CHAPTER XIII.

HOW GEOFFREY ENJOYED THE GARDEN-PARTY.

While Lucius Davoren was thus occupied at the east end of London, Geoffrey Hossack was making the best of an existence which he had made up his mind to consider utterly joyless, so long as adverse fate denied him the one desire of his heart. For him in vain warm August skies were deeply blue, and the bosky dells and glades of the New Forest still untouched by autumn’s splendid decay. For him vainly ran the bright river between banks perfumed with wild flowers. He beheld these things from the lofty standpoint of discontent, and in his heart called Nature a poor creature.

‘I would rather be mewed up in Whitecross-street prison, or in the Venetian Piombi, with Janet for my wife, than enjoy all that earth can give of natural beauty or artificial splendour without her,’ he said to himself, when his cousins had bored him into a misanthropical mood by their insistence upon the charms of rural life, as exemplified at Hillersdon Grange.

‘I’m afraid you have no soul for Nature,’ said Belle, when she had kept Geoffrey on his feet for an hour in the cramped old-fashioned hot-houses, where she went in desperately for ferns and orchids, and imitated Lady Baker on a small scale.

‘I’m afraid not—for Nature in flower-pots,’ answered Geoffrey, with an unsympathetic yawn. ‘I daresay these Calopogons, and Gymnadenia, and what’s-its-names are very grand, but I’ve seen finer growing wild in the valleys on the southern side of the Rocky Mountains. You English people only get nature in miniature—a poor etiolated creature. You have no notion of the goddess Gea in her Titanic vigour, as she appears on “the other side.”

‘Meaning America?’ said Belle contemptuously, as if that western continent were something too vulgar for her serious consideration.

The sun shone upon Lady Baker’s fête as gaily as if fine weather had been a matter within her ladyship’s power of provision, like the luncheon from Gunter’s, or the costumes for the tableaux vivants. The lady herself was radiant as the sunlight. Everybody had come—everybody worth receiving, at any rate. She gave Geoffrey a smile of particular cordiality as she shook hands with him, and murmured the conventional ‘How good of you to come early!’

Belle and Jessie were speedily told off for croquet: a sport for which Geoffrey professed an unmitigated dislike, in a most churlish spirit, his cousins thought. Thus released from attendance on these fair ones, he roamed the vast gardens at large, finding solitudes in that spacious domain, even on such a day as this. In these secluded walks—where he only occasionally encountered a stray couple engaged in that sentimental converse which he slangily denominated ‘spooning’—Mr. Hossack indulged his own thoughts, which also were of a spooney character. Here, he thought, Janet Davoren had been happy in the brief summer-tide of her life; here she had felt the first joys and pains of an innocent girlish love; and here, alas, had given that peerless blossom of the soul, a girl’s first love, to a scoundrel. The thought of this filled him with a savage jealousy.

‘I wish I had fired that shot out yonder instead of Lucius,’ he said to himself. ‘Egad, I’d have made sure my ball went through him. There should have been no shilly-shally about my fire.’

Luncheon found Mr. Hossack more attentive to the various Rhine wines than to _pâté de foie gras_ or chicken-salad, or even the wants of the damsel who sat next him. He was out of humour with all the world. His artfully-worded advertisement had appeared several times, and had produced no response. He began to think the Fates were opposed to his happiness.

‘I suppose if a man is pretty well provided for in the way of three-per-cents he must hope for nothing else from Fortune,’ he thought, as he punished her ladyship’s cabinet hocks.

Luncheon over, Mr. Hossack conducted his damsel to the sunny greensward, where enthusiastic archers—seven-and-twenty ladies to five gentlemen—were stringing their Cupid bows for a grand match. Here he shunted her into the care of one of the five male archers, all of whom looked ineffably bored, and anon departed, whither he cared not—anywhere, anywhere out of this world of luncheons, croquet, flirtation, and frivolity.

