latter, and he held himself of small account with her.

Though proud enough with his own sex, even to hauteur at times, his love for Ida made him her very slave; and now how often came back to Vane's memory, with regret and reproach, the bygone scoffs and silly ironies he had often cast on his friends, who, when he was heart-whole, were suffering from the lost smile of those they had loved, perhaps more truly than wisely.

Recollections of his own laughter, his gibes and his quips, came back to him as if in mockery now.

Trevor Chute and Clare were separated again; but not as before: now he did not feel, as in the old time, that he had lost her, and he looked back to his last interview with joy.

Long though the time seemed since then, it was but recently that her dark eyes had smiled lovingly into his; that all the nameless charms of her presence had been with him, that she had spoken with him, and that he had listened to her.

When would all this come to pass again?

Till then what mattered it how he killed the time, or whither he went?

Yet pleasure and amusement palled on him; the sea breeze had lost its charm, and the sparkling waves their beauty; flowers seemed to be without fragrance; the fertile green pastures of Germany and Denmark, in all their summer glory, and the woods with the first tints of autumn, were without interest to his eye; for he was, more than ever, a man of one thought, and that thought was Clare Collingwood.

In this mood of mind, without thinking how or why, he started for the famous old Hans town.

The train took him to Korsor, in Zealand; there he crossed the Great Belt, and from the deck of the Maid of Norway steamer could see the Danish Isles steeped in the noon-day heat, when every sandy holm and green headland seemed to vibrate in the sunshine that glistened on the blue waves which roll round Nyeborg and picturesque old Odensee; and after running through Sleswig and Holstein on a pleasant afternoon in autumn, he found himself at Hamburg, in the train for Lubeck, 'the Carthage of the North.'

Tom Travers had seen to the luggage and the inspection thereof; procured the tickets for himself and his master, and the latter had just lit his cigar, and composed himself for his journey, pleased to find himself the sole occupant of a carriage, when he suddenly observed a lady, undoubtedly an Englishwoman, procuring a bouquet of rose-buds from a Vierlander fleuriste, one of those picturesquely costumed girls who wear a bodice that is a mass of spangles and embroidery, a straw hat shaped like a Spanish sombrero, and thick, bunchy skirts, such as we may see in an old picture of Teniers, and who come from that district which lies between the Elbe and the Bille, where the whole population are market-gardeners.

There was some delay, during which the train was shifted a little, and amid the bustle of the platform the lady looked about in confusion, uncertain which was her carriage.

Already the starting bell had been rung and the shrill steam-whistle had sent up its preparatory shriek.

'Dritte klasse, zweite klasse!' the bearded German guard was shouting, while waving his little flag of the North Germanic colours. 'Hierher—nach hinten—nach vorn—Bitte, steigen sie ein, madame!' ('Pray get in,' etc.)

Mechanically, Chute, in mere politeness, opened the carriage door, and she was half handed, half pushed in by the hasty guard, for already the train was in motion, and she found herself, it would seem, separated from her friends, and swept away by the express in companionship with a total stranger.

'How awkward,' she said in German; 'I have been put—almost thrust, I may say—into the wrong carriage.'

'You can change at Buchen, the only place where the express stops,' replied Chute.

'Ah! you are English,' said she, her countenance languidly lighted up. 'So glad; for though I speak German pretty well, I don't understand the patois of the people hereabouts, on the borders of Holstein.'

Chute merely made an inclination of his head, and was about to throw his cigar out of the window, when she begged he would not do so; smoking never incommoded her—indeed, she rather liked it.

He thanked her, and they slid into the usual little commonplaces about the weather, the scenery, and so forth.

Though handsome, she was passée, and Trevor Chute could detect that she had in her manner much of the polished insouciance, the cultivated, yet apparently careless fascination of a woman of the world; and it soon became evident that she knew it, and the world of London too, in many phases.

Apart from the rank that was indicated by a coronet and monogram that were among the silver ornaments on her blue velvet Marguerite pouch, he felt certain that she was an Englishwoman of undoubted position, and was quite aplomb—even a little 'fast'—in her manner; but that amused Chute.

He could perceive that she was married, as a wedding hoop was among the gemmed rings that sparkled on her left hand—a very lovely one in shape and whiteness; moreover, she spoke of her husband, and said they were to take the branch line at Buchen for the Elbe, adding:

'Do you go so far?'

'Farther; to Lubeck—a place few people go to, and few come from.'

'Ah! And you travel——'

'To kill time.'

'Most people do so. We came here to be out of the way of people one knows and is sure to meet everywhere in more beaten tracks; also to get rid of the tedium of visiting ambassadors, and undergoing their receptions—one of the greatest bores when abroad.'

She evidently knew London well. In the course of conversation they discovered that several of their acquaintances were mutual, and Chute began to wonder who she was, and became interested in her, in spite of his general indifference.

She seemed to be 'up to' a good deal, too; acknowledged that she made quite a little book on the Derby and Ascot—was above taking a bet on a favourite in kid gloves only; and told in the prettiest way how skilfully, and with a little spice of naughtiness, she had, on more than one occasion, learned the secrets of the stables, and of the trials in the early morning gallops; and actually how she had persuaded people to lay five to one, when the printed lists said 'evens,' to square herself in the end; and then she laughed, and said it was so odd to have her husband travelling in the next carriage, and thus quite separated from her; but at Buchen she would rejoin him.

'Do you travel much?' she asked, after a pause.

'Well; yes.'

'Who does not nowadays!'

'My profession——'

'The army?'

'Yes; I have just returned from India.'

'To one who has seen all the wonders and marvels there—the rock-hewn temples, the marble palaces and mosques, the vast plains and mighty mountains of India—how tame you must think these level landscapes and little German villages!'

'They are peaceful scenes, and most English in aspect.'

'But all this part of Europe is quite like the midland counties. You were, of course, with the Line in India; but—you have been in the Guards?'

'Yes,' replied Chute, becoming thoroughly interested now.

'Ah! I discovered that from a slight remark you made about the Derby.'

'Who the deuce can this woman be, who picks all my past life out of me?' thought Chute, as they mutually recalled the names of many men of 'the Brigade.'

'Do you know Major Desmond?' she asked.

'Slightly,' replied Chute, while a shade crossed his face.

She was quick enough to perceive it, so the subject was not pursued; and now the train glided into the station.

She bowed politely to Chute, who endeavoured to open the door for her; but it was locked fast, and the guard was at the other end of the train.

A sound was heard, like the clanking of a heavy chain, as some carriages were uncoupled; and the train again began to move. Chute called and gesticulated to some men on the platform.

'Sitzen sie ruhig!' was the only response. 'Sit still! the train is in motion!'

And once more they were sweeping with increased speed, through the open country. The carriages for the branch line had been left behind, with the lady's husband, suite and baggage; and she borne helplessly off by the express for Lubeck.

She became very much discomposed on learning this, and that she would be carried on fifty-six English miles in a wrong direction before she could telegraph to or communicate with her friends in any way; but after a time she laughed at it as being quite a little adventure, and to amuse her, Chute, by the aid of his Continental guide, indicated the various places of interest through which they swept with a mighty rush; now it was Ahrensburg or Bargtehude, and after traversing a flat, stupid, and uninteresting district, Oldeslohe with its salt mines and lime pits, and then Reinfeldt.

Anon the scenery became more and more English in aspect, and enclosed with hedges in English fashion, and all so homelike, that one could not but remember that not far off lies the nook which still bears the name of England, which was transferred by the emigrant Saxons to South Britain. The rich meadows, the well-tilled corn-lands, the farmhouses and villages, all looking as clean and as pretty as red brick, white plaster, green paint and flowers could make them, all seem there to remind one of the most beautiful parts in England; while in the distance, more than once could be had glimpses of the Baltic, with its dark blue waters sparkling in the evening sun. Lakes and groves add then to the beauty of the scenery, and wood-covered hills that slope gently upward from the bordering sea, or smooth sheets of inland water.

Chute's companion seemed really to enjoy her journey; and her first annoyance over, she relapsed into her occasional air of nonchalance and languid carelessness, that seemed born of Tyburnia and the West-end of London; and soon the tall red spires of Lubeck, which had been long in sight above the greenness of the level land, were close by, as the train ran into the station, near the magnificent and picturesque double towers and deep dark archways of the Holstein Thor, which stands among the long and shady avenues of the Linden-platz.

Though small, beautiful indeed looked the ancient Hans city rising on its ridge, with its twelve great earthen bastions covered by luxuriant foliage, all steeped in the glorious crimson of the after-glow from the set sun that blended with amber and blue.

Trevor Chute handed out his fair companion. There was no train for Buchen that night, nor would there be one till nearly noon on the morrow. The lady knew that her husband would be taken on to Lauenberg, but as she did not know where to telegraph to him there, she could but do so to the station-master at Buchen, and on this being done, she turned to Chute, for, traveller though she was, she was perplexed to find herself in a strange place, without servants or escort, and surrounded by unceremonious German touts bawling out, 'Stadt Hamburg,' 'Hotel du Nord,' 'Funf Thurme,' and the names of other hotels.

'Permit me to be your guide,' said he, as Travers procured an open droski; 'the Stadt Hamburg is the chief hotel. I shall have the honour to escort you there.'

'Thanks, very much indeed,' said she, bowing, and for the first time colouring slightly; 'when' (he did not catch the name amid the hubbub around them) 'my husband arrives he will be most grateful to you for all this.'

And now, as they drove through the Holstein Thor towards the hotel, Chute was provoked to see in the face of his man, Travers, a comical and perplexed expression. He had never seen his master escorting an apparent stranger thus before, and hence knew not what to make of the situation.

CHAPTER XIV.

AN IMBROGLIO.

The great dining-hall of the hotel, where the table d'hôte was daily served, was empty; all the visitors had gone to the theatres, the Tivoli gardens, and so forth, so Trevor Chute and the lady found themselves seated at a long table alone, to partake of a meal that was of course deemed supper there, where people dine at 2 p.m.

The salle was elegant; at one end a great console glass, with all its curved branches, lit up the gilded cornices, the tall mirrors, the long extent of damask table-cloth, the rich fruit, the silver epergnes, and the wines.

Without, through the open windows, could be seen, on one side, the partially-lighted streets of quaint gable-ended houses, all of the middle ages; on the other, the dark and silent woods, where the Trave and the Wakenitz wandered towards the Baltic, showing here and there amid the shadows 'the phosphor crests of star-lit waves,' while overhead was a cloudless sky, the constellations of which had a brilliance and a clearness all unknown in England.

All was very still without, and perhaps—for all are abed betimes in these northern cities—the only sounds that stirred the air were the murmur of the Trave, with the music of a band in a distant Tivoli garden.

'Oh, that Clare were with me here!' thought Chute, while endeavouring to make himself agreeable to a woman of whom he knew nothing, and for whom he cared nothing; and Chute had a natural turn and capacity for doing it with all, but with a lady more especially; and she, to all appearance naturally fast and coquettish, could not help giving Chute, even amid her dilemma, what she deemed one of her most effective side-glances; but, though they were not unperceived, they were wholly wasted upon him, save as a little source of amusement; and after a time her face and manner seemed to express a wish to know who this man was who seemed so politely insensible to her powers—to those of all women, perhaps. He was quite unlike, she thought, anything she had ever met in her world, and she was, consequently, somewhat piqued.

On the other side of the table Chute, while toying with the fruit and drinking with her the golden moselle, was wondering who his fair compagnon de voyage was; and felt that it might be bad taste to inquire her name, as she had not asked for his; yet she knew many of his old friends in the Brigade—men who were well up in the service when he joined, and long before he left it for India.

She seemed fond of questioning about the latter, and led him to speak more of himself, and of wild adventures in the dark jungle, where daylight scarcely came, than was his wont. She asked him what his regiment was, and on his telling her, the expression of her face brightened; and laughingly tapping his hand with her perfumed fan, she said:

'Then you must know well a friend of mine.'

'Very probably; was he of ours?'

'If not quite a friend, one at least in whom I have an interest.'

'And his name?'

'Chute—Captain Trevor Chute.'

