CHAPTER XXIX.

THE MEETING.

They seemed to those who saw them meet, The careless friends of every day; Her smile was still serene and sweet, His courtesy was free and gay; Yet if by one the other’s name In some unguarded hour was heard, The heart you deemed so cold and tame Would shiver like a captured bird. MONCTON MILNES.

“Mr. Adrian Fleming,” was announced, and Mr. Adrian Fleming entered the boudoir.

He had thrown off his ulster and cap in the hall, and now came in, in his neatly-fitting morning suit of dark-gray broadcloth, and looking even handsomer in his perfect blonde beauty, more elegant and aristocratic, than he had ever seemed before.

Net had shrunk within the rose-colored and lace curtains of the bay window, beside Antoinette’s luxurious lounging-chair.

Adrian did not see her, therefore, but advanced directly to Antoinette, with his small, neatly-gloved hand held out, and his fair, radiant face clouding over as he perceived the fearful change that had passed upon the once beautiful and blooming girl;—beautiful she was now, with a spiritual beauty developed by trial, but no longer blooming, no longer attractive to a young man like Fleming in the heyday of his own youth and vanity.

“I am very sorry to see you looking so ill,” he said, with much feeling, but with no tact at all.

“Yes, I must give you a little shock, but you will get over it in a few seconds,” said Antoinette, calmly. Then holding out her hand, she added: “I am glad to see you, Mr. Fleming, and grateful for your quick personal response to my letter; but you will pardon my not rising.”

“Oh, do not take the least trouble, I beg of you, Miss Deloraine: I will find a seat,” he answered, looking around, and laying hold of a small silver-gilt and rose-satin chair.

“But you must find something else, or rather somebody else first,” said Antoinette, looking around to see what had become of her friend.

Adrian’s glance naturally followed hers, and fell upon the form of Net standing within the rosy curtains of the bay window and his fair face flushed up to his forehead.

“Net, my dear, will you come and speak to Adrian?” inquired Antoinette.

Net came out, her pretty face suffused with a soft blush, and her voice slightly tremulous with emotion, as she greeted her recreant lover and bridegroom with the words her own self-respect compelled her to utter.

“I did not know that you were expected here, Mr. Fleming, until five minutes ago.”

“Or you would not have been here yourself, I am to infer?” he answered, in a tone no less agitated than her own.

“I should not,” she assented.

“Come, dear friends, do not quarrel, or if you do—why, quarrel with me, not with each other. I am the only one in fault now, and the only one who has been in fault from the beginning to the end. Give me my elixir, Net,” said Antoinette, faintly.

Her friend filled a small wine glass with some rich and spicy cordial from a cut-glass bottle that stood on the table, and brought it to the sick girl.

She drank it, returned the glass, and said:

“Thank you, dear; now resume your seat. Adrian, take yours. I have something to tell you both which jointly concerns me and yourselves; therefore I have brought you to my presence together. I hope you will forgive me this also, if you think I have done wrong.”

Net raised her cousin’s hand and pressed it to her lips for all answer.

“Pray do not pain yourself or friends by speaking in this way, Miss Deloraine,” pleaded Mr. Fleming with some emotion.

“I called _you_ ‘Adrian,’” said the girl, with a sad smile.

“Thanks, dear Antoinette,” amended the young man.

“Well, I have brought you both to my side to make an explanation—ah!—‘_a last dying speech and confession_,’ the poor, condemned felons call it, don’t you know? Can either of you guess the nature of _my_ confession? Ah, I see that you can!” sighed the failing girl, sinking back in her chair.

“Dear Antoinette, do not overtalk yourself. Indeed it is not necessary,” pleaded Net, as she took a flask of aromatic ammonia and saturated a fresh handkerchief with it and gave it to her friend.

“You guess all about it without my telling you! No doubt you guess about my fault, but you cannot guess the motives that led to it! Can you, now?” inquired the girl, as she inhaled the reviving aroma from her saturated handkerchief.

Net shook her head.

“What do you say, Adrian?” inquired the sick girl.

“Nothing, Antoinette. I do not know, unless it was some passing pique against me,” replied the young man.

“It was nothing of the sort! No malice, no selfishness of any sort entered into my act, evil as it was in itself.”

“I am sure of that, dearest,” said Net, in a low voice, as she pressed the hand of her friend, which she continued to hold.

“And I beg your pardon for my own hastily given opinion, dear Antoinette,” added the young man.

While these two spoke and answered Antoinette on the same subject, in the same conversation, they never looked at or addressed each other.

In fact, they were as far apart as the nature of the interview would permit.

Net sat on a low hassock beside Antoinette’s chair, and held her hand.

Adrian sat several feet off, with his hand idly playing with the trifles on the stand beside him.

“But you both now see the necessity of a last confession to vindicate my motives,” said the sick girl.