Wandering at random, he came by and by to an obscure outskirt of the Mardenholme grounds, given over to the cultivation of huge rhododendrons, where there was a little wicket-gate opening into a green lane. He made his escape from Mardenholme altogether by this gate, glad to get away from the polite world, as represented by the croquet-players and toxopholites, and above all by those exacting first cousins of his, Belle and Jessie.

The green lane was rustic and secluded, well sheltered from the westward sloping sun by spreading boughs of chestnut and sycamore, with here and there the grander bulk of an oak, making an oasis of deep shadow in the afternoon sunlight. Altogether a pleasant lane, even for the indulgence of saddest thoughts.

It was on the side of a hill. Right and left of him stretched undulating meadow-land, small enclosures between those straggling unkempt hedges which make the glory of English landscape, and below, almost at his feet as it were, lay a little village nestling in a cup-shaped valley, so snugly sheltered by those gently-sloping meads, so fenced from north and east by those tall screens of foliage, that one might fancy the bleak winds of winter must roll high above those modest roofs, ruffling no leaf in those simple gardens; that hails and snows and frosts must waste their fury on the encircling hills, and leave this chosen nook unassailed; that even the tax-gatherer must forget its existence.

There were about half a dozen cottages, the perfection of rusticity—gardens running over with roses, beehives, honeysuckle; a village inn, so innocent and domestic of aspect that one would suppose nothing could be farther from the thoughts of its patrons than strong drink of any kind; a little high-shouldered old church, with a squat square tower and crumbly whitewashed wall; a green burial-ground, all ups and downs like the waves of the sea, overshadowed by two vast yews, whose never-withering foliage canopied those rustic graves from January to December.

There was a little patch of greensward in the midst of the scattered houses, and some feet below the churchyard, no two edifices in this village being on the same level. Here a meditative donkey cropped the soft herbage at leisure, and here on the bosom of a crystalline pool swam half a dozen geese, untroubled by forebodings of Michaelmas.

It was altogether a deliciously rustic picture, and Geoffrey, for the first time since his return to Hampshire, felt reconciled to Nature.

‘This is better than all the tigered orchids in Lady Baker’s collection,’ he mused, as he perched himself on a stile and took out his cigar-case for a quiet smoke. ‘Why do great ladies cultivate lady’s-slippers and pitcher-plants when for less money they might surround themselves with model villages and happy peasantry? Has the rôle of Lady Bountiful gone quite out of fashion, I wonder?’

He lighted his cigar and meditated upon life in general, dreamily contemplating the cottages and wondering about their inmates, as he had often wondered about the inhabitants of the dull old houses in the dull old country towns. These cottages seemed above the ordinary level, cleaner, brighter, more prosperous-looking. He could not fancy wife-beating or any other iniquity going on within those homely plastered walls. Those twinkling diamond-paned lattices seemed transparent as a good man’s conscience, and in most of these dwellings the outer door stood wide open, as if the inmates invited inspection. He could see an eight-day clock, a dresser decked with many-coloured crockeryware, a little round table spread for tea, a cradle, a snug arm-chair, a wicker birdcage, a row of geranium pots—all the furniture of home. He felt that he had alighted upon a small Arcadia.

While he sat thus musing, slowly smoking, very loth to go back to the civilised world, pert country cousins, and tableaux vivants, and tepid ices, and classical music, and general inanity, the door of that solitary cottage whose interior did not invite inspection was suddenly opened, and a child came skipping out—a child who wore a broad-brimmed Leghorn hat, with long yellow tresses streaming beneath it, and a pretty holland pinafore, and displayed symmetrical legs clad in blue stockings—a child after the order of Mr. Millais.

Geoffrey made as if he would have fallen off the stile; the half-smoked cigar fell from his hand. For a few moments he sat transfixed and statue-like, and could only stare. Then, with a sudden rush, he darted across the little strip of green, and clasped this butterfly child in his arms.