'I am he you speak of,' replied the other, feeling considerably mystified.

'You!' exclaimed the lady, colouring.

'There is no other so named in the regiment.'

'You the Trevor Chute who was engaged to—to Clare Collingwood!' she exclaimed.

It was Chute's turn to colour now at this blunt remark, and with some surprise and annoyance he said:

'I knew not that our engagement was such a common topic as to be known to every chance stranger.'

'But I am no stranger to all this,' she replied, with something of a haughty smile; 'I have heard much of your love and devotion—a love quite like that of a romance rather than of everyday life; but I fear greatly that in the present instance your chances of success——'

'Are rather small,' said a voice, and Sir Carnaby Collingwood, looking somewhat flurried and weary, but yet endeavouring to cover his annoyance by his perpetual smile, suddenly appeared beside them. 'Got your telegram at Buchen just in time to catch the last train for this place, and so am here; and so I find you, Evelyn, tête-à-tête with Captain Chute!'

Evelyn!

So the lady was the sister of Desmond, and the newly married bride of Sir Carnaby. The words he had casually overheard, without understanding their exact application, had filled him with a secret annoyance that almost amounted to rage and jealousy. The old baronet was aware of Chute's great personal attractions, his popularity with women, his charms of manner and handsome person, and of the disparity in years between them; he was fully aware also of the name Lady Evelyn had for scientific flirtation, and for a time he almost feared that, perhaps in revenge, Chute might have been overattentive, or tempted to improve the occasion, so little did he understand the real nature of the man at whom he was gazing now with a cold stare, while his lips attempted a smile.

'This is a doubly unexpected pleasure, Sir Carnaby,' said Chute, presenting his hand, which the other seemed not to perceive; 'I am so glad to have been of service to Lady Evelyn, and permit me to congratulate——'

'Thanks, that will do,' replied the baronet, abruptly interrupting him; 'you are too apt, sir, to thrust yourself upon members of my family, and at times, too, when you are neither wanted nor wished for.'

'Sir, this is most unwarrantable!' exclaimed Chute, who grew very pale with mortification and bitterness of heart.

'Sir Carnaby!' urged the lady.

'I am astonished, Lady Evelyn, that you could so far forget the proprieties as to sit down and sup at a common table d'hôte, and with a stranger!'

'A stranger!' said Lady Evelyn, with much of hauteur in her manner, for never in her life had she been reprehended before; 'he has been most kind to me, and seems to know many of my friends.'

'By name, doubtless,' sneered Sir Carnaby.

'Sir,' said Chute, 'you are offensive—unnecessarily so; and, after my past relations with your family, your manner is unjustifiable. Were you not the father of Clare Collingwood, whom I love better than my own life,' he added, with a tremulous voice, 'I would here, in Lubeck, teach you—even at your years—Sir Carnaby, the peril of insulting me thus!'

'My years! my years! impertinence!' muttered the other, who, we have said, had conceived an unwarrantable and unjust dislike of Trevor Chute, and now was disposed to give full swing to the emotion. Chute's faith to Clare, like that of Vane to Ida, was a sentiment utterly beyond Sir Carnaby's comprehension; and, indeed, was perhaps beyond 'the present unheroic, unadventurous, unmoved, and unadmiring age,' as it has, perhaps justly, been described.

Like all persons of her order, Lady Evelyn had a horror of everything that bordered on a scene. For a moment her calm insouciance left her, and she darted an angry glance at her husband, but was silent. She had lived amidst luxury, splendour, and pleasure, power and, at times, triumph, but now 'the perfume and effervescence of the wine were much evaporated, and there was bitterness in the cup and a canker in the roses that crowned its brim.' At that moment she felt, perhaps, ashamed of herself, and of him to whom she was bound, for thus insulting an unoffending man.

'Yes, Sir Carnaby,' continued Chute, 'your age and relationship to Clare, together with the presence of Lady Evelyn, alone protect you in daring to sneer at me.'

Feeling intuitively, with all his anger, that there was something grotesque in the situation, and that in it he was forgetting the rules he prescribed for himself, and was in 'bad form,' he looked at Chute for a moment with a languid but impertinent stare, and after ringing the hand-bell, said to the head waiter:

'Desire my valet to select rooms for us on the first étage, if unoccupied. Lady Evelyn, your maid will attend you at once.'

They left the salle together, she alone bowing to Chute, who, though swelling with passion, returned it, but with frigid politeness.

'Thank Heaven,' thought he, as he tossed over a bumper of moselle, 'poor Clare knows nothing of a scene like this, and never shall from me!'

He then thought with mad bitterness of the glory that had departed amid the monetary misfortunes of the old general, his father; of all that would have been, and once was, his by right to lay at the feet of the beautiful girl that returned his love so tenderly; and his heart seemed to shrink up within him at the tone assumed by Sir Carnaby.

The dislike of that personage towards the man he had injured in the past years, and openly insulted now, was at this time as great as though the injury and the insult had been received by himself. He was one of whom it might be said that 'he never went out of his way in wrath, but, all the same, he never missed his way to revenge. He had a good deal of ice in his nature; but it was, perhaps, the most dangerous of ice—that which smiles in the sun, and breaks to drop you into the grave.'

Disquietude of any kind, or mental tumult, were usually all unknown to Sir Carnaby, and were, he thought, as unbeseeming as any exhibition of temper; hence he was intensely provoked by the manner in which, through his own fault, the adventures of the day had wound up, as by means of their servants or others—perhaps Trevor Chute himself—the affair might be noised abroad till it assumed the absurd form of some genuine fiasco.

'Could the old man have been inflamed by the bad wine of the railway buffets,' thought Chute. It almost seemed so; and he began to hope that when the morrow came, and with it temper and reflection, some approach to a reconciliation might—especially if Lady Evelyn acted the part of peacemaker—be made by her husband; and if anything like an apology came, Chute felt that he would with joy take the hand of his cold-hearted insulter.

But in the artificial life she had led since girlhood Lady Evelyn had never found much use for a heart, and was not disposed to take upon herself the task of pouring oil upon troubled waters. At first she had been inclined, in her own insipid way, to like Chute very much, as who did not? But afterwards she conceived a pique to him, as the lover of Clare, for she remembered how the latter had called her marriage 'an affaire de fantasie;' and there had been other passages of arms between them, in which such as women, especially well-bred ones, with a singular subtlety of the tongue, can gibe and goad each other to the core; so, perhaps, she was not ill-pleased, after all, that an affront had been put upon Trevor Chute as the known lover of Clare.

Feeling himself galled, insulted, and outraged by the whole affair, he resolved to quit Lubeck—or the hotel, certainly—the next day, if no apology came, but it so happened that he had reason to change his mind.

The treatment he had received at the hands of her father was, to a man of Chute's sensitive nature, a source of intense pain.

This sudden and insulting hostility to himself made the love of him and of Clare seem more than ever hopeless, unless—unless what? in revenge he eloped with her, but that Clare would never consent to; and now, despite all that had passed between them at their last interview, the old dull ache of the heart had come back to him again.

From what did the old baronet's indignation spring?

'What were we saying when he came so suddenly upon us?' thought Chute; 'we were speaking of love, but it was mine for Clare. Could he have dreamed for a moment that I meant for Lady—oh, absurd! absurd!'

Yet perhaps it was not so much so as Chute deemed it.

So long after darkness had sunk over Lubeck, he sat at his window thinking, and smoking a favourite pipe given him by Beverley in India, and many times he filled and emptied it without seeing his way very clear in the future, while the clear northern moon flooded the sky with a light against which the taper church spires of the little city stood up in sharp and dark outlines, and the bells of the cathedral tolled the hours in succession, and the sunshine, or at least the grey dawn, began to steal over the woodlands that surround Lubeck; and with it came the odour of peat, as the fires were lighted—an odour as strong as there is in any Irish village, or a Scottish clachan in the wilds of Lorne or Lochabar; and he strove to court sleep, thinking that it would be better were he sleeping as Jack Beverley did, under the shadowy shelter of the Indian palms and the fragrance of the baubul trees.

CHAPTER XV.

'LOVE IS STRONG AS DEATH.'

Jerry Vane did not leave Carnaby Court at the time he intended to do; with ulterior views in her kind heart, Clare pressed him to lengthen his visit, and enjoy a few days' more shooting. She found but little pressing requisite to influence Jerry's actions; yet ere long he had cause greatly to deplore that he had not taken his departure earlier, and he was again doomed to experience a bitter shock concerning his rival—if rival, indeed, he had.

Daily and hourly intercourse afforded him all the facilities he could wish for now; but it seemed as though Ida would never again receive him or accept him as her lover, yet would permit him to be the slave of her fascinations, and without the slightest symptoms of vanity or coquetry. She knew all the simple and single-hearted fellow's love, and yet, apparently, would not yield him hers.

Indeed, she had more than once hinted or said, he scarcely knew which, as he declined to accept the proposition, that she wished his regard for her to die away in silence. If so, why did she permit her sister to urge that she should remain at Carnaby Court, where, in virtue of her widowhood, she yet presided as matron, though some change would assuredly take place on the return of Lady Evelyn to England.

Whatever were her motives, he could not but give himself up blindly and helplessly to the intoxication of the present time, to gaze upon her face, to hear her voice, and conjure up the hope that a time would come when she would love him better than ever. Besides, her society was full of many charms. As in Clare, there was in Ida a wonderful attraction to a companion. She had, though young, travelled much in Europe, and seen all that was worth seeing. She was thus familiar with many countries; and so far as their histories and traditions went, together with a knowledge of literature that was classic, refined, abstruse, and even mystic, as we have shown, she was far beyond an everyday young Englishman like Jerry Vane.

'I am neither a boy nor a madman, yet I dream like both in hanging on here as I do!' he would sometimes say in bitterness; and then he would recall her remarkable words on that evening in town—'It may be that we have only been in our hearts waiting for each other after all.'

From what did these hopeful words spring?—coquetry, mockery, reality, or what?

She was never known to coquet; she was too genuine a creature for mockery; hence, they must have been reality, and, full of this conviction, he resolved once more to put it to the issue on the first opportunity, and one was secured on the very afternoon he made the resolution.

He had not, that day, gone to shoot; the men were all abroad; nearly all the ladies were out driving or riding, save Ida, whom he found in the curtained oriel of the inner drawing-room, where she was standing alone and gazing out on the far-stretching landscape, that was steeped in the evening sunshine; the square spire of the village church, the tossing arms of an old windmill, the yellow-thatched roofs of white-walled cottages stood out strongly against the dark green of the woodlands at the end of a long vista of the chase, and made a charming picture. In the middle distance was some pasture land, where several of Sir Carnaby's fierce little Highland cattle and great fat brindled Alderneys stood knee-deep amid the rich grass.

Perhaps she was thinking of how often she had ridden there with Beverley, and loved to hear him compliment her on the daring grace and ease with which she topped her fences, and the lightness of hand with which she lifted her bay cob's head; and Jerry feared that some such thoughts might be passing through her mind as he paused irresolutely and thought how beautiful was the outline and pose of her darkly dressed figure against the flood of light that poured through the painted oriel.

The dark shadow had been less upon her to-day than usual, and on hearing his footstep on the soft carpet she turned and welcomed him with a bright smile. Would that smile ever change again to coldness and gloom? Would his hand ever again wander lovingly and half fatuously among the richness of her auburn hair, that shone like plaits of golden sheen in the light? Heaven alone knew.

'Dear Ida,' said he, longing, but not venturing to take her hand (he had been on the point of saying 'darling'—had he not been privileged once to do so?), 'I am so glad to find you thus alone, for I have much to say, too, that cannot brook interruption.'

'Say on, then, Jerry,' said she, knowing too surely it would be 'the old, old story,' while his devotion seemed to touch and pain her, for she did honour and pity him, as she had already admitted.

'Ida, save on that night in the conservatory, I have hitherto, from motives that you must be well aware of—motives most pure and honourable—never spoken to you of the love that my heart has never, never ceased to feel for you.'

'Love is no word for me to listen to now, Jerry.'

'Not from—from me?'