“It was I, of course, who changed the notes in their envelopes, placing the one written to me under Net’s address, and the one written to her in mine. It was I who completely deceived Net into the belief that you had written to propose this marriage to her, which, indeed, all that had gone before might have led her to expect you to do. Ah, Adrian, dear, I knew that at last!”

At these words the face of the young man crimsoned to the tips of his ears, and he snapped in two pieces a fragile little paper-cutter with which he had been playing.

Net heaved a sigh of relief. She _was_ pleased that Adrian should hear from Antoinette’s own lips how entirely she had been misled to believe that the fatal proposal of marriage had been meant for her, so that neither now nor ever could a doubt on the subject arise in his mind.

“Adrian, I should never have known the prior claim that Net had on your attention if it had not been for Kit—poor Kit Ken, who, with her outspoken truth, opened my eyes. I came to the Miston rectory, a young girl, just let loose from the strict discipline of a French boarding-school, full of vivacity and vanity—_myself_, I mean, not the boarding-school, at all, at all. I found a young man at the rectory as handsome, as vivacious, and as vain as—myself! Don’t wince, Adrian, dear. You know it is the truth I am telling.”

The young man bit his lips and broke a book-mark between his finger and thumb and threw away the fragments.

Antoinette continued:

“Naturally we two peacocks admired each other, and desired each other’s admiration, and set out to get it, and—did get it. We carried on a mutual admiration firm with distinguished success; but as to love, my dear Adrian, up to that time you had never loved anybody but yourself, and I—had never even loved myself! But I enjoyed admiration, devotion, homage, and never guessed the wrong I was doing to Net until poor Kit Ken burst forth upon me one day in a torrent of indignation, charging me with having broken Mistress Net’s heart, through taking away her ‘young man.’”

Now it was Net’s turn to blush up to the edges of her fine black hair, and to squeeze her cousin’s fingers until she winced.

“Kit’s story was a perfect revelation, a complete eye-opener. I believed it on the spot. I felt it to be truth. And from that moment I resolved to stop the play, and I _did_ stop it. I began to treat you with a coldness that utterly puzzled you. And to retaliate on me, _you_ began to resume your attentions to Net—with the amiable motive of piquing my jealousy. Why, my dear, you were doing just exactly what I wished and intended you to do.”

Adrian Fleming blushed until his brow was crimson, bit his lip until it bled, and unconsciously picked all the plumage off a stuffed humming-bird that hovered over a basket of wax flowers.

Net, seeing all this destruction going on, and not knowing where it would end, slipped quietly up to the stand, took off everything that could be injured and placed them on a distant table, and replaced with a vase of paper tapers, with which the restless fingers could play the mischief without much loss.

All this Net did, and then resumed her seat, without having been noticed by Adrian, so gentle were her motions and so deep was his absorption in the subject of Antoinette’s discourse.

“And thus you see, Adrian,” continued the sick girl, “how natural it was for Net and for every one else to believe that you had returned to your true allegiance. Affairs went on in this way for a while, until you grew impatient, found out your ruse did not answer your purpose, and tried to resume your friendly relations with me; and when you found you could not do so, you thought me still angry with you, and you wrote that proposal of marriage which you inclosed to me, together with an off-hand sort of note to Net, which you desired me, in a postscript written on a separate piece of paper, to read so that I might know there could be no question of marriage between you and Net. I saw that these two notes could be transposed with perfect success so that Net should receive the proposal of marriage, that your conduct had given _her_, as well as all her friends, every reason to expect.”

Here Adrian Fleming began, unconsciously, demolishing the sheaf of paper matches, while Net studied the windings of the rose-vine over the white ground of the carpet at her feet; and Antoinette, after inhaling aromatic ammonia, continued her confession:

“When I resolved to entrap you, by your own letter, into doing justice to Net, I was not impelled by any malice or any other sort of selfishness. I was rather impelled by a spirit of mischief, fun, practical joking, and also by a wish that justice might be done to Net, whom I felt that I had wronged, and led _you_ to wrong, and whom, therefore, I wished to _right_ and compel you to right. My judgment was at fault, I know—very much at fault. I wronged Net by this last attempt to right her more bitterly than I had ever wronged her, or any other human being, before. I know this now, and I knew it within one hour after it was too late to retrace my steps—to undo my work! I never spent such an unhappy night, in all my life, as the night on which dear Net—deceived by the proposal of marriage that had been made to me, but which I placed in the envelope you had directed to her—went off to Scotland to be married to you! Pity, terror and remorse harassed me by turns. I hoped that the plot would be discovered before the marriage could be celebrated; but that hope failed when you both returned—married!”

“And you did not confess?” murmured Adrian, almost involuntarily.