‘Why, it’s my little Flossie!’ he cried rapturously, smothering the small face with kisses, which the little maiden received without a murmur. Had not Mr. Hossack endeared himself to her by all the arts of bribery and corruption, in the shape of costly French bonbons, _éditions de luxe_ of popular fairy tales and German hobgoblin stories, and mechanical white mice that ran across the floor, and mechanical mail-coaches that, on being wound up, rushed off at breakneck speed to nowhere in particular, and came to grief after a few headlong journeys? ‘It’s my precious little Flossie! My darling, where’s mamma?’

‘Mamma, mamma!’ screamed the child, looking back towards the cottage. ‘Come out and see who’s come.’ And then, turning to Geoffrey again, she said with childhood’s candid selfishness, ‘Have you brought me some more French bonbons in a box with a picture on the lid, like the last?’

‘My sweet one, I ought to be provided with a box of that very description,’ replied Geoffrey, grasping the little maiden’s hand and dragging her to the cottage; ‘but how could I anticipate such bliss as to find you here in this O-for-ever-to-be-sanctified-village?’ cried the lover, coining a Germanic compound in his rapture. ‘Is mamma in there? O, take me to her, darling, take me!’

Tableaux vivants, pert cousins, Lady Baker, the claims of civilised society, all melted into thin air amidst the delight of this discovery. He was as unsophisticated as if he had been a Blackfoot, brought up in the pathless hunting-grounds of the West.

‘Take me to her, thou dearest child,’ he exclaimed; and the little one led him into the cottage garden, where the bees were humming in the sunset, the air sweet with roses and carnations, happy swallows twittering in the eves.

Here, on the threshold of the cottage door, framed like a picture by the stout black timbers, stood that one woman whom his soul worshipped, tall, slender, lovely, like a goddess who for a little while deigned to walk this lower earth.

She looked at Geoffrey with a tender gladness, a wild surprise, opposite feelings curiously blended in the expression of that eloquent face.

‘O, Janet,’ said he, ‘how could you be so cruel as to run away from me?’

‘How could you be so unkind as to follow me?’ she asked reproachfully.

‘I have not followed you. ’Twas chance that led me here this afternoon. There is a providence kind to true lovers, after all. I did not follow you, Janet, but I was heartbroken by the loss of you. I went down to Stillmington to carry you what I dared to think good news.’

‘Good news!’ she repeated wonderingly.

‘Yes, the tidings of your freedom.’

Janet’s pale face grew a shade paler.

‘Come in for a little while,’ she said; ‘we cannot stand here talking of such things. Flossie, run and play on the green, darling; I’ll come to you presently. Now, Mr. Hossack.’

She led the way into the simple cottage room, spotlessly clean, and with that dainty brightness of furniture and whiteness of drapery which industrious hands can give to the humblest surroundings. It was a small square room, with two of its angles cut off by old-fashioned corner cupboards whose shining glass doors displayed the treasures of glass and china within. A dimity-covered sofa, a couple of basket-work arm-chairs, an ancient bureau of darkest mahogany, and a solid Pembroke table formed the chief furniture of the room. One of Flossie’s fairy-tale books—Geoffrey’s gift—lay open upon the table, the mother’s workbox beside it. A bowl of cut flowers adorned the broad sill of the long low casement, and the afternoon sunlight was filtered through the whitest of dimity curtains. To Geoffrey this old room, with its low ceiling sustained by heavy black beams, was perfectly delightful.

‘Do you mean to tell me that my husband is dead?’ asked Janet, when she had brought her visitor in and shut the door, looking him full in the face with grave earnest eyes.

Geoffrey quailed beneath that searching gaze. In this crisis, which involved the dearest wish of his heart, he had become the veriest child.

‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘he is dead. It is a most extraordinary story, and as I have no evidence to prove my statement, you may be inclined to doubt me. Yet I pledge my honour—’

‘I shall not doubt your honour,’ said Janet, with a superb smile, ‘but I may doubt your discretion. How do you know that my husband is dead?’

‘I met him in America, and heard of his death there—heard it on the highest possible authority.’

‘You met him in America. Why did you not tell me that at Stillmington?’

