CHAPTER XI.

"A GOLDEN-HAIRED CIRCE."

"We cannot fight for love as men may do; We should be woo'd, and were not made to woo." _Shakespeare._

When Garth returned from the Quarry that evening, sad and dispirited from his interview with Queenie, he found a letter waiting for him; a messenger had brought it over from Crossgill Vicarage.

"Did you know Dora was at home again?" Langley asked him in a little surprise.

But he answered "No," very briefly, as he opened the envelope.

A curious vexed smile hovered around his lips as he read the note, and then he handed it to his sister.

"Dear Mr. Clayton," it began, "do you know that we have returned from our exile, and are settled at home again? Dear Flo was so well that I ventured on resisting the doctor's orders. Doctors are such old women sometimes; so, as she was quite strong and hearty, and in boisterous spirits, and we were both getting terribly restless, I just wrote to papa and Beattie to expect us, and here we are.

"It is so delicious being at home again, and everything looks so beautiful. Beattie has been a good girl, and has kept things in tolerable order. Tell Langley, with my love, that I shall come over and see her very soon; and now I have a message for you from papa. He wants to consult you again about that troublesome bit of business, about which he talked to you in the summer. No one helps him so well, and he thinks so much of your advice; that is great praise from a man of papa's age and experience, is it not? The girls are longing to see you; they are for ever talking about you. Beattie was always a great friend of yours, was she not? if I remember rightly, you were rather inclined to snub poor Flo. We all have so much to tell you; so if you will pack up your bag and come over and dine with us to-morrow, you will find your old quarters ready for you. Please do not disappoint us, the girls have set their hearts on seeing you.

"Your faithful friend, "DORA."

"Shall you go?" asked Langley, very quietly, as she replaced the note in the envelope. "It is rather strange that she has not asked me as well."

"Mr. Cunningham did not want to consult you, you see," returned her brother, with an inscrutable smile. "Yes; I suppose that I shall have to go; there is no getting out of it," and then he sat down and wrote off a brief note, with the gravest possible face, and gave it himself to the messenger.

When he rose the next morning it was with a sense of having to undergo some ordeal. He had to rest his head that night under the roof of Crossgill Vicarage; and before he sought his pillow he might have to encounter some difficult passage of arms with Dora. It was some months since they had met, and he had still a kindly feeling for his old playmate. If friendship would satisfy her he could promise her a tolerable amount; perhaps she had taken him at his word, and there would be no attempt to draw him again under her influence; perhaps she had grown reasonable. Dora was always such a sensible creature, and had begun to understand for herself that they would be better apart. If this were so he would eat his dinner with a light heart, feeling that nothing was expected of him.

Above everything he desired that there might be peace between them; he would never willingly make her his enemy. Perhaps some suspicion that she might prove a dangerous adversary at this time crossed his mind; he had great kindness of heart also, and would have hated to disappoint or grieve any woman, especially one for whom he had once entertained a tenderness. It was with somewhat dubious feelings, therefore, that he drove himself up that evening to the Vicarage.

Dora was not as before in the porch to receive him, but the old nurse met him at the door with a pleasant smile on her wrinkled face as she led him into the hall, dusky and warm with fire-light.

"The young ladies were in the drawing-room," she told him as she helped him off with his overcoat.

Garth stood and warmed himself after his long cold drive and listened, nothing loath, to the old woman's prattle. Nurse was a great favorite of his.

There was quite a ruddy glow when the drawing-room door was opened; the soft, harmonious light of the great white china lamps pervaded the long low room. In spite of his dubious feelings Garth could not help admiring that pretty picture of domestic comfort. Dora was in her favorite carved chair working, with Flo curled up on the rug at her feet; another girlish form was half hidden in the recesses of the Vicar's great easy-chair. The white dresses of the girls quite shone in the fire-light.

As Dora advanced to meet him Garth was driven to confess to himself that he had never seen her to such advantage. The soft velvet gown that she wore set off her golden hair and beautifully fair skin to perfection. As she gave him her hand with her prettiest smile a rose-tint, very like a dawning blush, tinged her cheeks.

"You are very good to come to us to-night," she said in the lowest possible voice. "I was half afraid you would be proud and stay away on purpose to punish me."

"Why should I wish to punish you?" he answered good-humoredly. "So these are your sisters. The question is, which is Beatrix and which is Flo?" and he shook hands with them both with a cordial word or two.

They were both taller than Dora, slim, graceful creatures. Beatrix was the handsomer of the two, with lively dark eyes and an expression of great animation. Flo was plainer, with an odd, piquante face and fair hair like Dora's, which she wore cropped and curly like a boy's.

"Poor Flo has lost all her beautiful hair," observed her sister, passing her hand regretfully over the curls. "Is she not grown? and Beattie too? They make me look such a little thing beside them."

"Beatrix has grown such a fashionable young lady that I shall be half afraid of her," returned Garth, looking at the girl with kindly interest.