'Even from you, Jerry.'

'I implore you to be mine, Ida. Do not weep—do not turn away—you stand alone now; this recent marriage has made your home a broken one; I, too, am alone, and each needs the love of the other. Do not trifle with me, Ida!'

'Trifle—I—oh, Jerry Vane.'

'You loved me once!' he urged, drawing very near.

'Yes—I loved you once,' she said, vaguely and wearily.

Once! How cruel the speech sounded, though she did not mean it to be so, of course; for as she turned to him, an infinite tenderness filled her sparkling eyes of grey or violet blue—for times there were when they seemed both; and his met them with something wistful and pathetic in their gaze as he said:

'Ida, dearest Ida, time and separation—separation that seemed as if it would be lifelong, have but strengthened the regard I bear you; and now—now——'

'That I am free, you would say?'

'I entreat you to be mine. Your father would wish it, and I know that dear Clare does. All my brightest hopes and associations, all my fondest memories are of you; and all have been bound up now in the hope that we might yet be so happy, beloved Ida.'

'Do not address me thus,' said she, imploringly, as she covered her eyes with her slender fingers tightly interlaced.

'Ah—why?' he asked, entreatingly, and venturing to put a hand lightly on each side of her little waist; but she stepped back, and said in a low and concentrated voice:

'Because—how shall I say it? Each time you speak thus the strange thrill I spoke of passes through me.'

'A thrill?'

'A shudder!' she answered,

'What causes it?'

'I cannot, cannot tell'

'My poor Ida! your nerves are all unstrung, and that absurd book of Reichenbach's has made you worse. Promise to marry me, Ida, and we will go to Switzerland, to Scotland, or anywhere that the breezes of mountains or the sea may restore you to what you once were, even as fate has restored you to me!'

But the lovely head was shaken sadly, and the pale face was turned to the distant landscape. The passion with which he loved her was of a quality certainly very rare in the world of 'society,' she knew that.

'Your wants are very simple, as your tastes are, Ida, and my fortune is more than equal to your own—in worldly matters there can be nothing wanting.'

'I know, Jerry, that a devotion such as yours deserves all the love I could and ought to give it; and yet——'

She paused, and permitted him to retain her hand. Was she, in spite of her asseverations to the contrary, about to love him after all? The heart of Vane beat wildly amid the dawn of fresh hope.

'Many men have loved, Ida,' he urged, in a soft, low, passionate tone; 'but it seems to me that I love you as few men have ever loved before. From the first moment I met you I loved you—and—and—surely circumstances have tested and tried that love to the uttermost.'

'Most true, Jerry.'

'I ask not of what your—your regard has been for another since we parted; I ask you only to love me as you did before that time, if you can.'

The words that Vane spoke came from the depth of the honest fellow's heart, in the full tide of emotion, and Ida could not fail to be touched; and as she gave him one of her profound yet indefinable glances of pity, the light in her beautiful eyes seemed to brighten as her lashes drooped, and Jerry read in them an expression he had not seen there since the happy time that was past.

In fact, Ida seemed to be trembling in her heart to think how dear—was it indeed so?—how dear Jerry Vane was becoming to her again, and how necessary to her his society was daily becoming, and how like the old time it was—more like than, with all her past love for Jack Beverley and her strange dreams and hauntings, she dared to acknowledge to herself!

'Say, Ida, that the gap in my life is to be forgotten—filled up it can never be!'

'Jerry, Jerry,' she urged, 'do not press me so—at present, at least!'

She was yielding after all.

'May I hope that you will accept me yet?' he said, pressing her hand caressingly between both of his.

'A heart is not worth having, Jerry, that accords to pity only what it should accord to love. You have all my esteem, and, perhaps, in time, Jerry——'

She paused and shuddered visibly, and sank back with eyes half closed and a hand pressed on her bosom as if about to faint or fall, but Jerry's arm supported her.

'Good heavens, that sensation again!' he exclaimed.

'I must struggle against it, or it will conquer me,' she said, suddenly regaining her firmness and striving to crush or shake off the nervous emotion that shook her fragile form and gentle spirit.

'My darling, I am to blame; oh, pardon me, if I, at a time when your health—your nervous system, at least—so selfishly urge my claim upon your heart, for a strong and tender claim I have, indeed, Ida.'

There was in this an eloquence greater than more florid phrases could express, as he spoke, for it seemed as if Jerry's very soul was spent in what he said. After a pause, he said, with an arm still round her:

'I will not press you to answer me now, dearest Ida; you are pale and seem so weary. I will go, but ere I do so, give me one kiss in memory of the past, if not to encourage hope for the future.'

She lifted her sweet face to his, and there was infinite tenderness, but no passion in the kiss she accorded him so frankly; and Vane was but too sensible of that; while a sound like a deep sigh fell at the same moment on the ears of both.

'Who sighed?' she asked, startled, in the fear that they were overseen or overheard; 'did you, Jerry?'

'No; yourself, perhaps, darling.'

'Nay—I sigh often enough, but I did not do so now, Jerry.'

'Most strange! We must have deceived ourselves, for here are people coming,' he added, as steps were heard in the outer drawing-room. 'You will give me a final answer, then?' he urged, in a deep, soft whisper.

'Yes.'

'When?'

'This evening.'

'Bless you, darling Ida. Where?

'After dinner—we dine at six—say eight o'clock, in the rhododendron walk.'

And as she left him, on her pouting lip and in her grey-blue eyes—eyes that seemed black at night—Jerry thought that the sadness was gone, and replaced by the beautiful smile of old. Unheard by both, the dressing-bell for dinner had already rung, and several of the sportsmen, Sir John Oriel, Colonel Rakes, and others, entered the room. Among them was Major Desmond, the languid, irrepressible, and imperturbable Desmond—who, en route from town, had turned up for a single day's cover shooting at Carnaby Court.

Overcome by the new tide of his own thoughts, Jerry Vane hurriedly left them to talk over their hits, misses, experiences, and exploits of the day, the results of which had filled a small-sized pony cart.

He retired to his room to dress, and threw open the window to admit the autumn breeze, that it might cool his flushed cheeks and throbbing temples. The kiss of that beloved lip—albeit one so coldly given—yet seemed to linger on his, and all nature around him seemed to grow lighter now that hope had swelled in his heart.

Lit by the evening sun, the leaves of the masses of wild roses and other creepers that clambered round the mullioned window of his room, seemed to murmur pleasantly on the passing breeze, that brought also the chimes of the village spire, the voices of the exulting birds, and the pleasant rustle of the old oak trees in the chase. To the ear of Jerry Vane there seemed to be a melody in all the voices of nature now, for his own heart was all aglow with joy.

CHAPTER XVI.

'JEALOUSY CRUEL AS THE GRAVE.'

He could gather from the manner of Ida nothing of what was passing in her mind during dinner. He observed, however, that she wore on this occasion a flower in her auburn hair, the first with which she had appeared since the time of her mourning—a simple white rose. He remembered that he had admired the simple decoration long ago, and that she had been wont to wear it to please him ere she had worn flowers to please another, so hope grew stronger in the heart of Vane.

She chatted away with Desmond and joined in the general conversation with more gaiety than usual, but not without showing a little abstraction at times, as if her thoughts wandered. She accorded little more than an occasional glance to Vane, with a soft smile on her sweet face, though there was the old languor in all her actions and manner, while she gave a programme of the forthcoming Christmas festivities at Carnaby Court, to which he, and some of the others present, were invited.

At last the ladies left the room, and the last glance, as she retired, rested on him. Jerry's heart beat like lightning. The hands of the clock above the mantel-piece were close upon the hour of eight when—after having to linger over a glass or two of wine—he quitted the table, and the house unperceived, and hastening through the garden, where the few flowers of autumn were lingering yet, he reached the appointed place, the long vista of which he could see in the twilight, bordered by gigantic rhododendron bushes, intermingled with lilac trees and Portugal laurels.

She had not yet come, and with a heart in which much of joyous happiness was blended with hope and anxiety, Jerry walked slowly to and fro, as he knew not at which end of the alley she might appear. The sun had set more than an hour and a half; there was a deep crimson flush in the west, against which the great trees of the chase stood up still, motionless, and dark as bronze, for the night was calm, without a breath of wind, and the garden was so lonely and still, that Jerry thought he could actually hear the beating of his heart.

Time stole on; the twilight passed away, and the shadows and shapes became lost and blended in darkness. The clock in the central gable of the court struck quarter after quarter, till Jerry, peevish with impatience now, and alone, too, found the hour of nine was nigh, and that Ida had not appeared.

Could he have mistaken the place, or she the time? Had sudden illness come upon her, as her health was so uncertain now? Had she been interrupted by some of their numerous guests? To forget, or omit to come, were surely impossible!

A distant step on the ground made his pulses quicken.

'At last, dearest, dearest Ida!' he muttered aloud.

But no; that could not be the step of Ida, hastening lightly and quickly to keep her appointment. It was a slow and heavy one—that of a man; and Major Desmond came sauntering along, in full evening costume, with his hands in his coat-pockets, and the red glowing end of a cigar projecting from his bushy moustache. He was chuckling, laughing to himself, and evidently much amused by something.

Vane would gladly have avoided him and quitted the rhododendron walk, but to do so might be to lose the last chance of seeing whether Ida kept her appointment; while, if she came, it might indicate that one had been made.

He could but hope that the tall guardsman would pass and leave him; but it was not to be so. He had partaken freely of wine, and he was disposed to be jocular, confidential, and particularly friendly, so he passed his arm through Vane's, saying:

'As I passed into the garden a few minutes ago, just to enjoy a soothing weed, I made the funniest discovery in the world—by Jove I did!'

'You discovered what?' asked Vane, intensely annoyed.

'Well—ah—that, with all her grief for our friend Beverley, I don't think the fair Ida is quite beyond being consoled. Do you take?'

'Not in the least,' was the curt response.

'She has an admirer.'

'Many, I should think,' replied Jerry, becoming more and more amazed and nettled by the tone and laughter of the guardsman.

'But she has one in particular, I tell you.'

'Who do you mean?' asked Vane, colouring, as he thought the reference was to himself.

'By Jove, that is more than I can tell you!' said Desmond, with another quiet laugh, as he tossed his cigar away; 'I only know that as I lounged slowly past the arbour where the marble statue stands, about ten minutes ago, I saw her in close proximity—quite a confabulation—with a fellow, though I did not hear their voices; doubtless they were "low and sweet," like that of Annie Laurie.'

Was this assertion a piece of Desmond's impudence, or the result of the baronet's champagne? his idea of wit, fun, or what?

Jerry Vane felt his face first redden and then grow pale with fury in the dark.

'You must be mistaken,' he said, sternly—almost imperiously.

'Not at all, Vane,' replied the other; 'I passed on without affecting to perceive them; but I could make out that the fellow who hung over her as she sat at the table was not one of the guests—very pale, with a black, lanky moustache.'

'Oh, it is impossible!' urged Vane in a very strange voice.

'Not at all, I tell you,' replied Desmond, in a somewhat nettled tone. 'I simply amused myself with the fun of the thing. I heard a sound, and on looking up saw her start up, look at her watch, and then hurry—almost rush——'

'This way?'

'Oh, no!'

'Whither, then?'

'Straight into the house by the back drawing-room window.' And the tall dandy stroked his long moustache, and uttered one of his quiet laughs again.

Vane, past making any comment, remained silent and in utter bewilderment. His heart seemed to stand still; and he felt a more deadly jealousy, a more sickening and permanent pang in it, than he had ever endured before. He remembered what he himself had seen in that bower, and recalled the eavesdropper in the conservatory, who was seen by another, and whose personal appearance tallied exactly with what Desmond had said, and an emotion of heart-sick misery—of bitter, bitter disappointment and hopeless desolation, came upon him.

Great was the mental torture he endured for some moments. While he had been awaiting her in that walk, with such emotions in his soul as were known only to heaven and himself, she had been in dalliance with another—an unknown man—in that accursed bower again! 'Violent passions,' he knew, 'are formed in solitude. In the bustle of the world no object has time to make deep impression.' So are deep emotions formed in solitude; but where had she learned to love this unknown, if love she did? and if she did not, what was the object of their secret meetings, and whence the power he seemed to have over her?