‘Because I had at that time no means of identifying Matchi, the man I met in the West, with Mr. Vandeleur. I have seen your husband’s portrait within the last fortnight, and I can take my oath that Mr. Vandeleur and the man I knew in America are one and the same.’

‘Where could you see my husband’s portrait?’ asked Janet incredulously.

‘Lady Baker showed me a photograph of a group in which you and Mr. Vandeleur both appear.’

‘Have you no other reason to suppose that this American traveller, whom you call Matchi, and my husband are the same, except the evidence of a photograph?’ asked Janet, somewhat contemptuously. ‘What more common than an accidental resemblance between two men who are utter strangers to each other?’

‘Not such a likeness as that which I am speaking of; nor is a genius for music the commonest thing in the world. The violin-playing of the man in the western pine-forest exactly resembled that which Lady Baker described to me.’

‘What,’ cried Janet, with a wounded air, ‘you have been taking Lady Baker into your confidence?’

‘Forgive me, Janet. I am bent upon bringing this matter to a happy issue. Lady Baker is your true friend. She bitterly reproaches herself for her part in bringing about your unhappy marriage; she went to Melksham in search of you, when she accidentally learned that Mr. Vandeleur had been seen there, and was deeply grieved at arriving too late to find you.’

‘She is very good,’ answered Janet, with a sigh. ‘And now tell me about this man you met in America. Tell me everything, without reserve.’

Without reserve; that would be rather difficult. Not for worlds—no, not even to secure his own happiness—could Geoffrey Hossack betray his friend.

He told his story as best he could; but in his fear of saying too much, stumbled a little over the details. Altogether the story had a garbled air, and before he came to the end he saw plainly enough that Janet was unconvinced.

‘I can trust your truth,’ she said, looking at that frank honest face with her clear eyes, ‘but I cannot trust your judgment. You had but just recovered from a fever, in which your senses had been astray, when you heard of his death. He was shot, you say, in the forest. Who shot him?’

‘I—I cannot tell you,’ faltered Geoffrey, in a cold perspiration.

This Janet understood to mean ‘I do not know.’

‘See how vague your information is,’ she exclaimed, with an incredulous laugh. ‘You were told that he was shot, but you were not told who shot him; you were not told the motive of the murder. Even in the backwoods I suppose people do not shoot each other quite without motive.’

Geoffrey stood before her dumbfoundered.

‘Did you kill him yourself?’ she asked, with a sudden flash of suspicion.

‘No, I wish I had; there should have been no mistake about it then.’

‘Say no more, Mr. Hossack; this is a subject upon which you and I can hardly agree. When you can bring me direct and legal evidence of Mr. Vandeleur’s death, I will believe it.’

‘And if I ever can do that—and from the manner of his death it is almost impossible—you will give me some reward for my fidelity—eh, Janet?’

‘I will make no bargains,’ she answered gravely. ‘I beg you to hold yourself entirely free, and for the sake of your own happiness I trust you may speedily get rid of this boyish infatuation.’

‘Boyish!’ echoed Geoffrey, with the proud consciousness of his eight-and-twenty years. ‘Why I am your senior by two years. Lucius told me so.’

‘Sorrow does the work of time in some lives,’ said Janet, with her sad smile; ‘I feel myself very old at six-and-twenty. Come, Mr. Hossack, you have been always very good to me, and for once in a way I will treat you as a friend. Little Flossie is very fond of you, and I know she is dying for a long talk about her new pets, the tame rabbits and the tortoiseshell kitten, whose acquaintance she has made down here. Stop and drink tea with us, and tell me how you happened to find me out in this quiet corner of the earth.’

‘You forget that we are not a mile from one of the gates of Mardenholme,’ said Geoffrey, enchanted at the prospect of drinking tea with his goddess.

‘True; but I didn’t think you knew Lady Baker.’

‘Didn’t you?’ said this Jesuit, in an artless tone. ‘Why, you see my people live down hereabouts—Hillersdon Grange—and my cousins and Lady Baker are uncommonly thick.’