Beatrix's dark eyes shone with pleasure as she answered his smile. The two had been great friends in old times, and many a game of romps had been enacted by them in the Vicarage hall and garden. He had always cared less about Flo, who was somewhat spoiled by her sister, and was in consequence rather pert and precocious. He had ever taken a mischievous delight in snubbing her, or putting her down, as he called it; but Flo was grown up now, and wore long dresses, and had the languid air of a _ci-devant_ invalid, and the snubbing must now be a thing of the past.

Garth and Beatrix had so much to say to each other that Dora at last grew dissatisfied, and bid him, with playful peremptoriness, break off his chatter and get ready for dinner. And then he took himself off rather reluctantly to the porch-room, where he found nurse coaxing his fire to a cheerful blaze.

"Isn't Miss Dora looking lovely to-night?" exclaimed the old woman when she caught sight of him; "for all the world like a picture, in her velvet gown. I do think she is the prettiest creature in the county."

"I think Miss Beatrix will be far handsomer," returned Garth, with a little spice of malice and contradiction in his voice. "She will play havoc with a few hearts before many years are over, take my word for it."

"Miss Beatrix!" in a tone of shrill scorn. "Dear heart, just to think of comparing her with our Miss Dora! But you young gentlemen will be poking your fun at an old woman. Miss Beatrix indeed!"

"My fire is burning nicely now, Nurse," observed Garth rather hastily. "If you make me too comfortable I shall be afraid of coming here."

"There's some folks would like to see you come oftener, sir; but it is not for me to tell young ladies' secrets," and then nurse dropped her ancient curtsey and took her comely old person out of the room, while Garth, with a shrug and sigh, proceeded to dress himself.

"Oh, my golden-haired Circe!" was his inward ejaculation, and then he wondered how Queenie would look in a velvet gown with some of that fine old lace round her long white throat. "She can have no end of that sort of thing now," he said to himself.

After all the gong sounded before he was ready; but Mr. Cunningham received his excuses with good-humor, and dinner passed off with perfect tranquillity. It struck Garth that Beatrix was rather quiet and a trifle dull, and he had some difficulty in winning a look or response from her, but he soon desisted from his attempts. "Poor child, she has been having a little sisterly lecture on forwardness, I expect. Dora is not likely to allow her to monopolize me," and he bent with some secret amusement over his plate. He was reading his old friend Dora by a clearer light now.

But he soon forgot Beatrix when Dora began to talk in earnest. Dora was very brilliant and picturesque in her conversation when she chose. She gave Garth full descriptions of their places of sojourn in the Pyrenees. Now and then there were hints and touches of a softer character: had he thought of her spending long anxious days and nights in that great white-washed ward in Brussels! why had he answered her letters so curtly, exiles were always so homesick and longing: for news? did he remember her and Flo eating their solitary Christmas dinner in their odd little room, looking out on the snow-capped mountains. They had chestnut soup, and a broiled fowl, and a salad to follow, and Flo was longing all the time for a slice of turkey and some English plum-pudding, and he had never taken the trouble to tell her how they had passed the day at Church-Stile House, and so on.

It was all very graphic and interesting, and Garth took himself to task for a certain feeling of relief when Dora and her sisters had withdrawn, and the Vicar and he had plunged into their business talk.

He was half disposed to prolong it when the coffee was brought in, but, to his surprise, Flo made her appearance. "Dora has sent me to look after the fire while papa takes his nap," remarked Flo very coolly, as she produced her knitting and planted herself comfortably on the rug. "Papa has had rheumatism very badly, and if the fire goes out and he wakes up chilly there is no knowing what will happen," finished Flo, with a toss of her curly head that reminded him of Dora.

"My girls spoil me dreadfully," observed Mr. Cunningham fondly. "Don't let me keep you, Garth, we shall be in to tea presently," and there was nothing but for Garth to withdraw.

But his heart quailed within him when he entered the drawing-room, and found Dora seated alone by the fire, apparently doing nothing but toying with a little screen.

"What has become of Beatrix?" he asked at once, stopping half way and looking round for his favorite.

"Beattie has a letter that she must finish to-night, and will be down presently," returned Dora carelessly; "she is writing in the old school-room. You remember the school-room, do you not, and the cosy teas we have had there? we still keep it for the girls' use. I must get papa to do it up prettily for them next summer."

"Couldn't she have left her letter until to-morrow?" asked Garth, half laughing, but the little subterfuge secretly displeased him. Why should his favorite be banished to that dreary schoolroom? and why should Flo be set to watch her father's slumbers? "I don't like the look of this at all," he muttered to himself, and again that allusion to Circe crossed his mind.

"Come and sit down," exclaimed Dora, with playful petulance. "Never mind Beattie's whim, girls will have their own way, and she does not mean to be rude; and now tell me, sir, why you have been so cool all this time, and treated me so shabbily?"

He was in for it now he saw, but he feigned to misunderstand her.

"How have I treated you shabbily?" he asked, with a tolerable assumption of innocence.

There was an ominous flash in Dora's blue eyes, but she answered him gently and plaintively.

"Why, in your letters, to be sure; they were as brief and cold as possible, not a trace of the old friendship, not even a regret at my long absence. They deserved to be burnt, every one of them, but I hadn't the heart," dropping her voice and looking at him with dangerous sweetness.