“_I dared not!_ I was in mortal fear of Dr. Starr! Besides, I saw confession would do no good. I allowed you to believe that _you_ yourself had, in your haste, misdirected the notes. I did not _tell_ you so, in so many words, but I _did_ suggest the possibility of your having made such a mistake, and you caught at it and believed it! Ah! my conscience would not permit me to tell a literal lie, but allowed me to forget that falsehood is falsehood, whether it be spoken in plain words, or hinted by suggestions or by silence! Well, this is all I have to tell you, dear friends; and now I have only to beg your pardon for the wrong I did you both, and to hope that the Divine Providence will ‘shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.’”

Antoinette stopped and sank back in her chair, much exhausted by the long-continued effort in conversation.

Adrian Fleming arose and took Antoinette’s limp hand and raised it to his lips in silence; then he paused before Net who was still seated on the low cushion beside her invalid cousin’s chair, and said:

“I have to ask your forgiveness for some misapprehensions, that I now set right.”

Net bowed in silence. She could not speak.

The nurse came in, uncalled, and said:

“My dear Miss Deloraine, I have been waiting for your bell this half hour. It is time for you to have your tonic and lie down.”

“Yes, it is; you may bring it to me,” replied the poor girl, faintly and vaguely; and then turning to her cousin she said—“That bell we heard a few minutes ago was for lunch, dear. You know the way to the little rear breakfast-room where it is served. Will you show Mr. Fleming?”

Net arose, pressed her lips to the pallid brow of her cousin, and with a slight bow to Adrian, led the way into the hall.

There he offered her his arm.

She declined the courtesy with a gentle gesture and walked on.

Adrian Fleming frowned slightly and followed.

A very dainty and tempting repast was elegantly served.

They sat down opposite to each other at the little round table, and Hart served them from a little sideboard.

Each of these young beings looked more attractive in the other’s eyes than ever before.

Both had grown handsomer in the few months of their separation.

And now some little excitement of pride or pique had added color to their cheeks and sparkle to their eyes.

Net owed nothing whatever to dress for _her_ beauty. Nothing could be plainer than the lustreless black silk, trimmed with black crape, that she still wore as mourning for her beloved step-father, and this was unrelieved by any ornament except the narrow white crepe lisse frilling around her throat and wrists; and yet she looked beautiful with her rippling, jet black hair, delicate features, dark-gray eyes, and brilliant complexion.

When the light meal was about half over, and the young footman was standing at some little distance doing something at the sideboard, Adrian bent across the table to Net, and said:

“Do you not think that we might dispense with the attendance of that servant?”

“No, by no means. He must remain here,” answered Net, gravely and politely.

Adrian Fleming shrugged his shoulders and relapsed into silence, which continued to the end of the meal.

When it was over they both left the table together.

“Where are you going?” inquired Fleming, when they were out in the hall.

“To the drawing-room first. This is the hour at which Antoinette takes her nap and cannot be disturbed,” said Net.

“I understand that. Will you take my arm?”

“I thank you, no; we dispense with formalities in this house for the present,” replied Net, as she walked on in advance.

“You dispense with formalities when you please to do so. You did not please to dispense with the formality of the servant’s attendance during the whole of lunch,” remarked Fleming, in an aggrieved tone.

“Ah, but that was another thing,” said Net, as she swayed open the door of the drawing-room and entered.

“Here,” said Net, going up to one of the many well-laden little tables—“here are ‘Leach’s Pictures of English Life,’ from _Punch_. Here are also ‘Doré’s Illustrations of Tennyson’s Idyls of King Arthur,’ and many other amusing works. Pray entertain yourself and excuse me. I have letters to write.”

She turned to leave the room but he called her back.

“Net!”

“Well?” she responded gently.

“Why do you go and leave me?”

“I have letters to write, really, and the only time I have to write them is while Antoinette sleeps.”

“Can they not wait?” he inquired.

“No, indeed they cannot. They should have been written before this. I left Castle Montjoie day before yesterday, reached here yesterday morning, spent nearly the whole day in Antoinette’s room, and went to rest early, because I was so very tired. This morning as soon as I had breakfast, I had to go to Antoinette, and I stayed with her until your arrival. Now I _must_ excuse myself and write letters to Lady Arielle Montjoie and to Miss Desparde,” said Net, taking the trouble to explain herself at large, while she stood with her hand on the knob of the door.

“Net,” he said, looking intently at her, “I shall have to leave here in two hours, in order to catch the six o’clock train.”

“Shall you?” said Net, calmly. “Then perhaps you had better bid me good-bye now, as we may not meet again before you go.”

He looked at her half fondly, half resentfully. How beautiful she was in her fresh, young womanhood! Surely never so beautiful as now!

“Net,” he said, reproachfully, yet affectionately, “is it possible that you have forgotten the relations that exist between us?”

“I do not know that I really understand them, Mr. Fleming,” she answered, gently and gravely.