Mrs. Bertram called to Flossie through the open window. The child was walking up and down the little path by the beehives, nursing her tortoiseshell kitten. She came bounding in joyfully at this summons, and exhibited this feline treasure to Mr. Hossack, that good-natured individual allowing the small member of the tiger tribe to make a promenade upon his outstretched arm, and pur triumphantly from a lofty perch on his coat-collar.

Mrs. Bertram rang a little tinkling handbell, and a decent old woman—who must surely have been what is called ‘upon the listen,’ or she could hardly have heard that feeble summons—appeared with a tea-tray, and spread the neat little table with the best china teacups, a brown home-baked loaf, the yellowest of butter-pats, the richest of cream in a little glass jug, a great wedge of golden honeycomb, a few ripe apricots nestling in a bed of mulberry leaves,—a repast at once Arcadian and picturesque.

‘But perhaps you may not care for such a womanish beverage as orange pekoe,’ said Janet doubtfully, as Mr. Hossack surveyed the banquet from his altitude of something over six feet, the kitten still promenading his shoulder.

‘Not care for tea! Why, on the shores of the Saskatchewan the teapot was our only comfort,’ exclaimed Geoffrey. ‘We had a cask or two of rum with us, and had no end of trouble in hiding it from the Indians; but they got the most of the fire-water out of us sooner or later, by hook or by crook. We rarely took any of it ourselves, except as a medicine. Travellers are a temperate race, I can assure you, Mrs. Bertram.’

They sat down to tea, the kitten now perambulating the backs of their chairs, now sending forth appealing miaws for milk or other refreshment. Geoffrey, who had been too much out of humour with the world in general to do justice to Lady Baker’s luncheon, was ravenous, and devoured bread-and-honey like the queen in the nursery rhyme, of which Flossie did not fail to remind him. It was the first meal he had ever eaten with the woman he loved. That fragrant tea was more intoxicating than Lady Baker’s choicest Johannisberger or Steinberger.

He forgot that he was perhaps no nearer a happy issue to his suit than he had been that day in the botanical gardens at Stillmington, when he made his first desperate appeal to his inexorable goddess; he forgot everything except the present moment—this innocent rustic interior, the fair-haired child, whose gay laugh rang out every now and then, the perambulatory kitten, the perfect face of the woman he loved, smiling at him with that proud slow smile he knew so well.

‘So you went back to Stillmington,’ Janet said presently, when Geoffrey had appeased the pangs of hunger with the contents of the honeycomb and the crustiest side of the home-baked loaf, and had consumed three cups of that exquisite tea.

‘Went back!’ repeated Geoffrey; ‘of course I went back. I should have gone back exactly the same if Stillmington had been in the centre of Africa, or on the top of Elburz. How cruel of you to leave no address! They told me you had gone to the seaside.’

‘Well, I did not leave a very definite account of myself, certainly. You see I was so tired of Stillmington and of my pupils; and thanks to concert-singing and pupils, I had contrived to save a little money. So, as my health was not quite so good as it might be—I had been working rather hard for the last few years, you see—I thought I would give myself a month or so of thorough rest. I had a fancy—amounting almost to an irresistible longing—to see my old home once more—the graves of those dear ones my ingratitude had wronged. I knew that to come back to the scenes of my girlhood would be the keenest suffering, yet I longed to come. I did not want to be very near Wykhamston, as that would be to run the risk of recognition; but I wished to be somewhere within the reach of the dear, dear old place. I thought of this village and of Sally, my kind old nurse, who came to live here in this cottage, which she had bought with her savings, when she left the Rectory. I was only fourteen when she left us; and one of our greatest treats—Lucius’s and mine and the dear sister we lost—was to come here of a summer afternoon and drink tea with dear old Sally. So I said to myself, “If God has spared my old nurse, I will go and ask her to give me a lodging;” and Flossie and I came straight here—to this out-of-the-way corner—to take our holiday. Flossie has been enraptured with the rustic life, the pigs and fowls, and the old gray donkey on the green, with whom she has formed quite a friendship. She feeds him with bread-and-milk every morning, foolish child!’