"I wish you had," he returned coolly, for he was in no mood for this sort of thing. Another time all this might have pleased and allured him; he might have been faithful in his allegiance to Queenie, and yet have taken a certain pleasure in watching her and listening to her reproaches. She was such a picturesque little creature, and there was something so sweetly seductive in her manners to him, that he would not have been a man and not felt the power of her fascination; but the memory of his past tenderness for her was now a source of regret to him, and he was too much shattered by the storm that had swept over him to amuse himself with aimless love-making. "I wish you would destroy all my letters, Miss Cunningham," he went on, gravely; and then he remembered that he had not yet told her about the failure of his fortunes.

He touched on it now, but lightly, and she listened with the deepest interest.

"Poor Mr. Clayton, how shocking to lose all that money! I am so grieved about it, and you never told me about that either!" with reproachful tenderness, and the mistiness he had before noticed gathered slowly to her eyes.

"There is something else I have not told you," he continued, taking his resolution suddenly, and determined to put a stop, at all risks, to this dangerous softness; "but then, to be sure, I have only just known it myself. Have you heard that our school-mistress, Miss Marriott, has come into a large fortune?"

"Why no!" she returned, very much startled and becoming a little pale.

"It is a whim of hers hiding it from all of us as she has done. Why, she was a rich woman when you first made her acquaintance! I call it a tidy little fortune, five thousand a-year."

"Why has she hidden it? What has been her purpose?" she inquired, with a sudden sharpness in her tone that struck him directly, but he answered her carelessly.

"Oh, I don't know; some girlish nonsense or other, nothing at all to her discredit, rather the otherwise." But he said no word about the loan. It was no business of Dora's; it was a matter simply between themselves, so he told himself.

But Dora's cheek had paled visibly. "I thought you hated money and heiresses," she said at last, very slowly, and looking him full in the face.

Garth flushed uneasily, the inference was too obvious.

"Did I say a word about hating or the reverse, Dora?" he asked, in some displeasure. In his vexation he had called her Dora.

"I feared you had made up your mind never to call me that again," she said, looking at him very gently. "I have thought since," hesitating and dropping her eyes, "that I was wrong and foolish in what I said to you that night, and you were perfectly right in being angry with me. Couldn't you--haven't you forgiven me yet, Mr. Garth?"

Then he jumped up from his seat, and his face was full of pain. She was still his old friend and playmate, and how was he to misunderstand her? Was it forgiveness only for which she was asking, or was it a tacit permission for a renewal of his attentions? Either way, he must set things right between them now and for ever, for her sake, for his, and for Queenie's.

"Why are you so hard to me?" she asked again, and her blue eyes were still misty.

"Dora, my dear girl," he said, and there was a certain warmth and affection in his tone, "I am not hard with you, and I have forgiven you with all my heart. Perhaps I was a little angry with you once, men are such touchy creatures; but you did a very kind and wise thing for us both that night, and I thank you for it most truly, for you have saved us both, Dora, from a very great mistake." And then he walked away from her, and took up his position by the fireplace.

Dora's pale cheeks were flaming now, but she made no attempt to answer him.

"I thought you were never coming, papa," she said petulantly, when her father and Flo at that moment entered the room.

When Beatrix returned from her sojourn in the cold school-room she had a rebuke ready for her tardiness.

"I do not know what Mr. Clayton will think of such manners," she said rather severely; but Beatrix only shrugged her shoulders and exchanged a droll glance with Flo.

"I am nearly starved with cold, and I should like some tea, Dorrie," she said very good-humoredly.

"I cannot have you sit in that cold school-room, my dear," observed her father; "there was my study, or Dora's writing-table in the front drawing-room, why could you not use that?"

"Never mind, this cup of tea will warm me," returned Beatrix, hugging herself and shivering.

Garth stirred the fire unasked, and brought her a low chair, and made her have a second cup of tea, waiting on her himself.

"And in that thin dress, too!" he remonstrated; "you ought to take better care of yourself, Beatrix."

Beatrix looked up at him half grateful and half laughing. She wished she were not grown up, and she might ask him to chafe her cold hands as he used to do when she was a little girl. She remembered even now the comforting warmth of those strong, brown hands.

"Never mind, one day he will be my brother, and that will be nice," thought Beatrix to herself. "I wish he and Dorrie would settle it quickly between themselves, and then there will be no more cold school-rooms."

Garth did not find another opportunity to exchange a word with Dora that night. The girls played some duets, and their sister turned the pages of their music for them, and left her father to entertain their visitor.

Nevertheless, the sense of her displeasure pervaded the atmosphere somehow, and drove all comfort from him. When he said good night to her, she gave him a very fleeting pressure of the fingers, and scarcely lifted her eyes to his, but her mouth looked a little scornful.

But it was not Garth this time that passed a sleepless night. When Dora brushed out her golden hair a pale, set face met her eyes in the glass, with a very decided frown on the brow.

"He thinks to blind me, but I am not to be thrown aside in this sort of way," she said to herself. "He belongs to me, and she shall not have him." And before she slept Dora took her resolution.