All these ideas and many more flashed through the mind of Jerry Vane, whose lips became dry as dust. His tongue, though parched, seemed cleaving to the roof of his mouth, whilst a rush of blood seemed mounting to his brain, and a giddiness came upon him. He heard the drawling and 'chaffing' remarks upon the arbour scene, which Desmond had resumed, but knew not a word he said, while arm-and-arm he mechanically promenaded to and fro with him.

He had but one idea—Ida false, and thus!

He knew not what to think, in whom to believe, or in whom to trust now, if it were so. Heaven, could such falsehood be, and within a few brief hours! he thought.

Then for the first time there began to creep into the heart of Vane something of that hatred which in the end becomes so fierce, cruel, and bitter—the hate that is born of baffled or unrequited love!

Anon, his heart wavered again; the unwonted emotion began to die away; it seemed too strange and unnatural and the passion he had for Ida vanquished him once more, by suggestions of utter unbelief, or there being an unexplainable, but dreadful, mistake somewhere.

It could not be that all along she had been deceiving him and others by playing a double game of dissimulation, while acting outwardly such gravity and grief! The soft and sad expression of the chaste and sweetly pretty face that seemed before him even then forbade the idea, yet the galling fear, the stinging suspicion, remained behind.

'She refused Jerningham, of ours, who was foolish enough to propose in the first flush of her widowhood, and she refused Jack Rakes of the Coldstreams last month, and sent him off to the Continent to console himself,' Desmond was saying; 'she has vowed, they say, that she would never, never marry, after the death of that fellow in the line—what's his name?—Beverley, don't you know, and here I find her billing and cooing most picturesquely in an arbour! It is right good fun, by Jove! I only wonder who the party is that was receiving "the outpouring of an enamoured heart, secluded in moral widowhood;" and I might have discovered, if I had only pretended to blunder into the arbour; but then I hate to make a scene, and it's deuced bad form to spoil sport.'

Vane felt it in his heart to knock the laughing plunger down, when hearing him run on thus.

It began to seem painfully evident that all this episode could not be falsification. Major Desmond had no particular interest in Ida, though piqued, as much as it was in his lazy nature to be, at Clare, for refusing the lounging offer he had made her.

For the other he had neither liking nor disliking; but, in all he told Vane, he seemed inspired only by that love of gossipy chit-chat in which even men of the best position will indulge by the hour at their club or elsewhere, together, perhaps, with the desire, so invariable, to quiz the grief of a widow, especially if she is young and handsome.

'There is,' says a writer, 'no weakness of which men are so ashamed of being convicted as credulity, and there is none so natural to an honest nature.'

But to the storm that gathered in the honest heart of Jerry were added rage, astonishment, and an overwhelming sense of utter disappointment.

Where had this unknown come from, and whither did he go? Where had she met him, and how long had this mysterious, and, to all appearance, secret intimacy lasted? What manner of man was he, that she was ashamed to have him introduced to her family? He had heard—he had certainly read—of ladies, even of the highest, most delicate nurture and tender culture, by some madness, inversion of the mind, or by temptation of the devil, taking wild fancies for valets and grooms, and even marrying them in secret, and thus at times all manner of horrible speculations crowded into the now giddy brain of Jerry.

Ida! wildly as he loved her he would rather she were dead than less or not what he supposed and believed her to be; but he thought bitterly, 'Alas! where was there ever man or woman who reached the spiritualised standard of idealistic love?'

So, in spite of himself—it was not in human nature that it could be otherwise—his old jealousy, that barbarous yet just leaven which he had felt in the past time, when she preferred Jack Beverley to himself, grew in his heart again.

He marvelled much how she would look when he joined her among other guests in the drawing-room; but the face he had looked for so anxiously was not there when he and Desmond entered it; and he was actually somewhat relieved when he was informed by Clare that Ida was unable to appear, and had retired to her room 'with a crushing headache.'

He expressed some well-bred sorrow to hear this, very mechanically and quietly, adding that he was the more sorry to hear it as he believed he would have to leave for town early on the morrow.

Clare heard this sudden announcement with surprise, and regarded Jerry's face earnestly.

CHAPTER XVII.

A QUARREL.

But one idea or conviction, prevailed in the mind of Jerry Vane:

'She who was so readily false to me before, may easily be so again!'

If he slept at all that night, his sleep was but a succession of nightmares, with dreams such as might spring from a slumber procured by the mandragora; one aching thought ever recurring amid the darkness of the waking hours, and all the more keenly when morning came, and he knew that he must inexorably see and talk with Ida in the usual commonplace way before others, ere he left her for ever, and quitted Carnaby Court to return no more.

The tortures he had endured he resolved never to endure again. It should never be in the power of Ida or any other woman to place her heel upon his heart and crush it, as she had crushed it twice!

Yet when he saw her at the breakfast-table, in all her fresh morning loveliness, and in the most becoming demi-toilette, with her gorgeous hair so skilfully manipulated by her maid, and her grave, chastely beautiful face rippling with a kind—almost fond—smile, as if greeting him and asking his forgiveness too, he knew not what to think, but strove to steel himself against her for the future.

She had a newly gathered white rose—his flower, she was wont to call it—in her bosom; and that rose was not whiter than the slender neck round which the frills of tulle were clasped by a tiny coral brooch.

At times, when he looked on her, and heard the steadiness of her musical voice and sweet silvery little laugh, and beheld the perfect ease of her manner and the candour of her eyes, he could have imagined the affair in the garden to have been a dream, but for the strange and conscious smile that hovered in the face of Desmond when he addressed Ida, while making a hurried breakfast before his departure for London.

'I would take the same train with you, Desmond,' said Vane, 'but that my things are not packed.'

'Do you leave us so soon?' asked Ida, who overheard him.

'I must,' said Vane, for whom there had been no letters that morning, much to his annoyance, as he wished to plead something like a genuine excuse to Clare for taking an abrupt departure. 'I mean to leave England—perhaps even Europe, if I can.'

'For where?' asked Ida, growing very pale.

'Well, I scarcely know,' replied Vane, with a laugh that certainly had no merriment in it.

'Do you really mean this?'

'Yes,' he replied, curtly.

She was silent, but looked at him pleadingly, and even upbraidingly across the table, while Jerry, becoming, as he thought, grim as Ajax, busied himself with a piece of partridge pie.

'No, no,' thought he; 'I shall not again begin that hazardous play with love, which some one truly calls "the deadly gambling of heart and thought and sense, which casts all stakes in faith upon the venture of another's life."'

He had hoped that by the mere force of his own passionate love for her some tenderness might be reawakened in her heart for him; and now—now, after all, she was actually fooling him—vulgarly fooling him!

By a glance that was exchanged between them they tacitly quitted the room when breakfast was over, and passed together—he following with undisguised reluctance—into the garden, through a window which opened like a folding-door on the back terrace of the mansion.

'What is the meaning of this sudden departure, Jerry?' she asked, when they reached a part of the garden near the very bower Desmond had referred to. 'Do you mean it?'

'I do.'

'How strange you are in your manner, Jerry! Look at me! why, you are quite pale!'

He dared not tell her the cause at first; he felt ashamed of his own folly—ashamed of her and of the accusation he had to make.

'I was in the rhododendron walk last night. You did not come, as you promised.'

'I—I could not,' said she, her pallor increasing, as she cast down her eyes.

'My heart was wrung by your absence, Ida; but still more wrung—ay, tortured nigh unto death—by the cause!'

'Cause?' said she, trembling.

'Yes,' he replied, sharply and bitterly.

'Oh, you know not the cause,' she said sadly, as she shook her head.

'I do know, and so do others; but I have no right to question your actions or control your movements—no warrant for—God help me, Ida, I scarcely know what I say.'

'So it seems,' said she, a little haughtily.

'Oh, Ida, what is this man to you?' he asked, huskily.

'To me—who—what man?' she asked, with a bewildered air.

'He who is always hanging about you—he who detained you in that arbour last night, when you promised to meet me, and give me the answer I prayed for in yonder oriel.'

Astonishment, alarm, and anxiety pervaded the delicate coldness of her pure, pale face, and then a flush—the hectic of unwonted anger—crossed it.

'Jerry—Mr. Vane—are you mad?' she exclaimed. 'How dare you address me thus?'

'Mad—I fear so; but for the love of pity, Ida——'

'Well, sir.'

'Tell me, what am I to think?'

'Enough,' said she coldly; 'the words we have exchanged are most painful to us both.'

'They are agony to me, Ida. But say, were you in that arbour last night?'

'On the way to meet you, I was,' she replied, but with hesitation in her manner.

'And there you remained?'

'Oh, thrice I endeavoured to leave the arbour and keep my appointment with you, and then—then——'

She paused, and her voice died away upon her quivering lip.

'What? Speak, dearest Ida.'

'That strange magnetic influence, which I told you impels my actions and controls my movements, came over me like a species of drowsy sleep, and I remained till the time to meet you was long since past.'

'And he who had this influence over you—he who detained you,' said Vane, bitterly and incredulously.

'Jerry! this to me!' she exclaimed, her eyes expressive now of sad reproach. 'Think of me as you will, I can explain no more.'

Her eyes closed, her little white hands were clenched and pressed upon her bosom, and again, as yesterday in the oriel, she seemed on the point of sinking. She had suddenly become bewildered and confused, and this bewilderment and confusion were but too painfully apparent to the sorrowing and exasperated Vane.

Was she thinking it possible that that of which she had spoken in a moment of confidence to Trevor Chute—the thing or being unseen, but which she felt conscious of being near her—could have been by her side in that dark arbour then, or what caused her emotion? Did a memory of the icy and irrepressible shudder she felt at times, when that dread pang occurred to her, come over her then?

Perhaps so, for the nameless dread that paralysed her tongue made her more tolerant to Jerry. Anon she recovered herself, and pride of heart, dignity of position, and a sense of insult came to her rescue and restored her strength, and she looked Vane steadily, even haughtily, in the face.

'You put my faith to a hard test, Ida,' said he; 'God alone knows how hard.'

'If I could spare you a pang, Mr. Vane, He knows I would,' she replied; 'but when last you spoke to me about a strange gentleman being with me in the arbour, I thought your manner odd and unwarrantable, and now I think it more so. I trust this is the last time the subject will be referred to—and, and—now I wish you good-morning.'

And bowing with gravity and grace, not unmingled with hauteur, she swept away towards the house and left him. Great was the shock this event, and this most unanticipated interview or explanation, gave the heart of Vane, who made not the slightest attempt to detain her, or soothe the indignation he had apparently kindled; but he stood rooted to the spot, motionless as the marble Psyche on its pedestal close by.

If perfidy rendered her unworthy of him, why regret her? Yet it was so hard, so bitter, and so unnatural to deem her so. With all his pride, we have said that Jerry had none with Ida, and the moment the accusation against her escaped him, he repented of it. With all her tenderness and gentleness, he knew how dignified and resolute Ida could be. He recalled all the varying expressions he had seen in her sweet face, great amazement, pain, alarm, and sorrow, culminating in indignation and pride; and though she left him in undisguised anger, he still seemed to hear the pathos of her voice, which seemed filled with unshed tears.

Was he yielding her up in anger now, and not in sorrow as before, to another who would revel in all the spells of her beauty and sweetness, and thus ruining all for himself again?

Then he said through his clenched teeth:

'What matters it? If she is so perfidious, let her go. But I have been too long here playing the moonstruck fool.'

Yet with a pitiful desperation he clung to the faint hope that ere he left, some explanation, other than he had received, might be given him; that another interview might pass between them which would change the present gloomy aspect of their affairs, and place them even on their former vague and unsatisfactory basis. But Major Desmond had taken his departure during the interview in the garden; thus Vane had no opportunity of recurring to what he had related overnight in the garden; and Ida remained studiously aloof, sequestered in her own room, and he saw no more till the moment of his departure, and even then not a word passed between them.