She said this with the mother’s tender look at the fair-haired damsel, who disposed of the bread-and-honey as fast as if she had laid a wager with Geoffrey as to which of them should devour most.

‘And have you been happy here?’ asked Geoffrey.

‘Yes—after the first bitter pain of seeing my lost home, and remembering how I lost it. I have been happier than I had hoped ever to be again. After all, there is some magic in one’s native air.’

‘Yes,’ exclaimed Geoffrey, with an air of conviction, ‘of course there is. I have a place in Hampshire myself, not a stone’s-throw, in a rural point of view—that is to say, five-and-twenty miles or so—from here. No end of arable and meadow-land, and copse and rabbit-warren, and some well-wooded ground about the house, which my father took the liberty to call a park; and a nice old house enough, of the Queen-Anne period; stiffish and squarish and reddish, but by no means a bad kind of barrack. I’ll give the sugar-broker notice—no, I can’t do that—I’ll offer to buy back his lease to-morrow.’

‘The sugar-broker!’ repeated Janet, perplexed.

‘Yes, a fellow I was foolish enough to let my place to when I came of age—seven, fourteen, or twenty-one years. He’s keeping it up uncommonly well, I’m told; has put up a good deal of glass in the kitchen-garden, and so on, and improved the farm-buildings. But he shall go. He’s on for his fourteen years; so I can’t give him notice to quit, but I can offer him a tempting price for the lease. I daresay he’s tired of the place by this time. People always do get tired of their places.’

‘But what can you want with a great place like that?’ asked Janet.

‘I don’t know. Didn’t you say you were fond of this part of the country?’ asked Geoffrey, in some confusion. Those cups of orange pekoe had proved far more intoxicating than the vintages of Rhineland.

‘O, Mr. Hossack, pray do not let _my_ fancies influence your life!’ said Janet earnestly. ‘Remember we may never be more to each other than we are now,—very good friends, who may meet once in a way, at some chance turn in life’s road.’

Geoffrey pleaded his hardest, but felt that he was pleading in vain. All arguments were futile. Honour counselled Janet to be firm, and she was steadfast as a rock.

‘I will not tell you that you are indifferent to me,’ she said, in her low sweet voice, unembarrassed by the presence of the child, who was absorbed in the antics of her kitten, and troubled herself in no manner about what Mr. Hossack might be saying to her mother, and presently, having eaten to repletion, roamed out into the garden among the clove-carnations and late roses and tall gaudy hollyhocks. ‘That would be too ungrateful, after all the trouble you have taken for my sake. I can only say that, until I have proof positive of my first husband’s death, I shall continue to consider myself bound to him.’

‘But what stronger proof can you hope for than my assurance of the fact? Remember that Mr. Vandeleur perished in a solitude where there are no registrars to take note of a man’s death, no coroner to hold an inquest on his body, no undertakers to give him decent burial; where a rough-and-ready grave under the pine-trees would be the sole witness of his end.’

‘We will trust in Providence, Mr. Hossack,’ answered Janet, with that steadfast look he knew so well, and which made her seem a creature so far above him—a being exempt from common temptations and human passions. ‘If my husband died as you tell me he died, I do not doubt that in due time there will arise some confirmation of your story.’

Geoffrey sighed, and shrugged his shoulders.

‘If the pine-trees or the songless birds of the wilderness could talk, you might receive such confirmation,’ he said; ‘but from any other source it is impossible.’

‘Why, my brother was with you all the time, was he not?’ inquired Janet, with a wondering look. ‘He at least must be able to vouch for the truth of your story.’

Geoffrey grew deadly pale, and for a few moments was speechless.

‘Unhappily,’ he faltered, after that awkward pause, ‘Lucius had a bad attack—brain fever, or apoplexy he called it—just at the time of this man’s death. His evidence would therefore hardly satisfy you.’