“Do you not understand that I am your husband and that I have some right to your society?” he inquired, with a slight accent of anger in his tone.

“You told me once that the marriage ceremony, certainly performed under a great misapprehension on your part, was good for nothing.”

“And you believed it?”

“I neither believed nor disbelieved. I thought that you might be mistaken in that, as you had been in other matters! But you did tell me the ceremony was invalid,” said the girl, quietly.

“Yet you took my name, and kept it.”

“Say, rather, that Sir Adrian Fleming and Dr. Starr both assured me that my marriage was perfectly valid, and forced the name upon me. I did not take your name willingly, Mr. Fleming—after what you had said to me—any more than I would have come here willingly if I had known that you were to be a visitor at the house,” said the girl, still very gently.

“Net,” he eagerly exclaimed, “would you believe me if I were to tell you now that though that mistake was a dreadful disappointment to me at the time, yet _now_ I am grateful that it was _you_ who stood by my side and was married to me, and that it was _not_ your cousin? Would you believe that my heart would have so changed, Net?”

“Yes, Mr. Fleming; for I believe you to be truthful, and I _know_ you to be changeable,” said Net, with a slight smile.

He made a gesture of impatience, but then controlled himself, and said:

“Net, I am _not_ changeable in the depths of my soul. It was _you_, and you only, that I loved from first to last. My fancy for poor Antoinette Deloraine was but a hallucination of the eyes.”

Net looked at him gravely, and a little sadly, and quoted some long passed words of his:

“‘Miss Deloraine, it is you, and you only, whom I ardently adore. My affection for poor little Net Starr was but a sentiment of compassion for the good, little, overtasked creature.’”

Adrian Fleming blushed scarlet to the edges of his fair hair as he stammered:

“You!—you overheard me speak those words! You were capable of eavesdropping, then!”

“No, indeed; I never heard you ‘speak those words.’ The quotation is altogether hypothetical. I only fancied that you were likely to have said just such words to Antoinette,” said the girl, with a smile in her eyes.

Adrian Fleming made a gesture of desperation and disgust. He knew that he had committed himself.

“Come, come, Net,” he said, after a few moments of silence. “We _are_, really and truly, legally and validly married. Let us forgive and forget. Dear Net, I swear by all my hopes of heaven it _was_ you, and _only_ you, whom I truly loved from first to last!”

“Oh, I dare say you think so _now_, Mr. Fleming, and I am quite ready to forgive and forget, but not by any means ready to take your word for all your future states. You had better take time to be sure of your own mind, Mr. Fleming, before you ask me to make up mine. And now I must really bid you good-bye, for my letters must be written before mail time, and you will have probably departed before I get through. Good-bye.”

And with the same unruffled gentleness, Net bowed and left the room.

Adrian Fleming stood where she had left him, looking after her as long as she was in sight.

Then he began to walk up and down the floor with very unequal strides, asking himself:

“Can this be Net? This be the gentle, patient little Grizzelle whose very gentleness and patience I once half despised as weakness and poorness of spirit? What a beauty she has grown to be! But she is changed in more things than one. I wonder if she has ceased to care for me?” he asked himself, as he went up to a pier-glass and contemplated his superb beauty in its reflection there.

“Ah, bah! of course she has not. She is only putting on this civil indifference—this gentle carelessness. And I deserve it all, I suppose. Well—one thing is certain: if I wish to win Net again I shall have to woo her again. And I will not go back until I have done it. I will send to the station and telegraph the governor not to expect me until he hears from me again,” concluded Mr. Fleming, as he gave the bell-cord a pull that suddenly brought Hart into the room.

“Pen, ink, and paper,” was Fleming’s brief order.

“Yes, sir. Please, sir, will you permit me to show you into the library, where you will find every convenience of the sort,” said the boy, with a bow.

“Very well; lead the way.”

The footman showed the guest into the handsome library, placed a chair at one of the writing-tables, and drew out a drawer filled with stationery.

“Now go and ask the butler if he can dispatch a servant on horseback to take a message to the telegraph office at the station. And do you come here to take it down.”

The boy bowed and left the room.

The young gentleman wrote the following telegram:

“MR. ADRIAN FLEMING, _from Deloraine Park, to_ SIR ADRIAN FLEMING, _at Fleming Chase, Flemington, Dorset_: Miss Deloraine is very ill, and not expected to live. Her cousin, my wife, is staying with her. The latter, you know, is heiress presumptive of Deloraine Park. Do not expect me home at present. Will write or telegraph before I return.”

He sealed this up in an envelope, with a sovereign, and gave it to Hart, who punctually reappeared to take it to the groom who was to convey it to the telegraph agent at the station.

Having dispatched this business Adrian Fleming stretched himself on a sofa to take a nap while waiting for Antoinette to awake or Net to reappear.

[Illustration: [Fleuron]]