Clare Collingwood heard with genuine concern the announcement of Vane's sudden departure that day; he was the sole link between her and Trevor Chute, and the medium through which she heard of all the wanderer's movements.

It was long past mid-day ere he could leave the Court, and as he passed through the hall he saw the ladies taking their afternoon tea in the morning room, and amid that brilliant group, with their shining silks and rich laces, their perfumed hair and glittering ornaments, he saw only the bright Aurora tresses and sombre dress of Ida, her jet ear-rings and necklet contrasting so powerfully with the paleness of her blonde beauty—the wondrous whiteness of her skin. She was smiling lightly now at Violet, who was coquetting with, or quizzing, old Colonel Rakes.

Why should not Ida smile when the eyes of 'Society' were upon her?

It fretted Vane, however, that she should be doing so on the eve of his departure, and added fuel to the fire that consumed him. He was just in the humour to quarrel with trifles. He simply bade her adieu as he did all the rest, and bowed himself out; but he could not resist making some explanation to Clare, who followed him to the porch, and whose expressive eyes seemed to ask it, for she had detected in a moment that something unusual had passed between him and Ida.

She heard him with pain and bewilderment.

'All this must, and shall, be fully explained,' said Clare, with her dark eyes swimming in tears.

'I doubt it.'

'Doubt not!' said she, firmly, 'and, dear Jerry, promise me that you will forget your quarrel with Ida, and visit us again at Christmas; papa and—and Lady Evelyn will be home long before that. Do you promise?'

'I promise you, Clare—dear Clare, you were ever my friend,' said he, in a broken voice, as he kissed her hand, and would have kissed her cheek, perhaps, but for the servants who stood by; and in half an hour afterwards the train was sweeping him onward to London.

'I had hoped, Ida, that Jerry Vane's visit would have had a different termination than this,' said Clare, the moment she got her sister alone. 'Why, you have actually quarrelled.'

'No, not quarrelled,' urged Ida.

'What then?'

'Parted coldly, certainly.'

'Why did you not keep your appointment with him?'

Again the expression that Vane had seen on her face—pain and embarrassment, sorrow and bewilderment, were all visible to Clare, who had to repeat the question three times; then Ida said:

'As he himself has told you, he accused me—me—of meeting another, and I was almost bluntly accused thus, Clare, when—when I was certainly beginning to feel that I might love him with the emotion that I deemed dead in my heart and impossible to resuscitate.'

'All this seems most inexplicable to me!' said Clare, with the smallest expression of irritation in her tone. 'Poor Jerry! he loves you very truly, Ida, and sorely indeed has that love been tested.'

'He loved me because he believed in me; that regard will cease when he ceases to believe, as he has done, through some insulting suspicion, the source or cause of which is utterly beyond my conception,' said Ida, wearily and sadly. Then she threw an arm round the waist of Clare, and lying on her sister's breast, said in a low voice, 'Another seems to hold me by bonds that will never be unloosed, Clare.'

'Another, Ida!'

'Beverley.'

'What madness is this?' asked Clare, regarding her sister's face with great and deep anxiety.

'I loved Beverley as I never loved Jerry; it was, indeed, the passion which Scott describes as given by God alone:

'"It is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart and mind to mind
In body and in soul can bind."

Beverley's last words were that we should meet again; and we have met again—nay, seem to be always meeting in my thoughts by day and dreams by night; but always the memory of him was most vivid when Jerry Vane was near me or in my mind.'

'How will all this end?' said Clare, in a voice of sorrow. 'I would that papa were here.'

'He had never much sympathy with, or toleration for, my grief, and now that it is passing away, he would have still less with these secret thoughts or strange impressions I have told to you, dear Clare, and even hinted at to Trevor Chute.'

'It is a disease of the mind, Ida; but all this seems so incomprehensible to me. Surely we have power and will over our own acts, and even in these days, when so much is said, thought, written—yes, and practised too, about spiritualism, mysticism, etc., there is the danger of adopting that as an inevitable law to which we must conform, but which we should with all our power resist as the vilest of superstition.'

Ida only shook her head mournfully, and poor Clare's motherly and sisterly heart was stirred within her. She knew not what to think; but she clung to the hope that ultimately a marriage with Jerry Vane would dissipate these morbid impressions with which the mind of Ida had become so singularly and so strongly imbued.

But now, after this, rumours began to spread—though the strange man, if man he was, had disappeared, and was seen no more, but seemed to have taken his departure with Jerry Vane—rumours born of chance, remarks overheard by listening servants, and taken to the still-room, the kitchen, the stable court and gamekeeper's lodge, of spectral appearances in the rhododendron walk, in the arbour where the Psyche stood, and elsewhere about the ancient mansion, till at last, through Major Desmond, they actually reached the ears of Sir Carnaby Collingwood abroad, and though they excited the merriment and languid curiosity of Lady Evelyn, they caused him anger and annoyance, and not a little contempt: 'Such stories are such deuced bad form—get into the local papers, and all that sort of thing, don't you know.'

One fact became pleasantly apparent to Clare ere long, that though Ida regretted the departure of Vane, and still more the inexplicable cause of their mutual coldness, her health for a time improved rapidly: the colour came back to her cheek, and the brightness to her eyes; she loved as of old to take her share in pleasures and amusements; and the chill shiver she had been wont to experience affected her less and less—but for a time only.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE EMEUTE AT LUBECK.

At the Stadt Hamburg Sir Carnaby and his bride probably secluded themselves in their own apartments on the day after the unpleasant rencontre related in Chapter XIV.; at least Trevor Chute saw nothing of them at the table d'hôte, which was filled by its usual frequenters, officers of the garrison, German Jews and Jewesses, and those whose names inevitably figure on the board in the hall as 'Grafs, Herrs, Rentiers, and Privatiers.'

Avoiding the hotel—on consideration, Chute saw no reason why he should change his quarters—he had 'done' all Lubeck, seen the Dom or Cathedral, a huge red-brick edifice of the twelfth century, with its wonderful screen, stone pulpit, and brass font; the Marien Kirche, with its astronomical clock, where daily the figures of the seven Electors pass in review, and bow before the Emperor; the wonderful old Rathhaus; and the stone in the marketplace whereon 'the Byng' of Lubeck, Admiral Mark Meyer, was judicially murdered for not fighting a Danish fleet; the wood carvings in the Schusselbuden Strasse; and the famous letter of Sir William Wallace to the Hans cities—the first 'free trade' document the world ever saw; and when evening was come again he found himself seated, somewhat weary and almost alone, at the long board of the table d'hôte in the great dining-room.

A tempestuous sun was setting in the west, against the crimson glow of which the black kites, like flies amid wine, seemed to float above the trees of the Linden Platz; and the waters of the Trave and the Wakenitz were reddened, as they flowed past the timber-clothed ramparts, the copse woods and turfy moors, towards the sea.

Something portentous seemed in the air, the sky, and even in the manner of the people of Lubeck that evening. Trevor Chute observed that the Prussian officers who were at the table, or smoking under the verandah outside the windows, all talked confidentially of something that was expected—he could not make out what, and the military eye of Chute observed that, since noon, double sentinels had been posted at the Burg Thor, the Rathhaus, and elsewhere.

The thoughts of Trevor Chute went back over the many stirring events of his past life since he had known Clare and been rent from her—events full of sporting excitement, of military peril, and Indian adventures, of rapid change by land and sea, of aimless wanderings like the present, of wet night marches and wild gallops, amid the scorching heats of the Punjaub, when men fell by the wayside, stricken and foaming at the mouth with sunstroke, or writhing with the deadlier cholera, and he knew not why all this retrospect occurred to him. Was he on the eve of any great danger? It almost seemed so.

The evening closed in dark and gloomy, and though the atmosphere was stifling, Chute perceived that the lower windows of the hotel were being all closed and barricaded. He was then informed by the Ober Kellner that a serious riot was expected by 'His High Wisdom, the Senior Burgomaster,' among the tradesmen and working population, who were all 'on strike,' and hence the doubling of the guards on the town house and at the city gates.

Sounds of alarm from time to time, shouts and other noises, were heard in the echoing streets, then followed the tolling of an alarm bell, and the beating of the Prussian drums, while flames began to redden the sky in one quarter, thus indicating that the houses of some persons obnoxious to the rabble had been set on fire outside the Holstein Thor.

Despite the advice of the landlord and the waiters, Trevor Chute remained on the steps at the hotel door, enjoying a cigar, and determined to see what was going on, though but little was visible, as in the streets the rioters had turned off the gas. Ere long he could make out something like the head of a great column debouching over the open space before the hotel.

For a moment nothing could be distinguished but that it was a crowd, shadows moving in the shade, but accompanied by a roar of sounds, cheers, hoarse hurrahs, oaths and imprecations in German, with the patois of Schleswig and of Holstein. The rabble, consisting of many thousands, were in readiness to commit outrage on anyone or anything that came in their way, and were now in fierce pursuit of an open droski that was brought at a gallop up to the door of the hotel, and out of which there sprang, looking very pale and bewildered, Sir Carnaby Collingwood and Lady Evelyn, whom the crowd had overtaken when returning from a visit to one of the three Syndics. Above the heads of the grimy rabble seven or eight torches were shaking like tufts of flame, and by their uncertain glare added much to the terror of the scene, for a madly infuriated mob has terrors that are peculiarly its own, and the simple circumstance that Sir Carnaby and Lady Evelyn were the occupants of a hired vehicle was sufficient to make all these half-starved and tipsified boors—tipsy with beer and fiery corn-brandy—turn their vengeance on them.

Even while rushing alongside the fast-flying wheels—for the driver lashed his horses to a gallop—they could see that Sir Carnaby was an aristocrat, an hochgeboren, or well-born man; that was enough to ensure insult and ridicule, or worse, and all the more when they discovered that he was an Englishman—and, like a true Englishman, the baronet, with all his folly and shortcomings in many ways, did not want a proper amount of pluck.

All that passed now seemed to do so with the quickness of lightning.

Sir Carnaby, highly exasperated by what he had undergone, and the terror of Lady Evelyn, instead of retiring at once into the hotel, unwisely turned and struck the foremost man in the crowd a sharp blow across the face with his cane.

The voices of the crowd now burst into one united roar of senseless rage, and a piercing and agonising shriek escaped Lady Evelyn, as she saw him seized by many hands, torn from her side, and dragged violently along the streets, amid shouts of 'To the Trave!—to the Trave!'

She did not and could not love this old man—she was, perhaps, incapable of loving anyone—but she loved well the position her marriage gave her, though a viscount's daughter, with the luxury and splendour in which she was cradled when at home. She had been used since childhood to obedience; to be followed and caressed; to have every wish gratified, every caprice supplied; to see every doubt and difficulty cleared away; to feel neither pain nor illness, not even the least excitement about anything; and now—now, the man with whom she had linked her fate was at the mercy of an infamous and brutal foreign mob; and with her shriek there came a cry to Chute to save him; but Trevor never heard her, for the moment hands were laid on Sir Carnaby, followed by Tom Travers, his servant, he had plunged into the moving and shouting mass, which went surging down the street; then Lady Evelyn saw the three disappear in the obscurity; out of which there came the roar of mingling shouts, the gleam of cutlasses as the night-watch attacked the rioters; and then followed the red flashes and the report of musketry, as the Prussian guard at the Rathhaus opened fire upon them; and Lady Evelyn, unused, as we have said, to any excitement, especially the sudden and unwonted horrors of an episode like this, fainted, and was borne senseless into the hotel.

Meanwhile, amid the wild whirl of that seething mob, how fared it with Trevor Chute and him whom he sought to save or rescue?

In all his service in India—service so different from the silk and velvet dawdling tenor of life in the Guards—dread of death had been unknown to Trevor Chute, and never felt by him, even when he knew that he was supposed to be dying of fever or a wound, or when he lay in the dark jungle, where the thick and rank vegetation ran riot, as it were; where the Brahminese cobra had its lair, the tiger and the cheetah, too; where, heavy, hot, and oppressive, the vapour rose like steamy clouds about the stems of the trees, while his life-blood ebbed away, and he had the knowledge that, if undiscovered, he might die of thirst, of weakness, under the kuttack dagger of a mountain robber, or by the feet of a wild elephant, for oblivion thus clouded the end of many a comrade who was reported 'missing,' and no more was known; so Chute was not to recoil before a German rabble now.