‘In point of fact, Mr. Hossack, it seems that neither you nor my brother were in a condition to know anything about the event. You could have only hearsay evidence. Who was your informant?’

This question was a home-thrust. To name Lucius would have been almost to betray him; and again, he had just given her to understand that Lucius was unconscious at the time of the event. Again there came a pause, painfully awkward for Geoffrey. He felt that Mrs. Bertram was watching him with gravely questioning eyes. How was he to reply?

‘There was a little German with us,’ he said at last, with a desperate plunge, knowing not how near to his friend’s betrayal this admission might lead him; ‘a sea-captain, a native of Hamburg, called Schanck—Absalom Schanck—a very good fellow, who was with us—our fellow-traveller. I—I think you must have heard me speak of him. He saw the shot fired.’

‘And saw my husband die?’

‘Yes,’ answered Geoffrey, but not with perfect conviction; ‘I believe so.’

‘And pray, where is Mr. Schanck? His evidence may be worth very little, but it would be as well to hear it.’

‘Upon my word,’ said Geoffrey, crestfallen, ‘I’m afraid that at this present moment Schanck is washing gold in San Francisco, unless he has been made mincemeat of by larger diggers.’

‘We must wait for some other witness then,’ said Janet, in a tone of calm certainty, which made reply seem impossible.

Geoffrey could but submit. He must needs obey this lovely image of destiny.

‘So be it,’ he said, with a despairing sigh; ‘but you will let me come to see you sometimes—won’t you, Janet?’ very tenderly, and evidently expecting a reproof; instead of which his devotion was rewarded with a smile. ‘And you’ll receive me just as you have done this afternoon, and give me a cup of that delicious Pekoe?’

‘A cup!’ exclaimed Janet; ‘I think you had five.’

‘I may come to tea again, mayn’t I, once in three weeks or so, like a boy who has a Saturday afternoon at home? Flossie likes me, you see,’ pleaded he jesuitically.

‘Well, you may come once a month, or so, if you happen to be in the neighbourhood.’

‘Happen to be in the neighbourhood! I would cross the Balkan range in January to obtain such a privilege.’

‘But remember you come only as my friend. If you talk to me as you have talked this afternoon, I shall ring for Sally, and tell her to show you to the door. It would be only a formula—as the street-door opens out of this room—but I should do it nevertheless.’

‘There shall not be one word that can offend you.’

‘On that condition you may come; but, believe me, your own happiness would be better secured by your utter forgetfulness of a woman who may never be free to reward your fidelity. There are so many who would be proud of such a lover. Amongst them you might surely find one who would realise your ideal as well as, if not better than, I.’

‘Never!’ protested Geoffrey, with warmth. ‘I never knew what a great love was till I knew you. I will never open my heart to a lesser love.’

Janet gave a little sigh, half regret, half satisfaction. After all, a woman does not easily relinquish such devotion. She has a duty to fulfil, and her little lecture, her few words of wise counsel, to pronounce; and having done that duty, she is hardly sorry if her foolish adorer refuses to hear.

So they parted—not briefly, for little Flossie hung about Geoffrey, and impeded his departure; nay, at his and Flossie’s joint request, Janet walked half the length of the lane with Geoffrey and the child. They only parted within sight of the distant towers of Mardenholme.

‘How pleased Lady Baker would be if she knew you were so near!’ said Geoffrey.

‘Pray, don’t tell her. She was very good to me, and I was fond of her; but she would want me to go to that great house of hers, full of strange faces, and sing to her company, and be made a show of. I have contrived to keep very clear of her pathway so far, near as I am. Pray, do not betray me.’

‘To hear is to obey. But you really do mean to stay here?’ inquired Geoffrey anxiously. ‘When I come a month hence to claim that cup of Pekoe, I sha’n’t find you fled, eh?’