He knocked down by main strength of arm and sheer weight of hand the two who had hold of Sir Carnaby, and were dragging him helplessly along the street; and then, with the aid of Travers, he assisted him towards an archway which opened off the street, while the rabble closed in upon them, showering blows and execrations, but impeding each other in their mad efforts; thus man after man of them, uttering groans and shouts, went down before the regular facers, dealt straight out from the shoulder by Chute and Travers into the eyes and jaws of their assailants, who had a wholesome Continental terror of 'the art de box,' as the French name it, while breathless, bewildered, and certainly appalled to find himself so suddenly become the sole victim of a dreadful mob, Sir Carnaby stood between his two defenders, his polite and deprecatory gestures (for voice he had none), and the elegance of his delicate white hands, as seen in the torchlight, exciting only the ridicule of the unwashed rabble.

Through the archway, which was narrow, they conveyed Sir Carnaby, and by their united strength succeeded in closing the door, and by an iron bar that was behind it completely excluding the crowd, who continued to shout and rave without as they surged against it and beat upon it with sticks and stones. Anon the crash of glass was heard, and then the cries of women, as the house itself was assailed.

Infuriated to find that their victim or victims, whom many of them now supposed to be some of their wealthy and oppressive monopolists, had escaped them, the blows upon the door were redoubled, but its strength baffled them.

'It is me they want, Chute, because I struck that rascal at the hotel,' said Sir Carnaby: 'leave me—they will tear you to pieces to get at me, the German brutes!'

'Leave you, Sir Carnaby! Never! If, even were you a stranger, I should stand by you, how much more am I bound to do so when you are the father of Clare Collingwood! And if I cannot by main strength save, I shall die with you—game, an Englishman to the last!'

They were in a court which had no outlet. From it an open stair led to a species of ancient gallery overlooking the street; it was a species of balcony, with pillars and arches carved of stone, like those in front of the wonderfully quaint Rathhaus, which was not far from it, and was built in the middle of the fifteenth century.

Their appearance in this place elicited a roar from the mob some fifteen feet below them, and hundreds of dirty hands were shaken clenched towards them, and hundreds of excited and upturned faces were visible in the red, uncertain glare of the torches that were held still by five or six of the rioters. But matters now began to look very serious; for the crowd was seen to part like the waves of the sea as a ladder was borne through it and planted against the wall. Then five or six men began to mount at once, while others pressed forward to follow, determined to visit the fugitives by escalade.

Travers looked bewildered, and Sir Carnaby still more so; but Trevor Chute, by habit, profession, and nature, had all that coolness in front of immediate peril, and utter indifference of personal risk, which made him renowned in his regiment and the idol of the soldiers, and he had been in many critical situations, where caution and decision had to be combined with instant action.

The head and shoulders of the uppermost man on the ladder had barely appeared above the front of the balcony when Chute seized the former by its two uprights, and thrust it fairly outward from the wall. For a moment it oscillated, or seemed to balance itself, and then, describing a radius of about thirty feet or more, fell back among the crowd with its load of ruffians.

Then shrieks and the rattle of musketry were heard, as the Prussian guard arrived from the Rathhaus, and by orders of a burgomaster poured in a volley of some twenty muskets or so, on which the mob took to flight, and dispersed in all directions, leaving behind two or three dead men and the maimed wretches who had been on the upper portion of the ladder.

So ended this episode of excitement and peril, after which the three Englishmen, to whom every species of apology was tendered—after due explanation given—were conducted by the armed night watch back to their hotel, and once more quietness settled over the little city of Lubeck.

CHAPTER XIX.

SIR CARNABY'S GRATITUDE.

Save that he had got a terrible shaking, a few blows, and considerable fright, Sir Carnaby Collingwood, thanks to Trevor Chute and his servant, was not much the worse and between his draughts of iced seltzer and brandy, he sputtered and threatened the whole city of Lubeck with our ambassador at Berlin, and to have the outrage of the night brought 'before the House' as soon as he returned to town; while Lady Evelyn, filled with genuine admiration of the pluck shown by Chute, his manly and generous bearing, and with gratitude for the manner in which he had assuredly saved the life of her caro sposo, became his most ardent ally; but as he and Sir Carnaby lingered over their wine that night he felt—and still more next day—the weight of the many blows and buffets of which he had been quite unconscious at the time they were so freely bestowed upon him.

'Egad, Chute,' chuckled Sir Carnaby, 'didn't think you and I should ever figure like two heroes in a melodrama; by Jove—absurd, don't you know—but those Germans are beastly fellows. The moselle stands with you. We have had nothing here,' he continued, laughing with more genuine heartiness than was usual to him, for his feelings had undergone a revulsion—'we have had nothing here but mistakes and scenes—actually scenes. I refused you Clare, and you make off, per train, with Lady Evelyn. I was most unkind to you, and you act generously by returning good for exceeding evil.'

Trevor was so unused to this tone from Sir Carnaby that his heart swelled with mingled hope and anticipation, joy and sadness, as he said:

'I am only thankful to Heaven that I was here to-night, and able to be of service to you.'

'Service—egad, my dear fellow, you have saved my life!'

'The consciousness of that rewards me for more than one past misfortune.'

'Ah, you mean those which caused you to leave the Guards?'

'To leave England, and—lost me Clare!' said Chute, falteringly.

'Ah, well, it was all no fault of yours. It was a thousand pities that your father, the old General—an extravagant dog he was—could touch the entail. That is all over now; and believe me, Trevor Chute, if you forgive me the past, you shall not go without your reward.'

And the two shook hands in silence. The heart of the younger man beat tumultuously, for well did he know the glorious 'reward' that was referred to. He knew that Sir Carnaby would keep to his word, and he had, we have said, an ardent admirer and adherent in Lady Evelyn.

'Captain Chute,' said she, 'do give up this peregrimania of yours, and spend Christmas with us at Carnaby Court. Promise me,' she added, taking his hands in hers; 'I will take no denial, and am always used to have my way in everything.'

So Chute, without much difficulty, accepted an invitation in which kindness was perhaps mingled with some desire to get Clare off her hands.

Chute, with Sir Carnaby's permission, wrote to Clare next day, saying that he had been so happy as to be of service to her father, and had saved him—'saved his life, in fact'—during a row among the Germans; that they were the best of friends now that all barriers were removed, and how happy he and she would yet be in the time to come.

Poor Clare was extremely bewildered by all this, till the letter was supplemented by a more descriptive and effusive epistle from the, sometime to her, obnoxious Lady Evelyn, describing in glowing colours the terrors of the affair at Lubeck, Chute's bravery, and Sir Carnaby's rescue, and the heart of the girl leaped in her breast with gratitude to Heaven for this sudden change in the feelings of her father, and gratitude to Trevor for saving the selfish old man from injury, insult, and, too probably, a sudden and dreadful death; and amid this new-born happiness grew a longing to behold that of her sister and Jerry Vane.

The latter, when in London, more than once, when with Desmond; contrived to draw on the subject of the male figure he had seen in the arbour with Ida, and found that he still adhered to it in all its somewhat vague details.

On the other hand, he had a long private letter from Clare, impressing upon him that it must have been a delusion; that no such person had been seen by Ida; and dwelling delicately on the health of the latter, and the strange fancies which haunted her. Perplexed, he knew not what to think, and would mutter:

'Delusion! Were Colonel Rakes, Desmond, and I all deluded alike? It is an impossibility!'

He actually doubted her, and bitter as the doubt must be of that one loves, deep must be the love that struggles against it, and his was of that kind. Clare reminded him of his promised visit at Christmas-time.

'Shall I go, to be snared again by the witchery of Ida's violet eyes and the golden gleam of her auburn hair?'

The most rankling and bitter wounds are those of the heart; because they are unseen, and, too often, untellable; so Vane, amid the bitterness of his doubt, consoled, or strove to console himself with the remark of a Scottish writer, who says, 'How humbling it is to think that the strongest affections which have perplexed, or agitated, or delighted us from our birth, will, in a few years, cease to have an existence on the earth; and that all the ardour which they have kindled will be as completely extinguished and forgotten as if they had never been!'

Love for him certainly seemed to have been dawning in her heart again; else whence that kiss—somewhat too sisterly, perhaps—which she accorded to him so frankly in the oriel window, filling his bosom with the old joy? Across the sunshine that was brightening his path why should this marring shadow have fallen, giving a pain that was only equalled in intensity by his love? hence it was simply horrid to hear a man like Desmond say, mockingly:

'You ask me about that fellow in the arbour so often that, by Jove, Vane, you are becoming spoony on her again—heard you were so once, don't you know—threw you over for Beverley, and all that sort of thing. Fact is, my dear fellow, women always betray those who love them too much. Never throw your heart further away than just so far that you can easily recover it.'

And with his thoughts elsewhere, Jerry, spoiled as women of the world will spoil a drawing-room pet, lingered on amid a gay circle in London, endowed with a vague flirting commission, and coquetted a little with the languid, the soft, and the lovely, to hide or heal the wound that Ida had inflicted; while it was with regret, and a sense of as much irritation and hauteur as her gentle nature was capable of feeling, Ida heard that Vane was to accompany Chute (after all that had passed between them, and his suspicions) to Carnaby Court, where now the beeches and elms were all yellow or brown with the last tints of autumn, and the tall trees in the chase showed flushes of crimson, purple, and orange when the sun was sinking beyond the uplands in the west.

On very different terms were Clare and her lover; and in their letters they wrote freely and confidently of their future—a happy time that seemed certain now—the future that had once been but as the mirage that Chute had often beheld on the march in the sandy deserts of Aijmere.

'Clare—I shall see her again!' he muttered to himself; it was a great thought, a bright conviction, that to him she was no longer a dream but a reality; thus in his heart he felt 'that riot of hope, joy, and belief which is too tumultuous and impatient for happiness, but yet is happy beyond all that the world holds.'

Objectless till he saw her again, after Sir Carnaby and Lady Evelyn had left him for England, he lingered in Northern Germany; but Jerry Vane had accepted Lady Evelyn's written and actually reiterated invitation for Christmas with very mingled feelings indeed.

Since the day he had left Carnaby Court so abruptly he had never exchanged a word, verbally or in writing, with Ida.

In going there now he would do so with a deadened sense of sorrow, disappointment, and bitterness in his heart and the wretched doubt as to whether he was wise to throw himself into the lure—was it snare?—of her society again; even with the intention of showing, as he thought, poor goose, how bravely he could resist it, and seek to convince her that he had effaced the past and forgotten to view her amid the halo in which he had once enshrined her. Were they, then, to meet in a state of antagonism?

Trevor Chute's brave rescue of Sir Carnaby Collingwood had, as a story, preceded his return to town, with many exaggerations; the clubs rang with it, and it actually stirred the blood in what 'Ouida' calls 'the languid, nil admirari, egotistic, listless pulses of high-bred society.'

But time was creeping on now, and the Christmas of the year drew near at hand.

CHAPTER XX.

CARNABY COURT.

The baronet's country seat was popular among his 'set,' and in the county generally. The ladies were attractive, Sir Carnaby was fond of society, and was undeniably hospitable: the preserves were good, the corn-fed pheasants were among the best in the land, and partridges abounded in the coverts and thickets; the stud and cellar were good, and his French cook was a genius. The oak-studded chase, where the deer lay deep amid the fern, showed trees that were of vast antiquity—remnants, perhaps, of the days when Bucks was all a forest, as old historians tell us.

The Collingwoods had been lords of Collingwood ever since tradition could tell of them. They were, it was said, old as the chalky Chiltern Hills and the woods of Whaddon Chase, and stories of their prowess had been rife among the people since the days when Edward was murdered at Tewkesbury, when 'bluff King Hal' burnt Catholics and Protestants together with perfect impartiality at Smithfield, when Mary spent her maudlin love on Philip, and Queen Bess boxed the ears of her courtiers: all had figured in history somehow; and everywhere, over the gateway half hidden by ivy, in the painted oriels, on the gables, and on the buttons of the livery servants, were three eels wavy on a bend, indicating a heraldic portion of the tenure by which they held their land, like the lord of Aylesbury in the same county—'By the sergentry of finding straw for the bed of the Defender of the Faith, with three eels for his supper, when he should travel that way.'

Built, patched, and repaired in various ages, the Court is one of the most picturesque old mansions in the county. In one portion, chiefly inhabited by crows and bats, there was a half-ruined remnant left by the Wars of the Roses, on which the present Tudor, or, rather, Elizabethan mansion, with its peaked gables, oriel windows, and clustered chimney-stacks—square, twisted, or fluted—had been engrafted. Hawthorn, holly, and ivy grew out of the clefts of the ruinous portion; and there in childhood had Clare and Ida made baby houses; and there they had devoured in secret many a fairy and ghost story, and thrilled with joy over that of the 'Ugly Duckling.' The terrace balustrades were mossy and green, and though Carnaby Court had an old and decayed aspect, there was a lingering grandeur about it.

The plate in the dining-hall was famous in the county for its value and antiquity, though many a goblet and salver had gone to the melting-pot when King Charles unfurled his standard at Nottingham.

We have said that stories had been rumoured about of a figure seen in the garden and elsewhere; and Sir Carnaby, who loathed scenes, excitement, worry, 'and all that sort of thing,' as he phrased it (though he had undergone enough and to spare), was intensely provoked when the old butler gave him some hint of the shadowy addition to the family at the Court.

'A ghost!' he exclaimed, with his gold glasses on his long, thin nose.

'Yes, sir—so they say.'

'They—who? Stuff! If this absurd story gets abroad, we shall find ourselves a subject for the speculation of the vulgar here and the spiritualists everywhere; and the house may be beset by all manner of intruders. And what is it like?'

'Nobody knows; a tall man in black, I have heard,' replied the butler.

'Black! How do ghosts or spirits get clothes?'

'I don't know, Sir Carnaby.'

'Of course you don't, how should you? Your spirits are in wood,' chuckled the baronet. 'I have heard of tables spinning about, of bells ringing, banjos playing, of sticks beating on a drum-head by unseen hands, and even of people flying through the air at séances, but I'll have none of that nonsense at Carnaby Court. It's bad style—vulgar—very! We'll send for the disembodied police, and have your ghost taken up as a rogue and impostor.'

Quite a gay party had assembled for the Christmas festivities at the old Court; there were Major Desmond, and two of his brother officers, with his intended, one of the belles of the last season at Tyburnia, Colonel and Lady Rakes, Lord Brixton, and many more, including old Lord Bayswater and Charley Rakes, a mere lad, steeped already in folly or worse, yet very much disposed to lionise and patronise the pretty Violet.

When Trevor Chute and Vane first arrived they were both shocked—the latter particularly so—to find a great and fatal change had come over Ida, and it had come suddenly too, as Clare asserted. Jerry had begun to feel the sweetness of cheated hope, but this was fading now. She seemed in a decline apparently; large dark circles were under her eyes, and their old soft sweetness of gaze was blended with a weird and weary look of infinite melancholy at times; and when Clare had expressed to Sir Carnaby a hope that she might yet wed Jerry out of pity—

'Let her wed him for anything, for—by Jove, this sort of thing is great boredom,' sighed or grumbled the baronet.

'The idea of you, Captain Chute, eloping with our new mamma,' said Violet, when she met him.

'That led to my being of service to your father, Violet—to my being here to-night,' he added, in a tender whisper to Clare, as the ladies left the dining-table, and Sir Carnaby changed his seat to the head of the table.

'Ugh!' said he, in a low voice, 'unless poor Ida brightens up a little, a doleful Christmas we are likely to have of it; but I am glad to see you, Vane—the wine stands with you—pass the bottles, and don't insult my butler by neglecting to fill your glass.'

With all his affected breeze of manner, his desire to appear juvenile before Lady Evelyn, and all his inborn selfishness, both Vane and Chute could perceive that the failing health of his favourite daughter had affected him. The unwelcome crow's-feet were deeper about his eyes; his general 'get-up' was less elaborate; his whiskers were out of curl, and like what remained of his hair, showed, by an occasional patch of grey, that dye was sometimes forgotten.

The first quiet stolen interview of Clare and Trevor Chute was one of inexpressible happiness and joy. They were again in the recess of that oriel near which he had first said he loved her, and she had accepted him. The moon shone as bright now as then, but in the clear and frosty sky of a winter night, and the flakes of light threw down many a crimson, golden, and blue ray of colour on the snowy skin and white dress of Clare, as she nestled her face on Trevor's breast, while his arm went round her.

Clare loved well the woods of the old Court—the lovely, leafy woods—with trees round and vast as the pillars of a Saxon cathedral—loved them in their vernal greenery, their summer foliage, and their varied autumnal tints of russet, brown, and gold, for there had Trevor told her again and again the old, old story, the story of both their hearts, hand locked in hand; and there she had first learned how sweet and good our earthly life may be, how full of hope, of sunshine, and glory to the loving and the loved; but never did she love them as when she saw them now, though standing black and leafless amid the far-stretching waste of snow that gleamed in the distance far away under the glare of the moon, for Trevor was with her once more, and never to be separated from her again!

'Oh, Trevor, Trevor! I thank kind Heaven,' she whispered for the twentieth time, 'that you and papa are friends now—and such friends! Lady Evelyn has told me again and again all the debt we owe. If the poor old man had perished——'

'Had I saved a nation, Clare, my reward is in you,' said he, arresting effectually further thanks or praises.

He had dreamed by day of Clare, and loved her as much as ever man loved woman; he had undergone all the misery of separation, of hopelessness, doubt, and even of groundless jealousy; and now, after all, she was his own! For the most tranquil time of all his past life he would not have exchanged the tumultuous and brilliant joy of the present; yet that joy was not without a cloud, and that cloud was the regret and perplexity caused by Ida, for whom he had all the tenderness of a brother.

On the day after his arrival he was writing in the library, and had been so for some time, before he discovered that Ida was lying fast asleep in an easy-chair near the fire, her slumber being induced either by weariness and languor, or the cosy heat of the room, with its warmth of colour and its heavy draperies, which partly hid the snowy scene without. For a few moments he watched the singular beauty of the girl's upturned face, the purity of her profile, and the sweetness of her parted lips, as her graceful head reclined against the back of the softly cushioned chair, over which, as they had become undone, bright masses of her auburn hair were rippling.

Suddenly she seemed to shiver in her sleep, and to mutter, as terror and sorrow hardened the lines of her face. She was dreaming; and starting with a low cry, she awoke, and sprang almost into the arms of Chute. Her lips were white and parched—white as the teeth within them; her eyes, with a wild, hysterical, and overstrained expression, were fixed on the empty air, while the veins in her delicate throat were swollen; and then she turned to Chute, who kissed her forehead, caressed her hands, and besought her to be calm. She drew a long, gasping sigh, and said, while swaying forward, as if about to fall:

'Oh, Trevor, Trevor! I have had a dream of Beverley—and such a dream! Hold me up, or I shall fall!' she added, pressing her tremulous hands upon her thin white temples. 'In this dream, Beverley said—said——' Tears choked her utterance.

'What did you think he said?' asked Chute, tenderly.

'Think? I heard him as plainly as I hear you!'

'Well, do speak, Ida.'

'He said, "We are never to be parted, Ida, even by death. Fate has linked my soul to yours for ever; and though unseen, I am ever near you." Then a cry escaped me, and I awoke. Had you not been here, I should have fainted.'

'This is—heavens! what shall I call it—morbid!' exclaimed Chute. 'Such dreams——'

'Come to me unbidden—uncontrolled,' continued Ida, sobbing heavily. 'There seems to be a strange, half sad and sweet, half fearful and subtle, influence at work around me! I am sure that there is a world beyond the grave—an unseen world that is close, close to us all, Trevor.'

As she spoke, Chute, who was regarding her with the tenderest sympathy, became deeply pained to see the grey, death-like hue that stole over her lovely face, and the droop that came into her—for the moment—lustreless eyes; and as he gazed he almost began to imbibe some of her wild convictions. 'It is a matter of knowledge,' says a writer, 'that there are persons whose yearning conceptions—nay, travelled conclusions—continually take the form of images which have a foreshadowing power: the deed they do starts up before them in complete shape, making a coercive type; the event they hunger for or dread rises into vision with a seed-like growth, feeding itself fast on unnumbered impressions. They are not always the less capable of argumentative process, nor less sane than the commonplace calculators of the market.'

'Whenever I think of Beverley, I seem to feel that he is, unseen, beside me; and this startling and oppressive emotion I can neither control, analyze, or conquer,' said Ida, wearily, as Chute led her to another room.

CHAPTER XXI.

CHRISTMAS EVE.

It was not in the heart of honest Jerry Vane to harbour much of doubt when pity was wanted; and, so far as Ida was concerned, it fully seemed wanted now.

The change that came over her health had been rapid and unexplainable. Her nerves were evidently hopelessly unstrung; she seemed to be pining and passing away in the midst of them all. Her temperament was entirely changed; she could see the light emitted by a magnet in the dark, and always shuddered at the touch of one. The doctors shook their heads, and could only speak of change of air when the season opened, and so forth; while poor Jerry Vane hung about her in an agony of love and anxiety, hoping against hope that she might yet recover and be his dear little wife after all; but when Clare hinted at this, the ailing girl only shook her head and smiled sadly.

It was just shortly before Christmas Eve, however, that Jerry felt himself lured and tempted, with his heart full of great pity for the feeble condition in which he saw the once brilliant Ida, to speak to her again of the love he bore her.

The jealous shame that he had a rival—another who might have won her when he had failed—the lurker whom Desmond and himself had seen—was all forgotten now; and though her bloom was gone, her complexion had become waxen, her beautiful hands almost transparent, her eyes unnaturally large and bright, he seemed to see in her only the same Ida whom he had loved in the first flush of her beauty ere it budded, and whom he had wooed and won in happier and unclouded times, in the same old English home where they were all gathered together.

She approached the subject herself, by saying to him, when they were alone:

'Forgive me, Jerry, if I spoke hastily to you when last we parted.'

'Forgive you!' he exclaimed, in a low voice.

'Yes; surely that is not impossible.'

'Oh, Ida! forgiveness is no word to pass between you and me.'

'Especially now, Jerry; but though I treated you ill—very, very ill—in the past time——'

'Let us not talk of that, Ida.'

'Of what, then?'

'Our future,' he whispered, while, drawing near, he took her passive hand in his, and longed to kiss, but dared not touch her, while great love and compassion filled his heart—the love that had never died; but as he held her hand she shivered like an aspen leaf.

'Future—oh, Jerry, I would that I were at rest beside mamma in yonder church!' she said, looking to where the square tower of the village fane, mantled in ivy and snow, stood darkly up in purple shade against the crimson flush of the evening sky.

'Can it be that your illness is such—your weakness—oh, what shall I term it!—is such that you are indeed tired of life, Ida?' he asked, with an anxiety that was not unmixed with fear.

'Life is only a delusion. What is it that we should desire it?'

'You are very strange this evening, dearest Ida,' he urged softly.

'My health is shattered, Jerry—my spirit gone! hence, though you love me, no comfort or joy would ever come to you through me.'

There were tears in the man's eyes as he listened to her. She was pressing his hand kindly between hers, but there was a weary wistfulness in the gaze of Ida which bewildered him, and he thought how unlike was this sad love-making to that of the past time.

'Poor Jerry!' she resumed, after a long pause, 'I don't think I shall live very long; a little time, I fear, and I shall only be a dream to you, but a dream full of disappointment and pain.'

'Do not say so, Ida—my own beloved Ida!' he exclaimed, as the last vestige of mistrust in her was forgotten, and sorrow, love, and perplexity took its place. 'Ida,' he continued, in a voice that was touching, passionate, and appealing, 'young, beautiful, and rich, you shall yet be well and strong; your own gay spirit will return with the renewed health which we shall find you in another and a sunnier land than ours. Oh, for the love I bear you, darling, do thrust aside these thoughts of gloom and death!'