‘I promise that if anything should induce me to leave Foxley—that’s the name of our little village—I will write you a line to say where I am going. But my present intention is to stay here till November—just long enough for a thorough rest—and then go back to my pupils at Stillmington.’

Geoffrey sighed. The thought of those sol-fa classes, and the hard labour they involved, always smote him to the quick; and he was rioting in the Three per cents, as he told himself.

He took his time in returning to Mardenholme; and the tableaux vivants had begun when he pushed his way in among the crowd of young men standing at the back of the picture-gallery, Lady Baker having naturally invited a good many more guests than could find even standing room. Here he stood patiently enough, and saw as much of the living pictures after Frith, Faed, and Millais as he could conveniently behold above the heads of the crowd in front of him. He was not deeply interested in the performance, his mind indeed being rather occupied with tender recollections of the humble tea-party at which he had lately assisted than by the charms of the graceful young lady who danced with Claude Duval, or of the pretty peasant lassie, with her shepherd’s plaid and neatly-snooded hair, or the damsel in white satin, who took a sad farewell of her Black Brunswicker under the glare of the lime-light. He applauded mechanically when other people applauded, and felt that he had done all that society could expect of him. His cousins came out presently among the crowd, and straightway pounced upon him, and reproached him with acrimony.

‘Why, Geoffrey, where have you been hiding yourself?’ asked Belle.

‘I’ve been strolling about the gardens a little,’ replied that arch hypocrite. ‘It’s rather warm in here.’

‘Rather warm!’ exclaimed Jessie, who was evidently out of temper. ‘It’s insufferably hot, and I’m tired to death. These tableaux are a mistake after a garden-party. Lady Baker always tries to do too much. One feels so dowdy, too, in morning-dress when the lamps are lighted. But, pray, how have you managed to keep out of everybody’s way all the afternoon, Geoffrey? I haven’t set eyes on you since luncheon.’

‘I hope you haven’t been looking for me all the time,’ said Geoffrey, with unruffled coolness. ‘I’ve been meandering about the grounds, enjoying nature.’

‘Which I thought was not worth looking at in England,’ remarked Belle. ‘But perhaps, now we have found you,’ with angry emphasis, ‘you’ll be kind enough to get us some refreshment. I daresay you have had something, but I know I am ready to sink.’

‘Yes, I’ve done pretty well, thanks. I had some bread-and-honey.’

‘Bread-and-honey!’ cried Jessie.

‘O, that’s to say, something in that way. Your sweets and kickshaws are all the same to me—I never know what to call them. Come along, Belle, we’ll fight our way to the refreshment-room. You sha’n’t sink if I can help it.’

He piloted the two damsels through the crowd to a large room, which had been arranged after the model of a railway refreshment-buffet, save that it was liberally furnished with things good to eat. Here Lady Baker’s men and maids dispensed strawberry ices, tea, coffee, Italian confectionery, German wines and German salads, to the famishing crowd; and here Geoffrey, by cramming them with ices, and creamy vanille-flavoured pastry, contrived to restore his cousins’ equanimity. There was some talk of dancing, and a few enthusiastic couples were already revolving in the drawing-room; but Geoffrey pleaded that no man could waltz in gray trousers, and thus escaped the infliction; and having the good fortune to find his uncle, tired of vestry and quarter-session talk and inclined to go home, this heartless young man had the satisfaction of packing Belle and Jessie into the landau before Lady Baker’s _fête_ was half over, as Jessie said discontentedly.

They avenged themselves by abusing the party all the way home.

‘Those huge garden-parties are detestable!’ exclaimed Belle. ‘I know Lady Baker only gives them in order to be civil to a herd of people she doesn’t care a straw about. She gives nice little parties for her real friends. I wonder people can be so slavish as to go to her in droves.’

‘I thought you said Lady Baker’s parties were delightful,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I know you wrote to me rapturously about her.’

‘I’m only just beginning to see through her,’ replied Belle, who couldn’t get over the day’s annoyances. This tiresome Geoffrey had not been the least good to them. He might just as well have been in Norway.