But she answered him slowly and deliberately, in a voice that was without tremor, though her eyes were full of melancholy, and with something of love, too, but not earthly loving, for that passion had long since departed.

'The thoughts of gloom come over me unsought, and will not be thrust aside; and to dread or avoid death is folly, and to fear it is also folly; for that which is so universal must be for our general good; hence, to fear that which we cannot understand, and is for our good, is greater folly. Moreover, it puts an end to all earthly suffering and to all earthly sorrow. But leave me, dear Jerry, now; I am weary—so weary.'

Then Vane, with his eyes full of tears, pressed his lips to her pale forehead as she sank back in her chair and closed her eyes as if to court sleep; and he left her slowly and reluctantly, and with a heart torn by many emotions, and not the least of these was the aching and clamorous sense of a coming calamity.

It was Christmas-tide, when, from all parts of the British Isles, the trains are pouring London-ward, laden with turkeys, game, and geese, and all manner of good things; when the post-bags are filled with dainty Christmas cards that express good and kind thoughts; when the warmest wishes of the jocund season are exchanged by all who meet, even to those whose hands they do not clasp, though eye looks kindly to eye; when the sparrows, finches, and robins flock about the farmyards, and the poor little blue tomtits feel cold and hungry in the leafless woods and orchards; Christmas Eve—'whose red signal fires shall glow through gloom and darkness till all the years be done'—the season of plum-pudding and holly, mistletoe and carolling, and of kind-hearted generosity, when the traditional stocking is filled, and the green branches of the festive tree are loaded with every species of 'goodies,' for excited and expectant little folks; and 'once a year,' the eve that, of all others, makes the place of those whom death has taken seem doubly vacant, and when the baby that came since last Christmas is hailed with a new joy; the eve that is distinguished by the solemnity of the mighty mission with which if is associated; and when over all God's Christian world, the bells ring out the chimes in memory of the star that shone over Bethlehem; and even now they were jingling merrily in the old square English tower of Collingwood church, from whence the cadence of the sweet even-song, in which the voices of Clare and Violet mingled with others, came on the clear frosty breeze to the old Court, the painted oriels of which were all aflame with ruddy light, that fell far in flakes across the snow-covered chase.

One voice alone was wanting there—the soft and tender one of Ida, who was unable to leave the house and face the keen, cold winter air.

She alone, of all the gay party assembled at the Court, remained behind.

Anxious to rejoin her, the moment the service was over in the little village church—the altar and pillars of which Clare and her friends, with the assistance of the gardener, had elaborately decorated: with bays and glistening hollies—Jerry Vane slipped out of his pew and hastened away through the snow-covered fields to where the picturesque masses of the ancient Court, with all its traceried and tinted windows gaily lighted up, stood darkly against the starry sky.

Unusual anxiety agitated the breast of Jerry Vane on this night; the strange words and stranger manner of Ida had made a great impression upon him.

That she respected him deeply he saw plainly enough; but her regard for him, if it existed at all, which he often doubted, at least, such regard as he wished, seemed merely that of a sister; and every way the altered terms on which they now were seemed singular and perplexing; and yet he loved her fondly, truly, and, when he thought of her shattered health, most compassionately.

On entering the drawing-room, which was brilliantly lighted, he saw Ida within an arched and curtained alcove that opened out of it; the blue silk hangings were festooned on each side by silver tassels and cords. The recess was thus partly in shadow, and, within, Ida reclined on a couch, near which lay a book, that had apparently dropped from her hand.

Her attitude, expressive of great excitement or of great grief, made Vane pause for a moment. Her figure was in shadow, but her lovely auburn hair glittered in light as she lay back on the couch, with her white hands covering her eyes, pressing, to all appearance, hard upon them, while heavy sobs convulsed her bosom and throat.

Vane was about to approach and question her as to this excessive grief, when his blood ran cold on perceiving the figure of a gentleman bending tenderly and caressingly over her—the man of the arbour.

His form was in shadow, but his face was most distinct; it was handsome in contour, though very pale; his eyes, that were cast fondly down on Ida, were dark, as Vane could perceive, and his thick moustache was jetty in hue.

What could he have to say to Ida that agitated her thus? And who was this stranger who seemed to avail himself of every conceivable moment she was alone to thrust himself upon her?—if, indeed, he were not, as Jerry's jealousy began to hint, but too welcome!

How many times had he been with her, unknown to all? was the next bitter thought that flashed upon him.

He resolved to bring Chute to the spot, for Chute had never believed the stories of Ida and her mysterious friend or admirer; so, instead of boldly advancing and intruding upon them, he softly quitted the room, and met the Captain in the entrance hall.

'Where is Clare?' he asked.

'Gone to take off her wraps,' replied Chute.

'Quick!' said Jerry, in an agitated voice; 'come this way.'

'What is the matter?'

'You shall see. The honour—oh, that I should speak of it!—the honour of Ida is dearer to me than life,' said Vane, in a voice which indicated great mental pain; 'yet what am I to think, unless her brain is turned?'

He leaned for a moment against a console table, as if a giddiness or a weakness had come over him.

'Jerry, are you unwell?' asked Chute, anxiously.

'I don't know what the devil is up, or whether Ida—with her face lovely as it is, and pure as that of a saint in some old cathedral window—is playing false to me and to us all!'

'False!' exclaimed Chute, astonished by this outburst, which was made with great bitterness.

'Yes, false.'

'Ida—why—how?'

'Because that mysterious fellow is with her now.'

'Where?'

'In the arched alcove off the drawing-room. I know not what he has been saying to her, but the effect of his presence is to fill her with grief and agitation; these are manifest enough, whatever may be the secret tie or sympathy between them.'

They were for the present alone, Chute and Vane.

The gentlemen had all gone unanimously to the smoking-room, and the voices of the ladies were heard merrily talking in the upper corridors, in anticipation of a ball on the morrow, for which the gayest and richest of toilettes that Paris and Regent Street could produce were spread on more than one bed to be exultingly contemplated.

Trevor Chute gave Jerry a grave and inquiring glance, and with soldierlike promptitude stepped quickly towards the drawing-room.

'She declined to go with us to the evensong, and this is the reason why!' resumed Vane, bitterly. 'There—he is beside her still!'

Ida now reclined with her face upward, and the pure outline of her profile could be distinctly seen against the dark background of the alcove, as also the dazzling whiteness of her hands, which were crossed upon her bosom. Over her hung the stranger, with his face so closely bowed to hers that his features could not be seen.

'She is asleep or in a faint,' said Jerry, as they paused.

'This man's figure is familiar to me—quite,' said Chute; 'where have I seen him before?

As he spoke, the stranger raised his head, and turning to them his pale, now ghastly, face, gazed at them for a moment with eyes that were dark, singularly piercing, and intensely melancholy; there was something in their expression which chilled the blood of Vane; but for a moment only did he so look, and then the face and figure melted, and in that moment a thrill of unnatural horror ran through the heart of Trevor Chute, who stood rooted to the spot, and next, as a wild cry escaped him, fell senseless on the carpet, for he had beheld the visual realization of that which he had begun to fear was Ida's haunting spirit—the face and form of Beverley, or of a demon in his shape.

And ere he sank down where he lay, even when the eyes of this dread thing had turned upon him, there stole over his passing senses, quickly, the memory of the hot air of that breathless Indian morning, when the notes of the réveille seemed to mingle with the last dying words of his comrade—his farewell message to Ida!

All this passed in the vibration of a pendulum.

Vane was in equal terror and perplexity, all the more so that the name of 'Beverley' had mingled with the cry of Trevor Chute.

'Beverley!' he thought. 'My God! can we look upon such things and live!'

Like Chute and many others, he had ever prided himself on his superiority to all thoughts of superstition and vulgar fears; he had ever scoffed at all manner of warnings, dreams, visitations, and spiritual influences, believing that the laws of nature were fixed and immutable; and here, amid the blaze of light, he had been face to face with the usually unseen world! He was face to face with more—death!

His beloved Ida was found to have been dead for many minutes. Her heart was cold, her pulses still, and when the cry of Chute brought, by its strange and unnatural sound, all the household thronging to the room in alarm and amazement, Vane was found hanging over her, and weeping as only women weep, and with all the wild and passionate abandonment he had never felt since childhood.

Had she seen, as they had at last, this haunting figure, whose vicinity caused that mysterious icy chill and tremor which nevermore would shock her delicate system and lovely form? Had the—to her—long unseen been visible at last—that pale, solemn face with its sad, dark eyes and black moustache?

It almost seemed so, for terror dwelt on her still features for a time, then repose, sadness, and sweetness stole over her beautiful face—still most beautiful in death.

Had she died of terror, of grief, or of both, inducing perhaps a rupture of the heart? The pressure of her hands upon her breast would seem to say the latter, but all was wild and sad conjecture now in the startled and sorrowing household.

So ended the haunted life!

But the doctors discussed the subject learnedly, and her nervous thrills or involuntary tremors were accounted for by one who asserted 'that such an emotion was producible in persons of a certain nervous diathesis by the approach alike of an unseen spirit or the impingement of an electric fluid evolved by the superior will of another.'

It was urged by some that anything supernatural could only be seen by a person who was under an extraordinary exaltation of the sensuous perceptions, and certainly this was not the case with either Desmond, Vane, or Chute; thus it was deemed doubly strange that such men as they should have seen this singular and terrible presence, when she, whose system was of the most refined and delicate nature, and rendered more spiritual by her sinking health, should only have felt that something unseen was near her, until, perhaps, that fatal night.

What miracle, diablerie, or spiritualistic horror was this? speculated all, when the story came to be sifted around the couch whereon the dead Ida lay, like a marble statue, with her skin soft and pale as a white camellia leaf.

Can it be, they asked, that 'his solicitude cannot rest with his bones,' far away in that Indian grave where Trevor Chute had laid him? Was that grave not deep enough to hide him, that his spiritual essence—if essence it is—comes here?

It was a dark and sorrowful Christmas Eve at Carnaby Court; guests who came to be gay, and to rejoice in the festivities of the joyous season, departed in quick succession.

Jerry Vane never quite recovered the death of Ida or the manner of it, and some time elapsed before the gallant heart of Trevor Chute got the better of the shock of that night; but he could never forget the expression of the dead eyes that seemed to have looked again into his!

He could recall the fierce and sudden excitement of finding himself face to face with his first tiger in India, and putting the contents of both barrels into him, just as the monster was in the act of tearing down the shrieking mahout from his perch behind the ears of his shikaree elephant in a jungle where the twisted branches had to be torn aside at every step; and the nearly similar emotion with which he speared his first wild hog—an old boar, but too likely to turn like an envenomed devil when hard pressed and the pace grew hot; he could recall its glistening bristles that were like blue steel, its red eyes, and its fierce white tusks, as he whetted them in his dying wrath against a peepul tree; he could recall, too, the shock of the first bullet that took him in the arm, the vague terror of a barbed arrow that pierced his thigh, and which, for all he knew, might be poisoned; but never was mortal shock or emotion equal to the horror that burst upon him that night in the drawing-room of Carnaby Court, when a grasp of iron seemed to tighten round his heart, 'when the hair of his flesh stood up,' the light went out of his eyes, and he sank into oblivion.

* * * * *

Brighter times come anon.

None can sorrow for ever; though that of the inmates of Carnaby Court did not pass away with the snows of winter—nay, nor with the sweet buds of spring or the roses of summer, when they climbed round the oriels and gables of the grand old mansion. Thus it was not for many months after that night of dread and dismay—that most mournful Christmas Eve—that the merry chimes were heard to ring in the old square tower of the Saxon church for the marriage of Clare and Trevor Chute, who passed, with chastened looks and much of tender sorrow, amid their long-deferred happiness, the now flower-covered garden of the gentle sister who had been indirectly the good angel who brought that happiness to pass.

THE END.

BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD AND LONDON.